Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for being here with me tonight.
I've been looking forward to this conversation for a little bit. I've been
listening to my guests today for quite a while. He's appeared on a bunch
of our Mutual Friends podcast Rachel Wilson, Buck Johnson, Tommy Sammons, a
bunch of absolutely fantastic people, and he's definitely had me questioning a lot of
my core beliefs and a lot of the things that I've kind of always taken
for granted my worldview. So I don't want to keep you guys too long
this porsch of the show, So I'm sure it's gonna be a very very
good conversation. Make sure you go to all the links below where you could
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use code Kyle at checkout and without food. Ado Let's Rock and roll.
What is up, everybody? My name is Kyletvik. I'm the host of
the In Liberty and Health podcast, where we talk all things liberty, health
and wellness and beyond. My hope is to encourage and spread the message of
liberty, physical and mental wellbeing. I hope you enjoy all the topics we
talked about with our guests. We are on all major streaming platforms, so
please sit back, relax, and enjoy. Man. I'm doing as good
as anyone can do. Getting buried by his thirteen year old son on play
day, I'm not going to apologize for not being on this podcast because I
got to go see Metality, So if that's a problem, kiss my ass.
Damn. Welcome to the show, Jay Dyer. How you doing man,
I'm doing great, Cayle, thanks for having me on. Yeah,
of course. Well, as I said in the introduction, you and a
lot of different people from the orthodox Christian worldview have really kind of got me
questioning my libertarian foundations and specifically listen to some of the debates you've done with
libertarians and also the idea around like Enlightenment philosophies. But I guess before we
get into that, for anybody who doesn't know you, feel free to give
yourself a low introduction. What you do. Yeah, I do a lot
of breakdowns of movies, philosophy, geopolitics, debates with atheists, Muslims,
Roman Catholics, Protestants. We do a lot of literary analysis. We break
down a lot of big geopolitical texts from the global elite, and then I
kind of summarize those in an accessible format for people. We also do a
lot of comedy. I host the fourth hour of The Ox Jones Show every
Friday. I've written in three books. Yeah, did you catch Kat Williams
on Joe Rogan? I heard you do an impression. You do a pretty
good one them my two watch lists. I watched the whole Shay Shakat Williams
interview and we did a couple of podcasts analyzing that. But I just haven't
got to the Rogan one yet, but I planned to gotcha, Gotcha.
I'm too excited for Dune to go watch that yet. I got you.
Okay, So I saw you did a whole stream on Dune. My wife
and I watched it once and I didn't quite follow it. But it seems
to be a very very big cultural thing. Because I see everybody talking about
Dune, so I guess we could maybe start there, are why is everybody
so obsessed with doing what's kind of the whole deal with this and what's your
kind of understanding of the meta of it? Probably most people are obsessed with
it because a lot of the culture is nerdified, and so you know,
sci fi rules the day. But there's been you know, eight ten years
maybe now, of the outlets that would produce most of the sci fi that
people are eating up and consuming, like Marble Disney, right, they've been
kind of like cyfying and making it social justice woke. So I think that
whenever we get just a taste of the way movies used to be before twenty
fifteen, sixteen or whatever, when we can you know, kind of reminisce
over what it was like watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you know
in the theater, or maybe even the Matrix trilogy in the theater. People
are kind of they're craving that authentic experience where they don'teel like they're being preached
at with a bunch of you know, woke morals and guilt trips. So
that's part of it, I think, And at the same time, Dune
is a unique series of novels. I've read the first two and I grew
up really loving the David Lynch version and ended up reading Dune one maybe ten
years ago. I really liked it, and I branched out read the second
one recently, and I think the drawl for those is that kind of like
Game of Thrones. I'm not a huge Game of Thrones fan, but I
think what people like about it is the complexity of the plots. There's a
lot of courtly intrigue, conspiracy, espionage all in a sci fi novel,
but also a lot of elements that you wouldn't expect in science fiction, like
no AI, right, I mean, the world of Doune is unique in
that they've had a crusade of sorts at one point in the universe's history against
artificial intelligence. So there's no aliens really that we can think of or that
we know of, so Aliens AI, the very staples of classic sci fi
are not there. And Herbert was a unique figure who doesn't fit into the
traditional normy liberal sphere of science fiction like most of science fiction authors would be.
He was a GOP speech writer, and I'm not saying that makes him
a good guy. The novels are not ultimately like Christian, but they have
kind of basic traditional ideas about the roles of men and women. They have
some perennialist ideas which I would critique, but I think are still interesting just
from a storytelling perspective. It's kind of a Nestorian view of man and God,
and that, you know, the main character kind of comes a godlike
figure eventually. And this is critiqued as kind of a warning against tyrannical government.
This was actually doing. Messiah makes a big point of this because it
came out in the Cold War, so Herbert was interested in warning people about
the dangers of Soviet autocracy. That's just one kind of element of the novel,
though, But there's all these other weird, you know, really pioneering
way ahead of their time things in the novel, which comes out in the
sixties. You've got geoengineering, you've got m culture, mind control, You've
got you know, the idea very profound. I think that a lot of
the global economy revolves around illegal resources in black markets, the spice, which
is the drug of that universe. So I think we're being told about that
and the Freemen are kind of a loose analogy to Islamic Arab cultures, loosely
speaking, in the future that we're speaking of there, it's actually a ten
thousand years in the future where there's like a blended Catholicism in Islam into some
kind of weird religion. And I just like all the elements of the secret
Society of the Witch Coven that sort of manipulates bloodlines, genetic manipulation, all
these conspiracy themes are not typically in an espionage themes or not typically in a
science fiction novel, so it's very unique in that way. And the series
itself, the books they get really really philosophical, and you know, as
a philosophy student, that interests me, so I could definitely understand why people
if they hadn't read the book or don't like that story, they might not
like the first movie. But I think just standing on its own, you
have to see obviously the first one to watch the new movie, but it's
just an amazing technical achievement. The sound, the cinematography, the art direction
just kind of blows everybody away. And we haven't seen anything like this,
like I said, in fifteen twenty years and in terms of movie going.
Yeah, Well, the one thing that kind of came to mind amongst some
of the topics you were hitting on there was I thought about Avatar, because
the original Avatar came out in like two thousand and eight, I want to
say, someone around there, and then the second one came out like a
year or two ago, and that kind of goes like the cinematography, Yeah,
because both of those were like beautiful films with like these you know,
very very beautifully animated world people and all that kind of stuff. But the
one other thing that I kind of thought about was when you talked about kind
of like the respective roles of men and women was Jack Reacher, and that
show I thought was absolutely fascinating because that was it was kind of show that
displayed a masculine archetype and a figure who wasn't necessarily you know, your typical
either Homer Simpson or outward abuser, but he was doing things that were questionable
but generally you know, you might almost recognize as good but didn't always seem
like a good idea at the time. So I thought it was a very
very interesting, just two seasons that actually did very very well despite you know,
not really having any outward agenda. Yeah, that's a good example.
I mean, I haven't seen that show, but there's a few diamonds in
the rough, you know, gems that I think guys like john Wick,
because john Wick kind of is, you know, the remaining you know,
action hero guy from the you know, the nineties was all about action heroes,
and you've got Stallone and Schwartzenegger and you know, Bruce Willis and so
you know, it's it's I guess it's interesting that Keanu can still pull that
off. But for the most part, you know, especially since twenty fourteen,
fifteen sixteen, it's just gotten really bad in terms of especially blockbusters are
so packed with propaganda and a lot of it's the Marvel stuff. So yeah,
I guess you could argue that I'm not a huge fan of Avatar myself,
but I understand what you're saying, just from sort of the visual experience.
A lot of people find it appealing, and I think Dune is that
way too. Dune too is that way that, you know. I didn't
actually go into the movie thinking it was going to be anything other than just
good and all right, like the first one, but it was way better
than I expected, so I think that's why people are are really gravitating towards
it. Gotcha, gotcha? Yeah, Well, I think we're gonna have
to rewatch the first one and maybe go see the second one movie theaters.
Our mutual friend Rachel Wilson good to see this collapse drops by. I appreciate
it, and I appreciate Rachel for all your support. So one thing that
I was curious about as well is kind of your path to the Orthodox Christianity.
Because I don't want to necessarily credit you for being responsible for the rise
of Orthodox Christianity because I see it. I don't want to say everywhere but
a decent bit now, but I definitely think you're probably one of the more
well known names. So what was that journey like for you? Were you
an atheist or an agnostic beforehand? Were you Catholic? I don't think i've
heard you described that, so I'm curious about how your journey on belief kind
of went. I was raised Southern Baptist, just kind of nominally. My
family was from the South, and then I grew up in San Diego.
My dad was in the Navy, so we didn't go to church like NonStop
we would go for a while, and then we wouldn't go, and then
we would and then I guess my high school time, I was pretty wild
and didn't think anything about church or anything like that. I wouldn't say I
was ever an atheist. I just wasn't really concerned with it so much.
At that time. I was more interested in chasing women and partying. And
by the time I was eighteen, I got invited to some Bible studies that
were evangelical. I went to those, so I kind of got back into
my evangelical background and went to Bible College for a couple of semesters. Didn't
really jie with that. I was more interested in the philosophical sides of things,
and so right around the same time, I started questioning Protestantism. This
is about two thousand and one two three, and so I started reading a
lot of church history, and I was really interested, you know, in
the Bible. I loved the Bible, and you know the history of the
Old Testament and all that, but I didn't know a whole lot about well,
what about the church fathers and what about the ecumenical councils? And so
I started hearing these things and I didn't know much about that. So about
the whole Church Fathers set thirty eight volumes, I didn't read all of it,
but I started with the Latin Church Fathers because they were the most you
know, accessible, and the ones that I had heard quoted the most as
a Calvinist, so I'd heard, you know, Augustine quoted, and Ambrose
and Jerome and these Western church fathers, and I liked Calvin and Luther a
lot. So I wanted to see, well, okay, but what are
these what do these predecessors believe? And so that led me to a lot
of questions around, well, now I realize they don't believe like I believe,
So how can I say that I'm you know, in the same line
of thinking or the same tradition as the Church fathers. And so then it
led to a bigger question ultimately, which was the how the Bible came to
be in the formation of the Cannon. So I read a bunch of books
on that from different sides. I didn't just pick a Catholic side of it.
I read Protestant, Evangelical, and Catholic histories of the formation of the
Cannon. And the more I got into the Church Fathers, and not just
reading the Church Fathers directly, but also historians of ideas like Rslav Pelicon and
his famous series which is usually read at a lot of seminaries. So I
read that series, the five volume series, and then I read more and
more secondary works on the Church Fathers, more and more of the Church Fathers.
I wrote a whole lot of Augustine. I get really enamored with his
writings, and that led me to becoming Roman Catholic. So when I got
into the Roman Catholic world in two thousand and three, you you pretty quickly
are introduced to the problems of the Roman Catholic world. And I was,
you know, keep in mind, I'm like twenty and twenty one at the
time, so this is I was pretty young at this time, maybe twenty
two, and you're really idealistic when you're in your early twenties, and then
you kind of study deeper and deeper into the problems of Catholic theology and you're
trying to grapple with this. And I grappled with it for maybe seven or
eight years, and I started having my doubts about the office of the papacy.
I didn't really doubt Christianity. At this point, I was just kind
of not sure whether where to go in terms of the contradictions that I saw
with pre Vatican two and post Vatican two teaching. So I went to the
Latin Mass for many many years SSPX, and then I eventually just felt like
I couldn't There was no reconciliation for the open contradiction of the Vatican. And
I remember this was that this is way before like the crazy stuff that Pote
Francis has done. I mean, this is back. This was still I
think in the John Paul the Second era, I was going to the Mass,
the Latin Mass, even when John Paul the Second was the pope.
And then we got Benedict and people thought, oh, well it's going to
be a lot better now, and nothing really got better other than sort of
externals and verbal credence to tradition. But anyway, so about two thousand and
seven I started just I was like, I don't know, I just don't
know if I believe rom with Aolocism anymore. So I had a period of
like not going to church for a while, and I did start looking at
Orthodox in two thousand and seven, and my girlfriend sort of fiance at the
time. She and I were both going to be received into the church at
the same time. We went through the catechumen it and we were going to
be married and received in the Antiochian Church in Nashville, and I just couldn't.
I just ultimately, when it came down to it, I couldn't do
it. Yet. I was so wrapped up with and enmeshed in like augustinding
and tonistic ideas about materiology and theology. I wasn't ready for the difference that
you experience in the Orthodox world. So I held off. I was like,
you know, I'm just not ready to become orthodox yow. And that
was actually the right decision. I really wasn't ready. So a lot of
people were like, why didn't you You should have become Orthodox. No,
actually you shouldn't. If you're not really into it, you shouldn't. So
looking back, it was for me the right decision to do it at that
time. So then I kind of took a break. I was burned out
on religious disputes and theological debates, and I've been so en messed in that
world for you know, since I was eighteen or nineteen. I just kind
of got tired of it, and I didn't become agnostic. I just kind
of wasn't sure about which theological tradition I was aligned with. I remember reading
a lot of neoplatonic stuff, perennials stuff. That's when I started reading gain
On and shoe On and all these different kind of traditionalist things which I thought
were interesting. But I never really found anything that was super compelling. So
I just kind of didn't have I wouldn't say it was agnostic. I still
thought there had to be some kind of God, I mean, and he
had to be personal. But it took about I don't know, four or
five years, six years of that, and then I started kind of gradually
reading the Bible again, reading the Church Fathers again. I kind of had
to warm back up to it because I also had some bad experience it is
at the Orthodox Church at that time. Yeah, And so eventually I decided
to keep studying it. And I had been studying it off and on.
I just it wasn't my main focus. But ever since two thousand and seven
or eight, I was always interested in reading the Eastern Church Fathers, Cappadocians
and so forth. In Saint Maximus, so I made the decision to finally
convert to Orthodox Sye actually in twenty fourteen, but I wasn't near enough to
a church to be received yet, so it took actually about twenty seventeen to
be received and then chrismated. So I called myself like a ten year catechumen,
so I was basically learning it throughout that whole year. Anyway, that's
a long story rambling, but that was that's my background. No, that's
that's fascinating because one thing that's kind of interesting for me as I've been agnostic
pretty much my entire life, but I would say over the last couple of
years, especially since I met my wife, I've been more and more interested
in religion. Then as I've seen what it's done for other people that I
know personally in their lives, it's really given me a lot to question and
a lot to think about. And I like that you said you weren't quite
ready and that you thought it was a right move to kind of hold off
on kind of going all in on becoming Orthodox, because I think a lot
of people, whether it comes to religion or really anything, the first thing
I want to do is they find there are new toys they can't wait to
kind of dive all in on it and say like this is me and I
identify as this and then you know, it's like the it's such a Dunning
Kruger effect where like so you'll learn about it, you know everything, and
then like right after the first couple of months, you realize, oh,
I don't know anything and there's so much more room for growth. That kind
of seems like what you were probably experiencing. I think that's a very wise
approach. Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming you're younger than me, but
I mean it took me many years to learn that. So again, yeah,
part of it's you know, when you're in your twenties about you,
but people in general when you're when you are, in general are in your
twenties, you're very idealistic and you think, like you said, like,
oh, I've you know, watched at that time, they we don't really
you have YouTube. It's like I've read a bunch of blog articles and like,
now I know you know this position, and I'm so convinced and certain
and I think, you know, it just takes time to get older.
And then you realize, well, no where nowhere is going to have like
this perfect easy. There's no position that's going to answer every question, right.
That doesn't mean that there's no position that can answer anything at all or
give a basis for a worldview. But I think you had really high expectations.
You have these purity spiraling tendencies when you're in your twenties, and as
you get older, you realize that these are kind of unrealistic expectations for any
position at all, whatever your worldview is. So so yeah, I think
that there was immaturities that I had in my twenties. Obviously, not just
theological immaturities, but immaturities about my own life and you know, kind of
being lazy and not being prepared to be married, and so there's a lot
of things that also, you know, like I shouldn't have gotten married at
the same time too, so I'm glad I didn't because I wasn't ready for
it. But but yeah, I think I think you learn that as you
get older that the grass might seem greener on another position right away, and
it may actually be right, it may be a greener but we don't want
to leap into those positions too hastily. And I think when you're younger,
there is the temptation to fall for that. Yeah, And I think to
that point as well, with age, I feel like you probably learned that,
like, regardless of the belief that you hold, like a lot of
the work is still going to be on you. And I think that's what
a lot of people who don't quite take their religion seriously probably lean on,
like you know, going to confessional and just saying, oh, I'm leave
all my sins, so therefore I can fuck off with the rest of the
week and it doesn't matter what I do. But I like the way that
or much you'll find Rachel kind of described it to me, whenever people pass
away and they're in the presence of God, that you're going to feel more
of a warm feeling rather than you know, perhaps a cold or unloving feeling.
And I may be paraphrasing this poorly, but like the idea that the
accumulation of your life and the good deeds that you did is going to define
the relationship with God in the afterlife. That was something that was very very
fascinating to me in the way that she'd explained it. And I'm incredibly ignorant
in religion, so, like I said, this is just over the last
couple of months kind of diving into the stuff has been very, very fascinating
for me, and you've definitely played a part in that, as well as
Rachel, Tommy and some of the other people that I mentioned. Yeah,
I mean, I think there's an attitude. Typically. One big difference that
I think you're hitting on, and you can correct me if I misunderstood you,
is that in the typical Western ideas of religion, whether it's Protestant or
Roman Catholic, like, the typical attitude is like God the stern judge,
and then I'm guilty. And you know, if I go and kind of
do these religious rituals, I'll be I'll be straight, you know what I
mean, I can go back to whatever. And I think the difference is
that Orthodoxy is more like a a rehab program, like in this sense that
we're all kind of going into the situation where there's not a mechanical exchange.
I mean, you could conceivably make it a mechanical exchange if that's what you
chose to do, but like in my experience, it's more so like confession
isn't a like a mechanical exchange. It's more like a very personal situation of
like having a personal trainer. So it's like literally having a personal trainer that's
like keeping you accountable to whether you've made progress in virtue. As opposed to
an anonymous confessional in the Romancallity church where I just say these things and he
says, Okay, go say at five hilm areas and try to do better.
This is more like you know, internal counseling, where you're figure out
the problem points and then addressing those and then kind of having accountability to see
if you're getting better. So it's a lot more intimate in the sense of
the confessional example that you gave, and that's I think a better uh explanation
overall as to one of the differences, say, between orthodox the Orthodoxy experience
and what you would experience in the Roman Catholic world. That's not to say
that Roman Catholics aren't serious or there aren't people who are sincere about wanting to
do better. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that just the experience of
confession itself as an example contrasts these two views of a kind of a cold
mechanical exchange versus a kind of personal trainer. Who actually kind of cares about
you as an individual. Because if I'm going to confession and it's like there's
the blinders there, right, and he doesn't know who I am, I
don't know who it is. I mean conceivably in the Roman Catholic world,
right, you can go confess in Roman Catholic churches and they have no idea
who's talking to them. So it's like it's like cheating the system, but
it's only cheating you because the purpose of having a confessor or spiritual father is
that to see like are you getting better? Like do we need to do
Maybe we need to do this over here. Maybe you need to spend less
time, you know, out of the bar, you need to spend less
time you know doing X y Z because that's an occasion for sin for you
or something like that. You see what I'm saying. It's like it's like
rather than reporting in on a phone call to like an automated service, like
did you do your workout today? Right, Like you've got an actual personal
trainer that's there, you know, on the spot. Like that's a better
analogy. Yeah, No, I think you picked up exactly post putting down
there, And I think the idea of accountability is very very important for people
because you know, when you have high expectations amongst your community or amongst other
people, then you do innately feel like you have to do better. Like
an example that always comes to mind for me is that, like I work
with a very very good group of technicians. Someone ought to move technician by
trade, and I know that if I were slipping or that if I wasn't
do my best, then the rest of the guys in the shop are going
to look at me and say like, hey, man, go on pick
it up. Like we have a good career guys here, we need you
to pull your weight. And essentially, I think kind of what you were
getting at there is essentially that your spiritual father would be the same kind of
motivating spirit in a way saying like okay, well you're falling behind on these
behaviors and you need to do a little bit better, but not in a
way that like, oh, you're going to go to hell if you if
you don't do better, but like you should want to do better for yourself.
Am I I mean relationship, it's a mirror, it's a spiritual version
of father's son. Right, So I mean U last week, we had
a particularly bad experience with our human fathers, which is possible, right,
typically we don't. We Most fathers love their sons, and so you know,
your dad doesn't want you destroyed. He wants you to do better.
So you know, that's that's the analogy to father's son. And certainly you
know, in the Protestant world there are pastors who who counsel people positively.
And I'm not saying that that doesn't occur. It's just a very different experience,
I think in the Orthodox world, because for example, in Orthodoxy there's
a big emphasis on things like fasting and alms giving, and so you know,
your spiritual father is gonna say combat like if you have a problem.
I don't have a problem with gluttony per se, but let's say you have
had a problem with gluttony. The antidote to gluttony is not just not eating.
It's actually the opposite. Every vice has a corresponding virtue. So if
your temptation is to like be a glutton and you're consuming, consuming, consuming,
then the antidote is to practice more giving. So rather than take,
take, take, you're giving. And so there might be like, you
know, not just fasting from these foods that are you know, high end
whatever carbohydrates and sugar. You know what, maybe you should also find some
people who are in need that could use some of that money. So maybe
you're spending i don't know, fifty bucks extra on junk food a month,
why don't you take that fifty dollars a junk food and find somebody who needs
help with their groceries. You see what I'm saying that that might be a
potential antidote. And so getting in the practice of virtue is how we acquire
the virtues. And that's different than like an average maybe Protestant pastor who they're
not typically gonna, you know, even stress alms giving unless it's like give
me more money for the church or like Protestants might do. So the pastors
might do something like that, but it's just a very different approach to virtue
advice, whereas in the Protestant world it's a lot more like, well,
ask God for forgiveness and then like you're you know, the God's disposition changes
towards you, and it's like, but I'm the one that needs to actually
have the interchange. It's not just me paying off God or like doing something
to be in his favor, like a mob boss, right, Like God's
the mod mob boss and you you, you know, send your twenty percent
commission up to the to the Godfather, then you're good. It's like,
no, actually I need the healing though, you know, I need I
need the inner transformation. I think that's a good analogy to the to the
difference there. Yeah, that's that's actually fascinating. Everything you said there,
specifically with laying out the vice and virtues. I've never heard anybody lay it
out that way, but I think that's beautiful really in its nature. So
one thing that I also want to kind of touch on it seems like,
uh, I'm I would say, I'm kind of included in the red pill
sphere right now, and I'm curious if you see a similar bassadorization of religion
in the way that people kind of talk about religion and alt media right now,
by the way like people representing it. So maybe I'm not articulating this
perfectly, but like when I see people who just kind of flip over to
religion right away and then want to, you know, preach to everybody sanctimoniously
and never acknowledge their own previous sins and just kind of the way that oh,
media just bastardizes everything now right, I'm sure you see this in droves,
but I'm curious if, like you think that's a net negative or a
net positive, because, like I said, I don't think it's just good
for religit, but it just seems like kind of like the current day,
everything that's good, the olt media will take it, and then you're gonna
have dumb asses that just go out and fuck it up. Yeah, it's
a really annoying phenomenon. I'm not sure what the solution is. I actually,
I personally I tend to not pay any attention to the for you.
So, like I tell my wife this, you're so much smarter than me.
My wife follows, she pulls up Twitter and she gets on the for
you, and then you know she's coming to me. Someone's as to this,
someone's to this, and I'm like, I don't care, don't tell
me what's on the for you. I never ever look at the for you.
Now, maybe other people can handle it better, I don't. I
just don't do it. So, I mean, that's not obviously going to
solve this problem. But I mean, as people are more and more,
you know, derascinated in modernity. They're going to be looking more and more
for answers, for authenticity, for tradition, and so they're going to be
looking across the spectrum of Catholicism, Classical Protestantism, Anglicanism, you know,
traditionalism. They might be looking at Orthodoxy, all kinds of different things.
I think that as things get crazier, more and more people are going to
continue to operate this way. There's I don't know how we there's no answer
really to stopping drifters, or to stopping people who were suddenly who suddenly becomes
super self righteous. I find it to be really annoying. People might think
that I'm like a heated debate brow or whatever, but like, you don't
see me preaching and going crazy on morals, no, real quick. I
wanted to touch on that real quick. Every time I've seen you debate somebody,
my interpretation, because I watch your Liquid Zoolu debate. I watch your
one with Austin Peterson, and I watch your one with Stefan mal Andu,
and I think, whenever you're with somebody who's being good faith to you,
I've never seen you go bad faith on anybody. I've only seen you get
frustrated when it seemed warranted. So I'm sorry to interrupt. I just want
to apprecid honestly phrase. But I think I'm a fairly reasonable person. I'm
not gonna for no reason just be you know, rude or asked to somebody.
He typically, uh, you know, if that comes about, it's
because people are debating in bad faith, or there are people who have been,
you know, a consistent problem for many years, and then maybe somebody
doesn't know that there's a background with that person being a problem troll or whatever,
and they hear me saying or I'm not I'm not gonna talk to you.
Well he's so mean he didn't talk. Yeah, but that's the guy
who calls in every time I do a stream, right, and I don't.
So so people don't know these backgrounds and this kind of stuff. So
that's part of it. But another part of it too is that I'm sure
you would share this sentiment. I mean, so many people are just so
like sissy now. I mean it's like they they'll act like if you disagree
or if you date debate in a in a heated way, that that's somehow
like hurtful to them and then it's attack on them, and it's which is
not It's just ridiculous. I mean, that's just what men do. Men
debate, men have disagreements. They can get heated if it gets to the
point where people are you ready to fight a dude. You know, dudes
can step outside and like wrestle it out or whatever, you know what I
mean, and let it go. But we're in this weird feminized, passive
aggressive situation where people have an Internet exchange with people and they hold a grudge
for five years and then you know, it's just it's just really weird or
they you know, the whole woke culture like it's all based on this envy
cancel culture. Really, I think it's just a technique of trying to bring
other people down who are doing well, and so because you're envious, you
want to get them canceled, you want to shut them down because you feel
like, you know, you should have had the job or the media outlet
that they have or something like that. So that's a big part of its
envy, which is again another kind of trait of a egalitarian, feminized society
that's all based around security. It's based around sensitivity. It's based around how
people feel as a result, and that means that we're not basing our society
around logic logos, around objective principles, around true and false, good and
bad. We're basing it around how it makes me feel. And that's all
very feminine when it comes to those are feminine virtues. They can be good
for women to have those types of nurturing virtues, they don't work for organizing
a society, and so we're in a situation where the society is intentionally being
organized around those feminine qualities, which again are not in themselves bad per se.
Right, women need those rights to nurture children, they're made that way,
but to make the nurturing of a child trait the norm for the society
creates the nanny state, and the nanny state is happy to have everybody policed
and controlled on the basis of irrational things like being able to cancel somebody because
they hurt your feelings. And that's just insane. And that's that kind of
a society. Can It won't last, It will collapse, and then we'll
be back into some sort of brutality situation, and all of those people would
be relying upon the masculine power and force which can protect them, defend them,
build the water systems, you know, engineer the bridges, et cetera.
Right, you're going to be back to relying on the patriarchy, which
is the way it should be. So yeah, I mean, there's no
easy answers to how to solve the grift or problem. And I think that,
like when in my twenties, I can remember when I get pretty serious
about my expressing of Christianity. You know, it was really immature, and
I was fairly new to this whole sphere of things, and I thought it
was my job to like publicly project all of this, and I thought that
was a good action to do. And I think there's been some really good
studies. I put a study up on this or an article on this on
my sub stack some months back, and there was a guy who was analyzing
the motivations of this kind of extreme religiosity and a lot of it stems,
I think, from people's insecurities and sensitivities and psychological problems. So if you're
an insecure person, and maybe even if you're insecure about your religious decisions,
you might do all of this external projecting to try to try to soothe your
own doubts and try to assure yourself that you're actually committed to this. I
thought that was a really profound just a psychology paper. I'm not saying all
religion is explained only by psychological motivation. I'm just simply saying that psychological motivations
can at times help us to understand why we might at times see these bizarre
manifestations of people expressing extreme forms of religiosity in the public sphere, which we
can say is Twitter and the Internet now, you know, and I think
it probably comes from insecurity envy, you know, soy rage, all of
those, all those types of things. But the grifter thing, that's maybe
a different thing. As part of it's that. But then the grifters are
you know, there's people who are pretending to be abased in trot or whatever,
and they're probably not just because they see that it's a rising trend.
Yeah, And that's one thing that I've noticed definitely over the last year,
because it's like with the rise of Donald Trump back in like twenty sixteen up
until now, you see a lot, Yeah, you see a lot more
of like a right wing revival but obviously since October seventh, some of these
right wingers you could quite us and their values whenever they're willing to shout people
down over disagreements on that little country over the Middle East, which has been
absolutely fascinating, And for me it wasn't unpredictable at all, because I more
so look at things from a human psychology standpoint, where you understand much to
your point that people are, you know, when it comes to their personal
beliefs, they're going to double down, triple down on them sometimes whenever they're
called to the carpet. I think you and I are both probably intellectually honest
enough people that you know a lot of positions that we hold, if called
into sufficient question with sufficient evidence, would probably change our minds exactly. But
I think a lot of people when it comes to Donald Trump is like the
perfect example where like you see, the whole left half of America will say
he's the worst person ever and you can't convince them otherwise. And the whole
right half of America will tell you he's the best person in the world and
you cannot tell them otherwise. It's been a fascinating thing to watch and like,
if you can just remove all your emotions and all the way you feel
about Trump or Biden. You could just say, holy shit, like people
are just acting in like their most base nature way where they feel like they're
fighting off their you know, the tiger that's on their back essentially. Yeah,
I think that's a very perceptive analysis. My friend David Patrick Carey,
he's done a lot of live streams where he talks about how the there's a
pattern to this, you know, rise of dissident right, whatever we want
to talk about. You know, we had Trump coming on the scene,
we had these you know, kind of wild versions of right wing stuff that
I think we're pretty quickly co opted alt right and all that when when in
a FED direction, I was always warning people against that stuff. And then
we had dissident Right, and then we had you know, Peterson played a
huge role obviously in people beginning to kind of question normy stuff, sort of
get Trump, and then right after Trump we kind of get the rise of
Peterson. Then it turns into Tate redpill stuff. So there's been this interesting
series of figures who have appeared to shift the focus of the disc course everyone
else. And then now we've got Elon Musk kind of coming to the floor
of his role. Everybody always asks what's their motives? I always hate this
debate because you can never figure out people's motives. How will you ever know
a person's motives unless you, you know, have some recording of them telling
you their motives or something, right, it's just a it's just a stupid,
ridiculous debate to debate people's motives. I mean, anybody can be deceiving
and deceptive, you know, deceive you on the internet. Any of these
very powerful people, I'm sure have to engage in some degree of subterfuge and
concealing their real motivation. So it's just an annoying constant. I'm not saying
you did this, but like people anytime I go on a show, they're
like, what do you think of Donald Trump? What do you think of
Elon Musk? And I'm so sick of that question, just like I don't
I mean, I don't know their motives. You want me to tell you,
like, I don't know, and I don't care about those motives because
it's something I can never really know anyway, So you're asking me to,
you know, give you information on topics I don't have access to So it's
like, well, what are the mo of Gping? I don't know.
He's probably not a good guy, but I mean, I don't know his
motivations. So I think there's all those distracting questions which don't really matter.
And then we have, you know, people trying to find authentic Christianity and
tradition, authentic religion, and you get these people, these figures who kind
of spur that question, which can be a good thing, right, Obviously
I don't agree with everything Trump says or Peterson says or Tate says, but
the questions that are caused and raised from those figures, then I think leads
to people in a lot of interesting directions. Maybe I'm just maybe I'm just
rambling at this point, but I forgot where what the question was or where
we were going. Yeah, that's okay. Basically I noticed a lot of
stuff that you said there, and like a lot of the social analysis is
more useful than necessarily the figures themselves. But basically, like you just see
a lot of people kind of act very very almost religiously when it comes to
political Oh that's right, yeah, Like yeah, people people, I think
humans are fundamentally religious I do agree with that that analysis, and that doesn't
mean that you can't strive to be objective and to refine your worldview or your
position based on understanding. I mean I've changed my position a few times,
like not zillions of times. But you know, I was raised Baptists,
got into Calvinism. Uh, then I became uh Rumman Catholic, and then
started questioning that based on information that I encountered. So and then you know
the changes continue on from there to eventually be Orthodox. So yeah, I
think, uh, there's there's I don't know what the perfect balance is to
that. There is no perfect easy answer to that. It's something that I
think you have to get learned experience, learned wisdom from It's not just a
question that's solved by knowledge. I think when you're young, you you think
that you can solve all these problems, like you're some kind of machine with
more and more information and data, but you actually need the wisdom of lived
experience to apply the information in at the right time, in the right way.
So that's something that only comes with age, and not everybody gets wisdom.
I see so many people today, like you're pointing out with like the
online uh, you know, pretending to be righteous sphere and I mean,
to me, a lot of these people like they come off as like obvious
fakes and to so I'm like, where is there anybody nobody has any discernment.
Nobody can discern between like you know, true and false, you know,
good and bad? Here my life just went out my bad or does
it? But so, but yeah, And I'm not saying that people can't
debate morals. I'm just saying, like, I've always found it distasteful when
people take this like super hyper moral approach, as many people do on Twitter
and places like that, when they're like, you know, like you said,
like you were an atheist last year and now you're like the super hyper
moral. It just really greats on my nerves. But you know, it's
a mistake I guess we all make. But I think, yeah, so
worldviews are religious. People hold them in a religious way. And yeah,
most of the time people are not motivated by logic. They're motivated by emotion,
psychological things. They're motivated by based desires. Yeah, Rachel, and
you try to turn this light back on. Yeah you're good, gonna get
dark. Yeah, that's all right, you still look good. Don't worry.
Peterson was right about people thinking they can fix the whole world when they
can't even clean their own room. To her point, yeah, I think
that was a really really good point. I think that did a lot for
people, and like it sounds so simple and it is essentially a platitude,
but I do think it's useful for people to at least consider, as saying
goes, you to consider the log in your own eye before you consider the
speck in your neighbors. I might be butchering that, but I think that's
kind of the ethos that she's kind of getting there. Yeah, I think
a lot of people think that morals is kind of just the easiest thing to
go to is to just go after, you know, be this really annoying,
preachy person. I don't know, it's just I feel like I grew
out of that my twenties, so it's not me again. I'm not calling
out anybody specifically. I don't even have anybody I'm thinking of in mind.
In my mind, I'm just thinking of I don't know. There's a lot
of young people on Twitter that I think probably you know, right, they're
new through religion or whatever, and they're kind of like there's a tendency towards
fanaticism. One thing I'm noticing, and this is my suspicion, is that
a lot of what's going on on the online sphere, I suspect with all
of these debates, and I'm not saying that it means any of the positions
are false, just from a strategic social engineering societal control vantage point, I
suspect that a lot of different positions are being intentionally engineered towards more and more
radical, more and more atomizing positions to foster and foment the debate within society.
So the h and I agree with many of the points of you know,
the red pill in the sense of like critiques of you know, feminism,
critiques of problems in modern you know, marital situations, the fault divorce.
I agree with all that stuff, sure, but I think like this
one sphere, the side of the sphere I totally disagree with is like the
migtai in cell group that ends up pushing sex bots and you know, this
kind of stuff that I think is like an intentional radicalization that parallels the intentional
radicalization of the extreme feminist groups. So I see, I see that that
was actually a mention. One of the NATO documents mentioned intentional fostering of trolling
and Internet division. It was the NATOS docu. I think it's a cognitive
warfare document talks about this. Oh that's that's actually fascinating. I never even
heard of that, but yeah, I agree in like that end of the
red pill MiG Taw situation. It's like they kind of get a lot of
the diagnosis rate, but their prescription is just absolutely ridiculous. And I know
you've engaged with Rollo and some of the other you know what, I would
say are better red pill guys, more of like the actual red pell guys
who just kind of stick to the praxeology of things. I think those guys
are kind of like the ideal where they're not telling you how to live.
They're just saying, hey, here's this information, you figure out how to
live from there. But a lot of people can't separate the two, right,
So a lot of people they can't get the person. And I experienced
that myself. They're like, oh it's Jay Dyer. It's like, well,
I mean, what who so what right? I mean? The information
stands on its own, the arguments down on their own right, irrespective of
me. I mean, i'd be imagine saying, well, I don't like
my math teacher, so two plus two isn't four because I don't like my
mathews. The butthole. That's just so dumb. But that's the equivalent of
It's like the arguments, the information, the data stands on its own,
and so there is a lot of good information in you know, the rational
mail, that kind of stuff. I was read and reading Rollo since probably
I don't know, twenty twelve thirteen somewhere in there. I used to read
Rusha's Return of Kings religiously for however many years he had that. So you
know, that's a sphere that I'm familiar with. I read the game when
it just Strauss is the game when it came out. I read, you
know, a lot of those texts Mystery method, So you know, I'm
familiar with that sphere and that whole mindset, whether it's red Pill or Pway
or whatever. So I think they have insights. Then I think that when
people have those insights, then what happens is you get the intentional diversion of
the information over into these extremes, or they just make it about the persons
to deflect from the topics being discussed. And so my wife and I were
having discussion brothers the other day and she was saying, you think that there's
the the dangers in this stuff? I said, yeah, because if you
think about it, there is. I think the system knows, for example,
that because we've had one hundred hundred and fifty years of feminism, the
system knows there's going to be a reaction eventually to that. People are going
to say, wait a minute, if we've had the feminizing of all areas
of our society, if all the HR people and the CEOs and the professors
and the managers are all women, now people are going to start noticing and
reacting in some way. And so the initial counter reaction is you could say,
might have even begun with Paul Elam and you know, people like the
MiG taal spearhead your head back in the day, it's back like late twenty
twenty fourteen is somewhere around there. So then the characterization then is that well,
that's all this group of people, they all believe it is this over
here, that its worse members. Yeah, and that's not accurate because this
movement ended up splintering in a lot of different directions where I met like a
guy in twenty twelve or thirteen thirteen fourteen, somewhere in there he had written
a book about divorce laws in Canada because he gotten screwed up. He'd been
screwed over in divorce courts in Canada, and his book was about that whole
changing the justice system in Canada to favor whatever women said, even if the
women were not fit to be the guardians, right, custodians whatever the children.
And so at that time, right the focus was either pickup artist community
or men's rights concerned with family courts. And then it's sort of like,
I guess what Cernovich puts out his documentary challenging the feminist narratives, and he
had that feminist woman in there and all that, and I think that took.
Then the title red pill right became kind of like associated with in general
anything to do with the manosphere, when in reality, the manosphere was you
know, if you had if you read Return of Kings, you were reading
stuff that was manosphere. Uh, pick up artists, philosophy, religion,
economics, all of that. It was all over the place, right,
So it was it was pulling from a lot of different arenas, and then
you had certain people, uh, you know Roycy. I read Roycy for
years and years and years, you know, and he was focusing on the
cathedral, the culture, the culture war, feminism, and the culture.
He might talk about some of the pu A points here and there, but
he also talked about a lot of uh manosphere stuff, men's rights and all
that statistics, you know, abortion, all of the stuff. Right,
So it's it was very pretty diverse. And then what happened, I think
with when the Tate sphere came to the fore and adopted the term red pill,
then it became associated with the Tape sphere, and it then all became
about Andrew Tate. And then it's not about the topics that are being discussed
and whether the data matches up with this or that claim. Right. So
I was just telling Jamie that I think that the system that there would be
a counter reaction. And I'm not saying that specifically an individual. I don't
have any information about any specific individual being like the catalyst or and I'm just
saying that the system's perspective, I think, is to anticipate the counter reaction.
You can think of the same thing. When you have communist revolution and
you have what's called the counter revolutionaries, smart cunning people from the system will
also want to co opt the counter revolutionary movement as they control the revolutionary movement.
And I think, I mean even I think Lenin talked about controlled opposition,
right. So this is a well known thing and it happens in the
sphere as well, where they will study and try to steer and radicalize in
various ways these types of counter reactions. We've seen it exactly with the right
wing movement when Trump, when Trump came to the fore, what did they
do. They had this this giant thing go on at Charlottesville, right,
and that ended up destroying and dissipating that whole movement very effectively, we get
another dissident right type of movement that occurs. Then when do we get J
six right, We get that that effectively does a similar thing. So the
system always does this where they try to take the counter revolution, the counter
reaction and do whatever they can to either fragment it, destroy it, neutralize
it, or turn it into some just lunatic thing. You know, we've
had for example, many I n CEL dudes go off the hook and go
crazy and go shoot up something, right. So, I mean, I
don't know the specifics of those cases. I'm not trying to say, oh,
it was an nkal, I don't know that, but I'm just saying
that, whether it is or isn't, like they'll take that and say,
oh, here, you know, it'll become this national needs it's been net
effect of it. It's the national Like Elliott Rodgers, right, wasn't he
like, oh he's like the first I NCEL guy. That was the That's
kind of what they pinned him down. That's how they framed it exactly.
So anyway, I guess I'm rambling, but that's an example of how movements
ideas that gained traction can be steered and neutralized. Yeah. That's kind of
the way that I see Trump's role in the twenty twenty four election, because
I mean, if you look at kind of how everything played out, I
don't know how anybody can look at twenty twenty and still say that Trump is
on the outside of everything. Would really like there is there's not a lot
of daylight between him and Biden when it comes to policies, other than maybe
like Trump wants lower taxes and less immigration. Biden wants more taxes and more
immigration. I mean, other than that, you know, when it comes
to Israel, foreign policy, a great deal of many things. They're kind
of locks up on a lot of stuff. So I understand the whole deal
with oh, well, you know, the establishment hates him and everything.
But really, I don't think this stuff is as meaningful as people want to
make it out to be. I really think it's meant to just recycle more
money into the RNC and the DNC because Trump is the perfect boogeyman. If
there's no boogeyman, nobody's gonna get paid. So as long as Trump's around,
the Democrats get paid, the Republics get paid. I mean, he
raised two hundred and forty million dollars on you know, election fraud lawsuits and
then pocketed two hundred and ten million of it. So like, where's all
this money going? And why are you know, so many people flocking to
Trump's his figure? I mean, if they really wanted to get rid of
him, they would have ron palled him essentially, just kept them completely out
of all the news and everything like that, and he would have never been
a thing. But for some reason, he was just so propped up,
and even you know, Hillary Clinton said it was the pid piper strategy.
So this kind of drags it back to politics. But the general theme here
is that I think that a lot of this stuff, like you said,
has kind of propped up art officially, so that way people still continue to
buy into the you know, the mainstream conversation and the ideas surrounding that.
Yeah, I think anytime somebody begins to speak against the defined allowable magic circle
discussion topics, they immediately are reminded that you can't do that. So,
you know, for example, Reagan talked about the Trilateral Commission, and Reagan
got warned with a bullet right, So similar thing happens has happened with other
people. There's you know, you just you can't there's certain things you can't
talk about. Now. I don't know if Trump was, like quote warned.
One good analysis I heard was that Trump initially was going to not take
Republican RNC money and then he would be independent. But then what happened in
the first term, supposedly was that the deal was that if he did take
there see money, he would also have to make a compromise on who would
be in his cabinet, and so that's I don't know if I mean,
that's just what I've heard from people who presumably would know that that's the main
source of the problem with why things were back why the swamp wasn't drained in
the first administration. I've never you know, I kind of checked out of
politics back in the I mean, I will watch stuff and find it interesting,
but national politics I think has been kind of a kind of a puppet
show for a long time. I mean, I definitely think Biden is pretty
terrible, So I mean, just even for morale and just you know,
like I mean, even if just Trump is there symbolically, it's like still
seems like it might be better than Biden. But I mean sure, but
I do understand the sort of apathy about like presidential politics. To me,
it's just kind of ridiculous. And I've thought it was ridiculous since the rom
Pouls here, like you said, I mean, I was there pro romp
Paul at the time, and I remember them, you know, like they
just excluded him from everything and that was enough to at that time to neutralize
Ron Paul. So yeah, I don't I don't know what to say about
the Trump phenomenon, I didn't really have super high expectations. So yeah,
I think that probably Trump is just kind of a boomer on a lot of
issues, like like unbending on you know, areas which just seemed absurd to
me. I mean, the Stabby program, it was ridiculous. His position
on bitcoin is totally boomer. I mean of just I just think that there's
certain issues that boomers and evangelical boomers they will never It's just they're never going
to get out of that. They're never going to question like pre millennial Zionism.
If they're a boomer Christian, they're never going to question uh stonks and
the dollar which is fiat and worthless. Ultimately, they're never gonna conceive of
what big point is. I mean, they're just I mean, if a
boomer can question JFK, that's I mean, that's all we can expect.
That's all. I'm serious like, because the only things that boomers were allowed
to question were like a war man or right, I mean, UFOs,
JFK and the war. That's literally all the boomers were allowed to question.
And that's pretty much all they have ever questioned. So they're in policy,
they're not going to question it for him. But so what's the point,
right, Okay, so one thing that we're just waiting for. If I
make that joke, they Boomers will get mad. But I was going to
make a cleansing joke. But it's just like in the next five to ten
year we were making this joke on my life. I love Boomers by the
way, that that are at least not evil. So I'm not I'm not
here bom is just I've been making boomer joke for ten years. We were
talking about not the great the great cleansing, but we were talking about uh
so basically in five to ten years, I mean, uh, we're going
to be ruled by the gen X. Man, it's the gen X.
It took me a second. Yeah, we're going to be ruled by the
gen X. Are our new overlords, That's what I'm trying to Yeah,
it's time to start thinking about Hey, uh, we've at least got a
little more open minded us with conspiracy reality, so to speak, with the
gen X than we do with any of the Boomers. So sure, maybe
we can hope for things getting better with the gen X as our overlords.
So well, when it comes to like Ron Paul and libertarianism. I understand
a lot of more dissident right wingers and perhaps some of your frustrations of libertarians
when it comes to like the egalitarian mindset and a lot of like the Enlightenment
ideals, But when it comes to let's say, more like right wing libertarians
kind of like Ron Paul or maybe even Stefan Maulinu, who I think is
pretty good and I know you debated him. I know you and him have
some disagreements, But where would be your significant areas of disagreement with them in
their worldview? Because this is, like I said, this has been something
that's really been racking my brain lately. Well, I mean, I guess
you could. You could conceivably have a libertarian position that has a high place
for religion. Conceivably. I don't think that's necessarily not possible. I think
that the typical disagreements revolve around Enlightenment ideas of universalized human nature, which you
kind of already hinted at, and the idea that I wouldn't see religion as
like an appendix or religious commitments as something that are a tool for society,
but rather fundamental to society. So I think the main difference I can think
of right away would be my ideal scenario might be more along the lines of
symphonia between church and state rather than negative liberty minimizing the state. And there's
no easy answers to any of these questions because I'm well aware of the problems
of the state having too much authority. But the Orthodox idea is symphonia,
so you have ideally, what you would have is a strong state that has
the ability to do certain functions. Obviously they're limited in other ways, so
you have spheres of authority, and they can't step over the sphere of the
religious world, which products a lot of protects a lot of the rights and
values of the individuals. So the state's not really the protector of anything in
the spiritual domain per se, but they have a function that the spiritual domain
doesn't have, So there's spheres of authority. Was really important, and that's
why the traditional image of a it's an eagle with two heads, and that's
church and state. So it's not like the papal model would be one headed
eagle with a church and a crown, because the pope is kind of head
of state and the church, whereas the Byzantine classic model is and you still
see this in the symbol of Russian government is church and state, not saying
the Russian government is simplyy. It's not, but that's the meaning of the
symbol. So the ideal that we would have is something like that. How
exactly that's fleshed out in terms of, you know, what laws are going
to be in place to restrict the private public sphere, I mean, I
don't have any easy answers to that. That's super complex questions. I would
probably agree more with a lot of the libertarian Austrian school on those kinds of
questions about the market and that kind of stuff. But main point would probably
just be the role in place of the church in a society that the Enlightenment
was pretty pretty stringent upon separating and basically having the There's a good Russian philosopher
who wrote a book. His name is Pablo notaza Of, and he wrote
a book called Reflections of a Russian Statesman, and in either the second or
third chapter is a really good analysis where he says that you think that when
you have the separation of church and state, you're going to get this independence,
but what you actually get is the state becomes the new church, and
so he made a fascinating argument that actually the healthy functioning of a healthy estate
which isn't out of control, must have this institution of the church. I've
always found that to be a pretty pretty fascinating wrong argument. There's another good
critique of this position, or just the state in general, from these kind
of enlightenment perspectives. I think it's an essay by auto On Hobsburg. So
actually, some of the monarchists have written, I think pretty good critiques of
libertarianism and republicanism. Not to say I agree with every position that some Habsburg
guy says, but I think I thought that was a good essay critiquing.
I think it's called auto ottov On Hobsburg's critique of republicanism would be a good
essay. To read the Pabianazz book on Reflections of Russian Statesman. It's a
good book, a good read. Yeah, that's I think. Another thing
that happens is that you get this assumption in the libertarian perspective that just by
studying praxeology, I can get to ethics and I can get to metaphysical idea
is and positions, and I don't think you can. It doesn't make sense
to me. It's wrongheaded. So I would say that while praxeology can definitely
give us information and data, just like if I were to read you know,
Rollo's book on praxeology of the Rational Male in the Rational Mind and all
that and how humans act, I could definitely get a lot of that data.
But it doesn't it's not going to give me the ability to make a
value judgment. It is not. I can't get an aught from it,
is right, And so studying what happens cannot tell me what ought to happen.
And that's why we need the religious system and functions as the means to
get the aught. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, no it
does. So then I guess my follow up question to that would be preps
out a question one Jordan Peterson basically lays out that like, when it comes
to atheists that they believe as if they they act as if they believe in
God, would you kind of say that's a valid statement or would you disagree
with that? And if you do, where would you depart from that?
No? I totally agree with that. That's a fact. That's a critique
that I mean I've gotten it from I think Monson. You know, back
back when I was a Calvinist, when I was eighteen nineteen twenty, I
was reading Greg Monson and Cornelis Vantil and they made that argument frequently. So
that's kind of an argument that's been around for a while. Maybe even you
could argue Doscievsky and makes this kind of an argument. So no, I
would totally agree with that, Okay, So then I guess the next question
would be why do you think it's just the culture and the civilization around atheists
that kind of keep them behaving in a rightful way? Because I'm agnostic and
I, like I said earlier, I've been questioning a lot of my foundations
over the last couple of months, and you know, I do kind of
run into the question, Okay, well, why, you know, why
do I behave the way that I do? Because I don't have necessarily religious
grounding. Although I believe religious values and religion for people is generally good,
I just never had the same experience that would convince me overwhelmingly if there was
a God. But I see the utility and religion, so maybe you call
me consequentials in that respect, where I see that like, Okay, the
consequence of people believing in religion is that society tends to flourish. But once
again, that doesn't feel right to say, because it's like I don't believe
in it, but I understand the consequences. Yeah, I think you're right
there that like that would be a pragmatic argument. I was reading this,
reading this book on the CIA's approach to religion, especially during the Cold War.
Its it's really good book of uncovering. It's called Aaron into the Wilderness,
The History of the CIA in Religion, And I just finished the chapter
where that guy was saying basically what you just said that during especially during the
Cold War, but even prior to that, and even still the CIA really
saw the value of whatever religion in terms of the region that they were studying
and wanting to maybe have a regime change or infant or project soft power into
Religion is seen as essentially a tool that helps the society. It's the glue
of a society. Perhaps it's the you know, the moral meaning source of
a society. You know, this is all kind of stuff that Peterson would
say. I think those things are observably the case. Now, whether that
means that religion is false or true. Is It's a different question, right.
So again, like psychological reports have value. But if I were to
give a psychological report, like you know, oh, well, you know
people believe in God because this is bertrand Russell's army says people believe in God
because they're weak. Well, you know that's like that's a fallacy first of
all, so that doesn't prove right wrong. Reasons that people come to believe
something does, in it self dictator determine whether the belief is true or false,
because I might, for example, have bad motivations or bad reasons by
which I believe something true. Right, So maybe you know, you say,
Jay, why do you believe too plus two's four? And I say,
I do believe touplus TuS four, and I believe it because Bill caused
me, came to me in a dream last night and told me, Okay,
that's not a good reason to believe the tupless use for me, but
it's true. Right, So I can have bad reasons for true beliefs,
and so likewise, I might have bad psychological motivations for a belief or a
disbelief, but those things have nothing to do with whether it's true or false,
but it still can be relevant information to know why people are motivated to
believe this thing or that thing anyway. So I think that it's very valuable
to look at the motivations and the pragmatic utility of religion and all that.
But what religion is true or false and this kind of stuff, that's a
totally different question. And I don't think they're invalid questions. I think they're
very valid. But yeah, I mean, so basically, you know,
the transcendental argument runs that the only way to have an objective basis or argumentation
for right and wrong, for true and false, for more metaphysics, which
would be things like the good and so forth, is that you need some
kind of worldview which grounds those things, because those are very all encompassing types
of claims. Right, So, in other words, to have belief in
the good, I have to have some account of the good, and to
talk about the good. It's not going to just be a question of metaphysics.
It's also ethical because I'm saying that this is good, and by extension,
something else is bad good and batter ethics, there are also metaphysical claims.
So what worldview can give an account for the possibility of making ethical,
metaphysical, and epistemic claims. And so the argument runs that not every worldview
can do that, so hence the Christian world you can do that. So
it actually provides the possibility for those So I think for me, that's the
best apologetic logical proof for God's existence. I mean, there's other people who
make different types of art. I think the other arguments are kind of weak.
But anyway, so that's kind of the basics of TAG in terms of
how I would go about offering an argument that provides, you know, an
account for world view, world views and ethics. M okay, I gotcha.
Jeez, all right, Well you've been very respectful of your time,
Jay, I don't want to keep you too too long. Well, did
I derail it? Maybe it's like you didn't want to go into TAG or
something. I thought, No, no, no no, I. If
you got more time, I'll keep going. But I don't want to go
a few more minutes to do if you want to No, no, no,
I do I do, because there's there's like a million things going through
my But we're starting to get good, like where Tom Peterson and morals and
Okay, okay, cool, Yeah, no, no, we'll keep going
then. Okay. So one thing that I never found quite compelling was when
people say you get your I don't want to sound dismissive when I say this,
but this is just the way that I'm interpreting it. And you can
kind of color in the lines here. When it comes to where we receive
our morals from, well, where Christians get their morals from is from divine
command. Well, this question is incredibly loaded for me because it's like,
okay, well, how do you know that the account you're getting of divine
command is right? Because each person's relationship with God is gonna be different,
right, And then if you're going to a spiritual father, how do you
know that that spiritual father is correct? And do you see the kind of
line of thinking that I'm going down? Like this has always been very very
confusing for me. Well, going to one source, it doesn't follow from
that that that's the only source. In our worldview, we would have multiple
sources. And that's not a problem because we wouldn't necessarily believe that having multiple
sources entails that the multiple sources are out of a chord with one another.
So, for example, if I'm reading my Bible on my own, and
then I go to church and we have a collective you know, experience of
the liturgy, and then I go and talk to my priest one on one
and we're having you know, counseling or something like that. Like conceivable,
most likely there's not going to be a contradiction between the information that's being gotten.
Right if I am reading my Bible and let's say I'm a new convert
and I'm reading it and I say, oh, I've noticed something that is
wrong, and then I go to the priest and I you are wrong because
the Bible says this. Well, I mean, that can certainly happen,
but most likely probably because if somebody's a new concert, they're probably not right.
They're probably you know, I mean, the person who's been studying it
and knowing it for a long time is probably more correct. But in my
experience this, I mean, this can happen, but I'm not run into
situations where you know, there was some like big existential dilemma over which authority
was right. But I guess that you know, that's more of a lived
experience that you would have to kind of see firsthand before you could really,
because I mean, that's not going to translate to you. You have an
experience as so you don't know if that's the case. Maybe it isn't the
case, and you might, like, you know, who knows, there
could be a situation where you happen to go experience a preach who's really bad,
or you know, like maybe you find some corrupt preach or something like
that. So I mean, anything is possible, but no, I just
I think out of an out of hand, I would say that, well,
typically it's not the case that multiple authorities are necessarily going to be out
of a chord with with one another. And even though that might arise in
some cases, even in some situations where you have an authority that conflicts with
another authority, eventually there would be presumably some means to right. Let's say
you have like an orthodox Churt's the normal practice of these kinds of issues is
called the synod. So there's a council, and so if something was serious
enough that it couldn't be resolved, then it would kind of go up up
the chain to the bishop and then maybe to the synod or something like that.
So if there was some serious issue like that, there's at least measures
in place to deal with those types of problems. Does that make sense?
Okay, So basically I don't want to say use consensus of bishops. So
basically you would go up the hierarchy until you find the final authority who would
be interpreted as the person who would be the best at interpreting the text and
the perception of whatever scripture or whatever divine command that you're trying to understand at
the time. I'm sorry if I completely butchered that, but does that make
sense? Let me let me put it this way. So when you maybe
I'm confused about because somebody says divine command, they might think that that means
that when I'm reading the Bible and it says, you know, like Jesus
told his followers to go sell their cloak and buy a sword, Oh,
Jesus is commanding me right now, because that was a divine command that I
go and sell my cloak and buy a sword, right like we wouldn't nobody
that I know would hold to That'll take all Bible passages literally, Well,
it's not even a question of literal versus figurative. That was That's actually just
a question of context because the context is speaking to the specific command to the
apostles at that time, because he didn't want anything impeding his mission at that
time. So, but that's not a standing command as we would say,
like, for example, the Ten Commandments reflect God's moral law, and so
the moral law doesn't change, not just because it's the Ten Commandments, but
we think the Ten Commandments are kind of a reflection of God's own character.
So there's not going to be like any divine command that comes to us or
to anyone that contradicts the existing structure of the Ten Commandments in the moral law.
In other words, God's not going to, for example, command me
to I don't know, like I had a dream last night and God told
me my dream to murder my neighbor. Because they're I don't know, engaging
in something evil. It doesn't work like like I don't have the God is
not going to tell me to do something that contradicts prior revelation. And there's
no there's no priests or anyone in the world that would tell you, yes,
you must listen to that, that's God speaking to you. Everyone would
say that's that's not God's speaking because we first and foremost, I think believe
in a an internal consistency and coherence. Okay, okay, all right,
so that is there another example that you're I mean, maybe I'm misinterpreting,
Like what's the example that you're like, what's the scenario that you're thinking of?
It was just when I hear people say, well, we get our
moles from divine command, It's like, okay, well, who, like
how is this supposed to be interpreted? That's what's always kind of confused me.
And you know, to preface it again, I'm just incredibly ignorant of
the religion as a whole. So this has always been something that I've wanted
to learn more and more about. Well, I think you've laid a good
account for it, and like, I'm definitely grabbing it more. The usually
divine command is raised in the context if it's like an atheistic objection. It's
usually raised in the context of the youth of ro dilemma, which is should
we believe in the moral command because the God said it? Or do the
God say it because it's the good. So it's like, is it the
gods that arbitrarily sort of determine the good? Or do the God submit to
a higher ultimate standard of the good, so that is always cashed out in
terms of Greek metaphysics, and for us, we don't believe in Greek metaphysics.
So for example, God doesn't arbitrarily say this is good this day.
In ten years, I shall decree suddenly that you know, this is now
evil and them we don't believe that it ever occurs that way. For one,
because Paul says it's impossible for God to lie. So God can't go
against his own nature, and anything that has a nature and argue can't go
against that nature in terms of like suddenly not being that nature right, So
humans can never not be human. God should never not be who he is
as God, and so he's never going to give a command that would contradict
his own commands or his own ways of operating. So now there are certain
things that God can do that humans can't do. So it doesn't mean that
God does everything the exact same way that we do things. But we would
say that the Youth of Rae dilemma is based on a different metaphysic than the
Christian has, and it's neither divine command theory, nor does God submit to
some higher idea of the good Okay, so when it comes to kind of
getting more principles, he would have the Ten Commandments, and you're understand of
those would basically be consistent because you believe that God would lie, do I
got that about right. Well. I was just saying, if we're looking
for a basic moral framework, the Tank Commandments are kind of our basic sort
of beginning example of a moral framework. And yeah, I mean, the
the reason that those principles don't change is because God doesn't change. Is the
way I would say, okay, all right, So because this has been
something else when it comes to like talking about red pel topics, our mutual
friend Tommy Sammons had said that like, oh well, you guys don't ever
touch you know, what's more metaphysical stuff. And my hold up with that
is that essentially it's like, okay, well, who's metaphysics are you kind
of appealing to, Because like the way that people of Islamic faith or you
know, maybe Catholic faith or Orthodox faith, the way that they kind of
interpret those meta physics in a way that they're going to navigate the world with
that is going to be different. So like the way that I may view
things that are immaterial is going to be completely different than somebody who believes something
different than me. Am I making sense in certain metaphysical principles like are there
immaterial realities? There's an immaterial reality? Is is something not ext extended in
space and time? I mean, I don't think in those those specific examples
of like basic metaphysical ideas, I don't think we would disagree with a Roman
Catholic or even a Muslim. I mean, there are significant, huge disagreements
between mainly US and Muslims. Maybe less but still significant agreements, disagreements between
US and a Roman Catholic. But I think it kind of depends on which
specific metaphysical thing we're talking about, because you know, if I'm talking to
Roman Catholic, you know, we believe that there is causation. We believe
there's teleology or purpose in the world. We believe in, you know,
universals, We believe in laws of logic, we believe in all We believe
in a lot of the same because, for one, not only do we
have a biblical heritage that's similar in that first thousand years of Christianity between us
in Roman Calthol, we also share a lot of ideas from Plato and Aristotle.
So, for example, Aristotle's ethics, you know, has been very
influential on the Christian tradition, and we would say that we have a version
of virtue ethics. You know a lot of Ariostol, So there's a lot
of commonality with things like Aristotle, but at the same time, you know,
significant differences. But the specific things that you listed, the immateriality of
the soul, we would agree with, angels, demons, I think we
would agree with those basic ideas. Sure, sure, Okay, So then
I guess the next question that I've always had and I don't think I've ever
got a sufficient answer for, is what would make you know, let's say,
so you're an orthodox Christian, what would make you believe that your religion
is the one right one? And I'm not necessarily saying that you're one hundred
percent certain that it is. Maybe you are, but I don't know,
why would you know Romantholicism or any of the other religions be wrong denominations compared
to the one that you've settled with. Is it just like the matter of
you know, how you studied it and the historical precedent for it, or
what would be kind of like your reasoning for being Orthodox versus everything else,
and you believing that that's the highest truth. So I think certain arguments could
be made that fit every possible world view that that would be like a philosophical
approach to the basic epistemic, metaphysical, and ethical questions. I could do
a critique of the Roman Catholic Church on those three branches of philosophy time view.
I could also do a critique of the Romancolic position in terms of the
shared first thousand year heritage that we have with Roman Catholics. And I would
say, you know, things like if we look at the seven ecumun councils,
each of those councils has canons, which is church law or canon law
that they passed and promoted and held to that don't comport with the Vatican one
definition of papal infallibility. The changes in the Romancallity Church from the time of
Vatican One to post Vatican two are pretty easy signifiers also that we could look
at. So these would be more historical arguments. And then I think you
could even you know, depending upon what Roman Galago saget them, and we
can go to biblical argumentation as well, so there's a lot of different avenues
that one could make that kind of an argument. But one commonality is that
we see a lot of similar approaches. For example, amongst Muslims, libertarians
and I could use stuff on malnu Azra Rashid, atheists, Thomass they all
have the exact same starting point of natural law and to translate that into religion.
That's natural theology. And I would, out of the hand argue that
all of those are fall apart. So all the same critiques that you've seen.
I don't know if you've seen the Muslim debates. But what's interesting is
that the exact same argument that came about with stuff on malony came about with
shake Azra Rashid, which was that well, there's just self evident principles.
Okay, well what are those? How do we account for those? Oh?
Well, they just are. So there's a commonality here that and this
is interesting that came out of the last Muslim debate. Some of the Muslim
philosophers actually anticipated the Enlightenment philosophers. And that's I think the commonality which I
didn't even know this until fairly recently, last few years of doing these Muslim
debates, Like, I knew about a lot of critiques of Enlightenment philosophy and
pistemology, but I didn't expect to find this as a commonality between small beween
Muslims, libertarians, enlightenment philosophers, and atheists. So basically your critique of
all of them would be that they kind of start with natural law as a
given and kind of work from there. And you believe that divine command would
take place before that. Well, you keep saying divine command, and so
I'm not sure do you mean just the idea of revelation or do you mean
divine command theory of ethics? Divine command theory of ethics? I apologize,
Yeah, that's okay. I'm just trying to be precise. So I don't
like reply to something that you don't mean. Yeah, I mean, so
I think that, Yeah. The argument would be that any position that tries
to pause it self evidence is it's a problem, and so that this is
called classical foundationalism is the epistemic position, and that's the position that everybody shares
here where we're kind of just using classic and medieval notions of first principles.
So, but the problem is that post Human, Kant, the world begins
to question first principles, so it's actually the enlightenment that questions some of the
Enlightenment arguments, and then it puts us in this position of a lot of
skepticism and post modernity. So the question is, well, okay, so
the Enlightenment is trying to get away from superstitions. It's trying to cleanse our
world views from from not having certitude and not having knowledge, right, because
Descartes kicks a lot of this off, seeking indubitable certitude, and then we
get Kant and Human and Locke taking the questions to a next level of well,
indibital certitude is probably not going to be had through rationalism of Descartes,
so it's probably going to be had if we can have it through something relating
to empirical sense data. So we get to shift away from rationalism to empiricism
with Hume, Lock, Berkley, Kant, and pretty much everybody after that
unless they're like weirdos like Hegel or something or Hediger, But most of the
time in the West, this empiricism comes to dominate, and eventually empiricism deconstructs
itself because we don't really have to go much further than David Hume. The
questions haven't really changed since David Hume, even up until Kwine, and the
questions are just, well, how do we actually have a way to justify
even these basic principles or first principles of natural science or sense data. Hume
was consistent enough to say we can't, there's no justification, and so they're
in the same category as religious beliefs. So the law of non contradiction,
the law of identity, identity over time, I mean, David Hume is
saying that if you're an atheist, skeptic, whatever, like, those are
in the same boat as the religious guy you're making fun of. So you're
talking about the guy who's an idiot for believing in God, You're just as
much an idiot for believing that you can give a rational episomic justification for your
first principles without contradicting being a circle. So this leads to people then kind
of positing different ways of accounting for first principles, namely transcendental argumentation or admitting
that there is circularity for first principles or for basic principles. This is the
points that Wickenstein is a bringing up about word games really is just making the
point that language is kind of circular. You can never get out of a
kind of basic fundamental circularity. And that would mean then that all of the
self evidence arguments and the belief in self evidence and first principles it doesn't exist.
So fiction. So if that's the case, then that right there cuts
out any religious position that would build their foundations on classical foundationalism. Okay,
all right, man, that is a lot. See I've never had to
question this kind of stuff, so I'm coming to it. Here's the thing,
like, if you get a book, like a mainline readable epistemology book,
like, for example, there's a really good one called Epistemology by W.
J. Wood, and it's not that long. It's I recommend it
to people in the audience because there's a whole chapter where he raises the very
questions that you hear me talking about, and it's the question on it's the
chapter on classical foundationalism, and he says, well, you know, every
classical foundationalist is some kind of evidentialist. And the problem with having this view
of well, there's just some things that are self evident is that says who
you become another kind of arbitrary religious authority. Right, And maybe it is
the case that the law of identity, the law of not contradiction, excluded
a middle all these maybe all these things are self evident, but why should
we think to that self evident? And then you get this problem of self
reliance where it's like, well, if they're self evident, they can't rely
on something else. But as soon as you try to give reasons for why
it's self outen evident, you're appealing to something else is no longer self evident.
Then there's another problem that's called the Chisholm problem, the criterion problem.
And this is a philosopher who raised the point that well, even if you
could lay out the ten things that you think are self evident, you've missed,
you've missed, you've overlooked the fact that if there's ten things that are
self evident and there's a million things that aren't self evident that are derived from
this, then you have a more fundamental notion of the criteria, which is
the thing that allows you to adjudicate between these two things. And so,
uh oh, now you've got something more fundamental than your ten things that are
self evident, therefore they're no longer self evident. So these are pretty pretty
well known. I'm not knocking you, but I'm just saying maybe if people
aren't familiar with these questions, like anybody who takes in a pistemology class,
you're going to have a textbook that will raise these questions. And these questions
are not just irrelevant, they're raised and they're brought up because as the discourse
happens in Western philosophy, by the time you get to Quine, Quine and
Nelson Goodman, they restate the problems of human say, we haven't we haven't
moved beyond hum and Quine goes so far as to say that really there is
no epistemology. It's done. It's just like we're just doing psychology now.
Well, if we're just doing psychology now, then we're doing a philosophy and
that's and that's essentially what Quin says. So when it comes to things that
are self evident, and the problem with that, I never really thought of
it as a way of that like if you use an individual or deciding a
things yourself evident, because like, hey, I can touch this remote right
here, I can rely that it's going to be here over time, and
like it's not changing shape in my hand. The question then is like,
okay, well why should I what's the grounding for that belief for atheists then,
because like you know, you can't reliably say that it's always going to
be there. But it almost seems like the religious argument, I don't say
is a about to say, okay, well, God accounts for that,
But that's essentially what I'm getting. The argument is. The argument is not
just God accounts for that. The argument is that sure, there are structures
in place that are not God, but transcendental categories that have to be there
in place, in reality, in an external world, and the only way
to account for all of those things together is God in the Christian world.
So it ends up being what's called divine conceptualism, which is the idea that
reality is grounded not just in the things themselves, but in something beyond physical
reality, in the divine mind. And the reason that it has to be
a divine, personal, intentional mind is that that's the only kind of thing,
the only kind of being that could do the grounding work in an epistemic
sense, to ground the things that we're talking about the categories as well as
the particulars, the universals, et cetera, all of those things. And
when you study what categories are and so forth, you realize they don't like
there's not like things that they're not structures to stand on their own right.
Like knowing knowledge presupposes a knowwherre a self. Okay, that's presupposed as an
external world. The ability to know things in the external world presupposes causation.
And so the question that you just raised about like the external world and the
object in my hand, this is this is a very that that very assumption
is questioned in a really famous book by Sellard's Myth of the Given. And
the point of that little book is that he's it's a famous book in philosophy
because he's critiquing the idea that there's this immediate givenness of a causal experience,
that this object in my hand is transmitting causally information to my senses and to
my brain. Now, maybe it is, but you haven't proven or shown
that empirically. You've assumed it in your interpretation of the object. You see.
So the point is that it's really impossible to get away from assuming things
even in something as simple as perception of a mundane object? Does that make
sense? And so Sellers isn't arguing that you, oh, Wilson, I
guess we're all skeptics. He's just pointing out that it's not adequate to assume
that because there's sense data that I'm getting reliable, meaningful information about the object,
as I think it's so constituted. You see what I'm saying. So
I guess the next question then would be like, how do you reliably account
for consciousness amongst other people? Then? And what's to say that, like
my interpretation of this remote would be different than let's say, my wife in
the other room's interpretation of the remote. Well, but you see, the
point is that if the world view and I'm not saying it's true, because
I'm saying this it's a hypothetical. If if the worldview that's positive by the
Christian system is true, and let's say we're made in the image of God,
we have minds, we have the ability to reason in a discursive way,
reasoning logos, which is this idea that penetrates the universe. It's makes
sense because it's a rational universe created by irrational being with purpose, tls intentionality,
there's structure, there's order, there's regularity in nature, which solves the
problem of identity over time, and the problem of induction that hum brings up.
So, in other words, a lot of these really difficult problems in
philosophy that have, especially in the last five hundred years, made the philosophers
say we're done, we give up. They've literally thrown up their hands.
A lot of those problems aren't problems in the Christian worldview, because the Christian
worldview gives us that logical structure and framework. The non Christian Christian worldview,
in say, secular academia, they can't even tell you if there's an external
world. That's what I'm trying to say, like, get they can't get
past because remember, everything is starting with just the presupposition of an individual,
finite human knower and the empirical sense data supposedly that maybe it's out there,
maybe it's not, maybe it's just a projection of my mind, maybe i'm
maybe it's just sillipsis. So in other words, it's it can't even get
off the ground, is the point, Whereas, at least in the Christian
perspective, it's not saying that you have a worldview that gives you an answer
to every question. It's a worldview that gives you the possibility of how there's
knowledge at all? Does that make sense? That's the actual argue. A
lot of people miss that, but that's I'm following. But the one thing
that I guess I'm kind of hung up on here is that it almost sounds
like you're saying, well, the religious worldview accounts for most of these things,
so therefore it is the most likely explanation. But that doesn't necessarily and
maybe it's just because I don't get it. It's not a question of likelihood.
The argument runs that it's the only way that all of the transcenental categories,
which are all necessary for the possibility of knowledge, hold and stand together
and make knowledge possible. So it's a pre knowledge type of argument. It's
a preconditioned argument. It's not an argument saying that the world exists, therefore
God exists. It's saying that for the possibility of knowledge at all, God
would have to exist. So it's as much stronger claim than just the claim
that well, maybe God fits into this you know, gap system or something
like that. Sure, Sure, okay, so I guess what I'm not
following is that I don't understand how all of that concludes that God is real.
And I'm sure there's an explanation, but I'm not. It's if knowledge.
It's The argument is that if knowledge is possible, it seems that it
is, then it requires this metaphysic, and that metaphysic requires this God,
a specific type of God. That's the argument. So you could conceivably say,
well, I don't believe knowledge is possible, but then you just made
a knowledge claim. So so it seems pretty yeah, it's pretty dead end
to go in that direction. So but the argument is that, well,
if if knowledge is possible, knowledge isn't possible on any random type of world.
It's only possible on a certain kind of world with a certain type of
metaphysic and a certain epistemology and by extension ethic as well. Okay, all
right, I want to make sure I let me rephrase it like this,
like you familiar with say, Aristotle's categories, not off the top of my
head, but maybe if you so. Basically, like Ariostotl gives this list
of categories, and these are the categories of how it's possible to know the
world. Okay, So like certain like things have to be in a certain
location, they have to have a certain quantity, they have to have certain
qualities, they have to have certain relations to other objects. Right that this
is appealing to sense stata, right, Like, well, aerosols is an
asking those kinds of questions yet because he just assumes that, Yeah, of
course we have information from sense data. Right, So he just takes it
as a given that we have these sense data knowledge. We have this knowledge
from sense data that's made possible by these metaphysical principles. Okay, So I'm
just trying to give examples of what kinds of things we're talking about here,
right, And I think we could also include things that are necessary for predication
and knowledge, like laws of logic, like linguistic meaning, universals, particulars
or these are all metaphysical things that I'm saying. If we want to say
that we have knowledge, and by knowledge I mean justified true belief, If
we want to say we have that, then the world's got to be a
certain way. So for example, well what if it's not. What if
the world is a rejection of my mind? Well, if I went in
that direction, I could not have knowledge anymore. It would be a self
defeating belief at a presubpositional fundamental level, because if I come to the view
that everything is a projection of my mind, then kind of everything is a
sort of an illusion, right, And if everything is illusory or just a
projection of my mind, there's nothing to compare against the false. Right,
I don't have a true to measure the false, because everything just is right.
So right there, you would be essentially a religious figure dictating reality.
Well but if well, but yeah, but not just that. It would
be that knowledge is impossible because if everything that's occurring is an illusion or just
a projection of my subconscious then it's not really real. I don't have any
real to measure the false against. Then what that means is that even my
coming to know that all reality is a projection of my mind, that's also
part of the projection, you see, And I can't know that that's real.
So I'm ellipsism. What I'm saying is that, as an example of
a position worldview that is self defeating, that actually makes knowledge impossible. And
when I say knowledge, I'm talking about criteria that meets the standards a belief
that meets the standard of justified true belief in the classical sense. So I
would affirm, like a classical idea of knowledge is not just mere opinion,
but the ability to justify, give an account for, and ground your beliefs
justified true beliefs. So and we say that because I give this example earlier
in our discussion where we were talking about good beliefs versus or good reasons to
believe versus bad reasons. So this is this is like Bill Cosby saying tuopless
two is four in a dream. Even though it might be true, it's
not a good reason to believe, too pluss for any better reasoning than that.
And so to get back to the tag point the argument for God,
I'm just using the syllipsis as a position as an example of how maybe I
don't think that there's an external world. Well, if I don't think there's
an external world, I'm immediately put in this box of syllipsism, canceling out
the possibility of knowledge. And so the transcendal argument runs that most of those
kind of fundamental moves away from a Christian or atheistic paradigm will put you in
a kind of box like that. Let's say I believe, oh h,
there is an external world, but everything is pure matter. Well, if
everything is pure matter, then I would fall into the deterministic fallacy, which
would make the naturalistic fallacy, which would make knowledge impossible. Or I would
not be able to predicate and make sentences because I don't know that what I'm
predicating actually applies to any meaningful thing in the world. Because if it's all
just matter and motion, then distinctions between matter and motion ultimately end up being
kind of illusory because there are always sol just atoms anyway, So there's not
really anything that makes the cow different from the man, different from the truck
different from the dog. It's just matter in motion. So there's not really
essences. There's no nature. And if there are no essences in natures,
then meaning, then language and predication that becomes impossible. Okay. So,
and that would be because they're each of those things you mentioned have distinctions and
things that make them. You know, simply, I'm so like you know,
obviously I'm myself because you could see who I am, you can hear
me, you can you know, feel me, small me, whatever,
But like you know, when it comes to like a cow or a dog
or something like that, like they have old distinct things, natures, behaviors
that you would recognize as like okay, well cow, you know, grazes
and you know is made up of meat, ribbi whatever. And a dog
is you know, going to have certain things that it does, and natures
which would need well, we need universals, we need real categories that make
those things those things and not other things. And so any position that denies,
for example, the reality of essences and natures is going to be in
the same boxes of human skepticism, and eventually, kind of on the inability
to predicate, you will reduce to psychologism. So and that's that's why Hume's
such a great philosopher for us. Ironically, even though I don't agree with
his conclusions, his point is that if we're going to go the route of
denying the metaphysics, which denying universals would lead to this, then things don't
really have anything in common beyond what we perceive them to be in common.
They don't actually possess those things in themselves. Because what I perceived to be
something common is just the thing I come up with in my mind. It's
a psychologized, linguistic token thing. It's not an actual thing that's possessed in
the being right between two dogs. The dogs don't have dogness in And if
you were to be consistent here, if you're an empiricist, because you're not,
you're not empirically seeing dogness. You're just seeing a bunch of traits that
this one has a bunch of traits that this one has, and you're just
assuming that they have some shared traits. But that's the thing in question.
What is the shared trait? Well, you don't believe in essences, so
what's what's shared? Exactly? There's nothing shared you can't consistently believe. And
so that that's why, as this debate progresses, if you're a nominalist and
pretty much every empiricist as anomalist, there might be some weirdo other that's not
but usually those like nine a half percent of the time those go together.
There's not a real thing that's shared. It's just appearances, it's just traits.
It's begging the question to say, well, then what is it that
makes a dog a dog? Does that you know doesn't make sense a little
bit, But so you couldn't appeal to like the name, Like you know,
dogs have specific behaviors like you might have heard my dog just run down
the stairs and barn. But the behaviors are another feature of empirical sense data.
So it's just it's no different than saying that, uh, it's the
dog. They have four legs. I mean, it doesn't like the behaviors
are another piece of sense data. They don't tell you if there's two different
natures because there are no natures. There's just there's just atoms. I mean,
if you're an empiricist, all you have is the sense data, and
you're assuming that there's these things that are called dogs and these things that are
called men, but those are just human and their social constructs. So human
is more consistent here and saying that's that's an interpretation from a human being that
you're calling. Those are English words, right, So there's no what's what's
a dog behavior of? I don't know, bone biting. I mean humans
can bite a bone, so are we dogs? If you have that behavior,
what's the specific behavior? And in other words, you can't reduce a
nature to a traitor behavior. And again, the it's kind of begging the
question because the question isn't can you think of a different thing that's not four
legs or hair or whatever, because they're all going to be sense data,
so it doesn't matter or which sense data trait you pick out. Human's point
is that what you're referring to linguistically is not in the thing itself. There's
no okay, that's not in that dog. That's a human social construct.
So basically, when we conceive of something, we have the different categories that
may not all be physical things that we can achieve through sense data that we
kind of abtrack and say, okay, well, you know, I know
this is dog because it looks like a dog, it feels like a dog,
sounds like a dog, but it also has these other behaviors that we
can't necessarily touch, taste, or feel that we know makes it a dog.
Same with you know, same way with people and categories. From there
all, well, you lose the ability to actually posit classes, is what
I'm trying to say. Now, you can do it, but there's not
an account for it. Right, So there's plenty of atheist materials philosophers out
there who believe in a species and who believe in a class of things.
But Human's point is that there's no ration justification for believing in those classes.
It's arbitrary. If we're an empiricist, Okay, so then okay, I
hate to do this again to you, But how would it be not arbitrary
when you install religion to the picture. Well, we're not empiricists, so
we wouldn't start our assumption of how we have knowledge or limit our knowledge to
immediate sense data. So the first thing we would not agree with is that
all knowledge comes from sense data. Secondly, we would not believe that knowledge
is limited to sense data, and we would posit the necessity of the metaphysics
that human and the Enlightenment rejected. There must be telos in the world,
there must be causation in the world. But the Enlightenment is posited on you
don't actually perceive in your senses cause and effect. So humans example is to
go along with what we're talking about with the dogs and the perceiving of the
essences or the natures. If you think of a billiard ball hitting another billiard
ball right, a billiard ball A hits biller ball B, and then the
next one moves right, do you actually perceive causation there? And Hume's point
is that if we're going to be consistent empiricists, No, you observe event
A an event B, and you're calling that causation. But in that particular
instance, you have not observed a universal causation event. So you see that
there's a mistake from jumping from the particular to the assumption which is not justified
on an empirical basis that there is a universal principle of causation. So Hume
is not arguing in this that he doesn't believe in cause and effect. His
point is that there's not a logical justification if you're an empiricist for cause and
effect. And if that's the case, then there's not a logical justification for
any of the principles that an atheist, rationalist, materialist, whatever empiricist has.
You can't justify the laws of logic, the external world, identity over
time on causation. They're just as arbitrary as somebody positing are gone. Does
that make sense? Yes, sort of? So what because of the billiard
ball example, If you hit the billiard ball, then you know that gravity
is going to maintain the ball staying on the table and then hitting the other
one, and when they make contact that you're missing the locus of human critique
because to appeal to something like gravity or some other force or principle at work
in physics or whatever is begging the question, because it's just moving to another
piece of empirical data. And the point is that you don't actually know that
that is a universal principle or thing going on in the universe unless you've had
universal experience. So remember you're if you're an empiricist, all you know is
sense data. On what basis of sense data? Do you know that there's
a universal principle of gravity by your I don't want to say lived experience,
but essentially that's all you can really rely on. That's right, So you
can't go from it. You can't justify sense data on the principle of sense
data, right, So to make it really simple, I mean, the
basic point, starting point of empiricism is that all knowledge comes through sense data.
Okay, does that principle itself? Do you see that anywhere in sense
data? Then it's self forgetting that's the point. Okay, So basically because
so okay, okay, no, I'm getting so because you can't actually visually
see a cause and effect like the actual what cause and effect means. Then
that requires abstraction, which if you're an empiricist you can't believe because it's not
a physical thing. And the same deal with like what it has to do
with universal and predication. Right, So I mean you're partly right there.
I would agree with the abstraction point that you're you're not really meaningfless, we
don't know that we're meaningfully saying anything about the external world beyond that. Yeah,
there's also this idea that all knowledge comes from sense data, so that
all is a universal quantifier, meaning that it's a universal claim. It's a
statement about all possible affairs. Right, But as an empiricist, you don't
have actually that. Okay, so it's annosified move. Maybe it's the case,
but we don't know that. We can go there just arbitrarily by saying
that, well, all knowledge comes from says data. Really, how do
you know that you're an empiricist? Have you universally observed that it's unknowable?
Okay? Okay, so now it's starting to click. So basically, like
I can't know that universally all these guitar picks all over the world look exactly
the same and do the same function because I haven't seen all the guitar picks
that are all over the world. Right, But yeah, so, but
it's it would be for any sentence or any class of things. You couldn't
make those statements justifiably. You can make the statements, they just can't be
justified, but you can't you can't prove it because you would That would require
you to see every single guitar pick that's ever been made and ever will be
made, right, and so, But it's a problem not just for specific
universal claims and formal propositions or whatever. It's a problem for predication in general
because it also means I can't knowably. I can't coherently class anything together as
if it's a real class of things. And that becomes a problem in language
because language relies on predicates predication. Right, Jay is a man, Kyle
is a man. We are both members of man. But there's not not
a thing called man. That's not a real thing. We don't there's not
a justification for this class of things. So this is the end result of
nominalism, which is humans on noomalists in most empiricists are normals. But I
mean you could say, Okay, Berkeley's not but nobody believes that world views,
so it's not relevant. So what this means, though, is that
it's not just a problem for language and predication, because once we do that,
guess what else goes out the window? Mathematics, universal laws, like
all of these things, they're out the window. And these are all just
just some of the examples of problems with reductionists, materialist world views, reductionist
materials, worthies. Okay, all right, Jesus, if you saw that,
if you if you saw the Stephon Debay, for example, I was
kind of making the same point, but with math talking about seven and coconuts.
That's the place I remember that. Yeah, that's your point. Yeah,
okay, Jesus, yeah, I I've never had to think about this
deep. So it's a lot to take in. Well, every atheist agnostic
person should read David him and the reason they should read David Hume is that
he's the consistent skeptic. And what happens when you really get Hume's argumentation is
that we realize that, well, if I'm going to take this worldview,
I don't really have a basis to argue because argumentation presupposes logic and logic can't
just be matter because you don't be a real law. You're you're appealing to
a metaphysic because it's non a physical thing that you could touch, taste,
or feel. Correct. I'm arguing that it has to be the case because
if we reduce it's, I mean, logic's gone. There's no way to
say that logic is matter. It's nonsense. Like where what atoms make up
the law of non contradiction? It's it's just nonsense. Okay, So then
how does religion account for Well, all religion is not built on the premise
that everything is reducible to matter, So religion is fundamentally not material a materialist
position. So religion, I would say, every religion I can think of
is believes in some notion of the transcendence. Yes, so you know,
when we talk about the transcendent, we don't just mean God. We also
mean things like universal's abstract categories, mathematical entities, et ceteratera, etcetera.
There's a great documentary I'll send you for example that kind of illustrates this point
on Mandelbrot sets and one of the things about Mannibroad sets that's fascinating. To
illustrate this point is that we couldn't really demonstrate a mandol brought set until computers
got to a certain level of sophistication to processing power to show like how intricate
they are. But they were positive prior to the computers. But then once
we computers could zoom in certain depths, then we were able to see the
like mathematical principles at work which are consistent just absolutely insane sequences of patterns with
regularity that cannot be It's that the human mind can't do it. In other
words, So what that shows is that these are mathematical principles that are discovered,
not created, and that means that probably the other ones were discovered,
they weren't made up as human social constructs. Right, so the law of
law, laws of logic or not human called social constructs their discoveries, and
that runs counter to materialism. Okay, now I get I'm getting I'm getting
it. Yeah, I've never heard explained like that. That's you said.
It's very very fascinating. All right, so you recommended I read David Hume
that that's the name, right. Yeah, Hume's good and his philosophy is
fairly accessible, like, it's not super difficult. I'm not saying you're dumb,
but just I'm saying, like for people that are not really familiar with
philosophy, and I'm not trying to make you a human skeptic. I'm just
pointing out that Hume's point is that if we're going to be consistent atheist,
imperious empiricist, and he was, his point is we can't give a rational
justification for logic induction the external world, identity over time, et cetera,
et cetera. Okay, Okay, If you're just interested in epistemology, the
book by the Epismology by WG. Wood is good. If you're interested in
the topic of Mandelbrot sets and what I'm talking about, there's a good book
by a guy I don't know what, but it's it's just along the lines
of kind of mathematics pointing to God. It's called A Mind of God by
Paul Davies. That's a good book. Those might be some books you find
interesting, and I'll I send you that Mandelbrot documentary, which is pretty cool.
Okay, cool, Well, then perhaps we should wrap on your recommendations
for your worldview. I got what would be like three books because I have
an audible credit coming up here soon. I know you're not supposed to listen
to audiobooks, but I'll probably buy a few more books because this stuff has
become incredibly fascinating to me. Jay, you were probably one of the smartest
people I've ever talked, and I've just smarter than me. So well,
well, on this podcast in almost three hundred episodes, I've had a lot
of great people on, and I definitely got to see you're probably one of
the smartest. Most This is wow. Okay, yeah, this is two
ninety one, so nine episodes away from three hundred. That's a feat.
Man. I know what it's like to do, so to hit three hundreds
is quite an accomplishment. I started back in October of twenty twenty one.
I used to do three episodes a week. But you know, between working
a full time job, playing in a band, and all that stuff,
it starts to get a little bit combersome on your life. So you said
three books that, oh man, that's a tough one. Maybe if need
be, I like, well, uh, my worldview like well, like
specifically or like specific topics, perhaps more like the last half hour of kind
of I don't want to say just philosophy, because I feel like we kind
of covered more than philosophy, but like when it comes to like skepticism,
empiricism, you know, pre Enlightenment, post Enlightenment, kind of like the
ideas of how we come to our beliefs in morals. It would be a
couple of books that you would recommend people read books. I'm going to get
those books. Ultimate Proof by doctor Jason Lyle L s l E. That's
a good presentation of the transcendental argument, uh in a very readable, accessible
form. It's about maybe two hundred fifty pages. A good critique of modernity
from an orthodox perspective is uh Nihilism Roots of the Modern Revolution by Father Sarah
from Rose. Oh, you know it's funny. You got that well,
a friend of mine sent me that. Okay, Yeah, that one's more
kind of a hitting you on a personal level, is more of it.
Yeah, it's like a philosophical critique of modernity. That one's good. One
more. Let me think maybe Reflections of a Russian Statesman might be good just
as a challenge to the to the libertarian ideas. Okay, yeah, I
got that one written down earlier. Yeah, okay, cool. Wow.
So this has probably been one of the most difficult conversations I thought it was
going to be that I've ever had on this podcast, and I'm very very
thankful that I'm much much rather drill into like these kinds of topics than like,
what do you think about Donald Trump? What do you think about Elon
Musk? Like that just gets so old, So that's yeah, no,
no, that's okay. I like to get the more meta of it,
because, like you said, I find like the the you know, the
mundane political topics to be so boring. But I would rather talk about like
the cause and effect and then kind of like how people are talking about it
and like why they're talking about it and why they feel the way they do.
Like that's such way more in our Yeah, we need to have more
conversations like that. That Paul Davies's Mind of God book, that's a fascinating
book. I I talked about that book quite a bit, like seven years
ago. I need to kind of resurrect that book because it's really good and
I haven't really covered that in seven or eight years. So now when you'll
find really fascinating I think you'll really like that book, Paul Davies's Mind of
God. Yeah, okay, he's a I forget what he is, but
he's basically looking at like mathematics and and there's a chapter on Mano broad Sets.
There's a chapter on raw for Penrose and various mathematicians who came to kind
of see the impossibility of materialism and what math shows us. So there's a
lot of stuff like that that basically mathematics shows that there's got to be some
sort of divine mind that's underlying everything. Sure, sure, okay, so
I'm definitely picking that one up. Then. Yeah, I got quite a
bit of reading in front of me. Now, Jay, go ahead,
give your plugs. Brother. I sincerely appreciate your time so much. Now,
that's a great conversation. I appreciate you handling it in a very civil
way when there's disagreement. A lot of times people can't they get, you
know, emotional, and they're all upset. You are way smarter than me
on all this stuff. So I will gladly see you the ground and just
listen, because this is I'm very open to changing my mind. I know
you this stuff, and you know I try to be as open minded as
possible so that way I can receive new information hopefully improve my life. Yeah,
I deally so, Yeah, that's exactly ho we should be. Yeah.
So you go to Jasonalysis dot com and everything that I do is always
there at that centralized website. I have a member section which goes back almost
eight or nine years now of content of lectures. We've got a philosophy course
that there with Richard Grove, which is separate from my website. But I've
got a lectures through like Plato's Republic and some of the dialogues. I've got
full lectures through Tragy and Hope. We got a lot of geopolitical content summarizing
fifty or so writings of the elite of the last one hundred years. We've
got a lot of interviews that we've done for the last ten years over there.
So yeah, that's at Jays Analysis. It's four ninety five a months,
six dollars a year. I've got three books on the website. You
can get signed copies in the shop. My wife also has a couple of
books there. She writes on similar topics to me, a lot of Hollywood
symbolism, that kind of stuff every Friday Fourth Hour Alex Jones, and then
we will be live in Los Angeles March fifteenth with Jamie Kennedy doing another one
of our live events. Our live events are a lot of fun. We
did big kind of five hour infotainment parties. We have stand up, we
have comedy, we have information like you heard tonight, and it's five hours
a lot of fun. Book signing, so that's in life. You're in
the Los Angeles area, come out March fifteenth and see us at that event.
And you can find me on Rock fin as well, which is a
great free speech based platform. A lot of my materials over there. That's
all I can think of. Yeah, man, Well, like I said,
I really appreciate your time. Every single show i've heard you on you
definitely got me thinking about stuff differently, and then particular this show as well,
I'm going to have to listen over probably two or three times to make
sure I got everything, and I'm going to continue your stuff. I would
love to get you back on to talk some geopolitics stuff. Yeah, I
think we would have. I don't think there's any disagreements, but I think
your analysis would be very, very productive for kind of like the libertarian and
any in anti interventionists. I called us perspective, So yeah, Jyfield,
anything else, I'll close her out. Yeah, I mean on the libertarian
front. You know, Richard Grove and I are good buddies and we've done
a lot of work together for many years. So you know, I have
a lot of interviews with him, and he's interviews with me, and I've
been on Granted World a lot, so you know, obviously have a lot
of affinities with the libertarian sphere and some disagreements. So I'm always happy to
have that conversation with you guys. Maybe not so much Austin Peterson, but
I don't think he was very rational though. He was like super emo.
But but yeah, man, I'd love to come back and have that conversation.
Nice man. Well all right, Jay, thank you so much.
We'll hopefully do it again. Everybody, Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time. Take care of it later.