Pints With Aquinas - Atheism, Boobs, and Swearing w/ Jonathan Pageau

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

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Hey, Matt Fradd here. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been a blessing to you, please consider supporting us directly at pintswithaquinas.com.com. Give or at patreon.com. Matt Fradd with any dollar amount would be a blessing to us. Thank you so much for considering. Good day. Good day and welcome to pints with Aquinas. Matt Fradd here. Today we've got Jonathan Pagio on the show. Do us a favor, click that thumbs up button. I don't know if the thumbs down button still works. If you don't like it, you're welcome to click that too. But if you enjoy this conversation and you think it's worth other people hearing,

it would be huge if you could share this video on Facebook. That would be the best way to kind of help spread this. Jonathan, what's up? Nice to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you again. Now, I forget, where are you in Canada and what's it like there right now? I am in Quebec, so it's French speaking Canada. We just had our first like snow that seems like it's going to stay there for a while.

And so it's nice and cold. And we're just watching the just watching what's going to happen with this COVID pass and the lockdowns and this new variant and what that means and them trying to vaccinate our children. That's the next thing right now that's gonna start in January, the five to 12 year olds. And so that's what we're just watching

and praying is the best thing to do, I guess. Yeah, people keep coming up to me and saying, it's crazy what's going on in Australia. And I haven't really been following it. And so I'm not sure if they're just hearing the worst case scenarios or if it really is that bad. But man, this is such a stressful time. You think like if you had a forest fire going on by you,

or if there was some sort of hurricane or something, there's a clear ending point where we can all just sort of go, ah. But with this, I get the feeling that there's no ending point. I mean, how are you kind of dealing with it? I mean, I think we're just finding strength in our family and strength in our community and trying not to get at least, you know, to just to just play it one day at a time. There isn't much you can do if, I mean, some people are becoming more, I know some people that are leaving, let's say going to the US, going, finding places where things

are less severe. But I guess it depends also on the way you see things. For us, we're just trying to, I've been trying to be more involved in my local community, local parish, and just yeah, just being with my family and praying. And yeah, that's for me at least for now, that's been the way that I've been dealing with it. Yeah, me too. And I've actually kind of gotten to the point where I pretty much have sworn off air travel for good. I just sense this spirit of hostility in the air

when I travel. I don't know if that's just my intergestion or something, or if it's actually like in touch with something real, but it just feels very oppressive. Air travel is awful enough as it is with going through security and things like that, and having to wear a mask, I'm just, I'm kind of done. So I find I'm turning down speaking engagements,

I'm trying to stay home as much as I can, or if I have to go somewhere hoping to drive and things like that, but yeah, it might be good. We might end up living a more human life by being closer to the communities that we love. Well we hope so. We hope that that will be the fruit, at least in our own lives, of what's going on. So what's going on with you? I saw that you just released or you're in the process of releasing a graphic novel.

I've got a link in the description below if people are interested. It looks really cool. Yeah, so my brother and I, we wrote a story 10 years ago. It was actually written as a movie, but we got some interest. We were able to have it scouted and we had some Hollywood studios request the screenplay, but we were very naive about how a movie's made at the time.

And there was no way this was gonna be made in the movie. And there was no way this was going to be made in the movie. Yeah. And, and so it took a while for us to kind of find the, the, the resources and the people to do it, but we have an artist now as we're putting it out as a series of graphic novels. And the idea is we're taking basically a good way to think of it is we're taking all the weird stuff in the Christian tradition and just jamming it into one story.

And so taking all the weird stuff in the Christian tradition and just jamming it into one story. Taking all the weird stuff, nice. Well, the main character is St. Christopher, who many people don't know, is secretly a dog-headed man. And so the oldest traditions of St. Christopher was that he was a Cenocephali, and so a kind of dog-headed man from the edge of the world. And so we kind of take, and there's all these encounters of early, for example, in the legends of St. Andrew, where he encounters these dog-headed people. And you see it in the legend of Alexander the Great and all these medieval legends. And so we kind of fuse that all into one kind of character of this wild

kind of dog-headed creature that encounters a group of pilgrims going to Jerusalem. And in that group of pilgrims is St. George the dragon slayer, St. Mercurius, whose legend also has dog-headed people in it. So it really is this, it is like an adventure story, you know, an adventure story in the world of scripture really, like is the best way to understand it, the world of Christian traditions and so there's, you know, you have all these biblical characters, Adam and Eve. We have a visit. It starts with this kind of retelling of Genesis account, but in a kind of adventure, legendary

way. And it moves, it slowly moves towards like a more and more epic, epic story of a giant conflict between, you know know the Nephilim and the Byzantine Empire basically and so it's like yeah so it's it's a it's really a it's an adventurous story so we hope people are going to to support us yeah I'm showing people I don't know if you can see that on your screen but I'm showing people what it looks like who did the did you do the drawings and the coloring so it's an artist his name is court Nielsen. Someone that I discovered a few years ago

who's just been doing some great work, very kind of nice, simple style of artwork. People know a little bit about comic books. He's kind of like Jeff Smith or like a Hellboy type comics with that kind of simple style with a really bold coloring. And so, yeah, it's the first of a series and we're really excited because we've reached already about, what is it like almost, 136,000.

Yeah, yeah. 136,000 and 2000 something backers. So it's pretty cool. There's still a few weeks left so people can get in on it. Yeah, I got a link in the description if people wanna support this. So yeah, I guess this is expensive stuff, huh? It's like we take things for granted. We see graphic novels in the store and stuff like that and just expect people just crap these

things out and it doesn't take money, but it obviously does. Yeah. And so we're hoping like that one of the reasons why we're doing it also as a crowdfunding is we're hoping to get enough funds to be able to finance the second book directly, you know, and not have to wait and not have to rely on volunteer work and stuff like we did this time. So, have your brother and yourself been involved in writing things like this for quite a while then? Well, a long time ago, I used to write plays.

This was like in another life in a certain matter. I wrote several plays that were produced here in Quebec and were that toured and everything. And then you know my life took on different turns and so this is in a way I haven't done it. I'd stopped writing for a little while in terms of fiction but this is just diving back into the world of fiction. But my brother is a writer. He wrote a book called The Language of Creation which is about biblical symbolism and I obviously write know, on different articles for different publications and stuff. That's really cool. Do you know that I kind of

write fiction as well? Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah, this isn't about me, but I'll just say it quickly. Yeah, my sister and I write short horror stories, and then we have a podcast called Sibling Horror, and then we pay a fellow, an American fellow, to narrate them. So it's just very clean, there's no intro or outro, it's very minimalist, there's no pitches for Patreon or anything like that, it's just straight into the story. And we have kind of always enjoyed, when I talk about horror, I guess I'm talking about sort of supernatural suspense fiction.

Interesting. But I think there's an interesting moment right now. I think there's an exciting moment because one of the things, for example, that's interesting about Tolkien is that Tolkien wrote what is possibly one of the most Christian stories in the modern world, but it doesn't refer at all to the Christian world, right? It's basically in a fantastical world based on northern mythological patterns, but the structure, the basic structure, and the moral structure and everything is very Christian. But I think that there's an exciting time right now. We started writing this back in 2005, 2007 is when we started thinking about it, and it was at the time when there were all these weird movies about using Christian, a kind of Christian mythological world, but in a subversive way. There's a movie called Stigmata, then

there was Constantine, and then the Da Vinci Code came out. So there was all this strange desire to actually use all these, all this imagery that, that, especially the Christian Middle Ages developed, but then use it upside down in a way to show how, like to twist Christianity into weird directions. And so one of the things we wanted to do is to basically do the opposite, which is, okay, we can do that too. Let's take all the weird stuff from Christianity that you think is funny, and we're going to put it in a strange story that is ultimately going to turn back towards a kind of more classic storytelling

and ultimately a story about redemption, you know, in the end. And so that's the, that's kind of the basic idea. And I think that in a way right now is interesting because people don't know about these stories, but we've forgotten our own stories. And so to say something like St. Christopher the dog-headed giant, it's like, whoa, it's as much a surprise as any kind of story. It was to me, yeah. You can tell, yeah. So that's the idea. So we have St. Simeon the stylite in the story who's just a monk who lives on a 60-foot pole, has this kind of mysterious hermit figure that's in the background. You know, it happens in these cave monasteries that look like the ones you see in Turkey. So it's like taking all this Christian

imagery and putting it back into a story that will, in a way, it's our own story, but we don't know it. And so it's bringing a sense of wonder back to Christian storytelling. How important, I mean, we live also in a very materialistic society, and I wonder if people hear about what you're talking about, like St. Christopher, the dog-headed giant, or whatever, and just be like, dude, all this does is make fun of Christianity. Like, a lot of people, a lot of friends of mine, they think Christianity's bunk anyway,

and here you are doing a book about some dog-headed monster, aren't you just sort of giving them more fuel for the fire? Well, I think that in a way, there's something of a trick being played on people. Because as we're moving, as the world is being re-enchanted, this is the sense that we have more and more is that a lot of this materialism and a lot of this kind of scientism is dying. It's going away. It's losing the battle. The new atheists basically

have lost right now, even in terms of attention, you can see them devolving into all this kind of weird politically correct stuff and they don't know where to hold anymore. And so, yeah, it's true. It's a good point. One of the things we want to present people is a different way of understanding reality which is more story-based and is more based on our experience of the world. And if you watch my videos, you know, I'll do that where I'm trying to, if you understand the world phenomenologically, that is like from the perspective of this experience that we have of the world, then a lot of the old stories that are weird will start to make sense again. So for example, the idea of the dog headed men, you know, it's interesting to notice,

for example, that, um, let's say Alexander encounters a dog headed man in Asia, and then Charlemagne talks about the dog headed man coming from the North. And then Christopher Columbus actually encounters dog headed men on the first day that he arrives in in In in America and so it's like what's going on and so basically you need to understand it as just the experience of the strange I love it. It's the experience of something that you don't understand The experience of something that doesn't have an identity for you And then you can start to understand

what monsters are in general. You know, there really is just, there's something that doesn't have a clear category presenting itself to you, and so it appears as hybrid, as monstrous, as too much of this, too little of that. And so, the idea is to kind of pull people into these stories, and then ultimately also, like if people read the graphic novel and then watch my videos,

we'll see that you don't necessarily need to posit a genetic existence of a genetic being that is somehow like genetically a dog and a man to have the idea of the dog headed man. Rather for the same reason that like a hippopotamus doesn't have to be genetically related to a horse. It's a river horse, but it doesn't have to be physically a horse. It's like it's a category of human engagement, you could say.

And so we dive into the idea basically of the monstrous and the stranger and the idea of things that don't fit and how we can integrate them into the world and how it's potential and it's danger. So that's basically, let's say, the underlying philosophical idea of the story. Of course, we don't explicitly say any of that. It's all storytelling. It's character and character arcs and adventure. But underlying that, it's really how to deal with this.

And it's really speaking to the situation we're in now, which is this weird world where the exception is the rule, this weird world where the exception is the rule, the real, this weird world where, you know, things that have unclear identities are starting to appear more and more on our horizon and imposing themselves as a question, like, okay, what do you do with this? And how is it that we can exist in that

and how we can answer that? So, that's really the, basically the dogged in men, that's what they end up being about really. I love that. I just had a big interview with a friend, Sean Fitzpatrick, on the show. We talked about fairy tales and things like that. And being an Orthodox Christian and into fairy tales, you're probably aware of the Russian fairy tales. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's the stuff in the Russian fairy tales is just amazing. It's not watered down like our fairy tales. Well the Brother Grimm's are pretty bloody. But talk about not having a category that you can explain this better than me but that idea where

you encounter a hut with chicken legs and demand that it turned to face you. Like what the hell is that? Yeah that's exactly Baba Yaga is a great example of let's say the strange woman in the forest or the the odd the oddness in this forest, but we have that like in many many stories for example Hansel and Gretel is a great example where it's terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, well you move into the strange world, and then you encounter something which seems impossible to you. And so that, let's say that encounter offers opportunity, right? It offers opportunity. It can actually seduce you. And so it offers both opportunity, but you have to be careful because that opportunity is always fraught with danger.

So the idea of like going out into the strange world and finding treasures, finding dragons that guard treasures, all has to do with that. Which is that something which has no category yet is an opportunity for increase in identification, because there are increase in power. But it's also something that can devour you. A good way, a good simple way of understanding it would be, imagine the Roman Empire. And so as it wants to expand, what it does is that it actually will hire mercenaries from all these tribes around them.

So they'll hire all these mercenaries that don't fit into their world really. They're kind of wild cards. So as you do that, you increase your power. You become more and more powerful. But if you do it too much, at some point they'll swallow you. Like at some point, you know, the outside will swallow the inside. And so that's really the, let's say, the opportunity and danger of strangeness. But if you're smart, let's say, like Hansel and Gretel, if you're smart, then you can turn the tables back, you know, and bring back a treasure to your family. But it's not an easy, it's not an easy thing to,

not always an easy thing to do. That's so beautifully put. And you do such a good job as of maybe dissecting to materialist of a word, but you know, like helping us understand what's going on in fairy tales. But I imagine that a fair, a good fairy tale isn't written by trying to first understand the sort of things you're talking about and then layering a story on top. You correct me if I'm wrong.

No, not at all. And fairy tales aren't written, they kind of like emerge out of society. It's not like we know who wrote these old stories, they just almost appear through almost like a natural selection process where you have stories that are remembered and then told again and remembered and told again and so they refine themselves and they move towards these very powerful fairy tales that we see and in a way in a normal world in a normal world you wouldn't have to explain these stories they would just embody your reality. Like, they would just be almost like a kind of

pattern detection and pattern orienting that you would see in these stories. But because we live in this materialist world and we've lost a lot of it, then we find ourselves having to explain the stories. But like you said, explaining it is not the best reality of it. Like explaining a ritual or explaining the Eucharist or explaining, you know, the things we engage in is actually, it's not as good as participating, it's not as powerful, it's actually, it can trick us into thinking we know what's going on. So when we explain, like when I explain symbolism, I know that in one way it's almost like a crutch that I'm giving people, right? It's like I'm trying to jump start an engine so that people can kind of get it a little bit

enough to to move in, enough to go to church you could say. But then going to church is the ultimate, is the purpose, right? Not the explaining. It would be like mistaking the wild dangerous world for the map we're looking at and you're inviting them to put down the map and enter the forest or something like that. Yeah, I'm just saying okay look in this direction. You know what the old people these you know what the let's say the boomer generation told you was stupid and superstitious and ridiculous and was completely arbitrary. Well it's not. It's actually extremely coherent, extremely powerful and it was completely arbitrary, well, it's not. It's actually extremely coherent, extremely powerful, and it actually underlies your experience of the world.

So it's like, at least now that you get it, now we hope that you're gonna dive in rather than just continue to think about it. Now, I haven't listened to this podcast you did recently with Dr. Jordan Peterson and Bishop Barron and another fellow from Toronto University. John Vervecki, yeah, he's a cog-sci professor at the University of Toronto. Okay, and it was titled, you know, The Four Horsemen of Meaning, which I thought was cool.

But what was that conversation like? It was great. It was really wonderful. In a way, the conversation was meant to be myself, Jordan Peterson, and John Vervecki at the outset, because we've been, like the three of us have been kind of coming at it a little bit into different directions, talking about new ways of explaining religious experience, you could say, or the religious world, religious tropes for modern people to understand, using cog-sci as a, for John Vervecki, like he's using, he's realizing that through, through these new versions of cognitive science,

that they don't look at all like the materialism that was presented to us just a decade ago. It's very different, and it's about embodiment and about participation and about this relationship between subject and object that isn't just a one-way street. He calls it transjective relationship between different things. So it's really to kind of continue that conversations between subject and object that isn't just a one-way street. It's like, he calls it transjective relationship between different things. So it was really to kind of continue that conversations together. But then I don't know exactly who suggested

but someone decided to kind of pop, drop Bishop Barron into the conversation. And it was interesting because people who watch the video can't see it but I was seeing the mosaic of everybody. And at first I thought, I don't know if Bishop Barron has heard this type of conversation before. So I was watching him and at first he said something, I mean he's an extremely intelligent and insightful person. He was saying things and then at some point I saw in his eyes that he really clicked. This is what's going on, like this

is what's happening. And then like he became very, he became more like kind of avid and present and this is what's happening. And then like he became very, he became more like kind of avid and present and curious about understanding what was happening. So it ended up being a very good conversation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna watch it or listen to it

and I'm gonna put the link in the description below. People can look it up of course, but yeah, that's really terrific. But you're really pushing people. Like we're really pushing people. I took John Ravecki, who's not a Christian. He's a non-religious person who finds religion interesting, let's say. And I had him on my channel after this conversation, just him and I.

And sadly the conversation ended after a certain time, but I'm right on the verge of having him admit that angels exist. Like that they have to exist scientifically. Like in terms of cognitive science and in terms of the way that people are starting to notice how qualities are necessary and let's say consciousness is necessary for the world to exist, that it's like, if it, why would it end at us? It's this silly idea that it would end at us. Like it scales up and you can actually- A ladder of being. Yeah, exactly.

And so it's an interesting time. I find it very exciting. Very cool. I mean, how's Jordan Peterson doing with all this? I kind of feel bad for him because I feel like Christians are going to just use him as a mascot, you know? And every time he says anything favorable to Christianity, there's like a billion little videos saying, see, see, it must be kind of difficult to

like genuinely discern the truthfulness of these things when you know the whole world sort of sort of watching you and almost is just wants to kind of use you to kind of boost their team up. But that's how it feels sometimes. But how is he doing with this whole Christian journey? I would say, I would say at least for Yeah, I would say, at least for that, I would say you don't have to worry about Jordan Peterson. You mostly have to worry about his health, let's say,

because his health keeps kind of dipping and coming back. But in terms of being used by people, I think he's quite akin to that. He's really, let's say, keen on what's going on, and I don't think that he'll just continue to do what he does and he'll be fine in that in that sense yeah. Yeah no you must kind of get to a point like even me and my little small platform like I've grown numb to the slings and arrows that are thrown my way you

know you just initially kind of it kind of rattles you but then you just don't sort of hear it or pay attention to it. We just need to I I mean, we need to be attentive to our own faithfulness to God and to our own faithfulness to the communities we're involved in. And then the rest, you know, whatever, people don't, people don't, people also are always trying to guess people's intentions and trying to discern, you know, why you're, why people are doing things. And that's really... I mean, sometimes we do.

I mean, I have to watch myself and think, okay, am I doing this just for attention? Am I doing this just to see my channel grow? Am I doing it? So that's my moral question that I need to ask myself and I need to be attentive to and I need to confess to when I go a little bit off key, but people writing YouTube comments, I mean. Like at some point, especially when they're anonymous and there are these like weird avatars

and they're telling you, they're criticizing you, at least have a name that will help to me to pay attention to, but if it's just these, at some point it's better to just let them float over your head, I think. I have a question for you, and I'm really interested in your answer. Why is atheism false? Well, because the world is, the world, meaning is inevitable.

Meaning is inevitable for the world to exist, and I think that that's the exciting thing that's happening now, or that people are realizing that your very perception is purpose oriented. That the way that you engage, the way that you perceive reality is always based on meaning, right? And so this is something that Kogsai is coming to, like a lot of Kogsai. Just a quick clarifying question. Why isn't that meaning just subjective? I look upon the world, I perceive it in a certain way, I come up with a narrative for why I exist and why things exist and it's basically coherent but God doesn't have to exist in that, does he? Well, I would say that at first people might think that but the subjective part is

problematic in the atheist thinking. What is this subjective thing that you're talking about? If you are the result of a process of evolution and of natural selection, then where does this subjective thing come from? Doesn't make any sense, right? It's like, you're like this weird exception in evolution that has the capacity to be idiosyncratic and subjective. It completely breaks apart. Even if you take the atheist kind of scientific,

let's say, evolutionary way of thinking seriously, then the notion of the subjective or projecting a story onto the world completely breaks down. Because you are the result of patterns of the world. Your subjective experience is based on these patterns. And so whatever story you project on the world cannot be arbitrary. It must necessarily come from the very processes that also created everything else. So the idea is like this is what's going on, let's say, in... It's a trick. It's a wonderful, wondrous trick, right?

Which is that when Christ died, you know, death thought it had won. They said, we've got the Logos, we've got the Son of God, and we're bringing him down into death, finally we've succeeded. And it was a trick, because when the light was pulled into the darkness, it's the darkness that faltered, it wasn't the light. And so we're seeing the same thing happen now, which is that all the scientists pretended, let me just finish, all the scientists pretended that there was this objective world, and we were these weird, disincarnate beings that could subjectively look at the world and interpret it. And then at some point they realized, well, there's something about that that's weird.

We need to be able now to analyze with our materialistic scientific means this conscious thing, this subject thing. We need to turn back the light and then we need to bring that into materialism, because it's that, it's a last remaining strain of let's say of a of religious thinking or whatever so they turned back and they started to look at consciousness and to look at the subject and the measure and then things started getting completely loopy and In trying to pull consciousness down into the material world They ended up doing the opposite of what they wanted to do, which is all of a sudden, there is no arbitrary. There can't be. And so the consciousness now becomes a part of this

system, and if it becomes a part of this system, and if meaning becomes a part of this system, then the idea that things are meaninglessness is ridiculous. It's a ridiculous idea. Meaning exists. Are humans engaged in the world with meaning? So explain it to me. Don't discount it. How can you discount it? You're supposed to be a scientist. You're supposed to objectively analyze the world. So analyze the world of meaning objectively instead of saying it's just. Every time someone uses the words just, you can't have that in, especially in a completely materialistic system, you can't have just. I don't know if that makes sense. So it's a weird flip. It's like a turn. And then, well, I want to ask you about like, when you say things became loopy when we began to look at the subject, at the consciousness. Can you give examples of that or explain what you mean? All right, so when we start

to look at the subject, or let's say the one that gives identities, or the one that recognizes identities, we realize that those identities are not obvious in the material itself. And so, this is something I talk about all the time with the problem of complexity, which is that things are made of parts and those parts are made of parts. And the notion that those parts scale up and become one is not something which is obvious, right? What's the difference between a crowd and a group? What's the difference between a bunch of things on a table and a glass? Right?

Or what's the difference between... So what's the difference between things that are next to each other but aren't joined together and things that are together? Right? that are next to each other but aren't joined together and things that are together. Right. So that is something which all of a sudden they can't account for in a strictly materialist world, but they realize that it's part of the way that consciousness engages with reality. And so then they have to use weird terms like emergence. David Bentley Hart had a great way of describing that. He said when an atheist or materialist uses the world emergence, it's just magic.

They're just saying magic happens here. And then all of a sudden this multiplicity becomes one through magic, basically is what they're saying. But that's when all of a sudden you realize that intelligence, right, the way that the ancient thought about it is a necessary part of reality because just for the fact of things moving from multiplicity into one while maintaining their multiplicity. So I look at a car, the car is one thing, but it's a million things. It's millions and millions of things. And so I'm able to, on the one hand, I'm able to see one and I'm able to see multiple at the same time.

And that's actually how the world unfolds. Without that, you have chaos. You have a quantum field. You have Tohubo in the Genesis 1. You have emptiness and void without intelligence. And so this is something that even like atheist materialists are struggling to keep there. If they understand the problem, the problem with a lot of atheists and materialists is that they don't even understand the problem. They're so blind to this situation that they just take it for granted. They take identities for granted. They think that a dog is an obvious identity, and they think that separating dogs between species

and somehow that's obvious. It's like, no, it's not obvious. It's not obvious without intelligence. You need intelligence to be able to, how can you have a category like dog, and then a category like mammal, and then a category like animal? Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, no no thank you. And forgive me if my questions are a little slow if I'm not catching up with you. But why not just sort of prefer a sort of nominalism where you say, well, phenomenologically this cup which is made of millions of things and I perceive to be one and so call it a cup and these this is just language that I use to identify the way things look at me okay but so you've said that just because I say just yeah if you want

to encompass everything in your system this is the this is the end of materialism and scientism if you want to encompass everything into your system you also have to encompass language into your system. You can't pretend that language is something that drops down from heaven. Language also has to be part of the system that you're dealing with. So the mechanism by which language manifests itself also have to be accounted for in science. You can't drop, you can't pretend like it's just something that you can't, you don't want to include.

That stands outside of the thing you're examining, yeah, okay. So the sin of wanting to encompass everything in their system is what is causing it to basically collapse and reestablish an ancient way of thinking. People use terms like the revenge of Aristotle or the revenge of Plato. Yes. way of thinking. People use terms like the revenge of Aristotle or the revenge of Plato because it's like you're trying to contain it all and then it actually collapses. And the analogy to Christ going into the 80s is, I think, is very appropriate in this sense because it's like trying to contain God, let's say, in death is what it just... So the same, like the same with religion so so one of the things that a lot of the atheists have used is saying religion is just silly

arbitrary epiphenomenal and everything you're like okay okay well then explain it you're a scientist right explain religion it has to have a it have to be you have to be able to explain it in the same way that you're explaining why certain animals eat certain things or why certain things act the way they do. You can't just pretend like it's something that doesn't exist. I don't think they do that though. I do think they try to give an explanation of religion. Usually the best explanations are the ones that actually try to show their function.

The explanation of saying something like, religion is just a silly misunderstanding of the ancient world is like, well, that doesn't hold. Something that's just a silly misunderstanding of the ancient world wouldn't last for thousands and thousands of years. Even in terms of evolutionary thinking, it has to have some kind of a function that you can discern. And so as they start to explore that function, then again, they realize that they're participating in religion all the time. You see this in the work of Jonathan Haidt especially, where Jonathan Haidt is realizing how all organizations have some form of religious structure. That is, they need to identify a virtue or something that they join themselves under, that they unite themselves under, and they have to process around

it somehow, they have to celebrate it somehow, they have to have icons of it, right, ways to recognize it, ways to represent it, and so that they can celebrate it. And so it's actually bringing, and by doing this, it's actually helping us understand what all these ancient ways of being are for and that they're, not only are they good, but they're actually inevitable, that everybody does it whether you want it or not. So if everybody participates in these types of things,

whether they want to or not, how about if we have one which is, how about if we have the one that is aimed towards the highest good rather than secondary goods? And then we're right back into Aquinas. We're right back into the medieval thinkers if we say that. Like if, let's say if say if a sports team is religious because it has a name, it has a purpose, it has colors, it has a way to celebrate its identity and the celebration of the identity participates in the success of its goal, right?

So you have a crowd cheering on the team and so the team has a better chance of winning because they're being cheered on and so you wear the colors, you have your little rituals, everything to on the team. And so the team has a better chance of winning because they're being cheered on. And so you wear the colors, you have your little rituals, everything to win the game. If that is real and that works and it does what it does, maybe there are higher versions of that, that aren't about winning a stupid trophy.

Maybe there are versions that bring you into higher states of existence. So that's what I think. And that ultimately ends up pointing you back to... So I did a talk, for example, called Sacred Space in Secular Terms, where I explain how sacred space works, just very, just basic secular language, right? You have something higher up, you have a church steeple, everybody looks towards it, it's a place where everybody

congregates and celebrates the same thing at the same time, you know, we all, we sing together, we act together, we walk together, and this binds the community together. It's completely coherent, like a church in a church village is completely coherent. So if it's completely coherent, maybe it's not also not arbitrary It's pointing to a reality that it's that it's manifesting, you know Yeah, that's really good. Thanks for Man, I hope that makes sense. Sorry if I'm breaking your brain here. No, no, no, you're not no it does make sense I can't help but think of the atheist tropes in response to these things

But I don't want to have to keep keep beating that Yeah, I go ahead let go ahead and and and challenge me with an atheist trope and see what happens All right Man finds himself in a chaotic world in which which he doesn't understand and which he'd like to order in order to remain safe and in order to flourish. And so in much the same way that that that machine of an optometrist's office makes things clearer or blurrier, he finds a narrative which, for the most part, or at least as far as he can see, it sort of fits things nicely together in a way that feels

ordered so that he can gain mastery over the chaos to some extent, as far as he can see, and that also makes sense of it as far as he can see. And that this is a perfectly understandable thing for a creature that has evolved to grow into and a way to use religion to make sense of that. I mean, that just seems like a naturalistic explanation of religion, that these are overarching narratives that no one's saying are meaningless, you know, like they're meaningful in the sense that they help us to prosper and yeah, feel free to steal man that if you'd like to. Yes, why not? Of course.

OK, so so what I'm saying then is that can exist and God cannot. Well, that's the thing is that if it if it works then it's it has a certain amount of truth to it. Yeah sure it has a sort of functional truth but it doesn't. It's revealing a pattern which is true just in terms of pattern. Yep. It's revealing a pattern which is true. Let's use a better word. It's revealing a pattern which is good. Right, let's use that.

I don't know if I want to agree with true or good. I would just say it's revealing a pattern that works. But if it works to a certain extent, it has to be revealing some kind of a good. Like if I have an apple and I have a pattern where I try to put the apple in my nose and it doesn't work, but if I put an apple in my mouth and it works and it's like I'm revealing the good of the apple when I'm engaging in the proper pattern around the apple.

And so you could say that this is something which scales up all the way into... So you could see it bottom... So the scientist wants to see it bottom up, right? And you're like, yeah, that's fine. All bottom up, bottom up. That's fine. I'll go with you. I'll follow your game. We'll go all the way bottom up until we realize that

without these overarching narratives and without these patterns of behavior, society crumbles. Or gets taken over by other groups. And you're like, okay, well, that's pretty real. Like, that's a real thing. Mm-hmm. Then once you reach there, you can say,

the reason why it works is because it's also top-down. It's also revealing the pattern of reality back down into the world. And so that's what I mean. So we as Christians, we say it's a revelation of God. And the scientists will say, no, that's silly, that's stupid. It's like, okay, fine. I'll follow you bottom up until you realize that without them, society does go into chaos.

Society does start to stop reproducing. You actually do create infertility. That you scientists, now that you've broken those patterns, you've created an infertile world that is obsessed with idiosyncrasy, that is full of people falling into addictions, that is full of social fragmentation, that is full of social conflict at the lowest scale possible. And so it's like, okay, maybe there was something about these things that were, that was real, that was actually... was something about these things that were that was real, that was actually that were revelatory, that were prophetic. Yeah, that were revelatory of the good

in a real way. And so it takes a lot of the materials that I encounter, they struggle to get to the point where you were like, if it's bottom up all the way, then it's also top down. It also works top down. And that the Christian way of describing it is coherent. It's not superstitious for sure, right? It's a revel, and especially the way we experience it. Like when you experience a good, like especially when you intuit a good, your experience of that is not something,

it's something that you feel like a revelation. You feel like it's coming from outside of you, even in a small way. You know, like when you're writing a story and then all of a sudden it clicks. If you're attentive to yourself, you'll notice that you don't think that comes just from you. That you're somehow tapping into something which is coming back down on you, you could say. That it's kind of, it is a little revelation. Not, obviously not like a profit or anything,

but like a little thing. And so that experience, you can't, so if a materialist will say, well, that's just an illusion. It's like, an illusion of what? What is the just again? Like if every single culture in the world has these intuitions about and it manifests itself that way, then what does it mean to say it's an illusion? Like what is it even, what are you referring to? Does that make sense? I'm sorry if I... No, these are great conversations.

These are conversations that should be had over a pint of beer and a cigar so that we could each sort of think them through, you know? When you say scientists try to understand them bottom up, I guess I'm not sure what you mean because when I think of materialists, they tend to try to break things down to the lowest common denominator. I remember somebody saying to me, and forgive me if this is a crass example I don't think it is but she said why are men so attracted to breasts? They're just bags of fat But that kind of thing right where you reduce everything to the material pornography does that right it reduces

Whatever this person is and is capable of to a sort of two dimensional thing for my consumption. And science in a way does that in order to look at the parts and understand them. So, but I say bottom up, is that kind of what you mean? So you get down to the lowest thing, like quarks or whatever. So you could say something like, a good way to understand it would be that, okay.

So let's say that's a wire man attracted to, attracted to breasts, like it's, they're just bags of fat. And you could say, okay. So let's say that say why are men attracted to attracted to breasts, like it's they're just bags of fat. And you could say, okay. Doesn't make that it like, let's say, can you explain it even in terms of just basic evolutionary biology? Can you explain more women are attracted to, let's say, breasts, then attracted to elbows? Yeah, to exactly. Or to some elbows? Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Random. You can say, well, first of all, it's part of a woman. Second of all, it breast become bigger when a woman is pregnant, by the way, that this is something that is just biologically

explainable, that there's a relationship between fertility and breast that is actually discernible visually when a woman becomes pregnant and when a woman has a child and is feeding a baby. So the idea that a man would see in a breast something which would make, which would properly make that woman into the house for his child is not something which is completely bottom-up explainable in terms of biology and in terms of of how animals reproduce. Now you can't like I think as a Christian it does it's not reduced to that it's actually manifesting another another type of reality but you can explain it that way if you want and then you could you could you could keep you could keep scaling up

let's say in terms of social behaviors and why it is that people act the way they do. You can kind of explain it, but usually it actually ends up surprisingly revealing some patterns which end up being, let's say, true. Even in the way that we as Christians understand it. Yeah. But how is a naturalist not just, not explaining things bottom up? Why can't it just be, well, they're explaining it by looking at the bottom, and that's it,

there is no up. Well, that's because they're bullshitting themselves that they think they're looking at the bottom, because the bottom is a quantum field. Let's start there. Yeah, yeah, okay. Or are you going, the only reason why they start at bags of fat is like, what do you think of the bag is the bottom of the reality? You think fat is the bottom of reality? It goes, keeps, it keeps breaking down my friend, keep breaking down. So you bring

it up to identities that you can, that are actually qualitative. You say a bag, so you say it's a container, right? And then you are relating it to something which exists. And so you stop there and you think that you're not scaling up the levels of reality? You are. You're just not doing it. You're not, you don't keep going. It's like, let's just keep going now because it's not true that you're at the bottom of reality. That's a, that's a, you're, now you're deluding yourself if you think you're at the bottom of reality. But the identity of a bag is something which we know what it is. It has a teleological purpose.

It has a good and we know what that good is. So there's something about the process which doesn't work. Got you. That makes sense. So you haven't started, when you say bag of fat, you've started well up the chain. You're well up the ladder. Way up the chain. Like really into human, even into like human teleology and human purpose driven action.

And so to say all that exists seems to be chaos because I have no good arguments for thinking God exists. So I begin by thinking all there is is mindless matter which I give names to And yeah, you're right. I can't see the bottom because I'm not smart enough or we haven't advanced enough in order to do that, but without a compelling argument for God or whatever you mean by God I'm just gonna stick with this is all meaningless and I give names to it. And that's not good enough, you don't think? Well, because it, first of all, you don't give names to it. Nobody gives names to things.

You could say it's like humans give names to things. So even those names you receive from your ancestors, like you receive from tradition. So you receive from from your ancestors like you receive from tradition so you receive names from from tradition and those names are teleological they're purpose-driven they're not just descriptions of things that's not true because there are certain things that we that we have let's say that we have names that we engage with and there's certain things that we don't. So it's like, okay, so think of a, I know you have a cardboard box, right? So we have a name for a cardboard box.

But if I point to you to a part of it, I would add, what's the name of that part? Here, I'm gonna, in this section right here, what's the name of that? And you're like, well, that doesn't have a name. Really, it doesn't have a name. You're saying it doesn't exist? Well, of course, it exists, right? Names are teleological. So the idea that we, that we have an identity of a cardboard box means that we know what it's for. There's a reason why we give a name to it. And it's like

that for everything. Like everything that has a name is named for reason, like it's named out of purpose, and it usually has to do with human level interaction or human level engagement. That's been messed up a lot because of artificial scene, like because of telescopes and microscopes, we've let's, convinced ourselves that we have complete access to any level of reality. But we still see that world through this lens, right, through this frame of experience that we have. And so you can think that, for example, the solar system is a perfectly acceptable structure. But the solar system is secondary to the sun rising up in the morning and going down at night. And you know why it's secondary?

Because your entire world is structured around that. Everything is structured around that reality. And so a lot of the science, a lot of the tropes, a lot of the tricks of science has been to move into levels of perception that are beyond our normal level of perception through mechanical means and giving us and trying to pretend that that's the bottom of reality. But you're still perceiving it from you. So it's not the bottom of reality.

You're still there. You're a person looking through a microscope and that's the first experience. Not what's down there at the, you know, underneath. Yes, yes, yes. And so that's what you can't, you can never get out of. You can't, and you can catch people. Like it's good to be, to be attentive and listen to people. And all of a sudden when they pretend that they're not in the world, like they pretend as if they don't exist. And you're like, wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's bring you back, my friend. Let's come back into this, this thing. And you're like, wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's bring you back, my friend. Let's come back into this thing. Because it's like, are you a disembodied God now?

That you can speak this way? That you can speak as if you perceive the solar system? You don't perceive the solar system? You've never perceived the solar system? No human has ever perceived it. It's a scientific abstraction based on this experience in the world that we have, that we're able to calculate and abstract from and create a model.

And now we can think of that model, but that's not first level. Like that's way up, like that's way up in terms of the levels of abstraction once you have something like that. Yeah, so it's like trying to detach yourself from reality and then you look at it, but you can't do that because you're part of it.

Yeah. You see it. Everybody that people that criticize religion are always doing that. They're constantly doing that. They pretend as if their moral system doesn't exist, that it's completely objective. You see it like Dawkins is a great example of that.

He has such strong moral sense, you know, and he pretends as if his moral sense doesn't exist, right? He's, I'm just a scientist. I'm just a scientist suddenly getting offended at how Christians act in the world. It's like, where does that offense come from, Mr. Dawkins? Like, does it come from biology? Does your offense at what Christians did burnkins? Like, does it come from biology? Does your offense

at what Christians did burn people? Like, you think that scientifically it matters whether Christians burned people or didn't? Like, does that really matter? Like, a lion that eats a cub in the nature and in terms of just scientific processes, there's no value there. There's no morality there. What are you talking about? But suddenly these weird new atheists, they have this super strong moral sense, but they pretend like they don't. And now they use science to criticize Christians, but they have this like invisible, they act as if they're like disembodied gods with like moral senses. It's very fascinating if you're attentive to it. You just have to ask like, where does your morality come from? Like where does your capacity to judge phenomena come from?

If all you're saying is that you're a scientist describing phenomena, like where does the judgment come from? How can you judge phenomena? It has to come from, it has to be something. Or at least you could say something like, let's analyze the manner in which you judge phenomena. And you'll see that you're participating in the same tropes, you know, that the 11th century

bishop was doing when he was confessing someone, a priest, you know, you're participating in the same pattern, you just don't know it. You're not, you're too naive, you don't realize it, but you're participating in the same type of structure. I don't know if this has anything to do with what we're talking about. I suspect it does. This desire to get rid of ritual, and it's coming back as you say, even Protestant churches are reincorporating it. I was listening to John Eldridge from Wild at Heart, he had a podcast that came out the other day, and he's talking all about Advent and the candles and the hymns and things like this

It's it's I'm sure he's been doing that for a while, but it's beautiful to see But you even see that like, you know We don't understand why we have to get dressed up for church or we don't understand why some sort of ceremony has to take place like isn't this just sort of BS like what just just Just say something in noughts and ones or something like yeah that's even that's even an easier thing to deal with because once you realize that action is purposed, like the action is theological, teleological,

and that action is necessarily patterned, all action must be patterned. And so once you realize that, then you will notice that not only is ritual meaningful, ritual is inevitable. Because when you brush your teeth, you engage in a ritual. You engage in ordered action with a purpose.

Now, you know, like it's easier to understand when you're talking about human interactions. So if I encounter someone, that encounter has to be ritualized. There's no way around it. If it's not ritualized, it will destroy the, the encounter. And so if I meet you, right, there's certain things that I have to do. I have to look you in the eye. I say, hello, ask your name.

I shake your hand. I speak to you and then I wait, then you speak back and I keep a certain distance from you. Those, the actual rituals are variable, right? They can depend on time and space, but the fact that it's ritualed is inevitable. Right, so it's always... If I scream at the top of my lung, then your face, then it's gonna break communion. If I like go behind you and talk to the back of your head, it it's going to break communion. If I go behind you and talk to the back of your head, it's going to destroy the communion. There are a million things

I could do to break the ritual that I'm engaging with. But it's still a ritual. Is that your point? It's definitely a ritual. There's no way around it. So it's almost like somebody- Sitting at a table, a dinner is a ritual, is a total ritual. Completely. There's no way around it. And so that scales up. And you realize that the way that you encounter, the way that you, when you drive on the street

on certain side of the road and you signal and you turn, and all of these things are all ritualized encounters with the world in order to make them possible. And that scales up into liturgy. And liturgy becomes completely understandable. It becomes completely coherent and inevitable, sorry. Yeah, when somebody says, so why do I have to go through this ritual?

So is what you're saying is, well, you will engage in a ritual, like you can't not, so which ritual best matches reality in the way in which you wish to engage it, associate with it. Yeah, it's even it's even it's even more radical than that, which is that if you don't engage in deliberate rituals, what you will do is you will engage in unconscious and accidental rituals. That is, addiction is

religious. Addiction is ritualized behavior and it's completely ritualized. You can recognize the steps, you can recognize the system, and it repeats itself over and over and you engage in the same types of behavior and you engage in the same steps towards your addiction and then what happens after your addiction, this kind of despondency and then you come back and then you re-engage with your addiction. And so addiction is a form of worship, you know, it's not, it's a form of ritualized behavior but it's a ritualized behavior which instead of bringing you into communion with others and making

all of us turn up towards the highest good is a type of ritual that is an idol and enslaves you and makes you a slave of its pattern. So you can't avoid it. There's no way around religious ritual. It just depends, like you said, which rituals would you engage with. And also the rituals that you engage with will help you modify the other ones, right? So if you pray, if you encounter the sacraments, it will help you. It's not just a one-on-one thing, but it will help you to move away from your bad patterns. You have to replace bad patterns with good patterns. I got a question for you. Again, I always think this is all tied together, and if you need to go at any point, just hang up.

No, I'm good. I've been trying for a long time now to stop swearing, and I think I think and my my listeners who are familiar with the show will forgive me for bringing this up again but I think I've got a decent argument against swearing but if it's not good I want to know and if it is good I'd like you to help me understand it better would that be okay? Sure go ahead. Because I do think it it ties into what we're talking about here, right? And here it is. When you observe humans, you see that when they engage in behaviors that are like unto the beasts, they ritualize them or elevate them to set that action apart or to distinguish themselves from the beasts.

So we defecate and urinate, we nourish ourselves with food, we copulate, right? And interestingly, most swear words are associated with those things, in addition to religion. It might have to do something, I think, with the places we find ourselves the most vulnerable. I'm not sure about that. But, you know, when humans get together to eat, they don't just eat in any kind of way. I mean, a hot dog is something you hold in your hand, but even then, there's certain rules. You know, you don't just eat like an animal. You don't do that. When you have sex, like we would think someone was beastly if they were having sex in the

street, you know, like we might light candles, you know, we might set the mood to elevate this action. If you were at my house, Jonathan, and you saw my son just taking a dump in the backyard and saw me encouraging it, like this isn't good. You shouldn't do that. Like you shouldn't guess you have to dump, but you shouldn't dump in the way animals dump. Right? So the whole point is that there's certain like rituals or things that we use to elevate those activities when we share those activities with the beasts. Okay. To tear down those activities is to become more beast-like and that's not good.

And the argument is that when we swear, we're doing orally, we're kind of tearing down those structures and rituals and elevations orally. And so I really shouldn't be saying things like shit and ass and sexual things and because I'm, yeah, well you get my point. What do you think of that? Well, I think it's a good beginning. I think that you need to be able, you should be able to account for, so how about this, let me give you my theory about swearing And then tell me how it fits with yours, let's say. Uh-huh. And so, the, there's a, in our world, we have the public sphere, like, it's similar to what you're saying, like, there's a world of the public which is reasonable and which is coherent, right, and is communal, okay. And so then from that world there are things that are set apart. Again, exactly the way that you're talking about, okay. And so

there are things that are set apart from the communion. Some things are set apart above as being sacred, okay. And that's because they are beyond the communion and they also, but they bind the communion together. Okay. And there are some things which are set aside below, you could say, and they are the scandals, right? The things that will break down our communion out of a scandal, let's say. And so there's two types of hiddenness. You could say that the world is hidden in garments of skin, right, after the fall. We are covered in garments of skin. And there's two types of nakedness. There's the nakedness of glory, you could say, in

the garden. And then there's the nakedness of glory you could say in the garden and then there's the nakedness of shame at the bottom Which is the nakedness of the you know, Noah drunk in his tent you could say so if you think think of the story of Genesis as starting as naked in the garden and Ending as naked in your tent in a in a drunken manner that you need to be covered Okay, so those are the two extremes, let's say, of setting aside. Now what happens when we swear is we are trying to express something which is outside of the system of meaning because this part in the middle is the coherent communal system of meaning. But sometimes we have experiences which is violence or like when you stub your toe

or you get super angry and you don't find a word within the system of meaning to express what you're dealing with. So what you'll do is you will go into the cast out, like into the cast away and bring it into the system of meaning to express the disjunction. You're basically expressing disjunction.

Expressing like, this makes no sense, I can't express it, and so I need to go into the hidden part. I need to bring out the hidden part into public to express the disjunction. So that's why it's all fecal, it's all sexual, it's all that. Now what we do when we use religious words is that we're confusing the top and the bottom. We're confusing the sacred with the dark outside and we're taking religious things and we're pulling them into this darker aspect. But they're related. That's why both of them tend to be used in swearing. Because we want to reach outside of the system of meaning

in order to express something which is beyond expression. So we'll reach up and we'll reach down and we'll mix them together. And so we create this thing. But what it does, I mean, obviously, the reason why we shouldn't swear is, especially not use the religious words, is exactly because we're desacralizing. We're participating in desacralization

when we're doing that. We're basically taking pearls and throwing them in the mud. We're taking the highest thing and we're confounding it with the lowest thing, okay? And so that's why we shouldn't do that. The reason why it's a dangerous thing to bring out the bottom things up is also because this stuff at the bottom, right?

All the dark stuff, if you bring it into public, like you said, it's destroying the world. Like it literally will destroy the world. Like if you shit in, like if you take a crap on the kitchen table, you will destroy your reality. Your reality will not hold together if you start doing things like that. So as you do it orally like what you said, you're bringing this chaos, you're kind of like, you're basically like pulling this chaos up into the world and you're kind of participating in its destructuring.

Now the most mysterious thing, the craziest thing, this is the thing that will blow your mind, is that Jesus Christ manifests those two at the same time, all the time. He's constantly doing that, but he does it in a way that doesn't destroy the world. He's basically reaching up and down at the same time. And so he's humiliated, he's beaten, he's treated like a criminal, he goes down into the bottom of death, but he's at the same time, he's the king, he's the holy and the holy of holies,

he's up in the secret place in the holy temple. So when he dies, he goes down outside of the world, down and into the holy of holies at the same time, which is just crazy. So Christ like, Christ smashes it all, like if you want to understand, but at least in our world, like in our world, you really definitely want to be careful because when you swear from above, you're just, you're, you're both, in both ways you're just, you're participating in destroying the world or destructuring the world. But if we can understand why that happens. It's not arbitrary at all.

That is so powerful. I'm gonna think about that for the next three weeks. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Now, but when we use sexual language, aren't we in a sense bringing the higher thing down also? Cause we're degrading this sacred act. No, because think about it.

The word, the sexual words we use are never the proper words. They're always the dirty version of the word. Yeah, that's right. We don't say, oh, copulate. Like we don't say that, right? We say, we use the bad word. Right, yeah, exactly. We use the dark kind of illegitimate words

in order to bring that. So we're always reaching down when we're doing that. We're kind of going into the dirty part of sexuality and wanting to manifest it in the world. But in so doing, we're degrading the beauty of the sexual act. Of course, we are, yeah, definitely. But I see what you mean.

You are, yeah, you're reaching down into the bottom and wow, that's really interesting. And then what's kind of sad is when you become the sort of person that doesn't doesn't even consciously drag things from the bottom up. You're just it's just part of your language is your blaspheming and speaking. I think about people who swear all the time. Yeah, I'm thinking of them.

If you know some people like that, you'll realize that it's actually it manifests a general pattern. Oh, it manifests a disjunction. It doesn't it like it's it's it's prophetic of their own. Exactly. Of their own state of their own spiritual state of their own, the way that they encounter the world, the way that also they might be someone who, let's say tends to damage relationships tends to not be careful of others tends to you

know, all of that will be part of why someone will be completely lost to, to swearing. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with me. Hey, we got a super chat. I need to read it because they were so kind. Ricardo says, greetings from Panama. Thank you both.

Your awesome work. It has helped me a lot. Do you have any suggestions regarding helping ones, loved ones understand the darker times that seem to be coming? I guess that, I guess they're talking about, you know, the demise of Western civilization and the end times. I think that it's, I think that if you if you attend too much to that, like if you're too careful about that, you might not be focusing on the right thing. You

know, I think that it's best for for each of us to find our own truth, let's say, like find the truth in this situation that is know how you're going to live it out as a authentic Christian, how you're going to live it out as a authentic Christian, how you're going to be faithful to your faith within these kind of chaotic times, and live as an example. And of course you can try to communicate that to people around you, but if you're worried too much about that, like if you're worried that nobody believes you, or that nobody understands what you're saying,

and that I'm trying to help them understand what's going on but nobody understands and it's freaking you out then maybe you're not focusing on the right things at the moment you know it's better to live your own life in the best way you can. Jonathan when we have this I don't know your traveling restrictions ended I would just love to get together with you one day mate I'd love to have you in the studio I know that's a sacrifice to have you one day, mate. I'd love to have you in the studio. I know that's a sacrifice to have to come down here, but gosh, I really so enjoy listening to you.

And you seem to be such a blessing to people. People are saying all sorts of lovely things about you, saying that you've really illumined them, have led them to Christianity. So thank you. I'm glad you exist, brother. Oh, we just say glory to God, I guess is the best thing to say.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, we have another super chat here. Can you ask Jonathan whether it's ever okay to use artificial contraception and how he feels about Orthodox priests? Okay, so I didn't realize how loaded this question was when I threw it on the screen. No, that's fine.

I'm fine with answering that question. I would say that in, I think in general, using artificial contraception is not acceptable. But I think that in the orthodox tradition, we have the capacity to adjust ideals to people's certain circumstances. So sometimes if there are health issues, if there are, if it's dangerous for people to say to get pregnant for this or that reason

or for whatever, then I would leave that up to the priest to decide to what extent they are willing to be flexible. But for sure, I think ideally in the Orthodox tradition, artificial contraception is not acceptable. And I just have to, I don't know, you understand the Catholic position, but for those who don't, the Catholic position would be that it is.

Like it's a contradiction of the meaning of the sexual act and for that reason is never acceptable. And the Catholic priest wouldn't have the authority to permit somebody to engage in that. You're welcome to push back. No, I don't want to push back. I think that it's the same, it's like in terms of an Orthodox priest, the way an Orthodox priest would see your spiritual life would be as a, like you're a sick person that needs to be healed. And there are different emphases that we need to put on different

things at different times in order to bring you to that healing. And so sometimes it's best to emphasize certain things and de-emphasize others in order to not make you crack. Right? And you know, it's like if I have an ideal for you, but it's like I can't just lay it out all on you at the same time, because you're not going to make it. And I know you're not going to make it. And so it's like, okay, let's moderate this and not negate the ideal, right? Because the purpose is to bring us into communion with God. And so it's like, let's slowly bring you up. And so that's usually the way a lot of Orthodox priests will, let's say, deal with that.

Because there's a lot of stuff in Orthodoxy, like there's a lot. Like if you take the ideal, like you should be fasting all these days and all these months of the year, and you should be saying, like you should have like a half an hour preparation service or more before you go to communion, and you should confess every time you go to communion.

And you should, it's like the ideal is super high, right? It's not just about one thing. So usually what clergy will do is try to say, okay, what can you handle at this time? And try to apply that to your life so that we move towards the ideal. So that's how it's treated. Like genuine question here,

like somebody comes to confession and they're looking at pornography every day, right? Because I understand what you're saying, right? This kind of law of gradualness. Like we're not saying that the law changes. Like there are things that are right and there are things that are wrong, but sometimes we seem to be incapable

of always choosing the good, especially if we're addicted to something. But I presume, and this isn't a gotcha question, but I presume a priest wouldn't, in the Orthodox community, wouldn't say, well, I mean, try to maybe just scale back your pornography use. I don't know. I don't know how, I mean, try to maybe just scale back your pornography use. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm not a priest. I don't know how the priest would, would, uh, would do it. Like there's some, there are probably different ways to approach that. Some priests might actually do something like say, look, like, especially if someone's super addicted to something might say something like, okay, look, let's not deal with your addiction right now. How about if we work on your prayer life instead to start with?

Let's get you started. Let's have you do your daily prayers. Let's have you do the Jesus prayer, let's say for a certain amount of time a day. And then once that's, let's say, set up, then we could attack the sin, for example, because just stopping to do something usually doesn't work. Yeah, I agree.

If you just stop doing something, it's not like you leave a vacuum in your soul that needs to be filled with other things. And so, I don't know, like I'm not a priest, but I'm saying that I'm giving an example of, like that I could imagine a priest telling someone, you know, it's like, yes, what you're doing is wrong and immoral and dangerous, but let's focus on this to give you the possibility of moving away from this. I'm trying to make a comparison between two particular sins. And that's what I'm saying. So, okay. So the Orthodox priest might... But if someone was, I don't know, there are certain sins also that have more social consequences. So it's like, sure. Obviously, if someone was beating their child and then they came to the priest, the priest wouldn't say necessarily, well, keep beating your child and, you know, we'll do this. It's like, they might be a little more extreme in the measures

they put, but I think it just depends also on it's not a, it's not, it's not something which has a, just as a rule, let's say, although there are cannons, like there are definitely cannons, that's for sure. Okay. We have two more super chats and then we won't take any more. So for those who are in the chat right now, cause I don't want them to have to be a super chat

and then we not get to the question, but here's one. Hey, I hope you all are okay. It's awesome to have Jonathan. I don't know if you could ask him, what does he think about the meaning of death in the universe? Or of of death in the universe? Or of the death of the universe. Oh, I apologize. Yes, you're exactly right. Meaning of the death of the universe.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I would say that it's probably, it's probably best not to not to worry about that. It's probably better to worry about your own death, because that's for sure going to happen, you're going to die. So there's a lot of these types of speculative or very large, large questions, which I don't think are completely, that there may be a little more of a distraction. But if you want to think of it, the idea that all created things are not eternal, if you want to understand it that way, it's a good way to understand it. The only eternal self-contained thing is God, and not thing, but you know, the only self-contained reality is that of God, and all the others are limited in their scope

and in their existence. And so the idea that the universe, that the physical universe has a, will not last forever, it's not something that should surprise a Christian. You know, I've often thought people like to think about when is the end times going to happen? And the fact is kind of as you say, like there will be an end time for you sooner, maybe then later. And like when might that be, right?

Like suppose I'm fairly confident that in 40 years I'll be dead. Okay, so now what if I knew for a fact the second coming was gonna happen in 40 years? All right, like how would I live? Well, I should probably kind of live like that. I mean, there's an analogy there, you know? Yeah, because your death is equivalent

to the second coming in terms of your experience. That is, that's it. When you die, that's pretty much the second coming for you. Yeah. All right, here's the last question here. Hi, Jonathan, you travel in a spaceship to a parallel universe and reach Earth while God created Eve. Eve hasn't yet eaten the apple. How do you explain Eve or maybe to Eve?

Yeah, not to eat the apple. This is nice. What a cool question, dude. I mean, I oh, man, this is going to sound really bad, but I probably wouldn't. Like, as if God's word wasn't sufficient for Eve to make the right choice. God told Adam and Eve, and so it's not like I'm going to drop in there and I'm going to say something which will be beyond what God has told Adam and Eve. And so I think that, you know, yeah, at some point, at that point, I don't think that I would have a say in what's going on.

It's probably the best way to understand it. So I probably would just watch. I'm sorry to say, I probably would just watch and not say anything. Yeah. Hey, just so those, I want to show them this again. For those who are just joining the live stream, Jonathan is putting together this graphic novel

and you can see it on your screen right now. There's a link in the description below. I'm actually, as soon as we're done here, I'm going to get on and donate to this because I want it to happen. And I want this sort of content for my children. And it's important that we support the sort of content we wish to exist. So if people are out there right now and you think this looks worth you know supporting

please please do it. Anything else you want to say? I think that like I said maybe at the outset I feel like there this is an interesting moment in terms of Christian arts. I'm getting a lot of artists writing me, getting all these emails of people converting to Christianity, becoming usually either Orthodox or Catholic, more like a little more traditional Catholic and a lot of artists, filmmakers, illustrators, people who work for big studio movies. I think there's an awakening in a lot of the artistic community

that we need better stories and we need it now. And we need better images and we need them now. And so hopefully we're playing our little part with this graphic novel and kind of putting some seeds into some positive seeds into the world. So we appreciate all the support people can bring to it. Yeah, all right, Jonathan, thanks so much for being on the show.

Thanks to everybody who's been watching the live stream and who will watch later. God bless you. Thanks, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.