Pints With Aquinas - From Mormon to Catholic Part 2 w/ Stephen Johnson

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Show Sponsors: https://hallow.com/matt https://stpaulcenter.com/matt  

People are excited. People excited. You're on. We're on. Welcome back. Hey, how are you? What's it like to be back for a second time? If you'll. I'm ready. I'm ready to go. Let's do it. Yeah. How was the fallout after the last interview?

So, I mean, I kept an eye on things in the comments section to see what the overall response was. And generally, it was really positive, especially from who I perceive to be Catholics. There was a flood, it seemed like, of Mormons coming in to look at it about a week or so after, probably with the release of that short. That one gained a lot of attention, the liar lunatic. Mormons are way nicer than trads. Like we get like, orthob or like Calvin bros or you know, the Catholic equivalent. They're very angry, but like Mormons getting angry with you. I was, I almost felt like grateful. Thanks, man.

The way you said that, I just feel so good about myself. I don't know. Maybe I didn't see enough comments. Did you get any direct interaction? I'm no, I didn't. We're trying to look for somebody who'd be open to a debate. any direct interaction? I'm no, I didn't. We're trying to look for somebody who'd be open to a debate, trying to find someone who's both credentialed and good at debates, you know? Yeah, there was one name that I saw pop up over and over again.

Last name, I think is Bo Lin, B-O-L-L-A-N. Yeah. And I think he has some background in Catholicism, so he might be somebody worth talking to. Yeah, because, you know because in these kind of debates, if you pick the wrong person, like you don't want to have just somebody with a big platform because maybe they're not that good. And then of course the criticism is,

well, of course the Mormon may have lost because of you chose the wrong fella. Yeah, who would you want to put him up against? Well, I asked Jimmy Aiken, he's open to doing it. Oh, nice. So, yeah, so Jimmy's open. So it'd probably be him. Yeah. He'd do a great job. Yeah. And he's just, and he's polite and congenial. And what about Joe Heschmeyer? Yeah, I'd be totally open to that. He's been picking out a lot of content.

Open to that too. I love Joe. He's a really great fella. Yeah, balanced, nuanced, so open to either. Did you have anyone reach out to you personally, even just to say I saw you on the show? Yeah, yeah, a couple of my friends. So there was the question that came in about Mexican meatloaf. Yeah, that was one of my good buddies, Josh. And so he reached out. One of my friends from my time in the military service, he watched it. And then, yeah, a few others. Isaac, who you'll meet. Yeah. Yeah. He reached out. So, yeah, there was just plenty of support there. Good stuff.

So where we left off, where did we leave off? So we left off somewhere while I was still camping in atheism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which we said, I said, makes sense. Like if I was going to leave Catholicism, because I was so disillusioned by it. And I started to think that there were a lot of lies, or if not intentional lies, but like, yeah, kind of historical fictions that I had believed, I'd probably maybe I could, I could see that someone would just be disinterested in Christianity.

Is that kind of where you were at? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, growing up and we got into this last time about what it was like to grow up Mormon and bear your testimony and understanding and believing the origin story of Mormonism, you hold that it's, it is the pure Christianity. And so whether, uh, whether I really wrestled with it or not, my presupposition was that this is the true expression of Christianity and whatever exists outside of this fear, it's going to be limited or deficient in some ways. So when I left, Christianity just went

out the window as sort of one whole package of beliefs. And I know you said you started reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and someone challenged you on moral facts apart from kind of transcendent grounding. Yeah, so the introduction to the new atheism and their militant opposition to Christianity definitely reinforced my my My natural movement away from Christianity throwing it out and then it was yeah, it was reinforced by their their strong Opposition to it and discrediting it as being a superstitious Nonsense as you began to kind of accept more of these atheist tropes, how did that affect your relationship

with your wife who converted to Mormonism from Catholicism or your family who still believe this? So my relationship with my wife remains strong. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. We each have our roles that we play. And that's just the role that she's set into. So she's got her sphere as being the homemaker and mother. And she's comfortable with that.

Whereas I'm more up and out. And I'm thinking and considering ideas on which way we're going to move and how to lead the family. And so I guess more traditional roles, something that was just naturally assumed. I mentioned that she's Hispanic. And so I think that that was more inculcated into her throughout her upbringing was the traditional gender roles that exist in a relationship between husband and wife. She trusted you to kind of navigate these things. Yeah, she did. But did you ever kind of become pejorative to the faith that she'd accepted? Because even though she wanted to submit to you ultimately, I presume she still had a love for Christ or the Scriptures. Well, she took her time with exiting the church.

Her process out of the church took about a year, year and a half. Whereas as soon as I got home from my deployment to Iraq, I had made it my mind and I began my process of moving out of the church and I mentioned the the resignation process that I had to go through in order to officially leave the church. I started that right away where she she bid her time, she worked through really methodically the information and the resources that I was I was presenting to her. And that was good, it was good that there was a bit of space and freedom for each of us to sort of Pick our own path and I think that the the evidence against Mormonism is so overwhelming that if somebody is sitting down and being honest with what it is that they're reading and just you know

Considering the fact that okay if I were to see something like this happen in modern day, 99 times out of 100 or even greater than that, I'm gonna assume that this is just a facade, that this is some sort of con man who's pulling the rug out from underneath people. We see cults rise and fall, and the movement or the growth of the LDS church, if we're to see that happen in modern day, I think it would just be dismissed just out of hand by the

vast majority of people who were to see it. So I think that she did a really good job of exercising, you know, that part of her mental capacity to place yourself outside of it and consider the evidence more objectively, which worked out to her favor because she, um, she made the decision on her own that, okay, I need to leave this behind as well. Couldn't the same thing be said about Christianity though? If, if we agree that cults, by the way, just side note, I do not consider Mormonism a cult. I'd love your, your take on this. I don't even like the word cult. I think the word cult is usually just a four letter pejorative

that we throw at groups that we don't like. But even if you wanted to give it some definition and say, I don't know, what would you say about a cult, that there was a controlling influence, that they were forbidden to read other articles of faith or something like that? I don't think of Mormonism at all as a cult. So I would agree with that.

I think that there is pressure, which comes from top down to stay in your lane, to not explore, to not... There's this whole attitude towards anti-Mormon literature. And this is something that we're indoctrinated with, that if it's not coming directly from the Brethren, the LDS sources of the Church, if it's not official Church doctrine, then you shouldn't either be reading it, or if you do read it, read it with like a great deal of skepticism.

How is that not true in Catholicism? I mean, we had the Index of Forbidden Books, which I'd like to bring back personally, and we also have imprimatas that say to a Catholic, this is trustworthy. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not saying that it doesn't exist within Catholicism. I'm not even saying that that's a bad thing. Um, because I think, yeah, you should, right? If I would do this with my family, you know, with my own children, like if you're going to read something that attacks the structure of the nuclear family, then read that really, you know, with my own children. Like if you're going to read something that attacks the structure of the nuclear family, then read that really, you know, with a great deal of skepticism and

incredulity. But so yeah, I think that that's wise, you know, especially if there is a trusted leadership, they should be warning and preparing people to how to react when you counter something that cuts against the narrative. Especially when you're a minority within a country. It makes more sense, I think, to be on guard. Yeah. And so I think, I wouldn't call the LDS Church a cult either, but what I think, if it has anything in common with a cult, it would be the ability for the leadership to gaslight its people,

which modern day revelation gives them that inroad. We can change things, we can move the goalpost and I mean, what are you going to say as a true believing Mormon to counter that, you know? So if if there's a policy change geared towards how we interact with LGBT community You know to react against it and then a few years later Reverse that both of them are revelation. And what's your defense to say that this was a manmade or it came from an opinion of a person

rather than divine revelation? I think that that would be the most dangerous aspect of it. So you can change doctrine, you can change policy on a whim and attribute that to something that can't be tested, but has to be accepted on faith. Yeah. Even if it cuts against the historical track record of the church. And I think I asked you this last time, but were you seeing people in the LDS church feel kind of resentment maybe towards the leadership for changing doctrines? Is that what you mean? Yeah.

So, I mean, this would have been after I left the Mormon church. And so I'm, I'm viewing it from a different orientation, you know, so I'm, I guess I'm, I would be sided more with the ex-Mormons who are looking back on and saying like, this is, this is an example, this is proof of what I've been saying. Now, for those who are still within the community No, I think that the the tendency is to just accept you know because the pre-supposition there is that there is divine revelation modern-day revelation and that the The prophet of the church is leading us

Through direction being received by God Yeah, so I think it just depends on where you're standing. Yeah. When then did you kind of move? When did you begin to question atheism? So it began, like I said, with objective morality. Now, moving away from Mormonism in a lot of ways was a lot easier for me because Mormonism was something that I assumed it was something that I assumed. It was something that I inherited. So the tenets of the faith, I never questioned because they were given to me and I received them from my parents who I loved and it was built up just from childhood as something that yes, we believe this, we live it out, we act it out. That whole God story narrative that I alluded to in the first

episode was something that I just assumed without any sort of critical investigation into it. It was just an assumption. And so when that went away, I guess the hardest part was the sense of nostalgia, you know, that I'm never going to get this back again. And then the fondness of the memories of the activities and Boy Scouts and EFY and various things that I did as a Mormon young person. Atheism was quite a bit different because atheism, I felt like this is mine. No, I had started out at ground level after Mormonism had fallen apart. And then I spent a lot of time reading and researching

and forming my own opinion and becoming attached to my ideas and forming my own identity as a 22 year old, 23 year old person. And so I felt a lot more attachment to atheism because it was mine than I ever did to Mormonism. That makes a lot of sense. You're intellectually invested in this thing. Right.

Yeah. And so, I mean, it was the first thing as a young person that I really explored and determined for myself, okay, this is what I believed. And you know, with any sort of framework, like a religious framework or an atheistic framework, it now becomes the lens through which I'm seeing everything. So this is now coloring reality for me, and I'm seeing it this way. And so the objective morality was definitely,

it was the stumbling, like, I don't know, like it made the ground shaky, and the foundation didn't seem as sturdy. Mason- Did you have atheist friends? Had you found a community online that you were going back and forth with? more agnostic, I suppose. He had sympathies for Christianity and thought that Christianity – well, I mean, truthfully, he saw that Christianity was really the structure, the foundation of Western society, and saw the goodness that it gave to our sense of ethics and morality that we all kind of operate within. So he and I had lots of conversations, and he was the one that first brought up to me the problem, the philosophical problem of assuming objective morality on atheism. And so that was where atheism began to crack for me, and I was really reluctant to give it up.

And there were different points where I assumed that, okay okay maybe I just have to jettison object of morality and I listened to people what's his name the the magician pen Penn and Teller yeah yeah so he was pretty let Penn Gillette thank you he was he's an outspoken atheist yeah and he would say things like well I don't murder and I don't rape and I don't steal because I don't want to. And that really resonated with me. Like, okay, well there, there, there is no like real law against this making it wrong. But for whatever reason, it's just built in me to not really want to do those things.

I'm not evolved. Maybe look at those things as grotesque. Yeah. And, you know, we mentioned Christopher Hitchens would have made the evolutionary argument for objective morality or something like it. And so there are these competing positions that one could hold within atheism to justify behaving a certain way. And so I grasped onto those as well as I could, but eventually it just doesn't work long-term. I mean, so you have to really wrestle with the idea,

well, maybe there are things that I really wanna do, and I feel this pressure on me to not behave that way, you know, like, like adultery or looking at pornography or, you know, whatever it might be, especially around, I guess, sins of lust, you know, where like there is this really deep ingrained natural desire to, to engage in that. Yeah. But what I mean, what's it coming up against? in that. But what's it coming up against? What's restraining me? And so it just seemed like halfway attempts to keep myself from engaging in those things. And a lot of times it just didn't work. It broke down and I ended up committing this or that sin without really having any justification

as to why I shouldn't have done that. And so that was one of the things that atheism initially, or I mean, it led me into was hedonism, just allowing myself a certain degree of moral license to do what it is that I wanted to do. And that included a whole lot of lying and being sneaky and just engaging in things that if I were being watched, there's no way I would have done.

Yeah. All right. So then what was the alternative? Because you could have accepted perhaps some sort of Platonism, presumably, that there are objective moral laws and they exist independent of a mind, perhaps in the same way that numbers do. Yes. This was a, this is one thing that I came across. I should say, there's a online philosopher named Stefan Molyneux. Have you heard of him? No. Yeah. I think he's a, he's Canadian, but he proposed this idea called, um, universal preferable behaviors. And so he's an atheist. Um, and he had this, it was really well worked out, this

argument for objective morality based on what the thing is in and of itself. So he used the example of stealing. So if stealing is not wrong, if it's not objectively evil, well then that means that it must be good or totally neutral. And so he does this thought experiment where he says, I can't be stolen from if I want to be stolen from. Like those two things are, you know, they contradict each other. So he gives the example of if I take my lawnmower out and I drop it on the curb and I put a sign on it that says free and somebody comes by and takes it, well I call the police as a result and I say hey this guy stole my lawnmower. Well obviously it's not stealing, you know, so stealing has to be something, you know, so it's not just this constructed sort of Make-believe fiction like it's an actual thing But the thing is is that if you want to be stolen from you can't actually be stolen from and he says the same thing

about lying Like you can't be lied to Well, I don't want to butcher it but anyways what Well, I don't want to butcher it. But anyways, what universal preferable behavior did, at least to me, was show that, okay, there are things like lying and stealing which exist, like have some sort of reality that have like a definition, like a true definition. And so that it's, it's, this has been a long time ago, so pardon me. But but what that did was gave me another way of looking at it, like, okay, well, I It's it's this has been a long time ago. So it's a part of me but

But what that did was gave me another way of looking at like, okay Well, I can see things like actions as being realities in and of themselves even though these actions like stealing as a Universal is an immaterial reality Nonetheless, it still exists in some way. Yeah, right So yeah universal preferable behavior gave me a new way of looking at it but I guess it was also a tiptoe in the direction of of seeing an immaterial reality as existing like some sort of code to reality that's Intangible does that make sense? Yeah, you mean morality itself, right? Yeah, it is. It is.

William and Craig quoted some moral philosopher. I think they were an atheist, but they were defending objective moral facts. And I'm going to butcher this, but she said something to the effect of any argument against moral realism, like any premise in that argument is going to be less apparent to me than what is apparent to me, namely, it's always wrong to do such and such. And so therefore, whatever argument you construct

against moral objectivity won't work because it's more apparent to me, let's say that I can't hurt children for fun or something else. The same thing is true of determinism, right? I mean, like the idea that I don't hurt children for fun or something else. The same thing is true of determinism, right? I mean, like the idea that I don't have free will butts up with like this overwhelming sensation feeling that I do. And unless I have a compelling reason

to go against this, this strong inclination, then why would I? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you have those two things, determinism, which people like Sam Harris and Dan Dennett really argue for this this notion that we don't actually have free will yeah And there's no way that we could have done otherwise than what we actually did. I want to just take a moment to talk about Those things that are properly basic, you know, because these are real fun like properly basic beliefs I spoke about this the other day in my testimony that when I was a teenager,

I had about of solipsism. I was really afraid that I was the only person in the world that existed and no one could convince me otherwise. You know, maybe you're just a sophisticated cyborg. I have no access to your inner life. And so therefore, since I have no access to it, I can't be certain of it. Other properly basic beliefs are the world was not created five minutes ago with the appearance of age, with memories in our minds that never happened, of things that never happened, of food in our stomachs that we never ate, you know, of crumbling mountains. Yeah,

they were created that way as well. The rust on the car, that was also, all of it was created five minutes ago. Like there's no way to disprove that, I don't think. And yet you're rational to disbelieve it, unless you're given compelling arguments that both prove that approve that hypothesis and thereby disproving the idea that the world is older than five minutes, you know? Yeah. But I so I think you're within you, obviously, within your rational rights to to accept something that

that you can't. That you can't prove when it comes to probably basically how beliefs, you know? Yeah. Do you ever do you ever do with solipsism? I did. Yeah, I did. I didn't know what the word was,

obviously, until much later. But how was that for you? I mean, this this came and it's it's part of the story, I suppose. But yeah, it there were moments where have you seen the Truman show yeah, yeah, it felt Reality started to sort of feel like that, you know where okay? All of this is kind of focused on me and I know that I'm conscious

Yeah, but I don't know that anybody else is or perhaps they are but they've been placed here just yep just for me Yes Perhaps they are, but they've been placed here just for me. Yes, that definitely was something I wrestled with. It wasn't, thank God, a long-lasting thing because it was, I don't know, I mean, did you feel like you were sort of losing your mind when you're I had a good conversation with a friend in a library in high school and I said, I'm afraid you don't exist. Like when you leave my vision, if you go to your house, the idea that you're doing something and I have no access to that, maybe you don't exist. You

know, maybe you cease to exist. How would I know? And he said, I was worried about me. I promise I do. And I said, but that's what you would say, you know? And I like, and it's kind of like trying to argue yourself out of solipsism sometimes feels like trying to argue yourself into theism. If you accept theism as a properly basic belief, right? Because you know, I don't know if there are arguments about solipsism online that'd be really funny to have a solipsist arguing with somebody he thinks doesn't exist about whether he does or not, you know, there'd be no way to reconcile that.

But if you went down this rabbit hole of solipsism and started reading books on it, I presume there are books on it, I have no idea, started watching debates on it, if I did that, that would negatively impact my relationship with you, with my wife, with Thursday, right? How could it not? And likewise, I think sometimes, you know, it's very good that we have arguments for God's existence, the church teaches that we can know God exists apart from faith, etc. But you could also go down a rabbit hole here where you become obsessed with watching debates for God's existence such that it actually negatively impacts the relationship with God you could have if you weren't locked up in your own head like this.

I think there's an analogy there. Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, it seems like that could easily devolve into like sociopathy. Yeah, words. Yeah. If everything is here just for me to interact with. What I mean, what's my restraint? What's my right and left limit? So it seems like a dangerous place to be. And it's also interesting.

I think that we seem to be more open, increasingly open to arguments for like the Matrix or that we are just players in a video game. You know, I know Joe Rogan talks about this or when Richard Dawkins was kind of challenged on intelligent design, I understand that he referred to like extraterrestrial life or something like we want any option, but the God option. And maybe it's because the God option has so much baggage or we associate it with people that we think are thick or we don't like. All the above. Yeah. Yeah. I think what it really contends with ultimately is sin is just you have to you have to confront that that every action that you have is not some meaningless, you know, event, but it's actually infinitely important, you know, the way that you behave, the way that you treat other people. And then you run into vice versus virtue and okay, there is an actual measure to the human person that's not athleticism, it's not intelligence, it's not

artistic capability, but it's actual virtue. And so you have to start striving for that and I think that what people run into is the difficulty in the life of virtue. It's I mean, it comes along with mortification and self-denial and those things cut against the hedonism that's rampant in our society. I mean, this is why I found Buddhism very attractive as an agnostic teenager. I was open to spirituality. Quite frankly, I think I would have been open to a religion that made zero demands on my sexual perversions. It could have made demands on everything else.

Like don't be a racist, insider trading is out, you know, like don't be, and then even the real egregious things like rape, cool. Basically I'm on board with anything I already don't want to do. But as soon as I get told to do something that I very much wanna do, it's constrictive and I would like it to go away.

Which is why I started listening to New Age tapes and practicing New Age meditation a little bit and looking into Buddhism in my teenage years. But if I had have found out, no, no, in order to be a Buddhist, like you have to, you can't masturbate, you can't fornicate, I would have been like, I need something else. Yeah. And what was that like for you then? You started to drift into these areas. something else. What was that like for you then? You had to drift into these areas. Yeah, so okay, so moving out of atheism, I guess that there were three main hurdles.

Hedonism was definitely one of them. That was the big one. Understanding, okay, like, well, using pornography was a big one. So I had to have a reason like, well, okay, why should I not use this thing? It seems harmless and it's something that I do in private and the people that I am viewing doing this are presumably free consenting adults. And so I had these justifications like, okay, well, okay okay it seems harmless plus

you know objective morality that doesn't seem to be a thing so why is it that what I am engaging in here is actually worth getting rid of and I think the the the movement away from that began with some sort of like biological argument that actually what you're doing to your brain by engaging in regular pornographic viewing and masturbation is you're actually like messing with the chemistry of your body. And you're actually depleting a lot of the pleasure that you could find in ordinary things by continually going to this engaging in it and I think that that's something that we don't want to lose sight of Even when we're speaking in spiritual terms is that we we are still biological creatures and our bodies have been built such a way you know so we can Experience fully this creation that that we've been given and if we begin manipulating that in order to just derive as much pleasure as we can It's gonna begin to make everything else seem

a little bit more gray and bleak and uninteresting. And so when I became more aware of this, I started to worry like, oh man, like, am I bored of my wife? You know, am I not giving my child as much love as they deserve? Because, I mean, I have to be robbing them in some way because I understand the processes you know dopamine feedback loops and serotonin and the neurotransmitters at work and the neural pathways and everything else and so that that became like my first like insight like okay this this might be a really good reason to try to get away from this pleasure seeking, this extreme pleasure seeking. So obviously that's a very materialistic way of approaching this, but nonetheless.

And I think it could even be harmonized with hedonism. I think hedonism sometimes gets a bad rap. We think about it as just like throwing yourself headlong into debauchery, but I think more sophisticated hedonists would say delaying immediate pleasure in order to attain greater pleasure later on. Yeah. Not that I want to defend the hedonists. No, that's a really good point. Yeah, because I mean, I guess I could have been arguing against hedonism from a hedonistic perspective. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. So I was I was lucky. I was lucky to be able to break free from the shackles of pornography through that avenue. That's awesome. Yeah, and thank God for that. And then there were a number of other things that I had to clear up about myself, especially when it came to things like sexual sin. When I was working, and I'll tell you a very personal story, but after I got out of the

military I was working in Africa and I worked there for these two- on two month off rotations. And so it is a is an incredibly long time away from family from my wife and my child. And, and very lonely as well. I was working in Africa as part of a Kazavac team. I mean, so what we did was we had a helicopter and airplane, but we stayed in a villa. And if there were ever any incidents with American forces somewhere in West Africa, we could respond to it. By and large, I spent most of my time completely alone in my room. And on one of my last rotations to Africa, I incidentally met a friend group. There were other Americans there and we formed a relationship with them. And there was a lady there and her and I hit it off and we formed an emotional

relationship and this emotional relationship started to go in the wrong direction. And, you know, by God's grace, it didn't enter into anything physical. It's so didn't cross the line in that way, but it was still inappropriate and So I'm wrestling with with overcoming pornography and I'm wrestling with this when I'm when I came home from this rotation thinking like You know, I don't know what to do with this But I just had this this weight on me that I've done something really wrong it was just a guilt that was this weight on me that I've done something really wrong it was just a guilt that was continually pressing on me and

and so one night it just it became completely unbearable and I had to I had to bring my wife into my bedroom and I Confessed it to her and I just I broke down just weeping with this This guilt that I've never, ever experienced before. Not at any point in my life had I experienced this sort of release of confession. There's somebody here, another person who is owed this,

is owed this truth that I've kept from them, that I've concealed this from them. And so I bore this out to her. And the result of it, it was difficult for sure, but the result of it was a breakthrough, a breakthrough that, you know, morality is not something to be trifled with. If you begin walking down the path where everything is permissible and you start to actually behave that way, the ramifications of that are serious. And I mean, it just it hit me like a like a ton of bricks that there are real consequences, real ugly and painful consequences to acting and behaving in a way that's contrary to good and

I Mean it was completely eye-opening to me that okay. There is a way I need to behave and a lot of that Orbits around truthful living being truthful as much as I can I mean with myself and who I am as a person and with those most close to me about how am I expressing myself? How am I carrying myself? How am I presenting myself to other people? That it should correspond to what's actually going on within me. And so from that moment forward there was a real effort on my behalf to live that out, to be honest, where I had never done that before. So much of who I was was just shrouded in layers of lies and deception and sneaky behavior

and a lot of things that I'm not proud of. But at that moment, it came to head, like, I can't do this. There's actually a way to be. And this is before I'd come to any sort of epiphany about the reality of God. And so, I mean, this was just something that was breaking down inside of me that was incongruent with the philosophy that I was trying to make work. Right? So that was, that was a big big thing, you know at any point did you consider that this was due to your Moralistic upbringing and that this is something you could have shed if you just pushed tried a little harder that that that came later

Okay, and um, so I'll jump I'll jump forward a bit if you like that. No problem. Yeah, you can get to that. Okay, so I Guess that was the first step towards or away from atheistic materialism was this confrontation I had with, with morality and recognizing my, me in relationship to it. The next one would have been my relationship with the state. Right? So, and this might be a little bit more difficult to explain, but when I left Mormonism and I shed my Christian conservative presuppositions and my attachment to those things, as my belief in some sort of higher benevolent power, I gravitated towards more left-wing politics. So the idea of government as that which provides and the importance of the welfare state and the importance of a big social net which keeps people from falling and these social services

like free health care and women's reproductive rights and everything else that I bought into because this was the alternative to a loving caring God. You know even in the Catholic tradition there's an understanding that the state is it's a true institution. You know that it is is a true institution, you know, that it is itself a perfect society. And now by perfect, I don't mean that it operates flawlessly, but that it is complete. The state is a complete society. Conversely, the church also says that the it itself,

as church, is a complete society. It doesn't need to go outside of itself. Everything that it needs to exist is contained within. Conversely, the family is considered an imperfect society because there are things that the family has to go outside of itself to attain. And so down at my level of the individual, looking up to these larger immaterial societies, the state and the church.

Well, now the church is just disqualified. You know, it's a competition. It's a competitor. It's something that's trying to oppress and to limit and restrict. Whereas the state, on the other hand, it's more tangible. It's more real. It's made up of actual people doing actual work and that that can be seen in and throughout my existence, my reality, as well as you know the the greater community and society itself. So the state began to occupy that role as being that which cares for and provides and assists, you know, so you have things like the fire department and the police department and the road construction and everything else where you can see Like these are actual goods. They're actually benefiting and blessing society this in a way became my god

Which I think is all too common and even People like Stefan Molyneux, that YouTube philosopher says as much, is that the state fills this role for God as God for atheists and non-believers. And it seems to bear itself out in how people on the left side, their disposition towards religion and towards God. Is that? Yeah, completely, yeah.

So the state was a big one. Seeing the state as this good, which filled the role of God, that began to fall apart as well. At some point I began to look at, well, what are the actual activities of the state? You know, what's going on? And this is around the time of 2016. So you had this 2016 elections with Donald Trump and Hillary

Clinton. And there were a couple of things that came to light that helped me to see that perhaps the state is not so clean as benevolent as I would have liked to have thought it was. And so this was one thing that came out of the 2016 election. And I wonder if you remember this, that there was once conversations about Russia started to pick up and Russian interference and Russia being very favorable towards Donald Trump and Donald Trump likewise being favorable

towards Russia. Around the time that this narrative was building there was a story came out that Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State had made this underhanded deal with Russia to provide them with 20% of US uranium. Do you remember this? No. Okay. So it was a huge story that there was this underhanded deal by the Secretary of State to provide an adversarial state with most, well, a good portion of our uranium. And so when that came to light, it just pulled the rug out from under me. Because at the time I assumed that Hillary Clinton representing the more left leaning

side of politics, the Democrat party, was that she represented the good state that I had come to believe in. And so it was just this weird turn of events where like, okay, well, that's a little odd. You know, like Hillary Clinton was doing the thing that she was accusing Donald Trump of doing, and there seems to be like this concerted effort by the media to conceal it and to hide it from me. And then, so the narrative began to rapidly change. Well, okay, well, maybe there's,

the state is not so good. Maybe there are these other interests and other actors at play that are, you know, really pushing, pushing for people to adopt a sense of, you know, statism and a belief that the state is going to provide and take care and do all good things. And so one thing led to another and I began looking into the military industrial complex and reflecting on my own time in the military and seeing like, okay, foreign intervention after foreign intervention and you know, so what is it exactly that the state is doing?

So that began to crumble my distrust for the state. And then the last one I suppose would have been science, you know, scientism, which I'd mentioned a few times in the last episode. As I, as I came out of Mormonism, I really wanted to answer those more existential questions. You know, where did we come from? Why are we here? How did we get here? And, and science was providing those answers in a way that I thought was really coherent and made a lot of sense. Big Bang cosmology, Darwinian evolution, these answers were being supplied to me.

And for a time that was very satisfactory. And then the deeper and deeper into science I went Wanting to understand more about Darwinian evolution and Big Bang cosmology It just it sent me down that this rabbit hole where he eventually led to things like the quantum you know the quantum realm and What I realized there and and most of it is is way over my head So I won't pretend to be you know an expert on something that I'm very ignorant about but the interesting thing about it was that there there seems to have been there's this connection which exists between spiritualism and quantum quantum mechanics and you don't have to

take my word for it you can listen to people like Niels Bohr and Max Planck and some theoretical physicists make this connection. And so one of the things that really opened my eyes was this experiment, which is called the double slit experiment. Are you familiar with this? It was on, it was referenced in the first episode of the Big Bang Theory and I am, I'm aware of it. Okay. So the, the It's wild. Yeah. the first episode of the big bang theory and I am, I'm aware of it. So the, the it's wild. Yeah. Yeah. What it's actually pointing to, I guess that, you know, it's still up for debate,

but the results of this experiment you have, you have two slits and they began firing light through it, like either photons or neutrons or atoms, some very fire electrons, electrons... They fire electrons. Electrons, okay. Yeah. Through this double slit and what they were expecting to find was little like scattered, like a shotgun shell behind the double slit, right? Do I need to back up and explain this a little bit more? If you'd like to. Okay. All right, so you have against the wall or in front of the wall, like a metal plate.

And on this metal plate, there are two slits. And they have some sort of a device on this side of the slit that's firing electrons at the double slit on the metal plate. And they were looking at- Just turn back around because I think you're going to go out of focus. Okay. Yes sir.

And what they were looking at was the image which was going to be cast on the wall behind this metal plate. Right, gotcha. And what they were expecting, because these were particles, to have something like a shotgun shell or a shotgun blast, right? So just little dots here and there. And then as they conducted this experiment, what they actually found was what's called an interference pattern, which is like a large concentration smaller concentration moving outwards

towards the side so what they saw is that okay it didn't react the way that we expected it to as particles it reacted a lot more like a fluid like a wave the the largest concentration was in the middle between the two slits so like it's it's where they shouldn't have been able to reach if they were like just things that you were shooting. Okay. Yeah. So an interference pattern, if you could imagine,

if you have a body of water and you begin putting ripples, like in two different spots, ripples, there's gonna be a place where you're creating as a frequency. And where those frequencies align, it causes an amplification. and so the concentration or the strength of the frequency increases and then the place where the frequencies go out of alignment right so this crest is meeting this trough it cancels itself out and so that's what

they were seeing with this interference pattern so wasn't it wasn't behaving like a particle is behaving like a wave. And so a number of the the theories surrounding this was that it was dependent upon the observer, right, and again I don't have a full grasp on this but this is the observation of the experiment itself is what determined the outcome of the experiment. And so this this led into a lot of things that have been speculated about quantum mechanics is that you as the observer actually participate in the thing itself. And so different theoretical physicists like Michio Kaku are saying like,

your consciousness is actually interacting with what is happening in the material world. And so this this obviously goes way outside of what like a normal materialistic, you know, a materialistic expectation would be. You know, you would think that your consciousness, you're just observing has nothing to do with the outcome of the experiment. But there's a fair amount of theoretical physicists that are beginning to say, no, it's actually very important. The outcome of the experiment depends on the person watching it. And so this was, this was an alert in a big way, the way into mysticism, right? So now consciousness isn't merely just this emergent property of the chemicals in

my brain, but it might actually be something a little bit more universal and spread out in space and time. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. Yeah. So isn't he the one who also has the really like he's the, yeah, he's the guy I'm looking at his picture now Okay, this is the guy who said that like Schrodinger's cat proves that the universe is conscious without just being like that's you just wrote a proof for God from Schrodinger's cat Are you familiar with this? Have you heard this Matt? I've heard of Schrodinger's cat, but not what he said about it. Okay, so

Schrodinger's cat for anybody who's familiar, is this thing where you put a cat in a box and you use the half-life of some radioactive substance to decide whether or not the cat gets poisoned and killed. And due to the nature of quantum mechanics, the cat exists as both dead and alive until it's observed because you have to observe a quantum state for it to break down into an actual reality. So his point is that humans are only actually on the psychological level. If you do the neuroscience, we're only capable of observing one thing at a time, which means your consciousness observing the cat to break down the probability wave means that you're

not being observed, which means that you can't be sure that you are like also existing due to the nature of the quantum thought experiment and you can repeat this on and on. And so you need a being which can observe itself and the people observing the cat. Otherwise the thought experiment totally breaks down in our understanding of how quantum mechanics works doesn't function. And his conclusion from this was, well, the universe itself must be conscious rather than just being like, bro, you proved God. So that that's it. I mean that, that was the door in to a,

to mysticism was theoretical physics. Yeah. Yeah. Because just like what a Thursday was saying, it's almost inescapable that you you've Consciousness has to be the underlying substrate of reality It can't be anything else. Otherwise What they're speculating would happen? Would it happen? Okay, so and then this I mean

Elon musk began saying something very similar when he started talking about simulation theory. So if we dig down in the strata of reality, we arrive at some substrate, that from which everything emerges. I mean, even Elon Musk is saying it has to be consciousness. So some sort of undefined, impersonal, ubiquitous consciousness that fills everything.

And so this is exactly what the mystics have been saying for a very long time is exactly that. So Hinduism is precisely that, that this is the dream state of some being. And we're just little parts of it having an experience. So, I mean, Hinduism goes so far as to say that when, I think when Brahma wakes up, everything disappears. Hello, I want to say thank you to Hello,

which is the best, not just the best Catholic app on the App Store, any App Store, it's the best app out of any app that's ever existed, Catholic or otherwise. I think it's finally time to say that. If you want to grow in your prayer life, please check out hello.com slash Matt. If you sign up on their website at hello.com slash Matt, you can get the entire app for free for 90 days. That's ridiculous. After those 90 days, if you don't agree with me that it's worth the money that you're going to get charged after that monthly, which is a relatively

small amount, you can just cancel. You won't be charged a cent. They have sleep stories. They have my Catholic lo-fi on there. They've just added the gospels, a dramatized version of the gospels. They have daily exegesis on mass readings, which you can listen to. It is fantastic. So if you haven't done it already, hello.com slash Matt sign up over there. Try it for free for three months. So I mean, Hinduism goes so far as to say that when I think when Brahma wakes up, everything disappears. Yeah. And so I mean, as the more I looked at this, the more I found that connection. And even people like Carl Sagan, who did the first Cosmo series and wrote a number of books like the Dragon of Eden, he made the connection

and he made it in very explicit terms that this cosmic cycle that we think that we're living in, it's happened eternally in the past. There's this expansion where everything happens know, there's this, this expansion where everything happens. And then there's this contraction where it all comes back and it goes, you know, so it's just a cyclical circle of time where everything is repeating and happening again. And he's, he talks about things like karma and, you know, so I mean, this was a mind blowing thing to think like,

you know, these are, these are people, the deepest, the most knowledgeable about what's actually happening in our material world. And what they're saying is it's not actually material, it's something else. And so there was a, this is, at this point I started looking into Jewish Kabbalism. Which is what? So Jewish Kabbalism is the mystical aspect of Judaism. Right. Yeah. So it purports to be the oral tradition which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, and it

wasn't actually written down for many, many centuries later. So you have the oral tradition which accompanied the Torah, and it was the way of interpreting it and understanding it and the Mystical side of that went deep into the the creation. So, you know, we have Genesis 1 & 2 which details the creation account Kabbalism Expands on it to a really large degree and it describes things like what's called the in soft EIN SOF Which is this eternal light, this impersonal light, which,

which is God. So in Jewish mysticism, God is not a, he's not the personal intimate God that, you know, you read about in the old Testament, but it's actually this impersonal universal light, this consciousness that, that fills everything and gives life and being and shape and intelligence to, to all of creation. Okay. Yeah. Do you want me to go on with this?

Yeah, no, I'd, I'd interrupt you if I were bored. Everything you're saying is fascinating, which is why I'm not giving up. Okay. Okay. I promise you. Okay. So the idea in, in, um, in Kabbalah is you have this eternal light, this infinite light, which fills everything. And that at some point this eternal light contracted, you know, it contracted in on itself. And this contraction is what opened up the space for all of material creation,

the lesser lower realities to form. And so each one of these contractions created what's what is called a spherote, which is we would understand it essentially to be like an attribute of God. And so we can think of God as having Maybe this isn't the right word but essentially like a hierarchy of attributes, you know, so there's The lower you the further you descend away from in soft this eternal light The more closer you get to material existence. That's you. Okay, and so I've heard it plate put this, that each one of these spherots, it's almost analogous to like a glass pane,

like a stained window, and that as the eternal pure light of Insof shines through it, it picks up some color of it, right? And as it permeates through each one of these different panes, it's picking up more and more reality, which would make it similar to the reality that you and I are existing in.

So me and you, according to this, are really not two separate beings. Fundamentally, what we are is just an expression of InSof through these different spherotes Having an experience here, which is not dissimilar from what Hinduism is right is that? The root of reality is consciousness this consciousness which fills and permeates everything and it's

Fractalized itself and it's experiencing creation, it's experiencing reality. But the distinction between you and I, or me and this desk, or me and anything else, it's an illusion. It's not real. And enlightenment comes from understanding that

we are really connected as one monism, one thing. And so all of the division that exists between us, it's a false part of the construct that if we could see that, all of war, violence, division would fall away. And so there's this thread that runs through the various mystical expressions, whether it's Kabbalism or Hinduism or even Buddhism, which see that. That really everything

is all one. And this would be called monism, that everything is just one thing experiencing itself. And that one thing is the infinite eternal God. Sounds close to Star Wars too. Sure you'll have to unpack that one. Well just that we're all one with the Force and it feels more of a Hindu expression than a Christian expression. Star Wars does. Okay yeah yeah so um Buddha was a Hindu yeah correct mm-hmm so I guess in one way we shouldn't be surprised that there's these similarities in these in these East between at least Buddhism and Hinduism. But it is interesting that this is a common correct me if I'm wrong, but is this a common kind of thread throughout? What is it just Eastern mysticism that we find this idea that we're all really one and we have to accept that we're one.

And so I mean, the I think that the Jewish capitalism is the outlier because a lot of this was developed and written down while there was big Jewish populations in Spain. You know, so this would have been like during the time of the first millennia, like 10th century or so when all of this was written down, Orthodox Jews for these Jews. I don't think that they... Okay, so this is my understanding, is that you have three main pillars upon which Judaism rests, modern day Judaism.

The Talmud, the Torah, and the Kabbalah. And so these three pillars make up what we understand Judaism to be today. And so I don't know if there are any branches within Judaism that reject things like the Zohar, which is a big part of Jewish Kabbalism or not. I mean, I just, I simply don't know. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So where do you want to go from there? Well, did you find the fact that it was even associated with Judaism? Was that a turnoff to you given how traditional Judaism is as a religion in the West? No, if anything, it vindicated it even more. Right? Because I mean, the Jewish people are

incredibly significant in world history. You know, I can't think of a people more significant than the Jews. And maybe this is just sort of my Western take on things, but when you consider their lineage, where they come from, how long they've been around, I mean, like one united continuous ethnic group, people with a certain identity and in-group preference,

continuing from ancient times and being arriving here. And still to this day, containing and possessing a huge amount of influence, both here in America and in the larger world as the state of Israel, there's something unique and peculiar about Jewish people. And the fact that mysticism of this sort existed within Judaism was, it was really- Gave it more credence. Right. And on top of that, you have many of the most prominent

and important theoretical physicists were Jewish. Albert Einstein, you know, for instance. Now, whether he was into Kabbalah, I don't know, but the, the connection there was still striking is that there's this bridge here between what's happening in atomic physics and theoretical physics and mysticism and Kabbalism is existing there. And it, I mean, some the things that um guys like Michio Hikaku are saying is that writings in the Zohar Correspond striking strikingly well to things like modern-day string theory

You know so the the number of dimensions which are those sphere Oats correspond with the number of dimensions that String theorists are, you know, postulating. Yeah, so it's, I mean, it's, it's pretty wild. And then you go back to even more like, um, enlightenment period thinkers like Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, you know, things that they were influenced by. And most of what sir Isaac Newton did was not actually physics or calculus but was alchemy Okay, so that he was he was Doing things like trying to break things down to back to prime matter and put new form on it to make it into something else and so a lot of that is sort of

neglected and ignored but it's makes up a huge part of what Isaac Newton was actually doing was something like magical arts and mysticism. Yeah. So did you share this stuff with your wife? Oh yeah. Yeah. Did she get on board?

I mean, was she just interested? Interested? Yeah. At the same time, I probably bombarded her with just incoherent ramblings about these things. All right. And so did you find another group of these people or just online? I mean, most of this was just my own research. I don't really have it in the past tapped into different communities or shared this thing with a lot of people. But I guess one of the next steps in this was what's called Hermeticism. And so Hermeticism, what it purports to be

is this secret doctrine which originated in ancient Egypt and it's tied back to this sage named Hermes Trismegistus who has some sort of relationship with the Egyptian god Thoth, which he's depicted as being a god with this bird head. And so there are seven Hermetic principles, and the first one is the one that I was most interested in, and it is the all, meaning everything is mind. Everything is mental. So this is the principle of mentalism. And so this was just further, more evidence

to support this direction I was moving in that, okay, materialism, it's the wrong way of looking at things. There's, I mean, the argument of mind over matter, mind versus matter, I mean, it's an ancient sort of argument that goes back to even ancient Greece where you had various Greek philosophers arguing over which came first, you know, which emerged out of which and as being two fundamental properties of our reality, mind, intelligence, and matter. And so hermeticism gave even more strength to the argument that materialism actually follows from mentalism.

And so now, like I'm dealing with this radical shift in my understanding of reality that, okay, everything is not just matter in motion, but there's actually some sort of intelligence buried within it. The question was then, okay, well, is it interactive? Does it know? Am I completely isolated and cut off from it? Or how do I interact with it? And so this, I mean, this was a seismic shift in thinking, right, whereas before as an atheist, reality is just something that happens to you.

You know, you're just, you're just along for the ride. And the, but if you are looking at this through the mind of mentalism, well now there's something there to be known. And perhaps there's something there that knows me. And so this is, this is about the time where I started experimenting with things like prayer and like different forms of meditation and yoga. And so, and what did that look like? What did your first experience of prayer at this stage look like? It was aimless, you know,

so it wasn't directed towards anything. I didn't have a name for it. And I wasn't calling it the universe or anything like that, which, you know, some, some, sometimes that happens where, you know, people attribute the name universe to whatever underlies all of reality. So I didn't ascribe any name to it, but I wanted to know if there was a way to access it. And I think, at least this was the case for me, and I think that this is, it's probably more of a dominant trend, especially with things like the rise of the new age movement is that I can now force my way into this, you know, by, by my own will,

by my own dedication, motivation and mindfulness, I can actually crack into what lies underneath reality. And this is, you know, going back to hermeticism is what those other seven principles drive up right so if you can some of these other principles are things like polarity is that everything just exists on a continuum so hot and cold are not opposite but there's a continuum there and hard and soft it's just continuum. Even things like good and evil

exist on a continuum. And so there is no true opposition in anything. It's just understanding that there is this one fluid movement and you know so you can by being attuned to it you can just easily shift and flow yourself back and forth to the place that needs you need to be like the most advantageous place at any at any moment. There's also the the law of vibration, which was, you know, that everything is just always in fluid motion. Everything is in constant movement. Another one is correspondence, which is broken down into the term as above so below. So these are just ways of understanding reality.

And the thought is, if I can master these seven principles well enough, if I can become a master at these things, I can now master reality. I can start creating my own reality around me. And so the goal is to grasp these things well enough to essentially make yourself something more God-like. I'm not just reacting to reality, but I'm actually causing reality. This is why it seems to me that there's such an emphasis on technique in the East, whereas in Christianity it's on relationship, because God is the one who pursues you. God isn't something you have to crack into. It's God's grace which you have to receive. And so therefore Catholics and Orthodox are critical of people who would take the Chot

key or the rosary and try to use it as a technique, whether they say, no, it's meant to facilitate a relationship with the one who's pursuing you. Do you see that? Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, that played itself out in meditation and yoga. There were things that I could do to break through. Okay.

What was it like breaking through? So one of my, I guess one of my clearest experiences of this was, so there's all sorts of different techniques and things that you can begin using. And one of those things was frequency and sound, right? So there's, frequency is a big thing. frequency is a big thing. And so there's this idea, which I think that there's probably something to it, is that the earth is continually putting off this frequency, this harmony or harmonics or something similar to that. And it exists at 432 Hertz. So I don't understand exactly. I mean, I guess I got it well enough in order to do it, but the technicalities to it. I won't ask you about it.

OK, so anyways, there is this continual resonance that's given off by things like the Earth. And we can tap into it. And since our bodies are mostly water, our bodies actually move and pick up different frequencies and react to things. And so getting back to the hermetic principle of vibration And so if there is this like ultimate frequency that I can tap myself into

Sounds a little crazy, but it's a nonetheless. It's still practice and so you can you can find these online. It's just a 432 Hertz frequency and it's just like a hum like mmm but at a very specific pitch right and this is supposed to be the natural harmony of the world and if you can just bring yourself an alignment to it it's one of these ways that you can break through or achieve some sort of clarity and so I was I was listening to 432 while I was meditating. And I can feel this as I'm sitting there for, you know, over five, 10, 15 minutes,

this movement kind of start up my head and work its way down through my body. And it was like this sense of not really euphoria, but this like real relaxing, but awareness of everything that was happening within my body and Then I can fill it working its way down my feet and then once it reached like the end of my toes It was like this one You know like this moment where I was like, I'm in alignment now and

It was it was a really strange thing and I have a hard time discrediting it as being you know, total pseudo It was a really strange thing and I have a hard time discrediting it as being total pseudo. But something happened there and so I just continued to chase it as far as I could. So using things like psychedelics and meditation and the 432 Hertz. But it was incredibly frustrating because no matter how hard I was trying, the breakthrough was not coming. You know, it was just like a little carrot on a stick, just moving me in a certain direction that wasn't really bearing any fruit, at least not the fruit that I was aiming for, which was to break free from the matrix or something to that effect.

What kind of psychedelics did you use, and what was that experience like? Mushrooms and acid, LSD. Both of them were eye-opening experiences. I think that there was something to be gleaned, and this is not an endorsement, but there was something to be gleaned by using them. And that was more interaction with the unseen.

You know, so there was, um, especially my experience with LSD was there, this interconnection like this web that tied everybody together. And so it was, it was something more visceral, something like I was actually experiencing and seeing, you know, so like you and I sitting across the table, And so it was it was something more visceral something like I was actually Experiencing and seeing you know, so like you and I sitting across the table were bonded by something and It's it's not totally clear what that bond is LSD at least gave me the the perception that now I can see it. I could see this connection that was coming out from you Meeting up with something that was coming out from me and that was what was creating this communion between us

And so that that was a very vivid experience But it gave me a sense that there is a true connection which exists between one another between people Again, you know these things didn't really Bear any fruit in the long run, but it was something that was more supporting and confirming some of the like the path I was walking down, which which ultimately was that there is immaterial reality that we're immersed in and can't quite access. But nonetheless is sort of the source code that's moving everything. All right. So how did you move on from LSD? So it was attempt after attempt after attempt to have that breakthrough moment.

But it never really came. All the while I was trying to get a better grip on, you know, like, well, what are these right and left limits that I'm continuously feeling and I can't break away from, like objective morality, you know, I mean, that was just the thorn in my side continuously was like, well, where is that coming from? You know, so if I'm just this, this fractal part of insaw for the great mind, the source having an experience, well, why do I feel so constrained? Yeah. That doesn't make sense.

Why does it appear like these moral facts are being issued to me and that I have to risk? There's a responsibility on my part to respond to. Yeah. And then the Hermetic principle of polarity would suggest that good and evil aren't actually two different things. It's just one thing, you know, the action on a continuum. And then some more of the more explicit forms of mysticism like Hinduism have this dualistic understanding of reality in that good and evil are actually opposites, but they're eternal opposites that are always at war with one another. There's a struggle between whatever the good God is and the evil God, and that their fight

is everlasting and ongoing. whatever the good God is and the evil God and that their fight is everlasting and ongoing. And so it just it didn't make sense to me why I felt the way that I felt and why my opposition and my sort of repulsion towards more evil acts, why it persisted. And so, you know, the true subjectivity of, or relativity of different actions was not something that I was ever, ever able to accept as, as much as I tried to. And then, um, I think that at some point I had to come to that that I had to make a decision About how I was going to proceed forward and why one way or the other would be would be better and so it seemed like I have the right hand path to choose the path of goodness and

altruism and empathy and compassion or the other side, which is narcissism, narcissism, egoism and hedonistic pleasure seeking and my will over other people's will. And it seems, it seems that there are a number of people that do select that left hand path and they don't think that there's anything wrong with it. If we're just a manifestation of God having an experience well what makes God acting immoral any better or worse than God acting morally and so there was a I mean these characters exist you know they're there they're certainly out there and you know one of them being a man named Alastair Crowley who he was a very

popular figure in the early 1900s, where he was, he was exploring these things and he was huge into Eastern mysticism. And he was writing about these things and talking about how, you know, things like sexual pleasure causing ecstasy can open up certain doors into strengthening your will to do certain things that you thought unthinkable before. How it was just a matter of exercising the will to do things that you didn't think you're capable of doing before.

And as that increases, as it progresses, you find yourself doing things that were unthinkable to you, like harming a child or engaging or torture or something, just unthinkable to you, you know, like harming a child or, you know, engaging or torture or something, you know, just unthinkable, awful things. And so there, there, there are practitioners who do that, you know, even like modern day stuff like that is happening. And certain amount of this was exposed during the 2016 election. Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar with the name Marina Bramovich. So she was a she's a bird for a trip I can't wait for this Pull it up Thursday. I don't want it on the search history

Okay, tell me yeah, so there's there's a popular I Guess you could call her influencer She she does some work with the elite political sphere and the elite popular culture people where they they approach her and she becomes like a director, like a spiritual director where I'm going to give you a certain number of things to do and if you do those things you're going to attain what it is number of things to do and if you do those things you're going to

attain what it is that you want to attain whether it's political power or fame and so some of the things that she's accused of doing or having people do is I mean it's satanic witchcraft, you know, so like things like cutting yourself, drinking blood, engaging in orgies and all sorts of like deprave things that spirit cooking, spirit cooking. Yep. What's spirit cooking? Go ahead. There's a, I got to Google it. It's super weird. She did this for Hillary. No, she was Hillary's. Wow. Google is just openly listening now. That's fun.

No joke. My phone just started like turned on. So she did this for Hillary. A bunch of this stuff. She had spirit cooking parties with Hillary. Holy mackerel. So all of the rights assumptions that the Clintons may be demonically influenced were. All right. I won't make the claim fully. What is the lady's name again, Marina?

How you spell the last name ma rina Abr amo Vi see with the little hat It looks a little creepy. Yes. She she was like she does work. She's done work with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, the Clintons.

I think she did some with Kamala, if I remember right. She did some stuff with Kim, if I remember right. She did some stuff with Kim right before Kanye and Kim got divorced and Kim started having affairs. What was that? A photo. Dark witchcraft.

So as it sounds like you're saying that things came to the surface, what she was telling people to do were really nefarious stuff. So since that happened, since I know nothing about this and I'm not disappointed that I don't have people tried to defend themselves who've been known to seek her help. I haven't heard any, I haven't heard any celebrities come out and defend her. But yeah, like Thursday was saying, there were a number of them that were using her as, yeah, it's like the opposite of okay What is this? What's cleaning the mirror?

Clean the mirror consisted of five monitors playing footage in which Abramovich Scrubs a grimy human skeleton in her lap She vigorously brushes the different parts of the skeleton with soapy water Each monitor is dedicated to one of the skeleton one part of the skeleton with soapy water each monitor is dedicated to one of the skeleton one part of the skeleton the the wikipedia page is just all of like a lot of listed um things she did and i'm sorry we can prove can we finish can you mind if i finish this or is it do you know something about it that i might go ahead each one i guess i did not know it's my show to drive directly off the cliff. Okay. Each video is filled with its own sound,

creating an overlap as a skeleton becomes cleaner at Bramovich becomes covered in the grayish dirt that was once covering the skeleton. This three hour performance is filled with metaphors of the Tibetan death rights that prepared disciples to become one with their own mortality. of the Tibetan death rights that prepared disciples to become one with their own mortality. The pieces consist of three piece series, cleaning the mirror one, yada, yada, yada. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. So I don't know if we want to read the spirit cooking entry right below it out loud.

Sure. We don't have to. Let me, let me read the description and not the recipe. That sounds good. Yep. So she worked with Jacob Samuel to produce a cookbook of quote aphrodisiac recipes called spirit cooking. Been there.

These recipes were meant to be quote evocative instructions for actions or for thoughts, for example. Yeah, let's not. Oh my gosh. This woman's not. Oh, my gosh. This woman's evil. Yes. This woman is evil. And she has Hillary Clinton is she has spiritual authority over probably most of the Democrat shot callers.

And they're out. They're okay. Being so everybody knows about it. I mean, they just kill anybody and say it was suicide. If it, I am not suicidal. You want to look into the cameraman and say, I have not me, I am not suicidal. I am not suicidal. All right. Well, that's a fun thing we did. I love that when you said it, he looked over at me like, what's the conspiracy guy say? And I was like, and now we're just watching that go on a trip. Like I said, he wouldn't be.

Dear Lord Jesus. Jesus. So why did you bring her up? So the you're talking about this and this's there's players who are going down this left hand. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

And so I felt like I was I was coming to that fork. Right. Right. Why do I go right hand over left hand? Especially if you have a strong sense of moral obligation. Well, on the other hand, you have the enticement of potentially worldly hanging out with Hillary and getting to do really weird things with weird milk, which I'm not going to talk about.

You can climb, climb the ladder, right? And who knows where that leads, but yeah, this just became the Joe Rogan experience. You ever tried DMT I Know what that is. What is that? dimethyltryptamine I'm so just like it's the drug Joe's Asks every Joe Rogan asked every single guess if they've tried DMT On YouTube all right there is

Okay. Yeah, so I felt like I was approaching that. I need to know why one is better than the other. Both of them, especially the left-hand path, seems to pay off, right? I mean, because there are a number of people, beginning with like Alistair Crowley back in the early 1900s, and continuing up through to this day with Marina Abramovich

that are serious practitioners and they go that direction. What does she say she practices? Who? This Abramovich. Well, she claims to be a performance artist. Oh. Yeah, you know, so I guess that's the way that she makes her.

But there's not like a religion or a thing she subscribes to. No, I mean, I think she's a priestess for Satan. I think that that's probably what she has, but I mean, that's still something far too taboo to say openly. Yeah. So I mean, why that way? Why not this way? Yeah, yeah.

And because dualism, what does it matter? You know, what does it matter left- versus right hand path if ultimately I am God? And you know, like it sounds shocking, but this is, it's what a lot of people who follow this path lead to. They run into that conclusion of basically apotheosis, where this is, once I know this, once I know that there is this path and I can become a practitioner and I can step into it, whether it's the right hand or the left hand path, my destiny is enlightenment breaking out of here

and becoming one with source and becoming God. And so I did have a friend at the time who was, he and I were keeping a pace with this. And he said it openly and explicitly while we're discussing like, well, you know, what, what is this going on? What, what does this mean? What are we supposed to do? And I, I had come to that realization, but I hadn't, I hadn't verbalized it.

And one of my really good friends did. And he's like, what it means is that we're God. And it was a shocking thing to me at the time to actually hear somebody say that out loud, even though all of the evidence and the conclusion I had reached was the same thing. But to actually say it, you know, we are God, was... It shocked me. And it sent me into like an automatic rejection. Like I've got to get away from this. Yeah. So if, if you and he are God, we're not talking about polytheism because the two of you are one. Is that the idea?

Yeah. So it's essentially monism and or pantheism. Right? So monism is this, I guess it just depends on the orientation, right? Monism is this, I guess it just depends on the orientation, right? Monism is this inward movement, recognizing that it is all one. Pantheism is that one expressing itself outwardly in the multiplicity of things. Okay. Okay. All right. So he said, we're God. That freaked you out? Yeah, it did. It did. But at the same time, I mean, I couldn't just run back to ground zero. I mean, I still had this stockpile of evidence and experience and I just, I didn't know what to do with it. But I was, I was terrified. Like I was, I was very, very afraid at this point in my life. It felt like just, like a continual, like anxiety ridden depression, like it was, it was very turbulent.

Have you since looked back as a Catholic and attributed some of that anxiety and oppression to the demonic? Yeah, certainly. Yep. Without a doubt. And I'll circle back to this, but what I think was happening with within me and around me was I was coming much what I think was happening within me and around me was I was coming much closer to the spiritual reality and the spiritual warfare that's actually taking place behind the veil.

And so it felt like, and this wasn't something that I could recognize at the time, but looking back on it, I definitely see just how strange things were and how upside down and inverted things were that there was, I was engaged in warfare. I mean, I didn't see it, I couldn't experience it, but there, it seemed like I was getting pulled, you know,

parts of me in either direction. And like, I can sense the enticement and the, you know, the gratification of the flesh on one path. And even if that path was right or left-handed, it would have been the same thing. It would have been self-gratification, self-idolatry. It would have been a recognition of my own divinity, whether it was expressed in altruism and goodness or if it was expressed through domination, vengeance and violence and everything else.

Is that, yeah, okay. Did you, how did this, I don't mean to keep bringing your wife into this, cause I know it's a personal thing and you don't, you can just tell me to shut up if you want, but I mean, how on earth did that affect your relationship with her? If you're God, I guess

she's God as well, but you're also, you have this desire for pleasure and power. I mean, did it negatively impact your relationship with her? No, honestly, honestly, it didn't. Not really. Um, you know, I rely on my, on my wife heavily and I talked to her and I expressed her these things. And you know, there was, there was just a lot of other life going on at the time. Like we had a daughter and we had a house and she was going through school. And so there were a lot of other things. And I think for the most part,

I was able to really conceal and keep under wraps what was happening within me as best I could anyways. I wasn't concealing any of these things from, or aside from maybe the possibility that the left-hand path could be something that I would take. And I mean, I even had like imaginations about what that would mean for my family life.

Like if I did start down that path, what does it look like until things absolutely implode and I desert my family and you know I leave them behind for something else? Because it seemed like it would have been an inevitable thing to just begin using them as objects and everything else and everybody else as objects to get what it is that I wanted which I think that this is probably the outlook that People who take that path whether it's you know some political

Person or a celebrity that that's that's precisely how they see things like you me and everything else It just means to an end which is their own deification. So I retreated as much as I could, really wrestling with this, not being able to rest and sleep, but still retreating, knowing that I was approaching that decision point of right hand, left hand path. And then something incredibly strange happened. I had this overwhelming sense that I need to look at the Bible. And I have no idea where it came from.

I didn't have a Bible in the house when I left the Mormon church. I got rid of all of my religious possessions, my Book of Mormon, my Bible, all of it. I didn't have a scripture in my home. And so it was just, I remember thinking like, this is weird. This is super weird. Why did that come to my mind? Why am I being drawn in that direction? But it just, it wouldn't go away as a very persistent thing.

So what I ended up doing was going down to my local thrift shop. And I went to their book section and found a used Bible. I took it home and I began reading it and I opened it up to Genesis one. And I began reading the creation account and it was it was like fireworks. I can't explain it. Just this feeling of there's my God and I

Don't know how to explain it other than to say I was encountering God in The words in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and then moving through and seeing I'm not God I'm not he's my creator Moving through and seeing I'm not God. I'm not he's my creator I'm different than him. He's the one imposing upon me this overwhelming sense that I I ought to behave this way that there is goodness and there is love and there is these these things worth having and these things worth desiring and It it it totally Opened my eyes and shifted me in a direction where I was like, I need to rethink all of this. And so I read through Genesis to creation accounts

and I was just like breathless. And so I jumped forward to Matthew and I began reading the Gospels and I'm seeing like all of these puzzle pieces are just fitting together rapidly and I can't make sense of it but the whole picture is coming together incredibly quick but with overwhelming clarity that God is his other and he's love and he's perfect and so the the transcendence of God which was lacking from my Mormon perspective and my Mormon presuppositions have now been filled in like now I can understand what it means to be an immaterial eternal infinite source of all things but now now I see with

clarity that this is this is the creator of all things and but now I see with clarity that this is the creator of all things, and he created me and he created everything else. And then so I didn't really know what to make of it, but I knew that Christ in some way was vitally important to the whole thing. So I went back to Genesis and I read the scripture all the way through. And by the time I was done, I had an understanding of what evil was and why it should be opposed and its nature as being something more parasitic in its ontology. It's just, it's not as concrete. It's not real in the way that goodness is, which it's corrosive on goodness. which it it's corrosive on goodness. Mm hmm. Yeah. So I read, I read the Bible, I finished it and I knew that I was

Christian and I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how to be Christian. This is after you finished Matthew you're saying? No. So I, so Genesis one and two, I jumped forward to Matthew. Yeah. After I read Matthew, I went back to Genesis and I read the whole thing through the whole, what thing thing the whole Bible through? Wow. Yeah, not losing interest. No, really? It was it's amazing. Normally people lose interest in numbers because it's just like yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get even a father Mike Schmitz's Bible. Well, I should say

Jeff cave in this Bible in a year. What's this? Well, Jeff cave in so put together the Bible timeline and Mike Schmitz obviously has Bible in a year. What's this? Well, Jeff Kavans put together the Bible timeline. Okay. Mike Schmitz obviously has Bible in a year podcast. I got it. It was based on Jeff Kavans and stuff. Yeah. So it reading scripture just became this like insatiable thirst. I just, I wanted to get into it and I spent a long time to read the Bible. Yeah. When are you reading it? Where? When? Like you're waking up reading it, you take lunch breaks. So I'm reading, I'm sitting down with it and spending a couple hours reading it every day. I'm listening to it in an audio version when I'm in the car and I'm... Yeah. Yeah. So the whole, I guess it took me probably two months to read through it. And so by the time I was done,

And so by the time I was done, it's like, this is it. I mean, I now have the puzzle solved and I could understand that right-hand, left-hand path. I could understand. What about when you came to the bit about the goats on the left and the sheep on the right? Yeah, I mean, it was. I'm sure you read that before in your Mormon days. No, I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I had a really cursory understanding of the big biblical stories. The suffering of Job and Noah's Ark and everything else. Daniel and the lion's den. So when you finished Revelation, you knew you were to be a Christian. Was there a temptation to go back to Mormonism at that point? No. I think throughout my experience with Eastern mysticism and even scientism, the Mormon Church just became less and less credible. You know, so there was immediately

departing it where I was, I guess I had made up my mind I could have been persuaded to go back, but the more I learned the less and less Mormonism seemed to be true and the more sort of silly it appeared to me. So I finished reading scripture. I decided, OK, I'm a Christian. I don't know how to be Christian. I don't know what it means to be Christian. But I know that Jesus Christ is God.

And I know that I want to follow him. And I had no idea about the difference between Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. I just knew that this is where I want to be. And it made sense for me at that time to just begin attending a church and start living as a Christian, whatever that looked like. So I just went to the closest church to me at the time, which was a Calvary Chapel. So non-denominational, more contemporary expression of Christianity.

And so I'm walking in the door to go to go to church for the first time. And the pastor is there and he stops me and introduces himself to me. And I ask him, I'm like, so, you know, what, what goes on here? You know, what, what do, what do you do? What am I supposed to do? And he says, this is here. We do just pure exposition, which means I preach directly from the Bible and that's all you're gonna hear from me. And he uses this term, Sola Scriptura, and

explains to me what that means. He's like, it's just, you know, Bible alone. That's all we do here. And having just finished reading the Bible and falling in love with that, I was like, perfect. That's all I need. That's all I want. So great. I went and sat down and I enjoyed the music and I enjoyed the preaching and I went home and continued to do that week after week until eventually I asked him, I was like, I think I need to be baptized.

And he's like, okay, great. I mean, we have something on the calendar. We're gonna go out to, I was living in Florida at the time. He's like, we're gonna go out and do it in the ocean. On this day. I just watched Jesus' revolution with Calvary Chapel, and they were being baptized in the ocean. Yeah, so it was fitting. I've never seen that movie, but... It was way better than I thought it would be. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. So we, at this time, like through the conversations that I'm having with my wife,

she's a little bit more slow-aced in her processing, but eventually she began going to church with me as well. And so we got baptized together in the ocean with the Calvary Chapel pastor. Had you repented of all of this previous stuff yet? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, what point did that happen?

Throughout, you know, it was, uh, as I was reading scripture and having to confront my behavior and things that I assumed to be true. And, you know, so I was, I would retire. I mean, it was kind of funny, like as prayer became something a little bit more normal to me, initially I was, I was getting as far away as I was running into like the woods and I was going deep into the woods to find a place to pray. And the first time I addressed Jesus in a prayer, that was a big thing. But I remember just this overwhelming sense of peace and reassurance, like, just keep going. You're going to find more. You're going to find more of me. Just trust me." And I rested in that. And the sense of peace and calm that was replacing that turmoil

and that fear and confusion and anxiety that was there before was just overwhelming. I mean, it felt like just being lulled, you know? Like, this is good. Everything about this is good. And you know, what I'm reading about Jesus is just beautiful. And I love him. And I can't really express why, because so much of what he's saying throughout the gospel is really frightening. You know, it really is. You forget that sometimes you pick it up. You're like, whoa, this is very different to the rainbows and butterflies account Jesus was sometimes told. Yeah. You know, but then I, you know, I read through, uh, through Romans and Romans five, where

it talks about how God loved us so much that even while we were still sinners, he sent his son to save us. And, you know, just, just recognizing that, like I've been an absolute enemy to God, you know, just from my entire upbringing and not knowing, not accepting his divinity and who he is and what he does and how much he loves us and assuming that he's just one God among many gods and that he's a man who's got these similar limitations and perhaps was once a sinner like I'm a sinner and just this really distorted and corrupted understanding of the goodness and It's just this really distorted and corrupted understanding of the goodness and perfection of God and then leaving Mormonism and then just outright rejecting his existence entirely

and being a rebel without a cause and seeking to gratify myself and in every which way imaginable and living a life of sin and secrecy. And, and then, you know, further down the path in this mystical phase where I'm, I'm equating myself with him and, you know, being a rival and doing exactly what Adam and Eve were guilty of doing, you know, making themselves like God. And here I am just trying to try and to wrestle my way up this path and shed the things about myself and my assumptions of morality just to empower myself. And then here I am, I'm confronted with it, you know, just.

Did you get smacked across the face with a proverbial two by four when you read Satan, Satan, Adam and Eve, you can be like gods. You're like, I don't remember reason this was on the first page. Yeah. Yeah. It's the second year. Wow. Yeah, it's right there, you know, so there is this idea of apotheosis and it's prevalent and it's a, so we've gone down a little tangent, but even in things like the civil religion of America. So I don't know if anything like this exists in Australia, but this sort of idolization that happens of the founding fathers. No. OK.

Not in Australia. Yeah. It's always been curious to me, looking from abroad and seeing that even little things. I've shared this before. It makes my listeners pretty upset. But like, I feel very uncomfortable when everyone stands to the flag and puts their hand on their heart and recites this thing. I'm not saying it's wrong. I haven't thought about it enough.

I just, I can't do it. I think it's, I think it's wrong in a lot of ways, because I think that there's the United States in a lot of ways was set up to create a civil religion and we, we deify the founding fathers. And if you go to DC, I mean, you can see it, like the monuments and the temples that exist there. It's sort of out of control. And if you go into the Capitol building

underneath one of the rotundras, is this image of George Washington deified. And the image itself is called the apotheosis. And so we have like the iconography of Christ, you know, in the Pentecostal Crator where he's holding up like the fingers and he's surrounded by a concourse of angels. The same exact thing exists of George Washington

in the rotunda of the state Capitol building. All right, I wanna say thank you to Emmaus Academy. They've put out this brand new digital platform to help you grow in your love of sacred scripture and therefore your love of Christ. If you're like me, you know how tempting it is just to waste so much of your day on YouTube like maybe you're doing now or listening to political podcasts and other things. The truth is we do often have the time to grow in our knowledge and love of scripture.

We just need a helping hand and that's what this brand new digital learning platform is going to help you do. It has short courses on scripture that you can take. You can learn from Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. John Bergsmere, Father Boniface Hicks, many more. I've been on this platform. I have a subscription to it. And I mean it when I say it's actually really excellent

and it'll help you love scripture. I think a lot of us want to love scripture, but we find we fight I don't know we feel guilty that we don't love it as much as we should Platforms like this will help you do that So click the link in the description st. Paul center comm slash Matt and sign up when you sign up you get two weeks Free to the entire platform. I mean think about how many times you and I have subscribed to say Hulu or something else, when we could be doing something like this and growing in our love of scripture. So again, stpoolstandard.com slash Macco, sign up today, you get two weeks for free.

You don't think it's worth it after that time, cancel it, you won't be charged ascent, but I think you'd be really impressed with what you say. So we have like the iconography of Christ, you know, in the Pentecostalor crator where he's holding up like the Fingers and he's surrounded by a concourse of angels the same exact thing exists of George Washington in the rotunda of the State Capitol building Wow. Yeah Wild. Yeah, so I mean there's People talk about America being an idea as a nation as if it's a good thing and I am People talk about America being an idea as a nation as if it's a good thing and I am every day more convinced that it's a bad thing that America is an idea before it's a nation

because it means that people read it as if it's a religion you can just convert to. Like a creed, huh? Yeah. So I don't think it's a good thing that it's creedal. So you think my hesitate, you think that hesitation I have that people make me feel bad for in the comment section isn't ill placed then? No, I don't think so at all. I think that America is the ideals that exist around America are religious. Like if, if you just hear about the way people talk about American politics

and America intervention, America being like the shining city on the hill. Right. Like even Ronald Reagan was big on that, talking about this place as being something like the new Zion. That language makes non-Americans feel very uncomfortable. But I also moved here and I love a lot about America. And so I guess I've been a little more open to hearing people out when they speak in that very passionate language. But like, you know, like I know I, I, there's a reason why Americans sow Canadian flags on their backpacks when they go throughout Europe. And some of the hatred towards America is completely unjust. Right. And a lot of it, I think, probably has to do with what we call in Australia Australia tool poppy syndrome, where you just see a thriving country that's better than yours in many respects.

And so you, you're jealous, but then some of it is this stuff. Yeah. You know, like where, anyway, it doesn't matter. Well, um, you know, so I mean like the inception and the creation of America, I mean, a lot of it was rooted in Freemasonry. So the American civil religion, it's something definitely worth reading about and looking into. It's this theory that there was a conscious effort made to create something within the civil society

of the United States that resembles Christianity as a way to detract from it and distract from the message of the gospel and to somehow, I mean, it's kind of like the message of the prosperity gospel, you know, that we're a land blessed and we're a land bountiful. And the reason for that is because we occupy this certain space as being like the new promised land. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

How do we get onto America? I don't know. It's all right. You should, you should. You should. Well, Andrew Jones has some stuff on this that's actually really interesting because he extrapolates this all the way back

to before we had an idea of church and state and how the church was just, like the state was just a group of laity serving the church in a different sphere. And like this is the enlightenment really starts to destroy this because we separate them as two things and then they become in competition. So if you want a successful state, you have to compete with church. And so you need a civil religion to do that.

All right, we're back. And we're back. That was a long break. That's the nice thing about doing these pre-recorded. We can just like go get a sandwich, come back, feel refreshed, have a 20 minute nap. All right. We should have ordered a pizza. Oh yeah.

Where were we? Calvary Chapel. Somehow we got into America. Yeah. Yeah. A Calvary Chapel, you were baptized in an ocean with your wife. Yours was a valid baptism baptism hers wasn't.

Because she had already been baptized but okay but was it good was it did you know did you experience something positive from the baptism the whole whole thing yeah yeah the whole thing the baptism just. the baptism just, yeah, it felt wonderful. It felt like this is it. Did you have a lot of really excited friends? No. No. No. Even at Calvary Chapel? Like people who were... No, I keep to myself most often. I've had a couple friends one in particular that was was there with me throughout most of this and

You know his like I said earlier we're keeping a pace with each other down our journey through mysticism and and what-have-you but When I when I took the exit ramp and found Christianity He he didn't at least not right away. So yeah, began attending Calvary. Around this time I moved from Florida to Portland. When I got to Portland I tapped back into a new Calvary chapel there. And there the pastor of that congregation invited me and my wife over to his house to get to know one another. And there I was able to share parts of this story with him. And he

was super excited about it. And he invited me, he's like, look, I just like I want to mentor you. You know, like you're still fresh to this, but I can see that you have a zeal and a real passion for it. So he's like, I would like to just do once a week Bible studies with you. And, you know, I would like to bring you into some of the ministry events. How would you like that? And at the time I was, I was stoked as I can, you know, this is just, you know, it seems like the next step. Like I want to get closer to whatever Christianity is. I want to know more about Christ. And so we began meeting once a week for Bible studies. And throughout this time, I'm getting more familiar

with biblical Christianity. I'm going deeper into theology, trying to just get a better grasp on the whole thing. And so he printed out for me the Calvary Chapel distinctives. So it's a non-denominational church, but it still has a whole slew of things which make it what it is. Otherwise it would just look like the next thing. So the distinctives, there are five of them, cover things like free will versus predestination and justification and sanctification and describing what these things are and how Chuck Smith who

founded Calvary Chapel the way he understood these. And then the fifth distinctive was pre-millennial pre-tribulation rapture. So Calvary Chapel affirms the idea that prior to the tribulation and prior to the thousand-year reign of Christ, the earth is going to be, or sorry, the church is going to be raptured and all true believers and disciples of Christ will be taken from the earth in a secret return of Christ. And so this has been depicted and it grew in popularity in the United States Particularly in like the 70s and 80s and 90s and there were whole books written about it and movies made about it

You know people like vanishing out of their clothing and just you know disappearing and airline pilots being raptured Well, sorry Yeah, and so Part of me was was really excited about this excited about this. It's kind of like this really neat thing that we can anticipate and look forward to. But the other side of me was struggling really hard to actually make this correspond with what I was reading in Scripture. Because I was- Not to mention history. This is a heresy that came from Scott. Well, I didn't know that then Yeah

I had no idea about that All I knew was that the scripture references that Chuck Smith was using to to pull this from and I guess it dates back to John Darby. Um, I forget who it was I feel is it a 19th century Scottish kind of some Scottish pastor I think came up with it But even if even if you don't want to say that it certainly isn't found in the Church Fathers. No, it's yeah, it's new. I didn't know that at the time. I mean, because I'm still a brand new Christian and I'm just being introduced.

You're having trouble reconciling it even with the scriptures. Right. You know, so the, the references being used are first Thessalonians. Could you find that? Could you look up who kind of came up? I'm on the Wikipedia page for it. First Thessalonians find that could you look up who kind of came I'm on the Wikipedia page for it First Thessalonians 4 where it talks about we will not all sleep but in we will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet and Matthew 24 where it talks about the you know, the end of days and even those Talks about the days being cut short. Otherwise even the elect would be deceived.

And parts of Revelation, I think in Revelation three, where in one of the letters to the churches, it talks about not having to go through the tribulation that's in store. And so a number of these proof texts are used to justify pre-tribulation rapture. But I simply was not seeing it. Like I understood the arguments that were being read, but I felt like it was being taken off context or could be explained

in different ways. And so I was, I was exploring the other suggestions, you know, like there's post-tribulation and there's pre-wrath rapture and there's pre-millennial and post-tribulation. And so there's a whole slew of variations on rapture theology. And none of them is like, I'm not finding this in any one of these things. If when I read these texts, it seems like the church will endure the tribulation. I don't see any escape for the church. It's going to be going through until the end of time. The whole ordeal and so my pastor began ordering theological books for me to study and so to hopefully demonstrate and prove to me through like scholarly

research that it is there in fact and one he gave me this one behemoth of a book I can't recall the name but it's a huge theological manual. And so I'm studying through there looking for rapture, and he's comparing and contrasting a number of the different theories regarding it. And then he ends his portion on the rapture by saying, the overwhelming historical consensus was that there's not going to be a raptureure and that this is something more modern and more novel. Mason- This is in the book he gave you to read. Bregman Yeah. So when that happened, I started looking,

okay, well, what is the alternative? What is the historical church? If this is new, something that came in the last century and a half or two centuries, what was the dominant opinion prior to that? And that, that put me in contact with more patristic thinking. And so I ended up reading St. Athanasius on the incarnation and loved it. And I mean, he was my introduction to the patristics and I read Confessions by St. Augustine. And so I'm slowly being introduced to earlier and earlier instantiations of church thinking. And while we're continuing this dialogue, my pastor and I, he encouraged me to to go to Bible college. And so he, which worked out just fine, because as a veteran, I had military benefits, which would allow me to use my GI bill to go and get free education.

And I thought what better way to use it. So I, I signed up and attended Liberty university, which is a Protestant university pursuing my undergraduate in theology. And most of it by and large was just real modern stuff. A lot of, I guess what would be called like deistic personalism, like an understanding of God as being, you know, something more. It's not the classical theology, which dominates Catholic thinking, right? Where God is a transcendent reality, but deistic personalism is something more like God is just the highest

of beings. And there really isn't any sort of real developed ontological differences that exist between, you know, somebody like me and somebody like God, other than saying that he is the supreme. And so it was, it was a lot of that, which, you know, I just took it as it came and I didn't have any sort of reason to refute it, reject it. It wasn't very exciting or striking to me. So I guess the real benefit of pursuing my undergraduate theology was a greater introduction into the historical church. So I came across names like Eusebius and Justin Martyr and Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch. And so I started turning to them to read what they were saying about the church. like Eusebius and Justin Martyr and Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch.

And so I started turning to them to read what they were saying about the church. And I mean, it didn't take long for me to realize that the church that they were describing was nothing like the church I was attending. What they were talking about, baptismal regeneration, and they were talking about justification in a way that was unfamiliar to me. And the Eucharist. And so the list goes on and on and on about these foreign things to me that I just wanted to know more about that I wasn't being taught about at Liberty University. And so I was doing a lot of extracurricular study on these subjects.

And still, I hadn't come across the Catholic Church. And there was no argument to be made from any of the places I was looking to tie these two things together. And eventually, I came across Ignatius of Antioch referring to this church, calling it the Catholic Church. And I remember thinking at the time, I was like, man, that's really strange.

That it can't be that, because existing in this Protestant sphere, I was still being introduced to like the various polemics against the Catholic Church, about it being a counterfeit church, and that it was really like this counterfeit Christianity disguise, disguising itself, but it's really state ism and it's like Constantine took over the church and imported paganism. And so surface level without doing any sort of investigation

on my own, that was what I knew about Catholicism was that from ancient times it had persecuted the true church and it had burned people at the stake and it had suppressed scripture and its availability to your average person. And you know, so the typical arguments against Catholicism. is his using that term and differentiating this church from the splinter churches that had already arisen or the splinter movements that had broken off from this church. This is in 8108, I think the letter was written. And he uses the word without explaining the word, which has given people the idea that this word must have been in use. You can't just throw out a word like that without explaining it for the first time. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, even St. Augustine, by this time, who I really revered, because he does have such an impact and an influence on Protestant way of thinking. I mean, he even talked about he would not believe the gospel if it were not for the authority of the church. And so I didn't really

know what to make out of all of this, but I was just going to be led. Like I was keeping myself open to that. Just be led, see where this goes. I was absolutely certain that the closer to the apostles, the closer to Christ I got there, like at the epicenter of Christianity, I would be getting something pure, something less adulterated, something less corrupted

by the progression of time. So I spent a lot of time just camping there and getting more familiar with the patristics and the arguments for the succession of the bishopric and so on and so forth. And then, you know, in a strange turn of events, like I was introduced to, and maybe it's because of some of the anti-Catholic stuff

I was looking at the time, Michael Voris and Church Militant. And this was in 2019, thereabouts. So, you know, the Cardinal McCarrick scandal was big news. And so there was like this Catholic moment in the sphere I was existing in, you know, what I was, what I was listening to like media wise and what I was studying and the Patristics, I was just becoming more and more familiar. Some of it really good and powerful and encouraging and like the,

like the early church fathers and some of it really scary and confirming some of my biases like Cardinal McCarrick and even a lot of the things that church militant has to say is really accusatory and sort of damaging to the image of the church as well-meaning as they might be to the outside observer that's still going to confirm a lot of their biases. I sometimes find it more compelling when you have Catholics had a very prominent Catholic say to me the other day that he's convinced that the Catholic church is the most corrupt institution in the world.

And he's saying this to me in front of my Protestant friend and you know, like bemoaning the kind of like the hypocrisy and the corruption in the church. I'm pretty sure I'm Protestant, but he's like, and yet y'all are Catholic. Oh, of course, where else is thereall are Catholic. Oh, of course. Where else is there? But anyway, yeah, fair enough. Yeah. So that's interesting. I mean, did you think of that? I mean, you're watching a Catholic talk about the scandals in the

Catholic Church. I appreciated the authenticity of it. You know, so there's a, I think maybe it's a generational thing, but authenticity is something that really appeals to my age group and people younger than me. So a clean cut, prepared image is sort of off putting. Interesting. And so I wasn't, of course, I wasn't seeing that from church militants. So whether, you know, This place sucks. You guys should join. I'm not leaving. It's something to that. Yeah, I think so. But, you know, what would push people out, you know, somebody who's got like a really

investigatory disposition is going to be something untruthful. Yeah. And so you could take somebody and appreciate somebody like Michael Voris, who really is good at what he does, and he pursues truth, and he pursues truth and he presents it in a way that's not flattering. But I would still think like, okay, somebody like that who's so critical and forthright about the problems within the church, if it wasn't true, why wouldn't he just leave? And things like Mormonism and atheism, it doesn't take long if you're really serious like Mormonism and atheism, it doesn't take long if you're really serious about studying it

and wanting to know the ins and out of it and even the ugly parts of it that, okay, this is just not tenable. It's not true, so maybe I should pack it up and move somewhere else. But if somebody is aware of those things and still holds fast to it regardless, I think it speaks well to what it is. And so I had two presentations

of Catholicism happening simultaneously. The mix of the Fathers and them saying what it is. And while I'm becoming more familiar with this, too. I'm also examining what's taken place over history. And it just seemed incredible to me that something that had a God apostate so early on could have affected the world in the way that it did. Because prior to Christ and prior to Christianity spread, I think that the world would be almost unrecognizable to us today. And even I read a book called Dominion by the author and historian Tom Holland, who in the introduction to his book makes this point. He says that he was going to, he really wanted to write a historical piece on Rome and how Rome had shaped. Have you read this? I haven't read it, but I know of it. Okay. So he says as a historian, as somebody, um, you know, he, so he's, he's English and has, I guess, you know, a modern sort of outlook on Christianity as

being some kind of relic of the past and sort of silly. And so he grew up with a distant, strenuous relationship towards Christianity and dismissed it out of hand as being, you know, just the religion of his grandparents. And so he, as a historian, was very interested in the Romans. And so he meant to set out and write this piece on Rome and how Rome had really created the modern Western world and

The more he was doing research and looking into it. He realized these Romans were really nothing like us at all you know like what they were engaging in the The assumptions that they had their way of conducting themselves as a matter of course Would be completely foreign to us today of conducting themselves as a matter of course, would be completely foreign to us today. You know, their bacchanalia and their orders and their edicts and their slavery and everything else that made them more barbaric.

He's like, I just, I couldn't identify him with all, with them at all. And so the main thrust of my book shifted whether I wanted it to or not, to what really actually changed the modern world. And he says it's Christianity. Prior to Christianity, the world did not look the way it looks today. You know, our sense of the dignity of the human person and that even the lowest of us is still has an intrinsic, an intrinsic worth based on just being a person made in the image of God.

You know, aside from Judaism and its small little isolated place in Palestine that didn't exist anywhere else, not until coming of Christ and the dissemination of the gospel. And so he traces on how this happened, you know, the movement of it throughout history and he's like hospitals orphanages universities So many of the things colonies Yeah, so many things that shape the world today that we just take for granted Come from Christianity. And so to to imagine that this could have happened as some sort of aimless

And so to imagine that this could have happened as some sort of aimless movement of people without some sort of structure, without some sort of guidance and hierarchy just seemed absolutely farfetched. To think that, okay, 1500 years later we have the Protestant Reformation and then there's a return to authentic Christianity. But 1500 years, I mean, that's the world had already been revolutionized by Christianity. Have you heard why Peter Crave became a Catholic? So he was in university, I believe he was a Calvinist, and someone was up the front talking about the church, and the church he analogized to a great big ship sailing

across the waters of time, and over the course of time, this ship attracted to itself many barnacles that began to almost sink the ship. And thank God for Martin Luther and co, who were able to scrape this ship back to its pristine position so it could keep sailing. Yeah. And so he went, all right, well then if that's true, um, like these are all kind of like medieval barnacles, like we shouldn't expect to see them in the first few centuries of the church. And so he went back, read the fathers and you know, the rest of the story.

Right. Yeah. So it just, it seemed so unlikely. And then there's a lot of similarities. At what point did you look at your wife and like, I've taken a really long route when I should have just submitted to the religion of you and your family. Because she was Catholic for those who haven't watched the first installment. Yeah. So. What did your wife look like when you looked at her and went, all right, turns out you may have been right. So there was a we were living in Portland at the time. Covid happened. Everything got nuts. So we packed up and we moved to Utah. When we got to Utah, we were in the area where we were living off grid. There's a small mission parish there. And this is before I disclosed anything about Catholicism to

her. And we passed by. I was like, tomorrow, drop me off. And she's like, what are you talking about? It's like, I need you to let me out of the car because I'm going to go inside that Catholic church. I'm going to talk to the priest. And she was shocked by this. And so I got out of the car. She came back and picked me up like 10 minutes later. We're driving back to our land.

And she's like, what was that about? I said, tomorrow I have a really good reason to believe that the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ, like the Church of Christ, like established by Him, preserved on down through the generations. And she looks at me and she's like, are we doing this again? You bet your ass. And so she, you know, she rolls her eyes and she's like, this better be the last time. I was like, this is the last time. So what was your meeting with the priest like?

Well, he wasn't there. Oh. No, so there was no meeting with the priest. So you got dropped off for a meeting. Yeah. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe. It could have been. So when I told her that this is the direction I was going and she verbalized and communicated to me the theme that had existed between us up until this

point. She's like, look, you care so much about this stuff. You're spending the time researching it. I'm not. So I trust you. And I mean, it was that it was just like a full surrender, like, I'm with you in this thing and we're going to we're going to do life together. But this is you're the one steering the ship when it comes to this. And so it was, it was beautiful. And so much of everything that I've talked about so far was only possible because my wife granted me that freedom. And I know just through listening to other people's

own conversion stories that contention between spouses is often a reason why the faith journey gets abandoned. And yeah, I'm very, very blessed and fortunate that my wife gave me that freedom, the freedom of expression, the freedom to think through problems and to discern and to go where I felt led to go, even when it was, you know, not so great places. Um, but I know that she knew that it was genuine and that ultimately what I wanted to do was to, to find truth. And we know, and I mean, this wasn't something that I knew throughout this, this whole process,

but truth is a person. And if you follow truth, I mean, if that's your objective is to just seek after truth, it's going to lead you to one place and that's the feet of our Lord. And that's where I wound up. And it felt fully actualized when I came into the Catholic church, that this is the place I needed to be. I mean, all of this, looking back on it was a journey to get here. And things like hedonism and the state and mysticism, these were all false idols that I had built up for myself. And one by one, they were just being decimated. And that the

strangeness of the spiritual experience that I was encountering in the turmoil, like I know now, looking back on it, that God was just wiping these things out for me. Now I was sitting down, I was bowing down to the altar of humanity and smash, you know, came crashing down and I looked for him somewhere else and built up some other idol and knock that one down and one by one by one. It was just, it was breadcrumbs. But the entire experience itself was just, I mean surreal. But the destination where I am now, within the Catholic Church, it's

home and it's secure and all of the threats and the insecurities and the anxieties that plagued me before have vanished. And I understand God's providence so much more clearly in knowing that I can just trust in Him and knowing that as a good Father, He's going to take me to the place that I need to go at a pace that I can handle, exposing me to the things that I need to see in order to understand But he's going to do it Compassionately and mercifully and he's going to deliver me just like he's delivered me in the past I mean, that's one of the things that I Continue to look back upon was just my own captivity

to this that or the other and You know willingly putting myself into captivity to things, but being delivered from it. And, you know, there were periods where it felt like I was in the wilderness and I was alone and I was thirsty and didn't have answers, but God just continually provided. And so, you know, part of what really drew me into the biblical story was being able to place myself into these stories and resonating with them, you know, the whole motif of being in the wilderness. I mean, I think everybody's experienced that at various points in their life, and if you

could just see it for what it is, is this period of exile, which just preludes your, if that's a word, your movement into the promised land. And yeah, I mean, I, I'm absolutely 100% confident that that's, that's where I am now. Like I'm, I'm aboard the ship. I'm yeah. Did your encounter of actual Catholics? What was that like? A lot of people say they read their way into the church and they're like, OK, this is pretty corrupt.

I'm pretty I think it's pretty fair to say that the West is a mess. The Western Church is a mess. And I trust that the Lord will write his ship, but right now to pretend that there's not serious confusion, chaos and corruption, I think would be naive. So how has that been? I say this as a committed Catholic, but how has that been entering the church

and encountering the everyday people, the average priest, that sort of thing? In Utah, we had a mixed bag of experiences. I think the Catholic community in Utah really struggles just because of its size and its resources. And those Catholics that are, I guess, the population of Catholics in Utah is overwhelmingly Hispanic. And so there's a bit of a cultural difference

that exists, the Hispanic mass, the Spanish mass. And so I wasn't really able to identify easily with the community that was there because of that cultural difference. But I was in it deep enough to know that what was taking place here was the true authentic worship of God as he wanted it. And, you know, I'm participating in the last supper. Um, and so the, the,

the hurdles, like the immediate community and even things like the more, um, abstract and distant corruption that existed within the church, just it didn't really, it didn't break in because I knew why I was there. And so the path that brought me there wasn't social. It was personal. And so I had formed a relationship with God. And so I knew that that's what it was built upon, not family ties, not an inherited belief,

but something that was really rooted in this one-on-one intimacy with God. And so, yeah, I wasn't daunted by the corruption and it wasn't daunted by the corruption and I wasn't daunted by the, you know, the lackluster celebration of the mass wherever I was attending or the bad example of this priest or that priest saying, and cause those examples, those things did happen.

We were at mass one time and the priest who was celebrating the mass, he was Colombian or Cuban, um, had a very, very thick accent. He was, he was hard to understand. And I had, um, my son at the time was one and a half or so. Um, and you know, so he's rambunctious and rowdy. And so he had just finished reading the gospel and was giving his homily and my son was losing his mind going bonkers. And I'm a brand new Catholic. No, actually I was in RCIA. So I was not even Catholic yet. And he, the priest looks at me and goes, that's really distracting. Slams the gospel closed and says, there's cry rooms in the back.

And so we got up and... Shame on him. Yeah. We got shamed as we walked back to our cry room and but he was done. And so things like that had happened. But I just I didn't let it ruffle my feathers. Good for you. I was driven. What was the RCA process like? This was during COVID. So it was was it remote? Yeah, it was all over zoom. And it was just me. I was the only person. So it was one on one zoom meeting with Steve, who's he was the only person. So it was one-on-one zoom meeting with a Steve who's, he was a great guy and he was very passionate and he was my RCI. Yeah.

Was, I mean, it sounds like a lot of this journey has been a solo journey or at least a journey with a few friends and travelers. But, um, but have you benefited from contemporary authors and others as you've sought to? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Uh, Brant Petrie was a big one. Um, the way that he's, he was able to illustrate the, uh, the continuity that exists, you know, between Judaism to, to modern present day Catholicism and its practices. I mean, that, that was a very powerful argument to just like, look, we can tie ourselves back the way

that we understand the Eucharist, the way that we understand our lady, the way that we understand everything. You find some Catholic practice, and sure enough, it can be tied back to an Old Testament foreshadowing of it or some practice that was done in ancient Judaism. Yeah, so he did a fantastic job of that. I really, really appreciate Dr. Brad Petrie. Do you ever get asked the question or do you have a fear that, I don't, I hope this isn't offensive,

I don't mean it to be, that this is just one more fad that you're entering into. I've had that thought. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like next year, will you be Orthodox then Coptic and I don't think so. I mean, it's stronger than that. I know so. And so because there was a process of elimination coming into the church where and and much of my journey already was a process of elimination coming into the church where, and much of my journey already was a process of elimination and I think that... Yeah, you don't seem like you're entering the church as an idealist at all, which I think is sometimes part and parcel with Feds, right? You get kind of obsessive about a thing for what you

think it is, and you can't handle priests slamming gospels and telling you to leave or lackluster liturgies. Yeah. Sure. So I mean, when I reflect on my own movement, right? So Mormonism broke down because of historical reasons and theological problems and, you know, modern day contradictions that exact that happened. Atheism broke down because of philosophical problems and incongruency between what it means to believe atheism and actually live that way. Mysticism ran into the problem of dualism, you know, and so one by one these competing narratives, these competing beliefs and worldviews broke down.

There was something that just caused them to fall apart, one after another, after another, even Protestantism. It wasn't just as simple as, the church fathers are saying this, but there was also, well, what's wrong with sola scriptura? What's wrong with sola fide? Where are these presuppositions coming from? Are they tenable?

And those things, you know, just fell away. And so prosentism is filled with a lot of problems that you have to either justify, you have to look for some way of making it work that puts a lot of tension on things and you have to, you know, like just name one, like Sola Scriptura. You run into big problems with it. The, the, why, why these books? Why the canon? The problem of canon is a huge problem for Sola Scriptura.

When I arrived at Catholicism, as much as I tried to do that, tried to deconstruct it and break it down and find the problem, and coming in through an avenue like what Church Militant was exposing me to, helped me do that. But looking at things like rapture theology and regeneration by baptism and the succession of the apostles, the scriptural argument for it, the theological argument for it, the patristic witness to it, all of these things just strengthened it. And so what I realized after more and more time

investigating Catholicism was that this is perfect. What the church is, excluding all of the people who make it up, but what the church is, is perfect. And no matter how much I dig at it and try to get a lever underneath that, I can't, I can't do it. Interesting. Yeah, so it was, it was just a reassurance like,

okay, this is, this is it. And this is, I think if we believe that this is something that's divinely instituted, that the son of God created this thing, gave it certain assurances, that it would be led into all truth. That's exactly what you would find. And there's not really anything like, well, you know, this, this, this certain doctrine doesn't really make sense. You know, papal succession, like there, there is no proof for it, no evidence for it, but I'm going to try to make it work in

order to preserve this thing. Nothing in my experience exists like that within Catholicism. Nothing in my experience exists like that within Catholicism. We have some Protestant listeners who disagree, but yeah, that's awesome, man. Thank you so much. I can see why in our last interview, which was three hours, I think we just got done with Mormonism. I was so you became Catholic. No, dude, we can't do that. We got to come back around to so I'm so glad we did.

This was so fascinating. Did you end up coming up with an email? Remember I suggested you may be a no, no, no, no problem. No problem. Yeah. But you'll be in the comment section, maybe responding to maybe. Yeah. Okay. Maybe. Oh, this is awesome. Anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up? Um, can't wait for your first book. wrap up? Can't wait for your first book.

So yeah, I guess I, you know, I could give a shout out to Pines with Aquinas too, because this fit in as well. And this was while I was going to Liberty University, and I mentioned just a little earlier on, like the personalistic deism, that sort of theological approach to understanding God, which I was being surrounded by as I was getting my undergraduate. That began to break down via this podcast. So you had, I think it was before it was Pines with Aquinas, you had Father Gregory Pinon, and you asked him to give you just a real quick breakdown

of Aquinas' five ways. And so that was my introduction into classical theism. Awesome. Yeah. And so scholastic theology was, it was in the mix, you know, so it was one of these other things that, okay, now I have a better, clearer, more full way of understanding natural theology, you know, so it doesn't have to rely entirely upon scripture, but there is a way of using my reason to understand

God and seeing like, okay, how it's been done in the past and seeing like, okay, or Aristotle was able to do this and he didn't have divine revelation to support him. But so God became even, even more exposed to me and a little less hidden via father Gregory Paine on your show. What a guy, hey, he's unreal. Someone said in the comment section that it's like he knew the questions ahead of time, wrote it out, memorized it and spat it out. It's infuriating.

Very impressive. Yeah.