Pints With Aquinas - Morality, The Lord of the Rings, and Awkward Jokes w/ Dr Peter Kreeft

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

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Can see my screen. We're live now. You can't see your screen yet, but you'll be able to put it up. So it was forbidden to dress up as a character in the Lord of the Rings. Yeah. So go back to those who are watching now. So now suddenly we're live. Yes, it's very different kind of interview. These ones before the Soviet Union fell.

I heard that people were dressing up as Lord of the Rings characters, renting hundreds of acres of woods as Middle Earth and staging as Lord of the Rings characters, renting hundreds of acres of woods as Middle Earth, and staging the Lord of the Rings. And the Soviet Union got wind of it and forbade it, so that you were thrown in jail for... Dressing up like a hobbit. For acting like a hobbit, yes. And why do you think they were sent to jail for that?

Because the Soviet Union is smarter than Peter Jackson. They realized that, as Tolkien said, the scouring of the Shire was an essential part of the story. And there's a political takeaway to it. And it's an attack on state socialism. And these people were acting out Tolkien's vision, namely, Harafatha, the original Shire, Boo to the socialist Shire. And when Peter Jackson was asked why he didn't include that in his movie, he lamely said we didn't have enough money, which is ridiculous. But you

don't offend Hollywood by trashing their favorite religion. But what did you, which is? State socialism. Yeah. You seeing that more and more these days? Yeah, yeah. I just got through yesterday doing an hour's worth of training required at Boston College on diversity, inclusion, and sexual harassment. Oh, Lord, how did that go?

Well, you don't have to do anything. Just sit there and listen to it and click the right buttons. But it starts with a lot of ideological stuff, like sodomy is good and transgenderism is good and you must not offend people in more acceptable language. And then it mixes that with a lot of necessary stuff about sexual harassment and so on. But when you said you just gotta click and go on,

does that mean you have to lie or that you just have to say, I've read it? Yes, you have to lie. What's the right answer? And if you put down the wrong answer, they give you a chance to do the right answer. Nobody can flunk it. Why don't you just say the right thing then, even if they don't want you to? Well, I learned to do that, yes.

We learned to lie. Well, but why don't you not lie? Why don't you stand up to them? It doesn't make any difference. All you have to do is get through the hour long program that certifies, that gives you a certificate that you have been a student of the diversity and inclusion program. It's a federal thing. It's not a...

But do you not think you're morally obligated to sort of deny the bullshit, for lack of a better word, that they're trying to push on us? Well, yeah, you can try. Why don't you do that? Why don't you, for lack of a better word, that they're trying to push on us. Well yeah, you can try. Why don't you do that? For instance, in the last election, I could not vote for either a murderer who wants to destroy our own children, or a liar and a thief, so I voted for Donald Duck. I am a write-in candidate.

Donald J. Duck. Donald J Donald Duck. I had a write-in candidate. Donald J. Duck. Donald J. Duck. So is the hope that if you just kind of go along with this diversity inclusion stuff, that you'll at least get to be in front of students and do good work for them? Well, this was not just for universities. It was for any workplace environment.

And I don't quarrel with the idea that such a thing is necessary because of all the sexual harassment that's going on. What I quarrel with is the ideological stuff they snuck in. Especially that transgender movement, for such a minority, they have totally conquered the media. It's crazy how quickly. Well, the philosophy behind it, I got in trouble at Boston College. What happened? Well, we were discussing, it was a class in CS Lewis,

and the last day of course, we had covered all the books, so it was a free and open discussion. So the students wanted to talk about sexual morality. So I did, and I was asked what I thought of the transgender movement, and I said, I think that there's a serious problem here that we have to address and we should not treat any people with disrespect But I think the the movement itself is literally insane. Yes that you can design your own sexuality and that there is no Objective truth anymore

And I came down rather hard on it and one of the students who was probably transgender himself or else. I had a transgender friend complained Did anyone object in the classroom or was it after the fact? I? Thought we had a pretty free and open discussion in the classroom. It was about 50-50 some defending it some attacking it So I thought it was a good discussion, but one student was very deeply pained by it So I met him and he's reasonable guy, he's wrong, he's confused, but you know we didn't paper it over, but we said all right let's agree to disagree. And the administration was

was fine, there was no charges brought up or anything like that, it was just a complaint that was settled. Do you think that's only going to get worse? Oh yes, yes, yes, absolutely. To ruffle students feathers, to destroy their peace with themselves is unacceptable. You can lose your job. There are people who have lost their jobs by confessing that they did not agree with the transgender movement. Yeah, I might lose my YouTube channel for doing that thing. You probably will.

I will. Yeah. Rumble.com. Yes. Yeah. But that's my point though. It's like I would rather, I don't want to be, there's a couple of things. One, I don't want to be so focused on my ideological opponents that I forget those who

are suffering with gender dysphoria so that they experience love in my communication with them. I also don't want to talk about it for the sake of talking about it, like just to be abrasive, but I also don't want to be a coward and not say anything so that I can keep my nice little YouTube channel. The thing that bothers me most is that very distinction that you make between the sin and the sinner, between subjectivity and objectivity, between loving people and disagreeing with their ideology. That is denied universally by such movements. You insult what we do, you insult us. If you disagree with what you do, you demean us.

We are what we do. We are nothing but that. That is our identity. My name is Sauron, that is my ring. You take that from me, you take my identity from me. That scares me. When did that become a philosophical, tenable opinion? Like how did that enter in, or has it always been with us? Politically, I think it had something to do with homosexual activists who were intelligent and philosophical enough

to realize that they had to be that kind of subjective philosophy in order to claim that they had the right to control our speech. If a speech, even though not directed towards individuals and even though it's qualified to help individuals, if speech disagrees with your ideology, which you so internalize that that's your identity, then you have the right to say you are hurting me when you are disagreeing with my ideas. And that I think is the line that must not be crossed. That's true totalitarianism.

A real tyrant doesn't want just to control your body, he wants to control your mind. Now, I certainly don't believe that all homosexual activists or all genderists or all liberals or anything like that are in that state. But the ones with the megaphone in those groups seem to. Yes. Yeah, the ones who are speaking on behalf of those groups seem to. Does this lack of distinction between who I am, what I am and what I do exist in any other realm of morality? It seems to be specific to do with sexuality.

So far it's specific to do with sexuality. Yes. Yes. And I find that atheists are not threatened by Christian theology. That theology, insofar as it stays clear of morality, especially sexual morality, is perfectly tolerable. I feel no religious or theological persecution in society unless it has something to do with sexuality. That's right, yeah. Which is why 100% of everything I have seen on television, political, in the last month is pro-choice.

Not a single pro-life ad or, because that's obviously about sex. I mean, abortion is a sexual issue. Why does any woman want an abortion? Because her birth control failed. And what is birth control? To demand to have sex without having babies. And that's our non-negotiable.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think the cultures kind of seems to butt heads, mainly with the church on that point? Well, you gotta have some sort of God. And if it's not the real God, it's either sex or power. Yeah. Or both sexual autonomy. And maybe maybe it's more power than sex. But it does seem, though, that for many people, those who get a lot of power, if they abuse it, it ends up in something sexual.

I think it's the other way around. I think it starts the other way around. I think it starts with sexual desire and then you realize that you can be the lord of your own life. I think power is probably even a more dangerous thing than sex because you can only have so much sex, but you can have infinite power. It's like the difference between money and the stuff money can buy. You can't enjoy the stuff money can buy beyond a certain limit. Well, money and power are similar in that way in that they exist to be exchanged for something else. The controlling of our surroundings.

Yes. And therefore they are potentially infinite. Yeah. Yeah, and when we're not rooted in Christ. And sex is finite. Yeah, and we're not rooted in Christ. And sex is finite. It's enormously powerful, but it's finite until it's joined with power, sexual autonomy. I get to decree that there are now 54 different genders in Canada.

That felt bigoted. I think there's at least a thousand. Must be. Must be. Yeah. Well, what's sad about it is they're turning people's psychological pain and their disorders into a joke, really, by making it so silly. And it obviously won't work because human nature was not designed at Harvard or

in Hollywood, but in heaven. And it will have its revenge. It will not make people happy. Nature makes people happy. Anti revenge. It will not make people happy. Nature makes people happy. Anti-nature does not make people happy. You can fool them only for a couple of generations. Have you heard of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morris? No. She was on my show and I want to run this by you. She says we shouldn't think of this as a left versus right issue because there's insanity everywhere. Like Trump was pro transgenderism in certain instances. And so she said,

we should think of them as a Gnostic death cult and the sexual revolution, she says, since it is a lie and therefore cannot work in reality, needs three things to get off the ground. A lot of power, a lot of propaganda, and then finally a scapegoat for when the thing that can't work doesn't. And that thing is Christianity in particular. Especially the Catholic Church. Yeah. And Christian, and Christian sexual morality.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. What do you think about that? I feel privileged to be the, the new chosen people. I mean, Catholics are the new Jews. Instead of racial anti-Semitism, it's sexual anti-Semitism. We're the traditionalists, the holdouts, the ones who claim that we're God's chosen people or recipients of God's chosen revelation.

That's harmful to diversity. You can't have that much diversity. Everything must be relativist. An absolutist has no place in a diverse community. An absolutist has no place. Yeah. There's that line from the Second Vatican Council, I believe it is, that says, when God has forgotten, the creature himself becomes unintelligible. Yeah. Yeah. Pope John Paul II loved to quote a line like that.

Only Christ reveals man to himself. He doesn't just reveal who God is, he reveals who we are. And if we really believed that, if that's our true identity, that would permeate our whole day. The practice of the presence of that philosophy, even, even if not incarnated in that person would change everything. Whereas if I don't take my identity and who I am before God, I don't believe he exists or I don't believe he loves me. Then the only thing that's on offer is what the world suggests will make me happy like

ambition and self aggrandizing and these sorts of things. And then the sins that seem to assuage the loneliness that results when those things don't work. So like sex and drink and all this stuff is just a way to... What's so interesting to me when I read the Old Testament is that in one sense I don't find the modern situation there because there's no secularism. You either worship the true God or you worship another God. Yeah.

Whereas here we don't. And I think that's what's going on behind the scenes. If God designed the human heart, there's an infinite vacuum there which can't be filled with finite things. So you've got to pretend that something finite is infinite. You've got to worship some idol if you don't worship the god. Whether it's sex or power or the right or the left or whatever. So relativism itself becomes a new absolute. Yeah. Well maybe that's why some of these social movements, what they're aiming at never seem to be concrete in reality like Marxism working for example

or the sexual revolution or it's utopian as it were. So I can make something that doesn't yet exist infinite because it doesn't exist yet to disappoint me in its finiteness. Yeah. Yeah. And that is also why to believe in objective truth is very threatening to that because objective truth about nature is always finite and it has limits and you bump up against the wall. But the Gnostic has no walls, never bumps up against anything. He can create a new universe. I think that's why she called it a Gnostic death cult because it seems to be at war with the body. This idea that-

Yeah, because the body has limits. Yeah. What do you think? Because you wouldn't have thought 20, 30 years ago that transgenderism would be as big a thing as it is. No. No. It's astonishing.

As Ricky Gervais said, no one saw that coming. That one day you get kicked offline for saying women don't have penises and now you get banned. Well, ask Larry Summers, you know, the president of Harvard who got fired, first president in Harvard's history to get fired for not believing in the idea that there is some innate difference between men and women, but saying that it is an idea worth discussing before we refute it and go on to other ideas, which explain why Harvard is not drawing enough women to the hard sciences. And the feminists at that faculty meeting rose together and demanded his resignation and got it soon after for believing that that idea is worth discussing, ought to be expressed

in public. The idea that every single culture in the history of the human race has believed. It reminds me of Chesterton's gate or wall, the idea that you shouldn't tear it down unless you know what it's for. And we're just tearing everything down. Of course. You think it'll be great. Which is, I think, the real attractiveness in postmodernism and deconstructionism. Can you define those terms for us? Well, postmodernism is a vague term, which is basically disagreement with the power of reason as in the Enlightenment.

And deconstructionism is the application of that, especially to texts and literature and words. Words do not intend things. There is no objective truth. Words create your own truth. Right, yeah, yep. So there's no concept within the term that's necessarily linked to it. We can, if you think of a term like a cardboard box

that I present to you and you open it up and there's something in there, something I'm conveying to you, you can sort of just replace that object within that term. Yes, and it is also associated with volunteerism. That is, it is the will that commands the reason to say what it wants it to say. There's no humility, there's no learning from the reason what reality is like.

There is only the will to power. It's Nietzschean. Nietzsche is the most popular philosopher today. More doctoral theses are written about Nietzsche than anybody else. And of course, Nietzsche was insane, literally. He spent the last 11 years of his life in an asylum. And it wasn't just his syphilis, it was his philosophy that drove him insane. I think the idea in Nietzsche that most drove him insane was questioning the will to truth for the first time. He said, all philosophers before me

failed to have the courage to ask the most dangerous of all questions, why truth? Why not rather the lie? There's no answer to that question. I mean, if you answer that question, you're assuming the will to truth. So you can't prove it. What about if you just said something that like, because aligning myself with reality is more conducive to my own good, it works better.

That's your truth. My truth is different than your truth. Don't implore your truth. My truth is different than your truth. Don't impose your truth on my truth. I do recall Nietzsche writing something to the end of, it was an answer to a rhetorical question of, if this world that you believe in, Nietzsche, is so grim and dull, then why pursue that truth and try to lay that out? And his answer is no reason. You choose it and that's your courage.

Yes, life is meaningless, but you love it anyway, because you want to. How much has Nietzsche been distorted by Christians trying to refute him? Do you feel like Christians are fair to Nietzsche? I don't know either Niet I know Nietzsche or the Christians who are talking about well enough to answer that question. What do you think Neil? Because I know you like Nietzsche. Nietzsche has many sides. He's certainly a

genius. I know as a Christian I get very frustrated when Richard Dawkins, who clearly never read even the Sumer article on a God's existence seeks to refute him and just totally misunderstands Aquinas. And I'm wondering if people perhaps in the atheist community or even those who are theists who like Nietzsche think that maybe we're misinterpreting him. For me, something my professor said in college was something to the end of Nietzsche contradicts himself apparently and apparently knowledgably he does that. And so it's kind of like there I think are people who read one or two quotes from Nietzsche

and sort of think they understand the gist of what he's saying but kind of part of the point of Nietzsche is he doesn't really have one gist. It's sort of the only way to truly understand him is to kind of grapple with him at multiple points because he says things he doesn't really mean that are hyperbolic and that he thinks is poetic and things like that. And I think that, yeah, I don't know, I think he has a lot to say, but I think it's kind of difficult to grasp. Pass it out.

Yeah, I see. Well, the law of non-contradiction does not apply to anything. He deliberately contradicts himself. So does Plato, though. I don't think he ever read Walt Whitman, but that line from Leaves of Grass, do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.

I am large, I contain multitudes. Very good. Hurrah for me, I contradict myself. But do you think Plato contradict himself intentionally? Yes, I think Nietzsche did too. But you think Plato did that? Yeah. Well, Plato playing games with you sometimes.

He certainly believes in the law of non-contradiction. Right. What was that? But he'll play devil's advocate. Let's talk about that just real quick. That Muslim philosopher whose name I forgot who said. Al-Ashari? The one who thinks to be beaten and burned is not the same.

No, no. He said the one who denies, whoever denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he finally admits that to be beaten and burned is not the same thing as to not be beaten And burned. Oh, that was not al-ashari al-ashari was a volunteer us. That was a rationalist. Hmm Well, you know, there's the famous youth of her problem that philosophers talk about that's relevant to this in the youth of row famous Euthypho problem that philosophers talk about that's relevant to this. In the Euthyphro, Socrates has a dialogue with this arrogant young man who believes that he knows what piety is, and piety is simply doing the will of the gods. And Socrates asked the question, is a thing pious because the gods will it, or do the gods will it because it's pious?

And Euthyphro says, oh, the only reason it's pious is that the gods will it. In other words, if the gods will you to lie, you should lie. If you, they will you to hate, you should hate it. Socrates says, no, it's the opposite. And when the early church fathers dealt with that problem, they didn't accept either Socrates rationalism or you, the froze volunteerism. They said that the good and the true are what God is and God's will is what God is. So the will and the true are what God is and God's will is what God is. So the will and the intellect are absolutely united in God. So neither one is the authority over the other.

They are identical. So the youth of fraud dilemma is a false one. It is indeed. But Nietzsche is certainly a youth of fraud. And so is postmodernism. And the enlightenment is a Socratic rationalism. Reason is higher than anything, even God. So that, uh,

if scientific reasons as miracles are impossible and God says, well, I'm going to do one, uh, rationalism say, no, you're not. Has it been difficult for you being a philosopher teaching at a secular school and maybe feeling like you can't have these open discussions about really important issues? Well, it's not a secular school. I teach at Boston College. It's not a secular school. No, it's a Jesuit school. It's halfway between Catholic and secular. So earlier you said you were forced to go through this inclusivity training. That wasn't on behalf of the school specifically? Did the school mandate that

you do it? I believe that the federal law, Title IX, mandates that all universities require that. And I have no quarrel with that because there is a problem about sexual harassment, but I have a quarrel with sliding in the leftist ideology into it. the leftist ideology into it. Yeah. Yeah. Has it been as difficult as people think,

speaking your mind on the university campus as a professor, or do you find actually despite all the hype, people are generally open. Students are generally open to having intellectual discussions about. Boston College is an unusual place. If I were teaching at a state university, I would be in trouble. I would probably lose my job. But Boston College is a genuinely Jesuit and Catholic university that still believes in objective truth and academic freedom. It's kind of a mirror of our own society.

Most people still have enough common sense to be rather suspicious of the far left ideology and most people have enough common sense to be suspicious of the far right ideology, but those are two powerful forces that are increasingly driving us apart. Yeah. Although doesn't it seem like the far left ideology ideology has government big tech universities. Oh, yeah Corporations. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely We're getting closer and closer to brave new world That's the prophetic book and that doesn't seem to depress you. That's what's interesting to me

It's like well, we live long enough to see the the devolution of the universities and America and oh, I'm a horrible pessimist, but I'm also selfish and I'm 85 years old and I'm getting out of this insane asylum pretty soon. I remember Benedict Grichel saying something like that. Oh God, I can't wait. Yes. How do you feel about death? Your death specifically? Death is wonderful. Dying is awful. Yeah. Dying is losing. Death is winning. But once you watch through that door, you're guaranteed heaven. No matter how painful your purgatory is, it's a joy because you want it. It's God's will.

And you're totally in that will. You can't sin after death. That's the best thing about death. It takes away sin. Tereza of Lejeu on her deathbed said that her soul was kind of engaging with the deepest, darkest doubts of God's existence, you know. The atheism was plaguing her soul. Do you experience that? Do you fear that you've just sort of wasted your life and it's just going to be a big

black nothingness? No, no, not that. But I've experienced more spiritual warfare this past summer than ever before in my life. I always believed in it, but I never felt it. I've lost a lot of sleep. I've had a lot of silly worries and only God and his angels come in and deal with it. I mean, I've never experienced such a direct answer to prayer as my prayer, God get rid of these bad angels and your angels, and he does it. Wow. Can you share more about that, about what that spiritual warfare was like and the specifics of it? I don't want you to feel like you got to share too much. No, except in general, pride and despair are really the same, but they manifest themselves

in opposite ways. And some people are tempted to pride and arrogance and extending their power. Others are tempted to pessimism and despair and giving up. I'm the pessimist. I'm an optimist by conviction, but a pessimist by temperament. You don't seem that way. And the devil, well, this is probably why I joke a lot. A laugh, clown, laugh, you know, that syndrome. And the devil knows us very, very well and hits us at our weak point.

So he tempts me to give up. And sometimes the temptations are really, really stupid. And I'll just forget how stupid they are and I'll succumb. How do you how do you distinguish between spiritual warfare and just having a bad night's sleep or having certain worries? Or is that a false dilemma? You don't know. I don't know if it's a false dilemma or not.

I don't think it is because the supernatural is not the same as the natural, but they blend. The devil usually uses natural forces. He uses our weakness, but it's the strategy of the war room in hell. That's the origin of all of that. So I think to to isolate the supernatural as literally supernatural and miraculous on the one hand and the natural as simply natural on the other hand is a false dilemma, yeah. They usually blend.

For me, I was giving a conference recently and I just felt this cloud of despair upon me, this fog that I couldn't see through and everything felt hopeless and I was anxious and scared. And it's usually in that moment, unfortunately, that you're not thinking, wow, this could be spiritual warfare. So I stopped and I prayed some prayers and within half hour it was really like a dark cloud lifted. Yes, yes. I've never experienced such a sudden answer to prayer as in that area. Yes. I know

exactly what you mean. Yeah. I've said before that trying to understand Christianity without reference to the demonic is like trying to understand the Lord of the Rings without reference to Sauron. It's just a, it's a boring story and it's not one that makes any sense really, you know? And maybe it's because we've sort of forgotten about the intervention of the demonic that we're looking for enemies within and without the church. They have to be the wellspring of the problem. Yes, yes. If we don't admit that we wrestle against principalities and powers, then we've got to find some natural substitute. Whether it's the left or the right or the whites or the blacks or the Jews or the Semites,

whoever. Yep. You gotta have a scapegoat. How old are you now? 85. As you've sort of grown in your Christian journey here at 85, would you, if you were to talk to young Peter Craeft as he was writing his first book, would you want him to focus on a particular topic more than you have? Or say this is more important than you think, or the thing that

you think is really important isn't as important as you think? The answer to that is going to be disappointingly obvious. Focus on the plus, not the minus. On God's mercy, not your stupidity. No matter how bad we are, no matter how weak we are, no matter how stupid we are, God is stronger. There's a movie, don't know the title, don't know the main character. I asked a lot of moviegoers. I know this movie exists. Maybe Neil will get it. Neil, 10 points if you get it. And 10 dollars. A holy priest, I think he's a Franciscan, in some South American country,

who's combating corruption. He sees corruption everywhere, including in the church. And finally, his bishop lets him down somehow. He's trying to help the poor people, and the bishop is so corrupt that he's preventing it. And he says, he does the opposite of St. Francis.

He throws away his, not his rich secular clothes, but his priestly garments says, I'm out of here. And there's this woman who has been trying to, uh, uh, to tempt him all his life and he's resisted her temptation. And now he accepts and he goes and shacks up with her in a little hut in the wilderness. And you think this is an anti-Catholic, pro-sexual, romantic, idealist thing, but it isn't.

It's just the opposite. He gets a little more antsy and antsy, and the relationship cools somewhat, and she still loves him, but he's not sure that he loves her. And then one day, she finds him missing in bed in the middle of the night and she knows where he goes and he goes she goes down this little road into a tiny little chapel and sure enough there he is all alone prone on the floor talking with Jesus in the crucifix and she says you're gonna go back aren't you and he

says yes he said I don't understand it. Why? They're going to kill you. Why are you going to back there? And he points to Christ in the tabernacle and says, because he is stronger. Three powerful words. And then he goes back and he is martyred. That's the end of the movie.

An extremely powerful line. If anybody knows that movie, put it in the comments. Yeah, that is. He is stronger. I want to speak about adultery for a second and just destroying everything the Lord's given you. And the reason this is on my mind is without giving any details away. A dear friend of mine's father is on his deathbed. And this man from all appearances,

kamikaze'd his marriage and went to another country, was with prostitutes, came back, just a sad life living in government housing, very overweight, maybe an alcoholic addicted to gambling. And I hear that story and I'm like, I totally get the temptation to just destroy everything and go look for heaven here on earth. I've said before that I don't know if I would trust any man or woman who's been married for more than 15 minutes, who doesn't understand the temptation of going elsewhere to find

what they have not yet found. But having that image of this person in my mind is like, yeah, don't, don't, this is this beautiful marriage that you have, Matt, and these lovely children and this beautiful Catholic little life with your friends. This is not unbreakable. You can destroy the whole thing with your own stupidity, but it ends in that. Uh, and, and having, and I pray for his salvation and I have been praying for it. But I yeah, that's like there is a way that seems right to man and in the end leads to death. That's sort of what I'm seeing in this person's life.

Well, scripture frequently uses that sexual analogy for our relationship with God. Idolatry is spiritual adultery. We're meant to be married to God and it's a stormy marriage. It's not easy. It's not automatically satisfying. There's war in it as well as peace. And we look for an alternative. So we break it.

Every time we sin, we commit spiritual adultery. I mean, sin is insanity. We know from our past experience, time and time again, every time we say to God no my will be done. Not yours It's miserable and every time we say your will be done It's it's peace and joy deep down in the long run and yet the next Moral choice we have My way or your way. Yeah, let's see God. I'm not sure. Let me try my way

Maybe I'll work this time. We're nuts. Yeah, but God deeply loves his severely retarded children I often think that's the story of Christianity the long story of God Disagreeing with me when I tell him I'm shit and unworthy of his love and affection Yeah God, uh, disagreeing with me when I tell him I'm shit and unworthy of his love and affection. Yeah. I love that he seems to disagree with our opinion of ourselves in that regard. God has to have the greatest sense of humor in all of existence. There's no other way he could tolerate us. But it's not just toleration.

It's passionate love. What has your, what ha how has marriage sanctified you sort of specifically? How long you've been married now? Six, I think 60 years. It's terrific. Congratulations. Well, it's, it's shown me what can be done by ordinary human choice to love. And that's not a stoical, I'll endure this, that's a, I will actively work on this wonderful vocation and create and perceive all the good that I can in it. And every marriage and every family is full of some disappointments and failures,

especially with children. The more you have, the more joys and sorrows you have. We have only four. I have a number of friends that have a dozen. That's an amazing achievement. I've written a hundred books, but I've only had four kids. To have five kids is more than to have four kids plus a hundred books. But you love them anyway. And it's always somewhat reciprocated.

I mean, no matter how rebellious the kid is, that you're the father or mother of that kid and the kid knows it. And the kid knows that you gave them life and it's the pass it on system, pay it forward system. You can't, you can't even try to give to your parents a gift greater than they gave to you. So you give it to your kids.

And if you don't have kids, you give it to the world or the church or your friends. We all deeply know that. And we all, no matter how screwed up we are, conscience isn't totally dead and conscience isn't just negative, don't do this. Conscience is this is what you're called to. You're called to do something. You're called to be a saint, far more than you are, but that's the direction.

No matter how little you climb the mountain, the direction is up rather than down. And we all know that. What's been more difficult for you, marriage or having children? No children, children. I can. I mean, my love, my wife and I are equals and respect each other and understand each other far more than parents and children understand each other. How do you think parents can maintain their peace in light of a rebellious child and maybe not just rebellious but somebody who is. Mutilating the sexual organs so I come across parents who come to me and they say this is happening because of the transgender insanity.

That's an extreme example but how do we as parents maintain our peace as opposed to flagellating ourselves and thinking if only I had have done a better job. I've got to be very honest with you. I don't know. None of our kids have deeply disappointed us. They have kept the faith. They still believe. And that's an unusual thing. When I was a kid growing up as a Protestant,

every family I knew was Protestant. And I didn't know a single family that had a divorce in it. I must've known 50 or a hundred families. Now as a Catholic, I also know maybe 50 or a hundred families and almost all of them are Catholic. Not a single one does not have a divorce in it. I think that's, that's a remarkable breakdown of the fundamental institution in civilization. a remarkable breakdown of the fundamental institution in civilization. That can't be sustainable. We talk about a sustainable ecology. What about a sustainable human ecology? We don't have it.

I don't think our society is going to last more than a couple more generations. I think it's just going to fall apart. What will that look like when it does? Might be civil war. The left and the right are increasingly angry. It might be just disillusioned, like the end of the Roman empire. Might be a reversion to barbarism. It might be just, um, no, not with a bang, but a whimper. I love that poem by the way. Yeah.

Sorry, it's easy for you since you're on your way out, but what about these young ones and these young parents with children? How are they to maintain hope? How should they live the Christian life amidst this turmoil and pessimism and insanity? Well, you have to have a kind of optimism and a kind of pessimism, the pessimism of realizing that you're in a decaying and decadent culture, and you're going to be increasingly called upon to make heroic sacrifices, and an optimism to realize that he is stronger, and he will win in the end, and we are on the winning side. We are hobbits, and he will win in the end, and we are on the winning side.

We are hobbits, and we're facing orcs, but God has given us the whole story, including the future. And if you look at the book of Revelation as future history, and of course it's highly symbolic and mystical, but it's true. You see two things, that there's horrendous stuff in the future. And Christ himself says, if God had not shortened those days, no one would be saved. On the other hand, it's a fixed fight. The lamb versus the dragon, Arneon versus Therion, the bad beast and the innocent beast. The lamb wins, the hobbit wins.

So there's no way around it. You're gonna need supernatural faith unless you wanna fall into despair. Yeah. Yeah, because all the indicators just look bleak. Yeah. For many of us. Expect it.

God sends you to a battlefield. He doesn't send you to a garden. We're not in the Garden of Eden. We're not tending the garden. We're trying to save people from death, from spiritual death. How did you meet your wife? By a very strange divine providence. My college friend had a sore neck. That's how I met my wife. Okay.

He, I went to college in Michigan, Calvin College. I'm an ex-Calvinist. And my friend went to New York to find a job, couldn't find a job, spent a week looking. Sat on a bench waiting for a bus to take him back to Michigan. He had an extra hour and he tried to look to the right where the employment office was and his neck hurt.

So he turned to the left instead and saw a restaurant and said, I'm hungry. So I'll go in the restaurant and eat before I go back. As he was entering the restaurant, the bus boy was leaving. He just got fired because he had his hand in the till. So he said, hey, maybe there's a job here for me. So he goes in and he gets a job. So now he's working at that restaurant.

He meets the, what is it called? The head waitress. And sort of makes friends with her. And she's a middle-aged lady. And she invites him home to meet her daughter, which he does, and starts dating her. This is the beginning of the summer. He calls me up in the middle of the summer and says,

Pete, just met a nice girl in New York. She's got a friend, let's go on a double date. So we go on a double date. Where'd you go? A restaurant, actually. Where'd you go? A restaurant actually. Uh huh. And his date, Maria, was really smart and really funny and very beautiful.

And my date was very nice and very polite and sweet. Good friend still. Oh wow. But nothing electric. So at that point I wasn't thinking of romance or anything, but we had a date and we went back to our homes. I lived in New Jersey and I went to Yale in the fall for graduate school.

And I got a letter from my friend who was back at Calvin for another year and said, Pete, remember that girl I was dating in New York? I think I got a good thing going here, but I'm trying to keep the romance going by letter. Why don't you write her a letter and tell her what a good guy I am? So I wrote Maria a letter saying, what do you see in Sam, anyway? What does he have that none of the other students in your college have? She was still going to college then. And she wrote me back a very funny letter saying, well,

I think you can answer that question yourself if you realize that I go to an old girl's college And we became friends literary friends and she invited me to Go to New York and meet the family and whatnot and at that point I was thinking of becoming a priest and didn't have romance in mind, but we became very good friends and when I Got baptized into the Catholic Church, Maria was the only Catholic girl that I knew. So I asked her to be my godmother. And she did.

And at the baptism, she joked with the priest, Hey, Father, suppose I fall in love with this guy. Can you marry your godmother? He said, No, no, this is forbidden by the church. You got to get a special dispensation from Rome, the spiritual incest. You have to write to the pope and he'll, he'll say, okay. So a year or two later, we go to the priest and say, father, remember that question? Meanwhile, meanwhile, my friend Sam started dating my ex-girlfriend at Calvin.

And I started getting serious about Maria and said this, that's the kind of father I want to be. Not a priest, but the other kind of father so I married my godmother that's incredibly wonderful because my friend got a crick in his neck waiting for a bus in New York divine providence has an incredible sense of humor yeah I mean I often use this this analogy Pascal says that history is big things caused by little things, like the inch of flesh on Cleopatra's nose. If it hadn't been there, Mark Antony would never have fallen in love with her.

The Egyptian campaign wouldn't have happened. The Republic wouldn't have changed into an empire, and the whole history of Western civilization would have changed. So. Here's another one. Obama made fun of Trump at that dinner party and then Roe versus Wade was overturned. There might be some connection there. I think so. Well, think of this. You exist, probably, because of some event like this. A squirrel dropped a nut on a branch in a city park

in October and that nut fell in a city park in one October, and that nut fell in a pile of dry leaves and made a strange noise that attracted the attention of your great grandfather who was sitting nearby, and he turned his head left rather than right to see what made that noise, and noticed this pretty girl sitting on a bench across the way and said,

"'Don't go strike up a conversation with her "'and eat lunch with her.'" And one thing led to another and they got married and you existed because that branch was there directing the nut. Yes. That's divine providence. How old were you when you proposed

and how did that happen? 21, I think, I just graduated, maybe 22. I think I was 21 when I proposed as well. I proposed on the Staten Island ferry and I'm so clumsy, I almost dropped the ring overboard. I'm a clumsy idiot with ADD. So you kind of knelt down and almost dropped it off the edge. I didn't quite kneel down, but the ship was a little shaky.

A little shaky. It's always my heart. Oh, that's really great. Wow. What was the toughest thing about marriage? Kids. Really? I mean, they'll break your heart with love. Yeah.

And they change everything. Absolutely no regrets. Yeah. Would you say you and Maria are good friends? Of course. I mean everybody has differences and I'm from a quiet Dutch family and an only child and she's from a very loud, wild Italian Russian family. So it's like, oh, I don't know, it's like a cat and a dog getting married. Yeah. But, uh, but,

but it has been, it has been everything. It's, it's, it's a mirror of, of a whole of life. And we deeply respect and, and, and, and love each other and are, are totally committed. And from the beginning to the end, that's it. Do you think maybe that's the reason why we're having more divorces? People are getting into marriages thinking that if this doesn't work out, then I have an escape.

Of course, of course. One of our favorite movies when we were dating was Divorce Italian Style. It was a 50s comedy about a guy who wanted to divorce his wife, but there was no divorce allowed in Italy at the time. So the only way you could divorce your life was by murder. So he hired a mafia hitman to murder his wife and the hitman killed like six other women thinking that it was his wife. And we thought that was very funny because we said,

you know, murder is more reasonable than divorce. So if we don't have instruments of destruction in our house, we're going to stay married. We'll kill each other before we divorce each other. Why is why is that the case? Why is murder more reasonable than divorce? Is that because divorce is impossible? Yeah. Yeah, it's a myth.

It doesn't exist. In the eyes of God, there is no such thing as divorce. Jesus clearly says that. I often have arguments with some of my Protestant friends who say that your church is authoritarian and tyrannical and whatnot. And I say, no, it's yours that claims more authority than Christ because Christ clearly

forbade divorce in three of the four gospels, and your church allows it and mine doesn't. So you're correcting your master and we're not. Divorce is a superstition. I've been thinking lately, it's not terribly well thought out and it's not terribly insightful, but here's what I got. It's like you've got the concrete reality in front of you, which is disappointing because it's finite and can't make you fully happy in this life. And then over here you have the idea.

It's kind of what we talked about earlier with Marxism and, uh, uh, the sexual revolution over here. This is kind of vague notion of what could be, like I could be married to this woman or that woman, or I could have different children, I could live in that country or this state. And it's pretty tempting because it's vagueness kind of like the, um, uh, unmet Marxism that's never going to work out or sexual revolution kind of thing. Seems like this could possibly make me happy. But if you were to like take any of those scenarios, I'll have that woman in this country in this

house and you actually lived it you'd be disappointed again the devil loves vagueness vagueness yeah that's in the screw-tape letters you know dim the lights that's his first principle don't have a realistic, honest understanding of the real world with all its limits. Live in your fantasies. Yeah. You can be whatever you want to be. No, you can't. How is that different to wanting to read the Lord of the Rings to escape reality, as it were?

Or are you not doing that? The whole point of myth is to plunge you into reality. After you read the Lord of the Rings, you understand the real world much better. That's so true. You understand the mythic nature of objective reality. Tolkien says in his essay on fairy stories that scientific truth is the friend,

not the enemy of fantasy. If you don't understand what a prince is and what a frog is, you can't write a story about a frog who changes into a prince is and what a frog is, you can't write a story about a frog who changes into a prince. I forget that line, but it's always the line stuck with me. I'm forgetting the context. It was Tom Bombadil, who said to the hobbits of pharma, he spoke about pharma maggot in a way that challenged their view of him, that he was perhaps far more important

than they had suspected. They had always just seen him as a crass farmer. And I love that because I think that's most of us, all of us, we kind of walk around bumping into each other, wishing others would get out of the way so we can get in front of them. How many friends understood how important the Blessed Virgin Mary was. She was probably utterly ordinary, like Mother Teresa, like Dorothy Day, two saints that I personally met. Tell us about that. And I was impressed by how extraordinarily ordinary both were. That's grandma.

Wow. It was Chesterton who said there's nothing so extraordinary in all the world than an ordinary man, his ordinary wife and their ordinary children. And that's the whole purpose of politics, to protect that. And if it's not doing that, it better not exist. That's right. What was it like meeting Mother Teresa? And where did you meet her? She came to our local parish. There was a big crowd, maybe 200 people waiting in line.

And she saw how big the crowd was and gave each person maybe five seconds. She simply shook my hand and said, God bless me. But she looked at me. And in that look, I saw absolute and total attention. Nothing else existed in the world for her except me. Wow. And then I learned that other people who had met her had the same impressions.

I've had that impression with very holy people. Father Bob Bedard, who's the founder of the Companions of the Cross up in Ottawa, Canada, who's since deceased. I remember meeting him and feeling like everything else in the world slowed down and he was directly attentive to me. You know who else I felt that with down and he was directly attentive to me. You know who else I felt that with? Father Scanlon at Steubenville University.

Yeah. A living St. Francis. I think he'll be canonized someday. Do you really? Why? The miracle that he did at the university. I mean, of course I've heard of it and I just had Father Dave on the show to talk a bit about it, but I'd love to hear your perspective on it.

Well, I know just what I've heard. I wasn't directly and personally involved in it, but he turned a failing school, failing in every way, uh, spiritually, academically, economically. I'm not sure if you know this, but Franciscan at one point was on the Playboy Top 10 party universities. Oh yeah, yeah.

That's remarkable. And that's where he started. This is a Catholic university, you're going to be Catholics, so you're going to live as Catholics and you're not going to have sex or drugs in the dorms and we're going to fire all the atheists and half the students left and he said, so what? And he built it up from there and now it's an empire yeah I would have loved to have met him the twinkle in his eyes reminded me of Mother Teresa's really yeah I'd love to get to that point where I'm less distracted but I'm incredibly distracted constantly well heaven heals all ills

including a DD which you probably have because you're quite intelligent. Most intelligent people have ADD. We go into universities because that's the only place we can thrive. We can't quite handle the real world. Yeah, I'd be screwed in a normal job, I think. But it would be good to get to that place where we were more attentive to what's taking place now. It's like we always have this idea that God's will is this afternoon or tomorrow or next year or when the kids grow up or. Well, Brother Lawrence's practice, the presence of God and Dikosad's

abandonment to divine providence. Both talk about that. The sacrament of the present moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the future may never enter into my soul, the past I leave into God's mercy. You, dear present, are all I have. How the devil loves to get us to worry about the future

or to resent the past. Doesn't want us to live in the present because that's where we meet God. That's where God is. Yes, there is. There's no past or future to God He's present. Yes Yes

There's a there's a line in one of a more Bergman's movies Bergman was a Haunted a God haunted agnostic. It's called cries and whispers. There's these three women who are sisters and they hate each other. One of them is dying of cancer and the other two can't wait for her to die because she's rich and they're going to inherit her money. And the dying woman knows it, but plays the game anyway. And one spring, I'm told that spring is magical in Scandinavia because the winters are so long. When the sun is shining, and there's still some snow on the ground, but the green grass is poking through. There are two sisters take this

dying woman out of her bed into the backyard swing. And they each sit on one side of her and she's swinging. And you hear the voiceover, you hear her thinking, yes, I know that my sisters are witches and hypocrites, and they don't love me, and they're just waiting for me to die, but that's the future. And I know that I'm going to die very soon, and I've accomplished nothing in my life,

and I have nothing but pain to look forward to. But this moment, this perfect yellow sunlight, and this perfect green grass, and this perfect white snow, that's all that exists right now. And that's where I am, and that's it. And then they go back and she dies. But that that one moment is like a light in the darkness, like that little star that Sam sees in Mordor. And there's clouds all around, but one star peeks through the fog and like the shaft of an arrow, it smites his heart.

It can't be put out, the light. A tiny little light will overcome an enormous room of darkness. The darkness cannot put out the light. The light always puts out the darkness. What do you mean, smotes his heart? I think I know, but... the light always puts out the darkness. What do you mean, smooths his heart? I think I know, but... C.S. Lewis has a little epithet that says, I forget the rhyme, but the basic point of it is that the greatest task that an artist can succeed

in performing is to break your heart. Isn't it strange that tears are the same thing that we shed when we have sorrow that we can't endure and we have joy that we can't endure? Yes. Both come from a broken heart. And I think it's Paul Tournier who says somewhere that the only heart that can be whole is the heart that has been broken.

I think I know exactly what this means, but I don't know if I can express it. Like I've been in beautiful situations or have been engaged in beautiful experiences, but maybe I've got it wrong. The thing that kind of broke my heart was the fact that it wasn't what I wanted. Do you see? So the sun is setting and I'm surfing on this lovely beach in San Diego or I'm intimate with my wife for the most beautiful, you know, back porch whiskey chatting with good friends. And as soon as I think, oh, this is it, it fades away. That's CS Lewis. That's Zane Zucht. That's what you mean by smoothing the heart or is that something? Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Appetizers. The smell of the steak rather than the snake. Smell of the coffee rather than the coffee. Or maybe not. The pointing finger. Yeah. That's why deconstructionism is so damaging. According to deconstructionism, ordinary words aren't even pointing fingers. Yeah. Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica defines that deconstructionist credo, I think, as well

as anything. He says, a poem must be palpable and mute like globet fruit. A poem must not mean, but be. Oh, nothing means anything. Nothing points to anything. No matter how transcendent the experience, it doesn't point to something beyond itself. That's all it is. And did he mean anything with those words about poetry not meaning anything?

I think so. I think so. I think you see the irony. with those words about poetry not meaning anything? I think so, I think so. I think he's- Did you see the irony? I think he is a nihilist. He's a brilliant nihilist. JB is a great play, but it's a retelling of the book of Job, almost from the devil's point of view. Oh, really?

I'm looking up one of my, a poem that I found recently that I just absolutely loved. What's one of your favorite poems and can you recite it? Lepanto. Chesterton's. It's quite a long poem. Can you? Okay.

Good. And can you, can you recite the whole thing? No, no, no, no. Can you recite any poems? I played Hamlet once so I can recite some of the soliloquies, but I won't do that here. Um. I see we can find this poem here. I love this poem because it's so humble.

And I think you'll agree. It's beautiful. It is by Edgar Albert Guest. He says the happiest nights I ever know are those when I have no place to go and the Mrs. says when the day is through tonight, we haven't a thing to do. Oh, the joy of it and the peace untold of sitting round in my slippers old, with my pipe and book in my easy chair, knowing I needn't go anywhere, needn't hurry my evening meal nor force the smiles that I do not feel, but can grab a book from a nearby shelf and

drop all sham and be myself. Oh, the charm of it and the comfort rare, nothing on earth with it can compare. And I'm sorry for him who doesn't know the joy of having no place to go. Sam Gamgee said that in three words at the end of The Lord of the Rings when he comes back to his family after all these adventures. Well, I'm back, he said. I when I finished that final three paragraphs, I had to excuse myself from those I was reading it to and locked myself in my closet to weep.

Yes, because it's the end. Tolkien himself says, I disagree with most of the critics who criticize my work, but I must agree with one criticism of it. It's far too short. It was that it was too short, perhaps. But it was it was it was the coming home. That bit about Frodo standing at the shore and the lapping of the water seeking, seeking deep into his heart and, uh, uh, Sam riding home and, uh, and seeing the light inside.

That was what it was. And he, and this is the word and he was expected that broke my heart. Yes. Yes. Yeah. As Gandalf says, not, not all tears are tears of sorrow And even death can be a joy, but it's a strange joy, paradoxical joy, joy through the sorrow, through the loss. I have a friend who's dying right now.

She has cancer's come back and I've got my family asking me to pray for her. But I don't know. I kind of feel like what am I praying for here? That she'd be reconciled to God and die. Praying that the angels do their job and carry them to heaven. That's right. But, um, it feels like sometimes people are expecting us to be praying for cures and certainly God can bring that about. But I don't know, like at some point, the faith is not a spiritual technology. It's not a how to do it.

They not a, uh, not a press the right buttons and you'll get your miracle. Right, and I know it's about abandoning all to divine providence, but if I heard next week or next month that you were sick, I don't know if I'd be praying for your healing. I'd be like, God, do what you need to do.

Bring him close to you, help him to repent of his sin and to love you more than he ever has. Prepare him for death. Health is a good, and you should pray for the sick that they recover. God doesn't like suffering for his own sake, but he uses it for higher reasons. Health is here for happiness and happiness is here for holiness. So those are three levels, all of which are good, but the lower two are means to the end of the highest one. What was it like being interviewed by Jordan Peterson? That was a lot of fun.

How did that come about? I had a student who knew Peterson and respected him and thought that this would be a match made in heaven. And it was he's my second favorite interviewer after you. You should have him on your show. He's a polymath. He's on the verge of faith. He's got the content there,

but not the personal God behind it. I heard somebody say recently, he believes in the crucifixion, but not the resurrection, which might be why he's so eloquent in talking of suffering. Well, I think he believes in the crucifixion But maybe not in the one who's crucified that that I thou relationship that specifically religious as distinct from Mythological or theological dimension I think is still missing but I think it's coming It must be difficult being in his shoes where every conceivable religious group is vying for your attention and allegiance.

I admire him for keeping his honesty and humility in that. He's enormous popularity. Yeah. When did you first hear of him? I don't know. Various people. Yeah. And then what is it that you saw or read that impressed you? Because you said that to him in the interview, that that you've appreciated his work or something to that of his honesty, his realism, yeah, his insistence on. Not shifting responsibility to

society or ideologies or anything else, but taking responsibility for your mind and for your life. It's like a father to a teenager who's dreaming too much. And he's very intelligent. He's read all the right books. I mean, I watched the first 20 minutes. It was the first conversation that I wished he'd spoken less because I wanted to hear more of what you had to say. What was your favourite part of that conversation? His admission that he has not made the transition from mythology to religion,

from a philosophical appreciation and personal assimilation of the values of Christianity to belief that Christ is the Lord and the Savior and the master of his soul. Christ's ideas are already mastering his soul, but not his person, I think. I think that's inevitable though. Why? Because he's on the right path. Once you're totally honest with yourself, you're sliding down in a certain direction and it may be a,

a twisty and turny sort of water slide and you might even fall off the slide, but you're going to get back on again and eventually you'll get into that pool and there's only one pool at the bottom. Did you get much feedback from folks? Yeah, they all liked it. Are you an intentional, uh, uh, I was going to say Luddite, but that might sound a little, I was going to say Luddite, but that might sound a little. Do you intentionally withdraw from technology? Of course, of course.

We all withdraw from areas of life that conquer us rather than that we can conquer. No, we don't. Sometimes we are willing to be conquered if it'll just shut up my desire for something better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I want you to lose yourself in social media or technology as a way of kind of not existing for a while. If you don't like yourself, that's helpful. Of course. And my students find it extremely difficult to, uh, uh, to do what Pascal suggests, you know,

spend an hour alone with yourself without any diversions or distractions. It's terrifying. But I think this is a relatively benign disease in me. They The whole of technology drives me mad but not that mad I've never met anybody that doesn't have one rather Strong is too weak a word Remarkable defect and one remarkable talent. I mean, even the most ordinary people are better than most people at something and worse than most people at something.

I'm good at writing books and I'm terrible at using machines. Okay. So it's not even a temptation for you to have to put energy into resist. You just don't care for it or don't understand it and therefore don't care for it. Yeah. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll use it and I'll, I'll, you know, master it in so far as I have to, but no more than that.

I can't imagine why people are in love with abstract things like algorithms or metal things like computers instead of, instead of real things like a cat that can come up and rub against you and say I love you in a catty way. What do you do on a day off? What does your day look like? There's no one answer to that question. I respond to needs around me. And if there's nothing more pressing to do, and there's good surf, which is very rare in the East, I'll go surfing. I haven't done that in quite a while. I've been to the beach only once all summer.

And if there's nothing more pressing to do, I'll go to my laptop and do another chapter in a book. I enjoy doing that because I, well, succeed. I think I do a fairly good job at it. And I don't mind doing household stuff, cooking and cleaning and puttering and whatnot, yeah. Well, what if God said to you, I'd like you to tell me exactly what you'd like

for just one day, and you're not allowed to say whatever you will, God. You have to come up with the perfect day at this stage in your life. What would that look like? He would not say, I'm not allowed to say what Thomas Aquinas said. Only yourself, Lord.

I know, but I wanna, I guess, okay, well, what I'm asking is, what would a perfect, okay, perfect, okay, you're gonna have to allow. OK, well, what I'm asking is what what would a perfect, like a perfect, OK, you're going to have to allow. OK, God, turn me into Kelly Slater and give me a 20 foot wave. Yeah. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older, but my ideal days involve sitting constantly and talking with people and reading. And well, my ideal day would would include what I'm doing right now, interviewing with you. Well, thanks. I remember the first time I had you on the show.

I was really nervous to speak to you. What? Yeah, that's ridiculous. Yeah. I'm nervous to speak to most, uh, interviewers. Uh, I'm you deal with that. I'm not nervous to speak to you because because there's no time pressure. That helps, don't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the goal. I mean, that's why I like to chat for a long time, because usually it takes about half hour to get into a conversation.

But what I like about you and it's impressive to me, it's not a compliment. You don't have to get your defenses up. Is that many people who are older than, say, like 50 or 40 and 50, who've been on the speaking circuit have their answers. They have their ways of answering questions. And the ways that they answer them are very good. And that's why they keep saying the same thing. But I like having to just have a conversation with nothing planned.

Well, I think ADD is a blessing in disguise from God because I get bored with myself. Yeah. So I don't like packaged answers. Yeah. When I teach a given course, if I teach it 12 times, I'll teach 12 different courses. I won't teach the same course. Okay. What's your favorite course to give?

Even though of course, of course, I'm always a philosopher. Biggie pardon. A course on one great philosopher, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal. I thought you said one great philosopher. One at a time. Oh, I always go deeply into a single. Wow. I think the best course I ever taught was the first time I taught Augustine's confessions. I've taken three courses on Kierkegaard, two by experts, one by an amateur. The amateur was by far the best. So at this point I was an amateur about Augustine.

I just reread the Confessions in the right translation, jeez, for the first time, fell in love with it, wanted to teach a course on it, even though I was far from an expert on it. And I got 12 students in a seminar who were also in love with August and the little bits of it that they knew. And we just went through the confessions, nothing else. We didn't even finish the confessions. We got up to book 10, I think.

And I think it was the best course I ever taught because the students asked for the privilege of writing journals instead of learned papers. And I said, wonderful idea. Every single journal was at least 200 pages long. Cracky. They really got into Augustine. I hope you didn't have to read all of that. I did.

I enjoyed it. Did you? I can speed read. Can you? I heard somebody, it was Brian Regan, who said he's been getting really, his speed reading has increased but his comprehension has plummeted. Well that usually is the compensation. But with student papers that's all right. If a student's brilliant on page two

they're usually going to be brilliant throughout the thing and you can skip around. Oh yeah. What annoys you in papers, students' papers? Predictability. Merely factual interest. Someone was born in such and such and he became, yeah, okay, go, let me see your mind. How many books are you working on right now? A couple at once. One of them is an introduction to philosophy for beginners by the use of the Socratic method. Oh excellent. And I'm going to write one comparing the two greatest novels ever written, The Brothers Karamazov and The Lord of the Rings,

Finding Common Things. I agree those are the two best books ever written, The Brothers Karamazov and The Lord of the Rings, Finding Common Kinsman. I agree those are the two best books ever written. I think I would have said that too. And Finding Commonalities in the two. Oh, I'm interested now. Yeah, can I ask to give some of that away or do you want to hold on to all that? One of them is a Russian word, Zoboronost, which is usually translated universality or the cosmic dimension of divine providence, we are each responsible for all somehow.

Yes, yes. That was one of the few ideas that radically changed my mind simply by reading a novel. Dostoevsky didn't prove it to me, he showed it to me in the Brothers Karamazov. And you see it throughout The Lord of the Rings, too. Well, how is Father Zosima who says this? Isn't he? Yeah, forget the context or who he says it to. But yes, Alyosha, perhaps. But how how is that displayed?

How did how did Dostoevsky show that in the novel that we're responsible for? Mainly by Alyosha, who practices it. He is an angel. Yeah. In vocation. An angel means messenger. And he doesn't do much. He's a very ordinary person and nothing very spectacular, but he just talks to people. And he's the oil in the pistons that makes everybody else's engine run. Mason Harkness What's so beautiful about Alyosha is how he treats, at least in the beginning and throughout the book, how he treats his father with,

he doesn't judge him. Yes. He doesn't seem to judge anybody. He doesn't idealize him, but he simply doesn't judge him. Yeah. And Dostoevsky's letters show that he was working on a sequel to the Brothers Karamazov. He died before he could do it. And Aliosha was going to marry Lisa

Okay, and have a very Troubled life interesting well That's that's another way in which Alyosha isn't the obvious hero at least the way in which we might write a story today in that he even just leaves the monastery and Marries the cripple Lisa well Dostoevsky says in his preface that Alyosha is a very strange hero. He is my hero. Yeah.

But he's a very ordinary man and yet he's eccentric, which means that eccentricity is ordinary. And most of us who are not eccentric are extraordinary for lacking that. Where is eccentricity? Let me, let me grab it. I'm going to grab, I'm going to grab. Okay. You keep talking.

I'm going to grab the Dostoevsky's book over here. Good. One thing I was thinking while you were talking about teaching courses on single philosophers, it's kind of a, you know, basic question, but what would you say your top three are and why, if you had to pick? Top three philosophers, top three books,

top three courses? Top three philosophers of the day. Of the day, what do you mean? Well, I mean just today, what would you pick? Do you mean who lived today or? No, no, just in general, top three. In other words, if an intelligent student who had never read any philosophy before came to me

and said, tell me three philosophers I should read in order to cope with the issues of today. Sorry, I shouldn't have said today. I just meant to put like a levity to it. So like not for your life, what would you choose as your absolute favorite philosopher? Just kind of like, which ones do you like? If I could have the complete works of A, B, and C

and I did it for the rest of my life, who would I be? Well, I'd start with Plato. The dialogues of Plato are the place to begin. I knew Thomas Aquinas, who is the greatest philosopher of all time. And I think I do Augustine because he's the total head and the total heart combined as no one else has ever combined them. Is that section in the brothers? And it kind of speaks to what we've been addressing right

about this desire for heaven now and not being able to get it and maybe wanting to kamikaze all the cherished relationships you have in order to find what doesn't exist. Who's that's that's also Tolstoy Anna Karenina is a perfect example of that. I said to this last summer at half of it and got bored. Which is my fault, clearly, I'm not blaming Tolstoy, in case anyone's wondering. Yes. Who's the fella who's

I forget the brother because I haven't read this in a few years who wants Grushenko? Well, of course, Fedor wants Grushenko. Yes, but and Dmitry wants Grushenko. OK, well, I just want to read this to you.

I'd love you to comment on it because this is one of the most beautiful parts in all the brothers for me that breaks my heart, right with sinking soul. He waited every moment for Grushenko's decision and kept thinking that it would occur as if unexpectedly by inspiration. Suddenly she would tell him take me, I'm yours forever. And it would all be over. He would snatch her up and take her to the end of the world at once. Oh, at once take her far away as far as possible. If not to the end of the world, then somewhere to the end of Russia, marry her there and settle down with her incognito

so that no one would know anything about them. Not here, not there, not anywhere. Then, oh, then a totally new life would begin at once. He dreamed of the other, this renewed and now virtuous life. It must, it must be virtuous, ceaselessly and feverishly. He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. The vile bog he had gotten stuck in of his own will burdened him too much, and like a great many men in such cases, he believed most of all in a change of place.

If it only if it weren't for these people, if only it weren't for these circumstances, if only if only one could fly away from this cursed place, then everything would be reborn. That was what he believed in and what he longed for. Isn't that just gorgeous and the human experience and idiotic and lovely all at once? Yes. And Dostoevsky's exaggerated characters, like Flannery O'Connor's grotesqueries, show us ourselves there. We see our own Dmitri, we see our own Alyosha, we see our own Ivan, we see our own Theodore, as Theodore Dostoevsky saw. This is why he named his villain after himself.

Give me that book a minute, I want to find the passage in the introduction where he's talking about eccentricity. Something I was thinking about Demetri is, cause they do end up, not to spoil, but they end up Kind of going off together except he's being sent off. I think in in a prison train. That's right She's being sent off to free him. So I think that Maybe this is reading too much into it

But I think it's funny that their epilogue is kind of like well now they're off somewhere together either in prison or you know Living their dream life. Okay okay like after they're kind of is that the epilogue is that when they is not I'm saying are they in Siberia at the end is that I'm always guys sometimes get crime and punishment mixed up did he get sent to Siberia it leaves me it leaves him being sent to Siberia but uh Grushenko is going after him yeah with a plan to free him from the prison, I believe. Yeah. Remembering that, right? And like Socrates in prison, they bribe the guards and arrange for him to be freed.

And he does not accept it. Oh, really? I don't remember that part. Hmm. I think there's that scene. I like this thing about eccentricity, because all of Dostoevsky's characters are eccentric. Starting out on the biography of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some perplexity, namely that while I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, still I myself know that he is by no means a great man. So that I can see the inevitable questions such as what is notable about your Alexei Fyodorovich, that you choose him for your hero. What has he really done? To whom is he known? For what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the

facts of his life? One thing perhaps is rather doubtless, he is a strange man, even an odd one. But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and finding at least some general sense in the general senselessness, whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case, is not not so, odd man out. Now, if you do not agree with this last point, and if you reply not so or not always, then perhaps I shall take heart concerning the significance of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich.

For not only is an odd man not always a particular and isolated case, but on the contrary, it sometimes happened that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his age have, for some reason, been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind. Here are two examples of odd people,

Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. There was a book written by Max Picard after the war, published in 1945, I believe, entitled The Hitler in Ourselves. If you don't see the potentiality for Hitler in you, there's something wrong with you. If you don't see the potentiality and the need for Christ, we're destined to be little Christ. What I said a moment ago about I don't trust any man who's been married for 15 minutes who doesn't feel the temptation at times to blow the whole thing up. Yes, yes. And I've said that and people have been very offended at that, like as if I must not love my wife. But it's just what

you're saying there. Like, yeah, you have a Hitler in you. I have no temptation to blow my wife or children up, but I have a temptation to blow things up. I have this dream of taking an axe and starting with every computer destroying it and laughing and then doing the same to the house. You know, I'm not that good a carpenter or a plumber or anything. And then to the whole of civilization. That's a very dark dream. It doesn't come to hating people, but it comes to hating the limitations of the things that do not fulfill my dreams.

So I understand that Dimitri passage that you just read. There's got to be an ideal world. No, there isn't. You'd be bored with it. It's impossible, it's impossible to imagine heaven. Yeah. Because of the problem of boredom. Absolutely. Make a list of all the things you want to be in heaven done all the things you don't want to be in heaven imagine getting it how long before you're bored not very long. Like five years if I get breaks in between naps. I actually do find Socrates is response to his friends comforting when they talk about the afterlife, especially

the bit about should there be nothing at all? Maybe I'm not supposed to feel this way as a Christian, but okay, if there is nothing, and he says in the dialogue that it would just be like a dreamless sleep, and who doesn't like that? Something to that effect. I didn't get that reaction. I was disappointed by that. I don't want to sleep. I want to be awake. Dreamless, yeah, that's good.

Dreams, dreams are an alternative to reality. But sleep is an image of death, and death is our last enemy. Christ transforms it into our friend. It's like he converts Gollum. Dr. Kreeft, what's your favorite platonic dialogue? The Gorgias. Okay, and then why? First time I taught that, I had a student who said that that dialogue changes life. He was going to go into some prestigious profession for the money and the power, and that persuaded

him to fundamentally change his values. The Gorgias is basically the argument of the Republic without all the political details. And absurdities. Which is the Republic's weakness. So I think the Gorgias is an even better dialogue than the Republic. What about you? Is that the one with the, I forget the word, but the fake philosophers that were around? The Sophists, yes. The Sophists were around... Vesavis, yes.

Yeah, Vesavis. Yes, Vesavis. Vesavis, right. And he says that rhetoric is the supreme thing in life because you can get people to do whatever you want by persuasion. You don't even have to use a physical force, which is the genius of Machiavelli, too. Machiavelli understood for the first time the power of propaganda, a kind of spiritual warfare without relying on the military. And it's a kind of proto-Nichian will to power,

but a kind of intellectual power rather than just physical power. And I think it's in the Gordias too where Socrates says it is better to be on the receiving end of injustice and to lack that power than to do injustice and to have it. A hundred percent. Yeah. That's so evident. Most of us don't believe that. We go to movies and we're not shocked by sin, we're shocked by suffering. But God is not shocked by that. He uses suffering to deter us from sin. Well, I've heard you say before, right, that our problem is with moral evil more than it

is with physical evil. And if you want proof of that, what would you rather your father doing the torturing or your father being tortured? That's an appeal to the deep heart. But on the surface, it's suffering that bothers the most. If sin bothers more than it did, we would do less of it. That's a great succinct way of putting it. Go see any movie where there's a lot of both kinds of evil and people are not shocked by the sins, they're shocked by the sufferings.

Yeah. Matt, do you have a favorite dialogue minds the Plato to answer your question or the Republic to answer your question I really like the last several dialogues so I like the apology and what follows from that yeah the apologies a masterpiece yeah and I have one here like Fado mm-hmm yeah that last scene in the Fado, after all the arguments are over, and the arguments are very clever, but I don't think they're very persuasive.

When you see Socrates die, that's the supreme argument for life after death. Because when the idea of Socrates and the idea of death meet in your mind in that death scene, when the two confront each other, Socrates in this corner, death in that corner. Socrates doesn't change, meaning of death changes. And that's what happened with the resurrection too, although there it leaked out into the physical world. I like that leaked out. He says, the world perhaps does not see that those who rightly engage in philosophy study only dying

and death. The philosopher releases his soul from communion with his body so far as he can beyond all other men. I think this he means while we're in life. Well the word body is the wrong word there. Passions, egotistic desires, that's the thing we have to die to. And every religion in the world has some version of that mystical death to the ego. That's very impressive.

I mean, even Buddhism, which has no God, no life after death and no soul, insists on dying to egotism. Have you been following or do you try not to follow? You know, church drama, German bishops trying to push sodomy and things like this? I don't try to follow it, but it follows me. It follows me. And, and I think that, uh, Sism would be a wonderful thing. Get rid of the dirty fruit, drop it from the tree.

I mean, that's, it's totally self-destructive. I Don't mean this to be racist but some bad things have come out of Germany beginning with the enlightenment figures and obviously fascism And Marx of course was German So both the left and the right were tearing us apart, emerged from similar sources. But it's almost funny in a Monty Python sort of way. I thought it was a joke when they had a synod on synodality.

That's like having a meeting about having meetings. Turtles all the way down. A committee on committees. Oh God, I couldn't think of anything worse. So you've written one book of fiction. Do you tinker with fiction even if it's not for publication? I love fiction. I love reading it more than even I love philosophy because life is fiction. Life is narrative at least. But no, I will never write another novel. It took 20 years.

Yeah. What about a short story pseudo mystical one in the appendix to one of my early books. I think it's Heaven the Heart's Deepest Longing, where nothing much happens externally, but something happens internally. But I don't expect ever to write successful fiction, fiction that people will like. I have no formula. I'm not a Stephen King. Yeah, he seems to have a formula. Have you ever read a novella by Dostoevsky called A Gentle Creature?

No, that destroyed me. So I'd love to get it for you and I'll send it to you. It's it's it. It opens with a dead woman on a card table and her husband bewildered at what she's just killed herself and it's made apparent on the first page, I'm not giving anything away. And he just recounts how they met and their life together

and how he distanced himself from her to try to earn her respect and punished her and how he just like ruined the relationship. And I have never cried the way I cried after I read that book. I don't know what it is with books. It's like every time I put a book down, I'm crying. You ever read The Road by... Oh, yes, Cormac McArthur. ...Destroyed me. Yes.

Yes. It was embarrassing how hard I cried at that book. Did you read his Sunset Limited? No. A black ex-con rescues a nihilist atheist overeducated professor from a suicide attempt. Oh, I've seen the movie. Yes. Sunset Limited. What's it called? The movie?

Sunset Limited. Yeah, you told me to watch that movie because I told you that I like movies with lots of dialogue. If there's not a lot of dialogue, I get bored. Yep. It's gonna be good dialogue Yep, and that sounds maybe a bit pretentious, but explosions in car chases bore the hell out of me. Yep. Yep, but I'm gripped Maybe that's why I like doing this like I find this way more engaging just talking and I Find movies that try to deal with philosophical or religious themes explicitly embarrassingly bad like my dinner with, which people rave about, I thought was as a philosopher, I thought it was really bad philosophy.

And I've seen movies, religious movies by Christians, where there's a lot of argument and it doesn't work in this one. It works because the personalities. Yeah, they didn't. I mean, the black is nothing but his faith. He has nothing else. And the other guy has everything else. Yeah. It's like Job arguing with, with Solomon and Ecclesiastes. And black is Job and the professor is Solomon. Yeah. And how much better is the book? It's, it's exactly the same. Oh, totally faithful movie. Oh, I see. So it's basically a script almost, almost never done. Wow. Which is also why I love Martin Scorsese's The Silence. Totally faithful to the

book. Very, very rare for a brilliant director. I tend to get, I think I've watched more movies where I've quit halfway through. Me too. Yeah. Worst movie I ever saw was the first version of The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi. If you want to get angry at artists, try it. Is that the strange animated one or is this a different? Yeah, the animated one.

However, the first version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was very well done, even though rather crude technologically. So here was my problem with the trilogy. And again, the problems I mentioned to you prior to the show, C.S. Lewis's trilogy, the space trilogy. Right. And just like my problem with Anna Karenina is clearly my problem, because it's Tolstoy. Same thing, I'm sure, here with Lewis.

Well, I sympathize with that. But even Dostoevsky and as well as Tolstoy They say too much and you have to have very great patience and a great memory to get through the book But once you're familiar with them the first time the second time around is always better That's why I recommend people read their novellas before their big work so that they can accustom themselves So the death of Ivan Ilyich is one of the most gorgeous absolute masterpiece I forced all of my children to make I read it to them on a beach trip over three nights. Yes. Yes. There's a

sunny Florida vacation. I was reading about a man dying and they were forced to listen to it. It's glorious that I've never seen death so well depicted. Yes. Yes. I would highly recommend everyone read that book now. Yeah. But what we're saying Dostoevsky. Too much CS CS those trilogy the problem with it again the problems me and I'd love you to show me how that's the case but I just don't like his fiction I like the line the witch in the wardrobe. I got a little bored with his other books of Narnia. Really? But this trilogy, I just, I had my elbows up against an looming allegory that I was sure was about to come. It just felt, I know he said that there's no allegory,

it's not a story of allegory, but it was hard not to see, okay, these are the angels and this is the fallen race. I just didn't like how on the nose. Well Tolkien didn't like it either, so you're in good company. And you can't argue about that kind of taste. It's like music. That's right, and that's okay. Not everybody has the same taste in music. So it's not a fault. It's just where you are.

Did you try Till We Have Faces, his best novel? I think you'd like that more. It's much more psychological, much more modern. His wife helped him write it, which is why it's so good. By the way, the best written book that I wrote was the one my wife helped me write. In fact, I sent it to, it was one on angels. I sent it to Ignatius Press and Father Fessio said, "'How come your style improves so much?'

No. I said, "'Do not.'" That's amazing. The best letter I think I've ever received was a letter from you after I had asked you to endorse a short book on atheism and you were back and went, this is very poorly written. You said, I enjoyed you listening to you. So I was surprised at how bad this was. Loved it. I don't know if you remember that letter, but it made my day.

Ah, there's a bit of a masochist in you then. Well, I'll take a beating from you. Other people, it may have offended me, but it was great because I rewrote it and sent it back to you and you actually endorsed it. Mm hmm. Yeah. On Boston, Boston College letterhead. I very much like writing. I like I like writing horror stories, little horror stories. Huh?

Who's your favorite horror writer? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know if I have a favorite horror writer. I like some of Lovecraft. I don't know if I have a favorite horror writer. I like some of Lovecraft. I really like Dracula Bram Stoker, the original one. At least until it gets to the epistolary back and forths So that first bit When he discovers who the Count is and him climbing down the wall like a spider and he encounters those women Elsewhere in the castle. That's terrifying.

I remember reading this to my wife and feeling afraid. I haven't really had that experience with a lot of books, but I, do you like Frankenstein? I didn't like that again. Surely it's my problem. He just seems super melancholic and I just found it like boring, sad. But maybe I should give it another shot. You can't argue about taste yeah have you read any Kafka no no you might like that it's a little long who's who's the William Shakespeare of ghost stories I've read some of these lately what is his bloody like Edgar Allan Poe no I like him but yeah Allen Poe? No, I like him, but. Yeah, I like Poe too.

Poe's a great poet. And then I love Flannery O'Connor. My kids like her. My kids say, read the one where that old woman gets shot in the chest and my wife bows her head and just in despair. And I'm like, all right, let's do it. Have you tried Walker Percy? I found him far too hung up on sex.

Yeah, yeah. It seemed like he had some sort of issue he was trying to work out. Try a series of essays called Lost in the Cosmos. Okay. It's the funniest philosophy book ever written. Really? It's a satire on pop psychology.

Okay. Well, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though written from a clearly atheistic point of view, is hilarious. So is Monty Python, especially the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail. What's one of your favorite lines or scenes? I think the killer rabbit or maybe the Holy Hand Grenade. Oh, my gosh. They had some brilliant things in there now, it's not it's just two halves of a coconut you're banging them together The Knights of Neat

Yes, bring me a strawberry. I think more people have memorized the lines of that movie than almost any other one Except the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I never watched that. Watched it once didn't like it that much. Where did that come from? Like this, it was almost like it was just making fun of everything. Yeah, but it made fun of everything in a brilliant way. I mean, sometimes it didn't.

But like, for example, is this right room for an argument? Like, that's really clever and funny. Or that scene in The Life of Brian where that God is? Correcting his the graffiti artists or the grief of ephetic Latin. Yeah, that's brilliant and the crucifixion scene We're just freaking pop psychology to the time always look on that one Is it was that it was in Jesus some people think the movie is blasphemous I don't think so. It's not a satire in Christianity satire and modern pop psychology. Yeah, there are two Three times I've fallen out of my chair laughing

At movies and and one of them. I remember where I was when all right. I am the Messiah now Fell out of my chair and couldn't get up you like doctor strange love I don't know if I've watched that's one of the funniest movies ever made Peter Sellers plays three parts it's about new it's about the end of the world through a nuclear. I'm so excited. You told me this Dr. Strangelove, let's see if he said dr. Crave Have you heard the original ending for that movie? No, so the planned ending for that movie was for everyone in the in the hall to have a pie fight with each other as An analogy and they changed it at the very last minute because of I think it was the assassination

Or no, what was it? Something to do with the president. They didn't want to make the presidency look bad or something like that. So they changed it at the last minute, but I love that ending. I wish they'd kept that or found some way to put it back in. I like the ending in the movie. How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Yes. And you'd recommend I watch this. Oh yes.

It's, it's, it's, I'm so excited. Tell me some good movies. I'm so tired of turning on a movie and to get. Well, I think my favorite movie of all time. Other than Dumb and Dumber. I'm sure. Well, that's that's that's that's truly funny. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Jim Carrey is a genius.

I think you've told me. His man for all seasons. A man for all seasons. That's an excellent. Liar Liar is one of the funniest movies ever made. Yeah. A fish called Wanda is. Yeah, that is quite funny.

I've been watching Hitchcock lately. Liar is one of the funniest movies ever made. Yeah. A fish called Wanda is quite funny. I've been watching Hitchcock lately. I think I've kind of exhausted what I like in him. I've watched like Rope. The movie was excellent. Back window. I think it was called rear window. Yeah, rear window. Thank you.

But I tried watching birds. Everyone said that was great. I didn't like that. I think Vertigo is his best. Yeah, that's what I've heard, but I didn't seem to like that either there's something haunting about that I just watched Armadaeus hmm that was quite good excellent yeah I like um I think, um... What's the Bergman movie with the Antonius Block the Knight who comes back from the Crusades and faces death?

Mm-mm. Ah... Don't know. I'm not a big movie person, I've got to say. I think movies are like science fiction. Most of them are trash. But when when you get a good one, you get a very good one. Ever read A Man for All Seasons?

I'm sorry. I've read a Canticle for Leibowitz. But I'm so glad you asked that because I've I've tried reading it. I've read the first two chapters and I want to keep reading it because everyone has been telling me to read this book've read the first two chapters and I want to keep reading it because everyone has been telling me to read this book. Only the first two chapters? Yeah, I just, you know, again, more about me than the book. I just lost interest.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's like reading the Lord of the Rings and stopping on page 50 where all you know is how the hobbits live in the Shire. All right. So read it. Well, let me let me motivate you to do so. Yeah, the protagonist who is a rather dull person dies on page 70 or something and the book is 200 pages long. Mm-hmm

So what get to at least that yes, all right And it's a philosophy of history, it's almost allegorical. All right, I'll read it. C.S. Lewis said it's the greatest science fiction novel ever written. Oh, wow. When was it written? Like 60s, 70s? In the 60s, the author, who was a troubled young man,

he reminds me of Cormac McCarthy, a very dark person. I think he committed suicide He he wrote it in reparation for bombing Monte casino He was an aviator in World War two and he dropped some of the bombs on the monastery Wow, I didn't realize that And then I've been reading just a bad fiction that I enjoy lately. I just, I know it sounds like a contradicting myself, but there's a particular kind of series of cyberpunk noir type books that are like nothing to write home about, but they pass

the time and I've been enjoying that. Are you bored? Why are you reading? I'm not bored. Stuff that you don't really love. Um, I don't, I think it's kind of like a candy. It's like candy. It's like, I can't, I can't live off this, but there's something attractive. There's something attractive about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's written from a first person perspective, which I really like. Any good TV shows around? Have you watched any of the Lord of the Rings? I hear it's terrible. Well, the movie was, was, well, the movie was, I thought it was fine, but the Amazon series has been released.

I watched the first half hour and I thought that the the technology was beautiful stunningly beautiful like talking but it wasn't talking it lacked his philosophy I said where is talking in this it's a totally different content yeah and that I was I was really surprised when there was that transgender Muslim abortion Dr. Hob. I don't remember that in the books. I didn't get that. That was a joke. A terrible joke. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm such is our day that we take that seriously. That's right. No, any good shows? Do you and your wife, what do you do to spend time together? Do you watch a show?

Yeah, usually the BBC or Masterpiece Theatre. Masterpiece Theatre, I don't know what that is. They have some good things. Grant Chester is a very well done... Grant Chester. Okay, That's a TV show about a, um, an English cleric and his, um, detective friend. Any good? Uh, Doc Martin is very good. It's, uh, uh, it's quirky. If you like, uh, Doc Martin, like the shoes.

Oh, it's about British as well as it. Yeah. Do you ever watch the show Keeping Up Appearances? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wasn't that delightful? Yeah. You know, there's a funny one on now. It's very shallow, but but's funny, called Upstart Crow. It's a satire on Shakespeare. Okay. Anything?

Anything come to mind? I think you'll like it. If you like Monty Python. Upstart Crow. You know what else was X-L? I remember laughing a lot back in the day. It was Blackadder. Don't know that.

You don't remember Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie? Oh, that was a kind of classic BBC. Uh, I think it was, must've been after Laurie, Peter Laurie's son. I don't know. He Peter Laurie did a lot of black horror. Okay.

Yeah. The 30s. Yeah. Black Adder. I'm saying Black Adder. Yeah. Yeah. It's a scary TV show.

No, it's, it's a, it's a comedy and it takes place in different parts of history. It's like a kind of medieval period and maybe World War II period. Something like 1066 and all that. Okay, I'm not sure. That's a very funny take on Western history. Jeeves and Wooster. Oh, oh yes. I mean, that's incredible comedy right there.

Yes. Even my children love it. Yeah. I'll read it to them. That's so funny. Ever a Jesus Worcester? I would recommend everyone read Jesus Worcester. Yeah, that's brilliant writing. Let's take a break. And when we come back, you know what a meme is? I know what I know what the word means, but I can't identify one.

I'm going to show you several memes for you to respond to that you haven't seen ahead of time. Some might be offensive, but hopefully not too offensive. I like that. Good. All right. Thanks. I like question and answer. Hey, you there looking at me. You want the number one Catholic app on the app stores is hello. H a l l o w it's a prayer and meditation app, which is faithful to the teachings of the Catholic church and is incredibly well produced. Go check them out. Hello.com slash Matt.

Two T's. Um, link is in the description below. If you go and download it on your phone, um, you got to start paying a small amount every month, but if you go to hello.com slash Matt, you can sign up and you'll get three months for free. It has sleep stories. One thing you might want to do, especially if you're a parent, they have sleep stories for kids. And so getting to play scripture to kids is super cool. Also, all of my lo-fi stuff is now over there. I'm just not interested in Matt, because I can't listen to your voice on that.

Well, you could. Is that is that the setup? Again, you can. I don't know why you'd want to. But if you want to terrify yourself, I mean, if you're speaking of sibling horror, this is far more creepy. If you want to listen to me, read the Bible to you like this. And, you know, I wouldn't want that.

Scott also does. Yeah. So forget about me. Scott Hans there, Jason Everett, Jackie Francois. So go go check him out. Hello.com slash Matt. Hello. H a l l o w dot com slash Matt. It's fantastic. And next, I want to say thank you to parlor.

You guys have heard about parlor. It is social media the way it was meant to be. I'm over on Parla. So if you click the link in the description below, you can go see my profile and sign up over there. Being on Parla means freedom from reach affecting algorithms and shadow bands. Actually, one thing that's interesting is when I post

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We're always posting the videos we're putting here. Parla knows what it's like to be canceled. They've been there, but they rose from the ashes, never wavering in their free speech mission. The reason is simple. They say that everyone's voices matter. So all on Parla are equal regardless of race, age, religion, politics or dietary

choices. I don't know if that includes pineapple pizza, but yeah, it's not just like a conservative platform. It's just a, it's a platform for people who value free speech. So go check them out by clicking the link in the description below and I'll see you over there. So I'm going to go ahead and start the video. So So Alright, we're back. Alright, so I know it's early, but it is Saturday. That's when it keeps for anything, right? Yes. And you were saying last time, because I had that abominable peanut butter beer, I think it was, or sweet baby Jesus Something is what it was called. And you said, why would you drink that?

Yes. And I said, I don't know. But I wish I hadn't brought it out. So maybe you are a messiest holiday ale. Save that for later. Beer is too filling right now. I think I'll just pass on that. Yep. But we have two whiskeys. Which do you like a more peteer whiskey?

Yep. Petey This is lag of own. This is my favorite Hmm. It tastes like drinking a campfire with salt water mixed in somehow Well, that's not that's not Petey a campfire with what about if it was burning Pete? Oh, if you're burning. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, when I drank like a villain, I remember thinking this is the greatest thing I've. Do you like it? Yes, I do. The most pity of all single bullets, goshotches has an O in it.

What? LeFrogue. Oh, LeFrogue. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what is a meme? Well, I think meme may have been termed by Dawkins. Do you want to tell us what it is?

Since you seem to know? Is a meme a theme? Is it a sentence? Is it a paragraph? Is it an argument? Is it a fact? What is a meme? It's like, I would liken it to like a genre

or like a form of media. So like a movie, a film versus like a novel or a novella. So it's an artistic genre. Yeah, somewhat. Essentially, though, it's it's just how is it distinguished from other genres like like a poem. It is generally a visual it's a visual medium. It's generally a image with some kind of text attached, and usually a joke.

An image with a text attack. It's usually an image with some kind of text attached and usually a joke. An image with a text attached. It's usually an image with some kind of text. If I- It sounds like an advertisement. How about I show you, I'll show you about eight and then you tell me what you think they are and whether you think they're funny. So what we're gonna do,

people are gonna see what I'm showing you on the screen. Can you throw that up? Yeah. And just make sure it's working. Look good. All right. So I'm going to turn this this way for you to look at. Yeah. It was good to go and I.

Oh, okay. A visual joke. Yeah. All right. Is that. That working again? Sorry about that. We're back up.

All right. So it says, did you know the symbol M in McDonald's represents the first letter of McDonald's, which is M. That's supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be funny because it's clearly not funny and it's just wasted your time. That's why it's funny. I see. All right. All right. Another one.

The guy at the church in Galatia who was circumcised the day before Paul's letter arrived. That is funny. OK, that I get. OK, so a meme is a joke. Yeah. But it's usually coupled with a visual image that's taken from... It's almost like that is a face.

I don't know what that face is saying, but it is the perfect depiction of disappointment. Yes. You know? So when I saw that, this is one of the few memes that I actually laughed out loud to, as opposed to just blowing air out of my nose gently. Yes. My son, several times throughout the day, said, dad, why are you laughing? So I think that's so far my all time favorite. I mean, I pay,

I posted this on Facebook and Scott Hahn responded and said, I don't think he'd be standing up. Something. Yeah. All right. Okay. Oh, this one's really small, but Matt Walsh says, why did the trans man eat only salads? And the fellow who's dressed up like a sheila says, Don't say it. And Matt says he was a her before. All right. Next one. Puns, the lowest form of that.

Read that. Read that out loud. Just speak into the microphone if you could, just so we can. The man in armor says, look what I invented, and he's holding up a loaf of bread, and what looked like a woman in a gown, says that's the best thing since ripped up bread. And it is in fact ripped up bread. So it's not funny, and it's funny. that's sliced bread yes right you know people see something they say that's the best thing since last bread yeah well before when they actually made sliced bread the only thing you could compare it to was ripped up bread all right another one wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute is the joke the contrast or the identity between sliced and ripped up? I'm I think it's funny because.

A common phrase is it's the best thing since sliced bread. And so you want to go before sliced bread. The best thing you had was ripped up bread. Oh, so it's the contrast. Yes, ripped up bread and sliced bread. OK, I misinterpreted. OK, got you. Another one. I admit that it's funny Okay. I misinterpreted. Okay. Gotcha. Another one. I admit that it's funny, but I'm not laughing.

That's okay. Lord of the Rings. And then Lord of the Rings, but Legolas has a sniper rifle. Instead of a bow and arrow. Well, they put Legolas on a skateboard in that scene in volume two, where he sails down.

Yeah. Come on. That's really funny. Yeah. Legolas was not, I think, a very successful character. Very hard to do elves. Yeah. He was, he was much too human. And he looked like one of the Backstreet Boys.

Yeah. Yeah. He was well, but they're probably going for a more feminine look to try to make him seem otherworldly or something. All right. Next one. Hey, says King Henry VIII. Can I divorce my wife? The Pope. No, that's bad.

OK, watch this. The Church of England. That is funny. What we want that font. There's something about that font that says the Church of England. And I just find it. The Church of Henry's Wormwood. This we call it.

Yeah, that is funny. All right. I don't know how many I got left. I think that's it. Well, there's one more that's particularly offensive. I'll find that to share with you. But yeah, the old, these are good. You're allowed to tell offensive jokes on this show. I don't know how long I'll be here.

This isn't that good, but John Lennon, imagine there's no heaven. God, imagine there's no John Lennon. Yes, that's like God is dead. So I need you to choose that side. And you might find this one funny. Not speaking English at mass. Check the connection matters. Traditionalists and charismatic's coming together.

Oh yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Shall we share some tasteless jokes? Oh, sure. Let's do that. You can take it off. Why don't cannibals eat vegetables? Why? They can't digest their wheelchairs.

Oh, yes. That's the most tasteless joke I know. I told Neil a joke prior to the interview that was so tasteless that I would never repeat it on air, so I'll have to tell you that one after. All right. All right, let's see. So this fella somehow owns an elephant and he's trying to raise some money, and so he decides to put out a challenge. He says, if you can make this elephant jump, I'll give you a million dollars.

But it costs you, say, a thousand dollars to step up, to try to make him jump. And so people come from all over to try to make this elephant jump. They pay their money. But of course, no one can make him jump until one day this red Ferrari drives in and this fella hops out of the car and he he pulls out a crowbar. He walks up to the elephant and smacks him in the balls. And the elephant jumps and so he gets a million dollars. And the other fella's out of money and he's really despondent and he's wondering what

other kind of test that he can come up with. And so he says, well, how about this? Elephants actually are incapable of moving their head from left to right. I don't know if you know that. That's a fact. Look it up. They can only kind of go up and down. So he says, well, if you can make my elephant turn his head left and right, I will give

you a million dollars. And people line up and he's beginning to make his money back when lo and behold, the fella in the red Ferrari shows up and he comes out with his crowbar and he says to the elephant, you remember me? The elephant says, he says, you want me to do that again? I've been told by an Arab about how you brick a camel. What does that mean? Well, camels can imbibe a lot of water for a long trip across the desert. And the more water is in his tank, the longer the trip can be and the more profitable. So when the Arabs take their

camels to the oasis and have them drink water, they fill their stomachs and they get an extra gallon by bricking the camel. With a brick in the right hand and a brick in the left hand, they sneak up behind the camel and squeeze its genitals. And the camel goes, sucks up another gallon of water. I like it. You know the definition of a camel? No. A horse designed by a committee. That's good.

Yeah, I have heard that. This fella comes home from a day of golf and his wife says, how was golf today? And he says, well, it was all right, but Gary died on the second, second green. She said, that's terrible. That's not the worst part from the for the rest of the day. It was hit the ball, drag, Gary, drag, Gary, drag, Gary. That's good. I'm probably you and I have done this before, so I don't know if I know any more jokes that you would have heard.

I told this one recently, so if everyone else can forgive me who's heard it, but, and you stop me if you have, this fella shows up at a baseball game and he makes his way through the crowd and he takes a seat with his popcorn and his Coke and he's getting ready for the game and all of a sudden from up in the bleachers he hears someone shout out, hey Wayne! He's not sure who it is so he stands up and he looks around he scours the bleachers but he can't see who it is so he sits down several minutes go by hey Wayne! He's a little frustrated at this point he stands up he's looking for the life of him he cannot spot the guy.

A few minutes go by, hey, Wayne, and the guy had had enough. And he stands up and he turns around and he shouts up to the bleachers. My name isn't Wayne. That's the end of the joke. Yeah. Oh, that's hilariously funny. Yeah, I can tell you liked it. Oh, it has broken my heart. You know, what's good about the joke, I think, is that, and it comes back to like

GK Cheston in orthodoxy where he talks about people don't care about you. Like, why do you think everyone's looking at you? No one cares. That kind of idea, right? Where Wayne thinks the world's revolving around him and he thinks he's being summoned, but it, and that's actually supposed to be funny. Well, I found it funny, yeah. I like that joke. What's funny about it?

Is it an anti-joke, is that why? No, I don't think so. I think it's... Honestly, I think you told it a lot better the last time you told it on the show, so everyone can go back to that. But I think that this time it wasn't unclear that he wasn't, that it wasn't...

It's supposed to sound like he's calling at the person.'s that's what I was trying to say did you get that yeah this is still not fun yeah good but I thought God was gonna come into it somehow he was going oh yeah no no but I think that I've told you that you go well you're just expecting it to have some other thing of like oh he knows this person or there's some other way it's gonna go go. And then it's just, it just changes. The bait and switch is usually the key to good comedy. Yeah, that didn't have it. All right.

What about this one? I think I've told you this before. Here's what's funny about the joke. My dad told my stop me if you've heard it. My dad told my mom this joke while she was driving him home from work one day. And this bit's funnier than the joke itself. And my mother found the joke so funny that she lost, she couldn't drive because she was crying.

And my dad from the passenger seat had to steer the car. This sounds promising. It's not as good as it's gonna be, you think, but here it is. This fellow walks into a psychologist's office wearing nothing but cling wrap. And the doctor says, well, clearly I can see your nuts. That was the joke.

That's very cute. Yeah. So is that two jokes about testicles now? I think three because he had the camel. I could compete with the stupidest joke. Yeah, not the funniest one. Men walked into a bar with a banana in his ear and the bartender says you have a banana in your ear and he says I can't hear what you're saying I have a banana in my ear. Simply stupid.

I love that. That is actually terrific. That's better than this one. What did Batman say to Robin before he jumped in the Batmobile? Hey Robin jump in the Batmobile. Ooh Clever that may be that may be the stupidest one. It's like the wet skunk joke. We call a skunk that's been left out in the rain wet skunk What is it? What is the difference between skunk roadkill and lawyer roadkill? Oh dear

What skid marks in front of the skunk roadkill and lawyer roadkill. Oh dear. What? Skid marks in front of the skunk. So Norm MacDonald, you ever listen to Norm MacDonald? No. He's since died, but he's very vulgar in certain respects, but very, very, very, very funny in others. He says, yeah, I go into this place and I ask for some Polish sausage and the fella behind the counter says you Polish?

He says come on. These are bloody racists. I asked for Polish sausage and you assume that I'm Polish. Do you see how you see how if I came in here, right? Looking for Chinese food, I suppose you'd think I was Chinese would you you know if I came in here looking for German whatever bratwurst I suppose you'd think I was I was German would you you know if I if I came in here looking for what Canadian bacon I suppose you'd think you'd think I was Canadian, would you?

You see? You know, like if I if I came in here. Looking for. Dutch. What do they have? Halverson hotspot. You'd probably think I was Dutch. This goes on for about five more minutes, you understand.

But I come in here looking for Polish sausage and you think I'm Polish. I think that's an outrage. And he says, well, sir, this this is a hardware store. That's the joke. I see. I think the joke. I see. I think the joke is just to force you to sit through it. Yes, of course. Of course. It's sadistic.

Would we get banned if we played the moth joke for Peter? Would we get the moth joke? I'm not sure though. I can't guarantee it. It's a very funny joke. Well in New York, it's a moth joke. Moth. Elsewhere is a moth joke. If I have a moth ball in this hand and a moth ball, moth ball in this hand, what do I have? A bloody big moth for testicle jokes.

You're welcome. I've met many lawyers. Not one of them has ever told me a lawyer joke except one. Okay. Mary England and my favorite lawyer. I said, what's your favorite lawyer joke? She said, the devil walks into a lawyer's office, dressed in an Armani suit and the lawyer says politely, what can I do for you, sir? And the devil says, no, no, no, no, it's what I can do for you. I can make you richer than Bill Gates,

more famous than Alan Dershowitz. All you have to do is sign this little contract, not even in blood, just with ink. This little contract that gives me the rights to your eternal soul and that of your wife and children and grandchildren down through 30 generations. And he hands the lawyer a contract. The lawyer takes it, looks at it, reads it very carefully, every single line, all 12 pages.

Now is his eyes suspiciously, says to the devil, I don't get it, what's the catch? All right, so here's some questions from our local supporters. And if you guys are watching right now, you can send a super chat in or go over to locals and ask your question. Cosmeen Petrila says Dr. Craifed, he says Dr. Craifed Peter, so he might not understand Dr. Peter Craifed, he should have said, what are your habits as a writer? How does a day in which you write look like? Do you write for hours or just a bit every day?

Do you have a favorite place in which you do it? A favorite software pen jacket? Thank you for your work. I have no schedule. I write whenever I have free time, sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. And the thing I love to sit on best is my own posterior. Nowhere in particular though.

Yeah, I have a desk and a laptop and some pretty pictures around. Well, here's a question, because I think writing comes naturally to you. What would your advice be to someone who wants to get into writing? If you don't love it, don't get into it. If you do love it, just do it and do it more and more and throw 90% of it away. Yeah. The best advice I think I've ever gotten on writing was write drunk, edit sober. Hmm. Like half perspiration, half inspiration. Hmm. Or another person said you don't try to varnish a boat while you're building it. you don't try to varnish a boat while

you're building it so don't try to perfect the text as it's coming out. Yeah yeah that is another point rewriting always improves it. Yeah for me when I write I just have to dump it out because working on something that's poorly written is easier than not having it out on the toilet. That's right. We just dump it out on the toilet. That's actually where I write from. It's the only place to get peace in my house.

Well, that's very common. I think Magdala says, thank you for saying that divorce doesn't exist. That's what I've always I always say to and people usually oppose. And how would you explain to someone what is a sacrament of marriage and how does it differ from a civil marriage, for example? And what do you think about so many people trying to annul their allegedly sacramental marriages justifying that they were too young or immature to marry? So a couple of questions there.

Well a marriage is made by God. A civil marriage is made by man. What God has joined together, no man can or should try to put us under. That is why there is no divorce. God incarnate has told us that that's non-negotiable. An annulment is not a divorce. An annulment is a declaration that there never was a valid marriage in the first place. Now, how you figure out whether that was a valid marriage in the first place. Now, how you figure out

whether that was a valid marriage or not, and how fallible and infallible the church is in annulment cases, and how pervasive perversions of that process are is a prudential question, which there's a wide range of opinions about. It seems that since something like 90% of enrollments in the United States and Europe get granted

and something like 10 or 20% elsewhere in the world, there is something of cultural relativity here and probably some corruption. But the principles are very clear and the church cannot change those principles, although the Church has never been very good, like most of us, at practicing its principles. In fact, that's one of the arguments for the divine authority of the Church. I mean, any institution peopled by such jackasses as us would have gone under long before 2,000

years. R. Very good. Sam says, how can we best change the lower and higher levels of Catholic education to help cultivate a wonder and openness to God? Practical tips appreciated. No practical tips, just do it. You can't give what you don't have. So if you're concerned with your educational system, go into it. And and show that that wonder and that reverence

showing is more effective than telling. It's it's the faith is something like measles. You catch it rather than teach it. Yeah, it's a good infection. Do you think, though, that some institutions aren't worth trying to salvage? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of colleges have declared that they are not Catholic colleges anymore because they're

honest and they say we don't have or care for our Catholic identity. Good for them. I mean an honest atheist has a better chance of going to heaven than a dishonest believer. Should Boston College do that? No, Boston College is a confused, half secular, half Jesuit, half Catholic college. And it has an ongoing honest identity crisis.

And there are elements in it which want it to be less Catholic, and there are elements in it which want it to be less Catholic and there are elements in it which wanted to be more Catholic. And I find it a wonderful place to work because it's Catholic enough to feel home and and find some genuinely holy and serious Jesuits there. But on the other hand, it's a mission field and it's got serious problems as most Catholic places do. Kyle Whittington says I recently gifted my mother a book you wrote to introduce her to your work. It led to a rather comical and awkward moment. When she first cracked open the book before I go, the first thing she saw was the Oprah piss test.

I don't you'll have to explain that to me now that Oprah is on her way to falling out of public consciousness. Is there another name in this day and age that would also make a great piss test? This is what's so great about you. Dr. Craved is that you're so highly regarded that publishers apparently allow you to put Oprah piss test in your books. What does that mean? That publisher did anyway. That's right.

Maybe in the others. Well, my, the Oprah piss test is if your book is not going to piss off Oprah, if it's going to be endorsed by Oprah, then it is worthless because it says simply platitudes, pop psychology and what we already know and want to be pat on the head for believing. So he says now that she's kind of falling out of public consciousness, is there another name? What would be another name? Something pissed us.

Maybe Dr. Phil, although he has occasional good things to say. Yeah, I've been impressed with him lately in that he's had certain Conservative voices on the show speak like Lila Rose if you're familiar with her He had died. It was an excellent where she just destroyed the Repent of my son of mentioning dr. Phil in that negative way for that. Are you familiar with Matt Walsh? Yes, Matt Walsh wrote did an excellent documentary called What is a woman and Matt Walsh wrote, did an excellent documentary called, um, what is it? What is a woman? And Dr. Phil had him on the show to debate some people who thought they were the different sex. I retract that. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Good. All right. Uh, Magda, uh, I don't know. Just said that, said that, said that. Okay. Before we leave that topic, I think the pines of the coinus passes the Opropis test, Matt. So maybe we could get certified. Yeah. How would I get certified? The Opropis test. Does our show pass the test? Do we pass the Opropis test?

Obviously. Okay. I mean- Is there some sort of award or- Certain things are self-evident. Certificate I could get put up. Anyone who's on YouTube, who's threatened with expulsion Has passed the Oprah very good very good

Okay Christian says this might seem like a silly question But I would like to ask dr. Peter craved whether every person has the same dignity I learned when you kill a priest, you have the sin of murder, but also the sin of something else. I forgot the term, maybe sacrilege. I have four kids. They're not the same.

They all have distinctive personalities. And one day, one of them, I forget who, in the presence of the other three, asked, do you love me the most? And I said, yes, I do. And then I turned to the other three and I said, I also love you the most. I love you the most. And I love you the most. Do we have equal dignity? Yes. Because all infinities are equal. Do we have the same dignity? No,

we have very different dignities and some of that difference is hierarchical and therefore a priest has a higher kind of dignity than a lay person, but not necessarily an unequal dignity. Everyone is an absolute end, not a means to any other end. And that is the fundamental principle that gives every single human being dignity. Dignity is not a measurable thing. You have this much

dignity but not quite that much. Yeah. Joe Ward says, I would like to know what Dr. Peter Crave's favorite Bible translation is and any devotional reading he does such as the Imitation of Christ. Well this is very personal. I grew up with the King James version and I love it and it's a masterpiece and I find that it's quite accurate, although it's in Elizabethan English. The same is true of the Douay version. I think the revised standard version, not the new one, but the old one, is the best compromise between contemporary intelligibility and accuracy. I once compared different translations. I don't know Hebrew, but I know Greek. And I found, to my surprise, that the older translations were not only more beautiful and poetic, but also more accurate. I had anticipated that I would find the opposite, that modern scholars would be

insensitive to poetry, but sensitive to scientific accuracy. But I found that the translation is like even the New American Bible, which is very boring, not that bad, but it's pretty bad, is deliberately off of the original Greek. Whenever the original Greek is too poetic, there's a kind of allergic reaction to to striking an expression in most modern translations.

Also, if it has an in it for the word new, it's bound to be somewhat politically correct, like inclusive language. So I'd say the RSV, revised standard version, is pretty much the best for most people, even though I love the King James the most. I love the King James too, I think it's very beautiful. I prefer it in its beauty over the Douay-Rheims. I find personally the Douay-Rheims a little too clunky in places.

Yep. Any devotional reading other than the Bible that you use? I like simple things like the practice of the presence of God and abandonment of the divine providence. Do you keep coming back? Because that St. Lawrence book is quite short. Do you keep coming back to that then? To its basic idea, yes. Yes. And to the book itself, because it is delightfully short. Yes. No, I keep coming back to the Bible itself. Imagine that. The Psalms and the Gospels especially. Yeah. I think it was Jose Maria Escrava who said, there are many devotions within the

church's treasury, choose only a few and be faithful to them. Which is, I think, very helpful advice to converts, especially who get overwhelmed by the cornucopia of devotions on offer. Which is why the Rosary is one of my favorite prayers. I was thrilled to realize that John Paul II, a great genius, also said the same thing. It's so simple. I mean, having a few close friends is so much better than having hundreds of non-close friends. So having a few perfect prayers, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, it's like music. You want to sing it over and over again. it over and over again. As long as you don't think of it as theology, as a science, but rather as music. Music uses and celebrates repetition. Hello Dr. Craved, this comes from Thomas Augustine, probably not his real name. Your books are part of what brought me into Catholicism. I just finished your book The

Greatest Philosopher Who Ever Lived and I was wondering if you have any advice on how to learn more about philosophy and keep the love of wisdom at the front instead of falling into the dull and dryness that philosophy is usually associated with. Well, don't read contemporary analytic philosophers. Read the classics, starting with Plato. Let your heart as well as your head guide you. Don't compromise either. Be like Augustine, whose statuary in the Middle Ages is almost always pictured as having an open book in one hand

that are burning heart in the other. Colin Carr says, what advice do you have for fathers of young boys? How can I help facilitate an adventurous life with a deep love for the faith? Well, you've already done the first and most important thing. You've already identified your vocation and your right attitude towards it. There are many good ways of being a father. That's right. Find yours. Yeah. But of course love them to death. Absolutely and uncompromisingly. Even when they're little buggers. Oh yeah. And they're bound to be little buggers because you were one. Yeah. My, uh,

my mom has a funny story. She tells me that when she would go to work and she would drop me off at my grandma's, sometimes my grandma would get so sick of my crying as a baby that she'd put me out the front under the veranda in like a pack and play and leave me there. And mum came home once from work and saw that this was happening and I was out there crying and she said, don't bloody leave him out there. Someone could steal him. And she said, well, put it this way.

Would you steal your kid? My father once told me a story. He had done something bad and destructive and and his father died when my father was only 12, so he must have been under 12 at the time. They were very poor and they were peasants. The family had just immigrated from Holland. And so his punishment was to sleep in the chicken coop with the chickens. And it was summertime, so it was not a problem.

And my father slept with the chickens and he said, I kind of thought of it as an adventure. So when his father rescued him in the morning, he said, you're not going to do that again, are you? He said, yeah, I like sleeping with the chickens what a boy. Every morning almost my daughters ask can we go to such and such house so that we can be with their babies. And every morning my son wants to kill something so I took him we butchered some chickens he was happy so happy and it's. I know that not all boys express that desire to kill, nor do all girls express a desire to mother children, but it's beautiful

to see. But very few girls want to kill chickens, and very few boys want to be around babies. Yeah. But that's okay. There are tomboy's and tombgirls. That's right. My wife and I have spoken about this, about how my wife was a tomboy very much so. She was captain of the wrestling team in high school. She was big into soccer and primary school. And that if she lived today, how sad it is that many people, instead of relishing in the uniqueness of her personality, perhaps would have sought to give her hormones

or surgeries or something. I'm sympathetic with one aspect of the far left in sexuality namely it's attack on social stereotypes they do a lot of harm. If you're not darst day you're not a woman if you're not john wayne you're not a man but i don't think that is there a tech because look at their drag queens. that is their attack because look at their drag queens. But I mean, it's it's like it's a it's a monster of what femininity ought to be. Yeah. So it's almost like the nuance, the nuance of the sexual landscape has been has been made black or white in the transgender proponents mind. Well, that's the difference between the old liberalism and the new. Yeah. The old wanted more openness and more freedom. And that's a legitimate desire. The new wants to attack nature.

One of the best insights I've got from Nietzsche, and I'd love you to comment on this, is his idea of resentimo, where we demonize that which we believe ourselves impotent to attain. Most psychologists would agree with that. Now, he attributed Christians and Christ, I think, and Socrates in that camp. We wouldn't do that. But I love the idea that if I feel myself impotent to attain, whatever, being a good father, getting married, then I demonize those marriages so that I can seem. This is why Nietzsche hated totally egalitarianism. He would never have made a Marxist. Sartre and Nietzsche are probably the two most brilliant and passionate atheists of all time. But Sartre became a Marxist. Nietzsche would never have become a Marxist. That refusal to stand out, that refusal of any kind of excellence, even the excellence of evil.

Something you have to admire Nietzsche for. We have a super chat here. Thank you from Mug who says, do you have a favorite genre of music? Dr. Craift also, did you publish that book on humor? We really enjoyed your talk at the University of Dallas. Oh, thank you. That was that was the talk that persuaded me to publish the book on humor.

It'll be out in, I think, a few months. It's called Ha. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

I was reluctant to do it because I'm not a stand-up comedian or anything of the sort, but I gave a talk at the University of Dallas and it was by far the most successful talk I ever made in my life. The audience loved it. And I said at the beginning, this is going to be an experiment. If you react well to this talk, I will reconsider my intention not to publish the book.

And they made me publish the book, so he's part of that. What was the other part of the question which I forgot? So he's part of that. What was the other part of the question which I forgot? Let me find it, sorry. There's a bunch here. Not to spoil another one of your books, but what do you think makes something funny or not? Is that an answerable question?

Read my book. There are more than one answer to that question. And the book again is called Ha Ha and it's out. No, it's at the publisher. Oh, I'm sorry. Gavin says, I'm very interested to hear Peter's stance on lying. I also just wanted to ask what he thinks about double effect and how that can work in self-defense,

but not in lying, since the means are evil in lying. You cannot unintentionally lie, but you should intend to not kill the person. Lying is a more relative thing than most evils because it's essentially an interpersonal relationship. You lie to another person, either to, that is, you deceive, you deliberately deceive another person, either to protect that person or to harm that person. So I don't think that lying to another person to protect him is a bad thing. Suppose, for instance, your father... I think it is. I've come to that. I'd love you to try and talk me out of that. But OK, you're a Dutchman.

You're hiding Jews in the attic for the Nazis. The Nazis come to your door. Yes. They say, do you have any Jews here? I think you're what ordinary people would call lying. If you use that definition, I think your moral obligation is to lie to the Nazis because you promised to the Jews to hide them. And hiding is a kind of lying.

So you promised to lie and you must fulfill that promise because that lie will not only save the lives of the Jews, but save the Germans who want to kill them from an additional sin and therefore perhaps shorten their purgatory. I think we should define lying and then stick to that definition. So if lying is speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving, then I wouldn't say that hiding is a type of lying. I would. I would. Sometimes deception is good.

Is deception might be good, but that's not. Is a hedgefake in basketball a sin? Is a head fake in basketball a sin? I don't. Yeah, I've heard different objections like this sort of like similar in football to sort of to deceive somebody and then go another way. I don't know about that, but I do feel strongly that I should never speak of falsehood with the intent of deceiving.

And I think you have to add. I think you have to add to the other person's harm or to someone's harm. But Aquinas, I mean, Aquinas isn't infallible, but he doesn't do that. And he would disagree with you, as would Augustine, as would Bonaventure. I think he would, in principle. But I don't think he would open the door and say to the Nazis, yes, alas, I have some Jews in the attic and I know you want to kill them. I can't stop you, so come in. Hear me out here then, because I think when people think of the Nazi at the door example, they think, okay, it's understandable that you would lie to save the Jews. And then I

want to say to them, what is another sin? And you may not say that lying is lying in that situation, but let's say it is. What is another sin that is generally believed to be intrinsically evil that you think would be permissible? Oh, that's easy, killing. Killing a human being made in the image of God whose life is intrinsically valuable. But that's not an intrinsic evil to kill. That's right.

In fact, the commandment doesn't say thou shalt not kill, it says thou shalt not murder. Right. So what I'm asking though, is there any... Okay, I'm going to use an example that's going to seem crass, but this is a thought experiment. But suppose the Nazis came to your door and said, we'd like you to fornicate with this woman, and if you don't, we're going to kill everybody in the basement. You don't do it. Yeah, you don't do it. That's right. What about masturbate? No, you don't do it. What about certainly not blasphemy? You don't do any intrinsic evil.

And then you just don't think lying is intrinsically evil. Or you think it is. If by lying, you don't include to someone's harm. If you simply say deliberately deceive, I think there are countless examples in ordinary life where you're morally obligated to deliberately deceive. Yeah, I don't think that. Well, then is the evil lying or the deliberately harming someone? There's an enemy attacking you and you're protecting your family. And in order to protect your family you have to deliberately deceive the attacker.

Yes, and I would do that. Of course you would. Gandhi himself said that he would in some circumstances kill to protect his family if a murder if a murderous I don't know the exact quote but if a murderer came into my room and started killing my children and the only way I could protect my other children from from from harm that's interesting by disabling him he said that yeah he said I would without any hate in my heart and without any intent to harm put up a shield and without any intent to harm, put up a shield. And if the only shield I could put up was an arrow that would disable him and perhaps

kill him, I would still do it. This is part of Aquinas's Just War theory, isn't it? Yeah. I think Aquinas is perfectly right about the Just War theory. So what do you think about this then, right? The reason we think that contraception is intrinsically evil is it towards the end of the sexual act. What if the end of the act of speech is to communicate what is that's not the only end of speech. Right.

Right. The end. That's right. And the end and procreation isn't the only end of sex, but it is a end. And to deliberately deceive you with my speech seems to thwart the end of speech, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Yes, yes. And I'm not sure what the logical, philosophical, theoretical answer to that question is.

But I am quite sure that you do not reveal to the Nazis where the Jews are. Now, if you call that lying, fine. If you say no, that's not lying, fine. I think that's a matter of what language you choose. I think that's a typical example of a question that seems to be a real question, but it really isn't. I think Kant would go so far as to say, I would not even deceive the Nazis. I mean, he's a literalist and a rationalist and a kind of a Stoic. But I think ordinary people would say, of course you deliberately deceive him here. But ordinary people get a, of course you deliberately deceive him here. But ordinary people get a lot of things wrong.

That's true. And a lot of things seem right to us that aren't. So tell me, I think that this is like an epistemologically reputable position to hold, namely, if people much smarter and holier than me disagree with me, and I don't know fully how to refute them, I'll go with them until I learn otherwise. Yeah. That's called trust. Yeah. Or faith. So that's where I am. And faith has a very large part to play in our secular lives, which we don't usually recognize. That's right. Yeah.

On the other hand, when the authorities contradict, when you have Aquinas and Kant on the one hand and, uh, many others on the other hand, then you're confused. I hosted a debate which you would love. It's between a Dominican, very brilliant young Dominican, Father Gregory Pine from the Eastern province and Janet Smith. Oh, two wonderful people. Two wonderful people. And whenever one of them stopped speaking, I thought they were right. Yes, that's just yes. Yes. Yes. I love the Dominicans. You know the difference between a Dominican and a Jesuit, don't you? were founded by Saint Dominic in the 12th century in order to combat the heresy of Albigensianism.

And the Jesuits were founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century to combat the heresy of Protestantism. Now tell me, how many Albigensians have you met lately? I've heard you say that before, it's good. Oh, I've read that about Gavin's question. How can I learn to suffer well? Oh, that's a very good question. You've already done the first thing. You realize that there is good suffering and bad suffering. That suffering is an act, or your attitude toward suffering is an act, a choice on your

part. And you also implicitly recognize that God has deliberately allowed this suffering to come into your life. God doesn't hate you, doesn't want you to suffer, doesn't will suffering directly, but allows evil. Why? Because he is working it for a greater good. The only reason the God who loves you allows suffering into your life is because he loves you.

Because this has the potentiality of working out for a greater good if you trust him. And if you say your will be done no matter what, if that's your absolute. If your absolute is your own pleasure and not suffering, that's a different absolute. But if your absolute is God knows best, that is his will, well then you struggle to somehow see that suffering by faith. You don't usually see it by reason and certainly not at the time that you're suffering, but you struggle to see that as somehow part of his perfect will for you. And insofar as you can see that, it is possible for you to say yes to your suffering and to offer it up We've already discussed this but I'd like you to take another swing at it if you will I Moulton says

What did dr. Crave to think of his conversation with dr. Peterson? I Enjoyed it very much. I Have a very high opinion of dr. Peterson. I think he's a just what our society needs He's not complete, but he's got a lot of great stuff to say. Yeah. When people are honest and vulnerable, you'll, if you watch several videos of his, you'll see him cry, tear up. Like he's, he doesn't have, he doesn't seem to have his defenses up a lot of the time in interview settings.

He did. He was here at the university. Do you know that speaking? No, he didn't know that. The first time he ever went to Holy Mass was here at Franciscan on campus. Wow. Wonderful. He never went to Mass before? Never. It was his first time. And Father Dave took him to the Adoration Chapel, that little chapel we have up on campus, and was explaining to Dr. Peterson that Catholics view the Eucharist as more than merely symbolic. And Dr. Peterson stopped in his tracks and said, and what's wrong with a symbol? And Father Dave said, well, I presume that all those coming to your lecture tonight would be pretty disappointed if they just got a hologram of Dr. Peterson.

And he went, fair enough. Touche. Isn't that good? Yes. I had a Muslim student once who asked to go to Mass with me. Never been to Mass before. And he was very reverent. He sat. He did not stand or pray or anything, but he was very careful. And afterwards, he said to me, you Catholics believe that that little piece of bread is really Jesus Christ, literally? I said yes.

And he said, you as Christians believe that Jesus Christ is God, fully divine? I said yes. And he says, I don't think you believe that. And I said to him, well, I don't expect you to find yourself able to believe that. It's a difficult thing to believe. It's a great mystery. She said, no, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying anything about you. I'm not saying that you're hypocrites and you don't really believe what you say you believe. And I'm not saying that you don't believe it, but I'm saying that, well, if maybe I am, and then he changed, he said, maybe I am saying something about you, because

I'm putting myself in your shoes, and I'm saying, suppose I were a Christian and a Catholic, and I believe that Jesus was Allah himself in the flesh and that that flesh was really what was going on in that apparent piece of bread. If I believe that and then he hesitated and I said you couldn't imagine yourself getting down on your knees like all those Catholics did at the moment of consecration. He said no, I couldn't imagine myself ever getting up again for the rest of my life. I was very impressed by that. Yeah, it's a good answer. But do you think it's do you think it's the right answer?

Because surely the Eucharist is truly no Christ and surely Christ doesn't want us to get on and he's not good enough again. So no, no, obviously not. But it's an excellent insight for sure. I also heard a Protestant once say, if I truly believe that was Jesus Christ, I'd call over broken glass daily to receive him. Fair enough. Well, it's like Christ himself. It's either or. I mean, if he's not God, he's the most blasphemous person in history. And if that's not Jesus Christ, then Catholics are the most ridiculous idolaters in history, confusing what's only a little cookie with Almighty God. Yeah.

Colin asks, what advice do you have for fathers of... Oh no, I asked that, sorry. How can I continue, he says, to fall in love with the faith? Now that I'm entering my 30s, I feel like I'm losing the romance I had with the church in college. I'll just add to that. I think a line from Chesterton who said something like, let your faith be more of a romance and less of more more of a love affair, less of a syllogism or something to that effect. Don't try to squeeze Christ out of the church as you squeeze orange juice out of an orange. You get the church from Christ, not vice versa. So first you have to fall in love with

Christ. And since the church is his body, you must fall in love with the church, even though she is an unfaithful whore. Yeah. But she is his whore. His whore. Yes. I am his whore. What do you think about that? T-shirts? Never saw that. Pretty good. Very good. So I want to invite people, if you want to enter questions into the chat, Neil, maybe you can pass up through some of them. And if there are any really good ones, we'll ask them. But I was thinking if you're open to it, I would like to read a respondeo from whether the existence of God is self-evident, to see your opinion

on the ontological argument. Is that okay? Fine. Do you want to sum up the ontological argument first? Yes. Do you want me to? Yes. Best way of summing it up, I think, is apparently we have to define the word God before we can talk intelligently about him. And the best definition of the word God before we can talk intelligently about him. And the best definition of the word God is Anselm's, the negative definition.

God is that then which nothing greater can be conceived. If you can conceive of something greater than X, then X is not God. All right, let's accept that definition. Now, if God does not exist, then I can conceive of a God that has all the other attributes that you say you disbelieve in, a being that's omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent and all other conceivable perfections,

but lacks real existence outside the mind. He's a figment of our imagination. He's lacking only the attribute of objective existence, which is of course a perfection, because it's better to exist outside the mind than dependent upon the mind. Well, then if in order to be an atheist, you have to define God in the way that the the. Well, then, if in order to be an atheist you have to define God in the way

that the theist does, and of course you must in order to deny that God, then you're contradicting yourself in saying that God, who by definition lacks no perfection, lacks this one perfection. So atheism is self-contradictory, and therefore theism is self-evident. That's a good argument, although I think it's not valid, and I think Aquinas is right in rejecting that as an argument. What's fascinating too is if you go online you'll find atheists impugning Aquinas and saying he's not a true philosopher, he's merely an apologist for whatever the church teaches. That's clearly not true, since this, I think, it could be argued is the most prominent argument for God's existence in the Christian tradition. Actually, there's another one too.

It's not the most prominent in the sense that it's the most popularly accepted, but it is the most argued about. There is no argument in the whole history of philosophy that's more argued about than the ontological argument. But what would be another argument prior to Aquinas, not including Bonaventure and not taking into account the sort of Islamic tradition that would be as prominent an argument for God's existence? Oh, the moral argument. In which philosophy?

If there is an absolute moral law, there must be an absolute moral lawgiver. Which Christians were teaching that? That's what I'm saying. I can't think of one, I mean, you'd know I'm saying. I I can't think of one I mean you'd know more than me, but I can't think of prominent Catholic saints and philosophers Cardinal Newman for one well, I mean prior to Aquinas Well, the Middle Ages were not an age of moral relativism. So that argument was not needed that yeah So let me change my answer to the cosmological argument. Some version. The design argument.

Right. Something like that. I mean, we see something like that in Paul and obviously from Aristotle. Yes. Point being Aquinas denies both the ontological argument, which was maybe the most debated and certainly popular, and the Kalam cosmological argument, the Bonaventura. Yeah. Maybe he made some concessions towards it towards the end of his life, but he seems to... The quick point I want to make is just how intellectually honest Aquinas is. He refutes two very popular arguments for God's existence when he could have just said nothing on them and let people believe them,

but he thought to put forth bad arguments in defense of Christianity was to make... Don't take too seriously those atheists on the internet. They don't know what they're talking about most of the time even Bertrand Russell made the absurd mistake of thinking that the the cosmological Argument contradicted itself because it began with the premise everything needs a cause and ends with the conclusion There's something that doesn't need a cause God, but it never began with that. That's right. Yeah Of course most Christians perhaps don't know what they're talking about either when they make arguments online. I'm not sure Here's his said contra to your to the ontological He says no one can mentally admit the opposite of what is self-evident as the philosopher states concerning the first principles of Demonstration, but the opposite of the proposition God is can be mentally admitted

We read the full has said in his heart there is no God, therefore that God exists is not self-evident. So what is meant by self-evident and why can't we deny that which is self-evident? A self-evident proposition is one whose predicate adds nothing to its subject. You ask, why is that not a self-evident proposition? It is in itself, logically and objectively and impersonally, a self-evident proposition, because God is His own existence. But it is not to us self-evident, because we do not know God's essence or nature. If we did know God's essence or nature, we would see that the argument is indeed valid.

And in heaven, we shall see that because we will see the very essence of God and see that his existence is identical with his essence. But since we do not see or understand his essence in this life, it is not self-evident to us. Although Aquinas admits that the proposition is self-evident in itself. What's interesting is that Richard Dawkins, let's pick on him, thinks he knows what God is and rejects it. Aquinas knows he can't know what God is and believes.

Yes. He is his response. God has a sense of humor allowing for Richard Dawkins. I'm going to read this paragraph and you cut me off whenever you'd like to interject and offer some commentary. A thing can be self-evident in either of two ways. On the one hand, self-evident in itself, we've just touched on this, though not to us. On the other, self-evident in itself and to us. A proposition is self-evident because the predicate is included

in the essence of the subject. For example, man is an animal, for animal is contained in the essence of man. If therefore the essence of man. If, therefore, the essence of the predicate and subject be known to all, the proposition will be self-evident to all, as is clear with regard to the first principles of demonstration, the terms of which are common things that no one is ignorant of, such as being and non-being, whole and part and suchlike. If, however, there are some to whom the essence of the predicate and subject is unknown, the proposition will be self-evident in itself, but not to those who do not know the

meaning of the predicate and the subject of the proposition. Therefore, it happens, as Boethius says, that there are some mental concepts self-evident only to the learned, as the incorporeal substances are not in space. Therefore, I say that this proposition, God exists of itself, is self-evident for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is his own existence, as will be hereafter shown now, because we do not know the essence of God. The proposition is not so evident to us. I love Aquinas so much, but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature, namely by effects.

It is self-evident that the point could not possibly be said more clearly. So no need to comment. No need to comment. Every word is exactly what it ought to be. I, I find a lot of things in Aquinas similar to Aristotle's definition of truth. The question, what is truth, is the easiest question in philosophy to answer. Aristotle says, if one says of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, he speaks the truth. But if someone says of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, he does not speak the truth. Right? You can't say it better than that.

There's no need. Yeah. The example that Aquinas gives is a very useful analogy. It probably sparked the Protestant Reformers' famous joke about scholastic philosophers argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Well, that's a joke that's a joke on itself, because that's a very good question. And the answer is an infinite number. As many as God wishes.

Because spirits do not take up space and are not confined by space. So there's no limit to the number of angels that can be present in consciousness spiritually at any particular place. Yeah, that's good. I've said- Because most people don't understand spirit. They think of spirit as material beings. Yeah, or some sort of-

And therefore they think there's some answer to how many angels can dance in that. That's right, yeah. And other people do understand spirit well. So that's why Aquinas uses that as an analogy answer to how many angels can dance in the heaven and other people do understand spirit well. So that's why Aquinas uses that as an analogy to the fact that none of us understand God's essence, some of us understand the essence of an angel, all of us understand the essence of whole and part.

Yeah. I've said jokingly that Augustine is beautiful like a garden is beautiful and Aquinas is beautiful like a game board instruction manual is beautiful. Hmm. I'm joking. I know that Aquinas is actually beautiful. But what I love about game board instruction manuals is there's no ambiguity. No word is wasted.

You'd be angry if it was. Yes. If during the course of reading the instructions, the person began giving you giving you their opinion of the game or about the time they first played it, it would just sort of. That's not what you're there for. You're there for a very direct concrete answer. Yes. I want to read Aquinas obviously famously has five remedies for sorrow, pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplating the truth and finally sleep and baths. I love a glass of wine. You mentioned that he doesn't. He doesn't know that's a common misunderstanding. I know it's not true, though.

Oh, a misquotation. Yeah, I know, because I wrote a book on happiness and did a deep dive into this and was desperately looking for that quotation. Yes, I've heard that, too. And a good night, a large glass of wine. But he doesn't he doesn't say it. If I'm I'd love to be proven wrong though. But here's the said contra, no, the respondio,

and I'd love, well both, and I'd love you to talk a little bit about self-care. I'm not sure if you're aware of this phrase, but people a lot today are talking about the importance of self-care, which I think understood rightly is a good idea, but taken to an extreme might just be sort of solipsism or selfishness or abandoning one's duties. But anyway, he says, Augustine says, I had heard that the bath had its name from Bal name from the Greek. I'm not even going to try from the fact of its driving sadness from the mind.

And further on, he says, I slept and woke up again and found my grief not a little assuaged and quotes the words from the hymn of Ambrose in which it is said, sleep restores tired limbs to labor, refreshes the weary mind and manages sorrow. And so here's Aquinas's response as stated above sorrow by reason of its specific nature is repugnant to the vital movements of the body, and consequently whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement is opposed to sorrow and assuages it. Moreover, such remedies, from the very fact that they bring nature back to its normal state, are causes of pleasure, for this is precisely in what pleasure consists, as is stated above. Therefore, since every pleasure assuages sorrow, sorrow is assuaged by such like bodily remedies.

Well, that's almost self-evidently true. Yeah. If you accept the psychosomatic unit, that's right. If on the other hand, you're a Gnostic who believe that you create your own identity and your body is simply malleable material, it makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. Are you familiar?

Who's the that that philosopher we had? Golly, he had to walk him up the stairs that time because the elevators were out. He wrote the meaning of J. Budziszewski. Oh, great man. He's terrific. And I love what he said about the bodies is the body is equally a part of who you are along with the soul. If it weren't, think of the absurdities that would result when I kiss my daughter good night, it's merely me manipulating the husk, which is not me and pressing it

against the husk, which is not her. Yes, I like that. But if you understand yourself as body and soul, then taking care of the body is to take care of you. No, no chemist when he kisses his wife says this is only chemicals kissing chemicals. I hope not. Yeah, very good. All right, we have one follow up on lying, if that's OK, from Gavin, who heard our response, he said, for further clarification. Well, he doesn't make an argument for it. He simply states that deception does not equal lying. We also don't determine whether or not something is intrinsically evil

by finding a situation where our Intuitions are to do that act fair enough. Mm-hmm And then he says I'm just wondering what is leading craved to go against Augustine Aquinas, etc Who don't think you should lie even to save a life and then he says and to clarify the lying definition I'm having in mind is to assert something you believe to be not true with the intention of to deceive Deception is different that were there here than lying because deception can work under double effect and lying cannot Even in context card games acting etc are people saying things that are not true and trying to make you believe it But are obviously not assertions and trying to deceive long-term. Well, if you see war as a kind of serious game,

you can use that principle to justify deceiving the Nazis and protecting the Jews. So I still think it's a matter of what language you use to translate the principle that lying is indeed intrinsically by its nature wrong because truth is a good and people ought to be willed good things rather than bad things. But life is also a good and sometimes it's necessary to kill in order to save life, such as in self-defense or in a just war. That was one of the points that Janet Smith brought up.

She said, it seems interesting to me that I'm allowed to kill the Nazi. I'm allowed to say go out and dismantle his car so it no longer works, but I can't say the Jews aren't in the basement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lila Rose was involved in that controversy, too, because she was. She would go into Planned Parenthood dressed up and pretend to be.

Of course you should. Yeah. No, I disagree. I think she's wrong to do that. So all sting operations are wrong. You can't get that. I'd have to say that. You can't. Doesn't that suck? I'm biting a bullet like a loser. I know. I have very uncomfortable with that. I hope you are, because I think your moral intuitions are not working.

A man who saves three women from sex slavery by pretending to be someone other than he is sins while he does a great good. No, you can't sit and do a great good at the same time by the same act. That's not possible. The act is, the act is meritorious.

Fair enough. Then he intends to to a great good but doesn't know. He does a great good. How about the outcome is a great good. I'm not utilitarianism is nothing to do I'm not trying to justify the act by saying the outcomes good that would be utilitarianism I'm saying the act is evil while the outcome is good. That would be utilitarianism. I'm saying the act is evil while the outcome is good. You are never permitted to do evil. Then that's why I'm saying you shouldn't be doing sting operations. But I don't think a sting operation is intrinsically evil.

Yeah. And I'm very uncomfortable with that part of the position I'm holding. Well, I think the difference between us is I would have once agreed with you when I was a more rationalistic philosopher who wanted to do everything deductively, starting with principles and then applying them unambiguously to difficult situations. Now I'm a little more intuitive, I think, and in sympathy with not utilitarianism, but William James' version of pragmatism.

Sometimes good and evil are not simply an impersonal option that you are to choose or not to choose. Sometimes good and evil are not created by your action, but sometimes your action is so embedded in the situation that it becomes part of the objective principle. That's a bad way to put it. Example from James. A new neighbor moves in next door and He seems to be very snobbish and off-putting Because he deliberately avoids you and when you look at him, he looks the other way So you conclude that well, I'm I'm stuck with a snob and I'll just have to put up with it And if he doesn't like me, I won't like him and I won't talk to him or alternatively

You can say I shall create a new situation here. I shall deliberately invade his life, uh, and, and welcome him to the neighborhood and see what he's made of. And you do that. And you find out that he's, he's extraordinarily shy and he's not arrogant at all. And he was in awe of you for some reason or other because your lawn was so perfectly mowed. Yes. And you make good friends with them. Now, are you not creating a new good or even a new kind of truth by your action? You are. So sometimes you don't start with

thought and end with action. Sometimes you start with action and end with thought. Now, whether that applies directly to the cases we're thinking about is questionable. But the fact that your act of quote lying unquote to the Nazis intuitively feels right and at the moment you do not think that you're sinning, I think counts for something. It probably counts for lessened culpability. You want to say more than that. It's the base tenet of moral relativism, though, to just say if something feels like it's not a sin, then it's not a sin. No, I certainly don't want to say that. And our intuitions and our feelings are far from infallible. So this is an example of a genuine moral dilemma that in this life probably will not be settled if two honest and moral people are arguing. They will probably not come to agreement. I mean, most difficult questions, if one is to

take a hard position, lead to difficult questions. Like if I say God exists and he loves us, and then you point to all the insane amount of evil that's taking place while we've been sitting here, I feel uncomfortable about that and may not know how to respond to that adequately. Or if you're an atheist and I point to the seeming teleology in the universe and the conditions at the Big Bang that's, you know, that sort of thing. Maybe that makes your life a little difficult as well. It's the person who doesn't hold any view perhaps can keep changing his mind. Aristotle sagely says in the Nicomachean Ethics that ethics is somewhere between art and math. Math is very clear and certain,

and if it's not, it's bad math. And art is very free and creative of its own values. If not, it's not great art. But ethics is between the two. It has clear principles, but there are inevitably going to be mysterious things that are not very clear and honest and good people can differ about them.

As we begin to wrap up, I don't want to because I'm so enjoying this, but we probably should. We've got to go down to the cigar lounge to have you sign some books. Thanks again for agreeing to do that. What advice would you give? And you've kind of mentioned already about, you know, the fact that the church has been run by scoundrels from the beginning to some degree or another, and yet it's still standing and how that's something of an argument for the legitimacy of the church. But there is a lot of very confusing and difficult things going on right now.

What advice would you have for someone looking to convert to Catholicism, but they look in and they just see, A, a lot of confusion coming out of Rome, and B, infighting among Catholics all over the internet. What sort of advice would you give them? Take your eyes off the whore and look at the husband, God the Father. Christ commanded you to marry this whore, to enter this very imperfect organization, which though run by scoundrels, has preached a high and holy and heroic truth for 2,000 years without ever contradicting itself, which is a miracle.

It's good for me too to remember that it's, you know, when I stand before our Lord, He's not going to ask me, did I call Pope Francis out on things? Or did I have the correct opinion about the status of the SSPX or what the German bishop said? I mean, unless I'm in a place where I have to make a decision about these things or speak authoritatively on them, which I don't. Perhaps I'm interested in those things because they pull me out of what is my responsibility, loving my wife and children and being kind to those around me. But I have the catechism, I have the lives of the saints, I have the sacraments, there's

no excuse, get to it kind of thing. But we all feel like we need to be pontificating on what's going on. Yeah. Maybe it's because including myself, maybe it's because we want a substitute for a kind of idolatrous revision of the absolutely absolute absolute of the world of Christ, which we know is going to lead us into things we don't want to go into. Kinds of suffering and kinds of overcoming our self-consciousness and egotism that we're afraid of. And it's so much more comfortable to say, I identify myself as a conservative or as

a liberal or as this kind of ideology. This reluctance to see myself as the problem. I once had a confessor say to me, you're far better and far worse than you can possibly imagine. That's why I love Dostoevsky. He shows me those two things. There is a Fyodor Karamazov in me, there is an Alyosha Karamazov in me. That's right. There is a Hitler in ourselves. There is a Christ in ourselves. That's right. Terrifying. Yeah.

Any other do we get any comments or anything as we wrap up? Superchats. Oh, was there a wife and son are out the door if you want to run? Oh, they can come in. Oh, they might be locked. All right. We'll wrap up. Well, could you wrap up? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

I hate traveling and I'm 39. Yeah, I can't imagine what it was like to be 85. Yeah. And travel. Thank you so much for taking the time. I sort of and I'm 39. I can't imagine what it was like to be 85 and travel. Thank you so much for taking the time. When I was your age, I sort of enjoyed traveling. Yeah. Now it's just, it's awful. Lines everywhere. Yeah. It feels like flying's gotten more and more difficult too, of course, over the years. But anyway, I know you don't want compliments, but shut up. You're going to take it. I am

grateful to you and on behalf of my audience who've been very blessed by your writings in your example thank you for being so good and so helpful and I will throw those ugly compliments right back in your face all right good God bless you. Thank you, Peter.