Pints With Aquinas - Social Media, Church Politics, and Simulation Theory w/ Joe Heschmeyer

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Joe Heschmeyer, Catholic Answers Apologists, joins the show. Matt Fradd and Joe talk about culture, commentary, "experts" and wisdom of the crowd, and much more! Support the Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com Show Sponsors: https://strive21.com/matt https://hallow.com/mattfradd Joe's Links:  @shamelesspopery  https://www.catholic.com/profile/joe-heschmeyer https://shop.catholic.com/apologists-alley/joe-heschmeyer-resources/  

Hey, Joe, how are you doing? Great. The last time I had you on, it was during mask season. Yeah. And if you remember, I texted you from the airport and said, I'll pay you $10 if you refuse to wear your mask. And I think you complied with that. Yeah, I went through the whole Pittsburgh airport with a drink in my hand. So I didn't have to wear a mask. I found a loophole where I was able to to not get in trouble and also get $10.

Exactly. Well, it's good to have you back on the show. How are things? Because when you were on last time, you had somewhat recently started with Catholic Answers. Yeah, since that time it's been great working for Catholic Answers. And I think I have one more book and one more child since last time we spoke. Okay, yeah. What's the new book? The book is the Eucharist Israeli Jesus. And so it's trying to explore Eucharistic theology in a little different way. So a lot of books say here's the Bible verses that show the Eucharist is true.

And I'm trying to do some of that, but also trying to show like here's how this interacts with the cross, here's how this interacts with what we believe about the covenant, here's how this interacts with what we know about the nature of worship. So that it's not just, you know, CS Lewis has that quote, that he believes in the sun, not just because he can see it, but he can see all things by it. And I think something's true, similarly with the Eucharist, that we can both see that it's true and we can see other things by it. From its effects, from the effects it has on the faithful. And that's what it means to say it's the source and the summit. It's the summit, it's the high

point of the faith. It's also the source. And so other things are connected to it, even if we don't normally realize that. I just realized it may have been wrong that you said, I got a new kid and a new book. I went, tell me about your new book. You're a man. Tell me about your new kid, I guess. If we, no, it's okay. So Kansas, you live in Kansas.

Yeah, I do. And you know who else now lives in Kansas? I do. I think I know where you're going with this. Taylor Swift. Yes. I could not tell you one of her songs. I don't, oh no, yes, I could. That was a great song. I think I know where you're going with this. Taylor Swift. Yes.

I could not tell you one of her songs. Oh, no. Yes, I could. That Romeo and Juliet one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 100 years ago. She's had a lot of different, I guess you could call them eras. Love story. I think it's good. Yeah. So. To prove my good credentials with.

Yeah. Look, I am slightly ashamed to admit I'm a little bit of a Catholic Swiftie. I am. I mean, she's got a lot of catchy songs and she's a very good songwriter. I'm a very, like, I don't know a lot about the musical side of stuff. And I'll admit that I love lyrics and she's a clever lyricist. Are they going to say that? There's something cool about someone fully owning something that's not cool. Like Taylor Swift, you know, just going all in on that.

It's like acknowledging you like pumpkin spice lattes or something. I don't, I don't care. I'm not going to apologize. Like that's a real man. Yeah. I wear socks and sandals. I don't really, but it's about that level of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. And so what's it like working for Catholic Answers,

but living in Kansas? Yeah. So all but one of the Catholic Answers apologist now live in the Midwest. So I, you know, Trent Horn started this trend. He moved out to Texas during COVID because everything was remote anyway. And so why not live somewhere for half the price? And I started and they said, you can either come and live in California or Kansas city. And it was not a hard choice. I mean, well, look, my wife's from California.

I love California. People knock on California all the time. I get why people live there. There's a lot to like about it. It is also insanely expensive. And so it's like, what would you like to pay extremely high prices while your kids fall into apostasy? Or would you like them to stay Catholic for less? And after carefully deliberating those two options? No, that's right. You would have to say to Catholic answers, I'm going to need like a lot more money if you need me to move to California. And thankfully we've been very flexible with it. I fly out maybe once a quarter or so to do, you know, video and things,

but they, they flew Zach from our video department out to set up a little studio space. And I'm so glad that they kind of moved with the times as it were, because it's tempting for companies that have been around for a while to keep doing things the same way. Yeah. So to allow that freedom allows them to have you and Trent and Jimmy, even though they're not on location.

Yeah. And I know that it comes at a cost, right? Like there's something to be said about having those times together. And that's really good. But there's also something to be said about having times with your family and to be in, you know, my whole family with the exception of my brother, uh, all four of my sisters and the, you know, the 14, uh, grandkids, my parents have are all in the Kansas city area.

So having that kind of community for my kids to grow up in is, is huge. It's really valuable. Very cool. And did they, do you have a podcast now, a video podcast? I do. What is the name of it? Shameless Popery. That's good. You've brought that back.

Yes. Because that was the name of your blog before you came out. Yeah, that's right. In 2009, I started a blog by that name. Thursday, can we put a link to that below? Because that's one of it. So did they fly to you and set up the studio in your house? They did.

So yeah, I'd been just, you know, doing a normal video in front of the camera thing. Originally they sent me some video equipment. They just mailed it out and I had to try to assemble it and you know, it showed. But then they actually flew Zach out to set it up and he did all sorts of stuff with the lighting and we rearranged the whole basement and it's gonna be insane if I ever have to move.

And are your kids homeschooled? So my daughter goes... I ask because I'm wondering what it's like to film at home with children. That's why I'm asking. Oh, it's horrible. So my kids are four, two and under a year. Oh, I see. So the only one who's really school age is a four year old.

She goes to school at a Montessori, like a Catholic Montessori for three half days. So the rest of the time homeschooled, both I was homeschooled for a few years. My wife was homeschooled until college. And so we've had some very positive experiences with it. And we're going to kind of wait and see. But all that's to say, you're right. If you're imagining that it's chaotic in the house,

it's worse than you think. So. Yeah, I lived in Atlanta and we had a little studio set up in the basement and it was, it was not fun. Yeah. So when I'm doing actual recording, we, we have a townhouse, it's kind of slender, but it's tall so they can be on the top floor. And then we got a floor in between. And so you, you aren't picking up too much of the sound, but even, even so

they're still occasionally you'll get little, the attentive listener may notice, Oh, it sounds like there's some chaos or violence in the background. It's probably my son exploring which things are breakable. Then finding out a lot that are. So you've done a lot of work on Mormonism. At least I've been seeing YouTube videos from when you've done it. What, so when you kind of got this job at Catholic Answers, did you just decide for yourself,

I'm going to investigate different topics, like the Eucharist, like Mormonism? Do they direct you to do that? What else have you been looking into? There's very little direction in that sense. I'll sometimes get suggestions where they say, hey, we don't have a lot of videos on x topic. Is this something you're interested in?

And it's always very invitational. They've never said, you have to record on this subject. And it goes at the speed of my own interest. I've never been diagnosed as having ADHD, but I would be shocked if I didn't. And so the number of like interests that I get super passionate about and go deep on and then get distracted and go deep on something else works really well for a podcast because I can spend as long as I want, exploring a particular topic and then jump over to another one. So when I started with Catholic answers, I didn't think like,

I'm going to be the Mormon guy. I'm going to be the guy who responds to LDS claims. But no, the whole way that started, I'd been doing a video on being charitable in apologetics. And I gave the example that a lot of times we're not very charitable with the Mormons. You know, people are often mocking and dismissive and it's not helpful. They might talk about burning an LDS book. Yes, exactly. Let me clarify that. I wasn't saying you should go to a Mormon and steal their books and set

them on fire. But it seems to me, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that if something is clearly a false revelation of Jesus Christ, then it deserves to be done away with. And by that, I'm not yet at the point where I'm saying we steal them from people's houses and burn them. But in the same way you might get like a copy of the sort of Jehovah's Witness translation, what's that called, the New World translation?

Where it clearly has errors in it in John's gospel. Like actually setting fire to a Bible is the appropriate way to do away with the Bible by the way, or to bury it. So if I had an extra copy of Mormon, I'd absolutely have no problem burning it. Feel free to push back there. Well, let me, let me nuance it because the church has always said error has no rights and that's true, but erroneous people do have rights. And so in a world in which Mormons didn't exist, and you just had books of Mormon lying around, because all the Mormons had converted to Catholicism,

we'd say, okay, we don't really need these anymore. We're gonna burn them. Or maybe we'll keep a few for reference copies, or they have some historical import, but we don't want people misled by the false claims. But in a world in which this is something valuable and meaningful to people, that even if it's wrong, there's a certain deference to the human person that you want to say, how do I respectfully treat you as someone who venerates this rather than just destroying

the stuff that you believe in, even if the stuff you believe in is wrong? Is there a kind of religion, and we will use the term religion loosely here, that you believe in, even if the stuff you believe in is wrong. Is there a kind of religion, and we'll use the term religion loosely here, that you would not hold that view? Yeah, so if it's directly opposite, so I'll give you an example. In the fall, I think of last year, there was the situation in the Iowa state Capitol where a man came in and destroyed the statue of Satan that was there in the state Capitol. Absolutely appropriate. St. Boniface of our day, and he's actually represented by friends of ours. They're his lawyers. And yeah, I think that's, this is a case where it's not an authentically held belief, it's mocking God and it's mocking Christianity. And here it is on state grounds.

I don't see a good case to say that that should be left up, A, because of the, and here it is on state grounds. I don't see a good case to say that that should be left up, A, because of the context of where it is, and B, because of what it's saying. But the fact that somebody gets something wrong, I think we need to be very careful. I'm going to err on the side of caution of being respectful of people's false views, trying to correct them. But if we, you know, if we go all seven roller. Well, what about this? Cause I already stated that I'm not talking about going into a Mormon's home

or stealing their books and burning them. But if you walk past one of those public little libraries, the little boxes they sometimes have, if there was a Book of Mormon in there, it's not, I probably wouldn't do it. I don't care that much, but I think it would be completely appropriate to take it and throw it in the trash.

Yeah, I think in that case, because there you're not, it doesn't have the same insult to the human person as doing it to like to somebody or in front of them. And you're just keeping it away from, and I think if you find garbage books in one of those little free libraries, you're totally justified to say, I don't want people reading these books. Right. And I think, like, I think I get why that's offensive to the Mormon watching. But I also think that if the Mormon watching tries to understand it from my perspective, namely, this is misleading Christians and this is a false revelation, if that is the case, Mormon, and you say, well, it's not, okay, but if it is the case and it's claiming to be true things about Jesus Christ, then do you see why it might be inappropriate? You know?

Right. Maybe they could take the example of another book. Well, here's an idea. Like what if, um, John Smith decided he was receiving a revelation and it was a new revelation and that all the other Christian denominations plus Mormonism had fallen into apostasy and he was here to reinstate the true Christian religion. And there was now this document that said that Jesus said things, did things. Okay, the Mormon would look at that and say that's false, presumably. And therefore, they would probably treat that with the sort of attitude I would want to treat theirs with. Now, they might not go the whole way and say we should burn it. Right. I think the question is in that last little clause. So certainly we don't have

to venerate false holy books. We don't have to honor them. We don't have to treat them with a special respect. The question is, what do we do about them? Because there's a lot of garbage books out there that aren't even, you know, I mean. So I may have just, I may be contradicting myself here. Maybe I'm talking myself out of this because if I found a Apocryphal gospel so you have Thomas or something I would want to keep on I would want to keep that But I think that no I think the difference is the reason I'd want to keep that is because no one's reading that right now I'm being misled into some false religion. This is this is exactly the distinction I mean a lot of what we know about Gnosticism,

prior to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, came from Christians explaining what Gnosticism was in order to respond to it. So you know the early Christians read a lot of Gnostic texts. Okay. They didn't just consign them all to the flames. They were clearly reading up on them and treating them with the respect to know what they taught in order to rebut the falsehood. And so, you know, St. Irenaeus and against Heresies is the best single source prior to the 20th century on Gnosticism. And it's true the Gnostic texts, after the Gnostics converted, their texts were eventually destroyed. And actually, this was a huge historical loss.

You know, we know less about Gnosticism than we otherwise would have. So I think you're tapping into something really important. There's three possible reasons to preserve the text. One is because you think it's true. That's not applicable here. Two is you think it's important for some kind of historical sort of reason. And three is in order to respond to the false claims it's making. And so, you know, to that end, if you're someone who spends your entire life debunking a certain political view, say, you probably have a library full of the view

you disagree with. This was sometimes referred to as the hell shelf in seminary because you would have all of the books that you needed to rebut. Yeah. Because if you didn't have that, how are you going to know what people are saying? So yeah, it's more complicated than just let's, let's torch them all. Totally. Which is not what I said. I know you, I know you know that, but just to, yeah.

So did you, have you ever had a Mormon take you up on a debate? Because we tried to do that. And the guy said yes and then he backed out and deleted all of his comments saying that he backed out and someone told me that would happen and I thought well this guy seems reasonable but no it happened. We've had some good let's see if we can set something up kind of conversations but it hasn't come to the point of actually doing the debate. And some of that is actually on my end of just being busy. So I don't know if there's going to be a back out or not, but we'll see. Though I'm hopeful in this regard, I'm not going to name any names,

but I will say that the LDS typically discourage debate. And that's a pretty institutional sort of discouragement of debate because that's not how they want to approach determining the truth. They're much bigger on, pray on it and look for that feeling in your heart that you know it's right. Or it might, to say it more cynically, it might be for the same reason that Planned Parenthood doesn't debate, because they would be exposed. Right. I think absolutely that's true. And I think there's often a cynical view of debate. I even hear this from Catholics saying, oh, well, there's no use debating religion on Facebook or online.

And I think that's just utterly false. There's no use doing it badly of just like shouting in a, in an incoherent kind of way. But that's true of any kind of approach. If you do it well, I've seen people actually change their mind on things and maybe it's not the person you're directly interacting with. But if you carry yourself in a charitable logical way and you, and you've done a good job of presenting the truth and love, maybe somebody reading that says, aha, that makes sense. I've had my mind changed

by things I've read online. I'm sure everyone has. I mean, unfortunately, because it's usually wrong stuff. But the point is we have this both, we broadly, but I think this is true in a particular way with the LDS, there's sort of a sourness towards debate and argumentation and all of that, that isn't a good position for a Christian to have, you know, if iron sharpens iron. Yeah. It's an understandable reaction, but it's, you're, I totally agree with you. It would be like if you grew up in a household where your parents fought and

were kind of mean vicious to each other. And then you might say, you know, married couples shouldn't be arguing. What you mean is they shouldn't be vicious. Not that they shouldn't propose premises that lead to conclusions. It's a very good analogy because the history of Mormonism in America is often fraught with violence and feelings of persecution and real persecution. And so understandably, I mean, this is a group that is regularly maligned and spoken falsely of and so they're going to be a little cynical of the idea that debate is going to lead to the truth now ironically One of the reasons those falsehoods flourish is because they don't just go back and forth in a way that brings the truth out. Yeah

Yeah, well very good. I I don't think there's any shame in choosing not to debate at all But no, I'm glad you say that because some people are not called to it. I'm not, I wouldn't be good at it. Right. You're, you're a very good interviewer. You're good at asking good questions and not everyone is called to yeah, to that kind of contentious style. Yeah. And I think it's really important that people have self awareness there. Like I actually think it's a virtue that I know I wouldn't do well in a debate setting. And then I choose not to debate. But I have seen people debate who I think really,

really should have been told this is not your gift. In the church too, I've seen it recently where I'm like, oh, just let Trent do it. Let Jimmy do it. So do you feel equipped to do it? I'm sure you would do it. I mean, I used to be a litigator and I was a high school and college debater for eight years. So I saw you in dialogue with, uh, who's the fella? Gavin Orland. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was a really excellent, and I think maybe I pushed that more in a debate way than he was comfortable with. I didn't try to, but I just naturally like, I want to be very charitable. I think he's a good man, but there are a lot of things. He just seemed to be getting substantively wrong. I wanted to push back on them.

I probably pushed back a little harder than I should have in that. And so maybe it would have been better to just have it set up as a debate or something. Cause I didn't want to abuse his, his generosity of doing a dialogue. Well, yeah, it's a humbling thing to choose to do a debate or it can be in similar way to why it might be a humbling thing to be a professional athlete where people are watching you and there's no excuses anymore. Like you're on camera and you didn't do well, you fumbled that ball or something or other and you could have

always done things better and it's easy to criticize if you're not the one on the hot seat. But yeah. Yeah, I think it's the letting down the team thing also comes in in a different way. Something like this, I don't have to do any real preparation to sit down and have a conversation with you, but I'll tell you, like a professional athlete, you may see them for an hour or a few hours on game day, but they're doing a lot of work that you're not seeing.

And if they're not, that's gonna show up. You're gonna see the difference. Well, likewise, Trent spends an enormous amount of time preparing for debates. I was stunned when I realized how much time he spent. So you see him for an hour or a few hours, and you just think, oh, that guy's really smart. And he is, but he also was thinking about

every possible way the conversation could go and preparing for it. I mean, it's an incredible skill set, but also takes a lot of discipline and diligence. And so there's a reason that there are plenty of smart people who have a natural gift of persuasion who can't do what someone like Jimmy or Trent does because they're not putting in the time and the effort and they're not reading all of this stuff and they're not doing all of that preparation. So you know, they wouldn't tell you that, but I'll tell you that about them.

They're extremely disciplined and that's the key to how they're able to seem like they just have everything at their fingertips because they got it there. They did the work to put it there. Now you said you're pretty sure you have ADD and whatever you mean by that, I'm pretty sure I'm the same. One of the beautiful things about hosting this show is talking to different people about a whole host of topics that have anything to do with the church, to philosophy specifically. Whereas like back in the day when I focused solely on pornography, I was glad to...

There's some context that I hope people know. Yeah, it's so funny. You become numb to that. People go, hey, you're the porn guy. I'm like, I get it. It was funny for five seconds, ten years ago when I realized people know. Yeah, it's so funny. You become numb to that. You know, people go, hey, you're the porn guy. I'm like, I get it. It was funny for five seconds, 10 years ago when I realized the joke. Now I don't care. It's still funny to me. So I want to speak on behalf of people who still enjoy that joke. Yeah, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and was honored to kind of take that role,

to write those books. And if I'm called upon to do it again, praise the Lord, I'd be honored. But it is nice to focus and just. This is one of the things that's great about working for Catholic Answers is I can kind of move at the speed of my interests and go where I'm interested. And it seems like you've got the same thing. If you want to have a guest on on a particular topic,

you can say, who do I want to have on this week? And there's something very liberating about that. It's just like, have good conversations. So what's your job description then? I mean, I used to work at Catholic Answers. By the way, you said earlier that sometimes they'll bring something up. Is this something you'd be interested in?

And you can say no. Well, back in the day when I worked for them, back in 2012, they asked me if I'd be interested in giving assembly addresses on bullying. And I said, no, I don't think so. Pro or anti? Right, said, no, I don't I don't think so. Pro or anti? Right. Well, yeah, anti. But I don't know.

Now I think I'm OK with a bit of bullying, you know, like now I feel like we've swung so far in the opposite direction. You know, we joke, but Greg Lukanoff, is that his name? The guy who co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt. He argues that one of the reason you get kind of the woke generation is because the anti-bullying movement taught them that words were violence, and they responded to that so incredibly that they thought real violence was fine

in response to mean words. And it's a provocative thesis, but he has some research that kind of points in that direction. Certainly there's a correlation in terms of time that, yeah, people become very thin skinned when the message is sticks and stones can break your bones, but words are way worse and ideas are dangerous and hide from them.

It's like, no, no, no, that is a disastrous. I want to be kind of clear here too, lest people think I'm saying something like burn all the Mormon books again. For example, I don't know. One should ever bully another person. And yet I think people should be ashamed of the shameful things they do. Yeah. And in eliminating bullying, look at this 10 year old boy petitions Apple to

change its nerd emoji. A 10 year old boy has taken it upon himself to petition Apple to change one of its emojis. Teddy from Oxford, Oxfordshire, England would like to rename the emoji that wears black frame glasses and has two buck teeth sticking out, which currently the company calls the nerd emoji. They're making people think we're nerds and it's absolutely horrible. The boy and glasses wearer and buck teeth. No said in an interview with the BBC, it's making me feel sad and upset. And I feel right. So again, the point is that we shouldn't be mocking other people.

We should be charitable towards each other. And yet there should be a way to sort of let people know. Like I was in a steak restaurant the other day with my friend, father Jason, and a kid came in with pajama pants on and I thought he should feel ashamed. Yeah. And okay. So maybe by shame, I mean something other than a hatred of self. That's not what I mean. Right? Well, this is a good distinction, right? Because a lot of the redefinition of shame is a hatred of self. And that's not what a quietness means. That's not what I mean.

I mean, he should have more respect for himself. Yeah. So as not to act in a way that's beneath his dignity. Yeah. Very well. And it felt like that back in the day when we could yell things at each other, you know, there was a way to sort of show the group, this behavior is unacceptable. And sometimes that was wrong, like you were wrong to think that's unacceptable, but sometimes no, you were right.

Like to tattoo your face and dye your hair purple and wear ripped jeans that are barely holding on, something like that. Like having someone in your community say, you look stupid, might be extremely helpful for that person. But if we're no longer allowed to express those opinions, then. Yeah, so I mean the two ways a society kind of goes when that's the case is either one, there's just no longer any standards whatsoever because having standards is offensive. Or two, and I think more realistically, those standards still exist and they still play a role, but you

don't say them out loud. And so the person that you just gave the example of the face tattoos and the purple hair and the purple hair And the ripped jeans can't get a job and thinks why is everyone persecuting me and no one's just like well You don't look professional. You don't look you know, and this is an injustice to that person Because look there's this important to mention just in terms of developmental psychology, right? When you're a child you look to your parents for approval and you need to get two messages. On the one hand, you need to hear you are unconditionally and profoundly loved. On the other hand, you also need this is good behavior, this is bad behavior. Do this, don't do that.

And so often parents go into one of those two extremes and they don't do a good job of hitting the other. Well, that's good. And after you get to really about the teenage years, you start looking to your peers for the same thing. And there's good developmental reason for this because it's not enough for you to survive that you are pleasing to mommy and daddy. You also have to be someone who is well looked upon in society. And so you look to peers and especially older peers and see, okay, is this cool? Is this uncool? Look, I wore like Jinko jeans.

I don't know if you maybe you were spared this in Australia, horrible baggy pants. I for a short period of time. I wish I told you, I looked ridiculous. Kind of limp biscuit, Fred Durst belt, you know, but it hanged hung down. Yeah, this is American culture just poisoning the world. You're welcome. Little boy, Port Perry, South Australia, picking up on it. Thanks for that. Yeah, exactly.

We also had dishwashers and automobiles and airplanes. So thank you for that, too. Those were from an earlier era. By the time we got to the 90s, we were like, we've run out of good ideas. Here's the bad ones. So yeah, but in all seriousness, like there is a role to say this works, this doesn't work. And when we don't have that because we're afraid it's going to hurt people's

feelings, that's a disservice to people. Now you've got to have a way of doing that. You know, there's such a thing as constructive criticism and such a thing as destructive criticism. So I actually agree that bullying and as much as it's not looking to help the person is not good But good can still come from yes. I think that's what I'm saying And the problem is when that can't happen in the schoolyard It's definitely happening on the internet and usually it's a lot more vicious and it's anonymous So you think of these three different categories one is two friends sitting across from each other

You know Like if I said and you heard me say before you came on the show, Mormon should burn all books. Because of our friendship, you realized, you probably thought, I don't want to tell you what you thought, but you probably thought,

okay, like I think I know what he's saying, I'm not gonna like skewer him publicly on this. In a conversation like this, we give each other the benefit of the doubt. We seek to endear ourselves to the other. We seek to say, well, what do you mean by that? You know, we don't, all right, so there's that. And then you have acquaintances, maybe, say the school yard,

where you know the person and the person is calling you out on something charitably or uncharitably. But when that can't even happen, then you've got the YouTube comments section where burner accounts are saying all sorts of horrible things. Yeah. And they certainly don't have your good in mind and they're just trying to be provocative. Right. It's the kind of rush to have a hot take on the issue.

And so there's a huge pile on effect where everyone wants to be on the right side. Because look, everyone is still performing for their peers, even online. Yeah. And so a lot of what's going on is they want to seem like they have the right opinions and the right ideas, and that often takes a form of scapegoating someone and demonizing the person who stepped out of line. And so, oh, I'm blanking on his name.

The guy who's done a whole book, yeah, he wrote a book on this and he's done a lot of other stuff. He's the guy who wrote, I think he did The Men Who Stare at Goats, but he anyway he has a whole book on so you've been shamed and what he looks at is he just goes and interviews the people who become like the Internet's person they hate for five minutes and Just see how it's destroyed their life while everybody else kind of moved on when you know and in most of the cases the person's

Actually done something wrong It's not that they were just misunderstood. You caught them on a bad day. They were making an inappropriate joke. They were doing something offensive. They were being stupid or cruel or whatever. But who hasn't had days like that? And without any relational context, a billion people just say, we hate you.

And then it's like, well, now you've lost your job and good luck finding another one. And it's just awful. So yeah, we haven't resolved bullying. We've just exported it to the internet. And it's way worse there than having someone say, don't do that, that's gross, that's offensive, that's too far. We're ironically having someone in their life to say,

pump the brakes, don't post that online. Don't even do that would have been tremendously helpful for them. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I, Brian Holdsworth was here recently and he said, increasingly he is coming to believe that social media is an identity establish. So it's the way you find your identity by agreeing with certain positions and shaming other positions and things like this. Yeah the algorithmic shift that happened maybe ten years ago was huge. As you start to be able to unfollow people and as the form, you know I'm old enough to remember

when Facebook was just a place where you said you were gonna have an apple and it was just like Joe is dot dot dot and a place where you said you were going to have an apple and it was just like, Joe is dot dot dot. And then you just finished whatever you were doing or, and it was banal, but it was mostly harmless. And so those of us from that era have or had friends of wildly different views and everything. It was just everyone you knew you had it. Oh, we met at a party once. Now let's go at each other on Facebook. And it created an actual marketplace of ideas. Now most of those ideas were stupid and banal like I'm gonna have an apple. But occasionally some would say

something really thoughtful or provocative or profound. And then they moved, they did a couple moves one they moved into doing more content sharing where it was like sharing links and then eventually having things on the platform itself and two they started to have things like unfollow so you could quietly censor everyone you didn't want to hear their voices and so it created this tremendous echo chamber but it also created this tremendous desire to fit in with the people you wanted to follow because you didn't want them to do that to

you because you knew if you said the wrong thing, the next time you go to follow your friend, you might just see the add friend button, the coldest of cold shoulders. Or maybe you don't see it, but unbeknownst to you, but you kind of suspect it. They don't see your stuff anymore because they've clicked unfollow. And so it creates this tremendous performative dimension where you have to, you know, every time you're like, like this, or they'll give a concrete example from my own life. When there is an issue, that's a hot button news sort of thing, I feel a strong internal pressure to say something. I don't need to, no one needs my take. And I try to resist this impulse as often as I can because why pile on? Why add to it?

But there's that sense of you need to say something. And so amazingly what we took originally is just, you know, Facebook was meant to be like that yearbook. It's a way of keeping in touch with people from high school and college it turned into Everyone on earth becoming a public figure and needing to release a press release every time there's a news story exactly That's a very good analogy. I've heard a different analogy that gets to the same point I'm told that people in academia with PhDs have to continue to publish to remain relevant And now we believe that that's true of every us,

like every human being feels, if I'm not publishing constantly, I'm no longer relevant. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just taking a break. And the ironic thing is, although we're feeling that tremendous pressure, do you really notice when your friend hasn't commented on the issue of the day?

Well, I don't know if you've experienced this, but I've kind of made a pretty conscious effort not to be commenting on every church scandal thing that takes place. Occasionally, if it's very big, we'll do a comp, but I don't like being beholden to respond to every little thing. This happened last year with Strickland when he was, what do you say, relieved? I don't know. Stricken.

Stricken. When Strickland was stricken, I said like, I'm not gonna comment on it. And it really was because other people are doing this and I don't know more than them, nor am I more articulate than them. But see, people were saying, you've had him on your show. Like you deserve, like we deserve you. No, you piss off.

Like I'm not, nothing, I owe you nothing. If you're my wife, my children, I owe you a lot. If you're my friends, I owe you stuff. But if you're a rando on the internet, I don't. And you might say, well, I disagree because I think the way that public personalities, well, great, then we have a different interpretation of what we should be doing.

So, and then of course you may have. So that's that's the difference. It's not, it's not just you thinking I have to give my hot take. It's others telling you we need you to. Yeah, which is just don't do that to people. It does not make the world better by getting everyone to add their hot take. Because what are you really, why? Like what does, should Bishop Strickland. You know what it is? People want an opinion and they don't yet have one and they want you to help them form one. I think you're right.

So that reality can be a safer place than it is right now. I think I used this example the last time I was on this show and I promise I have other examples in my life, but this one, I come back to it. I was reading the newspaper, it was in St st. Louis and it was something to the effect of there'd been a hung jury in a murder case and They said here are the facts you decide and I thought what? I'm I gonna decide a jury heard this evidence for days and couldn't come to a conclusion

Yeah, and you want me as a person who's never heard of this before and has now read one article. It's like a patronizing statement, isn't it, in a way? Like you're smart enough to figure this out. And it's also maybe a cowardly way of the person to not make a decision. Well, I think it speaks to something at the heart of us not knowing what we're doing with media in general. So if you've ever read Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he talks about how, well, now Texas and England can talk to each other, but do they have anything to say? And that's where you get things like, I'm gonna go have an apple.

They're like, we don't have any, there's no frame of reference. These are not things that God has placed in our life to do something with. We're just getting other people's decisions. You see what I mean? Like someone needs to know what should happen with Bishop I mean? Like someone needs to know what should happen with Bishop Strickland. Someone needs to know what should happen and whatever

the issue of the day is. But it's not me. And the more time and energy I spend trying to form an opinion on whether I think the actor acted in an appropriate way, that's all time that's being taken away from me actually figuring out the stuff God has put in my life to do. Mason Harkness And do you think that's because, just like you were saying, we seek to endear ourselves to our groups online to show them we're still in the group, here's our badge. Do we then take that into our offline circles as well, where it's like, gee, what happened with bloody Strickland? You know, you're like, I mean, yeah, it seems, like I think my response the few days after was something like, yeah, it looks really bad.

It looks like there's a prejudice coming out of the Vatican where conservative bishops are kind of given up being stricken. But other people on the left side aren't. But I don't know. I don't know what he did. I don't know if anything happened that I don't know about. So just just to not know. Right. Is to be thought just to not know, right.

Is to be thought a coward. Yeah. Yeah. And yet I think the willingness to be thought a coward, when you actually are correct in saying, I don't have enough to assess the situation, come to a decision is an act of bravery in a way to be willing to be open to attack. Yes. You were very brave. Is this where we're going? That's a low key way of me saying I am the bravest. Aren't I the hero? Yes.

No, but you're absolutely right that the pressure, and I guess I'd say this, I've been in situations where I've occasionally been close enough to see a news thing go down in real time and then hear the way it gets talked about in a distorted sort of way. I've got two examples. in real time and then hear the way it gets talked about in a distorted sort of way. Yes, yes. I've got two examples. One of them, I was at a Grandparents Day Mass with Pope Francis and Pope Benedict was there and beforehand they had school kids who were coming up and, you know, saying things. And one of these kids from Ireland said, oh, you know, Pope Benedict, Pope Francis, you

guys are great. You're like grandfathers to me and to us. And Pope Francis had a very kind response about how, as you know, this was early on his pontificate and Benedict had been serving in this wonderful role as like a grandfather to him as well. And it made total sense in the context of responding to this Irish school kit.

The headlines made it sound like Francis had dismissed Benedict as an old grandfather, had taken this very sweet, enduring moment and turned it into something malicious. And so then if that becomes a question, should Francis have written Benedict off as a grandfather, you can have all the hot takes you want and they're totally divorced from reality. You've got the wrong question. Exactly. And likewise, I was at the North American College and the public way a certain scandal played out and then the private way where we had more information was a totally

different kind of picture. And it was one of those things where it's like, yeah, people are forming these very ill, not just like uninformed, but misinformed takes. And so maybe the conclusion follows from the premises, but the prime, the premises are, are false and loaded in some of these cases. I like what you said earlier. Um, when, when someone says like, now, here's the facts, you decide. I even find that really frustrating in a debate setting. Hey, you guys go, you read the primary documents, you read the studies. We say, hey, you guys go, you read the primary documents, you read the studies. You're like, well, I came here because I don't have time or background knowledge to even understand.

But it's a way, I think, for the debater to show their being objective. And if you were to look into this yourself, you would come to the same conclusion as myself. This is deeply rooted in our approach to Christianity, and it's profoundly unchristian. What do you mean? That we don't want to be sheep following a shepherd. We want to read all the biblical data, all the patristic data, form all the theological opinions and then find a church that agrees with us. We want to be the shepherd, we want to be the pope, we want to be the key figure in

the religion and that is not what we're called to be. It's great if you understand theology. It's wonderful if you can understand why the church teaches A, B, C, D, E. That's not necessary for the faith. Faith is ultimately still an act of trust. So, the church historically has distinguished between what's called religious assent and real assent. Religious assent is, I believe this thing because you tell me so. And real assent is, I believe this thing because I see the truth of it for myself. Real ascent is great, but you're not going to get that on every issue under the sun. Even as someone who's like full-time in Catholic stuff, there are issues which I just

haven't taken a close look at. And so, I just trust the church got them right. I've never done a deep dive to say, well, how do we know X, Y, is true not just of faith related issues, but every single thing you believe. Yes. Right. That my wife is actually who she says she is. That these stairs that I'm walking on aren't about to collapse, you know. Right. And so this was one of the major things with like new atheism is they wanted to push back against the need for faith, which was taking this impulse of we'll decide for, to its logical limit. And it is an absolute absurdity. Because even if you say, I'll decide based on the studies, well, there's a huge replication crisis in science,

where studies that looked right the first time we did them, we rerun the experiment and don't get the same result. Sometimes it's a hoax, sometimes it was just a mis-designed experiment. So even when you're deciding, you're actually taking on faith that the evidence being presented to you is what it's named to be. And not just the evidence, but the interpretation of the lead researcher. Right. There's been instances where, I won't mention the name because this is a vicious woman who's come after me several times. I'll leave it at that. She did a study trying to show that pornography

wasn't had, didn't have kind of addictive related changes in the brain and she was wrong. Her interpretation was see, it's not like a drug and then a ton of, well, and not a ton. I think there was at least several neuroscientists said, your findings are accurate. You misinterpreted. Yeah, there was a somewhat famous case Sweden there were two researchers looking at people who'd had so-called like sex reassignment surgeries and Sweden has pretty open medical records so you can get a nationwide sort of example they looked at different people been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and they tracked the long-term outcomes of those who'd gotten The surgery and those who had not.

And these are about as close as you can get to a perfect widespread case study. And they released this press release and everything else with their study. It's international news that having sex change operations is good for your long-term health and you're less likely to attempt suicide and you're less likely to be depressed and da-da-da-da-da. And it turned out they compiled all good data, and they had misread the numbers. And it said the exact opposite of what they were saying,

that actually the people who'd had the operations were having worse outcomes. They were more likely to have attempted suicide, were more likely to be depressed. And it took other researchers to say, hold up, your own tables actually say the opposite of what you're saying. So all that's to say, if up, your own tables actually say the opposite of what you're saying. So all that's to say if they who are doing this full time and seemingly weren't doing this on purpose,

because you wouldn't purposely destroy your own reputation internationally, can get that wrong. What are the odds that me, I'm just going to be like, oh yeah, well, let me say the data on. Of course, I'm not going to just you report. I decide. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd.

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and things like that. Strive21, that's strive21.com slash Matt, or as I say, text Strive to 66866 to get started today. You won't regret it. Of course I'm not gonna just, you report, I decide. And I think we're all kind of growing cynical to people pointing to studies. It's true. A while back Trent did that debate with that porn performer, an unfortunate fellow, and with Lila. Yeah. And I thought Lila and Trent did an

excellent job. The comments section agreed with you on that video. What? The YouTube comments, the people overwhelming, they seem to agree. Well, the greatest comment, I've shared this on a previous episode of Pines, but the greatest comment was, uh, he quoted destiny as saying, you only believe sex with animals is wrong because you're religious has got to be the one of the best arguments for religion. But the point was the two of them were citing studies and you could even tell that they weren't terribly interested in each other's studies. Right.

And I think that's because we just it feels like you can get a study for whatever you're trying to prove. Yeah. Well, I mean, take since we're talking about the whole trans topic, the HHS secretary is like self-described transgender, and this is who's funding a lot of these studies. Wow. And so it's like, well, is there a thumb on the scale? Well, of course, because this person's also given speeches about how the science agrees that this

is bigotry and there's no other possible reason. So there's a huge, very obvious interest in, we want studies that say this is okay what I'm doing, and not studies that don't, and I'm cutting the checks. Of course you're gonna have these march orders. So we see this in polling all the time. A lot of times when the polls are wrong, it's not that there was necessarily wrong,

anything wrong with one of the polls particularly, it's that you had a cluster of polls that all pointed in one direction. And so then the other polls that would have gone in the other direction, no one wants to be the weird outlier who says, well, everybody else says Canada Day is up by five, I'm showing them down by five.

So they just put it in the drawer and they don't publish it. They're not even saying anything false, but they're not challenging the narrative because you don't wanna make yourself look like a bad pollster. If you're the only one finding this result, you're getting the outlier that looks bad professionally. And so you just put it in the drawer. And if it turned out you were actually the one with the best poll, you don't get any rewards for being right, but you avoided the public scandal of being wrong.

And so this is one of the, so we see this in professional context, which is one of the reasons there's a problem with studies is there's a strong professional impulse to have a study that agrees with the popular view, that doesn't challenge it in a dangerous kind of way. And you pair this, and maybe it's part and parcel parcel with the fact that experts has almost become a derisive term. And that is a little unnerving to me. Yeah.

In one sense, I like it because it enables us to question narratives that up until now we weren't willing to question. But you tell me what you think. It also seems to me that you're seeing even people in the Catholic Church going, okay, well, if I can't trust the experts and they're telling me that men can be women and men can be pregnant and then we didn't go to the moon. Evolution must be false. You know, again, I'm not opposed to people looking into these things, questioning them, coming out with different opinions.

I'm not saying a Catholic can't hold that evolution is false. All right. But it's just that where does that end if we can no longer trust the experts? Yeah, I think it's quite right to see, I guess we'd call it in like an epistemic crisis of authority that you have, you know, in the old days. So let's just go middle ages. You've got a literate class that are clergy and scholars, and then you've got a majority of the population that's illiterate or barely literate, and of course they're going to trust the church. They're going to trust their priests. They're going to trust the bishop. They're going to trust the scholars of their day because they're the guys who know how to read

books. Well, now we have just enough information that we can say, well, let me figure it out for myself. And I don't want to knock that because in some ways that's tremendously valuable. But there is this dual crisis where on the one hand, the experts often believe crazy and insane things that you can see visibly from space. No, they're definitely wrong about men being women and women being men. But then if I'm left to my own devices, am I less crazy or am I going to go to this like strange? So I understand, I guess I would say conspiracy theories are a very natural reaction to a reasonable distrust of authority, but they're not a solution there.

And then they sometimes it's almost like the more conspiratorial you can be the baser you are right. You know, so or to put it a different way, if the experts are now my enemies because they're part of the elite class, then whatever they tell me happened can't be the case. Yeah. I would just say to anyone listening to watch out for a sort of double standard where you take the official narrative with an extremely high threshold. We say it has to really convince me I'm not gonna believe it, but then any alternate theory,

you're way more credulous of. That's not actually a healthy way to approach understanding reality either. And so I see the problems much more easily than I see the easy solutions. Because you can't just blindly trust the experts, but neither should you blindly trust the opposite of the experts.

And so yeah, I mean, I guess I've even thought about writing about this. I've never done it. I think there is a dual distrust that the experts are increasingly distrustful of the general masses and hate them. And that as a result, a lot of the reason people react the way they do is they know they're being bossed around by people who are condescending towards them or derisive of them. Yes. Hillary Clinton's remarks about the deplorables. Yes, right. The clinging to guns and religion, the line from, I believe that was Obama, that

there is this widespread sense of like, oh, you benighted fools. And people are smart enough to realize, you hate me, you don't understand smart enough to realize you hate me. You don't understand me. You look down on me. You know, uh, Thomas Frank's book, what's the matter with Kansas? Whereas it's like, how could these stupid people in Kansas not realize they shouldn't be super liberal? And it's like, well, because they care about abortion more than they care about a welfare state. And that's a reasonable set of policy assumptions. You may disagree with it,

but they're not stupid for having different values than you. And so the example I go back to is in the hunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, or one of the two, they put a citywide lockdown so the police would be unencumbered by the people, get the sheep out of the way so the experts can do their job, and the police couldn't find them. And then finally they lifted the lockdown, the shelter-in-place order, and within a few minutes somebody found him. An ordinary guy. Just found him in his, like, hiding in the boat he had in the backyard. And so all that's to say is like, well, what they should have done is trust the wisdom of the masses.

Yeah. And they didn't. So it does seem to me like this And they didn't. So it does seem to me like this distrust isn't just people are distrusting authorities, also authorities are distrusting people. And that if there was more of a healthy mutual respect, I think that would be the closest thing to a way forward. Yeah. How would you even begin? It's almost like, cause you're talking about two people distrusting each other or two groups distrusting each other, which is not unlike two people distrusting each other. And if two people who distrust each other or two groups distrusting each other, which is not unlike two people distrusting each other. And if two people who distrust each other are going to begin to trust each other,

it feels like one of us has to show goodwill. It's true. And so I guess if I don't have a solution to this, but there's good data showing the wisdom of the masses. I'll give you an example. There's a lot of data on who wants to be a millionaire. You know, the who wants to be a millionaire, the classic form of the show. You had three lifelines. So you've got a multiple choice question, four answers. You can either do a 50-50 where two of the answers go away. You can phone a friend, which is someone you chose as like a particular expert, as like, oh here's my smart friend. Or you

can blindly trust the audience by pulling the audience of people you don't know who just happened to be there on the afternoon For the taping, you know, which of those three is the most effective? It's funny that you're gonna say I'm gonna say what I would do. Yeah what I would think I would I would probably phone a friend and I would choose the friend over the Shouting audience because I think the different answers would confuse me and I would feel like I don't actually have an answer. Yeah, but they pull the audience, you can actually see the numbers. Okay, then I guess you're given where you're going with this,

I'm sure it's the audience. Massively, massively, the experts, these are people that you handpicked. So I always point this out like Catholic Protestant things, like I understand how you read the evidence in the way you do. Yeah. And I respect that you may have some theologians you trust as experts who are telling you this. But is it really possible that the crowd, the masses, the ordinary Christians for 1500 years got all of these major issues wrong? Use contraception as an example. Yeah, right. Or the views on justification, or the views on the saints, the views on... You go back and look at medieval Christianity, and it's not just, oh, the experts say X and

then some other experts say Y. It's like, no, no, no. We have a whole mass of Christians who all believe the same thing. And so at some point, I think we need to take seriously that there is a wisdom in the masses, that ordinary people get this stuff right. Now, that's true in religion. I think it's also true in just any old kind of regular society. If you've got a position that says everybody's wrong about this thing, like it's wrong to have sex with animals, to use the example you gave before. Well,

that should give you pause to say maybe my intuitions or my reasoning has gone off course and I'm the weirdo. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was Andrew Clavin who said recently that the left or the elites hate Trump and fine, but they haven't paused to ask why did the masses want him? Right. And I think you see this, you know, the thing we were talking about, the kind of distrust of and even contempt for ordinary people in some of the conscious media decisions that we need to not try to do a fair, nuanced sort of reporting. We need to really put our finger on the scale and say, this is a bad person.

Do not vote for the bad. And people realize this is condescending, regardless of your views on Trump. Anytime you're being talked down to by the press, by the literati, by the experts, whoever they are, and being treated like a moral idiot and like a child, well, it's natural to say, screw you. It's natural to say like back off because you have a natural resentment for that. Now that's dangerous. You don't want to just go into that reactive sort of mode. You don't want to just be like blindly reacting.

Because sometimes when people say, this guy's bad, it's because he's bad. Sometimes when they say, don't put a fork in the light socket, it's because it's actually dangerous too. But if you're being constantly talking, I guess I'd just say if you're in a position of authority, don't treat people like that because they can pick up on it. And that's not a decent way to treat people. Yeah. Epistemology. I think if I was ever to do like a further study, I would like to do, I would like to learn more about epistemology because it fascinates me. Fascinates me how little I know about everything I think I know.

Yes. It really, I mean, I remember studying philosophy and hearing the claim that everything I know comes through the senses. Yeah. And being like, that's not right, is it? And then kind of going back and being like, oh, I guess it is. Yeah. Like if I didn't have my senses, I wouldn't be able to. It's hard to imagine what that would even be like.

Right. Well, what let's do that for fun. This is like a Joe Rogan part of the podcast. Imagine not having sight, touch. So's do that for fun. This is like a Joe Rogan part of the podcast. Imagine not having sight touch. So you can't feel anything, which I presume that means it like right now, you wouldn't sense that you're sitting on something. Right? Right. Right. So no sight, no smell, no taste, no hear, no hearing and no. What would that be? Yeah.

Like would you, you would be presumably, but would you know that you were? Yeah. I mean, this is, I think exactly where we get the enlightenment is Descartes asking a very similar question to this. I think therefore I am, but would you have any data to think? Right. That's the question. And I think Aquinas would say you've got nothing to think about. And so what is the experience of consciousness look like when there's nothing to think about? It's hard to, it's hard to wrap one's mind around. I would say this in, uh,

in the miracle worker, Helen Keller talks about her experience of object permanence and it's really fascinating. So before she learned sign language, you there's a pivotal moment towards the end, um, where I'm blanking on the name of the woman who was helping her teaches her to sign by doing sign language on her hand because Helen Keller can't see or hear And so the the principle senses are gone, but she still has a sense of touch. She's not completely without

but before I'm so annoyed. I can't remember the woman's name before she teaches her to sign the word water And introduces her to the concept of language because this is what she's done. She has not just taught her the word for water, she's introduced her to the world of words, that there are objects and they have names. Prior to that, Helen had been in a rage and she had destroyed a doll because she had no concept of it having like permanence, which is mind blowing. And then after she learns the word water and suddenly

realizes things exist and they have names and they stick around, she cries for the doll. She suddenly like, it isn't just like, Oh, now I have a word for why it's like she's entered the world in a new way. I obviously, you know, I'm touched by this, by this moment, by this scene. And if there's something moment, by this scene, and there's something so tremendously heartbreaking about it, but there's also something so incredible. Miss Sullivan, there it is, I think. There's something so incredible about language and about reality. And there is, I think, a deep and untapped dimension of Christianity about this.

Like God speaks the world into being, That there's this close association between the word and incarnation and creation. And, you know, it's through words that there's this kind of transformational reality. like a lot of people would be more open to a fleshed out theory that we are persons in a video game. Yes. Then they are open to their being a creator of all reality. Yeah, it's I don't know if it's because it's novel. I don't know if it's because we are so impressed by the magic of technology that nothing surprises us anymore. Yeah, that seems like if I can text my sister in Australia and she can text back

within a couple of seconds, then I guess lots of things. Yeah, I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said he gave it a 50% chance of being accurate. We're living in a simulation. Is it OK that I don't care at all what Neil deGrasse Tyson tells me? OK, OK, good. Yeah, but that is interesting. I find it fascinating because it's like, well, if you asked him, what are the odds that God exists, I think he's given it sub 50%, but all the evidence points to being in a simulation

is better evidence for the existence of God. Like, oh, reality seems to be created. Well, you couldn't remember the dumb anthropomorphic idea of a video game. Is it that we're tired of the God hypothesis as it were? Yeah. Or we've dismissed the God hypothesis as ridiculous. Yeah. Because we said, well, there couldn't be an old man in the clouds doing it. It'd have to be some sort of creator outside the reality. And as a Christian, you're like, that's what we were trying to tell you, but you were so

hung up on an old man in the clouds. Yeah. Like you were like, well, the Soviets had a poster where it was a cosmonaut saying, I don't see any God up here. And it's like, that's your understanding of what Christians are claiming. Well, of course. First of all, space is really large. So maybe the Mormons are right. And you just haven't found him yet. Like you're not nearly far enough away to see Kolob. So no,

it, but it's that kind of idea that we have this, this very small view of God, and it's easier, I guess, to get one's mind around the idea of a video game designer, because we have a direct experience of that. Or a simulation designer that's just some dude bro living in whatever the upstairs San Francisco is. Is that really a more satisfying intellectual explanation? No, but it might appeal to your imagination in a different way. Yeah

Yeah I was talking to Andrew Jones recently who's a philosopher here teaches political theory at the college one of the new polity guys, right? Yeah. Yeah, wonderful guy. My goodness. It was wonderful to talk to him But he yeah He was talking about how the atheists keep telling him that the most profound Experiences he has are less than he thinks that they are, and then have to give an extremely complicated account for why they're less than he thinks that they are. Yeah. Like your relationship with your wife is merely usorial, it's something of a contract, it has to

do with this and that. And we sit there and we're like speaking about the masses again, right? Like if every civilization in the history of mankind has believed in God or something like God, maybe we should pay attention to the democracy of the dead. And so he's saying, yeah, that's just not at all the case. Like, that's not, that's not why I love my wife. I know that, but it doesn't stop there. Right. It's it's that also you don't have free will. And he is a very complicated explanation as to why.

And also you don't exist free will. And here's a very complicated explanation as to why. And also, you don't exist actually over time. And you're like, yeah, okay, so I'm pretty sure I exist and I'm pretty sure I'm free to say and believe that I exist and pretty sure I am capable of loving my wife and believing this to be more than it appears. So I'm just not going to listen to you anymore. Right. And this is, this is what I was trying to get you before is if your philosophy leads you to deny the apparent reality over and over and over again, that's probably not a problem with reality.

That's probably a problem with your philosophy. And so if you have to tell people, yeah, sure, you have the illusion of free will, but you don't actually have it. You have the illusion of loving your wife, but you don't actually have it. It's ridiculous. So two things here. One in After Virtue, Alistair McIntyre makes a really provocative point that there's a whole subset of people who want mechanical understandings for everyone besides them while not believing those apply to themselves.

So everyone around me is driven by biological impulses and they only believe the things they do because of evolution or because of Some Marxist dialectic reason or because of fill-in-the-blank, but that's not why I believe those things I believe those things as are actually true Like my belief that everyone else is mechanically determined is a true belief not a mechanically determined belief Yeah, so I'm always the one like as the Subjective observer. I'm always in a different category than the objective reality around me. But it's like, no, no, if all of that's true, you've sunk your own ship. Like if I can't trust my experience of reality, because of X, Y, Z reason,

you're telling me you can't trust your experience of reality either, including your belief in X, Y, Z. And so the arguments become self refuting. You can't have a merely evolutionary understanding of cognition and still trust cognition because how do you know cognition is accurately reflecting reality? You don't. There's no reason to believe that it would. And so all of these arguments become self-refuting. That's first point. That's a high point. The lower Brown point is,

you know when teenage boys think everybody is making sexual euphemisms around them and it's like, no, no, you're just a high point. The lower Brown point is, you know, when teenage boys think everybody is making sexual euphemisms around them and it's like, no, no, you're just a perv. Okay. That's how I feel about people. All things are right. Exactly. And so the, the experts who say, oh, well, you're actually just driven by these base motives. You're only telling on yourself. Like maybe that's true in your marriage. Here's an example. I had Christopher West on a while back and we talked about masturbation and he had said that Thank God he can honestly say that he hasn't masturbated since he was I think he said 19, right?

one of the comments was I Hate it when people lie about not masturbating. It makes me distrust them. He like, okay that says way more about you, right? it's like Yeah, I mean, I can give a better example. Now that is just such a direct, I don't believe that there's anything better for me than the way I've been living because it seems so impossible that someone would be actually happy and actually self-controlled and all of these things. And so yeah, you see that in a thousand different ways where you imagine somebody's just making it look better than it really is.

It's like, no, no, maybe not everybody is actually miserable. Maybe not everybody's actually mired in sin because there are better ways of living and you have to believe and trust and hope. Totally. It's like a feminist who looks at the happy wife and says, you can't possibly be happy. This must be self-delusion. She's like, I really am happy. Right.

And this is not just a one-off, right? Happiness studies are a thing that they've been pulling men and women since like the mid seventies on happiness. And it used to be women were profoundly more happy than men and men's happiness has stayed pretty much flat line. I mean, we're not super self aware. So we're just like, yeah, things are fine. Whatever. We're good. But women's happiness has gone precipitously down. And they went from being so much happier than men to being so much less happy than men.

So the feminist trying to respond to this to say, well, maybe women in the seventies felt a really strong need to lie about how happy they were to the researchers. Like they can't take the data. They can't just accept that maybe the data is accurate because it undermines so much of what they've tried to do because in trying to liberate women, they've made women largely miserable because now it's not just you can have it all, but you kind of have to have it all even if you can't possibly do everything you're being asked to do. Is there an opinion that you've changed your mind about recently?

You know, Catholics might be accused, I know Aquinas is accused, right, of not being a philosopher, people will say. He's really just a theologian, you know, hired by the church. And so he already has preconceived ideas, which he then reasons to, which is just not true. And there's a lot of reasons we could give for that. I'm going to do them. For example, he wouldn't quibble with the Kalam argument if he's just about, you know,

showing God who he is. Certainly he wouldn't deny the most prominent argument for God's existence, namely the ontological argument. You know? All right. So, but then Catholics are probably accused of that too. So is there an opinion that you, you have changed since you've become a serious Catholic? Oh, there's a lot of opinions that I've changed. Oh, and a lot of times I find myself grappling with how to form. So this is true in obvious ways with the news, like what should happen

in Israel and Palestine. Okay. You know, it's like every time I hear something from ask you like, what was your opinion when the news broke and then has it developed? And so I'll go back super far. Can you ask even before, you know, as I grew up in a household that was like unabashedly, Israel is great, Israel is like, it's in the Bible, so how could it be bad? You know, it's Israel. And I mean, I'm oversimplifying, you know,

my family's views even back then. Their views are more complicated now because we had a trip to go to the Holy Land and we saw the treatment of Palestinians there and it was really kind of shocking. And I think we all left that thinking, these folks are getting a really bad deal. Yeah, so you're pro Hamas is what you're saying, right? That's the thing.

That's the only possible either you like the Bible because it says Israel or you like Hamas. So what could, but no, it's it's just so much more complicated where even something like a two state solution, if you'd asked me say a year ago, I would say, well, a two state solution seems like the only workable answer. And in some ways, that's still my answer. But I realize now, the more I look into this, the harder it is to say, well, how do you actually get a two-state solution where you have Gaza and the West Bank that aren't even

contiguous? And you have all sorts of issues of, okay, what about the Jews living in Palestinian areas? What about Palestinians and Arabs living in Jewish areas? What about all these settlements that have been created in the last 20 years? Do we just destroy these and kick a hundred thousand people or more out of their homes because they shouldn't have? All of those are really complicated, messy issues where I can say this is an unjust situation.

But I guess what I've come to is like, I don't know an appropriate solution to this that isn't gonna make life a lot worse for a lot of people in the short term. And I can't think of one. And so every time somebody intelligent on the issue talks, I'm like, well, that's interesting. But then I hear the other side and think, oh yeah, that doesn't work either.

And so I just keep coming back. What happened to innocent Israelis in October of 2023 was abhorrent, should never have happened. And no amount of systemic injustice or anything else excuses murdering civilians. And also we need to do something about the situation. And I don't know what that is, but things cannot just stay indefinitely kind of in the way they are. And so it's one of the, that's an area we're very concret, like, I find my views constantly evolving, but precisely because I'm trying to apply kind of a Catholic vision towards this really complicated situation. Your response to my question, have you changed your opinion on

something is that you gave like this really honest, humble human experience where it's not that I've gone from A to B, it's that I've gone from A to maybe B and A.5 or A.B and trying to be humble. And again, you'll be called a coward for that. Yeah, unfortunately nuance like that is... That's what I'm saying. Like to be willingly called a coward can be like an act of strength. It really can.

Yeah, it's hard to, I can't just like, you know, put a flag up on my Facebook profile and get the accolades. I have to say, yeah, both sides have acted very poorly towards one another and it's easy to see the bad guys here. It's harder to see either the good guys or more profoundly. Well, how do we go forward in a way where these two people can coexist in peace? Yeah. We like simple narratives. They, we do. Yeah. Like people say, Australians are laid back. Americans allowed the French are arrogant.

Like we love that. It's really good, you know, because it just, I don't know, gives us context to engage with reality. But as soon as you meet someone who's not laid back, who's Australian or whatever. Yeah, it's true. And then things, speaking of Australians, Australians I was gonna tell you a joke that the Australian government's been giving out those pictures of Cardinal Pell that you have. Pell grants. What does that mean? What's a Pell grant? Oh you don't have the American context. Pell grants are student loan grants. It's like a loan being underpaid. Okay yeah Cardinal Pell pray for us. I love that man. But yeah he's a good example of not a stereotypical Australian. I mean not that he's not laid back, but he just is

He's more kind of refined. I think than most I'm reading his prison journals and have and I'm going back to them and they're just remarkable. He's such a childlike man very simple and You know, he's writing these journals in prison. He's aware you can tell that he's aware that these will possibly be published and yet he's not trying to demonize the prison system or the guards. He's not trying to pretend that his experience is much worse than it is. He's talking about watching football tonight and I was just reading his entry on Good Friday. I didn't watch TV today except for the news, but I didn't watch AFL game.

Like the fact that he added except for the news, he could have just said, I didn't watch TV today because it's Good Friday. But he's just so transparent and human. And I cannot imagine what it would be like to have the whole country thinking that you've done something despicable that you didn't do. I mean, it really is a sort of white martyrdom. I mean, because to have been martyred would have been in many ways an easier cross to bear than to have your name utterly besmirched.

Imagine right now you're in prison, you're in solitary confinement and CNN hates you. That's kind of the equivalent of the ABC in Australia. And they're doing all these hit pieces and they've hated you for a long time, right? Because you've spoken out against contraception and sodomy and you've been an orthodox. They hate you and they are so excited to have this and you're in prison and you can't defend yourself and you're just hearing things and you're hearing that some people are defending you. But you've got to think, well even the people who want to defend me, they must have some doubt.

Right. You know, like all of us can do horrendous things. So maybe it's possible. Yeah. Just to have that. I mean, I've been in situations where I've known people where there was some kind of accusation of immorality and they've said, oh, no, this didn't happen. But there's still that part of you that says, well, you see, that happened. But a lot of a lot of seemingly good people no, this didn't happen. But there's still that part of you that says, well, you say it happened, but a lot of, a lot of seemingly good people have said things didn't happen. So to have someone actually innocent.

Yeah. And then of course all seven judges at the Australian high court overturn and say, yeah, we have no good evidence to think you did this. The accusations were outrageous. I mean, I was in that situation of wanting not to say, Pell is innocent when the allegations first came out because I held him in very high esteem. But I also knew plenty of people I've held in high esteem have had moral failings and even profound shocking evil ones. So it's certainly possible. But then you read the details and you say, this doesn't seem physically possible.

This doesn't, you know, this happened on a beach and no one noticed or reported. Yeah. Well, I was in Melbourne, uh Melbourne several years back giving a talk downtown and they took me to the cathedral. They showed me the presbytery, not the presbytery, the sacristy where it was said to have occurred and when it was just, it's so insane. So I'm glad he was vindicated and I would like to see him canonized. I'm not canonizing him, but I do ask for his prayers. Amen. Kind of a Pell better strongest. Yeah.

Very good. Very good. He's also a big fan of Aussie rules football and it's so beautiful to read his diaries and to have him talk about footy teams that I grew up watching. And you's like your uh, Blessed Carlo, you know? Yeah. That's Carlo Cuddas. Yeah, I know who he is, but how is he like that? He likes soccer and everything. He's just like, he seems very relatable and really down to it. He's just like, oh yeah, this is not a golden legend. This is a fully fleshed out human being who has human likes and interests and everything else. And there's something to that. You know, in um, Cram Green's The Power and the Glory. Okay. I haven't heard it. Okay. Oh gosh, it's so good. The whole thing is set in the 1930s and it's got the main characters known as the whiskey priest. He's never named in the narrative. And it's this priest who is a struggling alcoholic and he's trying, you know, this is 1930s Mexico, Catholicism has been outlawed and it's illegal for a priest not to be married. And this is, I mean, all that's true. All that really happened. And it's a capital crime to be a Catholic And this is, I mean, all that's true. All that really happened. And it's a capital crime to be a Catholic priest who's unmarried and, you know,

practicing the faith and all this. And so this is a priest who's had numerous moral failings. He's had a mistress, he's an alcoholic and he's not painted as this kind of ideal at all, but he's also striving to be faithful to the Lord in spite of all of his past failings and ongoing moral stumbles. And this story is told alongside a second story of a boy reading about the golden lives of the saints and being bored by the book and then seeing this priest and wanting to become like a Catholic. And Green's point is like, I mean, he's a little heavy-handed there, but it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Green's point is like, I mean, he's a little heavy handed there, but it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. People aren't actually drawn to the whitewashed, Photoshopped, painted over version of the saints. They want to know what are the struggles? What are the real life? Where can I actually see myself becoming a saint? And if it's having no struggles or problems at all, sanctity is not for me. I wonder if in a thousand years from now, should the world still remain, that there

is a different understanding of sanctity by nature of the fact that there will be canonized saints who use Twitter. And what I mean with that is, as you say, you have a bad day, there it is forever. Right, right. So rather than like, oh, there's these really cute anecdotes and cool, awesome, good stories about say St. Anthony of Padua or someone. Yeah. But we don't know what it was like necessarily when Anthony Padua had a bad

day and did something he shouldn't have maybe, you know, and we almost like, don't like to think about that. That's almost like, don't, don't, you shouldn't say that. But if he's human and if the way of sanctity is this slow gradual one for most of us, then it might be helpful to have a more sort of, well, I guess we're beginning to see that even now, right? With the canonization of St. John Paul the second. Yes. It's like, well, he made mistakes and he made bad decisions. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the point? Sorry. You know, right. I mean, even if you look at the reasons some people aren't canonized, uh, you know, Garag LaGrange, it's like, well, he had bad

political views. It's like, well, yeah. But if you were to go back further, most saints probably had weird political views that wouldn't fit neatly into modern. I didn't realize that that was the reason. I mean, I don't know that it is the reason, but it seems like one of the reasons, you know. Like I heard that the reason Thomas Aquempus isn't canonized. I don't know if this is true. Yes. He clawed at the coffin. Claw marks on his coffin. So the conclusion was, well, we don't know if he died in a state of despair. He probably bloody did and probably had every reason to, you know, but, but yeah, that, that's really interesting. Yeah. But all that's to say, you know, I think we're going to have to have

something more generous than a one strike you're out kind of policy for canonizing saints, which is good, which, you know, to be able to say this person is a saint in spite of all these failings, where we avoid the dual errors of this person made public mistakes and therefore they're not a saint or a saint believed this therefore it's good. We have to be able to say, no, there's another way. As you were sharing that, I was reminded a priest I know who's now deceased was invited to the priesthood by Saint Jose Maria Escriva. Wow. And he lived with him.

And so he knew him very, very well. And he tells us a funny story about a time. I would love to hear all the stories you have right now about this. Because I love Jose Maria Escriva. Okay. This was my first spiritual director, Father Arne Panula, God rest his soul, very saintly man in his own right. He was my spiritual director for two years and never once mentioned Jose Maria was the guy who'd recruited him for the priesthood that he knew him personally.

He would be in my bio. Exactly. I would start with friend of Jose Maria, Joe Heschman. I would lead with that. There's a statue of the guy in the chapel. He never once says it because he's so profoundly humble. I don't share this. I'm mentioning like a father Ari Panullo as my, I've got this connection to this holy guy. But then when I had to confront him about this and then he tells me this hilarious story about this time that he had been telling the story in the presence of Josemaria that had a bad word in it and Josemaria covers his ears because he knows the word is coming. Father Arnie doesn't say the word, but then later

he knows the word is coming. Father Arnie doesn't say the word, but then later, Jose Maria says, oh, listen to the language he's using around me. And so Father Arnie says, that's the time Jose Maria slandered me. He's like, I didn't actually say it, censored it, but he had his ears covered and didn't know. And it was like, the whole thing is very jokey. And it was very, you know, they were, they were having fun with each other. Even in the covering of the ears. Yeah, there's this kind of like, he was kind of playing around. Yeah. Uh, but, and then also like it wasn't really slanderers, but it was, it showed this profoundly human side where the saints seemed like a real

person. He seemed like a person with real passions and emotions. And you get that, I think you get that with Hosam Maria more than some because you see the, the irascibility, you know, you proud. Why? You know, that those kind of lines were like, oh, OK, I'm sure he had some rough edges sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas like when you read the lives of the saints, where they it's like they they they're given, they come out of the womb and they're right.

You know, it's like it's like reading or watching a modern female hero. It's like no mistakes at all. There's no hero's journey because they can't acknowledge any sort of flaws. And it's so much less interesting to actually see that compared to an actual struggle. And not just less interesting, but probably not true. And that's what's more important. It doesn't ring true to life. And it doesn't...

Yeah, it is both of those. Like if we are to believe that we are being called to be saints, then we're going to need to have, it's going to be helpful for us to look at people who were knuckleheads like us, who went forward and back and progressed along the way by God's grace. Exactly. I mean, you see that kind of growth. Like even just to give the example, Luke Skywalker's journey is much more understandable, realistic and relatable than what's her name? Ray. Okay. And the, and the. What's her name is exactly right.

It's like, there's nothing there. It's two dimensional. That's, that's an idea. It's a trope. It's not an actual human journey. Yeah, that's really good. I hadn't thought of that before, but that's really good. Well, as we wrap up, uh, Shameless Popery is your YouTube channel. And it looks terrific, by the way. Really good. Oh, thank you very much. Do you do that once a week or? Yeah, it's once a week and it goes roughly an hour. So people who've made it through

this, you can make it through an episode of mine. I just won't have any cool Australian accents and I'm not going to try. So yeah, and it covers whatever theological topic or topic in apologetics that I happened to be wanting to talk about that week. And so it's, you know, I actually, I scripted out, I kind of prepared a little bit, but I cover anything and everything under the sun. Any books on Mormonism forthcoming? Possibly.

Actually, one of your other guests mentioned that he'd reached out to me to do a book on Mormonism and I hadn't gotten back with him, which was all true. It was like, oh yeah, I need to email him back. I've, I've got, you know what, if people want to respond in the comments, I will try to check them whenever this goes live. I've got a few different books I want to cover. I want to do a book looking at kind of the reformation on trial using St. Edmund Campion's Decembracionis, where he makes 10 arguments against the reformation. Second, I want to do a book responding to Mormonism. Third, I should probably do a book on the reality of exorcisms and trying to give kind of a sober assessment because a

lot of times people go to one extreme or the other with spiritual warfare sort of things. Or the fourth possible book is one on just kind of the spiritual toolbox. So we hear talk about, you know, the infused virtues, the supernatural gifts, the charismatic gifts and the gifts of the Holy spirit. All in what does all of that mean and how do I use that in my actual life? So those are very different, you know, very different books. I personally like the first one. Yeah, that would be my, I'd pick that up. All right. You know, I wonder if, you know, we're seeing people obviously say they write a book and

then they read the book for Audible. I think what we might, I think what would be good to see is you don't only write the book and publish it and then release it on Audible, but then you do sort of like a video essays where you read a chapter and you make it very engaging and release it on YouTube. And at the end of that chapter, you promote the book. Yes. That would be really good because I think if we're to be honest, a lot of people are consuming these ideas on YouTube. Oh, absolutely. So your idea about the, what was the first one?

You said the reformation on trial and you said how many arguments? 10? Yeah, there's 10. So like, I would love to know that. And it would be really cool if you were to write that out and release it. And I would, and maybe you do one at a time and you call it something creative. I'd be fascinated, especially if it was done really well. And then I'd likely buy the book. You know, it's smart. I like this idea. Well, when this happens, you're going to be like, I think I know where that came from.

That's right. Well, Joe, it's always nice to talk to you. Thank you for being on the show. Well, thanks for having me.