Pints With Aquinas - The Truth, Reality, and Conspiracy Theories (Joe Heschmeyer) | Ep. 553

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

In this episode, Matt sits down with Joe Heschmeyer—author, debater, and Catholic Answers apologist—to talk about (and question) what we believe to be true, what's real and what's not, conspiracy theories, morality, and much more.  📚 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Our-Refu... 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 College of St. Joseph the Worker:  https://www.collegeofstjoseph.com/mat... 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook:   / mattfradd   📸 Instagram:   / mattfradd   𝕏 Twitter/X:   / pints_w_aquinas   🎵 TikTok:   / pintswithaquinas   👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com   ----- Time Stamps: 00:00:00 – Intro and Matt's new book 00:01:45 – Is baptism necessary for salvation? 00:08:24 – Debating James White 00:17:18 – Skepticism and the Paradox of Choice  00:28:22 – Conspiracy theories 00:51:18 – Truth in the internet age 01:13:40 – Is knowledge possible? 01:34:29 – Are we heading to a worldwide monoculture? 02:06:15 – The Jews and antisemitism 02:24:33 – The strength of Orthodox claims 02:50:26 – Mormonism and how to share the truth

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the app store. And I pressed him on that and just said, well, okay, is it your view that like the first thousand years of people after the apostles? None of them went to heaven in terms of anyone we know. And he was just like fine accepting that conclusion. Bananas. I've been thinking lately that I'm not sure I think knowledge. as possible if by, yeah, if by, well, if by knowledge, we take the standard philosophical

definition of justified true belief. It doesn't look like he's literally commanding genocide. And yet, it sits uneasily with my worldview as a Catholic. It just does. It fits as uneasily my worldview as a Christian. In the 19th century, my wife and my kids would be counted as black under the one drop rule. Fenomenal lot, or phenotypically, they don't look. I mean, you look at them, you'd assume they're white. But depending on what one means by these racial categories, increasingly we're going to have these questions where it's what does that even mean what is you know like i'm thinking about just the public square people like patrick mahomes where it's like what does it mean to be black in america what is it like what do any of these terms mean practically

hey everybody before we get into today's interview i want to tell you about my brand new book it's called jesus our refuge if you like many people and like i always of us to one degree or another have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out, Jesus, our refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. All right. Hey, how are you doing?

Doing great. Trying to get better at starting these interviews with questions that grip the audience. So they stick around. The last two times I was on. You asked me about COVID and Taylor Swift. You're really good at starting with very divisive topics. The Jews. No.

What are you being? You've been doing, you've had several debates since we last saw each other. What was the most impressive debate? Impressive or? Well, like kind of noteworthy. It was fascinating. I debated Ryan from the channel needgod.net. And we were talking about baptism. And I asked him in the cross examination if, you know, his view is not just baptism doesn't save, but that if you think baptism saves that you are not going to go to heaven. And I pressed him on then to said, well, okay, is it your view that like the first thousand years of people after the apostles? None of them went to heaven in terms of anyone we know. And he was just like fine accepting that conclusion. Bananas. Yeah, it was. It was. I was kind of struck by it. And I think a lot of people who saw it were just like, oh, wow. Like, that's, that's quite a position. But he followed this somewhat mainstream position within kind of the Baptist or non-denominational world. It's certainly not everybody. But this is not an unknown position. But most people don't couple that belief. Like you can't trust in your baptism with the belief like, well, the early Christians clearly did. And therefore, they weren't real Christians. Therefore, they weren't really. saved. And that's like hearing somebody just embrace both positions. Isn't that wild? It is. So St. Peter says

baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you. That's right. Christian believes, okay, that baptism saves me and therefore you won't be saved according to this Protestant. Exactly. You took the Bible too literally, so you go to hell. Like that's, that's a wild take. How do people come up with these takes? I think the worldview is if you do anything, that means that you're trying to earn your own salvation. So this idea of being free, you know, because obviously Paul talks a lot about faith verse works of the mosaic law. And this one interpretation of this going back to the Reformation ties this not just with works of the mosaic law, but any kind of good works. And really, I mean, you have some version of this interpretation going back even earlier in Augustine's fight against

the Pelagians. But Augustine doesn't go to this kind of extreme. And the reformers take this in a more radical way. And some modern Protestants have taken it in a yet more radical way of saying basically if you have to do anything at all, therefore you're trying to earn your salvation and that's bad. But that takes the human out of the equation of salvation so radically that why this is just something happening to you. It's a quietism almost. Yeah. Yeah. It's a strange way. Right. And so whereas we would say baptism is a work God does for us, which is why a baby can be baptized. No one is praising the baby like, good job getting baptized. Their view is, no, you have to do it. therefore that's you know you're trying to earn your salvation even more radical than

Zwingli in his work day baptismo where he says i can only conclude that all of the doctors and fathers have been in error right which is bananas it is but this fellow sounds like he's saying not only were they in error but if they believed it they got they all went to hell yeah but it does seem to be the lot like if swingley is right that they're actually holding a heretical view on baptism they raises so many issues i mean just think about one st paul is able to say one lord one faith one baptism. Like he's able to take, we get baptism right as one of those core uniting things, even in the midst of Christian division in his own day. And yet you'd have to say immediately everyone is united, but in the wrong direction. Now that means one of two things. Either everyone

changed their opinion as soon as Paul looked away or the unanimity he's talking about is a unanimity in favor of the Catholic view and your reading scripture wrong. So the people taking the first of those saying, oh yeah, everybody just immediately got it wrong. Because we see, really, I mean, it's easy to overstate unanimity, but on this, there's a remarkable unanimity on what baptism does. You know, Everett Ferguson has a book called baptism in the early church, and he looks at the first 500 years. And he speaks about just how remarkably united they are in that baptism does something. I remember doing a bit of a research project into this many years ago while I worked at Catholic Answers. I drove my wife nuts because all I wanted to do is speak about

baptism and all she wanted to do is go to sleep. But I remember, and you can correct me if maybe I've got this wrong, but every church father I looked at who commentated on John 3-5, Houdototas-Kipanumatos applied it to baptism. That's right. Is that right? At least in terms of all the ones I know of. Maybe there's someone who uses it in a way that isn't explicit. Like the best thing you could say on the other side of this question would be you've got some who are clearly on, you know, if you want to call it the Catholic side or whatever. But then you have other people who occasionally will reference something and they don't specify. You know, so you could say, like, we're born again of water in the spirit.

But if you don't explicitly say through baptism, then they might say, well, maybe that means a conversion experience. Yeah. Yeah, but this weird Protestant idea that by water, they may have meant amniotic fluid or something. That was one of the things that came up. Really? I haven't watched this. I can't wait to watch it.

Okay. Thank you for schooling my countryman. I appreciate it. Isn't he from Australia? I think he is. I'll be honest with you. I can't tell an Australian from a New Zealand accent, but I'm 99% sure he's Australian.

Yeah. And he's very nice guy. Like I talked to him a little bit beforehand. I found him very warm personally, even if he thinks I'm going to hell. He was very kind to me. So I don't want to like be rude to him in any way. Yeah.

But I do think the worldview he's articulating, it is worth it to just periodically stop and say, okay, you might think if you're in this worldview, your non-denominational, mere Christian kind of person, this is actually a radically extreme version of Christianity that's completely unknown to history. Like this would be like coming along and saying, 2,000 years of Christians are wrong. It's this new weird thing. And then being like, that's just mere Christianity.

Like, no, you're imagining yourself in the middle and you're on like the fringes of this, this Christian thing. And I think a lot of the people who are there don't even realize they're there. They don't realize that these are controversial takes because this is the version they learned. and they haven't done a lot of, you know, deep research into, like, the church fathers or anything. Did he get stumped? I mean, sounds like he did. Did he change his mind? Did he do a review of the debate where he realized?

I think he did do a, to be honest, I didn't watch his review of the debate. I know some other people who saw things he said afterwards and were frustrated because he also does, you know, like he'll kind of censor his comments, it seems. So if you read his comments, you'll think he wins everything. Yeah. Because anything. Pulls it James White. But he just turns his comments off these days because I think it was too hard to censor out

all the people speaking otherwise. Isn't that weird the turn against James White that's happened? It is. I wonder if he knows it's happening. Because I don't know, it's a good question. Whenever I watch a debate of his, or I open up a video,

the comments are all like, thank you, you led me out of Protestantism. The Catholic clearly won. And I can't tell if that's just, you know, a loud minority of Catholics just trolling him. Or if it is, ask people, tell us in the comments section, your opinion of James White and the debates he engages in. Like, he challenged me to do a debate recently and I said no because I would lose. And I know

that about myself, which is a really good thing, actually, self-knowledge. I wish more people had this. Me too. I'm maybe not called to this. Yeah, but you are. How was that debate? I loved that debate. Regime Zumer actually was tweaking him about that debate. He told James like he didn't think he'd won a debate in a long time and then pointed to that debate as one that he had lost so i i felt good hearing that from someone who wasn't you know a fellow catholic because you get plenty of people on both sides to just tell whoever they agreed with at the start they won and you could you could just load up those comments beforehand and so i think it's healthy if you do debates to just censor out the people telling you what you want to hear who are already on your

side just telling you great job it's nice it's comforting but don't let that make you think that you've actually won the debate because you can have the worst performance of your life and a lot of people who agree with your conclusion are still going to tell you that you won just because they agree with your conclusion but they did beforehand can you trust say jimmy and trent who you work with the catholic answers to give you the it's a good question i yes i think that if you tell them like give me scathing criticism or give me you know i think that we do it that's nice um i had jimmy's called me a few times after debates he's like how do you think i was too harsh because jimmy goes in there and like surgically dismantles their entire argument and

oh my gosh like somebody said to me i wouldn't debate jimmy about my last name yeah you'll be you'll be left pagan yes very good uh yeah i i can think of plenty of things that i would do differently this time i was super wired you know i i've been excited for this debate and i was just like i was jittery i was moving my legs the whole time i kicked the uh the light switch or the the the uh the cord for the light twice forgive me did we talk about this in my last interview with you? I forget when it was. I don't remember the last time we actually spoke. It's possible.

Now, people don't know this about you. Didn't you study law? I did. Were you a lawyer? I was. So you're good at this. And I was a debater before that and, you know, went to nationals and college and, you know, I did well. So for a while, my debate partner and I were, I think, ranked eighth in the country

in the kind of debate we were doing. So, you know, we were good at debating. It would be false humility to pretend like, I don't know how. a debate. But... So how many hours did you pour into prepping? That's a good question. Roughly. I went down a day before the debate to just have like unbroken time to focus on this. And along the way, I was listening to, you know, podcasts and things related to it, which was actually very helpful. Dr. Lawrence Feingold has a great book on the Eucharist. So the topic with James White was on the Eucharist as a propitatory sacrifice. And, uh,

This is basically a third of Feingold's book. And the book is like 800 pages long. So that was great because he'd already done a lot of the work for me. I'd done some work. Then I got that book and thought, oh, I should have started here. I mean, I already had it on the shelf, but I pulled it off the shelf, started reading and was like, oh, he's already done all the work. I just spent hours doing.

So it's a lot. I remember hearing from Trent what his schedule was like before a debate, where he will seemingly take like a week off of work to get ready, or not off of work, but off of his normal. duties to get ready for a debate. And I thought that seemed excessive. And the more I do this kind of stuff, the way I'm like, no, no, that makes sense. You can tell when a person hasn't done that. And I actually think we have too many debates right now online because they're really fun. They're exciting. They get the clicks. They do get the clicks. But if people haven't done their work,

I think you're going to get diminishing returns because people are going to come in see two unprepared debaters talking past one another, not ready to engage with the other side actually has to say. And then going away, I, they're dissatisfied or more set in the beliefs they came in with, you know, or just frustrated that their side didn't, didn't prepare the way they should have. So I think you owe it, if you're going to do debates, you owe it to yourself as someone who will stand before God, but also to the people who you're trying to serve by the debate to really do your work. And it's hard. Like, it's hard to prepare an opening talk or, you know, your opening speech. It's much harder to

prepare. There's a thousand different ways the other person could go on this. What, what, what that look like? So I spent maybe 20 hours and I probably should have spent more. Do you think you did well? I think it went really well. I especially for a first debate, especially for a topic that you know, we were in a reformed Baptist church. This was an away game. And so to be able to do that, I have not had a Catholic tell me that they thought I did badly and I've heard plenty of Protestants who thought that I did well. Yeah. So those are the voices I'm actually more interested in the people who don't have a bias in my favor, but say, despite thinking you're wrong, I still think you won the debate, or better, you caused me to reconsider my views on this. Because, you know,

you asked earlier, like, did he change his views? This is the... Oh, yeah, but for any debate. I would just say for any debate, rarely are you going to get the other person to just say? It's not really the point, is it? I mean, occasionally you'll have people, I want to say there was a... What I mean is, the reason you're going to do a debate is to show other people why his position is faulty, not necessarily to convince him. It's a difference between, like, privately writing the person where you're just clearly trying to get them to change their view and publicly confronting their error.

And that's what a debate is or should be. You're either this is an issue people can reasonably disagree on, let's just throw out the best arguments for each side, people can decide for themselves, or this person is actually teaching some heresy, and I think it's important to call it out publicly and to defend the truth in the face of this thing they've been teaching. Like, that's kind of the way I approach why you would do a debate.

So then you're really doing it for the people that you're trying to reach, like the people who are watching, the people who are there. And the people who are already convinced of everything, whether it's a person across from you or whether it's, you know, the people in the comments who got there three hours early to post about how they think their guy's winning, those people you're probably not going to persuade. But if you can plant some seeds and people who are maybe a little more open to hearing a different perspective, it does do really good work. And here's the other thing. Sorry, I know I'm going long on this. No, please. When you listen to people who are good orators, and I think James White's a

good orator, I think many of the people on the Protestant side and YouTube are good at speaking, and they're smart and they make what sound like good logical arguments. And I think I completely understand why someone listening to them, not hearing a different perspective, would come away being like, I think they got the better part of that case. If you then listen to a Catholic, maybe on the same topic two weeks later, you might hear them present and saying, oh, I think that makes a lot of sense too. And the problem is you're not hearing them get to speak directly to each other. So in everything I do, I try to present, here's something of what the other side would say.

And that's hard to do, especially for when you're doing a lot of topics, a lot of episodes. But like, for instance, in my books, I'll often have my argument. and then have a section called like, how would a Protestant respond? And then present the best arguments I can find against a position I laid out and then address those. And this is, of course,

this is the strength of St. Thomas Squintess and the Summa. This is, you know, Justice Scalia wrote a book, I believe it's called A Matter of Interpretation, where he gives his main argument and it's a fairly short essay, and then he asks a bunch of different people from different views to write essays responding to him, critiquing his argument,

and then he does a response to them afterwards. That is so much more helpful than just hearing one person monologue about an idea because you can actually see the exchange of ideas and see, okay, I now know what someone would say in response to that and I see why I don't accept that or why I think maybe there's some merit to that and I have to nuance my view. So that's what I love about debates is you get to hear the ideas in real time being aired out there where it's not just two people monologing to their own. own audiences. Yeah, for sure. It feels like the onslaught of information we've been the recipients of

for 10 years or more has made, has kind of created a sort of irrational dogmatism, not a not a sort of epistemological relativism, but almost something like that where we just feel very skeptical about everything. In other words, you know, when I grew up, it was in the 80s and 90s and, you know, just I had, okay, maybe there was the town atheist. and then there was the Baptist pastor and like these were the people. I would have duke it out and then I would decide among them

and then I'd feel confident in my position but now we're in this strange place where no matter how good you are at convincing or making your case there's likely to be someone else who's attacking it and you can't possibly respond to everything so it feels like people I think a lot of people just again

it's like this almost like we there's this concern of mine that because of the onslaught of information information, many of us are skeptical that we can make successful cognitive contact with reality. That's a brilliant way to put it. Yeah, I think this is a problem within Christianity. This is a problem in politics is a problem for any kind of belief about reality.

That are you familiar with the idea of paradox of choice? Let's talk about it. I'm not. Okay. Barry Schwartz, I believe, is the guy who wrote the book. His argument is this. So I'm going to start this and meander my way back. to answering your question.

Thank you, Tom. He gives the example of buying jeans. He bought some jeans years ago, and there were three different kinds, and he knew which kind he liked. Eventually, those jeans wore out. He had to go buy some new jeans, but it's been many years, because, you know, genes are durable. Suddenly, there's, like, 40 types of genes.

And so he spends, like, an hour trying on different genes, and he says he leaves there with the most comfortable jeans he's ever worn, and he was unhappy because he realized if he'd stayed another hour, he could have found an even better pair of jeans. And he uses this to say, we live in an age where we have so many different options that it can feel overwhelming. Like, I hate the cheesecake factory. I hate everything about it almost. And one of the things that's terrible about it is the menu is way too long.

And so you just get overwhelmed. You can spend 15 minutes and have no further idea what it is that you want. But this is affecting so much for a reality in ways that we don't even realize. Like one of the reasons people aren't getting married right now is they have too many options. that if you lived in a small town and there was one pretty girl that you thought you had a reasonable chance with, you were going to put everything you had into going after her. But if you've got an app on your phone where you're seeing girls who are way out of your league and then you see that girl, maybe you're not going to give her the time of day because you just

think, well, if I just, maybe I can find some girl who's even better than her. And you waste your life and you waste her life because you didn't just say, okay. this is good. I don't have to explore every, every possibility out there. So paradox of choice closely related to that is this thing you're describing with the onslaught of information. It can create analysis paralysis. It can create a situation where there is so much information that you just say, well, I need more, I need more, I need more. And this is one of the classic failures in discernment. And this is one of the classic failures in decision making. because you can always look for more information.

And people particularly who are more risk-averse can easily fall into this trap where it feels rash not to gather all the data and they can never gather all the data. And so they just keep gathering more and more and more information. So you find these people who are drawn to the church, but there's so much more information to look for. And so even if they're doing it in good faith,

they can sit on that fence for decades just gathering knowledge. just gathering information and saying, well, I started with these 20 objections. And along the way, 17 of them were answered, but I learned 10 new objections. And now I'm going to have to work through the, and that just can continue on at infinitum. So I think there's a couple things. One, you have to have a reasonable threshold of action. Like when our Lord is teaching and preaching, he says a lot of things, and you're not going to know the answers to all of those things.

and you're not going to maybe immediately agree with all of those things. That's okay. That's not, you don't wait till you see the wisdom of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and all this before you decide to follow him. The threshold is much simpler. Is he who he says he is? And once you have enough information to say he is, now you can say yes to him and there's an epistemological shift because once I can trust that he is a truth teller because he is who he says he is, I can trust him. on the stuff that I don't even understand. I can give an assent intellectually that I don't get why that's true, but you tell me it's true

and you know more than I do. And I trust you with the virtue of faith, for one, but also with a certain intellectual humility. Because we live in this world, like the idea of a Renaissance man doesn't exist anymore. Albert the Great was said to have known everything there was to know. You can't do that. I mean, Jimmy comes close. But you can't do that anymore.

you just know everything about everything. And so I will hear these claims. You know, light is somehow a particle and a wave and it behaves in these weird ways. And I think that's weird. That's fascinating. That makes zero sense to me. The more I try to understand it, the less I feel like I get it. And at a certain point, I just have to say, I trust the people who know this way more than I do.

So that's another kind of element in this. There are times where you have to say, I'm just not going to know the answer to this question, but I have to trust that this person I believe is an authority is right. So that's true. We're talking about Jesus. It's true if we're talking about authorities in our own life. But it gets a lot trickier with those other authorities. And we can talk about that because sometimes those other authorities are wrong.

And so then what do you do there? So you can have that kind of situation where there's just so much out there. So I would say this. Anyone who finds themselves in that spot, number one, the question you should be asking is, is the Catholic Church who she says she is. If she is, you should be Catholic. If she's not, you shouldn't be. Second, you can find a potentially infinite number of objections to the Catholic claim

from every possible direction. But lay out a simple positive case. Is Jesus who he says he is? Does he say he's going to establish a church? Is that church visible? And does that church have a petrine or papal kind of structure? And I think we can see all four of those things very, clearly. I mean, my book, Pope Peter, it's years old now, but that was the argument I make. Like,

if the papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic. If it's not true, no one should be Catholic. If you approach it like that, you don't have to deal with the analysis paralysis. You don't have to deal with an infinite number of doctrines from an infinite number of perspectives. And I don't know another way of kind of going forward other than to say, okay, let's consider this. Last thing. San Yereneson against heresies gives this image of, he uses the image of a arranging tiles. And I want to say that properly arranged, he says the tiles would be like the image of a king, but he accuses the Gnostics of rearranging them in maybe like the image of a dog or something like this. You could imagine if you prefer like puzzle pieces. And you can find

whether we're talking about all the various forms of Protestantism or all the non-Christian expressions of what they think the truth is, people put the puzzle pieces of reality together in different ways. And you can do that. You can make an internally coherent model of the world. Like just within Christianity, we'll take that, for instance. I think the dispensationalist worldview is complicated, maybe a little convoluted. Explain that to people. Okay. Dispensational is say God deals differently with different people in different ages. That part's actually true. And when you're reading something like the New Testament, some of it is written for Israel, some is written for the church. These two things are these radically separate entities.

And so you can't just take a New Testament passage and assume it's written to you. I'm even here oversimplified. But this is a worldview that gives you things like the rapture and everything else. And it's pretty new. Like 19th century. You've got Darby and then Schofield who really kind of pioneered this way of viewing the Bible. It's wrong on a lot of things. But the thing that's fascinating about it is how complicated and sophisticated it is.

That if you go read like the Schofield Reference Bible or any of these works, and they'll have maps, charts, and all this stuff putting together all this information in these baffling kind of ways to an outsider where you're just like, why in the world would you think this is what that passage means? And then you look through their chart and you're like, I guess I see it from your perspective.

I'm completely unperslated by it, but it's internally coherent. It makes sense within that world. And often in ways it's very hard to kind of break in too because they've spent so much more time thinking about that internal model of the world than you have. That's right.

Similarly, I would suggest, like the tulip model of Calvinism internally makes sense. If you believe man is totally depraved in such way

that he'll never choose to do the good thing unless God forces him to do it, well, then you have to say grace is irresistible because if we could resist it, we would. And therefore,

anyone who goes to hell must have been because God didn't want them to go to heaven because he could have just given this irresistible grace to them. Therefore, God didn't want

them to be saved. You got something like double predestination. It makes no sense to say Christ died for those people if he never wanted them to be saved. So now the atonement is limited. And there can't be anything good in them because that would be something on their part. And they're so wicked, they would never choose to do anything good ever. So election to salvation

must be unconditional. And they can't possibly fall away from salvation or they would. So you have perseverance of the saints. That is all, I think it's wrong. I think it's internally coherent. And we could give many more examples of this where within the worldview, they've arranged the puzzle pieces in a way that makes sense, but it's still wrong. And so we have to recognize, like, you can make sense of reality in all these different ways. And so one of the challenges we have is if you've got the Bible alone, or if you've got no trust that the Holy Spirit guided the church to get the puzzle pieces in the right order, you've got an infinite number of arrangements that those puzzle pieces could go in. And it seems genuinely limitless. Yeah, that's really well said.

It reminds me of Star Wars. Is the story coherent? Yeah, is it true? Oh, no, it's a story. And so similarly, just because the Christian can show how all of our doctrines fit, just because we can show that the doctrine of the Trinity isn't irrational. That doesn't make it true. Yeah.

So it is true, but it doesn't show that it's true. Let's talk a little bit about conspiracy theories. Yeah. Because it seems like I remember, I won't say who, but a very close relative of mine got really deep into the 9-11 conspiracy theories. And it was the sort of thing where, just like you were saying, like I can see from your point of view how this works.

I also know that you've been thinking about this way longer than any human should. And if I get in here with you, I will lose. Yeah. But I also don't care enough to do the research to interact with you on your level so I can see from their point of view, that seems unfair.

Yeah, I mean, this is, I think anyone who's ever tried to have a productive conversation with someone you worry is going down a really conspiratorial route has probably had the experience of them saying, oh, watch this two-hour video. And then you do and you're like, that video was crazy. Like that person was making arguments. I just don't find any connection with reality. And there's like, well, watch this other video. And you can just do that ad nauseum. And that's part of the reason they've ended up in this, they've done that kind of work.

So you're right. they will probably be better than you at whatever wrong theory it is because they know it better than you do. And isn't that bizarre that you can conclude that somebody is wrong that you can't out debate?

It's true. That's weird, isn't it? It is. But we're all in that situation because no matter what opinion you hold, again, unless you're Jimmy Aiken, someone knows the counterpoints probably better than you can.

And that might not be James Wyatt in your debate with him, but it might be somebody else where you'll get stumped And sometimes you might be able to go, oh no, here's why he was wrong, but there's a lot of times where you don't know how to do that. Yeah, I think this is one of the points Dostoevsky's making in Brothers Karamazov. I've been talking a lot lately about my friends at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, you know, Jacob Imam, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Jones, and company, the guys who started the college that combines the Catholic intellectual tradition with skilled trades training. Well, listen to this.

They're growing their program and are looking to connect with experienced Catholic tradesmen to hire as, instructors. So if you are an experienced carpenter, plummer, HVAC technician or electrician, and want to help mentor and teach future Catholic tradesmen, go right now to College of St.Joseph.com slash careers to connect with the college and see how you can become part of something truly special. And if you're watching or listening and know a tradesman who needs to hear this message, please invite them to reach out to the college. Again, that's college of st.joseph.com college of st joseph.com slash careers thanks like the grand inquisitor he doesn't have an answer to it but you see that he's wrong sorry spoilers for a book that you should have read by now

you see that he's wrong but he can't like and you see aloysha can't can't explain why he's wrong right but also in the grand inquisitor you see the response of christ and how disarming that was wasn't through debate that's right through a kiss yeah so this is very much i think he's showing us this exact point. Chesterton talks about the madman is not someone who's lost his reason but has lost everything but his reason. Yeah, can you, what does he mean by that?

That the people spending hours and hours and hours hearing versions of reality that agree with the worldview they want to be true and that might sound like an uncharitable way to put it, but the people who go in for this stuff the hardest often spend a lot of time hearing from voices that agree with their conspiracy and they maybe don't spend as much time

listening to voices that challenge it now that's sort of true of all of us but they have gotten a very thorough you might say indoctrination on on this year whatever it is whatever it is and they can see how the puzzle pieces fit together in the way that the person has has arranged them and so like you said if you go to debate them there's a good chance that you're not going to be able to dissuade them of that but similarly if you go to try to persuade someone who is schizophrenia and is having a sort of a fit of paranoid delusion that, no, they're not actually working for the CIA and the government isn't out to get them, the internal worldview they have actually makes perfect sense of the data that they're receiving.

Like, sure, of course you're going to say that, because you were sent by the government to say that. I don't know a good logical argument to overcome that. There is a sort of, I mean, if you think about the ways people address this, leaving aside cases of genuine mental illness. but people who are really deep in the rabbit hole on some of these issues, a lot of it's actually not out debating them. It's bringing them out of themselves and seeing another way of putting together the pieces of reality. And that can actually soften the edges of how strongly

they hold to this view and sometimes they'll come out of it then. So if you invite them into regular, because a lot of times the people who go into these spaces are radically alone and they're anxious about reality and they're anxious about the world. And there's actually something very comforting to believe. No, there's not just random stuff happening. It's all being controlled by a cabal. That is actually much more comforting than they're all just idiots trying to figure this thing out.

Yeah, I think, I mean, if you look at who's likely to believe it, it's usually not the people who are close to the event. It's not people who are close to the mechanisms of power or who know anyone involved personally. It's the people who are furthest away from it. There have been several times where I've heard conspiracy theories involving people I've known personally. And I just think, oh no, like they're not malicious.

They might be a little bit incompetent, but they're not, you know, but to imagine the level of coordination you would need for a lot of these things. So where I think what I would suggest, anyone who maybe is in that world is to take an honest examination and say, I understand if you take a skeptical view of the way the government or the church or whoever presents reality, I'm not telling you to just blindly trust the official narrative. But if your standard of evidence for them is here. Yeah. And your standard of evidence for what you'll believe from your favorite, like conspiracy monger is here, that's the disjoint. Also, I think, you know, Aristotle's idea that it's the mark of an intelligent man

to entertain a position that he doesn't accept. Yeah. I think that's another way to maybe just self-examine. Yeah. You know, can I, can I present the other position in a compelling way without getting angry about it. I think that's the thing too sometimes you... Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Because there can be a sort of mannequin worldview that develops honest on both sides, that the conspiracy theorists can imagine, oh, you're just an idiot blindly accepting the official version, or you're maliciously trying to cover up the truth. On the other hand, if you don't go in for the conspiracy, you might just view that as like a moral failing on their part rather than, no, they've actually looked at this issue, and frankly, much more than you

have. And they had some intellectual dissatisfaction with what they were told, or they had some doubts about the person telling them things, often for good reasons. And their skepticism is taking this particular form. But I would say, think about ideas with both the negative, like the critical, and then also the positive. Like, what does the world do that you're affirming? And there are plenty of reasons to challenge, negate, be skeptical of any of the kind of external worldviews that we're talking about, including Christianity. Obviously, I believe deeply in Christianity. Nevertheless, we can say, I can understand why someone would say, look at the problem of evil, or look at, you know, it doesn't seem like we need the existence of God.

And so you can imagine the reasons for skepticism. But what about the reasons to propose this concrete alternative view? And that's where a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart, because they won't just say the official narrative is wrong, they'll also say maybe it was this thing, and that thing is like wildly less probable. And so that's usually the weaker part of the case where you say, okay, you know, you gave the example of the 9-11 theories. I can understand someone saying, I don't see how jets could do that to towers. And, you know, you got this building seven that falls later, and you've got, you know, all this other weird information, where all the wreckage parts outside the Pentagon. You know, I've heard all this stuff before. And I understand

skepticism but once they start saying bombs were placed like in the pentagon itself to kill people in the pentagon by whom or you know within the world you know how hard it is to coordinate a logistical demolition inside the world trades into how many people would have to be involved in that all covering up and planes did in fact hit the towers so you'd have to time this demolition such that you'd still have to hijack the plane and you'd still seemingly need al-Qaeda in on this somehow or somebody's hijacking the plane and we've got 19 people who pretty clearly high and then it just happens that you're able to time it such that you can sink all this stuff up and the more you think about this and the sheer number of people that would be involved in it for pretty obscure reasons like oh

Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq and so his best plan was let's get the Afghani terrorist group funded by the Saudis to like it doesn't even make sense once you kind of spell out the theory that's where it all falls apart. So on the negative side of saying, I'm critical of the official narrative or I'm dubious or I'm skeptical, I understand that. On the positive part of here's what I think happened,

that's where it all falls to pieces, I would say. And I think most conspiracy theories are like that. When you actually start plotting them out and saying, okay, I mean, think about it like a murder trial, if you're a defense attorney and you're saying, the government says my guy committed this crime, And usually, even when someone's guilty, there's some reason that you can point to that, well, some of this stuff maybe isn't true. Like, I'll take the OJ Simpson trial.

I would not be shocked to learn the LAPD actually planted evidence. I think OJ was guilty. But I also think Mark Furman and people had a dubious enough record and the LAPD had such a bad track record at that age that when people said the LAPD probably planted evidence, those two things could both be true. like sometimes even when the official narrative is true it's also true the government is lying to you that might be true in the case of oj too so if you're part of the dream team defending him you can point to things where it's like it's awfully convenient that the evidence ended up right there where it falls apart is when you say here's what actually happened and any theory you present is so wildly implausible that the whole thing falls apart immediately we were talking about this

before the show and you pointed out to me and i'd never thought about it in this way before, but one of the reasons you want a free press is that if you don't have a free press, then nobody believes the narrative that the press is telling and is therefore skeptical of everything that the government is telling them. I felt that way in Australia a little bit when I was there recently. I was watching a news show, and it was showing these fellas who were marching on Australia Day, and they were calling them white supremacist neo-Nazisies. And I just, I thought I don't believe you at all. And I feel how strongly you're telling me this

and how emotional you want me to be about it. I don't believe you. Now, maybe they were right, but they never let the people speak. They never pointed to evidence. But that's a scary place to be in a country where you no longer believe the mainstream narrative because you don't think it's from a free press.

And then what? Like, what do you do then? Because obviously everything seems to have broken down during the COVID pandemic, right? I mean, I remember during the new atheism, back in what, 2010 or something like that, at its height, we're talking about the science. Yes.

They weren't saying that ironically. Right. Now, if you say, well, the science says, it feels like everybody's like, well, that mustn't be true. So what am I asking you? Well, let me just get on my own conspiracy theory soapbox here for a second. Because people who just heard the foregoing might be like,

oh, this guy blindly accepts whatever the government tells him. So let me just say something kind of doubling down on what you've just said with trust the science. When COVID first started, the official story was masks don't help. And they were lying based on what they believed at the time. They thought masks did help and they were purposely lying to people so there wouldn't be a run on masks. Then they do an about face after they have enough masks and say, actually, masks help and they save lives. And then you get all this research that says, it's pretty questionable, how much the masks are actually doing a good job. And it turns out you can't compare like a medical professional using an N95 with somebody grabbing their dirty bacteria-ridden masks they've been wearing for three weeks.

Those are maybe not the same thing. And maybe this is not helpful at all. But by that point, public trust had been so undermined. Whatever one's position is on masks, the government lied about this at least once. And then didn't really have any kind of public reckoning with it. And, you know, no, sorry we lied. It was just this is what we thought we had to do to create. the results we wanted. We had to trick people to get them to do what we want. Once you do that,

and once people realize you're doing that, even when you're telling the truth, you've killed your own credibility in a lot of ways. The boy who cried wolf. Very much so. And so you've got that. Now take the trust of science on transgenderism. Under the Biden administration, the deputy director of the HHS was Admiral Levine. Born, Richard, calling himself Rachel, identifies as transgender. and is in a place where he's got tremendous influence on the money and policy positions of medical organizations on things like transgenderism and is openly an activist, gives a speech at Texas Christian University suggesting the only people, like opposed to sex change operations for kids or people who hate kids and want them to commit suicide, basically.

I mean, that's maybe a slight exaggeration of views, but not much. so Levine repeatedly would just say that the science is so clear the science is so clear and this is just a lie like just was not true that all of the science was saying gender affirming surgery for minors was harmless or beneficial for mental health none of these things were true there were plenty of red flags that this is not helping mental health and carry some serious medical risks because you're doing a major operation on a child for something that is not a life threatening kind of issue to begin with. And so then you get things like the cast report out of the UK. You get places from around the world where the HHS doesn't have control, giving very different science than the stuff coming out in the U.S. And you realize like, oh, we might have a problem with the science being corrupted for political reasons. The New York Times actually did a fantastic expose. I want to say summer, maybe late summer, 2025, that just explored how the Blanking on the name of there's a medical group that was being used as like the objective standard for

When to give Transgender surgeries to minors and it turned out Levine behind the scenes was putting pressure on them to change their standards And then pointing to those standards are saying we're just following these standards Standards that no one else realized he'd been crafting So he's pointing to this external thing of all we're just following the data He's controlling it on both ends That sort of thing is happening you get enough of that kind of stuff and you just say

next time somebody says trust the science I'm not going to believe them now that doesn't prove the conspiracy theory true but it does show the effect of just what happens when you lie to people that when you don't tell the truth about things it's very hard to believe you later now if I may let's step out of the world of science

for a second into the world of international politics the meddling of groups like the CIA in Latin American politics say is pretty well established at this point. Whatever you think of some of the more conspiratorial claims like funneling crack into L.A. in the 80s or any of that stuff to fund the war with the contras, we certainly know it's true that they helped topple governments

and they help do all this other stuff. All of that stuff was, in many cases, lied about at the time, but we now know all of this to be true. So then you hear some geopolitical story and the people saying, I bet the CIA is behind this sound crazy, but they're not without reason for saying that. because there just hasn't been a reckoning with that.

So to that, I would say, the first place where we find this epistemic breakdown are the people lying, the people who are in positions of authority who aren't telling the truth. And we can say this about the church as well. When you cover up the sex abuse crisis, it makes it a lot harder to believe anything else you're going to say, even when you're literally preaching the gospel, because you've shot your own credibility in the face, not just the foot. And it's hard to trust someone with a pattern of deception. or lying or anything else.

And that's very unfortunate when the person lying is then trying to tell you the truth. Because I think a lot of times the things people are skeptical of, they're skeptical of things that are actually true, but they're skeptical of things that are true because they've been lied to so many times. Yeah, good point. And I think one of the reasons we're so skeptical

about the church and her leaders is COVID, sex abuse cover up, Pope Francis and all the gaslighting about what a saint he was and how he was perfect. and anything you disagree with them on, it was because you're a terrible Catholic. That's at least my interpretation. Maybe you have a different one, and I'd be happy to hear it.

But then now what you see is any individual bad deed by a prelate, such as the recognition, let's say, of someone who supports abortion or something, is it all just goes into the ledger of can't trust, can't trust. And then the odd good thing that a bishop does, we kind of don't even put that up there. And our biases keep getting confirmed.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent way of putting that. Our biases do keep getting confirmed because we look for things that confirm the worldview we already have. This is an almost inescapable part of the human condition. That if you think somebody is, I mean, think about a relationship breaking down, like an X, the things that you loved about them now drive you nuts. And so all of these data points you're receiving, oh, this person is really jokey and stressful situations.

I'm just taking myself as the example here. If you're someone who really likes me, it's like, oh, that's great. He really lightens the mood when I'm stressed out. If you don't like me, if we're having like a bad breakup, then you can point to that same data point and be like, this obnoxious idiot can't be serious even in a stressful situation. These are both true descriptions, but they're being received through kind of a hermeneutical lens that's pro or anti. We do this with everybody, and it's pretty hard not to do it. And so I think, you know, you mentioned with the papacy, there are going to be times where a pope says things that are not perfect. This is true of every pope ever, that they say or do something that is either not just not perfect, but like really unfortunate.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, take Benedict the 16th suggesting that politicians who support an abortion or excommunicated. That is canonically not true. He says this, I think, on an airplane to Mexico. And actually, in that case, thanks me to God, the Vatican press office actually clarified. We forgot what that was like.

What would happen if there was a press office that explained when the Pope had misspoken? But alas. Or think of Pope John Paul the second, kissing a Quran. Whatever his intentions may have been, it provided this scandal to Catholics. Yeah, and so there are going to be times,

I mean, going back to Peter, you know, Galatians too. You know, there are going to be times where popes say and do things that are not the right thing to say or do in that situation. Yes. And you can affirm that as a Catholic without undermining their authority. Now, I think you should be careful not to obsess about that because that can darken your attitude towards them in a way that makes it harder to trust them. Yes. But I think you have to be honest about, yeah, that can happen. I think about kids and a family. Your mom and dad aren't perfect. And there's basically three ways you can react to that. One is you can pretend they are perfect. And, oh, I guess I just don't understand why they did that, but they must have had a good reason. And maybe, or maybe they just had a bad day. Two, is you can obsessively focus on all of the ways they fall short,

the kind of classic teenager response. Or three, and I think this is a mature approach, is to say, they're not perfect, I'm not perfect. They're clearly trying. And they've been placed in this authority over me by God. So I'm going to defer to them, even if I don't think all of their decisions are right, short of course, if they're asking you to do something immoral. If your parents say, you know, we're going to go offer sacrifices of demons and we want you to come with us. Don't do that. But that's not most of the situations you're going to be in. And similarly with the church or similarly with even the government, it's appropriate to have a certain level of respect. Like, honor the emperor is in the New Testament. But it's weird because at the very

moment in this part of our history where we're becoming skeptical of science and for Americans, at least, and I'm sure in other countries, our governments are just leaders in general. So the scientist, the government, and the clergyman. It all kind of convaleses, right, that we're just skeptical of all of it. Yeah. There's a shift in the media landscape after Watergate. You know, before Watergate, the policy had been basically don't report bad news as of a personal nature. So FDR can't walk. Don't mention it. And, you know, Kennedy has all these affairs. That's nobody's business. Now Trump every day is talking about how Biden keeps falling downstairs as opposed to He can't walk, you know.

Right, right. It's mind-blowing how big this shift has been, even within the lifetime of people who are alive today. Yeah. And we're not ready for this. No. Because you've got people who are comparing the popes today of popes in yesteryear. And one of the issues is,

popes of yesteryear didn't have people constantly analyzing everything they said and did, interviewing them off the cuff, and then spending days upon days debating what did they mean by that sentence? or I don't know how anyone, myself included, could possibly withstand that kind of scrutiny. Yeah. And I think if you held up prior popes and presidents to that, you'd have had an undermining of authority then because it's not a healthy level of overanalysis. This is why I'm really interested to see going forward how skeptical everyone becomes

of the next canonization. Yes. Because all of our stuff is out there. Right. And like if you knew Anthony of Padua intimately, you no doubt would have believed him to be a saint. He also probably did a few things that you would. wish he would stop doing. I mean, yeah, they tried to poison him, right?

I didn't know that. I think, I believe they, uh, maybe I'm misremembering. Like, hagiography is a lot easier to write when they don't have social media, when everything about you hasn't been recorded. Right. What's it going to look like? Like, it's one thing, uh, who's the fellow who was just canonized? Carlo Acutis.

Yeah. He didn't live in the internet age. I mean, he did. Oh, yeah. He was creating websites, but I mean, nothing like, nothing like, like, you're, like, your point is exactly proof of Carlo. Okay. The New York Times did an expose saying, oh, maybe he wasn't that holy.

We talked to some of his friends who said he was like a regular kid. Yes. So, but all the more now with social media, it's, it's, uh. Yeah, we might just have to run out of canonizations after Twitter gets invented, you know? It's just like, now we've seen too much. So it's scary. John Eldridge says that the internet has made us all weary, skeptical pragmatists. Yes.

When one day you're being told, here's how to fix your back pain and you go all in on and tell all your friends that this is the one thing they must do. The next day you hear something, not just contrary. That's the worst thing you can do for your back. And then you just go, okay, truth isn't possible. I'll just try to find something that works, but I'm kind of exhausted and maybe truth isn't attainable anyway. So it's like you've got science, our trust in science,

trusting government, trusting clergymen, while we're being funneled information that continually conflicts. No wonder we don't trust anything. Absolutely. What do we do? So Thomas Kuhn, structures of scientific revolutions, he gives this example with what he calls the Copernican shift. This is where the term paradigm shift comes from.

He says, you know, everybody has a way of viewing the world, which he calls a paradigm. And you'll have bits of information that don't neatly fit within that paradigm. Oh, golly. Yeah, already I'm thinking like five or six that don't fit within my own paradigm. Right. And I think anyone who's honest about themselves can point to problems they don't have an answer for, whether it's your political views, whether it's your religious views, whatever it is. You know, for me, as a Catholic, I can give you answers for what God might have meant

with all the biblical language around like the apparent genocide of the Canaanites. This might be a spiritual metaphor. There's plenty of evidence that this is at least wildly exaggerated because the people who look like they've been killed in one verse show up later on. It doesn't look like he's literally commanding genocide. And yet, it sits uneasily with my worldview as a Catholic. It just does. It fits as uneasly as my worldview as a Christian.

And so you can find similar things like that, you know, in the history of the Catholic Church, what does this mean? How does it square up with this other thing the church said? And, you know, how do we harmonize these things? I think the harmonizations are possible, but there may also be time where you sort of throw up your hands and you say, I don't know. I don't know how to square this bit of information. But I have enough reason to have confidence in the worldview itself that I can just have this

bit of outlier data that I can't square. And this is true of whatever view of reality you have. You know, if you became a radical atheist, you would also have to say, wow, it sure is lucky. We happen to evolve in a way where we can accurately understand reality, because I have to believe that or else I can't even be an atheist. That doesn't sit very easily within an atheist worldview. Like evolution is not programmed for the discernment of truth. Evolution is programmed for the survival of the species. And there's plenty of times where delusion seems better than truth and then survival of the species.

I mean, we've got actually great data on this point. Men tend to believe a woman is attracted to them based on how attracted to her they are, which is incredible. That the more you're into a girl, the more you're like, I guess she's probably into me. And this is a bit of delusion that, thank God it exists because it makes you braver to go ask, and you're going to strike out a lot. But if you're right even one out of ten times and she's secretly open to a relationship with you, your boldness might itself be attractive.

Or if I'm continually thinking there's a snake in the bushes, and I'm right one time out of a million, then I'm more likely to survive than the person who doesn't think that. So there's no reason to believe from a merely atheistic evolutionary perspective that you are wired to know the truth. You are wired for survival, which may be at odds with the truth. Yeah, and procreation, that's it.

And so if you believe that, that actually isn't just an outlier bit of data. That, in my view, actually undermines your ability to even try, us that you can know that you're an atheist because all, so all that's to say, whatever world do you take, religiously, politically, et cetera, there are going to be some outlier pieces of data. If you're waiting to have a 100% grasp of everything where you can explain all of the details, you're not going to get there. You just are not. And the Bible presents that, like the book of Job. Job has this problem of suffering. He's got these friends who have it all

worked out and the friends are all wrong and Job doesn't get an answer and that's where we are left. We want Job to get some great answer to here's why you went through that suffering. God does not give him that answer. And the friends who try to give him that answer but are just making stuff up are not praised for, oh, you did such a good job of coming up with possible arguments. They're rebuked for their rashness, basically. So I mentioned all that to say. In every worldview, you've got these outlier bits of data, but eventually you may have so much that it causes you to say, actually, I bet my worldview is wrong. So some amount of – I wonder, though, I want you to continue. I don't mean to be a road bump in your thought there, but here's on to add to that.

Is it possible to accept something I do not currently accept without wanting to accept it first? Yes and no. So it's possible to accept something you don't currently accept without wanting to, for instance, when you accept bad news, you find, you know, proof you can't avoid that your wife has cheated on you, obviously, not Cameron, but hypothetical wife. That's bad news. You don't want to believe it. The police officer comes, says your son's in an accident. Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

I love one died. That's a great. You're not like, oh, yeah, I bet they're still alive because I really want them to be. Great point. Okay. So you can have things that are just so unavoidable. but nevertheless we should you know okay one of the things I learned in seminary I studied under father gear tech who is a papal theologian and he made the point repeatedly faith is not just an act of the

intellect it's an act of the will now there's going to be a few things that follow from that you have to make an act to trust God and when you do things will fall in place in a way that they won't fall in place if you are not willing to make that act so if you're expecting to get there from the intellect alone, you're actually not approaching faith in the way the Bible presents faith. Like this belief in God is not merely an intellectual assent. It's not merely an act of the intellect. Or again, the devil would be saved. Because the devil knows better than you do that God exists. He knows better than you do who the God of the universe is and in a certain ways. And yet he's not saved because he doesn't make that act of trust in him. He trusts in himself

instead. So a lot of what we're talking about in terms of faith and works is really this question of, in what role does the act of the will make, even in the gift of faith? And once you see that the act of the will is necessary to believe, then you can start to understand things like, well, how someone faces the same information might not put it in that order, might not accept it, but also the importance of things like living a moral life. Like if you're not living a moral life, you know, think about Pascal's wager here. He's basically bringing your will involved in saying, get your will involved and see if this doesn't solve your problem. Yeah, 100%.

I remember saying that to a dear friend of mine who was open to converting. We had argue, I'll just say it, as my sister, Emma. We were arguing back and forth, you know, and I remember one night I said, like, you need to repent of your sins. And I don't know what you've done. I have no right to know. I'm not asking to know. But, you know, you've been living as an atheist for many years now,

and I know you've been involved in some things. Like, you need to repent of all that stuff. and she said, but I don't think that they're sins. And I said, and I think this is true, I said, you know, trying to accept God in faith without turning from our sins is to not turn toward him at all. So it's almost like, well, try repenting of them anyway.

Just take on faith that they are sins and repent of them and see what happens. Something like that, maybe. Yeah, yeah, metanoia, right? Like there's this total about faith. So, you know, keep on. Well, go ahead. Well, okay, so I like that point

that someone comes to the door, your son's been in an accident, you know, that's fair. That's on the nose, though. So, but I don't know, it doesn't seem like most of the time the truths that we're presented with. Is it that they're more theoretical that they're easier to wiggle out of? Several things. When we're talking about theological truths, God purposely creates a situation where he encourages

faith, but he never eradicates faith. So there is a difference between faith and knowledge. 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 frad 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 dot com slash matt frad i use it my family uses it it's fantastic there are over 10,000 audio guided prayers meditations and music including my lofi hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different

countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. hallo.com slash Matt Fraud. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Halo.com slash Matt Fred. When atheists say like you don't know God exists or well, actually they're wrong with that. We do know God exists from reason alone. We don't know God from reason alone. Our knowledge of God comes by faith. There's an act of trust. And so this is different than just direct access to the

information. There are all sorts of things that you have to take on faith. And you have plenty of reason to do that rationally, but you still have to make an act to accept that the things you've been told are true. And you could always come up with this scenario in which maybe everybody's lying to me. Maybe every bit of information I've received from other sources is not reliable. And you can live in that kind of radical skepticism, sort of. So that's one of the things that makes it different. And even in the case of, you know, the police officers comes and says your son's been an accident and has died, short of you've seen the body. Yeah.

You could be a horrible prank. Yeah. So even there, you could take some radical skeptic. But the more you have direct access to the information, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion of the truth. getting back to the conspiracy theory example, a lot of times the conspiracy theories are from people who don't really know how the thing operates who have not been intimately close with it. And so the further way you are, the less likely you are to, number one, accurately understand it, or number two, have a reason to believe the things that they're saying. You know, that's interesting. If you told me, you know, company X does all sorts of evil and malicious

things, I know nobody from company X. I don't know how they operate. I'm pretty open to that. If I worked at company acts, I'd probably be more likely to say, oh, no, people here are just really bad at their jobs. Like, this is not intentional malice. This is just gross incompetence. And we've got people who should have been fired 10 years ago who are still, you know, that kind of thing. The closer you are, the more likely you are not to believe the incorrect theory, because you

just have more direct access to the data. Did you see that interaction between Matt Walsh and Joe Rogan on the moon landing? I did not. You have to watch this, because Matt's point was your point, that in order to create this conspiracy, that takes more faith to believe, as it were. Like, that's more difficult to believe than they actually did it. And then Joe, who apparently has thought about this from a thousand different angles, really just sort of took apart all that Matt were sharing with him

and provided evidence that me, someone completely removed from the event, you know, not just geographically or chronologically, but just knowledge. I have no knowledge of anything. I say, yeah, everything he says makes complete sense. And yet I'm unwilling to go along with Joe, and you say, why? And if I'm honest, what would that be? Why would that be? It's probably because I don't want to be weird, and it's probably because...

You're in the pocket of Big Moon. Yeah, right? The Jews again. Or it's probably because, why? I don't want to be weird. And that means two things. That means I don't want to be alienated. But it also means I know enough people that trust.

in this, that I'm unwilling to put myself against their position and to be weird in that sense. Well, I think there's maybe something more than weirdness there. Because you trust certain people. Yeah. You know, again, take the example of light being a particle in a wave. That's stupid. I don't know what that means either. It's true, but it's, that's ridiculous.

I mean, it just sounds so crazy. And yet, I trust enough people who understand science a lot better than I do. Yeah. That even though if somebody was really impassioned and said, that's in place. possible. If somebody told me you can't be a particle in a wave, I believe you on a certain level because, yeah, how could it be both of those things? It doesn't make any sense. And I have to just sort of take it on a human faith that this many experts who understand this better than I do are right, even when my own reason would lead me to a different place, I have to make this act of

trust. And this is how it is with huge swaths of reality where you can find, you know, the Joe Rogan or whoever, who's spent hours and hours. hours and hours doing their own kind of research of considering all these issues from the outside and they tell you it's one way when you know enough people who are on the other side who say they just don't understand like this is not like an expert understanding this is a layman spending hours and hours and hours from the outside trying to make sense of this this is what people mean by too smart for his own good yeah people because they know just or they know just enough to be dangerous you hear people say that because you can think about a lot of ways to arrange the pieces that

that are not true. And so I think having a sort of trust that there are a lot of people who know this better than I do, that's an unsatisfying conclusion in a certain way intellectually. And I think we just have to be honest about that. We're going to live in a world. We already live in a world in which the boundaries of our knowledge are becoming much more obvious to us, which is kind of strange because we have more information. But I think we realize more than ever how much we can't know as much as we want to know.

in this life about events, about different subjects, but whatever it is, like you, number one, don't have enough time to run every topic down to the level that it deserves. Like the conspiracy theorist, almost by definition, has spent way more time on an ancillary issue than they should have. And so you as a person who just thinks,

yeah, we landed on the moon, have probably not spent hours and hours confirming that opinion, but they almost certainly have spent hours and hours attacking that. So you are, much less qualified than that's it. And you just can't. You cannot do every issue that could possibly come up. You can't give it the hours and hours that it might deserve to have an exhaustive knowledge of it. That's why I don't think it's epistemologically disreputable to side with the safer position.

Exactly. While people are calling you a normie, like, all right, maybe I am, but I'm, this feels safer, so I'm going to do this. Right. At least until I can't defend it anymore, perhaps. Yeah, I think that's Exactly right. And, you know, I was starting to say earlier with the paradigms in which we view reality, there may come a point where you get so much data that you have to overturn your paradigm. You know, with the geocentric worldview, they knew for a long time that there were some data points that did not fit within it. Planets being the obvious one. And the stars appear to be exactly where we want them to be. Over centuries, they realized they were actually not quite where we thought they should be given a geocentric model. So that becomes an interesting problem in the Middle Ages. But the planets were very obvious. not where we thought they should be. So even the word planet comes from the Greek for wandering star. They realized this was a problem. They had no explanation other than some of these stars seem like they're just moving around. That eventually in the Middle Ages, like leads to these really complicated mathematical proofs to try to make sense of why things are, where they are in the sky. We can actually predict where they're going to be fairly accurately, but we have to do all these

really complicated mathematical formulas to get there. And then finally, Copernicus is just like, well, What if we take a different starting assumption? What if we assume that geocentrism isn't true? Heliocentrism is true. Now all of these huge problems we have go away. Now it makes perfect sense why the planets are there. Now it makes perfect sense why everything's a little off from where we would expect it to be.

And it's great, except there are still these data points that Copernicus's model didn't quite account for. They were more intellectually satisfying. Like, on the whole, it's like, okay, this seems to be a better view of reality, but it would not be true to say they figured it all out. I mean, even Copernicus' model is not perfect. And even now, we are finding things we can't quite explain.

They're always going to be those outliers. And so I mentioned this for a few reasons. One, the mere fact you've got something that you can't explain doesn't mean you're wrong. Doesn't mean the official narrative is wrong. Doesn't mean the church is wrong. Doesn't mean whatever it is you believe in is wrong. Two, when you're wanting to persuade someone else of the truth, whether you're talking about converting them to Christianity,

whether you're talking about talking them out of a certain theory they have, or whatever it is, you can poke holes. You can put little data points they can't explain out there. That may not immediately change their mind. Because you've got little holes and little data points out there. You can't explain also. And you should just realize that about yourself and humility, but also just that the nature of knowledge of reality.

We have a limited understanding of all of this stuff. And so there are things that we don't know how to make. sense of. So a lot of times people approach apologetics wanting two things. Number one, a bulletproof argument they can use on their non-Catholic friends and family to make them all become Catholic. And number two, an explanation of everything. That I have got all these questions about the faith and just explain them all and then I won't have questions about the faith anymore. And both of those are unrealistic goals. Because the first one is assuming one data point is enough to upend a system and it's not usually. Sometimes there will be such a good argument that you just think,

think, oh yeah, this completely disproves the thing. But you can have an airtight argument, logically, formally valid, makes a total sense, it's actually true. You know, like the Islamic dilemma is a great example. The Quran clearly says, if we want to know if this is true, we should look to the Torah and the gospel. The Torah and the gospel totally contradict the Islamic message, therefore we shouldn't accept the Islamic message. And it makes complete sense. Using the Quran, we disprove the Quran. And even if you say maybe the gospel meant something else, we know what the Torah is. and that disproves Islam as well. So you have to do all these exegetical backflicts

to try to avoid the force of this argument. Sometimes that's enough to dislodge someone from their worldview. But even when an argument is internally, coherent, logically valid, people often have so many other reasons why they believe the thing they do, but that just becomes one thing

kind of on the scale on the other side. Maybe they don't know what to do with it, but they're not ready to upend their system of belief. But then the second thing is, if everything we've just said about the nature of a paradigm and viewing reality is true, no matter how much work you do on the problem of evil or whatever problems you have with Catholicism or Christian, you or whatever it is, you might still have some areas you don't know the answer to.

You might have some theories, well, this might explain it, but you may not be intellectually satisfied to your own liking that you know the nature of everything. And God does not promise that you will. So he gives you enough to make a rational act of faith. he doesn't give you so much that faith is no longer necessary to give your earlier example. He's not going to just show you the body of your son.

You're going to have to trust him that your son died in an accident. And we want not for God to give us aids to faith, but for God to take away faith. You know, think about the classic atheist challenge. God, if you're here, you know, I'm going to drop this cup and I want you to make it float in the air. If he does that, you don't really have an act of faith to make anymore. You're just like, well, there's really no other explanation that could possibly begin. given for the phenomenon I directly observed. Yeah.

But both the apostles then and us today have to make acts of faith. One of the readings, I don't remember if it comes from St. Augustine or who it comes from, talks about how even the apostles are in this spot. They see the risen Christ and they still have to make an act of faith. Because he's telling them that this weak fledging little church that looks like it's going to die in an afternoon is actually going to survive and grow and become like the biggest thing on earth.

the mustard seed will become the mustard tree. They don't have any direct experience of that thing being true. We do have direct experience of that thing being true. We can see as a matter of history, this band of 12 became over a billion people in the Catholic Church. We have to take on faith that the founder of that really is who the apostles say he was. And this is a word of comfort for those watching. It took more faith for the apostles to believe that they wouldn't be overcome in an afternoon,

as you put it, than to think that the current giant. enormous church can be rehabilitated if there is great corruption in the church. Yeah, because we now have a ton of empirical data. In Chesterton's words, how many times the church has gone down to the dogs and it was the dogs who died. Like every time the church appears to have been overcome by evil, external or internal, she comes out stronger at the end of it.

Maybe not in your lifetime. But take the longer view of the thing. Now, I realize that's cold comfort to know things will eventually get better, but you may not be here to see it. but that should be actually a tremendous source of comfort. Right. Because we've been through worse and we've come out stronger. I've been thinking lately that I'm not sure I think knowledge is possible.

If by, yeah, if by... Go on. Well, if by knowledge we take the standard philosophical definition of justified true belief, but you've heard of Gettyer experiments that sought to have you... I don't know if I ever this. Right, I think I think Getty was a philosopher. Don't quote me, but I think he wrote his... It was like a several-page paper back in 1960.

joseph any chance you could check that out fact check me there anyway the the point is okay so what what do we need for knowledge well we need more than uh a belief yeah right it it has to be true um but we need more than true belief if i say it's raining in tokyo right now and it just so happens to be raining in toky that's not knowledge it's like it's a guess it's lucky guess so it needs to be justified in somewhere like i need to have some good reason to think that it's true Anyway, Gettier put up these experiments and then more people have come up with other ideas. I've heard the phrase justified true beliefs. Here's an example.

I don't think Gettier, I'm looking at this clock over here. So I don't think this was Gettia's example. But if I look at that clock right now and that clock says, you know, like 1129. And so I hold the belief now it's 1129. Yeah. And then I find out that the clock's broken. Yeah. It's hard to see why that's not a justified true belief.

It's certainly a justified belief. It's a justified belief that's true. Because it's 1129. It is actually 1129. Oh, I see what you're saying. That's the idea, right? I've heard of people doing their Zoom backgrounds. They take a background that is their actual backdrop and they use it as a fake background.

Yeah. So someone thinks they're in their room. That's good. And they are in their room, but they're believing in it on information. That's exactly. That's a Gettier experiment. That would be an idea of a Gettier example. Right.

And so, I don't know. I just lately I've been, I feel more comfort with the idea that the, uh, the what, to quote Hume, the wise man proportions his belief to the strength of the evidence, and that's all we've got. So I think, like, I think a solution to sort of Cartesian certainty is phenomenal conservatism, which you've heard of, right? And so I think, I like to use the analogy of,

okay, we're in Plato's cave. We got no idea what the hell's happening, and we want to get out of this cave somehow. And so I think of, you know, Cartesian certainty is a sort of ladder that we seek to build, but upon which every rung must be 100% secure or we will not take the next step. And even when you read Descartes, you just, it's funny.

Like, it's funny how secure he thought his cogito was. And then it's funny how quickly philosophers decided he was wrong to think that Hume and Nietzsche, right, thought he was wrong. And so you get this bundle theory from Hume that he can't, we don't have any sense of self when we reflect upon, not at no kind of immediate, all right, so that doesn't seem to work. And it kind of doesn't seem to work for the reasons

that we're kind of laying out here. It just, I think the problem becomes exacerbated in the day of the internet. But the idea of phenomenal conservatism, which I know you know, but for our viewers, it's just the idea that if something appears to be the case, seems to be the case, then I have at least some justification

for thinking that it is the case. And I'm within my epistemic rights to go on accepting that thing, unless I have reason to the contrary. And the reason I think that this is a kind of a nice sort of antidote to what we could call Cartesian certainty is that it's just how every human being has always reasoned at all times.

Yes, that's right. You know, and it's only the, it takes you a PhD perhaps or a sort of, I don't know, a teenage melancholic to disrupt that and to think that that isn't the way we think. So I think that's just perfectly reasonable. And I, you know, I worry sometimes. You know, I remember listening to a preacher once. And when I say preacher, he was a Catholic giving a talk.

And he said, do you know that Christianity's true? And he said, no, no, no. Do you know that you know that you, that kind of thing? Yeah. And I just am not comfortable with that because I don't know if I know that I have two arms. Now, I want to clarify this because it sounds like I'm falling into kind of skepticism,

which I'm not doing. I do know that I have two arms. But it depends what you mean by no. Like if you mean Cartesian knowledge, then I don't think I know. And that's why I don't know if no in that sense is even helpful. But if you mean, do I accept that I have two arms because you have no good reason to the contrary?

It's like, obviously, yes. And I think there's so many things in my life that you could press me on that I wouldn't have an answer to. That's right. Do I know that my wife is who she says she is? Am I convinced she's not a Russian agent? Yes, of course, of course. but then if you make the word no or if you try to make the word no means something other

than we all think it means right okay then yeah at that point i don't know i don't know if my wife is who she is she is i don't know i have two arms and i don't know that christianity's true but if by no you mean do you have good do you have reasons to think this is true uh yeah of course of course i do and so so i guess what i'm doing is i'm sounding skepticism like a skeptic but i'm actually saying the opposite. Like, do I know Christianity's true? A hundred percent, yes. Of course I do. Do you know your wife is who she claims to be? Yes, same thing. But then the other thing is, again, if you want to use this, I'm going to shut up soon. I don't know how much sense I'm making. You're making total sense. Yeah. So like this other, like if you press this foreign,

Cartesian idea of no, then you can make me doubt all sorts of things because I have different levels of evidence for the different things that I think that I know. Do I know who my wife is? Yes. Do I know that my car is parked out there? Yes. But okay, which one do you know more? Okay, I know who my wife is. All right. So you don't know that you know that your car is out there. And then you drive yourself insane. Yeah, I think this is completely true. And you see this breakdown really radically. I think one place you can see it is the popularity of simulation theory. This idea that we don't even know we're living in reality compared to living in a matrix. And, you know, if you look at Nick Bolstrom's arguments for this, if you believe that the mind and brain are the same thing and they're just matter, and you believe that given this, eventually we'll be able to create simulations so lifelike that someone could be sentient in this created world and think they're real, and you could do an infinite number of those things, basically, then it's wildly more likely, statistically, that you are yourself, a simulated being that thinks they're real, than that you're a real being who happens to know, man, I've really missed by a statistical, you know, very unlikely chance.

I narrowly missed being a simulation. You're probably a simulation. And so the logical place a lot of this skepticism ends up is literally doubting our own existence, doubting the existence of our bodies, of our world, of our reality, that it's all just a stimulation in some of the world that may or may not look anything like this world. Maybe there are no such thing as human beings. These are all just Sims in some game, some alien species and a different reality is the other thing that makes that more plausible is the as technology advances it seems more

likely that that's could happen. Right. We see these AI kind of characters and everything else. So here I think it's important to stress a really like one of the great arguments for Christianity right now is that we can actually affirm reality. Here's what I mean by that. The phrase

artificial intelligence. The word artificial has two meanings. It can mean fake or it can mean manmade. Now, both sides of this question use AI, but I think they mean different things. We would look at this and say, chat GPT is fake intelligence. It will very confidently say things that are completely untrue, and it's not even lying. It's just giving me, you know, in the same way that if you use auto-complete on your phone and you start to type a sentence and it'll finish it for you, it's not like, oh, I think a really good thing you could say is, I'm going to go to the store.

Let me help you. It's just doing sophisticated text. prediction. That's all AI does in these like chat models. And it's sophisticated to a point that you can't grasp it, but it's still doing something like that, where it's just doing trial and error. If I say these kind of things, users respond well. If I'd say these other kind of things, they respond badly. So I'm going to say these kind of things. And it does this with this remarkable level of sophistication that looks from the outside like real intelligence. But it isn't. Do you know the Chinese room experiment? Which experiment? Chinese.

It's Chinese room? No. Okay, this is, I believe it was Cyril gives this as a thought experiment. He says, imagine you're in a room and you don't speak Chinese. And you have a guidebook. So people will pass notes under the door and you've got a little thing that says when they put these characters, you write out these other characters and you pass it back under the door. The person on the other side experiences it as you having a completely coherent, smart conversation with them in fluent Chinese. and so they would reasonably assume

you're a fluent Chinese speaker but you don't speak... How are you getting the information to write the characters? You've got a little guidebook. So if they have these characters... You write these. F, A, then B, that sort of thing.

And his point is, this is what a computer does. It gets these kind of prompts and gives this kind of a result. Oh, that's good. Like, you see this very easily with a calculator. If you put seven times six, it knows what number to put,

it's not thinking about it beforehand. It's not like... I think it might be 43. wait, no, 42. You know, it doesn't do that at all because it's not actually doing anything like the human experience of cognition. It's a fake intelligence.

But the most influential, wealthiest, powerful people on Earth believe that artificial intelligence is something that we can create man-made sentience. This belief is completely contrary to a Christian worldview. It's completely contrary to the idea that soul is the seat of consciousness,

and soul is something distinct from matter. And since you can't create soul in a computer, you just can't possibly do this. They are spending huge amounts. I mean, in the billions of dollars, trying to create man-made consciousness, trying to basically create a soul in the machine. And because of that, like,

this is where, to make a long story long, you get this major breakdown. If you accept their view, that eventually will be able to create censure, then you basically have to accept that we probably live in a simulation. We probably are man-made, not actually real creatures. On the other hand, if you say that's not true,

then you have to believe in something immaterial, something like a soul that isn't reducible to matter. I mean, you get the force of the argument, like if we could create consciousness, eventually a sophisticated technological civilization would create consciousness. And if they did that, they could create it not just once, but billions and trillions and quadrillions of times,

which means if there are trillions and trillions of people who think they're real but are actually not real people at all, and we have a world where we say there's like eight billion people who really exist, we have to also at least caveat and say, well, statistically, it's way more likely we're in that trillions and think we're in the billions. Yes. So. And you began by saying the appeal of Christianity. The appeal of Christianity exists.

You can live in reality. You can know you actually exist. if you don't believe in the soul. If you don't believe in anything like that, then you're stuck in this situation where you have to say, I'm almost definitely not real. Mathematically, I'm almost definitely,

I don't exist. And that's such a stupid, counterintuitive conclusion that you should be able to step back and say, obviously if atheistic materialism has left us in a situation where you have to deny,

not just the existence of God, but of ourselves, that's a really good argument against them. Yeah, I think therefore I am a cyborg. Yes. Wow. That's bananas. yeah i was going to ask you what is one conspiracy theory you wish was true a conspiracy theory i wish

was true that's such a good well that you'd be willing to accept or glad to accept say yeah okay that's a really good question part of the problem with talking about conspiracy theories is my understanding of a conspiracy is just when you know two or more people get together right concoct something and that's going to be true in every real event even if it's maliciously done yeah you're right And a lot of the problem, I guess, was even the usage of the term conspiracy theory. I think it will probably get some pushback for using it's used, exactly, it's used pejoratively. And it's hard to have a good term for the thing we're describing other than conspiracy theory. People kind of know what it is we're talking about.

But usually when you believe in a conspiracy theory, you don't think of those ones as conspiracy theories. I mean, some people will open there and just be like, I love conspiracy theories. But usually when we have things like that, we think that those things are true and not. conspiracies. So a benevolent conspiring. This is what we're talking about here. I'll give you an example. J.D. Flynn of the pillar, they do fantastic work with the pillar. Let me just plug that and just say, if you're not a pillar subscriber, it's well, I mean, I get so much great Catholic news and commentary from those guys. They're journalists of high integrity and everything else. They aren't just trying to push some ideological agenda. They're trying to really just

understand things with a fair, charitable, but sometimes critical. kind of lens. J.D. went down to Chicalio, Pope Leo's old dioces, and just spoke to people who knew him. And one of the stories that he came away with was that when he was Bishop Prevost, he would go to churches that occasionally would have weird liturgical stuff that was going on, and he'd, you know, celebrate master, and they'd be like, oh, you know, Bishop, we do it this way here. And he'd often, unless it was just something gravely scandalous or something, he would just go along with it. But then afterwards, He would quietly address the situation with the pastor. So not to publicly humiliate him, but to quietly just say, like, get your house in order.

Like, don't do this again. I thought about that when I heard the controversy with Senator Durbin. And he was being honored with a pro-life award, or excuse me, a Catholic Award by Cardinal Suppich. That was the proposal. And it was clearly an off-the-cuff moment where he wasn't expecting to get confronted with this question. Pope Leo is being told, can ask one question in English, and then he's like, okay, and he's asked about this. And you see him appear to fumble around for an answer, and he gives this sort of non-committal

answer that a lot of people took issue with, that what does it really mean to be pro-life across the board, do you talk about death penalty, talk about the treatment of immigrants and those things. And he didn't directly say what should or shouldn't be done. and he just pled a certain level of agnosticism on on the details of the case. That afternoon, suddenly Durbin announces that he's not going to be accepting the award. Now, my benevolent conspiracy is there was a phone call. Somebody spoke to somebody else behind the scenes and just said, get your house in order, do not offer this award.

Don't embarrass Durbin. Don't embarrass, you know, just this needs not to happen. and so Durbin was able to politely decline the award because he didn't want to cause controversy where he'd been totally fine causing controversy up until that very moment and there's sort of a face-saving exercise. Now, maybe I'm giving too generous of a read

to everyone involved, but that's the kind of benevolent conspiracy that I see enough evidence that that might be the case and I really hope that was what happened. How old are you? 40. Yeah, I'm 42.

So we grew up... Are you saying 2 plus 40 or 40 also? 40 also. No, 42. Oh, 40 plus two. Yeah, I think I'm 42. You know how after a certain age you stop figuring. It becomes less precise. Like when you're a baby, they're measured in months, and then you're half years as a kid, and then you're a decade.

It's funny talking to people, let's say we're basically the same age. It's funny talking to people who are the same age as me, but who grew up in America, because the advance of technology in Australia was slower than the advance of technology in America, obviously. So the things that kind of hit the market back then tended to take longer to hit the market in Australia. Does that make sense? So the kind of computer you were probably messing around on

when you were 15 may have been the computer I was messing around on when I was, I don't know, 20 or something, even though you were younger than me, something like that. Truthfully is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence, whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding,

or looking for daily spirit, guidance, Truthly is your companion on the journey. It's like if Chat GPT went through OCIA, got baptized and made it its mission to proclaim the truth of the Catholic Church. But Truthly is more than just a Q&A tool, its formation in your pocket. Take audio courses on topics like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, Purgatory, and why the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ. Each course is designed to be accessible, engaging, and deeply rooted in the teachings on

of the church. You'll also receive daily audio reflections, short, powerful meditations to help you grow in prayer and stay grounded in your spiritual life. Already downloaded by thousands of people worldwide, Truthly is transforming the way we learn, share and live our faith. One question, one course and one prayer at a time. Start your seven-day free trial today. Download Truthly on the app store. It's bananas to think about our childhood and how different things are today. So I want to like reflect on that just for nostalgia's sake

and then I want to think about what the world might be like in 40 years from now, right? So it's crazy to people who grew up during the time of the internet to realize, I like using this as an example, if any human being on the face of the planet

wanted to get a hold of me when I was 15 or 20 or no, not 20, but let's say, 12 to 15. They had only three ways. They could write a letter and send it in the post. They could come and find me directly. Or they could call the phone that was bolted to my kitchen wall,

which had like a meter to two meter at most caught on it, such that when I had to try to talk to girls, when my mom was like cooking for the family, it was really embarrassing and annoying, you know? that's crazy dude yeah that almost sounds as crazy as we're all cyborgs it's like no one would believe that that's how we all acted and that i had two channels growing up and only two and i had the clicker channel four ABC yeah eventually SBS came on which was all foreign films which all of us watched at 10 o'clock at night to see boobs um because it tend to play foreign movies not proud

of that this is what we were doing we didn't even have that Yeah, so I'm thankful for. Yeah, well, y'all had much more sophisticated television cable and all that, right? But I grew up with three channels. We grew up poor, so we were behind the times with a lot of that stuff ourselves. Even though my neighbors might have had cable, I remember reading TV guide for fun to look at shows I couldn't even watch. And so, yeah, like that thing you're describing of going from a world where we had, I think we had four or five channels. But they came in, you know, kind of poorly, and that was your access to the world.

When I was 15, I had an opportunity to go abroad for the first time. There was something called the Cambridge College Program or a summer program or something like this. And it was for high school students. He wanted, I think, to get college credit. I can't remember if it was for credit or not. But it was a chance to go to Cambridge and England for like a summer for, you know, like three weeks or something. I was 15. And I went overseas and I couldn't figure out how to get my international calling card to work.

So it was like several days before I was able to call home. So my parents are alarmed. I've never been gone before. Suddenly, I'm just gone and they aren't hearing from me at all. And so they're like calling, trying to get a hold of, and they have no way of getting a hold of me at all. So what you're saying is absolutely on point. Finally, I had to just call, collect home.

And so they were happy to hear from me. They were not happy to see the phone bill at the end of the month when it was like several hundred dollars just to call home. So, I mean, it was, that is a world that is impossible to imagine It's been as recent as it was. Here's another thing I've noticed. In the 80s or 90s, if you went to Italy, there's a really good chance that no one would understand you.

Yeah. But I was just living in Austria for a few months this year, and we traveled to different countries, and it's really sad. I feel bad about this, but I didn't even bother to learn much of the language because whenever I would try, they would speak English,

especially in the cities, right? And especially people under 40. There were certainly times where that wasn't the case. But it made me sad. I think, you know, when you rob a country of its dress, of its music, of its literature, of its language, then you can kind of, they can just become made in the image of whatever. But that's sad, I think that my kids are going to, when they're older, or my grandkids,

it's just everyone in Europe will speak English at some point. Let me throw out a theory. Tell me what you think of this. I think that we're living in an age where every major metropolis in the world is more similar to every other major metropolis in the world than any of those cities are to the little towns an hour and a half away from them. Yeah, 100% that's true. All right, so let's take concrete examples. So let's think of Orlando. And then let's think Adelaide, Australia, South Australia. And so you're saying that those two cities have more in common and feel more

similar than what? Then going out of Orlando to like a small town in Florida. then Orlando does. Hang on, I'm still not getting it. Orlando is more like Adelaide. Yeah. Then Orlando is like the small town out on the sticks in Florida. Yeah. Yeah. That even though it's, you know, you can drive. At least superficially, I think that's true. I think this is more pronounced outside of the English sphere. Because as you just said, when you are, like if you're in Tokyo, you can get by with English. If you go out to rural Japan, you can't. If things feel much more Japanese and dress and language and culture. but the international monoculture which is largely American culture

but not exclusively feels pretty similar I was in Morocco and when I was in Marrakesh you see H&M you see all these like international brands and it's like

this is the exact same stuff I could get anywhere then you go out into the Sahara and you're just like this isn't this is pretty different this is nothing like right it's like people aren't even speaking

Arabic but they're speaking Berber and I don't have any idea it's going to like that's the shit But that is like a drive, not an international flight. You'd have these international flights to all these cities. And so I think you have people who imagine themselves to be very cosmopolitan because they've been in the really big, slightly different city all over the world. Exactly.

And they never get out of the major city. They never get out of the touristy city or the capital or whatever it is. And so they get a slightly different version of the same experience. Yeah. McDonald's has a slightly different way. Right. Seriously. McDonald's in Rome, it's got beer.

Hey, that's really crazy. It's not good beer, but hey, it's the beer to McDonald's. And you're just like, that was, that was amazing. Then you can walk outside of that. And suddenly you get to places where they don't speak English. The city life is not at all what's going on there. And then it starts to feel pretty foreign. Yeah, totally.

But the fear is, I think what happens is that that cosmopolitan, what do we call it? What do we call that thing that makes all the major cities the same? I've been calling it the monoculture. Like a white washing monoculture. The problem is, though, that that gets into the vein. of a country and destroys the whole country. So you might go an hour outside of Morocco or what have you. But already, right, there's the iPhones and there's the semblance of things are, yeah.

Yes, the seeds of the destruction of cultures around the world, we see it happening. This has been a much longer process than just the internet. The internet has absolutely sped this up. The iPhone, all of this stuff has absolutely sped this up to a dramatic degree. But, you know, like the Italian that is kind of spoken in New York or like the Italian words, you know, prosciute, gabagoo, all this stuff, that doesn't sound like Italian in Italy now. But the reason is, because you had a lot of 19th century Sicilian immigrants to the U.S., back when Sicily spoke a version of the language that was almost unrecognizable from modern Italian.

And after 1870, they worked to standardize the Italian language. The French did this with Napoleon, so that Corsican and Parisian, and all these other, what were basically different languages become standardized. This is actually an important part of just world history. It's also an important part of the conversation around like the Bible and the dialect of the people because we're imagining that with the languages

as they are today where everyone across England speaks English other than all the people who are not native English. But the reality was you would go to a country, France, Italy, whatever, and there'd be such wide variances between different dialects, they were functionally different languages. And you kind of have that now still with China, you know,

where you've got a bunch of different, we call them dialects like Cantonese and Mandarin, but they're not mutually intelligible. So they should probably just be called different languages, that there probably isn't such a thing as a Chinese language. There's a Chinese script. You can read the writing in different languages,

but Mandarin, Cantonese, et cetera, aren't the same. And similarly, I'd say, you know, you could speak. Golly, I just thought of something. Yeah, please. I'm going to throw it out there, and it's dangerous. And I can't tell if it's racist or not, but here we go.

We're just going to do it. If you want, if you, if you want other races to exist, then marrying them and having kids with them will eventually dilute them. Go. This whole thing is true, not just of races, but of cultures. No, let's stick with races. It's more dangerous. Oh, yeah.

It is certainly more dangerous. But I just want to say this point is true. I think, different languages, different ethnicities, different races. However you want to explain that, there is certainly a sense in which you've got a blended. You know, I mean, look, I'm a European mutt. You know, I've got English and German and Irish and Scottish and, I don't know, a bunch of other stuff, Swedish. And so if you said, what is your ancestral culture? I could choose one.

But the reality is they've been so blended in the American. experience already among different European ethnicities. And I think that's absolutely happening in a more international way where it's not just Europeans, it's Europeans, Africans, Asians, South Americans, et cetera. I mean, South America is already such a melting pot when it comes to like indigenous and Spanish and everything else. For centuries, that's been kind of the experience in the Latin American kind of context. I think it, at the very least, forces this.

The older idea of race is going to be almost unintelligible. at the rate things are going, where to say someone is white or black or something will become increasingly arbitrary. And do you think the same thing will be true like for Italy and France and Germany except for the fact that they have borders and governments? Oh yeah. No, I mean, there was a first thing's article

a few years back that's very controversial. It was called What Does It Mean to be French? And the question was, you know, okay, so I'll give you an example. When I was in Rome, I was friends with a young woman who was a Muslim who had grown up speaking Turkish in Germany. She was born in Germany to a Turkish

family. And the question was, well, is she German? Now, she could speak German as well, but culturally, she was much more Turkish than she was German. And she said as much. I mean, she said when she went to Turkey when she was 18, it felt like a homecoming, even though she'd never been there before. And she wasn't completely accepted as a German in these kind of large Turkish enclaves that they had in Germany. We are going to have more and more situations like that in either direction. Whether you have widespread in her marriage where the culture's kind of blend, or whether you have these little ethnic enclaves where the cultures don't blend, either way, there's going to be some major questions, what does it mean to be American, what does it

mean to be German, what does it mean to be every, every group? And these are challenges that I think we're deeply uncomfortable kind of facing, and I get why. Like, it's an awkward question to, to sort of grapple with, but what does it mean? I saw someone point out that if you want to say someone not of English ethnic origin who grows up in England is automatically English, then you have to do the same thing in reverse. You have to say, like, during colonial India, that people who are born to the colonists are Indians, full stop. And so you'd have to say, you know, for instance, Albert Camus, we call him French, but he's born in Morocco. You should call him a Moroccan. Those, like, you know, you've got a bunch of things, especially from the colonial

era where people were born not in their like ethnic ancestral home. And right now we use the same words for nationality and ethnicity and race. And those are probably just not sufficient to do all of the things we're wanting to do. I was teasing some friends of ours because one of our friends said that she had a Croatian friend. And it turned out this young woman that she had been referring to, her parents were Croatian, but she'd grown up in Canada. So she didn't have a Croatian accent or any city, you know, she was Croatian Canadian. And so like she was an immigrant to the U.S. but not from the country. We expected. And then we meet her and we're like, that's your Croatian for you. She's just clearly a Canadian. She's sorry. But that's, and so we've got that

where when you say Croatian, are you referring to an ethnicity and nationality? Like what? What are we talking about here? And that's going to be increasingly true across the board. So in that there's some really good aspects, but let's not deny the fact that there's also a loss of another way of living. Yes. That is becoming more similar across the board, but that even leaving aside the marriage thing in a generation, people in Croatia, people in Marrakesh, people in, you know, Mongolia are going to be a lot more similar to one another simply because of the technological culture and there's no getting around this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, this reminds me of something I thought of this, you know, you go to Ireland.

We used to live in Donny Goal. Yeah. And you drive like an hour away and the accents are different, at least for now, right? Right. And that's because that population has existed there for a lot longer than say the population in Australia has. And so you find that the difference in accents is less pronounced in Australia, obviously, than to say an hour up the road in Ireland.

Yeah. You know, I see this a lot with Midwestern culture, which is going to sound very strange. I was on the plane yesterday, and there were people from Tulsa who were talking. And the guy they were talking to said, what do you guys think of this show, Tulsa King, and how they depict Tulsa?

And they said, we've never seen it. How did they depict Tulsa? And he says, they depict it pretty redneck. And they're like, oh, yeah, that's not accurate anymore. And if you've ever seen Ozark, the accents are wildly wrong. Like, the reality is Hollywood's depiction of Middle America makes everyone like backwood Southern,

even if they're Midwestern, even if, you know, but part of that is because they're wanting to depict a place that increasingly doesn't exist. Like, you can still find people with, like, a strong Southern accent, it's a lot less. Similarly, like, the Boston accent where, you know, it's kind of the stuff of jokes. You can find some people who still talk, like they're from Southie, but it's not as many as you used to be able to. And we're seeing in real time, this linguistic shift of sounding a lot more like one another

as people move from place to place within their own country. And so there's a death of subculture. Do you think that this, in part, explains the very passionate desire people have for tradition? I think it does. That we're living in a place where people are disconnected from their own roots. Because it was cool in the 90s, wasn't it? You know what I mean? Like, it was cool to question authority.

Right. It was cool to, by the way, I don't consider myself American. I'm legally American, but I just can't say I'm American because I'm clearly not. Are your kids? my kids i mean what do you mean legally or not exactly that's a good question yeah they go yeah they're american they grew up here you know they have an american mother and they grew up in america i grew up in australia i mean i moved here when i was 23 if cameron had been australian would your kids still be american that's a great question yes i think they'd be american yeah i think you're

right but i think it's so there's great studies on this that the children of immigrants tend to talk more like their peers than like their parents yes i think that's i think that's true i also heard a different statistic that if that a child will more likely mirror the accent of their mother so my sister is an Aussie obviously and they live in Steubenville her husband's American they grow up in America but the daughter has a pronounced kind of Australian twang and it's not like a speech impediment you know how kids can't pronounce their eyes and Australians can't either it's not it's it's more than that so anyway the ROTIC R right the what ROTIC R is is a phenomenon you're talking about like saying lore oh yeah and instead of law yeah that's I do

didn't know that's what it was cool. Yeah, there's a certain phenomenon. And actually, it became more common in the UK as it became less common in the US. Because in the US, we became increasingly standardized with language because of television. In the UK, that was also the case, but it was London-based BBC.

London uses the Rotech R. Historically, the Midlands and other parts of England don't. So this London style of speaking became more uniform across England as the US was doing different things linguistically. Interesting. And so little pockets, like Boston, has the same R phenomenon that England and Australia, yeah, the whole like...

What does ROTIC mean? What is that? It's coming from, I think, the Greek word row. I don't know, though, I don't understand exactly, but it's referring to a specific thing that happens with the way R's are dropped, but also in a fairly standardized way, included in places that they don't actually exist. You know what's fascinating is in American music, because Australians are often accused of using like an American accent when they're singing, can't or whatever, plan.

Well, we say plant Australia. Well, some parts say plant, some say plant. But it is interesting, it seems like a lot of American music uses the ROTIC R. Like, you're a huge Swifty. Think of a Swifty song and see if, well, I'm right. I couldn't mean anything worse than listen to Taylor Swift. Yeah, we'll have to. When I first saw you first.

There's not first. Oh yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. But then American punk bands often pronounce the R. Yes, that's right. Like Blank or Green Day World, these, to the punk bands we know of. Yeah, and a lot of that, I've actually heard things about this before.

Maybe she does use a first. A linguistic channel that I watch a lot in the name of it is escaping me right now. But he makes this point with music. The genre of music often depends on where it originated because people will often be imitating. So if you're a punk band trying to imitate the clash, you might talk with more of a British style

when you're singing. Because you're, this is what you've associated that sound with. I need to correct myself. I need to be on the record here. or else the comments section we'll talk about nothing else. I'm pretty sure she says first. People go listen to Taylor Swift and let us know.

Romeo when you were throwing pebbles and my daddy said stay. This is the only Swift song. I am in awe right now. Actually, every time I love this song, man. I get the guitar out of night when me and the kids sing it. Everything to me, I was begging you.

I'm trying to get to an R. Please don't go. We could just as a story. Somewhere. There you go somewhere. Yeah. By the way, this interview took a hard left turn about five minutes. I'm here for it.

Some, yeah. I never know. Like, my wife asked me, what are you going to talk about on Matt Frad's show? And I'm like, I never know. Well, I just love talking to you. I think a lot of people come in and I'm like, okay, this is what they're good at. I just love talking about. I love this too.

This is the stuff where if I sat down and thought, like, I'm going to make a shamous popery episode where I give the etymological origins of how different places pronounce the R and where they drop it. But the flip side is they also will include it. So my old professor, oh, well, yeah, let me finish that thought. And then I'll go on the tangent. I would never, I would never make that episode. But it's so much fun to just get a chance to sit down with you and just talk about these things.

Because they really matter. And there are often things we don't think about. But it's hard to just like, you just got to see when they come up. My professor in undergrad had grown up on the east end of London. You know, this is a heavily like cockney accent. And then when he was 15, he moved to Kentucky. He had the weirdest accent I'd ever heard. because imagine those two blended together

and there would be times where he'd be talking about like Irish lore and we're like we don't know if you're saying law or lore because like it was such a thick in some context in history class both of those could make sense in the folklore

you're saying the legislation so that's what we're talking about the R but it's both the drops in places but also the inclusion like there where you say lore instead of law and there's an R showing up where it's not written yeah it reminds me how my wife makes fun of me um so she'll say like i'll say i'll try to say

with an american accent car keys okay but then the pants that you wear are called we well carkeys maybe does some people say car keys and car keys identically is the point yeah so the i should you left your car keys and your car keys kind of thing that's that's funny so then do you think just like how maybe in a hundred years this idea of race the way we talk about it is going to to be very different do you think it's already a loose concept i mean we'll think about this like my wife is like 2% black she doesn't look well i mean she has hair where you think that could be from the black side she's you know got thick curly dark hair she needs sunscreen as much as you need sunscreen i don't know she wears it and so in the 19th century my wife and my kids would be counted

as black under the one drop rule phenomenal lot or phenotypically they don't look I mean, you look at them and you assume they're white, but depending on what one means by these racial categories, increasingly we're going to have these questions where it's, what does that even mean? What is, you know, like I'm thinking about just the public square, people like Patrick Mahomes, where it's like, what does it mean to be black in America? What is it, like, what do any of these terms mean practically? Or even, you know, President Obama, he wasn't descended from slaves. He had a father who was from Africa and a mother who would. is white. And so is he black in the same way that someone who is a descendant of slaves is black? What do we mean by any of these terms? And what do we mean by African and African American? Is Elon Musk African American? You know, all of those kind of concepts have already become so muddled that we still use them in this vestigial sort of way? And obviously, like someone who is 500th generation Kenyan and has always lived, you know, like them and their ancestors has always lived in the western part of Africa is different in some important cultural ways and

everything else from someone who's grown up in Mongolia or grown up in Northern Europe. Fine. But other than those cases that are maybe more simple and uncomplicated, an increasing part of the world, we are pretty arbitrarily choosing a label to stick on that person's genetics or nationality or familial and ancestral experience that starts to feel. feel as arbitrary as I think it is. What is phenotypically? Oh, sorry, like the external appearances, like skin color. Pheno, what does that mean?

I don't know, Ph. P-H-E-N-O. Oh, it's P-H, okay. I've never heard that before. Oh, yeah, the phenotypes. You know, so, like, genetic expression, those are phenotypes. So do you think then that accents will soon become

as diluted as race may? Accents are rapidly becoming more diluted. My dad, if you heard my dad speak, he sounds, he makes me sound British. Yeah. Yeah. right. That was a sentence. He is, yeah, it's embarrassing how, well, I might also be because I live here. I also grew up in a very small country town. So what's been funny is even doing this podcast,

sometimes people will accuse me of using words that Aussies don't use, but I did growing up because I grew up in the sticks. Like, like what kind of works? Sheila. Oh, nice. Like bloke and Sheila. Yeah. Like I, Ozzy don't use those words? Well, my dad did. Like, you know, but, but I don't think people in cities did and it may even mean something negative now i don't know like sometimes i'll get a reaction people will say that you know or fella i'll say the fellas yeah sheila's blokes um but it's funny even my mom like i'll be on the phone with her and she will say you sound like a bloody yank because yank just means everyone from america and she'll correct me for saying a word that americans use that she doesn't think Australians use but it's actually a word that her generation

used. Yes. So she'll call, I'll say we went to the movies. Not that I do that anymore because every movie is horrible. But she'll say, the pitchers.

I'm like, no one, no one says the pictures anymore. Or like, we call flip-flops thongs. Yes. That's a fun conversation to confuse. I remember learning this the hard way when someone told me

he was going to go out wearing thongs. And I was like, I don't think you should. When do you wear him? When I'm feeling hot. I mean, the thing is, that's a, anyway, but I don't think

Australian say thongs anymore? Singlet is a term I heard from an Australian and was very confused by. Singlet, yeah. And you call them a wife beater. Which is way worse. Singlet is much better. Singlet, thongs. I love these kind of linguistic quirks. You know, so for instance, do you have a term

for when it's raining and the sun is shining? I don't think so. We didn't have one growing up in the Midwest, but across the south you can find a variety. Sun shower. We called a sun shower. Okay, there you go. I had never heard that term. Sun shower is the most sane term for it. There's other ones like the monkey's wedding. The devil is beating his wife. Oh, wow. Oh yeah. No, there's, like the number of terms for

what it's like when it's raining when the sun's out. And you're just like, what pineapple sun I've also heard. These are very strange kind of linguistic terms. I love that kind of stuff. And I do wonder how much of that stuff gets lost as we have a more standardized English become not just the Anglo-Sphere's norm, but across the world. You see it in the numbers, like British youth speak more like Americans than their parents do, and in such marked ways that it's pretty astonishing. Yeah, American culture certainly has, the American ideas, whether they're good or bad, MTV and all sorts of things,

certainly colonizing the world, colonizing the ideas of the world. I mean, I remember I grew up in Australia and my cousin used an American accent and her mom was really worried about her but it was because she was watching TV and all the TV or the majority of the TV was American. I'm as an American stunned by this. I saw this all across Europe.

You're that funny? I would talk to usually people who are like German or Austrian and then say, oh, sorry for my bad English. And then it was hilarious. I feel terrible about myself. I'm like, I'm so sorry that you're saying sorry to me. I'm the idiot who should be saying sorry. And then they speak flow.

I remember, I had a Bavarian friend, and the one word I remember him not knowing was seesaw. And he had to ask me what the word was. And I was so delighted I could give him an English word because other than that, his English was flawless. Like, used even obscure words accurately. And I was like, how do people know this? And repeatedly, when I would ask people this, they would say, oh, you know, we watched a lot of TV growing up. It's pretty alarming because you just think if it's shaping your vocabulary, the whole way you're able to speak how is it not also shaping your ideas and your view of reality yeah that's why i'm

excited about the amount of excellent catholic evangelization coming out of america because i know it is like i was just in uh transylvania in romania i didn't know that was a place i thought it was just out of the book um and depending on whose sides you're on it's either uh in romania or we won't get into that people go anyway but the point is switch because it's transylvania very good Okay, I can't even tell if you're joking now, so I don't even know if I should love. But I actually, now I'm wondering if Sylvan is wood, so it does seem to be across the woods. Is that what that means? I don't know.

But it's all I know of those two, like trans as a prefix and Sylvan as a... Point is... Sorry, go on. Point is this guy who couldn't speak more than three words of English, him and his friends were all doing Exodus 90, and it helped them a great deal. Wow. I thought, go America. Yeah. Here's another fun of story about that guy in Romania.

So we're in Transylvania, and I, I like smoking. I like cigars. I like Shisha or hooker, right? I like smoking. Anyway, so I'm with this guy and my wife was giving a talk somewhere. There was a couple of hours, so I wanted to go get some hooker. So I say, and you will see where this is going almost immediately, I'm going to go get a hooker and I will be right back.

And he laughs because he thinks I'm clearly joking. I'm probably not going to hire a prostitute. And then I kind of get defensive, like, what's wrong with tobacco? I didn't really get defensive, you know, but I was actually curious. You're like, I know it's a vice, but I think I need this too. I was like, no, I don't even think it's a vice. But I was like, what do you mean? Like, so I was like, well, why do you?

So I kind of got a little like, why, why are you laughing? And he went, you're not really going to get a hookah. Yeah, I'm going to get a Shisha hookah. Oh, so that was really funny that this fellow who invited my wife and I to come in an evangelized thought that just for a second that maybe I meant I was going to get a hook up. But the fact that he knew the language enough to even have that confusion. Yeah, well, that's right. I have a couple stories like that.

A friend of mine, his priest asked him what he'd done over the weekend. He said he'd been to a tapas bar. And he was saying tapas. Oh, tapas. Tapas. We have one like three doors down. Well, there you go. That's not what it sounded like he said to the priest.

And the priest gave kind of a startled, like, alarmed look, but didn't say anything. And he was too mortified to correct it. So the priest just went away thinking this kid had casually just been like, oh, I've been to a topless bar father. And then moved on, Spanish and Italian's the other one. Because they're very similar languages, but they've got some differences. So do you think there'll come a time where we all have the same accent? Like people in Peru and, I mean, Spanish is a great competitor to English at this point.

But I mean, in a thousand years from now, who knows where technology will be? Let me suggest a couple of things. Chinese is radically different linguistically and culturally and be a different alphabet and everything else. So it's way different from the romance languages. And the Chinese don't show any signs of wanting to give up Chinese as a language. And China's on the ascendancy. So it's hard to know. Yeah, so they tell us.

That's fair. You know, in the 80s, everyone thought Japan was about to take over the world, and that turned out to be something of a paper tiger. So the future of language is going to depend a lot on the future of geopolitics. Right now, so much trade and culture is coming from America or rooted in America. things are rooted, you know, tied to the dollar, they're pegged to the dollar, even when people do transactions that, certainly oil, this is what was called the petro dollar, OPEC sales are in dollars. So it could be Saudi Arabia selling to Russia and historically that's been in

dollars. It's a hard currency. And so it gave, um, it gave America a lot more force. And so the story of how American English and American culture comes to dominate the world is inseparable from this commercial financial kind of success. If that changes, I think the linguistics change. So I think we're growing more together. And so I think we will stop having these small regional differences in accents. Certainly within a language, linguistic subcultures seem like they're dying out at a rapid rate. Justice Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gola and off the islands of South Carolina.

It's a pigeon language, meaning it's a bling. of several different languages from the descendants of slaves speaking different West African languages. And it was genuinely a distinct language. It was not really English. I think goal is basically extinct. And I think we are in the future going to have those things gone. So I don't think we're going to all speak the same accent. But I think the amount of linguistic and cultural diversity is actually shrinking rather than growing. So with these tectonic shifts under our feet, Man, it's a scary time. I mean, I don't seem that scared.

You seem jolly. I always seem jolly. Alarmingly jolly about everything. I wonder if we are ripe for falling into the sin of cane where we look for a scapegoat, you know? Yeah. Like someone has to be responsible for things not going well with me right now. Yeah.

And with conspiracy theories. With that discussion that we just had, I wonder what that's going to look like, because, anyway. Well, as you have these forces that are drawing us together and making us more alike, the desire to have an outgroup doesn't go away. There is something deeply hardwired in us where we want to protect ourselves from the other. Quebec has the rest of Canada. Yeah, exactly.

Ireland has England. Right. A lot of places of England. Yeah. But. Whatever England means. Oh, that's a fair point. I think to criticize England is just an example of Islamophobia at this point.

It's bananas. I just saw a study that said if no more Muslims migrate, Europe will 100% be a Muslim-dominated country by such and such a year. Yeah, it's certainly birthright and everything else. I mean, one thing we could talk about is, okay, so I guess I'd say two things. Outgroup, certainly you're going to have that on a partisan level. So you've got people who are just biologically. hardwired differently. Some people are more tender-hearted. Some people are more tough-minded.

You know, if you see someone doing something bad, do you just say that person has done something criminal? They need to be punished for it. Or do you just say, oh, that poor soul, what led them to this? We need to just like help them feel better about their circumstances, so they're not likely to do that again. Those two types of people exist in every culture. There's different proportions and everything. But part of that is the human condition. We have these two impulses of compassion that can sometimes be too soft and a sense of justice that can sometimes be too rigid. So you're going to have differences among people based on their wiring and you're going to have political differences that in some way mirror those interpersonal differences.

So some of the out-group stuff we're going to be seeing, I think, will be an increasing partisan politics of everything. And I think we're seeing that already now, where the number of people who say they would be willing to marry someone of the opposing political party has been going to. down rather than up. So as much as we've become more tolerant of other cultures, religions, worldviews in so many ways, when it comes to the person of the opposing political party down the block, we've become less and less tolerant of that. So I don't think we're going to have some glorious kumbaya future where we all just get along. I think the who we hate is just going to

become shifted towards people who might look like us, people might be of the same nationality as us, might even, you know, same language, maybe even the same religion. but they're just different enough that we can find a reason to really hate them. Jews. Talk about the Jews. I want to know your opinion of Israel and Gaza. I think what frustrates people is on...

First, I get two frustrations. One is when people talk as if anti-Semitism is impossible. And the other is when you think Israel has committed evil deeds or might be now or is now that you have to be in any Semite. And I don't, I'm very confused because whenever I listen to people who are pro Israel or pro Palestine, I feel like I'm being lied to by both sides. And that isn't maybe an excuse to just sit on the fence and not make a decision. I'm not saying it is. But I'm seeing, I guess I don't know, I'm seeing two things happening. Like I'm seeing people becoming more vocal against Israel.

And maybe that's good. But then I also see some people and I wonder if it's blending into anti-Semitism or now am I responsible for doing the thing that I just said I don't like people doing? I'm sure you've thought about this. I've thought about this a lot. It's hard to know how to... We should acknowledge that it's raining on top of this roof. Oh yeah, it is. It is raining on the roof. Which will add perhaps the most fiery part of this discussion, a kind of nice, uh... Yeah, a very calm, soothing way of talking about a very contentious topic. Yeah. So a few things at the outset. When I was growing up, there were a lot of voices saying you need to support Israel because the Bible says Israel good and those who bless Israel will be blessed and those are cursed Israel

Israel will be cursed. Yes, Ted Cruz. Yeah, we should at the outset say this is terrible theology. Yes. And so I want to address that, which is the easy part, before I get into the hard part, if I may. Yes. The blessings of God are tied to covenants and those covenants don't apply to all of the descendants. They apply by faith. St. Paul talks about this at great length in his epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians. So you can read those for a much more thorough version of what I'm going to tell you here. But if it is by blood, if every ethnic descendant of Abraham inherits the covenant promises, well, that normally would pass first to the firstborn, who in this case would have been Ishmael, not Isaac. But as Paul points out in Galatians 4, it doesn't go by bloodline.

It doesn't go by flesh. It goes by faith. That's an important principle. Now apply that to the next generation. Isaac has two sons, Esau and Jacob. Esau is born first, but it gives way his birthright. So it passes not to Esau, the father of the Edomites, but to Jacob, who is renamed Israel. So, okay, already when you're taking this whoever blesses you will be blessed, whoever curses, you'll be cursed, that was originally said to Abraham and is passed along by faith. And it's true, it passes along to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament based on Jacob's faithfulness, based on the ongoing faithfulness of the people and prophets like Moses, et cetera. But it doesn't mean that because a group calls themselves Israel and because they're ethnically related to that people, that automatically the covenant promises extend to them. And we know this from the Old Testament itself, both because we've seen it passed on by faith, non-ethnicity, not by flesh, but also because when during the days of Jeroboom and Rehobam, the 12 tribes split.

You have the 10 northern tribes. You have the two southern tribes. The two southern, southern tribes collectively become known as the kingdom of Judah or Judea, which is where the word Jew comes from. That's where we believe the covenant promises extend. You know what the 10 northern tribes called themselves? The kingdom of Israel. They would go on to be called the Samaritans later on. But they called themselves Israel.

They're referred to as Israel in the pages of the Old Testament while making clear. They don't have Jerusalem. They don't have the true worship. They're doing false worship in Bethel. and this is not where God's covenant promises have continued because they have broken the faith, they have not gone where God wants them to go, they've gone into a spirit of rebellion.

So even though they are ethnically related to the Judeans and the South, God's covenant promises are not on them. If those points are in place, and then you get to the New Testament and say, here are some Jews who accept Jesus, here are some Jews who reject Jesus, where do the covenant promises go?

It's very clear what the answer to that is. and the fact that the other group continues to call themselves Israel, and in one sense is nationally, ethnically Israel, for covenant purposes, this is going to the church, which is why St. Paul can refer to the church as the Israel of God and why Revelation can speak of those who call themselves Jews and are not. Because there is this important spiritual sins.

Now, I'd say that at the outset, like don't do the dispensationalist Ted Cruz thing of saying, give arms to Israel. because there's a second level too like it's the best way to bless a country to give them weapons of war to encourage them to go to war with the palace like is that really what blessing looks like

biblically? I would say no but there's a bunch of other so let's get one says off the table now just imagine you have two parties at war Russia and Ukraine Israel, Palestine whatever it is where should our sympathies lie

and frequently as you said both sides are lying like when I hear a casualty count out of Ukraine and the Russians say one thing and the Ukrainians say another thing. They're wildly off. I don't believe either number because the first casualty in war is the truth. This is a general principle. This is true when the U.S. goes to war. This is true when every country on earth goes to war, that people lie and trying to support the war effort. They're trying to craft a certain narrative to get some

goal they want. They want to look like they're doing really badly so people will come and support them. They want to look like they have a chance so that people are more likely to back them. Whatever it is, they have an agenda for why they're telling you what they're telling you. So everything you're hearing out of Israel, Palestine, there is a layer of propaganda. Even if they're telling you true facts, they've chosen to tell you those facts because those are convenient to the narrative they want you to see and they're wanting to win your sympathy for their side of the equation. That makes it so hard to know, number one, what's true or number two, how we should respond. We can say at the outset that the intentional taking of civilian lives is gravely

immoral regardless of who does it. Always. Always. This is true of October 7th. This is why the A-bomb should be denounced by all Catholics, yeah. And so even if you broadly support people, and I think the atomic bomb is a great example. I supported, I mean, I wasn't alive for it, but I support the U.S. getting involved after Pearl Harbor in World War II. And I think it was a just war, and we don't have to get into all of that. But I still think a lot of the things that happened by the Allied side were inexcusable war crimes. The bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to take four examples, there are plenty other ones.

That doesn't mean there weren't horrible atrocities on the German side. That's the stuff of nightmares. But the fact that they're doing concentration camps doesn't mean you get to do war crimes. And so that same kind of principle we should apply in this conflict. We don't have to say Hamas good to be able to say some things Israel's doing to the Palestinians are not good. Like if they're targeting civilians and there seems to be enough evidence, even through the fog of war and all the disinformation, misinformation, and the rest.

There seems to be enough evidence that there are some immoral actions being taken and a pretty naked desire from some within Israel to just get rid of at least the Gazans, if not the Palestinians more broadly, to just completely get rid of Gaza, you know, turned into like a U.S. owned or someone else owned. Strip. And you understand, you know, they've had so many problems with people in this area, but you can't just forcibly displace a population with ethnic cleansing and have. have that be okay. So I think it's okay to have a full-throated denunciation of the evils that both

sides are doing without falling into a sort of what aboutism. Like I'm not saying they did this, therefore it's okay that you did that. I'm not saying all of the evils are equally bad. But I think it's good to just have a very clear, because I almost everyone I hear focuses on the evils of just one side and not the other in a way that I think undermines their credibility more than persuades me to their side. Because it's so naked. that there are things that are also happening on the other side of the equation that there are a lot of Palestinian children

being killed. There are Israeli hostages still being held that it's absolutely inexcusable to be holding human hostages like this. This is not a legitimate tactic in war and so people who can't say both of those things are bad are not doing good moral analysis of the situation. You said something earlier that I'd love you to go into here

this reminds me of like the should we own guns debate because people will complain about school shootings as sure they're horrific events but then they'll complain that well this won't end until we give up our

weapons or something like that and in other words they're not just bemoaning the evil that's taking place they're now making a suggestion that I think is immoral right to take to disarm a population. Do you agree with that? I think the question of disarming,

I'd want to do a little more nuance with it. I think you're right that to be completely disarmed, to be completely without the ability to defend yourself is proportionately to whatever the other side has. Right. Maybe, maybe not. Well, so, okay, I guess I'd say this came up a lot after the Charlie Kirk assassination.

There were people who were dancing on his grave, and their excuse was he said the Second Amendment was worth defending even though some innocent people would get killed. Right. And I think that is a perfectly legitimate stance. I'd give that in a couple ways. Number one, and I'm actually in favor of more gun control than I think he was,

but nevertheless think that the general principle, that there's some right to private gun ownership, is a perfectly defensible stance. Even with the full knowledge that we should grapple with, some innocent people will die as a result of this. You know, highways and everything else exist, and highways have speed limits that are often very high. If you lowered the speed limit of highways,

you would reduce the number of fatalities. This is an inescapable, we have mountains of data to suggest this. When we went from 55 to 75 on the highway, that increased the number of people who died in traffic fatalities. And, you know, this is basic physics. Somebody's in a car going 90 compared to going 30. You know what happens to their body in both situations. So we've decided that having highways and having highways with high speed limits or having cars at all is worth the cost of human lives that it comes at. It's not a small cost.

Like the number of people who die in traffic, fatalities, et cetera, is staggering. So we should just be honest about saying there are these tradeoffs. You can't create a world in which no one dies. You can't create a world in which people don't die as an unintended side effect of the thing you're trying to do. And the idea, I think we saw this a lot five years ago with COVID, like maybe if we just enact harsh enough policies, strict enough policies, we can get rid of these deaths from disease. it's delusional. It's not just utopian. It's completely divorced from reality.

So if your approach on gun control is we're going to create a situation where nobody has guns, I think the first thing to say is I don't believe that's real. I think that you're trying to achieve an unattainable goal and you're going to do a lot of damage

in the process. So this is what I'm getting to, right? This is the point I was clumsily trying to get to is that it may be the case that one country inflicts great harm on another country, but then the only way that country B can go to war on country A is immoral.

Ah. Right. In which case what, right? And it seems like some people would say, well, then you just got to do what you got to do. But I would think that the Catholic position is sometimes you just have to not have. Some of these loose. There's no solution now because you can't commit intrinsic evil. The good may come of it.

Right. You live in a world with a series of injustices inflicted upon you pretty regularly. And we don't often talk about it in that way, but the reality is there are all sorts of things that are unjust, either to you personally or just injustices you see in the world, and you have no legal and morally upright way of resolving them. For instance, there's an abortion clinic. You could use illegal and immoral, violent action to shut it down. You could go blow it up. You could go, you know, do any number of things that you could try to scare people into being afraid of doing abortions and use a kind of inns. justify the means mentality, but the church actually says, no, you can't do that. That's not a morally

acceptable. Well, you can't do that if you are targeting innocent people. True. Yes. That's, that's a fair point. We'll leave it there. But also, you're not a state actor. So this adds a whole other element that the state has certain authority you don't have as a private actor, which makes, like, vigilante justice. Right. Even when the cause is just, even when the thing is a capital crime, there's a limit on what you're able to inflict. That's interesting. Maybe we have to have this discussion off air because YouTube will absolutely ban us. Fair. I'll move on to a different topic.

One of the defenses I've heard for the atomic bombs, which were clearly immoral, clearly indefensible morally, is, well, if we didn't do this, we wouldn't have been able to win the war. It's like, if that was true, which I don't think it is, then we just wouldn't be able to win the war. That's right. And this is what so, this is what so upset me. Do you know that fellow Dennis Prager?

Yeah, I do. God bless him, and I pray for him because he's in a bad health situation right now. No, I didn't know that. But he recently, well, not recently, many years ago. had a priest on defending the dropping of the A-bomb and it was exactly that. It was consequentialism.

Yeah, this is, so anyone who's prone to consequentialism, I would recommend you read Elizabeth Anskolm's I say modern moral philosophy and she just points out that consequentialists can't say torture is always wrong. Can't say rape is always wrong if they could find an ins justify the means mentality for it

and someone who can't do that, whatever you call what they're doing, it's not moral philosophy anymore. they've given up morality for the sake of some other goal. So if we care about morality and if you're a Christian, you have to care about morality. I mean, St. Paul explicitly says in his epistle to the Romans, why not do evil so good will come about and then says that those who think that way are damned. Like their condemnation is just. So if you're thinking that way, if you're defending consequentialism as a way you're going to justify these moral evils, you're doing a damnable thing.

And we should just say that. In just war theory, one of the criteria we look for is the winnability of the conflict. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If you can't win in a moral way, then you can't win. And it's not longer a just war. And there's all sorts of situations that you might be in in your own life. We'll take a slightly less controversial issue.

You know, healthcare. Healthcare practices in the U.S. are arguably unjust. Exploitatively high profit margins and people are being denied life-saving care. And still, we can give a full throat to denunciate. of the Luigi Mangione's of the world. Like you can't use lethal unjust violence to murder people to try to bring about a more just solution in the world of health care.

That doesn't work. And so if the way you plan to get to your goal involves doing things that are morally unacceptable, find another strategy or give up your goal. Like those are the two choices. So in other words, if Mexico went to war with America and our only means of retaliation was for America to attack directly a civilian population,

then we would just have to not do that. Yeah, we'd have to find. So this is, what's something's called, moral creativity, which sounds bad, but it's the idea that you should try to find moral ways of achieving your goal. Yeah. And because if you can't,

if literally the only way you could resolve, take an easy example, if you could end all world violence tomorrow forever by killing one child on purpose. There's a sci-fi book based on this idea. I forget what it's called, but, yeah. I think there's like one child being tortured Yeah, either way.

You can't do it. And the minute you give into that temptation to say the good is so big and this is, it's true, it's evil, but it's a small, it's a localized, it's a personal evil. The minute you give into that, you know what happens? You never actually achieved that big result. Like all of the revolutionaries in the 20th century who thought we need to, you know, drown in the blood of our enemies and then we'll be able to create the bright utopia. They filled up the tubs of blood and they didn't create. the utopia. So just to be clear, are you making this case against Israel? Are you saying that's what Israel? Oh, no. I'm giving the broad, I'm not suggesting Israel is doing that.

Like, I'm thinking more of like the communist revolutionaries, the Nazis, these people who thought they could create a utopian world through massive violence. I'm glad you asked that. Arguably, you see some of that actually on the Hamas side of just saying, if we can just kill every Jew, then we'll be able to live in peace. You're not going to achieve that goal. You can create a whole lot of damage, you can kill a lot of people. You're not going to create peace that way. Like evil will not actually bring about the good that you wanted to. My point is just if we determine an action is immoral, it doesn't matter how big the goal is you're hoping to achieve national security, et cetera. The action is still immoral. It can't be done. And it is disheartening

to me to see the number of Christians who've given up that principle for either American national security or Israeli national security. Because here's the thing. Your particular view of Israel is not going to change the situation on the ground in Israel. Chances are. Maybe you're in the tiny, tiny group of people who are really influential. You can do something really concretely and make a difference. But your moral compromise where you start to justify evil for the sake of good, whichever side of the conflict you're on, what it can do is destroy your soul. And so we live in this age where we think we have to have a take on every situation in the world, no matter how ill-informed we are. And the desire to have a take and just take one side in a complicated

situation can encourage us ever more down the road of making these compromises with evil, where we start to overlook the problems on our side and start to think about morality in a worse and worse way. And that doesn't make the world better, but it does make us worse. Thank you. Switching gears here, you've written a lot on the papacy, and you've probably interacted with orthodox Christians, and I'm wondering how your opinion on orthodoxy and the strength of its claims, and I know that's a difficult question because it depends what you mean by orthodoxy, but how that's kind of evolved and whether you think that orthodoxy has a stronger case than you may have thought 10 years ago or why you're Catholic and not Eastern Orthodox.

That's a great question. I would say, growing up, there were a handful of Orthodox churches in Kansas City. I was something I was kind of dimly aware of on the margins. And there was a lot of just lack of knowledge. I remember going to a Greek cultural fest. This wasn't even that long ago. This was in adulthood. And the priest there was, he gave us a tour of the Orthodox Church.

And somebody asked him, what's the difference between orthodoxy and Catholicism? And he mentioned the Pope. But then he said, well, also, we Greeks have 73 books in our Bible and Catholics only have 66. I was just like, I think that's wrong. And at least one of you at least got the Catholic number wrong because we've got 73. I'm not sure if you've got 73 books in your Bible. It was such a baffling, but it showed like the state of Catholic Orthodox things were kind of a mutual barely aware of the other side that they knew Catholics existed. We knew Orthodox existed.

But as a result, I think for a lot of people. growing up in the West, orthodoxy wasn't a live option. So in that sense, the fact that the internet now exists, orthodoxy can be in your home on your screen. Even if you're living somewhere where there's not an Orthodox church for 200 miles, you are now exposed to the Orthodox claim in a way you weren't before. So in that sense, absolutely, orthodoxy is stronger now than it was before. Second, when your exposure to it is primarily either through the internet or in a country where it's the people who've continued to practice the religion, you're getting a certain view of the religion. And what I'd say is this. In places where Catholics are a minority in Eastern Europe,

their rates of mass attendance are often higher because the people who still call themselves Catholic are often more intentional about being Catholic. Or people who Catholicism was suppressed in that country, not universally. You can find exceptions to this. The places like Poland, like mass rates of attendance and the devoutness in every way you could measure that is higher than somewhere where Catholicism was, you know, like France or somewhere where Catholicism was taken for granted. So in the West, the Orthodox you meet are often converts or the immigrants who cared enough about their culture and their religion to continue to fight for it. Whereas in Russia or something, you know, mass attendance is between 5 and 10 percent or, you know, liturgy attendance

between 5 and 10 percent. You get a lot more nominal Orthodox. So I think we're seeing some pretty on fire Orthodox in the West. And so you've suddenly been exposed to this claim and you've got people who are really passionate about it, sometimes in an obnoxious way, often in a really winsome, inviting way. I think that the Orthodox case is very strong right now, particularly if you are someone raised Protestant and you come to realize that you're a little bit divorced from historic Christianity. Now, your mileage may vary in terms of what that looks like, but you grow up with, you know, say like the non-denominational stage and all of this stuff. And then you start to read the church fathers where you start to realize, okay, this is just not what Christianity

ever looked like. And not just incidentally. People really thought it was not supposed to look like this. We were not supposed to believe these things. We're not supposed to worship in this way. But maybe you've got these hangups about Catholicism because you've heard bad things about the church. You've maybe been taught them in church. You've certainly seen them in the news, et cetera. Orthodoxy feels like a very safe alternative to Catholicism where you get the cool tradition, all of that. Third, or fourth, I don't know where we are, there have been enough scandals where it looked like

the church is trying to compromise with the modern world. And you have popes and prelates saying things that look like compromises with the world, a world that is increasingly hostile to Christians. Look like or might be. Why not just say might be compromises? Well, because I think it's a little different case by case. I'm trying not to get into the weeds of like are all,

because in a way it doesn't matter. Yeah, whether they are on, they appear to be. Exactly. And so it looks bad, whereas orthodoxy looks like is taking this principle stand against the world. And there I want to really stress it looks like

because when you get in the weeds and say, oh, they've actually compromised on things like contraception. This stand against the world isn't as countercultural as it looks, but it looks very strong. I mean, you've got a whole realm of the internet that is basically saying, should be Orthodox so you don't have to believe Muslims worship the same gods as Christians do. Now, that I think misunderstands the force of Vatican, too, like the weight of the authority

behind the Declaration Muslims and Christians have the same God. But also, every major Orthodox prelate that I know of would say Muslims and Christians do worship the same God, but the popular Internet figures say no. So you have this kind of orthodoxy being presented that is maybe not what you would get in Greece, in Russia, in Turkey, wherever. but it's a particular kind of thing that really didn't exist, at least in my awareness, like when I was coming up in the world. Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God, Jo Hashemah?

I would say yes. And the reason I would say yes actually isn't because of Vatican 2. It's because of like Saul Kripke's theories of reference. So, Kripke gives the example, if you are at a Columbus Day celebration and you ask someone, oh, who is this Columbus you're celebrating? say, well, he was the first guy to realize the world was round, and he was the first European to make it to the new world. And you say, oh, okay. Well, it turns out neither of those two things are true. He was not the first to know the earth was round by a long shot. That's a myth going

back to Washington. And he wasn't even the first European to make it to the new world. The Vikings got there first, at least. Nevertheless, is that person referring to Christopher Columbus? They are. They're just getting every fact they told you wrong about him. So when a Muslim tells me they believe in the God of Abraham, and then they tell me a bunch of wrong facts about him, I think they're referring to the God of Abraham and are deeply, profoundly wrong about him. And the fact that the Muslim claims about God and the Christian claims about God can't both be true is true, but is no reason to say that's a different God. It's just a reason to say, yeah, they're profoundly wrong about God. Like, they're getting God

wrong in some really big ways, including about his nature. But so this theory of reference would just be to say, you can be wrong even about the nature. Because people will say, well, they can't be wrong about God's triune nature because that's who he is. So if they deny that, then they don't believe in the same God. I think that's a mistake. You could see something on the horizon and not know if it's a dog or a horse. And you're mistaken about its nature, but you're still referring to the same thing. The person who says, is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman?

They're confused about a question of nature, but they're still referring to the same object as the other person who comes to a different conclusion about that. So, referent is actually a fairly low bar, and what's more, the Bible seems to treat it this way. Like in Romans 1, when St. Paul talks about the pagans who are practicing immorality, he doesn't say they don't know God. He says they do know God, but have suppressed knowledge about God. Then he goes on in Romans 2 and 3, the talk, for instance, about Gentiles who do by nature what the law requires, showing the law of God is written on their hearts. So he's already suggesting even these pagans are in some relationship with God.

And they know him more than they would seem to know him. And I think that's where we should go as Christians. And to say, we're not saying Islam is just as good. We're not saying it's true. We're not saying any of that stuff. And because it gets so often mixed up with that, that becomes confusing. We don't have to say, oh, the God of the Bible and the God of the Quran. No, it's just there's God.

The Quran lies about God or gets him wrong. The Bible tells the truth about God. But there's not a different God of the Quran or the God of the Bible. Like if I talk to two people and one says, I love Madfrat, he's like this. And somebody says, I hate Madfrat, he's like that. One of them is wrong, hopefully the second one. And the fact that they're describing you in these opposite ways means they can't both be right. It doesn't mean they're talking about two different Matt Frats.

They're just making rival claims about the same referent in technical language. So to say that Muslims and Christians both believe in the same God makes sense to me, what about if you change the language and ask, do Muslims and Christians worship the same God. We want to distinguish further and say right worship and false worship because it is possible to give worship to God that is displeasing to God. So think about Aaron, the high priest of Israel, his sons, Nadab and Abahoo offer unholy fire before the Lord. And fire comes down from heaven and swallows them up. Were they worshiping God? They were. But they're doing it in a false man made sort of way. So I think a lot of the problem is where I think we're approaching

the question with two faulty assumptions. One is that we're looking at the character, as it were, of the two different sets of holy books. What is the depiction of God in the Bible? What is the depiction of God in the Quran? And do they match? They don't match. The better way is to say, behind the Bible, there is a true living God. The Quran tries to speak about that same God, but says false things about him.

Or maybe tries to lie about it. It depends on how maliciously you want to assume the Quran is. But either way, it's making false claims about the God. So that's the first one. It's a level of almost like a literary character rather than a real tripersonal B. The second, oh, I completely forgot. Sorry, tell me the question you just asked again.

Do they worship the same? Oh, yeah. The second is to assume that if they worship the same God, that means they're basically okay. And I think this is a problem that's crept in because we want to say, well, Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants all worship God. And people hear that, okay, therefore we don't need to evangelize them.

We don't need to convert them. They're worshiping God. Therefore, we're good. But the question of are you worshipping the same God is actually still too low of a bar. It should be, are you giving right worship to God? Are you in a right relationship with God? Not just are you in any kind of relationship with God? Because St. Paul, in Acts 17, when he's at Mars Hill, seems to say the people making offerings to an unknown God are giving some kind of worship to a God they don't know and that it's the true God, but that this is still ignorant and incomplete worship and needs to be corrected. He doesn't just say, you're good to go.

then, he views him as people who need the gospel. So I would say, yes, they offer some kind of worship to God. I don't think that worship is pleasing when they do false things for God or when they do evil things for God. You can get into the case by case. If someone trying to do a good thing for God, he's merciful. But the question of worshiping the same God is actually still too low of a bar. It should be, is it right worship? And we can clearly say no to that. What does it worship me. Worship is to give honor to God and to give him what he is worth. You know, the worthy ship is the origin in English. And in the ancient world is always tied to acts of sacrifice. This is kind of, so worship and sacrifice are not entirely interchangeable, but as Everett

Ferguson says, well, sacrifices the heart of worship in antiquity. So, for instance, in the Bible, Jesus goes to the synagogue, Luke 4, every Sunday, or every Saturday. And he goes there and he reads the Bible and he preaches on it, does those kind of things. But that's not prayer and that's not worship. Do you know how often the synagogue and prayer are connected in the New Testament? No. One time. And that one time is in Matthew 6th when Jesus says not to pray in the synagogue.

Now, he doesn't say don't go to the synagogue. But he makes a clear distinction between the synagogue. which is a place of teaching and prayer, which is talking to God. So rather than talking about God, you've also got talking to God. Like, we're talking about God right now. This is not prayer.

This is talking about God. The synagogue is that. Prayer, which can happen anywhere, should happen everywhere, is talking to God. But there's a third thing called worship. So in John 4, verse 20, the Samaritan woman,

she's on Mount Gerasim, which is the Holy Mountain of Samaria, and she asked you, Jesus. She says, our fathers tell us this is a place to worship. You say worship is to be done in Jerusalem, meaning in the temple. So what is happening on Mount Girazim and happening in the temple in Jerusalem that wasn't just happening in the synagogue or in the lonely place? And that thing is sacrifice. So one of the things that's made this so hard is a lot of the stuff we call worship, maybe isn't really worship. Like if you don't have the sacrifice of the mass, if you're not

offering things up, if you're not making sacrificial offering. to God, you're missing a lot of what we mean by worship. Now, anything you do in reference to God being God, there's a sense in which you're recognizing his worth in that sense. And those can be little acts of worship. But if you just go and listen to a preacher talk about God for 40 minutes, that's not prayer and that's not worship. That may be good, but it's not prayer or worship. So when Muslims try to acknowledge God as God and they have a strong sense of the sovereignty of God and they're right to have a strong sense of the sovereignty of God, even if they're missing a lot of other things like his fathership, fatherhood. That's good. And they're giving God his worth

in one way. But when they say other things like Allah is the best of all deceivers, that is false worship. They're trying to give God what he's owed, but they're actually giving it something evil. This distinction between true and false worship goes all the way back to Genesis. Genesis 4, Cane and Abel. They both are offering worship to God, but one is offering true worship. He's offering the firstborn and the other is offering false worship because he's offering the grain from the ground and not the first fruits of the crop. He's giving God his leftovers. Are they both making acts directed towards God? They are. Does that mean they're both valid? It does not. We were talking about orthodoxy earlier and you said that, you know, there's a stronger

case to be made for it today than there was in the past. One of those reasons being that it really wasn't on people's radar in the past, but you didn't answer the question maybe why you're not Orthodox. Yeah. Because I'm sure the reason you give today is probably different to the reason you may have given 20 years ago. Yeah. And so it's a few things. And I know I've said some Orthodox when I said this, but when you talk about Orthodox, you should ask the question, well, why are you Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox or not the other? Because if you don't live in Russia or Ukraine, in Russia and Ukraine, you know, you have more than two thirds of the Orthodox population, Eastern Orthodox population in the world, take those two countries out of the equation. And there's a

pretty similar number of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox in the rest of the world. So if you're not living in one of those two places, then why should you be either Eastern or Oriental Orthodox? What kind of principled reason do you have? And I think if people say it's because of their conclusions on the meaphysite, monophysite, diphizite controversy, I'm already worried about that for this reason. The modern world has this approach where you have to figure out all of the complicated theological issues and then find a church that matches the conclusions you've arrived at. And I see that people do this all the time. They're going to say, okay, I've got these 20 issues. I need to figure out if I should become Catholic. Okay.

And so if we agree with you on 18 of those issues, you're going to become Catholic then, and what if, you know, or people do this, certainly you see this all the time within Protestantism. They're Baptist on this. They're Methodist on that. They're Presbyterian on this. And so they find a church that they either most agrees with them or they just feel most at home at. This is no way to approach a denomination or a church because it inverts the role of shepherd and sheep. Like you are to be led and spiritually nourished by the authentic pastors of the church. And so if your allegiance to the church is just based on your own self-shepherding, you're still your own shepherd. Now, don't get me wrong. If you arrive at a place,

where you say, I cannot in good conscience believe this is the church created by Christ, I get that. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the fidelity based on the church agreeing with your own self-conclusions. That's not the model we see anywhere in the Bible. Nobody does that. The question is really simple. Is this the church established by Jesus Christ? And if it is, you should be part of it. And if it's not, you shouldn't. The theological stuff can help you figure out the answer to that question. But if you have to do that much theological, to figure it out, something has gone wrong. Because you don't see people doing that.

When people are invited into the church in the New Testament, they're not saying, well, what's your position on meophysitism? I've never seen, show me the chapter and verse where somebody does anything like that. It's a much simpler thing. There's a clear, visible, structured church, and Peter has a special role in that church as its chief spokesman.

And people can find it very easily. and they say yes to it and they join it. Or they say no to it and they don't join it. I mean, isn't an unfair comparison? I mean, because 2,000 years have passed and there's a lot of divisions within the body of Christ. There are many churches claiming to be the church that Christ established.

In the New Testament, you have one option. Yeah. And so the New Testament, your option is accept the church Christ established or don't. Here you've got a thousand contenders. And I could imagine somebody saying, look, based on my reading of the church fathers, in particular saints who I've come to trust,

this is why I'm so looking for a church that teaches this thing that this church father taught. So in that sense, it's, I could understand it. Yeah, I completely get it. I think that's the Orthodox case, either Eastern or Oriental, is the strongest challenger to Catholicism. I mean, it just is,

because they're getting the most stuff right. So they can say, we agree with you, there is a visible church, we can agree with you, and all of this stuff. But it can't just be, the, my understanding of this teaching is X and so I need to find a church that teaches X. And here's the example I would give is one of the early challenges you have to the visible church,

which is the Judaizer heresy in Acts 15. So some people come down without authorization and are saying you have to be circumcised and follow the mosaic law if you want to be saved. Now, could they point to elements of the tradition that seem to say that? They sure could. The Old Testament has plenty of passages that would seem to point in that direction. But then they went out without authority, declaring that that was the right position.

They could have just as easily said, we're going to found a church that, you know, has that as a position. And it'd be very problematic if, you know, one of the apostles just said, you guys are right, let's break away from the church, you know. But on the flip side, if somebody was reading the New Testament

and came to believe that Christ established Peter as the visible head of his church and read history such that they came to believe that that visible authority was handed down and then looked for a, a church and found that to be the Catholicist, you probably wouldn't criticize that. Quite the contrary. You're right. So how is that different? Because in one, you're just saying, where is the church? And the other, you're deciding whether you agree with the teachings or not.

Because in the case of someone saying, okay, well, Peter's ahead of the church, whether I like it or not. And look, there's a certain element where you have to do some discernment. Like, anyone deciding to become Christian at all has to do some theological reading. So when I criticize like self-shepherding, I don't want to, don't understand that in the absolute sense of you're not allowed to learn anything. Clearly, clearly not the case. And you should absolutely be doing supplemental theological reading and not just blindly just saying, well, whatever my pastor tells me. You should, I'm not saying any of that. But I think we should watch out for the fact that we've gone so far to the opposite extreme,

that there's no authority, no deference given to the visible church, that that's a real problem. So if we want to know what the visible church is, we shouldn't just look with what we think it teaches or ought to teach, we should look to what it looked like, what it looked like in terms of its DNA, as it were. And so, number one, it's visible. Catholics and Orthodox are going to agree on that. And Protestants who don't, I would just challenge you to read what the New Testament says about the visibility of the church.

I'll leave that aside since that's not really the focus. And two, it has this petrine dimension. And Orthodox will actually affirm that, that Peter is in some sense, at least Prima interparis, like first among equals. He has some kind of authority. and you start to delve into what that looks like. And you'll find early Eastern sources that talk about a primacy of honor.

But the twist here is honor in the ancient world didn't mean we're imagining of like a ceremonial pomp. It meant like your honor. It meant like an office. And so like the honorable so-and-so isn't just saying like really good guy. We're talking about them having some role in office.

So a primacy of honor is a primacy of office. So if there's a primacy of office that is tied to Peter and it's not just because of the Roman Empire it's because of Peter then we should expect that that's part of the DNA of the church as it were and if I want to find that

I know where to look and there's a few things I'd use to supplement this number one, John 21 now this could be a much deeper conversation but John 1 through 20 you hear about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and then John closes by saying these things have been written

so that you can believe. He hasn't told you everything. There's not enough books in the world to include all the things Jesus did, but this has been written for you to believe. And you expected to say, like, the end, but then there's an epilogue, still written by John, but clearly written in the style of epilogue, where it's, and then there was another appearance of Jesus. And you say, what is this about? And the way a lot of people, this is when you have Jesus appearing to the disciples telling them to, it's actually the third miraculous sketch of fish. You have the first one in the gospel of Luke where you have the four disciples and he calls Peter and says he'll be a fisher of men.

You have the second one in Matthew 17 where this is when people always forget about or Jesus sends Peter to catch one fish to pay for the temple tax just of Jesus and Peter. Fascinating, rich. This third one, they're on the sea and it's Peter with six others. So it's seven, which is the number of perfection.

It's the eschatological number. And Peter says, I'm going to go fishing. The six say, we will go with you. And I think to understand it's going on there, the first thing to know is about these other two miraculous catches of fish, that there's something connected to Peter about this. He's a fisherman, of course. So you've got two fishing miracles that Peter's very central with and explicitly is tied with evangelization to be a fisher of men. And then in Matthew 13, 47 to 50, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a net containing good and bad fish. So the net is the church and fishing is evangelization. Peter says, I will go fishing. The other leaders, the other apostles say, we will go with you. Not we're going to go do our own thing. We're going to start our own boat and form our own denomination. They're going to go with. And while there, they catch nothing because they're doing it on their own. But Jesus appears on the shore, tells them to cast the nets on the other side of the boat. And at his word, they catch so many fish that they can't haul them all in.

That's going to be an important detail that all seven of them together can't bring the fish in. Just like they couldn't catch the fish on their own, they can't bring their fish to the eternal shores with Christ on their own. But Peter, seeing as Jesus, swims towards Jesus, and then the apostles kind of haul the boat closer to shore. Jesus says, go and get some of the fish that you've caught. Even though he already has fish, he's already been cooking fish, he does not need the church's fish. He can bring fish any way he wants to. He sends Peter, and Peter single-handedly does what all seven of them together couldn't do, which is to bring the nets ashore. and it says he does them without the nets tearing.

Schismo is a word, which is where schism comes from. No, no, the bit about Peter bringing the nets are sure. I haven't thought of that. Yeah, it's, I really enjoy reading Protestant commentaries on this when they don't have this understanding of what's going on because they just think like Peter was really yoked. He's so strong, he's stronger than the other six combined. But it's like, no, he couldn't bring it in by himself.

But at Jesus's command, he can. And so Augustine's read of the passage and tractates on John, is that this is a story about the church going through history. The reason John gave us this epilogue is to say, Jesus lived, died, rose again, ascended into heaven, what happens next? And it's the story of the church from here until our eternal union with Christ in the wedding,

face of Lamb, that that's what's going on. And so if that's what's going on, Peter has this important role in bringing the church without schism to the eternal source, bringing the church to Christ. So this petrine dimension isn't some Roman artifact. It's not some political compromise. It's not some incidental detail

because Peter happened to be so charismatic. No, Peter is put in that role by God and is given these special set of instructions nobody else is. If that's true, if Peter is to be the servant of the servants of God, that's part of the DNA of the church. And so we should look to find the one church

where we still clearly see that and that doesn't leave any other contenders, including the Orthodox. The Orthodox gets so many things right. They don't get that right. They don't, we don't see a Peter type figure at the helm of Eastern Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy or anything else. And so that's the kind of positive case for Catholicism against all possible contenders. Did you, gear shift, did you watch that debate on my channel between Trent and that Mormon fella?

Jacob Hanson? Yeah. I've seen some of it. I'm actually going to be having a debate with Jacob Hanson. Oh. on great apostasy. I need to watch the whole thing because Jacob Hanson is pretty formidable.

Well, I was going to ask you about Mormonism, but maybe you don't want to... Oh, you can ask away. Why is Mormonism false? So Mormonism is built on the premise that the church fell into a great apostasy. Now, it's worth defining some terms here. Apostasy is a biblical context,

but concept, but the word means falling away. So someone falling away from the kind of Catholic faith is an apostate in one sense, particularly if you fall all the way into unbelief. That's, you know, apostasis falling away. The Mormon reinvention of apostasy, and you'll find this within some realms of Protestantism as well, is not people falling away from the church, but the church itself falling away from Christ. That is a completely unbiblical concept, because biblically, the church is the body of Christ. And Christ doesn't just lose his body.

You may fall off the body. You may be like a cell or a limb that is cancerous or has to be removed because of, you know, your behavior, your infidelity, your sinfulness, whatever else. But the body itself doesn't just fall away. Christ doesn't decapitate. So the idea of a falling away of the church is patently unbiblical. The gates of hell won't overcome. And yet, this means a couple things.

Positively, it means at any point in history, we can find the visible church that is seen. still the church, still the body of Christ, still the household of God, as 1 Timothy 315 says, it's still the people of God organized as the flock around the shepherd. In John 10, Jesus says he comes to gather his sheep together. So there can be one flock with one shepherd. So this is a dimension of Christianity that often doesn't get preached. And there's some common ground here where I think Mormons or, you know, Church Jesus Christ for Latter-day Saints get the importance of the visible church, even if they get, the details of that visible church wrong, that Christ, when he comes and preaches, the first words

in the gospel of Mark are repent and believe for the kingdom of God is at hand. So this individual idea of salvation of just me and Jesus, we got it our own thing going on. That's Tom T. Hall. That's not biblical. And Cardinal Dolan warned that we want a shepherd without the flock. We want a king without the kingdom. We want the head without the body. And we have to watch out for that. So so far, we can at least approach this from the same frame. Jesus comes and he builds a church and he gives authority to that church. He creates a priest and he does all this stuff. The LDS claim is that all falls apart immediately.

And so basically upon the death of the other disciples or of all the disciples that there's nobody keeping the church going. And so it falls into apostasy, the priesthood and the keys are taken away. and you have this global, total apostasy. And the reformers can't restart the church because they're not divine, they're not prophets, they don't have any kind of spiritual authority to do so. And so it waits until the 19th century

when Joseph Smith is commissioned by God to rebuild his church. And he establishes a church that will never fall away. And there's several things wrong with this. One, Christ promises he's with us always till the close of the age. He promises to send the spirit of truth to lead us into the fullness of truth.

He makes all these promises that sound like the church isn't going anywhere. In 2 Timothy 2, 1 to 2, St. Paul reminds St. Timothy to take the things he's been taught and entrusts him to other faithful guides. So you already have there three or four generations. You've got Paul leading to the next generation with Timothy. Timothy is instructing this to other people who can pass it on. So you have at least those three in the third generation is teaching.

I mean, they've called not just to learn, but to become faithful teachers. So the biblical presentation shows that the church is doing pretty well. Like when you read Acts, when you read any of the New Testament, there are problems, to be sure. We're warned about, you know, wolves coming in to try to, you know, attack the flock, not saying it's, there's no problems. But the church is clearly on the ascendancy. The church is clearly on the rise throughout the New Testament. Then you, we have the writings of the immediate, like, audience of the apostles, people who knew the apostles personally. Polycarp and Ignatius. Ignatius writes to Onesimus in his letter to the Ephesians.

Onisimus was almost certainly the freed slave, it's mentioned in the letter to Philemon. So we don't just have to wonder, what happened to all those people who learned about Christianity from the apostles? We have these writings from the early 100s that speak to that, but they speak in such an unimaginably Catholic sort of way that the LDS claim has to be, well, those people actually didn't understand the gospel. And this is frankly, the claim many, Protestants would make as well, that, oh, these people who the Bible shows getting it didn't actually get it. And I don't think that claim works within the interior model of the Bible. I think it also contradicts the whole notion of God's self-revelation. So revelation and apocalypse, they mean the same

thing. It means the unveiling. And what's unveiled is not just like a vision of the future or something. What's unveiled is God himself. We can't know who God is from reason alone. God reveals himself. The epistle to the Hebrews opens by talking about this. He revealed himself in many in various ways by the prophets of old. Now he reveals himself fully by the sun. And so everything was leading up to this. Christ, not Joseph Smith, is the center of the whole self-revelation of God. If that self-revelation of God immediately went away and was corrupted and everything else, that undermines the whole narrative. Like God went to all this work and it worked for like 30 years and then it stopped working.

Like that, it doesn't, it doesn't even make internal sense that God would spend thousands of years preparing for this moment. And then that moment would just fizzle out. Because if God is God and if he's leading the church by divine power, which everything we have in the New Testament points to, then it's incompatible with the idea of a total apostasy. Sure, people can follow away. They can reject God, but he always has a remnant.

He always has a people. This is repeatedly taught throughout scripture. and the trajectory of the church is on, according to Jesus in Matthew 13, is of a mustard seed that grows into a mustard plant. And it's the largest garden plants. This is going to become the biggest thing around. So all of that points to the fact,

Christianity's not going anywhere. And so if you believe, whether you're Protestant or Mormon or whatever, and you believe Christ set up this church and then it just withered and died. It didn't even make it out of seed form. It just died away. And then it had to be replanted by somebody else later on,

that's just fundamentally incompatible with the message of the New Testament. Using Lewis's Trilemma, how would you apply this to Joseph Smith, since is he a prophet, liar, or a lunatic? So here's what we know about Joseph Smith. He had prior to the alleged Golden Tablets events, plenty of messing around with things like, like playing around to things that were, if not a cult, at least kind of on the border of it. and trying to use, what are they called, sears, stones.

Yeah, well, trying to find water. Oh, with the, yeah. Yeah, I'm blanking on the term for it. I don't know either. Okay, well, anyway, he was messing around with a lot of this stuff. That was either a scam or meddling with, like, unholy dimensions. Prior to the stuff we're talking about here, he also was deeply influenced by Freemasonry and had done a lot of reading of, like,

these old Western stories and everything, we now can show with a fair amount of certainty that a lot of the elements of Book of Mormon seem to be plagiarized from other sources he had read. And so it just seems like he's copying stuff and inventing his own religion. I'm not sure Joseph Smith believed in God. I'm not sure he wasn't an atheist. I know this a controversial opinion. I know that will be hurtful for people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ for Latter-day Saints. I'm just suggesting this. Take Doctrines and Covenants 132.

Joseph Smith is publicly preaching that monogamy is a Christian message, and he is secretly sleeping with other women. And he's cheating on his wife. And when his wife catches him, he claims that there's a divine revelation from God that he's been given permission to have multiple marriages. It's interesting the similarities between Muhammad.

Yeah, he was called the American Muhammad. Who boy? Oh, 19th century critics. Actually, American Muhammad, because that was the old school way of saying Muhammad. But yeah, the, and I would encourage Muslim and Mormon listeners to consider their own religion in light of the critiques they would have of the other. Because you look at these and you've got all these cases where these guys hear about Christianity, they're not sold on the Christian message, but they find elements of it intriguing. This is very clear from Joseph Smith's own kind of testimony. he wants to know which church is the true church.

And he claims later on, he was told by God that the true church on earth doesn't exist so not to join any denomination. Clearly, it's fascinated by the Christian story. Muhammad clearly is very interested in the Christian story. And then they start preaching a version of it very persuasively to people that happens to get them enriched in a lot of ways.

So they start to become very powerful. They both have their own private armies, the Navu army and then obviously the army of the Caliphate. And then they start getting special permissions, allegedly from God that they get to have as many women as they want, that nobody else gets to. So, like, Doctors and Covenist 132 gets special permission for Joseph to have multiple wives beyond what other, like other Mormons, there's a cap, not so for Joseph. Similar with William Muhammad, you know, also I think both of them are given the authority to break treaties and things.

I mean, it's fascinating. And both of them kind of spread the religion in these ways that create some questions about, well, how faithful are you to truth as opposed to just for relying on force. So like Joseph Smith is regarded by some Mormons as a martyr, but he dies in an attempted jailbreak with a gun that was smuggled into prison. Like if you're going to call that martyrdom, we're going to have to call a lot of felons martyrs. Like granted, there were people who wanted to commit murderous violence against him. I don't deny that. It's maybe worth asking why they wanted to do that, not to victim blame, but to understand like he was seducing women in the community and teaching false, you know, all this stuff that that got people very concerned and

upset and had formed a private army and had used that army to shut down the Navu Expositor, like the local newspaper when it wanted to publish that he was sleeping with women in the community. You hear about this stuff and you just think, okay, this sounds much more like David Koresh in Waco, Texas, where he's, you know, an Adventist preacher who starts claiming he's the Messiah and starts sleeping with underage women and all this stuff. Muhammad, Joseph Smith, David Koresh, have that in common as well. They weren't just sleeping with a bunch of women. They started going for younger and younger girls.

That sort of thing, it should be very clear to anyone, is not of God. Like if someone did that today, I don't doubt that most Muslims and Mormons would be able to say, hey, that person is behaving in an immoral way. They're misusing the authority they've been given to advance their own passions rather than the kingdom of God. And yet we're supposed to just hold a different standard when it comes to the founders. So, again, maybe that comes off as unduly harsh, but I think it's important to just tell the truth about this seems to be motivated by man's proclivity to sin more than some special divine revelation. And in the particular case of Joseph Smith, this is happening at a time when there's an outpouring of new religious movements on the frontiers in the U.S. So you get things like Seventh-A Adventism.

You get things like the Jehovah's Witnesses, all coming from the same time and place. You get the Millerites who were convinced the world was going to end in 1844. It did not. All these stuff is going to happen at the same time. People are very excited by and interested in some new take on Christianity or some variation of it. And because they're being stirred up into a revival by these revival tent preachers and everything, but then there's no institutional church on the ground to kind of lead them in an orthodox way. so they become prone to every shifting wind of doctrine.

That's exactly the thing we've been warned about in the New Testament. And it's the reason why we hold to tradition, so we don't fall into something like that. Is there a single book or perhaps video that you might point people to who are trying to better understand how to respond to Mormon claims? That's a great question. I've actually done a series over on Shameless Popery. I know it feels weird to promote my own stuff.

No, it's good. I didn't realize it. How would they find that? If you look up Shamis Popery and this, Mormonism. I start off by saying I think a lot of the critiques of Mormonism are actually fairly unfair. That a lot of times it'll be this sort of exaggerated critique that is not taking the strongest, like it's not steelmanning the Mormon claim. And it's often just kind of laughing at how silly their teaching seems to the outside. And that might be persuasive to someone

who's not Mormon and not tempted by it. But it's not helpful if someone grew up. You know, you could do the same thing to the Bible and say, oh, look, here's Baylam with this talking don't. What, idiots? Or you do whatever. I've brought up this before, but the same thing with practices. You know, people will make fun of the Mormon's magical underwear. Right. Which, you know, okay, how exactly different is that to this tea bag looking thing around my neck?

So we have to be really careful. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think when you have that, when you have Christians, Protestants, Catholics, whatever, making unfair and even uncharitable attacks, and then Mormons are just famously nice and friendly. and friendly, you're losing that debate. And you're losing it for reasons that are your own fault. First Peter 3, 15 to 16 says, always be prepared to give a defense, but it doesn't stop there. So it's for the hope that lies within you. So already it's personal and hope-centered.

And to do it with gentleness and reverence, I don't think a lot of our Mormon apologetics have been rooted in gentleness and reverence. I think they've been often rooted in kind of a dismissive mockery that is hurtful and unhelpful and unproductive. Well, okay. I agree with you completely, but I'm also thinking, you know, circling back to our earlier discussion about the fact that we don't have time. And it might even be immoral to chase down things. Yeah. You know, to, like, it might be immoral to get to the bottom of the 9-11 conspiracy theory if in doing so, I abandoned my wife and obligations, right? And the same thing is true. Like, we're not all

meant to become experts on every weird religion. And Mormonism is a weird religion. It's true. And so I think I may be okay with dismissive mockery. But except, here, I want you to critique. I don't want you to agree with me because it's my show. I'm okay with dismissive mockery in certain instances, not to mock people, but to dismiss and mock ideas that are clearly false. But I think it's incumbent upon you if you are to engage in good faith with a person of that religion,

that you then study it with seriousness. I think that's a great distinction. And I actually, okay, I'm not going to agree with you, but you make it hard because you're making a reasonable point. Yeah, I'm not trying to be inflammatory. I just think that that's reasonable. Like if someone comes up and says that this tree is God or something, and I'm with my kids, I could just, okay, that guy's insane.

Okay, so I think we need to make an important distinction right there. All right. When you hear a bizarre teaching, it's fine to just say to people who are not prone to that teaching, like, that's a crazy idea. And you can kind of leave it there. And you don't have to say, well, should we take seriously that idea might be true? Should we read his literature? Yeah.

Yeah. You don't have to do that at all. But if you're talking to someone who believes that idea, starting with like, hey, this thing you believe is really dumb is probably not a charitable or helpful way to begin. Pragmatically, it's a bad idea. And every time someone has done that to you, has it ever changed my mind. No, exactly. So we know this is a great way to feel good about myself when I'm attacking someone else.

But it's not a great way to help them. No. You know, past. You're saying exactly what I just said. what I meant to say. Oh, okay. That's identical. Because it's,

it's one thing to dismiss, even with mockery, an idea that I'm hearing. Yeah. But if I'm going to engage with the individual, I owe it to them to engage with them,

like showing that I've tried to understand their world, you know. Okay, we actually might agree unfortunately. So let me add a few couple, a couple things. Blais Fascale says,

when we wish to correct another with advantage, we must first see from what side he views the matter. From that side, it is usually right and we must affirm the thing that he's getting right and then show him the thing that he's missing. Oh, Pascal. And it's brilliant advice. And I'd recommend this in every marriage, every evangelical conversation, whatever it is, when you disagree with someone politically,

religiously, interpersonally, whatever it is, try to see their perspective. Yes. Affirm the thing they're getting right, which is so hard to do. Yes. And then you can talk about where they've gone off and seen an incomplete picture. When my wife and I sometimes get into arguments, I'll say to her, you tell me what you think I'm saying, and I'll tell you what I think you're saying, yeah. Yeah.

And so you can just say, like, it sounds like you're saying X. It sounds like you're worried about why. Is that right? And it slows things down, and it wins a little more common ground. And you start to realize, my enemy is not the other person.

No. You know, as St. Paul says in Ephesion 6, our enemy is not flesh and blood, but powers and principalities. Like, it's the spiritual forces of darkness. Primarily, I agree with you. Secondarily, I don't. I mean, we clearly have enemies.

We do in one sense. Yeah. And, you know, we're to love our enemies, which clearly should we have enemies in one sense. But St. Paul can also talk about a sense in which our real enemy is, and so flesh and blood. Peter Lombard in his commentary in Ephesion 6

says that the humans are like horses that the demons ride, and we want to dismount the riders so we can claim the horses. That's excellent, right? Like, then it's like, oh, okay, this person with whom I vociferously disagree, this person who has evil ideas for the world is in the sway of, whether they know it or not, forces that are against their happiness, against our Lord, against the good of all humanity, the enemy

of human nature. And so I want to help win them, not just crush them. that changes the whole way to look at evangelization, certainly the way to look at marriage. Any kind of political conversation changes if you realize like, okay, this person might actually be well-intentioned. They're just wildly wrong

and may be influenced by some cases, genuinely by dark forces. You look at something like pro-choice stuff. I have no doubt there's a diabolical authorship to a lot of this stuff. I also have no doubt that many of the people in the sway of this think that they're doing good things. And if we can't acknowledge both,

of those things were not equipped for that spiritual battle. So this should change the whole way I think we approach evangelization as a whole and persuasion as a whole. I know we've gone pretty far afield from Mormonism here, but if I may give an example, I was on a college campus and I spoke to a young woman who said she'd grown up Catholic and still went to church when she was with her family. But when she was at school, she didn't go. And I asked why. And she pointed into abortion and she said, I'm not okay with abortion across the board. but I think it should be legal in cases of rape and incest and life of the mother. Now, the temptation is to immediately jump into why she's wrong in the hard cases.

But the thing I did, and I think I was led by God in that moment and what could have gone sideways very quickly, was to ask her and said, well, why are you not okay with abortion in all these other cases? Yes. And what it does is a fewfold. One, it creates some common ground. It turns out we're actually on the same page, 97% of the time. Two, it makes her articulate the pro-life position. And as Pascal also says, people are much more persuaded by reasons which come into their own mind than which come into the mind of others.

This is the Ponce, nine and ten. I mean, this is just like basic argumentation. If she has to explain why abortion is immoral and should be illegal in 97% of cases, you can then say, okay, you don't need me to give you my beliefs. We can just look at your beliefs and realize that this also applies in the other. three percent of cases. So now it's not just, here's my view of what the abortion remedy should be, it's just letting the person give the tools to let them realize what their own view ought to be if they're going to be consistent. So that kind of thing, I think is a better way to go about it, bringing that back to the Mormon conversation. It's easy to take a sort of dismissive attitude,

but if we're going to be effective at evangelization, we should find those areas of common ground and then show, yes, the visible church is real. It is important. It is created by Christ. And that's why we don't think he got rid of it eight years later. Like he continued to preserve his church. All of the, Mormons believe now that their church is indefectible. It'll never go away.

But all of the reasons in favor of believing that about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are just as good of reasons about believing that about the original church formed, not simply by Joseph Smith, but by Jesus Christ. And so if Christ himself established a church, why would that not be at least as durable as one re-founded by Joseph Smith? So all of the arguments in favor of the indefectibility of Mormonism

are just as good or better arguments about the indefactability of the Catholic Church, which undermines the Mormon claim. So that's what, but you start with that common ground rather than a dismissiveness. Last thing. You talked about not having the time

to be able to go in as deeply as you should about everybody's beliefs. And I think that's absolutely right. And one of the mistakes we make in evangelization is imagining we have to do that to be effective witnesses. And I would suggest we don't. Go back to 1st Peter 315

to be able to give a defense for the hope that is within you. You need to be able to make an affirmative case for why you're Catholic. That doesn't mean you've examined every other possible religious system on earth. It just means here's why, given the revelation of Jesus Christ,

I believe he is who he says he is, I believe he established the church and then the church is the Catholic Church. If you can do that, you're 90% of the way there with any non-Catholic, regardless of whether you've ever, like, you can meet a Rastafarian tomorrow and say, I don't know a lot about Rastafarianism, but I do know this. I know Christ is real. I know his church is real.

And that's why I'm Catholic and not Rastafarian. And this is the response, I presume a Mormon would give to somebody who came along and said, there's a prophet called Robert Smith. And he's just died, but he was given a revelation by God to show him that all the churches had fallen into apostasy. Well, the Mormon, presumably, would give a positive case. He doesn't need to examine Robert Smith. He already knows, quote, unquote, that, yeah, that Joseph Smith is the founder or the, however you would put it, of the church.

And that'll do. And so I think that, so that argument, not needing to learn about Robert Smith to defend Mormonism, is sort of the same argument that we give to the Mormon. You'd be able to have a positive case. But the thing is, Mormonism, and frankly, Protestantism as well, are not just affirmations of something. They also involve these negative claims. They involve believing that the church established by Christ somehow fell into error. There's different forms of Protestantism. I don't want to speak in a uniform kind of way, but you need either a reformation in the Protestant case or a restoration in the Mormon case.

And so there are negative claims being made specifically, like both of them have built into their system some belief about the Catholic Church. not just about their own. Right. Like we are the main character and all these other religions whether they realize it or not. Yeah, yeah. Okay, hey, thank you for flying out here.

My pleasure. What are you working on? Where can people learn more about you? So I do two episodes a week, Shamous Popery, and that's honestly, like most of what I'm working on is just making sure I get those two episodes out the door.

And I have this, I don't depend on when this comes out. I either have an upcoming or just released debate with Jacob on whether there was a great apostasy very much covering a lot of the ground we just talked about. So people want to hear those ideas criticized more aggressively than you did or want to hear me hopefully present them a little more articulately than I did. You can find that out. And where will you be?

Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity is going to be hosting it. Right now we're trying to figure out the details between Texas and Utah. So all of that information. Meaning you might fly somewhere for you? Yeah. We're open to do it in person. Oh, that's nice. I think it's more productive. We're actually planning to do that and have a sit down. with a Protestant pastor in Utah and do like a three-person roundtable where each of us takes turns asking the other two questions

about Catholicism, Mormonism, and Protestantism. Fun. Okay, Joe, thank you. Oh, hey, before you go, I want to tell everybody to get your book. I have it on the shelf. That's why I'm looking over here like a madman. The one on Peter.

Oh, yeah, Pope Peter. Pope Peter. I really want to recommend people get this book because I, last, maybe two times ago you were on the show, I read it over a weekend and was really impressed by it. So that book, go get Pope Peter. Anything else?

My most recent book is the Eucharist is really Jesus. And I always joke that books are like children where you love the most recent one, the best. That's not true. Like, our third is beautiful. I love all of my children. That's just in case they're watching. Yeah.

Hey. Exactly. But, you know, getting to talk about the Eucharist is such a joy, such a privilege. And so if you've got any questions about that and want to see a little bit of a deeper dive on the Eucharist and hopefully it's still accessible way, I've been very happy about. about getting to write that book as well. Great. Thanks. Yeah, my pleasure.