Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep941: The Brothers Karamazov (and Other Things): Tom Velasco

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has been hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time. I just got done reading the book and have been mulling over its multilayered meaning ever since. So I invited my friend Tom Velasco to come on the show to talk about. Tom has read the book at least 10 times (which, at 776 pages is not an easy feat) and has been teaching the book to highschool students at The Ambrose School where he’s been teaching for the last 22 years.  In this lengthy podcast, we talk a lot about the book including its background, characters, plot, and its philosophical and theological themes, especially the problem of evil, free, suffering, and the nature of belief. This leads to many philosophical and cultural tangents which we don’t shy away from. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you have not registered yet for the Theology in the Raw conference here in Boise in late March, early April, then please do so ASAP, pressandsprinkle.com. All the info is on my website or in the show notes. You will want to register sooner than later because space is filling up. My guest today on the podcast is Tom Velasco. Tom teaches at a local Christian high school, like a classical Christian education high school place. So kids are super smart and they read, they read books like The Brothers Karamazov in their senior year, which is insane because the book is 776 pages of pretty dense

19th century Russian literature stuff. It's really a heavy book, but this is kind of a different kind of podcast. Like i just read the book just finished a couple weeks ago and i i don't know i just i'm i'm kind of mesmerized by the book wasn't the easiest read there were parts that were hard to get through there are other parts that were like man i can't i just can't stop reading this this is so engaging and the book is so incredibly thoughtful and there's so many layered layers and layers and layers to it. I mean, Hailed is one of the great novels of all time. So I do want to give a spoiler alert. We do talk about all kinds of stuff in the book that we are going to spoil. So if you have not read the book and you don't want

it to be spoiled, then you might want to change the channel. But I mean, you've had over 150 years to read it. So if you haven't done so yet, I'm not sure you will. But anyway, yeah, I hope you enjoy this episode. It's kind of a different one, but we interact with all kinds of different themes in the book and related to the book. So please welcome to the show, for the first time, the one and only Tom Blesky. All right, I'm here with my friend Tom Velasco talking about Brothers Karamazov. I've never done this before, like a book review. I don't know. I mean, I think a lot. I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe a small percentage of people will enjoy this. So we're going to be talking about Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov. And so this is, I mean, spoiler alert. We're just going to go for it, right? We're not going to like. So if you don't want any spoilers, then go listen to a different podcast. So I don't mind the spoilers, especially the book this big, because I don't mind kind of knowing kind of what to be looking for personally.

But some people want the element of surprise or whatever. Well, and also so much of the book is full of spoilers itself. You and I have talked about it. The opening line of the book tells you that Fyodor Karamazov dies. That's the opening line of the book. So that, you know, you know the whole way leading up and then i mean i suspect there's a there no even even the climax or the like the result of the court case which is kind of the central plot event they tell you ahead of time what's going to happen

yeah so it's not like anything is really yeah doesn't care about the narrative. The narrative isn't the point. Really? Yeah, the point is the characters and the philosophy. That's what he's, like, that's what I'm convinced he is concerned about is he is creating characters that are real. And for me, and maybe this can be kind of like a good point to kind of introduce myself a little bit. For me, that's actually what I love about this book. I read this book every year in January. So I'm reading it right now because I teach it to a bunch of 12th graders. So I'm a teacher.

I teach 12th grade literature and history both at a classical Christian school. And I've mostly done this for the last 22 years of my life. I took a six-year hiatus to work at a church as an assistant pastor. And when I was there, I mostly was involved in teaching ministry. I would preach when the lead pastor was gone. And I started up a little, I don't know if it's proper to call it like a Bible school. It was a little, it was a very little Bible school. Did you help start the one at Calvary?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I did start the one at Calvary. Well, let me backtrack a little bit. At Calvary Chapel Boise, which is where I attend, we've actually had lots of stops and starts of little Bible schools that we've had there. Okay. And so before I came, a friend of mine, Ethan Larson, who, he's a missionary. Well, no, he's involved with a missions organization now and lives in Minnesota, I think.

He actually had started like two or three different Bible schools at Calvary. So none of them ever really, like the one I started, it ended. Oh, really? Yeah. So it's like there are lots of stops and starts with it. So that's mostly what I did. I was also a youth pastor. But I do think one point that might be of interest, Preston, is just how you and I met.

Because you and I met through our mutual friend, Sherrod. Sherrod, you know. Which would be great to have him on the podcast. I know, right? Oh, man. Or his brother, Samir, too, who's quite an accomplished theologian. But I think probably that can kind of transition into how I first ever even heard of this book. Because in college, I was bosom buds with Sherrod and Samir, the twin brothers. Did both of them go to school with you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Masters? Yeah. Yeah. who, did both of them go to school with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we, you know, Sherrod studied history with me

and Samir studied philosophy with me. I was a double major. So I did both. Oh, okay. I did both with those guys. And it was through Samir that I basically met everybody in the philosophy department, including the professors.

And it was his senior year, I think, which was kind of when I was just getting started in the philosophy department, including the professors. And it was his senior year, I think, which was kind of when I was just getting started in the philosophy department. I think I was taking a lower division classes at the time that Dr. Harbison, who, no way Dr. Harbison listens to this podcast, but shout out to Dr. Harbison, who's one of my favorite teachers I've ever had but he's a uh he he's an atheist and he's an analytic philosopher which to not go too much into detail on that means that he wouldn't teach the kind of philosophy that would be taught in this book really that's i mean in in short like uh analytic philosophy is going to concern itself with math logic science and this is like a literary work, which analytic philosophers just don't do. They don't do literary work. Yeah, and so, but he just apparently for years

had wanted to teach a class on Brothers K, and always refrained from doing so because he couldn't find a translation that he liked. And when the Pavier-Volkonsky translation came out, which they're married, it's the one that he liked. And when the Pavier-Volkonsky translation came out, which they're married. It's the one that we read. Oh, they are? Yeah.

Oh, okay. They're a married couple. Yeah. Volkonsky is Russian. Pavier is French. And what, I believe the translation principle that they kind of go through is, if I'm not mistaken,

I probably have this a little backwards. This has been a while since I read on this. Volkonsky will like translate it directly into English. Then Pavier will read it, and he's going to think about the way to nuance it, to make it literary in a sense. And then it goes back to make sure that the meaning was preserved. So it's like a back and forth kind of thing between the two. In the translation, obviously I don't know Russian, so I know nothing.

It just seems so English, so fluid and so English. So I'm like, really? Is there a Russian equivalent to this saying that seems very like unique to the English language? I don't know Russian either, but I've always taken it. Yeah, when you have – especially when you have some of those very – I mean they're idiomatic translations. I wish I could think of a specific example in the book. I just remember things where I'm like, oh, that's not quite an American idiom, but it sounds like – but I know what it means. Yeah, totally.

It almost is like they're doing a new metaphor that I'd never thought of before. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're very skilled. So you've read the book how many times now? It's hard to calculate exactly. I've taught it for 10 years. And during those 10 years I basically kind of each year do almost two readings because I read it to prepare for the class and I read large chunks. I just combine sections and chunks.

Chunks in class with the students. So in that sense, sometimes it's almost like two per year, but at the same time, I know which parts I'm not super interested in, so I kind of scan those. And so sometimes there might be a detail in there or whatever that I've skimmed over a lot and don't quite remember, but more or less 10 times and maybe a little bit more. So at least 10 times.

but more or less 10 times and maybe a little bit more so at least 10 times this is a according to my translation here a 776 page let's say a 776 um and pretty small print i mean this is not i actually googled how many words are in the book as 360 000 words oh wow so the average phd dissertation is going to be 80 to 100 000 words So this is like reading and the density of the book is, this is not a, I mean, it's not, there were parts where it were as hard as I thought. Yeah.

Other parts that were really hard. Cause I've, I've heard it. I've heard people say this book changed my life. I heard one friend of mine said it saved his daughter's faith in high school. Oh wow. In high school, in high school.

It's really, he said it's required reading for all my kids. i'm like okay i'm 46 i've got a phd i'm not i'm an idiot but i mean a lowercase i idiot and i had a you know i'm like slugging my way through it and like there's times i have to go back and reread reread i still i'm like i think he's saying this whatever so it's not the easiest read but it's not i've read more difficult i mean i've read you know corbett mccarthy's blood meridian probably the most it's not the easiest read, but it's not... I've read more difficult. I mean, I've read, you know, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, probably the most difficult book I've ever read. Oh, really?

I haven't read it. I've read two McCarthy books. The Road and No Country for Old Men. I haven't checked out Blood Meridian. The Road was fair. I mean, I think I've heard his easiest one. It was pretty easy. He's still very creative. He doesn't believe in punctuation or something. No, it's very weird.

Or at least he plays with punctuation and definitely capitalization. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's no capitalization. Yeah. So Blood and Meridian, I mean, he has like whole pages in Spanish untranslated. It's like, hey, deal with it. Go learn Spanish. You know?

Okay. So real quick. So give us just a, I mean, maybe a 30-second who is Dostoevsky and then go ahead and give us an overview of the book and then we can dive into some of the more really themes of the book. Yeah. So Dostoevsky is a super interesting individual. He was raised Russia, 19th century, mid-19th century. OK. Russia, 19th century, mid-19th century. Okay. So mid-1800s is kind of, you know, which keep in mind historically what's going on is you're talking about post-Napoleon, right? Post-Napoleonic invasion.

Russia was extremely nationalist as kind of everybody was. Especially, and it was rooted in their, just, I don't know, the way they viewed themselves as having beat Napoleon. Because they're the ones who beat him, right? He was seen by... So I didn't know, I way they viewed themselves as having beat Napoleon, because they're the ones who beat him, right? He was seen by... So I didn't know, I know very little about all this. Oh, he was an unstoppable force. Nobody could touch him. He was like the Hitler of that era?

Yeah, totally. And he was just a rolling juggernaut through Europe. And he actually didn't want to invade Russia. want to invade Russia, his original goal was to basically divide the Eurasian continent between himself and the Russian Tsar, and then to marry, basically to have intermarriage between their families so that you would have a single family essentially ruling over the entire Eurasian continent. My gosh, huh. For various weird political reasons, the Russian czar initially, Alexander,

initially kind of is on his side and then changes his mind. When that happens, Napoleon believes he has to invade Russia. So this is, of course, what leads to that great line in The Princess Bride, right? You've committed one of the classic blunders. You know, the first is never get involved

in a land war in Asia, right? Oh, okay, wow. Have you ever heard that? I now that you said that, I recognize that line. blunders you know one the first is never get involved in a land war in asia right so okay wow have you ever heard that i mean i now now that you said that yeah well that's all rooted in the fact that three times nations have tried to invade russia the first being uh sweden in yes sweden in the late 1600s early early 1700s i can can't remember the exact, it was under Charles X, they fought a war against Russia, beat the Russians badly. Sweden was actually like one of the, was the great Baltic power at the time.

To try to kind of really put down the Russians because the Russians were growing, he decided to invade. And the response of the Russians was to engage in basically a you know a slash and burn kind of approach where they they essentially burn their towns down and with withdrew or retreated in inward right yeah into the interior and of course the russians used to the winter used to the misery and also having supplies people always talk about their toughness, but inside they have fully functioning towns. Charles is coming in and his men require those towns that they're conquering to provide them with food and shelter and all those things, but they're not there because the Russians have burnt the buildings down and burnt up the crops.

And then when the winter sets in, Charles and his men are screwed and they end up losing tons of men and retreat well that's what napoleon does right so napoleon does the exact same thing napoleon invades wins every battle but when the russian winter hits and the russians in the meantime are burning their towns and withdrawing inside um napoleon is forced to withdraw he invades russia with 450 000 men he makes it back to france with 30 000 oh my god all dying to the russian winter and all that kind of stuff and um now of course napoleon would live to fight another day but after that he was so weakened he just couldn't compete against the combined power so russia always looked at themselves as like we're the ones right we're the ones who did this. So that forms, I mean, because there is a lot of nationalism in the book.

I was almost like, this sounds like 2022 America. Yeah, it's actually a great, it's a really interesting moment when Dimitri, I know I might be getting ahead here, but he's talking to the Polish officers. Oh, yeah. And they're the Polish officers. He's trying to be nice. So he says, a toast to Poland. And they're like, we can drink to that.

So they get up and they toast. And then he goes, and a toast to Mother Russia. And they're like, no. They're like, no, we're not going to toast to Mother Russia. And, of course, that's because Russia had partitioned Poland, had actually taken part of Poland. So Poles hated the Russians at that particular time. And then they say, we'll agree to toasting Russia before a certain date.

I forget the date. To her borders then. Not now where they've taken part in Poland. And Dmitry says that line, which I love. He goes, can't a man love his own country? Like it's actually a really, right. I remember this scene. Like as you're talking, I wouldn't have been able to recall it.

But as you're talking, I totally remember that back and forth. A lot of, I was like, I know nothing about this scene. Like, as you're talking, I wouldn't have been able to recall it, but as you're talking, like, I totally remember that back and forth. A lot of, I was like, I know nothing about this history, but I imagine there's stuff going on here that Dostoevsky's playing with. Well, and again, also at the end of the book, when Dmitry's planning to flee the country with Grushenka, he's going to America. Right. He goes, I don't want to go to America, Alyosha. I hate America.

I love that. He says, Grushenka is a Russian woman. Yeah. And he goes, and we love Russia is a Russian woman. Yeah. And he goes, and we love Russia, right? Yeah, there's a lot of nationalism. But there's also, and this is a big thing too, following Napoleon, right, as you go into the 1840s, you have the rise of, well, you have the Third French Revolution in 1848. And the Third French Revolution kicks off a continent-wide series of revolutions. Almost every country in Europe engages in a revolution. Like an Arab Spring only?

Yeah. European Spring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they call it the Spring of Revolutions that year, 1848. They call it the Spring. In fact, so when you talk about the Arab Spring or any of those subsequent springs, that term came from the term they used for 1848. Is that at all related to the Civil War?

I mean, that's 20 years before. Is there any kind of in the air? Not that I can think of, no, unless you're thinking just philosophy, right? Like philosophically what really kicks off the revolutions of 1848 is just increasingly people are embracing liberal ideas. By liberal I don't mean – I mean liberal for then, which means anti-monarchy, freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of – Democracy. Yeah, democracy, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, democracy, all that kind of stuff. But also with it, in the 1840s, you have the, that's right around the time when you have the first international, which is the first gathering of socialists, not international.

So it's like internationally, people from all over are getting together. And these guys are wanting this spring revolution to jump into a socialist revolution. So Marx is writing during this time. Marx, of course, course is not the only socialist people think he came up with socialism he didn't he came up with a special brand of socialism okay um and he was a member of the first international so all of those guys he was with the most probably the most famous one was a russian guy named bakunin mikhail bakunin um uh all those guys though were were kind of the pre-socialists and these guys were wanting they were wanting to not just have what they would have called the bourgeois revolution which the american revolution would have been a bourgeois revolution right and the um first french

revolution they would have called a bourgeois revolution with the underclass overthrowing the upper class yeah they want the they Yeah, they want the workers. Their big focus is the workers, the proletarian workers in cities. They want those guys to revolt. Here's why all this matters in Russia. Because these ideas are spreading like wildfire in Russia. And the Russians are, you just have a lot of radicals in russia terrorism is huge at this time yeah and a lot of socialist radicals a lot of anarchists it's a huge thing in fact um russia

starts to really liberalize even though they're they're on kind of the end of the liberalizing um spectrum, right? I think the date is 1861. I might have that date wrong. It's early 1860s, but I think it's 1861. Alexander II, so Alexander I is the guy who fought Napoleon. Alexander II frees the serfs in Russia. Oh, wow. And so the serfs were slaves. It's different from American slavery.

It wasn't chattel slavery. So it's not like you had a slave market where you'd sell individual serfs in Russia. But serfs belonged with land. So if you sold a piece of land, you're selling serfs with it. Okay. So you wouldn't have the thing that happened in America where you would sell off husbands and children. Right, right. They were always together.

Okay. But they were property. And they were counted as your belongings if you're a nobleman. Interesting. And so Alexander was actually a liberal, right? He's liberalizing Russia. And that wasn't the only thing. He also started, I think, the Zemsta movement,

where he's opening up democratic processes at a local level. But there were so many radicals in russia that it wasn't enough and weirdly he was assassinated because he wasn't liberal enough he wasn't yeah so it's like so he's assassinated which of course meant his successor um nicholas was going to be a reactionary right if he was a liberal if his father's a liberal and gets killed because he's not liberal enough then he's like okay we don't need to get these guys a favor we need to crush them so his son the socialist this uh well no no at that point they were nicholas the son of alexander so the next czar nicholas oh okay he's going to be like if my dad tried to

make concessions to these people and there were huge concessions and they still killed him for it, I'm going to make no concessions. So the people being the liberals. The liberals, yeah. Headed towards a more radical socialism kind of? Yes, yeah. Or – OK. Well, he's just talking about that group of people. OK.

That group. Not all Russians. Just that group. OK. So basically he decides I'm going to crush those guys. OK. I'm going to – I'm going to rid myself – like they're not going to be a part of Russia. crush those guys okay i'm going to i'm going to rid myself like they're not going to be a part of russia so what he starts to do then he actually creates a secret police for the purpose of

infiltrating socialist anarchist groups okay now let's come back to dostoevsky dostoevsky uh was low rank low nobleman like he didn't own big uh his family didn't own a lot of land his dad i think his dad was a physician um uh there's one story in his early life that is kind of important and impactful i mean some things to know about him his mom was deeply pious and she taught him to read based on the scripture and a book of lives of the saints uh she was of course russian orthodox right so um one story from his childhood is one of those ones he kind of brings back in his life. And there are certain allusions to it in this book.

And that is when he was eight years old, he found a nine-year-old girl in the fields. And she'd just been raped. And she was deeply hurt and traumatized. He runs and gets his dad. And his dad comes and tends to her and takes care of her um and that's like one of these things that he never not only never forgot it just was like deeply definitive to him in terms of what the world he lived in was like and so of course the brothers k has a lot about crimes against children right um and uh you know of course there's the

fact that like liza veda is raped by Vito. That has allusion to his real experience. He doesn't have a good relationship with his father. He ends up going to military school. He's a poor military, like, he always, he's a rule follower. He loves his teachers. He doesn't get along with the students. He's physically weak. Just a bad military student, right right he's not the kind of guy you want in there he ends up doing

it though makes it through ends up having to serve a little bit of time in the military which was required but during that time he takes up writing which is kind of his big thing um and after leaving the military becomes a journalist rights writing for newspapers and also writing fiction to publish in magazines. It is during this time, and this is kind of the big thing, he becomes a socialist. And that's why I brought up all that. Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky becomes a socialist. And this is, again, tied into a big concern of his, right, which is poverty.

He's just obsessed with the broken nature of people's lives, right? I mean, and wanting to lift them up out of it. So in his mind, socialism was the best avenue to try to get the poor, you know, lifted out of their... Does that play into it? Because in the book, it's hard for me to... I don't know the era at all, so I don't know, am I envisioning a poor town? But there's a lot of wealthy people there, but you also the peasants they kind of pop up here and there and well in

particular snargi off in his family right oh right he always has at least one family featured in his novels that are destitute in their poverty and the snargi off family is the one and they end up becoming kind of a central yeah his dad they become a central kind of like the whole scene when he first goes in their house and sees yeah the family is like really uh yeah anytime you read any of his other books you're gonna see the same thing like crime and punishment has the exact same destitute family that plays some kind of central role exactly and that's his like they represent kind of the people that need to be more of an concern. Yeah, or at least the thing he's wrestling with, right? Because he's

wrestling with this reality of just the pain of the world. Now, he doesn't stay a socialist. What's going to happen, in fact, in the book, he criticizes socialism a lot. Well, Rattigan's the one socialist, and he's kind of a puss. Yeah, well, and the Elder Zosima has some really good critiques of

the human vision for utopia. Oh, yeah. All of that is... While maintaining the kind of biblical kernels of socialism, the kind of doing good to all people and everything, but rejects kind of the... The human attempt to try to do that. Interesting. Which is super interesting. So here's the key moment of Dostoevsky's life.

And I'm sorry, I'm spending way too much time on this. But this is the key moment. It's a great 30-second overview. Yeah, great 30-second overview. The key, I'm sorry, I'm a tangential guy. I start, I get ideas and I start moving down. But the biggest event in his life happens, he was involved with this socialist group, not heavily involved.

He mostly liked being there so he could read their library. He just wanted to read books and he couldn't afford books. And they had books. So they'd get together to club and meet and he'd read stuff and he rarely took part in conversations. He actually hated the leaders of the group because they were atheists. And

he just, not hated, hate's probably the wrong word, he just didn't jive with them because he was still devout. He was always devout? Yeah. Dostoevsky? Okay. Yeah, and so what ends up happening is, this is under Nicholas I, the son of that czar who'd been assassinated. There's a secret police. They infiltrate that group. And the secret police tell the czar about Dostoevsky's group. The whole group is arrested, including Dostoevsky. And they are

condemned to death by firing squad. And so Dostoevsky is brought out before the firing squad along with all of his buds. The firing squad stands before them. There's the ready aim. And right before they're about to say fire, a horse rides up, stay of execution, and their sentence is, he's sent to is they're they're sent he's sent to exile in not exile he's sent to prison in siberia it's his his death sentence is commuted to a five-year sentence in siberia so we were one second away from not reading this book yeah and he considers that the most important moment of his life wow and he basically says he says to everybody's like imagine you're going to die

and you know it in the next minute or next second like you know you're gonna die right now you know it and then all of a sudden somebody tells you actually no you're gonna live for a very long time and he says it will change the it's like it changes the way you view everything wow everything changes and this is something that comes up. It actually didn't come up in Brothers K, but in The Idiot, he really contemplates this. Prince Lev, the main character, talks about a person he knew who found joy in every moment of life after. Because how could you not, right? You're about to die.

You know it. And then he says you can't even imagine what that life's going to be like. So he spends five years in Siberia. After that, he comes out. One more important thing about him, he's an epileptic. Oh. And so epilepsy always plays a huge part in his books as well. The idiot, Prince Lev, the main character, is an epileptic.

And one more thing kind of theologically to note is a lot of, I don't know that you could say theologians. I haven't read a theologian who said this, but it was kind of accepted tradition in Dostoevsky's tradition, anyway, in Western Orthodoxy, that epileptics, and this is kind of something I think a lot of people actually believe that when having an epileptic fit they have like a it's like a holy experience like they feel like they're experiencing God and he believed that about his he believed that like you transcend this mortal plane so to speak

when having an epileptic experience that's interesting that Smirdikov is the epileptic here and he's not a believer no he's like the foil of anything resembling Christianity. Although he's, you have this complexity of his kind of roots and everything that could feed into his wickedness.

Well, and the fact that he kills himself at the end. Yeah. Right. Like a Judas. Yeah. Then the final thing is, the remainder of his years when he became a great writer, he married twice and he was a sc writer, he married twice, and he was

a scoundrel. I mean, that's one of the things. Really? Dostoevsky? Yeah. He was always a believer, and actually that kind of heightens his I think just his love of grace and mercy and all those things, because he was a scoundrel. His first wife,

he hated her, she hated him. They respected, he said, we respected each other like nothing. He says, never have I met a greater person in my life. But they couldn't be in the same room with each other for a minute. And he cheated on her constantly. Really? And he, his second wife, he married a woman much younger than him, like 20, she died, his first wife died. He married a woman who was much younger than him like 20 she died his first wife died he married a younger a woman who was much younger than him he did uh according to himself remain faithful to her

but he completely destroyed their social situation because he was a horrible gambling addict and he he basically lost everything they ever made and so he lived so he actually lived in destitute poverty, even though he was regarded as one of the great writers of his day. And on his deathbed, he died of a brain aneurysm. On his deathbed, he had his son read him The Prodigal Son, which he believed is the story of his life.

And so all that feeds into then... Well, the three brothers, are they a composite picture? Exactly, yeah, yeah. It has to. I mean there's so – everything you're saying there is like – I just picture these three brothers like being him creating kind of his persona. Like him living out all these tensions in his own life, wanting to be Alyosha, living like Dimitri, doubting – intellectually I would imagine.

Yeah, because he's a brilliant man, right? So he has, and he refuses to take the easy answers. So, you know, getting to kind of that brief summary then of the book, you have three brothers. The three brothers are, I mean, if you were to characterize them, like you just said, you've got Alyosha, the religious devotee. I was about to say zealot. That's definitely the wrong term.

No. They call him a lover of mankind, which is a term that the Russian Orthodox use for Jesus. Oh, really? Yeah. He's described as a lover of mankind, which is specifically a phrase applied to Jesus.

And then Ivan is the intellectual. Brilliant. He's an atheist. Is he an atheist? He's, sorry, I mean, he's a self-proclaimed atheist. He wants to be an atheist. He's a self-proclaimed atheist. He's trying to be an atheist, I feel like.

Yeah. And then you have Dimitri, who is the sensualist. He's the one who lacks self-control. He's the one who lives self-control he's the one who um he's the one who lives for his passions yeah and that's like if i'm thinking dostoevsky after he gets out of prison that's dimitri right i mean he fell into it i don't think he he got out exactly like that because i would imagine uh you know who am i to say i't know. I would imagine he left prison like very disciplined because he's been in prison for five years. But also there's this thing of like, oh, now I can indulge, right?

I wasn't able to indulge in anything. You know, it's kind of. But what I love about, and I might be jumping around a little bit, but what I love about Dimitri and all the characters, there's a profound honesty to them. Yes. You know, so even in his essential, even even – I mean the court case is so brilliant where he's like, look, I know all the evidence is stacked against me. Yeah. And I will even say I wanted to kill him.

Yeah. Maybe I would have. Maybe I will. But I didn't. But I didn't. Yeah. He's so brutally honest. So even in his like – yes, I am a scoundrel.

Yes, I am. And I almost hear – and I don't know this about Dostoevsky, but I was almost wondering. I could hear a lot of believers saying, I know I'm jacked up. I know it. I don't need to be told that. I admit it. Well, and the thing about him is when we hear his story, we go, oh, he really was. Like you have the story of Martin Luther, right? When he was in the monastery and supposedly

he would confess for hours on end. And his, his confessor said, Martin, go away and come back when you've committed a sin worth confessing. Right. It's like every believer feels like they're garbage. But when you read Dostoevsky's life, you're like, oh, he actually was, right? He actually was. And so, but one of the things I think that he did have is this incredible, like what you just said, honesty. I think he was so aware of what was true about him and about the world around him. And it's like, I think about that moment when the Elder Zosima,

who's kind of the moral center of the book, who's Alyosha's teacher, he's a monk. He says to Madame Kokhlikov, a woman who'd come to ask him, you know, various questions and to bring her daughter for prayer. He says to her, he says, above all, do not lie, especially to yourself. I think I underlined that, which I didn't mark up the book a lot.

I remember hearing that most of the time when Zosima speaks, I've got my pen out. Yeah. I probably won't be able to find it. I think I can find it. I was sitting there thinking about which spots to mark before i know i have some spots really clearly in my mind it's um it's let's see here page it's going to be in the second the chapter starting on page 53 um

oh yeah oh yeah wait Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Wait. Act of love. I'm on 56, 57. Yeah. And so it's going to be. Oh, Lady, yeah. Chapter four is the. Lady of Little Faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So here it is. It's page 58. 58. Page 58. The fourth line down in that second paragraph, he said. I marked it. It's all, look at that. Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself.

Yep. Yep. Keep your own lie or keep watching your own lie. Examine it every hour, every minute. Right? And then look at this. Skip the next long line. He goes, avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie.

Oh, that's brilliant. Right? Yeah. Incidentally, when I was looking for that, I came across another thing. Back up to page 52, kind of getting back at this. Because I do think he had a profound sense of God's grace, right, in the midst of this. Going back to page 52, that paragraph, the big one, do not be afraid of anything.

Never be afraid. Do not grieve. Just let repentance not slacken in you, and God will forgive everything. There is not and cannot be in the whole world such a sin that the Lord will not forgive one who truly repents. A man even cannot commit so great a sin as would exhaust God's boundless love. How could there be a sin that exhausts God's love? Only take care that you repent without ceasing.

Chase away fear altogether. Believe that God loves you so as you cannot conceive of it, even with your sin. And in your sin, he loves you. Golly, that's good. And so it's like when you read that kind of stuff, you're like, oh, and you know the man. Yeah, yeah. You're like, this guy believed that, right?

And that's what makes this all interesting. I mean, when you're reading Ivan and you're reading his brilliant arguments, you're reading Dostoevsky's arguments. Yeah. He's not going to – You're saying a lot of Christians don't get that. They think he's the protagonist, right? Yeah, yeah. No, antagonist.

Antagonist. People look at him as bad. I've heard Christians say that. It's like, by the way, I should briefly, because you asked me to also summarize the book

really quickly, just before I get to that. I want to hold off on that. But I do want to come back to it. The book is really simple in terms of narrative structure. Three brothers, Alyosha, the religious one,

Ivan, the skeptic, and Dimitri the centralist. They have a father who's cruel and abusive and horrible. And he gets murdered halfway through the book. It is blamed on the eldest son, Dimitri, who hated his father and many times says he's going to kill him. And actually kicked him in the face with the heel of his boot, which could have killed him. And actually at the end of that said uh everybody said he's you killed

him and he goes good and if he doesn't die i'm going to come back and kill him right yeah and um and then the the the second half of the book is all about or i should say the last probably third is all about the trial of Dimitri. So narratively, that's what plays out. The characters of two other characters, well, there are a few other characters who are extremely important, but the main ones I'll mention is the Elder Zosima, who I've already described as the moral center of the book.

He's the spiritual leader that essentially is Alyosha's teacher. And then Smerdyakov, who actually is a fourth brother, because he's a half brother. Of course, Dimitri's a half brother to Ivan Alyosha, too. Oh, that's true, yeah. Got to readjust. Yeah, yeah.

For those of you who aren't aware, I got Tom in the worst thrift store chair. Well, I just tend to tip chairs backwards, so that's all. It's a comfortable chair if I just want to. You're one of like maybe three people that we've done a live podcast in my actual office. Oh, wow. I cleaned it up, actually. I cleaned it.

It was horrible. Oh, was it? I love it. It looked like my college closet like a week ago. No judgment on my part. You should see my house. Okay, so that's the summary. Well, a couple more things on the main characters.

So, Smirjikov is the fourth brother, and Smirjikov is an epileptic. By the way, they don't know he's their brother, and he's not treated as a full... He's an illegitimate brother. Well, and describe his mom. I mean, and what happened. His mom was a mentally challenged woman who got pregnant somehow, and everybody thinks that Theodore, the father, raped her. Which it is, right?

And it's almost certain that he did, because when she's about to give birth, she comes to his house, climbs over the fence, and that right there is just, is the symbol that... The same fence that Dmitri climbed over. Exactly, yeah. And so, anyway, Smerdyakov, who's also an epileptic, who admires Ivan. He thinks Ivan is just the best. He's a pseudo-intellectual that fancies himself as intellectual, and he wants to be smart like Ivan.

But unlike Ivan, and this is a big difference, he has no moral center. Like Ivan does. He does. And he doesn't. And Smerdyakov doesn't. And so, and then the last two main characters that I, well, there are some others. But Katerina Ivanovna, who is engaged to Dmitry, but is in love with Ivan. And Ivan is in love with her.

And Dmitry is not in love with her. And then you have Grushenka, who Dmitri is in love with and his father's in love with. So it's this weird, like, double love triangle. That's essentially the bulk of it. Now, if I remember, I said there was one thing I wanted to come back to. It had to do with Ivan. Oh, you brought up that Ivan is often looked at as like an antagonist. Yeah.

He's the atheist. Eliosha is the believer. And you almost want them to be played off each other as the good guy and the bad guy. Yeah. I just didn't even see it that way. Yeah. And then when we talked a little bit on Voxer, I was a little bummed. They're like so many – but I could see that where Christians, no, he's the atheist.

So he's kind of like, he's going to try to give the anti-Christian arguments and Aliosha is going to defeat him. And I remember reading, so the most famous passage, of course, is the Grand Inquisitor. I was more impressed with Rebellion, the section before where, I mean,

Ivan almost pried me away from my own thing. It's a tough one. Oh, my word. It's tough. When my students read it, it's so funny. But I think you should. Like, if you're like, no, if your defenses go up, you don't linger in it, you don't jump in Ivan's shoes,

I think you've missed the whole point. If you're like, no, no, no, no. If you just try to shoot down the arguments, I think you've missed the whole point. If you're like, no, no, no, no. If you just try to shoot down the arguments, I think you do that section of disservice. I think you need to come on the brink of becoming Ivan before you can fully appreciate the problem of evil or however you want to articulate it. It's such a bummer.

I'll read that with the students, and they'll be perplexed and frustrated and sad. And, and, um, and I don't just give them an answer. Like we go through, we spend the whole semester trying to work through answers,

but I don't just sit there and say, this is the answer because you can't like, if you walk through this world and you're like, Oh, the pain and suffering of this world. Cause that's what rebellion is about Ivan's main argument is he basically says

look more or less a world that has the kind of suffering in it that we live in and he says and I'm only going to talk about the kinds of suffering that children experience he then cites real world things

things that Dostoevsky read in the newspaper. Like all of this stuff has really happened. None of those are fictitious. Really? Every single story he brings up is a real story. That's fine. So this really is Dostoevsky himself.

It's Dostoevsky. So I'll just really briefly mention some of the arguments. These aren't arguments. These narratival things that he brings up, these stories, which he then uses as part of an argument to say that God just could not have created the world that we live in. And so he tells, for instance, the story of soldiers who would – actually, it's a really powerful and horrible thing. It gets brutal, too. So if you're listening, I mean, he twists that knife over and over,

and you're just like, ah. Yeah. He even says, do you want me to stop, Alyosha? Am I making you feel too bad? Yeah. I mean, I will, for me, if you don't mind, I mean, I don't know. Should I read it, Preston? There's one part that for me was always really striking,

and it's when he talks about Turkish soldiers. Oops, let me. Is it 245? I didn't realize that's not that long of a section. But when we say rebellion, that's just a title – Dostoevsky has titles of every chapter. There's four sections, 12 books, and tons of chapters within each book. So this is – I think – I don't know what book this is. Book three or four.

Chapter four. It's called Rebellion. And it's called Rebellion because as Ivan brings out, oh my gosh, actually, I'm going to wait. I'm going to come to it. Okay, okay. Because, okay, so because I want to read the core of the argument, but the first bit when he first starts talking about it is the Turks

as they invaded Bulgaria. What page are you on? This is on page 238. It's the last paragraph. And he says, somebody he met told him how Turks and Circassians there in Bulgaria

have been committing atrocities everywhere. They burn, kill, rape women and children. They nail prisoners by the ears to the fences. They leave them like that until morning, and in the morning

they hang them and so on. And then a few lines down, he says, these Turksks among other things have also taken a delight in torturing children starting with cutting them out of their mother's wombs and ending with tossing nursing infants up in the air catching them on their bayonets before their mother's eyes the main delight comes from doing it before their mother's eyes delight yeah they delight in it but here's a picture that I found very interesting.

Imagine a nursing infant in the arms of its trembling mother, surrounded by Turks. They've thought up an amusing trick. They fondle the baby. They laugh to make it laugh. They succeed. The baby laughs. At that moment, a Turk aims a pistol at it,

four inches from its face. The baby laughs gleefully, reaches out its little hands to grab the pistol, and suddenly the artist pulls the trigger right in his face and shatters its little head. Artistic, isn't it? By the way, they say Turks are very fond of sweets. So the big thing for me there

is the rhetoric at the end. This chapter is a master... You said it when we talked on the phone. Masterclass in rhetoric. Because that last line line by the way turks are fond of sweets that's actually why i wanted to read that section there's this juxtaposition of completely contrasting tones right you describe this horrific thing and then he just throws in there almost non-sequitur the turks are very fond of sweets but

there is a purpose to it his point is turks are human beings they like oh not that they were not that they were so numb to the evil that they can just eat a piece of candy after it's that they're like every other human well well it's not just to humanize them it's to point out that this is who we are human beings are the kinds of people who do this kinds of thing and have no problem with it. It's just what happens, what we do. Well, this is the... What are you driving at? My brother, Aliosha, says, Ivan says, I think that if the devil

does not exist and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image of likeness. Exactly. We are devils. Right? Now, he continues with these same kinds of... As well as God, then. We've created a God in our own image who allows this kind of crap to go on yeah exactly i've been saying yep um and and one of the things about this chapter is is that uh is that he actually is answering subtly every Christian response.

Yeah. So he addresses the question of the idea that all of this will be reconciled in heaven. Like, he basically says, okay, that's fine. Great. But he says, he essentially says, does that erase what happened? I know. Right? He says, does that create justice in this world?

So he takes away even like Christian universalism. It's like, okay, okay, let's just entertain this for a second and say if God reconciles it. But still, they still have to go through. And what about this one? This is what I often hear Christians say, and it drives, it's driven me crazy. And this has made it even like, well, the evil that exists

shows us the goodness of God. Okay, so this – God needed this child to get his head blown off. Yeah. Fondled, laughed, and head blown off. That's the way we can know God's goodness? Like does that – that just sounds like – I've never liked that argument. I never knew why until now. I know.

Well, he actually addresses that specifically. Yeah. And I'm trying to remember where that line is. Here it is, page 242. It's the big paragraph. It's like the last seven lines. He says, without it, they say, man could not even have lived on the earth, for he would not have known good and evil.

Who wants to know this damned good and evil who wants to know this damned good and evil at such a price the whole world of knowledge is not and this is the key word here worth the tears of that little child to dear god he's referencing a young girl who as a punishment her parents locked her up in an outhouse oh yeah freezing in her own feces, and she's crying out to God to save her, and God does nothing to save her. And that's like, and so he says, the whole world of knowledge, knowing everything isn't worth that. Which, by the way, the thing about Ivan is, and what makes him different from Smerdyakov,

and this is a key part of this book ivan teaches nihilism early in the book he says if there's no god no immortality then everything is permissible right but ivan cannot live in that world he he cannot he's he's too good that's the thing his his thing is he's too good to allow this kind of evil in the world. Now, by the way, let's really quickly go to page 245. He sits here, and this is kind of his key, and this is where the rhetoric is absolutely incredible. He pushes out the ocean.

Yeah, he really pushes out the ocean. So it's the big paragraph. He says people will say when we're in heaven, we'll look back and we'll say, Lord, you are just, just art thou, O Lord. But I do not want to cry out with them. While there is still time, meaning while I'm still alive,

I hasten to defend myself against it. And therefore, I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. In other words, I'm not gonna do that. I'm saying right now, I will never tell God he was just. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to dear God in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears. Not worth it because her tears remain unredeemed. They must be redeemed.

Otherwise, there can be no harmony. But how? How will you redeem them? Is it possible? Can they be redeemed by being avenged? This is one of the Christian responses. Well, he's going to suffer. He's going to go to hell.

But what do I care if they're avenged? I don't care if she's avenged. I care that she doesn't suffer. I don't care. And then he goes, and then this is actually brilliant here. What do I care that she doesn't suffer. I don't care. And then he goes, and then this is actually brilliant here. What do I care if the tormentors are in hell? What can hell set right?

If these ones have already been tormented, where is the harmony if there's a hell, by the way? He's saying, like, how have we eliminated pain? Where is the harmony if hell exists? I want to forgive and I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. I do not finally want the mother

to embrace, right? She's saying, I don't want any of this. Skip down. Is there in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive i don't want harmony for the love of mankind i don't want it meaning love of mankind is that that same word that's oh yeah that's right that's by daliosha that's interesting i never thought of that what he's saying there is he's like it's unjust to forgive them too it's just to it's unjust to send them to hell because now you have no harmony but it's also unjust to forgive them too. It's unjust to send them to hell because now you have no harmony, but it's also unjust to forgive them because what they did is horrible. There is no solution here, he's saying. And by the way, I think here Dostoevsky is kind of interjecting a little bit of his

theology. He says, is there and could there be anyone who could do such a thing? He's kind of saying it all has to be in Jesus. But he's going to have a response to that too. I don't want harmony for the love of mankind. I don't want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation. Here's the key.

Even if I am wrong. Even if I'm wrong. I've heard people... That's even italicized. Is that on purpose? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure. Have you ever met somebody who said that though? Where they're like basically, even if I'm wrong, I know I'm right.

I would rather... Basically, when I stand before God, I am the just one and he's the unjust one. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Even if I'm wrong and your whole worldview is right he's the unjust one. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, even if I'm wrong and your whole worldview is right, that worldview is wrong. Is bad. Yeah.

And I would choose to go to hell being, I mean, it's weird, but he's essentially saying, I would choose to go to hell being, like, holding to my virtue rather than to acknowledge It's kind of like when people say on a more pop level, like, I can never love a God who, they're putting God in the dock, right? Yeah, correct. Rather than to acknowledge. It's kind of like when people say on a more pop level, like I can never love a God who. Yeah. They're putting God in the dock. Yeah. Right. Correct.

So the thing for the readers, like this is never really resolved. The only resolution I could see is it's internal inconsistently. We can't live this way. And this, I mean, let me know if I'm onto something here. There's such an emphasis on truth being manifested in how we live um not in kind of this like all together put together worldview it's it's zosima saying you know love all people and love is an action and do do do um and the the where ivan's argument falls apart is not in the argument itself i don't think it's ever actually intellectually resolved it's it's not in the argument itself. I don't think it's ever actually intellectually resolved. It's resolved in the sense that Smirdakov is living out Ivan's ethic. Yes. And yet, it's like

this is, obviously, you can't live this way. That there is, if there is no God, there is no morality. It's like, well, your whole argument's built on there being some kind of moral foundation. Is that? Yes. And actually, so yes, he doesn't just give a resolution. This is a tough thing for, I mean, so yes, he doesn't just give a resolution. This is a tough thing for, I mean, it's tough to begin with. It's one of the things I actually struggle with. I mean, I don't know anybody's ever directly come out and criticized me for it. But I have had, I mean, Christians, it's not just Christians.

Everybody wants this, but a christian i'm speaking christians want to be able to say they have the answers to everything right yeah and they feel like and and and of course 90s apologetics yeah asserted that we did right like night like people in the 90s who are going around doing apologetics classes and courses and they kept saying oh no we have an answer for everything and we don't. That's the thing. We don't. And people, once people kind of started realizing that that was true, they realized that, well, there's actually, like,

there are some things that we are just left to a bit of confusion. And the reality is we're just rehashing stuff that people have been talking about for hundreds and hundreds of years. I mean, have you ever read Candide? No. Candide, that's a quick read. I didn't know what that is a book it's by voltaire oh it's a it's we actually read it in my school um and uh dostoevsky clearly references candide throughout this book okay candide is a satire okay and it's voltaire is writing in candide in probably the 1770s, I would imagine. Or I'm thinking 1770s, roughly.

And he's writing in response to Leibniz, who wrote a theodicy in the 1600s. So Leibniz, in his theodicy, of course, he basically more or less says God would allow evil provided that evil brought about a greater good that could not be achieved without that evil. What might that look like? Maybe free will would be an example. If you offer free will, bad is going to come. But free will is such a good thing that we have to give it uh or the god would have to give it and so but then also leibniz who's who's i don't know that it would have been i actually don't know theologically where he lined up because he voltaire always no leibniz leibniz always wrote

in a philosophical context i actually don't know like religious leanings. I would suspect he would have been like a pretty strong Calvinist. He believed in determinism. His view of free will was a kind of compatibilist view of free will. But I say that because in that theodicy, he makes a really simple argument. He says, God always chooses what's best. Therefore, we actually live in the best possible world. Like it couldn't be better than the world we actually live in. That's one of the conclusions he comes to. Because every single decision was one made by God. And if a decision was the wrong one, then God would have had to be lacking in either power, knowledge, or goodness.

But he's not lacking in those things. So that means every decision must be the good one. Voltaire is like like that's insane and what voltaire then does is he writes a whole book like rebellion everything is cataloging all of the atrocities of mankind and it's all humorous it's you don't read candide and feel like you do at the end of Rebellion. It's a comedy. The whole thing is, but it's a gross, disturbing comedy because he's constantly making light of these horrible things that are sometimes exaggerated, but are mostly just what humans were experiencing through that time.

Wow, wow. And at the end of the day, Voltaire's big thing is to attack Leibniz's argument about the fact that God would allow evil provided it brought a greater good Voltaire's essentially saying what is the greater good and he essentially says every single thing Christians give him aren't greater they're not worth it that's the big thing it's not worth it not worth it and that's what Ivan is saying right here nothing is worth it nothing is worth all this pain that's what Ivan is saying right here. Nothing is worth it. Nothing is worth all this pain.

I want to read this last part of this real quick, the last part of the paragraph, because this is where the rhetoric really is awesome and where the title comes from. Let me pause you. I've got to go to the bathroom real quick. I'm going to hit pause right here. Okay. Here we go. Let's see.

All right. All right. We're back. I was going to have some nice Russian vodka for us, but since it's like 10 in the morning, I decided to go with coffee. All right. So we're at the end of rebellion. End of, yeah. Page 245.

It's the last. This is where the rhetoric and really where the force of his argument comes in. He says, besides. So it's about the last four lines of that paragraph, five lines. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony. Harmony is his term for it all making sense, right? That we actually stand there in heaven and go, yes, all of this actually makes sense from God's perspective, right? They have placed too high a price on harmony. We can't afford to pay so much for admission.

And therefore, I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible, which is what I'm doing. It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha. I just most respectfully return him the ticket. And then Alyosha says, that is rebellion. So what he's saying is, is, is essentially he's like, essentially he's saying, I don't even care

if I'm right. This God, the world we live in is either no God at all, or if there is one, he's so evil, I refuse to be on his side. Oh, wow. Right? So that's where it's rebellion, right? On the one hand, it's not rebellion if there's no God. But if there is, and he's saying, I return him the ticket, then it's rebellion. So it's always, he's not trying to make it almost like a definitive argument against the existence of God.

Not necessarily. Like, just that line where he says, it's not, it's not that I don't accept God, Aliosha. And there's such an endearment to Aliosha.

You know, he says his name and everything. Here's what threw me for a loop. So I'm reading this. This is, I read it at night

and I'm just like, oh my God. I mean, he just, I mean, I've obviously wrestled the problem of evil and suffering

and all this stuff, but he just rubs your face in it, right? So I'm like, all right. It was like late at night. I'm like, all right. Grand Inquisitor tomorrow, most famous section, you know, pretty long section. I'm going to wake up early because here's my assumption. I knew nothing about it.

Al Leosha is going to rescue my doubts. And he does. It's not even Al Leos. He keeps going. I mean, I'll say Dostoevsky, because you would almost assume, right? Like first reading of this book, you'd almost assume, okay, we let him have his time. Dostoevsky's a Christian. Al Leos is a good guy.

There's got to be a response. There's no response. No response. So tell us about. There is a response, but it's not a satisfying one. And it's not really in the Grand Inquisitor. Well, sort of. Because the response...

So let me say two things with it. Alyosha's response is Dostoevsky's response in the Grand Inquisitor. And without going into too much detail, let me just express it like this. Alyosha basically plays off of one of the comments I made a moment ago where Ivan says,

could there be anybody who could make this harmony? Could there be anybody who would have the right to forgive? And Alyosha goes, yes, Jesus. And then Ivan says,

ah, yes, the Nazarene. You guys always wheel him out, right, when I'm about to, right? And that's when he brings up the Grand Inquisitor, which is a parable. The Grand Inquisitor is a parable. In short, it's set in the Middle Ages. You have a Jesuit priest who is an inquisitor. So, of course, like the Inquisition was set up for heresy trials when people would come and, well, people would be accused of heresy for a million different reasons.

But whatever the reason, if they were found guilty, they would then go through what's called an auto da fe, which is an act of faith. And those could be all sorts of, those could be different things. But the final auto da fe

is burning at the stake. You burn them alive, right? And so in this parable, Jesus appears in the Middle Ages doing all the things that he did, the kinds of things that he did in the first century. And an inquisitor finds him, has him arrested as a heretic, and is going to kill him. And then the inquisitor has a long conversation with him, which in short, because we could, obviously it's long, but in short, essentially what he says is, what Ivan's doing here is

he's answering two responses that Christians give. Because he's always, so much of what he's doing is responding to Christian responses. He's two steps ahead. Yeah, exactly. So much of what he's doing is responding to Christian responses. He's two steps ahead. Yeah, exactly. And so one of those responses is, of course, to basically put down the idea of the incarnation at all.

Like, that it was wrong. That it was the wrong choice. But the second one is to deal with the free will defense. Because the free will defense is the most common response to the problem of evil. It has its own problems, even if one doesn't entirely believe in free will defense because the free will defense is the most common response to the problem of evil it has its own problems even if one doesn't entirely believe in free will like or sorry even if one fully embraces free will as a as like reality metaphysical reality it still has its own problems for instance that it doesn't account for uh naturally right or natural pain you know things like that or it doesn't't account for the severeness of the pain. Right?

Okay, allow people to choose, but don't let them choose to do such horrible things. Right, right, right. Those kinds of things. But Ivan basically says, look, look, look. Freedom is bad. Right, right. Nobody wants freedom. And they don't.

We want security. We want to be safe. We want to be safe. We want to be well-fed. And we want to be provided for. And we are willing to do anything for that, which seems to be largely true, right? I mean, humanity, above all, wants safety. And you might, and by the way, I mean, this is obviously a recurring political theme right now, right?

People are always arguing over freedom or safety, freedom or safety. And I find it interesting because people just always land on safety. They say that they land on freedom, but they're always landing on safety, right? I mean, at the end of the day, not maybe, I shouldn't say 100% of the time, that's probably not nuanced to me, but in general, like you can be one who is espousing like some kind of freedom principle. And yet it does seem that generally speaking, what you're being motivated by is a desire to be safe in your. Well, that's,

there's been a lot of psychological work done on this. The rise of safety ism. You can even, if you just even do like, if you analyze like how many times the word harm is used in kind of moral arguments, it's like skyrocketed in the last like seven years. It's gone like, like everything the last like seven years. Yeah.

It's gone like, woo, like everything is just like harm this, harm that. Yeah. And Jonathan Haidt is going way off on a tangent. He traces it all the way back to like, he said even back in like in the 80s when they started putting kidnapped kids on milk cartons. Oh, wow. The awareness of stuff that was going on, even though it was so rare for somebody to be kidnapped.

And 90% of the time it was a family member. Like somebody really, nobody, rarely, rarely does somebody open up the van and throw somebody in, you know. But you had these milk cartons that the six kidnappings a year or whatever would be on millions of milk cartons. So that's when parents, and this is the generation I was raised in. Yeah. When I used to ride my bike just all day long, be gone at six years old or whatever.

But I remember the shift when we started seeing these milk cartons. All of a sudden now, our parents started getting freaked out. Like there's kidnappers on every corner and all this stuff. And Jonathan Haidt traces it to that kind of era when even though violence and everything has been going down since the 80s has gone skyrocketing down. Yeah. Racism, all-time low. That's going to freak some people out. But if you measure it, it's compared to any other time in history.

Violence, murder, racism, poverty, everything is plummeted. Yeah. But the awareness has gone through the roof. Yeah. And you – I hope i'm tracing this right and then it's the rise of the first generation that has the only world they know is instant access to all this stuff 2013 2014 2015 and that's when the rise in safetyism starts going through the roof to where we are now to where have – typically it's more left-leaning politically people who – it's this harm, safety kind of – that's the moral lens to read everything through.

I will say though – and I will say that the conservatives I think are inconsistent on this because the language on this is conservatives embrace freedom. The left – or I should say the right embraces freedom. The left embraces safety, right? But if you watch, it's still the same. Like I'll give you an example. I just listened to a podcast where they were talking about the laws, kind of a law. I think it was a law. I don't think it was like an executive order or anything that basically forbade certain kinds of books that potentially

could teach critical race theory or something like that. Oh, yeah. Right. And I'm listening to this podcast where it's it's talking about these books that were basically being put up for potential banning. Right. Based on the fact that they taught critical race theory in the schools. And they were interviewing the people who were arguing that they needed critical race theory in the schools. And they were interviewing the people who were arguing that they needed to not be there. Now, no doubt, these are people who are right-leaning, and they're people who are going to 100% be upset that people are trying to get Huck Finn out of the schools. Their arguments in general are going to be,

we want freedom, not safety from hearing things we shouldn't hear and don't be wrong i'm not like a like i mean i'm actually really not a fan of critical theory at all like so i'm not trying to defend critical theory i'm just pointing out that all the arguments that they used yeah were safety arguments my kid will be exposed to something that will make him feel like he's a racist or to hate his something like that and so it's like the same a racist or to hate his wife or something like that. And so it's like the same principle. I've seen similar things like when it comes to the vaccine thing, right? You find people who tend to be anti-vaccine. When it came to the question of COVID itself, they're like, we've got to stop being scared.

We've got to stop being afraid, all these things. But then the initial arguments, most of the arguments about vaccination that I've heard are like, but they're like we've got to stop being scared we've got to stop being afraid all these things but then the initial arguments most of the arguments about vaccination that i've heard are like but but they're scary like they potentially could lead to these various harm things and i'm like you're right i mean so so i mean i only say it to say that like we play the safety freedom thing inconsistently because i've i've heard the left like here's another thing um the people on that podcast i was listening to it was actually by the by the way, the most, or second to most recent episode of This American Life. Okay. Just if people are interested.

Those who were kind of clearly arguing that those books by black authors should be allowed to be on the shelves in Texas were arguing from a freedom standpoint. They're like, we can't ban books. We need – and all the while I'm thinking, you guys want to ban Huck Finn for sure. I've heard that a thousand times. Huck Finn? Why? Because – And we're in Huck Finn a lot, right?

Now, and that, by the way – That's a lot of – What's that? To Kill a Mockingbird. I mean, that's like – Oh, yeah. It's all – Just because it contains it?

Yep. Yep. Even though like To Kill a Mockingbird, these books books are like the narrative is against racism exactly it's actually you can't really do unless you contain racism to confront within the narrative exactly we're literally like when you're talking about huck finn you're talking about a literal monument in the fight against racism really right yeah i mean huck finn is it's so many things i mean i would never want to boil it down to anything but for sure a huge part of that book is a satirical reflection on on the absurdity of racism right but you know by the way this is a horrible tangent but the the everybody tangent, but everybody nowadays, everybody is functioning in kind of that, I mean, I

guess I'd put it this way. The way that people always think about evangelical Christian art from the 90s, super unsubtle, super un-nuanced, it's always clear, good versus evil, even though what is being conveyed is not really accurate. That's the way everybody views the world now, right? Yeah. Everybody essentially, like I've thought about this because I'm a big film fan.

Increasingly, people are making movies where they're preaching. These are movies in which people are preaching their philosophy it's unnuanced and like there's no room for any pushback at all in the films that's not like when you think of great films like like a great book like this like this is a great book brothers k because he's not just sitting there i mean he's not it's not i probably shouldn't say this i've never seen it it might actually be but from what i want god's not dead i've not seen it maybe it's good i don't know

but i've always heard that it's like the most insanely one-dimensional like we can easily knock down any argument that is not this right and and and the thing is is that everybody is making god's not dead now and everybody is believing as if it's like a religious thing. You have to believe things and we can't challenge them. And we're scared to even think about whether or not they're wrong. And we certainly can't let people get the wrong ideas. So we're going to protect them from ever hearing the wrong ideas. Gosh.

Which is what. So problematic. And is what Christianity has been forever too and that will lead to a bunch of 28 year old atheists who were stars in the youth group and homeschooled i mean i or whatever you know because like in an un i've said this recently an uninterrogated faith is a fragile faith that's about to die like if you if you don't if you don't marinate in rebellion and don't give a response you know this like just rub your face in it this this is some of the messiness of a christian world you know for for me i don't need everything to be worried if everything's too ironed out i start

getting a little nervous like sometimes i almost don't trust it like if if eliosha came in and just gave like airtight boom boom boom i'm like there's just stuff here that just cannot be resolved. And if somebody tries to, I start to be like, I don't know if I trust you. Like, I don't know if you've appreciated the tension here. At the end of the day, I look at the Christian worldview as it makes the best sense of all the other options, but it doesn't have everything all worked out. That's where I'm fine reading the book of Joshua and saying like, you know, my daughter comes to me all the time. I'm like, what do we do with the Congress? What do we do with this?

Like, I'm not okay with this. And I'm like, I'm not really okay either. I've tried to give her the simplistic answer sometimes. Like, well, there are really bad people and God had to punish them. She's like looking at me like, really? Like women and children? You know, like, I'm like, but if if i say no this is one of the several difficulties that we as a christian worldview we have and by the way every system is going to have it yep i

think atheism does ultimately seems like it ultimately lead to nihilism and i think that's kind of part of the counter argument that is definitely part of his counter argument yeah before i get to i would like to just kind of reflect on what you just said because because this is where it gets a little scary, I think, kind of thinking about history. Because when people have both an uncritical faith and an inability to allow anybody to challenge that faith, the result is typically violence, right? Like we just talked about the Inquisition. The Inquisition largely arises because, honestly christians are like thinking for themselves they were like actually let's read it and like oh gosh that doesn't say what we thought christians were supposed to believe and they're like maybe we shouldn't believe what we've been told and when you can't

win an argument then it's really hard naturally. Like, I just think back to when I was a kid. Like, it is a human impulse to respond in violence, right? Like, as a kid, I would be like, okay, you want to fight? You know what I mean? Like, that's where you go. And you can, like, you just see that increasingly. I mean, thankfully, I think we're still a culture that really disavows violence. But at the same time, you could, I mean, I've seen people say scary things where they're just like, nope, these people are less than human.

These people are not worthy to engage in debates with. And of course, the constant everybody's Hitler or everybody's – well, they're not somebody to argue with. They're actually somebody to just do away with. You know what's scary is I've done a little bit of research on the rwandan genocide here you have the most back in 1994 um yeah i think so so how do you get to a place to where the most christianized country 80 90 percent like sunday mornings houses are empty everybody's at church the most christianized country in 90 days it's the most massive slaughter of any human. I think in history, 800,000 people killed in 90 days.

30 days, maybe. I forget. Wow. With neighbors walking next door, babies on their backs with machetes, slaughtering their neighbor who the night before they're having tea with. Like, how does that happen? And people trace, going back here now 10 years since I read stuff on this, but it was this rhetoric of, you know, the Hutus and Tutsis. And, you know, one group was calling the other, they kept calling them cockroaches, like reducing their humanity to where now they're not even human anymore. And here's what I fear is exactly what you said is in our rhetoric today, no longer are, you know, Republicans andans and democrats whatever no longer is there like

i really disagree with your policies i really think you're wrong on economics i think your social things are no longer you just wrong now you're evil and almost less than human and i've seen i'm seeing that happen on both sides i'm like yeah i i'm not a fear monger conspiracy theorist whatever but like that that's not a no one would have thought there were one well i don't know no one but i mean again super christianized erupts in this kind of massive overnight almost i mean it wasn't overnight but the but the seeds was the seeds sown where this other group is less than human yeah yeah no it yeah i mean you can see it like on twitter i mean people

will specifically say these things they'll sit there and they'll say like because it is a it is a view to essentially say like i mean i'm trying to remember the most recent time i heard i feel like there was a i don't know it was a podcast i was listening to or a tweet i saw where they they essentially just making fun of people who say, oh, there's truth on both sides, right? And, you know, something like that where they're basically saying, look, some people are just the enemy and we have to, you know, that's really the idea. Some people are just the enemy and that's the reduction to Hitler all the time or something or the reduction to Stalin or, you know, you name it. I mean, it's at some people are just saying, well, at some point we just have to get rid of them. I mean, I don't know if you know this,

but French Revolution, the first one, the original 1789, the most famous member of the French Revolution, Robespierre, Maximilien Robespierre, he's the guy who spearheaded the famous Reign of Terror. He, this blows my mind. Did he have a Twitter account? Not yet, no, not yet.

Not at that point. He was against the death penalty. He believed the death penalty was inhumane. He believed it was wrong. He's the guy who spearheaded the terror. And the terror, they killed 26,000 Parisians over a three-month span with a guillotine he spearheaded that whole thing by the way without due process of law which he was also a firm believer in

and the reason like i'm so fascinated by him and i'm so like i find him one of the most interesting people in history he was known as robes pierre the incorruptible. He had these liberal convictions, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly. He believed the death penalty was morally wrong. He was considered the incorruptible because he would not take bribes. He would not violate his convictions. No, huh? No.

He did propose an alternative religion in his days as kind of like leading the government where he believed religion was necessary for a good functioning state, but he didn't believe. He might have believed like deistic, you know, kind of God. But he could do the terror. Wow. And how could he do the terror?

And the answer is because he came to the belief that the political enemies, his political enemies were acting in bad faith. Oh, wow. And that the only way to attain his dream, which was a truly free functioning France, is to get his enemies out of the way. His enemies being the upper class? No. So by the time he comes to power, it's purely political.

The upper class has been basically abolished. I mean, you still have upper class in terms of wealth, but the nobility has been done away with by the nobility. The early part of the revolution was mostly spearheaded by nobility. I need to read up on the... Offline, you can give me some recommendations. Yeah.

But anyway, so it's just one of those things. You definitely see that. I mean, it's... I'm glad Twitter's not a real place, otherwise it'd be... It'd be one of those things. You definitely see that. I mean, I'm glad Twitter's not a real place. Otherwise, it'd be kind of Russian. I said my policy on Twitter is I assume every account's a Russian bot unless they prove themselves to have humanizing rhetoric. So once they do that, oh, okay, now it's a human. Otherwise, it's a robotic account, which most of my followers are robots, I think.

Well, did you ever hear – I mean, not – did you ever see – Dave Chappelle said that. I don't know if you heard about that. That's where I got it from. Okay, yeah. Yeah, because he said – yeah, I just loved it. When you said that, it popped in my head immediately, yeah. I don't give a whatever. Twitter's not a real place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I even heard – I think like 7% of the population has an account and like 3% is active or maybe it's 20% it's a really small percentage that are you get the impression if you spend a lot of time on Twitter which I would never recommend I'm my worst enemy you get this

weird weird view of the world you know and then you walk around you think people are actually like this but if you invert it and you just if your world is actually the embodied world you know and then you walk around you think people are actually like this yeah but if you invert it and you just like if your world is actually the embodied world you live in like people are as literally no no no no one's screaming at you yelling at me you know like no for sure you know what is scary though when i when you think about it again not wanting to like i'm just a guy who i just think a lot about history the bolsheviks when they took over in russia they had an extreme minority oh really okay yeah they only held like 20 some percent of seats and they basically were

able to gain power because the rest of russia was tired of fighting and they were kind of like look we're gonna let you guys do this since you want it so bad and we're just gonna sit back and not do anything so it's like it's a weird thing but the minority can actually like like i'm totally on board with people like dude that's not the real world if you interact with real human beings it's not the same which is true and by the way even the worst twitter offender if you were to sit down and look at them face to face they would change their rhetoric tremendously right like just interacting at a human level changes everything yeah but you know and like for me incidentally it's like that's one of those things that every like everybody needs to have you just need to have people in your life who don't agree with you and then ask yourself whether the rhetoric you're using is correct right i mean you know it's like uh you know, I mean, I could give tons of examples, but I mean, I have a friend who's an agnostic communist, right?

So he's a communist. He loves Che Guevara. He is pro-choice. He's all these different things that, and I'm like, well, he's actually one of my good friends. He's a really nice guy. So it's like, the reality is you just have to, like, if you stop and think about it, you're like, okay, is he – does he – and I have a very conservative position on abortion, for instance. But does he want to exterminate all – like is he in favor of killing babies? And the answer is no.

So clearly the argument is something that lies a little differently from just his moral sentiment. But people are trying to make it all about the moral sentiment. And they'll say something like he's evil because he has this view. But when you actually love people who have these views, then you're like, okay, it's got to be more than that. It's more nuanced. Anyway, we're way left to feel. So Grand Inquisitor, going back to the free will thing, wasn't there a part – he talks about the temptation of Jesus and said Jesus had the opportunity to reign over the world. Yes.

And he messed up. He gave us free will. He gave us freedom. That's his whole, that's his rhetoric in Grand Inquisitor. He's like, we don't want freedom. Freedom's bad. If he would have reigned and protected us and kept us safe, everything would have been great.

So his anthropology is pretty spot on. Yeah, totally, totally. And I think that says, but what I love about this is, is it actually shows that the answer to the problem of evil is just not clear because you can sit there and say, okay, I see your point,

but I don't know that it's right. It still seems to me that Jesus did the right thing. Aliosha says the same thing. At the end, he goes, well, he goes, Jesus is the good guy in your story. And Ivan basically doesn't, like Ivan, I think there's just saying, well, I guess it kind of depends on what your perspective is. Now, there comes a moment in the Grand Inquisitor where Jesus, after hearing the Inquisitor give his talk, the Inquisitor then says, what's your response? Or what do you, like, I'm going to let you go. I'm actually not going to kill you. And then Jesus goes and he talk the inquisitor then says what's your response or what are you like i'm

gonna let you go i'm actually not gonna kill you and then jesus goes and he kisses the inquisitor right yeah and that's like zosima did something like that earlier uh and well and also that's how aliosha responds and this is the response to the grand inquisitor so we should actually read that yeah um give me a page i need to look that up real quick. Where he kisses him? Is that the end of the Grand Inquisitor? Yeah, it's at the end of the Grand Inquisitor, so it's going to be basically page 263.

Okay. I love this little bit. Actually, I'm going to back up to 262. Okay. bit. Oh, actually, I'm going to back up to 262. He goes, this is at the end, the very last paragraph on 262. It's nonsense, Alyosha. It's just a muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of verse. I love that he keeps calling it a poem because it's not a poem, it's prose. But why are you taking it so seriously? You don't think I'll go straight to the Jesuits now to join the hosts of those who are correcting his deed?

Meaning, like, you think I'm going to go and... The Jesuits are like the conservative religious people, right? Yeah, and I think this is kind of almost like a... like a subtle, oblique attack against Catholicism, which is, of course, you know, fundamentally very different from Orthodoxy, in particular with respect to its structure, right? I mean, the Catholics, like, in that day, and probably not entirely differently today, although the methodology would be different, they want to be universal. That's the thing. Everything, like,

and it all needs to submit under our authority. That's the goal of everything, right? And so Dostoevsky has kind of a veiled attack against them by saying, this is what the Jesuits want. They want to be in control and fix everything and control everything themselves. When he's, like, kind of, I think Dostoevsky might be, like, subtly saying Orthodoxy is different. Orthodoxy is not trying to do that. But in any case, good Lord, what do I care?

As I told you, I just want to drag on until 30 and then smash the cup on the floor. That's an early metaphor that he used. He told Alyosha, basically he wants to die when he's 30. And so smashing the cup was him saying, I'm going to commit suicide when that happens. So that kind of shows like the fact that, which was a part of kind of the nihilistic assumption

that life isn't worth living and you might as well kill yourself. That actually happened, by the way, in the 19th century when nihilism started to predominate in the universities. A lot of people are like, well, then why live? And a lot, suicide became so common amongst college students that professors would actually give lectures pleading with people not to commit suicide. In 19th century so 1800s when in russia or everywhere there's europe really yeah mostly europe kind of like today i mean the suicide rate has gone way up today but yeah

i've heard and this is anecdotal i couldn't give you a source but i i've heard that it would be like noticeable in a classroom people just start disappearing because they were all committing suicide. And it certainly carries over into the existentialists. The existentialists are responding to nihilism. They're basically trying to come up with an answer. If there's no God, this is the nihilistic assumption, and this is key to this book, then there is no objective value.

Value can only come from creation, right? Like, or purpose, right? So I have a microphone here. The purpose of the microphone is given to it by the person who made it. And if you're not made, then you're an accident, which means you have no purpose. And value is gonna be completely connected to your purpose.

If you have no purpose, then there's no objective value. So the nihilist basically comes to the conclusion that all value judgments are meaningless or conventional, and if they're conventional, they're meaningless. So meaningless, so like the only kind of value you could give is as a collective whole, and that would be arbitrarily ascribed and only ascribed by whoever's in charge,

and it'll change change but that means that there is no objective one right right right and so um the existentialist is trying to come up with an answer to that albert camus who's writing much later he's writing in the in the 19 i think he wrote this like the 1920s or 30s he wrote um the myth of sisyphus might have been 40s myth of sisyphus and he begins forties myth of Sisyphus. And he begins with Sue is this line. Suicide is the only serious philosophical question. Now that we've demonstrated, there's no God.

He says, trying to find a reason to live is the only thing philosophers should be doing with their time. So it's like this very much in the minds of, of philosophers. Okay. So, so Ivan says,

I'm going to smash the cup on the floor. And I love Alios responds and the sticky little leaves. So that was like the goodness of creation, right? Yes, because earlier Ivan does say, well, sometimes when I'm out there and the sticky little leaves. He's describing the world around him. He loves it. Like springtime.

Yes, springtime. And he's like, he loves it. He goes, and the sticky little leaves and the precious graves and the blue sky and the woman you love, which is Katerina, how will you live? What will you love them with? Alyosha exclaimed truthfully. Is it possible with such hell in your heart and in your head? No, you're precisely going in order to join them. And if not, you'll kill yourself.

You won't endure it. There's a force that will endure everything, said Ivan. What force? The Karamazov force. So here he's saying, basically, I am a Karamazov, and because of that, I hate pain, and I only want to feel good. So he goes, that force basically might... Like I'm an essentialist. I'm an essentialist at heart, which means that might actually stop me from killing myself because I want to feel good.

To drown in depravity, to stifle your soul with corruption. Is that it? That too, perhaps. Only until my 30th year. Maybe I'll escape it then. How will you escape it? By means of what? With your thoughts.

It's impossible. Again, in Karamazov fashion. You mean everything is permitted? Everything is permitted. Is that right? Ivan frowned and suddenly turned somewhat strangely pale. Ah, you caught that little remark yesterday which offended Musov so much, and that brother Dmitry so naively popped up and rephrased. Yes, perhaps everything is permitted, since the word has already been spoken. I do

renounce it, or I do not renounce it, and Matenka's version is not so bad. I thought, brother, that when I left here, I'd have you, at least, in all the world. But now I see that in your heart, too, there is no room for me, my dear hermit. The formula, everything is permitted. I will not renounce. And what then? Will you renounce me for that?

Will you? Alyosha stood up, went over to him in silence, and gently kissed him on the lips. Literary theft! Ivan cried. Now skip the next few lines. I love this. This is so moving to me.

Last paragraph. So, Alyosha, Ivan spoke in a firm voice. If indeed I hold out for the sticky little leaves, meaning if indeed I don't kill myself, I shall love them only remembering you. It's enough for me that you are here somewhere, and I shall not stop wanting to live. Is that enough for you? I just love that.

That's so beautiful. It's so beautiful, right? I mean. The atheist and the monk or whatever, like, he really loves his brother. Everybody loves Alyosha. And what he's saying, and this is why this whole thing is Dostoevsky's answer, in a sense. There's more.

This whole book is an answer. Like, there are answers all throughout that none of them individually will deal with the whole argument. But this is part of his point. And I'll come to that here in just a second. But what's going on here is, I want to call back to a conversation that the Elder Zosima has with Madame Kokhlikov. Madame Kokhlikov is talking to Elder Zosima and she says,

I really want to know for sure that God exists. And she says, will you prove it to me? And the Elder Zosima says, it can't be proven. He says, you can never prove this and by the way like i believe that wholeheartedly like wholeheartedly you can't prove that god is real and that christianity is true and by the way like i i know tons of people like the church if they were listening to this they would freak out i've had people freak out on me for that yeah and i don't know what to tell them other than like i've had people be very angry with me on that. I just, I think you're being intellectually dishonest. If you think you can prove without any possible doubt. Without, is that, is that an important qualifier? That's what I mean. Okay. Prove means you can respond to possibly be wrong. Okay. I think you could have good arguments. I do believe that. I think

you could have good reasons. I, I believe there are really good reasons for believing Christianity. Yeah. I believe, I believe that the reasons are better than believing anything else. Right, right. But I don't believe you can prove it. At the end of the day, when we go into the darkness as we face death, we don't know with 100% certainty. Everybody wants 100% certainty, and that's one thing that you don't ever get in this world.

And whatever 100% certainty you have is wishful thinking, I think. And people don't like that, but that's what I think Zosima is saying to her and is what I think Dostoevsky believes. Doesn't he say, how do you know God exists? Like, go love one another? Exactly. So here's what he says right after that. He says, you can't prove it.

And he says, but you can become convinced. Yes. And she says, how can I become convinced? I just listen to students argue about this, and they miss it. Because what Zosima says is he says, by act of love, he says, go and love people actively. He says, and then you will be certain. Yes, yes, yes.

You will be so sure. And what I love about this, all my students were like, students are like, oh, that's stupid. That's not an argument, blah, blah, blah. It's not an argument. What he's saying is, and this is one of those pure existential things. Dostoevsky is considered an existentialist. It's an unfair descriptor because he predates the existentialist.

He follows in the Pascal Kierkegaard basically tradition essentially. He's a huge fan of Kierkegaard. And those guys all held to the view that you can't know for certain. Can you give a 20-second definition of existentialism? Oh, goodness. It's really difficult especially because the way it's being applied is different. Yeah. The word is used in 10 different ways.

So the simplest definition is this. But I'm going to give you the secular version of existentialism because religious existentialism is much different from secular existentialism. So to whatever degree Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard are existentialists, they don't fit the secular definition because they believe in God. The existentialist essentially believes, they believe the nihilist assertion that we live in a world without values, that the cold, hard world of reality is meaningless. And that's the truth. However, there's a contradiction that

lives in the human race. And that is that in consciousness, we have the conviction that things matter, even though they don't. And so essentially what the existentialist does is the existentialist says there isn't any objective reality of truth. But what that means is we are free. If there's no objective reality, then we're totally free. Because objective reality constrains us but if we don't have that reality then what we should do is instead of like the nihilist killing ourselves and being totally depressed we should recognize that it frees us to do whatever we want and so existentialism is about choice so the the only thing the existentialist the only

value they have is you need to make a choice it doesn't matter what choice it is embrace it and that has value because you have made it that value like you as an individual impart value well that sounds very modern that sounds very like today for sure i will choose who i want to be my identity or whatever and existentialism is 100% the backdrop against anything any philosophy like any assertion you hear today about like people asserting that they are creating their own sense of value or whatever is all like it all grows out of existence okay now that ties into kierkegaard and dostoevsky in a very loose way but the existentialists who the main ones would

like the main guy is sart writing in the early 20th century um jean-paul sart um french philosopher uh he would have been an atheist existentialist albert camus also is kind of the second guy they put in there although camus didn't like the term existentialist he mostly was okay um but they were heavily inspired oh the forerunner to existentialism would be nietzsche right from? Okay, yeah, yeah. Late 1800s, early 1900s. But the people look at Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as two of the forerunners, even though they're religious. And in my mind, this is somewhat of a misconception, because they're not saying what they say,

unlike the secular existentialists who believe that, like, they're making a metaphysical claim, meaning like a reality claim, right? Like, there is no value in life, but we do have choice, and we're going to choose to embrace. Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard are making more of an epistemological claim, having to do with what you know or what you can know. Because they don't seem, I don't know much about Kierke kirkegaard but dostoevsky doesn't seem too into free will or at least well it's really complicated yeah yeah yeah no he's so so essentially the way i would look at kind of just define kirkegaard or dostoevsky in this is kind of what i was just saying you can't know for certain okay but you have to make a choice right so for them it's like you have to make a choice you can't just sit them, it's like, you have to make a choice. You can't just sit there and say, I'm going to remain.

That's different than saying there is absolute free will. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's like you, you have to make a choice.

And what, what Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are saying essentially is we are making the choice to believe, to believe in Christ. And, and that, I, you know,

they would, you know, Kierkegaard especially would say that there isn't – well, they both would say you can't prove it. I don't know what they would say in terms of whether or not it's more rational. I think they probably would say it's more rational to believe. But for them, everything is about making the choice of faith. That's the big thing. So they are predecessors to the existentialists really.

But they – and existentialists really like the terms and the categories that they have. But they don't really have the same view. But, oh, shoot, what got us on that? Oh, act of love. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that is a choice. That's a really raw, simple choice.

Yes. So here's the thing. That is a choice. That's a really raw, simple choice. Yes. So here's the thing. What Zosima does, which is so interesting, is unlike philosophers who say, well, here are the arguments. Zosima says, don't worry about the arguments.

The arguments aren't what gets you the knowledge of God. What gets you the knowledge of God is to love people. He says, if you go and you love people, and he means, by the way, the Christian concept of love, which is so funny, right? Culturally, everybody thinks of love as a virtue, which drives me crazy, right? Like people are giving different definitions of love. I mean, I always think about that thing that you see everywhere, that slogan, love is love. That's such a funny statement because love is not love at all, right? Like love is a very ambiguous term that can mean many different things and in one of those instances love is clearly not

a virtue and that is romantic love i'm not against romantic love i don't think it's bad in and of itself but it can be bad because romantic love can be very self-serving it can be very self-serving and can be used to justify so many obviously bad things. Stalking is always, well, not always, but stalking is often justified by romantic love. I had a youth kid once. Affairs. Yeah, affairs. I mean, abandoning your family.

I mean, I still remember I was a youth pastor and this girl came up to me in youth group one day and she goes, Tom, I go, yeah. She goes, you see that boy sitting in the back of the classroom? I said, yeah. Or in the back of the youth room. I go, yeah. She goes, he can't be here. And I go, why is that? And she said, I have a restraining order against him.

He had been stalking her. This was in high school. So I go and I take him outside and I say, dude, you're going to have to, like, I take him outside and I go, hey, can I talk to you? He goes, yeah, yeah. He's like very like, yeah, kind of tough. Like, you know, what do you want? what do you want to talk about you beat the crap out of him and well what i what i said was i said you're gonna have to leave and he goes why

and i told him and he immediately falls to his knees and cries but i can't leave her i have to be around her i you don't understand i love her and i'm like dude so why anybody would look at that and say that's a virtue i don't understand but it's all what it is is it's the fallacy of equivocation there's christian love which is not that christian love the way that jesus teaches it right that this this notion right greek agape lat caritas, which is where we get the word charity. It's sacrifice of your own interests and well-being for the sake of another, independent of what that person has to offer you. Yeah.

You can, like, this is why Jesus illustrates it by saying, love your enemies. Right, right, right. Right? You're supposed to have this thing for people that you don't even like. Yeah. That's the virtue. So Zosima, when he says act of love, that's what he means. He says, go out and love the unlovable, go out and sacrifice your wellbeing for other people. And he goes, and then it will settle

in your heart as assuredly as anything that God is real and that he's loving you through all of it. And here's the thing, this is where it's existentialist, real and that he's loving you through all of it. And here's the thing. This is where it's existentialist because existentialist is an experiential philosophy. I can tell somebody that and if they don't experience it, then it has no power. What I can say is why that had such power for me is that's been my experience. When I choose myself and when I choose to kind of as, was it Augustine who described sin as turning inward or something like that? When I turn inward and go inside my house and don't, like, don't, like, I'm looking out for my own concerns and needs, I get pretty miserable. But when I sit there and say,

somebody needs me, and I'm going to go, even though I don't want to, and I'm going to make this sacrifice for them, I always feel the power of God. I always feel the reality of God. And so somebody who doesn't feel that, they just say, well, that wasn't my experience. And Zosima would have to say that. Yeah, I don't know what else to say. So there is that. That is, okay, that makes sense.

So there is an existentialism, a kind of it in Zosima's, a Christian existentialism, okay. Absolutely. And so Zosima says that, and by the way, he goes on beautiful. His speeches are gorgeous. Oh, it's gorgeous.

What I love is right after that, Madame Kokhlikov says, oh, I've always wanted to love like that. She goes, I often dream. And it's so funny. She goes, I dream sometimes of abandoning my daughter. And she actually says that. So she does the love is love kind of. Well, she goes and she says, I want to go be a nun in a monastery and serve the poor and kiss the hands of lepers. But then she's also very self-aware.

And she goes, the only problem is, is I fear that when I see that they don't love me back, that I'm going to hate them for it. She drives me crazy. No, all throughout the book. Yeah. She's a fairly crazy character. When she opens her mouth, I just go crazy yeah this is another scene where she just it's like she just i think aliosha's there and she's just non-stop talking and no awareness of him even there what he says like just every time she's i don't know there are a lot of characters like that that rant

a lot she's a ranter right she she's like keeps just very superficial and just yeah but zosima credits her zosima's like i'm so glad you recognize that in yourself. And then he goes on, he says something for me that was super profound. He goes, active love is not love in dreams. And he says, he goes on to describe it. I should read this. Let me see if I can find it. It's.

Is this when he's talking to Koklykov? Yes, it is early. We were just on that. 57, 56. Yeah, somewhere around there. Yeah, so, yeah, 57. We were just on that. 57, 56. Yeah, somewhere around there. Yeah, so, yeah, 57. Go back to 57. This is Zosima after she says,

I worry that the moment I try to love people, then I'm going to hate them when they don't return. I mean, that's how it kind of feels. It's like, all right. This is a beautiful passage. She goes, I heard exactly the same thing a long time ago, to be sure, from a doctor. He was then an old man and unquestionably intelligent.

He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with sorrowful humor. I love mankind, he says, but I'm amazed at myself. The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular. That is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind. And it may be would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary. Like I might've died for people in general. And yet I'm incapable of living in the same room with anyone, even for two days. This I know from experience.

As soon as someone is there close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In 24 hours, I can begin to hate even the best of men. One, because he takes too long eating his dinner. Another, because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me. On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole. I love that because,

because we as a society have, that's like the, that's like Twitter justice warriors, whatever. It's like, are you, are you, you all this rhetoric of like justice and love and all this stuff.

But like when it gets down to it, are you really willing to, well, I always think about it. I feel bad. I don't want to throw my sister under the bus right now, but my sister's little hippie ish kind of you know what i mean kind of kind of character um uh whenever not every time but when i talk to her she often will mention

friends of hers and she'll assess them for me she'll go you haven't met so-and-so she's great and she'll almost invariably say she's a um an activist she say, she's an activist. She'll say, she's an activist. And I remember one distinct conversation I had with this. Our hometown burnt down a couple years ago. Wait, not Paradise? No, not Paradise. It was Phoenix, Oregon.

Oh, wow. Talent, Phoenix, Oregon, which is where I grew up, burnt down in 2020, August of 2020. Not the whole town. There were parts. Like my dad's house made it. Wow. But, of course, there are a lot of, like most people who lost homes were kind of the Hispanic communities because they lived in trailers and the trailers were really flammable, caught

up and spread all through. So you have a lot of displaced people in that area, right? So she describes how this, she mentions a friend who has this, who's an activist, who's a great person. And I said, oh, activist. I'm always like concrete. Everything for me needs to be concrete. I go, how is she an activist? What's she doing?

She goes, well. She posts three times a day. Yeah, that's actually. Obscure should say. Well, 90% of the time that is what it is. But she's like, well, she started a GoFundMe for people who've lost their homes. I'm like, oh, okay. And like a week later i

said hey how's that go fund me going she goes oh uh my friend let it go and i go what do you mean she goes well she got in a fight with the other person she started with so she just gave it to her and i'm like what's happening to the money and here's the thing i don't even know if anybody even had any sense of how to get that money to people my point is is that we live in this world like we have these grandiose virtues and we always want these grandiose virtues. We want to save everybody. So we want to love. Because as a culture, we equivocate love.

Sometimes it's about romance, but sometimes it's about genuine charity. But we go back and forth on it. But we love in the abstract and not in the concrete. Because we're terrible to the person that we're talking to. And like Chesterton said something like this. Chesterton said, it's the easiest thing in the world to love the starving Ethiopian, right? It's our Ethiopian child. It's the hardest thing in the world to love your neighbor.

Because it's like if there's an abstraction that we're not involved with, we have compassion and we think good thoughts towards that person. But actually loving an individual is so hard. I've seen this years ago. I started noticing this tension between career missionaries and short-term. It's really easy. And I go on short-term trips. I've never been a career missionary. So I, you know, but I kind of resonate with some of the career missionaries. It's easy to go to Ethiopia, Kenya for a month, even six weeks, you know, try living here for six months. And all the nostalgia starts to wear off, you know, and you start to have to like actually concretely do this work. The real world is unglamorous.

It's unsexy. It's like it's just like to really love people is hard. And we're not naturally disposed to it. And Zosima's saying that's the kind of love we have to have. And here's what's so great about the end of Grand Inquisitor. When Alyosha's kissing Ivan, he's loving him. And what Ivan's response is,

when he says, if I don't break the cup, if I decide to stick around for the sticky leaves, it's only going to be because you. Oh, wow. Right, because... That's a really powerful moment in the book. It's like, you are the only one who has loved me by the way

feodor says the same thing feodor the one who raped the the um the mentally challenged girl he and i can't remember the exact quote i don't know where it's at so he says to aliosha or no no it says about him it's third person. The narrator says that. That Alyosha is the only one that a person like him had ever loved before. Like, in other words, even Alyosha wins over Theodore's heart. And so what Zosima is essentially saying is it's not just that loving people actually is what wins them to Christ. It's also what wins us to Christ. As we're loving, that's actually what teaches us to believe. Now, there are all sorts of other answers that are given throughout the book. Tons of answers. It's like so many things are just

these little, but it all sets in here. And I mentioned this on one of those Voxer things I left with you. The final speech that the defense attorney for Dimitri gives, because Dimitri's, of course, on trial for killing his father. In that speech, he says, look, if we look at all the evidence against Dimitri, everything, then it seems to say Dimitri killed his father. the evidence against dimitri everything then it seems to say dimitri killed his father and he says but every little individual instance of evidence is defeasible meaning like we can actually show why it doesn't actually work every single one of these things can be turned on its head right and that's what i believe now this is this is my interpretation i'm not saying nobody else out there has ever brought this interpretation,

but I've never come across it. What Dostoevsky is saying in that moment is that Dimitri being on trial is essentially a metaphor for God being on trial. And the evidence, if you take all of the evidence that Ivan has brought up about pain as a sum total, yes, it's insurmountable. It looks like God is guilty. It looks like God is guilty.

It looks like God is cruel and evil. But every single individual piece of evidence can be explained. But you have to look at the individual thing. And here's the thing, when you actually look at the pain throughout the book, it's not that it's all justified, but it's not as clearly horrible as you would think. And there are many instances throughout the book of pain of children. For instance, the three brothers, they themselves suffered as children, right? And so their suffering as children is not the end of the story. Zosima, or no, maybe it's Alyosha at the end of the story um zosima or no maybe it's aliosha at the end he says he says that it's an amazing thing but a good memory even just a little good memory as a child can drown out all the bad memories i think he says that to the kids yeah to the kids like like remember this moment yeah and here's why i find this so important essentially what what he's saying is, is when you come on the other side of something, the pain that you experience in life actually

does harmonize. It actually does start to make sense. It actually does disappear against the backdrop of, of the, of the goodness that you've experienced in life. And again, that's experientially, that's true. So like seems true to me. Like I remember I had an abusive stepfather. I knew that it sucked being in his world when I was eight. He kicked me into a fire. He hit me over the head with a cast iron skillet. Some really bad stuff. I didn't

realize until I was sitting in a college class that it was abuse. I just thought I didn't like him. It never even occurred to me that it was bad. Here's the thing. Even though looking back now as a 45-year-old, like if I were to see him, I wouldn't hate him. It wouldn't even occur to me. I didn't even hate him then. Right?

Like it's like it was bad and I like looking back at it, I would go I would rather not have experienced it at the time. But as time moves, the nature of that suffering is different. And so when I think of that, it's like that's I think what he's getting at. And here's something that really struck me. Have you ever read Night by Elie Wiesel? No. Okay. It's the same thing as Rebellion.

Oh, okay. He wrote Night when he was 16, I think, right after being – not right after, but shortly after being liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yeah. And he goes, at the start, the book itself is an argument against God. Right? There's a moment in the book where he's sitting there. As a religious person or is he an atheist?

So here's the thing. He starts off as a religious person, Jewish kid. Yeah. He goes to the camps. He starts off as a religious person, Jewish kid. He goes to the camps. He experiences all this death. There comes the key moment in the book, kind of if there's a narratival structure, happens when he watches a kid get hanged. And he's sitting there, and it's a line I'll never forget.

All the people who are watching it because they're forced to watch this kid get hanged, they're crying out, where is God? Where is God? He's on the gallows, right? Doesned they're crying out where is god where is god he's on the gallows right doesn't he say and he says he's hanging there that's i've seen that line somewhere right yeah and i'm sitting there and i'm looking at that i'm like oh my gosh and when you read the book i remember i read it the second time i read i read it when i was in school but second time i read it i was so weird i was depressed and i bought the book for some random reason and read it that night. Couldn't put it down. And I was really wrestling with that question. Like what, like why would God allow this to happen? And his conclusion was there's no God. That's his conclusion. And then after I finished the book, I went back and I read two things. There was an, in my version,

there's an intro, there's an introduction. I might get this guy's name wrong. I think his name was Francois Gillot. And he was a Catholic. And he's the reason. I might have the wrong name, but I think that's what it was. He was a Nobel laureate or something like that. He is the reason the book got published. Because when Wiesel wrote it and tried to publish it when he was 18 or 19 or something, nobody was going to take a book from a kid.

And they actually, most people didn't believe that stuff. They were like, that didn't happen. And so he read it and was so moved, he pushed, he used his literary influence to get it pushed through. His name might have been Mariac. These are two names, it's been a while since I've read it, so I could be wrong. Gillo or Mariac, I'm lending two names. But in his his intro he ends it by saying

and like talking about his conversation with him he goes and I how did I respond to this to this Jewish boy who just shared this story with me he said how could I respond he said could I tell him that he reminded me of another young Jew who

also left the world too early who also hanged there before the world. And how could I tell him that that Jew hanging there on that tree reconciled the world and was the most important thing that ever happened? He goes, I couldn't tell him any of those things. He says, all I could do is weep and hold him. And so I read that and that like was this really powerful thing. But then what got me, and this just made me, it just brought me to my knees in tears. I then read the afterword, which was a speech given by Elie Wiesel when he was 70-something, when he won the Nobel Prize. And in it, I don't remember any of the speech except for the last line, or the last, like, the peroration, the very end of it.

He goes, I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Wow. And all I can think of is what Zosima and Alyosha are saying and what Lewis says, right? When Lewis says, look, when you are, like, redeemed, when you are glorified, when you stand before God, the glory of heaven is going to work backwards through your life and essentially sanctify everything

so that even the worst things you ever experience are different, right? And then, of course, he contrasts that with what he takes to be the damned. And he says, and everything that they experience will have worked backward to be part of that damnation. Glorification works backwards through your whole life. Damnation works backwards through your whole life. That's what Lewis says. I started thinking about that.

I started thinking about Wiesel. As an 18-year-old boy, he could not hold any more to God because he couldn't see how God could have done that. But by the time he was 70-something, he's like, something had changed. And his vision of that whole event was different. The whole thing had been transformed in his mind. And it went from something that God could not have allowed to something God not only could have, but used.

And that's the... And that's at the end, you have to have that life experience to have suffering and joy kind of woven together through the story. Or not joy, but like... I don't know if you have to. Yeah. But what Zosima and Alyosha are saying is, but it works that way. Like whether or not it has to. It just does.

It just does. Hmm. Well, yeah. We got to start to wrap it up here. It's almost. Hmm. Well, yeah. We got to start to wrap it up here. It's almost the longest podcast in the history. Is it really? Well, one last question then from me to you really quickly before we wrap it up. Because you said, because one of his key arguments is that nihilistic argument.

Like one of the things that Dostoevsky is very centered on, he does believe that, and this is the weird thing, if there is no God and no immortality, then everything is permissible. There is no moral reality, no objective morality, which means basically all morality is conventional and can be whatever people want it to be, and in fact just is what people want it to be.

And in fact just is the opinion of the stronger. If there is no objective morality, all morality must just be whatever the opinion of the stronger is. Right, right. And so Ivan says he embraces that, but then he doesn't. Because at the end of the book, he can't handle the guilt. And let's face it, even his argument, and this is kind of to C.S. Lewis' argument against the problem of evil,

even his argument is this is kind of to c.s lewis's argument against the problem of evil even his argument is predicated on the idea that torturing children is horribly evil and essentially what he's getting at is how can it be if everything is permissible and he's just saying ivan can't live that smerdyakov tries to and where does it lead to smerdyakov suicide right but but ivan can't even do it and it drives him insane trying to. And at the end, he confesses it all because, as Alyosha said, and this will be the last bit I'll read, and then you can,

because you said you had some thoughts with it, but this is in that passage towards the end. It's before Ivan, shoot, I gotta find it. It's before Ivan confesses, and it's during his run-in with the devil. So he has a vision of the devil talking to him. So this is starting on 634 is the chapter. And, of course, it's up in the air whether it's really the devil or whether it's a hallucination. I love the ambiguity there.

And I love that he doesn't, he lets it linger. Yeah. Is it his flesh manifest? Is it the devilness of Ivan coming out? Or is it the devil or somewhere in between? And he's like, probably like, yes. By the way, the devil gives an argument that I think is a very strong one in response to Ivan in the midst of that. Which means Ivan thinks it comes from his own head. And it's that the devil tells a parable about a guy who's

an atheist and he dies and he comes out on the other side and he's like, was wrong. God's there. And he's like, and the atheist goes, no, I refuse to believe even though I see it. And God says, okay, well, your punishment is you're going to have to walk a quadrillion miles to get to heaven. So it's like a purgatorial kind of, almost like a purgatorial hell, so to speak. And the guy says, I refuse. And he lays down, refusing to walk for a thousand years. And then Ivan says to the devil, he goes, I suppose he just laid there forever. The devil goes, no, he got bored. And after a thousand years, he got up and started walking because of course he's going to get bored. He walks and he walks the quadrillion miles. And Ivan's like, how? There's not enough time for that. He goes, time's different in this world.

And then he says something really, the key thing, he goes, Ivan says, and what happened? And the devil says, when he walked through the gates, he said, hallelujah. And he says, everything would have been worth it for even two seconds of this and what he's seconds of paradise two seconds of paradise is worth everything and this is from the devil this is from the devil of course that's because the devil is ivan's antagonist okay so he's arguing against what ivan has been believing so the devil is the adversary right so the devil is the adversary, right? So the devil isn't really about teaching. In this chapter, the devil isn't evil. He's the adversary to Ivan. I didn't pick that up.

Yeah, in other words, he's the one who's providing. He's basically, if you will, in Ivan's arguments, Ivan has taken the stand that it's not worth it. Nothing is worth the pain. And the devil goes, this guy, when he got through, he said, it's all worth it for even two seconds and i think this is the point you can't know whether it's worth it until you've seen it like people can argue all they want like can like voltaire did in candide that it's not

worth it but until you've arrived you can't know whether it's worth it you can't know until you've actually seen the end of the story and what we actually have evidence to believe it's worth it. And it's rooted in this thing that we just described. That as we get older, the tragedy in our past changes. It looks differently. And if it looks differently even in this world, what about if we actually live for eternity? It's actually an argument I had with a friend of mine who, I don't know if he became an atheist or not. He was really wrestling with it.

But I remember, as we were discussing, he kept saying, but the amount of pain, it's the amount of pain, it's too much. But here's the thing. If we are infinite beings, that is infinite in the forward, like we live forever, then all pain that we experience in this world is finite.

And all pain we experience in this world is finite. Then all pain is infinitely small, right? It has to be. It just has to be. I mean, after a billion years of living or whatever, you'll look back on the few decades where you had... Exactly. So that all sounds almost Bardian, like in a different way,

like where you can't make sense of the world until you have had this radical encounter with Jesus. You can't be argued toward that encounter. It's like it's not going to make sense until you've had that encounter. And that creates – I mean I'm not a Bardian scholar at all, but that becomes like the epistemological ends through you can – that's the only time you can understand everything. I apologize to my Bardian scholars if I'm butchering Bart,

but the 100 pages I've read. I'll tell you what. I'll take it as a compliment. I'm the biggest fan of Bart who's never read a little bit. That was me until I got convicted. I'll tell you what, I'll take it as a compliment. I'm the biggest fan of Bart who's never read a little bit of Bart in his life. That was me until I got convicted. So I read 120 pages of volume 4.1, which everybody says is great. Okay, the passage I want to read really quick is the last thing I'll say.

Well, until, but you had a comment to make on. So page 655, I said it was the devil's section of the next chapter. And this is when Ivan is wrestling with whether or not he's got to confess because here's the thing. Here's the spoiler. The person who killed dad was Smerdyakov. And he did it purely because Ivan told him there's no morality. He only did it.

He's the extension of. He only did it to prove that Ivan was right. And he believes he did it and here's the thing we don't have time to look at this now but I'd love to point this out later if you look back at the chapter when when Ivan and and Smirjikov talk Ivan tells him to kill dad it's really he does I need to go back it's actually super clear and the only way I can explain it is is that I thought he hinted at he actually He actually told him to. Well, no, he doesn't say the words. Yeah.

But what happened is in the chapter leading up, Smerdyakov says, here's the plan. I'm going to fake a falling fit. I'm going to fake a seizure. I will allow Dmitry to come in. Dmitry will kill the old man. But if he doesn't kill the old man, I'll go kill him. And you can signal to me this is what you want by going to Smirjkov,

to Chermashnaya. Right. And Ivan goes, what? That's stupid. He keeps saying, I don't know what you're talking about. Shut up. You're an idiot. He just keeps saying those things.

But when he leaves the next morning, he had actually told, at the end of the chapter, he tells Smirjkov, he goes, I'm not going to Chermashnia, I'm going to Moscow. And he goes, that's probably for the best. The next morning, he has an interaction with his dad. And he's really like, you can just tell he's disgusted with his dad. He gets in the carriage. Smirjakov runs up to say goodbye. And he turns to Smirjakov and he says, actually, I'm going to Chermashnia.

I did not pick that up. And then Smirjikov says, it's always, oh shoot, how does he word it? It's always enlightening talking to an intelligent man. Oh, right. And that phrase comes up later on. Exactly. And so Smirjikov takes that as his cue to kill Fedor.

And here's the thing. Later, Ivan believes that he actually was guilty that's why he's going crazy the whole way leading up because he told himself no no it wasn't me i didn't do that but if you read the end of the chapter he changes his mind doesn't go to chermoshney goes to moscow and when he arrives he actually says i'm a scoundrel that's his final thing he realizes he actually ordered dad's killing. And so when Ivan confesses that, or Ivan's wrestling with confessing that, Alyosha goes and is talking to him. And at the top of page 655, Ivan falls asleep.

No, yeah, Ivan's passed out. Alyosha's getting ready to sleep. He says, as he was falling asleep, he prayed for Mitya and Ivan. He was beginning to understand Ivan's illness, the torments of a proud decision and a deep conscience. Like Ivan has a deep conscience. He says all things are permissible, but he can't live it. God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart,

which he still did not want to submit to. Yes, it passed through Alyosha's head, which was already lying on the pillow. Yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan's testimony, but he will go and testify. Alyosha smiled gently. God will win, he thought.

He will either, meaning Ivan, will either rise into the light of truth or perish in hatred, taking revenge on himself and everyone for having served something he does not believe in. Alyosha added bitterly and again prayed for Ivan. That's right there for me. That's Ivan. He doesn't believe in what he's been saying.

He actually believes in God. He actually believes in morality and doing what's right. And he loves. He's full of active love. That's why calling him, he's an atheist. I don't know. I just, it's not satisfying. It's not accurate. In really, in a sense.

That's why I would say he wants to be. Yeah. Yes. Yes. He's trying hard. It makes the most sense to him. But deep down, he saw this moral conscience that just he can't run away from. Yeah.

And all his Christian values. He's loved for kids and he helps that peasant that, you know, he – didn't he hit him and then the guy was going to freeze to death and on the way back he's like, all right. Yeah, he goes and saves him, which is a very like – oh, the – oh, shoot. The parable of the Good Samaritan. Oh, yeah. He's on the lighted side of the road, takes him to the inn, pays for him to be taken care of, right? He's literally doing the Good Samaritan. yeah he's on the lighted side of the road takes him to the inn pays for him to be taken care of right he's literally doing living now he's doing the active love active love he's ivan's living out active love you can't dostoevsky believes it's impossible

to live this life he's and by the way real world people tried this uh if you've ever heard of um oh shoot lobe and oh i can't remember the other guy's name. There were two Americans who having read Nietzsche and the Nihilists, this was early 1900s? I think early 1900s, maybe late 1800s. Leopold and Loeb, two college students who decided that there was no morality because there's no God. And so they decided they wanted to kill a kid just to prove they could, that their conscience was, they were above their consciences. So they kidnapped a boy and killed him for no reason and believe they committed the perfect crime because they have no emotion. So they're going to commit the perfect

crime and get away with it and they couldn't because their consciences were absolutely demolished and they gave themselves away because one of them went to the police station every day asking for updates on the case. He couldn't handle it. Whether it's conscience or fear or whatever, they couldn't live with it and they ended up getting caught.

It's a famous case in American history. Which, whenever I hear, whenever I think about Dostoevsky, I think about that because D dostoevsky wrote about this all the time crime and punishment which i highly recommend raskolnikov the main character is smerdyakov the only thing is he's the protagonist and he starts off sitting here saying i've got to kill somebody to prove that i'm one of the great ones to prove that i can rise above morality and he does and that's a spoiler alert but it's the first 15 pages he kills somebody yeah for no reason other than to kill is it i heard it's easier than this to read crime and punishment uh i think it's a little harder because so much of

it's in his head imagine being in smirjakov's head i don't want to necessarily say he's exactly smirjakov he's like a mix between smirjakov and ivan but he's certainly closer to smirjakov because ivan would never kill an old lady with an axe which is what he does and um he can't live with it and so you're living in his head from that point forward by the way this isn't really a spoil but the other main character in the book is a prostitute who he falls in love with. And one of the most beautiful things I've ever read is him visiting her room and reading her. And it's like the whole chapter, the story of Lazarus's resurrection.

It is one of the most beautiful things. Really? It's unbelievable. But that book is like, it's wrestling with this same thing. Dostoevsky is convinced if you're gonna be an atheist, that's the road you have to go down. You have to go down that road.

That sounds similar to Alyosha with Grishenko and Ritika? Ritikan. Or Rikitan. Rikitan. He was trying to get Alyosha to sleep with her and said,

he gives her an onion or however you want to. Yeah. Oh gosh, I love that scene. Yeah, I've really got, my family's probably waiting for me. Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. No, so you're asking about the morale so that i don't know just

in and i this is me armchair philosopher thinking out loud but the whole like if there is no god there is no morality because there's morality therefore there's god i i just i don't know i maybe that's true it just it hasn't been as compelling to me because of just because of the idea of like communal morality being kind of a very real thing embedded in one's conscious. And the only parallel I can give is like languages. Like I, you know, I learned language. I wasn't born speaking English. It's not part of my conscious. But because of my communal environment, I English is so embedded in me that I can't not understand English, no matter how hard it's so part of me. But it's a purely it's purely a social construct. It just happened through my communal environment. And could morality be formed through a similar cultural phenomenon to where you don't need an actual higher authority beyond communities establishing morality.

That's just not just arbitrary from individual to individual. It's just so embedded in the communal environment. Or even like if you go to like, I don't know, places in the jungle in Brazil or whatever. I don't know if you read like, what's that? Oh, I don't know. Like, you know, where the morality in different communities is so far. Like, yeah, like revenge killing is just like, no, nobody even thinks about or revenge rape or whatever. Like, you know, some places stealing one's wife is horrible.

Another one, it might be justified on some grounds. Yeah, I don't know. So I just like if I was an atheist, I feel like I wouldn't be that impressed with that argument. But am I missing maybe? So here's why I think the argument is very compelling and why Dostoevsky was with it. The nihilist would agree with everything you've said. No, yeah. There are communal moralities for sure.

So it's not that the argument says there's no possible kind of morality. What it's saying is essentially is this. If there's no God, then all morality is convention. And the convention is established by the stronger. And here's the thing. There are two things because it's – and that seems – to me that seems obviously true. So it kind of grants everything I'm saying. Yeah, yeah.

So it grants all of that. And yet – so in one hand, you can embrace it, which is think, what Nietzsche, the nihilists all do. They're like, no, we embrace that. We just are saying the actual conventions themselves are just conventions, which means you don't have to do them. In fact, the only thing that should motivate you to do them, presumably, would be the fear of being put to death for not for violating them or being ostracized for violating them. And so that's where all the fear is. And who is going to put you to death or ostracize you? It's the strong.

Because morality is determined by the strong. And here's the funny thing, though, is that seems like the opposite of our sense of morality. But that's the reality. And also it means that your morality could literally be the exact opposite. Like if the strong say, let's round up people and just kill them indiscriminately, then that's going to be the morality. And this, of course, gets into the big critique of like, of basically, you know, cultural relativism, which is that we all sense that there are cultures that are bad, like objectively

bad. Now that could just be like a misconception. That could be like something that we've just desire in our minds as long as we realize that like we just need to try to speak properly about it so i i think about uh i listened to an episode of the podcast stuff you should know i don't know if you've ever yeah and the two guys was so fascinating they were about to do a podcast on um the inca and they were going to talk about human sacrifice because, of course, the Inca practiced human sacrifice. And one of the hosts gave kind of a disclaimer at the start saying,

listen, we're cultural relativists, which means we're not going to judge these people for committing child sacrifice. And then his partner goes, actually, I'm not a cultural relativist anymore. And the guy said, what? And he goes, yeah. And he goes, why?

Which I can't believe they didn't talk about this before the show, right? and he goes i yeah and he goes why and which i can't believe they didn't talk about this before the show right but he goes well he says a couple of weeks ago we talked about alan turing on the podcast you know the the guy who uh created the enigma machine and okay and uh who invented the computer right have you heard of alan turing i barely i mean so alan turing uh they made a movie about it the imitation game i think he cracked the nazi code with the Enigma machine. He didn't invent the Enigma machine, sorry. He cracked the code of the Enigma machine, which is what the Nazis used,

which enabled the Allies to read the code during World War II and anticipate what the Nazis were going to do. He also is like one of the key contributors to the invention of the first computers, right? He ends up, it turns out he's gay, and he ends up being arrested a few times for soliciting male prostitutes. And he gets punished by being chemically castrated. And then he kills himself, probably very much linked to that chemical castration.

So people really look at his story as like a great injustice, like perpetrated by the British. This guy was key in winning World War II, chemical castration so people really look at his story as like a great injustice yeah like perpetrated by the british this guy was key in winning world war ii and we repay him by by doing this thing well they talked about him a couple weeks before and somebody wrote in and said look we agree with you about your outrage at that this happened Turing. But you can't judge the British because it was their culture. In their culture, it was bad to be gay. And so you can't judge them because that was what their culture determined was the right punishment for being homosexual.

To which he goes, nope, it's always wrong to chemically castrate somebody. He's waiting in the podcast? Yes, that's what he says. So he comes around. He comes all around. He says it's always wrong. And the reason he wants to say that is because cultures do judge other cultures.

And we have this sentiment that we have to. Like what the Nazis did is not bad. We may not like it. And so we can justify destroying Nazi culture because we don't like it. But we say it's actually bad. And the nihilist says you can't say it's bad unless there is an arbiter above culture and there is no arbiter above culture

if in a naturalistic society so you can't say according i mean because you could you just nobody does it practically i'd say well if the community standards are established then divide then to be part of that community and to violate those community standards is – the ultimate morality is the community standards. And so in that case, what you could say is you could say we don't like that standard that the Nazis had. But you can't say it's wrong. We can't say it's – we can, but it's only wrong based on our conviction. Right, right, right, right. And the only reason, by the way, it's not upheld is because we beat them.

If they beat us, that would now be the standard. And then that would be what's right. So at the very least, it's a very inconsistent and chaotic kind of way of even understanding morality. But that's what's required if morality is conventional. And so the only way to have a truly objective morality is for something above culture and humanity. So now you can embrace that. People do. They just often don't know what they're saying.

And that's what Dostoevsky is saying. And it's inconsistent. It's – yeah. Yeah. Or even within – I mean when we talk about culture, we could talk about various cultures within a larger culture. So like you could talk like American culture and you know for a and what if a for instance you have a more a more progressive person critiquing a more conservative fundamentals person and what if you say well that's their culture that's a a hard time defining culture yeah exactly like well no but that's part of the fundamentalist

way of thinking that women are subordinate to men or whatever and you can just see somebody just their mind go crazy you know it's like president obama twice ran on a platform of being against gay marriage both in 08 and in 2012 he believed he by all assertions said shouldn't exist men shouldn't marry men he says i define marriages between president obama oh yeah people forget people forget this in 08 california held a public a popular referendum on whether or not to legalize gay marriage in 2008 it failed 60 to 40 california yeah 60 to 40 so all this to say i only bring this up because 08 american culture is not 2021 american culture so So you just have this problem of what even constitutes a culture, right? Yeah. You know, so it's a weird thing.

Hey, thanks for coming into my basement and recording The Longest Theology in the Rock. So I've almost done the thousand episodes. So I think, I don't know, this might be 940 or whatever it is. So you hold the record for the longest podcast episode, Tom Velasco. Thanks for giving us a tour of this book. I mean, I slugged my way through it. It only took me like five weeks to get through it. I'm a slow reader.

Again, parts were, I mean, just fascinating. Other parts were a little hard. But yeah, thanks for turning me on to it. Thanks, too, for Brian Zahn for solidifying the... He's read it four times, he said. He's the second most I've heard of somebody reading it. I kind of want to read it again, man it was a chore I mean it's a big I would

recommend you try before you read it again read Crime and Punishment read The Idiot also delve into Tolstoy I love Tolstoy very different much easier to read Tolstoy is like a breath of fresh air if you're into these Russian writers I love them they're the best alright thanks for coming on man thank you man that was awesome you