Within Reason - #22 Bishop Robert Barron - Seeking Meaning, Finding God?

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

Bishop Robert Barron is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. His website, WordOnFire.org, reaches millions of people each year, and he is one of the world’s most followed Catholics on social media. Bishop Barron joins host Alex O'Connor to discuss the "crisis of meaning" we might be living through, the reducibility of purpose to evolutionary drives, the conditions for salvation on Christianity, and whether God can be accurately described as analogous to a tyrannical dictator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor, and I'm excited to share with you this new project that I've been working on for quite some time now. Within Reason is a new weekly podcast that's going to go on this channel dedicated to having long-form conversations with interesting guests. Now, you might say, Alex, you already have a podcast, the Cosmic Sceptic podcast, and you'd be right, but that podcast has been incredibly sporadic. There's only been 21 episodes ever produced over some four years or so of doing it. It's just been as and when I could find guests and be bothered to make a long form episode. Within Reason is essentially a rebranding of that Cosmic Skeptic podcast, which means that if you're already subscribed to the Cosmic Skeptic

podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and the like, then you'll already be subscribed to Within Reason. You'll notice that the podcast art and the name will simply change. If you're not, however, then please do go over to your podcast platform of choice and subscribe for the audio versions of these podcasts. So because this is a rebrand, technically this is episode 22 of the podcast, but it's the first one under this new brand and so I'm excited to share it with you and I look forward to producing weekly episodes that hopefully will bring you some interest and enjoyment. My guest today is Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron is the founder of the Catholic ministerial organisation Word on Fire and one of the most

recognisable faces in the discussions around theism and specifically Catholicism. I debated Bishop Barron a number of years ago on the existence of God, something that was positively received and we thought it would be a good idea to sit down again. this time to talk about meaning. And so in this episode you can expect to hear us talk about whether we find ourselves in a crisis of meaning and if so, why that might be the case, whether the search for meaning can be reducible

to evolutionary drives to survive, the conditions for salvation are people like Jeffrey Dahmer in heaven and also a conversation about whether God can be described as a celestial dictator. Please enjoy the following conversation with Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. It's been a while since we last spoke.

We had a debate, I think, a couple of years ago on Justin Briarly's show. Right. And it seemed to be received quite well. I'm not sure what it was about that particular debate, but watching it back, I think we have a slightly different approach to the question of philosophy and religion. I noticed that when you speak, you speak quite poetically and almost motivationally about faith. I tried to be quite sort of cold and analytical in that discussion, but I'm hoping that today we'll be able to talk a little bit more on your terms and not have a debate, but a conversation this time.

And I wanted to begin by asking you about something I've noticed, especially on the online space and amongst young people, which is an increase in the popularity of so-called self-help movement. There'll be all kinds of YouTubers and books that are sold, but also in the intellectual space, people like Jordan Peterson, a lot of their popularity is driven by the sense of meaning that they're seen to reinvigorate people's lives with. And I think the most astonishing thing about this is the demand for that kind of material. It says to me that we might be living through something like a crisis of meaning. And I wondered if you shared that opinion, and if so, what you think is causing it. Yeah, I do share that opinion. We're in such a culture of self-invention. You know, the priorities given to the ego to kind of invent its own values and even to invent itself.

And the roots of that go back, I mean, go to Nietzsche, come up through Sard and into Fouca. Cole and people like that, which has now become the default position of most young people in the West, I would say that we invent ourselves, we invent our own values. And I think if you want to mention something like Peterson, he's appealing to, I'd call them objective values. And a meaningful life is one that's lived in some kind of purposive relationship to a value, I would say. That when you discover you intuit a value, whether that's epistemic or aesthetic or moral,

and then you order your life according to that value, you're living meaningfully. To me, it's an illusion to think you can invent your own purpose. You can invent your own meaning. I think you discover them. And those are the best moments in life. And they're recorded in some of the great literature of the world, those moments when an aesthetic value appears. A moral value makes a demand on us. Or an epistemic value appears.

And we say, yeah, that's the true. and I need to give myself to it. I think that's what makes life meaningful. And the crisis is that there's a great doubt about the validity and objectivity of those values. Subjectivity can be very attractive, like, well, I make it up as I go along, but it's in the end not attractive.

In the end, it's spiritually debilitating. And I do think that's why people like Peterson and others are so appealing, especially to young men, because they're appealing in a kind of tough spiritual director way, way, a tough guru way, to those objective values. You said that the idea of inventing your own meaning, inventing your own purpose is a vacuous one. I think I tend to agree with you, but I wonder if you'd be able to spell out for our audience

why you think that's the case. It's one of the most common views that we hear in response to people throwing off religion. If you become an atheist, one of the problems you run into is true or not the claim is made that without some kind of religious grounding, you can't have any objective meaning. And rather than saying, yes, we can, a lot of people decide to say, well, we don't need objective meaning. We make it up for ourselves. What's the problem with that? Well, first of all, I would say this, that an atheist can certainly be deeply in touch with objective value, epistemic, moral, and aesthetic. And that's what would give that person's

life meaning. So I don't hold to the view that ipso facto an atheist has a meaningless life, because I think they can intuit meaning all over the place. Now, if you really press it philosophically, I would argue that those objective values are ordered hierarchically and they point finally to a ground or source of their meaning. So that's from Plato on. We have all kinds of people in the great tradition that would argue just that way. So I think the more you live in the world of objective value, it will lead you toward the source of that value, namely God.

So I think that's true. But I wouldn't contest the view that an atheist can live a meaningful life. They can intuit all these different values. The trouble with self-invention, to me, is it's living in this sort of clean, well-lighted space of my own little subjectivity. And I don't allow the objective to break through into me and to broaden my life. It's like your country Manchesterton's thing about, you know, you need to crack some holes in the skull to let in the light.

The problem is a sort of self-absorption, or it's an Augustine called it being Kervato Sincere. I'm caved in around myself. And that's what happens, I would argue, when you walk into the San Chappelle, or you see a Cézanne painting, or you grasp the truth of a mathematical formula, or you look up into the heavens, you know, or it's kind, the starry sky above and the moral law within, that when you intuit these great values, it's like it's an epiphany, it's a showing, it's a breakthrough. And that's what gives life meaning. When you say, well, I'm going to invented for myself, to me it's just, it's very tiresome and vacuous and small. It's a little, it's a small space. Augustine talked about the pusilla anima, the little soul. And the little

soul, I think, is born of that self-invention prejudice. The great soul, the magna anima, is when objective value breaks in and then I can move into a higher space. Do you think the people who say, well, I'm just going to invent my own meaning and purpose, essentially just coping with the fact that they're beginning to recognize that their world view doesn't have any grounding for objective meaning. Yeah, my guess is that when they say that they don't really mean it. They are, in fact, in touch with objective value. But they're so enamored of the value of freedom, which, by the way, is a value. I mean, personal freedom is a great moral value. But if you valorize that to

the nth degree, then you get into this problem. I think people that say, I'm inventing my values, in fact, very often are intuiting objective value if you press them on it. Because we can't finally stay in that sartrean space. Go right back to existentialism as a humanism. You know, when he said, existence precedes essence. I think that's now the default position of most people today in the West. But to me, that's just a, it's like a going nowhere position, that my freedom invents who I am. No, my freedom finds itself in relationship to great values that call it and condition it

and summon it to something higher. You know, that's when you're truly free. Yeah, I mean, I've previously compared it to the idea. Well, I think it's helpful to try and understand what meaning means, right? Yeah. The term is often used interchangeably with something like purpose. And I think what we're talking about is something like a non-derivative reason to act or reason to be. This is what purpose is. Yeah. And so the idea of having a reason to act,

if you invent your own purpose, what it seems like you're doing is inventing some kind of task to fulfill or some kind of motivation to do something for its own sake. It's like you don't actually have a real motivation to do something and that's why you do it. But the lack of any motivation causes you to create a task just for the sake of having a task to fulfill, which seems a little circular, I suppose, and we'd also be committed to the view, for instance, that if one person decides to invent their value by counting the blades of grass in their garden every day until they die, and another person decides to find their meaning and invent their purpose by raising money for Oxfam and lifting thousands of people out of

poverty, that both of those people's lives are as meaningful as each other. And that just seems wrong. Yes, and that's the Sartrean problem. And Sartre himself, I knew it. If you say the authentic life on his terms is the one in which, you know, my freedom has authentically chosen its own value. Well, Sart chose to be part of the resistance, but then how do you say the Nazi isn't authentic? The Nazi has chosen his value based upon his freedom. So how do you adjudicate those two things?

And see, I would say you have to rely not on your self-inventing freedom, but on some objective value. And I would be able to say, I think, the Nazi. Nazi is radically out of step with proper moral value and the member of the resistance was in touch with it. You can't simply appeal to the primacy of freedom and subjectivity because then you get into precisely that dilemma. But what I find Alex interesting here is it's one of Aquinas' implicit arguments for God's existence. So the famous ones based on cosmology, but there's one based upon final causality. So here you are right now in your room or your studio and you're doing the show. So the first question, well, why?

Why are you doing it? And you'd give an answer of some kind, like, well, because this is my livelihood, well, why is that your livelihood? Well, because I want to make money. Well, why do you want to make money? Well, for this end or that end? Well, why do you think those ends are important? That with any concrete moral act, the two of us are committing a moral act right now, right?

We've chosen to do something we both think is good. Well, how come? Keep asking the why question over and over and over again. You'll come finally to some uncaused cause of the will, some sumum bonum. You know, now, I'd call that God for all sorts of reasons we can get into. But let's say it's its money, success, it's fame, its power, it's whatever. But willy-nilly, everyone's got a sumum bonum. That's why the Bible would say the choice is not between theism and atheism.

It's always between right worship and false worship. What do you consider your sumum bonum? Is it the true sumum bonum? is it some false sumum bono, but everyone's got one, right? You wouldn't, Teyar de Chardin said that. You wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless you were motivated by some finally unmoved mover of your will. And see, I think that's really worth thinking about. What is it that's motivating, even the simplest moral act, like the two of us sitting down and having this conversation?

Hmm. You said it's not about, it's not between theism and atheism, but essentially choosing what it is you worship or choosing what it is. that you follow. True worship or false worship. Right. Because there has to be something, right? There has to be something motivating action. If there wasn't some fundamental purpose or reason that underlies every other reason you have to act, then those reasons wouldn't exist. They don't have any power of their own accord. The, if you're motivated to go to work so that you can make money, without the reason for making money, which might be to, you know, have a comfortable life, the reason of, I want to make money, doesn't exist anymore.

It doesn't exist just on its own accord. It relies on something more fundamental, and this entire chain must lead back to a first cause. It's interesting. It's quite like arguments for the existence of God in terms of cosmology or something, but it's about meaning. Right. It's final causality, not efficient causality.

And that's why it's hidden in Aquinas. It's not up front. Here are my five ways. But it's a hidden way. But it's actually closer in spirit to Aristotle, himself, who thought the final cause was the most important. And so if you pursue final causality all the way, you come to some version of sumum bonum, or what, you know, Paul Tillick, the religious philosopher, talked about ultimate concern, right?

Everyone has an ultimate concern. You do, everyone does. If you didn't, you wouldn't act in any way. And Tillick always said, and I followed this in my own pastoral life, the most important question to ask about any person is, what does it? that person worship? Once you know that, you'll know the rest of that person's life pretty well. It'll fall into coherence. What's your ultimate concern? And he defined religion famously as ultimate concern. So in that way, then you've got either true religion, that's Augustin Vera

religio, or you just got regular religio. You've got some form of false religion or false worship. Now, what do you make of people who say that on an atheist, picture of the universe. What we essentially are as human beings are highly evolved mammals that have slowly developed this accidental consciousness to help us to survive. And so the ultimate motivating factor behind all of our behaviors, even if it's subconscious, would be something just as simple as the drive to survive, the drive to reproduce. Because of course somebody's not likely to say this. Some people might reference their children. But on the, on the cognitive level, we might reference having some belief in a set of ideals, but we might say that this is

essentially a way that the brain tricks itself into being more likely to survive, because by having these invented ideals, it's more likely to do the work that's going to lead us to survive. And so maybe that's the fundamental value. And I wouldn't say that I wouldn't characterize it as people worshiping their survival. It would be that this is the motivating factor. And what they're actually worshiping is some invented ideal that just helps to prolong their survival. I know. I've never found that convincing. To me, that's just hopelessly reductionistic.

I mean, to take a Hamlet and say somehow I can reduce that to the survival instinct, or I can read Plato's Republic and say, well, that's finally all about the survival instinct or the divine comedy. To me, it's hopelessly reductionistic. Is something like bodily survival, basic instincts, ingredient probably? probably in everything we do. Yes, I would say, because we have bodies and the bodies have evolved from lower forms and they have all of those instincts and impulses. I wouldn't deny that for a minute. I'm not a plaintiff in that way. But I do think there's something that transcends

the merely animal dimension of our life. And it's revealed in things like Hamlet and things like our ultimate concern and our quest, not just for a particular beautiful thing, but for the source of beauty. And that's that very interesting moment. It's James Joyce in a portrait of the artist when he's, that famous scene looking out at the woman who would eventually be his wife, and he describes her in this rapturous way. And when she turns to look at him, and then he says, oh, heavenly God. And that's the move from Plato through Dante up to James Joyce and many others, that through the particular beautiful thing, I'm triggered into an awareness of the source of beauty, the beauty that I'm seeking implicitly

in every particular beautiful thing. Or, you know, when you grasp a mathematical relationship and it's so powerful to you, and the truth of it is not just the evanescent truth of that thing is in front of me right now. It's you've grasped something that's true in any possible world that's true at any place or time. That triggers an awareness of the source of truth You know, so that's how I think it works in a religious consciousness, but I go back to Plato with that intuition. it's interesting how you characterize the position as being reductionist I share your intuition that something like hamlet the idea that the production of it could be reduced to apes trying to survive seems incredible but the two things I would say in response to that is firstly this is true

of all evolutionary biology and that I might talk about some minute facet of my body like my eyelashes or something and the idea that the development of these between particular hairs on the end of an eyelid somehow serve in the great survival of species on planet Earth. It seems so absurd and disconnected. But actually, if you draw a long enough chain of reasoning as to why we ended up here, it can be explained in those terms. And also, you said a moment ago that all the behaviors that we participate in are motivated in some way, they're moral in some way and there's some kind of ultimate motivation. And you said that you would call this God or ground it in God, meaning that, you know, if I choose to read a book or if I choose to get on a

plane or go to the shop to buy some food, ultimately I'm being motivated by this religious structure. And in the same way that you say, it seems absurd that Hamlet can be reduced to evolutionary biology. I might say, well, it seems absurd that me getting up and going to the shop and telling the guy to keep the change is inflatable to something like a religious structure. But I think you would say that, although that seems a little strange upon first hearing, there is a chain there that is ultimately fully explained by religion. In the same way, maybe something like Hamlet and the immense awe that human beings feel upon looking upon their loves or upon understanding the universality of mathematics is,

rather, you know, depressingly, but perhaps just a very long offshoot of this struggle for survival. Well, let's play with it for a little bit. I mean, might you trace origins of these ideas back that way, possibly? But the experience of the idea itself in its full expression, that's where I'm balking to say, well, I'm going to sort of thereby debunk it and say, well, it's really nothing but now fill in the blank, you know, we're bodies. We come up from. the earth and we come up from these deeper, you know, animal instincts and all that. I don't deny that. But I just, I don't think you believe for a second that when you're entertaining some pretty high-level mathematics, even though the ultimate origin we could

trace even, you know, biologically backward, that in itself it's reducible to a mere concern for survival, that something's opened up there that transcends that dimension. And that, Again, that's Plato escaping from the cave, that you've moved to a higher level of consciousness. I just balk at the reductionism, because I think it mocks the truth of that experience. So bracket religion for a second, just aesthetic experiences or epistemic experiences, or really profound moral experiences. You know, when you see someone like a Maximilian Colbe, an act of extraordinary saintly heroism in the moral order, and you say, hmm, that's explicable in an evolutionary terms.

I mean, I just don't buy it. I think something has opened up that mocks that kind of reductionism. I mean, it's a strong intuition. You know what I mean, Maximilian Colby who gave his life in Auschwitz. He was not chosen by the Nazis. They chose 10 people at random to die because someone escaped from the barracks. Colby came forward because there was a man that got to his knees and said, I have a wife and children.

And so Colby came forward and said, I'm a Catholic priest, take me. And so the Nazis happily took him and then starved him to death. So he's one of the great martyr saints of the 20th century. I would submit to you, it's impossible to explain that on simply like evolutionary grounds or some variation of the survival instinct. I mean, I think it mocks the moral splendor of that act. And I think there's something that's concomitant in the epistemic. and the aesthetic order, too.

I mean, do you think it's truly impossible? I mean, I understand that it's depressing and potentially insulting, as you suggest there with the term mocking, to reduce such an act of heroism to biological drives. But I think that people interested in this line of thought are essentially trying to explain a phenomena. They're saying, we have this phenomenon of these acts. animals that decide to sacrifice themselves for each other. And somebody comes along and says, well, look, I mean, in the evolution of mankind, people

share their genes, you know? If somebody is an adult, they might sacrifice themselves easily for their children on an evolutionary ground. It's so easy to see evolutionarily why it would be that a father would sacrifice himself for his children, especially if the father isn't going to have any more kids. On a purely survival of the genes approach, it's the most straightforward thing in the world to see why that would be the case. Similarly, you can see why it might happen for a brother or a cousin, and you can expand this to strangers who share some genetics in the human race. You're stretching that so thin now.

I mean, you're beginning with something, as you say, is somewhat credible, intelligible. But now you're stretching it. To reach someone like Colby, to understand his act of self-sacrifice that way, I just don't buy it. I mean, I get it. I've read the arguments that I, but I just don't think it honors the integrity of what's happening there, you know. This is why I wanted to, why I wanted to bring this up in this way is to say that that first step of saying, well, the father sacrifices himself for his son or his children, let's say, and somebody comes along and says, I think this can be explained in terms of the survival of genes. I don't think it would be appropriate to say, well, you're, you're. you're mocking the sacrifice or you're diminishing the sacrifice or you're ruining the moral import of that sacrifice I think all they're doing is explaining it and so you know be it we may be sort of stretching things a bit

more thinly but the terminology that you used of trying to explain such a sacrifice by reference to the survival of genes being first impossible you say I think it's just impossible to describe it in these terms and second that it that it mocks the moral sacrifice if it doesn't do it in the first case of the father sacrificing himself for the children, why would it do it in the latter? Because you've stretched that string so tight at that point. I mean, I think you've not honored that a quantum has been crossed. There's something new that's emerged within human

experience that can't just be reduced to a physical impulse. It's on a spectrum, obviously, because we're, I mean, I would say both visible and invisible, both body and soul, and there's elements that we can explain through recourse to material causality, but then others, I just think a quantum has been crossed. And I always just sort of laugh, that's why I use the Hamlet example, that it just seems so ludicrous to me to say that that's understandable utterly. I mean, maybe in certain respects or in the beginning of the analysis or something, but that utterly Hamlet's explicable in terms of evolutionary principles strikes me as ludicrous. and the same with high moral acts like the Colby Act or you know in any of the three basic orders

yeah i mean i can see why you think it would be stretching an explanation thin but i mean as you say you're familiar with i mean there's a wealth of literature and a wealth of generally scientists i think are of this of this view uh when you hear people talking about reducing morality to evolutionary drives It's often a scientist rather than a philosopher who's talking about it. But this is a view that's held, and it's a view that's quite popular, certainly among secular scientists and philosophers. I was just surprised to hear you so flatly describe it as impossible. No, I didn't say impossible. I said the beginnings of the analysis might participate at that level, but I think a quantum is crossed at some point where that becomes ludicrously inadequate as an explanation.

So I don't think you believe that. Whenever I talk to people or dialogue with people who are defending that position, I don't honestly think you believe that. That Hamlet or Maxman Colby or the Sistine Sealing is utterly explicable in terms of evolutionary impulses. I don't think you believe that because to me that's such a ludicrous position to hold. And it's animated, let's be honest, by a scientism. It's not animated by like pure objective science.

It's by the assumption that reality must be reducible to the physical. So I'm going to make this finally ludicrous claim that these very high spiritual and moral values are purely explicable in terms of their evolutionary foundations. I think it's motivated by a philosophical prejudice much more than objective science. I mean, certainly I would hesitate to recommend that people assume that a, let's say a materialistic explanation ought always be favored. There's this idea which I think is what you're describing as scientism here that should there be a materialistic hypothesis, there should be some kind of bias or some kind of automatic leaning towards that explanation over a non-material

explanation. I don't think we should do that. I think that explaining human action in terms of an ultimate sense of spirituality and belief in God is a powerful explanation. I also do think that explaining human action in terms of an evolutionary drive. So, for example, I've talked in a few podcasts now about this idea of terror management theory, which I don't know if you've come across, but it's the idea that human beings are ultimately motivated by a fear of their own death, at the same time. as a recognition of its own inevitable, of the inevitability of their death. And so human beings are unique in the sense that all animals are going to die, but human beings seem unique

in having a recognition of that mortality. And so when we ask, why is it that only human beings produce things like Hamlet? It may be because engaging in art like this is a way to escape death in a, in the sense of having something of yourself that outlasts your physical death. Now, of course, this is a scientific hypothesis about how the brain works. It might be true. It might be false. But it seems at least plausible to me. It doesn't seem ludicrous and totally out of the question to suggest that the reason why people produce works like Hamlet.

And indeed, the reason why people engage in spiritual affairs like religion, the reason why people produce music. And the reason why if somebody finds out they're about to die, it might motivate them to finish that magnum. Yeah, but that's, again, so reductionistic, because if that's all Shakespeare was doing. All he was concerned about was making sure that his reputation endures over the ages. I mean, maybe somewhere in his consciousness he was thinking about that. But I think what he was motivated by, if he asked me, is the sheer beauty and truth that he intuited and he wanted artistically to express in this sublime manner. I mean, I don't think he was in his room thinking, oh no, I got to make sure my reputation.

I mean, who cares finally? If I'm going to die like an animal going to the ground, I don't care if anyone remembers me. Why would I? So to me, that's so implausible. I think Shakespeare was a genius who, like all geniuses, intuitive values at a very high level and wanted to express that because it was lovely so to do. You know, and I'm just balking at this, finally, to me, very scientific prejudice that says, oh, no, no, no, that can't be right. I don't think Shakespeare worried that much about his stupid reputation.

Do you, honestly? Well, to be clear, I don't think that, I don't think that, I don't, think that the alternative that you're providing here is silly or should be thrown out. I'm just presenting an alternative here. And of course, Shakespeare isn't consciously thinking of these things. This is what terror management theory is all about, is that we essentially have a subconscious drive towards doing things which allow us to outlive ourselves. It's why human beings have an obsession with doing things that are larger than themselves because of the fact that, as you say, if you know you're just an animal and you're just going to die, you know, you're just going to

die. Yeah, who cares? You know, life becomes purposeless and nihilistic, but purposelessness and nihilism are very uncomfortable positions to hold, and that's why human beings invent these ways to try to outlive themselves because of the fact that they recognize that they're going to die one day and that will be, and that will be the end of it. I mean, for example, I don't buy it, because you're such a smart guy and that you've had that experience of, of intuiting great value. You know what that's like. What a sublime moment that is. And it's something beyond simply physical survival or beyond physical preoccupations and appeal to unconscious is all you want. But you know what that's like when you've grasped a truth or something beautiful or splendid or

transcendently good. It's more than just the body going on there. So I'm trying to speak out of, I think the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition and resisting a materialistic reductionism. You know what reminds me of Alex very much is Hobbesian political philosophy versus Aristotelian. So Hobbes is one of the masters of this approach. Human beings are just motivated by fear of violent death. And so all the things that we invent

about the moral purpose of government and what makes a state just, ah, forget it. All states are there is to protect us from each other. protect us from each other, you know, that we're kind of, we're animals toward each other, so life is nasty, brutish, and short, and so we need the Leviathan state to come in and organize things. And Hobbs felt he was there by producing a political science, as opposed to all this airy-fairy political philosophy that came before him. But I'm with Aristotle. You know,

I'm against that sort of materialistic reductionism. There's something splendid about politics, I think. There's something of great moral value about it that Aristotle and Aquinas and all those great figures saw. And Hobbes, I think, was a father in many ways of the position that you're, not that you're defending it yourself personally, but you're presenting it. And I just feel the need to stand to thwart that position. I wonder what you think. Suppose Shakespeare were to find out, you know, he's writing his latest play, and he finds out secretly that, you know, two years after he dies, just after he dies, the entire world is going to be destroyed by some meteorite. or something, every single human being is just going to die.

Do you think this would have the effect of motivating him to write as much as he can? Or do you think this would have the effect of saying, well, then there's no point? Because to me, I don't know about Shakespeare, but for many people, I think that, you know, if I found out that the world was going to end in a week or just after I die or something, my motivation to produce these podcasts would completely collapse because I would feel like, you know, there's intuitively no point in doing so. But that says to me that at least part of the motivation for what I'm doing here is that there's something that is going to outlast me.

And I'm not just doing it for its own sake of being intrinsically worthwhile. But because I know that if it were the case, that it was all going to come to nothing very shortly, I wouldn't be as motivated. That says to me that it does have perhaps more to do with what I'm suggesting than with what you're suggesting. Well, but it is all going to come to an end. I mean, whether it's tomorrow or next week or in billions of years, it will.

I mean, Michelangeles-David will be nothing. Shakespeare's Hamlet will disappear. Nothing will last forever. Of course, I know that. Every artist and every philosopher knows that. In a way, who cares? I think you do it because it's good so to do. And in fact, it links you to a transcendent realm.

So I would flip it around, that you discover the transcendent precisely through these breakthroughs. these epiphanies. There's Joyce again, right? His job as a writer was to was to report epiphanies, he said, beautiful. Even though he repudiated the church, which he did, but he was inescapably Catholic, James Joyce, because that's a deeply Catholic instinct. He wanted to be a priest for a time, but he became indeed a priest, but of a literary order, because he now was a minister of epiphanies, and his artistry was meant to display them, you know. And when you do this, You do that, I would say, authentically, you're in touch with a transcendent value that will transcend the world, that does indeed exist at a higher level than the world.

So in a way, who cares how long the world survives or not? You do it because it's splendid so to do. That's why Colby gave up his life for someone he barely knew, barely knew this man, but gave his life to him for him. I think those are what values are like, and that's where meaning comes from. I want to shift gears based on something that we were just to just to. talking about, which is death and death's inevitability. Is it possible for a Christian who believes that there is life after death to see human death as a tragedy? Well, not ultimately. I mean,

I think we can see as a tragedy within the framework of this world, but we hold to a divine comedy. I mean, we'd hold to an ultimate purpose to the world and to creation. So death, you know, we would tend to intuit as a doorway to a higher type of consciousness, a higher realm of experience. So it depends on how you define tragedy, I suppose, not in the ultimate sense. I mean, we hold to a sort of comic view of the world. It seems difficult to be rationally upset the passing of somebody who lives a good life and, you know, you're pretty convinced is going to go to heaven. It seems difficult to, I mean, obviously it makes sense to be upset, but do you think

there's an irrationality in being upset over it in the knowledge that such people aren't really gone and are in a better place where you'll be reunited with them eventually. Well, no, but there's upset and there's upset. I mean, you could be upset in the immediacy and your psychological pain in losing someone you love. Of course, you're upset. And then there's upset in the ultimate sort of cosmic sense. And I would hope that a believing Christian would avoid that sort of desperate view. But it doesn't mean we're not upset at the immediacy of the loss.

to someone we love. Is life after death here the key to meaning, given that we were talking a moment ago about the fact that if we're just animals and everything's going to come to an end, then what's the point? Do you think that without this afterlife, like if somebody was a theist who believed in an objective creator, an objective value, let's say, but it all comes to an end and we take an annihilationist view of everybody, everyone just ceases to exist, would that be a meaningless worldview as well? Not completely or utterly. I think you can still find something like meaning as you

intuit values around you. Let's say you're an atheist and you say there is no God, there's no life after death, but indeed I have intuited epistemic and moral and aesthetic value. Fine. I think, and if you have a purposive relationship to those values, then you have a meaningful life. Now, again, there's meaningful and there's meaningful. I'd say that's meaningful small m. Meaningful capital M would be those values speak of a higher. They're like an opening of a window to a higher, an eternal and permanent value. And it's in purposive relationship to that value that life has ultimate meaning. And so is this what religion can offer somebody with regards to meaning and fulfillment and purpose that atheism cannot?

Yeah. So imagine that you're speaking to somebody who, agrees with you that an atheistic world view can't ground objective meaning and that subjective meaning doesn't cut it, it doesn't have the force that we actually value in meaning. And they agree that what we essentially need in order to ground our objective meaning is belief in some form of God or belief in some kind of ultimate truth, but they just don't. And they try, but they can't. for such people, what are they to do when they don't disagree that meaning should be grounded in God, but they just can't seem to find God and therefore leave what they believe to be a meaningless life?

It depends on the person and depends on their situation in life. What I mean there is you could argue with someone. See, because to me, the position you're describing is like someone who would say there's a radically contingent world, but there's no ground of contingency. I think that's an incoherent position. So if you hold that, I would try to argue you out of it. In the same way to say there are really objective values, but there's no transcendent ground or explanation for them,

is an incoherent position, I would say. And I use everyone from Plato through contemporary times to try to show that. But more often than not, you don't argue people into it. You accompany them. I've used Pope Francis' language. You accompany people, and you help them to see how these values do, in fact, open on to a higher ground. Usually it's, we would say, saints who are living in and out of that higher space, that best witness to it.

And so it's the holiness of people around them that shows them the ground of ultimate meaning and truth. So to some degree it's arguing, but I think to a large extent it's showing. It's an accompaniment by a saint. I don't mean just a canonized saint, I mean by a holy person. That means someone who's whole or more integrated that often opens the window. I'd say too, as a Catholic, you know, that's the point of liturgy. The liturgy has a rational dimension to it.

It's filled with words and so on. But a lot of the liturgy is non-rational. It's sense experience. It's smoke and its colors and its lights and its gesture. gesture. It's like a dance, as Thomas Merton said, like a ballet. It's with certain prescribed movements and gestures. Well, I mean, it's all up and down the tradition. People who were moved by the liturgy to suddenly the window opens, the door opens, or the, use the metaphor, or change the metaphor, the floor opens and you go down to a deeper place. That can happen

through the aesthetics of the liturgy. It can happen through the witness of a saint. It can happen through rational argument. So I'd use any and all of those, depending on the person. I want to talk about Christianity in particular, because we've spoken about meaning and about theism broadly, but the Christian story has some peculiarities, and I wonder if you could summarize what you think the central message of Christianity is, as opposed to other world religions. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.

And the significance of this is that. Is it related to life after death? Is it related to forgiveness? Is it related to God being privy to the human condition? Yes. All that. I would say another shorthand, St. Paul used it, Jesus Curios, Jesus is Lord. It's another way of stating the essence of Christianity.

But I'll stay with the first one, the resurrection, which is the Ewangelion, right? That's the good news, the glad tidings. that God, who journeyed all the way down to the very bottom of the human condition, entering into absolutely everything that terrifies us. You mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier. He had a good little piece on the cross where he said that. You look at the cross of Jesus. You see physical suffering at its limit.

You see death itself. You see humiliation. You see the abandonment of someone by his friends. you see betrayal, you see institutional injustice, every little thing that terrifies us about being human is on vivid display on the cross. And Paul says that's the one thing I'm preaching. I'm going to show you this. And it horrified people in the ancient world. It horrified them, the cross. To see a cross was horrific. But Christians held it up. Now why? Because in the resurrection they saw that the love of God, having journeyed all the way into all the

of that is more powerful than all of that. It can bear us despite all of that. And therefore, it represents a victory. The Church fathers talked about Christa's victor, Christ the victor. Well, over what? Over all of that, everything that terrifies us. God's love is more powerful. So there's Paul. I'm certain that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor height, nor death, nor any other power could separate us from God. God's love. And he knows that because we killed God, and God returned to us in forgiving love. Boom. Talk about the door opening up. That's the door that opens up. Grace call it, Revelation, call it. But it's the moment when the supreme manifestation of the divine love that went all the way

down. I think that's the essence of Christianity. That's when they said good news. That's what they meant. And this, of course, is the prerequisite for human beings being sinful, creatures who sinned against God, allowing, well, absolving themselves and finding forgiveness, it seems like there's a condition here, though, of course. In the Christian story, God becomes man and is crucified and through this saves us from our sin, but it's conditional upon something like accepting this gift, something like... Well, sure. I mean, you can lead a horse to water. I mean, if God can open up the window and manifest his love in this utter way, And there's an objectivity there for sure. But then I can at the limit say, I still don't care. I'd rather live inside. I'd rather live on my own terms. I'd rather not have on any of that. So sure, and there's the ground, if you want, of the Christian doctrine of hell, that it's still possible to reject even that acrobatic manifestation of the divine love. I can still say, I don't want it. So that's what that would mean. So sure, that's still a possible.

possibility. Well, what I wanted to ask is what are the conditions upon which a person can accept this gift? I mean, suppose somebody commits some terrible sins in their lives and they've wronged lots of people. Is it enough to genuinely repent to God in the privacy of your own mind? Must you go on a campaign of trying to write the wrongs that you've done where you can? I mean, if you thief from somebody and you nearing the end of your life, perhaps, you pray towards God and you beg for his forgiveness and you accept the sacrifice of Jesus, is that sufficient, or do you have to seek out the person that you thief from and give them their money back first? You should. I mean, so that's a part of confession. If someone comes to me and confesses,

I want to know if that person is contrite. So are they sincere in their confession? And are they willing to make amends or reparation? Sure, it's something I'd strongly encourage them to do. But the divine offer of grace is not dependent upon that. Like until you do the last thing, you don't get any grace. Rather, it's a response to grace. It's having been grace with God's forgiveness, of course, and I want to do all I can to make up for what I've done. It's like someone in an AA doing a searching moral inventory.

And having done that work, now let me do whatever I can to make reparation. But the heart of it, though, is the manifestation of grace. It's an unmerited grace. You know, it's interesting, Alex, it's behind a lot of the doctrinal language, let's say, around the cross. Read like a high doctrinal articulation like Anselms, you know, Cordaeus Homo. But see, go behind that to a metaphor and behind the metaphor to an experience. The metaphor is something like, I've been ransomed. So in the ancient world, people are kidnapped all the time and held for ransom.

and there they were in some distant country in a hopeless situation and I'll never get home and then suddenly this person paid off my ransom. I was released, you know? Now go behind that to the experience. Their experience of Jesus crucified and risen from the dead,

it's like I've been released. It's like I've been delivered. Well, from what? From the fear, from Peterson's articulation, I've been liberated from everything that I'm terrified of because now I know that God's love is more powerful. So it was like being redeemed. Now, take the next step. I start articulating that in a high doctrinal way. Okay, so if I was redeemed, that means I was held captive by someone.

And if I was redeemed, I was bought back. Well, who paid the price and who got the... Well, sure, now you can work into Anselm's thing. But I'd go behind that to the more primordial experience of it. They experienced the risen Jesus as a liberation, salvation just means healing. I've been healed. I've been healed of every wound I've ever had. By his wounds, I've been healed, all of that. I've been straightened out. St. Paul, I've been justified, right? It's another metaphor. I've been straightened out. I was all crooked and mixed up. Now I'm straightened out. So they reach for this array of metaphors, which then later get into high doctrinal disputes. Now go to Luther in the 16th century fighting with Catholics over what does justification mean. But I'm more interested now with you and say, well,

The first Christians, they just they reach for these, some forensic, some medical, some economic metaphors to express what it was like to see the risen Christ. I think that's where it all comes from. Jeffrey Dahmer, famously near the end of his life, became a Christian, at least ostensibly, studied the gospel, saw a priest, and just very shortly after was murdered by a fellow inmate. Right. What do you make of the objection to Christianity that as long as he was sincere in his repentance, a man like Jeffrey Dahmer can end up in heaven, but a person who lives

their lives not harming a soul who doesn't find Jesus near the end of their life and dies an atheist might end up in hell? Well, first, as a Catholic, I can test that second side of the dilemma because we wouldn't put it that way. I mean, we would say that even an atheist who is sincerely following his or her conscience can be saved. So that's teaching of Vatican, too. So we wouldn't hold to that. And someone like Dahmer, you know, that's a case like, he's a very extreme case, obviously,

but that's been posed over the centuries. If, let's say if, I don't know what's going on inside of Jeffrey Dahmer's soul, but if with complete sincerity and real repentance, he opened his heart to the forgiveness of God, he received the forgiveness of God. Now, let's say Dahmer lived another 30 years, and I were a spiritual director, a confessor, I would urge him in every possible way to make reparation, you know, for what he had done. I always think of that scene in the mission. Remember Robert De Niro, who was this, you know, terrible slave trader and all this.

And finally he comes to an experience of forgiveness. But he himself demanded that he bare this terrible load all through the jungle and up and down mountains. And even his friends were saying, come on, you've done enough. And no, no, I've not done enough. And only when he knew that he had done enough, was he able to let it down. That's a good spiritual instinct. It's also reflected in the doctrine of purgatory, right? That even after we die, is there some work that needs to be done?

Yeah, 99% of us, I would say. So I guess I would deny the two, I deny one side of that dilemma. I don't think the atheist ipso facto automatically goes to hell, no. I find it sounds strange to say, but I find it quite reassuring to think of a man like Jeffrey Dahmer in heaven. I think it demonstrates the radical compassion of the figure of Jesus because if Jeffrey Dahmer can receive grace and end up in heaven, then what does that say about the rest of us? It gives me a sense of calm that no matter what I do wrong, you know, as a Christian, if I were a Christian, I could think like if that compassion really is on offer

to everybody, then it has to be on offer to someone like him, and I think it reassures, but you can understand why it might be seen as a problem. I mean, for example, if someone were to wrong me, somebody were to thief from me or mistreat me, and then they petition for God's forgiveness and God forgives them, I might say, well, look, that's not God's right, that's mine. If somebody wrongs me, then the person to whom they should be turning for forgiveness is me, and if I don't grant it, they don't get it. Why is it that God essentially seems to be able to grant forgiveness on the behalf of other people? Well, first of all, he should do that vis-a-vis you. And if I were a spiritual director, I'd tell them to do that. But I'd say this with C.S. Lewis, your countryman,

that God is the one who's offended in every sin. So God is a right to forgive anybody. Because someone sins against you, but they're also sitting against God by that very same move. So it's always God's prerogative to forgive. You know, only God's. can forgive sin, say the people around Jesus in the New Testament, and that's dead right, only God can forgive sins, because he's the one offended in every sin. But I would encourage that person, hypothetically, to seek your forgiveness too. Of course, it seems troubling that a person who commits these wrongs can get to heaven. There's a caricature of this position of imagining the person who lived their life doing essentially whatever their animal instincts drive them to do.

And then at the end of their life says, you know, well, sorry God. And then, you know, enters, enters into heaven. There's a, I remember there was an episode of Family Guy where, you know, they bust into the compound and they, yeah, they find Osama bin Laden. And then he says, I accept Jesus is my Lord and Savior. And then, yes, you know, he's in heaven. Right. And of course, you know, this is, this is ridiculous.

But it summarizes, I think, the idea that even if a person is genuinely sorry, it's not quite on the order of just being like, sorry, whoops. You know, they have to actually believe it in their heart. But it seems like they haven't done enough to overcome what they've done in their life. Hence purgatory on our reading. That's why purgatory to me is not at all a trivial doctrine. It's one that honors just what you're talking about. That's why, you know, Eli, life after death, too, is a way of honoring the passion for justice.

because let's face it, in this life, occasionally, justice breaks out. But I mean, typically it doesn't. Some of the worst people succeed, some of the best people suffer. And so, oh, and then we all just die like animals that go on the ground, that's it. Well, then there is no justice. There is no justice at all. And then why not just live the way any materialist would tell me to live? Belief in life and death is correlated to a great passion for justice,

that there's some order of being in which God will set up. things right. And purgatory then is ingredient in that idea too, that, right. If it's just like Osama bin Laden and the family guy, well, then that guy's no more ready for heaven than, you know, the man on the moon. So what he would require, in fact, is all kinds of purgation of his, you know, attachments, etc., etc. It's the good thief is a much better example, right? As someone who's presumably led a pretty bad life and he ends up nailed to a Roman cross because he's a common thief. But certainly in the gospel reading

summons the spiritual integrity to reach out to Jesus and in great sincerity of heart. And to him is said, today you'll be with me in paradise. So I mean, I get that. I get that. The Osama bin Laden would be

the guy that needs an awful lot of purgatory. Yeah, I mean, purgatory is something that I don't know very much about. And I don't know what the Catholic Church's official stances on purgatory at the moment? Does it have one? Yeah. If someone dies in the good grace of God, meaning someone dies in a state of grace, but yet in need

of purgation, which means about 99% of us, there's a state of reality in which after death one is purged that one's attachments and sins and so on. So it's a being readied for heaven. See, think of it this way. Mother Teresa taking care of the sick and dying in Calcutta is essentially in heaven because heaven means a place of radical love. Suppose somebody who's just lived a completely hedonistic life is sent to Calcutta to live with Mother Teresa's sisters and do their work. He'd be in hell. I mean, he would find that utterly, utterly, unbearably awful, right? He would require enormous amount of purgation to ready himself to live the life, which in fact is a

heavenly life, but he's in no way ready for it. So something like that, I think, is essential to the doctrine of purgatory. Christopher Hitchens once described purgatory as a disposal problem. I think he saw it as this idea of having an intuition that there are people who die. In particular, I think unborn fetuses are referenced here. If somebody has an abortion, on the Catholic view, of course, life begins at conception. And so you have a human being who hasn't had the opportunity to commit sins, but also hasn't had the opportunity to, you know, accept the gift of Jesus that they end up in this place called purgatory. And so he characterized it as a place that's invented to solve this problem. Is there a scriptural, a biblical basis for purgatory? Do you think

that there's a good general philosophical grounds for this idea of purgatory, or do you think it is something that you essentially have to believe, because otherwise you run into a problem of what happens to such people? Well, no, but that last point you made isn't a way the philosophical ground. As we reflect on the dynamics at play here, people say, well, yeah, it would make sense there'd be such a state. Otherwise, God's justice is not going to obtain. What you're describing in there, if it's Hitchens' view, it was not so much purgatory is limbo. And Limbo, the church is held at certain points in history. Most recently, it kind of suspended that and said, no, we entrust, let's say, a boarded child or an infant child to the mercy of God, and we leave it at that.

So that's closer to limbo than purgatory. Because purgatory is not... Yeah, no, I think it might have been limbo who was talking about the quote that I'm thinking of in the Catholic Church debate. I might have mixed that up with purgatory there. Because purgatory is a transient state, not a permanent state. It's meant to be a time of preparation. You know, read the Divine Comedy. Dante, of course, is so perceptive about everything. But, you know, a lot of the central part of that book, the Purgatorio,

is the purging away of the seven deadly sins, hence the seven-story mountain of purgatory. And on each one, Dante has them engaging in what Jung called the nanteadromia. They have to do the opposite of what they did in life. The prideful, who were always lifting themselves up, were pressed down by great rocks. The envious who looked out at the world all the time, who's better than I am and who's getting more attention, they have their eyelids sewn shut. And so in his poetic imagination, it's the way of saying, you have to just, Adjure Contra, as Ignatius said,

you have to act against whatever your tendency is. So something like that, I think, reasonably obtains as a preparation for the fullness of love that heaven is. So why not if nearing the end of your life you can apologize and as long as you do so sincerely find your way at least to purgatory and potentially to heaven, why not console yourself or consign yourself to a life of hedonism and base pleasure and just wait until your deathbed to really contemplate these ideas? Wouldn't it be rational for a person to put that off for as long as they can? No, that's childish because in fact the life you're describing is a terrible life and is a painful life a life that leaves you both physically, emotionally, and spiritually in a destitute condition.

And so to say, well, I'm going to do all that. And then at the last minute is just counterproductive. No, you want to start right now living a life that's joyful and spiritually alert and all that. So, no, no, that would be silly. I have one more question for you, which is, what do you think young people in particular get wrong about religion and belief in God? They imagine God as a competitive being.

The roots of that philosophically very interesting, and they're deep. To imagine God as a being, I think it was Hitchens who said, you know, religious people believe that the world is like a cosmic North Korea. There's this terrible tyrant who's surveying things all the time and judging God is not a being in Thomas Aquinas. God is Ipsum essay. He's the sheer active to be. He's sheer actuality. And he's not competing, therefore, on the same ontological plane with creatures. It's not the case that as God gets all the glory, I get no glory. As God gets all the attention, I have to be denigrated. On the contrary, it's what St. Iranae said. The glory of God

is a human being fully alive. What God wants is for me to be alive. spiritually alive in every way. That's the image of the burning bush, right? That's on fire, but not consumed. That's what God wants vis-a-vis creation. And I think young people get wrong. They do the Hutchins thing, that God is a terrible tyrant that's surveying and ready to pounce and to judge. No, God is the source of all value and is a source of life, the living God, who wants me to be like him, to be alive as he's alive. That's That's the mistake that a lot of people, especially young people make. Watch George Carlin sometime, you know, I liked in many ways, but George Carlin coming

out of this Catholic training of his era, but this horrible view of God is this desperately punishing tyrant. That's not the great tradition at all around God. So I may get that wrong. You understand why people, you might understand why Christopher Hitchens describes God as a tyrant, because of course, you know, God is the great ground of being, but there's this idea that if you don't accept this or if you put a foot wrong or if you do the wrong thing, you get punished. And in such a way that even if you do it inside your

own head, you have this force that can punish you for it. Does that seem tyrannical to you? Yeah, that does, but that's not the right way to look at it. Because, see, here's something very important philosophically that God doesn't need us. God needs nothing. God is God. The world adds nothing to God's greatness. It's a very important theological idea. God doesn't need my moral perfection. He doesn't need anything from me. God needs nothing from me.

So God's offended by what I... No, that's a psychologized sort of symbol of what we're talking about. God, the anger of God in the Bible, I would translate it's God's passion to set things right. God hates the fact that I'm not alive. And he hates what I've done to myself. And he wants that over. He wants to burn that away. And so the divine anger, the divine punishment, if we psychologize it as some, you know, Kim Jong-un punishing his rivals, that's not it at all.

It's God desiring, in fact, going all the way into our dysfunction, all the way down so that he might draw us out of it. That's the divine anger. That's why, you know, people say on the cross, we're judged. Well, yes, sin is judged on the cross. Sin is judged. God went all the way into sin so as to remake it, transform it. So that's the problem. Now, look, I'll grant to you, there have been a lot of lousy teachers of Christianity over the centuries.

Think of James Joyce's teachers in Ireland. I mean, they're terrible. And they took this genius kid. They gave him some beautiful scholastic philosophy, and he took that all his life. But they also gave him this sort of poisonous understanding of God. Or Christopher Hitches, he wasn't Catholic. I don't think, but would have taken in some very bad Christian instruction, it seems to me. But then there are these marvelous teachers in our tradition that we should pay attention to.

Yeah, and I mean, I would recommend the same. Yeah, it's interesting to think on that, the idea of human beings not giving anything to God or not being able to take anything away from God. I mean, for me, I think that the problem with tyranny is the tyrant. The reason why tyranny is bad, the reason why it's bad to have an authoritarian dictator is because of the corruptibility of human beings. It seems to me that if there were a person or a being who genuinely knew you better than you knew yourself, genuinely wanted the best for you and genuinely knew how to get the best for you, then it would be perfectly irrational for you to not do what they say all the time. And that this shouldn't be described as tyranny, but rather something like genuine in life. enlightened advice that you would be foolish not to take.

Right. That's why the psalmist can say, you know, Lord, I love your law. I meditate on a day and night. The law's not some imposition on me. I love your law. It's like when you're learning how to play golf and someone's giving you proper instruction and it's getting into your body and now you know how to hit the darn ball. I love the law. Give me more of it. Give me more of the law of golf. And if I'm living just in my own space, I'm going to golf any way I want to. I'll be the worst golfer in the world, right? So that's a better metaphor. for like religious law.

And that's why when the Lord says, I will write the law in your heart, that's like a golfer. I finally got it in my body. I finally have the laws in my body. So that's what God wants to do. He wants to write the moral law in my heart. Yeah, it's like a wonderful

and strangely paradoxical sense in which you can become more free or more enabled by restricting your behavior. Much like how by restricting yourself from going to smoke some cigarettes, in a sense, you actually become more free by restricting the amount of things that you can do.

See, freedom is a great spiritual metaphor up and down the tradition because our attachments make us unfree. And when I'm freed from my attachments, I'm freed for that thing we first talked about. This realm of objective value begins to open up to me in a fresh way. As long as I'm in my little world and I'm hung up on how do people think about me and how am I doing. Then I never, the world of objective value doesn't open up to me. It's like light pollution.

I never see the stars. But when I get rid of all that clutter and distraction, I can't. can actually see the stars. And this is what the tyrant of Christopher Hitchens' description is actually doing. It's not do this or else I'm going to punish you, but do this because this is the right thing for you. Trust me, do this and things will clear a way that will enable a whole world to open up to you. That would be the right way to read it.

Well, Bishop Barron, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a wonderful conversation. Delighted to be with you, Alex. Thank you for having me again. Yeah.