Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 827: Bishop Barron- Using YouTube & Social Media to Demystify Christianity & God

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So what do you guys think? I thought it was great. Wasn't that amazing? Yeah. The story behind, so you're going to hear us interview Bishop Baron, who's a actual bishop.

Starting point is 00:00:23 He's a Catholic bishop that is using new media, YouTube, and social media, Facebook, and Instagram. That was our first church podcast. Yeah. And I found him a while ago, and I thought he was so compelling. People who listen to podcasts know that I'm not necessarily religious. I know Adam and Justin are both. Necessarily. Oh, man. Further from that about this. We're so religious, I know Adam and Justin are both. Necessarily. You can have been further from that about the real show religious, bro. Well, you know what I mean. And insane. But I found him on YouTube and watched his videos

Starting point is 00:00:50 and he was so compelling in the way he communicated, his ideas was so well done that I was intrigued. And I watched so much of his stuff. I watched this whole series, this Catholicism series on Amazon Prime. I watched his videos on YouTube. And I'm, I got to get this person on our show because he's a really good communicator. He's very, very good and he doesn't shy away from hard questions at all.

Starting point is 00:01:14 I also think it's only fair that we kind of went this direction too. I feel like we've, there was a while there where we are on this interviewing all these, you know, spiritually righteous people and the Iohoska chasers. And I feel like we haven't done anything on the opposite side. I mean, we talk to a lot of people that don't believe in God. And we haven't really spoke to a really, really intelligent person that can articulate their point of view like he can. Well, we, you know, total health encompasses, we talk a lot about the physical part of health

Starting point is 00:01:45 and nutrition, but there's another side of health and that's spiritual health and that is, you can't have total health without spiritual health, you just can't, it's a part of what makes us human and it's a part, it's something that we seek out. And Bishop Barron talks about that a little bit in this episode as well. And we asked him some tough questions and we asked him stuff about the church.

Starting point is 00:02:06 It was a really, really good time. We went up to, we went down to Santa Barbara to visit him at the mission Santa Barbara. Just tell me how much you guys love it down there. Yeah. Gorgeous. So nice. Gorgeous. And Father Steve, who works with him, is such a great guy.

Starting point is 00:02:20 He's jacked. He's lifts. He's all buffed on what he was pulling out of here. He works out. He lifts weights and another guy on their team. Joe, forgot his last name. Apparently, he's like a strong man. Yeah, apparently another dude that lifts weights. They're all into fitness. So it was really, really cool. So we had a great time. We hope you enjoy this episode. We had a great time talking to him. We could only talk to him for about an hour and 20 minutes or so, but I just, what I could

Starting point is 00:02:45 have sat down and talked to him for. Are we squeezed everything we possibly could? Oh, every question I could possibly think of, we were trying to get in there. I tell you what, if you want to explore spirituality, okay, you don't have to be Christian, you have to be whatever, Bishop Baron is a great representative of the, faith. He does have such a good job. Find him on YouTube. It's Bishop Robert Baron. His videos are amazing. Well, he does an incredible job of distilling the information that I think a lot of people just stay away from, right? He'll take a really extremely difficult topic to address.

Starting point is 00:03:25 And we went there today with him. I mean, we definitely touched on some, you know, touchy subjects that I think a lot of people that I've asked in his position and they kind of just stray away from it, where I felt like he not only answered it, but then he also distilled it in a way that the average person can understand and digest it.

Starting point is 00:03:44 That's what I really enjoyed. What's unique about him is he's using new media to, you know, what they would say evangelize, right, to get things, you know, to be able to get their word out. And the church hasn't done a good job of that in the past, but he's doing a very, very good job of it. And so I find it absolutely fascinating, the way he's doing it.

Starting point is 00:04:02 So YouTube is where I found him. You'll find all his videos on there. So it's Bishop, Robert, and then Baron is with two RsBA, RR, ON. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter at Bishop Baron. You can find him on Facebook at Bishop, Robert, Baron. And then their website is wordonfire.org. And he's got all these series that you could pay for

Starting point is 00:04:25 on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend them. Again, I watched them to educate myself. And they were very, very good, very compelling, very well made. Yeah, definitely check out some of his YouTube. I mean, they're very compelling. And this is the first podcast I don't think

Starting point is 00:04:37 we had one swear word. No, that's the truth. That was crazy. So it didn't make it on air, but Sal was in the bathroom. And we were sitting there and we were talking to the other father, right? Yeah, father Steve and He was talking about how they were really hesitant to do the interview because we've been coined as the Howard Stern of fitness And I was kind of explaining that our raw approach to kind of shocking on and we absolutely swear and do things like that

Starting point is 00:05:03 And I said, but I think I think the podcast has come full circle. I think that we still are that way, but we don't, I think we used to default to that at a just plain old nurse when we first started. Nervous humor. And I was trying to say that and I was heading to say dick jokes. Yeah, but then you didn't say dick. I could say dick and then penis jokes sounds weird. And so I was like lost and then penis jokes sounds weird.

Starting point is 00:05:25 So I was like lost for words for a minute there. It was really funny. You know, unfortunately they didn't make it on air. It's the environment, I guess. Yeah, but they just up. They were awesome. Great, great people to talk to. This is a great interview.

Starting point is 00:05:37 We had a lot of fun. So we hope you enjoy it. Also, let's see, this air is tomorrow, Doug. Is this, what's the date tomorrow? Is this the, you should also warn, because I know that they're gonna be putting this out to their audience, right?

Starting point is 00:05:50 So they're gonna, out to their, he has a huge mailing list, he has a huge following on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. And I think we should warn his audience that's coming over to listen to our show right now that this is for sure the cleanest version of mind pump. You know, we definitely if you if you are offended by. We're a comedy and fitness show fitness and health show.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And so we go all over the place. So you'll check it out. See if you like it. It's a good time. We have a good. We're good guys. I promise you open mind is that you've been warned. That's all we were open minded with this.

Starting point is 00:06:20 Yeah. Now now this is going to be dropping the first of August. We have a new promotion. So last month's promotion was so successful that this month now we're gonna come out with another one, maps performance. I am so excited about this. 50% off we've never done a mass performance,

Starting point is 00:06:39 50% off sale. No, never. So this is massive. Now, mass performance is functional fitness training. So if you're bored with your traditional body building type exercises or traditional barbell and dumbbell type workouts, math performance is a phenomenal program. A lot of emphasis on mobility on the program.

Starting point is 00:06:59 It was the first MAPS program that Adam Justin and myself wrote together. So this is all of our minds put together on this program. It's an excellent, excellent program, especially if you wanna change it up, switch it up. Or if you're the kind of person that likes to move as well as you look, you wanna look good, but you also wanna be able to move good,

Starting point is 00:07:18 not just have those gym muscles. Again, it's 50% off, you have to use the code, green 50, all one word, no space. Green 50% off. You have to use the code green50, all one word, no space. Green50 at checkout. This is at mindpumpmedia.com. So without any further ado, here we are interviewing Bishop Baron.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Enjoy. Enjoy. I've found you, so I was on my own kind of journey and I was atheist for a long time and through my own reading or whatever learning I became more agnostic and then recently found Jordan Peterson and was listening to his talks and was absolutely blown away by some of the stuff he said and then I found a video where you were talking about Jordan Peterson. I thought the way you communicated yourself was brilliant. And so I kind of went down this rabbit hole of your videos and your content. There's a lot of your videos. And there's a lot.

Starting point is 00:08:11 I had never heard anybody do what you do as well as you do using new media. I don't think I don't know anybody from the Catholic Church that's really doing it that way. And I thought it was absolutely brilliant. And you're also not afraid to tackle all the hard stuff and pop culture. And how did you get into using new media to, I guess,

Starting point is 00:08:36 evangelize? Yeah, I was a teacher for a long time at the seminaries. So I taught courses in theology and I was a writer. So I wrote books and articles. and I was a speaker as well I'd go around the country giving talks, you know to groups of priests or groups of lay people and all that but around the end of of the last century I guess like the late 90s It began to occur to me. You know we could do so much more if we could start using

Starting point is 00:09:00 At that time, you know the older media of radio TV and. But then soon after, the explosion of the new media happened. And so I just thought, I mean, why not? Why wouldn't you use it if you could? You're right, very few were doing it. It just wasn't a thing in the Catholic space. But I just sort of launched into it. We first got into radio. I was on radio in Chicago with a sermon show

Starting point is 00:09:23 at 5.15 on Sunday morning. So that's how we started. Well, a surprising audience, I must say. I'd get truckers writing to me and say that they heard the sermon as they're going through Chicago at 5 o'clock in the morning. So we started there and then branched out to some video things and all that. But I think when the social media stuff really hit. So YouTube was invented, I think, in 2006.

Starting point is 00:09:46 By February 2007, we started the YouTube channel. And it just struck me, and you know, people around me, that why wouldn't this be a useful tool? If I just get on there, and then my instinct was, don't begin so much with religion and theology, but begin with the culture and then find points of contact. So my very first one, February 20, 2007 was the departed, the movie by Scorsese, you know, and with Jack Nicholson and all of this. And I just seen it and that, well, I'll do something with that.

Starting point is 00:10:16 I'll just talk about the role of evil and sin and grace, because Scorsese is, you know, a Catholic after a man we're speaking, and there's a lot of Catholic elements in his movies. So that's how we started and took it from there. I had no idea when I started who would watch if anyone would. We had a little bit of money to make these things and I said, well, let's try it. The foresight was brilliant, especially back then. I wish I knew YouTube get on YouTube in 2007, but now my business would be massive. So I mean, did you feel called to it or? I guess so, I put it that way.

Starting point is 00:10:50 I think it was a call. To me, it just seems obvious. I mean, why wouldn't you use these tools? Everyone in this brother will say, oh, there's all this negativity with it and individualism and their pornography and blah. Well, yeah, okay, but I mean, that's true of movies and TV and everything else. Any form of communication you use.

Starting point is 00:11:09 So I just thought, you know, why not do the glass half full approach and say, you know, all the evangelists over the centuries have used the tools available to them. And here's ones that we have that, frankly, they would have given their right arm for. I mean, they have the access. I remember it first struck me early on when we did a YouTube video, and I'd suddenly get an email from a sailor on a naval ship in the South China Sea. God, how do you find this video?

Starting point is 00:11:37 How cool is that? Yeah, because then it really is 24-7 all over the world. These things are now available. And then you just gradually build up the audience. And a lot of the audience building came from the comments. And in the beginning, I didn't know you could make comments on, I didn't know that. Oh, the trolls are terrible.

Starting point is 00:11:54 No, but, and I discovered that quickly. At first, I was kind of like flummic, and I was shocked. Oh my God, it, because 95% of people that come on the con boxes are there to criticize you. And especially religiously. Yeah, and you're talking about religion, I mean, come on. So it's just a recipe for a lot of negativity.

Starting point is 00:12:14 But once I got over that, I thought, okay, okay, that's the game we're playing here. I can at least get some traction. Some opportunity there. Right, and then I'd say to people on my world, I was like, why are you bothering with this? It's just these crazy people. And who's watching these videos?

Starting point is 00:12:33 And you have all these trolls? I said, no, no, no. I can get at least a little traction with people who would never, ever come to any of our institutions. So hey, I'm finding people out here trust me. They're not coming to our parish programs. They're not coming to Mass on Sunday. So I got some traction.

Starting point is 00:12:52 Now, some of the real troll types, you know, you can't read the gauge, but there were a surprising, I found a surprising number of people that you could engage. And they might begin very aggressively. They hate God, they hate religion, they hate me, or whatever. Well, hate priests, but I might have enough to work with.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Right. I can say, yeah, but let me just respond to that. Oh, I don't come back. Remember, okay. Okay. Now, let me respond to that. And in the in the early years, I have less time for it now, but in the early years, when I could really follow these things, sometimes he's really long, interesting, exchanges happen. Then I found people would write to me and say, you know, that they never got on here, but they were reading them. And they say, I read that long exchange you had.

Starting point is 00:13:35 I'm thinking like, really you did? Because you just start thinking, oh no, I'm just dialogue with this one guy. But no, now you're dialogue with all kinds of people. So that just convinced me increasingly, this is worth doing. And from the beginning to the present day, I've got people, trust me, on the church side

Starting point is 00:13:50 to think this is, you know, it's a trivialization or it's a waste of time. And, but I've never bought that. I think there's just so much good that comes out of it. Why do you think there's that kind of reluctance? Because it reminds me of like the original, or I guess one of the oldest examples of this kind of technology where you're getting the word out which was the printing press. And I feel like there was even resistance when the printing

Starting point is 00:14:13 stress was invented from the church. Yeah. And now there may be a little resistance with techno. Why do you think that is? Because, that's a good example actually, because when the printing press was going, people thought the same thing. Like, oh, pop, superficial, everyone's going to read it. Oh, we can't have that because they were used to communicating within a very small world. And then, of course, I get that. That's the so academic culture and so on. So it's a good comparison with the printing press. It really popularized and democratized communication.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Now, I mean, A4-0RI with the social media. We got this huge capacity to reach out to everybody So that's the danger and you know serious minded Catholics would say some of them would say You're gonna trivialize you're gonna flatten things out, but see I my wager has been and I think it's valid that you can do it In a way that's not trivializing so my my YouTube work, I've always tried to make it substantive. It's not a treatise of 25 pages, it's not a book, but I think at the same time it's not superficial, it's not trivial. I'm trying to do it seriously, but in short enough compass and in an attractive enough way that people will watch.

Starting point is 00:15:22 And I think that's been proven to be true, you know, 32 million views later. So that was a wager I made a long time ago, and I think it's paid off. I think you're right, you got my attention for sure, which never would have I ever approached or talked to, a bishop to have on my podcast or talk about these things, had I not seen you, and the way you communicate things, it just would have never happened.

Starting point is 00:15:44 Yeah, good, no, I'm delighted to hear that. And I've heard that from a lot of people over the years and it confirms me. And I'd say now though honestly, I think the church has largely come around to seeing that's a good thing. My Bishop colleagues, when we get together, they're almost to a person, very supportive

Starting point is 00:16:00 and very interested and grateful for it. And also, keep in mind, I started doing all this stuff right in the teeth of the first wave of the sex abuse scandal. So that's 2002, right? I even think about that. And so we start the YouTube stuff, 2000, what, seven. I started doing my Catholicism series.

Starting point is 00:16:18 We started filming that 2008. So it's in the new atheists have appeared by this time. So they're right after September 11. So you get Hitchhens Dawkins, Sam Harrison company, or all appearing after 2001. So that's when I started kind of launching into this world. So it wasn't in a way the most propitious moment. I mean, it was a little kind of a dicey time. But my conviction was, no, no, get a priest into that space, you know Very early on there was that we had a guy who was doing some consultation and he said hey father

Starting point is 00:16:51 You know, I recommend get rid of the collar and get rid of the bookcase behind you and and I'm not kidding He said maybe like arrive on skateboard or something Not kidding and I thought oh my god skateboard or something. I'm not kidding. And I thought, oh my God, it's like a skateboard. I mean, I thought a great idea. I think I think, like, parts of the sea through the end of the second world. That's trivial, but yes, it is.

Starting point is 00:17:13 And I thought that having a priest with a Roman collar appearing kind of unabashedly and saying, oh, here's what we're about, is a good thing in that space. And yes, you get a lot of mud thrown at you. No question about it. I mean, this morning, this morning, I had people throwing mud at me. I checked what's come in on the YouTube stuff over night, and oh yeah, I mean, people were bad mouth for me.

Starting point is 00:17:37 You just mentioned the Atheists, and I think we should dive into that because statistically speaking, I just looked up some statistics today The I think it's one one fourth of Americans now are not religious something like one third of four million Yeah, yeah, one third of of millennials consider themselves non-religious and a large percentage of them Some of them can serve them spiritual but not religious and then a large percentage also believed to be atheists And so there seems to be this explosion of atheism. One of the, and I've heard you discuss

Starting point is 00:18:09 this and I would love for you to do this on the podcast. One of the most difficult, I guess, positions or questions that an atheist will pose to a person like yourself is, you know, if God exists and if he's all loving, why is there so much evil and terrible things in the world? Why is that exist if he's there? And I always feel like the atheist will present that as one of their strongest arguments. Well, it is a strong argument. It's an old argument. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, you know, when he writes, he'll always list the objections first. So the position he's going to take. But then there's the objections. Like, well, people say there is no God because, well, in Thomas makes that very argument.

Starting point is 00:18:46 He'll say, if one of two countries be infinite, the other would be destroyed. If there was an infinite heat, there'd be no cold. That's his example. So he goes, well, if God is described as the infinite good, then there should be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore, there's no God.

Starting point is 00:19:02 That's a good argument. That's a very pithy argument. Thomas Aquinas states that in the 13th century. So my point is it's a very old objection that we've been, you know, wrestling with. And I would say certainly from an emotional standpoint, I totally, totally get it. Any one of us, we've all lived through suffering, everyone, you know, after the age of 10 or whatever, you know about the suffering of the world. I was a pastor for many years, a parish priest, you know, and you deal all the time with people who are suffering.

Starting point is 00:19:33 And trust me, every one of them at some point will say, how could this be? Why is this the case? I mean, so it's an old question, it's a question of enormous emotional power, which I totally get. But let me just say something from a strictly kind of rational standpoint, from a strictly rational standpoint, it's not a good argument. Now why?

Starting point is 00:19:55 Because the first premise of it has to be there is senseless suffering in the world. Then the second premise would be, but what God is all good and all, loving and all powerful, and those two are irreconcilable, therefore there's no God, see. But the first premise is predicated upon the assumption

Starting point is 00:20:13 that we understand all of space and all of time. So you have saying, for us to say, oh, that's senseless suffering. It makes zero sense. There's no justification for that suffering. We'd have to have a completely God-like command of all of space and all of time to see every consequence, every circumstance,

Starting point is 00:20:37 every result. But see, of course, we don't have that view. We have a little tiny swatch of reality that we see, a little teeny tiny bit of space and time that we see. And from that very narrow perspective, we can say that makes no sense to me. But see, God who has an infinite knowledge of all the space and all of time can God therefore allow certain evils to bring about a greater good, to permit a greater good, that we can't see. I mean, even in principle, we can't see it, but that God allows evil, so is to bring about a greater good. Now, that's the classical response to the objection. Not that God produces evil, but God

Starting point is 00:21:19 permits certain evils to bring about greater goods. Can we sometimes see them? Yeah, I think sometimes you can see, oh yeah, it's because of that suffering or that evil. Something happened that never would have happened otherwise. Sometimes we can't. Often we can't, you know, but that's not surprising, given our extremely narrow take on the world. So that's my point.

Starting point is 00:21:45 There is is emotionally, I totally get it. That's why he's been around for so long that objection. But from a strictly rational standpoint, it's, it's really not a very convincing argument. Here's a dumb example, but I was, I saw my nephew when I was in Chicago this summer. My nephew was going into a second year at MIT, so for super smart kid with math and all that. And I was like, mildly good at math in high school, but then I kind of gave up on it.

Starting point is 00:22:12 So the higher, higher math, I have no idea what's going on. So just for fun, he thinks straight A's MIT, so brilliant kid. So just for fun, I said, hey, tell me about some of your classes, old differential equations and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he's going on about, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in a way, that's analogous to our saying in the face of evils.

Starting point is 00:22:46 That makes no sense. That senseless suffering. Well, it's like, I can't say to my nephew, look, that doesn't make sense for me, but he gets it. He has a much higher mind than I do when it comes to me. He gets it. He understands all that. So now bring it to the level of God.

Starting point is 00:23:03 Right. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows all the space and all of time? Why is a certain evil permitted? Well, who knows? Maybe there's a good that will come with it in a hundred years that we can't even begin to sense right now. Why was this terrible thing permitted or so on?

Starting point is 00:23:20 Well, because of that... And then do a little more broadly too. A lot of the suffering we deal do a little more broadly too. A lot of the suffering we deal with is a result of freedom, right? Of the misuse of freedom. It's like Hitler, everyone brings up Hitler, you know, the Holocaust. Well, what is that? But it's a, it's a gross example of the misuse of freedom. So what's the alternative that God takes away freedom? Right? Why would God permit that?

Starting point is 00:23:48 Well, one of the class gantiers is, well, because he wants us to be free. And the minute you say that, you have to say that freedom has to be allowed to go wrong from time to time, you know. So I mean, that's sort of a framework anyway for looking at it. I used to tell my students at the seminary,

Starting point is 00:24:08 I mean, I wouldn't recommend using these arguments with people who are going through suffering. See, that's sure. You wouldn't go to the bedside of someone who's, and say, well, let me, you know, it's God's allowing it to bring about a greater good. Well, it's true, but you wouldn't say it to someone who's going through suffering.

Starting point is 00:24:23 But I think you can step back from evil and then speculate in these ways. It's almost as if you have to know you can do bad so that you can do good. Otherwise, neither one of those. Yeah. It's an awful truth about freedom. That if freedom is to be freedom, then we have to allow the possibility of its misuse. And so sin has so many, of course, negative, horrible consequences.

Starting point is 00:24:49 Here's a basic biblical idea, is that God can reshuffle the deck in a way that's always inviting us to deeper life. You know, it's a dumb example again, but you know, the ways app, do you guys have to use the ways in? Well, when I came out here, and I got it now, I use it every day.

Starting point is 00:25:08 But one thing I love about the Waze app is, if you, I trust it now implicitly, I mean, I just follow wherever it tells me to go. I do. But in the beginning, especially when I was out here for the, I didn't quite know what's going on, and I didn't sound right, I'd go somewhere else. The Waze app wouldn't, a chest dies me.

Starting point is 00:25:24 It would just patiently dilute, reshuffle the deck and say, oh, now that you've taken that dumb move, let me get you back where you're supposed to go. And I've often thought it's a analogy to the divine will, the divine voice, that God directing us, summoning us, luring us, calling us. And we always say the wrong road. No, no, I can handle this. I'll go the way I want to go. Well, the biblical idea is God, lup, reshuffles the deck.

Starting point is 00:25:53 All right, now having made that stupid move, let me try to get you back, you know, where I want you to be. So God brings good out of evil. Again, that's, there is the great principle. God can draw good out of evil. Again, there is the great principle. God can draw good out of evil. Even tremendous evil. And now that's a master theme of the Bible. Over and over again, the Bible showing how this happens.

Starting point is 00:26:17 Why do you think free will is there? Why is there free will? And why not just to have us all directed to the right place? Well, it's interesting. It's a really high philosophical question you're raising because I think both are true in a way. It's the first of a wife free will because God doesn't want us to be puppets. If we're just puppets, then we're not really in love with him, right? God wants his love to awaken our love and response. It's like, would you want to have your wife like an automaton just doing exactly what you want all the time know what you want is this wonderful

Starting point is 00:26:51 dance whereby your Love awakens an answering love on her part and then the two of you enter into this sort of play of of freedom right and you you fall in love with each other. There's a kind of surrender, but it's done freely. That's what we want. I mean, you wouldn't be in relation to a robot or a puppet or automaton. So same with God, as God vis-a-vis His creation. I mean, you want us to fall in love with Him, and that can only happen through freedom. But once you say freedom, you have to say the possibility of the abuse of freedom. So the price you're paying for authentic love is the possibility of sin. So that's how that

Starting point is 00:27:33 part of it works. But the way you put it was very interesting because God does lure us and draws us. But precisely through our freedom. What I mean is, is I could, if I have tremendous power, I could like make you do what I want you to do. I could boss you around, I could, I could course you, or, as you know, I don't know you at all. I don't think it's a know you lot better. If I started to understand what you like, what you're interested in, what motivates you, what fascinates you, and I wanted to get you to go someplace or do something I wanted. I could lure you with those things. I could somehow place those in your path. Signs.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Like, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan, right? So if you told me, I actually saw Bob Dylan here in Santa Barbara. He came a couple of summers ago. But if you said to me, let's say for a sake of argument, Bob Dylan is coming to the Santa Barbara mission and he's performing tonight at 8 o'clock. Where am I going to be? Right, I mean, you know that anyone that knows me. Now, as I get there to the show, you're getting what you want. Let's say you wanted me there. You got what you wanted, but did you violate my freedom? No, you awakened my freedom You you gave my freedom what it wanted so so based on voices contagious So based on that do you think that everybody gets these kind of opportunities or signs and it's

Starting point is 00:28:56 We some of us continue to deny deny them like I yes, I do think God is continually luring us toward relationship with him and Yes, I do think God is continually luring us toward relationship with him. And, you know, we just finished filming in our pivotal play or series on Flannery O'Connor, the great Catholic author. And she said her stories are about the offer of grace usually refused. That's what makes her story so dramatic. And that's a cool way to describe much of life. The offer of grace, like the way Zap, Here's where you go. Let me show you. Here's the path

Starting point is 00:29:28 usually refused. No, no, I don't want to go that way. I go my way. Okay, let me show you again. No, no, I don't want to go that way. Okay, let me show you again. I think that's the biblical view of God who never tires of trying to draw his people into a relationship of love with him. You know, and we say no, no, no, no, and God patiently Rechuffles the deck patiently tries again, you know, I Think that's a really fundamental biblical idea. Why do you think people do that? Why do you think people can will deny that consistently and constantly?

Starting point is 00:30:02 It's called in the art tradition, the mysterious and equitatis, the mystery of evil of iniquity. And the first word's important. It really is a mystery. And that's why the doctrine of the fall is really important. And I think dead right, you know, the doctrine,

Starting point is 00:30:17 you need to Christianity that there's something wrong with us. You know, something went wrong with us that we're not meant to be this way. We're meant for love. We're meant for relationship with God and therefore with each other. That's what's implied in the great Genesis story of the garden. Don't literalize in this history, but it's a theological poem that's making the point that God intended for us life. But from the beginning, what did we do? Is we opt against it. We, Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian,

Starting point is 00:30:50 said that the key is fear, that the fall comes from fear. And fear is born of our finitude. So we're limited. Because we're limited, we get afraid. I better protect myself. You're a danger to afraid. I better protect myself. You're a danger to me. I gotta be careful. When you make that move, then your whole life becomes self-protective.

Starting point is 00:31:13 Now the ego emerges. That's what the poetry about the knowledge of good and evil comes in there. It's the kind of birth of the... Oh, wait, can I have ego? The birth of the defended self, right? And God is trying to lure us now that reads salvation history all the way to Christ, is trying to lure us out of that stance, you know?

Starting point is 00:31:33 So that's what, something's gone wrong with us from the beginning, I would say, and then we all inherited. It's like someone born into a dysfunctional family, right? Where there's physical abuse or alcohol abuse or something. That's all the kid knows. The kid comes into that family. That's all he knows is this world of addiction

Starting point is 00:31:53 and violence and fear and all this. But he's got to be lifted out of that world into a different one to see another possibility. So that's the human race. We're born into a deeply dysfunctional world. I was wondering too with Genesis, is it possible to have a utopian world as far as everything working out and not having, I just feel like there's a lot of resistance towards. Oh yeah. No, what I would say, the theological answer is as an I'll use technical language as an eschatological hope

Starting point is 00:32:26 Otherwise eschatite just means the end times right that we hold out we call it the second coming of Jesus Which is the full Establishment of the kingdom of God here below. That's the trajectory of the Bible is toward that That's what we were hoping for you know, so it, we look forward to the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. That means the end of space and time, right? We live in the in-between times, in-between the salvation of the cross and the fulfillment in the kingdom of God. And the church's job is to try its best to embody the kingdom, the utopia, if you want.

Starting point is 00:33:04 The place by the way to look for that is the mass. The mass is the display of what the world would look like if we were all in love with God and praising God. You know what I'm saying? All of us coming together from different backgrounds and different walks of life and education, we all come together, we sing together. So the songs, we sing together. We're fighting, arguing, we're come together, we sing together, the songs that we sing together,

Starting point is 00:33:25 we're fighting, arguing, we're singing together, right? Then together we're hearing the word of God and we're responding to it and then we're being fed by God, there's the Eucharist, we're being fed by Christ's body and blood and then we sing our thanksgiving and then we're sent out into the world, right? Goal, the Mass is ended, go, love and serve the Lord. So the mass is what you're driving, the mass is utopia if you want. It's that moment when we say, yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. Now go and turn the world into the kingdom of God.

Starting point is 00:33:56 So we're not living in utopia, God knows. And I don't anticipate it any time in my lifetime. But the mass is the moment when it appears. I heard you say on one of your videos, and it was very, very powerful to me how people try to fill their spiritual bucket with things that are material or not spiritual and how it's just an endless, basically an endless hole.

Starting point is 00:34:20 And we just talked earlier about the the basic the rise of non-religious or not or yeah or or modernism. Yeah, scientism or whatever you want to call it, you also simultaneously have an explosion of depression, anxiety and suicide, especially among young men in a time of incredible wealth and opportunity and apparently we have everything in our fingertips. Is that a spiritual, are we in a spiritual crisis right now? Yeah, and you put your finger right on it. That's exactly, there's a causal relationship between those two things.

Starting point is 00:34:57 That's a way to name original sin too, is happiness will come, we convince ourselves by getting filled up, and the big four are wealth, pleasure, honor, and power. Aquinas said that. That hasn't changed since then. No, never changes. That's the basic human thing. As we think, some combination of those four things

Starting point is 00:35:15 will make me happy, right? Talk to any kid, talk to any 85 year old. What will make me happy? I don't even have enough wealth, enough pleasure, honor, and power. I'll be happy. And the reason I'm unhappy is I don't even have enough wealth, enough pleasure, honor, and power. I'll be happy. And the reason I'm unhappy is I don't have enough of those things. That's the formula.

Starting point is 00:35:29 That's a trap. That's a trap that we all fall into. And as you say, I'll spend my whole life trying to fill up the emptiness. If I just get enough wealth, so I can eat more and I need more and I need more. But see, the problem is, there's a contradiction because the hunger is for God and God is infinite. So nothing in the world is going to fill up my hunger for God. And the more I try, the crazier I'm going to get. I'm going to get addicted because it's going to start driving me crazy. I've got a million dollars. I'm not happy. I need five million. I got it, but now I'm not happy. I need 10 million. Now, the other one is pleasure.

Starting point is 00:36:07 Well, I got this great pleasure, but now I'm unhappy again. I need more pleasure. Talk to anyone addicted to sex or pornography, right? Or to booze or whatever it is. Power, same thing. If I just get enough power, you know, if I'm elected mayor, then I'll be happy.

Starting point is 00:36:23 And then after a year of mayor, and then looking around, I need more power, you know, and then I'll be happy. And then after a year of mayor, looking around, I need more power. And then I try and try and try. But none of that's going to work. What will work is filling yourself up with God. But then this work gets really tricky. And why so many of us miss it.

Starting point is 00:36:39 God is not an object or a thing. God is love, St. John said. And so to be filled with God is to be filled or a thing, right? God is love. Saint John said it. So to be filled with God is to be filled with self-emptying. That's right. You see, the saints are so rare that they get that formula. If I want to be filled up, which we all do, right, everyone's got a hungry heart. I need to fill it with self-emptying.

Starting point is 00:37:01 Now Mother Teresa and the rest of the saints who got that principle and then the more you give your life away the more you get filled up with what you actually want and that's that's not a nice little sentimental thing. That's spiritual physics that I'm laying out. Based on the spiritual masters, it's spiritual physics. The addictive rhythm that you put your finger on correctly is more and more and more, fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. And what it produces is an epidemic of depression and self-loathing and suicide at the limit. In fact, I think a lot of the people who want those things, one of the worst things that could happen to them is they get everything

Starting point is 00:37:39 that they think they want. And we talked about this on our show a few episodes ago where you see celebrities, you know, who have all the money all the women all the drugs all the whatever they want Post unhappy people and they kill themselves. Yes. Yeah Oscar Wilde said the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want You know so but that's that's a very deep spiritual principle What I want is he asked that question remember in the gospospels when Jesus turns on the two disciples of John, we're following him. Because John said, oh, there he is, go after him, the Lamb of God.

Starting point is 00:38:13 So they go after him and he turns on them and says, what do you want? It's a really cool question. It's a really important question. Imagine the Lord in front of you right now. What do you want? What do you want? And their wonderful answer is, it's a very Jewish thing, because it's all question answering question.

Starting point is 00:38:30 They say, where do you stay? But that's very interesting. It's not just what's your domicile. It's, what are you about? Who are you? What do you stay? And he says, come and see. And then it says, they stayed with him.

Starting point is 00:38:44 That little rhythm is really important in terms of discipleship. What do you want the Lord says to you? Oh, I want wealth, pleasure, honor, power, everybody want. How's it going to do it? But how wonderful when he's, no, well, I want to know where you stay.

Starting point is 00:38:58 Okay, good, come and see. And they stayed with him. Now, watch it, because staying with Jesus means what? The cross, ultimately. That's where he's? The cross ultimately, that's where he's going, you know, that's where he stays. He stays in the will of his father, which is self-empting love. And so it's dangerous, it is, it's dangerous. Say, I'm going to stay with Jesus, I'm going to follow Jesus because he only goes one place. You know, thought about your ways app. I mean, he's only got one direction and it's toward the cross. It's not morbidity.

Starting point is 00:39:28 It means toward self-empting love, whatever form that's going to take in your life. But that's the key to joy. If you try this bucket thing of filling it up, that's going to lead down to bad path. You said something. I want to back up when we've talked about Genesis about not literalizing it. How do you know what parts of the Bible to literalize and which one's not? That's a great because one of the biggest criticisms of the Bible is, well, that couldn't have happened. That's impossible and that's not real.

Starting point is 00:39:56 Well, a couple things I'll say about it. First, the word Bible comes from the Greek word, tabibliya, which is plural, it means the books. The books. So the Bible's not a book, it's a collection of books. It's more like a library. It's more like a biblioteca, it's a library. Well, the library's full of books of different genre. Poetry.

Starting point is 00:40:17 Yeah, it's got poetry, it's got history, it's got philosophy, it's got journalism, et cetera. So when you go in the library, you're gonna say, well, now, do I take every book in the library literally? Well, of course not. Nor do you say, oh yeah, it's all poetry. Nor do you say, oh, it's all journalism. You gotta be careful.

Starting point is 00:40:33 You have to look around. And furthermore, the library might have signs like, you know, hey, history section. But what happens usually is you learn how to read books within a community of interpretation that tells you what they are. So when I was a little kid, people would hand me a book and they would help me read it.

Starting point is 00:40:52 Well, here's what this book is. I think that's a fairy tale. It didn't happen, but it's a cool story. You'll like it. Or I went, I was eight years old reading a biography of Abe Lincoln and it started my lifelong love for Lincoln. Well, I mean, I knew, I forget who told me, but it's not a fairy tale.

Starting point is 00:41:06 That's a history story. That's really about him. Then later on, it gets refined. Oh, now this book of Lincoln is going to crack some things that you read there, because it's more sophisticated. Okay. Or let's say there's a book of Shakespeare. And I say, okay, open it up the page, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:22 357, start reading Hamlet. Well, is that going to work? Well, no, I mean, it's not a read Hamlet just spontaneously. Rather, you take a Shakespeare class, you talk to actors, you read a history of the interpretation of Hamlet. My point here is, it's always within a community of interpretation that you learn how to read books. Now, the Bible, we call the community of interpretation that you learn how to read books. Now the Bible. We'd call the community of interpretation the church. It's probably not a good idea. We say it's Catholics to just hand someone the Bible off you go because they're not going to read it right. They won't know what

Starting point is 00:41:56 kind of books these are. They won't know the history of interpretation. Better, we'd say, read it within the community and discipline of the church, and you'll learn thereby how to read these books and what they are. When I was doing like advanced scripture studies, then you get into things like genre analysis, you get into history, you get into the community being addressed. I would say like with the book of Genesis, within the book of Genesis, you've got different genre. So you can't just say, oh, the Genesis is, it's all legend, it's all myth, it's all history.

Starting point is 00:42:30 It's actually kind of a mix of different things, different parts of it, you know? The church tells us and teaches us how to read it. And see, people always look for a univocal answer. The Bible, it's literally true. Or the Bible, it's all myth. No, the Bible is history, saga, legend, poetry, letters, apocalypse, gospel. Those are all different literary forms, you know. And the sensitive reader kind of learns how to approach it, I would say, through the church.

Starting point is 00:43:02 Now, do you think this is what's kind of got us in trouble too as humans? Because this also begs the question of how did we get to this place where we have all these different denominations? Yeah, and is that why is it because of so many different interpretations and then people have taken off like explain that? It's partially yeah, especially in the Christian dispensation if you look at the the reformation so Western Christianity splits splinters really. And part of it I would say, yeah, is Martin Luther encouraged what he called private interpretation or private judgment. He was confident that if you hand someone the Bible, they'd be able to read it effectively. Now I would say as a Catholic, the very fact that you have 30,000 Protestant nominations, disproves that fact. Because it shows that,

Starting point is 00:43:46 no, I read this book in that way. And now we're gonna gather, but then this person disagrees with how the pastors read. So he's gonna break off former's own church. And yeah, I would say that's a problematic thing. I would say read the Bible within the church. I wouldn't recommend private interpretation, because then you're gonna lead to this splintering. I gotta ask one thing though, that I've always wondered as far as like the church, I wouldn't recommend private interpretation. Because then you're going to lead to this splintering.

Starting point is 00:44:05 I got to ask one thing though that's, I've always wondered as far as like the books. Like you see what's canon, you also see like a book like the book of Enoch. Like at one point, did they select those very specific books and how did they select them? Yeah, that's a good question. And word can is the right one, which just means like the, it means the stick that regulates. You know, the canon is what determines things. So the church, again, I would say,

Starting point is 00:44:32 meaning the community believers at various points in history would gather certain books and say, yeah, this reflects, these reflect what we believe. Other books know for whatever reason there's some problematic elements or that they seem it's more confused. They don't represent the faith of the living community. So they were not canonized, right? They were not accepted in the canon. I would say don't read that as some kind of aggressive power play. It's a community seeking to understand itself and making a judgment about certain books that are reflective of that faith and others that aren't. Now bring it into

Starting point is 00:45:10 the New Testament time, the same thing goes on. So we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four canonical gospel. So at a certain point, and it actually happened quite early. So even to the second century, people like St. Irenaeus who lived around the year 15160, they were making judgments that, yeah, these gospels are reflective of the living faith of the church. Now, as other gospels emerged, it's so-called Gnostic Gospels, for example, Gospels, Thomas and so on, they emerged. They're there, they're floating around.

Starting point is 00:45:40 At certain moments in this history, the church said, no, they don't reflect adequately the faith of the church. Does that mean they're all bad? No, I've read all the Gnostic Gospels. They have interesting elements. Thomas especially, you know, does it reflect currents within the life of the early church? Yeah, probably. But the church jobs at a certain point, they don't do it adequately, so they won't be included in the canon. There's a tendency in academic circles today, because we're very sensitive to this stuff, is to read that as a power play, or the powerful patriarchal people, and they're excluding these voices. I don't think it's right to read it that way. I'd read it as a community in a legitimate way, kind of policing itself, and seeking to find the text that best reflected's faith.

Starting point is 00:46:27 Sure. Something else about the Bible is there seems to be two very different representations of God between the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Old Testament you have, what seems to be a God that brings us up. This plays lots of wrath and intervenes into people's lives quite actively, and then the one that appears afterwards and now where we don't necessarily see that or hear that or feel that, how do we reconcile that? Well, first it's simplistic, I think, to say it that way. And everyone does. It's a very common thing.

Starting point is 00:46:57 But could a mother get her child? Could the Lord forget his own? I've carved you in the palm of my hand. That's the Old Testament. I can find numerous passages that speak of God's tender mercy and compassion. In fact, that term has said in Hebrew, which is rendered beautifully as tender mercy in the King James Bible. Well, that's an Old Testament term. That's the mark of God's way of being. It's simplistic to say that, you know, the Old Testament is just this

Starting point is 00:47:26 thundering legalistic, you know, overbearing God. There's plenty of language of God's tender mercy, compassion in the Old Testament. More to the point, the New Testament, I mean, line up the sayings of Jesus, it ain't all sweetness and light. I mean, Jesus is pretty harsh and pretty judgmental sometimes and pretty

Starting point is 00:47:46 angry. You know, you brew to vipers, you whitewash sepulchres, you know, impressive on the outside, but on the inside fill with the filth and dead men's bones. It doesn't sound like, you know, Mr. Sunshine to me. So my point there is the God of both great mercy and judgment is throughout the Bible. Okay, now what does it mean to say God is angry or that God is judging? It doesn't mean that God is falling into a snit, you know, or that God is now in some some agitated emotional state. It's a symbol, the divine anger. It's a symbol for God's passion to set things right, you know, a good parent looking at his child going down a bad path. What's he or she going to do?

Starting point is 00:48:30 Hey, you're great. God bless you. You're doing, no, the parent's going to rail and scream and shout and maybe jump in and intervene, right? If it's really dramatic. The divine wrath in the Bible, it seems to me, is a symbol of God's passion to set it right. That God hates sin. He hates what sin has done to us.

Starting point is 00:48:53 So he rails against it. Read the prophets now. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, those people, and to talk about thundering denunciation. Yeah, God hates injustice. God hates the fact that widows and orphans are being abused. God hates the fact that people are cheating and that people are stealing, that there's corruption.

Starting point is 00:49:12 God hates that, and the prophets express that passion to set it right. Even go all the way now to the cross. Crosses so many things, but it's also seen classically as an expression of God's anger. Maybe say, God's wrath being poured out on the sun. But see, don't read that as some weird alcoholic father working out his anger issues.

Starting point is 00:49:34 It's not that at all. It means God setting the world right. See, the cross is the great act by which God takes on all the cruelty and hatred and stupidity and injustice of the world. He takes it on himself, right? The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, we say, right? And so in that great cross, there's a judgment on the world. Again, it's biblical language, God's passion to set the world right. And it happens as he absorbs on the cross all the negativity of the world. And then in the resurrection shows forth the divine forgiveness and mercy, right? That's the whole story of Christianity.

Starting point is 00:50:17 So plenty of room, anger, judgment, railing, all that. But don't read it psychologically, you know, read it as an expression of God's salvation. How do you how do you think he feels about what I think we're in a unique time right now with this gender neutrality movement? How do you think he feels about that? And how do you deal with that during these times? We've never seen something like this before. You mean the whole gender-traditional stuff? Yes. Well, I mean, what's the bottom line is always God is love. So God loves. It's all He does. It's all God knows how to do His love.

Starting point is 00:50:58 It's it's all saying from one of the fathers that's always gotten His back. I mean, so as God comes forth, it comes forth as a blessing, right? But if God is only yes, when God's blessing, God is love, yes. But if something is off-kilter, then the yes appears as a no to the no. Does that make sense? So if something is off-kilter, it's in the world. It's a kind of no to what God intends. When God says no to that no, that's a yes. A double negative is a yes. And so can we identify certain things as off kilter,

Starting point is 00:51:38 as out of step with what God intends? Yeah, and so the church giving voice to God's will, we'd say here, it says no to them. But that's in service of the great yes of God, you know, it's a no to a no. Because the gender stuff, you know, it doesn't come down to our freedom to decide everything. Right, I just decide the person I will be. I'll decide what gender I'm gonna have. We recognize an objectivity to what God has created, what God desires. And so our freedom is not able simply to determine

Starting point is 00:52:15 the way things are. That's a quick answer to a complex question. Yeah, well, I'll give you an easy one. What is God? What is God? Yeah. Is he a being, a being that that kind of watches and controls things as the or or or not controls thing as the as Atheists will say you know, we

Starting point is 00:52:34 Religious people will perceive them as so what is God? Yeah, multiple interpretations, right? Yeah, well, and that's it's the it's the best question It's this ultimate question I'll do it two ways. One I've already said that God is love, and they actually give us a clue. So first of all, we're not talking about an object or a thing. It's very interesting, is that St. John uses a verb to describe God.

Starting point is 00:52:57 So God is love. Our doctrine of the Trinity comes from that, right? Because if God is love, and that just loves it love is something God does. So we can all, we love sometimes, and we don't love other times. It's an attribute, it's an activity of ours, but we say God is love.

Starting point is 00:53:15 Then there has to be in God a lover, a beloved, and the love that they share. So the lover, we call the Father. The Son is the beloved, and the spirit is the love that the two of them share. So that's one way to answer the question, what is God? God is love.

Starting point is 00:53:33 God is a community, is a play. We call them persons, because we have no better word to use. We don't quite know what we're saying, but there's a play of lover, beloved, and love. The other way to get at it is to use the great term being. We say, God is not a being. So this room is full of beings.

Starting point is 00:53:52 There's this bottle, there's me, there's a table, there's you, there's beings in this room. Objects. And our scientific minds are really good at picking out beings. So I can pick you out from the environment. I can isolate you, analyze you, and compare them pick you out from the environment. I can isolate you analyze you and compare them to you So we're good at that. We're good at dealing with beings, right?

Starting point is 00:54:09 So what we naturally extrapolate from that say oh God God's the biggest being of them all right, so God's the supreme being Well, I would argue that's precisely what God is not Thomas Aquinas says God is not a being but Tom as Aquinas says God is not a being, but Ipsum essay is his Latin. And again, it's very interesting because essay in Latin is an infinitive. It means to be. In ends in Latin, E and S would be a being. That's an ends, right?

Starting point is 00:54:38 It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, our right entity come from that. It's a being. But God's not an ends in Aquinas. He's an essay. And Ipsum means itself. God is to be itself. God is the zoom of being. He's the Octos Ascendi Aquinas. It's the act of being. Ascendi is a gerund of, it has an ING quality to it. God is the Octos act of being. Now my point there is, God's the great energy of existence, in and through which all things come to be, in and through which beings have their existence. So he's not competing with us. He's not like one supreme being alongside of the other beings.

Starting point is 00:55:22 I think all kinds of mischief comes from that idea. God is Ipsum essay, the sheer act of to be, in and through which all beings are sustained in being. Now the point there is, he's not competing with us, right? In fact, I find myself the more I surrender to God. It's not like surrender to God means oh I got a give up I give up Spring being I'll do whatever you want. Oh, we're spring being. I'll obey you. See that's all the wrong way to think about it Then we get into all the problems. I think you're driving at this that modern people time to have That God overbearing and legalistic and tell me what to do and you know suppressing my humanity So that's precisely wrong though. That's the right way to think about it

Starting point is 00:56:10 God is what makes me myself I I find myself in God Paul says it's no longer I who live it's Christ who lives in me See that's what he's driving it So that's a really cool question. It's the most important question. What is gone? Because once we get that kind of straight in our minds, and a lot of problems disappear. You know, I'm saying a lot of things disappear after that. Yeah, I think one of the difficulties throughout the years or decades or centuries has been

Starting point is 00:56:43 seems to be science, how science shows causality and experiment, the scientific method, and there's no evidence for God to create. We can't show that. But when I learned history, I also learned that at one point, science and the church were closed together, and then they seem to have separated and now seem to be, seem to be, or seem to be at least a percentage as opposing. Yeah. You believe one or you believe the other. Why and how did that happen? That's a great question. And you're right. It's in many surveys. It's the number one reason people are leaving the church. They'll say because religion and science

Starting point is 00:57:19 are out. And I'll take science and I'll leave religion behind, which drives me crazy. I tear my hair out when that happens, when I hear that. How to get at it? The sciences deal quite legitimately with the empirical order. That means the world that you can see, you're taking it with your senses, you can measure it, you can analyze it,

Starting point is 00:57:47 you see the objects and phenomena in the empirically verifiable world. That's the sciences. And then you got the scientific method, right? Is you observe and then you hypothesize and then you experiment and you repeat the experiment, you draw conclusions, and you come up with deeper truths about the world. Great. Love it. In fact, the scientific method emerged out of universities, which are all Christian universities in the beginning, right?

Starting point is 00:58:13 That's where the method emerged. It's really good at dealing with the objects and phenomena within the visible realm. It's terrific at that, and the church at its best has affirmed it, and still affirms it. The problem is not science. It's scientism, as I've called it. I've called it, and that's the standard term for it, is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. So what I just described there is great. You know, but it's one way of knowing reality. The scientific way. The scientism tends to say, that's it. That's the only way to know reality. Everything is reducible to the sciences. Therefore religion, like philosophy,

Starting point is 00:58:59 is best construed as kind of like primitive science. God will help them. God bless them. Wouldn't they great? You know, they tried hard back in the day. But now we've let go of all that. And so now we're serious scientists and we leave let go of that. See what the whole point is, let's say with philosophy, before we get to religion, philosophy.

Starting point is 00:59:18 Philosophy is not primitive science. Philosophy is something else. It's another way of asking questions, a different order of questions about reality. And you shouldn't reduce philosophy to science. That's why Aristotle had his physics, right, great book of physics. And in many ways modern science is going to evolve out of a book like that. But then he's got a book called the Metaphysics, right? It means beyond the physics. And when you've studied philosophy, that's how I got it in the game as a student of philosophy,

Starting point is 00:59:51 is you get it. You get what those great early figures were driving it. There is a dimension of reality which transcends the merely empirical that can't be gotten at through mere observation and experimentation. That's gotten at rationally, but not scientifically. Now we read everybody from Plato to Alfred North Whitehead, and you've got the history of metaphysics. You know? So I would say then with religion, you got another dimension there, but I'm a sworn enemy

Starting point is 01:00:24 of scientism. It's driving our young people crazy because it's locking them into such a narrow take on reality. You know, one way to tease people out of scientism I found is so, go back to Hamlet. You read Shakespeare's Hamlet. Is that telling anything true about the world? I mean, I hope it does.

Starting point is 01:00:46 I mean, it's entertaining and it's all these wonderful things, but is it also telling you something true about the world and about humanity and about history and about, yeah, of course it is. It's these great works of art. Beethoven is nine symphony. Is that telling you something true? Of course it does.

Starting point is 01:01:07 T.S. Eliot's the wasteland. It's not science text obviously, but is it telling you something true? Well, yeah, I mean, truth breaks out in all kinds of ways that are non-scientific. And I'm afraid that a lot of young people are being seduced into a sort of very reductive scientism. And that tends to pillory all these other forms is just oh well, you know, primitive science or trivial and so on.

Starting point is 01:01:33 I'll use some of the deepest intuitions of the human race, but they're not in science texts, you know. So it's giving full weight to the sciences, totally for the sciences, but a sworn opponent of scientism, that's kind of my perspective. You know, one of the biggest fears I have with science or scientism is it's by nature, it doesn't have a moral code, by nature, it doesn't say, is this right or is this wrong? That's right. It's test and result, test and result. And so my biggest fear is without that moral compass, science will do what it can.

Starting point is 01:02:12 It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop. We're going to clone humans. Yeah, or whatever. There's no question, should we? No, quite right. And that's a good way to get at it. Science is telling you all kinds of things,

Starting point is 01:02:23 but they won't tell you, for example, why something's beautiful? Scientists can't tell you that. Science could analyze the cysteine-chapel ceiling and tell you what the pain is, and you know, it can't tell you why it's beautiful. That's a philosophical question, an aesthetic question. Nor can it tell you, as you say quite rightly, that that act is right or wrong. It can't tell you that.

Starting point is 01:02:42 You can't observe, experiment, hypothesize, to figure that out. And so that reduction of everything to science is not just epistemologically problematic. It's morally and spiritually problematic. It's locking us in, I've always loved Charles Taylor's term, the buffered self. I'm in this little container. I'm buffered from any contact with a transcendent. That's the dangerered self. I'm in this little container.

Starting point is 01:03:05 I'm buffered from any contact with a transcendent. That's the danger with it. And that makes people crazy too. And I see with young people, is it a scientific view of the world is so delimiting? Well, ultimately, if you take that scientific rationalism to its end, you become this extremely self. It doesn't make any sense to be altruistic,

Starting point is 01:03:24 doesn't make any sense to give yourself to someone else or to help someone else. It's like, well, I just take care of me. That's just what makes sense. Yeah, right, right. Because you'll bracket those questions as uninteresting or unresolvable or just a matter of subjective desire. I can't tell you the number of times.

Starting point is 01:03:41 And I always try to back people into a corner on it because they'll say some version of, hey, morality is try to back people into a corner on it, because they'll say some version of, hey, morality is up to me, it's up to the individual. Yeah, what do you think about that? Well, the trouble is I say to people, then how do you argue with Hitler? So Hitler and Gering and Gurbals say, yeah, yeah, we decided that killing six million Jews is the right thing to do. And they really did.

Starting point is 01:04:00 Psychologically, they really did think that was the right thing to do. How do you argue with them? If morals is just a matter of my private opinion, how do you argue with Hitler? So the very fact that implicitly we all know that what Hitler did was a gross immorality proves that no one really believes morality is simply a matter of subjectivity. Well, of course we don't. How do you say, oh yeah, sexual abuse of children, that's a bad thing, how would you know that? If someone says, oh no, that's what I'm into,

Starting point is 01:04:28 I mean, I like that, I think it's a good thing. How do you argue? See, again, breaking us out of a mere subjectivity. That's why I like this guy, he's not a household name, but important thinker called Dietrich von Hildebrand, and he talked about the objectively valuable versus the merely Subjectively satisfying so we get to cool

Starting point is 01:04:51 Distinction simple, but penetrating the merely subjectively satisfying is you know, I like pizza So I'm not gonna argue you into liking pizza. I mean, it's just my subjective thing So we understand that category or like yeah, yeah, he's in a baseball and he's really not okay. I get it. It's just my subjective thing. So we understand that category. Or like, yeah, he's in a baseball and he's really not. Okay, I get it. It's just a subjective thing. But there are objective values that transcend my mirror private pre-delection, right? And these are aesthetic values, like beautiful things,

Starting point is 01:05:22 moral values, spiritual values. They're not my construction, they're not my little private preserve. They have broken into my life from the outside, and they have a hold on me. I'm saying, the loss of that category is really bad, and everything gets reduced to the merely subjectively satisfying. That causes a lot of mischief. Back when I considered myself a pretty strong atheist, I did acknowledge the role of the Judeo-Christian religion in creating modern Western civilization, or at least the idea that the individual has innalable rights. And more recently I've heard a new phrase, Christian atheists. These are people that follow the lessons and

Starting point is 01:06:09 teachings because they work so well and because they seem to be, they, in their opinion, the best, you know, objective moral code, but they don't go a step further and actually believe in, what do you say to those? Well, no, in some ways the glass half half full approach, I'd say good, glad. It's better than heading the right direction. Yeah, it is. But, but then see keep pressing it, because it's like flowers that are connected to the earth,

Starting point is 01:06:35 they're gonna flourish, cut the flowers, and you put them in a vase of water, they'll look pretty good for a while, but then pretty soon they're gonna fade away, right? Cause they're cut off from their roots. It's a similar situation there. I think you can see it happening. Is the great moral system of the Bible. I brought it out. Yeah, Judeo-Christian, the great biblical view, which, yeah, is predicated upon creation,

Starting point is 01:06:58 upon the grace of God, upon the dignity and destiny of the individual person, upon the cross of Jesus. I mean, that's where all that comes from, which informed ultimately, Russo and Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson and Emmanuel Kant and everybody else. Created free markets, created, I mean. Yeah, I mean, you can trace a lot of that stuff back to it.

Starting point is 01:07:20 So those who are calling this as Christian atheists, I would say, yeah, you've cut the flowers and put them in a vase for a while, but they're gonna fade away. Cause if they're cut from their metaphysical and religious roots, they are gonna fade. And I think it is demonstrably happening in our culture today.

Starting point is 01:07:37 You can see even those great values are fading away because the metaphysical undergirding and the religious support is even essay. So that's really, so I'd say great, you're doing well, Christian atheists, hang on to what you got, but I wouldn't rest with that. How do you know that Christianity is the right religion or the right belief? We have so many other, well, we have two other major religions in the world, you know,

Starting point is 01:08:06 Islam and Judaism, and then you've got all these other belief systems and people would say, oh, Buddha's are very nice people and they're great and all that. How do we know? How do you argue Christianity is the... Well, I'll say a couple things. In a way that, I get that question a lot. Yeah, and that's why I asked it. I know that's one that you're...

Starting point is 01:08:22 No, in a way though, it's kind of like, if someone says to a scientist, I mean, how do you know the theory of relativity is right? Well, in a way, you need a lot of time to say, well, let me explain why this whole integrated system is the best way to explain reality. So you can't read the answer quickly, but I'll say a couple of preliminary things. One is, it's never when it comes to religion, a question of right, wrong. Like, oh yeah, that's the right religion, the rest of y'all, you're all wrong. That's the wrong way to do it.

Starting point is 01:08:53 So Vatican II taught us, you know, that there are elements of truth in all the great religions. That's a hugely important observation to make. Is there a lot of truth in Judaism? Well, they're better beacuse Christianity comes out of it massively. Is there a lot of truth in Judaism? Well, they're better beacuse Christianity comes out of it massively. Is there other massive truths in Islam? Of course there are. I mean, the belief in the Creator God, belief in Providence, belief in afterlife, etc., etc. Are there massive truths in Hinduism and Buddhism? Of course there are. I mean, of course, huge, I would say patterns of meaning and truth in all the great religions. They wouldn't have

Starting point is 01:09:24 been around if so long if they weren't, right? So that's the first thing is it's not like, hey, we're right, you're all wrong. It's to a degree, all the great religions are participating in the fullness of truth. I would say the biblical view, culminating in Christianity, is the most compelling account of life and the way things are. Congruant with reason in very profound ways. So the image of God that comes up out of the Bible, I think is deeply congruent with what we can know through reason about God. So now do Thomas Aquinas, and you can show all kinds of rational grounds for belief in God, for describing God's attributes, etc. and it's deeply congruent with the Bible.

Starting point is 01:10:12 Part of it is beauty. Why do you accept the system of thought? You say, well, it's illuminating the way things are. And it's just compelling. It's just beautiful. And there's something of that, a lot of that, I think, in the biblical view of things, that God became one of us,

Starting point is 01:10:35 that we might become partakers in his nature, that God personally came and repaired a broken world and lifted it up for the sake of its transfiguration. Show me a more compelling account of things. Show me a more beautiful account of things. I don't know one. Relatedly, there's no humanism anywhere on offer that could be greater than Christianity, because of what I just said, God became one of us that we might become sharers in God's nature. Classical, medieval, modern, Marxism,

Starting point is 01:11:13 show me any humanism. No one's got a story as cool as that and as uplifting as that and as life enhancing as that. So it's the greatest humanism ever proposed. But finally, Christianity is the compelling power of Jesus. Why do people believe in Him? Because they found this encounter with the risen Lord so overwhelming that it changed their lives,

Starting point is 01:11:40 and they gave themselves to Him. I talk about that, grabby by the lapel's quality of Christianity. It's not like a detached philosophy of, I've meditated and I've come to these insights and let me share them with you. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not Christianity. Christianity is like these people who were so blown away by what they encountered encountered that they had to grab everyone they knew by the lapels and tell them about it. That's right. And when Paul preached, there were riots and that's throughout the actual apostles because

Starting point is 01:12:14 he was so overwhelmed by this manifestation of the risen Christ, you know. And that's still true of evangelization. I think that we want to grab the whole world by the lapels and tell them about this thing that happened. So anyway, those are just ways of kind of getting at it. But to answer the question adequately, you have to show, I'd say the great integration of the whole biblical view of life.

Starting point is 01:12:41 Here's a quick answer, just a quick one to me, from Stanley Harwas, he's a Methodist theologian, and he said, how do you know that the map is right? Well, it works. So I thought, you're way, the way's that again. How do you know that's right? Well, it got me here. Right?

Starting point is 01:12:55 Hey, I arrived. That's where I want to go. And so his answer was, well, Christianity works. It works. Meaning, I would say, it brings you into this living friendship with God. And it works. And so it verifies itself in a way. If I use a language of like William James, it verifies itself.

Starting point is 01:13:14 It gets you where you want to go. Can someone have a good relationship with God and not go to church or go to mass or? Yeah, you can, but again, I'd use the Cut Flowers thing. I wouldn't recommend it. I mean, because I think, so I'm in relation to God, but I don't practice that relationship. I wouldn't recommend that. I think it's not gonna hold out in the long run.

Starting point is 01:13:37 Well, isn't this considered church? Like, isn't it, doesn't it say that when one or two are gathered in his name, I mean? Yeah, and that's okay. I think you can do kind of by way of participation. What I mean there is that things participate to varying degrees in the church. I would say now as a Catholic, as a bishop,

Starting point is 01:13:53 church in the full sense means the mass. It means being drawn into the Eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus again. That's church in the full sense. But then to varying degrees, do you have church? Sure. I went to a Billy Graham meeting years ago. I wanted to hear him, you know, this is years ago.

Starting point is 01:14:11 But, sure, there he was proclaiming the gospel. Now, in a way that I would say is not completely adequate. I mean, I'm a Catholic and all that. But yet, you know, the word of Christ went forth and people were moved by it and they were, I think, yeah, sure, that's church, if you want, not in the full sense, but that's church. So I'm okay with that. But what I wouldn't recommend is, I got this interior thing, I'm going to call my relation

Starting point is 01:14:34 to God, but I'm not going to practice it exteriorly. That's not going to hold out in the long run. You got to practice the faith. You got to do it. And otherwise, it's not going to last. faith. You got to do it. And otherwise it's not going to last. Sure. I got it. Yeah, I got an interesting question. There's been sort of a resurgence of psychedelics making its way through for therapy and,

Starting point is 01:14:55 you know, helping post-traumatic stress. And there's also been sort of this feel of like the 60s where people are experimenting a lot more with these types of substances. You know, how do you feel like and people are getting a lot out with these types of substances. You know, how do you feel like, and people are getting a lot out of it as far as like getting answers and things like this? Many of you just hear things like, I met God, or I taught him, I touched God, or?

Starting point is 01:15:13 Yeah, and I read those testimonies, and it goes back to people like, you know, Elvis Huxley and others back in like the 1930s, who were experimenting with like LSD, that just emerged in the 60s, right? But whatever they were experimenting with back in the 30s. Yeah, I think it probably does open up dimensions of consciousness, probably.

Starting point is 01:15:31 I remember reading a count of P-tounds and the first time he took LSDs on a plane flying back to London and he said, there he was talking to the other member of the band. He said, then I was up on the ceiling of the airplane looking down at everybody. We had it out of the body experience. All right, I mean, I believe them something happened there.

Starting point is 01:15:50 I don't know what's going on. Something triggered that in him. So I don't deny that these drugs might produce types of consciousness. And they might open things up in fresh ways. I mean, to talk about the 60s people, the Beatles and others, we'll say that. And it opened up dimensions of their mind. Are there analogies between that and some of the mystical traditions, both East and West, that have also allowed dimensions of consciousness to open up? Yeah, probably, you know. I guess my instinct there is, it's

Starting point is 01:16:20 probably safer to do the classical meditation techniques if you want to do that. And that's okay. I think that opening up of these dimensions can do something. But finally, like contemplation, I've always used the Christian term, has little to do with that stuff. It's little to do with that kind of psychological experience. It's much deeper thing. It's a much deeper thing.

Starting point is 01:16:45 It's a confrontation with the living God. And it can be experienced like, you know, in some of the Buddhist traditions, there's the student, what's enlightenment? What does it mean? What does it mean? And the master tell me, I've been struggling for years,

Starting point is 01:17:01 and then the master holds up a flower. And he gets it. You know. And there's stories like that in the Christian tradition too, you know. That to me is a much purer thing than whatever happens, whatever's happening to Pete Townsend through LSD. I think it's purer. Oh yeah, I held the flower, I get it.

Starting point is 01:17:22 I get what this Buddhist teaching is. I think that's probably a better way. Well, what's the quote that I had a quote on that was like, beware of unearned wisdom, you know? Like, just getting there right away, and that's necessarily mean. Yeah, that's the best way. I think that's right.

Starting point is 01:17:39 That's right. And you know, life is weird, and there's a lot of things that, out here in California, I've met some folks, you some folks who are into this more kind of experimental stuff and I'm always cautious of it. I think again, the glass have full thing. If certain techniques are leading you to a deeper level of awareness of spiritual things, okay.

Starting point is 01:17:59 So that is possible in terms of the church and their stance on psychedelics. Well, no, I want to go that far because as you were saying, I'd be very wary of the physical abuse and violence. These things are pretty dangerous. I certainly would never recommend people to use them. I would recommend things like these more classical techniques of prayer and meditation. Like, for example, the Jesus prayer in our tradition, do you know about that? The Jesus prayer is simply Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me in the center. It's the whole prayer.

Starting point is 01:18:30 But it's repeated over and again, and you breathe in on the first part of the prayer and you breathe out and say, I've got one back on my chapel, it's this rope with these little knots on it called a shodky. And as you pray it, you just move the beads or the knots. Well, read the way of the pilgrim. It's a great book on the Jesus Prayer. And it'll talk a lot about what this thing starts doing to you, what this does to your awareness and your consciousness and your life. And the breathing thing and how it becomes just part of your whole life. I'd recommend that rather than psychedelics. The people.

Starting point is 01:19:09 Something else that's kind of growing today is this idea of open relationships or these where if you love your partner, if you truly love them, then you won't be jealous of them like you own them and you want them to feel pleasure and enjoy themselves with other people. And they make a pretty compelling argument in that regard.

Starting point is 01:19:29 And I don't necessarily agree with what they say, but when they say it, it can sound good to a lot of people. Yeah, I do love my partner. I don't want to be jealous. Like, what do you, good luck with that? I think that's from, I don't believe that for a second. I think the jealousy would kick in in about,

Starting point is 01:19:44 about 14 seconds, you know, and I don't believe that for a second. I think the jealousy would kick in in about 14 seconds. No, I don't believe that. And I think the classical, biblical teaching about marriage is still, I mean, it's the healthiest and the most life-giving form. And I think playing those games with shared partners and stuff, I think that's gonna be a short row to chaos. Science statistically, you're right, by the way. Science will show actually shows that that's the, I think that's gonna be a short row to Cans. So statistically, you're right, by the way,

Starting point is 01:20:06 science will show us that that's the... I think so, I mean, I would never recommend saying that. Now, why can't priests get married? Well, they can, I mean, they were for the first thousand years. I mean, look at the fact that St. Peter was married. You need a mother-in-law that Jesus cured. And then for the first thousand years, roughly, the vast majority of priests were married. There were monastics from the beginning who didn't marry. So monks who left ordinary

Starting point is 01:20:30 life when out of the desert and all that. And that's where the celibate tradition really takes the roots are finally in Jesus himself, who's celibate, Paul who's celibate. And Jesus says those who can become unix for the sake of the kingdom should do so. I mean, so I don't want to distrace for the desert fathers. It goes back to Jesus himself as a spiritual path. Now, Jesus didn't say now,

Starting point is 01:20:55 all priests must be celibate because for the first thousand years, they weren't. Most weren't. What happened was a certain stage in the church's history was deemed wise that all priests should adopt this monastic practice of celibacy. So that's kind of historically how it unfolded. You know, one thing I do, I would lift it right away out of a Christian context and just

Starting point is 01:21:17 go around the world, find celibacy all over the place in spiritual traditions. No one ever ever asked the Dalai Lama, what's this telebasy thing? No one ever asked him about that. Which I think is really interesting. When he's a little bit, he's a little bit of all his life. But somehow it's okay if the Dalai Lama is a little bit, but when priests are celibate, oh that's kind of weird. How about Gandhi, who's a Mary-Man head kid,

Starting point is 01:21:38 but in a certain stage of his life, as a spiritual discipline said, no, I'm now a celibate? Anyone saying, hey, Gandhi, what's the matter with you? How come your telebasy thing seems crazy to me? as a spiritual discipline said, no, I'm now Sullivan. Anyone say, hey, Gandhi, what's the matter with you? How come your celibacy seems crazy to me? No, whatever they think is cool to Gandhi Sullivan. So my point first there is broaden the thing out. It's a worldwide trans-cultural spiritual practice.

Starting point is 01:21:59 So first of all, they don't have to be. But why is there some wisdom to it? It's maybe another way to get at the question, why is there some value to a pre-spin cell of it? Here's a quick answer, complicated thing. Everything in the world is good, and that's the basic biblical idea, right, from Genesis, that God made everything, even creepy crawly things, even bugs are good, and God found the whole of it very good. So there isn't an ounce of what we call manachism in Christianity, meaning like, you know,

Starting point is 01:22:35 spirit's good, man is bad, and that's a really ancient and still enduring idea, what good star wars, you know, whenever you've got these manachian systems, light and dark and all that, none of that Christianity. Creation's good, creation's good, body, good, sexuality, good, the church is resisted and it's come up all the time, look throughout its history. From the beginning to now, the church has resisted any claim that says sexuality is bad, the body's bad. No, no. Now, everything in the world is good. But nothing in the world is God, right? So there's a great kind of yes and no at the heart of biblical spirituality, yes to the world in its goodness, no to the world as a substitute for God,

Starting point is 01:23:21 right? And there's our old thing we talked about a while ago, is we tend to say, oh, you know, well, that's God. Pleasure, that's God. Power, that's God. Honor. No, no, none of those things is God. Therefore, it's a spiritual practice from the from ancient times that all these things have to be detached. We have to be detached from all these things. They're good, but they're not God. So we affirm them and we deny them. You know what I'm saying? We deny their ultimatecy. To keep from the temptation is that the idea. Right. And so practices like fasting, which again can be found across the world and all the great spiritual, proletarians is a way of saying physical pleasure is not God. So man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes to the mouth of God.

Starting point is 01:24:11 Jesus is not down on food, but he's saying food isn't God, right? All these kingdoms I'll give you if you put bow down a worship me, you know, be gone Satan. What's he saying is is power, worldly power isn't God. And so he's he's detached from it. So now, celibacy. Married life, children, sexuality, body, family, good, yep, all of it, great.

Starting point is 01:24:36 Is it God? No, none of it's God. And therefore, spiritual people from time immemorial across the culture, some of them have opted to say, I'm going to fast from these things as a sign of detachment. Now, for myself, but also for the wider world, when people would see someone living that way, they'd say, wow, that's weird. So that's a good thing. That's part of the purpose of it. Wow, that's weird.

Starting point is 01:25:04 How could you live that way? What is that all about? It's like a wake up call to say, yeah, this good thing is not ultimate. So that's how it comes into the spiritual tradition. And then at a certain stage, around the 11th and 12th century, the church decided as a legal thing that they would make this practice of all priests in his tradition. Now, could that change? Yeah, it could.

Starting point is 01:25:32 It's not essentially tied to the priesthood. Okay. But that's, I think, the spiritual value of something like celibacy. I mean, you guys develop a fitness, you know all about this stuff too, of all sorts of things that you have to say no to. Absolutely. For the great things that you have to say no to. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:25:45 For the great yes that you want to say, you say no for the sake of a greater yes. And that's a way to get at it. Brilliant. You mentioned a couple things about why we don't criticize other people or question other people for doing the same things. Why is it so easy to, it feels like it's open season on Christianity.

Starting point is 01:26:06 But nobody else, if you say anything about anybody else or criticize anyone else, you're chastise. I mean, if I say, Saudi Arabia just allowed women to drive. I mean, that's a very oppressive religion towards women in the way it's expressed in that country or whatever, I'm Islamophobic. But people can say whatever they want about Christianity. I always thought that was even when I was in atheists, I thought that was very inconsistent.

Starting point is 01:26:35 Why is it like that? It's a good question. First of all, you're right. It's the correct observation. I see it all the time, you know, and the deep unfairness of it. Oh, because I guess you know, we're the dominant, we're seeing as the dominant religion.

Starting point is 01:26:46 And so, everybody hates the Yankees, right? Yeah, right. And especially the Catholic Church is, you know, the biggest, kind of, single denomination around. So I suppose that's part of it. And just that instinct of the grass is greener, or the instinct of, yeah, I'm gonna go after my own people,

Starting point is 01:27:01 you know, I suppose that's part of it. But I think you're right in scoring it as deeply unfair. Because a lot of things that people don't like about Christianity, you'll find the other religions too of you look hard. They're all, a lot of them are there.

Starting point is 01:27:14 So why are we being picked on? I suppose our dominant position culturally, but see that's, boy, that's shifting though. In my lifetime, that shifted a lot. The time I was a kid, to now that shifted a lot. I don I was a kid, to now that shifted a lot. I don't know if we can say as readily, or a Christian country or a biblical country.

Starting point is 01:27:31 I think part of might also be that Christianity allows for that to happen because that you value freedom. Whereas if you're in an Islamic country and you just draw a picture of the prophet Muhammad, you could be killed. Yeah, it's a good point you raise and NT, right? One of my favorite theologians made the point that, let's see, where's it in this room? We have a crucifix on it, but how weird in a way

Starting point is 01:27:57 that we boldly hold up, we don't hide it, we boldly hold it up. His, is our founder being mocked. Publicly. That's the cross. That's our symbol. Is so like mocking Jesus, well, it's off you go. They can't do anything worse than what they did.

Starting point is 01:28:13 And in fact, we're gonna, there's the cross over. We're gonna hold it up. There's this mocked humiliated, spat upon, crucified criminal left to die. Yep, there he is, everybody, hey look, look. So this whole thing about, oh, you couldn't possibly say something negative about Jesus, off you go. We specialize in it.

Starting point is 01:28:33 So there is something, but that's not just a trivial observation, there's something really profound about that. That we hold up, like Paul says, I preach one thing, Christ and crucified, and in his time, see, we say, oh, yeah, Christ crucified, that's great. Savior of the world. But your first century crucified it, what are you talking about? You're proclaiming someone crucified, are you out of your mind? Are you nuts? Hence riots, right? To recover that space is really good for us to go back to early Christianity.

Starting point is 01:29:05 Why was this proclamation so weird? And it was deeply, deeply weird because he's holding up this hopelessly persecuted and executed criminal. But that's Christianity. Boom, to get that. And I think that's part of our evangelical call today. What do you think the future of Christianity, how do you think that's gonna look? What are the biggest challenges today

Starting point is 01:29:33 that you guys have to contend with? Yeah, good. Well, it's in the West anyway, I'll say about that, is the growing secularism of the culture. That's a huge challenge. We're not, go back to the Reformation time, it was a split within Christianity, was a division among Christians.

Starting point is 01:29:52 That's not the major issue now. It's a culture becoming increasingly aggressive toward the whole idea of God. So I agree with Joseph Rodziger, Pope Benedict XVI, who said a long time ago, it's always about God, that that's our question to bring the question of God forward in a compelling way. That's our biggest challenge. You look at, you know, like within the Catholic Church, this whole sex abuse thing, which we have got to get handle on, you know. But I think more broadly, it's a question of God.

Starting point is 01:30:26 Scientism, materialism, the advance of a secular culture, all that, that's what we're facing. So, you know, we got a big fight. Well, I wanna respect your time. I could literally sit here and talk to you. I know, I know. I know, it was three hours. I really appreciate you doing this.

Starting point is 01:30:42 And like I said, the way I think you're doing it is absolutely brilliant. I think you're doing it is Absolutely brilliant. I think if the church is going to reach Younger generations today. It's got to be through the I guess you got to what is it? You get you got to join them you can't you if you can't fight them join them type of deal use their tools and oh No, I agree with that. Yeah, it's Paul used the Roman roads of his time That was a tool if you want and the printing press later on and Fulton Sheen used the radio and TV and absolutely we should use it. I also appreciate your willing list to answer difficult questions. A lot of your videos you will answer very direct, very difficult questions and I know you've

Starting point is 01:31:17 been open to debating very prominent atheists and I hope that happens. I'd love to see that discussion. Yeah, I'm open to it. I think that's the challenge of our time. Absolutely. Well, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to MindPump.

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Starting point is 01:32:33 and until next time, this is MindPump.

Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 827: Bishop Barron- Using YouTube & Social Media to Demystify Christianity & God

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