Pints With Aquinas - Free Masonry, UFO's, & Bigfoot w/ Jimmy Akin

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Jimmy Akin (born in 1965, Corpus Christi, Texas) is an American Catholic apologist, author, speaker, and podcast host. He has been working for Catholic Answers since 1993, their longest-serving staff Please support PWA on Locals: http://mattfradd.locals.com/support Show Sponsored by Strive 21: https://strive21.com/matt  

We're live. Okay, great to have you here. Thank you. It's always good to be alive. This is gonna come in and click that board. Hey Very fancy for the for it. I don't know for the clips. Yeah. Yeah make it easier to sync the audio in the video How was your drive up? Oh is great. Yeah, I Since I live in Arkansas now, I am only 13 away 13 hours away by car So it makes a nice little road trip. Certainly look closer than California. Much closer than, 1,600 miles closer than California. All right, how did you enjoy your move?

Are you glad to be out of California? Oh man, yes. I mean, California, as you know, is a beautiful state. Stop it. And that's about it. Uh-huh. It is insanely expensive. It is poorly managed. you know, is a beautiful state. Stop it. And that's about it. It is insanely expensive. It is poorly managed. It is near-line border fascist, both in the government

and in the private sector. Has that escalated over the last decade? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's really good to be back home. And I'm just delighted to be back in my hometown. That's great. Do you still have friends or family who live nearby?

I do. I haven't reconnected with all my friends yet. I have with some of them. But my brother and sister both live there. And so after 30 years of being in California, it's really great to be back around family and where I grew up and everything. It's, I'm flourishing there.

I really, really love it. I'm so glad. I'm glad, you know, that you might make a move like that and go, this wasn't as good as I had dreamed it would be, or remembered it was. Well, I do my due diligence. So before I moved back, I took a trip in, I moved back last July. And before I moved back, I did a trip in April, where I came back to town for like a week,

just to check it out and did a little house hunting, but mostly just to check it out and see how it had changed, because I knew it would have changed in 30 years, and just make sure it's a place I still wanted to live, and it was. How much had it changed? Is it still a nice small town feel? Well, it never had too much of a small town feel because it's one of the main campuses at the University of Arkansas. But the population has tripled in the last 30 years. When I was growing up, the population was around 35,000, and now it's around 100,000.

So there's been a considerable amount of development, both in it and in surrounding towns, because there's also a significant, there are several major industries that are based there. Walmart is based in one of the neighboring towns. JB Hunt Trucking, Tyson Chicken, they're both based in neighboring towns. And all of those have become major national and even international businesses now.

So since this is where their headquarters are, there's been a lot of people moving to the area for that. So it's more built up than it was, but there's still open spaces, there's still countryside, there's a lot of great stuff. I grew up in a very small rural town in South Australia, and I sometimes say I'm nostalgic for a town that I don't think exists anymore.

All the shop fronts have changed. People now have smartphones, obviously, but I have this memory of what it was like, and I go back and I, it's still beautiful, but yeah. Oh, I have that too. There are some things that I'm nostalgic about for the past, but it's still a great place. Out of curiosity, now the town you grew up in,

what size was it? Do you remember the population? Yeah, 16,000. Okay. I'm not actually sure what it is today. I don't think it's much bigger. No, so that's about half the size of the town I grew up in. Yeah, and where I grew up, it was surrounded by farmland,

so the next significant city was an hour drive, so it made it feel all the smaller, and so everyone kind of knew everybody. Yeah. When did you move to California? 1993. Okay. And was that for Catholic answers? Yes. Yeah. And you moved from Arkansas? Yes. Okay. And when did you convert prior to moving? 1992. Wow. Mm hmm. So you converted to Catholicism and within a year were working as a Catholic apologist. Yes. How did that happen so quickly? Well, so I had been a philosophy major. That's what my academic training is in. My undergrad is

in analytic philosophy and I was in grad school in the same field. And philosophy and apologetics heavily intersect. So when I became a Christian at age 20, it was natural for me to start studying apologetics, including in a philosophical realm. And I also made a point of studying the theology of all the different branches of Christianity, because in Fayetteville, my hometown, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of churches. And I realized early on upon my conversion to Christianity that what church is within convenient driving distance, and what church has a preacher I like, and what church has music I like, and what church has a youth group I like. None of those things

are good tests of theological truth, and truth is what I'm interested in. So I didn't want to reflexively fall into the theology of a church just because I liked it or it was convenient to go to. So I made a point of studying the theologies of all the different branches of Christianity. I would read books by Lutherans, I would read books by Calvinists, I would read books by Baptists, I would read books by Pentecostals, I would read books by Catholics, I would read books by Orthodox, I was trying to study everybody. And eventually, I started making discoveries in the Bible that convinced me I needed to look in to the truth claims of the Catholic Church more carefully. And I took about a year in grad school doing that,

where even though I was, you know, I was making good grades in my courses, but I wasn't doing a whole lot of the reading, I would show up and get what I needed from the class discussions. I was really spending all my time studying Catholic theology to see, is this accurate or not? And because I had been on a kind of ministerial track to become a Protestant pastor and seminary professor was my ultimate goal, I had a lot of issues to reconsider. I had a lot of unlearning to do, because I had to go through all of the categories of systematic theology with an open mind again, and re-examine questions that I

thought I had settled. And as I did that, I became convinced that the Catholic position on all these different areas was either provably better or at least reasonable. And so at a certain point I realized I needed to become Catholic. And at the same time, within a few months of that, my wife became ill. And she was only sick for a little over two months, and we only knew what it was for a month. She had had chronic health problems since she was a teenager. She had ulcerative colitis and we thought at first I remember the night when she first felt kind of a twinge and we thought it was another ulcerative colitis flare-up. She'd periodically have flare-ups and they would be very difficult to deal with but

then they'd calm down after you know a few weeks or something. So we thought this was an ulcerative colitis flare-up for the first month. But then we were having, we had a massage therapist in to try to get her some relief by helping her muscles relax. And the massage therapist found a lump under her collarbone. And so we went to have that checked out,

and it turned out she had cancer. In fact, she had colon cancer, but it had metastasized. It was all through her body at this point. And my first thought was, oh no, we have an ulcerative colitis flare-up and cancer to deal with. And the oncologist said, no, no, no no this is all the cancer this has always been this is in this flare-up there is no ulcerative colitis flare-up this is cancer and her oncologist told me that it was an extraordinarily aggressive form of cancer he thought you know a lot of

people live with cancer for years he thought she had only had it for a few months he said probably she's had it for a few months. He said, probably she's had it for three months, maybe for six months, probably not a year. And, um, how did that news affect you and her? Well, it wasn't good news. Um, it is something that she didn't really have the time to process because she died in just over two months from the first symptom. And so she didn't really have, and she was only 27 years old at the time.

It's an age you're not expecting to die. And so she obviously wanted to live, she wanted to get better. I don't think she really could admit to herself that she wasn't going to get better and she didn't really have time to come to terms with it. I was just concerned about taking care of her. I had always taken care of her throughout our marriage because of her health problems. And I was determined I was going to take care of her to the very end, by which I didn't mean death. I meant beyond death. I was going to take care of her until we put her in the ground. And even though it is very non-traditional to have,

to have a husband be one of the pallbearers at her funeral, I insisted on being a pallbearer because I was going to take care of her and escort her up to the last possible moment. I was the one who closed her casket. I was the one who locked it. I was one of the pallbearers who took her to her resting place. And even after that, I would notice, and I'll get back to how I ended up in California, but even after that I would notice that I had been so focused throughout our marriage on making her life easier because of her health problems, that every time I walked into a drugstore or a supermarket,

I would analyze everything in my presence in terms of could this be useful to make Renee's life easier? And so I would find myself in supermarkets and in drugstores after she died, and I would catch myself doing that, and I'd find something, I would think, oh, this will make Renee's life easier. And then I would realize, no, it won't.

So it was a deeply ingrained habit. And so while this was happening, I was doing, I was taking my year in grad school and reviewing all the areas of systematic theology. And I needed... doing, I was taking my year in grad school and reviewing all the areas of systematic theology, and I needed, I needed at a certain point, this was before the internet, the internet did not exist yet, so this is like 1991, the internet was not publicly available, the catechism had not been released, so there was lots of confusing post-Vatican II teaching, and at a certain point I needed someone who was biblically knowledgeable and orthodox, that was Catholic,

to bounce questions off of, you know, to see, am I understanding this correctly? What would you make of this objection? Things like that. And I called a friend of mine who was a Lutheran apologist, his name was Bob Passantino. He was very Catholic friendly, and he suggested I get in contact with Catholic Answers, which I was initially a little resistant to do, but I ended up doing that, and I got to know the apists who were there at the time. They included people like Patrick Madrid and Mark Brumley and so forth. And they saw that I had an apologetic mind. And so then we got up to the point where Renee got sick,

and within two months she was dying, and I actually was received into the church in her hospital room, using the emergency shortened form of the rights. And then after that, I came out to, you know, there had been some thought of maybe we could work together in the future with Catholic Answers, so after Renee passed, I came out to, you know, there had been some thought of maybe we could work together in the future with Catholic Answers. So after Renee passed, I came out and auditioned for the job, and I've been working for Catholic Answers ever since. I'm coming up on my 31st anniversary this June. What was the impetus to get you to look into these different theological systems? Because you were a Christian prior, so was

there something that interfered with that that made you question? No, I just, I was coming into, I'd been raised nominally Protestant, but largely unchurched. And I was aware that there were different views among Christians, and so it's like, well, I want to know what the truth is, I want to consider all the views systematically and see which ones the evidence best supports. Now Renee is your wife's name, yes? Yes. Was she, how open was she to you looking into these different things? She was fine. I mean, she had been, she had been baptized a Catholic, but her mom had joined a UFO

religion. And so Renee had been raised in this UFO religion, what's sometimes called a saucer cult, but I don't use the word cult because it adds heat rather than light. So Renee had had this kind of new age UFO religion background, but she dropped that shortly after she met me and went, but she dropped that shortly after she met me, and there was a period where she

was identifying as Catholic, but then I wasn't gonna marry a Catholic if I'm planning on being a Protestant minister for a profession. So she kind of started identifying as an Anglican, and I thought, okay, well, that's a stepping stone. She can eventually be evangelical. Well, no, after we got married, she went back to the Catholic church, which ruined my career plans. Okay.

But marriage is marriage. So, you know, so at that point I started, I said, let's, I'll go back to, to school in philosophy and become a philosophy professor. Did you find that a lot of the questions you had regarding Catholicism and its truth claims are very similar to the ones people have today? Or due to the Pope and different things, has it changed a lot? I think the fundamentals are the same.

I mean, it depends on where someone's coming from. If someone's coming from an atheistic background, they're likely to have one set of questions and objections. If someone's coming from a Protestant background, they're likely to have another. Now, some of those things will have softened, and a few have gone away, but kind of the foundation stones of Protestant objections to Catholicism and concerns about Catholicism were laid in the 1500s, and they haven't changed. There have been some that have, like for example, if you go back a hundred years, and you're, or 150 years, let's say,and you're reading Protestant anti-Catholic books from the 1870s here in the United States. They have these enormous conspiracy theories about the Catholic

Church is infiltrating Irish and German and Italian Catholics into America for purposes of taking it over and, like, making the Pope king or something like that, and denying Protestants their religious liberty. Well, okay, nobody has that theory anymore. Time has shown that that's not the Catholic Church's goal with respect to the United States. So that kind of objection genuinely has gone away. But others, you know, I mean, Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Purgatory, Mary, the Pope, all those are still there. It was interesting to hear you say that the catechism of the Catholic Church hadn't come out when you were looking into it. It's remarkable. I mean, I became a Catholic, well, I came

back to my faith at the age of 17, and the Catechism was there for the, you know, if I wanted it. It must have been a wild time for Catholics, especially during the post-Vatican times. It was, and that's what led to the proposal to draft the Catechism with the Catholic Church, because after the Second Vatican Council, there was this period of enormous confusion where you had a lot of people who were arguing that they were actually deviating from what the Council had said instead of implementing it, and they tried justifying this in the name of what they called the spirit of Vatican II. The idea was that the Council Fathers wanted to make a bunch of changes at Vatican II, but they

didn't go as far as they wanted to, and so now we need to complete their work in the spirit of Vatican II by pushing farther in a progressive direction theologically. And so this led to lots of confusion. I remember reading a quotation from Cardinal Avery Dulles, where he said, you know, after Vatican II, none of us knew how far the changes were going to go. This was really a crazy time. And so because of the craziness, in 1985, John Paul II had a Senate of Bishops focusing on the state of the Church and what had happened since Vatican II. It was the 20th anniversary of the closing of Vatican II, which had closed in 1965,

so 1985 is kind of a good time to take stock and say, what do we need to do from here? And it was actually Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston who proposed that we write a new catechism that speaks for the whole church, that summarizes the church's faith, so that people will have a firm reference point. Because there had been this confusing mess of different claims, and there was no solid reference point you could go to. Because even if you appealed to a church document, someone could say, oh, yeah, but that's a pre-Vatican II document, or that's a Vatican II document, but we need to complete their work now. And so by having

a new document that summarized everything, or at least all the big things, it provided the kind of reference point that had not been available in all this time. So over the next seven years, they drafted it at a committee run by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and they published it in 1992. And then there was a big fight about translating it into English because the progressive establishment wanted, there was, at the time, there was a progressive establishment in translation circles into English where they wanted to use dynamic equivalence translations rather than more literal translations

and they wanted to, and part of the reason for that was they wanted to be detached from having to say what the text literally said. They wanted to be able to spin it in particular directions, and that's one of the things dynamic equivalence more easily lets you do, since you're not as tied to word for word. And they produced a translation of the Catechism in English that was never published. The Vatican, people complained about the pre-publication draft of the translation, and the Vatican said, yeah, this isn't going to be

acceptable, go back and do it again. And so even though the rest of the world was getting to read the Catechism in 92, we really didn't get it until 94 in English. What was the pushback like, do you remember? To the Catechism and trying to solidify these things that many theologians and others were saying were up for grabs. Oh, well, there was pushback. I remember, for example, now one of the things at the time was the Hubble telescope that had its main lens installed wrong and they had to go up into space to fix it. And if I recall correctly, Who put that on wrong and how bad did they feel?

It was basically an English versus metric issue. But they eventually got it fixed. Well, this was a big thing in the news at the time, and as I recall correctly, if I recall correctly, the National Catholic Reporter, which is a progressive newspaper, had headlined Church releases Hubble catechism. It was like it was flawed in how it viewed the faith. But the bishops stuck with it. It turned out... Now, one of the ways that they tried to dismiss the catechism was saying, oh, this is for bishops and theologians to read. This is not for you, lady. And so that was kind of one of the lines that progressives wanted to use to minimize the influence of the

Catechism. They wanted to compartmentalize it as something only for like bishops and theologians. Well, it then became a runaway bestseller in Europe, yeah, before it bestseller in Europe. Yeah, before it was even out in English and people were gobbling it up. And so that argument kind of went by the wayside. It became clear really quickly, ordinary laypeople were very interested and could read it.

It was accessible to them and it was not meant exclusively for bishops. Yeah, and it's so beautiful to read. It's poetic in some cases. And then the bishops here in the U.S. mandated that all of the catechetical materials we had in English that had been written over the last, you know, 30 years be revised to bring them into line with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And so that implementation process really helped improve the state of catechesis here in the U.S. I remember, so I came into the church before all that, and so I was there for end stage pre-Catechism catechesis. And I remember being in RCIA, which was terrible.

You know, the program I was part of. Once you're done, I'm gonna ask you why it was terrible. What's that? I wanna ask you why it's terrible, but we can get to that. Oh, I'll tell ya. One of the reasons it was terrible was that, well, they had, it was all very touchy-feely. They had this segment every week called Breaking Open the Word. And what the idea was is we're going to sit down and read the Sunday readings,

and then we're going to talk about what they mean to me in a group. One sec, what's going on? I always felt like you were crawling on the floor. Okay, good. Touchy feely. So it was like... Yeah, and so I thought this was a waste of time, because I'm here to learn what it means. Yeah, I wanted to...

And I already had been studying the Bible a lot, you know, I could tell you what it means, but I'm not here to do this touchy-feely faith-sharing thing, and what does this all mean to each one of us individually? So I thought that was a ridiculous approach, to have people who are not biblical scholars trying to interpret the text and not being given any guidance in how they're supposed to interpret it. I thought it was a waste of time. But then they also had this video series that they would play. VHS tapes? Oh yeah, VHS tapes. Roll in the television? Yep, roll in the television. And these tapes had been approved by the diocese, but they were not

great. In the one on the Trinity, I don't remember the woman's name, but there was a woman giving the lecture, and she was talking about how logic was kind of a Greek thing, it wasn't really a Hebrew thing, and so the Trinity is this Greek idea, and it's like, this is not how you build confidence in the students about the central doctrine of the Christian faith. Also, in the week where they taught us about confession, the video was done by a priest, and he spent almost the entire video recounting the plot of an episode of Gunsmoke that involved forgiveness. And it's like, okay, we could be talking about the Bible and the sacrament here and stuff

like that, but no, we're here in the plot of an episode of Gunsmoke. Did you get a sense that the others in the class were appreciative of this touchy-feely approach or were they like you, sort of bored? Well, I don't think they, I think they were bored. I don't know that they hated it quite as much as I did. Now I was talking to Richard DeClew, I'm not sure if you know who that fairly wonderful fellow he was on the show and he was talking about putting the Second Vatican Council in context. He pointed out that prior to the First and Second Vatican Council, you've got

the two world wars, Vietnam, the creation and dropping of the A-bomb and landing on the moon and automobile and airplanes and cultures, it's crazy when you realize the amount of change that took place and yeah, it makes sense why there was this, why this council was called for his point was. Yeah, I've just, I've just drunk a carbonated beverage, but you don't have a cough button. Okay. Oh, yeah. Next time you're on, we'll promise to have a call. Awesome. Oh, yeah. Next time you're on, we promise to have a call. Awesome. Oh, no, we don't promise.

We don't promise unless you can help us, because we don't know how to get it. Oh, that's easy. Just Amazon radio cough button. All right. There you go. Thursday radio cough button. But yeah, his point was it was maybe a lack of oversight in the implementation of the sake. And would you agree with that? Yeah. And so what should have been done, I suppose? Because, yeah, that's the first question. Well, so you had two different factions at Vatican II.

I mean, there was a more progressive faction. There was a more conservative faction. And the council documents themselves are OK. I mean, there are a few things in them that are naive. Like if you read Intermarifica, which is the one on social communications, they're envisioning, you know, like Catholic newspaper owners and, I mean, not owners of Catholic newspapers, but Catholic owners of newspapers interacting with bishops about content in an incredibly deferential way. It's like this is not

how actual media works, you know, so they're kind of, they're a little naive. But there's nothing, there's, there's, there's, there's, and there are a few things that could be phrased better. You know, that's something Joseph Ratzinger talked about. But there's nothing fundamentally problematic in there. The problem was you didn't have effective oversight of the more progressive party after the Second Vatican Council, and things went nuts. And partly this is because bishops were not sure how far things were supposed to go. And some bishops were progressive and others were just exhausted.

You also had a problem with the papacy in that... So Vatican II ends in 1965 and in 1968. Now, one of the issues that Vatican II had punted on was birth control, because there was a question in the mid-20th century. It's like, okay, you know, historically, the Catholic Church has been opposed to birth control between married couples, because if you're not married, you're not supposed to be doing it to begin with. But for a married couple, it's like, okay, you shouldn't be using birth control because they're gonna be like barrier methods that are going to interfere with the conjugal act,

or they're going to promote abortion, not in the sense of let's directly kill the baby, but they may make the You know like an IUD will make the womb hostile to implantation and you'll have what's called a spontaneous abortion meaning a miscarriage And so they would promote miscarriages and that's bad. So you're either interfering with the with the operation of the conjugal act or you're interfering with the operation of the Conjugal Act, or you're interfering with the consequences of the Conjugal Act, and then we got the pill. Now, it had been acknowledged for some time,

okay, well, you can, you know, God made humans so that women do not go into heat like other animals, you know, like other organisms. They're sexually receptive throughout their monthly cycle. Men also are sexually receptive throughout that cycle, and so humans can have conjugal relations at any time. But nevertheless, God made women in our species, He made females in our species, so that they're only fertile for a small portion of that time. But He never said you can only have sex during that fertile period. And all the way through human history, people haven't even known when that was. So it's clearly okay to have conjugal relations when a woman is not fertile. So then we get the pill, and it's like, okay, this makes her not fertile for longer. Well, there's never been a problem

with having sex when she's not fertile, and this just makes her not fertile for longer. fertile, and this just makes her not fertile for longer. So is this okay? This was a real question that moral theologians, including conservative ones, had to wrestle with in the mid-20th century. Wow. I love how you phrased that. I mean, I've never heard it steel man in that way, but I'm like, I can see why people would have legitimate questions. Yeah. And so this came up at the council, and the council said the pope really wanted himself to deal with this, so he kind of took it off the table. And the council said, we're going to defer to the pope on this. And so Paul VI appointed a commission, and he later expanded the commission.

And this set up expectations of this is going to change. Because in the secular world, if you're planning to implement a policy change, the way you do that is you implement something like a commission to get buy-in and prepare arguments, and then that provides you with the justification as the leader, you can say, as my esteemed commission has determined, here's the new policy. Well, in fact, you had a majority of the Pontifical Commission for Birth Control saying,

yeah, it's okay. There was a minority that said no. And so, and this all got leaked, including through the National Catholic Reporter, the Hubble Catechism folks. They got embargoed copies of the Commission's preliminary drafts and published them. So everyone knows, it's like, okay, here it comes, it's going to be okay for married couples to use this. And then in 1968 Paul VI puts out Humanae Vitae and says, nope, not possible for a married couple. And this was a huge shock to people, because they had been

based on the Pope's own actions and what had been leaked, they had expected this is gonna be a change, and then there was no change. And so he even clarified that anything you do before, during, or after the procreative act to nullify its procreative potential is not legitimate for a married couple to do. And this was a big shock, and he got tons of pushback. You had Bishop conferences dissenting as a conference, you know, you look at like the Canadian bishops put out a statement that basically descended from Humanae Vitae. You had theologians like the American Charles Caron holding press conferences and leading a huge movement, you know, in opposition to this. And you had major, major pushback. So this is 1968. Paul VI

continues to reign until 1978 when he passes on to his reward. You know how many encyclicals he came out with between 68 and 78? I do not know. None. In the first few years of his reign, he became pope in like 62, 63, he published multiple encyclicals. Humanae Vitae was the last. He went into shutdown mode following that encyclical because of the profound shock he experienced at the

pushback. I see how you can arrive at the conclusion that he went to shutdown mode, which is reasonable. Do you know of other people who've testified to that? Oh yeah, yeah. He basically concluded, people are not going to listen to me anymore. Wow. And this is like the closest I have to being able to sympathize with Pope Paul VI, is when I've put out a tweet that got people really angry,

and then had to decide not to apologize for the tweet. I mean, that must be wild to have. Yeah, yeah. And because the Pope was in... Now, he did do wild to have. Yeah. Yeah. And, and because the Pope was in, now he did do some teaching on some subjects. Sorry, Thursday's just texting me. Would you mind tilting back a bit? He says the hat's getting in his eye line. Tilting back a bit.

It's kind of in your eyes. So if you could just tilt the hat back. Oh, tilting the hat. Just a touch if you don't mind. Okay. Yeah. Wow. That's...

Yeah, interesting. So do you, do you... That's the first time I've ever gotten a text like that. So, yeah, so... But you see how this adds to the confusion in the church. In post-Vatican II, you get three years after the council, and the pope goes into shutdown mode. Wow. And of course, that's going to foster further confusion.

So is he responding to these bishop conferences dissenting at all? They basically tried to... My impression, and I haven't done a deep dive on this, my impression is that there were responses that tended to be private, but they didn't want to smack them down. They had other problems on other fronts. So for example, the Dutch Bishops' Conference issued a catechism that had some notable flaws in it about the Immaculate Conception and things like that. And so they were kind of putting out fires with bishops' conferences, and they had a commission of cardinals intervene on the Dutch Catechism and review it, and they ended up writing and expanded.

And this was a huge bestseller catechism internationally. But they wrote an appendix that basically clarified the problems that had been in the first edition, and then they would print, sometimes they would print the clarifying appendix with it. And they also instituted a new rule, which is now if you're a bishops' conference and you want to put out a catechism for your people, you've got to run it through the CDF first, because they didn't want any replications of the Dutch catechism with the local bishops conference going off the reservation and teaching their folks a bunch of stuff that was problematic. And so later national catechisms, like the German national catechism that came out in

the 1980s, or the American national catechism that came out in the 2000s, had to be reviewed by the CDF, now the DDF, before they could be published. Will Barron Was the pushback from Bishop's conferences stated in a way similar to the pushback we're getting to fiducia supplicants, where it's very kind of, look, we love you, Pope, we're under you, we submit to you, but we're not doing this? Something like that?

David Hickman Yeah, I mean, they were churchmen who were schooled in Bella Figura, making stuff look good. And so, you know, Pope Paul VI has given us an important point of reference. At the same time, each individual must follow their own conscience and da-da-da-da-da. Do we have personal testimony of those around Pope Paul VI who spoke about how it impacted him? Yes, we do. Yeah. And if you read biographies of Paul VI who spoke about how it impacted him? Yes, we do. Yeah. And if you read biographies of Paul VI, they'll talk about that. Wow.

Here's something I've been wanting to know. After the Second Vatican Council and the implementations of the Novus Ordo, how is it that it seemingly, I might be mistaken about this, which is why I'm interested. It felt like universally you have the priest now facing the people, a thing that the council never called for. It feels like it must have been a top down approach to see see the universe. So if it wasn't a top down approach, what accounts for this sort of uniformity of the Novus Ordo so quickly? accounts for this sort of uniformity of the Novus Ordo so quickly? Well, it actually started before the new rite of mass was introduced. There were priests prior to...

So the new rite of mass gets introduced in 1969. There were priests who had noticed that even under the old rite of mass, it doesn't say which way the priest is facing except at certain specific times. Now, the way churches were built, it will say the priest is facing the altar, and that meant his back was turned to the people because the altar is built up against one wall in many churches, but not in other churches. If the altar's pulled out from the wall, then facing the altar doesn't tell you where the people are. They could be in front of him or behind him. And so there were priests, and I believe, if I'm remembering his name correctly, I think it's the Jesuit father Paul Mankowski was one of them, who was a conservative guy, said, hey, I can fulfill the... if it's not him, it's

someone else, you know, from this generation that was alive at the time of the council, said, well, I can both face the altar like I'm supposed to. If it's a freestanding altar, I can face the altar and I can face the people. And that may be a little more personal or something. And so they would. Or something. Yeah.

And so they would implement this even at the time before. Prior to 69. Yeah, prior to 69. And it got popular. And then what happened was the liturgical architects got on board. And the liturgical architects said, hey, we need to do a bunch of changes in church. You know, Vatican II talks, so we need to do a renovation.

That then led to the practice of having freestanding altars becoming basically universal. And that led to the theatricalization of the mass, if I can put it that way. We're out of a desire to be more entertaining and more personable and give people something to look at so you can have active attention instead of just saying your rosary while you're at mass. tension instead of just saying your rosary while you're at Mass. That led to a kind of preference cascade that without this being imposed from above, like from the Vatican,

it evolved on a much lower level. There were key players in that, like the liturgical architects who were advising pastors in different areas about, okay, this is how we need to build churches now. But it wasn't a Vatican mandate. This Jesuit you spoke of, he was American? Yes. So then did the... He may not have been the only one, but I know he was one of the early adopters on this. So this ad populum position, did it begin in the United States or was it happening elsewhere? That I don't know.

Isn't that fascinating? Like, I still find it interesting that it spread seemingly so quick. There's also precedence because it's what you got in St. Peter's Basilica. St. Peter's Basilica has a freestanding altar, and so the Pope is facing the altar, as you say, in mass, and the people are in front of him. And so it was easy for people to say, for like liturgical architects and stuff, to say that's how they do it in St. Peter's. But isn't it more 360 at St. Peter's? It is kind of 360, but you can see how you can spin that

as the Pope faces the people at St. Peter's. That's the way we ought to do it, too. If you were kind of given the power by God to make the decision, and you could just unchange the ad populum thing, would you? And why? Yes. Why? Because I think the ad orientum or facing the East position brings out more clearly what the priest is doing. He's not there to entertain us. He's not a performer on stage. He's there to be our representative before God. And so if he's facing away from the people in the same direction that we are, it more clearly emphasizes that he is our representative to God. And so if I could rewrite history without disturbing other things, then yeah, I would favor the ad orientum position. Do you see us going back to that?

Not anytime soon. It is wild, you know, especially those who are watching and maybe they're in their 20s or 30s. You can sometimes get the impression that the chaos that exists in the church right now is completely new. Nothing like this has ever happened before. But back in the 60s and 70s, like you were saying, oh, it was nuts. There were all these provisional liturgical texts and stuff for a while, and people didn't know is it all going to be in English? Is part of it going to be in English? Part of it going to be in Latin?

It was crazy for a while. So, Sacrosanctum Concilium says that Gregorian chant, pride and place, liturgy, Latin, were there other authoritative – I'm sure there were, but I don't know the history – other authoritative documents that came out specifying how these new implementations had to take place, and that's why we're following certain things? There were a variety of documents that came out, some of them authoritative, some of them not, and that was part of the confusion for a while. Like, for example, there was in the...so in the Roman...in the Missal, that's the prayers for the Mass, there's a general instruction at the beginning, which is basically...it's a set of instructions for here's how you say Mass. Well, there can be local adaptations, and local adaptations can, like in the present edition, be integrated into the general instruction itself.

So today, if you're reading an American Missal, if you're reading the general instruction at the beginning, you'll be going along and it'll say, in the Diocese of the United States, this is what's supposed to happen. So they've taken the local American adaptations and put them into the germ so that they're easy to find. Well, what they did in the 1970s was they would print the general instruction and then they would have an American appendix as a second document. Problem was, and the American appendix had stuff in it like an endorsement of some of the liturgical architecture themes that were being promoted. But that appendix had never been properly approved.

And so it looks like here we've got our mass book with all the official instructions for mass. It's got an American Appendix that says we're doing this with the architecture now, and it's really hard to point out to the parish liturgical director that that's never actually been approved. We don't have to do that. Well then how did it get in here? Right. And so there were some shenanigans along those lines. So that would be an example of a non-authoritative document that actually got published in a way that made it look authoritative. There also were other things like I've got, you know, I wrote a whole book on the liturgy.

The current edition of it is called Mass Revision. It It was originally mass confusion, now it's mass revision. It needs to be reissued. But, you know, in writing that book, I got all of these source documents, you know, from the 1960s and the 1970s, and I still subscribe to the Committee for Divine Worship newsletter here in the U.S. and so forth. I also used to be called the Bishops Committee on Liturgy, or BCL. Well, a few years ago they published a big, thick book called the BCL newsletter, and it's like the first 35 years of it, starting in the 1960s and up to around 2000 or whatever. And then they subsequently published updates. But when I got the BCL newsletter 35 years volume, I'm opening it up, I'm looking at

the 1960s documents that are coming out contemporaneously with the council and shortly after, and they're catching up all the local bishops on here's what's going on with the liturgy, and it's like, oh, this is how the chaos starts. Really? Because they're saying stuff like, of course we're going to have to completely redo all of the hymns we sing at mass and we need, we need new contemporary hymns that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you guys have no idea what you're asking for. Yeah. Yeah. Why? See, I remember shortly after my conversion, it was actually immediately after my conversion, I came back from Rome and Italy and I was just so on fire for the

faith that just couldn't believe this was real, that Jesus loved me. I was so excited about praying and I made a decision to go visit every single Protestant denomination in town. Oh, okay. Cause I just wanted to listen to all the Christians, you know? And I was surprised, you know, going to the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, that it kind of looked just like we did, even in the Lutheran Church, which made me wonder, was there some sort of liturgical reform among certain Lutherans as well deviated that far from Catholicism.

Neither had Anglicans. And so they had both retained a lot of liturgical elements. And that's true even of some more traditional Presbyterians, Methodists also. But if you go to a Lutheran church or an Anglican church, they're going to have a liturgy that's recognizable in terms of its structure. Recently I was at a, I went back to a Presbyterian church that I had gone to before I became Catholic. Since I moved back to Fayetteville, you know, go visit people and see who's still there and what they're doing. And it was great to see people. There were still people there who had been there 30 years earlier. But in watching their liturgy, it's like, these guys are

so making it up. Because, I mean, for the last 30 years, my head has been in historic Christian liturgy space. So Catholic, Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, even Anglicans and Lutherans, it's like there's this common liturgical framework. We've got the liturgy of the Word, then we've got the liturgy of the Eucharist, we say the Creed at a certain place, it's always either the Nicene or the Apostles Creed, and there's just this certain flow to the liturgy that all the historic Christian groups share in common, and even in some Protestant circles. And this place, they're trying to be

traditional. This is not freewheeling guitars and somers guitars and somersaults and down-the-isle, you know, church service. They're trying to be traditional, but it's clear they've become disconnected from the sources. And so they've got the right elements here, but they're putting them all together weird, you know, from a historical point of view. So like, for example, when we get to the Creed, they're doing something where they read part of the Heidelberg Catechism every week, and the part changes. So it's like, this week we're reading this part of the Heidelberg Catechism, next week we read that part of the Heidelberg Catechism, and so. And that's their creed? That's their creed. Okay.

And it's like, guys, apostles, Nicene, Athanasian, you know, we've got historic documents for this function that are widely used. So you can see how they're kind of being a little freewheeling here. They're trying to be traditional. They are using the Heidelberg Catechism. I almost said Heisenberg Catechism. That would be the modernist... You're not certain what it means, Catechism. Right. But they're using the Heidelberg Catechism. They're not... It's not some modernist text.

But you can see how it's like kind of imitating historical elements, but putting it together kind of weird. But in, like you mentioned, a Lutheran church, there was something of a shift, something of a liturgical renewal in Protestant circles following Vatican II. Because what they did was, number one, they looked at, okay, what are Catholics doing now? What in that might we want to do? Now, that didn't affect things like the vernacular, because they'd been doing the vernacular for ages. But what did get affected was their lectionaries, because one of the things that Vatican II

did was it expanded the lectionary. Originally there was just a given set of readings for every day of the year. There's one set of readings. There's one liturgical cycle applies every year. And so that would lead, for example, and that was common in Anglican and Methodist circles too. And so you would have things like a book of, here are 52 sermons by John Wesley, one for every Sunday of the year, you know, and you could just read that sermon if

you're a Methodist preacher, you could read that sermon every first Sunday of April, every year, or whatever. But then the Catholic Church expanded its lectionary, so now we have this three-year cycle for Sundays and Holy Days, and two-year cycle for weekdays. And Protestant churches looked at that, and a bunch of them said, that's a good idea, let's do that too. We can't have the Catholics being reading more scripture than us. Yeah. And so what happened was a common lectionary developed,

where it was based on the Catholic lectionary, Interesting. but Protestant churches basically adopted that lectionary with a few modifications. Like in some of the Protestant churches, like non-Anglican ones, they may not read readings from the Deuterocanonicals. They may in the Anglican churches, but it's basically they adopted the Catholic lectionary, the new Catholic lectionary, with a few modifications here and there, so that all of the historic groups of Christians in

the West could be listening to the same readings at the same time on Sundays or any other day of the year. There's a sense online today that the kind of craziness that erupted post Vatican II and it's still taking place didn't affect Coptic Christians, Orthodox Christians, and doesn't affect them now. Why might that not be the case? Oh man, there are some... okay. In India right now, there is an enormous fight about the liturgy that has led to physical violence. In which churches?

It's in Catholic. These are Indian Catholic churches. I want to say it's in the Siramalabar right. I'd have to confirm that. Thursday just did Siramalabar. Okay. Yeah. Okay, yeah. That's cute. Got a little screen over there. Okay, so, yeah, and, but what it has to do with is, which way does the priest face during particular parts of Mass?

And they had their own revision. Because even though we're most familiar with the liturgical renewal that occurred in the Latin Rite of the Church as Latin Christians, liturgical renewals of different forms have taken place across the different Eastern Catholic churches. They haven't all proceeded at the same speed. Like, for example, in the Chaldean Church, I knew Bishop Jomo, who was the bishop of El Cajon, California, and he was one of the key players. They were just doing their liturgical renewal. It was a few decades after the council, but they were finally getting around to it. Well, the same thing was happening in the Sierra Malabar Rite, and you had a division among the Sierra Malabar bishops about when should the priest be facing the people or facing the east, at which points in mass.

And people, like in the West, this became an identity marker. Are you one of the good guys or one of the bad guys, regardless of which way you view it? The good guys could be the, we're doing it the way we've always done it, or the good guys could be the, we're doing it the way the bishops say to do it. And you have enormous conflict. This is a huge issue that is way more intense than the problems in the Latin Rite over the older versus the newer forms. I mean, you've had physical violence break out over this in India, and this is a huge problem that Pope Francis has been trying to solve, and it ain't solved yet.

But I was referring to non-Catholic churches. Oh, yeah. So I think Orthodoxy and Coptic Christianity have great curb appeal online. You look at YouTube videos and they just seem like they haven't been altered by the same kind of lunacy that we in the West have. And given the state of the church today, this is why a lot of people are leaving the Catholic Church for orthodoxy. So what I'm asking you is, did they undergo a kind of period of craziness and turmoil like we did in the 60s and 70s, or were they somehow

isolated from that? My understanding is they were broadly isolated from that. That's not to say there have been no changes in their liturgy, but it's going to vary because we're talking about so many different groups. Having said that, there is a downside to not trying to update, because as you mentioned, we had the World Wars, we had bunches of stuff happening in society. And it is true, you need to, we always need to maintain the substance of the historic faith, but we need to be able to engage with new issues from a faith perspective in a way

that doesn't end up hurting our credibility. For example, it's pretty clear that the Ptolemaic cosmology that was broadly assumed prior to the 1600s is not the actual structure of the physical universe. Well, in the West and in the East, it was broadly assumed among Christians that the Ptolemaic cosmology is how the universe is structured. And if we had not updated and been willing to engage new questions being presented by the natural sciences or natural philosophy as it was called,

then we would be really lacking in credibility in our proclamation of the gospel if people could point at us and say, Oh, you guys think that the earth is at the center of the universe and the fixed stars are on a shell that's just outside the orbit of Saturn and all of the Saturn, and there is no Uranus and Neptune, and all of the planets are on these crystal shells that are surrounding the Earth that we somehow can't detect, and your faith wants us to believe that? Well that was never part of the faith, but it was a common view among Christians and in the same way. I'm smiling because I think it'll be five minutes before some channel claiming to be Catholic says planets actually don't exist other than the earth. And there will be a very sophisticated

argument that I won't know how to assess or respond to. Oh, well, we have me on now. Oh, well, we have me on the end. But the, so you can see how this scientific issue, it's not a matter of the faith, but it was related to matters of the faith, and we needed to be able to disentangle ourselves from the prior common opinion when we got changing circumstances that showed us new evidence from the natural sciences that indicated the previously broadly accepted cosmology is not accurate. Well, similar things happen with other things, with other aspects, like the liturgy. The exact prayers you say are not part of the faith. The language you say them in, that is not part of the faith. The faith may be

expressed through those prayers, but whether you're saying it in Aramaic or Greek or Latin or English or Neo-English from the year 3400, that's not an element of the faith. And so there is a need to adapt to changing times and circumstances. Okay. And so the kind of the downside, there are some attractivenesses like, oh, they haven't had a burst of chaos like we have recently. Yeah, but how successful has their adaptation to modern circumstances been overall? Are there other elements that you're not paying attention to where they're at a disadvantage that will become more clear with time?

So it sounds like there are good adaptations that one ought to make, but then also poor adaptations. Correct. Because you just pointed out that you think all things being equal at orientum would be preferable. Someone might make the case, well, we need to adapt with the times, and people find this more engaging. And so they would have their point of view, and then you would have your point of view. I would say that's a debatable one. I mean, you asked what's your preference. But I think if we, tomorrow, had all the priests turn around and face the East, it would be very disorienting for people. I think you'd, I think you'd need at a minimum a big catechesis if you wanted to even attempt that,

because it would be very alienating. And I think that's one of the reasons we're not having a lot of change in the liturgy these days. Why? Because we just went through the biggest liturgical convulsion in centuries, and there is a need to let things settle down and let the church have a period of peace. And so the last three popes have contended themselves not with making big changes, but with doing little minor fiddly bits of tinkering to try to improve things on the margins, but not go for anything big because we just had a big shift that was a huge shock to the church's system, and we need to recover from that before

trying anything else. Like Benedict XVI, you know, he allowed greater liberty for the celebration of the traditional mass, which I think is great. Yeah. But he didn't revisit the, what in his day was called the ordinary form of the mass, and make significant changes to it. He had talked about some, like for example relocating the sign of peace. You know, the sign of peace was not in the traditional form of the liturgy the way it is in the ordinary form. That was a revival of a custom that was from the early church and that was still around in some of the Eastern Catholic churches, and they said, let's reintroduce that here. But Benedict XVI was of the opinion that it's really not doing its job where it is now. It's

kind of a distraction at this point. Yeah, like a road bump. Yeah, we ought to move it elsewhere. And he commissioned a bunch of bishops to look at this, but it didn't end up going anywhere because the bishops weren't wild about moving it. Well, okay, you can see how cautious he's being, and he would prefer to move it, but he didn't want to just do it on his own authority, he wanted buy-in from the bishops, he didn't get the buy-in, and so he let the initiative die. So this is just little minor fiddling.

Same thing, Pope Francis hasn't done anything major regarding the ordinary form of the Mass. John Paul II did a second, or actually a third edition of the Roman Missal that made minor little tweaks, but that was it. Because what we have now is a functional liturgy. It may not be to, it's not to everybody's taste, but it's a functional liturgy that expresses the Christian faith and it really has transubstantiation happen, and it doesn't have glaring problems. And so there's a, let's just have some liturgical peace for a while before we start fiddling again. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, imagine if the same kind of change that took place from the

Tridentine mass to what we have now happened again. So imagine if there was a new mass that looked as different from the nervous order. How would people react? That that would be the equivalent. Well, take so we had the transition from the traditional mass. Sure. And then putting it back to the Trinity mass. Put it back. How would people react to that? It would be chaotic. But what I'm saying is, imagine if not just putting it back, but if it, I think for the

most, I think it's fair to say that the Novus Ordo isn't as grand and as, I want to be careful with my words here because I know you're very nuanced approach. Eloquent, majestic, okay, as the Latin mass. It seems to me that it's become a lot more casual, maybe not everywhere, but in a lot of places for sure. Imagine if it became even more to the same degree as casual. There would be a revolt, right? And then when I think of that, it helps me understand how difficult it must have been for many Catholics who loved the liturgy.

And it seems to me that there was a lot of gaslighting that went on, even as I was kind of getting into Catholic apologetics, that we would get really upset with people who wish that things were the way that they were before, that they were the problem. Okay. There was a lot of that. I need to ask you a question. So I hear people using the word gaslighting a lot lately, and I know its origin. It comes from the movie Gaslight. I can tell you what I think it means. But I hear people seeming to use it in a way that doesn't seem consistent with what happens in that movie. How are you using the term gaslighting? So when someone gaslights another person, I suppose baked into that definition ought to be the intentionality.

Like I'm actually trying to make you think that you're crazy. Maybe, maybe I'm using the wrong word. What I mean is- That is what happens in the movie gaslight. Yes. What I mean by it is there's not necessarily an intentionality there, but I'm getting you to question your sanity or your fidelity to the church when There's no need for you to do that. Mm-hmm Here we go. So here's the definition of manipulating someone into questioning their own perception of reality Yeah, that's what happens in the movie

Yeah, so I suppose by manipulating you do have baked into that definition of sort of I'm intending to do this to you Mm-hmm. I'm not necessarily meaning there's an intention, but I'm looking at you as the enemy. Like you're the problem with the church right now, because you want us to go back to the way things were. Yeah, I would just view that as a disagreement. Yeah. Um, but, um, because we're calling it feels like I'm in certain circumstances, I might be causing you, let's say you're the traditional one here who wishes things hadn't have changed so drastically. Yeah, I'm causing you to question your fidelity to the church.

And I'm kind of saying you're kind of a bad Catholic for not getting on board with this new program. Does any form of disagreement where you confront the other person with the disagreement involve the form of gaslighting by that definition? Because let's suppose I'm on team Orange and you're on team Topaz. And there's some, as a member of team Orange, I think team topaz is a, is a problem. Right. You're causing a problem in society and you should own up to that fact and you should recognize that you're doing problematic things. Am I gaslighting you or am I just disagreeing with you?

I see your point. Yeah. So maybe what I'm doing then is I'm taking the side of the traditionalists and maybe that's why I feel the way that I do. Because it felt to me like when I was at Catholic Answers that we would write, I got the impression that we would write off people too quickly who love the old form of the mass and were critical of the new form. But I think they were wrong to do that.

So maybe that's why I'm attributing gaslighting to the other side. But that's a good point. If I'm going to disagree with you and tell you you're wrong, well, in doing that, I'm calling into question your perception of reality. So in a sense, I could see how that would be. Okay, so what word should I use or what disagreement? I would just say, I would just, I just, I'm a bit baffled because this word gaslighting has become really common in the last couple of years. And I'm just not in the circles that use it a lot.

So I'm just trying to understand. I would be inclined to say that people disagreed and accused each other of doing bad stuff or being bad people or being behind the times or ahead of the times or whatever. I have, you know, you mentioned when you worked for Catholic Answers, I can't speak for other people there, but I know there's a lot of healthy respect for the traditional Latin liturgy there. And I've always been an advocate of it. I don't attend it myself, but I recognize it as a valuable contribution to the Church's liturgical tradition,

and I want to defend the rights of people who want to have it. I don't want to see it suppressed any more than I want to see the Chaldean right or the Maronite right suppressed. These are all different legitimate expressions of the Church's liturgical diversity under Christ. I want to see them all available for those who want to use them. So therefore, do you see them more appropriate as an act of suppression? The recent, the Pope Francis on the Latin Mass? Do you disagree with that?

I would not have issued that document. I think that I approve of Pope Benedict's approach of having generosity in the celebration and mutual influence, and if there are problems, which you know, there are problems. And I understand Pope Francis's impulse, especially based on his advisors and what they've told him, that this form of the celebration of the liturgy is becoming a kind of polarizing lightning rod, it's kind of tribal identity marker that is pulling people together so that they can oppose you and foster hate towards you. Well, okay, if someone has got a tribal identity badge, lightning rod, and they're getting together and rallying and hating me,

and I have the ability to take that away from them, if I'm acting in a human manner where I'm paying back people who hate me in kind? Well, that's a natural human response. If you and your generosity have been giving people something that they wanted, and then it becomes a rallying point to direct hatred and opposition to you when you have been the one authorizing them to have this It's only natural to say well, then you can't have it anymore and so

Even though I think that the better approach Would be to ride this out and I think there are other things Francis could do to To blunt or avoid a lot of the criticism that's been directed his way. Taking this away is not the approach I would do. I understand why it's a human thing to do. And I'll also tell traditionalists, you asked for what you got. Because if you make this a tribal identity marker and use

it to rally opposition to Pope Francis and Vatican II, you're asking for this to be taken away. It's your own fault. You brought it on yourself. It's a bad thing, but you brought it on yourself by being so unrelenting and reflexive in your criticism of Francis, and so hostile, frankly. If you're throwing a tantrum, if kids have a toy and they're throwing a tantrum, you can take their toy away to punish them, and that's what's happening here. Okay, so you're very passionate about this. Yeah, I want people to have the Latin Mass, and I very much hope and pray that a future pope will revisit this issue and reliberalize its celebration. But you agree that it's become a rallying point through which people have expressed

their opposition, because I know what I mean, traditionalists. I know several who love the Latin Mass. They're critical of Pope Francis, but they are very charitable, love the Pope, and they wouldn't want to be lumped in with the group of people you're talking about. Right. And I agree, not all traditionalists are this way. I hope and would be confident the majority of them are not. They just like the traditional form of the mass. And that's great.

But they're not, it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. And it's people who I could name, but maybe won't for the moment, who are the ones that are on the radar of Pope Francis' advisors. And those nattering nabobs of negativism, to use a phrase from the Nixon era, are the ones that are on the internet, doing clickbait to stir up trouble and opposition and have righteous anger among their listeners,

and they're the ones that are being picked up on by Pope Francis' advisors, and the advisors are the ones whispering into Francis' ear whenever the latest Whatever Hate Francis video comes out and says, see what this guy is saying right here? He's spreading this idea to other people in your circle. And it's not just tarnishing traditionalists, it's tarnishing all Americans. Because Pope Francis appears to have an idea that the American church is much more opposed to him than it actually is, and that it's much more along these lines. It's misrepresenting the American bishops. These guys are ruining it for everybody. So do you feel that the Motu Proprio will in a way backfire, that'll just galvanize

those people who feel like their mass has been taken away from them in certain circumstances? It depends on what's going to happen in the future. And my sense of, my precognitive abilities have not allowed me to discern exactly what's going to happen in that regard. So I have to leave that to the future. What advice do you have then for those who obviously a lot of people feel? Yeah. Okay. Let me go, go to this a different way.

You know, maybe in the eighties and nineties and two thousands, it felt like things were really on the up and up because in a way they were, There was clarification that was clarifying the craziness and the heresy that may have been rampant in certain circles. So for those of us who came into the Church during that time, I myself was one of them, it really felt like, okay, like everything is ascending, everything is getting better and better, and now it feels like we've got a bit of whiplash. There's a lot of Catholics that feel that way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say study church history, because actually, you know, this is, periods of progress and periods of setback are normal in the church. And if you have come into the church during

a period where things were improving on balance, you can get surprised and discouraged when you hit a period where they start moving in the other direction for a while. But long term, the church is guided by the Holy Spirit, and so consequently we can expect both periods of progress and periods of setback, but the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church into a fuller appreciation and appropriation of the spiritual riches that Christ gave it. And so I would say read the past to know the future. There have been problematic popes in the past that are much more problematic than Francis. And I mean, every pope has problems, you know, there's no perfect pope. Not even Peter, as the New Testament

indicates. He was a far from perfect individual. But the better you understand church history and the dynamics it involves, the better you'll understand the ups and downs of our own time. Now Now when people often point to the bad popes of the past, it seems like they're saying they live privately immoral lives, but may not have been nearly as confusing as Pope Francis is. No, no, no, no. Can you help me understand maybe a pope that was very confusing? Yeah, I forget his exact number. It's one of the Celestines, if I recall correctly. Okay. But he had theories about the private judgment of souls. This is the guy, you know, right around

the time of John 22nd, who basically thought that he basically endorsed Christian mortalism. What does that mean? basically thought that he basically endorsed Christian mortalism. The idea that it's sometimes, basically that the soul does not have conscious experiences until the final judgment. One variation of it is known as soul sleep. But basically the idea was that, and he had also a variation of it for the damned, but basically the idea was you die and you wake up on judgment day with your body back, and the particular judgment and the general judgment are the same thing. Well, if that's what happens, why are we praying to saints? Because they're not having conscious experiences right now. And was this being debated around this time, this pontificate? Was it creating that mass to saints, because they're not having conscious experiences right now.

Was this being debated around this time, this pontificate? Was it creating that mass level confusion among the theologians? It was creating confusion, and you can see how it undermines the Church's historic practice of praying to the saints is saying stuff like, yeah, the saints aren't having conscious experiences. I mean, imagine if Francis said that. People would totally freak out. There would be a lot of YouTube videos. Yeah. Yeah. What about an immoral Pope? What's one of the best examples of a scoundrel pope. Oh, well, so two spring to mind. The first one I want to say is Alexander the Sixth, Rodrigo Borgia. I don't know if you've ever, have you ever seen Horrible Histories?

No. Okay, so Horrible Histories is- I want to, it sounds, I like the title. It's a group of British comedians and they became famous with a show called Horrible Histories where they would present historical facts in a kind of comedy format. And they would have like little signs pop up on the screen to tell you this is true, what they just said, this part is true. So even though it's comedy, it's based on things that really happened.

I see, yeah. And they also would do songs. And so they have different historical songs. They have one called the Borgia Family. And it starts with a depiction of the Borgia Family. You've got Lucretia Borgia. She's sitting in a big wicker back chair. Next to her is her son, Giofre Borgia,

who's like 12 years old, her brother, Giofre Borgia, who's like 12 years old. Behind him is the older brother, Cesare Borgia. Next to him is Giovanni Borgia, another brother. And to the right is their father, Rodriganni Borgia, another brother, and to the right is their father, Rodrigo Borgia. And as the song begins, we zoom in on them, they're all sitting here impassively and they're doing the Addams Family snapping routine,

like the theme song for the Addams Family. And in fact, the song they sing is based, it's not identical for copyright reasons, but it's based on the Addams family. And in fact, the song they sing is based, it's not identical for copyright reasons, but it's based on the Addams family. And they're doing this, we're this creepy family vibe. And so they're singing their names, Lucretia, Giovanni, Gioffre and Cesare, the Borgia family. Our father was Rodrigo. I had a monstrous ego.

When he gives trouble, we go, the Borgia family. And so then they start singing about how they came to power. And Rodrigo Borgia, the father of the family, starts singing about problems in Spain and the bishops were a shower. So I went and splashed my cash to all the papal cardinals in hope that they'd be bought in short they were, and I became the pope. And then they talk about all the skullduggery that the Borgia family got up to.

Skullduggery is a new term for me. Oh, okay. It means mischief and criminal or immoral activity. So the Borgia family were notorious for their immoral and illegal behavior. As long as Rodrigo Borgia was pope, his family—he engaged in nepotism—so these are his children, okay, by his mistresses. So he's a cleric, he's not married, but he's got mistresses, these are his children. He uses nepotism to put them into key positions of influence in the empire. And his son Cesare is so ruthless that he becomes the model for Machiavelli's prints. And it's just, they were up to crazy bad stuff.

Well, so Rodrigo Borgia was a terrible pope of the immoral kind. He was not the worst. As far as I've been able to determine, the worst was Benedict IX. Benedict IX was pope three times. He bought the papacy, sold the papacy, bought the papacy. He was incredibly immoral, and I won't even... I won't go through all the things he did that were immoral in office, but he was a highly immoral pope. So yeah, there have been both kinds. And even if a pope is immoral, And even if a pope is immoral, that still sends confusing signals. I mean, it's not the case, oh yeah, he had a mistress in private. No, Rodrigo Borgia was public about this. He's putting his kids in office.

This is not a pro. He's privately immoral, but he's publicly a great pope that doesn't send confusing signals Yeah, he sent confusing signals. He I mean it was publicly known. He had these mistresses He had these children and now he's elevating these children into high position Similarly Benedict the ninth he gets pope gets to be pope three times You know, that's clearly sending confusing signals to the faithful. So it's not the case that there have been privately immoral Popes in the past. There have been publicly immoral Popes in the past, and that sends confusing signals that dwarf what's going on right now. Yeah, it's helpful, I think, to talk about that, to kind of give us some context. I was reading Descartes, this is going to sound like a tangent, but I was reading Descartes meditations, and he's trying to figure out how to explain, kind of coming up with mental

problems, not mental problems, problems as you're trying to discern things, you come up with errors and you're like, how would a good God allow us to have errors? And it's he kind of, it's like, is it to the problem of evil? And one thing he says is it's a, it's a sub case of the problem of evil. Right. He says it's when our will to know something exceeds our ability to know it, something like that. That's one of the reasons. Anyway, the point I'm getting at is I feel like in the nineties, if I went to a bad church or something or a church that wasn't very reverent, I had an idea of what I wanted.

And I think a lot of people had an idea of what they wanted, just a basically reverent liturgy. Well, it seems like in a lot of places we kind of have that now, but we're really not satisfied. You know, it's like how will desires something far greater than maybe is realistic. Do you see what I'm saying? That was a very clunky way of putting it. No, no, I agree. There has been a steady improvement, well steady is a bit of an exaggeration. There has been a market improvement in the quality of liturgy in

the United States in the last 30 years. It is better by a lot now on average than it was 30 years ago when I came into the church. One of the reasons for that is in the 1990s, the Vatican insisted on a shift in liturgical translation so that they kicked out the previous translation regime that was into constant fiddling and invention and dynamic equivalence and replaced it with a translation regime whose job is to take the Latin and put it into English and that's it. The second thing they did was they released the third edition of the Roman

Missal and that took a long time to get translated the third edition of the Roman Missal, and that took a long time to get translated, in part because of the shift in translation regimes. But when it was finally implemented in 2010, 14 years ago, it enabled the bishops to have a kind of one-time, let's all get on the same page and fix all the little problems that have been going around where people have kind of slacked off in previous decades, and it dramatically improved the quality of liturgy in ordinary parishes. Is it perfect? Well, no.

Even in good parishes, there will be little things that could be better, but the quality of liturgy on average is vastly better than it was. I'm really interested in the sort of psychological reasons that sort of undergird our desire for perfect, neat things. It's not to say that we're wrong to want them. I just, I'm interested in why it is we, uh, the kind of the traditional bent, which I myself have. And again, don't think I'm wrong to have, but I, sometimes I think it's this desire for a security amidst a time of chaos.

Yeah, I think that's part of it. Um, I think, I think there are other factors too. One of them, have you personally gone through something like this? So people talk about this trad phase or if, yeah, Have you personally gone through something like this? Oh yeah. People talk about this trad phase or if, yeah. Oh yeah. There was a phase where I barely could, this was not a long phase, but when I was, you

know, first writing my book on mass confusion at the time, this was before the 2010 release of the upgraded right. But back in the 1990s, early 2000s, there was a point where I was so mad when I would go to Mass that I would leave, I would walk out of the church and consider myself excused from my Sunday obligation on the grounds of how mad it was making me. I wouldn't do that today. I'm more mature now than I was then. I have a better perspective on things now than I did then. And I would not consider myself so lightly excused from my Sunday obligation.

But I did go through a period where I was incredibly uptight about things that were happening at Mass that were not to my preference. These days I would be uptight about something that invalidated the consecration, but that almost never happens. And I recognize the degree of liturgical diversity and the degree that exists and has existed historically. I recognize the degree of human error and fallibility and I recognize not everything has to suit me. You know, the church didn't revolve around Jimmy Akin, and it shouldn't. So I should expect to encounter things that are just not to my taste, and that's okay.

Does that enable you to have compassion on those who come to you with a similar anger? Yes. I suppose so long as they're open to having a conversation and they're not just sort of shouting at you. Well, there's another component, and I was guilty of this. When I had intense liturgical anger, part of it was virtue signaling. You can see that now. You probably couldn't see it at the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I was proving how virtuous I was by Insisting on my high standards for liturgy. Yeah, and And I'm a little more humble now now just not interject real quick But two things can be true at once right like you could have been right. Mm-hmm Yep, it should have been better. Yeah, right and Like you could have been right. It should have been better. Right. And yet you're also virtue signaling. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, just because you're right, doesn't mean you're not stuck up. Yeah. And, um, in fact, when you're right, that's when it's easiest to be stuck up. Oof. Um, so,

uh, so I just, I needed to do some more maturing. I needed to recognize that I can be right about things, but that doesn't mean I should be so angry and righteously indignant about them. And it's not the end of the world if it's not perfect. And if you believed it was the end of the world, if things weren't perfect, and you were stuck up and you were that tightly wound, that seems like a recipe to either apostatize, how do you pronounce that? I always get that wrong.

Well, it's both is the answer. Okay. Or to fall into some kind of schism, right? Like how do you remain that kind of frustrated with things and just expect to live like that forever? Something's got to give. Something's got to give, and what needs to give is the frustration, because schism is a sin, and no amount of frustration should lead you into sin. Therefore, if frustration is pushing you in the direction of sin, you need to get over the frustration. You need to give it up, because otherwise, if you let it push you into sin, you are in sin. Because prior to that, someone else might be sinning. Someone's celebrating a sloppy liturgy,

or whatever, like that's on them. But if you are now in a state of sism, now it's your fault. Now it's your fault. And so in order not to sin, you need to have a perspective on what's worth getting upset about and what's not. Now something may be worth getting upset about in principle, but that doesn't mean you need to be constantly upset about it. I mean, for example, let's take this out of the liturgical realm for a second. There are children who are starving in Africa because their governments are thoroughly corrupt and are kleptocratic and stealing all the money that could and should otherwise be used to feed those children.

I mean, there are Western aid agencies who send money to these countries to feed these children, and they got to pay bribes to the elected officials because the governments are corrupt, and consequently not all the money gets through and not as many kids get fed as should. Okay, that's wrong. That's taking money, that's taking food out of the mouths of starving children. That's something worth getting upset about and trying to bring change about. But should you be upset about that every single minute? I see your point. I think you're not good. I thought you were about to say, but it's not okay therefore to get upset about the liturgy and its abuses

because of what's going on. That's not the point you're making. I'm glad. No, your point is we all agree that's something to get upset about the liturgy and its abuses because of what's going on. That's not the point you're making them glad. No, no, no. No, your point is we all agree that's something to get upset about. And yet how would your life look if 24 hours a day? You were consumed by this issue. You'd burn out. You would burn out. You would damage yourself. You would damage your wife and your kids. You would damage your friends, it would be bad. We are not meant to live on a diet of anger. And so even though something is wrong and can be a focus of righteous anger, that doesn't mean you're meant to be righteously angry all the time.

You need to be able to step away from the problems, and you need to be able to do other things and take joy in life and maintain a healthy balance. Yes, helping starving children in Africa is part of that for many people. Yes, helping promote good liturgy is part of that for many people. But no, this is not the thing to just get terminally frustrated about. God hasn't called you to bear that burden. Isn't that nice. And so if you find yourself being just constantly frustrated by something, you should ask, is

this helping? Is this frustration doing anything productive or is it just hurting me? Because if it's not doing anything productive, it's not God's will that you carry it. What's interesting though is today with the tweets and the podcasts and the little clips and the shorts, making you angry and entertainment have come together. And it sometimes feels productive to get angry. And I wonder why that is. Well, partly it's because of how we grew up as a species, how God designed us and put us in an

environment where we were in a resource poor environment. So our ancestors had to scrape by, you know. If you go back to the stone age, people were scraping by. They were living hand to mouth. Everybody was living hand to mouth. And because we grew up in a resource poor environment, resources became incredibly important. That's why, for example, humans are what psychologists call loss averse. If you have a million dollars and could get a second million dollars, you care much more about losing the million dollars you have than the option of getting another million

dollars. We care more about losing stuff than we do getting stuff, because we grew up in a resource deprived environment where if you lose the few resources you've got you can starve. And so we care passionately about the resources we've got and we care about threats to those resources. So that leads to a kind of tribalism and rivalry where our group needs to hang together in order to fend off that other group and what they're trying to do to us. So if you are part of this group

and we've got a Latin liturgy that we really like, we want to band together against that group that might try to take it away from us. And sometimes that makes complete sense. Yeah. Right? Like you're not saying that's illogical or wrong. No, it's not illogical. I'm thinking of why Quebec is so obsessive about French being on every sign along with English. Yeah.

Well, for obvious reasons. If it wasn't there, if they weren't so obsessive about it, English would just sweep through the state or the province. Yeah. And so it's even there. The other folks in Canada could be concerned about, you just referred to provinces as states. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, the states are sweeping through the provinces So It's an understandable natural human reaction

That doesn't mean it's the best way to approach things. Yeah, because the Tribalistic approach of us versus them. Let's hate on them, let's attack them and undermine them can result in bad stuff happening. Like you tick off the Pope, he'll take away your Latin liturgy. Or he'll impose conditions on it you won't like. What I would do if I was trying to bring about change on this, on the Latin liturgy, I would conduct a charm offensive. I would say, let's get as many traditionalists as we can to write the Vatican and take out ads and make it known through social media that we support

Vatican II, we support Pope Francis, we are so thankful that he allows us to have this form of liturgy and I would do nothing but talk positive to them to change the impression that they have. And then, once a new impression has been made, you can petition for more liberalization, and say, you know, would it really be so bad if we have this? I mean, we've shown you that we're not just a rallying point for anti-Francis stuff. We are loyal sons of the church, we're loyal subjects of the Pope, we very much appreciate what you've given us. Would it really be so bad if we had it in a few other situations? And use that goodwill to bring about the change you want. There was an evangelical musician named Mark Hurd.

He actually died the same time my wife did. He was on stage and had a heart attack. And he was a young guy, so it was very unexpected. But he has a song. His songs are very human. They're not just singing about Jesus. He's singing about stuff like watching television late at night because it's so interesting, or interspousal problems. One of his songs is about, it's one that's about

interspousal problems. You know, some of the lyrics are like, I'm a tiger, you've become a tigress. Talking about how the sharpest fangs won't get us out of this mess. But one of the lines in that song is you might find that sometimes it helps to give when the instinct is to take. And that's true. That's, that's, you know, that's straight out of Jesus' ethics. I see that in marriage with my own beautiful bride. If we get into like a loggerheads and we don't know how to proceed, and we're both trying to defend where we're right, sometimes it's very counterintuitive in the moment, but to kind of give that, you know, everything becomes better. Yeah, and that's the basis for my advice on the traditional liturgy.

I would love to see it celebrated vastly more than even Benedict, you know, gave permission for it to be celebrated. I'd like to see it widely celebrated. And that's not going to happen if you listen to the loud squeaky wheels on the internet who are rallying anti-Francis forces and just trying to make you angry. That's going to be counterproductive. What you need to do is a charm offensive. You need to say, Holy Father, we love you, we respect you, we are grateful to you. And you need to drive that message home and give gratitude when the instinct

is to get mad. You need to overcome that. Where's the role for legitimate criticism? Because presumably that's okay, and yet it's a very hard line apparently to differentiate because it seems to me that people are being critical of Francis, but they do seem to bend over backwards, say we love the Holy Father, we pray for the Holy Father. This doesn't make sense. This shouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have done this.

I think that... Is it the amount of it or is it the... It's a combination of factors. So the first one is, now, Francis himself has encouraged people to be frank and offer sincere criticism. And that's good. At the same time, people who do that seem to get punished. And there's a human impulse. It's easy to say, I'm okay with you criticizing me. Until you criticize me.

Until you criticize me and then I can get mad. And so I think that there are situations where, I don't know Francis personally, but just as a distant observer, it looks to me like he has good ideals in this area of wanting to hear frank criticism, but he has a human reaction when some of that criticism happens.

And so you gotta be prudent in how you do it. And that means... Why do you say human instead of immature or inappropriate? Because it feels like that's maybe what you mean, isn't it, when you say human? No, I just meant human. I mean, it is, it's not the ideal human reaction, but it's what human, it's what human nature would do absent elevating grace. Because it requires, it's like, it's what human nature would do absent elevating grace because it requires it's like it's human to to love someone who loves you it's above you to love even your enemies right yep gotcha um so uh by the way we have trains going through Steubenville this happens regularly oh okay it's quite no problem as long as it's not a nuclear attack. I don't know why anyone would want to nuke Steubenville, but it's good to know. So I just mean human in the sense of it's understandable.

I see that makes sense. Yeah. So, you know, and I'm always impressed when someone asks for criticism and means it. Oh my goodness. A number of years ago I was corresponding with Cardinal Avery Dulles and he was doing a second edition of a history that he had written on apologetics. He had written it a few decades earlier, Ignatius Press was going to be reprinting it, but they wanted to bring it up to date, and so he'd written some new chapters to supplement for the decades that, you know,

since the book had originally come out. And so he sent me those chapters and said, tear them apart. I want to know everywhere I'm wrong. And I was so impressed by that. And did you? I did, yeah. And he wasn't wrong much, but I made a lot of suggestions. And I try to do the same thing.

You've done that with me. You've called me after your debates and went, how did I do? And if I'm honest, I've been reluctant to be fully honest, because often when people say criticize me, you're not sure if they mean it. Yeah. Well, it's nice to have good points pointed out, but if I ask for criticism, I want to know,

how did I come across? What did I have done better? And I've done that with you too. I've said to you off camera, like, please call me. If I start, and you've done that, and I've really appreciated it. You've called me when I think this is, and you've said it was such humility

that it was very easy to take. Oh, and I've taken things down because I've been really grateful for that. Especially I think in the internet age where you've got 8,000 voices vying for your attention with all of their two cents. It's like, it's not possible. I need advisors. I need people like yourself and Dr. Hahn and others who I can rely on to sort of... Yeah. But I think, you know, to pull back to Pope Francis, I think that he has good ideals in this area of wanting free and frank and open discussion of constructive criticism to help things improve. But I think he has an understandable human tendency to have a negative reaction when that occurs, because when you get negative feedback,

it's natural to not like that, and it requires an effort to set that negative reaction aside and say thank you and I appreciate it and let's see what we can do. So I think that's part of the issue. Another part of the issue is he's in a bubble. He doesn't speak English well. He may speak it a little bit, but he doesn't speak it well. And so he's relying on gatekeepers to tell him what's happening in the English-speaking world. I see. And he's surrounded himself by people, many of whom I would say have questionable judgment

and agendas, that they can advance by telling him what they want him to believe. I see. And he then believes that and acts on it. So, in a situation like that, one has to know when to criticize and when to keep your mouth shut. You may need to keep your mouth shut for some time in order to build the kind of positive relationship

that to show the other person that you're worth doing business with and you're worth taking seriously. I mean, in a marital relation, if you're in the doghouse with your wife, you better keep your mouth shut for a considerable amount of time until you've been able to turn things around, so that your spouse will be in a position to listen to constructive criticism. Well, the same way, if you've got a pope who you know perceives you as opposed to him, you're going to need to bend over backwards for some time to convince him you're not on, you're not opposed to him, you're not a threat, you're trying to be

supportive. Only after that do you then start to say make requests and offer tentative criticisms or things like that once it's been established that you're on the same team. Makes sense to me. I'm sorry you haven't had much of a chance to smoke your pipe there. Oh, that's okay. I tend not to when I'm talking. What I really need though is to is to have a break. No, to just drink more fluid. We've been going for two hours now. No, we have not. Yeah, we have. We started at 11.

It's now one of those. Quick. We're doing great. Yeah. But I try to drink 12 ounces of fluid every hour and I haven't gotten the first 12 ounces. So I'm going to take a sip. I'll tell you about what's happening with my wife while you drink because it's going to be difficult for you to drink and talk at the same time.

You asked me prior to the show how she's doing. Yeah. I said that she's so she'll be doing carnivore. Forgive me for those who are watching because they've already heard the story, but she's been doing it for about six months now, five or six months, and she's off all of her meds. She feels incredible.

It's been so beautiful to see. And in the beginning, when she started, I mean, when I say carnivore, I mean steak and butter. So she'll literally, she was eating a stick or two of butter a day. It's quite disgusting actually, but I'm joking. She'll put it in her coffee. And so for the first month she started losing weight, which I did not want to happen, nor did she,

cause she's already a slender woman. But then she started gaining muscle weirdly without exercising really. All that protein. Yeah. So she's doing excellent. Thank God. And I know you've had your own health or rather weight loss journey, which of course isn't where she's doing it. She's doing it for health reasons, but congratulations. I mean, you have lost so much weight. When I see those original photos of you back with Kyle Keating and the Catholic answers, that's incredible how much-

I was like, you look great. 320 pounds. You don't just look thin, you look great. Because you know, some people look thin, but they look ill. You don't just look thin you look great. You know, some people look thin, but they look ill Yes, well I could be a little thinner. I put I put on a few pounds over kovat But I'm now in a position where I'm starting to lose again I'm tightening things up and so I I plan to lose a little bit more but not a huge amount. That's good Yeah, so I thought about trying the carnivore diet. I just haven't, haven't to this point,

but I've been thinking about it. Well, it's an anecdote, but it is wild because on YouTube, you put out a video, you get happy people and you get angry people. Yeah. We'll certainly see that on this video. And with Cameron, I was expecting a lot of pushback, a lot of criticism or not understanding,

which would have made sense. The vast majority are people saying, I've had the same thing happen to me. I'm off my meds. This cleared up my whatever this issue, that issue. So it's, it's quite wild. I did it with her for a month and felt excellent, but then I was like, I would rather feel less good and eat bread occasionally. So that's what I'm doing. I'm just eating whatever I want now. Oh, that reminds me, I got a surprise for you

while we do this at some point. Yeah, cool. I look forward to that surprise. Is it bread? It involves bread. It does not involve only bread. You mentioned something about YouTube and the different reactions,

and that brought back to mind the clickbait that we have on YouTube of trying to make people angry as a way of getting views. And it works. And it works. And I have tried not to do that. I try to find ways to create enticing content that is titled in such a way that it may be a little dramatic, but it's not trying to make people angry. And I know I could get a lot more views on YouTube. I should mention for people who may not be aware, I have a YouTube channel. It's youtube.com

slash Jimmy Akin. I put up apologetic videos, and I also put up my most famous podcast, Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. But I try not to just do anger-based things, because I don't think it's spiritually healthy. There are various individuals who have gotten a lot of popularity based on constant anger.

Michael Voris was one of them. Did you hear this shutting down? I heard that, yeah. Also, Taylor Marshall is another one. You look at their content and it is constantly, it is just regularly pervaded by a sense of smoldering anger and looking down on other people, a kind of spiritual superiority. And that is fundamentally unhealthy. Jesus said, love your neighbor. He didn't say, look down on your neighbor. And in fact, St. Paul says, reckon your neighbor better than yourself. So we need to be charitable in our approach to other people.

Yes, there are things in the world that are worth getting mad about, but it is fundamentally unhealthy spiritually to have a diet of anger and pride and virtue signaling looking down on other people. That is spiritual poison. And if you feed yourself that spiritual diet, you are poisoning your soul. I see this on, and I know you would agree with me, I see this on both sides of the spectrum. So it's like Marshall and Lofton. It's like Fox News and CNN. I see this sometimes. It seems to me that Lofton doesn't sympathize with those who have legitimate questions about what's going on.

Oh, I was thinking when you said the other side of the spectrum, I was thinking like National Catholic Reporter, because they have the same issue. They're constantly looking down on conservatives. But any kind of spiritual diet that involves constantly looking down on other people is one that is unhealthy and poisonous and we shouldn't have. I've seen people who are like this, including in the pre-internet days, people who are not internet influencers, but you know, would be active in let's say apologetics, and I would think to myself, when was the last time you wrote an article or a book or did a video

about something that you just found interesting? You know, that didn't involve criticizing someone. There's so much in the world that is just cool, you know? There's so much that is just fascinating and wonderful and exciting to talk about. And it doesn't need to always be criticism. And I just wonder sometimes with different figures I'm aware of, like when was the last time you were just excited about something and wanted to share it and weren't critical. Now, however, if you said to, like, you use the example of Marshall, you know, like, well,

we don't have to do this specifically, unless you want to make specific, like, things, you know, like, not attacks, but criticism. If somebody you say, well, you're looking down on people. Like I don't think they would think that, you know, I hope I don't do that. But if this is what always bothers me, I think if he doesn't think that about himself, and I think that about him, maybe I do, maybe I don't. How do I know that I don't do that? How do you come to know

that you're looking down on people? Do you know what I mean? I think it's invisible to most of us. Well, okay. I suppose. Now the outrage thing makes sense. I mean, surely, Boris had some things that he said which were helpful or right. But yeah, it was like, oh my gosh, here we go again. Like this is really intense. He's very upset and I'm feeling upset just by watching it. I wouldn't put Marshall in that same category though, as far as outrage, which you know, no, no.

But if you if you find yourself, if you look at your content and all you're doing is criticizing, that's a warning sign. Now, I can imagine situations where people are criticizing in a way that doesn't involve looking down on someone else, not in an unhealthy way, because there are legitimate criticisms to be made. I think that it requires a closer look at the content. But an initial warning sign is if the content is

predominated by criticism. That's a big warning sign. There needs to be elements, if it's not going to be looking down on someone, there need to be elements in there that counterbalance the impression of looking down. Like what we were doing earlier, where I was trying to steel man various positions and show here's another way of looking at it, and you can see, okay, yeah, if I'm Pope Francis and these people are rallying against me using something I'm giving them, it's understandable I'd want to take it away.

Okay, so I'm trying to get inside his head and understand things from his perspective. And in fact, you're doing it so well that people might believe that that is your opinion. It's like Aquinas when you read Aquinas, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Or when we talked about contraception in the first hour where I said, here's how people, including conservative Catholic moral theologians in the mid-20th century, could think maybe this is okay, because it's okay to have sex when the woman is not fertile and this just extends the amount of time she's not fertile. So it would be easy for me as someone

who doesn't favor marital contraception to not do that and just be critical of those people. But I'm trying to understand things from their perspective and say, how could this make sense? Even if I don't agree with it, how could this make sense from their perspective? And so, and then you go for the jugular. But first, you want to understand how they understand something themselves. And so I can imagine, you know, someone producing content that's critical, that tries to pose the criticisms in a neutral, understated way that seeks to make the other person sympathetic, so you're not just looking down on them. I try to do this on Mysterious World. When I'm talking about...

Yes, even like Flat Earthersthers or someone you have them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good example So for the flat earth episode we did I told Dom bet Nelly my my co-host love that guy. Yeah. Oh, he's great I told him in this episode we are not going to use the term flat earther. Okay, like I just It's understandable because that's the accepted term. Yeah, but person who supports the flat earth, it comes across as an insult. And so what we're going to do for this episode is we're going to refer to flat earth supporters and globe earth supporters to put them on an even playing field. So we're not using language that has a negative ring for either

position. So it's like pro-life, pro-choice, not pro-life, pro-abortion. It's like if you're trying to engage someone who's pro-abortion, I want to use the language they want to use in order to bring them over to my side. In principle, yes. I'm not trying to... Although I also think there are instances where it's accurate to just say, you're actually pro-abortion, you're not just pro-choice.

For sure, just in the same way, if you were talking to someone who was a flat earther, you would say, but you are a flat earther in the sense that you believe this. I guess the- In principle, if I'm trying to convince them to reconsider that, I don't wanna use language they're gonna regard as prejudicial.

Right, same principle. Same principle, yeah. What's interesting though is a lot of these conversations make sense in the two of us talking, you know, like be thinking about this a lot lately that in the context of friendship, right. You and I sit down, the cameras are off and we start talking and I start sharing my opinions. I'm, you know, maybe I haven't thought things through, but I'm pretty enthusiastic about things. And and I might say something and you're, oh, that's not right. And you'll you'll get me to kind of clarify like you did earlier, right? When you asked me what I meant by gaslighting, you know, and we kind of go, OK, I can we kind of arrive at some agreed upon conclusion, hopefully, or else we just disagree.

The difference is, though, of course, with the cameras on, if someone's going online and they're spouting these things like I would imagine these fellows that we just spoke about, if I was to sit across the table from Taylor Marsh would say, I mean, I don't, I don't know him. I think I'd probably get along with him. I get along with most everyone I sit down and talk to. The difference is when they have a gigantic audience and they're saying something, then it feels like, all right, I got to well, people feel the need to kind of correct

what they're saying publicly because it's influencing so many people. It's not just in the context of friendship. They're saying something, it's unnuanced. Maybe in friendship, if you were to say, well, wouldn't you wanna rephrase that? Maybe they would, but then, but because of YouTube, because of how many people it's influencing,

we feel the need to push back publicly. And so we've just got all this back and forth publicly. I don't know what I'm saying, Jimmy. I think you're expressing the fact that human relations are complicated and they're especially complex when they're being, when you're relating to other people in public and there are some issues that are open to criticism regarding some people. And demanding of criticism too. Like if I say something to you,

that you disagree with without the cameras, you correct me and I go, Oh yeah, fair enough. But if I'm saying publicly to tens of thousands of people, something that's false or what the church doesn't actually teach, and I'm demanding that everyone agree with, then it's like, okay, now a public correction may be called for. Yeah. And I've tried over the years to find very gentle ways of getting such subjects on the table, but there's always a risk and it always involves prudence and figuring out the

best way to do it. Yeah. I've invited Lofton to come on the show to debate Yabara. I reached out to him a couple of times, haven't heard from him, so Lofton, if you're watching, I'd love to have him on. Because Lofton's someone who's sort of set himself up, who's criticizing a lot of really fantastic people like Faser and Ralph Martin and these other fellows. And it seems to me in a way that lacks nuance, lacks charity. Now, there's something that...

But he comes from the other side. He's not coming from the rad-trad side. He's coming from the, if you think Pope Francis... I'm not putting words in his mouth. I don't mean to strawman him, but you get the impression from Lofton, if you find Pope Francis confusing, it's because you're a bad actor and someone who doesn't have good faith. Okay. Again, he wouldn't phrase it like that. I'm saying that's the impression people often get from him. Okay. It seems to me. Yeah, I haven't watched it.

I mean, I've seen obviously some of his material. I haven't watched, I don't watch it constantly because I have a 40 hour a day, a 40 hour a week job and other things I need to attend to. But I, you know, I would have to, if that were the impression he's conveying, well, and I think that'd be wrong, I think Pope Francis has been confusing in some situations. At the same time, I think that not everything about Pope Francis is as confused or as, or is as it has been represented by the press. You know, for example, when Pope Francis

had just recently become Pope, he was giving an interview on an airplane, he was asked about a particular priest who was an official who had done some kind of homosexual activity. And this is the famous who am I to judge thing. And that got represented as if he's saying he has no capacity to judge the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality. That is not what he said. If you look at the context, what he said is, if a priest has done something wrong in the past and is now trying to live correctly, well then who am I to judge? I see. Okay, he just indicated he's talking about someone who's repented.

And what's the basis for continuing to negatively judge someone if they've repented? Okay, that's what he was talking about, but it got taken in a completely different sense. And so I think that it's legitimate to point out when there are other ways of looking at what Francis has said, and sometimes he's just flat out been misrepresented. Like people say, no, he doesn't believe in hell. When he's been warning mafia people that they'll go to hell. But he is confusing, isn't he? Because he'll say that, and then another time he'll say, I like to believe that hell is

empty. Yeah. Well, but that's, I mean, who't he? Because he'll say that, and then another time he'll say, I like to believe that hell is empty. Yeah, well, but that's, I mean, who wouldn't? You know? I mean, the, and I agree that there, that's, he's not as gifted a communicator as either John Paul II or Benedict XVI. Can you imagine if you had Pope Benedict IX during the age of Twitter? Oh man, it would be disaster. Gosh, cause I know it's a, it might sound like a worn out trope at this point to say that social media is a cause for a lot of the division, a lot of the confusion.

It's a contributing factor. But it's a massive contributing factor. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy times. Have you ever had a period or let me, let me strengthen the question. had a period or let me let me strengthen the question. When have you have you have you had a time where you thought Catholicism might be false and you might have to backtrack after becoming a Catholic? Yeah. No. Had has there been a time where you would say you were close to thinking, Oh gosh, I may have got this wrong and now I work at Catholic Answers and I got to keep this charade up somehow.

No. Have you ever been afraid, I'm just going to grill you here, have you ever been afraid that, well, I'm not as objective as I once was when I had nothing to lose? What I mean by that, or less to lose, what I mean by that is you were looking at these different traditions, you settled on Catholicism, you've now made a name for yourself, people respect the heck out of you, you've got a lot of great things to say, you've helped the church, you've helped Catholics a lot. Now it feels like if you were to discover that, oh gosh, the Coptics are right and the Catholics are wrong or the papacy can't be defended from the Patristics.

The difference between Catholics and Coptics is pretty darn small. So it would be a major change personally, but I don't think that the... I mean, I have a lot of respect for the Coptic people. In fact, I've wanted to have the Coptic pope on Mysterious World. I'm currently reading the previous pope, Coptic pope. Pope Shenouda? Oh, I love him. Yeah. He's fantastic. Yeah. So clear. I tried to get an interview with Pope Tawadros for the Our Lady of Zaytun episode. By the way, you did excellent in that episode. I'm sure any Coptic Christian listening to that would have felt so edified that a Catholic would speak so highly of the

tradition. Yeah, well, I believe in bridge building whenever possible, and thank you. You just have to ignore those outbursts from Thursday next door. Yeah, no problem. I occasionally say things that other people find funny, even when I wasn't trying to be funny. That's right. That's how good you are. funny even when I wasn't trying to be funny. That's right, that's how good you are. But if I did become convinced that, let's say, the Coptic Church was correct rather than the Catholic Church, well, okay, that wouldn't be a big change objectively, but... Probably don't have any Coptic churches in Arkansas. Not many. Not that I'm aware of. But it would be a big change subjectively,

and it would involve personal trauma. Having said that, I just don't see the evidence. Yeah. Okay, so the original question was, have you gone through an experience where you thought, what if I'm wrong? I might be wrong the more I've gotten to know, but it doesn't sound like you have.

No, what I can't say is that I'm as sensitive to the force of counter-arguments as anybody. What do you mean, sensitive to the force of counter-arguments? I'm thinking of actually a passage that I read in an interview with Benedict XVI, where he was being asked a parallel question about do you ever have doubts about the Christian faith? And he said, well, basically, I'm as sensitive to the difficulties that modern people have with the Christian faith as anybody. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that it's correct. And I think I would say something similar. As an apologist, it's my job to expose myself to arguments from every

position that I interact with. And so I, and I need to really expose myself to those arguments and not just casually dismiss them. You know, I can think of apologists who I don't think have taken the arguments for the other side seriously. But if I'm going to be a good apologist, I need to take the arguments from the other side seriously. I need to steelman them when I sense the potential to improve the arguments for the other side. And I need to interact with the best counterarguments I can. So I'm sensitive to the force of arguments. Now in terms

of, for me the divide is not between different groups of Christians. I'm quite convinced that the Catholic understanding of Christianity is the best. For me the division would be more between is Christianity or modern skepticism. And I'm sensitive to things like the problem of evil argument. At the same time, I think there are great answers to the problem of evil. They don't eliminate the mystery. They acknowledge the mystery, and they make the mystery of evil livable. But I can imagine, but still I understand the force that the experience of evil has. Yeah, I'd be in the same place as you. I think like if I'm tempted anywhere, it would be like, maybe this whole thing's just bunk and I've somehow talked myself into it. It kind of comforts me.

It's allowed me to get this far. Yeah, except they're now... Pragmatically, I'd probably just end up adopting a different Christian tradition or something. it comforts me, it's allowed me to get this far. Yeah, except they're now... Pragmatically, I'd probably just end up adopting a different Christian tradition or something. Yeah, in my case, you're triggering the apologists in me because now I want to respond to all that. Well, we can do that. Maybe we can do that after, but first we can just wade in these psychological waters for a bit.

Because Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles points out that belief in God is not strictly a matter of faith because man can Come to know that God exists apart from faith strictly through reason and yet he gives different reasons Why God has revealed himself the first being that a lot of people just aren't Enough but just I would put myself within that category Every argument for God's existence I have encountered and looked at, I have not felt the weight of. I have not felt myself fully moved by them. It's like if you were to show me a beautiful work of art, and you assured me that this was a beautiful work of art, and I just don't get it. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

Okay. I got to finish this thought or else it's going to sound bad, right? I do think that when you line up arguments for theism and arguments for atheism that I'm more convinced by arguments for theism. I feel like the weight of it definitely overwhelms the arguments for atheism. But you lay out one argument for theism to me. I don't think I'd feel moved by it, but I'm fully okay with that because I've read arguments against the subsisting self. And I don't really they worry me.

I've heard arguments for, you know, the maybe that the past isn't real. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know how to respond to that either. But I'm going to go on believing in the past because it just seems like it's real. So my my kind of belief in God has a lot to do with just, it just seems real. Plus experiences I've had, plus the coherency of the Christian doctrine. Plus I just, in the same way that you know a food is working for you, if you feel yourself healthier, you know, maybe you don't know how to explain why. Kind of like my wife, I don't know how to explain how just eating steak and butter is making you healthy,

but it is. Likewise, I find that when I, I find Christianity to be beautiful and its teachings to be coherent. And when I give myself over to them, I feel spiritually healthy and awake in a way that I wouldn't if I was to go against them. There's a scattershot of thought. Yeah, no, there's a lot of good material there. Someone else who expressed a similar thought is

Cardinal Newman. If you read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua in the general reply to Kingsley at the end, In the general reply to Kingsley at the end, he talks about how he is utterly convinced of the existence of God, but he finds it difficult to prove it with figure and mood. Figure and mood being technical terms for classical logic. So what he's saying is that he finds it difficult to pose an argument for God's existence that he finds convincing, but on purely intellectual grounds. But he nevertheless firmly believes in God because he says his being is so full of this truth. And I think my—so just because it's possible to prove God's existence with reason alone doesn't mean it's easy to do it.

I mean, there are lots of things that are possible to prove with reason alone, like Fermat's Last Theorem. Yeah. And yet proving Fermat's Last Theorem is incredibly hard in mathematics. Fermat had written... Yeah, tell me what this is. Okay, so Fermat's last theorem is basically that there are very few solutions to a very short mathematical expression. And he was writing in a book, in the margin of the book, and he said, there is an interesting

proof of this, but it exceeds what I can put in the margin. And so that then focused everybody's attention on can we prove this? And it took like two, 300 years to prove. And when we finally got a proof a few years ago in the 1990s, and the proof that we came up with is hundreds of pages long. So yeah, it exceeds that margin and it's incredibly hard and complex. What I

wonder is did Fermat even have the right proof? Because I don't think he did this proof. He may have been mistaken, he may have thought he had a proof that would work. Turned out he was right. But there can be things that are possible to prove rigorously, and yet are incredibly difficult to prove rigorously. And as an Aquinas's day, a lot of people are not in a position to work through the proofs of God's existence, and it's true today too. I think that for my money, the most convincing

argument for God's existence is the contingency argument. Could you spell that out for us? That we need an explanation for why things are the way they are. So like here we have a yellow ashtray. Why is it a yellow ashtray? It could be different. It could be something else. It could be a red ashtray. It could be a purple ashtray. It could be a yellow globe and not an ashtray. So why is it a yellow ashtray?

It's a contingent object if it can be something else, different than the way it is. So if I took red paint and painted it red, it wouldn't be yellow ashtray anymore. So the fact that it's a yellow ashtray is a contingent fact and all the proposal is we need an explanation for any contingent fact. So we can then say well why is it a yellow ashtray? Well, because its molecules are put together that way. They're put together in such a way that it forms an ashtray and they're put together in such a way that the surface reflects yellow wavelengths of light. So that's what we see is the yellow wavelengths that get reflected rather

than absorbed by its surface. Okay, why... So we have a first pass explanation for why it's a yellow ashtray. Now let's ask the same question of the things you just said. If the surface molecules are arranged in such a way that they reflect yellow wavelengths of light, why do they reflect yellow wavelengths of light? Why don't they reflect different wavelengths of light? So branches out, right, all these questions?

Exactly. And so you could then maybe appeal to laws of electromagnetism to explain why they reflect these wavelengths. So then the third iteration becomes, why are these the laws of electromagnetism? Because they could be something else. Instead of having a particular electrical constant, why isn't it a different electrical constant? And you can keep asking this question, digging into deeper and deeper layers, but the layers can't go on forever or they don't explain anything. There needs to be an ultimate explanation that is not itself subject to further explanation. In other words, the chain of contingent facts

ultimately needs to be grounded in a non-contingent or necessary fact and when you When you think about the causation in the universe because the universe is a collective entity that interacts with itself you know, so you know a Point five light-years away will interact with us in five years if there's you know A light-speed transmission between here and there you've got this whole big universe that's united and interactive. Why is that? Well, so we can ask these why questions about the entire universe,

and that's gonna lead you to a necessary fact that explains the entire universe. Now, I know what you mean, but explain to me why it is there needs to be a baseline explanation in order for anything else to be explained. Because if there's an infinite regress, why it is there needs to be a baseline explanation in order for anything else to be explained. Because if there's an infinite regress, you don't ultimately have an explanation for anything. This is an intuition that we need a satisfying explanation for what exists, we need a sufficient

reason. But if there's an infinite regress, then no element in that chain is satisfying because you need another explanation for it. And so no element in the chain is a sufficient explanation if it itself needs to be explained by something else. And so we ultimately need to ground our knowledge of contingent facts, including the entire universe in something non-contingent. And that is going to be God that can be meaningfully described as God as the ultimate explanation for all of, of observable,

created reality. And why does... yeah, so the question obviously is why does that thing have to be God? Why can't it be... Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be the kind of God that you and I worship. It is the supreme explanation for creation, but that's a separate question than is it personal? Does it have an intellect? Does it interact with us and so forth? There are attempts to argue that along these lines that it needs to be personal, that it needs to have intellect and will

and be capable of interacting, but my preference at that point is to shift to a different argument and say rather than trying to prove it has to have intellect and will on philosophical grounds, I want to say we have evidence that it has intellect and will because it has in fact made contact with us. I see, yeah.

And through Jesus Christ and I can prove his resurrection. And so that tells me we're talking about a theistic God rather than just an abstract non-personal God. Okay, so the contingency argument gets you to an unexplained or not needing to be explained explainer, a sort of basement of reality. Yeah. And then from the revelation that you accept to be true on other grounds, you conclude that that not need to be explained explainer is a personal God who's revealed himself ultimately in Jesus Christ yeah yeah yeah fantastic have you done any debates on God's existence um not that I'm thinking of he did oh my gosh I just want to give you a shout out here because I have I in

much the same way that I would never would have thought that Craig William Lane Craig would have done so well against Hitchens because Hitchens is so fun and cute and clever. I just I remember not wanting to watch that debate when it came out because I was so afraid of seeing another Christian apologist be decimated in the same way, seeing you debate Bart Ehrman. I was like, all right, here you go. You've got this renowned in certain circles scholar who's used to debates and is used to debating heavyweights. I wasn't sure how it would go.

You absolutely trounced him. If I can say that with charity towards Bart Ehrman, I was shocked. I couldn't believe how well you did. Well, thank you. So I guess my question is, do you agree? And did you think you would do so well? I thought I would do well, because I, you know, in thinking through any debate, I think through it strategically before I do it. You know, what is my opponent going to say?

How am I going to respond? What's my overall strategy and approach going to be? And I realized that... So, Barth has a fundamentalist background and that affects what he considers reliable when it comes to Scripture, because he has an approach where if everything is not literally true and literally precise in its details, then he's going to say it's unreliable. But that's a ridiculous standard for reliability. If I have a friend, my friend doesn't have to be literally accurate in all the details and everything he tells me to be a reliable friend. So I said, well, let's come up with a reasonable standard of reliability. Well, it can't be percentage-based, because we could tally up the number of different claims the Gospels make. What we were debating on

are the Gospels reliable? And so we could go through the Gospels and make a list of everything they claim, and then we could get in a time machine and go back and see which ones they're right on and establish a percentage, you know, like say it's 90% correct or whatever when taken literally. Um, except there's one problem. We ain't got a time machine. So we have no independent way of calculating percentages here. So what we can do instead as a reasonable estimate of, of, of reliability is say, well, are the gospels reliable when they make big, important

claims? And are they reliable when they make intermediate claims? And are they reliable when they make small, detailed claims? And if we can show that the Gospels are right in big, important claims they make, and in lots of intermediate claims they make and in lots of minor claims they make, then that gives us a general sense that the Gospels are reliable until such time as we see them being wrong on a comparable set of issues. And so what I did was I said, let's use Barth's own work against him. So I went through one of, I went through Barth's works, and one of his books in particular, and found where he agrees that the Gospels are right on all these major claims,

and he agrees the Gospels are right on all these intermediate claims, and he agrees the Gospels are right on all these minor claims. And he's actually only criticizing a handful of minor claims. So he has not, even if we grant him that the Gospels were not right about these minor claims, which I don't grant, but even if we were to grant that, it doesn't counterbalance the dozens of things he agrees they're right about. doesn't counterbalance the dozens of things he agrees they're right about. And so Barderm and himself concedes the data that shows the Gospels are reliable. Well, I knew that he wasn't going to be able to argue against that. That puts him in an impossible position of disavowing his own work. So he's going to, I mean, he could quibble and say, well, I

changed my mind on a couple of these points, but he's got to acknowledge, he has said that this stuff is reliable. And so I knew he agreed to that. I put him in this terrible position because I'm using his own words to prove his case. So I knew I was gonna do well. What I didn't know was how mad I was going to make him. You made him mad? No, no, no. I didn't know. Oh, I see. Prior. Prior. You wasn't sure how he was going to react to that. Exactly. Because I've seen instances where he turns really cold and really angry and is ruthless in debates. I was watching one debate that he had with James White,

where now Bart Ehrman is a world-class textual scholar. I mean, he worked with Kurt Allen, who was the guy behind modern manuscript science in the mid-20th century. And Bart Ehrman is, I mean, he is top rung when it comes to manuscript science. Well in this debate with White, White at one point tried to make himself sound superior to Ehrman on a textual matter. And Ehrman flipped and became incredibly cold and raked James White over the coals in the cross-examination period. So you

took this position on this. Can you name all of the world-class textual scholars that you know that take your position, and he can't really come up with the kind of names that Ehrman is asking him for. Can you see these other names here that he, Ehrman, personally knew, you know, are taking this other position that's contrary to yours? And it was, it was humiliating for White to watch Ehrman do this to him. So you say cold, but it doesn't sound inappropriate though. It sounds very appropriate. But it was ruthless. I see. And I didn't know, I didn't want to get in that same kind of situation. And so you know because it's possible for

him to pull credentials on me and say, I'm this world-class textual scholar. You're not. Yeah. You know, well, yeah, I have my own expertise, but that puts me in a defensive position. Yes. So what I knew was I'm going to use Ehrman's own words against him to prove my case. Yes. But I need to do it in the friendliest possible way, because I don't want to offend him, and I don't want this to become a peeing match in front of the audience.

So I pre-planned elements in my presentation to be positive to Bart. Like when you gave him a high five. Exactly, that was one of the pre-planned ones. As I was going through the major claims of the Gospels, one of them, Jesus existed. And so, you know who all said that? Bart Ehrman! Let's give Bart Ehrman a big hand! You know, I talked about his book that he'd written against Jesus' mythicists, acknowledging that Jesus existed. I walked over, said, high five, gave him a high five, you know, got him a round of applause. I, you know,

gave him a hug at one point. All of this was stuff that I had thought of as ways of trying to keep the emotions friendly, while I'm at the same time being as devastating as possible to this case. So, you know, and that's part of my philosophy. I want to argue as apologetically as rigorously as I can, but I don't want to be humiliating about it. I want to be effective, but I want to be positive and personable. And so that's why I took the approach I did.

So I knew that I would do well. I didn't know if I'd be able to keep him, to keep things friendly. But I was, and that was great. My suspicion is that I've done better against Barth than other Christian apologists on this issue. He privately, now we had agreed to debate the proposition, the Gospels are not historically reliable, with the word not in there, because normally it's the other way around. And I think it's fair to put the burden on the skeptic for once. It doesn't always need to be the believer who has the burden.

Let's put the burden on the skeptic for once and see how well he can defend that position. So Bart had to take the lead and then I just had to critique him. And I think that's perfectly fair. It doesn't matter which way a position is framed, it can be argued either way. Well, the first thing that Bart said to me privately as soon as the debate was over first thing that Bart said to me privately as soon as the debate was over is that that that he didn't like the framing of the debate because it required him to prove a negative. He said that to you privately after the debate? Yes, while we were still on stage. Oh really? And that told me... That almost sounds like an admission. Like I just lost this debate. I wish... What it told me is he didn't do as well as he had hoped he wanted because if you have done as well as you hope to do the first thing you say privately is not to criticize the way the debate proposition was framed that you agreed to.

Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Yeah. No, it's so good because I'm sure you have many Protestants who are so grateful for that debate. There have been quite a number that have commented positively on it, yeah. And then the other debate you did recently, I was at actually the Horns, Trent and Laura's house over Christmas, or just before Christmas, and you did that live debate on Batuzzi's channel

against the two atheists. Oh, oh man. And I wrote, wow. I wrote, Aiken resembles a cat playing with his food. It's just outstanding. That is not how I would frame it, but I take that as a compliment. There were two fellows on the debate. One was an older fella. I liked him. He seemed very reasonable. The other guy just seemed like he was going through, had a hard day. I mean, he just was

not in a good place, that poor fella. He was not in a good place and he had some personal problems in his life at the same time that we didn't talk about on the air. So he was, he was going through. Oh, okay. Well there you go. A really bad, difficult situation. God bless him. Yeah. It feels like the relations between eighth, sorry, you wanted to say? Well, I was also going to say I had a partner in that. It was an evangelical gentleman.

He was a Protestant. Yeah. Arguing in part based on Marian apparitions? Yeah, whereas, and I, the Catholic, was arguing based on Scripture. So, it was like team ecumenism. The Catholics arguing, making his case based on Scripture alone, the evangelicals making his argument based on Marian apparitions, we were both playing against time. He was great too, because after seeing you do what you did, I was almost willing to fast forward this fella who I'm not sure who he's...

Tyler McNabb is his name. Was it Tyler McNabb? No, he's a Catholic, isn't he? No, it's not Tyler McNabb. If not, then I'm misremembering the name. Yeah. Could you look that up Thursday? There was a debate over Christmas.

It was about the Virgin birth. I think Tyler McNabb is the... He's a Catholic. I might be wrong, we'll have Thursday. Yeah, fact check us. But anyway, this Protestant who debated alongside you did an excellent job, and I was happy to, I was really impressed with him actually. Yeah. Yeah. It was, this was another one where I, you know, I think strategically about every debate I'm going to do. And in this one, I thought it was a bad idea to debate this subject. For you and them.

Because, in principle, for both. Because they wanted to debate, then the atheists insisted on this topic. They said, it's Christmas time, we want to debate the virgin birth. And I think that's a bad topic for Christians and atheists to debate, because it presupposes so much, you know. God's existence, like God's existence. Are miracles possible?

Are miracles recognizable? And so, if inevitably what's going to happen is you're not going to be debating the virgin birth itself. You're going to divert onto one of these other topics like does God exist or are miracles possible? So we should just debate those. But no, they insisted on debating the Virgin Birth. Okay, so those are the atheists, but who debated alongside Jimmy? So it was the atheists which Darren Slade and John Loftus. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Caleb Jackson.

Caleb Jackson. Okay. Then my mistake. Sorry, and apologies. You're allowed to make one. Apologies, Tyler McNabb. Names are not always my strong suit. But, so I thought this was a badly framed debate, and I know what the atheists are expecting to do, they're expecting to just pick holes in a weak historical argument, you know, because what we've got Matthew that says this, we've got Luke that says that, they both agree Jesus was born of a virgin, and they just then have to impeach the integrity of Matthew and Luke and say, well, I don't find this convincing. Yeah, well, that's only part of the issue here.

The reason that I believe Jesus was born of a virgin is not because of a couple of random historical claims, it's because Matthew, I believe Matthew and Luke are divinely inspired. And that means God exists and God guided the writing of these documents. So I wrote a, I think there were nine steps, but tell me which one's wrong. Which one do you disagree with? That's all you gotta do and that's all they didn't do. Yeah, and so I wrote a logically, formally valid argument, so the only way it can be false

is if one or more of the premises is false. I then identified my premises and said, pick whatever one you want and we can debate that. And that was my way of getting to an underlying issue quicker. pick whatever one you want and we can debate that. And that was my way of getting to an underlying issue quicker. It's also what they were totally not prepared to do. And so they couldn't or didn't or wouldn't

pick any of the premises, which then means I'm in the position of saying, guys, you haven't disproved my argument. It's formally valid. You need to find a false premise in order to prevail. And you haven't given me a false premise. Yeah. Debates are funny things. I've participated in one debate, but I'm not good at them.

And I'm not good at thinking on my feet. And that's why I don't do them. And I wish other people realized that about themselves. I'm not trying to be overly humble here. I look at other people like, no, you're wrong to think you're good as well, buddy. Like you shouldn't be. Practice also helps. Practice helps. I also do have a lot of respect for folks who do choose

to engage in debates. Like I have a lot of respect actually for a fella called the other Paul who you debate. He seems like a cool guy. I like him. He's Australian. So that gives him an edge. An edge. Yeah, an edge. Someone. But I was interviewing someone before that debate, and I pointed out that you were going to be debating him. He's like, Oh, my gosh, talk about bringing a spoon to a knife fight. Why would you do it? But I thought I could for him. I mean, that as you say, like, you do need a lot of practice because it's not just. Are you smart enough to engage this, nor is it simply, do I know the topic enough?

It's also being put on the spot in an adversarial sort of back and forth, which can be difficult. Yeah. In the case of the other Paul, we were debating, uh, sola scriptura. Yeah. And I, in his case, I did something similar. I laid out, here's what you need to show in order to show, show me the money. And, and, and he's what you said, yeah, at one point, was that a reference? Cause when somebody said you were the Catholic Tom Cruise, do you know that? All right. I know it's a movie reference, but I've never seen.

Okay. This is wonderful. At the beginning of this debate, someone called you the Catholic Tom Cruise. I don't know if it was Cameron or Paul. And then about an hour and a half in you were like, show me the money. And then someone commented, I choose to believe that Jimmy said that because... Sorry, continue. That's okay. But I did something similar in saying, here's what you other Paul need to show in order to show me wrong, in order to show that I'm wrong. And I knew he wouldn't have an easy time I knew he wouldn't have an easy time meeting the test, because I've thought through this issue and the Catholic position is just right, and it's impossible to meet the test. But in order to show that the Catholic position is wrong, there are certain very specific

things you need to do. And so I told him what they were and invited him repeatedly to do them, but he struggled and wasn't able to do them, and I'm convinced that that's because the Catholic position is true. And so, yeah, you can't disprove it if you're doing it accurately. What topic would you most like to debate with what opponent? Oh, I don't know. It depends.

I mean, the topic is going to depend on the opponent. If I'm debating a Protestant, I see no need to debate the existence of God. If I'm debating an atheist, I don't see any need to debate Sola Scriptura. What topic would you be most interested in debating? Just off the top of your head without thinking it through. Sola Scriptura.

All right, so then what opponent would you like most to debate that topic with? Probably James White. And in fact, we're actually working on something that may happen. Good. Man. I remember the first time I heard him debate, I thought here is a formidable dude. He's, he's aggressive.

He's confident. He's. Yeah. He's, he, he presents himself well. I mean, you might perceive it as arrogant, right? But there's a fine line between confident and arrogance and depends on how you're perceiving. Um, but I thought that Madrid did excellent on solo scriptura against him. And I was not expecting that that was another 90s from the 90s. Actually we have that online. Actually. Yeah. Actually on our channel, Thursday, if you think of this, if you could put up all these links to the urban debate,

but also you did that little on Hank Hank Hanna graphs program back in the day with him, we have that online, that on our channel, people can check that out. Also the one we're referencing from the 90s between Madrid and white. That was 93 or 94. Yeah. Yeah. That was. They're funny. But however, after 30 years of thinking about this, I think I can do even better. Wow. Cool.

Well, that's great. I'm really happy to hear because I, I reached out. Certainly better than I could do 30 years ago. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it really it takes a lot of humility to get on a stage. Not necessarily, you may not be humble, right? You might just be arrogant. But I mean, to realistically assess how you did 30 years ago, like I'm sure there are moments you've looked back

and have cringed into. When I read stuff I wrote 30 years ago, I am aware of my own growth. I'll put it that way. When I edited together The Father's No Best, the book, version from all the columns it was based on, I said to myself, I'm paying for my apologetic sins. One of the things about trying for continuous improvement and continued growth in a field is you look back on your early stuff and cringe. What were your apologetic sins?

Principally being too much of a jerk, being triumphalistic and overestimating the value or reliability of particular things, but principally being a jerk, being triumphalistic. And I understand that because it's natural to, you know, when you... There was a phase in Catholic apologetics where after the Second Vatican Council, it basically went into eclipse for a couple of decades. Catholic apologetics had been prominent in the centuries since the Protestant Reformation, but then in the mid-20th century, there was an effort to improve relations and get along, and be ecumenical and be nice, and repair some of the rupture in Christenham.

Even if we can't formally reunite, well, at least we can be nice to each other. And so following the Second Vatican Council, there was a diminution of Catholic apologetics. It wasn't the hip-in thing. That was now ecumenism and getting along. Problem is, nobody told Protestant fundamentalists that that was the case. And so there were a lot of— More vicious! They were vicious. There were a lot of them that were just really rabidly anti-Catholic. And Catholics, and Catholics, ordinary

Catholics, were taking it on the chin. And so then, to give him credit, Carl Keating launched Catholic Answers in the late 1970s, and there was a renaissance in Catholic apologetics in the United States where Catholics began to realize, I can stand up for my faith. I don't have to just take this criticism. I can defend it. And then we came out swinging. Yeah, there was a feeling your oats period

that was pervasive in American apologetics. There was a certain sneering tendency that pervaded a lot of works, not all, but a lot of works from this period. And I was as guilty of that as anybody else. Yeah. Eventually, now there would be lip service paid to the need to be charitable and so forth, but in practice that ethic was not followed. Yes. And eventually in the course of my career,

I said, I need to mature. I need to get past this. Was there something that happened that made you see that you were being like that? Not in not on this topic. It was I mean, there were things where someone would point out to me I was being uncharitable. And at the time I kind of slifted off. But there were other things earlier in my life that had sort of planted the seeds for this. When I was in college, I was a philosophy major. And philosophy, like a lot of fields, it involves a lot of jargon.

And so there's a difference in philosophy between perseverance and perseverance, for example. And so I had all this philosophy jargon and all this stuff, and I had a girlfriend. And I was trying to impress my girlfriend and by using philosophical jargon because I wanted her to think of me as being smart. Yeah. You know, I wanted her to understandable. Yeah. And I wanted that to be attractive to her. Yeah. So I'm using all this jargon around her and at one point she humbly and sincerely asks me if I think she's stupid. That was not the message I was trying to send. I was trying to impress her by showing her,

I'm smart. I was not trying to make her feel unintelligent. I was mortified. And that was a pivotal point for me, even though I wasn't an apologist yet, it was a pivotal point in my life for becoming an apologist because I said, I never want to make anyone feel like that. I, I I'm going to rigorously discipline myself to figure out how to express high level ideas in language that anybody can understand, because I want to be understood in a way that seems natural and that doesn't seem like I'm talking down and that

provides clarity. And so one of the sort of, I think, signature guiding points for me as an apologist is that principle. How can I take something and make it easily understandable to a normal person? I have seen other apologists who have not done that. Who have not chosen this route. Yeah. And I think sometimes it's because they want to impress other apologists with how smart they are. But what impresses me about an apologist is can you say something in a way a normal person will understand and appreciate it?

Isn't this why people love C.S. Lewis? Yeah, exactly. He's someone who you just feel like you could have a beer with and he wouldn't look down on you. Yeah. So because I'd already had that kind of revolution, my phase with the feeling my oats was temporary. Because I'd already made a commitment to thinking through things from the other person's perspective.

And how is this going to come across to them? And for a while in my feeling my oats phase, I would try to justify being a jerk on the grounds of, oh, it's tough love. It's showing them no. There's a lot of that today, right? As you say, I know, I mean, some of the YouTubers out there, maybe myself, I hope not, we make a big play of being charitable, you know, and I just want to, you know, and you're like,

okay, I can tell you are saying that, but everything else about your demeanor and tone says the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. And so once I identified that that's what was happening with me, it then became, how can I purge myself of this? And I'd already had, as a philosophy grad student, I'd had some background in how to discuss things in a way that kept the temperature low. Because in like a graduate program in philosophy, you sit around a table with other grad students

and you tear each other's ideas apart. That's what you do. It's how you grow as philosophers. But it's not what you do with undergrad students. Right. They'll never get off the mat again. Exactly. And so I had, and also I was teaching it as a Christian, I was teaching at a state school that, not a Christian school.

And so I had to think through how can I present Christian religious content to students in a way that will be non-offensive for those who are not religious. Because, like, I was going to cover philosophy of religion in my Intro to Philosophy course that I was teaching. And so I thought through various techniques for doing that. One way I would do it is instead of posing an objection to a student and saying, you're wrong because of this, I would phrase it as a third party question. So I'd ask a student to give an argument for their position and they would give one. And then I would say, very interesting, what would you say in response to a third person, not me, to a third person who made this objection? So that way, I'm not putting them on the spot.

An imaginary interlocutor who's not me is posing an objection to them, and I just want to know how would they respond to that. And that helps keep the temperature low since it's not a direct confrontation between me and them. So I've tried to, in addition to systematically training myself to be easily understood, I've tried to systematically train myself to incorporate elements of charity and not putting people directly on the spot in my interactions with

them. Frequently, I won't even mention the person I'm interacting with if I'm writing about an apologetic issue. I'll just write about the issue because the personalities don't need to come into it. I'll just talk about the issue. And that's one way of being polite to other people. I'm not criticizing someone in public. On the other hand, if I may be criticizing an idea they endorse, but I'm not criticizing them.

And if I do talk about someone by name, I try to be as understanding as I can, like earlier, steelmaning different positions. I do talk about someone by name. I try to be as understanding as I can, like earlier, steelmaning different positions. And so I'm forgetting what you asked that led me down this path, but those are some of the general principles I operate by. Well, you talked about tough love, right?

You would try to justify. I realized that was a rationalization. Yeah, could you help us understand that? Because I mean, there is such a thing as tough love. And of course, love doesn't mean syrupy sweet. It does mean correcting and yes certain times So how do you know if and this is for me and for all of us watching when we're telling ourselves I'm just doing tough love. How do we know and that's maybe inappropriate or unhelpful? I think it's usually inappropriate Yeah, usually

Usually Tough love is not called for like if you think about parents and children, most of the time do you want to show your children so-called tough love or most of the time do you just want to show them regular love? Yeah, tender, affectionate, understanding love is what I think is the best. Tough love is what you use with children as a last resort when something important is on the line and there's no other better way to deal with it. In fact, the way the phrase originated, because this is a fairly recent phrase and it's only been around for a few decades, but when it, my understanding

of it is when it first began to be used was kind of in the 1980s, when you had irresponsible young people that were having the problem making the leap from being children to being adults. This was not a thing a few decades earlier. Children couldn't wait to grow up and assume adult responsibility. But as the post-World War II economy flourished, people became affluent enough and there began to be more entry barriers to young people to adulthood, like everybody's got to go to college, which had not previously been the case at all. But now everyone's supposed to get a college education. And that means what that had the effect of was it delayed entrance into adulthood for an extended period where

young people had very few responsibilities. And so adolescence, the modern understanding of adolescence, that didn't exist, you know, 100 years ago or 200 years ago. This is a new thing. And it got worse over the course of the 20th century as the American economy expanded. And you started having more and more kids living for years off the abundance of their parents and not really taking effective steps

to become independent as adults and live on their own and pay for their own car and you know things like that. And so and coupled with this was the 1960s and the the the counterculture rebellion against established establishment values you know like getting a job and stuff like that and protesting the war was a big And protesting the war was a big thing. And taking drugs was a big thing. And so by the 1980s, you had a lot of young people who were sponging off their parents

and didn't seem inclined to take responsibility for themselves. And a lot of them would get into trouble. And their parents would bail them out of the trouble. And this would happen repeatedly. And eventually, this idea of tough love developed, that the real way to be loving to my child is not to enable this pattern of irresponsible behavior. So, you know, son or daughter, I love you,

but the next time you get into a situation like this, I'm not going to bail you out. You're going to have to deal with this on your own, and this is my way of loving you to help you get to the point in life that you need to be where you're functioning as a responsible, autonomous individual. So you're dealing with something that's high stakes, and you're dealing with it as a last resort. So in those circumstances, I think tough love is appropriate. But if you're dealing with it as a last resort. So in those circumstances I think tough love is appropriate. But if you're in an apologetic context and you're trying to win someone over to your position, the way you do that is not by

trying to humiliate them. The way you do that is by trying to be understanding and friendly so they can see you're a good person and you're friendly to them and you're trying to help them and that will enable them to think through, well he's trying to understand me in my position, maybe I should think through his position and you know take his arguments more seriously as opposed to just looking down on other people. I think that's one of James White's biggest flaws as an apologist. He looks down on other people constantly.

He doesn't try to understand things from their perspective. If you listen to his dividing line show, the amount of apologetic content is actually quite small, and most of it is looking down on other people. And that will attract a certain number of people who have that chest thumping, feeling your oats sensibility, but it's going to hamper his apologetic effectiveness in terms of actually winning people to his position. Yeah, those are all very good points, but let me maybe push back a bit and see. Sure, push away. Well, I agree with everything you've said, but if you live in a day

and age where atheism is king, say, during the 2008, 2009 days where everything was atheism, and they were very condescending towards us, it was incredibly heartening to see Christians no longer cower, but get up and swing and swing hard, you know so Is there something to be said for manfully? dismantling Evil or false position in a in a manful way, you know in order to embolden those who are cowering Feeling like maybe my religion isn't so sure Defensible. Oh sure, but there there are different ways of doing it

back during the Cold War In the 1960s Nikita Khrushchev came to America and went to the United Nations and he famously did an act that was regarded as being rather petulant. He took off one of his shoes and starts banging on his the little you know table, podium in front of him with his shoe. And everyone's looking at him like, what the heck's going on, dude? And the response that was given was by the British ambassador to the United Nations. And it was regarded as a crushing disarming response. All he did was he said, I'm still waiting for the translation on that.

I'm still waiting for the translation on that. And so there are ways of being devastating and being kind at the same time. Like I tried to be in my Bart Ehrman debate. I tried to be as devastating as possible and as kind as possible. All right. Let me give you an example, because I really like this. When Ed Faeser said of Richard Dawkins, he wouldn't know the difference between metaphysics and metamucil. Come on, that's good.

Well, it involves work play. But it's good. I like it because it's snarky. I like that he took a shot at somebody who's... I appreciate the value of snark. As much as the next guy. However, I think snark is principally for in-house consumption. And it doesn't, it will work for some people.

And there's a place for gentle humor too, which is not the same thing as snarkiness. But for the most part... I'm still laughing at the... I'm still waiting on a translation for that. It's a great response. It's very good because you were the adult in the room and you took it lightly. It was very good. Yeah. Sorry. It's a way of claiming the high ground without being mean about it. And in any event, I think the famous saying of moms, you catch more flies with honey than

with vinegar is true. And that applies in an apologetics context. context, usually being nice and friendly and positive will win more souls than being negative and superior. Yeah, and maybe unless your goal is not to win over your opponent, but to embolden your tribe. And there's something to be said about that. Or if you're a martyr. If you want to get crucified,

by all means, call your enemies of Nest of Vipers. Jesus deliberately provoked the Jewish authorities. That's what the clearing of the temple is all about. He is setting up His own crucifixion. So this is not advice that applies in every situation, but recognize the situation in which Jesus would do this. He was being deliberately antagonistic to set up his own death so that he would redeem us all. That doesn't mean unless you're Jesus, unless you're going to redeem us all, you should be doing the same thing. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it wasn't just for that reason, presumably. He was also calling them to repentance through this harsh language.

In typical with the prophetic mode of language that they were used to in their culture. Our culture does not have prophets that talk that way. And so you have to adjust your language depending on the cultural context you're in. Yeah. It's like even here in the US, there's a difference between northern culture and southern culture. People from New York, for example, are famous for being blunt. Yeah. And they can regard the politeness of southern culture

as you're being disingenuous. Yeah. Whereas from a southern point of view, the northern bluntness, the New York bluntness, can be seen as really offensive. Yes. Whereas in the south, we're trying, by being charming and friendly,

we're trying to make everyone happy and keep things at a nice, cool temperature. Both communication strategies are effective. You just have to understand what the communication strategy is and use it in appropriate circumstances. I don't know how many folks you know from the Middle East. But I've known quite a few. For example, San Diego, or specifically El Cajon, where Catholic Answers is based,

has, you know, Maronite, it's like a quarter-Caldean, it also has Maronites, there's lots of people from the Middle East there, and they come from a very blunt culture. And I get along with them great. I was one of two Americans in a class of over 30 Iraqis in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq. I mean, we were in class, and they're getting calls on their cell phones about their villages being liberated and stuff. But going into that class, I knew

I'm one of two Americans in this class. Everybody else, including the teacher, is an Iraqi Chaldean, it's gonna be like being in a class of New Yorkers only more so. And it was, you know, the instructor would do things that were totally not from my culture. I mean, he would turn to students and say, that is horrible, horrible! But he didn't mean to be cruel to them. And it wasn't perceived that way. And it wasn't perceived as being cruel. So the communication strategy you use is culturally dependent, it's dependent on context.

They're just different communication strategies, but an underlying principle that applies in all contexts is if you can convince the other person that you're on their side and you're trying to help them, then they will be more receptive to your message than if they perceive you as antagonistic and superior. Yeah. This is why my wife, when we lived in San Diego, she would love the Maronite women because my wife tends to be quite blunt and cleric by nature. So when she would meet these women, she was like, Oh, finally, I can talk to them without them feeling intimidated by me. You know? All right.

Well, look, we've hit the three hour mark. Yep. We're nowhere close to being done. Nope. We're going to have a break. Come back, talk about UFOs. Okay. I'd like to do that. We're going to take questions from local supporters. If you're watching it right now, your local support, we're going to put up a post right now to take your questions. We'll take questions from $20 and above super chats. And I'm gonna get myself a Red Bull. And I need to get a new cigar.

I ruined the cigar. So I pun- What? So I intentionally lit it from the back and here's why. I punctured it, but it split open. And so I thought, well, I'll save it by, you know, inhaling from the wrong end, knowing that I would anyway. So that's never had that problem with the pipe.

You never have that problem with the pipe. So anyway, I'll see if we can get a cigar as well. All right. Thank you. Good day, everybody. I want to let you know. Start again. If you become a new annual supporter over at matfrad.locals.com, this month only we are going to send you a free Pints with Aquinas Crystal Whiskey Glass. We're very proud of them, they're very beautiful.

We try to raise extra money from time to time over on Locals because we have a lot of big plans which are going to require a lot of money, to be honest with you. And so we'd really appreciate it. We just ask that you pay for shipping but but we can ship these crystal whiskey glasses to anywhere in the world. Again, that's just for people who sign up, who are new supporters this month, who are annual supporters, and we'll send that to you. But you should know, because this is my favorite thing, and I wish I talked about this more because I think it's amazing. We have a Pints with Aquinas newspaper called The Jill. It's very beautiful, very well done,

and we ship this out four times a year wherever you live in the world, and we even pay shipping for those. We have a bunch of other free things. We're uploading right now a Lord of the Rings Masterclass taught by Joseph Pierce in a studio. It's very beautiful. So I give you a ton of stuff in return when you become an annual supporter of ours over on Local. So please consider it, and a massive thank you to your help also I should say this if you are currently a local supporter let people know in the description what you think of locals because my experience has been that people think it's terrific it's what social media should be but never was

it's actually social people encouraging each other praying for each other supporting each other, praying for each other, supporting each other. God bless you. Any sinner is capable of being a great sinner. The secret therefore of character development is the realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us. For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. for good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents just came by these things naturally. They had to work at them very hard. Any sinner is capable of being a great sinner. The secret therefore of character development is the realization of this power that there

is in each and every one of us. For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents just came by these things naturally. They had to work at them very hard. I'm sorry. Any sinner is capable of being a great saint, and any saint is also capable of being a great sinner. Wait, wait, wait. We are back with Jimmy Akin. Yeah, so the longest show I've done was, I don't know, was it five hour and 20 minutes? Oh, Dr. Harrelson's here. He says, Matt, thank you for the super chat, by the way. He says, Matt, please ask Jimmy to speak about the importance and challenges of being

Catholic in rural America. Most American Catholics are urban. so how do we explain the Catholic church to our rural neighbors? How can we develop a strong rural church? What's happening? Well, what are you doing? So I'll do what I can, but the same fundamental principles apply. By the way, I want to say thank you to Alan for he just sent me this pipe. It's beautiful. And I really appreciate it. I've been smoking it on the trip out here. Nice. Yeah. It's also, he had asked me what my favorite shape is,

and he got me one of that shape with some interesting coloration and finishing. So I really appreciate that. In terms of being Catholic in a rural context, I think the same basic principles apply. You may be encountering people who are not as familiar with the Catholic Church as people who are in an urban environment, but just being a loving Christian and interacting with them and explaining things that they may not be familiar with can be of help. And it helps to explain them in terms that they can understand. Like, for example, if people are like, well, you're a Catholic, so that means you pray to saints.

Why would you do that when you can go directly to God? Well, because God wants us to pray for each other, and just like I'd ask you to pray for me even though I can go directly to God, I'd also ask the Virgin Mary to pray for me and have her as my prayer partner too. In fact, wouldn't you rather have the Virgin Mary as your prayer partner than me? I'm fine. So I think there are ways to take even some historically sensitive issues, like Mary or Purgatory or justification by faith, and explain them in a way that even people coming from a Protestant background may be able to understand and accept as long as you're proposing them in a way that's

understandable in their terms. Like when I explain purgatory to people coming from a Protestant perspective, I explain it in terms of sanctification and growth and holiness, which is something Protestant Christians understand. If I'm talking about justification, I don't beat up on Protestants for using the phrase faith alone. I'll note that the phrase is not used in Scripture, except the one place where it's rejected, and it does have a confusing element to it, so even Protestants have to explain what they mean by it. But then I'll point out that it can have an acceptable Catholic sentence that, you know, Pope Benedict XVI talked about. As long as the

faith you're talking about is faith formed by charity, then you can actually say that someone is justified by faith alone. It's not our phrase, it's a confusing phrase, it's not the language of Scripture, but it can have a legitimate meaning. So I try to use these common ground approaches to help present the Catholic faith to those coming from other perspectives. At the same time, you may encounter people who are just venomously anti-Catholic in the country, just like you can encounter them in the city, but there's a limit to what you can do. That's a great thing to learn, isn't it? There's a limit.

You once said to me, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. You probably told me that 12 years ago. And I was quoting someone else. But it's a great point. I mean, you can argue someone into the ground with all your apologetic chops. But if you're not helping them understand where you're coming from.

Well, to extend his question a little bit, what might your advice be to a Catholic in rural America who may not have many options for Holy Mass. You know, I'm sure that you can go where you can go where you can. Yeah. There's usually a Catholic church within driving distance, especially the distances people in the country are used to driving. Yeah. Now what do you have for me? Okay. Yeah. Bread. Yeah. So I've got some bread here. All right. And...

Keto bread, is that what it is? Keto bread, yeah. So each one of these has like one gram of carb. What? Each slice, yeah. So I'm gonna get us four slices. Oh. Two for you, two for me. I think I know where this is going.

You may well. And it's not just bread You brought cutlery Thank you so we can have Vegemite sandwiches in honor of your Australian heritage. Oh, that is so kind of you. I'm legitimately grateful. I thought I was going to have to pretend to be like impressed, but I'm actually impressed. And I have some cheese. I don't know if you do cheese.

Oh, sure. I had hoped to get buttered toast, but that didn't work out. But I thought I would bring this. When's the first time you tried Vegemite and what was your experience like? Oh, I'm fine with Vegemite. I forget if it was the first experience, but I know I had it with you and Cameron once. Oh, did you? I remember Cameron really liked it.

And I was fine with it. Oh, thank you. Well, I'll tell you how I got my wife into it. I share this for those who might want to try Vegemite. You can get it on Amazon, by the way, if you live in the States. That's where I got this. But what I think a lot of times when America Americans grab a jar of Vegemite, they think it's maybe like peanut butter and they should put the same amount on.

But what I had my wife do is get some nice toast, put some butter, just a smidge of Vegemite and a nice yolky egg on top. That's like a nice introduction because it's a savory thing more than a sweet. I'm not so big on yolky eggs. You're not? No, I like my eggs hard. I like them scrambled dry or boiled hard. I don't like runny yolks. But so does this look like a decent amount for you? I'll have a bit more on me if you don't mind. Thank you so much.

And so for people who may not, who may wonder about Vegemite because it's not, it's not big here in America, it is an extract from brewer's yeast. So, you know, it originally was made from, you know, yeast used at a brewery to make beer. And it got used as a sandwich spread instead. There was a corporation in Australia... Thank you kindly. ...that marketed it beginning in the earlier 20th century. And in terms of what it tastes like, it does have a little chocolate note in it, but it is not dominantly chocolate. Yeah. To me, it tastes like beef bouillon. How is Kedar bread this good? I know it's really good these days.

Is it really good or is this stuff in it that's going to kill us? I mean, you can read about it, but each slice has 35 calories and 8 grams of fiber. Wow, this is terrific. Thank you very much. So I wanted to ask you, I know when Alan was on the show. That's so good. It's like the salty beefiness of it.

It's also very high in B vitamins for people who may not be familiar. Yeah. I want to ask you about tobacco smoke. Okay. And why on earth two Catholics would sit here with the audacity to smoke. And isn't that a sin? Isn't that a terrible thing to do? It's bad for you. Why would you do something that's bad for you? Your body's a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Why would you do something that would harm you? You know what one of the things that they have commonly in temples is? Incense. You know what tobacco is? Incense. As, I have to get his full name, hang on just a second, because his full name is amazing. As Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim said, or better known as Paracelsus, the poison is the dose. So, and that applies to anything. Even water is poisonous if you drink enough of it. There is such a thing as... What does poisonous mean? I thought I knew until you said water could be poisonous. Well, it means that it interferes with your body's operations in a way that can be injurious or even fatal. So that's why we have like intoxication is, you know, with alcohol, well, it can interfere with

your body's normal functioning, but it can also be pleasant up to a point and then it becomes unpleasant. And then you pass out and then you die. If you take enough. Well, it turns out the same thing happens with water. You can, is that really likely? I mean, I'm sure it's possible. It has happened. It has happened. I mean, he'd be throwing up presumably. No, you, you're, you can drink water fast enough in such quantities that it overloads your body's ability to get rid of it. And there have been people who have died

from water intoxication. A famous example was in, I think it was, I want to say it was San Francisco. I may have that wrong. But a radio station was having a contest to win a, there was a type of video game out at the time or video game device called a Wii, W-I-I. Yeah, I had one. Yeah.

Well, they were, this was when those were the big hot thing. And they were having a contest among their listeners to win a Wii. And the title of the contest, or the slogan of the contest, was Hold Your Wii for a Wii. And it was to see who could drink the most water and without going to the bathroom. Yeah. And they had these contestants who were drinking water and they had like a nurse call up on the radio station. Yeah. Call up the radio station and say what you're doing is dangerously unsafe. It is, people can in fact die from drinking too much water too fast and that proceeded to happen. One of their contestants was a woman who had entered

this contest in order to get her children this video game. And she drank so much water so fast that it overloaded her kidneys ability to process it and she died. Which is just heartbreaking when you think about what she was here for. Did her kids at least get the video game? I don't know. You're kind of ruining it for me if mom died to get me this. Oh my gosh, that's brutal. Can you read that from where you are? I'm a blind man. At one point a nurse contacted the station and informed the DJs that the contest could be dangerous and potentially

fatal. The DJs responded by saying we we're aware of that, and said that the contestants had signed releases and couldn't file a lawsuit. According to a contestant, the waivers addressed only publicity issues and made no mention of health or safety concerns. The DJs also joked about Strange's distended belly, that's the contestant, joking that she looked about three months pregnant.

Yeah, so even water and oxygen are fatal insufficient dosage. So as Paracelsus said, the poison is the dose and as long as you're using tobacco in moderation it is not a sin. All right, let me push back against that. I mean, surely there are certain substances that we shouldn't be taking even in moderation. Like if I told you that every day I went to the paint store and I just had a little bit of paint, you'd be like, don't do that. No. You wouldn't tell me not to do that? The poison is the dose. You'd be okay if I was having a beer? If you're having a, if you're, if you want to eat a paint chip that is so small,

if you're into that, that it's not going to cause you any problems, I'm not going to tell you not to do it. I'm going to warn you about problems. I'm not going to warn you about things that aren't going to cause you a problem. All right. Well, if you're in the chat right now and you disagree with us and you have an argument against smoking, let us know.

Hey, there's my wife. She just wrote, yeah, Vegemite. I craved it when I was pregnant with my Aussie babies. Howdy Cameron. I love cigars. Absolutely love them. And I try to have one for breakfast every morning. I can't always do it, but it's my goal. Is that too much?

I feel great. One cigar a day? No, not really. It's not going to really hurt you. I'd like to get up to three. I'm not joking. I would like to, I would like to get at least one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I'd like that. So I'm not an expert on cig like to get at least one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I'd like that. So I'm not an expert on cigars. I've never smoked a cigar. I haven't researched them in detail. But one of the things I know about both cigars and pipes is you don't inhale. And that means that you are not bringing the tobacco smoke into your lungs in the same

way that one would with cigarettes. And that's where the damage is. It's not the nicotine. Nicotine does not really cause physical damage. What causes damage is the other chemicals and elements, some of which are radioactive. And if you're bringing that into your lungs, it's going to increase the potential for damage. Having said that, a few cigarettes a day is probably not going to hurt anybody. Yeah.

I know with pipe smoking, when the Surgeon General Report came out in 1962, that they found pipe smokers actually lived longer than non-smokers. Sweet. So, there can be some benefits, like relaxation and lower blood pressure. Oh my gosh, exactly. Things like that. I mean, this is what I say all the time, and it might be a cope, but it's also like relaxation. Oh my gosh. Exactly. I mean, this is what I say all the time and it might be a cope, but it's also the case. Uh, there's something nice about lighting up a cigar and committing to an hour of just

sitting and relaxation. You went to our cigar lounge. You're going to come tonight. By the way, if anyone lives anywhere near Steubenville, 7 PM tonight, Jimmy's going to be there. Um, fellows get to sit around together. tonight, Jimmy's gonna be there. Fellas get to sit around together, chat, have a nice human interaction. It's really enjoyable. When did you get into pipe smoking? I'm sorry? When did you get into pipe smoking? 1978. And maybe this is too personal a question, so please don't feel the need to answer it,

but how many pipes do you typically have a day how many bowls I don't really count all right let's see here this harrelson $50 chat isn't okay here it is so harrelson also said someone get Matt to tell folks about his new pipe that he's currently smoking I should be doing other things but I can't move away from this conversation two of my favorite people in the world what What a very kind thing to say. Well, thank you. The new pipe that I'm currently smoking is one that, um... Oh, he's asking about my pipe. Oh, okay.

Yeah, this is a pipe I bought in Vienna a couple of weeks ago. It is a Dunhill. It's, um, let's see. What is it? So it's British. It's chestnut wood. And it has a, what's this called? A wind sun guard? Windscreen. Windscreen.

And it's very enjoyable. I, um, I've been smoking more pipes in Austria because there's no way to sit inside to smoke a cigar. And it's very unpleasant to smoke a cigar outdoors if it's in any way windy or cold. There's something very pleasant, I think, about holding a bowl, a warm bowl and smoking outside, especially with a windscreen. So that's what I was doing. Okay. Everyone needs to go and download your podcast.

Yes, Jimmy Akin's mysterious. Jimmy Akin's mysterious world is brought to you by Jimmy Akin's mysterious world is brought to you by... The Stark West Production Network. Oh, it's so good, Jimmy. Thank you. I'm not just saying that because you're here. I said... Oh, by the way, one other thing before we move off pipes. Yeah.

So, I've discovered that a lot of people want to ask me what, what tobacco I smoke. Yeah. And there are two that I currently smoke. Um, one of them is a, is a private blend. Is this it? Yes. May I smell it? Yeah, sure. It is called, well, I'll tell you the backstory. So there is a kind of tobacco that's made in Germany called Devil's Holiday.

And it has, it is a sweeter aromatic. It has notes of blackberry and apple and peach and a lot of kind of sweeter fruit notes in it. But there is a tax dispute between the company that makes it and the state of Arkansas. So you can't buy it in Arkansas. But there is a local tobacco shop called Ash and Ember in Silum Springs, Arkansas.

And they make, for me, they do custom blends and they made one for me that is close to Devil's Holiday. It doesn't have that in the title. Yes, and since they made it for me, I got to name it. So it is St. Michael's Holiday. Very good. And this is it. This is your own blend. Yes. And I actually, it's similar to Devil's Holiday, but it also has some features that I like that Devil's Holiday doesn't. Like a lot of German tobaccos tend to be drier, and this is more moist, and I like that. Yeah.

So then after they made it for me, they decided to release it to their other customers. And so you can buy it, and it's become one of their best sellers. Is that right? In fact, they, I've mentioned it it like when I was on the pipe cottage with Alan. He asked me about this and I mentioned it. And they got orders. And I've mentioned it a couple of different places. I mentioned it at my Christmas live stream. They got orders from that. So if you're interested in trying Jimmy Akin's special blend, call Ash and Ember in Siloam Springs, Arkansas and ask for St. Michael's holiday,

and they can ship you some. And they tell me that they've had quite a number of different people asking for it via phone and stuff like that. Would a website also be helpful? Or phone calls are best? I don't think they have it on their website at present, so I would just give them a call, but they've had apparently shipped quite a number of pounds of it to the

gentleman there who's a mailman told me he thought at least 16 different people were ordering it and some of them ordering it multiple times. Oh, I want to, I want to say something. Um, and this is, it goes to what you just said. I had Christopher West on the show Thursday. You're going to find this interesting. He made the statement that if somebody we're talking about vasectomies, so very different topic talking about vasectomies. Okay. And he had said that if anyone out there wants to get their vasectomy reversed, he'd be happy to pay for it. Oh, well, well. When he said I had the same reaction to that is when people say, here's my public

private by my email, here's my private email. I'm like, Oh, don't do that. So like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of people have reached out to him. Wow. That's why it's way more than he thought. So vasectomies back to pipe tobacco. I hope that they get a lot of business from us mentioning that stakes, lower stakes, but no, Jimmy Akin's mysterious. Well, and I want to, I hope that they get a lot of business from us mentioning that. Lower stakes. Lower stakes. But no, Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. I want to give this shout out because my kids love your show so much.

In fact, my eldest daughter, Avila, who's the best and I love her, often when she goes to sleep, we say, can we please, can we just please listen to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World? In fact, one night, I love reading to the kids at night, but I was reading this book and no one was really into it. And they also said, can we listen to Jimmy Akin's mysterious well? Fine. So we got one of your episodes, we put it in the, on the coffee table and we turned all the lights off and we all just sat around and we listened to the entire thing. It was wonderful. Cool. Yeah. Do you happen to remember the episode? It was that excellent episode on the woman who was abducted in the middle of the night by those fellows.

It was victim F. That was so good. There were a lot of twists in that story. And you did it really well. You knew exactly what you were doing. I'm like, oh, he seems to be talking in such a way that it might have that outcome. And I was lost the whole time. It was great. I think very consciously about the storytelling that we use in relating the different mysteries.

One of the things that, so for Victim F, it's this story about a woman, she gets kidnapped and out of bed, she's over at her boyfriend's house, she gets kidnapped. And it's a story that sounds crazy. And the police didn't believe that she had been kidnapped. They thought her boyfriend had killed her. And was trying to cover it up. Is it a spoiler alert? Should we give a spoiler alert here? We'll give a little spoiler alert here. So, if you don't want to know what happened with victim math, pause this video, go listen

to the episode. Yes. Um, but having said that, the story just keeps sounding crazier and crazier the more it goes on. Right. And then it starts to sound like she's in on it. Like this is a deliberate fraud they're poking the police with. And then it turns out it's all absolutely true. Well, in reading the book that she and

her boyfriend, now husband, wrote, they reveal from the very beginning it's all true. And then they walk you through how it happened. But I said, no, for storytelling purposes, you need to go through what the police and the public were thinking as it unfolded so you can hear how crazy it sounds up front and then it seems to get crazier and crazier and then wham it's all true. Did you ever expect Jimmy Akin's mysterious world to become this popular? Was it just a side thing and you weren't sure where it would go? Well I was intending for it to become this.

I intended it to become popular. I'd love it to be more popular than it is. We are regularly in the top 20 documentary podcasts on Apple podcasts in the US. That's amazing. We're getting up there. Last week, we were like number 35 or so in documentary podcasts in the UK and in Canada. We estimate over 100,000 listeners a week, and it's become very popular. I'd like it to become more popular still.

I think that even more people would benefit from it just for information value, and it's interesting to think about, and it's also a form of stealth evangelization, because we look at every single mystery from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. Sometimes, if it's a more faith-based mystery, there's not a lot to say from the reason perspective, meaning what would unaided human reason without faith say about it. Sometimes if it's a more reason-based mystery, there's not a lot to say about it from the faith perspective. It's like, well, if Bigfoot exists, then Bigfoot exists. The faith is okay with that.

It doesn't challenge anything in the faith. But we make a point of looking at every mystery from both perspectives, and we therefore are doing a sort of soft evangelization. It's like, come for the mysteries, stay, and you'll hear the Christian perspective. And so it's meant to be something that's accessible to people regardless of their religious perspective, but it's also meant to share a Catholic Christian religious perspective. My dad, for example, I hope he doesn't mind me saying this, but for a while was a pretty big 9-11 conspiracy theorist. And being able to share your episodes with him, knowing that it wouldn't be on the nose

of evangelism and yet he would get something out of it was really great. Cool. Yeah. That was another one I remember putting a lot of thought into about the storytelling aspect of that. I took a chronological approach and walked us through the attacks as they happened, playing audio phone call recordings from the people on the planes.

Yeah, yeah. When are you going to do the moon landing episode? And why was the moon landing fake? Well, I don't want to spoil it, but I don't think the moon landing was actually fake. However, we will take the argument seriously, as we always do. At the moment, I'm not sure when we're going to do that one. It is on the list. But then... Are there like... I'm sure there are only so many gigantic topics and you have to space them out. Exactly.

I didn't want to like blow all the big topics in the first year and then it's diminishing returns after that from a listener's perspective. So we only do the super big mysteries every so often. Also I'm glad I didn't do that because I know more now than I did. We started the podcast five years ago. We just had our 300th numbered episode. We also have some additional bonus episodes. But I just know a lot more now on these subjects than I did five years ago.

So I'm glad that, in fact, there are a few early ones I want to revisit because I know so much more now about them. I could do a better job with them than I did when we first began. Are there certain episodes that you've done and you're like, oh, I was just factually wrong on some of these things I now know? Or, you know, you do a pretty... Well, I don't have any that I would say I was flat wrong about, but there is one subject where I'm not as confident of my position as I was.

Can you tell us what that is? Bigfoot. Initially, and there was a minor factual, I think, issue in that show where I, this was like our third episode or something. And so it was right at the beginning, I was not doing the kind of intensive research then that I do now. And I took certain accounts of, like there was a guy who claimed to have impersonated

Bigfoot for the Patterson Gimlin film, the famous one, where you see Bigfoot walking across this creek bed. A guy claimed that he was in it in a costume. And I think, and I accepted that, but I don't think that's accurate now. Either there is, there was a guy who tried taking credit for a bunch of Bigfoot related things and when he passed away his family actually went to the press and said Bigfoot is dead now, but there's actually good evidence that he didn't do a bunch of the stuff he claimed. Which might mean what? Which might mean that he wasn't in a suit there.

There also is better evidence for Bigfoot than I previously had been aware of. Now, my fundamental conclusion... Come on, I love this. Yeah. My fundamental conclusion is that I found it improbable. I'd love Bigfoot to be real. conclusion is that I found it improbable. I'd love Bigfoot to be real, but my conclusion at the time was that I find it very unlikely that there is a larger than human anthropoid ape living in North America at present, given all the cameras and eyeballs we've got looking for it,

um, and so forth. And I still find it improbable, but I don't find it as improbable. There has been a substantial amount of additional evidence accumulated for Bigfoot that you often don't hear about, but that I have subsequently accessed. The Patterson Gimlin film, which I initially regarded as a hoax, may not be a hoax at all. There are problems with claiming that's a person in a suit. We did not, 1967, 1968 have suits that functioned that way. Also it

appears that the film was recorded at such a speed that a human couldn't really imitate that gait without it being extremely hard to do in a way that would show. You can also see muscles rippling under the skin. Thursday, are we able to show everybody this? Can we pull that up on YouTube and show it without the volume? It's a Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film. Yeah, if you find it. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So, Yeah, and there's you find it. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So but that's just a piece of the of the situation Yeah, so here he's got Okay, this is a stabilized version, which is can you show everyone at home? So this has been incredibly carefully scrutinized and it is not as obviously a hoax as people have made it out to be

There's also a lot of other evidence scrutinized and it is not as obviously a hoax as people have made it out to be. There's also a lot of other evidence. Uh, yeah. Okay. Holy mackerel. Yeah. Now this, as you can see, they've stabilized the frame, which is good. It makes it easier to watch. I see. By the way, the, uh, the big, so are you convinced that's not a suit? I see. By the way, the big story is... So are you convinced that's not a suit? I'm not convinced it's not, but I'm also not convinced it is.

It suits... in order to make a suit like this, you would basically need technology that we didn't have in costuming in the 1960s. And the guys who did this film weren't Hollywood guys. They were like a couple of cowboys. Where would they get the money to do something like this? Oh, you're kind. I already have a cigar. I got one. Thank you, though. Wow. That's wild. This is really has accidentally become the Joe Rogan experience. I didn't mean for that to happen. Oh, that's okay.

But that's excellent. Joe Rogan wants me on. I'm happy to do that. I would love to see you on Joe Roganan show. We've got to make that happen. That would be cool. Yeah. The, um, so in addition to the Patterson Gimlin film, there's been a lot of additional evidence, uh, that can be cited in favor of a Bigfoot, a Bigfoot in North America, being real, including, um, uh,

dermal imprints of feet that clearly are, number one, that have consistent striations in them. We have fingerprints, right? The purpose of fingerprints is to give us a better grip so that they generate friction. That's why we have fingerprints on the palms of our hands, but not the backs of our hands, because we don't grip tree branches with the backs of our hands, we grip them with the palms. Same thing for our feet, they give us stability. So like if you're a human being, out in nature, you're waiting a stream to catch fish or something, your fingerprints,

your footprints keep you from slipping. Okay, well if that's true of us as an anthropoid species, same thing should be true of Bigfoot. And in fact, there are casts that have been made that were taken in conditions where the apparent creature had stepped in a medium that was fine enough, we can get the footprints, the toe prints off of the cast. So we can look at the type toe prints from different apparent bigfoot tracks. So these are not made by the same creature, but they show consistencies in how the toe prints and so forth are oriented. And they're not oriented like human ones. Humans have, the dermal graphics on our feet

tend to be organized so that they show horizontally on our foot, but on Bigfoot tracks, they're oriented vertically. And this is across different tracks that are different sizes made by different bigfoot. So that's something that is a notable piece of evidence. Also, these tracks show flexion points. So it's not like if you made a wooden hand, let's say, just for, or wooden foot and just pressed on it, it would be obvious that it was not flexible.

It doesn't bend the way a regular hand or a regular foot does. But these tracks show flexion points that indicate they're not just a rigid wooden track. And there are other pieces of physical evidence that make it more plausible than I was originally aware that Bigfoot may be real. Yeah, those are some examples of tracks. Are there Bigfoot sightings in Europe, Africa, other places, or only in the United States?

There are equivalents of Bigfoot sight cited around the world, including in your home country, where the equivalent of Bigfoot is called a Yowie. And there are different names applied. In some places they're shorter than humans, in others they're taller than humans. But there may be, you know be small populations of other members of the anthropoid family that have not yet been discovered. In fact, the mountain gorilla was only discovered in the early 1900s, and before that it was a cryptid. So there may be additional cryptids like, you know,

Matt Fradd right there on the screen, who are still out there and just haven't been discovered yet. It's possible. My doubt about North America was because of how many cameras and eyeballs we have here looking for Bigfoot. And do you still find that a good objection? I find it a good objection, but I don't know that it's a conclusive objection

at this point. So what are they doing, hiding very well? That is one of the things they would do, yeah. There are species that hide from humans, and with good reason, because we're the boss of this rock, and you mess with us, it can go badly for you. Interesting. I love it.

Keep going. But if people are interested in a survey of some of the anthropological and physical evidence that I've been referring to, there's a book called Sasquatch. It's by a physical anthropology professor, if I recall correctly, and I should be able to pull up his name real quick. Library? Just scroll down here.

Revisiting Bigfoot would be an excellent new title for the new video. We did our first episode on ghosts and I've done a lot of different ghost stories now, but that's one where I may also do a kind of another summary foundation stone episode on ghosts. Yeah, I'm sure those are evergreen episodes. Those are the ones I'd want to click on. Those UFOs, Bigfoot, Fush, easy. Oh, let's see it in this one.

Let's try this this sub list. Oh, there's what I want. I want to. I cannot believe how many questions we have. It's insane. That's okay. Jeff Meldrum is the author. So Sasquatch by Jeff Meldrum. If you, if you want to hear about some of the contemporary evidence pointing in favor of Bigfoot.

Would it be okay if we tried to do something of a lightning round with these questions? I'm sure we could speak a lot more, answer them a lot, but since we have so many, maybe we can kind of go through them and then we can go back and discuss things more in detail if we find them interesting. Local supporter Patty says, do you have any suggestions for contemporary fiction in the speculative or horror genres that features Catholic themes or characters and does so with accuracy and respect? Tim Powers. Tim Powers is a living author in California

in Southern California, he writes a kind of Modern fantasy genre that where he it's like set in the modern world It's not set in Narnia or Middle Earth, but it incorporates magic and science and horror in some of his stories. In fact, he has a novel called Declare that incorporates Lovecraftian type horror. And he's a Catholic. What's his name? Tim Powers. He's a Catholic, he's a really nice guy, and he's very serious about his Catholic faith. So a lot of his characters are explicitly Catholic. In one of his novels, this is Three Days to Never, he has a character who's going under a pen name, going under a pseudonym, and she tells the pseudonym she

picks for herself is Libra Nos Amalo, which is from the Lord's Prayer in Latin, libera nos Amalo, deliver us from sin. And that's her name? But she says she bends a little to be Libra nos Amalo. Oh, I love it. And she explains that by saying, yeah, my parents were crazy Catholics. All right, very good. Speculative question from Mitch, where was Jesus going in Mark 6 48 when he, quote, meant to pass by them while walking on the sea past the boats? Presumably, he was heading back to Capernaum, which is where they had gone from in order to get to the location where the feeding of the 5,000 happened,

they were rowing back to where they came from, and presumably that's where Jesus was heading when he passed them. We have some super chats. Big thanks. Dominic Mosley says, Do you agree that looking deeper at beauty in the created world and in art opens us up to feel the power of their argument for God as creator and first mover. Yes, I do. Wisdom talks about this from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their creator.

Sounds like that's an answer to that. Yeah, it's right there in scripture. Yeah. Michael Joseph says, thank you so much for your contribution. As much as I have heard that producing your podcast is difficult, it has been instrumental in my reversion. You have literally saved my soul. Thank you. Well, God did, but I'm, it's my honor to play, play a supporting, be able to play a supporting role. Uh, let's see.

Question for Jimmy from JD Rahal. Thanks for the super chat. Do you think the book of Daniel was written and published in 6th century BC by Daniel or 2nd century BC by others? This is a question I don't have a firm opinion on. However, my suspicion is that the final version of Daniel does date from the second century BC. However, Daniel clearly existed in more than one version because some portions of it don't have the Deuterocanonical sections. And so there was clearly more than one version of Daniel,

and I don't know when the original version was composed, but I think the final version of it, the evidence at least, based on my read of the evidence, I suspect it does date from the second century BC. Tom, sorry Tony, says, how does Jimmy feel about Trent Horn's recent debate with James White? Well, I haven't actually, he did two, one on soul scripture, one on purgatory.

I plan on watching both. I have not yet had a chance to go through them thoroughly. I started watching the purgatory one, but I haven't been able to finish, I have not yet had a chance to go through them thoroughly. I started watching the Purgatory one, but I haven't been able to finish, I haven't finished it yet, just because I got pulled away on other projects. Seth asks, and thanks for being a local supporter, he says, howdy Jimmy, given your research into our mysterious world, have you ever looked into rainbow bodies? It is a Tibetan Buddhist phenomenon described as, I love that you're nodding, of course you know about this, as

developed spiritual individuals reputedly vanishing within days of death. I wonder what your opinion is of it given it is somewhat similar to Jesus' empty tomb. Yeah, so I am familiar with the concept. I haven't looked at it in detail yet. I am currently, I have some East Asian research projects queued up to learn about things like that and tulpas or thought forms, which are another thing that you find conceptually in East Asian context. So I have it on my list of things to research more carefully.

But if you're interested in the connection or in a possible understanding of Jesus' resurrected form as in terms of a rainbow body, I would suggest checking out the work of the scholar Dale Allison. He has a book, and I'm forgetting the title of it, but if you Google Dale Allison and Jesus Rainbow Body, he has a book where he discusses the parallels and how you might be able to look at like some of the things that Jesus's resurrected body does in terms of what a rainbow body is purported to be able to do. We're seeing a lot of people now pushing back in the Catholic space, maybe not a lot of people, but more and more vocally it seems, against UFOs, saying that UFOs are demons, UFOs don't exist, the Catholic Church does not allow for the possibility of UFOs and

aliens, specifically aliens. I'm sure you're aware of this. Yeah, I'm aware of it. Maybe state their argument better than I just did and show me why you think it's wrong? Well, so... And then, would you mind moving to the right just a smidge towards me this way? Yeah. Is that better Thursday? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. So you can adjust that if you want. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. So it's, it's, it's just a jump to the left. Jump to the left. And then a step to the right. Yeah, okay. Well, let's do the time warp again.

So. Let's do it. The individuals will have different arguments. But the fundamental argument, so if you say that there is no such thing as a UFO, you're saying, in fact, there is nothing that's unidentified. Well, that's clearly wrong, because there are things that we've captured video of where the government acknowledges we don't know what this is.

So saying there are no UFOs, properly speaking, is just factually inaccurate. In terms of if there are unidentified things that we don't know any kind of conventional technology that it represents, does it have to be demons? Well, the different individuals will pose different arguments. Some individuals, like Daniel O'Connor, have claimed that the catechism contains a passage that basically restricts the image of God to man, and therefore, in his view, there could not be creatures other than man that have the divine image and thus are intelligent. There are several problems with that argument, but to tie it back in to the UFO issue, before

I talk about why it's problematic, if you don't have intelligent rational aliens as a possible explanation for these unidentified things, then since they seem to display intelligent behavior, you would be left with the only other intelligent thing we know about other than humans, which would be angelic beings. And so UFOs would need to be either be good angels or bad angels. And given that they are sometimes reported to do traumatic things like abduct people and traumatize them, that would suggest demons.

So you end up with demons as a kind of, due to the availability bias. You've said, other intelligent life forms like us aren't possible, and that would point you in this direction, because that's the option that's available as an explanation. The problem is, the initial reasoning that says the Church does not permit belief in extraterrestrial intelligences, that's just false. That's just completely false. If you talk to Catholic theologians, and if you even read the writings of recent

popes, they are open to the idea that God may have other children out among the stars. They have not said that only mankind is capable of being rational according to the teaching of the Church. It's the reverse when you read including things popes have said. So what's happened is individuals, and I consider Daniel O'Connor to be something of a friend, you know, I've had positive interactions with him in the past, but I think he's taken a passage from the Catechism and read it contrary to the intention of the pope who promulgated it. And so he's reading a text against the interpretation that the pope would give it, in fact, the same pope who released the Catechism. And I find that a

mistaken hermeneutical strategy. I don't think you can say, ah, well, the pope may be open to extraterrestrials, but here he wrote something, and if you read it just the way I want you to read it, it actually contradicts what he said, and therefore the Church doesn't allow this when the pope plainly allowed it. That's just a mistaken course of hermeneutics. Okay, so, and what the passage in the Catechism was talking about is creatures on earth. One of the things you've always got to do when you look at a passage is say, what's the universe of discourse that this text is talking about? If it's not trying to answer the universe of discourse that this text is talking about?

If it's not trying to answer the question of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos, then it's not addressing the issue of what exists elsewhere in the cosmos. If it's talking about, well, here on earth, man's the only rational thing, well, yeah, okay, but that only talks about earth. It doesn't tell us anything about elsewhere. In addition to, as you said, recent popes being open to the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere, has there ever been a condemnation of the possibility of extraterrestrial life from popes or certainly not from an ecumenical council? Certainly nothing definitive. Okay. And there has been a discussion of,

in fact, I've got a huge, big, thick book on this, on the history of the extraterrestrial question down through history. There have been rejections of individual thinkers, like Savonarola, who proposed many worlds with other inhabitants on them, and he got condemned. But he also got condemned for other stuff. He had a bunch of problematic theological ideas.

But just because even if you have a condemnation in the past, that doesn't mean that condemnation applies today. Look at Galileo. And so even if you had an opinion that was expressed in the past and got condemned, that had a scientific bearing, and this all happened before the scientific revolution, the Church isn't hanging on to opinions that it hasn't articulated in hundreds and hundreds of years. So there is a form of doctrinal development that occurs where ideas that used to be common, like Ptolemaic cosmology,

where the Earth is at the center of the universe and it's surrounded by these crystal shells that the planets orbit on and the sphere of the fixed stars is just beyond the orbit of Saturn. Well, that used to be a common opinion, and some people like Galileo even got condemned for calling that into question in ways that were deemed problematic, but that doesn't mean the Church is stuck with all that. And in the same way, there's been a revolution

in cosmology to where we don't view the universe as a series of concentric crystal spheres ending just beyond Saturn. We don't, today, there's been so much revolution in our knowledge of cosmology that now there are options that Catholics can think about and endorse today that they didn't have a basis for in the past. Also, I have an episode of Mysterious World on Is It Always Alien Demons? And in that one I go through a bunch of evidence proposed by the evangelical astronomer Hugh Ross who supports the demon alien hypothesis.

Catholics often refer to Mary as the greatest creature in heaven, higher above the angels in grace, this sort of thing. If it were the case... In grace, sure, I'll buy that. If there were a civilization elsewhere in the stars and they fell and there was a redeemer, Aquinas says that God could become incarnate, God the Father could become incarnate. Or if the Franciscans are right and Christ would have come regardless, maybe he has already come to a planet amidst unfallen beings, then presumably or at least hypothetically, theoretically, you've got a mother of God on another planet, right? That's a

possibility. It's a possibility. They might not have sexes though. Or they might have more than two. Right. So all that's possible. I'm just going with this. If this is possible, then it's possible that there are now two mothers of God. And then what does that mean? Could it mean that some alien mother of God is above our mother of God in grace? I mean, that's where it starts to get weird for me. But it should be weird because we're talking about aliens. So I suppose it's appropriate. Yeah, and the answer is we don't have any data here, because God hasn't told us. At least, I don't think God has told us. Now, someone might say that the deposit of revelation

He's given us establishes that our Virgin Mary is the highest anywhere in any timeline in any cosmos, in which case, okay, well that would be true. And so if there are other mothers of Jesus out there, then, well, then they wouldn't be as high as our Mary. On the other hand, I think it's more plausible to, again, consider the universe of discourse. What are these statements about Mary? What are they talking about? Are they envisioning the possibility of Mary's on other planets? And I don't think they are.

I don't think that was on the mind map of the people who formulated these. And so if you want to say that our Virgin Mary is the highest creature in the order of grace because she has been more graced than any of the angels or any other human beings, that's fine, but I don't think that tells you anything about hypothetical creatures out in the cosmos, because the people who formulated these statements about Mary were not even contemplating that. Do you think aliens exist? Well, I think I have a spectrum of confidences. I think that life in some form, at least primitive, unintelligent life, probably exists off of Earth.

In fact, I did a two-parter about life on Mars. We've actually got good evidence for life may very well exist on Mars in a primitive form. Things that are equivalents of plants and fungi. There are structures on Mars that appear cyclically with the passing of the Martian seasons that look like fungus and look like trees from orbit. So and the Viking life test that was done in the 1970s passed. It verified the existence of life and then they changed the criteria after they saw the results, which is bad science. You don't change your validation criteria after you've seen the data. So I think that there is a very, I think if I have

to bet, life of some form exists elsewhere. And I think that's consistent with God making such an enormously big universe, you know, which way beyond what you would expect to need to just have us in it. Also, does intelligent life exist? I would guess that the answer is yes, but that's more of a guess. Is that guess, excuse me, is that guess based on the sort of things you've looked into as far as UFO sightings? No. No, it's not. based on the sort of things you've looked into as far as UFO sightings? Is that?

No. No, it's not. That's the third question. But the second question, do I think intelligent life, do I think we would have reason to believe intelligent life exists elsewhere? I would guess the answer is yes, but I'm not as firm on that. There are arguments that even though life

may be very common, intelligent life may be very rare. And so I don't presently have an opinion about are those arguments conclusive or not. And even if it would be exceptionally rare on naturalistic grounds, well, that doesn't tell us what God did. You know, there's something like, this is one of Hugh Ross's arguments, that, oh, the odds of intelligent life are so low it shouldn't exist anywhere in the universe at all, and therefore we have evidence that God designed our solar system to have intelligent life in it. Okay? Suppose that's right. Suppose he's right. It's so rare it should not exist in the universe. Yeah.

But God did it here. Well, if God did it here, God can do it elsewhere. So just because you've got an argument that this is naturalistically so uncommon it shouldn't exist doesn't mean you've disproved that it exists any number of times. If God chose to go against natural odds and make intelligent life here on Earth, He could have done it the next solar system over. It's entirely up to God at that point. And you'd have intelligent design arguments for aliens just like you would Earth, based on a Creator who's in control of everything. So I don't think, even if the naturalistic arguments for the rarity of intelligent life work, the fact that it's here means God did

it at least once. Not impossible. Yeah, so He could do it elsewhere, and those naturalistic arguments, those are not conclusive. Then we get to the third question, are we being visited? Maybe. I don't know. I recognize there are things that are flying around out there that are hard to, that are unidentified and that are hard to explain in terms of conventional technology. They therefore could have an exotic source, an exotic source meaning extraterrestrial, interdimensional, crypto-terrestrial, or time travel.

All those four I would consider exotic sources. So the UAPs that are flying around, they may have an exotic source. I don't know. I have studied and covered on Mysterious World a number of UFO encounters that some of which I think have natural explanations like Betty and Barney Hill. I don't think that abduction was a real abduction. I think that that it was a misunderstanding of what their experiences were by Betty and Barney Hill. of what their experiences were by Betty and Barney Hill. The evidence I have supports the idea that the Roswell UFO crash was not extraterrestrial. There was something that crashed,

but it wasn't an extraterrestrial craft. It appears to have been a project mogul balloon chain that was designed, that was a classified project at the time and was designed to sense nuclear weapon testing in the Soviet Union. Which is why it was classified, because we didn't know, we didn't want them knowing we were spying on them. There have been

others that are harder to explain in conventional terms, but I have yet to encounter one that absolutely convinces me that it has an exotic explanation. So I'm open, but I don't have a firm opinion. So I think life, in some form, probably exists elsewhere. Extraterrestrial intelligence may well exist elsewhere, but I'm not as convinced. I'm open to are we being visited, but I'm not convinced we're being visited. Are there stories of alien abductions in other countries?

Yes. In fact, the very first alien abduction story in the modern era was from Brazil. There was a guy named Antonius Vias Boas who was basically working as a farmer at the time and he reported being abducted by a group of extraterrestrials and then being required to engage in conjugal activity with a female of their party, he compares himself to have been used as a stud, you know, in the sense of an animal, like a stud horse. And that was actually the first one, that was in the late 1950s, but it didn't become well known here in the US for some time afterwards.

Is it moral to have sex with an alien if it's rational? That is a question that has not yet been settled by Catholic moral theology. The argument that it would not be acceptable, so sex is only supposed to be done inside a marriage. The question is, can you marry an alien? Also, sex must be able to be possible inside marriage because if you're not able to have sex, you can't get married. Antecedent, perpetual, and incurable incontinent, not incontinence, impotence, is an impediment

to marriage that blocks it from coming into existence. So you've got to be able to have conjugal relations in order to be married, and you've got to be married to have conjugal relations. So could you and... Procreative. Yeah, so Thursday is suggesting procreative capacity is also needed. Actually that's not true. You can have couples who are so old that their past childbearing years, they can still get married. You don't have to have procreative capacity. You just have to be able to perform the sexual act. Yes. So, would it be possible for a human to marry a rational non-alien,

non-human with suitable biological apparatus? Yeah. Well, maybe, but it's not established. It partly depends on the analysis that you're using on what is a human. If you define human in the classic way of man is a rational animal, then a rational alien is an animal and it's rational, so it's going to count as a human, even if it's very different from us biologically. So you could marry a Vulcan or a Klingon or whatever. If it's a rational animal, it's going to count as a human under the classic philosophic definition of what a human is. On the

other hand, if you mean it needs to have a genome that is sufficiently close to be able to breed with us so that it's of the same species, if that's what you mean by human, then no, you wouldn't be able to marry them because you're lacking even the possibility of procreation. So it's going to, if you take a species reproductive based definition of what a human is, so it's going to depend on how you define human, whether you define it in a classical way or if you define it in a more modern biological way. Fantastic. Alright, one political question, if you don't mind. Joe asks... You can ask, I may not answer.

That's okay, you don't have to answer, but it's generally speaking. It's about Catholics, not about your specific opinion. Joe asks, can Catholics vote for Trump in the primary? if yes, what about the general? Are we required to vote for a third party candidate? Who is the general? It's a question from someone. You know, I understand, but is the general a person or does he mean the general election? General election. Okay.

Well, so I can answer without reference to any particular candidates. The point of electing a candidate is trying to affect the future policy and direction of the country in a positive way to the greatest extent possible. It does not mean you endorse everything a person says or everything that they're going to do. You are never required to cast a vote for a third party person on the grounds that both of the two major ones are lame. What you're required to do, if you're going to vote, is use your vote in such a way that it will promote the greatest good that is possible in these circumstances. And so even if someone is profoundly undesirable, if that keeps a worse evil out of office, you're morally okay voting for the lesser of two evils.

And given America's first-past-the-post election system, which causes us to orient towards having two rival contenders and only two that have a real chance of winning the election, we will find ourselves in that situation more commonly than in other countries that don't use a first-past- the-post election mechanism. Okay, thank you. This is a great question. I need to hydrate some more. Yeah, great question. Jimmy, you seem to be filled with wonder for all creation. How do you keep from becoming jaded and cynical? It's a good question, right? Well, I think about good, interesting, fun stuff. I don't read a lot of news. Like, for example, I don't follow election cycles very closely because politics is just frustrating. So that's why I didn't know, in this case, does General refer to the general election

or is that a person who's a general running for office? Because I haven't really followed this election cycle very closely. What I tend to do is when it comes up election time, I'll check in, I'll figure out who I'm gonna vote for, and then I don't worry about it beyond that. And if there's some particular issue that comes up, you know, locally or something where I could have an influence, I may sign a petition, I may, you know, call my representative, I may call my representative, I may do something like that,

but I just don't spend a lot of time following the ups and downs of politics. Sounds healthy. Yeah. Yeah. I heard somebody say when you don't have metaphysics, you're just left with politics. You're just sort of interested in,

that's the highest thing to be concerned about. So, very good. I also generally, I don't watch news in general because it's so partisan and so leads it bleeds and it's designed to be clickbait and it's worse now than it was in the past. This really has changed. Now it was, it did used to be really bad in the yellow journalism era. Then they got more professional. Now they're getting less professional again, because they need to compete with the internet.

And that's making them all more clickbaity and partisan. So I don't do a lot of news. I do have one primary news aggregator that I will check in on from time to time, not every day. And that's InstaPundit, which is a kind of, it's a libertarian news aggregator. So it's not fully conservative, it's not fully liberal, it's libertarian. And I'll check in on that every so often. Other than that I have a science aggregator I check every day to see what the science news is

but I I don't typically follow conventional news or conventional politics. I don't know why this memory just came to me but do you remember when you and Trent Horn tried to convince me why reading comic books was cool? Nope. Okay we were on a Catholic answers. It worked though didn't it? It did for a bit yeah yeah we were on a Catholic answers staff retreat that none of us wanted to go to. Yep I remember that. And we were sitting around and and I had never read really a comic book before and you would try I think that you and Trent Were telling me that it was like

Greek gods like modern Greek gods and it's one way to think of it. Mm-hmm. It worked for why I really enjoyed it I have to say I think the the the Marvel franchise kind of has burnt me out a little bit Uh-huh, and I also find that when I try to go to a new comic book I find either woke stuff in it, which is exhausting, or I find just flat out, if it's not like the basic DC Marvel, some really immoral content. It's even pornographic content. I'm like, what the heck?

That has been done. But one of the good things about comic books is there's a huge history and going back you know basically 80 years at this point in superhero comics yeah and there's a lot of good stuff there's a lot of great stories out there some of them are public domain others are available electronically and there's always something you can find that's good to read even if there are more modern problems

Okay, somebody wants to get into comic books. What's your recommendation for a graphic novel? Oh A graphic novel that you would say get this one. This is a good one to start with You got me one for my 30th birthday. I don't know if you remember this it was I remember you had a birthday party That was superhero themed and your wife borrowed all of my superhero t-shirts for the guests to wear. That was a really fun night. Thank you for doing that. Yeah. Yeah, gosh, I forget what it was.

It was like the bronze age of superheroes or something to that effect. Yeah, well, that may have been a collection rather than a graphic novel. I thought that's what a graphic novel essentially was, a series. No. A graphic novel is typically one connected story. And it may not have been published as individual issues before. That's different than, okay, here's this span of issues, either six of them or 12 of them, that we're now going to reprint together.

One classic graphic novel, and it's not a Christian perspective, but one of the classics is Watchmen. Yeah, everyone tells me that's great. And it has some challenging material in it. Another classic is the original Dark Knight graphic novel, which was actually originally, it was just, well, the original Dark Knight, it's also got some challenging material in it. It's not nearly as bad as Dark Knight II

and Dark Knight III though, which were also by Frank Miller. Challenging content, what do you mean? Just immoral content that you've got to wade through? Yeah, I mean it's something that's not appropriate for children. I mean it's different than pornographic, but there will be like one of the characters in the original Dark Knight graphic novel, which was originally four separate issues that then got put together, is there's a character based on Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

I don't know if you remember her, but she was a sexologist in the 1990s. She was very popular. She would give young people advice about how to have positive, healthy sex without marriage. And she was very popular. She's this little old woman with a German accent. positive, healthy sex without marriage. And she was very popular. She's this little old woman with a German accent. And she would go on late night television and talk to, you know, Johnny Carson or David Letterman or whoever about it. And there's a character in the original Dark Knight graphic novel that's based on her, where I don't think they call her

Dr. Ruth, but that's what she was called in real life, but she goes on a late night talk show and is talking about Zex and Zex and how wonderful Zex is. Well, we never see anyone having Zex, but she talks about it in this libert uh, liver teen sort of way. And then the joker kisses her and poisons her to death. Um, yeah. So she kind of gets her comeuppance, but there is like this character there. So it's not material that's appropriate for a small child, but it's also not pornography. Yeah. Watchmen. Was that made into a movie? Yes. Is it worth watching? I don't know. I've never watched the movie.

Yeah, I've heard it's not great. It's a movie. Yeah Very good. Dr. Alan Harrelson says why is the American South not overwhelmingly Catholic historian Eugene? How do I say that? Genovese? Genovese. A devout Catholic argued that the South was once an intensely medieval society and rejected the dangers of the Enlightenment. Well, the problem was that the, it's true, that a lot of the populations that came to the South were from sort of the English Midlands and Scotland and so forth. The problem was they got Protestantized before they

got to the American South. So you didn't have recusant Catholics coming over and populating the South. You had people from, like, Scotland who had become Calvinists who got imported into the American South. So yeah, they retained a bunch of medieval cultural elements, but they had also had Protestantism imposed on them before they immigrated here. Okay, Bluecombe53, thanks for the super chat Chat says, is there a Vatican resource where one can look up all the miracles that have advanced people's causes towards canonization? Also, who's your favorite church father and why? I don't really... People often ask my favorite of different things, and I tend not to have

favorites. There are ones that I appreciate, and one that I appreciate would be, for example, St. Augustine. In terms of, is there a place where you can look up all the miracles that have advanced people's causes towards canonization? Yes, the Vatican Apostolic Archives. You can go over there. It used to be called the Secret Archives, but today it's called the Apostolic Archives. You can go over there. You can ask them to pull up miracle reports and the investigations that were done, and they'll do that for anybody as long as you have a, either are a historian or are connected to a legitimate historical

inquiry. So it's open to people regardless of their religious persuasion, but that's where you can go to get the records. Having said that, that may not be the most convenient thing for you. And so what I would recommend instead is a book called Medical Miracles by a Canadian physician named Jacqueline Duffin. Jacqueline Duffin is a blood pathologist and she was some years ago called in on a case where they said, we want you to tell us, is there any, here's these two sets of slides of someone's blood work, we want you to tell us, is there any medical

explanation for the difference you see in these before and after slides? And she looked at them and said, heck no, there is no scientific explanation for this. This is obviously a case where someone has botched up the record keeping and this is grounds for suing a physician or a lab for malpractice because they've clearly botched up. There's no way this is scientifically explainable before and after of this person's blood work. Then it

was revealed this isn't for a lawsuit. This is for a Saint canonization case. And even though she was an atheist, they don't care if you're an atheist, they want your scientific opinion. Is there a scientific explanation for the data we have? And she said no, there's not. So then the Saint canonization got approved. She actually went over to the Vatican. She got invited to the canonization ceremony, and she became fascinated by the subject of how the Catholic Church investigates and considers miracles as evidence. And so she did a historical research project. She went over to the Vatican secret archives then and had them

Had them pull up case after case after case so she could do a statistical study of The different miracles that have been used in approving saint canonizations most of them almost all of them these days being medical miracles And she wrote a book about it, which is really great. She also, even though she's still as far as I know an atheist, is convinced that things that can only be described as miracles happen, and they are profoundly meaningful to the people who experience them. And they're medically unexplainable. And the book is called what? Medical Miracles. And her name again is Jacqueline Duffin. Thank you. Does a do you mind taking that down after we've read it just cause I think it's

pretty bright. Thank you. Anthony who's a local supporter says, why were the so-called benefit contests wrong if they were wrong? And do they have any point? So the benefit contests were people who claimed that Pope Benedict did not resign from the papacy and therefore he continued to be Pope until his death. This position is false for multiple reasons. First one is Benedict did resign. There have been attempts to argue that he did not based on subtle

shadings of phrasing in the legal instrument by which he renounced his Petrine ministry, but this is creating... this is rationalization. It's trying to get to a conclusion even though no sane hermeneutical analysis of the text would lead you to this conclusion. It is, I mean, you can reinterpret what anybody says if you get to make up the rules. But this is another case of reading a text contrary to the intention of its author, and that is hermeneutically unsound. You always read texts in terms of what is the author trying to communicate. Authorial intent is the purpose of communication, and so you have to say, what is the author trying to communicate here?

And there's just no doubt about it. Benedict was trying to communicate, I'm not going to be pope after this date. So he communicated that. You can quibble about, oh, I would have preferred it if he'd done it this way rather than that way, but he communicated that. And so he did resign, and he and Pope Francis was validly elected in his in his wake now there are attempts to argue That his election was invalid Francis's And those also are just nonsense when you when you look carefully at the text like there are For example, there's a rule that a certain type of caucusing is not supposed

to happen among the cardinals. Well, yeah, that's true. It's not supposed to happen, but that doesn't mean the election is invalid because of it. And when you look at the section that pertains to the balloting, that's not a requirement that applies. In fact, even what it says in the section that deals with balloting is that if irregularities have happened with regard to making promises about if you elect me then I'll do that, that those promises are null and void upon election. So that means you got validly elected, even if you promised to do something,

you're now absolved of that. It doesn't invalidate the election. It invalidates the promises you made. So now you're no longer bound by them. And those are just a couple of overview examples off the top of my head. But neither the argument that Pope Benedict failed to resign nor the argument that Francis's election was invalid have any

canonical merit. So those who were so-called Beneficentists after Benedict died, some of them have claimed we're not set of accountants because set of a contest means something else. Explain why they are. You're set of a contest because you are not in subjection to the Roman pontiff. The Roman pontiff is Pope Francis, and you, if you're saying he's not the Roman pontiff, you are not in subjection to the Roman pontiff. So you are a set of a contest. You may, you are schismatic. You may not recognize it, a contest. You may, you are a schismatic. You may not recognize it, but you are a schismatic. Now was that the question you wanted me to answer or was it, are you a seat of a contest? Oh, no, both. I was actually, that was going to be my next question.

You're also a seat of a contest because if you believe Pope Benedict was the Pope until his death and he's now dead and there hasn't been a subsequent conclave, then there is no current pope and so the sea is vacant and you are now a seat of a contest. You're also a schismatic because you are not in subjection to the actual Roman pontiff. You may not recognize him as the actual Roman pontiff, but he is and you are not in subjection to him, so you're in a state of schism. So should those in a state of schism present themselves for Holy Communion? No.

So if someone's out there right now and they deny the papacy of Pope Francis, either because they thought Benedict didn't resign or because they thought Pope Francis wasn't validly elected, and they state that, they hold that, they're a schismatic. They are. Now, the question, there's a separate question of how have they committed the canonical crime of schism. Okay. Because that has certain additional requirements in order for it to be triggered. Like you have to do it contumaciously, which typically requires things like your bishop warning you, you know. And so all of the canonical requirements

may not be present for the canonical crime to be present, at least for the penalties to come into effect. Because there are a number of requirements, these are in the canons in the 1300s, there are a number of requirements that have to be met for the penalties to be enforced. But in terms of the basic question, are you in a state of schism, the answer is yes, if you're a Catholic and you either are not in subjection to the Roman pontiff or if you refuse communion with those who are in communion to the Roman pontiff or if you refuse communion with those who are in communion with the Roman pontiff. Okay, thank you. Bosman BDC says, I recently read an argument

against God from dinosaurs. It was a riff on the idea that animal pain disproves God since their suffering unlike ours isn't redemptive. The argument is that millions of years of dinosaurs tearing each other apart is nonsensical from the theistic perspective. I mean, when I read that I'm like, yeah, I get, I get why some would make, someone would make that objection. What are your thoughts? Well, um, I feel like I need to make these questions longer so you can enjoy your pie. That's okay. Um, so okay. So in the first place, what's required is that in order to claim God would be being unjust, which is really the fundamental issue here.

We claim that there's this omnibenevolent God, he's all perfect, and so he's just. He's not going to do anything that's wrong, which is kind of the fundamental claim. And it's argued then it would be wrong for a God to allow X amount of animals suffering in the world. So this is essentially a sub case of the problem of evil. Well, first of all, it's presupposing that animals have rights that can be violated and that's arguable.

Second, it presupposes the animals are coming out on the negative side. Because if I come out on the plus side in my life, I have more good than bad, well, God's being fair with me. He's not being cruel or anything like that. Yeah, I might have a painful final illness or a painful final murder scene where I get killed and there's a lot of pain, but if I've had 80 good years before that, I'm coming out on the plus side. And so what needs to happen for God to be fair with people is make sure they don't unjustly come out on the minus side. So let's look at the lives of these dinosaurs.

Well, even if they get eaten by the end of their life, it took them a while to grow up to that great big size to where they got eaten by somebody. They may have had a lot of good years before they had a final bad encounter. And if that's the case, then God was more than fair with them. He gave them more positives than negatives in life. They came out on the plus column. Then there's the assumption that animals don't have an afterlife. Because if animals do have an afterlife, then no matter how much suffering they experience in this life, God will more than make it up to them in the next, because the next life is infinite. And so they may not have the full

supernatural glory of, you know, the vision of God in heaven because they're not cognitively configured to understand God. But if they just have a pleasant experience that goes on and on and on, well then they're again, they're coming out in the positive. And so for them, like for us, the glories of the next life, the sufferings of this life are not worth comparing to the glory that's laid up in store for us. So I did a study a few years ago, I actually did a Mysterious World episode about this. I want to say it's episode 203 on animal afterlife, but I realized a number of years ago that the idea animals don't have an afterlife is not church teaching. You will not find that in the catechism or other authoritative church

documents. This is a theological opinion, and that means that the strength of the opinion, or the deference that's due to the opinion, is proportional to the strength of the arguments used in favor of it. And so that led me to go and look at the arguments that were proposed for the absence of animal afterlife by Aquinas, who is basing them ultimately on Aristotle. And these are not theological arguments. It's not like he's got biblical texts that say animals have no afterlife. These are philosophical arguments. And considering them as philosophical arguments, I think they are unsuccessful. I think they are weak and unconvincing.

And so I became open to the idea that some animals may have an afterlife. And then I found empirical evidence that some of them do. All right, come on. Okay, so people have near-death experiences, or deathbed visions, but sometimes they'll be in the process of dying. They have visions of like their departed loved ones coming to greet them and help them make the transition

into the afterlife and welcome them. And then sometimes they actually have a near-death experience where their heart stops. They're clinically dead. They see their loved ones coming to greet them and welcome them into the afterlife and so forth. And sometimes what they see makes absolute sense. loved ones coming to greet them and welcome them into the afterlife and so forth. And sometimes what they see makes absolute sense.

They see, oh yeah, whether I'm alive on my deathbed or whether I've just had my heart stop and I'm in a near-death experience, here comes my grandmother and my mother and they're departed and so forth. But what is my brother doing here? He's still alive. And so then people will come back, the vision will end, or they'll come back, their heart will restart, and they'll say, well, I was having this experience and my loved ones were greeting me, and most of it made sense. I mean, my grandmother was

there to greet me, and she's dead, and my mom was there to greet me, and she's dead, but then my brother was there to greet me, and he's not dead. And they'll say, actually your brother died while you were in the hospital and we didn't want to tell you. This is what's known as a peak in Darien experience, P-E-A-K, like a mountain peak. The title or the name comes from an old poem where you have these Spanish explorers climbing a peak, a mountain peak, in Darien province, Panama, where the canal is, and they get to the top of the peak and suddenly, unexpectedly, they see the Pacific Ocean. So the idea of a peak in Darien experience in terms of near-death phenomena is you suddenly,

unexpectedly, see someone who happens to be dead and you didn't know that before. So this is evidence that you're actually encountering something real. It's not just imagination. This is unexpected. It goes beyond random chance. Okay, so here's the thing. Animals show up in Pekin-Darien experiences. People will say, yeah, my heart was stopped and my grandmother came to greet me and my mother came to greet me and my mom was holding my cat Fluffy and that doesn't make any sense because Fluffy was alive yesterday when I was at home.

Yeah, well, Fluffy ran after you when the ambulance left and got squashed by a passing car so actually Fluffy did turn out to be dead. You just didn't know that. Well, if near-death experiences provide evidence for an afterlife for your mom and your grandmother and you, they're also going to provide evidence for an afterlife for Fluffy. Which is different to saying that animals survive death. It's just to say that there is evidence for it. The evidence might fail ultimately somehow. There could be something else going on there and in fact in parapsychology there are alternative explanations for near-death experiences that don't

involve survival. Like maybe you were subconsciously using your ESP and you picked up on the fact that your brother is dead or that fluffy is dead and you incorporated this into the near-death experience. So there are non-survival interpretations of these experiences. I don't think that's the best way to take these. I think we should take experiences as they... This is a position sometimes called phenomenal conservatism. You want to take experiences as they present themselves until such time as you have evidence they should be taken in another way.

So these experiences present themselves as encounters with afterlife versions of our loved ones, including our pets, and I would say that's how they should be taken until we get evidence that something like subconscious ESP is being used. So I would say, yeah, it's evidence that at least some animals, like domesticated ones, do have an afterlife, and that doesn't contradict church teaching. It only contradicts some philosophical arguments that were proposed by certain past thinkers, but they didn't have access to the information we do about near-death experiences now. And so if that's the case, there could be lots of dinosaurs for us to ride in heaven and they'll be totally happy about it.

What about mosquitoes though? Well, I don't know. I mean, they're not domesticated. They might not have an afterlife, or God may have a realm that's just fine for them and they won't bug us. What we do know is the afterlife is going to be fun and not involve pain. So even if there are mosquitoes and they interact with humans, it will be fun and not painful. Very good. Okay. Now, you okay just continuing to plow through questions or whatever you want, focus on something that's fine, too.

I really at some point need to do another Vegemite sandwich. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. Even if you just like it, you can do it. All right. Thanks, everybody, for being here, by the way. Oh, I need to do a shout out to cover. And I don't know. Yeah. Strive, 21 dot com slash. Matt is a 21 day detox from porn course that I created to

help you overcome pornography. So if you're a fella, obviously we have these wonderful resources now for women out there who struggle with porn and want to be free of it, but this is a course I created just for men. It's a 21 day course. You get about a three to five minute video from me every day. It's not an isolated experience because there are literally thousands of people tens of thousands of people who've gone through this course all around The world and so every video has comments under it men chatting back and forth with each other So yes strive comm strive 21 strive to one comm slash Matt click the link in the description below It's free. It's completely free

So if you're struggling with porn and you're sick and tired of it Give this a shot because a lot of people have told me they found it really helpful. I Think you have my silverware. Do I there? was when they oh It was stolen by an elf. Why did you how did you when? When did you? Would you like us to make you a sandwich Thursday? No, I don't want to eat veggies.

Well, I had a aluminum foil wrapper with a knife and a spoon and a fork in it. Yeah, fork. Mysterious world. This could be the next... You know, the name for this, if it disappears and reappears,

parapsychology, huh? Yeah, but see, it's stuck to the napkin I put it on. I don't mind eating bits of napkin. Oh, he's going to wash it, thanks, Thurst, eh? He's a good person. But if an object disappears and reappears, in parapsychology, it's known as a few different things. The classical name for it is apportation. So when an object appears, it's an apport. When it

disappears, it's an asport. More recently, there have been a couple of other names that have been applied to this kind of phenomena. One of them is just one of those things, or J-O-T-T, so it's a jot, and an individual case of it is like a jottle. Another name for it is disappearing object phenomena, but this is reported, and... It may have just taken place. Yeah, it may have just taken place. Also, it is, or it could be under something, this is one of the classic problems, is eliminating natural causes. Yes. And apportation can explain, or you can see Jesus's disappearance from the tomb

without the tomb being opened as an asportation, and then his arrival among the disciples when we're told the doors are locked as an apportation. Okay. You know a lot of things. Well, I try to. Do you have a photographic memory? And what is that? Well, photographic memories, thank you so much. Thanks a lot, Tosta. Photographic memories are kind of misunderstood. Now, there is a form of autobiographical memory where you can

remember basically everything that happens or at least a huge amount of everything that happens. The actress Mary Lou Hinner has that and it's actually not the best thing because we're not designed to remember absolutely everything. It causes problems. Like what? Well, confusion, for one thing, where you're trying to, you won't be able to remember necessarily when exactly things happened.

And you could mess up on what the current state of a situation is. Also you can find it difficult to relax and shut images out of your head. You can you can find it hard to let go of things that you need to let go of. Is it because they're you remember to your experience. Yeah. Like if, if, if you were, let's suppose 10 years ago, I insulted you and I would never have meant to, but let's suppose I did something that hurt you. Well, if you can remember that with perfect vividness for the rest of your life, it can be hard to forgive that person,

even when they're sincerely repentant and and you know they're sincerely repentant, and you want to forgive them, you just can't forget the detail of what they did to you. So you don't have that? I don't have that. I do have a partially photographic memory in the sense that I remember images very well. So like I will remember, for example, if I'm reading a book, I'll remember where on the page something was that I read. The I know I'll put it on, I'll put the knife on top of the Vegemite. There we go. Okay.

So if you want to add cheese or something. Yeah. So I do have a highly visual memory that is, and sometimes people call it photographic, where you can remember things as if you're looking at a photograph. Yeah. And so I do have something like that. It's also tied into my synesthesia. Yeah, talk about that, because I remember you told me you had that back at Catholic Answers.

Yeah, and I didn't talk about it publicly at the time because it wasn't publicly well known, but it's become much more publicly well known in recent times. So synesthesia, I have two conditions, one of which I've only realized recently. I apparently also have a condition called hypersthesia, which is very intense mental imagery. It's the opposite of, oh, hyperphantasia, I'm sorry. It's the opposite of aphantasia. Aphantasia is where a person does not generate mental images in their head. So you can-

That's a thing? Yeah, it's a thing. And people can function perfectly well without being able to generate mental images in their head. So you can... That's a thing? Yeah, it's a thing. And people can function perfectly well without being able to generate mental images. So if I try to remember my childhood and I have this thing, I can't see it in my brain? Correct, yeah. Or if I tell you picture yourself laying on a beach, you're not gonna know what to do with that.

Sort of drawing the point home, but are you saying if I had that right now, I would not be able to imagine what my house looked like and my room and my bed? Yeah, but you recognize them when you see it. I see. But you can't conjure the image of it. And people who grow up with amphantasia assume that when people say things like, picture yourself on a beach, they assume it's some kind of metaphor. And they're shocked to find out, no, wait, you can really imagine yourself on an image of yourself on a beach just by people telling you to do that. And they're stunned.

Now I have the opposite of that, which is hyperphantasia, which is intense detailed mental imagery. So I was in a class once and we were talking about aphantasia and it turns out one of the guys in the class was realizing as we're discussing it he thought I have aphantasia. He'd never known it. He had always assumed when people say picture yourself on a beach it's like a metaphorical speech. And he asked me, well so what do you see? And I said well basically And he asked me, well, so what do you see? And I said, well, basically, I've got a mental holodeck that I live in. I can conjure the image of any environment I want

and walk around in it. No way. Yeah. And it turns out that's a characteristic of hyperfantasia. Most people, it seems, are in the middle. They are able to generate some mental imagery, but they're not able to like detail a fully realistic imaginary environment around themselves.

So that's part of what I have, and that can be used for memory purposes. I also have synesthesia. I have several forms of it. Synesthesia is a cross-connection between different perceptual categories. So one of the ways this commonly manifests, and there's actually like a couple hundred different kinds of synesthesia, but one of the ways it manifests is in many people, not everybody, but in many people is they'll cross-connect colors with letters and numbers. This is called color grapheme synesthesia. 72. Yellow,red. Okay.

The yeah, I see the colors before I can remember the names for them. It's automatic. And so in any event, a grapheme is something you write like a a letter or a number, and then this is color grapheme synesthesia. Other kinds include associating colors and shapes with music, and I have that to a degree. It's not as strong for me as it is for some people, but I have some degree of that. I did an episode of Mysterious World last year on synesthesia, where I talk about all this. I even had some animation done to to illustrate for the audience. It's not perfect but it's this is kind of what I can experience with instrumental music. It's a little like

watching a firework show. So I had the Mysterious World video effects team animate an at least a partial attempt at what I see when I listen to a particular instrumental song. So okay anyway I have several forms of synesthesia and one of the things that synesthesia can help with is memory. So like sometimes I'll need to remember a number, and it's easier for me to remember the colors of the number long enough to...like, if I'm moving between one application and another on a computer, like, let's say I've got my Bible application open and a word processor open and I need to remember what's the number for this Bible verse, okay, well if it's numbers 1334, N-U-M-1-3-3-4, that's yellow, blue,

green, clear, purple-purple, seafoam green. And so I can remember those colors, and then when I get over to the word processor, okay, N-U-M-1-3-3-4. So that actually can help with memory, but it can also hurt. And I actually, this is a synchronistic experience because I had an example of that last night. I was wanting to look up a Kindle book on my phone, which does not have the best Kindle searching ability. But I was wanting to look up a book by the near-death researcher Raymond Moody. He's the guy who actually coined the name near-death experience back in his 1975 book, Life After Life. Well, he later wrote a subsequent book called Glimpses of Eternity, in which he discusses what are known as shared near-death experiences, where one

person is dying and someone else, typically a loved one, perceives it or shares in that near-death experience to some degree. And he discovered this phenomenon later in his research, so he didn't write about it in his first book, but he later wrote a whole other book called Glimpses of Eternity about people who have shared in the near-death experiences of their dying loved ones and thus gotten a glimpse of eternity. Well, so I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling trying to find my Kindle version of this book, and I had a clear mental image of its cover in my head, and it was an orange cover. Well, one of the things about

my experience of words is that the first letter, the color of the first letter tends to dominate my perception of the whole word. So I'll see a word as dominantly one color with undertones of the other letters that are in it. Like pints with aquinas. Pints is a dominantly pink word, with is a dominantly blue word, aquinas is a dominantly red word. Because P, first letter in pints, is pink, W, first letter in with, is blue for me, and A, first letter in Aquinas, is red. So I think of pints with Aquinas as pink, blue, red. Well, glimpses starts with G, and G

is orange. And so I was perceiving glimpses of eternity as dominantly orange, and so I'm looking for this orange cover of glimpses with eternity, and I'm not finding it. I'm getting frustrated. Eventually I find it, the cover is actually purple. So it was a case of my synesthesia interfering with my memory. Okay, maybe this is hard to convey to somebody who doesn't experience that, but how, when you say you listen to instrumental music

And you see colors almost like fireworks What on earth does that mean? I mean? Doesn't mean anything. It's just my experience Yeah, no, but I'm trying to understand what it would be like for me to experience that kind of like a music an abstract musical visualizer, but it obviously doesn't interfere with your physical sight. No. Yeah. No, these are mental images.

Yeah. And so it's like having an abstract musical visualizer in your head. Can you turn it off? Yes, at least. I can, because it's not as strong with me as it is with some people. So I don't have to see the imagery. Thursday just shared this. I can because it's not as strong with me as it is with some people.

So I don't have to see the imagery. Thursday just shared this. Can you show this everyone watching at home this to John Green? This is a ex post. It's baffling to me that some of y'all see stuff in your mind. You see it the way your eyes see. I always thought visualise meant thinking of the words, feelings associated with the thing not actual visuals I am such a total five on the scale I didn't know wonderful existed so it sounds like he has a fantasia so when did you it also doesn't have to be site. So I can, people can hear things in their mind. I was recently, one of my regular listeners,

and he's actually a volunteer at Mysterious World, turns out he's aphantasiac. And he was surprised to learn in reading about what I was discussing that not only do people like me who are hyper-phantasic see things in their mind, they can also hear things and smell things in their mind. So like I can, and this is common, but a lot of people, you know, they'll hear a melody in their head even when there's no music playing, or

they'll hear something, they can generate someone's voice in their head, you know, someone they know well. Or I can conjure the smell of Vegemite in my head when there's no Vegemite present. Yeah, I think I can do that. Yeah, a lot of people can, but not everybody has a nose of the mind or an ear of the mind along with their mind's eye. So can you imagine any place you've been to with specificity and walk around in it? Yeah. Even places you've been once or do they have to be ingrained? Well, I have to know the place because I don't have that intense episodic memory that Mary Lou Henner does. But if it's a place I know, I can, like I can, there's a supermarket next near where

I live that I go to and I can walk around in that supermarket in my head. You know what's funny is I noticed that sometimes when I'm falling asleep, falling asleep's a very interesting thing. Oh yeah. As you slip into unconscious. And it's interesting when you notice yourself slipping. Because it's almost like you have control of your thoughts, like reins on a horse.

And then all of a sudden the horse starts galloping away from your control, and then you notice that it's galloped away, you know that wonderful experience? Oh yeah, I have that a lot. But I notice that as I'm falling asleep, I'm more able to do something like that. I might be able to, kind of like in a dream, I suppose. In a dream, you feel like you're inhabiting a world. So when did you realize that other people didn't experience that? It depends on which form of synesthesia or hyperphantasia we're talking about, some of them I picked up on in childhood.

Like one of the things that I had is a kind of synesthesia known as lexical ordinal personification, where you have a sequence of things, such as letters or numbers, and you personify them. You assign different personalities to them. So to me the number five was a jerk and the number six was a kindly old man and the number seven was the son of six and was much nicer than five. I have a question that might sound insulting and I promise I don't mean it to. Sure. Did you believe yourself to be a weird kid? Do you mean because you had this ability? Did you feel other sorts with other people or the I don't remember that?

I mean, I remember I had mr. Spock was my role model I asked this only because I have a child who has these kind of Oddities and ticks about him that don't seem to be repressible and they don't seem to be things he's choosing to do. He's also incredibly bright and I'm sure you're on a whole other level to what I'm talking about. But I just I would imagine having those experiences when others aren't having them. If you didn't have I could imagine a parent saying like snap out of it. What are you doing? Why do you act like this act Act like other kids and then other friends thinking the same thing. I did have tics when I was young. Yeah.

They were called nervous tics at the time. But I don't know that that's an adequate, fully adequate characterization of them. This is not something for the air. But if you want to talk about this off the air, I'd be happy to hear about it and maybe be able to give you some points of reference that could be of use.

Thank you. Yeah, the last thing I would wanna do to a child, as any parent wouldn't wanna do this to their child, is to kind of make them feel weird when they're experiencing something that you know you're not. It can be supportive. There are ways to be supportive without, you know,

like, so what happened with me, I learned pretty quickly, not everybody has the number of personalities that I do. So I'm pretty confident I learned not to talk about that. And I learned not to talk about the letter number colors and things like that. And I, into adulthood, I didn't talk about it until just the last few years. Because back in the 1970s when I was growing up, synesthesia, now it was actually discovered and research had begun on it in the 1800s. But then with the rise of behaviorism

as a psychological school in the 20th century, behaviorism wanted to focus only on external behavior and totally discounted interior mental states. Well, these are interior mental states. So behaviorism didn't want to hear about it. And so the research into synesthesia died off in the mid 20th century. And by the 1970s, if people were claiming to have like colors with music, oh, I see. You're either schizophrenic or you're taking psychedelic

substances. And it took a few years for enough people to come forward who were clearly not schizophrenic and who were not taking psychedelic substances for it to be re-recognized, this is just a condition that a certain number of people have. The estimates vary between 4% and 10% of the population, depending on what type of synesthesia you're talking about. It's actually believed today that everybody has a low level of synesthesia that they're not aware of.

This is why you could say marmite or Vegemite has a sharp taste. Sharp is a texture. It is not a taste. This is why you could say blue is a cool color. Cool is a temperature. It is not a color. But you can see how we're cross-connecting shapes and temperatures as a way of expressing the truth about a color or a taste. And so it appears this is actually, this may be the basis of metaphor in human language. All human metaphor may be based in some form of low level synesthesia that

everyone has. But in some people like me, it's a much more vivid personal experience that you're much more aware of. When it came to other things that I didn't realize until adulthood that other people didn't have them. I'll give you an example. I have a and it's unclear to me whether this is synesthesia or hyperphantasia. I went on a synesthesia research email list that has lots of synesthetes. It's called the Synesthesia Cafe. It's by a researcher named Sean Day and It's called the Synesthesia Cafe. It's by a researcher named Sean Day, and asked about these phenomena that I'm about to describe to you, and I said does anybody else have these? Are they synesthesia? What would you call them?

And I got a lot of people saying yeah, I have that too, but I didn't get a definitive answer on should this be classified as synesthesia or something related to it. I think they may actually be hyperphantasia, But I have a, I'm not sure how to say it, other than I have a, an augmented reality virtual mental workspace that surrounds me and that I can use to do work. But it's augmented, it's augmented reality. I see it over what my eyes are telling me, but it has various functions that it performs for me, at least four. One of the functions is the slot function, and I have a series of slots in front of me and I can put ideas in the slots and then I'll refer

back to that slot with my hands when I come back to that idea. And so I'm told I use my hands when I talk with my hands I use it do it differently than other people because if I associate this slot with the idea of an electron and that slot with the idea of gravity, as I'm talking to someone I may say, well, you know, gravity is a completely different concept than electromagnetism. And I use it as a kind of visual aid to remind the person I'm talking of and to remind myself of where I've located these different concepts in front of me. So that's the slot function.

Another function that it has is the timeline function, where I can imagine a timeline in front of me and place objects along the timeline, you know, or place dates along the timeline. Another function is a map function. So I can conjure a map in front of me and say, okay, London's up here, Rome is here, Jerusalem is down here. Well, a few years ago, I decided, you know, if I have these maps and timelines oriented so I can see them, I could communicate better with other people if I flip them on the vertical axis. So I did that. I made a conscious choice to invert them. So now, if I'm talking to you, choice to invert them. So now, if I'm talking to you, London's up here, Rome is here, Jerusalem's down here. So I'm giving the data to you from your perspective. Similarly, from your perspective,

the past is that way and the future is that way. So here is 1 AD, here's 1000 AD, here's 1,000 AD, here's 2,000 AD. And so I did a flip with the timelines and the map functions to make communicating ideas easier to the person I'm talking to. And at this point, that's become pretty much second nature to me now. But the other item, the other major function that this has is what I call the grid function. And the grid function, you know how in a holodeck in next generation when the holodeck is turned off they've got this grid? I know. Sorry I don't know if I watched a lot of it. Oh okay. He's gonna throw it up I think. Yeah well basically there's... Just I have to say this. Oh yeah. So Seamus is the one who beat George's time. Do you know this? Yeah

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. So Seamus just said in the chat if anyone is going to break my record I'm fine with it being Jimmy Akin. He has at least five hours worth of valuable things to say. I certainly didn't Well, very good All right, thank you. So here's glad for such sportsmanship, Seamus. So here's the grid. This is, this is a holodeck that's turned off on next generation. And you can see they've got a square grid on the floor and the walls and so forth. Well, I've got that. What? And I use it. And can you turn it on and off? Can you like look at your slot function and remove that? Yeah, I can clear all these anytime I need. Come on. So I

use the grid when I'm dancing and I see on the grid where I need to be and when with arcs connecting my present location with my future locations and so it shows me the dance path I need to follow and when I need to be where on that dance path. So like if in eight beats I need to be there, in four beats I need to be here. And so I... So you're very good at square dancing then because of this? Yes and other forms of dance because I use it for any kind of dance I'm doing that involves moving on the floor. Well here's when I learned this is not normal because I assumed everybody has this. Well, here's when I learned this is not normal,

because I assumed everybody has this. And so when I started teaching square dancing as a caller to students, there was this one guy, he was such a delightful guy, he's an older gentleman, wonderful, wonderful guy. I'm not gonna say his name, even his first name, just for privacy reasons, but he was a square grenade. What does that mean? It means he will detonate any square that he's a

part of. He has... Yeah, so a square is a group of people that are dancing together. I appreciate that. And they dance cooperatively. They dance cooperatively together and they all need to be in their proper locations at any given moment. But sometimes dancers become dis together and they all need to be in their proper locations at any given moment But sometimes dancers become disoriented and they cause a square to break down Okay, where people can't get to where they need to be well this gentleman. I'll call him Bob That was not his name. Bob was a square grenade He would just detonate any square he was in bless his heart. That would be me and no you I doubt that That's kind of this level of disorientation

is not at all common. He's always impressive, was it? So I was, as his instructor, I was teaching him the moves, and I would encourage him to just see the grid and map out where you need to be. And it never helped him. And I would talk to him, and I'd talk to my classes in general about seeing the grid and where you need to be. How would you say it? Well, I'd say, you know, in this particular move, here are the sub moves you need to execute and then you'll be there. So just visualize the grid.

And often, oftentimes we'd have square tiles on the floor. And so I'd encourage people to think about where they're going to be in this grid-like formation. And with Bob, it never helped. He never... just talking about the grid meant nothing to him. And some years later, so I had been doing this for years in teaching people how to dance, it occurred to me, maybe not everybody has this. And so I started asking dancers and they said, yeah, I don't have the grid.

And I thought, well, maybe, maybe it's something only callers have. And so I went to a friend of mine who's an English country dance caller and I asked her, and English country dance is not English country in Western, it's like Jane Austin. Okay. You know, so I went to my, to her and I said, do you have the grid?

And I explained what it was and she said, no, I don't. And it's like, you're a caller. How do you, so I thought, well, maybe only choreographers have it because I'm a choreographer. I write dances and I rely on my ability to visualize the dance floor to see where the dancers are going to be at the beginnings and ends of moves and how their paths connect those points. And it's just part of how I write choreography. So I thought, well, maybe this is something choreographers need to have, but others don't. So I went to a friend of mine who is a world-famous choreographer in English country dance, and

I said, you know, she calls all over the world, and I went to her and I said, I have this thing I call it the grid, here's how it works, here's what I use it for. I thought maybe choreographers have this, do you have the grid? And she said no. And it's like, how do you write choreography? I can't even imagine that if I can't mentally see where the dancers are going to be. So at this point, this was adjacent to synesthesia, but I think it may be more accurately classified as a form of hyperphantasia, where I can generate this environment around me and use it for these purposes.

Wow. So I forget how we got off on that. Has that been detrimental? I can see how that would be beneficial. Like in some ways, I don't know if you remember this, very nice compliment that was given you by Peter Craeft. You were on Catholic Answers Live and he was on the phone waiting to be the next guest, and he said something like, you're a modern-day Thomas Aquinas, which is far too kind, I'm sure. But it seems to me that sometimes when you speak, I'm like, that's kind of how Aquinas, I is far too kind, I'm sure. But it seems to me that sometimes when

you speak, that's kind of how Aquinas, I imagine, he would speak, where there are three answers. And then within the first answer, there's like four subsections, and he writes like this. And he's famous for having dictated to several secretaries at once. Do you suspect that maybe he had something going on? It could very well be that he had something similar happening. Yeah Yeah, and I I do see images and structures for Arguments and keeping track of points and things like that. It's kind of a mental Visual mental notation system. I can see how that would be very beneficial

Especially in your line of work as you're trying to explain things and you do so very systematically. Has it also been detrimental? Do you sometimes wish? Well, other than embarrassing me when I've been giving Bob advice, it's absolutely meaningful to him. Yeah, but Bob was a crap dancer, so who cares about his opinion? No, no, no. He is a very sweet guy and I wanted to help him and I was trying to.

When you explain the grid to him and he wasn't getting it, were you just like, oh, come on, Bob, get with it, the grid to him and he wasn't getting it We just like come on Bob get with it the grid. We just well I wasn't I didn't want to make him feel bad so I I didn't try to show any exasperation but But you know, I don't know how it came across to him. Yeah Fantastic. This is the best him. Yeah, fantastic. This is the best. M. L. Culp says, thanks for being a local supporter, by the way, a good friend of mine is near the end of a long journey from atheism to Christianity, but he's leaning towards Eastern Orthodox. Praise God. What are some good arguments that I can use that a complete new person like him would understand? So I suppose what he's asking

for is arguments for Catholicism over Eastern Orthodoxy, but I'm not sure. Yeah, so I would say a couple things, because I had to face this question when I was becoming Catholic. You know, like I said, I read the theologies of all different branches of Christianity before I was Catholic, including Eastern Orthodoxy. So I had to face the question, should I be Catholic or should I be Eastern Orthodox? And I ended up writing a short piece about this that was eventually published called Why I am Not Eastern Orthodox. So if you Google Jimmy Akin, Why I'm Not Eastern Orthodox,

you'll get the gist of those arguments. Fundamentally, it comes down to the issue of the Pope. Now both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholics agree that the Pope is the successor of Peter in a unique way, and that the Pope therefore has leadership role that is unique in the Church. What they differ about is how does that leadership role function? Is it meant to be a sort of first among equals, like those in the church. What they differ about is how does that leadership role function? Is it meant to be a sort of first among equals, like those in the Orthodox communion would say, or is it meant to have more substantive authority, like those in the Catholic church would say? So I think that's the real issue that needs to be settled here. Everything

else, if you settle that, everything else falls into place. So there are a few things that I have pointed out, and that I pointed out to myself when I was making this decision. First one is to ask a question, would the disciples have even understood the concept of a first among equals that has ceremonial authority, but no authority beyond that. You know, we have such positions today, like in the US Supreme Court, the Chief Justice has very limited authority. He gets the same vote as everybody else. Other than that, he's able to do a few things for bookkeeping purposes, like if he's in the majority, he

gets to a sign who writes the decision. If he's not in the majority, then someone else decides who writes the decision. But he's fundamentally equal to all the rest, and he just has some procedural authority. So is that how authority worked in the culture that Jesus and the apostles were living in? Can we think of anybody in that culture who was regarded as having authority that had a purely procedural or ceremonial authority? No. This is not a concept in the Christian Israel.

How do the Eastern Orthodox understand first among equals today? What does that mean? Or is there disagreement on this? I haven't done a survey, but the idea would be every bishop is fundamentally equal to the pope. And the pope may have a certain prerogative of honor, or maybe he gets to preside if we're having an ecumenical council, or something like that. But he's fundamentally equal to everybody else. No special authority beyond what other bishops, or at least other patriarchs, have. But that's not how ancient

Israelites thought about authority. If God gives you authority, you've got substantive authority and you can use it. Kings were not firsts among equals. High priests were not firsts among equals. High priests got to do things that no other priest could do, and kings got to make decisions for everybody. So if Jesus gives you authority, and you're coming in that cultural context that doesn't have procedural positions, then you're going to understand the authority that Peter has been given in substantive rather

than procedural terms. So that was one thing that occurred to me. Another thing that occurred to me is here we have a situation that's analogous to the split between the northern tribes and the southern tribes. So Israel is originally a confederacy of 12 tribes, plus the 13th that we don't really count, the Levites, because they're spread all over the place, they don't have their own territory. So you got the 12 tribes of Israel, and because everything's turned around in Middle Eastern politics, instead of the South seceding from the North, the North secedes from the South. And that happens after the time of Solomon, after his son Rehoboam comes onto the throne. And God says this is okay, this is from me, but the northern kingdom still needs to

worship in Jerusalem where I put my temple. So, and that's the position that the Bible endorses. Now, the Samaritans disagreed with that. They want to say the temple is not in Jerusalem, it's on Mount Grazim in Samaria. In fact, if you go to Israel today, there is a surviving Samaritan community, there's a few hundred of them, and every Passover they will go up to the ruins of the Samaritan temple on Mount Grazim and sacrifice the Passover lamb. And you can see photos of this and watch videos of this. It's very interesting. But it is not the perspective of the canonical Bible. The perspective of the Bible that we Christians and Jews accept is that

God eventually chose Jerusalem to be the site of His temple, and all of Israel needed to go to Jerusalem to worship. So what we have is two communities that were originally one that have now separated, and one of them has a particular institution, namely the temple, whereas the other that is in separation does not have the temple, and they have different understandings of the proper role of this institution. The institution, the community that has it, the southern community, the kingdom of Judah, turns out to have the correct understanding. God did say put His temple

in Jerusalem, and they've got the correct understanding of the temple institution. Whereas the northern tribes that have seceded from union don't have the institution of the temple, and they have become mistaken on its proper understanding. They think the temple needs to be on Mount Grisim instead of on Mount Zion. So that's a biblical situation, but notice the parallels to what we have here, where we have two communities, Catholic and Orthodox, that were originally united, now they're in a state of separation. One of them has this institution, the papacy, and the other acknowledges it but has a

different understanding. So which group is God more likely to guide into a correct understanding of the institution? Is He more likely to guide into a correct understanding the group that has the institution or the group that is in separation from the institution? Well, I think on a priori grounds, or just on the face of it grounds, he's more likely to guide the people that have the institution, that are in union with the institution, are more likely to be guided into a correct understanding of the institution, and that seems supported by the biblical parallel with the temple, where the community that had the temple had the correct understanding of the temple, and the community that was in separation did not have a correct understanding. So I think God is more likely to guide the

Catholic community that's in union with the papacy into a correct understanding of the papacy compared to the group that is not in communion with the papacy. So that would be another point why I would argue in favor of a Catholic understanding of the faith rather than an Eastern Orthodox understanding. That is a good explanation, thank you. Yeah. Retro Eclipse just gave us a $100 super chat.

You are so kind, thank you very much. He or she says, this is epic. Both of you help bring me out of 25 years of atheism. Oh, yeah. God bless you, too. You're very kind. Please pray for us. Thank you. Yeah. Wow. That's wild. I mean, you don't have to get into this now if you don't want to. But when in your reading of the church fathers,

can you square how they talked and thought about Peter and the papacy with Vatican I's proclamation about the role of the pope and infallibility? Yeah, so one of the things that is an observable phenomenon across religious history is that there is a form of development that occurs as God progressively leads his people into a deeper understanding. And that began as soon as God started working with the Israelites. You know, even Jesus talks about how God gave them some permissions for things that didn't fully represent His will because their hearts were hard. Can I try some of your pot? Yeah, sure, of course.

Thank you. That's why God tolerated divorce in the Old Testament in a way He didn't in the New Testament. So we see this developmental process occurring over the course of religious history. Well, there's no reason for it to stop. In the first century. It's going to happen over the course of Christian history as the Church encounters new situations and has to think about those for the first time. And it draws on the revelation that it's been given and applies it to these new situations, and over time, under the guidance

of the Holy Spirit, the Church will arrive at new insights about how the deposit of Revelation is to be applied. So you're not going to have in the first century or second century fathers as precise and articulated an understanding of the role of the Pope as you will in the 1870s. But what you do see is a recognition of, from the earliest centuries, among the fathers we have commenting on the Pope and on the city of Rome, that Rome has a special place and that the Bishop of Rome has a special place in the Church, and from there it's a matter of working out, okay, so in what ways is it special? And that's part of doctrinal development that eventually crystallized in the understanding that was proclaimed in a significant way at Vatican I and then expanded

upon at Vatican II. Thanks. Curly Christina says, not a question, but Pines and Mysterious World are my two favorite podcasts, so this is such an exciting crossover. Thank you so much. Thank you. Matt Hartman wants to know, why does God allow for miracles to occur in other Christian denominations that openly teach against Catholic doctrine? Because God loves everybody, and He recognizes not everybody is culpable for the situation they're in. So as Jesus says, God makes His rain fall

and His sunshine on the righteous and the unrighteous. He loves everybody. He's gonna help everybody, and that applies not just to rain and sunshine. And by the way, in the ancient world, rain was viewed as a good thing. It wasn't considered unpleasant because you needed rain to make the crops grow and you needed the crops to grow. So it wasn't about cursing people with rain on the good and the bad alike. No. That would be a misinterpretation.

Yeah. It's not like the modern saying, into every life some rain must fall, rain is a bad thing. No, this is a good thing. God loves everybody and helps everybody even if they don't have a fully correct understanding of Him. Check this out. You like this question. Ryan Sayles wants to know, if we meet an alien race that has four arms and rational souls, and we evangelize them, and eventually one experiences the stigmata, will it receive wounds in two hands, since Jesus had two hands, or in all four? It's possible that it could receive it in all four, because stigmata are a mystical

phenomenon that involves the subject's consciousness, the same way visions of the crucifixion do. Back in the 1700s, he actually wrote it before he was Pope, when he was just Cardinal Prospero Lambertini. But there is a work on the beatification of servants of God and the canonization of blessed. The English title is Heroic Virtue, so I'll just call it that, that was published by Pope Benedict XIV, and this is considered the classic work on this subject. It's still used today.

You still find this set, it's a four-volume set, being cited in Vatican documents on this subject. This is like the classic work. And one of the things that there was a dispute about was how many nails was Jesus crucified with? Was it three nails? You know, one for each hand and one through both feet? Or was it four nails? One for each hand and one for each foot. And the thing was you had different visionaries seeing Jesus crucified with different numbers of nails. Some visionaries seeing Jesus crucified with different numbers of nails. Some visionaries saw Him being crucified with three nails. Some visionaries saw Him being crucified with four nails. And so

there's this dispute. And what Pope Benedict XIV said was, stop freaking out about this, guys. God is not showing mystics these visions to teach them about the number of nails. He's showing them visions of Christ dying on the cross to help them grow closer to Christ and to appreciate what he did for us spiritually. He's not doing this to teach us a historical lesson about how many pieces of iron were used. So you shouldn't look at either set of visionaries as being the ones we ought to listen to. And in the same way, if someone has six limbs instead of four, and they have an experience that unites them to Christ in the form of the

stigmata. Well, I as a human, I've got four limbs, so I might have stigmata in both of my palms and in both of my feet. But if I've got an extra set of arms, then I in identifying with Christ might have them, might have stigmata in all six. And so it wouldn't surprise me if in touching an alien's consciousness that the alien would interpret the stigmata and manifest the stigmata in the way that humans from different cultures see Jesus, you know, dressed in their cultural clothing, like Our Lady of Guadalupe. Yeah. I know you've looked into Padre Pio. You have an excellent episode on him.

Oh, thank you. At least on his by location. That's right. Yeah. Do you think his, do you, do you believe that he experienced the stigmata or if that's maybe, do you think he experienced wounding in his hands and feet and side, whether you can account for what caused it? I know it's reported that he experienced the stigmata and I haven't looked into that. So I defer to that, but I, I plan to do more work for mysterious world on Padre Pio in the future.

And I may do an episode on stigmatists and look at possible causes, including natural ones. In fact, there have been some stigmatists who were hoaxers. Did they actually drive nails with something through their hands? No, that would be the committed way to do it. I have an episode idea I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do. I was doing research for it actually on my drive here. I was listening to an audiobook where it talks about this. And I won't give you the context because I want, I've thought about the storytelling and how would I tell this story. But there is a, and so it does involve stigmata, but I have other shows that are gonna involve stigmata too. But in one of them, turned out the stigmata were painted on.

Wow. And they were discovered when they initially passed some inspection, but then you got some investigators who were called in who really, really gave a thorough scrubbing. And the paint came off. That's going to be embarrassing. Yeah. Oh no. Oh, and then you got to try to spiritualize it. Well, maybe it was supernatural,

but it was meant to be paint. And in this case, the, the hoax stir fest up and actually did a life of penance after that. The hoaxer was very, apparently very sincere about. That's beautiful. Yeah. Isn't it funny how pride is very ugly, but vulnerability and repentance, true repentance is very beautiful. So someone who does the worst thing, and not that that's the worst thing, if they're genuinely repentant, my heart immediately softens for them, you know?

Well, I'm sure you've addressed this, but there's a lot of controversy, especially in traditional circles, around the Divine Mercy image, and I'm not sure if you've looked into this. I don't find the objections convincing, but you'll find people out there saying that this is a demonic trick, it ought to be rejected by all Catholics and the three things they tend to point to me is one There doesn't appear to be wounds within Christ's hands and feet and that's a sign that this could be the devil Secondly that there are some problematic passages some things that Christ said in the Divine Mercy Diary I mean Christ said quite a lot within that diary. It's quite big and

There you go. There's that. Thirdly, I think this book was actually condemned or suppressed for a time before John Paul the second reviewed it. Um, have you encountered this? And I, I, I've encountered the latter more, more than the former two, Matt, could you show me your palms? Just hold them up. Dude, you may be satanic. There's no wounds in your palms. Just wanted you to be aware of that. Well, that's different to having an image of someone who claims to be Christ, is what they would say.

Did Jesus have wounds in his hands when he was a baby? No, but- How about when he was 12? No. How about when he was 30 when he started his ministry? No. How about when he was 30 when he started his ministry? No. So we've seen that Christ had no wounds in his hands for over 30 years, and then he had wounds in his hands. How long were those wounds in his hands before he died?

In his, I don't know, maybe three hours, if that's how long crucifixion took. Sure. So we have, and even after he came back, he was only around for a limited time. So maybe he had wounds for a few hours or days or even a few weeks compared to over 30 years with no wounds. So do I gotta always make a picture of Jesus from that last portion of his life?

Or can I make pictures of Jesus that don't depict him at the end of his life? Or can I make pictures of Jesus that don't depict him at the end of his life? Well, to that, there is clearly the wound in his side. I mean, the Divine Mercy image kind of hinges on the wound, the blood and water that comes. Well, here's the quick answer for you. I think people have said, actually, you look at a high-resolution image and they actually are there. It just so happens that when you look at Christ in the Divine Mercy, He's not doing this. I was going to go there next. And I was going to point out that Sister Faustina hated the images. She was not happy with the images of the Divine Mercy that

were painted. She thought they didn't capture what she'd actually seen. So, um, so I don't think for multiple reasons, I don't think we have any grounds for saying there's something demonic here. Yeah. Um, so what was the second argument? Well, one of them was, um, that there seems to be problematic or possibly heretical things that Christ said to Faustina. Okay. So two points. The first one is, apparently, a lot of these things were due to translation issues. Because originally they had a flawed Italian translation that was

why the work ended up on the Index of Forbidden Books back when that was a thing. But then, on the index of forbidden books back when that was a thing. But then when they looked at it more closely in the original and with an individual like John Paul II, who was a native speaker of Polish, they said, yeah, this isn't actually what you're thinking. This is not problematic the way you think it is. Even then, private revelations are not scripture. They are not divinely inspired. Right.

They're not necessarily inerrant. Right. They're not inerrant. They're contingent on the consciousness of the seer. And so, you know, if you look at the norms for judging private apparitions, it points out that the seer's consciousness may add elements to what they're perceiving. This is their perception and their memory of what the revelation was like. This is not gospel.

And so, you know, if you have someone who is not a theologian and is trying to articulate, I mean, even our theological language by professional theologians is a reduction of the full divine mystery into terms we can understand. So if you have someone who's not even a theologian, who's trying to express what they saw of the divine mystery, it can get kind of flattened and, you know, expressed in such a way that it could be open to some criticism. But if it's not fundamentally opposed to the Christian faith, then that doesn't stop it from being a genuine divine revelation, just of a private nature. Here's another objection which you're going to love.

You're going to hate it. I detected the sarcasm. Just in case. Somebody said, well another reason to think this is demonic is that it prevents people from praying the rosary, because you have to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet on rosary beads, and therefore people are substituting the Holy Rosary, which the Blessed Virgin told us to pray, with the Divine Mercy Chaplet, thereby subverting the rosary, and that's why less people praying the rosary today. Okay, so I guess I would say a number of things. How many exactly? How do we know?

Well, two spring to mind. Okay. So the first one is this. Where does the Virgin Mary tell us we need to pray the Rosary? They would say Fatima. Okay, so what category does Fatima go into? Private revelation. So we've got one private revelation on this proposal being pitted against another private

revelation. That's demonic, though, remember? No, no, no. You don't get to assume that. Secondly, did Mary at Fatima say, pray only the rosary and please don't show devotion to my son? She did not. She did not. Is that the kind of thing that the Virgin Mary would be likely to say? It is not likely. Yeah, so I think Mary would probably be okay with having Christocentric

devotions. If you're praying them on her rosary beads, I think she'd be my guest, have more devotion to my son. Yeah. Yeah, and I think of an analogy. That would be like saying, well, the brown scapular is something everybody should wear. There are other colored scapulars that came about after the fact, therefore they compete with the brown scapular, therefore we have good reason to think that, yeah. Why do we do this? Well, there is a regrettable tendency among Christians, not just Catholics, but including Catholics, to leap to the demon hypothesis when there is inadequate justification for it.

I did a whole episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. It's episode 188. People can get to it by going to mysterious.fm.com.au on how we need to not leap to the demon hypothesis without evidence. And yet that frequently happens, and it makes us look ridiculous as Christians, and it also harms us. I mean, imagine if in the past every unexplained thing was just attributed to demons. We wouldn't be broadcasting right now because we wouldn't have electricity. We wouldn't have modern technology. We wouldn't have modern medicine. If you just attribute everything you don't understand

to demons, you would basically put us back in the Iron Age. Yeah. Thank you very much. So please pray your divine mercy, Chaplet, and pray that God had mercy on me and Johnny. On your beads that were manufactured with electrical machinery. That's right. Okay, we have two questions, both asked to be anonymous. The first question comes from a woman who says, should tribunals work harder to grant or deny annulments quicker? What should these waiting Catholics searching for clarity in their vocational direction do in the meantime? So, we want tribunals to proceed with the expediency that is possible given two constraints,

three constraints. The first constraint is how quickly the evidence can be acquired and assessed. Secondly, the staffing limitations they have, because they have multiple cases they've got to proceed through, and therefore there needs to be a waiting list. And thirdly, the degree of deliberation needed in order to get to the truth, because the truth is the most important thing.

And unfortunately, we live in a world that is subject to the laws of economics. Economics is the laws of economics. Economics is the use of resources, of limited resources that have alternative uses. So they can't hear cases the same day they come in. They can't get the, there's too many cases for that. They can't get the data they need super quickly. And they can't analyze it super quickly

without running the risk of making mistakes. So within those three parameters, we want them to proceed as quickly as possible, but we don't want them to proceed any more quickly, because that would lead to compromising the accuracy of the results, at least given the resources they have. Now you want to give them more resources so they can hire more people?

Well then you can get faster handling of the cases. But that would be a change. You'd be changing the resource balance in that situation. So I think I don't have a way of saying in general should they be going faster than they are because That involves a knowledge of factors that I don't have I can say we want them to go as fast as possible within these parameters But I don't know how efficient they're actually being at present I don't know if it's reasonable for them to go faster or if they should go slower

In terms of what people should do in the meantime, well, be patient, be prayerful, pray that, you know, God will guide the, that the witnesses and the evident people are giving the evidence will all have accurate memories and they'll be honest and that the judges will be wise and discerning in processing that and that they'll ultimately come to the correct conclusion. Um, it's going to be a very difficult place to be in, doesn't it? If you're a young person and you think I might be able to get married and you have to wait and yeah, also, uh, should you be dating during that? I would say no. Um,

now there could be exceptions. There may be situations where it's really obvious that a prior marriage was null. A case of this would be, you know, if it's a documentary process, if it's a documentary case rather than a formal process case where you know going in it's invalid because one of them, at least one of the spouses, was subject to Catholic canon law, they didn't have a Catholic marriage, and they didn't get a dispensation,

and there weren't extenuating circumstances, so that marriage is just invalid. You know that up front. All that's required is to present the relevant documents, and the marriage will be annulled. That's why the Church has a difference between the documentary process and the formal process for handling annulment cases. Well, I'd say in a documentary case, if you know upfront the marriage was invalid, it's

just a matter of producing the relevant documentation to show that, well, then there's not a problem dating because you know you're going to get the annulment. Similarly, if you know that even if it requires a formal process, if you have really good evidence that the formal process is going to show that this was not valid, like, you know, well, I won't give hypothetical examples, but there are some cases where it's really clear. Well, then it's not as problematic to be dating as if the outcome is uncertain. If you don't know which way this is gonna go, I would say it is irresponsible to be dating because you're getting your own hopes up about something that very well

may not happen. You're getting someone else's hopes up about something that very well may not happen. If it doesn't happen and you're both faithful to the church, it's gonna hurt like hell. If you've gotten emotionally involved in someone and then it turns out you can't marry them, it's going to hurt like hell to break up and end that relationship. And if you don't break it up and you decide to sleep around or go get a civil marriage and then sleep around, you are not only going into sin yourself, you're pulling this other person into sin with you. So I would say if the outcome of the process is uncertain, you should not be dating.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, thank you. Either that, or you better brace yourself for we're going to suck it up and do the right thing. If we can't get an annulment, we will end this relationship. Yeah, this question is anonymous from a man. He says, while delivering our second child via c-section, my wife was told that her uterus was damaged. I'm so sorry. In a way that any future pregnancies would be very risky to both the lives of her and a future baby. My wife, who is not Catholic, requested her tubes be removed and I fully supported her decision justifying this as medically necessary.

I have since read a Vatican congregation of the Doctrine of Faith document stating this procedure and justification is morally illicit and not to be done in pursuit of being a faithful Catholic. How am I called to accept this teaching with my wife who is not Catholic and what is my path forward? Well, so your wife is presently infertile because of a procedure that was done. Is it wrong to have sex when a woman is infertile? Matt. I'll give you an answer from Aquinas. Do you know about this? Give me your answer from Aquinas.

Aquinas says that if a woman is hemorrhaging such that she cannot be pregnant, she may still demand the marital debt. I would say Aquinas is right. According to Aquinas, yes. Absolutely. It is just, it is not wrong to have sex when a woman is infertile. And that's obvious from the fact that, historically, we've not even known when women were fertile. They are not fertile for most of their cycle. And yet the Church has never said,

oh, you better make sure she's fertile before you engage in marital Congress. So it's not wrong for you to have sex with your wife. Now then there's the question of what attitude should we take towards the medical procedure that resulted in her infertility? And I would say as a Catholic, well, okay, now that you've learned what the Church's teaching is here, you can embrace the teaching and say, well, I wish I'd known this, and I might have done things differently. I would have tried to carry out the Church's teachings to the best extent possible in the

circumstance if I had known them in the circumstance, but I accept the Church's teaching. And if I had known this, I would have incorporated that in whatever... I may not have been able to stop the procedure, but I might not have signed off on it the way I did. You know, I might have said, honey, I think there's another side to this, but it's ultimately she's the one who has medical control over what procedures are done to her. And if she was determined to have it coming from a Protestant perspective, then I couldn't stop that, but I might have raised concerns about it with her in the best way possible. Similarly, in discussing it with your wife in the present day, if it's even necessary

to discuss it, and I would say I probably wouldn't raise it unless she asks. But if she did ask, I'd probably say, well, since this happened, I've become aware that the Church teaches that actually we should have found a different solution, and I accept that, or I'm trying to accept that, but I recognize that you're not coming from a Catholic perspective, and I respect you, and I respect your beliefs, and so I don't just expect you to share mine. And I would say in terms of her culpability, she acted according to her understanding of what's morally acceptable at the time, and so I wouldn't charge her with sin or anything like that because even if she did something she shouldn't, she was acting in good conscience based on

what she had been taught and I wouldn't find fault with her for that. I'd say maybe the decision should have gone another way, but that's different than saying you're personally to blame. I want to ask a follow-up question that I imagine someone like this person might be experiencing and might be afraid to ask. What if this person thinks to himself, gee, I feel guilty because even though I know it's immoral and if I had have known it was immoral, I would have advised her against it today. Nevertheless, I'm really glad that she can't get pregnant so that she won't have a problematic pregnancy.

And I feel guilty about being glad that she did this, this thing that's objectively disordered. Well, um, I would say that's a human impulse. So it's understandable. Um, but I would say, put it aside. Um, we all have impulses to say, Oh, I'm so glad this is the case, based on something that happened in the past that shouldn't have. But feelings are not sins. So as long as this is just a feeling, and as soon as you realize, wait a minute, this

feeling I'm having of gladness is problematic, well, then I'm going to put that feeling to one side, and I'm not going to sin by endorsing it with my will. I'm maintaining my will in a, I want to submit to God and what his church teaches, and whatever that truth is, I accept that even if I'm unclear or have feelings that pull me. Um, but as long as you just set it aside and don't worry about it, it won't amount to a sin on your part. Thank you. Rick Vaughn sent us a super chat. Michael Shelby,

oh, super lack asks, please ask Jimmy all about goose, prayer life, G you and for advice on rekindling faith when you feel incredulous blessings to you both. Who was goo? I don't know. All right. Well, thanks for the question, but we probably won't be able to answer that. I, I don't know if that's an abbreviation for someone with the initials G you or if

it's a reference to a character. What was the second part of the question about rekindling faith? Yeah, that's a good question. Advice for rekindling faith when you feel incredulous. Well, I would say two things. The first thing I would say is if you're feeling incredulous, meaning you're having difficulty believing in God or in the Christian faith, I would say a few things. One of them is you can always review the evidence for God and for Christian faith. You can read books on apologetics and re-expose yourself to that evidence, and that can help

with incredulity. The second thing is putting faith into practice can help rekindle it. Finding things to do, like as Pascal said, you know, take holy water and have Masses said, and it will... The habit of behaving in accordance with faith will itself help rekindle the faith. Also, stepping back and looking at the mystery and beauty in the universe can be a stimulus to faith. So those are sort of the three fundamental things that I would say. Kyle Whittington says,

with the myriad of different papal documents, how much weight are we to give to motu proprio, apostolic constitutions, et cetera? You've written a whole book on this. I wrote a whole book on this. What is that book? It's called Teaching with Authority, and I go through the different kinds of documents,

not just papal ones, but other magisterial documents, and talk about the levels of authority they have and how to process what is said in them, which really has to be done on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Okay. I want to apologize to everybody who's sending questions, because unless Jimmy wants to stay for another three hours, we are not going to get to all of them. So I want to ask a question and forgive me if this opens a can of worms and it's too difficult to answer succinctly.

You don't have to be succinct. Was there a Masonic infiltration of the Catholic Church? And how should we think about Masons today? I'm open. However, I have not seen convincing evidence. There are Catholics who have become Masons, but if you mean, was there a targeted situation where Masons had people who were already Masons and then got them into influential positions in the Catholic Church, if that's what you mean, well, I'm open,

because it's possible for members of one organization to infiltrate another, or if you mean they recruited people who were in influential positions and got them to become Masons. Either way, you have Masons become influential Catholics, or you have influential Catholics become masons. Okay, well to the extent either of those things happen, that's an infiltration. But it may be an infiltration with one person or three people, or what size infiltration are we talking about? And what's the evidence for it? Given that Freemasonry has been condemned by the Catholic Church since shortly after it began, you know, beginning with papal condemnations in the early 1700s, well, why would a Catholic want to become a Mason?

And how would someone who is fundamentally committed to an anti-Catholic version of masonry, how would they become an influential Catholic? You know, like a cardinal or something, you know? Knowing the penalties that would apply to them if they're ever exposed. What's the motivation? To take down the church, to seriously harm the church. Well, okay, so there are people who have tried to infiltrate the church for various purposes, like in the communist world behind the Iron Curtain. certain. The secret police would try to turn priests and bishops into informants for them. And I can understand that, but what they never had is a, let's infiltrate and undermine the teachings of the faith type of infiltration. there is this book called AA 1025 that was written by a French

author named Marie Corre, that describes such an attempt to infiltrate the Catholic Church by a communist agent and then corrupt its teachings and take it down. And by the way, I have a mysterious world episode coming up on that in just the next few weeks if I recall correctly. On the communist infiltration? Yeah, on communist. And so, spoiler alert, this is work of fiction. It is not an accurate, it is not an actual account. It is a work of fiction and I quote Marie Corre, admitting this is a work of fiction. But one of the ways that you could know it's a work of fiction, even without Marie Corre admitting that, is just look at what the communists did in the churches

they had the most influence over, the ones behind the Iron Curtain. They may have tried to get bishops and priests to be informants on them, so they could go after particular people and have leverage against them, but they didn't try to tamper with the doctrines of the Catholic Church. I mean, look at communist Poland. That's where John Paul II came from. Did they try to change the doctrines of the Catholic Church in Poland? No. Similarly, here in the West, you know, we had for decades a system known as Venona, where US intelligence had cracked certain Soviet codes, and we were reading their messages about talking to their spies and what their spies are doing and stuff, and we found lots of evidence of communist infiltration, but not trying to subvert churches

in the West, and not trying to change their doctrines. So we don't have evidence for a parallel attempt, even by the communists, and they were very well-funded compared to the masons. Masons are a tiny puny organization compared to worldwide communism. So even if you have individual Masons who hate the Church and would like to change its doctrines and corrupt it, where's the incentive and more importantly, where's the evidence? You can't just take claims as evidence. Claims are not evidence. I'll give you an example. A while back I did an episode of Mysterious

World about Leo Taxel, and if you don't want to know the story of Leo Taxel, pause this video right now and go listen to the Leo Taxel episode of Jimmy Haken's Mysterious World. But I'm gonna spoil what it is. So there's this French freethinker, his name is Leo Taxel, that's his pen name. He wrote books mysterious world. But I'm gonna spoil what it is. So there's this French freethinker, his name is Leo Taxel, that's his pin name. He wrote books under that name. And he was very critical of the Catholic Church. He would make fun of it. He wrote books with titles, this is in the late 1800s, he wrote titles, books with titles like Leo the 13th Poisoner. So he's accusing the currently reigning pope of poisoning people, you know,

murdering them. He had a book called The Amusing Bible, where he's got a picture of God sitting on his throne in heaven, and these angels are sitting around him and worshipping him and praising him, and God is just, because he's so bored with what the angels are doing. He's got another picture of God as a man with a long white beard, and he's got a pipe, and he's lighting a Strike Anywhere match on the seat of his pants, and it's titled Let There Be Light. And so he's making fun of the Bible and of Christian stuff, and he's very venomously anti-Catholic. He's a French freethinker. And then he converts, and he becomes Catholic. And he's very sincere about it all. And he like confesses his sins for three days, and he renounces his

previous positions. And the French Freethinker Society kicks him out as a traitor, and even shows up to the meeting and says, guys, I'm sincere, I'm not trying to be a traitor, I'm being sincere. They kick him out and brand him a traitor anyway. And he starts as part of his penance to write books in favor of the Church, and particularly because he'd spent time as a Freemason. He starts writing books about Freemasonry and exposing them. Now at this point in the 19th century, the Jesuit magazine, Civiltica Catolica, which is kind of a

quasi-official Vatican organ, is publishing all of these books about, or all these articles about Freemasonry, and talking about how it's ultimately in league with Satan, it's serving the devil's purposes. And Pope Leo XIII has written an encyclical called Humanum Familia, something like that, The Human Family, in which he talks about how humans are basically divided up into those who are serving God and those who are serving the devil, whether they know it or not, including the Freemasons. And so Leo Taxel starts writing books exposing Masonic rites, and he's concurring with this narrative that that that Chivalta Catholica has put out about them being kind of covertly satanic. They're not like openly worshipping the devil, but Taxel confirms he publishes their rites,

you know, that they perform, and he'll say things like the Grand Architect of the Universe, which is the Masonic term for God, that's really a code word for the devil. And so even if individual Masons aren't aware of it, they're really worshipping the devil. And then there was confirmation for various things that Leo Taxxon said. A lot of the rights that he published, and saying, you know, here's a Masonic ritual, had been published by others, you know, because one of the things that the Freemasons found out is if you want to be a secret society, don't expect your rituals to stay secret because people are going to die and their relatives who are not Freemasons are going to have your ritual books and

they're going to sell them. So you can walk into a used bookstore anywhere and buy books of Masonic rituals that used to belong to some Mason, but then he died and his family sold the book. So these days the Masons describe themselves not as a secret society, but a society with secrets, society, but a society with secrets, which are actually all publicly known anyway. Now, this is not to say Masons haven't done bad things, they have. But, so Leo Taxel is writing his books and exposing these Masonic secrets, and they're confirmed by other people who have found their ritual books too and have published extracts from them. So a lot of this is being confirmed. Then Leo Taxel writes another book called The Devil in the Nineteenth Century, if that's the correct title of this particular book. And what he describes is another Masonic group

known as the New Pallidist Revised Order. Is it called The Devil You Don't Know? Satan, the Satan like the new pallidist revised order. Is it called the devil? You don't know Satan, the Satan of the 19th century? That doesn't, I doesn't sound, doesn't ring a bell, but anyway, he writes about this new group and he says they're, they're based in Charleston, South Carolina. Um, they were, the devil in the ninth century. You were right. Yeah. They're, they're created by, um, I want to blank on his name now, General... He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but he moved to Arkansas and became a Confederate general, and I'm blanking on his name. Anyway, they were founded by him. He's a very huge figure

in the history of Freemasonry. And they, unlike other groups of Masons, openly worship Satan. They're not using code words. They're worshiping Satan in a direct and explicit way. And they've got branches all over the world in different countries. He also names certain figures that are prominent in them, like a woman named Sophia Saffo. Saffo wasn't her literal last name. He did reveal her literal last name. It started with W. It's something like Waldron or Walters or something like that.

And another woman named Diana Vaughan, who were kind of rivals for the leadership after General Pike, after General Pike died. And so you got this mixed lodge, what's known as an adoption lodge, meaning it has both men and women, and it's openly satanic, and it's got branches in various parts of the world. So this is Taxel's new claim, and it too gets verified, because you have a medical doctor named Dr. Bataille, that was a pen name to protect his identity, who was like a ship's surgeon that had traveled all around the world.

And he was a devout Catholic, and he met people like in India who were members of this palatist order. And he decided to, as a devout Catholic, he wanted to investigate it. So he started investigating it, and he had some code words from other Masonic groups that, like, he'd read about in the literature, and he was able to convince the palatists that he was a fellow Mason, and he got them to show him various things. Some of them were very interesting. One of them is the first woman I mentioned, Sophia Safo. She was destined to become the grandmother of the Antichrist, who was going

to be born in 1962, which means that today the Antichrist would be about 60, about the age that world leaders are coming into the prime of their world-leading career. Also, Dr. Patel went to headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina and got to see the inside of their headquarters. And he was very careful to distinguish between things he had seen with his own eyes and things he had only heard about. So one of the things he saw with his own eyes, and this is only heard about. So one of the things he saw with his own eyes, and this is the late 1800s, so telephones were a thing now. Well, in the headquarters at South Carolina, he found that they had this device that they called an arcula mystica,

which is Latin for mystical chest, you know, box. And when you open it, it looked kind of like a drinks cabinet, but when you open it up, there was a silver toad inside and seven small golden statuettes. And for the seven different centers where the palatists were operating in other countries, like in India and Gibraltar and places like that. And so what General Pike could do when he wanted to talk to one of the other palatist leaders is he would go open up the Arcula Mystica, press the golden statue, statuette corresponding to the palatist center he wanted to talk to, and then over there at that center the silver toad would spout flames to tell them that there's an incoming call from headwaters.

So cool! I know, it's great. It's like a supervillain telephone, right? I wish we had something like this in the church. I hope stuff like that's going on in the Vatican, just in a non-demonic way. Yeah. So Dr. Patel saw the Arcula Mystica with his own eyes, but he was careful to distinguish it from other things that

the palatists would tell him. Like they would say, you know, we have this ritual every Friday and the devil visibly manifests in it. Well, he didn't see the ritual for himself, so he didn't see the devil manifest. But he, you know, this is something maybe the devil convinced them the devil was manifesting, or this was a rumor about what went on at that ritual. But he didn't see it, so he didn't sign off on that. But he did record it as this is what many palatists believe. Okay, so he is confirming what Leo Taxel has written about the palatists. And then another figure comes forward, and it's one of the palatists. And then another figure comes forward and it's one of the

palatists themselves. It's Diana Vaughn, who is one of the rival leaders for control of the organization after General Albert Pike dies. She and Sofia Saffo were rivals to become the new leader. And she comes forward, she gives an interview, she lets photos be taken of her, they're published in the French press, and she acknowledges, yeah, I'm a Satanist, I'm a member of this Paladist Right, and so forth. So you have all this confirmation. But there are some questions. Now the other Masons had begun, as soon as this palatist stuff started coming out in the press, they'd begun to say this is not a real order, this is not an actual Masonic order, this is a hoax, this is a hoax by

the Catholic Church to try to make us Masons look bad, okay? And so they denied it. But the thing is, the Palatist order, if the claims about it are true, was this secret society. So a lot of Masons wouldn't have known about it anyway, and so the fact they said, I've never heard of this thing, isn't really evidence that it doesn't exist, because it's supposed to be a secret society that's Masonic. But there were also, after a certain point, some Catholics that started raising a question about is this real? Is Diana Vaughn even a real person? I mean, she gave interviews and she had her... people would get letters from her.

They'd write her and tell her like they're praying for her, and she'd send them a polite note with Masonic symbols on it, and back. And so she was interacting with people, but there's still a question about is she even real. Well, then, now she starts publishing a magazine, and the magazine is devoted to spreading her palatist principles, you know, so they're kind of coming out of the closet, and they're not being as secret about their organization anymore. Well then, she also, she's getting all these letters from people praying for her conversion, and she converts, too. And she becomes a devout Catholic. She writes a devotional book. It's like a 40-day prayer book for prayers to Jesus and so forth. It's kind of like a 40-day

novena. And she is corresponding with Pope Leo XIII, and she's getting letters back from his private secretary and from his cardinals and the head of...then it was called the Holy Office, it was later the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The head of the Holy Office is signing off on the authenticity of her conversion, and she's getting written up in Cheville to Catalica. It's talking about all the great work she's doing to expose the satanic forms of Freemasonry, and she's getting letters saying, you know, praise God for the work you're doing, keep on doing it. No doubt the Lord allowed you to remain within this organization for so

long, only to bring you out of it so that you can better expose it now. And so she's getting all this positive feedback, but there are some people now even in the church who were starting to raise questions about, is this accurate? One of them was the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. He made a private trip over to Rome to talk to Pope Leo XIII about the palatists that were supposedly based in his diocese, in his city, in Charleston.

And he went, and the only reason we know about this is he gave an interview while he was on the way there, and he said that, I'm going to tell the Pope that there's no truth to this, that I know the leading masons in Charleston, and they are not Satanists. They are devout Protestants. I've been in their headquarters in Charleston, and the rooms that are described by Dr. Patel don't exist. There is no Arcula Mystica supervillain telephone there. So what about the Sheila, who said she converted and was writing letters to the pope? We'll get there. So then the question was, well, after he gave this interview, how did Diana Vaughan react? And she said, he's covering it up, he's a Mason. So she accused the

bishop of Charleston of being a Mason. And she had all these supporters, you know, she's got these letters from the Pope's private secretary, and from the head of the CDF, and all this is Chivalta Catolica's writing about how great she is. But there's enough question now that there's a demand for her to come forward in public again. Yeah. Like, where is she supposed to be in a monastery right now? Where is it? Who were her godparents? Right. You know, things like that. And Leo Taxel pointed out at a public conference discussing this that we can't just announce all that stuff because it'll attract Masonic assassins. So, you know, we have to keep some of this information private, but what we can do is we'll give a talk.

We'll have an evening where she will come forward and take the public risk of being assassinated. I'll talk first, giving you my own history, and then she'll get up and give a talk on pallidism destroyed, you know, because of her exposés of it. And so you'll all be able to see her, you can talk for yourself, make your own judgments, ask her questions in the question period, and so forth. So, to make sure they get a good audience for this, they actually give away a typewriter. They have a raffle for one of those newfangled typewriters that was donated by Diana Vaughn, who had been writing to people on typewriters. And this was a big deal. Mark Twain had a typewriter

that he was... Sometimes you should read Mark Twain had a typewriter that he was, he's, sometimes you should read Mark Twain's plea to the typewriter company letter, please don't let people know I'm using a typewriter because I hate it. They published his letter. But anyway, so they get this big crowd there and they've invited the public, they've, there are masons there, there are Catholics there, there are priests there. And so Taxwell gets up, and he says, I want to assure everybody of my goodwill. I know I've been kind of mocked in the press, but I bear no ill will to anybody. I have loved my time in the church. I'm very tranquil, and my conversion was not sincere. I have loved my time in the church, I'm very tranquil, and my conversion was not sincere. I have never been a sincere Catholic. I joined as a prank, and it's been 12 years now,

and I didn't tell anyone, including the Freethinkers who kicked me out of their society, and I didn't tell my wife. She thought I was having a nervous breakdown, but just for fun I did this huge prank. I invented the palatist. Dr. Patel is a guy I hired who had traveled the world as a ship surgeon. I wanted him to give local color to the stories I was writing on his behalf. Diana Vaughn, she's not a Protestant, she's not a

Catholic, she's from a Protestant family, and she is another woman I hired. She's not a Protestant. She's not a Catholic. She's from a Protestant family, and she is another woman I hired. She's actually a free thinker herself, and she wouldn't accept money I was gonna give her because she thought this was such a fun prank. She's getting to correspond with the Pope's private secretary and the head of the CDF. She's just having a grand old time with all this. And we did this not to be mean-spirited, but just for fun. And so you can all appreciate it. Even you Catholic priests and cardinals can have a shared laugh with us at all of this. And it was regarded by the press as not the best way he could have made this announcement. But what this shows for our purposes is you don't just accept claims about so and so is

a Mason or Masons are satanic or Masons have this colossal conspiracy against us because it turns out all of the stuff that Leo Taxel said that was not confirmed by other printed sources was just his fantasy. He was doing it as a hoax. And look at what happened to the Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. He went to the Vatican to tell Pope Leo. And by the way, Pope Leo had told Leo Taxel what a fan he was of his work. He'd read all of Leo Taxel's books and pamphlets. So we're hoaxing Travill to Catolica, and apparently Leo XIII bought into all this because it fit the narrative that had been spun about the Masons in conservative Catholic circles, and they just accepted this

material that sounded like it confirmed the narrative. It was juicy. It was exciting. There was intrigue. It was shocking. It scratched exactly where the conspiracists wanted to itch. And they just accepted it without critical thinking and without insisting on proof. I see. And Taxel, by hiring Dr. Patel and Diana Vaughan, had actually created a simulation of confirmation. But when they actually checked out the source, because they seemed to be confirming what Taxel had written.

But when they actually checked primary sources, it all evaporated. And that's what led to the public exposure. And so Taxel said not only, you know, I promised you, you were going to get a talk tonight about palatism destroyed. Well, I, its inventor, have now destroyed it. But look at what happened to the Bishop of Charles in South Carolina. He went to tell Leo XIII, this is all a hoax, and he was not listened to. And for his attempt to expose the hoax, he was accused of being a Freemason. By them. By them. By Texel and... By the support,

by Diana Vaughn in particular, but in general, by supporters of the conspiracy theory. So I have no problem with conspiracy theories. There are conspiracies, that's why we have laws against them. But if you're going to accuse someone of participating in a conspiracy, you need to provide evidence that the conspiracy exists, and you need to use critical thinking and not just accept a narrative because it goes along with your preferred narrative. So if someone wants to say there's been a Masonic infiltration of the church, meaning more than a couple of guys for purposes of destroying it, I need to know how this works, how this conspiracy works, who is involved, and I need to see evidence for this, and I can't just accept

it based on it fits my preferred narrative. Because you can end up with egg on your face like this. Just like what happened with Leo Taxel. And in the process, you can slander, not just detract, but you can slander and columniate innocent men by saying, oh, he's just a Mason too. The bishop, yeah. When they're not.

Wow. So, spoilers. Wow, oh, he's just a Mason too. The bishop, yeah. When they're not. Wow. So, spoilers. Wow, wow, wow. So none of this is to say it's okay to be a Mason. No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. For those at home watching who might be confused right now. And Masons have done bad things.

I mean, one of the things I'll cover, so on Mysterious World, this is the first episode, the first full episode I devoted to Masonry. And I wanted to start with this Incident with the Leo taxil incident because it it provides us a cautionary tale that sets the tone So in the future knowing what can happen if you don't Insist on proof and you don't use critical thinking Now that we can appreciate why we need those things, now we can look at it in other contexts

and evaluate critically what have Masons done that's bad or not so bad. But there have been bad things they've done. There was an American figure in the early 1800s named William Morgan, who apparent, he was an ex Mason. He wanted to do an expose on masonry and he was apparently killed by Masons murdered. And so we're going to be talking about William Morgan in a future episode, among other stories involving Masons, but we're going to apply the need for critical thinking and evidence to all of

them. Jimmy Akin, thank you so very much for being our longest episode. We hit six hours and 23 minutes. I could keep going. Thursday just jumped out of a window, so I don't think we're going to be able to. But look, I want to just say, if you have stuck with us,

maybe you've watched on YouTube, you've listened on Spotify or Apple podcasts, do me a favor. Because I'm really interested to know whether you watched this entire episode. I don't expect that you did. But you did in the comments below the code words will be Shameless lost Not if they don't know there's a code word How about the Mason

We give you a code word. What's a How about the Mason? All right. We give you a code word. What's a Mugu guy pan. I mean that's a Chinese dish. No one's gonna think of it. How do you spell Mugu guy pan? M-o-o-g-o-o Yeah, G-a-i-p-a-n All right, Mugu guy pan is the code word if you've watched six and a half And if you know how to spell, just give it your best shot. This has been wonderful. We'll put links to Jimmy Akin's mystery as well.

Yeah, I hope people will subscribe. It's available. We've got a new mystery every week to talk about. We look at all different kinds of mysteries, natural mysteries, historical mysteries, scientific mysteries, murder mysteries, paranormal mysteries, UFOs, Bigfoot, psychic powers. I've had some of the government's former psychic spies on my show. I never dreamed that I would have their phone numbers one day. I get texts from them sometimes. And you've done an excellent job on the episodes of Kabehoejo, say, L.A. who appeared in Cabejo, Marian apparitions, and these things really like strengthened my

faith in these things actually having occurred. They were really well done, so I would recommend people check that out as well, because it's not just the UFOs and the other things, it's also religious apparitions and things like that. So excellent. It's available on all the standard podcast directories, you know, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, all that. And if you're watching this here on YouTube, go over to my YouTube channel now that we're done. It's youtube.com slash Jimmy Akin. And please subscribe because I'm trying to grow my channel and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified whenever I have a video, whether it's mysterious world or something else. Fantastic. This has been amazing.

Thank you so much. Thank you for the Vegemite sandwich. Yeah, you're happy. my pleasure. Six hours.