Pints With Aquinas - Our Lady of Fatima Made Me Catholic w/ Gideon Lazar

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Matt chats with Gideon Lazar about his conversion from secular Judaism to Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism. They also talk about the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima as well as young earth creationism. Watch The Post-Show Q&A: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/   Subscribe to Gideon's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCECSNsNDjYNmnP8tRn1UiYA  

Hey, Matt Fradd here. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. If this show has been aideon Lazar who was raised in a somewhat Jewish family became Orthodox and then in a big part I suppose due to the apparitions of our lady at Fatima became a Catholic so that'll be great just want to remind everybody that we do a post show Q&A session that's only available to those who support us on locals or patreon so if you'd'd like to do that, go to pineswithaquinas.com slash give, and it'll give you those two options there. If you can support us in any way, that would really help. And then you'll get access to that free bonus footage, which we will put up later on today.

Gideon, lovely to have you on the show. Thank you. It's so great to be on. Yeah. Tell us a bit. What would be fun is if we summed up your story in like a couple of minutes, because I know there's a lot to it. But just so people kind of get a gist, like a bird's eye view, and then we can we can maybe go into it and maybe put that a little closer. Yeah, very sweet. Yeah. So I was raised in a sort of non-religious Jewish family, sort of mildly religious, you know,

think of sort of like Christmas Easter Catholics. So around Passover, you couldn't eat like a single piece of bread. Around like Yom Kippur, like don't drink a single drop of water the whole day. But like around like a normal day, it's totally fine if you eat bacon. I had to go to a like religious school every Sunday morning, but we almost never attended Saturdays like actual Shabbat services. Did you ever celebrate the Sabbath? We did every once in a while, but it'd be like a family thing. You know, like we'd all get together Friday night. Yeah, that's a joke. So we'd have a challah. It was that was a challah. It's this Jewish bread. If you

never had challah, you should really go get some. It's excellent. It's this Jewish bread, it's very fluffy. Maybe I shouldn't tell people to go get it because they'll go out to some random store that doesn't know how to make it. It would be a bad one. But yeah, it's like the best bread. It makes the best French toast because it's nice and spongy, so it absorbs all the egg.

Yeah, and so it's very much a cultural thing. My parents were big that I keep up the Jewish tradition, even though they don't really believe anything in it, you know. So I remember at my synagogue, it's called a conservative synagogue, there's a few different major movements in Judaism. There's the Orthodox movement, the conservative movement, and the reform movement, as well as some smaller ones. And I grew up in the conservative movement, but I use the word conservative there very loosely. They're like the Episcopalians of Judaism. So, if you go to like an Episcopalian service, you're going to have like a very traditional service, and then the sermon is going to be completely out there. And that's sort of what I had, you know, so we had a very traditional service, but then like everything was chanted in traditional Hebrew, I had to learn all the chants for my Bar Mitzvah. But at the same time, then the sermon would be on something like how the Exodus never

happened or something like that. It's just better than my cousin's reform synagogue where we had a reading, I went there once for Bar Mitzvah and the reading was about, from Deuteronomy, about how cross-dressing should be like punished by death or something like that. And at one point it mentions in that passage, like justice, justice you shall pursue. And the sermon was on how we need social justice for like black lives matter and gay marriage and all of this stuff. But the Torah says justice twice. And it was weird that the rabbi was dressed in drag as he gave that sermon.

It was almost. And so that's the sort of Judaism I grew up in. It's very important that so that's the sort of Judaism I grew up in, you know, it's really important that you keep up the traditions, but then the real religion just becomes that you be sort of a normal liberal in modern society. And I sort of went along with that for a while. I really was considered myself an atheist for a long time, you know, I was like, maybe religion it has some nice traditions we can pass down. I actually thought religion was interesting to study as sort of this interesting phenomenon that happened sociologically. But I thought there was nothing to it. I thought

if you were intelligent, obviously you would be an atheist. And yes, then I got very interested in history. And as I started researching history, I got sort of interested in early Christianity. Christianity, I was about 16 at the time. And Christianity has sort of been that one religion I never looked into. Because it's just so ubiquitous in modern Western society, it's almost like, well, that isn't even interesting if everyone's around me as Christian. And I got interested, what about early Christianity? You know, Jesus was sort of this good Jewish guy is what I heard growing up. And so maybe I could find out about the historical Jesus, what he was really like before the Christians corrupted everything about him. So I went and I read the Gospels and the Gospels just struck me. I was like, this isn't the Jesus

I heard about at all growing up. The Jesus I heard about growing up was this weird hippie Jewish guy. And he cared about the poor. He would have voted for Hillary Clinton. That's sort of the Jesus that I knew growing up. So this is fascinating that a 16 year old Jewish kid would pick up a copy of the Gospels and read them. Yeah, so it started out a little bit with I don't even know like my own Bible as a Jew. So I went, I put on an audio book. I listened through Genesis and Exodus and I got to Leviticus.

This is really boring. But there's a Christian part here. Let me jump ahead to that part. And so, yeah, I read the listen through the gospel that really sort of shocked me. And the character of Jesus just jumps out at you from the page. Casso, he speaks with an authority that you feel like no one yet there has this authority or he doesn't have this authority to speak with, but he speaks like he claims he has this authority. And it's hard to put down, but he almost speaks with you with a strange voice that no one else

speaks with. I don't know how to describe it really. And so then I went and I tried to learn about what did Jesus really believe though. So I went and I read some books by this atheist scholar, Bart Ehrman, who's a famous scholar of early Christianity. And in his books, he mentions debating Christians about the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And I was very curious, like, we could have a debate on this, like, this is like, sure, a scholarship that none of this, like, actually happened. So I went and I watched his debate with William Lange Craig. And so Bart Ehrman presents, I don't know how much you want to get into this right now. Please, let's do it, because I watched that debate. It was really good. So Bart Ehrman has this argument that by definition, a miracle is the least likely thing that could possibly happen.

Which first of all, that's a terrible definition. But even if we accept that definition, William Lann Craig brings up probability statistics here and shows that yes, in a certain particular, a general situation, you can consider an event the least likely thing to happen, but you have to counterweight it with the evidence for it in that particular situation. So like if naturalism is true, then Bart Ehrman is correct

that a miracle is the least likely thing to happen. But if God exists, then it's not necessarily so. Yeah, that was part of what struck me. But also on that, it was more that you can take a particular situation, right? So it's very unlikely that somebody wins the lottery, right? That's extremely unlikely. But if you see somebody tomorrow have $10 million in their bank account they didn't have, now all of a sudden we have good reason to believe they might have won the lottery.

And so even though it's like a one in like 20 million chance they won that prize, in this particular situation there's a very high chance that they have achieved that. And so we can't just take the general situation of it. And him and Bart Ehrman debate, he debunks sort of Bart Ehrman's normal story of how the resurrection came about. And he sort of asked Bart Ehrman, well, first of all, Bart Ehrman says, well, here's some other possibilities. So he brings up that the word Thomas actually means twin in Greek. And there's some early Gnostic groups who believe that Thomas was Jesus's twin. So Bart Ahrman suggests maybe they didn't actually know about Jesus's twin before and they saw him

from a distance and they saw, oh there's Jesus again risen. And so this is how the tradition start. Ory suggests that an alien from another dimension has come and kidnapped Jesus and he tortures Jesus but says that the torture will increase if when he allows Jesus back once every 50 years, if Jesus tells anyone what's actually happened, the torture will get even worse. And so, therefore, this is why Jesus has appeared to so many people throughout history. He's allowed back once every 50 years but can't tell anyone the real story. And William Lincoln just sort of goes like, well, Dr. Ehrman, do you believe any of what you just said? And he's like, well, no, but both of those are more likely than a miracle. And that sort of struck me that Bart Ehrman will believe anything but

that Jesus actually did arise from the dead. As a Jewish atheist kid was, did you find William and Craig's arguments convincing? Did you want to find them convincing? I wanted to not find them convincing, but I found them incredibly convincing. Why did you want to not find them convincing? Because I, why did you not want to find them convincing? I just thought obviously they're not found them incredibly convincing. Why did you want to not find them convincing? Because I, why didn't you even not want to find them convincing? I just thought, obviously they're not going to be convincing. Oh, okay.

It's almost like a slightly incredulous. Yeah, I was. Yeah. But I was always a sky of like, I have to follow the evidence wherever it leads, you know? And if the evidence all of a sudden was leading me towards Christianity, then I had to go that way. And I also, um also looked into what do different

scholars of the New Testament who are atheists, how do they explain the evidence? And to a man, every single person who works at an accredited university, who teaches in this field on New Testament studies, either as a Christian or they believe that the apostles all hallucinated the resurrection because the evidence is so good that you have to have a hallucinated the resurrection. And the evidence they'll cite for mass hallucinations is that oh well there was these three Portuguese kids who told a whole bunch of people about how the sun was going to move in the sky and then they all saw it when that happened and shows this shows evidence of mass hallucinations. So they point to Fatima. That's their only, yeah, that's their only example of it. And they'll say that, um, clearly the evangelicals who were debating this with, aren't going to accept our Lady of Fatima. And so this was always what they

brought up. And at the time, they didn't convince me of our Lady of Fatima. I just sort of thought, well, one example of a mass hallucination is kind of small. And also, which of these seems more probable now? Even if we grant that a mass hallucination could have been what happened, it just seems so unlikely to me that that was what happened rather than they all, rather than Jesus actually rose from the dead. And around the same time, I also had an issue which I sort of realized that I have conscious, it's hard to explain, but I have consciousness. And based on everything we know about the properties of matter,

that should not give rise to consciousness. And I was trying to figure out this, and this sort of made me realize that there seems like there has to be an immaterial soul here. And both, as right as I was turning about 17, both of these realizations came to me and it sort of struck me of like, wow, my naturalism is completely wrong. And it seems like Christianity is true. How did your parents handle this? So at the time I actually didn't tell them. I actually didn't tell them. I sort of kept it secret. Yeah, so I looked into different types of Christianity. I was like, well, Christianity is true. I have to follow the right one.

Forgive me for interrupting because I know I said let's do a bird's eye view and now I'm so intrigued I can't help but derail you. But did you have friends at the time who were either seeking the truth and being led towards Christianity or Christian friends who were trying to convince you the truth of Christianity? No, I actually didn't know almost a single Christian at the time who was like a real practicing Christian. Wow. All my friends were

atheists. I knew one guy through a political Facebook group who was sort of a very progressive Christian and so I actually reached out to him at first to ask and he had turned me on to the works of N.T. Wright and so I read a bunch of N.T. Wright at the time. And yeah, but he and I were sort of going in opposite directions, because he's moved from a very conservative, evangelical family to almost now being very, very progressive Christian,

versus I was moving the other direction from a very progressive, non-religious family, moving towards being a much more conservative Christian. But our paths sort of perfectly crossed at that time. And so, I talked to him a little bit about it, but it was mostly just sort of me researching. I spent a bunch of time, I was on Reddit a bunch of the time, so I spent a while in the R Christianity, which I don't recommend anyone actually go to. It's full of very liberal Christianity. But at the time, there's surprisingly a big Orthodox representation. I also went on

Facebook groups a bunch. I was very interested in politics. So I joined some political Facebook groups like this one called Casual Youth Debates, where people just debate politics. And there was a number of religious people in it. So I started talking to them. And there was quite a number of Eastern Orthodox people on here. And they seemed very convincing talking about the early church all the time, and they were very interested in the church fathers. And it just seemed to me the most coherent explanation that if all these early Christians believed something, and they were all Orthodox, then I should be Orthodox, you know? The church was meant to be passed down from generation to generation. That obviously struck me. You know, so I went...

At this point, had you accepted the resurrection of Christ? Yeah, I had accepted the resurrection. This is... What was that like? It was very hard for me to switch from an atheist mindset to being Christian, because it's very easy for me to say I'm convinced of the evidence, and it's a different thing to actually believe. And I remember that I was like, well, this is true. At the very least, I watched some videos on Christianity and one of them was mentioning this prayer that this person has towards Jesus in the Gospel of Mark where he says, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. And I remember sitting there in bed

for like hours trying to fall, like I was falling asleep just thinking I should pray this prayer, but I couldn't get myself to pray a prayer silently because that would mean I'm accepting that there's somebody on the other end listening. And not intellectually there's somebody there, but there's actually somebody there listening. And I remember just sitting there for hours, like I look up like prayers online, and I just couldn't get myself to actually pray a single prayer. And even to this day, I all pray silently and stuff, but I mostly do written prayers, because I have that, that's how I learned to pray, was these great written prayers that I would read, especially the Psalms. I grew a great connection to the Psalms. And so that's sort of how I grew closer to God, was starting to actually

pray. And I found a prayer routine online taught by St. Seraphim of Sarov, where he said, pray every morning and evening, pray the Our Father three times, the Hail Mary three times, and then the Eastern version of the Hail Mary. For those at home who are Catholic who are like, Eastern, Hail Mary, what's that? Yeah, just different yet. Just um rejoice Otho talk Oh, both the otokos and Virgin rejoice Mary Full of grace the Lord is with the blessed art thou among woman and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus for thou has Born the Savior of our souls amen so it's basically the same just slightly changed It doesn't have the second half the holy Mary part

and um You can tell I've been around Latin's too much, where it took me a second to recall it now. And then you have the Nicene Creed also. And so that's sort of how I started praying. I'd pray that and I'd also pray a psalm along with it. And that's what got me into this routine. And my parents were out of town for one week. I was like, okay, this is the week I have to attend church. I just got to say, this is hilarious hilarious just like different generations. It feels like back in the 90s when parents would go out of town kids would go party and now it's like our parents are so secular that when our parents go out of town we sneak to church.

I had the same comment from people when I went to the church. So I went to this Greek Orthodox church and I saw okay they start matins at like 8 a.m. so that's when I should be there. So I show up there and there's like two people at matins. These are all Greek people. They all show up right before communion and they all leave before the dismissal happens. And so I go there and there's a woman wearing a head covering.

So I think she's a nun. So I go up to her and I think she's a nun. And I just, when she's lighting a candle and I'm like, and I thought what I had heard is that there were no pews and there are prayer books, like in the North X when you first come in. So I'm looking for the prayer books. Um, I, for some reason, don't look right in front of me where there was like 50 pews there. This is a Greek church. They all have pews and want to sit.

I don't know how I didn't notice that, but I'm looking around for the prayer books in the North X and I see this woman thinking she's a nun. And I just go up and say hi. She introduces herself, this is Mrs. Flanders, she became this great mentor for me. Really? Wow. And she's like, oh, come sit with my family.

And so I go and I sit with her family. And yeah, she asked me about like who I was and stuff she thought first I was an altar boy. And then she was like, oh, I'm not oh I'm not Orthodox and she's like are you Catholic wanting to visit and I explained and I'm this Jewish atheist. How old are you again at the time? Right as I turned 17, it was like the day after my 17th birthday. So you're still calling yourself an atheist even though you'd become convinced to the resurrection of Christ? I was trying to like quickly explain like where I was

at. Where you're coming from. And I was still very uncertain at the time, you know? Like, I'm going to attend this and see what it's about, you know? And so I went and sat down with them and stuff and I went through the whole like mat and service and liturgy and we do the Nicene Creed and like I know the whole Nicene Creed, we get to the Our Father, I know the whole Our Father. Very impressive Jewish atheist. Yeah, that's what she went to afterwards.

She's like, are you sure you're an atheist? And I'm like, well, I am Jewish. Yeah. And so yeah, she took me around the whole church, sort of told me about stuff and told me if you ever need to come again, she can give me a ride. I grew up in a very urban area,

so I never learned to drive until I was like 21. And so I didn't have a license, so it was great I had someone to drive me. And I felt, I was thinking like, okay, the next time I'm probably going to church is when I get to college and I have the freedom to, but that's like over a year away. But the next week I'm having a strong calling, like I need to go again. And so I go to my parents and I'm like, well, you know, I've always been very interested in researching religion. I want to learn more about like this Greek Orthodox Church. Could I go over to the service and they were like, oh sure Yeah, you can go learn about religion and my dad's like maybe you should like visit a mosque the next week and you can learn

About them as well. Yeah, maybe yeah, that sounds really interesting actually And so I go and I visit and the next week I'm like, wow, that was really interesting I want to go again to learn more my parents are like, oh yeah, go learn more about this religion and stuff. This is really interesting. And so I went in there, it was like all I could talk about for a while. And I went to summer camp for the summer. So that sort of gave me a break. I didn't have to come up with excuses to go. I was just away at summer camp. And I was away at a Jewish summer camp. What's that like? What's a Jewish summer camp like? So it's pretty secular, but they'd have like Saturday services and then Saturday in the

morning they would give us sort of a rest of not doing activities. But besides that, it wasn't very Jewish. You know, we all sort of had the secular Jewish background. Bagels? Were they bagels? Sometimes, but they weren't very good. Sorry, is that racist? No, we eat a lot of bagels growing up. I love bagels so much.

But the thing is we all eat good bagels. So we now people serve us bad bagels and we'll complain about it. Oh, man, there's a bagel store here in Steubenville. Did you go? I didn't go yet. We should go after this. Yeah. You can tell me if they're good or bad. OK, I will give you a real review of it. I'm sure you will.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I it's just sort of a good place of brotherhood, because I grew up as a single child and you don't learn to live with other people. And going for, I think, seven years to this Jewish summer camp, I went from having no brothers to having to live with like 13 brothers. And I remember the first year, I was like the worst brother to them. Like, I would complain if anyone touched my stuff, I would complain like that I had to like do these activities I didn't want to do. I was like the worst.

I'm sure none of them are watching, but if anyone is like, I'm really sorry for being so horrible to you. At this Jewish summer camp, becoming a Christian at the same time, or at least being open to the supernatural and Christ's resurrection, were you looking for spiritual conversations with people who actually believed in God? Yeah, there was sort of a range of Jews and people were a little bit and And I actually tried to get a little bit more involved with the Jewish stuff at this time. Like at least it's something there, you know? And I remember they would try and get the kids involved at like the summer camp and stuff. And there was this great prayer the Jews have

praying for the prophet Elijah to return and bring the Messiah. And we would pray it and we would sort of have all this. We have like a guitar with it. We'd be doing like hand motions for different stuff. Sounds exactly like a Christian can, except Elijah bringing the Messiah bit. Yeah, saying the prophet Elijah's name in like a really funny way. And I'm just thinking like,

is that now I finally actually knew the Bible pretty well. And I'm thinking like Elijah slaughtered a whole bunch of people for worshiping God improperly. Like, what would he do if he was here right now hearing this prayer? And it did strike me though. I was like, wait slaughtered a whole bunch of people for worshiping God improperly. Like, what would he do if he was here right now, hearing this prayer? And it did strike me though, I was like, wait a second, this is not a prayer to God, this is a prayer for Elijah to come and intercede. And I'm like, this is actually an intercessory prayer. And so, yeah, of course we should have intercessory prayers to saints. Like, this is something the Jews have as well. The Jews also, I knew prayers to the dead growing up all the time.

It would have really been weird for me if I'd become Protestant and couldn't have prayers for the dead. Like that's just so weird. And so yeah, I come back and I'm thinking like, I have to make the decision. I came back for a few days in the middle of the summer. I was actually a trainee at the camp this year, so I had to go for the whole summer this time, both the early session and the late session. Normally I just go for one. So I came back for a little bit while I set up the camp for the next session. I'm talking with my high school friends and I sort of just come out as Christian to them right before I left. And I tell them, you know, I'm actually thinking I'm not going to become a Christian actually. When I came back very briefly.

Did you? I was going to ask you that. Like, you know, now that you're open to the possibility of God's existence, would you not want to join the faith of your ancestors, as it were? Yeah, I'll go into that in a second. But yeah, so that never really grabbed me. The evidence for the resurrection, it wasn't arguments for God that ever grabbed me. It was the argument for the resurrection of Jesus. So it was either Christianity is true or I should just remain an atheist. Maybe not a naturalist, but not at least religious. And so I, um, I was just sort of doubting it this time. Like, is it true?

Is it not? I would be a huge change in my whole life, you know? And so I go back to summer camp and I come back thinking like, no, I do need to join. And now telling people who you just told you were converting that I'm not converting. Now I have to go back and be like, no, I am converting. And I'm also the guy who told them every like two months that I actually changed my mind about what job I wanted to have. So I always came off as indecisive to them.

And so they thought this is me just being indecisive again. I'm not really going to stick with it after a few months. But now I have to go to my parents who I told I was visiting because I was curious about it a few times and tell, explain to them why I want to be going to this church every single week for the next year. The Greek Orthodox Church and so I go to them and I tell them now like well I am deciding I want to convert and They were really shocked at this they had like this would like hit them like a bomb they had no clue

I was gonna say this Yeah, what was that like is slow down here so I can get more just like how did they respond? Where were you? They were just not sure they were like bull well they're like not something for you in Jewish spirituality. And they're like, why would you want to do this and not just be more Jewish? Yeah. And I just sort of went, I didn't want to really say the reason at first. And I keep asking me and I'm like, well, I want to go because I think it's true. And they're just shocked that anyone would think a religion is true.

Okay. Not just Christianity, but just- No, it's the religion is true. Yeah. Like you could like, oh, we do Judaism because that's what our ancestors did. They do Christianity because that's what their ancestors did. You know, maybe there's a God out there, maybe there isn't, but the real point of the Bible is to teach us to be a nice person. Will Barron Do you think that they perhaps thought you'd be a source of embarrassment to your relatives becoming a serious Christian?

Jared I think that's very much so. And I also think it just, they were sort of shocked and didn't know what to do. And I would talk with them about it. And they sort of got to this point where they're like, well, if you think a religion is true, then that means you want to genocide everyone who thinks that religion isn't true. That feels like a false dilemma. Yeah. Like that's what people in the past did when they believed their religion was true and somebody else was false. So they went and they did like the crusades and they killed everyone.

And you know, our ancestors were all killed because they wanted to insist they had to become Christian. And it's been nothing but suffering for the Jewish people because they believe their religion is true and ours is false. And so clearly we should just all have our own traditions. You know, maybe if their spirituality fits better with you, that would be a good reason to join them. But not just like, oh, you think it's true. That's just weird. And at the time they were like, okay, you can keep going

to them and stuff. They want to be those like accepting liberal parents, you know, who want to be like, well, it's up to you to decide who you want to be. And so if that's where you want to go, that's okay Just don't become pro-life. That was the one exception. What I shouldn't be So you can be a Christian just don't become pro-life. Yeah, oh man, that's misogynistic That means you hate women if that's your position. Yeah, so I just didn't do any discuss any political stuff with them. Okay Oh leaning more conservative in your political views. I actually at that time I was that's a whole nother strand I missed was happening as I became Christian that I was very very politically active. I was very liberal

I was part of my I was part of my school's Bernie Sanders Club Older you I was 16 at the time. You know, I'm 22 now. Okay, that's so cool. Yeah, cuz I um, I I'm 22 now. Okay, that's so cool. Yeah, cuz I am As one actually one of those people is a fan of Bernie Sanders before anyone knew who he was Yeah ran for president and we were like so excited. He seems to say what he means Yeah He does and a lot of us were interested in like something that was more to the left of what we were hearing from the mainstream Democratic Party, you know So in a sense this liberal

You know? And... So in a sense, this liberal, you know, online chats that you came upon, in some sense, didn't turn you off, right? You said you were going to these Christian online chats that were very liberal. Maybe if they were actually accurate or orthodox, that may have turned you right off. Yeah, well, a lot of them were quite orthodox.

I actually remember joining one online Christian group called, um, REL that was Stanford religiously intolerant. That was full of neo-Nazis. And I joined this group and it's full of like people claiming to be Catholic and Orthodox. And I see all these posts about how other people debating whether the Holocaust didn't happen or if it was good. And you're the Jew. I'm the Jew there and I get like shocked and I like make a whole rant about how I'm leaving this group and I'm like gonna reconsider becoming Orthodox.

And a bunch of people in the group like reached out to me like, we're really sorry you saw that and they added me to some better Orthodox groups. Oh dear. Um. Yeah, that's real stuff, isn't it? Like. I know and it's um, yes, this is all happening around the same time. And then I had to write a paper for English class

about, we had to pick a topic and make an argument about it. And I was really bored with sort of all the mainstream arguments. I wanted to argue something really controversial. And you were in your senior year of high school? Junior year of high school. And I was like,

I'm gonna argue something controversial that I know like my teacher is gonna disagree with. And I knew my teacher was very, very liberal. And I'm trying to think, what's something I can argue well and I thought well abortion they have a like I always thought even though I disagreed with the pro-life stance they had a very strong argument they had the argument that this is a child you shouldn't kill another human therefore it's should be illegal

and I made that argument in my paper and I remember we had to pure edit it and I handed to the girl sitting next to me to pure edit it and she just goes, I can't read this but I disagree too much. Ah, very open-minded. Yeah, and that sort of struck me. I became convinced of my own argument writing the paper. So while I was still a Jewish atheist, I became convinced of the pro-life stance. But my argument was also this is actually more compatible with me being a Bernie Sanders supporter because even though I disagree with him on abortion I now I'm fighting for another poor and marginalized group and it actually fits well with all these other left-wing causes that I'm fighting for

And so I made a what a bid for a while like yeah You should be a pro-life socialist because then you're fighting for the defense of the people who can't speak out for themselves And that sort of that merged well when I became... How did your teacher receive the paper? She actually liked the paper. Good for her. She got really mad when we gave a group presentation. Because with a whole group of guys there, we were all contrarians.

And we gave another group presentation of... We had a prompt where we were like, okay, you're going to have to have an argument. And you're going to have to have sources arguing for both sides and you have to give a presentation and the class will vote and the one we like the best we're going to do a paper on. And our group decided we're going to have a debate should there be a Bible study classes in public schools. And we presented lots of sources arguing that like, this is just like studying the Iliad or the Odyssey or other ancient texts that are influential to Western culture. And our teacher hated that, that we did that project.

And I remember we refuted like all the counter arguments in our Q&A, and we get a C on it with a whole bunch of counter arguments that we'd already responded to. And that's sort of, this is sort of the whole environment I grew up with. They don't want to hear the other side almost. And yeah, so all of this is still going on at the same time, and me being a little bit of a contrarian, you know, that I have to be different than everyone else. And so I end up going to this Greek Orthodox church, and I just love the church. You know, I can't stop going back. There's just something calling me there. I

get a whole bunch of friends there and stuff. And this is sort of where I am my whole senior year. And I get very involved with online Orthodox Facebook groups, some of which unfortunately can be quite toxic and they get this bad reputation. Were you a catechumen? Yeah, I was a catechumen. Yeah. Okay. And yeah, but I think there's also a lot of good people online.

I especially met this friend of mine online, Seraphim Hamilton. He has a YouTube channel called Kabane and he knew the Bible extremely, extremely well. And he was, I never really looked at the Old Testament all that much and why we're not Jewish, you know. My arguments were sort of objective from the resurrection of Jesus, and I was like, well, the Orthodox Church, we're based on tradition, not the Bible. The Bible is sort of this Protestant book. And so we can sort of disregard the Bible, you know, and just base our stuff on tradition.

And I started reading the Church Fathers actually and being like, wait, they don't talk about tradition very much. They just sort of talk about the Bible all the time. So maybe this whole Bible thing is important. And I talked to Seraphim Hamilton a lot, and Seraphim is able to show me from the Scriptures why Jesus is the Messiah. He walks me through very slowly through all these books of the Bible, through the New Testament, shows me why Saint Paul actually teaches the Orthodox view on all of these things, and he was able to show me this from the Bible. He has such a wonderful knowledge of the Bible, because like he'll be looking at like Leviticus and why Leviticus is really important for us to study as Christians, and not in some random sense where, oh, there were sacrifices and Jesus is our

sacrifice. No, he would walk through the five different types of sacrifice, walk through the details in it and show you why those details mattered and what they actually meant in their original context and how that points forward. He especially pointed me on to some Protestant authors like James Jordan and Peter Lightheart, who even though they're Protestants will end up with very Catholic and Orthodox conclusions just because they know the Bible so well. And that really convinced me that I was like, okay, now the Bible is really important. And that strengthened my faith so much, because now my faith wasn't based on this one little piece of evidence.

It was based on a whole new view of the world I had, based off the Orthodox Church and based off the Bible. Wow, fascinating. Okay, so you become a Catholic. At what point were you baptized and chrismated? Yeah, so I ended up taking two years to get baptized because my priest said he was 17 at the time and he said he wanted to wait until I was 18 just not to cause an issue with my parents or anything. Okay. And then I ended up going off to college so we waited another year till I was done with that year of college. And did you keep your pro life used to yourself or did your parents discover them? No, I kept them to myself.

My parents have sort of discovered them. I've never really talked with my parents about that. Now they're going to. Yeah. So I think if they're on YouTube. Yeah. So I had talked to them about I talked to my dad about it. I talked to my dad more about politics. He's I think he's easier to talk to about these things to my dad about it. I talked to my dad more about politics He's I think he's easier to talk to about these things

Versus my mom had done actually activism for the Democratic Party defending abortion for her first job It was harder to talk to her about that but talking to my dad I discovered that my mom knows my views on it That's it's quite obvious if I'm a Christian and I've been making an argument that you should believe what the church teaches. Yeah Yeah, and so so you went to university yeah, and I end up um the woman at the church mrs. Flanders yeah, she mentioned her son was going to Catholic University of America, and this is in DC I lived about 20 minutes from DC. So this would only be about like 30 minutes from home if I went to it And so I go and visit the school and I fell in

love with the school. I wanted to now learn Greek and Latin because I wanted to read the Church Fathers in their original language. So in Catholic University, it's a great program for studying patristic Greek and Latin because so many classics departments around the country, they don't care about anything that was the Christian era, you know, real Greek and Latin stops once they become Christian. Real Greek and Latin is only Greeks and Romans from, from BC, maybe the first century AD. And so yeah, I loved that I could go there and learn these things. I just fell in love with the school. It has such a wonderful environment. I know there's probably a number of people in high

school who love theology watching this. I highly recommend to anyone watching this. If you want a good Catholic school, look at Catholic University of America. What was your views on Catholics at the time? I was very positive towards Catholics. I know I met, encountered a lot of the Orthodox anti-Catholic attitude online. And I became very convinced of the arguments against Catholicism, but not

becoming anti-Catholic then. And this put me in a weird position where I'd go in more ecumenical groups and they'd be like, oh, the philioquy doesn't matter. And I'd be like, no, the philioquy really isn't an important issue. And then I'd go to these other groups and they're like Catholics or Satanists who don't actually worship the same God. And I'm like, well, that's just as ridiculous as the other group I've just been in and these are online these are online groups. Yeah my people I met in real life though Actually did have a good balance where I talked to them about the philia openly be like, yeah We agree this is a serious issue

But then they'd also have lots of Catholic friends and I think at the average Orthodox parish Has a much more balanced view and then what you find a lot of online. Okay Did you have Orthodox friends at the Catholic University of America? I go to the Catholic University. My Orthodox friends, interestingly, all came from the same Greek Orthodox parish that I was going to. Oh, they went with you? They went. A number of friends who were the same age as me all went with me

to Catholic University. So I had a few friends coming in and we were joking that it was becoming the official school for St. George. Is there an Orthodox Church nearby? So there actually wasn't. This was the big issue going to Catholic University. Is there's all these metro stations. So as you don't know, it's the subway system.

Yeah. All over DC. Great way to travel. And Catholic University has its own stop on the metro. Mm. It's the only school in DC that does. So it's a great place to actually get into the city all the time. The unfortunate thing is like a dozen Orthodox school in DC that does. So it's a great place to actually get into the city all the time. The unfortunate thing is like a dozen Orthodox churches

in DC, all perfectly placed far away from Metro stops. And St. George was just too far to get to. So I go and there's a Russian Orthodox church, not far from there. So I start going to that. And it was actually much more traditional. And I think I fit in a lot better. There was a lot more converts there

because the other church, there was a lot of people who were Greek first and Orthodox second. And here, even though there was a lot of people who were ethnic Russians, they were all Orthodox first and Russian second. And I loved the church. I had a great spiritual father there. I got really well formed there. And yeah, I was going there for two years. Had you been baptized yet? So not the first year. I went back to the Greek church to get baptized. I see, okay. Then like two months later,

the schism between the Greeks and the Russians happens. And I'm like, okay, what do I do now? Yeah, slow down here for those who aren't really familiar with what you're talking about and explain that to us. So there was a break between the Greeks and the Russians, really over a political issue, over whether the ecumenical patriarch has jurisdiction over Moscow. Not over Moscow, rather, sorry, over Ukraine. Yeah. Because, and part of this is really political, that there's

a civil war going on in Ukraine. And a lot of Ukrainians feel like the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, because it's under the Russians, is really actually an extension of the Russian government. And that it's actually being used as a tool in the Civil War there. Now, I'm not verifying or not those accusations. I'm just saying that's how a lot of Ukrainians on the ground feel there. And so they were very happy that the ecumenical patriarchs would have jumped in, said actually 600 years ago, there was this document. This is Bartholomew, correct?

Bartholomew, yeah. He said 600 years ago, there was a document transferring it to the Ukrainians, transferring it to the Russians rather, and now we're revoking that document and saying actually it's going to come back to the ecumenical patriarch. Really it's just over political issues here though. But now there was a break between the, rather the patriarch of Moscow got mad about this and actually broke communion. And they were very, because at first this looked like it was only going to do with the bishops, but they released a statement in a very, very clear words saying that if you are a lay person in the Russian Orthodox Church, you cannot attend a Greek Orthodox parish. And very, very clear words. Um, versus when I'm actually went to my spiritual

father though, at the Russian, at the Russian Church. He was just very clear to me He was like look this is something that has to do with the bishops I'm just gonna give you a dispensation to continue with going to the Greek Church when you're back home and come to the Russian Church When you're at college, what was that like for you? You know just becoming a Christian and seeing this schism as it were see in the church. Yeah Yeah, a lot of for a lot of people I think I would really shake them But for me it didn't because I had read a lot of church history and I'm like, well, this stuff happens all the time before.

And I'm somebody who's very much like I have to base whatever I believe off of like hard evidence, you know, that's sort of the atheist background I had had before. You have to convince me of your position, not from this is how I feel about it, but from this is true. And so what did you believe to be true regarding the breaking communion and the different opinions of the patriarchs? I sort of almost didn't care. You know, I thought I thought that the ecumenical patriarchs seem to make a good case from canon

law for his view. But at the same time, he was a little bit more liberal and the Russian Orthodox seemed much more traditional. Yeah. And so I wanted to hang around the more traditional people. And so, yeah, I was sort of like, well, I'll probably, probably side more with the Russians here, even though the Greeks maybe are right from canon law, but I wasn't entirely sure.

Did your Greek church care that you were attending a Russian Orthodox church? No, the Greeks actually didn't have a statement. They said you could continue attending a Russian church. Yeah, whatever, it's cool. Yeah, is the ecumenical pashor sort of wanted to like pretend like there was noc system because he didn't reciprocate it and put and break communion with the Russians

and so yeah, I Sort of continued going to both I had a lot of Greek friends though who were very hard Greek nationalists So they were the Russians are wrong not in any basis of canon law They were all very strong traditionalists. The Russians are better on theology, but they're good Greeks. And so if there's a fight between Greeks and Russians, they have to be on the Greek side of it. So these friends who were from St. George, who went to Catholic University of America, did they start joining you at the Russian Orthodox Church? No, a lot of them actually would just end up going home for the weekend so they could

go to the Greek church with their family. Because they're good Greeks. They can't attend a Russian church. And so, yeah, there's a lot of nationalism you'll encounter among the Orthodox there where it's sort of their ethnicity and they have to go to the parish that's their ethnicity, you know. Do you think there was an analogy to say back in the 50s and 60s and whatever in the United States where you have Irish churches and Polish churches? Absolutely, I think that's the case.

And that's why a lot of people will use that as an argument against Catholicism or they're against orthodoxy who are Catholics. And that's why I don't think that that's a good argument, because 50 years ago, that's what all the Catholic churches looked like as well. Although they didn't break communion with each other. Yeah, they didn't break communion. And that's the biggest issue is that they have overlapping bishops where you have two bishops in the same jurists in the same diocese. And they'll say, well, the Catholic Church has that where you have Eastern Catholic bishops in the same diocese, and they'll say, well, the Catholic Church has that, where you have Eastern Catholic bishops in the US as well. But that's because we have different rights that need to be treated on their own terms. And if you look at the Western Rite Orthodox,

they have Eastern bishops over them still, and so they get very Byzantine-ized as well. That got mentioned a few days ago on your podcast, the Western Rite Orthodox. So, yeah, I actually went to quite a number of Western Rite churches while I was Orthodox. Pete Slauson Tell me what that was like. Jared Slauson Yeah, because I thought, well, the West was Orthodox for a thousand years. So, clearly, this has to be Orthodox. So I went to two of them and I also joined a number of Western Rite groups online where

I got to meet a number of Western Rite priests both in Rokor and the Antiochian Church. The two near me were Antiochian. So I went to first St. Gregory's in Silver Spring, and they actually had, so it's basically the Tridentine Mass in English. There's some of them that actually have something more like the Book of Common Prayer in English. The ones I went to were both the Tridentine Mass in English. Will Barron Even the vestments? Jared Huffman Yeah, they have the vestments. Will Barron Are the same.

Jared Huffman The vestments are the same, the rubrics are the same. Will Barron The altar? Jared Huffman The altar. Will Barron Unleavened bread? Jared Huffman Yeah, so they actually can't use unleavened bread. Will Barron Oh, okay. Jared Huffman That was one of the deals. Will Barron What do you mean one of the deals?

Jared Huffman When they wanted the Western Rite Orthodox, one of the rules of, here's what you have to have to be Orthodox. Gotcha. We need leavened bread. So in the Middle Ages, there's these long lists the Byzantines come up with of the errors of the Latins. And one of the most common errors of the Latins on these lists, and this goes back to Phodius. I think it's in Phodius, actually. Now I'm double guessing myself, and somebody in the comments is going to point out Phodius didn't say that. Always good to qualify with, I think it's in Phodius actually. Now I'm double guessing myself and somebody in the comments is going to point out Phodius didn't say that and not listen to anything else I have to say. Always good to qualify with I think. Yeah.

Yeah, so Unleavened Bread becomes one of these things that's the heresy of the Latins. And they found one instance where the Armenians started using Unleavened Bread and the Easterners objected to this long before the Sism. And so they argued, well, the West started using Unleavened Bread now too, just like the Armenians had. And this long before the system and so they argued well the West started using unleavened bread now to Just like the Armenians had and this is a heresy. I see. I actually don't know that much about this issue It just to me seems like this is like the biggest like big deal out of nothing to me But if they had to use leavened bread now st. Gregory's they use leavened bread What was clearly leavened bread but they would have it in still like a circular shape like the host

Oh interesting, but they would yeah, they would have it and then they would do intension Well, they did it in the in the wine and then put it on the tongue And they had a few other little Byzantine ization So there was here's a question for you because if you go to Eastern Catholic churches Sometimes you find people who are moving towards orthodoxy because they become so find people who are moving towards orthodoxy because they become so enamored with the traditions of the East. Does something similar happen in Western Orthodox churches? I don't want to give them a bad name, but I know a number of people like me who started attending Western right Orthodox churches and then became Catholic.

I thought that might be the case. I think it's because there's a number of us who were interested, if you go to that, it's because you're interested in some priestism Latin stuff. And I think that people are interested in pre-Cism Latin stuff, start realizing that a lot of these differences are overblown. There's also some other little minor Byzantine izations there, so they don't include the phileoque in the creed. They add an epiclesis because one of the arguments in the Cism was that the Epiclesis, those who don't know, the Epiclesis is during the liturgy right after the words of institution, the priest calls down the Holy Spirit upon the gifts to change the gifts. And so they argued, well, we need to include that. They just took it out of the liturgy

of John Chrysostom and randomly added it into the Trinitine Mass. But actually, interestingly, if you look at before the schism, Nicholas Kabylisis, I think is his name, who was a student of Gregory Palamas, wrote a commentary on the Byzantine liturgy and in that he actually talks about the Roman Mass. And he mentions issues he has with the Roman mass, but he mentions they actually do have an epiclesis. And I can't remember which prayer it is in the Tridentine mass, he says, but there's one he points to that's still around before the words of institution. And he argues that that's their epiclesis. And so he says,

well, that's where I could change for the Romans. And so, but this is, they felt like that wasn't enough. They had to add one in. And then they also added the pre-communion prayers from the Liturgy of John Chrysostom, where it's, I believe and I confess this is truly the body of Christ, and all those prayers just to make a, they said they added them to make an Easterner feel more comfortable if they were at a, at one of these. And they have icons. They have lots of icons. So they have no statues? Sometimes you'll see a statue, they're rare.

I think the icons are mostly there because they get these as donations. So they just put them up. It's a lot of these parishes are very poor. And so they'll sort of take whatever donations they get, which from a lot of other Eastern priests end up being Eastern icons. So I went there and I also went to St. Patrick's in Virginia. This is actually

the Western Orthodox parish that's become famous because they live stream their liturgies on YouTube. Oh, we got to put a link to that in the description so people can check that out. St. Patrick's in Virginia, Western Orthodox Church. That'll be interesting for people to see who are Roman Catholics. Yeah, and it's a former Anglican priest and he has a very traditional liturgies. But these look better than pretty much like most modern Catholic churches are going to go into. It's a very traditional Western one.

And what's interesting is this is the example that everyone points to, like, this is what Western Orthodoxy is like. If you join the Facebook groups, though, you'll see there are Western right parishes with iconostasis, with chalices where they give communion. And I'm like, okay, I want to like the really good ones that actually look like Latin churches. So you're doing this during your time at DC? Yeah, during my time in DC, I never started regularly attending them, you know, I just sort of visited here and there, talked to the priests. Did the Russians or Greeks have an opinion? I don't mean so I mean the Russians and Greeks you knew yes, I have an opinion about the was the Greek friends

I have were very against this they were like no like they were saying that we practice what we believe Hmm, and so we have to all practice the same liturgy But that struck me as problematic because this liturgy goes back to before the schism And so if it goes back to before the schism, then how is it that this is heretical and we can't practice this? Clearly if this is this ancient liturgy, it's not like they were doing the liturgy of John Chrysostom before the schism. And so that struck me as problematic. But the Greek priest I talked to is actually friends with the priest at St. Gregory. And so he had no issue with me attending it. And this is sort of all I get very interested in the West.

I started reading some St. Augustine when I'm doing this and yeah. I know some people online say that you went to a Catholic school and got brainwashed and that's why you left the Orthodox church. You think that's true? No, go ask any of my Catholic friends there. They will mention how much I was debating the Filioque with them and trying to convince them the Filioque was heresy. And so I don't think that's the case. I think it was partly I had a lot of Catholic friends and I kept debating them, but that meant I had to research stuff more to make better arguments. And so

that I think it was more my research that convinced me than it was that I went to a Catholic school and they brainwashed me. Before we move on to Fatima and the alleged apparitions there, let's talk about the filioquay real quick. There'll be those at home who may have never even thought or heard of this. So what is the filioquay? What's the orthodox position? What's the Catholic position?

And which one do you where do you land? Yeah, I think this is actually probably the most misunderstood event within the controversy because you'll have one side saying sort of the popular apologetics, the Catholic side saying this doesn't really matter. Just real quick though, Phileopoet and the Son, just the basics and then we'll move on. So it's in the Nicene Creed, right? Most people who don't know about it are going to a Roman parish where they're hearing, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life who proceeds from the father and the son. But in the Eastern churches, they say who proceeds from the father and then go on from there. And so phileoque, it's just the Latin word for and the son. And so, yeah, this got added to the

Creed in the West around the 600s and slowly spread out from there to be around all the western churches. And I think by around 800 or so, it ends up in the, in like the creed in the city of Rome itself. And this becomes one of the major debates within the Sism. And I think that this is heavily misunderstood because you have the Roman side usually saying this doesn't matter. It's just a word we added to the creed and the East saying no the Roman Pontiff doesn't have the authority to change the creed of an ecumenical council an ecumenical council has to change it and they'll cite a canon from the council of Ephesus saying that the creed cannot be changed well actually if you

read that canon it really means the faith can't be changed but if you you want to read it as the Creed can't be changed, you're going to encounter two major issues right away. First of all, the Creed they recited there was the Creed from the Council of Nicaea, which is not the exact Creed that we use. The exact Creed we use is from the Council of First Constantinople, which didn't become the standard Creed until the Council of Chalcedon which didn't become the standard creed until the council of Calcedon. So it's the first issue which is a later council and that's the first issue you're going to encounter. The second one is that that canon does not say it cannot be changed except for the actions of an ecumenical council. If you read it as the creed cannot be changed whatsoever,

you're going to end up with the issue of it cannot be changed even by an ecumenical council, but by this point it had already been changed by an ecumenical council. But really I think the real debate goes a lot deeper than in ecumenical council. The real question is our metaphysics of how we explain the trinity. And so if you look in the Greek fathers, especially Saint Gregory Nazianzen, who the east calls Saint Gregory the theologian. So he's one of three people in the east who get the title The Theologian. Before the Sism, he was the only saint who got that title The Theologian. Actually, Saint John, who wrote one of the Gospels, he also got that title before the Sism, so just take that back.

This is the only black church father who gets this title by this point. To the point that in St. Maximus the Confessor wrote a whole long commentary that's like almost a thousand pages of just commentary on St. Gregory's homilies. And it's actually to the point where St. Gregory got considered of the authority of equal to almost equal to scripture in the East. He's actually to the point where St. Gregory got considered of the authority of equal to, almost equal to scripture in the East. He's one of the most copied writers in the Byzantine East at this time. So extremely important. And he makes the argument, he first of all, he only says anywhere that the spirit proceeds from the Father.

And then he also says that we cannot know the difference between begetting and procession. So the way the Spirit and the Son are distinguished is that the Son is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father. And the difference is begetting and procession, and we cannot know the difference. Now, I went and I debated my Catholic friends on this saying, that's the difference, we don't need the philiocles. And they would bring up St. Thomas Aquinas. And I read Against the Greeks by St. Thomas Aquinas. And in it, he says, well, we need to distinguish the father and the son somehow. And the way they're distinguished is that the son proceeds from one person and the spirit

proceeds from two persons. And this to me struck me. I was like, no, I know how to refute that. Here's how St. Gregory refutes that argument. I think it's so unfortunate that St. Thomas died on his way to the second council of Lyons because this was a council where they were going to discuss reunion with the Eastern Church. This is before Florence. Everyone forgets about this earlier council. And I, if he had been there and actually gotten to talk with Easterners, I think he would have heavily revised that work. I think it's his weakest work, but I think he doesn't understand a lot of the Eastern arguments on a lot of these issues. Now the bigger issue, I think, going into this though, is that there actually are a lot of Eastern fathers who do talk about some sort of eternal relationship between the father and the

son. So Saint John Damascene, who wrote a work called On the Orthodox Faith. This work basically summarizes the entire patristic tradition up to this point, the entire Eastern one at this point. And so this photo became the standard tool of catechesis in the East, and it actually got copied into Latin and was very popular among the scholastics. It's one of the most cited works by the scholastics. And so this is when the scholastics are trying to understand the East. This is the work they're turning to quite a lot. And unfortunately,

when this issue comes up in St. John Damascene and St. Thomas Aquinas, when St. John Damascene says that, we do not say that the spirit proceeds from the father, he says, oh, well, St. John was influenced by Nestorians on this position. And I think that was very unfortunate he makes that argument there. Because I think there actually is a very great case to be made for the phileoquate from St. John Damascene if he had looked at other passages in him. But St. John Damascene does say that the spirit proceeds from the Father in order to rest in the Son. And on top of this, you then have the Council of Blochernay in 1285 responding to the Council of Lyons in 1274.

So this is the Council repudiating the Union. And the argument they make against the Filioque in this Council repudiating the union and the argument they make against the phileochoi in this council repudiating the union and that there is an eternal relationship between the Son and the Spirit, but there's an eternal manifestation of the Spirit through the Son. So if there we could still distinguish the Son in the Spirit not by this eternal relation, but of course there still has to be some relation between the three persons of the Trinity eternally. It's not like the Son and the Spirit were eternally separated and they only came to knew each other when the Son sent out the Spirit in time. That would be a ridiculous position. It wouldn't make any sense. And so they want to have this eternal

manifestation instead. And then Gregory Palamas, taking up this issue about a generation later, he actually had St. Augustine's works translate, he didn't do the translation, but there was a translated copy of De Trinitate that appears to come about in the East right around this time, because when we're first seeing it cited in the earliest manuscripts we can find. So likely this is around when it got translated into Greek. And we find that he actually borrows from Saint Augustine the idea that the spirit is the love between the father and the son. And the way we know that he gets this from Saint Augustine is nobody in the East had ever said this before. It was only said in the West by Saint Augustine. So it's almost certain he's reading Saint Augustine and wanting to integrate this.

St. Augustine. So it's almost certain he's reading St. Augustine and wanting to integrate this. And Demutru Staniloai, I think, Staniloai, I don't know, it's a Romanian name. I've asked multiple Romanians how to pronounce it and I always pronounce it wrong still. He's a famous Romanian theologian in the 20th century. And I read his book on the Trinity. I actually heard he's going to, within the next few years, be canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church. He's a really wonderful theologian, I think. And he wrote this very short book on the Trinity. And I actually bought it from St. Anthony Monastery in Arizona, which is like the most traditional Orthodox monastery. It's so traditional. If you're a Catholic and visit there, they will tell you to your face that you're a heretic and won't let you attend liturgies with them. You have to stand behind like a sheet of glass to watch the liturgies.

It's kind of cool. Yeah. And they also won't let you eat meals with them. You have to wait until everyone else is done eating the meal and then you can come in and eat. And so it's very traditional, the head monk there, Elder F. Rem. He just passed away about a year ago, but I went there, he was still alive. And yeah, he's a monk from Mount Athos. So this is like a very traditional one. I bought the book from their bookstore. So it's not like I bought this from some liberal bookstore trying to promote union. And he in it says, well, obviously Augustine's before the schism, we have to see some unorthodox interpretation of his work. and he uses this exact same passages from St. John's Amazine and St. Gregory Palamas here to try and

reconcile the two. He interprets Augustine in this way, and he's the one who really emphasizes that in order to rest in the Son, and he says, right, the Son is begotten in order that the Spirit would rest in him, that the Father would love the Son eternally through the spirit. And so all of a sudden this sounds a lot like the filioque. We've sort of just reverse engineered the filioque but obviously Stoneloid doesn't want to have the conclusion be the filioque. So the way he gets around this being the phileoque is he goes to, is it, he argues that well also the son is begotten of the father in order that the father might love him eternally. So, the son is begotten in order that the spirit might rest in him and therefore he

says if we're going to add and the son to our creed that we then have to also add that the son is begotten of the spirit. But this all of a sudden struck me. I use this argument quite a bit because I'm like, oh, well, this is the only argument I can use to escape the conclusion of the filioque. But it never sat right with me. This argument always sort of felt like it's, um, how do I put it? That it seems like there's a certain logical order to this in the other way, right? So I might say that I right got married to my wife in order that we could have kids, right? And then I love my kids but obviously those kids were not the cause of

My marriage to my wife in the same way that me just loving my wife directly was the cause of that, right? That it obviously seems like there's a difference here between the two of that, right? That it obviously seems like there's a difference here between the two. Or even like maybe a better analogy might be I have a son. Well, that son's eventually gonna either get married or join the religious life at some point. And I had that son in order that he could have that vocation of either getting married or joining the religious life. But it's not like I had the son in order that that wife that I don't even know yet, maybe isn't even born yet, will get married to her. Like obviously that's not the same ordering of things. And so, there's a certain logical priority, I think, to the son proceeding from the, further the spirit, proceeding from the father to

rest in the son, then the son being begotten in order that the spirit might rest in him. And interestingly, around the same time I'm thinking of all of this, on the YouTube channel Reason and Theology, Dr. Jared Goff was on discussing this exact same issue and bringing up St. Bonaventure and blessed John Duns Scotus and arguing that they have an interpretation of the phileoque, much closer to the Eastern view, where they really emphasize this begetting of this proceeding of the spirit in order to rest in the sun. And interestingly, when I went to, um, blessed John Donskotis's Ordinazio, he actually cites the exact same passages of St. John Damascene that I was thinking of, also brings up Augustine and says, obviously we have to reconcile the two, here's how we reconcile them, and says, is anyone in the East

or West going to say that either Augustine or John Damascene is a heretic. These are both long before the schism. Both of them are agreed to be orthodox by both sides. So this is the way we have to reconcile them. And it's really the writings of Blessed John Don Scodus that really helped me to really consider Catholicism in a serious way. That's interesting. So you think that John Damascene and SCOTUS, their writings can help us reconcile this issue? I think so. And I think the way that a lot of people miss this, and I didn't even really fully understand this until only a few months ago, is how they speak of infinity. So within

a generally Platonic tradition, and St. Thomas picks this up quite a bit, infinity is really just an apophatic term. So, for those who don't know, there's two ways we can speak of God, either apophatically or cataphatically. So, when we speak of God apophatically, it means we're talking about God with terms that are almost denials, right? So, when we say God is bodiless, we're not actually saying anything really about God, we're saying what he's not. Versus when we talk, when we use the term, what is it, when we say, for example, God is good, we're speaking cataphatically, we're saying something positively about God. Now the question is, is infinity a positive term or

a negative term? Because for St. Thomas, infinity is a negative term. He says that infinity is simply that God is not limited by anything. Versus for Bonaventure and Scodus, and especially very clearly in Scodus, because he specifically makes this argument, infinity is a positive term. Infinity is part of cataphatic theology, that we're actually saying something positively. And this goes back to a larger point by Scodus about what he calls the univocity of being, which means when we say that God exists and we say that we exist, we're not saying something wholly unrelated. There's an underlying similarity between those two. And he says we first consider this concept of being simply to not not exist is how he defines it. And he says, well, we can either divide that all beings are

either finite or infinite. And he says, God is the only infinite being and we're all finite beings created by God. He also says you can have created or uncreated. God is uncreated, we're created. Being can either be participated or unparticipated. So our being is participated, we receive it from God. And God is unparticipated, he receives it from himself, and he goes through about 17 different things that God, and these, what he calls the disjunctive transcendentals, either God is on one side of this, or on the other side. Now, if infinity is a positive term, then God is infinitely beyond us in this positive sense. And this is why I think the essence energies issue is so confusing to atomists.

For those who don't know, the essence energies issue is so confusing to atomists. For those who don't know, the essence energies issue is that the East, especially coming out of Gregory Palamas, will say that there's all these different infinite energies of God that are each telling us something about God in a different way, but each of them isn't reducible to one another. But that's really because there's a positive conception of infinity there, that each of them in some sense, grabs a little bit of of what God is but doesn't fully exhaust him. And Paul Amos articulates this I think in a way that's very confusing, but I think Scodus articulates the same concern that Paul Amos has in a much more coherent way, because he talks about what he calls the formal distinction,

the distinction of formalis a parte rei, so the formal distinction on the side of the thing. So he's basically saying that within the thing itself, so within God himself, there are all these different attributes of God that really tell us something about God, but they're not reducible to one another. So for St. Thomas, he would say that God's justice and goodness are the same thing, and it's only once they reach our mind that we start interpreting them differently. But for Scutus, no, these are actually really within God. I should use the word real, because that's a full philosophical loaded thing, but they are not telling us the same thing about God. They're not reducible to one another, but each one exists within God, but God infinitely transcends each one. Mason right? So I am both, right, the son of my father and the husband of my wife, but I'm the son of my

father in a different way than I am the husband of my wife. Those terms are not reducible to one another. And within me, they are different things, right? It's not like it's only once we think about it that I'm the husband of my wife and the son to my father. No, really in me, both of those exist, about it that I'm the husband of my wife and the son to my father. No, really in me both of those exist. But it's not like each one is just part of me. They are. It's not like it's just part of me that becomes the son to my father. No, it's all of me, but in a different mode than I am the husband of my wife. So in your opinion, it's the like Francisc, the school of the Franciscans that can help maybe reconcile both the philiac way and the essence energies distinction. I think so. I think this is really the solution. Now, some people want to say that this just solves the issue entirely. And I don't think that that's the case. I think that it provides

a good middle ground where the two can now speak on common terms. And now once we have that, I think we can reach a common middle ground between the two. And I think that also just the arguments of SCOTUS are incredibly strong and are actually just the best position to hold apart from this controversy. So I have a YouTube channel I call the Byzantine SCOTUS where I'm trying to reconcile, basically it's part of what I'm doing there, is trying to reconcile the East through talking about all these issues of Franciscan theology. Great. We'll put a link to that. The Byzantine Scotus? Yeah, the Byzantine Scotus.

We'll put a link to that, Neil, if that's all right, in the description. Yeah. I say if that's all right, like he, like I'd allow you to object to that. Actually, I think that. Said Contra. Interesting stuff, man. So if I was to ask you the question, who's right on the filioque, the Orthodox or the Catholics? I would say the Catholics are right, and it's important that the Catholic Church is right

on this. I'm not actually a partisan who says we're saying the same thing. I actually think that the Orthodox are wrong about the simply an eternal manifestation. I think that we actually can, as the Council of Florence says, speak of the Son as cause of the Spirit, and that if we don't do this, we risk falling into the common polemical orthodox position, which is simply that the spirit only proceeds from the sun in time. Which I don't think is necessarily the best orthodox view or the only orthodox view, but very frequently becomes the view.

And I think adding the phileoque to the cre Creed helps really clarify that there's an eternal relationship between the Spirit and the Son, to the point where I would actually have no objection adding it to the Eastern Catholic Church's Creed as well, except that it would cause practical problems with it. Okay. And are you coming to all of these realizations on your way to being open to Catholicism? Are you still Orthodox at this point? I'm still Orthodox. I'm sort of halfway through,

so there's more detailed views of what SCOTUS really believes. I'm much more learned once I actually became Catholic. Okay. So once I became Catholic, we go back in a second. Before there, we can go wherever you like, but I want to ask what your first

Catholic mass experience was like. Yeah. Is this while you're Orthodox? Yeah, it's actually while I'm Orthodox. So my first time ever was I was invited by my student minister at Catholic University. He was well-meaning and stuff to come to adoration with him. And so I go to adoration with him. And I remember I came from this Jewish upbringing. It was very traditional. There was traditional Hebrew chant. The most

liturgically bad it got was a guitar, but that was really only at summer camp. You know, it's a little bit more excusable, like a summer camp and stuff. You're trying to get the kids interested. But I grew up with like, you have to have traditional Hebrew chants. I had to learn all the different types of chants. The readings were still in Hebrew. So it's very liturgically traditional. And I come to this adoration with him. And there are drums, there's guitars, there's pop music. And I'm like, what am I at? I sort of take out my prayer rope and I'm like, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Have mercy on them. Like, how do I get out of here? And I go on there. And I was a little uncharitable at the time about the whole situation. I go online and forgetting now that I have like real life Catholic friends on Facebook, make a whole angry post about the adoration. I'm like zero out of 10 would not recommend to a friend. Forgetting these are sort of like more normal Catholic friends there. And they get really mad at me. And I feel really bad about that post. I immediately went and deleted it. I shouldn't have said it that way. But it really struck me as a very serious issue that I had as an Orthodox. I'm like, well, I don't want to like be part of a church

where like, this is the normal sort of liturgy. And I went to a Novus Ordo, some friends invited me to as well and there were flutes at it. There was like clarinets at it. And I'm like, what is this? This is not a liturgy. This is like a rock concert.

These are all well-meaning people and stuff, but I just felt like this isn't really it. And I had heard a bunch about the Latin Mass. I'd been to a Western right Orthodox church a number of times. So I knew the West had good liturgy and we really wanted to go to the, we wanted a Latin mass on the campus of Catholic university. And the head priest there was very against the Latin mass. He was like, nobody will want to attend this.

You all want like pop liturgy. Oh my goodness. We got petitions with hundreds of signatures of students saying they wanted to attend the Latin mass. And he still said, no, no, nobody wants this. We don't have to have it. He said it would be divisive among the student population if we had it. And so eventually we realized, well, the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is not actually technically on campus. So he has no jurisdiction over it. Even though I'm not, I think nobody is sure where the actual border of where the campus stops the Basilica starts. It's really part of the campus.

And so we go there and ask them if we can have one in one of the chapels. And they're like, well, if you can get a priest, of course we'll let you have it. So we go, we find some priests who are willing to do it. So we have a few priests who are willing to say Latin mass for us. We started having Latin mass once a month there. And I go with friends and it's just a low mass. So it's completely silent. And that struck me in a whole different way because Byzantine liturgies, there's no Byzantine low mass. There's just this very high liturgy with lots of singing, same with the Judaism I grew up with. Which is partly why it's so exhausting to have to go to a daily liturgy. I know.

Just an hour and a half before I'll go to work. I know, yeah. And so the low mass trumpet, I've never been to any sort of liturgy in my life that was almost completely silent, but it was incredibly reverent. And it was really beautiful. It was in this super dark chapel that was based off the grotto from Our Lady of Lords. I gotta point this out. I was really proud of my son the other day we went to low mass here at st. Pete's and You know at first we went from a Byzantine Catholic Church to here And so we started going to the Latin Mass and they only have the high mass once a month right now until we can get some

Other people so if there's anybody watching who is a good you know Chant or organist, please move to Superville. Yeah, we'll pay you. This is not the bulletins. You're okay Exactly. So my son Said to me he's like I like the low mass because it's more peaceful Well, yeah good for you because when we first moved it was just it felt very awkward Yeah, you go from the Byzantine Church where you're bowing and singing constantly and then you're like, is this, has this started? What's happening? Yeah, I'm still much more of a high mass person. So you usually go to the Byzantine, right? But as you go to the high mass and I grew up in a Jewish synagogue with like lots of congregational singing and stuff

So I would always sing along at liturgy when I'm at high mass. I'm singing along with everything You don't want to sit next to me because I'm terrible at singing along with everything. You don't want to sit next to me because I'm terrible at singing. Then I go to low mass now quite frequently as well, because my wife likes going to low mass. She likes the silence and so we'll sort of go to both. Nice. Yeah. And so it was just wonderful going to these masses. I talked to my spiritual father at the time about it and he was actually a former Catholic who was a very old guy. And he grew up before Vatican II,

and he saw all the changes happen, and that's what caused him to become Orthodox. When I told him, I was thinking about becoming Catholic, he's like, look, now they're promoting the Latin Mass and stuff, it's very nice, but he's like, back in my day, they were suppressing, you had to go to these underground churches. And that might happen again. Yeah, and that's what he was warning me about. Um, and yeah, I sort of wonder now if I had been, even though I want to say like, I'm going to follow the evidence no matter what, you know, if it had been two years later and they were suppressing the Latin mass, I'm just as convinced of Catholicism even more than I was then. But would this

have caused me to think more about the issue? If I knew in the back of my head, one of my issues I was going to have to deal with was irreverent liturgy all the time, you know? And so, yeah, going to the masses was so nice. I started more regularly sometimes going to masses. And then I first started a calling shortly after that, actually, around Easter week, because Orthodox Easter was a week later that year. And all my friends are going to like Holy Day services and Holy Week services. And I'm like, this is like, I feel like a calling to it a little bit this is around we could get into in a minute when I started looking to Our Lady of Fatima and so my friends are going to Good Friday and the Latin Mass and I'm like

well I'll go with them to Good Friday you know so I go with them to Good Friday and it's absolutely beautiful service and I just felt this calling like I need to become Catholic is when I first started seriously looking into becoming Catholic. And at the same time I also started doing some pro-life work with fellow Catholics. So we went and we did we go to Planned Parenthood and we pray the Rosary outside Planned Parenthood. What was your first experience of the Rosary like? I actually started praying it a little bit while I was Orthodox because I was kind of curious like what is this whole thing, you know? And it was really beautiful praying the Rosary.

Any good objections from Orthodox to the Holy Rosary that you've heard? They'll say it uses imaginative prayer and therefore, but I talked to my Catholic friends, what do you guys mean by imaginative prayer? And they're like, well, we'll focus on these different mysteries from Christ's life and how like, we can like grow deeper and closer to these mysteries. And I'm like, well, that's not a question I want to ask my orthodox friends who would object to that. Like, what do you mean by imagination? Yeah, I've heard some of them because how can you read the New Testament without imagining it? Yeah. And some of them will claim that, um, what is it, that like what they mean by imagination is you should imagine like you're there with them. I see. At like the cross or like these different

events, like you were there and like you were like a first century Jew. Like, well, that doesn't seem like what my friends are talking about when I ask them what they mean by imagination. Okay. Maybe that's what some people do, even if that's the case and that helps you grow closer to Christ. They would say like that's demonic and like how is that demonic, especially if that's the case and that helps you grow closer to Christ, they would say like, that's demonic. And I'm like, how is that demonic? Especially if it's bearing all these great fruits in their lives. Yeah. Yeah. So I, um, for closest, I also highly recommend anyone who's out there who can join a pro-life group that goes outside Planned Parenthood to praise the rosary. So cool. Just how powerful that is. Also, single young men do that because it's mostly women who go and do that and lots of

Single woman that's how I met my wife You will meet a good quality wife if you go out to play parent and pray the rosary there I just learned this yesterday. I was so humbled I wrote a little book on the rosary for ascension and just yesterday. I found out that someone translated it into Braille Look, I was so moved by that. Isn't it amazing when you see something translated? I found my article translated into Spanish and I was like, how like I was like, I was just so shocked.

Someone thought it was worth the time. Yeah, I wrote actually my whole article of why I became Catholic. I didn't write that for any, I wrote it for myself at first. When I was thinking of becoming Catholic, I'm like, OK, I'm going to write out an article showing both views. And very quickly I was like, OK, no, I need to become Catholic, you know? And I thought through it, I was like, okay, I should send this to some friends because they're all gonna want to ask me to explain and I don't want to say the same story 80 times. So, I wrote it, I was like, I'll send

this to them. And then I didn't know where to put it up. And I had a friend who's, we had a blog, and his blog got like at most 100 views. So, I'm like, I'll put this up on his blog, you know? He had a blog and his blog got like at most 100 views. So I'm like, I'll put this up on his blog, you know, on that way, it's have a link for him to click on to see it. So I become Catholic, it gets posted that day. So I send it to my friends to explain like why I'm becoming Catholic. And I go to my friend, I come,

I go over and have lunch, dinner with him rather. And he's like, did you know your article has gotten like 10,000 views today? And he showed me his like past views that it's like a hundred views, a hundred views, 200 views, 10,000 views today. And he showed me his like past views that it's like a hundred views, a hundred views, 200 views, 10,000 views. He's like, you want a job? Yeah.

And yeah, now his blog regularly gets like some, a few thousand views than articles. But this like is the article that made them famous. And I discovered that my article was getting posted in all these Orthodox groups to refute. Yep, that's what I saw yesterday. Yeah. And they were actually giving me huge amounts of views.

And I was getting, I got some death threats from people I want to did not I got a person who made a meme about stoning me to death now I prefer I post edgy memes all the time, so I don't get that offended by it. Um When you say death threat that you mean I think they were a little bit tongue-in-cheek, you know, right? I know for older people that can be hard to get but for us like young people That's kind of the Gen Z humor of your post like oh, yeah I'm gonna stone him to death or something like that

And I know older people are like just shocked that that would be a joke for us But that's sort of this young person very edgy humor And so I didn't take it too hard or anything But it just sort of like pushed me of like well I'm gonna go and I'm gonna share this article to all these. And I think I'm really annoyed at how I acted at the time there because I reacted by sharing it and all these Orthodox friends I had who wanted to remain on good terms got really mad at me because they felt like I was jumping directly from being Orthodox to being a Catholic apologist and that was never what I wanted to do.

You know, I just was like, here's what I think. I thought I'd tell my Orthodox friends so they know why I'm thinking what I'm thinking. And I never want to become an apologist or something like that. I just wanted to discuss theology. I think discussing truth is important, but not in the sense of apologetics. Earlier you had said that you know, you can correct me if I'm misstating this, but that you would tend to get really enthusiastic about something only to drop it and to go into something else. Yeah. So how do you know that you becoming Catholics not just one of those things? I can see that people in the East might start fetishizing like Western traditions and vice versa. So maybe maybe you won't remain Catholic. Yeah. And it's just a fad. And that's why whenever I try and think something now before I become like

a big thing about it, I try and like look into the evidence and understand is this true or not? And when I was part of this, we're atheist subjectivist, you know, I never changed my atheism when I, when I wasn't convinced of evidence on this, you know, and more change what job do I want to have or what am I interested in majoring in in college or stuff like that, you know? But I think that when it comes to something of like, what am I going to base my life on the truth and to base my life on, I almost rarely changed on that. It was only when someone would present me with evidence. And if people want to accuse me of flip-flopping too much, I'd say more like, no, that meant that I'm willing to fairly study the evidence. And if the evidence leads me in a way that I wasn't expecting it to lead me, that I think I'm willing enough to

re-judge what I believe and try and follow the evidence as best I can. And your story could be seen as a progression, right? From atheism to being interested in Judaism, to being introduced to Protestant apologetics, to becoming Catholics, to becoming Catholics. So it could be seen from a Catholic point of view of being led into the fullness of the truth and that you're not necessarily kind of dispensing with anything except perhaps the filioquai. I have to think like let's say sorry not the filioquai but yeah let's say I had wanted to become catholic right away I'd probably go to like the catholic church down the road for me it would have been like completely irreverent maybe I would have gotten lucky enough

that I would have stumbled across some latin mass people who attended a latin mass but if that's the case I probably would have been just become interested in the tomism around me yeah I never would have gotten interested in scotus. And it was only because of this whole journey I took that I ended up as the person I was now. And we can tend to think our lives are really messy, but you have to remember God is guiding all of this as providence over history, and studying the Bible especially has really helped me understand how God's providence doesn't work over immediately like we want it to. It works over long periods of time. And I just have to remember like when Abraham, for example, he wanted to

inherit the land. He was told, you have to wait 430 years and your ancestors will inherit the land. And he's like, great, then everything will be fixed. And we get into the land and we see how everything's really horrible from the period of judges. Eventually we get to King David and David is told, your line will never lose the throne of David and you're like, okay, now great, we've gotten there. Everything's going to get perfect really soon now. Then we see the split, we see the fall of the line of David, we see the Babylonian exile, and Jeremiah is told 70 years and the exile will be done. And Jeremiah goes, great, 70 years and everything will finally be perfect. We get to the end of 70 years, things are still really bad. The prophet Daniel is praying and he's told 490 years by the archangel Michael and then everything will

be perfect. And he gets to the end of the 490 years, Christ comes, Christ dies on the cross and rises again for our sins. And the disciples now go now great, even after he's risen from the dead. He goes like, um, and he goes, um, when are you gonna retake the world? Right? I can't remember the exact words the apostles used towards Christ, but basically when are you gonna overthrow all our Roman enemies? And they wait 300 years, and eventually Constantine converts. We go, okay, everything's gonna be perfect now. We have our guy on the throne of Rome. Then a hundred years later, the Roman Empire falls. And you know, I think things, we always like to think God's providence works immediately, but God's providence can often take hundreds of years and

work itself out in ways that are very different than we expect it to work out. But at the same time, it's not like nothing happened at the end of each of these periods. It was just something different than what people expected. And so I think God's providence, where God sees all of human history and he sees it all eternally at once. And so he can make things work out in ways that we're not going to expect it at all, but God's providence is still working there. And we want everything to work out neatly, but God knows that things are a lot more complex than that. I see. So what do you say to the argument that, I don't know, like, look at the scandals in the church, you know, look at the, as I say, messy liturgies and things like this. How can this, why not just, why leave the Orthodox Church? Yeah. Why the why why why leave the Orthodox Church? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you were willing to grant the filioque,

but you could have reconciled that with certain Eastern understandings of it. So why I mean, was it just that you became attracted to the Latin liturgy? I think that because you could have remained a Russian Orthodox and had a beautiful liturgy. Yeah. So with all these scandals and stuff, right, we can look at that in one of two ways. We could look at, or three, I think three ways, you know, there's the, all these scandals are bad, so I'm going to leave the church. And then there's sort of the Catholic response to that. Well, there's always been scandals. The people are still human. They can have

errors, which is of course one good thing. That's true in all good. But I sort of ended up looking at it the other way. I'm like, well, all this bad stuff is going on in the church. It's almost like Satan is really, really trying to attack one church in particular. Why is Satan trying to attack this one church so much? It must be because this church is doing something good in the world and has some truth. That doesn't, I'm not convinced by that at all. I mean, why not just use that argument against the Protestants and say, say well the only reason they're Failing to understand certain scriptural passages is because Satan must be going after them. I mean that must be the real church Yeah, I don't think this is sort of the final proof of it, you know

Okay, but I think it's a sign that points to it if you go to almost anyone in the world today They at least will in some sense define themselves in contrast to the Catholic Church. It's just because it's the biggest though. But I think there's something providential about that. Like we want to say that God, right, that has nothing to do with that. That's just a coincidence. But God's providence from working over all of history, and if we believe right that Christ is the centre of history, that God is using the church to transform the world, we should expect that this largest church has something,

maybe even if it isn't the true church, it has something to do with the true church in some way. I see. That it has something, and if you notice, it seems like everyone is all rallied against the Catholic church as this main force within the world. I don't know, I tend to think that people tend to think that their group is under attack.

I mean, I was listening to an Orthodox priest yesterday on YouTube and he was talking about how the culture is, you know, against conservative values, against religion and against the Orthodox in particular. It just seems like whatever group you're a part of, you tend to feel like you're the target. I mean, I think it's nice, we want to think that, but I think it's actually the case within Catholicism,

right? So if you look at, for example, in politics and the pro-life movement, they're more scared of anyone than the Catholic Church. I'm really scared of the Catholic Church. We're a bunch of pansies. What are we doing? They actually, I think they really are scared of the Catholic Church. I know, for example, knowing people in the Democratic Party who do work in abortion stuff, it's always the Catholic Church that they're really scared of. They are scared of Protestants, but no one's Protestant Church.

Probably the Catholic laity. Yeah. I think it's the Catholic laity and even a lot of the bishops the bishops can They want to go make sure the bishops don't say anything wrong I'm George Soros poured huge amounts of money when the Pope visited the country of Georgia Not to say anything about gay marriage but the country of Georgia is where he's trying to flip a gay marriage issue and He you would think why wasn't that money focused on the Georgian Orthodox Church there? There are way huger influence on the people.

But there's something instinctive he has where the people seem to know that the Pope is the leader of the Christian world. And so he has to stop the Pope from saying anything on this. And- He said there were three ways, I think, of responding to these scandals.

Well, I meant three ways of thinking about it. Well, the first way was just simply leaving the church over this. Sure. Yeah. OK. So the second is you could think of this as an attack upon the church. Yeah. And then I think, well, my second way was more just except that bad things happen within the church, which is true. But I thought this third way of going even further

and using this as an argument for the church almost. But surely that that argument that the church is maybe has a lot of scandals, Surely that in and of itself, I know you agree with this isn't an argument for Catholicism. So I still don't know why you're Catholic. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing, the thing that really struck me actually was Our Lady of Fatimah. We can go into that a little bit. Yeah. So part of it all, because I read the second, some of the second in Vatican council, that was also what people point against. And in Lumen Gentium, it does say that people little bit, yeah. Part of it all, because I read the second, some of the second in Vatican Council, that was also what people point against. And in Lumen Gentium, it does say that people could be

saved by ignorance if they don't believe that the Catholic Church is the true church. Now, all of a sudden this struck me, because I'm like, well, if my conscious is pushing me towards Catholicism and I'm not going to become Catholic, well, I can't be saved then. Well, I better really evaluate this and make a decision. Because this isn't some random trad from the 1800s saying this. This is the Second Vatican Council, the one everyone points to as the liberal thing. And so I went and I looked at Our Lady of Fatima more. How did you first hear about it? Yeah, so I first heard about it in the context of this resurrection apologetics.

I see. But I don't know why. I can't explain why. This never struck me. I just sort of never looked into it for some reason. And yeah, I looked and I started looking into it more because some friends would mention it and stuff. And I was kind of curious about it. And it seemed to me that this has to be a true miracle. Why?

Because so the last event in human history that this many people publicly witnessed, I'm pretty sure, I'm trying to figure this out, I'm pretty sure is the fall of Jericho. Because there's about six million Jews if you count up, or six million Israelites if you count up the numbers in numbers. There's probably a few hundred thousand people in the city of Jericho, and its walls fell after they marched around it for seven days, the walls miraculously fell. I can't find another miracle that this many people publicly witnessed. Now that to me, if we're having a miracle

at that level, where thousands of people are witnessing it because- And what are they witnessing for those who aren't familiar? Yeah, so they witnessed these the these three Portuguese children. And I think they were 1917 said that Mary was visiting them once a month. And the last time they visited, they said, nobody's believing us.

Can you give us a sign that people believe us? And she says, tell everyone to come gather here next time you're going to meet us on October 13th. And I'm going to perform a miracle in the sky. And so everyone's looking up at

the sky now. All these atheist journalists have come being like, we're finally going to debunk these crazy children. There's like thousands of atheists at this event. And they all say that they witnessed the sun moving in the sky. And lots of atheist newspapers who are specifically anti-Catholic were publishing, yeah, we saw this thing move in the sky. And they were all trying to come up with naturalistic explanations of why they saw the sun move in the sky. Alright so there could be like four possible explanations to this that I can think of one is there is a naturalistic explanation and just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean it's it's not possible to this could be demonic.

The demon, Satan masquerades as an angel of light, as it were. We could, I suppose, say that it did occur and that it was heaven, heaven sort of supernatural event from heaven. What else is there? Well, I think that there's or it didn't happen at all. I guess that's not at all. Yeah, I think also once you have the supernatural event, you can either have, okay, I'm going to reconcile this with being Orthodox or there's this means Catholicism is true. So I think it's pretty clear this happened It's reported in so many independent sources. Okay. Yeah, tell us about that a bit more

Yeah, so all these different atheist newspapers are all reporting on this saying, you know We saw the sun move in the sky Now objectors to this will point out that they didn't actually see the exact same thing, right? Some people are saying they saw the sun zigzag in the sky. Some were saying they saw it change color. Some say they thought it was like going to hit the earth. Um, but this is actually quite frequent in eyewitness testimony that within a few hours of an event happen, not even a few hours of police officers pull someone over the moment after a crime happened. They will sometimes give very, very different testimonies because human eyewitness accounts are not very good. But if-

And in fact, if you had multiple people saying exactly the same thing, that might be a point against it. Yeah, right, they all conspired or something. And what's great here is we have all these atheists, so people who came to this event to debunk it and still don't believe it, are writing that they saw it happen and they're admitting they saw it happen. You also have to wonder somewhat.

You have all these different eyewitness sources that we didn't want to believe it. Are they going to add details so it doesn't agree with one another but have to admit they saw something because so many people there say they saw something. Why not? Why not think that it didn't happen? But this is an example of mass hallucination. I mean, you've got a bunch of people in a field looking up at the sun. That's not a very normal thing to do. Yeah, but you have your thousands of people all saying very, very similar things happen. And in the moment, right, people are all saying that they're seeing stuff and talking to each other as it's happening. And also, if you want to have a mass hallucination of a naturalistic

explanation, my thing is bring forward your mass hallucination of the naturalistic explanation, my thing is bring forward your mass hallucination that doesn't agree with Catholicism. They can find the resurrection, they can find Our Lady of Fatima. Where is there examples that don't fit with the Catholic faith? Oh, I see. There's not examples of mass hallucination. You can have one person hallucinate something, but you don't have examples in sort of a psychological literature that would point to something else.

Yeah, that would point forward to this. There are other examples of mass hallucination, there are five people in like a boat hallucinate something. That's not this event where hundreds of people. So with Jesus' resurrection, St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that 500 people witnessed it. Now the argument in scholarly literature for it, and this is the atheist scholars, they will say that this doesn't look like the exact words of St. Paul, like his writing style, and so they argued that this was a creed that he's quoting, which if for it to be this widespread in the church, they will argue that it had to have been within three years of Pentecost that people started believing this, which means that actually 500 people would have had to have claimed this. Now, I don't know if I

actually fully buy that, even though the atheists are accepting it. My thing is more, Corinth, you can actually go online, there's a website, I can't remember what it is, where they have redesigned basically Google Maps but with Roman roads and you can type in like two different Roman towns and they will calculate how long it would have taken in like the first century for you to travel between these towns. And it's only a few weeks from Corinth to Jerusalem. So, he's writing this letter to the Corinthians, and he also knows his letters are being circulated between churches because they have good doctrine in them. He knows that this is eventually going to end up with people who could go to Jerusalem and ask, okay, these were 500 people 20 years ago.

A few of them have to be alive still. Can you take me to one of these people so I can talk to them if there were any doubters? Which means he knew that there were still people and he regularly visited Jerusalem. So he knew there were people in Jerusalem who were still claiming this 500 thing, which almost certainly means it was the case. But you pointed out to an example that there was an example perhaps of five people in a boat who hallucinated something? Yeah, something like that.

I don't remember the exact story, but that's what I've seen this sort of thing cited. So if it's possible that five people can hallucinate something, isn't it possible that hundreds or thousands can? I think that we're looking, we look at that large of a scale, things are increasing, right? And these are often people in isolated situations who then talk to each other about the events that happen. This is police officers hate. Well, that listen to a lot of true crime stuff. And I know police officers hate when listen to a lot of true crime stuff and I know police officers hate when Witnesses talk to each other about the event afterwards because they begin to convince each other What's missing each other what happened to make their testimony more believable?

They're sort of accidentally introducing details other people have told them happened The first thing any police officers do is try and isolate all the different witnesses of an event in different rooms They can't talk to each other. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm just because that gives them better testimony. And how many people are at Fatima who see the miracle of the sun? I don't remember the exact number, but thousands of people.

Yeah, not necessarily all collaborating with each other. Yeah, and people who all hated each other. Many people who hated the Catholic Church were there. Okay. All right. Well, let's for the sake of argument, agree that it was a supernatural event. Why not think it's demonic if Catholicism is a perversion of the true faith, then wouldn't the demons wish to sort of increase people's fervor and and devotion to Catholicism in some sense?

Yeah, and this is an argument very frequently used. I ask because I was looking up all the hit jobs on you from your orthodox friends. And that was one of the things people said. And that was what a lot of people told me at the time when I was looking up all the hit jobs on you from your orthodox friends. So that was one of the things people said. And that was what a lot of people told me at the time when I was trying to look into this. They're like, oh, this is just demonic. But my issue with that is we know that Jesus says a badge free doesn't bear a good of fruits. Now Fatima has caused all these atheists to become Christian.

It's caused people to pray a lot more. There's been all these... Fatima was telling people, pray the rosary, which is 50 Hail Marys or 53 Hail Marys and six Our Fathers every single day. Why is a demon telling people and performing supernatural events to make people believe that you should pray 53 Hail Marys and six Our Fathers, which are fully Orthodox prayers, every single day? Why is a demon showing people visions of hell to inspire people to do penance

that they won't go to hell? These are not, right, think about maybe there's been a dozen people who've left the Orthodox Church and become Catholic because of Fatima. I mean, you could say maybe Satan was trying to trick those people, but why did he probably also cause hundreds of people, probably millions of people to be saved because of what he did there? That makes absolutely no sense why Satan would be doing that. Okay. Well, then why not reconcile it with Orthodoxy? You said yourself, our fathers and Hail Marys can be reconciled with orthodoxy, so this can be something, even though I don't believe the orthodox churches have had any official

statement on Fatima, they could accept it as an orthodox and say, yeah, this is terrific. We agree with what's being said. And that's what I had first encounter. Now the issue is the Orthodox don't have any veneration of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And I don't think as an Orthodox, we necessarily have to reject it. But let's say we can go into first if they are going to reject it, they have to explain why Russia is being asked to be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope. Now I looked online for Orthodox explanations of could, how could

you reconcile this and I found one by this one orthodox priest, I think he's in England, I think his name is Father Andrew something if I remember correctly. And he made the, first of all, he pointed out something very interesting that a lot of Mary's appearances are falling on famous Marian feasts on the orthodox calendar, not on the Catholic calendar. But I actually think that would even make sense from a Catholic perspective, given that one of the secrets relates to the consecration of Russia. It's very interesting that these are falling on Russian feasts

that the kids aren't even gonna know about. But I think pointing out, he says that the immaculate heart of Mary, what is Mary? She's a symbol of the church. And so her heart, well, that's her immaculate heart. That's a symbol of the teachings of the church. And it just says the Holy Father, not necessarily the Pope.

And so he said that the consecration of Russia to the immaculate heart of Mary was the rededication of Russia to the true teachings of the Orthodox Church by the Patriarch of Moscow after communism. Oh, that was the explanation. Yeah, that was the explanation. And that seemed sort of too out there for me. I believe a lot of out there stuff,

but that was a little bit out there. And I was like, OK, I can't reject it seems sort of too out there for me. I believe a lot of out there stuff Okay, I can't reject it just because it's out there lots I believe lots of things that are totally out there. Mm-hmm Okay But forgive me if it's getting annoying that I'm pushing back like no. Yeah, it's good but why not remain orthodox and Perhaps either call into question that the schism is is still in play or grant that the Pope of Rome is a sort of Western patriarch and say remain Orthodox and accept the visions at Fatima. That was my position for a little bit, but it seems to me at this consecration of Russia and this conversion of Russia, it seemed to me that this is gonna play something bigger, especially this is the largest miracle since the fall of Jericho, which was in the Exodus. Those

were world-shaking events that changed the course of human history, and so mass hallucinations supposedly, like the resurrection of Jesus, another event which changed world history. This seemed to me like there's something going on here which is changing human history that's going on right here, and it seemed to me that this has a lot more to do with, as is my opinion, maybe I'm wrong, but my best guess for what Fatima is telling us is that this is going to play some role in the reunion of the Eastern churches and the Western churches through the conversion of Russia by its consecration to the Immaculate Heart. And maybe it turns out I'm totally wrong. I just went into how people were wrong about how to interpret their own prophecies there. So maybe that's wrong,

but that seemed to me like what was going on there. And this is all going on at the same time. I'm looking into all this other stuff and some saying, well, if my objections to Catholicism that I was using before, if those don't work, wall at the same time, there is now seems to be good reasons to become Catholic. I see. That seems to be the weight of the evidence leans more towards Catholicism now than orthodoxy to me. And I had to struggle with that. Also at some point there has to be where God's calling is in.

So I went and I worked up in New Jersey for a few months, totally unrelated to anything Christian. One of my days off, I'm like, well, I'm like an hour from New York. I'll take a bus up to New York for the day. And I go to New York and I'm trying to like, what Christian stuff can I visit in New York? And I found that there was the full-body relics of Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini there in this chapel. So I go there and I go to this chapel and I'm just there praying and I felt like there was this strong calling towards Catholicism there, that St. Francis

Xavier Cabrini was right, her body was right there in front of me and she was calling me become Catholic. And I saw there on the wall like Pope Leo XIII commissioning her to go being depicted on the wall. And Pope Leo XIII was, what are these great theologians of the church. I'd read a number, some of the parts of his encyclicals and they seemed very good, and there felt this calling to me. And before that earlier, I had gone to a liturgy earlier that morning because it was the feast of the theophany, and that evening I was like, okay, I have about an hour to kill before my bus comes, and I found that there was a Catholic parish nearby that had the Latin Mass every evening at 6 p.m. and I'm like, well, my bus is out at like

7.30, I have just the amount of time to catch it. So I go to this Mass and I'm there, I look like a complete fool because I have no idea what to be doing at different parts. And it's all these people there practically doing all the Latin stuff. And I'm just there praying and it comes time for communion and I just felt this drawing draw like I needed to go up there to the altar rail and receive communion. I was like, well I'm still Orthodox, the Orthodox Church does not receive here so I'm not going to receive. But this had really struck me and about a week later my work ends, I come back to DC and I'd already been a little bit talking with a Eastern Catholic priest at this time so I go back to him and I'm like, I need to become Catholic as soon as I can.

And he about a month later I was receiving to the Catholic Church after that. How, how, how did you do it so quickly? Um, it's pretty easy. He'd already like, well, you already got a lot of catechesis. You've obviously studied these issues of the word different from what the Orthodox Church quite a bit. So he's like, all you need to do is just read the Nicene Creed before a liturgy. And he's like, I'll give you another month. Like really think

about this. What did your Orthodox priests and spiritual father think about this? Yeah, I honestly handled the situation badly and immaturely. I think I should have handled it better. I was like, I want to avoid the awkward conversation. I'm not going to tell them and they'll find out when they hear from other people. And I feel really bad about the way I handled it. I think I should have done better about how I handled it. I had talked with my current spiritual father a little bit of like, here's how here's where I'm thinking of heading and stuff. And he had given me some arguments against it. But I don't, that was a way the whole summer working. I think

I should have gone back and talked with them more. And I do feel bad about the whole way I handled that I should have handled it better. But at the same time, as a certain point, I was like, I don't think they're going to tell me anything that I haven't already heard, you know, from the books I've been reading. And I was, of course, was never in a person who was going to handle this emotionally. I had to have that last emotional push where I felt like God was calling me. But up to that point, I had to convince myself intellectually. And I already got into that point that I didn't think something drastic was going to happen.

I probably should have gone back. I think that was, I was, what is that? I was 20 at the time I became Catholic, so I should have probably handled it better. Oh, I love your humility. And that's a beautiful thing. What did your folks think about becoming Catholic? They were almost, even though it was interesting, my family's all from mostly the Orthodox side of the border from the old worlds. They actually got persecuted by the Russian Orthodox a lot more, but in this world, they didn't know about the Russian Orthodox very much. I had some very close Greek Orthodox friends to my parents. They became my godparents, which really helped them accept me becoming Orthodox more. But Catholic, oh, that's the big evil conservative church. And they also found this

was weird. I wonder if it also made them think, well, if he's jumping around a lot, maybe he'll come back eventually. But they didn't think all that much of it at that point, you know, and I think it had already settled in with them at this point for three years that I had been Christian. Well, here's a question. I mean, so much of devotions within orthodoxy and Catholicism becomes second nature, such as the Jesus prayer and things like that. Did you find that difficult or do you still maintain the devotions you had as an... Were you ever brought into the Orthodox Church?

What do you mean? You were a catechumen. Were you chrismated? Yeah, I was baptized and chrismated. Okay, I see. And then I was for a little over a year, I was actually in the Orthodox Church. Okay, yeah, yeah. But was that difficult to switch devotions or do you still maintain the devotions you had as an Orthodox Christian? I still maintain those mostly. I did the Rosary to my devotions or do you still maintain the devotions you had as an Orthodox Christian? I still maintain those.

I did the Rosary to my devotions. And yeah, so when I make the sign of the cross, if I'm going to Latin Mass, I make the Eastern sign of the cross because I can't do the Latin sign of the cross. Even just being at a Byzantine church for three years. Once you learn it, like you want to do it the other way. And I know in my wife, I brought her to Eastern liturgies for the first time and she makes the Latin sign of the cross and people Tried to teach her the Eastern sign of the cross and she's like no, I'm a Latin. I'm keeping it this way Yeah

That first I was like I'm gonna learn the Latin signs from the Latin churches and my friend turns to be right before mass He's like just make the Eastern sign of the cross like it's the sign of the cross. Yeah, amen Yeah, and it's so why did you decide to perhaps not attend or have you decided to attend a Byzantine Catholic? Yeah, I sort of my wife is Latin. She was attending the Latin mass even before she met me. She was raised a very conservative but not like trad Catholic. She became trad as well in college. And yeah, so we sort of alternated back and forth, you know. I'm also bad, I'm not a morning person, sometimes having like Latin churches that are later

in the day is kind of nice. But, you know, I still, I found a very good Eastern parish where I am now in Seattle. And yeah, I think I'm at this good spot now, attending both and getting a sense of both. And I feel like I'm someone with a foot in both worlds where I read especially a lot of Maximus the Confessor and a lot of John Don Scodus. And both of those have been huge influences on me. And I also, I read the Eastern fathers a lot, the Western fathers, the scholastics. And to me, it's almost like it's not contradicting.

It's each one is just me learning more about the faith. Yeah. And these people make a big issue of like, if we're Eastern Catholics, we have to be Eastern. We can't have anything Latin. Stop praying the rosary. Yeah, stop praying. You can't pray the rosary if you're at an Eastern church. You can't believe what Vatican One says. You can't believe like anything post-Sysm. You can't cite the scholastics. And yeah, it's almost like I'm like, well, we're still Catholic.

Like we are of the same faith as all these Westerners. We have a different devotion, a different way of life, but we have the same faith as them. We should embrace that, you know? I've learned to better appreciate the divine liturgy by studying the scholastics, especially understanding all these philosophical terminology a lot better, because Scholastics wrote all these great commentaries on Aristotle explaining these philosophical terms a lot better.

They actually find a lot of these same terms and ideas within the Eastern fathers. They just don't kind of stop to explain it. And so I've understood now the Eastern fathers and the Eastern theology a lot better by understanding the West. And so I think that the two sort of work together hand in hand.

What's the best objection you've heard about why you shouldn't have become Catholic and why do you think it fails? Yeah, that's a good that's a really good question. There's a ton of articles out there. I mean, maybe there's not a ton, but when I was searching your name and reading your article and reading responses to you, I mean Unfortunately, some of it was just terribly condescending And they didn't seem to really take you seriously they would sum up, you know, like Thousand words of your very long article in a sentence or something. That's a good question. I think what's the best argument I

Think the best argument I've encountered is why do the scholastics disagree with each other, right? So, if we want to say that we have Thomas Aquinas and Scodus and they seem to disagree on this very basic issue of how we understand God, doesn't that seem like one should be heretical and one's the true faith and we have to reject the other one? I think that's a very good argument, but the problem is it assumes that in the past everyone agreed on every little detail. And if you just go read the Eastern fathers and then pick up Augustine or Ambrose, you'll see there's already disagreements within the

earliest days of the church, but they already recognize, I think the most obvious one is predestination. I think that a lot of Catholics, if they wrote Augustine on predestination, they'd be so incredibly scandalized. If they read St. Thomas Aquinas on predestination, they'd be so incredibly scandalized of what they're reading there. They're like, this is Calvinism. But it showed that there was a boundary of where the Catholic church could have from the very earliest days, where we decide, okay, this is where you're going too far and you're now in heresy, and this is where you are where there's open room for agreement. And I think that's through that discussion, we can discover, okay, maybe actually this was heretical and we need to condemn this.

Or we see somebody take something to an excess and we have to condemn something, right? So we have predestination and we see it taken to an extreme and someone like John Calvin or Cornelius Jansen and now, okay, that's too far. We have to condemn that. And so it seems like there has to be some room for discussion simply by the fact that people have disagreed with each other in the past. Yeah, there is a freedom in Catholicism. It's not a tightrope of theology you have to walk. There are places where it is a tightrope,

but there are other places where there's a lot of room for disagreement to be still within the bounds of orthodoxy. Yeah, and it seemed to me that Catholicism has more clear lines, not as clear as we'd like them to be sometimes, but more clear lines about where there's church teaching and where it's heresy and where there's open room for discussion versus in the Orthodox church. I felt like I'd hear some people say, it's just the seven ecumenical councils. You have to believe that up to that.

The fathers are our guide. We can sort of believe what we want, to other people saying that actually every single word a Church Father said is infallible, and if there's an obvious contradiction between the two, you need to use as much mental gymnastics as possible to reconcile the two. Yeah. Is part of the problem that you found within the Orthodox Churches is this no central authority to make statements on certain things, like moral things. I believe the Russians on paper condemn contraception, if I'm not mistaken.

So, do the Russians actually on paper allow it? They do. But most of the Russian priests in America are much more traditional, so they don't want to allow it, and they will actually try and explain how the document, and from the Russian Patriarch, that clearly affirms that it's acceptable in some situations. They will try and tell you why that document actually means the opposite thing, because I've had priests try and tell me that. And it's very clear that they affirm contraception. The Greek churches said nothing. I think that at most Orthodox parishes, there's kind of

a don't ask, don't tell policy about contraception. The priest isn't going to talk about it, and you can use it, you know, but don't ask the priest because then he has to say, like, it's not acceptable or he's going to, or he has to say like it's not acceptable or he's gonna We have to dance around it Versus like when I attended like some monasteries if you talk to the monks at the monasteries They will tell you like this is a grave sin There were articles from priests I found online saying that this is a grave sin pointing out that the father's contaminant is a grave sin And so there isn't a clear boundary Yeah, was that part of your impetus to become Catholic? No, when I was Orthodox, I was actually extremely against contraception.

And it was mostly me just trying to convince other Orthodox that this is what the Church Fathers taught, so you should be against contraception. And I think in most more traditional Orthodox circles, which is where I tend to hang out, most people are against contraception there. Fair enough. And to be fair, most Catholics are probably pro-contraception if you take into account every head, every Catholic, you know. It just happens to be fair most Catholics are probably pro contraception if you take into account every head every cat Yeah, you know, it's just happens to be taught. Yeah

Yeah, I think that um, there's some variance on the issue, you know But I want to focus on especially those more Theological issues maybe that just sort of my temperament. I'm more interested in issues like the filioquay and stuff Notice the papacy played a sort of a minor role, but not a major role this to me There seemed like it was good arguments for a good papal authority, but the history of it was very debatable and very nuanced, especially reading Eric Ibarra's work. He did convince me of the Catholic view of the papacy. But that was not a major thing as much of these issues like the philly-oakway and stuff, where I felt like I had a good handle on those issues myself from my own research on the primary sources on that issue.

Good stuff. Well, you had mentioned that perhaps you wanted to address evolution. Yeah. We may as well throw that into the bag. Yeah, we can throw that. This is around when I was first becoming Orthodox. Yeah. I had encountered, well, we believe in the tradition, not the Bible, sort of liberal

Orthodox stuff. So these issues of what Genesis means, that's not really all that important. And so I was like, well, of course, like it's just those uneducated Protestants, they're the ones against evolution. Yeah. But I started reading the Church Fathers and I'm like, they kind of sound like they take Genesis pretty literally. They do. And I talked to people about this and they'd send me articles. There's a famous article from Catholic answers that goes around. Now I don't want to bash Catholic answers. They have a lot of good stuff.

But here we go. Oh, this is about one of the worst articles I've ever read from them where they will cite, especially this Justin Martyr quote they have. And this is a first quote on a long list of patristic quotes trying to show the church fathers didn't take Genesis literally. And it's Justin Martyr explaining how each of the seven days of creation is 1000 years. And so, okay,

he thought there were 7000 years of creation. That sounds like he doesn't believe they're literal. But that's not actually what the quote says. And it's very easy to read the quote. It's in Dialogue with Troifo, I think chapter 82, if I remember correctly. You can go to the Catholic Articles answer and all the citation below. It's all on New Advent for Justin Moore. You can go read it and read the next sentence pretty much from where they leave off. And he talks about how what this means is that history will last 7,000 years because Adam ate the apple and he lived for almost a thousand years and this was the first year. The second year is where the waters were separated and that's where

Noah's flood occurred. And I'm like, wait, he's taking this actually extremely literally in that passage. He seems to say all of human history will last 7,000 years with a literal 1,000 year reign of Christ on earth. Now that view was eventually condemned, but it seemed to me that this was a very out of context quote here. Mason Hickman Yeah, from my limited understanding of what the fathers have to say about creation, it seems to me that the majority do believe in a seven-day creation. But there's also an understanding of the symbolism within those seven days.

Steele Yeah, and the only one they'll bring up against it is Augustine, where Augustine says they all happen instantaneously. But there's also another passage in City of God where he's very he actually brings up that the pagans seem to have genealogies that go back to before the time of Genesis. And he says these are all made up by them because the scriptures say the world is only six thousand years old. Interesting. And so is your is your are you moving towards the belief that evolution just didn't happen? Yeah. And it was to me. Yeah. I sort of move. I was like, that's where you are now.

This well, that's where I am now. So the whole process of how I got there. And you kind of denying micro evolution and macro. Yeah, I'm denying macro. I think that there is variation. I can get to that in a second. Sure. It seemed to me the Church Fathers were taking this very literally and the argument against it is, well, the Church fathers took it allegorically. And I agree, the entirety of the

Bible is allegorical, but that doesn't mean it isn't literal, because we want to separate allegory and literalness, because we want to believe, we want to sort of reduce the truths of Christianity to things you can argue for intellectually, right? The things you can argue for on the basis of morality. I think there's a lot of apologetics, right, that wants to focus on the Church's ethical teaching and trying to convince people of that. But those are sort of truths that are timeless and are apart from it. But the Church also does seem to make historical claims on the face of it, right? We claim that Jesus rose from the dead, that Mary was ever virgin. I know one friend who was going in the

direction of arguing that we don't have to believe these literal things where he started telling me, oh, well, yeah, the church dogmatized the theology of Mary as ever-virgin, but we don't have to believe that historically happened. Oh, well, that's ridiculous. Yeah. Right. And so it seemed to me at the very least, the church does have the authority to speak on issues of history. Sure. And yeah, so I've looked into this more and it seemed to me that allegory for the church fathers is grounded in the literal meaning that the three spiritual senses of scripture arise from the literal sense. And so these events actually happened because God was demonstrating real parables through

the course of history, right? Is your reason for denying evolution based on scripture and the fathers or is it based on what you've looked at in science? So that led me to the point of I was like, well, what about the science this side? This seems kind of crazy, especially talking to Seraphim Hamilton, the Orthodox friend I mentioned earlier, where he's a big defender of creationism within the orthodox world. And so I talked to him a bit and he said, yeah, like a lot of creationism, he admitted, is terribly argued. You know, like you have like Ken Ham and Bill Nye debating, and neither of them know almost

anything about science on this issue, you know. Remember a big point in the debate revolved around whether these certain rocks were formed by the ice age or the global flood, or if either of them had taken a second to turn towards the creationist scientific research on this. Both sides agree that these rocks were formed by an Ice Age. The only issue is that the creationists are arguing this was an Ice Age that happened after the Flood. So there's actually our creationists who do real scientific research from a creationist perspective doing real research and creating models to explain the evidence.

Now can they explain every detail of the evidence yet? Of course not, but neither can anyone in science explain every detail. We create models, we test them by the evidence. And a great book I read around this time was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Now Kuhn was an atheist philosopher of science and he discusses how do we have change within scientific consensus and he points out that most of what we do, we assume a paradigm for what we're doing science,

right? So when we're doing physics, there's nobody, almost nobody in the world of physics who says, I'm going to challenge if gravity is true. They work with the assumption that gravity is true because somebody in the past already proved gravity. All right, so they're not working with the discussing, is it actually true or not? And Kuhn calls this normal science that we have a paradigm we assume and we do normal science within it.

And he says, every once in a while, a piece of evidence comes up that doesn't fit with the current scientific consensus. And he calls these, what of we treat them like we call epicycles so within. The ancient astronomy the actions believe that the planets orbited the earth in perfect circles and the problem is when they started actually mapping where the planets go. Mapping where the planets go they quickly realize these don't seem to actually be moving in circles right so it did away with the old paradigm yeah so watch they didn't get away with the old paradigm. Tullamie this great ancient astronomer not bashing Tullamie is one of the smartest people ever to live. He came up with the theory of epicycles he's literally mean basically on the circle where he said oh there's actually circles upon circles, which the planets are moving on. And every time our circles wouldn't perfectly match the view, oh, all we have to do is add on an additional circle to it. Well, now you've created an unfalsifiable model, but it doesn't matter how many times your observations turn out to be wrong. It's, oh, we missed a really small circle that we have to add for the planet's motion.

And now, of course, that very well could be true, but it's a paradigm in which we're interpreting the evidence. And so any data that falls outside of it, so a good example of this is dinosaur bones. So no one ever thought to break open a dinosaur bone. So at this time, everyone had already accepted. Yeah. I need to back up a bit. You say you're a creationist.

What does that mean? So there are different types of creationists. So I'm a young earth creationist. Wow, okay. So I believe that the world was created probably about six to seven thousand years ago. Wow. I know it's a really radical claim. It is a radical claim.

And does the fact that the majority of scientists who specialize in this area disagree with you, not cause you pause? It causes me pause a little bit, but it's the fact that I realize they're all working within the paradigm. Right? How many scientists are going back and verifying for themselves? Is the arguments for evolution actually correct? They're not stopping and verifying that for themselves. What about arguments from Big Bang Cosmology about the universe being 13.7 billion years old? Yes, there's one guy named Russell Humphries, who's a scientist. He's a PhD in the subject. It's not some random dude coming out there. And he's created, and I think this is an area where more research needs to be done. He's argued for what he calls white hole cosmology, where he points out, I'm trying to remember, it's been a few years since I've looked into this issue.

If I remember correctly, you can go watch lectures from him online, we'll explain this in more detail. That when the universe was expanding on the, we are using this on the fourth day of creation when all the planets are being created. But actually this would cause at different sections of the universe time to move at different speeds. So he argues that maybe if you had a watch standing at the edge of a universe, you wouldn't measure somewhere around like 13 billion years, but from the perspective of the earth, you would only measure a day.

And so he argues that actually time in the expansion of the universe, that when like a white hole is expanding, time moves differently in different sections of it. And so he argues the earth is probably somewhere nearer than the center of the universe. Now is this paradigm correct? I don't know. It might not be. It's a good chance it's not. But this shows at the very least that there are different paradigms in which the evidence can be interpreted to fit. With epicycles, for example, a good one, I think, of this in evolution is with two good ones. We have first have... Just to push back real quick though, I mean, the thing is though, the, I think the origin of the paradigm is important too though, because it seems to me that the basis of a lot of these, you know, in my opinion of creationism is the idea that

the Bible is speaking with authority about paleontological truths, and this is the thing with which everything else is to be interpreted by versus I think that there's something to be said for a paradigm which seems to have organically grown from the evidence, rather than to be based in a kind of external, you know, conclusion that needs to be built up to, rather than have some kind of natural, you know, trying to place evidences in pieces as they seem to naturally occur. occur like how would you like respond to just the fossil record? I think it's the go-to just yeah, so within the um

Issue of how this paradigm is forming right that doesn't necessarily mean the truth of it, right? So it's not like someone that's conform a paradigm based on very good presuppositions, you know But everyone's gonna have some sort of presupposition They're entering when they're looking at the scientific evidence they were in. So I fully admit that my presupposition to interpret it is that I believe that there was an eyewitness God to these events who told Moses about this, so Moses would write it down and that's been passed down to our day. And there's been miraculous events to witness to the truth of this eyewitness, that this is an eyewitness account by God. But also, it's not like when Darwin came up with his theory

of evolution, he wasn't doing it out of nowhere. On the boat, the Beagle if I remember correctly, the name of his boat where he sailed to the Galapagos, he was reading Lyell's book about geology because Lyell was the first one to challenge the idea that these rock layers we're seeing were formed by the Great Flood of Noah. He pointed out inconsistencies of these being formed by the Flood of Noah, and so he argued that these layers were laid down slowly over time, over the course of billions of years. And so now Darwin's coming here, he already assumes that the earth is now millions of years old and that these fossils represent these different ancient species. And now from there, he can work to build up evolution.

Now that he already has a basis upon which to build, this didn't come out of nowhere. Now from what I've read, actually, Darwin does actually seem like he was a nice guy. I don't have anything against him as a person. I think he's actually a really fascinating person. But we have to ask, does that mean he's correct? And I don't think that anybody's arguing from him is he's a nice person, therefore he's correct. Yeah, no, and I don't think anyone is too. There are some creationists who want to attack his character and I actually think he does seem like he was a genuine person. What did you say that a Neal's question about fossil records? Yeah, so fossil records. So I think that it's

actually interesting that if you look at and I'm going to use secular dates for these rock layers just to explain what I'm referring to. Sure. So everything from the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic, so everything dated 65 million years ago or more actually looks like it was laid down, like you have layers that will be thousands of miles apart, spreading all across multiple continents that actually all look like they were laid down at once. You find consistent evidence in the rock layers. Andrew Snelling and Leonard Brandt both have good lectures online, you can look up about this. These are real geologists,

PhDs in the subject are very well respected, and who are showing that these are laid down, it looks like, in these big layers. But when you look at the Cenozoic layers, everything dated 65 million years ago or more recently, these look like they were laid down rapidly in a series of successive things where there's not this consistency. And so creation scientists will argue,

if you have a global flood, they'll argue that the fountains of the great deep burst forth, the continent separated and moved apart. This changed the entire geography of the world. You would still continue for about a thousand years or so to have rapid like crazy climate things going on, including probably lots of local flooding. And this would include lots of more layers being quickly laid down on the ground. It's interesting when they created computer models for the flood,

they actually found that after the heating up that would happen, there would have to be a massive drop in temperatures causing an ice age. And so they actually interestingly came up with an explanation for why there was an ice age recently without even intending to. So their model was not only explained the evidence, it actually was predictive of stuff that came up. And what's interesting is all the clear transitionary fossils come up in the Cenozoic layers of

the rock. These are species quickly diversifying to stay where they are afterwards. And Todd Wood, who's done a lot of research in this area, as well as Kurt Wise, these are very serious people. Todd Wood is very well respected. I've seen his paper arguing against human evolution. I've even seen atheist scientists admit this is the best creationist case you could possibly make against it. And no one doubts that he clearly understands the evidence for human evolution on the other side. And Kurt Weiss studied under Stephen J. Gould at Harvard doing paleontology. Stephen J. Gould was probably the top evolutionary scientist.

Studied at like the best university in the world and Stephen J. Gould admitted that Kurt Weiss was one of his best students. These are not random people. And Kurt Weiss, when he wanted to look into this, when he was first sort of moving towards creationism and he was doing all the studies, he said, okay, what would be the evidence? We have all these different fossils in the fossil record. What would be about the order we would expect them in if evolution was true? And found that he went and created that order and then went and compared it to the actual fossil order and found it wasn't really matching up as well as he would expect it to. And he looked at all these things in the, um, with the

Paleozoic layers. And this is where you start having things like fish that seem to have legs on them. Well, this seems like, oh, this is the beginning of land animals. And he starts looking at it and he's wondering, um, you remembered when he was a kid that he visited this thing called a floating bog where you have these trees that are actually hollow on the inside. So it looks like a forest. If you take a step in, your foot will fall about a foot down because this is actually a swamp. And it looks like a forest and these trees are actually floating on the water. Remembered visiting this as a kid. And he thought, what if there was a continent-wise floating bog? This would actually explain

like the light bone structure of a lot of the animals we're encountering here. This explains why we have fish that seem to have legs, right? They would swim around and come up on land for a few minutes to maybe grab some food and then go back under the water. And this started explaining everything that would have here. Now, this would then fold under when the flood came and would actually then fold under and quickly produce the layers of coal that we have. And another one's creation scientist, Steve Austin, he did his PhD dissertation looking at the formation of coal, a rapid formation of coal somewhere in the Grand Canyon. This is actually where a lot of creationists have done their research because we have a

huge number of layers we can all look at together in there. And he went and looked at that. Now, around the time he was finishing up his dissertation, he was nearby Mount St. Helens, and Mount St. Helens was erupting. And rather than be responsible, he goes, gets on a bunch of safety equipment and runs towards the explosion, dives under the water of watching what's happening, and watches the layers of trees fold under one another exactly like he would predict to rapidly create these layers of coal. Sounds awesome. I have no idea what you're talking about. And this is not your fault. This is my fault, right? I don't even know what I don't know to get into a discussion about this.

This is kind of how I feel like when I talk to Jacob Imam and he starts criticizing different financial theories. I'm like, I don't even know what I don't know to have this conversation. I just think that... Well, did he answer your question about the fossil records? Yeah, I mean, I would just say that it seems that there's a, you know, things make a lot of sense biologically looked at through the lens of, you know, Darwin's original, you know, I think it's an origin of species. He talks about these birds' beaks and things, and it just seems to make sense that these things do derive from each other. I know there's a lot of different opinions about the rates at which these things happen and making sense

of the fossil records. I guess my main objection to, and this is kind of a separate objection, I would say I disagree with the idea that the patristics are our authorities on like, you know, paleontology and that was kind of, you know, something that, you know, beyond it just kind of having a sort of, you know, good mental framework or attitude with which to approach, you know, see, you know, mankind and the cosmos. I would also say, I don't know, to me it just seems that the idea that these things are so much at head with each other that it really matters intensely that the world originated this way versus this way, which seems much more like kind of, I guess like narrative, to me it's a slight at the majesty of God almost, to say that if these things didn't originate in a way which is like a human in the sky tinkering,

rather than this beautiful mechanistic kind of fractal of which is creation, which is in no way at odds with the kind of seemingly, you know, what would the word be like, stark, cold, aonic, just slurry of creation. To say that, you know, if that's the way the world is, then there can be no God behind it, I think,'s to minimize the the immensity of God. Yeah, so... And just real quick, and thanks Neil, like if if you could be convinced from science that that maybe you're wrong on this, would you be happy to accept a different view and then just have to adopt the scriptures to that different view? Yeah, I think so. So the first thing I want to

bring up... So you're not saying like young Earth creationism because the scripture teaches it. It's very clear, very unambiguous, regardless of what the science says. That's not what you're saying. That's not what I'm saying, right? So we can have it is doesn't require the Catholic believe this. Well, the Magisterium has been clear of no, it isn't. No, unfortunately, a lot of Catholics seem to think

that the Magisterium teaches evolution. That's right. No, it Catholic can be a young man. Yeah, humani generis actually says that Catholic scientists should research both views, and humani generis is clear on this. So my question is, where are all the Catholic creationist departments at least checking the science on this? You know, if the church has said scientists should be studying this. But it's on the look at the two points Neil brought up then.

So the first one was, do the patristics teach unpalientology? But, so I'm gonna look at the two points Neil brought up then. The first one was, do the Patristics teach on paleontology? And I would actually agree, no they don't teach on it. And I want to give an analogy to Egyptology. So I think that most people would agree that the Exodus teaches, the book of Exodus pretty clearly teaches and Jesus verifies that an Exodus did occur. But the Bible doesn't name the pharaoh that the exodus occurred under. So it's entirely free reign, right, for Egyptologists to debate which pharaoh the exodus

occurred under and where the evidence pointed to. But I would say as a Catholic Egyptologist, you should make the case, even if you're not certain which pharaoh it occurred under, believe that it did occur because it's taught by Revelation that it did occur. And so I'd say it's the same thing, right? Science doesn't tell us how these rock layers or the creation doesn't tell us how these rock layers were formed, right? The scripture gives us an account of history and now we can then look in science and use scientific tools to try and see what actually did happen. We can learn the details of it.

And I think that we like to think that these different fields of study are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other, but actually within the medieval university, science was considered the queen of, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. So theology was the guiding light under which we did the other sciences. And you'll be shocked, like sometimes we'll make a good argument for some view in philosophy, then argue against it from a the- that would create a theological heresy. And then they go back and they try and make an argument of why the initial philosophical argument was wrong, right? So they start off with, we know this is wrong by divine revelation, but we're still then going to use reason to understand

why it's wrong. And so I think that's the same thing here, right? We can understand by revelation, but we're still then going to use reason to understand why it's wrong. And so I think that's the same thing here, right? We can understand by revelation, I think, that the world was created recently, and then by science, try and go back and use our reason and understand, oh, that's what actually happened here. Here's actually the correct interpretation of this. Just in the same way that there was a whole debate in the Middle Ages over whether the form of the body was the same thing as the form of the soul. And one of the major arguments that the two have to be distinct is that Christ's soul left his body during his descent into hell. But at the same time, it's dogma that the body of Christ remained the body of Christ

while he was in the tomb. And so if it departed from him, so now the way the people who held that the form of the body and the form of the soul were the same, like St. Thomas Aquinas, they basically just said, well, miraculously happened for Christ, that his somehow it's he still remained the body of Christ. But at least the case, there was a good case made by a lot of people like St. Bonaventure to try and argue, no, we actually, because of this theological belief, have to argue philosophically that these two are distinct from one another. And so at the very least, it seems like a case could be made in that direction.

I see, yeah. And then to the argument Neil brought up about, can't we be good Christians and believe in evolution? This is a beautiful way God created the world. I would say if I'm not saying that evolution rules out God, my point is more that it is taught that God created in a certain way. And so it's not that God couldn't have created in a different way, but God also could have created in the way it's taught in the scriptures. And then we have evolution brings in another thing of that we have all of life was brought about through this process of death and competition and war. There's a great article recently put out on New Polity by Dr. Andrew Willard Jones

about the philosophy of peace. It's called The Priority of Peace. If you go to their website, it's actually the first article listed there where he goes and shows that liberalism is based on the philosophical presupposition that humans started out within a state of war, and then we set the state over us to resolve the state, the situation of war so we could have peace. So war is prior and peace only comes about by human action and human violence to place war within it. But he argues, if you actually look in the Middle Ages, they held the view that peace was prior, right? Because we see in Genesis, there's a world of peace, there's abundance, Adam and Eve don't need anything, they have everything they need.

And then because of human sin, they enter a world of war and scarcity. And this in the middle ages affected their political philosophy. So they don't need to have a totalitarian state in the middle ages. The purpose of the government then is to pursue the common good because when people, but when there is a disturbance in that common good that naturally happens, violence has to be

introduced only to restore that initial state of peace. Yeah. Whereas for liberalism, we need, we have that initial state of war and the government has to step in to bring about a state of peace. So I actually, and now liberalism was invented long before people believed in evolution, but I think that evolution sort of brings about the perfect creation myth. I don't use myth in a way of oh, myth is wrong. I just mean myth in the sense of it explains something.

It has their creation myth, which explains why liberalism is true because there was this eternal state of war for millions of years, which humans came about and then we got intelligence enough to rise above it rather than God created a naturally peaceful world which we through our sin have corrupted into violence and that will then affect the way in which you view politics. Wow, well said. Any thoughts before we wrap up, Neil? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's just, you know, I think that both, I think that's an interesting take. I don't know if I'd agree with your characterization of like the, this being the perfect thing to fit into the liberal paradigm. I think that there's, you know, like if you look at like Rousseau, I think that liberalism, at least as, you

know, I've heard it, and what seems to make sense to me also can come from this idea of perfect prehistoric man that's now like, take like Freud, what's that book called? The Civilization and its Discontents, so the idea that we've been thrown asunder by modern society and so it's like, that is one way to frame it, I think. I don't know if I'd agree with that. I think that's a long conversation. To me, the main thing is just this kind of, it seems to me that there's, because growing up I had to read a lot about this

for school, about evolution and the squaring of that conversation, and it seems to come from this, creationism seems to me to respond to a threat that doesn't exist which is that, you know, the world's presented in this way which, you know, has a, you know, sort of mechanistic system to it and to me it's kind of like that shouldn't really be a problem that shouldn't even be like like the outrage of that cause and then the kind of you know need to return to some kind of simpler explanation of the origin of the universe I mean I'm not an expert in the fossil record to me you know if

there's some kind of consensus I don't really you know have a reason to to run yeah yeah but but I would just say that't really, you know, have a reason to to write. Yeah. Yeah. But but I would just say that, yeah, it's to me, it's a response to a threat that just seems like not really a threat. It's just kind of like, you know, evolution doesn't disprove God. It doesn't have too much to do with the conversation. And it doesn't have to disprove Genesis. And also just reading Genesis, it's pretty different from Exodus.

One of them seemed pretty like historically concerned, Genesis doesn't. Yeah, it seems to clearly use figurative language. Yeah, would you be open to coming back on the show to maybe do a debate on this topic? Oh, I would love to do a debate on this. I think that'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, I'd love to kind of get, you know, as I say, it's one of those things where I don't know what I don't know. So I'd love you to be able to interact with somebody who understands where you're coming from a bit more so both of you can be presented fairly. Yeah, I think this is the great thing the Catholic Church has, right, is that we've said this isn't an issue of dogma.

And I think a lot of people want to shut it down on one side or the other. And I'm saying, no, we need to have that discussion. And to me, once we have that discussion, the creationist view comes out on top. But I think that that discussion should be had, right? And I think that Humanae Generis ended up being taken in a very different way than Pius XII intended. I think he intended it to try and open a good dialogue within the church, and instead it became with, we don't want to have another Galileo affair, and so we're going to just accept whatever the scientific consensus says. Yeah, okay. Well, Gideon, thank you so much for being on the show.

You're a super bright guy. It's always so embarrassing to me when I meet people who are 22 and I'm 38 and I can barely keep up. But it's great to have you. Thank you. Yeah. What we're going to do is we're going to do a post show Q&A

session where we take questions from our supporters, from Patreon and locals. So if you are a supporter on Patreon or locals, be sure to check out so we can post that later today. So if you are a supporter on Patreon or locals, be sure to check out so we can, we'll post that later today. And if you're not yet supporting the show, go to pintswithaquinas.com slash give,

and you can support the work that we're doing here. Where can people find you? You mentioned it, but as you wrap up here. So my YouTube channel, The Byzantine Scodist. I also have a Patreon that goes with it. So I have some exclusive interviews and stuff, but most of my stuff is public. And then I also have a patreon that goes with it so I have some exclusive interviews and stuff but most of my stuff is public and then I also have a Twitter I'm at BizKat B-Y-Z-C-A-T my Twitter is more just where I post whatever I'm thinking about

and I'm also Gen Z so I post a lot of memes on it. Yeah I was gonna say that you said memes do you have an Instagram account? I don't have an Instagram account I have a personal one but just and these memes are you coming up with them or Sometimes I come up with them. I haven't come up with any good ones recently It's mostly me finding funny stuff. I see any elsewhere. It's Gen Z one So if you're a little bit older don't get Gen Z humor some of them can come off as offensive I don't mean them that way. It's just sort of how Gen Z is no worries. All right. Well, God bless. Thanks so much Thank you. That's fun