THE END OF THE WEST, Will We Survive Without Christianity? | The Culture War with Tim Pool

This conversation we've had on our shows here at Timcast quite a bit. We had Milo Yiannopoulos on the show a few months ago, though he's been on since then. But a few months ago, he was talking about this nation was intended for a Christian moral people, that the founding fathers, or that some of them, had written that the Constitution would only work for those who are a moral and virtuous people. Milo's opinion was that this was, of course, referring to Christianity.

Now, many of the founding fathers were, of course, Christian, and many of, obviously, this country was deeply Christian for a very, very long time. Many of the founding fathers were considered to be deists, meaning they didn't really follow doctrine or anything like that. But this leads us to the big question, and we decided to have a much larger conversation about the whole issue: the end of the West. Can we survive without Christianity?

Over the past several decades, Christianity has been waning in this country. There is some bubbling up rumors and discussion about the resurgence of Christianity. People like Russell Brand getting being baptized and finding Jesus Christ seem to be influencing a lot of people towards religion, and even people I know who used to be staunch atheists, I would not call religious by any sense of the imagination, but they're much more open to the idea of these moral traditions. So I think this conversation will be particularly interesting. We got a handful of interesting fellas. Let's, uh, we'll start with you, good sir. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure, my name is Michael Jones. I run Inspiring Philosophy. I do a lot of Christian apologetics, arguing for a Christian worldview, arguing it's beneficial in multiple ways. I've done a lot of videos on that topic, real lately. Uh, lately, and I actually just debated Lawrence Krauss on a topic two weeks ago.

Right on that. Should be fun. We have another fine gentleman here, sir. My name is Justin. I run a channel called Deconstruction Zone on TikTok and YouTube, and I primarily debate religion. Um, I cross over into atheism quite a bit. Um, although I'm not a hard atheist, I, I'm agnostic to the position that some kind of a Creator could exist. Whether or not there's evidence for that Creator, I, I think is very much unsure. But, um, when it comes to like formalized organized religions, I'm definitely hard atheist on all the formalized religions.

To keep everyone on their toes. No slouching. Ian's here. Let's dance. Get up on them toes, dog. Um, I'm kind of where you are, Justin. I, or I was for a long time, agnostic, just plainly, like, show me the evidence and I'll start to believe it. Then I saw the cosmic microwave background radiation. Have you ever seen that stuff through radio telescopes? They map the universal radiation left over after the Big Bang. It looks like a neural net, and I'm like, all right, maybe this is like God's mind. So I'm much more open to the idea now.

But let's go. That's what I'm talking about right there. See, that's what we need. Otherwise, we'd be sitting here smoking C and cob pipes, talking about, you know, theology and such. You need to Ean to talk about cosmic background radiation. Yeah, here we go. Get your CBW coffee while you're at it. Yes, absolutely. Cas brew.com. Don't forget to also, uh, join Rumble Premium using promo code Tim10. The Green Room show, man, you got to check it out. It's, uh, getting R reviews, and I'm very, very, uh, impressed and, uh, grateful. The Green Room podcast is getting about 40,000 views per episode. I mean, that's, that's pretty nuts. That's amazing. If you want to see behind the scenes, setup for the show, conversations uncensored, sometimes it's pretty wild, sometimes pretty silly, you can go to, uh, rumble.com/timcastIRL, sign up for premium and watch it there. But let's, uh, in. Oh, don't forget Casper.

But instead of, uh, starting with cosmic radiation or whatever it is was talking about, instead of talking about, I mean, even God and, and God's existence, let's start with the moral traditions of Christianity, the foundation of this country. The question is, as this country becomes less and less Christian, and that seems to be the trend, though some say it may be reversing, will we survive as a country without this?

Well, I mean, first, we need to define what we mean by Western civilization. And generally, it's a civilization, not like Islamic civilization or Far Eastern civilizations. Uh, it's a civilization that is generally defined by, uh, adherence to ideas like democratic values, human rights, uh, found, uh, strong belief in modern science, and, uh, promoting of education. And if you read historians on this, like, for example, there's a great book called Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction. Every chapter has its own author. They've argued that a lot of these values come out of the Christian tradition. Uh, you're getting opinions of multiple scholars. You can also check out Samuel Moyn's book, Christian Human Rights, Tom Holland's book. He's an atheist, Dominion, that's his book. I've argued that a lot of these ideas about Western civilization that we have come out of the Christian tradition for a reason. So, can the West survive without Christian? I mean, like the West is built on Christian foundations. It'd be very hard to move beyond that and it not be the West at that point. So the question would be, would it even be the West if we moved away from Christian foundations and ideas?

I'm not a Christian. I guess I would be called a lapsed Catholic. But, uh, I, I do largely agree. I'm, I'm curious. I think you probably disagree.

Well, I think my question is not what do we mean by the West, but what do we mean by Christianity? Are we talking about the type that produces doomsday cults? The type that abuses children in mass? You know, the types that tried to change the Indian culture by killing the Indian but saving the man? Are we talking about the type that like want to relegate women to the kitchen? Like there's no like homogeneous view of Christianity. And for every good thing that you can pull from Christianity, I can probably pull five horrific things from Christianity, and the data points, and I can root it back to the Bible.

I would probably, uh, say when you look at the, the Constitution and the founding fathers' ideals, largely built upon, not necessarily, uh, uh, directly, um, overlapping with, but built from and overlapping with, uh, Christian war traditions. So obviously, we can look at any person anywhere at any time and find bad things about them. I can sit here and tell you why the police are evil, and I can show you every, every single evil thing the police and the feds have done. Ruby Ridge. Does that mean we should have no police? No. Can we survive without law enforcement? I honestly don't think we can.

So the issue then becomes the Christian moral tradition. And the example I like to give is, uh, the, the easiest, the easiest is the, um, right to a speedy trial, innocent till proven guilty. Which is, if you actually trace back the history of the Constitution and where the founding fathers got their ideas, that's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. So Blackstone's formulation was the inspiration for the right to a speedy trial, which was by Benjamin Franklin, built upon Blackstone's formulation, which is, uh, Blackstone said, it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer. Benjamin Franklin said, it is better that 100 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer. The founding fathers took it from a Christian perspective and gave and to the logical, uh, position of how can we actually prove that the, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Blackstone's formulation are the right thing. And of course, again, for those that don't know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, if there's but one righteous person, I will not destroy this town. Of course, then they got the righteous person out and then nuked that place. So, um, the logic applied by the founding fathers was, if you have a society where the citizen believes even if they are innocent, they will be punished, there is no incentive for the citizenry to be virtuous. In fact, the inverse, they will lie, cheat, and steal to avoid detection because it doesn't matter if you're good or not, and they'll have to lie to protect themselves. But if society tells the citizenry, even if you are guilty, we will try in every way imaginable to give you the appropriate chance to defend yourself, and if you are innocent, we would rather free 10 guilty people than see you suffer. The incentive, of course, then is to be virtuous because we're here to protect you. So that, that is just one element, but if you actually go through the, the, the Constitution as a whole, largely influenced by a Christian moral tradition. So that's my view.

Yeah, Christianity is bent and altered so many times, kind of to your point. It, it's changed. Like, obviously, you've had reformations. You have the Methodist Reformation. You had at one point with the, uh, with the, the Spanish Inquisition, where they would go into, I don't know if they would kick people's doors in, but they would execute people for not worshiping their cult. And there, I think there are excellent methodologies and messages from that book, the Christian Bible, except, but there's a lot of, of horrible cult worship adherence expectation, um, groupthink that's very, very dangerous, just in general, across all religion. And what do you want to call it? Mass formation of any kind. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm very much a cherry-picker in that sense, I guess.

When I think, let me ask real quick. He mentioned the Spanish Inquisition. I don't know if you are familiar with it. Oh, yeah. So there's a lot of propaganda about the Spanish Inquisition. A lot of it actually comes from a lot of Protestants later on. But if you read a book by an atheist named Nathan Johnstone, called The New Atheism, and he makes the point, like, we just can't say Christian, therefore Inquisition, because it comes about in the Middle Ages after a recent resurgence of rationalism and the need to place, uh, justice in the hands of humans more than anything. And then, of course, the propaganda aspect comes in. A Spanish Inquisitor would consider themselves a failure if they actually had to execute someone. They didn't want to do that. The goal was to actually convert someone. And often times they were far more rational than a lot of the secular governments of the time, like the kings and, and the nobility. Like Nathan Johnstone talks about in his book, like the inquisitors were reminding people, like, we're not just going to blame crop failures on witchcraft. There's probably a naturalistic explanation far more likely. So the, it's been blown way out of proportion. He points out it's often used to sort of attack Christianity. And we also have to remember there are multiple variables going into this idea. It wasn't just Christianity, therefore, uh, Inquisition. You know, we have to remember variables throughout the Middle Ages, political, secular, economic, various aspects are going into people's thinking, and it's going to affect the outcomes.

Sure. And as someone who's actually studied the history and brought some of it with me, uh, that's all wrong. So here's a book called The Bloody Theater. It's been renamed The Martyr's Mirror. It's a volume that's kept just by the Anabaptists, and there are thousands upon thousands of first accounts of people that were murdered by Protestants, murdered by Catholics, murdered by Zwingli, murdered in Geneva for simply baptizing people as adults. Whole families tied up, thrown into the river and drowned. Children drowned because their parents got baptized as adults. That's it.

There are thousands of firsthand accounts. So just to clarify, a person got baptized and they killed their children, or they killed them, or what? Whole family who killed them? Uh, typically the, the church leaders. So what you found was, there was a plague they called it in Europe of Anabaptism. It also went by the Waldensian plague. And the idea that you needed to stamp out heresy started with Constantine. And this book, I have decrees, edicts given all the way from the time of Constantine until the 15th century, saying we need to stamp out these heretics. And then they did it. They went out and did it. And there's good support in the Bible for it. God himself stamps out innocent alongside the guilty all the time. He says so. He brags about it. Exodus 34:7 says he visits the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children into the third and the fourth generation. In 2 Samuel chapter 24, God kills 70,000 Israelites for the sin of David. In 2 Samuel chapter 12, God has 10 of David's wives raped for David's sin.

I, I, I have a question. Do you, do you, uh, do you think American constitutional republicanism is a good thing?

Um, I think the American idea is a good thing. Whether or not we can root that in the Bible, I think is questionable.

No, I'm not asking that. I think, uh, do you think this country will survive if the Constitution were to be like abolished or destroyed? I guess it means, like, what do you mean by survive? Will, will there be a cohesive structure? Will there be, um, stable family growth, safety, security, prosperity, in the sense that we typically know it in the United States, if our form of government, which is constitutional republicanism, were to shatter overnight? Like, let's say we root out the, the rules and regulations, the teachings of, uh, uh, the founding fathers, and just said, gone. MH. Like, what would this country become?

Well, it's hard to know because, like, you create a vacuum, right? So, for example, when we found vacuums in the Near East, what filled it? You know, the Caliphate, uh, violent extremist groups. Um, if we found a political vacuum here in the States, it's hard to know what would actually fill it. But I think Americans, by and large, appreciate democracy. I would only assume that if our current form of government collapsed, it would reform as another democracy.

You think, do you think, would you consider that we should intentionally get rid of our, our current structure of government, or do you think it's a good thing?

How many? I have no problems with our structure of government.

How many children have been slaughtered and murdered in the name of our constitutional republic?

Oh, I don't know. But I, I know there are are millions of children that have been brutally raped by the church. Certainly. And I don't disagree with that. I'm asking you, how many people have, how many children have been murdered in the name of American constitutional republicanism?

It's quite a bit. It's a hefty number. I mean, it's probably in the millions. And so my issue there is looking at the worst vices and failures.

Are you talking about American children?

I'm talking about children all around the world from drone strikes, wars. You mean? I don't, I don't think a, a drone strike in Yemen that kills an American, uh, citizen who's 16 years old by Barack Obama was a war. We didn't declare war on that place. We had a drone strike. But this was in the name of American, the American government, the system that we believe is this moral and virtuous system. And George Bush, biblical justification for it. George Bush thought Ezekiel 28 was playing out and he needed to invade. Obama, Barack Obama's the guy who blew up a bunch of kids.

I agree. And my point is, I don't look at the United States, the Constitution, the founding fathers, and say, oh, a bunch of evil people over a long period of time murdered millions of children. I say, wow, there's evil people. We need to stop. So my point here is, I bring this up because we're asking a question about moral traditions on how they should be enacted, not did you know that in 1428, a bunch of evil people tortured people? It's like, certainly they did. And every culture, everywhere, did it. I mean, let's go to Japan and talk about how they raped and enslaved the Koreans. Does that mean that the, the honor of the samurai or whatever, or the Bushido, is should be completely thrown out? Or is it a good structure for people to abide by? The question and the challenge we face is, every tradition, every structure, every, every government, moral framework commits atrocities. Every single one of them. So we're talking about comparing the the core values of a moral tradition to another one, or a lack thereof.

What are the core values of Christianity? Because my reading in the Bible is that the core value of Christianity is that men are more, uh, more equal than women, men are higher status, slavery is okay, genocides okay.

So, so on that note, I mean, that's your reading. It's not, not important about what your reading is. It's about what's important is the effects that Christianity has actually created. It's actually brought about. Absolutely. It's about what the Bible says. Christianity is based on the book. Talking. And the book says slavery is okay. You can buy and sell slaves at.

Let me continue. It's about the actual effects. Most people throughout history are not going to agree with your interpretation. There's a reason the abolitionists came out through the Christian movement. It definitely did. Absolutely. We're burning crosses on people's yards even after abolition. The Christians were quoting the Bible to endorse slavery. Are you going to let me finish? Go ahead. Now. Go. So, uh, yes, people justified slavery in every culture. Something weird started happening in Europe, and then through the American tradition, is that people started saying, no, slavery should be abolished. When there are reasons, if you read John Coffee, if you read Robert Fogle, who is not a Christian, Ben Wright, the abolitionists were very much arguing from the Christian tradition that it should be abolished. Did Christians try to justify slavery? Absolutely. Everyone everywhere tried to justify slavery. But surprisingly, as historians will note on this issue, over time, through the Christian tradition, they started saying, hey, there are certain things in the Bible which demand that we end slavery. So now, this is again, what most historians will say, out of the Christian tradition, we see a strong abolitionist movement. Who, these early abolitionists were setting biblical verses, biblical values for their reason to end slavery. I don't. The enslavers. And John Brown, who was deeply motivated by Christianity, walked up to slavery and blasted them in the face without question, murdering tons of people and, and, uh, the taking of Harper's Ferry. The most famous moment, people don't realize John Brown and his sons and his and his gang were going through Kansas and straight up murdering people without question because they said, you are, you are an affront to God. MH. So we can talk about the abolitionists like it's remarkable to me. You go to the casino down the street, and they've got $25 chips with John Brown held as a hero, despite the fact that he was hanged for treason. And I'm like, look, man, I appreciate the abolitionist stuff, but I don't know that I'd ever get behind a guy who would walk up to a random person and put a, and blow his face off. Like, that's not the kind of world. But that was Christianity, right? Obviously, this country was like 99% Christian at the time. That meant that abolitionists, and the obviously they were all Christians. Nobody gets credit. Yeah, no, you don't get credit for using the Bible to abolish it. In fact, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, said, who gave them the right to decide that it's a sin? By what standard do they measure it? Not the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, imposes obligations in its connection that recognizes in that recognition. Not the Bible. It justifies it. And then he says later, it is not the cause of Christianity. It cannot be, for servitude is the only agency through which Christianity has reached the degraded race, the only means by which they have been civilized and elevated. And church fathers all through history said the same thing. Basil said it, Ambrose said it, through dozens of church fathers and popes who all said that slavery was the means by which we're going to bring these heathen races to Christianity because Leviticus 25 says so.

But, but, but it's a moot point. Christians also abolished slavery. Nobody gets credit for it. So therefore, it's not of Christianity. It's, it's, it's moot. We can sit here and be like, did you know that Christians abolished slavery? Sure. They also did it too, okay? It's zero. What's the next point, right? But the justification for it is in the Bible. That's what I'm saying. And, and every, every, every country, every nation, every people in the world had slavery. To this, the North, uh, the North African slave trade has been reignited due to the operations of American constitutional republicanism. So if we're going to talk about who's at fault for slavery right now, it's the American democratic system. Should we abolish it? I don't think so. But it is the absolute fault of Western NATO countries who are not abiding by some religious doctrine, who blew the crap out of Libya, reigniting North Atlantic slave, uh, I'm sorry, the North African slave trade. So history shows us everybody did slavery. Christians did too. Christians justified slavery at the time. Muslims did too. Christians abolished slavery, and then Western constitutional republicanism reignited slavery. And so I'm not going to sit here and argue that the Constitution in America is bad. I think it's a great country with evil people wielding us like a tool to evil ends. And again, we go back to my point. Everyone justified slavery from their traditions in the ancient world. Why do we now think slavery is wrong today? Go back and read what the abolitionists were doing. There was something in Christianity that started. Did most people early on try to justify it? Absolutely. But the abolitionists were not arguing from in light stat ideas, secular ideas. I mean, one of the earliest anti-slavery checks is called The Selling of Joseph for a reason. They were arguing from the Christian tradition, okay? So there was something moving within Christianity that Tom Holland talks about that did eventually lead to this new change in our ethics and our understanding of slavery that did get abolished, that that did lead to its abolishing it. So there was something within it that did lead. It didn't happen in Muslim countries, didn't happen in the Far East. Even early enlightened thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume are trying to justify slavery. So I mean, like everyone tried to justify slavery. The question we need to ask is, what motivated the abolitionists? And you can again say, yeah, Christians did justify slavery. That doesn't challenge the fact that what the abolitionists were using and arguing from, right?

But there have been multiple societies that abolished slavery many thousands of years prior to the US. There was a dynasty in China in the BC era that abolished slavery for a time period. There was a leader in India for a period of a couple hundred years where slavery was abolished. There were Stoics in Greece that were abolitionists.

No, there weren't. There weren't any Stoics. There actually was Seneca. Epic. No, you did not say Seneca was for example, an early slave. Absolutely advocated for getting rid of slavery. Said it was an immoral institution. There, another. He said it was immoral. He didn't say it should go away. Evil. There was quite a few Stoics that agreed with him. They agreed slavery was bad, but they didn't call for abolition. The first person that called for the abolition of slavery, Gregory of Nyssa. That is wrong. Now, Gregory is the first. He's the first Christian that talked about abolishing slavery, but he was outruled by the other church fathers. The other church fathers disagreed with him.

No, no, he is the first person in history to call for abolition. He certainly is not the first person in history. In fact, I, I already quoted you. There's the, I think the, the Wei dynasty in China, and then there's another dynasty in India that abolished it. Universal abolition. That was that was universal abolition.

I have a fact check. Seneca did not explicitly advocate for abolishing slavery. While he criticized mistreatment of slaves and encouraged, encouraged humane treatment, he accepted slavery as a social institution. The sources for this are Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 47, and Seneca, De Beneficiis, Book 3, Chapter 18. And then there is a book in 1994 discussing Rome's attitudes towards slavery called Bradley Keith, Slavery and Society in Rome. Would he have been, Seneca have been executed if he'd called for the abolition of it? I think executed. It's just Kyle Harper talks about this in his book. It just, no one even questioned it. It's like trying to say, could we get rid of water or money? Yeah, they just knew that this was just something that could never go away.

Money's a really good example. I, I think people need to understand, uh, when we talk about slavery in the United States, most people, they envision, uh, a black man in a field being beaten by a slave owner, and they don't realize how pervasive and widespread the institution of slavery was beyond farming the South. There were cobblers, black men who were trained to make shoes, who worked in cities and ran shoe stores where they transacted. But slavery meant that they had no legal rights. That means there was a person who owned them, and they wanted them to do this job. There's also an important factor in that they were depending on, uh, what the, the, the slave owner or the slave master wanted. They could make money for themselves. And in fact, Frederick Douglass bought his own freedom and then later bought the freedom of his wife and his child. It shouldn't have happened that way. No, but, and obviously slavery is bad. The reason I bring this up is the, uh, I kind of lost my train of thought. The, oh, I'm sorry. Slavery was viewed as exactly as we would view something like money, an economic institution that exists and is a function of government. And then slowly over time, sentiments towards it started to shift in the direction, and it ended up with a very bloody war in the United States. Now, for, for other, like, like the UK, they basically said, we're ending slavery, and then we're going to have to pay back everybody for taking their slaves away from them. They did a big debt, and then they ended up paying. It took, I don't know, it took them like a hundred years to pay off the. It took a good, you know, hundred years. It started early with like Anabaptists and Methodists working together, and eventually they started to get legislation passed. They got rid of the slave trade in some new territories under William Penn, and then shortly after they, they abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire, and then a couple decades later, they emancipated slaves. So it was a slow process.

Let's, we'll shift a little bit now. I'll, I'll jump to my good friend Bill Maher. All go for it. Before you get too far, the the emperor, uh, that abolished slavery, um, in, uh, China was not Wei, it was Wang. I apologize for that. And, uh, the in that was in, in the first century. In India, uh, hundreds of years before that, there was Ashoka who abolished slavery. Now, it came back years later, but early abolitionists existed throughout the world. So, uh, I, I want to shift to our good friend Bill Maher. Not really a good friend, but he's not that bad. He's all right. Obviously, he made that documentary, Religulous, and, you know, he goes around challenging people's views and things as such. And, uh, that's always okay. The, uh, the reason I bring him up is that Dennis Prager made a good example, uh, uh, he has a good example of moral tradition and, and where you go when you destroy it. He calls it, I think he calls it, I always get it wrong, cut stem politics, something like this, where he basically says you have this the root of a society, which in his view is the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. He's Jewish, obviously. And it grows into this beautiful flower that someone then cuts from the stem and holds up in the air and shows everyone how beautiful it is. But, you know, that once it's cut from its roots, it will eventually start to die. And that's where we're at right now. You can hold up this beautiful American society, but as in his view, Judeo-Christian values wane, it eventually is going to die.

I think, uh, I think it's a really good point. I think what we're seeing now with the, the, the future generations, the current generations, and their movement dramatically away from a, a, I mean, to be honest, any kind of moral tradition. Though I don't think all moral traditions are good. Um, uh, there are some that are in the East that they chop your hands off and things like that. I'm not a fan of. But the, the moral tradition we have in this country about honoring your parents, about, uh, uh, not stealing, not killing, is slowly disappearing. And I would say largely built in the Ten Commandments. And what we're getting in its wake is people who fear nothing, care for nothing. We're getting, uh, these people are ramming cars into department stores in Chicago. It's happened so many times that they've put up barriers in front of, uh, in Mag Mile. My friends who live in Chicago are like, you can't even go there anymore. 13-year-old kid pulled a gun, started shooting people in a shopping district. How is this happening? Well, you've ripped people from any kind of moral tradition, any kind of social fear or cultural consequence, or for many people, any kind of spiritual consequence.

I find, I find that you, a lot of the great things from Christianity, we've learned them, and then now you're supposed to like, so you learn a great piece of information from a seminar somewhere, you take that information, you integrate it into your life, you create books, you create empires with that information in it, and then that inform, that information is redistributed. That doesn't mean everyone needs to go to that seminar you went to 30 years ago where you learned this. So people that are obsessed with this book and worshiping some dude is like, bro, good luck trying to get half the world to worship a guy. It's insane. We shouldn't be worshiping each other, first of all. But the ideas need to be integrated into society. Some of these really good ones, like, I think the Ten Commandments are fascinating. I think they, on that, on that prior to the Bible and outside of the Bible. And countries that were largely Christian, like the Scandinavian countries, were largely Lutheran. They have had their own state church that are now below 50% population. As it turns out, like their citizens' rates, their crime rates, all lower in Scandinavia than what we have here. And they've largely depopulated the church.

Sweden would like to have a word with you. Well, Sweden's importing Muslims, which is part of the problem. And that that goes back to the main problem. But, but I got to stress the children, the children. The problem that Sweden is facing is that they brought in Somali refugees in the '90s who had children who are not overtly religious in any capacity. And the crime that they're witnessing is gang-related violence with grenade attacks. They've, they've, they've collected old weapons from the Balkan Wars and they're throwing grenades at each other. They're getting fully automatic weapons, and it's completely unrelated to religion. And why did they, though? That we need to ask that question. It's because it's because secularism has led to the abysmal bad birth rates. Secularism, in like studies like Secularism and Fertility Worldwide, notes that secularism is is correlating with population stagnation, including population decline. That's why they're importing a lot of people. I, I don't think in the '90s, Sweden, I could be wrong, but I don't think the importing of Somali refugees, uh, and migrants was specifically related to a low population. They had declining birth rates for many decades.

The Bible tells you not to have kids. Jesus himself says it's better for you to be a eunuch for the gospel. Paul advocates in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 that if you're married, it, it's better that you remain as though you're not married because the present world is coming to an end. He says, if you're single, stay single. I would rather you be like me, be unmarried to serve.

Are we talking about whether Christianity is true, or the effects of Christian teaching in the Bible that says you should have kids? Are we talking about whether Christianity is true, or the effects of Christianity? What I'm saying is, we're rooting this to what the book says. Christianity is rooted in the book. And you're saying, listen, because like Christianity is diminishing, that's causing lower birth rates. But that's not actually the case. There's nothing in Christianity that teaches you to have kids.

I do think that's very selective because you are ignoring "be fruitful and multiply." I mean, if we're going to say Jewish teaching of the Christian Bible, and it's slavery, but you, but you wouldn't let me use slavery. You would say, no, that's not in the New Testament. But on the point made on slavery was that everybody did it. Christians did it. Christians abolished it. Christians supported it. Christians opposed it. So it's, but the unable God says to do it. That's the problem. And then they, Christians eventually said, actually, that actually defies some of the teachings. They get rid of it. I think it's a moot point to claim. But there's no teaching that says you can't own slaves. Not a single word of the Bible says that owning a slave is a sin. Again, it's not about whether Christianity is true, it's about the actual effects we see in society. You may think your first point, yeah, you may think the Bible will cause. Let's divorce Christianity from the Bible. I'm all for it. But let the sooner we can do that, the sooner it becomes a less, the sooner it's less toxic religion.

I, I, I just want to make this one point before we move on is that you've, you've selected from the Bible only one thing to support your your claim. You didn't have to do that. You could have literally said, I do know that the Bible both says to have kids and not to have kids. But then there's no argument to be made. So it seems like you did it intentionally.

I didn't do it intentionally. In the New Testament, that's the Christian doctrine. The last thing that is said about having families is to not do it. What does it specifically say? It says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, that the present form of the world is coming to an end. In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus advocates for people being eunuchs for the gospel. Let me find it real quick. And Paul also says just before that, this is my own word, not a word from the Lord, said to him, if such is the case, talking about divorce, saying that you can't remarry a woman. If such is the case of a man and a wife, it is better to not marry. Then he said to them, not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can. And then in First Corinthians, sounds like you're twisting what that actually is. It doesn't say he says it doesn't say to all people everywhere, don't have kids. I never said this. What it says, Jesus says, but the Bible does say, be fruitful. Anyone accept this who can. Accept what? That it's better to be a eunuch for the sake of the gospel. Anyone who can. Anyone who can accept it. Which is why in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul himself advocates for people remaining single. If you're single, remain single. And why is that the case? Because the present form of the world is about to end. Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 7:8, to the unmarried and to the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. It's good, he says. It can be a good thing. But he also says, hey, if you're burning with passion, get married. So they never say you should never not marry. I never said that. I never said that the Bible says you should never get married. If you're burning with passion, if you can't control yourself, it's, it's okay to get married. Okay? So Paul and Jesus both advocated for limiting your actual family activities. Okay? And again, we're not talking about whether Christianity is true. We're talking about the actual effects it's created. So, for example, a longtime sociologist thought that secularism would actually increase democratic values. And recently, no, social and political scientists like John Compton have been saying, no, actually, we're seeing the opposite. It's actually diminishing support for democratic values. So sometimes we think from armchair sociology, X, Y, and Z is going to cause so and so. But no, we actually, Christianity does cause sustainable population and birth rates.

Well, let's, let's, that's the hard question, I suppose. Because, you know, instead of discussing whether the Bible is real, like you were saying, if Christianity leaves you, we were talking about, uh, uh, power vacuums. Like, if the constitutional republic were to fall, what happens to this country? If Christianity, let's say Christianity overnight, within like a span of a few months, people just largely abandoned it and said, we're, we're completely over this. Do you believe that there would be no new moral frame, like spiritual-based moral framework, or do you think a different one may move in?

Oh, there certainly would be. So a lot of the young people that are moving away from Christianity are actually moving into like different forms of spiritualism. So, it's not like they're leaving Christianity and going to atheism, like that's something that I did, but that's not something that's actually happening in mass. So young people are actually remaining quite spiritual. And believe it or not, there's a really weird crossover right now between people deconverting from Christianity actually moving into what we might call like Eastern religions, for example, like Buddhism. And Buddhism actually has a lot of the same core tenets as Christianity. So if you look at the core tenets of Buddhism, they believe in charity, they believe in, um, in being kind to your neighbors, you know? So like, there's certainly, uh, it's not like we're creating an open vacuum for all hell to break loose. Like people are still going to gravitate towards structure because the human mind desires structure.

So is Islam, uh, is projected to be the fastest growing religion in the United States as Christianity declines? And that's a huge problem. That is a huge problem. And why are we seeing that? Because we can see in real time what secularism, the secularization of America and Europe is doing. Declining birth rates, lower levels of charity. In fact, John Compton and Philip Gorski, Roger Brubaker have pointed out as Christianity has been declining, we're seeing a less value and appreciation for democratic values, more rise of right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism. This is coming out of the actual data we're seeing.

Let me, let me, let me just. How does the data point to less Christianity, more totalitarianism? That's not true in any of the other countries. Let me, let me, let me just. If you just look at the, the other democratic nations that have de-Christianized, we're not seeing that they're being, they're going into extremism. So almost all see authoritarianism in Europe. Denmark, Norway. I'm sorry, you, you need to go to those countries. They call Sweden the North Korea of the North. So you're, you're picking on Sweden, but have you looked at any of the other countries?

I did. Germany. And, uh, because they, they rate very well on the democratic and the happiness scale every single year. Complete, utter BS, just like lying to you, just like North Korea does. Right? The people of North Korea vote for Kim Jong-un 98% every single time. The media in these countries is homogeneous and under deep authoritarian control to the point where when I went there to post YouTube videos, we actually had spooks from the government spying on our hotel rooms. That's when we went to one location. And, and don't get me wrong, I've been in Norway and Bergen as well. It's not identical, but it is very, very similar in how the media is controlled and how people, they call them brainwashed in the Scandinavian countries. I went, I went to, I went to Sweden, and the first thing I did was I interviewed a Green Party leftist politician who seemed very reasonable. They all praised me and cheered for me unanimously across all the media. We went to Rinkeby and got attacked by the children of Somali migrants. I don't say attacked, they were screaming at us, and the police warned us they would start throwing stones and they'd escort us out. I said, okay. When I tweeted that, instantly the entire media apparatus of the country turned on me. The entire narrative inverted, and they were saying I was a crackpot, Alex Jones conspiracy theorist. They, when I started talking to people outside the country, they said, Sweden's of course the worst, but the rest of these countries operate under this authoritarian homogeneous culture much like, and I, and I hate to go Godwin's Law, it isn't so much that the government comes to you and beats you to death or throws you in a camp. The, the, the homogeneity and the authoritarianism they have is if you speak out, you will have no money, you will have no home, and you will never work again. And so everybody falls in line and no one dares speak about it.

Which is weird because the data says that they're happier, they live longer, they're healthier.

Well, I can address that. Absolutely true. There was a, one of the most famous studies on choice and happiness was they brought people into a, they pitched a bunch of people, would you like to do a study? Everybody says yes, right? They get their, their, their, their two groups, their control group and their, their study group. And they said the study is to fill out this questionnaire. When you're done, you'll get a free t-shirt. When everybody fills out the questionnaire, what they didn't realize, the real study was as they're leaving, one group was handed a free white t-shirt. They said, thank you. The other group was told, you can have the green, white, or blue t-shirt. Then they got to choose. As they were walking, they said, please rate your satisfaction with your experience here. Guess what? The people who, who got to choose the color of shirt they wanted rated higher levels of unhappiness because they were unsure of themselves. That was actually a surprising finding. Which they found as I, I would say as Harriet Tubman said, to go back to slavery, I have freed many slaves. I would have freed many more if only they knew they were slaves. Ignorance is bliss. I don't, I think unhappiness comes with freedom and hard choices being made.

To, to look at the, what company did that survey? This is an old internet trope on the, the, the. Okay, so you're not referring to any methodology that's actually being used by, like, the World Happiness Index that's been doing this for decades. So you're, you're doing credentialism and an appeal to authority.

No, I'm just saying that appeal to authority. You're saying that the way they're doing the studies is improper. I want to know who's doing it that way. Who, what's the, how are they doing the study? I'm asking you. You're saying that the way they're conducting the surveys. I didn't say that. I'm asking who's doing it that way. You brought up those surveys. I did. Okay. So what do they do? How do they, how do they write? Again, I, I don't know theology. So let's just claim to know. Let's just ignore that you brought a point you don't even understand because that makes you look really dumb.

The other thing about these happiness studies is I never cite them. I can show you studies that say Christians claim they're happy. You're just asking people, they're happy. And like, if you go to some place like Japan, most people are going to say no because that's their cultural heritage. It's too much, you're claiming too much honor to say you're happy. You go to Scandinavia, it's the cultural norm to say you're happy, even if you're not. So those a lot of those studies, they're not that well designed because you just can ask people. You can't measure happiness, you just have to ask someone. So I avoid those studies for that very reason.

But they rank health outcomes and other. It's not just a survey that the, when, when they do the surveys, it's not just, are you happy? So the World Happiness Index is the most famous one. They're not just asking, are you happy? They're actually looking.

At like, overall health predictors, as well. Obesity, diet, smoking, exercise. There's all kinds of stuff that they're actually looking for. The what gets published in the news is like, "Hey, here are the happy countries." But if you actually look at the data points they're collecting, they're collecting all kinds of data points. Longevity, life expectancy, all kinds of the data shows up in those reports. Those reports are hundreds of pages long. You only get one paragraph in the news. I've got one right here. Did you read it in its entirety? I've read them in their entirety before, but you don't know the methodology. These are secular. I can find you the methodology, I'm sure. Simply don't come at me and question my my stances and opinions on things based on methodology if you haven't done it yourself.

That just, there's also a difference between happiness and fulfillment. Like, somebody might say, "Hey, today we gave you a sticker," and you'd be like, "Oh, I'm happy." But like, "I'm so lonely when I go home. I'm not fulfilled in life." But for a moment, I was happy. Like, happiness comes and goes. It's fleeting. And if you're, you're feeling happy when you fill out that survey, but like, are they fulfilled? These people living under the totalitarian boot? Do they know they are?

This the thing about Christianity, man. It used to be counterculture. It used to be a revolutionary to be a Christian. You used to get hunted down by the government for being a Christian. Then it became the government. It became the totalitarian regime. So like, what are we even we talking about? Christian? This is another, going back to the topic, but like, what are we, what version of it do we want? There, there's, there's two principal religions that have replaced Christianity as it's waned. The first, obviously, being Islam, as it's projected to be the fastest growing. Not quite the fastest growing just yet, but globally, I believe it is. And the other, obviously, was, I guess we would refer to as wokeness. As Christianity started to wane among Millennials, predominantly, less so among Gen X and Boomers, they started to adopt this, what we called the non-theistic religion. That is, they had tenants, they had priests, they had institutional power structures. And you ended up getting what was effectively Chapel to wokeness in every major business. Diversity Chiefs. These people had no coherent logic. They still don't. We are seeing this now be pushed back and shoved aside, particularly by a large group of Christians and moderates. But wokeness was an emergent religion that began to replace Christianity.

And the issue then, we end up seeing with people in, if you take a look at these NSA whistleblower conversations, Chris Ruf was bringing up. Everybody was happy at work. Everybody was totally fine with hiring based on race. Everybody was totally fine with the fact that instead of actually doing your job at your accounting firm, you were having meetings on whether you had sex with men or women. Well, clearly that's not true. People were deeply terrified of it, but nobody would speak up. So we ended up getting these polls. We ended up getting all this information suggesting Donald Trump couldn't win an election. And then somehow he did twice. Because clearly, whatever they were tracking wasn't actually represented what people felt on the inside. No, what happened was, you had a deeply authoritarian religious institution, non-intersectionality or whatever they want to call it, where people were terrified that if they spoke up against it, they would actually lose their livelihoods. There was no, there was no enforcement mechanism codified in law. There were no police who were going to do it. You just knew that if you were at work and you said, "Hey man, I don't think we should hire based on who this guy's," they would be like, "You're fired, and you'll never get a promotion again." So people shut up and said, "Everything's great. I'm happy." And they voted for Donald Trump.

I'm thinking about Nazism right now, and I want to know what you guys think about this. Cuz it sort of seems like, um, a de facto religion. Nazism, this obsessive cult worship of their, of their, their prophet, Hitler. And whatever. But at the same time, it was like a Christian political movement. They call themselves Christian. They, they identify Christianity. So it wasn't like Christianity seeped, fell away, and then something else seeped in. But it's like multiple cult mentalities started to. So what's up with that? So if you read, like, again, like Nathan Johnson or other, like, uh, historians about Nazis, there's so much debate about what they believed because Hitler said so many contradictory things. Yeah, there's no unified belief. No. The majority is that, at least, was Nazism was a political religion. The, the new savior becomes Hitler. What you worship is Aryanism, this white German idea, identity. And so this is a political religion. It's ter- what you were talking about with wokeism earlier. It becomes this political religion. But they did form a church. Church of the Third Reich was a real church formed by the Third Reich. They called it positive Christianity, between Catholic and Protestant. And this new idea was just, again, it was just a neo-Marxian view. And this is why I brought up, uh, uh, again, I said I don't want to go into Godwin's Law, but the reason I brought it up is when people like to refer to the Nazis as socialists, that's not true. But what is true is they use social enforcement to ensure that people were construct- were working towards the goals of the Nazi party. So, uh, it's been a long time since I read this. I read, I read a, a, a, I guess a book, I don't know, a PhD thesis review of the economics, largely because people were like, "They're saying they're socialists." And the summary is basically, no, they weren't forced the way the Communists were. But if you were a steel, if you were a factor with the means of producing steel, the Nazi party would say, "What do you mean you're not producing steel for us? You don't oppose our government, do you?" And everyone would say, "No, no, no, no. We'll do whatever you say." So everyone seemed to be just choosing to do things, despite the fact they're actually doing it because they knew they'd be murdered, killed, or thrown in camps. Mhm. It was a political religion, authoritarian in nature. They would call themselves positive Christians on purpose because they didn't want to be known as Protestant or Catholic Christians. And positive Christianity, like, as they talk about this in the book, "The Holy Reich," was Jesus now becomes a white Aryan. The atonement is thrown out. The Old Testament is thrown out. Anything Jewish is thrown out. It became just basically this weird cult that was just political, purely nature.

Let's talk about, you know, modern America right now. And I like to use Bill Maher as a good example because he's a late 60s, childless, um, I guess the rumors are about him. I, I don't mean to be a dick, but that he gets around. And, uh, why don't we see strong moral values in atheists and agnostics in this country the same way we we see it in Christians? Well, I mean, I, I think that's an interesting question. For one thing, I don't want to say all atheists. How do you quantify that? I don't want to say all atheists are like that. But what we do see is definitely this new cultural norm that that Bill Maher's lifestyle is just a good thing. It's good to be single, childless, and in your 60s or 70s. And that's a problem, ultimately, for many reasons. I would, I would quantify it rather informally, I guess, admittedly, in that when you look to the prominent speakers on the right, Ashley St. Clair is getting absolutely annihilated by the Christian conservatives. And Elon, despite Elon helping Donald Trump win, they're, they're getting absolutely annihilated for having all these kids. For Ashley, for having a kid with Elon, for having kids out of wedlock. And then you look at, get most of the prominent, not all, not all, obviously, not, not, you know, I'm not going to give Trump credit for being a great, you know, traditionally moral man or whatever. He has good kids, though. But, uh, you take a look at these typical conservative individuals, you find they have kids, they talk about protecting children, they talk about, uh, going to church, having communal values. You don't see that reflected in the atheists. In fact, and again, I'm not saying all atheists, I'm not saying all Christians. They, people work here, obviously, atheist, atheist or agnostic, and they're good friends, and they're good moral people. But it's not, it, it seems to be tendencies in, in the inverse direction. That is, the Christian conservative commentators tend to have kids, go to church, teach responsibility, meritocracy, and things like this. And prominent atheists tend to say things like, "Don't have family, get, take whatever you want, wake up, masturbate, die alone." And you end up seeing now, predominantly among the left, individuals who are, and they're all atheist, agnostic, advocating for giving children pornography in schools, drag queen story hour, and things that are destructive and amoral. These are tendencies, not necessarily quantified in any hard data, I'll admit.

Well, I mean, just look at the culture that comes out of these different ideas of like a secular atheist view. For people that are in academia or the high levels of media, they have a purpose in society. But you tell the common man, "Hey, you're only going to live a good 70 years and you'll die." So just have as much fun. The common man is left with basically hedonism as his only fulfilling desire. Whereas if you go to Christianity, you tell the poorest of the poor, "The creator of the universe died for you so that you can have eternal life." You're going to have motivations to be a moral person, to return love to the creator that gave to you, and to actually do what he said, like, "Be fruitful and multiply." Which is weird, because the most, like, statistically likely place that you're going to get sexually assaulted is at a church. And that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. It's almost like Christian values isn't preventing kids from getting raped. And once again, you're not making an argument. There is true. 30, 30% of all rape cases for children under the age of 18 happened church-related. 30. I'm, I'm going to respond to that by saying, blah, blah, blah, because the point we are making is that in prominent pop culture, in politics, there's a tendency among the right, Christian conservatives, not to be raping children. And there's a tendency among the left to, they keep doing it. It's weird. It's weird. It's weird that the, the argument you're making, and you're saying, "Hey, look at, look at this instance of bad people doing bad things." I agree. Let's talk about the tendencies when it comes to like the church abusing children, which I agree, over historically, it seems to have. I think it's whenever you put a lot of kids in, in an area like daycare or something, there's just going to be a tendency for a lot of those kids to get abused because that's where kids are congregating. And for thousands of years, it was at church. It's correlative, not causative. Anna Suter talks about this. But hold on. 31%. Again, you are changing the subject because you didn't have an answer. Your subject was Christian morals going away because of atheism. But in Christian circles, they're still raping children today. So let's pause. And once again, I will say, you are not actually addressing what we were just talking about. I'm literally addressing it right now. You're saying that atheists don't have moral systems. They don't. But neither do Christians. Christians do. What, what is a Christian moral system? Find me in the Bible where I can find a Christian moral system. Comes that people can, you find me outside the Bible where those exist? Because they exist in the 42 laws of Ma. They exist in the Ten Commandments. Not exist in the 42 laws of. That's a big conspir- almost every single commandment that you'll find in the 10, every single culture. I didn't. This is, this isn't, this is unique to Christianity. I didn't say it was. Once again, you're not. The 10th commandment says not to covet your neighbor's slave. Atheists and agnostics don't have that moral structure. No, we don't have a God-given moral structure. It's a subjective moral structure. In fact, American atheists actually have a loose Christian moral structure, and that's a fact. That's why, absolutely. That's what we're talking about with cut, cut, stem, polit, cut, cut, stem ideology or whatever, or politics, whatever. Uh, I'm sorry, Dennis Prager, for for getting the name wrong every single time. Bill Maher is a great example. The man who believes in Blackstone's formulation, who believes in free speech, but can't tell you where it came from. That doesn't exist in China. Those values don't exist in China. They have a completely different moral tradition. Now, back to the point we were making, which is why is there a tendency among conservative Christians to believe in responsibility, meritocracy, and planting trees whose shade you know you will never sit beneath? And among atheists and agnostics in the United States, there's a tendency to say, "Wake up, do drugs, and masturbate, and give children porn." I'm seeing that data. It's, it's everywhere you go in the news. Setting a cultural phenomenon. We, we have a cultural phenomenon where Emma Vigland of the Majority Report came on this show and said that it is good that teachers, she believes, were giving books about scat to children. I'm like, how do you have this? The Majority Report, which I think is the, the 48th biggest live show on the internet, advocating for giving children kink porn. And how, how is it that in schools across this country, it is atheists and agnostics that have been giving children kink porn and teaching them how to, how to bang each other up the butt? And in fact, in Chicago, a teacher gave children a book that explained them how to use Grindr, 12-year-olds, to have anonymous gay sex with adult men. The parents called the police. Honor. I understand that's an anecdote. I understand the church also had had abuse. The tendency among prominent conservative personalities supporting Donald Trump, supporting Republic, the Republican party, or whatever it may be, as of the past decade or so, leans towards, "Whoa, we need to do things that create a better society." The other side, you have people like Chelsea Handler coming out and saying, "I wake up, I smoke pot, I masturbate, and I go to bed." There is a destructive element associated with atheists and agnostics and a, and a protective and creative element associated with the right. It's not that Christians are perfect people. There's a lot of evil, a lot of evil people. Donald Trump is not a guy who got married and then had a handful of kid, handful of kids with one woman. He had a bunch of baby mamas, with all due respect. Somehow, you know, not trying to be a dick, he raised a bunch of really good kids. The Trump family seems to be pretty great. Still not very virtuous. Elon Musk, working with Donald Trump, not very virtuous. But on the left, you have prominent, the, the prominent individuals are directly advocating for things that are destructive to society in any capacity. So are prominent Christians have been doing it for a long time. You're just saying why. I'm saying today, you're saying there are prominent atheists who have views that we don't like. But I can do the same thing. Prominent Christians, not that we don't like, that are doing things that are destructive, that are, that are, uh, uh, right. Which is why I said there's a tendency. If you, if you are a Trump-supporting personality, say you're Ashley St. Clair, and then you hook up with Elon Musk and have a baby out of wedlock, she is getting mercilessly attacked. Mercilessly. I mean, they're leaking messages, former friends are posting her screenshots of chats they've had. It is wrong. What you did is wrong. They are saying you can't do this. It's destructive. It's bad. You have done something wrong. Liberals tending to be atheist or otherwise are saying, "Who cares? Who cares if you have a dad who, who, who, who, who cares? Party, do drugs, don't have children, do whatever." It is a fact that those things lead to higher crime. This is one, this is one of the principal reasons Trump people thought would never win ended up winning. Where's the data point that correlates that? Which to which point that secularism leads to higher crime? I, as it turned out, there, there's lots of studies on it. And, and, and the point I'm bringing up is over the past 10 years, the, uh, over the past 30 years, the policies implemented in major cities, almost every major city run by Democrats, many of whom are not, they're not completely atheist, but overwhelmingly these cities are the places where they're bubbling up atheism, where the prominent personalities, celebrities or otherwise, are anti-Christian, where the universities are anti-Christian. These are where the policies are getting implemented where we see prisoners are being let out, violent criminals are being let to reoffend. An axe murderer was just released. It became a huge story. We're not seeing that rate of crime per capita in, uh, or even in its entirety in, uh, Christian Republican led cities. I think what you're, the point you're trying to make is that we see a different cultural idea. When Christians do horrible things all the time, absolutely. No one is denying that. Atheists do horrible things. No one's denying that. We're seeing different in terms of mentalities in these two groups. One is promoting a culture of, uh, destructiveness, is what you're trying to say. And one is promoting a culture that is pro-sociality. Do, when conservatives do something bad, they get attacked by their own group saying, "Stop doing this. It's destructive." Meanwhile, Bill Maher and people on the left are not attacking. They're saying, "That's just normal hedonism. It's great. Wonderful." And I think that the point you're trying to make is like, we see two different cultural phenomena coming out. And you're trying to ask, what's the difference? The, it is a tendency among the Christian right, and it's largely Christian, to say, "Hey, you shouldn't be morbidly obese. Stop eating garbage. Start exercising. And live a better life. Be virtuous. Be fruitful and multiply." They're more obese statistically in, in rural areas. However, what I'm talking about is the cultural phenomenon of body positivity. So, absolutely, there are people who are amoral or bad. In fact, it's actually, uh, it's, it's an interesting bell curve. The right has is more likely to be fit and more likely to be fat than liberals. Not according to data points I've looked at. The, well, then look them up again. The conservative right-wing, especially the Christian right-wing, are way more obese in almost every country. Just not what I said. Okay. Once again, it's a bell curve. People on the right, and particularly Christian conservatives, are more likely to be fit and more likely to be fat. That means it's the extreme ends, right? Bell curve. So, uh, you will find that, uh, this was a big talking point in 2018 or so when the corporate press kept running these stories saying, "Working out will make you right-wing." And it is true that people who tend to exercise more and more start to become more right-wing. And people who are already a right-wing, more conservative with moral traditional values, are more likely to exercise. But then you also do, it is true, find that they're more morbidly obese. People at the same time, meaning it's a wider bell curve than liberals. On the liberal side, you will find they advocate for and they cherish and they advertise morbid obesity to the point where they have the body positivity campaigns that conservatives will roast and make fun of. So there are lapsed moral individuals on the right, 100%. And there is social advocacy for destructive behaviors on the left. Or, or you could take a look at the transgender issue as well. Advocating for children to sterilize themselves or for parents to sterilize their children is not a Christian phenomenon. And that's also again going to cause decreased fertility rates for people on the left, for the atheist agnostic society of things. Meanwhile, on the Christian side, you have, uh, high fertility rates, replacement population, preventing mass migration of Islam coming in with their Sharia law and then ruining a lot of traditionally Christian countries. Horrible, honestly. Debate over, uh, can a nation survive? The debate is about does birth rates? Then that's the only factor. I mean, so that is such a, as long as we have more kids and let them get raped, it's better off. No one said that. You keep birth rate. Birth rate is hardly a argumentation for why we. Nobody is for kids getting raped. Like, no, no sane person trying to run a, a sound society is advocating for what you're claiming. That's a straw man. It makes it simplify. Like, kids without dads? Are we better off just having more kids? 60 million more kids, but they don't have dads? I don't think so. Can't survive. And the divorce rate inside the church is the same as the divorce rate outside of the church, unless you're Catholic. Catholics surprisingly stay married longer. But in Protestant religions, they don't. It's exactly the same inside Protestant religion than it is outside of Protestant religion. To be fair, the prominent, uh, uh, influencers that I refer to, they tend to be Catholic. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's interesting. Catholic % divorce rate. It's striking. Protestant is over 51%. So this is a Catholic versus Protestant debate. Let's get the. No, I'm saying is what I'm saying is like, there are so many indicators in a society like that we say are bad, like birth rates. We want good birth rates. Divorce rates. We want people to stay married longer. You know, uh, having Reagan's fault? Well, Reagan's fault. But I'm saying is, there's so many indicators of what is good in society that if we're just going to pick one and say, "Yeah, it's bad that birth rates are down." Well, guess what? You know, a lot of other countries have had worked on this. There have been countries that have now putting incentives in place to actually do tax cuts and pay people to have families. And we're starting to see payoffs for that. Just introducing a religion into a society doesn't fix the birth rate. No, we need more than that. Yeah, I, I think the issue for the West, particularly, is that you have, uh, community as country. And you had a community built upon a shared moral tradition, which is waning. And it's resulting in, largely among the secular atheists, uh, destructive, uh, destructive ends. That is, they have less kids, they're more likely to do drugs, they advocate, uh, or I should say, they they advocate for these things, whether they're doing more. Again, the right has a wider bell curve. There's probably a bunch of people in Appalachia that are Christian, but they're seriously harmed by the opioid addiction and things like that. But the birth rate may as well trump literally any other argument. If you don't have kids, you cease to exist. And if we are looking at right now, the, I think we've gone over these numbers so many times. It's like 1.85 among Christians in general. Catholics are way higher. And then you look at liberals, and it's down like 1.3. Give that 20 years, and the voting trend in this country is going to be Christian. In fact, the, with Muslims, with Islam on the rise, you are largely going to see, I think, at a certain point, maybe in the next 50 years, depending on technology, who knows, it's going to be a Christian-Islam voting block. Disagrees with each other on a lot of issues, but agrees with each other on more than the liberals do. And the liberals just cease to exist. What I'm concerned with is that if Christianity, I'm concerned with hypocrites. People that put on the badge of Christianity, they say the words to the priest or whatever, and then that's it. They say, "Now I'm a Christian." And then they go home and they scream at their wife. Like, I don't want these people to get power. That's what concerns me. Like, more Christianity doesn't mean better society. So I do think removing all of the idea of all the ideals could send us into a spiral downward spiral. But implementing more of it isn't, isn't necessarily the counter. J. position. You don't want necessarily want to just shove it there. Interesting point to be made. And everything we've argued could be argued that it's stronger in Qatar or Saudi Arabia where they have such strong Islam, they beat people to death and arrest women who get raped. Right. And then you have order and structure and lots of babies. And, uh, a friend of mine was telling me that she was walking around in, I think it was Dubai, and they had gold chains. There's a jewelry store and they had $5,000 gold chains right out. Nobody watched him, just in front of the store. And she was looking at him. And the guy running the store walked to the door. And she was like, "Are you not worried someone's going to steal these?" And he's like, "They'll cut their hands off." Mhm. No, yeah. I mean, like, again, when you were going back to your point, and you don't want people that are pretending to be Christian, you know, they're Christian on Sunday, and then six days a week, they're not. A lot of the studies you'll see about lower levels of depression, more volunteering, more support for democratic values, and of course, higher birth rates correlate more with weekly churchgoers than anything else. So one of the important things that John Compton is looking at right now is the rise of religious nuns that you were talking about earlier. These people, people that claim spirituality or religiosity, but they don't actually live or they're part of a, uh, traditional Christian church. When you start running the numbers comparing weekly churchgoers, people who actually belong to a denomination with the religious nuns or the unaffiliated, we see stark differences. We see more authoritarianism, more depression, less volunteering among the religious nuns than people that are actually living out the Christianity, going, doing all the traditional aspects that you must do to be a Christian. Do you find that it's the community itself? Well, it's tough to delineate here, but is it the Christianity or is it the fact that they're getting together with other families and communicating? Both. It's both. Because intrinsic religiosity is also very important in these studies. In sociology, you'll see the religious orientation scale between intrinsic and extrinsic. And sometimes you'll see quests in there as well. But a lot of negative effects come from extrinsic religiosity, which is defined as you're part of a religion because you want to be part of a larger group or it's your culture. Intrinsic religiosity in sociology is understood as you're part of religion because you believe the core tenets of the faith. And when we look at various studies, like these meta-analyses I have here, most of the data points show strong correlations with intrinsic religiosity. So it's not enough to just be a part of Christian because it's your cultural heritage. You actually have to live out the religion to have the positive. Here's the thing about believing a religion. Now, this is what confuses me. And I wish he was here. Russell Brand, you guys probably know, within the last two years, year and a half, he's like, "I'm a Christian. Jesus is my Lord and Savior." Like, what? Where did you come from, dude? What are you talking about? Even, what do you even? Apparently, he got splashed with some water and now he believes something new. Why do you believe it? So this people that say, "Real quick, intrinsically believe." Like, why? Okay. He didn't. He said that over a period of time he came to believe the teachings of Christ and decided then to get baptized. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying he's right or wrong. I'm saying you mix up the order there. He made the. Okay, he didn't just like, one day, someone splashed him in the face, went, "Whoa, I saw God." He'd been slowly creeping towards it. Why? What is it about that belief? Because you believe, have evidence? You have faith. I mean, maybe you've got some weak evidence, but the reason it's faith and not proof is because you don't have the correct evidence to call it real proof. So like, why do you have faith in that thing? I think it's comforting for a lot of people. Well, it's not just that. I mean, it, it just correlated with lower levels of suicide, lower levels of depression, better mental health. I have a meta-analysis, 850 studies on. I think you're agreeing it's comforting. I'm saying there, there are positives to being part of any religion. Now, some religions, way less positives. Like Islam, way less positive. Scientology, way on the bottom of the scale. So like, religion in general provides a lot of benefits. But we've also discovered through different studies that some of those benefits can be had through social structures. You know, just gathering in groups and having social community provides a lot of the same benefits as going to church. I agree. I absolutely agree. The problem is, is the current secular culture is not providing those communities the way the traditional Christian culture has. And they haven't to replace it, is what I'm saying. You're suggesting that they'll never be able to do it. Well, I, not have you. Have you heard of the God of the Gaps argument? That's a future humans of the Gaps argument. Just because future humans might come, but it doesn't mean they actually will. Or we have the solutions now, right? But you're, you're suggesting that we don't have any data at all. And we actually do have data. We've got lots of countries that used to be heavily religious that are no longer religious, and they did develop structures. So it's not like the society's going to collapse. Human beings seek structure. And when one structure fails, we find new structures, and we make new structures. And we could go back to the structures of traditional Christianity and leave the authoritarian secular European countries, which are again, diminishing birth rates, higher levels of authoritarianism, less volunteering, higher levels of depression. I mean, again, there's a reason that I, when I was just debating Lawrence Krauss two weeks ago, I brought up these factors because actual studies have shown that when it comes to secularism in Christianity, Christianity is winning on all these factors in the actual studies. But depression is just a red herring. For example, they didn't even include seasonal depression in the DSM until 1986. 70% of all depression cases that are diagnosed today are seasonal depression. Which means as people say, "Well, secularity has risen, but so has depression." Well, guess what? That's because they weren't actually diagnosing 70% of it. So the correlation is is furious at best.

I just want to make a quick point. I'm sorry for kind of deviating. You know, because you were talking about like the, the global happiness index and all that stuff. And the reason why this is probably not a, it's there's no real easy argument I have. It's very, it's an emotional argument. The reason why I don't trust these international ranking systems is that for the entire of my life, I've seen them lie. And from my experiences and from other data points, you can see that these, these things are not correct. One really is an example that hits more, uh, closer to home for me is the press freedom index. Which claims that Canada is more press free than the United States. Wow. Which is obviously false. They will arrest you. And the UK ranks higher than the US. In the UK, they will arrest you for criticizing Islam. Oh, yeah. And they claim in these global rankings, they, these, these international organizations of great merit, that it's better there. You can take a look at Sweden, which is number four, despite the fact that it is a completely homogeneous country that sent government spooks to spy on me for daring to point out that a, when this is crazy, when we got escorted out of Rinkeby by by the police, who literally said, "Hey, look, they're going to start throwing stones at you because you have cameras." We weren't filming anybody. And we said, "Oh, really?" The people there, they were Somali children, they were born in Sweden, were screaming things, expressing. And these other, whatever the names of these newspapers were, they thought we were with Swedish press. The cops said, "They don't view Swedes as part of their country. They don't view themselves as part of Sweden." If they start throwing stones right now, we can't save you. And I said, "Should we leave?" And they said, "Yes." And I said, "Will you follow us out?" Say, "Yes, we will." And I said, "Okay, thank you." Held up my camera and I filmed myself and them as they drove. They followed behind us until we drove out of the plaza to a parking lot where our car was. I posted that video. Actually, I tweeted, "This is what happened." The, the entirety of the press in Sweden, all in in in unison, argued I lied, made up the story. And the police said that story never happened. Then I published the video and I said, "Take a look at this." Then the entire of the media all came out and lockstep and said, "Tim Pool followed the police. He's lying." And I said, "Here's a video of the police following me." And they were like, "Uh, he knew where they were going and walked in that direction." And I said, "Towards my car, my phone." The journalists all started sharing my phone number with each other. So anyway, I digress. Sweden is the fourth most free. No, it isn't. Well, apparently Greenland, who has no press, is number three. You know, this. I, I agree with that, though, to be honest. If this is in 2020 or 2022, this might actually be more accurate than we realize with the Biden regime stomping down on Twitter, controlling mass media in the United States. Like, we did not have a free press in '22. Except the ranking for the United States has dropped. And the reports these organizations give out is that Donald Trump is curtailing press freedoms, which is not doing. He's strengthening them. Okay. In the UK, which is ranked number 26, you will go to prison if you report the race of a criminal. So they, uh, in Sweden, very famously, there was a, a, an Afghan man who robbed a store and, um, I can't remember the name of, I don't, Aftonbladet or something. One of these newspapers pixelated his face and then changed the colors of the pixels to white so that you couldn't tell. I think it was a smiley guy. They made it, they blurred his skin color, they blurred his hands and his face, and then changed the pixels so that everybody thought it was a white person who did it. I got, and that's number, and, and the UK is 26, and we're 45. These international organizations that are telling you communism is good, and we're free, and everyone's happy, are lying to you, dude.

I got to just, can we do a new religion where it's all the good stuff? The basic good stuff. We don't have to go sit in front of a cross, some murder tool, and we don't have to worship some dude. We can just enjoy the, the realities of the right way to be. I wish. I mean, I would always say, like, people often have ideas when we sit around like this and go, "It'd be really good if we could do X, Y, and Z." And then we try to implement in society. Sort of like what the Communists were trying to do. We just do this, we'll see this effect. Human psychology is weird. And often times we don't understand why we do X, Y, and Z. And then we get results A, B, and C. But I mean, often times we have to just see what actually plays out in real-world data. Christianity wasn't, didn't just happen. It, Constantine created it, basically. No, he didn't. That's Ian as a religion. It was a people that believed Jesus, for sure. But that was, Jesus wasn't trying to get them to start a religion. He just said what he believed. "Upon this rock I build my church." In Matthew 16, he was definitely trying to start. He was a Jew. I mean, he was definitely a Jew. And he maybe he was trying to reform Judaism. But he wasn't trying to create a religion. And he was trying to just to teach people and be like, modernized Judaism and and explain like, "Well, maybe you can, you know, sow two types of crops in one garden and it'll be all right." I don't know if he actually said that. But like, he was taking the Old Testament, like filling in the gaps for the modern age with new technology and being like, "Here's a lot of it." I mean, he definitely was a reformer. But he was definitely calling all sorts of people to him. I mean, if you go to Matthew 28, he talks about going and preaching to the Gentiles and doing this kind of stuff. Then we see it play out in Acts. I mean, the idea that Constantine created Christianity is a huge modern myth. Peter J. Lightheart wrote about this in his book, "Defending Constantine." He had nothing to do with the Bible. He had nothing to do with doctrine. In fact, often times he just sort of signed off on things the bishops came to in their conclusions. It's been a huge, huge idea within the past couple hundred years. They started to just blame everything on Constantine. If Constantine had wanted to stomp out Christianity, he probably could have, but he chose to elevate it to the national level. Whereas like, that religions, they don't, they aren't really, they're emergent. I mean, they kind of are. I know what you're saying, like human psychology, you can't just be like, "Now you're going to be a religion." But you kind of can, if you, if you control the narrative machine. And so without the authoritarian alteration of the scene, the scene, I don't know. I mean, other than just being becoming an obsessive prophet myself and just spouting it and spouting it and alienating myself and then getting slaughtered by the, the, the, the modern control structure, like Jesus did. Like, and then people in 100 years will start to create a religion out of me. Like, I don't see a path. Let me be like, "Please, can we do it, guys? Come on. Let's all come together and create a." That doesn't seem to be the way. To your point, you know, Christianity for the first 1500 years was really not a religion of freedom. It was a religion of repressive ideas. Even in the book of Acts, chapter 19, we see the first book burnings under Athanasius. There were book burnings under Constantine. There were book burnings under Eusbius and John Chrysostom. All throughout Christian history, they were burning books that they deemed heretical. Any books, any books that they deemed heretical, they were burning them. So the issue we need to understand, because book burning in itself is a, it's a Godwin's Law. It's like the Nazis burned books. The question is, what books were being burned and why? Well, they list them. In fact, there's a really good book on this. Let me pull it up for you where they go through Christian history. Uh, in fact, in late antiquity, it's called, uh, "Christianity, Book Burning, and Censorship in Late Antiquity" by Dirk Roman. And in fact, some of those book burnings are even recorded in this firsthand right here. Edicts during Constantine's reign and just after Constantine's reign where they say, "You go out and collect these books and burn them." A lot of them are philosophical works by the Greeks. A lot of them are just heretical books by, are Christians. That the, the idea of freedom of thought within Christianity is a modern concept. And why is it a modern concept now, though? I mean, it didn't just come out of nowhere. People are getting crushed by it. They, when, when a religion crushes you for 1500 years, eventually you're like, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this." The same thing with Islam. If Islam continues on the path that it's going right now, eventually their own adherents will rebel against them. They can't right now because they'll get killed. That's not happening. The revivalist movements in Islam are Salafi, and they're trying to go back to what Muhammad. And they're actually more authoritarian. They're actually far worse than a lot of, uh, regular Muslim types are because they're trying to go back. The question we need to ask is, yes, Christians did horrible things. But if we're going on what Tom Holland does in his, his book "Dominion," there were definitely revivalist movements. He talks about Christianity being like a city underneath an, like an earthquake line. What are those things called? Fault line. Yeah. He's like, "Yeah, they build these structures, but then often times within Christianity, revivalist movements shake them up and start things over." So he talks about this throughout his book. They did horrible things to the Cathars. Revivalists come along and they start to say, "No, we need to get back to the teachings of Jesus." And you're saying 1500 years. Actually, again, you go, Brian Tierney, for example, in his book, "The Idea of Natural Rights," notes this starts far earlier and it's moving through the medieval period. This idea of developing natural rights, freedom of religion, freedom of thought. It's coming up. It's sort of developing. And that's why Tom Holland says Christianity was like a depth charge. It took a while for that charge to go off and start spreading. People were fighting as I was doing it. But revivalist movement Christianity had built in this structure of revivalism. Was it, um, the printing press? Printing press helped a lot because the tech, like the internet, is kind of like another staging ground for a new religion. And I think there's a lot of cultures vying for that control right now. Um, I mean, I, I see a blending of science and God, like for sure. There's something. We've developed technology that can witness some fluctuations in, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, the cosmic microwave background radiation is no joke. That is not a coincidence. That is that it looks like a neural net in the brain, like a bunch of neurons arcing through planetoids and star systems where you see these bright dots, which are like neurons, and then they kind of fan out into what look like wisps. I mean, you, we, at some point, pull it up and look at it and just stare at it and realize what you're looking into. Are you guys familiar with the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum"? Negative. It's an official list of banned books that started in the medieval period that didn't get abolished until 1966 under Pope John. And guess what? There's a lot of science in there. Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Leffont, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, even novelists like John Milton, Spinoza's in there, John Locke's in there, David Hume's in there. This went on until the modern age. My dad was alive when they finally abolished this list of banned books. This is my problem with organized religion. Is that if they try, if a question, he made a point. I got to address. What is it? What is it like, who banned them and where are they banned? Uh, this is an official banning by the Catholic Church. It started in the in the medieval. Ban from where? From anyone who is found in possession of them. So 1966 started as part of the Inquisition. So in 1950, what would happen if you had a book? Well, obviously in the 1950s, in the USA, they wouldn't have been able to do anything to you other than excommunicate you. They can excommunicate you. Yeah. But in the, in medieval, more like church guidance on like, "Hey, this is a bad book." It's basically. There's been, there's an atheist named Tim Pool who runs history for atheists. He's addressed a lot of this. These books were not being banned. They're put on like a special list as if like, "Hey, we need more teachings on this kind of thing." So for example, Copernicus gets put on there, but it says, you know, once there's corrections to certain things, he says, then it can be removed. And it is. I, I, I can certainly accept that if you go back to, you know, Inquisition period, if you were caught with one of these books, they were going to, you know, Inquisition you or whatever. I'm just meaning like, in modern history, nobody was being, you know, excommunication is pretty nasty. You get exiled from the church, and you can never come back, or or you got to appeal to the Pope to get back. Very different from being like, flayed alive or something. Think about that. Like, that's like if, if atheism is true and there is no afterlife, I mean, like, that's what the church is doing. They're excommunicating people. I mean, like, oh, there's yeah, I mean, that's the only, hey, you don't follow our teachings, so you're not part of our teachings. There, the thing when you, the, if, if modern religion wants to ban books that are had scientific nature, that we're trying to talk about God scientifically, like, it, the last vestige of control of this, of this narrative machine of Christian, of the church itself. I'm not talking about the Christian ideals. I'm talking about the church that was.

Built to control. The idea if you don't follow their version of what God is, they lose control of you. And so they want to stifle. At least this is the, the autocratic idea of what they could do is they'll stifle disseminating or dissenting opinions about what God is in order to control people to join their herd. And that we don't need that anymore, man. That is sickening, disgusting cult behavior. You need to think for yourself and look out there and see what is. That's what the reformers said, the Protestant reformers. That's one of the things they were upset about. They wanted more individuality and choice of religion because Martin Luther's big thing was like, you know, my, my salvation is dependent on me and God, not me and a mediator, uh, through Rome, for example.

So this is what I was talking about earlier with Tom Holland. Talks about these reformations coming. The church gets too authoritarian. The earthquake happens and then reformers come along. Yeah, also advocated for burning down synagogues and repossessing the homes of Jewish people. I, I, I got a question for you. Uh, why doesn't, why does God make himself known only to some people?

That's a great question. There's a whole philosophical subject called Divine hiddenness, which philosophers debate. And there's various reasons. Uh, for one thing, uh, a lot of position of theologians is that, uh, well, let me just quote C.S. Lewis. He says, honest rejection of Christ, however wrong, shall be forgiven and healed. So one of the things he's saying, like, listen, if you are truly a non-resistant non-believer, uh, you're not going to be condemned necessarily because of that. You may have a good excuse. But the argument would be is that maybe God is making himself known to people throughout their lives in various ways. Maybe there was such a thing as non-resistant non-believers. There's a whole philosophical field discussing that.

I, I, I, I know a guy. It's a story I tell quite a bit. Uh, I'll keep it simple. He was an urban city atheist, hanging out, punk rock, cared for nothing, getting drunk. And he was out in the woods one day with a bunch of friends. Woke up hung over, went to take a leak. When he said that, he felt a powerful, booming voice emerging from within his own body. And it was God saying, why are you doing this? And he, he had a panic attack, started freaking out, looking around like, how am I hearing this voice? And he s, and it asked him again, why are you doing this? And he said, I, I don't know. And it told him, you have to fix your life. And right at that moment, he freaked out. He said that he, he began and trying to find answers because he didn't know what happened. And ultimately, it led him to the church where he cleaned up his life, stopped drinking, opened a coffee shop, and now he's just a regular working-class guy. And he says, no one believe, like, I understand that you'll never believe me that this happened, but it happened to me. And that's all that matters because I believe it. And so I don't think the guy's crazy. Maybe he was just crazy, I guess. But there's a lot of stories like that. A lot of stories of people saying they, they, they felt a shaking voice come from within their body.

And that's why I ask, assuming those stories are true, I don't know if they are. If it is true, why would God only choose some people to say this to? You get your subconscious. You'll have thoughts pop into your head sometimes. They pop into your entire body, your muscles, everything feels that subconscious message. And then that'll be a booming sound or something, a vision. You, you'll actually experience the so image. One thing we have to take into the fact is God's omniscience. Maybe he knows for that guy, he needs to do this, and it will help save him. Maybe for some people, if he did that, they'd become a fundamentalist preacher and they'd start attacking abortion clinics, for example. This kind of stuff. Are you hearing a voice? I'm, yes, at the moment. So I mean, like, maybe God can see all these possible timelines and he knows, you know, I'll do this here, I'll do that there, and that will help. Maybe for some people, he can see in all possible future timelines and go, doesn't matter if I did that, it would never help. It would just make them worse, depending on their psychology. So God, we have to take into a factor when we look at Divine hiddenness, the omniscience of God, and what he could know given this. This is something philosophers talking about. Given his vast knowledge, we can't say that he is not wrong for not doing that for every person, given that kind of knowledge.

But in the Bible, he's not even omniscient. Like in Genesis 18, he doesn't know what's happening in Sodom. In Genesis 22, he doesn't know if Abraham's going to actually fulfill the test that he's been given to sacrifice Isaac. In Deuteronomy 13, he specifically says he's testing the Israelites to know if they will be faithful to him. Over and over again, God just admits that he's not omniscient. If I, if I catch my daughter catching a cookie and I go, what are you doing? Does that mean I don't know what I just saw? Or is, am I trying to have a relationship with her and getting her to confess? Said, now I know. In Genesis 22, meaning he didn't know prior. The Hebrew word ATA means now, in this moment, I know. Yeah, we can just look at that through speech act theory. And God is when he's communicating and talking with people. Right, words don't mean words. I'm sure. Well, no, they don't. That's what speech act theory is about. If I said to you, you're standing on my foot, I'm not just saying, hey, look at that. I'm actually asking you to get off my foot. We often communicate in ways that are not literal. This is the difference between lauan and iluci. Or, or actually, an interesting point you brought up with you're standing on my foot. He's on the other side of the room. But he could be. We often say, don't, I don't want to step on anyone's toes here. Yeah, there you go. Sure. But that's an idiom. We know what idioms are. And God can use idioms too, to communicate. Now I know is not an idiom. Definitely. This is a statement of fact.

I do think that these ancient gods, gods from the ancient text, were actually human men. And they, they rolled into town. They're like, I'm, they killed the old guy who called himself God. And we're like, I'm God now. And that's why you get this schizophrenic God and all these different stories, different personalities. And then at some point, people tapped into the divine reality. And they're like, oh, it can speak to you as well. But the, the guys that would command the title get written into the story. Not, not, not as God, though. These people often have names and they're typically referred to as prophets. So certainly, if you want to argue that people were false prophets, I'd agree with you. But the idea that someone heard a loud crackling voice or something from a burning bush is your, your better argument is that it's allegory and not some guy hiding behind the rock shouting Moses. I think he was tripping. Wrote, uh, Esther Mor is a professor. She wrote a book called When Gods Were Men. And if you read the ancient Babylonian and Acadian literature, the gods are almost universally described as being manlike. Which is why we find in the Bible that mankind is created in the image of God, which is identical to what it says about the children of Adam. Adam's children were made in the image of Adam. Mankind and gods were, were more similar in ancient times than we like to believe. This idea that God is transcendent, omniscient, and pervading all things is a Greco-Roman idea. Aliens. Aliens. It's definitely the aliens. They built the pyramids. But they're inside you. If the argument is that they were people who were manlike and we made in their image, that is why you get ancient alien theorists. If there were gods, why would they be perceived as gods? They had the capabilities that man could not understand or comprehend. They were floating around and flying through the air. Or you think about like a gun. Imagine having like a, like a derringer. And you go to an ancient civilization and you point at someone and then there's a thunder crack and the person just drops dead. They're like, he pointed at him, thunder cracked in the sky and he was dead. Yeah, that was Zeus, dude. They were like, he can throw lightning. Like, dude, he had an electrical spark. No, he had a gun. Yeah, he had something that could do electrical sparks. He struck him with lightning. No, he went bang. Literally. He had, he could throw lightning. In the story, I mean, he had electricity. Obviously, these ancient texts. Someone comes in on a hot air balloon or a hang glider. You're going to be like, they have wings. And if they land and they're like, I'm a God, you're going to be like, I believe you. Uh, like superhumans. Or it was just stories they told with thunder. Like, no, Lord help us. If in the future, they're like, did you know they worshiped a God who was half man, half spider, and he could climb walls and he fought crime? We'd be like, wow.

I mean, the important point is that all of that could be true. We could all just pretend we're atheists here for the sake of the argument. That doesn't change the fact that the Judeo-Christian tradition has given us most of the things that we hold sacred today. I, I, I am a big proponent of whatever made you famous today, do you don't have to keep doing that now in the future? Like Christianity got us to this point. We don't need to keep focusing on 2,000 years ago when we can build something new. But we, the problem is we're trying again, collapsing birth rates, more authoritarianism, higher levels of depression, lower volunteering and charity work. The attempt to build something to, as you were talking about, the cut stem thing, cutting the flower off, the flower is dying before our eyes. So this idea that we can just keep having the light, the nice stuff we like in the West without the Christian foundations showing before our eyes in real time is not working. Why, why is giving to charity such an important thing? Because as it turns out, charities are actually quite popular. They're just a little bit below non-secular charities. But I'm trying to figure out why that's the measuring point we need to be aiming at. All the charities are fake, by the way. I'm trying to figure out why half these charities, we wouldn't need if we had a, a better government system. And government, I completely disagree. Yeah, government's horrible at providing. What I'm suggesting is that if, if we had proper structures in the United States on both the federal and the state and the local level that helped people to actually survive, we wouldn't need to be giving handouts to people. That's impossible. Well, when future humans, this future humans of the gaps argument, it actually works. Then we can have a discussion. But right now, it isn't. Well, the, the issue with government is that it is quite literally impossible for a single entity to, to, uh, uh, take care of literally everybody because of conflict. No, I'm not saying the government has to take care of you. What I'm saying is that in a, in a thriving society, charity becomes less important because you have less people that need the charity. So I'm trying to figure out, I'd rather prevent the need for charity. I just, I say that charitable giving is the goal. I, I disagree. That's less important. I mean, that, that seems to be more of a predictive, more opinion. If you go back 200 years, nobody would need a, like nobody talked about having therapists. Or maybe not years, but a couple hundred years. Like there's no therapists. You don't need organizations to provide mental health care for, uh, medieval warriors who fought. They came back and they were just, you know, damaged. And so we've actually increased charities, uh, and increased the perception of the need for them over time with with prosperity and technology. No, I'm not saying we don't need them. What I'm saying is I'd rather attack the root causes the charities are giving to. That's where I think is the my point is there will always be some perceived reason to provide some kind of charity to somebody else. No, I'm not disagreeing with that. Yeah, so it's never going to go away. It's always only ever going to expand. A government can't address these things. You were saying like, um, that the cut stem, the cut flower is like the Christian framework that if we, it's gone and it's like it's dying on the, the roots of the flower are the Christian moral tradition and the flower is America. The reason I think that like birth rates are declining is past these chemicals in the foods, in the, in the groundwater, the pharmaceuticals, the Azo D, all this crazy toxin in the, is made people mute. Their minds are like, where's the love? Maybe, maybe, but the actual data correlation we have is that young people are no longer going into public spaces largely due to the internet. So one of the reasons why, uh, and, and this is why I think religion plays a role in this for, uh, your typical urban liberal. They actually be from a from a Christian family or whatever, but their laps, they don't go to church, they don't do any of these things. Young men aren't going outside anymore. Virginity among men under the age of 30 has skyrocketed. Some like 20 or 30%. Even among women, it's going up. Now, Sheamus hilariously said, based, and I said, no, Sheamus, 20-year-old men, by your standard, should be married with children. And he was like, oh, yeah. Like, so it's not good that young men are not having families. However, there is a moral tradition aligned with Christianity, largely Catholicism, as you pointed out, where they have a duty not just to themselves, but to a shared God. They both see to have family. So they are actually getting married and having kids. Whereas the kid who grows up in the city is sitting around playing, you know, scrolling TikTok all day and not going outside. That's why fertility rate is declining. Can we, like, is it, like, not the only reason? People that adhere to a cult, and I, you know, it's a neutral term. Cult. Every religion is a cult. Every, you know, group think, whatever, bunch of followers. Now, no offense, everyone's a leader and a follower in their own way. But to, to choose to follow a group of, of ideas, a group think, do we need followers to thrive in a society? Do we need like a 0.001% of the society's leaders are the leaders, and then everyone else needs to be a follower that doesn't think too critically? Yes. And it's, and, and the problem is, I think in America, there is this perception that being a follower is a bad thing. And it's offensive to call someone a follower. And everyone has to be a leader. When everyone's a leader, everybody's running around in random directions. The example I like to give to people is, imagine the king standing on the front line of his, of his army about to engage in a battle to save their homeland. Each and every one of those men standing shoulder to shoulder with their spears or swords or whatever is a follower of the king. But they are also the most noble, willing to sacrifice themselves for something they care about and believe in to preserve a community. The king, as the leader, stands in front of them. I don't respect modern leaders who hide behind walls and cower in their bunkers and basements. But the traditional value of what it means to be a leader is you were leading the charge. You told everybody, I would never command you to do that which I would not do myself. The king would jump on his horse and scream, charge! And run forward with his followers behind him. That king had no power were it not for his followers who believed in him and were willing to sacrifice everything for something they believed in. That's what it truly means to have a good leader and good followers. And it's entirely respectable in my view that there are people who simply want to be followers. It's entirely respectable. There are people who want to be leaders. It is not respectable that everybody thinks they're the main character. Sometimes you're not. Sometimes you're never going to be the president. You're never going to be a billionaire. Your purpose is where you are. And sometimes that's okay. Okay. Sometimes you should strive for more. Sometimes you should recognize you should stop striving for more and just be what you're best at. This is what I call a product of Disney culture. We all need to be special. Someone who has a romantic or venture somewhere out there. And everyone's trying to be that main character. As you was mentioned right now, uh, it, it just doesn't work. It's just seems like it's a result. Could be a result of like, N.I. and Uber-mesh thinking. We all need to be this Superman kind of person. We are all the main character of our own story. Like we're all seeing it first person. So, and that is an empowering realization. That you are the main creator of your reality. Like stuff is happening around you. You are in control of this business. Um, but not to what point though? Because you need people to kind of calm down the, this, um, what do you call it? I guess, uh, aggression or this, uh, but like, but like, think about what you're saying there. Yeah, that, that is an issue. But look at what happens in Christianity. You, you say, God, you come into my heart, you become the main character, and I follow you. And Christ says, I'm, says, they hated me, they're going to hate you. They're going to persecute you for my sake. You're not going to be above your master. You're going to go through hardship like I'm going to go through hardship for you. So you're talking about this idea of a leader who, the king who goes out and leads his army. We see in Christianity that mentality. Jesus goes to the cross for us. He suffers for us. Therefore, we can go out and suffer and do good work. So Christianity has that built-in mechanism in there that's going to allow people to say, yes, I will go and suffer for the king. Yes, it has a built-in mechanism for people to be followers. Which does concern me when it, if it just, if it just disappears for a moment, Hitler, Trump, random demagogue appears, and Trump's a great guy, I love him, but, you know, powerful speaker. People will be like, I need to follow something. Someone, something. More came along that I can follow. Now, you're like, whoa, bro, are you addicted to following? Yeah, I, I'm actually in agreement with Tim here. I don't think being a follower is a bad thing. I think there's a huge segment of the population that don't feel comfortable being leaders. They feel comfortable as being followers. I think the problem is sometimes they, they don't know how to choose what to follow. And they can fall, fall prey to following something that's actually dangerous for them. And we've seen that all throughout history in every country, which is Ian's point. Nazism. Which I agree, sometimes there are evil people that amass dangerous amounts of power. Can you make a religion that creates leaders? Not everybody should be a leader, and that's nothing wrong with that. Like a buddy of mine told me a long time ago, he never, he, he didn't aspire to perceive greatness. He's like, I'm just happy working my 9 to 5. Why? Because I do my thing, I mind my own business, and my mind is free while I'm doing this menial task in this menial job where someone else is stressed. He's like, I have my hours where I have to work. While I'm working, I'm thinking about what I want to do after work. I'm thinking about what I want to do with my family. And then once I'm done with work, maybe and my family go out to dinner and we have a good time, we smile and laugh. My boss, he's doing paperwork all night. He's like, that's for him. He wants to do that. More power to him. It's not for me. And I was like, you know, that's, it's actually, you know, kind of informed my view on these things. Some people just say, hey man, you want to work 16 hour days, 24/7, and run a business and make the money? Tell me what you need me to do, and I'll do what I can. I'm going to spend time with my family for the most part. So what do we need? We need some more leaders. Because I think that they said the middle class has been, there's been a disparity between the wealth, you know, a lot of poor, a lot of rich, now less middle class. Maybe if we make more leaders, but not too many more, maybe like 7% more leaders in society, we'll create a middle class of business owners, people that are willing to, like, I think we need incentivization. It's very difficult for people to want to be leaders. Some of them have the capacity, but they don't have the means. Like, there's so many people that could actually be leading something, but they don't have, like, they can't leave their 9 to 5, or they've got family members they have to attend to. And it's very difficult for them to get training. So, for example, um, you know, I went to seminary. I got an actual seminary education. The number of pastors that I've worked with when I was a Christian that couldn't afford to leave their their actual work and family life to go get that education is very high. There's a high percentage of pastors with no education, not because they don't want it, but because they can't afford to leave what they're doing and actually go get it. And that's the hardest part in society is when you want to be a leader, it takes education and takes commitment. And it's hard to put down your other commitments to go do that thing. But I don't know how we incentivize it other than like scholarships, tax breaks, things like that. Yeah, it's like kind of crossing a class system, right? Yeah. And I mean, the good thing is, a lot of charities have been trying to help out with that. And that, that's another good thing we see in society is the fact that work is, you know, pushing these ideas like, we'll give you money to go do this kind of thing, or we'll help you out with that, you know, so those are always very important and we need those in society.

Look, looking at the, uh, the World Population Review.com, that's the, the happiness index. I don't know that I necessarily see any correlation between, uh, happiness and a nation other than wealth. I think that's the leading predictor. Right? Probably makes sense. And I think they actually say that it's gross domestic product, and social support, life expectancy, and freedom to make your own life choices is towards the bottom of the list. Generosity is at the bottom of the list. It really just is, can I afford food and shelter for my family? And then I'm, and then I'm good. Then I'm going to sit down, I'm going to watch TV and not got to worry about anything else. Can you expect to be healthy? Can you get your needs met? Those are the things that really make people happy. And do you have social connections that bring meaning to your life? Yeah. What's, and, and North Korea is, uh, considered to be very happy. Oh, yeah. They're so trustworthy over there. North Korea is unrated. Well, the thing of it is, there are some countries where if they're given a questionnaire, they only have the option to answer one way, right? I mean, that's the case. Well, even, even like sometimes people just say they're happy. I mean, I've known people who have committed suicide and I asked, are you doing okay? And he's like, yeah, I'm doing fine. I'll be all right. And then a week later, they're gone. But that's the thing about depression that people need to understand. It's not always, uh, uh, people assume depression is like, you're in debilitating pain. Mhm. But, uh, depression for a lot of people, and a lot of the time, is literally just boredom. Yeah. It's people who say, like, I don't, if I wake up, what am I doing? They have like a lack of fulfillment. It's different than unhappiness, sadness. It's, it's like, uh, what's the point anyway? I don't really need to be here anymore. I figured it out. I got it. You, you don't feel like people will say, the things that I used to enjoy doing, I don't enjoy doing anymore. They're not sad, they're not angry, they're not crying. They're just like, you know, riding my bike seems boring. I, I just don't want to do it. And they end up doing nothing. And this is a big sign of depression. That's why they always say, check on your friends. Because if they're not coming to hang out, you might text them, they'll like, no, I'm cool. I'm just watching TV. They might be depressed. They're not working towards anything, not doing anything. I, I, I do think obviously though, it doesn't matter which religion, but people who have a religion, particularly Abrahamic, are less likely. I'm not, I don't know if it's true, but they, they fear, you can't kill yourself, you'll, you'll be tortured for all eternity. It's, it's a moral. And it's like weekly, they're reminded that. I mean, getting out of the house and going somewhere every week is a big, big shakeup. Whether it's church or a job. Like this show is kind of like my church. I mean, I get out of the house. I sit at home, I work from home. I spend so much time at home. Walking is great. Yeah, I mean, you, it, it's Christians often feel it's their job, it's their duty to go to church every week, even when they don't want to. I can't tell you many times I've woken up on a Sunday morning and just been exhausted and I forced myself to go. And it's really good for mental health. It's very good for dealing with depression. And unfortunately, like secular culture just hasn't come up with any sort of replacement for that for going forward. This point, what, going to the gym has a huge impact on depression rates. It's true. But nobody goes to the gym. I know people are still reluctant to do it. But it, it's had a, a surprisingly large correlation with mental well-being. Yeah, definitely. Not, you just figured it out. I'm going to make a skateboarding religion. That's how we bring skateboarding back. Get people in shape. A big skateboard on the wall and everyone will just like, and be like, you will find. And, uh, and, uh, I'm half joking when I say this. Life lessons in skateboarding are invaluable. Yeah. There was a church I went to, they actually put a gym in the basement. And so, and they made, hey, every week we're going to work out Sunday morning early. So the men got there early, the kids would be upstairs playing, the women would be talking. And that's one of the things they did. One of, there's two big lessons. Skateboarding has many lessons. And the first is on a, on a half pipe. When you drop in, meaning you stand up top and then you lean in and go down the ramp, every single person is terrified to do it the first time. Every, without question, because how do you maneuver your body away? And I'd say, I don't know, the majority of people will fall the first time. So you bring a kid to the ramp and they're terrified to do it. You say, you have no choice. There is only the failure you will experience and the pain of dropping in and nothing else. Ask yourself if you really want this for your life. And then kids will do it. Typically, they'll fall, land on their knees, roll, get up and be like, that didn't hurt so bad. Let me try it again. And that's a lesson about having to do difficult things, knowing that you may experience pain. The other thing about it is, there's no cheating. You can't cheat skateboarding. You're, you're, you're competing against yourself. You can lie to your friends and say, yeah, I did a I tried to flip that stair set. And they'll be like, where's the video? And you'll be like, film it. They'll be like, nice try, dude. There's no cheating. It, it is all about every day improving yourself. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to make a religion. You know, we'll put a big skateboard on the wall. We're going to be like, this is your path to enlightenment. You got to come and do kick flips. He ends into it. I'm thinking about playing music. I was thinking about playing music as my church. Like the way your body vibrates. Well, in all seriousness, so good joking aside, uh, you made a great point that, and I brought this up, I bring this up quite a bit. As community is country. We, as a nation, whether it's Christianity or otherwise, we used to every week meet with everyone in the town, not literally every, but most people. And there was effectively a community meeting in the church. We don't do that anymore. Now there's no community. People don't even know who their neighbors are. Like, when was the last time you knocked on your neighbor's door and asked for a cup of sugar or something? He like, this doesn't happen. Honestly, when was the last time you knocked on your neighbor's door and asked them how they're doing? Lukowski made a really great video 13 years ago where he said, every day he goes on the train and there's millions of people on the New York subway and they never talk to each other. In fact, they go to great lengths to not interact with each other. They won't look each other in the eyes. So one day I decided, I'm just going to start talking to these people. And then he asked a bunch of questions about how they feel, how they feel about government and things like that. But that's a really interesting point that in a major city like New York, people intentionally go out of their way to try and avoid talking to their neighbors. I didn't. First, first I moved there and I was very much Midwest, come from Ohio, eye contact, super cool. But then after like a couple months of tens of thousands of people every day in my face over and over, I was just like, get out of my way. It would be like a woman would be struggling to get down the steps and she's got her bags and taking up three lanes walking downstairs. I just pushed her aside. I'm like, I just pushed a woman. What am I, what am I life? Like that's what happened. That was like six months, six or seven months. The evolution of being surrounded by it's weird to be alone in a group of people. To feel like there's even more people around, but I feel even more alone. That's what I felt like in New York City a lot of times. I used to force myself to interact, but no one, people don't, they don't want to stop and talk because they're all going somewhere. A lot of them are like, don't people don't just stand around on the corner hanging out in New York. It's very rare. Maybe on their front stoop. But if someone's on the street walking, they're going somewhere. They don't want to stop. And it was just culture shock, you know? Your neighbors' names today? Yeah, I know one of them personally, but I already knew him before he moved in. But other than that, no. Met one of them once. And I'm in a somewhat of a rural, I'm in a pretty rural area. But no, no, I don't know any of them. Yeah, that's, it's just unfortunate. Like how I think a lot of you thinking about the internet, it just, yeah, completely divided us from the people around us. And I think the one tether we have is is going to church weekly. The Americans that do that, because you're forced to talk to people at church. It's very rare for me to go to a church and no one ever talks to me. It's, it all, you almost feel like required because you want to make them welcome. You're in the presence of God, you better make people welcome. Other. And so there's that really good incentive holding us together at this point that we just have sort of lost. The more the internet comes out. I, I gotta say, you know, I, uh, was hanging out with Sheamus. I think this was last year or the year before, maybe. And he went to, uh, uh, Sheamus was going to a Latin Mass, which is that's top tier stuff, man. You know, they're speaking Latin. That's the real abracadabra stuff there. That's, that's as deep as you can get, man. And I showed up with my brother after the mass was over, just meet up, we're gonna, we're gonna hang out and grab food. And as everyone's getting out, I see a bunch of, well-mannered individuals wearing nice clothing, not like they're super dressed up, but they're Sunday's best. And the little, and the little kids that were playing were also dressed very well. And I was like, you know, it's kind of crazy to look at this because you contrast this with like a public school system. Being in Chicago, yeah, when like the parents showed up, they're slovenly. Not all of them, I'm not trying to rag on everybody. Poor people or whatever, but dejected, unkempt, some doing drugs. Like that's inner city stuff. And I was just like, we're in a much poorer area where this church is much, much poorer, but everyone here is trying their best and dressing up and trying to be nice. And I'm like, I, I, I can't speak for anything else inside of that. Like I can't. But we're not gonna, I say just these two scenarios where when I see kids get out of like an inner city daycare with their family, and you can see that people don't know each other, they don't talk to each other, they're not dressed well, they're not taking care of themselves, some are sick. And then I see this church get out and everyone's trying to maintain some level of like, you know, manners or or cleanliness. It's, it's objectively better. M. I, I think you scaled it up to the larger society. And I think you see the bigger point. I would get this is more personal, but like, just bored at that at churches, one because I didn't believe what they were telling me. I'm skeptical. And I would have to wait for it to be done for like two hours teaching. You, even if you're bored, it's teaching you self-control. You're learning a virtue there just by, I got to sit through this. I have to just control myself instead of getting up and leaving. But I could be bored at home. Like, why would I go to a place to do it if I don't have to? I think it shows that Ian lacked the discipline. And I don't mean that disrespectfully. I mean, like for, uh, for young people, it's like, because sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do. Mhm. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that doing things you don't want to do is inherently good. Like sometimes there are things you don't want to do that you shouldn't do, and they're pointless and boring and useless for you. And like going, it's always very strange going to a community meeting, whether it's religious or otherwise. Once a week is an extremely. That's what I love. The community meeting is what I like. So I got into the theater and when I was like 15, and that was kind of like, I mean, my personality blossomed after that level of communication, constant communication with humans. Let me, let me put it this way. There's the meme that I've been citing. And, you know, what, screw, we'll get a little crass. It's a funny meme. And it's from 4chan where someone, it says like, you know, 1994, dude says he wants to bang a toaster. Guy smacks him on the side of the head and says, knock it off, weirdo. 2024, guy says he wants to bang a toaster, goes online, finds community of people who bang toasters, and they'll cheer him on. And that's the difference between back then and now. If community was built around Christian moral teachings at a church where it's like, honor thy father and thy mother, obviously not slavery or anything like that. You go to church, no one's telling you to do that. Then whatever deviant behaviors an individual might have, like they're attracted to toasters, is constantly repressed and pushed aside for something substantially more socially acceptable and basic, like, you know, don't covet thy neighbor's things or wife or whatever. But now that community has largely become internet-based, you have quite literally people who have weird mental disorders, like they eat things that are not food, and they find communities where they cheer each other on. Or you have people who have eating disorders and they cheer each other on. We've replaced structured, centralized culture around a moral tradition with decentralized, random communities on the internet, which are more often than not destructive. Yeah, it's reverse culture shock. If, or it's like culture dampening or something. Well, I mean, you can just pick your culture, you can pick your community now and go where you want to do it. And then you can reinforce whatever you believe. When we were more localized focused in our own communities, I mean, people would try to conform to what that community was. And that wasn't always good. There were definitely bad communities of the past. But now it's just hyper-individualism. You can just go online, find what you want, believe what you want, and you can get whatever you want. Before the internet, you, it was, I had better adhere to this group around me. And then I, one day I'm going to move and leave this town and go somewhere else and start my life over again. And I did that at college. I was like, I'm going to be gregarious at college. I'm going to be outspoken and talk. I'm going to be an extrovert at college. So I did. I completely became, went from introvert to extrovert. And then the internet appeared and it's like, dude, I don't have to adhere to anything anymore. I can make a video, get nine people following me, and that starts the momentum of now I am creating my cult. I don't have to adhere to one anymore. He used to be a normal guy. I was very demure and just logical. Math to cut his hair. I did very. So I was about 28 years old. What were you going to say? Well, I was saying like, when we, when we talk about like the religious structures of Christianity, the problem we have is we don't have like a cohesive idea of what Christianity is, right? We're suggesting that like the version that we like is something like something that we need. But like, there's no Christian values that we can sit down and say, well, these are definitively Christian values and these are feel not. So we got so many different, uh, different denominations, and they can't agree amongst each other, especially the Protestants versus the Catholics. There's lots of things that they can't agree on. So to be fair, the Protestants are all wrong. What about the Ten Commandments? Or the virtues? I know the virtues are Catholic. Ten Commandments are Jewish. But what about those, right? Yeah, so when we go to like, like Ten Commandments, I do find that the Ten Commandments are like these universal principles that like people in all cultures at some point had said, yeah, we kind of agree with these things. And no wonder why it's like the, the main focus of the book of Exodus. But like, to say that they're unique to Christianity, I think would be giving it way too much credit. Well, I mean, in the Ten Commandments, there are unique things. I mean, like, only have this one God. No making graven images. No making graven images. The Sabbath, for example. You're not going to find that anywhere else. That is uniquely Judeo-Christian in terms of what that is. And it's a sign of an old covenant. Does Islam have these? The tenets? Uh, well, that comes out of the Abrahamic idea. So yes, but I meant like in that ancient culture from when they started. There's a couple kind of quasi-monotheists in the ancient world. Monotheist? Well, no, quasi-monotheist. So I can't, and could definitely count. I call him henotheism as a, a monotheist. What do that? What does that mean? So it's basically you believe in multiple gods, but there's like one God who's son of above all, who's more special than the other gods, kind of. But I mean, like, you know, like you could in like the Greek polytheism, like Zeus, of course, is the head of God, but you're going to worship a bunch. When you are a henotheist, your real focus is on that one God specifically, even though you believe he's part of like multiple gods. Yeah, the other gods are basically insignificant in henotheism. And so we find this in quite a few ancient cultures. But there were two, like, uh, Nabonidus at some point, had a, a trist with monotheism. Same with Akhenaten. But their cultures that they lived in did not adopt monotheism. One of the things about Islam, I really like, is there's the four pillars of Islam. Five. You mean? Oh, there's four. Well, one of them is fasting is Ramadan, which is basically in the hot, hot heat. They were like, yo, if we're going to survive this heat, we can't eat because you eat, your body burns calories, you get hotter and hotter. So they're like, just don't eat for a month. That's probably, I think where it came from. Well, I mean, they, they eat for the sun to go down. They, they, what they eat? They just wait for the sun. Wait for the sun. It cools down, then they can eat. And it's like, when you fast, the ability to hear God becomes so much clearer because you're not clogged. Like your body's a radio and you're tuning it to catch the frequency of it speaking to you. And if you're clogged up with funk from food, it's it's challenging. The cholesterol, it clouds that. But when your body's clear, man, it's easy to touch with God. The, uh, church father said fasting was the body's way of praying because you're craving something, so you're, you're speaking out for it. So it was this idea that we can pray with our minds, but how is our body going to pray? Well, it fasts because it's craving something. Idea. I'm surprised that it's not part of the Christian tenant. Fasting. Lent. Yeah, it, it did eventually become a tenant. Yeah. Once, one week a year. Is it? No, it's 40 days. You, you fast in between Fat Tuesday. So Fat Tuesday, get all fat, then you have Ash Wednesday. And then you would do some type of fast for 40 days. You don't have to, like, give up food. It's different in, like, for example, Catholic versus Lutheran versus the Orthodox. But like, you'll give up, like meat, or you'll basically be vegan for a couple days of the week. I believe in the Orthodox Church, uh, and in some Catholic traditions, but like, and then if you go to some Protestants that keep it, they'll just say, we're going to give up this one thing for 40 days. So it's different depending on where it manifests in Christianity. Oh, so sometimes it's food, sometimes it's like a video game, sometimes it's not always food. Well, if Catholic and Lutheran, or sorry, Catholic and Orthodox, it has to be, you're basically vegan a couple days you're of the week, or, you know, for the 40 days, other than, uh, Fridays where you're allowed to eat fish. Yeah. So it started as a morning ritual. So you're fasting prior to the crucifixion of Jesus, right? It's, it's a morning ritual because in the ancient world, you didn't eat when you were mourning. You certainly wouldn't have eaten meat. So, um, that's basically what they're tapping into with Lent. Now, over the course of time, the period that they fasting turned into a longer period into the whole Lent season. But you couldn't actually fast for the whole season. So it got morphed into like, well, we're going to, we're going to fast just meat, or we're going to fast just X, Y, and Z. But that's kind of the origination of it. But in Jewish culture and in early Christian culture, fasting was always very important. Mm. Yeah. Um, it was a sign of repentance. It was a sign of mourning. So, for example, if you are really repentant of your sins, like we see, uh, in the Book of Jonah, when Nineveh repents of their sins.

They fast and they put on sackcloth and ashes. In fact, they even put sackcloth and ashes on the cattle. That's how repentant they were. So, uh, with the last few minutes here, we'll go back to the the principal question at hand, and which is, can the West survive without Christianity? I do think one thing we probably all agree on, and maybe we don't, is here's the question: uh, do we as a nation, just the United States, require a shared moral tradition to function? I think yes, otherwise we're going to start to see slow societal collapse. We're going to move, moving from one culture to another would always be chaos. I do think that if, you know, we completely became atheists over the next 50 years, you know, we would eventually adopt, come up with a new culture, possibly. I think honestly, it'd be Islam based on birth rates. But, but let's, let's just say like everybody was atheist tomorrow, would we still require a shared moral understanding of how we should live? Yes, I think we do. I think societies and, and large do better when you can kind of have some level of agreement on like, what right and wrong is. Otherwise, you have nothing but infighting. What would like, let's say, um, I don't know, Qatar or the Emirates got rid of, uh, Islam and just said, we're, we're, we're no longer going to use this doctrine? What would their moral tradition look like if you removed Islam from those countries?

So, you know, my experience is when people leave religion, they typically have roughly similar moral values as when they were in the religion. In fact, if you pull most Christians and Muslims about their actual moral values, they don't always align with what they actually believe in the faith. People's moral values are more subjective than we realize. And so, um, my experience is that people leaving their particular religion is not that they go into complete lack of morals. They typically align similar with what they were raised. It's not until their kids come into the world that we find a large divergence in what they believe because they weren't tethered to anything. I guess the, the, the issue that I'm looking at is they're, they, in the United States, you have the tradition, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, and then you have lack thereof. There's, there's not been a, a dominant replacement for the Christian moral tradition in this country, even among people who are atheists. This is the example we give with Bill Maher. He still largely adheres to Judeo-Christian values in a secular way. Like, even though he's not religious, he still was raised in a society that said, these are, are valuable things he believes that. You look at, uh, countries like China or Japan that don't have those traditions, and their moral structures are very, very different. Obviously, China does not believe in, uh, innocent till proven guilty. They don't believe that you have a right to free speech. Most of these Islamic nations absolutely reject that, even despite the fact they did have Abrahamic values. So I guess what it comes down to is either we sit back and wait to see if there will be in this vacuum in the United States, a new moral philosophy or moral tradition that we value. So far, we haven't seen it. Wokeness, which emerged somewhat from this vacuum, which is considered, I, I agree with this, that is a non-theistic religion, was a horrifyingly authoritarian and despotic ideology that isolates people based on weird identities and who they want to have sex with. It's just a very strange thing that is ultimately very bad. I don't want to live under those rules. I also would not want to live under, uh, Islamic, even if it was reformed rules, that the values they have are very, very different. Mhm. Although not completely in every way, but they, their traditions are very, very, you know, different. Even if you got rid of the religion, I don't like the way that those countries typically treat women, for instance. And then obviously the communist values of these many of these Eastern nations, regardless of whether they're overtly inspired by communists, but they're very hierarchical, authoritarian, communal functions. I also wouldn't want to agree with stripping out the spiritual beliefs from it, leaving behind only the rudimentary, let's just, let's just call it like divergent beliefs of various countries. I would still rather live in a nation, whether it was Christian or otherwise, that was built upon Christian moral values. And that's probably because I grew up in a country that had these values.

So will the United States function without Christianity? Is a ridiculously difficult question to answer. But as most people in this country genuinely still value Christian, Judeo-Christian moral framework, if that starts to go away for wokeness, you get social collapse, you get conflict, you get fighting, you get people trying to blow up Tesla, uh, uh, dealerships. You, you get degradation, largely because what we're seeing right now in this country with the hyperpolarization is not necessarily a political worldview clash. It's a moral worldview clash. There are people who have outright said it should be illegal to have more than a certain amount of money. The other half of the country is like, what? Why? They don't have the same moral framework. One is rooted in a traditional Christian moral framework, one is a complete lack thereof. I think the children of people who are secular, as you were saying, they don't have that moral framework, and this is causing a clash which could lead ultimately to serious violence. Notably, as we mentioned with slavery, despite the fact that everybody was Christian, half of them were like, no, Christianity doesn't allow you to do this, and half of them were like, yes, it does. And then they fought to the death. So I don't know where we go from here, other than to say it's not so much that the religion is what matters, it's that we still largely in this country hold on to a moral tradition. And if that is taken away, the people who see the world this way are not going to let it go, and society will cease to function effectively. So the states break apart, or we get attacked from the outside, or the economy crumbles, and we become a very corrupt state of police not enforcing certain laws. You're not going to have social cohesion without cohesive moral tradition. And secular attempts to try to make new things like wokeism, or even on the right with like, uh, more political understandings of like Christian nationalism, just simply don't work. They lead to more of these authoritarian ideas. I mean, as John Wi Jr. said, the regime of law, democracy, and human rights needs religion to survive. There's a reason that a lot of these ideas came out of the Christian West, despite the fact that no one was perfect and there were Christians pushing against a lot of these ideas that we hold sacred. There's a reason that, uh, sociologists and historians will say these came out of this. So if we move away from Christianity, we can see in real time the authoritarianism and the low birth rates and the lack of charity that's coming out of it. So there is something still here that we need. Maybe in the future, some secular group will come up with something better. But until we get there, the best what we got right now is the Christian tradition in our Christian heritage for keeping this cohesive, stable society. Even Roland to Salem found Christianity was associated with more political stability, citizen empowerment, voice, and accountability in government, and he published the whole study using an OS model for this.

Let's try something real simple as we wrap up. Ian, you like free speech? I do. You also like free speech? I believe, love it. You know, the, uh, nations don't have this. China doesn't have this. Eastern countries don't have this. African countries largely don't have this. It is largely a Western tradition, as Christianity wed. And we saw the rise of wokeness, they also completely reject free speech. So not that it is inherent among Christianity as a core religion that we have free speech, but if we adopted any other moral tradition, I think we'd all be quite upset. Yeah. If I have to choose between Islam and Christianity, I'm going to pick Christianity. About wokeness, uh, well, I don't know wokeness because I'm not politically active like you guys are, so I can't comment on wokeism. So like, you're not allowed to, like, you have to hire people based on race. If there's, uh, too many white people at a company, you're not allowed to hire white people. If, uh, you, you need a certain number of people that, uh, work for you, or, or how about this, a better example when it comes to speech, progressive stack. This means that right now, none of you are allowed to speak. If we are operating under the tenets of woke moral, moral, uh, tradition, which I wouldn't call tradition because it's new, none of you are allowed to speak as you're all white men, and I, as a mixed-race person, am only allowed to talk and you have to listen to me. One of the craziest things about woke, real quick, like, you wouldn't want to live that way, right? I wouldn't want to. But I'm not really sure who is like, in the world I live in, I live in a moderate state, and we don't have those types of extremities on extremities on the left or the right. You do there. They're in all the schools, they're in all the governments, and to varying degrees. Loudoun County, for instance, which is fairly moderate, had schools giving kids books with porn, porn in them, which caused a huge controversy when a man's daughter was 12 and she was raped in a bathroom by a non-binary boy who was allowed to use the bathroom. Again, Loudoun County, Virginia, leaning kind of blue, but fairly moderate. When he showed up angry, demanding answers, they had him arrested, and the federal government referred to the parents across the country who are protesting this as terrorists. So it is not that it has taken over the entire country. In fact, I think it's being pushed back quite deeply now with the victory of Donald Trump. And there's a good reason why, in Chicago, in, in, in what you deem as moderate areas, they have been implementing these things. Points of Canada for the, for the real, like explicit danger of compelled speech, which was an aspect of wokeism. Bill C-16 in Canada, Jordan Peterson is kind of how he made his mark speaking out against it. He's famous on that. If I say I'm a woman and you call me a man, you could go to jail. That kind of danger of escalation of wokeism that's happening in the United States as well. That was like a language police religion kind of. Well, the UK is a good example. If, if you point out that a guy went on a murdering spree was, was, uh, uh, Islamic, you go to jail. And that is what we describe as wokeness. It is, they, they say the reason it's illegal is you're going to create racial animus. So stop telling people that religions or races, like the motivation for the crime was the man screamed, Allahu Akbar. If you go on Facebook in the UK and say, it is clearly Islam that is motivating these people to murder, you will be arrested. They, Germany especially, that's what we call wokeness. It's illogical. I don't want to live under that, under, under those rules. And there are people who scream online all day about Jews that are the most annoying, stupid people. Oh, they sure are. But they're allowed to say it because I don't want to live in Germany where they're going to kick your door and arrest you because you're an idiot. Mhm.

Well, let me just say, I think Christianity is the second least worst religion next to Judaism. Judaism is my favorite, just because the Ten Commandments are like my guiding stone. If I think about human religions, but kind of find God yourself. So I guess that's all I got to say about that. Well, we, we, we do have to wrap up. We went a little bit over. It, we got to go quick. But if you guys want to, uh, get a final thought or a shout out before we go. Yeah, I mean, you can follow me more, uh, at Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube. I'm having video, I'm planning videos this summer on how Christianity ended slavery, how Christianity created human rights, how Christianity created science. So you follow me there for more, and I'm going to keep doing more on this topic. Sure. Uh, thanks for having me, by the way. Um, I don't follow politics, so I was surprised that I was invited to come. But, uh, yeah, follow me on Deconstruction Zone. I primarily debate religious topics. Uh, I'm probably most famous for debunking all the prophecies that Jesus never fulfilled, and talking about how the Bible and shrin slave and when God says you can do it, it's very hard to question it. But, uh, yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, yeah, it was like, we, we opened up the, the pot and just scooped out a top layer of goodness to talk about for today's episode, and there's just a big bowl of jelly that I want to, I want to go deeper into. What were you going to say? We can all agree that Islam is dangerous. Well, I don't know. I think extremism is dangerous, and anyone that takes a religion and creates an extremist ideology out of it is a bad dude. I was on stage because a Muslim challenged me because he wanted to argue child marriage should be allowed today, and he is just a guy living in the US. And every time I bring up child marriage, it's always Muslims coming at me going, no, no, it's not that bad. It is bad. I'll give one final thought before, because we do got to go, but the, to to elaborate logically with hard facts as to what you said about Islam. I do not mean to disparage someone in the religious belief, so people to believe what they want. But the Hadith literally calls on Muslims to murder Jews, and I can never, never accept that. And it is a, a conundrum of the rules of big tech, though it's changing when they say you can't disparage someone based on their religion or whatever, or attack a religion or whatever. It's ridiculous. Look, if your religion of any kind, I don't care what it is, specifically calls upon you to murder other people, I am going to tell you that's wrong, and that's that. That's the, the, the principal issue I have with Islam is that it literally says the, oh, the end will not come until every tree and every rock will scream out, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come kill him. That's psychotic. I don't care. I don't care what anybody says. No, don't kill people. Okay. Ian, do you want to shout anything out? Yeah, all sorts of stuff, man. Quick. Do casper.com. Go to casper.com. Unfortunately, my coffee is out. Also, we got Kellen on the buttons. I don't know if Kellen's gonna shout out anything tonight. What are you, what are you up to? Nope. I got, I have to leave. Let's wrap it up. T-Bone. All right, thank you all so much for hanging out. This has been a blast. Thank you guys for coming. We're back tonight for Timcast IRL. We're going to be live at a special event. We're hanging out with Mike Cernovich. Big fan, uh, deep respect, really excited to have this conversation about the Epstein files. And we will see you at rumble.com, Timcast IRL, tonight at 8 p.m.