okay so it looks like we're live nick how are you doing very well david very well thanks for coming back thanks for keeping in touch although sporadically we haven't talked maybe in a what few months or a year so yeah i'd say i say since uh since covet i think this is what our our sixth installment with you fifth or sixth yeah you've definitely done uh interview one two three four five so this will be yeah and the last time i talked to matt i think was was also before covid too oh okay you're not in touch with him by text messaging and all that we are but it's so sporadic um things kind of dropped off several months ago and uh but now that i'm back on your show hopefully he sees it and yeah we get back in touch again yeah we keep in touch very sporadically but lately since uh like i took a whole year off the podcast i came back in february and uh got back in touch with matthew and had him on the show uh you can watch that but um he's the same old guy real sweet lovable guy but going through some challenges like we all do from time to time but he's gone through some rough stuff but uh i'm happy i'm happy he's uh sort of dabbled in the dark side and come back to god and uh it's it's always a come here go away kind of relationship with god you know like cat and mouse who's the cat who's the mouse but yeah it is and and somebody such as himself and and i know myself we can't let it go for long yeah so we can try you told me you're involved uh you moved to florida and you're involved in filmmaking for a religious organization of some sort can you talk about that yeah so um i moved from michigan to atlanta to florida and year and a half and now i'm living in vero beach florida so that's east coast about halfway down the state so it's warm and sunny and beautiful all the time and i appreciate that and it was a fluke that i even found this this job but now i work flowing streams is the church the main uh program is called true news which i don't i don't know it's it's decently well known um and i work alongside a gentleman named matthew and he and i are working on a documentary called the greatest reset and it is the counter move to what the globalists are doing right now uh the greatest reset is a play on the great reset which is what klaus schwab and the world economic forum and bill gates and everybody is overtly pushing the greatest reset being the second coming of christ ah so we're interviewing all sorts of smart people and uh traveling around the world we're trying to go to canada where we but there's a handful of people that we'd love to to head up a couple of doctors and personalities and pastors you might know dr roger hodkinson uh pastor coats i mentioned to you as well and then another church just got an eight-foot high chain link fence put around it in manitoba i think okay um and so we're itching to go up and and film all this and interview people interview the the canadian police and the um parishioners just to kind of they're they're it's it's really mind-blowing to me that they've taken to the point where they that they will actually prevent you from attending a church it's unbelievable yeah when i was uh going through sort of a dark time during the first year of kovid i was watching a lot of alternative media on uh bit shoot which wasn't probably a good idea but um there i discovered rebel news which is sort of a montreal born and bred uh news source alternative i guess it's right wing i'm not sure but uh i enjoyed the coverage i mean it's it's jabbing at the left left all the time and uh exposing the hypocrisy of the ways the different ways that governments are dealing with this so-called pandemic whatever it is and uh i'm not denying there's a pandemic i'm just saying that's what they're calling it i don't know what it is but um just poking fun at the hypocrisy and i have sympathy for politicians because they're just trying to muddle through and do their job and i think a lot of them have uh you know good intentions for the most part whatever mixed mixed motives but they're impotent like the rest of us you know uh it's it's a crappy job i think to be a politician i think it's a really crappy job and uh it's a good day is when your ego gets stroked to bad days when you get exposed for being hypocrite that's basically your life but uh rebel news might be someone you could partner with because they're really really interested in exposing uh corruption and the government of canada and stuff that hypocrisy and uh pointing out to stuff that you'd find interesting but they also covered the mandatory quarantine hotels prison things that they set up the government of canada set up and uncovered that i didn't i didn't follow all the stats but at least one of them one of these hotels ironically was owned by china that was not good whoops how did that happen but i don't i don't buy it you know i take conspiracy theories with a grain of salt and when someone has an axe to grind with the left i take their right wing media stuff with a grain of salt and of course we all know the left wing controls the media anyway so take everything in the mainstream media with a huge grain of salt but they're pretty overt with their agenda you know like they just want to destroy the family they want to just destroy uh anything that's meaningful for uh for a christian basically intimacy marriage the family destroyed babies in the womb destroy the elderly whatever like their agendas open it's an open secret what they're after they want yeah they want license to have pleasure at any expense and uh no responsibility no no consequences for their actions it's a very broad brush i'm painting but that's i think it's largely true are you familiar with timothy gordon or patrick coffin yeah yeah you know both of them yeah i i do sort of avoid the catholic media because as soon as i start to like someone i find out that they hate pope francis and then i'm i just i just got back from mississippi interviewing timothy gordon no way okay and he and he spoke uh at length about the the assault on the family yeah and um and that the the family is the cell of society and uh he's got six beautiful children and a beautiful wife and land and uh and really is manifesting what he professes which is rare to find so i appreciate that a lot um and then in a couple weeks we'll be los angeles and then and then we'll interview patrick there so yeah i've always liked patrick kaufman i've just heard sort of indirectly that he started to go a little bit more right-wing conservative whatever and when i hear about a catholic going to the right it just scares the hell out of me because that means they usually end up bashing the pope and that's just a no-go for me but it's cool it's cool too that you're that you're in touch with these people very uh influential catholic people and uh household names and uh for the most part it was my first uh re-immersion into what a catholic home was in the dialogue since you and i had spoken last you know we walked in and the smell of incense wafted over me and there was beautiful iconography on the walls and you know when they ate lunch they said bless us o lord and these thy gifts and it was just it took me right back and it was very edifying and since the last time we've talked um i think i've always been a curious person but it's taken years of humbling to become honestly open-minded but i think i can honestly say now that i'm open-minded it's quite credible for someone your age you mentioned you're in your early 20s so you're way ahead of your age i think because usually you gotta you've got to develop the sophistication to balance all the stuff you encounter all the data that you're gathering in the world but you're someone that's always gathered a lot of data so uh you obviously process it you digest it i know you struggle with a lot of it existentially and stuff we've talked about that but uh that's uh that's the path to wisdom you know just exposing yourself to a lot of data in the world and processing it boldly yes i congratulate you for that and how do you how are you with your people of your age group are you comfortable you find stuff to talk about with them or do you find a lot of them are just on their cell phones and not really digging as deep as you think they might i spend most of my time not among my age group because of my work and i don't have a social life my social life is it just doesn't exist and if it does it's it's people at work and they are all i have a couple of friends in my age with whom i have these sorts of conversations they're incredibly thoughtful and it's it's fruitful conversations and then i'd say the vast majority about 70 of my peers could not care less it doesn't seem to matter what bit of information i share with them about the state of the they believe that the world is as it has been presented to us and i would say that they're largely uncurious about theology philosophy conspiracy whatever it might be and it's a real bummer because i try and produce emotion from them like hey have you seen this or what do you think about this because you know as as 22 where gen z uh the world is categorically different for us than it was you know for our parents and man they're just i see you got a deck of cards are you still doing your magic tricks oh yeah these never leave my hands nice can you throw up something on the screen first is that too much pressure uh no i could do something for you here just oh that's cool you're always playing with the cards do you get gigs with that it just quiets my mind it focuses my my thoughts to have my hands doing something so i'm just always shuffling that's cool yeah better than those spinners that people fidget with yes those are infuriating so uh what uh just to briefly segue into the family what do your parents think of your ongoing search for truth do they comment do they offer support or guidance are they the subject of religion the meaningful part of that conversation has been uncomfortable and largely unplumbed i can talk about religion as a subject like factually isn't this interesting this historical bit of data or what's happening with the church or they are always supportive of my investigation into anything but they're at such different places like my dad especially is just in a fundamentally different state of mind than i am that they'll listen but they're not chasing you know they aren't pushing or being like you need to read this book you need to talk to this person or whatever uh i do know with certitude that my mother prays for me endlessly i know that um she is saint augustine's mother so you know that makes you with all yes and i will happily take that that that mantle yeah yeah he was a late he was a late convert relatively late in his life so yeah i think i'm in the not yet part of that prayer interesting so what about peer pressure if you want to call it that from your uh supervisor your boss your colleagues at work because it's a christian environment now that is the crucible yeah so my co-director matt is everyone there is protestant and they say orthodox protestant but they use the word orthodox to just mean like original as opposed to like the eastern orthodox use the word um as protestants they know the bible intimately and i'd say every day or every other day there is a a skirmish of some kind of the minds with one or more members every morning there's bible study you know we've been working our way through john leading up to passion week and so on and yeah it's just it is a crucible and it's forcing me to remain humble and open-minded and really consider things i mean and since i started the prodigal it was an exercise in paying attention to the part of me that was aware of denying my attention to things that i found compelling and that has allowed me to inch by inch by inch just start to consider information um i pray very often now like wait like shockingly often nice um and even though it's still wildly uncomfortable and i don't have the words it's just something that i'm i'm like yeah i'll just do it sure like what do i have to lose you very cool what's your favorite uh spontaneous prayer is it love thanksgiving questions is it god reveal yourself to me or what is it god of mercy and me a sinner lord of mercy me a sinner lord cleanse me of my sins and have mercy on me and if not that then just sort of a a background conversation of you know this is something i went through when i was when i was catholic and i see myself going through it again and it's so difficult to parse out is the entity that i'm conversing with of my own creation is it is it just this part of my brain talking to this part of my brain or is there something out there and um you know i i do believe in a god and i believe in a to mystic god um i believe an aristotelian god uh i'm not entirely certain about the whole personalism side of the theism uh whether he wrote books or had a son the shroud of turn blows my mind i don't understand that like there is something we're all connected man like there is there there must be a being whose essence is existence itself who has the qualities of that thomas described and uh upon whose existence ours is dependent um and i think from there you can derive many meaningful irrefutable aspects of god you know goodness uh justice logic perhaps even personalism i just haven't you know sorted that one out yet and i think you can also drive morality from from these truths as well yeah i would direct you just gently guide you to focus on the will like you have a will and so you are an agent you're a moral agent because you have a will so if you start just thinking about god do you want anything god do you desire anything god do you get what you desire do you always get what you desire um if you start focusing on god's will you're soon going to be at that crossroads like yes god is personal or you may go deist but i'm pretty sure if you realize that your will has a source uh you will start attributing will to the source and then you've got a personal god can you walk me through that one more time you have a will yes and an effect cannot be more perfect than its cause and you are caused by god and god therefore has a will not only a will but a will that is infinitely perfect just like every one of his attributes and perfections are infinite so contemplate that chew on that for the next couple of years and i'm sure you'll be right in line with the monotheism because uh to have an an entity with a will a supreme entity with a will my behavior would then matter in relation to it is that what you're saying well i'm saying it makes him personal because he he makes choices and he ah that's what that's that's what it is to be a person like your dog as cute as your dog is it's not a person because it doesn't have a free will right so how do you get to whether or not that entity converses well i mean i i see i see i see god's communication as so sophisticated that we were bumping into it all the time without recognizing it for example i was just reading uh saint alphonsus liguri last night and uh beautiful beautiful moral theologian among other things and a saint and a doctor of the church but he was talking about the way that the flowers spoke to the saints he was recounting other saints he wasn't talking about himself as a saint he was recounting stories of the great saints saint teresa and saint catherine have seen all these great saints who have used this imagery of walking through a beautiful pastoral scene in the springtime or in the summer and the beautiful flowers reproaching the saints saying uh you know reproaching the saint by drawing attention to the fact that god is good god created all of this for us and how eloquently nature speaks the the book of nature you know you've heard this term before the god is speaking to us through the book of nature very very powerfully if you're a sensitive soul like saint francis of assisi for example you'll see in the animals in the birds in the floor and fauna you'll see the communications of god and a lot of that it comes becomes very humbling because all of creation is singing out the praises of god in a certain sense in a poetic sense and when you witness the beauty and the innocence of a simple little flower it creates a contrast with your own sinfulness and i'm very happy that you are drawn to those prayers of contrition and repentance because that's very very powerful it's that's at the heart of christianity he's recognizing i'm nothing god is everything and without god's help this is what i do i'm selfish i'm lazy i'm greedy i'm horny i'm i'm indulging in lust and greed and everything else so having that contrition and that repentance is not a dark thing it's a very beautiful and wonderful light thing because it makes you realize that you don't want to be left to your own devices you want to do god's will you want to pursue the good the highest good and god is the highest good so the way that nature speaks to us the way that creation speaks to us is through its order its beauty its goodness its ontological goodness even if there's a polluted river you know that the source of the the evil that's polluting this river is not god the source is sin it's the uh original sin actual sin anything that strayed in creation willfully strayed from god's will that's what caused evil that's what involved evil in creation it wasn't the river that made a bad choice it was a spirit in the form of satan and his followers or adam and eve and their progeny so two thoughts from that the first being the purest form of worship i think i've ever had was when i was in the ocean uh shortly after i moved to florida and i i just looked out at the sky touching the water and i'm in the ocean and it was one of the most wordless worships i've ever had i wasn't just narrating prayers in my head it was just a status of awe at the entity that i knew was responsible for this so i can very much relate with what you were sharing about flowers and the book of nature and i think two years ago the that argument fell on deaf ears very deaf ears for me you know a christian would say well just look around you like can't you tell god exists i'm like you're a you know because daniel dennett told me about evolution so you're dumb you know genetics bro and uh it's been a it's been a multi-year process of pulling myself out of the matrix of just terrible ideas and bad ways of thinking and man like thought world views and if you get the wrong one you'll find yourself in a very loud room of all the worst ideas and i spent a lot of time there um so that was that was the first thought that i had and then the second was um you bring up the fall and this is something i'm struggling with i've been for a long time and that is i don't understand genesis 3 whatsoever uh the the idea that the seraph the throne guardian which is also lucifer was able to deceive perfect beings who were in perfect unity with god and that they willfully chose to do not god's will they were culpable yet they had not yet been made knowledgeable with the with the tree of which they ate um that whole paradigm confuses the hell out of it yeah yeah yeah well it's if you want to think of it as um a point of um unstable equilibrium so you know when you have a bowl and you put a ball bearing in the bowl it's just going to settle to the bottom and stay there but if you invert that bowl if it's not a flat bottomed bulb if it's a rounded bottom bowl if you invert that bowl and you set put that same ball bearing on top suddenly there's only one spot where it can rest and anywhere else even the slightest movement it's just going to fall so that's the way god set it up and the atheist will say well that's cruel to set things up that way but that's just the nature of human nature because we're finite and the nature of god he's infinitely perfect so he cannot create another god so he had to if he's going to create anything it's going to be not god it's going to be finite it's going to be radically different from him in many important ways including this equilibrium this uh unstable equilibrium that is built into his creation now he could they they did have grace so they could have maintained that position but it's just a question it's it's inevitable it's inevitable that we're going to say basically i've got this like um it's like if you're if you end up having a child or if you have a niece or nephew that's young you can go in the kitchen and you can say okay we're going to make a cake and the child might in his hubris or out of his enthusiasm think i've got this i can do this and then make a mess of the cake right and you can say well there's no ill will there but i'm trying to just isolate the component of why and how adam and eve were able to go astray it's because there's so many ways for us to say i've got this i can i can take control i can decide what's good and evil i can i can uh be like god basically and uh because you have you've been given you've been given by god this god-like life god-like beauty a god-like health a god-like wisdom and and love and you've got all this god-like stuff so it's i think inevitable that a finite creature endowed with these god-like attributes even though the limit limited and finite participation in god's goodness and his attributes even though it's finite and limited just the fact that we have that will i think lend itself very naturally to that sort of impulse that any child would have or any human would have where it's like yeah i got this i could do this let me take the wheel and and then of course 2000 years later we have a country or well however many thousands of years later we have country singers saying jesus take the wheel it's like we realized i don't have this you know i'm not equipped you know to drive this and we're driving it into the ground i think uh covered 19 is a good example of how we've driven things into the ground let me ask you this so there were actually two falls in the bible obviously you had the fall of say satan lucifer you took with him a third of the angels my conception of evil is that which perverts reality that which is not god right is a privation of god or a perversion of things that are good in order to pursue or choose evil you have to orient your will away from that which you know to be good and toward evil when i think about the fall of the angels who are created in the image of god and are in the presence of god they can see him right especially the seraphim the throne guardians of which lucifer was my confusion comes in toward what did lucifer orient himself toward himself because he's participating in god's uh attributes to a limited and finite extent but he sees that the image that comes to mind is cocaine it's like you know you think you're smart you think you're i've never done cocaine but this is what i hear is that you think that you're all that and you think that you're the most clever pickup artist in the bar because you're on that cocaine so i'm not saying that god's uh goodness and his perfections that he allowed his creatures to participate in is an illicit drug and it's gonna destroy your body and all that sort of thing no god is the source of everything that's good including health so he made us healthy and perfect he made satan healthy and perfect but that free will is by the way this is called the mystery of inequity it's not it's never been adequately explained by anyone even the most genius theologians right or saints makes me feel a lot better yeah it's the it's the deepest and darkest mystery and i don't expect to ever understand it even in all eternity when i'm in heaven god willing if we make it there but uh it is humbling to contemplate it it's frightening to contemplate it because how can someone so good fall so far and you know the fall of the best is the worst and uh that's a catholic maxim so that's why a lot of saints suggested that popes and priests run a great risk of ending up in hell and that many of them do end up in hell god forbid i hope that's not the case but that was the uh intuition of a lot of the saints just because of that the the elevation that they were given the sort of privileged position that they had the responsibility and with great power comes responsibility great responsibility interesting so his orientation was was inward as opposed to as opposed to outward um that's my take but i mean i don't i've never i've i've never encountered an explanation of the the fall of satan other than pride like it was just the pride and also another thing that the saints the catholic saints emphasize is the envy which the pride allowed him to fall into envy with respect to creatures that were lower much lower than this beautiful seraphim the human creatures in in particular the humble 14 year old virgin in some backwater village in the middle east somewhere when she was given this great privilege of the immaculate conception that she was given a special grace preventing her from being contaminated with original sin so there's this idea that uh satan was allowed to see not only the creation of humanity but he was allowed to see the in some uh amount of clarity i'm not sure the amount of detail that satan was given before the fall when he was being tested he and the angels were being tested but there were some some of the saints talk about the fact that there were they were given a vision of humanity and the role of humanity in the incarnation and this is coming from a franciscan school that believes that the incarnation would have taken place with or without the fall so this is a franciscan approach that i'm telling you about the domestic school says that the incarnation is dependent i think on the fall whereas the franciscans firmly teach that it's not dependent on the on the fall at all so i tend to sympathize more with the french systems on many issues um and if you want to look into them as a sort of alternative to complete and sort of complement your thomistic interests you could go to blessed john donne scotus one of my favorites you could go to saint bonaventure who is a great saint but which i find him very difficult to read uh blessed john don scores is also difficult to read um but you also have uh you know you've got other saints in the in the franciscan tradition that you could read and you could read saint francis himself frank saint francis assisi so three three thoughts came from that the first being that yes it is interesting the the emphasis on envy um and that satan tried to inspire that same envy in adam and eve by saying you know it's not that you'll die it's that god doesn't want you to become like god and that's interesting the second conundrum that i've run across recently with the fall is the some this peculiar difficulty or tension or uh not touching opposition between knowing more and being more moral that they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and by growing in knowledge they lowered in immorality that's not the way no that's can you resolve that for me there's no there's no correlation there the fall happened before they touched or tasted the fruit the fall happened before that so it's it's when they decided to dis disobey god that's when the fall happened the knowledge they got is a direct consequence of the evil act of the will the evil choice that they made the knowledge is just like when you make a mistake and you go uh oh i made a boo-boo that's the knowledge it's not a great knowledge it's not like wow i've increased in wisdom well you know you sort of learn from your mistakes but what a horrible way to gain wisdom what a horrible horrible way to gain wisdom and they would have been more wise to not have fallen but like i said it was inevitable and god knew it was inevitable so it's almost not so much it didn't matter what the tree was the the it was the command the tree was named that because god knew that they would regret their decision as soon as they made the decision that yeah that's it you know interesting um and then the the last thought that i had i struggle to be able to assist believers in taking a step out of this of the space of belief and observing christianity as a as a narrative as a story that's not a pejorative that is not an insult but it is a story and what's what stories do is they tell you things about the characters and they tell you things about the authors when you read lord of the rings you learn beautiful things about the world of middle earth and and bilbo and gandalf and so on and you also learn about jrr tolkien and something that i've come to realize is that if we assume christianity is true it is one of the most mind-blowing descriptions of reality that you have because it informs you about god what he's like what he's like in that he would create a thing like us that he finds it interesting to do it in that he's almost bounded by the attributes of what he's created like not to put bounds on god but the fact that he created something like this does sort of yeah sequester adjectives that you can yeah he did this he did this he did this specifically yeah he has a son and he cares in a way about us in such that he would allow torture right and and when i started to look at christianity through that way and just again assuming that it was true yeah it's intimidating how informative it is about reality yeah yeah it's hard to it's hard to cope with that and that's a sort of meditation i think that's an advanced contemplation so if you're meeting joe blow christians like me uh we can smile along with you but to actually go on the journey is it's a bit too intense right so that would be that would be a a very rare moment of clarity to go there with you and uh i can toy with the idea but i know that it's like um you talked about leaving the matrix or whatever it's kind of like that that sort of thing it just pulls you out of your comfort zone and so i'm i'm sort of going to speak in defense of the the average christian because it's just it's hard to get it's hard to go to work in the morning if you're connected to to reality and you're actually exposed like a raw nerve the way jesus and the saints were so until we're saints you're not going to see us connecting that way okay so give us a break and pray for us and uh that's it maybe you're the one maybe you're the pied piper yeah who knows and i also think that the it's not entirely organic that it's hard to get there that it's hard to think about those things i think it is a lot a product of socialization and and immediately complacency trauma neurosis yeah lots being injected into us that prevent us from actually having that appreciation because you know modern day uh new age atheism just looks at religions and and just laughs it's just a joke it's like how could somebody ever have this idea pop into their head and then it'd stick and they're so disconnected from the fact that like again if we assume it's real it's because there was a a visceral experience of of the life of jesus or of pillars of clouds and pharaohs and rivers of blood and so on and so forth and now it's like oh wow that's a cool plot for a movie because that's the only way that we can connect with something fantastical is is a screen yeah well it's kind of like i've been watching some real crime tv shows with my wife just because it's interesting psychologically and it's humbling to see what we're capable as humans and i i always am very very quick to connect and sympathize with not not the victim but with the perpetrators of the most horrible crimes because i know that i'm capable of that much worse like i'm a very sick person so i've never actually done anything too horrible uh you know compared with them on these on the show i wouldn't make a good candidate for an episode but uh when you when you're a nice housewife been married for 30 years and you find out that your husband has been molesting your kids for the past 15 years you you you need to be almost heroic in your virtue and in your sobriety and your sentience and your self-awareness to process that period just to process it and it's usually i think it takes years to really process what does that mean and what is reality because my reality is shattered now this man that i thought i knew i didn't know him and i'm using an innocent woman with an evil man because that's usually what happens in these stories but there are occasionally women that act weird too but it's usually a man because the man is driven by his passions he wants to fulfill his lusts uh usually with prostitutes or young children whatever it is that he's lusting after the the marginal or the vulnerable right so uh yeah it's it's shocking and horrifying that's an example of a reality check that's hard to take because it's so horrible but with christianity it's wonderful and weird but good like it's it's it's wonderfully good and even even the passion death and resurrection of our lord obviously the resurrection is good but even the passion and torture and death of our lord is a wonderful good because when you understand uh what it means for us you know and so to wake up to that reality the goodness of that even when paradoxically it looks so horrible if you just read the old testament i'm horrified by the old testament most of it most of it and what i'm not horrified by i'm bored and befuddled by except for things like genesis and you know a lot of there are a lot of uh you know colorful parts in certain books i love the the the tale of jonah and the whale you know lots of colorful parts that i do enjoy and i do think that i somewhat understand but for the most part if it's battles and uh shifting alliances and all that sort of stuff it just bores me or if people are being hypocritical and disgusting it just disgusts me so yes hard to hard to have a clear understanding of it and then integrate it and then enter into that world and say yes i'm a christian and i'm like aware of all that i know how it all fits together i know how it all works it all makes sense i'm comfortable with all of it i've never met anyone that's comfortable with elevator that understands all of it and i'm certainly not there yet i think that there are many paths to get to christianity as a resolute world view that if you can draw a line from the present you in the present moment through a set of like five or ten immutable truths um and actually believe it or not rand helped me do this she put into narrative the aristotelian and the mystic truths of the identity principle a equals a that you exist that existence exists and uh that the mere fact of you recognizing those means that you have a consciousness that is rational enough to not make a mistake on at least to those things doesn't mean you're all-knowing or that you can't be fallible in other ways but it couldn't be the case that you were wrong about any of those other things because it's logically incoherent and then so like okay if you have that foundation and then you start at the top with something like uh the shroud of turin or you know the resurrection or you know any number of inroads to christianity then you can kind of just draw draw a line of tension between the two and you don't have to answer for the other 99 because you can't be shaken from that yeah yeah that's a cool approach that's a very cool approach that's basically my approach i've got like a handful of principles i cling to and then the rest is just like well i you know uh if i am wrong you know i mean there's certain things that i cannot be wrong about and quite frankly they're sufficient for me like i've got god no matter what i've got i've got the laws of thought no matter what non-contradiction i've got the fact that i exist no matter what i've got all these things and it's like you know the the most anyone could ever tear me down to would be monotheism right a generic monotheism that's the that's as far down as you can go because after that it's just you're going to be contradicting yourself if you try to if you try to attack my base my base is monotheism you can't attack it so uh i mean even if you want to go for solipsism i've got i've got a way out of that like i mean it would be supremely ironic for someone else to be accusing me of assaults isn't being true in the first place so you can have fun with that but um no it's just like my my foundation is so rock solid and uh the the thing about christianity is that people need to realize that there is faith involved there are faith-based beliefs involved when i phoned the atheist experience like three four or five years ago whatever it was i talked to matt dillahunty and his guest co-host and i wanted to talk about the principle of sufficient reason i wanted to talk about the laws of thought i wanted to talk about philosophy the philosophical basis for monotheism and he was just too unable and or unwilling to talk about those issues and just immediately went to the faith-based based beliefs and i i reminded him like i went with him but i said look this is not what i'm calling but i'm calling about philosophy non-faith-based beliefs but if you really insist because you're pushing me towards the faith-based beliefs yeah i'll talk about it but just bear in mind that's not why i called you that's not what i want to talk about i want to pressure you to confront your unquestioned and absurd philosophical assumptions but he was really not comfortable with that do you mind giving me a 5 000 foot overview on psr just whatever happens there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it period whatever every effect has a cause right and so uh there are no exceptions like uh this is one of the basic principles the principle of sufficient reason and uh another principle that took me firmly into young earth creationism for lack of a better word is the principle of proportionate causality which is the one i cited to you earlier that an effect cannot be more perfect or greater than its cause so uh all your evolution theories are out the window right with that right just that but uh yeah i i dispensed with evolution about a year ago i think and that was very useful to getting to a place where i could play with a lot more interesting ideas yeah um because the because you're no longer a monkey not only am i no longer monkey but the the discussion around evolution is really just a an intellectual circle jerk it's gross it's they're finding as many ways as they can to reduce uh mind to the mindless and then cause and you know cause mind but they don't especially it's people like daniel dennett who who his theory of consciousness is that it's a good magic trick that fools itself somehow and we're aware of being full it's yeah but uh the i'm not aware of what's sufficient principle of sufficient reason no the second one the proportionate causality proportionate causality but learning that you can't give what you don't have that's a nice way to think about it you can't give what you don't have so i even got to the point when um i think it was the second to last episode that i did on my podcast uh last year i talked to wal thornhill who was the sort of creator of the electric universe cosmetology yeah yeah yeah and months after i kept talking to him and i really i just kind of came to the conclusion when uh eu electric universe refuted big bang yeah it refuted redshift it refuted quantum physics it refuted the expansion of the universe of black holes and i was like hang on a second the the law that every scientist will laugh at you if you even question that the universe is trending toward disorder and entropy that fundamentally cannot be true just looking around okay and and as a result of that i was like okay no matter how big the universe is it is there is a constant injection of and that got me to the mystic idea that there must be a being whose essence is existence itself period full stop you can't give what you don't have yeah yeah where are you now with the eu stuff i find it utterly compelling okay you're still in it yeah yeah and and i do think it gets you to a younger earth um 100 000 years ish planetary formation can be very rapid okay um uh and i think it also gets you to the formation of life very rapidly because the understanding is that um consciousness is sort of like music notes yeah and so if god speaks forms to the resonance of it yeah well you just think about the trinity you think about the breath of god being his spirit and the the word like coming out of his mouth is the sun right so the breath carries that word and that word is resonating it's just like it's very uh it's a very mundane image that we're all familiar with speaking a word and that idea of a word being like an image in a mirror they there is no there is no separation like you when you have a concept the concept doesn't evolve the concept is immediate it's an immediate thing that's generated the same thing with uh with the second person of the holy trinity it there's no development it's he's co-eternal with the father that's what i'm basically getting at here there's a there's a co-eternality in each of the members of the trinity but we put the father as the source throughout through attribution just like we give different attributions to we give attribution to the sun for redeeming mankind but nothing that's done outside of the trinity is done by only one or two of the persons they're all done by all three persons so god the father god the son and the holy spirit all redeemed us but it's only god the son that incarnated and uh you know so it's it's interesting thinking about the analogies and that's all they are is analogies that we're trying we're trying to poetically describe the trinity and we're never going to understand it but that idea of the word and the breath of god uh it's it's a very powerful image and that's why it's used by a lot of the saints well in the beginning of john is a bit of a mind bender because they incarnate yeah multi-faceted word multifaceted word you know it is it's it's it's even emotional to me now because of how much more i understand it like the idea that um because i've fallen in love with logic and i think that's one of the ways that you can fall in love with god is if you fall in love with logic and you rand has a great part in atlas shrugged where uh where john galt basically just rejoices and smiles to himself because the world is coherent it's logical and things happened in a way that we're understandable and when you realize that that is a beautiful thing what rand didn't realize is that is worship of god and that's because she's an atheist but i realized that and so when you when you think about logos okay the the speech of god is is and then the sun is logos incarnate right made flesh and then dwelt among us just gets you so much further than ever the the the platitudes and the stories that were tossed around yeah i i agree i agree that uh i came to christ and to god himself god the father primarily and chronologically uh through my love of philosophy my and philosophy of course is the love of wisdom right so the love of truth i mean nothing is more exciting to me than truth i mean it's just so exciting and logic is sort of a parsing of truth right a consistent parsing of truth but yeah when you know that you live in a well-ordered universe there's nothing more satisfying and that's why i have a lot of sympathy for the eastern religions that talk about karma i mean it's a very it's one of the most important principles in my life is karma cause and effect it's one of the most important things so i have a lot of sympathy for the the religions of the east and then not to mention of course the whole uh self and other uh quandary you know they really helped me uh just through sympathetic uh having people in the world that are buddhists and whatever it helped me i didn't i never became a buddhist but it just helps to know the people out there struggling with that you know the existence of the self the existence of the other the existence of god and the the buddhists sort of put to the side the question of god but at least they're asking the question about uh ontology and about existence in a very profound and focused way and some other conclusions obviously i think are wrong but uh that there are people out there struggling with that i think is very powerful and you and i i think came to god through philosophy and our love of truth and to me uh that's my way so i i really uh i really admire that way and i'm attracted to that way and when i hear someone that comes to christ through another way it can be touching uh but it's not as maybe not as it doesn't it's it's more other other it's not as intimately connected to my journey so yeah it's easy for me to be condescending if it isn't um if i don't see somebody have sort of the a the the base truths or even a defensible thing yeah um and perhaps that's wrong of me yeah yeah you gotta you're missing an opportunity to humble yourself in front of some uneducated peasant woman that's got faith but you know our faith is 300 times as strong as yours right so you gotta you gotta humble yourself you gotta humble yourself it doesn't really matter that she doesn't know from adam uh you know the principles of philosophy or whatever it does it really doesn't matter it's i would i don't know it's kind of a in a twilight zone sort of way i hesitate to even utter the words that i would like to switch places with her because bang i mean i i i really don't i don't want to switch places with anyone frankly uh and i think god made us as individuals and unique uh persons for that reason i mean i don't think i'm supposed to be that uneducated peasant not that i'm highly educated myself but there's a different path and different proclivities and tendencies and and tastes and sort of thing i really want to talk to you again right now i have to go because i promised my wife i wouldn't go past nine o'clock it's 901 can you just leave me and the listeners with a sort of um what should i say a preview to what our next talk will be about some of the things we haven't touched on that we're going to talk about next time please sure i think it would it would be us discussing the the battle that's at hand and what that looks like because it does seem that we are like it or not being pulled toward a battlefield yeah and you've chosen the side of good i'm presuming you're presuming correctly yeah that's it it's it's that simple right you go to the light and uh saint ignatius of loyola said there are two standards standard is like the battle flag on two hills one is jesus christ the lamb and the other one is satan and his followers and sadly a lot of satan's followers don't really have the clarity because of the choice they made they don't have the clarity that those of us under the standard of christ have and you can see that i think that you and your journey you can sort of already even though you're young even though your your journey is far from over i think you can already sort of taste and see how the lord is good because of the clarity because of the peace because of the joy because the ability to suffer the ability to humble yourself the ability to be uh have some self-control maybe not perfect self-control but a little bit more than when you're indulging in the dark side so i think you can already taste that right absolutely excellent talking with you nice seeing your face yeah and uh we're gonna do this again soon i'll i'll do it with you uh as early as next weekend if you're up for it sounds good it was great to talk to you again david alright take good care of yourself much love brother pray for me i love you love brother pray for me i love you bye