CVS Live Guest - 2021-05-27 - Nick Stumphauzer

Author Streamed Thursday May 27th, 2021

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In this episode Nick and I discuss Freemasonry, Thy Mystery of Iniquity, Loving obedience and submission, and the theological virtue of Faith. God is good.


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already i think we're live nick so uh nice to see your face again nice to hear your voice how you been doing since we last talked about seven weeks ago well that that flew by which uh describes just how busy i've been how insane life has been so that's always good yes um i travel quite a bit for work um i was averaging about about a flight a week to a city but oftentimes in that one flight it would be several days so we'd fly for four days and it'd be four cities and we'd be shooting two or three interviews on each of the following days that was taking a lot out of me wow yeah uh is it worse because of the kovid restrictions and all that miserable so it's just a traumatizing flying experience where uh i remember being a kid and and the plane was a magical place and the flight attendants were kind and i looked forward to getting those little cookies yeah and now it's just everybody seems upset that you're that you're there and uh it's just a very anxiety inducing experience that i don't like yeah anyone daring to not wear a mask on the plane or no me but well so typically it's a it's a cat and mouse game of just trying to keep it as low as i can without because if you take it off completely it will they will if you haven't taken off yet they'll pull the plane back in and kick you off the plane and arrest you and put you on a no-fly list for that particular airline and because i need to fly for my job i've decided to not go to that extreme if you just pretend you're sleeping it's just drooping down is that okay nope they uh they forcibly jab you in the shoulder and wake you up it's happened to me several times yeah uh i bought myself a little uh neck fan for it's supposed to keep your head cool in the summer but i don't need my head cool i hate having i hate being cold but i just got it to blow under my mask because i got a mask that's like a neck gaiter so it's a big thing so i was going to put it under there but it's too big and bulky and it's too noisy so i just wanted some oxygen i just wanted to breathe i just wanted to have free breath yes well the good old days we used to be able to breathe freely i remember yeah so speaking of your travels what sorts of uh interviews is your team doing and how active are you are you just behind the camera are you what are you doing so it's a it's a dual um enterprise with myself and my co-director matthew who's got about 20 more years of experience than i do in in this industry and so it's he and i carrying around about 200 pounds of equipment to each of these cities and setting up and taking down in about three hours with each of these individuals so for example we were just in missouri and we interviewed a man by the name of david l gray who was a former 32nd scottish rite 32nd degree scottish right freemason who converted to catholicism some years ago and so we were asking him about uh all of the masonic aspersions that that we hear that oh the masons do this this and this and we were just trying to figure out if any of that was legitimate um and it turns out quite quite a lot of it is is legitimate he had he had a remarkable testimony that we were able to capture yeah so he was pretty firm that the church condemns and has always condemned freemasonry yes well he he sort of took it from the other standpoint which is that masonry was an explicit inversion of the church okay and so when he he personally came to so he he grew up in the ame church the american methodist something episcopalian uh and something like 38 of all ame members are freemasons and if you want to be a pastor you have to be a freemason and so he grew up in this in this protestant church but didn't even really know or understand jesus or christianity he thought jesus was just like a figure wise teacher and later down the line when he came to understand that he was a real person is when things started to shift and eventually he realized that christ was a real person and christianity was incompatible with freemasonry and he was also experiencing some demonic attacks uh having gone very far down the occult stop engaging with a plane of existence he knew he was not supposed to be engaging with he got baptized and all the attacks ceased nice yeah so he's pretty on fire for his faith now yeah but a very even keel yeah person slow burn slow burn not not evangelical he's just very matter of fact that you know he'll describe a demonic experience very matter-of-factly and it's it's rather unsettling so and then he also one of the things we've been focusing on is the the freemason and uh have you heard of the carbonari carbonari it sounds familiar what is that it's an italian iteration of freemasonry made up of freemasons but not a product of freemasonry and its stated goal in a in a document called the alta vendita was to oh yeah i read that one yeah it was to undermine the catholic church from the inside and uh monsignor george f dillon i guess apprehended this document which the alta vendita which was sent out to the various um hovels of the carbonari and and presented it to pope pius the something or another in 18 something or another 1832-ish okay and and that's when they were put on blast oh wow so uh you're convinced it's a legitimate uh document it's a it's a historical historical document of the carbonari or whatever they're called the document is historic um and more than that the the evidence of their plan seems to be have come to fruition enough that i'm convinced that the stories about what they were planning and doing were real yeah yeah yeah okay within the church today you can see all kinds of signs yeah so i didn't know i read that it's a very small document i read it a while ago uh maybe seven years ago and uh i took it with a grain of salt because i take everything with a grain of salt but if it's true i mean if they really came up with that it's pretty nasty and they're pretty uh pretty open which i admire i admire the openness of it like we're gonna destroy the church and uh they're not making any bones about it but i guess it was designed as an internal document not to be shared with the public yep yeah it was it was a memo kind of like this is okay everybody who joined the carbonari this is why you're here and this is what we're doing and um i found that it seems to be a trend among the machiavellian to flaunt what they're doing if you look at the bill gates or the klaus schwabs or the rockefellers of the world they write and publish memos very publicly and if you only read them it's it's rather revealing for example operation lockstep which was a 2011 rockefeller document which outlines the utility of a global pandemic and the consolidation of authoritarian powers under a one-world government and it describes you you know wearing masks and all these different things and it's just 2020 but in a 2011 document you know yeah so that you know they fought these things yeah i guess the the old catholic proverb is that satan can't enter your home unless you invite him in is that is that uh or is that a is that a myth from the vampire mythology that you can't have that they can't come in unless you invite me i'm getting confused now it sounds like both they probably borrowed they probably borrowed it for the vampire stuff they borrowed it from the catholic thing well i'm starting to wonder if uh are you familiar with the term fictionalism not really but it's where you fictionalize everything it's where everything that's fiction is actually true oh okay no i haven't heard about that no so as a as a dreamer and as a romanticist that was a very enticing concept to me the idea that unicorns and atlantis and the lord of the rings can all be um people perceiving true facts about the world through their creative mind and then presenting it in a narrative form yeah um and so part of me wonders if things like vampires are absolutely real yeah yeah yeah there's there's a way of interpreting everything and uh including fiction uh interpreting it spiritually and i definitely i would definitely not find it difficult to see the reality behind every lie and behind every myth and behind every story and behind every fictional character because we can only work with what we've experienced and so if we've experienced it there is some reality now how disguised is it and how twisted and frankenstein is it with all the different parts going together like a lot of artists in montreal think they're very edgy because they'll take a baby doll and they'll chop the head off and put a horse doll's head on it and they think oh wow it's so edgy but so many artists are doing that but you know horses exist babies exists uh exist and dolls exist and horse dolls exist and we're not really creating only god creates we're just moving things around and trying to be yeah yeah was it nothing new under the sun is that ecclesiastical yeah yeah but uh a lot of the art in montreal like the sort of low-level amateur art is uh naked breasts penises and devil horns ooh edgy and uh and twisty you know twisted up body parts right when i was a satanist i used to draw like for example women with three breasts or four breasts or five breasts or six breasts or anything but two never one you never just did one i don't think soak is just too ugly the mono boob the mono boob has never been popular i i totally forgot that you were uh he dabbled in satanism i guess i guess of the things to be derelict at satanism is probably the best thing not very devote but it did you know it did lead me to god because i the the atheistic satanism that i belong to put reason as its god so reason truth and all this sort of thing and uh you know i was seeking the truth and i did find the truth because i was sincerely seeking the truth and i hope that a lot of satanists are sincerely seeking the truth but the ones i meet online just just seem to hate the truth from what i can gather but so what you just said uh brought been on the mind so that the end of the threw me for a loop and i really haven't taken a moment to process it yet so he he was explaining how the stated goal of freemasonry was to deconstruct the moral order that was put forth by the church and to reconstruct it with man's reason as the guiding light as opposed to then i went in this conversation i then brought up uh genesis 2 the fall so we have the proposition to eve to be to become knowledgeable about good and evil and to become like god and it's and then he was explaining how the further he got down and and this will come out in the film but uh this guy he he didn't want to say what he was experiencing he said i don't want to make it sexy to explain the phenomena that i was experiencing from the demonic because i don't want people to pursue this and thanks be to god my co-director did push him because he did share something remarkable and that was that he wasn't satisfied with what he was learning in freemasonry and so he went down the path of the occult and started learning more and more things until he started hearing voices as he was going about his life and he realized that he was hearing another plane of existence and it was very troubling to him extremely upsetting at this point in the interview he began crying and he said i realized that i was seeing something that i knew i was not supposed to see and then he got baptized the voices stopped and this just set up a a set of premises for me that was extremely upsetting because i come from a place of i just need to learn the next thing and it will be okay and he basically said you aren't supposed to know and not only are you not supposed to know but if you do it will destroy you yeah yeah and then i was thinking about the beginning of john in the beginning was the logos you know the logos was made flesh and dwelt among us and so all of this stuff just came crashing back to me full circle almost invalidating the pursuit of knowledge as the highest good yeah well i mean i would just uh simply point out that the ten commandments are a good guide to everything in terms of your thoughts your words and your deeds and they they can all be summarized in the first commandment which is to put god first and to love him and to to strive to know him and to serve him so he can be happy with him basically so i use the ten commandments as sort of the guiding principle or principles depending on how deep you want to dive into the subcases within that one commandment which is the love of god because within that you can split it up multiple ways but uh depending on how deep you get into it there's one principle or multiple principles but um i use that as a guide for my thoughts my words and my deeds i mean in principles as a guide and if you watch me day to day i'm just acting like uh an average satanist you know just not being very very holy not i i've been having a bit of a crisis lately because everything i'm reading is talking about good works and i'm just like i've never done a good work so when does that so i'm exaggerating a little bit i've done a few little minuscule good works but um yeah with the ten commandments the idea is to be holy holy in your thought holy in your words holy and your deeds and so that precludes any sort of seeking knowledge for knowledge sake or being curious one of the first things that upset me when i discovered christianity when i discovered god and then christianity was the sort of poo pooing of curiosity that i read in a lot of the catholic saints and that bothered me because i thought that curiosity brought me to god you know it was this quest for knowledge yes but there's a there's a catholic understanding of curiosity which is uh it's a very frivolous uh activity curiosity within the catholic jargon there is over against that frivolous pursuit of curious knowledge there is the true responsibility we have to know god and to know our neighbor and above all to know ourselves because you can't get to heaven if we don't know ourselves if we're deluded about who we are then we'll just think i'm okay you're okay and uh you know just have a very complacent attitude toward sin so knowledge of self is uh in some ways even more important than knowledge of god but uh you set up two premises there well you sparked a thought and you set up a premise of of fealty okay right and you've talked about this before in the past that not with that word i'm not familiar with that word fealty just means some sort of uh submission yeah okay yes as a humility a recognition of of subservience yeah and and that i'm realizing how much the gnostics have saturated our society right that it is the highest thing to become the most knowledgeable that you're a more actualized person if you just learn more things than the people around you and uh i brought this up at a bible study we do we do bible study in the morning at work and we were in i actually can't remember if this happens in john or not but um you know jesus tells tells thomas blessed are they who have not seen and yet still believe and so i you know raised my hand and said okay so it sounds to me like jesus is setting up a relationship between three things how good you are as a person how much you know and how much you believe and the relationship that he seems to be presenting is you are a better person and i said does that make anyone else as and and yet and this is sort of the full circle understanding of like okay you have freemasonry and if i were just painting with a broad brush the illuminati those who who seek knowledge for knowledge's sake the secret societies seem to be at the root of some of the worst and if that's the case and i recognize the fruits of that as evil then it then it seems like i should be orienting myself toward not pursuing the greatest amount of knowledge that i could possibly cram into my head and that brings up the idea of fealty of submission of authoritarianism and over the last year and a half i s i went on the political compass from staunch libertarian to hardcore authoritarian right wing thinking and and understanding and appreciating that perhaps ju people just being as free as they could possibly be that maybe it's actually a really really bad idea if we can just do it all and and it's these two ideas and are kind of coming back in in harmony with each other that hey perhaps it is the it is the case that the human spirit can bite off more than it can chew for sure yeah so uh a couple of things you said there got me thinking about the relationship between faith and understanding or reason and uh if you if you've even done a cursory overview of the history of christianity you'll see a lot of talk about faith and reason and how it's couched in in the catholic church at least is that you first take the plunge into faith and then it's faith seeking understanding right uh saint augustine talks about this and then the second saint augustine saint anselm talks about this in later in the 12th century um but i from my own personal experience i can tell you that i was seeking from adolescence onward like from the time i became an atheist at age 14 i just dove right into philosophy not deeply but just superficially and it was always on my mind and seeking truth and whatever and i studied physics at university and i did a lot of seeking in terms of the well-ordered universe that we live in i took a philosophical approach to my studies and uh i delved then more deeply after wandering around traveling having fun with my wife i delved more deeply once we settled down into philosophy and so always seeking the truth always seeking the truth but it's only when i had faith the gift of faith that i accepted because i cooperated with those unmerited graces of god because i said yes to the grace of faith and was converted i was flooded with a new appreciation for the natural sciences for philosophy for theology of course for the scriptures and everything that bewildered me before because i'd been studying the bible as an enemy of the church for years you know just walking and recalling but uh i can tell you that the the leap of faith brings with it all kinds of gifts of the holy spirit so you've got wisdom understanding counsel fortitude knowledge piety fear of the lord and um it just it just cleans partially at least some of those lenses so that you can appreciate more and that's not to say that you take the leap of faith and become a great genius but relative to groping in the dark just having a little bit of clarity through some of those lenses uh is a big improvement and you have above all you have peace right you have peace so that that goes a long way i mean this last year has been rough for me because of covey and i've been sort of dancing with the devil a little bit with some temptation with video games because i just been bored and playing video games and i won't go into detail but a lot of video games have sex and violence components and i'm just attracted to that so um i've been dancing with the devil a little bit but luckily i have enough grace to go to confession and just i'm fighting it off and trying to it's not like an addiction or anything but it is a temptation just because there's a lot of boredom so play video games whatever but my point is that um i when i dabble with sin even though it's not graves and i mean i don't i don't think i'm getting as far into as to commit graves in but um you know just dabbling and being excited by stuff and what uh you know i i feel the darkness over overcome me and i feel my prayer life is diminished my uh ability to see and understand the truths of the gospel is diminished everything is just clouded my my understanding is diminished and then i go to confession and boom it's just a lot of clarity so this is what faith does and this is what renewing your faith through the sacraments does and it's an ongoing struggle i mean i'm back now going more frequently to the sacraments i found a priest where i can confess regularly every two weeks and i'm getting on top of some of my sort of lazy bad habits which is sort of just going into self-indulgence and just being lazy and and indulging in sin even if it's not a really a big deal like i mean what i've been doing is not really that embarrassing or that bad but for me because i have so many graces it doesn't take much right like i mean even just looking at women on the street a lot of sexy women on the street in montreal especially in the spring so even that it doesn't sound like a big deal but it's enough to cloud me it's enough to i have to go to confession and cleanse that and try not to look at the sexy women and uh so it doesn't take much once you have the faith the the bar is raised and the standards higher so uh i could never do the things i was doing before when i was a satanist you know i was like masturbating in public and doing all kinds of sick in cemeteries and defiling grave sites and doing all kinds of stuff i had my genitalia plastered on a huge wall in downtown montreal as an art exhibit i was like fully or fully erected with my it's like huge pornography basically it's plastered against the side of a building with a full full-on projection so i was doing all kinds of sick stuff as a satanist i'm not doing any of that without satanists that sounds like a very devout satanist yeah well i dabbled a little bit you know i i'm not proud of what i did but i mean i could have been a lot worse could have been a lot worse so uh just to say that the the standard changes once you have the grace of faith once you take that leap of faith the standard changes so what seems like a little temptation or a little sin now to most people to me is uh is still enough to cloud my judgment to cloud my my understanding and what little wisdom i have and stuff like that so i think faith is all important i have the reason i'm going on and on about this is not to brag about my sins it's to tell you that faith does clean those lenses a certain amount i mean i don't have obviously a lot of clarity even when i'm in the state of grace but you know compared to the great saints but it's relative to when i was indulging in sin so it's i think it's very important to understand that and i'm telling you that it's a very practical experience i have with it it's not just something i read in the book right right would you say that faith can be understood also as a command no it's an invitation because i i what scares me most about my faith is that i know how free i am like i mean i i've i have the blessed virgin mary looking at me here on the other side of my computer screen and i was sitting here on the computer playing video games and it's like sex and violence you know so i mean i have her there to protect me and to not let me go into anything that's not good but i still did because i'm free so and then i stop and go to confession and delete the video games whatever and then and then i'll buy a new vid i bought a series of video games thinking oh this one won't be you know there won't be sex or violence in this one but then it turns out there is and these games are like designed for people like 13 14 15 16 17 whatever it's like holy cow i'm 51 and i can't handle it okay there's there's a there's a few things there um well the main answer was that i'm free i'm not i'm not commanded to have faith i'm very free i could walk away at any time and uh that's scary so i can't remember if i brought up this question in the past but something that is perplexing to me is how a god who is all good who how that creation can then produce evil or produce anything that isn't good goodness my understanding of evil is it's a privation of good and so how can something that has created good have the capacity to withdraw from that which is good well the same way that if you're on a bumpy stage coach going over uh log road and you're trying to build a house of cards with your 54 cards uh you're asking me how can it not stand how can it not be a perfect structure structure and stable well because of the chaos you know so i mean as it falls away from that pyramid form that you want to build it's that's the evil it's the it's the way that it's falling away from the good the in god's way of being and way of acting and thinking and doing what he wants he gets and what he wants is good and so he builds something it's solid this is what jesus said you have to build on a solid foundation so we're in the midst of chaos that we're creating ourselves and we're wondering why our projects are failing and falling away from the good and falling away from the ideal and we have people preaching now that everything is just a random uh assortment of things that have banged into each other and that's that's where life came from so this you know our evolution mindset makes us think well let's just bang things around some more because that's how we got here by things banging around randomly so let's just bang things around but if you're trying to build something that's well ordered you don't just bang it around right you have to respect the nature of everything and this is what evolution theory doesn't do it doesn't respect that nature's even exist so um the the answer to the question is that everything is ontologically good everything is ontologically good but it's the way that it's done that can be wrong when finite creatures do things and that frankly i think is almost always done wrong i mean other than jesus christ who is a god man you have mary who never sinned not even a venial sin because she had this special grace not to sin and she cooperated with that grace that's why we we revere her so much because she cooperated with the grace to never sin not even a venial sin and perhaps a couple of others like saint john the baptist and saint joseph or her spouse and stuff like that but not too many that didn't engage in venial sin so basically 99.9999999 whatever percent of humans are doing it wrong at some point if we're ontologically good but we it sounds like you're you're presenting um god's creations as entropic that that they trend toward chaos and disorder and doing things in an ungodly way whether it be the angels or humanity but would that be fair yeah for me i mean even if you read the great saints like one of my favorite saints is saint anne salman he talks about how sluggish and dull he is when he tries to do something spiritual or good or for god but when it comes time to indulging in selfishness or pride or whatever it is other than serving god he's sharp his attack he can think clearly he's got everything flowing but when he tries to serve god everything is hard awkward sluggish and that's a great saying so with me i can attest to you personally like trying to like i told you at the outset of this interview trying to do good works it's like i can barely even think of one that i did but i mean if i if i make it my project to submit to god's will and to do god's will and to be good and to have faith and persevere in my faith and to cooperate with the graces and to do good works and all the rest it's hard so yeah if you want to call that entropic i call it concupiscence the tendency to sin and fighting against it is bloody hard i mean i'm frustrated and annoyed especially because of neglecting the sacraments but with god's grace now i'm coming back to a more regular uh instance of the sacraments and it is helping so i think you're if you're not moving forward you're moving backwards that's what i've that's what i've experienced this year it seems strange that there was such an inflection point with the fall where we have creatures who are created good who know god in a way that you and i can't even possibly imagine they walk with him in the garden and and yet they do choose to not obey him which still just perplexes me but then that that also mangled their spirit their their essence such that you and i are born with that concupiscence yeah that's just it's mind-boggling um because that would have to the fact that we have to try and swim upstream to be good people means one of two things either the thing that we're trying to make ourselves do isn't good or our nature has been perverted such that we have to inject energy into the system in order to actually do the things that are yeah i think the the solution is probably a lot easier and more obvious than you and i are aware of i think some of the saints talk about the sort of simplicity and and just being natural and um avoiding the complexity of uh sort of anxiety of how to please god but just being the the image that i like to use is like if i were your pet dog like you nick stump houser if you had a cute little white pet dog poodle it's tiny and it's cute i want to i want to be in this analogy i want to be that white dog i would know right now i know how to please my master next dumb pastor i know how to please you how do i do it when you say sit i say when you say walk i walk when you say stop eating i stop eating whatever it is right and i just i haven't i have a nice dis disposition i'm always smiling happy and cute yes so that's what i need to do with god i just need to be that that good cute little dog it seems very very very easy and simple that's it that's what i use yeah wow that's it kind of goes back to the idea of fealty like the king doesn't need you to go hey hey what about this hey hey what about that he's just just be or i'm hungry i'm hungry i'm hungry again yeah all that all that kind of stuff interesting because yeah we have the hungers we have are not good for us like hey i want to eat with my eyes i want to eat this image and that image and the other image well that's not good for us so and and that's so again this is where the the gnostics have permeated our culture to such a large degree that that we think what was it aquinas who said that sin is believing that we know how to make ourselves happy more than god knows how and when i heard that i just hit me right between the eyes and it's like well then i am a brave sinner because i consult no one in fact in fact i'm the expert yet yeah well you mentioned ecclesiastes earlier right yes that's a good one to read the first couple of paragraphs of that one or whatever the whole thing and he ends with the fear of god you know that's that's the way to go and by fear by fear of god it's just picture that cute poodle that wants to please nick stumphauser and it's it's a everything about that obedience is good and healthy for that cute little white dog right right it's funny were you ever such a hardcore atheist that that image would have disgusted you and you would have thought that christianity is is demeaning to humanity for even allowing the possibility of making that analogy no question i mean even now it's i can only let it play in my head because i've made such immense progress toward where i'm at um because it does it does upset me however in the same way that i recognize a parent uh knowing what's best for their complaining and belligerent child yeah how much more magnified would that be um and then then the question is okay well where do i go to find the instructions of god and of course the christian would say well in the book he i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say that i would say go to the church and find out what the church teaches about the interpretation of the book and that right there has been such a roller coaster because i work for a protestant institution but i was raised catholic and so every time we interview a catholic just this consternation arises of like what do you mean tradition like that's you made that up that's man-made and uh and this is one wheel house where i feel very comfortable defending the church in of of the necessity of sacred tradition uh but you know you have no scripture without sacred tradition you yeah you have no bible without the so you get that part you get that piece like that's intuitive for you yeah makes perfect sense yeah yeah it does and uh and then that also sort of lends credence to the idea of um of authoritarianism having a place right as long as the authority is correct then authoritarianism does make some sense um i think aristotle even understood this intuitively many thousands of years ago when he said that there's a natural aristocracy and there's a natural slave class uh not everyone has the has the innate capacities to rule a country yeah plato talked about the philosopher king and yes 99.9 of people uh are eating paint right and i know this because i see i see one individual in an empty car wearing a mask this is this is why i know the populace ought not be in control of of things so the idea of yes just be the good dog um yeah it just requires endless endless humbling which i i think also when you invite that sort of humbling god is uh never going to let you down if you ask to be humbled yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure but you know um i don't find it demeaning at all and i i want to explain to you i'm not a big dog or cat person or a pet person i'm not really a fan of having pets but when i picture a cute little happy dog that's obedient and you know has a good master obviously so i've seen i've seen pet owners that abuse their pets and that's disgust me and the pet is not happy right no matter how obedient he tries to be he you should not be obedient to that kind of master just run away right that's what i think run away and that's what i say to atheists when they say well god's mean god's this god and let's just like run away from that god because that god is a demon right yeah run away from that god yeah any god you're superior to in any way run away from it so it's the same thing with a bad pet owner but what i'm my point i'm trying to make here with that cute little white dog that's obedient to his good master is that that is not only an ontologically good dog but it's it's a joy to behold like i mean it's it's something it's a window into god i think that's the way a lot of saints like saint francis of assisi saw the animal world even the plant world but the animal world even more so where you see you catch a little glimpse of god his goodness his humility his gentleness whatever it is and so that's why it's not demeaning to me it's not complete it's just a partial glimpse but it's a glimpse it's a real glimpse of something real about god and the reason i say something that that the dog in my analogy is a glimpse of god and not a glimpse of me the slave boy is because our mission in submission is to be like god that's the whole point right that promise that satan made that you'll be like god why did he say that because he just gave a little twist to the truth the truth is that's our goal our goal is to be with god to partake of god's attributes in a finite way but to really participate in the divine life of the trinity and all that goes along with that the infinite joy and uh to participate in that partake of that so every lie of satan has a lot of truth in it a lot of truth but just that little twist if if your analogy is uh holds true then uh we from the beginning were driving in a stagecoach along a bumpy log road do you think it it was in it was the fall inevitable i think so i falls yeah i think so i think so okay it kind of would have to be yeah just looking at uh the difference the gap between the finite and the infinite the gap between the perfect and the imperfect i mean you can you know we can acknowledge that god made us perfect but when we acknowledge the free will that we have that it immediately tells me that we if we can fall we will fall just having enough time yeah yeah now how much time did did it take how much time does it take different saints have different have received different visions about the uh the book of genesis and what happened in the garden some of them had uh enough information to surmise what part of the day the fall took place and how many hours they'd been alive right it wasn't long it was not long so i mean it was definitely within that first day and they're 12 hours in a day so i mean uh i can't remember what these saints said that i have read but it was something like it was in the morning which meant it was head pops off the pillow and they just they didn't even make it through the day oh man was it a sunday or a monday when they were created i don't remember anyway sunday morning you know what it's like yeah they didn't have their coffee satan rolls up well so it makes me wonder then um how sort of deterministic a lot of this is in that okay god who is omniscient creates mankind perfectly with the capacity of freedom of will and then he knows in his all-knowingness the inevitability of a fall yeah so probably from the moment he created the world jesus is like are you sure like because you know what i'm gonna have to do if we do this so then it kind of this is why i said when uh i think i said it last time either christianity is is false and just a cute fairy tale or it is the most informative narrative on the nature of reality and god that you could possibly study yeah because if you just explore genesis that means all the things we just talked about so many implications yes okay the implication of god created us knowing that we would fall and knowing he would have to sacrifice his son why would he do that what does that tell us about him and his son and the nature of reality and and because a story um places bounds up about the characters right so god is boundless however the story seems to indicate that he made humanity and angels and he didn't make uh the things in men in black the little the little alien looking guys right he made us and then this is the way that history transpired and it could have been otherwise but it was like this therefore we can intuit that there is attributes of god based on this narrative it is a dogma of the church i want you to know that good that god could have made a better world that's a dogma of the church he could have made a better one he could have made it better okay so there was a something going around around the time of voltaire the best of all possible worlds we live in the best development it was a catholic guy we live in the best of all possible worlds and voltaire made fun of that idea with khan deed the very funny book you should read if you haven't read it condeed but um i have sympathy for voltaire he actually dedicated that book i think to the the current pope of his time but uh he was sort of the kind of atheist that i like that's tortured by his atheism you know even though he persisted i think to unto his death but he was tortured by his atheism and i don't know if you were or are or if it's lessening or worsening or what but that's the kind of atheist i like one that struggles with it as opposed to just thinking well i'm a genius believers are idiots and that's where it ends yeah the prodigal was born of my suffering yeah the the podcast journey that i did that that we met on was was a a product of i am in despair i am suicidal i'm nihilistic um i have zero reason to inhale and exhale that's your uh that's your tinder profile too isn't it yeah yeah exactly yeah check magnet yeah it really just brings them in um and uh sorry to break your thought there no no problem um and so i thought if this is the product why not try and disprove it because if and it was that commitment to truth that you had as a satanist that i had as an atheist that even though it was biased and disingenuous like there was so much pride in me two years ago when i started this out um but i just had just had enough that gave me that traction enough humility enough humility and enough commitment to to truth above all but like because you can still be a prideful atheist who's committed to truth and then the then that the the battle becomes is the thing that you learn that disproves the thing that you believe going to win because then you have to decide okay is it pride or do i care about truth which one's more important to me and uh it was it was in that process that i i got back the thing that i wanted in the world which was believing that it's magical yeah so where are you in terms of i always think in terms of monolith monotheism is the most important thing and then if you're a monotheist i think it's pretty obvious you should be a christian i think if you're a christian it's pretty obvious you should be a catholic um and if you're a catholic i think it's pretty obvious you should be a saint but um that's not easy it's not necessarily but uh are you a monotheist have you toyed with it or are you a christian have you toyed with it where are you on that sort of spectrum that i like to to mystic and aristotelian theist okay and i think that makes me a monotheist yeah um and then i am saturated with christianity day in and day out so um i think the culturally christian no culturally stubborn but but very much open-minded to it i i really am struggling with a lot of the uh the precepts of of christ and i do think it will require a move of fealty and and humility to go from what we talked about it to to the okay i will i will submit it has to be a submission because i don't understand it it doesn't make rational sense i disagree with it but if i simply look at the fruits assuming that there's only two options uh the fruits of christianity and then the fruits of uh freemasonry satanism illuminati all these different things um then then my choice is extremely easy to make yeah yeah this is the saint uh sorry not saying not yet but pope francis just made this the year of uh saint ignatius loyola the founder of the jesuits of course he did and he's one of my favorite saints and he has an image a beautiful image of two hills with two groups two groups of people that are gathering under two banners or standards one is that of christ and one is that of satan antichrist or whatever you want to call him well i guess the antichrist technically is not satan but christ or satan so you've described the sort of fundamental option the sort of choice that is very clear for you if if those are the two choices you're with christ saint ignatius says very clearly those are the two choices now the big hurdle for you is understanding that those are the choices those are the options there's one choice to make those are your two options now if you talk to a typical atheist they'll say what about hinduism what about buddhism what about this what about that jehovah's witness and they'll just try to dilute the problem but that's where your monotheism is deadly to them because your monotheism to me is everything i mean you should be jumping up and down celebrating i think but for that one thing of submission but to me i want you to stop thinking in terms of religion and rules and all this sort of thing i want you to start thinking in terms of love and romantic love i can do that not the way you submit not the way you submit to your mother or your doctor or your lawyer or whatever but the way you submit or to a policeman but the way you submit to a woman that you're just right you just that the magic that you want in the world i mean the best example for me is a woman a beautiful woman how beautiful yeah i just i i just entered a relationship oh so that's very it's very convenient timing uh yes it is i'll be curious to see the parallels of of that you've been married now for how many years 26 26 years wow you've been going out with this girl for how long we've been we've been dating for about three months okay but uh it made it official this past sunday so that's basically 26 years you know but that that's your that's your key to taking the leap of faith that is you should focus all your attention on romantic love and what does it mean to commit because it's the same commitment do you have commitment issues or no well i feel like that's a that's a trope that i i get uncomfy about that's a stereotype okay but i have commitment skepticism i'll say which is which is probably the identical ideology of my religious skepticism you know my lack of i really do think it is the same sort of origin the the well what if there's all these things that i don't yet know therefore i'm not going to submit because what if i learned something and i realized this was a terrible mistake yeah i took the complete leap of faith into catholicism not believing it i took a leap of faith i said i'm in 100 percent until i find a reason to leave i did not believe it when i when i joined i did not believe it i just said i'm in 100 percent and i'm gonna spend all my time and energy trying to find out that it's false but the more i dug the more i was reassured that it's true but i did not care if it was true because i only tentatively dove in but i dove in that's the key i dove in completely same thing with my woman that i met i knew there were other women i knew there were maybe more attractive women or more compatible with me because we had conflict it wasn't all rosy but there was a wave of energy and a circumstance and it's like i met this woman at this bar at this time of my life and this is what's happening all the signals were there like david you're being served something here right hey so it's ringing some bells for you it's yeah no it's doing it looks like i'm out of time already convenient very convenient yeah i do have to go because my woman is uh she hasn't eaten yet she's making a sacrifice so that i can do this podcast with you because usually i get home and i cook dinner but i had to come home and reconnect my find my microphone on my camera because i've been disconnected but really great to see i'm going to leave you to digest all my little hints about how to be a good boy and i'm really excited about where this is going and i'm also uh looking forward to talking to you again very exciting i appreciate you doing this again and uh and please thank your wife for the the time granted to us not a problem and uh i love you lots and we'll talk soon okay love you much david we'll talk soon okay love you much david take care bye