okay so we are live i'm here with benjamin benjamin how you doing i'm doing fantastic david thank you for having me it's been a while uh you were on in late may 2019 do you remember that i sure do what did we talk about at that time at that time we talked about uh my movement uh away from the catholic faith when i was in franciscan university and we also talked about a little bit about jordan peterson and we we went over how different descriptions of god as far as like how it's a little you can't define him but he's like everywhere constantly like a fish swimming in water so we had some interesting conversations about that and the nature of goodness and how it relates to god and how it's either separable or inseparable and that's about everything i could remember from our last conversation oh that's pretty good you have a good memory um i don't know what you've been up to i saw you in the comments recently but i took a lot of time off and i don't know what your journey has been doing but can you catch us up a little bit about if there are any sort of interesting stops along the journey like in terms of your reading or your thinking or your philosophy religion anything like that or i mean even if you want to touch briefly on milestones that don't directly relate to philosophy and religion like if you had a baby or something you can let us know yeah for sure well um i got two rowdy kids and a third on the way so that's nice yeah it's pretty exciting um trying to just keep them happy and healthy and uh my thoughts i did so i've been finding more youtubers to listen to and uh just listening to all the back and forth like there's there's capturing christianity and he had this big back and forth on the kalam cosmological argument with uh rationality rules which i thought was very well formatted so it really did justice to the argument so it was not a i'm trying to beat you type of dialogue it was a exploratory thing so where everyone was learning more with each interaction um and then i listened to a guy named brett weinstein who talked about free will in a way i'd never heard it before so i kind of gave up on the free will argument because when i discussed it with my wife who's also really smart she said that regardless of which model you choose determinism or free will it doesn't have any you know it doesn't affect how you will it if she asked me will it affect how you live your life and i said well not really i'm still gonna want to eat i'm still gonna want to sleep the same way and she said well then why argue about it and i couldn't find a good rebuttal to her so i kind of left it there for a while but then brett weinstein was talking to sam harris about it and as you know sam harris is full deterministic all the way and but he was making a counter point i hadn't heard of which was um well then how do you distinguish you know conscious uh voluntary action from those who have locked in syndrome when there are certain illnesses that result in that type of consequence where it from all intents and purposes from the outside you look like you're in a coma but inside you have all this you know desires and thoughts and he said you know to go the deterministic route is to essentially say that everyone has locked in syndrome i thought that was really interesting and i thought that that kind of opened the door a little more to for more interesting and further discussion on that because now i'm not sure where i stand and now it became an interesting topic again now you're forced to choose haha right right so that was kind of neat and um and what was the other one uh oh i recommend you just listen to this guy for your own uh intellectual pleasure his name is joshua bach he's a ai scientist and he i still my goal is to be as smart as he sounds because he has tackled these heavy topics as well even though that's not his field but like to to generate artificial intelligence he has to have some rudimentary understanding of how emotions relate to thought and you know our passion to reason those types of things so he's read up on all these thinkers and he has such an eloquent way of delivering his thoughts and they're so dense so like there's it's a three-hour discussion with this guy named lex i forget his last name but man i just i was listening to that mesmerized like wow this guy is so smart so i need i realized i'm so stupid i need really need to learn more the guy's last name wasn't luther was it lex luther nope not lex luthor he's lex is a russian i wish i remember his last name i could i guess i could look it up but um lex yeah joshua yeah yeah so joshua versus lex yep and then obviously you know i'm still following jordan peterson's work he had a rough time and took a big break just like i mean hopefully your break didn't entail no no trials and tribulations that his did yeah uh yeah so then i read his new book and i'm synthesizing it with you know where what i'm learning and it's um yeah i'm basically just uh happy to talk to you about topics that nobody none of my co-workers or family are interested in delving deep into yeah for sure for sure we'll get into that but briefly uh i have a friend who really likes jp but i don't really follow him or his work i know he was in a lot of trouble with addiction uh with the pharmaceutical whether it was a opiate-based pharmaceutical or something like that um i had a hellish nightmare trying to get off it went to russia or whatever it was i also heard his daughter is coming on the scene in terms of uh putting out content is that true that is true yeah i mean obviously she's a lot younger than him so she's kind of at the beginning of her journey but yeah she's had some people on her podcast some heavy hitters and thinkers and as well as celebrities and you know she's kind of carrying the family tradition it looks like they're starting how would you characterize her world so like she's i would say i don't want to insult her but she's very fresh to this type of thing so i she had a pro-life and pro-choice person on and you know she had she let them both completely they get she gave them each an hour and um her thoughts at the end of it i was kind of like oh i guess she didn't really hear much so um you know but that's that's good in a way because the fact that she's inviting these voices on and she's interested in knowing what the truth is you know that's everyone has to start somewhere yeah yeah yeah for sure and the the beauty uh of being young and innocent and inexperienced is there's that foolishness like where you're willing to go where other people are shy to go you're willing to take a leap of faith where other people are not willing to take a leap of faith we get stodgy we get set in our ways we get opinionated we get uh cantankerous as we go through life we get cynical yeah so the the beauty of youth is just like hey i'm gonna wander over here it's like what the hell are you doing where it's fun it's exciting and there's there's obviously danger right there's obviously danger but uh that's how we grow i mean we have to uh we have to give it to the youth and let them be free i mean freedom i think you know i think a lot of my listeners know that freedom is very very very very very very very very important to me as an individual it's very important i don't like having uh constraints inordinate constraints placed on me i accept all of the constraints all of the normal constraints but when someone's overreaching with their control top-down control or manipulation it really really gets me into a rebellious mode so i don't know i don't know if this is uh a psychological problem i have if it's a strength or weakness or what i would call it a strength there's not enough of that in the world so what are some of the topics have you got a list of topics today are you just going to freestyle um i have a rough list of topics in my head so i i am interested to hear your thoughts on some things yeah so the first topic is um are you do you know these two names michael voris and bishop baron and i would love to hear your thoughts on each of those two individuals wow so i avoid i should say as a sort of disclaimer i avoid all catholic media on purpose i avoid it wow i avoid it like the plague why because i hate politics i hate politics i hate politics okay so you just named me someone from the right someone from the left i hate the right and i hate the left okay i i love jesus christ i love his church okay but when if i have to choose i will defend those who at least portray themselves as being faithful to pope francis and the living magister so that's my sort of default okay who's who's maligning the pope in public okay i shy away from you more so if bishop bishop baron seems more faithful to the living magisterium i'll slightly give him a few more points and a few more a little bit more listening time but i mean i'm very sympathetic to those on the right uh it's just that i think it's very very very very very very dangerous to start thinking that you are above the living magisterium of the catholic church so that's why i keep more distance from the right than i do from the left but i'm not i'm not a fan of the left either like i mean if you're gonna start preaching that uh it's okay to be an unrepentant homosexual it's okay to kill the baby in the womb or anything like that i'm going to give you just as much birth as i would give to someone that's saying that the pope is the antichrist yeah you know there's been a lot of that i i you know because i do follow catholic media and it's it's uh i kind of don't blame you if considering your position i because it it's crazy i even i can't make heads or tails of it um as far as because you know as you were saying you know maligning you know the head of the magisterium so far i mean the rules are still the same as far as you know this the succession and um you know what he can't what words his a authority holds to the church and which are his personal words like i feel like that is totally not part of the conversation like you said it's it's just all sensationalized yep yep uh one of the reasons i don't follow catholic media is that i don't trust any mainstream media whatsoever and then the alternative media i don't trust them either but i i do avail myself of their wacky conspiracy theories just to just to get an alternative point of view from the mainstream because the mainstream is is one kind of cult mainstream media and then you've got this alternative cult over here it's just good to sort of map out and stretch the sort of possibilities of interpretation of some of the so-called news quote-unquote news like because things do happen like i mean if a bomb goes up off in my city in montreal if a big bomb goes off a bunch of people die and the waters water mains are broken and the electricity's off in a couple of neighborhoods and all this sort of thing it's like that's a real event these are facts something something happened i don't know what happened tune into the news and you're going to get a story okay it was a bomb or aliens landed or it was terrorists or this or that it's like you know we we really have a hard time today with journalism because instead of just giving the facts and letting people sort of do a lot of speculation and interpretation the journalism today is giving predominantly the interpretation the spin what does it mean and uh there i have i mean i've always known that the reliability is very low in terms of uh when they start giving their opinions or start interpreting if i ever do a fact check on their opinion i'm usually justified in my opinion that the journalism the standards of journalism have really dropped if they were ever high to begin with i might have a romantic idea of some golden era where journalists were seeking the truth and presenting the truth and if they had biases they were honest about their biases and this sort of thing i don't know if that was ever the case but that's sort of a fantasy i have about the good old days so i mean that's a right wing trait like having this a fantasy about the good old days the left-wing the left-wing trait would be to say well in the future we're moving towards this golden age of journalism and if only we can get everyone hooked up onto their iphones and all the data then we can have perfect transparency we'll know everything about you and your health and your movements and your shopping habits and this is the view beautiful future you have to sign up you have to sign up if you don't sign up you're my enemy and we're going to put you in a concentration camp so just sign up because this is the best thing for the future of humanity okay that's the left wing so uh it's a crazy world yeah and you know i that tendency i feel like that tribalism like you said when you lose that youthful foolishness to listen you you think oh okay i'm 40 years old or insert age here now i don't need to search anymore and now i've found this ex-trusted source and i'm just going to shut everything else down and in i think it is worse i don't know if it was as good as your romanticized version of it was but i think the internet and the click baity uh necessity to survive actually forced their hand into a false sensationalist journaling because those that even tried to put five minutes of truthful journalism in they're completely ignored and passed over for the the vatican's on fire click you know folks been arrested you know how many videos i've seen on a bit shoot the pope's been arrested for pedophilia like you know how many times probably a lot it's ridiculous but i mean the pope may well be a pedophile he may well be the antichrist but until i have reason good reason like yeah the the you know what the good reason to believe that would be when the church stops saying the name of pope francis in every single mass right like i go to mass pretty much every day and every day we're praying for our local bishop christian le pen and the holy father pope francis so until that stops absolutely like that's the bare minimum like i would i would need at the bare minimum to stop seeing that the church is officially paying homage to the pope and they're naming the pope by name like i mean that's a pretty good tell about what the current situation is now the church is sluggish and slow to move so it might be that in a hundred years we look back and we say oh well the you know this bergoglio was the antichrist but the church was unaware of that fact and they kept praying for him and referring to him as pope francis and uh it only came out uh you know as well there have been in as you know in the middle ages people that referred to themselves as the pope that were not good people yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure but what i think when i um at my particular judgment and god's like what the hell were you doing why were you calling bergoglio pope francis why were you doing that david that'd be like because that's what that's what your church told me to do okay and then god would just i yeah i mean i guess uh you know it's a it's a little hard when you know unless you speak italian or i'm not sure what language pope francis speaks um spanish is it spanish italian english french german portuguese it's you know unless you're seeing it with your own two eyes directly you know trying to interpret it through you know a news outlet and their interpretation is definitely not reliable i have a little story for you about that you know um the set of accountists right yes all very familiar you know do you know stephen heiner i've interviewed him two or three times stephen is he older with like a goatee no he he's a young asian looking guy paris france nice guy i like him a lot okay he's a very generous guy he comes on my show and we we get along and you know there's a bit of tension obviously over uh issues to do with the papacy and stuff like that but i i like him i think he's a nice guy um he runs a channel called francis watch or something like that or something if it's channel or if it's a show or something like that but he he he told me one time about how bergoglio as he called him uh did some very vicious move on a child like the child was praying with the prayer hands and bergoglio came up and forced his hands apart and said no you can't pray and whatever i mean what yeah and so i went on francis watch on the website and i i watched the video of pope francis and his interaction with this young choir boy or whatever this young like this this boy was probably six years old you know dressed in white and he was standing there sort of i don't know sort of accompanying the audience that the pope had he was just sort of on the sidelines with some other people just standing at a tension sort of thing and this guy has this young six-year-old had his prayer hands and he was really cute uh the pope just walked up and he pulled his hands apart the boy's hands apart saying what what's happening are your hands magnetized to each other and he patted the kid on the head and gave him a smile and a kiss and it was just like the most natural grandfather kind of love like you know simple real love friendly familiar nothing threatening nothing bullying it was amazing and it's like oh my god our pope is a saint okay because he just knows how to love people right okay naturally simply and it's being twisted and spun by the center of a cantus among this this guy's a monster and he's he wants to stop young people from doing the traditional prayer posture you have to be you how how do you let yourself get that deluded about reality that you see the same video clip that i watch and you interpret it so radically how does that happen it you know it's funny it actually happens even in secular media i think it was with the guy who played aquaman and he was like the paparazzi was ganging up on them so he pulled his daughter you know aside so to kind of protect her and of course his hand touched her chest slightly very non-sexually and the same exact spin happened he's doing this and that and this is totally inappropriate and then you watch the video you're like not at all yeah you project much you sick perverts excuse my language oh you you feel free to cuss around me i'm i love you these people are sick in the head they're sick in the head and we're seeing it more and more this is the thing about uh about satan and his and his minions and that includes the humans that he's fooled at least temporarily i hope it's temporarily the the politicians and the people that he's fooled here on earth they i'll just focus on satan he overplays his hand he will not be able to contain his excitement and he will overplay his hand i think c.s lewis talks about this too like it's just like he can't contain himself he's not he doesn't he's not you know god god tells us that satan is the most subtle of all the creatures like the serpent whatever it's like no this guy's not subtle this guy is not he's an idiot he's a completed he's showing his face he's the mask is following that we can see it all over society and it's uh it's ugly it's really ugly so okay uh we will continue to talk about satan because i like that topic too but um what i want to hear from you is it set me straight on what i'm hearing about pope francis and the latin mass because when i was catholic i was definitely on the latin masses better camp i acknowledged that the norvasoda was valid kind of begrudgingly and then i'm hearing what i've whether this is spin or factual i'm not sure is that he has put new restrictions on the ability to perform the latin mass and that was one of the big controversies that the catholic media left and wright were talking about and i wanted to know what do you think of the latin mass versus norvis ordo versus what pope francis actually said versus what the news is saying he said yeah well i don't know what the media is saying i would imagine the media is spinning it left right whatever you know uh my my perspective is very simple it's not going to be exciting for either side they're going to be like wow that's boring okay my perspective is very what i would consider very traditional and conservative perspective which is that vatican ii is legitimate council we've given like over i don't know how many how many years since the 60s has it been i mean it's been about 50 years or so more than 50 years yeah right 60. 60 years okay it's like we've we've given you time to adjust okay we've given you time to adjust now we're just going to try to implement the novus ordo more completely right it's like you know the the latin is given pride of place gregorian chant is given pride of place do we see that in the parishes no we don't you would need to go to some sort of rad trad right-wing place to get what vatican two promises okay that's the paradox the paradox is you got to go to the rad trads to get what vatican ii emphasizes right but the the this is a very messy and complicated thing they're going to be people resisting on the right resisting on the left and people on the left trying to make a future church where everything is wacky and weird and just has nothing to do with with the with the gospel and so it's all a big messy thing but at the bottom line when all the dust settles and when the historians look back on this time they're good they're just gonna say vatican ii was a real council there was resistance there was chaos satan was going wild with all the vatican the spirit of vatican ii and messing up this that the other thing and then there was of course and then there's of course the pedophilia stuff that satan injected into this whole atmosphere also and then that can be blamed on vatican ii and it's all the council it's the council it's the council it's the council no the council is the holy spirit guiding his holy church in closer and closer to the truth and the disciplines and those things that are not dogmatic they're also true and good and wholesome and appropriate to the time and you know there are you know in essentials unity and non-essentials diversity and all things charity so this is straight out of vatican ii it's like this is the basic bottom line when it comes to these councils they're adapting to the times without compromising right without changing there's no dogmatic change whatsoever so i think pope francis is right to move ahead and to push forward with vatican ii if i had been one of the recent popes i would have been strong arming even more violently the reforms of vatican ii and squashing rebellion squash the rebellion of the left in the church squash it violently that's what i would have done does that mean right does that now the question is does that make me right wing or left wing is that is that a right-wing move or a left-wing move to squash the rebellion against the progress of the church i mean i don't know if that's right-wing or left-wing i think it depends on your method of squashing because you could you can squash a rebellion through direct communication you can make yourself unambiguously clear as to your goals and your motives and why the direction is the way it's going like i actually had to kind of invent a reason i was talking to a rad trad back in when i was high school um she didn't believe in uh john paul ii of all people i'm like you can't you can't hate john paul too you're crazy and but she did and because she was thought that you know all the same thing the vatican ii thing and i told her well you know think about the barrier of entry to people who are unaware of the faith and you have the latin mass which all grant you know you could say on the order of beauty is x y and z values if we're trying to save more souls wouldn't it make more sense to you know have a mass that communicates the same language as the people attending the mass and so they can hear the message like it just made sense to me i i don't know if that's the if why that's um the true reason behind the vatican ii council or what was discussed or how the holy spirit guided them but that was how i always saw it so i kind of was able to keep my feet on both sides as far as this is my personal preference on one hand with the latin mass and here's this rational pragmatic you know reasoning behind the nervous odo and you know the church's reasoning behind standing by it yeah well you know the thing with the medic too if you read the documents of vatican ii and particularly the documents that deal with the liturgy in detail latin isn't removed from the vernacular masses right it's not removed right like you're supposed to be doing predominantly latin with certain sections in the vernacular so the spirit of vatican ii is that oh just remove the nailers remove take the altar off to the side and do this and do that and we're just gonna have completely in english and we're gonna have clowns on the stage we're gonna be dancing girls and this might be i think it's like that's not in the documents sorry so on the one hand i applaud pope francis for saying look let's just do the vatican let's do vatican ii let's implement the council right on the other hand on the ground it's extremely extremely messy and people are just doing what they want to do basically like i mean you know uh i am disappointed i'm disappointed in the bishops that they're not more strict with their priests but i haven't lived a day in the life of a bishop i would imagine that it's a nightmare it's a headache it's a hassle there's politics there's money the money the money issue the money issue alone probably keeps these people from sleeping at night they probably have to take drugs to sleep at night because of the money issues right yeah have you seen have you been inside a catholic church lately no it's like it's like uh going to ancient greece the ruins of ancient greece it's just like it's it's falling apart like it's just the the infrastructure's falling apart like these buildings are falling apart for the most part here in montreal like i mean i could show you i could show you the church i went to uh one or two weeks ago i just tried it out the reason i wanted to try it out is because it looked like something out of a horror movie it was overgrown with weeds and like graffiti and it's like oh my gosh i saw i saw someone coming out of the side building like the uh i forget what they call that that building on the side of a church but um there was a little family coming out and i said oh this church is active what's going on and she said yeah there are masses here at 11 o'clock on sunday so i came back on 11 o'clock i think it was 10 o'clock on sunday and uh they just do it in a little side chapel and uh you know it's very small and intimate and after i talked to afterwards i talked with a couple of people and they said that the building has been condemned it's formally condemned it's going to be torn down and i mean this is a very extreme case but today i went to my parish i've moved last year i moved so i'm in a new neighborhood it's a new parish for me but uh it's a nice church but it's very run down today i met the organist and he took me upstairs and showed me the organ is amazing i mean when i say he showed me his organ uh the uh anti-catholics are anyway have fun with that if that's your thing go for it but anyway i'll take yeah so um yeah uh so yeah beautiful huge organ with multiple parts and all that he showed me he showed me the the intricacies of this it's just it's just amazing like i asked him i said you're an organist you've been an organist for 40 years if you could travel the world you could just magically choose any of the organs in any of the countries of the world which organ would you choose to play he said i would choose this one right here he said it's magnificent and uh so it's quite an experience but all of this to say that he took me into the sort of guts of the church up up top into the rafters and where the organ is and all that sort of thing and uh it's in disrepair i mean this i felt i really felt like i was in uh what's it called beauty and the beast or the yeah the uh what did what did they call that what was the original novel where the guy's ugly and isn't the truth oh phantom of the opera that kind of thing yeah yeah or hunchback of notre dame something like that yeah yeah yeah yeah you know that kind of romantic feeling wow old church it's falling apart or whatever like a horror movie but uh no the state of affairs in the church is pathetic so the reason i talk to the organist i know i'm rambling a lot here but i'll let you speak afterwards but the priest after the mass said we're looking for lecters we're looking for people to read we're looking for people to serve and uh we're looking for volunteers and if you have any ideas to how to help perish talk to the organist so i went and talked to the organist i said uh you know my french isn't that good so i'm not comfortable like going up and reading doing the readings but um you know is there anything else i could do and so i might help out a little bit with some uh their website stuff like that i do help another chapel with uh website so um but uh no there's a reason why i'm telling you this story about the uh oh yeah so the thing the the reason that i talked to the organist is because i said look what what's going on here like we've got 12 people in this church i said the capacity of this church is probably 2 300 people right he said no the capacity of this church is 965 people so wow it's like we've got a dozen people and there's room for almost a thousand i said what can we do what can we do like should should uh the priest said like if you have any ideas for a program to help the parish talk to the organist so i'm here i'm talking to you what can we do what can i do to help you to get people in the pews here he said oh well people have free will and they you know they don't want to come they don't want to come whatever i thought that was a lackluster response but i'm like can i like should i go out in the street and like invite them in like what's going on he said no no you know covid and we used to have a lot more people like twice as many people oh really so twice 12 so you have 24 people coming right the capacity is a thousand it's like am i the only one that thinks that we need to start going out into the streets like uh what's your perspective on that as the next catholic um well i kind of have a snarky response so my snarky response is you know uh god tends to task humans to do his work a lot and i feel like there's a lot of things that he could do yeah yeah so i so my unsnarky response would be uh i actually heard that same exact discussion was talked about between bishop baron and jordan peterson actually and uh jordan peterson's response to him on that topic was that the church has is been more afraid of challenging people lately like they've toned down the you know you know the reality of hell they've kind of trying to do the you know hope that all can be saved you know is it's been emphasized more strongly whereas jordan peterson was saying what people are starving for is a challenge and a um you know the test of life and you know a call to greatness and you know to sainthood that is going to be a trial and tribulation and he and that's like that's natural in the human soul that and so bishop baron was like oh you might have a point yeah uh you know you you do know it's ironic that the the one slogan that represents best the second vatican council the one slogan that best represents the spirit the true spirit if there is a spirit of vatican ii the slogan that best represents it is the universal call to holiness so the saints are heroic in their virtue so the only tragedy in life is to not have been a saint right so this is an adventure like if you want to talk about it in terms of joseph campbell you know the great ark that storyline yeah and uh this is ironically at the at the heart and center of the second vatican council and you would never know it by looking at the lackluster response of priests bishops organists whatever i mean i'm not saying anything against this organist he's a lovely man or against my priest or against the victim so and one i to elucidate a point you've been making is uh there's vatican ii and what it says and then there's what people see on the ground and that and being able to distinguish where vatican 2 ends and where uh you know female clowns on the altar begin like nobody has the means other than looking up the document itself which everyone should do if they're catholic and are interested um i guess people like that is i think where the that the water gets muddied um for sure and that's why so they're thinking they're making an association oh what is this you know grotesque display of lack of of reverence um and then they hear oh vatican ii oh well i'm against this even if they wouldn't be against vatican ii had they only read it yeah well you know there's a crisis uh in medicine there's a crisis in education there's a crisis in law enforcement there's a corrupt a crisis in uh justice system and uh prison system like i mean it's just like it's a hot mess not to mention politics right but the the golden thread running through all of this is corruption right like i mean you are just compromising your principles or you just don't have any principles and that's why i'd rather just you know uh go along to get along i'm not gonna i'm not gonna take a stand on this issue like i mean i'm i'm a new i'm the newest teacher and like who am i to speak out against you know uh who am i to raise all these idealistic principles that i learned at school when i was being trained to be uh early childhood education or whatever like that's all just theory now here in the trenches and like i mean i need the money i can't rock the boat this is a new job whatever it's like just like people cave and they just start compromising the principles it's just the the way it is and we talked about journalism it's the same thing it's like you're gonna go in all naive into your journalism job are you really gonna have the balls to get fired on day one i don't think so yeah and then it piles up because then you've been you've established that as who you are and what you've been doing and then now to backtrack is even more difficult than starting off you know forthrightly from the get-go imagine imagine the resume of someone who sticks to their principles it's like let's see your job experience wow you had a lot of jobs and they all lasted one morning one morning here he did the morning here the afternoon there and morning here it's like wow you're hard to employ so yeah i mean and like you i think the same it's funny you listed off all those institutions and their failings i think they're failing for the exact same reason that as far as there's an association so you have the law and then you have you know laws that people voted on and then you see cops like beating down innocent kids and then they make that association oh the law means beating down kids well then defund the police even though that's not what it was like it's it's kind of an oversimplification and an over generalization like you kind of have to have a higher resolution of what specifically the problem is instead of put baking a big category and throwing the baby with the bathwater yeah you know we were talking about satan earlier it would be i i mean it is a little bit uh blasphemous to do these thoughts experiments but i do these thought experiments about how fun it would be to be satan or one of his minions because it's easy it's easy to mess stuff up right and it's like when i i'll be honest with you when i play video games like sandbox open world video games they're demonic they're very demonic right but because of all the sex and violence but when i play them my objective is to just mess things up like that's my objective it's just fun to watch the artificial intelligence world respond and see if i can break it how can i break this and twist this and pervert that so i think it's in a certain sense fun to be demonic in that way or to be satanic or to just break everything invert everything lie cheat steal rape torture kill like everything destroy i think it's because there's a uh a return on your investment for a single activity being destructive versus being maintaining a structure i mean you can spend hours of labor maintaining a building but you can spend 50 minutes with a wrecking ball and just have the time of your life and like for one for one press of the button you get x amount of enjoyment versus sanding the the limestone just right you know and you don't even really perceive us a difference even though you are in the long run but i that satanic uh appeal is totally a thing yeah yeah yeah you know how long it took to build some of these cathedrals in europe like multiple centuries ridiculous ridiculous and then you know i've got an interactive map one of my friends uh steve sent me an interac well not interactive map but a map of all the churches in canada that have been destroyed ever since they discovered these alleged uh victims these babies that were abused tortured killed or whatever by residential schools in canada i don't know if that made your news there where you are oh yeah so uh residential schools these were predominantly catholics some orthodox schools but the point is that the we have a native community here different uh tribes or first nations that are uh sort of putting prison camps in exchange for uh not having to pay taxes and they get which is free goodies it's sort of like a reservation style uh deal right like it's like we're taking your country but you can live in this little place and you don't have to pay taxes and just just go away and you can go on welfare and you can become addicted to alcohol and video games whatever okay so it's a raw deal it's a bad deal and uh you want to talk about racism like everyone's up in arms racism black lives matter well the indigenous lives don't matter like we're just treating these people like fifth class citizens anyway um so uh there's a lot of outrage about that but then people like the same blm antifa types just started like burning down churches like these churches like they're people in the indigenous community it's like yes i'm part of this first nation nations tribe and it's my grandfather it's my grandfather that built this church my grandfather was a catholic he built this church like with his own hands with the help of the community it's my family it's my community we're native people this is our worship place of worship you burn it down you're a white man you come in with your you're a white woman highly educated and you come in you come in to protect me and you burn down my grandfather's greatest work and it took you how much blood sweat and tears he put into this building well even uh you know that same type of hypocrisy was happening when it started where you know the riots were starting which uh for george floyd and then black owners of businesses were getting rampaged and their life savings ruined and i'm like wait a minute hey that that totally contradicts your whole message what's going on here oh you have to laugh but i mean i wish i wish i could cry i really wish i could cry i wish i could cry first and foremost over my own sins i wish i pray to god i wish give me the grace of tears because unless i can shed a tear for the pain that i've caused my lord and savior jesus christ unless i can shed a tear for the fronts i've done to god almighty i mean i i think i'm in danger so i pray to god to give me the tears but i also want to be able to cry over the atrocities of the world the victims of their fellow man like how people are just going astray and hurting each other like but i find it hard i find it hard to conjure up sympathy and compassion empathy and my heart is cold how do you feel as a human being in 2021 with the news the news is tragic it's always been tragic my whole life life how do you connect how do you or do you not want to connect do you not want to be vulnerable well it was a i mean it's a survival mechanism if you let yourself feel for all the tragedy you simply wouldn't be able to function you have to hold your heart a little bit just to be able to listen to it at all like or you could not listen to it but there's no way there's no compatible way to in feed that stream of the tragic world events and keep your heart as empathetic as you would like it because it would just it would ruin you you know that that's my thought i'm pretty i'm i took a personality test and i natively i'm very low in compassion which i was kind of surprised because i i feel a lot of empathy towards my family and friends but i did you know this test is for a broad spectrum like over the course of your life like on average compared to other people and so i so compared to other people i'm extremely low in compassion so i'm probably more able to watch the news and try to think of solutions in a more cold calculated way versus you know feeling sorrowful when's the last time you consumed a news item and you said hey i could do something about that and then you went and did something concrete and it helped the situation when's the last time all happened never makes you wonder makes you wonder why people uh feel like they're all grown up when they watch the news doesn't it yeah you know and it actually there have been times where it frustrated me to the point where i was ruined at least for that night i forgot what news it was but i was so frustrated that i couldn't do something like it with the proximity was it when the canadians lost the stanley cup no no not a sports guy i'm not joking neither am i yeah but it was something to do like it was such a needless crime and it was such an easy solution and there were so many people that could have done it and didn't and i remember watching and feeling so frustrated like if i was only within proximity i would have you know i mean of course i would tell myself that who knows you would have saved george floyd right yeah similar exactly um uh oh i don't know i actually have an interesting story on that so i was luck all right just to preface this it didn't end tragically but i didn't know that in the moment so i was driving and there was a car accident and it was a family suv and so the car crashed there's kids in the car the doors were smashed in and there's gasoline pouring underneath this steaming car and i am 20 feet away and i had a real test of character and conscience because i was like i should probably rush out there and help get the kids out of the car but if that car bursts into flames then i'm in flames and then my family has no dad or a dad that was consumed in flames but then was that worse or better than the kids being in flames when all i had to do was just go and open that door and it took me like like that was the longest 15 seconds of my life and i luckily the guy behind them was like because i think the the two parents in the front were too stunned to start doing anything and they were they're alive and not you know mortally injured and uh luckily they the parents were able to get out they had to kick the door open and grab their kids out of the car but i remember thinking to myself i've had did a lot of self-reflection like you know you ha you kind of have a model of what you would do and then when the humbling humbling very humbling yeah for sure but you had the right impulse you had the right desire there was the equation was a dilemma really like it was a dilemma for you and uh you know you don't need to beat yourself up about that i think your your approach was a noble one and uh your analysis after the fact is an honest one so uh yeah there's some people i saw a video of uh i saw a video of a so-called nurse on bit shoot a lot of crazy stuff on bit shoot but uh a nurse bragging about how she's injecting everyone with this poison and uh these fools are all gonna die and whether that's true or not i mean that's it's a separate question right um yeah but she believed that these so-called vaccines for so-called covid are death traps and she's just laughing like these fools want to get it okay well just line them up i don't care line them up i'll just do as many as i can so that there's a special place in hell for these people right that have ill will like that you're supposed to do no harm right yeah it's i so i feel like so here let's segue this into the free will thing so i and i think i mentioned this before but maybe i don't remember your response to it so let's isolate this factor of decision making which is that motivational instinct that we we subjectively experience and now contrast the good willed person who has that motivational experience with this person you just described that has the opposite she she wants to harm she feels that instinct it motivates her in a behavior that is harmful and then she finds it rewarding to execute that behavior now it the thing that i lean towards in the direction of determinism even if it doesn't lead completely to determinism is you didn't choose that emotion and i think that we could be fooling ourselves to think that we can choose against it i think even if we choose against it it's only for another more generalized motivation or maybe a conceptual motivation but i feel like the motivations that spring up in us is is all that exists as far as motivating behavior so is as much as i am motivated to condemn that behavior part of me thinks to myself well i wasn't born with the same disposition as that evil intentioned woman was you know so what are your thoughts on that well i i when someone really wants me to unravel free will or um make a convincing argument or how it might be possible that we really and truly are free to go against our instincts and this desire and that consideration and this more general consideration and this more specific one and the one that's acute and the one that's you know it's like if someone asked me to try to theoretically unravel all that or at least speculate about all that i just sidestep the entire issue and i say there are two cases either we have free will i mean i'm speaking from a christian perspective okay either we have free will and we have a responsibility to choose wisely to choose life and that our eternal destiny is on the line heaven and hell right that's what i believe or not and if not i mean then christianity is false and all the monotheistic religions are false and we're just going to end up being worm worm food plant food whatever you want to call it will be six feet under and we'll just our molecules get recycled into whatever comes next right so it's like is there is there a difference between the best case scenario and the worst case scenario for any human is there a difference if there is no difference if you just end up being worm food then eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you die and you're just plant food so if you believe in christianity if you believe in some it doesn't have to be christianity it could be hinduism it could be buddhism the different forms of eastern religions that believe in the survival of the individual right some believe that there's only god and that we are just part of god and we're all going to go back to the godhead and so there's only heaven there's only heaven right so in that case you may as well not have free will because no matter what you do you're going to end up going back to your identity your true identity which is the godhead it's just like there's a happy ending it's called heaven it's called your god and that's all there is and the other the separation is an illusion maya okay so that's why i don't that's why i don't favor the eastern religions right i think they're foolish i think it's just hard solipsism it's just there's just god your god that's it now in terms of uh judaism and christianity and islam we have among most of those mainstream mainline forms of those religions we have the very real possibility of heaven or hell and you have to choose and so the atheist or the agnostic or the one who hasn't committed to a monotheistic religion is in the sticky situation of saying well if you know pascal's wager like i mean uh it matters or it doesn't matter like i got to decide i gotta commit and the beauty with pascal's wager is that if you're wrong when you commit when you commit to christianity and christianity is false you don't lose anything but if you commit to paganism and paganism is false you end up in hell well there is a hidden lincoln that pascal's wager though that i'd like to sleuth out which is um you there can be a universe of free will and a universe of monotheism but um depending on the monotheism your behavior and your choices of your free will may or may not be tied to your ultimate fate so you could it's logically consistent to pose a a monotheistic universe with free will agents where regardless of their moral behavior they're gonna end up the same place yeah sure that that's when you abandon the reality of justice but i monotheism teaches that justice is real truth is real goodness is real health is real beauty is real and they all are united together they're all united in the person of god right so all the monotheistic religions teach this justice is real you don't go toward truth without simultaneously moving toward justice so there is if there is a god he is the source of all the pure perfections truth justice beauty goodness etcetera okay so if there's no god just do what you want to do that's it like so basically the way i see the two world views there's the world view of aleister crowley and the law of the lemma do what the wilt do what thou wilt this is my advice to everyone do what they wilt you're an atheist great do it that wilt you're a satanist do it thou wilt you're a catholic love god and do with that world that's saint augustine what he said yeah the one maxim love god and do without wilt so all crowley did was remove god that's the same it's the same thing do what that wilts right so the bot the fundamental option is are you gonna love god or not because either way it's the same advice the religions are in agreement the two religions are in agreement that you should do what you want to do that's it it's not hard and uh so the the real question is does it make a difference and if you believe in justice then by that very fact you believe in god and so you are what i would consider a de facto monotheist and you should be self-aware enough to appreciate that and get excited too at the same time but at the same time you know there's a reason why there's a word for justice and a word for god and there are relevant distinctions that at least in theory whether regardless of the truth of the matter can be separated and thought of separately yeah yeah yeah i mean we we have different words for and different you know different sort of contexts for uh health beauty and goodness and truth and justice and peace and unity and all these things okay we treat of them differently and separately sometimes but this is the this is just the humbling uh and startling situation we find ourselves in as finite creatures and i think if you meditate on the fact that you right now are a finite creature meaning that you uh didn't always have existence you were brought into existence even if you're a naturalist even if you're a naturalist you'll say okay well my parents you know created procrea i would say procreated but you might say created me in the womb of your mother or whatever and uh bam here i am and uh it's all a wonderful naturalistic mystery or a naturalistic miracle if you want to appropriate that word yeah um and uh but the the if you meditate on the fact that you're finite that you don't know everything you're not all powerful you know you're not omni benevolent obviously uh you meditate on that and you meditate on the fact that your life is coming to an end soon uh and then you think about the infinite i mean even if you want to think about it in a very cold dry way like on pencil on paper in your math class yeah the infinity symbol just you're sitting there and you've got this infinity symbol and you know what that represents right you know what it represents you a finite creature are contemplating the infinite just think about that meditate on that i think these are the the these exercises are so humbling and they're so mind-boggling and then you can transport beyond your finitude you can go beyond this sort of horizontal wave living your life and with all its petty concerns and you can start really confronting god in the sense that you are being confronted in your smallness by the greatness of god i think this is a very useful exercise how do you feel about what i've just walked you through so this this is right up my wheelhouse when i was 16 15 or 16 that was my own pet project actually was you know starting like i had that same sense of awe when contemplating in math class the fact that a finite creature can contemplate the infinite and so i i i built a kind of rickety um uh syllogism from that to the trinity back when i was in high school because i was trying to you know kind of develop my own ontological framework and um but i so now looking back what i i want to propose to you is you know we have this symbol that represents this boundless you know the infinite like we we are we have a name for it that's enough now but we may be able to construct a a definition of a boundless value or you know the the the great beyond but that doesn't mean that we have a course i mean you know we don't have a corresponding idea of that in our mind but what i'm afraid might happen is we get we think we have an i we think we're thinking about it because we have the name for it so ha ha i'm thinking about infinity when what you're actually thinking about is a sideways eight and you're like this is the best sideways especially because you know you've been wandering around this world right and so there you see it on paper wow oh yeah there's where we had the little mini adventure with the ogre and there's where we did this and that remember that oh i remember when we did this and that the other thing and you go down memory lane looking at this map that the dm finally put together for you and i had a drawing of my characters i had drawings of my characters and we all did drawings of our characters and it's like it's the same thing with this uh mathematical symbol of infinity right it's like it transports you it transports your imagination it transports your mind so the ultimate fundamental question is is it a fantasy is it just is it just imagination is it just a silly kid's game or is it some demonic deception right like i mean i think dnd is demonic just because that's the sort of consensus of the the catholic consensus on it so it's like that's dangerous whatever right the context i actually didn't know that i i had heard that but i didn't know that there was any consensus on that it's not it's not it's not a full consensus it's not it's not dogmatic by any stretchy imagination but i just i have chosen to err on the side of of caution i see and i know that i love the demonic i know that i love satan i love uh like i said the destruction the chaos the confusion like i was i was always playing a very devilish character in d and d i would always be chaotic neutral okay nice chaotic neutral that's sort of my predisposition mess things up and be a disturber so the the uh the map like the map is not the destination right so uh there's a famous saying i forget which saint said it uh i think it was thomas aquinas saint thomas aquinas i think he's the one who said our faith is not in propositions our faith is in the reality indicated by propositions or the reality behind those propositions or the reality to which those propositions direct are pointing yeah yeah is that does that sound familiar to you yep yeah i was a big fan of thomas aquinas back in the day so so this whole thing about the map and the finger like the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon you know you know you've heard this in eastern religions and stuff like that so is that sort of at the heart of the the conundrum so where where it becomes a problem is you can have let's say two arrows are pointing in opposite directions and then you ask well where are the arrows what point are the arrows pointing there's already a problem in the phrasing of the question because they're technically not like it has to be unraveled in other words so i feel like a lot of the you know the monotheism from christianity is is jam-packed like instead of one concept of one name it's like 50 propositions uh molded into one like black hole of meaning not not in a bad way but the density and so i think like what what is referred to as one entity is actually like 50 very complex entities you know what i mean i was just thinking about the sort of interpretation of signs symbols gestures and these sorts of things and how there could be a built-in ambiguity you know you could have secret handshakes in the freemasons and this sort of thing yeah you could have like for example i to be silly with my wife i used to tell her i still tell her i love her but i used to tell her like i love you this much and i could indicate it by holding two of my fingers apart i would put my fingers as close together as possible i love you this much and i would like the fingers are practically touching okay i love you this much instead of putting my arms as far apart as i can and say i love you this much i put my fingers as close together as possible they're touching practically i say i love you this much and she's like what and then i explained to her well no it's not the area in between it's not the distance in between the two fingers uh that you see here in between them it's the distance in between them going outward from the outer finger oh nice across the universe and then back to the other side of the other finger okay nice so i mean there's a lot of room for ambiguity when it comes to arrows like when you talked about the two arrows pointing in different directions the first thing i thought about is that as a physicist i i studied physics and as a mathematician i'm not physicist or mathematician but i did study at university uh there is um immediately a sort of alternative solution that comes to mind where there is an intersection there is a point of intersection no matter how you want to point these two arrows there's going to be a point of intersection okay because of the curvature of space time like you can you can you can find the point of intersection you just need to have a sufficient sufficiently sophisticated model of the curvature of space-time and you're going to find believe me you're going to find a point of intersection it might spiral around the entire universe a billion times a trillion times but there will be an intersection point so that's what i thought of when you said where are these arrows pointing well i would say they're pointing to that point of intersection nice that's a good that's a very creative uh uh you know third way that i wasn't considering and i'm glad you brought that up because i think that those types of philosophical or you know you know those types of solutions are available to us through reason alone and i feel like that we're well from exhausting those options yeah yeah yeah the the point is not to say oh look how creative i am the point is to say that life is wonderfully complex and the complexity can it can either overwhelm you and stifle you yeah or it can free you and i mean if you i don't know if you engage in poetry music dancing or whatever kind of creative purely creative artsy things if you do any of those things but i mean there comes a point where you're like i'm bored i'm out of ideas or whatever and you have to shake it up you have to put constraints you have to ask a friend to give you a rule and i think it was brian eno if i'm not mistaken i don't know if you know his music uh i think he came up with a deck of cards maybe 100 cards of creative stimulants and so you can just pull out one or two or three of these and it's like just random sort of ideas like what would your best friend do right you're composing music and that card says what would your best friend do and you're like oh what the hell what does that mean anything you think about george and how he's always picking his nose and that gives you an idea right so i mean it's totally lateral thinking like uh and as you know as human beings we have this we have this potential to be creative we also have the potential to be lazy spiritually lazy creatively lazy and i mean it's all very mysterious to me but in terms of free will you can muster up the energy just like you can muster up the energy if you're tired and you don't want to get up in the morning to go to work you can just say well heave-ho let's go and just you know take a shower or whatever it takes to swim at yourself maybe you have coffee i don't do coffee but some people do coffee like i mean they're little tricks to gold yourself into action it's the same thing with your own um your own project or even if you're doing parenting like i mean i'm not a parent but i would imagine it becomes a bit repetitive and whatever if you're not uh you know if you're letting life uh the burden of life get to you it can just become like a chore and then you have to you have to take a time to say well come on this is not a chore this is the best this is the best part of living you know giving giving myself to these young these young people and making their life better and you can come up with ways to stimulate yourself to be a better parent and all this sort of thing so all of this to say that we have a certain burden of responsibility and it can crush us and then we have to make the time and take the energy to find creative ways to stimulate ourselves i don't even know why i'm talking about this but no it's it's because uh you know what may be perceived as a dead end in a philosophical examination of the concept of god might just be our lack of creative thinking there you go yeah so i and because i just because i'm at a roadblock doesn't mean that that's the roadblock like i'm i'm still completely open to you know those creative solutions i just i i've been doing a lot of reading and i i can't you know i'm in the uh the self if i have to if it's mandated for me morally to be consistent for my words to be consistent with my internal beliefs i just don't have those internal beliefs because of those roadblocks and so it would to to proclaim prematurely would be disingenuous and sinful so i'm kind of in a uh interesting quandary as far as you know that one of my friends that i interviewed uh you can go and listen to his interview if you want um and when i say you i mean listener and yourself um anthony he uh always one always tells me he mentioned to me a couple of times that there are two kinds of people those who are predisposed to religion and faith in god and those who aren't and he said i david i'm predisposed and he anthony is not so that seemed to me like a sort of sad analysis um i don't believe it i choose not to believe that because that's just horrible right that's sort of calvinism 101 right there i guess oh yeah i didn't even make that association until you mentioned it i have a couple of uh i'm going to let you go soon but i have a couple of questions because you're uh a bright guy with a lot of ideas i want to just give you a couple of quick things that you're going to respond to okay so the first one the first one before i forget it uh well they're two one is groceries and one is gold digging okay so i'll do the gold digging one first cool so when i was i broke my wrist several years ago and that led to my conversion to god actually it's connected but oh because i had surgery and it's the first time i went under general anesthesia and it was like the best time of my life i had the best time of my life being under general anesthesia why was it so much fun why would why was it what explain to me this is now it's a third topic why was it so much fun just not being there like why how how can you explain that i woke up from the general anesthetic i was on top of the world i was like oh my god why'd you wake me up like you leave me there leave me where i was that was amazing but i have zero memory of it i don't know where i went what i did who i talked to you know but shortly thereafter i became a monotheist okay is that causally connected i don't know but i my gut tells me yeah okay so anyway um i'm getting way off topic here the gold oh yeah because my wrist i went to physiotherapy for like a year and a half to try to get flexibility back in my wrist and they did two surgeries on me like they put a metal rod in and then they messed it up when they tried to take it out it's just a big nightmare anyway at physiotherapy uh there's a poster on the wall and it's got uh like a little you know um miner with a shovel like a pit pic axe or whatever it is and he's like digging through his tunnel it's just going uh toward the right side of the paper okay it's like big long tunnel he's going going going going going going going and then t