Why Mormonism Denies God's Existence (Joe Heschmeyer) | Ep. 567

So the question is, are Mormons atheists? Mormons actually have a very good knowledge of scripture and the ability to cite chapter and verse. But what they don't have is philosophy. If somebody believes that you should worship Adam, that person is an idolater. Do Mormons today agree with you that Brigham Young, in this sense, taught idolatry? It's just not true that it's just alleged to have been taught. And it's not true that it was just a theory. It is a false doctrine. How many gods would Brigham Young say there were? And then how many gods would Jacob Hansen say there are? Jacob was asked almost this direct question. The question he was asked was whether God the Father had a God that he worshipped. What did he say? There's two things. One, how many gods are there? Two, what do we mean by God? The Omanian, they're going to say he's a creator in the same way that any artist is a creator. When you create content, when you build a statue, we can call Michelangelo a creator in a certain sense, but he doesn't create the marble. He just turns the marble into something beautiful. The God that we are bound to worship, is it fair to say he was once a man like we are now? according to LDS Today. Yes, overwhelming. My next question. Was he once a stinner? That is a good question. Joe Heschmeier, how are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? This is a bit bloody different, isn't it? It's similar in some ways, but very different in others. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. Getting to walk through behind the scenes and seeing all the people that are helping you now, whereas before it was kind of a two-man show. Yeah, it's a bit different. And I also just love that we've got six vessels of liquid. Yes, exactly. Fuel for the journey. But I'm so glad to have you on the show. You have had a lot going on lately. You've been debating Mormons and running away from orthodox. So here's how we'll start, all right? And then if you don't like this, you can just pretend you heard a different question and answer however you wish. I've watched politics before. All right. Well, here's the question. Why are Mormons atheists? So it's a very loaded question, and I think it's the kind of thing that is likely to hurt someone's feelings. So I want to be clear. You know, let me give a preamble to the answer, if you don't mind. dealing with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, LDS, Mormons, although sometimes we use Mormon to refer to non-LDS followers of Joseph Smith as well. They often come in with a certain experience of having been misunderstood, misrepresented, mischaracterized. And so there can be a little bit of, frankly, pretty understandable protection, maybe knee-jerk defensiveness. and it's very easy to come off as needlessly combative. So we have to sort of thread the needle where we approach people charitably and we speak the truth in love, but we also take care to recognize it's very easy to get things wrong when you're trying to describe a belief system that isn't your own. Like every Catholic knows this. Like every Catholic has had the experience of being told, here's why it's wrong, you guys worship Mary. And you just say, we don't though. Or you have someone quoting some really crazy liberal Catholic and saying, well, look, here's a Catholic priest who even says this. And you're like, well, that person carries no weight in my view of the world. Just because, you know, somebody with an SJ after their name in the mid-20th century says a certain crazy thing, that doesn't automatically make it true. It doesn't automatically make it a representative view of the Catholic Church. So I say all that at the outset to say I'm going to do my best to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position. Again, I'm using Mormon as a shorthand here, not in a pejorative way, but also provide some actual critiques of it. So I would just beg forgiveness in the beginning. If I get anything where you say that's not quite how we would articulate it or, you know, that's just one view among many. I've done my best to make sure I'm representing the actual position. The other thing that makes this trickier with Mormonism compared to something like Catholicism is there's not a catechism. Yeah. So you can say here are some official Mormon sources. You can even say here are things that your presidents in the past have said and they're regarded as prophets. Right. And we expect as non-Mormons that that's going to carry the same weight as if you said, you know, Isaiah says such and such. It doesn't matter that Isaiah is not alive anymore. He's inspired by God. He's got revelation. So obviously we carry that with the weight that we would carry it if we were alive in Jesus' day and hearing, you know, St. Peter talk or, you know, those things, whether they're alive or dead, it doesn't matter. But because of their vision of ongoing revelation, when you cite to even like past presidents, even though they were regarded as prophets, they don't seem to carry the same weight as the living. I don't think they believe in infallibility at all for anyone. No, Jacob Hansen in our debate explicitly denied that. So I think these are important things to just know at the outset. There is a line that Flannery O'Connor says in a letter, I believe it was to Dr. Spivy in the mid-50s, where she says, you can know what I believe because I'm a Catholic, but I can't know what you believe as a Protestant unless I ask you. And Mormonism is somewhere in the middle between those two, where there's a lot of, I mean, you have an authority. So you can point to things where you say, look, your church teaches X, Y, Z. in a way you can't for something like there's no Protestant church of an equivalent structure at all. But on the other hand, there's very few things that are going to fall in that all LDS are required to believe whatever. And so it's much more that this is a common Mormon view. You might find some outliers. I give all of that to say, even on big issues like the theology of God, you can find some very strange differences within Mormon thought, strange from the outside. Things where you would expect them to be much more harmonious than they are. A quick clarifying question. Do they believe in biblical inerrancy? No. So Joseph Smith articulated that the Bible was divinely inspired as it was originally written. But that leaves open the idea, as you get in Islam as well, that, oh, well, maybe the manuscripts were corrupted. It would seem to me that if you're dealing with a religion who doesn't believe that their scriptures are inerrant or their prophets are infallible, that there's probably going to end up being a lot of flecks in the joints. Yes, that's a great way of describing it. And a lot of just, well, that's not what we talk about right now. Yeah. So you can find things that were very clearly taught with what seems to be the highest level of authority. And we'll return to that in a minute. Okay. Where now it's just they've moved on and they reject it as not even being true. The most famous example of this, and we can get into kind of the nuances of the level of authority at which it was taught and everything, is what's called the Adam-God doctrine. and in the Adam God doctrine Brigham Young the immediate successor after Joseph Smith declared that the only God were to have anything to do with is Adam that Adam is our God he has his own God but there is this sort of Godhead of three persons not three persons in one being but three separate gods united in purpose this is sometimes called social Trinitarianism it's just polytheism, but they're united in purpose. So Adam has his own God, Elohim, or Yahweh, and Yahweh has his own God, Elohim. And so it's very clearly like Yahweh is the father and his son is Adam. Or, yeah, it's complicated. And this, I want to stress, is not what Mormons today believe. And in fact, later LDS presidents have described this as a damnable sort of doctrine. I'm a big fan of coffee. 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Now, let's talk about the coffee, because I care about what I'm fueling my body with. it's mold free pesticide free shade grown and low acid and it's organically farmed it truly checks all the boxes when i first heard about seven weeks coffee i was thrilled they had a great mission but i thought to myself that's fine but the coffee needs to be fantastic for me to really get interested and it it is it absolutely is we've got about five bags right now above my espresso machine it's terrific coffee i highly recommend it so go to seven weeks coffee.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Plus, get a free gift with your order and exclusively for my listeners, use code PINTS for an extra 10% off your first order. That's a 25% total savings on your first order plus a free gift. Just use code PINTS at checkout. And how do they talk about it as a damnable doctrine when their second prophet said this? They'll just say, well, we don't know for sure what he meant by it. We don't know for sure that it was said at the highest level of authority. And what makes this complicated is several things. First, he taught this in the tabernacle. Now that is, the closest you're going to get is like ex cathedra. So in the 1850s, there's a work called Journal of Discourses. Journal of Discourses was originally published quasi-officially. loves the like anyway it published quasi officially and it records the things that the prophets are saying in these various contexts and Brigham Young gives a sermon in which he says all of us can fall into mistakes and errors and this is true even of the prophets however the things said in the tabernacle are different they're protected from error like he makes this very explicit actually I I think I have his actual words if we want to. While you're doing that, what I'm thinking of is if the scriptures aren't inerrant and the prophets aren't infallible and they can sort of change what they say about God. So one of the things they've changed is that we're not worshipping Adam. That sounds like. OK, then if Mormon doctrine is mutable, should we hope that it just morphs into Catholicism? So you have a sort of similar thing with what was previously called the RLDS, where they sort of accept something like the Trinity now, and they've moved into much more. Who are these people? So after Joseph Smith dies, he leaves three different sets of criteria for who his successors are going to be, and they don't match up. He gives contradictory instructions over the course of his life. And so there is this succession crisis. If you're familiar with the history of Islam and the Sunni-Shia split, very similar. This is called the Succession Crisis of 1844. And so his own wife does not believe the LDS is the appropriate church. She rejects Brigham Young. There's a lot of controversy. There's a lot of scandal. Joseph Smith has a brother who dies mysteriously, and there's accusations of poison. It's a crazy situation. And Brigham Young is the one who is appointed with one of the mechanisms. And then, again, think about the Sunni Shia thing. Do you go with the blood relative? Do you go with the person who's kind of popularly supported? And you've got the quorum of the 12. And so you have this interesting question of how is a successor determined? And this was, to put it mildly, an unsettled question in 1844. And there were controversies about do we wait for everyone to come back so that we can do this? Do we need to act quickly? There's all kinds of questions about the validity of the election. And I'm an outsider to it. I've got no dog in the hunt except to say that the result of this is you have a bunch of different schisms. You have a bunch of different denominations of Mormons. The LDS are one of them. And they're by far the largest. How many are there today? Like three? Ten? No, the number I saw at one point was that there were 60 different denominations. But a lot of these are very, very small. A similar in doctrine? Or just small? Similar in doctrine depends on when they break off. Because some break off in 1844. So you began by saying a group that broke off shortly after Brigham Young now holds something like trinitarianism. And even break off is maybe not the right term because the question is just who do we think is a valid follower of Joseph Smith? And they weren't part of the LDS and then broke off. They just never accepted Brigham Young as a successor. Do you see LDS going against each other online as far as like presenting an apologetic for their branch of LDS in the way that Protestants might attack Protestants, you know? Well, no. So this is where it gets a lot more confusing. I have not seen – I'm sure this exists. I just haven't seen it. Like LDS versus RLDS or like Beckerites or any of these. I think these groups are largely too small, and I'm sure that you could find those fights. The algorithm has not led me into those recesses of the Internet. There's still time. Actually, so I come from Jackson County, Missouri, which allegedly is where the Garden of Eden was. Nice. Yeah, we can't even keep a stadium these days, but we used to have the Garden of Eden. Far we've fallen. Exactly. This is post-fall. That's all you need to see. And it's allegedly where Jesus is going to return. And so Joseph Smith had a bunch of prophecies about how they were going to build the temple there in his lifetime, and they didn't. He later claimed this is because of the wickedness of men. But he made very explicit promises that did not come true. This reminds me of conspiracy theorists online who are saying things that don't seem to pan out, and then they jump onto a different conspiracy theory, hoping that everyone forgot about the last thing they just conspiracy. Yeah, just watch the next episode. I'm going to drop, I've got the receipts. I'm going to drop, is there anyone in particular you're thinking of? No, I'm not talking about that. So, yeah, there is a certain, and look, let's bolster, let's steel man the LDS argument here. They're going to say, Jonah goes into Nineveh and says that in 40 days Nineveh will be destroyed, and lo and behold, it's not destroyed. There's an implicit conditionality to some of the promises of God. So I do think there's a way out in a certain sense. But I think that Mormons should also be mindful of the fact that the normal way we test whether a prophet is a true or false prophet is if they're making predictions about the future that then don't come true. We're told pretty explicitly in the Old Testament that is a sign that this is not a person who is authorized to speak on behalf of God. So understanding where that line is, I would think would come down to this. When Jonah is saying 40 days hence and Nineveh will be destroyed, it's like when you tell your kids, I'm going to count to three and you're going to go to your room or whatever. It's implicit in what you're saying. A normal person would hear that and understand this is going to happen or else. And you don't have to include the or else. You have to change your behavior because that's the whole point of the message. I don't think you could reasonably take that away from Joseph Smith's prophecies about the temple being built in Jackson County, but neither here nor there. The original reason I brought it up was to say that the RLDS, and I believe they're called Community of Christ or something similar now, they've tried to make themselves look like just another Protestant denomination that happens to have the Book of Mormon. Do they accept the Trinity? They say they do. Can we trust them? That's a great question. I talked to a guy who was baptized. Because if they accept the Trinity and are baptized, then they would be Christians. Yes, if they have a Trinitarian intent with the baptism. But the problem is not everyone who says in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit means the same thing in the mind. Of course, that's why I asked if they believe in the Trinity. And so I'm a little unqualified to answer that with any... They say they do. They say they do. So I think, and that's a relatively recent kind of transformation. So when you were talking, could this ongoing series of changes lead to them becoming Catholic? They could at least get closer. Yeah. And in some ways, half. Like, they no longer believe that being black is a curse from God, which was originally taught and then was reversed in 1978 with Official Declaration 2. So there are a lot of ways in which we are certainly closer now. Official Declaration 1, forbidding plural marriage, a.k.a. polygamy. Official Declaration 2, undoing the sort of curse that keeps black people from becoming members of the LDS priesthood. those reversals which and they're just 180 degree reversals there's no how do they talk about it how do they further revelation further revelation and so would they i mean i imagine if i was a what i would say is it's not that we didn't want blacks to be priests it's just that culturally it wasn't a smart time to have blacks as priests no it's it's much it's worse than that yeah okay and because i understand at the time a lot of 19th century americans believed that being black was a curse from God. This is part of the curse of Cain, or this is a curse of Ham. And you can find this reflected in the Book of Mormon itself. Like, it reflects some of the racism of its day. And Brigham Young seems to have been much more racist than Joseph Smith was. Like, Joseph Smith seemed like regular levels of 19th century white American. Joseph Smith was like, I got black friends. He wouldn't have. He was against slavery, which at the time put him on... So what was Brigham Young doing that was uber racist? Well, he would preach against the ugliness of the Negro race and the sign that this is a curse from God. You can find much more shocking quotes from him. So the Mormon will hear that and go, but guys, you've had popes who had mistresses and who rode into battle and who stole the papal cutlery, so we're the same. Your objection holds no way. Right. So here, the idea is that it wasn't just a cultural vestige of the age. It's true. You can find people who believed things we would no longer believe because of the age in which they were. that their view of women or of other cultures or whatever we would say is unsophisticated, ignorant, and sometimes maybe even uncharitable. That's different than saying God has, you know, cursed people with dark skin and making a theological kind of claim. And this theological claim, it's worth reading up on this. And I think it's tricky because with both plural marriage and this issue, there's two things. One is the offensiveness of the doctrine at hand, and two is the doctrinal reversal. And I'm not making a point about the offensiveness of the doctrine at hand. Like, I'm not oblivious to the offensiveness. I don't think anyone is oblivious to the offensiveness. But I think it can be offensive and true. Like, some things are just unfortunate, you know, facts don't care about your feelings, I believe. Some people in this very studio have said, yeah. Never heard of it. My point is actually just about the truth claim. Like, if you have this reversal, if you say A is true one day. Yeah. And then A wasn't true. It's like we've always been at war with Eurasia. You know, like, there's a certain sense of which you can't have this Orwellian view of Revelation just reversing itself. And I think this is a point not just for Mormons to consider, but also for liberal Christians. Like, if you think that the doctrines that were believed in yesterday can be overturned today and just declared, oh, those things were all wrong. Yeah. you have no ground to stand on to believe the doctrines you believe in today won't be regarded that way tomorrow so the question is are mormons atheists yes so that's a very long preamble it was a good one it was a helpful one i think we have to distinguish in two ways philosophically yes they are and that matters for some important reasons uh psychologically no they're not okay so the reason i say this is because if you tell someone you're an atheist and they're like I've devoted my life to following Jesus Christ and to serving Heavenly Father. This is a needlessly offensive sort of charge. And you're likely to just burn that bridge. And the person doesn't understand what it is you're saying. We should distinguish, too, between am I speaking to a member of the LDS community? That's right. Or am I speaking to somebody who's asking questions about the LDS? Right. Very different how you might approach those things. And how much they understand things like philosophy and logic is going to play a major role. Mormons actually have a very good, on the whole, a very good knowledge of Scripture and the ability to cite chapter and verse. Much better than you might imagine. But what they don't have is philosophy. Right. So given what you've said about LDS, flex in the joints, how many gods are there? According to the LDS Church, how many gods would Brigham Young say there were? And then how many gods would Jacob Hansen say there are? And I don't mean gods that we're bound to worship. I mean just gods. Jacob was asked almost his direct question, because the question he was asked was whether God the Father had a God that he worshipped. What did he say? We don't know. He said we don't know? Yeah. But I thought that that was Mormon teaching that he did. So, it was. It was. But there's maybe a little flex in the joints. Okay, I wasn't trying to be smart. No, no, this is a great question. So, there's two things. One, how many gods are there? Two, what do we mean by gods? And this is going to get to the heart of what we mean in saying, philosophically, Mormonism is a species of atheism. Okay. Because imagine someone who says, I don't believe there's a God who created everything, but I do believe there's a spiritual realm of ghosts and demons and angels. And if you want to call some of those angels and demons gods, go nuts. Yep, I get it. But they didn't create the universe. Right. That is very similar, actually, to where a Mormon ends up. Right, so philosophically, they don't believe in a creator of all creation. Yeah, exactly. They reject the idea of creation from nothing. They believe in creation from pre-existing matter. And if you ask where that pre-existing matter comes from, you get the same kind of shrug of the shoulders. Okay. So God is not a creator. Their God, lowercase g, is not a creator. Theo Manning, they're going to say he's a creator in the same way that any artist is a creator. Okay. Like when you create content, when you build a statue, we can call Michelangelo a creator in a certain sense, but he doesn't create the marble. He just turns the marble into something beautiful. Athanasius is on the incarnation. He talks about this. Yes. I don't think he mentions Michelangelo, but you're right. No, but he does make the distinction, if I'm not creating out of nothing, then I'm like a carpenter that fashions something. I make something, I don't create it. This is much more the idea of what we would call a demiurge. So they don't believe in God, strictly speaking. They believe in a carpenter, not a creator of everything. Can we sum it up real quick and then air it out? My fear is that we're kind of beating, or maybe I keep interrupting you too much, but all right, so let me see if I can sum it up. So what is God? God is the unconditioned ground of existence, the only uncaused cause, the metaphysically necessary being whose non-existence is impossible, the creator of all creation. That's what we mean by God. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Mormons don't believe in a thing like that. Exactly. Am I wrong? They would regard a thing like that as the corrupting influence of pagan philosophy. So they don't believe in God. Yeah, they don't. What we mean by God, they would reject as being contrary to Scripture. But what we mean by God is correct. Correct. So they don't believe in God. Is that what you're saying, Joseph? It is. Okay. That the arguments that would disprove atheism from reason are almost all of them. Yeah. Also arguments that disprove Mormonism. Contingency argument. Exactly. Do that. Show us that. So, okay. This is the third of the five ways that St. Thomas Aquinas lays out. And he says, you know, you and I, we are contingent. We wouldn't be here without our moms and our dads and without water and oxygen and food and everything else. Our existence, it has a beginning. We only exist under certain conditions. We continue in existence under certain conditions, and we could be snuffed out of existence. So we exist under, we'll just say condition X is really like a billion different contingencies, but we'll just make it really simple. And then you look at any of the things that we are contingent on, our mom and our dad, or oxygen or any of these things and say, does that have to exist? Or is that also contingent? Well, it's also contingent. Everything I've said of you is also true of your parents. Oxygen does not have to exist. We can look at all the biological reasons oxygen exists and so on. And so everything in the cosmos that we encounter is contingent. Right now. Here's the problem. If you have only contingent things, nothing will ever come into existence. Right. Like if everyone else says, I'm only going to go to the party if that other person shows up first, no one's ever going to the party. You need something that is not contingent. You need something called necessary. Now, you can have multiple things that are necessary, but you need at least one or else you can't have any existence. That's the first half of the argument from necessity. An illustration that can make this make sense. I'm marrying here a little bit of the argument from contingency and the argument from motion, so bear with me. It can be helpful for people in just explaining this. I explained this on a bar napkin one time in Arizona to a guy who had a few to drink and was skeptical about God, and he got it. So that's what I'm working with. Pines with Heshmer. Exactly. I just said, okay, imagine you come to a railway crossing and you see boxcars going by. Now, each boxcar is contingent upon the one before it. It wouldn't be there if there wasn't something pulling it along. And you flat surface so you can't make the earth the thing that they're contingent on. We'll make it really easy. You don't see the engine car, but you know there has to be one. And it doesn't matter if you have 10 boxcars or a billion boxcars or any number of boxes. The more boxcars you have, the more you actually need a very powerful engine to be pulling all of those things. So if you say, well, I'm contingent upon X and X is contingent on Y and Y is contingent on Z, these are boxcars. Because as long as you're pointing to more contingent things in that chain, you haven't gotten to the ground of anything existing. And so run that to ground, get to the engine car, and you need something that is necessary, but which also accounts for its own existence. You're not going to just arbitrarily say, well, you know what? We think there are always this many atoms in the universe that just changed their form. We think there is always space and time. Those things, you can't just arbitrarily choose something and slap the label necessary on it to get out of this. You can't use the brute fact kind of loophole that many atheists try to use. You have to have something that satisfies intellectually the hole that we recognize. Okay, the hole in what we experience is there must be something necessary or none of us would be here. We need something big enough to plug that hole, and that hole seems infinitely large. Yeah. And so it must be one who's able to account for its own existence. Whose essence is existence. Exactly. And we don't have that. And this we all call God, Thomas would say. so if that's true that is going to take atheism off the table and it's going to take Mormonism off the table and lay out why it's going to take Mormonism off the table because they explicitly deny that God is that so first of all he is material he is native matter he has a body Joseph Smith is very explicit about that in the first vision he gives contradictory versions as to whether he sees one God or two personages he originally just says he saw the Lord And then he later says he saw two personages. At a certain point, there's a question about whether there's two or three. There's a very strange history in terms of how many personages there are in the Godhead. But one of the things that he's very clear on, eventually, is that the Father has a body. Now, originally, he doesn't say that. Originally, he says that Jesus is, what does he say, a personage of tabernacle, and the Father is a personage of spirit. so he seems to be saying that the father is disembodied and the son is embodied but later that will get kind of retconned that will be changed and now they both had bodies and this is very clear in the King Follett discourse or King Follett sermon it's actually a funeral that he's preaching and he's very clear there that God used to be God the father used to be a man and then is glorified and elevated by whom is completely unclear does he glorify himself Some LDS like Blake Osler seem to argue maybe he does a self-glorification. Like the King of France? Yeah. But how do you give yourself omnipotence if you're not omnipotent? So that doesn't really work. And then you still have the question of, well, when God was on earth, who did he worship? Unclear. Those are kind of some problems with that. Most Mormons historically have thought, well, he had his own God, and that God had his own God, and it's just turtles all the way down. There you go. And that's just more boxcars. like that is not an actual engine kind of explanation because then you're left without actually hypothesizing any kind of immaterial creator of matter any uncreated creator of all things and to the extent that you reject immateriality of god explicitly then then you're taking the god you're hypothesizing off of the list of possible candidates to be the god of this universe now a mormon listening to you is going to say you're trying to sit there and you're trying to make it seem ridiculous that God has a body. But guess what, Joe? You believe Jesus is God and you believe Jesus has a body. Not a problem. Yeah, it isn't a problem to say that a human nature can be united to a divine nature. That's not inherently a problem. It would be a problem if you said God always had a body or if you said he was given a body by some other spirit or some other being that is a separate divine being from God. Because then you've created this problem. If you said God the Father wants to become incarnate I don't think that is philosophically precluded so that's not the argument at all but the argument is that on some planet God the Father was once a man it doesn't seem to have been Earth because this is a planet he created and populated it seemed to have been some other planet he was a guy on and so this starts to sound much more like the atheist who says our planet is put here because aliens planted people here it's almost exactly that But the difference is one person calls themselves an atheist and one person calls themselves a Mormon Christian. But their belief about the origins are both an alien being put the first seeds of life here. Okay, this God that Mormons today say that we're bound to worship, the Heavenly Father. Okay, yes. Joseph Smith says he was once a man like we are now, correct? Yes. Do modern Mormons believe this? Yes, but there is some, again, there's some flex in the joint. golly it's like trying to nail jello to a wall i used that exact expression in my debate with jacob hansen and i think lds listening to this should at least realize how difficult it is for non-lds to fairly critique the position when they keep changing and and when you can find lds who just say oh well we don't think that necessarily happened but yeah well here's my question okay let me just have two questions so the god that we are bound to worship is it fair to say he was once a man like we are now according to lds today yes overwhelmingly okay so my next question was he once a sinner that is a good question this is one of the things that came up in the kind of dialogue uh that so before the actual debate i did with jacob and i guess what i'm asking is what does official lds sources say even if even if they're mutable and then what a poll to my knowledge this is not something that the church has taken on head on because you immediately raises all these questions of, does he have human parents? Does he have, you know, like, yeah, not just who is his God, but like who's his, does God have an uncle? Is there like a heavenly great uncle that we could be? And sure, we're not to have anything to do with him, but why not? If we're being invited into the family of God and we're ontologically the same as God, because this is an actual point that I think is very important. Talking to people who come from an LDS background, they really like the idea that we are not ontologically different than God. Now, we would say this is a huge difference. This is the difference between the boxcar and the engine car. This is the infinite difference between the uncreated creator of everything and his creation. Like, even if the author inserts himself into the story, he is different and kind from the characters created by the author. but they reject that difference because they feel a closer intimacy thinking of God as being one of us and us being one of whatever he is. So he doesn't create you. He gives you a body, but you have a pre-existing intelligence. Am I as old as God? Am I God, lowercase three? Yeah. I'm as old as God. You're infinitely old. You're uncreated. And that's something Mormon sees today. It's even a point that they will use against Christians and say, you've got this problem of evil because creation exists here without its consent. Everyone who's ever created by God did not consent to be created. And so, therefore, God is morally responsible for the evils in the world. Whereas in Mormonism, God's not morally responsible for the evils in the world because he's just kind of powerless to. We've got to give their God a different name so we know what we're talking about, like Jeff or something. Oh, didn't her? Yeah. I mean, it is much similar to some of the pagan conceptions of God, where you have gods that are demiurges or architects. Tell our viewers what Kolob is and if it's still taught and where it is. So this is the idea, you know, as we were talking about this planet being the one. Yeah. Our planet being populated by God, but him being from another one. So that raises all these questions of where is God's planet and is it in the cosmos? and particularly if God is material, how does that work? If we took a rocket ship far enough, could we find God's planet? It almost seems like if the Big Bang theory is true, it might disprove Mormonism. That's right. I think that is actually correct. That if creation has a beginning, if time has a beginning, then some of these claims don't seem to work. and if their theory about how the Big Bang happens or any of this is just what just happens on its own, then it becomes very clear that we're dealing with a species of atheism, a very colorful species of atheism, a spiritually rich species of atheism. What's bananas to me is the Mormons accuse the church, that might be the wrong word, of falling into a great apostasy. But just from the little you've said in our interview today, it seems like I would have more reason to say mormonism has fell into a great apostasy because from what i'm hearing and again i might be wrong and you can correct me because i know you want to be fair that the difference between joseph smith and the early prophets to mormonism today seems very very very different in its doctrines or yeah i would say this so give the task of trying to interpret with the hermeneutic of continuity yeah both to mormonism in the 19th century mormonism in the 21st century and then Christianity in the first century and Christianity in the third century. And it's much easier to see how Christians in the third century are part of the same religion. Yes. Believing the same thing. Yeah, we don't even have to say all 2,000 years. Right, you can just take an equivalently long time. Because they believe it happens sometime within those three centuries. Big brands ruined deodorant. 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That's two months of tallow balm plus a deodorant for $34. Buy from an American farm. They sent us a bunch of this stuff. So I live in Florida right now. I'm commuting to Nashville. Whenever I come to Nashville, it's much drier than Florida. So I'm reliant on this product, which is fantastic. Also, I'll be honest, I was slightly skeptical about the tallow deodorant, but it works terrific. I've been using it. My wife uses it, and we really like it. So click the link below to grab a deodorant and a tallow balm for the price of one. We should probably talk through what is and isn't meant by the great apostrophe. I want to do that. I just want to make sure we tie up whatever we were just discussing. Oh, yeah. So this is that question of like, this is God's kind of planet. And who was that originally taught by? I don't. I have to plead ignorance. I don't remember. If you're a Mormon watching, tell us in the comments. Yeah. So apologies for that. I don't want to misrepresent. Yeah. And I know that this is sometimes raised to sort of point to the absurdity. And so, again, let me just try to steel man it and just say, yeah, we believe Jesus has a body and is in heaven. We believe Mary has a body and is in heaven. So the idea of materiality in the heavenly realm isn't a problem unique to Mormonism. It's just that the answer given looks more obviously wrong from a man. Well, when they talk about Kolob, do they mean that to be in the heavenly realm? What they mean by the heavenly realm is different because even the soul was understood as being made of very small matter. So, and I don't think that is actually officially taught by the church, but Brigham Young does talk about kind of particles to this. So he even denies that the immaterial is strictly immaterial. So if you are an apologist who's trying to interact with Mormon claims, are you saying that you'd spend your time better reading modern apologists than the earliest prophets? Yes, because you can show that the early LDS prophets seem to be false prophets. You can show that they get a lot of things wrong. They make predictions that aren't true. They make these descriptions that are contradictory, that are no longer believed in by the LDS today. And the reaction overwhelmingly that I see to that is people sort of shrug their shoulders and say, well, that's not binding church teaching, so I'm not bound to believe that. I can think they got that wrong. Who says what they're bound to believe then? So there are what are called the standard works, so like the Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants. These things... But that teaches that God was once a man, doesn't it? Well this is the King Fuller discourse so not as directly Oh okay So this is one of the last things Joseph Smith teaches before he dies And so this is something Brigham Young expands on So the status of some of this stuff again when you say about flexing the joints now I would suggest a different standard. I would say, okay, it's abundantly clear from those who listened to him that Brigham Young taught that we should only be worshiping Adam. Even if you say that's not an official church teaching, one, I think that's actually not true. It was official church teaching, and we can talk about that in the 1877 Discourse at the Veil. It was part of the temple induction, as reported by multiple people, that you were taught the Adam-God doctrine there. Two, it was taught in Journal of Discourses. Now, today, Journal of Discourses is not one of the standard works that Mormons are bound to believe, but it used to be. And so it used to be this source of official teaching and is no longer regarded. And three, Joseph Smith, excuse me, Brigham Young explicitly taught this in the tabernacle while declaring it was impossible for the prophet to err on teachings in the tabernacle. And four, he describes this as a teaching of salvific proportion, that one's salvation, it turns on whether they accept Adam God or not. So all of that, I would suggest, points very clearly to this having been at one time official binding ex cathedra, if you will, LDS teaching. It is absolutely not LDS teaching today. It's not even a permitted opinion today. It is explicitly rejected. So there's two ways you can approach that. One is to say, well, this is as clear of a contradiction as you could possibly have. Like if the Pope just says, I declare this issue of faith and morals infallibly, and the next Pope says, you're not even allowed to believe what that last guy said. game, set, match, the Catholic Church is over I agree, and it's also important to realize that what we're saying is we're not making a sorry, I want people to avoid making a two quoque fallacy because we're going to have LDS in the comments like, yeah, well what about you guys even if you're right all that would prove is Catholicism is false and okay, maybe it is for the sake of argument but that doesn't make LDS true and right? Yeah, I do. And this, okay, the thing you're pointing now is so clear to us and is so confusing because one of the things that one of the earlier presidents taught and this was not like an official teaching, but he gave a talk in which he basically said it's Catholics or it's us and it's us. And so there is a kind of bifurcated view that many LDS have where they say, okay, well, either the Catholic claim is true or the Mormon claim is true because you need some leader who has universal jurisdiction, who is the keys of Peter, who is a successor to Peter. And the only two claimants to that are Pope Leo and the eldest president. And since the Catholic Church has gotten all this stuff wrong, it can't be them, so therefore we win by default. That's kind of the way the argument works. In my debate with Jacob Hansen, he was operating within that framework. But if you don't come from that framework, it doesn't make any sense. Right. Because it's assuming certain things have to be true about the leader. But the only reason we believe those things are true about the leader of the church is because of claims that Jesus makes about Peter, for instance. And if those things Jesus makes about Peter are true, then the papacy is true and the great apostasy is false. Now, here's what I mean. One of the reasons we would say, yeah, the successor of Peter. Yeah, like you need to have the keys and all this is because Jesus gives Peter the keys and promises the gates of hell won't overcome in Matthew 16. Well, you can't point to Matthew 16 as proof that you need this and then simultaneously say we lost the keys because the whole point of that passage from a Catholic reading is that this is given in such a way the gates of hell won't overcome. We're not going to lose the keys even for 1700 years, even for a day. Like the keys are not going anywhere. The gates of hell won't overcome. So you can't appeal to the common ground to build a we both agree you need this kind of leader. We're going to have it because we don't actually we make similar claims. we don't mean the same thing by successor to Peter we don't think that the Pope is a prophet in the way that Peter was receiving ongoing revelation any of that so we're using similar language but we're meaning different things by it so it's actually confusing to put things that way so don't to any Mormons watching don't try to build from that common ground of saying well we know it has to be one of the two of us because the Catholic is going to say we don't know it's going to be one of the two of us even if they don't have that dilemma even if they don't have that dilemma It's still a common fallacious retort to say, well, what about you? Right. But saying what about you doesn't enable you to escape the critique we're currently leveling against you. It could just be true that we're both wrong. Right. Right. So if you want to respond to Joe in the comments, instead of saying, well, what about you? You could try to defend the position with me. Right. Like if you've got – like take the Millerites. Take a nice neutral example. Who are they? In the 19th century, at the same time Joseph Smith is coming up, there's a lot of these different, like, strange movements within Protestantism. Because you have, like, the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. You have people who are becoming on fire for God, but without any formation, without any stable preachers. And then you have these different popular preachers going out there preaching contrary things. And Joseph Smith talks about this. Like, his family is divided about which Protestant denomination to follow, and they're preaching against one another. They're preaching all this contradictory stuff. This leaves him to conclude that there's a great apostasy. It leaves other people to just say, well, why don't we read the Bible for ourselves? And they go invent some new denomination and some new form of Christianity. So Miller was convinced that Jesus was going to return in 1844. And for those of you listening, he did not. And this is what's called the Great Disappointment. And because of that, you have this situation. Now, if someone wanted to critique Miller and say, well, obviously, Milleriteism is false. You coming back and saying, well, your guys make mistakes, too, is a total deflection. It's not an actual logical answer to that problem. Because even if our guys make mistakes, even if we've followed some false prophet as well, your prophet is then revealed nakedly as a false prophet. Now, he wasn't claiming to be a prophet. He's just a bad reader of the Bible. but if you have a prophet making a claim and it doesn't come true it's obviously disproved that guy's out of the running that doesn't automatically prove like if everything i'm saying about mormonism is true here that doesn't prove catholicism is correct right of course but if catholicism is true that would disprove mormonism i want to get to your debate with but earlier i asked whether the lowercase g god that mormons say we are bound to worship was once a man like us, and you say they're fine going along with that. And then I asked, was he a sinner? And I think you said... I believe. Have you heard of... He has an exultation in the sense that he seems to have a redeemer, and he's offering worship. But I don't think this is something the church has taught in any official capacity. So if you were to ask a modern-day apologist, they would say, we don't have any... And you've got people like Blake Osler who are trying to do things, of trying to make a form of... Who's that? He's a theologian on the LDS side. Okay. And he's presenting some stuff that's not mainstream, but it's probably becoming bigger. And Jacob Hansen follows him. So you're going to find people like Jacob saying things that I think their parents' generation wouldn't have believed. There is this big shift. Because, look, the Internet exists now. And a lot of the claims that people living in Utah a generation ago believed, we now know those things are false. And they know those things are false. So this is where the give and the joints has kind of worked, where the leadership kind of points in a different direction and says, well, we're not saying that. We didn't mean that when we said great apostasy. We just meant more revelation. We just meant the keys are taken away, the priesthood is taken away. But there's still a lot of great Christians. And so you can kind of hollow out the doctrine without just reversing it. Or you can have things that just look like reversals, but you're encouraged to listen to the current president, to listen to ongoing profits without stopping too much to compare. Well, how does that match up with the things we've been told before? I think your example with the podcast of like the conspiracy theorists is kind of true. Because if you say, well, look, earlier you said this group did it. Now you say this other group did it. Were they working together? Are you reversing yourself? But if they keep you going by just saying, oh, I've got all this new information. And unless you stop and say, what you're telling me today doesn't match what you told me a week ago, then you don't notice the contradiction because they can spin a coherent compelling story until you notice that it doesn't match the story that you were told earlier and so that's how you want i mean this is this is true whether you're considering a podcaster whether you're listening to a suspect in a crime who's given five different versions of where they were you just you have to step back and say okay let me listen to what you're telling me today and see if i can harmonize that with what I was told previously. And if I can't, there's a problem here. It's fine. Like, we, just to be completely clear, it is fine to say you have new pieces of information today you didn't have before. That is not the objection. It may be that some prophet has some new insight that you didn't have before. That's not a contradiction. It is a contradiction if they're just absolutely 180 reversing what happened before and what was taught before as binding doctrine. Now, I'm going to tie up a loose end I left hanging. I said I think Adam God was taught at the highest levels of authority. And I think that you can show that. Now, it wasn't written down in Doctrines and Covenants, so you can find a kind of counterargument. But it was taught in this official way. It was part of the secret temple induction ceremonies. And so we know this for a fact. It's very hard to get around any of this. And the first way people tried to get around it is you would have later LDS prophets say, oh, well, maybe this was misquoted or misheard. But you have other LDS future presidents, people who were not presidents of the church at the time, but were present and wrote about it in their own journals. So we know from the private writings from well-respected Mormon leaders that this is absolutely what Brigham Young was teaching because they wrote about it in their diaries. And so just as a sheer matter of fact, this is what he was teaching. We can't get around that. You can leave the what level of authority question to one side and say, if somebody believes that you should worship Adam, that person is an idolater. That person is not a true prophet. You can't teach idolatry and be a true prophet. So Brigham Young is a false prophet. Whatever else may be true, even if he's just privately teaching we should worship Adam, fine. He's privately teaching idolatry, but he's doing it in the tabernacle, very publicly declaring everyone as a matter of salvation must be an idolater. And this is damnably false doctrine. And so whatever you think of Joseph Smith, you should at least be able to say, well, his successor, Brigham Young, is clearly a false prophet. Is this what the breakaways from the original Mormon church point to? Do they point to that? He said all sorts of stuff, even before this. I mean, that was, I want to say this is 1856? Sorry, 1852. So this is like eight years after. He'd been saying all sorts of things. He claimed that Joseph Smith taught this doctrine. And a lot of LDS today would say, no, he didn't. So Brigham Young's also apparently lying about what Joseph Smith was privately teaching. So do Mormons today agree with you that Brigham Young, in this sense, taught idolatry? They would say the Adam-God doctrine is false. They don't explicitly call it idolatry. It's difficult to see how it doesn't meet even their own definition of idolatry. And so I think that is something worth reckoning. They would just say, this was never officially taught. This was just someone's theological opinion, and theological opinions can be wrong. But it's not just that it's wrong. It's that it's idolatry. Yeah. So if Mormon prophets have taught false things, including idolatry in the past, and if Mormon prophets don't necessarily have the gift of infallibility, what level of docility should a modern-day Mormon have in respect to the current prophet when he teaches something? What would I say or what would they say? Both. So they're going to say you follow the standard works. So if it's at that highest level, you defer to that, particularly when it's the current leader. I think the question of how much they can err is something of an open question. But like, for instance, Joseph Fielding Smith said, President Brigham Young is quoted, in all probability, the sermon was erroneously transcribed. But we've got so many different versions that everyone had to have just slipped the pen in the exact same ways. And it just doesn't work. So they try to just say like, oh, maybe he didn't really. They just kind of kick up some dust. Spencer Kimball said he was alleged to have taught that. And then he calls it the Adam God theory. And he says, we denounce that theory and hope that everyone will be cautioned against this and other kinds of false doctrine. So he he makes it a little iffy like, well, we don't know for sure if Brigham Young taught it. We do know for sure Brigham Young taught it by every standard you would normally know. I mean, this was in Journal of Discourses. You have LDS presidents like signing off on Journal of Discourses, talking about the importance of it. And so it's just not true that it's just alleged to have been taught. And it's not true that it was just a theory. It is a false doctrine. So they're clear that it is a false doctrine. But, you know, obviously it creates this big question of, well, if they can get things that wrong, they don't just get an attribute of God wrong. They're worshiping the wrong God. Then what else? What could they not get wrong? It's hard to imagine something bigger than that to say, well, should we worship God or Baal? Should we worship God or Adam? Like, well, if you've got that one wrong, I'm not worried about the details of the other stuff you might be claiming that this God told you because the God you're claiming taught you things isn't even the real God. I'm seeing a lot of people converting from Mormonism. Has that been a phenomena taking place since the advent of the Internet more and more? What are you seeing? Yeah, I think it absolutely is. And the latest numbers I saw, I want to say the retention rate for someone raised Mormon were something like 48 percent. So most are leaving, just slightly most. It's about a 50-50 kind of split. And the Catholic Church has been doing a great deal better in terms of current adults who were raised Catholic. You've got a lot of people who are ex-Catholic. But I saw that in one study and it might be totally wrong. So I want to give that lots of grains of salt. A lot of flexing the joints. Yeah, exactly. I'm not declaring that at the highest level of authority. This is me trying to remember. I guess what I meant, though, is I'm seeing a lot of maybe I shouldn't say I'm seeing a lot of. Well, look, I know anecdotally. I mean, I don't just mean leaving the Mormon communion. I mean, a lot of Mormons becoming Catholic is what I'm. Yeah, so I think this is where it's either us or the Catholics might be a natural pipeline. Although I think if I were a Mormon and I became disillusioned with Mormonism, I've had some amazing ex-Mormons on my show who've become Catholics. Yeah, Isaac Cappos. You know them. What a guy. He's terrific. We hope to have him back on. But I don't know. Even with me, if I came to a point where I was like, this is false. This is clearly demonstrably false. I think I'd just be an atheist. I'm not saying I should be. No, no. That is the biggest place ex-Mormons end up, is disillusion with religion in general, because they realized that they didn't just get the Bible wrong. They were actively misled by their own church and the people they trusted the most. Someone might say to you, but Joe, why are you attacking this amazing group of people? I mean, these guys are, at least from what I can tell, and I know every community has their skeletons in the closet, Catholics are like, every group of human beings is like this. so I don't mean to put them up on a pedestal but from what I see these are beautiful people who love their families they have conservative values they're attractive and that's a big thing I like attractive people it's important to me as a non-attractive person to see attractive people makes me happy we've all seen your ankles those are really good I covered them up for the sake of the purity of my audience however I remember my wife coming out from Target one day and she said I just saw a family in there they had like seven kids and I went oh did they look put together or disheveled And she went, put together, went Mormons. She had us disheveled Catholics. Yeah. So why are we doing this? Let's pick another opponent. Why are we doing this? I would say this. Two reasons. One, if it is important to be part of the flock of Christ for salvation, we should want everyone to be a part of the flock of Christ. We want people to be baptized with a valid trinitarian baptism to become sons and daughters of God by adoption. All of that you can find in the New Testament. All of that you can find proclaimed by the earliest Christians. Like this is something the early Christians went out wanting not just people to follow Jesus in their own way, but to be baptized into the family of God and to be part of the visible flock of Christ. That's the mission all of us should be on. And so I do a lot of work answering Protestant objections who are actually much closer than Mormons are. They're already baptized into the family of God, but they're not completely in the fold of the flock of Christ. And so we want to bring them in out of love, not out of like whenever you go out after anyone, you can do it in the spirit of trying to tear them down and just destroy. Or you can say, look, you already have all of this, which is good and true and beautiful. And you're being invited into so much more. And so that's the attitude I take and the attitude that I hope everyone else would take. The second thing is we need more beautiful, put together, large families. Please help us. Yes, exactly. You know, like when you find someone who clearly is seeking after God, read John 10. Jesus says he's got other sheep that are not in the visible fold. And he doesn't just say, therefore, leave them alone. He says that they should be brought together so there can be one shepherd and one flock. It's precisely because they love God that we want to reach them and bring them into the family of God. And do they love God? Well, they seek after Heavenly Father. You can be radically wrong about the creator and still have some good intentions. So this is where I say philosophically they're atheists. Yeah. Let's talk about that psychologically. Why did you make that distinction? Because someone who misunderstands what is philosophically true of God might nevertheless have God as the object of their worship and object of their affections. So the easy case would be something like a child. Yep. A child has a radically deficient theology. Idiots. Yeah, these impacillic children. And they are nevertheless oriented in such a way that they're trying to worship God. Now, I know last time I was on the show, we actually talked about this a little bit in the context of Muslims worshiping God. So I don't want to get completely down already trodden paths, except to say, following Saul Kripke, he gives the example of you go to a Columbus Day parade and you say, who is this Christopher Columbus guy? and somebody tells you, oh, he was the first European to make it to the New World, and he's the first guy to realize the earth was round. Neither of those things are true. Is that person still talking about Christopher Columbus? They are. They're getting everything about him wrong. So it is possible to be oriented towards God as the object and still wrong about everything you're saying about him. Okay. Or at least wrong about a lot of things. So you can be philosophically wrong about God. You can have such a skewed view of God. Yeah. That he doesn't even deserve the title of God in your conception. So philosophically and theologically, and by theologically, I mean what has been revealed by these so-called Mormon scriptures, they're atheists. Yeah, and so this is relevant, not as a pejorative, but it's relevant because the arguments against atheism work to disprove Mormonism as well. Yeah. And so it's relevant to know that information. but in terms of they're reading the scripture and seeking to follow Jesus as they understand him in the scriptures yeah we say same team the one thing you could say to a mormon missionary who's beginning to be brought over to the catholic side is you don't have to discount this burning in the bosom this experience you've had with heavenly father i'm not telling you that's illegitimate right right yeah that's absolutely right and so there is a certain kind of christian who wants to say, well, look, they're theologically wrong about God, therefore they were never worshipping the true God. But think about it this way. Someone who is Jewish, who doesn't believe in the Trinity, but is reading the Torah and says, I believe that the God who revealed himself to Abraham is the true God and I await the Messiah and then you reveal Jesus to them and they say, I want to follow him. He is the Messiah of Israel and they come into Christianity. Were they just believing a complete false religion before? No. Like, take an easy example. They don't even leave the Talmud, all that out of it. Just imagine it's 125 AD. They've never heard of the Trinity. They're not consciously rejecting it. They're faithfully following God as they understand him as revealed in the Old Testament, which is not as they understood it. Triune. They're philosophically wrong. They're getting something essentially wrong about God, but they're nevertheless oriented towards God in such a way that we would say, obviously we're building upon that, not just chucking it in the bin. I wonder if it would be a little more modest and helpful and less offensive to say, I'm not claiming that any individual Mormon is an atheist. What I'm claiming is, according to your own theology, God does not exist. Yeah, or to put it a different way, the big distinction between a theist and an atheist is not on materialism. Because even though almost all atheists are also materialists, they believe matter is all there is, that is not essential to atheism. And you'll find atheists who are not materialists, who there are spirits and they might be fine with ghosts. They might be fine in the spiritual realm, but they don't think that there's an uncreated creator of everything. On that actually on the actual fight between atheists and theists, Mormons are on the atheist side of the question. But there is not an uncreated creator of everything. Let's talk about your debate, if you want to, with Jacob Hansen, who is a really sweet guy. He came to my studio. He debated. He was only lovely. Yeah. I don't know if you still feel that way. I do. Actually, we had a very good kind of post debate conversation. It was very good. Oh, that's good. I'm happy to hear that because I think it is it's too easy in this day and age to attribute bad motives to people. And whenever we cannot do that, we should do that. I mean, there are times where you have to attribute bad motives because it's abundantly clear. But all of this talk online today, like, oh, he's they're a liar. He's a liar. They're lying to you. He's malicious. You have to be really careful before you start throwing around accusations like that, I think. So I don't want you to get all into the weeds, but just for those who are coming new to the conversation, just sum up real quick what happened, and then we can get into what you want. Okay, sure. I'll do it as quick as I can, but you've encountered me long enough to know that. I'll do my best. It's a long-form podcast. Jacob invited me to debate the LDS claims about the great apostasy. And so he picked the topic. He picked me as the opponent. He picked the moderator. And then we settled on a Catholic church in Draper, Utah, St. John the Baptist, because I know the pastor there, and I thought, oh, Catholic Church in Utah, it's as neutral of territory as you're going to possibly get. It was that or, you know, find some sort of LDS place in Rome. I mean, it was not really. Is there an LDS place in Rome? There probably is. There probably is. I don't know. But I'm not sure. It could be. Anyhow. I'm derailing. Yeah, I don't need much derailing. Much help. So he gives the first speech, the affirmative opening. Anyone familiar with debates knows that the affirmative has a burden of proving the resolution. That's right. And the negative's job is just to show why that case doesn't work. So the affirmative has a lot of leeway in terms of how they understand and articulate and put the resolution forward. And the negative just has to show this case that they're making is not true. So what was the resolution you agreed on? That there was a great apostasy. Okay. I don't remember the exact wording, but like in emails and everything, I think it was just worded, was there a great apostasy? But he was very clear he wants to debate the LDS claims about the great apostasy. The opening words in his affirmative statement are that it is my responsibility to convince everyone, including Protestants and Orthodox, that the papacy is true and that they should. Like the Pope is the successor of Peter. And I wanted to put my pen down there to be like, where am I? Not only like that, I've just been told I'm the affirmative with the burden of proof and that the topic is the papacy. Why am I going second? Right, right. Exactly. Like, why not let me come up and give a full 18 minute speech on the papacy then? And if I'm being expected to defend it, I should be allowed to have all the preparation of an affirmative. And people who don't debate probably don't realize how much. Because, look, as a Catholic, if you want to approach me on the street and say, why is the papacy true? I can do an OK job. But if I'm being asked to give an 18 minute speech on the papacy with sources without being told we're going to be talking about the papacy as the topic, that's what looked bad, both in terms of shifting the burden of proof and in changing the topic. Now, I want to be fair to Jacob. because a lot of Mormons said, I don't see anything wrong with this approach because it's logically us or Catholics. And if the papacy is not true, then we're obviously right. Or at least if the papacy is not true, then there must have been a great apostasy. And that is logically invalid unless you assume a bunch of different things. And I think in fairness to Jacob, what was probably happening is he was assuming, we all know that there has to be someone with universal jurisdiction. There has to be someone who's a successor of Peter who's receiving ongoing revelation. And all I have to do is show that that guy doesn't exist and the Pope isn't him. Now, we would actually say, yeah, there's not anyone who is receiving revelation in the sense Peter did after Peter. This is a not controversial claim. Now, we would say that's not an apostasy. That was part of the plan of God. And you can see this in the first century itself. So 1st Clement and 1st Clement, paragraph 42, talks about how the father sends Jesus and Jesus sends the apostles and the apostles send the bishops and the deacons. Now, that's very clear. So Jacob rhetorically would just say something has been lost, but that presupposes something was meant to continue on and didn't. And he doesn't show that something was meant to be continued on. And a really good indication that you have that there wasn't something that continued on is the fact that nobody talks in this way. Like the first apostle to die is in about the year 42. It's James, the brother of John. We read about it in Acts. I mean, I'm leaving Judas off the list. He's technically the first to die and they replace him. They don't replace James. Now, if that's the sign of an apostasy undergoing at that moment, like the people have become so wicked that God is not going to replace any new apostles, so there will be no future guidance of the church. You would expect the other apostles to write about that, to preach about that, to warn the people, hey, God is withdrawing his hand of protection. And ironically, this case is stronger the more you listen to the LDS claim, because they will say one of the ways we know that there must be a prophet. As God says in the Old Testament, he won't do anything without revealing it first to his prophets. Great. So now you have to believe if an apostasy happened like this, God removed the keys, he removed the priesthood. He must have told the apostles this was happening. And they don't warn anyone? What horrible shepherds they were. What horrible preachers they were. If you know Nineveh is falling and it's going to be destroyed and you don't go out and preach, there's something wicked there. That's Jonah. he has to be redirected to told you have you can't let people fall into that and not tell them and so all of the arguments for oh well there must be a prophet so someone can hear the revelation of god and other things going to happen next would obviously apply to the great apostasy look are you tired of sending your money every month to a phone company that does not share your values i want to tell you about our sponsor charity mobile they're different they're proudly pro-life and they're not apologizing for it. Here's what I love. Every month, they take a percentage of what you pay and send it directly to the pro-life, pro-family charity that you choose. Over the last 30 years, that's added up to millions of dollars making a real difference. And here's the thing. You're not sacrificing anything. Plans start under 50 bucks before taxes and fees. 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You can look at them afterwards and say, aha, that clearly happens. you don't have anything like that for the fact that there was apparently an ongoing apostasy happening either in or immediately after the time of the apostles so how did the debate go? yeah I really enjoyed it the people there were very gracious both the Catholics and the Mormons who were there were incredibly lovely was it like a battle of people trying to be kinder than the others? every time I've gone to Utah I've come away with stuff I didn't come with I've been three times and all three times I've had more stuff coming back that was just given to me. I really have such respect for many of the things Mormons do. And that's not just a throwaway line to sound like I'm trying to be gracious right after I've said they're atheists. When I used to work in the anti-pornography realm, you know, I used to speak about this, write about this a lot. Everyone who was doing amazing work in that area ended up being a Mormon. I'm being a little hyperbolic. But I would learn about people doing incredible work helping men or women overcome pornography. And I'm like, oh, I bet they're Mormon. And I would ask them, and they were. Yeah, I think this is one of those areas. I heard Peter Kreef say many years ago that we should learn from what's best in all of these other systems. So if you've got Muslims praying five times a day, you should go pray seven. 100%. No, I'm with you. We have to learn from. Yeah, or 100 times a day. I mean, that's more OCD. That's right. Yeah, I mean, the reality is we should look at these things and say, you're doing this thing that's really good and that is in some ways a little bit of a rebuke that I'm not doing more. But if you've been given five talents and you're doing less than the guy with two talents. I remember my wife and I were flying out of New York City and you see these Mohammedans doing their prayer role outside of, they must have been working for the airport and there they were. And I thought, you know, there's a lot to learn there. They put many Catholics to shame. Oh, I went to Georgetown for a long time. Their commitment to prayer with the way they fast, right? And so we can acknowledge these as basically good, right? Yeah. Not commenting on whether they're worshiping God. You don't have to do that. You can just say, look at the commitment they have to their religion. Yeah, the drive. Yeah. Even if you're driving in the wrong direction, St. Paul can talk about how zealous he was for God while he was killing Christians. Well, look at the Shabbat. I mean, the Jews. Yeah. I'll text Ben, and I'm very great. He never texts me on Saturday. Yeah. uh saturday night i might get a text i i just love that commitment and then you look at us and we can be really sloppy i understand we're not required to keep it in the same way but you know we might go shopping and doing all sorts of things we don't even really think about what it looks like to have a day of rest yeah i was trying to say i went to a catholic law school and yet in the chapel there was a sign pointing which way mecca was because it was used as much by the small handful of mothers as by the handful of Catholics, which was convicting. Like, we need to get our act together better, and it shouldn't be like that. Like, we should be the ones who have that reputation for prayerfulness, or in the Mormon case, we should be the ones with this reputation for generosity and hospitality and all of this. So we can look at that and say, without a, you know, there's a way of doing that just is kind of like, kind of saccharine, but I think authentically. No, I agree. There's a lot of things where they clearly, their hearts are in the right place and their drive's in the right place. There's some theological and philosophical problems being made that have really important consequences. What's the future? And I want to wrap up our discussion on Mormonism here. What is the future? What does the next five years look like, would you say, between Christians and Mormons? That's a good question. I think that they are becoming part of the public consciousness in a deeper way. that they were on the fringes of the periphery. And then in our lifetime, they've become more well-known and were originally an object of just mockery and derision by a lot of Americans. You know, South Park, the Book of Mormon musical, all this stuff. Yeah. And I think now you're going to have more of an appreciation for the unique kind of genius that you find within Mormonism, but also more of an engagement with the obvious logical and philosophical and theological problems. So I suspect you're going to see more of two things. One, you will probably get Christians who convert to Mormonism because they realize it's stronger than it was presented to them as. For a lot of people growing up, they were given such a caricature of Mormonism. Or they were given what Mormonism was 100 years ago. Sure. Maybe it was kind of a combination of both. But then you hear the actual claim, then, oh, okay, it's actually better than you thought. Yeah. You can set the bar so low that they clear it just by not being kind of a cartoonish caricature. On the other hand, I think when you have the charitable, nuanced, good faith engagement, I do think Mormons, as they discover some of these problems, and also as they realize this isn't just a problem with religion itself, this is a problem with their particular religion. Because a lot of them are going to just say, I guess religion is irrational. I guess, you know, religion is contradictory. It's like, no, that's a very unique experience you're having of being taught these different things on Wednesday than Tuesday. That's not the experience Christians have. All the faults we may have, all the experiences we, you know, we don't just have a series of prophets telling us contradictory things. And so in that sense, I think you're going to have some people who become disillusioned with Mormonism and become, you know, agnostic, atheist, irreligious, et cetera. I think you're also going to see, mark my words on this, you're going to see an ongoing watering down of some of the theological distinctives of Mormonism on the sexual front. Some of the things we actually agree on now, they aren't standing up as strongly to the culture on some of those things when you actually get into the weeds. Like what? Well, on abortion, but also on homosexuality. So on abortion. I thought they were good on abortion. They are mostly good on abortion. Now, I'll give you this. This is a great talking point with Mormons. If you want to invite the Mormon missionary in, it may not be fair to do a full-on theological debate. Although, honestly, if you're sending a missionary to someone's house, you can hardly complain that they're debating theology. Sorry. But they are 18, 19-year-old kids, and they're far from home, and they're trying to serve God. So you want to do it in a respectful way. Yeah. one thing i have found very helpful is just to establish with them where we agree on abortion but their church refuses to call abortion murder because they sometimes permit it you need to pray on it and get the permission of the bishop but you're allowed to abort and logically this is just you're behaving so according to mormonism you can sometimes kill an innocent human being and justified in doing so. That's right. And they stopped short of calling it murder because they, and this was another thing that I pressed Jacob about in the event we had prior to the debate. And he just said, well, we don't know for sure when the soul enters the body. So he took the Nancy Pelosi out. And that sort of thing is really alarming. So you're going to find more Mormons who are exposed to things like that, which are their own church's teaching and they don't even realize are their church's teaching. and so you're going to have this caving to culture on abortion and on homosexuality now tell me about that because i thought they were pretty good when america tried to pretend that two men could be married yeah they were but there is a lot of an internal push on this and so i don't internal push yeah within the ranks you have people saying like oh well maybe it's you know maybe we're being too hard on this issue well yeah i don't know what that's going to mean if your doctrines and morality that you can change right i don't know a reason why if you can get something like marriage wrong on plural marriage what about that can reverse what about contraception and masturbation i don't know much about it to be honest i've never talked in any great detail on those issues with them so all right so you're gonna start to see that you think you said mark my words yeah i think on the issue of same-sex uh behavior maybe same-sex marriage but at least homosexuality in some way You're going to find more kind of squishiness because there are activist forces in the works in the church and they don't have the divine protection. What about transgender stuff? Are you seeing much of that? I don't know. I know you're not the spokesman for Mormonism. No, no. To be clear, I understand that. I don't know. I don't know what that's going to look like. And we might be moving in some ways past that fight, a cultural level, because I think the sort of accept this or else days are largely ebbing because they're realizing there's not a big – like if you don't talk about things with bad philosophy, it's not just Mormonism, it's also transgenderism in very different ways. But there's just no anthropology. So, yeah, I think it'd be very interesting to see what that looks like. Okay, here's another question. where do you so if mormon doctrine is not infallible or inerrant as they say themselves and it has evolved such that we can say well that was wrong and here's what we teach today where do you realistically uh as mormons continue to be pressed where do you see mormon doctrine evolving to yeah well that that's where i'm imagining you'll find more i don't just mean about moral truths yeah well that's that's where i think that there's going to be more of this because I think that's where a lot of the heat and the pressure is coming from. I think you're going to see two things. One, you will see more of a softening of the Mormon position towards Trinitarian Christianity, where there was much harsher language used in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and you see a move as they get to have Christian neighbors and they realize the Christian neighbors aren trying to kill them like they were experiencing in the early days There a softening and they start to realize like oh maybe God working through these people as well And you get some of that in Joseph Smith. It's a tonal shift more than a substantive shift, maybe. But I think you're going to continue to see sort of that more of an ecumenical, interreligious approach. So I don't know. It's hard to guess. It's hard to guess where it's going to go. But that's where I would see you're going to see some more softening and some more vague statements that sound much more Christian friendly. There was a very intentional rebrand. So even terms like LDS, it was called the LDS Newsroom and everything else just a few years ago. They under the prior president had a massive rebrand to call the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. or I guess two presidents now ago where they stopped, I believe, on Google Maps they used to have the Angel Moroni, which is one of the characters in the Book of Mormon and they replaced it with a picture of Jesus or with a cross sometimes you'll even see. Historically, crosses were not used in Mormonism. And so they're trying to present as more of a Christian movement where they would never have just out and out denied that but you would find some earlier Mormon writers who distinguished Mormonism from Christianity and young Mormons, I think, overwhelmingly think of themselves as Christian. And it's just like, well, there's just different flavors. It's a Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon. This is why I don't love that you keep referring to them as LDS. I understand that you're trying to be respectful, but if it's a propaganda... Well, they would say LDS is now actually an outdated term. I know, but you're not using the word... You said Mormon earlier, and I'm not trying to be disrespectful, and neither am I. But why do we have to tell a heretical group... I'm using that word broadly. Yes. They weren't Christians. But why do we have to go by what a non-Christian group says about itself if it's just muddying the waters? Well, I think for the sake of clarity and charity. So I'm fine using terms like Eastern Orthodox, even though I don't think they're the ones who are Orthodox on the questions that we're disagreeing on. But it's a term they're known by. And as a Catholic. So if they change their name to the True Church of Jesus Christ, would you call Orthodox that? If there was a lot of the reason I don't say Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is just because it's a mouthful. So true church is pretty much what the Orthodox church means. No, but I'm just saying if the Eastern Orthodox, let's say the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church, I know this is a, we're just spitballing here, but if they chose to change their name to the one and only true church of Jesus Christ, presumably you wouldn't start calling it that. No, but my reasons for not calling them that would be almost exclusively how clunky it is, and that would be more confusing. But if they had a really succinct way of saying you're right and you're wrong, you would go ahead and say it. The succinct way of saying that would be Orthodox. and calling themselves the Orthodox Church, they're implicitly calling everyone else heterodox. And we use that term. Yeah, but it seems like there was a shift within the Mormon community to make them seem like mainstream Christians. That's right. That's the difference, right? That's right. It is marketing. So why go along with it? Charity and clarity, I get it. But the clarity part is important. I mean, look, you've had situations, I'm sure, where someone will say, oh, you Romanists or you Papists, and you just roll your eyes and know whatever they're going to say next is going to be the dumbest thing I've heard today. Because they're not approaching with the kind of intellectual thing. Right. And I don't want to do that to Mormons. Yeah, well, we've got to thread the needle, though. Because I agree, we want to be charitable. But I also don't want to start speaking of them in a way that would lead other people to think I think they're Christians. No, I think if I say the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is teaching atheistic philosophy, No one is going to hear that and be like, oh, well, you did say the Church of Jesus Christ, so I guess. So, yeah, this is probably situational to a certain point. I don't think anyone who's hearing certainly this conversation is going to come away saying, oh. Joe Hashman. Yeah, Joe thinks this is the real Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We've had the Saints in the early days and in the latter days. We're the Church with the Saints following Jesus. We have even canonized them. Like, we clearly aren't conceding the substance, but there is, and you see this even within the Vatican itself, you'll refer to, you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury, even though they're not a real archbishop. It's a lady pretending to be an archbishop. And even if he wasn't a lady, it still wouldn't be an archbishop. And would you find it offensive if I referred to her as the lady pretending to be an archbishop? In some context, that's fine. How productive is that? Again, this goes back to what we said earlier. you speak differently just like an LDS would admit this like an LDS sitting down with his LDS friend having a root beer and they're critiquing the Catholic Church and they might have strong language and good for them so they should if Catholicism is false when they engage with a Catholic they're going to try to be charitable so that you can know that they're a person of good will yeah I just think that I would rather save the ammunition for the substantive critique rather than the name calling like if I'm burning the bridge over I'm using a term that they find offensive I'm burning the bridge needlessly I'd rather burn the bridge over you guys are teaching these things that are dangerous you might be convincing me so I'm open to changing this I've been calling I honestly didn't know Mormons saying that was offensive I really didn't Mormon was a name given by outsiders it was honestly a helpful term because not every Mormon is LDS remember there is that split oh I see so you're distinguishing the type of Mormon Yeah, LDS Mormonism is by far and away... They used to call themselves Mormons? You will find them using the term, but again, it seems to be... Kind of like how we took the term Roman Catholic. Roman Catholic was a term we were originally called. By the Anglicans. Yeah, because they were like, we're Catholic and you're Catholic. You're just the Roman Catholics and we're Anglicans. Yeah, it was a pejorative, right. Right, and so you will occasionally find Catholics who use Roman Catholic now because it's... Well, there's a sense in which we can use it, especially in distinction to the Eastern churches. Yes, and that's where it becomes confusing. Right. So you're saying the Mormons never call themselves Mormons? The Mormons did not give themselves the term. Okay. And there was internal stuff from the president to push against those kind of terms. From the get-go? No, no. More recently, there was an intentional kind of marketing push. What did they call themselves 100 years ago? I think LDS or Latter-day Saints. Oh, is that right? So Latter-day Saints is a fairly neutral. That is not a term that is imposed by the other. You've changed my mind. I'll call them LDS from now on. Yeah, thank you. You won the debate. Now, let's talk about your recent interaction. What happened with this Orthodox thing? Oh, yeah. By the way, you're very good in debates, and so is Jacob. Like, I thought the exchange that the two of you had on Batusi's channel after the fact, yeah, I thought you both acted like gentlemen. I love that kind of approach. And Jacob is someone who, you know, I was frustrated after the original debate because I didn't know if he was trying to be clever. or if it was just really where his reasoning ended up. So I called it out, but I was clear. It felt dishonest. I'm not accusing him. I'm just saying this is how it came off, of saying you've got the burden of proving the papacy when I don't have the burden and we're not talking about the papacy. But afterwards, he explained his own reasoning, and even though I disagree with logically where he ended up, it seemed to be coming out of a place where it wasn't bad faith. And I tried to acknowledge that publicly as well. And we had, I think, a great conversation afterwards. Good for the two of you for doing that. Yeah, I'd be happy to engage with him again, where we can have a respectful... You'd be very clear, though, on the resolution. Yeah, well, I mean, I'd be happy. I actually think the moderated discussion we had on capturing Christianity afterwards, where we both could just speak it in more of this way, like an immediate conversation. We could ask for clarity. And way more productive. Yeah, I think it was. All right. So, Justin Menard, who has an Orthodox channel, I believe it's called The Transfigured Life. Okay. He reached out to me and said, hey, you did a video on why you're not Eastern Orthodox, and there's an Eastern Orthodox attorney who it'd be great to have you guys sit down and have a charitable dialogue. And he compared him to a well-known Protestant apologist and said he's like a more charitable version of this person. And I was like, great. I don't know who this Alex Oren guy is, but he sounds like he's very intelligent and it sounds like we could have a nice charitable discussion. And so I've been traveling a lot. I was at Sikh, and I came home, and I got immediately sick. and uh one day in the middle of the night my two-year-old fell out of bed so that was i'm home i'm gonna take care of this i'm already not feeling great fell out of bed like from a top bunk or just uh rolled out of a regular size bed but you know so he'd fallen he has a little bed on the floor had gotten out of that bed so i put him in the guest room bed this was entirely my fault put him in the guest room bed as my wife tells me yeah he then rolled out of that bed in the middle of the night so i was like oh shoot and so i'm home it's my fault he was in there in the first place. I was convinced he couldn't possibly roll out. His rolling ability was better than my guessing ability. And so anyway, all that's to say, I'm awake and against my will. So I go on Twitter, and he had apparently had a debate I think the night before with Elijah Yossi on Catholic Orthodox. Yeah, he's terrific. And I had not and still have not seen the actual debate. I've seen two clips now, I think. but the amount of nastiness afterwards was just completely dispirited a lot of a lot of afterwards yeah on twitter a lot of like oh our guy totally wrecked your guy you guys stink you destroyed him trash crashing out like and some of that you're going to get every time because you get a bunch of guys who are just fanboys and catholics have this there's a huge culture of this among kind of these ortho bros and it's it's spiritually immature it's not charitable and it's the kind of thing i really want no part of yeah and so seeing alex engage with some of that stuff he was not the worst offender i mean a lot of other orthodox were worse than he was is he the fellow who yeah he was the guy i was gonna and i just and he was being kind of he was sort of i mean he was like sharing some of the stuff and retweeting stuff and it was just and he was accusing eric ybarra who you and i both know and one of the fairest guys he was accusing him of lying about obscure historical details come on and i'm sure part of it was just being somewhat sick and already feeling like overwhelmed by travel and sickness. But I just looked at that and thought, I want absolutely nothing to do with this. Like, I don't want to watch this debate. I don't want to be part of this. I don't want to engage with these charitable trolls, uncharitable trolls. I'm happy, if you have a spiritually mature Orthodox who says, what are the differences between Catholicism and Orthodox, I'm happy to sit down and do that. But if it's just going to be like Jay Dyer's fanboys, there's something so toxic about that, that these are just young guys who are being led in a disgusting direction. I'm just going to say it very bluntly. This is Andrew Tate for orthodoxy. It's just like I don't want any part of that because I think that this is the opposite of what we should be as Christians, not even getting into the particular nuances of Catholicism and orthodoxy. If your thing is just calling everybody gay online and how edgy can you be, grow up. Like, dude is 40 years old, more than 40. What are you doing? I get his fans being like that but I don't want you might as well go and say I think the next debate should be at a frat house you're not going to have a meaningful productive charitable Christian conversation and to be clear we're both agreeing that there are probably Catholics oh no no I should be very clear there were Catholics who were absolutely a part of the problem with that as well but it was just drawing out the worst elements of the Catholic and the Orthodox side I also want to be clear there are a lot of great Orthodox who aren't doing any of that I just saw that and thought that's not going to be a meaningful discussion. It was two things. It was that, but it was also the idea that the way we're going to settle whether the papacy is true is obscure debates about some, the acta of a council most people have never heard of. Strikes me as itself a gross misunderstanding of how Christianity works. By which I mean, one of the major points Christians made in regards to Gnosticism was you don't need some secret teachings that only the intelligentsia or the elect, this secret Gnosis knowledge, and so Jesus preaches openly. St. Paul says these things didn't happen in a corner. Like Christianity is open, and it's public, and it's clear, and anyone from the most terminally online bro to the person who is like the 80-year-old grandma can know where Christianity is and what the true church is. This is one of the reasons Jesus compares the church to a mustard seed that grows into a mustard tree. It's the largest of all the plants in the garden. Christianity, it should not be hard to understand. It should not be hard to follow. Now, that's not to say there aren't complicated doctrines. There are. But it shouldn't be hard to know, okay, where should I go? I want to follow Jesus. Where should I go? One shepherd, one flock. He has the largest church on earth. And we can find that. The idea that we're going to arrive at the right answer by some obscure document that 99.0% of Orthodox and 99.0% of Christians are not aware even exists. and that's going to be the make or break moment for this, is such a misunderstanding of Christianity itself. It's much closer to Gnosticism than it is to Christianity. And one of the other ways I would say it, and I think this is a problem within Orthodoxy as well as within Protestantism, and almost all the guys doing this are converts from Protestantism and are still approaching apostolic Christianity with a Protestant framework, whether they know it or not. In Protestantism, you have this problem of sheep needing to self-shepherd because you can't trust that your church has gotten it right. So you have to go and educate yourself on all the theology and then find a church that agrees with you. That's not anywhere in the New Testament, the model of what the laity are called to do. Now, by all means, if you want to go and read up on a lot of theology, wonderful. That's great. But the idea that you have to do that so you can figure out the true church, it completely misunderstands the role of pastors, of leaders, of a magisterium. And so doing the Protestant version of that, of, okay, well, I've read all these books, and now I'm going to become a Methodist, or then I'm going to become a Baptist. And you've got people passing each other, going to the opposite denominations, so they read different books. That whole self-shepherding sheep problem is a real problem. Orthodoxy has this problem as well, particularly among what they call the converted docs, like these former Protestants who are now Orthodox. And they've realized that the Catholic things were right on things like the Episcopate, and they were right about the Eucharist, they were right about all of this, but they don't want to become Catholic. so they go choose one of the various forms of orthodoxy instead oriental orthodoxy or eastern orthodoxy and they just choose the church that they agree with the most or that they like the vibes of the most because russian orthodoxy is really tough and if you want to be a little softer you go greek orthodoxy you know like that sort of thing that's not how christianity is meant to work and so if that's what we're doing of just playing this self-shepherding game and the whole thing's going to turn on oh you're lying about how you're reading this sixth century document we're just doing the wrong project there and i think we have to have a more fundamental discussion about how we come to know the truth and how we're meant to determine what the true church is like it's wonderful if alex soren is brilliant knows a lot of ancient church documents that's great i don't really know the guy but i'm happy to assume that he does but if you have to do that to be able to know the true church, something has gone deeply, fundamentally awry with how you're arriving at the church. When were you scheduled to have the debate? We were in April 28th, I think. Oh, wow. So a while away. No, yeah. It was months. I wouldn't, if it was like a week away, I wouldn't have. I got the impression it was the next day. No, no. It was months away. I hadn't done anything for it. I assume he wasn't already preparing for it. And we had actually still been hammering out the terms of it as well. So it wasn't like we'd already said, you know. Oh, I see. Okay. I backed out of my own ordination to the diaconate with less notice than I backed out of that debate. So and yeah, it was just kind of like it's also if that's what you're wanting out of a discussion. Like, let's say I'm wrong. Let's say like my whole approach is wrong. And you want somebody who's going to get super deep in the weeds of the arcana of patristic or later documents. I actually love patristic writings on papal stuff. Fine. All that stuff. You can have someone who will happily have that debate with you. I find that to be a waste of time, largely. Like, I don't think that's what's moving people to convert overwhelmingly. I think it just kind of reaffirms people's priors. This episode is proudly sponsored by Catholic Match. With Valentine's Day being this month, our culture tells us that dating apps are the way to go. But really, they're mostly about superficial connections and endless swiping, where half the people don't even know what they truly believe or what they're actually looking for. But if you are a Catholic, you understand that marriage is a sacred vocation, not just another relationship. And this season of love reminds us we're called to something deeper. That's why there's Catholic Match, which is the largest and most trusted Catholic dating app in the world, purposefully designed for faithful men and women who are serious about finding each other for the right reasons. 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Can we talk about this phenomena in general that we might be seeing online where people speak? what is it sardonically is that the word yes and look down their nose at others and maybe speak with perpetual irony um and call everyone gay i wish we'd stop doing that yeah yeah what are you seeing what's the apologetic landscape looking like or yeah i think this is this is becoming a big issue how controversial do you want to take this you can do whatever you want to do all right one of the things i find confusing about knowing how to engage with like the followers of nick Fuentes. Yeah, the Grifus. Yeah, is that Fuentes will say things that on their face are shocking and offensive, often contradictory of things he's previously said, and if you take them literally, are just like these are gross and unchristian things to say and clearly false and clearly wrong. And when you call that out, you'll have 10,000 people being like, old man, you idiot, don't you know this is a joke? Yeah. And I don't know if it's a joke. I don't know if it's a joke for a couple of reasons. One, because the jokes all seem to be going in the same direction. So it's like the guy at work who's like, wouldn't it be great if we went on a date? Just kidding. Unless. And you're just like, I don't know that you're joking. I think you just are hiding behind the appearance of humor because you can't get away with just saying what you actually unironically believe. But let's grant that you're joking. Let's grant that everything is ironic. What is the unironic position that you're actually advocating for? and if you don't have one if everything is a dang joke if everything's irony there's something spiritually toxic about that as well there's a flannery or connor short story i'm blanking on the name of it but it's the one where the little kids uh oh he's raised by uh the one where she's he is essentially baptized the guy with his dick is chasing him what is that called anyway he he wants he's searching for the kingdom of god because he goes with i believe it's his grandma and yep and and she takes him out of the river and they're baptizing in the river but the boys own parents are non-believers yep and so he hears this guy you know is it the violent bear it away no people will absolutely get this right tell us in the comments yeah absolutely we don't have chat you pee it out of sposal right right i should have oh whatever well anyway he's convicted by a couple of things one he hears this preacher talking about jesus and this is his first time realizing Jesus isn't just a word like damn that is an actual name for someone and two he is really drawn to the fact that this preacher believes things are real and serious and this boy even though he's like a young boy has been living in a household where everything is a joke and everything is ironic and everything is sarcastic and the authenticity is what draws him I was going to say the book broke my heart this is a short story but it broke my heart I mean you remember that in the beginning people should go read this book the only problem is do you have a phone on you by chance could you give me your phone thank you so much maybe unlock it before you give me your phone no i'll you better just google or whatever i'll i'm gonna find this but that bit at the beginning remember he wakes up and all the parents are hung over and still sleeping and he's playing with cigarettes in an ashtray thank you so much all right now you keep talking i will find it all right well that's how i feel as someone who's just like i want to have an earnest discussion because if somebody says you know this this person's pointing to real concerns that i the river the river there it is we were totally wrong thank you yes there it is it's a it's a heartbreaking story i highly recommend it has a twist we're not even going to share but yeah thank you it's well not just the twist but i mean the innuendo at the end doesn't matter we'll tell you about that after all right that sounds good well rivers have twists anyway that was an idiotic I didn't mean to derail you. Sorry. He lives in a world where nothing is serious. Everything is just ironic and sarcastic and sardonic and the internet can be like that. And whether we're talking about some of the Orthodox, and don't get me wrong, there are a lot of, especially Orthodox, who are really good faith trying to share the truth and maybe they just enjoy the sort of mocking approach. And a lot of young Catholics can be like that. Look, I was 20 once and someone who's like, oh, they're edgy and they're really pushing the envelope, that's really exciting and it's really got this, this really, I don't know, there's, there's something that can give you kind of a surge of adrenaline. Like, I can't believe they went there. And like the comedian or the commentator or whatever. But if that's always what you're doing and you're just pushing the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope and you're pushing it in the same way every time over and over and over again, I want to know what you earnestly, no pretenses, believe, have the vulnerability to say, here are my beliefs and here's what I actually unironically stand for. And then we can have a substantive conversation. And you don't think the people who are constantly ironic at doing that in other situations i mean i think they're sure they might be in other situations i think with the groiper stuff you particularly see like it's very hard to critique any of the ism there because it's very hard to know who is and isn't being serious i saw earlier today uh disaffected followers of fuentes who are mad about his position on venezuela by saying that he was a gay jew and i have no idea what does that mean i exactly thank you thank you like are people is this just saying me no like or are you saying you actually think he's homosexual do you think he's secretly jewish like what are we yeah and without knowing what someone means and particularly when it's just like in text and it's very vibey that's just a bad way to do anything like i would just say more broadly than just the irony thing so much of the way that there's been a cheapening of intellectual discourse is really where it's really vibes based. When you're using a lot of slang, when you're using a lot of like memetic phrasing, that's usually a sign that you're not actually thinking deeply or independently about the things that you're passionate about. So when somebody says like, oh, get out of the internal longhouse in your mind, it's like, okay, you're just parroting a phrase someone else has given you. And it's, it's loaded with all of these kind of implications. And no one outside of this small bubble of people even understands what the heck you're talking about right now. And so you're using a language that's now so jargony, so loaded, so everything else that I want to just say, let's stop and unpack. What do you think that means? And how do you and that can be productive if you can get people to that. It's hard to do online. Yeah, it's much easier to do just having a cup of coffee with somebody and just letting them explain, here are my frustrations, here are my fears, here are my thoughts. Yeah. And in a way that's much more vulnerable, but I don't see a lot vulnerability yeah i i'll sometimes encounter people in real life and they seem super sweet and they'll say hey i was one of those people who said all sorts of nasty things about you like okay well i'm sorry okay thanks but i i don't know why in person i don't encounter people acting like mad people i mean i'm sure they are i think there's a few things one when you're actually interacting with another human being you are brought into a different like you're not going to speak in the harshest most pejorative way there's a lot of performance for the other people a lot of performance and and you get a jolt off of it yeah oh a thousand people like this this mean reply i had it's it's almost like the way youtube incentivizes creators it also incentivizes commenters that's right and so you put out a video you want that video to do well youtube gives you a dopamine hit by showing you how many views how many thumbs up well they needed to do the same thing they needed to make a place where people would engage and so since humility rarely goes viral people are saying the most outlandish stuff to get thumbs up i don't know i presume they go back to see oh look i got 51 thumbs up people reply yeah especially if you can't create anything yourself if you don't have anything well let me pause and say this people in the comments say the meanest rumor you can about matt fray uh just no do it gets more already doing it's good for the clicks no better yet it's the meanest thing you can say about me and joe maybe not that's going to go in a couple directions i'm not something comfortable with I've already complimented your ankles. But in the unironic sense, I think there's a couple things to watch out for. One, there can be that kind of performance. And two, there's a strong correlation to how much time people are spending online. Oh, man. And how much they're likely to do that. If you are successful in your real life and you're in a real community of other people that you interact with. Your screen time is likely to be significantly lower. And you're not doing this. You're seeking validation online. Like the people who do this, the other thing, I'll just say this because I think you're too polite to say it. When you meet the people who are your critics, let me speak for you here. All right. Their criticism does not land because you're just like, oh, wow, the world's most awkward person said they thought I was an idiot. And that I'm doing, you know, like this person who has no qualifications, this person who in any other context is likely to be bullied, is bullying me online. The profile picture was a crusader night. I can't believe that the Crusaders are letting people You're an idiot kid from the Midwest Yeah The Crusaders don't have basic training I guess So yeah I didn't know armor came in that size I'm making fat jokes I'm in a place where it's But the point is if you have an actual community of other people you can have the much more vulnerable kind of discussion and you can do that online but it's much easier as a commenter to not say, hey, that was really convicting or, hey, I think you're wrong, but I think we're both seeking after God or something. And so I think we see a lot of and I think we see a lot of that among young men. This is we see it at these incredible levels with the younger generation, but it's not unique to them. I have and I've got some anecdotal stories that have been very helpful in shaping my thinking about this, because I have talked to people who were sharp critics of Catholicism and sharp critics of things that I was saying. I've been in the online space doing content since 2009. So I've seen generations by the digital standards. And I had people who were atheists or Protestants who were often really strong in their critiques who then quietly converted. and some of them converted to Catholicism. Trent just interviewed a Protestant fellow he debated. Yeah, that's right. Stephen Boyce, who is fantastic. Boyce was great as an Anglican. He's even better now that he's a Catholic. Boyce was never like, he was never a troll. He was never somebody who was nasty about it. But even some of the people who were really heavily critical, sometimes that's the way you go through the objections yourself. And this is one thing I want to say to sort of balance out. The fact that somebody is critical of Catholicism, the fact somebody is critical of Christianity, the fact somebody is critical of whatever it is you're saying, that doesn't mean they're a troll. It doesn't mean they're bad faith. Hopefully they can express it as an actual critique rather than just a mock. But for some people, and I think this is true especially of men, that the way they work through the objection is by raising the strongest objection they can to it. Thomas Aquinas. Yeah, exactly. And so they hear you say the Eucharist is really Jesus and they're going to fire back with really strongly worded things about why it's not. And internally, they might be actually entertaining your claim a little more than they're acknowledging. So I say that because I've seen it happen so many times where someone will say something publicly is really sharp and then I might even get an email from them. That's a lot more nuanced and a lot more like that has happened to me. Yeah. So don't. So I don't want people to hear the earlier things we were saying about like people just mocking in bad faith. And it's very hard to have a fruitful discussion to say, therefore, I'm not going to do anything online because people are just going to be closed off to it. Sometimes they're more open to it than they seem. I just don't want to be part of the kind of bully gang up online stuff because. Oh, yeah. It's just it's exhausting and unfruitful in that sense. Yeah, I agree. What role does irony and sarcasm play? if any in apologetic battles. There can be sometimes a need for a blunt sort of assessment of the thing like if you can show the absurdity of an idea by just saying I mean for instance let's say you're talking to a Protestant who believes in once saved always saved somebody comes to the faith and they can't lose their salvation there's different versions of this persons of the saints etc. They believe in that but they also believe in the great apostasy to just be like, okay, so nobody can lose their faith, but we all lost the faith. You just got to laugh at it and then just point out the absurdity of believing those two things simultaneously. But there, there's still substance behind the kind of laughter. But you have to be careful even with that stuff because it's easy for people to just get offended and to close off. And so, again, you know, circling back to the very beginning part of this, Mormons in particular, they've been made fun of so much that even when you come with... LDS, not Mormons. Yeah, excuse me, you're right. LDS. When you come even with good faith critiques, they have had so many bad faith critiques that proving that you're actually trying to engage in good faith, even if you say things like Mormon instead of LDS or Church of Jesus Christ will add her to science, that you have to show that you're trying to be a good faith interlocutor. And it's worth saying. You know, even if you have a valid critique, people aren't going to receive it if you're a total jerk about it. And if the 10 people before you were total jerks about it as well. It almost feels like the method is might makes right. So I'm not accusing author bros of being unintelligent. They're clearly not. And also the Catholic equivalent, the Protestant equivalent. I don't know if there's an LDS equivalent. You'd have to tell me. That was in pretty kind or nice. I think it's a different thing. You can find a sort of mocking that happens. Definitely. But I think that's not the... There's a niceness to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen it occasionally in LDS channels where they'll kind of make fun of the Trinity. They'll make fun of creedal Christianity, that sort of thing. But by Mike McBride, what I mean is I'm afraid that people are going into the online space, and it's like, well, these guys are loud, and they make fun of everyone. So they're the cool guys, and so I'm going to join them. Yeah, absolutely. If you're someone who is looking to be part of a cool thing, then the Ortho Bros or Nick Flintas or any of these people, they have these groups that are fun and exciting because they're acting like the mean girls. And the mean girls are entertaining because they feel strong and powerful because they're being mean to other people. And there's something very psychologically attractive about that if you're someone who's a little weak. And so I just mention that. Why is that? Why does it appeal to weak people? Because they feel very vulnerable. And if they're part of a group that's attacking other people, they don't feel vulnerable anymore. And so it is proportionally that the online bullies are people who are not successful and, you know, able to kind of defend themselves and their life individually, which is why they're joining in a pack. And you saw this with some of the Andrew Tansel culture. Andrew Tate. Exactly. Yeah. Like the guys who are drawn to that, like I have zero desire to watch podcasts about alpha masculinity because like I'm I'm a husband and father. I've got this is all the masculinity I can take. Like, I'm not trying to be like a lady, but I don't need to be told by some other dude how he thinks I should live out my masculinity. Like, what are you talking about? Did you see that video clip between Andrew Wilson and that guy dressed in white on that panel? I don't think so. uh it's exactly what you're saying because you've got this ginormous guy trying to make fun of andrew wilson in the most bro way internet bro way possible and it just wasn't landing at all and andrew was just like intellectually like disabling him here and there and everywhere and i don't know i think if i was in the crowd watching it the the feeling was wow this big bald guy i gotta show it to you after this big bald guy is clearly winning but he definitely definitely definitely didn't win the poor guy and he did seem like a very insecure fella yeah i mean could crush both of our heads with two fingers for sure but seemed like you know god love him i'm sure who knows what's going on in his life but i mean look there is this quest for manhood that is built into us and we don't have rites of passage to enter into manhood so you don't have anything like a bar mitzvah you don't have anything like a speak for yourself yeah touche you're welcome I don't even know what a bar mitzvah is still It's not that But you have historically These rites of passage that different cultures do I think I mentioned this Maybe in the last time we spoke Sebastian Junger Who is the director of the movie Restrepo He was embedded with the troops in the Donegal Valley And so he's in the Valley of Death in Afghanistan And he's talking to the guys there Like why they signed up without a draft To go to Afghanistan and there were you know all sorts of reasons patriotism response to 9-11 etc but one of the recurring themes that he was really struck by was how many men were early boys were wanting to become men and they didn't know how to and were being actively discouraged from asking how to become men and so i think you have some that online like this stuff isn't coming out of nowhere yeah no totally i i actually was talking to a good friend of mine recently i'm not sure if you've heard of him he's got a great youtube channel people should check it out mike pancilla so you look at mike Mike's a muscular dude, and he speaks about masculinity and patriarchy and against feminism, but he does it in a humble way. I was talking to him about this recently. I was saying that maybe our desire to reclaim masculinity is a little bit like Catholics born after the revolutions of Vatican II. I'm not talking about Vatican II in a bad way. I'm just talking about what took place after it. Catholics like myself, I mean, we didn't know what incense was. I didn't know what rosary beads were, except that my grandma had them. I knew that, but I thought it might be a necklace. I wasn't sure, right? And so now you have Catholics who weren't raised with this stuff awkwardly, because how else could you do it? Trying to appropriate it again, because it was taken from you, and now you're trying to, how do I integrate this into my life? There's an awkwardness to that. Yeah, that's right. And there should be an awkwardness to it. It's an awkward thing to have to do, but it's a worthwhile thing to do. something similar i think with being born into a world where men are constantly being made fun of the homer simpson stereotype and now you've got men who are trying to go okay hang on no i'm i'm gonna i want to be a man and i want women to act like women okay there's going to be a lot of awkwardness there as well but i think one of the dangers in that catholic sense is now you may have catholics online telling other catholics unless you do x y and z you're not a good catholic when the church hasn't said as much and that can cause a lot of damage and i think likewise in the broa sphere okay you can have and see what often happens in the catholic sphere is a catholic finds a particular devotion that legitimately helps him and it might be the holy rosary it might be this particular book from this particular saint and then they start pushing that on everybody and kind of talk like unless you're reading this private revelation from so and so you're really not with it right that can actually do damage to people's faith and i think likewise in the broer sphere you may have found something some particular thing that worked really well with your wife and your children and the way you discipline them and then you tell everybody to act exactly as you act but you don't know who you're talking to and men and women are different obviously but individual men like your temperament is very different to my temperament and i imagine your wife even though you said she's an extrovert as is my wife is very different my wife's an introvert okay my wife's much more like you i'm much more like your wife okay so she's superior but again not in a weird way yeah good yeah again make fun of us in the comment section um but do you see what i mean so once you start you take a particular thing that works and then you make it an infallible like litmus test for whether or not you're a man i think what we're going to see is a lot of damage being done to catholic families because of things that bros online are saying when they didn't intend to do anything bad, but I think they end up will doing it, which is why humility is really essential and gentleness. Anyway, what do you think? I think that's absolutely dead on correct. I would add that this is also a problem in female circles as well. Mothers do this to each other all the time. Yeah, how so? This is the parenting technique that works for me, so this is going to work for your kids, and these moms just horribly ripping each other down. Yeah, like co-sleeping or cloth diapers. Right, right, all this stuff. It's like if you're not doing it this way, do you even love your kids? And discipline is like this. Discipline is a huge one because what works for one kid often doesn't work for the next one. A hundred percent. Like our kids. I mean, the three kids and the techniques that work for one of them, the ones that work for like my four-year-old son would not work at all for my six-year-old daughter. And our two-year-old is radically different. So everyone's so individual. So trying to give a one-size-fits-all thing based on your experience of a small sample size is almost always unhelpful. All right, everyone, I want to tell you about Bible Across America, which is an inspiring initiative from the St. Paul Center. It represents an unprecedented opportunity to unite the entire church through the world's, listen to this, the world's largest Bible study. This transformative program invites believers to embark on a spiritual journey alongside thousands of fellow individuals and groups from across the globe, creating a powerful sense of communion that transcends geographical boundaries. As participants delve deeply into scripture together they will discover new dimensions of knowledge and cultivate a more profound love for our Lord Jesus Christ The experience goes beyond mere academic study offering participants the chance to encounter Christ in a personal and meaningful way through both the sacred scripture and the vibrant community of fellow seekers. Through this dual approach of scripture engagement and communal learning, participants will find themselves increasingly equipped and empowered to share their faith with confidence and authenticity. becoming effective witnesses to others in their own lives and communities. You know, I've had Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. Bergsmuth, wonderful Bible teachers here on Pints with Aquinas, and I couldn't recommend the work that they're doing there highly enough. So transform your journey this year. Join the movement alongside a global community starting February 18th. Don't miss out. Sign up today at stpaulcenter.com slash pints. And so here's the difference. You can say, this worked for me, it might work for you. Whether you're talking about parenting, whether you're talking about masculinity, whether you're talking about spirituality, whatever it is. But if you start saying, this worked for me, therefore it has to work for you. And if you're not doing it, you're not a Catholic, a good man, a successful woman, whatever. Exactly. So in Catholic terms, we would just say, don't bind what the church loosens. If the church gives someone latitude, don't you impose your own private strictness. Amen. Man, it's like the church is so much more open-minded than us. Right. And so, you know, there's sometimes this question of like, well, how strict should we be on stuff? If you want to be strict on yourself, be strict on yourself. Yeah. If the church has imposed strictness, follow that. Yeah. But otherwise, let other people live this thing out in a different way. If the church is not demanding that we go to Holy Mass every day, which she hasn't, then you shouldn't be doing that. Right. If you want to do that for yourself, that's fantastic. Yeah. And if you can talk about the benefits that you've got from it and what others might go, why it's a good thing, sure. Jimmy's really good at this. He is very good. He makes this distinction between what does the church forbid, permit, encourage, demand? You've really got to get those right. That's right. And the church is very careful about that. Where we might say, well, this bar is too low. This should be a holy day of obligation. This should be whatever else. We might say, why is Mother Church not being tougher with her kids? although I think she's being sensitive to the fact that different kids are in different places and maybe she should be tougher that's not your job to figure out you can then say well I'm going to go to mass whether I'm required to or not and here's the good part these things you're doing voluntarily are worth more than the things you're just doing because you're forced to do them so the fact that you think this is really good and this is something you've voluntarily taken up as a penance as spiritual reading as a devotional practice as whatever that's pleasing to God. The minute you start trying to impose it on your neighbor like a Pharisee, that's not pleasing to God. And if your neighbor is guilted into doing it, that's not as worthwhile than if they just did the things that they're trying to do for God's sake out of the goodness of their heart, out of the promptings of the Holy Spirit. So I'd say that. You're actually depriving your Christian brother or sister of the ability to give proper service to God. And two, there are as many different kinds of saints as there are saints. I like to give the example of within France, do you just take the category of female French saints and you've got Therese, you've got Joan of Arc and Therese dresses up as Joan of Arc. There's a famous picture of this. Yeah. And it's funny because there's such different saints. Yeah. And so imposing look one model of what a saint looks like. And how sad if Therese thought that in order to be holy, she had to be exactly like Joan of Arc. Exactly. And they're both the patron saints of France, we should say. Right. Yeah. And she's the patron saint of missionaries and never left her convent. Right. She and Francis Xavier, who are living these radically different lives, and they're called to live these radical different lives. The beginning of Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales is fantastic in this regard. He talks about how absurd it would be if a bishop decided to live in silence like a monk or if the parent decides to live like the Benedictine and they're like, I'm going to sleep for eight hours and work for eight hours and pray for eight hours and it's like, not going to parent at all. Not going to, you know, like these things don't work at all. The different people are called to different forms of holiness, and it's all the same holiness. And this is not some, this is not even a point we can dispute. There's one body and there's many parts of the body. And so for the eyes to say, hey, this works really good for me as an eye, so I'm going to impose it on you ears, is just black and white what you're not supposed to do. Then the ear feels like a failure because it can see nothing. Right. And so people have different gifts and different quantities of gifts. Someone might actually be more talented than you, and they might be talented than you in a different way. And if your idea of what your holiness looks like is imitating them, you're going to be a cheap knockoff rather than the authentic version of the saint God makes you to be. Yeah, I just hear our lords come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Yeah, absolutely. And this is true of masculinity as well. There's so many different ways of living up masculinity. I'm going to give free dating advice to everyone listening. All right. One of the common complaints that men have is they don't know what women want. And there's one thing that, in my experience, almost every woman will say that she wants. She wants a man to be strong. But herein lies her up. the kind of strength a woman is looking for is going to be very particular based on her own fears her own anxieties her own upbringing the men in her life her own gifts and talents and so some women want to be protected from physical danger they want a really buff man they want a man who they know he can protect me if an intruder breaks in the house other women are saying we lived you know maybe my dad is really physically strong but we lived in dire poverty because he couldn't hold the job for more than six weeks. And so they want a man who's got a different kind of strength, a responsibility. Maybe it's financial success. Maybe it's just like a certain approach towards work. There's as many different flavors of strength. And what is the word for strength? Virtus, manliness. This is going to be particular to the man. And what the woman is looking for is particular to her. And so some of this is just finding the right lids for the right pots. That not every woman wants a super brough Jim bro. and it's weird because women keep saying this online and dudes online are like no trust us you do and it's like they really don't i mean eight percent body fat yeah exactly like i'm married guys you clearly don't have to follow that that is so funny trust us you do what do you know women this is why you shouldn't vote you don't even know what you want you don't know we will tell you what we exactly so it's weird because like there's a culture of just dudes complimenting other dudes for how manly they are in a way that is deeply unattractive to real life women. Let me give you, I've shared this before, but I used to have a beard. Yeah. I don't know if you remember. My wife didn't like it, but my dear man friends loved it. Like my mate, John Henry Spann's like, dude, you look fantastic. My wife has really sensitive Irish skin. Yeah. And so if I try to kiss her with any kind of stubble, she can't help but recoil, even though I'm very attractive. I couldn't tell if I wanted John Henry's respect or my wife's kisses. It took me about four weeks to decide. This is the most questionable thing you've ever said. Again, in the comments section, go nuts. Yeah. But no, this is exactly what it is, where they will make fun of guys for being, what is it, like wife guys, where guys are just like obsessed with their wives. And it's like, look, what are you living out there? This is the other thing. You shouldn't be friends with your wife. I'm like, well, I'm sorry. I really like her. So what do you want me to do? You know? And also explain what you mean by that. Because if you explain what you mean by that, maybe I'll agree with you. But just to throw it out there, like this is the new bro thing we have to submit to. I'm like, oh, sorry, honey. We can't be friends. I mean, if charity is maximal friendship, and if you're to have charity towards your wife, then it sure seems like you should be. Now, Father Moses, who you've critiqued, and I think it was an excellent video, actually have a lot of respect for Father Moses for two reasons. I once went after somebody on Twitter. So I was off Twitter forever. I got on, and within like two days said something stupid. And that's why I'm not on it anymore. um father moses texts me he's like dude what are you doing and i uh i made excuses there's a knee-jerk reaction as we all do but he came to me privately i thought about it prayed about it it hurts so much to realize he was right so i apologize to the individual right so that's why i thought it was great that he did that um secondly he has this excellent video when he says men shouldn't be best best friends with their wives i clicked on it hoping to hate it does that make sense yeah i can't wait to write this guy off now what he said was excellent like what he was saying is not that we shouldn't be friends with our wife but that look as the man of the house right you you want to take the burden for your family and for your wife right you don't want to come and dump stuff on her continually right that's what your hash my is for so you and i'll go out for a drink and maybe i'll share with you in confidence and stuff that's really bothering me like my stress with finances or my stress with this child or that but and it's not that you can't do that with your wife but you do want to be a source of strength in the home so when he explained it i'm like yeah i get it i agree with him there yeah i i do i and actually you know i i responded to particular arguments he made against catholicism right i'm no great expert on father moses and i want to say that in fairness to him because i'm not just saying i've watched all this guy's stuff i was like i've watched the stuff i could find he'd said on catholicism those arguments were not very good. He might have It was a good response. I saw a lot of people who've been tremendously benefited by him and I want to respect that. And I think that's absolutely right. Like if he's privately counseling you, that is what a priest should be doing. Like giving you good spiritual guidance and encouragement. And I think he's right as well that if you are taking out all of your frustration and stress on your wife, even in the sense of just dumping it all on her, some women are going to want to just be like, oh, tell me everything. But if you've been with the kids all day and the house has been like on the verge of burning down all day as it is now while you're here in Nashville my wife she's incredible in this way she will occasionally tell me when things are going sideways but she always just lets me think things are going well at home and then half the time they are and half the time she's like oh yeah also this happens but she she saves it up so that she's not like burdening me with stuff I have no control over at the time Which is wonderful. And it's a lot to ask of her. Like she has to, when I'm on the road, when I'm doing this kind of stuff, she's got three small children at home who are figuring out exactly what boundaries look like when I'm not there to help enforce them. And they have very aggressive, God-given personalities. That can be great and can also mean like there's a lot of pushing. There's a lot of, I heard you tell me 10 times I couldn't do it, but what about the 11th time? So that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I think it's really good to have that sense of what can your wife handle right now? What is good kind of vulnerability of just sharing? And what is just a burden you shouldn't be placing on her because she's already got so much on her plate? And a lot of that is going to be negotiated in the particulars of a marriage. What's something your marriage has taught you? How long have you been married, first of all? I've been married for seven years, going on eight years. Yeah, I've been taught a lot. So my wife is a marriage and family therapist. So, yes. Yeah. What's that like? Well, it's really unfair because I'm, you know, I'm good at winning arguments usually. But when I sit back and be like, you know why you feel that way. It's like, feel is not even a word in my vocabulary. Like, what are you doing? This is not, this isn't fair. No, it's great. My wife is brilliant. And it's something I, she was funny and smart and beautiful. And those things, and someone who very obviously was pursuing the good of God over everything else. and so those were things that really drew me to her first as a friend and then as a person I would want to spend the rest of my life with one thing that I've learned is the stuff that you're worried about is not usually stuff you have to be worried about like before we got married we used to play this game of just like disaster planning like hey if we get married and five years down the road this happens what are you going to do and this was like a game we played but also sort of like sounds very stressful oh yeah it's just like plotting out every disastrous scenario in marriage and then like the stresses in the early days of our marriage were not on any of those things. It was just much more of just like, I don't know what we should be doing in this concrete situation or, you know, should she be working? Should she work at all? You know, the marriage and family therapist, she can set her own hours. Should she do that? Should she not? Like we had to negotiate all of that stuff and figure that stuff out. And it's not always just cut and dry. And it's not always really simple. And I know it's very easy for people online to be like, here's what the right answer is. You have no idea what you're talking about. And we had no idea until we actually got to a lot of those things. You can stress about it. You should make sure you're on the same page in general. You should have the same principles. You should have the same values. You should both be seeking after the Lord. And if you have all of those things and you know how to converse and argue charitably, I think you'll be fine. But I guess another thing is, you know, in a debate, you can just show, like, here are 20 reasons why you're an idiot and you're wrong. You can't do that in marriage. Yeah, I guess you can, but it'll be a hollow victory. So learning how to engage with her and seeing all of the ways that, like, okay, this thing that would convince me won't convince her and vice versa. Here's an example. I can think of a clear one in the other way around. I want incredible levels of bluntness like many years ago back when I was in college I was pursuing a young woman this is not my wife this is a long time ago and she made a list of 22 reasons she would never date me oh my and I asked if I could have a copy of it tell me what some of them were just like ladies and I was kind of a jerk fake and gay come on so I just remember looking at the list and being like okay well I can fix these ones and I think I can get her past these ones because if she's making a list, it's obviously entered her mind that like this is a, and so we ended up dating for like two years. But like I have no problem receiving criticism. I have no problem with someone just being like, here's 22 reasons. And I want to know, like if someone's got a B for frustration with me, I would much rather than just tell me to my face, here's everything I think you're doing that's wrong. And I can either say, you're absolutely right about that. I need to change that. Or I can say, I disagree. Here's why I disagree. And we can have a spirited conversation. it would crush my wife if i did that to my wife and said here's all the ways i think you're feeling as a wife and mother that would be devastating to her and and so her wiring is much more like i will kind of in the general direction sort of lay something out if he wants to intuit what this means he can and she's very gentle with it but i'm oblivious so i will dismiss So we've had to kind of meet each other's styles of conflict, of directness, of all of this stuff, because both of us are meaning to be charitable. But I need to be really good at saying, here are all these things that you're doing that are really good. Here's one thing you might think about doing differently. That's going to go a lot further than here are all of these critiques and list form for your future reference. My wife and I have been married 20 years this year, and I would say about four years ago I figured out something about her. isn't that bananas you would think that even after a year you go i understand you and here's what it was uh my wife is perfectly willing going along with what i want to do she just needs to understand it yeah and i took her continual yeah but what about as just like what are you doing why are you being like belligerent or like like objecting to me submit woman um and what i would find is she just had she really wasn't trying to be like that she's just asking her just asking question and um when i would go well here's why so oh okay yeah that's right 17 years it took me i relate to that my wife she's not she's not wired the same way your wife is from my conversations with both these women i can say that but i think in general overwhelmingly women particularly christian women want their husbands to lead but they also want to have some kind of assurance that they're not just blindly trusting someone who seems to be making like if if my wife led me if she allowed me to lead us financially we would be destitute please i know that's my fault i shouldn't be leading in a wrong way but i i hope that she would push back if i was like yeah this is one of the things that came up uh this past fall this debate of what does it look like for male headship and if you actually read cassie canooby it's very clear that like the men should lead and the women should submit this is a document by Pius the 11th, but that this isn't the submission of like a child to a parent, because with a child, you don't assume they have anything thoughtful to add. You don't need kids to be like, well, here's how I run the finances, dad. You're a child. You've got nothing to add to this conversation. That's not how husband and wife should work. But also, this is very much particular to the unique skills. So if one of you is really good with numbers and one of you is really good at like keeping the budget, they should probably be the one to do that. And this is in every area. Like a bishop who thought that the only way he could run his diocese was to do everything himself would be leading a disastrous diocese. A head of a company who thought the only way to run things was to do everything himself would be a disaster. He said, oh, don't do anything in the company without getting it approved by me. That kind of micromanaging is a terrible method of leadership in every context, including the family. So these guys were like, oh, my wife can't buy anything without running it by me first. It's like, that sounds horrible. I don't want any of that. That's not how Christian leadership works. That's not how any leadership works. Like the model of leadership we're given in Luke 22 is that the one who leads should be as a servant. And this model isn't everyone clear all of your expense reports with your husband. Like that's just that's insanity. And so recognizing what are the gifts and talents of each individual? This is why it has to be negotiated and lived out in a marriage and not online. Like you don't go to your bros on Twitter and say, oh, hey, my wife and I are disagreeing. Who's right? Like you could ask Rock. It's not going to go well. It's just going to tell you you're right. But you figure out like what are the gifts and talents God has given each of us? What are our fears? What are our desires? What are the ways God's calling us? And then you can chart a course. And if you do that collaboratively and then you chart that course, I can almost guarantee your wife will be happy to go along with that. so you gave some dating advice earlier about strength i am increasingly reluctant to give any advice because the zoomers keep telling me that i don't know what i'm talking about and i believe them actually i mean when i started dating my wife phones weren't a thing you know i well i mean they were a thing computers we had msn messenger sometimes i would wait till she was up and we would go back and forth but it was such a different world back then true um what are you seeing and do you think you have anything to add to the rumors who are watching and want to get married so right when i'm speaking i'm speaking in the general way of just like straight figure out cultivate your strengths and find someone who desires those strengths work on the areas you have weaknesses particularly moral weaknesses but also areas where you have major interpersonal flaws that is cross-culturally cross-technology just good generic advice where things get particular it involves a lot of the technological hurdles. So there's a few things. Have we talked about Barry Schwartz and the Paradox of Choice? I don't know. Okay. Well, Schwartz wrote a book called Paradox of Choice. I think you did talk about that last time. We just talked about the more choices you have, the more you can have kind of a paralysis. Of course. Yeah, that's right. I mentioned how much I hate the Cheesecake Factory menu. Yeah. Well, this is how dating works. They actually did studies on speed dating that found that women would often have thoughtful kind of things that they were looking for in men. And if you're going on a date with one guy, you have a chance to find out whether he matches your criteria. But if you're speed dating a room of 20 guys and you need some sorting mechanism, it's going to be something superficial because you need a sorting mechanism. And it's not going to be here's the value. It's going to be, well, this guy's tallest and he's the most handsome or whatever. And so women were making more superficial decisions because they needed some interior mechanism to determine which guy was most worthy of investing the time with. because you just can't give that level of analysis to each individual guy. If you're in an arena full of men, the internet is an arena full of men and an arena full of women beyond our wildest imagination. And it's, so it's encouraging us algorithmically just because our brains can't comprehend the amount of data that's at our fingertips. It's encouraging us to make more superficial split second decisions. So you start having the women who just say, I'm going to only date men who are over six feet tall. And it's like you've just narrowed down, you know, a huge portion of the dating pool. I'm only going to date men who make this much money or whatever. And so those kind of superficial decisions are partly a survival mechanism for being overwhelmed by information. But they are making the dating culture abhorrently toxic. I mean, no one individual is making those decisions. But people are just failing to be connected. You know, we're talking about putting the right lid on the right pot. those connections aren't happening very well if you've got the world of pots before you and the world of lids before you and you just feel completely overwhelmed and so i see the problems and it's hard to give good solutions to it now that's just one problem another problem is if you're spending eight hours a day on twitter does anyone really i know you're being hyperbolic i don't do people do that yes you look at the screen time averages and see how people are using their time. Like there are some people where if you criticize them online, you can guarantee you're going to get a response very quickly. And you're just like, why are you on your phone right now? Like, why are you looking at Twitter this minute? That's like people we mentioned the Alex Soren thing before. A lot of the Orthodox bros just could not fathom that I had not watched this debate the day it came out when I'd come back from a trip and was sick and was like with my kids who I hadn't seen in days. And like they couldn't fathom I wasn't watching a three hour debate in the middle of the night and they just literally thought I was lying about this. It was just fascinating to be like, we live in such different worlds right now. And overwhelmingly, these guys don't have wives and kids. They don't. And if they did, they would wonder how they ever had time to watch this much stuff online. But that kind of stuff is malignant to your personality. Like the people who speak like the internet and who it's just super obvious when you talk to them, like they spend a lot of time in front of a screen. there is a need to touch grass as the kids say and to go outside and i say that as a person who frankly spends too much time online myself who has to be online a lot for work that if you aren't careful about balancing that by spending time with other human beings in a context where your phone is away you're missing a real opportunity of just growing inner person as a human like you learn more from just doing that, then you can learn, you can't learn some of those skills online. And those skills are really important to learn when you do things like dating. Here's a common issue I see. Some guys will peacock in dating, meaning, you know, a peacock, he shows off his magnificent feathers and peahens are able to just be gray, but peacocks have to have all these beautiful colors. And so he'll want to show how cool he is. Look at all my accomplishments. Look at all the stuff that I do and he's expecting her to come away being like, wow, that guy is so impressive. And how does she actually respond? I don't know. She's under impressed usually because she didn't get a word in edgewise. This guy just bragged about how amazing he was the whole time. And that's one of the things you want to show rather than tell. Like be a good listener. Ask her about her own life. If you get asked something, by all means, share about it. But be good at asking questions. Listen to the questions. Like what you do is something of a unique skill set. Like you are good at asking good probing questions. Most of us are not good at that. And it's something that has to be learned and it's hard to learn if you're just a consumer of content online or if you're in this mode of like, I need to impress you by just showing you all this cool stuff I can do. That's a very common thing people fall into. But as long as we're giving like dating advice from a guy who's now 40, I would say if you're trying to impress her instead of showing her that you're a good listener, that you're probably making a misstep. And women, jump in the comments and tell me if this is right or wrong, and then tell me the most embarrassing thing about Matt. Any advice for women? I would say a couple things. One, there can be this unrealistic set of criteria. Like you have to be a well-fed Dutchman? Yeah, right. Six foot. Yeah, exactly. And those men might exist, but those women are also being pursued by a bunch of other women. And so having a sense of like what are the actual non-negotiable things and what aren't is important. But you know what's interesting, though? I mean, when you and I lived before the Internet and we were dating, I don't know if you ever had this experience, but you might meet a woman and you don't initially feel attracted to her. You might objectively acknowledge that she's beautiful, but there's a lot of beautiful women. right but then you get to know her and her personality shines through and you go oh my gosh like there's something here like you know um can i embarrass my wife a little bit i'm sure she'll so we'll find out if she watches the uh episode or not well if you're in the comments yeah hanging on me you know she has simone rizcala who i don't know if you've ever had her on the show or not but she's great she does a lot of fantastic work and she introduced me to my wife not as like someone i would ever want to date but she just like shared a funny story from my wife and I was actually a seminarian at the time. She had just gotten out of an engagement. So neither of us was remotely on the dating scene and we were just friends in a pretty casual way where we were part of like a group chat online. And my wife had taken, I'll just conservatively say, one of the worst pictures of her life as her profile picture. So I was convinced I was not attracted to her and so she seemed very safe. It was not a flattering shot. She always claims I'm exaggerating. right up the nostrils yeah it was just yeah it's like yeah the angle is like she criticizes the pictures i take of her and i'm just like i don't know babe i i've seen the ones you've taken over yourself but uh so she's beautiful in real life i didn't know this i hadn't seen her in person so i got to know her just at a personal level which is the opposite of most people's experience right most people you meet in real life there's no way that's you how is that you exactly or you you think they're really attractive and you find the personality you're like not for me so i was friends with my wife and then i don't know it was probably months later uh they posted some pictures i was like who is that and i realized it was anna and was like oh i've got to be a lot more careful around this woman because turns out she's actually very attractive so that sort of thing of you know what you were describing of sometimes you'll get to know a person and then you can sort of see the chemistry like oh okay but this is what you may not get the chance to do if we're only dating online and i'm not i'm not saying on tinder or something she posted that picture i would no no slide whichever way you're supposed to slide and i'm certainly not putting down these dating apps i'm sure they're terrific you know catholic match is a great one and there's other excellent ones emily wilson and her husband have put something together so i'm not but i just i'm really glad that i because i had something not similar but when i met my wife we became really good friends yeah and i i found her funny i didn't find a lot of women funny but i found her really funny and i liked that and she was had a lot of admirable admirable qualities and i remember fearing that i wanted that because she came to visit me in australia and we were both afraid that we wouldn't be there wouldn't be a spark yeah but that we both wish there were because we were so close yeah yeah absolutely that there was a spark but you know 20 years later thank god yeah i think that like finding someone who you can and so how do you do that except in having in real person relationships that's a really good question that's a very good question i don't know what to counsel i mean in the case of my wife i did get to know her largely online before i ever knew her in person and in a way where we weren't like online dating we were just part of like a group chat and she'd say something funny or thoughtful or whatever we were doing a marian consecration together as a group and like you know you you get to see someone in those kind of contacts that can happen online but that's so particular that i can't be like oh go join a whatsapp group on marrying consecration and maybe you'll see someone else who and if people start going to consecration groups for that reason it might be ruining the consecration group yeah so yeah it can be hard to find the spaces right now yeah to get to know someone in a vulnerable thoughtful way where you get to know their character because everyone is performing online and everyone is maybe a different person online than offline. Those are hard things. I think the people who are frustrated with the dating scene right now have every right to be because it is a bad scene. And it's not clear exactly what we do to get out of it, but it is clear that there are real problems with it. And we haven't even talked about things like the distorting effects of pornography, of both corrupting men and also giving them a false sense of what women are looking for in men because the false vision of female sexuality, or women who are reading, frankly, pornographic books that are doing sort of a similar thing, presenting these imaginary men that real men are not going to compare to or just presenting men in a way that isn't true to life and that maybe a woman wouldn't really want a man to act like that in real life. That those things can have this incredible distorting effect on top of. But even if you don't have it, even if you're not struggling with pornography, even if that's not the issue you have, you still have this is a really bad medium in which to get to know someone at the level I need to know them to know whether I can spend the rest of my life with them or not. I never thought we'd get into dating advice in this interview. That's why I love chatting with you, Joe. My mate Nick Stumphauser created something called ShiftYourPhone.com. I'm not getting paid to promote it or anything like that, but I use it, and it's really the only thing that works. You may have heard of Brick or the app Opal. They don't work. It's so easy to get around. I tried getting the dumb phone and then just found I use it for a long time, but just found it was really difficult to live and travel. This is the best thing I've found. I was in Florida a few days ago, came up here for a week. I shifted my phone, that's what you say, to remove all distracting apps. Do you know about it? I know the basic model. I know about it. So you have Uber, you have Delta, you have Gmail. I have Slack for work. I have WhatsApp. I chat with my brother and sister. So you have just enough, but there's zero way to get to a browser. there's no distracting no you no distracting apps no youtube no anything right the the point is i have to impose that upon myself in order to live well because if i had have brought my computer like this this trip i've already read a bunch of crime and punishment again yeah right i've read it before reading it again why well because i need something to do and i can't just like waste my life away so i really do think that to get in control of your screen time I mean, ideally, it'd be great if you get to a point where you just had the willpower. But obviously, these apps, they hack our willpower. And they're often more powerful than we are at putting it at arm's length. And so whether it's shiftyourphone.com or something else, I think we have to put our phone in its place. I read a lot of St. Isaac the Syrian these days. Every day. Just one page a day. That's it. Of his ascetical homilies. Not more because they're so dense, right? I'm reading his fifth homily right now. he talks about the importance of distancing ourselves from the world. And I think the temptation is often we read it and we go, okay, but he's talking to monks. If he knew about my life, he'd have nothing to say. Therefore, I have nothing to glean from his wisdom. But it's like, okay, well, maybe he meant go live in a hole in the desert somewhere. But like, how could I apply that to my life? Right. You know, another thing he talks about along the same lines is imagine yourself as an enclosed city. and he talks about barring the gates so that you're only now fighting the inner man right you know because we're being attacked and dragged away from our internal communion with the lord at all very often and so like one of the ways you could bar the gates if not perfectly is at least by diminishing your screen time so how has this been true in your life yeah well i when i was in Italy, I didn't have a phone plan. So I had access to the internet when I was connected to Wi-Fi. In bathrooms, in cafes. Right. And I would walk from seminary to class and it was like two miles. So I'd have like, you know, 40 minutes each way where even if I wanted to use the internet, I just physically couldn't. I mean, I could, I guess I could have gone into a cafe and like tried to get connected to the Wi-Fi. And at that point, you're just like, it's 20 more minutes, I'll just get back to it. You know, but it forces this time of quiet or of being, you know, like I could record a WhatsApp message and it would send when I got to wherever I was going. So I could, you know, formulate a response and then see 40 minutes later what the person had said when they got it. But it forces those times away from the devices. And I'm someone who that's a struggle. How do you do it today? Or do you not need to? It's entirely possible you have just more self-control. I have things like just app timers. so that if I'm spending too long, that it'll cut me off then. But I've had to do things like Advent. I just turned off any, like, mobile games. Because, you know, sometimes you're on a plane, and you're wanting to listen to something and fiddle with something with your hands, and you've got nothing to do. You could read a book. I've been listening to Thomas Madden's lectures. He's going to be in studio very soon. He's fantastic. I've got a quick Madden story as an aside. I took one of his classes on the Crusades, I believe. No, it was maybe medieval types, maybe the Crusades. Whatever the case was, we were talking about the Fourth Crusade. And he was talking about the Doge of Venice. He was like the leader of Venice at the time, but it was a city-state. And there was a story about how he'd been blinded as a boy in Constantinople. And I'd heard this story, and I didn't know if it was true or not. And I go to raise my hand, and I'm like, he hasn't mentioned that. And I'm like, I don't even know if this is a thing. I just heard from one guy or if it's true or not. And it turned out it was a popular myth that had been debunked by one Thomas Madden. so I go to look it up and it was just like oh this is literally the guy who wrote the book on the Dojo Venice and he disbunct this myth and everything so I need to just shut up and pay attention that was a great example of like where I was starting to get distracted by reading online stuff that was relevant to the course but you know you go on Wikipedia to see one thing and you figure like how do I end up on this thing five pages later to just realize like no I'm sitting at the feet of a real master of his craft I need to just listen to what this guy has to say well now I've been on a plane and actually a Protestant friend of mine turned me on to this that he's been listening to Madden on the early church and saying, I'm learning so much about Catholicism. And he's got these lectures on the early church that are available through the Kansas City Public Library. I think there are many public libraries on the app Libby, L-I-B-B-Y. And it's a great way to do audio books and everything else. So if you're in a place where maybe you can't take a book with you and you want to just listen to something, well, you know, if you're on a plane a lot or if you're driving a lot, this can be a great way of having that be something that actually builds up the soul rather than tearing it down. But it takes a lot more intentionality than just going on social media or doing any of these things that are likely to just feed the outrage addiction and likely to, you know, even if they're not out and out sinful, they're at least unproductive and they're not making you a better person. So a good question for myself and maybe for anyone listening. At the end of, I don't know, an hour, at the end of a session of being online, whatever that looks like for you, stop and ask two things. Like one, what did I learn? Try to remember what you saw on Facebook 10 minutes ago. And if you can't, it's that ephemeral. Like, what are you doing? And two, is this making me a better person in some way? Don't give me this nonsense that I'm better informed. No, you're not. You have more trivia, but is it actually making you more of a saint? Or are you just like a corrupt center with more knowledge of world events? Because that's not better informed because you're not being formed. Well, as you wrap up what are you working on lately and what's Catholic Answers up to yeah so we are trying to share the truth of Jesus Christ and the truth of his church and answering all of the objections people might have so I had this season of you know debating Jacob Hansen and doing a lot of stuff with Mormonism I don't really know I've been doing a lot of stuff lately that's kind of liturgically tied, but I'm going to be pivoting, but I'm not sure exactly what to yet. Unfortunately, everything like books is on hold. I have so much time I spend just making every week's kind of episodes of the podcast that I'm not doing any books right now. There's a couple of books I really want to do. And there's one in particular that I don't think anyone besides me will read, but I really want to do it at some point on just how to grow in wisdom like St. Thomas Aquinas. because in the Puerhiesus, the homily he gives on the boy Jesus, he gives these four steps to how to become truly wise. And he's modeling off of Christ in the temple. And there's something so beautiful and brilliant to this that I'd love to just do like a book-length exploration of like the tips that he gives and how to put them in practice. Beautiful. And then anything else going with Catholic answers? Or can we not talk about that? The only thing I think I know what you're referring to. I don't know if that's publicly. Yeah, good. No, we won't do it. So I don't want to be that guy just in case. Yeah, well, I'm really grateful for Catholic Answers. People can check about Catholic.com, and where can they find you? Shameless Potpourri is my YouTube channel, and I usually have a short episode every Tuesday and a long episode every Thursday. Thanks for the work that you do, and we'll put a link in the description. Thanks, I appreciate that. Joe, fantastic to talk to you. Yeah, my pleasure. The Great Darkness is falling upon this land. These brothers are our only hope to stand against it. Not our only hope. We need you, Marlin. No, Marlin. Marlin was a myth before our father was even born. Marlin spooed 70 men with his own hands. No man's capable of such a thing. No mortal man. The Pendragon Cycle. Rise of the Merlin. Now streaming. Only on Daily Wire Plus.