Catholicism on the Rise? Why? | Yaron Brook Show
01:46:39 Share

The Radical Fundamental Principles of Freedom, Rational Self-Interest, and Individual Rights. This is the Yaron Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Yaron Brook Show on this, my voice is funny, Sunday, on this Sunday.

June 8th, everybody is having a fantastic weekend. Hope you're getting a chance to relax, do fun stuff. I see Robert is out biking, maybe. I don't know. That's the emoji put on his chat. So, yeah, cool. That is all good. All right, so today, in spite of the fact that there's a lot of news out there, like National Guard's being deployed to Los Angeles, we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Well, that's a good Monday thing for your own book show. I thought today would take a topic, go a little bit in depth in it, a topic that is a recurring theme on the Iran book show, but I think crucially important, and that is the rise in religion.

So we'll talk today specifically about Catholicism and the rise in Catholicism. So we'll dig into that. I will not be reacting to Jordan Peterson's Jubilee video today. Just didn't have a chance to prepare for that. I'll try to do that maybe next week. Yeah, maybe next weekend. I'll try to do that. It depends, though, because I'll be heavily in prep mode for the Peterson Academy show.

a course that I'll be teaching the following week in a week and a half, which I need to prepare for, which is not a course I've taught in many, many years and a lot of new material. And then I've got two more courses for the Peterson Academy that I'm preparing. So three courses that I'll be doing in the next six weeks,

for the Peterson Academy, and then we've got one talk for Ocon. So I'm going to be very much tunnel vision into that. Maybe I'll do something. Maybe I'll try to do some content from those talks as kind of weekend shows rather than doing new content so I don't have to prepare new stuff. So at some point we'll do the debate between Peterson and the 20 atheists.

20 atheists. So I did. Anyway, we will get to news tomorrow. You can ask me questions. So you can ask me questions about the news, about what's going on, about what's happening, whether in California or about the big, beautiful bill, whatever you want. Just put it in the Super Chat. Super Chat, great way to support the show. $20 questions, particular, a valued question.

appreciate it and get priority, but I will try to answer all questions that are asked, whatever amount of money you put behind them. You can also support the show with a sticker as Jonathan Honing just did. Thank you, Jonathan. And all right, well, let's just jump in. Let's just jump in and talk about Catholicism. You know, Catholicism, I think surprisingly,

surprisingly, not religion surprisingly, but Catholicism surprisingly, maybe shouldn't be surprising, but it is, and I'll tell you why in a minute why it's surprising. Catholicism really does seem like it's on the rise. There seem to be record numbers of baptisms, not record numbers, but increasing numbers of baptism, adult baptism, in the United States, in France, in Sweden, in many Western Spain, Western European countries.

And so you've got increased interest in Catholicism among young people? I mean, I saw this that among young people, Catholicism now is bigger religion than Anglican in the UK. The UK is seeing a big spike in Catholicism. Catholics set to exceed Anglicans for first time since the Reformation, since King Henry VIII.

All because of young people. Young people, and one thing that is a theme across all of this is when they say young people, what they really mean is young men. So predominantly young men turning towards Catholicism and embracing Catholicism. She's seen that in England, France. Here's a headline, a record number of adult baptisms in France. So surge among youth. And again...

It's the highest number ever recorded since they started doing a survey, I guess, of baptisms over 20 years ago. And it's all young people, which is new. It used to be that people, adult baptism, were typically a little later in life, maybe midlife crisis. But this is all like 18 to 24-year-olds that are being baptized now.

And it's quite striking. Yeah, they say in the age group 18 to 25, age group composed of students and young professionals, I represent 42% of adult, whatever it is, baptisms, surpassing the 26 to 40-year demographic that used to be the dominant one. This is in France. Even adolescent baptisms, 11 to 17-year-old teenagers, has increased dramatically in

increased dramatically over the last year or so. So this is a new phenomenon. So this is, we're talking about, you know, these are all reports coming out April 2025. So reporting on 2024 and so on. Now, generally, there seems to be a, you know, there's been this long-term trend of, in the United States, according to the Pew survey, of people who are kind of, you

declaiming themselves not affiliated with any major religion uh or even uh increased in the number of atheists and increase in the number of certainly non-denominational um unaffiliated that affiliated seems to peaked uh but down affiliated seems to have peaked in um you know i'm looking at the at the numbers here it looks like a few years ago 2022 uh and uh since have gone down um

So I think it peaked at like 29%, 30% is down to 28%. It's not big changes, but down. Christianity, people self-identifying as Christians, bottomed out at the same time as not affiliated, peaked in 2022. And then...

And then it's been going up since then. So the numbers of those identifying as Christian is actually rising slowly. It's not a big rise. It's still a small rise. Other religions, pretty stable, a little bit increase from 5%, you know, 25 years ago to...

7% two years ago to 6% this year. So somewhere between 5% to 7% pretty much consistently without changing much. It's really Christians who used to be self-identified Christians used to be 78% of the population, and today only 63% of the population. So Christianity overall is in decline. But in the last few years, it's seeing a small increase, just small. In aggregate, the numbers are all small.

So what happened to you? Among Christians, the decline is mostly among Protestants, who, you know, over 50% of American Christians used to consider themselves, what do you call it, NET Protestants. I don't even know what NET Protestant means. And now it's closer to 40%. Again, seeing a slight uptick from when it bottomed out a few years ago.

And then if you look at evangelical Protestants, that's down to 23% now. Mainline Protestants, they're way down from 18 to 11. Black Protestants, 7 to 5. Mormons, Mormons from pretty stable at 2% of the population. Orthodox Christians, pretty stable at 1% of the population. Catholics, we're 24%.

went down quite a bit and to, I think, under 19. And we're seeing a little increase. So back up to over the last three years, you're seeing an increase in Catholics. Now, this is big aggregate numbers based on Pew surveys. When you look at actual, you know, and if you look at Catholicism around the world, Catholicism around the world still is massive. It's 1.4 billion people.

It increases year after year, primarily because of Africa, where the population is increasing and where there's a lot of Catholics, where there's a lot of evangelizing for Catholicism, and where there's a growing increase in number of Catholics. Catholicism represents about 17.7% of total population of the world are Catholic, 17.7%.

And most of the growth in aggregate for the big numbers is in Africa. We can ignore that. I want to focus in our discussion on the growth in the West, particularly in Europe and the United States, and kind of what potentially is driving it. Over the last, again, April, May, the last couple of months, a bunch of stories about this.

You know, in here's some headlines. Young people are converting to Catholicism in mass. I think that's a little exaggerated. Driven by pandemic. Internet lacks alternatives. Not sure what that is. All right. You know, there's a lot of discussion about religious revival. And then there was this headline. Why are so many young adults becoming Catholic? And then.

The thing that really got me thinking about this and thinking we should do something about it or talk about it is, what is it, four days ago, earlier this week in the Free Press, this is the headline, is how Catholicism got cool. Young Americans and people around the world are flocking to the Catholic Church. Again, probably an exaggeration. The Free Press spoke to them to find out why. And it's an interesting article.

Again, they're saying there's a surge in the number of aspiring Catholics registering to join the church at Easter. This was in April. This is across the country, anyway, from Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame. So the largest church attendance this Easter that they've maybe ever seen or seen in a very long time.

As I said, this is true in France, 45% increase in the number of adult baptism this year. In England, surge in mass participation. But also places like Sweden and other places in Europe where you wouldn't expect it. And add to that all of these articles, at least some of them, are emphasizing the fact that this is primarily...

a phenomenon that is related to young men, that is, young men are the ones converting to Catholicism. So what's going on? What is it about Catholicism that people are finding appealing? Why, first of all, are they attracted to religion at all? And then why, if they're attracted to religion, are they going to Catholicism? Again, the decline in religious affiliation seems to be

there seems to be a slight increase in affiliation, at least with regard to Christianity, since 2022, maybe since COVID. So since the early part of this decade. And it definitely seems to, Christianity seems to be in the uptick, although again, in the aggregate, the numbers are still small. But I think it's more important that we, what's important here is not the aggregate numbers, because those could be small numbers,

The trend and the trend particularly among young people because they are – cliche, they are the future, right? They are what's coming. And so if you look at Gen Z, if you look at millennials, most of this movement now towards Christianity but mostly Catholicism is among Gen Z and to some extent millennials. So what is going on?

Now, it's important to note that this is something that Dr. Peikoff, in a sense, predicted would happen and saw it happening in the, you know, in the, what is it, 20 teens, early, very early 20 teens coming out of the financial crisis.

I don't know that the numbers were really there, the statistics. But again, anecdotally, it seemed like Christianity was on the rise. And then it wasn't. And then you saw all these numbers of Christian affiliation declining, declining, declining. And now it's coming back. And the question is, is this it? Is this Leonard Peikoff's prediction coming true? I mean, it's hard to tell. But I think if we're going to look at the causes for this, he gives us the causes. And I think they are...

I think they are legit, and I think they're coming real. That is, I think whether this is the big conversion to Christianity, whether this is going to be sustainable, whether the numbers are going to be there, I don't know. It's hard to predict the future. But in terms of why this is happening, why this is happening, I think Leonard Peikoff had it completely right when he wrote The Dim Hypothesis.

What is it now? I think it was published in 2013. So you wrote it in 2010 to 2012, something around there. I think it was absolutely right. So let's walk through what that is. I mean, what we've seen over the last 10 years is the rise, particularly among young people, and this is probably true more millennials than Gen Zs, of kind of a postmodernist, disintegrated philosophical movement

A philosophical system. We've seen the rise of all kinds of, you know, woke ideologies, intersectionality, the intolerance for anything other than a particular leftist ideology. But a leftist ideology that, you know, starts in the premise of, you know, reason is not capable of delivering us truths. Reason, you know, we cannot know the world properly.

through reason. Everything we do know is conditional on the particular perspective we happen to have. There is no absolute truth. Everything is your own perspective. And, you know, human relationships and the relationship between human beings all determined by this kind of exploited, exploited

And all human being relationships are exploited, exploited relationships. And those exploited, exploited are somewhat related to your particular group. But since nobody belongs only to one group, since we belong to multiple groups, each individual has, in a sense, a somewhat different relationship.

intersectionality score, you know, place in intersectionality in this exploited, what is it, matrix. There are no universals. There's no universal truth. Concepts like a universal morality or concepts like individual rights or

or any particular system as being good, or any particular interpretation of history as being right. Just none of that exists because, in a sense, a kind of a universal truth cannot exist. Everything is from the perspective of the observer, from the perspective of the individual. And yet the way to reach any kind of truth through this is not through reason. It's through some other means.

And of course, this is a completely fragmented ideology. It leads people nowhere. Frustration. It leads people towards, I think, being alienated from the people around them. Because if all relationships fundamentally are exploited, exploited, exploited, exploited. In other words, if all relationships are fundamentally zero sum relationships.

then, you know, other people are dangerous. Other people might exploit me. If I win, they lose. If I lose, if they win, I lose. I mean, there's always a loser in the equation. That's no fun. So I think if people look for the loneliness epidemic, a big chunk of it is this. It's this attitude towards life and towards human relationships. And then, of course,

All this drives people to be tribal, to look for people who are like them in some dimension that they can find. And then given that they have abandoned the ability to use reason, they, you know, aggregate in tribes and try to figure out or emote together what their truth is going to be. And it's just a gobbled and it's nonsense and it's,

It induces fear and loneliness and just disintegration. The mind disintegrating means there's nothing universal. There's no truth. There's nothing to... There's nothing that...

integrates all the information, all the data, all the knowledge that is out there. There's no principle that integrates it. There's no meaning to anything. This is the whole crisis of meaning that we see, the crisis of purpose. What's the point? What's the point? Yeah, existential dread, fear. Everything's unreal, fake. And I think this is what young people feel because this is what

They being kind of taught explicitly or implicitly. I mean, this is the I mean, what is the message at the end of, I don't know, all the other popular TV shows that young people have been exposed to and have been watching religiously for the last 20 years? What is that? What is the ultimate message of? I don't know.

What are some of those animated shows, The Simpsons and The Fall Guy? And what's the real cynical one, the one that the Book of Mormon, the guys who wrote the Book of Mormon did? But even Breaking Bad and all the other really popular TV shows,

What do they get South Park? Thank you. South Park. What do you get out of South Park? What ultimately is the sense of life that the meaning that you get out of these shows is everything's to be laughed at. Everything's to be not mocked. Cynicism and skepticism is.

And what can you hold on to? Well, nothing except cynicism and skepticism, except knocking everything down and smashing everything. And, you know, this is the kind of mentality that leads to ultimately to nihilism. Family Guy, what was that? There was that series, original series, 20, 30 years ago that started this super cynical thing.

you know, putting the really, really, really dumb people at the center of the universe. Also had family in it, I think, in the title. That really, you know, Beavers and Bradhead was the first movie that put stupidity at the center. But it's just this impossibility of values.

The impossibility of values, the unimportance of value, married with children. That's the one. Thank you, Andrew. Married with children was the first one which was unwatchable. I mean, literally unwatchable. It was, to call it stupid would be a compliment. It was beneath stupidity. It was cynical and stupid and just disgusting and complete contrast to the

kind of sitcoms of the past, which, you know, elevated family and showed it as a positive and smart people, you know, trying to manage the challenges and the often humorous things that are happening within a family. Married with children just was like the negation of all of that.

Just everything is dumb, stupid. And at the bottom, everything is meaningless. Everything is meaningless. There is no meaning. And I think that's really, you know, this, we've got a generation that grew up. Whoops. What just happened there? See if that'll fix it. You guys still there? I don't know if I lost the internet or something less. Now, again, I'm not saying every show is nihilistic. Not every show was, but...

A lot of them. I mean, think about Breaking Bad. Fascinating show. Interesting show. Well done. Well produced. Beautiful visually. I mean, well done visually and well acted. Interesting often. But just about a good guy descending into homicidal madness and destroying everybody in his path. And nobody good standing up.

Nobody good capable of standing up to him. Just descent into, at the end, nihilism. All in the name of supposedly survival, but not really. And yet it was hailed and it was one of the best produced shows ever. Amazingly scripted. Everybody watch it. I mean, there are almost no heroes. There's no beauty. I mean, I guess what they consider beauty today is an action movie that

the way the blood splatters all over the place is about as beautiful as it gets. So we live in a world, have lived in a world, do live in a world, in which the philosophy is a philosophy of disintegration. The philosophy is a philosophy of lack of meaning, of the denial of meaning. In many ways, you know, a denial of self and a denial of the individual. A philosophy that is bound to create existential angst.

And when people turn to art, I mean, the most popular forms of art are television and movies. And there they get cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism. And if they turn to music, and I know I'm going to offend some of you, but tough. What do they get? They get rap with ugly, ugly, you know, lyrics.

Again, hate and emotionalism and just ugliness, ugliness. You know, maybe there's some pop music that sounds a little OK because it wouldn't be pop if it didn't. But there's no meaning there. There's no values there. There's no there's nothing to challenge there. It's just dull. I mean, the thing about mostly about popular music is it's dull.

And it's the same repeats over and over again. I mean, when was the last time you had a spiritual experience when listening to pop music? I don't know. Last time you listened to, I don't even know who a pop singer is these days. A spiritual experience really moved you. It just doesn't happen. And then if they go to a museum, if they go to a museum, yeah, maybe you watch Taylor Swift. Where's the last spiritual experience you got from Taylor Swift? And if you go to a museum, what do you get? You get crap.

You get meaningless, empty nothingness. You get, I mean, the culmination of our modern culture and modern ideas is in modern art museums. Just splashes of paint, geometric shapes, white on white.

I mean, some of it's kind of pretty because it has some aesthetic design, but most of it is just ugly and stupid and meaningless, meaningless. In other words, you look at it, and again, where is the experience? Where's the spiritual experience of it? There isn't. So we grow up, or Gen Z and millennials have grown up in an environment that is incredibly wealthy, right?

They have all the material stuff that they need. And if they have a job, they can afford. You know, they are, in spite of everything they're told, they are the richest generation ever, given where they are in life. They're making more money. They have more stuff. They have a higher standard of living than any generation before them. And at any time they turn to things of consciousness, to the mind, to the spirit, what do they get? Nothing. Emptiness.

garbage, a slap in the face. And this has got to cause a crisis, a real crisis, not a potent crisis, a real crisis. What does it mean to be a human being? In the case of a lot of young men, what does it mean to be a man? Young men experience what they think is negative change, or at least change as compared to what they perceive past generations, primarily because women in some respects are dominating them.

and they don't know how to handle it. So for them, modern society is much more challenging than I think it is in many respects to women. Women went through the biggest change in past generations. This generation is mostly a generation of change for men. And again, emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, and ugliness. That's the other thing, ugliness. They turn around, and all they see is ugly. A lot of the architecture is ugly or boring. The music is ugly.

or boring. The movies, the TV is cynical and cynicism and ugly and boring. And you can go on and on and on and on. It just, in every respect of their lives, there's nothing, there's no meaning. And importantly, there's no beauty. There's no appeal to the spirit. There's no appeal to something beyond the material. And of course, somebody like Jordan Peterson tells them,

That their angst is real, which it is. Jordan is right. Young people are struggling, particularly young men are struggling. And he tells them to go take responsibility, find values. But, you know, he's not specific, particularly specific other than stand up straight and make you bad. Not very specific. He's kind of vague on the details. And of course, if you watch a bunch of Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube, you'll

What do you think YouTube is recommending to you as the next video you should watch? Well, I mean, they are leading you towards Christianity. I mean, Jordan is doing that in his roundabout sometimes way. Given that, YouTube is feeding you the content. Now, what does Christianity have to offer you? And here in particular, I think Catholicism stands out because the difference between Catholicism and

and Protestantism primarily is, I think, and I'm not a theologian, so this is me, is that Catholicism is intellectual. It is much more grounded in tradition. It has a real grand appreciation of beauty, ceremony, if you will, the spiritual. It has...

a theology, a real thought-out, I mean, completely BS, irrationalistic, but a completely thought-out theology, ideas. They have books and books and books. I mean, there's no end. They have opinions about everything. It's not just...

I don't know, standing up in church, in some evangelical church and telling you how you should go out and make money. And by the way, you should give the preacher, you know, X percent of that money so he can get a jet, so he can fly around the world or whatever. It's got depth to it, whereas so much of the Protestant evangelicals

don't have the depth and and what do they use in terms of their music in their in their i don't know masses or ceremonies whatever they you want to call them they use pop music there's convention i mean everything's it's very modern it's very modern and in in its modernity it it's very similar to popular culture they might politically be different it's very similar to popular culture there's no it's not in a sense partisanism is not some radical it's

It's, I mean, American-style evangelical megachurch Protestantism. But generally, it's just vague. It doesn't have a cohesive ideology. Nobody in a Protestant church in America today, I think, really takes Luther or Calvin that seriously. I mean, I'm sure there are exceptions. But again, in the megachurches, it's not giving you anything.

So when young people are looking for meaning and they're told by Jordan Peterson that meaning is transcendental, meaning is outside of them, meaning cannot be found in their own lives, certainly their life is not their meaning, it has to be outside of them, where are they going to go? Well, Catholicism has 2,000 plus years of practice at this. Given the ugliness and the incoherence and the fragmentation and the disintegration of the world around us,

Catholicism provides them with—now, you have to do a lot of evading to accept this, but it does provide them with a structure, a clear theology. I mean, there are disagreements between Catholics, but there's a theology, clear ideas. It boasts—you know, right now, there are a number of these very charismatic priests who

who are online, who you get fed from, from Jordan Peterson to them directly. There's a guy named Mike Schmitz, Father Mike Schmitz, who's a charismatic priest on the Bible in a Year frame. You got Bishop Barron of Wood on Fire and others. And they talk about the struggle, particularly of young men. They give them a path. They talk about 2,000 years of tradition of fulfilling this path.

And they promise them a better life now and a much better life in another world. But there's a path. God wills. They demand standards from them. They expect behavior to change. They demand, if you will, them to change themselves, but to live up to something where our modern culture doesn't expect anything.

So I think a lot of guys, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case, a lot of guys who are attracted maybe by an Andrew Tate or some of the other people in the manosphere who tell them just to be men and so on. But at the end of the day, I like, yeah, but that, that, those guys, that's not, that's not really good. So they might be attracted to certain talking points of the manosphere, particularly those that address their angst. They want more. And, and,

The Catholic Church is there to provide it, and it's there to provide it in a beautiful package. It's pretty amazing the number of times as I'm reading these news stories and interviewing people, the number of times people say that they are attracted to Catholicism because of how beautiful it is. Because not that it is beautiful, that it presents beautifully. I mean, the amazing cathedrals, the stunning music.

And, you know, they're not adapting rap to the latest evangelical cool thing. They're sticking to, you know, old masses and requiems and sabbat maters written by great, truly, objectively great composers of the past. The Catholic Church figured out

certainly during the Renaissance, but even before that, they figured out that art was an important means by which to convey their message, that they needed to embrace art, and they needed to embrace beauty in order to make it interesting for people to come to church, and in order to create an objective spiritual experience that people could relate to and people could associate with the church. So if you listen to

Pogolesi's Sabbath March or a Mass by Bach or a Mass by Handel or a Requiem by Mozart, a Requiem by Verdi. It's a real spiritual experience. Even for somebody who does not believe and never has really believed in God, it's amazing. It's beautiful. It's stunning. It moves you in a way that literally no pop or rap artist

or rave, or drug can do. It actually moves you. It hooks into your emotions directly. It is sacred. And sacred should not be a word monopolized by religion. Beauty, art, aesthetics have real power. Real power. So you go into a beautiful church,

You know, I don't know, the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame or St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican, you know, and if it's in Europe, you're surrounded by beautiful art. There's a choir singing amazing music. They light the place in a beautiful lighting and, you know, with effects where they lower the lights in appropriate times, right? Yeah.

And, you know, everybody's together and there's a certain uniformity of values, uniformity of spirit that goes on. And it's, I can see it. It's a beautiful experience. And there are values and virtues that you're expected to live up to. You're expected to live by. Now, I mean, you can't ask too many questions about why.

Marylene says, I was raised Catholic. The only good part was the music. I mean, there's some good paintings and sculptures too at some of those churches in Europe. Pretty amazing paintings and sculptures, actually. But yes, there's ceremony. There's a process. And particularly, if you as a youth conditioned to tribalism, which I think our modern culture is so eager to condition us towards, and to emotionalism and tribalism,

There is a loving, beautiful tribe here, all in sync, all pursuing elevated values. Not about, you know, exploiting and exploited. It's now about love and about beauty and about pursuing the good. And, you know, many of us want to question what good, you know, I don't want to join a tribe. What's going on here? But if you grew up

in a world where you weren't taught to question, in a world where reason is not your means of knowledge, if you grew up in a world where belonging to a group was super important and where emotions were super important, but all of that was associated with ugliness and disintegration and lack of values and anything like that, suddenly you're exposed to all of that

tribalism and groupthink and emotionalism but now there are also values and beauty and art and just a just a just a a calm and a you know yeah i can see it i mean here's one guy one professor who

You know, this is how he writes about this. It's kind of interesting how he describes this. He says, in a disembodied time, and I think it is a disembodied time, disembodied, fragmented, disintegrated, it's a time where people don't understand their place, don't know what their life is about and what meaning to bring to it and what purpose they have. So he says, in a disembodied time, the church is resolutely concrete.

It's real, right? The splash of holy water, the smear of oil, the pinch of exercising salt, the smell of incense, the quiet voice of absolution in your ear, the gentle slap of confirmation.

I mean, that's beautifully written. And you can see, again, the kind of mentality here.

The kind of person who is going to be drawn to all of that is the kind of person we've been educating. We've been raising for the last 30, 40 years. Somebody is looking for that sensual, physical, and yet spiritual experience, an integrated experience, supposedly, full of emotion and, you know, not to, not to, not, not, not, not, don't think too much, right? Don't think too much.

So, you know, the Free Pass interviewed this one guy. He says, 21 years old, he likes the fact that Catholicism doesn't shame you for being a man. He believes young men inspired to become Catholic in a similar way that they might join the military, right? Being Catholic is like joining the military in some way. It's a brotherhood among other brothers of Christ.

along with that discipline that I believe is bringing so many young men to Catholicism. I mean, it sounds so much like Jordan Peterson, right? Discipline. So bonding, manhood, a tradition of manhood, a tradition of male responsibility, a tradition, you know, there are no yet women priests, right? A tradition of men being men, women being women. And then he said,

You know, he went to other churches and he didn't like any of the other churches. But when, you know, it was like they were like concerts, more like, you know, connecting to God, having a spiritual experience. But then Catholicism, because of, you know, because of its, you know, tradition and its intellectual rigor, kind of rigor, appealed to him.

Somebody else says they were drawn to Catholic tradition by the music, by the emphasis on contemplation, by the quiet. And you can go on and on. It's fascinating. But clearly, these are people looking for something and, again, conditioned by the culture in which we live to be emotionalist. And Catholicism is very good at this. Again, it's had 2,200 years of 2,000-plus years of training.

And the combination is indeed super appealing. It's also now the chosen religion of the elite. So most of the people converting to Catholicism right now, particularly in America, are highly educated. And they are coming to it also from a perspective of the intellectual traditions of Catholicism. And I think I've told you,

A big chunk of kind of the new right, the intellectuals of the new right, are not just Catholics. They're converts to Catholicism. And if you look at the integralists, integralists are people who believe that we need to integrate Catholic teaching with government. They reject the idea of separation of state and religion. The government's job is to create a good society, and the only way to create a good society is by imposing...

the moral code of Catholicism on society's members. But you've heard me talk about Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame or Adrian Vermeule at Harvard. There's also Gladden Pappin at University of Dallas and Edward Waldstein and many, many others that have embraced this perspective. Maybe another notable person is Sohab Amari. All of them, all of them, I think all of them are converts.

weren't originally Catholics, became Catholics. And of course, maybe the most well-known of all of them, who's the most well-known convert to Catholicism right now on the new right, who I think is an advocate of integralism, even if he doesn't know, even if he doesn't want to say it, that's J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance was not a Catholic, raised evangelical, Protestant,

Became an atheist at some point. And then recently, five, six, seven years ago, became a convert to Catholicism. So there's a revived Catholic intellectualism, you know, intellectual class now, you know, appealing to young men with ideas, ideas that are not just theological, but now ideas that relate to politics and how we can implement this in a political context.

How you can live your values not just for yourself in your own life, but how you can actually use these values to shape and change and mold society. And this is a political and cultural movement that is growing and I think will continue to grow in terms of its impact and its power. So...

So why is it surprising? Because Leonard Peikoff, in Dim Hypostas, when he said he thought Christianity would come back and there would be a revival of Christianity and it would intensify in power and it would gain political power, but he said it won't be Catholicism. And why did he say it won't be Catholicism? He said because he believed that Catholicism could not recover from the child abuse, the sexual assaults against children.

The pedophilia that the Catholic Church has engaged in, or people in the Catholic Church have engaged in, that the Catholic Church officially covered up. So it's truly amazing how people might talk about pedophilia and the evil of it and how horrific it is and how ugly it is and how it shouldn't happen. It's the fundamental ideas that either attract them or don't attract them. And the reality is right now, the fundamental ideas of Catholicism are attracting people.

People who are avoiding their lives. People who are looking for purpose and meaning. And people who want beauty, who find the modern world ugly, and in many respects it is, and want something that they don't know. Values, virtues, morality. Look, we all need philosophy. We all need an explanation for the world. We all need to be able to answer questions. We all need morality. Good and evil, everybody needs it.

And I think what has happened, particularly over the last 10 years, is the secular world has basically defaulted completely. It has for a long time. But over the last 10 years, it's become absurd the kind of answers they give as explanations for the world. There is no truth. There is no reality. Just go by whatever emotions. It's all about sacrificing others to sell for being sacrificed. It's all about exploiting, exploiting. It's all zero-sum game. That doesn't sell.

It's sold for a while, but it doesn't sell. There's a backlash against that. And what fills its place? Something that has answers to pretty much every question. Not very good answers, actually pretty bad answers, horrible answers, but answers. And something that provides guidance. Not good guidance, but guidance nonetheless, better than nothing. And people are willing to put aside all the sins of the church, the history of it,

all the evil popes, all the just disasters that the Catholic Church has led to in all of human history, including the pedophilia, in the name of just getting some kind of integrated coherent or semi-coherent, it's not coherent, it's semi-coherent answer to the questions of why am I here? What's my purpose in life? How do I live? What's good? What's evil? And a sense of that aesthetic beauty that we talked about, that spiritual something.

And at the end of the day, that's what's lacking in the secular world. And that's what objectivism brings to the secular world. But it's just too small. And it's just too small to have a real impact. Objectivism provides us with guidance, meaning, explanation, values and virtues oriented or originated from reason, discovered by reason.

And oriented towards happiness. One's own happiness. By the way, the Catholics, one of the things the Catholics say, oh, we're for happiness. This is following Thomas Aquinas' reading of Aristotle. We don't define happiness the way you guys do. But we're for happiness. Well, we're really for happiness. And for values and for living a full, complete life. And by the way, as I've said many, many times over the years, we are for beauty and for love. If there's ever been a philosophy of love, objectivism is it.

And Ayn Rand conveys these ideas through beauty in her novels. What we need today is a vast quantity of romantic art that elevates this world, that presents this world as knowable, presents an ideal to strive towards without mysticism, without emotionalism, without...

Rejection of reason indeed dependent on reason. We need a, you know, a aesthetic, artistic renaissance. We need to use art and aesthetics better in conveying ideas. Again, people are drawn to beauty. Beauty is important. So we need an aesthetic revolution. And we need to be communicating with people about values, about ideals, values.

about virtues, about how to live a life, about the purpose of life. We need to pick up on Jordan Peterson's challenge to people to find meaning. But tell them he's sending you to the wrong place to look. He's sending you to the wrong place to seek out that meaning. That purpose is your life. The meaning is your life. Embrace it. Embrace life. Life, big L, life. And

And your purpose is going to be living that life to the best of your ability for the achievement of your happiness. And yeah, part of that purpose is having a central purpose, a career. But it's also about love and it is about family and it is about friendship and it is about having a successful life in every dimension of that life. It is about beauty. It is about surrounding yourself with beauty. And we as objectivists, if we're going to win this,

One of the things we need to do is project that. We should care about beauty. We should promote beauty. And we should promote reason, but not just, but reason not in a dry, detached sense, but reason as the means by which we live and thrive and succeed and have great lives. We need to project happiness and success. To project it, you have to attain it first. We have to attain and project happiness, success, success.

And a life well lived. And then we just have to grow. We have to grow. We need more people. Because the alternative to the craziness of the disintegrated left is not the lie and the falsehood of Catholicism. The alternative is reason, reality, and life. Life. All right. That's part of what I have to say. There's a lot more.

But that's part of what I have to say. If you're interested more in kind of my view of how to live life, there is a playlist of Yuan's Rules for Life. Yuan's Rules for Life. There's a playlist on this channel. Please seek it out. Go watch those videos. I think you'll enjoy them. But, you know, I wish more people would view them. Too many people are too focused on the news instead of what I think is much more important, and that is the questions of living life.

So seek out those videos. Of course, more importantly, seek out Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand's novels and Ayn Rand's philosophical writing that give you the tools, cognitive tools to live this much better life and to avoid both the falsehoods of subjectivism, relativism, and the falsehoods of, you know, extremism.

religion and mysticism and uh and uh in christianity uh you know we've got some catholics here sending me crosses pretty funny all right let's go to your questions let's see we'll start with the 20 questions i think do we have any 50s no we just have 20s

I'll remind you, we have got goals for these shows. We've covered the first hour. We've done well. Thank you. We've got another hour to cover. So if anybody wants to add questions, please consider doing $20 so we can make it up, you know, 10, 12, $20 questions, and we're there. So, of course, you can also do $50, $100 questions. Also do stickers. Stickers are great. Stickers, you don't have to ask questions. You can do any amount. Just...

Support the show, Value for Value. If you enjoy listening to this show, some of you don't, I know. Our Catholic friend here on the chat doesn't enjoy the show. But many of you do. Value for Value is great. All right, let's jump in with Under Leroy.

I believe Roman Catholicism is one of America's strongest and most ancient enemies. Looking forward to today's show. Yes, I absolutely think that Roman Catholicism is antagonistic to the very, very nature of this country. It is an authoritarian dogma that rejects the basic principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Even if some of the ideas about natural rights came out of a Catholic tradition, it's a very different interpretation of rights that comes out of that Catholic tradition than what is embraced by the founders and what we understand rights to be today. So what is this? So yeah, Catholicism is antagonistic, and you can see that in the writings of...

The integralists, it's very clear from the writings of the integralists that they hate the Declaration, and they want to undo the Declaration. They reject the idea of individual rights. I mean, Vermeule's whole conception of constitutional interpretation is from the perspective of the common good. It's all about the common good. There is no such thing as individual rights. Individual rights don't matter. Everything needs to be from the perspective of a Catholic interpretation of the common good.

So it's a complete rejection of the American political system. That's integralism. That's who we have as a vice president. It's not an accident that J.D. Vance said America is not about an idea. It is, but it's not an idea he supports. It's not an idea he believes in. So he needs to undo that. And for him, America is a place and a people, place and a people that can be imbued with

Whatever common good set of ideas that they want. But J.D. Vance, a real, a good friend and supporter of practically Deneen, I don't know, Dedeem, and I think a real supporter of the mules, common good constitutionalism. Really bad stuff.

Liam, the decaying pumpkin in the White House just called in the National Guard to call riots in California about hardworking immigrants being seized and deported. We're in the early phase of dystopian authoritarianism. I mean, it's bad what he's doing, but, you know, let's not exaggerate. I don't think we're quite there yet. I will talk about the calling of the National Guard tomorrow on the new show. And...

We'll just have more info about what they're actually doing tomorrow for the show. So we'll have another 24 hours of knowledge about what's going on. So we'll talk about it tomorrow. Shazbat says, blessed are the cheesemakers. That, of course, is from the classic, classic, brilliantly anti-Catholic piece called movie called The Life of Brian. If only we had more humor of that quality, the world would be a much better place.

Monty Python. All right, John Bales, a sign of our time. In today's superhero movies, all conflicts between individuals or between nations are settled by hand-to-hand conflict. Yes. And sometimes, depending on the superhero movie, hand-to-hand conflict where the good guy is not allowed to kill the bad guy, right? Where the good guy is not allowed to kill the bad guy.

I just got a text from Brad Thompson, who's always quick to correct me when he thinks I'm saying something wrong. He says, quote, my sources tell me that Catholicism is no longer hip for young men and women on the reactionary right. The cutting edge thing that is rising in popularity for the young on the so-called new, new right is Eastern Orthodoxy.

and he's linked to a video describing that. He says, pretty slick and pretty sick. And yes, I mean, I didn't talk about that, partially because I don't really know that much about Eastern Orthodoxy, but also because it is on the fringe. It's still on the fringe. The movement of Catholicism is culture-wide. It's, again, in France and the UK and in the US, and it's not just a fringe right, but it's more broad. But it is true that on the kind of fringe side,

cool, particularly cool, new, new, new, new, new, right, Eastern Orthodoxy is considered cool. I mean, remember, Eastern Orthodoxy kind of survived or flourished under the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, for a thousand years after the fall of Rome.

So it was linked to political power in a way that the Western Church was not, right? The Western Church, because it rose at the same time as Rome declined, there was this ongoing notion of separation of church and state, which doesn't really exist in Eastern Orthodoxy, not in the same way, because in the Byzantine Empire, church and state were united in a much stronger form.

Eastern Orthodoxy, from what I can tell, is also more mystical. And I think it's being made popular right now by a hero of the new, new, new, new, new right, of the far right, and that is Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Putin's Russia. You know, Eastern Orthodoxy is much more explicitly, particularly, again, in its Russian interpretation. There is a difference between Orthodoxy, I think, in Greece and

and now in Ukraine and in Russia, but particularly in its Russian form, it's anti-gay in a way that the Catholic Church has not been, and in a way that the Catholic Church has tried to moderate and tried to be more hip and cool and more appealing to the left, because it's ultimately based in Europe. The Eastern Orthodox Church has not succumbed to that. So I can see why...

The Eastern Orthodox Church is more appealing. But we'll have to do a separate show on the Eastern Orthodox. And I'll watch this video that Brad sent me to try to get a stronger sense of it. But it's not good either way.

Either way, it's not good. But yes, John, I agree with you about the superhero. I mean, the superhero movies are stupid, but the hand-to-hand combat thing is pretty ridiculous. Let's see. Adam, the world's most rapidly growing economies are Poland and Macau in the long term and Argentina in the short term. All Catholic. Does this have an impact on

on the better informed young and middle-aged people around the world. I don't think so. I don't think anybody's really noticing that. Um, you know, again, that the, the, the, I mean, a lot of the fastest growing economies in the world in Africa right now, and those are Catholic, uh, or mostly Catholic. I don't think any of this is driven by economics. I don't think anybody really cares that much about economics. I don't think it's driven by economics. Um,

so I, I don't think that paying that much attention to it, it is, we haven't, I haven't commented on the latest Polish elections, which I don't think went well. Uh, but, uh, uh, you know, we're a religionist kind of right wing religionist came into power, at least as president doesn't have a huge amount of power, but has enough to kind of put a lot of, uh, constraints on the, on the government, uh, in Poland. Uh,

Okay, Brad wants me to correct what I said early. He says he doesn't always criticize me when he thinks I'm wrong. So there are many, many times he thinks I'm wrong and he doesn't criticize me. So what those times are, we're going to leave in suspense. Maybe he can send me, text me a list of all the times that he hasn't criticized me when he thinks I'm wrong.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important so you don't think that he agrees with me too much because he doesn't criticize me too often. Thank you, Adam. Andrew, our digital tech age has a beauty that's not being romanticized enough. Too much immature goofiness still surrounds the aura of Silicon Valley. It's ready for more romantic treatment. Why do you think that's missing? Well, because I think tech grew up in the age of cynicism. It grew up in the age of cynics.

And if you think about one of the big drivers of tech, what's the one big driver of tech over the last 40 years since the invention of the videotape? It's porn. You know, so porn, cynicism, ugliness. Now, and the one real romantic in tech, the one real romantic in tech was Steve Jobs. And Jobs, unfortunately, died way too young and way too early.

but he was a real romantic. He understood beauty, understood the power of aesthetics, the power of art, the power of beauty. And he spoke that way and he inspired and he was a romantic figure. And there's just nothing like that in the tech world right now. Much of technology is now used, I mean, on a day-to-day basis for people, it's used to insult and offend and attack people.

on Twitter, you know, or to con people. And there's just, they don't know how to pivot towards beauty. How do we use this technology to make beautiful things? How do we use this technology to create beautiful relationships, to build beautiful things? How do we emphasize the aesthetics of the tech? How do we think about it in terms of long-term versus short-term technology?

I think all of that is lacking, and it's lacking visionaries. It's lacking people in Silicon Valley who know how to do that. Again, Steve Jobs is the only one who comes to mind, and he's no longer with us, and I don't see anybody else. And to the extent that even Silicon Valley is missing something, feels like it's too materialistic and they're missing something, they're turning to nationalism. You saw that with a book by the CEO of Plantia.

It's complete nationalism. That'll give us meaning, a project, a big project for the state. Rather than pursuit of individual happiness, individual beauty, they can't see how to do that. They view it as all tech has just led to more of a consumer economy, materialism, more ugliness. But it is, that's a real challenge. I think Andrew's onto something. It's a real challenge. How do we, where are the tech leaders?

Who will integrate this new technology into something beautiful. I mean, Elon Musk could have done it, right? I mean, SpaceX has a romance to it, a beauty to it, a like grand purpose to it, that it could truly be inspiring the capacity of the human mind, the capacity of human beings to reach out and to go to space and to colonize Mars and all of this stuff.

And it's cheapened by his politics. And I think it's, even when he talks about it, he doesn't talk in as inspiring a sense. He talks about it as the species or whatever, not as an inspiring sense, as an individualistic adventure, which I think it really is. I mean, Zuckerberg has nothing. I mean, what does Zuckerberg have to offer in terms of great spiritual beauty? There's just nothing there.

Just nothing there. So I don't know who is going to lead us in that direction. I don't see anybody. I mean, Boom has that romantic notion. I think they do a good job projecting this, what's possible to man in a romantic version. But it has to be a technology that's bigger than that. It has to be a technology that touches everybody to really make a big difference. I mean, Bezos...

But he's not doing it. He's not a, he's not vocal. He's not a leader. He's not, I mean, he's a leader business, but he's not a cultural leader. He's not a cultural voice. Steve Jobs was a cultural voice. Jennifer, I remember when I was a kid seeing the crucifix up on the wall in the church, when I went with a friend, I thought, why do they have this ugly, unhappy looking thing up there? Yeah. When you're healthy, you know, you are healthy and most people are not. And, uh,

He died for your sins. You should feel gratitude and appreciation and reverence towards him and his suffering. Anna Leroy, what do you think about Freemasonry? It shares some of the qualities you've attributed to Catholicism's resurgence. It has values, and Mozart wrote music for its ceremonies. But it places more of an emphasis on the individual. Yeah, but it's...

Still mystical, or at least has mystical elements. It's not a coherent philosophy. It doesn't have virtues and values, not coherent ones, not separate ones from Christianity. It's too conventional. So it's kind of a social club, is ultimately what it boils down to. And it's, as far as I can tell, it's died as a real movement, certainly as a real movement of the successful people within society.

Dan, my super chat last month advertised my pro-Ayn Rand YouTube channel. Dan Norton won. Helped me get many new subscribers. Thanks. Value for value. Thank you, Dan. Molten Splendor, I think you are being kind when you suggest that tribalism describes those that practice Catholicism. In my opinion, sheep is a better description. I mean, you have to be careful with that because sheep,

There's a sense in which it's sheep. There's no question. But it's also like it's smart people. It's well-educated people. It's people that are searching and looking for something and finding it falsely there. And I think, look, what motivates people to be sheep? It's tribalism. They're not the leaders of the flock.

They're not the shepherds of the flock. Yeah, they are the sheep of the tribe. I mean, all tribalism is sheepness in a sense. But yeah, I mean, we agree. It's irrational. It's emotional. It's detached from reality.

And it's barbaric in a sense that Catholicism, God, have you ever read the history of Catholicism, the evil that they have committed, just the horrors of it, and really digested the ideas of it and the fact that it's, I mean, one of the things that Catholics, I was just reading up on stuff from Catholics and

One of the problems they have is if the doctrine was always right, how come it changes, right? So, you know, if the doctrine around gays, if that's the word of God, then how can a pope change it now? Or the article I was reading was like, there's a doctrine about usury. Usury is evil. Usury is a mortal sin. And this guy's making the argument, yeah, it is.

And all the banking and all the finance we have today is all mortal sin, and Christian doctrines cannot change. It is fixed in time, and therefore, we have to launch an anti-usury campaign from the Catholics. I mean, I didn't know there were still Catholics who believed that. I really didn't. I read the article today. There's a book out about how usury, how the scholastics and

Aristotle and everybody else was right about usury. It is a mortal sin. Dante was right to put them in the seventh rung of hell or whatever, those bankers, those evil financiers. I mean, the Pope said okay. I mean, it's so barbaric. It's so primitive. It's so anti-life and anti-reason and anti-well, I'm repeating myself. Anti-reason is anti-life.

Jeremy, thank you for the sticker. We had some other stickers. Let's see. Jonathan early on, but I thought I saw some more. Yeah, Mike, thank you. Mary Aline, thank you. And Oli W., thank you. And Lucinda. There's Lucinda. I think that's it. I think we caught everybody. If I didn't, I apologize. Thanks to all the stickers. You too can help support the show.

show that is funded 100% by listeners like you, by watchers and listeners like you, please consider making a contribution through a sticker or becoming a monthly supporter on patreon.com. All right. Oh, SuperCasky asked, are you reacting to the Jordan Peterson Jubilee video, right? The one with 20 frogs? No, not today. Liam, I heard the big beautiful bill gets rid of inheritance tax. I don't think so. I don't think so.

I think it maintains the now higher threshold for where it applies, which was passed in 2017 and was going to be phased out and is now is now they're going to keep it high. So, yeah, but I don't think it gets rid of it completely. Harper Campbell, no one stares harder at their own mediocrity than a narcissist. Yeah, I mean, narcissists are often not even mediocrities. They're worse than that.

Michael, Ayn Rand said, quote, the truth is not for everyone, only those who seek it. Did she mean don't be too needy to convince people of objectivism? Those morally worthy will discover that it's true. No, I don't think so. Because, you know, people who seek the truth might be seeking truth and just not discovered objectivism. And you can be providing that truth.

truth to them. So how much you invest in them will be a function of whether you think they're seekers or not. So that's true. I think it's a more broad statement. You can't impose the truth on people. People have to want it, have to seek it, have to use their mind. It's an active process. It's not passive. You can't just implant it on somebody.

They have to be actively engaged in it. I think that's what she's talking about. Not your average algorithm. Is PTSD real? Given how abusive people are to each other in today's world, you would think we would see more of it. Yeah, I think PTSD is real, but it's a consequence of, you know, dramatic abuse. It's trauma that is caused by things like war or abuse, beating, sexual abuse as a child, right?

It's not caused by somebody yelling at you or somebody impolite or not opening the door for you. It's caused by, you know, real trauma. And that real trauma needs a big source. And wars is the classic or extreme violence. And that is still unusual in our world. We are less violent today as a species, as a people.

In the world, we're less violent today than probably at any point in time in human history. Read Better Angels of Our Nature by, what's his name? Steven Pinker.

and he's got all the data to show it. And I talked about murder rates a few shows ago. Murder is dramatically in decline. So we're probably being abused less today than ever before. Now, there are places around the world where people are suffering PTSD, but it's unlikely that you're going to be suffering PTSD in the United States.

John, looking forward to listening to this later in the car, a fallen Catholic, a risen Catholic. You're not a fallen Catholic. You've risen above Catholicism. You've done better. Michael, wasn't Catholicism big in 1930s Germany? Ominous. Yeah, I mean, but so I don't know if it was growing in 1930s Germany. I mean, Germany is a country split between Catholics and Protestants. Indeed, Catholicism.

The most brutal, savage war in European history, probably, on a per capita basis, was the 30-year war. And it was primarily German Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other for 30 years, killing, I think, it's between a third and half the German population. Michael, our status relying on an ever-expanding tech sector to preserve the parasitic extortion racket is

I don't know how aware the statists are of this, but yeah, I mean, there's a sense in which tech is sustaining our economy, keeping our economy going so the statists can survive. And it's also providing the statists with tools for preservation, including the surveillance tools that allow them to thrive as statists. Hop up. Are you able to have more influence on Millet and his administration, or is he doing a good enough job on his own?

I have not been able to have influence on Millet and his administration. Millet never contacted me, even though he promised to read my book. So he either didn't read it or read it and wasn't that impressed, or I don't know. But he hasn't contacted me. I haven't been back to Argentina for a variety of reasons.

And I haven't had invitations, you know, urgent invitations to come. So I'd like to have more influence, but I need a way in. And it's not obvious what that way in is. And in the meantime, he's doing a good job by himself. And, you know, you have to know a lot about Argentinian politics to be able to improve on what he's doing in terms of just the economic stuff that he's doing.

James, are the most evil figures in history Catholic intellectuals? Well, I mean, was Kant a Catholic? I don't think so. I don't know. I don't know. They were pretty bad. Yeah. I mean, I think Augustine ranks, definitely ranks up there as one of the most evil. And a lot of the fathers of the church were really, really evil. So, yeah, a lot of them. Most, I don't know, but a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas Aquinas, of course, was a Catholic intellectual, and he was pretty good. Ali, hi, Ron. Just a general reminder about review of Ride the Tiger. Yes, as I said, Ali, it's going to take me a while. I apologize, but it just is. You know, realistically, we're looking at—because, I mean, the rest—we're looking at sometime August, September, October, sometime in that period of time. It won't be before August. It won't be before August, but it's definitely on my list.

And I've downloaded it. It's ready to read. Richard, a reminder that Catholics promote the abolition of original, the abomination of original sin. Yes, they do. The abomination of original sin, that to a large extent is Augustine's work, right? Augustine was the big original sin guy. But by the way, so do Protestants, at least Protestants who take Luther seriously. Luther was a huge original sin guy and predestination.

So Lutherans and Calvinists are even bigger original sin guys and even bigger determinism people because they're Augustinians. Their critique of the Catholic Church was that the Catholicism had moved too far away from Augustine.

Protestantism never developed, though, because it didn't have a unifying dogma and a unifying church. It never developed aesthetics of Catholicism. It never understood the role of aesthetics in the way Catholics understood it. James, isn't it crazy you can make more money having your own podcast than you ever could as an elite college professor? The Internet is breaking the university stronghold on the intellect.

It isn't breaking it yet. I'm hoping that it will, but it isn't breaking it yet. Right now, universities are still strong and going. I think it'll slowly be diminished. So breaking is a little hard, certainly diminishing. Michael, would you argue Christianity, particularly Catholicism, is more dangerous than Islam? In the West, yes. Yes, I think in the West...

It's much more likely that people become more and more Catholic than they become more and more Muslim. Certainly in America, Islam is not a threat to America. And in Europe, at the end of the day, I don't think Islam will be a threat to Europe. I think the Europeans will take care of that threat, but by doing so, we'll become authoritarian. That is, we'll be in a self-destructive way, they'll take care of Islam. So yes, I think Christianity is much more dangerous to the West than Islam.

Nico, Nick, is there a difference between individual rights and human rights? Not really. No, I don't think so. Not when you understand it. There is not. Andrew, if Kant wanted to preserve Christianity, he has succeeded. It appears he has. By the way, I mean, human rights is...

like a more PC way, a non-individualistic, not emphasizing the individual way of talking about rights in that sense. And it's usually brought up by people who want, who have a leftist interpretation of rights, where you have a right to all kinds of goodies. Individual rights is usually, you can only hear individual rights from classical liberals who have a Lockean interpretation of it. So, but...

So there's no different, there's no thing called human rights that's separate from individual rights, even if people argue for it. Jacob, my parents are doing a three-week trip to Portugal and Spain in September. Can I send you the itinerary for food and general accommodations? Sure. I don't know how much time I'll have, but I'll try to get you a few recommendations based on where they are.

Cook, did you read Rob Dreher's recent piece for the free press titled The Radical Right is Coming for Your Sons? Might be worth talking about on a show. God, I read something else by Dreher in the free press. I don't think I did that. And I'll have to check it out because that sounds like one of those topics that is good for me. Yeah, he is a piece of work, that guy. Although he's become a little skeptical about Trump, which is good.

But he is a big fan of Orbán's and a big fan of Christianity. And when he says the radical right, he's to a large extent talking about himself. Cook, also, have you ever looked into Catholic social thought?

When I looked into it years ago, it sounded like Bernie plus Greta plus Richard Wolff with the Bible. Yes, I mean, the previous pope was part of that social thought school, liberation theology, I think it's called. It primarily comes out of Latin America. It's not the dominant view within the church. The Europeans are a little different, and then the Africans are quite conservative. African Catholics are the

fastest growing group of Catholics are quite conservative. But, you know, liberation theology is kind of a mixture of Karl Marx and Jesus, which is not that crazy of a mixture, but it's much more explicit than it would be otherwise. Donna, thank you. Appreciate the support. All right, let's see.

uh, Sukhaski Catholics do believe in zero sum oppressed, oppressive dichotomy though. It's why the church has been against capitalism and pro Palestine, uh, Catholics. Yeah. I mean, Catholics invented altruism. So, I mean, altruism in its, in its, in its modern form. So Catholics definitely believe in altruism and they invented the idea of, of oppressor oppressed or they, they, they, you know, the, the woke, uh,

Modern intellectuals just reinterpreted, stole it from Catholicism. But Catholicism deals with it very differently, right? Because they don't necessarily resent white men or, you know, to them it has much more to do with religion and Jesus and your belief system and stuff like that than kind of the identity politics that the left has interpreted it as. But yes, there's very much altruism is...

the theme within Catholicism, within Christianity. Frank, artists move between their spiritual creators and depressed voids. Even Ayn Rand, doesn't religion perform the business of filling the voids of culture to avoid a culture falling into vice and other excitements? No, I don't think so. There's nothing about religion. Religion indeed is what creates many of the voids of

It doesn't have answers. It doesn't fill the gaps. What you need in order to fill the gap is philosophy, is ideas, is a system of thought that explains the world. And the only way to explain the world is through reason. So, no, I don't think religion fills the voids. I think it creates voids. And it gives you the illusion of

That your void has been filled, but all it's doing is creating a much bigger void that you get sucked into. Because that's what religion is. It's a void that sucks you into it. A void filled with faith and lacking in reason and facts and reality. Shows what in Superman 2, the hero defeated the three equally powerful villains simultaneously with a clever ruse rather than combat. So there are exceptions. And he killed them. All right, maybe I should watch Superman 2.

I like when the villains die at the end rather than, uh, is it, it's one of them doesn't kill anybody. I thought Superman didn't kill. I thought that was one of the principles. Uh, Joshua, uh, says, I actually do enjoy the show in spite of putting up crosses everywhere. Never understand that. Frank, did IDF kill 15 paramedics? What really happened? I don't know what really happened. It's very hard to tell. It's a battle zone. There's a lot of misinformation. Uh,

But I can almost guarantee that Israelis didn't knowingly kill, purposefully kill a bunch of paramedics for the sake of killing. There was reason or an accident or mistake. Mary Eileen, the nuns used to tell us that the fact that the Catholic Church has survived all the corruption in its past was proof that it was the one true church. That's a flaw. There's a flaw in that reasoning. Yeah, there is. Yeah.

I thought the reason Judaism survived all the Holocaust and discrimination and oppression and slaughter and, you know, disasters and anti-Semitism and everything else is because it was the one true religion. I mean, Judaism and Christianity are going to have to have it out. Problem is, there are only like 18 million Jews and there's 1.4 billion Jews.

Catholics. I'm not sure if there's a fair fight there. B2Brawler. I'm attending your lectures from Peterson Academy this month. It's going to be weird listening to you live without the 1.5 speed on. I know. Everybody tells me that when, like I sat down with lunch with somebody in London who listens to the show, it's just so weird talking to you. You're so slow.

So, yeah, so I'll try to speed it up. Not really. Yeah, sorry. You'll just have to bear with it. On the other hand, you'll have the amazing, you'll be in the presence of the amazing magnetic charisma that I exude when it's in person and not over video that mitigates my magnetism. How much do you interact with or take questions from the audience after lectures?

So what the way it happens is I give the lecture with very little interaction with the audience just because of the way they they've got the structure. So you basically deliver content. Then they cut and there's a Q&A and they'll pass around a mic and you'll you'll ask a question in the mic and I'll do that for as long as their questions. And I don't know how many people are going to be there. Usually it's pretty small, maybe 10 people.

Maybe less. I don't know how many people show up. Hopefully there'll be a good size attendance, but I'll answer questions. And then once the questions, you take a break. And the three of these sessions on two of the days and two of these sessions on the third day in between, I interact a little bit, but I rest a little bit too.

And then, you know, at the end of the day, there's more time to interact. So I'm happy to interact with the audience after the lecture, beyond the Q&A, just as long as I do need a rest between, because each one of these are pretty intense. And you go an hour, you do Q&A, you rest for half an hour, you go another hour, you do Q&A, you rest for a little bit, lunch stuff, and then you do another, you know, it's, it's,

I used to be able to go like eight hours of lecturing without blinking. Yeah, I'm not that young guy anymore. Now I need my rest. So I'll try to interact as much as possible with you guys. And I appreciate you being there. Really, I do. It'll make the class much better having a live audience. But the interaction will be there will be some maybe less than what you want. I don't know. I mean, there might be a lot. We'll see.

Robert says, right you are, out on the bike, 15.7 miles so far, still a few miles from home. Tell Amy I'm still alive and we will go live at 6 p.m. Great show. Amy, Robert's still alive and you're going live with him at 6 p.m. So get ready. It's like an hour from now.

All right. Frank says, I am impressed by The Godless Girl, C.B. DeMille's 1928 film about a girl who runs a school atheist club. It's in Wikipedia. Ayn Rand, not in it. I don't know what that means that it's in Wikipedia. I've never heard of that movie. That would be interesting to see if I can find it and watch it. That would be interesting.

Frank also says, I like a Catholic sect based on Pelagius's ideas. It believes in free will. Also, more Protestants in 1600s killed accused witches than Catholics did. Yeah, Protestantism is the more emotionalist religion. Less dogma, less pretense of reason, no scholastics, much more based on feelings, reason,

and less theological, less spending time on theology. So yeah, they're more likely to burn witches than the Catholics. Of course, the Catholics had an inquisition. So the inquisition was pretty brutal. Even if they didn't burn witches, they burned Jews, they burned heretics, they burned lots of other people. Catholicism has a very, very, very, very, very dark past. Very dark past. All right, guys, and a very, very, very dark future and a pretty dark present.

But the past, particularly dark, because they had power. And when they have power, they do horrible things. Matthew just came in with a question. Have you seen Equalizer 3? Seems like McCall realized he had become broken and is slipping into vigilantism. I have not seen Equalizer 3. Oh, wait, wait a second. Equalizer 3, was that the one in Italy where he goes after the mafia guys in Italy? Yeah, I think that's it.

Yeah, I mean, I thought it was the weaker. I mean, I like all the Equalizers because I like the actor. God. And I like the basic vigilante. I like Denzel. I think Denzel's amazing. And I like action movies. But Equalizer 3 was way too violent, particularly the opening sequence. There was no reason for that violence. The previous ones were not as violent and I thought were better.

It also did, you know, digress into this, you know, vigilantism for the sake of vigilantism. And yeah, versus I think the first two were much more values driven, positive values driven. But look, I still like Equalizer because I like revenge and because I like bad guys dying and because I like Denzel Washington.

Oh, he's so much better than Bronson. Charles Bronson was not a good actor. Dred Zell Washington is a great actor doing the kind of roles Charles Bronson did, but as a great actor. So there's so much better. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed the show. If somebody wants to do a sticker for 40 bucks, we'll make our goal. But otherwise, and in any case, we will call it a night, a date. And I will see you all tomorrow.

for a new show. We'll definitely cover the National Guard in California. There's a lot of other stuff going on in the world that we will cover. And yeah, this week will be a week full of shows. And, you know, until I go to Arizona in a week and a half, we're going to be doing shows. All right, everybody. See you tomorrow. Bye. Have a great, great, great rest of your weekend.