SPEAKER_1: Welcome to the second Q&A episode of the At Any Cost podcast.
SPEAKER_1: Tonight, I have a number of questions already prepared that I took from last week, mostly.
SPEAKER_1: Some of them from this week as well, and I will try to get through at least a number of them.
SPEAKER_1: Perhaps not all of them, there are quite a few.
SPEAKER_1: A little feedback there.
SPEAKER_1: But I will get right into it since there are quite a few questions here.
SPEAKER_1: I'll also pull up the chat just so that I have that there.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, it's spread across four different websites, so it makes it a little harder, but...
SPEAKER_1: The first question, you wrote that fascism is a step towards monarchy.
SPEAKER_1: What are the things that successful fascist movements have in common?
SPEAKER_1: What are the mistakes which need to be avoided?
SPEAKER_1: I think when it comes to fascist movements, it's important first to note that fascism is sort of an umbrella term.
SPEAKER_1: I use it essentially to mean anything that is right-wing and authoritarian.
SPEAKER_1: Not totalitarian, but right-wing and authoritarian.
SPEAKER_1: Which, of course, is going to make some people a little annoyed because they use fascism to mean something specific historically.
SPEAKER_1: A specific ideology, usually contrasted with national socialism and other things like that.
SPEAKER_1: But I use it more as a general term for, again, right-wing authoritarianism.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that there's any necessary, inherent aspect to it, other than the fact that it is concerned with the nation, it is concerned with all of the things that we call traditional and conservative, in the proper sense of both of those terms.
SPEAKER_1: And it is, of course, right-wing, but of course, it's going to be that just by nature of the other things.
SPEAKER_1: The question about the form that it's going to take in a given time and place is going to largely be determined by the nation that is enacting those policies.
SPEAKER_1: Right-wing authoritarianism is going to be a product of the nation that employs it.
SPEAKER_1: That's sort of inevitable.
SPEAKER_1: There's a reason that we don't see the same sort of right-wing authoritarianism in France that we see in Germany, and those are both different from what we see in Italy or in the Slavic countries, because they're different people.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to do different things, different things are going to work.
SPEAKER_1: And so that's part of the answer is that these things have to be tailored to the people who are employing them, tailored to the people who are going to be using this form of government.
SPEAKER_1: Because if you don't do that, it's never going to work.
SPEAKER_1: And it's just going to be unnatural.
SPEAKER_1: People are going to act in a certain way according to what they are.
SPEAKER_1: Just like you're going to have differences in church worship services in different nations, because different races are going to worship differently.
SPEAKER_1: The Italians are going to be more boisterous than the Germans, and certainly Africans, Mexicans, others are going to be much more boisterous than the Europeans.
SPEAKER_1: That's simply the nature of it.
SPEAKER_1: And so, you're going to have different characteristics of the people that are going to play a part in the governmental structure itself.
SPEAKER_1: That is simply the nature of the beast.
SPEAKER_1: Insofar as mistakes are concerned, I guess I can get this mic out of my way since I have the lavalier on.
SPEAKER_1: Insofar as mistakes are concerned, really, that's probably going to mostly be excess.
SPEAKER_1: There are times where right-wing movements can go overboard.
SPEAKER_1: And the issue with that is going to be alienating those who are natural allies.
SPEAKER_1: We see this, of course, on the right all the time, the constant infighting and other problems that we have.
SPEAKER_1: But beyond that sort of problem, I'm not sure that there really were that many mistakes made historically by these fascist movements, by these right-wing authoritarian movements.
SPEAKER_1: I think by and large, they were just vastly outnumbered.
SPEAKER_1: Which notably is a problem that we don't have as badly in the American context because of our geographical isolation.
SPEAKER_1: That gives us some advantages.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, we're dealing with a century of technological development, and so it's not as much of an advantage as it would have been back then, but it's still an advantage.
SPEAKER_1: There's a difference between having a neighbor, a national neighbor who hates you and is a thousand miles away across an ocean versus one who hates you and is literally ten feet away.
SPEAKER_1: The second case is a much greater problem for obvious reasons.
SPEAKER_1: So moving on to the second question, would you be willing to share your understanding of Gödel's loophole?
SPEAKER_1: I get asked this one a lot, actually, incidentally, perhaps unsurprisingly.
SPEAKER_1: There are a number of related loopholes, one could call them, in the constitutional structure of the United States government.
SPEAKER_1: Some of them are not fit to be discussed in this format for a number of reasons at which many of you can guess.
SPEAKER_1: And others deal largely with the fact that if you push things in just the right way, you can basically force an amendment of the Constitution that makes it easier to amend the Constitution.
SPEAKER_1: You're building yourself a ladder, basically.
SPEAKER_1: And then after three or four steps of that, you've basically made yourself a dictator and you can rule by fiat.
SPEAKER_1: That, of course, is the easiest one.
SPEAKER_1: Probably, incidentally, not the one that Geddle had in mind because it's too simple, it's too straightforward.
SPEAKER_1: But there are a few other ones that, again, not necessarily fit for discussing in this format for reasons that people can guess.
SPEAKER_1: The third question, what is your theological view on the Book of Common Prayer, the 1662 specifically?
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, there are going to be some theological differences because I'm Lutheran and the Book of Common Prayer is indeed not Lutheran.
SPEAKER_1: It is reformed in nature, and so there will be some differences there with regard to our conception of things like the real presence of Christ in the sacrament.
SPEAKER_1: But of course, every group disagrees with every other group on that one, so it's not too surprising.
SPEAKER_1: Insofar as Lutherans specifically are concerned, though, we have used the Book of Common Prayer in the English setting for Lutheranism anyway, not so much over in German speaking areas and not so much in the US when Lutheran spoke German in the US., but English speaking Lutherans have used the Book of Common Prayer in order to formulate some of our collects and things like that in our context.
SPEAKER_1: Much of our modern liturgy has roots in the Book of Common Prayer.
SPEAKER_1: It's not just roots back in German Lutheranism.
SPEAKER_1: And so we did sort of the same thing that we did with the Roman Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_1: We took the parts that were good and we jettisoned the rest, because you don't get rid of everything simply because some part is tainted.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, I'm speaking as a Lutheran, and I know some people disagree with me.
SPEAKER_1: That's fine, but you're wrong, but that's fine.
SPEAKER_1: When it comes down to it, you can keep many of these things if you change the parts that are objectionable.
SPEAKER_1: And across Christian traditions, we're going to hopefully at least agree on the core of things, because we should all agree on the Christian basics.
SPEAKER_1: That's the nature of the beast.
SPEAKER_1: And so we don't, certain things we don't change.
SPEAKER_1: You don't get to change the creeds for your particular denomination or tradition, because the creeds are universal, they're ecumenical.
SPEAKER_1: If you don't agree with the creeds, you're disagreeing with the actual church upper case C, which is to say all believers down through all ages up to the last unfortunate man standing on this earth.
SPEAKER_1: But things like the liturgy and other things like that, those are human creations, and so we can use those, and we are perfectly within our rights to change those over time.
SPEAKER_1: This is actually one of the disagreements we had with Rome during the Reformation, although obviously Rome has changed since then, since they've amended their own liturgy so many times now.
SPEAKER_1: But it is entirely proper for a people to change the liturgy in their time, in their place, for their people.
SPEAKER_1: Now, of course, it's within reason, and there are certain restrictions.
SPEAKER_1: You can't do things that make the liturgy teach false doctrine.
SPEAKER_1: You can't do things that would be outside the bounds of decency.
SPEAKER_1: There are some general guidelines, some rules here, obviously.
SPEAKER_1: But these are not things that have to be uniform across time and geography.
SPEAKER_1: And so, the Book of Common Prayer is something that we have used as Lutherans in the English-speaking context, almost exclusively.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, would you include Bell and the Dragon in other editions in a Bible in a year reading plan using the Septuagint for the Old Testament?
SPEAKER_1: There are really two questions there.
SPEAKER_1: One is, would I include those as scripture, or at least as useful to be read?
SPEAKER_1: Because obviously, not everything I read in the Daily Devotions, for instance, not all of that is scripture, because I read from the Book of Concord, which is not scripture.
SPEAKER_1: Granted, it cites scripture a lot, but it is not itself scripture.
SPEAKER_1: And so I do read from things that are not scripture.
SPEAKER_1: So would I read from those?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is yes, I don't have an objection to them.
SPEAKER_1: But do I consider them scripture?
SPEAKER_1: I think some of them probably are.
SPEAKER_1: Now, I'm not going to give a list of, well, this verse to this verse in this chapter.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not doing that here because I'm not the man to do that.
SPEAKER_1: That's something for the men who will be translating the Septuagint into a proper English translation.
SPEAKER_1: That's their task.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to tell them exactly what they should do.
SPEAKER_1: The advice that I was willing to give, that Wo was willing to give, we gave that already in the Stone Quire episode on translating the Septuagint into English.
SPEAKER_1: We already went through and did that.
SPEAKER_1: So, but the sort of general question, the secondary question, what do I read from them?
SPEAKER_1: I have no objection to that.
SPEAKER_1: I just certainly have not created an annual lectionary from which I'm going to read.
SPEAKER_1: That would involve a lot of time figuring out where to put things together, because a lot of time and effort does go into a proper lectionary anyway.
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, it's very easy to just sit down and start reading.
SPEAKER_1: And so, the Through the Bible in a Year podcast that I've been doing, I'm behind a little bit, but that one, I'm just reading straight through.
SPEAKER_1: So that doesn't really require prep time, but a lectionary where you're reading, say, from the Psalms or the wisdom literature, and then from the Old Testament and the New Testament, and that takes more planning, because you have to figure out what you're going to read through the course of the year.
SPEAKER_1: And to some degree, it should probably align with the seasons of the church.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I don't have an objection to it.
SPEAKER_1: I just don't have that lectionary.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't have the list of readings to actually do that right now.
SPEAKER_1: Next question, was Satan the first sinner?
SPEAKER_1: The answer to that one is yes.
SPEAKER_1: Satan was the first sinner.
SPEAKER_1: He's called the father of lies, and those who sin are said to be taking after their father, and their father is Satan.
SPEAKER_1: So he's the first one.
SPEAKER_1: He is the one who brought in evil.
SPEAKER_1: The next one is actually three different questions, so I will address them in turn.
SPEAKER_1: The first, actually, I will take the second one first.
SPEAKER_1: Do you think that marriages within the same general race, for example, Germans and Slavs, may contribute to higher divorce rates due to differences in inherited personalities?
SPEAKER_1: I think that the data bear that out, and just human experience does.
SPEAKER_1: We all know if you cross certain lines, the greater the line you cross, the more trouble you're causing for yourself, and for those around you, of course.
SPEAKER_1: So if you marry someone within your own nation, you're going to have the fewest problems, all else being held equal.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, you could have a bad marriage.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying that.
SPEAKER_1: No one's talking about outliers, exceptions, things like that.
SPEAKER_1: But if you cross that line and then marry from, say, a very close nation, a neighboring nation, the example that I use a lot would be the Germans and the Dutch, because the Germans and the Dutch are very close, very close cousins.
SPEAKER_1: And so not going to have very many problems there.
SPEAKER_1: A few more problems, difficulties, differences, than you would have if you married someone who was Dutch, if you're Dutch, or someone who's German, if you're German, but not as many problems.
SPEAKER_1: If, however, you're a German and you take a Russian wife, now you're going to have more problems because you've crossed a larger line.
SPEAKER_1: There's a difference, a bigger difference, between Northwestern Europeans, which is basically the Germanics and the Nordics, and the Eastern Europeans, the Slavics.
SPEAKER_1: So once you've crossed that line, you're going to have more problems.
SPEAKER_1: That's not to say that it's always wrong, of course, but what it's saying is you have to make the wisdom call.
SPEAKER_1: There is a necessary recognition that you are going to have more trouble if you have more differences.
SPEAKER_1: Because of course, these are things that have built up over time, and part of it is, as the question says, inherited personality differences.
SPEAKER_1: I already mentioned that with the way the different nations worship.
SPEAKER_1: We're just simply not the same.
SPEAKER_1: Germans do not interact the same with one another as do the Russians, as do the Italians, and anyone who goes to try and hug a German knows that, because we're not going to respond the same way that an Italian would.
SPEAKER_1: Different cultures behave differently, and so you are going to have to overcome those hurdles if you marry across those lines.
SPEAKER_1: And so generally, the wiser call is not to do that.
SPEAKER_1: It's not to say you can never do that, because it's not per se sinful for a German to marry a Slav or vice versa.
SPEAKER_1: It is simply not something that one normally does, and if things are operating as they should be, you're probably not going to really have the opportunity, because most people are not going to travel enough to be seeing a bunch of foreign women.
SPEAKER_1: That's not the way the world is supposed to work.
SPEAKER_1: It is sort of a very negative quirk of our modern society.
SPEAKER_1: The next question is, Exodus 21, 22 through 25 in the Septuagint seems to imply a difference in value between formed and unformed children.
SPEAKER_1: So, for that, let me have a fight with my camera here, and let's see.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so I will pull up that window, hopefully.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Now, if two men fight and strike, a pregnant woman and her child comes forth not fully formed, he shall be punished with a fine.
SPEAKER_1: According, as the husband of the woman might impose, he shall pay with judicial assessment.
SPEAKER_1: But if it is fully formed, he shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
SPEAKER_1: The last part, of course, is the lax talionis.
SPEAKER_1: And so, the question then, of course, this relates to abortion, this is one that comes up sometimes, not so often, because generally speaking, the people who are arguing from scripture, trying to argue from scripture with regard to abortion, don't actually know anything about scripture, so they're not going to bring this sort of thing up.
SPEAKER_1: But the question is, what is the difference between formed and unformed?
SPEAKER_1: And I haven't really researched the question, so I'm just going off memory here.
SPEAKER_1: But the church fathers and others, theologians who have treated this, have come down in basically, I believe it was two different ways.
SPEAKER_1: They either come down on the side of it being a miscarriage, or the first instance being the child is not harmed, but was simply premature.
SPEAKER_1: And the second instance is where the child is actually harmed.
SPEAKER_1: And I do think that you can get either one of those with a fair reading of the text.
SPEAKER_1: I don't necessarily have a personal opinion as to which one of those is true.
SPEAKER_1: I would not look to this for my argument with regard to abortion.
SPEAKER_1: And anytime I've argued about abortion, I've never looked to these verses in order to do that.
SPEAKER_1: I've addressed them before.
SPEAKER_1: I've addressed them primarily in the context of those who try to say that abortion is permissible in certain ways.
SPEAKER_1: And in particular, there are those who will try to argue that because of the ritual dealing with infidelity, for testing infidelity, that God says abortion is permissible.
SPEAKER_1: And that's simply not the case, because you could also try to make that argument saying God says abortion is permissible because he killed David's son with Bathsheba, his first son.
SPEAKER_1: That's not the case.
SPEAKER_1: There's someone being harmed, being killed in this case for sin.
SPEAKER_1: That's a different thing.
SPEAKER_1: We all die because of our sin.
SPEAKER_1: And so dying because of sin isn't per se immoral.
SPEAKER_1: It's not immoral at all because God's the one killing us.
SPEAKER_1: But with regard to abortion and this particular passage in Exodus, I think I would probably take this stance that it is the difference between the child not being harmed, but being premature, and the child being harmed.
SPEAKER_1: I believe that is consonant with the other parts of scripture.
SPEAKER_1: I believe Augustine took that view.
SPEAKER_1: I would have to look that up.
SPEAKER_1: But I believe that's consonant with the other parts of scripture and what else is taught, because we have the places where it says very clearly that God knew us before he formed us in the womb.
SPEAKER_1: He, you know, let me look up a couple of those real quick.
SPEAKER_1: I believe I actually have one of them open.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Jeremiah 1.5, before I formed you in the belly, also womb, I knew you.
SPEAKER_1: And before you came forth from the womb, I had consecrated you.
SPEAKER_1: And then I have, not open in the window that's on my screen right now, because it's a different Logos window, but Psalm 139 speaks of God knowing you before he forms you in the womb.
SPEAKER_1: There are these things that are very clearly teaching that God not only knows us beforehand, but he formed us.
SPEAKER_1: He is the one who created us.
SPEAKER_1: And so I think the only fair way to interpret when life begins is that it begins at conception.
SPEAKER_1: That's when you have a unique organism, a unique human being.
SPEAKER_1: I have some people saying the audio on YouTube has some issues.
SPEAKER_1: So let me try and figure out what is going on there, because of course, I will just switch my inputs for...
SPEAKER_1: Let's see.
SPEAKER_1: If someone could comment on the audio quality now, that would be helpful.
SPEAKER_1: If I know whether or not it has a problem, I don't know why there would be an echo there, but apparently, there was.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: I would think that swapping to this mic would fix it.
SPEAKER_1: No change.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's even more odd.
SPEAKER_1: I don't see anything on my end reporting hitting limits.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe it's in OBS.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see.
SPEAKER_1: I knocked down the max volume level in OBS, and I don't think I'm hitting any limitations there.
SPEAKER_1: So does the audio sound fine now, or I'm still having issues coming through?
SPEAKER_1: Because I do not see anything on my end, insofar as those problems are concerned.
SPEAKER_1: It got clearer when I said I'd check OBS.
SPEAKER_1: That makes, actually, even less sense.
SPEAKER_1: Let me see if...
SPEAKER_1: I literally see zero problems on my end.
SPEAKER_1: Well, maybe I will just kill Twitch and hope for the best.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, someone says you can hear me perfectly on both.
SPEAKER_1: I assume that means that I somehow fixed it without really actually changing any of my settings, which is always great.
SPEAKER_1: I have to love audio at any rate to continue answering the question.
SPEAKER_1: The central issue is what constitutes abortion and is abortion ever morally permissible?
SPEAKER_1: I think that the safest answer is that abortion is never morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: And I believe that human life begins at conception because that's the clearest point where you have a unique life form and any harm to that life form, deliberate harm, of course.
SPEAKER_1: We're never talking about miscarriage because that is out of, obviously, it's out of control if it's accidental, because of course, abortion is an intentional miscarriage.
SPEAKER_1: But if you have this unique human being, this is a creature created by God.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, it does have the image of God.
SPEAKER_1: I don't want to get into that whole thing right now, but you cannot terminate or harm that life without adequate moral warrant.
SPEAKER_1: The same thing for any human being.
SPEAKER_1: You can't harm another human being without adequate moral warrant.
SPEAKER_1: And I don't believe that there is adequate moral warrant for abortion in basically any case.
SPEAKER_1: No, it's not in the case of rape or incest or anything like that, because yes, on the one hand, there is sort of the issue of, are you punishing the child for the sins of the father?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, but is that always wrongful to punish the child for the sins of the father?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is no.
SPEAKER_1: But in the case of abortion, I simply don't think that it's ever morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: And even if you could construct an argument saying that it is morally permissible under certain circumstances, I think you should still err on the side of caution and never engage in that behavior.
SPEAKER_1: If there are things that lead to the point where you're trying to argue that abortion should be permissible, it should be an option to resolve a problem, step back a few steps and solve the actual problem.
SPEAKER_1: So, abortion is not a solution for rape.
SPEAKER_1: Executing rapists is a solution for rape, among other things.
SPEAKER_1: The next question is, do I have a recommended reading list?
SPEAKER_1: And the answer to that is no, I don't.
SPEAKER_1: I should probably start making one.
SPEAKER_1: I should start formulating one.
SPEAKER_1: I get asked that question all the time.
SPEAKER_1: Perhaps, I will start adding things as I think of them to a list on my site about, here's my recommendation for this particular area.
SPEAKER_1: I just have, I have too many books that I would have to go through for figuring out sort of a top 10 or whatever it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: But I can generally give some recommendations, certainly in a given area.
SPEAKER_1: Most topics.
SPEAKER_1: What are your thoughts on right-wing political philosophers like Spengler, Schmidt, and Avela?
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's rather timely.
SPEAKER_1: Pretty much an extension of that previous question there.
SPEAKER_1: So in order of whether or not they are worth reading, Schmidt would be first and Avela would be last.
SPEAKER_1: I know that some people really like Avela.
SPEAKER_1: I just really don't.
SPEAKER_1: I don't feel that he's necessarily worth the time to read.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying that no one can get anything out of him, the same sort of thing as Nietzsche sometimes.
SPEAKER_1: You can get something out of reading Nietzsche, but unless you are a certain type of man, you're probably going to get more out of doing any of a number of other things than actually reading Nietzsche or Avela.
SPEAKER_1: Now, Schmidt, of course, is great.
SPEAKER_1: You should read him if you have any interest in political philosophy, political theory, anything like that.
SPEAKER_1: He is definitely worth your time.
SPEAKER_1: Spengler has some good insights.
SPEAKER_1: I won't say that his work is not worth reading, and I won't necessarily give a blanket recommendation either.
SPEAKER_1: He has, again, good insights, but I don't think that all of his conclusions are correct, which is not a reason to say that a man shouldn't be read, because of course, there are plenty of great authors whose conclusions are wrong, even if their work is good.
SPEAKER_1: But the general hierarchy there that I gave the three in order would be, obviously, Schmitt, yes, read him, Avila, probably don't.
SPEAKER_1: The sort of follow-up question to that is, have they impacted my beliefs in any way?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is probably not really.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe Schmitt a little bit, but I already sort of agreed with his argument before I read it, so I don't know that he really impacted the things I believe.
SPEAKER_1: I guess perhaps I refined my own beliefs in interacting with his.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, do you think we are now in the time that Satan has been released as stated in Revelation 20 verse 7?
SPEAKER_1: If so, when do you think that time began or is it more symbolic?
SPEAKER_1: I do think that there is a period at the end of all things where Satan will be released or has been released depending.
SPEAKER_1: I know that Woe is more inclined to believe that we are in that period, that end period where Satan is actually released, where he's free, where he's off his leash.
SPEAKER_1: I am not necessarily of the opinion that we are in that end time.
SPEAKER_1: I think one could argue that we are, I think you could argue that we are not.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's going to depend, it's unhelpful perhaps or at least not satisfying as an answer.
SPEAKER_1: It's going to depend on what happens in the future because then looking back, we'll be able to tell whether or not we were in that time now.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't think we can necessarily tell.
SPEAKER_1: At least not with certainty.
SPEAKER_1: And so the question is, how do we deal with that?
SPEAKER_1: How do we address that?
SPEAKER_1: And it is very much the same as what I have said a number of other times at other places about something very similar.
SPEAKER_1: It's how we conduct ourselves because we're conduct ourselves as if we could die tomorrow.
SPEAKER_1: And so does it matter if Satan has been released or not?
SPEAKER_1: Maybe, because it's going to depend upon whether or not he's been released as to how bad things get, certainly.
SPEAKER_1: But as Christians, we simply live our lives as Christians, regardless of whether or not Satan has been released, regardless of sort of what sort of harm is out there in the world and how bad things are.
SPEAKER_1: It's very easy for Lutheran to answer that typically because we always use the comment from Luther that if he knew the world would end tomorrow, today, he would plant his apple tree.
SPEAKER_1: That's the right outlook on things.
SPEAKER_1: Live your life as a Christian, do what you're supposed to do, do your duty.
SPEAKER_1: And whether or not Satan has been unbound, yes, it's going to change how your life goes and generally how society goes.
SPEAKER_1: But there's nothing you can do about that.
SPEAKER_1: All you can do is do the things that God has set in front of you and given you the ability to address, which is, say, do your duty, live a Christian life.
SPEAKER_1: The next question is, have you read Carroll Quigley?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is yes, but it has been a long time.
SPEAKER_1: I very vaguely remember his work on political theory, on democracies, weapons.
SPEAKER_1: It's been a long time since I read his work.
SPEAKER_1: Insofar as, is it worth reading?
SPEAKER_1: My general recollection is that, this is another case where he had insights.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know that they were necessarily worth the amount of time you would invest in reading it.
SPEAKER_1: I know Bill Clinton really liked, remember that.
SPEAKER_1: But I believe, if I am not remembering incorrectly, that I did enjoy reading some of his work, but I didn't find it, I didn't find his arguments necessarily particularly compelling.
SPEAKER_1: And I believe one of his theses was that, you have to have parity and access to weaponry within a given population, so that that population can sustain a democratic form of governments, democratic form of governance.
SPEAKER_1: And I mean, maybe that's true, but I just don't find it particularly compelling.
SPEAKER_1: And I would argue about the validity or viability of democracy on other grounds, not necessarily on the availability of certain kinds of weapons.
SPEAKER_1: Now, of course, that's not to say it's irrelevant, because if you don't have a population that can defend itself, you're never going to have any sort of representative government, because you're going to clearly have a ruling class and a slave class divided along the lines of who can and cannot buy weapons.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's not wrong in that sense.
SPEAKER_1: It's just not necessarily what I would personally spend my time reading.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, why would you consider eugenics to be Christian?
SPEAKER_1: I addressed this at one point in an archival episode, actually, not of Stone Choir, but of this podcast, what I'm using for the Q&A and maybe some other things in the future.
SPEAKER_1: I commented on it in light of the duty that we have as stewards of creation.
SPEAKER_1: And we have a duty to steward creation to basically gardeners.
SPEAKER_1: That was our original job.
SPEAKER_1: Adam was a gardener.
SPEAKER_1: Incidentally, there's some lovely sort of book ending there with Christ being mistaken for a gardener in the garden after the resurrection, which is appropriate because of course he is a gardener as well.
SPEAKER_1: But the point of eugenics is to see that you maintain the best of a given line, whatever it happens to be, because we engage in eugenics constantly.
SPEAKER_1: That's one thing that's worth mentioning sort of at the outset.
SPEAKER_1: When you breed your tomatoes so that they are fit for your soil and your climate and all those other things, that's eugenics.
SPEAKER_1: When you pick your pet based on the family line, and this is particularly something comes to mind when I am, I'm just reading a question about the audio bitrate again.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, that's probably is a bitrate mismatch.
SPEAKER_1: I'm going to have to look at that when I'm done with this.
SPEAKER_1: YouTube has very different settings from X, which is very weird with their bitrate settings.
SPEAKER_1: But to return to the question of eugenics, you're engaging in eugenics all the time.
SPEAKER_1: And as I was saying, with regard to pets, this is particularly something that is important to me, something that is relevant.
SPEAKER_1: My family has always had golden retrievers.
SPEAKER_1: And due to the actions of, well, bad breeders, basically puppy mills, there are some lines of golden retrievers, particularly United States, that have a lot of genetic problems.
SPEAKER_1: They are, in fact, prone to cancer in some cases, and I've lost a dog to that.
SPEAKER_1: So I recognize the problems there.
SPEAKER_1: And so you want to have this concern, and I've certainly had this concern when looking at potential new dogs, and not recently, because now my dog, I guess recently, my dogs are only two years old.
SPEAKER_1: But you want to look at the line in order to avoid some of these problems.
SPEAKER_1: The issue is, we see everyone wanting to draw a hard line.
SPEAKER_1: Plants and animals are on this side, human beings are on the other.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, that's completely ridiculous, because we are part of creation.
SPEAKER_1: We are not just spirit, and we are certainly not a ghost riding around in a meat suit, as some people want to say.
SPEAKER_1: You are your body, and it should matter to you what you pass on to your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren.
SPEAKER_1: And it should also matter to the prince, the Christian prince, the leader of the nation, whatever title he happens to have, for those who aren't familiar, prince just is a generic title for the Christian leader.
SPEAKER_1: But he should be concerned about the fitness of his people.
SPEAKER_1: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: Because that is going to impact every part of his nation, every part of their lives.
SPEAKER_1: If you have genetic problems, it is going to impact you every single day of your life.
SPEAKER_1: And those things can be avoided by engaging in eugenics.
SPEAKER_1: The issue then is not so much eugenics, and this is...
SPEAKER_1: People tend to conflate some things here.
SPEAKER_1: So eugenics itself is not a problem.
SPEAKER_1: The question is not the practice.
SPEAKER_1: The question is the means used to implement, or the means used to attempt to achieve the goal.
SPEAKER_1: There are some things that are morally impermissible.
SPEAKER_1: There are some things that are morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I believe that sterilization is morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: Our Supreme Court, now decades ago, ruled on that and said that it was morally permissible, and that it was legally permissible, more notably for them, to sterilize the mentally infirm, so that they did not continue to pass on those genetic problems.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I believe that that's morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: But you cannot take that next step and engage in euthanasia, because then what you're doing is you are killing someone without a sufficient moral warrant, and to kill someone without a sufficient moral warrant is murder.
SPEAKER_1: And so, that is not permissible.
SPEAKER_1: This is where the question arises, where people start to have trouble understanding this.
SPEAKER_1: They get into sort of a gray area.
SPEAKER_1: Passive eugenics is sort of the distinctive term I've used, is morally permissible.
SPEAKER_1: It is the active eugenics that is not, which is to say you cannot euthanize people because they have bad genes.
SPEAKER_1: And it's worth mentioning, of course, particularly in a Christian context, all of this is a problem for this life.
SPEAKER_1: You're not going to have genetic problems in the next life because God is going to cure all of that when he raises you in an imperishable body.
SPEAKER_1: But that doesn't mean that the problems of this life can be ignored.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't mean that they go away because those problems continue to exist, and they get worse over time if we ignore them.
SPEAKER_1: So, for instance, if you have a population that engages in inbreeding for centuries, or for millennia, in some cases, we can look at certain parts of the world, that population is going to have a lot of problems.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to have a lower IQ.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to have lower fitness overall.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to have lower fertility.
SPEAKER_1: They're going to have so many different problems.
SPEAKER_1: And if they had simply had someone at some point in the past enforce a prohibition on inbreeding, they would have fewer problems.
SPEAKER_1: It does not get better if you ignore it.
SPEAKER_1: It just keeps getting worse.
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, it is worth mentioning that banning inbreeding, banning incest, banning marriages to your very close relatives is, in fact, a form of eugenics.
SPEAKER_1: And so we already have eugenics policies live today.
SPEAKER_1: We use them all over the place, even for human beings.
SPEAKER_1: The objection that people have, because it always comes back to this, is that the eugenics policies of the past typically prohibited interracial marriage.
SPEAKER_1: And so really when people are saying they object to eugenics, what they're really objecting to is banning interracial marriage.
SPEAKER_1: And I've addressed that a number of times in other places, and so I want to get into it now, because I think we're already in about an hour and a half, give or take.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't know how much longer I will necessarily go right now, but I have a few more questions, so I'll try to get through those as well.
SPEAKER_1: I will go to this one as the next question.
SPEAKER_1: What are your thoughts on the tactic to not appear as an extremist?
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, in my case, I can answer that one pretty quickly, pretty straightforward.
SPEAKER_1: I think that there are fundamental problems with trying to appear to be a moderate.
SPEAKER_1: It's not necessarily that you're lying, although in some cases you certainly are, and there's something to be said about that.
SPEAKER_1: But I think the bigger problem is that what being a fake moderate actually does, is it makes it look like being a moderate is more moderate, so called, of course.
SPEAKER_1: It makes it look like that is more popular than it actually is, and it makes it look like the correct views are less popular.
SPEAKER_1: And for better or worse, many people simply go along with the crowd, and they're going to do that regardless.
SPEAKER_1: That's the way that it goes.
SPEAKER_1: If you have people who are speaking out truthfully, instead of trying to appear to be a moderate, to be respectable, or whatever it happens to be, it does actually shift things.
SPEAKER_1: It's one of the reasons that I have chosen as a strategy to stake out, not necessarily extreme positions, but the ultimate form of the position that is morally permissible, because then what I've done is I've anchored the Overton window at one end.
SPEAKER_1: And that forces people to recognize that this is the limit, because someone's staked this out now in a way that cannot be ignored.
SPEAKER_1: And so, it opens up this other territory where other men can maneuver.
SPEAKER_1: And I can say that that's a tactic, it's a strategy, because it doesn't change the reality even if people recognize what is being done.
SPEAKER_1: It still works even if people know it's being done.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I don't stake out positions simply because they're the most extreme.
SPEAKER_1: I stake out a position because it is an ultimate form of that position, is the ultimate sort of position you can take within that spectrum.
SPEAKER_1: And so, I pick something that is morally permissible, and I pick something that I believe, but I argue it in such a way that it opens up opportunity for others.
SPEAKER_1: And so, the basic answer to the argument is, I'm not particularly fond of trying to appear like a moderate, because I don't think that moderation is actually, in this case, in politics, is a virtue.
SPEAKER_1: Now, moderation with regard to drinking and eating and things like that, of course, it's a virtue, because you shouldn't be a glutton or a drunk.
SPEAKER_1: But with regard to politics, you should believe that which is true, not that which is comfortable in a sort of moderate sense.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, do Lutherans believe faith is merely an empty virtue, as Catholics often criticize them?
SPEAKER_1: Why couldn't God reward faith with justification for more than it's strictly worth rather than have faith as a mere instrument for justification?
SPEAKER_1: This goes into Fides Formata and Fides Informus and things like that, which Fides Formata is just the Roman Catholic conception of faith formed by love, which is their argument.
SPEAKER_1: And I think the real answer to this question is taking a step backward, because the Lutheran answer is going to be that faith is a free gift of God that receives salvation.
SPEAKER_1: So it's all God, it's monergism, it's not synergism in this case.
SPEAKER_1: Now, in sanctification, there's synergism, because your renewed spirit, your renewed person can indeed cooperate and should indeed cooperate with the Holy Ghost.
SPEAKER_1: But in justification, God alone acts, because what does God say of you with regard to you before you are justified?
SPEAKER_1: Well, he calls you a corpse, and the dead do not act outside of Hollywood movies.
SPEAKER_1: And so, insofar as the difference between Lutherans and Roman Catholics is concerned, the Roman Catholics are trying to shoehorn the Lutheran understanding of things into their system, and then saying that it doesn't fit.
SPEAKER_1: Well, of course, it doesn't fit, because we don't believe the same thing with regard to justification.
SPEAKER_1: They mix works into justification, which is semi-Pelagianism, even if they don't like the term.
SPEAKER_1: That's what it is.
SPEAKER_1: That's the reality of what Rome teaches.
SPEAKER_1: It's what they've taught for centuries.
SPEAKER_1: Lutherans teach sola fide, by faith alone.
SPEAKER_1: And for those who think that, well, Lutherans say that you have to be baptized.
SPEAKER_1: Of course we do, because we're talking about the means of grace at that point, and the means of grace are essentially the word spoken and the word in the water, which is to say baptism.
SPEAKER_1: The word's always present.
SPEAKER_1: You don't have a baptism without the word.
SPEAKER_1: And so if I just splashed water on you, that's not a baptism.
SPEAKER_1: The word has to be present as well.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's not so much that we Lutherans believe that faith is an empty virtue, as it is that the Roman Catholics just have an entirely different system.
SPEAKER_1: They have built up a different philosophical system with regard to these virtues, with regard to what justification is, with regard to what faith is.
SPEAKER_1: And the Lutheran conception doesn't fit into their system because their system is not what we believe.
SPEAKER_1: And so is faith an empty virtue?
SPEAKER_1: It's not an empty virtue.
SPEAKER_1: It's a free gift from God that certainly has virtue.
SPEAKER_1: And you could even say, if you were so inclined, it is the thing that receives justification.
SPEAKER_1: And so does it warrant that?
SPEAKER_1: Does it deserve that in a sense?
SPEAKER_1: And the answer is yes, which there's no problem in saying that, because again, faith is a free gift from God.
SPEAKER_1: You are not warranting or deserving salvation.
SPEAKER_1: God is the one doing all of it.
SPEAKER_1: I think that is most of the questions that I had picked out from earlier.
SPEAKER_1: For those who want to, I'm not necessarily ending right now, but for those who want to submit questions for next time, when hopefully I have figured out how to get the bitrate in OBS and these various streaming platforms to cooperate a little better, if you want to do that, then there will be a link on X and other places, so you can sign up and submit those questions.
SPEAKER_1: I will just quickly scroll through the chat, see if there are any questions that stand out.
SPEAKER_1: And, let's see, are you going back on the backlash?
SPEAKER_1: I would not object to doing so, I have no objection to that.
SPEAKER_1: So, for those who question where I was getting the questions, I already answered that.
SPEAKER_1: So, look at a couple more platforms here.
SPEAKER_1: The problem with having these spread around is it takes a minute to check.
SPEAKER_1: I do see that someone submitted a few questions in an image here, and now X refreshed, and I don't see the image anymore.
SPEAKER_1: That's helpful.
SPEAKER_1: If I can find that one, I think I will go through those and then call it four.
SPEAKER_1: Well, if you are listening and you submitted a question in an image format, X refreshed and your reply disappeared.
SPEAKER_1: I cannot find it.
SPEAKER_1: So if you would resubmit those, I will answer them next week because I can't answer them because they disappeared.
SPEAKER_1: I can answer in so far as I very briefly was able to look at it.
SPEAKER_1: I looked at it for a couple of seconds.
SPEAKER_1: But I saw that one of the questions was about baptism.
SPEAKER_1: So I can go over very quickly what Lutherans believe on baptism, which should answer the question, hopefully.
SPEAKER_1: The Lutheran belief on baptism, as I just said, with regard to the means of grace, is that baptism is a means of grace.
SPEAKER_1: And so faith is not a requirement for baptism because faith is given to you in baptism.
SPEAKER_1: However, that is the ordinary course of things, and the ordinary course of things is fathers raising up their children to be Christians, which is to say, baptizing them as infants.
SPEAKER_1: And so if you're baptized as an infant, maybe you have faith because you heard the word in utero.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe you receive faith in the waters of baptism.
SPEAKER_1: We don't know.
SPEAKER_1: Also doesn't matter because it's however God wants to do it.
SPEAKER_1: But if you're an adult convert, then most likely you are going to have faith when you come to the font.
SPEAKER_1: And there's nothing wrong with that because then baptism is still going to be a seal of your faith.
SPEAKER_1: It is still going to function to strengthen your faith.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, you are going to publicly profess your faith, but that is something separate.
SPEAKER_1: The baptism itself is God's work.
SPEAKER_1: Even if it is the hands of the pastor or if it's your father's hands, if you happen to have been baptized by your father, which in my case, I was or both my siblings.
SPEAKER_1: Because if you have this man acting in the stead of Christ, it is not actually that man acting.
SPEAKER_1: God is the one baptizing you, it is God's work.
SPEAKER_1: All good things that you receive are mediated in some way, basically.
SPEAKER_1: There are almost no exceptions to that.
SPEAKER_1: And so all good gifts ultimately come from God, but they are usually mediated by created beings or created things.
SPEAKER_1: A good example would be, when you were growing up, your parents cooked all of your meals, fed you, took care of you.
SPEAKER_1: All of those goods ultimately come from God, but they are mediated by the hands of your parents.
SPEAKER_1: Similar, baptism is mediated by the hands of the pastor, whatever Christian man happens to be baptizing you, but it is God's work.
SPEAKER_1: It is not your work, you are not the one doing anything, and neither is the pastor, because it is God's work, and that is why it can bestow the free gift of faith.
SPEAKER_1: So that's sort of the short version of the Lutheran belief on baptism.
SPEAKER_1: Again, X disappeared your questions, so if you'd like to resubmit them, please do.
SPEAKER_1: Have I spoken to Arvold from Return to Land?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, I have spoken to him.
SPEAKER_1: I have not gone on a show with him or anything like that yet.
SPEAKER_1: I may do that in the future, but I have spoken to him.
SPEAKER_1: He's a very nice man.
SPEAKER_1: I got along with him very well.
SPEAKER_1: So I think that is all of the questions for now.
SPEAKER_1: I see that X is not working again, which I'm going to assume that the gentleman who mentioned the bitrate, probably right since I've looked at X's settings and they are a little quirky.
SPEAKER_1: So hopefully next week, I will not have audio issues, but I will certainly try to fix that.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see, someone just mentioned something else that I will look at after this.
SPEAKER_1: But for those who are going to submit questions, I will certainly post that again on my X feed so that you can see where to submit those questions.
SPEAKER_1: I'll post it in my Telegram channel as well, since many of you were in there.
SPEAKER_1: And I will get up the audio for this, as well as the questions with a transcript when that is run off.
SPEAKER_1: I just use the one that's run off by Apple Podcasts, because their AI is very good at doing that, so I use that one.
SPEAKER_1: So thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you for those who submitted questions.
SPEAKER_1: And I hope that you have a nice evening.
SPEAKER_1: God bless you.
SPEAKER_1: Until next week.