03 Apr 2026 (Q&A)

0:21 It is the third of April twenty twenty six. I am Cory J. Mahler and this is at any cost. This is episode twenty three, a QA episode. And I do not have any housekeeping for this week other than to wish all of you a blessed good Friday. So I will get right into the questions. I'm actually going to start with two questions from previous episodes that I did not get around to answering and then we'll move into some specifically for this episode that came in this week. So question one What have the Japanese done that kept their morality intact as opposed to the rest of Asia? Why are they not as morally bankrupt as China or India or not as devolved as India is. I put this one off in part because it's kind of a

1:21 complex question, as you can probably already notice. And there is a lot to go over here. So this one is going to take a little time to answer. Probably not too much time, but in order to understand the differences in Asia, we're going to limit this analysis to limit Japan, China, and India, because expanding it beyond that would have been you know, the course of study of an entire semester at university. But in order to understand these differences, you have to understand some religions slash worldviews first. A little bit, not going into it in depth, because again that would be quite the course. So Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Taoism are really what's in play here. Yes, you also do have more recently Islam in the case

2:17 of India, but quite frankly I'm just going to ignore it because it doesn't form as much of the substrate on which all of this stuff has occurred over a course of two thousand plus years. Really more than that. But But Shintoism, starting there, is polytheistic and animistic and is going to have the largest impact in almost exclusively in this case, a little bit in China, but almost exclusively Japan. And The focus for Shintoism is ritual, purity, and it's focused on this life. I'm obviously simplifying this to some degree, so bear that in mind. Cum granos salis, as it were. But insofar as commonalities and differences, I'm going to sort of break it down that way so we can compare it to Christianity and

3:09 how it has influenced these societies, these cultures, these races, as opposed to European Christianity. And so for commonalities, you do have the focus on prayer in Shintoism. There's communal worship, moral purity, community, hard work, and honoring ancestors is a little bit of an overlap because it overlaps with obviously the fourth commandment, and particularly a proper understanding of the fourth commandment, see Stone Choir for more. So that's the rough outline, a small bit as it were, for Shintoism. Now Buddhism. Buddhism is non-theistic. It's going to be less of a religion and more of a worldview, although it has elements of being a religion as well. Usually Usually it's layered onto something else.

3:58 There's syncretic pairing as it were. And so you have the religion of Shintoism with some Buddhism on it, so the Japanese case, Zen Buddhism mostly in their case. As far as differences go, because it's really mostly differences here, there's a little bit of focus the same with regard to morality, but it's so different and for different reasons that there's almost no overlap with Christianity. But there's a denial of the self in an absolute sense in Buddhism that is not a thing in Western Christianity. And I don't mean denial of the self in the way that Western ears might hear it, which would be if you say denial of the self to a Westerner, they're going to hear self-control or fasting, something like that, denying the self in a way that is

4:46 deliberately doing that for some other purpose, whatever it happens to be. That's not what Buddhism is. Buddhism is a denial of the self as self, saying the self ultimately doesn't exist. And so you wind up with views that are not even really annihilationist because you're returning to the grand universe. And so it's a dissolution of the self, but not really annihilation because it doesn't believe the self ever existed. Obviously, very different from Christianity, from the Western view of things, including the pagans in this case. There's a focus on impermanence, karma, reincarnation, and a pursuit of what they call enlightenment, which is really just realizing you don't exist. Sort of absurd, but as opposed to what we would call a

5:35 pursuit of wisdom. So there's a distinction there between wisdom and enlightenment. They're not the same thing in these traditions. Confucianism, obviously mostly the Chinese case, although during the During the Tokugawa period, also applicable to Japan. So there's some cross-pollination there, as it were. Part of that came through Korea, but we're ignoring them for tonight. The focus there would be again, ritual, but propriety more than purity in this case, filial piety, and social harmony. There's also benevolence, but it's in a different sense from how we would use the term in the West The West, and so I don't know I can really add that in here. As far as commonalities go, you'd also have that respect for ancestors,

6:21 although for differences, in this case it starts to shade into ancestor worship, which obviously we do not do in Christian lands, or at least we should not be doing. There's syncretism in some parts of the world, obviously, it's a big problem in Africa, for instance. The focus again is on this life, as opposed to the next life, as opposed to you know salvation, damnation, judgment, things like that. It's a focus on this life, and so it is a different thing. Apparently OBS decided to disconnect from kick, but I'll just toggle that and hopefully it'll fix itself. And maybe it did. Anyway, moving on to Hinduism, which is one more after that because w Taoism does play a role as well. Hinduism is polytheistic, obviously extremely polytheistic in most formulations.

7:19 Also pan theistic more than panentheistic. So for commonalities, there's a focus on morality in it, but it is an illusory focus, and it takes such a form in Hinduism that it's not anything we as Christians or Westerners would recognize as morality. And we'll get into that as well. So for Taoism, the last one here, the Tao is an impersonal force. There's no actual or absolute moral right and wrong moral system in that worldview. It's more indifferent because it's an impersonal force. So So now to get into analyzing why these nations are different and how they sort of got where they are, obviously again this is going to be cursory. This is the sort of stuff where you could spend an entire semester on each one of these nations just within this scope in

8:16 university somewhere. So like I mentioned earlier, there's the Tokugawa period, which is basically the sort of end of the the samurai period here, hundreds of years ago in this case. And you have a policy of seclusion. This is Japan, so. And Confucianism is also imported at this point sort of from China into Japan. It starts to form some of the ultimate foundation of the Japanese outlook, their worldview as it would be constituted today, adding to Shin Shintoism. Now you also have after this period there's the Meiji Restoration, which is when they start to adopt p some of the Western views of things. And so this is when the economy starts to become capitalist, for instance. And capitalism plays a role in all of this, but you

9:12 have reform. Incidentally, you have a purging of foreign elements during that period, largely trying to remove Chinese influence from Japanese society. And so some suppression of Confucianism in favor of more of the traditional Shintoism, which is sort of the pagan Japanese religion. I should probably mention that the Japanese religion doesn't really have much of a focus on salvation, judgment, damnation, the afterlife. It's like I said in the beginning, it's more focused on this life. But it's also regional, sort of in a way that we do not have with obviously Christianity, because we have a creator God who made everything. He is God. They have a bunch of kami, which are basically local gods that

10:01 have some connection to a place and don't really have an overarching power. And so you have all these various shrines, you go and revere them, but they don't have one creator god as we have, and so you don't have the same sort of system of judgment and salvation things like that. So these are some differences where we where we would call them obviously wrong, but they also play into the differences between the various Asian peoples and why they are the way they are. We'll see the greatest contrast between the Japanese and the Indians actually, but there's some contrast there obviously between the Japanese and the Chinese as well. But in addition to sort of this opening up that you have during this period and the modernization, you see

10:48 the creation of the Zaibatsu, which are basically large conglomerates, this is partly an outgrowth of the way that the Japanese view the world, and so you have these large industrial conglomerates that in some In some cases, do basically everything. You have equivalence in China and Korea. This is kind of common in Asia generally. Less common in the European context, although we have some of that now as well. This is sort of how they integrated capitalism into their system and gave it a Japanese flavor. But insofar as the overall way that Japanese religion interfaces with their society, it's sort of less overtly religious as we would conceive of it, and it's become more of sort of the background radiation of the

11:37 society, the foundation. It's based on the mixture of all of these things, but not necessarily overtly religious in the way we would think of it. This is similar to some of the very secular now so-called European nations that are still very culturally Christian, but no longer particularly religiously Christian. But moving on to China, and I have one particular aspect I'm going to draw out after I do these brief country summaries that really highlights the difference in how they came to be the way that they are, but it's important to understand the philosophies and the religions that fed into that. But in the Chinese case they have what they call the three teachings, and the three teachings are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

12:25 That's why I went over those, they're all relevant here. So for Confucianism, you get the Chinese focus on hierarchy comes from that, again filial piety, the focus on social harmony instead of strife, and so there's a particular pressure not to ruffle feathers, as it were, which is going to run counter to sort of the individualism in the non-negative sense that has always been part of Western society. They're going to focus more on group cohesion as opposed to being right, for instance. Which you can see that starts to play into how they're different. There's a m there is a focus on moral self-cultivation. We can sort of resonate with that for Confucianism. There's some similarity there, but again, the morality is very different from

13:18 what we would call morality, and so it's not necessarily a commonality, there's a big difference there. There is a focus on merit based governance. In part this is inherent to Confucianism itself, and in part it comes from the imperial period in which you had large-scale, mass-scale instruction in Confucianism, including testing in order to get into these imperial positions, and you had a giant bureaucracy. It was very much deliberately entrenched in the Chinese nation by the Empire, by the Imperial Court. And then that's also where we get the Chinese view of benevolent authoritarianism. We have that as well in the West. It's a slightly different formulation because racial differences. But that comes in large part from Confucianism and from the way

14:11 that the Chinese Empire used it in order to maintain their control, build out their control, and shape their society as well to some degree. For Taoism, I don't know that I really need to get into their concept of Wu Wei the effortless action sort of thing. It plays a role in this because there's an undercurrent in Taoism, the view of the world, that you have this impersonal force that sort of acts without acting in an effortless way and aligning yourself with that is seen as a good thing and so you can see how that would influence their psychology to some degree. It plays a role. But there's adaptability and pragmatism is a big part of Taoism, which very much plays into the Chinese psychology and how they, of course,

14:59 view the world, but how they interact with the world. Their entire worldview has that as sort of a substrate. And there are some will bring up harmony with nature that's supposedly part of Taoism, but I think we can all look at modern China and see that it is anything but harmonious when it comes to nature, and so pragmatism sort of controlled over that, particularly after the introduction of capitalism and industrialization. So that's sort of the brief over there for Taoism, now it plays into the Chinese system. But for Buddhism, you get the general thing for Buddhism: the impermanence and the focus on karma. A little less in the Chinese case. But much the same as Japan. This is more of the background or the substrate of the culture

15:49 instead of an outright overt sort of religion. They are not overtly religious, mostly. In the same way that we are in the West, for those of us who were actually religious still. The mandate of heaven is another thing that's important to understand in the Chinese case. That gets more into politics, which perhaps it's relevant at some point. I guess it's relevant today, really. But the mandate of heaven was the argument of the Chinese imperial court that they had a right, a divine right to rule, because they had the mandate of heaven, the mandate of the gods, right? The Chinese Communist Party doesn't necessarily use the same language, but they use the same arguments. They still use Confucianism.

16:37 They suppressed Confucianism supposedly, but then reimported all of its teachings. So they kind of did the same thing that the Communists did in Russia with the Russian Orthodox Church. They pretended to suppress it, then they revived it, brought it back, and used it as a political weapon. Which is exactly what it became. And it is there are those who will try to argue that because of the fact the communists pretended, really pretended, to suppress con Confucianism in the Chinese case, that they are at odds, but really Confucianism is what paved the way for communism to take over China because of that natural acceptance of almost totalitarianism, not authoritarianism really, as we would call

17:22 it, this conformity, this slavish acceptance of hierarchy, the desire not to ruffle feathers, all of these things played into fertile soil for communism. There's a bit of exploitation there as well, obviously, because there was Jewish involvement with the Chinese Communist Party, particularly early on, but question for another time perhaps. But Confucianism has given them the ability to mobilize in a way that is difficult in some other countries because you have this have this level of mass conformity and this obedience to hierarchy, there are advantages and disadvantages. Individually, they don't do so well, but you can mass mobilize them much more easily than say those in the West or some other

18:12 places. Japan has a little bit of the collectivization as well. All of these countries in this part, not India at this point, are collective in a way that Westerners are not. The Indians are in a very specific way both collectivist and individualist, but I'll get into that after I'm done with China here. So they also do have this opposition to foreign influence, which has helped keep them somewhat insular. However, because of the way that it played out historically, they wound up obviously being defeated and not entirely conquered and colonized in the same way as some other nations, but they had to open up and pursue a rapid policy of development because of what this did historically. There's the whole middle kingdom concept and being the center of

19:03 the world and not needing anything from anywhere else and It has pluses and minuses. It's kept out foreign influence, but it also made them insular in a way that proved to be detrimental because they sort of ignored the outside world and you can't do that because the outside world doesn't stop existing and doesn't stop influencing you simply because you pretend they don't exist. Japan also learned that sort of the same way. But insofar as that's concerned, you also have the the communist element plays into it. They're related related and because communists are always maintaining power in part based on grievance. This nation has a grievance of that against that one and so I mean it's the same a lot of places, you have the

19:50 common enemy and the common enemy helps to unite you. But you have the century of humiliation in the Chinese context, which basically was the period before they opened up, because they were forced to open up by being conquered. Not entirely, but in part. This fuels more their interaction with some of the Western powers, although they have some views of Japan as well, incidentally, but it doesn't play as much of a role in their relationship in this part of the world, but it does form part of the psychology of how they look at the world. But then moving on to India, the third and final one for this The concepts that are important in India would be really the concepts that do play the major role in Hinduism.

20:39 So you have what they call dharma, which is duty, which is not the Western conception of duty. It is scoped in a totally different way and it runs in very different ways. You have karma, you have I think we all know what karma is, I don't have to explain that one. You have samsara, which is reincarnation. It's really the cycle of life and death and suffering and re-b it's it's reincarnation. That's easy enough what we have here. And then you have obviously their caste system is extremely important to understanding how they behave and why they behave the way they do. In part, their caste system, just sort of historical tangent, was imposed on them. It's partly a natural outgrowth of the fact that they are various

21:24 somewhat, at least to some degree, distinct ethnic groups inside of India. Do remember, China and India are both empires. They're not truly homogeneous nations. They have different subpopulations in different parts of the country. Less so China these days, very much so India still. In part India has the caste system because they were conquered by Indo-Europeans. They were conquered by peoples from elsewhere who then intermarried and created their upper caste. That's part of the Indian history. It's part of why the caste system can still be maintained even though it isn't officially a thing in Indian policy anymore. It really is. It's just not enshrined in the law anymore. But India is rigidly hierarchical according to that caste system.

22:12 And so you don't have any mobility insofar as that's concerned, today there's a little bit of leeway because of capitalism and wealth and things like that, but generally speaking, the people in the lower castes are not going to achieve great things anyway, because part of it again is biological. You can almost map caste to IQ essentially in the Indian case. So the caste system is that you have the priests and the scholars at the top, you have the warriors and the rulers, the merchants, the laborers, and the untouchables, the Dalits. So if you're looking for a word that makes Indians mad at you, there you go. One of the problems that you have with their particular formulation of a caste system is that there is severe pressure to stay within

23:02 your caste. That in and of itself is not necessarily bad. I mean, obviously, they have, you know, a billion plus people, so there are a lot of people in each cast. But because of the way that their society works with regard to family structure and the unofficial networks of people, you wind up with severe endogamous pressure, which is to say it winds up being inbreeding. Which is a huge part of the explanation for why the Indians are the way they are. It's inbreeding. Is a huge part of it. That's the case in basically every part of the world with low IQ. It's inbreeding. It is in many cases, particularly Africa, promiscuity, which leads to inbreeding because they don't know their fathers. And And if you don't know your father, sometimes you wind up

23:49 marrying your sister. That obviously causes problems over hundreds of years. That's a big part of the reason India is the way it is, and it is so much worse than China and Japan. It's biology, it's the sort of harsh mistress that is genetics. But part of what I want to pull out and part of what really contributes to this and this difference here is the different conceptions of honor. I'm not going to go deeply into the European conception of honor because it's just not what I'm doing here. But each of these nations has a fundamentally different understanding, fundamentally different conception of what honor is. And so for the Japanese, you have what grew out of being essentially a warrior ethic became their conception of honor.

24:40 So that's about as close as you can get to the Western conception of honor in the Asian case. The Japanese are the closest to us with their understanding of honor. The Chinese, it's more hierarchy and your relationship, your place in the hierarchy. It's a relative sense and it's relational in a way that not in the way our honor is, because obviously we think we'll honor thy father and thy mother, and that's relational. It's not that kind of relational. It's more pragmatic. It's going back to that conception of pragmatism. The Indians are fatalist and look at it as being sort of a cosmic duty, that's their conception of honor. And so it winds up being things connected to the staying in your cast and things like that.

25:26 And that fatalism aspect is also important because they look at it as you are born into this and you are doomed to do X, Y, and Z. It's not the Western understanding of fate. It's a different kind, it is fatalistic in sort of the full sense of that. But Eastern conceptions generally are different from Western conceptions of honor. So Era and Izat are not the same at all. It's almost a misnomer to use the same sort of word. But in the Japanese case you have Mayo and Giri, I'm not going to get too deep into terms and things, but the real core of it is duty or obligation. Obviously it raises the question to whom duty is owed, and that's generally going to be roughly the same kind of hierarchy that we

26:12 think of your family, your clan, your nation, right? That's what we think of. Add tribe in there if you feel like it. These days, due to industrialization and capitalization, they also have a same sort of view toward their employer, toward their corporation. And that's expected in society. That's sort of a difference between them and us. We don't really have an honor relationship with our employer. You can do things that are dishonorable in your employment, but your personal honor isn't really at stake when it comes to whether or not you're loyal as an employee to a corporation. That almost sounds insane to Western ears, particularly European Western ears, a little less so for Americans. there's a distinction there though.

27:01 But that unwavering loyalty to your group is a huge part of Japanese honor. That is incredibly important. And so your family and your nation are big part of that. We can resonate with that. That's important. Self-restraint plays a role in their conception of honor. You have to have a willingness to sacrifice, and that's going to be your personal comfort, personal desire for things that are seen as a collective duty. A little bit similar to the Western sense, but also different from the Western conception. Like I said, the Japanese are going to be the closest to the Western conception of honor of any of these three. But the Japanese view of honor, their own personal view of it, is that it is sort of an intensely and

27:48 sort of naturally Japanese thing. Their sense of honor is very Japanese and they consciously view it as being a Japanese thing. And the final point that I'd pull out for the Japanese would be that dishonor, doing something dishonorable, brings brings collective shame in the Japanese mind. It's not just personal shame, it's collective shame. You brought shame to your family, you brought shame to your clan, you brought shame to your nation. You'll see that also in the Chinese case and a different formulation of it for the Indians. For the Chinese you have two different ideas, and I'm not going to bother using the terms because I can't pronounce Chinese very well. But the two different aspects of it for honor in the Chinese case would be moral

28:37 character and so your personal honor in essence and then saving versus losing face, which we might call reputation, but it's distinct in a way that it's worth calling it face because well you'll see. So two of the ways that you can save or preserve face would be using your personal network. Personal networks are a huge part of just how the Chinese system operates. More so even than formal networks. Now, obviously, networks are important everywhere, but in a way that is an order of magnitude different from how it works in our case. Deference to authority is the second one. That's also an important part of maintaining face. It is seen as a violation of the Chinese conception of honor not rightly to defer to authority.

29:30 That ties back into the philosophies we discussed, you can see how that works together. National honor is a big part of it, which is why the century of humiliation is still seen as a big thing. It's why ultimately there is still a level of animosity toward every Western nation on the part of the Chinese, particularly those that played any active role in colonization or their defeat various defeats during that what they call the century of humiliation. And so that would certainly include the British, but it also includes the Germans and the French. There's still it's under the surface, they play it down to some degree, but it's still very much there because it is seen as a slight to their national honor.

30:12 And of course this is used as an excuse for various communist policies both domestically and with regard to foreign affairs. It's one of the reasons they see nothing wrong with the rampant theft that goes on in China. Because they view the West as an enemy, ultimately. It's also because they have a different view of property and property rights, but that is part of it. One of the things that the Chinese conception of honor does, and this will lead into one of the reasons they're so different, culturally at least, is that it can incentivize corruption. They'll call it harmony, but what it really does is it centerizes greasing the wheels and corrupt actions. All of these things that we would condemn, but they would say,

31:00 No, this is good because it's being done in pursuit of societal or group harmony. We would not look at it that way. It's one of the things that has made them different culturally that has led to what they are. But the last thing I would do for the Chinese, that would be just emphasize again, pragmatism being part of their ideology and their vaguely religious expression has played a huge role in this because if it's pragmatic, then it's aligned with their values. It doesn't matter what the morality is because there's no objective morality. And the losing face thing obviously going to be a big deal in politics for those who are interested in political science. But But moving on to India, their conception of honor they call

31:47 Izat, which is not just personal honor, it's more group honor. And what group varies because if say a member of your family is insulted, well that's family isat. If a member of your tribe is insulted, well that's now your tribe versus you know member your nation. This is similar to what we see in a large chunk of the world, really, the Near East through the Mideast, the Middle East. They have this conception of basically every level of society and every single resolution is just constant conflict and war. You know, the famous Arab proverb, right? It's me against my brother, me and my brother against my father, me and my brother, and my brother against my cousin, and so on and so forth. It's just constant war up and down the social hierarchy at every

32:40 single resolution. You have the same thing here in the Indian case with Izat. And so your personal honor, then the honor of your family, the honor of your tribe, the honor of your clan, the honor of your region, the c honour of your people, broadly understood. It's why Indians respond the way they do on the internet when India is insulted. It's this. It's Izat. That's what they're doing. The important parts for Izat, it's their conception of purity. It's so alien to our conception of purity that calling it that almost seems insane. Chastity's part of it, incidentally, you'd never know that from their behavior, but only female chastity, not male. So. And then adherence to your caste assigned role in society.

33:26 It is considered dishonourable to move outside of that. Incidentally it was also historically considered dishonorable to go abroad. They had a taboo against crossing deep water, basically. Religious weirdness. At any rate, they are part of the group of countries that will engage in honor killings for what is seen as a vi honor killings for what is seen as a violation of their honor. That's why you see murder of women happens a lot in these parts of the world. This also leads, incidentally, to what I mentioned earlier, the inbreeding problem. Part of it is seen as if you cross certain lines in order to marry, well that's dishonorable. Well the problem is this gets taken to the extreme in many

34:13 cases, and they wind up marrying their first cousins, or even closer, over many, many years, centuries. That explains almost all of what is wrong with India, other than the fact they worship demons, which is obviously important. But what this does with this conception of honor is that you have, like I mentioned, all these little warring groups. You know, you have warring groups within a family, and then you have families against families, then you have tribe against tribe, then you have region of the country against region of the country. This is a recipe for just complete chaos in society and everything except for what we would call honor. It's one of the reasons India had so much trouble and is

34:53 still having trouble modernizing and industrializing. Part of it's because of the extremely low IQ in India, and part of it's because at every single possible opportunity there is graft and theft and corruption. Because taking whatever you can is honorable because you are improving your position and that of your family. Doesn't matter that it's the expense of everyone else because that guy is a different tribe, and now we're thinking of tribes, and so it's part of the reason India is the way that it is. And I'll there's also the fact they don't respect contracts. Only really two parts of the world truly respect contracts, the Japanese and Europe. So it's been a major problem in international business.

35:37 The nation in the Indian mind matters less than the small group. This is going to be sort of a difference with the Japanese and the Chinese. You see a little bit more concern for the nation for the racial group writ large as opposed to the Indians where well I got mine. I don't really care about everyone else and there are some dynamics there that are just due to population size, but not entirely because obviously China has, you know, some hundreds of millions of people as well, a billion, whatever it happens to be. They don't even know. But to answer the question in short, now that we sort of have the everything laid on the table as it were, it really comes down to honor and genetics. Because their conceptions of honor, but obviously the honor is built up

36:25 on that ideology and that religious foundation. But what these things have done is they have sort of formed this feedback loop and created a worldview in each of these respective nations, these respective countries, that has that has entrenched certain biological proclivities and in some cases corrupted them, the Indian case due to inbreeding. And that combined with their natural abilities, has made them what they are. Again there's the aspect of it that you have less evil in the Japanese religion than the Hindu religion, the Indian religion, because Hinduism is literally just demon worship. In many cases, the Japanese is more revering your ancestors and nature, and yes, there are the local gods, but it's not open

37:22 demon worship and human sacrifice like it is most of the human sacrifice, not anymore, but still going on in some of the hinterlands in India. And so these things combined led to the difference in these peoples. Part of it is IQ. The Japanese are much brighter than the other groups. That includes the Chinese. The coastal Chinese, you have a swath of them that are high IQ, that are intelligent, but you have the IQ drops off as you go toward the the hinterlands. Again, different racial groups. It's an empire, not a cohesive, coherent, homogeneous nation. So that's sort of the brief explanation of these things. Obviously, like I said, this could take a very long time to go over all of it. But hopefully, that is enough of an explanation of why these different

38:15 peoples have wound up how they are. And this is entrenched over thousands of years. This is not something that happened quickly. And to sort of draw out a lesson from this, it's one of the reasons we have to care about these things in our own context. Imagine what you could wind up doing to Europeans if we behaved like the Indians for 5,000 years. We'd be just as bad as they are. So we're not above it. We're not immune to it. It's one of the reasons we have to be so concerned about marriage laws and you know biology and genetics and all these other considerations because if we don't have those concerns, the experiment has already been run. We see what will happen. We don't want to become that.

39:04 The The next question is also somewhat in depth, but I'm going to have sort of a light touch with this one just because this again would take Months to cover fully. So question two: can you go in depth of how the swastika and national socialism is absolutely Christian? We greatly appreciate your in-depth apologetics on this as men are being barred from the table over their political stance. There are two answers here. I am first going to give the practical answer and then sort of the not full, because again, not going into it in that great a depth. But the real answer as it were. First I'm going to take a sip of coffee. And it is coffee tonight, not tea. Summer has begun in earnest here and so I do not want

40:01 hot tea. But I will bring up my browser here. So So the practical answer is that you are not going to change the minds of most of these people, and so don't try. It's not me saying you you know don't try because you know there's a small chance of success. It's saying you are going to make your own life miserable and achieve probably nothing in the process or just make things worse? And I am mostly giving the answer that I give to millennials and Gen Z with regard to the baby boomers. And I know Gen X, so I was like, oh you forgot me. No. Gen X is split, you're a millennial or you're a boomer, depending. You're a young boomer and old millennial. So pick the one you want to be. But insofar as that's concerned, you are never going to convince the

41:00 boomers of these things. So if you bring it up with them, just know that you are going to probably have a knockdown, drag out fight, and they are not going to listen, you're not going to get anywhere, and if they can, they will kick you out of the church. That's the reality of it. And the only thing that can be done about that is waiting for them to retire or die off and be replaced by better men. That's already happening. There are faithful churches that are springing up now. There are churches that are starting to get that turnover in elders. And so men from our generation or younger are taking on those roles, they will be better men than the baby boomers were and are. But the full answer, right?

41:49 That would be that As I've said, National Socialism is Christianity translated into politics. And the reason that I say that is sort of partly as a refutation of those who try to say, oh, it's just it's all about the gospel. It's just the gospel. It's not only the gospel. If it were only the gospel, the Bible would be really short, right? But it's not. Because there's more to it than that. There's quite a bit more to it than that. So when someone tells you it's all about Jesus, just the gospel, that person is going to try to ruin your life in some way, and you should probably avoid him. Even Christ spends a lot of time talking about stuff that isn't the gospel. Most of his time is dedicated to stuff that isn't the gospel.

42:49 There is more to the Christian life than just Jesus died for your sins and rose again, and if you believe you will be saved. That's great news. That is the gospel. That is wonderful news. But it doesn't tell you how to live your life. It doesn't tell you how to grow tomato plants. You know, you can use trivial examples like that. It doesn't tell you what to do with your wife. You can use important examples like that, right? So there's more to it. But I would give a twofold answer just sort of for this answer here tonight and as a starting place for anyone who is going to run into this problem. I may go into this more in depth in the future, maybe I'll write something on it. I haven't written a book yet.

43:32 I'm not saying I will. I honestly not much of a desire to do so, but perhaps someone should. But the two ways that I would approach this would be looking at the party platform of the National Socialists and looking at the 28 Theses of the German Christians. The latter is going to be the one that is more compelling for Christians for obvious reasons, because the former is really politics, right? The former is their political program. And so I think I'll probably start with the 25 point program instead of starting with the 28 theses. But to pull up this, right, and of course, OBS decided to move my window. Let me fix this. I will just bring up just the browser for right now. See if I can fix that.

44:28 I don't know why OBS does that. Anyway, They are going to object to this. The men who are going to object are going to object based on race, right? Obviously, because yes, you're going to get libertarians who object to things like old age pensions which are in here, right, point fifteen. You're going to have people who object to point fourteen saying it's anti-capitalist, which it is. They were anti-capitalist. That's part of this, you know, it's the third way versus Jewish capitalism and Jewish communism. And for the men who are willing to hear, important to include that Jewish part because they're both Jewish, it's what they are, it's the kosher sandwich. This is the alternative to it. This is the Christian way of looking at it.

45:12 And if you start reading the Church Fathers, you read the Reformation Fathers, you're not going to find capitalism in these men. You're going to find anti-capitalist rhetoric. You are going to find Luther complaining about prices. You're going to find him condemning merchants for charging whatever they please. This modern integration of capitalism and Christianity is anathema to Christian history. And so those who will object on those grounds are just completely ignorant of what Christianity teaches and what Christians have believed for hundreds of years for two thousand years. But like I said, the big objection is going to be the issue of race. And so how do you overcome the objection for those who are

45:55 willing to listen with regard to race? Well, you have to explain to them race first, because they're going to have to understand what it is, because they probably don't. We did a series on that for Stone Choir. If you can get them to listen to that, great, it's going to do a lot of the work for you. And anytime you can get someone to do that for you, it's great, because then you have the foundation built and you can just build upon the foundation. But if you have a proper understanding of race, then none of this is objectionable whatsoever, because all it says is that we want our nation in the sense of the land, to be composed of our nation in the sense of the blood. We want the people running our nation to be of our nation.

46:40 Well that makes perfect sense. You can even get to some of these points by coming at it sort of tangentially, right? You if you're talking to another American, should the president be an American? He's probably going to say yes. Why? See what he answers. See if he gives you something where you can go with it, okay? What is an American? If they're just going to say, well, it's anyone who has the paperwork who's naturalized, okay, so anyone in the world can be an American as long as I give him a piece of paper. If you're dealing with someone who doesn't see that's absurd, you're probably wasting your time. If you can get him to see that that's absurd, then maybe you can get somewhere. Because you have to recognize the fundamental reality of race before you

47:26 can get someone to build up to this sort of ideology, right? This is jumping in the deep end. This is meat not milk. You have to subsist on the milk first. You have to understand the basics before you can build up to something else. And so if you don't have these building blocks, you're never going to get someone to understand that national socialism and Christianity are not simply compatible, but the one is the natural outcome of the other. National socialism is the natural outcome of applying Christian theology to the political, the economic, and the social. And you can see that in particular in the 28th Theses, and I'll get into that in a minute here. But again, just to reiterate, with regard to race, you have to

48:12 get them to understand that it exists. There are a lot of arguments for that. Go listen to the series from Stone Choir. You can sometimes get there by asking someone about, you know, children, right? If you pick a random child off the street and stick 'em in your basement, is that your child now? No. Is that your child in any meaningful way? No. Does that mean you can't adopt a child? No, of course not. But is there's a difference? Is there a distinction between the child, you know, particularly helps if you're talking to a woman? Is there a difference between the child to whom you gave birth versus the child you attained with a contract? That's what adoption is ultimately. And I'm not saying adoption is bad because adoption is good.

48:58 It has to play a role in society because sometimes people die and leave their children behind, right? That happens, that's unfortunate, but we live in a fallen world. But we all recognize there's a distinction between the biological child and the adopted child. You can love both of those children. You can be an excellent parent to both of them, but there is a difference. And just because you have a piece of paper, it doesn't erase the difference. Right? There are cases where animals have adopted, as in the animal sense, another animal into their pack that didn't change the species of the animal that was adopted. My cats and my dogs get along really well. It doesn't make the cats into a dog.

49:45 Different things. The same thing is true with regard to race, and sometimes you can approach it in that way, right? Are there different breeds of dogs? We have course. Are there different breeds of horses? We have of course. Are there different breeds of goat? Yes of course. I have black copper moron chickens. They're a particular breed of chicken. They produce a particular kind of egg, that is a particularly good egg. If I had random other chickens, it would not be the same. Everyone is going to agree with you on that. They all recognize that. They will even go so far as to agree that it is genetic in nature, because if I go out right now and take some of the eggs that are sitting in the nesting box in

50:26 my barn and then hatch those, I will get black copper morons. I won't get Astrolorps. I won't get any other kind of chicken. We could list a hundred different kinds of chicken. I will get the ones that produce the egg because it is genetic. If you have a child with your wife, the child is going to be a combination of you and your wife. Because that's how genetics works. So if you can build up to these things and get the person to recognize the building blocks, then you're going to have to wait. This is the part that so many hate. You are not going to get the person to simply flat out agree with you in one course of discussion starting from nothing, building up to, well, I'm a national socialist now.

51:16 That happens once in a hundred thousand times. You build up a little bit at a time and you give the person time to process it. You know, you see how far you can push. You give them a book on some subset of this. You're building up the foundation the person needs to change his worldview to something that is consonant with the truth, as opposed to what he learned in school, as opposed to the propaganda. It takes time, it's difficult, and the biggest part again that people hate is that waiting, because you are not going to get him to change all his views in one night. This is to give you an example, sort of an illustration. This is something that has to be taught to new attorneys. Because everyone has this conception, this misconception of particularly

52:09 courtwork. They have this idea that you get a witness on the stand and you just ask the right chain of questions, you ask the right question the right way, and he confesses. Or he gives you exactly what you want. He gives you the exact answer you need to convict some guy or to whatever it happens, it doesn't happen. Occasionally you find someone dumb enough, but it almost never happens. That's not how you build a case. You build up a case by getting specific answers to specific questions and then stringing all of that together into your argument in your closing argument. That's why I like closing arguments. Opening is okay, but I like closing arguments because that's the stringing it together and making the ultimate argument.

52:58 Piecing it together is a tight is a different thing. It's vitally important. You have to have it. But it's a different thing. That's what I was doing against James White in that debate, and he recognized it, which is why he was so uncomfortable. That's how you do it. You do not get the person the opposition witness, the person who is hostile to you, to make your case. But you get him to give you all the pieces you need to make your case. Here, what you're doing is you're giving that person all the little bits and pieces he needs to ruminate on it later, to build up the case in his own mind. He will form some probably shoddy, slapdash version of it, but you can help him improve it over time.

53:44 But to move on to the twenty eight Theses, the the way you're going to win over a Christian, if you possibly can. You can give him my article. By all means, I'll put this in the show notes. I read through it earlier and found a couple typos I have to fix. Inevitable typos are just impossible to fix all of them in the first go through, but not the change anything, just minor things, obviously. This is what you want to go through with someone who is Christian, and ask him, to what do you object? Which parts of this are objectionable to you? What part of this do you think is not Christian? Because now you're going to have a real discussion, because if you object to any parts of this With I'm going to bring up

54:25 one possible counterexample here, as it were. If you object to any part of this, well, okay, you're just not a Protestant. And I'm not saying as opposed to Roman Catholic, but Roman Catholics could object to parts of this because it is very Lutheran. It is very Protestant. But you can't object to it in large part because almost all of it is simply Christian. It's sort of not on the same level and I so I don't want anyone to say, oh well he's com elevating this to the point of a confession, an ecumenical creed, right? No. If you object to any part of the creed, you have fallen below the standard of a Christian. Because the creeds are simply a restatement of Scripture. With regard to this, this is a statement of theology pulled from

55:15 Scripture And so if someone objects to it, he better have a very good reason for objecting to it. And not just because it was written by those evil Germans and I don't like them and their language sounds scary. That's not a legitimate argument. And you know it's translated into English, so don't even have to deal with the German, but it's there if you want it. Now like I said, this is very Lutheran, it's very Protestant, and it's not necessarily condemning Rome, so it's not anti Roman Catholic. It does say that the Roman Catholic position is wrong in some ways. So for instance, right here you say, you know, the Church cannot be above the state as the Roman Catholic position asserts, right? The mouse actually shows for once, that's nice.

55:59 So obviously there are some disagreements with Rome. But it's not condemning Rome and saying Rome isn't Christian. It's saying we disagree with some of the political ideas of Rome with regard to how the church and the state interact. But for any Lutheran, you're going to have a very hard time as a Lutheran looking at this, reading through this, and objecting to it without ceasing to be a Lutheran, because it is all staunchly founded and firmly founded on theology from not just the Book of Concord, but our Lutheran forefathers and basically none of it's objectionable, obviously it even mentions Luther a number of times. But this is what you want to do. Go through this on your own first, obviously.

56:42 Go through it point by point. See if there are things to which you object. Figure out why. If there is nothing to which you object, then you can go over this with someone else and ask him, and you can work through those problems. Part of figuring out why someone objects to these things is finding what his point of objection is and then why he believes that. Maybe he doesn't have a reason for believing it. If you can get him to recognize that, then you've made some good progress. But everything in this statement is solidly Christian. Like I said, there's one thing to which some are going to disagree. They're going to object to this thing, and that is because there is the Aryan paragraph. So called.

57:28 they don't call it the Arian paragraph, they even call it the so-called Arian paragraph. But that's usually what it's called in English language literature. So by all means, use that if you want. It's point three. The People's Church commits itself to blood and race because the people are a community of blood and essence. Therefore only those who are national comrades according to the state's law can be members of the people's church. Only those who can be state officials according to the state's law can be office holders in the people's church. That is the thing to which they are going to object. And you want to ask them why. Why do you object to that? Well you're saying that they aren't Chr no.

58:06 It actually explicitly says in point four, and that's the great part of this, many of the objections are explicitly addressed in the document. So when someone objects, you can even lay a trap for them, right? If they object to that, you can say, Well you're saying that Christians of another race aren't Christian. Point four. A people's church does not mean excluding Christians of other races. From Word and Sacrament, or from the great Christian community of faith. A Christian of another race is not a lesser Christian, but rather a Christian of a different kind. Thus the People's Church takes seriously that the Christian Church does not yet live in the perfection of divine eternity, but is bound by

58:42 the orders God has given to this life. The objection is addressed right in the next point. The point that this paragraph is making, point three, thesis three, is that those who are going to be members of the national church and serve in positions of authority in the national church have to be members of the nation because it is in a way wrongful to be ruled over by foreigners if you are capable of self-rule. Obviously the exception here, and I'm not even I'm somewhat disinclined to not even bring up the exception because we're basically talking about the Western European context, the Christendom context, mostly Americans obviously. I'm speaking English here, but I know some Germans and others as

59:28 well. You can read the German. You want these people who can to produce their own leaders, to produce their own theologians, because they are going to know how to deal with the Christian faith in a particular racial, a particular national way that is going to be the natural expression of Christianity for that people. And I've gone into this many times before, there's nothing wrong with having a national expression of Christianity. For those nations that cannot do this for themselves, and you can think of any number of nations with an IQ below seventy can't produce theologians, they cannot remain orthodox, they have to be controlled, they have to be ordered and directed by their superiors. And I have no problem using that term because it is correct.

1:00:17 For those people, they are going to have to have those of another race in positions of authority in their churches because otherwise they will never remain Christian. Germans don't have that problem. Americans don't have that problem, the French don't have that problem, the English don't have that problem. We can produce our own pastors, our own bishops, our own theologians just fine. Now, we should get along with those of other races who are also Christians. We shouldn't be at war with the Germans because they have a German Christianity that looks different from American Christianity. That's not valid. It's completely insane. There's nothing wrong with saying that to be a member of the church a member of the church, you should be a member of

1:01:05 the nation. Because quite frankly, if you aren't a member of the nation, why are you even in the nation? You should not be there. What this partially says and what this is partially permitting is those who are sojourning, while they cannot join the Church, can still attend the service and receive the Word and the Sacrament, because they are still Christians. They are still part of the Invisible Church, the true, lowercase catholic, universal church. This does not deny in any way, shape, or form that you can be a Christian and be French instead of German, or even African instead of European. I really can't think of any other point to which someone is going to object in this. And so go through this.

1:01:54 Because very few men have read this. Very few men know what the German Christians in the Third Reich actually believed. And this is what they believed. They bound themselves by this confession. In this case, it's particularly the Lutherans, and others who were Protestant, but this is what they actually said they believed. And so you can work through this with someone and say, where do you find that you think this is not Christian? I think I went over the one point where you're really going to have a problem. But That would be my recommendation for starting to try to get someone to have not an open mind, but a correct view of these things. To answer the other part of the question: how is the

1:02:37 swastika Christian? Well, it's the Hakenkreutz. It's the hooked cross. The Germans didn't call it a swastika because that's not a German word. It may sound like it to people who don't know German, but it's not. It is the Hakenkreutz. And Hitler took it specifically from a monastery that he went to when he was a child. He saw the symbol there, he liked it, he used it as a Christian symbol. It has been used by Christians in artwork and stonework and tombs. There are many, many places in Europe where you can still see it. Because it's been around for centuries. And what it ultimately is is a well it's a cross as a symbol, but it's also from the way that the Big Dipper orbits over the course of

1:03:25 a year. And various stars as well. But like I said before in a previous episode, it is a sign in the heavens. And Genesis is extremely clear. The stars are not just the lights in the sky, variously, but the stars specifically, aren't just for seasons to show the change of the seasons. They're also for signs. So there's nothing wrong with using that. We don't understand how all of that worked. It seems like peoples many hundreds of years ago, centuries ago, millennia ago in many cases, knew more about that than we do. Certainly the wise men who visited Christ figured it out from looking at the stars. I don't think we could do that today. So God put things there we don't fully understand. There's nothing wrong with using those symbols.

1:04:14 I have no problem even repurposing symbols that, you know, the pagans love. There's nothing wrong with that. Many of these symbols trace back to some misty Christian connection back in time where we've lost the fullness of that because of playing telephone for hundreds of years. But it's still there. And in this case, it's even more obvious because it's literally a cross. We use many different crosses across the world, we don't all use the same one. The Eastern Christians use a different cross, Western Christians use a different cross. Even within the West we use various different crosses. The English have ones they prefer, the Celts have ones they prefer, the Germans have ones they prefer.

1:04:53 There's nothing wrong with the symbols being different across various people groups. Another part of how you express Christianity within your racial context. That's appropriate. That's how it should be. But I think I will probably follow up on this at some point in the future, but I hope that that's sort of a beginning place at least. But the practical answer, just to reiterate it, is if you are dealing with baby boomers or you are dealing with elders at your church who are of that generation, don't do it. It's probably not worth it. If you are the sort of cantankerous person, so probably a German, if you are inclined to do that, then maybe Scottish. If that is your personal inclination, then go ahead.

1:05:36 I'm not going to tell you to stop, because it's not wrong for you to do that. It is a matter of wisdom, it's a matter of personal conscience, but I just want to be very clear that you're probably not going to get anywhere. They will probably kick you out of the church and they may call the police That is the reality. But to move on to the next question, I don't know through how many I will get tonight since we've had a couple that were a little bit longer than average. Question three. Ah, yes, this one is shorter. I recently spoke with a friend about circumcision and whether it is permissible for Christians. He directed me to Genesis 34. This one is an important one to bring up, which tells of

1:06:19 the violation of Dina, we won't get into that narrative, but the Sister of Simon and Levi, by Shechem the Canaanite. My friend suggested that this passage is evidence that circumcision, even in the time of the Israelites, required a lengthy recovery. Can we infer that Simon and Levi deceived Shechem into believing that circumcision involved removing the entire foreskin, rather than only the tip, or a cut, depending on which procedure, for the purpose of being able to easily kill Shechem and his men as retribution for Shechem violating Dinah. So we should pull that up to actually look at the text. So that's going to be starting verse 13, I think it is. No, it's later than that. Okay, verse 25.

1:07:20 Obviously, I hope everyone knows the story of this. They convince these men of a different tribe to be circumcised so that they can marry into their tribe and intermarry and etc. Now it came about on the third day when they were in pain, so note the day, that the two sons of Jacob, Simon and Levi, Dina's brothers, took each one his dagger and entered into the city safely, and killed every male, and so on and so forth. The important part here is obviously three days. And that's when they were in pain. Incidentally, you also have a similar, roughly similar length of time when Joshua has to have Israel circumcised after coming out of the wandering in the wilderness, as I'd mentioned previously.

1:08:04 But three days here, right? That sounds like maybe sounds like a long recovery. It doesn't to my mind, but maybe for some people it does. And so they're going to bring this up. I'll get into specifically why this is not modern circumcision, but I want to start by pointing out you've probably injured almost everyone listening to this, right? You've probably injured yourself in some way that took longer than three days to heal. A scratch takes about a week to heal, depending on a number of factors, you know, how old you are, your immune system, things like that. Small cuts, even small cuts, can take a week or two to heal. Cutting off any portion of your foreskin is going to take a while to heal.

1:08:51 Even if it's a small portion, cutting off the entirety of your foreskin is going to take a long while to heal. And I think every man in the audience listening knows cutting something there is probably going to cause a lot of pain, regardless of how little flesh you remove, right? So they're in pain on the third day because the third day is about when you feel some of the worst pain pain from surgery. That's when you have sort of the active healing process and the bruising and the swelling and all that stuff. It's when a lot of the bad pain is you don't really want to move or do anything. That's why they waited for the third day because it was the easiest day to kill these men. We can get into that another time.

1:09:35 Three days is nothing for recovery. For and part of how we know this and getting into the actual answer here, the substantive part is Part as it were. We know how long it takes to recover from male adult circumcision because the procedure is performed. It takes three weeks. If you go and don't do Don't do this, but if you were to go and have your foreskin removed, it would take you three weeks to recover as an adult male. And they actually tell you don't move. Like if you can at all avoid it, don't move for the first three days. Just do nothing. For the first week, don't lift anything. Don't do anything strenuous. Basically just kinda sleep or sit on the couch and and don't wear, you know, binding clothing, no abrasion, no friction, nothing.

1:10:29 Like the list of what they tell you basically not to do is rather long. But it's a two week minimum and more like three week recovery. So So if this is three days and they're in pain, this is not saying that it is the modern version of circumcision. That would be a totally different thing, and I do not think these men would have been quite so eager to participate in that particular ritual. And even then, it would have been a difficult thing to perform, given the sort of tools they had on hand at this time, they didn't have surgical steel. They didn't have obsidian blades or whatever. They didn't have the sort of tools that we have today. That would have been quite the procedure to perform on a man

1:11:18 giving the sort of tools they had at that time. So no, the it's worth bringing up, it's important to recognize that it is related, but it does not make the argument for the modern procedure in any way. In fact, I think it is very clearly an argument for what I am others have contended is the original version in scripture, which is just a cut in or a removal of the sort of tip of the foreskin, as opposed to a total removal, which again would have been a much longer recovery, and probably something those men would not have wanted to do. The The next question For someone Question four for someone who just converted to Lutheranism but only churches around him are either Baptist or Catholic, which would you recommend?

1:12:09 So the recommendation is going to have to be you go to the Baptist Church. And the reason for that is that in the Lutheran Confessions the Roman Catholic Mass is called an abomination And so Lutherans cannot in good conscience participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. You can go to the Baptist service, they are going to teach things with which you disagree, you are going to have Some staunch disagreements with them, particularly with regard to the sacraments. So you're not going to get baptized there, right? And even if you did, it would be a valid baptism. Baptist baptisms are valid. We just wish they would also baptize children. If they are doing the Lord's Supper, which they do very seldom, but if

1:12:54 they are doing that, then maybe just leave the room briefly. Because obviously their conception of that we would consider we would consider to be highly irreverent to say the least. But other than that, you can have fellowship with them. They're still Christians, they're just Christian brothers in error. But you are going to have fewer objections with regard to your conscience at the Baptist Church than at the Roman Catholic Church. Even though for many outside of these things, the High Church Lutherans and the Roman Catholics look similar. The theology is sufficiently different that, yes, the Book of Concord calls the Roman Catholic Mass an abomination, and so again, no, you cannot participate in that in good conscience, so the Baptist Church is the

1:13:40 option. Question five Will Germany return to Christendom? I am a native German who in the last three years got enlightened of the truth about the world wars. Ever since I have developed great grief over what was done to my nation. Christianity was bombed out of us. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish over my kinsmen. So three sub questions. One, do you think there is hope for Germany to return to Christianity? I'll just take them as I read them, I think. I do. I do think there is. The foundation to some degree is still there, the history is still there, all of those connections. Martin Luther is the one who reformed the church, the reformer, the teacher of the church. So I do think that there is that potential and I hope

1:14:30 that it does happen. A lot of things are up in the air for all of us these days. So Germany is not alone in being in a particularly bad position. The US, we certainly have our own problems over here and every other European nation. But we are all in this together. I guess this sort of touches on sub question three here, but we're all in this together. We should want every single western nation to become Christian, we shouldn't be concerned about ourselves only, we should also be concerned about our brothers, because they are our brothers, and you have a higher duty to those who are closer to you. And like I have mentioned many times before, the American nation, yes, there's some admixture from some other European peoples more recently, but we

1:15:16 are an English, Scottish, and German nation. That is essentially what we are, and so the Germans are very much our brothers Question two here Do God's promises that He made in the Old Testament apply to all Christian nations that if they become wayward he will discipline them until they return? Yes, in essence they do. God deals with people very similarly down through the centuries across time. There is a point when a nation becomes so wicked and so apostate where God draws a line and stops chastising them so that they return and switches to destroying them for their evil. We see that with the Canaanites, we see that with some others down through history, the Assyrians, the Babylonians. Most of those cases not entirely wiped out, but some of them

1:16:06 simply wiped off the face of the earth. The Indians have to be close at this point. I don't think that the European nations are there. I don't think that the European nations are anywhere near that level of wickedness and impenitence at this point. You can think of God saying that it's going to take four hundred years, right, for the wickedness of the Amorites to be complete. Europe is not there. It is under a century. That's not good, that's very bad, but I don't think that our peoples anywhere in the Western world are beyond the point of repentance yet. And so I hope that we do repent as a nation. I think that things are trending in that direction. I think that many among the younger generation have recognized the lies

1:16:51 in the past and are moving back in the direction of the church and I think that's a good I think that's the great thing. Hopefully that continues to accelerate and so I think that yes, there is hope for Germany and the rest of Europe as well and hope for America. The third sub question, any encouragement to deal with the grief. So I I sort of touched on that it's going to depend partly on personal disposition, but as a German I think I kind of understand the personal disposition. Read the book of Job. Read Ecclesiastes. I know for many men that's going to sound like insane advice because they're going to think Reading the most depressing parts of the Bible seems like the wrong response. I don't think that it is.

1:17:34 I think that it's a recognition that God is absolutely sovereign, God is in control, He will work all things out for the good as he promises to do, and that our position in this life, as I've said many times before, is to do the duty that is set before us. Ours is the duty, God's is the outcome. He is not going to fail. He is going to succeed in everything he has set out to do. And he has made many promises to our people and he will fulfill them. So I think reading through those books is a good devotional practice and then reading the Psalms as well, there's plenty in the Psalms lamenting the state of his people and things like that. I think those are important for Christians to read these days, and

1:18:23 particularly for those of a Germanic bent, we have that sort of psychology, that that general outlook. It's not fatalist, but it is a recognition that fate plays a role, and it's sort of hearkening back to what I went over with regard to Indians, right, and samsara and things like that. We're not looking at the world as if we're doomed because we were born a particular person in a particular time, right? We're looking at it more as we go through life as a particular person, formulated and formed in a particular way by virtue of the time into which we were born, the race, the body into which we were born, we are our body, so it's not just you know the spirit operating a meat suit, right? We very much are what we are.

1:19:16 And so recognizing that, and I think again, as a German, it's going to come more naturally, but recognizing that's an important part of it. It's not a reason for despair. Rather it's a recognition that you have to embrace the fact that we live in a time of great challenges. The military way of saying it is usually embrace the suck. Things are going to be bad for a period of time, just embrace it and slog through it. I have an article on my site that's about the specifically the Germanic conception of fate, and I think that might also be useful for you. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Note that down. But I should also say, welcome back to the church, brother. So, question pull up the next question here.

1:20:11 Question six. Shifting gears a little bit here. I listened to the Stone Choir episodes on race a while back, and remember you mentioning that being That being in a mixed race marriage can cause problems for the child because it can be hard to find donors for medical needs with a child. I was curious if the negative medical effects extended further. They do. Within my friend group, two of the couples are in mixed marriages, where the male is white and the female is fifty percent non white. These two couples have had birth complications including miscarriage. Between their two children who were successfully born the children have had to have surgeries within months or less of giving birth. All the couples in my friend group who are not mixed race

1:20:53 have had their pregnancies go smoothly, with practically no complications. A simple Google search on the subject says that mixed-race couples decrease the chances for health complications. That is simply an outright lie, but it is very much what is being astroturfed. Because it decreases the chance for stuff like sickle cell. If you're European, you're not going to get that, so in other words, Google says it's good because it helps non-white people. For blacks that is somewhat true for sickle cell, which if you don't ever get malaria. I figured if there was a truth on this subject it would be buried under years of fake or biased research to promote the mixing of races. So the question does mixing races increase the chances of health complications

1:21:33 in the child? The answer is yes. It increases the risk of health problems not only for the child, but actually to some degree for the parents as well. There's some incompatibility issues. The issues there are less dire than for the child, certainly, but with regard to complications surrounding pregnancy, significantly more for mixed race couples, and it does scale with the distance of the races. So white and black much worse than someone you know closer. Right. One of the things is that there are actually morphological differences among the races as well. Obvious we know that just from looking at the races, and that can lead to complications with regard to the birth itself. It is more likely that you are going to have a dangerous

1:22:23 complication during the birth, including endangering the life of the mother in a mixed race marriage versus one that is within a race. So yes, that is very much a concern and it extends all over the place. The example that I often bring up is the example of, you know, donations and things like that, just because it tends to drive it home for people. And it is more difficult to explain to people and get them to accept the fact that you also have these problems, like miscarriage and things like that, but it is very much part of it. And And you can logically even just draw that out if you know where fertility peaks, right? Second or third cousins is where fertility peaks. Sometimes as far as fourth cousins, but it's it's right around third

1:23:08 cousins is where it peaks. So you're going to have fertility issues outside of that window. Some of those are going to be things that can increase the odds of miscarriage and other complications like that. Question seven. I have been rereading through the Old Testament and have noticed that the Notice that the legal system that God gave the Hebrews is rather simple in comparison to what we have in the 21st century. That is an understatement. My question is: how did we get to the system we have today, and is there a reasonable way to fix it? Looking over the past several decades of my own recollection, there are myriad cases that seem to be open and shut cases of particularly violent crime that seem to take years to litigate.

1:23:58 While the system that Moses received might take weeks, I believe that our system is perverting justice for all parties, whether that is letting obvious violent criminals go while waiting for trial or leaving men on death row till they die of old age. Our legal system right now is wicked and inefficient and unjust and any number of other things you'd like to call it. That is a complicated thing. It is due to many factors over a long period of time. The most concrete and easiest step is simply to remove all of the Jews from the process. They should not be lawyers, they should not be judges. We can go back to the 28 points and the 25 points and basically pull out exactly what they say. They were right.

1:24:50 You see the corruption in our system because you have all of these people who are maliciously advocating for creating corruption and chaos in our system and letting the wicked go free. Their desire is to pervert and subvert justice because they are evil. So simplifying our system simplifying isn't so much the goal as just making it just, making it achieve the ends it should. No, you shouldn't have endless appeals for very clear things. You know, if you have these days it can't be video evidence anymore, but if you have incontrovertible evidence that someone committed a homicide For some heinous reason, right? There's no it's not justifiable homicide, it's just outright murder. He should not be getting a bunch of different appeals that take

1:25:40 years. He should get what I have said, I've actually addressed this issue before, I don't remember exactly when. It's been a number of years now, but I think the way that it should work for capital cases, because I think that you should have some differences in your system depending on the type of case. I think that our adversarial system has some problems versus inquisitorial, but that starts to get into legal theory and things like that. What we should do for a capital case, is you should get your trial. I think the trial is fine. You know, you can have some differences with regard to how you structure it with the jury and things like that, but you have the trial, and I think it should be an automatic and immediate

1:26:20 appeal to a specialized body that reviews capital cases. That's what they do. They're experts in it, they're experts in the law, the forensics, all that. They review it. If they sign off on it, conduct the execution as quickly as possible and just be done with it. Instead of taking years. Then you know it takes it might take six months or something. That's fine. You should still want to achieve justice even if it is somewhat delayed because you have to do these things. The system back then was easier for a number of reasons. They didn't have access to the kinds of forensic evidence we do, and so it was either you had a witness or you didn't have a witness. So there are things that are more complicated that we have to

1:27:03 do these days that do take more time, but yes, our system is deliberately a mess. And part of fixing it is removing the wicked people from the various roles they're currently holding. And also yes, streamlining it as it were instead of letting it drag on forever, which it should not. And bringing back public capital punishment also discourages crime and is a good idea. On a tangentially related note. Question eight, and I think I will probably probably call it after this question. I wanted to get to question ten, but I think I will save it for next time. So a question that is related to some things that have been coming up on social media recently. Quibono is Latin for to whom is the benefit, correct?

1:28:04 And I think this phrase is applicable to the moon landings. Assuming arguendo, the moon landings did actually happen, I believe they did. That's him saying I believe they did I also believe they did, but what is the benefit to our people of policing or berating those who question their veracity? When even the men who contributed to the moon landing at least gave the appearance that the moon landing was human progress. For example, Neil Armstrong won Leap for Mankind. I am failing to see how not believing in the moon landings is somehow denigrating white people. It's clear that Jews have exploited the moon landings to get whites to believe that Africans could land on the moon. So why is it beyond the realm of possibility that Jews fake

1:28:46 the moon landings for expressly this purpose? I'm not saying I believe this, but I can see why many people in our circles do. One minor concern I do have about the moon landings is that if they actually did occur, why is it that moon tourism has not yet been monetized if you have time, etc. So two questions. The first question really is kind of a compound question there. It is denigrating whites to say the moon landing didn't happen because it is trivializing and denying basically when Basically, one of the greatest technological feats we have ever achieved. And quite frankly, the greatest technological cheat feat we ever achieved, given the time and the technology. And of course, one of the reasons is because it's specifically attacking

1:29:37 drivers. The Jews hate Germans more than anyone else, other than obviously Christ. And so it's attacking Germans because who built the rockets? Who designed the rockets that took Americans to the Moon? Germans. Germans both designed and built them. And it was the National Socialist Scientists who did it. That is why this has been astroturfed on the right by Jews and others. This is not something that is organic, this is not something that just sprung up. This is an astroturfed conspiracy theory, and it serves two purposes. One, it is to attack whites and white achievement and white excellence. And two, it is to make people in the right seem like kooks. Seem like completely insane, untethered, unmoored from reality psychos.

1:30:27 Because Because unlike all of the other things that we would, or we wouldn't, but others would call a conspiracy theory, right? Jewish involvement in communism in Russia and incidentally China, relating back to that first question, all of All of those sorts of things. You can prove those, and you do not have definitive proof that the person saying that it happened is wrong, right? There's a fundamental difference here, and this is something I've brought up many times times. There is a difference between having hard evidence for something and having argument for something. I'm not saying argument is false because having a logically sound argument is compelling. But for something like an historical event, that's more difficult, right?

1:31:17 I've seen many compare it to the Holocaust, right? And I tell them, okay, right now, maybe not right now, you know, you have to go out and buy some stuff, but right now-ish, you could go out and buy the hardware to bounce a laser off the retroreflector, on the moon, and statistically prove, because you're not going to have a large enough thing to see it coming back, it's a laser. To statistically prove that it's there. A retroreflector is a man-made object. The only counterexamples for retroreflectors that occur in nature are in the eyes of things like cats. Okay, there's no giant cat on the moon standing still off of the eyes of which you can bounce a laser. It's a man-made retroreflector.

1:32:05 We put it there. We have a picture of it on the moon with a footprint next to it. You can literally bounce a signal off of it, a laser off of it, and detect it. I've seen it done. I haven't done it because I never got into the hobby because I don't want another expensive hobby. But I've seen it done by, in this case, observatory equipment so much much more expensive equipment than I would have anyway. But doing that is different from people compared to the Holocaust and I say, okay, find a metal detector, go to Auschwitz and see what happens. Please don't do this, you will be arrested. But that's the difference. The claims of the moon landing you can investigate them as much as you like. The same as people who claim the earth is flat, right?

1:32:52 No one is stopping you from building your own rocket. No one is stopping you from getting in a higher hot air balloon and going up high enough to see the curvature. No one is stopping you from going to the ocean and watching ships literally sail over the horizon. I used to live in Los Angeles. I've seen that happen I don't even know how many thousands upon thousand tens of thousands of times I've seen that happen. There's a difference there. You are prohibited from physically examining the evidence for the Holocaust. No one is prohibiting you from physically examining the evidence for the moon landings. It's very obvious if you look at it, the totality of the circumstances. This is something that has been astroturfed to make the right

1:33:36 look insane. To make us look unreliable and irrational. It's one of the reasons that I object to it so strenuously. You know, if it's just some crazy guys in a bar talking to each other, I don't care. Excuse me, I mean maybe it's a little obnoxious, but whatever. When you have these people, particularly those who have a decent size audience, spreading this on the right and making the right look insane, it is unhelpful, it is detrimental, it is harmful. And quite frankly, what it does is it actually entrenches people when it comes to all the other conspiracy theories, right? So-called. If you see someone saying the moon landing wasn't real, the moon isn't real, it's a giant ball of glass that someone stuck

1:34:26 to the firmament, whatever it is they're saying. And I've heard every crazy argument this week because none of them agree, right? Not one of them agrees with others. But if you have that guy saying it, and then he pivots and say says, Oh, by the way, the COVID nineteen vaccines, those were poison. Well, what has he just done? He's discredited any argument that might be legitimate about the safety of those vaccines, so called. And the same thing with regard to every other point. It is a deliberate campaign of subversion to make all of this other stuff get lumped into the category of the guy with a tinfoil hat. So it's also just something there's so much evidence for it, and there's no evidence against it.

1:35:14 And the strongest one of the strongest arguments that I find particularly compelling, the Soviets never objected. They never said we didn't do it. They had every reason to say we didn't do it. They challenged everything else we did. And we challenged the stuff that they did. If they had thought for a second that it had been done in Hollywood, which incidentally they would have known because they had infiltrated Hollywood already. They meaning the Jews in this case, but they would have broadcast that to the world and said the Americans are lying, the Americans didn't do it, look at how bad the capitalist system is, we are the best, and then they would have kept trying to do it. They were not so interested in landing on the moon after we

1:35:57 did it because it was no longer a race. It was no longer first of the moon. That is a compelling argument that we actually did it. And of course, there is the physical objective proof, the retro reflectors, right? It just doesn't make any sense to object to it, and it is harmful to do so. It is why I think it is actually important to tell these men they need to shut up. Everyone does not have a right to object to everything, particularly when he doesn't understand it. The sort of men who could not do the math to explain to you how a retro reflector works should not be trying to explain orbital mechanics to you and telling you that this is impossible because there's a big number. These are the sort of people who see the number thirty six

1:36:47 thousand or whatever it happens to be, whichever one they happen to have latched onto, and say, Well that's not real because that number scares me. That's effectively what they're saying. I do n I have never seen any of these men objecting to it doing the necessary math to prove it is actually wrong. All they do is throw up a big number on the screen and then hope that their audience knows even less math than they do, which is often true True. That's not what we are on the right, it's not what we want to be. And again it is denigrating white achievement because we are the ones who put those men on the moon? Our race did that. It was the Germanic race that put men on the moon, and that includes America because we are a Germanic nation as well.

1:37:34 Insofar as the second question is concerned here, and I think it'll probably be the last question for tonight, ran a little bit over, but I suppose that's fine. People can listen whenever they like, so it hasn't been monetized yet because it's actually very difficult to do and dangerous and expensive. That's really the expensive part is actually probably the biggest part of this. I just ran some very quick numbers when I saw this question, just for the the sake of it. And the companies that are looking at doing because there are companies looking at doing that, right? They're space tourism companies. It's one of the things Bezos is doing and others. They're trying to get their per seat cost down to like 100,000

1:38:14 per person, right? Per seat cost. The current cost to do that, and for the foreseeable future, is still in the millions. And that's just to get up into space to say I've been to space and not even, you know, distant. That's near Earth orbit sort of thing. Very near Earth orbit. The companies that are trying to do moon tourism, and they're not talking about landing. They're talking about going around it, maybe, or getting out to it and looking at it and coming back. They're looking at numbers in the tens of millions per seat. That's not a very good business idea. And so that's something that this is incidentally a critique of capitalism really, but it's not a good business idea. It's one of the reasons that it has to be funded by

1:39:02 state actors, at least originally, even today, still largely funded by state actors, because you know, Elon Musk may be doing some things. He's funded by the U.S government. He's not the one funding those rockets. So fifty million dollars, right? Say it's twenty million, you know, cut it in less than half. Twenty million dollars per seat to go up into space to get close to the moon just to say you did it. That's all it gains you, right? You know, if it's someone who likes space exploration, maybe you're funding it. The guy who wants to do that though can fund it without getting in a potentially explosive device and going there. The number of men, the percentage of men in the world, and it'd be almost exclusively men incidentally, so it's not just the gender

1:39:49 in specific use there. Small number who have the funds to just spend twenty million dollars on a rocket ride. Now you take all of those and remove all of the men from that pool who don't have a death wish, essentially, who don't have the daredevil spirit that you need to have to be a test pilot effectively. You now have almost no men left in this pool. So I don't know what kind of tourism business you would be running, but you're targeting a very tiny pool of men, and even then, you have to get the money to build the company even to be able to target the it's just not a very good business plan. It just doesn't work. It's really what it comes down to. The economics don't make any sense. And just for the sake of comparison, I sort of roughly calculated,

1:40:42 if you had, you know, that sort of disposable income, and you spent a million dollars, and you visited every single national park in the US system, you could spend nights at their nicest hotels, rent nice RVs, hire guides, do every single one of the cave tours and everything else, and have money left over at the end of the year and spend a tiny fraction of what you would spend to say, I got close to the moon. It just doesn't make sense. So that's why it hasn't happened. That's the sort of thing that happens after all of the hard work of the technology has already been done, developing it, testing it, making sure it's reliable over many, many uses, right? Commercial air travel did not happen right after the Wright brothers.

1:41:30 It took a while to build. And you have to prove that it has a sufficient safety rate before people are willing to use it. Yes, you have the occasional crazy person who's willing to get in a metal tube using a PlayStation controller, and then you wind up paying a price for that. But that's a tiny percentage of men who are willing to do that. So it's just economics for the the moon tourism bit. And practically there's nothing there to see. So even if you went up there and landed on the moon I I don't know what you're doing. There's nothing there. It's dust and rocks. So that I'm sure that appeals to a number of men, right? Because you're the first in X to do it. You're one of only a handful of people.

1:42:16 You can say, I went to the moon. That's very appealing to some. But personally, I would rather go camping. So But yeah, I think it's economics at the base there. I think that will be the last question. Perhaps an appropriate question to end with, I guess. I did want to get to the next one about kings, but I think I will save that question for next week. Some of those questions took a little longer to answer than normal, which is why I had put them off because I knew they were going to do that. But at any rate, thank you for those who submitted questions and thank you for those in the chat. I do see that we have some questions in the chat. I am going to add those for next week. Hopefully I will get to them then.

1:43:05 My backlog isn't long now. I've got through most, but it's part of the reason I spent more time tonight to get through these. So again, thank you for submitting the questions. Thank you for listening. And I hope all of you have a blessed Good Friday. And I won't wish you happy Easter just yet because it feels kind of wrong to do it on Good Friday, but do make sure that you go to church on Sunday and have a good weekend. I will see all of you next week, hopefully Thursday, and then we will start with discussing Why you can or can't have a king, according to scripture, and with a particular verse that comes up all the time in those discussions. So I hope you all have a great weekend and God bless you until next week.