04 Sep 2026 (Q&A)

2:02 It is the fourth of September 2026. I am Cory J. Mahler and this is at any cost. This is episode 40, and I guess it's sort of a weekly roundup as well as the QA because I have a little bit of housekeeping before we begin, just to mention a few things. Yes, for some reason the boom mic is always the more reliable option. I don't know what it is about OBS and not liking my Lavalier. At any rate. I have been working on some translations and things. I'm sure that those of you who follow me on X or my Telegram channel know that I have completed at least the initial version, the version 1.0 point oh as it were I will actually go ahead and pull up the website here. May as well do that while we're talking about it.

2:56 I have completed a translation of the Psalter. I am going to start using it for the daily recordings. I actually have already done that. And I see that OBS is going to be uncooperative with that as well. There we go. So the psalms are currently complete. If you would like a study version really is what it is at this point. The readings are readable in modern English. I am going to go through them personally by hand very slowly over the course of the next handful of months, and make tweaks here and there, some formatting things, make it more readable. A few little diction changes, things like that. But by and large they are readable, they are usable. The nice part about it is that I have supplied also the

3:43 Greek for those of you who know Greek, if you don't know Greek, then there's a literal translation, it is a very literal translation, woodenly literal, but each psalm also has study notes, and so that has a literal translation, a literary translation, and then notes on why things were translated as they were, and then a little bit of interpretive remarks at the bottom. So that is complete for the Psalter. I would say don't expect that to happen for any of the other books anytime soon. I am going to work on Genesis a little bit. There's some caveats there for some reasons I won't go into right now, but I want to work on my own Genesis notes. That's the reason that I'm doing the Genesis translation next, so that

4:27 I have it as a working copy for myself. But as I make it available to myself, I will also put it on the website. So that's just where I'll be storing my notes as I work. Not the actual notes for the study, those will be somewhere else, but the actual notes for Genesis will be there. And I suppose that is essentially all of the housekeeping, unless you are interested in hearing a discussion about Christianity and philosophy. I had that with the gentleman who goes by the name Arvol on X. I'm sure you all many of you anyway know him from Return to the Land, so you can find that on his X account. I also reposted it on mine. There's also high quality audio available at least from my end. I may be able to extract his audio and then merge those

5:13 together to have a higher quality one because X was being very weird with the audio. The quality wasn't great. So at the very least you have a high quality version of my answers available, my my comments that is linked in my telegram and also on the forum. So that being said, I think we will go ahead and get into the questions. That is all of the housekeeping for right now anyway. So question one I would like you to give some practical advice on dating to follow up on what you said in a young man's life. Once you get a barista or cashier's number, how do you proceed not knowing the girl's spiritual and moral state? Growing up I was taught that you should never even consider going on a date with a girl unless you knew she was a

5:58 Christian. I've come to see that this approach will not work for many men in my generation, he is a zoomer, but my family's expectations have not changed, particularly my mother's. I live in the same town as my parents and see them regularly. How do I honor them in this situation? So when it comes to the Christian requirement with regard to relationships and the faith of your spouse, it's for your spouse. It's do not be unequally yoked. You are not yoked to the girl you're dating, at least if you're doing things as you should be. You're not yoked to her in any way. So she does not have to be a Christian. It's better if she is, certainly, if there's some sort of substrate there, some sort of foundation But at the same time, if she

6:44 is open to Christianity and to you practicing headship with regard to religion, that may be better in some cases than if she were, say, really entrenched in some kind of fringe Christianity that has a lot of false beliefs. It's a lot easier to build something where nothing exists than to have to basically tear something down and rebuild it, which is the case, say if she is one of the crazier Pentecostals or something like that. There's no problem with dating someone who is not Christian. You have problems if you go to marry her and she has still refused to convert. Now you have a real problem. Now you should not be unequally yoked. But there's nothing wrong with converting her as part of dating her.

7:28 In fact, that's a good thing. You've brought someone else into the kingdom and gained a wife in the process. So will you know her spiritual or moral state when you first meet her? Probably not. Can you tell some things about her about her? Absolutely. If she is covered in tattoos and piercings and her hair is bright blue. You need better judgment because you're not going to fix that particular woman almost certainly. Now, is it the case that there are no women like that who are just broken in some way and yet haven't gone all in on the stuff that has real long-term consequences? Sure, there are probably a few of those here and there. But by and large, the woman who is covered in tattoos, and

8:12 I'm not saying, you know, a little butterfly in her ankle or something dumb that she did in undergrad. You're going to have to overlook some of that stuff these days. But if she's got full sleeves and facial piercing piercings and her hair is a really weird color. You know she's almost certainly done other things that are going to have long term consequences that are going to have damaged her in ways that you can't undo. That doesn't mean that you know she's unsalvageable necessarily in this life, but it means that any man who marries her is buying himself a lifelong project. So bear that in mind. But as long as you're going for particularly if she's on the younger side and so she hasn't made all those really bad mistakes

8:56 in, say, her late twenties and her thirties, which is sort of how it goes sometimes, then yes, you're probably going to avoid most of those problems and part of the dating as it goes. I mean, this is not ideal, right? We wouldn't want dating. We would want some form of courting back. You want the parents to be involved. You want the whole structure to be organized around getting people into relationships that are going to work and be solid, last the test of time, that quickly go from courting to marriage. That's how it should be. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where you're going to be dating her. And part of dating her is going to be asking her a lot of questions. The good part for you as a man is that women kind

9:43 of like answering questions being asked about themselves, though that's actually going to get you points in her book. So that's part of dating, but it's not a bad part of dating. Don't be weird. Don't ask really blunt questions right up front. I've seen some Zoomer guys who are asking, like, how many men have you slept with as the first question? Don't do that. And the reason you don't do that, yes, it is an immediate filter, right? If she says forty, okay, you move on to the next one. But the problem is the woman who is a virgin still or maybe has slipped up a few times, but not, you know, forty times. There's a difference there. You're going to scare her away as well. That's a terrible way to open.

10:29 This is a topic that is quite expansive and I've been meaning to write more on it. I'm going to, particularly with regard to marriage and some related matters. Partly because the Zoomers just had no male influence in their life teaching them these things. Millennials didn't have much either, so we're kind of in the same boat as you. The only difference is we are older, of course, an older generation. We've already learned it all the hard way, in many cases. I don't want all the zoomers to learn all of this stuff the hard way, and certainly Gen Alpha's coming up, they're starting to, you know, get into the high school years and things like that, so they're going to have similar problems. So I will be writing more about this.

11:11 I'm going to make myself a note to move that up my to-do list, as it were. But the bottom line here is that you don't have to date a Christian. You want to marry a Christian, but that gives you time to make her a Christian between when you meet her and when you propose to her, right? And Honoring your parents' expectations, your parents' desires here, I'm fairly certain your parents probably would rather see you married, happy, and on your way to having children than avoiding every woman who isn't perfect out of the gate. You're not going to find one who's perfect out of the gate. Part of being married as a man is conforming your wife to you. That is part of what marriage is. So you're not going to find the woman who is perfect for

11:59 you. You're going to find a woman who is good for you who then becomes perfect for you over time. That's part of marriage. Women change. Men don't change that much. That's how it's supposed to be. That's how God designed it. That was God's intent for the institution. So move my mic boom down here a little bit. So So don't be afraid to date a woman who's not Christian, but make sure that she's the kind of woman who is not categorically opposed to religion or something like that. That's going to be quite the uphill battle. Maybe you're the sort of man who is up for that kind of fight. If you are, I wish you the best of luck. Most women are not going to be that way. And just because she says she is, doesn't mean she is.

12:39 You're going to have to gauge that for yourself, not based on based on the exact words of her answer, but the cumulative nature of the answers she gives you to related subjects. You have to do some interpretation when it comes to women's answers. That's the reality of it. It will be that way for the entirety of your life Men and women are different. So there's no way to get around that fact. You're going to have to accept she's going to give you answers that you have to interpret as part of your duty as a man. It is what it is. Don't look at it as some horrible burden. Think of it as sort of a little game you get a play. So go ahead, date the woman who's not Christian, but convert her into a Christian before you marry her.

13:22 And as part of dating, ask her questions, and she will eventually reveal whether or not she is suitable to be a wife. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't. That's a roll of the dice, right? This is in part a numbers game these days. You're not going to necessarily find the perfect woman, like I said, you're not gonna find the perfect woman, period. But you're not necessarily going to find a woman who is good enough to be your wife the first time. It may take ten, twenty. Go out there and ask. That's the only way to do it. And don't be afraid of approaching women and maybe even embarrassing yourself a little bit. You get better every time you do it. And eventually you'll find one, right? And that's just how it goes it goes.

14:04 You don't take the risk, you're not going to get the reward. So you have to take the risk. Just checking the chat quickly before I continue to make sure I don't miss some questions. Question two. I recently purchased a starter home which has prompted me to stop my 401k contributions so that I might build an emergency fund. I base this decision on the trajectory of our nation. It likely not being what it is now in thirty years, I agree. My pastor, some family, and most friends think this is unwise. Is this poor stewardship and does it jeopardize the future needs of my family? I would rather have the cash in my hand now and live

15:06 within our means than trust in an uncertain event i. e. drawing retirement, that may not be in God's will for me or our generation. So obviously I'll preface this by saying none of this is legal advice or investment advice, but that being said, my standard recommendation has long been to invest in things that are concrete. Yes, if you have the spare capital to do so, you can invest in some other things like this, 401k, whatever it happens to be. But going for the best hedge, as far as I'm concerned, is things like land, the machinery you need to work the land, chickens, the things that have concrete benefits for your family. They're good to have, period. If everything goes great, you won't regret having had chickens and fresh

16:00 eggs. If everything goes poorly, you'll be very happy you have chickens and fresh eggs, right? So that sort of thing is good regardless of the outcome. You know, as a millennial, my generation generally has never had any sort of expectation, except for maybe very early on in high school, that the social programs and retirement and those things would be around by the time we're in our sixties 60s. We just had the general sense that it would not be, and I still hold that position. I don't think those systems are solvent. I don't think they're stable enough that they'll still be around. So you want to hedge against that. Part of this is very much a matter of normalcy bias, right? And so go ahead and see the Stone Choir episode on that.

16:45 Make a note for myself. Many of these men to whom you're speaking commenting on your plan for you know retirement or not retirement and how you invest, are operating under the belief that the system is going to continue the way that it has because that's just their assumption. They don't examine it, but they have this bias they believe everything will continue in their perception of normal, and that's not even true within the span of their own lifetime. So much has changed from the time undoubtedly some of these are baby boomers, from the time they were young men to today. They have just acclimated to it over that time. It's you know the proverbial frog in the boiling water sort of thing. So no, I don't think that you're being unwise.

17:29 I think that investing in concrete things is a wise move these days. We don't know exactly how things are going to go. Ultimately that's in God's hands and there are a lot of moving parts, it's pr it's quite difficult to predict where things are going to go, but like I said, there are concrete investments you can make that are beneficial regardless of what happens. So, no, I don't think that you are exercising poor stewardship or a lack of wisdom. I think it is wise to make those concrete moves instead of gambling on a future that may very well not be there. And there is a part of scripture that you can actually turn to if you want to do so with regard to these men. Let me pull up Logos here.

18:13 It's in Luke twelve and it starts at verse right. It's the parable of the rich fool, right? I'll just go ahead and read the full bare the full parable because it's good to hear it repeatedly, right? Someone in the crowd said to him, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he said to him, Man who made me a judge or arbitrator over you, and he said to them, Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. And he told them a parable saying, The land of a rich man produce plentifully, and he thought to himself, What shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said, I will do this, I will tear down my

19:03 barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods, and I will say to my soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, be merry. But God said to him, Fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. So yes, the initial the surface level, as it were, the main takeaway from the parable is obviously about not neglecting the things of God and focusing on the material things of this life. But there's another level to it as well, where the future is to some degree always going to be uncertain. And so it's not always the wise move to gamble on, say, I'm going

19:55 to be here when I'm eighty-eight. I may very well not be. I probably won't be, given my family history. I'll probably be here to about eighty-five or eighty-six. But There is a degree of wisdom. There's a wisdom call when it comes to how you invest and how you project into the future what needs to be done, right? You want to have that inheritance that you can pass to your children, but you don't want to accidentally gamble that away by betting on a market that may not be there in 20 years. So again, the bottom line, I think what you're doing is not unwise. I think it's perfectly reasonable, and you can go ahead and cite that parable. They'll probably object, but at least you've told them that, you know,

20:35 there's some scripture on my side here. There are a few questions coming in from the chat. I do not know that I will get to all of them this time, but I now have a system in place where I can drop the chat transcript into it and have the questions pulled out to make it m less likely that I will miss any questions from the chat going forward. Question three is about the dark arts as it were. Would you support the US government fighting Santaria warlocks in Colombia? And the reasoning he gives, of course, is the suffer not a witch to live. Which, yes, scripture is very clear about not permitting those who practice black magic to exist in your society. It is a curse that you bring on yourself if you tolerate

21:33 them. So would I support us going in and dealing with them in another country? The answer is no and yes. No, I wouldn't say that we should go in and just deal with it. Yes, I would support a Christian government in Colombia. If they were trying to do it, I would be perfectly fine giving them material support or intelligence or something, helping them do that. We should be willing to help our Christian neighbors. That is, of course, presupposing a Christian government in Colombia and a Christian government in the US, and we're not really currently in a position to do that, because our government is wicked and not Christian, and their government is extremely corrupt I have a friend who works for the Colombian government.

22:17 I will not name my friend, but there is a lot of trouble down there. There are a lot of problems down there. As I'm sure anyone familiar with that part of the world and particularly Colombia is well aware. Question four, switching gears a little bit. Would it be perhaps would it be possible for you to combine all the recordings of the readings you've made of the Bible in a year into one file? I believe such recording would be helpful to me and perhaps others. There are a number of considerations here. On the one hand, there is the IP consideration with regard to obviously copyright and fair use and things like that. Which are certainly more forgiving when you are using excerpts as opposed to the entirety of the text.

23:15 So good chance I would run afoul of some restrictions or terms somewhere if I simply combined all of that into one file and made it available. Now there are versions of scripture where I could do that, but I'm sort of taking an eclectic approach, I guess, to the readings because currently from yesterday or yesterday actually, well today it the I recorded it yesterday, but today, the Psalter readings are my own translation. The Old Testament is Nets with some edits here and there that I make for consistency with English grammar and clarity. I usually just make those on the fly as I'm reading. And then I use the ESV for the New Testament. So the big concern there would be the ESV. I don't remember the exact restrictions, the allowances with regard to the

24:10 nets, I would have to look. It's more of an academic text. It's probably more liberal with regard to that. And I would think they would be less likely to try any sort of legal action of enforcement. I don't trust Crossway, the producers, the publishers of the ESV. So the short answer is I could do that, but it would have to be a different version from the one I've been using. So So perhaps something for the future once I have everything translated or hopefully someone else has made a full translation of the Septuagint and with appropriate copyright freedom on that, then I would be willing to do that, but as things currently stand, I don't really have the option within the bounds of IP law. Question five

25:07 How do we get Christians to stop calling the demonic and those who engage with the demonic crazy or stupid and instead get them to recognize the evil of the demonic. Is it an overreaction to constantly be correcting people on this? Example, someone getting a tattoo of a symbol like a pentagram and not necessarily knowing the meaning of said symbol Initially, I would like to say that I would hope people are not getting tattoos of symbols they don't understand, but I think we all know from tattoos in foreign languages, particularly say Chinese and Japanese, that people are indeed getting tattoos of things they do not understand. So perhaps the first recommendation would be don't get a tattoo of

25:51 something you don't understand. Generally probably just don't get a tattoo, it's generally more wise not to get a tattoo. I don't object to them in a blanket sense. Not fond of them on women. When it comes to men, you know, if you're a sailor and you get a tattoo of your, you know, your ship or your unit if you're a soldier or whatever. I don't think that's that big of a deal. Don't get full sleeves, chest, don't do face or neck, obviously, but just Generally speaking, to go to the actual question here about the demonic, this is a matter of teaching and a matter of really a lack of teaching. There are very few pastors who teach about this and there are very few pastors who are fit to teach about this.

26:39 They don't understand it, they don't know how to approach it from a useful and a Christian perspective, and they wind up teaching nonsense, and you get people who read all the various weird books on the subject. I think Left Behind delves into this. I haven't read the series, so I don't know for certain, but I believe from talking to other people who have that it delves into this. There's what was that big series that was popular among American evangelicals? Was Frank Perry, I think was the name of the author. This is the sort of stuff that winds up seeping into the culture and becoming the general background understanding of it, and it's not a Christian understanding of it. It's at the absolute best fiction.

27:20 It is something we should take seriously. Scripture takes it seriously. Satan is listed as one of our constant enemies, right? This is something that perhaps there is an advantage to being in a liturgical church, because if you are in a church that still uses a proper hymnal, there are hymns about this, right? We walk in danger all the way, right? I walk in danger all the way. There are many hymns about the demonic and the danger that it poses to us and the necessity of relying on Christ to keep us safe from that. I think that that probably keeps those in the high church, at least those still using hymnals and things like that, a little safer than those who are in say low church Protestantism where this stuff

28:08 is totally neglected or left up to fiction. So it's a matter of teaching. And there's no easy fix, there's no quick solution. We just need to actually educate Christians about these things. There are some good books on the subject. I'm not going to say that everyone should read them because I don't think everyone should read them. Perhaps men who are in teaching positions should certainly read about this stuff, know about it more so they can teach usefully on the subject. But a big part of it is just changing our culture because our culture is currently suffused with demonic symbols all over the place. We have demonic statues, we have demonic symbology in music videos and things like that. Our celebrities are quite frankly, openly satanic in many cases.

28:57 This is a very real problem and it needs to be addressed, but it needs to be addressed in a comprehensive sort of way. One of the places where we could start doing that basically today is teaching correctly on it with regard to one Christian to another, particularly for those who are Christian teachers, need to understand it and teach correctly on it. This is something that is going to interest people, for better or worse, you shouldn't have too much interest in the demonic. God doesn't tell us that much about it. For a reason. You shouldn't want to know a lot about it. But you need to know enough about it to safeguard yourself against it. And that involves some knowledge, say, of like you mentioned, the symbols,

29:40 some knowledge of how the propaganda techniques are used in Hollywood and other places like that to push these things, sometimes at an almost subconscious level. So this I guess is really a condemnation of the lack of ability and the lack of knowledge on the part of many modern teachers. They really need to invest the time and the effort to understand these things better, or at least know where to find the answers, so they can direct those who ask them to more competent men. But I can certainly make some book recommendations. Maybe I will look at that after the stream and add that to the show notes. Make a note for myself. Question six is also about the scripture but sort of tangential.

30:41 Can you talk about the oral tradition that was needed to inform the ancient Hebrew with its lack of vowels and the oral tradition of the Talmud that Jewish rabbis say supersedes precedes the Pentateuch. So the distinction here, and at this point, the Jews would say that their Talmud is no longer an oral tradition because now it has been reduced to writing, and so now it is actually their scripture, they won't admit that, but that's the reality of it. When it comes to the ancient Hebrew, which to remind those or to say to those who've not seen the Stone Choir series on what is actually scripture, which is to say the Greek is scripture, not Hebrew. The reason the Hebrew is not is the Hebrew is lost.

31:26 We don't have the ancient Hebrew. We have a modern reconstruction that lacks the vowels, because Hebrew is what's called an abjad and how it's written. The consonants are written but not the vowels. And that's a problem, right? The difference between bat and bot. Pretty big difference, one vowel. Now imagine that expanded all the way to an entire book, or in the case of Scripture, a library of books. The oral tradition for the rabbis, for the teachers in ancient Israel, mind you, I'm not talking about modern, but ancient Israel was literally the vowels. That was the ancient tradition. The oral tradition was passing down what the text actually said, so that you could actually read the thing.

32:10 Thankfully, as we went over at length in the Septuagint series for the Stone Choir podcast, God gave us an inspired translation in the Septuagint in Greek. Greek has vowels. Greek is a proper written language. You can read Greek and understand what's being said. You can stare at ancient Hebrew scribbling and hallucinate, but you're not going to get the word of God, because God gave his final stamp of disapproval on those people at the very latest seventy AD when he burned all their records in the temple, all their incidentally all their genealogical records, which means they can't ever bring back a third temple because you have to know who the priests are. The records are gone. Tangential point but worth mentioning.

33:01 God destroyed not only the Hebrew text, but also the Hebrew language. Modern Hebrew is not ancient Hebrew revived, it is a totally synthetic, constructed language. There's a reason when you talk to them, they all sound like they're speaking a weird conversation of Russian French and German. Because the men who designed who created modern Hebrew were indeed Russian speaking, French speaking, and German speaking. So the oral tradition was the vowels at that point, essentially, and so they could read it back then. And also keep in mind, they also had God literally there in the temple, and they had a way to talk to him with the Urim and Thumim, right? So if they lost something, which maybe they did at some point,

33:47 they could literally ask God. God gave to us an actual reliable scripture in the Greek, so we can just preserve that and we have. We have access to that. So that's essentially the difference. The oral tradition is not a thing anymore. So anyone who tries to build up something on the basis of the oral tradition particularly contrary to scripture is indeed trying to mislead you. Shifting gears here, we're going to return to the topic of IQ. Two related questions on IQ. Question from Revelation and then I will try to get to some questions in the chat, I believe. The first question on IQ. Question seven. I want you to speak to or emphasize the importance of using your inherited IQ.

34:47 Also speak to not marrying a stupid girl because she will not buck or be a feminist. That's not always true. As she will pass her genes and be the one teaching your children, speak to the education or formation of young women, to prepare for homeschooling, etc. So I'll address there are a number of things in this that I will address. IQ, of course, is very highly heritable. It's one of the most strongly proven things in genetics, and it's one of the most strongly tested and proven things and reproduced things in psychology. And the point about not marrying a stupid woman, right? Okay, sure. Don't Don't marry a woman who is actually clinically retarded. That's a bad idea. Do you have to find a woman who is a the exact

35:43 same intelligence as you? No. Does she have to be more intelligent than you? No. Do remember that the curves are very close for men and women. The one for men just has a higher standard deviation, so there are more very stupid men and more very intelligent men. But there's also something called regression to the mean. And so for instance, if you are an extreme outlier, and even if you marry a woman who's an extreme outlier, your children will not be at your level. They will almost certainly be above average, but they will be less intelligent than you are because of regression to the mean. There is a tendency in each subsequent generation to go back to the mean. So if you're 150, maybe your children are 130 or 140, because

36:25 they're going back toward the mean. Now there's a difference, of course, between populations large and subpopulations. You can have a subpopulation with a slightly higher mean, and so that's part of the equation. But there's still a tendency to regress toward the mean. So if you're an outlier, don't expect your children to be the same level of outlier as you are. So bear that in mind if you happen to be in that position. That being said, the majority of your intelligence is indeed inherited from the mother's side. That's the reality. That's not always the case, right? Because this is sort of a statistical matter. Statistically speaking, you are most likely to inherit your intelligence primarily from

37:09 your mother's side side. Incidentally, statistically speaking, and just to give a counterexample, right, statistically speaking, you inherit more of the genetics controlling for whether or not you will go bald as a man from your mother and your matrilineal grandfather. My matrilineal grandfather still has a full head of hair. Again Again, doesn't always play out, but these are the odds of the thing happening. You're sort of playing the odds. That's many things in life. You're playing the odds. Because you can't know the outcome for a certainty. You can only predict the outcome statistically. So, yes, whether or not a woman is intelligent to a certain level, whatever that happens to be appropriate for you, your station

37:57 in life, all these things, that is very important. That should factor in to the equation when you are picking a wife. Does it mean that you have to set a hard IQ, my wife absolutely must be? No. Do remember that again, this is statistics. The men who are outliers had parents who were probably not outliers, or if they were outliers, not as extreme, right? The man with say an IQ of a hundred and ninety probably has parents who were above average, maybe, maybe touching genius level, but not where he is. That's not how it works. So yes, be wise about it. Factor this into the equation when you're deciding if a woman would make a good wife. But don't make this your only factor. And don't think that you are going to solve all your problems

38:52 in life by finding a woman who is a genius. You're going to buy yourself some new problems, some novel ones, particularly if you're not at her level, so bear that in mind. It is going to be difficult for you if you find a woman who is significantly more intelligent than you are. And women actually like when their husbands are more intelligent than they are. That is the right and proper dynamic. So there are There are a lot of things involved here. It is a matter of wisdom. You can't just say this is best or this is best, right? And part of it is going to be the woman you happen to find. As long as she's within that range of reasonableness, don't disqualify her just because she's not exactly at the end you would prefer.

39:36 So it's a question of w of wisdom. Your point about women being ready for home schooling, education, things like that. I'm not necessarily the biggest proponent of homeschooling. These days I am because of how bad the schools are, but in a Christian society that is functioning well, I think having schools is fine. They shouldn't be for eight hours a day, they shouldn't be what they are now, but if you send children off to have rigorous formal schooling for say four hours a day, I think that's probably best. Particularly because you're going to have people who are trained in subjects that you can't reasonably know at the same level. This is just standard specialization, right? It's the same thing I've discussed many, many times.

40:26 I didn't make the Stone Choir Challenge coins. Could I have done that? Sure, if I had invested the time and the money and the effort and probably a lot of wasted resources practicing, sure. It made more sense to contract someone who was an expert. The same thing is true with regard to, say, geometry or trigonometry or whatever it happens to be. It makes sense to have someone else teaching that because that's his expertise. There's nothing wrong with having his expertise in society and school is part of that. So I actually do think that we should have national standards and schools that adhere to those. We aren't there today, so the work around, as it were, the temporary measure, the stopgap, is home schooling.

41:15 If you have a wife who is reasonably intelligent, she can train herself well enough or follow the teacher's book to treat to teach the children. There are great resources that are available for homeschooling, many of them free or relatively free. So I don't think that's necessarily that big of an issue. But yes, certainly women should want to train their children at home. And even if you have that formalized schooling, right? For four hours a day, whatever it happens to be. That's a lot of time. Your children are still going to be at home with your wife. She's still going to be teaching them during that time, right? That's when she teaches her daughters how to cook, how to do things around the home.

41:56 That's when you go out and walk around in God's creation and teach your children about nature. You still have to do those things, and so tons of resources for that though. This is not an era in which it's hard to find the resources to teach children. All you have to do is actually invest the time to do it. A second question, as I mentioned on IQ. This is question eight. You speak of IQ as though it is inherited only and persists for life, discuss the ramifications of high IQ individuals that squander it by not training and nurturing it. Many people are capable and use IQ to be successful in age twenty five and do not take care of it, do not feed their mind. Particularly boomers with seemingly high IQ have so little executive functioning left

42:51 they do not participate and do not serve any more. I guess what I want for you to discuss is that it's not enough you have to maintain and contribute. That's true. It's like everything else in life, you have to maintain it, right? If you were in excellent physical shape when you were twenty five, that doesn't mean that you are when you're forty That's something you have to maintain. And your mind, your IQ, the machinery, is not any different from that. I've recommended many times before, and I will continue to staunchly recommend, learn a second language. It's one of the best things you can do to help keep your mind in good order as you age. And if you know two languages, learn a third. Or at least, you know, attempt to learn a third.

43:33 Maybe you learn a little bit of French with your wife, or whatever it happens to be. Pick Japanese or something, pick something crazy to learn here in the West if you're so inclined. It's something that will keep you mentally agile and active, and it has proven benefits for you as you age. Play memorization games, things like that. And actually video games to some degree are beneficial for your mind as you age. Not all of them, obviously, but some of them, and don't play fifteen hours a day, but there are many things you can do to keep your brain, to keep your mind active, but to keep your brain in good shape as you age. And absolutely you have to do those. If you don't use it, you will indeed lose at least some

44:17 of it. It's the same thing as if you do like lifting or something, right? If you don't lift for many years, when you get back under the bar, you won't lift the same as your previous record. Just not the way it's going to work. The mind is the same. Question nine is about scripture, so I'll go ahead and pull that up. We're back to this time Revelation. So question nine. How does Revelation 320 agree with the doctrine of monergism? For those who don't know, the doctrine of monergism is that God is the sole actor in justification specifically. Christ says that if anyone hears his voice and opens the door, he will come in and eat with him. How can someone not yet regenerated by the Holy Spirit open the

45:06 door? Wouldn't that be our work since we are dead in our sins in before regeneration? We cannot open any spiritual doors. So the first point I'll just pull it up first. Makes more sense to read it first. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne, he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. This is of course one of the letters to the churches in Revelation, this one specifically Laodicea. But I think one of the helpful ways that you can look at

45:54 this particular saying is to look back to the parable right right of those waiting for the master to return to the house. Blessed is the one who is awake and opens the door, right? that's the sort of thing you want to have in mind when you're reading this. And what is not being said here is that you have to go out and find Christ, that you have to be the first mover. You're not the first mover, right? So take the knock on the door as the free offer of faith, and then you can either reject it, leave the door closed, or you can accept it, right? And I'm speaking in human terms to borrow from Paul, right? Because obviously if you're dead in your sins and your trespasses, you aren't accepting anything.

46:37 But God is the one waking you up here with the knock on the door. So that's the free offer of faith. This is not somewhere you can try to say that synergism is true in justification, and also, you don't pull out this is a standard doctrine of exegesis of basically any work, but certainly scripture. You don't pull out a doctrine from somewhere that doesn't address it explicitly unless it's not addressed somewhere better, right? You take a doctrine from the places that address it explicitly. So if you're going to take, say, the doctrine of justification, you're going to turn to somewhere like Romans, and you're going to deal with the areas that deal with it extensively and explicitly. You then use other parts of scripture that address it, say, obliquely

47:25 or impliedly, you use those to bolster the argument, you use those to expand it to demonstrate that it's elsewhere in scripture, but you don't find a one off verse somewhere and pull out a major doctrine from it when the verse does not address it directly. That's just standard exegesis, basic exegesis of scripture. So this is not where in scripture you're going to turn to look for monergism versus synergism. And also bear in mind when Christ is speaking or when Scripture anywhere speaks in a parable or in symbols or allusions, anything like that, you don't take that exactly woodenly literally. It's going to have a sort of level of demand, a layer of interpretation necessary to understand it, because it's not literal.

48:14 The same thing as the various poetic books in scripture, right? They're not exactly literal. Are you going to read the Song of Songs as perfectly literal? Some degree yes, but also no. You have to be able to interpret it according to genre and do remember that Revelation is apocalyptic prophecy, it's not history. So does that mean that there aren't historical bits in it? No, of course not, but it requires a greater degree of interpretation. It requires more of the reader than say Genesis. And I will now try to pull out some questions from the chat. Assuming that OBS and Firefox will both cooperate with me as I

49:17 attempt to do so. I will just answer this one first because it happens to be the first one I saw when I scrolled. Which of Walter, Walter, however you want to pronounce his names, books or articles would you recommend? This is going to depend on whether you are just a Christian interested in this, and most of my audience is male, not all. It's there's a pretty good chunk of women, but I assume the questioner here is male he has a lion in his profile picture, so pretty good indication here. If you are interested in reading Valtter, then maybe you have teaching duties as a husband or with your church. Everything from Valter is good. Excellent practical writer. You are going to find things that you can apply on practically

50:07 every page of the things he's written. And you'll probably enjoy it as well. Uh, he is one of the authors that I actually do enjoy reading, but his work, Law and Gospel, is always one of the top recommendations that Lutherans are certainly going to give you. It is an excellent treatment of the subject. It is absolutely worth reading. He has theses on election. Those are worth reading if you're interested in election, predestination, whichever term you want to use, he treats that excellently. But really, I can just give a blanket recommendation. I'm looking at what works I have of his on my shelves in here, but I can really just give a blanket recommendation. Go ahead and read anything from him where the title interests you,

50:48 or even if it doesn't, you will get something out of it. He is an excellent writer. The same is basically true of Luther. You can read almost anything from Luther, and you will get something out of reading that. But law and gospel is probably a good place to start. And then maybe the book on predestination, election, whatever the version you have translates that as is another good option. Particularly, say if you are reformed and just interested in Lutheranism, or if you're dealing with the Reformed, because one of the big differences between the Reformed and Lutherans, of course, is how we understand election, right? They have double predestination. We believe that scripture does not teach that.

51:38 Uh question about genetics as some of the letters have been swapped I assume to miss. I don't actually have chat moderation enabled, so your comment would probably get through I don't know if YouTube does some sort of basic chat moderation. They may very well do so. But it's a question about basically genetic differences between Chinese, Jews, and Indians and how those came about. The the Chinese, right, are largely Shemitic. The Japanese also it looks like there's some admixture year from J Fith among the populations in Hokkaido up there, there are the Jomon, right? They're a different, they're genetically distinct from the majority of the Japanese island. But the difference among peoples isn't necessarily just the influx of genetics from

52:32 any particular one line of the sons of Noah, right? Because it depends when that happened, and it depends which subgroup, because there is a degeneration process over a period of centuries that is essentially a matter of worshiping demons and inbreeding. Demon worship often includes murdering the firstborn, lowers IQ, and inbreeding, lowers IQ. For some reason, Satan wants to make everyone really stupid. surprise. Ugly also in the process. But that's basically all it is. It's the more degenerate the population has become, then admixture from that population is going to be detrimental. Very simple math, very simple to understand. So the difference among populations is really just a matter of how

53:19 degenerate they have become because of those practices of their ancestors and then the various mixture. So obviously for the Indian subcontinent you have various waves of immigrants, different ones in the south versus the north, different levels of admixture, different restrictions due to caste and things like that, different levels of inbreeding due to different religious practices in different parts of the country. It's complicated, but the basic outline is demon worship and child sacrifice and inbreeding. Don't forget that you are indeed a biological creature. There are very real consequences physically. Question twelve his Roman Catholicism aside, what is your take on Francisco Franco's government in Spain Spain.

54:13 I don't know as much as I would want to know about his government specifically to make any real sort of extensive comments, but obviously he opposed the communists and he did it effectively, and I agree with that. He was certainly a little less friendly toward Protestants than I think was appropriate. You know, we're not going around saying that we're going to exterminate all of the Roman Catholics, right? So But other than that, I he was very good about opposing the communists in Spain and sort of balancing what he was doing domestically against the concerns internationally that could have spilled over into Spain and caused greater problems. So overall I think he was a fairly good leader, but like

54:58 I said, I don't know enough specifically about his government and things like that to give any sort of extensive answer Sort of a question about our legal system here. Question 13. Take a sip of my coffee here before I keep going. Coffee at eight o'clock at night is obviously the optimal choice of beverage. Question 13. Could you please give a quick explanation of exoneration? A lot of blacks have been using it as an argument against their criminality. A rebuttal to this would be greatly appreciated. Exoneration is a complicated topic, a very simple concept, but a complicated

55:59 topic. It's a simple concept because you are exonerated if it is later found that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a finding of guilty or the process was deficient or something like that. It's going to depend on jurisdiction for the specific laws, but that's the basic contours of the matter. It is declaring someone after the fact to be not innocent, because we never do that, but not But not guilty. Which incidentally is all that innocent means, right? Innocent is in no series, it's not guilty. But exoneration has a severe problem in the US context, particularly these days, because there are a lot of Jewish groups that go around picking at cases and getting new appeals or bringing them before a higher

56:46 court to do everything they can with every possible loophole they can find to exonerate people who are guilty. This happens all the time. The Innocence Project so called is probably the biggest offender in this area, but there are dozens of these groups. And they are all largely Jewish run, Jewish funded groups. They're basically all, I think literally all Jewish funded groups. I can't think of a single one that's not. But they go around trying to get exonerations on technicalities, and then you have leftists and others who will crow about this saying, Oh look, this person was innocent and the justice system is racially biased and blah blah blah, right? They do that. The problem is that's not what the court has proven.

57:28 Usually they get off on sub technicality because there was some minor defect in the process or there was some hypertechnical point of law that for some reason, right, well some reason, the judge hearing the appeal decided oh that was sufficient to overturn it. They're not being declared innocent, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are in fact unbelievably guilty. They've just been exonerated because of what amounts to corruption and politics. So you're never going to explain that to the people who are arguing that exoneration proves that we're convicting people on the basis of race instead of the basis of being violent criminals. So probably don't bother trying, but that is the reality of it.

58:13 So if you encounter someone who is putting forward these talking points and still has a functioning mind, then you can maybe make the argument. Question 14 Stone choir finally put into words the things that I haven't felt right, the things that haven't felt right to me about my non denominational church. I love the people here, but no communion. How do I bring that up without sounding too smart? So I would first have to ask by no communion, do you mean uppercase C communion? Because I there's no uppercase C here, but I don't know if that was incidental or to typo. Or do you mean no communion in the sense of fellowship? Because I can certainly read that either way. I'll just answer both. With regard to fellowship, the way to push for that partly is

59:16 going to depend on the size of the church, right? But push for things like having a men's night, and there aren't very many baby boomers who listen to my QA's, but please stop making the men's Bible study, the men's groups, at six in the morning. You want to get the younger men involved in the church, and the younger men are not going to want to be up at six in the morning. That's the reality of it. It's great that you want to be up at six in the morning if you're an early bird and you want to be up then be up then and get coffee and a donut and do all those things. But that's not the point. Then it's just a coffee club for the old men, which is fine. That's a great thing to have. Don't call it the men's Bible study.

1:00:00 That needs to be at a reasonable time for men in their twenties, men in their thirties, men who have wives and children, men who have demands on their time, and can't be doing something between seven and nine in the morning on a Tuesday. So sort of a tangent, but a very important one here. But you want to push for things when it with regard to fellowship. You want to push for things that get those in the church to view themselves essentially as an extended family. So have the wives meet together and do th bring bring all their children together and play somewhere. Hopefully someone has a large enough property where you can do that. Maybe of you know goats they can pet or something. Have the husbands get together and go on a hike or a

1:00:38 hunting trip or whatever it happens to be. It's going to be tailored to your congregation in your part of the country, right? If you have a congregation that's in Los Angeles, you're probably not organizing the 30-year-old men to go on a hunting trip. Maybe you are. Some of the churches I attended in LA, you could do that, but not all of them. Now if you're in Arkansas, probably going to do a hunting trip, right? Tailor what you want to do as if you would have an extended family. The same thing is true with your literal extended family, right? Every family is going to be different. They're going to have different things they enjoy doing together. Some families love hiking, some families hate hiking.

1:01:16 So when it comes to fellowship, do that sort of thing. Treat it as an extended family and build those bonds the same way you build bonds with anyone else. When it comes to uppercase communion, that is a more difficult question because that is going to get immediately into theology, and a non-denominational church is as a Lutheran, I can't really say just push for it right, and whatever they do is going to be fine because there are some things I would view as being, if not necessarily outright blasphemous, then at least very wrong. Like if you're going to use grape juice instead of wine, it's better to just not have it then. So that is a very fact specific inquiry. It's going to depend on your church, the theology it currently holds.

1:02:07 As a non denominational on a non-denominational church in the US, I can pretty much just assume it's Baptist. And so they're probably going to object to using wine, and they're probably not going to believe in the real presence. So That's an uphill battle, and partly it depends on what you believe, right? If you have come to have a belief in the real presence, maybe you just read John 6 enough times that God smacked you in the face until you believed it. If that's the case, then if Then if you can nudge them in the right direction, great, by all means do that. Foregoing communion for a period of time for a good reason is not a sin. That is something you're permitted to do, right? Sometimes that happens

1:02:52 and it's out of your control. If that's the case, then by all means, I'm not going to tell you just abandon this church family and find a new one. But if it turns out that they are absolutely going to refuse to hear any entreaties about this, to hear anything from scripture, then eventually they'll probably force you to leave if you force the issue, and that is a matter of conscience for you. Maybe you attend a Lutheran church and commune at the Lutheran church and continue attending this church as well, and eventually you'll probably have to decide. But like I said, that is fact-specific. I don't know your circumstances. I don't have enough information from the question, so that's up to you. It's a matter of wisdom and conscience.

1:03:39 A quick question here that I can answer. Anyone know what version of the Septuagint I recommend? I do in fact know what version I recommend. The Nets is probably the N-E-T-S, is probably one of the best ones for study and general use. It's a little It's a little stilted because it is very woodenly literal. It's faithful to the Greek. So if you're using it for study, great. The Lexum, the LES2, the second edition is also a good one. In the same way, it has some other quirks. I use I use it less than the Nets. If you want one that is readable and sort of akin to say the KJV, but not quite KJV English, but very close, that would be the Brenton. And beyond that, there are some other ones in the pipeline.

1:04:26 They're not available yet, so that's kind of the recommendation. If you want to read the Psalter, I translated the Psalter, so you can go ahead and just use that on my website if you're so inclined. I don't have a print one, and that's probably never going to happen, or at least not into the very far future. So if you want to print one, those are pretty much your recommendations and your options, the Nets, the LES2, and the Brenton. Question sixteen, I guess little topil here. Thoughts on the idea that Lindsey Clancy may have been possessed. I don't know enough about the case. I have not been following it, I've only been seeing it scroll past on X. So So I know the basic fact pattern, but I don't know

1:05:28 enough. I've not listened to any of it. I've not heard her speak. I don't have any real evidence one way or the other. Could she have been possessed? Certainly. Could she just be evil and not possessed? Also certainly. I don't know which I see we're going to go for the questions that run real close to the terms of service and things tonight in a couple places. Of course it's asked on X, and on X it's fine, but I'm also streaming on other platforms, so I will go ahead and maybe modify the question a little bit, but I will add it into the show notes in its existing form. At what point does something count as sexual assault inside a marriage and is it different to outside a marriage? The answer is yes.

1:06:25 However, that being said, this comes with an enormous number of caveats that I will probably not get into all of them right now, but when you marry, you are relinquishing control over your body. You no longer have full control of your body. This is very clear, right? It's from scripture. The wife does not have control over her body, rather her husband does. And then it also says the husband does not have control over his body, rather the wife does. You are not permitted to withhold sex from your spouse. Now, does that mean you have to say yes every single time your spouse wants to have sex? The answer is no, because you may very well feel terrible, right? You're still going to get the flu. Hopefully, you don't.

1:07:09 May God bless you and you never get the flu again. But if you get the flu, you'd probably rather sleep or spend time in the bathroom, right? Or any of a number of things, right? Maybe you are extremely sore. You went way too hard at the gym or something. There are times where biological reality is going to mean that it is perfectly reasonable to say no and your spouse should accept that. Whether it's the husband saying no or the wife saying no, there are times. That's not withholding. Withholding is when it happens over a relatively long period of time. And it doesn't have to be, you know, months or years. This is we're talking weeks, not months or years here, because it you know Paul says maybe you abstain for a period of time,

1:07:56 but then come together again so that you don't have the temptation. That is one of the purposes of marriage is to deal with the temptation to sexual immorality. Well, if you're not making the natural use of the marriage, you're not doing the very thing God said you're supposed to do. So but on the topic of sexual assault, no you are not allowed to just force your wife to do whatever you want. She is not just your plaything or your inanimate possession. She is her own person. Yes Yes, she is part of you. Yes, you are her head. But the way that you should view that is the same way you view other parts of your body, right? Like you don't chop off your hand because you just feel like it one day.

1:08:42 That would be an evil thing to do. We all recognize that. You don't abuse your body because that's an evil thing to do. The same is true of your wife. You should view her as your most precious possession. Yes, she's your possession. But you're going to answer to God for how you treated her. You should treat her well. And that includes not abusing her, not harming her, not misusing her. But But, yes, she still has to grant you the natural use of the marriage. This is not exactly an easy issue, but it's part of living together with someone of the opposite sex. You have to to do the things that make her, of course, feel comfortable in that marriage, make her feel desired. This is one of your duties as a man.

1:09:27 You don't just get to come home and demand sex and never do anything else with your wife. That's not how it works. That is abusing her, that's mistreating her, that's not living up to what God demands of you. But if she is simply refusing you for no reason, or just pure whim, whatever it happens to be, she is violating her marriage vow. That is a reason to bring her before the elders of your church, or even to divorce her. Because if you are withholding for a long enough period, that is the same thing it is tantamount to adultery. And so that is grounds for divorce. Anything that is adultery or tantamount to adultery is grounds for a divorce. Incidentally, so is abandonment. So if your spouse just disappears, yes.

1:10:11 Years later, never reappears, grounds for divorce. So the answer is that there are differences because of course there are things you're not permitted to do with regard to someone to whom you are not married, you shouldn't be doing it anyway. I don't want to get into the legal issues of, you know, proof and he said versus she said because that's sort of a morass and it's not really the the central thrust of the question here, right, is not the positive law, it's the moral law. So morally, don't abuse your wife. Treat her as you would, your most valued possession, the most precious part of your body, and you should think of her as your own body. Treat her well, and she will reciprocate. If you're in one of the rare circumstances where she does not,

1:10:59 then you may have to involve the church elders, church discipline, and even up to divorce if it comes to it. But yes, you obviously are not permitted to do anything sexual with someone to whom you are not married. You're not supposed to, right? That is a violation of God's law. That is a violation at least of the sixth commandment and of other things as well. So there is a difference between whether you're married to the person or not Your girlfriend is supposed to say no, your wife is supposed to say yes. That's kind of the foundational difference there. On a totally unrelated note, I really wish that the comments, or

1:12:00 at least the aggregate comments, would not only show the timestamp, the comment was received, but also the timestamp in the video the person was watching when it was sent. That would be helpful. Because I have people saying that I'm muted, and that was from the beginning when OBS was fighting me, not now when I am not muted, I can see my levels. So, you know. Just the fun of technology as it goes. I think I'll answer maybe a a couple more questions here and then call it a night. We're approaching that one hour mark. I think we're a little over one hour actually recorded. Question eighteen. How do we acquire power in a godly way? This I of course pick a question that is going to take a little bit of time to answer, but

1:12:54 make a couple notes for myself. When it comes to acquiring power in a godly way, it is worth at the outset highlighting that there is a difference between the kingdom of the left hand of Christ and the kingdom of the right hand of Christ, right? The right hand is the church. And how you conduct things, how you behave in the church, very different. The church is a family. You should behave as a family. You should treat people differently from how you just treat a random stranger. When it comes to power, you're dealing in the kingdom of the left hand. And the kingdom of the left hand of Christ is dealt with in a different way because you are dealing in matters that are more practical. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difference is what is the

1:13:44 only weapon that God gives to the church? His word. That's it. That's the only weapon you have. You can resort to the text. You can make arguments from the text. Yes, you can make arguments from reason and creation, you know, his two books, creation being one book, scripture being the second book. The church doesn't have the sword. The church doesn't have any other power. The only power the state has ultimately is the sword. You're talking about two very different, two fundamentally different things. And so when it comes to acquiring power, you're dealing with matters of the sword. You're not dealing with matters necessarily of just scripture and arguments about scripture. Now, are there restrictions on what you are permitted and not

1:14:33 permitted to do? Certainly yes. But they're not as stringent, perhaps, as many pastors would argue, and as I've as I've seen many pastors argue, it's a fundamentally different beast. You're dealing in politics. And so when it comes to politics, we'll just quote Bismarck, it's the art of the possible, right? You are doing what needs to be done to do what you are supposed to do. So there is some consideration of the ends when it comes to the means you are employing to achieve those ends in a much stronger way with regard to the kingdom of the left hand, which is we could just use this the shorthand of the state versus the church. The practical considerations, of course, I think are more interesting than necessarily

1:15:22 the moral arguments, because I think the moral arguments largely sort of resolve themselves in praxis. But the practical arguments are how do you organize, how do you get things done? How do you do it in a way that is effective? And that is one of the problems the right has right now. I've talked about this a lot, particularly on X. A big part of it is that we have that very strong libertarian and individualist strain that has just been part of America since kind of the beginning. It's sort of really heavily entrenched in say Probably like the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, it really heavily entrenched, and then there's sort of another wave of it recently with sort of my generation, maybe a little older, maybe Gen X.

1:16:10 The problem is you can't view yourself first and foremost as an individual. God doesn't view you that way, you shouldn't view yourself that way. God speaks of entire nations with the first person masculine singular pronoun in scripture. He addresses the nation of Israel in some places as he. So God thinks of us in a very different way. You have to think of yourself as part of that greater collective, as part of your family, as part of your tribe, as part of your nation. Part of what we have to do is fundamentally changing that way that we view ourselves and others. You have to view your fellow citizen as a brother or as a sister Not as a competitor, there's a lot of work to be done there. I will continue to say that a huge part of it is

1:16:58 a lack of not just leadership, but leadership, and the willingness of other men to fall in line in the hierarchy that nature has instilled. There are natural leaders, there are natural followers. There are men who are higher in the hierarchy, there are men who are lower in the hierarchy. Every man needs to know his place and except his place, or else the machine doesn't run. Right? Paul speaks of this with regard to the body, right? If the hand doesn't want to work because it's not an eye, your body's not going to work very well. The same thing is true of political machinery. If you have someone who is suited to go knock on doors and he doesn't want to knock on doors because he wants to be the leader, you're going to have very real problems.

1:17:42 But I think that's probably enough for that question for now because I don't want to get into you know the full treatment, be here for hours. Trying to see if I missed any questions in the chat here. Hopefully I did not. Okay. I think I will make this question nineteen the last question for this stream. If you sent another question by all means I will try to also copy that for future streams. But question nineteen sort of hearing back to the beginning here, where

1:18:47 can a Christian man age thirty six go to find a wife besides a dating app or a bar? Without the internet nobody connects anymore in real life, I don't know where to go. The bar's not a terrible place, let's be honest. And not the bar bar. Don't go to the dive bar. You're gonna find something you probably don't want there. The brewery isn't necessarily a terrible place. Maybe you have one in your area that has live music one night out of the week. Maybe you can find someone there. You'll find someone who maybe has a common hobby with you to start out. That might be good. You can always go to the coffee shop. I like to recommend because that's a good place. I've said that sometimes you can pick up the cashier at the

1:19:31 grocery store. You can meet people almost anywhere. The point is you have to involve yourself in something in a way that isn't just mercenary. Women can kind of sense when you're just there in a mercenary sense as opposed to being there to be there. Totally different thing. Women pick up on that and they have to because that kind of is a safety mechanism for them. So you can find plenty of places where there are women once you get up into say your late 30s, your early 40s, older than that. Are you going to have to make some compromises? Certainly. And this is something I will get into when I start writing a little bit more about marriage and things like that. But we are sort of an interim generation.

1:20:19 We are all going to have to make some compromises because we have inherited a dumpster fire. Our duty and our goal is to get out of the dumpster fire and make conditions good enough that our children and grandchildren have better futures. That is going to mean that we will personally have to make some compromises here and there, we'll have to do things that we don't find necessarily preferable or according to our own tastes, but the ultimate point of this life, right, is to live a life of duty in accordance with God's law and make it to the next one and bring your people along with you. That's sort of the encapsulated version of the purpose of this life. And enjoy the things of God along the way, right?

1:21:04 So maybe that brewery is not a bad choice. You can enjoy the things of God. God made wine to gladden the heart of men, right? Beer counts as well. So find a woman who is going to be someone you can live with for, you know, you're thirty six. Maybe it's going to be fifty years. She doesn't have to be perfect because she won't be perfect, and you aren't perfect either. She will have to bear with you, you will have to bear with her. So make sure that your standards are calibrated reasonably for what is possible according both to what you bring to the table and the reality of the world in which we live. So you could just look at it also practically, what is going to be better for you long term mentally psychologically, all those things.

1:21:54 A wife who doesn't live up to some sort of mental image that you've constructed that probably no woman does. And that's always going to be a risk if you've made it that many decades, right? You've probably built up some idea of like my ideal woman is what's worse? Being alone forever, because you rejected every woman you did love, didn't live up to an ideal to which no woman could possibly live up, or having a happy life with a woman who didn't meet that ideal, but maybe it turns out that's exactly what you needed, right? Marriage is not a matter of perfection. It's a matter of two imperfect people living together and making the best of this life while they live it. So I know practically speaking, the best advice that I can give is

1:22:40 just wherever you happen to be, go somewhere where you are going to feel natural in that environment, and there will be merit there will be women of marriageable age there. For you it may be the brewery. It may be the coffee shop. It may be the local non-denominational church. Maybe that's the case, if you can deal with whatever kind of women are at that one. It depends on the church. Maybe it's the dog park. There are all sorts of places where you can still find and interact with people. Is it more difficult these days? Absolutely. But that just means that you have to keep trying. This is a numbers game. Don't let the first rejection or the second or the twentieth discourage you, because you don't know which one is going to be the

1:23:28 right one. You don't know when you're going to find one where you will be happy living with her for the rest of your life. So So the reality of it is that we live in hard times and there are going to be things we have to do to deal with that, things we have to accept, compromises we have to make, challenges we are going to have to endure that our forefathers did not because our forefathers passed us again a dumpster fire. So part of it again just depends on where you are, what is available to you, and the kind of man you are, because Where one man is going to be very comfortable, you know, I'm comfortable going to the coffee shop and sitting there for six hours to write. Some men aren't. So if that's not you, don't force yourself to do that.

1:24:13 Find the niche that works well for you. Be comfortable in your own skin. Work on yourself. This is always the recommendation for men, right? And as the opportunities present themselves, and as you are able to find them, seize the opportunity. Go up to a woman and talk to her. Give it a try, see where it goes. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. That is all you can do in this life until we have those systems back in place, which won't be for us. It'll be for our grandsons, basically, where they can enjoy a better system than what we have, because we've rebuilt those safeguards and the places where men and women mingle with, you know, marriage in mind at some point in the future. We don't have that.

1:25:02 So we make the best of what we have and aim to give something better to future generations. So I wish you the the best of luck in that. And the same with all the men who ask about that question all the time. And like I said, I do intend to write more about the the nature of marriage and some of the practical considerations and things going forward. Because it's a very important issue. More of the millennial generation and the zoomer generation need to be getting married and having children. It's a you know if you don't show up for the future, then the other side wins, sort of thing, right? But I think that's probably it for this week. Like I said, if I missed your question in the chat, by all means, please go ahead and submit that on the forum.

1:25:50 That is always the best way to submit questions. The link should be in the description of the stream. Regardless of which platform you happen to be using. I did go through and clean up the pending questions topic, so you can look at that and now it is should be much easier to read that and look at that. I've also gone through and cleaned up all of the previous episodes. They should all have their question lists now, the questions that were answered in the episode. I didn't do time stamps yet, I'll get to work on that. I also have all of the transcripts up, so now all of the answers and things are searchable on the forum. That's the best way to do it. I have full control over that so I can make sure that

1:26:35 everything is up to date and functioning. At any rate, thank you to those who submitted questions and for those of you who participated in the chat. You can also of course submit questions in the chat, Telegram, X, other places like I said, I try to collect those and compile them. If I miss it, go ahead and flag me again, tag me on X or whatever it happens to be. But thank you for all of you for participating as always. It's always good to be able to answer these. these questions and since it is Friday night, those of you who are looking for a wife, at least if it's a reasonable time for you, it's you know nine o'clock here, but it's a little earlier for those of you still on the west coast, go out

1:27:15 and have a nice weekend. Go out and do something tomorrow. Enjoy God's creation. Always good to get out in the sun a little bit. Maybe not in the middle of the day here in the south. It's been like a hundred degrees. Anyway, have a good weekend, a good rest of your night, and go to church on Sunday, and I will see you all next week. Until then, God bless