08 Oct 2026 (Q&A)

1:57 And uh letters. It is the 8th of October 2026. I am Cory J. Mahler and this is at any cost. This is episode 43. This is a QA episode. And I don't really have any housekeeping. There are a couple things that I am working on in the background that I'll be announcing in the coming week or two. There's the app that I'm currently beta testing. If you're subscribed to my telegram channel, you have seen that. There's an open beta for that. Other than that, I really only have about an hour tonight, so I'll probably get right into the questions. And also OBS has decided to give me a a sort of deadline we'll call it, because it has a memory leak and I have only so much free RAM before it probably crashes itself.

2:56 So that being the case, we will just go ahead and get right into the questions instead of trying to resume the stream. Question one. You are obviously a very productive man while also making time for recreation and I assume rest. Do you have any methods you use to effectively manage your time? So I guess this is actually somewhat related to some of the things I've been working on today, and incidentally on a tangentially related note. I guess we'll see how much Grokbot decides to charge me for a QA stream because I hit my limit earlier and it's managing some of the question stuff in the background for my board that I have here in front of me. But in so far as time management is concerned, first off, I

3:44 would say for rest, relaxation, things like that, you're supposed to be taking Sunday off, right? We like to focus on the fact that Sunday you go to church, you hear the word of the Lord, things like that, and that's good, and that's part of what you're supposed to do as a Christian. But that's not the whole of it, because it's supposed to be a Sabbath, it's also supposed to be a day of rest. That is something that God does actually want for you and from you. He expects that from you. So you should not be working on Sundays. Now the Now that doesn't mean that you can't do any labor, right? We're not going overboard like the Jews. I'm not going to tell you, oh, you you can't pick up this book, it's too heavy, or anything like that.

4:26 No. You're not supposed to do your ordinary work, like laborious stuff outside, things like that. Don't vacuum the house on Sunday. Keep that stuff for the other six days of the week. Relax on Sunday. But insofar as Just checking the chat quickly to make sure that none of the issues OBS is having or carrying over, it seems like we're fine. But insofar as time management goes, one of the best things you can do is simply be organized, which is something that most people very much are not. And it is not something that's going to be easy. It's going to be something on which you are going to have to focus and you'll have to spend some time and some effort to devise a system that will work for you.

5:11 These days, there's an additional bit of nuance to something that I've always recommended, and that is if you can reasonably delegate a task so if it belongs properly to someone else not to you. This is perhaps more the case in the business sphere, but it's also the case in the home, right? Because you have to have a division of labor in the home as well. But if something should be delegated to someone else, don't do it yourself. If you have to review someone else's work, figure out a way that you can do that that's more efficient than just redoing it yourself, right? Sometimes there's this temptation, I certainly have it, to simply do everything yourself because you are concerned about perhaps the quality of the work

5:58 product someone else will produce or having to deal with supervision, whatever it happens to be. Delegation is a part of life. And particularly for the men in the audience, right? You're always going to have delegation. If you're not the bottom rung at work, you're going to have some delegation. At home, you're going to have a delegation of tasks, right? Because you have a wife and children. You're going to delegate things to them. So delegation is part of it. But the not really a wrinkle, but the additional aspect of this that is relevant these days would be automation. Now of course you could do automation historically, we've had automation for thousands of years in some minor sense, right?

6:38 But there's a different kind of automation that you can do today, certainly with AI. And I'm not going to tell you don't use AI. I'm going to say that using AI for certain tasks makes a lot of sense. There are things that you can automate out of your day and get back hours for yourself where you can do other things that, you know, either the AI can't do or shouldn't be doing, right? There are things you can't automate and there are things you can automate. So when it comes to the stuff you can automate, go ahead and do that in a reasonable fashion. I'm not saying invest $10,000 in AI right away, unless you happen to have that much you know, capital lying around. But you can use these little bots and agents and things to automate

7:25 away some of these tasks and get yourself time that you would not have had otherwise because that time would have been spent doing those tasks, right? Like right now. I have a bot in the background that is ingesting through Restream the chat stream so that it can pop up questions on my iPad here in front of me. That way I don't have to read the entire chat trying to find those questions and make sure that I don't miss them. That saves me time and effort and makes it so that I can focus more on answering the questions, which is the point of the stream. But generally speaking, those would be my major recommendations. In addition to that, and sort of on top of it, get yourself a very good application application or system, there are some people

8:12 that prefer pen and paper, pencil and paper, whatever it happens to be. For tracking tasks that you need to do and then tracking that you have done them. And you want to have that log. It's important to have that as well. So So some people really like the bullet journal system, things like that. I mostly use the application is just called Things. It has been on basically the entire Apple ecosystem for a very long time. It works really well. I like it. It's not necessarily cheap for an app, but it is a one-time purchase and I've used it for many years. That's a good option if you are over on the Apple side of things. Otherwise, there are plenty of to-do apps you can find. And then I would recommend keeping a diary or a journal just

8:56 for yourself. It helps to get some of those things out of your head and onto the paper, right? That's a very helpful thing to do psychologically. It can also help you work through things that maybe you missed or you need to review, something like that. That's the basic contours of the system, and then you adapt it to yourself so that you have a system that truly works for you, right? Because that's what you need. You need a system that works the way you need it to work, not necessarily some just objective out there general system. It has to adapt to what you're doing. You have different demands on your time, you have different work from what, say, I'm doing. You need to have a system that works for you.

9:38 But that's the basic contours of it, so Take that and adapt it to what you're doing. Question two. I am writing in direct response to your recent post concerning the duty to love our women, even when they have become enforcers of the present system. I find myself wrestling with how to apply this principle to a particular reality. We frequently see a type of woman today often cloaked in the performative lukewarm Christianity of the modern evangelical milieu, who acts as a militant agent of the feminist religion. These women are not merely passive victims of a failing system, they actively weaponized state and State and legal institutions to dismantle their own households through fabricated abuse claims, parental alienation, and the kidnapping of their

10:29 own children, all while maintaining a facade of piety. When a woman has consciously abandoned her head in the domestic order to serve this other religion and continues to actively persecute the father of her children through the state, how do we reconcile the duty to will her good with the reality of her role as an active adversary. At what point does she move from being a fallen woman deserving of our pity to being a willful enemy of the household in the faith? I would appreciate your thoughts on where the boundary lies between a woman in need of restoration And a woman who has chosen the path of the destroyer. So to some degree, you already laid out kind of the two options here, right? There is the woman who has been misled, propagandized, deceived, and isn't

11:17 really acting with anything that we would really call intent. She is more or less reacting to the system and going along with it because that is in large part in her nature as a woman. And then there's the other kind of woman, right? The one who is acting with malice, who is doing things that are evil, who's doing things that are sinful, things that should be punished. And in a proper society, that would essentially be the line, right? It would be you have the evil woman who is punished by the godly prince, and she's no longer a problem because the punishment for adultery, which is always going to be in view here, is death. And so she's not going to be a problem going forward if we had actual Christian rulers enforcing the laws they should.

12:07 We of course don't have that, but the other kind of woman be the one who can be disciplined, brought back to her household, and made to do the thing she's supposed to be doing instead of the evil things that she had been doing. So the question really is: how do we discern one from the other? And then there's also a sort of subtext here: what do we do when we discover that she is the other one, right? It's one of those times where yes, I'm going to say it again, it is a wisdom call. This is not something where I can simply give you a mathematical formula and then you plug it in and you get a value and the value gives you an answer based on a table, right? That's not how this works. Because we're dealing with human beings, we're dealing with psychology, we're dealing

12:51 with society, the legal system, a dozen other things, all of which are more complicated than math. And they require assessment according to the abilities that God has given you, right? You can seek counsel, of course, and you should do that if you happen to have good, faithful, capable men in your life who can give you counsel, it's always good to seek that, right? God is the one who gave them those abilities to help others, and they happen to be in your life, you should use that resource. So a woman who is undertaking these actions with malice. And you can always kind of tell when there's malice involved. But a woman who is doing it with malice is one who has definitely crossed that line. And so she is still a fallen woman.

13:40 It is still a pitiable state, right? And to some degree, yes, she's still a victim of the system that turned her into that thing. But just because someone is in some ways a victim of a system, and even if it's our evil society today, that does not necessarily mean the person should not be punished, right? This is akin to that difference between Christian forgiveness and the duty to seek and enforce justice, right? You are to forgive those who transgress against you. That does not mean that the law should not still punish them, because their transgression against you is minor compared to your transgression against God, right? That's the whole point of of the wicked servant who's forgiven the great sum and then refuses to forgive his fellow servant the

14:31 small sum, right? You are the one forgiven the great sum with regard to God. Any transgression against you is minor in comparison to the transgression that is sin. But that doesn't mean that we don't still have justice, right? God's moral law is still enforceable. You still have to punish the murderer, even if he repents and you forgive him, he still has to be put to death because that is a requirement of God's moral law. That does not change. And so some of these women, the ones acting in malice, have to be punished. They have to be punished by hopefully God will actually give us, you know, a Christian state that will actually do what it is supposed to do, but they still have to be punished.

15:17 Just because you are forgiving them for the things they have done does not mean that the temporal consequences go away. Now there's also the case where some of these women will not repent, right? Not everyone repents and is then punished. Some people refuse to repent, and so in fact, one of the most loving things you can do in that situation is punish them swiftly so they do not continue to acquire and accumulate sins and make their eternity worse. That is perhaps a hard truth for some people to accept, but that is the reality of it. The longer a wicked person lives who will not repent, right? That's we don't know that, but that's a hard call. Some people, it's kind of obvious, right? Some people have the hardened heart, the seared conscience, you can tell

16:01 they will never repent. But the person who will never repent, this hypothetical person, it is worse for him to live longer because there are different levels as it were in hell. Not in the sense of, you know, Dante's Inferno, but in the sense of some parts of hell are worse than others. Just like there are different rewards in Paradise, which I'll be getting into in a future question here pretty soon So the bottom line is that it is a wisdom call, and you have to determine if this is the woman who is acting with malice or if she is acting out because society has led her to believe that she should behave like that or it's acceptable, and none of the men in her life has ever told her no. Because that's a big problem here.

16:46 That's a big part of why we have the problems we have today Day because men don't tell women no. They need to hear that. That's an important part of being a man is supervising, being the head of the women God has entrusted to your care. Typically that's going to be your wife, it's going to be your daughters, but in some cases it's going to be other female relatives, say if your sister is a widow or something like that, right? So I'm not saying that men are exclusively responsible, certainly not those of us who are I'm not going to say younger, you know, I'm forty, but in the sense of in the younger in the sense of having grown up under a system that will severely punish you if you try to enforce any sort of moral norms, right?

17:34 That makes it much more difficult to do these things just because of the system that we live under these days. And yet within the home, within the church and organizations, circumstances like that, men still have some authority and it needs to be exercised, right? Women need to be told no, you do not get to read the scripture in church, no, you do not get to speak in the sanctuary, no, you do not get to teach Bible classes, and so on and so forth, because that is in a small way setting that precedent that there is an authority over her, and she has to act pursuant to what that authority says. These are problems that are going to take time to address, and they are a civilizational scale problem problem, but every minor step in

18:22 the right direction makes things just a little bit better. So when the opportunity arises, make sure that you nudge in that direction. or if you're in the position of authority, make sure that you enforce things as you should. Because God is going to judge you whether you do or not. He will judge you for the things you do and the things you fail to do. So, bottom line, wisdom call, is this woman acting with malice? I think is kind of the dividing line there. And I think a lot of times malice is more often than more obvious than people often want to admit. Question three. I have always struggled with flying in commercial airplanes. I have the feeling it is inappropriate fear that stems from me not being in control and the terror of falling?

19:17 Do you have any advice for what I should pray and perhaps some things I can do practically to get over this? Is this a normal phenomenon as a Christian, or should I be concerned with having this fear? Fear of flying is normal. I don't personally have it, but it's up there with the most common fears, right? If you had a list of the ten most common fears, what are you going to find on it? The number one is public speaking. Death is actually second. And then spiders, heights, flying, those are all going to be in the top ten. So So that's a perfectly normal fear to have. The question isn't so much is it inappropriate anxiety or fear? Because I don't think it's necessarily that. I think it's more psychological than spiritual, right?

20:04 People have certain fears for various reasons. And you touched on part of it. It's that lack of control. Right? Generally speaking, people who have a fear of flying don't necessarily have a fear of driving. Driving is statistically more dangerous, but right, we don't run that statistical analysis when we're determining our irrational fears. And this one's not even entirely irrational, right? Flying is dangerous to some degree, right? It's one of the safest forms of transportation But being at 30,000 feet in a metal tube is not inherently perfectly safe. But also, nothing in life is inherently perfectly safe, right? I could be hit by a meteorite sitting here right now or struck by lightning or something.

20:46 So life is not a matter of things that are perfectly safe or trying to always eliminate risk, right? We can minimize risk. We can do things that are reasonable. And we've done that with flying. We have plenty of safety measures and inspections and maintenance and all these things. These are important. It's good to have these. But the goal shouldn't be to remove all risk, because if you do that, you've kind of removed being alive. You may live in the strictest biological sense, but you won't truly be alive. So that could That kind of deals with that portion of the question. But then perhaps the more important one is what do you do as a Christian, right? I would say pray. That's certainly important, and what can you pray?

21:33 Well, one good example I actually believe I held this up as an example last week, not last week, but two weeks ago as well, and that is Stark's prayer book. This one has excellent prayers for basically any occasion that might come to mind. So on page 361 in this particular edition, there are other ones as well, there is a prayer for believing Christians to pray to God before traveling. I won't read the whole thing because you know it's couple pages long at least with some scripture notes and things like that, but I'll read a little bit of it. Just because this is the sort of thing that Christians used to consider normal. You would pray something before you traveled. You would pray something when you were sick.

22:20 Like I just opened up randomly, and it's morning prayer for a sick person. These are the things Christians used to do, and it's important to bring the Bring these back into our Christian life because this is the appropriate response to have, the appropriate mindset to have with regard to God. So the prayer starts off with there's always a little scripture reading and some exhortation, other things as well in this book. It's a very good book, and I by all means grab one. They can usually be found quite cheaply. Gracious and merciful God, in your name I have resolved to be absent from my loved ones and from my home for a time, and so I come and pray to you. Bless my going out and my coming in.

23:00 In your name I begin my journey, let me accomplish it with you as my constant companion, and let me return to my home under your protection. Let the host of angels surround and guard me like Jacob. Let your angels stand by me in every danger as he stood by Saint Paul. Let the company of your angels travel with me going and coming, as with Joseph and Mary when they fled to Egypt with the young child Jesus, that I may refrain, that I may remain safe from all misfortune, from thieves, murderers, and any other injury And it goes on and couple pages there. So excellent option. You can find it online for free, or you can buy a book, however you want to do that. That's a great option. And then just as a practical option, some people will surely think

23:46 this is at odds with the Christian answer, but Lutherans know better and so do Presbyterians and some others. Have a beer before you get on the plane, if you are the kind of person for whom that doesn't make you anxious, right? There are a handful, tiny percentage of people for whom that would make them more anxious. Most people, that'll calm your nerves a little bit. Nothing wrong with that, perfectly reasonable. There's kind of a reason they have bars and airports, right? It's not just because people who travel drink too much. It's also because sometimes a beer before you fly might help calm your nerves a little bit. And then I guess as a little trick for flying if you aren't aware, if you chew chewing gum, it will help you with

24:25 the equalization of the pressure in your inner ear, which that also is a stress inducer if you have that constant pressure, so that may help as well. Question four and five. There are two questions here, actually. Question four. I have heard you and others mention that church pastors and other church leaders Church leadership bring a harsh judgment upon themselves due to the responsibility that comes with shepherding of flock. How do I properly understand this without falling into works-based salvation? And he the beginning of the question, the actual topic instead of the question content is about stricter judgment, which of course is what is in view here for a harsh judgment, right? So there are really two aspects to this.

25:29 The first part of it is that there is very clearly in Scripture a stricter judgment for those who are in positions of authority, particularly for those who teach the faith. And in essence, what this is, is that you are held to a higher standard with regard to the things you teach if you hold the office of teacher. And that's not just pastors, that's many others as well. Pastors do not exclusively hold that office. You, if you have taken up that mantle, are expected to know the truth and to speak the truth, to teach the truth. You are expected to have put in the effort and to have the capacity to teach the things of God truthfully because you have accepted that role. If you do not have that capacity, then you should not accept

26:17 that role. And so you will be subjected to a stricter judgment. Now, we have to be careful here, right? Because there are two things in view. One, there is the judgment with regard to faith. That's whether or not you're saved, that's a matter of salvation. And then there's the judgment with regard to works. These are both in view here, because it is, of course, possible to reject Christ, right? Lutherans do not teach once saved, always saved. If you happen to believe that, I think you're wrong. That's not what we're debating right now. But Lutherans agree with Scripture, and Scripture's pretty clear it is possible to say to lose your salvation in the sense of rejecting it, not in the sense of, you know, God changed his mind or

27:05 something. That's not what we're talking about. You can deliberately reject God in the free gift of salvation. And if you are a teacher, you are going to be held to a stricter standard with regard to that, right? Which perhaps the Lutheran way of wording it would be that felicitous inconsistency narrows as your office and your abilities increase, which is to say you have a higher duty to be truthful and to be accurate in the things you believe, teach, and confess, if you have been given greater abilities and if you hold those offices. So what might be felicitous inconsistency for someone who has an IQ of seventy five and is never going to teach anyone would not be felicitous inconsistency for someone who is in the office of theologian

28:01 and is actually capable. The second part of that now, before I go on to the second part, I should still say, absolutely, you are saved by the blood of Christ alone. That is what covers you. You are forgiven because of his perfect work. Work not on account of your works. That is still the case. Regardless of the office you hold, the abilities you've been given, you are still saved on account of Christ's work. Nose itches. The second part of that is the judgment according to works. And this is one where sometimes people will read a particular line from it's the table talks, not from Luther, necessarily, but they'll read a line from the Table Talks about the Epistle of James and things like that, and no Epistle of Straw and those comments.

28:49 Even if you take that to be Luther's statement, which it's the Table Talks, I think it best it is some sort of like third hand hearsay. But even if you took it to be his statement at face value, he's just referencing a passage in scripture that comments on the different grades or values of works and things like that. He's making an analogy. And so if you are building on Christ as the foundation and you're doing it with fidelity and competence and all those things, then you're building with gold, right? In the sense of not obviously literal gold, because literal gold doesn't work as a building material in that way, but you know what he's saying in that passage. And if it's a little less good than that, then it's silver,

29:36 and if it's garbage, then it's straw or something else that will be burned up, and you will not be rewarded for those works because they were worthless, but you won't be damned, right? And so for many of those who teach and do so say ineptly or they not necessarily falsely outright, because that's kind of difficult, right? You there's a line there, you cross the line into false teaching, and well, now you're a false teacher, it's a different thing. But if instead you are just an incompetent teacher, say, and you're not acting in malice, you're acting in innocence, you're just an idiot, those works aren't going to benefit you. So you aren't going to get a crown for those works. God isn't going to say, Well done, good and faithful servant, for

30:28 these worthless works. But you aren't damned because your works were worthless. That is the judgment according to works, and that is a matter of the rewards you receive in eternity, the crowns you receive. It's not a matter of whether or not you're saved. So it's basically there are two steps there. And before I get to question five, I just want to nudge a system here on my side. Question five pull that up. About the Lutheran calendar of the church calendar. What calendar do you use for the daily devotions podcast, particularly in relation to the feasts, festivals, and commemorations? So I actually use the treasury of daily prayer, which I am not going to grab because it is on top of my bookshelf,

31:30 on top of a stack of books right now. But I have most of my computer, so I actually have to use the physical book that often. The Treasury of Daily Prayer is where I get most of that from. I have modified a few things a little bit because a couple things were wrong and I decided to fix those. And other than that, I've basically expanded some of the text of the commemorations, the feast, festivals with additional information, and things like that from church history. So it is essentially just the church year calendar, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and a handful of others essentially agree on like 95% of this stuff. So a lot of it is not going to be different if you grab a Roman Catholic church year calendar versus a Lutheran church year

32:24 calendar or an Anglican church year calendar. That being said, there are some caveats, of course, because for instance, Rome will have more of the Mary stuff in it than we would have as Lutherans or the Anglicans would have. So that being said, the second part of his question is I would like to hang a Lutheran ch calendar on my wall next year, but the only one I can find is sold by CPH, and the one image they have advertising it displays their commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. That's I don't even know I didn't know that thing existed until I read this question. I'm not surprised, of course, it's CPH PH and the current leadership of the LCMS are a bunch of evil men. But there is a traditional Lutheran church year calendar, the one in the

33:11 Treasury of Daily Prayer, does not have any of that nonsense in it. That's not suitable for display on your wall, of course. Now, as far as a poster or wall display goes, I have not really looked into it that much, so I'm not aware of of very many of them. That being said, I will pull up this one example of which I actually am aware. Owen Cyclops made one some number of years ago and I happen to remember that I had seen it at the time when he posted it. And it's one of the nicer looking ones. It follows the traditional church year calendar, and it is very close to identical to what I use for the daily devotions. So you can go ahead and look at that and decide if some of the Roman-specific stuff is something you would not want on your

34:08 wall. Last time I looked at it, I believe there was nothing particularly objectionable, so I don't think I would necessarily object to having it on my wall. Obviously there are some things that are a little off, right? Like this one I found, you know, Feast of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary. We wouldn't have that on our calendar as Lutherans, and most of the Anglicans would probably not have it, but by and large it is still going to be the church year calendar, on which again we agree, and by we I mean all of the high church denominations agree ninety-five plus percent. So yeah, don't buy the the garbage modern one from CPH or anywhere else. If you want to church your calendar, get the traditional one.

34:57 And if you can find one that is specific for your denomination, even better, but I have not personally particularly looked into it, so I don't know of them. I would say look at the Anglicans, they might have one, and it will probably be very similar to what we have as particularly American Lutherans. In part, American Lutheranism, when it was switching from German to English, used the Anglican Book of Common Prayer as some of the material for modeling things like our hymnal and some of those materials. So you'll find a lot of similarity there. Now I will go ahead and pull some questions from the chat. Question six Do you agree that the US Constitution is a godless and anti natural law document that we need to

35:50 move on from? The answer to that ultimately is yes, but not in the sense that everything in the document was bad, right? I don't think that so-called representative government is a good thing. I think it is unnatural. I think it goes against the hierarchy that God has built into creation everywhere. I think it leads to problems. I think where we are today was the inevitable outcome outcome of that sort of system. That doesn't mean that every single word, phrase, claim in the document is wicked, right? I can certainly think of some that are not. But I would not retain it as part of our national system, our legal code, or anything like that. I've even gone so far as to post before that I would

36:37 burn the document as an offering to God because it has become an idol to many. And I don't think it would be wrong to do that. I don't think it's necessary to do that. I think it could be put in a museum, I think that would be perfectly fine as well. But if people are going to keep treating it as an idol, then the correct thing to do with an idol is burn it. So no, I don't think that we should retain the Constitution. I do not think it is a good thing. I am going to postpone this question about Confucianism because that is long and involved, and I am not going to take the time right now. I'll go ahead and address this one here because it has a lot of trolls who like to bring it up in my chats all the time, so I'll just go ahead.

37:38 And answer question seven. Would you ever debate Hitler hated Christ? That of course is the Jew, who goes by that name on X and has been slowly enveigling himself into various circles on the right, mostly the so called and accurately called kosher right, unsurprisingly, he is not a good actor. He is a bad actor, he is acting with malice, and he is not an honest individual. He has been offered many opportunities to debate individuals who are extremely knowledgeable about the topic, Karl Radl on X, for instance, and many others. He has been thoroughly refuted many times. And insofar as the Christianity of Adolf Hitler is concerned, I published an article on that, I consider that my final word.

38:30 There would be no point in debating him. Because he is not going to behave in anything approaching an honest manner. And just as a general rule, debating Jews is almost always a net negative. I am not going to say you can never do it. Now I'm going to say actually most likely the you in the case of most of you listening should never do it. But there are some small number of cases where I would take that sort of opportunity. And the reason I would do it, and I'm fine with saying this publicly, because anyone who's going to offer that debate is going to know why I would accept, and it won't change the calculation because of arrogance. I would accept it if it were an opportunity to advance something

39:13 beneficial. And so I would do an interview or a debate or a discussion with a Jew or a number of Jews if it gave me an opportunity to explain Christianity or our positions, nationalism, all these various important things to an audience. That would be the only reason to do it. There's no benefit here. It's just a crazy guy on X who's obsessed with me and whose followers decide to post in my comments and stream all the time. There's no benefit. And again, he is just a bad actor, so there is no reason for me to do that. Question eight. What are your feelings on Christians engaging in Halloween festivities? Is it all or nothing, or does it depend on how you treat the holiday? So traditionally Halloween is part of all hallow tide, which is

40:12 Depending on which system you're using, two or three days of Christian festivals. And they are remembrance of the departed, essentially. There's remembrance, there's memento mori, there's remember that you will die, and then there's remembrance of the Christian departed, right? That's basically the scope of the festival. There's some other stuff in there as well, but that is the core of what it was historically. And I think that that's just fine, right? We still celebrate this in those churches that follow a liturgical calendar by singing particular hymns and focusing on certain scripture passages and the message, the sermon is usually on that topic, right? It's one of the days out the day that it's cl the

40:57 Sunday that's closest. It is the day out of the year where basically you are focusing on the memory of the Christian departed, and I think that that's a good thing to do. Insofar as the Halloween festivities abstracted out from that are concerned, if you're doing all the fall festival stuff, no one can reasonably object to that. If you are getting into the stuff that is pretty clearly demonic, then I would say that's probably unwise. So So go for the like upper middle class main fall festival look, and you all know exactly what I mean when I say that, right? Don't go for the sort of inner city zombie eight-foot-tall skeleton look. You know, being a Christian and holding the views we do should

41:49 influence how we behave in society. So I think that a lot of what Halloween has become, and obviously it's been commercialized in the same way as Christmas by the same bad actors for similar reasons, I think that a lot of it has taken it away from the historical roots of what it is supposed to be and what it should be in a godly society. And I think it would be better to focus on those things instead of focusing on All of the modern stuff that's basically a horror movie made into scenery. Does that mean you can't go to a haunted house? No, I'm not saying that. Does it mean that you probably shouldn't go to the one that's gruesome and gory and over the top, yes, I think that you should probably avoid that one.

42:36 But generally celebrating the Halloween as a fall festival, I don't think it's wrong to do that. I think it can be that in the sort of it's a misnomer but the secular sphere and then you can still have that Christian focus with Christian church services and we should have multiple services. It should not just be Sunday. It should be multiple services in that period in the calendar. Question nine. What should a Christian government do about drug addicts and homeless? In quotes, that is correct, but that they're who roam the streets and usually refuse to go to rehab or receive help from those who want them to live good lives. I've answered this one before but I'll answer it again because it is worth repeating because it is a question about a problem that

43:39 has not been solved in the sense of the solution being applied, not in the sense of the solution being known. They should be rounded up and given the treatment they need, which is probably going to include psychological treatment in some cases, some psychiatric drugs, because some of them are legitimately insane, and so often drug-induced or demonically possessed, and so obviously they'll need Christian counseling as well, and then forced to work. Because, you know, he who does not work, let him not eat. They need to work. So I don't believe in handouts, but I also don't think that the Christian answer is just letting them roam the streets and destroy themselves and cause problems for everyone else.

44:22 So we're back to something similar to what's been asked before in a number of other context, right? They are in many cases both victims of the current system and malefactors. They are bad actors in many cases. They are not just victims. And so they have to be treated accordingly, right? For those who are clearly victims, maybe they've had a truly horrible life, and in some cases they have, particularly some of the women. They should be taken care of as best we can. They should still be given something productive to do, but for those who are just drug addicts who are out making a mess of society, stealing, causing problems, just generally being a nuisance, round them up and put them in work camps.

45:06 And get them I do believe we should get them the treatment they need as well, right? I'm not saying just treat them like prisoners. You know, we shouldn't even have prisons, but work camps are fine and they're a good solution for that problem. Someone asked me asked me about if I were the supreme leader for twenty years. I would hope that I would live longer than that, but I'll I'll postpone that one. I do actually believe that the the leader should hand off power to his son before he is, you know, eighty years old or something. We don't want rule by the elderly. That's never good for a society. Do you like Dostoyevsky? I guess that is question ten. The answer is yes, I do like a number of his novels.

45:55 I did not get necessarily as deep into reading The Russian authors, as Wo did, he got a little more into that than I did. I was reading other stuff at the time. But yes, I think that they're worthwhile to read. And enjoyable to read, in some cases. Enjoyable intellectually in others, if not necessarily an enjoyable read. Question actually going to check the chat over here just to make sure things are syncing correctly. Okay, I think that's good. Question eleven. How much of a Much of a problem is the national debt? How would you solve this problem? Can we really just say no? And what would be the repercussions of that? So I'm going to answer this one in the context of the United States and the context of America because it differs depending on

46:57 your country, and it'll be very obvious why when I answer. So in the context of the United States, could we simply say no we are not going to pay this? The answer is yes, we could. Should we do that? The answer is yes, but with exceptions. We should say that we will continue to uphold and honor the debt that is owed to allies, and I mean that in the full sense, not in just the positive law legal sense. So countries that are actually our allies should be treated well. We should not just erase the debt that we owe them. That would not be the right thing to do. Countries that are not allies, countries that are hostile, we should just tell them go pound sand, and we're not paying a cent. Now, there are some other ways, of course, that you can solve

47:50 the national debt without doing that. One is obviously if you grow the economy, then what are you doing effectively? The percentage of the economy relative to the national debt, right? Which is say what percent of the economy is the national debt or debt service, depending how you want to calculate this. If you grow the economy, the debt doesn't matter. On the smaller scale, this is like having various expenditures as a person or a household, right? If you have to pay, we'll pick a large number just for the sake of the example. If you're currently paying $10,000 a month in just generic recurring stuff, you have to pay it every single month, right? And I know in a lot of places that's not a high

48:38 number, but for much of the country that's pretty high. You know, $120,000 a year. If you are making a hundred thousand dollars a year, you now have a very big problem. If you are making a million dollars a year, you do not have a problem. You can see the solution there, right? So one of the ways that you can now obviously as an individual that's very hard. And it's not easy as a country, but it's doable. The US should have an immense economy. And it does, but not at the level we should be. And the reason for that is all of the policies of which we're all aware, right? It's importing people who cause problems, and suck up social services, are in a net drain on the economy, and are just generally a

49:24 nuisance to have here, to say the very least. That's an immense anchor on our economy. If that were solved, the economy would skyrocket and we wouldn't have a debt problem, because the economy would be much bigger compared to the current state of the debt. So there are a number of different ways you can solve the national debt, but they all depend on solving other problems. Because ultimately, the national debt is not a math problem or an economic problem, it's a political problem, and so it has to be solved with politics like so many other problems we face. You can't solve it just by tweaking the economics of the country. You have to fundamentally change some things, and that requires political power

50:06 and political will. But yes, to answer the the core question there, the secondary one, can we say that we're not going to pay the debt? Absolutely we can do that. And the reason we can do that, which is the part of the equation I want to draw out, here is my final point, is that we have a very powerful military. And ultimately the debt only matters if it can be collected. So So most nations cannot collect, and most nations would not try. The only nation that could really mount an attempt would be China, and that would be an enormous gamble for them, and one that they would probably not be willing to take unless we did it in such a way that it crashed their economy and their only choice to maintain power, in this case I mean the CCP of

50:55 course, their only choice as a viable avenue to maintain power would be a foreign war, then they would pursue it. So obviously I don't want someone who is incompetent trying to pursue this politically. But these are all options that should be on the table and they can be used together, not necessarily you have to pick one. Question twelve. Can note for myself here. What do you think about the hypothesis that feminism or female empowerment is the root cause of all modern problems, and if corrected, many of our issues would self-fix. I think that the conclusion is overstated, I don't think the warrant

51:58 supports it, which is to say I don't think that feminism or female empowerment is the cause of all of our problems. I think it is a consequence of our problems that then in turn is a cause of many additional problems. And you can see this if you look back through history and you look at where and when the laws granting women the so called right to vote were passed, right? Passed basically in the wake of World War One. And so that was a consequence of a much bigger problem, but it then led to additional problems down the road. So is part of what needs to be done disempowering women politically? Absolutely, yes. The nineteenth Amendment, that one at the very least we can, you know, cut out of the paper and burn that one.

52:50 Obviously I know it's not part of the original constitution, but we have the the document, right? So can we get rid of that and solve a lot of problems pretty easily? Yes. Because a lot of things will actually sort themselves out naturally if you get rid of these sort of perverse incentives. I have pointed this out many times before with regard to family formation, fertility rate, and many related problems, right? One of the ways you can solve that is by making it illegal for women to work outside the home. What have you just done? They're no longer competing with men. Men's salaries have to go up because the labor market has just shrunk, right? The supply of labor shrank. So the demand didn't go anywhere, right?

53:38 What happens? Wages go up. Very simple economics. It's not a hard problem to solve. So that is one of the things you can do, and that almost quite literally is just making it illegal for women to work outside the home. One change. Obviously I recognize it's a big change, right? But it is certainly not an impossible change, and it is something that we should do. So, yes, I do 100% believe that women should not be involved in politics, women should not vote, most men shouldn't vote either. Women shouldn't be allowed to own property in their own name, they shouldn't allowed to work outside the home. These are all traditional Christian positions that if they were enacted would solve a lot of our problems.

54:21 Would they solve all of our problems? The answer is no. And the answer is no because there are a lot of problems with men as well, right? You can point to many of the problems we have today, even some of the problems that people will try to pin exclusively on women, and there is a male part of the problem. Right? Is female promiscuity a huge problem? Yes. Is it possible to be promiscuous as a female if there are no men willing to say yes? The answer is no. And so men are part of the problem. And obviously, yes, men are going to have a harder time saying no to that in some cases. But one of the problems with that is you abstract that out to the societal level, the cultural level, and what's not being done.

55:08 The men are not supervising the women in the way they are supposed to. You don't have wild, promiscuous women running around in society, when fathers are doing what they are supposed to do and supervise their daughters, keep them under their roof, don't allow them to go to university. All these things that encourage that problem are downstream from men failing to do their duty as men. And so many times I find there are those who will try to pin everything on women, and they're really just trying to shirk responsibility. They're trying to say that it's all women's fault when in reality that's not the case because the man is the head, woman is never her own head. God is going to ask men why did you not do what

55:54 I told you to do and control the women in your lives. They were entrusted to you. They're headless. You're the head. You know, it's the buck stops here kind of thing, right? It is the head who answers for what has happened. Does that absolve women of all responsibility? Absolutely not. The example I've given, and it makes some people mad, which kind of makes me like the example more, if your neighbor's dog defecates on your porch, which party do you blame? Well obviously the dog has to be punished, reprimanded, and taught not to do that. But your neighbor's responsible because it's his dog. The same thing is true with regard to women. Women are responsible for their own actions, and they should be held

56:37 accountable, at least in many cases. But the men who should have been controlling them are ultimately responsible and should also be punished. So do we solve all problems by getting rid of female empowerment? So-called? No. Do we solve a lot of problems? Yes. But not the root problem, which has to be addressed as well. The root problem of course is sin. It's always sin, but Let's see. Question thirteen. I think I can just answer this one with what is What is a good response to evangelicals who claim that

57:42 all races are God's children? And the question actually disappeared from my pad, so I'm just reading I'm reciting it from memory of the three seconds it was on my screen. So hopefully I didn't miss any elements of that. I think I got the gist of it though. Something to fix later. But see if I can pop it up. Nope. So the response to that, the longer response, as it were, would of course be what we did with Stone Choir, right? Because Stone Choir has the series on race was which explains what race is biologically, explains how race interacts with salvation, explains all of these things, explains away the so-called sin of racism, all these things are important to understand, but It's going to depend how you respond to this person.

58:35 It's going to depend what exactly he's saying, right? If he's saying that all races are potentially God's children in the sense of can come to a saving faith in Christ, then he is correct. If he goes on to say that that means we should erase national borders and permit anyone to move here who wants to do so, then he is incorrect and he has gone back into a particularly pernicious sin. So it depends what he's saying. Because it's not just any one race that can be saved. Anyone can come to saving faith. The offer of salvation is open to all men. And so obviously there's also the sort of abstracted out, like Adam is the Son of God, and so all human beings are sons of God, right? He's probably not saying that.

59:28 And that would be a very technical point that doesn't actually really get you anywhere, unless you're arguing against certain people. So it really depends on what exactly it is he's saying. He's probably using it, and I'm going to assume that is sort of the subtext of the question from what I saw. I am going to assume he is trying to use it to say that race isn't real and you know the we're all just there's the race of Christians and the race of unbelievers or something like that. And for that I would say the Stone Choir series on race is what you really need to go through because that gives you all of the information. Hopefully he'll be willing to listen to that, but you can at least start off by saying that you agree that the gospel is

1:00:14 for all men from all nations. It doesn't mean that all men will be equally open to it. We see that historically, right? It was the sons of Japheth, which means Europeans who were most open to it. Most of the rest of the world did not convert. They converted only when we went and colonized them and made them convert. So it depends what he's saying, so feel free to ask a follow up question, perhaps after you've clarified with him or s gauge his response to the offer of more information. Actually while I'm thinking about it, I should probably check what the memory leak is doing. Yeah, I am going to have to probably bring this to a close real soon here because OBS is using 120 gigabytes of memory.

1:01:06 And my system is about out. So I will answer one more question and call it for tonight before my system crashes and OBS closes. Do you believe question fourteen do you believe that some level of federalism would be necessary for American government even under a Christian government? The easy answer to this is yes. And there are a number of reasons for that, right? I think that it is important to have things locally when and where it is possible. I don't think everything should be local. I don't you know, subsidiarity basically. I don't think that you have to make decisions as close to the local as possible. I think some decisions are naturally made at the higher level, but many decisions need to be devolved.

1:02:05 Just the same as Lutherans fully believe that different churches in different nations are going to have different customs, different traditions, and that's just fine, because they're different people. I don't expect the Russians to worship in the exact same way as the Germans or the Germans as Germans as Americans, or Americans as the French, right? We are different nations, we're different people, we are related, but different races, for those examples. So we are going to express things differently. I don't think that's wrong. The same thing is going to be true in society, in the culture, and we see that in the United States, right? The South and the Pacific Northwest, they're both American, but they're very

1:02:51 different. The culture's not the same, the ideas, the mindset, many of these things are very different, and that should be recognized. And I think it's also inevitable because we have to remember, right, we don't believe that race is just a matter of blood, right? It's blood soil and myth, as I keep saying. Well that soil part matters. And the reason it matters is that if you take a population and move it to different soil and wait long enough, they will become distinct from the founding population. And I don't think there's any way to avoid it. I think that's how God designed humanity. And so given the size of the United States of the American nation, I think you are going to inevitably have these regional differences,

1:03:38 and they should be recognized and so far as they are good celebrated. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And so we'll have a form of federalism inevitably, but perhaps something in the sense of like the Holy Roman Empire had, right? You had the Empire, then you had nations, you had principalities, you had cities in some cases that were independent to some degree. I don't think that system is necessarily the wrong way to do it. In fact, I think that's probably one of the best systems we could use. So will we have federalism? Yes, I think it is inevitable. And I think it's also a good thing to have that. Some things should be devolved and there should be some leeway permitted regionally given those distinctions that seem like God built them into humanity.

1:04:33 I just want to comment that I do see the question about anxiety. I am going to leave it for next week, but I'm going to make a note that I will answer that next week. Okay, I'm going to answer one more question. I'm going to risk this computer crashing thanks to whatever memory leak is currently going on. Question fifteen. Do you think that the Septuagint is uniquely an inspired translation, or can we be said to hold the very words of God in English? So I do believe that the Septuagint is uniquely inspired because it is the version that God caused to be created so that he himself could use it, and so that it could be used to fulfill the prophecy from Noah, to spread God's word and the church

1:05:35 back to the sons of Japheth, who largely knew Greek, at least in the Mediterranean area area, and that it was easier to spread from Greek northward, right? So I believe it was uniquely inspired because it was part of God's plan. Does that mean that we can't hold the very words of God in our hands in our language, in English, or German or French, or whatever it happens to be. I don't think that that necessarily follows. Is it inspired in the exact same sense as the Greek? I don't believe that is the case. Could it be? I am not willing to say it could not. I think that perhaps God would bless a translation undertaking in one of our languages the same way that he blessed the Greek. I don't know that he would not do that, so I'm not

1:06:23 willing to say one way or the other. I will say that none of our existing translations are uniquely inspired in the same way as the Septuagint. That being said, they are still the Word of God, because by and large these translations are still faithful, and God's promise that His Word will not pass away still stands. And I think that promise does carry down two translations. God preserves the translations of his word. Because look at the kind of men who conducted some of these translations. And they've still wound up overwhelmingly faithful. Does that mean there are no problems? No, of course not. There are problems. There are things that need addressed. I wouldn't be working on translating the Psalter if I thought that

1:07:08 there were an existing perfect translation in English. I don't believe that there is. Also I just want one that's better for reading aloud because I read it aloud every single day. So partly it's a personal concern, but not entirely, because it's meant to be read aloud. That's how you memorize things. We should be memorizing scripture by doing that. But the bottom line is yes, I believe the Septuagint was an uniquely inspired translation. I think that it is a uniquely inspired translation. But I don't know that God wouldn't do the same thing for us if we undertook that task with the same level of solemnity and care as the Septuagint translation. And the versions that we have are still God's word and are

1:07:48 still quite faithful, even if they do have some deficits. Thankfully, we generally know the deficits now, so you can account for that while reading. But that is going to be it for this week because OBS is now at 135 gigabytes of RAM. I'm not sure what it's doing, but it should probably stop. Thank you for those of you who submitted questions and thank you for participating in the chat. As always, you can submit questions on the forum. That is the preferred method. It's just the easiest way for me to organize them. Although now with my system that ingests the stream and numbers and catalogs them for me, the chat's a pretty good way as well because now I am much less likely to miss them in the

1:08:33 scroll. That being said, it is Thursday. I actually managed to do one of these on Thursdays. It just sort of depends. It's usually Thursday or Friday. Depends how my week goes. This time I am not available tomorrow, so I had to do it today. Glad to take the time as always. I hope you all have a good rest of your evening and a good weekend. And of course, as always, go to church on Sunday, and until I see you next week, God bless.