The Mapp
The Mapp is a long-form dialog podcast that is intended to be a platform for people from various walks of life to intimately and candidly share how they navigate different aspects of the human experience. The stories shared will undoubtedly hold nuggets of wisdom and meaning that we all can adopt and integrate into our lives. There will be rabbit trails, there will be laughs, there will be nonsense, and there will be gold. Welcome to The Mapp.
The Mapp
Breaking Bias and Unmasking Assumptions: A Fight for Meaning, Morality, and Culture in an Age of Division
Dive into an eye-opening conversation with Tim Churchward as we tackle some of the biggest challenges in today’s culture head-on. We dig deep into the societal pressures that shape our identities and beliefs, calling out biases and assumptions we don’t even realize we carry. From the impact of social media on mental health to the complexities of gender roles and the heated debates around abortion, Tim brings a grounded perspective rooted in faith, history, and philosophy. Oh, and yeah, we even talk about the Peaky Blinders.
We’re not just talking theory here—this is a no-BS breakdown of how history’s big ideas, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch or the moral fallout of the Nuremberg Trials, still echo in how we live today. Tim lays out why utopian promises grounded in postmodern and Marxist thinking often go off the rails and why understanding the lessons of English common law is still crucial. If we don’t learn from the past, we’re doomed to keep repeating it. Sounds cliche, BUT cliches are cliche because they are true.
But this isn’t just about pointing fingers. It’s about self-awareness, taking responsibility, and understanding the power dynamics that shape our lives. Tim gets real about sexual ethics, masculinity, and how society’s roles are evolving. We dig into stories that show why mutual respect and personal accountability matter now more than ever. If you’re tired of the constant division and want real talk about what it means to find unity and purpose in a fractured world, this is your episode.
Tune in. Think hard. And let’s figure this out together.
Thank you for joining The Mapp. If this resonates with you, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with others who might find it meaningful. Follow us on social media to stay updated and join our community of explorers. Together we navigate life’s pathways.
All right, guys Got another one with a great and powerful Tim Churchward. This one covers a ton of ground, from big societal stuff to some really personal stories. Tim and I talk about everything from stress and social media to beauty standards and the influence of groupthink on our personal beliefs pretty heavy territory, discussing postmodernism, the dangers of echo chambers and the importance of self-reflection in breaking cycles of injustice. What's really cool about Tim is he's not just talking about theory. As an intellectual, he lives this stuff. He's out there teaching young people, he's running a school, he's building bridges within his own community and he's getting into really tough conversations about things like abortion and gender roles and social media's impact on mental health. This guy is a unique mix of faith, philosophy and experience that makes one hell of a perspective. So if you're up for the conversation that challenges your views and makes you think a little bit, you're going to love this one.
Speaker 1:Buckle up, this is a wild ride. Let's get into it. Welcome to the map. Two, one, zero, all engine running, okay, um, and have you ever seen, before we dive in here, you ever seen Peaky Blinders? You ever seen this show?
Speaker 1:uh, yeah, like a couple of times okay, I like, uh, I sat down with Vanessa Vanessa was. She dated this guy from Wales like forever and so she lived in the in the in the UK for a period of time also, and I was kind of jarred by the fact that I could clearly understand everything that everybody was saying, but she couldn't understand anybody. I mean, english is my first language and I'm used to like appalachian, like different kind of dialects in english, but she could not understand anybody in that show. When killian whatever his name would like talk like I, I fell in love with the accent that he had there, but she was lost. But yeah, yeah, it was ethically violent. That show, bro, it's like it, you know.
Speaker 1:But the arc at the end of it, the arc of the story, what was like really jarring to me you know, spoiler alert is at the end of the show. He like this is a guy who's just purely driven by like um, reckless abandon of like how far can I take my life? Because he like served in the first world war? He was in these tunnels underground. Uh, you know, it was like which, the worst, one of the worst jobs you could take. Everybody when they found out he was a decorated soldier doing that. They like kind of stepped back because these guys were like the og badass kind of guys and him and his brother had this like philosophy that everything that we have in life now is gifted to us, like we should have died there. We actually died there, whoever we were, we're died there. But like he didn't take it in a redemptive way, like a Christian, like I died to myself. He took it in like like I'm going to maximize the amount of risks that I can take and like he just like skyrockets into like you know, wealth, but then also like political uh, prominency, blah, blah, blah. But at the end like he like goes on his, like he figures out like everybody who messed messed him over at the end and just goes back, tries to go on this vendor streak.
Speaker 1:And the last episode, the the clock on the tower is is chiming and it remembered uh, 11, 11, like whenever they declared the end of the war and like peace, whatever.
Speaker 1:And then he had this like epiphany and then he's just like oh, I'm just gonna go be a gypsy somewhere and like live in peace, I'm not gonna seek vengeance for people anymore.
Speaker 1:And it was like a great character arc of somebody like going through the human condition and trying to like follow their thoughts through the human condition and trying to like follow their thoughts all the way through, and he was absolutely miserable, like he like had as much wealth, has much women, has much you know, uh, influence as you could get from people, but, um, his life was super stressful, that's, it just stressed me out all the time, um, but anyways, uh, so like, last time that we were, we were chatting, one of the things I want to talk about, which you never actually got into, was a confirmation bias.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how now, with social media and the way that algorithms are wired to just keep us engaged with scrolling on our phone as much as possible to generate as much ad revenue as possible, is there's like a balance that it plays with you and you can look into this, but there's certain times of the day where more negative stuff will come on your algorithm to spike your cortisol, and there's other times where it'll be funny stuff, stuff'll make you laugh, where it's going to like whatever, and that's that's really intentional uh, in terms of like if people to just it's more distracting, keep you engaged at work, if it's like more funny stuff and like the outrage stuff, just like in the nightly news cycles or the morning news and nightly news, the contrast will be a little bit different, uh, in terms of what they report, but it's about to keep you engaged on that content, so it's not a nefarious thing in the sense of they want to make as much money as possible.
Speaker 1:Now the social media platforms and these tech giants have figured out we can leverage these to affect elections. Zuckerberg admitted to that openly like we in fact, uh influence the 2020 election. He testified to that point. Um, but a byproduct of that is we get stuck in this what's called an echo chamber, but basically we're just hearing what we believe and we're seeing the lens through what we believe, which radicalizes people more in their ideas um, as in, as in what?
Speaker 2:what you input is reflected back to you in output from someone else. So you think that everybody thinks exactly like you and you're outraged and someone can think differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and so one of the things I'm trying to do now is after the election and like full disclaimer. Uh, you know, when the election, I, like everybody, when the election was over, in the first couple of days I was, you know, you had two kind of reactions like. One was like celebratory people are dunking on people funny memes like ha ha ha. Other people are like screaming in their cars, crying, like talking about researching, looking to move to another country, even here, bro, even the uk, where it's not our election, people were doing that yeah.
Speaker 1:So what we, what we kind of need to figure out now is we've been the, so social media and institutions well, let me just stop there. We're talking about where we're getting our info from. So, like frederick nicha back in like the 1800s, said god is dead, we've killed him, blah, blah, blah. And like the gay sciences book, where he's writing and he wasn't saying in like a triumphant way, peterson talks about this, but he's basically just questioning now that we have enlightenment, now that we have humanism, uh, what do we? Is that what's going to replace god? And that's kind of a terrifying thought, because we've built all the, and me and you have talked about this in the past we built everything on western society, on judeo christian values. So if we're going to abandon that and build something else, where will that take us? Because, where it's taken, the united states has become the biggest military superpower in the history of the world and the biggest economic engine in the world. Not that that's the end, all be all, but that's what it partially what it produced.
Speaker 2:Um I mean in germany they? They took it to the uber mention thing, didn't they say about the idea of the overman, the, the, the great man, that nietzsche never meant to be that, but the nazis took it to that level yeah, so.
Speaker 1:So when nietzsche said that, he was like questioning, what do we replace this with? And, like lewis and in Mere Christianity in the first chapters he talks about, when we're approaching this idea of Christianity, we have to do it with some soberness and we can't. He meaning he was talking to everything that led up to the first world war. So for everybody listening to this, before the first world war, people were drunk on the idea that humans were just great and that we were going to create this utopia and everything was on the fast track to bit, to prosperity, to everything like being awesome, and it was all people being basically being driven by what media was telling them positive feedback loops and their endocrine system. Because what happened in the early 1900s was as much a train wreck as what you could surmise. Like worldwide it was a train wreck. We're talking about economical collapses, the Great Depression in the United States. The Deutsche Daymark had hyperinflation. They had to bail out their currency, which took them a long time, which took other countries helping them forming three other currencies. We had a first world war and then, after the first world war, they're like my God, we'll never do that again. Not very long later, we had a second world war, which was worse, which was even crazier to think about. The Second World War was worse than the First World War, with that trench warfare where people were just being hamburgered by machine guns and tanks and set on fire. The Second World War was worse because we industrialized murder. Genocide was coming to the forefront of thought when you're talking about the Uba Minj and then we created the most horrific weapon that the world had ever known with an atomic bomb and we vaporized two cities. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in those bombings in an instant. Next Well, that was what was coming. Next, we were creating our own Tower of Babel. We abandoned these ideas and we thought as long as economy is good, medical science is prospering, globalism is prospering, we're going to get to the right place.
Speaker 1:And we found out really violently and really abruptly. People are not, in fact, good, and the Nuremberg trials spoke to that, because the Germans were saying we didn't do anything wrong. Our state told us this is the law. We followed the law. That's what good citizens do, and you live in a different state who has different laws. Every country has different laws, and it created this conundrum in the court system there because they were like that's actually true. Every country does have laws and we don't want our citizens to be dissidents, but there's actually something higher than the state's power. There's something called good and evil that we would actually subscribe to in these court systems, and we are going to judge you not on the laws that you were following within your state, but in a higher uh, a higher uh order if you want to say yeah yes, and that was really profound.
Speaker 1:People. If we miss that, if we, we need to understand that. If the state is the highest authority that you can aim at your political party, you're right. We talked about this last time your, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation, whatever it is if that's the highest thing you aim at, you are going to unravel, unravel, unravel down and cannibalize yourself because you're you're defining that. But there's something higher than that. Then everybody is subjected to it and I think english common law and I'll. I'll stop there because I'm going to go higher, harder than that, because you made a comment when we started the conversation, when I wanted to talk to you before about free speech. Yeah, free speech means something different americans than the british, I'm like that may be true, but english common law is the grounds on which we created free speech and in the uk, like it's for the western world.
Speaker 1:It's like one of the best things ever. It's like the idea of english common law. That's one of the greatest things that the british have done. I know we like knock on you guys as americans, but it's fantastic that you exported that, that principle.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think and I think I think people don't know what English common law is. It's the idea that you have case law and precedent. So, instead of making an individual decision every single time that there is a legal conundrum or legal conflict, there's actually precedent and case law. That means that you can go back and have a general system of law and justice that applies to everyone. So that's a really powerful, it's a really powerful export of the UK, particularly england. The uk, they can, they can claim it, but it's the england, right? Yeah, that's right, and so I'd say, yeah, that's that's powerful.
Speaker 1:Um, but yeah, dude, carry on, carry on so without that, you're going to have a two-tier system and without that, like basically that that that system is saying like, irregardless of who you are, you're still under this, this umbrella of law. So I could be a king, I could be this person, I could be that person, unless it really really specific exceptions, like we're all kind of under this umbrella of ruling, which again would come kind of back under under god. But right now we're what we're seeing in the world. Is this return to this idea really driven by a new form of postmodernism, really driven by a form of Marxism? We can build another Tower of Babel. We can build a utopia. The reason why it's not working, guys, is because we weren't the ones doing it.
Speaker 1:And there's a quote from Orwell I think it's Orwell, but he said every generation supposes themselves wiser than the one that came before them and more morally virtuous than the one that comes after them. And when we have people who think that they're morally superior, they will dehumanize anybody else who is not them in the group. And there's no logical kind of dialogue. That can happen. Everything. There's no actual debate, there's no actual discourse.
Speaker 2:Everything breaks down if I position myself that I'm morally higher than you based on my group, then I've dehumanized you and there's no way for us to like find any justice, because we talked about justice last time because what's really interesting is that because the church I work in obviously our student community we've got 400 students, all Gen Z, between 18 and 24, whatever they are, and one of the things that we say to them all the time is is that you will have more knowledge about more things than any generation before, but you will not have the same wisdom or the same morality. And one of the things that we try and teach our young ones is hey, knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge really is the taking apart of things. It is the deconstruction, which is actually quite an important process. I'm not decrying that in the slightest. You deconstruct ideas to find their origin, shape the foundations and see how good they are.
Speaker 2:But the difference between knowledge and wisdom is that, while knowledge takes down tears apart and deconstructs, wisdom seeks to build something in the application of the knowledge that we've learned. And the reality is that you can only be wise if you've applied knowledge over time through trial and error, and or you've experienced suffering in your life. And so what's happening is is that a trial and suffering leads to wisdom, like you just can't get away from it because you've done something crazy or someone's done something crazy to you and you're wiser than you were before. We've never experienced any life. It's really hard to be wise. You can have loads of knowledge, but it's really hard to be wise. And this idea of moral virtuosity is really important because every every me, us included right like we we're 18 every generation.
Speaker 2:Screw you. Guys. Like we're amazing, like we know way more than you, I'm going to show you how bad the stuff you built is. And we have this generational thing every generation, where it's like. The young ones are like deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct. And the wise ones, the elder generation, the elder statesmen, they have to find a way of being, of protecting what they've built. That is good, but allowing the expression of a deconstructed generation to learn how to apply knowledge through trial and error and suffering, in a way that means that they grow up. As opposed to that, they just get to do whatever they want to do. And that's basic parenting, right? That's basic parenting, where you give boundaries and you have freedom within boundaries, absolute freedom.
Speaker 2:And the issue with our current young ones we're generation z, sorry, generation z um. Those, those ones they have been given absolute autonomy to decide whatever is right and wrong in their moment, because they are given freedom way beyond their ability to steward and because they haven't had suffering or pain or trial and error, even though they think they have right. And this is such a massive conversation. The young generation is like we we suffer. It's like you don't, like. You don't know what suffering is, like you just don't get it. And what third world problems and western problems are not an issue like this is a this. This only exists in the western world, this conversation, because everywhere else you're just trying to survive, like live or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:And we have to get our heads around this, especially in our age bracket, because we are straddling these two positions right. So I'm now straddling the position of oh, I really want to basically kill everything that came before me because I want to do something better and actually realize oh, actually, there's something pretty decent about what's happened before. How do I cohabit this space between being 20 and being 60, in my 40s? And this is a really interesting dynamic. And what you're talking about there in terms of how we think about the generations that are coming, is that they're always going to deconstruct, but our job is to help them construct through trial and error and suffering of their own, in order that we can build something together. That's a really tricky thing to do, but that's just what I wanted to add into that conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I, I. There's a family who, who lives in our town. They came there, the mom's Congolese and the kids are from, born in South Africa. Uh, they're like the daughter's 16 years old and we just, we just will laugh anytime we get together. I just laugh hysterically with her because I'll just go through and have her translating for me what's riz, what's?
Speaker 1:And I remember like being being a kid and like middle school, high school, and we had our own slang, and like the slang that we had back then was so, so provocative and offensive. Like now it just doesn't make sense. It's like gobbledygook. The slang that we had was we were adopting words that were like like we've called people douchebags all the time. That was the, that was the insult you know, uh. But it's like clear, like when you say it, like even for someone who's my mom's age, she would get it. She, she's like that's so gross. Why would you guys ever say that? Anyways, their slang. I don't get it at all, and so I'm finding myself in this position.
Speaker 1:Music that I listen to is now classic in terms of where it falls historically. She's laughing. She doesn't know any of the artists that I know. She doesn't know anything that I was into as a kid. It's like over over her head and then so I just like bombard her. You know, sometimes on Instagram of like you know Gen Z, like slang, there's like these guys who are millennials, but they'll dress up and act like they're Gen Z and then like break up with each other and I'm like vaguely following in the conversation but I don't understand actually what they're saying um yeah and I think, and I think that's really, I think that's really.
Speaker 2:And then that goes back to the to the idea that we're talking about, which is this echo chamber thing. Because because that generation is consistently on social media, what they feed in normally is bracketed around their generation and they get fed back the same thing from their generation. It's why multi-generational expressions of community are so important, which is why the church is actually so important, because basically you get a 21 year old who's like I can rule the world. Then they come up against me and I'm pretty forceful and pretty forthright and I can, I'm good on the spot. They can ask me questions. I've normally thought about it and I've got an answer, or whatever it is. It's really good for them. It's good for me to be challenged, but it's good for them to be like, hey, you're not, you're actually not as good as you think you are. You know like I, I'm not a genius, but I have. But the questions that you're asking me, one day you might ask a question I haven't thought of one day, but not right now. And actually you need to be aware that people before you have actually grown up and thought about these things in a way that you have not even considered yet, even though you think you are the DBs, as they say. Well, not as they say, as we in our generation say.
Speaker 2:But I think there's something really powerful about that multi-generational community because you can't get away with it. It's the whole iron sharpens iron thing. You can't get away with just being in an echo chamber that doesn't exist and then you have to choose, choose, okay. There's lots of people in this community that don't agree with what I have to say. They also don't let me just preach on a sunday. I can't believe they don't let me get a microphone and preach on a sunday about the things I want to preach about give me the mic, dude give me the mic, that's right, yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:And then you get to our age. You're like take the mic away, take the mic away. I'm. I'm absolutely over this thing. I'm only doing it because I have to, because you guys are all nutters. Do you know what I mean? I think this is this is really interesting dynamic and that multi-generational thing is really important. But in terms of that echo chamber thing, it's so foundational to understand that to get out of that requires a huge sacrifice because you have to start taking on board that other people think differently and that is very, very hard in our culture.
Speaker 1:It's one thing I'm kind of desperate for, honestly, is to understand other people. Like right now we talked about the election briefly, but I desperately want to get people on the podcast who, like, have like polar opposite viewpoints on me and just like, but I want to work from the departure point, like, hey, I just want to understand you as a human being. I want to understand, like in your mind, the you as a human being. I want to understand, like in your mind, the big picture and for the greater good, how does this all kind of flush out and how does that work If we can have like an adult logical conversation, if we're going to descend into moral superiority, if we're going to descend into like, just emotional outbursts and like that, I just don't have the capacity for that. But, like, if we're going to be objective, like I genuinely want to know because you didn't arrive there by act, it wasn't just like I'm choosing to be wrong, like, from my perspective, if I don't agree with them, it's not like someone's actively saying I woke up today and I feel like I want to be wrong, and then there's a ballot list of like wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You know, no one does that there's a reasoning behind what they're doing, be it it might be a false departure point, and they have to talk about that and they have to have somebody actually think out loud with them. Not trying to punish them, not trying to dunk on them, not trying to publicly humiliate them, but like let's work out your idea, follow the thought through. Do you still have the idea? Does it still hold on? Sometimes you're trying to break emotional things or belief systems. When you're trying to work things out like that, that you're just not really going to, but just having like real conversations.
Speaker 1:There was a debate between JD Vance and Tim Waltz during this last election cycle and all this stuff came forward like as if they were like making their eyes and they were lovers or whatever, because they weren't dunking on each other, because they really weren't like being disrespectful to each other. And we've kind of gotten away from that uh to this point where if we get like more and more and more and more radicalized into our groups and more militant and our tribalism for groups, it's going to descend in a place that we don't want. That's why I was referencing specifically at the end of the 1800s. We were at like the height dude, like we'd moved from whale oil into like oil out of the ground, like fossil fuel. There's all these advancements that we were like walking into and people like we're going to, we don't need God, we don't need anything Huxley and Darwin, and the scientific revolution, evolution and the survival of the fittest.
Speaker 2:You had the Edwardian era in the UK in the 1920s, which was the greatest wealth that has ever experienced by a very few people. In the end, actually, to be fair, the upper classes and the poor were still poor, but but there was this real sense of we. We've made it. This is this, is it? Historically? We are at the pinnacle of our expression and what's really interesting about that aspect of it is that you because I know that you mentioned, like the weimar republic, you mentioned um, the the wall street crash 1929. Um, you mentioned, I mean, hitler became chancellor. Germany, 1933, chris, and that was 1936. 1939, world war ii broke out and then we didn't even talk about lenin and stalin and we didn't yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:It's never that and you know that's never really addressed that much, but you're looking at a hundred.
Speaker 2:I think a hundred million people in total were killed with the greatest killing machine of the 20th century. And and it's, and it's just, it's just this incredible um example of what happens if humanity consistently believes that we should eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and define our own morality and and, like you said at the beginning, not come under a transcendent morality, that somehow we are the ones to determine and dictate what is true, what is real and what is good. And I mean, and if you want any lessons from the 20th century, just look at, even look at Mussolini in Italy, like, look at some of the stuff that happened. Yeah, absolutely, I'm saying it doesn't matter about your political view, left or right, it's human beings.
Speaker 1:Every ethnic group, every country, like you can go to any hemisphere, any latitude, any ethnic group where they applied these ideas, it ended very badly. And so now when universities are saying, hey, Marxism was a super good idea, it's just the wrong people were trying to do it and they got corrupted, they got power and it's like, well, guess what that's gonna happen unilaterally anywhere. And when christians they say you're just being old-fashioned, you're being dumb, you're being superstitious, like rightfully so. When you look at the russian revolution and you look at what happened to orthodox christians, their churches got changed into brothels, movie theaters, bars, and they were executed and ostracized. There's still people who are alive today, who live in the middle of the siberian wilderness because their ancestors were christians and they had to go live and literally, like john the baptist, eat locusts and honey and lose their. They lost their minds. They're all like crazy now, but like that.
Speaker 2:That's why people have some hesitancy around those ideas and implementing those ideas on wide scale in a political absolutely and and and like the japanese, the japanese in terms of the prisoner of war camps, I mean the stuff they did to people. I mean it's like it's unreal what they did. I had a, my granddad, um, on my mom's side, he had a friend that was in a japanese pow camp and a dude like the guy, he, like he, he ended up um, running around naked, um in the town where we lived, shouting the japs are going to get me, the japs are going to get me, because he just completely lost his mind and and so what I'm saying is like because because and we think that japanese is a capitalist economy, they're great people and of course they are. But every group, every ethnicity, every culture, if it focuses itself around itself, becomes one of the most self-consuming things you can do, and it normally means that anybody that doesn't have the majority opinion or anybody who is in a situation where they are seen as a threat either to ruling authorities or just the general rule and order of society, they're targeted as the problem, when actually the problem is deeply human. I, I just think you, you can't get away from the 20th century, you just can't do it.
Speaker 2:I mean, my first degree is history of philosophy and you look at the philosophical connotations of, and then so if you look at so, so if you go from kant to hegel, to marx, to freud, to foucault, to derrida and to sartre and all these guys, and I mean you you shift from german to french and when it gets french it gets really, really bad, just like well, when it gets french it gets pretty crazy and there are lots of the pedophiles and wanting the edge of consent to be reduced and all the rest of it. But you track that philosophical journey and then you also track the historical journey. Dude, like we, we are living in the 2024-25 and we are living in the inheritance of fukai, we're living in the inheritance of existential post-modernism. And and what happens is, is that we, we think that just around the corner, we're nearly there, just around the corner. If we can just find the perfect expression of humanity, if only we could be the person that we feel like, even though our biological genders or bodies, whatever you want to sex is, don't reflect it. If only we can be a jewish fish and identify how we want, like, if only we can be that, then we'd have utopia.
Speaker 2:But the thing the thing is is that and this is the christian ethic is that the answer is not forward, the answer is backwards not backwards, but the answer is before. The answer is two thousand years ago, and so actually, what we're trying to do is we're trying to go forward from a point of the cross, as opposed to go forward from the point of our individual lives and going all the way back to the echo chamber. If you believe that your life is your story and that's the story you should be promoting, you will just do your best to have a story that makes sense to you, so no one else can get in. That's why anxiety is up, isolation is up, depression is up, suicide is up, because no one can live in a story that they control. They must be part of something far greater, and echo chambers are the greatest killer at the moment of young women between between 10 and 13.
Speaker 1:Yeah, suicide, I mean suicide rates of younger people just have gone up like really since the pandemic. But like you go before that with the, with social media, with uh, pre-pubescent, pubescent girls, like it's such a. It's a crazy thing because they all have body dysmorphia in some degree or another. Because they're not, they're changing, like their breasts are coming in, their hips are widening, they're. You know they look.
Speaker 1:But they're still not quite a woman and, like I've heard you know girls on on social media. One girl she transitioned to be a boy because she said I never thought I was actually a boy, but she just looked at Kim Kardashian and she knew that she wouldn't just looked at her own body. It's like I'll never have that kind of figure. So I can't even I can't be sexually attractive to men. So anybody listening, listen, I don't want to send you down a weird rabbit hole, but beauty standards are always changing. When I was in school, girls used to pluck their eyebrows out until they were like razor thin and like the way that they wore makeup, everything. And then there came this phase where girls have big boxy eyebrows you british people really love that look where the women will just have these huge boxy eyebrows, don't throw me in that hole, bro.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying like it's.
Speaker 1:It's something I've seen, like you know, in that essex show. Whatever my wife will like, sometimes like, show me some reality stuff. But I'm just saying anybody listening to this the standards that are held right now, by the time that you actually like, when you're pre-pubescent, you're, you're, you're going into puberty, by the time that you hit your 20s and your 30s, beauty standards will have completely shifted in the ideal that you're trying to get to and I can't tell you of how many, I don't know a better way to say it. But people who I grew up with had ugly duckling syndrome, where they just you, just you're growing in your body. Your body's always changing, but you are not going to look the same as you're 16 when you go in your 20s and your 30s. And I've saw girls who are like and then what then, bro, why do you have kids? Yeah, yeah, so, but anyways, my point there is.
Speaker 2:It's just that I, just, I just want to say one thing real quick someone will always find you sexually attractive and someone will always, always find you attractive, um, and and just because you don't find yourself attractive, someone else won't. And and there's something really important to know um that in the, in the process of finding a mate, or like a partner or a spouse, or whatever you want to call it, um, someone is always going to choose you, and and I think that the lie is is that they'll only choose you if you look or sound or feel a certain way, and I'm like it's just such a lie. It's an absolute lie anyway, karen yeah, well, that was.
Speaker 1:That's pretty much the gist of it is that with the, the line is always moving on beauty standards. If you look at fashion as well like we've been we've been alive, we've been doing this human experience thing for a long time look back at the clothes that they used to wear in the middle ages, look at how like it just always changes, and one of the trends that I see is ideas. Just now, people are getting lazy and they just get recycled, so they'll, for example, converse like black. Converse will be in for a period of time. Then they'll move to like the classic adidas. Then they'll move to like a black, uh, nike with a white swish and a soul. Then they move to van and they'll just recycle these. The fashion trends now, uh, are what was in style when I was in middle school.
Speaker 1:So I was in middle school big baggy jeans girls are wearing like crop tops, like a lot of this stuff just gets recycled, so you're just the. The fashion industry and marketing is centered around creating a sense of lack in people, a sense of I need that, I need that, and if they can have that, string and carrot. That's why you're always pursuing that versus just having contentment and thankfulness, not wanting things but not living out of like a pursuit of materialism, a pursuit of people's opinions. We talked about this last time. I don't actually have permission, or it's none of my business what Tim thinks about me. It's none of my business what someone thinks about me per se, but that's what media and social media.
Speaker 1:Does you want to quantify? What's my reach? How many followers do I have? And I seem like a joke. It was just like are you friends with your mom and Instagram? No, dude, she only has like five followers. No way. It is like like you're foregoing like real connection, real intimacy, relationships with a digital front. Uh, and that's like trying to control how you see yourself and how you think, to maximize the amount of money it can extract from you and your parents. Social media is trying to maximize. It's capturing your attention.
Speaker 2:I work in social media marketing just to give people context, like literally that's all we think about is like how do I stop you from scrolling on your phone and convince Dude, you're the problem, man.
Speaker 1:You're the issue. I'm the guy that I'm the whistleblower of, like hey, this is what these platforms are trying to do. It's people are trying to make money, it's lifting people, it's out of poverty and things like that, but it's also, like you know, making people mentally ill.
Speaker 2:So just be aware there's some things I could say about cultures in Europe making people mentally ill in America.
Speaker 1:but I'll stop there.
Speaker 2:So yeah and dude, like I'm on Instagram because like I, because I, so my view on social media is pretty extreme, I think. I think it's probably demonic.
Speaker 1:Right, so. So so I think, like for me your view is demonic.
Speaker 2:Or you think social media, no, no, the social media in itself, but it's like it's the, the, the, the. The big thing is is the. So I get messages all the time on my Instagram saying your reel is not recommendable because it's more than 90 seconds. So what I use my social media for I don't run my social media, someone runs it for me but what we use it for is to try and actually input thought into people's minds. So you can't get a good thought over in less than 90 seconds. So all of my stuff on Instagram isn't short enough for most people who scroll through. But I don't care. I'm like the people that want to see it will stop and watch it. That is what it is. But the whole drive of the social media world, even on Instagram or whatever it is, is they want it to be short, snappy and engaging, but basically meaningless. Yes, or basically not challenging, unless, like you put like a three, three second thing in there that you hate kamala harris and then all these people hate you and all the rest of it. I'm saying like there's that. So so for me, um, there's a constant drive from my even my social media account saying just so you know you're not going to get as many followers, you're not going to get as many views, you're not going to get a bit of me like, because you are trying to tell someone something something more than 90 seconds and I'm like that is a crazy state to be in. And the only place that does that really is stuff like youtube, where you can actually have long-form conversation, all like these podcast things that we're doing and it's just this really interesting story where you are being invited to in social media, not just to sell your soul to an echo chamber, but you're also being invited at a foundational level to stop thinking, to stop having long form thought, to have glimpses of someone's view that has taken years to mould, and take that as your own thing and regurgitate it when you feel like it's necessary. We are creating stupid people. That's what we're're doing. We're creating people who do not think for themselves and it is drowsy, batty mate, the amount of people.
Speaker 2:So this girl came up to me. She was like she just said all this stuff and I was like oh, what, where did you hear that from? She was like tick tock. I was like okay, so, so who on tick tock is saying that and she's like I don't really know. Them know like they have this following and like I just follow them on TikTok. I'm like so what point did you start thinking about this issue for yourself? She was like well, like, just because I just said it. That's why I'm I'm just saying what I know to be true. I'm like you don't know. It's true. Yeah, did you see? It's just a just a really bizarre. We live in a bizarre world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just to give context, like the way, so like influencers, the way that they become influencers, like young kids, understanding is they're monetizing your attention and so they convince you to buy things, they convince you to go and subscribe to things and when you do that, they get a portion of it. So it's actually a huge conflict of interest. If I benefit directly from you making a decision in the direction I want, and probably the clearest, like this, is a not to go off track and not to. I don't want to like open a total can of worms, but the Harris campaign paid $20 million in total to Eminem, beyonce, cardi B and that stallion chick. They paid $20 million for them to come and say, hey, vote for this person. Elon Musk is the richest dude in the world. How much do you think Trump paid him? Nothing, because he was sowing into his campaign.
Speaker 2:So I'm not trying to make a political statement there. He gave a million pounds, didn't he a day, to someone that came out to vote for Trump. Is that true or not? Say what he gave like a million dollars. He got taken to court, didn't he? The judge kicked it out because he was giving a million dollars away daily or weekly to Trump supporters Trump voters. Elon Musk. I don't think anything like that Trump voters.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk, I don't think anything like that. I think one of the things that they did in the election that he was talking about, for example, amish people. They can't really go to the voting places sometimes because they live out in the middle of the country and they only do horses. But in their religion, if somebody comes with a bus and gets them, they're allowed. So the Republican Party said, hey, we'll come and get you Vote however you want, but obviously if the Republicans come and get you, they're kind of banking that you're going to align with their values.
Speaker 1:I think, like stuff like that. But my only point there not to be like super political about it, but it was just that if people are getting paid to tell you what to buy and they make money from you making that decision, they don't have your best interest at heart. And if they're trying to be in like a group towing a narrative and you can't belong in that group unless you tow that narrative or question within that narrative, that's cult behavior. Like and I, anybody who's young, go look at cults, go go research YouTube. Like, look at cults and look how they function. There's sex cults, death cults that's pretty much it. Like the sex cults they'll monopolize your money. There's a figure things get wonky there. Death cults they don't last very long because everybody commits suicide or they kill their people. Okay, but that's it Like. That's what they devolve into. And all of them have the same promise we're going to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1:This is about transcendence, tim. This is about inner peace, tim. Come set in the fire by us. Drink this Kool-Aid Now. How do you feel? It always starts out People give 25, 30 years to their lives into some of these cults.
Speaker 1:It's always fascinated me. They're like indoctrinated. They lives into some of these cults. It's always fascinated me. They're like indoctrinated, they're in it and they were like like in tears. Even after they leave the cult they're in tears thinking about how good it was in the beginning, in tears, recounting like he was. Such a tim was such a powerful speaker. I remember I remember uh, one, one guy, he, he, uh, he spent six hours every morning. He got fresh fruit and he cut the fruit in a design on a plate and it made it like art and he gave it to the guy to eat this fruit plate every day. And then, years after he finally left that cult, somebody who worked in the room with that guy said yeah, he just took all the fruit that you did and he dumped it into a juicer and blended it and drank it. Yeah, I'm sorry to laugh at the guy's expense, but it's like utter dedication to somebody who doesn't care about you and that's like.
Speaker 1:My point is like they're not going to show up to your dad's funeral. They don't care about you. You shouldn't really care what influencers say. You shouldn't take their political advice. Have a brain between your ears.
Speaker 1:Uh, is what I'm saying, and I was going to ask you the question sure and I, I was gonna ask you the question of like, hey, tim, how do we like break down like the mirror moral superiority thing? And then immediately I'm thinking, like asking you. I'm thinking about, uh, jesus saying like, if you think, if I think tim has a speck in his eyeball, then I'm supposed to like If I think Tim has a speck in his eyeball, then I'm supposed to stick my finger in his eye and wiggle it around and get it out. I have to look first at the board that's inside of my face. There's a big piece of lumber that's lodged inside of my own eye socket that I need to pull out first. I want to hear your thoughts, because I'm kind of firing away at you pull out first. But yeah, I want to, I want to hear your thoughts because I'm kind of firing away at you.
Speaker 1:I drank some coffee, but I want to hear kind of your thoughts on.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, a break breaking out of echo chambers and like more superiority well, it's, it's it's the true purpose of um, it's the true purpose of self-awareness, it's the true purpose of internally looking internally, looking inward. Because in our culture, looking inward um is how can I justify my own life, how can I justify how I feel, how can I justify what I want to do, how can I justify my own personal ambition, right? But jesus actually says looking inward is not about you. Looking inward is looking at yourself and going. How can, in peterson's language, how can I have possibly been the auschwitz guard? How is it that I? Um have got these crazy thoughts in my head about this person that I? I don't like and I want to kill them? Or whatever extreme example you want to think about? True, um, true inward thought, true self and introspection, um, self-inspection. Introspection is about how you are not the greatest thing ever, but where you need to improve your life. And so this is absolutely I mean that whole. Don't look at the speck in your brother's eye until you've taken the planko.
Speaker 2:It was such a powerful parable because it applies across generations, across culture, across everything else, because we spend so much of our time saying let's try and remove this thing that is a blemish on my friend's face, while not knowing that you're smashing them in that same face with a massive plank. That's in your face, because you can't get close to someone unless you get close to them and all of a sudden, like your whole dysfunction smashes them in the face and you destroy the relationship them. And all of a sudden, like your, your whole dysfunction smashes them in the face and you destroy the relationship. That's, it's a powerful narrative, and but what's even, what's even crazier about that, about what jesus says and the christian ethic, is that self-inspection, introspection, is not even simply about um, having this sense of your unworthiness and your need for a saviour. It's also about taking responsibility to get yourself better, taking responsibility to actually pursue a saviour, pursue healing for yourself before you even think about someone else's healing. And what's crazy about that is that, if you and I mean Jesus obviously tells multiple parables, but on the Sermon on the Mount, jesus talks about this idea of forgiveness, right.
Speaker 2:So he talks about turn the other cheek. He talks about if someone takes your coat, give them your tunic as well, and he talks about go the extra mile, right. And so I don't want to bore people if they know the background to this narrative, but turn the other cheek. Jesus says if someone slaps you on the right side of your face, turn the other cheek. And that's because it's the greatest insult to be slapped by the back of the hand. So what Jesus is saying there if someone insults you, in Jewish tradition, by slapping you with the back of their hand, resist that person, but don't do it in the same way. So don't do it in the same way that they came at you by slapping them back or hitting them back. Turn the other cheek and say if you're going to insult me, hit me properly, with respect. That's what that means.
Speaker 2:And then the Romans would ask the people that they had dominion over so in this case the Jews to carry they were legally allowed to get anybody at any point to carry their bag, their helmet. The chosen does a great job of this. Actually, when in the chosen they give this example, and Jesus actually in the chosen and resists the oppression of the, of the, of the people in power, by saying they're saying that's enough now, and then they're like, no, it's not, we'll take it an extra mile. Why? Because you're resisting evil. They're saying that's enough now, and then they're like, no, it's not, we'll take it an extra mile. Why? Because you're resisting evil, but you're just not resisting it in the same way. Because your internal inspection is this could be me doing this to someone else. And so what am I going to do? To resist in the same spirit or am I going to go against it, a different spirit?
Speaker 2:And then the whole thing about if someone takes your cloak, give your tunic. It actually refers to poor people and often and when poor people couldn't pay their dues to their or slaves can pay their dues to their masters and they would take things away from them, like their cloak or whatever intended to court as a result. And he's basically saying to the slaves, to the one who is in slavery, if, or in servitude, if, if your master takes your cloak, give them your tunic as well, which basically means it's been naked in the court. Expose the evil for what it really is, but don't resist it in the same way as what is being done to you. Expose evil and resist it differently.
Speaker 2:And what's so foundational about this is that the idea is is that it is the opportunity and this is the opportunity to break the cycle of injustice is laid at the feet of the one who has suffered the injustice. That's crazy, right? So jesus is saying the way that you break injustice, the way that you break um cycles of injustice over and over again, is not by attacking the people who are oppressing you. It's not by trying to make trying to make your point using the same tactics as they did. What you do is you expose the evil for what it really is and you go in exactly the opposite spirit, and that brings shame on your oppressor, which means that they are publicly shown to have actually oppressed you. And that is the way that you break injustice.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting about that in relation to the speck and the plank, is that if you're internally inspecting yourself for your prejudice, if you're internally inspecting yourself to see where you need to improve, you're internally inspecting yourself to figure out how is it that I have this element of my life that isn't put together, then what you're more likely to do is when you're facing justice, you're like well gosh, I am just the same as everybody else. I have anger, I have hurt, I've oppressed people, whatever it is, and actually Jesus says that now I have the opportunity to break the cycle of oppression, even though I'm the one that's being oppressed. That is the most crazy thing that you can ever think of in our culture. Am I making sense like, like it's the craziest thing that you can think of that if you are the one to have suffered at the hands of another, you get to be the one who gets the glory for breaking the cycle of injustice, as opposed to continuing it? That's a crazy invitation that, if we take it and we remove the plank from our own eye, that we, that we love despite the things that happen to us, that's what changed the world.
Speaker 2:That's what meant that the early church in the first 300 years grew, with people dying for a person they never met. People died at the hands of the gladiators or in the lions or wherever it was, for a man called Jesus that they'd never met. Why? Because they believed in the teaching that he shared, which is hey, listen, number one to live is Christ and die is gain. Also, number two you know what You're entitled to death and nothing but death. And so, actually, if you have a good death in the name of Jesus Christ, it basically means that you are living a life of glory where you get to go into the place of the heavenlies and be one with God, be at one with Christ, and the idea of the introspection in our culture isn't to make ourselves better, it's to justify our position. Introspection is not that. Introspection is trying to figure out how on earth do I get better and love someone? And how? Is it not about me? That's my long ramble about that that's super good, dude.
Speaker 1:I was like, well, maybe like go back into when you said, when you're talking about, uh, you know, put a coal on top of someone's head, carry the romans pack, turn the other, cheek those pieces. So you were saying, like it's basically like you're looking into the face of evil or oppression being done to you and you're creating the response, but also, like you said, like you're not, you're not answering it with with the same spirit that was done to you. So maybe like, practically like, walk through that a little bit. So we're talking about breaking out of echo chambers and more superiority and, of course, like these power narratives that we get fed, that through Marxism of, like you know, if you belong to this group, like you're, you're wrong, it's systemically bad. If you belong to this group, you're systemically a victim. We need to help you like, so maybe like, yeah, close the gap there with that, yeah, I mean, maybe maybe this, maybe this example will help.
Speaker 2:I mean, if it doesn't, we can do another one. But, and I, people regularly come to me. So, so I'm I, I I'm pastor in a church, um, and people come to me regularly, um, and and they and they often are like you you say that we can ask you questions. I'm like, yeah, of course, like, if I can't justify why I believe what I believe, what am I doing? Leading anyone? That's ridiculous, um, and and and what's really interesting is that their narrative is that leaders hurt you and you must do what they say in order that you don't get crushed. This is, this is honestly so prevalent in our mindsets, particularly in my experience of of black congregational church members. This is, this is there in the UK. This is their experience of leaders. Know, in the uk, this is their experience of leaders. And and so what?
Speaker 2:Um, I had this conversation yesterday actually with a girl and she said um, basically, I believed that you were probably going to try and overcome me. You were going to try and oppress me. You were going to try and make me believe what you believe, and the reason why I came to your school was because you said that I could ask questions and every week this girl comes and asks questions. In fact, the first week she asked me, um, because we're talking about um, the, the symbolism of water through the bible. Um, and I was like there's no water, there's no sea in heaven, like the sea is glass, and then it goes. And then she and she got up on stage because we asked them, we got a little stage, we asked them to feedback, because otherwise it's very boring hearing my voice the whole time and and and she said I fact-checked you and I'm like how amazing is that that she actually got up and didn't just take what I said and wasn't offended by what I said, but because she didn't know something, she looked it up on google or wherever she looked it up. And then she was like actually you're right. And I'm like, of course I'm right. No, I didn't say that. Um, it's like it's that.
Speaker 2:But there's this real sense in which actually you can come with a fence to a, a leader to the page freaking patriarchy. You can come with a fence to a different group. You can come with a fence to a representation of oppression and you can come in this same spirit of the oppression that they represent or the impression, the oppression that they are, and you will continue that cycle of injustice. So this girl, she wanted to come and confront me because, um, she felt that essentially I was never going to listen to her point of view because I was a leader and she was a minion. And we got to talk about it and we got to have a conversation and actually I and what's really interesting is is that she's completely and utterly changed over the last eight weeks. We do the school transformation thing and we completely changed over the last eight weeks because she has found that to face up to the fear because it's very vulnerable coming to someone who you think might hurt you very vulnerable, but it's the only way to live your life, it's the only way to overcome it, but it's the only way to live your life, it's the only way to overcome it. And so to confront the fear, to face on the fear of what might happen, actually brings the greatest freedom.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you consistently stand back and you create this narrative of distance as opposed to the reconciliation, if you have the ministry of reconciliation, you continue to create distance. What happens is you create polarization. And so, in that very small example between leader and follower. In whatever context you're thinking about, you can see that if the follower believes that they're going to get oppressed and the leader believes that they're the only one, that could be right. There is an ever increasing division and ever increasing polarization of relationship.
Speaker 2:But if someone comes to you with a like hey, I need to ask this question and like honestly, dude, I can't express to you how many people come to me crying because they, because they think that I'm going to like, batter them, like they I've I've particularly young women come to me to ask a question because they're like they've, just, it takes all of their courage, all of it, their courage to come up to me and ask me hey, like, what did you mean by this? Not even I disagree with you, like what did you mean by this? And they're crying, they're like, they're shaking as they come up. I mean I'm like, dude, at what point in our society did we not expose each other to different points of view to get to that stage? And so for me, just I mean I'll keep going and going and going. I can think of a different example if that's not helpful, but for me, in that example, the breaking down of the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, the narrative of leader and follower, or the patriarchy and the control they have is so foundational.
Speaker 2:And what we teach in the school we taught it last night is we teach out of Numbers 21 quite a lot. And Numbers 21 is this, so Num, numbers 21. What it talks about is this crazy story where the Israelites have this amazing victory over Canaanites um, which, if you, if you, and if you, I mean no one cares about this, but if you, if you, as if the Jewish people hated the Canaanites with a passion um, the Samaritans take the Canaanites place as time goes on with this polarization of groups, right, the Canaanitesites sacrificed to the god Molech their children, so it was detestable in the eyes of the Jews. And what's really fascinating is that after this victory, they walk back into the wilderness. They get to a place called Eden and the Israelites moan. They're like, oh my gosh, we're still in the wilderness. Even this victory kind of gets out of it.
Speaker 2:And it it's like you know, like you're most liable to attack after you've had a victory. It's like you're most liable to to have a goal scored against you. You can see the goal when you've we've just scored a goal. Right, because your guards down whatever, and, and, and they moan. They're like, at least in egypt, at least in slavery, we get three straight meals a day and we detest this miserable bread, this miserable miracle bread that every day falls from the sky. We have, and without it we would die, you know so.
Speaker 2:So it gets really twisted up, and and what happens is sin enters that camp, and, and god sends snakes, and, and we know biblically that the snake is a very important symbol for the consequence of sin, because the lucifer falls, he becomes satan, satan, blah, blah, blah. So the snake in the garden is the is the epitome of the consequence of sin, and the consequence of sin, um is that you end up um having to deal with being, uh, being, imperfect. That's the reality, and and what happens is is that the snakes come, they bite the, they bite the, um bite the Israelites and the Israelites die, many Israelites die, and they go to Moses like gosh. We sinned Like no big revelation there. We sinned against God. Take the snakes away. Go to God, moses, and take the snakes away, but God doesn't.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating that story. What God does is that he asks Moses to raise a snake, a bronze snake on a pole, and when the Israelites are bitten by the snakes, they get healed. And what's fascinating about that is that the consequence of sin and, by the way, not even just your sin, because not all the Israelites would have moaned, not all one million of them moaned or sinned against God, but because they were together in unity the consequence was that everybody got the consequence of the snakes right, and so you might live in a situation where it's not your issue, or your sin, or your mistake or whatever that creates in you a situation where you're bitten and poisoned. It might be someone else, but the solution is still the same. The solution is behold your healing.
Speaker 2:And so, instead of running away or avoiding the pain, avoiding the poison, avoiding the snakes, god doesn't give them that choice. Instead, he says you must overcome the fear and overcome the snake by beholding the bronze snake and being healed, and that means that you are no longer afraid, but you're the overcomer of fear and you're being healed as a result of that. So your healing of the poison in your body is actually synonymous with you overcoming fear, overcoming the oppression that comes when we live in a sinful world, either by our own self, in terms of sin or by someone else that impacts us, by our own self in terms of sin or by someone else that impacts us. And what's really interesting is that in John 3, he mirrors this, because in John 3, just before he says John 3, 16, for God to love the world, just before that really famous verse, jesus says as the serpent was raised in the wilderness by Moses, so the Son of man will be raised up for the healing of the nations. And so what Jesus says is this is that, just as you have looked, this is the israelites have looked at the snake and overcome the fear of the devil and being healed from the poison the devil brings, that the consequence of sin brings. We get to look to him and we get to be the person who, um, beholds our healing. It never invalidates oppression, ever it. It never minimizes it or says it doesn't exist. But the solution is not to focus on the poison or the snake. The solution is to focus on the healing and then overcome what has happened.
Speaker 2:And I think there's something so powerful about that narrative where an echo chamber would give you the consistent story, social media gives you the consistent story that if you are under the cosh or if you the consistent story. Social media gives you the consistent story that if you are under the cosh or if you've been hurt, if you've been maligned, if you've been oppressed, whatever it is, then the way that you deal with it is that you go and in your own strength you try and kill that snake. And actually that minimizes three things Number one, the fact that you have a snake in you somewhere. Number two, that you actually need to be healed from the poison before you go and try and right the injustice. And number three, that you get to be the person that breaks the cycle of doing the same thing over and over and over again, even though that you were the one that got hurt.
Speaker 2:And it's such a powerful story of Christianity that we completely ignore in our current culture. And if we really got that, if we really understood that, then we would live in a very different society. And people will say, well, you're a white middle class man. You represent all that has been oppressive to many groups of people across many, many years. And I'm like, maybe that's true, I'm not even I don't want to deny that I'm like I'm a representative of some form of oppression. Of course I am, whether I am that oppression like. I'm not going to get into a self-justification or defense mechanism here, but what I would say is this does that matter around the biblical truth? And just because I'm speaking a biblical truth, does it matter what my color, my skin is and what gender I am?
Speaker 2:And, and the question is, is that can we as a community of people hear the stories of pain? Jesus says come as you are, come with all your anger, come with all your pain, come with all your hurt. But the point is is when you come to jesus, you get healed, and people sometimes don't want to be healed, they want to be angry. Yeah, and actually, if you can take that, that plank of anger out of your eye in order to go and address the injustice that you see happening over there, then what you'll be is you'll be a far more effective and far more powerful conduit of forgiveness and conduit of transformation, culturally and societally, than you would ever be unless you'd actually approached your healing in the first place. If hurt people hurt people, angry people make people angry, people that feel isolated, isolate people you always recreate of yourself, unless you're able to go to the king of healing, receive healing and move forward and, from that place, address the injustice in the world. We do not understand that principle and my suggestion is that if we did which I think the early church did in the face of Roman persecution and Nero in the face of all sorts of things, and the Jewish people knew this the Jewish people like this is the last thing I'm going to say. I'm going on a long time. The Jewish people like this is the last thing. I'm going on a long time.
Speaker 2:The Judeo-Christian heroes Moses healed a man, spent 40 years in the wilderness, encountered the burning bush and then spent another 40 years in the wilderness, having led the Israelites out of slavery and then still didn't get to see the promised land.
Speaker 2:So their hero is someone that never, ever, made it to the promise. So the issue is not the promise, the issue is the journey that takes you there, and the big thing is that we want to avoid wilderness, avoid pain, avoid. We want to go back to the slavery of anger, the slavery of whatever it is. We're desperate to go back there because we can control it, but Moses is the one that leads a million moaning people through the desert and experiences the glory of the Lord in the burning. Bush experiences the cloud and the fire, speaks to God face to face and still doesn't make it. Why is he a hero? Because he saw the wilderness as a chance to encounter glory, not as a chance to get justice done on his behalf, and there was something so powerful about the ancient Judeo-Christian ethic that we've completely lost in our society today. I have no idea if that answered any of your questions, but that's what I think.
Speaker 1:Well, like when you went I mean the whole thing was good At first I was like where's the tie down coming? And when you hit those like three points, and then everything you just said from those three points now is like fantastic tie down, like anybody listening to that, like that's you. You'd pay like $15 to go read a book in some bookshop and and you're not going to get that, that that much gold. So like for like unpacking it, I guess, like I had, so like I want you for like unpacking it, I guess, like I had, I wanted to tie it down to like the things that we got into before we can do that.
Speaker 1:But one thing that did come up in my mind that I just want to kind of pick your brain out, cause you kind of said when you laid out those three things, and before you go and try to address it, you have to like seek healing for yourself.
Speaker 1:This is kind of like I don't know how you'll think about this, but like, like whenever you're going to go take communion, the Eucharist, whatever your, your kind of stream is, generally they'll say like if you have a grievance with your brother, you should probably go and do that first before you take communion, but you're saying I understand like the principle of what you're saying, but I guess like how would you hold those two things in tension of it? Saying like, yeah, sort, sort it out between your brother before you're going to take communion. You're saying like, hey, before you go and address like injustice from somebody, like get yourself like in a right heart posture before you do that, which I don't think those are necessarily like mutually exclusive things, but I just wanted to get your hot take on that, and then I'll ask you the questions that I had pertaining to what you just said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, I mean communion is is one way that you can experience. Can I just really quickly explain what communion is? Is that all right?
Speaker 1:So I'm sorry to go off, but the reason why I thought I might open a can of worms when we get to this question.
Speaker 2:I just want to bring it because it's really important, because communion is healing. That's what it is, that's the purpose of communion. It's the remembrance of the death that brings salvation, the resurrection that brings healing's communion, um and and and. And. The reason why catholics believe in transubstantiation is because they believe that the blood of christ is the lifeblood of everybody that has been redeemed by him. Right, and we, as protestants, we don't hold to that, but. But I'm saying there's a, there's a rationale behind that.
Speaker 2:But actually there there's something really important to know that taking on the lifeblood of Christ as the ultimate sacrifice is the reason why no blood was allowed to be drunk or had in the whole of the Jewish religion up to that point. Because when you took the blood on of a beast, then you took on their life and you don't want to take on the life of a beast. And so when Jesus comes and says eat my flesh and drink my blood and then lose all his followers, and then in the upper room he does this thing, he's taking the absolute pinnacle sacrificial moment and saying now you can drink blood of a sacrifice that you can take life from. And so when we were willing to take his body broken for us. We remember his death and his blood shed. For us is the life that comes as a result of his resurrection, and so, foundationally, you are here. It's a healing process, because you are giving up your life for his life to come into you. That's the purpose of it that's.
Speaker 1:That's where you lose. That's where you lose a lot of people, even today. It's not even that time. Like I have friends like growing up, like yeah, I can get down with like the teachings of jesus, but that whole like drink my blood, like that sounds like culty. Have you ever seen a rob zombie film mike? Like I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 2:So right anyways, continue absolutely. And I mean, one of the reasons why it's a powerful sacrament is because it means something far more than just the material realm that exists in, which is what the Catholics are trying to get at here, the Eastern Orthodox are trying to get at this. It's foundationally transformational, anyway. So that balance between this is my perspective, that balance between before you take communion and and also the bible talks about before you bring your offering. So, before you give to god, go and get yourself right with your brother. Um, and the reason for that is is that hopefully there's, as you come before the lord and as you come and behold his sacrifice on the cross, as you come and behold the fact that you are a sinner like that, you that you yourself have a plank in your eye, whatever it is that there should be a conviction of the spirit in your conscience where you say, oh man, before I take this and receive redemption from the judgment that God should have over my life, I should actually probably go to my brother and actually redeem him from the judgment that I hold over him. And so, when you go to my brother and actually redeem him from the judgment that I hold over him, and so when you go to your brother, it's not a confrontational conversation where you're trying to deal with conflict. It's a repentance conversation where you say I repent of my judgment for you or over you. For me, that's what it's talking about. So for me it's not like you're going to go and hash out your issues of politics. For me it's like, hey. So for me it's not like you're going to go and hash out your issues of politics. For me it's like, hey, just like Jesus died for me in my sin. Even though I absolutely hate what you did, or hate what you said, or don't agree with you politically, whatever it is, I know that I'm holding judgment that even Jesus has taken away from you, and so I can't hold that judgment and then go receive redemption for myself. I have to get myself right first. So for me there's there's a really powerful story within that context.
Speaker 2:Because what, what that? Because what communion should do is which is why it's so powerful is say to you, man, I'm about to take on the life of a divine, of the divine, perfecter of my humanity, and and how can I take on that life and not go and repent to my brother and not go reconcile to him because reconciliation is not working it out. Reconciliation is apologizing and bridging that relational gap and bringing it back together and we often think that like working, like reconciliation is oh, I understand you now and you understand me now. It's like sometimes you're just not going to understand each other. You just have to love each other. You just have to say I'm sorry for holding you in judgment. Is that helpful? Am I making that make sense?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's good, man, I literally just trying to pick your brain on that point, because that's immediately what like came up in the in my mind when you're saying like okay, like go and like deal with this. Like on the second point, when you're talking about the snake, so that's good, but going, going back, so so like way back, when you had the school girls come to you. They're crying before they ever make it to you you talked about, the girl is black who came to you and said, hey, this is the lens of which my question, you, or what I'd want to kind of understand from you, is the girls who are coming to you. They're crying because one or two or both things have happened. One, they've had some kind of experiential. They had some kind of experience in their life where that was a reality, where they were kind of bludgeoned. There's like a top-down leadership. It was oppressive. I've definitely bludgeoned. There's like a top-down leadership. It was oppressive. I've definitely been in places where it's like belong, believe, behave, like don't ask questions, don't question. I've been in places like that. I just the way I have to police myself because, uh, I have like anti-authority bias, uh, and immediately when I get into an institution. It's kind of like I thumb my nose at stuff. I try to understand as I go older. Now I really try to understand the spirit by which rules are made Like why did you do that? If they can't give me those kinds of things, even if I disagree, if they tell me like I'll just give an example, and this is going to offend some people, but I'm not, whatever.
Speaker 1:So I went to Mozambique, africa, and I was in this ministry school. They said why are you here? Absolutely in no circumstance drink alcohol. And they're like why? Because alcoholism is a huge problem here. We're trying to build like reputation. There's like Muslim culture who completely abstained from alcohol. We're planting churches in Muslim villages. We don't want to see the locals, like students, coming here saying we're with this ministry where we're drinking alcohol, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:It was like four or five months I was there. I was like cool, I just it wasn't like a huge thing to me and it's not like I'm like a raging alcoholic or whatever, but it's just like if I sat down a meal, maybe I'd have a beer or something, but I'm just like, okay, I, I don't think that it's not a problem for me, but I can definitely see biblical precedents where it says don't let your don't, don't let the immaturity of other people uh, your freedom cause other people to stumble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and don't get caught up in these disputes about what to put in your body. So I'm like if I just fight on this point, it's kind of like nonsense. It wasn't important to me, but I'm just making that as an example of I understand why the rule is made. But I've been in other scenarios where it's like why do we do this? Because I said so in Germany. Ie, that was kind of thing. It's like it's literally my way the highway. Why? Because I said so. So I'm like we're going to have a problem because I have a leaning towards my relationship with the rules or generally to break the rules before I became Christian, and that bias has carried over even as Christian. That's the kind of nature.
Speaker 1:So these girls are approaching you A they could have had some experience where that's very much the thing, where they've been belittled, abused, traumatized in a sense, emotionally or verbally, of like just shut up, be quiet, take what I'm saying, or or they've been so conditioned by what they've heard that it created that rowdy, it created the boogeyman inside of their head before they ever came to you, and then they were living out of that, that reality coming up. But either either way, like that's the truth that they're believing about who tim, tim was going to be um, there. So so, and I guess I'll stop there because there's another point I want to make from this about European lawmakers and some things that I observed there. So social media, all that builds into a narrative of white, straight, christian male is going to be X. They're misogynistic, they're sexist, they're chauvinistic, they're this.
Speaker 1:And then, with leadership, it is a reality within church, but also other institutions like teachers and and politicians, etc. It's not just something exclusive to church, um, but but do you feel like dealing with kids and that, or dealing? I see kids dealing with people in that age? Is there pre a lot of pre-judgment, uh, kind of projected on each other, but also you, as is that the is? Are these stories the exception or the rule, or is it like somewhere in?
Speaker 2:between. It's the rule, but from that age group, my experience is it's the rule, and what's interesting is that they're in massive conflict A lot of the time. They're in conflict because they they hear what I'm saying, I'm talking to them, and so so one of the big things is feminism. I, I'm not a massive fan of feminism. It's third and fourth way. First, like whatever great third and fourth feminism are not found. Um and when I go through, because in the school we talk about cultural issues and we talk about feminism and both of them were huge, both these girls were hugely offended by that. Um and and it's really interesting, but um, because no?
Speaker 1:no, go ahead. So what was the effect? You say they're hugely offended. So just by you say you're not a fan of it.
Speaker 2:But the what was the well, yeah, well, I basically said that feminism is probably the, but I I basically said that feminine third and fourth feminism probably is basically the reason why women find themselves in the position they find themselves today, where they somehow. I think feminism is foundationally anti-women and also the gateway to the transgender movement. And what happened in that moment was that they came to me and they were like but they're conflicted. They're like alarm bells ringing ringing. A white, middle class, straight man is talking about feminine alarm bells are massively ringing. But also we trust you because you're the leader, and so there's this really interesting dynamic in that room.
Speaker 2:One girl's a convert, an ex-muslim. She's a convert from islam. Um she, she comes to jesus in our church and so she has all that in the background as well, especially in terms of how Muslims leave, which is very controlling. And the other girl came from a Pentecostal background, which is quite controlling as well. So they have these, and what I found is that it's not as simple as saying they sit on one side of the fence or another.
Speaker 2:There's all these conflicting things that come in, and the only way that they can get around it is if they begin to build trust with me that I'm not simply just some chauvinistic man?
Speaker 2:Now, actually I might be. Maybe I've got massive blind spots and I'm like the worst example of human men that could ever exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but in taking the risk, what happened is is that we actually built relationship and rapport where I said to them hey guys, listen, can I just explain why I believe what I believe? And, by the way, I just want to say at this juncture, if you are under a leader who cannot explain to you why they believe what they believe, then it's not their belief. They're regurgitating it and get out, because what they're doing is is they're consistently just regurgitating information. They've not done any work themselves. You've got to get out. They might have a charismatic personality, they might be amazing at building and strategy and all the rest of it, but if they cannot tell you the core foundation of their belief, and why get out? Just get out straight away.
Speaker 1:And they're not interested in investing in you or being in any form of relationship other than the fear that you have legitimately like a power thing relationship, other than the fear that you have legitimately like a power thing, Like sometimes, people within the church. They miss the invitation to relationship and I've been in situations where, like people will want to quickly pull me into leadership, like, pull me into like speaking or pull me into like the inner circle, whatever, but they actually miss my invitation to relationship of us, like whether we do this or not, like I would like to have a friendship with you. It's not that you have to be friends with everybody, but like it is an element of like there is an invitation to a relationship on some level. Um, there that people miss and that's really what it's about. It's about god and people, not that, anyways.
Speaker 2:so continue sorry, but, but I think that's really important and and this thing of covenant and agreement is really important here, because, basically, covenant between God and man is friendship. That's what it is. Old Testament it's more marriage between God and the Israelites. New Testament is friendship being a friend of God and being part of the bride of Christ. Right, and so when Jesus chose his disciples including women, by the way he was their friend. He was a good, loving friend as well as the saviour of the world. Right, and so what's really interesting is that our model for leadership from Jesus is we are people's friends. We're not just their leaders, we're their friends.
Speaker 2:Now, you can't be friends with everybody. I'm not saying like go around and like meet everybody and like love them and stroke their face. Don't hear me say that but what I'm saying is that if I cannot offer a covenantal relationship of friendship, and I can only offer a relationship that says I'm in charge and you're a follower, I've got a major problem with my leadership, because Jesus never did that. He never built some massive church in order that he could be the leader and everybody else could be the follower. He never, ever did that.
Speaker 2:I'm not decrying big churches. I'm part of a big church and we have a great leadership team here, but we offer people friendship and when these girls come to me, what they find first and foremost is that I ask them questions about what they believe in order to understand them. Yeah, and so what they get it's actually a pretty big shock because they're dude. Honestly, like the fear of approaching me is. I mean, I've never come from this background so I can never fully understand it, but the fear of approaching me is so tangible in the room as they walk to me and you can see them talking to each other before they come over to say should we do this? Should we not do this? Like what, if you, whatever?
Speaker 1:it is. It's so funny for me because I know you personally, so I just think it's funny, like not to like demean you in any way, but just like someone having anxiety about because you're a pretty down-to-earth guy, like I just know you hopefully I am.
Speaker 2:I mean, I mean I I speak with conviction. But I say to the guys all the time hey, just because I'm convicted does not mean I'm right. You have to figure this thing out for yourself. You've got to come and talk to me. And so I mean it means that my nights go on to midnight because I've got a queue of these Generation Z kids wanting to ask questions. That's crazy. But I mean that's a sacrifice of the covenant relationship. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:They asked me these questions every week Kamala Harris, donald Trump, abortion, euthanasia but they asked me all these Palestine, the Israel, gaza that they ask me these massively deep questions. And what I say to them is not this is the definitive thing that you must believe. I ask them good questions about where they're coming to, and then I gently challenge them and say why, why is that? And then they say to me so what do you think? And at that point it's a friendship relationship where now I'm investing in their thought process to transform their mind, not simply trying to prove my point. And this is the thing right.
Speaker 2:In our culture we have this really weird thing where listening is not really real listening. It's where you're trying to figure out how to respond. So when you're quiet, you're not actually listening. You're trying to figure out how to conjure up a response to dominate the person in front of you, which is another way of getting your plank and shoving it in their face. And it's really, really interesting to me that all those walls come down if you ask a question to people. And so what's foundational is that we break down the stereotypical nature of what it is to be a leader, what it is to be a man, what it is to be I don't know, whatever the classic things are.
Speaker 2:Because now what I'd say is is for Kishi and Valentina, who are phenomenal thinkers, brilliant minds, grappling with these things day in, day out, going into a secular environment full of people of different faiths and different understandings. And they come to me and they say full of people of different faiths and different understandings. And they come to me and they say man, we, we have answers now that we never knew that we had before, and I was like how, how did that happen? It's like because we know what the story is and we know it's not about us. This is, these are their words, not mine. We know it's not about us and what we think and how we want to. It's like it's about the beginning of time and the cross between the pinnacle of creation, and everything revolves around that. This is what we do in the school, and what we see is is that we see people invited into friendship.
Speaker 2:The other thing we always do, by the way, is that it's not just a teaching session. They have to feed back and everyone has to feed back with a microphone from the stage, everybody. It doesn't matter if you're nervous, young, old, whatever it is, you have to do it, and if you don't, I pick you. And some people are like no, I'm opting out. I'm really scared. I'm not going to force you, but that's part of the thing, because stop hiding.
Speaker 2:Stop hiding behind these things that you think that you believe. Stop hiding behind your social media echo chamber. Stop hiding behind false humility or self-deprecation like stop hiding, you're meant to be a light. How are you going to be a light if you can't even speak in front of 50 people that already love you? Come on, let's think about these things and as we build those, those relationships and those friendships, all of those presuppositions come down and they're like oh, actually, maybe, maybe there's a different way of thinking and I'm like maybe there is, should we talk about it some more? And so every sunday, every monday and every thursday, I have minimum 25 people come and they they queue to talk to me and listen. I'm not a hero or genius, I'm genuinely not. I'm freaking, essex mate, but I'm not. I'm not a hero, but all I'm doing is trying to put into principle the, the lifestyle of jesus if you, if you come from essex and you are comparatively, you are a hero to him yeah, that's right I've made it
Speaker 2:but I'm just saying and, and, and, and it and it breaks down the walls, it breaks down the presuppositions. Guys, I've got to say unconscious bias is probably one of the most ridiculous things you'll ever hear in your life. Like, just don't, don't spend any money on unconscious bias training. It's ridiculous. What you've got to do is have good conversations with people and learn how to disagree. Well, like that's what you have to do. And and and. The lie is is that if you disagree with someone, you can't move forward with it. It's a lie. It's an absolute lie. Anyway, dude, I just get really passionate about stuff.
Speaker 1:I don't know, yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, you hit the nail on the head earlier where you said I'm convicted, but it doesn't mean that I'm always right. And you know, if I like share, I'm just like, hey, this is where I'm at right now, but there's a reality that everybody who's alive right now you're going to die at some point and you're going to believe something wrong. You're going to believe something wrong about money, about marriage, about kids, about the Bible, about God, about yourself. There are things that you're going to be really certain of. But it actually was wrong because you're only seeing in part. You have a lot of blind spots and you know what you know, you know what you don't know, but you don't know what you don't know, and that keeps you in the realm of grayness in some areas where you're going to have a really strong conviction. But it's not going to be right.
Speaker 2:Right and what it says is that truth is like a diamond.
Speaker 2:We often think that truth is like a blunt object. It's not. Truth is like a diamond and you can turn it and get a holy, holy revelation. And you can turn it and see the light refract through that light, through that again and and with so I've run this course eight times. We now have people from tokyo and scotland and all over the place like come and join us for this school and it's really good. I'm really, I'm really proud of it, and. But I've had people come to me and say, hey, have you thought about this? And I'm like I'll actually know, that's a really good point. I should probably change the notes. And I've done it. I've taken something out of the notes and put something in the notes because I'm like now, that's a really good point.
Speaker 2:You turn the diamond and I saw something different. That someone's right and someone's wrong is that, and sometimes it is that. Sometimes people are stupid and they just they think crazy things, but more often than not people are with ideas and they turn the diamond. You're like, oh, I never saw it like that. And what I would say that I do is is that I give people a diamond and I just twizzle it, I twirl it round and round and round and let them see the light coming through it, the light of christ coming through, the truth of that diamond, and what happens is is that they're like man.
Speaker 1:I never realized that you could think about it that way, and it's transformational for me yeah, well, self-awareness is really important to the point that you're making, because, like and I've heard like, this thing of like being, like being being brave and then like having fear, uh, like, depending on the situation, it's not you can't always be brave and you can't always be a coward, but that's what makes life hard is that you make the wrong choice, the wrong decision. You'll be labeled one or the other stupid, stupid or brave, coward or brave. But so we're wrapping, we're getting close to like wrapping up here. But one thing I did want to circle into cause. We talked about these girls coming to you. We talked about a narrative that they believed in, one thing that just popped up on my feed. So I plugged back into x ever since must took it over because it was pretty jarring for me, because all these social media platforms have like all this censorship and kids gloves on you can't see certain content, and x twitter is like, it's like the wild west, unfiltered, like people just say crazy stuff.
Speaker 1:Anyways, something popped up in my feed and it was all these european lawmakers, all women and some trans women, uh, were there standing with their arms folded and it said american sisters, we stand with you. And the only thing I could surmise from that is that donald trump has been elected and then 90% of women who were voting, that were polled, said that their main focus was abortion. And then a lot of liberal men who were interviewed on social media and stuff. What they would say is like I'm just thinking about the future of my daughters and I don't want my wife to have more rights than they have, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it kind of provoked a few things in me. I'm like what the hell do European people think is going on right now? What do they think is important actually to the state of the country?
Speaker 1:But then also one of the thoughts I'm just trying to see it from the departure point of a dad. So the dads are I can't see it as a woman because I'm never going to have an abortion. I'm sorry to the, but I'm trying to think from the perspective of one of these dads like a liberal, progressive dad. I can't think as a woman because, regardless of what trans people say, I'm never going to be able to have an abortion. I have a penis and testicles. I don't have a uterus. I'm never going to be a 3D printer for a baby. It's just not. Can't think from a departure point of a woman. That's where you know people are. You're a woman, you understand.
Speaker 1:But I'm thinking from the departure point of a dad on this specific topic, and they're saying like I'm just thinking about my daughter's future and I'm like me too, and actually what abortion is in essence? At the end of the day, it's a form of contraceptive. It's just the timeline of when that contraceptive is leveraged. You're actually killing a person versus preventing pregnancy. But it is a extreme form of contraceptive where you're not allowing someone to develop.
Speaker 1:And I'm thinking like, between the time that my daughter is six now and the time that she reaches sexual maturity to the time where she gets into relationships and then she'd be sexually active, there's a lot of steps and a lot of things that I should be ingraining into her as a person, irregardless of what's going on in the world, that she would if she's going to engage in sex. I'm just thinking of this from a Christian worldview and I'm thinking of it from a secular worldview. So if I think of it from a Christian worldview, I don't need to go down the rabbit trail of like, hey, you should be in a marriage, you know sex is confined to, to, to that relationship. Because if you get pregnant, guess what's going to happen? There's going to be a guy there who's going to co-labor with you to raise the kid. You're going to be financially stable, all the stress is there. You don't have to make the government, your husband or your dad and try to elicit money from the government to function, survive and let the government then raise your kids so you can go to work, et cetera. So there's that.
Speaker 1:But even if I was from a secular worldview and I was in the like I believe in, like the free love movement and I won't want people confined sexually, I'm just like that's a horrible form of contraception, like in a pragmatic, in the game of trade-offs and pragmatism, even if I'm not a Christian, even if I say like yeah, I'm not going to embrace this as like actually killing a person, I like do all the moral shuffling and all the redefining of words, but even it's like who says I love my daughter and I want her to have a good life in the future and I'm trying to protect her. Why would you want to create a structure where that's something she's going to have to engage in? Because that was a point where I couldn't really connect with what was being said, and you made the comment earlier when you went through those three points about the snake that sin actually has a collective consequence with people, even if you're not the person engaging in it. There's a collective consequence and so in that trade-off of entertaining stupidity or entertaining ideas that aren't yours or entertaining behavior that's not yours, there's going to be a consequence that you take on for that. And I think that that's what's being missed here from both parties. One party is saying, like we need this right to like be able to like terminate this pregnancy and kill this baby or abort the baby, depending on what kind of definition you're going to put that we need that and you're not letting us have access to that in the full capacity that we want. And the other group is saying that we have a moral burden or we have a burden on our conscious for this to like stand up for people who are not get or have a voice than innocent and we just have a structure on how we're positioning our lives where that that's like outside of, like in, like most people who are in like moderate and I would say myself more but like, if you exclude rape, incest and medical situations where that person's going to die, have some major complications with that, etc. Etc. But just saying like, purely, we're using this as a contraceptive because right now I just don't want to have a baby.
Speaker 1:I don't, I really struggle just with being a dad, that mindset of like hey, I need to prepare a better future. I'm like what do you perceive as better and what are you preparing your daughter for? Are you preparing your daughter to be a sex worker? Are you preparing your daughter to like, what are you preparing her for? Because that's like a, a last, last, last resort of something in my mind and I'm saying this from the departure point that people in my immediate family have had multiple abortions and I see the physical effects of it in terms of cervical cancer. I see the psychological effects of it in terms of like when you actually do have children and you experience the gravity of what that is and the the emotional effects of it, of instability.
Speaker 1:Uh, there, I don't know of anybody who I love, who I'd say I want them to go through this. Does that make sense? Now, I'm, I'm a, I'm a realist, I believe that there's trade-offs. I'm not a religious idealist who says like under no circumstance it's going to happen, whether I want it to or not. There's people who are going to try to do and they'll do botched attempts at it, you know, as they've done through like history. I'm not an idealist in that sense, but I'm just not understanding that point. Point so like I don't know, like that kind of was just tying in, like that was where my mind was tying in what you're saying, the girl's coming to you.
Speaker 1:There's these European lawmakers who are having this assumption about what people are thinking on the other side of like I'm just trying to rob you of your rights. I'm not, I don't want to rob anybody of of rights, but it's like we all have a collective responsibility of what when we're making those decisions and we have to be able to take responsibility for decisions. And if I'm thinking about the women in my life my wife and my daughter and whoever my wife has had two pretty like one really hard delivery and the other second like hard pregnancy, like um, and we've had like several miscarriages, stuff, so we there's a, there's a real value of the potential for life, and then obviously the life of our children, and then like anyways, I'm going on kind of rant, but I kind of wanted to like get your feedback of what, because I don't have that much interactions with people in like Gen Z on like a one-to-one basis. But, like you're in this school, you said that that's coming up. Like, what are they thinking? And You're in this school, you said that that's coming up, what are they thinking?
Speaker 1:And then, in terms of dads who you talk to and hear me out, people, if you don't have kids, I'm not as interested in what you think. I'm not saying that in a demeaning way, it's just you will never understand as a woman or a man, you'll never understand the value of life until you have a child. In the same way, I'm not trying to like speak down to people who can't have children. I'm just saying like, if you, if you don't have kids, you're a single person and you're like, especially in your twenties, you're like we just want to go to like Ibiza and rave and like have no consequences to any choice with me. I just have no interest in that. But anyways, give me some feedback. I'm going in a lot of different directions.
Speaker 2:Oh, dude, like. It's just so much Like. Abortion is not a rights issue, it's a sexual ethic issue. Number one the reality of sex is that it's designed, whether you believe in evolution or biological evolution or Christian faith. It's designed to create life, and so to try and completely, um, untether the potential for life from sexual activity is one of the most ridiculous things you can ever do. It just doesn't make any sense. So it's a sexual ethic issue. It's not a rights issue. Um, the, the, the and and the.
Speaker 2:But the issue is, in the european context, that we stand with you American sisters, or the outrage that I've seen from my American Democratic friends who are saying you prioritized your glass of milk, not going up by five cents to me now not having rights over my own body. I mean, it's such an extreme way of expressing that and not really even that real. But it's like there's this really interesting narrative where it's all about me and it's all about what I need in this moment and it's all about what is utopia for me in my life. When I want kids, I'll have kids. In that case, don't have sex. I mean, for me it's literally that simple and that's the whole point. And so we have to get to grips with like a sexual ethic here, and I think one of the big things for me is that the greatest sexual revolution was not the 1960s, it was the first century, because the sexual revolution of the 1960s has probably been the greatest tragedy for women in the course of history. Over sexual ethics, because there's that famous sex in the city quote isn't there, which is where one of the characters is. She can't find. Why would I go and try and find a partner. I'm just going to go have sex like a man.
Speaker 2:And this idea that women somehow can have sex like men and just go off and there's no consequences, just like men or the rest of it. And actually that's completely statistically not true. Women have a far greater need for connection in sex. They have a far greater emotional engagement pre, post sex, sex, um they, they have much more negative, associative um feelings but also, um, uh, self-worth issues in sex and after sex and so all that stuff. It's all studied so it's not even true.
Speaker 2:And but the point of the first century sexual revolution in the church was no men need to have sex like women. So in the romans times, in the issues with various different pagan societies that women were sex slaves slaves. If you were a female slave, you could be raped at any point and it was just what it was. That that's your life. Men could have multiple wives, but women could only have one husband.
Speaker 2:All of those things and the sexual ethic basically turned everything upside down, because it monogamized sex into a marriage relationship between a man and a woman, and what that meant was not just from a religious perspective, but it meant that family structures were secure. It meant that men were always there and they had a responsibility to love their wife like Christ, love the church, which basically means lay down your life and die for her, get over yourself. And it also meant that there was a um, an accountability for men. That meant that they could not just go and spew their seed everywhere and see what happened. It doesn't work like that and it should never have worked like that. Adam was made for eve, etc. Etc.
Speaker 2:And actually that tom holland says this actually that that is the greatest gift that christianity ever gave was the monogamization of sex, particularly for women and for children, and what's really interesting in this whole debate about abortion is that men are nowhere in the picture. It's about children's rights and women's rights, and I'm like you. We missed the point. The point is where on earth is the, the one who can have sex and walk away? How on earth?
Speaker 2:The great miracle of Christianity is that men were made to stay in family units Because men do have no real sense, biologically speaking, of Women can't make men stay in families. They can't. Men are bigger, they can walk away, they can physically overpower you, they can sexually dominate you all the rest of it. And the miracle of Christianity is that men were taught to stay in a family unit with one wife and look after your kids. That is the only time in history that's ever happened and we have absolutely undermined it. And the issue is not women's rights and children's rights, it's the sexual ethic between a man and a woman to, to, to be together with the potential for life whenever they come together sexually, no matter what contraception they're on and, to your point, because there's a collective burden on this whole topic.
Speaker 1:That's also the argument. If I'm going to pay taxes unwillingly through the effect of violence, I have to pay taxes out that fund that decision. As a man as well, I have no decision on whether the baby is going to. The woman can do whatever she wants. The effect of violence. I have to pay taxes out that fund that decision. As a man as well, I have no decision on whether the baby is gonna. The woman can do whatever she wants, hypothetically, if she does want to keep it. The government is then stepping in as a pseudo husband, father in the sense of like I'll protect you and provide by you, by extracting money from this person who you can choose to exclude from that child's life. It's a complete perversion of the family unit where it makes the person interdependent on the state.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and what I say is that I think that normally that's out of a good heart. Big government is a good heart because it says what about the vulnerable? What about the people whose husbands walk out on them? What about the people or whatever? But the problem is is when the exception becomes the rule. So what we do is is that we create systems of thought and governance around the exception of the vulnerable, when actually what we should be doing is we should be creating systems of governance that reflect an ethic that we want everyone to be part of. That's what the church should be doing and has done up until 200 years ago, and, and I'd say, the heart of government to stand with the people who are vulnerable.
Speaker 2:The problem is is that many women and men now choose abortions on the basis of convenience and, honestly, that is the most heinous crime. It's the most heinous selfish thing that you can do, both men and women, and it's not even and I'm never going to experience a pregnancy or experience an abortion I'm talking about the decision between men and women to have sex and then abort a child. That was always going to be a potential consequence. It is a foundationally selfish narrative. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't circumstances where those lines are grey and the lines are blurred. Of course they are. We have to love people, walk them through it pastorally.
Speaker 2:But there is also truth, and bro, I'm not being funny. The issue is a sexual ethic issue. It is not about what rights the woman has and what rights the kids have. It's what rights are extended to the child as a result of a sexual combination, because in that moment you know that you could have a kid and so for me, you take responsibility, both of you, for what is going to happen in that woman's body. And the man stays around and the woman says, all right, this is the reality and you can never enforce that. But I'm saying a principle, transcendent truth level. You can never, ever get away from sexual responsibility.
Speaker 1:And I've got to go because my wife's gonna kill me yeah, yeah, what I'll, what I'll set up for our next conversation is like you made the point of um, that a woman can't make a man stay, and so that would be like the. This is going to be the, the controversial hook that gets people to watch. The next one is women who are in government. I'm not not saying this to be funny, I'm not saying this to be chauvinistic. Massages that you're in government because men allow you to be in government. If we physically want to just overpower you and like, take over and be that, we would, but we're we're operating out of a different guiding system than like us being in ourselves. Who do you call when someone breaks in your house? The, who predominantly are men. If there's a female cop, generally she will call back up to men. We see watch an episode of cops from the 90s. Anytime there's a female cop, you better dial in because she's going to get ragdolled at some point and she's going to have to have other cops happen. So I'm not trying to demean women, I'm just saying like we all have roles and people have forgotten. They've forgotten the baseline that if violence needs to be done or something needs to be protected, you call a man to go do it, you need somebody to tunnel underneath trenches. In the First World War it wasn't women doing that. And I'm not saying women don't have value. They can do things that men can't do. But we've missed that role.
Speaker 1:And for most of human history, men have stepped up as protectors, not just of women and children, but really of societies and the infrastructures that make our modern lives possible. And when we look at societies where women can't get a driver's license and they can't vote and they can't go to school, it's really clear that we've taken some advancements for granted. In the West that didn't just happen on their own. Men played a pretty significant role in allowing this progress, supporting women, expanding roles rather than literally or figuratively just empowering them. And if we're being honest, men collectively chose to withhold power. Like I said, they could do it. We could just refuse that women would not have a seat at the table. But in the Western world we made a conscious decision and a collaboration to broaden roles, to open up opportunities, and it's had a really profound impact. It's a good thing.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but I think that some people have just forgotten about this, and when you see something done for the first time, you suddenly realize it's possible. And so, yes, women move into roles, and we've seen they can do things really exceptionally well, but there's still things that have physical demands that even the average man might not be able to do. So a woman is going to be really struggling, and specifically something like a combat role in the military. They've done plenty of attempts at this. A woman has to carry a 50-kilo rucksack, it's just non-negotiable and it just crumples them. And so the attempts to integrate women. Basically what happens is they have to lower their standards, and so in a combat situation, that's not ideal because the enemy is not going to make those concessions. And so this raises a really serious question about, in the game of trade-offs that we're trying to play, whether losing sight of biological realities in favor of ideals and doing things that feel good instead of things that actually do good.
Speaker 1:And there's no doubt, when people talk about toxic masculinity, that there is a form of masculinity that is toxic, but there's also a powerful, healthy form of masculinity we don't talk about enough, and at times this comes down to the way men are raised, and women are already highly influential in shaping our culture. They're often the teachers in a single-family home, it's generally the mom it's largely mothers raising the next generation. Everybody who's ever been born, ever, is coming from a woman, and so they have a significant role in shaping young men. But when we sometimes overlook the fact that a man can't raise a girl to be a woman, the vice versa is true as well. Moms do incredibly work. I'm not trying to talk down about single moms, but we have to recognize that there's an ideal Women's role. They're incredible at. It is nurturing babies to be boys, helping them feel loved, helping them feel accepted. But fathers, ideally, are there to point them towards the world, to prepare them for the challenge of responsibility, and a father's job is to test his son's character and his readiness, give him meaning and purpose, often through setting expectations around protection, around provision and creating a legacy for the next generation. And we see how powerful that purpose can be.
Speaker 1:There's a story I remember from the UK and you'll appreciate this Tim of World War I, where veterans who had nearly they were completely catatomic from trauma from World War I. They're redrawn, they're living in like an institution. And the second World War popped off and the bombing started and many of these men suddenly just took up arms. They started driving rescue vehicles and emergency vehicles and helping people. Something in them reignited by purpose. Another example is in Cambodia. After the genocide there was often like landmines scattered around. It would cause countless deaths and injuries and American doctors went to Cambodia and they were trying to introduce antidepressants.
Speaker 1:And the Cambodia doctors were telling a story, they were explaining what antidepressants do and they're like oh, it just helps people be happier or something like that. And like, oh, yeah, we have treatment for that. And they explained this guy lost a leg, depressed, laying in his bed, and they just gave him a cow to take care of and he had like a means of income because he could milk the cow, he could strap a seat to his butt and he had purpose in the village again. And so when you look at the States, you know 65% of the world's antipsychotics, antistress and antidepressant medication is consumed by Americans and predominantly that's done by women, and so we see that mode being imposed on men. So when we see an over-reliance on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds in the West, it's fascinating that it's just an evident flaw in what women are so capable with empathy and attunement to detail.
Speaker 1:And all these highlights that just men aren't, but they're just biologically and psychologically different, and what they need and purpose, and sometimes what's prescribed for one, like needing to feel loved or firm, keeps men in a childlike state, if taken to the extreme, like babies with beards and, and you know, guys living in their parents' basements till they're like you know, 40, playing video games, et cetera, and and and so the the mother's role is essential one, but the father's role, in masculinity itself, is testing a person's capacity to stand up under stress, to confront the world head on, derive meaning from that responsibility, and so it's kind of like this paradox in modern world One hand, we're rightly concerned with making space for women, nurturing people's emotionally wellbeing.
Speaker 1:On the other side, we're risking and forgetting what makes us different as men and women, and the power in embracing that difference and men, historically, were activated in duty and purpose.
Speaker 1:The real question isn't just how we support everyone emotionally, but it's how we build a society that gives people a genuine sense of meaning and responsibility, especially young men, and Peterson hits really, really heavy on this and so it's crucial to recognize that men's role as protectors isn't just an outdated tradition, but it's a deeply ingrained part of maintaining a society where life and harmony can flourish, and every man who's ever come into the world has done so through a woman. I said that before. The truth alone highlights the sacredness of a woman's role in humanity, and men are meant to safeguard that harmony there. And men, historically, are the ones standing between harm for those that they love and they're prepared to use force to the extent where they'll lay down their lives. This role of sacrificing, even violently, in the name of peace and preservation deserves a genuine respect and a genuine adoration in that sense. But yeah, that's the best forms of masculinity, it's not just bullying and what's diagnosed there.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts, thoughts there and what I say is this is that the christian ethic is that the creation narrative is men and women are created completely equal, but completely different. Yes, and so what? And so what we're trying to do is is that we're trying to create equality of human beings from an egalitarian equity and equality point of view, and it has never worked in the history of the world. What we have to do is is that we, as men, have to restrain ourselves. Listen. This is why, oh gosh, I'm going to bang on about this now, but this is, this is a teaser for the next time.
Speaker 1:I just want, yeah, I just want to get the hook for next time.
Speaker 2:But this is why every rites of passage um for a man involves in antiquity in ancient times go outside of the camp, go kill something, make a fire, don't die. Why? Because you realize the enemy is outside the camp and not in the camp. So when you go back to the camp, you protect them, you protect the women who's by nearly every civilization, whose rights of passage are create a home, create environment, learn to cook, learn to forage, whatever it is. It's not that they're different, so it's not that they're unequal. They're completely and utterly different. And equality is killing us because we're not equal. No one's equal. Everyone is foundationally only equal as a child of God. Equality is not the point. The point is how do we prefer each other's difference? And I would say that men and women are very bad about our current culture. All right, that's a good place to stop.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Ben.
Speaker 2:Bye dude, see you soon, man, bye, bye, bye.
Speaker 1:All right guys. That's a wrap. Big thanks to Tim for coming on diving into some tough issues that are probably gonna trigger some people. If something we talked about hit home for you, if it got you thinking or challenged your perspective, let us know, Post it out on social media. Tag us in it. We'd love to hear how that resonated with you and in what way. And if you know somebody who'd benefit from hearing this don't keep it to yourself Share with them. I think these conversations are worth having. We're thinking out loud, especially in a world where it's easy to get stuck in our own little bubbles. We need voices like Tim's, who's going to challenge us, to look at the bigger picture, think bigger, pull the log out of our own eye, since that reference was made several times. So thanks for tuning in. I'll catch you on the next one, Take care.
