The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
Exploring the Thin Line Between Cults and Traditional Religions: A Deep Dive into Catholicism, Schisms, and Personal Faith Journeys
Is Catholicism more similar to a cult than you might think? In this episode, we embark on a thrilling exploration of religious movements, beginning with a deep dive into the controversial distinctions between cults and established religions. We critically examine characteristics like deference to authoritarian leaders and contrast them with the structures of traditional religions. Our discussion scrutinizes whether any religion truly fosters independent thought or if they all, in some way, impose an authoritative influence on their followers.
Our journey takes us to the unique town of St. Mary's, Kansas—once a Jesuit boys' school, now a bastion for traditional Catholics resisting modernizing reforms. We unravel its historical transformation, the role of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), and the broader struggles within the Catholic Church's confrontation with modernity. Key events like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's controversial actions and the subsequent schism offer a fascinating lens through which we examine the intersection of faith, tradition, and change.
We also delve into personal narratives and community dynamics that illustrate the diverse experiences within Catholicism. From the challenges of homeschooling in a devout community to the existential crises that push some to transition from faith to atheism or Objectivism, this episode provides a raw and honest look at belief and identity. Whether you're intrigued by religious history, personal faith journeys, or philosophical debates, this episode promises a riveting exploration of the complexities of religious life and thought.
Connor so you were in a cult. I hesitate to use the word cult. There were I'm not sure how to define that word there were cult-like aspects of it, but when people use the term cult like, I think of, like Jonestown or Waco or things like that. And this was definitely not like that at all.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about what it is. I think it was a cult yes, I mean, but I think like all religions are cults, basically on some level um there's a leader.
Speaker 2:It depends on how you define the word.
Speaker 1:Well, exactly, there's a leader, there's a trance. That's mystical, it's not, it's not reality-oriented, and you're basically putting up authority like you're deferential to the authority of a higher figure over your mind and consciousness and your own reason. That's basically a cult.
Speaker 2:Well, with cults there's usually a singular person, a living person, who is that figure, who becomes like the God figure to the people in the cult and who generally abuses people and takes liberties. And when I think of a cult, I think there's a personality, a real person at the center of it who's a narcissist or a megalomaniac or something like that, and he or she it's usually he is abusing people and has delusions of grandeur, whereas with religions, I mean there's an overlap in the sense that there are obviously mystical elements in both, but with religions you usually don't have that. I mean there's often a hierarchy, like in Catholicism. There's a hierarchy, but there isn't necessarily a cult of personality like that, although cults within religions like there have been cults within Catholicism that have formed around, let's say, specific priests or specific figures.
Speaker 2:There's a guy that I know who was very active in traditional Catholicism, who was in his younger days. He was part of a cult and I forget what they were called. Was it the Legion of Christ or something like that? I forget the name, but that was definitely a cult where you had that central personality. And so I wouldn't just call all religions a cult just because there's a little overlap.
Speaker 2:all religions, a cult just because there's a little overlap.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think all religions at least start as a cult. I wouldn't agree with some of what you include as necessary as essential to cultism. I mean, I think the essential for cult is the deference of your own reasoning mind toward the authority of another. That's how I would fundamentally define it. I think there's aspects where a person could have, you know, we use terms like personality, they could be highly charismatic, but those are all tools toward the end of getting your deferentialism or absconding your reason for my revealed revelation, my thought. So when you say things like, well, there was a figure above the person in front of you, yeah, that's what they all claim. Of course they all claim because I'm an atheist, so there's nothing above anybody, so it's just what this person claims. I don't care if you're the Pope and they're just saying it's God. That's a cult of that person claiming that they have some kind of revealed information from, or there's some tradition or whatever it is. But it all goes down to.
Speaker 2:The issue of this is basically this is a cult your own reason in favor of someone else's authority, then if that's your definition, I think that's a little too broad because I don't think that that captures all of the concrete things that people associate with cults. But I see what you're saying and I agree.
Speaker 1:I know people think Jonestown drinking the Kool-Aid, but interestingly the drinking the Kool-Aid analogy or metaphor, has been applied to religions properly.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's been applied to a lot of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Applied to a lot of things. Like you know, you're anti-industrialism, you're an environmentalist, you're drinking the Kool-Aid.
Speaker 2:Or political movements of any kind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, any kind Like it is that type of thing and I agree that it can easily be misconstrued and applied to different things improperly. But I also think that there's something real and what they're capturing which is you're again the like it's. There's a different reasoning, is not like your own individual reasoning is being hijacked and you're allowing it to be hijacked right, right.
Speaker 2:So that's that's an element of of many religions, not all. It's certainly an element of Catholicism, at least as traditionally understood what religion is not that Well, I think of Protestantism.
Speaker 2:You know with Protestantism and I'm not intimately familiar with Protestantism I was raised Catholic but my understanding of Protestantism is that everyone has the right to, you know, read the Bible and the Holy Spirit can speak to any man. I mean that was one of the central tenets of a lot of the Reformers and it depends on which Reformer you're talking about. But a lot of Protestants, I get the sense, have the general sense that I can read the Bible and be given a revelation and I can speak directly to God and I don't need, you know, the priest to bring God to me, which is very Catholic and very Orthodox.
Speaker 1:I think that's what they say, but I think historically there's been a lot more like there's a reason why puritanicalism is protestant. Like puritans were protestants, they were protesting, originally from the catholic church in in england and europe, and I think one of the reasons that like so what happens is so that's a claim. That's a claim that protestants and then that we came what you know was known as puritans and the american puritans, that there's a claim that they had that, um, you know where it's. Like well, we shouldn't have an intermediary between me and God or between you know, and have the church. Really, they were just defying the power of the church, which is complying with state, and there was like a marriage between state and church and they were, you know, having problems. There's a lot of encroachments, yada, yada.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of history behind that, but the issue that they were making this claim was that there shouldn't be this intermediary of the church and the whole structure of the church and how it operates, which is really just taking its orders from its marching orders from the state. But in the end it still amounts to the same thing. It's just it's now we're not going to have as hierarchical a structure, not going to have as hierarchical a structure. But then I think Protestantism and Puritanism and I'm kind of using them interchangeably they end up being more cultish in a certain sense, because now you have well again, because you're talking about something that doesn't exist, you're talking about like there is no such thing as revelation, so it's really who can then? Now the personality and the, so, like all these, you get all these cults that are part of Protestantism.
Speaker 2:All these little cults.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you look at school shooters, they're all highly religious area. Most of them are very Columbine shooters. Columbine is a very religious place.
Speaker 2:It's very Protestant and the idea of, well, I can have a revelation and then I could preach that to other people, that kind of thing is this is why religion is just a destructive point because there is more opportunity for little individual cults of personality to form in protestantism, because it's not hierarchical, because anyone can have a revelation and if he's very charismatic he can gain a following um it wasn't jones jones town.
Speaker 1:I don't know enough about that. I don't know enough about that to say, yeah, I have to look that up. But I know he's using religious With.
Speaker 2:Catholicism it is harder for those little individual cults of personality to form because it's so hierarchical and if your bishop or the archbishop or the pope sees what you're doing and doesn't approve of it, he can squash that very quickly. So the authority is much more distributed in Catholicism in that sense. So in a sense it's less prone to that. But from a purely theoretical perspective Protestantism is much more individualistic in the way that Protestants approach religion. Catholicism is very collectivist. In Protestants approach religion it's a much more. Catholicism is very collectivist in its approach to religion. You know, you don't just go off and do your own thing. I mean there have been Catholics and people claiming to be Catholic who do that. But you know, if you look at the doctrine and the teaching and the history and the practice of the church, it's very collectivist, it's very top-down, hierarchical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I imagine there's a little injection of individualism that is good in Protestantism, which is primarily when the Puritans were immigrating to America in the 1600s. Immigrating to America in the 1600s, they had a high focus on education and reading and literacy, because they believed in the value of you as an individual being able to understand the word of God on your own, whereas in Catholicism, historically, it didn't matter and in fact, they would do it in a language that the people didn't even know, latin. They would do mass and people didn't even know anything. It was just about the rituals and going and you said, you stood up and sat down and ummed and ahed when they told you to, and all that stuff. And yeah, it was very much like that, as you know, and we'll talk about your story in a second. Yeah, as you know, and we'll talk about your story in a second. But I think with Protestantism that was the seeds of something new, where people they were really spreading literacy and in fact, the Puritans I don't remember the exact date, but they brought in before they could afford anything they brought in a printing press. It was one of the first things they brought in from Europe right away.
Speaker 1:And now, the first thing they did, of course, was the bible. Actually I think it was um hymnal, hymnal books and things like that, but they, you know it's all religious books, but that's the seeds of, because now it was in a language you could read. Right, that was their big focus. So it was in the, the common tongue or english, you know, we could talk like. There's actually a disconnect between the American Puritans who moved here and the Europeans who had, like they wanted a certain King James Bible. That Bible had a little bit of resonant like poetry to it and verse, whereas the American Puritans in the 1600s hated that. They wanted as literal as possible. So a lot of times if you look at the hymnal books, they just don't sound good. I have a theory that this is one reason why in America we really don't appreciate beauty much, especially with language, as much as in Europe where they really kept that in their culture.
Speaker 2:But that's another story in many ways than Catholicism, because Catholicism had had Aquinas and that synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle, whereas the Protestants very explicitly rejected Aristotle. So in many ways it had good social effects, but it had negative philosophical effects in other ways.
Speaker 1:So I started by saying you were in a cult. Yes, I think it was a cult, but not just because it was a religion. I think it was a cult, but not just because it was a religion. A lot of people have obviously been in a cult. If religion is a cult, I do think there's probably some differences in certain ways, if you thought about it. But I think you were in more of a cult than just a religion, from what your story is.
Speaker 1:So you shared an Atlantic article with me. What was the title of the article?
Speaker 2:It was called St Mary's, Kansas and the Christian Withdrawal St.
Speaker 1:Mary's Kansas and the Christian Withdrawal. Now St Mary's Kansas is a city.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, it's a town.
Speaker 1:Or whatever. Yeah, so it's St Mary's Kansas. Yes, that's where you lived for a while.
Speaker 2:Yes, for almost 13 years, 13, 14 years. Oh really, I didn't realize it was that long. Yeah, it was a while Okay.
Speaker 1:So, and your parents moved there. So let's get into your story a little bit. Yeah Well, first off, so your parents moved there, We'll talk about that. But what is this thing that happened in St Mary's, Kansas? That Atlantic thought it was worthwhile to write an article about.
Speaker 2:So in the late 1970s 78 or 79, a group of traditional Catholics basically bought a bunch of property in this town. So in this town there had been a Jesuit school, so there'd been a Jesuit school for boys there in the 19th century. In fact there were some semi-famous stories written about this place, about St Mary's in the 19th century. It was a Jesuit boys' school and there's some published young adult sort of fiction from the 19th century.
Speaker 1:Do you remember any?
Speaker 2:of them. I forget the name. It was written by a priest who had been there, but it was popular at the time.
Speaker 1:It was popular at the time.
Speaker 2:Um, and I remember reading those stories. Before I even knew what St Mary's was, before I'd ever heard of the town, I'd read these stories, um and always Catholic.
Speaker 1:I was raised Catholic, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was raised Catholic Um and uh, and then it had been a Jesuit seminary for in the from like the 1930s until the 1960s, and then the Jesuits had essentially abandoned the property. They still owned it, but they had they packed up and left in like the mid to late sixties.
Speaker 1:Explain what a Jesuit is.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's an order of the Roman Catholic church. It's an order of priests.
Speaker 1:That's a type of priest, and is this an ancient order that's been around for a long time, I believe the 1500s.
Speaker 2:It was founded in response to the Protestant Reformation. So the Jesuits were like the Pope's Marines They've been described as that. They were like an elite unit of priests and they were like kind of missionary Missionaries yeah, they went to Japan and India and places like that.
Speaker 1:So they're the ones spreading the good word.
Speaker 2:Right, and they're combating Protestantism specifically in Europe at the time as well. Okay, like physically or just spiritually, spiritually, spiritually no, the Habsburgs did it physically.
Speaker 1:The Jesuits did it spiritually. Okay, all right, okay, so you have this Jesuit order that's there in St Mary's Kansas. Yes, all the way until the 19th century, or not all the way 1960s, in the 1960s, 1960s, all the way to the 1960s. So it was founded.
Speaker 2:I think in the 1840s.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So it's the city, and it was founded as a result of the Jesuits founding the school and the church, because the Jesuits were administering to the local, the native Indian tribes there, and so a town and all of that grew up around that, and so it had been abandoned for about 10 years. And then in the 1960s the church modernized with the Vatican Council II, the Second Vatican Council and the reforms, and a lot of Catholics were not happy with this.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the church reformed in the 1960s, 1960s. Reformed for what?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of clergy and a lot of Catholics in general felt that the church was out of step with the modern world, okay, and felt that a lot of the doctrines were outdated. A lot of them had been influenced by more liberal ideas, like the ideals of the American founding and liberalism in Europe and Protestantism as well, and by the 1960s a lot of them had become cardinals, they gained positions of power in the church and they wanted to update Catholicism.
Speaker 1:Okay, a lot of these liberal educated cardinals Right.
Speaker 2:A lot of liberal clergy and Catholic intellectuals decided okay in the 60s. Now we need a council because the church is out of step with the modern world and we need a new praxis. We need a new church.
Speaker 1:We need to update the church. I know Ayn Rand wrote some responses to papal encyclicals.
Speaker 2:So around this time, right Is this?
Speaker 1:the new pope or the old pope? So around this time right, is this the new Pope or the old Pope? Because this was I can't remember like the titles anymore off the top of my head, but like one of them is you know about the rhythm method in sex for birth control?
Speaker 2:Right, and that's, I believe that's Humanae Vitae. On Living Death. So, on Living Death was, I believe, a response to Humanae Vitae. Yes, which is about birth control. Yes, which is about birth control, and basically the Catholic Church. So Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, yeah, because there were calls for the church to update its stance on birth control.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And Paul VI said no.
Speaker 1:So is Paul VI a part of the new movement or is he the traditional? No, no, he's part of the new movement. Okay, so he is part of the new movement, but he resisted the birth control by writing in Humanae Vitae. Yes, and that was basically because he kind of says he advocates for birth control, but the natural rhythm method is what he does, which is basically just pay attention to the moon, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it follows the rhythm of a woman's cycles, because it's natural.
Speaker 1:But you're saying that he, paul vi, right, yes, that he who wrote that he was still part of this new movement to modernize but they just didn't do the birth control thing is right, it wasn't that modern right, so a lot of the so it wasn't like. It's not like. Let's start adopting everything and doing everything. The modern is it just like? How can we adapt to this?
Speaker 2:Right, right. If they had tried to go that far, I think there would have been a huge schism.
Speaker 1:A bigger schism than there was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would have been huge. So they didn't go that far. So they kept that and they kept a lot of other things, and that's what Ayn Rand is writing in response to. But it's the same time and Paul VI, you know my understanding is he regretted a lot of things that happened at the Second Vatican Council. Later on in his life he regretted it. But yeah, so a lot of Catholics were very displeased. They thought, okay, they're changing the ancient faith.
Speaker 2:This can't be right. There's something wrong here. And there was a French archbishop called Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who really resisted a lot of these changes and was not happy, and he took it upon himself to try and preserve Catholic tradition. So his thought was well, we're in a crisis, an unprecedented historical crisis of the church, where it almost looks as if the church herself and the Pope and the cardinals are abandoning the true faith. So we have to preserve the faith through this crisis. And so he founded an order called the Society of St Pius X, which is an order of priests, and he did this with the full approval of the Pope.
Speaker 2:And the Pope said okay, yeah, you can, yeah it was the full approval and he said, okay, you can, you can say the traditional mass, you can, you can teach your, you know your, your seminarians in the traditional ways and you can establish a presence in different places for the faithful who want to continue going to the old latin mass. Because they updated the, the, the mass and they now it's said in the vernacular. They also changed a lot of things. They changed the ritual in in many ways that catholics were unhappy with. A lot of catholics thought it was a protestantization of the mass.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so.
Speaker 1:Because it was made in the vernacular.
Speaker 2:Not just the vernacular, but there were changes to the ritual, like instead of having the priest facing the altar. So typically you have the altar and it's set against the wall at the far end of the church and the priest faces the altar and says mass, whereas Is the audience behind him. Yeah, so the congregation is behind him and they face towards the altar as well.
Speaker 1:Wait, wait wait, hold on. So you have the audience here facing this way. You have the altar. Let's say this is the altar. He's standing here with his head facing his eyes this way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's facing this way and they're behind him looking at his butt. Yeah, looking, yeah, his back is to them, his back is to them. What a bunch of crazy. Sorry, no, I'm sorry, I cannot.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not sorry. This is crazy. He's like talking to nothing and people are looking at him. That was the old ways. Well, yeah, so he's. Yeah, so it's not like Because he's not important either is part of it, right, like he's just a vicar of Christ.
Speaker 2:So the idea is not that you know, he gets up at the pulpit and he just preaches. That's a very small part of the Catholic mass. Yeah, like preaching I mean a lot of times I've been to Christmas mass. A lot of times a sermon is like 15 minutes.
Speaker 1:I mean it's barely, in fact I've known.
Speaker 2:So it's just part of the Mass itself is a whole ritual that has nothing to do with the priest talking to the congregation. The idea is that it's the unbloody sacrifice. It's basically the reenactment of the sacrifice of the cross in a ritualistic way. And Catholics believe literally that it is fundamentally the same thing as what what happened 2 000 years ago at christ's crucifixion yeah, they're reenacting, right they, but they believe that it's fundamentally the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course I mean all religions do that kind of right like what's a reenacting of a core you know event or something like that right judaism, you know islam, they all do that right and so with the, with the new mass, they put a table.
Speaker 2:They typically they keep. You can still see the altar, but they keep. They put a table in the center of, of the, of the, the space, the sanctuary, and the priest now stands at the table and faces the, the congregation, and still says a lot of the same prayers. I think when I saw it that's what I saw Right. That's the Novus Ordo, the new mass.
Speaker 1:Pooh, pooh.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, yeah, turning around, oh my gosh. But it is a very. It is a change because it reflects a different doctrine. It does reflect a different way of thinking about what's happening at Mass, so in that sense I don't think they're wrong. It is a Protestantization. Obviously I'm not Catholic anymore, so I don't have any objections to that. But they're not wrong when they say that the ritual reflects the doctrine. And when the ritual changes, it's because there's a change in the way that they view the doctrine, or a change potentially even in the doctrine itself.
Speaker 1:Well, this is another conversation, because the doctrine is changed all the time. Throughout history it's been changed.
Speaker 2:If you look at the whole history of the Catholic Church, it's definitely been changed, but traditional Catholics do not believe that and they will fight tooth and nail against that idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean okay.
Speaker 2:So anyway, a lot of people, they were very unhappy.
Speaker 1:They started attending the Society of St Pius X Masses the SSPX, which is I'm going back to look at my butt. I'm going to call it the look at my butt syndrome. I mean, what else do you call it? I'm not going to be respectful of something. Silly thing, sorry.
Speaker 2:So they were attending Mass, as said by this group of priests and the SSPX, to use the acronym.
Speaker 2:Society of St Pius X so the SSPX began spreading all over Europe and then throughout the United States as well, and it grew quite a bit because there was quite a bit of demand for the old ways, especially in the US and in France. And then in 19, I believe it was 1983, archbishop Lefebvre was. He was getting older. In fact I think he died in 92 or 93. He died like a decade later. He's getting older and he realized he was going to die and he thought well, if I die, then the SSPX will probably be destroyed because they'll put someone in charge who is a modernist and you know, they'll put a modernist bishop in charge of it and then my work will be destroyed.
Speaker 2:So he asked the Pope, who was John Paul II at the time, for permission to consecrate new bishops, so to pick out priests that he liked. So Lefebvre wanted to handpick his own priests and consecrate them as bishops so that they would continue in the same vein. Yeah, and I don't know all the details, I know that the Pope I believe the Pope said yes, you can do it, but they hadn't gone through the formal process necessary and so he didn't have official permission yet. It was just sort of like yeah, yeah, well, we can do that, you can do that, but we'll get to it later, or something like that. And so there wasn't official permission and Rome was dragging its feet and Lefebvre thought they were going to drag it out until he died. They were just going to say they were.
Speaker 1:They were just going to be like hey, yeah, yeah, Don't you think? You don't think they were?
Speaker 2:placating.
Speaker 1:I don't know I'm not in anyone's mind but well, I mean, but like, just like this is something that rulers and people of authority do all the time, even at work, where they're you know, like you see this in companies where you know they have someone who's ambitious and they want to move into a new role, but the manager, the boss, likes them in this role and it's like I don't want you, you know, and it's like it's going to mess everything up and they're going to have to rearrange things. It's like a normal thing. I think you see just human behavior of yeah, yeah, we'll get that. You're very talented. We're very respectful of you. Thank you for all your time, thank you for all your service and work. Keep working.
Speaker 1:We're going to look into that. We'll look. And then they go behind. Yeah, we'll get back to you on that. Right, like that's. I'm sorry, like I know you can't read someone's mind, but you can make analysis of the actual behavior of he did not want to click. Like if you wanted to do it, he would have done it. Like, if it was something he was on board with, he'd be be like that's a great idea. I didn't think of that, let's do that. No, he didn't want to do it, so he's like yeah, and so he made all these you know overtures to doing this stuff that's probably something like what happened.
Speaker 1:These are just people, yeah, with just big funny hats and looking at their butts yeah, so I know you don't like that, I'm gonna keep saying so so, um, I'm sacrilegious baby, so, uh, yeah.
Speaker 2:So. So what happened? Was Lefebvre thinking okay, well, I'm going to die and this is going to fail, and I'll have failed the church, because I need to get it through its hour of crisis.
Speaker 2:He has a mission to save the church it's not the first time this has happened and so he went ahead and consecrated bishops anyway, without any official approval, and so according to canon law, that carries an automatic sentence of excommunication. And so that's essentially the position that John Paul II took, which is I think the term is latte sententiae it's by the nature of the act You're excommunicated.
Speaker 1:He's going to hell too.
Speaker 2:And of course Lefebvre, because he wanted to remain Catholic, said well, I'm actually justified in this because otherwise the faith will be destroyed, and so I have the right to do this. And I'm not actually excommunicated and I'm still Catholic and I still recognize the authority of the Pope. Technically speaking, I recognize the papacy, but in this case I have to disobey the Pope, because I have to obey God first and I have to save the Church.
Speaker 1:And this is just a schism. Well, a lot of people would say that it's a schism.
Speaker 2:This is just a schism. Well, a lot of people would say that it's a schism. No, it is a schism.
Speaker 1:Well, that's still something I know he wouldn't call it that If you talk to different Catholic theologians but if you talk to different Catholic theologians, you'll get different opinions.
Speaker 2:No, I know.
Speaker 1:I understand that a lot of people would think that he was justified in his actions, but that doesn't matter. It is in fact a schism. It is in fact a break. He's doing his own thing. You could call it what you want.
Speaker 2:Essentially, he sets up what is—.
Speaker 1:So here's the thing Once you realize that—you know, there's a great article by Ayn Rand, an essay called the Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made. I really recommend everybody read that. It's one of the best ones. I mean, she has a lot of amazing ones.
Speaker 1:But once you start to really wrap your head around what is metaphysically given and what is man-made, so all of this is in the man-made realm, right, in this case, it's just they're dealing with stories that they're telling each other and there's certain traditions and doctrines that they agree on these stories and the structures of how this is supposed to happen. But once you realize that, well, they made all this up in the first place and it was just stories that they're telling, and this guy's just telling a slightly different story, it is a schism. And now you might have, like certain people who are reading these fairy tales very seriously I mean, I think theologian. That that's an actual legitimate thing is just insane to me. Like that there's actually people study like, if you want to, like I study literature. So it's like, okay, if you're studying literature, you understand you're studying something that's fake, but that they're like treated almost like seriously, as like a lawyers or a doctor or something.
Speaker 2:Well, you have actual canon lawyers Exactly, yeah, that's what I mean it's like, no Like.
Speaker 1:if you want to call yourself a literature person, like Kirk, great, I'm all on board. I like to study fairy tales, you like to study theologian, you like to study fairy tales, but it's the same thing. But the point is that they're taking their fairy tale very seriously. So once you're in that realm, if you have someone who's you know, you might have someone schisming off from the inside. You might have all kinds of rationalizations about how they're connecting to what well like, but the point is that it's all made up. So all you have to do is just find a way to like you know, let's connect this to this and connect that to that, and oh, he's, he's actually part of the canonical truth and it's like, but it's all a fairy tale. So it's, it's all fairy tales. So it's like.
Speaker 1:You know, there's a question in the study of literature of, like, what is the actual Greek mythologies? Right? So the Greek mythologies were stories that were passed on over and over again and certain people put it in canonical truth in terms of you know, there's Homer and Hesiod and Ovid and people like that who put these down on paper and we think of that like that is the mythology. But if you look at other Greek stories, like in Euripides and Aristaia and other writers you know, and other Roman writers later, there's different variations and it's really just because it's made up and it's like well, there's a general feel to what this is.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell this kind of story and focus on this element of it, or I'm going to add an element and people are like well, what's the truth about Achilles? Achilles is made up. So it's like in Homer he doesn't have anything go on with his heel. There's nothing in the Iliad about Achilles being killed by the heel. That's a later invention. So what's the canonical truth? It's all made up anyway. So that's my roundabout way of saying this guy is a schism from what a lot of people are believing. There's going to be a few people who can make up stuff too, but that's what happens when you live in made up land.
Speaker 2:No, I agree, I agree, I'm not saying there's metaphysical truth to it I'm saying from their perspective. If you buy into that system, you know there are ways you can justify it and and I'm I'm just giving you their perspective, so I can buy that.
Speaker 1:So you're you're saying, and I agree, that there's going to be some people who are on his side and some people who are not on his side right, which is what a schism is right.
Speaker 2:so that's what a schism is right. No, I'm.
Speaker 1:It's like there's some people who are pro.
Speaker 2:If you use schism in the general sense, schism in Catholicism has a specific meaning in canon law. That's what happens when you make up crap all the time. Yes, but I agree with what you're saying. I'm just giving a. We're on the same page, I agree.
Speaker 1:From their perspective. If we had a Catholic priest right here, he might be on one side or the other.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And he might say you know, pope Pius, or what was his name, favre, lefebvre, lefebvre. Lefebvre was wrong-minded, but he was actually coming from real canonical truth. I don't quite agree with him or whatever. So he'd have that kind of vibe the Catholic priest here in the room would probably have. Or he might say you know, lefebvre was completely wrong, he's really destroyed a lot of what we've been trying to build. And, yes, and he would probably be a more modern liberal person, like the catholic priest who was against lefebvre would be more liberal. The catholic priest who's for him would be probably more traditional, yeah, more conservative conservative.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's get into your experience in Kansas, St Mary's Kansas, where you moved there, Right.
Speaker 2:So well, yeah, I want to just connect that. So the SSPX bought the old Jesuit property there and rebuilt it essentially and created a K-12 school and eventually an actual liberal arts college. And what college is this. It's called saint mary's college.
Speaker 1:Yeah, saint mary's college I feel like I've heard of that. It's a pretty popular one, right? No, there's another saint mary's college in, like minnesota or something. Yeah, um no, this is just a small.
Speaker 2:I'm not an academic a small liberal arts college that they set up and then a lot of people started moving there to set up a community, like an intentional Catholic community, and the idea is the modern world is crumbling Culturally, we're decadent and the world is falling apart.
Speaker 2:world is falling apart and let's all move to this town and create our own little Catholic town and our own little sort of parallel culture where we can raise our children according to our own moral values and we can live among like-minded people and we have this very tight-knit community. You know, people in the modern world are starved for community and connection. Everyone feels quote-unquote, atomized. So this was seen as a solution to all of those problems and it was also seen as a way to find like a religiously pure community as well, where your children aren't going to be exposed to pornography or or liberal ideas or things like that and uh and and so. So that was established in, I think, 1978.
Speaker 2:And we ended up moving there in your family, my family, when you were 15? Yeah, so 2009. Yeah, late 2009,. We moved there and before that we were living in Pennsylvania. And just to give you a little background of how we ended up there, like how we got there, so my parents were basically converts to Catholicism, my mother's Jewish, and she was raised basically atheist. They were cultural, ethnic Jews, but they weren't religious. And then my father was raised sort of nominally culturally Catholic.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My grandfather was very devout till the end of his life, but my grandmother was not and my dad wasn't really. I don't think he really practiced. You know, after he was like 14 or 15, didn't practice at all. But in there my parents in their early 30s, both separately, had conversion experiences. Basically they were both living in New York City at the time and they both decided to. They came to religion and I think the reason that they did that was they were both raised without any kind of clear moral code or system.
Speaker 2:It was, you know my mother has told me explicitly. You know, growing up she heard well, do whatever you want, do whatever makes you feel good, just don't hurt anybody, which is just not a moral code. Like, you can't live by that, and she certainly couldn't. And so she felt very lost and my father, I think, for similar reasons, felt lost and my father came back to Catholicism because it was something that he had known in childhood and my mother, I think she, met some Catholics, became friends with them and got introduced to, I think, some Franciscan monks in the New York City area and she found a lot of comfort in prayer, specifically in the rosary. Specifically in the rosary. She was. You know, both my parents have told me separately that prior to rediscovering in my father's case, or discovering in my mother's case, catholicism, they thought like suicide was on the table, like they thought that they were at that point, they were almost at that point before they discovered religion, and so they had this experience and around the same time Like together, so to say, not together, oh, separately.
Speaker 1:Separately.
Speaker 2:This was before they knew each other.
Speaker 1:I got it.
Speaker 2:And then, during their reconversion experiences, they happened to meet. They met at a, they met at a business meeting and, uh, they hit it off and discovered that they were both like-minded and um, and so they and they, uh, they, uh, you know. So they got married and and they, we lived in. I was born there, so we lived in, uh, murray Hill, which is a neighborhood in Manhattan, until I was, I think we moved. When I was almost three years old, we moved out of the city and we moved to Pennsylvania. And it's interesting the reasons that my parents gave me for why they did that. They felt like the city was not a good place to raise children. They started to feel very out of step with their friends, like the people that they knew, because my parents started to become more religious and more conservative and their friends were not, and so they started to feel alienated, I think, from all the people that they had known. And my mother actually told me something interesting once. She said she was like you know, right before we left new york, she's like I just felt. I just felt like there was, there was evil all around us in the city, like she just had this feeling of that there was evil all around and so they left.
Speaker 2:They moved to uh, we moved to pennsylvania and that's where I spent most of my childhood, and early adolescence was in Pennsylvania, and my mom ended up becoming a stay-at-home mom. She wanted to stay home and raise the children, so she left her career and started homeschooling and eventually actually in 99, we moved up to the Pocono Mountains and my parents wanted to live in a rural area. They had sort of a back-to-the-land mentality, a kind of anti-modern civilization. Things are falling apart. We need to go back to the land sense, which is ironic because my dad's worked in tech.
Speaker 2:For most of my life he's worked in tech and he worked from home on his laptop quite a bit when I was growing up, but he also liked to. We tried to become self-sufficient and grow a garden in the backyard, which is a very difficult thing to do in the Pocono Mountains because the soil is rock. So we were digging up huge boulders and, yeah, the gardening experiment didn't go well, especially because no one in my family has had experience with any kind of farming. For but how did you make?
Speaker 1:it to St.
Speaker 2:Mary's. So my family ended up. My parents ended up learning about the SSPX because they discovered traditional Catholicism through some friends that they met when they converted and I think around I must have been nine or ten, maybe I was eleven we found an SSPX chapel, a chapel run by the SSPX in Scranton, pennsylvania, which was a little north of us.
Speaker 1:East Scranton.
Speaker 2:East Scranton from the office yeah, my favorite. So we started going up there for Mass. So growing up we were homeschooled and because my parents went on this journey from sort of just normal centrist people to religious conservative, to very conservative, to, I would say, very reactionary, we had lost a lot of friends. Like even when we first moved to Pennsylvania we were part of, like this homeschool group of conservative Catholics but like sort of just normie conservative like not highly not, not reaction, not really reactionary people. Um, but over time, you know, my parents would talk about how, essentially, like those people, the people we were hanging out with weren't ideologically acceptable anymore. They were doing things that my parents didn't approve of, or they had ideas about religion or what have you, or they were letting their kids do things that my parents didn't approve of, you know, letting them watch movies, that they.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were having a disagreement with their friends, is that? Why they moved to St Mary's To be with like-minded people.
Speaker 2:Yes, but initially the impetus was we had become very isolated, We'd become extremely isolated.
Speaker 1:So in modern culture you became isolated from people because of your beliefs, your parents' beliefs which as a kid are your beliefs Right, and so your parents hear about St Paul Pius X.
Speaker 2:Society of St Pius X in St.
Speaker 1:Mary's Kansas, and then they move there to be with them. Yes, and then they move there to be with that.
Speaker 2:Yes, and then they're like well, it's not healthy for us to just be really isolated, you know? Up in the mountains by ourselves. And they were right, it was not healthy at all. So you know, we should move to a community of like-minded people.
Speaker 1:Nothing I've heard is healthy, right? No, well, this is one of the reasons that I have From the very beginning of the story, this Right, no.
Speaker 2:Well, this is one of the reasons that I have. This is one of the reasons that I'm very skeptical of homeschooling. You know, when people ask me about homeschooling, I think theoretically it can be, I think theoretically it can be done right, but I think a lot in a lot of times, in a lot of cases it's it's motivated by the neuroses of the parents and that has very negative effects on the children.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean I don't. I'm going to say I think we should hold off on that topic. I don't agree with that at all. Okay, Because the alternative is. So I'll just say that, yes, of course you might have more individual parents with neuroses putting that on their kids, but they're going to do that anyway, whether their kids go to a public school or not.
Speaker 2:But that's a different topic. I have some things to say about that, but I won't.
Speaker 1:Well, but the difference is that then you have mass neuroses by teachers who are teaching within a K-12 government school. It's different Mass neuroses, mass ignorance, mass all kinds of bad things from the school, versus you have 300 million or 150 million people teaching their kids and you're going to have a variety of different alternatives and, yes, some individual kids are going to get worse than others, but it won't be as mass, it won't be as integrated, where everybody has a crappy education.
Speaker 2:Like 80% of the population, there are pros and cons to each of those situations. No, there's no cons or pros to the public at school. I would disagree with you on that.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's another topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, down with public education. No, public education it's the worst thing since slavery, it's terrible. Worst thing since slavery.
Speaker 2:Okay, it's terrible, I won't. I won't go down that road right now, because we'll get into a different.
Speaker 1:It's a whole different topic, but okay, go into how. So you're in St Mary's, you're with your group of friends now, like where I assume your parents are more connected and in agreement, because you stayed there for 13 years, so your parents are more in agreement with that and they felt like they were in a society of like-minded people.
Speaker 2:Yes, so one of the reasons that I'm talking a little bit more about what it was like living in Pennsylvania is there were changes that happened when we moved Changes in your life, changes in my life, significant changes, because to go from a homeschool environment where you're very isolated, because your parents believe that almost no one around you, even other Catholics, are acceptable to spend time with, yeah. But that's not the nature of homeschooling, that's other things.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not the nature of homeschooling, qua homeschooling, but it's the nature of the way homeschooling is done by a lot of conservative parents, especially anyone who is a religious conservative, especially an extreme religious conservative. A lot of people have this kind of experience.
Speaker 2:But don't you think people have a right to do that, but don't you think people have a right to do that? I think absolutely, but I don't think it's. I think that my parents had a right, Like I don't think the government should ever have stepped in and been like no, you're not allowed to do that. I think that would be a huge violation of my parents' rights Got it Okay. So we agree there. But I think that is that actually the right decision? Like, is that actually healthy psychologically?
Speaker 1:No, it's not at all. I can understand how you, going through that, would have preferred something else. I would have preferred to not go through an education system that warped my mind and made me have to start from scratch at 20 in terms of learning and being able to do it.
Speaker 1:Well, there are different ways to warp the mind, exactly so what's the ultimate way to train a mind is a really important question. It's why I'm interested in education. Way to train a mind is a really important question. It's why I'm interested in education. I think you and I had different experiences, both very negative, for different reasons.
Speaker 2:Right. So I'm not saying I think we would agree a lot on education. I'm just talking about the way that I experienced homeschooling was very unhealthy psychologically and socially. I think like teaching kids religion is horrible, and so things in many ways were better when we moved. For me, because I went to an actual high school, I had an actual friend group. I felt like initially I had to play catch-up because I had never had experience with those kinds of social dynamics.
Speaker 1:I just had never experienced them at all.
Speaker 2:You had nothing to do with homeschooling at all and I'd never had those experiences at all. And so it was a bit of social dynamics. I just had never experienced them at all and you had nothing to do with homeschooling at all and I'd never had those experiences at all. And so it was a bit of an adjustment and after a couple of years I was well integrated and I had a good time. But, it took some time To get adjusted and to be socialized and it was a rough adjustment the first year.
Speaker 1:It was a very rough adjustment. That's true of anybody who moves to a different culture, but especially if you're in a culture where you're isolated Right but again, that's not homeschooling, that's just parenting. So the issue there has nothing to do with homeschooling, qua, homeschooling, yeah, and I'm not saying it necessarily does.
Speaker 2:I think that, in theory, homeschooling could be done very well. I I have. Okay, this is true about I have never personally seen I've seen homeschooling done in multiple different ways and I've seen it done better than my parents did it. From a social perspective, I know a lot of them were well, but uh, but I I've never seen it done in a way that I thought was was entirely healthy and that could just be my personal experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we need to get you out there Because, again, that's just a personal bias. Like I've met people who've went through public schooling even a bad public schooling and they were fine, and I'm not saying there's like zero positives that come out of that socializing experience, but homeschooling is the educating of a certain methodology of training the mind of your kids. Parenting is a more holistic look. What you're talking about that's the non-socializing, the living in the mountains, the preaching of certain values. All that is part of what I would call parenting.
Speaker 1:That's different than homeschooling, which is one substrata of that, which is the books that you're reading, education or not reading, you know like which is non homeschooling? Are you teaching science, math, literature, history, things like that? That's homeschooling, where you're getting some kind of quote unquote education, depending on how you define that, and there's different variations in again. So think about parenting as one holistic thing. As a parent I'm not a parent in real life, but as a parent you can say I want to send my kid to this private school or to that private school, or I want to get I have the money to hire a tutor full time, or to hire a multitude of tutors or to set together a micro school or what know, so that there's. So there's a lot of different ways that you could do it, but qua homeschooling, the idea of not putting your kids into a public school system that's supposedly free, that's what I differentiate homeschooling yeah, that isn't.
Speaker 1:There's nothing wrong with that, it's the parent.
Speaker 2:I don't think there's anything wrong with not going to public school but do you see what I'm saying about?
Speaker 1:the issue here is not homeschooling. You're pointing on that. It's parenting methodologies and it's how do you raise a child as a parent? You're having more qualms. I'm hearing only qualms with parenting, not homeschooling as such. Well, I'm talking about homeschooling.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about the way that I have seen homeschooling done. I'm not saying that that in theory, homeschooling couldn't be done in a very healthy way that's very good for the child. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that in the vast majority of the cases that I have seen it, it has not been done well. Even in situations where I would say well, it was done much better than you know in other cases. So I'm skeptical of homeschooling. I'm not saying, oh, homeschooling in every case, homeschooling by its very nature, by the very nature of your just being at home, learning, that's fundamentally unhealthy. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the way that it's done, that I've seen it done, and the motivations I think of many of the parents, most of the parents that I've seen, are unhealthy. So I'm not. I don't think we necessarily disagree.
Speaker 1:No, we do disagree because I think that the motivations are very healthy for most people and the because the motivation like, for instance, there was a big pop in micro schools and homeschooling over the last four or five years because parents saw for the first time because of COVID, the reality of how crappy the education system is that they're sending their kids, and so they said this is what these teachers are teaching and then they took them out. So the motive and I think that is a dominant strain and has been for a long time for homeschooling I'm very pro homeschooling. So I will agree that there's a subset of what I'm going to call the crazies, yes and that, but what I'm arguing is that that is because of their own indoctrination, their own parenting methodologies, their own irrationalities. That's leading to this and I understand that. From where you're coming from, you're seeing and meeting people who are probably homeschooled in a certain way, but I'm seeing people who are homeschooled in a different way. I have a lot of friends who own schools. I have people who own multiple schools and they started it from the same kind of motivations that I'm talking about. Are the pro parts of this, which is I want my kid to actually have a good education, and I think that's way more dominant of a strain. There's a lot of evidence in the homeschooling world, lots of data about this is why people are doing it. Yes, there's going to be some people and maybe some portion I don't know the percentages that the reason they're doing this is because they want to have.
Speaker 1:You know again, it's irrational. It's like getting back to the St Mary's story is I want to have or I hate the culture that we live in? There's irrationalities and liberalism, so it's not even the. There's actual negative things in our culture, and you can actually, but they're identifying the bad things wrong, which is why ideology is so important. Because they think, yeah, so they're identifying the bad things wrongly, which is why ideology is so important, because they think, yeah, so they're identifying like, okay, there's, oh, there's, there's gay marriage, ooh, this is the worst end of the world.
Speaker 1:So now it's like, well, there's gay marriage and there's pornography in the world. That's the devil. Versus there's religion that preaches irrational beliefs in fairy tales. That's the problem. And so they're misidentifying the core issue. But I would like to get to, so we could always do episodes on homeschooling and do more research. Because, off the top of my head. I don't have all the data and everything, but I want to get back to this St Mary's situation, which was an Atlantic article. St Mary's, there's this movement of society of. I'm going to get this society of St.
Speaker 2:Paul Pius X. You got it. You got it, yeah, so, yeah. So I want to. Before we talk specifically about that, you know the town itself I do want to talk a little bit more about the ideology behind all of that. Okay, Because my parents bought into the ideology, you know, long before they ended up in the town and you know, like I said, it's about preserving the traditions of the church and there are a lot of things that go along with that. So there's a certain, there's an apocalyptic, millenarian strain of it. What words are you?
Speaker 1:throwing at me.
Speaker 2:So a lot of traditional Catholics believe in prophecies and they think that we're not. Don't all Catholics believe in that with Christianity? Well, it depends on the well. I'm talking about private revelation.
Speaker 2:What revelation Pride, private revelation.
Speaker 2:Okay, so in 1917, there was a supposed Obviously I don't believe this, but a lot of Catholics believe it there was an apparition of the Virgin Mary to these children in Portugal it was a town called Fatima, so it's Our Lady of Fatima appeared to these children and she basically preached.
Speaker 2:The revelation, supposedly, was that communism would engulf the West and would engulf the world and there would be Christianity would be almost completely destroyed, the Catholic church would be almost completely destroyed and there would be these terrible wars where whole nations would be annihilated. This very apocalyptic prophecy about the 20th century in Portugal. It's called Our Lady of Fatima and it was approved by the church, not in the sense that the church said well, you must believe this, but you can believe this. This is a real thing that you're allowed to believe in and it's very popular among traditional Catholics. So there's this strain of apocalyptic prophecy where a lot of them are waiting for some cataclysm that will essentially end modern civilization as we know it and then afterwards, the church will rise anew and triumphant and there will be this new golden age of a second Christendom.
Speaker 1:But they believe that you know. But what's unique about this? This sounds like every religion all the time. I've never heard any sermon where that's not part of the fundamental belief that there's some destructive hell, something hellfire. If there's too much sin in the world, everything will get another Noah, this is part of every religion, especially Abrahamic religion.
Speaker 2:This is very specific to traditional Catholicism.
Speaker 1:So I understand that. Look, I'm trying to get to the story of this one thing, but I see you're trying to tell this.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm trying to set up what really goes into this, yeah but all it really comes down to is there's a certain set of beliefs they have. That's it, and it's a particular. Fundamentally, all religions have their own set of beliefs and a variety of how that set of beliefs operates within the behavior of the actual, you know members within that society or within that who accept, you know, most of it or all of it. So that idea is yeah, I get that. So there's this Fatima as part of that story that many of these traditionals, these trad cats, believe in. Okay, so there's, and this also is a end of the world apocalyptic.
Speaker 1:You know philosophy, again, I think that's part of every religion and most non-religious ideologies. Environmentalism has the same thing. You know, we're using too much energy and we're going to destroy the world. It's catastrophism, and it doesn't matter that the evidence is actually the opposite. When you look around at the world, it's catastrophism. And it doesn't matter that the evidence is actually the opposite. When you look around at the world, things are getting way better and we're living way longer lives, and but like that doesn't matter because, like, look, here's a fundamental sin we're putting, you know, pollutants into the air. Here's the result that has to happen. Mother nature is going to kill us. Every ideology, for the every especially, the more irrational and mystical, the more it's going to, I think, be prone to that kind of thing. I, I don't disagree at all. I don't disagree so. But so this fatima is one, okay, so, but is that so this? You're saying that these saint mary's, um, kansas, uh, sspx people are fatimists in that sense, right?
Speaker 2:um, I would say you'd be hard-pressed to find someone that isn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they're Fatimists essentially for the most part, and this is what you and your parents entered into when you were 15 or so as you moved there.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what was the? And then you went through a year or two of having some complications because you had been homeschooled away from you know, not socialized with other people. You were up in the mountains for many years digging in rocks and now you're in a society where you have a junior high, you have a high school. There's this whole background and there is this pastor, this priest Rutledge, who's one of the founders no no. Because who is the one that was mentioned in the so in the Atlantic article.
Speaker 2:So that priest mentioned in the Atlantic article, father Rutledge.
Speaker 1:He was the headmaster or the director at the time Of the article At the time of the article, but they cycled him through, which was 2020. Yeah, just so we're clear.
Speaker 2:But they cycled him through, so when the article, which was 2020. Yeah, but they cycled him through so when I was first there.
Speaker 1:I was a different person.
Speaker 2:I was a different guy and then they cycled through, I think like one or two other, so just who happened to be there when they were investigating?
Speaker 1:Right, they just happened to be there at that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so he wasn't like a founding figure or anything, and the Atlantic article was trying to look at the broader idea of these anti-modernists who are moving. Because there was a growing population of people going into this rural town, a small town in St Mary's, kansas, and it's like the Atlantic article was arguing that this is a broader movement of anti-modernism. This is an extreme kind of example of people doing this and going out and saying I'm done with society and it's almost like a Waco type thing, right, like that's what they were doing. Well, I'm sorry, it's the same type of thing, just different belief systems, because they had a different leader and the Waco didn't have as much of a hierarchy in Catholicism. Again, I think it's all made up. From my perspective, there's not that big a difference between the two. Maybe the priest was sleeping with less women, maybe more boys, I don't know. Sorry, but that's the—.
Speaker 2:Well, I never saw any evidence of that, yeah.
Speaker 1:But the point is that I'm never going to see them as fundamentally different Because, even though there's differences in specifics and I'm looking at the fundamentals the fundamentals is they both have an irrational set of beliefs based on fairy tales that do not have any basis in reality. There's literally zero evidence for this thing, so it's just a set. One may have a larger corpus of evidence and not evidence I don't want to use that term. That's something I have of historical record that has been put down by individual people who also agree with certain sets of beliefs that they've passed on for generations. That may be true of one, so in other words, there's an ancientness to one where one is newer, but fundamentally, because they're both based not on reality, they have no basis in reality for their fundamental beliefs. It's just one set of beliefs that someone has written down and agreed and has gotten persuasive agreement on by a group of people, and another one that just happens to go back farther. That's really the only difference.
Speaker 2:Well, no, there are more differences than that. So, so, yeah, there are differences. Doctrin no, there are more differences than that. So, yeah, there are differences doctrinally, there are differences historically, but there are also differences just sociologically between the two groups.
Speaker 2:So I mean, with a lot of cults like Waco or Jonestown or something like that, there's a tremendous amount of control that the cult leader has in the personal lives of the people there. I mean, he's a lot of times he's you don't think that's true of sspx, no, it's not. So um, there's a tremendous amount of direct personal control that, like some charismatic leader has, um of you know, the individual families and people, um, and and there's much more insularity. So in a lot of cases the cults are not going to have any real contact with the outside world. A lot of them won't even have jobs outside of the cult. They're not even going to have real jobs with real businesses outside of their community. They're not going to have businesses that interact necessarily very much with the outside world, except insofar as it's necessary to provide for that community. Um, and that is that was not the case at all in this community, not at all.
Speaker 2:So the the people in this community all believe in Catholicism. They all have a base set of ideological commitments. How is that different? There isn't a cult of personality. There isn't like some leader who has, you know, this hold on the people there, like that's. That's not a thing that happened in St Mary's. That's not a thing that I'd ever seen. And there isn't. And also there's a lot of, there's plenty of interaction with the outside world. It's more. It's more akin to Mormonism. It's much more akin to Mormonism, which, of course, is has its own strangeness, but it's much more akin to Mormonism than it is, like you know.
Speaker 1:You said Waco much more akin to living in Provo, utah, than it is. So I don't see any difference. Like you're telling me that they could have abortions, no, okay, so that's them having a certain set of beliefs. So it's true that it's so. First off, I think a priest, pastor, whatever by his or her or I guess in this case has to be him, right by his nature isn't going to have the same kind of characteristics as a Jonestownian like new, like the founder of a new. I've known priests who did. There are priests who could, yeah, but my point is that I understand that you know most priests that you're going to encounter in sspx, like the one that you might have had in school or the one, the church that you might have had, that they're going to have a kind of priest, a catholic priestiness. Then that's the personality. But when? So when you're saying but then if you look at the Waco or Jonestown or these are other cults around, that you're going to have a different, like a slightly different set of personality quirks.
Speaker 1:But the personality quirks are still personality quirks over the minds of individual people. One is just using a set of traditions as their example to hold them over you and to impinge and excommunicate people. Oh, you helped your sit, you? Or you did not stop your friend from having an abortion. You're excommunicated unless you do X. Oh, you watch. You know you're helping people look at porn in this way. You're excommunicated unless you do X.
Speaker 1:But that's the same thing as like in Waco, and you know the difference might be again details about this or that detail, but it's the same fundamental thing. And the issue is that the personality has been set by some other personality in the past. So the priestiness of how a Catholic priest has to move and talk and do the culpas and the blah, blah, blah, like that's all set by somebody hundreds or thousands of years ago and it's been, you know, maybe tweaked here and there and there. When you get a personality of you know, a Waco or a new person, he's coming up with all of it. So there's, there is a kind of unique nature to the creator versus the non-creative personality.
Speaker 2:But again, the fundamental is the same. What's fundamentally the same is that you, at the end of the day, your judgment, you're abdicating your own rational judgment to someone else.
Speaker 2:In this case, it's the authority of the church which is kind of this big impersonal organization of many different people and you're abdicating your reason to accept this priest's or this archbishop's interpretation of all of that. So that is true. So in that sense you're not sovereign over your own mind, at least not in practice. Theoretically, certain Catholics will argue, especially because of Aquinas, who definitely took reason as an epistemological absolute, and there are certain Catholics who very much hold to that. I was one of them. But in practice many people are just abdicating their own judgment towards the church. But what is very different is and this is why I want to make a distinction here is it's a much healthier environment than you would have in a cult. I'm not saying it's a healthy environment because if I thought it were healthy I wouldn't have left all of it.
Speaker 2:What I want to say is that it's unhealthy, but it's a different kind of thing.
Speaker 1:This is where I'll concede that there's probably some more healthiness to a Catholic versus the personality, especially the cults we're using as an example the Jonestown, because it's an obvious you know, let's all drink Kool-Aid and die is an obvious example of. But so I agree that in the sense of there's restraints to that kind of extremity, extremism in terms of, you know, somebody can't just easily take over with their irrational set of beliefs, that there's kind of barriers to those types of things and there's structures that go back thousands of years of how you make a change or a difference. And so they've adopted over years in the Catholic Church certain methods that are modern, even though they're saying that this is Treadcaths. That's a history of thousands of years of developing into what it is. Even with the Treadcaths it's not like it's ex nihilo, like it was just born that way it started very differently in the fifth, sixth century.
Speaker 1:The churches back then in the early years were very different. Catholicism has been moderated to a large degree by Aristotle between, like a Johnstown and a Catholic, and they went through the Enlightenment. So that's a big part of it is. They do have some strain of Aristotle through Aquinas that has shaped them into a little bit of a better semblance and assembly of individuals with individual set of beliefs. So they at least have some lip service to reason. Well, I want to go into that.
Speaker 2:I want to go into that because I think that's really that's an important part of my story and why I left Um and that's kind of why I wanted to talk a little bit more about how I was raised um before we got into the St Mary's stuff, because so the way I was raised, it was I. Traditional Catholicism is in many ways for a lot of people it's a very intellectualized version of Catholicism because it's all about the doctrine and what's the real doctrine. And so a lot of people get into these arcane Byzantine disputes about doctrine and about philosophy and about, well, does this change in the theology align with the philosophy as we understand it, which is Aquinas? That's Catholic philosophy basically, and so it's very intellectualized. And so I received kind of two strains, kind of two contradictory strains that run through Catholicism. One is the more rationalistic strain that comes from and I use rationalistic in the broad sense, not in the strict philosophical sense the more rational strain from Aquinas, where Aquinas says that reason is an epistemological absolute and faith must be built upon a bedrock of reason. So I learned that in early age.
Speaker 2:I remember picking up a biography of not a biography, it was like a historical novel based on the life of Thomas Aquinas, and I remember picking that up when I was like seven or eight years old and being completely captivated by it, because I was captivated by A Aquinas' concern with truth. He was all about we need to discover the truth and reason and we have to discover it rationally, the truth and reason and we have to discover it rationally. And we can't just take faith without reason, we can't just take faith as an absolute. We have to support faith with a foundation of reason. And I was absolutely captivated by the idea of the philosopher searching for truth and using his reason to do so and, of course, being Catholic and using his reason to do so. And, of course, being Catholic, I wanted to reconcile that with Catholicism, just like Aquinas did. And so I got that from an early age. You know, we had like a commentary on the Summa Theologiae, which is, you know, aquinas' magnum opus, and you know, from there I got into like a lot of GK Chesterton, who is I hesitate to put him in the same category of the Aquinas because he's not, he's nothing far inferior, but he was a popular Catholic intellectual in the early 20th century. So I got into a lot of that.
Speaker 2:And my mother, because she was a convert, was very zealous. She was a true believer, and one thing I learned from her growing up, a value that was really implanted in my consciousness at a very early age, was there's nothing more important than knowing the truth and living it authentically, and you cannot live without a moral code that is based on the truth. That's something that I got from her and that's why she ended up becoming Catholic, which I think was a mistake. But the fundamental value, that desire that drove her to that, was really good, and I think that's actually what ultimately led me out of Catholicism, was because that belief in reason and that belief in truth and that belief in following the argument wherever it leads, and the idea that it's supposed to be a guide to living a healthy life Ultimately those were the values that won out.
Speaker 2:But I had those values and at the same time, I held other values, and I got these values more from my father, who comes more from the Irish Catholic strain, which is much less not necessarily it's less rational, but it's more about self-denial and suffering and guilt self-denial and suffering and guilt. And so, for instance, you know one of the things that I remember I was eight or nine years old, I was driving along the highway with my father and I saw like a yellow sports car, like a yellow Camaro or something like that, and I was like, oh, that's so cool. And I was like, when I grew up, I'm going to have a, I'm going to buy a cool yellow sports car like that. I remember saying this to my father and he basically scolded me. He was like you know, you have a very unhealthy attraction to the world and basically told me like made me feel guilty for wanting a souped-up yellow sports car, because it's worldly and, as a Catholic, your focus is not on the world, it's on the next life.
Speaker 2:You're supposed to reject the world and reject the pleasures of the world. And so I got a lot of that, especially from my father, and I also got this more irrational strain of, well, you need to accept the authority of the church. My father is very big on outsourcing almost outsourcing judgment to priests. A lot of times when I was a teenager, I would say, oh, I want to do this or I want to do that, and my dad would be like, well, go talk to the priest about it and see what he says. And so I had this sort of You're saying that's unique to your father.
Speaker 2:Well, there are different. It's not unique to my father, but you have these different strains in Catholicism. One is the world is terrible. You should reject it, you should be focused only on heaven and you should strip yourself of all worldly pleasures and all worldly desires and you should accept mystical revelation. And then you have a more rational, aristotelian side where, well, the world isn't bad, the world is created by God, so it must be good and you can enjoy worldly pleasures. But you just can't. You have to place them in the proper order. So God is first.
Speaker 2:But you can enjoy worldly pleasures as long as you remember that they're not the ultimate end, as long as you remember that you know they're supposed to direct you towards God, not toward. They're not ends. Worldly happiness is not an end in itself, it's sort of a means to the ultimate end of heavenly happiness. And so you have these two, I would say the mystically irrational on one side that is very focused on self-denial. And then you have the more rationalistic version of Catholicism that is more open to pleasure and earthly happiness, while saying well, we really do agree with this, but we're just placing it in the proper order.
Speaker 2:And fundamentally those two things cannot be reconciled. You can't reconcile rationality and happiness on earth with mysticism and the afterlife. But Catholicism attempts to do that. And so I grew up, I think, with two contradictory sets of premises, sets of ideas in my mind, and ultimately one of those went out which was the more rational, worldly-focused one. But that tension exists in Catholicism and it existed throughout my education and it existed when I was being homeschooled. It existed when I was in school at St Mary's.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so I think that. So, when you were at St Mary's, you're having this experience where you're having friends and things like that. I want to get back to that and we can finish up with your story of you know, you eventually left St Mary's, but there was a positive element to it for you in the social realm, and you felt this tension that is there and you're saying it's an all-Catholicism, which I think makes sense that there would be that strain with Catholicism. I think this is what led to Puritanism or Protestantism in the first place, is that there's different arguments fundamentally about how to get to the truth, because you might have a strain like this, you might have a strain like that, so who's going to reconcile it?
Speaker 1:Well, you might have a strain like this, you might have a strain like that, so who's going to reconcile that? Well, you might have a you know a pope that does it. But what if the pope is in the pocket of the king? And so you might want to say, well then, you know what, I'm going to work on reconciling it. We'll just branch it out and, like I want to have more of a connection, part of what happens in Catholicism and then Catholicism continues when you have all these Protestants bleeding out of it, and so then the people who stay in are probably going to be more like your father, where it's like you know, obey the preacher or you, it's like the priest will help.
Speaker 1:The only difference is just, again, specifics in terms of you're not going to go to a confessional to talk to a priest. You're just going to listen to a sermon and maybe tell him something in private. There's just no official confessional where you can just absolve all of your sins confessional where you can just absolve all of your sins. So in your experience in St Mary's, did you not get a sense? Were there moments in your life because you're there for 13 years when you got a sense that something is deeply wrong with the way that this is?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. Well, I had this sense that something was wrong with Catholicism from a very early age, from the time I was 10 or 11. I had the sense that there was something wrong, that I really couldn't reconcile Catholicism with reason. I really couldn't accept belief in God, although I tried. So I had that sense from a very early age, but I was very motivated to rationalize it because I really absorbed a lot of passion for Catholicism, from my mother especially, who was very passionate about it, and that was, I think, one of the reasons I got into a more philosophical version was because I needed to rationalize it to myself, even from an early age. And then, as I went through high school, though, it became less and less tenable to me, and I remember sitting in a religion class in 10th grade and just reading through all of this theology and listening to the priest talk about theology and just thinking to myself this is all bullshit, like this is like there's no way, like how can I possibly? How can I? It's the sophomore year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you started really questioning.
Speaker 2:That's when I started to really feel like I was going to. I was going to end up leaving Because I was like I don't know how I can possibly, but that's only two or three years into this.
Speaker 1:I was like I don't know how I can possibly, but that's only two or three years into this. Yeah, so how'd you end up another 10 years then? Well, I'll have to get to that part of the story, okay. Well you've got to get to that part of the story, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I.
Speaker 1:How'd you do it yeah?
Speaker 2:So I just thought this is so strained and unreal, like this whole system, it just can't possibly be right. And you know, and I got to know a lot more the priests really well and I was never. You know, a lot of the priests were like nice guys but I was never impressed with them as human beings.
Speaker 2:Like I felt in many ways, like a lot of them were psychologically stunted people, intense, right yeah, just yeah. Guys that I met like priests, that I knew, like I just felt like this is not like a well-rounded, like psychologically integrated person. This is there's something stunted and there's something wrong.
Speaker 1:Interesting that you. How did you get that sense? Wouldn't you have needed to meet other people, or did you? Were you a reader of literature?
Speaker 2:Well, I, just, I mean, there were plenty of normal people in the town who were.
Speaker 1:So non-SSPX.
Speaker 2:No, no, sspx, people who were actually pretty normal.
Speaker 1:So you're saying the priests were not necessarily the priests themselves?
Speaker 2:because of the life of a priest, because of the way that traditional Catholic priests lived.
Speaker 1:No, I don't disagree with that. The priests are stunted, it's just not a, I think this is natural.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that and I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm curious about how a 10th grader who's isolated his whole life, doesn't really meet other people, would come to that conclusion. So it makes sense what you're saying. Though You're saying now, there's other people in the society and you would think that the priest would be the peak, in a sense, because we're getting all of our moral advice and guidance from them. But it's like no, the mailman is smarter, more well rounded and interesting than the priest. And so, like, what's wrong with this whole thing, with well, I wouldn't say smarter.
Speaker 2:A lot of the priests in new were well rounded were quite intelligent, but they were um. The other parts of their personality were just not well developed.
Speaker 1:I get that. I definitely get this sense whenever I've seen Catholics debate, especially priests. I've seen on YouTube Jordan Peterson would do stuff with a Catholic priest and there's a sense where they can really talk very in-depth on particular subjects because they have, like any academic have a subject expertise. But then you try to go somewhere or take them out of that context where they're not doing just that one thing that they're okay at and then they fall apart. They have no abilities to do anything. They can't function in the world, and I'm sure there's some priests that are better than others in this, but for the most part I would think that that kind of and unfortunately I can't even just say that this is just a priest thing, this is just a. Many academics fall into this where they get really good at one thing but then they can't fry an egg or boil an egg or that type of thing.
Speaker 1:And so they have like a real disconnect. Now I would say that I will say, being in an objectivist movement, I think there's there's some of that, but it's much. It's a little bit less than my experience where there's people who can, you know, do a variety of activities. They play music, they have all these different interests and values and things like that. So that's one thing that I think is somewhat unique within the movement that I participate in, which is, you know, more pro all values of your life. But there's even there, when you look at the academics, a lot of them are in that same kind of vein, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's a downside. That's something that I think academics can fall into Well.
Speaker 1:I think it's not just that academics fall into. It's probably that the type of person who's drawn to academics and who's good at it too, these are people who are really good at this kind of scholarly work, which is an important kind of work. But to do that is a kind of hermitage type mentality, know mentality. It's like the the mole people type thing, where you like have to go into the ground and it's like they come up with stuff that's brilliant. But you know they sometimes are.
Speaker 1:Uh, but I, what I'm saying is like within what I've seen within a lot of objectivists is there's because there's this got like this idea, ideal of being more well-rounded in the sense of you should have, you know like you should. Romantic love should be of high value. Having other passions in your life is a high. Worldly pleasures is a high value, as well as long range values.
Speaker 1:Even among the most extreme of these types, you'll see singers and playwrights and novelists, people who are bodybuilders and strength builders and doing all types of athletics and raising families and all types of things, and they can have conversations about other things. So anyway, I just it's. But I I do think with priests I can see especially Catholic priests it's, they're falling into that same kind of category and they may be more prone to it because they don't have that pressure to be, you know, like, oh, you don't, you're not well-traveled. You should be well-traveled, right, you should like. That's the pressure you get within objectivism and people like you know you should, you should explore more, you should try something new, you should, you know, expand your career, be more. But like there's that kind of thing about worldly things where I don't think that's probably there with Catholicism.
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on the person. Um, it depends on, like a lot of the people that I knew who lived in same areas were, um, you know, a lot of people went to Europe and traveled and spent time there whether it was just for their own personal reasons, or whether it was for to go to different schools there or even to teach at schools there, because there's, you know, there's this global network. The SSPX has this global network, and so, you know, I knew guys who went to the missions in India.
Speaker 1:So, in other words, they went to Europe to do the same thing they do in St Mary's Kansas.
Speaker 2:Not necessarily Hang out with the same kind of people, not necessarily. I mean, a lot of them went and traveled.
Speaker 1:No, no, but they went to, they traveled and then they went to the same group of people in a different country, in some cases yes, in other cases no. You should travel and experience different cultures, right? Well, they did that as well. They did that as well.
Speaker 2:It wasn't just like oh, we're going to hide in a little castle and never come out. They went out and explored as well.
Speaker 2:So they went out and explored and there was an emphasis among people on having that experience, on having been to Europe. In fact, if you go to any traditional Catholic gathering, the majority of people there have been to Europe and have spent time in Europe, um, and have experienced, you know, different cultures there, um, so so that that's there, um, for for sure. But, um, yeah, so when I was, when I was in high school, it kind of started to fall apart for me, um, and I remember I remember I was on a I went to a priest one time and I told him about my doubts and I was tortured by them because I was like I wanted to believe and I thought it was important for me to believe and be a Catholic, but I just couldn't. I felt like I couldn't hold it together anymore. And I told this priest of doubts and I thought he was going to say, okay, well, what are your doubts? And I thought we were going to have a philosophical discussion and he was going to like, show me the light and show me why my reasoning was wrong and why God really did exist.
Speaker 2:And and he didn't, he just went oh yeah, you know it's, everyone has those and it's, it's totally normal and it's okay and you'll get through it and just pray and you'll be fine. And I remember sitting there like and I'm like 16 or 17 at the time and I'm just thinking what? Like? You're not going to like argue with me, you're not going to, you're not going to explain it, you're just going to be like oh it's, it's okay. It was almost like he didn't realize that I had that. I wanted to to hash it out intellectually and I thought, okay, I was like and I then I went to a different priest and and just was afraid couldn't go into it.
Speaker 2:So I went to another priest and said the same thing and I got the same response. Yeah, and I was like, okay, either they don't understand that I really want to have an intellectual discussion or they can't give me an answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they can't give me an answer. Yeah, and they don't even want you thinking like that, right and so. But you know, I also had a philosophy professor in high school who was a great guy, really very intelligent, and this was an SSPX high school. Yeah, he was a layperson, he had a family and he…. A layperson as in non-religious, non-religious, yeah, he was sspx well, not as sspx is for priests, but he was part of the community um well, but aren't you a part of it if you go to the church?
Speaker 1:you're just saying not part of the sspx, because the sspx is, that's just only I see the, the sspx like administers everything, but the people themselves are just lay people Well, they're just Catholics, yeah, they're just Catholics, but they're listening and adhering to the priest class of SSPX. Yes, so it's true, they're not part of that order, necessarily, right, but they're part of the congregation, yeah, they're part of it. So if they were to go out in the culture and say, are you this kind of Catholic? No, I adhere to the SSPX Catholics. They would say something along those lines yeah, yeah, okay, so they're SSPX.
Speaker 2:Sure Shorthand.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so— so he's just not a priest.
Speaker 2:Not a priest, he's just a lay high school and he was a great guy. He invited you know all of my conversations. I also had a math teacher as well who who ended up this was in 10th grade, he was my geometry teacher and he I had known him in Pennsylvania and he was also really bright guy, very intellectually open and was kind of a mentor to me intellectually, and he ended up he actually works in Silicon Valley now. He left and went to San Francisco, went to work in data science at a startup there and so I had great mentorship intellectually in some ways when I was in high school. But in other ways, especially talking to priests, that wasn't there. And so I remember I was.
Speaker 2:I think I was in my senior year and I was walking home. Not walking home, I was walking back to school from lunch. I'd gone home for lunch, I was walking back to school and I was thinking, I was thinking about, I was thinking about epistemology. I was thinking about like how do I know? How can I be sure that the evidence of my senses is like, how can I validate my senses? Because I thought, well, everything comes to me through my senses, like I can't know anything without it first coming to me through my senses. But I was like, well, but how do I know that, my senses, how do I validate my senses?
Speaker 2:And I was like, well, I can't validate my senses. The only way to validate my senses would be to somehow step outside of my own senses and look at them objectively. And I was like, but if I did that then I would still be perceiving it by some other sense and I wouldn't be able to evaluate that unless I were able to step outside of that. But then you have, like, this infinite regress of epistemological validation and I was like so there's no way to validate knowledge. And I remember it hit me like a ton of bricks, because, a because truth was such a high value to me, and B I think I'm just generally a more neurotic person and I literally had a panic attack. I was like I can't know anything, it's impossible, knowledge is completely impossible. It's impossible, knowledge is completely impossible. And and I was, and that was the moment where I was like, well, not only can I not know if catholicism is true, I can't really know if anything is true.
Speaker 1:So I think they call that an existential yeah, I was like I think I'm.
Speaker 2:I was like you know what? I think I'm done. I think I'm done with catholic and I'm done. But this is high school.
Speaker 1:This is high school, yeah, okay, so we got, we're going to wrap up for in pretty soon. But what? What led to the end of leaving Cause this is still eight, nine years away from you leaving, so initially, I left after high school, left Catholicism. I left it all behind.
Speaker 2:You lived in St Mary's. I did live in that community, still Okay, but I wasn't Catholic anymore. I stopped practicing, stopped believing in it, stopped going to Mass, stopped doing any of that.
Speaker 1:I was just doing my own thing, this is after high school, yeah.
Speaker 2:I just was doing my own thing for about a year and I went out and just basically did everything. I had sort of a rumspringa. I out and just, uh, basically did everything. I had sort of a rumspringa. I just went and did all the things I wasn't allowed to do growing up and uh, okay, all the things, all the things good for you, everything, so you live everything. I lived for a year, um, I did everything good for you and but the problem was so it. So I was still very troubled because I I knew in my mind like I need a rational code to live by, but I also I don't know how I can validate anything just at a fundamental level. And so I was sort of like, well, maybe if I just go out and do enough things and have enough experiences, maybe I'll eventually like have an ego.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'll have some intuition and I'll just know I mean that's a philosophical theory. It's like only through experience can you have not right, well, yeah, maybe if I, just if I experience, enough things.
Speaker 2:I'll just like intuitively grasp the truth. Truth somehow yeah, that was kind of my thought. And uh, at the end of that, unfortunately I. So at the end of that, I spent a year doing that and then I decided, okay, I'm gonna go to college now and I'm going to just live my life. And unfortunately, in my first semester of college, I got very, very sick and I ended up basically collapsing in the first semester to the point where I was incapable of doing anything. I ended up bedridden for almost four years.
Speaker 1:Jeez, and this is still in St Mary's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was still living there, so you're in St Mary's.
Speaker 1:This is one reason why you weren't able to leave.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. I was bedridden for four years. I ended up in this little apartment. My parents set up this little apartment for me. That was just me alone and I was just convalescing and I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I eventually did, and that's a whole different story. But I eventually recovered, but during my illness, that was. You combine that with the existential crisis I was already suffering. You combine the illness with that.
Speaker 1:And I was.
Speaker 2:I was, you know, thinking. I was like how do I, how do I avoid suicide? Because I feel like, with this existential crisis where I feel like I don't know anything, I already don't know if life has meaning. Now I've lost everything else that I could possibly have in my life at 19. And I thought I need to find a way quickly to avoid suicide. I need to find a reason for living. And so I was like, well, maybe I'll take another look at Catholicism, and I started reading. I went back to the scholastic philosophers and I went back to some of the lives of the saints and different things, and I rationalized it to myself. I went deeper and I I rash I just re-building a system.
Speaker 2:I rebuilt a system that allowed me to believe in it again yeah and and I was like, okay, I've got some solid ground to stand on and now I can get through this illness and, uh, yeah. So I rebuilt it and I was very motivated to maintain it. Even after I got healthy, you know, I was still like I was deep into it and so I was able to maintain it, like I got back into a basically normal life in like 2017, late 2017, early 2018. 2017, late 2017, early 2018. And I ended up starting a business with my friend and I recommitted to the community and the whole enterprise. I was like, well, now I have a rational foundation and I have friends here, and like I can actually build a life based on this.
Speaker 2:And I ended up I got into a very serious relationship with a girl who I was this close to marrying and I had a whole business and I thought, okay, I've got the beginnings of a life for myself, but I still had a lot of doubts and basically every day, I was arguing with myself in the back of my mind about my doubts. Every day, I had to wake up and say, okay, well, that's true because of this and this is true because of that. Just imagine this exhausting background rationalization going on all the time. That's what I was doing, was doing, and in so, right after COVID in 2021, late 2021, the business failed. I lost. I had put everything I had into that, totally lost it. And then I ended up. I broke up with the girl I was dating, who I thought I was going to marry, ended up breaking up with her and I basically found myself with nothing, like I had nothing at all. And all my friends most of my friends are married, like basically all of them, and some of them even had children and they had lives. And I'm like, okay, I don't have, I don't have any of the things that I thought I would have.
Speaker 2:And there I thought there must be something deeply wrong with the way that I think about reality. If everything in my life seems to have gone wrong, if Catholicism is making me unhappy and I have to constantly rationalize it to myself, my business failed, my relationship failed, if everything is going wrong, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the way that I approach reality. So I was like, okay, that means I need to maybe reconsider. You know my fundamental philosophy. And I went back and I thought, okay, well, I need to go back to epistemology and well, if I'm going to go back to epistemology, I need to go back to metaphysics, and I already had metaphysical questions about Catholicism metaphysical questions about Catholicism and so I started thinking a lot more about it and in early 2022, I was like, okay, this is completely irrational and I'm ready to admit that to myself. I'm ready to admit this is irrational and I've been living in an irrational way. I've been part of me believes in reason, but there's this whole other part of life that I am separating from reason and I'm basically being mystical about and that's actually why I've gotten myself into this entire mess. And so I basically committed to reason as an epistemological absolute. I recommitted to that and I left Catholicism and that was very difficult.
Speaker 2:Like I went through months of I agonized over it for months. I went to a priest initially and tried to. I talked to him about you know, I was in the real, a real depth of a crisis and I talked to this priest and told him where I was at and I was. I was on the verge of breaking down and I said you've got to help me, you've got to help me figure this out. And he basically said almost verbatim your feelings are bullshit.
Speaker 2:And if you were perfectly submitted to God, if you really were perfectly submitted to God's will, none of this would bother you. You wouldn't be upset about the loss of your business, you wouldn't be upset about the loss of your relationship, you wouldn't be upset about anything. You would be perfectly happy no matter what happened. And so the fact that you're so upset about all of this is a sign of imperfection and you need to fix that. And you're basically full of shit, and I was like I walked out of there like stunned, I was like he couldn't even empathize with me, like he couldn't even emotionally empathize with where I was, and yeah and so, anyway, yeah, 2022, I left and I wow, shortly after, more recently than I expected, yeah, early 2022.
Speaker 2:I left and then shortly, uh, shortly after that, I moved away and I I found objectivism, because I had a friend who was an objectivist and I didn't know he was. And uh, you're looking antsy. Are we running out of time? No, we're out of time okay, but so that's.
Speaker 1:But the end of the story is like so you left 2022. You had a friend who, uh, we both know won't say his name, but yeah, we both know who was an objectivist. He became your friend and he helped you. Read more of ayn rand well, I told him.
Speaker 2:Well, after I left, I said because I was reading some I was reading nicha and I was reading, I was diving into modern philosophy and I was very disappointed with it. And I told him over the phone one day I was like you know, I need a. I either need to somehow build my own rational system, system of philosophy, or I need to find one.
Speaker 1:And he said oh well, if you were looking for I must build, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. That's William Blake.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something like that. And he said, oh well. Well, if you're looking for a rational system, I have just the book for you. And he gave me opar and I never understand people. I read I read the first chapter and I was like, and I loved it. I, because it's very it it the most of the metaphysics chapter. Yeah, the first chapter. I loved it because, yeah, it's amazing. It resonated with the way I had been taught from an early age to think philosophically, which was an Aristotelian way.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, I think it's good that you're here. There's a lot of great experience that you're going to have. I did not realize it was only two years. I thought you'd been an atheist for many years. No, not at all. So this is someone new to you. That's exciting because you're still kind of on the journey, I think at that point. I mean, we're always on a journey of learning. I'm learning all the time, but I'm glad you made it out of that of what I call a cult, what you just call Catholicism. And you know, welcome to Austin.
Speaker 2:and good man.
Speaker 1:Thanks, it's good to be here. It's great to be here.