"when we're beyond good and evil you know and all that's left is the will to power then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes when we forget id..."

"bishop robert barron founder of ward on fire and one of the greatest educators in the world on the beauty and wisdom within catholicism christianity and religious faith in general this is the lex frie..."

"let's start with the big question who is god according to christianity according to catholicism who's god i'll give you thomas aquinas definition uh god is ipsum essay subsistence god is the subsisten..."

"god they are kind of gnomic and that's on purpose there's almost a zen koan kind of quality about the way we talk about god i'm saying something that's substantive but it's more in like a via negative..."

"in the world in fact i would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists old and new make all the time is they think of god as a big being when aquinas says that god is not in any genus even the ..."

"coincide is to say god's very nature is to be and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world so what i'm doing there is i'm i'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward god using langu..."

"quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that everything in our experience is is a being of some type so it's existence received according to the mode of some essence that'..."

"category error dawkins i think cites bertrand russell to the effect that proving the non-existence of god is a bit like proving the non-existence of a china teapot orbiting between earth and mars no t..."

"creator of all things so if god is outside of our world is it possible for us to visualize to comprehend to know god not utterly of course and i would say our knowledge begins always in this world beg..."

"language about god that we use is analogical so it's not it's not univocal meaning what i say about that you know can or about this bottle i can say about god no that makes god an entity at the same t..."

"or subatomic particles would be analogous to god's manner of being so on that basis i can make some statements i can i can theorize and even at the limit as you suggest i can visualize so we have meta..."

"now only the crude fundamentalism would say well that's a universal accurate description of god it's an image that's catching something of god's manner of being then what does it mean to believe in go..."

"you kind of sneak up to the idea of god with metaphors better he sneaks up on us because i like the language of grace god's action comes first so if i stay perfectly within the realm of i'm seeking wi..."

"sense i'm with paul tillich though the protestant theologian said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary's faith because he said the way we take it usually is something sub-rational y..."

"superstition or or childish credulity so authentic faith is is the darkness beyond reason and on the far side of reason it's it's super irrational not infrarational and that's a very important move at..."

"stuff that i've been talking about taking moses maimonides for example now what makes christianity distinct this supremely weird claim that god becomes one of us god becomes a creature but without cea..."

"why is this such an important thing so it's a distinctive thing yeah but why is it so important philosophically to what it means to be a christian like what impact did that have on our world on human ..."

"like cells and molecules in an organism that's the church it's not an organization that's a that's a deformation of ecclesiology the church is this organism that begins with jesus and then he's drawin..."

"think humanism is profoundly influenced by the incarnation uh and just our notion of god as non-competitive to us that's so important because i think it's so many systems from mythology onward you hav..."

"to become one with with god it's possible to become uh become one with god now i should mention you're one of the greatest religious communicators i've ever experienced a lot of a huge number of peopl..."

"couplet they're the head sins from which things tend to flow the most fundamental is pride uh probably most people today if you talk about like vice or you talk about you know deadly sin they would th..."

"so as a sinner and you know i'll confess i'm a sinner um the temptation is okay this is the bishop baron moment and i'm gonna i'm drawing you now into my you know world and so on what that does is it ..."

"you know he's at the center of the earth so like a black hole that way like he's at the center of gravity he's at the heaviest place and he there's not fire where he is but ice it's a much much better..."

"great so that's pride see that's an image of pride because satan that's his great sin pride which is why he needed michael right mikael who's like god so that the great challenge to him which we need ..."

"general empathy humility compassion love thy neighbor always the way to fight this the sin of pride right which is why the masters tend to say this was bernard saint bernard was asked what are the thr..."

"that's it that's heaven right and those moments in our life when we when we get that it's a little hint of of paradise but but the trouble is most of us live frankly most of the time in various levels..."

"or i i hesitate to use the word sort of uh evil but uh yeah maybe overwhelmingly sinful where's the line between hell and heaven think of them as limit concepts maybe they're like heuristic devices ye..."

"what's god's purpose and christianity's reading is to bring us out of that you know now where did he go he went all the way into it to get us out of it it's like pulling the sock back out socks inside..."

"that said day to day there's like uh oscillations in terms of how much um each human sends and there's a struggle against that so you know that dog that loses himself on the beach may have had a lot o..."

"be down to my benefit right that's just an indirect egotism that's why i see love is really rare and strange that i really want what's good for you as other so not connected to the black hole tendency..."

"the final calculus i'll leave that to god i mean like but but use love as the metric at the end of the day when you examine your conscience did i will the good of the other today how how effective was..."

"is willing the good of the other he he died that we might come to a richer appropriation of that so to be fully alive is to be in love with the world or to love the world deeply and what love means is..."

"probably articulate it that way too yeah i love love it's such an interesting thing but we have to be hard-nosed about it like you know your friend dostoevsky love is a harsh and dreadful thing yeah r..."

"what makes them uh happy what are they afraid of what are they hoping for and it's like a dance right dance of conversation a dance of uh just shared experiences and all that kind of stuff and all of ..."

"other because the father is the fullness of being the son is the fullness of being and they're so crazy in love with each other that they this is um fulton she put it this way that there's this they j..."

"and and that's why see christianity is unique in this claim that god is love so every religion will say god loves you know in some way love is an attribute of god god is or love is a thing that god do..."

"you visualize how do you understand this yeah this this very this very fascinating essential thing for christianity the first thing i'd say is what we already have been sort of talking about is if you..."

"so of of course god has an image of himself heck i've got an image of myself that's something i can pull off as a as a puny little creature god in his infinity has a perfect image of himself and they ..."

"yeah sure whatever sexiness of the buildings yeah no whatever is corrupt in the church of course it comes from pride from sin and one thing i like about you know the new testament is so clear on that ..."

"part of the 19th century and he was part of the kind of romantic movement and he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church so he's the pe..."

"more judgmental kind of communicator all that kind of stuff i mean can you maybe speak to the human part of this of these symbols yeah well i i might just shift to another image um of shepherd so that..."

"and that's another reason i don't like the prosperity gospel is though i'm i'm getting attached now to all these material advantages and i'm even seeing them as a sign of god's favor let go of all tha..."

"so there's uh don't seek worldly possessions but whatever happens to you good or bad seek how that could be used to increase the amount of love in the world right the image i i love for this is the wh..."

"crazy every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety where you should live is the center of the wheel where christ is right because that's the link now to the eternity of god that's the poi..."

"uh the greece called apathea and the latins called it uh uh in indifference you know not like i'm blase it just means i'm i'm detached from success failure less success more success i'm detached from ..."

"um has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years absolutely um i'm glad the church has made important strides and it has back in 2002 there was a thing called the dallas accords wher..."

"sure yeah so maybe you can speak to the fact uh as a priest the bishop as part of catholicism you're not allowed to marry you're not allowed to have sex uh you're you're sworn to celibacy what is what..."

"within this world of how we will all love in heaven so in that way it's a bit like pacifists um i'm glad there are pacifists in the church and i i've known some you know some very powerful witnesses t..."

"and it's always been a small number the actual experience of it would you uh the spiritual nature of it is it similar to fasting so i've been enjoying fasting uh recently so not eating yeah uh for sev..."

"think it does involve you a certain redirection of energies i'd say that don't you think do you think it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear some priests to bear is that sure is that the thing gi..."

"the the challenge of course is all kinds of you said institutional cover there's all kinds of institutions that cover for people that don't that do uh evil onto the world to do uh sinful things on the..."

"but it's naming it truthfully enough and it goes back to augustine which is god permits evil to bring about a greater good now again i know how unsatisfying that sort of spare austere language can sou..."

"all come from within the religious tradition namely the book of job so job he's great i mean he's a great guy he does everything right he's he's god's great servant and he and he's punished in every p..."

"and stalin has a role to play there's a there's a dark aspect to somehow evil helps us make progress and i don't know how to put that in the calculation it's uh i don't you know on the local scale i w..."

"we're like little kids you know like a four-year-old and their parents make a decision and we said what why in the world would you do this to me um this is my pastoral experience years ago there was a..."

"all the time and we say what are you doing why aren't you taking this away from me and the answer i mean ultimately is trust trust me trust me surrender to me and when we don't that's uh get we get in..."

"i i don't i don't know what to tell i i can't i don't have an answer for you but but i was there i'm not saying to pat myself on the back it's just that's where the church goes because jesus went ther..."

"claim that well this is such a such a knock-down argument so now we know there is no god i would say no there's all kinds of other rational warrants for god and so i i know that god exists i know that..."

"somebody asked who your favorite um communicator of atheist ideas was and you mentioned christopher hitchens yeah are there other ideas for atheism that you find particularly challenging well that's t..."

"just stay with plato the first step out of the cave if you combine it now with the parable of the line is mathematical objects and and i'm with those the many people that would say mathematics is an e..."

"the world we haven't figured out yet but do you think it's possible through science to know god just to look outside the world so it's fundamentally the limit of the empirical scientific method is tha..."

"he just is so impressed by the fact that high complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and can be used to to create things and to manipulate and why should that be true that ther..."

"walking around in the dark trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there and we're patting ourselves on the back and how many puzzles we've discovered so far even ghettos and completeness theor..."

"anymore but i'm also utterly confident i can come to know it and those are theological ideas well we live in this world so we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world by making the assumption t..."

"and then what are the characteristics of being so not from aristotle to heidegger you know this question of the nature of being but see i would say we call it a universe because it's turned toward the..."

"and i thought yeah that's right uh let me ask you about jordan peterson you had a great conversation with him yeah um he has a complicated and nuanced view of faith or faith period um he has said that..."

"with the archetype of jesus and even language of like live as though god exists that's the outs all above kant you know the kind of as if um attitude and where i oppress him when we talk is in the dir..."

"there's a lot going on there there's a sort of calmness though about it like yeah the interesting and that's in this culture and that culture and it's the form of the moral life and i understand all t..."

"bible we're in historical religion and we've been it's important we generate philosophical reflection we can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that we can and the the church fathers ..."

"breathes through all of it i would say he inspired all of it right inspira he's he's breathing through all of it god is speaking through all of it but he speaks in different voices uh he uses differen..."

"of independence what are the words mean we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these a..."

"sufficient education should be in the political life the rest should all be in private life you know and then some are suited for slavery so i mean he divides us dramatically same with cicero and so o..."

"the idea looking into the 20th century that god is dead that there is uh a cultural distancing from a belief in god yeah you know i'd be so much sympathetic to jordan peterson's reading of of nietzsch..."

"i don't know i believe that there's a capacity to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil and there's something that tends towards good whatever that is i tend to think that if that community t..."

"higher reason a higher good you know because i it's part of my work my ministry is to you know the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture and okay well why do you want that well becaus..."

"i think rational path to god is is every single moment every day we are implicitly seeking god so with your um word on fire ministries and and the website and the communication efforts what what what ..."

"social media but what i really love what we're doing today is something i really like which is having a conversation outside of just the narrow catholic world or even the narrow christian world but to..."

"i would say i like doing that i was a teacher for a long time and taught in the seminary for like 20 years and so you know i've been engaging these questions for a long time i'm a writer i've written ..."

"i've told my brother bishops and priests about that i said structure your adult education programs or structure your youth outreach around those four questions uh well let me ask you about gay marriag..."

"real human beings always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on so it's somewhere in there that the church takes its stance and then uh so there's probably variation in the stances that it it..."

"um again reaching out always in love and understanding and compassion to those who are dealing and believe me every single pastor every single priest understands that because we deal with people all t..."

"own decisions so i think casey was terrible law and and it was backing up roe v wade which is terrible law so i i'm in favor of the overturning of those i've spoken out that many times now it'll retur..."

"know this sort of freedom run amok or see you know in in classical philosophy and theology freedom is not self-determination freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the ..."

"self-determination but our country is now i think really in the grip of that i decide and that's why the nietzschean thing comes to my mind of you know the will to power there's i'm beyond good and ev..."

"the values come in part from the tradition carried through the generations let me ask you to put on your wise hat and give advice to young folks so high school and college yeah thinking about uh you k..."

"you're good at that's that's from that's a tricky one finding what you're good at what because it's not just raw skill it's also what you connect with yeah and it's also um like this iterative process..."

"it's a guided choice your freedom is not sovereign it's a it's a guided freedom so in the in the struggle and the suffering you've seen in the world let me ask you the the question of death have you h..."

"limit you know question but yeah i'm sure i'm afraid of it because it's the unknown uh what do i think happens i think i'm drawn into the deeper embrace of god's love you know and that's stating it ki..."

"resurrected body uh so paul talks about a spiritual body his body for sure because he believes in the resurrection of jesus um but it's not a body like ours from this world it's a it's a body at a hig..."

"you're adding a lot of love to this world and which is something i deeply appreciate and that you would sit down with me uh given how valley boogie time is is a huge honor thank you so much my great p..."