 Well, I must say I was slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead. I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian, I'm not a believer, but there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian and so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense. It's true that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down and I'm happy with that, but I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches, so I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it wouldn't matter if we, certainly if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful. All right, so this is in the context, I guess, of, what was I going to say? This is in the context of some place in London, I guess in the UK and London, where they embrace celebrating the Ramadan instead of celebrating Easter and in that context, this is why Dawkins makes this claim. Of course, Dawkins is famous for being one of the, what is it, three horsemen, four horsemen of the apocalypse, the new atheists. He is a evolutionary biologist. He is quite famous for the selfish gene, not selfish in the way we mean it and, you know, it's created quite a bit of controversy within the field of biology about his views around biology, but, you know, I have no reason to doubt that he is a leading thinker in the field of evolution, and I don't think he's evolutionist psychology and evolution, evolutionary biology, and, you know, so he's saying, so he starts off and he ends really, really ends with saying, look, what I really would hate is if we replace Christianity with another religion, and that, you know, particularly if it's going to be Islam is absolutely true. That would be horrific. I mean, Islam in its current variation is just monstrous. Christianity, for the most part, isn't enuded, at least politically. Christianity, at least, is being subdued by the Enlightenment. It's being subdued by science. It's being subdued by liberty, by the ideas of freedom, again, by the ideas of the Enlightenment. But, you know, but he's saying, so he's saying, I wouldn't want to replace it with other religion, but then he's making a bigger point. He's saying, no, but there's something about a culture that I like, and that it's associated with Christianity. There's a Christian culture that I live in, a Christian ethos, ethos that we live with. And he mentions hymns and Christmas carols. I don't, yeah, okay, hymns and Christmas carols are nice. He mentions cathedrals. They love cathedrals. God, God, I mean, I mean, people just love cathedrals. I'll talk about cathedrals in a minute. And old churches, and I think they're just wonderful, the cathedrals and the churches, and that's part of the vibe. It's part of the world in which they grew up, and they like, and they love, and isn't this amazing. And I think it tells you something about the soul of a man, when this is what's culturally important to them. Like hymns and Christmas carols, nice. Yeah, they're pleasant. They're nice enough. Versus, I don't know, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, even Mozart, and you know, symphonies, concertos. I mean, give me a break. If the choice was between those two, I'd give up the hymns and carols in an instant. So if we live in a more secular culture, if everybody becomes an atheist and pro-reason and still loves music, good music, but eh, we give up hymns and Christmas carols, would the world dramatically be a worse place? No, not really. Not really. Maybe a better place. Maybe more energy would be devoted to actually producing great music. And the same goes with cathedrals and churches. Yeah, cathedrals, they're nice. I hate cathedrals, just so you know, just you're out there. I mean, cathedrals are these monstrosities that were built on the back of the equivalent of slave labor. These are buildings, magnificent, that they could be built when they were built, and magnificent. But they're ugly. The decorations are ugly. To the extent that they have sculpture, it's gargoyles and it's ugly. They are purposefully massive and high to make you feel small in the presence of God, right? Because the whole point is to glorify God. They're horrible buildings. I mean, I go into them because, wow, I mean, it's impressive. But it's not impressive as, whoa, they're so anti-man. They're so anti-this world. They're so anti-happiness and joy and celebration. If they have any decorations aside, it's Jesus on a cross, sacrificing, bleeding, dying, painful death for my sins. How is this culturally superior? I mean, Ain Rand had it right. Skyscrapers. Skyscrapers. Not only because they shoot up into the sky and they have, but because they're used by man. They're used by man to live in. They're used by man to work in. They're used by man to be productive in. They're built for human beings at scale. A cathedral is built to make humans small. And that's the whole point about who go uses it. And yeah, I mean, you have to recognize who goes genius in using it that way. And in using the imagery, it's unbelievably powerful. But the whole point of a cathedral is to make you small, make you small. And part of walking in to make you small is to make you feel reverence. That's the goal. And reverence in this case too, that guy on a cross dying for you. To some God, non-existent God. That is the purpose. And if you look at a cathedral and just marvel at their ability in the 13th century to build something like this, you're missing the point. What didn't they build because they built this? They didn't build aqueducts. They didn't build, you know, places where people could live and work and improve. I mean, think about the gazillions equivalent of gazillions of dollars that went into building cathedrals where nobody could afford to build cathedrals. Again, amazing in the intricacy. Amazing. And they grant you amazing. And yes, make you feel reverence when you walk into it. But at what cost? Churches? Yeah. I mean, cute, quaint little churches in the little bellows in London. Very nice. Yes, maybe we should keep a few just to entertain our eye. But Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, what does that mean? I mean, we can create amazing, magnificent modern architecture. We can create inspiring homes for people to live, inspiring skyscrapers for people to live in and office buildings. Beautiful factories even can be built today. We can, you know, fill our streets with magnificent sculpture. We saw that in the 19th century. We saw it in Greece. The best part of our culture from Beethoven's music to the scientific revolution to our respectful science, which some of us still have, to our quality and standard of living, to the skyscrapers and the automobiles. And I mean, you walk in London, you see these beautiful Aston Martins. I'll take an Aston Martin over a parish church any day. These are truly beautiful and truly inspiring. And all of that is not a product of Christianity. All of that is a product of the enlightenment. It's a product of Greece. It's a product of the pagans. We'll get to pagans in a minute because Ben Shapiro will raise it. The good in the world today, this, which I for one prefer to any church, is a product of Aristotle and the enlightenment and the scientific revolution and Steve Jobs. Wow. That's the culture I love. It's a product of Newton. Newton wasn't a pagan, but Newton used the method of a pagan. Newton, Chua physicist, is asked, it was Stotillian. He's not Christian. Chua physicist, he's rejecting Christianity. He's rejecting what's written in old books. He's rejecting prophecy. Newton, Chua scientist, is channeling Aristotle. He's channeling reason, reality orientation. He's challenging, channeling the scientific method, which the West learned from Aristotle. Falsely for a while because it was transmitted to them by Catholics who misunderstood and took Aristotle as dogma, there's nothing, nothing in Christianity leads to science. Indeed, Christianity rejects science. There's a wonderful book, Courage Everybody to Read, called The Closing of the Western Mind. And it's all about how open the Western Mind was, the knowledge, the science, the discovery, the evidence, the reality, the facts under the Greeks and the Romans. And as Christianity gains in power, the mind closes. And you find this closing in Paul early on in the first writings of Christianity. It's all about faith and knowledge and this world, knowledge in this world is junk, is, none of that has to do with science. Christianity is anti-science and this is why for a thousand years, for a thousand years, there was not a single astronomical observation made in the Western world. In the Muslims there was because they were reading Aristotle. Maybe even in China there was, but they never went anywhere with it. But in the West, in the Christian West, science ended. You get achievements of the Greeks and achievements in the Renaissance and a thousand years, a little over a thousand years of basically almost nothing, whatever advances they are in medicine, science are happening in the Muslim world, nothing in the Christian world. Because Christianity, qua-Christianity is anti-science and it's anti-reason and it's anti-the mind. It's some conception of love, but love is self-sacrificial. Not love as a response to values, love is self-sacrificial. And this is what is the Christian ethos. The Christian ethos is altruism. The Christian ethos is self-denial. The Christian ethos is original sin. The Christian ethos is love thy neighbor like yourself. I don't turn the cheek. They don't live up to that because Christians are unbelievably violent in history. So the Christian ethos is an ethos of self-denial, self-abugation. It's an ethos that is counter to science. It's counter to what Dawkins is. The culture, the real culture, the vibe, the achievements that Dawkins is actually observing in the life that he lives around him are not the achievements of Christianity. These are achievements in spite of Christianity. These are the achievements of a secular world. He likes having a car to take in places. He loves living in an air-conditioning, maybe more heated home, heated by technology, heated by the Enlightenment. So the culture we live in, all the benefits, all the good that exists in the culture, is not a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. A tradition that is anti-science. All you have to do is look at the ultra-orthodox Jews, the ones who take their religion super seriously. How many of them are scientists? Zero. How many of the very religious Christians are scientists? I mean, the real orthodox ones, they're not. I mean, you have to be somewhat secular in order to be scientific. You have to not take religion too seriously in order to be a scientist. In other words, you have to be open to reality, to facts, to evidence, and that almost immediately eliminates science, eliminates religion. So to extend your religious, you won't be a scientist. To extend your scientist, you won't be religious. Now, some people, like Newton, could hold both. But in his science, he was a scientist, he was a vestitilian. In his religion, I mean, even there, Newton was pretty nuts when it came to his religion. So people can be compartmentalized as Newton was, but they need a compartment for reason. And it's the compartment for reason that allows them to achieve. It's the compartment for reason that allows for progress. It's a compartment for reason that has created the world around us. It's Aristotle's world, Aristotle's culture, of what we have around us. Religious music can be nice, just like, you know, because it appeals to certain universal values, just like reverence is not an emotion that is limited to religion, just like you can have reverence for Hugo, whereas a Christian has reverence for God, Hugo being the author. But reverence doesn't come from religion, it comes from you and the values you admire and respect and look up to. And those values can be secular and are secular, mostly in our world. All right, let's listen to what Ben has to say about this. Okay, but we have substituted an alternative religion and that religion is paganism because the... So in Ben's world, you can't have reason. We'll talk about that in a minute. You can't have reason as the standard. It has to be some religions. If you give up on Christianity, you have to become a pagan. I'm not a pagan. You're a pagan. You guys pagans? I mean, I love Aristotle, but not... But even Aristotle was not really a pagan, right? He believed in a prime mover, but that was it. But all they can think of is in terms of faith, is in terms of belief, not in terms of fact, evidence, not in terms of reality, not in terms of science. The reality is that when you cut off a civilization from Mr. Judeo-Christian roots, what you end up with is a paganistic replacement for that religion. Humanism devolves into paganism pretty quickly. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. Yeah, I guess he's calling woke paganism. He's calling the left paganism. That's one version of what happens when you give up on Judeo-Christianity. And of course, Ben wrote a book about the origins of Western civilization being Jerusalem and Athens. He overstates Jerusalem. He understates Athens. The source for everything good, not everything, almost everything good in Western civilization is Athens. At the end is Athens. Everything good attributed to Christianity, even there has its roots in Athens, has its roots in Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy is so far superior to anything that the Christians had, that the Christians basically adopted, mainly Plato early on and later Aristotle, and brought them into Christianity because they knew they were like, they won quicksand. They had nothing. There was no there, there. They needed philosophy. They needed justification for what they believed in. So they brought in the pagans. They brought in the Greeks in order to justify themselves. So it's, you know, they create these constant false dichotomies. You either Christian, Judeo-Christian, Ben has a strong vested interest in the Judeo part of it, even though Judeo-Christian doesn't even make sense because Judaism and Christianity are so different, so fundamentally different. I wish Ben would admit it, right? I mean, Judaism has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. It has nothing to do with Christianity in any of its interpretations. I would, I mean, I wish somebody would point this out. There was no Judeo-Christian, anything. There's a Christian tradition, which has dominated the West. And every achievement has been in spite of it. Because all of the central premises of humanism, things like reliance on human reason, make an argument for human reason as an independent force. You cannot from an evolutionarily biological perspective. Make an argument for human reason as an independent force. You cannot from an evolutionarily biological perspective. You can't. How is that? How can't you make a argument for human reason as a force? Human reason is the faculty that evolved in human beings in order to observe and integrate, understand reality. What the senses provide for us. The data does the sense provides for us. Evolution has evolved that. It is this magnificent, magnificent achievement, achievement in quotes, of evolution to create a brain, a mind that can actually write its own software, that can evolve knowledge itself that is not, the knowledge is not coded. This is purely a product of evolution. It's an evolutionary leap, but there are plenty of evolutionary leaps. We have an evolutionary leap from something that is not alive to something that is alive. We have an evolutionary leap from something that is alive but not conscious to something that is alive but is conscious. And then we have an evolutionary leap from something that is conscious, alive and conscious, but has no capacity to reason, no free will if you will, to some being, a new being called man, that has a capacity to reason and has a capacity for free will. That is not, I just made the case. And indeed, every piece of new knowledge, every piece of real knowledge and every value we as human beings have sought, we have only achieved it through the use of reason, through the use of reason. So this idea that you cannot, what did Ben say? Let's see again what he said. Like reliance on human reason, make an argument for human reason as an independent force. I just did. It's an independent force. It's a fact of reality. And since we know that we evolved, it's a fact of evolution. What argument beyond that can one make? It is the way in which we know reality. It is the way in which we discover truth. It is the way in which we adapt nature to fit our needs. It's the only way we can do it. Show me another way. So whether we have a detailed biological explanation for how it all works, well, of course we don't. We don't know a lot of things. You cannot, from an evolutionarily biological perspective, you can't. You can say that human beings are capable of using their brains in order to adapt to their environment. Human beings don't adapt to their environment. There's another one of the common fallacies in the world out there. Human beings do not adapt to their environment. We don't change our genes in order to adapt to our environment. Human beings adapt the environment to fit our needs. And this is the ultimate argument against environmentalism. We must change the environment. The way in which we survive is by changing our environment. So we don't adapt to our environment. We adapt the environment to fit us. That is reason is an evolutionary biological tool that allows us to do that. Pretty cool. Pretty pretty cool. And pretty much a fact. And denying of that fact is kind of bizarre. So reason is not a faculty. It's not an attribute of the individual. It's not our means of survival. What are you saying here, Ben? See, this is why this is going to take hours. You cannot say that human beings are capable of searching for truth. There is no such thing as truth in it. Of course there is such thing as truth. Truth is concurrence with reality. Truth is right there in front of you. I'm holding a pen. That is true. And the only way to discover truth is through reason. God does not create truth. You see, this is Plato. This is the platonic nonsense which Christianity, I mean, Judaism doesn't have this. This is pure Christianity. Truth is somewhere else. Truth is the world of forms. Truth is the word of God. Truth is the logos. And then it's true. Can't use reason to discover. Can't use it. There is no reason. There is no weight to discover. Now, truth is does it concur with reality? When I say I'm holding an iPhone right now, am I saying the truth or not? I exist. Is that true or not? Well, I mean, we've got eyes. Everything ultimately is brought down to century data. That's where, how we discover the world. That's what we know what truth is. Only reason, only with reason, is there such thing as truth. I mean, this is such mystical. I mean, it really is. It's such platonic, mystical nonsense. Right? There were Jewish plateness, absolutely. But Christianity anchored Plato at the very center of itself. He also had an impact on Judaism. Later, somebody like my monotheist brought in Aristotle and I think reformed Judaism somewhat and made it more Aristotelian. And I think that's why Jews are more thisworldly. And that's why modern Jews are more science oriented and stuff like that. It's because my monotheist influence. But Plato, this whole idea of the word, the truth with big capital letters, that is all Plato. And that requires revelation. And revelation is not reason. Even though Plato called it reason, it's not reason. You cannot say that human beings are capable of searching for truth. There is no such thing as truth in evolutionary biology. There's just what's effective and what's not effective. But that is a false dichotomy between truth and effective. If it turns out that this fruit is poison, then it's not effective. But it's also truth about that's not a good fruit. Don't eat it. But that's exactly about truth. Evolutionary biology has to allow us to discover what reality is. And the very fact that we can reshape reality, I mean reshape nature, we can reshape our environment, suggest that we discover truth all the time as biological entities. That's exactly what we do. It's not about whether it works or it doesn't work. That is, you know, nonsensical pragmatic philosophy, which then, God, where are you getting this from? Sorry. Everything is utilitarian in nature. You can't make the case for higher concepts like justice or freedom. Of course you can. Iron Man makes it all the time. All the time. And it's not a higher concept. It's a more abstract concept in that sense. It's higher. But it's not a higher concept in the sense of it comes from above. The definition of justice is given to us by God. Yeah, I can't derive it if it's given to us by God. But there is a definition of justice that's derived from human experience on this earth. And that's what freedom is. Freedom is something we've had to learn. And in that sense, what works and what doesn't work is very relevant. In Iron Man's terminology, the moral is the practical. And the practical is the moral. If you think about the right time frame, if you think about the right scope, the moral is the practical and the practical is the moral. There is no conflict between the two. See, but in his world, because truth is revealed, it's not induced, then there's no relationship between truth and the real world. If you are operating from a non-God-based universe, you might be able to live that way individually. You can be like Richard Dawkins and be an atheist and be a cultural Christian. I'm an atheist and I am not a cultural Christian. And I think many of you are too, atheists and not cultural Christians, even though you might like to listen to him once in a while and you might even like, I don't know, certain Christian affiliated music. I wonder why this is not working. My super chat tracker has somehow stopped working. I'm not sure why. That's not good. Oh, I guess I have to press that. It's working again. Cool. Sorry about that. So there we go. That's better. So yes, you don't have to be a cultural Christian if you're an atheist. You can be just an enjoyer of secular culture. I love secular culture. I don't like leftist culture, but I like secular culture. Not the same thing. But you cannot separate the church building that he is praising there off from what goes on inside the church. Yes. That's why I'm a little skeptical about churches, right? Unless there's a masterpiece by Corvaggio or by Michelangelo. And I get that they were also impacted by the church. I just wonder sometimes, they might go wondering, what would those guys be producing if there wasn't a church? God, what would have happened to Michelangelo if he wasn't raped by guilt, if he didn't feel like he was, you know, you know, this abandoning God, a disrespectful God or that God was horrible, you know, that he was not living up to God's expectations or whatever. What would happen to Michelangelo if he hadn't felt guilty about the fact that he was probably gay? What could he have produced? What would he have produced? I mean, think about it. Michelangelo's David, Michelangelo's Pieta, maybe the two greatest sculptures in all of human history. And then after that, they never live up to that. They never live up to the idealism. They never live up to the beauty. They never live up to, what is it, that secular nature of both of those that Pieta is the origin of it is, of course, Christianity. It's Mary holding the dead Jesus in arms, but it's completely secular sculpture. Michelangelo's David is the story of David, but who cares? It doesn't matter. It's a beautiful secular sculpture. Imagine, imagine if he had not been required to paint the stuff he didn't want to paint and it wasn't constantly required to build Muslims for dead popes and actually, and didn't have the burden of Christianity over him. Imagine if he had continued to sculpt David's and Pieta's. Yeah, we know he was full of guilt from his journals. It's not an educated guess. It's a reality. And we know what the guilt was, right? But yeah, you can pretend it wasn't, but the reality is that it's pretty clear what he was. But no matter what he was, he was riddled with guilt. You can see that in his journals. He was riddled with frustration. He was riddled with a fear of God. He was riddled by Christianity. It was a burden on his soul. Yeah, and I've looked at his sculptures and you can see the sculptures compare, compare. If you have the guts to compare his first Pieta and then his second Pieta, and then his final Pieta. And you can see what religion and what the Pope's politics have done to his soul, their soul. You don't have to read anything. It's in the marble. It's right there in the marble, right there in the marble. I've looked at some of the journals. I've not read all the journals. I've seen enough to be able to say confidently what I just said. And if you, you know, if you've read the journals and you disagree with me, show me, show me where Michelangelo is excited about life, motivated by life. Show me where Michelangelo is is just happy about his Christian values. He's being oppressed by Christianity, being oppressed by Christianity. You can see from the sketches, you can see exactly what the sculpture is going to be, particularly the way Michelangelo sculpted them. If you understand Michelangelo sculpture, I think I do in ways that a lot of people don't. You can see that. You can see the sculpture he is creating, even in the sketch, because all he does is window it down to what the final result is going to be. And if you think about his original Pieta and the kind of body Jesus has and the kind of power and strength and that relationship between Jesus and Mary in that original sculpture, and you look at the sculptures afterwards with Jesus' pathetic, drooping body and just the nature of the collapse. I mean, if you don't get that psychology, if you think about his dying slaves, if you think, I mean, again, the most magnificent sculptures ever made, you think about it dying slaves and you can't see the erosion in Michelangelo's soul when you see that God. Then I don't know what you're looking at. The church building is an outward manifestation of the soul that is the church. Yeah, it's a waste of real estate for the most part. The same thing is true of our civilization. Our civilization is built in a particular way, on particular frameworks and foundations. Yeah. The modern civilization we have today is a civilization built on the foundations, on the framework of a rejection of Christianity, a rejection of the ideas of Christianity, which is the basis for the Enlightenment. It's built on the notion that individuals have the capacity to reason, that they have the capacity to discover truth, all the things that you claim today, that sitting in your studio using YouTube and using cameras and using the latest, greatest technology, all built on modern science, which entail the rejection of Christianity, where they implicitly and in some cases explicitly think about Darwin. So no, this is our modern culture, our modern civilization for good and for ill is based on the Enlightenment. The ill is because people misunderstand the Enlightenment and have distorted and perverted it. And the good is that glimmer of continuation of the good within it. And when you destroy those foundations and frameworks, what you end up with is secularist pursuit of values that ends up undermining itself and eating itself. You end up with postmodernism. You don't have to end up with postmodernism. Not every secular idea ends up in postmodernism. Ain Rand certainly is not postmodernism. There are so many different strands of secular philosophy that are not postmodernism, almost all of them bad, but postmodernism is not the logical conclusion of secularism. It's not the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment. Ain Rand is. Ain Rand is the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment. The reason that postmodernism is a natural outgrowth is because it is a natural decay. You go from a thriving civilization, an Enlightenment civilization that was in fact rooted in Judeo-Christian values. This is a thriving civilization, a thriving civilization. I mean, until the Enlightenment, sorry, until the Renaissance rediscovered Greece, Christian civilization is not thriving. It is a decayed civilization. It is a dark civilization. It is an anti-man civilization. It's only the discovery of Greek art and Greek philosophy that elevates Western civilization starting in the Renaissance. And it does so in spite of Christianity. It does so with Christianity fighting every achievement. I mean, just read the continuation, the part two of the closing of the Western mind, which is called the reopening of the Western mind. And that reopening of the Western mind doesn't come from religion. Religion is what closed the Western mind. The reopening of the Western mind comes from secular thinkers. It comes from science. It comes from discovery of the Greeks. It comes from thinkers. And yes, some of those thinkers are religious and they're compartmentalizing. It comes from Aquinas bringing Aristotle back in. But Aquinas' books are considered heresy not long after he dies. Now, nobody takes that too seriously because they're pushing civilization forward, but not Christian civilization. They're pushing Greek civilization forward and Christianity is desperately holding back unsuccessfully, unsuccessfully. Why, for example, when it comes to capitalism, Adam Smith wrote theory of moral sentiments before he wrote Wealth of Nations. No, I mean, this is amazing to me. Note that Ben Shapiro thinks that the only place you can write a theory of moral sentiments from the perspective of religion. Maybe, I'm not saying this is what Adam Smith did, but you can write a book on virtues and claim that capitalism is based on morality without going to religion. Morality is not equal religion. You can have a secular morality. I hope that people in this chat agree with that. Maybe. Theory of moral sentiments is an entire book about virtue and necessity thereof. And then he wrote Wealth of Nations, which was predicated on the idea that when you have a civilization that does, in fact, promote virtue, capitalism can thrive. The same. That's true. Only in a society that promotes virtue, capitalism can thrive. That's right. But does that mean Christian virtue? Oh, sorry. Judo-Christian virtue? Or could it be a different set of virtues? Could it be a secular set of virtues? A secular set of virtues that is derived from, oh God, what works? A secular set of virtues that is derived from biology, from evolution, that is appropriate for man's life, and therefore appropriate on which to build an economic system, a political system. Man needs freedom in order to survive as man, as a biological entity called man. That's why he needs freedom. That's why he needs capitalism. What does that have anything to do with religious virtues? Zilch, nada, nothing. Same thing is true of things like free speech. These all exist on deeper foundations. Those deeper foundations are- Yeah, free speech exists on the deeper foundation of the importance of reason to human life. Again, importance of reason, not importance of faith. Ligious in nature. Trying to separate those off. Pretending that they're the natural state of the world is historically ignorant. History is, in fact, contingent. The enlightenment rests on Christian bases. No, the enlightenment rests on the Renaissance, which rests on very explicitly, on Greece, on Greece, and indeed the rejection of the culture that was pre-enlightenment. Rejection of the Christian ideas. Sorry, pre-Renaissance or pre-Renaissance. And the discovery of humanism and the discovery of science and the attempts by the Christians to suppress new knowledge. And in spite of that, in spite of that, the great achievement of civilization, the great achievement of scientists and thinkers and philosophers was, was to reject the church in favor of new knowledge. And ultimately to reject Plato, including his Christianity, for Aristotle, reason, science, and secularism. Pretending that it does not means that you end up severing the two, and an enlightenment severed from its Christian bases ends in terror. No, enlightenment severed from its Christian bases doesn't end in terror. It ended in ends in the Declaration of Independence. It ends with the founding of the United States of America. It actually ends in gulags and death camps. The cost of living has already increased 17% this year. Skip this. Or how, for example, freedom of speech is just a uber-mench. Because you have- This is the point that Nietzsche was making near the end of the 19th century. He was making the case that when you kill God, you don't in fact end up with a higher secular humanism. You end up with a pagan pursuit of power. That is what Nietzsche claimed, absolutely. But was Nietzsche right? I don't think so. And again, there is a philosophy that's an alternative to Christianity. There is a philosophy that's completely secular. There's based on reason that provides moral guidance. Provides moral guidance. And that is objectivism. That is Iron Man's philosophy.