 A lot of the secular movements that have come from the 19th century on that have come to dominate wokeism as the most recent but even communism seem to be inspired by religion. They seem to reject religion and yet embrace often its epistemology and its morality. Truth is revealed and the morality is a morality of altruism. So maybe let's go through a few examples and see how that manifests itself. I don't know if you want to start with communism or if you're comfortable doing that? We could, sure. I was telling you before the show started that because I've been doing this research on the religious roots of altruism and doing this talk on St. Augustine at Okon. I've been reading a lot of Augustine and the connection to socialism and communism isn't the point of the talk but that gives me a good opportunity to share the following which I came across while I was reading The City of God, which is this massive 1400-page tome. Book 5, Chapter 18 of The City of God. The Christians make a common property of their riches with a far more excellent purpose, namely, so that they may distribute to each according to his need in compliance with what is written in the Acts of the Apostles with no one calling anything his own in all things being held in common. A doctrine, by the way, that Augustine practiced when he lived a monastic existence and founded what amount ended up being the Augustinian order and wrote the rules for all subsequent monastic orders. I mean they were the original communists, the Christian monastics, and Augustine was right there to explain to them why well because you should be humble and not be proud. You shouldn't claim any of your property for yourself but you should share it in common with others and admittedly in that part of the book he's described and what he was advocating with regard to monasticism was a voluntary arrangement but it's not like Augustinian Christianity has any principled basis for making a case for individual freedom. I mean he advocates slavery later in the city of God and he says you're a slave to God. Part of being humble means recognizing that you are a slave to God and in fact politically speaking you're probably better off being a slave in many cases because the way he puts it is better to be a slave to man than it is to be a slave to sin. So not much of a case there for you know why it should always be a voluntary arrangement. No, he's percussion. I mean he comes up he gives the justification for kind of campaigns to convert people to Christianity. And why the heretics should be tortured and even relatively you know modest heretics, not even the ones who are disagreeing in big things. Like he wants to torture the Donatists who have all the exact same dogma. They just don't happen to think that the Catholic Church has preserved its apostolic succession so they have different communion rituals torture them. So it's that's just one example and there's many others that you can see throughout history. One that is people interested look up the name Rudolf, sorry Moses, Moses Hess, who was a who's raised Jewish in the 19th century and lost his religion and worked to look for an alternative. I worked without rest to rediscover my God whom I had lost. I had to have a God and I did find him after a long search after a terrible fight in my own heart. He went on to substitute Christianity's concept of heaven for socialism's concept of heaven on earth and Hess is the one who introduced basic socialist ideas to angles and marks. And so there's another example you can you can look to or just fast forward to I think two years ago Pope Francis writes an encyclical called Fratelli Tutti which means brothers all and argues on the basis of some of the same kinds of Augustinian ideas that I just mentioned along with St. Ambrose who was Augustine's mentor for why if you are holding private property to yourself you're in effect stealing it from the poor because it really belongs to the poor. And so therefore when government redistributes wealth it's not violating anybody's rights it's just returning to the poor what was stolen from them in the first place because after all these all these goods were created by God and given to man in common and it's only the prideful selfishness of men that has separated what God had joined. And so there's just no religious basis for anything like private property rights and I'll go one step further there's there's you sometimes hear people say that okay Christianity has all kinds of flaws and irrationalities but you have to give it credit for at least one thing that it's got this special respect for the individual soul, individual salvation. Ayn Rand herself said this in certain letters that she wrote this is something I disagree with Ayn Rand about like I do not I mean I think that might that's maybe true of the way that many modern Christians have sort of retroactively interpreted their their religion in light of the enlightenment but if you go back to someone like Augustin who's you know one of the four doctors of the church the one of the founding fathers of the religion who defined all the core doctrines I don't see any basis for saying he has any respect for the importance of the individual soul and you see so much evidence to the contrary you see for instance the fact I mean his idea of original sin is a form of determinism and it means you have no free will but free will is the essential core of individualism if you can't if you don't control your life if you're instead predestined by God for salvation or damnation there's no individualism there and it's more than that like there's this concept he has called that he probably many have probably heard of as the body of Christ it's the idea that the church forms a collective and in especially in the afterlife when we we are separated from when we're purified and no longer tied to the the lust of the flesh we merge into a into a great collective sacrifice for the sake of God and I can read passages where he says stuff like this and it's there's there's no individualism there it's it's I want to escape from this mortal coil separate myself from the sufferings of this life and enter into a kind of nirvana where all is forgotten in the afterlife there's no individual soul left there yeah and it's it's interesting because there's a little bit of that in kind of Marxist utopia at the end and there's it and it does seem like sadly Augustine Augustine is making a comeback these days among Christians well he was quoted in the Wall Street Journal a month ago by Peggy Noonan about why we shouldn't be prideful and create new technology and that's why we need to worry about AI that's right so it's and Josh Josh Hawley is a huge scene Augustine fan that wouldn't surprise me he writes a lot he's quite feel quite intellectual and he writes quite a bit about Augustine thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show if you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me you get value from listening you get value from watching show your appreciation you can do that by going to Iran book show dot com slash support by going to patreon subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution uh on any one of those any one of those channels also if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live and for you those of you who already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show thank you i very much appreciate it