 You know, those of you who've been following for a long time probably know this already, but it's worth repeating this and clarifying this. You know, Ayn Hirsi Ali, in my view, is one of the real heroes of the post-911, really the last 20 years. She is unbelievably brave. She has a phenomenal life story. I'll highlight that a little bit in a minute. She has stood up against Islamism in the face of death threats, in the face of people she knew well being murdered, and she stood up against them and challenged them. She is a keen observer of the Islamic world, but more importantly, a real valuer when it comes to Western civilization. Just, what was it, a week ago, two weeks ago when I was at the Jordan Peterson Conference, I mentioned that I thought she was one of the best people up on stage. She gets the West, and she is unequivocally a great hero, a hero, because she has the right ideas for the most part. We'll get to where she doesn't, but she has the right ideas for the most part. She articulates them. She speaks them. She's incredibly articulate and intelligent, and she does so in the face of real obstacles, threats to her life. And she has achieved what she has achieved in spite of the fact that this is a woman who grew up under an Islamist regime, with an Islamist family being taught at a Muslim Brotherhood school, taught is the wrong term. I mean, brainwashed in a Islamic Muslim Brotherhood schools, brainwashed to hate life, brainwashed to hate Jews, brainwashed to hate, to sacrifice all for Allah, to live by religious dogma exclusively. So here's a woman that has stood up to religion, managed as a teenager to escape, somehow established herself in the West, became a known atheist, and a known opponent of radical Islam. She was a member of the parliament in the Netherlands as a young woman, just a few years away from being a refugee, and just a few years away from being an Islamist in the post-911 period. She saw her friend and a collaborator, Van Gogh, the film producer, the film director, murdered in the streets of Amsterdam. And when the state of the Netherlands wouldn't grant her security, wouldn't provide for her security, she fled the Netherlands. I remember that. I remember already admiring her back when she was in the Netherlands, and then she, you know, seeing her manage to escape to the United States, or get to the United States, and being embraced by a community of intellectuals in the United States, and find a home here. And again, she continued in the United States to be a clear, passionate advocate, not only for the evils of Islam and Islamism, but also for the values, at least some of the values, primarily the value of free speech, in the West. And she was unbending. She was unbending. Unbending. And, you know, I was a fan. And I met her, I managed, I met her once. We talked. I can't remember when this was. It was, I think it was in our Montpelerin Society meeting years ago. And here, see, Ali has read Ayn Rand. She told me at the time she had read Ayn Rand. But she was not attracted to the ideas of Ayn Rand. She was attracted to the ideas of David Hume, of kind of the Scottish Enlightenment. She was attracted to the ideas of Richard Russell. And what attracted, in particular, to David Hume was skepticism. What Ayn Hirsielli embraced was, in spite of her principal defense of Western moral values, what ultimately stuck with her, what ultimately she embraced as a guiding philosophy in this new secular world that she adopted, was skepticism. And you can understand it to some extent. I mean, what appealed to her about, I think, the writings of the new atheists was the skepticism of religion. And she embraced that skepticism of religion. And she associated anything absolutist, an absolutist view of the world, absolutist moral code, an absolutist view as religious. So while she wasn't absolutist on certain issues, it only went so deep. In spite of that, at this latest conference, she was on a panel and she talked about the difference between the West and the rest of the world, the West is focused on life. She was incredibly, incredibly dignified and incredibly brave and incredibly sharp and true in a way that people like Jordan Peterson and others just aren't. They're wishy-washy, ambiguous, mumbo jumbo kind of stuff. She is clear. She also, I think, important to understand what is going on. She also married Neil Ferguson, the British scholar, the historian, conservative. So I have to admit that when yesterday she posted on Twitter, that's why I saw it anyway, X. She posted an essay, basically declaring herself no longer an atheist, basically declaring that she had now embraced Christianity. To me, this was a major blow. It was unbelievably sad, unbelievably disappointing, but also, I think, a further indication of the fact that the secular world is failing. It is failing all around us. Maybe one more step towards Lena Peekoff's predictions in DIMM. But personally, it's just a failure. Failure of all of us who advocate for secular values. Now, I don't really think that because I'm not sure you could have actually gotten to her. But the point is, it's a failure. And more than that, it is sad. It is truly sad that a person who came so far is willing to go backwards. Well, of course, not to where she came from, thank God, but backward still, to fundamentally a rejection of reason in the name of faith. So I want to go over what she says her reasons are, because I think these need to be taken seriously. I think she is one in a long line of intellectuals and commentators out there that are following this path. We all know what happened to Dave Rubin. And look, I like Dave Rubin really friendly and everything. But Ayan is just, Ayan Hirsi Ali is, she is a major figure. And she's a major figure as an intellectual. She's a real thinker and a real intellectual force out there. Dave is great, but it's just not the same. Dave, I'd say, I'm not surprised. Ayan Hirsi Ali, I am surprised. But it's more than just even them. I mean, you saw, we did a show here a few weeks ago on Kissin, the guy from Trigonometry who published the essay about the problems with atheists. And he suggested that he was turning towards religion, even though not Christianity in any sense or not anything more substantial than that. So I think this is a real trend. It's a trend that in many respects, you can see Jordan Peterson ushering, Jordan Peterson creating the culture for, the arguments for. And you can see here Jordan Peterson's influence on the culture more broadly. So I want to go through her arguments and discuss them and see whether they make any sense or not. I'm going to be back in one second. So I've got a message in front of me. I've taken out a few paragraphs that I'm going to read you. We're going to discuss them as we go along. But we can see, we can discuss and debate the impact that they have. This is in who would. So I want to cover this. I want to go over this and then comment on it as we go along. So rather than watch a video, I'm just going to read you a segment from the essay. She published this essay on Unheard. You can find it on Twitter. You can find it in a lot of different places. So first she writes about upbringing in Islam and the challenges we face from Islam. But broader than the challenges we face through Islam, she talks about the challenges the West faces from Russia. The challenges the West faces from China. I mean, here is a woman who understands that there is evil in the world. There are bad guys in the world that these people want us, if you will, dead, or they want us subjugated, whether it is the kind of fascism of Putin or whether it is the fascism of Xi or whether it is the Islamo-fascism of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the rest of them, the theocratic fascism of all of them. She understands that there is an enemy here. She understands the values that at stake because she has been on that side. And again, she is intelligent. And she's saying that the challenge right now in many respects is unprecedented. And I think she's right. Not only are we seeing, you know, what's going on in Israel, Hamas, and you're seeing this on university campuses. What you're seeing on university campuses, I don't know how many of you are following this, but it truly is unbelievably horrific and it doesn't seem to stop. And they just get, this seems to be getting bolder and bolder. 300,000 people marched yesterday in London in support of Hamas. They won't say it that way, but that's what it means. The anti-Semitism is overt. It's no longer being hidden. This is true throughout the West, throughout much of Western Europe, but particularly in the United States and in the UK. At the same time, we've got Putin on the rise, or at least, you know, trying to assert himself in Ukraine, engaged in horrific actions in Ukraine, and where the 300,000 people in support of the Ukrainian babies that were killed. Where the 300,000 in the streets in support of Ukrainian sovereignty. None of that, right? So Putin gets a free ride to a logic stand. The West is very tentative in its support. It talks a big game, but doesn't act. And indeed, Putin has no support for many of people in his early, I think, associates with, on the right. Has no support for people on the left, on the far left. I mean, Ukraine doesn't. Putin has their support. And then, of course, the one place that everybody agrees is the enemy, and everybody seems to hate uniformly, which is China. And, yeah, the West faces the biggest set of challenges to its existence, certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but arguably since World War II. Since the rise of Nazism and the rise of communism, that period in the 20th century, where it looked like collectivism was going to win and overwhelm the rest of the West. We now face the challenges of the West, we now face challenges equal to that, and they're multiple, just like they were back then. And the question is, how do we survive these challenges? And for Ryan Hosea Lee, this is a big issue. She understands, she understands what the West's failure would mean for all of us, for all of us. And again, you can see that in October 7th in Israel, that's what the failure means. It means the barbarians control everything. It means the barbarians rape and pillage and destroy civilization. So here's what she writes, quote, We endeavor to fend off these threats with modern secular tools, military, economic, diplomatic, and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease, or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We're either running out of money with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in technological race with China. But we can't fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question, what is it that unites us? Now, I agree with all of that. She's absolutely right. Our defense, our defense of Western civilization has been weak, pathetic, appeasing, so far. We have compromised, we have sold out, we have bended the knee, we have given in. We have appeased over and over and over and over again. Yes, we have a big military we cannot use. And yes, economies aren't tatters. Not that anybody else is better, but economies aren't tatters because we must appease every pressure group that exists out there. And I agree that to win, we must know what we are fighting for. To win, we have to have values. We have to know the value of what we're defending. And for that, there has to be meaning to the we. Who is we? What is Western civilization? What are we defending? What are we fighting for? We know who we're fighting. And yes, to some extent, we're fighting against barbarism, murder, rape, pillage. But what is the positive that unites us? What makes us all part of the same team? And what are the values, the positive values, not the negative values we're trying to avoid, but the positive values we're trying to achieve? And I agree completely that we have no such values explicitly articulated by the leadership of our culture. And this is where people like the new atheists, but also like people like Jordan Peterson and other intellectuals left and right, have failed us, failed us completely, thoroughly, deeply. What unites us? We have no clue. Skepticism, skepticism. And by the way, what is the big difference between skepticism and relativism and moral subjectivism and ultimately woke in all its nonsense? Not much, not much separates those concepts. She writes, the response that God is dead seems insufficient. This is in terms of what unites us. Absolutely. God is dead is empty. God is dead has no positive content, but it's upon us to provide that positive content. So she continues. So too does the attempt to find solace in quote, the rule-based liberal international order. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And this is the great frustration. This is a complete misreading of our history. Is it a complete misunderstanding of the role of ideas in our history? It is a failure, a failure, an intellectual failure, a moral failure. It is a failure to understand Western civilization and what it represents. It is a failure to see who your allies are, what we're fighting for, and what is truly, who is truly the enemy. It's a tragic failure. It's a failure I see everywhere. Every place I go, I discuss my talk at the University of Utah and how offended they were at the very thought of Western civilization. Never my interpretation of what it actually was. So it's true that the West has no answer to what it actually was. To what it is that unites us. It is true that God is dead and the rule-based liberal international order are not good things to be fighting for. They're not concrete. They're not ideals. They're not inspired. They do not move people. They have intellectual vacuous. They mean nothing. Mean nothing. They have no positive content. But what we need is a real understanding of Western civilization. What we need is a positive philosophy. What we need are positive values, not the old trot and irrational undermining and undercutting values of a Judeo-Christian tradition that didn't lead to Western civilization. But Western civilization evolved from a rejection of those values. At least the rejection of significant number of those values. Not enough of them and that's our problem. That's our problem. Indeed, one of the reasons maybe that our military economic diplomatic is all geared towards appeasing and is all focused on weakness. Maybe, maybe, maybe the reason for that is the Judeo-Christian, primarily Christian, view of morality, of altruism, of sacrifice, of suffering, which sadly so many of our secular friends have embraced. She goes on, quote, that legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity. Really? Really? The church was designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity? Tell that to Galileo? Tell that to the Christian sects that were slaughtered? Tell that to other people who died in the 30-year war between Catholics and Protestants? Dignity, there is dignity in bowing in front of the altar and placing the body of Christ in your mouth? There is freedom? Freedom? Where is there freedom in the Judeo-Christian tradition? What kind of freedom are we talking about? Political freedom? No, not until the Enlightenment. Economic freedom? Nope. Tell that to the to their to their users who are slaughtered because they dare charge interest on money. What kind of freedom? Religious freedom? What about all the pagans that were put to the sword because they refused to convert to Christianity? I mean, history 101, simple. For 1500 years, Christianity was a brutal, oppressive, anti-human religion dedicated to death and destruction. It was the slumbers today. Talks about the massacre in Verden, which is one famous example with tens of thousands of pagans were slaughtered, but that's just one example. Read the history of Christianity, what was done in Eastern Europe, in Northern Europe, in Scandinavia, all over the world. Northern Africa, what was done, not just to pagans, what was done to Christians who didn't quite agree on your particular version of Christianity? Freedom? Now, it is true that Christianity has been watered down. The Christianity has been secularized. That Christianity now claims to uphold, claims to uphold human life, freedom and dignity. But even then, look at the integralists, the national conservatives, are they advocating for freedom? Dignity? Who's dignity? Human life? Some, but not all. And how was Christianity watered down? What was it watered down with? It didn't evolve. Christianity didn't evolve. It was watered down. It was watered down with reason. It was watered down with a respect for individual rights. It was watered down with enlightenment values and enlightenment thinking. It was watered down by the age of reason and the age of science. It was watered down by science. There's only so many times you can claim that the sun goes around the earth. At some point, you can't do that anymore. At some point, you have to acknowledge that the Bible is wrong because reality just is what it is. They didn't do that willingly, kicking and screaming and objecting and slaughtering and killing and silencing all the way. The legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition is not safeguarding human life. It is not freedom. And it is not dignity. There is no omnic-created equal in Judaism. There is no freedom in Christianity. There is no individual dignity in Christianity. There's subservience. There is the bend to God. There is your commitment to sacrifice for the other, God, the group, whomever. That is not dignity. She writes, designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity. From the nation's state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. Really, I mean, the nation's state arose out of maybe the most secular, among the most secular periods in human history, the founding of America and therefore, and later, the nationalist movements of Europe, but not exactly driven and motivated by Christianity, even if they were Christian. The rule of law? Christianity, like all religions, is authoritarian. It is not the rule of law, as we understand it, as the protection of individual rights. There are no individual rights, political rights. In Christianity, at least if they are, then for 1500 years, they ignored them completely. And the institutions of science, health and learning, this is the legacy of Christianity. There was no learning in Greece. There was no learning in Rome, but Greece is the prime example. We needed Christianity to do this. And institutions of science, Christianity did everything it could to subvert and undermine and undercut the institutions of science. Science became science, and the institutions of science became important in spite of, not because of. Now, she writes, as Tom Wood has shown in his marvelous book, Dominion, a book I just bought and downloaded, so I want to read this book, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms, she says, of the market, really, of conscious, conscience, and of the press, find their roots in Christianity, the press. I mean, what was the extent of you, if you read about this, all the way to the 19th century, early part of the 19th century was the church trying to suppress, for example, the writings of Spinoza, to exclude them, to ban them, and to persecute those who actually printed them and read them. Luckily, in Amsterdam, there was very little religion in that sense, in the Netherlands, and they were the ones printing Spinoza and others like crazy. Where is this roots of a marketplace in Christianity? I mean, Islam has a more favorable view, Islam has a more favorable view of markets than Christianity does. It's harder for the rich man to go to heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle, just one of a gazillion examples within the New Testament that do not, in any way, support the idea that Christianity allowed markets to evolve. See, she says, and so I came to realize that Russell, this is bird-ride Russell, and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilization built in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is the story of the West, woods and all. Russell's critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope. She fails to differentiate here between what evolved in the Enlightenment, the marginalization of Christianity, the watering down of Christianity, the great contributions of Spinoza on the philosophers of that period and thinkers of that period. She fails to see how even during the Renaissance, there was a systematic reappraisal of religion, a challenging of religious dogma, a watering down of religious ideas, and an embrace, an embrace of secular principles. Instead, it's just one progression, Christianity. This is just a logical consequence of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is not. It's the rejection of that progression. It is a revolution in thinking which the Enlightenment represents. So, can we confront Islam? Can we confront Russia? Can we confront China? And if so, how? What unites us? Well, I've talked about this many times. What unites us is not atheism. What unites us is not some liberal order. What unites us should unite us, not does unite us, but should unite us, should unite us, are three ideas that came out of the Enlightenment, three ideas that are essentially all Western civilization, three ideas that are necessary, maybe even sufficient to fight Islamism, to fight Putin mystical Christianity, to fight China, and to fight our mystics at home, our Christians at home, reason, individualism, and political liberty. In that order, because reason, everything flows from it. Reason, individualism, political liberty, those are the ideas that should unite us in the great civilizational struggle that we are facing, and to the extent that we reject them, as sadly, I and Hirsi Ali just did, to the extent that the West says, no, no, no, my faith is better than your faith. How do I know free speech is good? Well, because it's a tradition. It comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's what makes it good. And the Judeo-Christian tradition is good. She continues to say, to me, this freedom of consciousness, speech has passed the greatest benefit of Western civilization. There's a lot of truth to that. Greatest benefit, not the source, the benefit. It has not come naturally to man. It does not. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. I want to scream. I want to yell. Out of frustration. It was these debates that advanced science and reason diminished cruelty, suppressed superstition, and built institutions to order and protect life while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ's teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer. No, Christianity did not grow its dogmatic stage. Kicking and screaming and fighting all the way, Christianity was watered down by secular forces. It was watered down by science. It was watered down by philosophy, by ideas, by philosophers. Philosophers who were flawed, significantly flawed, but good enough to show us the weaknesses and the inconsistencies and the challenges that Christianity presented. And those philosophers didn't come out of Christianity. Yes, they studied Christianity as everybody did. They were Christians as everybody was. But the whole point is they were challenging Christianity. It is so frustrating. It is not out of Jewish and Christian communities. Jews had very little to say about this kind of stuff, for example. And it wasn't Christian communities. It was communities of oppressed intellectuals who were at the fringes, who were not embraced by Christian communities. Take Spinoza, who were shunned by his own Jewish community, and was not embraced by Christianity, but was embraced by a modern, secular group of intellectuals in Northern Europe. And Christ's teaching? Who gets to decide what Christ's teaching actually implied? Who gets to decide which one of these, what he says, what it means, how it means? Does Ein Hersey-Ali get to interpret it? The modern Christian zu did. Which sect of Protestantism actually reflects this? Did the Catholic Church reflect it? Maybe Sixth Century Christianity was the right Christianity according to Christ. How do we know about what standard do we measure? How does she evaluate western civilization as having any benefit? What makes freedom of conscious and speech important and crucial and so good, the greatest benefit of western civilization? What makes it so? By the standard of Christianity, by the standard of God, by the standard of mystical revelation, by the standard of whom we will not win. We will not win against woke. We will not win against Putin, Okshi, or Islam by joining them in rejecting reason and embracing faith. We will not win by, if we don't understand our history, if we don't understand our intellectual roots, and we don't understand all of ideas in history. We will not win by shouting from the top of the mountain that our dogma is better than your dogma. This is a battle of ideas. Everybody we're opposed to, supposedly, that all the enemies we share with Ein Hersey-Ali are all mystics. By joining them in becoming mystics, we do not win, we lose. And even if we win the specific exchange, we lose in the long run because we become like them. I mean, the great failing of Christianity, but even greater, the great failing of secular philosophy, the great failure of Butcher and Russell, the great failure of Nietzsche, the great failure of the new atheists, is that they will not challenge Christian morality. They will not advocate for reason and individualism, maybe political freedom, but certainly not reason and individualism. That they will not advocate a reason-based philosophy and a reason-based morality. They will not stand for something really new and radical. That is, there's right there in the Enlightenment if only they were willing to look and see, if only they were willing to let go of their Judeo-Christian traditional values. So this is, you know, she has fallen into the trap. You cannot fight the enemy without values. The only source of values is religion, and therefore we need religion in order to fight the enemy. This same trap Scott falls into, I guess. But this is all nonsense. And again, by doing so, you become the enemy. You become him. Now, there's no question, there's some really good Christians. I'm sure Ayn Hissier-Lee will be one of the good ones. Her husband, now, now focusing for the most part, is one of the good ones. There are a number of others, but there are also some really, really bad ones. And you know who the really, really bad ones are? They're the ones who are more consistent. They're the ones who take the Christianity more seriously. They're the ones who embrace the Christianity and really are going to fight for it. Who is going to win the battle for Christianity, not the battle for western civilization, but the battle for Christianity? Is it going to be the watered down version? Or the principled version? I fear it is the principled one that wins in the end. So there is one reason Ayn Hissier-Lee has turned Christian and has rejected atheism. Of course, atheism just, I mean, I think this is obvious to this group. Atheism is nothing. Atheism is an negation. It is not a positive ideology. It doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't propose anything. It just says God as that concept is conveyed by religion is meaningless. There's no there there. It rejects faith. But it doesn't even elevate reason. You've got lots of people out there who call themselves atheists and who are believers in, I don't know, Mother Earth or the original sin of man or a million other mystical ideas. Western civilization is not atheism. It is not skepticism. Western civilization is not a rules based liberal international order. It is not God is dead. Western civilization is reason, individualism, political freedom, and everything that that implies. That is worth fighting for. That we can defeat anybody on. But that's hard. That's hard to explain to people. And when you're surrounded by intellectuals as we are today who are all kind of religious, who kind of advocate for individualism, like Jordan Peterson says, oh, he's free individualism. And then a lot of his prescriptions are collectivist. He's for reason. But then his mumbo jumbo is completely mystical. He's for political freedom unless you disagree with him. And then maybe the state should regulate you to be a true advocate of reason, individualism and political freedom, political liberty is a lonely job. It's a lonely job. I know, because I'm one of the few who do it. And God is it lonely. The second reason she gives, so I've already gone 50 minutes, but this is going to be a long show today. Bear with me. We have 212 people watching. Let me just say, please, if you're watching and if you're not a subscriber, please consider subscribing. Agree or disagree with me, I am going to challenge your beliefs and shake things up and cause some cognitive dissonance and get you thinking. So please, if you're not a subscriber already, please subscribe. Also, like the show before you leave if you can. We got 99 likes. That should be well over 200. So please like the show. It helps with the algorithms. All this stuff helps with the algorithms. So she writes, yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realization that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without spiritual solace undurable. Indeed, very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question. What is the meaning and purpose of life? Here you get to the heart of it, and really this is the source of the other, the lack of personal values, a need for purpose and meaning, and being educated by Muslims in her past, by the Jordan Peterson's of the world today. The purpose and meaning can only be found outside of you. The purpose and meaning must be something elevated above you, more important than you. Every politician left and right cites this. Every intellectual out there explains this. Purpose and meaning are external. They're out there that can be found by searching. And atheists and non-antheists all agree on this. I mean, where does Sam Harris find purpose and meaning? I saw an interview he just did with Trigonometry. I saw a section of it, him and Eric Weinstein. And he says, yeah, it's really sad that people can't find purpose and meaning where it really is. Where is purpose and meaning according to Sam Harris? In a psychedelic experience. I mean, he says, if only once psychedelics become more common, once psychedelics becomes more acceptable, then people will discover a purpose and meaning in them. In a state of consciousness elicited by drugs. A state of consciousness detached from actual reality. In a state of consciousness where one is not in control of one's own mind. That's where you will find purpose. That's where you will find meaning. This is Sam Harris. This is the advocate for reason. This is the secularist. This is the atheist. And I like Sam Harris. I like a lot of his stuff. But that is insanity. So if purpose and meaning have to be found in a mystical experience, then I don't need to take drugs. I can just believe in God and meditate to God. Yeah, I think, I think just as an aside, I think Sam Harris is one of the best cultural commentators out there by far. By far. Very few better than him. His analysis of so many issues. Yes, I know he denies free will. They all deny free will. Who exactly upholds free will? Stephen Pinkett denies free will in some respect. He also is defending free will right now. They all deny it in some sense. And yet he is still the best commentator, among the best commentators on current events. He was excellent on Trump. He's been excellent on woke. He's been excellent on free speech. He's been excellent on, I don't know, even on gun laws. He's really, really good. But his advocacy for psychedelics as the source of meaning and purpose of life is nuts. Nuts. Yes, David Deutsch promotes free will. One of the few intellectuals out there who does that good for him. I'm a big I'm a fan, right? Up to a point. Sam is terrible on a number of things. Yes, I know, but he's great when he's great. And if you can't see that, I can't help you. So the idea here is that meaning and purpose have to be outside and meaning and purpose of the exclusive realm of religion and psychedelics, I guess. But what about the idea? The meaning and purpose are in our lives. A choice as we make or we decide how we decide to shape our life, our material life, and our spiritual life. What about the purpose of living a good life, living a moral life, elevating your life to the best you can be to living the best that you can be to being a moral person. Morality as I ran conceives it, not as these Christians conceive of it. Shouldn't that be the purpose of life living? Being the best at living you can be. Why does the purpose of life entail something outside of you and therefore always entails sacrifice of your own values, sacrifice of who you are, sacrifice of your independence, sacrifice of your own mind? She goes on to write, Russell and other activist atheists believe that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. We should, but Russell of course is an enemy of reason, properly understood. But the God whole, the void left by the retreat of the church has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. All true? Does that mean it cannot be filled by reason and rationality? It cannot be filled by rational values and the pursuit of rational values and a rational life? The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being in action, mostly by engaging virtue signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.C. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy, quote, when men choose not to believe in God, they do not therefore believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything. But that is such a narrow view of the world. Is everybody doing that? Is everybody who is a secularist engaged in virtue signaling theater? Is everybody joining modern cults? It's true, many people are. It's true, it is a real problem. But is the solution at an ancient cult instead of a modern cult? And isn't part of the reason that there's virtue signaling on behalf of a victimized minority and doomed planet, isn't it? Partially because of the altruism that Christianity teaches us, the original sin that Christianity teaches us, do we have to believe in nothing or can we believe in rational values? In this nihilistic vacuum she continues, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can't withstand China, Russia, and Iran, she goes back to this. If we can't explain to our population why it matters that we do, yes, I agree with that. We can't fight woke ideology, if we can't defend the civilization that it is trying to destroy. Yes, what is that civilization, Ayan Hirsi Ali? You have to think about what that civilization really is. It's not the Judeo-Christian tradition. And we can't count Islamism with purely secular tools. Yes, we can't. And how? It's the only way to count to it. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok. True. But why are videos on TikTok the symbol of a secular country? They're not. The symbol of hedonism and nihilism, the symbols of emptiness. And most of the people on TikTok would probably say they believe in God and probably say they were part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, most woke people, here's something I would guarantee you, most woke people are religious or at least believe in God and think of themselves as part of that Judeo-Christian tradition. It's only through reason. It's only through rational values. It's only through valuing your own life and understanding what value your own life requires, demands of you, that you can actually A, live a happy life and B, challenge all the enemies that we face. She says, The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story. Absolutely. Embedded in the foundational text of Islam to attract, engage and mobilize Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. Unfortunately, there's no need to look for some new age concoction and medication and mindfulness. I think that's an attack on Sam Harris. Christianity has it all. Yeah, except liberty, except freedom, except dignity, except truth. By the way, no way in the entire essay does she claim Christianity is true. No way in the entire essay does she say she's come to the conclusion that God is real. She can't find purpose, so she needs somebody to give her purpose. She can't fight Islam, so she's looking for another tribe to join to be able to fight Islam. And I'm being ungenerous here on purpose. I really do respect Ein Hursi Ali. So this is why it's so shocking and upsetting. So she says that is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapped atheist. Of course, I will have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church every each Sunday. But I have recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief have to offer. There you have it guys. This is what the world is coming to. And this is what you should fear. You should really, really fear.