 And yeah, so it is the biggest conspiracy. Of course, the next topic we're actually going to talk about is the conspiracy within the big conspiracy, which is the whole child abuse issue in the Catholic Church, the travesty. And it seems only to be growing now and more and more revelations and also revelations. That's a good word. But more and more facts are being discovered about what these Catholic priests have been doing and the cover-ups in the Catholic Church itself and the cover-ups within the media in the United States. I liked that movie a few years ago about the Boston Globe spotlight, it was very good in terms of revealing and also the resistance within the paper, the politics, the mayor, the kind of rationalization the church was giving, it was very, very well done. So if you haven't watched it, I encourage everybody to go watch spotlight, but you in an article connected with the new proclamation from the Pope about the death penalty and the idea that he's now come out completely against the death penalty and before it was more tentative and now it's more absolute. Now those two connected and I want to talk about the whole issue of moral authority and what that represents. Well, so there were some people who thought that they might be connected in that the timing was interesting, the church released its revision to the Catechism on the death penalty right around the time that there was this big scan, the latest iteration of the scandal was brewing in various places around the world in South America and also here in Pennsylvania and so they said well this is just a distraction, they want people to debate about this rather than about the scandal and there might be some element of truth to that but I think that the bigger issue here is that they know that they're losing their moral authority, that an institution that holds itself up as holy and as a source of moral guidance to be impugned in such a way as it has been because of the sex abuse crisis is a real threat to the people who they're trying to influence to the believers and they've certainly lost a lot of support and a lot of adherence because of it over the years and the latest round is only going to make things worse and so I think what happened was that they wanted to reassert their authority and say these secular governments, they're killing people unjustifiably and we're the church and we're in a position to say that they're wrong. In effect, I think what they're thinking is maybe we've got some child rapists but at least we don't murder people and here's why. And it's a popular position they're taking, it's a position that all of Europe is already accepted in a sense and most of Europe is already accepted and the US is seemingly moving towards that position slowly so it's quite a popular position, it's not going to alienate anybody in particular and here we are with the moral voice of the world. So I want to clarify that I think that the death penalty question is a complex question. There's certainly a case to be made for the idea that someone who intentionally takes a life doesn't deserve to live but on the other hand you need to have a pretty rigorous standard of proof to know that they did before you give the government the power to take their life away. These aren't the sorts of points that the church is making in defense of its position. What it's doing is saying everybody has this intrinsic dignity that nothing that they do can take away and the world has to be deferential to that fact and respect their life even if they're a vicious criminal and why is that? Why should we believe that? What is this dignity? Where did it come from? It's worth reading the quote from the Pope about dignity because they're really horrific. Even evil people are made in the image and likeness of God and they don't lose their inherent dignity because they have turned away from God in his law. Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity and God himself pledges to guarantee this. You know, you want to shoot somebody. And so what I found interesting was the reaction to this change especially coming from various religious conservatives who they didn't want to, the main thing that concerned them was the church was changing its position. And what we were told 100 years ago that this was okay but now we're supposed to believe that it isn't. This is going against our tradition. This is going against the magisterium of the church. And they end up saying things like when the church changes its views about these things so radically, it undercuts their credibility and their authority. And my question is, oh yeah, you mean we don't have any good reason to believe them just because they say so? Well that's an interesting point but you should think about its implications more generally. And why it was that you believe what the church said 100 years ago or why it was that you believe anything that's just based on some thousand year old scripture that's supposed to come from a mountain somewhere. And so the biggest point is that this is just both the controversy about the death penalty and the ongoing sex abuse crisis. These really ought to be the nails in the coffin of the idea that we need religion to have a source of moral guidance because if all it is, is somebody say so, believe us that there's this intrinsic dignity that these criminals have. It's not too much different from the priests who say, you know, believe me, you're a sinner and God's penalty is that you do these terrible things that these priests ask these kids to do. And so many of them just took their priests' word for it and believed them on faith. And they're really, you know, tragic outcomes because of that. No, it's horrific. And yeah, I mean, you'd think that the Catholic church would be, this would be it. I mean, it would end. Right? I mean, put aside, OK, you can kind of, people can rationalize other religion. I agree with you. This is generalizable to all religion, but enter the authority of religion. But certainly the idea that there's a pope and that these cardinals and they have some special authority and special communication with God and they know the truth better than everybody else, that should be gone from the face of the earth. It is stunning to me that Catholicism is not dead. Well, it's a it's a really good point. And I have have the I asked these kinds of questions of the Catholics. I know I was raised Catholic, so I have a family this way. But and it's a it's a real puzzle for me. I mean, and the best that I can come up with is is that just like what we were talking about before, it's not an intellectual issue for them. It's it's it's an emotional issue, their connection to this institution. They they have fond memories of the smell of incense and organ music when they grew up and and they can't bear to break with this. The image of priests of using children should be able to dislodge any memory like that from your mind. Well, you know, here's the other thing. And here's where the intellectual aspect of it does still kick in, which is and I mentioned this in a webinar I did with on car recently. That religion has a built in self defense mechanism for this kind of thing, which is the concept of original sin. We're all sinners. We're all sinners. So forgive us and and judge not. And and and there is another connection then with the dental the death penalty issue, because if how can we judge these murderers if we ourselves are sinners is the idea. And if we can't judge the murderers, we certainly can judge the priests who molest kids and there you go. Everybody gets off scot free and so much of this and the conspiracy theories and so much of all of this, I think, is motivated by fear, by the emotion of fear, default of the mind, default on thinking and reason. But then just going with emotion. And I really do think the dominant emotion, because what happens if you give up on your Catholic church? What do I latch on to? Right. So it's and it's not an intellectual thing. You can probably explain to them that there are other alternatives. But it's truly is this emotion of fear that it's a void. It's it's blackness, you know, and they can't confront that. It's in the same with conspiracy. Again, it's the fear of the unknown, fear of not understanding something, fear of complex explanations. And I get that to some extent, because like I told you, I at the beginning, I used to be religious myself. And and when I started doubting and I had doubts about religion before I discovered objectivism. I had doubts that I came up with on my own. And then, you know, objectivism was just the nail in the coffin. But it's scary to give it up. And I went through about a year there where I was I was terrified. And I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. But, you know, that's one of the reasons why philosophy is is so crucial to study on, you know, on some level, because it does it does give you a way of understanding the world around you that doesn't depend on somebody say so. I think the advantage of becoming an atheist very young, which which I luckily did for who knows why, but I did, is that you never because fear is something of these kind of things is something you develop as you become more conceptual because there is no concept of, you know, really no concept of evil and punishment, you know, when you're a little kid. So I just dismissed it and walked away. And it was it was I wouldn't even say liberating. It was just a one less bullshit thing I have to think about more than anything else. But it's how old were you when you when you made that decision? I was somewhere between six and seven. And I don't know exactly. I only know the where I was. I was in London and it was in England. I was actually studying at a religious Jewish day school. So I wore Yarmulke every day to school to get off when I got home. But it wore Yarmulke and we were studying the Bible. But I can't remember anything specific, although I was traumatized by the idea that if you saw God, you died and it's still stuck in my head. And I had a dream related to that, which kind of led to this me just saying this is stupid and walking away from it. But but it was definitely six or seven because those are the ages I was in London. So I remember it that way. And then it never I can't ever remembering remember it coming up as, oh, I wonder if I should believe it always was no, this is silly. And now I would debate in class and argue with anybody you believed, including my parents or grandparents or whatever. So it just it just and we continue to study the Bible and I continue to go to synagogue and do all the things you're supposed to do as a good Jewish boy. But, you know, it always just OK, this is what you do, but not because you believe that makes sense to me because you beat me by about 10 years. I didn't start having my doubts and tells about 16 or 17. I think that's part of the reason that it hurt more to give them up because I hold decade more of of integrating this viewpoint into your life. And in my case, it was I had to do some real intellectual work to untangle it. And it was, you know, intellectual confusions and discovery of contradictions that that got me into that doubt in the first place. And I think Catholicism in many ways is more insidious to Judaism in a lot of these things. It it it promotes a lot of and it tries to present itself as somehow rational and somehow. And I never got that sense. I mean, Judaism, you know, some of the stuff is presented as logical, but it basically is all coming from a book and they teach it that way. And nobody takes it too seriously, even the people who pretend to take it very seriously. And there was no dogma. There's nothing about Judaism. There's no dogma. Everybody argues about everything. There's nothing is there's no pope. There's not there's like nothing like every passage in the Old Testament. We studied as kids, there were 25 interpretation of it. There was no one way to understand this, and that's how we studied it. So it wasn't we studied it as this is what you're supposed to do. It says this is what God said. And then some people think it means this. Some people think it means this. Some people think it means that. Who knows, you know? So I guess I guess a breeding ground for skepticism. Somebody asked if our critique is applicable to other other religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism. And yeah, I think everything we said about Catholicism, it's just the Catholicism is like slapping Catholics in the face right now. And it should be more obvious to Catholics. Now Islam has done that in spades. So Muslims should be questioning a religion way before Catholic Catholics, but Catholics are next than then everybody else because because there's a lot of questions these religions have to answer for. It's interesting. The the main thing that got me doubting religion in the first place was basically the issue of comparative religion. I I when I was in high school, I got I got to know, I got to know some Jews. I got to know some Muslims. I, you know, they were friends of mine and I started reading their scriptures. I started reading the Quran and it's like this says every this says different things than what my book says. And yet this whole half the world believes it. And why is my book better? Because this is the one that I grew up with. Well, if I had been born somewhere else, I'd have grown up with a different book. And and that's really what got me asking big questions about it. And that's that, again, I think connects to the issue that for so many people, it's it's the accidents of what they're born with, what their parents raise them to believe and where they happen to live and who their friends are. That's what is that's what keeps them in the faith. It's it's not like they've done a survey of all the different world religions and have decided, oh, this is the one with the best logical arguments. It's not like that at all. Yeah. No, that's that's fascinating that that argument worked on you because, you know, it's it's obvious when you think about it. But it doesn't seem to work on a lot of people because they seem to somehow resist it. And I don't know how they rationalize it in their own right.