 All of my recent videos have been very controversial, so I want to take a little bit of a step back and talk about something that makes me happy rather than disgruntled. Of course, switching from talking about politics to religion is hardly less controversial, but discussing religion is actually pretty peaceful and fruitful if you simply choose to ignore people who come in packed to the brim with condescension and anger for no reason other than personal biases. So we're going to choose to be comfy and that is that. Things are going to be a little bit dry and heavy in terms of philosophy for a while while I start out as I outline some logical proofs of God's existence, but if you want to hear about how I found overlap between Christianity and stoicism and life in general as well, then stick around and I'll come to that later. In my last Q&A stream, which yeah, was a good while ago now, somebody asked me if I was religious and my answer was basically that I didn't know. For a very long time prior to this I'd been an agnostic daist. Agnostic because I believed there was no way to truly know if an intelligent higher power does or does not exist, and a daist because through Aristotle's metaphysics I came to learn of the unmoved mover, which shows that the universe is full of motion, but that all motion must be traceable back to its starting point, which was not itself moved. This would have to be considered God, but only as a title for a creator, not necessarily a personal and intelligent deity deserving of worship as that in classical theism. In quick succession after this Q&A, both my agnosticism and daism became knocked down and after spending this entire summer researching, questioning and adjusting my entire way of thinking about existence, I am a Christian. Before I go on to explain why, I will simply ask that if you are not interested in actually listening to the reasons behind why I made this change, then please just stop listening. I'm happy to have any discussion on any relevant topic to this, only provided it is in good faith and done with a willingness to learn. I was an agnostic for all of my early 20s, but I was a thoroughly anti-religious atheist edgelord in my teenage years, so I know how to spot an obnoxious time waster because I was one, so basically just don't even try it. So a while ago I made a Twitter thread about why if you hold to the tenets of Austrian economics, you should give classical theism at the very least some serious consideration if you haven't already. I thought this would cause all sorts of drama, but the reception was actually entirely peaceful and agreeable, which is what gives me confidence that the comments section on this video also could be. Allow me to read the thread in its entirety. It's a little more janky than I'd like, but such is the nature of a 240 character limit per tweet. Austrians uphold the validity of our priori reasoning at its starting point, lines of logic that do not require empirical validation. This is because they are based on postulate axioms about human nature, famously man acts. Even empirical science requires axioms, namely that the universe exists and most importantly that the universe is intelligible. Why is this believed? These are not empirical claims, they are the foundation required for empirical research. Without them, nothing is empirical. So science itself is unscientific if you were to be polemic about it. Not all knowledge is gained through empirical verification. This verification needs a priori axioms, but internet science worshipers will tell you everything needs this verification to be true. Axioms, the universe exists, everything within it is moving and changing. Why? We know that movement and change are causes of an effect as per Newton's laws of physics. Rather than asking what caused the change or movement of a specific object, what caused change itself? There is no empirical answer to this. The Big Bang is not sufficient. As it was an event, it must itself be an effect of change. What caused the Big Bang? It must be causation itself. This cause must exist outside of time and space and be immaterial, which would make it infinite. Mainstream economists will tell you Austrians are unscientific for using axiomatic logic, but the act of rejecting axioms is unscientific. Mainstream economists are the only ones who try to do this, so are far more unscientific than we ever could be. Saying God must be observable to exist is to deny axiomatic logic. We are finite, so how does it follow that we would be able to observe the infinite? You cannot prove a negative, you can only disprove a positive, and denying axioms does not achieve that. TLDR, Soyboy Science Worship is a logical at its foundations. Science cannot tell you what is true, it can provide you with models to accurately predict observable phenomenon. It does not tell you what truth is, and can't tell you whether or not God could exist, philosophy does. So that is agnosticism out of the way. To say that the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven is to claim that empiricism is the only way to obtain true knowledge, but this claim is false. The early Austrian scholars adopted their epistemology, that is the philosophy of knowledge, from Renaissance and Enlightenment era French and Spanish Scholastics. Scholasticism was a branch of Roman Catholic Christian theology and philosophy, which drew almost all of its inspiration from Aristotle. As I said, I was a dayist thanks to Aristotle, or at least so I thought. The most famous scholastic of all was Saint Thomas Aquinas, and he proved thoroughly that Aristotle's unmoved mover was God, not just a title to be given to some unknown creator that didn't even have to be sentient, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God worshipped by Christians, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. To believe in the deistic unmoved mover and not reading Thomas Aquinas' expansion on it should be considered a crime, and it's one I was guilty of for many years. Aquinas was without the slightest doubt one of the most outstanding thinkers in all of human history, and I would not be able to do him justice. What I'll try to do here is give the basic explanation of causation, motion and change, then give an Austrian spin on it to prove that God is intelligent and personal. But I implore every single person to check out the Thomistic Institute who make bite-sized YouTube videos and upload full lectures as a podcast on Spotify to really learn more about Saint Thomas' philosophy to an appropriate level. One way I like to cut to the chase is talking about the principle of sufficient reason, or PSR for short, which was used extensively by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. The PSR essentially states that every observable phenomenon has a reason and a cause. If you observe a ball rolling on a flat surface, the reason it is rolling must be that it was pushed by something else. The unmoved mover theory asks you to wonder, what moved the thing that moved the ball? If the ball was kicked by someone's foot, what moved the foot? If an acting human moved the foot, how did they get to the ball in the first place? Follow all motion back into the past and you will arrive at the first movement in the universe that we can confidently determine, the Big Bang. And if all movement has a reason for occurring, then for what reason did the Big Bang occur? If the universe itself can be thought of as a rolling ball as it is always in motion but wasn't kicked, then it would not be rolling. The universe is not sentient and could not roll itself, so something outside of it must have done so. But what could exist outside of our universe? A deist as I used to be would agree with all of this argument but stop at the final question, throwing their arms up in the air and saying there's no possible way to know. But let's keep empiricism at the door and try to deduce some of the characteristics that this unmoved mover would need to have. First, in order to move without itself being moved, it would need to not have a physical form. As all motion of physical things requires a previous motion, the first mover must be different from this and if it did not require prior motion to move, it cannot be physical. And given that no matter existed before the moment it came into existence, this mover must be immaterial and this has the exact same meaning as not being physical. Trying to imagine such a being is of course tough but we have to remember that we are physical beings and all of our motion comes from previous motion, so trying to imagine something completely different to ourselves is tough to grasp. It's not dissimilar to try to imagine what a non-carbon based life form would look like. As all life forms we have ever observed including ourselves are carbon based but this does not mean another kind must be impossible. We are also constrained to linear time as are all other things in this universe, so something which is not of this universe must not be constrained in this way. If it is not constrained to time, this being must have always existed and always will exist. Time for us is a straight line from birth to death but time for an infinite being would be a circle having no beginning and no end. Of course this is impossible for us to accurately imagine as it is impossible for us to experience infinite time but these are the necessary conditions for the unmoved mover and it is starting to look a whole lot like God. One area where Aquinas built on this argument is also determining an uncaused cause. As far as I can really understand it's the exact same process as the unmoved mover but I think it's stronger at proving God to be intelligent and is perhaps easier to get your head around. So just as every motion has a prior motion, every effect has a prior cause. In the previous example the kicking foot caused the effect of the rolling ball. What caused the foot to kick? We're in the same process again and we end up at the same place, the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang? It must be the first cause of our universe and therefore must not have been caused itself. Showing the Big Bang as an effect of a cause rather than a process of motion began by an unmoved mover, I think better illustrates how this cause is an intelligent God who is a person and not some sort of supernatural inanimate object. A singular uncaused cause creating all of the effects that we see in our universe is much easier to imagine as something acting deliberately rather than some sort of freak accident. This whole time I've been trying to refute deism but it's just dawned on me that most people watching this won't even be deists. They'll either be atheists or already religious. So what I'll do is present reasons why I think atheism, that being outright denial of any possible existence of God, is illogical and then try to give a brief explanation of why I think out of all the religions that exist, Christianity is the one that perfectly fits the arguments that have already been made. So let's cut to the chase again by considering the principle of sufficient reason. To boil it down quickly, atheism says that the universe does not have a reason for existing. Some will say that the reason the universe exists is the Big Bang but this is not a reason, it is the method that the universe came into existing by. That's like being asked why a cake exists and saying either A, there is no reason for why the cake exists or B, that the cake exists because the ingredients mixed with heat over time and formed a cake. A is a wholly sufficient answer and in fact not an answer at all and B is missing the point entirely. A cake does not come into existence unless it is made which requires rational action so the reason it exists is that somebody chose to make it. If everything which occurs occurs for a reason but you claim that there is no reason for existence occurring then why does anything exist rather than not? If there is no reason for the universe existing that means it could have not existed but it does so why does it? There simply has to be an answer. So in all the proofs I outlined before I used the Big Bang as the starting point and this is lazy of me. Even if the universe began before the Big Bang the universe cannot still explain its own existence and this must be found outside of it. There is another theory to the Big Bang called the Big Bounce which says that the universe goes through Big Bang cycles and in fact existed before the Big Bang at least for one cycle and all the way up to infinity. Now I am not a physicist by any possible stretch of the imagination but I cannot see any reason for believing the Big Bounce over the Big Bang other than as a cop out and clutching at straws to find the slightest of reasons to deny God's existence usually driven by personal bias. Until I think there is equal or greater probability of the Big Bounce than the Big Bang I am not going to give it much thought and it's not a big deal anyway because the possibility of the universe existing before the Big Bang still does not explain why the universe exists at all rather than not and why motion and causation could exist without an unmoved mover or uncaused cause. One little brain teaser I like to do to push this point home is to consider what science is. It is a process of observing nature and its laws but science cannot tell you why in nature and its laws exist any more than putting a cake again under a microscope can tell you why it exists. Science requires observation. We can only observe nature and nature does not explain its own existence. The existence of nature is found in the supernatural and as science can only observe nature it has no place in determining the cause of existence. Trying to do so is trying to fit a large square peg into a round small hole. They are incompatible. There is a reason that they are called the natural sciences and that one of them is called physics. The natural sciences deal with nature and physics deals with physical things. They have nothing to do with the supernatural or the immaterial and to deny that the supernatural or immaterial could exist because we can't observe it is to in effect deny our priori truth. So now I'll get onto why Christianity meets the logical framework that we've so far set up as opposed to other religions. First of all, paganism is indeed a very broad brush to paint with and encompasses a lot of religions but religions typically given that title can be outright disregarded as nonsense. Neo-pagans that worship them today especially know this is nonsense and does not exist but choose to follow them anyway showing themselves to be lapers of the cringiest variety. Greek mythology for example said that the gods live on Mount Olympus. Go there and see if you find any and get back to me. The gods of these dead polytheistic religions are called gods in title alone and are nothing compared to the god of Abraham the infinite creator of the universe and the uncaused cause. Gods such as Jupiter, Odin or Poseidon are not supreme supernatural beings who created existence from nothing and imbued it with a purpose. They are little more than immortal humans and their spheres of control function as nothing more than being gods of the gaps. God of the gaps is a logical fallacy that occurs when you can't correctly determine the reason of a natural phenomenon so you just say well it must be God and when you can't determine why waves are formed in the ocean you could say it must be Neptune. When you finally figure out how tectonic plates work Poseidon and Neptune die when the proof of your god's existence can be empirically disproven you do not have a god at all. This is why I admit that I was being lazy by hinging my argument on the Big Bang but thankfully if the Big Bang was definitively disproven we are still left with many important phenomena in the natural world which logically cannot be explained through natural means such as why nature exists. Also bear in mind that I am a Hellenophile, a lover of Greek culture, history and language and I do not want to unfairly disrespect any of it but there is a very clear reason why when Christianity came to Greece thousands of years ago the renowned Greek thinkers didn't last long at all in trying to defend their pagan religion through philosophical means and thereafter Greece remained the most prominent nation in Christendom for a thousand years through the Byzantine Empire so much so into the present as well that the Eastern Orthodox denomination is commonly known to this day as Greek Orthodoxy. The history of paganism, its tales and effect on ancient cultures are indeed fascinating but trying to claim that they have any sort of equal or greater basis than our monotheistic God is nothing short of deluded and the only other non-Abrahamic religion that might meet the criteria is Hinduism specifically the Hindu concept of Brahman if that's how you pronounce it. Hinduism is known for its nearly endless list of multi-limbed blue-skinned gods but at the top of the hierarchy is something called the Brahman believed to be the first cause of all existence. Trying to find good philosophical coverage of this has been difficult so far for me so there's really not much I know about it but the whole Hindu mythology is so bonkers it's hard to take as seriously as Christianity even the most anti-Christian atheist would admit that the resurrection of Jesus is a far more plausible historic event than just about anything to be found in Hinduism and one last one I'll mention is Buddhism and while I admit I know next to nothing about it I think I understand that they don't believe in any sort of personal God so again they don't fit the philosophical criteria. Now judging Christianity against the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam is when things get deep but it's only really a discussion that can be engaged in by people of those religions. Lots of the debate is found in Scripture and by determining the personality of God for lack of a better term so if you think God does not exist and there is no such thing as Scripture it's not really a conversation you can get too invested in. All three Abrahamic religions start from the same point and share much holy Scripture and as such they have the same notion of God but I don't agree with the opinion that many people hold which is that all three have the same God. If in each religion God teaches different morals and has a different character he cannot be considered the same person but they do share the same characteristics of being infinite and immaterial etc and the creator of all. One of Thomas Aquinas' other main influences than Aristotle was Moses Ben Myman a Jewish scholar and modern Christian philosophers such as William Lane Craig have revived the Kalam cosmological argument deriving from medieval Islamic scholasticism. So to get to the core of justifying Christianity over those others we have to go straight to Christ. C.S. Lewis used what I think is the best formula for trying to categorize Jesus as he must have been one of the following Lord, Liar or Lunatic. If he was indeed the Word of God made flesh who died for our sins and rose from the grave he is Lord. If he was some sort of ancient magician who fooled everyone then he was a liar. If he completely fabricated his claim to be the Son of God yet truly believed it then he was a lunatic at the same level as a man who calls himself a poached egg. One thing that Jesus could not have been as some secularists try to describe is some sort of moral teacher who was so fantastically good that lots of people followed him for thousands of years. That is the essence of Buddhism but Jesus did not live this avenue open in terms of understanding him. He claimed to be the Son of God as part of the indivisible Holy Trinity and we must determine whether or not that is true. In order for Jesus to have performed miracles out of total trickery he would have had to be some sort of magician at or beyond the level of David Blaine except two thousand years ago with no support team, no modern technology and no magic camps he could go to on the weekend to train or Las Vegas casinos to employ him. And what reason would Jesus have for doing any of this if he could have? He died in an extraordinarily painful and gruesome way and knew that his mission would result in such a fate. Blasphemy was the most heinous of religious crimes in ancient Palestine and while I'm sure modern magicians love their craft with a great passion they don't feel the need to claim to be God incarnate even without the threat of a death sentence by excruciating torture. Jesus being a liar makes no sense. There was no financial incentive for him to do this. No worldly power to be gained as he made enemies of the Jewish and Roman rulers who he couldn't have possibly defeated through some sort of military or political coup. The cross was always where he was going to end up. He simply would not have lied about his claims. Now let's ask if he was a lunatic. Anybody who wholeheartedly believes they are something which they are not can be called a lunatic. So if he wholeheartedly believed he was God but wasn't then a lunatic he was. But Jesus was never alone. He was followed by a great crowd of about 5,000 people and had the 12 apostles follow him closely and continue his mission after he was gone. If Jesus was a lunatic then these people must have been too as if he was not the son of God or some sort of unbelievably good ancient magician he could not have performed miracles. And if he went around ranting and raving about how he did perform miracles but nobody saw it I find it almost completely implausible that he would gather such a following. People can be stupid in large groups but in modern times the largest suicide cults such as Jonestown only had a population of just under a thousand people. Heaven's Gate had just a few hundred people and the based I mean branched avidians had fewer than a hundred. For the first 300 years of the existence of the Church of Christ it was totally outlawed and persecuted and if you were discovered to be Christian by any sort of government or religious authority you would be tortured, killed and probably both. The apostles knew this better than anyone and they wrote their testimonies of witnessing the miracles of Jesus. You can read them they're only in the Bible. Either they all lied about witnessing the miracles of Jesus for no reason as their only rewards were living in nomadic poverty than becoming martyrs or they are all lunatics as well and that is not the impression you'll get from reading Saint Paul's eloquent and crystal clear letters. Ultimately when weighing all the facts and context I cannot conclude that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic and that leaves me with only one option that he is Lord. Muslims for example say that God has never had a son and to which I can only ask why. It appears holy in God's nature through his total fulfilment of goodness, love and mercy that he would incarnate himself at the precipice of human civilisation. Just as literacy would never again be lost as it was multiple times before in human history such as the Dark Age after the Bronze Age collapsed at the time when a huge empire connected nearly the entire civilised world and allowed the good news to be transported and understood all over and coming with the mission to undo the failure of humanity which occurred at the fall and to make his creation whole again. We as humans love our children and when we talk to them to tell them of our love we kneel down, we get on their level and speak to them in ways which they understand. We are children of a God who loves us and there would be no better way for him to communicate his love to us as our Father than to do exactly the same thing, to come down to our level and speak our language. If instead of saying God would not do this or has not done this you now try to say that he in fact could not do it then you are outright denying God as he has shown himself to be, all powerful, all knowing and all present. He created all of existence out of nothing, he absolutely can create a human form to walk in. The Hebrew texts that preceded his arrival have the coming of Jesus as a through line running all the way along as he fulfilled over 300 Old Testament prophecies pointing to the arrival of the Messiah as his role as a servant king, not a worldly king or a military commander. It is the mark of human nature to suffer and Jesus took on fully both the nature of God and man to suffer with us. We are incredibly blessed to have a Father who loves us so. To deny that he would do this is to claim God is either not all loving and merciful or not all powerful, in either case you do not have God as explained in the Old Testament. And there is still yet so much more to be said about the nature of Jesus. He was not a demigod of the Greek style like Heracles being 50% God and 50% human. He was 100% God and 100% human. We as constrained finite beings cannot truly comprehend what that means but things being true whilst being beyond our comprehension are abundant even in the natural universe so you might as well get used to it and see it for the beauty that it is. And it remains beautiful in the realm of faith. Dante for example in his famous novel The Divine Comedy which is commonly referred to as Dante's Inferno described the Virgin Mary in this way. Holy Mary, mother of your own Father. I for one just love that way of describing the mysteries of divinity. I'd like to talk more casually and about the effects that my conversion has had on my own life. I've talked about Stoic philosophy before on here and I will make a few more videos on it but what I found so remarkable is the compatibility of Jesus' teachings and the Stoic way. Matthew's Gospel chapter 6 verses 25 to 34 reads. Therefore I tell you do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is alive and tomorrow thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all those things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself, sufficient for the day is its own trouble. If you've got a keen eye and you follow me on Twitter, you would have noticed in my bio is the verse Matthew 6.33 and that was it there. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That whole paragraph is of course extremely stoic, putting your mind before the anxieties of day to day and focusing on the things you can control within your mind and your own nature. But for all of my reading and proclaiming of stoicism, nothing has helped me put the stoic mindset into actual practice than that verse 33. Say before, if I wanted to overeat and have some cake that I didn't need, I knew it would not be stoic to do this but I was only answering to myself and so I didn't really care. If I am only guilty of committing a sin against myself then I can also pardon and forgive myself. But if I am committing a sin by going against the standards of virtue that I wished to uphold in God's name, the drive to do what is right becomes so much greater for me. And let me just quickly touch on what sin actually is for that matter. Sin is not just being naughty and therefore deserving punishment. It is not some sort of tool for priests to guilt-trip you into giving the church money for. I think sin should be defined as something which is less than perfect. When God made humanity in his own image it was perfect. But we live in a fallen world and as the saying goes, we are all sinners. It is our natural inclination to be imperfect yet we know we must strive for perfection even though we can never reach it in this life. Just as a good stoic would strive to be a perfect stoic sage whilst acknowledging that the destination is impossible to reach, a Christian strives to be like Christ even though he never can be. Most Christian theology believes that Jesus was the only human to be born without sin and to never commit a sin in his life. And of course Jesus could do that. He is God but we absolutely are not. And I'll also add here for representation that Catholics believe Mary was immaculately conceived and sinless but that's a whole other can of worms. What I'm trying to get at is that by pursuing virtue for my own sake and pursuing virtue for the sake of a higher cause has been almost night and day for me in terms of practice. Knowing that God wants me to strive for perfection is a much more potent motivation than just myself as who am I compared to God? We know that low time preference is based and I've been preaching that a hell of a lot lately but I've realised if anybody could possibly have a negative time preference it is Christians and if low time preference is based negative must be off the charts. I am of course kidding but what I've noticed in myself is the life I want to live today and the one I wanted to live a year ago are very very different and I'm very grateful for it. A useful Catholic phrase is do not swallow the world and that sums up so much for me. I used to really covet luxury cars, watches and a big house even though I knew that for stoic reasons I shouldn't but now that I am working for a purpose far greater than this world the things of this world that do not emulate God's plan for humanity mean so little to me. My priorities in life now are to have a family and provide for them living simply in the countryside away from the noise, busyness and especially the vanity and materialism amongst people of the cities. Having a job will simply be a means to this end of an almost monastic, contemplative and thoroughly peaceful life offered up to God. And denominations is of course an enormous area that I'm going to try to keep brief by just talking about my experience and current beliefs in regards to which particular version of Christianity that I follow. I was baptised in the church of England as an infant and didn't choose to step foot into a church until this summer 25 years later. I was however dragged along to Anglican services and Roman Catholic masses by my mother who flip-flopped between those two denominations a lot. I hated every second I spent there for no other reason than I was an edgy twat who watched a couple of talks by Christopher Hitchens and the amazing atheist on YouTube. Earlier this year however I was heading out to get some groceries and was handed a pamphlet by a man on the street. I had never stopped to talk to one of these people who hand out leaflets before but for no reason I can explain this time I did and the pamphlet he handed me was for the Baptist church just around the corner from my house. I had never heard of the Baptist denomination which might sound funny to my American viewers because I looked it up after getting home and found it is extremely prevalent in the US and especially in the south but not really much in England despite this being the place where it started. This pamphlet set off my journey and after a couple of months racking my brain for hours every day about Christianity I started going to that church. Evangelicals have a completely symbolic view of all sacraments and as a recent skeptic this really helped me. They believe baptism is purely a symbol just to show that you're dedicated to the faith, that the bread and wine at communion are nothing more than that either physically or spiritually and so on. However largely through my exposure to Aquinas and the Thomistic Institutes when researching what theology makes the most logical and biblical sense to me I kept finding myself coming to Catholic conclusions. Aquinas again uses Aristotelian metaphysics to explain the doctrine of transubstantiation that being the process of turning bread and wine into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ in substance. Protestant tenets such as solar scriptura that being the belief that the Bible is the sole authority of religious doctrine doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either. That is essentially a claim that all the Hebrew prophets before Jesus could proclaim the Word of God. Jesus of course proclaimed the Word of God, the apostles proclaimed the Word of God but that as soon as the book of revelations was finished which is the last book of the Bible all religious discovery must have stopped. For one the Bible was compiled and made into official holy canon by the Catholic Church so to say that the Bible is authoritative in some way says that the Pope's authority to make it authoritative stands. To say that tradition after the Bible was written cannot in any way provide new learning about the faith to me sounds outright ludicrous as if God came, taught the good news and then left it at that never to be expanded upon again. So at this point I should have become Catholic but there's one thing holding me back the papacy. Catholic tradition holds that the Pope is the supreme leader of all Christianity and that when speaking ex-cathedra on matters of doctrine and morals he is in fact infallible. I understand that infallible does not mean impeccable and I imagine lots of my viewers would find Pope Francis to be less than impeccable but infallibility states that if Francis writes an official theological document it is 100% true no matter what. He cannot say anything wrong. To say that a man can have this sort of power is already highly dubious but that is coupled with another reason that I don't buy the Catholic justification of the powers given to Saint Peter who they claim was the first Pope. Peter did give false teaching by telling the Galatians they must circumcise themselves to enter God's covenant and Saint Paul severely rebuked him. Saint Peter denied Christ three times as he was persecuted. These absolutely are examples of Christian faith and morals that Saint Peter was not infallible in so even if he was the first Pope by declaring itself infallible the papacy is no longer what it was in Saint Peter's day. So where does that leave me? If someone asks if I'm Protestant I will say yes. If someone asks me if I'm Catholic I will say yes. I always find myself agreeing with every Catholic theological claim except for that of papal overreach and by a twist of fate it took me back to the very beginning. The Church of England in which I was baptized, dragged to and hated. I realised the reason my mother jumped back and forth between Romans and Anglicans was exactly the same as mine. The Church of England was designed to be a big tent church after being instituted by Henry VIII. Within the C of E there are evangelicals called low church Anglicans and they have a low view of sacramentology the same as the Baptists and there are high church Anglicans who inversely have a high view like the Romans. These high view Anglicans also go by another name which I find absolutely amazing for an obvious reason and that is Anglo-Catholic. I honestly feel like I couldn't have made it up. A traditional Anglo-Catholic mass looks exactly identical to a traditional Roman Catholic mass. The only real difference between the two is disavowing the supremacy of the Pope while still granting him extraordinary respect as is deserved by being Bishop of Rome. They also recognise that the Church of England was not in fact founded by Henry VIII in the 1500s. The Church had existed in England since the first century as tradition holds that St. Joseph of Arimathea came here. He was an apostle, one of the 12 hand-picked followers of Jesus during his earthly mission and he died in Glastonbury, a tiny village in Somerset known for the giant music festival that happens there every year. To me that is an amazing thought even if it can't be conclusively verified. However we do know for a fact that Celtic English bishops were present at ecumenical councils starting in the 4th century and that in the 6th century the Pope sent St Augustine of Canterbury to England to help in the conversion of the newly arriving Anglo-Saxons and of course became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. This all means that Christianity has existed in England for pretty much as long as Christianity has. The majority of the history of the Church of England has been a Catholic history. It is an apostolic church. The Church of England was founded in the 1st century, not 1534. That was the year when it rejected papal authority and I believe it was right to do so. All of these arguments that I've listed started to light on fire during the 18th century as the Oxford movement sought to return the C of E to Catholicism minus the Pope and ever since then the Anglo-Catholic tradition has existed within it and sometimes I think it was tailor made just for me. So I am extremely grateful to the Baptist Christians of my city for being so wonderfully hospitable to me and giving me just the introduction to the faith which I needed but I am going to be confirmed into the Church of England ever grateful to my mother for baptizing me and dragging me to Mass and following Anglo-Catholic theology and worship. I am now compelled to serve and help my fellow man and I hope that my content here can be retroactively looked upon as such and that this video in particular can be of great help to anyone whether they've never considered Christianity before or didn't know how strong the actual logic and philosophy behind their beliefs really are and that I can help them to grow in their faith. To those of you who are beginners and interested in learning more I recommend to you the book Mia Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He is known of course for the Chronicles of Narnia book series but he was an amazing popular apologist for the faith and explains why it is true without anything too heavy or tough for the average person to understand. Another great one like that is G.K. Chesterton who was actually Lewis's greatest inspiration. Chesterton was a great example of a witty British aristocrat so if you like a little bit of dry and convoluted humor paired with sartorial poetic language his book The Everlasting Man is your go to. If you want to dip your feet into some real theology you can get a book of selected writings by Thomas Aquinas which is great because his magnum opus is called the Summa Theologiae and it is often printed into five enormous books and could easily cost you over £100 so the selected writings are much more doable. Also check out the Thomistic Institute on YouTube for short form content and find them on podcast services for proper lectures not unlike the Mises Institute. Pints with Aquinas is easily my favourite Christian YouTube channel so check him out for more Catholic stuff and if you want to learn more about the mind field of denominations that exist check out the channel Ten Minute Bible Hour where the host Matt goes to all sorts of different churches shows you around and speaks to the clergy about what particularly they believe and why. If you would like to really deepen your faith I encourage you to go to church and make the most of it and also pray. I will pray for you all and I would love it if you could also pray for me. Take it easy.