Western civilization has a major problem: Every societal ill that had been taken off the table by generations of received wisdom has now come back and come roaring back to life stronger than ever. 
The latest example of this is exemplified in a <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/im-28-and-im-scheduled-to-die">piece</a> by Rupa Subramanya in Bari Weiss’ Free Press that speaks of the spates of suicide and euthanasia growing in the West. 
The piece speaks of Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who expects to be euthanized in early May and plans to be cremated:
<blockquote>She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats. 
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” At that point, she said, she decided to die. “I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore.”</blockquote>
She is not the only one, unfortunately. Euthanasia is becoming incredibly common across the West. 
In the United States, euthanasia has jumped from 2018 to 2021 by 53% and in Canada by 125%.
Increasingly, the West is legalizing euthanasia for people who are clearly not terminal. For example, Lauren Hoeve. As the piece explains: 

<blockquote>On November 30, 2022, Hoeve, a Dutch YouTube creator who was then 27, took to her newly created blog, Brain Fog, to <a href="https://hersenmist.wordpress.com/2022/11/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announce</a> that she wanted to die. She explained that she had autism, ADHD, ARFID (a.k.a. avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder), depression, anxiety, a “history of complex trauma,” and, since 2019, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. She added that she had registered with the <a href="https://expertisecentrumeuthanasie.nl/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Euthanasia Expertise Center</a>, in The Hague, to get the ball rolling.</blockquote>
She then committed suicide. She was 28. 
This sort of stuff is becoming more and more common. 
And it&#8217;s not just this social malady that is plaguing the West. Drug abuse is plaguing the West. 128 million Americans report having used marijuana at some point in their lifetime. It&#8217;s worth noting that marijuana today is significantly more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana when you were a kid. 
Pornography is not only widespread in its availability, but also in its use and its addiction. The latest stats show that about 70% of American men view pornography. 24% of American women say they view pornography as well. The number of people who admit to being addicted is actually quite high. The impacts of pornography on the human brain are very much like drug addiction. There&#8217;s a dopamine release, it wears off, and then people want more of the dopamine. And so they go back to the pornography. 
This empties out relations. It destroys the relationship between men and women. Men begin to see women as sexual objects in a way different than would normally be the case. It disconnects them from other human beings.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1939-our-unaliving-civilization-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
We see this with regard to major societal issues like family formation and childbearing. 31% of women aged 30 to 34 in the United States are childless now, which is much higher than ever in the United States. When it comes to LGBTQ+- identity, fully 22.3% of Gen Z say they are LGBTQ+- .
That has tremendous societal impact. It turns out that when one-fifth of your population suggests that they are no longer going to engage in monogamous heterosexual relationships with the goal of family formation, it has a major impact on your civilization. 
So what exactly is going on? Why are all of these social maladies suddenly cropping up? Social epidemics are spreading through the population like wildfire. But in order for that epidemic to actually take hand, the systemic immunity of a society has to be compromised. 
What was the immunity to all of these sorts of bad ideas? The answer for literally hundreds of years was religion. Not just because people believed in God, but because there are two particular facts about religion that are deeply necessary to understand the beneficial and salutary effects of religion on a society. 
One: Religion takes certain moral matters off the table. It says, “God says X, therefore don&#8217;t do X.” Why is that important? It&#8217;s important because when you&#8217;re talking about time-tested wisdom, one reason why any society might say something like, “God says &#8216;thou shalt not murder&#8217;” is because it takes the subject off the table for debate. Once God says it, you don&#8217;t need to come up with an independent rationale as to why it&#8217;s not okay to murder. 
The reality is that when it comes to the vast majority of rules we abide by in society, those are rules not because somebody sat somewhere in a cave and came up with a rationale for the rule, but because over trial and error, over evolutionary long periods of time, those are rules that have been found to be effective. 
You don&#8217;t have to explain why it works. You just have to know that it does work.
One of the great lies that the Enlightenment told us is that every single thing that was good required a rationale. 
That’s not even the same way that science typically works. People tend to think that science works by having a theoretician in the lab who comes up with a theory and then the theory has practical ramifications. 
Very often it&#8217;s the reverse. Very often the inventions that we use come from someone tinkering in their garage and doing trial and error until something worked. They may not even know why it worked. They just know that it did. 
That’s the first thing religion does. 
The second thing it does is to create the social fabric necessary to enforce those rules without a top-down state. It creates the intermediate institutions of society that act as an enforcement mechanism. 
If you violate the rule of society, for example, that says that you should get married and have kids and live within the boundaries of the church, the rest of the members of the church might not want you at the church. You&#8217;re not going to be part of that particular social fabric. 
That is necessary. Any society has to have rules that are enforced by social censure.
But both of the things religion provided have been dissolved. We have become the “touch the stove” civilization. 
When you teach your very young kids to avoid touching the stove you don&#8217;t explain, “Certain objects are hot. When you touch a hot object, you get burned.” You say, “Don&#8217;t touch the stove. And if you touch the stove, there will be a consequence.” 
We as a society have decided that anything we can&#8217;t explain requires us to touch the stove. So we&#8217;re going to touch the stove on everything. 
So things that we&#8217;re just common-sense propositions — such as “It is good that you get married and have children” — we as a society decided to ask, “Why not alternatives? What&#8217;s wrong with alternatives? Why can&#8217;t all alternatives be treated as perfectly equivalent?” 
The answer to that is that it fails. Society fails when you don&#8217;t have man, woman, child. End of story. Societies that don&#8217;t focus on man, woman, child fall apart because that is the basis of every functional civilization. But we decided because we couldn’t come up with a rationale, why we shouldn&#8217;t we have man, man, no child, or woman, woman, no child?
We touched the stove. The result is widespread childlessness; breakdown in family formation, destruction of existing families, children born into families where they&#8217;re not really families, just a mom and a kid, because dad is nowhere to be seen.
That has resulted in many more social maladies. We had to touch the stove when it came to drug use. We as a society had decided that it would be bad if huge swaths of the population ingested hallucinogenic drugs.
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And then we decided, well, what if we tried it? What if we touch the stove? Maybe it&#8217;ll be fine. How do we know? 
And so the time-tested wisdom that favored sobriety was thrown out the window in favor of something different. Has it been salutary in its effect on young Americans? I would suggest the answer is no. 
We used to say that engaging in pornography ought to be illicit, that it is bad that when you view pornography, it does something to your brain that is not good, it perverts your view of the opposite sex, of sex itself and of relationships. And then we decided, “Oh, but really, is it going to be that bad? What, are you just a prude, man? Can you find a rationale for your prudishness?”
The response used to be, “I don&#8217;t have to find a rationale. It&#8217;s gross and bad and you shouldn&#8217;t do it. It&#8217;s bad for your soul, and it&#8217;s bad for you.”
And that was accepted wisdom for literally hundreds of years.
And then we decided to touch the stove and find out what happens.
This has had incredibly negative effects on our civilization.

Global warming, conceptual illustration

The West Decided To Touch The Stove. It’s Destroying Us.

The West Decided To Touch The Stove. It's Destroying Us.

Ben Shapiro

Bible

Euthanasia

Opinion

Pornography

Progressivism

Readers Pass

Western Civilization

As they&#8217;ve done for thousands of years, Christians celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Sunday. 
All over the world, the faithful gathered to celebrate the joyous news: that the Messiah died and rose from the grave, for the salvation of mankind. This is the central fact of our faith, and the reason why Easter is our most sacred holiday.
At the same time, a cult that was invented mere decades ago — and which opposes everything Christianity stands for — was holding its own observances on Sunday. In a deliberate attempt to mock the very idea of Easter, they celebrated something called the &#8220;Transgender Day Of Visibility.&#8221; Joe Biden, who claims to be a Catholic, ushered in the festivities with a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/29/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">presidential proclamation</a> that can only be described as not only blasphemous, but also completely counterfactual. It&#8217;s not overstating things to say that this proclamation document underscores, once again, that the Biden administration is the single most radically anti-Christian regime in American history — and it&#8217;s not even close.
In the proclamation, Biden describes so-called &#8220;transgender Americans&#8221; as &#8220;part of the fabric of our Nation.&#8221; He accuses millions of Americans of being &#8220;hateful&#8221; for supporting laws that ban the castration, sterilization and mutilation of children, saying these Americans seek to &#8220;target and terrify transgender kids and their families.&#8221;
And he also claims that there&#8217;s an &#8220;epidemic of violence&#8221; against people identifying as transgender, without mentioning that this violence almost <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshShow/status/1727039849880830069" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exclusively</a> relates to domestic incidents, or prostitution and drug related crimes. He also failed to qualify this statement with the fact that trans-identified Americans are murdered at a lower rate than the general population.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1337-the-most-anti-christian-president-in-history-declares-easter-transgender-day-of-visibility" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Of course, nowhere in &#8220;devout Catholic&#8221; Joe Biden&#8217;s proclamation is there an attempt to explain how the concept of transgenderism is compatible, in any way, with Catholicism. He does not grapple with how a Christian can ascribe to modern gender theory while also accepting what we are clearly told in the first chapter of genesis: “male and female created He them.” There is no way to grapple with this. These views are diametrically opposed. One can either believe in transgenderism or Christianity, not both. Just as one can either believe in transgenderism or biology, not both. On both counts, Biden chooses transgenderism. Coming from the same alleged Catholic who pushes the mass murder of the unborn, that&#8217;s not surprising.
This decision — to issue this blasphemous proclamation on Easter — was so unbelievable, so unprecedented in modern politics, that a lot of people wondered if it was real. When I saw it on social media, I had to check the White House website myself. And I found that indeed, it was real. And precisely because it&#8217;s real — because it&#8217;s easily verifiable and so damaging to the Biden administration at the same time — so-called &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; instinctively jumped into action to tell us not to believe our lying eyes.
There were many examples of this, so I&#8217;ll just pick one. Here&#8217;s the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/transgender-day-visibility-falls-annually-march-31-not-always-easter-2024-03-29/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">headline</a> from Reuters: &#8220;Fact Check: Transgender Day of Visibility falls annually on March 31, not always at Easter.&#8221; And here&#8217;s the spin: &#8220;International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) takes place annually on March 31 to celebrate transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. It was not designed intentionally to fall on Easter Sunday as claimed by some online account. &#8230; TDOV has been celebrated on the same date, March 31, for years. The date of Easter changes each year.&#8221;
The point of &#8220;fact-checks&#8221; like this is to censor posts on social media platforms like Facebook by labeling information as misinformation. They do this not by debunking a claim, but rather by intentionally confusing the issue. We see this again and again. It&#8217;s like when PolitiFact said it was &#8220;false&#8221; to <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/politifact-aoc-parking-lot-fact-check-mockery" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claim</a> AOC was photographed crying in front of an empty parking lot, because in reality, it was an empty road. They know what people are reacting to. And instead of talking about that, they pick some phony misconception related to the episode, in order to rate it &#8220;false.&#8221;
The problem with this excuse, in this case, is that Joe Biden did not have to issue any proclamation recognizing the so-called &#8220;Transgender Day of Visibility.&#8221; Even Barack Obama never did that, despite the fact that this holiday was invented a year after Obama took office. That is what people are responding to.
Of course, no president should recognize any &#8220;transgender day,&#8221; regardless of what date it falls on. But if you have any respect at all for the holiest day on the Christian calendar, you would at least skip the proclamation this year. That&#8217;s the point. Reuters knows that, and they dodge it on purpose. There was no need to issue this proclamation, except for the sole and express purpose of mocking Christians.
Secondly, it&#8217;s not like the Democrats just begrudgingly nodded towards Trans Day because they felt like they had to. This wasn’t a perfunctory checking of boxes. They went out of their way to celebrate the occasion. It wasn&#8217;t just some staffer in the White House who put out that proclamation with Joe Biden&#8217;s name on it — they all did it. And this went beyond the White House. Here’s Gavin Newsom&#8217;s Easter message, for example:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
BREAKING: CA Governor Gavin Newsom just released a touching Easter message. 
Just kidding. 
It&#39;s for Trans Day Of Visibility. <a href="https://t.co/maKOi0OXGb">pic.twitter.com/maKOi0OXGb</a>
&mdash; End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) <a href="https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1774569413611511878?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It&#8217;s not necessarily the most important point to make here, but notice how Gavin Newsom’s wife claims that trans people have made many incredible contributions to human progress but then fails to cite one single specific example. She just says they&#8217;ve done a lot of great things, and moves on. But the truth is that trans-identified people have accomplished nothing of significance in this country, or any country. All they have done is contribute to massively increased rates of depression in the last decade, by encouraging young people to castrate and mutilate themselves instead of improving their mental health. They&#8217;ve also committed several acts of terrorism. But beyond that, they&#8217;re not doing anything of significance. Even if I was interested in celebrating the achievements of trans people — even if somehow I wanted to do this on Easter, of all days — I still would not be able to partake in that celebration for the simple reason that there are no achievements to celebrate.
But politicians throughout the Democratic Party, all over the country, pretended otherwise yesterday. In New York, Kathy Hochul <a href="https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/Transgender-Day-of-Visibility_2024.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">issued</a> her own proclamation for Transgender Day of Visibility. It states that New York &#8220;reaffirm[s] our commitment to see beyond the gender binary and create equity.&#8221; 
For his part, the HHS secretary, Xavier Becerra, put out <a href="https://x.com/SecBecerra/status/1774466699066024177?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this message</a>: 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Today, I&#39;m thinking about our country’s great transgender, nonbinary, and two-spirit leaders who epitomize resilience, progress, and joy. Transgender Day of Visibility is an opportunity to celebrate their accomplishments and double down on our commitment to their wellbeing. <a href="https://t.co/BehdgWJZV8">pic.twitter.com/BehdgWJZV8</a>
&mdash; Secretary Xavier Becerra (@SecBecerra) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecBecerra/status/1774466699066024177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
He also added a picture of a bunch of people without faces, because that&#8217;s what equity means. No one has a face.
First of all, like Newsom&#8217;s wife, he doesn&#8217;t mention what &#8220;accomplishments&#8221; transgender people have achieved. That&#8217;s because there are no accomplishments to mention. On top of that, like the identity of &#8220;transgender,&#8221; so-called &#8220;non-binary&#8221; and &#8220;two-spirit&#8221; are nonsense labels that mean nothing. The two-spirit thing blew up in Canada a while ago, which is why Justin Trudeau goes around referring to &#8220;2SLGBTQIA+&#8221; people. But it&#8217;s not a real thing; it was <a href="https://lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php">invented</a> by some woman at a gay and lesbian conference in Canada in 1990.
There are other major problems with this statement, which again, is from our HHS secretary, who oversees health in this country. The biggest one, perhaps, is that you cannot tell us that trans people will kill themselves if you misgender them and then in the next breath insist that these people &#8220;epitomize resilience and joy.” If they really are a resilient, joyful people then we don’t have to worry about what kind of language we use around them. They can handle it, with resilience and joy.
But if we do have to worry about the words we use — worry, in fact, that the wrong word might cause them to commit suicide en masse — then there may be many terms you can use to describe them but “joyful” isn’t one of them, and “resilient” even less so. As for &#8220;doubling down on our commitment to their wellbeing,&#8221; as the HHS secretary claims to want to do, the only way to accomplish that is to tell them the truth and stop catering to their delusions.
But of course, most importantly, Sunday was Easter. Xavier Becerra, like all of us, should have spent the day thinking not about trans people, but about the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the state of his own immortal soul.
The same is true of Karine Jean-Pierre, who issued a <a href="https://x.com/PressSec/status/1774203846023053330?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> about the &#8220;courage&#8221; of the trans community on Sunday. This is the same woman who claimed that &#8220;trans kids&#8221; are under attack in this country, just three days after a trans terrorist murdered men, women and children in a Christian school. 
But Karine Jean-Pierre never praised the courage of the police officers who put that trans terrorist down. She never mentioned their heroism. They do not need to be “visible,” apparently, like trans people do. They don’t have their own holiday, like the sacred Trans Day of Visibility. A holiday so apparently important, so engrained in our national tradition, that it must be officially recognized by the White House, no matter if it conflicts with Easter or not.
It could be interesting now to take a look at the person who started this fake holiday. It was invented by a man who identifies as a woman and now uses the name Rachel Crandall-Crocker. Here he is:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
This is the person who invented “Trans Day of Visibility.” He claims he knew since he was 8-years-old that he was trans. <a href="https://t.co/FQtsqig1D2">pic.twitter.com/FQtsqig1D2</a>
&mdash; Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) <a href="https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1774494901742575834?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Trans Week of Visibility 2018 | Rachel Crandall-Crocker" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aNoWDAbM2yA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This is the Left&#8217;s approximation of Jesus now. This man who believes that 8-year-olds can change their gender, is who they&#8217;re choosing to valorize. He achieved the incredible feat of starting a Facebook group back in 2009, which is where Trans Day of Visibility originates. Easter began with the son of God emerging gloriously from the tomb. Trans Day of Visibility began with a guy starting a Facebook group. I guess this is what passes for a great accomplishment in the trans community.
Another irony of this whole &#8220;trans day of visibility,&#8221; of course, is that trans people are already more visible than any other group in the history of the world, when you compare their population to the amount of media coverage, et cetera, that they receive. There has never been such a vast gulf between the attention paid to a group of people and the actual size of that group. LGBT people in general are celebrated with <a href="https://x.com/jarvis_best/status/1774115482255106479?s=20">dozens</a> of special days and months, just for them. 
We’ve gone over the full list several times in the past, so I’ll spare you. But we know, of course, that they have all of &#8220;Pride Month.&#8221; That&#8217;s 30 days right there. They have the Trans Day of Visibility, the Agender Pride Day, International Pronoun Day, National Coming Out Day, Transgender Parent Day, Trans Awareness Week, Omnisexual Visibility Day, Bisexual Visibility Day, Bisexual Awareness Week, International Non-Binary Day (which is also a week, for some reason), the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, the International Lesbian Visibility Day, as well as Gay Uncle Day in August. There&#8217;s many more. In all, I counted more than 130 days on the calendar reserved to worship our LGBT deities. There might be more but I gave up counting.
Government leaders make a point of recognizing most of these days. Meanwhile, Christianity — the faith that built this country, the faith that many of the most important, most accomplished, most significant human beings in the history of humanity belonged to — only has two holidays that someone like Joe Biden will even pretend to care about. And now one of those two has been overshadowed by one of the 130 LGBT days. It&#8217;s outrageous and disgusting, but also instructive. I&#8217;ve been saying for years that &#8220;LGBT&#8221; isn&#8217;t just a collection of sexual and gender identities. It&#8217;s our new state religion. And never has that been more clear than it is today.

Annual Easter Egg Roll Held On South Lawn Of The White House

The Most Anti-Christian President In History Declares Easter ‘Transgender Day Of Visibility’

The Most Anti-Christian President In History Declares Easter 'Transgender Day Of Visibility'

Christianity

Easter

Jesus Christ

Joe Biden

LGBTQ

Matt Walsh

Transgender

Gideons International, the Christian organization known for distributing Bibles to hospitals across the country, is being blocked out by a large hospital system in rural Georgia because of new diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. 
Gideons, which distributes its free Bibles to not only hospitals, but also various other locations like hotels, and jails, is now blocked from servicing the Phoebe Putney Health System, which serves hundreds of thousands of people in over 40 Georgia counties and is one of the state’s largest healthcare providers. Gideons hasn&#8217;t had its Bibles in the system&#8217;s hospitals for months after maintaining a working relationship for several years, according to sources who spoke with The Daily Wire.
The policy raises questions about why inclusion policies would be used to exclude Christians from sharing Bibles with those who are sick or on their deathbed. It also raises questions how such a policy could be in place in a place referred to by locals as the “belt buckle” of the Bible belt. 
Gideons was founded in 1899 and has distributed over 2 billion Bibles in more than 95 languages to 200 countries and territories. It is most well known for placing Bibles in night stands in hotels across America with about a million being distributed every year to hotels and motels.
A source familiar with intimate knowledge of the situation said that Gideons was first restricted during the response to the coronavirus pandemic from entering Phoebe. The organization wasn&#8217;t let back in after COVID restrictions were relaxed and they attempted to resume their work last year. At the time, the Gideons were told their work was &#8220;a violation of the DEI policy and they would no longer be allowed&#8221; into the Phoebe facilities, according to the source.
The source said that the policy was &#8220;clearly anti-Christian&#8221; and that citing DEI to restrict the Gideons made no sense because Christians were being excluded instead of included.
Neither Phoebe’s communications team nor its chief DEI officer responded to multiple requests for comments. Scott <a href="https://www.phoebehealth.com/about-us/leadership/executive-leadership-pphs">Steiner,</a> the CEO of Phoebe, is aware of the exclusion of the Gideons from Phoebe facilities, as are several members of the board of the health system, according to a source familiar with the situation. 
The source said that hospital policies started to take a leftward drift when Phoebe brought on Steiner as CEO back in 2019, which is evidenced by the fact that he has pushed DEI principles throughout the health system since taking the helm of Phoebe. Steiner is a <a href="https://www.phoebehealth.com/media-center/media-center-news-story?news=8108" target="_blank" rel="noopener">member</a> of the Georgia Diversity Council, which <a href="http://www.georgiadiversitycouncil.org/portfolio/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">describes</a> itself as the “premier resource for diversity best practices and leadership development in the state of Georgia.”
In previous comments, Steiner has said that his staff managers are not diverse enough and that he would take the lead on changing that.
“We have an incredibly vibrant and diverse workforce that is representative of the communities we serve,” he <a href="https://www.albanyherald.com/news/phoebe-s-new-diversity-council-gets-to-work/article_8be1dc9c-37fe-11eb-be93-cba746b68add.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> at the health system’s diversity council&#8217;s first meeting in January 2022. “In some areas of our organization — like on our management team — that diversity has been less evident, and we are committed to looking at ways to making meaningful change.”
He added that looking at the diversity situation at Phoebe “might make me a little uncomfortable, but if we’re not dealing with discomfort head-on, then we’re not diving in deeply and honestly enough.”
According to the Albany Herald, pursuing diversity policies was a major focus of Steiner when he took over Phoebe and he appointed Jennifer Williams to be the system’s diversity and inclusion officer. William’s <a href="https://archive.ph/6O6Yp">bio</a> says that she is a “bridge-builder and believes in the value of diversity of thought.”
Under Williams, Phoebe has begun <a href="http://albanyceo.com/video/2024/01/dr-jennifer-williams-phoebe-putney-health-system-creating-inclusive-workplace/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tracking</a> how much money it spends with “diverse” local suppliers, tracking improvement on “diversity” each year, and conducting focus groups with employees. 
“We began with focus groups made up of minority leaders across the health system — distilling their input into key action items,” Williams said. “Two recommendations were the establishment of a permanent diversity council and systemwide diversity and unconscious bias training. Our senior leaders and health system board quickly adopted those recommendations, and we’ve been off and running.”
The exclusion of the Gideons at Phoebe Health comes as the medical institutions across the country face criticism for focusing on DEI as opposed to merit and teaching the actual medical field.

USA, New Jersey, View of Bible and cross

Christian Group Blocked From Distributing Bibles In Georgia Hospital In Name Of DEI, Sources Say

Diversity

Georgia

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Dr. John Lennox on Nietzsche’s seventeenth-century prophetic observation, the eternal voice of being, the concept of transcendence, the glory and weight of being, and Jesus Christ’s triumph over death. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/a-conversation-about-god-dr-john-lennox" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/a-conversation-about-god-dr-john-lennox" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.
Start time: 36:16
Jordan Peterson: In the late 1800s, Nietzsche observed that God was dead. It was a very complex observation because people like to think of that as a triumphalist proclamation by this emancipatory philosopher. But that wasn&#8217;t the case at all because Nietzsche basically said that God was dead, we had killed him, and we will never find enough water to wash away the blood. He knew it was a catastrophe, and he prophesied that three things would happen. One was that there would be a wicked turn toward a kind of hopeless nihilism because every structure of morality had fallen apart. The second was the rise of totalitarian substitutions for God; Nietzsche actually specified communism as a likely candidate and also prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would die as a consequence, which was quite the damned prophecy for the mid-late 1800s. Then he also said the alternative is that we could create our own values. And that was the root that Nietzsche saw as the way out.
Now, there are a couple of technical problems with that, you might say. One is that we don&#8217;t live very long, and it is not obvious that any of us are wise enough to create our own values. The second problem is, as the psychoanalysts pointed out very quickly, it is not obvious at all that we are masters in our own houses because even if you only look at the spiritual realm as equivalent to something like the unconscious, we are all haunted beings — and we cannot necessarily trust our judgment.
Therefore, the third problem is, who do you mean by the “we” who will create our own values? Which aspect of the psyche is now going to create value? Nietzsche said himself that each drive tends to philosophize in its own spirit, so in order for us to create our own values in some sort of transcendent sense, you have to hypothesize the hierarchical integration of the psyche towards some super ordinate end that is speaking in some voice. And it is not obvious to me at all that that would be a subjective voice.
So when Moses investigates the Burning Bush, he goes deeper and deeper into the investigation, and the first thing that happens is, his attention is attracted. The second thing is that he starts to notice that he is treading on sacred ground because he is getting deep into the phenomenon. The third thing that happens — and this is relevant to your notion of levels of revelation — is that the voice of being itself speaks to him. The eternal, transcendent voice of being. Moses is smart and wise enough to know that that is not him. It is something above and beyond him, and he does not take credit for it. That is partly why he never turns into a pharaoh in the desert. He separates himself from the source of sovereignty as such, and I do not see how that can be done in the rationalist, atheist, materialist realm of conceptualization. You fall into that subjectivist trap.
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John Lennox: Nor do I, and I think nature in that sense was a kind of prophet. And we&#8217;re seeing the damage done. You know, ever since I was very young, I was fascinated by the polar opposite of my Christian heritage. That has led me to spend quite a lot of time in Russia and I’ve talked about these kinds of things to Russian friends, many of whom suffered in the Gulag. I remember one conversation with a leading academician and he said to me, “You know, John, we thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings. And we woke up too late to realize that it cannot be done.” It was nature that said if you destroy God, you lose all right to the kind of values that we accept, in a sense, deep down in our Judeo-Christian culture. What is so interesting about Moses — and I loved your discussion about that — is that he came face to face not only with the concept of transcendence, but transcendence itself. He was brought into the presence of the very glory of God.
You were discussing in your round table how in Hebrew, glory is associated with weight, and that leads me to think, relevant to what you&#8217;ve just said, about C.S. Lewis. I&#8217;m old enough to have listened to C.S. Lewis, by the way, when I was younger. C.S. Lewis in the 1940s saw exactly what was going to happen if a group of human beings took it into their heads to determine and redefine all future generations through genetic experimentation and so on. And in two books, “The Abolition of Man” and “That Hideous Strength,” he spelled that out, and he made the point that if that happens, it is not going to liberate human beings. In fact, it&#8217;s going to abolish them because what would be created by, say, playing around with the germline, is not human beings but artifacts. So he writes [in] the final triumph of humanity, scientists will be the abolition of man. It&#8217;s that that I fear is really permeating our culture. I mean, the Caesars in Rome and the Babylonian emperors who thought of themselves as gods looks pretty trivial compared with this insidious teaching that&#8217;s around in particularly the Western world today, that we are actually all gods, that we ought to rise to this, and the only way to rise to it is to reject the transcendent completely; there is nothing above us.
Jordan Peterson: Let’s delve into that a little bit because the devil&#8217;s always in the details. When I had little kids, I thought about there being a terrible fragility to children. Adults are fragile too, obviously. We all are because we are mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering. But I thought about my three-year-old son; he has this terrible vulnerability. Wouldn&#8217;t it be good if that could be ameliorated? You can do that two ways: You can institute protective mechanisms that shield them from the depredations of the world or you can strive to make them into the sort of competent people who can take the world on their own. This is akin to the gospel ideas, I would say, that you can learn to handle serpents, and that is your best defense against serpents. That way you get to have the benefits of being and develop into someone simultaneously capable of bearing the weight of being, let&#8217;s say. And I do not know if you can have being without it having a weight. I do not even know. It is like it is possible that mortal limitation is the price you pay for being. I do not know how things are constructed.
John Lennox: It could well be. What you are saying reminds me of Dostoyevsky, who said that he couldn&#8217;t imagine a great person who had not known some kind of suffering. What we try to do with our children is somehow to limit that, but we realized that part of their maturing has to do with how they learn to handle life and we don&#8217;t want to leave them defenseless, do we? So what you&#8217;re raising is a very big set of questions.
Now, you mentioned that transhumanism attempts to solve some of this vulnerability and, of course, some things are very good. I wear glasses, and they enhance my vision and they&#8217;re very important. But this idea of Harari’s where he sets two agenda items for the 21st century — firstly to abolish physical death, to solve that as a tactical medical problem, and then to enhance human happiness by genetic engineering and cyborg engineering and so forth — I take a very radical view of that. When people hold out this promise to me, I simply say to them, “You&#8217;re too late.” 
The problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago because I think there is strong evidence that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. And the problem, therefore, of developing some kind of immortality was simultaneously sold to that because Christ promises to those that trust him and follow him that he will eventually raise them from the dead, and that will be the best uploading you can ever imagine of brains, body, and everything else. So I take a very radical view that the transhumanist ideal is bound to fail and there’s deeper reasons behind that as well.
* * *
To hear the rest of the conversation, continue by listening or watching this episode on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/a-conversation-about-god-dr-john-lennox" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a>. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

MixCollage-21-Feb-2024-03-38-PM-6672

The Problem Of Physical Death Was Solved Centuries Ago

Artificial Intelligence

Atheism

Genesis

Jordan Peterson

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s conversation with Christopher Anthony Lundsford (stage name: Oliver Anthony) on the beauty of building a life with someone who shares a similar vision, and why it’s worth taking a leap of faith. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/oliver-anthony-with-jordan-peterson-art-commerce-and-the-religious" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/oliver-anthony-with-jordan-peterson-art-commerce-and-the-religious">watch</a> the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.
Oliver Anthony: I&#8217;ve been watching your <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/exodus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Exodus series</a>, and I can find a parallel in that and your story, and it&#8217;s part of what&#8217;s inspired me to get back into Scripture the way I have because you&#8217;ve done a great job of finding the practicality in Scripture and presenting it in a way that it&#8217;s very easily understood because so much of the Bible is interpretation and trying to understand the deeper meaning and things. And so, yeah, this has been said many times in many ways, but it&#8217;s important for people to [do] whatever it is that really tugs at their heart strings — and, you know, maybe it&#8217;s lost through the education system — but, as a child, we all have these dreams of whatever it is we want to do and life seems so limitless and there&#8217;s so much potential. You&#8217;ve got to find a way to just face that fear and pursue it no matter what. 
I have a song called “Hell on Earth” that I just kind of threw together. It&#8217;s an Android recording, but it sort of reminisces this idea. “A lot of people die and go to hell before they ever hit the ground” is one of the lines in the song. But it&#8217;s like people get stuck in this sort of monotonous work: Let me drive to work down the interstate and get pissed off and flip everybody off when they cut into my lane and go work this stupid job that I don&#8217;t like so I can come home to this stupid house that I don&#8217;t like so I can pay all these stupid bills that I don&#8217;t want to pay. And deep down inside of them, there is some sort of ambition or pursuit that maybe they&#8217;ve even forgotten about. But the subconscious has such a weird way of holding onto things that sometimes even our cognitive memory can&#8217;t recognize.
For me, I didn&#8217;t want to die not taking that chance. You know, time is very precious. It seems like we live for a long period of time, but really 80 or 90 years in the grand scheme of the world&#8217;s existence is just a blip on the map. You don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ll even live to see tomorrow. So yeah, you do have to pursue whatever it is that you feel compelled to do in that moment when the time&#8217;s there.
Jordan B. Peterson: All right, so you have about ten cool things there. You mentioned Exodus. One of the things that happens in Exodus is that Moses is being a shepherd. He is off with his Midianite father-in-law, Jethro, and he married one of Jethro’s daughters, and he is away from Egypt. He is just minding his own business. That is when he is wandering down the pathway by Mount Horeb, which is the center of the world. It is Jacob&#8217;s Ladder. It is the place where Jack would plant his beanstalk that stretches to heaven. That symbol is reused consistently in the Bible.
That is when he notices something off to the side that glimmers and glitters. That is the burning bush, and he could continue just walking down the path as a relatively satisfied shepherd — or maybe dissatisfied — shepherd, but he decides to go investigate this thing that attracts his attention. That is the key aspect of the story. He decides to go investigate what attracts his attention, and as he gets closer to it, he understands that he is on sacred ground. When he continues his pursuit, God himself speaks to him. That is when Moses becomes the leader. That is the story of life.
You said people are all tangled up in the nine-to-five and they are not paying any attention to anything but immediate practicalities, even though they are dissatisfied with them, and they are ignoring what is calling to them. Moses does not do that. Then he develops a vision, and that is the vision of the Promised Land. Everyone needs a vision of the Promised Land because, as we already said, that protects them from anxiety and gives them hope.
Then you talked about what you did with your wife. Now, this is particularly interesting to me because I used to play house with my wife when I was like eight, and this is how kids play house. If you are a boy and you are playing house with a girl, to play house properly, these are the rules: You have to come up with a vision that you offer the girl or she has to do the same to you. They have to say, “Look, here is the house.” You can maybe sketch it out on the ground or pretend this playground structure is the house, and there is the door and there are the rooms and you be the mom and I will be the dad. Here is what we are going to play out happening. The girl has to say, “Yes, I am on board with that,” and then you enter the same fictional landscape.
You said and you noticed you have to do the same thing with your wife. It is exactly the same damn thing. Once you develop a vision for yourself, let&#8217;s say, in your imagination, that is what calls to you; it is based on what you really want. You have to develop that vision. Then you have to say to her, “Look, here is what I see five years down the road.” Is there a manner in which what you see and what you envision — and that was, say, your wife&#8217;s concern for animals, that joint interest you had — is there some way that you have a vision of give years down the road that we could bring together, that we would both be thrilled to play out, that we could commit to? That visionary practice has to extend within the marriage. Then you get to play house. That is a hell of a lot better than beating each other up and, you know, using force and compulsion.
Those are the options, as far as I can tell: It is slavery, tyranny, or negotiation. If you negotiate in a visionary way, then you get to play. If you get to play, then you are not in that hell on earth that you described. You are as close to the opposite as you can get. So you obviously managed that successfully, I presume. What does your wife think about the way this decision is unfolding?
Oliver Anthony: Well, in the present moment, she is very excited. Neither one of us had any idea that any of this would happen the way it did with the music, but we&#8217;re excited. The last few weeks have been so difficult to interpret anything because she is pregnant now with my first son. I&#8217;ve got two daughters and so this will be my first boy. So the last couple of weeks have been spent more trying to figure out what we&#8217;re going to name the little rascal than anything else. But our vision, I think for the next 20 or 30 years, is very similar in what we want to do. We want to make sure that our children are brought up in a way that they get to experience nature and get to sort of have some of the imaginative, and like you said, even just some of the playful nature that children have. We want to do what we can to try to protect them from being so institutionalized at an early age — sort of the system that you describe and the way modern education works — and we want them to be able to pursue whatever. We&#8217;re very excited about the opportunities with our children and with our family. 
We have this vision. I don&#8217;t know exactly how it&#8217;ll work out. There&#8217;s a model very similar that Robert Kennedy Jr. describes called the Healing Center. I think we want to incorporate animals into it as well, but we want to use our property. Maybe we even try to purchase another piece of property just through this nonprofit. But I have this vision of creating a model that can be replicated that involves regenerative agriculture [for] people that are suffering with PTSD and people that are just getting out of rehab. There are studies that show that hard work in general helps anxiety and depression [plus] being out in nature doing it. I think there&#8217;s a place over in Italy that does this, that takes kids in that have depression, anxiety, and suicidal thought and [they work] on this vineyard for a period of time, and it&#8217;s got a very high success rate.
We have a vision of trying to take whatever has been produced from this, and we want to sort of light a fire that will hopefully light other fires and this can become something a lot bigger than just what she and I want to do with our world. We both are very like-minded in that bigger vision. And it did take some time. You know, it&#8217;s very difficult for anyone in today&#8217;s society, including me. I mean, I&#8217;m just like anybody else. But sometimes it&#8217;s hard to — how would I say it? — it&#8217;s hard to take away the immediate gratification of whatever world you&#8217;re living in now and those comforts and being able to somehow put those to the side for something that doesn&#8217;t even exist. It&#8217;s a terrifying thing to make that leap. But you know, there&#8217;s no going back.
Jordan B. Peterson: Well, it is a leap of faith. First of all, you have to have faith to do anything because you cannot do anything unless you have faith in it. So maybe you have faith in your nine to five routine and you think that is the best that there is. And that is faith, too, because like you said, you might be run over by a bus tomorrow and who the hell knows what is going to happen? You are going to put your faith somewhere. Then the question is, where should you put your faith? One answer to that is security or hypothetical security. But that seems to me to be stupid because there is no security. So if there is no security, then where do you put your faith? I would say, well, you put your faith in what beckons, and music beckons to people and beauty beckons to people — and art and justice and truth, these eternal verities. The path of heroism beckons. These things call, and that is the burning bush. You have to put your faith in something because you are ignorant and you do not know everything. So you have to take a leap.
* * *
To hear the rest of the conversation, continue by listening or watching this episode on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a>.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> listen to</a> or<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

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Meditations With Oliver Anthony: Negotiating A Shared Vision And Taking A Leap Of Faith

Marriage

Music

Oliver Anthony

Psychology

The following is a transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/episode-2-understanding-the-ending" target="_blank" rel="noopener">episode 2</a> of Jonathan Pageau&#8217;s new series &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/end-of-the-world-official-trailer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">End of the World.</a>&#8220; Now available on DailyWire+.
The ancient Greeks had an interesting understanding of their world and it is an understanding which actually reflects itself in every culture. It&#8217;s not unique to the Greeks. It is the image of the center moving to the periphery.
In the city of Delphi, the Greeks had something they called the “Omphalos,” a holy stone considered to be the “belly button of the world.” That&#8217;s actually what it means. To them, this was the center of the world, or better yet, the center of their world. It bound them together as Hellenes, having the same language, worshiping the same gods, and even though they had conflict amongst themselves, there was something transcendent which bound them together nonetheless.
As the Greeks would move away from their city, however, they would encounter people who were strangers, but were recognizable. They would form some kind of relationship with them. Because they shared a border, they could even understand them a little bit and they would trade with one another.
But as they moved further out, they would encounter new groups of people and they really struggled to understand their language. That&#8217;s where the word “Barbarian” comes from. It&#8217;s the idea of hearing someone bark like a dog — not because they actually barked like a dog, but because they&#8217;re language was so far removed from the Greek language that they couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar,” is what the Greeks would hear when they encountered the Scythians or other strangers further off.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/episode-2-understanding-the-ending" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: Episode 2 of &#8220;End of the World&#8221; with Jonathan Pageau</a></h3>
So, in the Greek vision of the world, as you move further and further away, then you start to encounter even stranger things. You would start to encounter humans who were not like us: humans who had the heads of dogs, humans who had no heads or a head in their chest or maybe humans with one large foot. They had this weird movement towards something like idiosyncrasy.
At the end of the world, there were the Amazons, which were an upside down version of Greek culture, where the women were the warriors. The men didn&#8217;t have much of a place in their society, so it was an upside down reflection of their world.
There are legends about Alexander the Great who, as he invaded the world and took more and more space, came to a place in the north called the Caspian Gates where he built a giant wall. That wall was meant to hold back all the monsters of the world on the other side.
If you look at the descriptions of those monsters, you&#8217;ll see why they&#8217;re put behind the gate. Many of them were animal-human hybrids, they ate bugs, and were known to do very disturbing things. They broke all of the taboos. Because of that, they had to be fully excluded from the world.
Now, the legend is that when we come to the end of this world, that’s when the Gates of Alexander, the Caspian Gates, will be broken and the hordes of Gog and Magog will flood into the world, playing a part in the destruction of the world.
That image is a little story to help you understand what the “shape of a world” is. It&#8217;s very dramatic, of course, but there are many other smaller versions of this story.
You can even see it in the Bible. 
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For those of you who know your Bible, you&#8217;ll notice that the first chapters in Genesis are actually quite similar to Alexander’s story. In the beginning, God puts Adam and Eve in a garden in a place of balance between nature and culture. Usually, this garden is actually seen as a mountain, a high place up above. Think of the mountain as something like a pyramid with a point at the top, which joins us all together. When Adam and Eve transgressed, they were chased down the mountain, out of the garden of paradise, and into the world.
As you follow the story in Genesis you discover an increase in faults. When Cain kills his brother, he is chased even further down the mountain or further into the valley. Then, as Cain&#8217;s descendants develop, we get two things: On the one hand, we get an increase in civilization or power. The descendants of Cain founded the first city and all the things which represent civilization up to metallurgy, weapons, and the arts. So there is this increase in power, this increase in the setting of inside and outside, because that&#8217;s what a city is. Before that, there were no cities. So when Cain built the first city, he created this inside-outside identity. Some things were ejected and some things were on the inside.
There&#8217;s also something else which happens during that time. Cain&#8217;s descendants start to mingle with the sons of God.
Now, without getting into what exactly that means, it is important to understand that it is seen as a type of mixture, two things which don&#8217;t belong together start to mix together and become confused. These giants, these monsters that came about from the relationship between the sons of God and the daughters of men, brought about things like hybrid animals, that mixture of different identities of animals.
As the civilization increased, confusion increased at the same time, and at some point, everything broke apart. You could say the walls crumbled and up came the waters. The waters of the flood invaded the world and that was the end of that world.
Looking at the relationship between the Greek stories and the stories of the Bible, we can see how these types of descriptions can help us understand the shape of the world and how there is this relationship between power, civilization, control, and chaos.
* * *
Jonathan Pageau is a French Canadian icon carver, public speaker and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@JonathanPageau" target="_blank" rel="noopener">YouTuber</a> exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world, how these patterns emerge and come together, manifesting in religion, art and in popular culture. He&#8217;s also the editor of the <a href="https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Orthodox Arts Journal</a> and host of <a href="https://thesymbolicworld.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Symbolic World</a> blog and podcast.

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How Ancient Stories Can Help Us Understand And Survive The End Of The World

Alexander the Great

DailyWire+

Jonathan Pageau

Theology

A planned Torah reading got awkward in a hurry when a group of leftist Jews gathered to publicly call for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and the terror group Hamas.
The group, who refer to themselves as &#8220;Rabbis for Ceasefire,&#8221; joined with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — who has often faced criticism and was even recently censured for repeated anti-Semitic statements. Their plan was to bring &#8220;the Synagogue into the public with Shacharit [morning prayer] in front of Congress.&#8221;
But some who listened to the Torah reading – which was supposed to be done in Hebrew and then in English — quickly realized that something was a little bit off.
During the Hebrew portion, several pointed out that the woman doing the reading — among truly religious Jews, men typically do the Torah reading — dropped her voice to nearly a whisper when she got to the part that talked about God giving the land to his chosen people — the Jews — and their descendants.
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During the translation segment “…god came to him (Isaac) and told him don’t go to Egypt, just stay where you are —, I’m skipping a lot of parts here — gave him a lot of blessings…” <a href="https://t.co/8fFvJ6VXmk">pic.twitter.com/8fFvJ6VXmk</a>
&mdash; Vaad HaBadchanim (not parody) (@VaadHaBadchanim) <a href="https://twitter.com/VaadHaBadchanim/status/1725568852845535588?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 17, 2023</a></blockquote>
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When they got to the English translation of the same passage, they simply left out the part about God promising the land to the Jewish people.
&#8220;God came to him (Isaac) and told him don’t go to Egypt, just stay where you are &#8230; I’m skipping a lot of parts here &#8230; gave him a lot of blessings for his kids &#8230;&#8221;
&#8220;Absolutely hilarious! She drops to a whisper when she realizes she’s about to read the words where God promises the land of Israel to the Jews. Then in the English translation he says &#8216;I’m skipping a lot of parts here,'&#8221; Chaya Raichik responded.
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Absolutely hilarious! She drops to a whisper when she realizes she’s about to read the words where God promises the land of Israel to the Jews. Then in the English translation he says “I’m skipping a lot of parts here.” 🤣🤣 <a href="https://t.co/JoknlMDYIp">https://t.co/JoknlMDYIp</a> <a href="https://t.co/43P3aMvrfb">pic.twitter.com/43P3aMvrfb</a>
&mdash; Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) <a href="https://twitter.com/ChayaRaichik10/status/1726404862781604010?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 20, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;This might be the finest example of &#8216;irony is dead&#8217; in all of human history …&#8221; Dave Rubin added.
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This might be the finest example of “irony is dead” in all of human history… <a href="https://t.co/zebsRh1HTU">https://t.co/zebsRh1HTU</a>
&mdash; Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1726381424557642176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 19, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Anti-Israel Jews are decorative, identity politics ornaments—and, to get the best bang for the buck, they sometimes need to play-act as actual religious Jews. Here’s when it gets pretty awkward,&#8221; Dave Reaboi observed.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Anti-Israel Jews are decorative, identity politics ornaments—and, to get the best bang for the buck, they sometimes need to play-act as actual religious Jews. Here’s when it gets pretty awkward. <a href="https://t.co/SYiGZpBIck">https://t.co/SYiGZpBIck</a>
&mdash; David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) <a href="https://twitter.com/davereaboi/status/1726382845063565614?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 19, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Blake Flayton came to a similar conclusion, saying, &#8220;It is wrong to criticize Jews for their own interpretation of Judaism unless that interpretation is weaponized against Jewish communal interests. The &#8216;Rabbis for ceasefire&#8217; event was a performance for the non-Jewish world, the only circumstance in which Cori Bush and the like could feel comfortable.&#8221;
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It is wrong to criticize Jews for their own interpretation of Judaism unless that interpretation is weaponized against Jewish communal interests. The “Rabbis for ceasefire” event was a performance for the non-Jewish world, the only circumstance in which Cori Bush and the like…
&mdash; Blake Flayton (@blakeflayton) <a href="https://twitter.com/blakeflayton/status/1724309181241709039?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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US-ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-CONFLICT-POLITICS-CEASEFIRE

Torah Reading Gets Awkward Fast As Leftist Jews Hold Pro-Ceasefire Rally

Torah Reading Gets Awkward Fast As Non-Religious Jews Hold Pro-Ceasefire Rally

Hamas

Israel

Palestinians

U.S.

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s tour stop in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Aoy08tjHlg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wheatland, California</a>. In this segment, he draws on previous philosophers’ writings to form thoughts on why we should not aim for happiness and what should be pursued instead.
Start time: 00:00 
The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote 150 years ago, and he was one of the first psychological philosophers who really wrote about anxiety. He regarded himself rather useless, all things considered. He wrote a section in one of his books about all the industrialists who were operating in Europe at that time, trying in every possible way to make life easier and more efficient and productive for everyone, which was definitely happening during the Victorian period; Europe was rapidly transforming into an industrial powerhouse. He said someone as useless as him with an orientation toward being a student who liked to sit and contemplate ideas, talk in cafes, and smoke cigars and drink could never make anything easier for anyone than everyone was already trying to make. So he thought his task would be to make things more difficult for people because there would come a time when what people wanted was not more ease but more challenge and difficulty. That is really smart — and it is witty and it is true.
Dostoevsky knew this too. He wrote about this in “Notes from Underground.” It is a great book — a very short, absolutely brilliant, compelling, dark read. It is the confession of a miserable, resentful, murderously genocidal bureaucrat who evaluates his own soul and confesses his sins. It is also a critique of the idea of utopia oriented toward security. Dostoevsky was dealing with the set of ideas that are really tearing us apart culturally right now — this idea of an eventual utopia, based on something like security and safety. Dostoevsky really objected to that back around 1860, a long time ago. He said the thing about people that you do not really understand is that fundamentally, we are ungrateful and we can curse; that is what distinguishes us from the animals — which I thought was pretty damn comical. But he said something very interesting: If you set up a utopia so that all people had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, after a surfeit of that, which would happen quite quickly, people would go mad, just to break things so something unexpected and remarkable could happen. We are not built for security and safety but for, let’s call it, adventure.
That is good to know because you do not want to suffer unduly; that seems reasonable. You might think because of that, what you really want is happiness. But Solzhenitsyn, for example, wrote about what happened under Stalin in “The Gulag Archipelago” and said, if your goal is happiness, what are you going to do when the jackboots hammer down your door at two in the morning and haul you off to the prison camp? Because you are not going to be happy there.
Happiness is a boat that is easily capsized and the waves are always there. So if your philosophy is one of impulsive happiness — the same sort of thing Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard were pointing out — then you are not prepared when all hell breaks loose. And all hell will absolutely 100% break through at some point in your life, and you are lucky if it will not be decades. It will certainly be some of it and it might be a lot of it, and for some of you, it is going to be damn near the whole thing. So, if what floats your boat is happiness, you are going to be capsized by the first decent wave. You might ask yourself what you have instead of happiness that might be even more reliable, and I do think that adventure is more reliable than happiness.
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In the Old Testament story of Abraham, founder of the Abrahamic faiths and obviously a crucial figure in the development of world culture, Abraham is presented as a late bloomer, to say the least. He is about 83 (people lived longer back then, at least, so the story goes), and he had a very rich father by nomadic standards. He could just sit around in the tent all day with a doting mother and a rich father, eating peeled grapes and busying himself with the continuation of the species. But God appears to him and tells him to get out of his security, get out of his comfort, leave his family, leave his community, leave his nation, and go out into the world. It is very interesting to contemplate the story both from a psychological and religious perspective because what God is presented as in that book, which is a crucial book for world culture, is the manifestation of the spirit that calls even the too-secure and pampered to adventure.
Abraham is a pretty rough guy when he goes out and has his adventure. It is not all skittles and roses from then on, quite the contrary. Right away, he runs into a conspiracy of elites to steal his wife, he runs into tyranny, he runs into starvation, and he encounters war. He goes out in the world and has the whole tragedy of his life, on both the social and political front and individually. But the promise and the implication of adventure is that if you have a sufficient adventure, then that cannot so much protect you from suffering — because perhaps that is impossible — but to justify it. You know this from your own life. When you look at your life, you might look back at travails that you have undertaken.
End-of-life surveys that ask people what they regret have shown they do not regret what they did that did not work; they regret what they did not do that could have worked. They regret the chances they did not take. Even if you do an evaluation of your biography, one of the things you want to be able to say to yourself — maybe there is nothing better you can say to yourself — is: that was extraordinarily difficult but it was worth it. It is not like you can have one of those without the other because you cannot imagine that you could. Have some confidence in what you have managed to accomplish, the kind of confidence that would instill you with a genuine sense of self despite your fundamental inadequacy. To have that fundamental sense of self-regard that is grounded in something real, it has to be based in a narrative that approximates: That was extremely difficult, but it was worth it. You have to have both of those.
You see the suffering in the world: the suffering of children, the suffering of maybe your children, or you are suffering. One of the questions we always ask ourselves (which is technically a theodicy question) is: How could reality be constituted so I can have faith in its essence when there is so much suffering. One answer to that is: How much suffering do you want? You might think, none. But I do not think that is right — at least, you want something approximating optimized challenge. At least, you want to be pushed to your limit, and maybe you find the most exciting times in your life. In fact, you will pay to have this experience, to be pushed to your limit — maybe even a bit beyond it but maybe not so far beyond it that you crumble and break and things fall apart. But could you be pushed to your limit if there was not the possibility of falling apart and breaking? That is an open question. How are you ever going to take something seriously if the consequences are not actually serious? There is something delightful about dancing on the edge. That is why Hawaiians believe surfing was sacred; it is because to surf, you have to be on the edge. The waves can come and take you out at any moment, but without the possibility of the waves rising to take you out, you cannot dance on the edge — and maybe that is exactly what you want to do.
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There is good evidence from the neuroscience literature that consciousness itself is something akin to dancing on the edge. So technically when you are conscious (when you are awake), your brain is occupying a position between something like chaos and order. If your brain is maximally ordered, you are just bored and nothing is changing. If you are chaotic, then it is anxiety and catastrophe. You want to be positioned right between those two, and that is when your consciousness is optimized. When your consciousness is optimized, then you are deeply engaged in life and everything seems alive and meaningful. Maybe that is the solution, in some profound sense, to the problem of suffering. It is that you optimize your interaction with chaos rather than being protected all the time from everything that can hurt you.
To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch">DailyWire+</a>. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast"> listen to</a> or<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson"> watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

5JP_FOR_DW_GDWOODMAN057 (3) copy

A More Reliable And Meaningful Aim Than Happiness 

Communism

Hawaii

Surfing

Newly-minted House Speaker <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/mike-johnson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mike Johnson</a> (R-LA) told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday that the entirety of his worldview could be found if one would simply &#8220;go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.&#8221;
Johnson, who received unanimous Republican support after three weeks of chaos — and three other nominees for the position — was elected on Wednesday to replace ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and spoke with Hannity about getting back to business in the House of Representatives.
WATCH:
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Speaker Mike Johnson tonight: “Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” <a href="https://t.co/ylMWX1XVJy">pic.twitter.com/ylMWX1XVJy</a>
&mdash; Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) <a href="https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1717718043525099743?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 27, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Someone asked me today in the media, they said, &#8216;It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?'&#8221; Johnson told Hannity of the intense media scrutiny he&#8217;d seen since taking on his new role.
&#8220;I said, &#8216;Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview.&#8217; That’s what I believe and so I make no apologies for it,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;That’s your personal worldview,&#8221; Hannity pressed, and Johnson confirmed: &#8220;That’s my personal worldview.&#8221;
Johnson took his Bible with him to deliver his first speech as House Speaker — where he told every other member of Congress that he believed they were all called by God to use their gifts to the best of their ability to serve the American people.
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WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): &quot;Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: God is the one that raises up those in authority. All of us &#8230; [Marxism and Communism] begin with the premise that there is no God.&quot; <a href="https://t.co/VCh4kKHdQC">pic.twitter.com/VCh4kKHdQC</a>
&mdash; Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) <a href="https://twitter.com/HeartlandSignal/status/1717256767569047552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 25, 2023</a></blockquote>
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Johnson was also part of a small cadre of House members who chose to lift up the Speaker&#8217;s race in prayer back in January, when McCarthy fought through more than a dozen ballots before his bid was successful.
Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) posted a photo of the moment just before Wednesday&#8217;s vote secured the gavel for Johnson, writing, &#8220;In January, Congressman Mike Johnson joined me on the House floor while we were in a deadlock over who our next Speaker would be. We lifted up the speaker’s race to the Lord and asked for his divine guidance. Immediately after the prayer, 14 members changed their votes, ultimately leading to Speaker McCarthy securing the gavel by the end of the day.&#8221;
&#8220;Mike Johnson is a strong conservative, but above all else, he is a strong Christian. He’s not afraid to look to his faith for guidance. America needs that more than ever in the U.S. House,&#8221; he added.
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House Elects Mike Johnson Of Louisiana As Speaker

‘I Make No Apologies’: New House Speaker Says The Bible Is His Worldview

'I Make No Apologies': New House Speaker Says The Bible Is His Worldview

Christian

Congress

House Speaker

Mike Johnson

Politics

This is a portion of a speech delivered by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Knowles</a> at Georgetown University on Tuesday, September 26, 2023.
There is a crucial fact about liberty, a fact at odds with our mistaken, modern, liberal notions of what liberty is. Modern liberal culture tells us that liberty is the right to choose. This is how most people today — even conservatives — think about liberty. But this is not the way our forebears thought about liberty. This is not the way our civilization has understood liberty for most of history. From the ancient pagan Greeks all the way up through the medieval and Renaissance Christians right up until just a few hundred years ago, liberty was understood quite differently. 
Even Lord Acton, an ardent liberal and favorite of libertarians, famously admitted that liberty is not the ability to do what we wish but rather the right to do what we ought. The nineteenth-century Spanish writer Donoso Cortes put it even more clearly. He said: 
<blockquote>“When man came from the hands of God, he understood the good; and because he understood, he willed it; and because he willed, he executed it; and by executing the good his will desired and his intellect understood, he was free. That this is the Christian signification of liberty is clear from the following words of the Gospel: —‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ (John 8:32).”</blockquote>
We know that liberty cannot merely be the absence of external constraint when we consider the case of the heroin addict. According to the modern, liberal conception, the freest man is the one with the fewest external constraints. So, according to that definition, the freest man in America is the heroin addict in San Francisco. As long as he’s got a few bucks in his pocket — no matter how dubiously he acquired them — that man can shoot up dope in a filthy alleyway, and no cop is going to stop him. He can loiter, he can defecate in the streets, and he can sleep on the sidewalk until he freezes and dies of exposure. Man, isn’t he free? I don’t think so. He’s a slave — a slave to his appetites, his passions, his lower will. And he knows it. He probably wishes to break his addiction — he almost certainly does — but his appetites cloud his intellect, and his defective will succumbs to temptation until it destroys him.
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Anyone who’s ever had a bad habit — or a good habit, for that matter — knows that the more you do something, the easier it is to do, and the harder it is to do the opposite. The more you do drugs, the easier it is to do more drugs, and the harder it is to stop doing drugs. The more you learn, the easier it is to know things, and the harder it is to fall into error. This fact of human nature reveals a second error with the liberal definition of liberty: namely, that the better we become — or the worse we become — the less free we should be.
It’s an unfamiliar thought today. What I mean is: so long as we have no habits, tastes, or inclinations — so long as we’re perfectly neutral — then we are perfectly free, according to the liberals, because we are perfectly disposed to choose between alternatives. But the moment we begin to develop habits and tastes and inclinations — which of course happens to all of us all the time, whether we want it to or not — then suddenly we are less free to choose between alternatives. The moment we start shooting heroin, the less able we are to choose not to shoot heroin. The moment we start learning, the less able we are to err.
Taken to its logical conclusion, we see the absurdity of the liberal definition of liberty in the case of God. Because according to the liberal definition, God himself is not free. Because God cannot sin. His very being precludes him from evil. And yet does anyone seriously believe that God, the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, is not free? Even an atheist must admit that the very concept of God demands that he be not only free but perfectly free. So how can this be?
It&#8217;s for the same reason that we all know intuitively that the heroin addict is not free. Because freedom is not impartiality between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Freedom is not synonymous with choice. On the contrary, choice is a defect of our liberty, which actually consists of willing and understanding. Human beings, uniquely among the animals, possess intellect and will. That’s what distinguishes us from the other animals. Other animals possess instinct. A chihuahua can sometimes figure out where we keep the dog food and eat it. But a chihuahua cannot write a poem or contemplate justice.
And as a consequence, neither chihuahuas nor any other non-human animal is free. We put human beings on trial for committing crimes because we are expected to know better and act better. Crimes are an abuse of our liberty. We do not put chihuahuas on trial — even if the little chihuahua bites a kid at the park — because chihuahuas can’t abuse their liberty, because they don’t have liberty, because they don’t have intellect or will.
Liberty, therefore, is not the maximization of choice but the perfection of our understanding and of our will. And since God alone understands and wills perfectly, God alone is perfectly free. And we will be free only inasmuch as we align our wills and our intellects with God.
I know that all of this probably sounds strange in an age when Reddit-tier atheism reigns supreme in politics, but this is how the wisest men of history have understood the defining feature of human nature. 
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5Knowles_2020_headshot (1) copy

Freedom Isn’t Choice

Conservatives

Freedom

Liberals

Michael Knowles

Archaeologists in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/israel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jerusalem</a> have reportedly unearthed steps descending into the Pool of Siloam, where Biblical records show Jesus Christ healed a blind man over 2,000 years ago at one of the most significant heritage sites in the world.
&#8220;It&#8217;s exciting to be a part of a story that&#8217;s bigger than ourselves — to be a part of bringing a story to life that has significance not for millions, but for billions,&#8221; Ze&#8217;ev Orenstein, director of international affairs for the City of David Foundation, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6336698717112" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> Fox News Digital.
The discovery comes amid an excavation project in the ancient city of the Middle East carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel National Parks Authority, and the City of David Foundation, which works to preserve and develop the city and its environs by connecting people through different faiths and backgrounds in Jerusalem.
Construction crews and archaeologists began working on an excavation project at the historic site of Biblical Jerusalem in 2004 after a large water pipe south of Jerusalem&#8217;s Temple Mount, at the southern end of the ridge known as the City of David, burst, according to the Biblical Archaeology Society.
In recent weeks, however, archaeologists discovered a set of eight steps at the project site — about the size of two Olympic swimming pools — dating back to the days when Jesus and millions of others used the pool as an ancient ritual bath.
According to the <a href="https://www.bible.com/bible/114/JHN.9.6-10.NKJV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gospel of John</a>, the story of Jesus and the blind man at the pool began when Jesus and His disciples encountered a man who had been blind since birth. The disciples asked Jesus if the man or his parents caused him to be born blind. Jesus answered that neither caused his disability, but rather, the man had been born blind so that God&#8217;s work might be revealed in him.
&#8220;We must do the work of him who sent me while day lasts; night is coming when no man can work,&#8221; Jesus said. &#8220;While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.&#8221;
Jesus then put clay made from the ground and his saliva over the blind man&#8217;s eyes and said to him, &#8220;Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam.&#8221;
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The blind man went to the pool, washed the clay from his eyes, and returned with his vision restored.
Construction of the pool reportedly began more than 2,700 years ago when Judean King Hezekiah first ordered the digging of a 1,750-foot tunnel under the City of David to bring water from the Gihon Spring, which lay outside the city wall, inside the city to a pool on the opposite side of the ridge, according to the <a href="https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/biblical-archaeology-sites/the-siloam-pool-where-jesus-healed-the-blind-man/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Biblical Archaeology Society</a>.
Hezekiah foresaw the likelihood of a looming attack from the Assyrians and presumed the water supply would help the Judeans survive. The tunnel continued to carry fresh water into the part of Jerusalem that would lead to the construction of several different pools, including the Second Temple pool that Jesus knew.
More than 2,000 years later, the biblical site revered by Christians and Jews worldwide marvels at the discovery.
&#8220;The ongoing excavations within the City of David — the historic site of Biblical Jerusalem — particularly of the Pool of Siloam and the Pilgrimage Road, serve as one of the greatest affirmations of that heritage and the millennia-old bond Jews and Christians have with Jerusalem,&#8221; Orenstein said.
The site, which runs from the Pool of Siloam in the south along the Pilgrimage Road and up to the footsteps of the Western Wall, Southern Steps, and Temple Mount, represents the most significant half-mile on the planet, he added.
&#8220;There is no half mile that means more to more people that affirms Jerusalem&#8217;s biblical heritage not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;And obviously living in a time where so much of biblical heritage is being questioned — to be able to be unearthing all of this historical heritage and antiquity that shows that whether for Jews or Christians, that you could see it, you could touch it, you could walk on it, that really our heritage in Jerusalem going back thousands of years, not simply a matter of faith, but a matter of fact, being unearthed here in the city of David,&#8221; he added.
In January, Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/steps-where-jesus-walked-and-healed-a-blind-man-unearthed-for-first-time-in-2000-years" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> Fox News Digital, &#8220;In the Pool of Siloam, we find evidence of history preserved for us, revealed at just the right time.&#8221;
&#8220;Theologically, it affirms scripture, geographically it affirms scripture, and politically, it affirms Israel&#8217;s unquestionable and unrivaled link to Jerusalem. Some discoveries are theoretical,&#8221; he said. &#8220;This one is an undeniable. It is proof of the story of the Bible and of its people, Israel.&#8221;
Visitors have accessed a small section of the pool previously excavated, but the City of David plans to open the entire historic site once crews complete the project.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a big responsibility. And it&#8217;s also a big privilege, and the best is truly yet to come,&#8221; Orenstein said.

Archaeological excavations in the City of David, Jerusalem, aerial

Steps Descending Into 2,000 Year Old Biblical Site Where Jesus Healed A Blind Man Unearthed By Archaeologists: Report

Archaeologists Unearth 2,000 Year Old Biblical Site Where Jesus Healed A Blind Man: Report

Archaeology

Jerusalem

World

It&#8217;s rare to see actual Biblical-level events taking place in normal, everyday life. But that is what is happening over at Burning Man.
According to the Associated Press: 
<blockquote>“An unusual late-summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a sloppy mess with tens of thousands of partygoers stuck in foot-deep mud with no working toilets in the northern Nevada desert.”</blockquote>
When a hurricane hits Florida, the Left acts as though it&#8217;s because of the great sin that we have all committed in driving cars and running our air conditioners.
So now, I get to joke about how a bunch of morons decided they were going to jet-set into the desert, in the middle of nowhere — where it&#8217;s 115 degrees — to screw each other. Then there&#8217;s a giant, Biblical-style rainstorm and flood and no one bothered to bring enough wood to build an ark.
<blockquote>“Some Burning Man revelers said Sunday their spirits remain unbroken.” </blockquote>
Unfortunately, their toilets do remain broken. And so they are just sitting there in their own poop, screwing each other. It sounds like the height of human experience. 
The elites there treated it as though they escaped the beaches at Normandy. You wonder why people don&#8217;t trust the elite. You wonder why there&#8217;s a giant cultural gap between the Left Coast and the East Coast on one side and everybody in the middle of the country on the other.
These morons went out in the middle of the desert to worship their pagan selves and then got stuck in the mud? Well, that’s a rough ride for you. 
A lot of Americans have been dispossessed of the Judeo-Christian architecture that used to undergird the United States of America. They&#8217;ve been dispossessed by a bunch of pagan morons who believe that the actual value system is radical self-expression and individualism. The great capitalists, from Adam Smith to John D. Rockefeller, understood that undergirding capitalism was a Judeo-Christian value system. Rockefeller went to a church and sat in the pews next to people who were a fraction of his wealth.
What used to unify the country was a belief system that the elites held in common with the common man. It was the same belief system overall. It was the radicals who were proclaiming the creed of radical self-expression. But now it&#8217;s not the radicals — now it&#8217;s the most powerful people in the society who have basically decided the reason they became powerful is because they followed their star.
But it’s not true. They&#8217;re actually more likely to be married with kids than people who are not high earners in American society. But they promulgate the lowest values. When I say the lowest values, I mean like the hippies on the commune or burning giant nine-foot tall statues. 
One of the weird elements of the United States is that the counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It used to be that we called people who did things like Burning Man strange. But now, if you say they are weirdos who are participating in weird pagan mystic behavior, you are considered strange. You&#8217;re considered part of the problem. You are intolerant.
The counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It is, in fact, just the culture, which is why you see so many rich and famous people going to Burning Man.
It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn&#8217;t show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then go to the Orgy Dome all day. It used to be that serious people in our culture were serious.
You get all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man and then proclaim they have allegiance to these sorts of principles. Then others adopt the principles, and then it becomes the culture in which they swim.
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It used to be that if you showed up at Burning Man, you showed up with a bunch of plywood and a hammer; now, if you are a rich person, you show up at a turnkey camp. According to Mashable, the festival offered luxury amenities, cleaning staff and chefs, while reportedly wreaking havoc on the environment by chartering flights to get there.
You have an entire elite strata of our society that hates itself and that is constantly seeking to signal to everybody else how much it hates itself by doing things like going to Burning Man. They don’t seek to exemplify the behavior that everybody else should engage in. And if they do, they believe their behavior should be this hippie garbage and we should all just laugh and giggle along with them as they go to their Sodom and Gomorrah-style pleasure dome.
The principles of Burning Man look like a religion. Burning Man’s 10 principles declare:
<blockquote>“Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”</blockquote>
That’s a lie. If you show up as a Bible thumper, I guarantee you you&#8217;re not going to be welcome over at Burning Man, where no one has a shower, but they&#8217;re all having sex with one another.
Burning Man’s principles also state: 
<blockquote>“Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.”</blockquote>
That is wildly untrue. It turns out that Burning Man has had a bad history over the past few years of leaving garbage strewn along the highways as people careen out of there as fast as possible. 
Contrast the Ten Commandments of Burning Man with the actual Ten Commandments, things like respect thy father and mother, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, don&#8217;t commit murder, don&#8217;t commit adultery, don&#8217;t commit idolatry. One of these sets of rules has built a civilization that has lasted for literally thousands of years. The other set of rules lasted until a heavy rainstorm.
Perhaps that’s the real story of Noah&#8217;s Ark, that the rain wasn’t all that heavy. Maybe the society was just not durable. In the absence of God, paganism rules. It is not that there is no God, it’s that there are many gods. And these gods typically involve self- worship, which is where things currently stand. This idolatry is idolatry of the self.
We celebrate a holiday in Judaism that&#8217;s coming up shortly called Sukkot. You build a hut outside your house and you are supposed to live in it for a week. The purpose of it is to remind you that you are at the mercy of God. You&#8217;re supposed to build the hut so you can see the stars through the roof. It’s open to the rain. The whole purpose of it is to remind you that while you are a physical creature, there is something more spiritual to you than that.
The idea is that when you decorate all the physical surroundings around you, that&#8217;s not the essential you. So then, what is the essential you?
It&#8217;s unity with God. That&#8217;s the part that matters.
Disconnect that and all you end up with is a bunch of morons rolling around in the mud and then being mad at each other when they have to poop in a bucket. 

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