Let's pray, and today I'm gonna give you a pair of glasses, okay? A pair of glasses to begin looking at the world we're in, but let's pray, okay? Father in heaven, you tell us to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we want to do that in the class today, or at least continue to do it and work on it. We pray in Christ's name, amen. Which reminds me, I need to get my Bible if I'm gonna do that. Okay, ideas. We're dealing with ideas, okay? Ideas are like either viruses, which is not a good thing, or antibodies. If you think of ideas like viruses or antibodies, that's what we're dealing with. You get a virus in your system. Am I right, nurse Mary Vaith? Do you ever really get a virus out of your system? No, it goes into dormancy usually, right? Well, that's interesting. Oh, yeah, I've got Dr. Duffy. It depends on the virus. A lot of them just go into a dormant state. Yeah, but most cases they're just there, right? The viruses? The evidence of them is there, but there are some that don't go away at all. Yeah, okay. Okay, well that's why thinking of ideas like viruses is a good analogy. At least it's hard to get them out. Now an antibody, and again Dr. Gaffey, correct me, that's part of your autoimmune system. It helps you resist viruses, okay? And so really what we're doing with this in this class is we're talking about viruses and we're going to talk about the Thank you. Antibodies as well. We'll get to the antibodies a bit later. Okay, two texts. There's a lot of texts that you could use to frame the class, but two texts for this week. Genesis six and verse five. And this was not changed by the flood. The Lord basically repeats this after the flood because the flood didn't change hearts. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart, and that's a fancy way of saying all of the emotions of the heart, all of the drives of the heart, remember out of the heart are the issues of life, right? Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Now if God didn't restrain us, imagine how bad we would be. But that's what our nature is. Now with that in mind, not necessarily explicitly, but at least implicitly, the Apostle Paul writing to the Colossians. And I think when we do a Bible study, I'm very tempted to begin working through Colossians. It is the book for our day. So Paul writes, as you've received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, which is faith in him, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." I mean, Jesus is God, is what it says. and you have been filled up in Him who's the head of all rule and authority. To put it very bluntly, you abandon Christ and you abandon everything. Okay? Now, it's not okay, but I want you to keep that in mind. We're going to cover a lot of turf today. We're going to look at chapters 2 and 3 of the book. If you want it, just sign the list. Strange New World. And the title of the full version of this, keep this in mind, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. So we're going to fly over some history today. The Enlightenment, which is not a good name for it, but the Enlightenment was a movement in Europe, Western Europe, in the 17th and the 18th centuries, 1600s, 1700s. And basically, the theme of the Enlightenment, I know because when I taught history, the textbook we had at the time and its chapter on the Enlightenment was a secular book. The subtitle was, Man is the Measure of All Things. And that's basically what the Enlightenment was about. It was rethinking everything, not from the perspective of quote-unquote religion, but from the perspective of man. And there were two key Enlightenment figures in the 17th and the 18th centuries, and they're two of four, and I want you to watch how their ideas kind of build like a Lego set, okay? I've been told it's not Legos. It's Lego. It's a Lego set. And I don't know how I look at all those wonderfully made things without saying Legos. But anyway, I don't want to be incorrect. So they go together like a Lego set, all right, these four figures. Number one, very quickly, a man named Rene Descartes. Now, you may never have heard of these people. But you see, you don't know where your virus came from either, but if you have it, you have it. Rene Descartes, who lived from 1596 to 1650, product of the Enlightenment. And he raised the question, how do I know that I exist? Now, if you've never watched the Matrix movie, you may never have asked that movie, but people do ask, how do I know that I exist? And his answer was, see if you can, this is the Latin, is cogito ergo sum. What is that saying? What's that? I think, therefore I am. That's right, cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. That was his answer. My thinking is the ground of my certainty that I exist. Now, a lot of ways you can deal with that. This is the one thing I want you to get from that. Prior to this, if you wanted to know something existed, you studied it. It was something external to you, you studied it, you learned it, or if it was you yourself, you studied yourself. But you were studying something out there. For Descartes, you begin with yourself. I think, therefore I am. You go technically from the object to the subject, I, or from the objective out there to the subjective, me. I think, therefore I am. So that figure, that's all we'll mention about Descartes. He was followed 1712 to 1778, again an Enlightenment figure, by a man named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now this is for another day. Rousseau's governmental ideas were the foundation for our republic, social contract, which is something to discuss at another time. But for our purposes today, this is the big change in Rousseau. And this was radical for his day, again the 18th century. Feelings are central to who and what we are. That's what's most important about what you are, is what you feel. Now folks, we're not against feelings, okay? Some people say Presbyterians are. We're not. We feel things deeply. When my heart is overwhelmed within me, what's a feeling? Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted. The Bible talks about feelings. But remember the text, every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart, which includes our feelings, they're all tainted. They're all tainted by sin. But for Rousseau, who did have a moral base, but he still believed that feelings are central to who and what we are. But further, we're thinking a Lego set. People are, for Rousseau, essentially moral. Man is the measure of all things. But society exerts corrupting influences on us. And again, that's true. That's true. Nothing wrong in that. But let me just quote. This is Truman, Carl Truman quoting Rousseau to get it straight from the horse's mouth. This is from Rousseau's autobiography, Confessions. I am resolved on an understanding that has no model and will have no imitator. In other words, I want to be myself. I want to show my fellow man, a man in all the truth of nature, and this man is to be myself. The particular object of my confessions, title of his autobiography, is to make known my inner self, exactly as it was in every circumstance in my life. It's the history of my soul that I promised. And to relate it faithfully, I require no other memorandum. All I need to do, as I've done up until now, is to look inside of myself. Now, that's saying to your own self be true. But you notice how the focus is not on something external. Rousseau's ideas, I don't think he ever used the phrase, but the concept the noble savage has been used. If you could only get people away from the corrupting influences, especially of cities, which he hated, and get them even beyond urban areas, but get out in the rainforest. And then you're going to find true nobility. Really? headhunting and cannibalism and so on. But that was his basic idea. Society corrupts people who are essentially moral. Or his statement, which is really ludicrous. Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains. And we've talked about this. By nature, we're slaves to sin. I'm born free, and people aren't everywhere in chains. I mean, there was a lot. So anyway, but that was his statement. This is the big word though for Rousseau. You need to be authentic. So you've got Descartes, my thinking is the ground of my certainty. Rousseau saying feelings are central to self and you have to be authentic or you've got to let it all hang out, people would say. That was both, as Truman puts it, radical and explosive in his day. Why? Well, Rousseau lived in the 18th century. This was the time of the effects of the Puritans and the Reformation, and you were taught self-discipline, self-control. The fruit of the spirit is self-control, putting a bridle to your tongue, okay, all this language. And this, for Rousseau, endangered your individuality, okay? Now, let me make some application to the contemporary day. You've got to be true to your feelings. This and society corrupts. And yes, society does affect us. But the modern view of crime today in many cases is the person who did it really isn't responsible. It's the evil employer, the evil parents, the evil neighbor, the evil whatever it would be. And there you get something of that influence that it's society that corrupts us. Or, for Rousseau, granting normative authority to your inner feelings. See how significant this is for today. I am a woman trapped in a man's body. Now folks, that's not scientific. That's the way you feel. You can't prove that in any way. But that's to be respected and honored in our culture today. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a senator in New York, and while I didn't always agree with him, I respected that man greatly. And I love Daniel Patrick Moynihan saying at one point, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. So that's Rousseau. Now, interlude, interlude, okay? This brings us to the 19th century, and it was an age of romanticism, not romantic. Romanticism is an emphasis on the power of nature. Just be passive and give yourself over to the wonderful, beautiful power of nature. And the way you know you're doing that is by your feelings. that the Romantics called the inner voice of nature. That's genuine and that's pure, that's authentic, that's a true guide to what you really are. And it's no coincidence that in the Romantic era, the 1800s, you had an outcropping of sexual deviancy. A man like Walt Whitman, for example, Song of Myself. It was a homosexual. But you can see where they would get this. Just be passive as a human. Give in to the power of nature. And so the hero, for example, would be, if you apply this in our day, a trans person who is born male but is trapped in this male body and becomes a female. To the romantics, that's honest. That's courageous. Because your outward performance is aligned with your inner feelings regardless of what society says. So see the viruses of our culture. And so with Romanticism there was a gradual rejection of belief that human nature has an inherent moral structure. At least predecessors had some sense of what was called the categorical imperative, that there's a sense of what is moral, what is right. The Romantics by and large rejected that belief and said human nature is inherently moral and what's more, moral codes are necessarily oppressive. Again, Walt Whitman is an example who didn't want to have moral codes imposed upon him. Song of Myself epitomizes this. Okay, so that brings us now to 19th century thinkers in that age. The third one we're dealing with, we've got Descartes and Rousseau, is Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. He's the father of theoretical communism. What you see in the world today is not Marxist communism, but that's not what we're dealing with. Marx basically said, I don't believe in God, everything is material. The world that you see is all that there is. If you can't get it in a test tube, it doesn't exist. And therefore, there's no transcendent realities. There's nothing above us. All that we see is what there is. So there was a focus on the body. Now for Marx, it was particularly on economics. the way human beings interact with one another in their greed and oppressing others and being slaves to the system. Economics was his driving thing. But what he said is that the material things in society decisively shape how you view reality. So for Marx, he saw this class struggle between the workers and the factory owners and the bosses and businesses. That for Marx is reality. Okay, that's what you look at. Therefore, think Lego systems, everything becomes political. Everything is ultimately about politics and changing structures. Hello, you want a cake decorating business? And you get sued because you won't make a cake for a quote-unquote gay couple? That would be unheard of five or six years ago. No, no. Political involvement is important, very, very important for him today. Now, Marx though, with the Romantics, but Marx and the one that followed him, Friedrich Nietzsche, they wrestled with this question. Why do people still believe in religion? Why is there this irrepressible quest for something beyond us in religion? And Marx's answer was, it came from what he called alienation. This was a big word for Marx. We're not comfortable in our environment. We feel ostracized in our environment. We feel bullied in our environment. We just don't feel comfortable here. So we will create something that gives us comfort to help us deal with our alienation. And so for Marx, you would take human ideals and attributes and you would project them up to God. The illustration of a baseball has been used. It's like taking all these things you really want and you really think are good and really think are right. You think what God ought to be like and wrap it in a baseball and throw it up as high as you can. We're not going to go very high. And it comes back to earth. But that, and you see how, again, religion has been turned from, thus says the Lord, something objective to us, to how do I feel about God? How do I view God? What do I think about God? And so for Marx, see, religion is about meeting psychological needs. That's really all it's about. It would be the language of a crutch would be used. And it worked for the workers because they would say, I'll work, I'll be oppressed, I work 18 hours a day, my kids work, we die at our work, but that's okay, because there's going to be a heaven that comes, there'll be pie in the sky by and by, and so I do it. Or the workers say, a moral God, a just God, he wants people to work, he wants people to be honest. And so for Marx, he saw on both the worker's side and the boss factory owner's side how religion catered to what they needed and what they wanted. But he didn't stop there. He was a radical atheist. And for Marx, and for all of Marxism, religion has to be debunked if we are to really rectify the situation. It's not just theoretical atheism. Marx was an activist. And incidentally Marx was not a good guy. You read about his family, but that's neither here nor there. You have to work to overthrow that mentality. So he said religion is the opiate of the people. Later he'll use the term analgesic. Religion makes you feel good. But essentially Marx didn't want you to feel good because we're in a revolution all the time. You don't want anything. If you're going to be in a war, you don't want anything to dull your desire for war. And religion did that. It's the opiate of the masses. And therefore, you have to debunk it if you're really going to change the world. I'm giving you glasses to look at the world today. One of the points that Karl Truman makes, and it boggled my mind because I've been there, he said we're all, to some extent, Marxist today. What does he mean by that? You got this stuff going on in the political realm? Then we gotta change the politics. Hello? It's not gonna really change things because out of the heart, the issues of life, although we do need to be concerned for when we vote, but that's not for today, okay. Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates, I'm gonna turn this over to you in a little bit because you studied Nietzsche in college, right? Okay, Friedrich Nietzsche, or as some pronounce it, Nietzsche, 1844 to 1900, Romantic Age, the 19th century. He just assumed the enlightened view that man is the measure of all things, but he said, we're not serious enough about it. And Nietzsche, say what you want, he was a driven and driving man, and incidentally, a very brilliant man. So again, he wrestled with this question. Why does religion persist? And in what is his most famous book, he has what in my opinion is a pretty memorable way of answering this question. The book is called The Gay Science, not Homosexual Science, but Happy Science, Liberating Silence, or The Joyful Wisdom, as it was also put. And listen to this. Why this irrepressible sense of God? He said, after Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave. Now he's using a metaphor here of life. a tremendous gruesome shadow. God is dead, which is what Nietzsche is known for, given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow, his gruesome shadow, will be shown. And we still have to vanquish that shadow too. That's kind of clever. Because a shadow doesn't exist, it reflects someone who's dead, God is dead, but it's still there. And you have to eradicate it. Socrates, correct me if I'm wrong, I think that was pretty much his driving view about religion. So, enlightenment. Man is the measure of all things. And for Nietzsche, The Enlightenment has slain God as a plausible idea, that we just, out of hand, rule out God's existence. But the idea of God, a gruesome shadow, still exerts oppressive and ominous influence on the way people and society are organized. You see the contemporary relevance? You know who the big danger to our culture is for many people? Christians. You're serious about your faith, and you're a big danger to the society. Nietzsche said that. Many people have never heard of Nietzsche, but again, viruses. There's no moral structure to Nietzsche. Again, he's a materialist. People aren't made in the image of God, so they're not required to act in accord with that image. In fact, that's repressive. If you say, I've got to act in accord with an image of something that doesn't even exist, Then he would say, and remember, people must not be manipulated. Nietzsche hated weakness. That's one of the reasons why he was a driving force in Adolf Hitler and his ideas. Weakness was hated. If you were weak, and what does the Christian faith emphasize? Weakness and weakness. And the Lord makes his strength perfect in our weakness. And for Nietzsche that was just out of the box. That's a way of manipulating people by saying they need to be weak. They need to rise to be self-creative. That's his language. Self-creative. I think the scriptures speak about worshiping and serving the creature more than the creator. Well you see that in Nietzsche in a specific way and further, again think of a Lego set. We must resist having religion as a crutch by which the weak avoid the challenge of creating their own meaning in a meaningless universe. You're trying to, you have this crutch called God to help you understand the universe. Forget it, it's meaningless anyway. You gotta create your own meaning in the world. Glasses to look at the culture. The goal is to break free of the myths that religion weaves and shatter moral codes that keep us from being strong and truly free. I'm going to say that again. For Nietzsche, the goal was to break free of the myths that religion weaves and shatter the moral codes that keep us from being strong and truly free. Again, quoting from the book that many of you will be ordering. this summary of Nietzsche, and see if this doesn't, I want you to think about what is said here. Nietzsche's thought was this, freed from the burden of being creatures of God, human beings must rise to the challenge of self-creation, of being whoever they choose to be. But perhaps even more bluntly, be whoever or whatever works for you. You should feel no obligation to conform to the standards or the criteria of anybody else. I want that to sink in, folks. That describes our culture. You wanna know the root of the mass killings? This idea. If I'm gonna be authentic the way I've learned life from my video games, if I'm really gonna be true to myself, I'm gonna massacre some people. That's the root of what we're dealing with. That's the root of somebody saying, I'm on a subway, if I want to push somebody in the tracks, that's what I feel like doing because my feelings have been hurt. All right. So that's why I said this is a lens to look at a car. OK, so today, let me wrap all this up to you. So today, the language of morality, if you will, for our culture is really a matter of personal taste. And I'll give you an illustration of this in a moment. So if somebody says, this is right to me, I think it's helpful, I think it's convenient, I happen to think it's good, then I'm going to act on this, and that's the way I keep my power. That's the way I keep my authority, by being authentic in the world. Now, let me read you this quotation from the book. I've got two more, but these are so rich. This is Carl Truman commenting, Nietzsche's notion that morality is really about taste is very helpful in thinking about our current moral climate. So often the language we use confirms that Nietzsche's perspective is now cultural intuition. This is just the way people think. So often we'll speak of morality in terms of taste or aesthetics. That remark was hurtful. That idea is offensive. That viewpoint makes me feel unsafe. Now notice that such expressions don't make a statement about whether the matter's in hand or right or wrong. In fact, the underlying assumption is that the offensiveness or hurtfulness of them is identical with the moral content. The subjective response, I think, therefore I am, movement to the subject, has become the ethical criterion for judgment. Now let me give you an illustration. This past week, I have a Zoom meeting once every few weeks with a Jewish girl who's wrestling with a lot of issues. I won't go into the situation, but it's a situation she needs to get out of. It's not only wrong, but it's hurtful to her. to other people, I'll put it like that. It's not a good situation. So in the previous session, to the one I had with her this past week, I said to her, you've really got two options in front of you. You either stay in this situation the way it is, and it's going to get worse, or you do what you need to do to regularize it, and that would involve marrying somebody that she doesn't even like. So I know it was two distasteful options. We begin our call this week, and as I said, I want you really to think about this, pray about this, ask the Lord about this, but I'm telling you, these are the only two options. This was her response. That made me feel bad. Now how do I respond to that? I said, well, no lady's name. I'm sorry that it made you feel bad, but I was telling you the truth. Yeah, well, for you. For you that's the truth. But it just hurt me. That's the kind of thing we're getting at, where feelings or aesthetics become the final standard. So we'll wrap it all up. Don't turn it over to Socrates. So what makes things moral, or right, or good? If you could even use these words in this culture today. Freedom and honesty with my feelings, out of which I do things, out of which things are performed. One person called it moral iconoclasm. I basically, you know, I did it my way. So last quotation from Truman where he brings us together. Now see if this doesn't give you a lens to help you see and understand our strange new world. While Marx is in many ways a very different philosopher from Nietzsche, the two men share a common rejection of the idea that human beings as human beings have a transcendent, that is something above us, stable, moral nature to which they need to conform in order to flourish. For Marx, morality is historically conditioned and designed to justify and maintain the current unjust economic structure of society. For Nietzsche, morality is a fiction. invented by one group to denigrate and subordinate another. See, that was what that girl was saying. You were denigrating me when you said you need to change something. While Marx will allow religion a certain analgesic function, in other words, it makes you feel better, for those suffering in this life, both Marx and Nietzsche See religion as something that is at best a crutch, at worst a manipulative confidence trick designed to prevent people from being truly themselves. That's part of our strange new world. Now, you wed this with the sexual revolution, and you've got a whole new, strange new world. But, Socrates, our Nietzsche man. I am far from it being, I tried to prepare something and I wasn't successful. It was a lot of, I got caught up in a lot of the, he's a very, and I got a little caught up in it. So I just want to say a couple words in general about philosophy and something to be aware of as Christians. So Socrates, my namesake, said 400 years ago before Christ, 400 years before Christ, the unexamined life is not worth living. And you're talking about Greek, ancient, civilization where it was the beginning of philosophy, the point of philosophy being that we need to have some deeper understanding of why we're here, what is the point of my existence. So fast forward to where we are today, you know, a lot of people are growing up in a culture, in an academic setting that has really been the byproduct of the Enlightenment thinkers, where science displaced God as the center of the universe, and man thus became his own standard bearer. So when we look back at Nietzsche and figures like that, he started really this psychological our identity, and he, I thought, I learned a few things yesterday that were, I think, worth bringing up. So, his father was a pastor in the Lutheran Church. Interesting, interesting. His grandfather was a bishop in the Lutheran Church. He grew up heavily understanding scripture. He loved reading scripture. Interesting. One of the quotes I heard is that he read it so, that he would bring people to tears while he read it. Wow, interesting. He was a young boy and his father died when he was four and he grew up with his mother and his aunts. And he grew up in a very effeminate surrounding Oh, interesting. And they were just coddling him. He never really, from what I understand, so he never had a male father figure to guide him. And he went to become, he wanted to sign up for the being in the military. He was always physically ill and ailments. He wasn't able to serve, but from an abstract perspective, he looked at the soldiers and saw the strength and the manhood and the masculinity which he desired to see. And he juxtaposed that to his Christian upbringing, which was very passive and effective. He called it weak, as you were saying. He kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater and kind of just gave up on his Christianity and started trying to come up with his own. the leaf system. He was an interesting term. He was a philologist, a study of language. He was the youngest philologist ever to become a Ph.D. professor at the University of Basel at the age of 24. but he really understood language and history of thought and then became a philosopher and was like a bit of a, you know, wasn't really well received, but the whole current of thought was this kind of becoming true to yourself. That's why I brought up Socrates in the beginning. A lot of kids today, they want an authentic life. They want to be true to themselves. That's what they're being taught, be true to yourself. Well, Christianity is being true to yourself, but you have to couched in a way, you have to be able to see where they're coming from, understanding all this stuff about philosophy and psychology. I mean, that is like mainstream today. Psychology is mainstream today. Your psyche, your person, you have to be self-fulfilled. That's it. Yeah. Right, right, right. Interesting. I don't think really Nietzsche was an anti-Semite. Interesting enough, his ideas were taken and used to promote this idea of the uberman, the superman. Basically, he said that this in his book, like a poetic book about a man who, I can't even do justice to it, but I think the general idea is that in the face of seeing that all morality is just an illusion, we have to now reinvent ourselves as somebody who can overcome all this, and we have to be strong, and basically survival of the fittest. That's right. And that's all it boiled down to. And that was really his big thing. Yeah. And that's kind of a very simplistic way. But I think the key, all I can say is my whole reason for being is being a truth seeker. Praise God, God revealed himself to me through his word and through the Holy Spirit. And we You know, really have to just be empathetic to those around us. Right. And also in ourselves, be aware our children. Ourselves, I mean this stuff draws you in. This can be revolutionary if you're reading for the first time, Christianity is the opiate of, oh wait, I've been hypnotized all my life. I really don't believe this anymore. Bingo, that's why our children walk away from the faith. They hear all this stuff, they grow up in good Christian homes, and all of a sudden at 20 when they go to college they hear about Nietzsche and all this stuff, and they're like, Why would I believe that? That's so antiquated and special. We really have to be on our guard and equip ourselves by reading things like this book and understanding. Yeah, thanks. Calvin addresses this in the Institutes. And he says, basically, the only true knowledge of ourselves comes when we have a knowledge of God who made us. Right? So it's, you see, totally opposite. Well, look, yeah, Jim. Yeah, that was fascinating. Two things I just want to add. This thought about, I feel, therefore, I am. I think, therefore, I am. I feel, therefore, I am. And that's what I think. So therefore, if I don't feel that there's a God, or if I feel that there are many gods, or if I feel that there are many ways to God, that's what I believe. And I'm not accepting the truth that's in the Bible revealed. even though the Bible says that the heavens reveal that there is a God, so that's contrary to the thought. The other thing I was going to just throw out there was early when you were reading, and I said, oh, Google. And the reason is because when Google first began, most of us know, and most of us use it, and there is benefit. But it began to be the repository of all things. And so therefore, that becomes the final authority. And now, often we catch ourselves who say, and I just said it to Iris, I think yesterday or something, just Google it. And so therefore, if that becomes the word of the truth, then everything else contrary to it is not true. And that's why so many political organizations and left thinking People say that we need to suppress that because you are speaking untruth and we will censor you as a result of it because if it's not Googled, then therefore it doesn't exist or it's not true. This is the truth and that's not. And then finally, there's a whole generation now that their whole life, Google existed their entire life, so they don't know anything else. Yeah, and again, it's not saying Google's wrong. We're thankful, but you're right, it's making an idol out of something. You're worshiping and serving the creature more than the creator. Good, I'm glad you're thinking. Great, yes, Socrates, great. I just want, also, let's never forget that the devil is the father of lies since the beginning of time, right? And from the beginning of the Bible, so, He's still around, he's still flying, and he's been using subtle deceptions. This, I think, what we're seeing now is just horrific. You know, it's so deceptive. And one thing I would say is when you can, you know, the New Age movement of all religions point to the same God, Buddhism, Hinduism, you know, Islam. That is also a huge lie, and a lot of people today get caught up in, well, that's your God, that's not my God, and then Buddhism, I was reading over the weekend, a lot of these philosophers were very enticed and enjoyed reading about Buddhism, because it's kind of obvious that there's an animating principle to the universe. Right, and Buddha emphasized enlightenment. Yeah, right. It's also very subtle, but you have to be equipped to be able to unpack that. Yeah, and that's brothers and sisters. This is an unusual class, but this is why we're dealing with this. You've got to remember, you've got to look at the world with Christian eyes. Understand that. Iris, yeah, and then we'll break. All of these, you know, our scriptures teach us rules. Scripture teaches what's right and what's wrong. And a lot of these young people, what they come to think is that it's repressive. And because they cannot live out, it's a killjoy. I mean, why can I not be with my girlfriend in a way that, and then these other philosophers and these other thinkers are like, A, you have to, Be who you are. So if you had a choice and really the Holy Spirit has not opened up your heart as of yet, you're going to tend to choose that which allows you to enjoy the worldliness of the world. Unless the scripture opens up your heart and unless you really sold out for Christ, it's very difficult for these young people who are indoctrinated in schools and with their other friends. to say, why should I believe this when it's so repressive? Okay. You, Iris, have brought us right to the boundaries of the antibodies. Remember, we've got viruses and antibodies. By just assessing this and critiquing it, you're not going to get very far. It's to help you to understand people. This world needs to see that what they think is repressive is the most liberating, joyful thing in the world. And how that's done, we'll get to it. But you brought us right to the boundary of that, thank you. We want you back at six. Incidentally, Nan is one of God's great gifts to us in this class. She is at NYU. in the theater department at NYU. And when Nan comes back, I get modern versions of exactly the kinds of things that we're learning about in here. So at some point, Nan, maybe you can help us a little bit to see what the kinds of, not now, but some of the things you're getting down there. I have a different view of the feeling thing. In China, I think for Eastern culture, we were taught If it's the right thing, no matter how you feel, you've got to do the right thing. So for us, to swallow bad feeling is not hard. But then, in our country, the hard thing is what is right or wrong? Exactly. That is another question. I think a lot of things we are told to do, if for God's standard, it may be not right, But for our culture, it may be right. For example, you have to be very patriotic. And that can be beyond, I think, humanity. So yeah, we can swallow feeling, bad feeling, but then we are not able to discern what is right or wrong. You can't define anything in the universe without two dimensions. You can't define anything that's unidimensional. You can't say where anything is on a plot unless there's an X and a Y. So if you have, there's nothing wrong with enlightenment. That whole idea, I think, came about because people were told what to do. But in the serfdom and everything that he was in Western Europe for so long, that you didn't have any definition of who you were. You lived where you were born, where you died, and that's it. And you never thought anything. We wouldn't have had the scientific and cultural advancements that we had if we hadn't had that. And I know that we're not arguing that. But the thing is that what happened was people were all of a sudden starting to try to define who they were. And the issue is that in China, you're defining who you, the government is defining what is right and wrong for you. And here, and if you're not, if you are a young person here and you don't have, if you're searching, everybody who's doing anything that's all this deviancy is searching to fill a void. And if you don't have that- That's Marx's alienation. Right, because you don't know, if you are only one swirling around point, you don't know who you are. So you have to have something to define you. So it's supposed to be that you're a place in this universe. And it's in our society. When you're born, you're born into a family. If you had nothing to define you as a newborn, you would never survive. If there were nobody there to be your carrier, you would never survive. You would just be abandoned. And that way, you would never live. Your emotional life cannot exist. Your psychological life cannot exist without another plot point. And then people are trying to pick their plot point. And the platform was supposed to be that you knew who you were in God and where God put you. And to be honest, that's why religious people, whether they're Christian or not, are always, in general, or I shouldn't say always, but in Poland, are happier than you religious people. Interesting. Yeah. You're like your mom, you're bringing us to the borders, excuse the metaphor, of the antibodies to this. You're spot on, including the point about community. We're not meant to be isolated and alone in the universe. Good, I'm so glad you're thinking, praise the Lord, that's great. All righty, let's, Jim, may I ask you to close our time in prayer? Let's stand together and let's pray. to be thankful for, first, your word, your son, Jesus Christ, our pastor, and his devotion to study and leadership in the word, and aid. Lord, we are here gathered to be enlightened through your word from Christ, who has revealed the scripture. Thank you for this time. We look forward to learning more about the Reformation Amen.