The 7 Tenets of the Satanic Temple

hello hello and welcome to pints with aquinas i'm excited today to have steven rummelsburg to chat about the seven tenets of satanism steven gave a excellent presentation on this recently on on youtube the link is in the description below so today we're going to be talking about this discussing the seven tenets um but to go deeper be sure to click that link and watch the full video after after today's show um hope everyone's well thanks for being here uh before we do anything else i need to say thank you i don't need to well i guess i do need to but also want to say thank you to el investments for sponsoring today's show you know when i was a kid and as a teenager even as a young adult i figured that you know investing is something that old people did or rich people did it was something that was super complicated that i don't need to be doing it and i think that's true so if you've been thinking about investing but haven't known where to start or how to begin go to el investments dot net slash pints there's a link in the description for you to learn more in the past economic justice for all the usccp states that invested funds must be used responsibly and that's why you should check out ethos logos investments because they're 100 catholic and when you invest with them you won't be profiting from things like pornography abortifacients embryonic stem cell research human trafficking or environmental depletion so go to el investments.net pints again there's a link in the description below and you can see a five-minute interview that i had with the founder of el investments about the questions i had before i decided to invest with them you know like is this complicated like what does it look like i've never done this before i'm a you know super newbie and maybe you're feeling like that as well maybe you're not either way go check out el investments.net slash pints el investments.net points again the link is in the description below stephen good to have you hey good to be back matt always good to be with you thank you for having me we've had you several times in the past and i absolutely love chatting with you um it's kind of like the the club whenever i chat with you i feel like it's one of those chats from one of plato's dialogues i really feel like you know we get into some deep stuff and i always say hi phrase i hope that happens today yeah yeah today's important yeah yeah yeah yeah um well and i think we're gonna have to deal with this uh throughout the uh throughout this live stream you're you're sometimes freezing sometimes not you look good right now but if everybody freezes if you start freezing people should know that he's not just really good at this game that it was a technical error but we are going to move past it nonetheless stephen before we get into today's topic tell our viewers a little bit about who you are and what you do uh well i'm steven rosberg and i'm a public school teacher and at the moment i'm working in northern california at john adams academy and i'm a mentor coach where i'm helping all our teachers form into the classical model of teaching so my area of interest is classical formation classical education and so i get to do my dream job all day by working with teachers to help them form scholars in a classical way uh as well i write and i uh talk about religion education and culture those are my main interests in my writing awesome and then you also just a couple of months back led a seven-part video series on the great books of western civilization for my patrons so if you're watching today and you've been thinking about becoming a patron you can get access to that course by going to patreon.com frat it was a seven part video series and it was super fascinating i know people got a lot out of it but okay so today we want to talk about the seven tenets of satanism and uh you've already said we're not going to be able to get into everything today because it's such a big topic that's why people should click that link below to watch the presentation you gave on this topic but uh where should we begin because there might be some people out there who are familiar with satanism there might be some other people who are thinking i thought that was a joke is this actually a real thing what do you want to say yeah you know we ought to begin where where i began with this uh most of us it's really not on our radar to think about the satanic temple and satan in our lives it's just not on our radar so my brother michael verlander he sent me this article from the national catholic register that was about a soccer mom who's uh who had a really devastating response to the death of um ruth bader ginsburg um and she had this intense she was gripped by this feeling that america's was going to become a theocracy and that all the women's rights were going to be stripped away from her so she found solace in the satanic temple she went there and found that they she found like-minded souls there and uh this this article the national catholic register listed the seven tenets of the satanic temple and the reason michael sent them to me is because when you look at them they don't appear to be that bad right and that's deeply disturbing well let's uh maybe before we do anything else let's let's throw them up on the screen here now the text is quite small so i want to apologize to everybody who's seeing this uh but but we'll just read them real quick is that okay yes it's a good idea all right so first of all i guess i have a question how long have these seven tenants being seven ten tenants of satanism that is to say is this something they've come up with recently or is this something that they've been espousing for decades i think that's a great question that i can't answer but here's here's what i do know what the serpent said to eve in the garden are reflected in these seven tenets all right well let's go through them then uh number one one should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason sounds good number two the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions that's great number three one's body is invaluable subject to one's own will alone interesting number four the freedoms of others should be respected including the freedom to offend to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of others is to forgo your own okay beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world we should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs number six people are fallible if we make a mistake we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may be have been caused awesome number seven every tenant is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought the spirit of compassion wisdom and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word so i read that stephen and i'll be honestly this is the first time i've actually read these seven tenets and you know i'd want to qualify some things but overall i'm like wow that sounds really cool like that's i can get on board with a lot of that you know it certainly doesn't sound like what some people might think satan has proclaimed um what was your reaction when you first read it well that's the that's the reason i was inspired to do that or horrified enough to do this whole talk in the first place is that i pass these by good souls and when we look at them they do look good they're so intelligently crafted uh that that what's really wrong with them escapes us and i was wondering why is that why is it when you tell good people these tenants they don't bother them we're talking about the satanic temple satan wants us to embrace these and they don't bother us today and that's hugely problematic and so that's the whole point of discussing this is asking why is it these are troubling all right so i want to get to that but but maybe kind of excuse the pun a devil's advocate question you know couldn't it be the case that these are seven tenets of satanism but it not necessarily be what satan wants to promote that is to say this isn't an infallible institution that puts forth the declarations of lucifer this is just a group i don't even know if they believe in satan maybe some do maybe some don't so couldn't it be true that just because they some say something it doesn't necessarily mean that's what the demonic would have um i i think on the surface that that's true but that deep down that's not true i think satan would love for us to embrace these and the satanic temple itself does make the claim that they don't believe in satan but that's one of satan's favorite tricks it benefits him if you don't believe in him because you don't believe in satan it's one step away to not believe in god which which works for the devil yeah absolutely so i would i would on the deep deep level disagree with your devil's advocate question while on the surface it certainly appears to be so okay certainly all right well then uh where do we want to begin well we ought to begin asking the question if these are appealing and they are deeply disordered how did we get here i i think that's the right question to begin mean i mean think first of all i think there's a lot of people who are like this these they aren't deeply disordered they they they seem great like look one should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason wouldn't you agree with that on the surface it sounds really really good okay it really does it sounds great um so are you familiar with the term enthymeme aristotle uses it to describe a statement that is a conclusion to an argument that has assumptions so i missed that because you broke up am i am i familiar with which word the word the word enthymeme um oh oh yes yes sorry i thought you said empathy uh-huh yeah i'm sorry yeah everybody's familiar with empathy not everybody's familiar with enthe means the idea that you can put forward a statement and if you ignore its underlying assumptions it can mean anything to anybody yes so we can't just take what they're saying here and apply aristotelian or christ-like principles to it to interpret it there's a fundamental assumption of not just secularism but materialism through which we must interpret this so when it when someone from the secular humanist cultural or from the satanic temple when they say the word reason they're talking about self-referential subjective reason which is always problematic and reason that is in accord with nature that is accord with reality that's that's always good so reasons that is that is that is in accord with reality subordinates things like compassion and empathy because compassion and empathy are appetitive their appetites their their sense appetites in fact we call them the passions um animals and humans share passions and empathy is a small subset of our passion of sadness we have we have the capacity to feel sorrow as animals do and empathy is a particular kind of sadness which is appropriate sometimes and at other times it's not um so so we have a real problem here with defining the word reason uh using reason in an aristotelian way it would seem that that would be true but look at the order first they say the universal premise here is we should have compassion and empathy towards all creatures and then the minor premises in accord with reason which really means according to you and that makes it problematic for this reason if you have the right use of reason above all your passions that's rightly ordered the satanic temple assumes that passions are overarching and that reason is subordinated to empathy and compassion which makes reason deeply disordered in fact it makes it rationalization okay so so that's that's deeply problematic it sounds great but we can't rip this statement out of the context in which the satanic temple asserts it yeah and i guess that's kind of the problem i'm having and i the last thing i want to do is play devil's advocate for the devil here forgive me but you know couldn't it be the case that maybe we're reading too much into these seven tenets that we haven't allowed the the satanists to define what they mean by these seven things you know like it sounds like you're reading this one line as if here's the major premise here's the minor premise when maybe it was just clumsily worded tell me to shut up yes no you need to ask these questions because that's why people find it appealing it's not clumsily worded at all it's very well it's perfectly worded but here's the first thing we have to recognize that's not in this statement compassion and empathy are not unqualified goods we've been conditioned to think they are empathy is not always appropriate there's compassion in the face of evil empathy is not not reasonable and you might think they're suggesting that here but you do have to know a little bit about the foundational assumptions of the satanic temple okay continue so so if we if we take something like the city of god the idea that uh when one loves god to the contempt of self you you put things in the right order but when one loves self to the contempt of god there's there's the movement towards atheism so an atheist there's there's two kinds of things in the way c.s lewis says it in miracles he says there's supernaturalism and naturalism naturalism c.s lewis says is the whole shebang is materialism there's nothing beyond the material and if there's nothing beyond the material then reason which is an immaterial faculty becomes a material faculty and so the assumption of the satanic temple is that not only does satan not exist but nothing exists beyond the material right which is probably why they've put old creatures instead of human beings huh yes all creatures and that falsely quality of creatures that the rejection of the hierarchical order of creation is now flattened out to all creatures um so it is a naturalistic a secular humanist venture yeah um i wonder why they decided and i think i do know why but i wonder why they added accordance with reason like why not just say one should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures because that accordance and reason is the one thing that trips us up it's that grain of truth that if this were rightly ordered that would be true we should have compassion and empathy towards all creatures in a corporate reason that's true but not from the assumption of naturalism that's true from the grounds of supernaturalism or as augustine would say from the city of god it's it's right in the city of man it's not right it's arbitrary subjective and self-referencing and and it is it isn't a statement of unqualified value to compassion and empathy i mean the qualification is in accordance with the reason but if it's subjective that makes it arbitrary right yeah or even if it's just materialistic hugely problematic yeah would you mind stephen if i put up that uh billboard yes i think that kind of uh you know plays into this here let's see if i can find it here yeah so here we have a couple of billboards uh abortion saves lives put out by the satanic temple pregnancy complications are the sixth most common cause of death among women between the ages of 20 and 34. uh abortion saves lives our religious abortion ritual averts many state restrictions what a disgusting disgusting billboard wow and and i mean yeah like i'm i'm wondering if that that little thing there like all creatures in accordance with reason like i guess except for like unborn human creatures right yeah right there's the contradiction if if they if they interfere with my autonomy i know i need not have compassion with them not sure certainly not well look at the cake baking one down there do you see that one yeah let me throw that up here here we go our religious abortion ritual averts many state restrictions not a cake not a baby well yeah that's uh that's true it's not a baby it's not true that it's not a human life um so if we're supposed to be following science as they'd say uh they might want to admit they're wrong about this for at least sort of setting up a straw man right have you seen these in california uh no i haven't seen them up yet um and i'm surprised i haven't seen them yet but most other billboards are soft versions of that yes billboards about sickness billboards about your rights billboards about your value believe in yourself all these things are really soft soft soft pitches of those things um they're horrible billboards there's one with them hitler did you see that one yeah let me uh imagine if abortion was an option well you know what's funny is you can find like truth in in in many things in almost all things i suppose um so honestly what this does i think is show why those who say you know think of how many geniuses and philanthropists you've aborted that's a bad argument against abortion right because you know there's the response to it well you could have also aborted hitler yeah yeah they could say how many hitlers have we aborted but it's a really bad argument but it's materialism and it's narcissism it's actually psychopathic before we get to why it's psychopathic talk about what uh fulton sheen said about the three uh what do we say three marks of the demonic yes uh this is uh i think really really important to recognize as well is um fulton sheen shared in a talk once that there are three marks to the demonic you can recognize the demonic by violence by a split mind or contradiction and by nudity and by nudity that's the overarching blanket of um sexual license sexual perversion so we're not talking here about naked art or the body is seen appropriately of course he doesn't mean that no that's how people will take it so maybe right he would mean pornography included in free free the free sex movement the free free love movement as they call it which is which is ironic because you see those three marks in abortion you have that sort of license the idea that no one will tell me what to do nobody can tell me what to do with my body right um violence and this contradiction like abortion saves lives is a stupid thing to say and it's a contradiction very stupid and it requires materialistic reason to believe materialism self-reference subjective or rationalization i don't think it's reasonable at all and neither is it reasonable to have compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accord with a disordered rationalization just not reasonable so um one thing we might want to also bring up is um in my talk i start i talk about justice kennedy's statement in casey versus planned parenthood i think it was 1996 i didn't look that up but have you heard that before i have heard it yeah the idea about uh being able to define one's own existence i sent you a picture for that a lot of liberty did you yeah i did and justice kennedy said i think this is really important he said at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence of meaning of the universe and of the mystery of human life i'm not sure if i have that exact quote but i do have this sort of uh satanic image here the satanic temple and if i can find where it starts it's this circular thing here oh yeah one's will alone one's body inviolable subject uh one's will alone one's body isn't available okay so that's not exactly what you're referring to sorry no i did i did send an image just of justice kennedy oh okay i didn't get that sorry i'm sorry um but the reason i would start there is we have our supreme court def planned parenthood uh with this statement and uh dr peter craig the amazing doctor craig said this is either the most brilliant thing or the stupidest thing ever said and he's which i love that characterization um because it literally means anything you think makes it true yeah right the heart of liberty is your right to define your own concept of existence of reality and even human life yeah that would fit beautifully in the seven tenets yes unfortunately yeah here it is here at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence of meaning of the universe and of the mystery of human life yeah that's the stupidest thing anyone's ever had yeah i think it might be the stupidest and the bad news is that we've all we we all operate with that assumption we don't all operate but we the society conditions us to operate with that assumption and it's the basis for many people's arguments on freedom it's hugely problematic and that's just one sign out of a million you know one thing i noticed while i was writing my master's thesis i was trying to write a thesis on why pornography was intrinsically evil and i tried to make the case apart from the teleology of the sexual act and i couldn't i couldn't actually do it i couldn't actually come up with a convincing argument but what i came to discover while writing that thesis was just how we have understood morality in this day and age right it's this idea that it's not about the fittingness of certain acts or the ends uh in human actions rather it's just a matter of not usurping another's autonomy so if someone's immoral they are stopping you from doing the thing you want to do and the thing you want to do is totally fine so long as it doesn't usurp another's authority that's basically what we mean by morality today yes and that's i think that's built into the seven tenets as well yeah that notion that's in here um yes the freedoms of others should be respected including the freedom to offend that's the fourth one that's really interesting to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forego your own yes that's that's the idea because we shouldn't really encroach upon another's freedom i suppose i mean you would have to qualify that statement but that's all we mean by morality today that's all we mean by and then if we are encroaching on another's freedom by killing them whether they're old and annoying or in the womb and burdensome then we just redefine what they are yes that's exactly right what it is we're doing to them yes i heard uh president obama say a few years ago on tv he said do your own will just harm no one i i that's not an exact quote but it's close i know i just quoted the wicked creed but that's our national and that's what you just said yeah do your own will but harm no one um that's from the satanic tenets as well um i found this i found this this two comments i'd love to read under the fourth one sure can i read these real quick there was a there was a young guy objecting he said he was responding to the fourth when he says i thought about satanism and i personally cannot respect the fourth tenet of that that the ability to offend someone must be protected it implies that people like me who deviate from the norm in some way such as being black lgbtqia or neurodiversive or whatever else is fair game i'm not black but i am autistic and do question my sexuality and have received so much abuse for it so that's that's one person saying i'm okay with six tenets just this fourth one bothers me because i i don't think we should give license to offend it's almost a good point but the response is this the fourth tenet is not about the right to discriminate against minorities or other persecuted groups it's best understood in the context of heresy and free thought from the membership page on the site it quote in addition to upholding the tenants and mission of the national organization the satanic temple in new york city as a local chapter is committed to maintaining an environment of respect and support both at in-person events and online misogyny transphobia racism anti-semitism out ableism or bigotry of any kind have no place in the satanic temple right so so who gets to be offended and why or why not yeah that's a good point because when i read that i thought it kind of sounds a little like the first amendment like you have the right to express your opinion right um and if it offends me that's that's okay as long as you're not harming me it kind of sounds like that which i would agree with right but they don't mean that at all in fact they mean political correctness and all the speech codes out there and all that yeah this is just this just sounds like secular secular morality like everything we're reading here the seven tenets of satanism sounds like um just secular dogma it doesn't i can't see the difference i don't i don't think there is one and maybe this is a good time to bring up the fact that the satanic temple has an after-school program they've instituted called after school satan i'm throwing that up on the screen so people can see it yeah after school satan constitutionally necessary constitutionally necessary and the reason this is a good time to bring that up is that just as you said if you look at the the mission statement of after school satan it really sounds like our public schools and this should trouble us let's read them yeah yeah i got in front of me go for it so after school satan the clubs follow a standard syllabus and strive to provide students with the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to make important life decisions for themselves they emphasize a scientific and rationalist non-superstitious worldview and oppose indoctrination into other worldly belief systems it is critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues and that they have a choice in how they think satan is just a metaphorical construct intended to represent a rejection of all forms of tyranny over the human mind talk about contradiction i mean listen to that i mean it it's critical for children to understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues except apparently according to them there isn't multiple perspectives on that issue right that's right so contradictory the whole thing uh take out the word satan and you literally have quotes from the public schools though this is what they do and i think that's really important to understand and these after school satan programs they've intentionally gone to every school that has a good news club a gospel club and they've tried to assert their right to have an after-school satan and i don't know how many there are i'm only aware of three that i was that i was able to confirm uh because they said they're having trouble finding enough volunteers but they're not having trouble finding students to go there no well i wonder i wonder why the images are so ugly yeah do you know what i mean like i'm serious like this this after-school satan i i presume this is their official image the kind of crap yeah i mean that's that's just ugly you would think that if they were trying to appeal to people they might try and do a better job than that it just looks creepy but think about modern art we are we are embracing in this age the cult of the ugly yeah we've inverted the order the white for black the black for white the ugly for the beautiful the beautiful the ugly it makes sense to me that they would propagate this with the ugly the goat all their symbols and their statues they're hideous and people it's attractive in this day where we've been in condition in the cult of the ugly there's something i appreciate about the satanic temple in that they're saying what it sounds like the secular culture is saying behind a veil they're saying something wicked but at least they're not pretending otherwise yes and they deserve our full condemnation but um at least they're saying it without the varnish you know what i mean yeah it's well i think i think that's what's so troubling about this is that i think it was varnished and whitewashed and and just asserted under the surface and now it's out in the open and my my biggest i'm horrified that it it doesn't seem to bother people could we could we pause and say hail mary yes is that okay i'll say the first half you say the second half because if there's one thing satan is terrified of it's that beautiful handmaid who's crushed his head and continues to in the name of the father son and holy spirit amen hail mary full of grace the lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb jesus holy mary mother of god pray for our sinners now and at the hour of our death amen say michael defend us amen amen i begin my talk with the saint michael the archangel prayer so for the same reason yeah um doing this whole project and writing the talk has been really bizarre it's put me in a fog it was really ugly it's really a bizarre thing because it wasn't necessarily hard to do but it was really a gross feeling after finishing digging into all these seven tenets and i think they're worth understanding um and like i said i'm pretty horrified that that they are so appealing and you hear more and more out front up open out front statements that are horrifying and we're less and less bothered by them it's not just like the death of outrage it's the death of horror at what is horrible the death of horror at what is horrible yeah yeah and they're all so appealing we we seem to like them um i was concerned with the public schools when the school shut down from the pandemic the um they all went on to zoom meetings and then what was happening in the classroom was piped into the home and parents could see with their own eyes what was happening how they were how they're trying to indoctrinate kids into being anti-racist which is actually racist anti-fascist which is actually fascist um and you know anti-transphobic which is really bizarre but all these things were coming in the home and i was expecting a revolt from parents and i was expecting to say we're taking our kids out of the schools but that didn't seem to happen yeah right you know all the zoom into the home and and parents are no longer appropriately horrified by how their children are being conditioned i think we christians have a lot of the blame to bear here in how we have sort of turned god into just a way to feel good as well like it's like we abandoned um you know historic christianity and replaced it for this sort of like what's it called i forget therapeutic dayism you know this kind of got up in the clouds who's there to make you feel good and hell doesn't really exist and all he cares about is you being happy and that's the kind of bull crap we kept hearing and we really we really got to get back to like um god is a just god who demands things of you and you have no right to disobey him and if you reject him like you will you will go to hell he wants to save you but he is a holy and just god and you going to church on sunday and praying it's a matter of justice it's not about you and how you feel it's about what we owe the the triune god we can never of course repay him for what he's given us but i i think we've got to get back to that right i couldn't agree more we've been deeply immersed into a kind of materialism that's even even overtaken those of us who are are seeking the religious life or seeking the faithful life it's inundated it comes in through the screens through entertainment through politics through the media through the schools there's just no area to go to except for maybe a holy parish where you're going to be protected from this bombardment constant bombardment if we look at the third tenet i think that almost says it all one's body is inviolable subject to one's own will alone that that's to me that's pretty stark and you're asking the question do you own yourself are you your own prophet and king you're right and the answer from the tenant is yes you are but but even in their next one they v they contradict that by saying but if you offend somebody the wrong way you lose your freedom and your body is no longer here and we will punish you i i think i sent you that article from that uh from that newscaster i can't remember his name now but he said tell us about that i remember yeah i i there's this newscaster yeah go ahead i saw i was going to sum up what you said the the newscaster i think he said he wants to find some never masters and beat the hell out of him or something oh he wants to beat them to death yeah and and that sounds like it would fit right in with these satanic tenets look at the arbitrary judgment someone who doesn't wear a mask is a murderer right that's that's the line and then therefore i have the right to beat them to death which is we're not nearly offended enough by such an idiotic morally intellectually idiotic statement we're just we're like oh okay yeah i i'm with you i i sense your feeling all those anti-masters are um they're murderers in spite of the science that would inform you otherwise if you if you looked at the science on the masks uh just crazy but but they don't mean that your body's in violent it means it's inviable as long as you're not offending the satanists and their arbitrary changing political correctness rules so it's really crazy but but then to bring it back to reality what we do with our bodies in all cases is public what we choose to speak is for the sake of the other whom we choose to touch or to punch or whatever this has a public and common good consequence uh you know your body is not your own and that contradiction of aborting your own child is it's just that just contradicts the whole idea to begin with but it's just really wrong because everything we choose to do by free will has an impact on the common good on others and we belong to god and we belong to our families into our society you know i think it's one of the things we've been bringing up here is just how we have uh we've slowly become accustomed to these these sort of wicked things to the point where we we read them and go yeah that makes total sense and um so it's i guess a question for you i have is how do we stay sane how do we stay holy how do we not how do we not allow ourselves to become evangelized to use that word in a perverse sense uh by the world you know to be evangelized by the world and into the sort of these sort of satanic pillars what is it that we we got to do what is it we got to stop doing that's an enormous question the beginning is recognizing parents is first educated with their children parents have to protect their children from this and parents themselves have to return to the church in a meaningful way return to proper religiosity people that are atheists they're very religious as well so returning to the truth makes us answer several questions the first of which who's the enemy we have to be really careful about thinking that that everyone who's participating in the satanic temple we have to be careful about thinking that there are enemies they're not per se it's satan that's our enemy the powers and principalities so we have to recognize the enemy we have to root out errors from our own souls by the grace of god alone and then we have to protect our children it's a really short answer but but it's really really vital that we return to reality as it is and the first question yeah i i mean i think a lot of us myself included justify some of the entertainment that we're watching by saying you know look i can i can i can engage with this entertainment and and i understand that there are perverse elements in it and i don't think you or i would want to call people to this sort of puritanism where unless something has unless you're reading the bible you shouldn't be reading anything unless you're watching you know whatever you shouldn't be watching anything like um so it is a difficult question it does take some prudence but i do wonder if there is some entertainment we're exposing ourselves to but we got to quit the justification of it and just delete the netflix account or delete disney plus or something like that um but again how do you do that without falling into a sort of puritanical mindset right right there's always the golden mean between the puritanical and the licentious and and that is the good moral soul who's in the world but not of the world and that's certainly what we strive for but we can recognize some things as as over the top on netflix there's shows that are terrible there's there's a i don't know i think they've done five seasons of this of the show lucifer which i've seen it i haven't either but i looked it up and i gave a description in my talk of it um it's appealing obviously or it wouldn't have run five seasons but it's a very sympathetic look it's satan who who evidently comes from a boring job in hell to la the perfect perfect place for him um but yeah i think we have to be prudent about the entertainment we consume not to be puritanical but to be prudent and especially to protect our children one of the most vast sources of conditioning in the world are the schools i think parents need to have a much closer look at what's going on in the schools the new sex ed programs are vile the new history programs are they're ahistorical the literature and the literacy programs are anti-human and they've they've used their literacy to promote ideological agendas and those are unacceptable you don't have to be a puritan to say those are not good for my children to be exposed to um so whether promoting anti-fascism anti-racism and anti-transphobic anti-lgbtq agendas those are really damaging and skewing to our children those conditioned us really towards the psychopathic yeah talk a bit more about that you've mentioned psychopathic twice now how how do these seven tenets of the satanic temple uh lead to psychopathy well properly understood they are all the path to psychopathy but but we ought to just we had to define the term i think psych uh psychopath today has a little different meaning than he used to but the original definition used to mean anyone with a mental disorder and we're not going to be that broad but we could say a psychopath is one with such a personality disorder that they cunningly lie they manipulate they're arrogant promiscuous they lack moral responsibility they're callous and remorseless that reminds me of romans 1. you know where it says they they hate haters of parents and holding to a form of religion while denying its power yeah psychopathy so these seven tenets condition you to be exactly like that concerning cancel culture political correctness the speech codes all the new all the new ideologies are psychopathic because they they're they are all those things they're narcissistic they're arrogant they're subjective they're self-referential they're callous they will destroy your life that that moral idiot who said he wants to beat somebody to death because they don't believe you should wear a mask that's psychopathic yeah and he might not even be a psychopath we we don't have to be psychopaths to adopt psychopathic ideology and our entire society is almost there when we hear these tenants and we think they're okay we're giving the nod to psychopathy being okay sometimes unless you redefine psychopathy to mean somebody who's just religious and faithful which is kind of what they've done yeah how do we judge whether or not we are narcissistic and because obviously that's something we would like to say but other people and have never said of us but you know i i see i see like my the own my own struggles as a father and as a husband i think come down a lot to my own narcissism so what do we mean by narcissism and how do we detect that in ourselves yeah it's almost a given in all of us unfortunately it's it's an artifact of pride of self-consideration right um when you raise yourself and your interests above everything else that's the path towards narcissism ah and it's what we tend to because we're fallen that's just that's the way it is so i unless unless you're already saying or unless you're already holy if you're like me i just assume i'm narcissistic because i am and then i i really try to deal honestly with my intentions and motivation and my formation so i think i think it's a question we all have to ask and answer you know just just maybe this is funny i don't know but you know one way to get to whether or not we're narcissistic and awful is just for a moment reflect upon the criticisms your family have of you and just take just just for for the moment assume them to be true because i do a really good job of blaming my family members for when i am too tired or or when the house is a mess or when they're too loud it's always them and i never stopped to think like i must be a pain in the ass to live with i never i never very rarely i shouldn't say i never because i do i do try to repent of it but but i rarely stop and go okay like maybe maybe a lot of this stuff that i'm saying is their fault is because of my own selfishness and i think that might be one way to begin to see our own narcissism if if we were to take seriously the criticisms those around us have of us now these people love us i'm not saying these are people who are just critical for the sake of being critical but they're like yeah you know i wish you wouldn't do that or you you do tend to do this a lot and i think most of us because of our fallen nature is to kind of defend against that and say no no no that's just because of this and but but instead it might be a good exercise to go okay what if all that's true now what i i give you some pushback on that i mean it's highly likely that i mean gosh i think about how i annoy my family it's unbelievable um if you just look at my morning texts from my daughter you'd see how annoying i am but i would i would say one of the problems today is that the modern satanic temple asks us to ask others and to and to take them at their word about how we are i mean whether it's true or not that's okay but the better thing to do would be to take the ten commandments every exhortation from jesus christ the beatitudes and to measure your actions and motivations and intentions against those holy things okay uh because what other people say is going to be as as clouded and as shrouded as what we say to others that's it for example that's excellent thank you for yeah keep going but thank you for pushing back yeah yeah just you know make the reference the saints and you know christ himself and those who imitate christ that's the standard for the measure of our own actions and if we pray for the grace to see clearly those things then i think we'll have a do a much better job of reforming our narcissism because the subjective opinions of those around us it's a moving target and often they're not not as clear as we would love them to be anyway and yeah so in the racist movements the the anti-racist racist people say if you want to know what a racist you are ask somebody who's not like you and then you'll know how racist you are and that's not true you will know how racist you are by comparing yourself against the objective standard of what it means to be a racist it has nothing to do with other people's feelings about you or their reactions to you has everything to do with truly how you are right and we can't measure against measure that against other people's subjective feelings but that's the argument and that's from the satanic temple that's also all the ideologies yeah let's uh are you okay if we start taking some kind of comments and questions from those of course yeah of course it's a good time to do that i want to remind everybody that in the description below you can click a link and go watch this presentation that stephen gave um you know we're only able to kind of touch the surface here but if you're if you're liking what you're hearing today and you want to go take take this deeper um go be sure to click that link and watch that okay um these these comments aren't working but let me just read them boxing monk of gourds says i was born and raised as catholic then in my teenage years i became satanist i tried suicide beat my brothers i was full of hate holy mother bring me back to the church to christ there is always hope with mary wow what do you say well come back no i think he's i think that's what he's saying he's come back yes because of the blessed mother he says she brought me back to the church you always thank you to god always help with her thanks be to god that's a beautiful story wow wow i i'll bet he's not alone you know to some degree without going to the satanic church to some degree all of us who have embraced secularism participate in english so i think we have to be really careful about but but the story is yeah come back be faithful pray the rosary every single day attend daily mass until the end that's beautiful mikey fox says satanism satanism's teaching is much more humane than the teaching of hell so this person is disagreeing with you here they're saying i would much rather teach my kids about satanism than the idea that my kid or me or someone i love could go to hell forever right that's a really great point at the end of that that article in the national catholic register they said exactly that they said if you compare the ten commandments to the seven tenets you see that the ten commandments are really mean and the seven tenets this is everything we're striving for they're so nice and uh that's that's understandable why we've been conditioned to believe that but it's so inverted it's so opposite the doctrine of hell that that points to true divine justice is is an artifact of love the cult of the nice is an artifact of hate and the culture of death if you if you spend your life trying to be humane which doesn't mean humane anymore it means to be comfortable and to be pleasant have pleasure to be happy in a very materialistic sense that's not an act of charity to tell somebody that's a good way to be if you love somebody you're going to tell them the truth grounded in reality so for a secular humanist that doesn't work because you say well if god doesn't exist then the ten commandments are really mean because hell is scary and that would be true but if god does exist then the doctrine of hell because it's true ought to point us in the other direction so so it's an act of charity to understand the nature of hell and that it's real and that it's permanent so so i think the seven tenets lead to temporary pleasurable things and they end you in misery even on earth even here but i do understand his point yeah uh this person in the comments says do you think we need to be more puritanical in this age maybe puritans have had a bad rap because they were too extreme in their time but our time needs more scrupulosity the good kind about media etc uh yeah i would say i would say like like when we talk about being puritanical we're talking about something negative so asking can should we be more this negative thing isn't the way to go about it maybe what they mean is i don't know what would you say we should be vigilant we shouldn't be peritanical that's that's a protestant uh that's a protestant problem we should definitely be vigilant we should definitely seek truth we should definitely humble ourself before the one who made us we should definitely return to truth and virtue and goodness and recognize that as isaiah said woe to him who calls black white and white black woe to him that calls evil good and good evil we ought to return to calling good good and evil evil but we don't anymore those seven tenets are actually evil and they sound good because we've been conditioned in the inversion puritanicalism is not the answer fidelity and vigilance is the answer return to christ return to truth return to virtue return to goodness that would be my answer yeah that's good um now look here's the thing though i mean i suppose the reason you're saying these seven tenants are evil is because of how they're being understood by satanists isn't that right because if i came to you and said hey look you know steve in the end of the day people are fallible you know if we make a mistake we should do our best to rectify it resolve any harm that may be been caused that's clearly not an evil thing to say that's a correct thing to say people are fallible yes if we make a mistake we should do our best to rectify that is not false that is true and resolve any harm that is true so i think maybe some people are looking at this guy like how could you it's just you're wrong to say these are evil but maybe if i'm understanding you correctly you're saying when you understand these seven tenets in the context of satanism that's when you understand them to be evil yeah they they are sheer evil and they sound good because there's grades of truth that you just mentioned but a perfect example of that is the anti-master guy he says you caused harm by not wearing a mask you deserve to be beaten to death that's his that's his example of taking care of the damage allow yourself to be beaten to death for making that mistake yeah if we were to say that same thing in light of the beatitudes well of course make reparations for all harm weep blessed tears for your sins and the sins of the world that is not what they mean by that they mean adhere to all those ideologies and if you offend against the ideologies then get on your knees allow yourself to be canceled and and all those things so it's it's tremendously evil it it wouldn't be just to take those con concepts out of the context of the satanic lens yeah that would be that'd be unjust even to the satanic temple and it would be satanic to give our old spin on it yeah instead of ask what objectively is being said here this bloke catholicism i can never say his name says good to see you here by the way he says does satanism have an apocalypse of sorts in mind do they believe there to be hope for lucifer's victory you might want to restate what you did earlier about the satanic temple not believing in satan yeah they're they're ultimately an offshoot of the idea that we make a heaven on earth and they're they're naturalists in the way that c.s lewis describes naturalism i have a really good friend dr thaddeus kozinski who points out that nature properly understood includes nature and leads true but the way c.s lewis says it naturalism means it's all about just the material and so their concern is here and now a sort of a hell on earth that they call a heaven on earth it's utopianism it's uh so i don't i don't think their endgame is anything other than controlling and grasping as much as you can in this life yeah so i don't i don't believe so if there is something more than that i'd love to learn about it yeah i just want to kind of maybe go back and begin to kind of wrap up on that comment that someone made recently about should we become more puritanical because i think to try and state their question in the best possible light um you know i think maybe what they're saying is like you know should our lives look a lot more radical today as christians as as say we were to live this same life 50 100 years ago and i think the answer to that is probably yes um absolutely it would seem to me that we sh if we're not if we don't look like crazy christians to secular people then then we might want to look at that and i don't mean crazy in that we're acting irrationally but people who are fully committed to jesus christ who are reading the sacred scriptures daily and if we're not then we should be like if i'm not i'm saying the same thing to me i should be if i'm not like praying morning and night i should be one of the things i suggest to people is something very simple is that they take a crucifix and place it by their bed and in the morning let their first act of the day be to kiss kiss the kiss the corpus kiss kiss christ and say lord i'll serve you or glory to jesus christ something like that like we have to we have to look we have to be radically in love with our blessed lord uh i think we should be reading the saints reading the early church fathers we should have a steady diet of of their writings and not what you know netflix is publishing um and i don't say that any way to shame anybody or to make anybody feel i mean it might be a shameful thing right like if all you do is watch netflix that is a shameful thing you should feel ashamed so i guess maybe i'm trying to but um but i get what i'm saying i guess is uh like i don't want to overwhelm anybody i don't want to kind of like impress upon people how i think i in my stage of the christian walk ought to be living i know that sometimes it depends on our state of life but but yeah i think we should we should look like we should live radically for christ what do you think no 100 agree uh i i just object to the word puritanical uh and it's interesting because right now if you live a faithful life part of that is you're called to evangelize and that means our public words and works ought to be holy and if they are they're going to offend society um if we're going to commit to martyrdom or commit to witnessing this is a really tough time to get started with that because if we're doing what we ought to do we're going to offend people in the opposite way of the satanic tenets we're going to we're going to offend with truth and with goodness and we ought to make sure that our words are measured that they're truthful and that they're charitable that would be our standard um or or maybe we we stay home and quiet but i believe what you said i think we need to be out in the world um promoting the common good the body of christ here's a here's a question that i know you're going to love to answer so i want to set this up for you comes from jay mota who asks jane motor who asks how do we protect our kids with all these ideologies okay eliminate the screens no phones you don't need television and get them out of the public schools that's a great start and yeah that's a great start if you did that you would radically change your possibilities for edifying your children as they ought to be edified amen brother amen and i think what you know suppose you would listen to that and think gosh that's hard teaching but you're right i think the first place maybe to begin is definitely with our children of course but with ourselves yes like it's if i'm gonna say to my kids all right we're gonna just read some good books and we'll watch the occasional movie but you know the tv is not really a thing and you're definitely not having phones yeah well do i walk around in the house like looking at my email looking at my text checking my instagram like to do that is just to show your kids that this is what the grown-ups do this is the thing that you're being denied but if our kids see us praying and playing with them and reading books and helping others and you know yes i wish i would have said that first yes absolutely no but you're spot on you've got to say things you've got to say things strongly yeah we we can sometimes nuance things to death and they they end up not being heard right in the cult of nice yeah i mean this this society makes sodom and gomorrah look pretty good not bad yeah we're coming along towards that too quickly too quickly i'm surprised by how far it's gone and so quickly but uh but it's out in the open now yeah yeah i'm a i'm a big fan of this realism i don't think it's pessimism to say that uh this this society as it stands does not deserve to exist right right and there's great joy in embracing the truth and seeing the truth uh there's great joy in seeing things as they are it satisfies the human soul yeah so it's worth rooting some of these things out of our souls in order to see more clearly maybe with the with the eyes of christ so you asked earlier i think saint paul says that we need to put on the mind of christ put on the armor of god and recognize that we are all called to the spiritual combat that's a universal call yeah yeah now spot on and i think it's important that we you know we kind of remind ourselves and each other that you know the opposite of satan isn't god you know like it's not like god has equal sense strength and satan the opposite of satan is saint michael the archangel you know right um if you know to put it put it that way it's like god is infinitely more powerful than satan and so just the name of jesus terrifies the demons i sometimes had this image of it at the name of jesus every knee shall bend you know under the earth i sometimes think of the demons or falling to their knees despite themselves at the power of that name yes without a doubt without a doubt return to christ let me let me just ask one final question because you are a way more um optimistic joyful guy than i am and i love that about you so much how do you do that like how do you look into this stuff be convinced about just where society is going and well i'm not sure that's true but i can tell you this like that one uh that beautiful story we just heard i spent 40 years in secular humanism i know the mind of the enemy and then by a miracle of grace i could never explain christ called me to the body when i was about 40 and uh the joy of not being in that secular culture even though i'm alienated from my family and my old friends it i would rather be alone with christ then then very very popular in the world and so uh i wouldn't say i'm more joyful than you but i am so joyful that i brought my family into the body of christ and that i was welcomed into the church with the kind of sinner that i am so i'm i'm elated every day because of that i am so grateful because of that so that's a miracle so pray for that miracle just allow christ to take you in because he's courting you and i looked back and i saw the 40 years he was courting me in the 40 years i said no it's unbelievable so i am very grateful and i think gratitude might help amen here's a question uh comes from solace griffis who says i'm divorced and a recent conv revert i don't have equal custody of my daughter due to mistakes in my past and she is being raised by her secular mum i feel so powerless now i get her every other weekend is there any hope yes with christ all things are hopeful um the one caveat i would say if is there any hope in us remedying that the answer is no is there any hope that the holy spirit in christ will take care of this the answer is yes so i think building up your prayer life and your devotion and making reparations for the mistakes you made in the past i think that's a great place to start and there's surely hope there's oh where there's life there's always hope yeah absolutely and i mean you think of how many people probably probably i don't know your past stephen but i was kind of you know raised with influences that would certainly lead you to think that i would never kind of accept christianity um consider myself an agnostic in my teenage years and it wasn't until i was 17 that i accepted you know my christian faith and accepted salvation um and so you know there's so many stories like that where people are raised in secular homes when they see the beauty of christianity so you know you you have this beautiful opportunity to to be this saint in your daughter's life to love her to listen to her uh to to to to to respect you know her mother uh and yes you know you have a beautiful influence on her there as well and of course to pray and fast for her i mean what a beautiful thing to think if she knew one day that my dad every day of his life prayed a holy rosary for me what a beautiful thing to for her to be able to say no that would be the road to go down beautiful beautiful answer matt yeah yeah all right brother well look tell tell people about this link i've mentioned it twice now there's a link in the description below to a talk that stephen rummelsburg gave on the seven tenets of the satanic temple we didn't get into all of that here this was really really a teaser for that talk so maybe tell people why they should go listen to that well okay so the talk i made is a little bit like uh drinking from a fire hose but i start at the beginning with with the battle lines are drawn and i go through the seven tenets and i go into a little bit of depth philosophically to explain why they're wrong and then i give a bunch of really good bible quotes i think to prepare yourself to escape these psychopathic tendencies and i i think i conclude fairly hopefully but it is an hour-long talk that goes in depth to the stuff that matt and i just began to talk about i also have a website i wanted to tell you about for any parents or teachers interested in learning about an authentic education i'm just starting to develop a website and i'm trying to draw good people into a community of souls that want to reform education for the sake of our children and it's a similar topic but on my patreon page you can see that see that video and on my web page i'm going to have a weekly newsletter and i have articles and i have videos of things that i think are really important for us to get get the conversation started about how to reform education especially in the home now i'll put that link below stephen but what is it it's kiwitate sj.com okay i'll put that below yeah i actually oh and i gave who i gave you a slide with my email address if you wanted to ask questions about the talk okay yeah we don't have many guests that are willing to give give out their email this is uh pretty pretty exciting stuff let me i'll see if i can find it while you talk okay yes and if you reach out to my email with a question about the talk or about education i'd be really happy to answer those publicly or personally either either way is great both are great um if if i get good questions i can make a video answering them about the talk because the talk it goes in depth a lot more depth that we went to but it's still tip of the iceberg because we're talking about centuries we're really talking about since the garden but we're talking about centuries of philosophical errors leading us to this point where we're pretty easily fooled by very basic things well i've got it up here uh what does this mean in latin uh city of god i got that from augustine yeah my patrons stay in the saint augustine so there you go everybody who's watching right now you can see that's stephen's email if you want to reach out to him he'll respond to you um so there it is that's very kind of you stephen oh thank you yeah no it's my pleasure i love being on the show and i love the work you do matt it's i find it magnanimous i think i think it's beautiful i once heard a priest say may the lord use my bull crap as manure for other people's growth and that's my prayer like maybe there's something good in here may the lord use that and may he also use my you know things i say wrong on falsely for his for his glory too i'm gonna echo you yes yeah thanks a lot steven thank you so much matt

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

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Length: 65min 21sec (3921 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021