A Show of Faith
Millennial, Priest, Minister, and Rabbi walk into a radio station...
A Show of Faith
November 17, 2024 Loyalty, Trust, and the Dance Between Faith and Reason
Can loyalty exist without trust, or is it merely fear disguised as allegiance? Join us as we unravel this complex web with Professor David Capes, Rudy Kong, and Father Mario Arroyo. We explore how loyalty can take on different forms, sometimes dangerously veering into blind allegiance, reminiscent of historical regimes. From political landscapes to personal relationships, we question the true nature of loyalty and its interplay with trust, and ponder whether it's possible to separate the two without consequence.
Faith isn't just a leap into the unknown; it's a reasoned response to the world we observe. With insights from theological heavyweights like Karl Rahner and Thomas Aquinas, we challenge the misconceptions that pit faith against reason. Together, we explore how belief systems, whether religious or secular, are underpinned by a form of reasoned faith that harmonizes with the order in our universe. The discussion meanders through the Enlightenment era's shift away from traditional truths, examining how this philosophical evolution continues to influence modern culture's understanding of morality and trust.
Prepare for an intellectually stimulating ride as we juxtapose faith, reason, and loyalty with cultural and historical contexts. Our stories and reflections aim to illuminate the unique perspectives each faith tradition offers and question traditional forms of truth. As we share the transformative journey of individuals like Mike Lindell, we encourage listeners to reconsider the sources of their own beliefs and loyalties, contemplating a return to foundational truths that can stabilize our ever-confusing cultural climate.
What is exactly clear. There's a man with a gun over there and in me. I got to beware.
Speaker 2:It's empty. Stop what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down.
Speaker 1:This is such a perfect song for us, mm-hmm, the sound line guidelines being drawn, nobody's right if Trump is ever wrong. Their mind needs so much resistance From behind Time to stop.
Speaker 2:Hey, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down.
Speaker 1:Hey, welcome to a show of faith tonight, where professor, priest, millennial and rabbi discuss the theology and philosophy and anything else of interest in religion. If you have any response to our topics or any comments regarding what we say, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at ashowoffaith at hotmailcom. You can hear our shows whenever you want, again by listening pretty much everywhere that podcasts are played.
Speaker 3:Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts. Okay, wow.
Speaker 1:Professor, today we have our guest. Yes, thank you, he's not a guest.
Speaker 3:It's nice to be a guest here.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:With you fellows on a Sunday night.
Speaker 1:We have been doing this far too long. Professor David Capes. He is a Baptist minister and he is the head director of academic programming for the Lanier Theological Library.
Speaker 3:Yes, I am, that is me, thank you. It's good to be with you, father Mario.
Speaker 1:Yes, rudy Kong is our millennial. He is a systems engineer and has his master's degree in theology from the University of St Thomas. There we go and he is on the air with us, with his wife sitting next to him, probably.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:Natalia.
Speaker 4:Natalia, she's not feeling too well today. Ah, okay.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And who are you?
Speaker 1:well, wait a minute. The most important person always goes last.
Speaker 3:It's a show of humility so a show of faith is also a show of humility.
Speaker 1:I have a show. I'm an extremely humble person and I'm very proud of that. My name is Mario. Last name is Mario. Last name is Arroyo. If it sounds Hispanic, it's because I am Cuban of origin. I came to the United States when I was 10 years old. I'm the former pastor of St Cyril of Alexandria Catholic Church in West Houston, 10,000 block of Westheimer, where I was senior pastor for 26 years 26 years.
Speaker 3:They put up with you a long time.
Speaker 1:I know I put up with them too. God only knows. It kind of goes both ways, doesn't it? It goes both ways.
Speaker 3:Now, where's Stuart? You're sitting in the Stuart Federo chair.
Speaker 1:Well, I was just about to say Stuart had other things to do tonight and he just could not be with us tonight.
Speaker 3:Ah, okay, stuart, and he just could not be with us tonight.
Speaker 1:Ah, okay, so, Stuart, we miss you. We miss you Because we always.
Speaker 3:You know, it's always a little weird when we have an all-Christian show. You know, well, I can always be a heretic, if you like. Well, you are, at least from the standpoint of you Catholics, I'm a heretic, yes.
Speaker 1:But you're a wonderful heretic. Thank you, you're one of the nicest heretics I've ever met.
Speaker 3:We were talking about protesting on the way up the elevator and how Protestants have been protesting since 1517. Yes, so we have a lot of practice.
Speaker 1:I still remember that story when we were talking about, years ago, occupy Wall Street. Remember that.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh. Remember that.
Speaker 1:And you on the radio you said how long are they going to keep this up? And I said I don't know, David, but you guys have been doing it for 500, 600 years 500 years, that's right. You're pretty good at it, yeah exactly so.
Speaker 6:Rudy's with us tonight, and Rudy is our show director.
Speaker 7:He is our show director.
Speaker 3:We'll see you, Stuart, next week, I'm sure. So you're right, Rudy. Tell us about what the show's going to be about tonight.
Speaker 4:I have been thinking a lot about. Of course, we had the elections right and Trump won. The elections right and Trump won, and you know, this kind of led me to think a lot about the concept of loyalty, right, and what are the things that we are loyal to, right? I mean, we can show loyalty to a political party, right Republican, democrat, libertarian. We can show loyalty to our loved ones, right A wife, a father, a mother, a brother, right.
Speaker 4:So there's these things that bind us, that provoke us to act in either a positive way or, dare I say, a negative way, right, because there's abuses of loyalty, or loyalty, if you will, that has led to blind loyalty, I would say that has led to a lot of destruction and damage.
Speaker 4:You know, I think of Nazi Party, for example, or Stalin's guard, or Mao Zedong, these guys, they had a lot of soldiers and a lot of people in an entire institution that was, quote-unquote, loyal but still committing all these heinous crimes, right. So so I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of loyalty and I wanted to also bring in the concept of trust, because I think one gets to the other, right, and even if you're doing, you know, I gave the example, the extreme example, example right of, let's say, nazi germany. Even if you're, you're or or stalin, right, if you go alongside with the party, even though you may be doing evil acts, you trust that maybe they're not going to kill you or you're going to be protected, right? So there's kind of this concept, um, that one kind of uh leads into the other. I'm going to define them real quick and I want to channel my inner Mario right now and start with the etymology.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, the phrase that came to my mind as you were talking is the one that came out of, I think, the Nuremberg trials, which was I was just following orders, kind of thing, yeah. Kahnberg trials, which was I was just following orders, kind of thing, yeah, yeah, you know. And on the one hand, you could say, well, I was being loyal to the people above me. On the other hand, you can say, well, I knew it was wrong, but I did. Then you are living a life in jeopardy at that point, right. So, as you were saying, but yeah, I think those are two really interesting ideas loyalty and trust. Are they related, are they connected? And I'm going to throw in there just to be a, you know, I don't know, a Protestant.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the whole idea of allegiance, the whole idea of allegiance, because I think that's a part of what you're talking about as well. So, yeah, go ahead and give us those definitions there, as our Father Mario stand-in.
Speaker 4:Father Mario stand-in. Those are great shoes to tell. So okay, trust is essentially derived. It's derived from an old Norse word, trost, which means confidence, protection or support, right. And now the interesting thing about this is that trust is normally what we're talking about. Right is is is more involved with a reliance on relationships and tied and this is how they understood it right and tied to sort of systems or survival. So I have trust in my community, I have trust in the police, I have trust that when I dial my iPhone or my Samsung phone, that it's going to work Right. So there's these kind of structural things that are around us.
Speaker 1:All around. The only thing I disagree with you is that you're equating iPhone with Samsung All around. The only thing I disagree with you is that you're equating iPhone with Samsung.
Speaker 4:Father Mario, 80% of your phone is made by Samsung. I just want you to know this.
Speaker 3:It's Apple who puts it intelligently together. He's loyal. Let me just say that he's loyal to the brand.
Speaker 4:He's loyal to the brand and he trusts the brand.
Speaker 2:He does you know.
Speaker 4:So loyalty comes from an old French, loyale, loyalty, and of course from the Latin legalis, and it means lawful or faithful adherence to a promise or duty. Right, so, philosophically and you guys can kind of jump into it please I mean, this is kind of how I understood it. To me, trust is a belief fundamentally Right. Of belief fundamentally right, I believe either someone or something that is going to be reliable, honest, capable, right. To some degree, it requires a vulnerability on my part, right, Like I'm sort of entrusting myself, I'm sort of allowing me to not understand everything that is going on about what I may be trusting Right. So, for example, a phone. I trust that a phone works, although I don't have an entire understanding of every little piece of hardware that functions within that phone.
Speaker 4:As opposed to loyalty, as opposed to loyalty Now, this kind of what you were talking about, dr Cates, is more significant of an allegiance. Right, it could be like a sort of external obligation or a culprits norm, like, for example, following our laws. Right, we have a loyalty to the rule of law in the United States. You could say right, so we trust it and then we're also loyal to it, because they are accompanied by particular repercussions if we're not loyal to it, right? So we mentioned earlier with the nazis there was a lot of loyalty because they believe that they they trusted that maybe they were going to get killed, um, if they didn't fall in line with the party line.
Speaker 4:So I wanted to get to the, to the kind of first question that I wanted to throw to you guys is okay, can, can, can loyalty exist without trust? Is it? Is it something that that there's two different words and two different concepts? Right? But the way I think about it is I can't. I can't be loyal to something that I don't trust. Whether I'm afraid of it, whether I'm afraid of my fear for repercussions, you know, but it's a very real, tangible belief that I have for me to be loyal to something right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:But wait a minute, you know? For example, let's say if I were married, which I am not, thanks be to God.
Speaker 3:Wait a minute. You're married to the church.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not I am a Catholic priest.
Speaker 3:I know, that's what I used to hear a long time ago that Catholic priests are married to the church.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's a silly comparison. The reason I'm saying is I can be loyal to my wife even though I may not trust her all the way.
Speaker 4:You know what I'm saying. You can be loyal to your wife, but not trust her.
Speaker 1:Or my trust could be severely impaired.
Speaker 3:Let's say she's been unfaithful at some point and you're trying to find your way back. That doesn't mean you have to be unfaithful you can be loyal to that covenant of marriage, at the same time as you're not sure you really fully trust her.
Speaker 4:So that's what I Now let me, father, Father, let me, father, father, let me tell you this I would, I would argue that you are trusting in a more fundamental belief, which is the sacramental marriage yes, but notice I violate that trust but I can have loyalty to her because I'm married to her.
Speaker 1:I'm not married to an abstract marriage.
Speaker 3:And don't you. Isn't the covenant with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean the covenant. As I understand the Catholic sacrament. You're sort of pledging and vowing together for that covenant together.
Speaker 1:I've always expected. You know, there was a great bishop many years ago, bishop Fulton Sheen, who wrote a book and the book title has always captivated me. The book title was Three to Get Married and I use it quite a few times because what I use it is when I do weddings. I always say you know, there's not just two of you to get married. If you say I love you, the I is there, the you is there, but the love there in the middle, that word is not talking about a feeling, it's talking about a person. And so I Love you is a three-way, it's almost Trinitarian. You know I love you but anyway I love this station and I love very much this show and you love commercials and I love commercials. So this is 1070 K and TH and we'll be right back AM 1070, the answer.
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Speaker 2:Shawnee angel, shawnee, angel, shawnee angel.
Speaker 8:You're an angel to me, oh sing it Karen.
Speaker 2:Sing it. Johnny Angel, how I love him, how I tingle when he passes by. Every time he says hello, my heart begins to fly. Johnny Angel, how I want him. He's got something that I can't resist, but he doesn't even know that I exist. I'm in heaven. I get carried away. I dream of him and me and how it's gonna be. All the fellas call me up for a date, but I just sit and wait. I'd rather concentrate on Johnny Angel, cause I love him, and I pray that someday he'll love me and together we will see how lovely heaven will be will be and together we will see how lovely heaven will be.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the Show of Faith. You know, next time it's my turn to do the Show of Faith. I'm going to do the whole subject of love.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:How you know, using CS Lewis's Four Loves, the Four is for love for love and the whole concept of falling in love and what that means and stuff like that yeah, yeah, so anyway okay, I'm not quite in love with you, but I do love you, my brother. So what do you want to say next?
Speaker 4:I would love for us all to go to heaven.
Speaker 3:How's that? I think you are correct, just like Karen Carpenter has done that Well, I mean.
Speaker 3:So we were discussing during the break. There's a clock here in the studio and that clock is perfectly in tune with Mario's iPhone in terms of the time, and so he looks up at the clock and he can tell it's time to go to a break at that particular moment. So he trusts that clock, yeah, but I'm not loyal to it, but he's not loyal to it. So I think the term trust and loyal are similar, but they're not completely overlapping.
Speaker 1:That's a good point because, see, I am not loyal to that clock, right, because I can just as well use another clock. That's just as good.
Speaker 3:Right, or your iPhone, or my Apple iPhone Right, so you could do that. But I do think and this is part of it is that sometimes we have words that are associated with certain kinds of relationships. We were kidding about how father mario was loyal to the brand of of apple right, and he said he'd been with it for a long time. Uh, we can be loyal to a covenant of marriage, let's say. But I might trust you know that if I buy a Toyota or if I buy a Ford, that that's going to be a good car. You might have a, and maybe that's a loyalty thing too, but it's. I think I'd use the word trust.
Speaker 1:They are Loyalty and trust are different. Loyalty can exist without trust and trust can exist without loyalty. I think that they are. The reason, I think, is because I think that they are overlapping realities. Okay, that's why we can't seem to separate them tremendously, you know very clearly, because they both contain each other in some, but they do not totally contain each other. They are overlapping and they have things in common, but they don't contain each other. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:There's a fellow named Matthew Bates who teaches at Northern Seminary.
Speaker 3:He wrote a book a few years ago called Gospel Allegiance, where he's a New Testament scholar. He goes into kind of the background and the cultural way that the Greek word pistis, which is translated faith or belief or trust, in the New Testament is used trust in the New Testament is used and he makes kind of a compelling case. I think that the idea of allegiance may be the best thing there, because for us and let me tell you why because when we think of allegiance and we think of Jesus being the Christ or the Messiah, or the Messiah or the king, we are allegiant to the king, we may trust the king, we may be loyalty to it, but we will also, at least in our language, our vernacular, we would say I pledge allegiance to the flag, right, right. And so the idea of allegiance overlaps with it, because it's and I think we use the term allegiance primarily in terms of a, maybe a government or a king or someone who is a, you know, a ruling and ruling family, you know that kind of thing.
Speaker 4:But I don't know that.
Speaker 3:I would say I would be yeah, state country, that kind of thing. So I think these realities and I might say I trust my wife and I'm loyal to my wife. Let's say Use those terms, but I wouldn't use this. I am a legion to her. How do you spell allegiance A-L-L-E-G-I-A-N-C-E?
Speaker 1:A-L-L.
Speaker 3:E-G. Oh oh, there you go, okay, so he's using his trusty iPhone, his loyal iPhone, his true friend, and he's looking up you know what allegiance.
Speaker 1:A-L-L-A-E-I.
Speaker 4:A-L-L-E-G-I-A, a-l-l-e-g-i-a, a-l-l-e-g-i-a.
Speaker 1:See, rudy was just helpful to me because he did it in Spanish.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, if I'd just done that in. Spanish, then you could spell it.
Speaker 1:Elegiance.
Speaker 3:Elegiance.
Speaker 4:That's how I learned English was to say English words.
Speaker 1:You know, what's funny is that that's exactly how I do it. That's exactly how I do it. I memorize the word, but I spell it in Spanish so that I can understand how it's spelled.
Speaker 3:Because English spelling is, For example this word is alojeance.
Speaker 1:Because in Spanish all the vowels never change a sound. It's always a, e, I, o, u.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:They don't sound any different. You don't have a, a e, An. E is always an I. It's never.
Speaker 3:You mean the sound of an I?
Speaker 1:Yes, the sound of an I, okay, no, no, no. The e e, the letter e, in English it's always e.
Speaker 3:Oh, I see. In Spanish A, oh, I see, okay, Gentlemen we have an allegiance to the time.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, it is time to go to a break.
Speaker 3:Father Mario just missed it.
Speaker 1:Corey didn't even give me a dirty look. This is 1070 NTH and it's his fault. We're going to a break. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 2:The Answer what is this In the mood? Is that what it is? Ah, classic, classic.
Speaker 8:Bruback right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, we're back.
Speaker 3:I love that that's good. Let's keep that in our rotation. Okay, we're back. I love that, that's good.
Speaker 1:Let's keep that in our rotation because he can't sing to it. I think what we need to do in honor of Trump's election is play YMCA. Have you ever seen this? It's going all around the internet. I haven't seen that. All around the internet, everybody's copying the Trump dance.
Speaker 3:Is there a Trump? I don't even know. Oh, I'll show you. I have no clue.
Speaker 1:Look it up, look up, go to YouTube and say I don't have time for that kind of junk.
Speaker 3:That's just a waste of time. No, it is not. It is.
Speaker 1:It's called reading the signs of the times. Would Jesus do that yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, all right. Hey, you know, we were talking in the last segment about the idea of allegiance and I just remembered this when I was a kid, I mean this is like 50, 60 years ago right, it's a long time ago we would have a thing at our church called Vacation Bible School.
Speaker 3:Churches still do that and as a part of that we would always start the day about 9 in the morning and we'd have an assembly and the kids would process in and they would bring the flag in and the flag of the United States of America and we would first of all pledge allegiance to the flag.
Speaker 3:I love it when I hear kids doing that. I mean little kids and they're all kind of ages. Then we in our church, our Baptist church, Valley Brook Baptist Church, back in Decatur, Georgia, we would pledge allegiance to the Christian flag. It was a Christian flag. And then somebody and this is a very Protestant thing to do, Father, there would be a Bible sitting there, Somebody would hold the Bible in a particular way and I remember the words of that particular pledge. I can't remember the pledge of allegiance to the Christian flag, but I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I may not sin against God. That was our pledge. That goes way, way back.
Speaker 1:At St Cyril's. One time about ten years ago, I decided to do something weird, which I often do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was pretty normal for you.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I decided to develop and I spent some time developing a pledge of allegiance to jesus christ. Okay, I don't remember it, but I remember putting it on that. I remember the way I wrote it. I remember putting it on the on the screens and I had everybody stand up and pledge allegiance to Jesus. And then I started talking about are you first an American or are you first a Christian? And how did it make you feel to pledge allegiance to the Lord, which I found very. It was an interesting sermon to give.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, it was a good illustration of the way we use those terms differently.
Speaker 1:Let me bring in something here, because I want to steer this discussion towards the whole idea of where does God fit into either? Does he fit into loyalty to God? Is it trust in God? Is it loyalty, allegiance to God?
Speaker 3:Is it belief in God?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, but the word belief can be anything, so I find it interesting to use the word loyalty. Are you loyal to God, and is that a way to say it Are you? Obviously you can trust in God, but it's interesting to use the word loyal. But you know, here's something else and I'll shut up and you guys can comment it. I don't remember where I got it Probably Karl Rahner but I can't remember the definition of faith Faith as reasoned loyalty.
Speaker 3:Reasoned loyalty.
Speaker 1:Reasoned loyalty.
Speaker 4:Reasoned loyalty.
Speaker 1:I find that that, to me, is a perfect blend of the content of trust and the content of loyalty, because the content of trust is the content that you believe that other person is reliable, and you can only achieve that by having come to a reasoned understanding of their worthiness to be trusted. And so to reasoned loyalty, and that's how I've always described my faith of reasoned loyalty. I don't know how does that strike? You, both of you.
Speaker 3:We'll start with Rudy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think you know, Aquinas wrote, I think, quite a lot about that too, with sort of how loyalty aligns with this virtue of justice, right, and our obligations. And when we talk about reasoned faith, I mean I have a belief system that's reasonable. Reasoned faith, I mean I have a belief system that's reasonable, that stands the test of criticism of just about any sort of philosophical, scientific mechanism that I can throw at it, and I think that's why I'm loyal to my faith right, because it's not something that is absurd, even though culture and that's part of what I wanted to get to kind of touch on next is as a culture and a society, I think there's been a lot of shift in these things that we trust and we're loyal to, because the meaning of these things have changed and they've worked right. Instead of looking at reasonable things, it's sort of worked into something else. So you know, I would agree, father.
Speaker 1:You know, you can even say the word reasoned belief.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a was a book called A Reasonable Faith at one point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but see it's interesting because I heard a kid the other day actually I heard it on the internet, but a kid. The pastor asked him what is faith and he said that's when you believe something even though you know it's not true. It was a care you know, but I think a lot of times people equate faith with lack of reason.
Speaker 3:Or a leap of faith.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a leap of faith with lack of reasoning, and it's almost like they put faith and reason at opposite camps. And it's almost like they put faith and reason at opposite camps. And I think that one of the things that I love about the Christian faith and reasonable is that it's reasoned faith, it's reasoned belief, reasoned loyalty.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, I think about this quite a lot. And you know, I have some family members that are atheists and I know people that are athe lot. And you know, I have some family members that are atheists and I know people that are atheists and they're very successful people. They're hard workers, you know. But when I think about the things that they trust, it's like to me they have you know, whether they want to agree with it or not a belief system that they trust. Right, you wake up, you go to work every day. You trust that you are not going to die, that you're not going to hit this thing, that your efforts are going to generate you enough value for you to be able to feed your family. Let's say, right, yes, I think that every single human being, whether they like to or not, has a belief.
Speaker 1:They have faith. They have faith. Yes, einstein was one of the things that he said. That amazes me. Is that the great? When he was asked what has he found the most amazing in his life? And he says that the world is intelligible because, if you think about it, it didn't have to be. If you throw a bunch of marbles or a bunch of confetti and you throw it up in the air, it's not going to land in any kind of intelligible way. And so if you see intelligible organization, you always presume an intelligence behind it. And so that's why Einstein would say the fact that our reasoning is able to hook or match the reasonableness of reality, the fact that reality is actually reasonable to be discovered by our reason, is actually what he found the most amazing.
Speaker 3:Which is the logos basically that's right.
Speaker 1:It didn't have to be. If you had the Big Bang, well, the Big Bang could have just been a big bang. When you go to a house explosion or to explosion of a car, you don't expect to find reasonable organization. The normal thing to happen is total chaos. But what if you went and all of a sudden this explosion, and there was order in the explosion, in the effects of the implosion? You would find that extremely strange.
Speaker 4:So I just what is that other thing that you say, father, more you'd say nothing turned into something and something oh yeah organized I know in the beginning it's, it's a little limerick it goes.
Speaker 1:In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing ever happened to nothing. And then one day, for no reason, nothing exploded into bits of everything, and then, for no reason, they all became dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense, yeah.
Speaker 3:I remember there was a little line in a movie I'm trying to remember which movie it was Somebody, you know one of the characters encounters an atheist. He said you know? He said well, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. It takes a lot of faith to believe certain things, whatever that belief system is. So faith itself is a belief system to some degree.
Speaker 3:But it's reasoned faith, but it's reasoned faith. Yeah, in Christianity let's say Right, right. There's a line in CS Lewis that I'm trying desperately to remember and I'm not sure that I can get it, but maybe at the break I can get it, you're not desperate.
Speaker 3:I'm not that desperate, but basically he says I believe in God the way I believe in the rising of the sun, because not only do I see it, but by it I see everything else. Yes, I remember that. That's a wonderful statement that he makes. I believe in God like I believe in the rising of the sun, Because not only do I see it, but by it I see everything else and I believe in commercials.
Speaker 1:You do Because by the existence of commercials we can bring the show to faith to you. This is 1070 KNTH and we'll be right back.
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Speaker 5:Dennis Prager explains why Democrats must be upset he made inroads in every single group.
Speaker 7:the most loyal groups to the Democrats Blacks and Jews made tremendous inroads. Hispanics it's not even an issue. Nothing worked. The whole appeal to abortion and the women voted Republican anyway.
Speaker 5:The Dennis Prager Show weeknights at 10 on AM 1070 and FM 103.3. The answer.
Speaker 1:I like this one, celia.
Speaker 2:Poor guy. Celia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence. Baby, yeah, you can't be loyal to her. Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you, please don't cry.
Speaker 1:Listen to this poor guy, cecilia, you're breaking my heart.
Speaker 2:You're shaking my confidence, baby. Yeah, she's a poor, she is. Oh, Cecilia, come down on my knees. I'm begging you, please, to come home Now. Listen to this next sentence. You can write in the afternoon. We'll see you off in my bedroom. Cecilia up in my afternoon. With Celia up in my bedroom, I got up to wash my face. When I come back to bed, someone's taking my place, the poor guy.
Speaker 1:Jesus, it's 1070. We're talking about disillusionment and lack of trust and lack of loyalty. Poor Celia, not poor Celia, poor guy. Anyway, rodolfo, where do you want to go next?
Speaker 4:Okay, real quick. Tom sent us a note saying that was Take Five by Dave Brubeck on the song before and it's a classic and he says the show is great. Oh, great, so is Take Five. Was that the?
Speaker 3:name of the song before, and it's a classic. And he says the show is great, oh, so is take five. Was that the name of the song? That's right. What was I thinking in the?
Speaker 4:mood, that totally all right.
Speaker 3:I would love it if somebody could tell me the words to the Christian, the pledge to the Christian flag or, even better, if they could tell me Father Mario's pledge of allegiance to Jesus.
Speaker 1:Oh that would be. Nobody would remember that Ten years ago. I'd have to see if I even kept a copy of it.
Speaker 3:I bet you probably have it somewhere, somewhere, yeah, yeah. So, anyway, thanks to him for listening and getting back with us.
Speaker 4:Okay, I want to just go there because I think it's important to realize that there's a lot of development that has happened right, especially within the Enlightenment. I mean, this was a period of, as we all know, intellectual revolution, right, and during this time the Enlightenment thinkers were questioning a lot of things Loyalty to monarchs, feudal systems, religious institutions, everything. You had Rousseau, you had Descartes, you had a lot of thinkers who really thought a lot about the things that individuals trusted right, the things that they were loyal to. And I think this is kind of one of the major things that has been happening in our culture now for some time is that we've completely flipped the things that we essentially trust right, because during the Enlightenment we were able to sort of reframe morality as a product of individual reasoning, right, rather than some sort of external, divinely given sort of objective truth that exists. And when we turned inside right to look for this validation, for this sort of moral compass, we essentially turn around the things that we trust and instead of trusting essentially let's call it the logos right, which is reasonable faith, we kind of turned it inside and we've been looking and trying to find this inner voice, thinking that it holds this kind of fundamental truth that needs to be trusted and loyally adhered to and loyally adhere to, and I think this is one of the things that are sort of discombobulating our entire culture is, I have this inner voice somehow, which we all do right? We all have this kind of inner voice and somebody's inner voice tells them that they're a man now and they're a woman now, or they're a cat, or they want to cut something out, or they want to perform something that is against the natural order validates this, and I think I think it's just something that's kind of continued to essentially devolve unless we, we somehow are able to go back to this logos, right, to re-engage this logos and within our culture, right, I mean it. Just there's no other way that we can that past this, that we can get through this without reengaging that.
Speaker 4:So I wanted to touch a little bit on containing this concept of loyalty and trust. Is loyalty something that has to be earned, right? I think of trust as something that requires evidence, okay, something that demands commitment would be something akin to loyalty, right? So something that requires commitment would be something that I'm loyal to. But trust, for me, to trust something, it requires evidence. So something that requires commitment, would be something that I'm loyal to. But for me to trust something, it requires evidence. So if I say I trust in the resurrection, why do I trust in the resurrection? Because there's a body of evidence that exists that to me and to my criteria and to many other people across the world, has proven to be reliable about two billion people right, two billion people in the world yes, so I guess I just wanted to pose that question is is do you guys agree that that trust requires a fundamental evidence?
Speaker 4:right, but it has to somehow.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, I think, trust. You know it's an interesting term that I think expresses it, and that is the two terms Motives of credibility. You know three words. You have to have a motive for credibility. That is trust. When you say I believe in God, well, I believe in God because there are motives of credibility that lead me to that belief, so it's not just an empty belief. Rudy, I think what you just said is so true we have. I may be wrong about this, but I trace this idiocy back to Sigmund Freud, because Sigmund Freud basically got us to believe that the deepest truth is found internally by ourselves, inside of us, and that if you trust yourself deep enough, you'll find the truth.
Speaker 1:But Freud did not understand or maybe he did, I don't know but the human capacity for self-deception, the human being has a tremendous capacity to deceive themselves, and so the very fact that you think you know when people say well, you got to make up your own mind, never rely on external authority, you know. That's the height of idiocy, because what you're saying is I reject the experience of humankind which is called tradition or wisdom, or well, yeah, that the, the, the, they it's.
Speaker 1:Somebody said a long time ago that, uh, the the greatest amount of tradition is the greatest amount of the, the fullest amount of democracy, because it includes the vote of the dead. And that is really really true If we do not allow our consciences and our way of thinking, our understanding of life, to be expanded.
Speaker 1:To be shaped by that, by the tradition of our brothers and sisters and you live only by yourself. You are saying that you are inside of you is all the wisdom that there needs to be, and you are ignoring the capability of fooling yourself, which human beings do all the time. Yeah, yeah, I think back when I was a teenager, even when I was younger, how much I fooled myself, and never did I do it on purpose, but you do it just because you're stupid.
Speaker 3:Well, people of all ages can fool themselves right at some point.
Speaker 1:Exactly the infinite capacity to fool yourself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, that's a great answer to that. I remember during COVID uh, people were talking about trusting the science, trusting the science and do you follow the science, kind of thing, and I heard more and more people say well, I trust science, but I'm not too sure about scientists or the people who manipulate the data getting to you from there. Science itself is just a way of knowing, a way of knowing that's right and getting at knowledge and getting at wisdom and those kinds of things.
Speaker 3:But you can have between you and that moment and your own sort of thinking about it. You can have several layers of, again, deception, or you can have layers of individuals who have an agenda that they're trying to press upon you.
Speaker 3:So trusting the science does not necessarily mean trusting the scientists who present to you the science yeah, very often Interpret, interpret, yeah, and part of it is you know, science is a moving target. Yeah, I mean a few years ago. You know all the cholesterol. You know eggs were terrible for you. You shouldn't eat eggs. Now they're telling you to do it, eat eggs. You know, chocolate's terrible for you, terrible, and now, oh, it's good for you. So I mean it's's, and those are just a couple of silly examples, but uh, we don't know all that. We don't know, no, about any of these topics the very notion of science.
Speaker 1:The scientific method is something that has to be always open to further growth. You can't further correction science is never, never. Uh, presumed over, woody. We have about a minute Any closing thoughts.
Speaker 4:I would not trust a scientist that tells me that they understand everything about a subject.
Speaker 1:I think that's something that or a priest that doesn't want to tell you he doesn't know.
Speaker 4:Or isn't. Yeah, you know I'm always reminded, and real quick about something you keep saying, paul Mario, is at least the things that I found within the Catholic churches. People are always willing to question and dig, and be wary of the person who tells you not to.
Speaker 1:I always yes, I always tell people my favorite three words when I teach. And I get lots of theology questions. When I teach I say my favorite three words are I don't know and that is important. That's a true answer. It is Completely true. Okay, folks, thank you for listening here to the Show of Faith. We look forward to being with you next week, so during