The War Against Thoughts | Ep.17

This week we trace how Fahrenheit 451 maps onto our lives of screens, short-form loops, and engineered division, then argue for a better aim: follow Christ, pursue objective truth, goodness, and beauty, and reclaim deep thought. Along the way we test AI’s limits, question productivity worship, and share a personal testimony of change.

• Fahrenheit 451’s logic of control through ideas
• propaganda fatigue and polarisation in modern media
• porches to wall-sized screens and the loss of talk
• AI’s blind spots in nuance, emotion, and ethics
• short-form content versus deep, slow reading
• productivity as idol and the myth of arrival
• progress instincts, games, and retirement traps
• aiming life at Christ and the cost that frees
• objective truth, goodness, and beauty linked
• cathedrals, real art, and culture that lasts
• closing call to seek Christ and think deeply

Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he’s coming back soon, which means get your life in order. Follow him, find out about Christ. If there’s one thing I can recommend, investigate it, look into it.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Reading Obsession
• 1:03 Fahrenheit 451 Explained
• 4:40 Propaganda, Polarisation, And Exhaustion
• 7:49 Why Power Fears Books
• 10:20 Porches Gone, Walls Turned To Screens
• 13:36 AI, Conversation, And Lost Nuance
• 18:00 Distraction Culture And Short Form Loops
• 24:10 Productivity As A False Idol
• 28:35 Progress, Retirement Myths, And Games
• 34:20 Following Christ And The Cost That Frees
• 41:15 Ideals, Objective Good, And Conscience

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to episode 17, the Ministry of Man podcast. I'm your host, Isaac Anthony Turner. Now, let's get down to business. We've got business to take care of today, okay? There's no more mucking around. There's no more tomfoolery. There's no more monkey business. So I read a book recently called Fahrenheit 451. And what I can say is this. First of all, I'm obsessed with reading now. It's my thing. I don't want to do anything else. Whenever I get spare time, I just want to read. And what do I want to read? Literally anything. I'm reading. I'm reading the classics. I'm reading ancient Greek philosophy. I'm reading the Bible. I'm reading. I don't know. That's probably about it, actually. It's limited to classics. Maybe some random books. Who knows? Anyway, so Fahrenheit 451. This is basically the plot in a in a nutshell. This is what it's about. It's a book about book burning. So they live in a dystopian future. And they have these firemen. So the protagonist of the book is a fireman. But in this world, the firemen don't put out fires, they start fires specifically to burn books. So the reason that they do that, this is gonna be uh I I don't know if it's a spoiler, but maybe skip forward like three or four minutes if you don't want to hear like the big thing. Because like in the first, the book's split up into three parts, and then at the end of the first part, there's this really long speech that's like the coolest part of the whole book. Uh it just basically explains everything. So skip a few minutes if you don't want to hear it and you want to save it for the book. If you're not gonna read the book, allow me to explain. So he basically goes on to say the reason that they burn books is because books have so many ideas, they have diverse ideas. And in small communities, that's fine. You can have lots of different people believing different things, and it doesn't really impact anyone if everyone's really spread out and just doing their own thing. But as time elapses and communities grow and people get uh cities get larger and larger, and the population gets more and more dense, having a diverse range of beliefs and ideas becomes a lot harder for peace to be maintained. It's a lot harder for, let's say, a government to control people that have so much conflicting beliefs. As we're we're actually seeing that a lot in in America, it seems like that there is a lot of conflicting beliefs. And to be fair, that's probably more due to propaganda and fear-mongering and pitting two people against each other. I think a lot of people are actually getting really sick and tired of it now. Like, I don't understand how you can keep going time after time after time of just divisive event after divisive event. It must be exhausting. Like, I've I've basically tapped out of the whole thing, like since COVID, pretty much, since after that, and I invested so much time and attention into that. Post that, when everyone just forgot about it, it was like, what do you mean you're not talking about it anymore? This like consumed us for ages, and now you're just onto oh, there's a war in two other countries that we shouldn't even know about, by the way. Like, in a different time, there would have been a war in Ukraine and Russia, and I never would have heard about it ever in my whole life. Wouldn't have the news wouldn't have reached me in Queensland, Australia. But because of the age we live in, we're just getting absolutely bombarded. I'm digressing so much here, but we were getting bombarded with all this news and you need to be talking about this. Why isn't anyone talking about this? We need to be talking about this. No, we don't. We don't actually need to be talking about all of that all of the time. We aren't built to be able to take on so much stress and anxiety and anger all the time. If you go on your phone, you're probably gonna find something within two to three minutes that's gonna make you annoyed and angry. I've had to stop looking at the comments on any post now, even funny ones, because it just gets annoying. There's always like annoying people saying really bad takes and like there's arguments in the in the comment section. Like chaos is everywhere, chaos is literally everywhere. Uh but going back to what I was saying, so one of the reasons that they burn books is because they're they're not wanting the diverse range of ideas, they want to control the ideas. So uh in in larger societies, for efficiency purposes of ruling, they're seeking whatever is the most efficient way of ruling the maximum amount of people. And so they're limiting the amount of ideas. Books are incredibly divisive and have a lot of different conflicting ideas, they have a lot of different worldviews, they have a lot of different takes on how someone could or should live. Uh, and it's can also be very provocative. It can be very, it can, it can drive people to change the way that they can they live all together. And because there's such a large range of diverse ideas in books, if you're a government, let's say, and you're wanting to control people and keep people in line, or just have everyone moving in some form of unity, then you don't want there to be such a you're not gonna be able to govern a cohort of millions of people if they're all believing different things, they're not gonna go the same direction, they're gonna listen to the same ideas. Um, so there's not gonna be a lot of unity, and then therefore there's gonna be a lot more chaos. Not necessarily, by the way, but that's that's the plot of the book, anyway. So the idea, there's this quote in the book that says, a house requires nails and wood for it to be built. If you don't want a house to be built, hide the nails and wood. And so it's a funny way of putting it, but that's literally what they're doing. So they don't want a diverse range of ideas, so they're hiding the ideas. That is the the theme of Fahrenheit 451. And Fahrenheit 451, by the way, apparently is the degree or the temperature in which pages of a book would burn. So there that's a little fun fact for you. Now, in addition to that, it goes a little bit further than just burning books. The way that they set up their society is that they don't even want people talking about potential ideas. So they used to build houses back in the day with a front porch. They stopped doing that in this world. They stopped doing that in, well, probably in our world too. You don't see a lot of front porches anymore. But the the point is in the book is that the front porch was a place that people would go to sit and to think and to talk and communicate and share ideas. And so they're also robbing people or they're changing the environments that people are in in order that they won't come to any conclusions or think of anything that might be liberating or ask questions between one another. So, what they do is that they build these houses that have literal walls that are TV screens. They will have like four walls and it will be just completely all screen. And so it's the most immersive entertainment experience you can possibly get. They talk to the people on the screen and refer to them as if they're their own family. But the difference is, then this is very actually, this is actually very weird because that's kind of like what's happening with AI. When you speak to AI, that isn't a real person with real ideas. It's a it's a program, and it doesn't have the ability to start to question things and go, hmm, you know, I don't even, I don't know if that if this is good. I mean, most of the time, like AI is so bad. There's there's this guy who does uh this thing with his AI, where he'll ask it questions and it'll say things like, you know, I'm drowning in quicksand. What do I do to help? And then it'll just kind of laugh and be like, oh, okay, you're not really drowning, you're not really sinking in quicksand. And then he's like, No, I really am. It's up to my neck now. And he's like, Okay, well, I'll play along, but you know, and it's just like this whole back and forth. That's it's just showing how stupid the AI kind of is. Um, like there was a thing that went viral that people were realizing that it couldn't spell strawberry properly. It would it kept saying strawberry only has two R's. And no matter what you did, you could go through letter by letter and we'll go, yep, that's only two R's. And um so there's so many complications with that. I mean, maybe maybe one day they'll fix it. But the point is it's not gonna have critical thinking. There is no possible way to create AI with critical thinking because some of the things that go into a thought, right, is so much more complex than anyone could possibly realize. So if I come to a if I'm in a conversation and someone says something and it's an idea that they put forth, in order for me to understand that idea and then to respond back properly, these are the types of things that have to go into play. First of all, my entire upbringing and how I was raised factors into any thought that I make, my genetics, my biology, all of that factors in. Anything that I've learned and experienced, any type of emotion that I might have. I mean, I've I've said it a few times now, but emotion is a big factor in decision making and in what we might believe to be true as well, by the way. So that factors in. Your current mood factors in. So how you're how you're feeling in that moment. Sometimes if you're angry or sad or happy, like you can get three different answers to or three different perspectives on any given situation. And those are the sorts of things that are good. So if I'm around a friend, let's say, and I'm maybe in a bad mood, and I put something forth, and my friend knows that I'm in a bad mood, he might respond in a way and said, Hey man, I think you're just in a bad mood at the moment. I don't think you really feel that way. Like I think on another, maybe you should sleep on it. Maybe that's the best advice. And AI is not gonna be able to pick up your tone because they can't read like the microfacial expressions that we have. They they can't read the the slight changes in tone that someone might have. This there's so many subtleties, even in the form of sarcasm or like a maybe a passive-aggressive comment, the likelihood that AI is gonna be able to pick up something like that is just ridiculous. So, this is the kind of world that they're living in in Fahrenheit 451, where they're they have these screens that they're communicating with, that they're calling family. And um, so they're not going to get a diverse range of ideas from from any of the things that they're consuming. But the the more important aspect of this is that it's so immersive that you wouldn't even, they're not even focused about like going to meet and greet other real people because it's not as entertaining as what they have. They have um so many different avenues of distraction, like let's say games, sports. Um, I mean, like if we look in our world now, we have smartphones, like it's literally happening now. Like one of the most eerie and uncanny things about the book is how close the reality they're describing in the book is to our reality now. That's one of the scariest things. Because we we can't be left alone with our thoughts for even a minute. Like there used to be a time where if you're out for you know dinner or something, or you're at a cafe, and the person you're with, they go to the bathroom and you would just sit and you would sit with your own thoughts. Now the phone is straight out. Like no one wants to be alone for even a moment and just with their own thoughts. There is this fixation and high and hypervaluation on productivity and efficiency and time, and being like, okay, well, while I'm doing this, I'll I'll listen to a podcast, or while I'm driving, I'll listen to something else. And uh, you know, there's a constant input, and we don't give our ourselves enough time to ruminate on a thought or an idea. In addition to that, that's like the world that's being presented before us with the amount of reels. Like every single app now has a short form content, uh, a short form content section. There used to be a time where that was only on maybe TikTok, and then Instagram adopted it and got reels, and then YouTube got shorts, and then I don't have Snapchat, but I'm sure Snapchat's got it too, and Facebook has it, and it's just like every single thing now has got these the short form content. And the issue with that is people think that if they put their algorithm in it into a particular way, that maybe it's not so bad. Maybe if I'm not just watching funny reels and cat videos or whatever, and I've got some educational stuff, maybe that'll be a bit more productive, but it's not really because you watch a thing and then you move to the next video, and then the next video, and the next video, and you've barely given yourself enough time to digest and remember what it is that you actually learned or found interesting. Like, I know one thing that happens when I read a book is that it takes me so long to read because I'll read a line, and then sometimes I'll have to sit there for like five minutes, just like and let the thought kind of take me somewhere and go off with that thought and then come back to the book in a moment. But you give yourself time to actually let the thought or the idea sink in and chew your teeth on it a little bit. Like actually run with an idea and take it somewhere. Take it to a place that you can see yourself using it, putting it into different examples, but you don't give yourself enough time because as soon as you watch a reel, you flick, and then the next idea is already there. And then nine times out of out of ten, you've probably forgotten whatever the first thing was anyway. Maybe you save it in your in your reels section and then you look at it randomly, but you know, it's kind of not the point. But the the idea of this, like like productivity, it's really become a bit of an idol in people's lives where they think that efficiency and productivity is the most valuable thing, you've got to always be doing something, you can't be wasting even a second of time. You could oh, I could have been doing this instead of that, and then um it's just not like it's not a good value to have, like, productivity is good, but if that sits too high on your hierarchy of values, and that's your main priority is just being productive. What's gonna happen after that? Like your life is gonna end in a particular way, you're gonna look back and you're yeah, I was so productive. But anyone that values productivity, they're never gonna reach a point where they think I've I've made it. Like I've I finished all of the things that I wanted to finish in my life, now it's done. There's always gonna be something else. We we as humans, we're not built to arrive at particular places, we're built to journey and to progress. We're not built to just get a thing and then stay there, we're built to move. This is why having the goal, let's say, to get fit is a bad goal to have. The the goal should be to be fit, because then you're maintaining something that has longevity to it. If you get in shape or get fit, well then you'll you'll move on to something else, I suppose. You should be wanting to be in a place that you're continually doing something. So another reason is is why people have this idea of, you know, oh, I'm gonna retire when I'm this age, and and what are you gonna do? Oh, I'm gonna sit sit on the beach and drink meitas and um kick my feet up, and I'm gonna go to Hawaii and just like lay on the beach. It's like, yeah, you're gonna get sick of that in like a week or two. Like you're gonna do that for a little bit, and you go, okay, I I feel like I need to do something. There's people that retire and then they just go into charity work because they just want to do something. You can't just sit around and doing nothing. Like we are built as human beings to progress and to do something. It's one of the dangers, for one, of why men get so addicted to video games and and women as well. I suppose women maybe more in the form of the Sims, I suppose, as uh, which is interesting because you can't really win at Sims. It's just a kind of playing house game. But men seem to get more addicted to games that have progression. So they'll they'll have like, whether it be a competitive game, there's always like ranks and levels to to get up to and achievements to unlock, or there'll be um uh if it's a role-playing adventure game, there's like a boss to fight, and there's this adventure to have, and there's there's all these sorts of things to progress, but when they finish a game, they just want to play another game. Like you move on to the next thing. There's a this constant progression that grips people. And it's not an accident, that is how the human being is. That's the it's a design of the human. Um, it's also why following Christ is the perfect way of life, by the way. Because that's something that never ends. If you're following Christ, obviously that's a you you never stop following. You do you're can continually following Christ, but it's it's also uh the only thing that doesn't take a tax on your soul. So in life, there's always a cost. Like no one rides for free. You can't just do whatever you want and then not be a cost involved or a tax involved. You want to drink all the time, all right, sure. But there's a there's a cost on your body. It's gonna, you're gonna have issues in the brain. It's literally a poison. There's there's health uh uh issues that people get from drinking. And then in the end, I suppose, or the worst case scenario is you become an alcoholic. Um, there's things like, you know, if you want to sleep around with a bunch of people, well, then you're gonna have issues pair bonding later in life, and you're probably gonna have uh, you know, issues with connecting percentage-wise, you're more likely to end in divorce if you've had more than five, let's say, I think the the numbers is five, going off of what Mac and Murphy said. Uh, he is an evolutionary psychologist, and he rec says that the the likelihood of divorce after in in comparison to someone that has had less than five partners, yeah, is it's completely different. So there's there's a tax involved in that. Uh there's a tax involved in if you want to just eat the most pleasurable foods, you're gonna gain weight and you're gonna be unhealthy. Like there's always gonna be something. When it comes to a philosophy of life, let's say, or whatever you value the highest, whatever you value the highest, that's what you focused your attention on the most, and that's what you're gonna be moving towards the most. So I've mentioned this before in terms of uh, let's say money, for example. You can never get enough money for one. You're always gonna, you can't complete money. You can't complete it. It's just something that you are going to always be moving towards, but it's never gonna satisfy. And there's a cost as well in following Christ as well. The cost, though, is just everything that you were never meant to be to begin with. So it's not to say that following Christ is an easy road. It's a very difficult path to walk. They say wide is the is the path that leads to hell, narrow is the path that leads to eternal life. It it is to say that that is the harder road to walk, but it's but it's the better road to walk. And it's the one that doesn't take attacks on the actual soul itself. Instead, it's the one that gives life, eternal life. So uh, but also life while we're here now. Like you can follow Christ and have as much. As you want, and you're not gonna feel empty or longing or have a void, like it. Let's say if you put your ultimate trust and faith in let's say family. Well, what if your family disappears? Like, what if something happens? Like, I I know people that their whole world was their partner, let's say. And then they had a divorce. And it was like, well, now their whole world's been ripped out from under them. Or maybe it's their reputation. They had a they had uh maybe they had some fame and some notoriety, and that was the highest value that they had, and that was who they were. And then they fell off, and people moved on, and then they lost who they thought they were. That's what happened with the Janoskians. I'm a big fan of the Janoskians, or at least I was when they were a thing. They're not really a thing anymore. But listening to one of the guys, one of the brothers, in that he was basically saying, like, that was who he was. Like he was a famous person, he became really famous, and then they just disappeared, and no one wanted to see him anymore, and then he just completely lost everything of who he was. And um, he's actually come to Christ though, which is really awesome. So it's yeah, anyway, it is the best thing to do because unlike everything else that you could pursue, because you should be pursuing something, if you're gonna do anything, there should be a goal for you to have, let's say. You should anything you may, or any any thing you do, there should be an ultimate aim. And if you don't have an aim and you're moving because we're built to move, then that means you're aimless and you're basically just disoriented. Like you you could be putting effort into things, but your efforts would be in vain because like you don't know where you're going, you don't you don't you've got nothing to aim at. So you've got to be aiming at something in life, otherwise, you're moving towards something is just moving towards nothing, really. So that's one thing is that you should know where you're aiming. And if it's Christ that you're aiming towards, then what happens as a consequence of that is your desires decrease, and you then have more of a purpose in life because your purpose then becomes living outside of yourself for others. So you've got something else to live for that is beyond yourself. That is the the definition of love is that you are you're basically selfless. Selfishness is the opposite to love, you could say. In addition to that, Christ is perfect. So everyone has an ideal. You just do. Like you just have an ideal of what would be the best way to live, or or in any given moment, what would have been the best decision to make in that moment. Let's say, as if you were the perfect person or the perfect human, what would they have done? What would they have said? How would they have behaved? Let's say. So everyone has an ideal of what the perfect human could be. And you might think, like, let's say, examples for that could be generous, courageous, could be selfless, never lies, never steals, all these things. But let's say, so first of all, that is in Christianity, that is Christ. Like Christ is the perfect ideal. And that's why when you're following Christ and you have your eyes on Christ, you're walking towards Christ, and then trans, like the more you walk towards something, the more you become like that thing. Like you are what you set your sights on, and or at least you become more like that. So if you value something and you're aiming at something and you're moving towards something, that's what you start to become. So uh anyway, some people might not believe that Christ is the perfect or the ideal. Someone might say, Well, I have a different version of what the ideal is, and I don't think that it is Christ. Let's let's say that that someone says that. You have to ask, like, okay, so whose version is correct? And is there an objective ideal? And is there an objective good? Because you say, Okay, so the ideal is to to be good, let's say. So, where is your sense of good actually coming from? And this is a really interesting one to think about because the fact, just the mere fact that everyone has a sense of good, tells us something and tells us a lot about the human being in general, just the the nature of human beings. We're the only creature that has a sense of right and wrong and of good and evil, which is interesting because that's what it said in Genesis that we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So we are the only creature that actually has that knowledge. Other creatures, they just have survival instincts and reproductive instincts. Uh, but there is this sense of good that we have. Plato spoke of forms, this idea of forms, where we we don't get our all of our information that that we get. We don't just get from our sense experience. Some people think that life is just what what we are experiencing, and that is how we understand and recognize what everything is. Plato said that that's not quite true because we've never seen a perfect square in our senses. It's not something that we've ever seen, but we understand what a perfect square is based on mathematics. And now, you know, years after Plato existed, we we can do it with computers and things like that. But in nature, we never we never experience that. In the same way that uh there might be a sense of justice that we know exists, even if the judge doesn't quite get it right. We know that if a judge, let's say, is trying to find justice in something and they might get it right or they might get it wrong, regardless of that, there is this idea of the perfect justice that exists outside of what we're able to maybe experience or create ourselves. So Plato's idea was that there was a different world basically of these forms that that only exists intellectually, not a physical world. Now, there's a lot of things that are wrong with Plato's idea of forms, and no, I'm not gonna go deep into that. Maybe I will another day, but um, but the the fact remains is that where is this sense coming from? The Bible says that the Lord or that God has written the law on our hearts, and that's kind of why we have a conscience. There's always moments where you do have a sense of maybe I shouldn't do that. Like everyone's got a conscience, like this the idea of the conscience, even though I think there is someone that debated that, but the idea of the conscience, it it does exist. There is this feeling of right and wrong, or should I do this or shouldn't I do this? That is basically the essence of the conscience. It's not really yeah, it'd be hard to debate that that exists. But um, the main point is that if there is any objective good, that has to be Christ. And so following Christ can only lead to more good. And if there is an objective good, that also means that there must be an objective truth as well. So truth must be objective, it can't be relative, because if anything is to be objective, that means that it's true, for one. And if truth is subjective, well, then nothing can be nothing can be true. So this is why you you can't really listen to anyone that that says like anyone that makes a claim is asserting that truth exists. Even the people that say there is no objective truth, well, they're making a truth claim by saying that. Because you can just say, if you go, they go, oh, there is no objective truth. And you go, okay, well, is that true? Like, if there's no objective truth, then how do I even know that that's true? Like it's a self-defeating argument. It's just a it's a paradoxical uh statement or phrase to say. So the other thing, the other side of that as well, is if there's no objective truth, then the world would just be in chaos. And that's probably why the world is in some sense of chaos. Like you look at the way that Europe was built. So I was reading this thing recently about looking at these cathedrals that would take, let's, you know, six over 600 years to build. And you go, okay, so why were people doing that? Like, what was it that they thought I'm gonna spend my entire life building something that I'm never gonna see finished ever? Like they're gonna they're gonna start and finish their work and never see the fruit of their labor. The reason that they were doing that is because they were doing it for a greater good. They they were doing it for something that they valued more than the recognition that they might get for doing a great piece of work or a great piece of art. Artists nowadays would never do that. Like, no offense to artists, it's just the culture that we live in. But and also, maybe not just that, but the culture that we live in now is very secular and it's not Christ-driven. The reason that Europe was built beautifully as it was is because it was driving towards Christ. That was the essence of why they did anything and why that they might put effort in because they knew that it was worth it, and that they knew that that was the real value. And so these cathedrals and the artwork that they would do then, it meant something more. This is like the the idea of art being self-expression is blasphemy to to real art because as Jordan, no, Jonathan Pagu would say, that art should be expressing something much greater than yourself. The fact that art has been condensed to this selfishness of self-expression, it's sacrilegious to the purpose and the beauty of art. That art should be highlighting things that are much greater than you outside of you. And I think that is something that next week, maybe I might go a little bit deeper into this because I've been learning a lot about this trivium of goodness, truth, and beauty being this kind of triune, complete uh idea that you can't have one without the other two. And what something that is beautiful, it must be both good and true as well. Um, I won't go deep into it now, but an example might be: let's say, if there's an objective goodness and an objective truth, then there must be objective beauty as well. So when you look at, let's say, a piece of music, let's say this there's some music that you find beautiful. The beautiful thing about the music might be that it's got harmony and it's got melody, and the notes in it correspond with one another, and they they follow a certain pattern and a rhythm. Well, let's say that someone creates a song and it doesn't have pattern and rhythm, and it isn't harmonious, and it doesn't link together and it's jagged and jarring and it skips beats and doesn't have any kind of harmony within itself, and someone goes, That's a beautiful song. You could say, Well, objectively, no, it's not beautiful. The things that make up beauty aren't included in that song. The things that are what whatever is good and true isn't equal to whatever it is that this song is. So, and someone that might say, But I like the song and I think that it's beautiful. And they go, you know, it's all subjective and whatever. You go, well, that might be true that you might find it beautiful, but all that means is that there's something wrong on the inside of you. Like there's your capacity to identify what is good and true, it's stained your ability to see what is beautiful. So if someone looks at this demonic, evil-looking, grimacing face that is just, I don't know, moulded and decrepit and decaying face, and they say, that's beautiful. And then someone goes, you know, no, it's not, and they go, well, no, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, right? So I think that it's beautiful, therefore, it's it's subjectively beautiful. So any anything could be subjectively beautiful, but it doesn't, it doesn't supersede the idea of objective beauty. And there is objective beauty, I believe that it there is objective beauty, and I think it's in the same realm as goodness and truth. So, uh, and in the same sense, if someone, you know, thinks that that the decrepit painting or face, you know, the image is beautiful, then you go, okay, well, there's something wrong with you, like because that's there's something out of alignment. Because you shouldn't think that that those things are beautiful. You shouldn't think the ugly things are beautiful, and and not in the sense of, you know, it depends on your definition of ugly. Because something someone could go, oh, like an ugly person is beautiful, but then they're not talking in the same sense. I'm not talking about physical attraction as being beautiful. Uh, I'm talking about the definition of beauty for one, uh, because anyone could find, you know, someone attractive, and they're not, you're not right or wrong necessarily for what you find a you know, a romantic interest. So I'm not talking necessarily about that, even though there could, there is definitely objective beauty standards as well. That I might go into a little bit deeper, but um, but a lot of these books, an interesting theme that I've seen in both Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, which are two dystopian future novels. I've just started 1984, so maybe they'll have some elements of this in there as well. But they hide their the there were books that were hidden in Brave New World, they're burning books in in Fahrenheit 451, and both for similar reasons. Like in in Brave New World, they're hiding books because they had truth and beauty. And I mentioned before that beauty is upsetting for people, like it it highlights the non-beauty or the ugly. Like if something's beautiful, it infers there are other things that are not beautiful. In the same way, if something is true, that implies other things are false. And if something is good, that implies other things are bad or evil. So there's an attack on those three things. There's been there's an attack on truth, an attack on beauty, an attack on good. And I think that is why we are seeing a deteriorating, deteriorating world. I think that there is a movement to attack those three things, to spit in the face of God, because that is God. God is good and he is true and he is beautiful. That is the essence of God, amongst other things. He isn't limited to just those three things, but he is those three things. Christ is those three things. And so I'm finding it strange and eerie that the these books were written so many years ago and we haven't heeded the warnings. We're seeing the signs of these things happening, and we're not really doing anything about it. So it's a strange world that we're living in at the moment. But needless to say, um, I will probably go into more depth into maybe definitions of goodness, truth, and beauty next week. We'll see how we go and we'll see if I learn enough about that. Um, but in the meantime, I'm gonna finish it there, I think. And yeah, we'll st we'll finish there. So just remember, Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he's coming back soon, which means get your life in order. Follow him, find out about Christ. If you haven't found out about Christ, like of anything you could do, of anything you could do, that is the thing that is of the most valuable thing. Like if there's one thing I can recommend, investigate it, look into it. Like the amount of testimonies of like, man, my life was completely changed. My life was completely changed by Christ. Like I used to hate my life. I used to be sad all the time, I used to be angry all the time, I used to be on antidepressants, I used to drink heavily, I used to do drugs all the time. And then I found Christ and He set me free from all of those things. Now I don't I haven't drunk alcohol in six years or five years, I haven't touched drugs in five years, I haven't had any antidepressants in five years. I don't have any medication at all. Like I'm completely set free. I'm not angry all the time, not sad all the time, I don't have any mental illnesses. Doctors tried to tell me that I had manic depression, which I think was reclassified as bipolar depression, don't have that anymore. They tried to tell me that I had ADHD, don't have that anymore. Uh, and if that's even real, but whatever. I'm not on any medication and I'm doing great. Thanks to Christ. And it's so weird that like I can say that right. So I can say, you know, Christ changed changed my life, right? I used to be all these things, and I was very overweight as well, very unhealthy. And then I go, yeah, man. Found Christ. Now my life's completely different. Set free, all these things, set free. And people just go, yeah, cool, man. And then they just like go on with their day. It's like, hey, what? Like, aren't you curious about this? Like, don't you have any questions about like what exactly it was that I found? You're just kind of like, yeah, man, good for you. You're just like, what? How are you not like perplexed? You saw the way I was living in absolute shambles, and then I found this thing, and then my life's in order and it's good and it's great. And then you're like, Yeah, good for you, man. Like, don't like, how do you not get curious about that? Like, even if you don't believe that there that there is a God, aren't you just interested in the way of living and like the the fundamental steps and like the life philosophy at the very least? I don't know, man. I mean, I feel like if I saw a transformation like that, I'd be curious. If if I was still feeling the way, I'd be like, dude, I need to be doing something because my life is just meaningless and I hate it. So, but nevertheless, it is what it is. Anyway, um, thanks for listening. And you know what? If you are still listening, and I genuinely mean this, I love you. You're awesome. And um, and thank you for listening because I don't even really know who listens, but even if no one listens, I'm still gonna do it because I love it. So thanks and um have a good life. I'll see you next time.