100,000 Subscriber Special!

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

All right, 100,000 subscribers. Here we are, whoo, whoo, whoo. Laura’s better at getting super excited. That’s why I married her. She handles all the super excitement in the family. I get excited but for things that are really niche or weird or quasi lame. There’s this cover band I really like that’s going to be playing here in Dallas soon. If you go, maybe you’ll see me there. They’re called The Windbreakers. I talked about them free for all Friday. They do yacht rock. That’ll be in a few weeks. Maybe you can catch me there live if you don’t go to an event or anything like that.

Welcome to the 100,000 subscribers special. Last time, we did this was at 50,000. And thank you guys so much for all of your support. I’m very grateful, everyone who watches and shares the channel, and I’m very excited for the growth. I went back and I checked, when I hit 100,000, how the growth was, and I’ve had the channel, I guess, up since, I don’t know, 2012 or something like that, but I never added videos to it. Then I think it was very low, 100 subscribers, and I started doing YouTube stuff here on the channel in January of 2020 thinking, “Oh, this would be a great time to start a project.” And when that started, I’d already been doing the podcast, I think, for about a year. It was just audio only.

And then I would do my podcast episodes. I remember when I first started the podcast, I tried to do five episodes a week. That nearly killed me. So I was doing, I think, three episodes a week, two episodes a week, I was doing that on the podcast. And every now and then, I upload the rebuttal videos. I started doing those rebuttal videos. I started with Mike Winger. Gosh, that was like five years ago. I need to revisit those because that’s been so long. I could definitely tighten those up because that was back when I did the rebuttals just live. I just recorded them, stopped the tape, comment on it, start going. I like where I’ve been going now. So I started that in 2020 and I’ll get to your questions soon. So definitely, we’ll put them in the comments. I think we have super chat enabled. I don’t know, Kyle did that for me.

So I was starting that and I noticed we had a growth there. But what’s interesting, so that was in 2020, we got 50,000 subscribers, I think, in 2023. So we’ve doubled in the last year. So it took three years to get to 50,000 subscribers and then a year to double that to add another 50 to get to 100. So it’s reaching a lot of people. I’m super excited about that. And I think it really grew once I made the decision. It’s been neat reflecting back on the podcast to see how it’s grown and what I’ve wanted to do with it because I always want the podcast to maintain … It’s like how we have development of doctrine in the church. I want the substance of the Counsel of Trent to always remain the same, to not have a hermeneutic of discontinuity. If you turn on the channel and it just becomes, here’s how bad this bishop is or the pope is, nonstop over and over again, you’ll realize this is not the true Counsel of Trent. It’s a shadow of Counsel of Trent. It is a hermeneutic of discontinuity. That’s not development where I want the channel to go. I always want the channel to have the same feel, which is apologetics, theology, explaining the faith, defending it, rebutting arguments against the faith.

But the way of doing that has changed a lot over the past four years. So we really saw more growth when we had the episodes. I synced them up. So if it was audio on podcasts, it was also video on YouTube. Shortening the episodes. I think what I want to focus on moving forward … And then I’m going to jump into some of your questions here, and you can write in the questions what you think of this. I guess here’s my plan going … Oh, the other thing where we had a big change up was about a year ago, eight months ago, I started scripting all of the episodes, all of them, not just the rebuttals. I scripted the rebuttals to make them tighter, but I’ve scripted all the episodes because I want to be a good steward of your time. I want to give you really good content.

And there’s so much out there, right? There’s so much you can be watching on YouTube or listening on podcasts. There’s so much competing for attention. So I want to be respectful of your time. Everybody’s busy. Here is the essential elements. So you notice I’m covering the same content, but what’s changing is the manner of the delivery. And so I just want to make it more efficient, more YouTube friendly, without sacrificing podcasters. So I don’t want to make it so that you can only watch on YouTube to make sense. Podcasters would make sense of this. But I just want to make the presentation of the material as efficient, easy to digest, and learn, and fun to take that in, and I think we’re growing. So my goal moving forward will be still two episodes on Monday and Wednesday. My goal for those would be around 15 to 20 minutes or so, 10 to 20 minutes, 15, the median or the average, just because I don’t know if I have to do … Maybe I’ll do some longer rebuttal videos, but I think what I can do is focus on rebutting a very specific topic and just go from that and just people have that.

Dialogues and debates. Absolutely. That’s what I really want to focus on is doing a lot more of those. Those have been very enjoyable. I can’t but too much out there. I am in talks to try to go back on the Whatever podcast to do another debate on a different topic than abortion. That’s all I’m going to say about it for now. All I’m going to say. We’re in talks. We’re getting all the chess pieces together. It would be two on two. It’s all I’m going to say, no more details, but I am excited for that.

Let’s see here. I wanted to grab a few questions in here, see if there were any super chats. So as I talked about debates, somebody … Let’s see. When will you debate Allie Beth Stuckey? So that’s the other thing. I want to do a lot more debates, dialogues. It wouldn’t be a debate, it’d probably be more of a dialogue. The last I heard from her people, and actually her studio is here in Dallas, so that’s nice, I can just drive on over there, probably a few weeks. I don’t know if it’s going to be live or it’s going to be posted a week or two later, but the calendar, what I have on there is, middle of November. I’m supposed to go and we’re going to dialogue. I don’t know the exact thing we’re going to dialogue about. I imagine it was going to be about Catholicism. So I’m looking forward to a good-natured chat about that.

But let’s see. Kevin, the Nontradicath. I want to go back up here. What is on the horizon for Counsel of Trent? This is good. This gets me back to what I was talking about before. What is on the horizon for Counsel of Trent? Any changes resulting from 100,000? What on the horizon are you looking forward to the most? Can we expect more peer reviewed stuff like your abortion paper? Yeah, this is hard. This is difficult to focus on what I want to be doing.

I have one peer reviewed paper. It was actually my final paper that I submitted for my program. One of the papers I wrote getting my master’s in Science in Bioethics, I wrote a paper on bodily rights arguments for abortion. This was through the National Catholic Bioethics Center and then it got cleared by them. It was put in National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. I thought about maybe doing other papers. It is really hard. The time … Right now, I think the most time I have would be to doing three, if you count free for all Friday. The two podcast episodes. And then I’m also focusing on personal study and writing. So the book I’m working on now is … I’m not going to give the title. Should I give the title away? Should I give the title away? I don’t know. Well, ultimately, the press decides what the title is going to be.

It’s going to be on Protestantism and the Church Fathers. Well, I’ll just tell you. I want to call the book Protestantism at the Bar of History. So if you’re an apologetics nerd, you may remember back in 1995 the Protestant apologist, William Webster, wrote a book called The Church of Rome at the Bar of History. I’d show it to you, but I left it at my house. So I was reading it and other books last night for research for a chapter I was writing. He wrote Church of Rome at the Bar of History to argue that Catholic doctrine is not really as historical as Catholic’s claim. So you know the quote from Newman, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” I think Catholics have to be careful when you bandy that quote around because it can come off very triumphalist. It can also be misunderstood.

To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant is not the same as saying to be deep in history is to be Catholic. I do think history ultimately testifies to the truths of the Catholic faith, what the Church Fathers taught, that ancient councils taught. But more so what I think is obvious when you look through the fathers is many of the bulwark claims of Protestantism. Sola scriptura, sola fide, especially Protestantism that is not Magisterial Protestantism. So evangelical nondenominational is simply not rooted in history. When we see the attestations of baptismal regeneration, the ability to lose salvation, infant baptism, the propitiatory sacrifice of the mass.

But there are Protestants. This goes all the way back to Calvin and Luther who said … There was a book, I think it was Barrett, Barrett published a book. Matthew Barrett. Reformation Rome. It was a new book. The Reformation as Renewal. I want to say it’s by Barrett. He also wrote a book, Defending Sola Scriptura. Yeah, Matthew Barrett. The Reformation as Renewal” Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. It’s not an apologetic book. It is a historical book on the reformation saying that Calvin and Luther and others were trying to say, “No, the fathers actually support us, not you.” We have 19th century Anglicans who also argue this way. It fell out a favor for a bit in the early Catholic Protestant wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Karl Keating, Pat Madrid, James White, others who are in that scuffle. But we’re seeing more resurgence of it. Protestants who are trying to retrieve the fathers. So you have long before Luther, which is a book trying to show the history of sola fide in the fathers allegedly. Gavin has been doing, obviously, a lot of this kind of work in his videos in his channel. I’ve responded to a lot of those. A little bit of that in Collins and Walls’ book, Roman but Not Catholic. So that’s the big thing I’m going to be focusing on.

So I don’t see myself writing peer reviewed. Maybe some of the chapters I could adapt for peer reviewed. There’s some ideas I’ve had. I don’t know if I have the time for it. I think for me, I’m not really a strict academic, so I see myself wanting to engage a broader audience. And for me, that would probably be YouTube, books, a mixture of casual books with a casual reader, and slightly more advanced books, but not super academic, but slightly more advanced, something like Case for Catholicism. But Kevin, thank you for your question there. We’ve got a few super chats here. Let’s see if I can find these here.

How do I … I see it. I see the super chat. I’ve clicked on it. But how do I … Oh, I think here we go. Hey, this works. This is fun. All right, let’s see. Super chat from King Galidier, Your Majesty. Thank you for being here. I’m sorry if that is your name. I made fun of you. I don’t want to make fun of people. I know you don’t like getting into church drama politics. What are your thoughts on the recent synod and/or dubia responses? Dubia responses.

Yeah, that’s the other thing. I mean, I think it’s okay for me to have opinions here and there about this. This is a livestream. Why not have a few opinions about it? But I definitely don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of just talking about this stuff nonstop because there’s so many people online who do this on blogs or YouTube and I just don’t see it being very helpful. But if you want to know my opinions, and people are free to have whatever opinions they want, I think one hard thing I had with the dubia was that, I mean, some of the questions that were asked, it’s not like a strict yes or no answer. Some of the questions seemed a bit open-ended and so you really couldn’t answer them yes or no. So I think dubia responses are best when it’s like, is this allowed or is that allowed? Can you do a hysterectomy for a uterus that is no longer capable of maintaining a pregnancy? The CDF handled that dubia a few years ago.

Oh, here would be a very germane one. Are Mormon baptisms valid? That was something that had to be … That was addressed with the dubia recently. Answered in the negative. Mormon baptisms are not valid and there was a commentary on it in L’Osservatore Romano. Here’s why. But some of the questions, it’s like you couldn’t really get a yes or no out of them. I don’t want to get into it, but I just feel like, “Oh,” I think it’s fine to ask these questions, but people are like, “Oh, Pope Francis was owned,” or, “Oh, the dubia cardinals were owned.” It’s like, “Let’s try to better understand everybody here.” The synod. Yeah, what I wanted … You know what’s funny, I wanted to do a video about how mad trads and liberals have the same thing a lot of times, but I didn’t end up doing it. I was like, “Laura, you should do a video on this.” And she’s like, “That’s a great idea.” And so Laura made a super funny video about that. And so I’m like, “Oh, she can do that.”

Here’s my funny thing with the synod, honestly. The funniest thing to me are seeing people like Father James Martin and others who, back in July, were crowing to critics of the synod on synodality saying, “You don’t trust the spirit? Oh, it’s so sad to see these radical traditionalists not trusting the spirit and how the spirit will guide the synod. It’s very sad, tat, tat, tat.” And then after this, you hear them saying, “I’m very disappointed in what came about from the synod.” I think Father Martin said this. It’s not unexpected that LGBT wouldn’t show up in the document or the working document this or that. Well, wait a minute, father, what is that? Are you not trusting in the spirit to lead the synod? That was the thing that I thought was rich.

All righty, let’s go through here a few more. This will be an easy and disappointing one for super chat, Newgloff. What are your thoughts on Byung-Chul Han, a German-Korean Catholic philosopher, who talks in culture theory postmodernity? Empty set. Never heard of him, but I’ll look it up, German-Korean Byung-Chul Han. I’m going to check him up after this.

Let’s see here. Let’s see. Are you aware of the recent trend of textual criticism where folks like Dan McClellan are starting to generate a fan base? His motto is data over dogma. I’ve seen a few of his videos. I was … Interesting he did a video where he basically reached a similar conclusion on the word theopneustos as I did that the word, while the word has come to mean, inspired in a unique way. So it’s used in a unique sense today. In the first few centuries, it was not considered a unique word relating to how God gives something infallible authority. Because in the early church, early Christians would talk about the church being theopneustos. They would describe the writings of the church fathers as being theopneustos. And, of course, saying things are theopneustos you have in the first two centuries, you don’t have until the time of Irenaeus when Christians begin to see universally of the New Testament is scripture.

And I did a whole video about this, where you look at the earliest apostolic fathers, they quote primarily from the Old Testament, not the New Testament, because the faith had been given to them primarily through the sacred tradition, lived out in things like the church’s liturgy. The written scripture was not the … It was not the sola of rule of faith, definitely. It wasn’t even the primary vehicle for the transmission of the faith. So there’s an interesting agreement there, but it doesn’t mean I agree with everything McClellan says. I think he has stuff that’s pretty squishy on homosexuality in scripture. But I agree with him that a lot of times when people will read scripture, they will take a tradition, however as meaningful it can be, and read that into the text instead of letting the text speak for itself, like trying to deny the existence of henotheism, the belief in many gods, but only one God that ought to be worshiped in the early part of the Old Testament, trying to create elaborate explanations for alleged contradictions when there are simpler explanations that can be given like that what did the father say at Jesus’ baptism, you are my blessed son or this is my blessed son.

Well, the evangelist, they chose different language to emphasize things is not verbatim what the father said. So I think that there’s always a spectrum that you have a fundamentalism that is really, really rigid that is ultimately untenable because the facts don’t support it. And you have a modernism that will just be led by the nose by critical scholarship and take an extremely skeptical, pessimistic view of the data and rush to the worst conclusions instead of allowing the rule of faith to guide our interpretation of things. So I do believe it is a balancing act. I don’t know what you mean by textual criticism. Maybe it’s deconstruction. Textual criticism has been around for a long time. We need that to figure out what were the original manuscripts of the Bible, especially the New Testament, because we don’t have those anymore, but we can reconstruct them to a high degree of accuracy. So it’s meaning more critical scholarship, even Pope Benedict the XVI has talked about responsible uses of the historical critical method. And I’ll have to … Maybe I could share more resources on that later in a future episode.

Let’s see. Would you be willing to dialogue debate Dr. Peter Kwasniewski on the viability of liturgical reform of the reform? Love you, man. Trad here. Oh, thank you, Joseph. Probably not. I have gotten some debate invites on what might be prudential or intramural Catholic questions. So, for example, there’s more than one person actually who wants to debate me on the old Joseph, young Joseph theory, right? Was Saint Joseph a young man who had never been married before who was espoused to the Virgin Mary? Or was Joseph an old man who was a widower, who had grown children, who was chosen as a protector of Mary, who is a virgin serving in the temple? And I hold to the old Joseph view, but I find it easier to … Well, I hold it because not just that it’s easier, I find it to be the best. When I look at the biblical and historical data, it makes the most sense to me was the view … I think it was the view that was held in the church until the time of Saint Jerome.

The other views are comparably later, but I’m not going to get into a big hissy fit about Catholics holding the Jerome theory or the hieronymian view, the young Joseph theory. Fine, if that makes sense to you, go ahead. Believe that. Do your apologetics and engage people. I don’t want to have unnecessary fights. I think it’s bad if people take their pet theories on things where you’re allowed to disagree and fight one another. I’m fine with a good-natured discussion, fine. But if I’m going to be spending time working on debates, if it’s a question that’s like the viability of the liturgical reform of the reform, which is the idea, was the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium? Is it viable? Is it good? Is it bad? I mean, people have a whole lot of different views on that. Stephen Bullivant has a good book … There are two good books on Vatican II. Bullivant has a good book on Vatican II.

There’s Vatican II, a very short introduction, but he had another one that was weighing it saying that, “You know what, look …” Oh, I think Mass Exodus. Yeah, it’s this, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II by Stephen Bullivant. And he talks about how Second Vatican Council didn’t start this mass religious exodus from the Catholic Church, but he said it also helped it along, basically.

Let’s see here. I want to make sure, by the way. Oh, check the comments. Make sure … Oh my goodness, there’s so many. Okay, good. I just want to make sure everybody can hear me.

Let’s see here. And go back to … Oh my gosh, you guys, so many questions, but this is good. Let’s see.

Let’s see. Well, I’ll go back to this. So whether things are good or bad ideas or what I think about this or things that we can disagree on, it’s not subjects I want to spend a lot of time. If I’m going to be spending a lot of time learning about material and engaging others, there’s so much in the areas of philosophy and history to engage Atheism, Islam, Protestantism, maybe do more in Eastern Orthodoxy, I haven’t done really a lot of debates in that area, but there’s a lot just in these other areas where there’s not as many people engaging them. So I want to be able to do that.

Let’s see here. Here’s the next one. Aren’t apologists more like attorneys than scientists in their relation to truth? Doesn’t apologetics lead to confirmation bias and related fallacies? Well, what I would say here is that confirmation bias, which is a psychological bias that you tune out data that disagrees with you and only accept what you do agree with, that’s not a vice of apologists. That is a human vice. All people have that, including scientists. Scientists are not 100% objective. They can … Especially like social scientists. Scientists can subtly, even without knowing it, manipulate data and have biases involved in it to reach particular conclusions. So there’s not like this objective scientists and you’ve got the apologist that will just twist the facts however which way they want to go. But I do think that when you argue for a position, rather than having a disinterested investigation of it, you’re more susceptible to bias.

So, for example, an atheist who is investigating the question, did Saint Paul believe in justification by faith alone? If an atheist investigates that or an atheist investigates other questions of the faith, they’re a bit more removed so they might be a bit more unbiased, doesn’t mean that their word is perfect, obviously, than a Catholic or a Protestant who has a theological bone to pick with the fight. That’s why in a lot of my works, I will reference atheists and critical scholars to say, “Look, they don’t have” … Especially atheistic scholars, they don’t have a bone to pick with this. I remember once, actually, I cited Richard Carrier, who is an atheist, he denies Jesus existed, but he wrote an art essay way back in the ’90s on an examination of 1st Timothy 2, talking about whether the Calvinistic interpretation of 1st Timothy 2 is correct, that God desires salvation. Does he desire the salvation of all people or all kinds of people? And Carrier reached the conclusion it’s not all kinds of people as Calvinists would want, he’s talking about all people. It’s just an interesting little thing, but finding atheists who venture in, that might be a fun one to do to get atheist scholars together to see, “What do you think?” Once again, doesn’t mean that they’re infallible, but they might provide a very interesting perspective on some of these issues.

Yeah. So I think you can be more tendency to do that, but everybody, when they have their idea, they believe in, even scientists have a temptation to want to twist the data. And that’s why you always have to put your arguments out there and just have people check over them and just pray to be open to that. And maybe you might be. And here’s the thing, you might be right about something and just have a bad argument. And so you got to ditch to bad argument and get a better argument. So let’s see here, what else do we have here? But thank you for that.

Let’s see. Let’s see. Would you be interested in responding to a video by YouTuber Jessie Gender critiquing Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? I feel it deserves a response. Yeah, that could be good, especially … When I choose to do responses, I definitely try to find things that are … They reach a lot of people, they’re decent quality material, and they haven’t been responded to the death. If everybody else got in there and responded, it’s like, “You don’t need me in there.”

Let’s see here. Yeah. And this helps me, by the way, guys. So I have been … I’m pulling out of social media gradually. I deleted my Facebook. I deleted my LinkedIn. I don’t know why I even had a LinkedIn. I did use it to reach some people now and then, but I just want to be off of this stuff. I just want to be off. Twitter, I have barely … There have been things that have shown up on Twitter, like the thing I just said about Father Martin and the synod. I wanted to write about it on Twitter, but I don’t, because if I write about it, I’m going to waste time writing about it and I’m going to waste time responding to comments and arguing and debating with people or just checking and clicking to see, “Ooh, what do people think of me,” and get my dopamine hit in my brain because people like me. I don’t want to waste my time doing that. I got to grab a … Let me grab my water.

Hydro Flask, dehydrated here. There she goes. So I don’t want to … Just saying on social media. I don’t want to … It becomes not a waste of time, but there’s so many other things I could be doing writing episodes. Imagine if I could be doing two podcast episodes, working on a book chapter, and working on a peer reviewed article, but it’s just like you have to just focus. I even have this thing Cold Turkey blocker to get off Twitter. I just haven’t turned it on again yet because I go on Twitter. I saw somebody said, “Thank you, Trent Horn and Jimmy Akin, for helping me come back to the church.” And I wrote, “Oh, praise be to God.” Nice, I want to affirm that person. Or I saw somebody else at a big Twitter thing and they’re like, “I want to learn about Catholicism.” So I messaged them and said, “Hey, do you want a free copy of my book? Here you go.”

So that’s why I don’t want to get rid of it. Maybe I might just change … Well, I guess if I change the password and I just have Kyle go on and check to see what’s going on. I use Twitter also to figure out what’s happening, what’s going on. So getting back to this question, Dominic, thank you for suggesting this to me because I love when people can get ahold of me, tag me on Twitter or email me, go to trenthorn.com saying, “Hey, here’s this thing. Can you respond to it?” Sometimes I don’t, but sometimes I think, “Oh, that’s really good.” In fact, during my day, I have horrible short-term memory. My long term is pretty decent, but I have horrible short term. So I was going to write that down, Jessie Gender video respond. And then I can forget about it, go back to my list and see like, “Oh, yeah, I can be done with that.” Let’s see. I’m not too shiny, by the way. I got to invest in … Now that my camera’s getting more high def, I got to get more makeup and stuff. So I’ll probably respond to that. I have heard of her. I watched somebody else cite her, him, probably him, right? And I’ll respond to that. Let’s see here.

Let’s see. This is from Triconias. Would you be willing to consider Matthean priority, especially via the Griesbach hypothesis? David Pallmann recently made an interesting detailed case for it and later discussed it with Swan. Yeah, I’m open. This is called the synoptic problem. We all know that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they’re borrowing from one another in some way. There is a literary relationship between these documents, because in many cases, you have passages that are verbatim. We don’t know the exact nature of the relationship. So that’s a synoptic problem. There are variety of ways … Let’s see if I can bring up here just a … Hold on. It brought me up some weird drug. I’m trying to bring up here. I’m sure somebody has a … I mean, I know there’s a lot of different ones, but the Griesbach hypothesis, aka, Matthean, this would be Matthean priority. So Matthew wrote first, Mark and Luke derived from Matthew. That’d be the … Is Griesbach the same as Augustinian?

Let’s see if I can find it here. I haven’t done synoptic problem in a while. There is one called the … Yeah, the Augustinian theory. I want to say that that is … Augustinian theory is that Mark derived from Matthew and Luke derived from Matthew and Mark. The other views, the one that’s probably really common now, would be Marcan priority, Mark wrote first, Matthew and Luke expanded on that. The other view is Q, the two-source hypothesis. Q stands for the German word Quelle, which means source, that either was an oral tradition or there was some other source of Jesus sayings that are independent of Mark that Matthew and Luke drew from. Also their special Matthew, special Luke, their independent sources. Luke’s independent source might’ve actually been the Virgin Mary. A lot of the things that he talks about in his gospel. Very complicated.

I think Mark Goodacre’s work on Q has been very valuable in showing that the arguments for Q are actually pretty weak. There was one that I remember a while back called the Wilke hypothesis that was promising. Let’s see.

Wilke was, yeah, that Matthew was actually written last, that it was Mark and then Luke, and then Matthew derived from Mark and Luke, placing Matthew later. If Matthew was written much later, that would also explain a lot of the relationship between Matthew and the Didache. We know there’s a relationship of some form between Matthew and the Didache, whether the Didache drew from Matthew or Matthew from the Didache that’s out there. It is very interesting stuff. So, like I said, it’s all about freeing up time to be able to do these things. Social media is not a great place to do that, but I need you guys’ help to send me tips. Trenthorn.com is a great place that goes to me. Nice to be able to see, “Hey, can you respond to this? Hey, this is a big deal.” And I might have Kyle maybe run the Twitter to do that. Let’s find a few more.

Congrats on 100,000. Love the videos. Thank you very much. Let’s see here.

Let’s see. Let’s see. We have Christian Wagner on to discuss filioque. Here’s interesting, probably not, but this has nothing to do with Christian Wagner. Is it Wagner or Wagner? I always feel like you need to say Wagner. It has more of a command to it. Probably not because I am really trying to move away from the channel from doing interviews in general. The only kinds of back and forth I want to have on the channel would be debates or dialogues with non-Catholics or a dissenting Catholic. So with a Catholic who rejects the church’s teaching on, let’s say, homosexuality, for example. I’m trying to find someone to do that, by the way. There is a few. Jason Seidel and he’s the guy … Father Bryan Massingale, who teaches at Fordham. They’re both open dissenters. I’d love to have a debate with them on whether homosexual conduct is compatible with Catholicism, with the deposit of faith.

So maybe we’ll do that for Catholic Answers around pints. We’ll see if they say yes, been trying to reach out. But I don’t want to have … Well, once again, this goes back to I want to just get people information in as efficient a way as possible. So I feel like what you talk about in a one-hour interview where you’re just trying to break open a subject with an expert, which are great. I mean, they’re fun. I love listening to those. You could also … If you just wrote a script and engaged the material directly, you could probably … What you would cover in an interview in an hour, you could probably get done in 20 minutes in a scripted video. And I just want to continue my mission of efficient, high-quality content to edify listeners. So I don’t know. Well, okay, I tell you what, is there a way … Can I put a poll in here? Oh, wait, I saw someone in here. I saw Jesse Driftwood, $5. Let’s see.

Let’s see here. Oh, first, Jesse, thank you for commenting here. Jesse has a very decently sized channel and I think you do photography stuff, actually. Thank you for putting that in here. So I saw some … Because I saw Jesse, you left a comment on Brandon from MindShift. You left a very kind comment, thank you for that, on MindShift. So I had that dialogue with Brandon about, is heaven hellish? And I went over to the community tab on Brandon’s page, see what people thought of that. And Jesse and others said that I was one of the few apologists they like listening to. Thank you. And I appreciate that because I’m trying very hard. I am not going to name names as a professional courtesy, but there are people who style themselves as Christian apologists, they range from being cringey to absolutely insufferable that they talk at people.

All they want to do is just use a rhetorical trick with someone and they’re always in debate mode. And it’s like, “Can you just stop for a second and we can just have a conversation?” Now, there’s some people that I might want to engage who are not very nice, so I might just do a debate with them to keep them from dominating a conversation, but I want to have these decent conversations. So Jesse, yes, in your live discussion with Alex O’Connor, you said you’re going to get off the fence about meat consumption, either become a vegan or fully okay with factory farming. Did this ever happen?

Yes. I was reading an article … There is a … Timothy Hsiao, H-S-I-A-O. I was reading a defense of factory farming from him. And I think I’m ultimately convinced that eating … I don’t think you have to be either between vegan or fully okay with factory farming. There’s two arguments here because you can also meet meat and just have something like a causal impotence argument that in choosing to become vegan, you don’t accomplish any goods and it’s a great cost, and it’s a cost in personal energy and time that could be spent achieving other greater goods. And so there’s really no point … Even if factory farming were evil, there’s no point in choosing. You don’t have a moral obligation to be a vegan because it’s a causal impotency relationship there. But Hsiao has actually made a decent point about the wrongness of animal cruelty and centering it more in the classical view that the wrongness of causing pain to animals is more related to what it does to the human person rather than to the animal itself.

While it’s still wrong to cause pain to an animal for no good reason, it opens up the view for more good reasons to cause pain to animals in order to sustain the human race and things like that. And I remember … What was it? I was speaking with a dialogue with a non-Catholic apologist saying, “Yeah, I think I’m inclined to Hsiao’s view.” And he said, “Yeah, I’ve read Hsiao’s paper. I don’t find it convincing at all. Hsiao’s argument ultimately leads to the conclusion it could be okay to eat dogs, for example.” I remember that was one thing he said to me and we were having an email back and forth. And I remember I thought like, “Oh, I don’t think that’s a very strong rejoinder at all.” And Ed … Sorry, you see how my brain ping-pongs around people? I’ll read all kinds of stuff and connect together.

Because I was reading Ed Feser talking about that viral video you saw on Twitter maybe of somebody like an immigrant cooking a cat on the street, and it’s like, “Oh, how could you do that?” Well, yeah, if it’s somebody’s cat that they own, it’s destruction of property. But I don’t see the moral difference between cultures that might raise dogs for food versus those that raise pigs for food. Pigs are probably even more intelligent than dogs. There’s no moral difference there in what animal you choose to eat. So I remember that vegan who was engaging me thought that was a weak part of Hsiao’s paper. I didn’t think it was weak at all, frankly. But Jesse, thank you for the question there. And, yeah, I might do a more thought-out view on that. It’s not one that is direct into the Catholic apologetic sphere, but now what’s interesting here is I need to talk to Alex about this because I remember Alex being very assertive when we had our dialogue about this, but I think recently he said something like he’s not a vegan anymore. Don’t quote me on it yet, but I remember him saying something online that he’s had to take a step back for health reasons or something else. So there you go. But I might need to be corrected on that. I remember him saying something about that a while ago.

Let’s see here. Let’s try … I’m going to go back to some of these other questions here. A few of you have been asking this question. Let’s see. What would be your dream debate opponent? What topic? Dead or alive. Dead or alive.

Why not raise Calvin or Luther from the dead, have a one on one, the final showdown. The final countdown showdown. I had an idea for a book a while back. I don’t know if I’ll ever pursue it. If somebody out there is smart enough and has a literary eloquence to do it, I would appreciate this. I thought it’d be cool to have a book where you write mock debates or maybe there could be videos about this. You could use AI for this, honestly, where you do a mock debate between historical figures. So it’s like, what if C.S. Lewis could debate Friedrich Nietzsche, for example? What if Cardinal Newman could debate John Calvin? You had these matchups. It’s like how ESPN does that, right? Do they do that? I don’t know if they do that. I just saw it in Rocky Balboa.

It’s like, what if Rocky fought Mason Dixon, who would win? Rocky in his prime. Mason Dixon, come on, man. That guy was not a great … He was okay Rocky antagonist, not the best one, but they have the computer fight. Does ESPN do that? They do the computer fights still? I don’t know. But what if you had that or go forward in time, what if C.S. Lewis debated Richard Dawkins? Both of them in their prime, both Oxford guys. C.S. Lewis versus Richard Dawkins. And you had these little debates throughout the book of the greats from different time periods engaging one another, but you have to know each person’s argument and literary style really well to make it sound realistic and not boring. But, yeah, I can’t think of anyone. Honestly, there’s multiple questions about this. What is your dream debate opponent? My dream opponent honestly is going to be Joe Rogan.

Why is that? Because he has a huge reach. The reason I do debates and dialogues is to reach people who are on the fence. That is why I do them. So I won’t agree to do a debate unless I have the rights to the footage that’s going to be publicly shared. Debates are a lot of prep time to do a good job for them. And if people aren’t going to see it … I mean, it still benefits people who are there, but I really want lots of people to see it. So if I’m going to put the time and energy in, my goal … I mean, I enjoy the mental challenge of engaging someone, that’s always a lot of fun. But when I do a debate, I want to do it at the service of those who are listening. So my dream opponent would be the person who would give me the greatest audience of reaching people who are on the fence.

Most people watching the debate will be set in their ways. They’re not going to switch sides. But the larger audience, the larger you get of that small subset of people who are truly on the fence, that’s what I want to reach. Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world. And he’s had Christians on there. I think some have done better than others. I know the intelligent Stephen Meyer, I think it was Meyer. Yeah, Stephen Meyer, the intelligent design guy who went on there and he did fine. I think he could have been a little stronger on the historical Christian evidences, but just to have a solid Christian on there who can answer Rogan’s arguments in a way that is relatable and has good intellectual firepower to it, I’d be so stoked. I’d be stoked to do that. Or sit down Ben Shapiro, talk about what we disagree about. So we’ll have to see. But that would be my goal, because when I do these things, my goal is to reach people, especially people who are on the fence. So let’s see here.

Let’s try to find a few others. We’ve got a few others just send a chat. John, thank you for that. Let’s see. A fun question. Yeah, you guys can ask fun questions, by the way. You can ask whatever you like. Let’s see. Let’s see here. More of a fun question. What do you prefer between Lord of the Rings and Star Wars pre-Disney? Geez, guys, don’t you know that Star Wars is way better than Lord of the Rings? I don’t know if I can … It is hard to make a pick here because they’re two very different genres. So Star Wars is swashbuckling Buck Rogers space adventure. So Star Wars is taking the genre of … What was it like? Was it Buck Rogers 25th Century or, no, Flash Gordon. It was Flash Gordon, I think. And the old serials, the old Kurosawa films, those old action serials from the ’30s and the ’40s, that’s the hero’s journey going there.

And then both in Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the one common thread they have is a hero’s journey. Frodo and Luke Skywalker, they both have a very similar journey. You’ve got someone from an unassuming background. They become the chosen one. They are mentored by a wiser older figure who dies, then comes back later, and they have to face trials. They face a trial, fail, or at least had a significant obstacle, and then they have to face their fears, regroup and then accomplish the goal they set out. So they’re similar in that way, but one’s obviously fantasy, one’s sci-fi. I was more of a Star Wars kid than a Lord of the Rings kid growing up, if you were in middle school. I was more into Star Wars, Star Trek, science fiction. I thought that stuff was really cool.

I wasn’t as much of a fantasy person. I did not play Dungeons & Dragons. I was not a Lord of the Rings person. I was more … I liked science fiction. I was in the Young Astronomers Club. I was more of a science fiction person. That’s not a knock on Lord of the Rings. Wasn’t a big fan of that. I think we have another … John has another fun one here. Who would you most and least like to have a jiujitsu spar with in the apologetics world? God bless you of the great work. Yeah, I just did that this morning. Sorry, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m a little shiny because I rolled a little bit today and then I went to the gym and then I rushed over here. I forgot my computer, so I just came straight from there. So I think I’m a little shiny. Who would I most like to? I don’t know. I like rolling for fun with people. I’m going to be honest with you guys.

My injury from March, it is my tiny little cross that I’m bearing right now, and it sucks. So I had a partial ACL tear. I still feel it in my knee. It might be a very long time for that to heal. I’m still feeling it. My performance is … Well, even walking around, I feel the pain in my knee. It’s hard. I’m not going to get surgery. I don’t think it’s going to help. It’s a partial tear. I’m doing squats, I’m doing exercises. When I roll, I feel a lot better. But ever since the injury, my cardio suffered, my strength has suffered in my legs. So I remember before my injury, I could roll with a blue belt and go the whole five minutes and not get submitted. And now I’ll be rolling with a comparable white belt and takes them about three minutes to submit me. So I’ve gone backwards in ability and that is very discouraging, but I’m just not going to give up. I want to just keep trying. It makes me feel better. It’s good exercise. I like engaging other people. I like seeing people that don’t know I’m Trent Horn Catholic apologist, but now they’ve figured that out because they saw me on Ben Shapiro and stuff like that, and I talk to them about stuff, but they’re a fun group of guys.

But, yeah, it has been … I’m weaker. I am weaker. It’s an injury. It could be a long one. I’ve met other people who took them years to get over their ACL tears. I don’t know. I just keep trying and I go, and if I get a little better each day and have a good day or a bad day, it makes me feel good about it, try to get better. I have thought it would be fun to try to do a role with my colleague, Karlo. Karlo and I have talked about this. Karlo has muscles despair. He looks like he’s smuggling tennis balls under his shirts all the time. Karlo Broussard, the ragin’ Cajun. He’s got … His workout routine is he’s muscle. He builds muscle. But Karlo and I were talking, he said, “Oh, man, oh, man, you kill me with cardio, bro. I’d be dead in a minute.”

And that’s the thing, a lot of people are untrained. They’ll gas out doing jiujitsu, then they’re tired and then you got them. So just saying, I would be sad if I couldn’t … I would hopefully be able to submit. I mean, I could submit people who are slightly bigger than me who are less skilled than me, but I’m having a hard time because a lot of people are bigger than me or they have more skills than me. So in the world, let’s see, who’s doing that? I feel like everybody’s getting involved with this. I think Matt Fra did it for two weeks, so I could try with Matt and just have fun with that. No, [inaudible 00:48:14], Trent. Not at all.

There is a guy who was on conversation with Jackie and Bobby. His name escaped me in the moment. He’s doing … He’s a bigger guy, though. Everyone’s asking now, Taylor Marshall, why aren’t you going to roll with Taylor Marshall? If Taylor is a purple belt, it wouldn’t even be fair. It wouldn’t even be fair. Purple belts. My wife says a purple belt and a white belt is like watching a cat play with a mouse. But in a few years, if my injury heals up more and my knee is sturdier and I’ve gotten to at least blue belt, if not, purple belt, why not? Maybe we could do a fun one.

And if you’re ever in town, you guys can always message me on trenthorn.com. You can always stop by my gym and we can roll. I’m like a training dummy come to life if you want to do that. Let’s see. What more do we have here? Let’s see. Got a thank you here from Doris. Congrats on 100K. Been watching your videos for about five months. I’ve reverted back to Catholicism from being in the occult. I wanted to thank you. Your video has been pivotal in my journey home. Praise be to God, Doris. Everyone, just pray for Doris that she continues her journey home into the church and away from evils of the occult. I should do a video on the occult. I mean, this is a good time to do it because it’s Halloween. Good time to talk about the occult. Maybe next year or whatever, I’ll do that.

But a lot of people get into that stuff and like Ouija boards, psychics. It’s so funny to me when I’ll see atheists, people who identify as atheists, or at least non-religious, it’s usually non-religious, they’ll say, “Religion is for a bunch of suckers. Oh, I don’t believe in organized religion. That’s just for suckers. But my psychic told me.” I’m like, “Come on, dude.” I can at least appreciate an atheist who is universally against religion, psychic, superstition. I can at least appreciate there being consistent. But if you just have an ax to grind against religion and you’re also believing in horoscopes and psychics, come on, man. Come on.

Oh, yeah, Trent, I was one of the few that saw you debate at UT a number of months ago. It was a great night, wish it was recorded. That’s the thing, that was so hard. That was a great debate. It was on atheism. But there was a problem … Oh, I was supposed to do that debate in person and my flight was canceled because of bad weather. So they had me set up on Zoom and then my computer kept restarting to do a system update something. And so they didn’t end up recording it, it got all messed up. It was still a great debate. I’m glad people saw it and it’s fun, I like doing debates, but that’s cool that you were there. The debate … I did a video resummarizing the arguments. It was a debate at University of Toledo, I think.

Let’s see. Let’s see here. On what theological basis did the hierarchy in contrast to the entirety of church history shut down the churches during the pandemic?

I don’t believe it is the case that churches have always remained open during pandemics. I believe during the Black Death in England, masses were canceled. Churches were closed in order to control the plague. Now, of course, that was something with an extremely high fatality rate, extremely contagious. That’s a lot more understandable. But I don’t think that it follows that bishops can never suspend masses. I think, for example, in the midst of a war or an invasion, you might have to suspend mass while you figure out a way to conduct them in underground ways and keep people safe while doing that. Doesn’t mean it would be wrong for you to have mass and put people at risk. I think, though, you should at least suspend the obligation so that people who want to go understand the risks they’re taking, they’re not obligated.

But I do think, though, that it’s easy to start with what would be just like, “Oh, we should suspend mass to figure things out for a week or two,” to let it drag on for months and months or years some people wanted. The pandemic’s a sore spot for me. I get really grumpy about people who want pandemic amnesty. Yeah, we were wrong and we hurt kids with learning loss and we really wrecked the economy, but we were all trying to do that. We didn’t know any better. That’s not true. There were people at the time saying, “Look at the data. This no longer makes sense.” And we were told, “You want to just kill grandma, we’re not going to listen.” So that’s not the case, at some point. It’s not like, “Well, we didn’t know.” That might’ve been true the first month.

But it’s like, “Well, we didn’t know,” that’s not true. There was a sizeable group of people telling you this isn’t working anymore. Look at the data from Sweden and other countries, and it makes me mad. No, you don’t get amnesty. You get to be held responsible for decisions you made. And we should learn from them if this happens again. But when it comes to churches, I do believe they were shut down way too long that churches … It depends where you were at, but here’s the thing for me that really boils me. This is the thing that boils me. Okay. It’s not even that the church is shut down, but there is a diocese … I’m not going to say which, because I don’t want to get in trouble. Use your thinking hats to figure out what I’m talking about why I don’t want to get in trouble. But there is a diocese that sent out a letter saying, “Masses are canceled indefinitely.”

And the thing I was mad about in the letter was not that masses were canceled, it was the tone. And it was a tone of, “We shouldn’t be mad about this. We should be thrilled that we are engaging in a corporal work of mercy to protect people from this illness.” And it was defensive and arrogant. I was just so mad about that. Because if there was a letter written like this from a bishop, “To the faithful, it brings me great sadness that I have exhausted all legal options to keep masses open for people to attend and I will continue to find options to restore the sacraments as quickly as possible because this is a source and summit of our faith. Let us pray during this time and care for one another during this difficult period we are traversing.”

If that was the tone in the letter, okay, there’s this sadness about the sacraments being deprived from people and in earnest saying, “I will not rest until I find a way to restore people’s ability to receive them.” That I’d be like, “Okay, I get what you’re saying. Your heart is there, good, but, man, I cannot stand” … The live stream. Now you’re getting more prudential, ranty trend. Some of the bishops who … The letters sounded like something a PR firm would come up with. And it’s just about we need to do the right thing and there’s not even a sense of the importance of the sacraments, of communal worship, of the liturgy. So there’s people who excelled well and had the right attitude in the midst of that and some who didn’t. But that doesn’t mean that, “Oh, well, you can never shut down churches.” That did happen.

And you had things like developments in the Middle Ages where during plagues, I think they used metal spoons to anoint oil on people’s heads so you wouldn’t have to touch them. I had thought about this, by the way, and I guess it’s hard because you have to work with a congregation for divine worship, but I think the biggest thing during the pandemic we definitely should have had was confession. And I really feel like … Honestly, the priests, they were heroes. God bless them. The priests who sat in a lawn chair and people drove by in their car and spoke with them. And you’re more than six feet apart. I feel like we could have done drive-through confession in that way. There’s a little bit with the sacrament of confession like, can you do it? Can you use a walkie-talkie? Pick up the walkie-talkie. Clorox wipe it, pick it up. Talk to me in it. I look at you, I see you. There’s a little bit of can law issues about like, can you do it by radio? Because you can’t do confession over the phone, right? But like a priest, I think he can go to prison. He could absolve someone through a prison telephone and you’re looking right at him. I don’t know if he’s right there in person, even if there’s a sheet of glass.

But I know there was a concern about using electronic devices for confession because you don’t want … The seal, you don’t want to have an ability to record things. But even just driving up, the cars are parked away. If it’s an open, clear day, you can talk 10 feet apart. You can hear each other talk. I absolve you, you’re on your way. What else do the priests got to do? Nobody’s got anything to do. It’s all shut down. Sorry if I’m all ranty. But, yeah, I felt like we could have done more of that if I was a bishop, if I was Bishop Trent. Honestly, the other thing I wish we’d been able to do is have priests more doing last rights in hospitals, but the hospitals were turning people away, they wouldn’t let you come. So finding a way to do that, but having … Look, I might say if I was a bishop … That’s why I do this in the livestream because I don’t want to do videos if I was a bishop. It’s easy to talk about it when you’re not in the job.

It would’ve been cool if a bishop said, “All right, I’m putting out a call to priests. If you are a young priest who is at low risk for this particular disease, I would like you … And I will join you all. I’m not going to ask you to do things I wouldn’t do myself. We will live communally in a pod and people will deliver meals for us and we’re going to live together in a communal pod, say, four priests and a bishop. And we’ll live together in this way and go out and minister to those who have COVID, give them last rights, and then go back to our communal pod and people bring us food and bring us stuff and we’re not killing grandma because we’re either in the pod or you go out and you minister, give last rights to people who are dying of COVID. And if we get sick, at least it’s like, well, you’re still young, you might have a decent chance of beating this and leave it as just, if a priest wants to do this, you can.” I would’ve loved to have seen something like that during the pandemic.

So thank you, though, Ben Thorpe, for that. Let’s see here. Oh my gosh, there’s so many chats. How will I get through all of this? I won’t get through all of this. Let’s see.

Let’s see. Oh, this is good. More non-Catholic stuff. Since you’re into BJJ, what’s your opinion of MMA? So since you’re into Brazilian jiujitsu, what’s your opinion of mixed martial arts? This is interesting because I think Father Mike Schmitz was sour on MMA and there’s some Catholics who say it’s not justified. I think it is. I think that most mixed martial arts can be justified that there are proportional goods that while there are risks of injury, I do think that they’re not as serious risks as in other sports. Honestly, the sport that I feel most guilty about is not MMA, it’s football. Football has so many concussion injuries, it’s absolutely insane. I could even be on the opinion that football is immoral, that the risks are so great for the people who are involved playing it, that it’s not justified. MMA, though … Especially Brazilian jiujitsu, but let’s say MMA. So MMA would be, you can use any style. A lot of people Muay Thai, kickboxing, judo, and Brazilian jiujitsu together. You have throwing, striking, and grappling. And if you can do that, you engage people.

I think MMA is nicer than boxing because you’re not hitting someone in the head all the time. I think it can be justified as long as there’s not a risk of serious injury and that the risks are proportional for the goods of learning this particular skill. I think it is good for people to learn combat training. But the thing is, in order to learn combat training, to learn a martial art, how to fight someone, you have to practice fighting someone at full force. You have to be able to do that to really learn how to engage this. BJJ is nice because you can go full force on someone, whereas in boxing, you’re always holding back a little bit. You can’t … I mean, in BJJ, you don’t go full full force, you’ll gas out, but you can really use a lot of strength on somebody and not hurt them.

I think it’s justifiable. I don’t like … There is a show I saw recently, the slap challenge, kind of has some MMA people in it where they just stand, they put their hands behind their head, and somebody just hits them on the head. I don’t agree with that. I don’t like that because I feel like that is just sadism. That is just, what’s next, put your hand on the table and have a nail gun go through it. I don’t like where it’s just, let’s see how much pain you can endure. There has to be a skill level. So there’s part of it … If you’re doing MMA and you’re getting hurt, it’s because, well, you made a mistake, you didn’t block, you didn’t shift. So I think it’s justifiable. Maybe I’ll have a debate with somebody on that or a dialogue. I don’t know.

Let’s see.

Let’s see here. Follow up. Was it a sin for priests to allow parishioners to participate in holy mass during the pandemic against the direct order of their bishop? Well, I would say here is that it would not be a sin for the layperson because the only person who takes a vow of obedience to the bishop is the priest. So I would say in this circumstance, if a priest is offering, he has faculties, it’s valid for him to offer mass, I think, though, his priest could discipline him for that. I don’t know. Well, would it be a sin for a priest to do that, to disobey an order from his bishop? It very well might be because he’s taken a vow of obedience to the bishop. Just because he thinks that he has a good idea to do that doesn’t mean that he can just go and do that.

This came up a little bit with Frank Pavone back when he was Father Pavone. People are saying like, “Oh, he went out and was doing pro-life stuff because his bishop was not going to let him do that anymore.” Okay. It doesn’t matter if he wants to keep doing pro-life stuff, he can ask to be dismissed from the clerical state. You could be a priest, you could be doing really, really great work as a hospital chaplain. And if your bishop says, “Hey, I need you at this parish,” you can’t be like, “No, I do better work at the hospital.” You got to do that. But the question is, was it unjust for bishops to prohibit the celebration of the sacraments? It certainly could be. So you need some prudence in determining that, but I’d have to mull over the question a little bit more.

Let’s see here. Oh, this is good. I thought about talking about this. Have you seen the YouTube channel Abolitionists Rising? They put out a video pro-life versus abolitionists. I’d love to hear your thoughts on their position. Yeah, I don’t know if this would fall under a dialogue for the channel. Maybe you guys can let me know what you think, if this would be worthwhile. I am responding to that guy, Abolitionists Rising, on Wednesday on All Saints’ Day because I’m doing a video defending seeking the intercession of the saints, and that guy had some objections to people saying Hail Mary’s at abortion facilities. So I respond to him. Yeah. So he seems to be a Protestant evangelical type. And so he has, obviously, his complaints about Catholicism, but he seems to do really good pro-life work, meets a lot of other Catholics who do this.

I don’t know his name, I just know the channel’s called Abolitionists Rising. I am familiar with these terms, pro-life versus abolitionist. Historically, the difference between the two would be this, that an abolitionist believes it is only permissible … Historically, this is the meaning. It’s changed a little bit. But historically, an abolitionist would say it is only permissible to vote for a law that bans abortion if it bans abortion from conception onward in all cases, that it is immoral to vote for a law that has any exceptions whatsoever. So even if you ban all abortions, except you leave an exception for rape and incest. And I don’t know what they believe about life of the mother either, if that’s an okay exception to include in a law. Or a heartbeat bill, say, “You know what, we can ban abortion after six weeks.” That’s what we have here in Texas, I believe. It’s banned after six weeks. And abortion facilities have closed down. Tens of thousands of babies’ lives have been saved.

And the abolitionists will say, “No, it’s wrong to cooperate with evil in any way. “And you either … They’ll say things like, “It’s up to us to do good. It’s up to God to give the results.” What I would say is that’s silly, you’re going to let babies die for what? And they’ll say, “It doesn’t matter.” God tells us we can’t cooperate with evil, but it’s not cooperating with evil. So that particular question on, is it okay to vote for laws with exceptions, that has been answered magisterially in the gospel of life. Pope St. John Paul II. I think it’s in paragraph 73, John Paul II said it is permissible for a Catholic legislator whose opposition to abortion is well known to promote a law to restrict abortion that is feasible even if it’s not ideal.

So let’s say abortion is legal, all nine months for any reason, and you have the opportunity to ban abortion from six weeks on, let’s say you could ban 90% of abortions. The Pope says, “Yeah, in an unveiling vitae, yes, you can do that,” as long as it’s known that the reason … Now, you couldn’t go from no abortions to abortions before six weeks, that increases the evil, but you can decrease the evil because there’s feasibility here. You can’t … As Rolling Stones would say, you can’t always get what you want. But we live in an imperfect world so we can achieve the good through imperfect means. We can’t do something sinful, but I think the abolitionists are wrong here, that there’s nothing evil about saying, “Look, abortion is legal. Hey, if you vote for this law, we can make it illegal to kill this 90%.”

In voting for that law, I’m not voting for it to be legal to kill the other 10% of babies. It already is legal to kill them. So I feel like the abolitionist, if he was a police officer and the bad guy has hostages, let’s say one police officer says, “Hey, at least let the women and children go.” And so nine women and children leave and one man is left behind. The abolitionist would say, “Nope, all 10 or not, we’re going to take all 10 or nobody.” And he wouldn’t even care if you said nobody and the bad guy ends up killing all the hostages saying, “Look, it’s up to God to give the results.” No, the abolitionist, I think, has really failed to show that it is evil to vote for a law that protects some unborn … The abolitionist has failed to show that it is evil to vote for a law that increases the number of unborn children who are protected from killing. What is evil about it? There’s nothing.

So I think that there … I have a big disagreement on that point. So that one, I think, is where they’re just completely wrong, that the way that oftentimes you do achieve victory and social causes is incrementally. That is how racial advocates won the LGBT movement, the gay pride movement. They didn’t start with, “We want marriage.” They started with, “We want this right. We want that right. We want this right.” They worked incrementally and they won. The fight against child labor was won incrementally. So I disagree with them on that.

There’s other things, though. There’s differences. They do talk about … I think they brought up the question of, what should the legal punishment be? I think they raise a good point when they say that it’s incoherent to say, “We will never punish a woman who chooses abortion under any circumstance.” I believe that’s an untenable position.

I do believe, though, that the alternative, it doesn’t follow from that, that in order for a law against abortion to be just, it must punish a woman for homicide like any other homicide. I believe other mitigating factors can come in. I’ve used the examples before of how you understand that if prostitution harms society, the woman who sells sex, the man who buys sex both equally harms society, but you have jurisdictions where only the man is legally punished. The woman, other factors that drove her to this decision are taken into account to try to reduce this bad situation. I’ve said there are mitigating factors about how abortion has been legal for 50 years, it’s still legal in many places. You have women who don’t know that this is an unborn child. You have lots of other factors that are put in, including just the feasibility of passing the laws in the first place that to get to the ideal punishment for those who choose abortion, the man and the woman, you might have to incrementally get there.

So I think that the … What’s the word I’m looking for here, the pro-lifers that they are against, I think the ones who say it is always wrong … This is interesting, by the way. So on the Whatever podcast, the first debate, when it was Kristan Hawkins and Lila Rose engaging Destiny, Destiny asked the question, would you punish a woman who has an abortion? And I think Kristan said, “Absolutely not.” And she says, “No, we are never going to do that.” But Lila said, “I could see that under some circumstances.” So I give the abolitionist credit that that position, that legal punishment for women and men who choose abortion, pay for it or choose it will never happen or for the women at least that it’ll never happen. I think that’s an untenable position. I think punishments are going to change over time as culpability for crimes become more deep-seated at a social level, basically.

And I talk about this a lot in my breakdown in my dialogue with Destiny. So I do give the abolitionist credit here that they’ve raised an important issue on this point, but I think that they go too far in the other direction. On the incrementality, I think they’re just wrong on that, to say it’s wrong to vote for a law that will save 90% of children. I just think that’s wrong.

Oh, the thing that they talk about is we need to make this a gospel issue. The Abolitionists Rising will say that pro-lifers want to hide God and they want to talk about God. Well, in some circumstances, yeah, I think it’s fine to talk about God, but I think when you’re making a case or saying, “This is why the law should be this way,” well, then you need to give a secular reason because we live in a culture where the law is not sectarian. It can’t just be a law because my religion says so.

But when I’ve watched these Abolitionists Rising guys, I watched their videos, they engage you. They don’t just say, “Oh, abortion’s wrong because the Bible says so.” They use standard pro-life apologetics, like Scott Klusendorf, like what I use. They’re good. So I don’t know. I think it’s fine to talk about God at some point, but you don’t always need to have that in the conversation. You can just focus on the human rights issue first. But you shouldn’t be afraid to talk about God. But you don’t have to have it in every conversation. And if this is seen … By the way, I don’t know, I’m open to having a dialogue with them about this because it’s hard. I mean, people can disagree about this, but I do think it could cause some harm to the pro-life community, especially if … Well, there were cases I remember many years ago where one of the Dakotas almost outlawed abortion in 2008. It was like 55-45. The law had a rape exception and many pro-lifers did not vote for the law because of that exception.

But it’s like, dude, so you’re just going to … You’re making the perfect the enemy of the good and your conscious may feel good, but you haven’t done any good to help these children when you could have, you falsely called it evil to absolve yourself from responsibility of that. So I hope that’s helpful. But like I said, if the abolitionists see this and they want to respond, they can reach out to me at trenthorn.com. Maybe I could go on their channel and have a dialogue about it. So that’s the other thing. If I want to have dialogues, I do it on my channel, sometimes another channel. So maybe I’ll go on their channel and we could have a chat about this at some point. But I do like … I watched them engage people. They have solid pro-life apologetics. They’re doing a good job. So keep that up. I just don’t want to … Let’s just convince people abortion kills a human being, it ought to be illegal. And then we’re going to have disagreements about some secondary issues, but don’t make that a big fight where it’s like, “I’m not pro-life anymore. I’m abolitionist. Dude. There’s prudential judgments we’re going to disagree about how to get to the end goal.

What’s your favorite Nintendo game? Finally, fun question. Finally. So I bought a Switch a long time ago. I was having a real bad midlife crisis. I missed being young and I bought game systems, bought an old Xbox One. I just play Halo 3 on that, even though nobody else plays it anymore. And then I was going to buy an old N64, but I got a Nintendo Switch with the online thing. So I was showing Laura some of the old games. And the old … By Nintendo, I had a Super Nintendo growing up. I did not have a classic Nintendo, but I can play classic Nintendo games. Nintendo game, classic Nintendo, probably Super Mario Brothers. That’s the only bit of goodie right there. I didn’t do a ton of Nintendo. I liked Mega Man on Nintendo. So going into Super Nintendo, my favorite games growing up were probably Super Mario World. Mega Man X, I love that. Star Fox, that theme, playing it. I’d found an emulator that was really crummy and I was sad. I’m like, “I miss Star Fox.” Then I played it. Nerd. What a nerd. Hey, it’s fun as a kid. And now, it’s cool. My kid … Matthew’s eight years old now. It’s like, yeah, I play it with him, I play the games with him, and that’s super fun to be able to share with him. I only let him do old games and stuff that I do.

Let’s see here. Let’s do a few more, actually. Let’s see. I’ve heard that initial justification is through faith alone. Don’t they have to cooperate with God’s grace to believe, repent, and be baptized? Thank you, Tom.

Yeah. So the Catechism 2010 … I’m actually doing a video on sola fide soon, so stay tuned for that. Paragraph 2010 of the Catechism says that nothing in the order of conversion, nothing merits the initial grace of conversion. Neither works nor faith. Because that’s how a baby, for example, can … A baby receives sanctifying grace and is capable of entering heaven and the baby does not have works. Baby doesn’t even have faith. It’s just a gracious gift of God through the sacrament of baptism. So baptism is something … It’s not something we merit through faith, but it is something that when we are given the gift of faith, we are given the ability to respond to God’s grace. This prevenient grace, we’re given the ability to respond, as adults at least, or as parents who seek it for our children, we have the ability to respond to it and say yes and receive that grace. So it’s something that we just receive.

So we receive that. And then through there, if you’re an infant, then you cultivate the gift of faith that needs to be given to you from others. I mean, it comes from God, obviously. We have to be instructed in it, of course. I know Lutherans have this idea about infant faith and I find that be wild, actually. It’s very interesting. I know that the Bible does talk in poetic terms about Job and John the Baptist, but I don’t know if there’s enough there to really get infant faith for everybody to talk about how, if you’re justified by faith alone, how could a baby who’s baptized really be justified? And the answer is, well, they have infant faith, that they’re able to have some kind of a dim awareness of God in some way. I don’t know. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not really sold on that of the concept of infant faith.

Yeah. So we can talk about initial justification through faith. The fathers talk about this, how we are justified by faith, not by works, in the sense that we’ve trusted in Christ, we trust to obey his promises. And in doing that, we choose to receive him in baptism and then to be obedient to him, to have faith in him and be obedient to his commands. So the process of justification going forward when we are obedient, we can merit rewards. We can merit an increase in our righteousness because God is pleased with us. The righteousness we receive from Christ that is infused into us, it’s like a light. We receive this pure light of Christ, but it could be dimly lit or brightly lit based on whether we do the works God prepared first beforehand, Ephesians 2:10. But when we do the works, we can choose to do them or not do them. We have a free choice there to respond … All of it, when we do choose to say yes, we are responding to God’s grace, we can choose to say yes or no there to either do good works or to do bad works to lose the grace of justification, like mortal sin. So hope that’s helpful for you. Drama Salvation by Jimmy Akin is another good work on that subject.

Let’s see. Let’s see here.

Let’s see here. I will … Super chat, trying hard. Could you review Catholic theologian R. Trent Pomplun’s article, Heat and Light, about how purgatorial universalism with hell does not contradict Synod of Valence, Synod of Arles, and the Fourth Lateran Council? Yes, I’m not familiar with this particular theologian. I’m familiar with those who try to put forward universalism. But from my understanding, looking at things like the Council of Orange and looking at how other councils have seen this, especially if you read Hans Urs von Balthasar’s work, Dare We Hope. He’s very clear there that Catholics cannot believe universalism is a given. They cannot believe that all people are going to heaven and God has revealed this. God has certainly not revealed that. It seems pretty clear that God has revealed that some people are going to hell. That seems pretty clear. The idea is that it’s possible in the barest sense of that word, that hell is more of a purgatory that people would endure and that eventually all will be saved.

And so you have people like Bishop Barron who say that we can have a reasonable hope that all are saved. And I don’t know if Bishop Barron would include purgatorial hell as a way to explain that. I have said that Bishop Barron’s position actually can be fixed by fixing one word, because most people say, “How can you have a reasonable hope all will be saved?” Look at all the evidence from the saints and the deposit of faith and private revelations and the dangers of eternal hell separated from God for eternity. And I think the problem is when Bishop Barron says, “You can have a reasonable hope that all will be saved.” So if I buy a lottery ticket … Let’s say I buy Powerball. Odds of winning Powerball, I think, are like 80 million to one maybe, and I remember them being 80 million to one. And I tell you, I have a reasonable hope I’m going to win the Powerball lottery tonight.

You’d think, “No, you don’t. What are you talking about?” But if I said, “I have a rational hope I’m going to win Powerball,” do I? Yeah, it’s not irrational. If I said … That someone said to me, “Oh, the Powerball is going on. Oh, yeah, here, hold on.” I am going to imagine I have the invisible ticket that has the winning numbers. It’s going to appear in my hands. I have a rational hope I’m going to win the lottery. No, that’s irrational. But I have a ticket, it could win. There’s nothing irrational about that. I have a rational hope, but it’s rational but its probability is so fantastically low it might as well not be an option at all, even though it’s possible. That’s what I would look at the idea of all people end up going to heaven. That’s like winning Powerball. It would be awesome. It’s not going to happen. It’s possible. It would be amazing. It’s not going to happen, though. That’s honestly how I look at that view of … And that avoids the two extremes of saying it’s definitely going to happen and Bishop Barron’s a heretic, Balthasar’s a heretic. It’s definite people are going to hell because we don’t have a reverse canonization process. I know there’s Judas. It’s a whole different discussion that can be had, but I’ll check it out, though. I’ll write that down, Trent Pomplun. That’d be easy to remember. Just like me, Trent.

Let’s see. Let’s see. Got a few more here. Combat vet. How can I justify myself both in combat and self-defense at home in relation to when Christ says turn the other cheek? Well, I think here … I mean, you think about that particular context, what is happening here, that if someone is striking you … I don’t know. I’m going to have to look at the particular exegesis of this. It’s very easy for people to have a folk exegesis of passages without going into the sociological background of what is being said there to miss the point. So it’s hard. I don’t want to do too much exegesis here without being prepared. It’s like in the Book of Revelation when Jesus says, “You’re neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out.” And what that means is don’t be lukewarm. I’d rather have you be cold to me than being lukewarm in the faith. I’d rather have you be like an atheist than a lukewarm Catholic.

That’s not what Jesus is saying at all. He’s not saying, “Don’t be lukewarm.” He’s not saying, “Be either hot or cold to me.” He’s comparing two springs from two different areas in Asia Minor that were known for having very faithful believers. One had a hot spring, one had cold water from the mountains. And another place that he’s criticizing would’ve had brackish, lukewarm, disgusting water. And the people there didn’t have a lot of faith. So you miss it. So here, I’ve heard the expression, “Oh, well, it’s not like a strike.” It’s like a little dignity slap. And to say, “You know what, fine,” but you’re not really in danger here. But if someone is threatening … But I don’t know if that’s the case, don’t quote me on it. But I would just say here, as a combat veteran, someone who does martial arts, the attitude one ought to cultivate is I am only going to use martial arts in a worst-case scenario when escape is not an option. And I will work to only disable my opponent. And that, I think, is fine because we should turn the other cheek, but we should … So that means if someone does evil to us, we don’t say, “You know what, now I’m going to do evil to you.”

Let’s say somebody at a bar smacks me and says, “Get out of here, old Joseph theory,” and this mean young Joseph guy. He’s like, “That’s for old” … I’m hitting myself. Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? That’s for old Joseph theory and gets to my face, but then he backs away and he walks away. Okay. Your pride, you might think, “You know what, you’re going to smack my face, I’m going to punch you in the head.” But if someone’s diffusing and they’re leaving and it’s done, “Okay, you know what, I’m willing to take a slap to the face if it means you’re going to walk away and you got it out of your system and you’re done.” I find the people who are most skilled at martial arts are the least likely to want to actually fight people. They don’t want to hurt people.

So I think that if you look at it as, “Look, I am only going to use this to prevent someone from committing the sin of causing me serious bodily harm,” you’re completely justified. But if somebody slights you, Jesus commands us to not strike back just out of vengeance. But Jesus would say that we can use proportional force in order to defend ourselves. Ideally, if you’re in a bad situation, you would just try to leave, get out, escape, get away from the situation. It’s not a game, you could get killed. No, these people are fighting for real. But if you’re in a situation where it’s like, “You know what, I’m cornered, there’s no other way out of here,” or “It’s happening, this guy’s on top of me,” then do what you’re going to do and just disable a person and not vengefully take it out on them more by causing more gratuitous damage to them. I hope that’s helpful for you there, Mark.

Let’s see. Let’s see here. Do you still hold the corruptionist position? Have you read the CDFs a letter concerning eschatology? It seems that position is strongly rebuked. Corruptionism is the idea that the human person does not exist after death, but rather what exists is the human soul and the body that is decaying. But we can speak properly of the human soul as the seat of various operations. I mean, I lean towards that view. I think last time I talked about it, I leaned towards it, but I’m not familiar with the CDF talking about corruptionism in the letter on eschatology. So I’ll go and check it out. And if there is a magisterial teaching that is opposed to corruptionism, I’ll have to evaluate the level of authority given to it and what speculations I can offer on that. So thank you for bringing that to my attention. I will go and check that out.

All righty. Well, I think I … Wow, this was really cool.

Let’s see. All right. Well, we covered a lot of ground. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, I think I’m probably going to wrangle it all in. Maybe I’ll just go back through the live real fast at the end. Oh my gosh, I can’t keep track of all of them, but it’s so nice to be here. It’s good to be here as well. Thank you from Scotland. Scotland. Do you have any McDonalds’ out there in Scotland?

Let’s see. All righty. My nemesis, How To Be Christian. Congratulations, Trent. I see that I have a successful nemesis. It’d be embarrassing for me if you weren’t, so thank you. Got to run, though. I don’t know how that all started with us being nemesi, but it is what it is, I suppose. Go check out How To Be Christian’s channel, he has a lot of cool stuff over there.

All right. Well, thank you guys very much. It was cool to be able to do this chat with you all. As I said before, I’m really excited for the channel to grow. And it’s not like an ego thing, it’s like more subscribers means you reach more people. I just want to share the gospel and defend the faith and just reach more people in doing that. So I think the big things I’m going to be focusing on here on the channel, aesthetics, keep it getting better and better. I need to figure out a dress code, too. Black T-shirt, suit, button up. I don’t know. I got to figure it out. I don’t know how to dress myself. So I got married to figure that out.

So I need to figure out aesthetics around here, but we’re getting there. I’m really happy with the new aesthetics. I want to do short focus, 15, 20-minute episodes on topics. Still free for all Friday. Maybe we’ll do a video channel for that at some point. I’ll figure that out. Debates, dialogues, and then the books. Lots of really good books on subjects, so we’ll keep that going. Yeah.

All right. Thank you, guys. Sorry that … There’s so many questions, I couldn’t get to all of them. Maybe for a future one. Oh, if you want me to get to questions in a private way every month, I do Patreon-only questions for my Patreon. It’s at trenthornpodcast.com. First Wednesday, 7:15 p.m. about, or, sorry, 8:15 p.m., I will do them. So Eastern Time, 8:15. So go to trenthornpodcast.com. I’ll do some patron-only questions there on Wednesday night. All right, thank you all very much and we’ll talk to you all later. Have a good one.

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