YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Barron

lines on the record: 123
first: 2022-07-20
most recent: 2022-07-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's too much of it. If I were to steal man that argument, I do what Stephen Fry does. I would do what Dostoevsky's Ivan does. I would do exactly that. I would say there's just too much. And then if you want to keep pressing it, animal suffering. So we talk about human suffering, but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on. Isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with an infinitely good God? And that's, again, Thomas Aquinas. I've just used his very steel manned argument.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We trusted because we know on other grounds of God's existence. See, I would resist the claim that, well, this is such a knockdown argument. So now we know there is no God. I would say, no, there are all kinds of other rational warrants for God. And so I know that God exists. I know that God is infinite love. And now I got to square that with this experience. And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence that God knows what he's about. You know, again, I know how inadequate that always seems to anyone who's suffering, including myself, when I'm in great suffering. But I think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the limit case of evil, humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering and death, it's all there. And that's where the Son of God went. And I would say that's why as a priest I went there. That's my job is to go to those places. So that's the ultimate answer to the problem.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What? And just by instinct, I went like that too. I went like. I don't know what to tell you. I can't. I don't have an answer for you. But I was there. I'm not saying to pat myself on the back. That's where the church goes because Jesus went there. Now we're gesturing toward a more theological response. The first one's more austerely philosophical, God permits evil to bring about a good. But the theological response is that's where Christ went is he went all the way down. He went all the way down into our suffering. And see the cross.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. No, but trust me when I tell you, I mean, I completely get it in my own life and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time, with people in pain all the time. I remember as a young priest, there was a policeman in our parish. So he had a gun. And inexplicably, no one had any clue. He got up one night, shot his son to death, and then shot himself. This is in my parish. So I went to the wake, I remember I show up. I'm this young 27-year-old goofball priest. I might roll my collar on it. I walk in and there were two coffins. There are two coffins in the room. You know, there's the son and the father. And the mother was there. And she went like this to me. She saw me're the religious guy here.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Son, this is what the father told me. He said, He's looking at me. Like, what gives here? I mean, why would you love me? I've always assumed that. And yet you're presiding over this somehow. You're approving of this and doing nothing to get me out of it, right? And he said the kid couldn't articulate that, but his eyes did. And the father said, it was just killing me because I knew I couldn't explain it to him. And it's true. He could vaguely gesture toward, but the kid didn't understand surgery and cutting his body and taking things out of it and that this was going to make him much better in the long run. But I remember thinking that's a great metaphor for us vis- ⁇-vis God is here's God infinitely loving God who's with us all the time and we say what are you doing? Why aren't you taking this away from me? And the answer, I mean, ultimately is trust. Trust me. Trust me. Surrender to me.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, how could we have the arrogance to say I know there's no good that could ever come from that? I know there's no morally justifiable reason why God would ever permit that. Because I think that's hubris to the nth degree for us to say that. And that's the assumption behind this claim that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good. Now, God understands it, but we're like little kids, you know, like a four-year-old and their parents make a decision. And we say, what in the world would you do this to me? This is my pastoral experience years ago. There was a young father and his son was like three or something. And he was in the hospital for something. I forget what it was, but he had to undergo surgery, right? So after the surgery, he's in great pain. This poor kid, this three-year-old kid. And the dad was there with him, you know, holding his hand.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, sometimes we can see it, and that's where the idea comes from, that evil's permitted to bring about some greater good. And we can sometimes really see it. Can we always see it? No. In fact, typically we don't see it. But now you bring another factor into this, which is the difference between our minds and God's mind. So our minds, I mean, look, even they're remarkably capacious, but they take in a tiny, tiny, tiny swath of space and time. And even like our eyes kind of like taking so much of the light spectrum and these little ape sensorium that we have that could just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really, how are we ever in a position to say, oh no, there's no possible good that would ever come from that? Even the greatest evil that, you know, every Dostoevsky and can conjure up and Stephen Fry.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The famously atheist writer, he will bring out this argument with great authority. He does. Of children with bone cancer and worms that go into the eyes of children and blind them before they kill them. But he's been preceded by the author of Job, Thomas Aquinas, and Dostoevsky, who stood right, think of Job in the whirlwind. He stands there in the whirlwind. So you can't blame the Christian tradition for not dealing with this problem, for brushing it under the carpet. I mean, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Job, he's great. I mean, he's a great guy. He does everything right. He's God's great servant. And he's punished in every possible way. He has every possible suffering. Aquinas' argument from the Summa. And then to your friend and mine Dostevsky. I think in the Brothers Karamatsov, Ivan's argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha. And these examples drawn, they think from Dostogski from the headlines of his own time of the most abject cruelty to children, like an innocent child being made to suffer. How, in God's name, could that happen if God exists and he's all good? So I get it, but see, the book of Job, Thomas Aquinas, Dust Devsky, these are all profoundly believing people. When I hear Stephen Fry.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. From his medieval physics, he goes if there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold. But God is described as infinitely good. Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil. But there is evil, therefore God does not exist. That's a darn good argument. That's a really persuasive argument. And I think, and I've done this for a long time in apologetics and in sort of higher philosophy, that's the best argument against God. But here's something before I press ahead with it. Something I find really interesting. I think the three best arguments against God all come from within the religious tradition. Namely, the book of Job.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can gesture toward it using rather abstract language, which is true enough. It's completely emotionally unsatisfying, but it's naming it truthfully enough. And it goes back to Augustine, which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good. Again, I know how unsatisfying that sort of spare, austere language can sound, but it gets us off the horn of a dilemma. Aquinas, you know, when he lays out a question, he always has the objections first. So is there a God? Well, objection one, objection two, objection three. And he's really talking about steel manning an argument. Aquinas is great at that. One of the really steel manned arguments, is that the right grammatical form? What's the past participle about the steel man? One of the best arguments he formulates it this way.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people who have a tendency toward abusing children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access to kids and they get institutional cover. So that's the only go through the list from sports and Boy Scouts, et cetera. And that's been proven again and again. So I would tie it more to that. I wouldn't tie it to celibacy”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I might use the language of sublimation or redirection of energy and all that. I think that's true. There's a certain sublimation of energies into prayer, into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies. So it's meant to be life-enhancing the same way fasting is, it's meant ultimately to be life-enhancing and make you healthier and happier. So celibacy is a path of love. And I think it does involve a certain redirection of energies. Let's say that.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, right. I'm glad there were celibates, but I'm glad not everyone's a celibate. I wouldn't want that. I mean, because married love is a marvelous expression of the divine love. So that's why it's good there are some. And it's always been a small number.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Church. And I've known some very powerful witnesses to pacifism. I'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares and heaven's a place of radical peace that some people even now live it. At the same time, I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist because I would hold with the church to a just war theory that there's sometimes all we can do in this finite world is to fight manifest wickedness.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever Jesus was challenged about the person who had a whole series of husbands and then they all died. And so in heaven, which one, which husband will the wife have? And his answer is in heaven, people don't marry and they're not given in marriage. There's a higher way of love. It's a more radical way of love. It's not tied to a particular. But I think through God is tied to everybody. The celibate, and this has been to the beginning of the church, not as a law, but there were celibates from the very beginning of the church, including Jesus, of course, and Paul. They sensed something that that way of living mystically anticipates the way we'll love in heaven. It's a sign even now within this world of how we will all love in heaven. So in that way, it's a bit like pacifists. I'm glad there are pacifists in the church.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a good way to get at it. It's a path of love. So the church is always in favor of inculcating love. Marriage is a path of love. But so is celibacy. St. Paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of this world and family and those who are free from that are freer for doing the work of God. So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy. And we still, I think, take that seriously. Look at my own life. I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and minister in a way that I could not if I had been married. So I get it. I get the pragmatic side. But I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to protect institutions, you know, that's always a sinful instinct. I'm not altogether. I mean, sure, an institution is worth protecting, but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent to people's well-being, then you're in trouble.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's awful. And it's been a problem. Go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century was talking about it. So it's been a problem. And whenever really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to children, we find this issue has been around the church. Yes. Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years? Absolutely. I'm glad the church has made important strides, and it has. Back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas Accords, where the bishops of America put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective at ameliorating this problem. The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s, and that's been demonstrated over and over again. And then they fell dramatically after that. So that's not to excuse anything, but it's to say, I think progress has been made with it.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a guy that rode the wheel of fortune like crazy, he was at the top of the world in every way. And then beatles break up and he kind of loses it. And then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s at the very bottom. When he died, he was just kind of coming back up again. But the song I always think of is Watching the Wheels, right? I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and around. I really love to watch them roll because I'm no longer riding on the merry-go-round. That's right out of the medieval mystics, that he's not riding on the wheel. He's just watching it go round and round. That's the point of the Greeks call it apathea, and the Latins call it indifference. Not like I'm blaze. It just means I'm detached from success, failure, less success, more success. Detached from that. I'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round because I'm not writing on it anymore. The mystics have always made that transition.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. The image I love for this is the Wheel of Fortune, which is a device on a lot of the Gothic cathedrals. And it's this great circle, right? This wheel. At the top of it is a king. And then it turns this way, and as a king has lost his crown, and the bottom is a pauper. And then over here is a king. climbing up to power, right? And then in the middle is a depiction of Christ. And the idea is it's very simple, but very profound, that the wheel is life. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. Sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige. Where love can flow through you to the world. And then you can look at the wheel. You're a Beatles fan, right? I think I discovered that. I love the Beatles. And the song that always comes to my mind when I think of that image is John Lennon at the end of his life.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the masters talk about detachment, and that's another reason I don't like the prosperity gospel is though I'm getting attached now to all these material advantages. And I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor. Let go of all that. You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love. So if you're rich, the right question is, okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich so that what can I do? How can my riches be an expression of love? If I am popular, if I am healthy, okay, why am I popular? Why am I healthy? How can I use that for your good? I'm sick in bed. I'm suffering. Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love? So I'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success. That's why I'm against the prosperity gospel.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the view that if I follow Jesus and I follow God with great trust that I will be rewarded with wealth and position and status in this world, it might be God's will, but I get that. But Aquinas said this, say I look at a very sinful person, I say, kind of he's got a great house and he's richer than I am and all that. Aquinas says, yeah, but maybe that's a punishment because maybe all that is leading him away from God. And actually, that's God's way of punishing him. And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house is actually a great gift to you because now it frees you for doing God's will. So we can't read God's favor in worldly terms. I would say God's favor is, am I awakened to deeper love? Then I know that I'm finding God's favor. Now God might decide, sure, I want you to have this and that. I want to provide this to you. Fine. Then I say, thank you, Lord. How can I use it as an instrument of love?”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like the prosperity gospel because the gospel is about Jesus' journey into radical self-forgetfulness on the cross. And he never makes a promise of earthly well-being.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's okay. I mean, that's part of the role of the hierarchy and the pope and bishops and pastors. Pastor just means shepherd, right? I'm the shepherd of a parish. So that's okay. It's not like just all sunshine and light and what a pretty image. The one who embodies the unity of a community is also the shepherd.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I might just shift to another image of Shepherd. So that's a classic biblical image. And as a bishop, I walk around with this thing called the Crozier, which is a shepherd staff, right? So it's the symbol of the bishop's office. And the crozier, though, is a kind of in your face thing in a way because it's got the end of it was meant to hold off wild animals and then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold, right? So I walk in with that. Oh, this is nice. Look at the bishop coming in. But that's a kind of in your face symbol that I'm here to defend the church against predators. And I'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Aderm ⁇ ller, who was a theologian early part of the 19th century. And he was part of the kind of romantic movement. And he said the purpose of the Pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church. So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church. Who's a bishop? The bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of a diocese. Who's a pastor of a parish? He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish. So he understood it not so much organizationally as organically again. It was like that around which the pattern organizes itself. And if you don't have that unifying figure, the community will kind of facip. And you see that all the time without headship, we would say. So it's more symbolic and organic than it is organizational.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, whatever is corrupt in the church, of course, it comes from. What's the one thing we know about them is they fought with each other because Paul's always upbraiding them and telling them, come on, would you people get it together? And who's bewitched you? And so from the beginning we've been fighting with each other because we're made up of sinners. And so one thing we do in Catholic ecclesiology is the official name for the study of the church is to talk about the treasure and earthen vessels. Paul's language again. The treasure is Christ. The treasure is the love he's bequeathed to the world. That's the treasure that we have, but it's always held in these really fragile vessels, namely us. And so it's going to be marked by corruption and stupidity and pride and everything else.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's the mystical body of Jesus. So, as I said before, it's not an organization. If we do it that way, we're going to miss it. It's got organizational elements to it. So I'm a bishop. I'm an office holder within the church. But the church is an organism, not an organization. So it's an organism of interconnected cells that I said, namely all of the baptized gathered around Christ in a mystical union. That's the church”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the tradition eventually came to see that. The image I was using before of the father his imago, the son, well, that's born of God's infinite mind. So, of course God has an image of himself. Heck, I've got an image of myself. That's something I can pull off as a puny little creature. God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself. And they have to fall in love with each other. What else can they do? Because they're in the presence of infinite good. And so it has to follow that you then have the shared love that connects them. And that's how we generate, if you want, this idea of the three persons in God.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing I'd say is what we already have been sort of talking about is if you say God is love, and most people probably say, yeah, I like that. That's a good idea. God is love. But it's very peculiar because if he is love, there has to be in his unity a lover, a beloved, and the love that they share. Otherwise, he isn't loved by his very essence. He would love, it would be an attribute of God or an action of God. But if it's his very nature, there has to be lover, beloved, and love shared.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each other with this sigh, and we call that the spiritus sanctus. That's the holy breath, right? The holy sigh of love between the Father and the Son. And that's one being, one essence we say of God, but in these three persons. But all your language about like dance and play and community, the Greek fathers talked about pericoras, which means God, the three persons kind of sit in a choir together. So they sing together, you know. And that's why, see. Christianity is unique in this claim that God is love. So every religion will say God loves in some way, loves an attribute of God. God is, or love is a thing that God does sometimes. But Christianity is unique in all the religions in saying that God is love.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“eternity by a great mental act forms his interior word as Aquinas puts it. And that's the law cause, right? That's the Verbum. That's the word by which the Father knows himself. And we call that the Son. So the imago, it's the image of the Father. But the great thing is that imago is not like just a dead image on a mirror or a dead image on a pond or something. It's a full reflection of the Father's being. He's one in being with the Father. Therefore, the Son has everything the Father has except being the Father. But that means that the two of them look at each other and they're just crazy in love with each other because the Father is the fullness of being, the Son is the fullness of being. And they're so crazy in love with each other that this is Fulton She put it this way, that there's this, they just, they love.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several minutes ago, about the pillars of Christianity, so we talked about God, talked about incarnation, but you're getting now to a third key one, namely the Trinity. But we don't think God is monolithically one. We think God is a play of persons. And the father from”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to be hard nosed about it. Like, you know, your friend Dostoevsky, that love is a harsh and dreadful thing. It's not a feeling. And our culture is so sentimentalized love that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want. And that's not it at all. Love is always correlated to the order of the good. Because if I'm willing the good of the other, I have to know what that good is. So, a parent that says, oh, give the kid whatever she wants. Well, that's not love. That's indulgence, or that's sentimentality. But I have to know what the goods really are if I'm going to will them for you.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might talk about like a gift of self that you you're self aware, but you give a gift of yourself. Yourself becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself, but it becomes a radiant source of life for others. Mother Teresa would have had a keen sense of herself, it seems to me, but it was to light other people up so that they might be radiant. You know, that's the game. So you could probably articulate it that way too.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the beach. And see, play it the way not so much God the law giver surveying and you did three of those and four. It's God wants us to be fully alive. St. Irenaeus is one of my great heroes, ancient patristic figure. And his famous line is Gloria Dei Homo Vivens, right? The glory of God is a human being fully alive. And that gets us over this sort of obsession with legalism. That we might come to a richer appropriation of that.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not connected to the black hole tendency of my own prideful ego when I've broken that I've forgotten self and I've moved into the space of your own good. That's what love is. Now God wants us to be, by this they will know that you're my disciples, that you love one another, Jesus says. So that's it. Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth, and we're better or worse at that. The point of a church is to graft us onto Christ that we might become more and more conformed to love. But the final calculus, I'll leave that to God. I mean, but use love as the metric. At the end of the day, when you examine your conscience, did I will the good of the other today? How effective was I at that? And this Ignatius of Liola, be brutally honest, or was I just willing someone's good because it was good for me? Where were those moments where I was like the dog?”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As others. See, because if I'm willing, you're good because it's good for me. So it's good for you that I'm on this program, I guess. I'm willing you're good, but that's because it's going to redound to my benefit. That's just an indirect egotism. That's why I see love is really rare and strange that I really want what's good for you as other.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the metric is love, right? And love is not a feeling. It's an act of the will to will the good of the other. That's Aquinas again. To will the good of the other as other. See, that's the anti-black hole principle.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though he was in the form of God, and this is St. Paul, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born the likeness of men. But then he was known to be of human estate, and he accepted even death death on a cross. And so Paul imagines that incarnations this downward journey. In order to get all of us, all of us who were stuck in our sin. And so, again, Paul says he became sin on the cross. It's a really, really powerful idea. He wanted him a sinner, then he'd need to be saved too. He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction in order to pull us back out of it.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found Beatitudo, right? I found joy, the beatific vision we call it. That's the limit case. That's where we're tending. That's where God wants us to go. Think of hell as a limit case in the opposite direction. That's curvatus and say, that's the black hole. And we're all sinners, meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum. We have good days and bad days and we have good moments and bad moments. And I can be drawn toward sin. What's God's purpose and Christianity's reading is to bring us out of that. Now, where did he go? He went all the way into it to get us out of it. It's like pulling the sock back out, socks inside out. You have to go all the way in and pull it back out. And so God had to go all the way down. And there's the trajectory of the incarnation.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God. So think of the dog on the beach who is just, he's fallen in love with his environment, with his master, with the surf. He's just lost in it, right? He's forgotten himself. He's transcended himself and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place. Now, imagine the limit of that is the friendship with God that we talked about, that I become the friend of God. I become forgetful of myself, so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God that I'm”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those moments in our life when we get that, it's a little hint of paradise. But the trouble is most of us live, frankly, most of the time, in various levels of hell. And we're dealing with these deadly sins. Like envy flows from pride. Because if I'm prideful, I'm a black hole. I'm in Karvatu Sensei, I'm collapsed in. What am I really going to be concerned about? That guy's getting more attention than I am. That guy's richer than I am. That lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do. And why don't I have that? So envy is a very close daughter of pride. Anger flows from it. Why do I get angry? The dog isn't getting angry on the beach when he's running after the tennis ball. But I get angry all the time. I sputter with anger when things aren't going my way and you're insulting me and you're not doing what I want and I'm being hurt and my reputation. So anger flows from pride. All of them do. All of the Devil Sins do.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they bring Aquinas in again because we think humility, I'm no good. That's not what it means at all. It means what I was describing before. When you're just lost in something, you're just lost in it. My image, I live out in Santa Barbara, and I like to walk on the beach out there. And there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs run free without leashes. And when you see a dog and he's well cared for and his master's right there and the master's throwing the tennis ball out in the surf and the dog was galloping out into the surf and he gets it with a big smile and comes running back. That's humility. That's an image of heaven because he's just lost in that moment. He doesn't care about impressing anybody. He doesn't care about what people think of him. He's just lost in it. That's it. That's heaven, right?”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, which is why the masters tend to say this was Bernard, St. Bernard was asked what are the three most important virtues? And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas. Because it's the Because it's the opposite of pride.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also from all three mouths, he's chewing a sinner. He's got Cassius Brutus and Judas in the three mouths, you know, the three traitors. But I thought it's just a great image of all of us sinners is we're stuck. It's heavy. It's cold. We're chewing on our past resentments. We're weeping in our sadness. And we're making the world around us colder. It's beautiful. It's great. So that's pride. See, that's an image of pride because Satan, that's his great sin. Pride, which is why he needed Michael, right? Mikael, who's like God. So the great challenge to him, which we need all the time, is someone to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not God. But the minute we say, I'm God, black hole. I now cave in on myself. I suck everything into myself and I turn into Dante Satan. So that's a great image.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's not fire where he is, but ice, which is much, much better image, that you're frozen in place and you're stuck. And he's got wings, right? And they used to be angel wings because he's an angel, but now they're like bat wings for Dante. And they're flapping. And all they're doing is making the world around them colder because he's ice. He's stuck in his own iciness. And then he's beating his wings over the ice, making everyone else colder. It's a great image. And then he has, this is cool too. He has three faces, Satan, because he's the simulachrum of the Trinity. So every sinner thinks he's God. So I pretend I'm God. So he's got the three faces. And from all six eyes, he weeps.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But see, compared to the contrasting thing is when you're lost in a moment, you're not concerned about the impression I'm making. You're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself. You're not concerned about this monkey on my back that's always telling me, you know, look good and sound right, but you're lost in something. You're just talking to a friend and the two of you together are discovering something true or beautiful. You're lost in a movie or you're lost in a book. Those are the best moments in life. Those are the best because they're the least prideful moments, right? That's when the light comes out. I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself. Dante is so good because the way he pictures Satan in divine comedy. And he's at the center of the earth. So like a black hole that way, he's at the center of gravity. He's at the heaviest place.”
2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source