¶1I am so utterly intrigued by today's topic and really excited to get into it with you. Everyone and their mom has been talking about this, but now it's my turn. And I think I have a pretty different take or at least a different reason for why I'm interested. We're going to get to that in just a second. But what I'm talking about is the recent conversion or at least the recent announcement of the conversion of Joe Schmid from Majesty of Reason from agnosticism to Catholicism.
¶2Now, that is a very drastic change. any conversion is at any time. A total worldview shift is always interesting to me. The name of my channel is mind shift. That is what I'm interested in.
¶3But additionally so because like me, Joe has a channel and he was making a bit more philosophical content, but he definitely had a lot of content. I've gone and looked at it. I wasn't very familiar with him before. I had seen the tier list thing he did with Alex O' Conor. And again, I've went and watched a few videos just so I have some context for this.
¶4plus the main video that I'm talking about, his conversion video. So, we're not exactly in the same space, but I think about this for myself all the time, as I've shared on the channel, and this is the basis for why I'm interested, why I'm skeptical, and why I want to talk about this. I think often of what it would look like if I was convinced of Christianity or any other religion as someone who has a channel like this, right? Cuz that's a totally different category. Do I change the channel?
¶5How does that happen? Does it happen slowly over time? What is the reaction like? What do I share now with my friends and family? If I have converted, am I still figuring things out?
¶6What I believe about this doctrine or this argument or this denomination? Again, it sounds like Joe's done a lot of that work. He mentions that this kind of started back in February and he just announced it a few days ago. And if I'm understanding his path correctly, he was raised Catholic, became an atheist, then became an agnostic, then got interested in theism, and then again in February started ultimately working towards reconverting toward Catholicism. I don't know Joe at all.
¶7And what I don't want this video to be because I hate it when Christians do this, is to say, "Oh, he must be grifting or he was never really an atheist or anything like that." Joe is worth taking seriously from the little bit I've watched of him and looking into his background. He's a Princeton philosophy PhD candidate. He's published in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. He's co-authored an academic book on theistic proofs and of course all the work that he's done on majesty of reason which again I wish I was more familiar with for this video but I'm just not. So if I get anything wrong about Joe, forgive me.
¶8So what happened here? Joe changed his mind. Joe says directly that he has converted, that it is sincere, and that his personal journey involves intellectual, emotional, and spiritual components. Good for him. Seriously, good for him.
¶9Many people I read through the comments. I was interested since I don't know Joe at all. Of course, it was a mixed bag of comments. You had so many people, I've been praying for you. Welcome back to the faith.
¶10Good for you, brother. You had a lot of atheists that were throwing out, oh, he's grifting or this is a April Fool's joke too late in the year or this is some kind of social experiment. They just couldn't wrap their head around that someone that had seemed to understand all of the issues so well all of a sudden was just again 180. Like it's the way he speaks about it. Just watch this opening for those of you that haven't seen the video.
¶11Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church. I'm not kidding. I just converted to Catholicism.
¶12Conversion is a change of heart and mind and that just happened. I'll be honest, that kind of threw me because other than that tier list at that time and only partially and I don't really remember it that well, I have never encountered Joe and so I don't know his personality or how he typically speaks. But going back and watching a few other videos, this seems to be a bit different. I was having a very hard time telling when I initially watched it if it wasn't some joke. I mean, Alex Okconor has done something very similar.
¶13I think it was with a genetically modified skeptic for an April Fool's joke. So was Myth Vision. So it was lots of people. And so it wasn't out of the realm. I wasn't like naturally assuming that he was grifting or anything like that.
¶14But I was like, is this is this real? But it seems very real in the days that have followed. And so I want to take it as real. And if I end up being wrong about that, fine. But for now, I'm thinking good for Joe.
¶15He seems happy. He's gotten some questions answered. he gets to wrap up the mysteries of the universe into this defined tradition of knowledge. I think he's wrong. I think that it's untrue.
¶16I think the religion at large is harmful. But I don't really care what any individual person believes as long as they're not harming others. And we can have a whole another conversation about does someone's inherent belief prop up a religion that does do harm and thus that individual is responsible for some portion of harm. That's something I've been thinking about more and I want to talk about, but again, not in this video. For today, we are going to be talking about what these occurrences look like at large, what we can learn from them, what we should be thinking, what better questions we can be asking.
¶17And the first thing that I want to encourage atheist, because I've already seen some things that I don't love, and it's just my opinion, is that atheism, atheist should be confident enough, secure enough to survive another atheist or agnostic converting to religion. Especially since we've all seen or many of us have seen how this looks when people leave Christianity. Christians scrambled to explain it away. Oh, he was never saved. Oh, Satan was always working on him.
¶18Oh, he had all this unrepentant sin. Oh, he had unforgiveness in his heart. And it's all these excuses so they can keep their ranks clean. And it's disgusting. And I hate it.
¶19Joe does not owe any agnostic or any atheist anything. I promise this isn't like a Joe apologetic video. I'm not defending Joe here. I'm wanting to build a really careful and nuanced case around this. So, yeah, Joe doesn't owe any agnostic or atheist any more than I owe a Christian for leaving the Christian religion, right?
¶20Like, we have to be consistent in our logic here. He gets to follow the evidence wherever he thinks that it leads. But that also means we get to investigate that evidence and question it and push back on that, which is again why I might do a part two here. That's our jumping off point. The next angle that I kind of want to look at this from is the Christian reaction.
¶21What a fascinating thing to experience. Again, I wasn't familiar with Joe, so I don't know like how many people were. His channel size is decent. It's 45,000 people. But all of a sudden, I can't tell you how many comments I got from Christians who were like, "Hey, Joe Schmid just became a Christian.
¶22Therefore something. Therefore, ha, I told you so." or therefore now you're just the stupid atheist holding on to your grudge against God while someone who's actually being intellectually honest has achieved the faith and all of these other kind of implications toward atheism at large or me as an individual because some agnostic that I don't even know converted to one particular kind of this religion that most of the people commenting wouldn't even agree with. And then you have all the like YouTube or apologist types that are hopping on this and using him right away. Now, to be fair, he's part of that. He's going on these shows.
¶23I think he like as I'm filming this is doing a stream with Matt Fred. Am I saying his name correct? I got to learn these people's names. I think I saw a post that he's going to be going on capturing Christianity. Many others are making videos about it.
¶24And there's a few reasons for this. one, I think you do typically have this kind of, hey, we won over someone. It's the same thing. I've covered a few videos on celebrity conversions, but a prominent, educated, wellspoken content creator who was against them, or at least not for them, now being 100% for them. Yeah, of course they're going to use that.
¶25So far, I've been a bit disappointed in how I've seen it used, but I do understand why Catholics would genuinely be happy that Joe has come back to the faith. What I don't love is immediately turning Joe into apologetic evidence for the validity or truth of Catholicism. He is one man who had one conversion to one kind of religion to one part of that religion. This is not a trend. This in and of itself is not evidence.
¶26Joe can share evidence. Others can point to the evidence that Joe is sharing. But I was very disappointed. If I'm being honest, this is maybe the first negative thing I've been saying. I can't believe how much I've been I don't know.
¶27It sounds really positive. The first negative thing that I would say is that I feel like his reasoning or arguing was really weak. Again, it's only a 28-minute video. He's going to be making larger videos. Maybe he just wanted to get the announcement out there, but he took the time to cover some things and they were weak.
¶28They were silly, some of them. They're ones that I don't understand how someone like him who's thought about these things for as long as he has can just immediately overcome. Not even immediately, ever overcome. I don't get it personally, but if I did, I'd be a Christian. There just seems to be this swooping in, this kind of vulturistic pecking at Joe as this grander evidence.
¶29I I've seen a few people compare it to like a Pauline conversion that he's this generation's Paul. And this just seems wild how fast everyone jumped on board. What if he had been doing some social experiment or still is? What if he was grifting and this isn't sincere? Again, I don't think that's the case.
¶30But to the same day make a video declaring that this is absolutely real, thanking God for how God has moved in his life and using it as if it's some kind of evidence, that's wild to me. Which is the reason I don't make those videos when someone converts from Christianity to agnosticism or atheism. I don't say, "Ha, see Christians, look, this guy was smart enough. You're all so stupid. That proves my point." That is a nonsense thing to do.
¶31And I wonder how Christians are feeling about that or do they just not care? Because is anything better than nothing? Right? It's one less person talking against you who is pretty good at it and now they're talking for you. It just seems maybe the word I'm looking for is shallow.
¶32It all seems so cheap. It all seems so much like it's about points and winning instead of what's real and what's good. And I don't care how smart Joe is. I don't care if he's Einstein. These kinds of appeal to authority mean nothing because then what about brilliant Catholics that became atheists, brilliant Protestants, brilliant Muslims, brilliant Mormons, and they all exist.
¶33Unless you're just totally bigoted as a believer and think that if you're not in the right religion, you can't have any merit intellectually. What about all the brilliant philosophers who have been and have remained agnostic or atheist? If you use Joe like this, you immediately create mutually exclusive evidence. Joe's conversion is evidence about what Joe believes and nothing more. Maybe I'm covering this point too much, but it's because I see so much of it from this seat.
¶34A Christian decon converts and he's the devil. Ah, just one person's experience. It proves nothing. One smart agnostic converts. Have you seen this Princeton philosopher?
¶35If he knows well enough to come back to Catholicism, everybody else should too. So if you as an atheist are feeling like we lost one, you're making the same kind of mistake. I think this should not be about a scoreboard. No points awarded or taken away. This is truly neutral.
¶36But I will say kind of moving into my next point here, my next angle that I'm looking at this from, the weirdest thing about this whole thing to me was what the evidence ended up being. Like if we look at the track record, which I am just now getting familiar with, of Majesty of Reason and Joe Schmid, I could understand if it's just like God shows up to him, right? Like he is absolutely visited by an angel or Mary or whoever and they tell him and he believes that it wasn't a hallucination and he can't justify it any other way and so he just has to accept it, right? I think that's the kind of thing that could convert me, which I know sounds weak, but if I'm being honest, personal experience, I think, is what converts most people. I don't think it's argumentation.
¶37In fact, I think the arguments for Christianity and religion at large are so weak so much of the time that when people even talk about what convinced them, I don't think they're being purposely manipulative or lying, but I think they're giving it way more of the ratio than it actually played. I think it's desire, which I see a lot from Joe in that video. >> When I reflected on this story, I was like, this is such a profound and beautiful story of radical forgiveness, radical love, radical purity. And it's like, listen, whatever she's on, I want some of that. >> And things like personal experience that I talked about, >> God was here just launching like a full frontal assault on me to get me converted, right?
¶38like he's just like putting all these like overwhelmingly beautiful and inspiring saint stories on my radar. He's making them have a significant impact on me. Um he's like giving me these like quasi religious experiences to kind of calling me to saintthood. He's given me this like weird almost indescribable magnetic attraction to Catholicism and less about oh the miracle claims are overwhelming really. And if so, what about all the miracle claims of all the other religions?
¶39Like there's a part of it here that needs to be said. I'm not accusing Joe of anything, but isn't it convenient that he converts back to the religion that he was already raised in and familiar with? Isn't it amazing that in all of the thousands of religions that have existed and all of the very specific denominations and splits that have existed within all of those different spiritual and religious beliefs? It just so happens that the very particular one that he would be comfortable with or would want to go back to is right. And if I ever convert back to Christianity, I expect you all to say the exact same thing about me.
¶40That doesn't make Catholicism untrue. It doesn't make Joe Schmidt a grifter, but I do think it's a part of the equation that should be considered, especially when we look at all the evidence that he listed. So, let me walk you through a little bit of what I kind of gathered through the video and through some of the other things that I watched and read about him. He feels that he encountered some pretty good arguments. He had some pretty long conversations with some people that were really quite convincing to him.
¶41He becomes less confident in naturalism. He starts seeing theism as a potentially elegant answer for many of life's big questions like a unifying explanation for consciousness, fine-tuning, morality, beauty, rationality, etc. And sure, I get wanting to know things, right? Consciousness eludes me. I can't possibly begin to understand it.
¶42That doesn't mean God, though, right? Like a lot of this is just God of the gaps. And again, for a mind like his that I've heard to some degree to say that fine-tuning and morality and these unbelievably weak things were convincing is strange. But hey, that's the philosophy of religion. Now, Joe talked about a lot and on some of the other things I saw that his biggest problem was always kind of the problem of evil.
¶43That he couldn't justify the concept of hell. But then he's convinced by things like Marian apparition, exorcists, demonic possessions and manifestations, objects flying, room temperature changes, ukaristic tissues, extreme temperatures, and all kinds of other religious experiences. And not just a little bit, he said he was inundated with miraculous evidence. The other thing that I found strange was that he repeatedly kind of framed his problem as essentially this. Either those things happened, all those miracle claims I gave you just like a really quick list and not even just miracles but divine happenings, right?
¶44Spiritual warfare. So either those things happened or he has to posit enormous conspiracies of people lying. No, that is not how skeptical explanations work. Which again is why it's so interesting to me. I don't get it.
¶45How do you go from the mind Joe had and was exhibiting to making such rookie and fundamental errors? One case could contain poor documentation. Another uh unreliable eyewitness. Over there's a bad chain of custody. Over here is another ambiguous medical recovery.
¶46Over there's some more folklore around a real person. Over there is an actual fraud that was disproved. we see that the evidence was faked. Like, if you need an example of this, I'm thinking because I saw that he's going on capturing Christianity, right? Like, do me a favor.
¶47Go watch these two videos, which Cameron put out with all the confidence in the world, at least in first. Then he took down the first one and put up a second one that really hedged a lot of the bets. But everything in both of his videos was so easy to explain. And not through a conspiracy of conspiracies, not through having to go through leaps and bounds to excuse it all away. Like ridiculous levels of evidence that don't even constitute as such, that were being looked at so myopically from someone in a religion that wanted that religion to be true and to have evidence for it.
¶48This is not convincing at all. over and over and over. It's the unexplained must mean God and God must mean Christianity and Christianity must actually mean Catholicism and then this particular Catholic doctrine. Those are enormous jumps being made left and right and it seems to be like the majority of the basis. Again, I'm not showing you the whole video.
¶49That was going to be my original plan. We were just going to watch it together and I was going to interject. I just want to talk about it. Please go watch it for yourself though. And quick interjection here because I think it's fitting.
¶50As I was researching and trying to learn a little bit more about Joe and his stance, I found a very interesting article from January of this year. Now, again, I think it was in February that this all kind of kicked off for him. But I want to read you where his mind was at like one month before he starts becoming convinced of Catholicism. So, he was asked this question for an article. What impression do you have of the Catholic faith when you hear about these miracles?
¶51Joe says, "When I heard about Eucharistic miracles, I was initially both intrigued and skeptical. I was intrigued because the miracles, if genuine, would surely lend credibility to the Catholic faith, and the church seemed open to rigorous scientific corroboration of the purported miracles. I was skeptical, however, because naturalistic explanations of seemingly miraculous phenomena seem much more likely to me from the outset. This skepticism, however, didn't prevent me from researching the miracles further, and what I learned was a bit disappointing. Some of the investigations behind the miracles are marred by poor methodology, mixed and inconclusive results, and questionable practices.
¶52While some of the findings are suggestive, my general takeaway is that many popular presentations of the miracles are infested by distortions, blatant exaggerations, and suspiciously convenient omissions of key facts. The pernitious effects of these distortions, exaggerations, and omissions extend well beyond Eucharistic miracle investigations. To my mind, they damage the credibility of the Catholic apologist, influencers, websites, videos, and organizations who propound them. When I see Catholic defending some of the exaggerations or emitting some of the inconvenient facts, I immediately become more suspicious of their other claims and arguments. In short, I become less trusting of their Catholic witness.
¶53After all, they evidently haven't done their due diligence concerning a matter they're publicly defending. So, why should I put much stock in the other Catholic miracles or arguments they're publicly defending? This, I think, is why much more rigor, caution, and intellectual humility are needed in this sphere. Reputation, credibility, and general trustworthiness are on the line. This isn't meant to be a gotcha against Joe.
¶54Again, he obviously has changed his mind, but within this same calendar year, that is what he is aware of. That's so powerful. I couldn't agree with that more. And the reason I bring this up is because I want to show you I don't understand how Joe is no longer meeting his own skeptical standard. Like my question to Joe, who is now bought in on all the Catholic miracles, or a lot of them.
¶55I'm sure there's some that he still knows are frauds or whatever, but obviously he believes in many of them despite what he had just said. Is what changed? What evidence all of a sudden appeared? Which previous methodology problems that you talked about got resolved and how? Again, he says this case is coming and his 28-minute video wasn't supposed to be able to answer for everything he's ever said.
¶56Like, totally fair. But that's where my skepticism and curiosity comes from in this particular conversion. So, I'm truly excited for that video. Like, I can't wait to hear him out. I know that the next little angle I wanted to look at here was one specific line that Joe says in that video that I think is incredibly problematic.
¶57He kind of starts this section by talking about why he landed on Catholicism is because of the unifying nature of it. He says, "Catholicism just unifyingly explains all the miraculous evidence." I want to read it cuz I want to get it just right. I wrote it down. Catholicism would make it not particularly surprising that I might be going systematically astray with respect to some of my moral intuitions, including some of my intuitions against hell. Okay, let's call timeout.
¶58Before his conversion, he says that hell seems morally objectionable. But once Catholicism becomes the preferred explanation for the universe, then all of a sudden, his intuition about hell being morally objectionable is just wrong. The theory has begun explaining away evidence against the theory. His worldview is grading its own test because look at it here. He says, "Beauty exists, so what's up with that?" Oh, well, God explains that.
¶59Moral knowledge exists. What's up with that? Well, God explains that. Consciousness exists. Hey, God explains that.
¶60Religious experience exists. God explains that. Miracles are reported. God explains that. Catholic miracles are reported.
¶61Catholicism specifically explains that. But what if I encounter moral evidence against Catholicism? Oh, well, Catholicism just explains why my moral faculties might be wrong about Catholicism. No, now your theory can absorb both the positive and negative evidence. That's very dangerous.
¶62It falls apart as soon as you would apply that to any other god, particular god or religious claim. Like a worldview that can explain everything kind of ends up explaining nothing. Like a theory that can survive every single possible risk becomes what we all know, what we talk about here all the time, unfalsifiable. And yeah, by the way, other religions do this too. Atheists do this too.
¶63A naturalist can argue that religious experience comes from our evolution that granted us agency detection. Right? Like I've made that argument. I think it's a great counter to, oh, it must be God. No, we have a very natural explanation here.
¶64We understand the psychology behind it. But when you go further and you say that every single religious or spiritual experience then becomes evidence for naturalism, you've done yourself a disservice. Political ideologies do this as well. Conspiracy theories do it constantly. But this is what I mean.
¶65I don't think it's a good camp to be in. Atheist included. We can do things wrong. I still think we have the right answer. I don't believe that Yahweh exists.
¶66I think we can know that he doesn't. But I think you can go too far. And I think that you can arrive at that conclusion through really bad or poor evidence that doesn't hold up or is illogical. We should all be doing this before you accept any kind of a worldview. And again, atheism doesn't give you a worldview, but atheists develop a worldview that doesn't include God.
¶67Like that's a very important distinction. But we should all be asking ourselves this. What would count against it? You can't let your worldview rewrite the rules after you've joined it. It still has to be able to answer.
¶68I think I'm being really fair here. Like again, I I want this video to matter. I want this conversation to be beneficial. I don't want to dunk on Joe or say how stupid it is that he converted to this obviously false religion. I'm just saying there's issues here with I think how he arrived at the conclusion that I believe he believes he arrived at.
¶69Here's the last thing that kind of bugged me about Joe's video. And again, I think it's because I was trying to think like, well, well, how would I do it? And just because we would do things differently doesn't mean Joe bad, me good. I understand that. But I kind of feel like changing your mind that drastically should make you a bit more humble, at least for a little bit, right?
¶70Let me explain what I mean by this. Believing Christianity for me was a huge process. Years and years and years and years. And at that first moment where I arrived at the idea that hey, Yahweh isn't real. Christianity is false.
¶71I didn't all of a sudden know everything else. I didn't all of a sudden know why every other religion was also false. I didn't all of a sudden know exactly how the world worked or consciousness worked. I didn't have an answer that I could articulate for every single Christian argument. Those things took time.
¶72In fact, the channel itself only happened after a very long period of time of me postbelieving in this God still going through and learning and checking myself. And even when I started the channel, it still started off a little slower. I was only talking about things that I had had a chance to really come to a conclusion on and felt I had really good evidence for. And as I had more time and the years went on, I got more and more of those and I've been able to talk about more and more subjects. But Joe here had a public identity of Agnostic until very recently.
¶73And again, I want to make clear, I know that this wasn't overnight for Joe. But in this video, he lays out his new plan. >> Here are some plans for the channel going forward. I'm still planning to occasionally produce general philosophy content. There will be a major change, though.
¶74So, the major shift is that I'm planning to focus on arguing for Catholicism and theism going forward. I'll be going through everything I went through in this video in much more depth. It will take a lot of time, but I want to essentially create and compile together the best series of videos in history on arguments for God's existence and Catholicism. Uh I I can't promise it, but I'd like to do it. So, first I'd like to start with arguments for theism, then systematically respond to arguments for atheism, then comb through the miraculous case for Catholicism, comb through the non-miraculous arguments for Catholicism, respond extensively to all the objections to Catholicism issuing from atheists and generic theists and Protestants and Orthodox, etc.
¶75I want to develop an extensive body of videos criticizing other religions. Like again, this is all just like a dream of mine. I'd like to do that. Um, and we will see where the Lord takes me. >> Now, benefit of the doubt, we all use words sometimes that weren't exactly what we meant or what we wanted.
¶76You know, wanting to critique other religions, wanting to help other people, not be left in the dark and find the truth of God. Sure. But in January, he's talking about how ridiculous the methodology is for miracle claims and how there's so much fraud involved. and now he's 100% certain of it to the point where he says out loud part of his mission statement for his channel is to criticize other religions. That was very disappointing to me.
¶77Again, I don't know him, but the hype around him as this very serious thinker. That particular line above all struck me really negatively. By the way, I don't believe any other religions are true either. But I also know I don't, having not grown up in it, not having an education in it, not having actual experience with it, know that I'm not the best person to do that. If I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, though, this could be like his long-term plan.
¶78You know, this is going to be the rest of his life. Now, if he knows that Catholicism is true, then these are all the things he wants to be able to address. But again, to just immediately have this is like, this is what my channel's going to be about, and I know now, and everyone else is wrong, and I'm right. like that that is some of the things we don't like about religion that it seemed like he was well aware of that now he's playing into like I would like to think if I converted someday that I would come at it with the humility of having been on this side for a while right like understanding why people might have a hard time accepting some of these things for me having to have a higher standard of evidence of what convinced me because of all the kinds videos and arguments that I had made and I just didn't see that with Joe. It was like, "Oh, none of that mattered.
¶79I'm a Catholic now. Catholicism is totally true. If I said something negative about it in the past, I was wrong. If I thought hell was bad, it probably isn't because again, Catholicism is true and it says hell is real and God is good." So, like that is shutting the brain down, I think, which is I think what religion does, what it has to do to survive. And so to see that act on this way, if I'm correct at all, on Joe's brain, that seemed pretty darn good at this kind of thing, I think is fascinating.
¶80I think it shows the harm of religion. I think it shows the power of religion. It shows what you have to do to be able to buy in to these things. Like, if I could say it as gently as possible, dude, you just discovered that you were wrong about one of the biggest questions a human can possibly be wrong about. How did that discovery create this much certainty this quickly?
¶81Joe tells the story of St. Maria, a story of murder and forgiveness and transformation because of forgiveness. And he says it's such a profound and beautiful story that whatever she's on, I want some of that. He says this created a kind of magnetic attraction to Catholicism. He goes on to say the same thing about Jesus himself that he's preaching radical love of your neighbor, radical forgiveness and radical self-sacrifice.
¶82Jesus has a lot of other things that he promotes as well that is the opposite of radical love and radical forgiveness. Hell is not radical love. Hell is not radical forgiveness. And hell affects way more people if it were real than the people Jesus was preaching to 2,000 years ago or even that have heard his words today. I'll never understand even when atheists do it that Jesus is such a great guy that he's a moral genius that he was yeah he was unique in his time he went against some of the more stringent parts of the Jewish religion.
¶83He also introduced some of the most harmful aspects of Christianity. But I got off track going back into the critiquing. I really do understand the heart issue, right? I really believe that he was affected by this whether I think he should have been or not. So he explains that he experienced kind of waves of this that he could be a saint.
¶84He's quick to say he didn't actually hear a voice in his head, but he feels like this kind of palpable call to saintthood. And again, if we're being honest, I think that is typically where conversions happen, in the heart, not in the head. But that's also what brings my skepticism about Joe's not necessarily about his conversion, but about how he got there, his methodology, if he's being as fair now as he was before, if he's being consistent with what he said is important in terms of logic and how we approach these things, right? Because if you make the concessions that he made here, hearing good stories that pull on your heartstrings, being convinced of miracles that a couple months ago you absolutely were not and saw through, then it does look to me like the desire for his childhood religion to be true, mixed with the culture around him and his good feelings about Jesus and saints and this radical ideology that he's attracted to. That could all work to prove some other religion true.
¶85Next, he says he became intensely convicted of his sin. That's a feeling. That's guilt or shame. He says God launched a full frontal assault to convert him. These quasi religious experiences like that all this is what I mean.
¶86I was so disappointed. I don't know what I expected. I know everyone gets, you know, convinced for different reasons, but this seems like what we all know is the weakest part of conversion stories and testimonies, personal experience, because if you're not willing to apply to everyone else who claims their religion is true because of their personal experience, then you don't get to do that with yours. I mean, you can you can say, "Hey, I'm a Catholic now, and here's why." But he's going further than that, right? He has a YouTube channel, and he is turning that channel around.
¶87It's not like he said, "Hey, I'm out now." No, he has a mission statement now to prove Catholicism, prove atheist wrong, and criticize other religions. Because of that, I think I have the right to say, I think you need a better founding for your conviction of your belief before you tear down everybody else's ideas. At the end of the day, beauty just isn't the same thing as truth. Desire just isn't the same thing as truth. The feeling of goodness about having an answer and having everything unified just isn't the same as truth.
¶88And everything I just covered also, I think, is why one of my first points becomes especially potent. Everyone is saying that Joe, the great philosopher, has converted to Christianity, thus it should count as some kind of evidence, but he's not using any tools of reason and logic and philosophy. I mean, he says it's a mixture of head and heart. I'm not saying he doesn't have any reasons, but a lot of the reasons that he says go back to god of the gaps or feelings or personal experience. That's it.
¶89Let's wrap up here. I hope I explained myself well. I think that this was a really interesting topic that allowed us to have a more nuanced conversation about conversion and evidence and psychology than we sometimes otherwise get to have. I'm not responsible for my audience, but I will say I would appreciate it if my audience can kind of get behind this and not partake in either awful side that is going on with Joe's conversion. Maybe someday I'll get to have a nice conversation with Joe about this.
¶90I don't know. But let's be the ones who are consistent. Let's be the ones who remain with rationality and logic. Joe is a person. He's not a chess piece.
¶91And I believe Joe. I believe that Joe is convinced. I believe he looked into evidence and had head and heart experiences that led him to this conclusion. And I also think he's wrong. And I'm fine with both of those statements.
¶92And I bet Joe is too because Joe knows at least did know what I know, which is that everybody can be wrong. Christians can be wrong, atheists can be wrong, smart people can be wrong, educated people can be wrong, philosophers can be wrong, mind shift can be wrong. Majesty of reason can be wrong. And if the opposite happens and five years from now Joe says, "You know what? I was wrong again." That's not a point for us.
¶93It's not a point against Christians. It's just one person's conversion. Let's all just shoot for as much fairness as possible. That's it. I'm going to shut up now.
¶94Thank you so much for being here today. I'm really excited for the comments. I will see you Thursday hopefully with a new comment deep dive. And until then, keep thinking. I wanted to personally thank my top tiers of support.
¶95My coniclist, Chris, Grace Steel, Jimmy, Joe, Kipogga, Lorie, Matthew, and Perry. My humanist heroes Chris, James, Jared, and Christy. my atheist advocates, Equitar, Caleb, Caleb, Dakota, Dan, Jeff, Jeffrey, Jugs, Julie, Melissa, Paul, Regga, Sparky, and Thomas, as well as all of my secular scholar patrons and new mind shifter members. Thank you so much for your support. It means more than you can ever know.