¶1And like for me, I was like, okay, I just have this almost properly basic sense. It just seemed to manifest to me that like if the dude is supernaturally reduplicating Christ's passion wounds in the context of a vision of Christ, [laughter] saying, "I made you to my passion." Christianity has to be true. That's awesome. We have uh Joe Schmidt here with us today. If you don't know who Joe is, he just recently converted to certified grifting.
¶2He has become another certified grifter along with all of us grifters here, as you know. That's what we do. We grift. So, welcome to the grifting club, Joe. We're happy to have you.
¶3>> I appreciate it. I just received my, you know, certification in the mail and I even brought it. So, um I I've got the I've got the receipts. >> So, yes, we have Joe Schmid with us. was agnostic for many many moons and then he recently uh converted to Catholicism which Stan knew about.
¶4I didn't know about till like two weeks ago. So you did a really good job keeping that private. Thanks fan. >> Uh I I Joe was a friend and I promised I wouldn't say anything including you, Mike. Sorry.
¶5>> Yeah. You know who also didn't tell anybody? Matt Frad. Matt Frad was like someone converted but I can't say who it is. [laughter] when I was there with him in like April or March it was.
¶6And I'm like, "Oh, okay." And I was like, "Can you give me a hint?" He's like, "No." I'm like, "All right. All right. Fine. Whatever. [laughter] >> Oh, thank you, Matt.
¶7Wonderful." Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> Totally didn't say anything. So, I'm very disappointed in both of them. >> So, can you kind of give just like a a brief 30 second rundown who you are um and why and >> yeah, let's just stay there and then we're going to kind of go into your journey a little bit is what I wanted what I wanted to do.
¶8>> Yeah. So, I'm currently a philosophy PhD candidate at Princeton University. I uh got my undergrad at Purdue University and I run a YouTube channel called Majesty of Reason where I host discussions with philosophers and I make lecture videos um that like are usually on my research but also sometimes about like a conversion and sometimes they even get up to like you know 12 hours long and you put them together they get like 25 hours long. So I I do like the kind of in-depth content on my channel. And so yeah, um for a long while I had been an agnostic, very public critic of um arguments for theism, Christianity, etc.
¶9And then um relatively recently, I was just like inundated with evidence for Christianity and for Catholicism. And so I was like, okay, I got to give it up. I got to submit my life to Christ. And so then that happened. And then I spent uh roughly 6 months under the radar um just you know quietly trying to you know immerse myself within the sacramental life of the church.
¶10>> Mhm. >> Before I was ready to go public. Um and then I went public and then the world exploded and here we are post explosion. [laughter] >> So on that >> go ahead Mike. >> Yeah on that.
¶11So you obviously converted because you just didn't really study the evidence. You don't know anything about what is the term Philos philosophy or something like that. You don't know much about that, but you just you just got sad one day and decided to convert. This is the obvious this is the obvious thing that happened if I'm correct >> basically. Yeah.
¶12Yeah. No, I mean [laughter] Yeah. No, I mean like listen um yeah, I've been an agnostic for quite some time. So I mean I grew up Catholic. Um I guess around 9th grade or so, maybe nearing the end of it.
¶13I don't know the problems for theism kept mounting and mounting and I was exposed to the problem of ev evolutionary animal suffering and I was like a man seems like God just instituted this horrific means by which he creates biological diversity in general and humans in particular and it seems like he could have done so much better and it seems like he should have done so much better. Um and then I had all these other problems for you know the Bible and various other things. And so as a result of all that I deconverted uh became a kind of naturalistic atheist thought that you know fundamentally reality is just blind pitulous and indifferent as uh Richard Dawkins says. Um you know I did listen to the new atheists and was influenced by them some in high school. Um but I don't know that kind of phase didn't last too long.
¶14I I just sort of graduated from that relatively early on to people like Paul Draper and Jeff Louderder and various others who were old. >> Yeah. How old were you when you went from the new atheist to like the Draper >> 10th around 10th grade or so >> near the beginning of my uh senior year. So it was actually this summer right before my senior year. I came across the work of like Josh Rasmmanson >> and I was like whoa whoa man this is like new and interesting and cool stuff that he's publishing.
¶15These are some like good arguments. [laughter and gasps] And so I was like, "Oh man, I think I prematurely judged the question of God's existence. I think like, you know, there's much more to theism than I thought. I read his books." Um, I read his I read Alexander Pruce's work and I was like, "Okay, I need to become agnostic." And so then that persisted for quite some time all throughout college and, you know, through maybe the first year of grad school or something like that. And then uh so yeah, and I just kept on trying to fight back and uh eventually I sort of was like, "Oh man, there's much more to this argument than I thought." thought and I was even getting other arguments and I was finding new responses to the problem of evil and then so I was starting to maybe and I was losing lots of my objections to the fine tuning argument.
¶16Uh and so I started leaning towards theism and then I just started becoming inundated with like really good evidence for miracles and then that ultimately >> together with a whole concoction of other factors >> that ultimately won the day. >> But have you ever considered the argument if bad if God exists why bad thing happened? But have you ever considered that? I don't think you have obviously. >> No, I don't think I've heard of that.
¶17Do you want bound upon it? [laughter] >> No. No, I don't. Anyway, S, what were we gonna say? >> No, I was going [clears throat] to say like I think the fact that you and this is coming from a perspective I think for me at least where I've been pushing the argument for miracles with Caleb um and Cameron and them for quite some time about two years now.
¶18And in my personal experience, the it's the argument that gets met with the most hostility. Like it's almost like somebody is offended that you would use that argument and they're like, "How dare you use such a bad argument against me? What do you think?" Like, like you are just so intellectually responsible to even talk about this. Like that's how it feels. I'm not saying that's what they're saying.
¶19I'm just kind of painting my experience. So, I that's why I'm not too surprised about kind of how it's broken the internet too at the same time. But I what I before we get into the argument for miracles, I think what I really want to know is like if people people before your announcement, Joe, they would have looked at you and they probably would have thought maybe he'll become a Christian one day, but he'll most likely stay an agnostic his whole life, right? And it sounds like there's this process where there was these arguments for theism that you were getting convinced by and then the argument from miracles comes along. It was psychophysical harmony, novelological harmony, a priority moral knowledge.
¶20Is there anything else in there that like >> Yeah, fine-tuning um like the empirical side, but also just like the opiori side of fine tuning. I covered this in my um you know my recent video on like the best ever. I mean obviously it's a YouTube t it's a YouTube video, right? So people call them, right? But you know I got to play the YouTube game.
¶21So, you know, my best ever argument for God's existence or whatever. Um, yeah. So, I covered the opori fetine tuning and I mean a number of other considerations, but um yeah. So, let's let's get into some of these miracle examples that really like pushed you over the edge. What are some of these miracles that led you to Christianity specifically?
¶22Because Stan has been doing a lot of work on this. We've making a ton of shorts about various miracles that have occurred. Uh what how did this get you over the edge? Yeah. Good.
¶23[laughter] >> Well, for those interested, I have 11 hours on this. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> Um, let's see. Okay. Maybe I will pick maybe I'll pick like two or three that have a kind of special place in my heart.
¶24Okay. So one of them which has a special place in my heart is Our Lady of Zetun or Zaiton >> because I was aware of this even when I was like agnosticle leaning theist >> and I I just was like >> dude I don't know what to do with this and it's like [laughter] >> it's like a good it's a really well evidenced marina version I'm like oh my gosh okay so you know this is between 1968 and 1971 >> in um I think it's a suburb of Cairo Egypt called Zetun. There is a church or uh it's like St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church. And um you know one evening, I think it's in April 1968, like a few Muslim transit workers are like, "Oh gosh, there's like a nun on top of the building and she's about to end her life.
¶25I'm not going to get you demonetized, so you're welcome." Uh she's [laughter] she's about to end her life. So, uh, they go and like they knock on like the priest and they're like, "Dude, like your nun, your sister is like on top and she's on top of the copic orthodox church. She's about to jump off. Like, come on. What are we going to do?" I think they also like called the cops or something like that.
¶26Um, and then like when they look at this apparition in more detail, they're like, "Oh, wait a second. This like luminous female figure is actually like it started to like float and they're like, "Oh, that's not a nun." And they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is the Virgin Mary." And um, so that was just like the first night. uh you know the crowds started gathering because this happened more and more often um different nights uh and you know like they shut off power to the neighborhood. That didn't stay the operation. In fact like it it lasted like hours when they did that when they shut off the power to the neighborhood.
¶27And then yeah, like things just blossomed and the apparition kept on happening. And then basically like later on within this 1968 to 1971 period, uh there were literally hundreds of thousands of people in the the crowds that gathered around this church. Um and we just have thousands, that's not an exaggeration, thousands of contemporary like detailed eyewitness reports. And they're also these like super striking like independent convergences and undesigned coincidences between people at like different sides of the church and different um and you can like coordinate them in really striking ways where it's like and they're describing like intentional movements on the on the uh part of this. >> Yeah.
¶28There's literally testimonies where you like somebody on one side of the church will talk about being able to see the figure and then the figure goes away and then somebody on the complete opposite side of the church ends up seeing the figure and those testimonies converge and everything. And you can you can go down to like the time and like how >> tiny details and they'll even mention like specific like structural details of the church, right? Where it's like okay well there's no way dome Yeah. Yeah. >> It's [laughter] crazy.
¶29>> And they and dude some of them are like Yeah. Um they're like we got to them where it's like yeah she was wearing a crown and she was slightly tilting her head and it's like both of them say that and you're like whoa. And there's another one where it's like she slowly extended her arms to bless and greet us. And like both of them said that I was like oh my gosh. So yeah, just like thousands of testimonies to this like luminous female distinctively female-shaped uh figure engaging in intentional movements, bowing to the cross, kneeling before the cross.
¶30Um all these like anomalous um seemingly like dove-ike objects which seem to be like luminous. They seem to be like radiant and they would just like spontaneously form fly sometimes in formation of a cross and like also like seemingly spontaneously fizzle out and they would fly without flapping their wings. Like we got lots of testimonies to this. There were like billowing clouds of incense on top of this church as well that people testified to. Um like we had the the Coptic Orthodox Church set up like this commission to uh investigate um healing miracles and there we just had like medically documented healings of like cancer and like uh hernas and like thyroid disease and I think also like blindness and muteness like >> like dude like the paralyzed are walking, the blind are seeing, the deaf are hearing.
¶31[laughter] like uh it's like all the same sorts of like vindicator miracles that are present in Christ's ministry. It's like we got them here with like medical documentation it seems. So um yeah um it was it was a silent apparition. Um and so uh you know the the best defender of the um our lady tune these days Dr. Travis Dums I've got his book right over here um which I highly recommend people check out.
¶32It's called the Marion apparition at Zetune. Um an evidential inquiry. Definitely check it out. Um but he he thinks it's a kind of ecumenical miracle that it doesn't like vindicate um like Coptic distinctives. You know, it's not like she's saying like this particular Coptic doctrine is true and in witness to that I'm going to perform a miracle in three months.
¶33You know, it's like that's not what's happening here. >> Even if like you know, the context is suggestive. I I don't think it's dispositive or anything like that. But um right. Yeah.
¶34So I think this the original one so I suspect that this image is slightly touched up. Um but we do have the original image of this and at the very least for a number of the images we had Dr. John Jackson look at them and say he found no signs of tampering. Even though for some other images he did find signs of tampering. Um and uh one of the people who took an image also uh had a pretty dramatic healing as illustrated in um Caleb Jackson's forthcoming article on uh Zetune on his Substack.
¶35So anyway um so yeah, we also have like at least suggestive photographic evidence as well. So yeah, like this this thing happened and it it was a real source of cognitive dissonance for me and um cuz like there's just so much testimony, so much evidence and it's like all converging. It's like you got to explain away the healings, you got to explain away the billing clouds of incense, you got to explain away the doves, you know, doves don't don't tend to fly at night like um you got to explain away the apparition phenomena for like hours on end multiple times. hundreds of thousands of people in the the crowd. [laughter] So, it's like, okay, um what am I supposed to do?
¶36Like, um well, I don't know. You just file it away and say maybe something weird happened, but then, you know, you just you can't keep doing this. It's not a sustainable strategy. And then the cognitive dissonance will mount and mount and mount and mount until a conversion happens. So, um yeah, that that just has a special place in my heart.
¶37Our lady of Zetun. >> Yeah, it's interesting. even like Mike Lakona who will say yeah there's something hap something supernatural happened there uh there was definitely a miracle of some sort uh so and you know he he's I wouldn't say he's anti-atholic but he's just a vocal evangelical for example so I mean like you do definitely have other people recognizing that and these are kind of the things that are like yeah that not only would that confirm Christianity this is happening in association with the church and I believe there was a guy that even predicted this was going to happen like he was told to build the church and then a miracle would occur. Uh and so this confirms Christianity uh over and against other religions even uh because again it's it's happening in that sequence of someone being told to build a church building the church and then the miracle occurring on the church supporting >> it's the mother of god as well. I mean like you know how how much clearer can it get?
¶38I mean [laughter] um yeah but anyway uh you know I'm I'm with you. I think it's uh you know pretty good evidence for for for Christianity. So go on. >> I was going to say what was the what was the next one you wanted to talk about. >> Okay.
¶39Another one that just has a special place in my heart and and this this is one of those where it just seems properly basic to me once once you like learn the facts that like okay you got to become Christian and it it just is like Padre Pio. Um, so yeah, Ethan Muse has a a really nice Substack article on going through like the evidence for his mystical charisms. But Padre Pio was a 20th century Catholic um, saint, stigmatist um, and mystic. And in the early 1900s, it's like 1918, 1919, sorry I didn't memorize this stuff, but um, he has this like complex vision, I think after mass or something like that, of Christ. And Christ says, "I unite you to my passion." And then thereafter he supernaturally reduplicates Christ's passion wounds on his palms, on his feet, and on his side.
¶40And like we have so much documentation to this, it's insane. So like Father Benedetto, I think one of uh it might have been his provincial superior, but someone um associated with the comment was like examined them early on. And there are lots of reasons why they they seem to be naturalistically inexplicable these stigmata. But um they examined him early on and Father Benedetto is saying, "Yeah, there was a perforation such that I could literally read stuff on the other side of his hand if I if I put stuff behind his hand." It's like, "Oh my gosh." Okay. And then you go on later, Dr.
¶41Romanelli is examining him multiple times over the course of his stay, right? So this is a doctor examining him multiple times. complex multimodal experiences multiple times and he literally not only visually inspects them but palpates them with his hands and he describes in extensive detail how he does it and he's like palpating both his hands and his feet and he's like yeah I feel a palpable void and there is no muscle or bone where I would normally expect it and there is just uh on the outside there are these like thin membranes that I press in between and it causes him a lot of pain when I do that but um so like this extensive complex multimodal interaction repeatedly it's like we got other doctors who examine him and like they're all sorts of reasons why um like they persisted without getting infected. They smelled that it has this beautiful scent and fragrance just emanating from the wounds and from the blood. Um they they didn't they didn't have any swelling regional swelling around them.
¶42That's like a unanimous uh feature of all the like the doctor's testimonies. Um where you know if you're applying carbolic acid or if you're crucifying yourself it's going to swell [laughter] and also I mean there are just all sorts of reasons why those um explanations don't work. But um and then you know he also has lots of different healing miracles and whatnot but like that I just couldn't couldn't live with the conspiracy that I have to posit in order to explain away the data. >> Um and like dude I just for some of these cases I just feel like God has given us a kind of sense >> uh a sense of his work like you you just kind of know when the hand of God is operative. And I think this is what like Christ was expecting the Pharisees um to pick up on when he did when he said like you know so that you may know that the authority of man has sorry so that you may know that man has the authority to forgive sins like get up and walk like he expects them to just kind of intuit it that like okay paralytic gets up like this is the hand handed work of God but no they sort of rejected it and like for me I was like okay I just have this almost properly basic sense it just seemed to manifest to me that like if the dude is supernaturally reduplicating Christ's passion wounds in the context of a vision of Christ [laughter] saying, "I made you to my passion." Christianity has to be true.
¶43How could you how could you look at that and be like, "Oh, well, maybe it was just like some complicated prank by the aliens." Or like, you know, there's just like lesser [laughter] there's like this lesser spirit running a muck which like kind of likes Christianity, but but Christianity is ultimately false. And there's this lesser spirit which is going around just like happening to almost like induce this in him. It's like guys, it's properly based. Like he's reduplicating Christ's passion. It's like what?
¶44What? Anyway, so that's the one where I was just like I just had that palpable sense that like if I grant that this is miraculous, I got to become Christian. [music] >> [music]