Hi everybody, so we're going to to talk again about privacy and I need to click So who am I so I'm not Aaron McSween which was the person that was supposed to come do the presentation Unfortunately, he's home with the flu and so I'm Ludovic Dubost So Aaron McSween is a full-time privacy engineer. I'm I'll define myself more as an open source activist Aaron is our researcher at X-Wiki SIS. I'm his boss and And so Aaron is a full-time Crip pad developer and slash product manager CTO depending so he likes to say it depends on how how important he wants to present himself and so I'm more involved in the Crip pad communication So I get involved in what Crip pad actually does how we communicate about it do marketing or so how we Finance it because I'm the CEO of X-Wiki. So we're 40 people at X-Wiki SIS that is getting its revenue most from building X-Wiki and And and we're doing full-time open source And so the challenge with open source is also how you get to pay for it and how to get people to pay for it I'm also an occasional Crip pad contributor. So in Crip pad the Kanban was my work actually very proud of it and so Actually to try to make a bit the subject want to talk a little bit about floss. So We all hear Users or or creators of floss software and actually when you look at floss and you try to understand Why why do you do floss? Actually, there's one reason which is ethical reasons. So we do we do floss or we get involved in in floss because it's empowering users and And it's because it allows the software to be not only for the people that can pay for it and It's in pouring in pouring the clients and have no luck in now We also have business reasons and there is also interesting business reasons why companies or people do Floss is that it gives an edge over proprietary software It gets more help from other people. So you get contributions So it actually reduces the cost of of of building it or making it known and an openness is actually a feature Also in what we do. So you'll you'll see a bit why we're coming there Why we're talking about this that if you look at the issue of privacy on the internet today Which is more and more a big problem. So Joss explained before Why why privacy is important? and if we're talking if we're starting to talk more about privacy because actually privacy is in danger and This the reason privacy. I mean why is privacy in danger is big because basically we're living in in surveillance capitalism so on one side there is State surveillance But that that's actually one part of the issue around privacy that the states can can know are Trying to know more and more about what we do and there's a lot of debate in some cases We could say I don't care. I trust my state So it's okay in some other cases. It creates serious democratic problems But there is also a problem of surveillance in the business world in the normal world in in a sense that basically most of the internet's business is actually Surveillance is actually based on advertisement that are based on what we do on the internet and actually when we think about it For the people that are as old as I am We felt like Advertising on TV. It's it's oh, it's a pain. We get advertising all the time and we're getting every every hour Advertisement so that we can watch the TV for free. But when we think about it on the internet It's worse get advertisement everywhere while we're while we're actually reading the stuff we read on the internet and this advertisement is Based on method that are way worse than what we got on TV 20 years ago on TV They they they study to try to know who is watching the show Is it woman? Is it guys and we're gonna show advertisement based on that but on the internet They're actually showing advertisement based on who you are the individual that is in front of it And they're trying to know more and more because it makes more money Oh Exactly who you are but everything they want to know everything so that they can make the most money out of it and nobody's stopping them Except GDPR which is doing some some work today Now this thing is is it is it evil actually is it evil that we are in this world? Well, this thing is It's just market and a lot of what what my friend Tristanito works at quant and is doing a lot of talks about privacy He says he says basically Google was supposed to be nice. We're not evil But in the end the the tracking they were doing was not that high, but Facebook came in and Doing more and more individual user tracking about who you are what you do, etc. They ended up being Outsmarted in terms of competition and making money and they end up doing the same thing So it's actually the market the capitalism market is pushing all these companies to go further and further So what we're what we're trying to say Aaron and me is that? The reason is that we've ignored business concerns. We've ignored We've ignored the business aspects of of why the software so and in the end we get only Only software on the internet that is paid by advertisement and that's actually and so We get a lot of stuff for free, but in the end we I mean The thing is we forget that there needs to be a way to pay for it And this way today is advertisement. It's targeted advertising this creating this privacy problem. So and What we're trying to do at a Crip pad is okay Is it possible actually to operate as it need to know basis? Is it possible to say? We'll try to do software that doesn't Doesn't look at everything you do. So that's not operating on this model of working with advertisement and When we look at this well business technical so business and so what we're looking at so Why what is the software we're proposing so we need to look at what type of product we're proposing So why do we have a what do we have a software that's actually interesting the second thing is okay? What what is what data are we are we capturing for people and then okay? What are the risks? The business risks and the technical risk. So if we don't collect the data Can we actually offer that product for free? So if we're not Get getting ways to make money off the data. Well, how do we actually provide that software for free? And what are the consequences if the data is leaked? So when we look at this so we do a Cost-benefit analysis. So how difficult is it to implement something? That's fully private. Is it actually technically possible? to build something that's totally private and how how would it work and And will people actually be happy with it? So Well, that's what we're trying to do with script pad. So we're trying not only to solve the technical problem of Privacy can we actually make a software that allows to protect users privacy? But we're also trying to solve the business issue around it So this is important is this this is why this talk is not only about a technical solution Around Crip pad. It's also about whether how how do how can we as a community or can we as users? Do so that we get software That is protecting our privacy and so what so what is script pad? So our pitch is it's like at the pad, but it's encrypted. So who knows at the pad here? Okay, good. We know script pad actually Few okay, so well at the pad or like you could also say like Google Docs Type at the same time But everything's encrypted So that's actually Interesting is it it's not easy to do So it's already not easy to do a software where people are typing at the same time So the story of Crip pad actually is because we're trying to do that for xwiki So for the xwiki software we needed we need a real-time editing and we've done we work with researchers to do that That's the original story of of Crip pad So it's already not easy to do to have people typing at the same time. Well It's even harder when you say okay, let's make so that the server doesn't know what we're doing and so this is what it is so to Mention one thing is in the open source world. We use licenses to define how data is made public Well in the world of Crip pad and software for security. We're actually using cryptography to define how how data can be used in private so and This is a point where we differ a bit with Crip pad with next cloud Next cloud is proposing as a solution for privacy decentralization So we at the Crip pad we say yeah decentralization is interesting. It's good But actually we need to go one one step further if you put your server on a cloud Service you need to trust that cloud service that they're not going to look at your data And so we believe that if we want to really be sure That our data is safe. We need to use cryptography Cryptography is key if we want privacy we need to go the whole way to Encrypting the data and so we're using cryptography To define how the data can be used So in the end what is Crip pad and I'll make a demo So is it's actually much more than Etapa because it's a full range of Collaborative tools it goes from rich text a rich text editor that goes further than then what you get in Etapa It's a full CK editor Editor that you have in in Crip pad, but it's also a pad where you can do markdown or syntax highlighting of code You can do slideshows. This is actually a Crip pad document stored on Crip pad afar You can you can store encrypted files which themselves can be used in rich text or in presentations So we have images in this presentation. They're stored as Individually encrypted files in the Crip pad drive We have a Crip pad drive inside that Crip pad drive. We can do shared folders So you can make a folder in your drive that will be shared with other people. We have whiteboards poles We have Kanban. We have a messaging between people and we're working on office We just released two days ago spreadsheets inside Crip pad and I'll show that in in the end Where what we're trying to provide is strategies and technology that ensure privacy which can effectively Generalize across a wide variety of application domains. So we're not trying to just encrypt files or secure files. We're trying to Allow to build applications that are secured by design and private by design So that use encryption all the way and that's what is in the Crip pad technology inside Crip pad They're pretty advanced technology to to to secure Documents that are modified in real time by multiple people and so potentially It can go very far in terms of what we can build on top of it However, there's a lot of work because when you work privacy by design you kind of have to rebuild everything from there So basically you cannot just adapt other software to become private private by design You have to actually have it in the core of the system that encryption is everywhere Because it changes for the mentality. This is why for us X wiki Crip pad. It's the same company, but with two different software They they cannot really work together So let me demo a bit oops So the best way to demo is to have two screens So here First thing is a drive. So I have a drive with With folders. So this is my my personal drive with a lot of folders. We can have found there. So I'll take a hop a spreadsheet document I'll take it on this side too Hop a spreadsheet document here. Actually, it's a bit too zoom. Yeah Oops, it's not very well zoom and so here I can do hop 600 Yeah, you can see so I changed the number here My graph was changed in my spreadsheet in real time. It was sent to the other to the other client So actually the way it works is every time we do something in a pad There is a patch that is created encrypted on the client side. The key never leaves the browser The patch that is encrypted is sent to the Crip pad storage The storage will send it to all the other users that are part of the session And then the patch will be applied on the other client and the Crip pad algorithm will manage conflicts If there is changes on at the same time from both users, there's a way to manage that in the algorithm So this is our latest spreadsheet document Then we can show here hop a Document if people have a browser they can even join with that URL is that gd Crip pad for them if they won't so you can have an image here So for example, I can change The size of my image it will change on the other side. I can type here It will go on the other side So you can see the different features we have here So we have the text code Presentation polls can then etc. So for example, if I create a Kanban document It takes a little second to create it and then I can give the URL here to the other users And up and I can start editing the document like that So a Kanban document is actually a JSON file So every time we make a change here. It changes a JSON a JSON model that is the JSON model is synchronized over the Crip pad system and And we can then apply it on the other side So Crip pad is actually quite extensible new new document types can be created The only thing that is needed is JavaScript JavaScript application so Crip pad can only work with JavaScript modules. You need something that works only on JavaScript For example, there are JavaScript libraries that can edit mind maps. We can integrate mind maps in Crip pad We want to integrate Kanban. We've used the JavaScript library Oh, it would have been nice to use we can which is a very well known actually a well-known open source Kanban system the problem is everything is based on the server. So you can't do it So basically then the the requirement for integrating something in Crip pad is that it needs to be built client side It needs to have no server component Basically, the server is only doing is only doing storage is only storing encrypted data I'm finishing up Get back to the slides So now what is the business aspect of Crip pad? So if we don't sell the data There's a question. How do we actually make the software so we could sell it? Well, the thing is we want to do open-source at xwiki and in that Crip pad And the other thing is that if we believe that if you really want to do Security software software that is secured you need to have it auditable So it needs to be shown to the world that the world can verify. There's a few things We haven't done in Crip pad. So Crip pad afar is a service run by us Everything on our servers is encrypted. The thing is how do you actually verify that it's true? How do you actually as a user verify that we're not injecting code in the JavaScript? We're sending from Crip pad afar That would read the data on the client side and then send it to us So the problem is that there's a few more steps to get to full privacy So right now if you want very good privacy you take the code of Crip pad from Github You install it on your own server. You know what you're running and You know that the data on that service encrypted even if somebody is stealing that database Nothing he can do is it because the keys are on your client. You need to secure your client So there's a few things that so we believe that Secure software needs to be open source and now the thing is if it's open source, how do we sell it? We don't read the data. We don't sell advertisement on the data So what how do we do to sell it? So we we can do we're doing paying subscriptions. So on Crip pad afar, you can actually pay For an account that goes over 50 megs We can sell enterprise support. We haven't started to do that. We can do research projects We're doing that where we're Candidating and so Crip pad is actually born out of research project that is financed by by France And we're looking at European fundings to continue to fund that and then there is crowd funding So we actually have an open collective where where you can chip in and it's actually important for us So right now we're mostly we believe that in the next year We're going to mostly finance Crip pad through Through the research projects and we also have people that are buying subscriptions because they actually go over the 50 megs And that Crip pad afar is an interesting service Now the thing is if we really want to have enough money to pay for the actually complexity of everything that needs to be built Like if we want to do everything that Google does On the Google app suite. There's a huge amount of work And so before we can fund this with paying subscription We will have we will have to have way more users than we have today and so We believe that we're going to finance this with research projects short term But actually crowdsfunding and paid subscriptions are really important to us Because they allow us to show to the people that are funding the research project that there's actually people interested in the software And that I believe that it's important that we get this type of software Working so What I want to point out and this is goes back to the business aspect of of of software and privacy Well, if we don't want the world where everything is paid by advertisement and and and made with systems like Facebook Well, we need to think About paying the our software last slide you can try out what we do and and so try it out on Crip pad afar and you can also take the code from From github this is our staff to show that there is a lot of people visiting what we do And here is our contacts if you want to talk to us


When you first get into personal development, there's this really easy temptation to read a tactic in a book or something that somebody shared on the internet and then try that, expecting it to really change your life. But no one really talks about the most fundamentally important tactic you ever do, which is really your ability to recognize hunches and the ability to trust yourself. So in this video, I want to introduce a really fun challenge for you that'll do that. Hey guys, Alex Hein, author of the book, Master of the Day. So I've included down there below is a free journaling worksheet. The journaling worksheet will help you plan out your best year ever, as well as how to reinvent your life and push it in a new direction that you really wanted to go in. Check it out right there below the first link. So as we're continuing this 10 day personal development challenge, it would be impossible for me to talk about all these things that have helped me without talking about this simple principle. So it originated as far as I know with this guy named Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, and he talks about this advice that a mentor gave him, which was basically that in these decisions in life, you get screwed in the little ones, the ones that are I don't know or maybes.  So you can move on with your life.  So that's easy to move on with. But what happens when they're in the middle? You're like, I don't know. I love some things. I don't love some things that in the middle is what kills you in life. That in the middle, that ambivalence is what prevents you from taking action on that move, dating that person or starting that business. So how do you get rid of the middle?  And if it's in the middle, that's a no.  And the ones that were I don't know to straight up no, but I forced myself to do it anyway, were not necessarily regrets, but they didn't work out that well compared to the things that were 100% hell yeses.   It's not going to be your mind. It's not going to be what your mom or your dad said. Some opinion that your friend had, it's really going to be training yourself to be attuned to when your gut feels excitement for something so that you stop looking for the external things. You don't look for the jobs, you don't look for the people, you look for what elicits that feeling of excitement, which is an internal thing and is not something external. And once you begin to recognize that in the little things in life, maybe this is the meal I want to eat now that my stomach really wants, not my mind. Maybe the trip right now, this is what my spirit needs to feel better. Maybe this job is pays less, but I know it's going to really lead me to where I want to be, or that's what feels good. That's what excites me. When you begin to attune yourself to that, you can easily start recognizing your gut instincts a lot quicker.  I honestly would do this for as long as you can endure it. I mean, it's a fun challenge. If you decide that's for one day, great. If you decide that's for a hundred days, that's great too.  All right. What do you really want to be doing every day in the first hour of your day? What do you want to be eating for each of your meals of the day? What time do you want to get up if you can afford to control your sleep wake schedule? How do you want to spend your day from nine to five?  Where do you want to travel? What do you want to work on? What do you want to wear every day? How do you want to arrange every single room where you live? So really, for most people, it's most practical to start on a Saturday or a Sunday morning and just begin. What is the most fun and exciting first hour of the day?  Maybe it's in a fitness class or maybe it's hiking or maybe it's with someone you really love. Figure out what that is that makes you feel hell yes and then do it for at least one whole day. Now this inner hell yes begins to become the compass for your life because then you can internally recognize, I don't know why I feel this is a no, but I feel this is a no. You start to be really closely attuned to how you actually feel because a lot of us unfortunately really forget how we feel on a daily basis. And so you go on a date and you say, I don't know why I'm ambivalent, I don't know, but I can't go forward. Or you recognize it right away in the grocery line.   And then you decide to talk to them. You begin to recognize this in the little things like what to eat and in the big things like where to move or should I make that move right now? And eventually you've trained your compass for what to do when and how to do it. And you don't need to rationalize why all you know is that if it is a hell yes, there are some intuitive or gut kind of resonance that is saying this is the green light. Now do the work. So that's your mission. It's a fun one. And it's an easy one. But I dare you to try it for at least one weekend day and see just how awesome life is in terms of how you really feel. So for you go, click the first link below. It's for a free journaling worksheet that can help you plan out your hell yes or your no challenge. It'll also help you plan on how to reinvent your life and script it going forward in the way that you want. It's the first link below. And then before you go, check out this related video right here.


Hi, it's Bridget. Welcome to Above Life Channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you up with hope. Today, I'm going to do a channel with Farah Fawcett in The Afterlife. Now, some of you may remember way back 10 years ago on the day that Michael Jackson died, someone else famous also made her a quiet and a graceful exit, and that was Ms. Farah Fawcett. So, she died on the same day that Michael Jackson died. That was so, it seems so long ago, but it also seems like it could have been yesterday. It's like this weird time warp, don't you think? Now, that would have been 2009, in June 2009, and I think it's so poignant to honor her by channeling her today, on the anniversary of the day that she chose to transition into The Afterlife. Now, Farah Fawcett, she passed away from cancer. She had cancer, a battle with cancer, and I know that, that part I know. So, I'd like to connect with her and give her opportunity to have a platform to speak, to share what it is that she would like to share, because it's so... it's such a special thing to offer to you, who are fans and who are admirers to be able to connect with her energy vibration as a spirit now. So, welcome Ms. Farah Fawcett. She has a lighter voice than I thought she would. I don't remember how she sounded, but she has a lighter voice, a much lighter, lighter voice, a little breathy voice, and very beautiful, very beautiful in her hair, very blonde hair, kind of wispy, as you'd imagine. Gorgeous smile, very strong jaw, and very, very perfect smile. And in the days before Photoshop, she says, before Photoshop was a thing. Before the social media frenzy, and before people were, she says, filtering themselves. She says, long before that, I had to live, she says, and she's showing me a picture of her in a swimsuit, and I don't know, I'm sorry, I don't know that much, like I'm not a mega fan or follower, but she's showing me a swimsuit, so she must have been in, like, the swimsuit edition of maybe Sports Illustrated, or in a swimsuit, like, known for an iconic image of her in a swimsuit in part, so she's showing me that.  She's mentioning, okay, so I know that Ryan O'Neill was with her, and at the end of her life, but there's some, I know that, I know that, I think that, I feel that, I don't know, I haven't heard anything about you, Farah, and I haven't heard anything about your life, I know someone had said, I think, one of the comments on my YouTube channel was about your death, and that there was a recent documentary or something, and I don't know that, because I haven't watched that, so I don't have factual information, the only information I'm getting, you guys, who are viewers here at Above Life channel, is just from my communication connection with her, okay? That's what it is. All right, so, but I'm feeling like there's some uncertainty about the energy of you and Ryan together, and she says we were on again off again, or not on again off again, but like close and then not close, close and then not close, it looks like they actually may have broken up and gotten back together, is what it looks like, but she says it's something like, she says, he was my best friend, and you go through so much with someone, and she says you deal with addiction, you battle with addiction, and I don't know if she, she's showing me pills or medication, I don't know if she was actually, she's, if she struggled with addiction, but I see Yeah, she's showing me taking pills medication, but I don't know if it's abusive, I feel like it's to help numb pain, but I don't think it's connected to her cancer, you guys, I don't know if it's connected to like, if she's depressed or she has anxiety or intense worry, but there is, she's taking pills, but it looks like it's easy to abuse that when you mix the pills with alcohol, it can really dramatically impact the effects, so I'm feeling that there's some, she's saying I had a tumultuous life, like there were a lot of ups and a lot of downs, she said a lot of swings, and she says as a mother we want what's best for our children and for our family, but you can only do so much, she says your hands are tied, she says she's making me feel like as a mother her hands are tied, and you can only do so much, and it's very, she says it's a very painful thing to watch your children hurt, hurting, and, and not being successful, and, and spiraling out of control is what she says, she's really emotional all of a sudden, she's kind of, she's upset, she's saying, and spiraling out of control, and there's, there's, there's no, you cannot rationalize this, this child that is doing these awful things and acting and behave, behaving in such a way that you can't, it doesn't even resemble the beautiful sweet child that you had, and you know that there's this, this corruption and this, this incredible something that has taken them over, that has corrupted them so much that you no longer, they no longer belong to you as your child, they, they belong to this evil that they are not the person that you know, you can't look at that person and look into their eyes and see the child that you had, they're lost, and so I know, I do know, Farah, that you, that you had a son that had some trouble with the law and things, and so I know, I do know that, I know that, and that as a mother, I can only imagine how difficult that would be on you and how heavy that would weigh on your heart, so I want to acknowledge that, so, so I know intellectually that you have a son that had had some problems, but I'm not sure how bad necessarily that they are, but, or were at that time that would have been long before 2009, and she's saying something about 2010, and then she's showing me a boat or a yacht, and that there's some, there's some judgment of people who are very critical of Ryan O'Neill, she's saying of Ryan, and his decisions are his choices, and people have to understand, they've got to understand that grief is a very private thing, and we grieved together, we grieved, we knew that I was dying, we knew that the outcome would be death, it would not, things would not get better, they would get worse, and we discussed how, I wanted him, if the situation was reversed, we would feel the same way, no matter which one of us was in the situation that was going to have to, somebody was going to have to carry on, was going to have to continue to live life, it doesn't help anyone to have someone be alive, but be so grief-ridden that they can't even function, and Ryan and I grieved a lot together, and he was criticized for some of his choices or behaviors perhaps, but you know it's so easy for people on the outside to judge, and there's really no place for that, there really isn't any place for that, she's feeling very defensive of her family, of her family, and of their behaviors is how she feels, she feels very defensive of her family, like she needs to defend them. So Farah, can I feel into you as a, because I feel I connect to you instantly as a mother, because that's how I can relate to you, so when I channel spirit in the afterlife, I connect however I can relate to you, and whether it's like if it's a musician through their music, and for you, I connect to you through mother, being a mom, so that's why you present with your family so strongly, I think, that's how I think.  She's showing me an angel or angel wing, so I don't know if actually her gravestone, her grave marker, if there's a statue of an angel near it, or if there is actually an etching of an angel, it looks like wings, and I think it's like the side profile of an angel, that's what I see, I think I see that, it's not just a straight angel, it's like sideways, there's this like angel thing, and I feel that, but she's also making me feel like she had a, I don't know if she had a baby who died, or a miscarriage or something like that, but I feel like there's a loss of a child, I feel that, and I want to acknowledge that, because she's helping me to feel that, that she's with a child in the afterlife, that's what I'm feeling, and there's a tense and a stressfulness, or a tenseness about her, and I feel into her as a body, when I feel her as a spirit, I see this beautiful peaceful angelic energy, it's very yellow, which is Archangel Azrael, or Archangel Gabriel, messenger angels, connection between earth and heaven, berry, I want, for those of you who are her fans, I want you to understand that there is a peaceful energy around her as a spirit, so I want you to understand that, so she's not at, she's not upset in the afterlife, she's not stressed in the afterlife, I'm just describing to you how the energy feels, and the difference between her as a spirit, and now her reflecting upon her human life, because I think it's important for you as a fan, as a viewer to understand the difference, so she's making me feel like it's different than I thought it would be, she says, heaven, what you consider heaven, or the afterlife, it's different, it's a lot less rigorous, or like it's almost like she's making me feel like athletic, like less exercise, less movement, less effort, less effort to be a spirit, it takes much less to just feel good, to be in your fullness, it's different than I expected, she says, but she says, you have to remember that I had cancer, and cancer is, it takes such a toll on the body, so that process self is very difficult, and for those who have to watch loved ones go through cancer, she says, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, I would rather, she says, I would rather experience it myself than to have to watch someone I love suffer with it, that is a powerful statement, she says, yes, it is, and she's making me feel like her mother is there, I think her mother's in the afterlife, it's how it feels to me, or her mother is there with her as what she's making me feel like my mother is here with me, she briefly mentions her dad, but I don't think he's in the afterlife, I can't tell for sure where he is, but she briefly mentions a dad, and then there's a separation, and then there's a mother, but the mother is with me, the mother is with me, she's making me feel like she had to grow up fast, and that she developed or looked much older than she was, and I feel like she modeled is what I feel like she may have been a model first, because I see her like advertising pictures of her, and I'm not sure if she was in playboy or not, but she's showing me Hugh Hefner, I don't know if maybe they were friends, I don't know, and again she goes back to, Ryan gets a lot of blame, and a lot of there's a lot of anger that's directed or projected toward Ryan, and she says that's that's ill-informed, that's not blaming someone else for things, it's simply how some people deal with grief, they redirect their true emotions or their feelings, and they deal with their grief in that way, and so Ryan has had to bear a heavy burden and a heavy weight, and I don't blame him for anything, for any of it, for anything that has gone down, I don't blame him for anything, so I'm not sure what's gone on, but it feels like there's a lot of questions, and this feels like there's money issues and concern about money, and whose money is it, kind of a thing, and moving the money, something about moving the money, I see that, and then I see Sophia, I also see, then she's showing me a ring, a burst stone ring, she points to my ring, but then she says burst stone, so my ring is just, it's just like crystals, I mean it's nothing fabulous, it's nothing, it's not like a topaz, but that's the color of it, it's like topaz or aquamarine, kind of color, and I know that aquamarine is March, but I don't know what topaz is, so she's pointing, either she's being exacting and saying, literally, this is my burst stone, or she's showing me a ring that's her burst stone, and she's showing me a ring that's special to her and that has, there's some special ring, but it's not a wedding ring, you guys, it's different, or if it is used as a wedding ring, it looks different than that, again, I'm gonna go back to it, I think her and Ryan were married and then not married, and then married and not married, or they were together and not together and together and not together, but she's making me feel like he was my best friend, that's what she's saying, and we understood each other, she says, and I feel like he's drinking, somebody's drinking, I think they both are, I feel like he's drinking, but they could have very volatile fights, that's what she's saying, they could get very vocal, and I feel like somebody cheated, I think maybe he did, but she was on a movie set, I wonder if they met on a movie set, because I see her on a movie set and I see him, but then I see cheating, I don't know if they met because they cheated on somebody else and then they got together, or if he cheated on her, or what that was about, I also see lead majors, and I don't really, at the top of my head, I know the name, lead majors, is that the guy that was like the bionic man or the six million dollar man or something, lead majors, I see that, so I don't know what the connection is to that, if you know what connection is between lead majors and Farrah Fawcett right up below or between lead majors and Ryan O'Neill right up below, all right, and I see something about the estate and her bedroom, one of their homes, it looks like it's in California and I want to say it's Los Angeles or a specific part of LA, I don't know if it's Beverly Hills, it doesn't feel right, okay, so I've been to California, but I haven't been for a very long time, it's been at least six years, so I'm trying to remember, it feels like, you know, there's a hillside and then there's different levels of different places, kind of groupings of neighborhoods, I don't feel like it's the Hills, Beverly Hills, I think it's someplace else, Sherwood, Sherman Oaks, Sherwood, I'm not sure, I'm not sure exactly where she's at, but I see that there's a house and then there's another house, like maybe Malibu or someplace different, so there's two, there's at least two residences and once near LA, that's kind of on a hill, then there's another one that's down lower, like I don't know if it's in the valley or if it's actually a way like a Malibu or something like that, but there's a beautiful, like her bedroom in one of these houses, it's beautiful, it's very feminine and airy and light and the colors are neutral and very beachy, beachy is how I describe it, like beiges, tans, topes and then like peach, like a light peach color with some like ivory and very just very calming and comfortable is what I'm seeing and I look out and all I can see in the windows, there's a huge bank of windows and all I can see is I can see some of the palm trees kind of moving like rustling and I know that it's near the beach, I know that I'm near the ocean enough where I could almost hear it if the window was open and yet I'm not right on the beach, it's very clear she's not right on the beach but she's off and she's up a little ways and she can hear it and you can almost smell the air, smells different, if you could just please open the window, just please open the window just a little bit and it's really bright and that's a contrast to whatever's in this room, I wonder if I'm seeing the room that she died in, I'm wondering. I feel like she was in the hospital, well she was in and out of the hospital and then when the treatments made her two weeks she stopped, she said no I'm done, I'm done, we're done though and I feel like she entered hospice but I also see her going to the hospital so I don't know if when she died she went to the hospital or if there was like a change of heart and somebody wanted to get her to the hospital and see if they could help her feel better, make her more comfortable, I'm confused about the end of life circumstance but why would you show me how beautiful your room is, your bedroom is, unless it's a very peaceful place and then when I'm seeing this stuff very specifically it's making me think, it's making my mind think or wonder is this where she died or is this the place where she died but then there's confusion about this, like no I see her going to the hospital though, I'm not sure if there's a consciousness or not a non-conscious, she feels like she's making me feel like I'm unconscious like I slip away but there's a tremendous amount of pain, the body is very achy, there's a lot of aches and it almost, she says the body almost feels like concrete, it starts to become like it's setting, that concrete it's soft at first right when they first lay it down and then it starts to get hard and it gets really stiff like that, she said I can feel that in my body, that's quite specific, is there anything that you would like to share with us about about your life, about how you'd like to be remembered? She says for my work and she says philanthropy for the charitable, for the charitable efforts that I participated in, like she's saying for the charity, for the charity, I almost feel like there's animals like animal cruelty stuff, I feel like there's that, I wonder if she's vegan, she really feels animal specific so there must be some activism there in that regard but I feel like she's charitable so she's showing up for charity events and she's giving money and that kind of thing, she wants to be remembered for what she could contribute and what she was able to give is what she's saying. She says we only have control over so much and that's the message that it feels important that she would share is that you only have control over so much, she says like look Michael, who would have thought Michael and I would leave on the same day, we would go on the same day and she says but it's kind of nice because then my family could be left alone to grieve, to mourn, to move through their process without the lights and the cameras and the paparazzi and so many people in their business, it was much more quiet. So did you plan it? Like did you know? And she says well timing-wise, I did have a choice about when and I quite simply didn't want to, she says to wreck the weekend, she's showing me sardines and sundae and she says to wreck the weekend, I didn't want to to wreck the weekend, there's something about the weekend and messing up something on the weekend and so she didn't want to do that and then to wait till Tuesday seemed too long, it seemed cruel to put my family and my friends through that, it was like a death watch, you know, it seemed too cruel to do that and I, so I see a yellow angel with you, so that's, so I see a yellow angel, so I see they're Gabriel or Azrael, can you tell, can you share? She says you know I was a very, she said I was a spiritual person, I did believe in eating right and taking care of your body and meditation and all of these beautiful things, I really did believe in God and this whole concept of oneness and love and I wasn't afraid to die and the energy that just came around me that I remember feeling at that moment was just warmth, just warmth, so like the most beautiful sunny day at the beach, the most gorgeous sunny day and just being wrapped in that warmth, that's what I remember and then she's saying to me something about New York, so I don't know if like she missed New York or New York City was important to her but she's saying New York, New York are being in New York or New York, New York City, all right and then she's, she's saying that she wished she could have made it easier on Ryan, he was very upset, he had a very difficult time saying goodbye and that's something that is a human thing and yet the love that is there is, it's such an unconditional thing, I would like people to know that, that love, the love that you have in your human, the idea of what love is in the human life that you have, it's so much more than that, it's so much beyond that and unconditional isn't even an accurate way to describe what it feels like, it's just this perfect, it's like your perfect day, it's your best day and sharing it with someone that you love so very much and I want, I wish for Ryan to find happiness and I wish for my friends, my dear wonderful friends, to know how much I love them and appreciate them and wish them so much joy and how I'm so thankful, there's so much gratitude, you guys she's making me feel very grateful and it's interesting so I have this necklace on that I have that says it was a gift for me, it says practice gratitude and that really feels like part of the energy that she's bringing into as well as great gratitude, grateful, she's expressing thanks, she's saying thank you, thank you a lot to people, her friends especially and I thank her friends for helping Ryan because I feel like they were a support for him just as they would have been for her if the situation was different and they were trying, although some of them had strong opinions or weren't quite sure about things with Ryan necessarily, they may be maybe in the past have not been that approving but after she says after I died they really carried out my wishes and I appreciate that and she's making me feel like she was scattered a bit but I know that she was buried because I remember in one of the grave tours in one of the famous Hollywood cemeteries seeing her gravestone like one of the online one of the vloggers that does old Hollywood stuff that does the the grave tours or whatever I don't know grave tours that sounds weird but the movie star graves you know I remember seeing her a long time ago seeing her her stone but I don't know what it says or what it looks like but I remember seeing that she was buried I know she was buried but I feel like there's like a scatter or going to the beach with her so there may have been a two part kind of a thing there and I see a boat I see that too so all right well thank you thank you very much thank you for giving me the opportunity to honor your memory and to celebrate your life and thank you for being willing to share in the context of human life because you have so I appreciate that very much and I'm sure the viewers will as well so here at above life channel you have been watching a channeling with Farrah Fawcett in the afterlife I'm Bridget and the goal here is to inspire your spirit to fill you with hope because this is your life this is your life so live it thank you so much for watching


All of my recent videos have been very controversial, so I want to take a little bit of a step back and talk about something that makes me happy rather than disgruntled. Of course, switching from talking about politics to religion is hardly less controversial, but discussing religion is actually pretty peaceful and fruitful if you simply choose to ignore people who come in packed to the brim with condescension and anger for no reason other than personal biases. So we're going to choose to be comfy and that is that. Things are going to be a little bit dry and heavy in terms of philosophy for a while while I start out as I outline some logical proofs of God's existence, but if you want to hear about how I found overlap between Christianity and stoicism and life in general as well, then stick around and I'll come to that later. In my last Q&A stream, which yeah, was a good while ago now, somebody asked me if I was religious and my answer was basically that I didn't know. For a very long time prior to this I'd been an agnostic daist. Agnostic because I believed there was no way to truly know if an intelligent higher power does or does not exist, and a daist because through Aristotle's metaphysics I came to learn of the unmoved mover, which shows that the universe is full of motion, but that all motion must be traceable back to its starting point, which was not itself moved. This would have to be considered God, but only as a title for a creator, not necessarily a personal and intelligent deity deserving of worship as that in classical theism. In quick succession after this Q&A, both my agnosticism and daism became knocked down and after spending this entire summer researching, questioning and adjusting my entire way of thinking about existence, I am a Christian. Before I go on to explain why, I will simply ask that if you are not interested in actually listening to the reasons behind why I made this change, then please just stop listening. I'm happy to have any discussion on any relevant topic to this, only provided it is in good faith and done with a willingness to learn. I was an agnostic for all of my early 20s, but I was a thoroughly anti-religious atheist edgelord in my teenage years, so I know how to spot an obnoxious time waster because I was one, so basically just don't even try it. So a while ago I made a Twitter thread about why if you hold to the tenets of Austrian economics, you should give classical theism at the very least some serious consideration if you haven't already. I thought this would cause all sorts of drama, but the reception was actually entirely peaceful and agreeable, which is what gives me confidence that the comments section on this video also could be. Allow me to read the thread in its entirety. It's a little more janky than I'd like, but such is the nature of a 240 character limit per tweet. Austrians uphold the validity of our priori reasoning at its starting point, lines of logic that do not require empirical validation. This is because they are based on postulate axioms about human nature, famously man acts. Even empirical science requires axioms, namely that the universe exists and most importantly that the universe is intelligible. Why is this believed? These are not empirical claims, they are the foundation required for empirical research. Without them, nothing is empirical. So science itself is unscientific if you were to be polemic about it. Not all knowledge is gained through empirical verification. This verification needs a priori axioms, but internet science worshipers will tell you everything needs this verification to be true. Axioms, the universe exists, everything within it is moving and changing. Why? We know that movement and change are causes of an effect as per Newton's laws of physics. Rather than asking what caused the change or movement of a specific object, what caused change itself? There is no empirical answer to this. The Big Bang is not sufficient. As it was an event, it must itself be an effect of change. What caused the Big Bang? It must be causation itself. This cause must exist outside of time and space and be immaterial, which would make it infinite. Mainstream economists will tell you Austrians are unscientific for using axiomatic logic, but the act of rejecting axioms is unscientific. Mainstream economists are the only ones who try to do this, so are far more unscientific than we ever could be. Saying God must be observable to exist is to deny axiomatic logic. We are finite, so how does it follow that we would be able to observe the infinite? You cannot prove a negative, you can only disprove a positive, and denying axioms does not achieve that. TLDR, Soyboy Science Worship is a logical at its foundations. Science cannot tell you what is true, it can provide you with models to accurately predict observable phenomenon. It does not tell you what truth is, and can't tell you whether or not God could exist, philosophy does. So that is agnosticism out of the way. To say that the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven is to claim that empiricism is the only way to obtain true knowledge, but this claim is false. The early Austrian scholars adopted their epistemology, that is the philosophy of knowledge, from Renaissance and Enlightenment era French and Spanish Scholastics. Scholasticism was a branch of Roman Catholic Christian theology and philosophy, which drew almost all of its inspiration from Aristotle. As I said, I was a dayist thanks to Aristotle, or at least so I thought. The most famous scholastic of all was Saint Thomas Aquinas, and he proved thoroughly that Aristotle's unmoved mover was God, not just a title to be given to some unknown creator that didn't even have to be sentient, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God worshipped by Christians, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. To believe in the deistic unmoved mover and not reading Thomas Aquinas' expansion on it should be considered a crime, and it's one I was guilty of for many years. Aquinas was without the slightest doubt one of the most outstanding thinkers in all of human history, and I would not be able to do him justice. What I'll try to do here is give the basic explanation of causation, motion and change, then give an Austrian spin on it to prove that God is intelligent and personal. But I implore every single person to check out the Thomistic Institute who make bite-sized YouTube videos and upload full lectures as a podcast on Spotify to really learn more about Saint Thomas' philosophy to an appropriate level. One way I like to cut to the chase is talking about the principle of sufficient reason, or PSR for short, which was used extensively by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. The PSR essentially states that every observable phenomenon has a reason and a cause. If you observe a ball rolling on a flat surface, the reason it is rolling must be that it was pushed by something else. The unmoved mover theory asks you to wonder, what moved the thing that moved the ball? If the ball was kicked by someone's foot, what moved the foot? If an acting human moved the foot, how did they get to the ball in the first place? Follow all motion back into the past and you will arrive at the first movement in the universe that we can confidently determine, the Big Bang. And if all movement has a reason for occurring, then for what reason did the Big Bang occur? If the universe itself can be thought of as a rolling ball as it is always in motion but wasn't kicked, then it would not be rolling. The universe is not sentient and could not roll itself, so something outside of it must have done so. But what could exist outside of our universe? A deist as I used to be would agree with all of this argument but stop at the final question, throwing their arms up in the air and saying there's no possible way to know. But let's keep empiricism at the door and try to deduce some of the characteristics that this unmoved mover would need to have. First, in order to move without itself being moved, it would need to not have a physical form. As all motion of physical things requires a previous motion, the first mover must be different from this and if it did not require prior motion to move, it cannot be physical. And given that no matter existed before the moment it came into existence, this mover must be immaterial and this has the exact same meaning as not being physical. Trying to imagine such a being is of course tough but we have to remember that we are physical beings and all of our motion comes from previous motion, so trying to imagine something completely different to ourselves is tough to grasp. It's not dissimilar to try to imagine what a non-carbon based life form would look like. As all life forms we have ever observed including ourselves are carbon based but this does not mean another kind must be impossible. We are also constrained to linear time as are all other things in this universe, so something which is not of this universe must not be constrained in this way. If it is not constrained to time, this being must have always existed and always will exist. Time for us is a straight line from birth to death but time for an infinite being would be a circle having no beginning and no end. Of course this is impossible for us to accurately imagine as it is impossible for us to experience infinite time but these are the necessary conditions for the unmoved mover and it is starting to look a whole lot like God. One area where Aquinas built on this argument is also determining an uncaused cause. As far as I can really understand it's the exact same process as the unmoved mover but I think it's stronger at proving God to be intelligent and is perhaps easier to get your head around. So just as every motion has a prior motion, every effect has a prior cause. In the previous example the kicking foot caused the effect of the rolling ball. What caused the foot to kick? We're in the same process again and we end up at the same place, the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang? It must be the first cause of our universe and therefore must not have been caused itself. Showing the Big Bang as an effect of a cause rather than a process of motion began by an unmoved mover, I think better illustrates how this cause is an intelligent God who is a person and not some sort of supernatural inanimate object. A singular uncaused cause creating all of the effects that we see in our universe is much easier to imagine as something acting deliberately rather than some sort of freak accident. This whole time I've been trying to refute deism but it's just dawned on me that most people watching this won't even be deists. They'll either be atheists or already religious. So what I'll do is present reasons why I think atheism, that being outright denial of any possible existence of God, is illogical and then try to give a brief explanation of why I think out of all the religions that exist, Christianity is the one that perfectly fits the arguments that have already been made. So let's cut to the chase again by considering the principle of sufficient reason. To boil it down quickly, atheism says that the universe does not have a reason for existing. Some will say that the reason the universe exists is the Big Bang but this is not a reason, it is the method that the universe came into existing by. That's like being asked why a cake exists and saying either A, there is no reason for why the cake exists or B, that the cake exists because the ingredients mixed with heat over time and formed a cake. A is a wholly sufficient answer and in fact not an answer at all and B is missing the point entirely. A cake does not come into existence unless it is made which requires rational action so the reason it exists is that somebody chose to make it. If everything which occurs occurs for a reason but you claim that there is no reason for existence occurring then why does anything exist rather than not? If there is no reason for the universe existing that means it could have not existed but it does so why does it? There simply has to be an answer. So in all the proofs I outlined before I used the Big Bang as the starting point and this is lazy of me. Even if the universe began before the Big Bang the universe cannot still explain its own existence and this must be found outside of it. There is another theory to the Big Bang called the Big Bounce which says that the universe goes through Big Bang cycles and in fact existed before the Big Bang at least for one cycle and all the way up to infinity. Now I am not a physicist by any possible stretch of the imagination but I cannot see any reason for believing the Big Bounce over the Big Bang other than as a cop out and clutching at straws to find the slightest of reasons to deny God's existence usually driven by personal bias. Until I think there is equal or greater probability of the Big Bounce than the Big Bang I am not going to give it much thought and it's not a big deal anyway because the possibility of the universe existing before the Big Bang still does not explain why the universe exists at all rather than not and why motion and causation could exist without an unmoved mover or uncaused cause. One little brain teaser I like to do to push this point home is to consider what science is. It is a process of observing nature and its laws but science cannot tell you why in nature and its laws exist any more than putting a cake again under a microscope can tell you why it exists. Science requires observation. We can only observe nature and nature does not explain its own existence. The existence of nature is found in the supernatural and as science can only observe nature it has no place in determining the cause of existence. Trying to do so is trying to fit a large square peg into a round small hole. They are incompatible. There is a reason that they are called the natural sciences and that one of them is called physics. The natural sciences deal with nature and physics deals with physical things. They have nothing to do with the supernatural or the immaterial and to deny that the supernatural or immaterial could exist because we can't observe it is to in effect deny our priori truth. So now I'll get onto why Christianity meets the logical framework that we've so far set up as opposed to other religions. First of all, paganism is indeed a very broad brush to paint with and encompasses a lot of religions but religions typically given that title can be outright disregarded as nonsense. Neo-pagans that worship them today especially know this is nonsense and does not exist but choose to follow them anyway showing themselves to be lapers of the cringiest variety. Greek mythology for example said that the gods live on Mount Olympus. Go there and see if you find any and get back to me. The gods of these dead polytheistic religions are called gods in title alone and are nothing compared to the god of Abraham the infinite creator of the universe and the uncaused cause. Gods such as Jupiter, Odin or Poseidon are not supreme supernatural beings who created existence from nothing and imbued it with a purpose. They are little more than immortal humans and their spheres of control function as nothing more than being gods of the gaps. God of the gaps is a logical fallacy that occurs when you can't correctly determine the reason of a natural phenomenon so you just say well it must be God and when you can't determine why waves are formed in the ocean you could say it must be Neptune. When you finally figure out how tectonic plates work Poseidon and Neptune die when the proof of your god's existence can be empirically disproven you do not have a god at all. This is why I admit that I was being lazy by hinging my argument on the Big Bang but thankfully if the Big Bang was definitively disproven we are still left with many important phenomena in the natural world which logically cannot be explained through natural means such as why nature exists. Also bear in mind that I am a Hellenophile, a lover of Greek culture, history and language and I do not want to unfairly disrespect any of it but there is a very clear reason why when Christianity came to Greece thousands of years ago the renowned Greek thinkers didn't last long at all in trying to defend their pagan religion through philosophical means and thereafter Greece remained the most prominent nation in Christendom for a thousand years through the Byzantine Empire so much so into the present as well that the Eastern Orthodox denomination is commonly known to this day as Greek Orthodoxy. The history of paganism, its tales and effect on ancient cultures are indeed fascinating but trying to claim that they have any sort of equal or greater basis than our monotheistic God is nothing short of deluded and the only other non-Abrahamic religion that might meet the criteria is Hinduism specifically the Hindu concept of Brahman if that's how you pronounce it. Hinduism is known for its nearly endless list of multi-limbed blue-skinned gods but at the top of the hierarchy is something called the Brahman believed to be the first cause of all existence. Trying to find good philosophical coverage of this has been difficult so far for me so there's really not much I know about it but the whole Hindu mythology is so bonkers it's hard to take as seriously as Christianity even the most anti-Christian atheist would admit that the resurrection of Jesus is a far more plausible historic event than just about anything to be found in Hinduism and one last one I'll mention is Buddhism and while I admit I know next to nothing about it I think I understand that they don't believe in any sort of personal God so again they don't fit the philosophical criteria. Now judging Christianity against the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam is when things get deep but it's only really a discussion that can be engaged in by people of those religions. Lots of the debate is found in Scripture and by determining the personality of God for lack of a better term so if you think God does not exist and there is no such thing as Scripture it's not really a conversation you can get too invested in. All three Abrahamic religions start from the same point and share much holy Scripture and as such they have the same notion of God but I don't agree with the opinion that many people hold which is that all three have the same God. If in each religion God teaches different morals and has a different character he cannot be considered the same person but they do share the same characteristics of being infinite and immaterial etc and the creator of all. One of Thomas Aquinas' other main influences than Aristotle was Moses Ben Myman a Jewish scholar and modern Christian philosophers such as William Lane Craig have revived the Kalam cosmological argument deriving from medieval Islamic scholasticism. So to get to the core of justifying Christianity over those others we have to go straight to Christ. C.S. Lewis used what I think is the best formula for trying to categorize Jesus as he must have been one of the following Lord, Liar or Lunatic. If he was indeed the Word of God made flesh who died for our sins and rose from the grave he is Lord.  If he completely fabricated his claim to be the Son of God yet truly believed it then he was a lunatic at the same level as a man who calls himself a poached egg. One thing that Jesus could not have been as some secularists try to describe is some sort of moral teacher who was so fantastically good that lots of people followed him for thousands of years. That is the essence of Buddhism but Jesus did not live this avenue open in terms of understanding him. He claimed to be the Son of God as part of the indivisible Holy Trinity and we must determine whether or not that is true. In order for Jesus to have performed miracles out of total trickery he would have had to be some sort of magician at or beyond the level of David Blaine except two thousand years ago with no support team, no modern technology and no magic camps he could go to on the weekend to train or Las Vegas casinos to employ him. And what reason would Jesus have for doing any of this if he could have? He died in an extraordinarily painful and gruesome way and knew that his mission would result in such a fate. Blasphemy was the most heinous of religious crimes in ancient Palestine and while I'm sure modern magicians love their craft with a great passion they don't feel the need to claim to be God incarnate even without the threat of a death sentence by excruciating torture.  There was no financial incentive for him to do this. No worldly power to be gained as he made enemies of the Jewish and Roman rulers who he couldn't have possibly defeated through some sort of military or political coup. The cross was always where he was going to end up. He simply would not have lied about his claims. Now let's ask if he was a lunatic. Anybody who wholeheartedly believes they are something which they are not can be called a lunatic. So if he wholeheartedly believed he was God but wasn't then a lunatic he was. But Jesus was never alone. He was followed by a great crowd of about 5,000 people and had the 12 apostles follow him closely and continue his mission after he was gone. If Jesus was a lunatic then these people must have been too as if he was not the son of God or some sort of unbelievably good ancient magician he could not have performed miracles. And if he went around ranting and raving about how he did perform miracles but nobody saw it I find it almost completely implausible that he would gather such a following. People can be stupid in large groups but in modern times the largest suicide cults such as Jonestown only had a population of just under a thousand people. Heaven's Gate had just a few hundred people and the based I mean branched avidians had fewer than a hundred. For the first 300 years of the existence of the Church of Christ it was totally outlawed and persecuted and if you were discovered to be Christian by any sort of government or religious authority you would be tortured, killed and probably both. The apostles knew this better than anyone and they wrote their testimonies of witnessing the miracles of Jesus. You can read them they're only in the Bible. Either they all lied about witnessing the miracles of Jesus for no reason as their only rewards were living in nomadic poverty than becoming martyrs or they are all lunatics as well and that is not the impression you'll get from reading Saint Paul's eloquent and crystal clear letters. Ultimately when weighing all the facts and context I cannot conclude that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic and that leaves me with only one option that he is Lord. Muslims for example say that God has never had a son and to which I can only ask why. It appears holy in God's nature through his total fulfilment of goodness, love and mercy that he would incarnate himself at the precipice of human civilisation. Just as literacy would never again be lost as it was multiple times before in human history such as the Dark Age after the Bronze Age collapsed at the time when a huge empire connected nearly the entire civilised world and allowed the good news to be transported and understood all over and coming with the mission to undo the failure of humanity which occurred at the fall and to make his creation whole again. We as humans love our children and when we talk to them to tell them of our love we kneel down, we get on their level and speak to them in ways which they understand. We are children of a God who loves us and there would be no better way for him to communicate his love to us as our Father than to do exactly the same thing, to come down to our level and speak our language. If instead of saying God would not do this or has not done this you now try to say that he in fact could not do it then you are outright denying God as he has shown himself to be, all powerful, all knowing and all present. He created all of existence out of nothing, he absolutely can create a human form to walk in. The Hebrew texts that preceded his arrival have the coming of Jesus as a through line running all the way along as he fulfilled over 300 Old Testament prophecies pointing to the arrival of the Messiah as his role as a servant king, not a worldly king or a military commander. It is the mark of human nature to suffer and Jesus took on fully both the nature of God and man to suffer with us. We are incredibly blessed to have a Father who loves us so. To deny that he would do this is to claim God is either not all loving and merciful or not all powerful, in either case you do not have God as explained in the Old Testament. And there is still yet so much more to be said about the nature of Jesus. He was not a demigod of the Greek style like Heracles being 50% God and 50% human. He was 100% God and 100% human. We as constrained finite beings cannot truly comprehend what that means but things being true whilst being beyond our comprehension are abundant even in the natural universe so you might as well get used to it and see it for the beauty that it is. And it remains beautiful in the realm of faith. Dante for example in his famous novel The Divine Comedy which is commonly referred to as Dante's Inferno described the Virgin Mary in this way.  I for one just love that way of describing the mysteries of divinity. I'd like to talk more casually and about the effects that my conversion has had on my own life. I've talked about Stoic philosophy before on here and I will make a few more videos on it but what I found so remarkable is the compatibility of Jesus' teachings and the Stoic way. Matthew's Gospel chapter 6 verses 25 to 34 reads. Therefore I tell you do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is alive and tomorrow thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all those things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself, sufficient for the day is its own trouble. If you've got a keen eye and you follow me on Twitter, you would have noticed in my bio is the verse Matthew 6.33 and that was it there. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That whole paragraph is of course extremely stoic, putting your mind before the anxieties of day to day and focusing on the things you can control within your mind and your own nature. But for all of my reading and proclaiming of stoicism, nothing has helped me put the stoic mindset into actual practice than that verse 33. Say before, if I wanted to overeat and have some cake that I didn't need, I knew it would not be stoic to do this but I was only answering to myself and so I didn't really care. If I am only guilty of committing a sin against myself then I can also pardon and forgive myself. But if I am committing a sin by going against the standards of virtue that I wished to uphold in God's name, the drive to do what is right becomes so much greater for me. And let me just quickly touch on what sin actually is for that matter. Sin is not just being naughty and therefore deserving punishment. It is not some sort of tool for priests to guilt-trip you into giving the church money for. I think sin should be defined as something which is less than perfect. When God made humanity in his own image it was perfect. But we live in a fallen world and as the saying goes, we are all sinners. It is our natural inclination to be imperfect yet we know we must strive for perfection even though we can never reach it in this life. Just as a good stoic would strive to be a perfect stoic sage whilst acknowledging that the destination is impossible to reach, a Christian strives to be like Christ even though he never can be. Most Christian theology believes that Jesus was the only human to be born without sin and to never commit a sin in his life. And of course Jesus could do that. He is God but we absolutely are not. And I'll also add here for representation that Catholics believe Mary was immaculately conceived and sinless but that's a whole other can of worms. What I'm trying to get at is that by pursuing virtue for my own sake and pursuing virtue for the sake of a higher cause has been almost night and day for me in terms of practice. Knowing that God wants me to strive for perfection is a much more potent motivation than just myself as who am I compared to God? We know that low time preference is based and I've been preaching that a hell of a lot lately but I've realised if anybody could possibly have a negative time preference it is Christians and if low time preference is based negative must be off the charts. I am of course kidding but what I've noticed in myself is the life I want to live today and the one I wanted to live a year ago are very very different and I'm very grateful for it. A useful Catholic phrase is do not swallow the world and that sums up so much for me. I used to really covet luxury cars, watches and a big house even though I knew that for stoic reasons I shouldn't but now that I am working for a purpose far greater than this world the things of this world that do not emulate God's plan for humanity mean so little to me. My priorities in life now are to have a family and provide for them living simply in the countryside away from the noise, busyness and especially the vanity and materialism amongst people of the cities. Having a job will simply be a means to this end of an almost monastic, contemplative and thoroughly peaceful life offered up to God. And denominations is of course an enormous area that I'm going to try to keep brief by just talking about my experience and current beliefs in regards to which particular version of Christianity that I follow. I was baptised in the church of England as an infant and didn't choose to step foot into a church until this summer 25 years later. I was however dragged along to Anglican services and Roman Catholic masses by my mother who flip-flopped between those two denominations a lot. I hated every second I spent there for no other reason than I was an edgy twat who watched a couple of talks by Christopher Hitchens and the amazing atheist on YouTube. Earlier this year however I was heading out to get some groceries and was handed a pamphlet by a man on the street. I had never stopped to talk to one of these people who hand out leaflets before but for no reason I can explain this time I did and the pamphlet he handed me was for the Baptist church just around the corner from my house. I had never heard of the Baptist denomination which might sound funny to my American viewers because I looked it up after getting home and found it is extremely prevalent in the US and especially in the south but not really much in England despite this being the place where it started. This pamphlet set off my journey and after a couple of months racking my brain for hours every day about Christianity I started going to that church. Evangelicals have a completely symbolic view of all sacraments and as a recent skeptic this really helped me. They believe baptism is purely a symbol just to show that you're dedicated to the faith, that the bread and wine at communion are nothing more than that either physically or spiritually and so on. However largely through my exposure to Aquinas and the Thomistic Institutes when researching what theology makes the most logical and biblical sense to me I kept finding myself coming to Catholic conclusions. Aquinas again uses Aristotelian metaphysics to explain the doctrine of transubstantiation that being the process of turning bread and wine into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ in substance. Protestant tenets such as solar scriptura that being the belief that the Bible is the sole authority of religious doctrine doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either. That is essentially a claim that all the Hebrew prophets before Jesus could proclaim the Word of God. Jesus of course proclaimed the Word of God, the apostles proclaimed the Word of God but that as soon as the book of revelations was finished which is the last book of the Bible all religious discovery must have stopped. For one the Bible was compiled and made into official holy canon by the Catholic Church so to say that the Bible is authoritative in some way says that the Pope's authority to make it authoritative stands. To say that tradition after the Bible was written cannot in any way provide new learning about the faith to me sounds outright ludicrous as if God came, taught the good news and then left it at that never to be expanded upon again. So at this point I should have become Catholic but there's one thing holding me back the papacy. Catholic tradition holds that the Pope is the supreme leader of all Christianity and that when speaking ex-cathedra on matters of doctrine and morals he is in fact infallible. I understand that infallible does not mean impeccable and I imagine lots of my viewers would find Pope Francis to be less than impeccable but infallibility states that if Francis writes an official theological document it is 100% true no matter what. He cannot say anything wrong. To say that a man can have this sort of power is already highly dubious but that is coupled with another reason that I don't buy the Catholic justification of the powers given to Saint Peter who they claim was the first Pope. Peter did give false teaching by telling the Galatians they must circumcise themselves to enter God's covenant and Saint Paul severely rebuked him. Saint Peter denied Christ three times as he was persecuted. These absolutely are examples of Christian faith and morals that Saint Peter was not infallible in so even if he was the first Pope by declaring itself infallible the papacy is no longer what it was in Saint Peter's day. So where does that leave me? If someone asks if I'm Protestant I will say yes. If someone asks me if I'm Catholic I will say yes. I always find myself agreeing with every Catholic theological claim except for that of papal overreach and by a twist of fate it took me back to the very beginning. The Church of England in which I was baptized, dragged to and hated. I realised the reason my mother jumped back and forth between Romans and Anglicans was exactly the same as mine. The Church of England was designed to be a big tent church after being instituted by Henry VIII. Within the C of E there are evangelicals called low church Anglicans and they have a low view of sacramentology the same as the Baptists and there are high church Anglicans who inversely have a high view like the Romans. These high view Anglicans also go by another name which I find absolutely amazing for an obvious reason and that is Anglo-Catholic. I honestly feel like I couldn't have made it up. A traditional Anglo-Catholic mass looks exactly identical to a traditional Roman Catholic mass. The only real difference between the two is disavowing the supremacy of the Pope while still granting him extraordinary respect as is deserved by being Bishop of Rome. They also recognise that the Church of England was not in fact founded by Henry VIII in the 1500s. The Church had existed in England since the first century as tradition holds that St. Joseph of Arimathea came here. He was an apostle, one of the 12 hand-picked followers of Jesus during his earthly mission and he died in Glastonbury, a tiny village in Somerset known for the giant music festival that happens there every year. To me that is an amazing thought even if it can't be conclusively verified. However we do know for a fact that Celtic English bishops were present at ecumenical councils starting in the 4th century and that in the 6th century the Pope sent St Augustine of Canterbury to England to help in the conversion of the newly arriving Anglo-Saxons and of course became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. This all means that Christianity has existed in England for pretty much as long as Christianity has. The majority of the history of the Church of England has been a Catholic history. It is an apostolic church. The Church of England was founded in the 1st century, not 1534. That was the year when it rejected papal authority and I believe it was right to do so. All of these arguments that I've listed started to light on fire during the 18th century as the Oxford movement sought to return the C of E to Catholicism minus the Pope and ever since then the Anglo-Catholic tradition has existed within it and sometimes I think it was tailor made just for me. So I am extremely grateful to the Baptist Christians of my city for being so wonderfully hospitable to me and giving me just the introduction to the faith which I needed but I am going to be confirmed into the Church of England ever grateful to my mother for baptizing me and dragging me to Mass and following Anglo-Catholic theology and worship. I am now compelled to serve and help my fellow man and I hope that my content here can be retroactively looked upon as such and that this video in particular can be of great help to anyone whether they've never considered Christianity before or didn't know how strong the actual logic and philosophy behind their beliefs really are and that I can help them to grow in their faith. To those of you who are beginners and interested in learning more I recommend to you the book Mia Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He is known of course for the Chronicles of Narnia book series but he was an amazing popular apologist for the faith and explains why it is true without anything too heavy or tough for the average person to understand. Another great one like that is G.K. Chesterton who was actually Lewis's greatest inspiration. Chesterton was a great example of a witty British aristocrat so if you like a little bit of dry and convoluted humor paired with sartorial poetic language his book The Everlasting Man is your go to. If you want to dip your feet into some real theology you can get a book of selected writings by Thomas Aquinas which is great because his magnum opus is called the Summa Theologiae and it is often printed into five enormous books and could easily cost you over £100 so the selected writings are much more doable. Also check out the Thomistic Institute on YouTube for short form content and find them on podcast services for proper lectures not unlike the Mises Institute. Pints with Aquinas is easily my favourite Christian YouTube channel so check him out for more Catholic stuff and if you want to learn more about the mind field of denominations that exist check out the channel Ten Minute Bible Hour where the host Matt goes to all sorts of different churches shows you around and speaks to the clergy about what particularly they believe and why. If you would like to really deepen your faith I encourage you to go to church and make the most of it and also pray. I will pray for you all and I would love it if you could also pray for me. Take it easy.