They Are DESTROYING Our Civilization

[00:00:00]My daughter is a princess. She can do no wrong. And if you want to come to my house trying to date my daughter, you better be ready to face off with the twin eyes of my double barrel shotgun.

[00:00:09]Meanwhile, his daughter last Friday on someone's yacht. [music] And here we are still cleaning up the mess left for us by our previous generation. The same men who call young guys losers for not getting married, buying a house, and starting a family by 23 are the same men who raise today's women. And if it needs to be said, they did a awful job. They raised their daughters to expect worship and then mock young men for struggling to want to marry the result. And better yet, we already have the next generation of simps carrying on their legacy. But why is this happening? The architects of the sexual revolution, no fault divorce, modern psychology, and corporate feminism openly told us what they wanted to do to the traditional household. So today we're exposing the media, the corporations, the foundations, the psychologists and political movements that have spent the last h 100red years quietly dismantling the traditional household and replacing it with the simp economy. This is why it becomes a lot easier to understand the modern dating crisis and why it's so hard to find a partner when we understand a simple economic example.

[00:01:13]The dark truth is that every female vice that becomes profitable has a male customer somewhere behind it. either the father, the husband, societal hive mind, or the state. And the first two have been essentially castrated by the latter two with things like no fault divorce, where a woman can divorce you whenever she feels like it, and child protective services can take away your kids whenever they see you are actually being a good father. This is legally placed man no longer at the head of the household, but at the mercy of his wife and children. We'll go into examples later, but this legal setup has naturally brought about the simp. Think about the dating market like an auction.

[00:01:46]Female attention is the asset now.

[00:01:48][music] And men keep bidding against one another. One man offers flowers, the next offers vacations, then the next one pays her bills, then the next one accepts public humiliation. Another subscribes to her content, and each bidder raises the prices while demanding less in return. We call this simplation.

[00:02:03]You see Sophie Rain posing in a mansion claiming extraordinary earnings from Only Fans. On the surface, it looks like one woman becoming rich by selling sexuality. But that's only the storefront. Behind it is an entire market of men purchasing messages, fantasies, and stimulated intimacy. When a woman publicly disrespects her husband, people focus on her behavior.

[00:02:23]They rarely examine the man behind her who tolerates it, explains it away, and attacks anyone who notices. Look at Piers Morgan.

[00:02:30]>> But now, we've been asking this morning, would you ever take a marriage sabbatical? Journalist Celia Walden [music] did just that with husband Piers Morgan. calls the predictable Twitter responses to the uh my piece about sbaticals, saying, "Well, if I were married to Pers Morgan, I'd it would make it a very, very long sabbatical."

[00:02:48]Um, >> and when another man brought it up in an interview, Morgan walked off the air rather than confronting the humiliation [music] himself.

[00:02:54]>> Listen, sir, I don't know why you come on and you talk like you're holier than as soon as you're away. This >> applications are open.

[00:03:01]>> All right, let's bro. That's your girl.

[00:03:04]>> Let's end this, please.

[00:03:05]>> Cooked.

[00:03:06]>> You know what? I'm not doing this.

[00:03:08]Sorry, guys. [music] >> That is the hidden balance sheet. The woman records the revenue. The man absorbs the loss. And if he ever stops providing exactly what she wants, no fault divorce does allow her to simply get up and leave, which has already happened to him before with his previous wife. And because enough men keep paying, defending, and competing, the market keeps rewarding worse and worse behavior.

[00:03:29]>> Husband bought me my own private island just so I could wear whatever I want and feel safe and comfortable in seclusion.

[00:03:34][music] If he wanted to, he would. girls. I set the boundaries and he matched me.

[00:03:39]>> The dark truth that nobody wants to admit is that women like this. I mean, they really, really like it. The standard neoconservative explanation that you hear from guys in that world is that feminism simply brainwashed women.

[00:03:52]That they are helpless victims who secretly want marriage, children, and domestic life, but have been manipulated away from their true desires by the evil patriarchy. Apparently, the births to women in their 20s have declined. Rates for women in their 30s and 40s have risen modestly. This This is women feminism where these women are told that they should put off having children walk and married prioritize having a career.

[00:04:09]It's not even totally their fault. Not even totally their fault. Oh, it's so horrible. Someone stop these simps from sending me millions of dollars for posting pictures of myself. But don't worry, [music] sweetheart. Conservative media is here to give you a second life.

[00:04:23]That explanation is comforting. It gives us the false sense of hope that maybe if we just logically convince these women that what they're doing is bad and wrong, they'll just stop doing it.

[00:04:32]That's also incomplete. A culture may take a while to catch up essentially to what we're seeing in culture, but we've got to make some structural chang. So women [music] are the most easily indoctrinated, most easily propagandized out of the sexes. Okay? Every single study you look at will tell you this.

[00:04:48]The most easily influenced, [music] right? That's why all the marketing and is towards women because they buy they buy that is insane. Pink razors you charge a premium for cuz women will buy it. Why? Because it's pink, right? It's sparkly. But what it really is is Susan down the road has one.

[00:05:02]>> Yeah.

[00:05:03]>> Okay. Okay. And if Susan has it, she's, you know, she's pretty awesome. The other girls like what Susan's doing, so I'm going to do the same thing.

[00:05:09]>> And surprise, surprise, Susan down the road wants to around and have a career.

[00:05:13]When you look at the statistics, modern women do not merely feel unable to have children. They flat out do not want them. They do not merely lack the opportunity to stay home. They do not value that life enough to choose. Among young adults without children, only 45% of women say they want children someday, compared with 57% of men. And among adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children, 64% of women say a major reason is simply that they do not want them. That is not merely economic pressure. It is a stated preference. The number of children young women plan to have has also collapsed.

[00:05:44]Among women ages 20 to 24, planned fertility fell from 2.3 children in 2012 to only 1.5 in 2023. The share who either already had or planned to have at least one child fell from 93% to 66%.

[00:06:01]Likewise, 46% of women say that an enjoyable career was essential to a fulfilling life, while only 17% said the same thing about marriage, and only 22% said it about having children. So, no, women are not simply standing outside the traditional life desperately waiting for some white knight hero to come and rescue them back into it. Sure, feminism lied to women, but now they are voting for it. And this is part of the problem.

[00:06:24]A lot of people think that we really have freedom, but are you really free? A lot of people say that they want to pray more, get in shape, read, work, and spend time with the people they love, then proceed to lose hours every day scrolling through apps that leave them more distracted, more lustful, and less present. Some estimates say that people are spending more than 5 hours a day on their phones. That is over 75 full days of life every year. That is why things like Reset exist. Reset will block out all unproductive and lustful apps and essentially force you to complete good habits instead. Turn the blocker on and the addictive apps get locked away. No relying on willpower while Instagram, Tik Tok, or whatever else is constantly calling your name. Instead, screen time is earned back by doing things that actually matter. Prayer, going for a walk, deep work, sleeping properly, and taking time off your phone. One of the best features is the prayer option.

[00:07:15]Instead of going back into Instagram after being unproductive and falling into lustful content, Reset can require prayer first to help keep people focused. So, when you do scroll, it is not just mindless, you actually earned it. If you are serious about overcoming lust and no longer wasting your life on those apps, Reset is built to help give some of that life back. Hit the first link in the description or pin comment and download Reset and use code faith.

[00:07:37]The QR code is on screen now. Now, if you don't believe me that the post-sexual revolution dream is simply the life that women now are voting for and wanting, take the world's largest podcast for young women, call her daddy, where Lucy Hail revealed her best relationship was with a drug addict and a drunkard. Boyfriend after that, [music] God, we were it was the most passionate relationship of my life and the most toxic. He was a drug addict. He was an alcoholic. I [music] learned habits from him. We were a perfect storm. But there was also a lot of love there. That was also um a deeply scary time in my life. I was like, "Oh, >> can you share some of those habits?"

[00:08:13]>> Uh day drinking, drinking a bottle of wine before bed every night. At that point, I had never done a drug and that was like when I was like, "Oh, I kind of like how that feels." Yeah, it was a lot of just self- neglect. And it was like the day drinking thing. That was when I [music] was like, "Oh, you can drink the day after." Huh. I never really thought about that. She even says she was also terrified of it, but she enjoyed it because those types of relationships are quote unquote more exciting than normal ones.

[00:08:38]>> But but also, you know, those types of relationships are the most exciting.

[00:08:41]Like the most passionate, like whoo.

[00:08:45]Like [snorts] I this person I I think I'm like, if I were ever to be in a room with him now, it's still one of those people where I would be so >> I'm equal parts terrified of him and attract like deeply attracted to him.

[00:08:57]>> It's so crazy. I had one of those where it was like [snorts] he was definitely into drugs >> and there's like a thrill element of like the the instability like this person does not have their [ __ ] together and it's like every day is [ __ ] different and it's this like exciting rush and it's also what you don't realize is it's like uncomfortable fear that like you are thinking is like attraction but you're also like this is you're my body telling me like I shouldn't be doing this >> and it's exactly that like my nervous system the whole time I was with him was like I did not regulate my nervous system for a full here. But I also loved that because I told you I loved chaos.

[00:09:33]>> This further proves the thesis that propaganda is everything. These girls know these relationships are bad. They just told us. But they also told us they don't care. Because for women, desire is not formed by logic alone. It's shaped by repetition, imitation, and cultural permission. When women grow up on smut, chaotic romance novels, and crime shows that glamorize dysfunctions, those patterns can begin to feel not only normal, but desirable. Once the hive mind labels something exciting, empowering, and romantic, logic and facts take the back seat. A commenter notes, "Women like excitement more than they like stability." This is something that men have trouble grasping. You live in a time where women do not need men for money and safety. Women live safe, comfortable, and boring lives where the most interesting thing she has going on is shopping and celebrity gossip. If you can provide her with excitement, she will want to be around you even if you have nothing else going for you. As a man, you have to understand that money, stability, how nice you are, etc. are all secondary to excitement. Another notes, women will post this s and then wonder why the entire planet and every major religion has imposed strict social restrictions on their sovereignty since the dawn of time in every place humans have ever lived. But all it shows in reality is that ancients and moderns have a very divergent view of anthropology. And we'll get to that in a little bit. Women initiate around 70% of all divorces in the US, which is consistent across multiple studies, including Stanford research and recent 2026 reports. And guess what? A major driver is lack of excitement, emotional connection, or passion. Oh, yeah, but they're going to be miserable cat ladies and they're going to regret it when they're older and they're going to have mental health issues. Uh, yeah. So, did you ask if they care? Like, let's pause it. They don't get married. So [music] what? What are they missing out on right now? This second. Not 20 years later, not 30 years later, not when they're old and single, but right now. They can start an Only Fans account, make millions of dollars, have simps bail them out of their problems, get celebrated online, get invited onto podcasts, get treated like victims, coast scot-free, and if none of that works out, they can join your local evangelical church. And this is the part modern conservatives cannot accept. Just because someone makes bad choices does not necessarily mean they will experience the consequences in this life. Sometimes they show up decades later and sometimes in a sick society like ours, vice gets rewarded for a very long time. If you actually want to fix this crisis, you have to start by fixing the incentives. This isn't some ancient pearl of wisdom. It's literally just common sense. Before we get into that, I want to quickly remind you that Lungs of Faith is a oneman operation. It's just me. Videos like this take a huge amount of time to research, write, record, and edit. So, if this channel has helped you think more deeply about these issues and if you want to support the work, you can donate at buymeacop.com/longsof faith or through the PayPal link below.

[00:12:15]And if you want to go further, my supporters at $50 a month plus become producers of the channel and get direct input on future video topics. Your support is what helps me keep making these serious in-depth videos on topics that most people frankly are too afraid to touch on. Now, back to the plot. Just look at Sophie R. She has reportedly made tens of millions of dollars from Only Fans while barely being out of her teenage years.

[00:12:36]>> This is how much I'm actually making and no one believes me. So, I'm on the site and you can see that I'm not faking anything. I'm going here. I will go to my statistics if it will load and then this is the last 30 days. I'm going to hit all time [music] and these are the two like so this is the gross.

[00:12:56]>> There's just Wow. Wow.

[00:12:58]>> And then like you [music] can see that it's not a screenshot. That's real. And >> what's most revealing is that she is not some mythical once in a generation beauty. She is not Helen of Troy. She looks like an ordinary girl from math class in a lowincome neighborhood. That is the point. The system is not just rewarding supermodels. It's rewarding average and below average looking women for selling access, fantasy, attention, and the illusion of intimacy to armies of lonely men. And instead of being ashamed, they often become rich. Instead of being corrected, they become influencers. Instead of being treated as cautionary tales, they become success stories and end up teaching lectures at Harvard.

[00:13:32]>> I brought an Only Fans star to Harvard Business School's campus and I almost got expelled. I started following Ari Kitsia. [music] I had no idea that she was on Only Fans. I genuinely followed her because she was funny, beautiful, relatable. Once I learned more about her, I realized that this woman has built an insane [music] marketing funnel. She has 10 million subscribers across platforms, [music] most of them women, and she's converted many of these women to paid content on only, which is rare. So many students showed up to meet her.

[00:14:02]>> Can't make a career off hard work and honest effort like everyone else. Don't worry. She graduated from university and Alexia quickly grew tired of her minimum wage barista job, much as she loved it.

[00:14:13]So, she stopped selling coffee and started selling her own sweat instead.

[00:14:19]>> Yes, you heard that right. After an intense workout, Alexia bottles up jars of her own sweat and sells it to her fans online, which she says makes her up to $10,000 a week.

[00:14:30]>> Even several Olympic athletes have joined Only Fans to achieve financial independence and fund their demanding athletic careers >> and I feel like I have a dual personality. I'm a athlete at heart [music] and a business woman by day. I had many women role models growing up.

[00:14:49]My room was decked out in Marilyn Monroe. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:14:54]>> She had this [music] sense of using her beauty as a weapon to get what she needed to get done. And I love that.

[00:15:00]>> Now, you might say, "Oh, well, they're going to regret it when they're older."

[00:15:04]Maybe, maybe not, because it does not even necessarily end when they get older. Look at Shannon Elizabeth. She was one of the major sex symbol actresses of the late 90s and early 2000s, and in her 50s, she launched an Only Fans account. reports said she earned more than seven figures in her first week. So, think about what that means. A woman can become famous as a sex symbol when she is young, spend decades being remembered through that image, and then even in her 50s, turn that residual male attention into a massive payday on a platform built around parasocial access. That is not consequences. That is a marketplace. So, who's buying? Well, well, well. What do we have here? the most corrosive moral solvent eating away at society's remnant hope. Male simps. This behavior is everywhere [music] in way more places than we would like to admit. In movies, advertising, celebrity culture, relationships, and even supposedly masculine spaces. Men have been trained to believe that having no boundaries, no authority, and no willingness to correct women is evidence that they are emotionally mature. But how did this happen? We'll get into that in a bit, but it's much darker than you think. But first, we need to start with the rise of the girl dad. And this post unironically gives us the true formula.

[00:16:16]Behind every spoiled little girl is a daddy who can't say no. Where is child protective services when you actually need them? And most Christians today don't even realize that this is an antichrist way of raising your daughter.

[00:16:27]We'll get to that in a little bit. And these are the celebrities that men look up to as manly guys. David Beckham openly admitted that he was stricter with his sons, but when it came to his daughter Harper, he had quote unquote no power whatsoever. He said the entire family is wrapped around her finger from the moment she was born. Shaquille O'Neal said his sons have to leave home when they become adults while his daughters can remain as long as they want. Notice the pattern. The son is trained through pressure, independence, and consequences. Not saying that's bad, but the daughter is protected from those same consequences. He raises a consumer who expects the next man to continue the worship service. And many men do continue the worship service.

[00:17:04]Now, an interesting piece of symbolism that's very common in these princess treatment trend videos on Tik Tok is a depiction of the man tying her shoes.

[00:17:12]According to this nature peer-reviewed study in classical art and vases, such as those from ancient Greece and Rome, tying someone's sandals visually established a rigid power dynamic, marking the person tending to the laces as a servant, captive, or subjugated individual. Do you think this symbolism is accidental, or do you think it's being utilized as a subversive message towards young men? All we have to do is look at the consensus of the church fathers to know that Christianity is not a religion for simps and that this idea that you can somehow be a feminist and a Christian is absolutely ludicrous. St. Jerome said, "He who loves his wife too passionately is an adulterer." St. Jerome also said, "A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not with passion." And Sarak says, "Do not give your wife authority over you. Being a white knight is the opposite of virtue.

[00:17:55]Quote unquote, train and restrain her.

[00:17:57]Necessity is upon you. It is for this you are the head. Regulate her, therefore, do your own part. If she be a gossip, silence her. This is the very highest philosophy. Scripture does not tell fathers to make their wives and daughters feel like infallible princesses. The wisdom of Ben Sarak says [music] plainly, "Do you have daughters?

[00:18:14]Keep them chased and do not be indulgent to them." Elsewhere, he commands the father to quote, "keep strict watch over a headstrong daughter." Because the truth is, men did not simply wake up one morning and decide to become timid, pornographic, and terrified of their own authority.

[00:18:30]A lot of people like to say that the sexual revolution happened because men wanted it. But that's not exactly what history tells us. Before the finance years, psychologists and NOS's could reconstruct masculinity. The old world first had to be broken apart. The two world wars provided that perfect rupture. Millions of men were removed from their homes, subjected to industrialized slaughter, and returned wounded, displaced, [music] or psychologically scarred. what was called quote shell shock after the first world war and quote combat fatigue after the second did not remained on the battlefield. Men carried the effects back into their marriages, families, and communities. At home, governments reorganized entire societies around emergency production. Men were sent abroad while women were silently lured into factories, offices, and military auxiliaries with emotionally charged and manipulative propaganda. During the Second World War, roughly 3 million American women worked in war plants, while government propaganda deliberately presented industrial employment as patriotic womanhood. This was a propaganda filled radical change that went unnoticed under the guise of necessity, but it changed women's attitudes. And for the first time, men were not part of their wives' decisions.

[00:19:38]>> Why did I take a defense job? That's a funny question. I never thought of that before. Do you have to have a reason?

[00:19:44]We're in a jam, aren't we? I'm sorry, but you have to excuse me. I'm too busy to answer questions like that.

[00:19:51]>> But once institutions discovered that families, sex roles, labor, and education could be reorganized on a mass scale, the emergency president did not entirely disappear when the soldiers returned. The wars did not automatically cause feminism or the sexual revolution, but they provided an open door by weakening resistance, expanded the state, normalized mass propaganda, and demonstrated that institutions could rapidly redefine what men and women were expected to do. Then came the financiers. Rockefeller philanthropy became deeply involved in the new institutional world created around the wars. During the First World War, the Rockefeller Foundation spent approximately $22 million in that time's currency, which is way more now, on humanitarian relief, medical research, public health, and community welfare.

[00:20:37]During the second, it funded refugee scholar programs, wartime health research, and projects explicitly concerned with reconstructing the post-war world. But why did they do this? Those same networks later entered sex research, population policy, and social engineering. This is where you need to pay attention. The Rockefeller Philanthropy funded the committee for research in the problems of sex, which financed Alfred Kinsey's work. And if you want to learn about just how disgusting but also influential this man was, I highly encourage you to watch one of these two videos I made, which go far more in depth. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council and helped transform contraception, population reduction, and fertility management into respectable international policy. But much of this wasn't popular on the social scale.

[00:21:23]Excuse me. Hang on, madam. Don't walk around with that. Put something on, please.

[00:21:27]>> And that's why you needed a bridge.

[00:21:30][music] >> Then came Hugh Hefner. Hefner did not merely sell images of naked women. He used the fortune generated by commodifying women's bodies to support legal challenges against traditional sexual restraints. As he openly declared, "Playboy is the antidote to puritanism." But the progressive simp was not always a lonely young man buying photographs. Sometimes he was an enormously wealthy man using male resources to dismantle the sexual boundaries previous generations of men had been responsible for defending more importantly Christianity. Take it from the horse's mouth. Al Goldstein, the father of modern pornography, says it himself. The only reason that Jews are in pornography is because we think that Christ sucks. We don't believe in authoritarianism. Pornography therefore becomes a way of defiling Christian culture. And as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream, its subversive character becomes more charged. Then intellectuals supplied the mythology. Terrence McKenna is an important person to understand. He portrayed the male ego, patriarchal monotheism, and the supposedly rigid masculine order of civilization as forces that should be dissolved into a more intuitive feminized consciousness.

[00:22:34]Over the next decades, it became normalized through media and eventually psychology supplied the clinical vocabulary.

[00:22:42]The APA's 2018 guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men explicitly addressed quote unquote traditional masculinity ideology as inherently harmful. But it gets even more insane because the boundaries they're trying to push aren't just limited to [music] sex. Several feminist UN and NGO initiatives now promote quote gender transformative programs that encourage boys and men to take on more caregiving, domestic chores, and emotional labor to achieve equality.

[00:23:08]These often frame traditional male roles such as bread winner being less involved with the home as part of a patriarchal harm that needs resocialization. For example, Botaa Colombia's care school for men, government program teaching men diaper changing, cooking and cleaning, etc. Campaigns for boys to do housework equality with girls, share care work, and reject stereotypes. Tips include involving boys in cooking and cleaning from young ages and promoting quote feminist [music] child rearing. Programs like men engage and program P engage men in fatherhood and so-called antiviolence via caregiving training initiatives in places like Rwanda, in India, and elsewhere train men and boys in quote unquote maternal skills to challenge norms. Of course, right in line with where America plans to bring immigrants from. Funny how that works.

[00:23:52]We have to rethink the idea of freedom.

[00:23:55]The deeper change was not merely that feminism encouraged women to choose careers over children. It changed what a woman was understood to be in relation to the household. Here's what I mean.

[00:24:05]Under the old legal order, a daughter existed beneath the authority and protection of her father until she was married. And marriage transferred that into a new household governed by her husband. Under coverture, husband and wife were not treated as two entirely independent economic actors negotiating against one another. They formed one legal household. This is usually summarized by progressive pmacists by saying that, oh well, women were just property the same way that this glass of water is property. But that is crude and very inaccurate, but it does gesture towards a new idea that was completely foreign to the old world and instrumental in changing the public's perception of marriage in order to help this chaos unravel. the presupposition that relationships were no longer structured and hierarchical, but rather viewed through [music] a quote unquote oppressor and oppressed lens, where of course the husband's the oppressor and the wife is the [music] oppressed. And politicians at the time openly warned that separating the legal and economic interests of husband and wife would not simply correct isolated abuses. [music] It would alter the nature of marriage itself. Member of Parliament Henry Cecil Rea warned that this measure would quote disturb the peace of every family and quote destroy forever that identity of interest between husband and wife which he regarded as the basis of the Christian family. He specifically objected that the wife would retain the sole control of her property while the husband remained legally obligated to support the household creating not equality but separate rights combined with unequal responsibilities. [music] At this point, you could argue that marriage in the eyes of the law is not marriage at all because they abolished the Christian definition, which is man and a woman cleaving to one another to form one new body. Now, I'm not arguing that coverture was perfect. That was the Pandora's box. If autonomy is the highest principle, [music] every permanent duty begins to look like oppression. Even Plato predicted this.

[00:25:49]Plato's argument is that democracy does not merely loosen political authority.

[00:25:53]It trains the soul to regard every hierarchy and every desire as equally legitimate. Parents fear their children.

[00:25:59]Teachers flatter students. Rulers imitate subjects. And restraint itself begins to look oppressive. Society becomes simultaneously permissive and unstable, sexually disordered, hostile to correction and governed by impulse and emotions.

[00:26:13]So where does this actually leave us now? And what do I think is the solution? The truth is I don't think there's an easy answer to that. And anyone who has an easy answer, I think is just griffing because this is not ultimately a dating problem. It's a problem with our presuppositions. As modern [music] people, listen, everybody has a worldview. All of us do. None of us can say that we somehow uh neutrally interpret data. We all interpret data according to our existing worldviews and presuppositions. But those [music] can't just be any presuppositions. They actually need to be coherent and justifiable for the rest of our worldview and provide an explanation for the very reality that we live in. Under atheistic naturalism, which is, I would argue, our modern world general sort of working ethos, what men and women are doing right now makes perfect sense.

[00:26:57][music] And you have to be willing to admit that. Why should a man marry when he sees promiscuity being rewarded, paternal authority abolished, divorce available without fault, and male obligation enforced [music] without corresponding female duty? Why should a woman not sleep around in her youth, restrict her sexual options, bear children, and submit herself to household responsibilities when the culture offers money, attention, career status, and an easy exit which requires half the effort and more immediate pleasure. And with all of these immoral technologies such as in vitro fertilization, women are having children at later and later ages. So [music] if human beings are merely evolved animals, we we come from monkeys. [laughter] Morality is a social construct and existence has no final [music] purpose.

[00:27:36]Then maximizing pleasure while minimizing obligation is entirely rational and we should all [music] just chimp out, eat bananas, swing from branches and be a bunch of hedenistic degens like our political elite and ruling class. If we want to throw away metaphysics, [music] if we want to throw away Christianity, if we want to stop taking the book of Genesis literally and we replace [music] Adam and Eve with fictional characters or just some metaphor and we forget the reasons why God created man and woman where God created man [music] to his image and authority through headship. He created woman as man's fitting helper to become one flesh with him and together ascend towards holiness and communion with God.

[00:28:09][music] Then I think we forfeit the very justification for marriage. Without those presuppositions, I don't think we can really make a good coherent argument for why marriage is good. Because the most pleasurable [music] thing is not always the most beneficial thing for our souls. And to desire to do a less pleasurable thing in favor of a higher metaphysical truth, must be grounded in metaphysics. [music] And to have metaphysics, at least coherent metaphysics, yeah, I would argue you need the Christian God with the monarchy of the father with the orthodox doctrine of the trinity and the essence energy distinction. Marriage is not a vacation from aseticism. It is aceticism. That is why you cannot discern this alone. There is no YouTube checklist that can replace a spiritual father, a priest, a bishop or a holy monastic or somebody who knows your soul, your passions, your weaknesses in your life. But marriage is a holy path to salvation. And if it is truly your path, you cannot black pill yourself out of obedience to God [music] because the modern world made the institution dangerous. We just have to be sober. I think marriage can bring absolutely amazing blessings and young people should get married. And there's ways of mitigating this. Some people like Andrew Wilson have proposed certain ideas of not getting married in the state and [music] just getting civil marriage and only an ecclesiastical marriage through the church. But I know that's not legal everywhere. The reality is though, if you marry into a traditional community like orthodoxy, your statistics for divorce significantly significantly drop. It's never going to be zero. This is the reality. We are living through another flood. You can remain outside endlessly diagnosing the water as it rises or [music] you can enter the ark of repentance and salvation that is the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy does not promise an easy marriage, but it reveals what marriage is [music] for. And I think that is fundamentally the question that needs to be answered before we can even get to changing laws and having this [music] broader discussion. And orthodoxy gives us in society the only coherent understanding capable of making the pains and sacrifices of marriage actually meaningful. So until next time, this is Lungs of Faith and as always, don't negotiate with terrorists.

[00:30:01]>> They want to count me out. Next time a higher number, next time she'll run for cover. Next time, let the giant slumber.

[00:30:08]They want to keep me down.