0:11 - Introduction to Psalms 145
1:19 - The Nature of Goodness
8:04 - The Burden of Relationships
11:31 - Apologies and Accountability
16:50 - The Role of Anger
20:10 - Compassion and Responsibility
25:34 - Knowledge and Moral Choices
30:51 - The Dilemma of Contact
34:47 - The Impact of Non-Contact
36:11 - Conclusion and Farewell
In this lecture, the discussion centers around Psalms 145:8-9, which speaks to the attributes of God as gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and overflowing with mercy. The speaker emphasizes the significance of understanding these virtues not only as divine qualities but also as ideals that can be cultivated by individuals striving for personal growth and ethical behavior. The interrelation between compassion and moral responsibility is explored, highlighting how those who wish to help others often harbor a deep desire for their improvement, underscoring the optimistic hope that motivates such interventions.
Discussion continues on the balance of virtues, particularly optimism and honesty. The speaker notes that excessive optimism can lead to disappointment, while honesty, when taken to an extreme, can be counterproductive, making one vulnerable to exploitation. These ideas lead to an examination of the personal relationships affected by moral failings and the desire for those who have strayed from virtuous paths to recognize their errors and seek redemption. The struggle between self-perception and ethical conduct is unpacked, articulating how this tension can lead individuals to either confront their shortcomings or rationalize their wrongs in a way that protects their self-image at the expense of truth.
The conversation further addresses the challenges faced by those who aim for improvement in their own lives while witnessing friends or family members succumb to destructive behaviors. This is particularly poignant in the context of addiction, wherein the frustration felt by friends and family becomes a catalyst for a genuine desire for others to seek help. The speaker elaborates on the emotional turmoil experienced when seeing loved ones make consistently poor choices, stressing the heartache that comes from wanting their well-being while feeling powerless to effect change.
As the talk progresses, there is a deep engagement with the concept of conscience as a guide toward virtue. The speaker emphasizes that confronting one’s own moral failures is a crucial step in the journey toward self-improvement. However, this confrontation often brings discomfort. The discussion outlines the potential dual paths one can take: either acknowledging wrongdoing and striving for change or dismissing guilt by denying the existence of right and wrong altogether. This fork in the road becomes a recurring theme, representing a critical choice faced by many.
Furthermore, the lecture touches on societal dynamics, specifically in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The speaker calls attention to a collective failure to acknowledge past wrongs, questioning the absence of accountability and reconciliation within communities. An examination of behaviors that flow from the lack of acknowledgment leads to a broader commentary on how societal norms can degrade moral responsibility.
As the talk progresses towards personal anecdotes, the speaker reflects on their relationships and the critical moments that benchmark personal growth. It is pointed out that recognizing when relationships become harmful is an act of self-care and compassion, both for oneself and for the other party involved. The distinction is made between compassion and enabling negative behaviors, drawing from personal experiences that illustrate the need to sometimes sever ties to prevent further harm.
By the conclusion, the importance of knowledge as a transformative tool is emphasized. The speaker encourages individuals to share wisdom and understanding, envisioning a world where growth and compassion guide interactions rather than exploitation and resentment. This notion underlines the lecture's central message: that true compassion involves boundaries and responsibility, balancing mercy with moral accountability. The speaker ends by reiterating the importance of continuing this dialogue on self-improvement, compassion, and moral responsibility as foundational elements of personal and communal well-being.
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. This is Bible Verses, and we are going to look at Psalms 145, 8 to 9. Psalms 145, 8 to 9.
[0:11] And I quote, The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy. The Lord God is good to all, and his tender mercies are all over his works. So, we can take this, of course, as God. If you're secular, we can take this as what is the most virtuous. What is the most virtuous? Gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy. One of the things that corrupt people don't really understand is how much good people want them to improve. If you have somebody who's an addict.
[0:58] A drunk drug addict, it's hard for them to understand how much those around them want them to improve, want them to get better, want them to give up their addiction. We are rooting, we good people, we are all rooting desperately sometimes for corrupt people to become good.
[1:19] Now, that is a hope born of optimism and sometimes, yeah, optimism needs to be in the Aristotelian mean? Too little optimism and you're depressed. Too much optimism and you are exploited. So you need a healthy amount in the middle, which doesn't answer much other than to saying it is one of the virtues where an excess is a problem. Even a virtue like honesty. An excess of honesty is not healthy because then you put everything out into the world, which allows you to be targeted and exploited.
[1:55] So, honesty is also one of these virtues that you need to balance a little bit, not so much in your private life, of course, to be honest with people in your private life, but in the world as a whole, right? This is why Jesus says, be as cunning as the serpents. Do not wear your heart on your sleeve. Other people will pluck it for profit. So, I mean, speaking personally, of course, my desire for my family of origin and my friends to become better, I mean, I was begging friends to go to therapy, I was begging friends to improve, and as disasters hit them, people that I knew in the past, as disasters hit them, it broke my heart, and I very much wanted them to seek and achieve the consolations of philosophy and humility and virtue and all kinds of wonderful things. I just wanted them, I was so desperate for them to see the light as I had seen the light, to move towards virtue to become better. And I was a lot of emotion early in the morning.
[2:56] It's hard for me to say why they didn't, why they steadfastly avoided and rejected, the path that I had blazed towards a better life. I don't really know any of them who had happy marriages. I don't know any of them who achieved any particular sustained success. I think that it was because they had done wrong and they had harmed others, and in particular harmed... No, I'm just going to leave it at harmed others. And when you harm others, you either recognize that you harmed others and...
[3:39] Take your lumps, take your licks from your conscience, right? The conscience wants to make you feel bad for doing wrong so that you will do better. It is the first step towards virtue, which is the avoidance of the pain of the bad conscience rather than the pursuit of virtue for the sake of the happiness it provides. But when you do wrong to others, it clashes with your self-image. And when the empirical wrongness of your actions clashes with the vanity of your self-image, you are really trembling on the brink. You are standing on the greatest fork in life, in the world, in your soul, in the future, in the future of the world, which is either.
[4:28] Either you adjust your self-image to accept that you're capable of great wrong and vow to improve and work to improve, or you say, I am blameless because there's no such thing as right and wrong, thus saving your self-image at the expense of truth, virtue, happiness, and improvement. I mean, you do something wrong. It's sort of like if you are failing to attract, if you're a man and you fail to attract women, or maybe you repel women, you either say, well, good women out there and I need to adjust what I'm doing to be more attractive. Or you say, women all have terrible taste. They're all bad, whatever nonsense you would come up with. And that saves your self-esteem, right? That the fault is is not yours. The fault is women. So you save your self-esteem and end your bloodline. You have no future with women if you blame them for being unattractive. In the same way, if you have disastrous relationships, you can either say, I'm choosing the wrong women, doing the wrong things, or you can say, well, all women are like that. That's the nature of relationships.
[5:43] And then you just either continue dating bad people until your adrenals burn out, your fight or flight burns out, and you give up, or you just go monk mode right away. So when you have a clash between your self-image and your empirical actions, right? So if you've cheated on your partner, again, talking to the men, if you've cheated on a woman or you cheated on your partner, then you either say, I did something really wrong and take your lumps and work to improve, or you say, well, she drove me to it. It was just impulsive. It was a one-time thing. She's overreacting. Who really cares? We're all just mammals. It doesn't matter. You know, it's just flesh and flesh, right?
[6:27] You either accept your conscience, which is painful in the short run to say, gee, I cheated, you know, and that's not good, and there's something wrong with the way I'm approaching the world if this is what's going on, or you then adjust your mindset to remove the morals from what you're doing. And you remove yourself from the divine to the mammal, the divine being there are universal moral values that we should accept and pursue.
[7:02] And you say, well, I'm just flesh, I'm just atoms in space, and virtue is just a tool of manipulation, sort of the Nietzschean approach in some ways. Virtue is just a tool of manipulation and what matters is physical hedonism, fleshly hedonism. Animals pursue pleasure and avoid pain. I'm just an animal. And then you can't pursue moral philosophy. You can't pursue God or virtue in that situation. And in hindsight, though, I didn't really see it at the time. I had a sort a vague feeling for it, but I didn't really see it at the time. But I can think back to instances where that choice was occurring for people, where that choice was occurring for people. And it's very sad, of course, to see the path they took. Especially, not to overpraise myself, because certainly I was no angel back then.
[8:05] I'm still no angel now, but I'm trying. But it.
[8:09] Having at least access to philosophy through me was a real benefit and a bonus, but they didn't, oh, and not just philosophy, but, you know, therapy, self-knowledge, and all that kind of stuff, and they chose what they chose. So, gracious and full of compassion. This is part of the sort of 24-hour rule, that if someone has wronged you, they have 24 hours to apologize, or it's not going to happen, because, and this is part of this fork in the road. If you do someone wrong, if you don't apologize within 24 hours, it is virtually inevitable that you will simply justify and avoid it, right? I mean, we, of course, can see this in this strange lunar landscape of society post-COVID. And people should be at least, I mean, look, the unvaccinated were right about some things, not everything, but they were right about some things. And there's no apology.
[9:07] From, nobody references it, nobody talks about it. And so they've simply justified it to, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had, they happen to be lucky, it's not something worth talking about, it doesn't matter, and so on, right? But nobody will say, listen, we kind of threatened you and attacked you and said you were going to die and took away some of your rights of bodily autonomy for a time. And, you know, that was kind of wrong, we got to figure out what we did and why we were so susceptible. And like, you know, there should be a reckoning, like in a healthy society, there would be a reckoning, but there's no reckoning. And so people are just moving on. And then if you bring it up, well, of course, if you bring it up, you're provoking people's bad conscience, if they even have one. If you bring it up, you're provoking people's bad conscience. And therefore, they get annoyed and irritated with you. Why are you digging up the past? It's all moved on. It doesn't matter, right? Everybody was doing the best they could with the knowledge they had. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of misinformation, it turns out, but nobody knew it at the time, all that kind of stuff, right? So, I mean, you're going to get these apologies within 24 hours, usually.
[10:11] And I think everyone who got vaccinated or strongly advocated for it to the point of interfering with people's bodily autonomy, at some point, they read something that gave them pause, right? Something that didn't make sense with regarding to vaccination. And, you know, that was the point where they could have said, well, geez, tell me what your experience was. It turns out that you weren't totally wrong about everything as I first thought, and so on, right? So you get that 24-hour window. It's the same thing when the pursuit of hedonism leads to a pain. You know, like this sort of typical example is the guy who gets married to a woman mostly because she's really sexy and hot, and then they have problems because the relationship is not founded on virtues, and then he ends up in this dead-bedroom sexless marriage.
[11:01] A negative consequence to pursuing this kind of hedonism. In the same way that, of course, if somebody says, well, exercise is a drag, and yes, it is, and I don't want to limit my food intake, so he goes for hedonism because he can eat whatever he wants and doesn't have to exercise, and then he ends up, you know, overweight, joint pain, back pain, gout is going on that is difficult and unpleasant for him. That's a time when he can say, gee, I was wrong, and work to improve.
[11:32] And of course, it's the same thing with people who do you wrong. You're going to apologize. It's the same thing when people have that time where the consequences of their bad decisions are becoming manifest, but rather than say, I was making bad decisions, I've been making bad decisions, and rather than go, because it's an act of, this is the angry will that I talk about, sort of angry animal will, which is, if I've been telling people, you're living the wrong way, and it's going to go badly. If I say that to people, and then it turns out that they have been living the wrong way, and it is going badly, it is the angry will to say, I must subjugate myself to a standard.
[12:18] This is the Garden of Eden, the serpent. God says, here's a rule. And if you subjugate yourself to a rule and if you don't subjugate yourself to a rule, then bad things will happen and you have to I mean you have to subjugate yourself to a moral rule if you don't or moral rules if you don't subjugate yourself to moral rules bad things will happen you have to subjugate yourself to the disciplines of eating well and exercising and if you don't bad things will happen you know we sort of understand that right in a marriage you have to subjugate yourself to monogamy and if you don't bad things will happen and so on but the angry will does not want to subjugate itself to rules, because it views subjugation to rules as humiliation, as a blow against vanity. Now, why do people view subjugation to rules as humiliation? Well, because they have inflicted rules on others in order to humiliate them, or they have had people in authority inflict rules on them in order to humiliate them, and they haven't processed that and found a different path forward. Because, let's say, they had mean teachers who bullied them with stupid rules, as mean teachers and most teachers tend to do when they were growing up. They had teachers who bullied them for the sake of pointless rules. What they do is then they say, well, all subjugation to rules is humiliation. Anyone who tells me to live reasonably and morally is exactly the same as a teacher who bullies, right?
[13:48] A friend many years ago, not part of this group, but I had a friend many years ago who was telling me once that he skipped school and the school called his mother. And his mother said, why weren't you in school? He said, I got sick. I threw up. Where did you throw up? In a corner of the playground. And she, it hadn't rained, of course, and she took him, not quite by the ear, but she took him over to the playground and demanded to know exactly where he had thrown up. And there was of course no throw up there and so it just got into a real tussle about these kinds of things but of course a lot of parents have backed themselves into such desperate corners that they can't really have empathy for their kids right so if you know you're just broke and you absolutely need a job you've got no husband or your husband is non-functional as a woman and you just have to work and your kid has to go to school because you've got to have him be somewhere during the day, the kid really can't say, I mean, the kid can say, but you can't act on it. If the kid says, I don't like school, I don't want to go to school. Well, I mean, what can you do, right? You back yourself into a corner to the point where you can't do what your kid needs, right? You can't say, okay, we'll take you out of school because it's sort of pointless and stupid. Well, you can't do that. And because you feel bad, you then often will get aggressive against your kid for saying, I want something different.
[15:13] I mean, I certainly remember I didn't really want to go to boarding school, I didn't really want to go to Canada, but my needs and preferences were not acceptable to my mother, and therefore I just was pulled along like a tail on a kite after my mother's whims. So when people make bad decisions, they.
[15:37] Either learn and work to improve, or they justify those bad decisions. Gracious and full of compassion. People often make bad decisions based upon childhood suffering, and we can be compassionate to them, right? I mean, I can't come down like a ton of bricks on people, I mean, morally or rationally, I can't come down like a ton of bricks on people who make bad decisions, based upon their bad childhoods, because, I mean, at least when I was young and sort of certainly pre-philosophical, because I made bad decisions as a teenager based on a bad childhood.
[16:15] So, I mean, there has certainly been cases where I've had a much more critical view of somebody on a call-in show, but then hearing about their bad childhood is like, oh yeah, okay, that kind of makes sense and I have compassion, right? So, the Lord or morality is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger. Now, it doesn't say without anger, it says slow to anger and of great mercy. Slow to anger is important. Being quick to anger is a fault, it's a flaw. Being without anger is a fault and a flaw, right?
[16:51] So, it's sort of like the autoimmune issue that people have, right, this is obviously my amateur understanding of the issue, not being any kind of medical professional myself, but you have an immune system that does not attack healthy cells, but rather attacks viruses, bacteria, dangerous foreign entities, right? Now, you don't want to have no immune system, because then you're just desperately, you're going to live in a bubble and you're desperately sick from everything. So, you don't want to have no immune system. But at the same time, if you have an overactive immune system, it can attack healthy cells, and that's really bad, right?
[17:29] It's the same thing with anger. You don't want to have an overactive anger that attacks everything. Instantly, that's called being defensive and aggressive. But at the same time, you also don't want to have no anger because then you're unprotected in a world that has predation and exploitation in it. Slow to anger and of great mercy. I mean, it's funny, you know, I've thought occasionally over the years, I mean, it comes up, people that I knew when I was younger, it comes up. And I just, I think sometimes if people were to contact me and to say, you know, you were right about some things and I should have listened and, you know, congratulations on what you're doing with your life. It seems to be pretty noble and it would be great to reconnect. I mean, honestly, I can't imagine that I would be like, oh yes, but you know, in the time of my trials and sufferings and right, you weren't there and so on. I would be like, I mean, you've heard this, of course, in shows, right, where people who were really critical and negative towards the show at a time when a lot of that was going on and it was not always the easiest thing, they have called in to apologize or to work with all of that. And maybe I'm just really bad at holding grudges, but when somebody approaches with an apology.
[18:49] And it seems to be genuine and it's not manipulative and it's not like some weird information gathering thing, and I've got a pretty good instinct for those kinds of things, if somebody has seen the light, doesn't mean necessarily we'll be best buds, but I'm glad to have the conversation and.
[19:04] In terms of forgiveness, yeah, sure. I mean, if somebody has seen the light and improved and learned about their past and become a better person, then good. Then good. Of great mercy. I admire people who, having done the wrong thing, find a way to turn it around and take down the angry ape will of dominance and submission and do the right thing. And they're honest and apologize, right? I mean, I admire that behavior in others, of course, because I hold it as a standard for myself that if I do something wrong, then I will examine it. And I will not apologize for everything because there is a hierarchy to these things. So if somebody comes at me with some nitpicky thing from years ago, I will not necessarily apologize for that because I suspect the person's motives and I do not believe that they're interested in my moral improvement. They're just trying to dominate and humiliate me by often pulling something out of context from years ago i just i don't view that as acting in in good faith and i just won't i won't do that.
[20:11] So you have great mercy i think that's important if people have overcome their animal will their dominance will and they are willing to subject themselves to virtue well that's a that's a be respected. It's a hard thing to do. So, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. Yes, I am very sorry for people's childhoods, and I want them to make better decisions, and I want, of course, myself to keep making good decisions, and that means that you do have to have some graciousness and compassion, slow to anger. Yes. Yes. Because there is a certain amount of, forgive them Father for they know not what they do, there's a certain amount of people don't know the connections between their past.
[21:01] They're present. They don't really get what has happened between their past and their present. You start connecting those things. Well, you're drawn to this type of woman because this is how you were raised. And so once they have those connections and they understand why they're doing things and they understand why it's negative or dysfunctional, particularly if there are children involved. So once that happens, then they have a responsibility to work to improve. right? We can understand that, right? I don't really need to get too far into that. If a woman is overweight because she was sexually abused and therefore wants to remain unattractive to predatory men, then that's a connection that she can understand. Now she's responsible for working on it. She's also responsible for eating more healthy, more healthily and so on, right? So it makes sense, right? So we are compassionate with people and we provide them knowledge with the hope and intent and goal of having them use that knowledge in order to improve, right? I mean, if you wanted to be a really good torturer, you would pretend that you wanted to be a doctor, and you would be trained about the human nervous system, not because you wanted to heal people, but because you wanted to do maximum pain damage to them without harming them. You would want to do minimum physical harm and maximum pain, right? Because that's how you could draw out the torture for the longest.
[22:25] So if you were a compassionate teacher in the medical field, and somebody was really eager to learn about the nervous system, you would probably be keen to teach them. But if you found out that the person was planning on using the knowledge that you were providing to torture people, then you would kick his or her ass out of the class, right?
[22:47] Don't take my knowledge and use it for evil purposes. If somebody came to your art gallery because they loved your art, you would be happy to have them there, even if they came seven times in a week. However, if you found out that the person who was coming to your art gallery was in fact an art thief, then you would bar them from your gallery because they would not be coming because of their appreciation of art, or only in part, but because they wanted to scan your security system and steal everything that wasn't nailed down. So in the same way, we want to teach people how to be good, how to have self-knowledge with all humility. And at some point, they have enough knowledge that they're now responsible for their choices. So we can view people, and I think reasonably so, as living in a state of nature, right? They're subject to propaganda, haven't really thought things through, haven't thought things from first principles. And so, yeah, they don't really know what they're doing. They're not responsible for knowledge they don't have, particularly if that knowledge is hard to come by. I mean, the internet has increased everyone's moral responsibility virtually infinitely.
[23:55] So you provide people knowledge, principles, connections, and so on. You provide them all of these things, and then they are responsible for doing better.
[24:08] So once they are responsible for doing better because you have informed and instructed and modeled the behavior, once they are responsible for doing better, then they have a choice to do better. And if they choose continually to do bad things, to do wrong things, to do corrupt and negative things, well, then they're immoral. They're evil, corrupt. So if you have some guy who was severely traumatized as a child, he's a father and he keeps showing horror movies to his little kids, and you tell him, look, this is because you were traumatized as a kid and here's what happened and this is a reproduction of trauma, it's bad for your children, then he has a responsibility to stop showing appalling horror movies to his little children.
[24:56] Through this whole process with him, and then he decides to continue to show appalling horror movies to his little children, then he is now, with knowledge, sadistic. He's not just reproducing, copy-pasting the Groundhog Day trauma of his past. He is, in fact, now, with full knowledge, traumatizing his children, which means he's no longer unconsciously reproducing his own trauma. He's now active with knowledge, fully responsible, a sadist. So slow to anger is provide them knowledge. And once they have that knowledge, they're responsible. And if they continue to do wrong, then you can get angry.
[25:35] Because now they're not acting in an unconscious manner. So you give people the truth about the nature of the system and society they live in. And if they can disprove you, then you gain the benefit of knowledge. But if they can't disprove you, then they are responsible for not advocating for these things, these negative or destructive things anymore. And if they continue to do so, then they are no longer acting without knowledge. They are no longer acting automatically. They are, in fact, acting in a malicious, conscious fashion. Well, then you can get angry, right? Then you can get angry. And, in fact, you should get angry. So your parents can say if your parents were cruel or abusive.
[26:20] Then going to talk to them and say, listen, I experienced this and this is my judgment and this is what I think happened and this is how tough it was for me. Well, they can no longer claim that they didn't hurt you. And if they just continually come up with the sort of mealy-mouthed excuses that I dissect in Peaceful Parenting at PeacefulParenting.com, please share. If they continue to avoid an excuse and then continue to abuse, well, now they're doing it with full knowledge, and therefore they have moved from potentially unconscious trauma repeaters to fully knowledgeable conscious sadists.
[26:56] To all, and his tender mercies are all over his works. This is something I've talked about with people. If your parents were abusive, and you don't have conversations with them about this, then what happens, unfortunately, is that by not providing any negative feedback, they have no chance to stop being abusive. I've mentioned this before, of course, with my mother. My mother behaves badly around me in particular, because I don't conform or comply with her corruption. I pointed out, I was fairly assertive on multiple occasions talking to her about my needs, history, experiences, and preferences. And she escalates and screams and throws things around and accuses me of being in league with bad people and, you know, to harm her. And like, she's really, she behaves really badly. So if my mother was an alcoholic, and every time.
[27:53] She interacted with me, she binge drank herself into near comatose, well, the kind and compassionate thing would be to talk to her about this. But if every single time this happened, she was okay not drinking, but every time she interacted with me, she drank herself into near oblivion, then the only kind thing that I could do, since we couldn't break the pattern, the only kind thing that I could do would be to not interact with her so she wouldn't die from alcohol poisoning, or, you know, permanently damage her liver, her health as a whole. So if people cannot restrain themselves from acting badly around you, you remove yourself from their presence because you are a catalyst to them doing great harm to themselves and to others. So that is a kind thing to do. So if you separate yourself from people with whom, if you are honest, they freak out and behave in really terrible and appalling and negative ways. You know if your father had a real temper when you were younger and then you kind of comply and he's relatively peaceful but then the moment you're honest with him and try and actually, participate and show up in the relationship he goes back to his old habits escalates yells intimidates threatens calls you names or whatever right then if you decide not to see him either anymore forever or for a certain amount of time it is because in part because your behavior and your honesty provokes him to negative behaviors.
[29:21] Girlfriend who cut herself, you break up with her, and then every time you contact her, she cuts herself again. You need to stop contacting her, because when you contact her, she cuts herself. I mean, we can all understand this, right? So, there is compassion in separating yourself from corrupt people. If your continued contact and honesty causes them to act out in negative and destructive ways, then it is compassion to them to say, look, if my honesty provokes you to destructive behaviors to yourself or others or both, really both, you can't harm others without harming yourself. If my presence provokes you to truly negative and destructive and corrupt and immoral behaviors, then I will withdraw myself from contacting you because I don't want to provoke you to negative destructive behaviors, right? If every time I contact you, you drink yourself into oblivion, I'm going to stop contacting you because I don't want to be any kind of cause of you harming yourself in that way. My mother is a better person without me in her life because she could not restrain herself from attacking and being abusive when I was honest, right? You say, ah, yes, well, I go back and be dishonest, but that's harming me, right? To be in a relationship where I have to be dishonest is harming me.
[30:45] So it's the least harm possible, right? For me not to be in contact with my mother is the least harm possible.
[30:52] It is the most compassionate thing. It is the nicest thing because she doesn't behave in terrible ways and I am not harmed by having to lie and misrepresent everything about my history and pretend to have respect and love for someone I do not have respect and love for. So, I mean, there's little white lies and then there's like.
[31:11] Soul, lies, falsehoods, thou shalt not bear false witnesses in really, really important matters. So the Lord is good to all. Yeah, I mean, virtue benefits everyone, even those it causes pain to in the short run, it benefits them in the long run. My mother is better off because of my decision to not see her. So the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. Yeah, we try and extend knowledge, virtue, and compassion to people who are doing wrong. Slow to anger. Yep. It means that we try to instruct them if they end up using our instructions against us or to manipulate us or to control us, right? If you say to someone, I really care about your life and want you to be happier and better, and they take that and say, gee, that's really nice of you. Let's talk about it, and I'll try and figure out a way, you know, assuming I accept what you say is true, and it is true, then I'll try and find a way to be happier and better. Thank you for your care, blah, blah, blah, right? That's good. However, if someone is really corrupt, they crossed that Rubicon, they took that fork in the road towards hell itself. If they're really corrupt, then what will happen is, if you say to someone who's really corrupt, I care about you and I want you to be happier and better, then they will use your caring against you. If they're sadists, they will intentionally harm themselves or others or you in order to make you feel bad because they enjoy that.
[32:34] Or they will, you know, like a drug addict who there's people around him who desperately want him to become better. He will beg and plead them for money for quote rehab, right? Because he knows that they want him to stop doing the drugs and to get rehab and to get better. So because they desperately want him to get better, he will use that desire to get money pretending to go to rehab, but then just use it for drugs, right? So he knows that they want what's better for him and he will manipulate that in order to get that or they you know the drug addict who says like let's say there's a daughter she's a drug addict and she says to her parents you have to give me money for drugs or i'm just going to go out into the worst section of town and try and get drugs, any way i can right which might mean prostitution or or something right terrible right.
[33:24] Knows that her parents want what's best for her. They don't want her to get hurt. They care about her. And so she's using it as a bully tactic to extract money to get the drugs, right? I mean, this is, again, we can say she's out of her mind with the, it's the addiction talking and so on, but it is, that's the mechanism, right? And this is why in the show Intervention, as I've mentioned before, they say, listen, you either go for help like right now, or you're out of her lives completely. I mean, this really is the most compassionate thing that you can do, right? So yeah, slow to anger, for sure. We will try to give people good knowledge, and because we care about them, but if they then use that knowledge and are caring of them to further abuse and escalate and exploit us, then we get angry. Because then your virtues are being used against you, which is about as corrupt a thing as is possible. And then the more virtuous you are, the more you'll be exploited. And therefore, you are feeding the preferences, desires and material wants of someone because you're virtuous and they're corrupt. In other words, you're paying them for their corruption and they will, whatever you pay, you get more of. So you have to withdraw because they're just getting worse out of association with you. So yeah, his tender mercies are all over his works.
[34:36] So because it is well known, certainly in this community and, you know, by many, many people across the world that I do not see my mother because she is abusive.
[34:47] Think of course of the, well, first of all, she's a better person and I'm a better person because of it. We're both less traumatized because we're not in contact. So it's a huge net plus for the world as a whole. My honesty was not making her a better person by provoking her to further abuse. So we're better off. But also think of the number of parents who've said, oh gosh, well, if my kids don't have to see me, if I'm relentlessly corrupt, I will work to improve.
[35:15] Work to improve. Well, okay, so think of all of that. So, my decisions with my mother, say, just to take the example that's most understandable to people, my decisions with my mother have been a net positive for the world as a whole. Virtue is good to all. My mother has benefited, I have benefited from our non-contact, or my decision to go no contact. And his tender mercies are all over his works. So, having mercy to my mother by not provoking her to bad behavior through my own virtues, well, if you have a friend who's so lonely that your happy marriage makes him suicidal, it's probably better to disconnect from your friend and suggest he gets mental health help, because if you keep being happy with your wife around him, he's going to throw himself off a bridge, right? So, it's not, right? So, the tender mercies are virtue benefits just about everybody, right? So, I hope this helps. I really, really am enjoying these. Thank you for these great Bible verses, and I hope that you find this helpful and useful.
[36:11] Lots of love from up here, freedoman.com slash donate to help out the show. Ooh, going to grab a little. It's 10.30 a.m., Sunday the 19th of January 2025, and I'm going to grab a little food before the 11 o'clock show. Lots of love. Take care, everyone. Bye.
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