Cheer Up! We’re Blessed To Live Among Such Great Evil So We Can Counteract It

The Busier You Are….The Less Time You Have To Sin

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “In doing that, the more time you spend, I think, with those moral elements of your life or of a life, the less time you have to sin.  The less time you have to do the things that we all agree are despicable.  If you view it that way, then look at the glass as half fill.  Why not fill the glass up, right?  Always work to and pursue that highest ideal, that beau ideal of being the great, good, gentle, humble Christian gentleman, being the great, good, humble gentle Christian lady.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I was on Facebook, just looking to see if there was any sign of sentient life out there other than Eric, Adrian, myself and Professor Gutzman.  I found a post by a dear old friend, I won’t mention her name, but she’ll know I’m talking about her because she came to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the rollout of the Ron Paul 2012 presidential campaign and I met her and her husband.  She’s pondering whether or not she wants to bail on social media because it has consumed her life.  I talked about this before.  It has consumed a lot of people’s lives.  [mocking] “Mike, you promote it.”  I know I do.  I have to try and reach people in any way that I can.  If I didn’t do it, I’d receive more criticism, [mocking] “Why aren’t you on Facebook?  Why aren’t you out there talking about this?  Why aren’t you out there on Twitter?  Why aren’t you on Google Plus?  Why aren’t you on Reddit?  Why are you not promoting what you do?”  Eric, how many people follow @anonymous, millions, tens of millions?

Eric:  Give me a second and I’ll check.

Mike:  By the bye, if you have fans out there who want to follow you on Twitter, if you have a Twitter address —

Eric:  It’s just @Ejwhite0 if you want.  Tweet as often as you — it’s mostly for research.

Mike:  I think most of the time I’m just tweeting so I can see that I put tweets out there because they don’t generate what you think they would.  In any event, she’s contemplating whether or not she should bail on the endeavor of being consumed by forms of social media.  I can only tell you, and I get asked this on a pretty regular basis now, people want to know — I know I can hear some of you, [mocking] “Mike, get back to bashing Obama.  We don’t care about you.”  Well, it’s my show, and since I am the host, from time to time I’ll inform you about what it is that I’m doing.  You might find it mildly interesting, you might not.  That’s why there’s the 80s at 8.

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You can catch up on the rest of the show at SiriusXM.com/OnDemand.  Listen to the last hour if you don’t like this one.  Download the app on your smartphone, iPhone or Android.  But seriously, get the On Demand app.  It’s a great app.  Listen to the show commercial-free when and where you want to.

Lots of you have been asking me lately what has changed, what’s going on?  [mocking] Mike, what’s changed?  Lately it seems you’re talking a lot more about this God entity, this Christ character.  There are many of us out here that are atheists.  There are many of us that are agnostics out here and we resent having to sit through — we want the republicanism but we don’t want the preaching.  Quit the preaching.”  Well, I am sorry to inform you that I believe that the two are inextricably linked.  I don’t think there can be a republicanism without a Christ and without the prospect of an eternal life that you can earn through your moral behavior while you’re mortal.  I think that’s something that people of the medieval ages and the middle ages knew.  We are so arrogant we’ve convinced ourselves they were a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal boobs.  Thank heaven we have social media.  What would we do if we weren’t able to post this on Facebook?  I don’t know.  Maybe we’d use telephones.  Maybe we’d go to barber shops and hang out and talk to people in town or to our friends.  Maybe we’d have cookouts.  Maybe we would go to town hall meetings.  Maybe there would be someone whose kid was sick and was in need of rallying people to do some of the chores around the house while they cared for the kid.  Maybe we’d be at the house mopping the floors, mowing the lawn.  I could go on and pursue this endeavor for as long as you’d like me to, but I think you get the point.

In pondering that question, as to whether or not you should do those things, I would say as long as you have time remaining in your day for the things that are actually important, the things that I think are important are prayer and acts of contrition and humility, meaning you actually have time to think it’s only by the grace of God that any of us are here.  As I get older and study more of the texts of the Catholic Church and of the doctors of the church, Augustine and Aquinas in particular, folks, much of what we talk about and what we are today as civilized Western people comes from — I know a lot of you like to deny it, but I don’t think that you can historically make that case — comes from the fathers, especially Augustine.  Most certainly our civil code and our civil discourse come from Aquinas.  Read parts of the Summa Theologica and that’s not even debatable.  Are there other parts of the Western tradition that were handed down to us from secular sources, pagan sources?  Yes, there are.  The Romans gave us some of this and so did the Greeks, but that’s not exclusionary.  I think that some of the things that they passed down were altered by Catholicism and altered by the early church.  I realize there have been schisms and Eastern Orthodox and all that.  I don’t want to argue about any of that.  I’m talking about going back through the epoch of time that we currently live in, which is the sixth age according to biblical teachings.

It’s a marvelous time to be alive.  Again, we tend to look at things as glass being half empty instead of being half full.  In fact, we’ve all been born and know each other — you listen to me.  I listen to you in your emails, the eight I’ve received in the last 13 years.  Thank you very much to those eight people.  [laughing]  Twitter posts, phone calls, Facebook, snail mail.  For example my dear old friends Stewart and Karen Skrill from Vermont still send me letters and I receive them happily in the mail and read them with great anticipation.  We’re fortunate to live in this time.  We should be excited that we live in this time, that we can confront the great evil that’s all around us, and it is great.  It is mighty.  He from down under has done a masterful job as Wormwood.  Wormwood has done a great job on tens, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people, in conscripting them into sin, into less-than-moral lives and existences.  When you ask me [mocking] “What’s going on with you lately?  Why are you doing this?” I’m reading and meditating and praying and things are coming in front of me that I don’t ask for. They just appear.  They appear because you people send them to me.  It’s just amazing to behold.  I know it’s miraculous and these are gifts from God that are being sent to me.

In doing that, the more time you spend, I think, with those moral elements of your life or of a life, the less time you have to sin.  The less time you have to do the things that we all agree are despicable.  If you view it that way, then look at the glass as half fill.  Why not fill the glass up, right?  Always work to and pursue that highest ideal, that beau ideal of being the great, good, gentle, humble Christian gentleman, being the great, good, humble gentle Christian lady — I see little signs of things that bother me now that didn’t bother me before.

For example, I was driving down the interstate yesterday and I saw a billboard, an advertisement for a hot tub company here in southeast Louisiana.  No, it was an advertisement for a company that builds decks.  There just happened to be a hot tub on the deck.  The advertisement showed a woman laying on said deck and all she had for clothing was some manner of a bikini top and some manner of one-third of what should have been a very short skirt.  I think you ladies call them sarongs or something like that, a wrap, whatever you call it.  Otherwise she was exposed.  I just thought: Where’s the humility in that?  Where has humbleness gone?  Most people will see that and go “She’s hot!” most guys will, and won’t think twice about it.  I saw it and I looked at it in a totally different light.  I went: That’s just not right.  I don’t know that woman.  Why am I being exposed to nearly all of her body?  She doesn’t know me.  I don’t know her.  That’s what our culture now has become because everything has a price tag attached to it.  As the old saying goes, sex sells.

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When people ask me, [mocking] “What are you doing?  What’s going on?” — and some of you ask it in a very polite manner and talk about it or say that you have noticed a change and you approve — that’s what’s going on, reconsidering a priority, reordering a priority.  Do I really want to spend all of my time chained and shackled to these computers 18, 19 hours a day?  Aren’t there other things I could be out there doing?  I’ve got to tell you, folks, one of the things that I love doing and that I would be content to do from now until my heavenly Father calls me hopefully home, or maybe not, I could sit here and I would be content in just writing screenplays like for Times That Try Men’s Souls and republishing books that people don’t read anymore and therefore major publishers have chosen to not republish them.

We’re doing an edition right now, and I’m going to do it anyway regardless of the commercial success of it.  Washington Irving’s Life of Washington has basically gone out of print.  There is one edition that was published in the late 1990s.  It has a good introduction and a very nice bio written about Irving.  That’s kind of the model that we’re going to pursue.  In the edition I’m going to publish, I’m going to see if I can actually find, I’m going to try and track down who it is — I’ll just tell you what my mindset is here.  There is an artist that lived from 1830 till about 1920.  His name is Henry Alexander Ogden.  Ogden is responsible for many of the black-and-white engravings that you see of events during the War for American Independence.  Ogden drew them.  Now, somebody owns a large portion of those, and Washington is in dozens of them.  They haven’t been published in a collection that I’m aware of, but I’m still trying to find it.  One of the things I’m trying to do is find the Ogden artwork to include in the student edition, which will be two volumes of Life of Washington.  It’s a great book.  It’s what I based Times That Try Men’s Souls on, on eight chapters in Washington Irving’s Life of Washington book.  He tells a great story.  I couldn’t tell it any better.

In any event, these are some of the things that I’m doing and I’m working on.  I’m content, happy as a pig in proverbial you-know-what.  Cheer up, you people.  We have been blessed to live in a time when goodness and virtue is needed.  If we don’t provide it, then look in the mirror and ask yourself the question: Who will?  If you cannot be relied upon, if I cannot be relied upon to provide it, who will?  If you’re waiting for the next guy to do it, then I think you’re participating in the decline.  Think about that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript