No Virtue = No Happiness

Conversations That Matter

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Hey guys, it's Jon again from the Conversations That Matter podcast, and I'm walking here on such a beautiful day and thinking about one of the chapters

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I wrote in my book, Against the Waves, Christian Order in a Liberal Age. You can go to againstthewavesbook .com

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if you want to get a copy. But in the first chapter of that book, which is entitled Regaining Reality, I make an argument for the natural order, which

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I actually debated whether I even needed to write that chapter, right? Doesn't every Christian believe in a natural order, but that's not necessarily the case.

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So I decided to lay a groundwork, and that's what that chapter is about. And one of the things

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I wanted to highlight as I'm thinking about this is something that was embedded and just taken for granted in our

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American spirit, you might say, from 200 years ago. And that is this idea that you cannot disconnect happiness and virtue.

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It's impossible to disconnect those things. George Washington wrote in the 1790s,

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I think it was 1798, that happiness was impossible without virtue.

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Virtue needed to exist in order for there to be happiness. And that's so different than the way we think now.

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We think that in order to be happy, we need to sometimes kick virtue to the curb.

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We need to emancipate ourselves from virtue, from order, from law. And what our founding fathers understood is that's not the case at all.

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Actually, you need order, you need virtue, you need law in order to actually find happiness.

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Because we each have a purpose, we each have a role. We have general roles, but we also have specific roles.

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Some of them are more menial than others, but they still matter. And I think you read how often the founding fathers talked about providence.

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You find this sense that there's a transcendent standard. There is a purpose beyond that gives us fulfillment.

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It makes life worth living. It makes, I mean, it's not to bring up Lord of the

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Rings here, but I'm going to bring up Lord of the Rings. I don't write about this, but it just came to my head. I mean, it's Frodo, right?

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In that fantasy novel, wondering why he is this little defenseless hobbit essentially is given this large task.

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And we don't always know the answers to those things, but we know that there is an answer. We know that there is a reason.

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Sometimes it might even be a bit mysterious, but providence drives us on. And that is an understanding of order, that there is order in the world, and we're not just left to ourselves and our own devices.

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How terrible would that be? And so I want you to think about that. I mean, one of the other assumptions the founders made was that you couldn't have virtue without religion.

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So you can't have happiness without virtue, can't have liberty without virtue, can't have virtue without religion.

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And the religion they were talking about, of course, was Christianity. So that's your thought for today.

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I hope you'll get the book. Whoa, almost slipped there. It's pretty wet because all the snow has been melting and we got the spring, the spring rain and everything is combining with the snow to make it slushy here.

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It's part of the natural order though, part of the seasons, right? But anyway, you can go to againstthewavesbook .com,

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againstthewavesbook .com to get your copy. And when you get it, if you like it, please go ahead and rate it high, write a little review on Amazon or wherever you can.

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And I'd really like to get this in as many hands as possible because I don't see a lot of people writing on this stuff from a

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Christian perspective. And I think this is an area that needs to be explored a lot more.