A Catholic bishop seems to think he knows why there is a mental health crisis affecting children. Well, if anyone knows how to drive children into a downward spiral, it is certainly a member of the Catholic clergy. They have expertise in covering up sexual assault and demanding young girls into thinking that they're inferior to men. Richard, what is it that this child psychology expert attributes to mental
health crisis or crises affecting children? I assume you are saying child psychology expert end quotes. Oh, that's right, that is a quote unquote remark. In his recent address, US Catholic Bishop Robert Baron raised the concerns about the burgeoning mental health crisis, attributing it to what he terms a second pandemic. Highlighting the staggering rise and depression and suicide rates, especially among youth, Baron
points to the social media as a significant contributor. He emphasizes the adverse effects of increased screen time, particularly during the pandemic lockdowns, leading individuals to retreat into their virtual worlds and losing meaningful direct social connections. Barn underscores the importance of genuine human connections for happiness and argues against the culture of self centeredness perpetuated
by social media. Drawing on insights from psychologists like Jordan Peterson and Carl Jung, Bishop Baron suggests a spiritual dimension to psychological problems, linking the decline in religious belief to declining mental health. He advocates for a return to spiritual values, positing that true fulfillment lies in transcending self preoccupation and embracing genuine connection with others. Bishop Baron stated, and I quote the greatest source of human suffering
is idolatry, false worship and a quote. Perhaps the bishop should produce some evidence to substantiate that the worship he encourages is to a God that actually exists. I also think that this Catholic bishop should research how much sex abuse of children by authority figures contributes to depression and other lifelong psychological problems for the victims and the nearby children worrying if they're going to be the next victims. This
story comes from a Farmer's Forum dot com. Article was written by A Patrick Mager and it's out of Canada on April tenth, twenty twenty four, with some Questions and Commentary by Richard Allen. Yeah. So you bring up some good points there, and you know, I want to turn to Scott and get his opinion. You know, Scott, is this bishop kind of grasping its straws here in order to establish a narrative that the church will solve problems
created by social media. I think it's significant to mention that they stave the way from problems created by the church itself and instead look to find some other scapegoat for maybe a decline in youth mental health stability, if you will. It seems like that article anyway, was built up to this idea. What are your thoughts on that? I think absolutely he was grasping at stris.
I mean, this would be a textbook case. It amazes me how much this man was able to pull straight out of his ass and put into this article. It was just utterly bereft of any anything of value. With one small exception. He did point out that there was studies. He didn't specify any particular studies, but he said that there's been studies that have shown an
association between use of social media and depression in youths. What he failed to mention is that there's also numerous studies that show that there's no association between the two. Some even show that there's a positive association between the two. But most importantly, what he failed to mention is that in none of those studies, at least none of the ones that I found, and I did a
pretty exhaustive search, none of them indicate any kind of causation. And you know, and we could certainly even imagine a revi first causation there, like, if somebody is depressed, it's it's easy to imagine that that would drive them to increase their social media use. If they're feeling Now, if they don't want to get out of the house, they don't want to do things, you could easily see somebody turning to social media to to have, you
know, a certain kind of outlets or something. And so the fact that it's just so up in the air, you know, the fact that he was drawing any kind of conclusion at all is dubious. But the fact that he was trying to present that in such a way that, oh, and we happen to have this unique solution right this Christ right there, and it was just utterly, utterly ridiculous, and it was difficult to read, I'll
tell you that much. Yeah, I agree with you there, But even in the midst of that difficulty, I thought Jonathan had some good points that he's bringing into the show tonight. So, Jonathan, I want to ask you about the thoughts you had on hyper access to information. Is it maybe not necessarily social media itself that's the problem, but the accessibility of social media that causes people to have certain expectations that, when unfulfilled, maybe cause anxiety
or depression. What is this hyper access to information relationship with what what we're talking about tonight? Well? What what? I what I first thought about this? I thought about Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and how that affects people. Uh, when we get overloaded with information, we tend to want to simplify things. And when we do that, we start simplifying things about ourselves and then we you can you can follow that road into a depression. You can
follow over stimulus and overpowering your mind. Ability to process all that information can be rather overwhelming. You start feeling overwhelmed. It leads to other emotional issues. I don't think that that it's social media is causing that kind of depression. I think social media actually gives people connection with other people. It may not be physical, and I think people do need physical contact with friends in that to really feel that connection, but it helps the when they're not able
to do that. And so I'm kind of in this position of saying I think a lot of the issues we're having with social media is that a they're not and I hate to say it this way because I'm going to get jumped on, they're not governed well. The people who are running it are running it for the usual capital that they get for running a business, instead of trying to keep the content under some sort of control that isn't going to denegrate
people. Students aren't going to get bullied by fellows students that sort of thing, which causes a lot of that. But the access to other people, and some of them not very nice people, can also be contributing to it. Well, I think you raise a good point. I mean, they're not governed well. But let's not just blame the media companies, but let's also take a look at parents. Me being a parent of a teenager myself,
you know, I think there's a bout empathies on that one. Yeah, it's been the greatest reward of my life, but also among the most challenging. And I'll take the challenge every day. But I will say, you know, parents have some role to play in this. I can tell you that from what I have seen so far, Jesus or Catholic churches are
not helping at all. In fact, you know, I want to jump over to Richard and ask, you're Richard, this Catholic official, you know, say it's a Catholic bishop saying that you know he's got the answer, and social media is to blame. But isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? Doesn't the church own some cause at least for mental health issues with respect to their doctrine, especially how it affects children. What
are your thoughts there? Well, I think broadly, there's a lot of things about the Catholic I mean, this guy is a bishop, so he's not you know, maybe this maybe that he's doctrinaire. Otherwise you don't get to become a bishop. Where he says the decline a religious belief to declining mental health? How does how does religious belief that you put it a wafer in your mouth and it becomes part of the body of Jesus. How does
that help kids become rational and understand the world better? I mean, this is this is you know, what was what was Dawkins's major book on religion to God Delusion. There's lots of psychologists that will say that, you know, if you took a religious thing and took it outside of the group and
did it, you'd be delusional. I mean, imagine if somebody like Abraham today talked about wanting to take his kid up on a hill and tie him down to a bunch of wood and burn him to death they lock him up, that would be that would be at least a seventy two hour hold, and probably you know, longer than that. It'd be a lot more complicated than that. Well, but let's face it. The point is, these are people here who again are distinctly outside of the range of reality, trying
to tell other people what is causing them psychological problems. And I think what Scott said earlier is you know, the proper orifice that he's bringing this stuff from. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, I want to pivot to Scott because you know, Scott had some concerns or some thoughts on the fact that atheism. How is atheism to blame? I mean, the title of this article is atheism and smartphones lead to depression. But Scott, you make
a point that atheism isn't even hardly mentioned in this article. You know, what do we have to take away from that? Well, the impression that I got is that, well, first of all, in the headline he mentions atheism first before he mentioned social media, and in the article he spends ninety percent of it talking talking about social media. And then it was like at the end he's like, oh yeah, I got to mention, I got to tie this to atheism somehow, And again, you know, it
was just ridiculous and dubious and spurious conclusions. And so he just mentions briefly at the end that uh he and this one he didn't even pretend to cite a study. He just says, you know, atheism leads to that, you know, spiritual deficit, and and and so forth, when the and and again, we have a situation where studies show a variety of things.
There, Sure, there are some studies that show that there is an association at least at least some sort of association between a person's religiosity and their their happiness level and their depression level, and and and uh and their you know,
frequency of that of those types of issues. Uh. The study, some of the studies that I found though, showed that there was kind of a U shaped curve that result, meaning that people that were strongly committed to to one end of the spectrum or the other, the very religious and the very non religious tended to be the most comfortable in themselves and we're the most satisfied with their can with their situation. And it was those people in the
middle. A lot of the uh, you know, the spiritual but not religious, or the you know, the fence sitters and that kind of thing. Those that's where the highest incidents of depression and those types of issues came up. And so at best, at best, he's he's telling half the story. But I think really what he's doing is he is, like you said before, he's just grasping at straws. I think it's no small amount
of irony that the word scapegoat has religious origins. Right back in the days when they used to take a pig or a goat or something and they would take the curses and the demons and the devils out of out of an individual and throw them into the pig and then kill the pig or eat the pig or whatever they did with it. And you know, that's what's happening here. He doesn't, as as was already mentioned before, he does the eyes do not look back on himself. He doesn't look at the problems that the
that the Catholic Church and religion in general can cause. He's just saying, oh, there's a problem, must be them. And and it's really kind of as you bring up a great point to so the sacrificing of animals and things like that. You know, this kind of old style thought process, I thought. Jonathan h. Jonathan comes in with a good point when he mentions the bishop quoting Carl Carl Young. Jonathan, can you can you talk
to us a little bit about that. You had a very interesting quote that I'm not going to steal your thunder by by reciting, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this bishop's relationship with Carl Young. Oh yeah, Well, Young said that all problems are spiritual, So imagine that as a as a deal, you know. And the thing is that even Jordan Peterson's quote
in there was was bad enough. But his quote, of course, is that misery is due to you know, uh oh shoot, I'm messing it up here, all I, Jonathan, before you move on to Peterson, But what when you talk about the Carl Jung quote, you say this bishop had to dig up a quote from a sixty plus year old means right? I mean this is because Young Young died in nineteen sixty one, you know, So it's like and he was, you know, and he was an
afficionado of Freud as well. So you're talking late eighteen hundreds and to the early and him through the you know, early nineteen hundreds. So somebody who's working in psychology through the probably the teens, twenties and thirties and forties, you know, if you have like a forty year work life, and this guy's most of his things. He was the father of a whole bunch of
analytical psychology. I'm not detegrating his original work for the period of time, however, we have moved on from Freud and Young and Young really with his whole thing about the over soul or the soul, the consciousness of everybody, and the archaeotypes, it's been long kind of disproven, so It's like anybody who's going to quote young that goes back that far to find a scientist or
somebody who's you know, a valid in some field. You know, it's like like we always run into the problem people going back to Darwin for evolution. We've come a long, long, right way. I mean, you have a bishop making an argument against social media and using somebody who's been dead for I don't know sixty years. You kind of run into an issue right of legitimacy. And that is a great point. And you know, Richard had some other points. Richard, you have some thoughts about the demeaning of
women in scripture by the church, the massive wealth increase. How are these things exacerbating by other means, you know, or means other than screen time. They're clearly studies right now that show a lot of young people are not looking toward a very bright future because they've got so much college debt, they've got problems with, you know, thinking about getting jobs that are going to be move them up. You know, the whole paradigm before was were your
kids going to have a better life than their parents? I can consciously say I did economically at least. I mean, you know, there's a lot of other factors, but with regard to this thing about happiness and depression, I just want to point out a little bit of worldview. You know, they do these studies every year or two. I don't know if it's a un or some other group that does it about happiness index. The happy the
happiest countries are the least religious countries. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Amsterdam, you know, Holland, Switzerland, you know, and we are yeah, we or most of the time, right around eighteen and I think in the last one we fell down at about twenty five. So and we are one of the of the of the industrialized nations, we are the
most religious. So you know, those kinds of things show you a lot in terms of what really worked in a social environment, as opposed to some guy who's spent most of his life studying theology, which which some people say shouldn't even be a subject because it's about nothing. Yeah, I would tend to agree. I think this article was a little bit strange. I think this Catholic bishop having an opinion on mental health and blaming it on everybody else.
But the kind of threads the fabrics that create society that have Christian influences is a little bits misguided, you know, it's it's misdirected. Scott. I wanted to get your take. You know, we talked a lot, We talked a lot about of different points tonight on this article completely, uh specifically, what did you think about the article overall? I mean any were there any points that made any sense? Or was this whole thing just ridiculous?
I mean there was there was a you know, like I said, he mentioned some actual studies, but other than that, it was just it just seemed like it was just rhetoric, and you know he was just trying to uh, you know, kind of dredge up a reason to point fingers. And you know, we mentioned how he didn't really say anything about atheism until the end, even though that was like not the number one word right right at the top of the headline, and so you know, it was
uh, he was definitely reaching uh and failing to make that connection. And so uh, I mean, you know, it was it was a blog post, and so you know, he's entitled to his opinion. He's entitled to share his opinion, but you know, as far as getting any kind of worthwhile information or even sharing any worthwhile information with his uh, with his readers. I think it was just an utter failure. Uh. Quick comment on the Jordan Peterson comment. Uh, Jordan. He quoted Jordan Peterson who
said there is no technical difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. And I think that to us, to me at least, that's more of a com comment on Jordan Peter Peterson's frame of mind than anything else. I just want to ask, Jordan, are you okay? And you know it is there something we can do for you here? But yeah, it was just uh, it was just vacuous and uh uh you know it was you know,
school yard name calling is really all it was. And on that note, you know, Jonathan, I I did cut you off before when you started talking about Jordan Peterson, uh, you know, trying to keep things on topic. But now we're back and I wanted to just kind of let you continue your thought. Uh that I saw abruptly kind of shifted gears on.
No, No, that's fine. I think that the comment about yourself and being miserable, thinking about yourself and being miserable or so centeredness, I guess what he was thinking, if thinking about yourself is a misery to you, You probably have deeper issue than just the thought that you were told you were ugly and your breast stinks by the middle school bully. You know, it's like, you know, it's just such an absolute red hairing in a
sense to try and blame something on something that's not even related. You know. So you know, if you think about yourself, and you think about yourself in a positive light, that's good for your self esteem and causes good things to happen. So if you you know, it doesn't have anything to do with misery necessarily, it's it's just a separate thing. So I just
find that is absolutely disingenuous in a way. Richard, we talked about some Oh go ahead, Richard, I actually have a couple of thoughts I want to throw out there. Number one, Scott brought this up a little bit, but I want to amplify it. And then I've got one other final little thought. But you know, you talked about the way this thing was done. This was a classic example of a manipulation article where they put they use the theory of primacy. What you've put out first has the most impact,
so they throw in the thing they hate the most. Then they don't talk about it, and they bring up all this other stuff, and then they bring it back again. This was you know, if this guy was in an English class somewhere I'm getting graded for right, he would have got an F. I mean it was terrible. It was. It was totally manipulative. Now one final thought in the theme of what we're here about. What there's a lot of correlation between people's self esteem and depression. People with
good self esteem don't find themselves depressed very often. Okay, this is a reality. What is one of the fundamental principles of Catholicism that causes a lack of self esteem? Original sin? You're bad from the beginning, so you know you have to grow up with that if you're really indoctrinated into that, and you're not going to feel good about yourself until maybe you have some you know, supposed meeting with Jesus or something. But that's the kuy that goes
back to what Scott said before too. They throw all this stuff out there, but they don't deal with their own stuff at all exactly. And on that note, you know, this bishop is offering Jesus or God as a fix to some kind of depression. Yet we don't see any depression being fixed within the church itself, So why would that even be attracted, Why would that even be attractive to skeptics or atheists at all? In any case, U