Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s then the puzzle I’m faced with. Let’s take all of that at face value. Why is it you just don’t slide into Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox, belief in free will? There’s some middle position. Why is your middle position stable? You could either be Catholic or, for that matter, Mormon, where there’s plenty of room for free will, right? Well, again, they’re certainly not all the alternatives. It’s always a little bit of a cheap shot. My two-word rebuttal to Roman Catholicism is Pope Francis. [laughter] I grew up as a Lutheran. There are probably all these things that are problematic about Luther; there are things that were good about him. But I think the one part of it that — if we judge him by the standards of the 16th century, I think the Reformation had to come from the outside. It was not actually possible for it to start from within. There is a way that the Lutheran piece — it was the less globally centralized church. It was going to be a less centralized church, and there’s probably still some part of the Protestant political project that lines up more closely with a libertarian view. What is it from the Hebrew Bible, or one could say Old Testament, that you’ve incorporated into your own political thought?…

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