THE BEE WEEKLY: Free Will and the Problem of Drunk Driving Elephants
Kyle and Ethan are joined by our friendly neighborhood professor of theology, Dr. Thaddeus Williams. He is the author of Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth and God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil. As usual, they dig into the weird news of the week, but they also get an update from Ethan's wife about her experience getting a mandatory jab and talk to Dr. Williams about how free will doesn't get God off the hook for all the evil in the world. First, the guys get an update from Ethan's wife Jess about what happened to her after getting a mandatory jab so she could keep her job. Then, the Bee wishes Bill Powers a very happy and healthy 75th birthday! The guys try to think of their stories of being 18 years old for a Subscriber Dare since they will do just about anything for money. The weird news keeps coming and this week it includes naked stabbing matches, a romantic man stealing 50 cars for his 16 girlfriends, and Sri Lanka banning the drunk driving of elephants. They also get updates on Larry Elder being the black face to white supremacy, a ladybug living in some dude's colon, and another record smashed by the person with perhaps the world record in number of world records. Kyle and Ethan ask Dr. Thaddeus Williams some meaty theological questions about free will and the problem of evil related to his new book coming out called God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil. Following the main course, The Bee always has a dessert of sweet hate mail, which The Bee always shares with its loyal listeners. In the subscriber portion, Kyle, Ethan, and Thaddeus read subscriber-pitched headlines, bonus hate mail, talk about Calvinism a bit, and then give Thaddeus the Next Ten Questions.
Two men get in a stabbing match and they're naked.
Man steals 50 cars in one day for his 16 girlfriends.
Romantic.
Sri Lanka bans drunk driving of elephants.
Man finds Ladybug in his colon.
Boat sinking walrus gets free couch.
Ethan's wife went to the ER after getting the vaccine, but it's totally safe.
And for something a little on the lighter side, we're going to talk about free will and the problem of evil with Dr. Fadius Williams.
All this and more on the B weekly.
The B or not the B?
That is a question I ask myself every morning as I drink from my the B or not the B mug.
Now you too can drink from this amazing coffee cup and ask yourself the same question.
Which is better?
It's so hard to decide.
In fact, I would say it's absolutely the Babylon B, but now the B is pretty cool too.
Enjoy this mug.
Well, we're here with Dr. Williams, Dr. Thaddeus Williams.
What's up, Doc?
What's up, Doc?
You know, it's good to be back for what's definitely only the second time I've been on the show.
Only the second time.
Yeah.
There's definitely a lot of fun.
There's not a third secret episode.
Never happened.
We'll never see the light.
I'll never see in the light of day.
Right.
Although it's on a few thousand people's iPods somewhere, or do people still use iPods?
I don't know.
Hey, as a doctor, can you do vaccine exemptions?
Oh, I do.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
My wife needs one.
No problem.
Is she okay, man?
I saw her.
The only thing is mostly it's just scary.
My wife went to, so I guess that's, this could be my what happened this week.
My wife went to get her vaccine and everything's fine.
You know, they have you sit there for like 15 minutes, make sure you're fine.
She was fine.
She got back in the car.
She was leaving.
And then all of a sudden her heart just started like racing.
So she went back and they put her in the ER and she was in there for a while, like a few hours and it kept going super high and then super low and nothing like this has ever happened to my wife.
She's like the healthiest people on earth.
But it was scary for a while.
I'm like texting her and she's not replying and I don't know what's going on.
And so in that moment of passion, I tweeted about it and said, you know, my wife's in the ER, heart issues after taking the vaccine.
But of course, it's totally safe and you're only a conspiracy theorist if you say otherwise.
And that tweet is probably the biggest tweet ever tweeted and the amount of response that I got from that.
And then she posted on Next Door about it.
We've been getting all these messages from local people, a lot of private messages, people saying like, I don't want to say this publicly.
My family would disown me.
Like I had side effects from the vaccine.
Like it's just this crazy thing that kind of exploded through this experience.
So she's fine now, except she's trying to get out of getting the second shot and like it's like she's like getting blocked.
Oh, is she here?
All right.
Well, on the phone, we don't usually do phone, but my wife has a busy woman.
She's juggling four children and she has a job.
And so, but we've had this crazy experience I just told you about.
So Jess, I just told him about how the whole issue, what happened in the ER and how we've kind of talked about it publicly and the response.
So I don't know where we want to go from there.
I was just starting to talk about how you're trying to get that second shot and the kind of barriers you're running into.
Yeah, so I am a nurse and I work in California.
And I fit under the category of healthcare workers that are being mandated to get the COVID vaccine by September 30th.
So I have kind of a complex medical situation that involves a lot of autoimmune disorder.
So originally when the vaccine was offered, I was hesitant because of my personal immune system and my complex medical history.
So I'm 39 years old.
Yeah, that's you.
I mean, you can put words in my mouth if you need to.
It's okay.
So I'm 39 years old and I'm Ethan can attest to the fact that I take very good care of myself.
I'm helping him, yeah.
Yeah, basically.
So I take very good care of myself because my body is wacky.
My immune system is really wacky.
So at my young age of 39, I already have a rheumatologist, an allergist, immunologist, and an endocrinologist.
So before getting the shot, I checked with all three of them.
And all of their response was, because you're at such a high risk of exposure, you should get the shots.
It wasn't like, based on your medical history and everything going on in your body, we felt confident that you'll be okay with getting this shot.
It was just, because you're at such a high risk of exposure, you should get the shot.
So last week, I went to my hospital.
I got the first dose.
Within about 10 to 15 minutes, my heart started racing up to like 150.
I felt short of breath.
I had like pressure and pain in my chest, and I felt very dizzy.
So I was actually taken by wheelchair from the vaccine clinic to emergency room.
And I spent the next day there.
I spent the rest of the day there just with some monitoring my heart and doing KGs.
And they did a bunch of labs.
They rolled out pretty much any of the other common things that could have caused me to feel these symptoms.
Everything else came back normally.
The only thing, the only thing was that I had just got the COVID vaccine.
So through my hospital, it's being handled as a workman's comp.
So I've been following up with workmen's comp doctors through my hospital, which I'm actually really happy with the way the hospital has handled it.
I feel like they have tried to take care of me.
But I've seen two doctors through employee health.
Both of them told me that they were documenting it as a vaccine reaction.
The doctor I saw yesterday even told me that she wouldn't advise getting the second dose because typically reaction to the second dose is worse than whatever reaction you had to the first dose.
And through my own research, I have discovered that there's a correlation between the vaccines, especially the Pfizer vaccine, and cardiac complications like arrhythmias, tachycardia, which I had.
And these can be long-term.
Like people can develop arrhythmias.
They're asking their doctors, is this because of the vaccine?
I just got the vaccine a month ago.
Now suddenly I have a new arrhythmia.
And their doctors are telling them, we don't know.
It's too soon to know.
We don't know.
Other doctors are telling them, this is the type of thing that could cause you to develop an arrhythmia, but we don't know.
It's too soon to know.
So when I saw the, go ahead.
But take it anyway.
Exactly.
So when I saw the doctor yesterday, I asked her, I have the form.
I got the form from my hospital.
Literally, all they have to do is check the box that says, I, you know, authorize a medical exemption and sign it.
There's no special wording.
It's all there.
It's a pre-made form.
Neither one of the employee health doctors would touch it.
They said, you need to be, this needs to be signed by a doctor who knows your medical history, who knows you as a whole, your lab, your history, all of this stuff.
Okay, so even though this doctor yesterday advised me, I wouldn't get the second shot.
She still wouldn't sign the form.
So today, I spent my morning calling all of my specialists and all of my doctors.
And my allergist immunologist flat out said, I will not sign exemption forms ever under any circumstances.
I asked the officers, can this be done on a case-by-case basis?
I said, I've already tried the shot once.
I had a bad reaction.
If I come in and meet with her, will she change her mind?
I'll bring the form to the office.
Anything.
And I'm not talking directly to the doctor.
I'm talking to the MA or the receptionist or whatever.
And she told me, this is what we've been trained to say.
We do not offer medical exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine.
She said, the doctor will not authorize delay.
She won't authorize exemptions.
That's what we've been trained to say.
That's so bizarre.
So, yeah, so I went through the whole case.
Like, I will, I'll meet with her.
I'll bring the form.
She can do.
And what she told me was, we will give you an appointment so that the doctor can help you deal with the side effects of the vaccine, but she still won't sign the form.
Even if I'm having side effects and reactions that are so bad and longstanding that I need to go see her to deal with them medically, she still won't sign the form.
It's more business for them, right?
What's that?
It's more business for them if you have more side effects.
I guess.
So I have a call out and my rheumatologist's office.
My rheumatologist's office said the same thing.
They said he will not sign exemption form.
So I made like basically an impassioned plea to his assistant.
And she's like, okay, I'm going to talk to him on your behalf.
I'll call you back.
I'm waiting for a call back.
I talked to my endocrinologist's office.
I'm still waiting for them to call me back.
So there's hope that one of these doctors may take pity on me and sign it.
But from the rheumatoid standard.
We are sitting here with a doctor of theology or something.
Yeah.
It counts.
And as a doctor.
Doctor of like, doctor of mystic science.
Something like that.
But I do have a few medical questions.
When your heart pace started racing, was Ethan in close proximity not wearing a shirt?
He was not.
Okay.
She probably has pictures on her phone.
They rolled out all other causes of the tachycardia.
Was a television on Joe Biden speaking?
Yeah.
Watching Pirates of the Caribbean.
I don't know.
Explanation.
There's no explanation.
That was the main explanation.
The main thing people said online was like, oh, she has anxiety because she's a Trump tart and she's afraid of the vaccine.
So she went in already scared.
But like you said, you were fine for a while after you took it.
And you're an RN.
You're around this stuff all the time.
No, what happened was I took the vaccine.
I sat in the clinic and got monitored for 10 minutes, which by monitored means they look at you.
They don't, you know, they don't take you to the medical state.
And then they told me, oh, you're good.
You're free to go.
Turn around.
And I was like, I left the vaccine clinic going like, yay.
Like, they were all laughing at me because I was like, I had my arms in the air because I was like, I did it.
I got it.
And I didn't die.
And I'm fine.
So I left super happy.
I was like, I got my vaccine card.
I got my vaccine.
I can move on with my life.
You know, I didn't have a reaction.
So I get out to my car and I'm sitting there just sending a few text messages before I leave, completely alone, completely calm, happy that I had already just been able to get the vaccine and not have a reaction.
To keep your job.
Yeah, to keep my job.
And that's when my heart started racing.
It wasn't anything to do with anxiety.
I know 100% it wasn't anything to do with anxiety.
But at this point, I also got an appointment to meet with my primary doctor, who I've never seen because I see all these specialists all the time.
So I got an appointment with him, but his first available was September 27th.
And I have to have the form signed by September 30th or I will get fired.
So I'm like up to the wire with this.
If my endocrinologist says no and if the rheumatologist says no, that's like my final hope is that the primary will sign it.
Do you have any doctors out there want to help us out?
Monit?
Do you have any other side effects?
Do you pick up a better 5G signal?
Do you find Bill Gates attractive?
Anything like that?
None of the above.
Do you find yourself more or less Calvinist?
Wow.
Wow.
You were mentioning, I had no idea about this.
You said pediatricians are only allowed to do four exemptions.
Where'd you hear that?
That's crazy to me, that no matter what, they can only do four.
You know what?
I would have to search for the source of that, but I've been reading a lot of articles about people like me who have legitimate reactions to the vaccine.
And there's like a fund set up for people who are injured by what we will call the childhood vaccines, like the MMR, the TDAP, all of those ones, the Varicella, the kids.
that kids get to go into school.
So there's a fund set aside where people can report an adverse reaction.
It's called VAERS.
It's vaccine adverse, I think, event recording.
And they're collecting VAERS data for the COVID-19 vaccine.
But despite the data, they're still pushing it forward.
And now Pfizer has a full SEA approval.
So anyway, what I have been reading is that, and this is from reputable news sources, the people who are injured by the COVID-19 vaccine are not entitled to as much compensation.
For a while, they weren't entitled to any compensation, but now they're not entitled to as much compensation as a person who's injured by the MMR vaccine or something.
It's like a separate fund that they're, you know, use that money to pay for your medical bills and pay for, some people can't work because of the effect the vaccine's had on them.
So, you know, they could use that work for to compensate for lost wages or whatever.
But in one of those articles, it was talking about, I believe that's where I saw that, that pediatricians can only write four exemptions for, I don't know if it's per year, I'm not really sure exactly what it is, but that's, I don't know, that's what, that was the information that I had that they don't want these doctors who are like naturopathic or something just going around signing everybody's vaccine exemptions for school for the kids to get into school.
So they have to like cap the exemptions that they can sign so they're make sure that they're legit or something, I guess.
I don't know.
It's wild.
We're not an anti-vax family.
I mean, Jess was like pushing me to get this vaccine even after she had the bad effects.
So it's been out of the answer.
Well, when Calvin turned four, which was a couple weeks ago, he got four separate shots and three of them were the combo shots.
And the doctor's like, you want him to get them all?
And I'm like, do it.
You know, that's, I, I vaccinated all of all four of our kids are fully vaccinated.
I get the flu shot every year.
I, my hesitation, a lot of my hesitation about this vaccine was completely personal because my body's jacked.
I have a really weird immune system.
And furthermore, as I already listed off all these specialists that I see, I just added two of those specialists to my life in the last year because I have progression of symptoms.
And when I did my testing through the allergist, they did a lot of extensive testing and blood work and pricked my back 150 times and the whole nine.
When I went in for my follow-up, they had me set up to see the physician's assistant.
And he told me, your case is so complex, I don't even feel comfortable discussing this with you.
I'm going to have to have doctor, the actual doctor, discuss this with you.
So, like, that's how messed up my immune system is.
It's not, I don't even, it's not political for me.
It's my own personal body that is messed up.
And I have, you know, I have pain in my joints all the time.
I have my blood sugar, it goes paywire for no reason.
You know, I have a lot of issues with food.
My diet's very restricted.
And, you know, for me, that's what it was about, was knowing my body, my body is very sensitive.
I've had diabetes for almost 30 years.
I've had type 1 diabetes for almost 30 years.
And I know my body really well.
I can tell when my blood sugar is going up.
just being inside my body like I am, I didn't feel like this was a good idea for me personally to get this vaccine.
That doesn't mean I don't think anybody else should get it.
And I know these type of reactions are rare.
They're very rare.
When I talked to the employee health nurse, she told me I'm one of about 20 employees to have this type of tachycardia reaction.
And there's probably 3,000 employees overall throughout my whole hospital system.
So that's very rare, but it happened to me.
And now I can't find a doctor to sign the medical exemption.
So if I can't find a doctor to sign the medical exemption, my understanding is that I will lose my job.
Yeah, I don't know if you ventured onto Twitter when Ethan tweeted about this.
Hopefully you were smart enough not to.
I did not.
I don't even look at Twitter.
That's a good idea.
You're smart.
My wife doesn't either.
I never look at Twitter.
The wives are smarter than we are.
But it's bizarre because you say, hey, my wife actually had this reaction to it.
And all the responses are like, you know, medical misinformation.
You know, this is harmful.
This is, you know, and you're like, this is actually what happened.
I'm not.
There's a crazy variety.
I mean, there's a ton of people talking about their side effects or people in error.
And there's people saying it's misinformation.
And there's people saying it's a, well, yeah, there's a bunch of side effects, but it's for the greater good and it's worth the less people will die from the vaccine.
They're making these mathematical equations.
The needs of the many.
Your forecast of the deaths were so great on COVID.
I'm sure you're going to do a great job of forecasting the deaths.
Or they say, what I've heard from a couple people is, well, if the vaccine did that to you, just imagine what real COVID is.
Oh, yeah, I've heard that one too.
It's a good thing you got that one.
I'm like 99% sure that I actually already had COVID back before testing was available.
And I couldn't even go get tested.
It wasn't available.
But yeah, I put up a post on a neighborhood app that we use and just said, hey, just curious, did anybody else have a reaction like this?
Because you look over the CDC's website, it doesn't say anything about tachycardia or arrhythmias.
So I was just like, hey, I know I'm pretty sure this is happening to other people, but can anybody just share their personal story with me?
And a lot of people started sharing like, this is what happened to my brother-in-law.
This is what happened to me.
This is what happened to, you know, for the most part, it was like close family members or the person himself posting.
And I was like, wow, gathering a lot of information.
People were very supportive.
And then within about 24 hours, the vaccine police had found the post.
And there were two people in particular going through, combing through, there was like almost 200 responses on the post.
And this is just our neighbors.
I went through the responses going, that didn't happen.
You're lying.
Why are you lying?
Like, replying individually to certain people sharing their personal experience.
And then the one guy said something about you're all idiots.
It was just anxiety.
Why, well, first after he diagnosed me, oh, first he said it was psychosomatic and I have anxiety.
So after he diagnosed me with anxiety, then he blasted me for looking for a medical diagnosis online because I shouldn't be looking.
But he was kind enough to provide me with a medical diagnosis online before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just once.
But yeah, so I, and then the other lady was going, one of the other ladies was going, you're scaring people away from getting the vaccine.
And I hope you're happy when all these people die.
You know, so I just eventually, I eventually just shut down comments on the post.
I left it up so people could read it because it's valid information.
But I shut down comments because it was just upsetting me and it was getting so nasty that I was just like, I can't put any more time and energy into this right now.
People get in fights on next door about like where you put your trash cans on the street.
So it doesn't surprise me that a vaccine.
You should see the posts about leaving dog poop.
Oh, yeah, it's wild.
People are like about to shank each other over the dog poop post.
I like the post where they just took a picture of a Mexican guy walking by the house all the time.
Have you seen this guy?
He was walking by my house.
We lived in a really white area in San Diego, and we got that all the time.
Like people busting, do you know what these two kids are doing?
You know, they're just hanging out playing basketball or something.
They're bouncing this orange sphere around.
Were they posting pictures of you, Kyle?
Yeah.
When you had your mustache?
Well, that's understandable because I looked like a pedophile.
Yeah, passed.
You had the hairdy that you had in your engagement photos.
Okay, let's put that up on the screen, please.
Well, that's enough out of you.
Jess, thanks for joining us.
This is a conspiracy theorist.
Thank you.
Alex Jones correspondent.
To be canceled.
All right.
It was fun being married.
I'll have to decide what to do when the government comes and makes me decide I want to live or stand by you.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
I'll probably be the first.
I'll probably be the first to die.
So you're going to have to decide.
We have to decide whether we want me to live or whether we want me to keep my job.
That's true.
Well, I'm a doctor.
That's a chance for work.
We'll talk about it when you get home tonight.
We'll make like a pros and cons list.
We'll figure it out.
Sounds good.
All right.
All right.
I love you.
All right.
Love you.
Bye.
Love you.
Bye.
Just met you.
Love you.
It's crazy, though, right?
It's like a can of worms.
I'm just like, I never thought we'd get in the middle of this vaccine thing.
The whole like greater good thing.
I think that's the framework that I see this through that it's so interesting.
Where you're saying, like, there's here's an individual who's actually hurting because of this thing.
And you're not, you're not making a broad statement.
Right?
Right?
Yeah.
She's very rational.
This is not like, you know, you see some people that are like freak out anything.
Oh, well, of course they freaked out.
It reminds me, maybe this is a reach, but it reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote from Screwtape Letters where he's talking about push the humans' emotions out to care about the people out there.
But when they actually encounter a person, don't make them love that person.
That's kind of how it feels.
That's exactly it.
Thank you.
Exactly.
Dr. Neil Theology.
Dr. Theology.
Give it a thumbs up.
You got my stamp of approval.
He signed off my exemption.
Okay.
My C.S. Lewis quote exemption.
All right.
Well, we also want to give a shout out to our graphic artist, AJ Powers.
His dad, Bill Powers, is 75 years old.
Tomorrow, this Saturday, depending on when you listen to this.
Yeah.
Congratulations on 75 years of being AJ's dad.
And he described his dad as a tank.
A tank.
That all these health issues keep getting shot at him, and he just pings them all off of him.
I want to also just congratulate AJ.
You guys are going to see a video.
It's probably going to be out by the time this comes out.
We did a robot video.
We interviewed the Tesla bot, and he did the special effects, or at least the robot, I think.
He designed it.
He 3D designed the robot.
He designed and animated it.
And it's our most high-tech video we've done so far.
It's amazing.
Yeah, and those videos come together so fast that we are sitting here going, came up with the idea.
Our author or screenwriter Ehrlich Wheatstain goes, let's write the script.
He writes it in an hour.
He's like, hey, how are we going to make a robot?
Call AJ.
He makes a robot.
It's just insane.
Like, we had most of that video done by the end of that day.
I was like, it was written that day.
Four or five hours, it's done and edited and written.
Is it higher tech than the baguette bread hand Jeopardy?
Just a little.
It's at that level.
Oh, yeah, when his hand was cut off in that video, we used bad gets.
Did we ever say that?
Did we ever show behind the scenes how that's bad gets?
It might be in the subscriber.
You get outtakes stuff.
If you're a paid subscriber on the Babylon B site, you get some behind-the-scenes stuff.
So maybe that's.
Yeah, we put out like a monthly, I think, just a bunch of outtakes videos.
They're great.
Yeah.
Hey, we have a subscriber dare today.
This is subscriber day.
This is an easy one.
Alex Slater says, This year I'm turning 18 and I want to subscribe to the Babylon B as a birthday present to myself.
But first, I need to hear Ethan and Kyle wish me a happy birthday and share stories from way back when they were from way back when they were 18.
Love the podcast.
Keep up the good work.
God bless Alex.
Happy birthday, Alex Slater.
That's a young listener we got there.
18.
He's 17 right now, right?
He's going to be 18.
He's turning 18.
Man, it's like 50 years ago.
Yeah, so long ago.
So I might have told the story on the podcast before, but I only, but only psychopaths listen to every episode.
That's true.
And it might have been in the subscriber only portion.
My girlfriend through all high school, she broke up with me.
She dumped me all of high school.
Right after I turned 18, was about to go off in the world.
I always thought your wife was your first girlfriend, but I guess I got that wrong.
Well, because when you have a girlfriend in high school, it's kind of like...
It doesn't count.
I mean, I was a Christian kid.
I wasn't going out on dates.
And it was just like, oh, there she is.
Do you hold hands or anything?
Yeah.
Okay.
But like, she broke up with me.
And I was playing X-Men Legends on the GameCube at the time.
I was way into X-Men Legends, a super awesome action RPG.
And she goes, we need to talk.
I'm like, okay, talk.
While you're playing.
As it goes on, she's like, I really need to.
Okay, you know, go ahead.
And I'm still playing.
And then at the end, I'm like looking at her and I'm still playing.
I'm like, did you just break up with me?
And then she goes, it's kind of awkward.
I'm like, oh, okay.
So I keep playing.
And she's like, can you give me a ride home?
And I'm like, all right.
And that was that.
That was it, huh?
That was it.
How long was the relationship?
Four years.
Oh, my God.
Four years?
Yeah.
Wow.
All high school.
That's longer than a lot of marriages.
Yeah.
All high school.
And then, you know, I don't know, four or five months later, and that summer, I met my wife.
Wow.
That was it.
So did you meet while you're still playing X-Men Legends?
Did you mean I was still playing the same?
Did you propose to your wife while playing around?
It became a thing.
Have we married?
All major life events play X-Men Legends for.
I think I was 18 when this happened.
And I can't remember if I told the story, but I told Kyle and he said he didn't remember it.
So there was a girl that I had a crush on at that age, and I was convinced that she was very shy and quiet.
She's a very good Christian girl, farm girl, lived out in the country, very traditional family.
And I had asked her out once, and she had kind of turned me down in a very nice way.
But kind of, you know, when the way nice girls turn you down is like they leave an opening because they don't understand.
They need to just be strong.
Yeah.
So I felt like I had this opening still.
And I talked to my roommate, who's this like hippie surfer guy who wouldn't buy toilet paper.
He'd wipe his butt with anything in sight.
So I'd have to like.
Wait, let's go back to that story.
So yeah.
That was the other part of the.
You know what?
I might not have been 18, but we're still going to tell this story because I just remembered I wasn't 18 when I lived with him.
But so he convinced me that she's really traditional.
I bet if you asked her for her father's permission first.
And then I got convinced that, oh, yeah, that's what I should do.
So like I found their phone number and I called her dad up.
He's like this very quiet bearded man, farmer guy, very serious.
I can't listen.
I just asked, I was like, hey, I'm a friend of your daughter's.
I'd like her a lot.
I just wanted to ask her on a date, but I wanted to get your permission first.
And he just laughed at me.
He thought that was hilarious.
And he's like, she can do whatever she wants, man.
She's 18.
I guess if you want to try, I don't know.
She doesn't seem like she's dating much.
Sure enough, that didn't work.
Wait, so then you asked her out?
I think she got back to me.
She through her dad?
Yeah.
Yeah, I heard what you said to my dad.
And no, I still don't want to go on a date with you.
Can you tell her that I like her?
Is that when you first kissed a dating goodbye?
That was when I was trying to, I was wondering, I was questioning it.
So I kissed it back.
Yeah.
I was around that age.
Yeah, I went through a phase after the Josh Harris book came out of basically doing everything that dating was, but calling it courting.
You have to call it courting.
And it made me feel so righteous for that.
That's all that did for me as well.
Courting.
And now I'm an atheist.
No, I'm just kidding.
You have a story for me or 18?
An 18-year-old story.
Man.
You were hanging out with me.
These are all like romance, like girlfriend-themed.
I made my first girlfriend, uber, conservative, solid Christian girl.
We dated like, I want to say six months before we even kissed, that kind of thing.
And so all this like suspense built up.
And so I leave her house one night and kiss her, and she called me back five minutes later in tears.
Oh no.
You finally made her just weep for my kiss.
It's probably not worth sharing.
I'll leave it there.
But let me give a little more this quick redemptive 18-year-old story.
I'm in Nepal, missions trip.
We got a boat in this lake called Lake Okara.
And me and my friend Layla decide, hey, we're going to jump out and tip our friend's boat.
That would be fun.
So we do, and it just sinks to the bottom of this lake.
It just disappears into the darkness.
And so we had run the boats, and now we all pile into one, pull up to shore, and there's all these Nepali like fishermen and sailors hanging out, just laughing at the stupid Americans.
You sunk a boat, you morons.
And so my friend Dan, who was leading the worship trip, was like, they're all here.
Why don't we just share the gospel with them?
And I'm like, yeah, we just proved we're complete idiots by sinking their boat.
Now we've won the credibility points.
Let's share the good news of Jesus.
The boat is like man's attempt at taking care of his own sin.
Yeah, there's some vision there.
Illustration.
So many sermon illustrations.
We did that on purpose to illustrate.
Now that I have your attention.
Your $200 boat at the bottom of the lake.
Let's talk about depravity.
So anyway, we did.
We hung out and shared the gospel for about 45 minutes, and a dude got saved.
There's the 70 of God for you right there.
A couple idiot Americans sinking a boat.
Wow.
And it's a lost boat, saved a man.
There you go.
Title of your book and speaking tour.
All right, you guys.
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday, Alex Slater.
And let's do some weird news.
Oh, well, Kyle, your shirt just suddenly changed.
Crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to a Padres game after this.
Oh, cool.
Is that a sport?
Yeah, it is a sport.
Yeah.
They play the stick ball.
Okay, the stick and the ball.
That's like cricket with red threads in the ball.
That's the one.
That's the one.
Okay.
But the problem is, all the good seats are in the vaccinated section.
So, but I don't want to get vaccinated because I don't want to grow a third arm.
So I'm going to wear my identify as vaccinated t-shirt.
Guaranteed to work in any situation.
Guaranteed.
100% on your money.
So, what I love about this shirt is that we work very hard on our jokes at Babylon Bee and our one joke.
And this is our one joke.
And it's been honed down to the final.
This is the final form.
The final form of the joke.
Have you monetized it before?
Is this your first merchandise?
This is our first merge.
And we spend a lot of time trying to come up with a good merge.
And then our CEO was like, hey, you should just do a shirt that says identify as vaccinated.
We did it.
And it's like, it just sold like crazy.
Nice.
Made all of our money for this month just on this shirt.
Yeah.
So they're still available.
Shop.babylonbee.com.
Check it out.
It's already being pirated by other companies.
This logo has been stolen and sold all over the place.
But buy the official one.
Yeah.
You can go anywhere you need to go.
We have one for men, one's for women, one's gender.
Coffee mugs, everything.
Hats, everything you need.
And if you're a premium Babylon V subscriber, you have a discount too.
Sorry.
Dang it, Ethan.
If you're a premium Babylon V subscriber, you have a discount on your email that you can use.
Discount code.
Discount code.
So, you know.
Don't discount that.
Anyway.
Okay.
This news is weird.
I can't even read this headline.
You want me to take it for you?
I got it.
I got it.
Nude man stabs second nude man in Seattle.
So this is a thing that happened.
So it's a Tuesday in Seattle.
Or as they call it in Seattle, Tuesday.
Just after 8 a.m.
So these are some early bird nudists.
Or they were up all night.
But it's 8 a.m.
What's the usual time for being nude?
The nude stabbing?
I'd assume it'd be like 11 p.m.
Late night.
That's the same night activity.
Yeah, it does seem like not a crack of the morning.
Like he just got his Einstein bagel and he's out there.
All right.
Shine up the old stabbing knife.
See if I can find another naked guy.
Hey, the only one naked guy in this town.
There's like a sign on the sign now in Seattle, like no nude stabbings before 11 p.m. and all that stuff.
One witness had already taken the victim to the hospital before the police arrived.
Other witnesses told the police the other man was last seen around the corner where police found him at the entrance to an apartment building with what appeared to be a self-inflicted wound to his neck.
Wait, he stabbed himself?
Apparently?
After stabbing the other dude?
He lost a significant amount of blood, was unresponsive, supplied medical aid.
This could be like a thing where you go jogging at a certain time of day and it's great and then suddenly someone else decides to jog at the exact same time and they're like, ruins your solitaire, your solitude.
So he's like, this is his time to go out and be naked in Seattle.
And suddenly this other naked guy is out there making that his naked time.
Yeah.
Stabbing.
Hey, I had the 5 a.m. slot.
Yeah.
George?
Well, this is my route.
What else we got here?
British police unveil new pride-themed hate crime cars.
So the British police have had a fabulous rainbow makeover.
You may have even seen a rainbow-colored hate crime car patrolling your neighborhood if you're in the UK.
Julie Crook, the LBGT Plus lead for the National Police Chiefs' Council, says the cars are necessary to raise awareness of hate crime.
So I guess the basic idea of these cars is there's not enough people reporting hate crimes.
So they think if they put rainbows over their cars, then suddenly a bunch of people are going to come out of the woodwork and report all these crimes that they, in theory, are sure are out there.
Gay guy gets speed up.
He's walking down the street.
I really normally record that.
And then a rainbow car goes away and he's like, I'm going to call them.
I think they're just really into the Noahic covenant.
They're just celebrating God will no longer flood the earth.
That's all.
So this was actually a prophecy fulfilled from the Babylon V. We did an article where the police are replaced with this rainbow VW bus and they just drive around singing Imagine.
And we also had our animation where the cops end up replacing, because they get defunded and they replace their squad cars with clown cars.
So double prophecy.
Double prophecy.
Fulfilled.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's based on a crime that they don't have, they don't have evidence that it's rampant, but we think it secretly is rampant.
It's not reported.
We got to draw them out of the woodwork.
It's like if there's some other crime, like ferret kidnapping or something.
Nobody's reporting ferret kidnapping.
Yeah, ferret rights.
We don't think ferrets are like gay people.
Just to be clear.
Well, some are probably.
There's also heterosexual ferret-like people.
That's true.
It has nothing to do with organizations.
Or weird news.
I'm cutting you guys off.
Going nowhere.
Go ahead, Danny.
Racehorse Bucks Rider escapes racetrack and is found running down the highway.
Also survives barn fire?
Yeah, on the same day.
I was looking at the, and I looked the story up and found that that had been left out.
It also survived a barn fire like two hours later.
By the way.
Two-year-old racehorsey.
Startled onlookers.
On Saturday afternoon, when she bucked her jockey and ran off the track, this would have been her racing debut in Kentucky.
Bold and Bossy soon found an exit and ran away down Interstate 69.
I think they were startled by a horse named Bolden Bossy doing this.
The name is Bold and Bossy.
I also just want to pause and say I want Bucked her jockey to be a brave of some kind.
I thought it might not be a good name or a style of A1 steak sauce, Bolden Bossy.
That would be good.
Or like a 90s punk band like Buckeder Jockey.
I'm Bold, and this is Bossy.
Bold and Bossy.
And this is Buckingham.
You're hanging up for slick shoes tonight.
An unknown hero rescued Bold and Bossy and six other horses from the burning barn.
What is happening?
So the horse was taken to the road.
After they rounded it up, the car blocked it in.
They got the horse back.
They put it in a barn.
And the barn started on fire, and an unknown hero rescued the horse.
Well, there you go.
Bold and bossy.
And it was in Ruden Riddle Hospital.
Bold and Bossy was in Rude and Riddle.
It's a little confusing.
The rescuer or the mystery is going to be a theme.
There's more mysteries in the later stories here.
LA Times has called California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder the black face of white supremacy.
Black man Larry Elder, conservative radio host.
Grew up in like South Central.
So this, I love the title of this op-ed.
Larry Elder is the black face of white supremacy.
You've been warned.
I've been warned.
You've been warned.
There's so many good, like this next line.
I fully agree with this line.
It says, I won't lie, wrote Erica Smith.
Few things infuriate me more than watching a black person use willful blindness and cherry-picked facts to make overly simplistic arguments that whitewash the complex problems that come along with being black in America.
You could take that out of the rail, right?
Yeah, you can take that either way.
And the race is like irrelevant there, right?
It's just when people do that.
When you just make this whole cherry-picking facts, it seems like a big issue.
Just take out the black from there.
A few things infuriate me more than watching a person use blind facts to make an overly simplistic point.
You're like, oh, yeah, I agree with that.
But they have to insert all this race stuff and they slam it to their.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
I guess she's saying, I like when people who aren't, or, you know, for the right reasons, use willful blindness and cherry-pick facts to make overly simplistic arguments and whitewash the complexity.
That accidental racism there, I think.
Yeah.
Well, it's crazy.
When I did the Confronting Injustice book, you know, there's several.
Oh, you made a book?
I did.
Hey.
Smooth transition.
Now, my last book, Confronting Injustice, I have Sam Say, Monique Dusan, several brothers and sisters of color who added their voice.
And what I keep hearing back from so many of them is, man, the kind of racism that comes their way just by questioning the leftist narrative is insane.
Just daily, whether it's Uncle Tom or Oreo for being black on the outside and white on the inside.
That's the black faces of white supremacy right there.
There it is.
Well, cool.
Yeah.
So, wait, whose turn is it?
Mine?
Yep.
I'm always the one who can't remember whose turn it is.
Man steals over 50 luxury cars to satisfy his 16 girlfriends.
The weird thing to me is that's not an even number of.
Yeah, that's like some demanding.
You hooked up with 16 very demanding women.
So each woman got three points.
So a Delhi man has confessed to stealing over 50 cars, which he then gave to each of his 16 girlfriends.
Some of the cars he used for his own hobbies.
A local news report says the man would change his look when stealing each car, being bald sometimes.
He'd donn a different wig each time.
I was curious if he changed his look for each of the girlfriends.
Yeah, is that how he had 16 girlfriends?
Yeah.
He has a string of known aliases, and he says it took him about 10 minutes each car.
So he did this all in one morning.
No.
So that sounds like a Guinness World Record right there.
I would applaud that.
Yes, he stole most of the cars in the early morning.
Bold and bossy head.
He was in a fight with all 16 of them.
He's like, hold on, hold on.
I'm going to make this up to you guys.
And he takes off, comes back with 50 cars.
Yeah.
This is why polygamy is such a bad idea.
Right.
If you just had one wife, he'd only have to steal five or six cars.
Yeah, a few cars, three, three.
Well, Sri Lanka has banned drunk driving of elephants.
Not meaning that elephants can't.
You can no longer be driving.
You don't have to ride an elephant drunkenly?
They have little cars that you can't fit an elephant in a car there.
Sri Lanka will issue captive elements with their own biometric identity cards.
Ban their riders from drinking on the job under a wide-ranging new animal protection law.
Many rich Sri Lankans, including Buddhist monks, keep elephants as pets to show off their wealth, but complaints of ill-treatment and cruelty are widespread.
The new law will require all owners to ensure that animals under their care have new photo identity cards with the DNA stamp.
What?
That's weird.
That's racist.
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
Photo ID for elephants.
How would you tell Mars in the face?
Yeah, is there a photo ID of an elephant?
Yep, elephant.
That's why they need the DNA stamp.
That looks like stinky, all right.
Hey, a man discovered a ladybug.
That's not a common occurrence.
It's so cute when you walk and you say, oh, there's a ladybug.
Oh, ladybug.
You always stop the kids.
Like, look at that.
But he found this one living inside his colon.
Well, he didn't find it.
It was found.
Well, it says man discovers, so I don't know what he was doing.
That should really spruce up a colon.
During screening.
Oh, okay.
So, yeah, he was a colonoscopy.
Yeah, they're in there.
Okay, let's check it out in here.
Oh, ladybug.
Do we have a graphic for this?
I didn't look.
I hope not.
You click on it.
There is a graphic.
Okay.
And it's graphic.
There's a graphic.
You're looking in this man's colon.
Yeah, that's for subscribers only.
Yeah.
Put him in.
But once you get inside the body, it's all.
It's all tubes and tunnels.
Yeah.
Made of meat.
Meat tunnels.
Meat tunnels.
Flesh tunnels.
Never flesh tunnels.
We have a subscriber dare, actually.
Did you see that subscriber there someone sent us?
They said, I will subscribe if you never use the term flesh tunnels again.
Lost that guy.
So we just lost that subscriber there.
Maybe next time we'll do that subscriber there.
All right, we got two big mysteries.
We'll see if we can crack them right now.
Okay.
First one, loose wallaby captured in Pennsylvania.
Origins remain a mystery.
So just a mysterious wallaby appeared in Pennsylvania.
And then giant rubber ducks presence in Maine Harbor, a mystery.
These were like back-to-back headlines, so I had to put both mysteries.
And the rubber duck, minor detail, was huge.
And it had the word joy in all caps written on the side of it.
So someone's just spreading joy, huh?
Just no one knows where they came from.
Okay.
But both are things that make people happy.
So maybe someone's trying to make everybody happy.
It's 25 feet tall.
That's a tall yellow duck.
The rubber setup.
Oh, not the wallaby, the rubber duck.
That artist who would like hang random umbrellas stretching 100 miles in the desert.
Christoph, I think was his name.
Sure.
Something like that.
But he just died.
Couldn't have been him.
Sad.
It's a Banksy.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's a Banksy.
Yeah, so these could be Banksy's.
It's a new kind of really whimsical Banksy guy that's like, wallaby is for you.
Giant rubber ducks.
Giant rubber ducks.
What'll be next?
Giant wallaby.
A huge hamster in a giant ball.
All right.
My turn.
Walrus on Irish coast to get a floating couch after sinking boats.
All right.
So basically, the walrus is just like resting on people's boats.
Okay.
And he keeps sinking into floating.
So they got him his own.
It's really a pontoon that looks like I keep sinking them.
Name's Wally.
He's like, Wally the Walrus has been spotted resting in park boats along the coast, has sank.
He's pulling a Thaddeus on those boats.
Maybe he's a Christian.
He's trying to do a sermon illustration.
That's probably it.
Probably it.
Sank at least two vessels.
Seal Rescue Ireland said.
Wally the Walrus proceeded to share the gospel with Seal Rescue, and one dude got saved.
That's what it sounds like when you say the gospel.
Well, we've got one more weird news story for you.
And believe it or not, it is a Guinness World Record.
Man walks 2.2 miles while balancing a baseball bat on his chin.
And that is the Guinness World Record.
And that's our old friend David Rush.
David Rush has.
So what is David Rush's talent?
Like, is it just balance?
Figuring out how to do a thing no one else does and then doing it.
Yeah.
Is it coordination?
Or does he find?
We need to interview this guy.
We do need to interview this guy.
Didn't you break a Guinness record on this show once?
At least you thought you did?
Yeah.
No, I totally did.
No, I totally did.
I totally broke it.
Was it like the speed of drinking?
Capri Sun, that's right.
Capri Sun.
But the thing is, even if I didn't break it, the fact that I'm like within 0.01 seconds or whatever of breaking it.
Still makes you a big deal.
Well, it means that it's a stupid record.
If you can break a record by just going, yeah, I'll break that record.
I'll try it.
It's not a record.
It's not anything.
Doesn't that segment have the.
I'm with you.
I agree 100%.
I'm sorry.
But what came out of that was probably one of the greatest lines: the vampire sucking a hamster.
Wasn't that?
That was probably him.
That was one of those.
I throw him jokes that go completely missed, and then they get mentioned in the comments.
Someone goes, hey, nobody listened to what Ethan said.
But if we stopped every time he said something like that, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, no, no, I like that.
That's my goal: to sneak it in under the radar.
Yeah.
Sneak it in.
It's my style.
All right.
Well, that's weird news.
Now let's do weird theology.
This weirdo right here.
So Thadias has a book about how free will arguments do not get God off the hook for the problem of evil.
Some listeners are going to be triggered.
God reforms hearts, rethinking free will and the problem of evil.
So this could be like a nine-hour segment.
How long is this thing going to be?
The book itself is a 250-page cure for insomnia.
Okay.
Anybody out there just, you know, three in the morning and you're binging the office?
Read a survey.
God reforms hearts.
I was just going to read that.
Deepest rhyme of your life.
Okay.
So when we talk to apologists, this is one of the most common arguments that they make when we discuss the problem of free will.
Yep.
Is they'll say, I think to them, free will is the piece of the puzzle that makes everything fit together.
To them, it gets got off the hook for evil.
It gets, I don't know, maybe I'm playing the devil's eye advocate here.
I don't know.
It gets God off the hook.
It explains God's love.
It answers a lot of questions like, what about the man on the desert island who never heard?
You know, those kinds of questions.
So I think for a lot of them, it's hard to get over this because it's, to them, it is the linchpin that hooks it all together.
Yeah, and it was for me for probably my first 10 years as a Christian.
And when I started nerding out to apologetics and theology, it was like, yes, this solves it.
God wants authentic love.
He doesn't want like those creepy chatty Kathy dolls from the 50s where you pull the string and out comes this pre-programmed, I love you.
I love you.
I'm happy you like you see in old like Twilight Zones.
It's a creepy doll with a butcher knife.
I love you.
A plug for our animation.
There you go.
We have the CRT doll, CRT.
Yeah.
CRT.
This should be about plugging me, all right?
You're being plugged.
You're talking.
All right, let's move on.
Let's move on to hate mail.
All right, moving on.
So basically, I bought that idea, and there's this common sense appeal to it.
God doesn't want robot love, he doesn't want forced love or coerced love.
And so when I got into this years and years ago, I started seeing all these passages that just seem to flat out contradict that.
So one of the first ones in Deuteronomy 30, the text says, it's God talking.
He says, I will circumcise your heart and cause you to love me.
And that seemed like, well, somehow God is able to pull that off.
What part does it?
Never mind.
I don't even know.
Wait, wait, I had that.
We got to hit pause.
We're talking meaty theology.
Are we not?
This isn't milk.
This is meat.
So you guys each have to, by the time I'm done talking about my book, down an entire bag of you want carnia sauce?
I don't think he's a motivation.
I'm on a very strict diet right now.
And I broke it for the chip, but I'm not breaking it for beef jerky even though that's my favorite food.
We'll just CG it in later.
Yeah.
I could eat eating it.
And last time.
Eat them for me.
Eat for two.
Last time I saw you eat meat.
Yeah.
Sitting right there did not go well.
This is supposed to be green, right?
The infamous porky theology.
So Lincoln pork followed by meaty theology.
There you go.
Or is it beefy theology?
So if I say something meaty, you got to.
I'm going to sit back from the microphone.
Well, jerky is probably not as bad.
We were eating these juicy sausages last time.
He was eating the uncooked ones, too.
They were just.
So anyway, do we have to have free will?
Well, in order for love to be authentic, well, of course, it means it all hinges on what we mean by free will.
If I put a gun at Ethan's back and I said, say you love me, he'd be like, I love you, bro, but it's not authentic.
He's just, it's not genuine love.
He just doesn't want to get shot.
So you didn't mean it when I held my gun to you?
No, I did not mean that.
If I were to sneak into, I don't know why I'm picking on Ethan.
Let's go to Kyle.
If I found out, like, here's Kyle's address, and I'm going to sneak into his bedroom at night and I'm going to install this little brain chip, this artificial affection chip, so that he wakes up.
Like a little Bluetooth speaker that whispers in his ear all night.
Yes, you love him.
That is awesome.
He is sexy.
Love.
Not that kind of love.
Creepiest segment ever.
And you wake up and you're like, must love Thaddeus.
He is a cool dude.
We would agree, you don't have free will there.
So the love isn't authentic, right?
So this is something in the age-old Calvinism-Arminianism controversy that Calvinists and Arminians, instead of being at each other's throats, can actually high-five and say, amen.
Neither of us believe that in order to love God, that God puts the gun at our back or that he installs some artificial affection software in our brains.
So Calvinists and Armenians both believe in that kind of free will.
What in the book I call freedom from the gunman and freedom from the machine.
But there's these other kinds of freedom that when I read scripture, it seems like God can actually so radically transform our hearts, recalibrate our affections so that we love him and really can't do otherwise.
And he can pull that off without turning us into chatty Kathy dolls.
Wow.
But you don't know how.
You just know that's what he can do, right?
We can understand it.
So what's the difference between God and if you like Adam and Eve, right?
Because it seemed like he gave them a choice, but it wasn't really a choice.
It is a choice.
Okay.
Could they have chosen differently, though?
That was the question.
So that's a problem.
So I had a guy, so we have a friend who's a very hardcore Calvinist, and his argument, which I actually found very compelling, was the idea that whatever turn you get to, you can go left or right.
It's just a mundane decision.
And he just, really the question is, like, would I ever choose differently if you just repeated that?
And like, I can't.
Why would I?
I am me, and I would probably choose the same thing every time because I'm just, I'm me.
So there is that element that, and I'm not a Calvinist, but I do find it, I find the whole debate fascinating.
Whenever I replay a video game like an RPG where you have free choice, I always make the exact same choices.
I'm like, oh, I can do whatever I want in this open world.
I create the same character, do the same dialogue, often go to the same place.
Your choose your own adventure books as a kid were like the same story.
I died on page three every time.
I can't get past the third page.
What is happening?
But no, there is.
knowledge of your past well I'm just yeah so So let's get a real world example so it's not too heady.
In the book, I talk about Les Chambon, which is my French chambon.
Like a fighting style.
Southern France.
It was this Christian farm town.
Okay.
And Jews are fleeing the SS.
You know, Hitler's troops are on the hunt.
And so all these Chambonai start getting knocks on the door from these Jewish refugees.
And they ended up saving over 10,000 Jewish lives, these Christian farmers in the south of France during World War II.
You know, they'd hide them and they created this cool network that would get them to Switzerland or somewhere, you know, beyond Hitler's.
And so there's a philosopher, a dude named Phil Halley who went out.
He was writing about free will and libertarian free will, compatibilistic free will, all these heady categories.
And he went and asked the Chambonai, could you have, did you have the freedom to choose to turn those families away?
And these Christian farmers looked at him like, what are you talking about?
Like, what else are you going to do?
You have a refugee family running from the SS on your doorstep.
We couldn't have done otherwise.
And so there's a sense in which they couldn't have done otherwise, not because they were forced by the gun, not because they were coerced or predetermined by their brain chemistry or anything like that, but what you were getting at because of who they were.
These French farmers were related to the Huguenots.
They had endured persecution.
People tried to exterminate them.
And so part of their character was such that it was just impossible for them to turn away these families.
And so I interviewed when I was writing the book one of those Jewish girls who was saved at 10 years old from the Nazis.
And I asked her the same question.
Her name was Madeline.
It used to be Rosenstein, which is not the kind of name you want to have when the Nazis are invading France.
So she became Madeline Rousseau, which is just a generic French last name to escape Jewish Nazi detection.
And so she said in her experience being saved by these Christians, that they were just the kind of people that that's what you do.
And I would argue that's real freedom, the kind that God experiences, not because God is torn 50-50 between like, do I sin, do I not sin?
But he's completely free because of who he is.
His actions are consistent with his holy character.
We will be most free in heaven when we aren't split 50-50, but we're forever liberated from the sin, the magnetism of sin in our hearts.
So, yeah, I believe in freedom big time, just the biblical or compatibilistic kind.
So, what's the difference between compatibilism and libertarianism or hard determinism?
Like, how does that because I don't get how I really, I guess I don't, I have a tough time finding that wiggle room of there's God wrote it all out like a script.
Is that what you guys believe?
I do.
I do.
Okay.
Yeah.
All things were decreed according to the people.
And we're just watching it play out.
Is that how we?
But it's different from like hard determinism.
Because in hard determinism, that's why I gave the creepy examples.
If I put a gun at your back, you are determined to say, I love you, man.
Not because you want to.
It's not an authentic expression of your heart.
I've bypassed your willpower to force love, thereby making it phony love.
If I install that creepy computer chip in Kyle's brain when he's sleeping, I've bypassed his beliefs, his desires, his affections to force his love.
And so it's not real.
What God does in Deuteronomy 30, when it says he will circumcise our hearts, or what he does in Ezekiel 36, where it says, you know, guard God, the heart surgeon, I'm going to yank the rock out of your chest and replace it with a heart of flesh that keeps his commands, that loves him and loves others.
And Jeremiah 29, 30 and 31, God writing his law in our hearts so that we love him.
It's just over and over in scripture, you see this theme that God has a unique access to our hearts because he's God, and he has a unique authority over our hearts because he's God to recalibrate our affections so that we love authentically.
And that's where it gets confusing because I can't do that because there's a creator-creature distinction.
If I tried to get you guys to love me and force it, I would have to make that love false.
But because God's a creator, not a creature, he can pull that off.
And I think we know this every time we're on our knees praying.
That's how we pray.
We don't pray, God, please try to persuade this person so with their autonomous free power, they just might say yes and affirm the crosswork of Jesus.
No, we pray.
You know, J.I. Packer famously said, on our feet we disagree, but on our knees we're all Calvinists in the sense that we pray as if God is actually sovereign enough to answer those prayers to change people's hearts.
So there.
I'm just kidding.
I'm the worst person to debate on this because I'm like, okay, sure, whatever.
Let's get Patrick in here.
We need like a hard willer.
The sin comes with a philosopher.
Isn't that awesome?
There you go.
So, yeah, I don't, but I kind of see what you're saying.
What?
Did you get the philosopher out there?
It came out of it.
That's why I said it.
Look, flosser included.
Flosser.
It's true.
He's just flossing his flosser over here.
So.
I don't, uh.
I mean, I get what you're saying.
So there's this like, is this a script?
And like, you know, I get when Calvinists say, and I am a Calvinist, but I get when Calvinists say, like, we don't believe in determinism or we don't, or like hard determinism.
We don't believe that God holds a gun to your head.
And I get the argument of like, it's not like when someone gets saved, they're like, I don't want to say yes.
And they're getting like dragged to the altar, you know?
Oh no, you know, it's like, yes, Lord, I love you.
No, you know, it's like there is a change of the heart that comes.
Yeah.
I guess it is hard to see the distinction, though, between that and, you know, irresistible grace, where you are changed despite any choice of your own, you know?
Yeah.
So I don't know.
Well, for me, check in, mate.
So for me, when I was doing the research years and years ago, I was also professoring at Biola.
And I got to see all of this sort of click where here's all the nerdy book stuff I'm doing and here's what it looks like in real life.
And so I had a student who we'll call Bob.
And Bob was a porn addict.
Did I tell this story before in here?
I don't think so.
That was on a secret episode.
I think last time it was the neo-Nazi.
You got the neo-Nazi in there, yeah.
So this student, Bob, he wrote me just the most bleeding heart, vulnerable email ever confessing his tenure pornography addiction.
Hits send like with trembling finger.
And a week goes by and I don't respond.
Two weeks go by.
I don't respond.
Three weeks go by and he comes up to me after one of my classes.
He's like, hey, man, like that was the hardest email I've ever written.
Did you want to bother at least acknowledging my existence?
So it turns out he sent it to ThaddeusWilliams at gmail.com, which is the email address I couldn't get because some other Thaddeus Williams has it.
Hence, mine is ThaddeusJWilliams at gmail.com.
So some Thaddeus Williams out there opens his morning email like, oh, wow.
Like, here's a 10-page.
They didn't say it went to spam because the word porn was in there so much.
No, some Thaddeus Williams.
That actually happened to me once.
That someone else sent me an email like that.
Oh, really?
Like this massive, like they were trying to talk to their Bible study leader or small group leader or something, and they accidentally sent that to me.
And it was super vulnerable.
Yeah, like with this massive period.
You're like, oh, boy.
Hey, buddy, I think you sent this to the wrong person.
I ran a college group one time where we were pretty tight-knit and everybody shared like, how are we going to be praying for each other's sins?
And so some dude was taking notes on everybody's sins and posted it to Facebook as like, now we all remember so we can pray for each other, but he left it public.
So it's like when you're out about your all-time backfires.
So anyway, this student sends the email.
You haven't responded.
Oh, yeah, drop the J in there, Thaddeus J Williams at Gmail.
I promise I'll get back to you.
Like your all-time backfires.
I felt terrible for the kid.
So he does.
I read it.
We get together that week.
And the advice I gave him was, what are we calling him?
Bob?
Bob.
I said, Bob, despair.
That's my best advice to you: despair.
You've been trying to fight this for 10 years.
You've got all the internet filters.
You got all the accountability groups.
But, you know, he would set an internet filter and then turn his head and type a random code so that he couldn't hack it.
And then within like three days, he'd become a world-class hacker and like managed to get the exact combination of random buttons so that he could get back to his porn.
There was an upside.
So he learned.
His hacking skills really grew during that period.
That's how he took terrorist style of hackers.
Man meant for evil.
He's the man who later found Osama bin Laden.
That man's name was Bill Gates.
That man's name was Mark Zuckerberg.
So anyway, I tell him, despair.
You've been trying to fight this on your own willpower for 10 plus years.
You told me it's only getting worse.
So let's try something radically different.
And so I took him through 1 Thessalonians, I think it's chapter 3, verse 12, where Paul is writing to the church in Thessalonica who struggled with the Greek word pornea, sexual immorality.
And Paul doesn't say, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps or go start, you know, get an online filter or anything like that.
He says, may God cause you to increase and abound in love.
May God cause you to increase and abound in love.
And what struck me reading that is a few things.
Number one, the premise of the prayer is that God's actually sovereign enough to answer it.
God can cause us to love without turning us into robots.
And number two, it really exposes porn addiction for what it really is.
It's not just, oh, you're looking at pictures.
It's a failure to love.
Why?
Because pornography strips the imago de, the image of God, out of somebody.
So they're literally just an image.
It flattens them out into two dimensions, which there's all kinds of science on this.
It actually tweaks your brain chemistry so you start treating people in real life as two-dimension rather than as multi-dimensional image bearers of God.
So Paul's diagnosing pornea for what it is, a failure to love.
And his solution isn't self-help spirituality.
It's may God cause you to increase and abound in love.
And so by his second letter to the Thessalonians, the first chapter, he says, praise be to God and Father because you are.
And he uses the same phrase from the first letter.
You are increasing and abounding in love.
God actually has the sovereignty over our hearts to answer those prayers.
So that's what I told the student.
I said, we're just going to pray that for you for the next week.
I'll commit to praying that for you every day.
Pray it for yourself and let's just see what happens.
So fast forward next week of my theology class, Bob shows up.
And I will tell you guys, I didn't even recognize him.
Like before that, you could just tell this dude, he was like in a cartoon with this cloud following him everywhere.
He couldn't really look you in the eye.
He just had a gloom and doom about him.
You could tell he was super lonesome and spent way too much time on porn hub or whatever.
But when he showed up to class that next week.
What's the name of that website?
When he showed up that next week, man, it was like looking, it was like catching a glimpse of the real Bob.
Like there was just a glow about him, like what an old school King James Bible would call your countenance, right?
The external appearance of your soul's interior state.
His countenance was different.
And so I knew before he even came up to talk to me that God had shown up, the Holy Spirit had answered that prayer.
And so he comes up to me, and the way he described it was exactly like this.
He said, Thad, I'm so filled up to the brim with the Holy Spirit that there's just no room left for the porn.
I just don't need it in my life.
Because whatever itch I was trying to scratch with pornography, whatever hole I was trying to fill, like I'm satisfied because I'm filled to the brim enjoying God.
So there's just no room for that in my life anymore.
Now that's one story that I have seen play out.
That was years and years ago, probably eight years ago.
That has happened every single semester at Bile University in my ministry where God shows up.
And so for me, it's not just let's have an abstract Calvinism or Minnonism debate.
The biblical teaching that God is sovereign enough to cause us to love without making us robots is something that I see setting people free every single semester.
So there you go.
That's my sermon for the day.
If you want to learn more, you can get Thaddeus Williams, God Reforms Hearts.
He's very NPR.
I don't know.
So lackluster.
If you want to learn more, you can get Thaddeus Williams.
God reforms hearts.
God reforms hearts.
Use code FLESHTUNNELS to save 5%.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, you want to continue this discussion in the subscriber portion?
You can dive in a little more if you want.
Whatever you want.
It's up to you guys.
Because there's a lot more to talk about.
I don't think we didn't even touch on our notes.
We just were talking.
I mean, it's safe to say we solved the problem of evil and the subscriber.
There's nothing more to say.
So I think we're good.
We'll just talk about our favorite Marvel movies in the subscriber portion.
Oh, yeah.
Let's go to Hate Mail.
Hate Mail.
Hey, sorry to interrupt that hilarious podcast that you were just listening to, but my buddy Ethan and I here were thinking, you might not be a Babylon Bee subscriber, and we need to correct that.
Yeah, in fact, I could smell it in the room.
It smells like a non-subscriber in here.
Or is that cow farts?
Could be cow farts.
I can't tell.
Hey, if you subscribe, you get this giant, awesome, beautiful coffee table book full of beautiful images.
What?
And hilarious stories.
Premium subscribers get this for a limited time, which is crazy because this book is like half the cost of a Babylonia.
It's like a brick of gold.
Anyway, it's awesome.
So you get a coupon code for cheaper merchandise.
You get to be part of the community.
The advantages are endless to be a Babylon Bee subscriber.
Literally infinite.
Oh, you get our bloopers from our.
Oh, yeah.
Those are really fun.
Those are hilarious.
The gas.
So please.
Yeah.
Go to BabylonB.com/slash plans.
Subscribe.
Become one of the elite.
The few.
The Babylon Bees.
I really miss Adam Ford.
So this is like, this is borderline hate and mail.
It's kind of weird mail.
These are people who just chain blast a bunch of accounts that they like think, I don't know, need to hear this or maybe that would spread this idea.
I don't know.
We get some wackos.
I think it was similar.
Remember the guy that wrote the headline submission or the poll, the satire about the speeches falling down the thing?
I love that one.
Yeah, it's great.
And it's like he just blasts it to a bunch of accounts.
If you're new to the podcast, go back and find that.
It might be our second episode or four.
It was a very early one.
We did rejected Babylon Blue.
Rejected headlines, and there's some gold in there.
Just absolute gold.
I rejected every headline I've ever sent you.
Some of those are good.
Well, maybe we can split those up into five.
Oh, it's pretty much every headline I've been submitted by anybody.
I get some big names now and then ignores the picture.
Please, I'm going to install some love fad headlines software in your brain.
All right.
Well, why don't I want me to take the first paragraph and then you could take the second term?
Okay, here we go.
We need to face facts.
Our insurrectionist are Taliban promoters.
Just like their Republic Land party, they will endure any abashment to gain a perceived advantage, no matter how detrimental to their cause in the long run.
How long till they invite their homophobic, misogynistic brethren in their battle against libtards here in the America?
Wake the.
Wake the duck up.
This is war here in America, and there exists no compromise with these self-righteous clocksuckers.
I can't follow that.
Arm yourselves to the gills and prepare for war.
It is here now.
I hate the Democrats.
I'm surprised they didn't put Demon Crats.
Yeah, demon craps.
Demon rats.
Demon rats.
Demon craps.
Because they refuse to kill a snake when they see it to save themselves.
We will wait and see.
Dun dun.
Sea is all caps.
We will wait and see.
Wow.
That's powerful.
There's a lot of different capitalizations in there.
So it's very, it's kind of like a comic book.
They like bold certain words so you know how to read it.
Yeah.
And that's very common.
It's totally arbitrary.
Bam.
The Republican party, they will endure any abashment.
I think they mean abasement to gain a presentation.
So, what's the gist of this message?
Do you mean to get the gist of the money?
I think this is a liberal.
This is a liberal.
They're a liberal?
But they hate the Democrats?
Because they're losing their.
I hate the Democrats.
They're mad at the Democrats for not killing all the Republicans.
They're pissed at everything.
I think.
They're very upset.
They're poetic.
But then they want everybody to arm themselves.
Doesn't sound like a Democrat.
It's so confusing.
I don't know.
But they use limits.
Mute cards.
Send it back.
Send it a follow-up, please.
Please clarify.
Yeah, just to clarify.
We should reply to this.
Who are the limits?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
That should be the hate mail thing.
We should start talking about correspondences.
All right.
We have some good ones with Seth Repawas.
We could write a reply right now.
Yeah.
On the show.
Okay.
I'm going to do that.
Can you find it?
Yeah.
So we need to ask, please clarify.
The Republica Klan Party.
Okay, I'm going to reply.
You might want to check your K button.
You keep accidentally.
Tiger.
Okay.
Hi, Tiger.
Hey there, Tiger.
Ask him where he stands on Calvinism.
Thank you.
Thank you for your thoughtful correspondence.
We appreciate the feedback and input.
However, we are not 100% sure what you are talking about.
Can we get the elevator pitch?
Can you please clarify?
Explain like we are five.
The nutshell.
Yeah.
I'm going to make up a name because I'm not going to say my name because you'll probably come to my house and turn me into a lampshade.
But there's also a podcast of you on YouTube writing these.
That's true.
Regards Gilbert.
Ironic.
I've been doxxed Gilbert.
Regards Gilbert.
How long till they invite their hom.
It's not even homophobic.
It's homphobic.
Homphobic.
Well, tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of what Tiger Says Back to Us.
It's a cliffhanger.
And with that, that's a show.
So let's go.
We're going to go to the subscriber lounge and we're going to hang out.
And Thaddeus is going to tell us cool stories.
And, you know, his best story when he bombed teaching a class.
Every day.
Maybe talk some more about free will and favorite Marvel movies.
Fantastic.
Or not.
We've also got bonus hate mail and subscriber submitted headlines and all kinds of fun stuff.
So let's do it.
Let's go have fun with all these guys sitting here.
Kick them out.
Eat some more jerky.
Hey, we have a YouTube subscription now.
Is that an option yet?
It's not out yet.
But it is coming.
We're going to be having a paid YouTube subscription.
Yeah, so you can actually pay for a YouTube exclusive subscription and get the subscribe portion on YouTube someday soon.
A giant millstone just lands on her and crushes your whole body into the ground.
You're reading this to your children?
Let me just classify this real quick.
It's a classic fairy tale children were told in the beginning of time.
That's actually pretty smart.
It's like when people create a whole, they try to create a holiday to sell a book, like the elf on the shelf thing.
Yeah.
It's like, hey, you know what a fun tradition is, is buying our elf book for $29.99.
Wondering what they'll say next?
The rest of this podcast is in our super exclusive premium subscriber lounge.
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Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dillon for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.
Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Babylon B.