All Episodes
Previous Next
April 7, 2020 - Louder with Crowder
01:11:50
Rhett & Link Get Woke | MASS MONDAY | Louder with Crowder
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to continued Mug Club Quarantine Month.
That's the hashtag.
And of course, you can enter in the promo code QUARANTINE.
You get $30 off at loudearthcreditor.com slash Mug Club.
We've decided to try and serve you as best we can since we're not first responders.
We can create more content than ever and put all of the content that's usually available exclusively to Mug Clubbers in front of the paywall so that you don't feel so lonely during this month.
You can go to loudearthcreditor.com slash schedule to see all of our live broadcasts when we'll be doing live chat.
And what you're about to watch is actually something we do every A couple of weeks, Mass Monday, where we'll take on sort of a topical but also theological issue and deal with it from a biblical perspective.
Full disclosure, most of us here are Christians.
And let us know what you think about these kinds of programs and if you'd like to see more of this on YouTube, as it's usually available exclusively at Mug Club right now.
And if you are a member, please do renew, because we make zero of the Benjamins from YouTube.
If we were to count on them to make it rain, There wouldn't be any rain.
All right, that's not really a dance in.
For people, of course, those of you watching on the YouTube, we have the free Mug Club month going on.
Of course, the promo code is QUARANTINE if you join up at livewithcarter.com slash Mug Club.
You get this stuff every week.
That's awesome.
Every day of every week.
Morning show right now is special for the quarantine, obviously.
It is, yeah.
I don't want to be doing two-a-days for the rest of my life.
Who am I, Terrell Owens?
No.
I'm not your rubber band man.
Did you know that?
He was known as rubber band man.
Really?
Yeah.
Why is that?
Because he used rubber bands.
This, for people who do not know, that's all I know.
I saw an advertisement for Body Elastics and they said, meet Terrell Owens, the rubber band man.
And he came in and said, I am the rubber band man.
Body Elastics.
That was it.
And I bought them.
Wow.
And I gave them to a housekeeper.
Not my housekeeper.
I can't afford a housekeeper.
Somebody else's.
But I gave the Terrell Owens-endorsed body-elastic bands to a housekeeper of others' houses.
Homes.
Speaking of which, I should probably clean up my own house first and get an order.
We do this often.
I think every other Monday.
It's been typically a mass Monday.
We've talked about horror films in the past.
Taking on some issues.
You know, as everyone here is a Christian, some people come from different denominations, different walks.
If you don't like it, I get it.
You're a 2007 YouTube atheist.
You just read Hitchens.
I get it.
Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Super interesting.
It's so interesting.
But this is... Was that Hitchens or was it Dawkins?
I don't remember the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I don't know why I say monster.
Like it's Herman Spaghetti Monster.
It's not Herman.
That's for sure.
Actually, we do want to talk about something because it's been making the rounds on YouTube throughout the whole sort of YouTube blogosphere.
And you brought this to my attention, Audio Wade.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You said, hey, I would like to maybe do a podcast yourself on Explain.
Yeah, so the Rhett and Link, famous on YouTube, I think they have like 16 million subscribers, recently came out, did a couple of videos about their spiritual deconstruction, is the word that they've used.
That's the new term.
It's the woke term.
It's very cool.
So cool.
So yeah, they did a couple of episodes on that, each one about an hour and 45 minutes, just going through their stories of basically how they lost their faith.
Right.
And they came from very different points of view on that.
But yeah, that's and I thought that warranted at least a response.
Well, I think it warranted a response because, and I wanna be really clear, as a Christian, obviously, we wanna speak to these people, everyone who's in this boat, out of love, compassion, we care, of course.
And Christians, we all believe that our worldview is correct, namely because we also want what's best for people.
And obviously, creating distance between yourself and God, we don't view as being best for you.
No, he doesn't have the coronavirus.
He does not need social distancing.
Now, that being said, I also think, based on what we've, and we'll get to some clips here, based on what we've been watching, Um, that sometimes these people also need to be intellectually challenged, not emotionally coddled.
Uh, so I think that's pretty important here.
And there were a lot of questions that were sort of asked that weren't really answered.
And this is a big thing that you see the term deconstruction.
That's sort of the terminology that's used a lot now from these, uh, really sort of the, like freedom from religion foundation.
I don't know if they use it exactly, but a lot of these places.
So just someone leaving the faith.
So let's set up the context before we get into some of these arguments.
And I want to, by the way, hear from everyone out there, since this isn't only Mud Club right now.
We're doing a live chat.
We've been doing live chats all week.
But in the comments section, let us know if you've ever had a crisis of faith, or how you maintain faith, or what your worldview is as a Christian.
Because sometimes I just go, oh, that's a different perspective.
And then sometimes it dumbfounds me.
I'm a Christian, but I sacrifice goats in the Temple of the Dead.
I'm like, whoa, that's a little strange.
That's a bit of a niche.
They're just Swedish.
It's confusing.
It's a very weird place.
It's a very, very weird place.
So before we continue, and yeah, this might be a little bit, I don't want to say scholarly, there'll still be dick jokes, but let's go for context to Rhett and Link explaining it off the bat, why they left the Christian faith.
This is when I adopted what I'm going to call California Christianity.
Oh boy.
To get at what Link was getting at here a second ago.
In LA, even within the Evangelical Church, I think there is this sort of, because you're in this incredibly diverse place with so many different perspectives, You really can't maintain a Christian faith in a place like this without at least some sort of realization that there's a lot of gray.
It's not about having it all figured out.
It's not about being completely certain.
It's about a relationship with Jesus.
At this point I was like, okay, you know what?
I think this is probably where faith comes in.
You know, it makes sense to me that this might be where faith comes in because I am sitting here trying to prove this stuff out, but shouldn't I just have faith first?
And then maybe these answers will be given to me by God?
Isn't this what faith is all about?
I mean, the whole point is it's evidence of things not seen.
And this is where L.A.
comes into play.
Something about seeking knowledge.
L.A.
did allow me to ask a new question.
It's almost like it's an expectation of us.
And that was, why am I still doing this?
Could be in the Bible.
And I'll be honest, I would not have asked that question if I was in North Carolina.
You know, we were working out of this little basement studio, just putting stuff on the internet, and once we started to actually, our world got bigger when we started to meet other creators.
I remember when we met Michael Buckley the first time, he gave me a hug.
And I remember thinking, this is the first openly gay person I've ever hugged.
And I don't know what... I know what I'm supposed to believe about this guy that I'm hugging, but this... And it was a crisis moment for me, because I was like... Because Jesus would just facepalm him.
That's true.
Get out the way!
No hugs!
I didn't feel right for me, and let me clarify, I didn't feel right for me to render judgment of him Because what I wanted to do was hug him back and actually mean it.
But there was... I had been... The belief that I was ingrained with didn't allow me to... Sounds like wrong belief.
To sincerely hug the guy.
And I was... It was upsetting.
Yeah, that must have been really hard.
Okay, so a couple of things that need to... I want to say this as a jumping off point, and this is with a lot of Christians, and by the way, no surprise here, they try and cut it off at the pass, that people who come from small rural areas, from small Christian towns, go to California or start working in the entertainment industry, and they say, I know people are going to say, you went to California and became a sort of a liberal, woke liberal, or whatever they say, but that's not what happened.
No, that's exactly what happened.
You basically said that you had never had any personal experience with someone of a differing viewpoint or differing lifestyle, Michael Buckley.
He was the guy who used to do the show.
What the bock!
Do you remember what he used to be?
What the bock!
That was his original... It was like tabloid stuff.
He wasn't even a particularly nice gay guy.
It was a very b****y gay show.
Oh my god!
Chris Hemsworth needs to do some push-ups!
What the bock!
Go back.
That was his catchphrase.
He used to do every single time.
He'd say, What the bock!
You should still hug him lovingly.
As a matter of fact, it would be more un-Christian of you to not be able to hug this person and mean it.
And so this is important because this is often used, and I understand that everyone has their own sort of journey, or people talk about it this way, but listen, you cannot say that you had to abandon your faith because of what the faith teaches, or what the Bible teaches, or what Christ teaches, because you had ingrained in you something that was not at all biblically correct.
This is really easy.
Go to scripture.
Does scripture at any point tell you?
And this is also used, by the way, as a jumping off point where they say, well, we know there are some decent Christians out there who are pro-LGBT.
Q-A-A-I-P, by the way.
I noticed they didn't use the full acronym.
Not woke enough.
But the insinuation there is that anyone who is a Christian who believes in the fundamental roles of men and women in a marriage and a nuclear family must hate gay people.
Just like you can hug someone who is promiscuous, which as Christians we don't agree with, and love them.
Or materialistic.
Or a liar.
Get out of the way, Michael Buckley, you and your what-the-buck catchphrases!
Not in my house of worship!
Like this is just, you were taught wrong or you believed wrong and you had false guilt.
There's nothing in the Bible that would say you should feel guilty or repulsed by hugging a gay man out of love.
And that is not the reason for, it shouldn't be the reason for a conversion.
No, and I think that's a great point to make is that when we talk about Islam, we don't talk about somebody's teaching on Islam.
We talk about the book, right?
And so there's a lot of people that are going to have, well, we don't, we don't pick like a random thing.
Yeah, well, you know what I mean?
We judge these faiths by the texts that they say that they go by.
Sometimes you're going to have a misinterpretation of that, and somebody's going to go off and form a religion that believes if you can survive a snake bite, you're truly holy, and that's the religion that we're going to have.
And so we're not going to put them out and say, well, that's Christianity, and we're going to judge that.
I was like, we're going to go to that one scripturally based.
Doesn't the Bible say something about not testing me?
Lord, if you are true, you will protect me from this snake bite.
Well, it's in the scripture.
It's in the instructional booklet.
He's saying he won't.
So, I mean, I want to make sure that we're being fair, but also for the people out there that are watching this, even if you're an atheist and you have no faith whatsoever, we'd love to hear why maybe you don't have a faith.
Maybe you've done some research and you just don't want to.
But with these guys, what they're doing is they're putting out stories about their journey through this process.
Their personal experiences.
Yeah, their personal experiences, and I think they're bringing up points that are very easily challenged.
Again, we're approaching it with love, and we understand that people have crisis of faith, and so we're not beating them over the head saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, how dare you?
We're just talking about what they are saying to everybody else.
There's a lot of feel, there's a lot of touchiness to it, there's a lot of slow storytelling that kind of draws you in, and there's nothing wrong with that, that's a personal story for those guys, but it's very short on, let's dive into these issues on these podcasts at the very least.
Well, my main point here is, if you convert from a religion, from a faith, because you don't agree with what is prescribed in that faith, well then you better be sure that it's what is prescribed.
And not hugging gay guys is not in there.
Do you realize, I've worked in the entertainment industry since I was 11 years old, on the set of Arthur, and I was doing voice work behind the scenes, I was taking sips, it was just, almost my takes of doing voiceovers were between huggings of gay guys.
But I think that's also the danger of keeping young Christians very sheltered and not allowing them to be challenged at a young age.
So what I see is the personal experience trumping all when we're talking about issues of faith.
And it doesn't all come down to personal experience.
And whether they realize that or not, that is part of the California Christianity.
They're being sheltered in a different way now.
Yeah, so they moved away from North Carolina where they said that they felt sheltered in some way, but yeah, they are very insulated there.
They're also very insulated in California.
It's just different people insulating them.
Different beliefs.
Yeah, and I think that's important to note because this also can be indicative of someone who becomes a byproduct of their environment.
For example, I did not fit in at my youth group when I was young, or any of the churches.
I did not.
I didn't fit in when I went to public school, which was Catholic school in Montreal.
I didn't fit in with the youth group.
There was a Pentecostal youth group at one point, and that was a whole different thing.
That was the only church within a five-mile radius of me at that point.
And then, of course, I didn't fit in with people in the entertainment industry.
So just because you feel like you don't fit in somewhere, or people might disagree with you in Hollywood, doesn't mean that you fundamentally abandon your principles.
So I think we do need to get a little bit more into why it is that they had these doubts, or what the reasons would be.
If there is any reasoning, as opposed to feelings, I think that's the next clip.
We have, correct?
Yeah, well, they talk mostly about those reasons during the first 45 minutes or so of the interview, and it's mostly just sort of quoting experts or quoting books that Rhett said he read.
And for every single one of those, you could find some PhD who says the exact opposite.
So really, the issue is not any particular piece of evidence.
It's obvious that a lot of this has to do with prestige, or at least at some level, some amount of respect.
He opens his portion of the podcast with saying, I want people to like me.
Like right off the bat he says that.
That's part of his personality.
He kind of admits that about himself.
Didn't Jesus say, they hated me first?
They're probably going to hate you.
I'm rusty on my scripture.
They hate us.
If they hated me, they will hate you as well.
And by the way, that's not an excuse for you to, for example, steal from people's clearly labeled drawers in the office refrigerator.
And then if I'm mad, say like, well, they hated Jesus first.
That's not the same thing here.
I'm sorry.
I want to be very clear.
Yeah, I know.
It's clearly Mark.
I shouldn't use my middle name to be fair.
Because you didn't know my middle name.
Let alone just be with a period.
Yeah, so I want to be clear, and I do encourage everyone to go and listen to the show, listen to the reasoning, but like you said, it's not really any one piece of evidence.
It really does come down to, oh, we're experiential.
Yeah, very much so, and there's something that we saw in there that he said that we found out that there was a lot of gray when we moved to California, and I'm very puzzled by what he means by gray.
There shouldn't be new gray.
there is gray, but there shouldn't be new gray based on geography.
There should be, maybe you've taken a different approach to gray and your faith shouldn't change,
but the situation is Christianity doesn't, almost the reason for religion, the reason for faith
is to often deal with the gray.
Right, and so we talk about this, the Bible does have, you know,
I've said this a lot to you guys in our offline conversations.
We should be firm where the Bible is firm, and we should hold it loosely where the Bible holds it loosely, right?
We should make sure that we're not firm on things that the Bible is not, and then the opposite.
If the Bible's loose on it, we shouldn't be firm.
And so there are places where specifically he ends up talking about the LGBTQ plus community, and that's how he says it, and saying, you know, this is one of those things.
And I'm like, well, the Bible is not gray here.
The Bible has never been gray about what sin is and is not, right?
It's very clear on that.
Otherwise it would be, we serve a very capricious God who can kind of change his mind whenever he wants to on what sin would be.
But how you treat those people is also not gray.
And those people is me as a sinner as well, like how we all treat each other.
That's not gray.
You treat each other with love, just like your brother is your neighbor and your neighbor is your brother.
It's like everybody is that close together, and that's very, very easy to see.
So I'm wondering, what gray are you talking about?
Because that was the one thing that you brought up that was big.
More so, what sudden gray?
What sudden gray?
What changed?
Kind of like I said with Mitt Romney, where Mitt Romney went from being pro-choice his whole political career, to then pro-life.
I was going, hold on a second.
What changed?
Because you were always a Mormon.
You always claimed that your religion was what determined, right, is what educated your politics.
So then what changed?
It's not like you were saying, well I was a secularist and then I learned, you know, someone came knocking on my door, got off his bicycle with a helmet and short middle management shirt and a tie and brought me the Book of Mormon and then I said I'm pro-life.
No, no.
What changed?
And so for me it's what changed where all of a sudden There's this gray.
And if what you would use as an example is, well, now it was gray because I had to hug a gay guy and I felt like I should be repelled by him.
Well, that's not gray.
That's your own issue.
And I think the danger here is applying your own hang-ups and your own issues and offering that as any sort of prescriptive advice to people out there who may be struggling with their faith, because that is not Yeah.
That's a lot of the reasons that personal people that I've seen leave the faith or say that they're atheists is that they say all these things like people are hypocrites and they're liars and they do these things that are inside of the Christian faith and you're talking about people.
Right.
You're not talking about the faith.
You're not talking about Jesus.
You're talking about the people that are inside and we know that they're that way.
Right.
So, yeah.
Okay.
Well, let's go here.
We have another clip to get to and then we'll come back and sort of dissect this a little bit more.
I understand that it is unreasonable to expect Christianity to be a set of scientifically verifiable principles.
It is a faith, implying that some sort of believing without seeing is involved.
And more specifically, Christianity is a relationship with Jesus, and relationships are not well-defined or experienced scientifically.
I don't think it insignificant that the deeper I have dug into Christianity with a thirst for the truth, the more difficult it has become to have faith.
In fact, for me, it has become impossible.
And that was kind of the reckoning for me.
When I jumped ship, I didn't jump to another boat.
I jumped into the water.
And I pulled my wife and my children in with me.
Again, I want to know, you started seeking for the truth, and they talk about how the conversion happened after they moved.
So they try to cut it off with the past, again, not because of California.
Why did you only start digging for the truth once you moved to California?
Yeah.
Why weren't you digging for the truth when you were in North Carolina, when you were
surrounded by Christians, when you, by your own admission, led a men's Bible study?
Were you lying to them?
Because I would obviously assume that someone in a leadership position of a Bible study
is seeking truth.
And I think they could be wording it improperly, but a lot of this is designed to discredit
everything they believed before as though they were never seeking truth.
No, no, no.
You had a different opinion that was formed often, I can't necessarily say this with certainty,
because of your environment.
Yeah, he did say at some point whenever he was leading that, he was like trying to, he
had all these questions and he was trying to look to knowledgeable books and stuff like
that, so he did have like questions about it, but yeah, like you're right, he didn't
really jump ship until...
Well, we all have questions about it.
I'd be lying if I were to say that I don't have doubts in my faith.
That's why it's a struggle.
That's why almost the entirety of the Bible is designed to at least help you with answers and your struggle with doubts.
Right.
And the environment also includes the books you're reading.
Right.
So those are things that you're putting in your life.
It's the choices that you make and the things that you're surrounding yourself with.
So you can surround yourself with books that are saying the one thing.
You can surround yourself with things that are bolstering your faith as well as challenging your faith.
I would recommend both.
Right. Yeah. Well, so he said something about science, and this is something that we talked
about just a little bit. But he said, the deeper I dug into science, the more I couldn't kind of
buy my faith, so to speak. Right. I'm paraphrasing kind of what he was trying to say there. And,
you know, some people will make some pretty easy mistakes when they look at the Bible.
They'll make the Bible out to be a science book when the Bible never claims to be a science book, right?
And it doesn't discredit what the Bible says about scientific matters if it does address them, right?
But it's basically saying like, look guys, this is not like cellular biology.
This isn't freshman bio 101 that we're trying to accomplish here.
We're trying to, God has obviously chosen stuff to communicate to us that he feels is very important.
But Wade, you and I were talking about this and really the crux is there are wonderful It's pillars of the faith that have different opinions on some of the science discussions that happen within scripture.
But I had a question, my church has something called Great Questions, and people can come in and ask any question.
It can be atheists, it can be people who seek, you know, have a deeper relationship, people who are on the fence, like whatever it may be, we've had everybody come in.
And this person asked me, they said, you know, I don't believe in evolution, can I still, or I do believe, sorry, in evolution, right, so they believed in evolution, scientifically taught.
Can I still be a Christian?
And it floored me, and I had this response to it, and I had it again when you and I started talking about it before the show.
I wanted to kill this question, and there was a reason for it, and I understand that it sounds like it's over the top, but I said, look, when you get to heaven, right, and you're standing before God, do you think He is going to say, did I do it in six days?
I don't think that's where you start.
It doesn't mean that that question isn't something that we can't discuss and have a really interesting conversation about, but at some point with that, we have to understand that certain things are very important.
They're crucial to the faith, and certain things are debatable.
And that's okay.
We can debate about those things and still be Christians.
I'm wondering what he's talking about here with science, because there are plenty of scientists out there that are Christians, and there are plenty that are not, obviously.
And you can listen to what both of them have to say, and then you can test what they say.
All the Christian scientists aren't wrong.
All the other scientists aren't wrong.
So where are we?
We're not talking about Christian scientists.
We're talking about scientists who are Christian.
Scientists who happen to be Christian.
Not the people who, you know, they shun Benadryl.
No, I'm not one of those guys.
We're okay with the antihistamines here.
It's allergy seas.
That's right.
And I think that that does illustrate that debates like this are not ultimately decided by the evidence.
It's ultimately decided by what you bring to the evidence, which is what your worldview is.
Right.
And the amount of who you trust, what you trust, if your baseline trust is in the Bible or if your baseline trust is in the world standards, that's going to make the difference.
Yeah.
So, the specific evidence is about the age of the earth.
I believe in a young earth, but that's not something that is a decisive issue as far as, like, what I'm saying is, like, it's, I can't prove that to somebody who has decided to not believe that.
Right.
Just like I can't prove that the Bible is true.
And there are some things, and I do want to be clear, they never really bring this up, there are some things that can be proven that are undeniable by people across the spectrum.
Yeah.
And let me address this first.
There's a lot of deferring to experts, right, that you Well, you know, I read this book, or I heard this person, and I understand there's a value in experts.
I understand that.
Particularly, like, I am someone, if we know in this program, I always try to seek out the best at whatever it is, whether it's someone who's doing something technical on the editing side, whether it's someone for research, whether it's someone who's really good at actually finding and securing a location.
Security, like, we really try and find the best folks.
Believe me.
I understand the value in particularly being advised by experts.
That being said, you can't simply adopt the opinion of an expert because they're an expert.
And let me kind of explain it to you this way, to bring it to something simple.
I've talked about this with Brazilian jiu-jitsu or any kind of combat sports.
I've been doing it quite a long time.
And the reason I bring this up is, if you play basketball, not many people who play basketball, you know, at a, I don't know, local park, get to play with Michael Jordan.
Right, right.
Not many of you, even Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen.
The thing is, in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I get to do that.
Like, I've actually gotten to hit the mats with people like Marcelo Garcia, Buchecha, these guys who are multiple-time world champions.
The Michael Jordans of this sport either come in and do seminars, so you get to experience really, really brilliant people, the best that the world has to offer.
And I have, at some points, performed certain techniques and someone goes, well, don't do it that way, do it this way.
I go, well, why would I do it that way?
They say, well, just look at my medals.
Do you trust me?
Sometimes you have people that way.
They're not very helpful.
They go, look at my medals.
This was a very specific instance where someone said, well, look at, trust me, I know, do it this way.
The very next tournament this guy went on, who was a former world champion, got smoked by doing it the way I was doing it beforehand from another expert.
In other words, today's expert can be tomorrow's ignoramus, because this idea that scientific progress, you were talking about this, is linear, it's not always.
Sometimes there's a double back.
It's not a straight, sometimes it's a brrr.
It's a loop-de-loop.
It's a Six Flags man!
Yeah, Thomas Kuhn talks about this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
It's essentially, the myth of scientific progress is, it's not some kind of hockey stick graph of, like, everybody was idiots for a long time, and then now we have this explosion of technology.
Really, there's, every 50 or 100 years, some new paradigm, just because, like, an entirely new paradigm is taken on.
I mean, one illustration of that is the coming ice age in the 1970s.
Leonard Nimoy narrated it!
And now it's global warming, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love Leonard Nimoy.
No, it's climate change, again, because we're not so sure.
It's warming.
None of us are scientists!
That's true.
Just as an illustration of the whole idea of a paradigm shift, and that's what happens in science just like any other discipline.
It happens quite a bit, and by the way, these issues were argued by early Christians, too.
Keep in mind, this is important.
Which will bring us to our next clip here pretty soon where they talk about how all societies have some kind of moral good core.
Well, not only is that not true, but guess what?
Not all societies have sought out knowledge with the same importance.
That's why you have people who had aqueducts, you have people who had used the wheel, and you have people who hadn't even domesticated horses here when we're talking about Native Americans, because pantheism didn't encourage people to go forward, be fruitful, multiply, and to explore the questions of the universe.
That's why the early scientists were Christians.
And I understand we can say that's a different period in time, and now these people are actually trying to halt science.
I understand some people might have those arguments out there, but there is no historical There can be no historical denial of early scientists who were deeply Christian, and philosophers, by the way, a lot of them.
And there can be no historical argument about the impact of the Bible, the impact of Jesus Christ.
And for me, when we talk about history, the easiest thing, when you read the early persecutors of Christians, This to me was the most convincing case because I had read a lot of sort of the Christian apologetics books, and I don't want to get too into the details here, but what really convinced me was when I started reading the anti-Christian writings of early Christian, and they all accepted the idea that Jesus Christ was—you can read these right now.
You would probably know the names better than I would.
Are we going to talk Tacitus?
Titus.
Those are names.
Those are names.
I don't know the actual names off the top of my head.
It's been a long time.
I haven't brushed up on this.
I probably should have.
But they all accepted that Jesus Christ was a person.
Yeah, they wrote about him.
And he had this great historical impact.
And there was this resurrection.
But here's why it doesn't matter that much.
The easiest thing to do would have been in early Christendom.
Trot out Jesus's body.
The easiest thing to do would have been like, well, actually, it's a hoax.
There was no resurrection.
The fact that people were arguing against this exploding faith, trying to quell it, saying, all that happened, but this is why it doesn't matter to the degree that you think it matters, for me, was very convincing, in tandem with the rest of the historical context, and in tandem with archaeological discoveries that we've since had.
I mean, a big one was the Kingdom of David.
We've talked about this.
I think Rhett and Link say this in their thing as well.
The fact that there was no evidence of the Exodus, which Just inaccurate.
It's not right.
But for the longest time, up until, I don't remember the year when they discovered the slab, and then more evidence about the Kingdom of David, people often argued against the Bible and would say, well, you know what, the biggest case is, if we're going to talk about historical evidence, David, this crazy ruler of this kingdom, there'd be something, and then there was.
And then they've since sort of moved on to the arc.
So because you're on the edge right now, doesn't mean that you won't find it eventually.
And that's not proof positive that it means that it's real, but it is something to keep in mind when you're making arguments that can be very temporary.
And I think that Rhett and Link do that quite a bit.
And again, I say this out of love, but I just don't think the arguments that they make cut the mustard.
This is another one that is very common.
We see it among all sort of SJW woke leftists, not saying that they are
that, but then we have another clip to get to that, but this idea of sort of situational ethics or moral relativism.
Let's go to the clip.
I think the point is, is I don't think you wake up and make decisions to be a good person because you've got this moral
lawgiver.
There may be a moral lawgiver.
I'm not saying that God doesn't exist.
Yeah, where else does it come from?
But I think that it's a much more natural and organic process than, there's a book, I read it, and now I know what to do.
I think that's why those core qualities of what makes a human good exist in cultures everywhere.
You find a culture in the middle of the Amazon that's never been exposed to the gospel or any sort of religious system outside of what they believe.
Are they gonna think that murdering is great?
Probably not.
Actually, they do exist.
Some, yeah, some.
They don't need Hemi-Rabbi or... Hemi-Rabbi.
...you know, Moses to tell them that.
Well, you know what?
You can also go down the base, just go down a few Amazon Basin walks, I guess, and you'll find tribesmen who are munching on some guy's testicles like it's a snack pack, okay?
Human sacrifice.
Chopping people's heads off.
Just go to your Cancun break and between booze cruise stops and go check out the Mayan ruins where they would kill small children.
This idea that morality is universal, no, it's not.
And I can tell you that certainly for me, and I know this is an argument that you hear from people like Hitchens and Dawkins, well then you're just a horrible person if you need God to tell you not to do those things.
Well, hold on a second.
I don't need God to tell me not to murder.
Maybe I do, because I grew up in a modern Christian society, Western civilization, where we are told not to murder.
And by the way, that's not the same everywhere.
The same thing with theft, right?
Or I grew up in a society that says, don't abuse women.
Western civilization.
We created domestic abuse laws.
In Islam, in Islamic nations, they call that laughable, right?
People have different beliefs.
These come to different conclusions of morality.
I need the Bible to tell me that I shouldn't be a philanderer.
Right?
Because there are plenty of societies where you can sleep with as many people as you want.
You can be a polygamist.
Or in Islamic societies, where you can have child brides.
In your state of California, you think that it is stigmatizing for people to have to disclose their AIDS when they have sex with somebody.
Everywhere else in the country, we say that's a common courtesy.
So this idea that it's universal, no, you can't just take the extremes of murder.
You have to look at mercy.
They didn't say Alexander the Merciful, because that would be Alexander the Pussy, right?
Mercy was not a value until modern Christendom.
It's still not a value in much of the third world or non-Western civilizations.
It just shows me that to make a comment like that, it's wishful.
You're hoping that there is good throughout cultures throughout history, and that's just not proven to be the case.
If you study history at all, what you see is that, left to our own devices, we're very evil, and evil tends to manifest itself as selfishness.
You have kids, you know that people are not inherently good.
You have to teach them.
Some people do.
They think that everything a kid does is cute.
It's like, that's abusive.
Look right now, right?
And so people would be like, well, is this evil or not?
Well, it's selfish, right?
Everybody hears that there's a toilet paper shortage and they go and buy every single piece of frickin' toilet paper they can find and they have two rooms full and their neighbor has none.
That's the kind of condition humans tend to exist in.
We've only recently gotten to a place where we don't kill each other on sight, okay?
Give us a minute.
It's not goodness and culture throughout the world and throughout history at all.
And you will find that out if you just do a cursory study.
Well, I'm actually pretty glad because I used to, you know, I was on YouTube back in 2006 and it was a sort of wave of atheists.
You know, common saying, if God is real, why do all these horrible things happen to good people?
Why does he allow these things to happen?
And then, of course, I don't need a God to tell me not to kill someone.
And these have been debunked since sort of the modern wave of people who aren't even necessarily Christians, but Christian sympathists and sort of the new right, I guess, conservatives, libertarians, all these people who understand the value of Western civilization and how it was spawned by Christendom because these shared values have created what we know and love.
It's widely accepted, it's been debunked, this idea that morality is the same across cultures.
So this is frankly very rudimentary, but I guess it works in California.
Yeah, and technological advancement is something we were talking about earlier.
And technological advancement is a moral good.
It actually—like being resourceful, looking at the things around you,
and making things, making new stuff that makes people's lives better, that is a moral positive.
So it's not like there's morality over here and scientific advancement over here.
Those things go together.
So a society that has scientific advancement and moral advancement is a better society.
Right.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
And I think that's how you end up getting backwards when you have things like communism, or you have things like socialism, because now you've conflated.
Well, hold on a second.
We've separated economics and morality.
Well, now let's bring morality into economics, because the moral thing to do would be to redistribute this.
But hold on a second.
The problem with this is that you haven't applied, for example, from the get-go, a moral view or application to use of money.
The Bible is clear about that.
The biblical application to money is, first, don't steal it.
No, no, no.
I don't care if you afterwards give it to the Salvation Army.
You stole it first.
You can't do that.
That's in kind of the top ten.
Don't do that.
And that's how you realize or you avoid this idea of socialism.
God, the original top ten.
Yeah, no, exactly.
But also they get rid of the, you know, socialism in countries that kind of work off of those systems.
They get rid of individual value, which is espoused throughout the Bible, right?
Thou shalt not steal assumes that somebody has something that's not yours.
It institutes personal property rights right there.
Thou shalt not kill assumes that it's their life and not yours.
Something that many Native American tribes didn't have a concept of.
No, not at all.
Here's the thing.
I'm not saying that that's right or wrong.
I'm not saying the fact that, effectively, Manhattan was purchased for, what is it, something guilders?
I don't remember.
The equivalent is like 7,000 beaver pelts.
Look, we weren't the nicest.
No, we weren't the nicest, but the whole thing was they just thought a lot of these people, I believe they were the Canarsies, if I'm not mistaken.
Someone can fact check me.
I don't have this in front of me.
I believe they were like, well, yeah, we'll sell them this Manhattan.
It's hard to get to.
We have to get in the canoe to get there.
And plus, if they take it and they're like, we miss it, we're just going to take it back anyway.
Because they didn't understand, like, no, this is a sale.
All sales vinyl.
Now, you may think one is right and one is wrong, but that shows you that this understanding of morality was not universal.
The idea of personal property, that is something that Christians believe in.
Individual human value.
That was the cornerstone of Christianity and really just the God of the Bible is that every individual is valuable and unique and has rights that are given to them by God, their creator.
And it's not the whole that you're looking at.
As opposed to Stalinist collectivism.
Exactly.
But the cool thing is, it doesn't get rid of the need to care for the whole, too.
It also addresses taking care of the widows, the orphans, and the poor, right?
And taking care of people that have been disenfranchised.
It takes care of all of that, and they claim that it does not.
So anyway, sorry, it was kind of a side point, but I thought it was worth making.
No, I think it's worth making as well.
Was there anything else that we had to hit there, Wade?
Not on that one, no.
Okay, alright.
And this is where we kind of get to the...
I will say this because I think a lot of people out there hopefully you know we do this obviously mug club behind the paywall for people who are paying members because there's more buying this is difficult to have this conversation and sometimes we'll do an ongoing series of mass Mondays so use a promo code quarantine to get your very steep discount yes but this is something that a lot of people may not understand who aren't Christians out there. I think that a lot of atheists think
that Christians exist in this monolith. Like we're all, you know, the mom from Carrie
where, you know, we get the entire silverware drawer in our bosom by the end of the film.
This has been creeping into the Christian Church for a long time, the social justice sort of leftism.
And that's because, unfortunately, they've been trying to water it down.
And I don't mean necessarily water it down.
Frankly, strip elements of the faith that are pretty important to make it palatable to places like California, so that people don't get hurt feelings.
Which is why, if there's nothing else that you take from this, it is that the experiential cannot trump understanding why you believe what it is that you believe.
You need to have a reasoned basis in your faith.
You need to understand scripture.
You need to understand and be able to articulate and defend your beliefs, or you have no business espousing them.
So, that being said, this is sort of indicative of what we've been talking about.
It's not just Christian conservatives and SJW left.
A huge portion of the church, I would wager probably most members of churches in Southern California, at the very least in my experience, are a part of that amalgamate of the social justice where you're left.
Yeah.
Cason, just play it so I don't, it's gonna hurt.
So many women and so many people who don't fit the mold.
Women?
We talked about like the LGBTQ plus experience of people.
How dare you plus?
In the church.
There's a lot of stories of trauma because as people were sort of developing their identity and self-actualizing, they were doing it in an oppressive environment.
I don't know what that means.
That's damaging.
But again, because of who I am and what I look like, I pretty much just benefited.
And so I don't look back at my experience with the church In a traumatic way.
We've heard enough of those stories, right?
To know that it's a nightmare.
It's much more of a nightmare than what we experienced, which was extreme privilege.
Yeah.
We benefited.
One of the things we talked about is we just benefited from the system.
I mean, you know, look at the leadership in the Evangelical Church, and it's very male, very white, and very straight.
You ever been to a black church?
Yeah, I went to an Ethiopian church when I was in Los Angeles, and I went to a church in Jamaica, Queens, where they actually came and canvassed for a local congressional candidate, because they don't really care about the 501c3c4 there.
Yeah, they're not.
Farrakhan, look it up.
This is an exercise, I will say, in not insulting people, because I obviously want, there are a lot of insults that I want to make, not only about the, but the host, with Philip DeFranco, everyone, but I'm just going to try and be as... So that's my, my point is, that's my baggage.
That is your cross to bear right this minute.
What are you doing with it?
I mean, first off, the hairdos.
I'm not saying it because he looks like a gay European soccer player bear.
What I am saying is that if you look at, and this is so, for people out there, please, please listen, the Christians out there, please don't be afraid to comment this and feel like you're letting them in.
The other team settled.
The truth is, the hairdos that they had when they started on YouTube were the exact hairdos that you would expect a youth pastor to have in that era.
That kind of Blink-182, but really you listen to MXPX so your parents don't get mad and you have the bangs and then all of a sudden it switches to now the Trimmed on the sides and high on the top in the middle and then it'll probably switch to a verse like the original Terminator where the bangs will be really short and I'll have some of the mullet the point is
They're values in Silicon Valley and apparently are just as cyclical as the styles.
And if you look at the kind of content that comes from Rhett and Link where you can describe, and they describe it as brand friendly, you can describe the entire, I guess, sort of mission statement of the content of Rhett and Link is Brand friendly YouTube trend chasing.
Yes.
It's what worked in YouTube in 2009.
That's what they did.
What do they think was going to be working in YouTube in 2014?
That's what they did.
That's the style of video.
That's the style they dress.
That's how they try to appeal to people.
Milk toast, go along, get along.
And that's what bothers me.
And you see that a lot with people sometimes who are Christians where they change their values as often as their style.
That's the problem with being trendy.
Yeah, and one of the things you said about traumatic experiences for a lot of people and that they didn't necessarily experience that same kind of issue because they were straight, white men in the church.
Look, there are plenty, there's a lot that we have to own as Christians, right?
Because sometimes our brothers and sisters do and say things that we very much disagree with.
Inquisition?
Look, we were the primary beneficiaries as well as victims.
A lot of Christians killed in the Inquisition.
A lot, a lot.
So, what I would say is that, look, I understand that that happens.
That does not change what truth is.
Well, hold on.
Before we get into this, I don't want to get into this sort of like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris thing.
What truth is?
I want to get into the... These are specifics.
They say women.
They say what?
Like women aren't welcome at the church?
Do you know that women could claim sanctuary, by the way?
They were allowed to claim sanctuary for a long time.
Women are very well treated at the church.
And this is something that's also important.
If you mean to say that it is offensive for a church to believe in traditionalist roles,
If you believe it is sexist to have expectations of women in the church, just as they have of men.
In other words, they have expectations of accountability, of transparency from men in positions of leadership, right?
They have small groups, they have a board of elders, and they expect women to also serve in the church.
There are expectations of both men and women, and yeah, this is absolutely true, the Christian faith does not see men and women as fundamentally interchangeable.
We do believe, going back to your point, that they're unique, intrinsically, fearfully and wonderfully created, and so we believe in complementarianism.
I get that's offensive today, but it's not because we hate women.
If you look at Jesus in his preaching, the first feminist, the guy was hanging around with women.
They didn't do that back then!
And they were included in a lot of things that they never would have been included in any other writings around the time.
There's no way that they would have been featured in some of those things.
And so one of the points that I was going to make is, okay, well, let's take out hot button issues, right?
Let's take out the feminist stuff.
Let's take out the LGBTQ plus movement.
I'm going to take all of those.
No, that's what he says, right?
Those are the hot button issues.
I'm going to take those out.
You're a little firecracker.
Let me put it this way.
If I walked into the church— I'm gonna call you Songs of Solomon from now on.
I'm gonna kill you.
Oh, that's racy.
That's spicy.
Yeah, exactly.
I'll tell you what.
I will say this for— His wife is spicy when she talks to him in front of us.
I'm like, oh, we're still here.
Yeah, it happens.
That's why we're— That's why you said that Christians have a great sex life.
Yes, exactly.
You and your wife are well-matched.
Yes, exactly.
Healthy drives.
So let me put it this way, what if I walked into a church, what if I walked into their church, like their ideal church, what would the response be if I said, well look guys, I'm a serial liar, I don't care about lying, I think it's okay to lie all the time, and I really don't, are you going to confront me with truth?
And this is where I was going.
Are you gonna confront me with truth and say, well look, God says, not I believe.
I believe is not a precise way of saying it because your beliefs can be wrong.
God says is much more precise, and I can point to scripture.
Lying is wrong.
It's not me you have a problem with, it's God if you disagree with that.
And Wade has a good point, but here's a perfect example of Gerald and I, and I know I give Gerald a tough time, but Gerald is someone I very much trust.
He was a groomsman at my wedding, and we've talked about these issues quite a bit, and I'm willing to bet substantially more than a dollar.
But do you remember, I think we've talked about this on air, we were outside, at the patio, outside of a Chili's.
Yes.
And you were talking about how at that point, I don't wanna... Can we talk about this?
Yeah, we can talk about this.
How you were, you were, you were, you were, you were... I was acting, I wasn't going, like, I was, I was earlier in the dating... You were, you know... Yeah, I was, well, no, no, no, I'm not, like, sleeping around, that was not what was happening.
No, no, no, it wasn't a war.
I was confessing, like, hey man, I'm having a problem, I'm not being the person that I wanna be, and this is what's going on, and you're like, well, Stop being a dick.
I said, I love you and I think that, listen, you need to be consistent with your values.
You know this is wrong.
And I told you, I wouldn't say this if you were an atheist because it wouldn't matter.
But I know you're telling me this because it matters to you and because I love you, I think you need to live this way or you're not going to find the woman that you want.
You're just going to find whores.
Unless that's what you're looking for.
Some Christians will get mad at this show because they think that's naughty language.
But that was appropriate.
It worked.
No, it was appropriate.
You compared me with truth, right?
And the wounds of a friend, right, essentially is what scripture talks about.
Like, you were very careful in how you did that, but you let me know, based on who you've said you want to be, this doesn't line up.
And by the way, this doesn't line up with what scripture says.
Right.
Like, you need to understand that if you go down this path, that's not who you want to be and that's not who God has called you to be.
If you can't correct in love, then there hasn't ever been a single loving parent who issued disciplinary action.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
So, I wonder.
Yeah, and he mentioned specifically, like, what I look like, so he talked about straight, white males.
I thought he was talking about the gay soccer player.
Yeah, the man in the back.
Though he does look like that.
That's not an homonym, it's just a joke.
It's real.
An observation reel.
Yes.
I really want to make an observation.
It's that Philip DeFranco has gone in his entire life to the barber and said, give me the child number two.
So yeah, so he mentions whiteness as if there's some kind of hierarchy in Christianity.
Like, I mean, yes, there is racism in people who call themselves Christians, but before Christianity, I mean, white people were sacrificing each other to trees.
It's not some kind of inherent hierarchy in Christianity.
And after Christianity, mind you.
Yeah, it does happen.
And enslaving other white people.
By the way, black people also enslave black people.
Non-Christians and Christians alike.
Doesn't mean that it's necessarily consistent with their values.
And again, this idea that somehow you are less qualified to speak on an issue or that God expects you to shut up because of your skin color, that is not biblical.
That is a California indoctrination.
And it almost might as well be the book of Southern California, the book of the entertainment industry, the book of the woke left, because it is dogmatic.
It is dogmatic.
When you tell people that race Is race determines someone's identity more than their faith, which is what they are saying.
It is bullsh**.
And for Christians who get mad that I say bullsh**, it matters more that we get through the bullsh**.
You've got to clearly specify what is bullsh** and what isn't.
To say that someone's... I cannot be... I want to make sure this is crystal clear.
To imply that somebody's race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation defines their identity more than their values is bullshit.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
And you know, they're talking about like this loving experience, like these traumatic experiences, kind of quickly going back to that.
If you know, Penn and Teller, right?
Who's the guy that talks of the two?
I can't remember, I always forget.
Is it Penn?
Penn.
So Penn actually, you can YouTube this, he actually said, look, if you believe what you say you believe, Christians, like if God is real and there is a heaven and a hell, he goes, it'd be like somebody standing out in the middle of the highway and you seeing a truck coming at them and you don't warn them to get out of the way.
In context, he was saying when people sort of try and talk to him, right?
Yeah, he was saying actually appreciate it, even though he's obviously an atheist.
And a very kind atheist, too.
So what is more loving?
If somebody who is gay, or somebody who's a liar, or somebody who God has said, hey, this is sin, comes and says, hey, these are the things that I do.
Is it more loving to say, oh, God doesn't care?
No, no, no, it's totally fine.
Or is it to say, hey, let's talk about what God has called you to here, right?
What's the more loving thing to do?
And in culture, we think the more loving thing to do is just to accept everybody the way that they are and say that there is no truth for us to look at and say, well, what does God say?
What does God say about how this will work best for all of us?
Yeah, so it really does come down to who you trust.
Do you trust the culture who says, be nice to everybody or treat everybody and, you know, be nice, at least with that kind of definition?
Or do you trust God?
Do you trust the experts with all the degrees or do you trust God?
Do you trust the culture that you're living in that might have some kind of particular milieu?
And their standards are constantly shifting from left to right all the time.
I would even take that further and say, even if you don't believe in God, let's just take them as archetypes.
Because a lot of times the left, they try to act as though there isn't some kind of an archetype.
Jordan Peterson is talking about this.
It was tough for me to understand if he really believes that Jesus is a true person in God or if it's this sort of terrible archetype.
Let's assume that you don't believe the Bible, right, literally, to shorten it right now.
The archetype of God.
The archetype of the left, what they are talking about now, what these people worship effectively in the entertainment industry, is the archetype of the perfect, woke, Entirely enlightened, inoffensive social justice warrior leftist.
That is the archetype.
The archetype is someone who uses all the right acronyms, who includes everybody, who supports diversity quotas, when really there should be some kind of a financial bill to help with a growing virus pandemic.
The archetype there is, this is the perfect, this is the ideal.
Even if you say that you don't believe in a God, or you don't believe in any scripture, you still do have an idea as to what is right.
Because if you don't believe there is a right and wrong, Then this doesn't apply to you.
But if you believe that there's right and wrong at all, that does mean that somewhere down the line, if you question it long enough, there is an ideal.
That's what's right.
Yeah, and that's the thing that guides your life, and in this case, it's something that moves with culture.
You need an anchor to guide you.
If you're going to have an archetype, make it something that does not change.
Right.
And having it be the cultural whims of him, her, they, theybes.
Because culture can suck!
Culture is transformative and it ruins people.
Just look at 80s era David Bowie.
I get that you like labyrinth, but that crystallized him at the worst point in his career.
Or Elvis in Vegas.
I don't know why the Elvis impersonators go out with the stupid Vegas rhinestone suit.
Elvis, when he was young, was the most beautiful man to have ever walked the face of the earth.
I don't care who knows it.
T-shirt and jeans, his hair slicked back.
He did a few curls.
He'd go around.
They'd talk about Jailhouse Rock.
But for some reason, every Elvis imitator decides to grow a pot belly and sunglasses, rhinestones,
a cape and impersonate him at the worst point in his career.
Culture can be the most corrosive facet of humanity.
All right.
Very true.
Let's move on to the next clip, I guess.
You're sort of in this whatever it is that we are right now.
I call myself a hopeful agnostic right now.
I don't have the structure, or the community, or the singular sort of well-defined purpose that I did, and that is, that's a problem.
Listen, it's not like I'm about to give you some philosophy that I live according to now, that gives me community, purpose, and meaning.
I don't have that, okay?
I think there's a giant sort of shift that's happening culturally, and I think that we may be arriving at that sometime, but it doesn't exist right now for me.
But what does exist is an openness, is this curiosity.
To what?
Yeah, I don't know.
Does anyone want to take that?
To be honest, I don't know anything other than to say that that seems really sad.
I don't have any interest, hopefully I'll get to it.
I jumped into the water, took my wife and children, what he said earlier, and I don't have any guiding philosophy.
Well, his wife, his children, and his whole audience now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and does he really think that what we're headed to in our culture is more unity?
More purpose?
Right.
Without God?
Yeah.
We're in this huge shift culturally that might be arriving at a replacement for the church.
Yeah.
Like, the purpose, the guiding, everything.
It really has shown that he has— Crossfit!
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would hope.
Yeah.
He's shown that he's essentially replaced an old thing with trying to build a new utopia, and that's his new religion.
That's also the danger of organized and centralized planning from a government, because that's a big reason when you look at Stalinistic, when you look at, I'm saying Stalinist, but communism, right?
Communism is a distinctly atheist idea, because it's this idea that the collective is more important than the individual.
Christianity, we do not believe that.
You may find some Christians who say they do.
Sorry, they're incorrect.
I don't have time to get into it right now, we're already 50 minutes in.
No, your honor, the defense is wrong.
Communism does not believe in the power of the individual over the collective, and they believe that it is the government's job to centrally plan these communities so that people find purpose through what now?
Nothing more than community, culture, and what the government has devised for them, and that's why it was so important that they would shut down churches and literally nail the doors shut.
When people say that religion has killed more people than anything else throughout the history of mankind, first off, a lot of these religious wars were fought over territory, they were fought over all kinds of reasons where you happen to have people from different religions,
worldviews on either side, but you would have to look at just the regimes in China
and Russia and the hundreds of millions of people.
It's not even close.
Yeah, not even close.
And this is one of the most sad things that he says to me because it's not like,
I think I would understand a little bit more of his story if he says, I've looked into these 15 world religions.
There are plenty of suitors for you to come.
There's plenty of people that want you to come to their church of the now, right?
There's plenty of things that you can go out there and join Oprah's thing, or you can join whatever.
Satanists!
Yeah, exactly.
It means you must hate your agnosticism.
It's like, I'm a hopeful conservative.
You're telling me that none of those things like you're a hopeful agnostic. What does that mean?
Does that mean you're a lazy agnostic? Because if you're hopeful that somebody's going to bring the knowledge to you
You're never gonna get anything right? So if you're just sitting there waiting for it to show up on your front porch
from UPS It's not gonna happen. I don't know what that means hopeful
agnostic. It means you must hate your agnostic. It's like I'm a hopeful conservative
Oh meaning that you think like I'm hoping I become a liberal. Yeah, and where does the hope come from?
What is the hope for?
And he says at some point that he is going to follow truth wherever it leads.
Well, how will he judge between what's true and what isn't true?
He's dropped his whole standard.
He doesn't have any objective standard.
He just has his whims.
Right.
And so he said something that resonates with me.
And that's why I will say, yeah, and I want to go right, I want to go back to your point there, but that's why it's so important to get back to the idea of there's universal right and wrong.
When we talk about the linchpin, that is it.
And I love, I love that that is so easy To discredit, and I love that so many people who are not Christians recognize the value of Western civilization right now.
That's sort of been this awakening of Donald Trump and this populism.
People who weren't Christians, but they go, you know what?
I see the difference between us and the Islamic world.
I see the difference between us and even continents like Africa, and you see what goes on there.
And the idea of Western European American civilization and our values, because values are not universal.
And if you Understand that, and if you are able to point out that moral relativism does not work, that there isn't a universal good and we have to live in a society that agrees upon that, nothing else that Rhett and Link can possibly stand.
And I think that's why it's so important to say, well, why do you believe there's a universal right and wrong?
Poke those holes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And he said something earlier on in the video, like, this just resonated with me.
Right.
You know, it's not that that was a bad thing.
It's not that a feeling is a bad thing.
Didn't he say something about his frequency, like, resonated with him?
I just resonated with my frequency.
Resonated, yeah.
And I was like, that s*** movie with Dennis Quaid?
Not that one, thankfully.
Different frequency.
Was that the one with Jim Caviezel, too?
Shorts?
That was Jaws 3.
Dennis Quaid was always wearing shorts.
He had nice skims.
Nice, very nice.
Cracky band, though.
Let me just make a quick point about that.
Religion is not based on your feeling, right?
Being a Christian, believing in God is not based on your feelings about this, right?
It's really irrelevant, like, your feelings, like, oh, it resonates or it doesn't resonate.
Like, truth cannot resonate sometimes with you because it's hard, because you don't necessarily want to change how selfish you've been to get around it, right?
The first time I used a wet wipe when I went to the bathroom, I realized that I had been so inconsiderate all this time.
Change!
To your underwear or to the person?
Dry, wet, then dry again.
There you go.
So I worked in a ministry, and it was the new believers, basically.
So if you raised your hand, you walked down, you said the prayer, we would have you come back to a room, and we'd talk to you for a minute just to say, hey, great, we're so excited for you.
But we would ask a question that would always become very telling to me over time.
How many of you, is this your first time committing your life to Christ?
And we'd get probably 25% of the hands, 30% of the hands would go up.
And that meant the rest of the room, had made an emotional decision at some point.
They felt a moment.
They had the worship was great.
The pastor was speaking the way that they wanted.
Something inspired them to come down and now they feel like they have to do it again.
And then they feel like they have to do it again.
And we started seeing frequent flyers and I'm like, man, and I'm not picking on those people.
I'm not saying that it's not okay to like reaffirm your faith and say, you know what?
I have been wondering and I want to come back and really get back into this because I've been doing the wrong thing.
I'm saying that people think that it's this feeling, they're missing it.
Like if you, once you get introduced to Jesus and ask him into your heart, that's done.
Like you don't have to be reintroduced.
Right. You know what I mean?
You don't have to recommit your life to Christ.
You've done that already.
You just have to stop acting like a fool.
Right. Right?
Come back and receive forgiveness, repent.
Then it comes down to your actions that define it.
Just like when you fall in love with someone.
Listen, this is something that a lot of women At some point, every man who loves you more than the earth itself is going to fall out of that feeling of love with you, if only temporarily.
It happens.
There are times when you get into a fight with your wife or your husband.
That's why the Bible is prescriptive in its approach to love, being in action.
It talks about the feeling of love, which is a thing.
Right?
And we can scientifically sort of observe that, where you can talk about neurotransmitters and dopamine and all this stuff going on.
Fine.
But then, because that is temporary, because that is fleeting, the Christian worldview of love is that of an action.
And that is why we are against divorce.
Whereas in Islam, a man can say Talaq, Talaq, Talaq three times and he's divorced and the woman has no recourse.
That's true.
That's why you have a lot of Not Without My Daughter and Abducted Islamic Children because men have the rights and the women do not.
We don't believe in love as a feeling.
We believe in love as an initial feeling and then an action.
And the same thing should be your faith.
Because I think, honestly, I've had maybe two times in my life a deeply spiritual experience.
Yeah.
Ever.
On an emotional level.
Yeah.
Twice.
And one of them was very recent.
They're formative.
And the rest has been a battle of the mind.
Yeah.
And I think a lot, and there are some Christians out there who may, you may not struggle with that.
Some Christians, they, you know, they have that, that faith of a child and it's that nothing can tear you away from God's hand.
And that's beautiful and it's wonderful, but that's not, that's not most of us.
And that's okay because the battle taking place in your mind, that is expected.
That's why we have the scripture.
That's why the Bible talks about doubts.
That's why the Bible talks about faith.
That's why the Bible is prescriptive in how you should approach your marriage, how you should approach your finances, how you should approach your business.
All of these things because it understands that we are human beings who live in a very physical world with tangible decisions that have to be made.
Did you have something else you wanted to say?
I was just going to say that that's why it's important to have a baseline level of trust.
Through all of the doubts, through all of the confusion and things like that, having a baseline trust in God, even through the questions, is the only way to go.
And questions are encouraged in the Bible.
Acts 17.11 actually makes a point that, like, these guys are better than these guys, right?
I'll let you go read it.
Berean's basically better than the Thessalonians, saying, these guys heard it and received the word.
They were ready for it, and that's tough to be ready for in the first place.
But then they searched Scripture to see if it was true.
They were lauded for that.
Go out in question and see if this is true based on what scripture says.
Go and test this.
God, you're right, says don't test me in some of these ways, but he does say test me in this.
Test me in tithing.
That's very easy.
And search the scriptures to see if what you're hearing is true, if what the culture says is true, or what your priest says is true.
My goodness, sometimes people can be wrong.
It's not saying don't trust anybody, but it's saying, hey, receive it.
Trust it, but then go and make sure that it lines up with what I have told you is true.
And by the way, for those of you out there maybe listening and saying, man, it seems like a really high bar not to, like this feeling of love and sometimes you're not gonna love.
God made it very clear that that's exactly what he did for us, right?
He said that Christ died while you were yet sinners.
There was nothing about you that was need, like that I should like and want to redeem.
Like your actions weren't warranting any of that.
To put it in context.
You're getting a little grandiose, but you're correct.
To put it in context, walk into your nearest Jack in the Box.
Or Waffle House.
Wherever assholes hang out.
Pick the worst representative.
That's what Christ did for you, only he was killed.
Jack-in-the-box or Waffle House, would you be willing to be kicked in the nuts for that guy? Right could be a girl
probably Probably yeah, that's what Christ did for you. Only he was
killed. Yeah. Yeah, he knew the worst Jack-in-the-box customer that ever existed and the worst
person of all March. I'm going to be crucified for that guy That's pretty tough to do.
And that matters a whole lot more than somebody using the proper pronouns in California.
I'm sorry, it's not the same level of suffering, especially when you know Aaron at Jack in the Box.
Screw that guy.
Don't like that guy.
He likes the tacos.
He does.
It's too late for Rhett and Link, mostly because of this LGBT thing.
Once they've gone there, it's too late for them.
And I'm like, can't you see that you guys have lost this argument?
History is going to leave you behind.
The thing that we're finding out right now, and it's one of the key reasons that so many people are leaving the Church, is that that tension can only lead to the tension being broken.
You know, and I think the way it's going to be broken is that, just like I said earlier, many different issues that the Church has held out on, even the most conservative denominations a hundred years from now, No one except a fringe cult is going to be anti-LGBT in a hundred years.
If you just look at history and the way things progress culturally, eventually the church says, okay, we'll incorporate that, too, because if we don't, we're going to die.
Really?
But I think because the church is being really slow to do that, and it's kind of causing an existential crisis and a crisis of just The way that they see the Bible, the young people are just saying, I'm out.
I'm not going to be a part of this.
Okay, so a couple of points here.
It's very clear that the hang-up is the LGBT thing for them.
Yes, it is.
And that's based, again, on a false premise that if you are a Christian that you can't hug Michael Buckley, that you have to hate.
By the way, back then it was still probably LGBT, that you have to hate LGBT people.
That's not true.
As a matter of fact, it's the opposite of how our faith informs us.
You are, of course, supposed to love them, and you can have disagreements with people and we can talk about sin.
Yeah, that's not true.
They try to cut off at the past too and say love the sin or hate the sin.
That's a really silly statement.
I also have a problem with his analogy there about there's nothing that can happen to the
tension other than break.
You ever hear of a pulley?
Yeah, that's not true.
You're using the tension to pull up the bucket.
I suss with family Robinson.
It's just not right.
He's an engineer too.
The only thing that can happen is tension and break.
And by the way, this is a danger when you talk about there's this mass exodus.
I don't have the sources in front of me, but actually in the United States, there's actually a kind of resurgence of Christendom with a lot of young people.
But for sure, beyond any shadow of a doubt, what was her name, the lesbian who was just on the show?
So Arios Garcello brought this up, and I think we have an overlay from USA Today that for the first time in several decades, the young Americans, they have a more negative view of the LGBTQ community than people who've come before them.
So those tides are turning.
So you don't want all of your fundamental principles to rest on everyone else is doing it.
Because guess what?
That can change.
And unfortunately for you, it's actually changing right now where there's an existential crisis for lesbians on the left.
Lesbians are getting aggravated with lesbians.
Just like, by the way, this could have been used at one point to convert people to Christianity.
Certainly was used to convert people to Islam by force as opposed to word of mouth was everybody else is doing it.
With Islam it was everybody else is doing it.
Well, they were sharpening it, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It doesn't mean that it's right.
That's one of the most common logical fallacies there is.
I'm baffled by this.
If this is the crux, like in a hundred years, none of these churches are going to say, Oh, we'll just incorporate.
How do you incorporate it without changing the word of God in several clearly defined, like what pages are you going to rip out of your new Bible?
Because you can't leave Romans in, you can't leave Leviticus in, you can't leave other parts of the Bible in that are very, very clear.
They really want that to change in the church.
And this is something that I've talked about and Dave Rudin was surprised when I said, I don't support gay marriage.
I said I support gay civil union.
I think that churches should be involved in marriage.
I don't think the federal government should be involved in marriage.
Is there another clip I'm seeing on there?
I don't know what that means.
So David Rubin was surprised.
And I was saying because I don't believe that men and women are fundamentally interchangeable.
This was before the whole tea part was sort of tagged on, right?
And I don't remember the point.
You were saying something and then I saw this thing.
You did see it.
It kind of distracted you a little bit.
So the assumption is that sin means that you can't be cordial to somebody, you can't love somebody, you can't incorporate.
You can't say, look, I understand.
You have a right to go be a sinner.
God gave you the freedom to choose to not pick him.
Oh, I don't have a point right so they're saying that at some point. We're just gonna say well
This is the hot button. I said it again dead gum, but this is the issue of today right the LGBT
What's wrong with you because you're gonna go back and do it again?
You're gonna call me the the Solomon thing whatever I don't know what you're talking about the song of Solomon. Yes,
you do Yeah, I should have just kept going
But this is what is the next one?
We're just gonna pick another part of the Bible and say, well, we don't really agree with that.
And then at that point, what do you believe?
Here's what they believe.
This is what it comes down to.
We become our own gods, right?
It's up to us, whatever we choose to do.
Get away from me.
Get away from me!
Get away!
Get away!
Get thee behind me, Satan!
No, I mean, it really is.
That's essentially what it comes down to.
I'm going to call you habanero.
I appreciate it.
Give me something hotter.
Ghost pepper, you know, whatever.
I'm going to call you habanero.
Hybridized jalapeño ghost pepper.
Nice.
Hydrogenated ghost pepper.
Can we figure out how to do that one?
No, hybridized.
But no, the point I was making is when they say something about the LGBTQ thing is because they've desperately tried to thrust that upon the church.
And this is what I was talking about with Dave Rubin.
I said, you have this in Canada where if a pastor says, I'm not going to marry two guys, Stephen Boisson was one of the pastors in Canada, you can be jailed.
Now, that being said, people haven't really argued before because men now cohabitate.
Men and women, like, they live together before they're married.
That's relatively new when you take into consideration sort of... Shacking up?
Yeah, shacking up.
Which always, by the way, shocks me when someone calls into Dr. Lore and like, I'm living with my boyfriend.
I did not know what Dr. Laura was going to say!
Society changed, but they never really tried to thrust that upon the church.
It's like, well, people are living together and you don't do it, you're traditionalists.
But the same-sex marriage thing was something they tried to thrust upon the church because of this worldview that men and women are fundamentally different.
And I'm not talking about the entire gay community.
I'm talking about those who are the sort of gestapo LGBTQ Nazis who, by the way, now aggravate Lesbians and gay people on the left who just want to live and let live.
And that's why they've really tried to thrust it into the church, because it pulls at the thread.
If they can, they can get a foothold saying, well, no, hold on a second.
It's actually hate speech to say that men and women are different, and that a man and a man is not the same in the eyes of God as a man and a woman.
But the church needs to stand strong and say, well, in the church, it's not.
The state can say sure, but the church doesn't.
And Christians should recognize that there's a play being run on them, and that's the play.
The play is niceness.
The play is they're taking advantage of our willingness to sort of go, okay, yeah, that's fine, and just keep retreating, and they're using that, again, to gain the upper hand in the culture, so that the left-wing, like you said, the sort of totalitarian-minded people have this inherent impulse, and that's to try to keep people down.
I love how you said, you said, they're, they're what?
They're running a game?
Is that what you said?
Running a play is what it is.
Shame on all YouTubers who try to run a game with the trick.
That's what I was thinking.
The entire point.
I didn't hear it.
I was trying to think of how I could sing that song.
Without using the N-word, because I've done it in my car with the windows rolled up at least a thousand times.
It's hard.
It's hard.
I saw it in your eyes when you checked out, but it's fine.
I think they glazed it.
I just ruined my career and now I can't believe it.
Shame on the people who tried to run the game.
That's just like, what are you gonna say?
If ever I'm put in a deposition like Paula Deen, have you ever used the N-word?
I'm just like, I'm a huge hip-hop fan.
And I sing, and I have a Bluetooth speaker in the shower.
It's an admiration thing.
It is.
It is.
It's cultural.
That's a wonderful way to, on that note, cultural.
Does context matter?
Have I ever used the N-word?
Does context matter?
Because I'm an NWA fan.
OK?
Yeah.
It's in the name.
What are you supposed to do?
What do you?
What?
Have you?
Ugh.
Do you want to go through the list of mortal techniques?
I mean, what, what?
Do I need to go through albums with you?
I think, so, you know what, listen, we've been going, and let us know, I want to hear how much people, whether you're a Christian, whether you're not, this is the kind of stuff that's available on Mug Club.
Tomorrow, we will have, I think, more of a standard, yeah, standard show like you've come to know on Thursday.
Sometimes we do a scrapyard, where we take all of the crap that was too offensive to make a show, and we shove it into Tuesday.
And the reason we do it is because often the Photoshop's are too offensive, so we just have Smooth Manny from Columbia just do them as cartoons.
Let's figure that takes the edge off.
It does.
So that'll be tomorrow with a guest, a show that you've come to know and expect.
And of course, Morning Drive, Good Morning Mug Club.
Check the schedule, available at ladloscreditor.com.
I think what's most important here is, first off, I would gladly host Rhett, Link, Philip DeFranco.
This doesn't come from—none of this comes from a place of hate.
It comes from a place of love and wanting what's best for people.
And listen, I would be remiss if I didn't tell people that, yeah, I think what is best for everybody—man, woman, child, gay, straight—is to have a personal relationship with God.
And when—Lord, I call him Good Guy God.
Jesus.
I think that matters.
And I will tell you this, when people say, what, I just do it because God told me to?
No, not always.
But if anyone here, maybe you don't need to, but I certainly would acknowledge that in my moments of weakness that I've had, where particularly as someone who struggled with depression, understanding, that is, that is A safeguard.
That is a guardrail of, you know what, actually I was designed for a purpose.
And I do think, and I have known a lot of Christians who've also struggled with suicidal thoughts or tendencies and thought, you know what, hold on a second, I don't have the right to do that because this really isn't my body.
So it may not be of value to you in Southern California, but it is to a lot of people.
I think that particularly for me in moments of weakness where maybe I don't have the answer,
having that trust that, okay, this is, you know what?
I don't necessarily know each individual step, but I do know the prescription for what I
need to do to achieve what is morally right.
And I look at scripture and that helps me make decisions when sometimes decisions are
tough to make.
The only way though, that this faith can stand, and I think we can talk about this, this happens
by the way, also with Christians who are just, like you said, running a game, the nice Christians
who are open to all.
I mean, as someone said, this is not my own original quote.
I don't know who said it, so please don't get mad at me for not attributing this to you.
They say, listen, you cannot continually water down the message of Christ and the value.
You can't continually water down the medicine and then be shocked when it doesn't work.
When someone turns to it for answers and they don't have them.
And so everyone out there, even if you've grown up as a Christian your whole life, I know people say grow up, you always have to choose to follow Christ.
No one is just raised Christian.
You can be raised in that culturally, but you choose to make a decision.
Every single person does.
But even if you've been raised with that and you've never had a crisis of faith, you need to have it be based on reason. You need to be able to reason your faith. You
need to understand intellectually why it is that you believe what you believe, and you need
to be able to defend it. I don't mean go out and argue with everyone because you're always going
to find someone who's more qualified than you to argue. But it has to be more than an emotion.
Otherwise, you just become a byproduct of your environment, and then you find yourself subjected to the whims of moral relevancy.
And I don't think you're going to like the way that one ends up.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you guys very much.
The promo code, of course, is QUARANTINE to get your steep discount.
We will be back with you tomorrow with a normal show, a show you've come to love.
Hope you enjoyed Masked Monday.
Let us know.
▲
Export Selection