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Dec. 7, 2017 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:24
Ep. 71 - The War On Christmas: A History

Michael assumes the role of candy cane-chomping Douglas MacArthur in the War On Christmas. Does it exist? Are we winning? He explains why the War on Christmas matters Plus, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, I assume the role of candy cane-chomping Douglas MacArthur in The War on Christmas.
Does it exist?
Are we winning?
I will explain why the war on Christmas really matters, and I will be wearing this helmet the whole time in case any lefties try to break in and attack me with euphemistic language.
Plus, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Is there a war on Christmas?
Before we get into it, I have to talk about some Christmas presents.
It is Christmastime, so the first thing that I want to talk about are movement watches.
You can see I'm wearing it.
Any great general has to wear, any great cultural general has to wear a watch into battle to know what time it is and what end is up.
Movement does this really, really well.
Holiday shopping can be very tough thanks to movement.
All that gift-giving anxiety can disappear with the press of a button.
These watches make the perfect purchase for any guy in your life.
They really do.
They're so sleek.
They're very fashionable.
They also start at just $95.
So if you went into a department store to get a watch like this, you'd probably be paying $300, $400.
Movement has innovated.
They've shaken up the whole watch industry by selling direct to you online.
You can finish your holiday shopping and get a Movement watch for someone on your list.
Now, the company was started by these two broke college kids who wanted to wear nice, stylish watches, but they couldn't afford them, as broke college kids want to do.
So they started their own watch company.
This is American ingenuity at its finest.
It's a great time and a great price point for Christmas.
You can give someone a really high-quality gift for a reasonable price.
They begin at $95, and at such great prices, there's classic design, there's quality construction, there's styled minimalism.
You don't usually get that for Christmas.
Under $100, so I would take advantage of this.
They've sold over 1 million watches in 160 countries.
And today, this Christmas came early for you guys because you will get 15% off plus free shipping and free returns by going to mvmt.com slash covfefe.
That is C-O-V-F-E-F-E, mvmt.com slash covfefe.
I recommend doing it just to type in the promo code.
I think you'll like the watches when you get there.
It's got a clean design, great fashion statement.
Now is the time to step up your watch game and to step up the watch game of that man in your life who just, you know, doesn't keep track of time, doesn't really dress like an adult.
Adults should be wearing watches.
MVMT.com slash Covfefe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Join the movement.
So, is there a war on Christmas?
Of course there's a war on Christmas.
Stop trying to be a cool guy and get the New York Times to like you by pretending there isn't.
There obviously is.
It's now fashionable in some conservative circles, where people care what the New York Times thinks, to say that the war on Christmas is some crazy illusion of conservatives.
And I'm, you know, I'm not that kind of conservative.
No, no.
I'm educated and fancy.
And I think, wait, wait, don't tell me is clever.
I'm not one of those middle state rubes who pays attention to the degraded culture belched out every year by our sophisticated betters on the coasts.
Stop it.
Stop it.
You're embarrassing yourself.
Of course there is a war on Christmas.
To begin, here's the first bit of evidence.
Barack Obama struck the word Christmas from the White House Christmas card.
A quick look back through history shows this is not the norm.
Calvin Coolidge wrote in his 1927 White House Christmas card,"...the real spirit of Christmas, if we think on these things, there will be a born in us a savior, and over us will shine a star, sending its gleam of hope to the world." FDR wrote some variation of Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs.
Roosevelt each of the 150 years he reigned in the White House.
Harry Truman wrote, quote, As 1950 ebbs to its close, our hearts turn once more to Bethlehem and to the coming of a little child, the divine infant that brought love to a weary world.
Six paragraphs later, six paragraphs later, he concluded, quote, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and goodwill toward men.
Eisenhower wrote a Kurt, typical season's greetings for Christmas and New Year.
JFK, Happy Christmas.
The pieces of LBJ's card available still don't show the wording, but given his preference for four-letter epithets, that's probably for the best.
Language on the other cards is hard to track down as well until we get to George W. Bush, who included verses from Psalms on the Christmas card.
Then we get to Barack Obama, who not only struck mention of Christmas entirely, but according to his own White House social secretary, tried to ban the creche, the nativity scene, from the East Room of the White House.
Now why would you do that, you ask?
Why would he want to do that?
Because they wanted to make Christmas more, quote, inclusive.
That's the line offered, by the way.
That's how you know that there is a war on Christmas.
School districts will replace Merry Christmas and Happy New Year with the vague happy holidays, retail outlets, work environments.
Christmas parties have become vague holiday parties in many circles, particularly in the cultural centers of the country.
To say Merry Christmas has become a political act that expresses to the retail worker or the acquaintance your political and politically incorrect point of view.
And if you harp on this long enough, as I do every year, you will inevitably get the same reply.
Well, yeah, but why shouldn't the greeting be more inclusive?
You know, not everybody celebrates Christmas, you know, and that's the moving of the goalposts.
First there wasn't a war on Christmas, now there is, but it doesn't matter.
That's how you know.
The other trick that those who deny the cultural movement will say is that it isn't a war.
The language is hyperbolic.
It's ridiculous.
There isn't a war.
You don't say.
There aren't guns.
That's true.
There aren't tanks and bullets.
Christmas is not literally being cut down by machine gun fire.
That's because the war on Christmas is a figure of speech, much like the war on poverty.
Poverty is not being cut down by bullets because, like Christmas, it isn't material.
What is meant by the, quote, war on Christmas is a battle of language and culture.
There is a belligerent group of left-wing cultural warriors which seeks to replace clear, traditional, precise language, Christmas, with vague, meaningless euphemisms like happy holidays and season's greetings.
Of course, both phrases have been around for a long time.
But whereas in the past they referred specifically to Christmas and New Year's, like Eisenhower's Christmas card Seasons Greetings for Christmas and New Year, now they serve as a replacement for the politically correct term, what the modern mind considers the grave offense of Christmastime.
Merry Christmas.
But aren't there other major holidays during Christmastime beside Christmas and New Year's?
This is usually what they ask.
Not really.
There are holidays, to be sure, but no major ones.
The closest contender we have is Hanukkah, which is the Jewish festival of lights.
But while Hanukkah is indeed an ancient holiday, it dates back about 2,000 years, it is a relatively minor holiday.
Major Jewish holidays are biblical, they feature restrictions on work.
Because Hanukkah is non-biblical, there are few religious restrictions on work.
According to historian Diane Ashton, Hanukkah rose to prominence in America as it did, not in the rest of the world, because of two reform rabbis in 19th century Cincinnati who worried their children had little connection to the synagogue.
Before that, there is little record of Hanukkah celebrations.
The rabbis modeled the celebration in gift-giving after Christmas.
As Ashton explains, quote, They didn't see Christmas as something they could do easily because it's Christian, but they did want to do something like that because it was American.
So kosher restaurants even started serving turkey dinners after the American custom.
That's Hanukkah.
The far less credible pretender is Kwanzaa, which is a socialist contrivance invented by a criminal L.A. City College Africana Studies professor named Malana Karenga in 1966.
He created Kwanzaa to be a holiday specifically for black Americans, even though black Americans already celebrated Christmas.
Ironically, while virtually all African slaves were brought to America from the west coast of Africa, Kwanzaa is a Swahili word meaning first fruits that originated in East Africa, which means none of the slaves brought to America would have understood it.
Now, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa is communism, Ujamaa, cooperative economics, and Milana Karenga himself was sentenced to prison in 1971 for felonious assault and false imprisonment after he sexually assaulted and tortured multiple women.
As the LA Times reported, he ordered them to strip naked, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat them with a karate baton.
Karenga then placed a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face and tightened her big toe in a vice.
He finally put detergent and running hoses in their mouths and hit them on the head with toasters.
As the Black Power movement of the 1970s has waned, so too has the celebration of the holiday.
On the high end of estimates, 0.3% of Americans acknowledge the supposed holiday.
That rate continues to decline.
So why pretend Christmastime does not center around Christmas?
Why pretend there are so many other major holidays on equal footing?
There's New Year on January 1st, and we've long said, good tiding for Christmas and a happy New Year.
There's Hanukkah, a relatively minor holiday.
But by the way, we don't say happy holidays instead of happy Labor Day, even though Rosh Hashanah, which is a far more important Jewish holiday than Hanukkah, sometimes occurs around the same time.
You don't say that.
We don't say happy holidays or season's greetings instead of happy Columbus Day, even though Yom Kippur, another much more important Jewish holiday, sometimes occurs around that time.
Well, actually, now we don't say Happy Columbus Day either.
We say Blessed Indigenous Peoples Day or something like that.
That's another story.
There is Kwanzaa, a virtually non-existent holiday.
What else is there?
There's Boxing Day, which no one in the United States celebrates.
There's the Winter Solstice, which people pretend is a thing, but nobody celebrates.
And of course, it isn't about the celebrants of Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or the Winter Solstice who are waging the war on Christmas.
It's the atheist left who constantly seeks to replace clear, vivid language with bizarre, secular euphemisms.
This is the essence of political correctness.
The essence of political correctness is to replace clear language with euphemisms to remove the strength of that language.
So we have abortion.
Abortion isn't the killing of babies in the womb.
It's women's reproductive health.
Assisted suicide isn't killing the old and the sick.
It's euthanasia.
Euthanasia is a word that literally means good death.
You know, it's good.
It's nice.
So it's no surprise that his political correctness reached peak potency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, We see the war on Christmas.
Denver banned religious floats from its Christmas parade.
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg displayed the city's holiday tree.
Major department stores like Macy's removed references to Christmas.
Public schools began removing Christian symbols from Christmastime display all around this time.
How coincidental.
Now, the left alternately denies that the war on Christmas exists, and then when they can't deny it any longer, they say it doesn't matter.
Who cares?
Who cares?
It's just language.
You're just arguing over semantics.
Sure, but semantics means meaning.
If the language doesn't matter, then why are the war on Christmas belligerents so insistent on changing the traditional, clear, and precise language?
If it doesn't matter, then great.
Great.
That's perfect.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Forget about Happy Holidays.
But of course language matters.
Of course.
Those who insist on the bizarre, vague euphemisms, they know precisely that.
Because politics sits downstream of culture.
You know who else knows that is President Trump.
Here he is on the campaign trail.
You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore.
They don't use the word Christmas because it's not politically correct.
You go department stores and they'll say Happy New Year and they'll say other things and it'll be red.
They'll have it painted, but they don't say, well, guess what?
We're saying Merry Christmas again.
This was a great promise.
People didn't really take it seriously because they don't take these language issues seriously.
But here is President Trump as president.
The Christmas story begins 2,000 years ago with a mother, a father, their baby son, and the most extraordinary gift of all, the gift of God's love for all of humanity.
Whatever our beliefs, we know that the birth of Jesus Christ and the story of this incredible life forever changed the course of human history.
Each and every year at Christmas time, we recognize that the real spirit of Christmas is not what we have.
It's about who we are.
Each one of us is a child of God.
That is the true source of joy this time of the year.
That is what makes every Christmas merry.
And now, as the President of the United States, it's my tremendous honor to finally wish America and the world a very Merry Christmas.
There's nothing like just sitting here with a little candy cane pipe and watching that.
That is pretty good.
And there's good news.
The great news in the war on Christmas is that clear language and tradition are finally winning after a decade or a decade and a half.
According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 41% of respondents deferred to Happy Holidays over Merry Christmas.
Ten years later, a similar survey, albeit through a different research center, found that number had dropped to just 25%.
Now, the last two years have brought a cultural exuberance to the right, and it's given us myriad early Christmas presents.
We've got tax reform, originalist judges, responsible foreign policy, massive deregulation, Obamacare mandate repeal.
The list goes on and on.
Now, all of this has been possible because of a cultural shift in the country, away from insidious euphemisms and political correctness, the pinnacle of insidious euphemisms.
Now is not the time to retreat or seek the approval of the New York Times.
David McCullough observed that to write well is to think clearly, and that's why it's so hard.
Don't give in to fashionably muddled thinking, especially around the incarnation of the divine logic himself.
Now back to Christmas presents.
Before we get to the mailbag, back to Christmas presents, because I have just gotten my favorite Christmas present so far of the year.
You might have seen this.
If you watch Andrew Klavan's show, he got to unpack a man crate.
This is from Man Crates, and it was this box.
It's gift-wrapped in duct tape, and it comes in a giant crate, and it comes with a crowbar, and you open up your box that way, and they have these excellent gifts for men.
So I know.
It's very hard to pick out the perfect gift for everybody.
You know, it's very easy to get it wrong.
You feel bad if you don't put any thought into it.
ManCrates.com is the surest way to find gifts that guys will actually love, guaranteed.
I have been begging, by the way, for this sponsor for a while now because I wanted a ManCrate.
This is not a Cheese of the Month Club.
It's not a New Thai Club.
They offer over 100 hand-curated gift collections for every type of guy, from the rugged outdoorsman to the sports fanatic and everything in between.
So the one that I got is the Whiskey Appreciation Crate, which is phenomenal.
Clavin got the same one.
It gives you a personalized whiskey decanter, personalized whiskey glasses, a bunch of nuts and bar food, basically.
Great little whiskey companions.
There's the Grillmaster crate with a brass knuckle meat tenderizer and a cast iron smoker box.
ManCrates.com, you pick the perfect crate for you or your loved one.
I say loved one, but really you're going to look and get it for yourself.
You choose the delivery date when the crate arrives.
You get to pry it open with a laser engraved crowbar.
Men's Health and Allure Magazine, which do not agree on much, both say that man crates are the perfect gift for men.
They have thousands of five-star reviews.
It comes with a high-five guarantee.
You can own the holidays.
Now today, if you go to mancrates.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, you'll get 5% off of your order.
And they don't offer this discount anywhere else.
That's mancrates.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. If you don't want to get too creative with these gifts...
And you don't want to go for the whiskey set or the brass knuckle meat tenderize or whatever.
You can get a gift card.
I know everyone gets gift cards.
Everyone probably wants gift cards.
It's the easiest thing to get.
But when you get a gift card through mancrates.com, they deliver it with a sledgehammer, and it's in a block of cement.
So you have to smash your block of cement to get your present.
And that is really the essence of giving a gift.
It's not really so much about the thing itself.
It's about the experience of it, the relationship between you and the person.
And it's a really great experience.
And yeah, I highly recommend it.
So go to mancrates.com slash Knowles.
Okay, I'm going to put down my candy cane pipe and we're going to get into the mailbag.
First question from David.
Hi, Michael.
First, I'd like to point out I'm a big fan of your show.
Thanks.
You had made an argument for venerating Mary.
I understand having great respect to Mary as the woman chosen by God to bear Jesus in human form, but I'm curious as to how does praying to Mary not conflict with the first two commandments?
I myself am a Christian and base my faith on Scripture and use Scripture as the basis to evaluate practices, ideologies, etc.
Thanks, David.
A good time of year to be asking that question.
You know, I think a lot of this boils down to this question that some Protestants ask, which is, why would you pray to anybody?
Why not just pray directly to Jesus?
Why would you pray to saints?
Or why would you have people on earth pray to you?
In Revelation chapter 5, here's a verse.
And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the Lamb.
Each one had a harp, and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God's people.
So we have the saints offering prayers to God in heaven.
They're offering prayers for what?
They're not offering prayers for themselves.
They're in heaven.
They're offering prayers for other people.
So as early as the first century of the Christian tradition, we see people asking for intercession, praying for intercession, and we have the city of God, the saints who are in heaven, praying for those of us who aren't there yet or who need their prayers.
We have 1 Timothy from Paul, which is pseudepigraphal, but...
It might tell you something.
certainly we still read 1 Timothy.
"First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, "intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men, "for kings and all who are in high positions, "that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, "godly and respectful in every way.
"This is good and pleasing to God our Savior, "who desires all men to be saved "and to come to the knowledge of the truth." Now Paul asks others to pray for him all the time.
In Romans, in Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians.
And he prayed for others.
We see that in 2 Thessalonians.
Christ himself tells us to pray for others.
He says, quote, Why wouldn't he tell them?
I'll just have them pray to me directly.
No, he says you have to pray for others.
Pray to whom?
Pray to him.
Jesus regularly supplies for one person based on the faith of another person.
So in Matthew, we see Christ says, O woman, great is your faith.
Be it done for you as you desire, and her daughter is healed.
So it's not the daughter praying.
It's someone interceding for the daughter and praying, and based on the woman's faith, the daughter...
The daughter is healed.
We don't hear about the daughter's faith.
We only hear about the mother's faith.
Another in Matthew.
Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly.
In Mark, teacher, I brought my son to you, that he has a spirit that makes him mute.
In Luke, do not fear, only believe, and she, your daughter, will be well.
So one thing we also know from James is that the prayers of the righteous work especially well.
So James says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.
Thank you.
to be the Ark of the New Covenant, to give birth to the Incarnation, to our risen Lord.
It seems to me she would be a good person to pray for you as well.
I think that's a lot of words.
I think probably you could answer that question by saying she's the mother of Jesus.
She's the mother of God.
But I hope that clears it up a little bit because very often I think people say, "Well, I don't think we should do these rituals or these traditions or have this liturgy because it's not in Scripture But actually, it is in Scripture.
It does come from Scripture.
The liturgy comes from Scripture.
And you just have to read a little more broadly or more closely to see exactly how that fits in.
It's not always clear to people who aren't in the tradition itself.
Next question from Bridget.
Hey, Michael.
So I've made a bit of a political come-around in 2016 due to all the election craziness.
I was pretty far to the left in most ways and still am on a lot of economical issues, but I've recently become more devout in my Catholic faith and have changed my position from pro-choice to pro-life.
I'm afraid to tell my pro-choice friends and family because I'm afraid they'll ostracize me and I was wondering if you have any advice.
I do.
This is hard.
This is a hard thing to happen to me.
I was pro-choice back when I was—I wasn't really left-wing, but I was pro-choice.
I'm from New York.
New York Republicans are just not terribly conservative.
As I got more conservative, it was clear to me that abortion isn't good and we shouldn't have— Have it be a legal thing.
Diana Shaw, who's a bioethicist, convinced me of this over a lunch.
And when it happened, I didn't know how to tell my friends.
The way you have to do it is two things, unapologetically and patiently.
Don't apologize.
The left sees pro-life as anti-woman.
They really earnestly believe that.
It's not just some joke.
And so you have to be unapologetic.
You have nothing to apologize for.
But you also have to be patient with them.
They're not going to understand.
Be calm.
Usually the first person to get angry and start screaming in an argument is the one who doesn't understand really what you're arguing over.
So be patient.
Be calm about it.
And, you know, Louis C.K. had a good bit on this.
Louis C.K., the now disgraced comedian, but he had a good bit.
He said, you know, abortion, I don't think it's a big deal.
It's like going to the bathroom.
It's just going to the bathroom.
It's not a big deal.
Or it's killing a baby.
It's either completely meaningless, like excretion, or it's murdering a baby.
And I think you have to explain those premises.
Because if you explain those premises, and it's perfectly logical and compassionate from there, and then you just debate the premise.
Is this...
Baby in the womb.
Is it living?
Yes.
Is it human?
Yeah.
It's not a dog.
It's not a giraffe.
It's human.
So is it independent or is it part of the mother?
It's independent.
It has its own genome.
It will develop into its own personality.
It has a beating heart within not very many days.
It's obviously independent, or separate rather.
It's obviously dependent for food on its mother.
And so if all of those things are true, then the question is, Are you willing to risk what is the moral equivalent of murder on the premise that it doesn't yet have human dignity when you're going to abort it?
If you put it in those terms, I think...
You might not bring them totally to understanding, but they'll begin to understand the premises.
Okay, we have a lot more to talk about.
We have so much more mailbag, but I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Thank you for being with me and serving in the war on Christmas.
Go forth, troops.
Go on and fight the vague, secular, language-transforming opponents on the other side.
But if you are subscribed to The Daily Wire, go over there right now, dailywire.com, and you can watch the rest of the show.
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That conversation's going to be next Tuesday, 5 p.m.
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That's great.
Forget about all that.
It's Christmas time.
This is the most coveted object gift in the entire world.
I know you're not going to give it to your friends as a gift.
It's too desirous.
It's too wonderful.
Al Franken resigned today.
The leftist tears are going to be flowing left, right, and center.
Make sure you have this or else you're going to drown.
You can have them hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
Go to thedailywire.com right now.
Now we'll be right back.
Next question from Steven.
Season's greetings.
How do I answer my leftist friends who point to studies that show disparities in criminal sentencing between blacks and whites?
There do seem to be a few that show more time for similar convictions.
Thank you for your time.
You shouldn't dismiss this out of hand.
This is a real issue.
There's a 2014 study that showed blacks are more likely to be jailed while awaiting trial.
What does this mean?
When you look into this, it seems that it's largely because a lot of those people can't afford to post bail.
So the wealthier people who are...
Jailed can post bail, but these poor people can't, and that creates racial disparities.
There's also evidence that shows blacks serve longer sentences.
One of the reasons behind this is, ironically, are mandatory minimums.
So mandatory minimums have an important motive.
They have a good motive, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It's the idea that certain crimes are so bad, they have to have a minimum sentence, and then you can play around with it from there, and it's up to the judge, and it's up to the parole board or whatever.
But The mandatory minimum seemed to have created some racial inequality.
We saw this in the drug war.
Drugs like crack cocaine were punished much more harshly than drugs like regular cocaine.
I don't think there's any particularly racist reason for this.
Crack cocaine is much worse.
It's much more dangerous to individuals and communities.
Nevertheless, it creates disparities in drug sentencing.
The thing that you should begin with here when you're talking to your friend is to suggest that perhaps the cause of these disparities is not the man.
It's not institutional racism.
It's not an intentional move on the part of the government or of white people or whatever.
To create racial disparities and to imprison black people.
The situation is obviously more complex.
We've just talked about two examples of this.
So if the situation is more complex, then we need to look at what is causing these disparities.
Are they political?
Then perhaps we can fix them.
Are they cultural?
You can fix them, but that's much harder.
You need to know what the issues are.
They might be geographic.
Tell them to hold their judgment for one second.
And if you don't take the easy, silly answer that it's institutional racism, I think you're more likely to arrive at a serious answer, and then you can fix the problem.
Next question from Evan.
Dear Master Knowles, is Santa Claus St.
Nicholas or St.
Christopher?
Because of Kris Kringle.
Merry Christmas, Evan.
No, he's not St.
Christopher.
He is St.
Nicholas.
Jolly old St.
Nick.
I love St.
Nicholas.
He was a 3rd century bishop from Asia Minor.
There's a legend around him that says he frequently gave secret presents to people.
That's where we get part of the Christmas story from.
But forget that.
Forget the presents.
Forget him giving man crates to people and stuff.
The best story of jolly old Saint Nick is he punched a heretic at the First Council of Nicaea.
So he was at the First Council of Nicaea.
They're debating the divinity of Christ.
And St.
Nicholas, jolly old St.
Nicholas, got so angry by the nonsense Arius was preaching that he got up and punched him in the face.
So there are a few memes that go around every Christmas season.
One says, quote, I came to give presents to kids and punch heretics, and I just ran out of presents.
And then the other, which is my favorite, is he sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've denied the divinity of Christ.
So if you're an Arian duck...
That's Saint Nicholas.
Great guy worth reading about.
He also was martyred pretty brutally, viciously tortured and killed, and we commemorate him by giving each other candies and sweaters and things.
So worth reading about the guy, a wonderful saint, and gave us Santa Claus.
Next email is from Luke.
What is the best response to atheists who say, it's irrational to believe in a god because when you make an assertion, you have to prove it.
In other words, you have to prove a positive.
The burden of proof is on the believer.
This is something Christopher Hitchens and the new atheists like to say.
This isn't so.
This is not true.
First of all...
One point you might bring up to these people is that every culture around the entire world for all of time has believed in a remarkably similar version of divinity and metaphysics and God.
That is a little strange.
It seems to be baked into humanity just as thirst is baked in, just as hunger is baked in.
And then the second thing I would point out is we take so many things on faith all the time.
This is evidence that a little bit of learning is a People have learned a very basic version of induction or a very basic version of the scientific method.
And so they think that you can prove everything using the scientific method.
But obviously this breaks down when you get to the scientific method itself.
It breaks down at reason.
So what are some axioms?
In mathematics, there are a lot of axia, right?
There are five axia.
You have to assume that A equals A. If A doesn't equal A, you can't perform mathematics, right?
You have to assume that if A equals B, then B equals A. If A equals B, then B and B equals C, then A equals C, right?
If A equals B, then A plus C equals B plus C, right?
You can't prove that.
Those are just axia.
Those are the building blocks.
Even for reason, you can't make an argument for reason.
So I can say, well, I'm going to prove that my faculties of reason are reliable.
I'm going to prove logical argument.
But you can't do it because the only way that you could do that is to make a logical argument.
It assumes the conclusion in the premise of the question.
You can't prove that yesterday existed.
There are many, many things that you can't prove that you take on faith.
So what you have to parse are those aspects of theology that we can reason through.
You know, Thomas Aquinas did a pretty good job of this and many others.
And where ultimately reason butts up against what can only be bridged by revelation and faith.
And you can read plenty of logical people to bring you to that point and to describe it to you.
But this is the evidence of a little learning is a dangerous thing.
Christopher Hitchens used language very well, so people thought that he was making good points, but he wasn't making any points.
His book God is Not Great doesn't even make that point.
It's a book about how terrible religion is, but it doesn't argue what he pretends the thesis is.
It's very clear, the atheist thesis.
It's very clear.
Well, I can't see God, so he doesn't exist.
But shallows are clear, and shallow thinking is clear.
So think a little harder than that.
And maybe ask yourself, why is it that everybody throughout all of history, practically, and all of the great geniuses have believed in God?
Why is it that Isaac Newton spent the last 30 years of his life interpreting Scripture?
Why is it that Blaise Pascal believed so much that he offered the great wager?
He was devotedly Christian.
Francis Bacon, Leibniz, Gödel, all of the great scientists and mathematicians, why is it that they all believed?
Why is it that Bertrand Russell, the greatest logician of the 20th century, couldn't make an argument against the ontological argument for God's existence?
I'm seeing a lot of coincidences here.
So tell them to think a little more deeply about it and point out all of the faith that they take anyway that they don't even know about.
Next question.
Michael, this should be an easy question for me to answer, but it doesn't come to me quickly.
The Founding Fathers believed all men are created equal but also created the three-fifths clause.
This is a hypocritical situation.
If the Founding Fathers violated the very thing that this country was built on, why should we honor their documents, views, history, etc.?
Thank you.
There's nothing hypocritical about that.
There is nothing hypocritical about saying all men are created equal and then those same men, for purposes of reality, of creating this government, compromising their philosophical purism to create a country that would...
Get rid of that institution in fairly short time.
This is a conflict, I think, between philosophical idealism and metaphysical realism.
It's an error that the rationalists fall into.
So they think, well, I have this purity of thought.
And they kind of preen about it, and they get on their moral high horse.
And then whenever men, real people in the real world, do something that doesn't live up to their philosophical purity, they say, ah, you hypocrite.
I'm pure.
But you haven't done anything.
Of course you're not.
That doesn't make you pure.
Those men were some of the greatest men in American history at the Constitutional Convention.
And they're great because they had philosophical purity and they also dealt in reality.
It's very important.
And look, in the Constitution, they built in a provision that within a short number of years they would stop the importation of slaves from Africa.
This question of slavery was already built in.
And by the way, the Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise to, I suppose, in a way, help the black slaves.
But really, the question had little to do with the slaves themselves.
It had everything to do with representation between the North and the South in the Federation So the South wanted to count black slaves as citizens for the purpose of population numbers and representation in Congress, but not count them as citizens when it comes to giving civil rights to citizens.
So they had no rights, but they wanted more representation.
And the Northerners said, that's ridiculous.
If you don't treat these people as human and you don't treat them as citizens, you don't get to count them as population.
And they arrived at this compromise to create the greatest Most free, most equal, most fair, most just, most prosperous nation in the history of the world that has given countless benefits, philosophical and material, to the citizens that were excluded and were harmed and oppressed and also to the rest of the world since then.
So I wouldn't call them hypocrites.
I'd always take a look at the man in the mirror and say, am I better than...
John Adams, am I better than Thomas Jefferson?
Have I done anything great for the world like those guys did?
And I think you'll find, no, probably not.
Next question.
Dear Cardinal Mike.
I'm a Protestant, and I believe that communion is an important ritual, but I don't believe in transubstantiation.
That the bread becomes the body and blood of Christ.
Why do Catholics think Christ was being literal when he called it his flesh and blood, but they don't take other Christian rituals literally?
For example, they don't believe baptism causes someone to be physically born again.
What would happen if we scientifically analyzed the bread and wine at the bottom of someone's stomach?
Thanks and love the show, Justin.
This is a good question.
Why is this different?
So Jesus says you have to be born again in the baptism.
But the context is important here because he speaks in genre, just like the Bible is in genre.
It's not all literal history.
It's not all poetry.
It's not all philosophy.
So at the At that time when he says you have to be born again, we don't see people being born again.
He doesn't say you have to come out through a womb again.
He makes it clear that he's speaking in a more symbolic way.
When he speaks in parables, we don't really believe there was a great man who had a banquet and he invited all the people and they couldn't come.
We don't really believe that.
He's speaking parabolically.
But the case of the transubstantiation is different.
And we know it's different because he tells us he's speaking differently here.
This is from John.
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, saying, Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, saying, Jews then disputed among themselves,
It goes on.
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, This is a hard saying.
Who can listen to it?
So Jesus responded, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, he said, There is so much built into this scene about how hard the saying is.
That clearly Christ is not saying, this is a symbol and it means whatever.
It's a saying that is very hard to understand.
It's so hard he tells us it's hard to understand.
They tell us, the people who heard it tell us it's hard to understand.
And then he goes on and says, I'm telling you guys, it's real flesh, it's real food, it's real blood.
Now, no one questioned the transubstantiation.
Until centuries, well over a millennium later, after the Protestant Revolution, Paul in 1 Corinthians wrote, quote, He says,
He clearly believed in the transubstantiation and the real presence in the bread and the wine.
St.
John Chrysostom wrote, We must not confine our attention to what the senses can experience but hold fast to his words.
His word cannot deceive.
This is what Christ told us.
He said, I know you don't understand what I'm saying but I'm telling you it's true and you're going to think it isn't true but it is true.
Chris Austin goes on, you may not doubt the truth of this.
You must rather accept the Savior's words in faith.
Since he is truth, he does not tell lies.
The other reason, there are many good arguments for the transubstantiation and not very good arguments against it.
Martin Luther makes great arguments for the real presence of the body and blood in the wafer.
But obviously, if you put it under a microscope, I don't know what you would find.
That isn't really the question that's being said.
This is why it's a hard saying.
But if you think about it more removed, the beauty of the transubstantiation, the beauty of the sacraments, is the beauty of Christ.
It reflects the beauty of Christ.
So at the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, the symbol and the symbolized, the poetry and the criticism were united.
And as a Civilization developed after the fall from Eden, as civilization moved on.
Those two became further and further away, the symbol and the symbolized, the physical and the metaphysical, and the poetry and the criticism.
As language evolves, we see that this happens.
This is what Owen Barfield wrote about in Poetic Diction.
It's what Edwin Bevan wrote about in Symbolism and Belief.
We have to understand the nature of those symbols.
Only in Christ, only in the incarnation, do we see this come full circle.
So the symbol and the symbolize, the poetry and the criticism, separate fully the metaphysical and the physical until we have the person of Christ, who is fully God and fully man, who unites those two.
And he gives us sacraments.
To live in that.
It's why the saying is so hard.
It's why he makes a point of doing it as his last action before he's put on the cross.
He is enshrining this heaven and earth touching one another, the metaphysics and the physics touching one another regularly for the believers.
And this is why St.
Paul has such joy when he talks about it and takes it so seriously and says that if you don't recognize this, you're eating your own condemnation.
There's much more to talk about the Eucharist, but we have to move on.
Next question, philosopher King Knowles.
The USCCB, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, recently published a letter in which they called the new tax plan, quote, unconscionable.
As a devout Catholic, I tend to look to my bishops to inform my politics, but I'm having trouble grasping their stance this time.
How can I, as a religious person, justify my support for the tax bill, despite church leadership condemning it?
Thanks.
Love the show, Zach.
So with regard to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, I was talking to a priest friend of mine, and he told me that he enjoyed my blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, very much.
And he was inspired to write his own called The Wisdom of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops.
I mean, no disrespect to the bishops, but when they weigh in on politics, sometimes they get a little wacky.
And we should...
Obviously have great reverence for the leaders of our church, especially when they're speaking on matters of the church and of theology and of doctrine.
And when they're weighing in on politics, they don't have any special political expertise.
They aren't granted special political knowledge or smarts.
And so I would read them on other topics before I would read them on politics, and I wouldn't get too worried about it.
Next question.
I am Christian and love the holiday season.
However, some of my Christian friends say it is going against scripture to put up a Christmas tree, referring to Jeremiah 10, because it's pagan.
Now, I've tried looking into this, but it seems there are good arguments on both sides.
Can you explain further and what you think about it?
I enjoy having a Christmas tree, however, at the same time, I don't want to do something that's unpleasing to God.
Please help.
As you might be able to intuit, especially if you watched the show yesterday, I really like Christmas trees and lights and holly and definitely mistletoe, you know.
But...
I understand this argument.
This comes from Jeremiah.
There's a line that says, quote, A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
They decorate it with silver and gold.
They fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move.
Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak.
So he seems to be describing a Christmas tree or a similar tradition.
And so we shouldn't do that, right?
He tells us not to do that.
We shouldn't do that.
The issue isn't the tree.
The issue isn't the fun little tradition at the holidays.
The issue is the idolatry.
The issue is what you invest in that tree.
So, for instance, in the Ten Commandments, God says to Moses, you shall not make a graven image.
Don't make any graven images of anything that is in heaven.
Don't make that image.
Because it's an idol.
And then about a paragraph later, he tells Moses to create statues of angels for the Ark of the Covenant, right?
He tells him, he said, don't make any graven images and by the way, create a work of art of a thing that's in heaven.
Why is this?
it's because of the difference between idolatry and a piece of art.
So if you bring in a Christmas tree because you're going to worship it and dance around it and ask all of the gods and demons to give you nice presents or something, don't do that.
That's probably displeasing to God.
But if it's a tradition and you aren't worshiping the tree, you aren't worshiping the graven image or the picture or the statue, it's there as a reminder, as a piece of art that inspires you to look beyond a tree or beyond a piece of art toward heaven, toward God himself.
That's a wonderful thing.
And you don't need to worry about it, but I know that it can be scary and confusing when you see something that basically says, don't have a Christmas tree, and you have to figure out, well, what do they mean by this?
The essence of it is in what you're worshiping, what the culture is looking to.
From Jake.
How many five-star reviews do I have to leave for Another Kingdom to get to have a stogie with you and Clavin?
Are you going to bring the stogies?
Like one?
I don't know.
None?
That's fine.
Speaking of Another Kingdom, Another Kingdom is doing very well on iTunes.
We're shocked, as Hollywood is figuratively and literally burning to the ground, somehow my podcast with Andrew Clavin, Another Kingdom, has shot to the top and gotten 1,200 or 1,300 reviews.
Please, please go over there and leave a review and tell your friends that.
And send it around.
It really helps us.
We're pitching this now to very big people in television out here.
It really helps.
It would be a great joy to look around the smoldering of Hollywood, figuratively I'm speaking, of course, and to have some conservatives get a show out of it.
So please go over there.
Another Kingdom by Andrew Klavan performed by me.
That's our show.
That's the whole show.
Go on, troops.
March forward in the war on Christmas.
I am Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you on Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
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