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Feb. 11, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
37:23
Ep. 195 - Sex Abuse Crisis In The Southern Baptist Church

Today on the show, a new report reveals the horrifying extent of the sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist church. We’ll discuss. Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to backpedal and invent excuses for some of the insane stuff in her Green New Deal proposal, but the excuses are pathetic and dishonest. Date: 02-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, a sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Church.
We will discuss all the details on this latest and horrifying report of sex abuse in the church.
Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to backpedal and come up with excuses for her, for some of the insane stuff that was in the Green New Deal proposal that she unveiled on Thursday.
But the excuses are pathetic and dishonest.
So we'll get to the bottom of that today as well on the Matt Wall Show.
Thanks for being here everybody.
Thanks for watching.
I hope you had a great weekend.
Remember, if you want to get the whole show, to subscribe on iTunes or become a premium member of The Daily Wire.
And that way, if you're watching on Facebook, you only get 15 minutes.
If you want the whole thing, you can do that on iTunes or on The Daily Wire.
The Grammys were last night.
I just wanted to briefly mention it.
I only know that they happened because the Daily Beast sent out a tweet outraged that the wrong race had won Album of the Year.
So the tweet said, the Grammys were a glorious confounding mess, but worst of all is how a black person still hasn't won Album of the Year in over a decade.
Now, I read that and I thought, Wait a second, I don't pay attention to this stuff very closely, but I'm pretty sure minorities and women win the big Grammy Awards all the time.
I mean, that's just my general impression.
So, is there really a diversity problem with the Grammys?
So, I went and looked it up just out of curiosity, and first of all, a black man won Song of the Year this year, which is a big award, but apparently that doesn't count.
A Puerto Rican man won Album of the Year last year.
Three black men or groups have won over the last 15 years.
Women artists have won seven times over that time span.
White men have only won four times.
So is that really not enough diversity?
I mean, you're still finding a reason to... Is that not... What exactly is the... What percentage do we have in mind?
Like, what are we supposed to hit?
Is that not good enough?
By the way, whoever wrote this article for The Beast, I just want you to think about the process here, okay?
They, so they saw that a white person, so a white woman won this year.
A country artist, I think.
So they saw that a white person won and they thought, okay, how can I turn this into a race thing?
We've got a white person winning an award.
Obviously there's a race issue.
How can I do this?
So then they thought, let me go check and see how long it's been since a minority won album of the year.
And then they went and they checked and they saw that, oh, wait a second, a Puerto Rican guy won last year.
So maybe the, And then they would have seen that, oh, black people have won three times over the last 15 years.
And rather than just say, OK, never mind, I guess there's no issue here.
Not a big deal.
OK, actually, there's a lot of diversity.
No, instead, they decided to structure their complaint in such a way as to get around those facts.
So rather than complaining about a lack of minorities winning, they singled it out to black people in particular, and rather than complaining about the last 15 or 20 years, they chose arbitrarily the last 10 years.
And if a black person had won, say, nine years ago, they would have said, well, there hasn't been a black person winning in the last eight years.
So they just, whatever it is they're looking for, this is basically how the identity politics sausage is made, and it's pretty It's pretty annoying to see.
All right.
I want to talk about something else.
Something much more important.
The Houston Chronicle published a report over the weekend about widespread sex abuse.
in the Southern Baptist Church.
The story and the details are eerily familiar to anyone who has followed the scandals in the Catholic Church, which I have very closely, as I think you know.
So let me read now a little bit from the Huffington Post article on this.
It says, according to the three-part investigation, the first installment of which was published on Sunday, about 300 380 Southern Baptist pastors, ministers, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct since 1998.
More than 200 of them have been convicted or took plea deals, the newspaper reported.
Nearly 100 are currently in prisons across the nation.
The victims of the accused number more than 700, the report said.
They include teenagers and children, some as young as three, who were molested or raped inside pastor's studies and Sunday school classrooms.
Many victims said their stories of abuse were ignored or silenced by church leaders.
One victim, who alleged she was raped and impregnated by her pastor when she was a teen, said her church leaders had urged her to get an abortion.
When she refused, they threatened her and her child, she said.
Dozens of pastors, employees, and volunteers were reportedly allowed to return to work in Southern Baptist churches despite being dogged by sexual abuse allegations.
Let me give you some more, just some sort of bullet points.
This is now from the Houston Chronicle, which, as I said, they had the original report about this.
It says, at least 35 church pastors, employees, and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades.
In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.
Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit.
Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston non-profit that works with the student organizations, according to federal records.
The name of this non-profit is Touching the Future Today, Incorporated.
Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors.
Some victims, as young as three, were molested or raped inside pastor's studies and Sunday school classrooms.
A few were adults, women and men, who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.
Okay, now keep something in mind here.
When you have a widespread scandal like this, and you have efforts to silence victims, which is what is happening here, and which is what always happens in these kinds of cases, you can be sure that there are going to be more victims, a lot more victims, than initial reports indicate.
Okay?
Because only the victims who were not successfully silenced are counted.
But any victim who was successfully terrorized or intimidated or humiliated or shamed into keeping quiet will not be counted in the statistics.
Now, if the Catholic Church scandals have taught us anything, it is that.
In fact, Catholic Church scandals have taught or shown us quite a bit.
Speaking of which, You know, anyone who's followed me for any amount of time knows that I have been very, very, very, very vocal about sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
I have written thousands of words about it.
I have spoken at rallies denouncing bishops for their inaction.
I've called as much attention as possible to this issue.
I have spoken in the harshest imaginable terms about the guilty parties and those who aid and abet the guilty parties.
I've called out the Pope, the bishops, the cardinals, everyone, okay?
Now, I only point that out so that you understand, and as I said, if you've been following me for a while, you already know this, that I am not someone who's looking to deflect from the Catholic scandal, who's looking to ignore it.
No, I want to call attention to it.
In fact, I reached a point where people were complaining to me and saying, will you stop talking about this issue?
It's like all you talk about, you know.
I went through a period of like a month where I felt like I was writing about it every day.
But I thought I needed to, because this can't be ignored and it needs to be exposed.
So I'm not someone looking to deflect or change the subject, you know, whataboutism, nothing like that.
I'm not looking to do that.
So, when I point to what's happening now in the Baptist Church, that's not my point.
My point is, I don't want those in the Southern Baptist Church to make the same mistake that Catholics made for so long, which was to be in denial, to insist that it's not so bad, to claim that anyone pointing to the problem must just be anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, they must just have a grudge, whatever.
I don't want to see those same mistakes made, and it looks like they are being made.
And not just in the Baptist church, by the way.
As I've mentioned in the past, this is not just a Catholic problem.
It's not just a Baptist problem.
This is a problem in the Christian church.
This is a Christian problem.
The three largest insurance companies who insure many of the Protestant churches in the U.S.
have reported that there are about 260 sex abuse claims made against Protestant church leaders every year in this country.
And it's been going on at that rate for years.
So, not Catholic, not Baptist, not Protestant.
This is a problem in the church, in Christianity.
Now, it's obviously not just a Christian problem either.
It's a sin problem.
It's a society problem.
It is a human nature problem.
It is a we're-a-fallen-species problem.
All that is true.
Yes, there's a sex abuse crisis in the public school, in the universities, in Hollywood, in the media, even in our doctor's offices.
There's a big problem there, too.
But the churches should be an exception to that.
Now, I'm not saying that churches should be a place where only perfect people go, because if they were only for perfect people, then nobody would ever go to church, right?
But there's a pretty wide gap between perfect person and sex predator, okay?
There's a pretty wide chasm, and there's a lot of room in between.
Churches should be a place where you can go and be safe and be away from all of that.
And so it's not good enough.
Yeah, we can look around and see, oh, every single institution where there are adults and children, it looks like there's a sex abuse epidemic.
And that's true.
But we can't use that to deflect and say, well, you know, it's happening with everyone.
I mean, it's just, it's unavoidable.
The churches should be different, but they aren't.
And no denomination is exempt, not one.
You know, I tell you, I was pretty troubled yesterday.
I sent out a tweet yesterday calling attention to this issue.
Because this report just came out over the weekend.
And I think it's something we all need to look at.
And here's the tweet I sent out.
I said, a new report finds that over 300 Southern Baptist church leaders have been accused of sexual misconduct since 1998.
To put that in perspective, the Catholic sex scandal in Pennsylvania implicated 300 Catholic clergy over a period of 70 years.
My point here was obvious, I thought.
Yes, Pennsylvania is a smaller area, fewer churches, but that scandal stretched back 70 years.
Most of the cases were from decades ago.
Many of the predators are now dead.
The issue in the Southern Baptist Church is more recent, more immediate, which isn't to say that it's worse.
This is not a competition for God's sake.
I was simply trying to highlight the urgency and the immediacy of the problem in the SBC.
And the point is, people were viscerally outraged, instinctively outraged, about the Pennsylvania scandal.
And rightly so.
The fact that a lot of it was old, that a lot of it was from years ago, that didn't stop anyone from being extremely angry and demanding action.
And it shouldn't have stopped them, and it didn't stop me.
And so what I'm hoping is that that same kind of visceral reaction, the same level of anger and outrage and calls for change will arise also over this issue in the SPC.
That's what I'm hoping.
That's what I think should happen.
Because if you wanted to, when you looked at what happened in Pennsylvania, it was a huge story.
Everyone was talking about it.
Christians all across the spectrum were outraged.
If you wanted to, you know, if you want to find a way to really split hairs and actually look at what was being reported and you wanted to find ways to diminish the severity or, you know, deflect, you could have because you could have said, well, most of these are, you know, they've already put things up, but most of this stuff is from, you know, we're talking about a lot of these cases happened 40 years ago and blah, blah, blah.
You could have done that.
And there were some Catholics who did try to do that.
But most people didn't.
Most people said, yeah, you know what, but who cares?
Okay.
The fact is this is a problem.
It's an epidemic.
Even if something happened 40 years ago, it still happened.
It shouldn't have.
So there needs to be, there needs to be accountability.
And so the same thing should happen here.
The problem is, you know, the tweet that I sent out, it did engender a lot of outrage, but at me.
Lots of people took the time to lecture me on my inappropriate comparison, and to scold me for my wording, and to insist that, no, the Catholic thing is so much worse, and let's still talk about that, how dare I compare them, etc., etc.
You know, a lot of people were getting mad at me about a tweet I sent out.
And so just out of curiosity, some of them, I went to their pages to check to see if they had tweeted anything about the SPC scandal at all, aside from just lecturing me about the way in which I called attention to it.
And what I found, of course, is that a lot of people who were taking time out of their day to lecture one guy for the manner in which he called attention to this crisis had not themselves taken any time to call attention to it themselves.
And this is something I've found You know, not just yesterday, but anytime I've tried to call attention to the sex abuse problem in other churches, I have found that a lot of people are very resistant to it.
They don't want to hear it.
They want to think that it's just a Catholic thing.
You know, my church is different.
No, it's different here.
That's not the same.
It's different.
We're different.
Today I posted a link to the Houston Chronicle article with a, you know, this time just a link with a simple caption saying, this is the tip of the iceberg.
You know, there's, so just keep that in mind.
That's all I said.
Here are some of the responses I received.
Did you make a similar comment after the Catholic scandals emerged?
I know you're embarrassed about the Catholic Church's decades of abuse, including thousands of innocent children, but to point to another denomination and saying, hey, look guys, we're not the only ones that like raping little boys is pretty sad.
Clean up your own house first.
You should pipe down!
This humbling moment for American Protestants could bring Catholics and Protestants closer together, and possibly even help end anti-Catholic bigotry, unless Catholics like you continue doing whataboutism.
I'm neither Baptist nor Catholic, but seriously, what's your point, Matt?
Whether it's one or one billion doesn't matter.
Sin is sin.
Okay, Matt, what's the next move, then?
What are you suggesting with these tweets?
Shut down SPC?
End Christianity?
I don't understand the direction you're heading with these tweets.
Do you understand why SB leaders declined to act?
They don't have any authority to act on this.
Each church is governed by its congregation.
Headquarters mostly direct creation of event content.
Could you drop the subject already?
Don't be silly.
They are human like any other group.
They're going to have problems like any other group.
Are you biased against a Baptist church for some reason?
Excuse-making, deflecting, pipe down, don't talk about this.
No, let's talk about that over there instead, not this.
No, this is different.
This is why it's different.
Oh, no, they didn't have any choice.
They had to hire the predators.
What were they supposed to do?
There's nothing else they could do.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
People are cowards.
I mean, this is just, you know how pathetic that is?
That I could post an article to, hey guys, look at this crisis going on, and those are the responses?
Don't talk about this?
Pipe down?
You're biased against Baptists?
People don't want to face it.
They don't want to think that these things could be happening close to home.
It's the same reason why no one wants to hear about the sex abuse crisis in the public school.
I've talked about this many times.
I mentioned recently how, you know, I wrote an article A few months ago, about the sex abuse crisis at public school.
Because that's a problem, I would think.
Tens of millions of kids are in that system.
And thousands of them are being sexually abused, according to every statistic you'll find.
It's a problem.
Huge problem.
Epidemic.
Crisis.
Tried to write an article about it, and a lot of the responses were, why are you talking about this?
Let's talk about the Catholic Church instead.
Why are you trying to deflect?
No, it's not the same.
Oh, you're exaggerating.
No, no, no.
We've got to be better than this in the church, in the Christian church.
We've got to be better than this.
And if we continue having this attitude, nothing will ever get better.
And like I said, in the Catholic Church, this is the attitude that a lot of Catholics had in the beginning.
You know, these scandals first erupted back in the early 2000s, back, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, or whenever it was.
And I was a kid back then, but I remember I remember how a lot of Catholics reacted to it, and they were pretty defensive, and it took a while.
Now, you're not going to find that now.
Most Catholics you come across are not so defensive about it anymore, and they're going to be the first ones to bring up this problem and to demand change.
But it did take a while to get to that point.
But that is inexcusable and cowardly.
And now we're seeing the same thing with this.
All right.
Let's check in briefly with the saga of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal.
You remember last week when the proposal, the plan was released and we had a glorious time making fun of it.
The thing was just so fantastically insane that it almost had a certain charm to it.
You know, it was kind of cute in a way.
It's like when my two-year-old The other day, my two-year-old came up to me to present me with a gift of pocket lint.
And he said, here, Daddy, for you.
And so I took the pocket lint, and I said, oh, wow, thanks.
This is great.
And then I threw it away as soon as he turned his back, right?
And so you were tempted to do the same thing with the Green New Deal, because there was something almost adorable about it, that it was just so Childish.
And so you were almost tempted to say, oh, wow, really good.
Good job.
Nice, nicely done.
And then, you know, just chuck it in the bin.
But then you realize that the people who came up with this deal are actually adults in Congress proposing this thing in a serious way.
And then once you realize that, suddenly the whole situation becomes quite a lot darker.
So the nuttiest part of the plan was this FAQ, Frequently Asked Question, sheet that was published by Cortez's congressional office.
And it contained all the stuff about giving money to people who are, quote, unwilling to work.
And it had stuff about farting cows, getting rid of farting cows, and so on.
So then, mysteriously, on Friday, the FAQ sheet was gone from the website.
Taken down.
And Cortez and her people started claiming that it had been doctored by Republicans.
That this was some sort of conspiracy and Republicans had managed to doctor the document and somehow post it on their website.
That's what they originally claimed anyway, which of course was insane and people were making fun of that.
So then they backpedaled and they said, oh, no, no, no, that was our proposal, but it was a draft proposal, not the real one.
And somehow it ended up online by mistake.
But there are still some problems here.
Problems remain, even if it was just a draft proposal.
First of all, the rest of the plan is still insane, even without the farting cows and the income for people who aren't willing to work.
It's still insane.
Second, this rough draft excuse.
That just means that if this is a rough draft, then it gives us a look at what they really have in mind and what they really want to do.
So in many ways, if it was a rough draft, which I don't believe for a minute, by the way, that it really was.
I think they're just lying to cover their butts here.
I think they put this thing out in all seriousness, and people just—it got such a reaction, and everyone was just laughing at it, which is really the last thing that you want, right?
When you put out a legislative proposal, if people disagree with it or are angry about it, okay, that's one thing.
But if people are just laughing hysterically at the proposal, well, then you know that's a problem.
So I think that happened, and then they just took it down, and now they're lying to try to find a way around it.
But even if it were true, okay, even if this was a rough draft, then it's actually worse in some ways.
Because it would mean that they unintentionally revealed their true plans and actually showed us, they actually showed us the difference between how they present the plan to the public, or how they meant, how they wanted to present it to the public, versus what they actually want to do.
Which doesn't make them or the plan look any better.
So if you're hearing that, oh, what everyone was freaking out about, it's a rough draft, don't worry about it.
No, you should still be worried about it.
That doesn't change anything.
All right, before we wrap up, I want to look at a few emails.
Check the inbox.
If you want to send a message, email to the show, you can do that at mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
All right, this is from Josh.
He says, Matt, I recently got into a debate with an atheist about how God doesn't exist because if we do not believe in God or Jesus, we cannot make it into heaven.
He proceeded to cite the Bible by saying in John 14 6, no one can come to heaven but through Jesus.
His proof then that God does not exist is what about people who never heard about Jesus?
Native Americans, Aztecs, etc.
Being damned to hell for eternity because they were never given the moral compass that is Christianity.
And how can God damn people to hell without hearing the word of God?
I tried to explain that 1.
He was not there among those natives who he is referencing.
How can he know they were never given the moral compass?
2.
Western civilization is founded on Christianity and is more successful than any other civilization ever conceived, including natives and Aztec civilizations.
I didn't feel satisfied with the explanation I gave him.
What rebuttals do you have after hearing his argument?
Thanks.
Love your show.
Okay.
Hi, Josh.
Thanks for the message.
I'd say a few things to your atheist friend.
Your second point about the success of Western civilization is true, but that really doesn't have any bearing on whether or not God exists, right?
But also, this isn't really an argument about the existence of God.
Your friend is not making an argument that has anything to do with the existence of God.
Because even if he were right, and it's unfair or unjust or whatever for people who've never heard of Jesus to go to hell, that would do nothing to disprove God.
You know, maybe if he were right about that, that does nothing, does nothing at all about the existence of God.
So it's got nothing to do with the subject.
But I think the more important point here is that no serious or thoughtful Christian ...believes that all of the millions or billions of people who existed and died in parts of the world where the gospel never reached automatically went to hell.
A serious or thoughtful Christian is not going to make that declaration.
As if they know.
Right?
Now, you may have unserious and unthoughtful Christians who will say stuff like that, but I think your atheist friend has a responsibility to engage with the serious Christian arguments.
Not the unserious ones, because that's called a straw man, otherwise.
Now, the gospel didn't make it to this hemisphere until 1400 years after Christ.
And it took another several hundred years before it had reached every corner of this part of the world.
And it absolutely is not a Christian teaching that all of those people went to hell for all eternity.
Because they didn't hear something that they never had a chance to hear.
Now, Scripture teaches us that no one goes to heaven but through Christ, which means that Christ decides.
He calls himself the doorway.
He's the door.
He decides who the gates of heaven will be open to and who not.
He separates the sheep from the goats.
So, are we going to sit here and say that Christ cannot, is not allowed to, doesn't have the power to admit someone who didn't fully know him in life into heaven?
Are we going to say that Christ can't put such a person with the sheep?
No, I certainly won't say that, and that's not the traditional Christian teaching, and most Christians won't say that.
Third thing, people are judged based on the information available to them, okay?
So, what that means is, yeah, if nobody ever told you about Jesus, and you weren't there to see it for yourself, then there's no way you could possibly know, unless he appears to you, but, you know, it's in some sort of vision, but outside of that, which would also be, you know, in that case, you're still being told about it.
So, if nobody tells you about it, then you're not going to know.
But everybody has a conscience.
Everyone knows basic right from wrong.
And this is called natural law.
This is the natural law that God has written on our hearts.
So that even an Aztec could follow this law, could live by it, even if they don't know fully what they're doing or who they're obeying, they still have it there in their heart.
So while a person can't be blamed for not believing in Christ if Christ has never been presented to them, They can be blamed for committing objective acts of evil, because they did know better.
They are without excuse, as far as that goes.
And as proof of this fact, just look at any civilization that's ever existed on Earth.
It is a remarkable fact that they all have the same fundamental kinds of laws, all of them.
Okay, they all outlaw murder, they outlaw rape, they outlaw theft.
They, as a society, they encourage heroism, they encourage courage, generosity, virtue.
Every society is like this.
Now, you might say, well, what about the Nazis?
Or what about those Aztecs who were committing human sacrifices on such an enormous scale?
Well, yes, that's true.
But murder wasn't legal in Nazi Germany.
Neither was it legal in the Aztec Empire.
No, it's just that it wasn't considered murder to kill a Jew or to commit a human sacrifice.
Now, does that make it okay?
Of course not.
Was it still murder?
Obviously.
They might not have called it murder.
They might have tried to pretend that it wasn't, but it still was, objectively speaking.
My point is only that the Nazis, even the Nazis, as depraved and evil as they were, they still felt the need to kind of work around this natural law that was on even their hearts.
So even they weren't going to come out and say, yeah, you know what?
Murder is fine.
Do what you want.
Instead, they tried to rationalize that murder wasn't murder.
We do the same thing with abortion.
Murder is illegal in this country, but you can still kill babies.
But isn't killing babies murder?
Yes, it absolutely is.
But the people who do it feel the need still.
No one is going to come out and say, yeah, you know what?
Let's murder babies.
Fine.
Murder is fine.
No, they're conscious because they have a conscience.
They recognize at some level that it's wrong.
And so they feel the need to kind of rationalize, work around it.
And the rationalizations are crazy.
But the fact that they feel the need to make those rationalizations at all really tells you something.
So, ironically, you know, the Holocaust and abortion, they really only prove the existence of the moral law, the natural law, because even the propagators of those kinds of evil still felt the need to work around it.
And if there was no such law, if there was no natural law, if there was no fundamental moral truth, Which, by the way, also proves the existence of God.
Because what is that moral truth grounded in?
Where does it come from?
And if it was really totally based on society, it was completely arbitrary, completely subjective, then when you look around the world, especially when you go back 500 years, and you find that the two hemispheres were separated, and there was no contact between them, or hardly any contact, what you should find is vastly different I mean, you should find civilizations where murder was okay.
Rape was fine.
It was explicitly fine.
But you don't find that.
Which is pretty incredible when you think about it.
So that's what I would say to your friend.
All right, from Daniel, he says, Dear Matt Walsh, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for what you do in your daily podcast.
I'm a Christian who has often been impressed by the genuine thoughtfulness and insight on your daily show.
I'm just reading this to compliment myself, I guess.
Sorry about that.
You recently recommended reading The Problem of Pain by C.S.
Lewis.
Being that C.S.
Lewis is one of my favorite authors, I gladly picked up the book.
I enjoyed following Lewis's reasoning throughout the book, and especially found my thinking shifting on how I look at God, in that He is the Creator, and I am the created object desperately in need of Him.
I am a mechanical engineer working at a firm which designs power plants.
What I am daily struck by is the pretentiousness of those I work with.
I am unsure of how often you've been around engineers, but they like to act as if they have the whole world figured out.
Speaking as a professional engineer myself, I can assure you that the engineers truly do not know everything.
Being a conservative-minded Christian in the workplace, I have found that I am treated as ignorant when bringing up anything dealing with God or politics.
This is frustrating and disappointing, in that my faith is not a blind faith, but rather a reasonable faith.
However, even when presenting a perfectly reasoned, thorough argument, it is quickly dismissed as brutish and uneducated.
Encountering this on an almost daily basis, I am reminded of Psalm 119, I have more understanding than all my teachers, for thy testimonies are my meditation.
I understand that the only way to truly know the world around us is to understand and know God.
However, since my co-workers refuse to know God, they quickly dismiss and deride views that do not line up with their narrowly constructed and logically inconsistent mindsets.
I want to thank you for exposing and seeking truth and to let you know that you are a daily encouragement to me.
Well, thank you, Daniel, for that, and we certainly need Christians like you who are in those environments, as hostile as they might be to your faith, but I appreciate your courage in any case.
All right, let's see, we'll read one more.
I wanted to get to this one.
Okay, this is from Alana.
She says, Alana, Elena, I think.
She says, Hi Matt, you raised a question on Twitter a while ago about what would happen if we split a brain in two and transplanted it into different bodies.
I've been thinking about it ever since.
Fascinating question, but you never gave your own answer.
So what do you think would happen?
Okay, so this requires some explanation.
I raised a question a while ago on Twitter.
It's a question originally posed by a philosopher whose name I cannot remember at the moment.
But the idea is to kind of get at the nature of consciousness and to understand consciousness.
And so it goes like this.
We know that a person can survive with half a brain.
We also know about the split brain phenomenon, where something goes wrong in the brain and essentially the two sides disconnect from each other, and then you end up with a literal split personality, almost like two sides of a personality that don't recognize or even know about each other, because the two halves work independently of each other.
So we know about those cases.
We also know, theoretically, that it will probably one day be possible to perform a brain transplant.
Taking a brain out of one body, putting it into another.
We're a long way from that, but hypothetically, theoretically, it could be possible.
So here's the question.
What if you were to take half of my brain and transplant it into someone else's head?
Where would I be?
Where did my consciousness go?
My identity?
Where am I?
Am I now in two places?
So that's the thought experiment.
Yes, I know I've opened myself up to jokes about how I only have half a brain to begin with, so I don't have much to spare.
I get that.
But once you've gotten those jokes out of your system, what's the answer to the thought experiment?
Now, I'm not exactly sure how to answer it.
I would have to say, this is why I posed the question and didn't answer it, because I don't have one.
I would have to say, I would have to assume that, well, this is kind of a cop-out answer, but I guess the answer is that It just couldn't ever be possible to do that.
Even if it's theoretically, medically, scientifically possible, it wouldn't actually be possible.
Because it's not possible to split a person's soul in two.
And we know that in this life on earth, our soul is somehow inextricably linked with our brains.
Now, we don't understand that relationship exactly.
The mind, the soul, whatever you want to call it, the soul and the mind, the soul and the brain are not just dualities but also a harmony.
So we know that.
We know the soul is immutable, you know, indissoluble, cannot be cut in half.
So, I would have to say that God would not allow something like that to work.
I guess another way of putting it is that this is something that even if it were physically possible, it's not metaphysically possible, and so it just couldn't happen, which is a totally lame answer.
But that's all I got.
If anyone has an answer to that question, that doesn't require you to compromise on the idea of a soul, and yet is a better answer than mine, then I'd be interested to hear it.
All right.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, a new Democratic fresh face comes out as a blatant anti-Semite, AOC lies about her own Green New Deal, and Virginia settles into place.
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