Ep. 219 - Why Lowering The Voting Age Is A Terrible Idea
Today on the show, I predict who will be the Democratic nominee. And I'm not basing my prediction on polling or fundraising. We'll also ask and answer the question: should 16 year olds vote? Finally, I watched a classic of the Christian film genre: "God’s Not Dead." I found that it perfectly exemplified everything that’s wrong with the Christian film industry. I'll explain why. 03-18-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, I will predict who will be the Democratic nominee for 2020.
I'll put on my Nostradamus hat and try to predict it.
And we will ask and answer the question, should 16-year-olds vote?
Also, I finally watched a classic of the Christian film genre, God's Not Dead.
After many people recommended it to me, it was utter and total garbage, and it exemplified everything that's wrong with the Christian film industry, and I'll explain why all of that and other topics as well today on The Matt Wall Show.
OK, I'm not going to I'm not going to talk much about politics today, except to say, by the way, I hope you had a great weekend.
Nice to see you again.
OK, that's enough pleasantries.
I'm not going to talk much about politics, except to say that I think I can predict who is going to win the Democratic primary, the Democratic nomination for 2020.
And I make this prediction not based on any polling data or anything like that.
I'm not even basing it on any qualities of the candidate, but just based on the fact that this is the candidate that the other side, the Republicans, are obsessed with.
And that, of course, would be Beto O'Rourke.
As I pointed out many times, I think he's going to win the nomination because of this.
As I pointed out many times, and I'm sure I'll point out many more times in the future, this is the way it works now.
This is the pattern in modern politics.
Each side The stars of each side are chosen by the other side.
The other side becomes obsessed with one of their personalities, and then that person becomes an even more well-known and powerful figure because of it.
Basically made Donald Trump president by obsessing over him during the primaries.
He was the guy that got all the media attention, was getting all the attention from Republicans, from Democrats.
It was negative attention, but it was still attention.
And he became president.
The right turned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the biggest star in politics right now by obsessing over from day one.
Now, she's at the point now where we have to talk about her because she has all this influence and power.
So now it matters what she does and says.
But it wasn't like that at the beginning, when she was just some unknown person running for a congressional seat in New York.
But from the very beginning, when she first appeared on the scene, The right just latched on to her and wouldn't stop talking about it.
They did the same thing with David Hogg, turned him into this big household name.
And so it goes.
And now we're doing it again with Beto O'Rourke.
No other Democratic candidate provokes quite so much focus and attention and hand-wringing among conservatives, which gives O'Rourke a distinct advantage.
I mean, look at this tweet.
I think this is the moment, right?
This is the moment right here when I knew That O'Rourke was going to be the Democratic nominee.
It was when the GOP sent this tweet on Sunday.
Look at this.
So you've got, if you're listening on iTunes and you can't see it, you've got, it's a picture of Beto's mugshot from his DUI arrest 20 years ago, or whenever it was, with a little leprechaun hat.
Photoshopped onto his head and the caption says on this st.
Paddy's Day a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis o'rourke, please drink responsibly now First of all, it just shows you what What thick skin we of Irish descent have that we are never offended by this kind of thing.
But can you imagine pretty much any other nationality, if any other nationality were the butt of that kind of joke?
Like, can you imagine if that were a sombrero?
On Ocasio-Cortez's head.
And there was a little message about Happy Cinco de Mayo.
Can you imagine the nuclear reaction or something like that?
But you do it to Irish people and nobody cares.
Okay, that's not the point.
The point is just that O'Rourke has, for whatever reason, burrowed into the heads of many Republicans and he's living there.
And that means that he is the most talked about.
And these days, if you're the most talked about candidate, Well, that's pretty much all that's needed to win.
And, you know, this past weekend, Republicans were going on about how, you know, this bombshell news that O'Rourke, when he was a teenager, was part of a hacking group.
And they think that that's going to make people like him less.
But all you're telling is, OK, so he was a punk rock hacker in the 90s.
That just makes people think, oh, you know, you just made his cool points about double or triple with that.
It's just.
It's not working.
This obsessing over every little detail of him, it's not going to work and it's just going to make him even more powerful.
Okay, now let me step to the side for a moment.
A lot to talk about today, but I want to first mention Freedom Project Academy.
Look, I could be here all day complaining about public schools.
In fact, I have, as you know, spent entire shows complaining about public schools, and I don't regret that at all.
I have a good reason to.
Right now, there are 50 million kids in the system.
And the left is not trying to hide the fact.
They've made it very clear that their intention, obviously, is to indoctrinate the next generation into their ideology and to do it primarily, especially through the formative years of a child, primarily through the school system.
So, real-world skills like reading and writing and arithmetic and American history, well, who needs any of that, right?
Because now we've replaced that with social justice, gender confusion, test-driven regurgitation-type instruction in the classroom.
Thankfully, though, You do have a choice.
You have a real choice.
And that is why Freedom Project Academy was created.
Everyone seems to love choice, right?
We're all supposed to favor choice.
Well, here is an area where you ought to have choice, in the area of education.
You ought to have a choice about the kind of education.
That your child receives Freedom Project Academy is an accredited classical online school built on Judeo-Christian values for students in kindergarten through high school.
Freedom Project Academy has taken the interaction of the traditional classroom and it's created an online atmosphere where so it's kind of the best of both worlds where you've got the that instruction that you get in the live classroom, but you're also your online.
With live teachers in small classes who are going to teach students how to think, rather than just what to think, it's how to think.
This is about critical thinking skills.
That should be the objective with education.
So, go to freedomforschool.com and request a free information packet today.
That's freedomforschool.com.
Enroll by March 31st to take advantage of the best early bird discount.
So you have a couple of weeks left.
But go right now, and don't forget to subscribe to their weekly podcast, The Dr. Duke Show, available on iTunes and more.
Take back control of your kid's education.
Freedomforschool.com.
All right.
Nancy Pelosi had a press conference late last week, and here's an interesting exchange.
Listen to this.
Well, I disagree with the ACLU on this.
In terms of legislation, we couldn't be prouder than H.R.
1.
This is about reducing the role of big, dark, special interest money in politics and empowering small donors.
Ending voter suppression.
It's about making redistricting fair.
It's really a source of joy and hope to so many people in the country.
I myself, personally, I'm not speaking for my caucus.
I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 60.
I think it's really important to capture kids when they're in high school, when they're interested in all of this, when they're learning about government, to be able to vote.
So, she wants to capture kids in high school.
In other words, some of the priorities in this bill are about transparency and openness
and accessibility and the rest.
That's a subject of debate, but my view is that I would welcome that.
But I've been in that position for a long time.
So she wants to capture kids in high school.
Capture.
What an apt word choice.
And notice the gesture she made while she said, so we got to capture them, capture them.
She made this gesture like she wanted to grab them by the throat and drag them into the polling booth, which I'm sure she would do if we let her do it.
This is an idea that is becoming increasingly popular among Democrats.
A Democrat, as was being alluded to in the clip I just played, a Democrat proposed an amendment to the bill that Pelosi was talking about, an amendment that would allow 16-year-olds to vote, would lower the voting age to 16, and it was 120-some Democrats Signed on to the idea.
So this is something that I suspect, as time goes on, will become even more popular among Democrats.
Why?
Why would a Democrat want 16-year-olds to vote?
Well, obviously, because 16-year-olds are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.
But what does that tell you, right?
What does that tell you about the Democrat Party?
That they're saying, well, we got to get in and capture them while they're young.
Because if we wait too long, you know, by the time they grow up and get a little bit older, they might not be Democrats anymore.
So what does that tell you about the about the leftist ideology and what the Democrats are pushing?
That a person is much more likely to support it when they're 16 than they are when they're like 36.
And they have a family and they've lived, uh, you know, they've, they've lived a little bit and they've had some experience and they've grown and gotten wiser.
They're less likely to support it.
Uh, well, you know what it tells you that, uh, leftist ideology is among other things, um, silly and, uh, childish and ridiculous.
So what about allowing 16 year olds?
Because, because, you know, although that's the case, I also don't think, I think it's of course ethically wrong to support expanding the voting age just because you think it will help your political party, which is what all these Democrats are doing.
But at the same time, it would also be ethically wrong to oppose expanding the voting age just because you think it will hurt.
Your favorite political party, you got to have a better reason than that.
And I think we do have a pretty good reason for not wanting 16 year olds to vote.
And that is, well, first of all, 16 year olds have no It's not just that they haven't lived very long and they don't have that experience and that wisdom.
They have no responsibility, okay?
They don't have any skin in the game.
Almost every 16-year-old is still going to be living at home with their parents.
Most of them don't have jobs.
Hardly any of them are going to have full-time jobs.
They're not paying bills.
They're just living at home.
And see, the idea with voting is it's supposed to be people who actually have skin in the game and have something to lose.
And so they're going in and they get a voice.
But when you give a voice to people who have really nothing to lose, because they're not really paying any taxes, they have no responsibilities, most of the laws that are passed don't really affect them directly, Well, that's a big problem.
And of course, you could point out that, well, yeah, but a lot of 18 year olds don't have any skin in the game and are still living in a lot of 23 year olds.
Well, yeah, that's true.
Which is why if we're going to do anything with the voting age, we should be moving it back some.
The idea originally with voting was the idea that our founders had was, well, we're going to let landowners vote.
Because these are the people who are really contributing, and these are the people who are gonna be most affected by the laws.
Now, obviously, that had the not-unintentional effect of disenfranchising all black people, all women, at that time, which, of course, was wrong.
But now, we don't discriminate in the voting booth based on gender or race, which is great.
So now, no matter what your race is, no matter what your gender is, you can vote.
So we're all on the same page there.
But I think that means we can go back now and sort of and look at some of those ideas and maybe adopt a few of them.
Now that we've taken the racist and sexist angles out of it, so that's great.
But is there something to be said for the idea of only letting people vote if they are contributing members of society?
Well, there's nothing to be said for it if you have entire races and genders who are not allowed to contribute to the site.
But as long as everyone's allowed to contribute, then I think we could say, well, if you're not a contributing member, maybe you shouldn't be voting.
And especially at 60, like when you, here's the thing about 16.
When you reach 16, that is when you first, when you really start to enter into what I would call peak dumb phase.
That is when you start to enter into your phase, especially if you're a guy, where you are going to be your dumbest and most reckless self.
And you're going to stay at that phase.
In fact, you're going to keep climbing for a little bit and you'll hit really the zenith, probably around these days, maybe 22 or 23.
And then you'll start a very slow descent into maturity.
Um, but I think the idea is probably it's, it's best to keep people out of the voting booth for as long as possible while they're in that phase.
Although I will say this, although I think it's crazy to allow 16 year olds to vote, I would be okay with it.
I would support it.
Um, I would support allowing 16 year olds to vote.
And in fact, I would say, let's even, we could even lower the voting age to 12 for all, we can lower it to seven for all I care if All voters were required, as I have suggested in the past, if all voters were required to take a simple civics test, just confirming that they have a basic rudimentary understanding and knowledge of the system in which they are participating.
If we required everyone of all ages to take that test in order to vote, then I would say fine.
You know what?
We don't even need a voting age.
If you've got a toddler who can pass that test, then absolutely let them vote.
I'd rather have that toddler voting than the majority of 40 year olds who vote these days.
So if we wanted to go that route, I'd be all for it.
But of course, of course, we're not.
So it's a terrible idea.
All right.
Here's something else I wanted to talk about, taking a step back from politics or anything like that.
I have been I have been known to criticize Christian films.
Generally, I find the offerings of the faith-based genre to be exploitative, emotionally manipulative, shallow, theologically suspect, and embarrassing on a number of levels.
The bad acting and the bad writing would be perhaps a surmountable problem if it were actually true that, as people sometimes claim, the people who make these movies have their hearts in the right place.
You know, it's well-intentioned.
But I think in many cases, the thing that really bothers me about the Christian entertainment is that I don't think it's well-intentioned, and I don't think the people who make these things do have their hearts in the right place, unless the right place is their wallet, because I think that's what they're focused on.
There's a lot of money to be made in Christian entertainment, because it caters to an audience that will consume literally anything that carries the Jesus tag.
Um, there is a, there's a, a, a large audience.
There are millions of people out there who they have no standards, no artistic standards whatsoever.
Um, no standards in terms of quality.
If, but if it's, if it, if it is faith based, if it's Christian, uh, I'm doing the scare quotes way too much.
I gotta, I gotta just, well, I'll put the scare, just, you can do the scare quotes in your mind.
Every time I use the phrase Christian entertainment from here on out.
But there are people that, as long as it has that tag on it, they will consume it.
Which means that it's a very profitable industry to be in, because there's no need to spend money and time producing something with emotional, intellectual depth, theological insight, artistic value, what have you.
You don't need to do that.
Just hit the right notes, repeat the right lines, pander in the right way, and you'll make millions of dollars.
I don't think this is a good state of affairs.
It isn't good for two reasons.
Number one, it makes Christians look shallow to the rest of the world.
And worse, it makes Christians actually become shallow because their religious and philosophical ideas are being shaped by the empty rhetoric they get from Christian movies and even a lot of Christian music.
Now, so I say all this, many Christians will agree with what I've said so far, for the most part, they'll agree.
But then they'll insist that, well, there are some good ones, right?
There are Christian movies that are actually good, that are high quality.
And generally the movies that tend to make it into the good ones category are movies like, well, The Passion of the Christ, which is not only good, but great.
The movie Risen, I Can Only Imagine, came out, you know, just last year.
The Case for Christ, a few others.
And, as I said, The Passion of the Christ is legitimately great.
The other ones, I've seen most of them.
They're pretty good.
They're decent.
Not great, but okay.
Another film that has often been suggested to me as a good ones candidate is the movie God's Not Dead.
Um, and there are now, I think, I think there are three films in the God's Not Dead cinematic universe, uh, as they, as they sort of pop up every spring around Easter time, like Dandelions.
Now, the original starring Kevin Sorbo came out in 2014, and it's been recommended to me periodically, and sometimes very enthusiastically over the last five years, with Christians insisting to me that it is actually one of the good ones, and I've even been told many times that it's an effective apologetic tool, is this movie.
So, finally, although I'm five years late, I decided to watch the movie over the weekend.
And it was much, much worse than I could have ever imagined.
It was possibly the most torturous thing that any Christian has ever contrived, at least since the Inquisition.
But God's Not Dead so perfectly encapsulates everything wrong
with Christian entertainment, with the Christian entertainment
industry, that at various points in the film, I really thought that maybe it was a parody.
Like, I really had to stop and think about, wait, is this real?
Is this?
This has got to be some kind of satire.
You could actually make a movie.
You could make that movie into a hilarious parody of Christian films, and you wouldn't
have to change a single scene or a single line of dialogue.
You just, it's.
If you wanted to make a parody of God's Not Dead, well, it would just be God's Not Dead.
It would just be that movie done over again.
And when I say it's bad, it's not just bad in the sense of being hokey, although it is that, or in the sense of being poorly scripted and poorly acted, although it is that as well.
But it's bad in the sense of being actively harmful, because it does so much insulting and demeaning and demonizing and exploiting, and it does it all beneath this Jesus-y veneer.
Which is what Christian movies very often do.
And so it's for that reason that although I'm five years late, I thought it might be worthwhile to examine just what makes this particular movie so malignant.
Because I think that this movie, as I said, kind of encapsulates everything that's wrong with Christian entertainment.
So, let me give you a quick review of this, if you haven't seen the movie.
Before I summarize the plot of God's Not Dead, I'll begin with a quick disclaimer.
That I'm not going to bother naming any of the characters in the film when I talk about it.
I won't give you their names.
And I won't bother giving them their names because the filmmakers didn't bother giving these characters anything in the way of personality or motivation or believable dialogue.
So they're all just caricatures.
They're archetypes.
You've got the earnest Christian student, the grumpy atheist professor, the ditzy secular girlfriend, the bratty liberal blogger, the wise pastor, the self-absorbed atheist lawyer, the fundamentalist Muslim father, all kinds of characters like that.
We also get a cameo appearance from cool black guy who, and I swear I'm not making this up, but there's a scene where you've got this black student who introduces himself as G-Dawg.
And I had to stop the movie on my computer at that moment and just collect myself and say, yeah, that really happened.
They actually put that scene into the movie.
The one black guy that appears in the movie and his name is G-Dawg.
And then there's also the slacker classmate in a ball cap who he just appears in one scene
But it was a great so one of my favorite scenes in the movie when the professor
on The first day of class the grumpy atheist professor comes
out and he gives us a little spiel about how it's going to be a tough
And he says, you know, this isn't just gonna be an easy A. You're gonna have to work hard in this class.
And then the slacker student goes, I'm not kidding, the slacker student goes, pfft, I'm outta here.
And he gets up and he leaves the classroom.
And then, they didn't show this part, but then I assume he skateboards down to the local park and spray paints school sucks on the half pipe.
They didn't show it, but I think we're supposed to fill in those blanks.
So, needless to say, every atheist in the film is selfish and miserable.
Every Christian is well-adjusted and generous and cheerful and nice.
There are no shades of gray in these characters whatsoever.
At one point, the atheist lawyer is at dinner with his bratty liberal blogger girlfriend, And she tells him that she has cancer.
And so the atheist lawyer, his response is, this couldn't wait till tomorrow?
And then he lectures her for ruining his day, and then he dumps her on the spot for getting cancer.
And you know what?
That was actually one of the subtler scenes in the film.
That was actually maybe the most nuanced scene in the entire movie, was that.
So the basic plot revolves around the struggle between earnest Christian student, ECS for short, and grumpy atheist professor, or J.P.
Gap.
So on the first day, Gap requires all students to write the phrase, God is dead, on a sheet of paper and sign it.
And they're supposed to do this, Gap explains, because God is lame and stupid and religion is dumb, and so that's why they have to do this.
So he gives this assignment and, of course, he passes out the paper.
All the students in the class are prepared to immediately sign this pledge, swearing off God for all time, except for an earnest Christian student.
He has a bit of a moral crisis and he takes a brave stand and says, I'm not going to sign the paper because I'm earnest and Christian.
And so grumpy atheist professor tells him that, OK, well, if you don't want to sign the paper, you don't have to.
But that means that you're going to have to prove that God exists or you'll fail the class.
This is all very realistic, right?
This is how it really goes.
I've never been to college, but I admit I didn't go to college myself.
Maybe this is how the classes actually work.
I don't know.
I tend to doubt it.
So he's given this assignment that he has to, over the next few weeks, prove that God exists or he'll fail the class.
So after researching the question and praying a bit and getting a little bit of a pep talk from the wise pastor character, he finally comes up with three arguments for the existence of God, which he presents in three separate scenes dispersed throughout the film.
He argues first that God exists because the universe had a beginning, Second, that God exists because of the diversity of life and the suddenness with which it came into existence.
And thirdly, he argues that God exists because without God there are no moral absolutes.
So, the first two arguments, as given, are among the weakest in the theistic arsenal, I think.
Yet, the atheist professor has no response for them whatsoever.
He is completely flummoxed by them.
He has no response.
He can't think of a single response.
When the Christian student says that the creation account in Genesis was vindicated by Big Bang Theory, the grumpy atheist professor somehow didn't think to observe that, well, yeah, but Genesis has the Earth pre-existing the universe, which is not a sequence of events that modern cosmology confirms.
Which I would say is a point that we as Christians can deal with, but it's not a point that the movie had any interest in dealing with whatsoever.
So instead, the atheist professor has no response except to just say, oh yeah, well Stephen Hawking is an atheist, and then he storms out of the room, and that's the end of that exchange.
So he makes the argument about the life coming onto the scene so quickly, and the atheist professor has no response to that except to quote the book of Job, and then to admit that he is only an atheist because his mom died of cancer, and he has no other responses.
Finally, the Christian student wins the argument and the day.
By shouting, well, he makes the moral argument.
It says, well, there are no moral absolutes.
Again, the atheist professor has no response to that.
Now, this is supposed to be a philosophy professor.
Who has no response for the moral argument for the existence of God, which is an argument that if you talk to Christians, it's a good argument, I think, Christian argument.
So, we bring it up all the time.
It's an argument that every atheist has a response to because they hear it so often.
Yet, this atheist had no response to it.
Finally, the Christian student wins the day by...
Shouting at his professor.
Why do you hate God?
He shouts it out.
I'm like three times and Finally the professor breaks.
It's supposed to be I guess the kind of a few good men scene Where the professor breaks down it admits that yes III know that God exists, but I hate him because he took my mother from me And then a few scenes later, the professor gets run over by a car on his way to a Christian rock concert and lies there in the rain with the wise pastor kneeling over him praying, and the atheist professor comes to Jesus in that moment with his dying breath.
And that's the end of the movie.
Remarkably, the movie leaves the strongest theistic arguments on the cutting room floor.
It never mentions the fine-tuning argument or the argument from consciousness, which I think are very strong.
The cosmological argument is given a very weak showing.
The argument about the origins of life is also framed in a very weak way.
And meanwhile, the atheist side was presented as being entirely bereft of any logical reasoning whatsoever.
It's presented as if atheists have no arguments at all on their side.
They have nothing.
The atheist professor even allowed the Christian student to neutralize the problem of suffering by bringing up free will, which free will is part of the answer.
But if an atheist brings up the problem of suffering to you and you say free will, well, what's their next move going to be?
They're going to say, okay, yeah, but what about cancer and earthquakes?
What does free will have to do with that?
And, but this atheist, this particular atheist, although he's a philosophy professor, never thought to bring up that point.
The student just brought up free will, and the professor said, okay, yep, well, you win that point.
This is a, there's one other scene I liked, I have to mention, the bratty liberal blogger Confronts one of the guys from Duck Dynasty who of course appears in the movie because obviously he's gonna appear in a movie like this and She she says she tells him that she's offended that he openly prays to Jesus so much
And then he has this very eloquent response ready for it.
But once again, yes, it's perfectly believable that a liberal blogger would confront someone from Duck Dynasty, but the liberal blogger isn't going to say, I'm offended that you pray to Jesus.
What she's going to say is she's going to bring up homophobia and accuse you of being homophobic.
And that's the tack that she's going to take.
But in this movie, she doesn't bring that up because every atheist in this movie always presents the weakest possible version of their argument and does so in the stupidest imaginable way.
So, what's the point of a movie like this?
It's not a good primer for Christian apologetics because it sets the best apologetic arguments to the side, and it also studiously avoids all of the intellectual and theological challenges for which a Christian might need to be prepared.
Now sure, if a liberal ever tells you that they're offended that you pray to Jesus, or if an atheist ever argues his case by shouting Stephen Hawking at you five times and then storming out of the room in tears, yeah, you'll be well prepared for that confrontation if you saw this movie.
But then again, you don't need to be equipped for a confrontation like that, because it's fictional, and that's not the way it goes in real life.
As for real discussions and real challenges, this movie has absolutely nothing to offer whatsoever.
So, what is the point?
What's a movie like this trying to achieve?
It's also not going to help you understand the other side, because in this film, the other side is exclusively populated by psychotic, brain-damaged narcissists with IQs of about 45.
So it's not going to help you with that, and it won't help you better understand the difficulties of living a Christian life, because Christians in this movie have no difficulties.
They're all happy, satisfied, smart, attractive, well-adjusted, well-spoken, supremely confident in their faith at all times, although everyone does seem to get cancer in the end.
But aside from that, Christians are just wonderful and amazing and awesome.
And if you think that's the way it is in reality, well, just take one step inside a real church in real life, and you will be disabused of that notion rather quickly.
Because Christians are also very flawed, troubled, broken people as well.
So then, what is the point, is the question.
As far as I can tell, this movie is basically spiritual pornography.
It exists first to turn a profit and second to make Christians feel good in the cheapest and most debasing manner possible.
You are meant to walk out of the movie not with wisdom or understanding or knowledge or information or edification, Or anything like that, but with an entirely empty satisfaction and with that sort of sick feeling of superiority that you always get when you set up a straw man and burn it to smithereens, which is all this movie does.
And it does so with such cynicism that I really hate it.
It's really just a garbage, trash, worthless, awful movie in every way.
And I really would encourage Christians to reject garbage like this.
Read Dostoevsky instead, okay?
The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky is a devout Russian Orthodox.
But in that movie, he makes his atheist character a brilliant, layered, tragic, nuanced, interesting figure who presents some of the most compelling arguments against God that you will ever read anywhere.
Some of the most compelling arguments against God you will ever read are in that book.
Which is a Christian book written by a Christian.
But he confronts the hardest arguments that an atheist can possibly present.
And he faces those arguments down and he comes up with some kind of it.
Not a perfect answer because there is no perfect answer.
But he comes up with some kind of way to deal with it.
And that's what that book is all about.
So read that book instead.
Or read The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene, you know, the protagonist, the Christian protagonist in that movie is a cowardly, drunken scoundrel who finally discovers his faith and courage at the end after a long and devastating journey.
But it's real, you know, you feel like this is a real person, right?
So there are plenty of great Christian books that do What God's Not Dead and other Christian movies pretend to do.
And I would recommend that you go to those instead.
All right.
And the movie Calvary is a recent movie made And not by a practicing Christian, but it's a film about a small-town priest in modern Ireland who's pastoring his flock of broken and flawed sheep, one of whom he has informed in the confessional is planning to kill him in revenge for the crimes that the church has committed, sex abuse crimes.
Not crimes that this priest committed, but the church itself.
So in that movie, it has more truth and more subtlety and more nuance and more depth in one scene than God's Not Dead could muster collectively during its entire two-hour runtime.
And as I said, the director is not even a practicing Christian.
And he was able to do that.
All right, let's see here.
Let's move on.
I only spent about 30 minutes on a movie that came out five years ago.
You know what, I think I'm going to skip emails for the day.
I'll save these emails for tomorrow, because there's one other thing I wanted to mention, and I didn't want to end the show without getting to this.
An Australian politician, Senator Fraser Anning, made some pretty repulsive comments in the wake of the mosque shootings in New Zealand last week.
And you know, he blamed the shootings on on policies that allow Muslims to enter the country in the first place.
So there's really repulsive comments.
And then the next day he was in front of reporters, talking to reporters, and this happened.
Nice girl.
You're a f***ing n****.
You're a f***ing n****.
Now, a lot of people on social media were outraged that Anning assaulted a child, is what they said.
Now, the kid is 17, by the way, not a child.
And, you know, the people that were freaking out about this, these are the same people who, most of them, who want 16-year-olds to vote, as we talked about earlier.
So you can't say that 16-year-olds should vote and then in the next breath say that a 17-year-old is just a helpless child.
If he's just a helpless child who doesn't know that you're not supposed to break eggs over people's heads, then they don't belong in the voting booth.
So anyway, so he gets punched in the face for egging this senator.
As I said, I don't support what this guy said about the mosque shooting, but I totally support his right to punch someone in the face when they smack him in the head with an egg.
You break an egg on a man's head and you get your nose broken.
It's a pretty simple formula and it is a completely justified Response.
I mean, what was he supposed to do?
Was he supposed to say, he gets hit in the head with an egg?
Was he supposed to say, well, yeah, I deserve that.
You know what?
You can hit me with another one.
Turn the other cheek, right?
You know, if someone hits you in the head with an egg on one side of your head, turn the other side.
Maybe in a perfect world, that is, you know, that is how someone would respond.
I'm sure that's how Jesus would have responded.
But at the same time, From the perspective of the person smashing the egg, you have no right to not be punched.
Okay?
At that point.
You have the right to be punched.
There's another way of putting it.
Once you do that.
It's very simple.
I really, well I'm not going to say I can't believe, but I guess I was even, somehow.
This is how naive I still am.
I was somehow actually a little bit surprised that so many people were criticizing this guy and not the kid who broke an egg over his head.
And you know what?
I could even be convinced that that guy deserved to have an egg broken over his head.
Maybe he deserved it.
But the problem is, if you're the one who breaks the egg, you also deserve to get punched.
So, maybe this is a situation where both sides got what they deserved, and we can just leave it at that.
We can leave it at that kind of nice compromise, that kumbaya moment.
And we'll leave it there for the day.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, the media turned the New Zealand white supremacist anti-Muslim terror attack into a referendum on the entire right.
