Ep. 220 - Elementary School Indoctrinating Kindergartners Into Radical Left Wing Gender Theory
Today on the show, an elementary school in Virginia has been caught trying to indoctrinate kindergartners into left wing gender theory. We'll talk about why this is child abuse, and also why the left’s theories on gender are contradictory, insane, superstitious, and incoherent. Also, what is it about the internet that makes people depressed? I have some thoughts. Finally, Elizabeth Warren says abolish the Electoral College. Does she have a point? Date: 03-19-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, an elementary school in Virginia has been caught trying to indoctrinate kindergartners into left-wing gender theory.
We'll talk about why this is child abuse and also why the left's theories on gender are contradictory, insane, superstitious, and completely incoherent.
Also, what is it about the internet that makes people depressed?
I'll try to break that down a little bit.
And finally, Elizabeth Warren says, abolish the electoral college.
Does she have a point?
We'll talk about all that today on The Matt Wall Show.
So, some old tweets from Cory Booker have been, as they say, unearthed.
A woman named Anna Fitzpatrick on Twitter found them.
And apparently, Cory Booker has been recycling the same joke.
For like 10 years in a row.
But it's, this is a great joke guys.
This is killer material.
Cory Booker is one of the, I didn't realize this, he's one of the comedy icons of our time.
So let me just, here are the jokes.
In 2009 he tweeted, sleep and I broke up a few nights ago.
I'm dating coffee now.
She's hot.
That's good, that is good stuff.
Then again in 2009, he tweeted, Had another fight with Sleep last night.
I left her and I'm hanging out with my smoldering love Coffee now.
And tonight, she's smoking hot.
Then 2010, he tweeted, Sleep and I broke up again tonight.
I'm finding comfort with my new special friend Coffee.
She's hot.
Oh man, this is good stuff.
Then in 2010 he tweeted, Well that was a rhyme too, did you get that?
Mean old sleep left me for another dude. I'm with coffee now. She's got a stimulating attitude
Well, that was a rhyme dude. You get that then in 2011 sleep and I are fighting again
So I'm hanging out with my old love coffee. She's so hot I'm not.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Sleep and I have irreconcilable differences.
We separated.
I'm dating my tall, hot, sweet new friend, coffee.
2012, again, had a fight with Sleep.
She's so uncooperative.
I'm hanging with Coffee now.
She's so sweet and very hot.
So hot!
Like, as you get as a hot as in temperature-wise, but also, you know, it's attractive, you know, like the way that... 2012, yet again, Sleep and I broke up tonight.
I'm now dating Coffee.
She's hot!
2013.
Sleep and I broke up again.
I'm back with coffee.
She is... She's hot!
She said the coffee's hot.
Did you get it?
2015.
Sleep and I broke up.
I'm dating coffee now.
She is hot.
Again, it's the hottest coffee.
2017.
I broke up with sleep last night and I'm dating coffee this morning.
I appreciate her warmth and stimulating company.
Stimulating?
Is it double B?
Oh man, that is classic, classic stuff.
I think Cory Booker might have a condition, actually.
I'm kind of worried about him.
Someone should probably check on him.
All right, before we go on, there's a lot to talk about today, and I think it's enough comedy for now.
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All right, here's something.
Here's here's something.
Terrible, I hate to say, but I'm gonna read now an article from, a little bit of an article from the Daily Wire, and it says, at the very end of February, in an elementary school in Arlington, Virginia, had kindergartners sit on the floor to hear a transgender spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign read them a book in which the claim is made that a boy can have a girl brain but a boy body, or a boy brain and a girl body.
The school district later claimed that, quote, parents were notified by a letter ahead of time and were allowed to opt out as if they chose.
But that claim was reportedly false, as Casey Chalk, himself the father of three small children, notes for The Federalist, A copy of the February 22nd letter provided to the Family Foundation of Virginia under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act shows absolutely no offer for parents to pull their kids out of the activity.
Moreover, although the letter notes that a book written by a transgender person would be read to the class, it does not explicitly say that kindergartners will be told they may have a girl brain but a boy body, or a boy brain and a girl body, as the book claims.
Nor does it say that the kids would be read to by a cross-dressing man who calls himself Sarah.
The Washington Post reported that in the February 28th class at Ashlawn Elementary School, which was taught by openly homosexual teacher, Jane Foster, the transgender advocate, Sarah McBride, read the children the storybook, I Am Jazz.
Now, okay.
First of all, this is child abuse, plain and simple.
Pure indoctrination, pure brainwashing.
That's what that looks like.
What does it look like for children to be brainwashed?
Well, here it is.
It's a bunch of children sitting around on the carpet, listening to a cross-dressing man reading a book about transgenderism.
I mean, really, this whole scenario, which you hear it and you're horrified by it, but you're also not shocked, right?
But this scenario, it sounds like something that a conservative would have made up satirically, like 10 years ago.
Where you've got an openly gay kindergarten teacher inviting a transgender crossdresser to a kindergarten classroom to read the kids a story about boys having girl brains.
I mean, it's just, it's the kind of thing, like I said ten years ago, if you had made some sort of slippery slope argument ten years ago and said, you know what, where we're headed now, soon enough there's going to be a transgender Cross-dressers in kindergarten classrooms reading stories about transgenderism to kids.
If you had said that, everyone would have laughed at you and said, you're crazy, calm down, you're being paranoid.
But that's where we are now.
I'm going to pause here for a moment and just analyze that particular point about girls having boy brains.
This isn't really the most important point.
The most important point is simply that the school district and these two men and everyone else involved are guilty of abusing these children.
They are all agents of ideology.
They are not educators.
They are not fit to educate.
But let's also examine what they told these kids.
In fact, if you're curious at all about the content of this book that was read to these kids, a book that you can find in the children's section of many libraries, and a book that, well, this is certainly not the first time that kids have been read this book in an elementary school.
So, if you're interested to know what's in it, I found on YouTube Jazz Jennings himself reading his children's book where he explains how he discovered that he's a girl.
So, let me play just a minute or so of this so that we're all on the same page.
No pun intended.
Here it is.
Hello, this is Jazz Jennings and I am going to do a reading of my book, I Am Jazz.
I am Jazz.
For as long as I can remember, my favorite color has been pink.
My second favorite color is silver, and my third favorite color is green.
Here are some of my other favorite things.
Dancing, singing, backflips, drawing, soccer, swimming, makeup, and pretending I'm a pop star.
Most of all, I love mermaids.
Sometimes I even wear a mermaid tail in the pool.
My best friends are Samantha and Casey.
We always have fun together.
We like high heels and princess gowns, or cartwheels and trampolines.
But I'm not exactly like Samantha and Casey.
I have a girl brain, but a boy body.
This is called transgender.
I was born this way.
When I was very little and my mom would say, You're such a good boy.
I would say, No mama, good girl.
Girl!
At first my family was confused.
They'd always thought of me as a boy.
As I got a little older, I hardly ever played with trucks or tools or superheroes.
Only princesses and mermaid costumes.
My brothers told me this was girl stuff.
I kept right on playing.
OK, so a number of significant problems here, starting with the fact that this book and the transgender theory generally only reinforces all of the gender stereotypes that the left has been trying to demolish for decades.
So the boys, the boy didn't like to play with trucks.
He liked the color pink.
He liked dolls.
And that means he's a girl?
You see, I thought that colors and toys and all that stuff had nothing to do with gender whatsoever.
That was the big deal with, remember, Target.
They were going to stop segregating their toys by gender and stop saying, well, these are the girl toys, these are the boy toys.
And we were told that that's a very important thing because there are no girl toys and there are no boy toys.
So if that's the case, Then the fact that your boy likes to play with dolls doesn't mean anything.
It is not significant at all.
How could that be an indication that your son is really a girl if those toys don't mean anything?
And if you can't delineate between girl and boy toys, it just doesn't make any sense.
You're obviously contradicting yourself.
So if we are living in this new enlightened age, Where we can't even speak of toys that boys generally like to play with and toys that girls generally like to play with.
Then if that's the case, why can't Jazz just be a boy who likes dolls?
Whatever happened to that category?
I thought we were told that there can be boys who like to play with dolls.
Well, okay, fine.
But now you're telling us that, well, not really, because if a boy likes playing with dolls, then he's really a girl.
Second point is, a child at two or three years old, or however old Jazz was, saying, I'm a girl.
Well, that means nothing at all, because a three-year-old child has no idea what a girl is.
OK, so the next time you hear a three-year-old boy say, I'm a girl, here's a good follow-up question.
Ask him, oh, what's a girl?
And what you're going to discover is he has no idea.
He doesn't know what a girl is.
He doesn't know what a boy is.
Because he's three.
You know, three-year-old children will also very frequently claim to be dinosaurs, ninjas, princesses, fairies, pirates, superheroes, and so on.
They have no idea who they are or what they are or what's going on in the world.
They are living in a fantasy world, which is perfectly healthy and good and normal for kids that age.
But to actually take their pronouncements seriously, When a three year old says, uh, I'm a girl or, or, you know, I'm a, I'm a dinosaur to actually say, well, what did you hear that?
He says he's a dinosaur.
He says he's a stegosaurus.
You know, we better go take him to the Smithsonian and check.
I mean, what kind of maniac parent does that?
Do you really not understand the concept of a three-year-old?
You're with your three-year-old every day.
Have you not noticed that he has no idea what anything is or what's going on?
The third point, though, is what is a girl brain?
So Jazz tells us, well, I had a girl brain and a boy body.
Well, again, I thought that the left has been telling us for decades that there is no such thing as a girl brain.
In any other context, if you were to speak of girl brains versus boy brains, you would be castigated for that.
You would be reprimanded harshly by the left for saying girl brain.
So, So, what does that mean?
You can only have a girl brain if it's in a boy body?
But you can't have girl brains in girl bodies.
And also, isn't the brain part of your body?
Last I checked, it is.
So what kind of weird dualism is this?
Where you have your body and then your brain is some sort of separate organism?
You can't speak of, well, here's my body, here's my brain.
That's like saying, well, I've got my body and then I've got my left toe.
You know, it makes no sense.
It's part of your body.
Your brain is an organ in your body, like your pancreas or your spleen or your small intestine.
If my brain can magically somehow be a girl, then what about my other organs?
Can I have a boy body but a girl liver?
And a gender questioning, you know, colon?
I mean, how does this work?
Well, that makes absolutely no sense, does it?
I mean, it wouldn't make any sense at all for me to say that my lungs are girls, but the rest of my body is a boy.
Exactly.
It wouldn't make sense.
And it doesn't make sense to say it with the brain either.
Remember that song?
There was that song that you sang as a kid about bones all being connected, right?
The toe bones connected to the foot bone, foot bones connected to the ankle bone, so on and so on.
The point here is that your body is all connected.
It's all one thing.
There are parts of your body, but that's the point.
It's parts of your body.
They're not completely separate, distinct things.
They are all part of one whole.
It's a synthesis.
It's a harmony.
Your brain is connected to everything else in your body.
It's part of your body.
It's part of the whole.
It can't have its own identity in contrast to the rest of you.
That makes no sense.
This anti-science, superstitious gibberish.
That's what this is.
It is superstition.
And it's being taught in our schools to our kids.
Meanwhile, on a similar topic, also this week, reading now from the Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Library officials apologized this past Friday for failing to conduct a background check on a registered sex offender who read books to children at an event hosted by drag queens.
Once again, that is a sentence that 10 years ago, if you had predicted something like this, everyone would have said you're crazy.
Albert Garza, a 32-year-old registered sex offender, participated in the program under the name Tatiana Malaninya.
Library officials acknowledged in a statement Friday that Garza has a criminal background that should have prevented him from participating in the Drag Queen Storytime program, in which drag queens read books at the library.
Department of Public Safety records show Garza was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of an eight-year-old child in 2009, for which he received five years of probation and community supervision.
All right.
First of all, He sexually assaulted an eight-year-old child and he got probation and supervision?
He never went to prison at all?
Are you kidding me?
Someone who sexually assaults an eight-year-old child, we shouldn't have to worry about that person showing up at the library.
Do you know why?
Because they should be in prison forever.
As in, that's something where if you do it, you should never be allowed out of your cage ever again.
That should be one of those one strike and you're out kind of situations.
But in this in this country, it's you might not be out at all, you might not have to spend any time out of society out of out of circulation, as it were.
Secondly, To those of us who are not delusional, it's not terribly surprising to find out that a guy who enjoys dressing up like a woman and prancing about in front of children might be a sex offender.
To those of us who actually have brains in our heads, whether it's a girl or a boy brain, if we have brains at all, we realize that that's sort of to be expected because it's a weird To put it mildly, it is a weird and concerning thing to find out that a grown man enjoys dressing as a woman, number one.
And in particular, dressing as a woman and then going to a library in front of children.
If you find within yourself the desire as a man to dress up like a woman and go present yourself to children, that is deeply, deeply concerning and you need to get help.
You need to go, and I'm not trying to be funny, you need to go and find a counselor, find a therapist and get help.
Because that is unhealthy and it's And it's an indication of some serious things going wrong.
So this is not surprising.
But it shouldn't even it shouldn't even come up.
Because if you're a library, and You want to have an event where a bunch of children come and they listen to a story.
Well, that's great.
Libraries have been doing that for decades.
You know, that's what libraries should be doing.
I remember when I was a kid, we would go to the library sometime and there would be story time, right?
Okay, then just have the librarian come out and sit there and read a story.
Why do you need a man dressed as a woman reading the book?
Why is that part of it?
Why does that need to be introduced?
Absolute insanity.
All right, moving on.
Switching gears here a little bit.
There was a study which was released last week and published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
Actually, I guess this is kind of related.
Speaking of abnormal psychology.
But this study says that As we know, there's been a dramatic rise in depression and suicidal thoughts in young adults over recent years.
And this study says that social media may be partially to blame for that.
And that isn't much of a revelation either.
I think it's undeniable, really, that psychologically it's unhealthy to raise a generation of kids who are conditioned to live vicariously through their phones.
Because life is a very big Very dynamic, complex, beautiful, painful, complicated thing.
And you just can't fit it inside a phone.
And that's why you can't live every day on your phone.
Because life is just so... is beyond that.
It's bigger than that.
But I got to thinking about why exactly the internet depresses us so much.
Aside from the obvious about how everyone is so negative to each other and the lack of sunlight, all that kind of stuff.
But what is it really?
What's at the core of the problem?
I think it's this.
I think that we as human beings are desperate to make an impact, right?
To leave an impression, to be noticed, to be cared about, to be loved.
And so we invent this thing called the internet, and we think, okay, well, here it is.
Now I can enter into this world, into this cyberspace, and I can interact with millions of other people, and I can really be noticed.
And, oh, look at all these likes I'm getting, and these shares, and these retweets, and comments, and everything.
But what we find, inevitably, is that we are, in the end, basically dancing in a void.
It doesn't matter what we say here on the internet.
Nobody will remember.
Nobody cares.
We are just noise.
It's all a bunch of noise.
And we're simply contributing to it.
It's all content.
Even if we post a great hot take on Facebook, and it gets like 52 likes, and we think, wow, 52 people, 52 likes, that's incredible.
Well, those people were just scrolling through their feed.
And you were one of probably about 350 pieces of content that they stumbled across, and they've already forgotten about all of it.
They liked your stuff, which they skimmed, just as a gesture of acknowledgement.
It was just their way of saying, yep, I encountered this.
But it left no impression on them.
It made no difference.
And 30 seconds later, they forgot what you said.
So this is the fact that disturbs us, that we spend so much time on the internet, We invest so much of ourselves into this world of the Internet, but we are leaving no mark there, no impression.
And if we cease to exist, if we disappeared, if we died, nobody on the Internet would notice or care or realize that we were gone.
Our Facebook friends might pause for a second and go, hey, whatever happened to so-and-so?
But and if we actually do, if we actually did die, and they found out they might leave a little thing that says our IP on our Facebook page, or you know, something like that.
But then they'll just go back to scrolling Instagram, and they'll forget all about it.
Now, I don't exclude myself from this, by the way, I have a larger than average platform on the internet, because I do this for a living.
I do think that writing, not social media posts specifically, but actual writing, actual long form, real writing can definitely move people and have an impact and be remembered and matter in the grand scheme.
But it's hard to write things that matter, especially these days, especially on the internet.
And most of what I write, I fully realize.
Most of what I write on the internet, most of what anyone writes on the internet, won't matter or be remembered.
I mean, I wrote a viral article about, two weeks ago, I wrote an article about Michael Jackson, about the Michael Jackson documentary.
And it got like 600,000 views or something like that.
Which is a lot, 600,000.
600,000 people read this.
Or about, maybe 500,000 people read it.
And that's a lot of people, especially for an editorial.
Does anyone remember it now?
If you read that article, do you remember what it said?
I don't remember what it said, and I wrote it.
I wrote, I think, I wrote, in my opinion, if I do say so myself, a pretty good satirical article this past Friday about the student loan forgiveness idea.
And that one did well, too.
It got something like 300,000 views.
And this was just a few days ago.
But does anyone remember that?
Does it make a difference?
What if I went back in time four days and I stopped myself from writing that piece?
Would the world look any different now?
Would anyone's life be even slightly different?
What would the butterfly effect be if that article was never introduced into reality?
Well, there would be no effect.
So if I can stockpile 700,000 some Facebook followers and 200,000 some Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of readers and all this stuff, if I can do that and still almost everything I say and share online, including what I'm saying right now, is forgotten instantly, Then how much more must the whole process be defeating for some 17-year-old kid who's trying to secure an identity for himself here on the Internet, in this place where nobody knows him, nobody cares, nobody loves him on the Internet, where we're all just consumers of and sometimes creators of content and nothing more.
So, yeah, depressing?
I would say so.
It's tragic.
When you consider how much time we spend here on the internet not mattering.
Now, if you're on the internet for a couple of minutes a day, and it's really nothing to you, then none of this matters.
But when this is your life, and you spend hours a day on the internet trying to be noticed, it becomes very depressing.
But here's the good news.
There are people in your life.
People.
Actual, real, People, real life people in your actual life, who you can impact in profound ways, in ways that are deeper and longer lasting than anything you can achieve on the internet.
You know, I know that I'm the most important person in my wife's life.
I'm the most important person on earth to my wife.
And vice versa.
No other person on earth has the same kind of impact on her that I do.
I know that I am right now, along with my wife, the most important person in my children's lives.
If I died, they would be devastated.
A hole would be ripped open in their hearts and it would never, ever be completely filled for as long as they live.
That's how important I am to them.
How much they love me and need me and I them.
So this is it right here.
These are the people, along with the rest of my family and a few close friends.
I mean, these are the people who I am important to.
The people who will remember.
Right?
It's just such a shame.
It's such a terrible shame that we spend so much time trying to be noticed by people who couldn't care less about us and who wouldn't be affected one way or another if we lived or died, while at the same time neglecting the people whose very existence is partially shaped by our own existence.
The people who we are intertwined with by blood and friendship and love and sacrifice, they get the short shrift so that we can be on the internet.
As I was thinking about this issue, I happened to stumble across another survey that just makes my point perfectly.
This was a survey released this week, I think.
That finds that young people today are very stressed out.
Millennials are very stressed, they're stressed about everything.
And one of the major stresses for millennials is number one, cracked phone screens.
And number two, getting zero likes on a post on social media is a big time stress.
In fact, 20% of respondents to this survey said that low engagement on social media is more stressful to them than getting into a heated argument with their spouse.
And this is exactly what I'm talking about, right?
That lack of recognition from people who don't know us, don't love us, don't care about us, creates for many of us a greater void and becomes a more pressing concern than even discord and alienation from the people we love, those who are closest to us.
And it shouldn't be that way.
It just shouldn't.
So I think that the answer to a lot of this and the answer to a lot of the depression and all of this, you know, the despair and misery that a lot of people feel is just, it's really a matter of we've gotten our priorities just all out of whack.
And we're looking for something in a place where it cannot be found.
That is, we're looking for impact and acknowledgement and love and all that stuff in this world where it's just, it's not on offer there.
There are things you can get on the internet.
There are even good things.
You can get information.
You can even get some correct information every once in a while.
So there are things you can find, even entertainment, you know, even harmless entertainment sometimes.
But those deeper human yearnings cannot be satisfied by the internet.
But they can be satisfied, largely anyway, by our real life, the people that are around us.
And so we have to look there for it.
All right.
Let's see, what else?
Quickly wanted to mention this.
Elizabeth Warren has come out in favor of abolishing the Electoral College.
And I just wanted to mention this because here's the thing about that.
First of all, it will never happen.
Abolishing the Electoral College is never going to happen, ever.
So it's just an applause line, basically.
It's not a serious proposal.
But taking the idea seriously for just a moment, for the sake of argument, I think we have to admit that it's not a crazy idea.
It's not in itself a crazy idea.
There is something to be said for it.
The Electoral College Definitely presents some challenges, and we can't deny that.
It's not a perfect system by any means.
Because of the Electoral College, our presidential elections revolve around a handful of states.
You know, you've got a few states that decide everything, where all the presidential candidates go, and the whole election comes down to those states.
And if you're in any of the other states, Your vote is basically meaningless, especially if you are like the situation that I've been in for most of my life.
I have been a conservative in a deep blue state.
I've been a conservative in a state that will never ever go red, which means that my vote in every presidential election Since the day I turned 18 has been completely meaningless because of the electoral college.
Now, if you had a, like a national popular vote type of system, then theoretically my vote is worth one vote and everyone's vote is worth one vote.
And, um, and you know, and so if you have 120 million people voting or something like that, then I am one out of those 120 million.
But with the electoral college system, um, Well, all of the electoral votes in my state are just going to go to the Democrats.
So the vote that I sent, it's just, I just threw it down a pit.
It doesn't, it may have some symbolic meaning.
I can say, well, I, you know, I did my part.
Okay.
But see, after a while, People get tired of voting symbolically, and you really wanna actually vote and have your vote mean something.
Not just mean something morally, but actually mean something.
And with the electoral college system, in many states, depending on your politics, the simple fact is it doesn't mean anything.
There really is, in the states that I've lived in, there's really been no reason for me to vote for president.
I know everyone says, well, you gotta vote, you gotta vote.
Well, why?
It doesn't matter.
In my state, even if everyone who agreed with me went to the polls, it still would not matter.
But so that's the issue.
And that is why a lot of people want to get rid of the Electoral College, because they're just tired of that.
They're tired of their vote not meaning anything.
And that is a perfectly legitimate problem to raise, I think.
But The issue is that, well, number one, like I said, it's not ever going to happen anyway.
Second, Democrats only want to change it because it will benefit them.
So it's a bad faith.
Discussion on their part and they know it.
It's not about they try to frame it as well.
This is you know, we need a pure form of democracy We need to give everyone a voice so on and so forth.
Well, they only want to get a give everybody a voice In that way through some sort of national popular vote system because they think Probably correctly that if that were the system You would never see another Republican president ever again, and that's why they support it and we all know that so it's a bad faith discussion But then on the other side, I think there are a lot of Republicans who oppose it simply because they know that if that was the system, there would never be another Republican president again.
They're opposing it for that reason, not because they actually think that there's something, you know, objectively wrong or unfair with that kind of system, but because they think it will.
So that's on both sides.
That's all it is.
And that's the case with so many discussions that we have these days.
Where people aren't really worried about the principle of it.
They're not worried about what is objectively the fairest, most logical thing.
They're just worried about, well, what am I going to get out of this thing?
All right, let's move on and answer a few emails before we wrap up here.
Matt Walshow at gmail.com.
Matt Walshow at gmail.com is the email.
This is from Wes.
He says, thank you for making the argument that voting rights should be tied to being a contributing member of society.
I have long believed that the simplest, least discriminatory way to do this would be to restrict voting rights for those who have a net positive tax liability on their last 1040.
The most important impact of voting Love the show.
Yeah, I think that there's a lot to be said for that.
But again, that is something that will never ever happen.
who should be who should be who should be represented are the ones actually
paying taxes. Love the show. Yeah I think that there's a lot to be said for that
but again that is something that will never ever happen but it is nice to
think about anyway. This is from Hudson says Matt you mentioned that the
conservative attack plan on Beto is all wrong.
Yes, being in a band has been cool forever.
His road trip diaries are easy to laugh at, but free spirits, uh, hork that stuff down.
Hork that stuff down.
Hork.
I like that word.
I don't know if you made it up, but maybe I'll use it.
Then I read on Daily Wire that he was a hacker under the moniker of Psychedelic Wizard.
Cut it out.
That's badass.
Don't get me wrong.
I abhor what the guy stands for, and he kind of seems like a doofus.
But come on.
A bass-playing hacker.
That's badass.
I just wrote to say you're right.
Keep up the good work.
I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I think I mentioned this.
You know, attacking Beto for being a punk rock bass playing hacker in the 90s.
I don't think that's going to, that isn't going to hurt his cool points.
It certainly won't hurt.
This is from Ken.
Hey Matt, I really liked your show.
I was impressed on how you addressed the question of gospel authorship, but my retort to these guys who might make a too far reaching claim about the anonymity of the gospels is, so what?
They were written by someone and form a coherent document that serve as an eyewitness account.
You can read Jim Wallace's book, Cold Case Christianity, to get this point, if you haven't already.
And I would think that the textual criticism that has been done on these confirms that one author wrote each one, not a committee.
And we know that during the time the canon was being gathered as scripture, the rules were that no document that was written by someone who wasn't an eyewitness or did not sit at the feet of an eyewitness Yeah, I think you make an excellent point there.
You know, I do believe that Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses.
But, as you say, even if, let's say, especially John, because John was written You know, in the year 90 A.D.
or later.
So if it was written by the Apostle John, then he was certainly a very old man at the time.
But let's say it was written by his apprentice or, you know, someone, his successor, who he had passed this information down to.
That wouldn't, I wouldn't see that as a terribly significant problem.
Finally, from Linda, says, Hi, Matt.
I know I'm way late on this, but I was just registering I guess listening to the podcast you did about Pascal's wager.
You were pretty critical of the argument.
I understand your point of view, but don't you think that the wager can be helpful just in getting people to at least stop and consider Christianity?
It won't take them all the way, but it will get them on the right road.
Yeah, Linda, I am critical of the argument, and no, I don't really think... I understand your point, but I don't think it's useful, even in the way that you describe.
Pascal's Wager, of course, being the argument that first put forward by Blaise Pascal, that you may as well believe in God, because if you're right, you go to heaven.
If you're wrong, you don't lose anything.
But if you don't believe in God and you're wrong, then you could lose eternity.
And if you're right, then you don't really gain anything.
Anyway, so then it's sort of like, you might as well believe, and that's the argument.
I really dislike the argument, as I said before, because for one thing, belief just doesn't work that way.
Belief is not an act of will.
It's not something that you simply decide to do.
You can't sit here and say, I'm going to believe X, Y, Z. You can't do that.
You believe something if you think That the thing is true.
That's what it means to believe it.
If you don't think the thing is true, then you don't believe it.
Even if you pretend that you do, you don't actually really believe it.
That's simply what belief means.
So, for instance, my kids think that there are leprechauns living in our backyard.
And they may think that because I told them.
I don't remember exactly, but they think that there are leprechauns living in the backyard, and I would love to believe that.
In fact, I really wish there were leprechauns in the backyard, but if there can't actually be leprechauns, then I would love to believe that there are leprechauns in the backyard, because that is, you know, my kids, I'm talking about my twins, are five years old.
They live in such a fanciful world where there are leprechauns and fairies and unicorns and everything.
I would love to believe that also.
Because it's such an exciting world to live in.
But I don't believe it.
And I can't just say to myself, well, you know, it would be really nice to believe that because it would make my life a lot more exciting.
So you know what?
I believe it.
Doesn't work that way.
So with God, not that I'm comparing God to leprechauns, but you know, you either think that God exists or you don't.
If you say God exists because you want to go to heaven, but you don't really think he does exist, then who are you fooling?
You're not fooling God.
You're probably not even fooling yourself.
You may be fooling other people, but is that really it?
Is that how you get to heaven?
By lying to everybody?
And being intellectually dishonest?
That's my other problem with Pascal's Wagers.
It seems to be encouraging intellectual dishonesty.
It's saying, even if you don't really believe this, just pretend you do.
Well, that is intellectual dishonesty.
And I don't think that that's the point here.
I don't think that's what God wants of us.
But the other problem with the wager, which I didn't mention before, and I'm glad you brought this up because I was thinking about it.
It's a false binary, is the other problem.
What I mean is that even if someone did buy that argument and was somehow swayed by it, Well, there's no reason why it would lead them directly to Christianity.
Now, yeah, Blaise Pascal was a Christian.
He's the one who formulated the argument.
Everyone I've ever heard use the argument is a Christian, so it seems like the idea is this is an argument that will lead you towards Christianity.
But what if somebody buys the argument and then they decide to believe that Allah is God.
Or they decide to believe in Brahma, the Hindu god.
Or they believe in some ancient Aztec god.
Pascal's wager, even if successful, only gets you to theism.
It doesn't get you to Christianity.
That's the problem.
Because in Islam, they would also say that if you are not a Muslim, And if you don't believe in this God, Allah, you could be in trouble when the time comes.
So Pascal's wager could apply just as much to Allah.
So that's why.
It turns out if we want people to accept Christianity as being true, then we need to give them reasons to think that Christianity is itself true.
And if we can do that, if we can successfully present reasons to believe that Christianity is true, if we can do that, then we don't need Pascal's Wager.
But if we can't do that, then Pascal's Wager is also useless.
So it seems like it's useless either way.
And that's why... That's why I don't like it.
Alright, we'll leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching.
Thanks for listening.
God's.
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