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March 22, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
48:00
Ep. 223 - The One Thing Saving Us From Civil War

With all of these deep ideological divides in our country, are we on the verge of civil war? I think there is only one thing preventing it. Also, how old is too old to be president? Should there be an age limit? And what does it mean to say that the Bible is divinely inspired? We'll tackle all of these questions today. Date: 03-22-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, with all of these very deep ideological and cultural divides, are we on the verge of a civil war?
A lot of people are talking about this and seem to think we're headed in that direction, but are we?
We'll talk about that.
Also, how old is too old to be president?
Should there be an age limit on the presidency?
And finally, what does it mean to say that the Bible is the inspired word of God?
This, obviously, is what Christians say.
But what does that mean exactly, practically speaking?
We'll talk about that as well today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Well, you've heard the old canard probably, haven't you, about how a movement, if it sticks around too long, it will eventually become a business, and then it goes from a business into a racket.
And I think that that has proven correct over history.
It is certainly true of the so-called Never Trump movement.
Now, Never Trump meant something.
It served a purpose in the campaign, especially in the primaries.
The idea was very simple.
Trump cannot be the nominee.
We cannot support Trump as the nominee.
That was the idea.
As you may remember, he did become the nominee and then he became president.
So it makes no sense to still identify as never Trump when Trump is the president.
What does that even mean now?
It's not a matter of voting anymore.
He's already there.
So never Trump, never what?
Never Trump what?
What is it that you're never doing in regards to Trump?
The only thing that makes sense now, now that he's president, And this has been my strategy for the last two years.
I think it's the only honest path forward, the only rational path forward, and that is to hold Trump accountable like we should for any president, any politician, to criticize him when he's wrong and to support him when he's right.
And that, again, is what we should do for any politician, any president.
And it is the only morally and intellectually defensible path.
Any path aside from that is absurd.
Now, some former so-called Never Trumpers, myself included, Although I never really liked that label, but I would have been lumped in with that with that category during the primaries So this is what I've tried to do.
I will defend Trump a hundred times in a week If if I'll defend him passionately if I think that he's right or if I think a certain attack is unfair I've defended him on many topics including very stridently on the whole Cohen thing, you know, I think that The whole concept of taking the president's lawyer and forcing him to give up dirt on the president is dangerous and unethical in the extreme.
So, of course I'm going to defend Trump on that.
But I will also criticize Trump, and I will criticize him passionately if I think that he's wrong.
I'm not shy about that.
I don't care.
And as far as I'm concerned, anyone in the audience, anyone who reads me or watches the show, listens to it, And cannot stomach any criticism of Trump whatsoever?
Well, then that's not someone that I care to appeal to.
And if they decide to never listen to me again, I'm perfectly fine with that.
Honestly, that's someone who I don't think I even want to appeal to, that sort of person.
Someone who's just a narrow-minded sycophant who is just a groupie for a politician.
That's just not the kind of audience that I personally want to assemble.
So, for instance, Trump obsessively whining about a man who died months ago, and attacking the man's family, and complaining that no one thanked him for allowing the man to have a funeral.
That, I think, is completely ridiculous, and you have to be a totally sold-out sycophant to defend Trump on that score.
Not saying that, I mean, there are plenty of reasons to be opposed to the kinds of things that John
McCain did when he was a politician.
And I was certainly a big McCain critic myself.
But this obsession with him and attacking him after he died, this is just the kind of
thing that, of course, if any Democrat president did that to anyone, it doesn't matter who
they are, every Republican would be freaking out about it.
So, it's just, it is indefensible.
Now, there are other never Trumpers who have become sold out sycophants themselves.
They went from opposing Trump and warning that he would be disastrous for the country
and for conservatism, and now they follow him around like a puppy, licking his palms,
begging for treats.
Some former never Trumpers have done that.
They have completely flipped.
They went from, no, we can't have Trump, to now they are bowing before him as a god and
they defend him on everything.
Now those are people that, when they were never Trump, and now these are just people
that are, they're just pandering to whatever they think the biggest audience will be.
They have no integrity.
They have nothing to offer.
There's no reason to listen to them on anything.
On the other end, though, you have some former never Trumpers who have become essentially Democrats.
And they have decided to get revenge on Trump by becoming full-time lackeys of the left.
And I find these people completely repugnant.
Bill Kristol, Donated to Ralph Northam's campaign in Virginia because he's so- Trump made his tummy hurt, and so then he went and donated to Ralph Northam.
Ralph Northam is the radically pro-abortion, infanticidal governor of Virginia who also wore blackface.
Now, we didn't know about the blackface thing.
We also didn't necessarily know about the infanticide thing when he ran.
We did know that he was a Democrat and a pro-abortion Democrat.
That's the only kind that exists anymore.
Crystal supported him because he hates Trump so much.
Crystal also helped to start a publication called The Bulwark.
It's a Never Trump liberal website, because that's basically what Never Trump means.
If you still identify as that, that means that's what it's become.
It has become a liberal racket.
It has become a wing of the Democrat Party.
And that's not because, I'm not saying that if you criticize Trump, you're a Democrat.
No, that's a stupid thing to say.
What I'm saying is if you still identify as that, What that means now is that you will oppose Trump no matter what he does.
And whatever he says, you're going to take the opposite approach.
So that means if Trump comes out and says, oh, we're going to take some money from Planned Parenthood or we're going to do this pro-life thing, you're all of a sudden against it.
So that just makes you a Democrat is what it makes you.
They have this—Crystal started this—helped to start this publication called The Bulwark, which claims to be a website defending conservatism, which is a total joke.
It is a website which now pushes democratic liberalism.
It is in the business of attacking conservatism and conservatives individually and conservative values.
They sent a pro-abortion extremist to CPAC to mock pro-lifers, just to give you an idea of what the Never Trump crowd's up to now.
They also had an article—reason I'm bringing this up—they had an article making the rounds yesterday.
Blasting a whole host of conservatives for, according to the article, agitating for civil war.
And the article gives examples of various conservatives who have been warning that a civil war is on the horizon.
And the writer of the article wags his little finger at these conservatives who are supposedly engaging in violent and dangerous and scary rhetoric about civil war.
Uh, except that obviously the people who are saying that we may be on the verge of a civil war, it's not that they want one.
They're not saying that let's have a civil war.
They're saying that I think that's where we're headed.
Now, is that true?
Well, I think it is.
Uh, it might not be fun to talk now.
I think we are on that path.
But I don't think there actually will be a civil war, and I'll explain why.
And this is all, it's not fun to talk about, it is unpleasant, but that doesn't make it wrong.
We have most of the ingredients now for civil strife and unrest, if not full-on civil war.
So let's think about it here.
We have, first and foremost, deep and unbridgeable ideological divides.
When I say unbridgeable, I mean unbridgeable in the sense that there is no meeting in the middle.
There's no compromise, okay?
It's not like you've got one side saying one thing, another side saying another, and you could meet in the middle and, you know, you each could have a little bit of, you know, you come to an understanding or something like that.
The divides are so deep and irrevocable that the only way to meet is for one side or the other to give up their defenses and to surrender and say, you know what, you're right.
That's the only thing that can happen.
So you have one side saying, for instance, that babies aren't people and advocating for the continued slaughter of the unborn.
They say that biological sex isn't real.
They say that America is systematically racist and sexist.
Masculinity is toxic.
Religion is poison.
Let's have drag queens come in and talk to kindergartners.
That kind of thing.
Then you have the other side that takes the opposite position on all of those topics.
These are positions that cannot be brought together in understanding.
Like, either unborn babies are people or they aren't.
Either it is a horrendous crime against humanity to kill those individuals, or it's perfectly fine.
You know, it can't be sort of one and sort of the other.
So we have that.
We also have, as a corollary to the ideological divide, we also have a cultural divide.
And this was one of the primary things that led to the first Let's hope the only civil war in 1861.
Even aside from slavery or politics or economics, all of those things obviously played a part in the Civil War.
But the fact also was that the Antebellum South and the Industrial North were like two different countries.
With people in both countries who didn't understand or particularly like the folks in the other.
On the other side.
Now, our cultural divide isn't so much between industrialized and agricultural or whatever, but our divide is more religious and ideological and kind of philosophical in nature, which I think is, shall we say, an even spicier issue to be divided on.
Because, at the end of the day, even in Civil War times, you had people from very different cultures, different priorities and things, but they did agree on some really fundamental, basic issues.
First and foremost being, they were all religious.
They were almost all Christian.
They believed in God.
I mean, almost all of them did.
And so that is, obviously, One really significant foundational similarity that we don't even have that anymore.
We also have economic divides.
We have geographic divides.
Now, the geographic divides aren't quite as clear-cut as North versus South, but you could point on a map to, well, these are basically liberal areas and here are conservative areas.
The point is, yes, If Civil War is a chili, let's say, then we've got most of the ingredients.
We've got the beef.
We've got the pork.
Yes, you should put a little pork in your chili.
We've got the spices.
We've got the peppers.
No beans ever in chili.
But we are missing one ingredient.
We're missing the beer in the chili, and you can't make a chili without a beer.
And the beer for us in this particular chili is really simple.
It's willingness.
We have We don't, that's the difference.
We don't have sort of the willingness to fight like they did back then.
So, the men in the Civil War era, these guys were fighters, especially in the South.
They were willing to fight it out.
They also were not living comfortable lives, many of them.
A lot of the generals were living comfortable lives, but the grunts, the infantry guys, they were coming from poverty, they were coming from dirt floors and working in the fields.
That's the life that they have.
The thing that saves us from violent conflict, I think, Is that we're pretty comfortable at the end of the day.
We're pretty lazy.
We're unwilling to completely upend our apple cart and make the sacrifices that such a conflict would require.
And I say that with gratitude.
I mean, I don't like that people are lazy, but I'm grateful that we're not going to have a civil war.
I don't want that.
600,000 people died in the Civil War.
Anyone who would root for that is a psychopath.
But my point is simply that people aren't, you know, the factor that I think prevents civil war in our case is that people aren't willing to do it.
Back in the civil war times, guys were still dueling, right?
You had duels.
Like if a guy insulted you, you would say, sir, I challenge you to a duel.
And you would go out and you would shoot bullets at each other's head.
These were guys willing to die to defend their honor.
Now, these days, if somebody insults you and you pull out a gun and say, sir, I challenge you to a duel, the guy's going to say, whoa, wait, dude, dude, okay, I'm sorry, never mind.
Forget what I just said.
Calm down, man.
Like, take it easy.
And that would be the end of it.
And that's probably good.
It's better to end that way than by shooting someone in the head.
But those were different sorts of men.
And they were men who weren't afraid of death, really.
They were afraid, but not nearly as afraid as we are.
They had much more physical courage, typically.
And I'm not advocating that we prove our courage by dueling or by fighting civil wars.
I'm just observing a fact.
So that was the beer in their chili.
That was the one remaining factor that they had.
We have a lot of the things that they have, but they also had that kind of desperation, that willingness, that, for lack of a better term, that more violent kind of nature that we don't have.
And that's what's going to stop it.
But it prevents a civil war.
I think it will not prevent the continuing and deepening divide between us.
That's the thing.
And where does that divide lead?
I don't know exactly.
I'm not a prophet.
I can't prophesy about it.
But it doesn't lead anywhere good.
And I could, more realistically, see a scenario where... I could see a scenario where you've got... I mean, look at the riots and things we had, especially for a period of, you know, a year or two there.
Where it seemed like every few weeks or every couple of months there would be a riot in one of these cities.
I could see a scenario where you see where things like that happen much more frequently.
How do we stop?
How do we pull ourselves back from that?
I wish I had the answer to that question.
I don't know.
Because as I said, there is no easy middle ground that we can find.
All right, let's see here.
Joe Biden, a little bit of political news.
Joe Biden is about to announce his presidential campaign.
Biden, by the way, is 76 years old, soon to be 77.
So I want you to think about something here.
You have to be 35 years old to run for president.
Now, nobody seems to complain about that, right?
Nobody calls that ageism.
There are certain realities about age and one of those realities is that typically wisdom and when you age you gain wisdom and you gain experience.
And so we would say that if somebody is 25 or 26 years old They are going to probably be short on wisdom and experience and so that's someone who we don't want in the White House.
Not because we're discriminating against them or because there's anything wrong with being 25 or 26 years old.
There's nothing wrong with being any age.
It's just you can't help it.
You're inevitably going to be every age until eventually you die and then you're not going to be any more ages after that.
So we don't We don't consider that ageism.
Well, there are realities about age on the other end of the spectrum, too.
And the most harsh reality on the other end of the spectrum is that age will eventually kill you, unless something else does the job first.
Age is a deadly thing.
And before you die, If you live long enough, your mental and physical capacities will diminish.
It's going to happen.
The only way that it won't happen to you is if you die before that.
But if you don't, then it will happen to you.
It happens to everyone.
We are mortal animals.
This is part of the package.
And so that is why it's completely absurd for elderly men.
When you're 78 years old, Joe Biden is going to be 78 years old on Inauguration Day.
That is elderly.
The life expectancy for men in America is 76.
Now, yeah, that number is weighed down by men who die much younger, but still.
Point is, it's really old.
Way too old to take on the most stressful job on the planet.
As I pointed out before, think about What the job did to George Bush, who was a young man when he got into office, or Barack Obama, also both of them relatively young men.
Think about what they look like after eight years.
It aged them considerably.
Now think about what it would do to a guy who's 78 when he gets into office.
By the time midterms roll around, Joe Biden will be 80 years old.
At 80 years old, you will have been AARP eligible for 30 years.
At 80 years old is also the age where people typically start to get dementia if they're going to get it.
It's not ageism.
That's just a reality.
At 80 years old, your chances of developing dementia are pretty good.
At the age of 50 or 60, they are very, very low.
What happens when a president gets dementia?
Does anyone know?
What do we do about that?
I mean, how do we know that he... I mean, sometimes it's not obvious right away.
And what happens when he has the early onset of dementia?
What do you do?
Well, we've never really had to figure that out, but Joe Biden's insatiable thirst for power may force us to figure it out.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have been running for political office, or holding political office, for a hundred years between them.
They just can't get enough of it.
And they're going to keep going until it literally kills them.
And I think that's reason enough to oppose their candidacies, and I haven't even gotten into their bad policy ideas.
But before you even get to that, the fact is these are elderly men who are obsessed with power and cannot let it go.
Anyone who wants to be president so bad that they'll run for president at the age of 78, that is someone who should not be president.
You know, the other problem, I think, with having someone at that age be president is that An elderly person isn't going to be around to reap the consequences of their policies and their actions.
And I think that's just not fair to the rest of us.
Like it's not fair that you have control over the future of America and it's a future you're not even going to be a part of.
That's not fair to us.
We deserve to have somebody in there who's going to have to also live with the consequences of whatever they do.
How do you hold such a person accountable?
I mean, when someone is 80 years old and they're president, they are almost definitely going to be dead within 10 years, probably within five.
Now, look, it's It's not a pleasant reality, it's just the reality of the situation.
Most people don't live past 85, especially men.
Yeah, there are exceptions, but most people don't.
So, it's just, why should a person like that care what the voters think?
Well, they're not going to.
They have nothing to lose.
And, you know, it's difficult enough when you have a lame duck president.
Like, when you've got a president on his second term, and he knows he's leaving after this, Well, what about when you have someone who's about to be term-limited out of existence itself?
I mean, how do you control someone like that?
Now, there are many reasons to not vote for Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
I just think that this is definitely one of them.
And this is why there should be an age limit on the presidency.
It should be, you can't run until you're 35 and you can't run after you're 75.
That gives you a good 40-year window to become president.
And guess what?
If you can't do it in those 40 years, then it's just over.
Let it go.
Go home and play with your grandchildren.
You don't get to be president.
Well, you know what?
Almost nobody gets to be president, so that's okay.
It's not much of an injustice.
I'm never gonna be president.
You've never been president and never will be, so why should Joe Biden be president?
Joe Biden ran for president the first time 30 years ago.
Okay?
I mean, let it go now.
It's over.
Every time I talk about this, there are people who say, I was talking about it yesterday, and someone said, well, my grandmother is 92 years old, and she's sharp as a tack, and your generalizations are ageist.
Oh, come on.
First of all, Nothing I have said here is factually inaccurate.
Are you going to deny that your mental and physical capacities diminish generally over time?
Are you going to deny that you're much more likely to get dementia at 80 than you are at 50?
Are you going to deny that most people die before they're 85?
No, you cannot deny any of that!
Those are just facts!
To call something ageist because it's a... That's like if I said, you know, one-year-olds need diapers because they can't use the toilet.
And you said, well, that's ageist.
How could you make such a sweeping statement about one-year-olds?
It's not ageist.
That's just a reality of their age.
Yes, your 92-year-old grandmother may be sharp as a tack, but there are... Most 92-year-old... Most people don't live to 92.
Most people die before that.
And...
Most 92-year-olds who are living, they may be sharp for 92, but they're not as sharp as they were when they were 50.
50 and they and so physically they're definitely not going to be as as there
is no 92 year old living today who is in good physical shape compared to a 50 or
40 year old it's just this we are mortals okay It's just what happens.
I know it's uncomfortable to think about.
You know, I think part of this, when I talk about this and people react, how dare you say that?
You know what, I think part of it, because the reaction on the surface seems so ridiculous.
Because everything I'm saying is factually correct, you cannot deny it.
But the people who react that way, I think part of it is just a fear of death.
Like they're afraid of their own mortality.
They don't want to admit that this is just what happens.
Like we are all marching into this.
We're all marching into the abyss of, you know, of death and diminishment.
And that's where we're headed.
It's just, I'm sorry.
I don't, I don't like it any more than you do.
Um, There is no good reason.
There is no good reason to have 78-year-olds running for president.
There isn't.
It does not benefit the country.
You cannot think of a good reason for it.
It would not harm the country in any way whatsoever to cap it at 75.
And I could think of many ways that would help us.
I mean, at 75, forget about running for president.
You should have to go and retake the driver's test.
I mean, the fact that we Let people drive until they're 90 without with that alone is crazy enough.
Um, let alone be president.
So, all right, let's see.
Uh, I think I'm going to jump ahead to emails because there were several emails, emails that I wanted to answer some really interesting, um, subjects.
Okay, let's check in with the inbox.
mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com if you want to get a hold of the show.
This is from Daniel, says, Dear Matt, I am a firm believer in Jesus Christ and thoroughly enjoy the subject of apologetics.
One of the tougher subjects that I have often wrestled with is the veracity of Scripture.
While the Bible states that the Word of God is forever preserved in heaven, it does not explicitly state that God preserves His Word here on earth.
A great example of this is found in 2 Kings 22, where King Josiah finds the book of the law hidden within the temple.
This means that there was a long time where the people of God did not have portions of Scripture.
How do we defend the canon that we have today?
I've often heard the Bible challenged in that it is simply a conglomeration of texts chosen by men.
Historically, this is true, and the accusation is hard to deny.
Ultimately, I personally accept the veracity of Scripture by faith.
Since it so accurately describes the world around me and how I relate to God.
That being said, that is a defense from faith.
And while there is nothing unholy about it, it is a difficult defense with which to convince a skeptic.
Along this topic, I have a couple of other related questions.
Being a Protestant, I have a general understanding that the Catholic faith accepts the Apocrypha.
I am not sure where you stand on this, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but could you let me know why or why not you accept the Apocrypha of Scripture?
Last of all, Within Protestant circles, there is often a very strong debate concerning translations.
While I do not believe that any translation is God-breathed, there are many around me who do, namely the King James Version.
I believe that translations can be open to error, and the only truly scripture inspired by God are the original manuscripts, which appear to have been lost to time.
I do believe that a translation can be truly evil when it distorts and changes biblical doctrine, but I believe there are many consistent and faithful translations that I would deem acceptable for knowing God.
How would you define the need for looking at translations, as well as addressing those who choose one translation only
and condemn the rest?
All right Thanks for that email.
It's a great email.
Very meaty.
And this is why this is my favorite part of the show, because I get these great topics and I don't even consider them questions.
Like, it's not like you're coming to me so I could teach you, because I think a lot of you probably know more than I do about almost everything.
But it's just you're bringing up a topic that we could talk about, which I really appreciate.
And I also like how, Daniel, you same thing I said to someone yesterday, I think.
I think it's great how You're thinking about these things and being critically minded.
I love when I see that in Christians.
I think that, unfortunately, it's somewhat rare.
I could be wrong.
My general impression, my feeling is that most Christians, at least in America, don't really think about these things.
They don't think about the Bible.
They don't really try to understand it, especially not from a historical standpoint, and I think that's unfortunate.
So then one of the problems is, you're probably running into this, Daniel, is that if you are someone who thinks about this and reads about it and wrestles with it, struggles with it, it can get to feel kind of lonely because when you try to talk to someone else about it, another Christian, you just get this blank stare like they've never even thought about it.
And so, if this could be a forum for these kinds of conversations so we know that we're not alone, then I think that that's a good—that's enough.
All right, so we do believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, obviously.
However, that idea of the inspired Word of God doesn't have one obvious meaning.
So it's easy to say, oh, it's the inspired Word of God.
Okay.
Yes.
What does that mean though?
What does it actually mean?
And don't just spit talking points at me or doctrine.
What does it actually mean though?
There's a debate to be had and a debate has been had for centuries about what that means exactly and how that works.
The very simplistic sort of childish understanding is that God basically bent down from heaven and he said, hey come over here and he audibly spoke the words That would eventually be in the Bible.
He spoke those words to the writers of these various books, and those writers just became essentially cosmic stenographers, and they just wrote down what God was telling them.
They said, well, hold on, what was that you said there, God, about?
Okay, let me write that down.
And that is not how it worked.
As we grow and we study and we mature, We begin to see that that's just not the way the Bible came together.
The Bible is a collection of different types of literature across many centuries, written in many different regions, and written for many different reasons to many different sorts of audiences, and written by people who did not know that they were writing something that would eventually be compiled in a book that we now call the Bible.
That's the reality.
And we also know, and this is the important part, we know that many of these writers used sources, or probably they all did, used sources.
They conducted investigations, they went through a process that would have looked like a very human process, and they incorporated oral tradition, and they incorporated all these different things.
Luke, you know, Luke even tells us at the beginning of his gospel that he conducted interviews and he did research and so on.
Luke does not say that, oh, an angel came down from heaven and told me all this and I wrote it down.
He doesn't say that.
He says he went in and he tried to investigate and figure out what the heck's going on and this is what he came up with.
He tells us that.
So, what does it mean to say that the Bible is inspired?
It means that God somehow guided that human process And that everything in the Bible is in the Bible because God wants it to be.
I think it's sort of as simple as that.
I think that's the best way of looking at it.
Everything's in the Bible because God wants it there.
I think it's better to say that than to say something like, everything in the Bible is accurate.
I'm not saying that everything in the Bible is not accurate, but I am saying that there are many different forms and genres of literature in the Bible, and for some of those genres to call them accurate just makes no sense.
What does it mean to say that the Song of Solomon is accurate?
What does it mean to say that the Psalms are accurate?
What does it even mean to say that, you know, the Book of James is accurate?
You know, when you've got poetry or, you know, Essentially sermons, which is what the epistles do, letters.
To call them accurate, it's true in a certain sense, but it's not exactly the words you would use.
Like, you're not going to listen to a Mozart symphony.
You're not going to listen to Mozart and say, well, that's very accurate.
That doesn't mean anything.
What you're going to say is that it's beautiful, it's deep, it's meaningful.
You're going to use a lot of great words to describe it.
Not necessarily accurate.
So, I think that the best way of putting it is, as I said, it's there because God wanted it to be there.
Because we will get something from it that we need to get from it.
And what that thing is will be different depending on what book we're reading.
So, how do we defend that notion?
Well, I agree that you can't defend it by demanding that the person you're talking to believe the Bible on faith.
You can't defend the Bible by using the Bible.
This is something that Christians try to do and it's kind of embarrassing because it's They're essentially trying to prove the veracity of the Bible by pointing out that the Bible claims that it has veracity, which, first of all, is circular reasoning to say, well, why should I believe the Bible?
Because the Bible says it's true.
Yeah, but why should I believe that?
Well, because the Bible is true.
You see, it's a circle, and that's not good reasoning.
You're not going to be able to convince anyone that way.
And the second problem is that the Bible actually makes no claims about itself.
Because, as I said, no one who contributed to the Bible knew that they were contributing to something that we now call the Bible.
None of them knew that.
So, I think we have to be able to launch a more sophisticated defense, which is a whole other subject I could talk about for 10 hours, but I think that defense has to be historical, philosophical, theological, Literary, spiritual, all of it.
We have to be able to launch a defense that is multifaceted and that engages on all of these different levels.
And what we certainly know is not the case is we can't convince someone that the Bible is true by just throwing it at them and beating them over the head with it.
And say, the Bible says it!
The Bible says it!
And that's a stereotype, it's a cliche, but that is what some Christians do.
And it is so incredibly ineffective.
And they're making fools of themselves.
You ask about what you call the Apocrypha.
That would be a collection of books in the Old Testament.
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Maccabees, a couple others.
I don't remember all of them.
The Protestant Bible excludes those books, and you call it Apocrypha.
Obviously, I don't call it Apocrypha.
It's sort of a negative label to use, obviously.
So, why do I accept it?
Well, it's simply a matter of history for me.
When I look at the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, I see that most of those books are in it, and that is very convincing to me.
When I read the Church Fathers, I see that most of them accepted these books.
That's very convincing to me.
I think that a Bible with those books has a better historical claim than a Bible without them, and it's really as simple as that.
And by the way, the Catholic Church is not the only one that accepts them.
The Catholic Church accepts them.
The Coptic Church accepts them.
The Coptic Church has been around since the very beginning.
The Coptic Church can trace its roots back Almost 2,000 years.
The Greek Orthodox Church accepts them.
The Russian Orthodox Church accepts them.
A lot of very ancient churches accept these books, and that should tell us something.
If somebody decided in the 16th century that these books shouldn't be in there, well, personally, I'm more inclined to listen to someone in the 3rd century, or the 4th century.
Someone who's a little bit closer to Not only when these books were written, but when they were ultimately compiled and everything.
Finally, on translations, as I've said before, the claim that the King James Bible, the King James Version is the most accurate, the only inspired translation is completely absurd.
The whole house of cards comes tumbling down, as I talked about a few weeks ago, just based on the fact that the King James Version has the Johannine Comma, which is an interpolation in the Epistle of John, which talks about the Trinity, and that we know was not in the earliest manuscripts and was added in centuries later by someone who decided, oh, you know what, this should really be in there, and I'm just going to put it in.
So, it shouldn't be in there.
The King James Version has it.
Almost no other Bible translation you're going to find in America has that, because almost every scholar knows it shouldn't be there.
So, that's a pretty glaring error that the KJV has.
Doesn't make it worthless.
I still read the KJV.
I like that style, especially for certain books.
But, to call it the most accurate or the only inspired version is just completely wrong.
I'm not dogmatic about translations.
I have a bunch of translations back there.
I flip between them.
As you said, some of them have issues.
They have different sorts of issues.
And so, you know, you can't get too attached to one translation.
That's my feeling.
By the way, if you don't read Greek and you don't read Hebrew, then you're only stuck with pale imitations.
Talk to someone who reads Greek and they'll tell you that what you're getting in the English Bible, it's the best you can do.
It's better than nothing.
But you're missing a lot when you don't know the original language, and I don't know it.
So I already know.
It's already weird to be really attached to an English translation.
If you're going to get really attached to a translation, then get attached to a Greek translation.
Learn Greek and get attached to that.
All right.
Okay, that was a long answer.
There was one other here.
This is also a long one.
That's alright, I'll do it.
From Robert says, Hi Matt, I enjoyed your thoughts on Pascal's wager.
I agree that it's the weakest Christian argument.
I think the best Christian argument, at least one of the best, is one from C.S.
Lewis saying that Jesus must have either been Lord, lunatic, or liar because only someone who's a conman, crazy, or actually God would claim to be God as Jesus did.
I've always thought that this is a really logical argument and I'm not sure how unbelievers deal with it or dismiss it.
Seems rock solid to me.
Have you heard this argument?
What do you think?
Yeah, Robert, that's the trilemma argument.
I've actually dealt with it on the show.
I'm pretty sure.
I love C.S.
Lewis.
I get what he's doing in the argument, but no, I'm afraid that it's—I don't think it's a good argument.
I think it's maybe even weaker than Pascal's wager, and I think it's by far the weakest argument that C.S.
Lewis ever made, which is a shame that it became his most famous argument.
He made a lot of great arguments, and I think that maybe is his worst one, yet that's the one that a lot of people have grown attached to.
So, let's read what C.S.
Lewis did.
He's not the first one to make this argument, by the way, but he did popularize it.
This is from Mere Christianity.
C.S.
Lewis says, I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him.
I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.
That is the one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
He would either be a lunatic On the level with a man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell, you must make your choice.
Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and call him a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.
But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
He has not left that open to us.
He did not intend to.
Now, it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God.
Very eloquently put, but there are two problems.
First, The argument operates from the assumption that Jesus actually did say everything that the Gospels claim he said, and that's a fine assumption among us Christians.
It's one that I share, but the argument isn't for Christians, right?
If you're going to—you're not going to make this argument to another Christian.
They already agree.
So, if you're making this argument, then you must be making it to someone who is outside the faith, to non-Christians.
And non-Christians do not assume that the Gospels are 100% accurate.
If they did, they'd already be Christian.
So, you know you're talking to someone who looks at the Gospels and says, you know, that's a book like every other holy book.
It's a, you know, there's maybe some accuracy in it, there's some fables, there's some this and that.
That's how they're looking at the Bible.
So, when you say, hey, Jesus claimed to be God, which means that he must have been God or else he was crazy or a conman, the obvious response from an unbeliever is, okay, well, then he didn't claim to be God.
And this would be a perfectly logical retort from the perspective of an unbeliever, especially because almost all of Jesus's most explicit claims to divinity are in the Gospel of John, which was written last and written maybe 60 or 70 years after Jesus died.
So, all a person needs to say to diffuse this argument from C.S.
Lewis, all a person needs to say is, Well, the Gospel of John was written 70 years later by someone who obviously was not an eyewitness from their perspective.
And it is a theological and poetic work and also a mythological work.
And so, I just don't accept that it's historically accurate.
And like I said, that is a logically sound response.
The second problem with the argument, though we don't need a second argument because the first problem is enough, is devastating enough, but the second argument is that it's not necessarily true that anyone who claims to be God and isn't God must be lying or crazy.
I mean, even today, you could talk to people who are kind of these new-agey pantheists, and they'll say that, yeah, I'm God, we're all God.
You know, God is everything and everyone.
We're all God.
Now, that's nonsense.
It doesn't mean anything, but that's what they would say.
Jesus was not a pantheist, obviously, but the point simply is that you could conceivably come up with a spiritual—you could come up with a scenario.
Where a person may develop a spiritual notion of their own divinity without necessarily being totally insane and while actually believing what they say.
I think that it's too simplistic on those grounds as well.
I think it's conceivable that a person could come to think of themselves as some sort of divinity Without being crazy.
Especially in ancient times.
I mean, the Roman emperors considered themselves divine.
They weren't crazy.
And I don't think they were lying exactly.
They really thought it was true.
Of course it wasn't.
So, you know, those are the two problems with it.
I would recommend everyone go read C.S.
Lewis.
So many great arguments, so many great points that he raises.
That's just not one of them.
And I'm telling you, take this argument and present it to any atheist, and what I just said, that's exactly what they're going to say.
So then what the argument really becomes is an argument about proving the historical veracity of the Gospels, because that's what it all hinges on.
So I would say, now, cut out the trilemma thing, and just talk about that.
And if you feel like you can prove that, or provide evidence for that, then great, just do that.
Because if you can get them to accept the historical veracity of the gospel, then you don't even need the trilemma, because they're already going to be Christian at that point, right?
Alright, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for the great questions, and have a great weekend.
Godspeed.
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