Mayor Pete, the trendy Democrat presidential candidate of the week, is accusing Evangelicals of hypocrisy. Be he claims to be a Christian while supporting late-term abortion. What about his hypocrisy? Also, Cory Booker has introduced a slavery reparations bill. We’ll talk about the left’s effort to cure injustice with more injustice. And finally, what about parents who use child leashes? Is that a horrifying practice or practical and smart? Date: 04-09-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Mayor Pete, the trendy Democrat presidential candidate of the week, is accusing evangelical Christians of hypocrisy.
But then he claims to be a Christian while supporting late-term abortion.
What about his hypocrisy?
We'll talk about that.
Also, Cory Booker has introduced a slavery reparations bill.
We'll talk about the left's efforts to cure injustice with more injustice.
They seem very fond of that sort of strategy.
And finally, what about parents who use child leashes?
Is that a horrifying practice or is it actually practical and smart?
We will discuss that very important issue today as well on the Matt Wall Show.
So tonight I will be speaking at Baylor University as I'm sure you've heard by now
here in Waco, Texas as part of the Young America's Foundation campus tour.
If you can't make it out, you can catch the live stream on YouTube at YAF TV.
So tune in and share, share, share, share.
I have to say, flying into Dallas, Um, last night was a little rough.
It was a very bumpy flight and I'm an extremely nervous flyer.
I fly all the time.
But it doesn't get any better.
Just to give you an idea of how bad my paranoia is, in the middle of the flight, while the turbulence was really bad, I was frantically trying to get connected to Wi-Fi so that I would be able to text my wife goodbye in case the plane started going down.
That's where my head was.
And then the other thought, this is even more sad, Even sadder.
The other thought that I had after I thought about my family, my second thought was that if this plane goes down, some of the protesters at Baylor are going to be way too happy about that.
And I started thinking of all the snarky tweets they would send about the fact that I died in a plane crash.
And so I just started praying to God, like, please, Lord, don't give them that satisfaction.
Please.
So, essentially, I was praying for the plane not to crash out of spite.
That's what it was.
And my prayers worked, because I'm here today.
So, alright, a lot to talk about today, and we'll get into all of that.
But first, I have to say one other thing here at the top.
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All right, let's talk about a person that I have avoided discussing on this show, mainly because I don't want to have to deal with pronouncing This person's name.
And so this will be the first time that I pronounce it, because up until now I've only written it.
This is my debut pronunciation.
Very exciting stuff.
You all get to be here for this.
Okay.
Pete Budigig.
Budig... Budegedge.
Budig... Budig... Budegig.
Budeg...
No, I already said that.
I think that's it.
Sounds like I'm summoning some sort of dark force from the underworld.
Anyway, well maybe we'll just call him Pete from here on out.
He's one of the sort of long-shot Democrat candidates, 38-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, getting a lot of attention because of his youth, but also because he does have an impressive and interesting resume.
He's a Rhodes Scholar, a combat veteran, clearly a very intelligent person, well-spoken, formidable candidate, I think, and in a crowd that includes some candidates who are over 300 years old, I think his youth is also a big plus for him.
Mayor Pete is also openly gay.
And this is a fact that has come to the foreground in recent days.
It's come to the foreground because he has put it in the foreground.
A couple of days ago, while giving a speech to a gay rights group, he had this to say.
Watch this.
People talk about things like marriage equality as a moral issue.
And it is certainly a moral issue as far as I'm concerned.
It's a moral issue because being married to Chaston has made me a better human being.
Because it has made me more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware, and more decent.
My marriage to Chaston has made me a better man.
And yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.
You may be religious and you may not.
But if you are, and you are also queer, And you have come through the other side of a period of wishing that you weren't.
Then you know that that message, that this idea that there is something wrong with you, is a message that puts you at war, not only with yourself, but with your maker.
And speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a choice,
it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade.
And that's the thing I wish the Mike Pence's of the world would understand.
That if you've got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me.
Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.
So he's decided, for some reason, to go after Mike Pence.
And this isn't the first time that he's talked about Mike Pence.
I mean, he's been talking about Mike Pence a lot over the last few days.
Keep in mind that Mayor Pete is a mayor in Indiana.
Pence used to be governor of Indiana.
So you think, okay, well maybe Pence mistreated Buttigieg, Pete, somehow while they were in Indiana.
And maybe that's why Pete has something against him.
Well, actually, interestingly enough, we do have a clip of Mike Pence talking about Mayor Pete back in 2015 when he was governor and Pete was mayor, and so here's what Pence had to say about him.
Well, I hold Mayor Buttigieg in the highest personal regard, and we have a great working relationship, and I see him as a dedicated public servant and a patriot.
That unbelievable bigot.
I mean, how could he say that?
Oh, wait a second.
No, he just said that Pete's a great guy and a patriot.
He could not have been more glowing in his appraisal.
But the interesting thing about Mayor Pete is that while he's openly gay, very liberal in many respects as well, he talks a lot about faith and is sort of inculcating This image of being a devout Christian, as you saw in that clip, is talking about God, his creator, and so on.
And he not only talks about faith, but he uses it against his opponents.
Watch this from Meet the Press a couple of days ago.
You said something rather strong about the president, that you said, it's hard to look at his actions and believe that they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.
How do you square that assessment with the fact that the evangelical Christian community is so devoted to his candidacy?
Well, it's something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable.
Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in Scripture or in church, where it's about lifting up the least among us and taking care of strangers, which is another word for immigrants, and making sure that you're focusing your effort on the poor, but also personally, how you're supposed to conduct yourself.
Not chest-thumping, look-at-me-ism, but humbling yourself before others, foot-washing is one of the central images in the New Testament.
And we see the diametric opposite of that in this presidency.
I think there was perhaps a cynical process where he decided to, for example, begin to
pretend to be pro-life and govern accordingly, which was good enough to bring many evangelicals
over to his side.
But even on the version of Christianity that you hear from the religious right, which is
about sexual ethics.
I can't believe that somebody who is caught writing hush money checks to adult film actresses is somebody they should be lifting up as the kind of person you want to be leading this nation.
Now, all things being equal, I agree with some of what he just said right there.
It's true that Trump's behavior is often not at all consistent with the gospel or Christian ethics.
There's simply no denying that.
And it's true that Trump has, as we know, a certain base of obsessive supporters who basically worship him like a god and have humiliated themselves and their faith by actively excusing some of Trump's worst conduct, including paying off porn stars who he had affairs with while his wife Was at home with her infant son, so he's not he's not wrong About some of that, but but speaking of unbelievable hypocrisy Mayor Pete demonstrates it himself because here he is Or he was just there talking about about faith bringing faith into it, and he does this a lot Talking about the gospel and Jesus the Creator everything and
But then then watch what happens.
This is interesting.
So he's talking about faith everywhere.
Watch what happens, though, when he's asked about late term abortion.
So do you do you support the late term abortion legislation that was passed in the New York state legislature as well as in Virginia?
I don't think we need more restrictions right now.
And, you know, what I've learned in Indiana, being at a place where A lot of my friends, a lot of my supporters even, come from a different place than I do, being pro-choice.
I just believe that when a woman is in that situation, and when we're talking about some of those situations covered by that law, extremely difficult, painful, often medically serious situations where life or health of the mother is at stake, the involvement of a male government official like me is not helpful.
Do states have a right?
Should states have a right to ban abortion at 20 weeks?
That sounds like a constitutional question.
I'm not a legal scholar.
What I know is that these questions ought to be resolved by women in consultation with their doctors, not by the intervention of male politicians putting politically motivated restrictions on women's health care.
Well, wait a minute.
What happened to the Gospel?
What happened to the Creator?
Pete said that God created him gay.
Well, we can talk about that notion, but he is right, at least, that God created him.
That's true.
But did God not also create the little babies who are killed by abortion?
Do they count for nothing?
What about them?
It's very fascinating, isn't it, that he's talking non-stop about the gospel.
As soon as late-term abortion comes up, he's got nothing to say about the gospel.
Apparently, he thinks God has no opinion on that subject.
He thinks God has an opinion on immigration.
God has an opinion on Donald Trump.
But apparently God has no opinion on abortion.
This is the problem that liberals run into.
They feel that they have to defend abortion, all abortion, even late-term abortion, but that defense undermines everything else they say, especially on matters of faith and morals.
Pete's whole bit about evangelicals supporting Trump may have had some kick to it, may have had some real bite.
But then it's just blown to smithereens because this guy, when it comes down to it, will, at a minimum, tolerate the killing of 32-week-old infants in the womb.
At a minimum, he'll tolerate it.
At a minimum, he'll put up with it and say, well, that's none of my business.
So abortion continues to be an albatross for Democrats.
As long as they support it, nothing else they say matters.
And some issues are like that.
There are some issues that, you know, just if you get that wrong, it destroys everything else you say.
I mean, imagine if there was a candidate out there defending slavery.
Or maybe not even defending it, but just saying, well, you know, it's none of my business.
People have property rights, and I'm not going to get involved.
They don't need to hear my opinion.
Even if there was a candidate saying that, taking a kind of hands-off approach to the question, well, that would obviously destroy his candidacy.
And we would all say rightly so that listen, there's, you know, it doesn't matter what else this guy doesn't matter how smart he is.
Doesn't matter about his resume.
It doesn't matter about his leadership skills or what I don't care what what else this guy has done.
If you get that question wrong, then you're not fit for leadership.
And your opinion doesn't matter.
Because whatever else you say, you're obviously operating from a foundation That includes treating human beings as property, as livestock.
And so if that's part of your fundamental worldview, then whatever grows from there, whatever springs forth from that is Is going to be deeply flawed, to say the least.
And so, slavery is one of those topics.
Rape is another one of those topics.
If a candidate was out there defending rape, we would say, again, look, that's a deal breaker, and it should be.
Well, abortion is in that category.
Holocaust denial, that's another one.
Candidate is out there denying the Holocaust or justifying it.
Again, doesn't matter what else, doesn't matter what else they've done.
If they've cured cancer, if they're a war hero, none of that matters.
If you get that issue wrong, you're not fit.
And abortion, again, is one of those.
This is the genocide of the unborn.
If you can't get that right, if you can't figure that one out, if either you lack the intellectual clarity and moral insight, To see what's wrong with it, or if you lack the courage to speak out against it, although you know that it's wrong, either way, you're unfit.
And so Pete, Mayor Pete is unfit, just like all the other, just like all the other Democrats.
Okay, let's take a look at this story from the Daily Wire by Paul Bois.
In an effort to differentiate himself from the pack by moving as far to the left as he can on the political spectrum, Senator Cory Booker has now introduced a bill to the Senate that would study the payment of slavery reparations, according to Fox News.
On Monday, the Senator said the bill will study whether or not slavery reparations will help to alleviate past racial injustice in the United States.
Booker said the bill is a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country.
It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.
Booker added that slavery in this country fueled a subsequent system of white supremacy designed to keep black Americans from competing economically.
And he goes on from there talking about white supremacy and so on and so forth.
Well, let me see if I can help our friend Spartacus out here.
Can we alleviate injustices from 150 years ago?
Well, really, I could just stop the question right there.
Can we alleviate injustices from 150 years ago?
No, we can't.
There's nothing we can do about them.
It's 150 years in the past.
It's over.
We can't do anything to right that ship anymore.
It's happened.
It's over now, right?
There's nothing we can do to go back.
And make that okay.
Slavery was an outrageous injustice.
It will always be that way in the past, and we can't go back and change it.
If we could, I wish we could, but we can't.
But especially, can we alleviate injustices from 150 years ago by taking money from people who had nothing to do with it and giving it to people who never suffered the injustice in question?
No, we cannot.
Just as I cannot alleviate the injustice of my grandfather getting carjacked in 1962 by slashing my neighbor's tires.
That's going to do nothing for my grandfather, whose car was taken, and that's all there is to it, and who is dead now.
Anyway, I don't know if my grandfather was actually carjacked, this is just an example.
But it's not going to do anything for my grandfather, who's not even alive anymore.
The person that I am punishing for this injustice had nothing to do with it, so I'm teaching him a lesson that didn't need to be taught.
As far as I know, my neighbor's never carjacked anyone.
Even if I discovered that my neighbor is a descendant of the guy who did the carjacking, even then, the slashing of the tires would just be another injustice added on top of it.
We would be adding injustice to injustice, and that solves nothing.
Maybe you've noticed this about leftist policies, hopefully you have, that leftists are always seeking to cure injustice by creating more injustice.
Have you noticed that?
So you cure the injustices suffered by immigrants by allowing them to break our laws and undermine our national sovereignty, which just creates more injustice.
You cure the injustice suffered by a raped woman by killing her baby, who had nothing to do with it.
You cure the injustice suffered by the poor by stealing from the rich.
You cure the supposed injustices suffered by gay people by taking First Amendment rights from Christians.
You cure the injustices of racial discrimination by discriminating against white people in the university system and elsewhere with affirmative action.
And now you cure the injustices of slavery by stealing from people who never owned slaves.
So everything is a zero-sum game with these people.
That's how everything works.
And I think maybe it's more so that everything is a kind of a competition.
And this is one of the fundamental flaws with the left's whole idea of human rights.
Their human rights, their version of human rights, their claims to human rights are always zero sum.
Like, in order for this group to have rights, we have to take rights away from this other group.
And it always works that way with the left.
But the way that you know that something is a real human right is that it doesn't work that way.
If something is a real human right, then you can grant it to a group of people without taking anything from any other group of people.
Or, I should say, if it's a real human right, you can grant it to a group of people without depriving any other group of their human rights.
Now, if you want to grant human rights to slaves, then you are, in a sense, taking something from slave owners that they never had a right to in the first place, so you're not depriving them of human rights.
But in granting rights to slaves, the slaves had rights.
But you're not taking rights away from anybody else, because they never had a right to that.
To begin with, they never had a right to own another person to begin with.
And that's the way that works.
Religious liberty, freedom of speech.
If you give someone the right to go out and speak their mind, live their beliefs, that doesn't take anything away from anyone else.
It may mean that other people have to be inconvenienced, or by listening to ideas they don't like, they might even have to be offended by listening to ideas they don't like, but they never had any right to not be offended in the first place.
But with the left, no, it's a competition.
So with them, it's, well, if you want to give rights to women, that means that you have to take The right to life from the unborn.
But that's how you know that what we're talking about with women here that will it's not it's not a right at all.
Women have human rights.
They do not have the right to kill anybody any more than men do.
So that's how you know all of these competing claims to human rights.
It's very confusing.
Well, if you ever find a situation where you've got two competing claims, and if one group gets their rights, the other group has rights deprived of them, that's how you know that something is wrong here.
That's how you know that we're not actually talking about rights anymore.
We're talking about entitlements and privileges and so on.
All right, before we get to emails, I had something else I wanted to mention.
Very important topic, extremely crucial.
I have been traveling a lot this month, as I mentioned, a lot over the past, like, four years, really.
And so I've been in very many airports.
And I have noticed, this is anecdotal, of course, but I have noticed that there's been a huge uptick in the number of parents who have their toddlers on leashes.
This is something I noticed, especially in the last couple of weeks.
It seems every airport now that I go to, there are at least a few parents walking their toddlers around leashed.
Now, often the leash is connected to the child's backpack, but a leash is a leash.
I mean, let's be honest.
Now, I want to say this.
I was thinking about it, and I have long been anti-leash.
I have long been one of those people who looks at the leash-wielding parents and shakes my head and says to myself, oh that's awful, oh that's how terrible, how dehumanizing for that poor child.
But I have three kids, five and under now, and I've been in crowded places like airports with all of these kids at once.
I have had those moments where one of them runs off and for about 12 seconds you're panicked and you think the tragedy has struck.
And I will say that I, I get it.
Okay, I get the leash thing.
I didn't, I didn't used to get it, but I get it now.
Now, I don't use leashes, because I can't bear the looks that I would get from people like myself.
So that's the only reason I don't use them.
And I suspect that's actually the reason why most parents don't use them.
It's not that you really have anything against it, it's just that you can't deal, you know how you always looked at those kinds of parents and you don't want to get those same looks and that's why you don't do it.
But I do get it.
It's practical.
It makes sense.
And I mean, if you've never at least considered the option of using a leash, then that tells me that you've never been in charge of keeping track of multiple young children at one time in a busy place.
Because if you have, then at the very least, you've thought about it.
You've at the very least had a moment where you thought, okay, yeah, I see it now.
There are a lot of things that parents do That non-parents will judge rather harshly.
And that's why parents can get defensive sometimes, because when they get these judgments from people who aren't even parents, it can be a little annoying.
Or even some, I've noticed also that as parents, especially of young kids, or if you're a parent of children that you still have to look after, You're going to get judged by non-parents and also sometimes older parents who have kids that have long since grown and moved out of the house, who it seems like have forgotten what it was like to actually have young kids, or maybe they don't understand some of the challenges that come with raising kids in the modern world.
But I, over time, And I think this is a process that a lot of parents go through.
I've become much more tolerant and understanding.
I'm not tolerant and understanding in many aspects of life, but in this aspect I am.
Increasingly so when it comes to parenting.
Another example is I used to hate the idea of TVs in cars.
I used to think that You know, we have TVs everywhere.
Do you really need a freaking TV in your car for your kids to watch?
I used to be behind someone in traffic and I would see through their car the screen on and some Disney movie playing and the kids are in there watching the movie.
And I used to think, is that really necessary?
I mean, do you really need the TV there?
But then I actually experienced driving 8 or 10 or 11 hours in a car with three kids, five and under.
And I experienced that enclosed, up close and personal whining and talking and constant question asking, and are we there yet?
And I'm hungry, and I'm bored, and blah, blah, blah.
And so, yeah, I get why you turn a movie on for them now.
Why not?
It's a tool that you have available to you.
It makes everything easier.
It's not hurting anyone, so why not do it?
I think here's what happens.
Everyone has these grand ideas about what kind of parent they're gonna be, what sort of rules and policies they'll have in place once they have kids.
And then they have kids, and pretty quickly, they realize that a lot of those ideas are silly and pointless, and they're not worth the trouble.
You had all these notions about, oh, when I'm a parent, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do this, there's gonna be none of that, and then you become a parent and you're like, yeah, you know, it doesn't really matter.
So, now you don't hopefully abandon all of your priorities and principles, you know, hopefully, but you kind of boil them down to the essentials.
That's what ends up happening.
You figure out which lines you feel, you and your spouse feel, cannot be crossed, and then you compromise on the rest of it.
And that's fine.
Like for me, one of the things that was always important to me and to my wife is I don't like the idea of young kids playing video games.
So I said, We're not going to get video games for our kids at this age, or probably for a while longer.
No matter if all their friends have them, which at this point, all my son's friends do have video games.
But that's not something I want for our family, and we've stuck to that, and we're not going to do that.
It's important to us.
It's not important to everybody.
Some parents, it's not important to them, they don't see it as a big deal, and that's fine.
I'm not judging them, it's whatever they want to do.
Some parents feel strongly about dietary things, like soda.
They won't let their kid go anywhere near soda.
Well, we let our kids have soda on occasion.
We let them eat junk food on occasion.
I don't really care that much.
It's not a big deal.
I don't see it as a big deal.
Some parents do.
Whatever.
That's fine.
You figure out what your lines are and then you draw them.
And there have to be some lines that are just there and that you don't cross.
You've got to have some of those.
You can't just erase all of them.
Because then you're gonna end up with spoiled bratty kids who get whatever they want.
So you obviously can't do that.
But, there are going to be a lot of lines that you drew before you actually had kids, and you didn't know what it was like, and you didn't know what you were doing, and then pretty quickly you see those as superfluous, and so you make practical decisions and compromise, and that's okay, because parenting is hard enough, and you don't need to create more challenges for yourself.
You don't need to make it harder than it actually already is.
One big thing about parenting is guilt.
You always feel guilty.
You always feel like you're not doing a good enough job, like everyone else is squared away with their parenting, but you're not.
But that's not true, because nobody has it figured out.
See, that's the secret you learn after a while.
When it comes to parenting, no one knows what the hell they're doing.
We're all just figuring out as we go along.
Nobody knows.
I mean, these kids are... I mean, they're human beings.
They've got their own mind.
They've got their own identity.
They have free will.
I mean, you can only control them so much.
Um, and so we're all kind of fumbling around in the dark and figuring it out.
And, and, and that's all right.
Um, and so if you have to use a leash, then you use a leash.
That's my point.
All right.
So that was about what?
27 minutes on child leashes.
Good, good stuff.
Good content.
All right, let's go to emails.
Um, Matt Walsh show at gmail.com.
Matt Walsh show at gmail.com.
Let's see here.
So it says, this is from Carl, says, Hey Matt, I've listened to Ben Shapiro for years and I've heard you on and off.
I recently started listening to you regularly.
I appreciate that you speak often on Christianity, that you dive deep into subjects, you ask hard questions, and don't claim to have all the answers.
I've been a Christian for almost 12 years now and I found that some of the nastiest encounters people, slash people, I have dealt with are Christians.
I've been through two church collapses that ended with people not talking, calling each other demonic, friendships ending, etc.
You receive a lot of angry email from fellow Christians.
Why do you think Christians behave this way on such a frequent basis?
Keep up the good work.
You got another new fan, Carl.
Hi, Carl.
Good question.
I think that there's...
There's a lot in Christianity about being hated by the world, being set apart from the world, resisting the world, and so on.
And all of that is true and important.
But if a Christian doesn't have the right perspective on those injunctions, if they don't have the right heart about them, they may start to think that the world is literally everyone except themselves.
That it's just them as the sole right person, the sole holy good person, and everybody else is wrong, and therefore deserving of their contempt and scorn and ridicule and so on.
And that's a real temptation, I think, that can spring from the true words and warnings in Scripture about the world.
So, I think that has something to do with it.
You know, of course, I mean, the easy answer is Christians are people, they're not perfect, and they have all the same flaws and foibles as other people, and that's true too, but there is, as I said, there is something, there are things about Christianity that if you don't look at them the right way and approach them the right way, can encourage you to act the way that that you're talking about. So that's something we all have
to look out for. This is from Joseph, says, Hi Matt, a man from, a fan, a man also, a fan from
Croatia here. Some time ago I asked a question regarding penal labor. The question was basically
about morality of the penal labor. Is it moral and fair for an inmate to be required to do a job
in some kind of prison factory, and maybe in which cases it is or isn't?
Haven't gotten the answer, so I thought I might try again.
Love your work.
God bless.
Thanks, Joseph.
Sorry that I missed your email when you first sent it.
I think it's not only moral and fair to have inmates work, but probably more moral and fair than the system that we have here in the U.S., anyway, where most inmates just sit around in their cells all day doing nothing, The idea behind putting them to work is not just cheap labor, but actually giving the inmates something to do, a way to contribute.
And that has a restorative effect, I think.
Hard work is almost spiritual in that way.
It helps to cleanse you, refocus you.
So I think it helps towards the rehabilitation effort.
Just being locked in a cage all day like an animal, I think that's way less humane.
So, yeah, the idea of penal labor, I think, is perfectly humane and a good idea.
There is a hazard, though, if you look throughout history, where you don't want to have penal labor because of the cheap labor.
If cheap labor becomes the point, then all of a sudden it's less penal labor and more like slavery.
And there have been many examples of that in history.
Think about the Soviets, for instance, where cheap labor was so much the point of the Gulag system that people would be sent to prison on bogus charges just so that they could be enlisted to build railroads or whatever else.
So obviously you don't want that.
That's a risk.
But if you could have a system that is just and fair and where the people who are, you know, And you have one of the problems in the Soviet Union is that you didn't have a real court system to actually find out if people were guilty or not.
You had people that eventually were forced to admit their guilt through torture and so on.
So if you don't have that, if you have a real court system, then I think it could be a good thing to have.
This is from John says, Dear Matt, this is going to be a long email and I apologize.
Today my dad came up to me saying he wants to take a job in two to three years that would move us from Chicago to Utah.
That sounds great as a conservative on paper, but my parents are divorced and I've been anxiously waiting for the opportunity to be with my mom more, as I don't see her as often.
I would be able to finish my high school career and all, but I would be shaken up a little going out due to this.
It's always been a dream of mine to also live in Chicago like my parents, but it's grown a little hard due to the blueness of the state.
I know Utah is a fairly religious state, too, which would be a plus, but I just don't know how I would see my mom or what career I'd go into.
I want to go into broadcast communications.
If you could help me out even a little, that'd be greatly appreciated.
Well, it sounds like a tough situation, John, so I'm sorry you're going through that.
But listen, Here's the good news.
Eventually, you'll be 18, right?
And you'll be 18, and you'll be out of high school.
And then you can live wherever you want.
So, you know, go with the program now.
If your dad's the main one who's in charge of you, then you go with him.
But it's only temporary.
And if ultimately you decide that you want to live in Chicago, you could always move back to Chicago, or you can move wherever you want.
Nothing is permanent at your age, or really at any age.
You can always change it if you want.
And that's something, maybe you've heard me preaching this before, that's something that I think young people who are adults, And emancipated in that way.
But that's something that I think young people forget.
I mean, you can, once you're 18, you can go live wherever you want.
And the whole world is open to you.
And so I would say, I mean, take advantage of that.
Thanks for the email.
This is from Paul, says, rank these top 90s TV shows.
Well, I hate to say it, Paul, but I, and I'm going to lose a lot of cred as a 90s kid here, but I've only seen one of those shows, Seinfeld.
I've never seen a single episode of any of that.
I've never seen a single episode of Friends, ever.
I have seen every Seinfeld episode probably multiple times.
So, you know, I would have to just put Seinfeld at the top and by default, I hate to say.
Look, in the 90s, I was born in 86, so most of the 90s for me was Nickelodeon.
So, you know, you've got to give me Nickelodeon shows to rank and then I can do that for you.
This is from Travis, says, Hi Matt, I enjoyed your review of the 90s bands yesterday.
Can you please rank these 90 comedy movies?
Keep up the good work, Matt.
Love the show.
Alright, the movies are Clerks, Dumb and Dumber, Tommy Boy, Office Space, The Big Lebowski.
Okay, well this is good.
I have seen these.
Alright, I can do this.
This is a tough one.
This is actually really tough.
I was thinking about this.
I spent hours thinking about this when I saw this email.
All right, so I'll go five to one, one being best, obviously.
Number fives will be Clerks.
I know Clerks is a quintessential 90s movie.
It doesn't really hold up.
I don't know if you've tried to watch Clerks recently.
It's pretty unwatchable now, so I'll put that at number five.
Number four would be Tommy Boy.
Look, I love Chris Farley.
Everybody does, and it's a funny movie.
It's funny just because Chris Farley's being Chris Farley.
It's not an especially clever movie, aside from that.
Number three, I guess I'd put The Big Lebowski.
I mean, The Big Lebowski is a great cult movie, iconic movie, but I don't even know if I'd call it a comedy.
I mean, it is a comedy, but it's not like laugh out loud funny all the way through.
It's just it's kind of it kind of defies all genres so for this these purposes.
I put it number three Number two I would put office space.
This was a close one the office space is a classic and that's that's one you can watch That that you can watch that whenever that's on TV.
You just watch it.
You always laugh I would put number one dumb and dumber.
I just think it Of course, it's an incredibly stupid movie.
It's called Dumb and Dumber, but the comedy holds up.
I've probably seen Dumb and Dumber 30 times or more, and I still think it's funny.
Office Space and Dumb and Dumber, you can really switch those around because they both are funny every time you watch them, but I would put Dumb and Dumber at number one.
All right, let's do one more.
Okay, we'll do a good theological one here.
This is from Victor, says, Hi Matt, my name is Victor.
I was posed an interesting question when talking with a co-worker today about intelligent design, and he, being an atheist, asked me, where did God come from?
Who made God?
He stated that he has never heard a good answer for this, therefore cannot believe in God.
Listening to your podcast about addressing issues on a scientific or factual basis with non-believers, what's your thought on this?
Thanks in advance.
Okay, Victor, well, your friend's question is not stupid.
It's not a stupid question.
Sometimes Christians can treat this objection like it is stupid, but it's perfectly legitimate.
If we are insisting that God made the universe because everything has to have a beginning and nothing can begin without a cause, then it is absolutely legitimate and logical for someone to say, well, what about God?
And if you don't, because that is the argument, that's one of the most compelling arguments for God, for the existence of God, is that, well, everything has to have a beginning, the universe began, a thing cannot make itself begin, because in order for a thing to do anything, it has to first exist.
So that's why a thing cannot will itself into existence.
That's a logical contradiction.
It has to have a beginning, so you need some sort of creative force.
That's an argument for God.
But, if you're going to say something like, everything has to have a beginning, and you also believe that God exists, then he must be included in everything.
He's part of that, isn't he?
Especially if you believe that God is omnipresent, so then he's really part of everything.
In everything.
Well, you want to be careful with that.
You don't want to sound like you're a pantheist, but you get the point.
So, that's a logical response.
And too often I hear theists respond to that by saying, come on.
Yeah, obviously God's an exception.
You don't want to sound like you're special pleading.
So, how do we respond to that?
Well, we respond to it this way.
God By the Christian understanding, by the monotheistic understanding, the Abrahamic religion understanding, God is the ground of all being.
He has not seen, we don't think of God the way the pagans do, or did, maybe still do, if there are pagans out there.
We don't see God, despite how the atheists portray our belief, we don't see God as a man in the clouds, holding a staff with a white beard, sitting on a throne kind of thing.
That kind of God would absolutely need a beginning.
He would need his own God to have created him.
But that's not how we see God.
That's not this sort of sophisticated idea of God in Christianity.
We see God as the ground of all being, the foundation upon which all of reality exists.
He is a non-contingent being in that all things that exist, that we see around us, are all contingent on other things for their existence.
They needed something else to have created them, to have spawned them.
They rely on something else for their existence, so all things are contingent things.
But God is not.
And it seems a logical conclusion that we cannot possibly live in a universe filled only with contingent things.
If everything is contingent, if everything is dependent on something else for its existence, then eventually you're going to get to the end of that chain and then what's at the end of it?
What's there?
You're going to get to that sort of last link on the chain of a contingent thing But then, if it's contingent, then what is it contingent upon?
You're at the end of the chain, right?
So that means that, at bottom, you have to get to something that just is.
It just is.
It just exists.
It is existence.
And that thing that is must have the ability to create what else there is.
That must be the non-contingent contingency.
And that being must be timeless, because time has a beginning, and is therefore contingent.
It must be spaceless, because space has a beginning.
And it must be creative, because it created all these other things.
So it must be a timeless, spaceless, creative, non-contingent being.
And that's what we mean by God.
Hope that made sense, but that's basically how you respond to that objection.
And I would just stress again, you know, respond to it in a thoughtful way, not a dismissive way.
Because it's a, you know, this idea of non-contingent beings and all this kind of stuff, I mean, it's not like this is These are difficult concepts.
And so if someone has never encountered them or doesn't understand them, then that doesn't make them stupid, doesn't make their questions stupid.
It just means that, you know, it's something that needs to be explained.
So, all right.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Hopefully I'll see you out at Baylor tonight, if you're in town.
And if not, I will talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.
Trump says there's an emergency at the border, and the media Democrat complex spends hour after hour saying he's wrong, and if he's not wrong, he's to blame, and if he's not to blame, look, there's a crying baby.
