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April 11, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
46:36
Ep. 237 - Black Holes And Black Lists

Today on the show, Pope Benedict has finally emerged from the shadows to talk about the sex abuse crisis in the Church. His words are both true and startling, but they raise deeper questions. Also according to a recent report, I’ve been blacklisted by Google. And we'll talk about black holes, the Lion King, and Biblical end times prophecies. Date: 04-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the show, Pope Benedict has finally emerged from the shadows to talk about the sex abuse crisis and his words are both true and startling.
We'll talk about it.
Also, according to a recent report, I have been blacklisted by Google.
We'll discuss that and we'll talk about black holes and the Lion King and biblical end times prophecies.
A lot to talk about today on the Matt Wall Show.
I'm sure you did.
It was all over the internet yesterday.
I mean, it's amazing.
It really is amazing.
And it annoys me so much that all of these idiots online yesterday were talking about how disappointing it is and how anti-climatic.
Do you have any idea When you look at that picture, do you have any idea what you're looking at?
First of all, this is a thing that scientists theorized about based on mathematical calculations a hundred years ago, and now here we have discovered it.
Isn't that crazy that they could do that?
That someone could just work out a math problem?
And say, well, so according to this, there should be massive holes in space that suck in all the light and energy around them and crush it into non-existence.
And then we look into a telescope and we say, oh yeah, well there it is right there!
I mean, and speaking of looking into a telescope, this thing is 55 million light-years away.
55 million light-years!
Do you have any idea how far away that is?
A light-year is 5 trillion miles, so this is I don't know what that number is.
It's really, really, really big.
Do you know what that number is?
I don't know what that number is.
It's really, really, really big.
Let's put it that way.
So it is so far that you could travel at the speed of light, which is 670 million miles
an hour, fast enough to travel around the entire globe seven times in one second.
You could be going that fast and it would take you 55 million years at that speed to get there.
If you started heading there at the dawn of human civilization, OK, you would still have right now, oh, another 55 million years to go.
You basically wouldn't have even started your journey yet.
You would still be you would still be so early in your trip that if you realized you left your wallet back on Earth, you might as well turn around and go get it, because that's how vast the distances are.
That we're dealing with.
And I mean, if that doesn't blow your mind, then you must not have a mind that can be blown in the first place.
I mean, come on folks, come on.
Oh, and by the way, this black hole, okay, its mass is 7 billion times greater than the sun.
You could plop our entire solar system and everything it contains inside it.
The sun is just a speck of dust in comparison to this thing.
The sun compared to this black hole is like you compared to the earth itself.
But we're all disappointed because it's blurry.
Oh, it's blurry.
Yeah, the image.
The image of the thing that's millions of quadrillion miles away is blurry.
Oh, it's so bl- Oh, I'm sorry about that.
I'm sorry we couldn't get it in high def for you.
I'm sorry that this image that took 55 million years to get to your eyeballs Is blurry.
Oh, I, you know, I'm so sorry.
Yeah, yes, well, that's so disappointing.
Meanwhile, a stupid trailer for The Lion King was released on the same day as this image of the black hole, and that Lion King trailer is literally just a slightly more realistic cartoon, which is a verbatim shot-for-shot remake of another cartoon, which only came out 25 years ago, yet that got a bigger reaction than the image of the black hole.
People were astounded by that.
They said, My God, look at this cartoon!
You see that lion?
He almost looks like a real lion!
I mean, this cartoon!
Look at this cartoon!
It's amazing!
It's beautiful!
That's what impressed everybody.
Not the black hole, 55 million light years away.
We are living in an idiocracy, folks.
That's what we're living.
We are surrounded.
We are living in a black hole of stupidity.
And we're all being crushed to death by it.
Anyway, let's see what else is going on today.
Julian Assange was arrested today.
That's the big story.
Now, to be honest, I need to read more about what's going on here in order to deliver an opinion worth listening to.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to admit that, you know, but there it is.
One thing I don't like about this job is that people expect you to automatically have a worthwhile and informed opinion about everything that happens to occur in the news, right?
And that's what people expect.
And I think that when people watch a show like this or any other show or, you know, cable news show or anything like that, and they see people pontificating and offering their opinion, they just assume that, okay, well, this person must be omniscient, that they, you know, can be informed about everything all the time and have an opinion worth listening to.
But the dirty little secret is that it's all basically a camera trick.
I mean, the people that are in this line of work, because of course we can't have worthwhile opinions about everything, and we can't automatically have all the necessary information immediately in order to deliver a worthwhile opinion.
So what a lot of times people end up doing is that even if they don't really know anything about the subject, they just kind of look at what other people in their same ideological vein are saying about a particular thing, and then they just calibrate their point of view based on that.
Now, I prefer not to do that.
I want to have my own perspective, but it takes time to develop that sometimes, and so maybe I'll revisit this later, if you'll forgive me for that.
This story was just breaking this morning as I was preparing to talk about other things, thinking about other things.
Like, for instance, This.
There was an essay that was published just yesterday.
Yesterday was a big day.
I mean, we had the Black Hole, Lion King, and then you also had this.
An essay published from Pope Benedict about the abuse crisis in the church.
It's a fascinating document in many respects.
Benedict basically argues that agents of change in the church, agents of rebellion, really, of sabotage, you might say, sought in the 60s and 70s to create a new church.
A new church, that's how he put it in quotes.
One that is modeled after the morality of the world rather than natural law in the Bible.
And this led to moral chaos, which led to the sexual abuse crisis that has plagued the church ever since.
That's his basic case.
Let me read some of this to you.
Here he is talking about what kinds of situations developed in the 60s.
He says, in various seminaries, homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.
In one seminary in southern Germany, candidates for the priesthood and candidates for lay ministry of the pastoral specialists lived together.
At the common meals, seminarians and pastoral specialists ate together, the married among the laymen, sometimes accompanied by their wives and children, and on occasion by their girlfriends.
The climate in this seminary could not provide support for the preparation to the priestly vocation.
He goes on, indeed in many parts of the church conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new radically open relationship with the world.
One bishop who had previously been seminary rector had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.
There were, not only in the United States of America, individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicism.
There we go.
In their diocese, perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood.
He goes on, the idea of a better church created by ourselves is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped.
Okay, so you see he's there diagnosing the problem.
And pointing not to... See, the problem is that a lot of people in the church today, especially church leaders, when they're discussing the sexual abuse epidemic and all the issues in the church, they're always looking for practical causes, practical solutions.
You know, everything's very practical, very kind of earthbound.
They're not looking deeper at what is the spiritual, moral root of the problem.
Which, I mean, this is a moral problem, right?
So you have to speak of it on those terms.
Now Benedict is willing to do that.
And then he talks about dying.
Now his idea is about Remedying the problem, I think, are worth quoting at length.
He says, What must be done?
Perhaps we should create another church for things to work out.
Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed.
Only obedience and love for our Lord Jesus Christ can point the way.
So let us first try to understand anew and from within what the Lord wants and has wanted with us.
First, I would suggest the following.
If we really wanted to summarize very briefly the content of the faith as laid down in the Bible, We might do so by saying that the Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it.
The counterforce against evil which threatens us and the whole world can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love.
It is the real counterforce against evil.
The power of evil arises from our refusal to love God.
He who entrusts himself to the love of God is redeemed.
Our being not redeemed is a consequence of our inability to love God.
Learning to love God is therefore the path of human redemption.
Let's see.
I'm not going to read this whole thing, but a society without God, a society that does not know Him and treats Him as non-existent, is a society that loses its measure.
In our day, the catchphrase of God's death was coined.
When God does die in a society, it becomes free, we were assured.
In reality, the death of God in a society also means the end of freedom, because what dies is the purpose that provides orientation, and because the compass disappears that points us in the right direction by teaching us to distinguish good from evil.
He goes on, this is the case with pedophilia.
It was theorized only a short time ago.
It's quite legitimate, but it has spread further and further and now we realize with shock that things are happening to our children and young people that threaten to destroy them.
The fact that this could also spread in the church and among priests ought to disturb us in particular.
Why did pedophilia reach such proportions?
Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God.
We Christians and priests also prefer not to talk about God because this speech does not seem practical.
And then he goes on from there.
I mean, it's worth—I'm not going to read the whole thing.
I wish I—it'd be worth doing, but I won't.
I would recommend that you do so, though.
And so, everything he's saying here is good.
It's on point.
It's necessary, and it's true.
But it raises, in my mind, a whole separate question, which is this.
Why did this man leave the papacy in the first place?
I mean, why did he retire?
It's been now six years, six years since he left, and he's still clearly on top of things.
Clearly, he understands what's going on in the Church.
He understands it better than the current occupant of the chair, I would say.
And he's interested in providing leadership, which is why he wrote this essay.
So, why isn't he in the lead?
It's strange to me.
It's a strange situation.
Yeah, he's an old man.
I think he's 90 or 91.
But Pope Francis is no spring chicken either.
Francis is 82 or 83 years old himself.
Now it would be different in my mind if Benedict was sitting there in retirement writing the occasional essay while a pope in his 50s, a real reformer, was in there in the Vatican kicking butt, taking names, shaping things up, putting the church back on the right path.
Then I would say that this is the best of both worlds that we have, because you would have the elder statesman, former pope, who's old and retired, and he's sitting to the side, providing advice here and there, direction, while the man with energy and vigor has his sleeves rolled upright, and he's getting the job done.
Now, that would make sense.
That would be a dynamic that would make a lot of sense to me.
But that's not the dynamic that we see in the Church today.
What we have is an old, retired pope, Sitting off to the side, while another old pope, who is in his 80s, is in there doing very little to address the problem, and in the meantime is sowing more confusion and discord in the church with his obscure and strange pronouncements on every subject under the sun.
So that situation makes no sense to me at all, and it's very bizarre.
So, on one hand, it's great to hear this truth from Benedict, but on the other hand, it's kind
of disturbing.
Because I think the assumption was when Benedict stepped down six years ago,
the assumption was that six years in the future, you know, 2019, he wouldn't be alive anymore.
I mean, we all thought while he's stepping down, he must be on death's door.
So I don't think anyone thought that we'd be heading into 2020 and Benedict would still be around.
The fact that he's still around, it's like, well, where did you go?
Why did you leave?
A lot of questions are raised there.
That's all I'll say.
All right, now, The Daily Caller had a report yesterday about an alleged blacklist that's kept by Google, which singles out certain people and websites and tries to mess with them.
Now, I'm going to read a little bit from their report, and stick around for the twist ending here, okay?
So it says, according to the Daily Caller, Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company's official denials.
Documents obtained by the Daily Caller indicate two official policies dubbed the misrepresentation policy and the quote good neighbor policy inform the company's XPA news blacklist, which is maintained by Google's trust and safety team.
The deceptive news domain blacklist is going to be used by many search features to filter problematic sites that violate the good neighbor misrepresentation policies that according to the to the document.
The document obtained by the caller says the purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any search feature or news product.
It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether.
What that means is that targeted sites will not be removed from the quote 10 blue links portion of the search results, but the blacklist applies to most of the other search features like top news, videos, or the various sidebars that are returned as search results.
Okay, so let me get to the, as I said, the twist ending.
On the blacklist are a number of conservative sites, including Gateway Pundit, Matt Walsh's blog, Gary North's blog, TeaPartyEconomist.com, Caroline Glick's website, Conservative Tribune, which is a property of the Western Journal, and the website of the American Spectator.
Okay, so Yeah, so I'm on there.
According to Daily Caller, I made the blacklist.
I made the team.
I was picked.
Varsity.
What's interesting, though, is that my blog now contains my contact information.
You can find links to my written work On my website, mattwalshblog.com, if you want to go check it out.
So if you go there, it's now for a few years, I was, that's how I got started.
I was writing on this blog and that's what I did.
And that's where all my content went.
But now, you know, my written content goes to the Daily Wire.
Before that, it went to the Blaze.
I haven't written unique content on the Matt Walsh blog in like four years.
But as I said, so if you go to my website, there's contact information for me.
And there's links to my written work, which will take you to The Blazer, to Daily Wire.
Yet, even in spite of that, according to this, apparently it's been blacklisted.
I don't know anything about it.
I've had a couple of media outlets try to get a hold of me and want to interview me about being blacklisted by Google.
I don't have anything to tell you.
I have no perspective on it, because I found out about it from The Daily Caller.
That's all I know.
But I do know that the blacklisting, you know, blacklisting online is a real thing.
It's been a real thing.
And I think we all know that.
But these companies are smart about it.
And this is the point I want to make.
These companies are smart about the way they do it.
And so with Google, okay, it's not like... Now, I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I had been cited as a blacklisted site.
And a bunch of people responded by saying, oh, yeah, well, I just typed your name into Google and you came right up.
So clearly you're not blacklisted.
Yeah, but according to this to this report, that's not the way the blacklist works.
Yeah, it's they're not just going to scrub you from the Internet completely.
That would be way too obvious.
So, yeah, if you go and you Google Matt Walsh, I'm going to pop up.
You're going to you're going to see me there as one of the first results.
So they're they're a little bit more Subtle about it, which makes it easier to get away with.
And it's also not always clear what criteria is being used, which is part of the problem.
Now, obviously, none of these sites are ever going to admit that they have any criteria to target conservative sites.
So they might not admit to the criteria, but we all know that they have it.
But even with these various sites, The criteria they use to target conservatives, that is not consistent.
There's an arbitrariness to it.
So I'm blacklisted by Google apparently, but meanwhile Twitter has never once suspended me.
I mean, knock on wood, Twitter has never once suspended me or anything.
I've never been I've never had any problem with Twitter, even though Twitter has suspended and expelled many people who have smaller followings than I do, and who have said things that are much less controversial than what I say on a daily basis.
I mean, I see the kinds of things that get people kicked off of Twitter, and every time I see a story like that, I think, I say stuff like that every day.
I've said things that are far harsher than that.
You know, not that I'm trying to Not that I'm asking for it here, but it's interesting.
Then Facebook as well, as far as I know, has never really monkeyed with me.
But Google has.
And Wikipedia has.
I'm apparently not allowed to have a Wikipedia page, it seems.
People have told me at various times over the years that I've got a Wikipedia entry up, and then it's deleted, and then someone else puts another one up, and it's deleted.
And this has happened several times over the years, where I guess someone tries to put it up, and then it's always taken down.
And so I'm not allowed to have a Wikipedia page.
So it seems like I've been blacklisted by Google, Wikipedia, not by Facebook and Twitter, but there are other conservatives who clearly have been blacklisted by the social media sites, but not so much by Google or Wikipedia or any of those sites.
And that's the way it works.
And this is what makes it hard to navigate the censorship online.
It's precisely the fact that all of these gatekeepers don't coordinate, and they don't do it exactly the same way.
They all seem to basically agree that they want to de-emphasize conservative content, but they seem to pick on different people for different reasons at different times, and that's how they get away with it, and it's all quite nefarious.
But that's fun anyway, to be blacklisted by Google.
Maybe I'll get that on a t-shirt.
Blacklisted by Google.
All right, let's go to emails, because I got a bunch of interesting ones.
Most of which I will not be able to get to, but mattwalshow at gmail.com.
mattwalshow at gmail.com is the email address.
This is from...
Dave says, Hey Matt, I've been a reader and listener of yours for quite a while now.
I started back in the days when you were a lowly alpaca groomer.
Anyway, when I first started reading your stuff, I was a new Christian and not a very deep thinker on biblical issues.
You've really helped me open up to much deeper thinking on issues of spiritual significance.
In all my time reading your stuff and following your podcast, I've never heard your opinions or beliefs about biblical end times prophecy.
I am a Pentecostal Christian of the non-snake handling variety.
That's good.
And essentially my beliefs boil down to this.
There is an event that is imminent, meaning this event could occur at any time, known commonly as the rapture, in which Christians will be removed from the earth, similarly to the way Christ is taken up after the resurrection, or Elijah is taken up.
After he passes the mantle to Elijah or John and his vision on Patmos.
Following this event is a time known as the Great Tribulation or the time of Jacob's trouble.
The Great Tribulation is a period of seven years in which the world will be judged and a political figure rises to power in the earth who has incredible demonic power from Satan himself known as the Antichrist.
A lot is prophesied to happen during this world leader's reign that I don't necessarily care to split hairs over, but at the end of the Antichrist's seven-year reign, Jesus returns in physical form once again.
This time, Jesus comes not as a baby, but as a conqueror who destroys the Antichrist and his armies in the final battle of the world.
These beliefs are based on my pastor's teachings, books I've read on the subject, and in my own reading of the books of the Bible, like Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Matthew, and Revelation.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and give me your thoughts on this topic.
P.S.
Not that I'm one of these guys who are incessantly trying to identify who the Antichrist is, but I'm fairly certain it isn't Ben.
Ben Shapiro.
Yeah.
Yeah, but there was a... that's in reference to... yeah, I'm fairly certain it isn't Ben Shapiro either.
As Michael Knowles pointed out, I don't know what kind of Antichrist would hire a bunch of Christians to work for him.
There was some idiotic stupid Christian was on TV a few days ago saying that Ben Shapiro, you know, Christians shouldn't be listening to Ben Shapiro because he's, if not the Antichrist, he's an Antichrist.
So, idiotic.
Anyway, Thanks, Dave, for that, for being a loyal reader and listener as well.
Let me try to work through this with you.
First of all, as it pertains to the rapture, My problem with the Rapture, which I do not believe in, is that it is unquestionably a new doctrine.
It was invented by John Darby in the 19th century.
Nobody was talking about the Rapture before that.
The Church Fathers weren't talking about it.
The theologians of the Middle Ages weren't talking about it.
The Reformers weren't talking about it.
No, it fell to John Darby, apparently, to be the one guy who sees it after almost 2,000 years.
He says, oh yeah, it was right there the whole time.
I just, I don't buy that.
I'm always skeptical when somebody, you know, 19 or 20 centuries later notices something in the text that nobody noticed before.
But more importantly than, you know, what any theologian throughout history was saying is that the biblical writers were not talking about any rapture either.
I mean, what's the one verse that almost everybody immediately cites to prove the rapture?
Well, they go right to Matthew 24 40, right, where it says the two men will be in a field, one will be taken, one will be left, two women will be grinding at the mill, one will be taken, and one will be left.
Okay.
Now, even just out of context, I'm not sure that you have here a strong enough hook to hang a whole mythology of rapture on.
So you think about how much has grown out of just those two sentences, and this is the problem.
People feel free to just take any sentence or two in Scripture, and to go to town on it, and come up with an entire new system, a whole new theology, a whole new, all of these new, you know, predictions and everything, based on, you know, one or two sentences that they find in Scripture.
And in this case, That practice is all the more absurd when you look at it in context.
So let's do that, okay?
Let's look at this supposed prediction of the rapture in context.
It says, "...but about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.
And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.
That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Two men will be in the field, one will be taken the other left.
Two men will be grinding with a hand mill, one will be taken the other left.
Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day the Lord will come.
So, the person taken in this image here is the unrighteous, the wicked.
Jesus is talking about the destruction of the wicked.
For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.
And they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away.
This is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
One will be taken.
Well, what's taken?
The wicked people were taken away.
And not just at the blink of an eye, like, disappeared.
I mean, there was a flood, right?
And he's not saying that at the end of the world there's gonna be another flood, but the point is the wicked were washed away, were taken.
I believe in some translations even the word seized is used, which makes it a little bit more clear.
Seized.
So this To me, clearly, explicitly, it's talking about wicked people being destroyed.
It is not talking about good people being ascended into heaven.
It's just not.
So the rapture folks have twisted this verse to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means.
Which is incredible, really, when you think about it.
Because all you have to do— I'm not trying to attack you.
I don't mean any disrespect here.
I'm just saying, if you read that verse in its context, I don't know how you come to any other conclusion, right?
It's really clear what he's saying.
But notice something else that Jesus says.
He says, you won't know when the end is coming.
Okay?
You will not expect it.
So, if you're expecting the end, that's a good sign that it's not gonna come, if anything.
Because Jesus says, you won't expect it.
Stop looking for it.
You're not gonna know.
Sorry.
And I think that's what Jesus is saying here.
As for verses in Daniel and in Revelation, well, I've read those books also, and I would recommend that For everyone to actually sit down and read the book of Revelation cover to cover.
Not just a verse here and there, not just the things that your pastor points out.
I mean, it's good to, you know, to also get guidance on these things as well.
But if you actually sit down and read it yourself, like cover to cover, right?
Do that, and then tell me whether you could make heads or tails of it, because I don't think you can.
I can't.
I don't think anybody can.
The book is heavily, heavily, heavily metaphorical.
I don't think you can just crack open the book of Revelation and say, oh yeah, okay, well that's what this means right here, and that's what this means, and okay, I've got it now.
There's nothing wrong with, I guess, coming up with theories about what it might all mean.
That could be very interesting to do.
I'm not opposed to that.
But for a person to get dogmatic, and this is what I've noticed about I think a lot of Christians today, not just Pentecostals, but a lot of Christians in general, where they get very attached to the book of Revelation and to their personal interpretation of it, and they're dogmatic about it.
And I think that that's kind of ridiculous, in my opinion.
There's no way you can look at that book and say, I know exactly what that means, because you don't.
You've got creatures with multiple heads and various eyes.
You've got lamp stands and all these things coming out of the sky.
And horses and chariots.
Clearly, with most of this stuff, we're not talking about literal imagery.
It's metaphor.
Allegory.
I mean, it is saying something.
But I don't think you can just crack it open One other point here.
I think this is the most important point.
It's important for us to understand that Christians have been predicting the imminent end of the world Literally since the beginning, since the very first Christian decade, since the very beginning of the Church.
I mean, from day one, Christians have thought that the end is coming soon.
Right away, within a few years at least, is what Christians thought.
And I know that sometimes people are uncomfortable admitting this.
I don't know why.
But it's true.
You can find it even in the Bible.
It seems clear to me that Paul thought the world was ending.
That seems pretty clear to me when you read his letters.
He was wrong, obviously, and that's okay.
Paul was not omniscient.
We don't have to think that the early Christians were omniscient, or that Paul was omniscient, or that any biblical writer was omniscient.
None of them were.
So if these Christians personally believed that Christ would be coming back very shortly, which I think they all did, That's okay, you know.
They were wrong about that.
They were probably wrong about a lot of other things, too.
Because, like I said, they're not God.
And then, through the ages, this belief continues.
There are always Christians who think the world is ending.
You go to the first century, second century, third century, every single century, right?
So in the year 120, people say, oh no, it's definitely coming now.
Then 220, no, it's definitely coming now.
320, definitely coming now.
420, definitely coming.
720, definitely coming, guys.
1520, oh yeah, the end is coming.
It's gotta happen now.
1820, oh yeah, it's happening for sure now.
1920, oh man, for sure it's happening now.
2020, no, this time, this time I'm telling you.
And so, after a while, everyone's predicting an imminent end for 2,000 years, 20 centuries.
At what point do we just admit that we have no clue when the world's going to end?
We have no idea.
I mean, the world could end tomorrow.
It could go on for another 10,000 years.
It could go on for another 10 million years.
Who knows?
At what point do we admit that?
And if we could only step back and take a historical view for just a moment, we would see how silly these doomsday forecasts are.
Yeah, there are things about the modern day that are bad, to say the least, but apocalyptic?
Think about it.
Up to 50% of Europe's population was wiped out by the Black Plague in just a few years in the 14th century.
That's well over 100 million people, if not up to 200 million people.
In terms of doomsday scenarios, that outdoes anything we have ever seen or probably ever will see, hopefully.
So, do you think they had reason to believe that the world was ending back in the 1300s?
Well, yeah.
They did, but the world didn't end.
Or think about when Rome fell.
I mean, the Roman Empire ruled for a thousand years.
Do you think people had reason to think apocalyptic things when that ancient empire was laid in ruins?
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
And I think this is what's happening.
We look around and we see things happening in our civilization, with our country, and we say, oh, it's the end of the world.
Well, maybe.
Or maybe it could be, you know, our country could end.
I'm not saying that it is going to, but our country could come to an end.
Our civilization could come to an end.
That doesn't mean that the world is ending.
Many civilizations throughout history have collapsed.
And yet the world continued going on.
Our country has only been around for a measly 250 years.
If our country collapsed tomorrow and didn't exist anymore, honestly, 500 years from now, the United States would be a blip on the radar.
It would hardly even be discussed because of how short its existence was in comparison with like ancient Rome or ancient China or Egypt.
I mean, these things, these empires were around for thousands of years.
And we are just babies compared to that.
We've barely even gotten started.
So my point is that if bad things are happening in America, that doesn't mean that the world is ending.
I mean, we just got here, for goodness sakes.
So, the problem is that we're stuck in our own era, with our own experiences, our own lives, and we just assume that everything happening to us is unprecedented, hugely important, catastrophic, historic, so on and so on, when really that's not the case.
Necessarily, right?
And anyway, none of this matters really, because here's what we do know for sure.
We don't know what Revelation is telling us exactly.
We don't know when our civilization or world will come to an end.
But you do know, absolutely, that as far as you are concerned, the world will end within 80 years at tops, probably, right?
As far as you're concerned, the world is coming to an imminent end.
Sorry.
So, your world will end in a few decades, if not sooner.
The world may go on for another 500 million years, but your world will end.
I mean, practically in the blink of an eye.
So, because of your death, right?
So, imagine if Jesus appeared in the sky and told us that the world would end in the year 2087, let's say.
We would all react very strongly to that, wouldn't we?
It would change the way we lived, the way we operated.
Yet Jesus essentially has told us the world will end in the year 2087, or much sooner, for us.
Because he's given us a lifespan that probably won't last much longer than 85 or 90 years at the most.
Yet, it's as if we need to think that the whole world is ending in order to act with any urgency, which is silly, because what does it even, in a sense, I mean, what does it even matter when the world ends?
You're going to end soon.
Whether the whole world goes with you or not is almost like a minor detail, really, as far as you're concerned and your soul is concerned.
Maybe we should be less focused on the fate of the entire world and more focused on our own fate and on our own mortality and on our own imminent demise, which indeed for us is certainly imminent.
All right, this is from Heavenly.
Says, Hey Matt, first off, I love your podcast.
I think you have great insight.
I always appreciate good sarcasm.
I'm a 22 year old woman.
I'm just starting to get into the dating scene with the intention of marriage and starting a family.
My question is, aside from kids and religion, is there other important values and goals two people should share in order to have a lasting marriage?
Do you think it's deeply important that they agree on doctrine?
How much should someone be willing to change or give up for someone else?
Thanks.
Keep up the good work.
Alright, so those are three separate questions.
All are pretty deep.
I will try not to drone on too long.
What other values and goals should two people share?
Well, you mentioned kids and religion already.
Certainly you want to be sure that your future spouse is interested in having kids.
Not just theoretically, but really wants to have kids.
A marriage where one person wants kids and the other doesn't can be disastrous.
And then obviously you need to be sure that you both have values that are rooted in the eternal and God and faith, and so you already mentioned that.
Beyond that, I don't think you need to have a one-to-one match on every fundamental value and goal that you have.
I think what's more important is that once you have those really basic things down, the next step is to make sure that this person is someone with virtue.
Okay, so somebody who's honest, generous, trustworthy.
If you've got the basics aligned, and your spouse is virtuous, then the other differences are not only not a problem, but they could add variety and interest and intrigue to your relationship.
They could be positive.
So, I think, and they give you some, you know, they give you guys something to talk about and work through together, which isn't a bad thing at all.
As for doctrine, Again, I would personally say that if you have the first base covered, then, as I just discussed, I'm not sure that the finer points of doctrine should get in the way of marriage to someone.
I mean, if you find a man with whom your fundamental values are aligned, and who wants kids and wants a family, would seem like he'd be a good father, who is virtuous, honest, trustworthy, and faithful, then in my opinion, I think it'd be a good idea to just pull the trigger, honestly.
It would probably be foolhardy to say, well, yeah, he's got all that going for him, but I'm not sure if our theological views are 100% identical.
I think that that would be a misordering of priorities.
How much should you be willing to change or give up?
Well, I would say, Maybe this would surprise you to hear, but don't change any of the good things about yourself.
Certainly don't compromise your virtue.
Don't give up good and healthy things for someone else.
And the reason I say that is that a good partner and a good spouse would never want you to give up those things in the first place.
So there's no reason why you should have to.
And I'm not just talking about virtuous attributes here.
Obviously, you don't want to give those up.
But I'm talking even about healthy interests, hobbies, passions.
You shouldn't have to give those up either.
Like, for instance, I love to read.
I'm a huge nerd.
And I'm either reading a book physically, or I'm listening to audiobook all the time.
My wife is not a big reader herself, and When we got married, I wasn't going to give up that part of myself.
Not that I'm saying reading a book is more important than my marriage, but I wasn't going to give that up.
That's something I still want to do, and I'm going to do it.
And it wasn't an issue because my wife didn't want me to give it up.
She wouldn't want me to.
In fact, actually, if she notices that I go a few days without reading something, she gets kind of concerned.
She says, well, I haven't seen you read anything in a few days.
What's going on?
My wife has healthy interests and passions and skills that I don't share, but I wouldn't want her to give up.
The point is that a healthy relationship should not entail you forfeiting your whole identity.
Your identity, rather than shrinking, contracting, should expand and grow more diverse and interesting through marriage.
If anything, I think it's sad when you find people that they get married and then they start giving up these things that they're passionate about.
It should go the other way.
You should gain passions and interests because of the influence of the other person.
So, for instance, my wife, before she met me, didn't drink bourbon at all and now she drinks bourbon all the time, which maybe isn't a good thing.
I like to say it's because that's an interest that I have and she has Adopted it as well either that or I've driven her to drink
I don't know but you know the point is I think you you pick up on these things from each other
So if you if you find someone Who expects you to be just a bland copy of themselves and
to give up everything else in life that you love and are passionate?
about then that again is a good indication that this person is not marriage material and you might as well head the
other direction and In essence, I'm saying that you shouldn't necessarily have to give up or change anything that is good and edifying in your life just because you got married.
You might have to adjust some things, rework your schedule and so on.
You won't be able to do everything you want when you want to.
But I don't see why marriage should involve the absolute forfeiture of any good thing.
It will or should, however, involve the forfeiture of a lot of bad things.
Bad habits, bad inclinations, bad aspects of yourself.
Those things you should give up in a marriage.
And it would be a lot easier if you do.
All right, let's see.
Okay, one other quick one.
It's not even really a quick one.
This is from Sammy.
He says, Hey Matt, I just started watching your show after watching Shapiro for two years.
I enjoy the fact you cover different but yet important topics.
My question for you would be, to what extent can morality be derived from reason, if at all?
You guys are hitting me with the heavy guns today.
It's great, I love it.
This isn't really one that I can just throw in with the final two minutes of the show, but I'll try to anyway.
So, to what extent can morality be derived from reason?
I would say that we all have an innate moral sense, natural law, we all recognize intuitively, I guess you could say reasonably through reason.
The basic moral truths of life, which is why, when you look around the world and throughout history, you're going to find all these civilizations have remarkably similar moral codes.
Similar in the basic structure, anyway, not necessarily similar in practice or interpretation.
So, for example, every human civilization has outlawed murder.
Yet some human civilizations have practiced human sacrifice, genocide, in our case abortion.
These are all redundant terms anyway, basically saying the same thing.
But none of those civilizations that tolerated or committed such atrocities would have considered the atrocities murder.
Now, they were murder.
It is murder.
But the point is that even the murderers felt the need to work around, pay lip service to, this moral code that even they recognized.
So, as reasonable beings, I think, yes, we can arrive at rudimentary moral truths through reason.
And this is a sense, a recognition of rudimentary moral truths that God instills in us.
But for the fullness of those truths, for the full picture, as it were, we turn to Revelation.
And that's the way that I would break it down in two minutes.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
The president came out swinging on Saturday, describing the need for immigrants to learn English and assimilate.
The surprising thing here is that the president was Barack Obama and not Donald Trump.
We will analyze the open border policies of Democrats, and then it turns out we're all Eric Swalwell.
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