Today on the show, Joe Biden is in the race but there’s no way he can win the nomination. I'll explain why. Also a burlesque show for kids. Yes, that is a thing, apparently. It's as horrifying as you expect. Finally, I'll explain why my thinking on the death penalty has changed. Date: 04-26-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Wall Show, Joe Biden is in the race, but unfortunately for him, there is no way he could win the nomination in the modern Democratic Party. | |
| I'll explain why. | |
| Also, a burlesque show for kids. | |
| Yes, that is a thing, apparently. | |
| And it is as horrifying as you expect. | |
| So we will talk about that. | |
| And finally, I want to explain why my thinking on the death penalty has changed over time. | |
| So we'll discuss that as well today on The Matt Wall Show. | |
| You know, I've got to say, admittedly, I am a pretty nervous and paranoid flyer. | |
| Well, I'm a nervous paranoid person in general, but especially when I'm flying, I happen to be that way. | |
| So, and I was flying down to Texas yesterday to speak at an event down here. | |
| And so you can imagine my reaction when, as we are flying, we hit a little bit of turbulence and then the captain comes on the intercom and he makes an announcement. | |
| And, you know, it's a problem for me that, for whatever reason, when airline captains give announcements, they always mumble and they make no attempt to actually be heard. | |
| When, you know, this is one announcement I want to hear. | |
| Like, you're the person who's behind the mysterious door who's piloting this tin box 500 miles per hour over the clouds. | |
| Our lives are in your hands. | |
| I want to know what you're saying, so please enunciate. | |
| But anyway, so he's on there mumbling. | |
| I can't understand what he's saying. | |
| The only thing I could pick up, I picked up two phrases. | |
| He spoke for about 45 seconds. | |
| I pick up two phrases. | |
| I heard him say, pretty chaotic. | |
| And then a few seconds later, he said, isn't working. | |
| Okay, so I knew I didn't know what else was going on. | |
| All I knew is that something is chaotic. | |
| Which isn't good, and something isn't working. | |
| And I had no idea what it is, and then I start, I look around, and no one else is reacting to this. | |
| Like, no one else is concerned that there is dysfunction and chaos that has apparently made its way onto this plane. | |
| No one else is worried about it. | |
| Anyway, we made it home. | |
| We made it there in one piece, but it was... | |
| I just look, if you're going to if you're going to use phrases like that and words like that as a as an airline pilot, just make sure we can hear everything you're saying in context. | |
| I still don't know what was chaotic. | |
| It'll be a mystery until the day I die. | |
| All right. | |
| So speaking of chaotic, the Democratic primary race, I do want to, you know, briefly talk about this. | |
| Joe Biden, of course, entered the race. | |
| Yesterday, so we all can rejoice, Biden, Biden, who first became a senator in 1973, that's 46 years ago. | |
| He's held political office continuously over that entire time, except for the last two years. | |
| And now he wants to be president. | |
| He's, and I think, I think that's enough reason to reject him. | |
| There are other reasons too. | |
| All the other stuff, bad policies, the creepiness. | |
| You know, all that kind of stuff. | |
| But that doesn't even need to enter into the conversation. | |
| The fact is that Biden is an almost 77-year-old man who's had his hands on the reins of power for half a century. | |
| And I think we just say, you know, that's enough, Joe. | |
| Let someone else Take a turn. | |
| How about that? | |
| Why don't you let someone else get a shot at this thing? | |
| It's 50 years. | |
| About 50 years. | |
| That's enough time. | |
| You really don't need to go beyond that. | |
| So that's, I think that's kind of all you need to know about him. | |
| And I'm not going to go into the whole, I'm not going to get into a lot of inside baseball analysis of Joe's campaign rollout and his prospects and everything, mostly because I don't care that much. | |
| But I will say that, I will say just a couple of brief things. | |
| Number one, President Trump really needs to up his, his nicknaming game. | |
| Because it's fallen off, I think, sharply over the last year, and that's a pretty concerning development, especially when Trump's whole strategy against his opponent is just to nickname them. | |
| So if you're going to put all your eggs in that basket, you better really come with the big guns, which he did in 2016. | |
| So he's going with Sleepy Joe. | |
| That's his nickname for Joe Biden. | |
| Now, I like that nickname. | |
| I like the sound of it. | |
| It kind of sounds like maybe the sort of nickname that a mediocre baseball player might have earned in 1912. | |
| You know, the shortstop of the Yankees in the early 20th century, Sleepy Joe. | |
| It's all Sleepy Joe over there. | |
| But it doesn't work for Biden because Biden isn't known for sloth, necessarily. | |
| He's not known for being sleepy or low energy. | |
| It's not really, it's just, it's not going to, It's not going to click, because that's not what we know him for. | |
| Yeah, he's old, but so is Trump. | |
| I mean, they're close enough in age to have attended the same high school at the same time, basically. | |
| That's how close back in the 14th century. | |
| So, Sleepy Joe doesn't work. | |
| Creepy Joe is much better. | |
| You're going with Sleepy Joe. | |
| Meanwhile, you've got Creepy Joe just there for the taking. | |
| Much more on brand, much more devastating, much more embarrassing for Joe Biden. | |
| I mean, it really, it seems like Trump's nicknames have gotten sleepy, ironically enough. | |
| Now, in terms of Biden's prospects, you know, in the general election, I think his prospects are pretty good. | |
| The latest poll had him up by like eight points over Trump. | |
| You decide whether to trust that poll or not. | |
| I don't think Trump has to worry about it, because even if he's polling over Trump, he's not going to make it through the Democratic nomination process. | |
| He's not going to be nominated. | |
| The fact is, the Democrat Party has gone so far left so fast that they've escaped Earth's gravity at this point, and they're hovering somewhere over Europe or something like that, despite what the polls may say. | |
| I don't think that a guy like Joe Biden, old and white and vaguely centrist, has a chance of winning the nomination in the modern Democratic Party. | |
| I think a person like that could win in the general in a landslide, potentially. | |
| But he couldn't make it through the gauntlet of the Democratic nomination process in the first place in order to get to that point, because he's going to be eaten alive, and we're going to see that play out over the next few weeks. | |
| Here is, I think, in my opinion, here's, let me describe a candidate who could win 75 million votes in this country, I think. | |
| This would be a candidate who is pro-abortion, only up until 20 weeks, pro-gay marriage, pro-welfare, non-interventionist, pro-gun, pro-immigration enforcement, pro-free speech, critic of police brutality and police excesses, not perceived as racist, but also not an SJW. | |
| Okay, now, I would not vote for such a candidate because I disagree with a number of the positions I just outlined there. | |
| So I'm not saying that this is a candidate I want to vote for. | |
| I'm saying that I think that is where America is right now. | |
| That they would go for someone like that. | |
| that combination of positions would actually stand a chance of attracting sizable numbers of people from both sides, | |
| from both parties. | |
| And it's more of a leftist, more liberal platform. | |
| And it's, you know, if any party is going to put forward a candidate with that selection of positions on the issues, | |
| then it would be the Democrats, but they just, they're not gonna do it anymore. | |
| Basically, what I just described, That is essentially Bill Clinton in 1990. | |
| I guess he pretended to be against gay marriage at that point, but for the most part, that is what the Democrat Party was 30 years ago. | |
| And I think that party in 2019 against Donald Trump would be formidable. | |
| But the modern iteration of the Democratic Party is a totally different thing. | |
| Because the party's changed dramatically since then. | |
| It's changed so much that if you've been paying attention over the last week, a number of Democratic candidates were asked this week if they think the government should provide a third option for gender on government forums and stuff. | |
| And of course, Several of the candidates, well, all of the candidates who were asked this question said yes. | |
| Kamala Harris said yes. | |
| Now, do you think that Kamala Harris really believes that there are three genders or a hundred genders or whatever the left is saying now? | |
| Do you think she really takes this transgender stuff seriously? | |
| No, she certainly doesn't. | |
| And we know all of these Democrats, almost all the Democrats who are running, They don't really take this. | |
| And I know that because most of them were on the political scene 10 years ago, and they weren't talking about this stuff back then. | |
| This is just where the base has dragged them to, where they have to pretend. | |
| Kamala Harris in particular, she's kind of an interesting case because she's, I think | |
| in her heart of hearts, she's a little bit of a law and order reactionary even. | |
| Now she wasn't interested in law and order in California when it came time to prosecute | |
| Planned Parenthood for selling baby parts because she is a minion of the abortion industry | |
| as all Democrats are. | |
| But aside from that, she's not exactly naturally a squish when it comes to law and order stuff. | |
| Yet she has to temper that. | |
| Or stifle it completely, pretend it doesn't exist, and affect this impression of a social justice warrior and LGBT trans ally and all that kind of stuff. | |
| It doesn't come naturally to her, it doesn't seem like, and you could tell that. | |
| She was asked at a town hall a few days ago at CNN, She was asked if she agrees with Bernie Sanders about letting felons vote in prison. | |
| And her first answer was, yeah, well, that's a conversation we could have. | |
| We can have that discussion. | |
| Which is the answer I give my kids when they ask if we can go for ice cream or something later. | |
| I'll say, oh, yeah, well, we'll talk about that. | |
| I'll think about it. | |
| Well, that's a discussion we can have. | |
| And the answer is no. | |
| But that was her tentative kind of answer, trying to get around it. | |
| And then the next day, she was asked again, and she let her true colors come through. | |
| And she said, no, you know, I'm a prosecutor, and never mind. | |
| No, I don't think these scumbags should be able to vote. | |
| I'm paraphrasing. | |
| She didn't say scumbags, but that was the point she was trying to get across. | |
| So she doesn't do a very good job in pretending to be an SJW. | |
| Biden will be even less effective pretending to be a pink-haired feminist. | |
| I mean, Elizabeth Warren actually is a pink-haired feminist, and even she comes off awkwardly when she tries to portray herself that way. | |
| The party's going so far left that even Elizabeth Warren is trying to catch up. | |
| And so what that means is a guy like Joe Biden, even though I really think he could win in the general election, especially if he ran on his real positions, what he really believes, not what he thinks the liberal base wants him to say, that person could win, but he's not gonna make it there because of where the party is. | |
| Okay, speaking of crazy left-wing deranged lunacy, I'm going to show you this and it's disturbing. | |
| I should warn you. | |
| It's not appropriate for children. | |
| So if you've got, if you're watching the video right now and you've got kids in the room, then make them leave the room for a minute because it's, it's, as I said, disturbing. | |
| All right, now here's a screenshot that came up on my Twitter feed yesterday. | |
| Take a look at this. | |
| All right, there it is. | |
| This is, and if you're listening on SoundCloud or something, it is an image of a burlesque performer in lingerie. | |
| With a bunch of dollar bills protruding out of her underwear, and a young girl looks to be maybe about eight or nine years old, putting money into stuffing money into her underwear, while in the background, you see adults, at least one of which would be the girl's parents, mother, looking on approvingly and smiling and applauding and filming it on their phone. | |
| That's the picture. | |
| And this is from this is an image from what I could gather. | |
| If you look at the The caption, some kind of event, some children including or children targeting event put on by Bella Blue Entertainment, a burlesque | |
| It says in the caption, brunch, apparently, for kids to go to. | |
| And it was shared on Facebook by this company, proudly so. | |
| They were bragging about it. | |
| But they took it down after the backlash, yet defended it in a follow-up post, which was also taken down. | |
| As a matter of fact, let me read the caption to you on this picture. | |
| It says, from Bella Blue Entertainment, it says, this little girl was at brunch a few weeks ago and her family was encouraging her to tip and engage with me. | |
| It's always so refreshing to see families actively de-stigmatizing and changing narratives around bodies and sexuality. | |
| At the end, her mom came up to me and said, thank you for showing her that being a strong woman is okay. | |
| And I told her, no, no, thank you for exposing her to burlesque and for encouraging her to experience it. | |
| So there you go. | |
| Thank you for exposing her to burlesque because that's something that we all need Why am I sharing this extremely disturbing picture and story with you? | |
| Well, because for one thing, I think the sexual abuse of a child carried out in public should provoke a reaction from us. | |
| It's the kind of thing that we should React to. | |
| It's news. | |
| It's a story, right? | |
| I don't ever want to get to the point where I see something like that and I think, oh, that again? | |
| Well, whatever. | |
| What are you going to do? | |
| If we have lost our ability to be outraged, really outraged over stuff like this, then we've lost our humanity. | |
| We've lost everything. | |
| We've lost our spine. | |
| We've lost our soul. | |
| Outrage gets a bad rap these days, and for good reason, because people get outraged over stupid things all the time. | |
| So we get tired of hearing about people being outraged. | |
| But some things should cause outrage. | |
| There are things that should provoke that in us, and this is one of them. | |
| How do you think people would have reacted 50 years ago to a picture like this? | |
| I think the reaction would have been fairly nuclear, as well it should be. | |
| Children are now being groomed for sexual abuse right in front of our eyes. | |
| There are events officially organized for that purpose, for grooming children. | |
| Whether it's this or a Drag Queen Story Hour. | |
| Or a drag brunch. | |
| I mean, they love to do the brunch thing, apparently, is a big thing now with degenerates who want to groom children for sexual abuse. | |
| All of the worrying that conservatives did about the potential normalization of pedophilia down the road, well, here we are. | |
| We're down the road. | |
| We got there. | |
| We arrived, right? | |
| It's happening right now. | |
| That's what this is. | |
| It's the normalization of pedophilia. | |
| In fact, I should back up because I called this grooming for sexual abuse. | |
| I said that, well, they're grooming this girl. | |
| No, they're not grooming her for sexual abuse. | |
| This is sexual abuse. | |
| The grooming already happened. | |
| That phase is over. | |
| Now she's actually being abused. | |
| This is the thing itself happening. | |
| To bring your child to a burlesque show and have her stuffing Tips into a grown woman's underwear. | |
| That is sexual abuse. | |
| And the people responsible for it should be in prison. | |
| Everyone in that picture, except for the child, should be in prison. | |
| Maybe first throw them in the stocks for a few days, let people go by, let the townsfolk go by and toss rotten eggs and tomatoes at their faces, and then lock them in a jail cell for a few years and let them think about it. | |
| That's the way it should go. | |
| That's the way it would be. | |
| In a healthy society, but we don't live in a healthy society. | |
| So what happens is we see stuff like this. | |
| And there are people who actually click like and send supportive comments. | |
| And then everyone else kind of yawns or rolls their eyes and says, Oh, it's just the way things are now. | |
| Yeah, it may be the way things are now, but it shouldn't be. | |
| And we cannot accept that. | |
| I can't accept it. | |
| We can't throw up our hands and say, all right, yeah, so kids get sexually abused on camera and it's posted on social media. | |
| All right. | |
| That's our country. | |
| No. | |
| This is The words, any word you use to condemn it is not going to be a harsh enough word. | |
| All right, one more item to cover. | |
| John William King, age 44, I believe, was executed in Texas yesterday. | |
| King is one in a group, the ringleader of the group, who kidnapped a man named James Byrd Jr., a black man. | |
| The crime happened about 20 years ago. | |
| truck dragged him to death over the course of three miles. | |
| And they did this for explicitly racist reasons. | |
| The crime happened about 20 years ago. | |
| King tried to get a reprieve before the execution, much like I'm sure Byrd begged for a reprieve | |
| from his execution. | |
| But just as Bird was not granted that neither was King. | |
| And he was executed by lethal injection. | |
| And now he will be buried in a in a grave with a tombstone that has no name, just his inmate number. | |
| And that's how he will be remembered, or rather forgotten by history, as well, it should be. | |
| I bring up this case because it's cases like this, Not necessarily this specific case, because I've been going through this transformation over a period of months, but these kinds of cases have caused me to change my thinking on the death penalty. | |
| My thinking has evolved on the subject, and I wanted to tell you about that. | |
| I've been for and against the practice at various times, most recently against it, and I was against it pretty firmly for several years. | |
| But more recently, I decided that I can't justify a blanket opposition to capital punishment. | |
| Crimes like this, it seems to me, simply cry out for the ultimate punishment. | |
| There are things a person can do which, once having done them, cancels out their right to continue existing. | |
| And when I say that, I realize the implications of a statement like that. | |
| Because I have often said that the right to life is absolute. | |
| I've said everyone has the right to life. | |
| You can't lose it. | |
| It's ingrained. | |
| It's absolute. | |
| I have made points like that in service to the pro-life case when arguing against abortion. | |
| But I've realized that that's not the right way of framing it. | |
| It's not exactly true. | |
| It's an imprecise way of framing the pro-life argument. | |
| Because your right to life is, of course, not absolute. | |
| You can lose it. | |
| And there are scenarios where we would all agree that you lose your right to life. | |
| If you run into my house with a gun, I am under no obligation to respect your right to existence, your right to life. | |
| That right is null and void in that situation, as far as I'm concerned. | |
| You have forfeited it. | |
| You forfeit it the moment you come through my door wishing to do me harm. | |
| It would also be hard to argue that enemy combatants on the battlefield have an absolute right to exist, because if they did, we couldn't justify any act of war against them, and that would be ridiculous, of course. | |
| Maybe it's better to say That human dignity is inherent, is absolute. | |
| And that I certainly believe. | |
| That inherent human dignity is naturally attended by a right to life, a right to exist. | |
| But though you cannot lose your inherent dignity, and therefore even the condemned have a right to a humane execution, you can lose that attending right to life. | |
| Now, babies have not lost it and could not lose it because they are innocent. | |
| They haven't done anyone any harm. | |
| There's no such thing as an abortion in self-defense. | |
| There's no such thing as a punitive abortion. | |
| These are human beings who do have a right to life, certainly, because they could not possibly have done anything to lose it. | |
| But as I said, the person running into your house with a gun can lose it and does. | |
| The enemy soldier on the battlefield can and does lose it. | |
| The question is whether a man who ties another man to the back of a truck and drags him until his body falls into pieces, the question is whether or not that man can also and does also lose his right to life. | |
| And I would say yes. | |
| There is no place in human society for such a person, not even in prison. | |
| There is just no place for them, by their own choice. | |
| They have chosen to forfeit their place, their claim on existence. | |
| And if they want to forfeit that claim, and they express their forfeiture by killing the innocent, Then we have no choice but to respect their choice and abide by it and say, okay, you don't want to be a civilized human being who lives in human society? | |
| Have it your way. | |
| You have forced our hand. | |
| Now, that strikes me as just. | |
| It strikes me as fair. | |
| And it also is important to me that, and I feel much more comfortable supporting the death penalty now than I would have, say, 40 years ago, because now we have DNA. | |
| We can do DNA evidence. | |
| There is video surveillance everywhere, GPS technology, all of these things that make it theoretically very | |
| possible to establish beyond any doubt whatsoever | |
| that a person did commit the crime they're accused of. | |
| I think one of the more powerful arguments against the death penalty is, | |
| well, what if you execute the wrong man? | |
| And that is a powerful argument. | |
| But it is also possible, especially with all this modern technology, to be absolutely sure that you have the right man. | |
| And if you're not absolutely sure, then they shouldn't be in the execution chamber. | |
| They probably shouldn't even be in a jail cell in that case. | |
| So I think the question comes down to this, really. | |
| What is the point of the justice system? | |
| What's the point of laws and trials and all of that? | |
| Now, some will say that the point is segregation. | |
| We have to segregate dangerous people from the innocent. | |
| Some will say that the point is rehabilitation. | |
| Some say the point is deterrence. | |
| Some say the point is punishment. | |
| I think that the answer is all of the above. | |
| I would choose all four of these theories. | |
| I think anyone in prison should be there for at least one of those reasons, if not all four. | |
| And if none of the four apply, Then that is probably someone who shouldn't be in prison. | |
| That's why I think you could make the argument that non-violent drug offenders should not be in prison. | |
| Because they aren't necessarily a threat to society, so segregation isn't necessary. | |
| You're not going to rehabilitate drug abusers by putting them in jail cells. | |
| That doesn't work. | |
| Jail does not appear to be an effective deterrent against drug use. | |
| And a person who does destructive things to themselves experiences the punishment for those actions in the action itself and in the natural consequences. | |
| I don't really think a heroin addict has destroyed their life, their health, everything. | |
| I don't think you need to add extra punishments on top of that. | |
| So, crimes that don't fit under any of those umbrellas, those are people who probably shouldn't Capital punishment, I would say, fits under three of those theories. | |
| It permanently segregates dangerous people from society. | |
| It does present some kind of deterrent to crime. | |
| And most importantly, it exacts the ultimate punishment for the ultimate transgression. | |
| It is just fitting, I think. | |
| It fits the crime. | |
| The crime necessitates it. | |
| And I think in the end, that is the simplest argument for capital punishment. | |
| It's the most kind of visceral argument. | |
| And I think it's the best and most powerful. | |
| That some crimes just warrant it. | |
| And that's all there is to it. | |
| I'll tell you one other thing about this. | |
| Because I can see the other side, the anti-death penalty side. | |
| I'll tell you the one thing that still holds me back a little bit from becoming a full-on death penalty advocate, and this may seem like a small thing, but it's really not. | |
| It's a serious consideration and it's one that I think we don't usually talk about or take into consideration. | |
| I am concerned about the psychological, moral, and spiritual effect that the death penalty has on those who are tasked with administering it. | |
| You could perhaps make an argument that executing another man is a job that nobody on earth is really emotionally or spiritually equipped to perform or handle. | |
| Um, that's an argument that I hardly hear anyone ever make against the death penalty, but I think it's a powerful argument. | |
| I think about the first scene of a documentary called Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog. | |
| It's an anti-death penalty documentary. | |
| Very compelling, I think. | |
| Well done. | |
| The very first scene is an interview with a Texas prison chaplain who attends executions and prays over the condemned. | |
| And he'll even stand in the room while the execution is happening, if he's requested, and he'll put his hand on the inmate's ankle while he's being executed. | |
| Executed. | |
| Now, in the interview, he doesn't rail against the death penalty. | |
| He doesn't give his opinion about it at all. | |
| He looked at it like, okay, this is happening. | |
| It's legal. | |
| And it's my duty to be there and bring solace and hopefully some spiritual enlightenment to the condemned, which I think is a heroic and much needed vocation. | |
| But in this interview, Just a few minutes long, you can see in this man's eyes and in his body language and in his words, you see what sort of toll all of this constant death and destruction and misery has done to him, taken on him. | |
| At one point, he starts recounting this lighthearted story of when he, one time when he went golfing and he was on his golf cart. | |
| And two little squirrels were playing and they darted in front of his golf cart and he stopped suddenly before he ran them over. | |
| And it starts like a light-hearted anecdote, but then he gets emotional and he starts crying as he's telling this story. | |
| And he says, you know, life is precious. | |
| I can't preserve the life of the condemned men. | |
| But I could preserve this squirrel's life. | |
| So this was a man so broken, so beaten by all the death and misery that his ability to simply save one little squirrel or two little squirrels from an early demise was something that he grabbed onto desperately and he cherishes even to this day. | |
| That one little glimmer of hope and life meant so much to this guy because he's surrounded by death all the time. | |
| And I found that to be powerful. | |
| Can we, as a society, support an institution that does that to people? | |
| Now, we know what it does to the person being executed. | |
| It kills them. | |
| Okay. | |
| But what about what it does to the people whose duty it is to be involved and to carry these things out? | |
| Can we ask anyone to perform those duties? | |
| Or are those duties that, again, nobody is fit for or equipped for or prepared for? | |
| I don't know. | |
| That's my one sticking point. | |
| I think it's a big one, even though no one really ever raises that point. | |
| But it's a difficult one. | |
| I guess maybe I'm not as convinced as I originally thought. | |
| As I kept talking, I convinced myself back in the other direction. | |
| So I don't know. | |
| I guess I could still see it from both sides. | |
| So that was my long and windy way to get back to the starting point, I guess, which is I still don't know how I feel about the death penalty. | |
| All right. | |
| MattWalshow at gmail.com. | |
| MattWalshow at gmail.com is the email address. | |
| Let's check some of your emails. | |
| This is from JL says, Hi, Matt. | |
| I was listening to your show. | |
| I heard you say that there was no good reason to go to college, but I've heard of a very good one. | |
| First, I want to make something clear. | |
| I agree with you. | |
| I know people who went to college after school and are losers now. | |
| I also know people who enlisted in the military and are now great officers making a good living. | |
| But one argument that I've heard for going to college right after school is that you may meet a girl, get married, and have kids, then need to stay in a low-paying job and not have time to go to college. | |
| How do you reconcile this with your belief that you should get married young, which I also agree with? | |
| Uh, well, sorry, this was from Joey, by the way, not JL. | |
| JL's the next guy. | |
| Joey, uh, first of all, I don't, I, I certainly never said that there's no good reason to go to college. | |
| There are many good reasons to go to college. | |
| Uh, I'm, I am not, I would never make a blanket statement like that. | |
| I think there, there are many good reasons to go to college. | |
| My only point is you should know what your reason is. | |
| Before you go. | |
| That's all I'm saying. | |
| That's my whole point. | |
| Figure out what... Have a plan in mind. | |
| And I think for most people, that is going to mean not going to college right away, going into the workforce, earning some money, gaining life experience and maturity, figuring out what it is you're good at, what you want to do, what your vocation is, what your skills are, and then make your decision about going to college or not. | |
| That's my main point there. | |
| As far as meeting someone and getting married, I guess I don't follow your point exactly. | |
| I mean, you could meet someone at college, you could meet them not at college. | |
| I guess what you're saying, my whole idea of going to college later might not work because what if you get married first and then it's difficult to go back to college? | |
| Yeah, look, a lot of different things can happen. | |
| But these are the kinds of considerations that have led people to the conclusion that, well, you've got to rush out of high school and rush right into college right away and kind of get that out of the way because you'll never be able to do it later. | |
| And that's not true. | |
| I could go to college right now if I wanted to, especially these days when you've got online colleges everywhere. | |
| I've got three kids. | |
| I've got three kids, a fourth on the way. | |
| I could go to college if I wanted to. | |
| If I wanted to take some classes, go online, it might take me a while to finish it all, but I could do that. | |
| Anyone could. | |
| So, that's why you have to figure out what your path is going to be and then follow it. | |
| All right, now this is from JL. | |
| Says, Hi Matt, love the show. | |
| More importantly, the dense beard you sport. | |
| Don't ever shave it because your voice might ascend a few octaves higher. | |
| That's why I never would. | |
| I agree. | |
| That is my concern. | |
| Anyway, I read an article from the New York Times today, an opinion piece, which was an interview with Serene Jones, the president of the Union Theological Seminary. | |
| I was pretty shocked how she denied that the resurrection happened and called the virgin birth a bizarre claim, and also proceeded to say, I don't worship an all-powerful, all-controlling, omnipotent, omniscient being. | |
| I just wondered if you had any thoughts on this. | |
| I'm a very active member of my faith and want to thank you for how you explain your positions on things. | |
| Yeah, well, this is the trend that's been happening in Christianity really since the 18th century. | |
| And places like Union Theological Seminary, which is not a seminary at all, really, but a hive of heresy, they've been at the forefront of this naturalizing of Christianity. | |
| I didn't read the interview that you mentioned, but I can already tell that this person is an atheist. | |
| Who maintains some emotional connection to her Christian past and therefore wants to mine it for some moral lesson. | |
| She's digging through it to see what she can salvage. | |
| And that's all that she and her ilk think that Christianity is good for. | |
| It's a source of moral lessons, nice stories that impart little tidbits of wisdom, like Aesop's Fables or basically a fortune cookie. | |
| But this is not Christianity, of course. | |
| Christianity is the belief in and worship of precisely that all-powerful and omnipotent being who she rejected. | |
| A being who we believe sent his only begotten son to save mankind from their sin. | |
| If you don't believe that, Then you aren't Christian. | |
| That is what Christianity is. | |
| The word Christ is in the word Christian. | |
| It's right there. | |
| Christ is a supernatural concept. | |
| There's no such thing as a naturalistic, rationalistic, non-supernatural Christ concept. | |
| So it's right there in the name. | |
| You got to believe in Christ as Christ to be a Christian. | |
| If you reject that premise, If you reject the supernatural, then holding on to Christianity and scriptures for just moral lessons is not only pointless, but impossible. | |
| Now, it's pointless because you don't need it for that, then. | |
| If you're not worried about the supernatural aspect, the afterlife, judgment, sin, all of that, then go ahead and get your morality from a fortune cookie. | |
| You might as well. | |
| And then you also get to eat a cookie at the end of it, so it's a bonus. | |
| But it's also impossible, really, to reject the supernatural and then try to find something else in Christianity, because from the naturalist viewpoint, we really have no idea what Jesus said, if he said any of the things he's claimed to have said. | |
| We have no idea from the naturalistic viewpoint. | |
| Now, we as Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guided the sacred authors, But if the Holy Spirit didn't guide them, because the Holy Spirit doesn't exist, which apparently this person thinks the Holy Spirit doesn't exist, then that means that these are guys, were guys, trying to record entire monologues and complex theological exchanges from memory 40 or 50 or even 60 years after the fact. | |
| With the Holy Spirit, sure, they could do that, but on their own? | |
| No. | |
| By the naturalistic logic, there is no way we can be sure that anything in the Bible actually happened or that any of the words recorded were actually spoken by the person claimed to have spoken them. | |
| And so when you chop the supernatural legs out from under the Bible, you're left with nothing. | |
| You're left with a jumble of words and stories, and you can't make heads or tails of it. | |
| And in that case, why run a seminary? | |
| Even a fake seminary. | |
| Why bother with any of this? | |
| Why bother calling yourself a Christian? | |
| Why not go and be a Buddhist or something instead? | |
| That's what makes no sense to me. | |
| So you have to, for many reasons, you have to accept the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith and be a Christian, or reject them and don't be a Christian. | |
| Those are the two All right, this is from Taylor, says, My name is Taylor, a longtime viewer of the show. | |
| I'm a devout Episcopalian in Ohio. | |
| I recently had a meeting with the Church's Council of Elected Officials called the Vestry. | |
| In the meeting, in preparation for the Bishop's visit, the Reverend brought up not using the masculine pronoun for God and instead using gender-neutral pronouns. | |
| Not only has my church adopted an SJW perspective to the Bible, but there is also a socialist group that meets in the chapel. | |
| The very people who wish to destroy us need our help to plot our demise. | |
| Is there any way I can reason with the church council to bring back the more traditional aspects of the church, or is it a lost cause? | |
| Taylor, I'm afraid to say, and I hate to be the bringer of bad news here, but it is It is a lost cause. | |
| It's definitely a lost cause in the Episcopal Church. | |
| Not universally, but in the Episcopal Church. | |
| The Episcopal Church is lost. | |
| So I would get out. | |
| Don't bother with it. | |
| You are not going to be able to, on your own, drag the Episcopal Church back into orthodoxy. | |
| It's been a long drift over many decades, and now I would say the process is irreversible. | |
| What you're experiencing at your church, this is at every church, every Episcopal church. | |
| Or maybe there are a few exceptions, but I tend to doubt it. | |
| And so I would say find a new church for sure. | |
| As far as the pronoun thing, obviously, as you know, it's completely stupid. | |
| And there is no support for it in the Bible whatsoever. | |
| The Bible is Extremely clear in referring to God with masculine pronouns. | |
| Now, we can have an interesting discussion about what that means exactly. | |
| Why is God referred to in masculine pronouns? | |
| What does it mean for God to be quote-unquote masculine? | |
| And that's, that is a fascinating conversation that we could talk about. | |
| But, as Christians, we have to start from the premise of accepting what the Word of God says on that subject, because it is so overwhelmingly clear. | |
| And that's all there is to it. | |
| All right, we'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks everybody for watching. | |
| Thanks for listening. |