Ep. 273 - What's Wrong With A Straight Pride Parade?
Today on the show, there is a straight pride parade planned in Boston. We’re told that this event is offensive and stupid, but if it's stupid to have straight pride parade, then isn’t it stupid to have a gay pride parade? Also, the LGBT lobby has not stopped harassing Jack Phillips. We’ll talk about the latest in that ongoing saga. Plus, your emails. Date: 06-11-19
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, there is a straight pride parade.
A straight pride parade planned in Boston, and we're told that this event is offensive and stupid, but if it's stupid to have a straight pride parade, then isn't it stupid to have a gay pride parade too?
Also, the LGBT lobby has not stopped harassing Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cake Shop.
They just continue going after this guy.
We'll talk about the latest in that ongoing saga, plus your emails today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Welcome to the show, everybody.
You know, I want to talk about this Straight Pride Parade that's happening in Boston.
But before we get to that, let's begin with a word from BigToken.
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Okay, so I will say that personally, I agree for the most part with the people who say that the upcoming straight
pride parade, maybe you heard about in Boston, is silly.
I agree that it's a silly thing.
It's not something that I would be personally interested in attending.
Though I appreciate especially the intentional irony of Milo Yiannopoulos being the grand marshal of the parade.
He's, of course, very openly gay, and yet he's leading the straight pride parade, which is kind of a tongue-in-cheek move by the organizers, and I appreciate that.
I do.
But I think overall it's a silly thing, and I think I am on stable intellectual ground in calling the parade silly, because I have also said the same thing about gay pride parades.
In fact, in my opinion, I think parades in general are kind of stupid.
I don't get the attraction to parades of any kind, really.
Parades are basically festive traffic jams.
That's what they are.
Especially if you've ever been to a small town parade where they don't even have floats or anything, and for the most part, the parade mostly consists of Just local business owners riding their company vans, you know, through the parade.
Yeah, you really are just watching traffic go by.
And people sit there for two hours and just watch the traffic go by.
And I don't, you know, I don't get it.
I personally don't get it.
But I will acknowledge that there are some justifiable reasons to throw a parade.
Okay, like if you win a war, you throw a parade.
If you win a Super Bowl, you throw a parade.
The point is if we're going to have a parade to announce our pride in something,
it should be something that we actually accomplished.
It should be an achievement of some sort.
Well, then it makes sense to have a parade.
Or, if not an achievement, it should be a holiday.
You know, an actual day of celebration, like a Thanksgiving parade or a Christmas parade.
But your sexual orientation is not an achievement.
Neither is it a holiday.
Okay, you haven't accomplished anything simply by being attracted to one sex or another, and the thing is...
The LGBT folks, they're the ones who insist that being gay is not a choice, it's biological, you were born that way.
Well then, that's even more reason not to have a pride parade, because it's just, if it's something you're born with, then you might as well have a parade, you know, a right-hander parade, that you're proud of the fact that you're right-handed.
Well, if that's the case, it makes even less sense.
You might as well have a parade for people with brown eyes.
What's the point?
It's argued, of course, that the real purpose of a gay pride parade is to resist and protest and stand up against the persecution of homosexuals.
Heterosexuals are not persecuted for being heterosexual, as the argument goes, so therefore a heterosexual pride parade is pointless, but there is a point to the gay pride parade.
But if that's the point of a gay pride parade, then why do we call it a pride parade?
If it's really a protest, then why don't we call it a protest, or a rally, or a demonstration?
You know, but you don't hear that.
They don't say it's a gay pride protest.
They say it's a gay pride parade.
And if it is a protest, why do they hold these, quote, protests in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York rather than Iran or Saudi Arabia?
It seems that these pride parades are held in precisely the places where gays are not persecuted.
So, all of the evidence indicates that gay pride parades are indeed gay pride parades.
That is, they are parades that give gay people the opportunity to announce their pride in being gay.
You know, if you go to the New York City Pride Parade website, it calls their pride parade a pride celebration.
There's another LGBT website that says, you know, gay people should, quote, feel pride in being gay.
So that puts it pretty plainly.
And if you agree that gays should feel pride in being gay, if gays should feel pride in their gayness, and that parades ought to be held across the country to celebrate that pride and to, you know, create these spaces for self-expression for gay people or whatever, then it's obviously ludicrous.
And it's a double standard to insist that heterosexuals aren't entitled to a similar celebration.
Straight people, why aren't they entitled to a celebration of their straightness?
And the double standard becomes even more pronounced and obvious when you take into account the whole, as we talked
about last week, you've got this whole buffet of sexual orientations that
have now attached themselves like barnacles to the broader LGBT ship.
So gay men and lesbian women aren't the only one.
Only ones celebrating their sexual orientation.
There are also bisexuals and transsexuals and pansexuals and asexuals and graysexuals and demisexuals and genderfluid people and gender questioning people.
Is it reasonable to say that all of these people can and should publicly declare their pride but not heterosexuals?
I mean, is it reasonable to say that all of those people, yeah, yeah, sure, gay people, they got pride, lesbians have pride, asexuals have pride, transsexuals, all of them, but no, not straight people.
No, you're not supposed to have pride.
And going back to the persecution thing, if this is really about persecution, then why are we including pansexuals?
I mean, when was the last time a pansexual was persecuted?
I mean, have you ever heard of a pansexual?
Have you ever seen a sign up on a business somewhere saying, pansexuals not allowed!
Get out of here, you pansexuals!
No, I wouldn't know how to persecute a pansexual if I wanted to.
If I went out looking for a pansexual to persecute, I wouldn't be able to do it.
No, again, this is not about persecution.
This is about boasting of your sex life.
And then, if that's the case, then why can't straight people boast just the same?
Now, as I said, I'm not in favor of anyone boasting about this sort of thing.
But I'm even less in favor of arbitrary rules that allow some people to boast while telling other people to keep quiet.
The double standard, the inconsistency, to me, is the worst thing.
I hate that more than anything else.
And the left is famous for making rules like that.
And so maybe on second thought, the straight pride parade is a little bit more than a silly stunt.
Maybe the point is simply to defy the left's rules just for the sake of defying them.
Why are they doing the straight pride parade?
Well, because Because they're not supposed to.
I guess maybe that's the point.
And if that's the point, then, you know, maybe there could be some value in it after all, even though I still wouldn't go myself.
See, the message that the left has been sending to straight white males for years now has been, you're not allowed to take pride in anything.
While everyone else celebrates their sexuality and their race and their culture and their heritage and their history, you aren't allowed to celebrate anything about yourself.
If you do, you're a homophobe or you're a racist or you're, you know, you're ethnocentric or whatever.
No, the only thing you're allowed to feel about yourself is guilt and shame.
That's been the message for decades.
And eventually, you know, people get tired of it.
People get tired of the guilt and the shame.
People get tired of the double standards.
I think it's as simple as that.
There's been a lot of discussion recently about radicalization, especially the radicalization of young white heterosexual men.
Now, much of what the media calls radicalization is really just people deciding that they're conservative, and that's not radicalization.
That's just someone exploring ideas and coming to conclusions and forming opinions.
There's nothing radical about that.
But there is some actual radicalization going on.
I acknowledge that.
There are radical groups.
There's a radical fringe out there on both sides, where indeed, especially on the right, you have angry young white men who end up in these groups.
That is happening.
Maybe the straight pride parade is an example of that.
I don't know.
I don't know a lot about the group that's holding this thing.
I have no idea.
But whatever radicalization is, perhaps we should consider the possibility that young white men are becoming radicalized in part because of the guilt and the shame and the blame that is constantly heaped on them by the culture.
They are born the villains.
They are born into an identity that the culture tells them is tainted.
And while everyone else is told to celebrate their identity, these men are told the opposite, to apologize and repent and feel guilt.
And after a while, it wears on you.
And you take these men, you add in, on top of the shame and the guilt from the culture, on top of all the cultural situation, you add in a lack of good male role models in the home, A lack of attentive fathers, perhaps.
You add in a school system that caters to girls while telling boys that they're diseased and have ADHD or whatever just because they act like boys.
Take all those factors together, it's not hard to see how some of these guys go down the radical path.
And that's not making excuses or anything like that.
That's trying to understand How we ended up where we are now.
And why people make the choices they make.
And if, you know, the left loves to complain about angry white men.
Oh, they're angry white men, angry white... Have you ever stopped to think, like, what are they angry about?
Have you stopped to consider that?
Does it... I mean, you don't want them to be angry.
Have you just stopped for a second to think, like, what are they angry about?
And the thing is, everything I'm saying now, there are going to be people who respond, oh yeah, sure, straight white males are persecuted.
Yeah, whatever.
See, that attitude is exactly the problem.
And I'm not talking about persecution.
That's not the word I'm using.
But shame and guilt, yeah.
There's just no question about that.
That is a fact.
It's just a fact in our culture that if you are a straight white male, there is shame and guilt heaped on you from a young age.
Call it whatever you want to call it, but that's what happens.
And it has a negative effect on people.
That's the lesson here.
So maybe leftists could consider that what you're doing, it's not working.
The white guilt thing, it is having the opposite effect from what you intend.
It's not causing white people to be more open and tolerant and everything.
People don't work that way.
That doesn't work.
But we're not allowed to talk about this, of course.
When discussing the real or perceived sins of young white men, the only thing we're allowed to do is blame them, and so the cycle continues.
All right, let's, on a somewhat related note here, let's check in with Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cake Shop.
Now, this is a sort of a never-ending saga.
And I'm going to read now from a Daily Wire report just published on the site yesterday.
It says, Masterpiece Cake Shop is again under fire, now the subject of a third discrimination lawsuit alleging that owner Jack Phillips discriminated against a customer by refusing to make a cake for an unspecified offense.
Phillips, of course, won the United States Supreme Court after suing the Colorado Human Rights Commission that punished him for refusing to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding in Denver.
The latest, skipping ahead a little bit, the latest lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Denver District Court on behalf of Autumn Scardina by attorneys Paul Greeson and John McHugh.
Scardina is the same woman, I believe actually this is a quote trans woman, this is a man we're talking about, who filed the previous lawsuit alleging discrimination after Masterpiece Cake Shop denied her request for a cake celebrating gender transition Then the reports on the newest lawsuit are vague on the theme of the pastry in question.
They have said so far only that Scardina requested a birthday cake, but previous filings indicate that Scardina has gone out of her way on several occasions to request cakes that Masterpiece Cake Shop clearly would not make.
Okay, so this is, I guess the specifics of this, this is the third lawsuit now against, this is the third time that the LGBT lobby has come after Jack Phillips.
Third time.
I mean, the bullies that went after him.
Now, we can't really say that he won in the Supreme Court.
He didn't lose.
So the fact that he didn't lose maybe you could say is a victory.
But certainly the bullies that were going after him, especially the Human Rights Commission, they lost.
They got scolded by the Supreme Court for targeting Jack Phillips and for having clear anti-Christian bias.
So that was the first one.
Then this Autumn Scardina character, who again, I believe is a man because this was someone who wanted a cake to celebrate his gender transition into a woman, filed a lawsuit over that.
And now we have another, I guess, apparently another, a different cake that this person wanted.
But this is clear.
This is a troubled person.
Who has been harassing Jack Phillips for months.
Let me find some of the details of the other cakes that this person wanted.
Newsweek reports that the baked goods at the center of Scardina's previous complaints to Colorado authorities included a cake to celebrate Satan's birthday.
With, quote, cheesecake frosting that would feature a large figure of Satan licking a nine-inch black dildo, an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.
Okay.
Okay, so, this is a person, that's one of the cakes that Scardina requested, and that was turned down.
Wanted a gender transition cake, which isn't even a thing, right?
I mean, that's not a gender transit, like, So you got a gender transition, which, by the way, is impossible.
There's no such thing as a gender transition.
You can't transition from one gender to another.
But I can't continue doing the scare quotes around every word that I use when talking about this case, so just fill in the scare quotes yourself.
He had a gender transition cake, which is just not really even a thing.
Obviously a cake that he came up with because he wanted to be turned down.
Then you've got a cake for Satan's birthday, and then another cake.
He is harassing Jack Phillips.
This is anti-Christian harassment.
The only reason why this bully keeps going after Jack Phillips is because he knows that Jack Phillips is a Christian.
That's the only reason.
So the lawsuit should be the other way.
The discrimination is happening the other way with this case.
There's just no basis to this whatsoever.
This is a completely baseless discrimination complaint, and anyone who takes it seriously knows what they're doing, knows they're being dishonest.
And by the way, that applies also to the original lawsuit that got all this going in the first place.
I just don't believe that those two gay men who came to Jack Phillips looking for a cake for their gay wedding, I just don't believe that it was a coincidence that they happened to go to Jack Phillips, who was known as a devout Christian, and who was known as someone who turned down cakes if he didn't want to do them on religious grounds.
He turned down Halloween cakes and other cakes like that.
You know, raunchy, you know, uh, bachelorette party or bachelor party cakes, he turned those down.
He was known for doing that.
And these two gay men just happened to pick him as the guy to make their gay wedding cake, and when he turned them down, they just so happened to be ready, you know, they had the lawyer on standby, they went to the Human Rights Commission, yeah, okay, that was a, sure, right, it was just totally innocent and coincidental.
I'm sure.
No, it was a setup from the beginning.
This is a setup too.
They won't leave him alone.
And this is how the LGBT lobby operates.
If they get you in their sights, they will not leave you alone.
They will just keep coming after you and keep coming after you.
The LGBT lobby, these are the biggest bullies in America.
These are some of the most vicious people in America.
And when I say that, I am talking about the LGBT lobby, these left-wing gay activists specifically.
I'm not talking about gay people in general.
I'm talking about people like Autumn Scardina and the two gay men that came after Phillips originally.
Those people that go out prowling on the lookout for Christians that they can entrap and then try to ruin their life.
It is vengeful, vicious, cruel.
These people are bullies and nothing more.
All right, before we get to your emails, we need to talk briefly.
Well, I guess we don't need to talk about this, but we will.
These videos have been popping up online recently.
They are absolutely terrifying.
And I'm sorry I have to subject you to this, but I do have to share a couple of them with you.
Just because I had to see it, so that means you have to see it as well.
So first, watch this.
Boom boom, I wanna go 85. Boom boom, that's alpha delta pi.
Boom boom, I wanna go 85, don't you?
Boom boom, I wanna wear white and blue. Boom boom, and wear that diamond too. Boom boom, I wanna go 85, don't you?
We are truly sister.
Vote by loyalty.
We can't be beat on friendship.
It's Alpha Delta for me.
Boom, boom.
I want to go 80 pi.
Boom, boom.
That's Alpha Delta pi.
Boom, boom.
I want to go 80 pi, don't you?
Boom, boom.
I want to wear white and blue.
Boom, boom.
And wear the diamonds too.
Boom, boom.
I want to go 80 pi, don't you?
We are truly sister!
Bound by loyalty!
We can't be beat on friendship!
It's Alpha and Alpha for me!
My God.
My God.
But it gets worse, okay?
But watch this one.
Hi, I'm Maddie, Recruitment Vice President.
I'm Haley, Chapter President.
I'm Jean Marie, Formal Recruitment Chair.
We've been waiting for you all summer and we're so glad you're finally here!
WOOOOOO!!!
BOOM BOOM I WANNA GO 80 MILES!
Boom, boom, and baby that ain't a lie!
Boom, boom, I wanna go 85, don't you?
Boom, boom, I wanna wear white and blue!
Okay, you know, I changed my mind.
Actually, white people are bad.
It turns out that, yeah, okay.
You know what?
Down with white people.
That's a vision of hell right there.
I mean, I imagine that walking up to the gates of hell is like that.
You just walk up the gates of hell, you see that.
That's how you're greeted, by a gaggle of white sorority girls in matching t-shirts, chanting their witch's spell at you.
It is bone-chilling stuff.
And it only further supports my view, which I've held for a long time, that sororities and fraternities are cults that are always just one step away from Jonestown.
And if you want proof, I mean, you have Exhibit 1 and 2 right there.
Really, really terrifying.
Alright, let's try to get away from that and try to erase that from our minds.
As quickly as we can.
We'll go to emails.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
Here's a... Here's a long one, but I love emails like this.
Kind of someone describing their intellectual journey.
Or I guess, as the media would put it, this is a story of radicalization.
So let me read this one.
This is from Chris.
It says, Hello, Lord and Savior, future theocratic dictator of this world.
My name is Chris.
I am a...
19-year-old Chilean conservative male living in Canada.
I redeem myself to your wisdom today to get some insight into two main questions to which I can't seem to answer myself since I do not possess your intellectual capacity.
Great beginning.
I used to be an atheist socialist left-wing pro-abortion psycho since I used to think that if my girlfriend got pregnant I would like to be able to get rid of that responsibility to which abortion is very convenient.
After listening to one of Ben Shapiro's anti-abortion videos in which he shows the picture of a baby and says, this is a little game for the left, where in this picture is it okay to murder this baby?
That made me realize how evil I was, how evil that I was supporting, and I became instantly pro-life.
Now I advocate pro-life at college where I study, which is overwhelmingly left-leaning.
I also used to be a socialist because I thought it was unfair there were people driving Ferraris in the same place in which there were homeless, starving.
I have by now realized that there's a lot of personal decisions that both of these people took that brought them to where they are now.
After noticing that I was wrong in socialism and abortion, I really wondered in what else I was wrong.
I started listening to Ben Shapiro more often and seeing his debates, and it turned out that all the points he was making sounded kind of rough, but it was common sense.
Later on, I discovered you through the Daily Wire, and since I was by then a conservative atheist, I agreed with virtually all your points, but religion.
Despite being raised a Catholic Christian, every time you talked about religion, I was like, nah, I will take the moral lesson from this since it is correct, but I will not attribute it to God nor religion.
A year ago I became a conservative.
I was wrong in every single opinion I had two years ago when I was left leaning.
Everything.
The only thing I wasn't really able to believe in was God.
But I agreed in everything else with you.
But I said to myself, since I had been wrong in virtually everything else, I will assume I was wrong as well in God's existence.
I am willing to open myself to that possibility.
I joined a Bible study group at college and started reading the Bible, I started praying, and now I'm getting some courage to start going to church.
I can't say I believe in God by now because I'm still uncertain, but I am living my life as if God were real, since I have been wrong in everything else.
Do you think what I am doing, since I am not certain about God's existence, is wrong?
Do you think this kind of resembles Pascal's wager?
And if it does, do you disagree, since I know you don't like that argument?
An atheist argument that I heard you addressing is, who created God?
If everything has a creator and nothing exists on its own, this is an argument that I used to make when I was atheist, fully convinced that God was not real.
However, I didn't really understand your explanation and I would like to ask if you could elaborate a little bit more
on that one or On simple words and then a bit more complicated to get the
general idea Assuming that God exists God bless you Matt
I say that from the bottom of my heart.
There's so many people that see you as a role model, as the father they never had.
And you have brought so many people from the deepest holes of depression.
Consider me one of them.
Thank you.
God bless you and your family.
Hope the surgery went well and you're not in too much pain.
Okay, Chris.
Well, thanks for that email and for your intellectual consistency and courage to radically change your position like that, to be willing And I think a lot of people don't understand this or appreciate this.
To be willing to even consider the possibility that you're wrong, not just about one issue, but about, as you say, almost everything.
That takes an enormous amount of courage.
And most people don't have it.
And there are a lot of people, I think, conservative Christians, who are basically right about most of the things that they think.
But they didn't earn those opinions, really, or come to those conclusions on their own.
They were just born into it, which is fine.
I mean, you know, I'm trying to raise my kids that way.
So it's good.
You know, we want to raise our kids that way.
That means that they were raised the right way, in my opinion.
But it does mean that, you know, and I'm the same way.
I was born into these At least most of these conclusions.
But I had to take all of them and put them to the test and say, yes, this is what I was taught.
This is how I was raised.
But that doesn't mean it's true.
It's quite possible to be raised the wrong way or to be told the wrong things growing up.
And so I had to take all these points of view and subject them to scrutiny.
And there are some things where I decided, no, no, no, I was wrong about that and I had to change.
But the point is to To come up against the possibility that you're wrong on such a fundamental level is a scary thing.
Most people aren't willing to consider it, so I think we need to appreciate the courage there.
It's very inspirational.
To your question about are you doing the wrong thing by going to church and exploring religion even though you don't believe in God, the answer to that is absolutely not.
Now, when I talk about Pascal's Wager, I've said that I don't think that's an effective argument on its own, in and of itself, to convince someone to be a Christian.
But I think what you're doing here is not Pascal's Wager.
What you're doing here is you're exploring the possibility of God's existence.
You're exploring religion.
You're opening yourself up to that truth.
And that is, again, a brave, courageous thing to do.
I fully encourage you to continue on that path and to keep asking questions.
And if you come up against a question about God that doesn't make sense to you, then keep exploring it and keep asking.
Don't just put it to the side and say, ah, it doesn't matter, because it does matter.
And so that's what you're doing here with this question about who made God.
It's a good question.
So let me try to take another crack at it.
The answer is that nobody made God.
I mean, that's the answer.
Obviously, that has to be the answer for a theist, because if somebody or something made God, then that person or that thing would be God, and the being that we call God would be just a very powerful created being, much like an angel or something, but not God.
So in order for it to be God, then this has to be an uncreated being, sort of by definition.
One way or another, if there is a God at all, you must reach a point, an endpoint, You must reach an uncreated creator.
An uncaused cause.
Part of the basic argument for God's existence is precisely that such a being must logically exist.
Because there seem to be only three other options aside from God.
If we're trying to figure out, you know, how is it that things exist at all?
Where did all this come from?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
You know, the classic question.
Well, the theists have an answer, but if you don't want to go with the theist answer, it seems to me that there are only three possibilities.
One is that we live in the midst of a never-ending, never-beginning chain of causes.
You could trace the effects back, and every effect will have a cause, but the chain of cause and effect would go on forever into the past, never reaching a starting point.
So that's one possibility that excludes God.
But it seems that that option doesn't really make sense.
Because the whole world, all of reality in that case, becomes kind of like a man lifting himself into the air by grabbing his feet.
You know, if you can imagine a guy bending over and grabbing his feet and lifting himself into the air, of course that's impossible.
A chain of causes and effects that is not itself caused by anything would seem to be like that.
would seem to be like a, you know, just a thing that's sort of just hovering in the air, unsupported by anything.
It doesn't really make any sense.
Moreover, there's a logical problem with the idea of an infinite past.
Because if the past is infinite, then that would mean that you would need to traverse an infinite series of moments in order to reach our current moment.
Which means that you would never reach it, because you cannot traverse infinity.
So in other words, if the past is infinite, we would never have arrived at right now.
The fact that we're at a right now, in the middle of, you know, time, a series of events, would seem to suggest that there's a beginning to that series.
If there was no beginning, then we would never get to right now.
So, just the whole idea doesn't make sense.
It creates just a lot of logical contradictions.
And I think that doesn't work.
The other option is that the universe did begin to exist at a certain point, but for no reason.
It just popped into being one day with no cause.
But I think that doesn't work.
Because then you have an effect with nothing causing the effect.
And that is a logical impossibility.
Moreover, if we lived in a reality where uncaused causes are possible, Then why don't we see them happening?
Why don't we observe that?
Atheists will use this argument in the other direction.
They'll say, well, if we live in a reality created by God, then why don't we see the reality of God around us?
Why don't we see Him?
Why don't we see that?
Why isn't it more obvious to us?
And now I would argue that we do see evidence of God around us, but I would also say that I can throw that right back at the atheist and say, look, if things can just pop into the air with no cause, If there can be uncaused effects, then we should see that, but we don't see that.
All we see around us, all we have ever observed, is that every effect must have a cause.
We don't live in a reality where elephants can just materialize out of thin air, or where a car or something could just disappear.
We don't live in a reality like that.
And you would think that we would, If reality itself just popped into being one day with no cause.
The third option, aside from God, is that the universe did have a beginning, and it was caused, but not by God.
I don't see how that could be the case either.
I see a lot of logical problems with the idea of mindless energy or particles just randomly causing a universe to come into being.
Not to mention, where did that energy or those particles come from?
So you still run into the same problem.
But I think the biggest problem with the idea of a mindless cause is this conversation right now.
Or really, what allows us to have this conversation, which is the mind.
We have minds.
We are conscious beings.
How could mindless particles arrange themselves in such a way as to create consciousness?
As to create awareness?
I mean, how could mindless particles formulate so that they could become aware of themselves?
You see, it just doesn't make sense.
And that is a mystery that no scientist has ever been able to solve.
And I think because in order to make a mind, you need a mind.
And that's what leads us to God.
That's what leads us to the conclusion that there must be an uncaused mind in the universe.
A spark that starts the fireworks.
A conscious spark.
So when I say that God is uncaused, that nobody created him, that's not a cop-out.
That's the whole point.
I think we can logically arrive at the conclusion that such a being must exist.
So why is there a God?
Because there must be a God.
And why is God uncreated?
Because he must be uncreated by definition.
I think it's a logical necessity.
Is maybe the best way to put it.
Alright, but I don't know, hopefully that helped in some way.
Thank you again for the email.
This is from Bree, says, Dear Matt, I don't think I read this email yet.
Or did I?
I don't know.
Well, we'll do it again if I did.
Dear Matt, huge fan of the show.
I'm a big believer that the pro-life position should not be focused just on abortion.
We as pro-lifers should be pro-life in all situations, but I have trouble applying this to the topic of euthanasia.
I absolutely think it's horrible to euthanize children or people who have alcoholism or depression, like they do in Europe, but what about someone who's on the verge of death anyway with terminal cancer or a similar diagnosis?
Isn't it compassionate to put them out of their misery rather than force them to continue being in unthinkable pain, dying slowly?
I just can't see it as equally bad as abortion to allow someone who's dying anyway and in pain to just get it over with.
I think that's probably what I would want in that situation myself.
I'm interested in your thoughts.
Great.
Another great question.
I would say that it's great that you're wrestling with this problem.
First, I would say that I don't think the kind of euthanasia you describe is as bad as abortion.
I think it's fundamentally evil, and so in some ways it's pointless to rank them.
But, you know, I mean, shoplifting and rape are also both evil, but we wouldn't say that they're the same degree of evil.
So I think that euthanasia and abortion are both evil, both very evil, but if we are going to get into the game of ranking them, I would say abortion is worse, so to speak.
But why should we oppose the kind of euthanasia that you're talking about?
And just assuming that, as we both do, that, you know, of course it's wrong to euthanize children or people who aren't terminally ill, as they do, in fact, do in Europe.
But what about euthanizing people who are terminally ill, the very elderly and so on?
I think there are three reasons why it's wrong.
Number one, or at least I'll say, there are three reasons why I oppose it.
Number one is that I think it's just inherently wrong.
Number two, I think it's a slippery slope.
And number three, it is a dangerous misuse of the medical profession.
And now let me go through and explain those each in more detail.
Number one, it's fundamentally wrong.
I believe that life is meant to be lived.
It's really as simple as that in some ways.
Every moment of life is precious.
Even moments that are filled with pain.
Even the final moments.
And to take our own life, or to assist someone in taking their life, is to deny the very purpose of life.
It is to literally give up on existence.
And I don't think that that is ever the right thing to do.
I think we are meant to live our lives for as long as they are given us to live.
Number two, it's a slippery slope.
You mentioned those horrible cases in Europe of people being euthanized, not for terminal illnesses, but for alcoholism or depression or what have you.
Well, how do you think that Europe got to that point?
They didn't just dive in with lethal injections for alcoholics.
They started with terminally ill adults, and eventually they ended up where they are today.
And I think that's inevitable.
Because the point, the justification of euthanasia, is that nobody should be forced to continue existing, and if someone thinks that life is pointless and too painful, they should be provided an exit.
And that has to be the justification for euthanasia.
But if that is the justification, then how do you justify excluding the non-terminally ill?
I think that exclusion is kind of arbitrary.
I mean, to be in physical pain, the kind of physical pain you would be in if you were dying of cancer is, I mean, it's horrendous.
But there is also emotional and psychological pain that is very much horrendous itself.
And so if we're saying that pain is a moral justification for euthanasia, then I just don't see how you do exclude those who are in emotional or psychological pain as well.
So I think it's a slippery slope.
And then three, it's a perversion of the medical profession.
Here's the thing.
Even if I thought that suicide could be morally acceptable sometimes, which I don't, but if I did, I still would never agree with enlisting doctors to kill patients under any circumstance.
That is just the opposite of what a doctor is meant to do.
And it creates this kind of This kind of Jekyll and Hyde scenario where a doctor is tasked with preserving life in one case and ending it in another.
And I know that it's already like that with abortion, but we don't need to make it worse.
The medical profession, the chief aim of the medical profession must always be to preserve life.
It's in the Hippocratic Oath.
Once its aim becomes preserving life or ending it, I think you have literally destroyed the medical profession and you have replaced it with something else.
You have turned the medical profession into something other than the medical profession, and I think that's a very dangerous thing.
So those are my reasons for opposing euthanasia.
I guess I would also add a quick fourth reason, which is that I just kind of related to the third reason.
So maybe 3A or 3B.
I don't see the point of it.
It's completely pointless.
Because, again, even if I agreed that suicide can be justified, which, I reiterate, I don't, but if I did, I mean, why do you need a doctor to come in and kill you?
It doesn't make any sense.
There are, not to be crude about it, but there are at-home ways of doing it So this whole idea that we need the medical establishment to work on the project of killing people, it just, it doesn't make any sense to me.
You know, there are, in many states, there are laws against suicide, and I think that those laws are good, because part of what those laws do is they allow, you know, if someone attempts suicide, they allow potentially, you know, The court system to send those people to, you know, to admit those people to mental, you know, institutions and that sort of thing, which I think is good.
But of course, at the end of the day, if someone actually succeeds in committing suicide, you can't punish them for it.
And you also can't preemptively prevent someone from doing so unless they have announced their intention and then you can get them some help.
But if someone is really intent on killing themselves, you can't really stop them.
They can do it.
Which is just yet another reason why it doesn't make any sense to me.
Why you need to have a doctor come in and give someone a pill or give them a lethal injection.
The whole thing to me is just grotesque and wrong.
And for the third time, a horrible misuse of the medical profession.
All right, I guess we will leave it there.
Thanks everybody for listening.
Thanks for watching.
Godspeed.
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