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Sept. 20, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show

48:54

Ep. 336 - The Religion Of Environmentalism

America is still a religious country, but our new religion is environmentalism. We'll talk about why environmentalism is a religion and why so many people subscribe to it. Also, the New York Times finds sexism in the weirdest imaginable place. And we deal with the question of why so many young people are leaving the church. Date: 09-20-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	So today was the day that the captive aliens at Area 51 have been waiting for and pining for.
	The Storm Area 51 event, which I'm sure you heard about.
	The raid on Area 51, organized on Facebook, was kicked off today, or was supposed to kick off today.
	And shockingly, nobody stormed anything.
	They're just hanging out in the desert, drinking beer, listening to music.
	This mission, this righteous mission to rescue the captive aliens has turned into a festival.
	How does that happen?
	You're organizing for a raid.
	It's a raid that turns into a festival?
	Imagine the disappointment.
	Imagine being an alien prisoner at Area 51.
	And you hear about this raid, you hear about it from the scuttlebutt from the other prisoners, maybe you heard about it from Rorg and Snorg in the prison cafeteria at Area 51, and now you feel like you're finally going to be free again.
	The day you've been waiting for, you've been captive all this time, you start dreaming of being home on your planet.
	You start excitedly planning your revenge invasion back on Earth to enslave and kill mankind for what they did to you, and you're just thinking about finally returning home to Neptune, and you're smiling again for the first time in years.
	And then the day arrives, and you look out from your cell, and you're expecting an army of people, and all you see are a ragtag bunch of scrawny white boys.
	Standing around in the desert, tweeting memes and laughing.
	And you realize it was all a joke.
	It was all a joke.
	Your freedom is a joke to these people.
	And then the Area 51 scientist comes and says, it's time.
	And they cart you away to the hospital ward to harvest your organs while you're still alive.
	And the last thing you see is your own spleen being removed from your body.
	That took a really dark turn at the end there, so I apologize for that.
	Things got way more serious at the end than they needed to be.
	But the point is that the Area 51 raid was sadly a huge, huge disappointment.
	Okay, well, a lot to discuss today, besides the Area 51 raid that never was.
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	Okay, well, there's something else going on today, aside from the Area 51 raid-turned-festival, and that is a climate strike.
	Yes, there's a climate strike.
	We are going on strike against the climate.
	We are boycotting the climate.
	We are saying to the climate, you stop it, climate.
	You stop being so hot.
	I personally, I am not going to associate with the climate.
	I am not going to use the climate.
	I am not going to be in the climate.
	Until the temperature drops by 20 degrees.
	That is my solemn oath.
	Or maybe that's not exactly how it works.
	I don't know.
	It's a climate strike.
	I think what mainly it apparently involves is a bunch of kids skipping school.
	That's what the climate strike is.
	Kids are skipping school today.
	They're walking out of class.
	They're letting their voice be heard.
	I love it when we have protests like this because kids all across the country, and it seems like every year there's a reason for some sort of school walkout or whatever, and you've got this thing where kids all across the country, across the world, they're ditching class, they're not going to school, and then everyone says, wow, the kids must really care about this issue.
	These kids are really involved.
	Yeah, maybe.
	Or maybe they just hate school and they're looking for any reason to walk out.
	I can remember, when I was in school, I can remember a couple of occasions when we did a school walkout.
	I have no idea what the issue was.
	I don't think I knew at the time.
	I didn't matter to me.
	I just knew people were walking out for summer.
	It made no difference to me.
	I was on board.
	At least for that period of time, for that day, I was marching alongside those people for whatever reason, to whatever effect.
	Didn't matter to me.
	The point is, the headline for me is, I get out of school.
	And I think that's the way it is for most kids.
	But on the sort of darker side of things, the fact is that a lot of people, kids included, and adults, are being sucked into what is essentially now a doomsday cult.
	Now, just to give you an example, let me read a very disturbing, let's see if I can find it, a very disturbing thread from a guy named Alex McKinnon, who's a writer out of Sydney.
	Not a grade school student, as far as I know.
	But let me read this thread that he put up this morning.
	Verified account, by the way, on Twitter.
	He's got the blue checkmark, so you know he's an important guy.
	And here's what he said.
	This is not a joke.
	This is what he had to say.
	He said, Since the federal election, I've been overwhelmed by feelings of dread, grief, and terror of what a heating planet will mean for my life, the ones I love, and our collective future.
	Hashtag climate strike.
	He goes on.
	For months, getting out of bed has been atrociously difficult.
	Any thought of the future's terrifying implications and what they will mean for the later years of my life has sent me spiraling.
	I quit a good job.
	I took months off work.
	I started on medication, all of which has helped, but none of which has solved the cause of the existential horror I feel when I look the future in the face.
	I have bawled my eyes out and screamed into pillows and felt a panic so intense it seemed impossible it could be contained in a small human frame.
	I can't say that the climate strikes have made those feelings go away.
	We are always signed up for too much climate atrocity and are too likely to cause more for a single protest to make the situation entirely better.
	But to see tens of thousands of people all grappling with the same trauma and hurt and gut-wrenching fear, the single biggest protest I've ever seen in my life made my own little battle a little bit easier for a while.
	We are all headed for a future demonstrably worse than the present in ways we cannot predict.
	The world will be brutal and horrific and beyond endurance.
	But I will help you through it in any way that I can.
	I hope you'll help me too.
	This has to be... Now that I'm reading it all the way through, this guy can't be serious.
	I'm looking at his profile.
	I think he is serious.
	Yeah, I think he's serious.
	And I can't even...
	I mean, I can't even laugh about it.
	I can sort of laugh about it, but I can't fully laugh about it because this is, I mean, this is a doomsday cult.
	This is like, that's not an exaggeration at this point.
	There are people.
	Now, to some of us, to those of us who are a little bit more balanced, we can laugh this off, but there are people.
	I guess when you've got Prominent Individuals like AOC and pretty much any Democrat and liberals across the world in the country When they're insisting and saying over and over again the world's going, you know coming to an end It's gonna end in 12 years and and you know, there's all these coastal cities are gonna be underwater.
	We're gonna drown It's like there are people who hear this stuff and they really take it seriously Now Think about this the walkouts today Then things like the climate confessions on NBC.com, which we talked about yesterday, gave you a chance to anonymously confess your sins against the climate.
	And then there was the confessions to actual plants at a liberal seminary that we talked about the day before yesterday.
	And on and on and on.
	It's very clear that, you know, I call it a doomsday cult.
	Well, a cult is another word for a religion.
	Cult is, you know, religions are technically cults, and I say that as someone who's a member of religion myself.
	The word cult has taken on this pejorative meaning, but in a broader sense, in a broader, less pejorative way, you know, religions and cults are synonymous.
	So, you could call it a doomsday religion, a doomsday environmentalist religion.
	And that really is what it is, and that's not a joke.
	It is literally a religion.
	It has all of the hallmarks now of a religion.
	It has its core ideological tenets.
	It has its apocalyptic vision.
	It has its rules and codes of conduct.
	It has tithings and offerings and sacrifices.
	It has a call to repentance.
	It has its high priests and priestesses, AOC being one of them.
	It has its prophets, Al Gore.
	It has its child saviors, Thunberg.
	In every sense, this is a religion.
	It's got everything that a religion has.
	America has found its religion, and this is it.
	This, I think, speaks to a certain truth, which is that apparently, it would seem, religion actually is a basic need that we have as human beings.
	We can't escape it, even when we try.
	The West is by far the least religious civilization in the history of the world, but only at first glance.
	And only if you're believing, if you are looking at the polls and the surveys and saying, how many people are unaffiliated with any religion?
	Well, there are more unaffiliated people today than there have been at any other point, percentage-wise.
	If you look a little bit closer, and you don't even have to look that close, you see that the religious instinct has just manifested itself in a slightly different way.
	They're not really unaffiliated, they're just affiliated now with a different religion, and one that we don't call a religion, even though it is.
	Now, it would seem that there is a fundamental need here.
	And if you're an atheist, you can claim that the fundamental need for religion The instinct, whatever you want to call it, you could say that it's evolutionary, it's psychological, whatever, not proof of a god.
	That could be your claim.
	If you're a theist, you say that the fundamental need speaks to an innate sense of, an innate knowledge of, an innate longing for the divine.
	I'm not going to get into that debate, though you know where I stand on it, but that's not really my point here.
	My point is simply that The need is clearly there for religion, and environmentalism fills that need for a lot of people, and it's not a coincidence that as we go on, it begins to more and more resemble religion, and it takes on more and more of the characteristics of religion.
	This repentance stuff, that we see two of these things in the same week, where now this confessional aspect of it is...
	To me, that was kind of like the last piece that we needed to really call it a religion.
	And now we've got it.
	And okay, so it's a religion.
	You could just classify it.
	You've got Christianity, Judaism, Islam, you know, Hinduism, environmentalism, right?
	In the list of religions.
	All right.
	I've been meaning to mention this for a few days.
	A restaurant in Baltimore is being accused of racism.
	And this is going to shock you.
	The reasons are frivolous and stupid, if you can believe it.
	A frivolous claim of racism.
	That doesn't sound like the culture I know.
	It doesn't sound like our culture.
	So reading now from the Daily Wire says, um, a soon to be opened restaurant in Baltimore is being called racist because it posted a sign with one specific message.
	The restaurant has a dress code.
	Um, The Chop Tank, which alerted prospective customers that it will be opening soon on its website, posted a dress code listing some items that would be unacceptable to wear on its premises, including excessively baggy clothing, offensive, vulgar, or inappropriate attire, athletic attire, jerseys, brimless headgear, backwards or sideways hats, work and construction boots, sunglasses after dark.
	On Twitter, one Twitter user described themselves as a photojournalist tweeted, dress coded sign at the new Chop Tank restaurant in Fells, followed by another tweet.
	And then from there, the controversy starts.
	One Twitter user said, this is racist as hell.
	I will never enter your restaurant and will actively warn others away from it.
	Have a great day.
	Someone else said, y'all could have saved yourself some time at the Chop Tank and just posed a no black people sign.
	A writer from Elle magazine tweeted that the restaurant had a blatantly discriminatory dress code.
	And the Washington Post is writing about it, and on and on and on.
	People are calling it racist.
	This is one of those cases where the people calling it racist, and this happens a lot, Where the people who call something racist have revealed themselves to be racist.
	Because if you read that list and you think, oh, that's going to disqualify all black people, how is that not racist?
	Are you just, is that not engaging in insulting stereotypes?
	No, this is a dress code that is put forward for everybody.
	And there's a logical reason for a lot of it.
	Like, for instance, one of the reasons why establishments don't like really baggy clothing, especially in the city, is because you can hide stuff in it.
	Like a gun, for instance.
	They don't want vulgar attire.
	Well, most places don't want that because that offends other customers, and you don't want to offend paying customers.
	Don't wear athletic attire.
	Well, again, if you're trying to be a slightly nicer kind of restaurant, maybe one step up from Burger King or Subway, then you don't want people walking in in basketball shorts.
	Don't wear sunglasses after dark.
	Again, this is just, that's another thing.
	There are a lot of places, if you go into a bank, it's gonna say, don't wear sunglasses and hats in the bank.
	Is it discriminatory?
	No, they're just, because you might be trying to rob the place.
	So to look at that list and say that it discriminates, that to me seems extremely bigoted and racist.
	I think that a dress code like that seems to me to be completely reasonable, No matter what your race happens to be, anyone of any race is perfectly capable of complying with that dress code, and it should really be as simple as that.
	All right, not to go too rapid-fire here, but I've also been wanting to talk about something else, and I can't let the week end without bringing this up.
	And I'm sorry that I have to talk about it.
	Well, I don't really have to talk about it, but I will anyway.
	The New York Times a few days ago ran a story and, okay, well, here's the headline of the story, all right?
	The headline is, well, it's not a story, it's an op-ed.
	Women poop at work.
	Get over it.
	That's real.
	That's the headline.
	In fact, here's the screenshot of the headline there, so just so you can see.
	This was published in the New York Times.
	And it's an article all about, well, you can tell what it's about.
	It's kind of self-explanatory.
	And this is something I talk about a lot.
	Not women pooping, but rather feminists finding the weirdest ways to be persecuted.
	Just the weirdest.
	Feminists who are so desperate to be victims and so desperate to be persecuted that they go searching for it and they find it in the weirdest places.
	And they find the weirdest claims about discrimination that they face.
	Like, whoever told women that they can't go number two at work?
	Is that even a thing in my 33 years of life?
	I've never heard anyone say that or I just is I don't think that's a thing.
	Are there jobs where they say where like you walk into the bathroom and there's a there is a gendered code telling you what you're allowed to do in the bathroom?
	Like, men can go number one and two, women can only go number one.
	Is that a thing?
	Are there jobs that have rules like that?
	If so, I will say I'm totally against it.
	I have no problem.
	I will march with the feminists in that case and say, no, men and women should be allowed to, you know, use the toilet at work.
	But I don't think that's a thing.
	The real story here is the picture accompanying this article.
	This to me is utterly mysterious.
	But I want to show you this picture.
	This is the picture that went along with the headline.
	And as you can see there, OK, what?
	It just makes me it really makes me wonder the woman who wrote this article.
	She obviously has had some very specific experiences at her job, which I don't know if she works at the New York Times or if this was, or what.
	But there are weird things happening in her bathroom at her work that I don't think happen at other places.
	Look, okay, you've got a woman with her shoes off in the bathroom and her bare feet on the floor.
	And then you've got, that appears to be, and I don't, you know, I don't want to be transphobic, but that appears to be a man in that one.
	I mean, it's someone with pants, they're facing in the other direction, appears to be a man.
	And then you've got two women in the stall next to it.
	What in the world is happening in this bathroom?
	What is this even supposed to be?
	So the real headline of the story is very weird stuff happening in New York Times bathroom.
	If you go to New York Times, do not use their bathroom under any circumstances.
	Apparently, if you're a woman, you're not allowed to.
	Or I guess you can, but maybe they have to do two in a... Is that... Okay, maybe that's the issue.
	Maybe the New York Times, to save space, they make women share stalls, and that's why they're not allowed to... Anyway, I don't want to get too graphic with it, but this is just completely bizarre and strange.
	All right.
	We'll go to emails.
	MattWalshow at gmail.com.
	MattWalshow at gmail.com.
	This is from Kevin says, Hey Matt, I read your article on the Daily Wire about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing blackface and how we should apply the left standards to them.
	I know that this is something that a lot of conservatives struggle with their insistence that, uh, uh, Lost my place.
	place. That conservatives should not jump into the mire of leftist PR tactics
	while I agree that the left should be called out for their blatant and
	unwavering hypocrisy for what they did to Megyn Kelly and treating Trudeau and
	Ralph Northam with kid gloves. I believe that we should not attack Trudeau and
	look at the totality of the circumstances. While I don't agree with
	many of Trudeau's policies, the man does not deserve to be destroyed for
	doing something ignorant and stupid. This is the best tactic and we should not
	engage in leftist attack strategies. Just wanted to give my thoughts. Well, this is
	That's what we've been talking about over the last few days and I agree, it is.
	I've been wrestling with this as well.
	What do we do?
	We accuse the left of having a double standard.
	We don't want to ourselves have a double standard.
	So if we say, in principle, that we don't think that people should be destroyed or fired or cancelled over dumb things they said or did 20 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever, then how can we all of a sudden abandon that argument when it's a leftist who's got themselves into trouble?
	And that's where I tried to thread the needle yesterday.
	And the way that I kind of look at this is, yeah, we don't want to be disingenuous.
	So we don't, when it comes to the Trudeau blackface thing, I think any rational, especially any conservative, we see that.
	And we know that objectively speaking, not a big deal.
	It's not racist.
	You want to call it insensitive?
	Go ahead.
	You want to call it stupid?
	Sure.
	It's not racist.
	Okay.
	His intention clearly was not to be racist.
	So we know that.
	And so we shouldn't be disingenuous and go around pretending that we really think it's racist.
	Unless we're doing it ironically as a joke, in which case, go ahead.
	But I do think, as I said yesterday, with this kind of thing, our point should be, okay, this is not a racism scandal, this is a hypocrisy scandal.
	So it's the same thing with the New York Times editor who herself has participated in cancel culture, retweeting things, calling for Shane Gillis to be fired from SNL.
	Then it turns out that she has all these offensive tweets where she has said offensive things about gay people and people of other races and so on.
	Well, our response to that is not that, oh, this person is a horrible bigot and all of that, but it's just, this is hypocrisy.
	This person is a hypocrite.
	Clearly.
	Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite.
	And so, I think there's nothing wrong with us saying, okay, forget about the standards we hold you to.
	You should hold yourself to the same standard that you hold other people to.
	I think that's a perfectly fine, perfectly consistent Message.
	That is an intellectually honest way of approaching this, from our perspective.
	Where we are saying to these people, like Justin Trudeau, hold yourself to the standard that you hold other people to.
	Just like the comparison I drew yesterday, I think it's an apt comparison.
	Think about what the left says to socially conservative Christian Republican politicians who end up in scandals where they're having affairs, Larry Craig in the bathroom soliciting gay sex.
	What do the left say in that case?
	Their message is, hey, you know, we don't think this kind of stuff's a huge deal.
	But you're the ones, you're the ones putting yourself forward as this conservative, Christian, family values, Christian values, so on and so forth.
	Hold yourself to the same standard that, you know, live up to your own standards.
	You're the ones who say that this is a horrible, evil thing, it's terrible, the collapse of morality and everything else.
	So hold yourself to that standard.
	By your own standards, you should resign in disgrace.
	Because that's what you would expect other people to do, who have done the same things.
	And in that case, I agree with the left.
	I think that's correct.
	Well, I think we can take that and throw that back at them here.
	And say, well, here you go.
	This is your standard.
	We aren't the ones, as conservatives, okay, we're not the ones going around saying that everything is racist.
	We aren't the ones saying that if somebody makes a joke five years ago, we should destroy them now.
	That's not our thing.
	We didn't invent that.
	That's not our opinion.
	But it is your thing.
	That is your philosophy.
	So apply it to yourself.
	Be consistent.
	All right, let's see.
	This is from...
	Hi Matt, long time listener, big time fan.
	I'm well aware of your opinions on issues such as people facetiming in public, people sitting next to you on planes when other seats are open, etc.
	I would like to know your thoughts on when you are using a urinal in a public restroom and someone comes in and decides to urinate right next to you when other urinals are available.
	I believe this is sociopathic behavior.
	Do you agree?
	I guess we're talking a lot about bathrooms today.
	I didn't plan it that way, but that's the way it's turned out.
	Yeah, Sam.
	Sociopathic, yes.
	Psychopathic, I would advocate.
	I think the death penalty in those cases, you could make an argument for it.
	That's all I'll say.
	I think as a society, as a country, we need to have a national conversation about
	what do we do about the sorts of people. You got a line of urinals, all of them are
	free except for the one you're using.
	Someone comes in, uses the one right next to you. You could make an argument for not only
	criminalizing that behavior, but considering at least capital punishment in those cases.
	I don't know.
	We could talk more about that, but I think there's certainly a rational argument to be made there.
	Thanks for the email.
	Finally, this is from Addison, says, Dear he who must not be shaved, as a fellow lay theologian, I commend you for continuing the tradition of maintaining your beard.
	Anybody who attempts such deep discussions without facial hair should automatically be marked as a heretic without exception.
	Totally, totally agree.
	Speaking of theology, I've stumbled upon a rather unique discussion in my studies many years ago.
	Somebody introduced me to a documentary titled Divided.
	The filmmaker, Philip Leclerc.
	Leclerc.
	L-E-C-L-E-R-C.
	He asks a very important question.
	Why are the youth in our churches falling away in such terrible droves?
	If I'm not mistaken, I believe the current statistics range between the high 80s and low 90s.
	That is a staggering number, one of great concern, obviously.
	But his diagnosis of the illness is even more bizarre.
	Rather than blaming it on lack of discipleship, sugar-coating preaching, or the absence of apologetics, he more or less points the finger towards the institution of youth ministry.
	His argument relies on two premises.
	Premise 1.
	There is no such thing as a youth pastor in the Bible.
	Premise 2.
	The Bible teaches family integration, not separation, in the context of worship.
	Conclusion, therefore, youth ministry is outside the will of God.
	Now, I don't want to strawman his argument, so I'll grant that maybe he doesn't hold to the first premise as strongly as the second premise.
	Regardless, he and several others strongly support the second premise and cite various scriptures to proof their claim.
	The idea is that parents have to be involved in the discipleship process or else the children will most likely fall away during high school and beyond.
	The more committed the parents are, the more committed the children will be.
	Therefore, youth ministry is not part of God's plan because it wedges children from their parents and further divides between them.
	Children look to youth pastors as fathers and in most cases just play games and flirt.
	In rare instances, the youth pastor actually disciples, but even this is dangerous because it fails to recognize the family as a God-ordained institution and robs parents of the love and devotion of their children.
	Church should be the place where they grow together, not separate.
	I obviously disagree.
	I'm reading this like I'm Ben Shapiro over here.
	Speed reading.
	I obviously disagree with the first premise because many things are not specifically mentioned in the Bible that are still permissible.
	Also, it errs on the side of legalism when we get wrapped up in condemning things that the Word does not specifically condemn.
	As for the second premise, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest.
	In one sense, I do agree that it would be ideal to encourage parents to have their children sit with them in church services.
	On the other hand, we should Should we be so quick to dismiss a ministry that may indeed harvest young believers as strong, committed disciples?
	Would this categorize under unnecessary dividing the body over trivial issues or is this a rather a discussion that needs to take place and receive our consideration?
	All right, Addison, I think you raise a lot of interesting points, which is why I wanted to read that.
	I'm sorry for reading it so quickly.
	Hopefully people could understand what you had to say.
	I agree with much of what you say.
	And, of course, the question of why are so many people leaving the church, why are so many young people leaving, that is one of the most important questions we can be asking now as a church, as a body of believers in America.
	Now, you say 80 or 90% leave?
	I don't know if it's that high.
	That seems a little too high.
	If we're looking at 80 or 90% of kids eventually leaving the faith, then that means the church in America is going to be extinct in 50 years, if not sooner.
	That is not at all sustainable.
	That is apocalyptic kinds of numbers.
	I tend to think.
	I'd have to see where you got those numbers.
	I tend to think that those numbers are not exactly, you know, maybe inflated a little bit.
	But anyway, the point is, the numbers are too high.
	As for youth ministry, first of all, not all youth ministry has to remove kids from worshiping with the parents.
	That's not how it works in the Catholic Church, for example.
	Most Catholic churches, anyway.
	You know, you got the service.
	The mass, as we call it, and families are together.
	And then you have the youth ministry, which is a separate thing, and kids will go for youth group meetings and youth services, and they'll do that separate.
	It's a separate thing that they'll do, oftentimes, on different days of the week.
	They go to youth retreats and everything else.
	I agree that families should be together in worship, ideally.
	Doesn't always work out that way, of course, but can't always work out that way.
	But I think, ideally, that's what should be encouraged, having the families together.
	So I'm in agreement there with that argument.
	I also agree that youth ministers, or youth ministries in general, can sometimes be, frankly, just BS, a waste of time.
	They can be very clicky, very, I suppose the word is worldly, that we would use.
	Not all the time, certainly, but they can tend that way.
	And so that's something that you got to look out for.
	I remember when I was in high school and a few, you know, my parents were encouraging me to get involved in youth activities at the church.
	And I made a few attempts and I just was, I was turned off by it because it just seemed like it was, like I said, very clicky, which I think, which from talking to other people, that's a big problem in youth.
	In youth groups and youth ministries at churches, and in churches in general, frankly.
	But on top of that, to me it seemed like everyone's just kind of hanging out, which is fine, I guess, if you want to hang out.
	Who doesn't like hanging out?
	But there should probably be more going on here than that.
	But actually, as I was thinking about your email, what I would like to do I want to put all that aside for a minute and address this question of why so many kids, so many young adults, as they grow up, end up leaving.
	Because it's a very high number, as we said.
	It's a big problem.
	It's something that we need to think seriously about.
	And I don't think there's one answer, but I would like to suggest an answer.
	One of the answers.
	I think one of the important answers I would like to suggest.
	I think one of the reasons why a lot of people end up leaving the church, Christianity, faith, is YouTube and the internet more generally.
	We would make a mistake to discount this factor.
	Now, I don't mean that YouTube and the internet are the devil, though, I mean, who knows?
	You could maybe argue that, but what I really mean is that at a certain point, People, Christians, a lot of them, start to ask difficult questions about their faith, about their belief system, about their history as a religion, about their theology, their books.
	People start to wonder.
	They start to question.
	They start to notice things as they grow older that they didn't notice before when they were kids.
	They start to do their own research.
	And they think, well, the Genesis creation account is pretty strange when you look at it, especially considering what we know about science.
	Why are there two creation accounts that seem to conflict?
	What is going on with this Noah's Ark story?
	What really is happening here?
	Why is it so similar to other stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh and that flood story?
	What's going on with the Exodus?
	Why isn't it there?
	When I look it up online, I see there's hardly any archaeological evidence to support it.
	Why does God send bears to maul 42 children?
	Wait, did God really just endorse slavery explicitly in the Bible?
	What's with all the wholesale slaughter in the Bible?
	What about the New Testament?
	What about the infancy narratives and the fact that there appear to be only two infancy narratives that seem to really contradict each other and be two completely different stories?
	Why don't the other two Gospels even mention the virgin birth?
	What's going on with the resurrection accounts?
	How many angels were at the tomb?
	What happened afterwards?
	Who went to the tomb?
	Who left?
	Where did they go?
	What exactly is happening here?
	And wait, when were these Gospels written?
	And by who?
	And how do we know that?
	And, you know, wait a second, what is with this, the whole idea of atonement?
	What's up with that?
	You know, why did God need Jesus to forgive us?
	Why couldn't He just forgive us without that?
	And why does God allow all these horrible things to happen, diseases and everything?
	And what about evolution?
	Why didn't God ever mention that?
	And on and on and on and on.
	Okay.
	The point is, I think, people, A lot of young people at a certain point, they start to ask these questions.
	Okay?
	A lot of people.
	And these are good questions.
	These are good, tough, real questions.
	But then here's the issue.
	Where do they go for answers?
	They go to YouTube.
	They go to the internet.
	They go to Google.
	Okay?
	And why do they go there for answers?
	It's not their fault.
	That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
	You've got all these questions, so you go to the internet, you look it up.
	They're forced to do that, in many cases, because our churches, for the most part, are not addressing these problems, are not even acknowledging them, are ignoring them.
	are not even trying to provide answers, are not addressing these things head-on.
	And what happens is that people start asking the questions that the churches have ignored, and that their parents have never addressed, and they go online, they go to YouTube, they find things out, they learn things, they notice things, they start to feel lied to.
	They start to say, why didn't anyone ever tell me about this?
	Why?
	What?
	Wait a second.
	And they start to feel like things were hidden from them, and their faith completely falls apart at that point.
	It's like a house of cards.
	It just tumbles down.
	It just all falls apart.
	And you lose them.
	And I really believe this is what's happening in so many cases.
	In fact, I know that this is what's happening because I get emails from people all the time, all the time, describing exactly this kind of process.
	You have no idea how many emails I get describing not only exactly this story, this narrative of their own life, this is how it worked for them, but asking me a lot of these questions that I just rattled off.
	And there are hundreds of others that people could ask related to religion.
	They ask me these questions.
	Now, why is that?
	Is that because I'm some sort of genius theologian or scientist?
	No, I'm not a genius, I'm not a theologian, I'm not a scientist.
	I'm just a guy babbling on the internet.
	But the fact that they have to come to me, of all people, to answer these questions, is a reflection of the fact that the people in their lives who should be answering them, or at least addressing them, are not.
	They find me on YouTube and they say, let me talk to this guy, because their pastor's not talking about it, their priest isn't talking about it, their parents aren't talking about it, their religious education people, you know, they went to Sunday school, they went to Christian school, Catholic school.
	These things were never talked about.
	And what I hear in emails a lot is sometimes they'll go and they'll try to talk to the pastor, they'll try to talk to people in their lives and ask them these questions.
	And what they get are platitudes, they get evasion, sometimes they'll get the distinct impression the person they're talking to has no idea, hasn't even thought about this stuff before.
	I think it's so important for us to realize this because, you know, I think we need to stop looking at the problem as one of purely about, you know, shallow self-centered millennials who want to leave Christianity so they can go and run off and sin or whatever.
	I think that, you know, maybe that's the case sometimes, but I think we make a big mistake.
	Now, it makes us feel better to look at it that way.
	We want to see it that way.
	Okay, we want to say that, oh, all these people are leaving.
	They're just not as pious as I am.
	They're just not as strong in their faith.
	They're not as holy as I am.
	That's why they leave, those wimps, those weaklings.
	When in reality, no, it could be in some ways the opposite.
	That they had the courage to start asking questions, but unfortunately, nobody was there to answer those questions.
	And unfortunately, they didn't really know where to look for the answers.
	So I think that we need to start.
	I think Christians need to be trained, educated, really educated.
	and, you know, and, and, uh, Bye.
	Now, and we would know this too, that's the other thing.
	When we're trying to answer the question of why do people leave the church, you know, one thing we could do is ask the people who've left.
	Let them tell us.
	Now, if you ask people, they might tell you they left because they're disenchanted with the church, they had personal problems with somebody in the church, so on and so forth.
	You will hear stories like that, yes.
	But, just as likely, they'll tell you something about some of those questions that I mentioned before, some of those problems, and they'll tell you that the best answers they could find for those questions were secular ones, from secular sources.
	You know, and so what we want to do is we want to make ourselves feel better and we want to say, oh no, no, no, that's not really why you left.
	No, that couldn't be it.
	That's not it.
	I'll tell you, I'll tell you why you left.
	Because I know, I know, I know better what's in your mind than you do.
	Do we have any idea how pretentious and arrogant and stupid that sounds?
	No, no, it wasn't really that.
	No, no, it's because you wanted to sin.
	That's what it was.
	Telling you.
	No, no, no, you don't know.
	No, it wasn't.
	Let me tell you.
	No, no, let me tell you why you left.
	No, I think we need to listen.
	I think maybe we could listen.
	Let's listen to what they're saying for a change.
	What ultimately needs to happen is the church needs to help to form mature Christians with a mature understanding of their own religion and their Bible.
	This is a big part of the problem is that a lot of adult Christians in this country have a very immature, childish understanding of their religion and of the Bible.
	And the problem with an immature and childish understanding is that it won't hold up to scrutiny.
	And also the other problem is that you, if you're a parent, if you're a leader in the church, because you have yourself a childish, immature understanding of your own faith, you are not going to be able to answer the mature, intelligent questions from people who are apparently more mature than you.
	I mean, I can't tell you how angry I get when I hear people that say, you know, I had these questions, I talked to my parents, I talked to my pastor, and it was like they never thought he's... How could you be an adult Christian?
	You never even thought about these things.
	What the hell is wrong with you?
	Use your brain!
	I think there are a lot of Christians who still think of the Bible like a self-help book.
	I run into this all the time.
	You know, Christians, you think of the Bible as a book of inspirational sayings.
	But it's not that.
	There's inspirational stuff in there, but the Bible is a library of a whole bunch of different books and genres and forms and styles written over the course of a thousand years at least, hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years.
	By dozens of different authors who were all trying to do different things, and none of them had any idea that their writings were going to one day be compiled in a book, the book that we now call the Bible.
	And we have to understand that.
	We have to understand what it is, and what its many different functions are, and were, and were supposed to be, or else we're setting ourselves up for a crisis down the line, when the Bible doesn't quite live up to, or rather I should say conform with, our expectations.
	Recently I saw somebody on Facebook, they post a picture of their Bible, With a cup of coffee.
	And in the caption she claimed that every morning she opens the Bible at random and she finds her morning inspiration wherever it lands.
	She lets the Spirit guide her, opens the Bible, and wherever it lands she finds inspiration.
	And I read that and I thought, really?
	Really?
	Is that really what you do?
	Because first of all, if you really read the Bible every morning, you aren't posting pictures of it and posting it on Facebook, okay?
	But second of all, because if you really open the Bible at random, if you open it at random and you stack the deck in your favor, because you kind of know where the Psalms are, or you could kind of flip it maybe and try to land on Matthew chapter 5, get to the Sermon on the Mount, or you flip all the way back to the Epistles, you try to get somewhere in Romans or Corinthians or something, Then, yeah, you'll find a lot of inspiration that's very relevant to your life today.
	But if you're really opening at random, there's a good chance you're going to land on a six-page-long genealogy, or a long, dense discourse on Jewish ceremonial law, or dietary restrictions, or a description of some violent siege that took place, or a conquest that happened, or a prophet's lengthy denunciation of this or that group.
	of people or dozens of other things that would be very difficult to, at a glance over your coffee in the morning, find inspiration from.
	Why is that?
	Because the entire Bible wasn't written to inspire 21st century Americans while they eat breakfast.
	Some of the Bible was written to inspire.
	Yes, some of it is inspirational writing.
	Some of it was written with other purposes in mind and to do other kinds of things.
	And so I point that out as an example of the immature, silly, frankly ridiculous impression that a lot of we Christians have about our own religion and our own holy book that we claim to read every day, read the Bible every day.
	Do you?
	Do you really read it?
	Do you really study it?
	Do you really know what's in it?
	Because if you do, it's just, anyway.
	Um...
	So I think that's a big part of the answer, is for us to... So let's begin with ourselves as Christians, you know, enriching our own understanding of our faith and our religion.
	Coming to a deeper and more mature understanding of it.
	Reading, you know, not just the biblical text itself, but the history around it, so we can understand the context of it.
	It's a big part of it.
	There's a lot of stuff in the Bible, and some of those questions I rattled off.
	It's easier to answer those questions when you understand the context surrounding When these texts were written and why.
	If you don't know any of that and you just pick it up and read it, there's a good chance you're going to walk away confused, disturbed even.
	So that's my thing.
	And it's got to start in the churches.
	I mean, pastors got to get up there and start giving substantive sermons addressing real questions and issues people have related to the text, related to their religion, related to just real stuff.
	We don't need an inspirational self-help sermon every single time.
	People have real questions.
	Answer those questions.
	At least acknowledge the questions.
	I feel very strongly about this, as you can tell.
	But I guess I should wrap it up.
	It's been about 30 minutes of me babbling about this.
	I could go on for another five hours on this subject, as you can tell.
	But we'll leave it there for now.
	Thanks for watching, everybody.
	Thanks for listening.
	Have a great weekend.
	Godspeed.
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