Joel Osteen, Michael Belch, and Wesley Todd argue that lifestyle choices trigger epigenetic changes affecting descendants for thousands of generations, citing Native American diabetes rates and Ashkenazi Jewish schizophrenia linked to sin. They claim East Asians exhibit higher oxytocin levels fostering family values, while American instability stems from porous borders and immigration policies destabilizing social cohesion. Addressing racism accusations, they assert biological disparities reflect God's created order rather than white supremacy, urging Christians to use the Gospel to reverse generational curses and leave legacies of spiritual and physical health for future generations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why Reviews Matter for God's Glory00:02:02
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
War, disease.
Famine, worship, prosperity, technology, diet, and exercise.
All of these things fundamentally affect who we are as individuals and as groups.
But it affects more than psychology or experience.
It affects us at a genetic level, and the impact of these events and patterns is measurable over the course of even generations.
Because of this, How we live matters.
Living well, including eating well, living in chastity, staying active, and avoiding toxins and their impact, is not just something that will affect you, not even just your children, but it has the potential to affect untold thousands of your future descendants.
God visits iniquity on those that hate Him to the third and fourth generation, but He shows steadfast love.
To the thousandth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments.
Yes, this literally means that the wicked reap their reward for their iniquity in their own bodies, not merely their souls in the life to come, but even in their flesh, here and now.
We see this per Romans chapter 1.
While the righteous, however, are renewed and protected.
Rooting Studies in Scripture and Faithfulness00:06:18
For their faithfulness.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
Join us for this special episode where we dig deep on genetics, faithfulness, godly living, and how all of it. matters.
Welcome back.
Here we are.
It is Wednesday afternoon.
For those of you who are new to the stream, we live stream three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3 p.m. Central Time with myself, and we also have Michael Belch, and we also have Wesley Todd.
Now, today's episode, as you just saw in the cold open, is going to be dealing with some things that are important that we believe the Bible addresses, but that are highly controversial for our culture today, especially within the church.
We are going to address some things.
That the evangelical church has said are not allowed.
You're simply not allowed to go there, kind of like Simba and Mufasa.
What's that dark, shadowy place over there?
That's the subject of race, and you must never go there.
But we are going to go there, and by God's grace, we're going to do it carefully, but we're going to do our best to do it courageously and truthfully.
And we're going to try to do it using as much of the scripture and also as much natural revelation of what we have data as possible.
This is an episode, just to be frank, that I would not feel comfortable doing by myself.
And so I'm glad, I'm very, very relieved and grateful that I have both Michael and Wes with us today.
Wes has outlined this episode.
Real quick, you've said it in the past, but if we have new listeners just for this particular episode, what are your bona fides?
There was a comment already from Classic Troll, and he said, I guarantee no one in this lot has an education in biology behind high school.
So I went to Columbia University for neuroscience and behavior for my undergrad.
Oh, troll.
Oh, troll, getting known.
The biology part, the neuroscience, the behavior is the psych part, and then the neuroscience is the biology part.
The two classes there, Dr. Deborah Mauschowitz, she teaches them both.
They're regarded as some of the hardest biology classes in the nation, of which I did both of them.
So that was my undergraduate in neuroscience and behavior, and now I have my master's degree, master's in public health, epidemiology.
And epidemiology, for the record, is a study of diseases and traits among people groups as a whole.
So the micro level, biology, And then the macro level, I hate credentialism, but if it comes down to it and I have the credentials like Paul, I'll say, like, no, I have a degree.
It's in my mind to speak like this, but allow little fools to talk.
I have a degree in these things.
And so that's why I'm qualified to talk about it.
Joel, you didn't ask me.
I'm going to state mine.
Yeah.
Well, Michael, you are fantastic.
And I think better than me.
I took high school biology.
There you go.
So did I.
I think I even took the, what do they call them? AP or like the advanced class.
I think I was right in the middle of the pack.
I think you're qualified to lead this one off then.
No.
No.
So, Wes is going to be, he's outlined this episode.
He's going to be leading out.
We're all going to be pitching in.
We have thoughts about this.
I've been thinking about this for quite a while.
But Wes has done a lot of the research and the heavy lifting.
And we're going to make sure that we're looking to God's book of nature that he's written, that he's sovereign over, but making sure that ultimately, in this sense, I would still define myself as presuppositional.
In what sense?
Because every time I disagree with someone, I just.
I just recite Romans 1.
No, presuppositional in the sense that at the end of the day, I'm going to appeal to logic and nature and these things, but I know that these things ultimately have authority and that they are trustworthy and credible because of the Word of God.
To me, that the heart of presuppositionalism is when you peel back behind this and this and this and this and you get to the very bottom, what is the bottom?
Is it nature or is it the inspired Word of God?
And I believe it is the Word of God.
So I can look to nature and learn things that God has said through nature.
But the reason I can trust my sense perceptions and I can trust things that I see in nature as an orderly world and not just chaotic or random is because the Bible tells me so.
The Bible tells me so.
So, we are going to be looking at a lot of studies, and we're going to be relying on Wes's expertise, and we're going to be doing our best at the very same time to root these things also in the scripture.
That being said, real quick, if you haven't registered yet for our conference, Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World, happening Thursday, Friday, Saturday, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th this year, then we encourage you to go and do that.
Go to Right Response Conference, not ministries.
But write response conference, it has its own page, write response conference.com.
And go ahead and also sign up for our business networking lunch.
If you are a business owner or an aspiring business owner, you're looking at starting a business sometime this year, then we encourage you to sign up for that.
It's $25.
We're just trying to cover, we're going to cater food for this.
So we're just trying to cover the food and the tip and the delivery and tax.
And so sign up for that.
It's on that same page.
So you can sign up for the conference.
And if you scroll down, you'll be able to sign up.
For the business networking lunch and then also for our singles event.
Unfortunately, we are full for the guys and we still need a few gals.
We're about halfway there with the gals.
So if you are a God fearing woman and you want to be a part of this conference, again, go to rightresponseconference.com to register.
If you've already registered, still go to that page, scroll down, and you'll see the singles event and register for that.
So that's pretty much all of our talking shop.
I think we're ready to dive in.
All right.
Illustrating Race with DNA Traits00:06:31
The best way I know to illustrate this, we've talked about this before, this is the field of epigenetics.
So, genetics, epi meaning above genetics, what's going on that affects them.
The best way I know to do this is to literally illustrate it and to talk about real life case examples.
That's what we're going to spend most of the episode doing.
But before I do that, it's necessary to just.
There is a notion going around, and I don't know who said it, oh, wait, every evangelical, that race is not real.
Race comes from this idea of fountainhead.
And when we describe race, what we're just really getting at.
Is really just common ancestor.
Now, if you could show this chart when you get back into the office, this is the best way I know to illustrate it because it can be hard to conceptualize of streams of people and they break off and they form new populations, new groups, or whatever, and they carry on different traits.
So, this is what's called a phylogenic tree.
And what a phylogenic tree could do if you imagine the first dogs that got off Noah's Ark imagine there was one canine, right?
That class of mammal canine.
Well, that dog went on to break into bigger and smaller breeds.
Now, you could speak of terrier and then you could speak of some of the smaller ones.
Those would only be two groups.
But within those two groups, there's then groups of five, six, seven, eight, nine.
And then even within Terrier, within Lab, within all these different ones, there would be then sub differences.
And all of those would be because maybe you take a bulldog from England and you brought it over to America, and that then became the American bulldog.
In human beings, we have the same thing.
All human beings come from Adam.
Adam and Eve were the first man and the first woman, and all men and women come from them.
And so everything about what makes us human ultimately originated in them.
And we experienced what was called a bottleneck at Noah.
So in the story of Noah, as we see, God floods the earth and he wipes out all but roughly three sons, their wives, maybe a couple other people, no one, his wife, about eight people.
So you have tons of genetic data and everything.
When you say maybe, you mean definitely eight persons in all.
Do they have kids at the time?
Nope.
That's what I mean.
Eight persons in all.
Yeah.
All right.
So, 1 Peter.
So you get all the way down to that amount.
And from then, his sons then spread out and they fill the earth.
And it would look kind of something like this.
So all I've done is here illustrated.
This isn't necessarily this part from a study.
This is, for example, the European phylogenetic tree of the different races that would comprise Europeans.
A big one is the Germanic peoples.
Then you had the Romance peoples, the Slavics.
This would be more in Eastern Europe, Celtic, all of that.
And there's more that I haven't mentioned.
There's more that goes down.
Of course, Europeans and Africans and Asians as big groups.
But the point is, you can get as small or as big as you want.
And this is what is tough.
I get why people say, like, they don't like race because, like, what's the difference between an Anglian and a Saxon?
So these are both English individuals that came from Germanic peoples and they resided in different areas historically.
Like, are they different races in the same way, like, Germans and like Russians are?
Like, well, not as much.
And then the difference from Europeans and Africans is even bigger.
There's not a necessarily like strict, hard and fast rules.
But if we get back to the idea of that word, race, fountainhead, is referring to different peoples that came from different origins that settled in different areas and formed distinct peoples.
Nate, you can pull up this chart, the graph too.
Chart games out of control this week.
All these little dots on here, I made for the record.
Wow, wow, wow.
So let's imagine right here on the left, you have, imagine each one of these dots, it's talking about 10,000 people.
And this, the common ancestors occupied one space.
Each one of the arrows?
Each one of the arrows.
10,000 people.
Okay.
Dots, arrows.
Okay.
Each of these represents a large number of people.
And at one time, all of these people on the right, which is as time goes on, they all originated from a smaller core group.
And that smaller core group shared a lot of the similar characteristics.
Maybe use characteristics like height and intelligence and skin color and all of that.
But then you had one people, as you can see there, that maybe migrated north and they went to a different climate.
And then a people down there that maybe experienced war.
And then when that war ended, these two people split off.
Well, you can begin to see there in the colors that differences arise.
That people that once had one set of traits on the whole, on average, no longer share them with the people that they once did.
The environment, events, things that happen, diet, this, that, or the other, change somewhat of their composition.
A great example of this, I want to illustrate it on the ground, is the LCT gene, which allows adults to process lactose.
So normally, the ability to process lactose goes away as a child gets older and weans.
They simply don't need that milk anymore.
But in especially Northern European peoples, it became a very advantageous trait to have.
So there was not a lot of food going around.
But what they could do, even adults who had this gene, was drink cow's milk because they'd be able to process the lactose.
And so now there are different groups of people in the world.
Some of them can process lactose.
I destroy about a half gallon of milk a day.
Literally, it's a great source of calories, protein, protein shakes, all of that.
I can process it.
Other people's can't.
And it's mind boggling that people would go so far as to kind of deny.
These differences.
That common origin, tracing back to someone, tracing back to an event, tracing back to different lifestyles, different environments, would actually create differences.
But it's just objectively true.
People have different traits from the environment, from their lifestyle, from the different things they do, and it does meaningfully affect their life.
Being able to process lactose affects my life.
It changes my diet, the way I eat.
It's a great source of calcium, which helps me, then children, all of those different things.
So just to lay the groundwork, common origin, common ancestor, The traits they have passed down and passed down, people's breaking off, starting new groups, intermarrying, all of those come to create differential sets of traits in different people.
And none of that is extreme, obscure, contested, anything like that.
That is what has been believed.
This is what has been affirmed in the literature.
This is how people have lived.
And it's observable.
And it's observable.
Exactly.
Like melanin, like darkness of the skin, that's a function of the equator and the sun.
People that lived there ended up needing a darker skin to combat.
The continual effects of the sun versus people that live farther north that often had fairer skin.
That's just how it works.
And so those people that live there developed that trait.
A culture did not give someone black skin or white skin.
They were born with it because of the environment, because of genetics.
Yep.
All right.
So far, makes sense.
Let's go to chart number three, Nathan.
How Environment Shapes Genetic Expression00:03:29
I realize some of this, especially as we get into DNA, it's a little bit technical, but here's the deal.
For those of you that want this, you're going to get the info.
And if you can't follow it, here's the deal.
Every minute I keep going, atheists look stupider and stupider, dumber and dumber.
The human genome is incredible.
The complexity here, like I'm just.
We're going to get pretty complex, just scratching the surface.
It is incredible the way that God has made our cells and our genes to be passed down.
Every single one of your cells, besides red blood cells, contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, 46 total in general, that contain all of your DNA.
Every single one of your cells in every single part of your body, and it's from that DNA.
You see there the chromosome, the DNA is contained within the chromosome, and the gene is then contained within the DNA.
Every protein.
Everything that makes your eyes, everything that makes your liver, your fingernails, your skin, all of these things come from your genes that are there.
And so, because you have, for example, all 46 chromosomes in your eye, the eye unravels just certain portions of your chromosome that has the proteins and the enzymes and everything needed just for the eye, unravels it so the DNA is accessible, and then the gene there actually transcribes it.
It's called the central dogma of the cell transcription, where what's called an RNA polymerase reads the DNA.
And then the DNA is taken into messenger RNA that is then translated and made into proteins.
I say all of this to say these genes contained on the DNA, in the chromosome, in every single cell, can be turned on and off.
They can be done with two ways.
In the chromosome, the way they stay all wrapped around, because there's like a meter worth of DNA in every single cell, and you have trillions of cells in your body, is wrapped tightly around these things called histones.
And histones can be turned on and off with the addition of what's called methyl groups.
We're going to talk a lot about methyl groups and methylation in this episode.
Methyl groups, methylation.
Methylation blocks the enzyme that comes in and reads the gene.
So, if a gene here for some type of protein, like vitamin A or whatever it would be, if there's a methyl group, either on the histone that contains that gene or just on the DNA in general, it blocks transcription of it.
Now, it could be a truly total, like this is not being transcribed at all, or it could be much so of it's transcribed less to a lesser degree.
When you say transcription, that's really important, right?
Because that's passing on to new cells.
So, I think you need to.
Exactly.
That's like.
Copying it down for the next one and the next one and the next one.
Exactly.
Because originally we were only essentially two cells the zygote, so the sperm and the egg.
But then they came together and they divided to make two and then four and then eight.
So at one point your eye was like a single cell.
Now it had all the information to make all the pieces of the eye, but eventually it took those different pieces, it made more cells, those replicated, those replicated.
Retina and cornea.
Exactly.
But genes turned off, say, at that very beginning cell, that very first cell that went on to make your eye or went on to make your liver or your heart or anything like that.
Different parts of being turned off and turned on really matter because then the cells that followed would also be turned on and turned off.
So, all of these different traits, all of these different proteins, habits, ability to process lactose come back down to your gene.
Your genes held across your DNA, wrapped in chromosomes contained in every cell of your body.
Praise God, absolutely amazing.
How does what happens?
Native American Tribes and Diabetes00:06:26
What could be a way?
What is a practical example of the way this worked?
The Native American Indians, Rush Juni speaks of this, they really were a hardy people.
Obviously, there was variation in the tribes.
Some of them were much more nomadic.
Some had settled more.
But they were very nomadic people that really, Rush Dooney, he lectures about this.
They spent every moment of their day working because they had to find food.
They were a hunting gathering community.
They didn't have downtime.
It seems like the most that they would do was the children would gather around the grandparents at night for a fire.
They were a hunting gathering community.
And it's one of the reasons alcohol has destroyed them, for example, on the reservation.
There's not much work, they're not doing what they did for thousands of years.
So, when the Europeans that then went on settled America and became Americans, and they took the Indians and they said, We've got to put them somewhere.
We have hundreds of thousands of people.
What are we going to do with them?
They eventually put them on the reservations.
They began to provide a stipend that gave them a bad diet.
So, Nate, you can pull up this quote.
This is quote number one.
This is from history.com.
And so, you had European colonization, and it changed the diet of a people that had lived a certain way for thousands of years and were very good at it.
Let me read this for anyone that's listening.
During these forced relocations, so relocation to Indian reservations, new foods were distributed to tribes in the form of government issued rations.
These rations, distributed twice a month, originally included lard, flour, coffee, and sugar, and canned meat, generically known as spam, which has been linked to an increased risk of diabetes among Native people.
This food distribution program led to one of the most dramatic dietary changes in Native American history.
The original intention of the U.S. government was to supply rations as an interim solution until relocated Native people were raising enough food on their own.
Instead, many indigenous people became dependent.
On the rations.
Some tribes initially abandoned their traditional food procurement practices but found that there were never enough of the government issued food to feed all of their tribal members.
And so, what you had happen, this is late 1800s, this is getting to the 1900s, and most certainly now today, is a government supplied diet.
And we talk about spheres and responsibilities.
This is why the government does not provide food.
The family does, a father does.
Because when the government supplies food, it's going to supply it at the lowest possible price.
And the government doesn't really care about diabetes and hyperactivity and all of those things.
Because that's ultimately not their problem.
They're concerned with just are these people fed?
Are they happy?
So, what have been the results of this?
The results of this diet that has been fed to Native Americans on reservations, largely subsidized by the US government since then.
In some American Indian communities, this is from a scientific research, type 2 diabetes prevalence among adults is as high as 60%.
So, prevalence being how many people in a population have it?
60%.
Type 2 diabetes is destructive to the body.
It is not something you want to have.
And for anyone listening, my heart goes out to you because that is a lifelong condition that you're going to have to deal with.
This process of insulin, insulin sensitivity, I think, in type 1, and then insulin resistance in type 2.
60%.
Now you could say, okay, but if they quit it tomorrow, imagine tomorrow you get out all the junky sugary drinks, you get out all the sugar, all the fatty foods, all of that.
Will it all go back to normal, right?
Well, scripture does speak about.
I want to be careful because the iniquity in this case really is in some ways in the US government.
The iniquity of the father is visited on the children to the third and the fourth generation.
The Bible says that.
And now God shows faithful love to the thousandth generation of those that love him and keep his commandments.
But there are effects that just don't go away.
Diabetes is up to 70% heritable.
That means in a given group of people, if you took 100 people, and how many of them got diabetes?
The difference between, well, they all eat the same diet and they all exercise the same.
The difference, 70% of it, could be attributed to genetics.
Now, I'm going to get into the genetic exactly here, but you have to understand this.
There are thousands and thousands of children today, Native American Indian children that have type 2 diabetes.
And as I'm about to show, it comes from that high sugary diet, which led to a genetic change, methylation, all of that, that are really suffering right now today because of a government subsidy of a bad food program and a bad diet.
Like real people with high medical bills, lower quality of life, lower length of life, they're going to live less long.
And the point is, even if they had a perfect diet today, it wouldn't all go away.
And it wouldn't all go away tomorrow in 10 years and 20 years.
It would last.
I don't want to make a scientific judgment that every single one, there's some arbitrary cutoff at the 40 to 60 year mark.
But about three to four generations it would take for this people group in whole to be affected.
Like kind of what the Bible says.
Crazy.
Kind of like what the Bible says.
It takes three or four generations.
Yeah.
Anything else to add, gentlemen, before I get into how?
Nope.
All right.
Real quick, what's the name of Rush Journey's book where the whole thing is a case study of the reservation?
Oh, yeah.
The Indian reservations.
I'm trying to remember.
I was going off the list.
If you can find that, I just want to be able to recommend it to the listeners.
You can be looking as Wes goes on, but there's a whole book that Rush Dooney wrote because he worked on anemia reservations for a lot of his personal work.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that and man, they were a people that were destroyed like alcoholism.
He said it was there was a fourth grade boy that was pulled in front of the court for disorderly drunkenness.
Wow.
And he was like, well, I've just been drunk my whole life.
Like that is the destructive effect.
And my point is, this is not surface level culture.
This is not well, it's habits and it's values and this, that, or the other that can be very easily swapped out one for another.
No, there's a propensity right now at the genetic level in this people towards it's called the American Indian, published by R.J. Rushduni.
The American Indian by Rushduni, R.J. Rushduni.
Genetic propensity towards that, then also.
So you could say, like, well, there's tons of people that have worshiped demons for thousands of years.
I thought it was only a third and fourth generation.
Well, if that sin is repeated again and again through the centuries, right, then that iniquity is continued to be visited.
I'm going to show you how this actually works.
Again, because I want you to see it.
I want you to see the complexity that God's made.
So, Nate, you can pull up.
This will be the next graph.
It was already on the TV behind us.
No One Size Fits All Diet Solutions00:08:54
Transcription like factor two.
So, I talked about transcription.
You go from the DNA to the RNA, from the RNA to the protein.
So, transcription like factor two is one of the biggest alleles for risk for type two diabetes.
So, it encodes a transcription factor involved in signaling that's crucial for your pancreatic beta cell proliferation.
So, your pancreas is where insulin is made, and it's necessary to have these beta cells.
That then grow and multiply and secrete insulin.
So, your TF7L2, transcription factor 7, like 2, makes insulin.
DNA methylation, the addition of methyl groups to DNA to turn these things off.
DNA methylation, CPG, there's four different amino acids that DNA is made of A, T, C, and G are their abbreviations.
So, cysteine, preceding guanine sites.
And the TCF7 promoter can alter its transcription, impacting glucose homeostasis.
So, I've listed here, you see on the right, What are some lifestyle factors that affect turning off this gene that, when it turns off, leads to a propensity to diabetes?
A high calorie diet, too much fat and calories, adds chemical tags to TCF7L2, turning it off in the pancreas.
This reduces insulin production, making blood sugar control worse.
Fasting can remove them.
So, then if you have calorie restriction and you fast and you just practice not being gluttonous, those tags can be turned off and this transcription factor turned back on.
Then your insulin works better, lowers your blood sugar.
Pregnancy and baby's future health.
If a mother eats too much sugar or fat while pregnant, it can permanently alter her baby's genes.
That some of these can truly be turned off for life.
And so, you have this thing that helps make insulin, which helps regulate your glucose.
You can eat a diet that is high in sucrose, high or high in glucose, that suppresses its transcription, and you have less insulin in the body.
Go to the next graph, Nate.
And then, this is the ultimate result.
So, you eat this diet high in sugar, you have less insulin, and that increases your diabetes risk.
You develop insulin sensitivity.
And this TCF7L2 is a genetic risk factor that is one of the most predominant ones and is brought about by a high sugary diet.
And in this group of people, It is very common.
Many, many, many of them have it.
It gives them a predisposition, which is not a sentence.
So it's not as though you have this, you will develop diabetes.
Right.
But you will have the risk for it.
And you could eat a diet better than someone else who doesn't have this and still develop it while they don't.
And all that to say, these are the practical means that God accomplishes it.
It's complicated.
We wouldn't know this without decades and decades of research and understanding, looking at the body.
We now understand that you can turn off the thing that helps you regulate sugar by eating a bad, high sugar diet.
Right.
It's like you almost like break it.
Like it's supposed to regulate sugar to a degree, but if you overload it, it just collapses.
It's a relevant question because it wouldn't make sense to answer it later.
James says all fats, Wes, or just trans fats?
Like grass fed butter.
Like there's some things that are good for you, right?
Yes.
Your saturated fats and your polyunsaturated fats.
I'm bullish on both of them.
I'm negative on the cholesterol theory of high blood pressure and everything.
The biggest thing is what's surrounding those fats.
Stacy would agree with you.
He absolutely would.
What's surrounding those fats?
So, you're eating a high fat diet, but it's a high fat of deep fried things, or is it high fat that's generally healthy?
So, I wouldn't worry too much about the trans line on your nutrition label.
You need to be worried about trans in general.
The trans line on your nutrition label, I wouldn't worry about that so much as what is my sugar looking like?
What is my protein looking like?
If it's high in protein, low in sugar, but high in trans fat, don't worry about it.
All right.
I have one anecdote to add there, Wes.
You said that we understand this now through medicine and medical research.
Um, but what's amazing is people have, I think, instinct either instinctively or just through the process of trial and error, understood this for a long time.
I know, for instance, that when we were missionaries in Taiwan, um, Taiwanese women have a very regimented um diet for the first three months after they give birth, and they all have to have it.
And it's like a lot of bone broths and soups and meat and things like that.
What's interesting is, um, this is speculation here, but I would imagine.
That if you took that same diet and gave it to a Western woman, it would probably have some benefit to her post delivery.
But I bet it would not be as precisely effective as what has been developed in Taiwan with these Asian women because just process and trial and error.
And over time, they've realized like these things for our people produce the healthiest women coming out of pregnancy and then the healthiest babies for the first couple months or years of life.
I'm glad you brought that up because it's now being understood.
We don't understand much of it now.
People adapt to a local diet.
So, if you ate, for example, from generally the same farm in the same area that experienced the same weather, same farm, the same eggs, this side or the other, your diet works best to that.
It adapts to best pull out nutrients, to pull out the things that it needs.
So, you should be eating a consistent diet, and that's from that same area.
And for getting into ancestors and all of that, it would probably be best if it's a land, for example, your grandparents and your parents and everything that you live there, you generally ate from those individuals.
That would be your body best adapted.
To the nutrients that it's getting.
We don't understand all of the mechanisms of how this works.
But all that being said, do we really need to?
Do you need to be told you should eat local beef from a farmer that you know and eggs from a guy instead of the giant chicken farm 500 miles away?
Do we really need a clinical peer reviewed study to say which one's better for you?
Which one, if you eat longer term, is going to be more profitable for your health?
I think we actually do.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know if we do know that, to be honest.
You're right.
Common sense comes to that as we're getting back to living on the land and And we've talked about like the idea is not to go full homestead.
Like, well, the best thing for me is to eat local cow.
And so I'm going to do 50 acres.
I'm going to try to make it profitable.
My brother in Christ, you'll spend 50 years and we'll be profitable.
Like, it's just farming isn't something that we all can do.
But generally speaking, where do I source my food?
Where do I get things?
Local is better.
To your point, Michael, people, they live, they pass down habits for generations.
This is best.
And it really helped me with nausea during pregnancy.
This is best and helped me when I was postpartum.
Like, they've passed these down.
This is what People groups always did.
They passed on diet, they passed on habit, they passed on different supplements to help them, and they formed something very unique.
You couldn't export it.
So you couldn't take one people group here that's like, we eat this mushroom and we eat this and we eat that, and everyone across all time, everywhere should do it.
Nope.
People are different and they have different genes and they're adapted to different things, and there is not a one size fits all solution.
We're at 3 30.
Let's hit our first commercial break, and we'll be right back with another example.
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We are back.
I plug this book every time we talk about it.
This is the book I've ever been on a podcast.
Junk DNA as a Reference Library00:02:52
I know, it's incredible.
People are listening, like, is Joel there?
Is he okay?
Did he die?
Does he have bad genes?
Yeah, this is the Wes Michaels show from here on out.
Yeah.
All right.
I plug this book a lot.
This is the book Deep Nutrition by Kate Shanahan.
Yeah.
This deals with all of this, specifically more in the diet aspect.
And to be honest, and we can talk about it a little, she gets into beauty as well.
Like, beauty is a property of symmetry, it's a property of fertility.
And she says, look, if you want your kids not just to be healthy, They don't have diabetes, they have strong bones, all of that.
Like healthy living is also a big function of beauty.
And then because people are healthy, they look better.
And then they also people also marry and have children with people that also look better.
Like it's not just an egalitarian level free for all.
Like these things actually matter in real, I've been saying a lot, but like real tangible ways.
And one of those is beauty and the way people look.
She says this, and this is profound.
Kate Shanahan, deep nutrition.
Taken together, Nate, you can show this quote on the screen.
Taken together, all epigenetic evidence paints DNA as a far more dynamic and intelligent mechanism.
Of adaptation that has been generally appreciated.
In effect, DNA seems capable of collecting information through the language of food about the changing conditions in the outside world, enacting alteration based on that information, and documenting, keeping record of, both the collected data and its response for the benefit of subsequent generations.
Junk DNA is full of genetic treasure.
It may function as a kind of ever expanding library, complete with its own insightful librarian capable of researching previously written volumes of successful and unsuccessful genetic.
Adaptation strategies.
It follows that more complex organisms like human beings with larger cells whose genomes represent a more complex evolutionary history would carry relatively more substantial libraries filled with more junk DNA.
And what she's saying is that junk DNA is in many ways a reference library that's not currently in use, they'd be filled with more of this DNA.
And we do know that.
That DNA, we don't understand how, but it would appear to have some level of an understanding like, oh, we've seen this before, or we know what this does.
There's an incredible study in pigs.
And so she talks about this in the book.
They took pigs and they deprived them of vitamin A.
And vitamin A is a byproduct of photosynthesis, which gets down into plants.
And deprived of vitamin A in utero, pregnant pigs gave birth to pigs that had no eyes.
Like, okay, so we knocked out vitamin A.
They just don't develop eyes.
Well, if there's no sun to go to the plant to produce vitamin A, why would the pigs need eyes?
They still had lids, they still had everything.
But it would appear at some level there are mechanisms within the DNA itself to say sunlight might not be hitting plants and photosynthesis and creating these vitamins.
We don't actually need these anymore.
Vitamin A Deprivation Causes Blindness00:12:03
And so we do all this, and it's like, wow, we understand.
It's all cool.
Yeah.
And there's an iceberg of things we actually still don't understand.
I'm going to get into a more controversial one.
And this one is because it deals with morality.
The last one, diabetes and junk food, like that one's more of an affliction, right?
You're afflicted with diabetes.
I have this.
It requires time, insulin, needles, all of that.
But it's not necessarily a propensity to a certain moral action, unless we get into kind of gluttony, but there's different ways of parsing that out.
But I'm going to get into one that's moral.
And again, the verses in the Bible faithfulness to a thousand generations of those that love me and they keep my commandments.
What are the commandments?
In the cold open, I just wanted to real quick point that out.
Like that verse, you know, and that's why we included it in the cold open today.
But it's not just God will be faithful to a thousand generations of Christians, but included in that, just like the Great Commission, right?
Like it's, you know, going and making disciples and baptizing them into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and teaching them.
To obey, teaching them, being nations, peoples, to obey all my commandments.
And so, too, in this promise that we have, that God would promise to be faithful to the righteous and to a thousand generations of those who love him and obey his commandments.
So, there is an obedience mechanism.
Yep, absolutely.
Nate, you can pull up this graph.
So, oxytocin is a molecule that modulates, it's called the love molecule, but it modulates.
Pair bonding, emotional connection, affection, regulation, all these different things.
Is that primarily between mother and child or everything?
Husband, wife, wife.
It's broader than that, it's social.
But most specifically in, and I'll get to a study on this in a minute, pair bonding, like the bonding of a husband and a wife.
They come together in marital union.
It's not just a machine that runs a command or a function or the equivalent of adding a contact to your phone.
They're joined together, and that's mediated by real things that happen.
It's not just abstract and spiritual, but it's bodily, it's in the body.
And so, oxytocin is one of these things that mediates it.
And so, this is a graph from a 2022 study.
In genes, brain, and behavior of oxytocin expression in major people groups.
So, just like transcription like factor seven, like two, just like that one related to diabetes, the OXTR gene modulates, regulates, promotes the expression of the molecule, the gene OXTR to the molecule oxytocin.
Oxytocin modulates all these different things that are good.
Your body produces it at a genetic level.
So, this is between five different people groups, the average estimated expression rate in this is a brain region with the higher values indicating more expression.
So, on the left, you have Africans.
This is the average expression, it's the lowest of the five groups.
And then in East Asians, so this would be China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan.
East Asians have the highest expression.
I'll go through these other ones and come back to East Asians in a minute.
Then you have America.
And Michael, I want to hear from you on the length of time that people can stay and that matters.
You have America, which is second lowest, Europeans.
And then you have South Asians.
So these are some of the southern regions like India.
I don't know if Australia would fit into that.
No, it wouldn't.
So you don't have Australia, but you have Southern Asian regions, and that's the second highest.
These are the average levels of oxytocin expression.
And this is a molecule that helps people pair bond, stay monogamous, helps mothers nurture their children, breastfeed them, helps people control emotional regulation.
The people can still sin, but it sets them up with the highest chance, with the greatest propensity of.
Of staying faithful in marriage, of being nurturing mothers.
Is that what you're saying?
Yes.
Yeah.
Like a good mother is not, like it's just not an abstract category.
Like a mother that loves her children and cares for them and breastfeeds, which is a great thing that should be done as much as possible.
Sometimes it's not possible, but if it's possible, to be without pain and difficulty and all these things that should be done.
And the point is, those things are mediated by real physical things that exist.
And the graph of different people groups on the whole, on average, it's not a flat line, it's not the same propensity.
It's not all of these groups have the same thing.
It's not egalitarian.
Exactly.
And we're not talking about behavior.
So, this is not a graph of monogamous behavior.
Well, these cultures have less monogamy, less faithfulness, less husbands staying in the home, and these have more.
No, these are genetic levels.
And the problem is, oh, well, that's just genes.
That's just numbers on a screen.
That's just molecules deposited in a brain.
Well, which of those peoples, those five different ones that were named, have the greatest level, the greatest family values?
Oh, it's East Asians.
Compared to Europe and compared to America, East Asians have the most structured, long standing, grounded, rooted sense of family values of anywhere in the world.
And they're not a perfect model.
And also, some of the longest lifespans.
They have some of the longest lifespans.
They have honor cultures.
Now, all of these different things, there's a thousand things, of course, that mediate monogamy.
So, nothing in this graph.
I just want to note for a second because on X, there's so many people that hate us.
They love us, but they hate us.
Well, I'd say there's 100,000 people that love us and about 10 million that hate us, but which I'm fine with that ratio.
But here's the thing people have hated me for a while now, but Wes really doesn't get enough credit.
But you were quickly up and coming.
And I've noticed, you know, on the Twitter streets, even just the past few weeks, like people starting to realize, wait a second, Wes might be further right than Joel.
And as they're starting to notice, like they're kind of like, now you're kind of starting to get some credit.
He doesn't get enough credit.
You're getting your own special attention.
But I just want to say that, with that chart that you're showing, so with the haters, one of the things that I've seen people say that's absolutely false and slanderous, but they're just white supremacists.
Right.
Well, but I love white people.
I have a great life.
I am one.
I love them.
Right.
My wife happens to be white.
My kids are white.
So I love my parents are white.
I love white people.
And I love my country and I love my kinsmen.
I love all those things.
But if we were just white supremacists and that was our agenda, you probably wouldn't be showing charts where the Asians are kicking our butt.
Kicking our butt is strong.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right, right, right.
You know what I mean?
Like maybe not kicking our butt, but just, you know.
Of this specific gene that mediates family values and monogamy.
This does not help your white supremacist case.
Just wanted to throw that out there.
Exactly.
All right, go ahead.
And this culture, for the record, like Japan is 2% Christian.
Right.
They are very, their central bank is screwing them over.
That's a topic for another time.
But as far as a culture, as far as trust, success, work ethic, all of that, Like these aren't, China is not majority Christian.
So this is not a chart of like least Christian, somewhat Christian, most Christian.
These are just different people groups that have lived a certain way and as a result look different.
Nate, we can go to the last quote here.
But real quick, just you showed the chart, but let's just say it for those who are listening because we're just looking at something.
There's no animus here.
There's nothing sinful.
We don't need to apologize.
We don't need to be cowardly.
So with the chart, you're saying East Asians rated the highest.
Yes.
Americans were second lowest.
Yep.
And in part, I'm going to argue that part of that is because.
Because of our greatest strength, diversity.
Part of it.
And there's also something to be said, too, for just being a homogenous people that have high trust.
Like Europe is higher.
Europe is more godless than us right now in the moment.
But they're an ancient people.
I remember I was back when I worked in consulting, I was talking with a guy, and he's like, Our old cities, our old cities, you're like, Oh, DC is an old city.
Boston's an old city.
Like our old cities, Amsterdam's like 1,500 years old, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000.
You go to Italy, it's like this.
Tito was built a In like 280.
Exactly.
Or 480.
America has existed for 250 years, a little bit longer, obviously, if you go back to some of the original arrivies, the Mayflower and stuff.
But I do think that's one of the things.
America is second lowest.
We're even lower than, obviously, Europe and then Asia and all those different things.
And there's different factors that impact it.
But one of those is just it's been a while.
It has not been long that we've been a people.
And even in being a people, our greatest strength, we don't even have any type of cohesive sense of who we are.
That's been the biggest question right now.
Like, what is a woman?
What is an American?
Or what is You know, what is a woman?
And then Matt Walsh did.
Am I racist?
But we, yeah, we really need like, what is an American?
Yep.
What is a nation?
Is it people in place or is it just, you know, some prop set of propositions?
So, yeah, so I think it's how young we are as a nation and that, like, the cement hasn't hardened, the dust hasn't settled.
That it's just been this.
Now, there have been various times where things did kind of settle and America did really well, you know, but then there'd be new waves of immigration, you know, so from, you know, like, it's the Irish, it's the Italians, it's, you know, and And we kick them often to the west because there's a lot of land.
So they'd arrive.
People in the want to be there.
You kick them out.
Well, that's the thing.
You kick them out, and then they actually get to become settlers.
They have something to settle.
The Irish stayed in the East Coast.
Yeah.
But some of these waves, early waves of immigration, there was still something to settle.
It wasn't just immigrants, it was actually going somewhere and making something on your own and building.
But then, you know, so there's waves of upheaval, seasons of upheaval and disrest, unrest.
And then, you know, things kind of calm down and the dust starts to settle.
And then it happens again and it happens.
And but then lately, like by design, and this is not just us, Europe is now experiencing this, they just have you know a thousand years as a bedrock, you know, so a little bit more stabilization, but it's being destabilized.
But but most recently, it's it's not like our past and and different historic moments in America, or and there's nothing historic that you could go and point to being similar, you know, with England or with France, but it's um it's it's a somewhat novel phenomenon of um your political elites and leaders of these European nations and also here in America.
Um, intentionally by design, um, trying to replace the native population with porous borders and and legislation like anchor babies, you know, which praise God, Trump's trying to get rid of that.
That's a horrible, horrible policy, um, that just incentivizes people who are nine months pregnant, you know, to just barely make it over the line.
Hit that Disneyland trip, what hit that Disneyland trip so you give birth in the United States, right?
And then drop it, literally, like, yeah, that's what happens.
That is what happens.
So, anyways, um, so all that being said, like, there's reasons for why America is rated.
More lowly on this scale, and this isn't an overall.
This was particularly in regards to what oxytocin, which again, that's not as though you have high levels, you'll be monogamous, low levels, you won't.
But of different factors, of higher levels, you're better able to pair bond, better emotional regulation.
I'll show some research here in a minute on mothers and nurturing, but right of oxytocin on average, on the whole, and it's even tough with America because you have different races that are all here and all of that, but on the whole, lower than East Asia and Europe and Europe.
And then the lowest was Africa.
Yes, the lowest was Africa.
And we'll have to do an episode probably on the fertility crisis.
But diversity is something that the presence of diversity, diverse municipalities, communities, nations, they don't have people having a lot of children.
Early Care Impacts Future Generations00:14:58
Like at the end of the day, that's another reason you bring in that foreign populace.
And then the people that are there are like, well, there's not a lot of future for these children that I could have.
Why would I have a bunch of them?
They have no place to just be displaced and deracinated and all that different thing.
Because they're dumb and they watch Boy Meets World.
And instead of practicing violin for eight hours, right?
Exactly.
Wasn't that hypocritical to see Vivek like he's going on his re imaging, rebranding tour, like his crawl of penance and atonement?
But it's so hypocritical and ironic because it's like you just said Americans are too big on recreation and now you're going to the Indy 500 or some kind of you know sports car race.
You know, it's like shouldn't you be at home, you know, teaching your kids math, right?
Yep, and when I say home, I mean India.
No, it's like I understand, but let's take the last quote so.
I want to show because the point is, you can modify this.
This is not set in stone, right?
Diabetes, 70% of it is genetic.
IQ, it's between 50 and 100%, but it's probably not all genetic either.
There are things you can do to modify it.
So, this is a study from 2019 in psychoneuroendocrinology, the journal.
And this was looking at voles, they are actually really cool.
You do a lot of studies in these.
I did some studies on this in my undergrad because they're one of the few mammals that pair for life.
So, we actually look at them, we do things to them we couldn't do to humans, and understand the effects of oxytocin for these voles.
That literally, like, as animals, have one spouse for life.
We report, so the authors report in this study, I'm quoting now, that low levels of early care in voles lead to de novo DNA methylation.
So, early care, this means nurturing, licking, petting, nursing.
Low levels, so less nurturing, less care, less provision for these little youth in these prairie voles, leads to, we've been talking about this whole episode, DNA methylation at specific regulatory sites in the oxytocin receptor gene, OXTR, impacting gene expression.
And protein distribution in the nucleus accumbens that's a brain region.
These results identify a mechanism by which early care regulates later displays of typical prairie vole social behavior and suggests the potential for nurture driven epigenetic tuning of OXTR in humans.
So, the reason you can use voles and mice and all these different things when they have the same regions and structures and all this as humans, you can do something in a mouse, you can observe an effect and say, We anticipate obviously you're not going to kill a human being, look at their brain and replicate it.
You can say we can anticipate this would be replicated in humans.
But don't miss what this study is saying.
Little voles, the little babies, and those that received less care had these receptors and these genes that mediate them later on as adults, as moms and dads, this bonding, this social behavior, this emotional regulation, all of that.
Those who didn't get that early care early on, their DNA itself, methylation, methyl group turned that off, turned that off, turned down that gene expression.
So then later on in life, They experienced lower levels of that ability to do what voles do.
But the behavior that it was tied to was not abstract and it wasn't chemical or molecular.
It was nurturing behavior, it was care.
It was obviously they're animals, they're not human beings.
It was love.
And the authors say in that study, like this guy, this is not 4chan literature, this is peer reviewed academic study.
We think the same thing would happen in humans.
We think the same gene, the same mechanism, the same care, love, and nurture.
If deprived early on, it would impact an individual later in life through the same mechanism.
So, you're saying with people that it's possible, maybe even likely, that if you had not just one generation, but I assume it would only compound if you had like three generations or four generations of a loving mother, ideally if she's able to, like my wife was not able to breastfeed and we're on our fifth child now, a little baby, Mabel, who's doing great.
She's about three months old now.
And she's our first child that my wife, Megan, has been able to breastfeed.
And with each child, she was able to produce a little bit more milk, which is amazing.
And I think that's happened naturally with her body, but all of it is the work of God and the way that He's designed her.
It's like each child, it's like training her body to do that.
But, anyways, my point is if you had like three generations of a nurturing mother, stay at home mother, especially in the early years of life, and if she's able to, I'm not saying that it would just be.
Intentionally by design, I understand my own wife wasn't able to breastfeed, but for those who can, she chooses to breastfeed and all those things.
And a father, I would imagine, the mother would be more integral, but the father for those later years, as the child starts to develop, if he's also in the home and providing and doesn't abandon the marriage and abandon the child, and that happens consecutively for three generations, we would say on the spiritual side, that's discipleship.
But then we would say that God created a world that's so incredible and so magical.
I mean, He made a magical world, right?
It's like, oh, well, that's just science.
Yeah, but He made it.
The fact that water, I forget who said it, G.K. Chesterton or Lewis, that water flows downhill.
When it, you know, God could have made it go up it, but it's just as amazing.
We should be amazed.
For us, it makes sense.
And so we're not, we lose the sense of awe.
But all of this is built into the fabric of the world that God has made.
And so, on the one hand, the spiritual way that we would describe it is discipleship.
But that also has a chemical and biological side of it that works not against, and it's not just completely severed, but they're working together.
On the one hand, it's discipling generation after generation after generation of good parenting, loving mothers, loving fathers.
But then also, that's having a physical effect.
So, it's not anything less than the spirit.
It's not anything less than discipleship.
It's not anything less than love, parental love, and Christian love for those Christian families, which we would say would be all the greater.
It's nothing less than that.
But we're just saying that, you know, God moves sovereign.
So, like, whenever someone's saved, well, how does that happen?
Well, before the foundations of the world, God and his sovereignty elects, like, all that's true.
So, that's the macro, ultimate, spiritual side of the equation.
And that is the ultimate, because God sovereignly ordains and the spirit.
Um, regenerates, and that's that's how God saves, but also He works through human means.
Somebody shares the gospel, there's evangelism, there's a mind that's at work, you know, and firing, um, and making logical conclusions, and all these different things.
And so, we're just saying the same thing, not so much with uh, soteriology salvation, but when it comes to nurture and discipleship and these kinds of things, that with three generations of good, natural love and nurturing for a child with a mother and a father, I would imagine that would all be all the better.
Um, to do that consecutively, and then to do that even, um, Even to a greater degree, with not just being natural love, but Christian love, which wouldn't be against natural love, but just even heightened, you know, grace restores and elevates nature.
And to do that with three generations, we would say that spiritually speaking, by the time you get to that third or fourth generation, they've been well shaped and discipled.
But you can also say that the human, you know, the physical, biological means at play within, you know, the larger macro picture of what God has established is that it actually is even making.
Even making them biologically, physically with a higher propensity, with a greater inclination towards doing the same now for their own children, for their own offspring to be loving and caring and present and nurturing.
Whereas if you have the reverse, I'm just spitballing here, it doesn't sound that crazy, but if you have multiple consecutive generations where the father leaves or is in jail, and maybe the mother is there, but it's a one parent home, or maybe the mother isn't as attentive or These kinds of things that you're saying that that's not just a spiritual component, but the spiritual component is ultimate,
but that there's a physical component and deficiencies that would compound over time that would set that person generations down the road at a greater disadvantage.
Yeah.
I'm going to hit Alex's question because they're questioning, but I think it's from a good place.
So, Alex asked two questions that directly relate to this.
I'm talking about moles, voles, and mice.
So, people are like animals, Alex asks.
How can someone be nurturing if God made them not to be nurturing?
And that is some of the thorny question of this.
The caution I do want to say, and I'll get back to the animals comment, is none of this should be taken as a mechanical problem.
My mom was absent, therefore, I'm doomed.
I'm fated.
Mechanics, I won't be able to commit to my woman, to show nurture, love, all these different things.
That's not what's going on.
You don't know how her mom, what she maybe gave to you.
Gave to your mom, which then passed down.
So, the genetic level, nothing is for sure because our human genome, our DNA, yours especially, you don't know what sites are methylated.
We just don't know that.
And it's good that we don't know that.
God made it that we don't know that.
So, none of us are able to say, Well, I'm sure X happened or I have this genetic, this, that, or the other.
And that's why I disobey or that's why I do what I do.
You just simply don't have that excuse.
And then, even there are people that defy the odds.
So, someone could come from a long line and it does happen of bad parenting and an abusive home that didn't show love.
And they say, I'm not going to be like that.
It stops with me.
It stops with me.
It ends with us.
And they turn it around.
If they turn it around, you know, five generations from them, their great great grandchildren would be better than them.
But they would still merit a great degree of credit and respect and honor because they're the ones that changed the sequence, that changed the time.
Exactly.
And that does happen.
That's the thing.
People are addicts, people are violent people.
And someone says, be it the gospel or whatever, right?
It's done with me.
And then they build something new.
And that faithfulness, God blesses.
At the genetic level, to where a couple generations down, they're not inheriting what was given to them.
That does happen.
In God's sovereignty, for sure.
My personal story is somewhat in this line that, for those who don't know, when Eric Kahn got in big trouble sometime last year for his infamous adoption tweet, well, Eric, the reason he did that was, believe it or not, he wasn't just trying to be an edgelord and get under everyone's skin.
You can always word something different.
It's like, well, I wouldn't have said it like that.
I've never heard anybody say anything that I didn't think I would have said it differently.
So, okay, you want to say it like that?
Fine.
But what was behind the scenes, because I talked to him about it, was multiple families that he's close to that had adopted.
And in many of these cases, adopted older children through the foster care system.
And then God opened their wombs and they had biological children.
Uh, later on, and had, um, obviously not going to be completely inappropriate to share names, and I'm not going to go into details with the situation, but I'll just say, in a general sense, um, some pretty, pretty alarming and terrible,
tragic things, um, done to the biological children who ended up being younger by the foster adopted child who was older, and especially these children coming from broken homes that their parents came from, broken homes that their parents came from, and um.
Yeah, I'll leave it there.
I could be more detailed.
So, that was kind of the behind the scenes in a lot of these families, they're all Christian families because it's, let's just be honest, it's Christians for the most part that are willing to adopt and serve in the foster care system, all these kinds of things.
And so, these were Christian parents who love both their biological and adoptive children, both are their children, and yet had talked to Eric as a pastor about some of those challenges.
And Eric was privy to, you know, just knowing about some of them and then even pastorally dealt with some of them.
And, um, And then from myself, from my own story.
So I defended Eric one because he's my friend and I thought he was right.
I wouldn't just defend him because he's my friend, but that helps when you have a relationship with someone.
I also thought he was right.
And I knew some of the behind the scenes experience that was informing that tweet.
And then I also know my own personal set of circumstances.
So I was fine defending that tweet because I'm adopted.
You know, maybe a lot of our listeners don't know that, but I was adopted.
My biological parents, especially my father, was a deadbeat.
You know, he was just, you know, he was a loser.
And, you know, and he probably would have, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what he would have done.
But I know he abandoned my birth mother.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if he would have been fine with her getting an abortion.
Praise God, my biological mother did not opt for having an abortion.
And she actually, you know, now she was charismatic, like most Christians in America, you know, more Pentecostal, but she was a Christian.
And she was older and she had health problems.
I think she was almost 40 years old when she gave birth to me.
And she was poor and didn't have a husband.
And my biological father was hit and run, he's out of the picture.
And so she was like, I can't do this.
And so she decided to put me up for adoption.
And for the few days that she had me, she had me in the hospital for a few days because I had heart complications, which I still have.
And so I had to be life lighted to Herman's Children's Hospital in Texas.
All these different things to find out if I was going to be okay and running tests and doing some different things.
And so she was with me in the hospital and nursing me during that time.
And she wanted to call me something.
So she called me Samuel.
And that's why I said, like a little charismatic, but like in her mind, she was thinking, like Samuel, you know, Hannah says, you know, God, if you open my womb, give me a son, I'll give my first child to you, you know, to the house of the Lord, the temple with Eli, the priest.
And so she wanted, To give me up to adoption, but to Christians and particularly a pastor.
Hospital Struggles and Faithful Parents00:14:50
My dad was a minister.
And so she said yes and let my dad and mom adopt me.
But my point is, my parents did such, my adopted parents now, did such a great job of being, they weren't overly spiritual.
Like they were, you know, serious Christians, love the Lord, believe we live in a world that's not just stuff.
That was a spiritual component.
Dad's a pastor, charismatic pastor for that matter.
Both of my parents are members in our church now, and two of my favorite members, you know, just fantastic, yeah, besides you guys, of course.
Um, but uh, but you know, but even being charismatic and and and certainly believing that God created a world that's not just stuff and there's a spiritual component, they also were just my parents, my adopted parents are um, just the most down to earth people you ever meet, and in nothing but the very best ways, and just it's awesome.
Like every every Sunday night after our second service of church, they come over, we do a game night, you know, they read to the grandkids, we have.
Put them down to bed, and then me and my wife and my parents have game night together.
And they're just so practical and they're just normal people.
And so, my point is from a very young age, though, they noticed because my mom, my adopted mom, God opened her womb.
And so then I have biological brothers and a sister younger than me.
And at a young age, they realized, like, oh, you know, one of these things is not like the other.
He's a weirdo, you know, and just.
And I just had some challenges.
Nathan, you know, he's our tech director.
He's my cousin, known me.
He's like, yeah, you know, Joel was a little strange.
And by God's grace, he protected me from, you know, doing something beyond just, you know, that's silly, that's strange.
But yeah, it was different.
It was different.
Like I, because here's the thing about adoption, even as a child, you know, the bright side is in adoption, someone chooses you.
The bad side, though, is someone chooses you because someone rejected you, someone didn't want you.
You can say, well, but your birth mom was just doing the best she.
Okay, well, then my birth father.
Like somebody didn't want me.
And so I wasn't breastfed for a few days, and then it's bottle.
And then I came physically, biologically, from a line of, as far as I know, I don't know every detail about my birth father, but a line of not great people, not great people with not great habits.
And yeah, and so there were things, but here's the point all that back to what Wes was saying.
None of the three of us are saying, and therefore, I'm not morally culpable for any of the mistakes I've made.
No one's saying that.
I'm a sinner and I'm responsible for every single sin I've committed.
And it's only because of the blood of Jesus Christ that forgives and atones for sin that I have any chance.
And that's my justification, but in my sanctification, the same standard that God would hold from.
For children who come from a good home, he holds for everyone.
It's not like there's 10 commandments for this set of people over here, and then I had five commandments or some kind of lower bar.
No.
But all I'm trying to say is that the immutable law word of God remains constant for each and every one of us.
And every man, Romans chapter 1, is without an apology or without an excuse.
I had the law of God written on my heart even before it was converted, like all men do, just by being created in the image of God and having a conscience.
These kinds of things.
And yet, I will admit, and I probably wouldn't even have been aware of this because I was so young.
My parents would admit, my adopted parents would admit, yeah, it was harder for Joel than our other kids.
Like in school, the last thing I said, in school, all the way through almost all the way through elementary and part of middle school, I had three, in every single one of my classes, I always had three desks.
I had one in the rows with the other students, one right next to the teacher's desk outside of the rows at the front of the class.
That's a place of honor.
And then one out in the hallway.
And I would basically, on a daily basis, hour by hour, depending on my behavior, rotate between one of those desks.
And a lot of times, I would just be getting distracted.
If I was getting distracted, then I'd have to go sit by the teacher.
If I was being distracting, then I would, because there were those moments too, I'd be in the hall.
But the point is, these things are real.
They're real.
And none of it makes.
And so there's a certain class of people who are, that's just wokeness, right?
Like you're absolved from your sin.
It's not your fault.
No.
Because somebody has to turn the tide.
Somebody has to say, As for me in my house, we will serve the Lord.
And if I come from a line of, you know, it's like even when I think of like Europeans, especially, I love like people show like some pagan dance or something video on X, it'll go viral.
And they'll say, You should do, you should follow the heritage of your ancestors and do what they did and convert to Christianity.
You know, like the richest heritage of many ancestral people, especially among Europeans. Is giving up paganism and turning to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And my point is, in every single person's history, in every people's, peoples of the earth's history, at some point they had to convert to Jesus.
It's not like they just came out of the ether as moral people, loving Jesus.
They had to convert from pagan demon worship, from bad habits, from all these kinds of things.
And so, whether it's on a micro scale with adopting a child from a family that's kind of a rough family, or whether it's on a macro scale of a new people that comes to Christ and now has to be discipled and learn better habits, that ultimately all of it stems from the Word of God that affects every single realm of life, including even their biology, not in 15 minutes, but over generations that would lend towards more health and prosperity and blessing.
And better habits and morality and fidelity, and all these kinds of things.
The point is, all these things are true, and these things being true absolves no one.
We all ultimately still rely on the grace of God and are still responsible for obeying Christ's commandments.
And God will not be mocked.
A man reaps what he sows.
And there are, right, the prosperity gospel.
And the last thing I know I've said this, the last thing I'll say, the prosperity gospel is a heresy.
Because what it asserts is that you can have the blessing of God apart from obedience.
That you can use faith as a mechanism, as like an incantation, as like some pagan spell, and where Jesus isn't even the true object of your faith, but you just have faith in your faith.
And by just manifesting positive thinking and just wishing it into existence, you can have a 401k and a big house and a Ferrari and health, and your cancer will go away.
That's a heresy.
That's a prosperity gospel.
But that's not what we're talking about.
But what we're talking about is the law of sowing and reaping.
The law of sowing and reaping and the prosperity gospel are not the same.
And there's a lot of people, I think, in the reformed camp that want to say they think they're being cute, like the Pam Beasley office meme, like Corbett wants you to see that it's the same picture reaping and sowing prosperity.
No, it's not the same picture.
One of them's a heresy and one of them's the word of God.
The Bible, what I'm trying to say is that the Bible is clear that it's not just the life to come, but there is.
There are temporal blessings in this earthly life for obedience.
Not guaranteed.
You can still get cancer and die, right?
God's not entitled.
You're not entitled to the blessing of God.
God's not beholden to anyone.
There's nothing you can do by your obedience to work the God of the universe into your debt.
But ordinarily, I'll use that qualifier ordinarily, God's system and the way that He's set things up is that obedience, right?
Children obey your parents.
This is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you.
Not that if you obey your parents, You'll have eternal salvation.
No, you only get that by faith in Jesus.
No, you'll get an earthly blessing.
If you obey your parents, it'll go well with you and you'll live a long life on the earth, temporally in this life.
And that's just, you know, that's the fifth commandment.
And so if you have consecutive generations of nurturing parents and honoring obedient children, and the like, yeah, that's society.
And if that becomes society wide, you know, not just one family, but those families become more and more families, and that becomes eventually a civilization and a nation, and you have that kind of heritage, then.
Yeah, that, that, those peoples that come from that lineage are probably going to be doing pretty well.
Do you want to have a predisposition to diabetes or not?
Right.
Literally.
Like, would you rather or not?
I would rather be part of the people that he who works does not work, shall not eat.
But these people did work and they ate a good diet and are healthy because of it.
Right.
Which one would you rather personally be part of?
Which would your kids?
That's a great point, Wes.
Like, it gets jarring and people get offended.
My pint is hardest hit.
I know it gets offensive.
And I know that sometimes we say things, I say things in a bombastic manner.
I get it.
We're trying not to do that in this episode.
I hope the listener can sense that.
But I'm glad you said it like that because that's not being hyperbolic or bombastic just for the fun of it.
No, it really is.
There was a group of people, and we're not even saying it was all their fault.
Talking about, again, going back to Indian reservations.
So you can put a lot of blame on the United States government.
Exactly.
So we're not even putting all the responsibility on them.
But here's the facts you have a group of people that literally for life don't have to work.
And so many of them, the vast majority don't.
They don't, you don't have to work.
And a bunch of them, you said, what was it, 60%?
70% in some communities.
So, not every single tribe or reservation, but some of them as high as a prevalence of 60% of type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes.
And then if you have.
Which is 70% hereditary.
Right.
This is not something that's just like 60% of them eat badly.
No, almost entirely driven by genetic predisposition to it.
Which does come by eating badly over generations.
Exactly.
And so you're saying a whole.
Am I right that the.
Predisposition is more likely to be unlocked depending on then what you do with them exactly.
I want to get to that in the last second, but okay.
So, you have multiple generations of a particular people group that because of sin, whether it be their sin or other sin or a combination of the two, and I would argue probably the latter, a combination of the two, um, they're by and large not working and just living off of tax money for a guilty white people.
Even this is not generosity, it's guilt.
White people felt guilty.
And so, out of guilt, we gave reparations, basically, in perpetuity, indefinitely, to these peoples.
And so, our sin of guilt instead of gratitude caused us to give reparations instead of actual generosity and teaching people like reparations in perpetuity, which allowed for another sin of apathy and not working and eating poorly because they weren't willing to work.
There's actually a genetic in their own body, Romans 1, receive penalty in their own body.
There's a physical consequence, as well as all the spiritual and relational.
That will preach.
Now, in America, a lot of people don't want it to preach.
They don't want to hear that sermon because they think that sermon is racist or they think that.
But these are biblical principles.
And if we just pretend that they're not, and I'll be the first to say, once again, first to say this is not something that I've been.
Aware of and consistently teaching for 30 years.
No, no, I haven't been consistently teaching this for 30 years.
I've been consistently stupid for 30 years.
Like, there's very few things I've been consistently stupid.
But this is also pretty, like, cutting edge.
Like, as far as our understanding of how anyone else is connecting the field of epigenetics, which is emerging, to religious Christian living.
Yeah.
I don't know of anyone doing that yet, except me and you, Mess.
We, a few months back, I said it publicly.
Yeah.
And I, like, heard you talking about it, but then I made that connection.
Of epigenetics, I think it was like you're preaching on faithfulness across generations.
I was like, Wait, we know about how that happens biologically.
Well, we've been having the discussion behind the scenes a lot about like what is the nexus of like what is the connection between like, like Jordan Peterson was talking about how psychologists are trying to treat people who have depression strictly through diet, right?
Which has prompted us to be talking behind the scenes like, what is spiritual and what is physical, right?
Anxiety is a sin, and yet it could be cured with a physical means, like.
It's very interesting.
Like, are you sleeping?
Are you exercising?
Depression.
What's your diet?
So, my point is that all I'm trying to say is that I don't want to pick on anybody because, if anything, I should just pick on myself.
These are, we are learning.
We're learning.
I'm learning.
Michael is learning.
Wes is teaching.
Teaching.
Wes is learning.
He's teaching the gen. But still, like you said, connecting some of the dots between what you learned at Columbia and where was your grad school?
University of Texas.
University of Texas.
And then, you know, from some of my sermons on covenantal teaching, and then taking the covenantal aspect and then taking the biological aspect and seeing, like, how, like, here's God's promise and then here's.
The agency and the ways that, you know, or at least one of the agencies in the physical, you know, sense that you could objectively point to and say, these people did this.
Right.
So now they look like, feel like, act like this.
Right.
So my point is for all three of us, we're perfectly willing to admit, happy to admit that it's new for us.
I say all that to build up to this.
I, I, so it's not like I've been saying this for 30 years.
Defining Jewish Identity Beyond Religion00:09:04
I, there are guys right now who say, there's only one race, the human race.
And I say that to say, I would have been one of those guys.
Well, I'm picking on those things.
It's subjectively true.
Right?
There's only one money.
Right?
It gets muddy because it's like, honestly, it's kind of like talking.
I'm not trying to, again, I'm not trying to get a rise.
We're trying to be really careful in this episode.
But it's like talking about the Jews, religion, ethnicity, nation.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're talking about America.
Like, there's so many of these topics that they're already touchy, they're already controversial.
And what makes it even harder is like race, but in what sense?
Jews, as in the religion?
I think we need a better word than race.
Because race has been through the 1700s and 1800s, especially the 1800s, it was not what you're talking about now, Wes.
Right.
You know, it's not what Calvin was talking about when he talked about the English race and the Irish race and the Scottish race, right?
He saw three different roots of people, he saw them as distinctly three races, which now we would say rice is white.
Right.
So that's the problem is getting at the beginning with the different tiers.
Yes.
And so, race for the listener, someone asked me, What do you mean by race?
Biology.
Biological differences.
Not just culture.
Not just culture, ethnicity, habit, location, like all these different things.
Race is truly biology.
What was passed down?
What is prevalent?
Hold up.
So you're saying, you weren't saying ethnicity is one of the components.
You were saying you were giving two different categories.
So race is biology.
And then you're saying ethnicity is just the layer on top of it that then how is that expressed?
How is that modified, that genetic milieu?
And then there's a lot of, so going back to what I was saying, there's a lot of modern guys.
So Vodibak is a great example.
I love Vodi Bakum.
So I have not a single negative thing to say.
But I think what he would say is he'd say, there's only one race, but there are multiple ethnicities.
What you're saying is, no, there are multiple races and multiple ethnicities.
To Calvin's point, different branches, different groups.
But Vodi Bakum, by race there, he means species.
Yes.
Of which there is only one species, the human race.
And that's my point.
I think the term is difficult because it means so many things in all contexts.
So many races.
I don't think we need to invent a new term, but we just need to define.
Our terms.
This is what we're saying.
The problem is the term has been defined in culture differently than what we're necessarily saying now.
And so it's like when you say, Wes, one of the first, you don't know this.
I've never told you this.
One of the first conversations that you and I had, you said, Yeah, I'm leaning more on old earth.
And I went away thinking, I didn't know that.
I don't like that at all.
And then I came back and I talked to you, and you were like, Yeah, I think it's more like maybe 8,000 and not four to 6,000.
I was speaking of an extended pre Noah flood.
Either way, the point was like in popularly defined, old earth means.
Billions and billions.
So that's what I thought.
Yes.
So we have to acknowledge that when we say race, even if we define it, that's not what everybody hears, is my point.
Yep, exactly.
But someone mentioned the Jews, and I'll add this in there as another example.
There's a group of people called the Ashkenazi Jews that claim to be the origins of the people that obviously God blessed.
They're some of the highest rates of schizophrenia because of a genetic malfunction in the DST gene, which leads towards schizophrenic symptoms, which include mental disorders, difficulty understanding reality.
Like, it's kind of ironic, like, of people claiming to be these who are objectively not, that they have higher rates of mental illness.
Like, talking about how DNA and everything.
Everyone's going to get clipped by Right Wing Watch.
But objectively, the clinical literature shows there's a group of distinct people that have these higher rates.
And so it's not just like you guys found the two examples of diet in this set or the other.
No, it's across all different people.
We could give multiple examples.
Exactly.
And I think that is a good example because you're talking about a group of people who, um, Now, the argument that you made, and I understand that that is technically my position.
And for anybody who wants, you know, that has to be fleshed out thoroughly.
And I could, one, I could be wrong.
Two, see my published work.
And when I say published work, I don't mean peer reviewed articles because I just, I'm not that guy.
But I do have a nine part podcast series with Andrew Isker on Israel and who are these people?
How should we think about them?
What does the Bible say?
And basically, our position is that Romans 11 was ultimately fulfilled in AD 70.
It's not that God didn't keep his promises, but there was a great spiritual revival.
A bunch of people did come to faith in Jesus among that generation that Jesus was actually speaking to in Matthew 24, 40 years later, many of them still living with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and all these kinds of things, from Titus coming in, who later became emperor, that many people saw that.
They saw Jesus coming on the clouds, clouds signifying judgment, like Joel 2, Isaiah.
And so they saw that as judgment language, not heavenly, pretty clouds.
And they realized, oh man, Jesus literally said, not one stone in the temple would stand on another.
This is a fulfillment of the prophecies.
We crucified.
The son of God.
He was right.
We were wrong.
And many actually did repent.
And so God's promise was not neglected.
It actually was fulfilled, but it was fulfilled 1950 years ago.
And it's not a future promise today.
So no future land promises and also not a future spiritual revival.
So then the question, of course, becomes well, then who are these people?
I don't think that we need to.
This is back to Michael's point.
Like you can't just invent a new word when the whole culture already, you know, so I'm not advocating for that country over in the Middle East.
We should call it something besides Israel.
Right.
That's just not going to happen.
That's just that would like, I would devote my life to an endless.
Fruitless battle of trying to change the name, like that's just dumb.
So, for all intents and purposes, they are the Jews.
I would just like to maintain, whenever I'm able to clarify and define my terms, these are not the Israelites of the Bible of antiquity, right?
These are a new people called the Jews, and not new in the sense that they just sprung up, you know, in the last 50 years, like there are centuries.
But here's the deal all the way back to what you said, Wes, if I'm right about that, and Richard Baxter even.
Um, hold so if you're wondering, anybody in antiquity hold that position, um, it is not the lion's share, it's not the lion's share, it's a minority position, um, and I'm willing to admit that.
But, um, but guys today would be like Jim, you know, James Jordan, Andrew Risker, myself, and and and other guys on the new Christian right, um, but then you know, Richard Baxter would be one.
But with that, um, if we're right, then you're saying, uh, so a people who are trying to trying to, especially like Ashkenazi Jews, they just basically emerge.
About 600 or so AD in Western Europe or so, some of them kind of migrate north.
They were very isolated, so they didn't intermingle with outside groups.
That's one of the things that can help mitigate certain genetic diseases.
So they're in group, they emerge, nobody knows where, about 600 years after the death of Christ, after the end of the disbursement of the Judean people.
They just emerge, but this is a group then claiming continuity, which really would probably be those that have lived in the region since before that time.
They claim that continuity, but then on an objective level, they have some of the highest rates of schizophrenia of any people.
So my point is if you have a people that are defined by many things, as many people as all peoples, different peoples are defined by much more than just one thing, but there's at least two things, not the only two things, but at least two things.
Claiming an identity that may not actually be theirs.
And number two, the identity that they're claiming, they're also claiming with their ideology and their religion of Judaism, they're claiming a unique and explicit hatred of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Right.
So, even if you aren't, don't have the lineage actually tracking back to Abraham and first century Jews, even if that's not the case, if you're claiming to have that lineage and saying, You know, and some of your religious literature literally talks about Jesus, you know, being in hell right now, burning in human excrement, which is a teaching of the Talmud.
So, if that's your, if your people and your culture has been shaped by that religion and that ideology, we hate Jesus.
He's burning in hell in excrement, human excrement.
And also, you may not, most Jews wouldn't even be aware of this.
So, it's not even conscience, but your heritage is people who actually, or at least possibly, according to our opinion, which could be wrong, but actually hijacked.
An identity that wasn't actually theirs.
And then you find out statistically, you also have a disproportionately high degree of schizophrenia.
And for anyone who hates this, this is just objectively in the literature.
Is your legitimate position?
You shouldn't know that.
Some of these things come down to differences in IQ and this side or the other.
It's not even like, yeah, this is true, but we should do something different about it.
You shouldn't know that.
I'm uncomfortable that you're even aware of that fact.
But this is a well known fact that has been clearly replicated.
It just is a reality of the world God made.
Dominion Mandate in Real World Problems00:02:40
I want to jump on there one thing before we go to our break.
This really runs into a lot of problems in healthcare because there are things that certain peoples are genetically predisposed to.
And when healthcare systems treat blacks exactly the same as whites, yeah, there's a lot of similarity.
But when they're unwilling to look at some of the genetic predispositions that generally categorize different Blacks or whites or Asians or whatever.
Or men and women.
Or men and women.
100%.
Like it really runs into problems.
And we're talking tangible, real world problems simply because people have to run around like this.
Right.
You know?
That's a good point.
Yep.
Let's do this.
So we want to try to get to some of the questions.
Nathan, I just in my peripheral, I saw him, the cursor on the screen was just going wild.
Question about epigenetics.
Yeah.
So we'll get into some of that.
But there's three things we need to do.
One, we need to go to our last commercial break.
Two, we need to make sure that Wes is able to leave it all in the field, so to speak.
And then three, get to some questions.
So let's go ahead and go to our last commercial break.
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Distinguishing Science from Eugenics Claims00:15:01
All right, we're going to get right to questions.
We've got some great super chats.
The final thing I want to say people hate when we talk about this topic.
They say it's eugenics, they say it's racism.
Like, even just knowing and laying it out and being clear, like, hey, here are the differences.
But here's the deal like, these predispositions, diabetes, schizophrenia, like pair bond, all these different, and there are many, more.
If you just don't talk about them whatsoever, you remove from people the option, the hope of saying, and it doesn't have to be this way.
There are probably a number of viewers today.
Some of them certainly probably have type 2 diabetes, and some of them could even be Native Americans.
At the end of the day, you're going to have to eat healthy, you're going to have to care about physical exercise.
Now, knowing this, knowing the predisposition that you could have, because some won't even say it, like, well, you know, everyone kind of is at risk for this.
We said, hey, this could be a risk factor.
These are the things you need to do.
And you are at higher risk.
And you are at higher risk.
This is more likely to happen to you.
It's cardiac all the time, right?
You go in, the doctor's like, you're at risk for cardiac disease.
You need to da, da, da, da.
It's just whenever we want to group them into certain people who are more likely to have a predisposition, then we start freaking out.
And here's the awesome thing the way God has made the world DNA methylation, it is not something that happens one time.
And it's over.
You get a certain set of genes, and some are turned off.
They can be turned on by lifestyle.
You have hours and hours to go through the different diet and everything like that.
Read books, go educate yourself.
You're here watching, you have the internet, you need to care about your health.
But they can be turned back on if they're good ones that have been turned off by how your previous generations lived.
And if they're bad ones, they can be turned off by the way that you live.
And you might not do all of it.
Go ahead.
And I love that.
And not just for you, but it can make a difference for you, a real difference for you.
It can make.
A compounding significantly greater difference for your children, and then even greater if they continue it for your grandchildren.
Assuming you're pre-childbearing.
Right.
And so, but my point is, that just rocked my world.
It's only been about a year when I thought, you know, I started talking, you know, the last five years about, you know, with post-millennialism, the great, you know, post-millennial hope, and saying, you know, like we want to leave first and foremost a spiritual inheritance to our children's children.
A good man, a wise man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
And about the last five years, I was like, yeah, and also, poverty gospel, prosperity gospel is bad, so is the poverty gospel.
We want to leave, in addition, not as a substitute, never a substitute, but in addition to a spiritual inheritance, nothing less than that, but more than that, we want to leave a monetary, financial inheritance.
And I started talking about that over the last five years.
And over the last one year, I started realizing, combining some of these things, Wes, that we've been talking about today with scripture.
And I realized, what if you can actually leave a spiritual inheritance?
A financial inheritance, wealth, and even a physical inheritance, health.
Right.
Not that your offspring are going to live forever or anything like that.
And not that God owes it to you.
He's still sovereign.
He allows for suffering and sickness in the world.
Your great grandchildren, you could love the Lord.
Your children love the Lord.
Your grandchildren love the Lord.
And your great grandchildren love the Lord.
And one of them is diagnosed with leukemia at two years old.
Yeah.
Like we're not, we're not, this is not the prosperity gospel.
We're not negating those things.
Yeah.
It's not a guarantee, but we're talking about statistics of likelihood.
Of likelihood.
God's always sovereign and there will always be tragedies.
And exceptions, but we're talking about going with the overall general grain.
And when I realized, oh my goodness, this didn't my point that I'm trying to make is this did not take away from my faith in the word of God, it only strengthened my resolve.
It made God's word all the sweeter, all the truer, all the more authoritative to realize, whoa, what God has promised in His word is actually applicable at every level, not just in a spiritual plane in the 17th dimension, but it's.
It's applicable spiritually and eternally.
That's first and that's ultimate, but also financially and also even physically in terms of not just wealth, but also health.
That I, that, you know, Winston Churchill, you know, could smoke cigars all day, drink like a fish, take random naps, wake up, play with action figures.
Methamphetamines during the war?
Methamphetamines during the war, not sleep at night, call the war delicious and tell everyone, I, you know, written testimonies of how much he loved it, refuse.
All the chances of peace.
I mean, be an absolute maniac.
Churchill was a maniac and he could be a maniac and not just being a warmonger, which he was, but in addition to that, I'm saying physically in terms of his diet and his health habits and diet 90.
How?
Because he was standing on the bones of the English stock.
The English stock of like close to a thousand years or at least, you know, eight, nine hundred years of practices, both in diet and exercise and monogamy and sanitation and all these things.
That were far superior at that time compared to multiple other peoples and cultures around the world.
And so he took an inheritance, right?
So a wise man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
And I'm saying that's spiritual first, also financial, also health.
And he took that inheritance and chose not to give it and shut all those genes down.
He didn't have many children, did he?
I don't know, but I'm just saying, based off of this research, theoretically, he would have had all the wrong habits and he would have taken that inheritance and, like the prodigal son, He would have lavishly spent a lot of it on, well, but I just, I want to live more in the forest and play with action figures and take naps and smoke cigars.
So, this brings something that I thought about earlier and now it's back.
So, I'm going to say it.
Sometimes we look at the 90 year old grandma.
I have a, my wife has a great aunt who, she drinks like three or four Dr. Peppers a day.
She eats French fries all the time.
She's not, she's in her 90s and she's still spry.
And so you get these examples where the guy that smokes three packs a day lives to 85, you know, doesn't die of lung cancer.
Here's the point of all of this we need, like, the life of the Christian is lived by faith.
And part of this even is, in spite of the fact that before I knew about epigenetics, I saw some people that buck the trend.
You have two choices.
You can say, well, I'm going to choose to live in an unhealthy way myself, and God made it work out for them.
It's going to make it work out for me.
Or you say, no, no, no, by faith, God has said that the discipline, the bodily exertion, and the being healthy and the honoring your parents and all of these things that go into a healthy lifestyle are still important, regardless of what I might see the 90 year old or the 85 year old grandma or grandpa doing.
We live by faith.
And so, like, what part of what I'm trying to get at is a lot of people are going to listen to what you said, Wes.
And I, you know, I hear some of this stuff a little bit because my wife's medical.
But if you're just coming into this topic, it's like, oh, this is totally overwhelming.
Part of it is like you can educate yourself.
This is an emerging field.
I just bought a book on epigenetics that I'm working through.
But also, if you are simply faithful to obey the commands of God of being healthy, providing, desiring to live a long life so that you can be a better steward, so you can see your great grandchildren and invest in them.
People before they knew about epigenetics were doing this already, simply because Christianity or even just natural law informed how they lived.
Right.
Right.
This is not, even though it's verging on rocket science at the technical level, it's not rocket science on the practical level.
Well, to explain how it happens is rocket science.
Yes.
But to know that simply what you should do is not rocket science.
Unfortunately, breastfeeding is like.
Of course.
We do live in a system that's working to provide.
Counter narratives to all of this.
That's right.
That is a reality, right?
People are, even people who think they're healthy, could be living in very unhealthy ways now because our nation is nuts right now.
But all right.
We've got a super chat.
I'm going to hit this one personally.
This is from Philip Nathaniel, one of my best friends from back home, actually.
Really good guy.
He says this first of all, $50.
Thank you so much, Philip.
I really appreciate that.
He said, Thank you for doing the Lord's work.
My wife and I, wonderful wife, they got married.
I was in their wedding.
They were married young.
They said, We're going to get married.
We're going to start a family.
He said, My wife and I are the fourth generation in our families of divorce, abuse, and fatherlessness.
And I was on the front lines.
I mean, we were both friends younger on to all that that went on.
We both committed to ending the generational sin with us.
God has been good.
Hey, Wes, thank you for this live stream.
Thank you, brother.
And God bless.
That's a good one.
A couple other super chats we'll start with.
Some of these are from earlier and they weren't necessarily questions, so we didn't tackle them right away.
But Grandad Farms, thank you very much again for your generosity.
Said GA from Emmett, Idaho, CA.
See if you can get on Right Wing Watch with this episode.
We did our best.
I think, well, we actually did our best to be careful.
Yeah, right.
But the subject matter is just so controversial that this one might, we might have like three or four clips on Right Wing Watch.
Or from probably Christian.
Yes.
You think there's no such thing as racism.
These days, Right Wing Watch is more charitable.
Right.
Like, seriously, when Right Wing Watch clips me out, they actually leave at least some of the context.
The most uncharitable, sinister, I mean, just really like just.
You can just tell it's just mean spirited, like where it's like spliced up, like, and it's not even like just cut out of the overall context, but it's like three seconds, then seven seconds, then four seconds, and like, just deceitful, just absolutely deceitful.
Right wing watch, uh, the pagan Kamala voters who are Christians and hate Christians, they wouldn't do that, they have more integrity.
The only people who would do that are, um, well, like unsupervised, uh, women tweeting, sure, is the name, like, it's seriously, it's, um, it's.
It's women who profess to be followers of both genders.
Of both genders, that's right.
Some of those women have beards, but for the most part, it really actually is women in the literal sense who claim to be Christian and actually are far more deceptive than a group like Right Wing Watch that's not Christian.
The Westminster Catechism on the commandment to not bear false witness against your neighbor is very strong in its prohibitions of all types of defaming.
So, any type of, and maybe like, well, it's not slander.
That's literally what he said deception, falsehood, obfuscation, all of those things are strictly prohibited.
By the law of God.
Ben Hofstedler, thank you so much.
$50.
Get that support going.
Men, it's in all caps.
Keep it up, guys.
Changing the world with your submission to the Spirit.
Men and women, that's it.
Only way there is something produced through a union.
Amen.
And one more.
Micah Timmons.
Yep.
Super chat, $20.
Thank you, Micah.
He says, Thank you, brothers, for your ministry.
Greatly looking forward to the conference.
P.S. If you find any help, or if you need, is what I think he's saying, any help with tech at the conference, then let me know.
And I guess that's his X handle.
It's at the 1689 wizard.
At the 1689 wizard.
Nathan, our tech whiz, make a note of that.
If you do need any volunteers or help, Micah Timmons at the 1689 wizard.
Thanks, Micah.
Let me hit the.
This is a biochem question.
I'll hit it quick and then I can hand it to Neville.
Dolly0987.
I'm a biochem student, biochemistry.
So this topic really interests me.
I don't disagree with anything said, but I am curious if you are specifically referring.
To epigenetics only, referencing epigenetics only or epigenetics and natural selection.
It is epigenetics and natural selection.
Natural selection happens much higher at kind of a population level.
So, like lactose, for example, people that could tolerate lactose were able to have better nutrition and have more children, and then their children were able to.
So, that's kind of natural selection high level.
Think of epigenetics.
There are patterns for sure, but also that's much more like individual, like me specifically passing on diabetes, predisposition, this, that, the other.
So, it is natural selection.
And epigenetics.
For the record, natural selection, the Christian is not opposed to it.
That's not evolutionary biology.
That's just simply stating that the strong, God has made the world such that the strong survive and do better.
Yep.
Okay.
Any other good questions, Nathan?
Here's one from Neville.
Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
Neville says Do you think the renewing of the mind by the gospel does normally fulfill, fully, does fully overcome a genetic intelligence deficiency built up for generations of unbelief?
I'll answer this one.
Because I'm, for the three of us on this particular topic, and let's be real on most topics, I'm the moderate centrist between the three of us.
So, this would be my position, and all three of us have talked about it a little bit on the podcast here and there, and we've talked about it just as friends offline multiple times and with other men in our church because it's fascinating.
And it's a question that you're going to have to answer.
I understand that some of the other pastors and Christian YouTubers and influencers are going to say, you're racist and you're Hitler and you're, you know.
None of us are Hitler fans.
We just also don't think that we need to define everything in the world for all of time based off of Hitler.
We think that that's part of why we're, that's what the post war consensus in a nutshell is everything I don't like is Hitler.
Like, why can we not have nice things?
Well, because 80 years ago, there was a German dude who did X, Y, and Z.
No, you're allowed to have nations.
They're allowed to be independent and sovereign.
You don't have to have gay globalism.
You can have hierarchy where there's still equality under the law and everybody's still made in the image of.
God in the eternal sense, you have equal worth and dignity, but you still recognize disparities and differences because God didn't create a homogenous world, but He created a world with beauty.
And part of that beauty is with distinctions, and distinctions naturally create disparities, and disparities don't always necessitate injustice, but it could just be rooted in God's created order and all these kinds of things.
You could do all that, believe it or not, and not even know how to speak German.
Christian Alternatives to Globalism00:03:26
I would be a point in case.
So, all that being said, There's that.
But a lot of guys are just, they're not going to be able to go there.
And these guys are going to become obsolete.
They are.
And I don't, just, I want to be really clear.
I don't want that.
I'm not celebrating that at all.
I mourn that.
There are guys who I would like to have a strong Christian voice for decades to come.
I really would.
But here's the deal you think, oh, we're American free speech.
No, we have not had freedom for decades.
Especially when it comes to information and speech and things being suppressed, and all around the world right now, whether it's JD Vance's speech in Europe, you know, and in Germany, you see like, did you share a meme?
We're going to jail, you know, like, I mean, it's real.
And you've got pastors, like, ministers, like, and I'm not trying to open the can of worms and redo this, but, you know, I won't say the names.
So for those of you who aren't privy to the story, it doesn't, at least, involve new people coming into some gossip thing, but.
But with some of the controversy that I recently went through, there was a guy who explicitly said, I don't think that we should have free speech in certain regards.
And I do think that the state should crack down with legal penalties on somebody who questions the number of the Holocaust or something like that.
And this is a Christian pastor, a reformed pastor.
And he's saying it as though it's like just the gospel truth.
Like, of course.
And how could you, Joel, be so.
Racist to think otherwise, you know, and I got in big trouble for having a differing opinion from the opinion that, you know, the gospel of six million and not one less, and if it is one less, you're going to jail.
Like, I got in big trouble for that.
And it wasn't even something that I was espoused, but defending a man in my church.
And so, my point is faithful ministers, including that minister, I think is largely faithful.
So, I'm not trying to disparage anybody.
The point is that a lot of guys, good guys, Good guys.
They can't go here.
But the world is going here.
The world is.
And we don't want to go with the world to appease the world.
But we do want to explore and say, but is there anything that all truth is God's truth?
Is there anything that is actually God's truth here?
Because if there is, then we want to be able to say, no, the Bible actually addresses this.
There's actually a Christian answer to this, there's a Christian alternative with this.
And not just put our heads in the sand.
And pretend that it's not there and hope it goes away.
And so, all that being said, my point is that, and looking into these things, what I'm trying to do is with everything, I'm trying to, like the Bereans, test everything with the Word of God, test everything with the Word of God.
And that being my final arbiter.
So, looking at natural revelation and realizing that, okay, this is God's world.
He made the world, and there are true things that we can observe.
And those things, if they're really true, they won't contradict the Word of God.
And so, looking at those things, and the position that I've landed on, For about a year now, where I'm at, and I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
Put that on my epitaph.
Here lies Joel Webbin.
He could be wrong.
Using Talents Without Bitterness00:03:34
But the position that I've landed at as of now is I think that the gospel really can change everything, but slowly is basically how I would say it.
So, back to the question Neville says, Do you think the renewing of the mind by the gospel does normally fully overcome a genetic intelligence deficiency built up for generations of unbelief?
It's a great question.
And I like the way you worded it.
Yeah, Neville's thinking.
So everything I'm saying, he already gets it.
It's clear that he gets it from the question.
What I would say is, I think significantly, I would say significantly, I'm inclined to think fully, but I definitely would feel comfortable saying significantly.
But here's the caveat I would add over generations.
So, no, I don't think that you can come from a people who for a thousand years, We're sexually not monogamous, using substance abuse and worshiping demons, violent, promiscuous, no system of sanitation.
Your diet is instead of eating cows and cooking them, you use cow dung in your diet.
I don't think you can come from.
That being your ancestry, and then in five years, you know, or even 20 years, in one generation in your personal life, fully try and answer the question fully overcome all of the genetic deficiencies and how that might affect things like intelligence or whatever, all in the course of one generation.
I do think that you can say, The curses stop with me.
As for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord.
And then you just try to be the first.
Faithful servant, if you have five talents or two talents or one, if the master is only in his providence has only given you and your house one talent, then don't be like the wicked servant.
What made him wicked wasn't being given one talent.
What made him wicked was that the one talent he had, he didn't put in service of the master.
So take your one talent, take whatever you got, right?
If you have a lower lifespan, it's like I'm only going to have, you know, 70 years of life instead of 85 or 60 years of life or whatever, or I have an 85 IQ instead of 100 or 120.
You You take your intelligence, you take your life, you take your gifts, you take whatever the Master gave you because He gave you something.
You have breath in your lungs, He gave you something.
The Master has been generous to everyone.
There's not one person on this planet that Jesus hasn't been generous to.
And He's been generous even to the poorest of the poor.
We all, because the only thing we deserve is help.
Anything more than that is generosity from the Master.
So He has been generous with you.
You take whatever generosity He has given you and you don't get bitter.
You don't get angry by comparing it to His other servants and saying, Well, He gave me less.
You take your lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
What makes it pleasant is not the objective place where the lines have fallen.
What makes it pleasant is trusting that the lines have sovereignly fallen and that the Lord is the one who laid them there, that it's His doing and that it's marvelous in our sight, that He's good, that He's just, that He's kind, and that He's working all things according to the counsel of His will for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.
Building a Five Talent Generation00:09:01
You believe that.
You take that to the bank and you say, the generational curses.
End with me.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord with whatever we have, however much, however little.
And will it fully, can the curse fully be undone, even at a genetic level?
I'm talking about even IQs increasing.
Yes, I think so.
But probably not in your lifetime.
Probably not just with you.
If you're sitting on a thousand years of demon worshipers and pagan ancestry and no sanitation and substance abuse and promiscuity and cannibalism and all these things, then no, it can happen for you and your posterity.
But it'll happen for you and your posterity the same way it happened with other cultures, like European cultures.
They had to turn and convert and follow Jesus and do so faithfully and patiently over generations and generations and generations.
That's my position.
And if that's racist, well, then number one, then we just all need to admit that the word just doesn't mean anything.
If that's how you define racism, then racism really isn't a sin.
Number two, if that really is, you're going to say, well, okay, well, I'll use a different word, but that's, you know, whatever, that's ethnic animus or whatever.
Guys, you are.
It's like a computer program deleting itself.
You have just rendered yourself completely and utterly obsolete.
That world, I understand that, especially for those who are older, you grew up in that world.
The world of USAID, where everything, where nature is artificially suppressed or inflated by billions and billions of dollars and programs.
And systems and three letter agencies by the dozens who hide these sources and give you this made up sources and manipulate and the propaganda of having just a few news stations that they all work in concert with.
That, guys, the boomer world is over.
It's over.
You will not be able to survive with the principles that you once had that used to be, you know, they used to be.
Workable, effective principles.
They are not going to work in this new world.
And I'm telling you, this new world, it's scary in a sense.
It can be intimidating.
It can be daunting.
Who knows?
Like, Jesus, please, you know, Jesus, take the wheel.
Please, like, lead it in a Christian direction because you can veer to the right and towards nature.
And it doesn't necessitate that it's Christian.
It can be a pagan nationalism.
It can be a pagan, you know, new right, whatever.
It can be Islamic.
The verdict's still out whether or not it will be Christian.
And a lot of that is up to.
You know, ultimately, the sovereignty of God, but in terms of agency to Christians.
Are we going to accept the providence of God and celebrate even what He's doing and say it's good that we can have free speech?
It's good that lies and manipulation and propaganda are being exposed every day, a new story of these things being exposed.
It's good that the billions of dollars that are going to fund programs in Pakistan that lie about nature and try to brainwash people and indoctrinate people are being canceled.
It's good, it's good, it's good.
But here's the deal.
Here's kind of the consequences of that.
Well, on one hand, then crazy progressive leftists aren't going to be able to do very well in this new world.
But also, even your neocon, boomer, post liberal.
Egalitarianism, everything's the same.
Neo Christianity also won't do very well.
Because this next generation, they have the whole world's information in their pocket.
Generation Z is going to look at you, Pastor, and they're going to say, I like him.
He's a nice guy.
You know, I don't have anything against him, but he's either lying or he's dumb.
And in either case, neither of those look good.
I can't follow him.
You know, like I can, you know, 15 years from now, I can come and visit him and bring him cookies in the nursing home, you know, and like, but I can't, but he can't be my leader.
He can't lead me because he's either ignorant or deceitful.
And so all these things are going to come out.
The fact that people are different.
Is going to come out.
It's already coming out.
So then the question is can the Christian run into that space without fear, without guilt, but with a Bible in his hand, with courage in his heart, and with the blood of Jesus atoning for his sin and all the sins of his past and any generational sins of ancestors and say, I'm forgiven.
I'm innocent in the sense of my positional justification, my positional righteousness.
I'm forgiven.
I'm blameless.
The Bible as my ultimate arbiter, my guide, and I'm courageous because the righteous are as strong as lions.
And I'm going to run into this space with all this new information that's been hidden by nefarious people for a very long time.
And I'm going to trust that the Spirit of God is within me.
He'll give me the words, and that in His Word, in His written Word, there are explanations that none of this undoes Christianity.
It might undo 20th century Christianity.
Judeo Christianity.
Judeo Christianity is certainly going to be undone, but none of this undoes Christianity.
And in fact, as I look at the Bible and in conjunction with the Bible, as I read the Bible alongside theologians and pastors who are older than just the last 50, 60, 70, 80 years, when I look at the Bible and I look at Calvin and I look at Turritin and I look at this guy and this guy and this guy, oh, they had answers for all of this.
This is just historic Christianity.
And none of these guys.
were racist bigots.
They were just, I'll tell you, who cares?
Your fathers, your fathers were better than you.
They were better than you.
Our fathers are, they're like, and we have been breaking the fifth commandment and dishonoring our fathers for decades in the West, calling them all a bunch of bigots, calling them all a bunch of racist, saying, well, they're good on soteriology, but even when we reprogram Print their books, we'll do secret revisions and take some of their words out of it and not even tell people.
Talking about reform publishing companies now.
And we'll read them on soteriology, but we'll tell everyone they're stupid when it comes to political philosophy.
And they did.
No, they were better than you, not just on soteriology.
It's not just, oh, we can learn from their soteriology because they were better here.
No, they were better than you on everything.
On everything.
Turns out.
And it's taken me years to figure that out.
But basically, It's taken me about 38 years old.
It's taken me about four decades to realize one consistent truth, one common thread that runs through everything.
Our generation sucks.
And we are the lesser sons of former, better sires.
And the best that we can do, in a large sense, what we're talking about is like if you're this guy, then the best that you can do is say, well, the buck stops with me and I'm going to turn the tide.
Well, at a macro level, at a corporate level, Pastoral level, that's really the story for our entire generation, for all of us, even the best and the brightest of us.
We all, the mighty have fallen.
The apple has fallen and rolled far from the tree.
Every single one of us, even the best and the brightest, we all pale in comparison to these titans that came before us because we have been walking in rebellion against the Lord.
And so we should run to this new space, not be intimidated by new information that's actually just old, observable information that's now no longer being suppressed and is now coming to the forefront.
And then we should run to it with courage, run to it with, with, with.
A forgiven, clear conscience and run to it with the word of God and run to it with older, better fathers.
Fathers in the faith before World War II, before liberalism, and step into that space.
Generational Sin and War Reflections00:14:07
Take our one talent, our generation, with the one talent that we have.
We're not a five talent generation.
Take our one talent, don't bury it in the sand because we don't want to be icky and cold, you know.
Marxist terms.
Instead, take the one talent, even if all we have is one, put it to work and trust that the Lord will be faithful and bless it and that our great grandchildren, that they'll have, they'll be a five talent generation again and that one day we will have Calvin's again and Luther's again.
That's kind of taken me a long time to figure that out, but macro picture, that's where I'm at.
So to answer your question, Neville, yeah, I would go so far as to say even fully, definitely significantly, and I'd like to think fully.
The curse of sin and dozens of sinful, rebellious generations can be undone even as that curse affects biology and the body.
But over time, that's the one qualifier I would add to it.
But that shouldn't discourage us, even if it's planting trees whose shade will never sit under.
I think somebody said something about that once upon a time.
Sounds like a good thing.
So let's do it.
Let's do it.
Okay.
Next.
There's three questions.
Maybe we can hit them quickly.
Can we trust the literature?
Who is behind the literature?
That's a fair question.
Scientific studies, there's lies.
There's, what is it, lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It is, with scientific literature, totally possible.
But when you get to dozens and dozens of studies observing something that doesn't contradict with common sense and how God made the world, I'm much more willing to trust that than some magical study that says formula is better for babies than breastfeeding.
Well, You know, let me see the author list.
What are your thoughts on generational sin curses?
I don't think they're.
Nobody is generationally cursed to be poor, right?
So you're mailing money to the televangelist, break the generational curse of poverty.
No.
But what some of what we're talking about could be considered generational, it passes on for generations and it's a result of sin.
Now, there's certainly no curse that it will always be this way that a given people group will always have a predensity predisposition to diabetes.
So curse eternally, it's always going to be there.
No.
Generational sin that has an effect.
See the whole rest of the episode.
Yeah, that does exist.
Michael, you got to end right at the end.
So, real quick.
So, this is a super chat from Michael.
I'm going to do this one.
So, Michael, I really appreciate this.
And just we have been in so much hot water that I just, I'm not going to read it exactly the way that you wrote it, but I'm going to answer the question for you.
It is a good question.
It's a fair question.
I don't think there's, you know, I don't think you're wrong in asking it because it makes sense.
But just so that I'm not publicly on record saying exactly what you said here.
I'm just going to answer the question for you, and you'll know what I mean.
So, Michael writes, how much of the blame for this Judeo Christianity and some of the more kind of post war consensus neo Christianity thoughts and sentiments,
how much of this should be blamed on the legacy of, and then he puts a particular name here, but some of the older well known ministers and ministries that many of our listeners would know if I named them.
I would just say for the guys who are currently living today, I wouldn't give them a ton of blame.
I really wouldn't.
Because I think it kind of started in some sense before them.
I think that in many ways they had a choice, they had an opportunity to stem the tide.
And in many ways, instead, they doubled down and perpetuated many of the lies and the problems that we're now facing.
But I don't think it's.
I'm hard on the boomers.
You guys know that.
I tried to.
There have been episodes where I have actually gone to some pretty intentional great lengths to honor boomers, believe it or not.
It's just those parts don't get clipped up and go viral.
But I'll say this I think the boomers made some catastrophic mistakes that have just absolutely destroyed the welfare and the.
The likelihood of viability of future generations in the West and especially here in America.
I just think that's undeniable.
However, everybody's a product of place and time.
Nobody lives life or does theology or any of these things in a vacuum.
We're all product of place and time.
The boomers were not the first generation.
They're not Adam and Eve.
They didn't come out of the garden.
They weren't created in a state of innocence or a state of integrity and then willfully fall, and everything starts with them.
The boomers, there's generations before them.
And so, I mean, even like the greatest generation, I don't want to pick on them either, but a bunch of people went to fight wars and then came back and pretty much decided that they had seen so many atrocities in these wars.
They pretty much decided that the world was fundamentally broken and could never really be fixed.
And Like a lot of your dispensationalism, like Schofield predates, you know, World War I and World War II.
And I understand that 150 years with dispensationalism and 80 years, you know, if you're thinking of like World War II.
But World War II and the aftermath and the disposition, the psychological frame that these men came back with their wives who were trying desperately to hold down the fort and, you know, while they were gone.
When they came back, they just.
The ones who did come back.
The ones who did come back.
Right.
And then think about all the children who grew up without fathers.
Like, they just, they, they, they were like, yeah, that like I, post millennialism was pretty hard to believe in 1945.
Yeah.
You know, the world's getting better and the Christ is bombing now.
Yeah.
Like, when, when that's like, that's your life.
And so a lot of people just came back defeated.
Like, World War II is like, well, thank God Germany lost.
Everybody lost that war, in my opinion.
Everybody lost that war.
And I'm not saying that we should have teamed up with the Germans and fought against the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks were terrible.
I think Stalin was worse than Hitler.
That's my opinion.
You guys have heard me say it.
But I think they were both bad guys.
And personally, I think America should have stayed out of it.
That's my political historic opinion.
But the point is, everybody got involved.
It was in some sense similar to Putin and Zelensky.
It's like with Poland and what's going on here and Hitler wanting to invade.
And it should not, in the same way that I've been like, this thing needs to end with Ukraine and Russia.
And this is not the world's problem.
It's their problem.
That's kind of how I feel about World War II.
But that one, Churchill made it the world's problem.
He did.
He forced that.
He was like, everyone is going to deal with this because, right?
Great Britain, the empire for which the sun never sets.
Well, the sun kind of was setting on Great Britain.
And they didn't really like it.
And they needed to.
They weren't just caring about virtue and all the principles.
There was some of that, but there was also a sense of, no, Germany, like, we're the superpower of Europe.
We're Great Britain.
Germany can't supersede us.
And so this thing became a global affair.
And here's the deal everybody lost.
Every country lost.
Our country lost.
We lost probably the least, right?
Because just geographically, we were removed.
And so we had less to rebuild.
Part of the reason why America became quickly a superpower, just economically, was all of Europe was on fire.
All of Europe.
Was in shambles.
And we were hurting too, but we had less to rebuild than all these other European countries.
So, anyways, my point is even the greatest generation, which again, I don't want to disparage those guys at all, but even like the greatest generation, in some sense, you can make an argument that the greatest generation is also the founding generation of pessimism, eschatological pessimism, that the world will only get worse and worse and worse.
And then they give to the boomers their eschatology.
But then, coupled with a ton of just tangible, you know, temporal luxuries.
And so the world's only going to get worse and worse and worse.
And there's not much that you can do about it.
And the only thing that you can do, you can't really fix things at a cultural level, civilizational level, but you just do evangelism.
So then the boomers made a ton of money with all these tech, you know, booms and innovation.
And but then didn't put it into cathedrals and long works.
They thought Jesus was going to come back next week.
And so they put it into the only thing that's.
Seem to them to matter with that kind of eschatology if Jesus is coming back relatively soon, evangelism and global missions.
And then their own kids all went to public school and then grew up and became new atheists.
And yeah, it's just, it's all a wreck.
It's all a wreck.
So my point is just to say to answer the question, I know it's long, long winded, but Michael, it's a thoughtful question.
Don't blame me for asking it.
It's a good question.
But I guess what I would say in terms of the person that you named specifically and his ministry, and then others like him, because he is kind of a stand in.
He's a good guy to name.
He's representative of a lot of other ministries of that generation, of the boomer generation, Christian ministries.
Yeah, I think everybody, nobody's absolved, right?
See what I said earlier.
So I'm not absolved.
Okay, well, boomers are also therefore morally culpable and responsible.
But nobody, no individual, and no generation of individuals, Just sprouted out of the ether or was forged in a vacuum.
Everyone's product and place were all in a stream.
And this generational stream, that's the whole point of today's episode, I think.
I think this comes full circle.
But the whole point is like there was a stream that was already moving.
And it was a positive stream of Christendom.
And it got off the rails, but it didn't just get off the rails in the 1970s and 80s with the boomers or the 60s, you know, as their young 20s, you know, and the sexual revolution.
It got more off the rails, and I would argue significantly so, but it was already off the rails.
And you could argue with the greatest generation and their pessimism and feeling defeated and all these kinds of things, like the world was broken, it could never really be fixed.
And then you can argue all the way back to the Enlightenment.
And like, there was a positive stream, there was a negative stream.
That negative stream, the fount head of that negative stream, is not the boomers.
That wouldn't be fair.
The boomers might be where that fountain, the stream, all of a sudden goes into a surging waterfall, you know, and picks up strength.
The streams joined together and made a big river.
Yeah.
The boomers might be representative of that, the currents of the stream picking up force significantly, but it's not the head of the stream.
It's not the, yeah, that would not be fair.
So, okay.
That's all.
All right.
I think that's it for today.
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