De-Platformed by Dan DeWitt, the Influence of History, Receiving the Received Text

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line on a, I think it's Thursday. Yeah, I think it's Thursday. Huh? All day. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm sorry, I'm having to apologize to Luke the Bear, because once again, The Dividing Line is on at the exact same time as Apology Radio.

So I guess, you know, I'm feeling conflicted about that. Maybe we'll have to arrange not to do that in the future so that people can watch both live at the same time, but nothing we can do about that right now.

We'll have to work on better coordination or cooperation or something in the future. Anyways, a few things to get to. One of them, have you ever, well, this is probably just for you older folks, but for example, it's happening a lot more to me these days that I'll get an email and I'll think about what I'm going to say in response to it.

And because I thought about what I was going to say in response to it, then I assume that I actually wrote it. And then I never write it. And then they say, I never heard back from you. And then you're sitting there going, but I remember, I remember responding to it.

But actually all you had done is thought about what you're going to say when you responded to it. That kind of thing, unfortunately is happening. And I had, I have this graphic and I have a distinct recollection of responding to it.

And I thought it was on the program, but I can't find it anywhere. I don't want it to go by. I think it is important to look at. So I may end up repeating something. That's just, you know, honestly, part of it is age.

Part of it is trying to do as many things as I'm trying to do at my age. But I'll tell you what I think the most of it is. We, modern problems, I know modern problems, but people will contact me about something.

And I've said, yeah, let's do it. And then the next day I'm like, I don't remember what the date was. And how did that person contact me? Was it a, was it a text message? Was it a Facebook message? Was it WhatsApp?

Now there's this new thing, Marco Polo. You haven't done Marco Polo yet. Oh, you'll get sucked into it. It's, it's visual text messaging. No, yeah, no. And this is visual text messaging. It's sort of nice.

There's just, there's just so many WhatsApp and everything. And I'll be sitting there going, I know they contacted me. And sometimes it'll be an actual text message. It didn't go through iMessage. So it's not in the message thing.

And there's just, I don't think God designed our brains to have this many avenues of input. I'm being serious. I just don't, I just don't think so. And I think that lends to, especially to people who are not naturally multitaskers.

I sort of am, but I would imagine folks like that, just like, man, I'm just not going to touch any of that kind of stuff. So anyway, I'll get to that one later on. I may be repeating myself later on. And if so, you all can have a laugh at my expense.

It's amazing how many times people will say, oh, he's never admitted to being wrong about anything. And I'm constantly talking about how dumb I am and the stupid things I do. And it's like, man, whatever.

Oh, so I, oh, Utada is counting up the number of facepalms I do today. That would be, that would be interesting. Should I get my, should I get my Picard facepalm thing? Three? No, not saying it, doing it.

Not saying the word. Actually, facepalming. That's different. So anyway, anyway, we'll get to that one in just a moment and we'll, we'll press on from there. But one of the things that we do need to, I do need to address is I was initially sent just one of these two tweets and only about an hour, hour and a half, two hours later, I don't remember exactly what it was.

Did I see the second tweet? Partly because when this individual decided to post these accusations, he also decided to block me. Though, to my knowledge, we've never had any communication whatsoever. Is that a virtue signal block?

I think it's a virtue signal block. That's a, that's, that's a virtue signaling block. Um, you know, if, if you're, if you're going to talk about somebody, why, why, I mean, I've, I've got a huge block list and it's generally because there are some really nasty insulting people and I'm talking real insults, not I'm insulted by your position type stuff.

But preemptively, that's, that's interesting. Anyway, uh, so I, the first tweet that I saw from Dr. Dan DeWitt, who teaches at Cedarville University, he is a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a PhD.

And Dr. DeWitt teaches apologetics and a lot of very similar areas. That's why he said the first thing here, which was, I purged my syllabus from resources from a particular apologist whose online witness has consistently been careless and uncharitable.

I'd encourage any seminary or Christian university who has seen the online conversations and then this cut off here. I think it is to do the same, is what the rest of it said, I believe was the rest of it, to do the same.

So that was the first, um, tweet that I saw. And there was no name. So again, if you're wondering, uh, when you've been blocked by someone, but you have a direct link to a tweet, you just simply open a browser window, an anonymous browser window, uh, go private or whatever it is.

What, what, what, what does it say in, uh, in, uh, Chrome? It is file new incognito window. Um, and then you pop the, uh, the URL in there and up, up it comes, then you can follow the chain. And so, so all blocking does like, I can see all of Kyle James Howard stuff, even though he blocked me a long time ago, it just takes an extra step.

You've got to get a URL to one particular tweet. Then you pop that in and then you can see whatever you want. Um, so anyway, I did not see the follow-up tweets. So the initial thing is no name. Um, but people started going, well, who are you talking about?

And people knew exactly who it was. And so people responded and you started getting conversation going on Dr. DeWitt's, uh, thread there. Uh, and immediately people were like, well, what are you talking about?

Uh, even, even if you don't like what he said about a subject over there, how does that, how does, if you've had him in your syllabus all along and, and folks, there were people popping into the, who popped into my threads and his threads stuff going, I found out about you because I was in his class and I love you both.

And I'm just so thankful. I got hold of all the resources and another person said, I've become reformed because I ran into your material there and started reading. And that led me to do more reading and thank you very, very much.

And it's such a shame to see this and so on and so forth. So evident now, evidently the material was worthwhile suggesting to the students before, but notice, notice the, the assertion, uh, whose online witness has consistently been careless and uncharitable.

Well, you're certainly free to have whatever opinions you wish, but there are all sorts of people that would find all sorts of material in my online witness, which I guess would include this program, um, which began when you, I think were a teenager or earlier.

Um, I'm not sure exactly how old you are, but the started in the eighties and I think that would have been, you know, probably born in the late seventies, early eighties. So as a child, um, and you know, you can characterize it as you wish, but I think most folks realize just the opposite, um, that there has been a, a consistent, um, carefulness and charity.

I mean, I, I, I suppose there's something to be derived from the fact that, you know, I've got the people on the one side constantly saying that I'm a, I'm a wimp, uh, that I'm, I'm too nice to this group over here or that group over there.

And, uh, yeah, you and you and Michael Brown are just, it's just, it's just terrible that you all would get along with each other and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, you just, why do you have to insist on being so careful in representing what this group means?

That group, they're just all a bunch of heretics. Anyway, so you got those folks. And now over on this side, you've got, um, you've got this type of an attitude that I think derives from some other source, but anyways, um, so consistently been careless and uncharitable and then saying, Hey, everybody needs to, in other words, exclude this man, uh, exclude the most active English speaking Christian apologist in, in the current day.

Why? Because of the tweet from Saturday, because the tweet from Saturday. Now this, this makes a claim that there is there, there it's consistently been this way. Then why did you have my materials in your syllabus in the first place?

Because I haven't changed. I had Votie Balcom on talking about this stuff years ago. Now, maybe you just didn't know about it, but the possibility Dr. DeWitt is that you've changed and not me. And one of the reasons I would say that is in looking at your bio, you are a associated with the ERLC.

You're a research fellow for the ERLC, for the ERLC. And I have criticized the ERLC and have publicly stated that there is very strong evidence that the ERLC has been deeply influenced over the past number of years by critical theory, intersectionality, that there is a obvious leftward lurch in the ERLC.

And I am not exactly the only person who's come to that conclusion. Um, there are many within and without the Southern Baptist Convention that have seen rather obviously the leftward lurch under Russell Moore of the ERLC.

But let's keep one other thing in mind. What happened just recently that involved the ERLC and Alpha and Omega Ministries? And most people don't even think about this. Hadn't even, hadn't even been a thought, but other people did.

And what was it? Sam Mulberry and Living Out. Say, well, you didn't do that. It's true. That was Dr. Tom Buck. Where were Tom Buck's articles posted? AOMN .org, our website. We hosted the articles that specifically targeted the ERLC's commendation of Living Out.

So now you have a research fellow for the ERLC saying, I'm purging all this guy's stuff out of my soul. Not that I've found better stuff. That's, that's the thing about this. That's, you know, when I, when, when people say, you know, I'm not going to use your material.

I'm not going to, you know, I'm just going to reject you and everything else. What about the students? What about the students? What, what, what are you going to direct them to on the subject of the King James only controversy?

What are you going to direct them to for a, a, a Orthodox Christian analysis of the Quran that will, that will equip them to engage in direct conversation with Muslims to seek to make the gospel clear to them?

What are you going to replace the forgotten Trinity with that will have the same impact upon people's lives in making them passionate and grounded in the word of the subject? Are there good books on those subjects?

Yeah, there are, but in our time and our day up to date that communicate with a background of engaging and by the way, engaging in a very respectful and charitable fashion with all those groups, having done so for decades, what's your real priority when you would no longer utilize that kind of information only because, well, I don't like the stand he takes on these other issues.

And the stands which taken as were unremarkable only 10 years ago. But hey, the point is I'm not is broke. And I think woke is anti-biblical. And I think woke requires the importation of foreign categories into the Christian faith.

And it seems if you're woke, then everyone who is not and knows that you say they should be now becomes your enemy, which would substantiate the assertion we've made from the beginning that critical theory by definition is can only be divisive.

It cannot provide a mechanism for uniting individuals, which is true. But that was just the first tweet. I didn't see the follow-up tweet, which was worse. This was a follow-up tweet that I guess I ran into.

I don't know if someone posted it to me or I forget how, but it was a little bit after that. So this is the follow-up. It says, we should not, we cannot have prospective students, parents, and alums perceive that we support hate-mongering by Christian leaders who thrive on controversy and cruel comments.

So what do we have here as far as accusations from Dr. Dan DeWitt of Cedarville University? We have the accusation of hate-mongering, thriving on controversy, and cruel comments. Well, those are serious accusations.

And so I responded, but of course he has me blocked, which doesn't, which would mean that my comments might not directly appear on his feed. I mean, I can see people I've blocked if I want to. But again, I then utilized the Cedarville University contact website, webpage, whatever, and I wrote to Dr. DeWitt and I challenged him to back up the publicly made accusations.

And I invited him, if he really believes this is true, if he really believes I am hate-mongering, that I am producing cruel comments, should be easy to substantiate that in context. Now, of course, Dr. DeWitt knows that I would demand that everything be put into a context.

So any response that I would write to someone who's calling me a woman, a misogynist, racist, you know, I'd want to make sure that was in the context so that someone would know what the context of the comment was.

But I said nothing to anyone that, to an adult anyways, would be considered cruel. In our day, where if you say to someone, your statement is illogical, oh, that's so offensive. Okay, there will be people that, well, that's cruel comments.

Well, if Dr. DeWitt thinks that that's cruel, that needs to be pointed out too, I think. I think people need to know that that's the foundation of that kind of an accusation. But I would think that the main people that would need to know about what a hate-mongering, thriving-on-controversy, cruel person I am would be this audience.

So this would be the perfect venue to come on and to demonstrate and to ground these accusations. Or the perfect venue to come on and say, I did not do due diligence. I only heard secondhand information.

This was posted before I did the dividing line, a 90-minute broadcast providing full documentation and defense, and I withdraw my accusations with apology. That would be very acceptable as well. Now, I have not received any response to the email.

Of course, it's summer. I believe Dr. DeWitt is traveling to Florida, actually. So maybe the stuff that comes through the university email, I don't know. Maybe he hasn't seen it. Don't know. Maybe he's choosing to not even respond to me.

I don't know. But people in this audience do. And I'm sure there are a number of you in this audience that have direct contact with Dr. DeWitt. And so, if you would want to respectfully let him know that there's an email waiting for him and an open invitation to substantiate the accusation that he has made on this program, that he is more than welcome to do so.

But I think it needs to be dealt with. If these accusations are untrue, then they're slanderous. And there are passages of Scripture that deal with how you're supposed to handle these types of situations.

And so, it's sad to see this kind of thing, especially what it tells us about the church today. Let's just be, can we just be straight up honest? The reason this is happening is because I'm not black.

And therefore, I am not allowed to speak on this subject. Which means, here, a Southern Seminary graduate speaking on worldview issues clearly gives evidence of being thoroughly impacted by, formed by, infected by, I would say, in a negative sense, critical theory, intersectionality, identity politics, or as Vody used to put it, ethnic Gnosticism.

You can't talk about this stuff. And it doesn't matter what you said. It doesn't matter how you said it. Any words you use will be used against you in a different context than you offered them. Because intersectionality doesn't care about objective context or objective meaning.

You're either an oppressor or you're the oppressed. And if you're in the oppressor class, your context and your intention is irrelevant. That's what you, folks, you need to understand this. Once you buy into identity politics, and you don't have to have read books on the subject of critical theory to imbibe the worldview and the mindset.

It can simply become this feeling that old white men with white goatees should never say anything about the abortion rate in the community. You're not allowed to. And then when you start pushing, why?

What's behind that? And if you start pushing for consistency, you're being mean. You're mean-spirited, you're nasty, you're offensive. That's where we are today. There was a day when you actually felt the responsibility, if you made a statement or a claim, to back it up, to be able to back it up, and to not run to your safe space of intersectionality and identity politics.

You're a part of the wrong group. You can't talk about these things. You can't even have a concern about these things. And that's one of the reasons that I have not backed down on this, and I cannot back down on this, is that we have brothers and sisters in this community that are fighting the fight.

There's Ken on Twitter. He was posting some stuff in regards to this. You know you've got Daryl in Omaha, and you've got Black brothers and sisters in that community that are fighting the battle. They see what's going on.

They know what's going on. They're trying to bring a word of to bear. And what is our culture saying to us? Leave them alone. Abandon them. Do not stand with them. Do not defend Samuel Say when he writes that tremendous article, because you can't.

You don't have the intersectional authority. You are an oppressor, and that's what makes it wrong for someone like Samuel. That's why he was attacked by that guy. You're betraying your race, because you are of the oppressed, but you aren't buying the oppression narrative that you're supposed to buy for everything.

So the point is, what we're being told and what Dr. DeWitt's actions demonstrate is abandon them. Leave them to their own resources. Do not stand with them. Do not encourage them. Do not say to them, what you're doing is right.

I know that it costs you a great deal, but we're with you. We support you. No, no, no, no, no. You're not allowed to do that. Shut up. Wrong identity. You're the oppressor. Doesn't matter whether you oppressed anybody, but you're the oppressor.

That's what critical theory is about. Now, so I simply reiterate my challenge to Dr. DeWitt of Cedarville University and of the ERLC. You have made public slanderous accusations that are false. You either need to substantiate them, and you see, the reason I want to do this, the reason I want to have him on is because when you attempt to substantiate this kind of rhetoric, you and I both know it collapses immediately.

Okay, Dr. DeWitt, let's read my tweet again, and let's see what is hate mongering here. And what that does is either they're going to stay as far away as possible from ever being exposed to cross-examination, which I think what's going to happen, or once cross-examination takes place, you begin to see the categories, and they have to become plain.

Well, it's hate mongering because, and in flies the critical theory, in flies the intersectionality, in flies the categories of oppressor and oppressed, and then it's literally child's play at that point in a Christian context to demonstrate your use of the term oppression there isn't the biblical use of the term oppression there, and let's see how that is.

And the whole thing collapses. Does the left in our culture politically actually engage in meaningful debate? After last night, do we really need to ask that question? We didn't need to ask that question before last night, but now we can go even farther with it.

No, of course it doesn't. They can't because intersectional categories are irrational. They can't survive cross-examination. And so, Dr. DeWitt, never met you. I didn't know of your work before. It looks like you've got some children's books, which I think is really super cool because I've said to a lot of people before, if you really want to know if you know the doctrine of the Trinity, explain it to 10-year-olds.

If you can do that, then you really know your stuff. And so, I've not seen them. They're probably great. They're probably wonderful. There's lots of folks at both Southern and Cedarville that, like both of us, I'm sorry you've chosen to take this action.

I hope you'll do the right thing because the right thing, Dr. DeWitt, will be to withdraw and apologize. Withdraw and apologize. You were wrong. I think you went on really bad partial information. Listen to the last dividing line I did, and if you can still think that you can substantiate the allegation of hate-mongering and cruel comments, we will set you up and bring you on if you really believe that.

Yes, sir? I just saw something on Twitter that disturbs me just a little bit, and I want to—the issue here, part of this is that he's called for deplatforming. Oh, yeah. This is what this is called. You look at what James O 'Keefe has been talking about about his Google video, and he's talking about the fact that he's running out of places to get it out there because the news media is embargoing him.

Google is now shutting him down at every turn. I posted that video yesterday—I linked to it on Vimeo, and that's gone within hours after my linking it was gone. So they're hitting him everywhere they can.

This is called deplatforming, where eventually you get debanked, you get deplatformed. Nobody knows you. You just take away your voice. And I just saw somebody call for a, shall we say, a tit-for-tat with Dr. DeWitt, and I don't want to see that.

I know you don't want to see that. That's not what we are calling for here. We're calling for an open and honest conversation. We want more conversation, not less. Exactly. So please don't go there. It's just not right.

Yeah, no. I mean, I don't know. If Dr. DeWitt is—and this is—how does anyone do apologetics once you have begun to embrace categories of critical theory? Race theory, gender theory, whatever. I would say that would be like pouring acid on any argument for the Christian faith.

I cannot see how there can be any consistent apologetic methodology once you embrace critical theory. It's the nullification of the message we're seeking to proclaim. So the question would be, is that what Dr. DeWitt's doing?

I don't know. I had not heard of him before yesterday, or the day before yesterday, whatever it was. Sorry. There's lots of great guys out there. I didn't know them. And Dan, if we've met, I apologize.

I mean, I'm really bad with names. You just remind me when we did. And but anyways, I just hope you'll do the right thing. But yeah, calling for my deplatforming on the basis of one tweet after 166 moderated public debates, 24 books, almost 40 years.

Does that tell you something? I think it tells you something. I think it tells you what's going on. And this is not gonna be the last time by any stretch of imagination. It's not gonna be the last time.

So yeah, there you go. Which then brings me to a... I mentioned, and I'm not gonna put this on the screen, I'm just gonna read it. I mentioned yesterday, Tuesday, that a particular individual, Keisha Atkinson, who I guess has been going after my daughter for quite some time.

I wasn't aware of that. So I guess this isn't overly surprising. But I would not normally respond to this, but it's just so helpful in illustrating a major problem in the thought processes of people today.

Keisha Atkinson on June 25th, 3 .41pm updated her status and it said, someone tell James R. White, I don't know who James Cone is. Listen to this, can't be influenced by someone I don't know, homie. So it says, can't be influenced by someone I don't know, homie.

Now, I put up a Facebook article about that because there are so many people who think that's true. This is part of the modern plague. Modern individuals, especially millennials, looks like she's a millennial, modern individuals do not recognize because they have not been challenged to have a meaningful worldview that recognizes their place in history.

I don't think I'm being overblown to say that we've never seen a generation so self-absorbed and so ignorant of where they came from as the millennial generation. Well, Z-gens are probably out doing them now.

But all those jaywalking episodes, even after Jay stopped doing them, asking people basic fundamental questions about not only modern political leaders, but I mean, can you really imagine if you went to your local university today and started asking basic questions, who won the battle of Midway?

Who are the primary antagonists in World War I? Who were General Grant and General Lee and why are they relevant to each other? What was Hiroshima? Basic issues of history. You know that the vast majority of the people that you would talk to on a university campus wouldn't have a clue.

They don't read about history. They don't see that there is an absolute necessity to understand where you've come from because they don't think there's anything about your nation or your culture that is relevant.

And so, I get it amongst the worldly, but as Christians, we are specifically told, we are given the instruction, we are to look to the scriptures because they're going to give us example of what God has done in the past.

We are to learn from these things. And so, look at Hebrews chapter 11, this long, long story of what God has done and what he's done with all the people and their faith and what you're to learn from that and all the rest of that stuff.

And then the reality is every single person in an evangelical Christian church has been influenced by Basil the Great and Cyril of Alexandria. Though 99 .99998 of all American evangelicals have never read so much as one sentence, let alone a paragraph of either one of them.

And yet, you've been influenced by them. Why? Because they were important in the development of the theological vocabulary that becomes the very foundation of what you and I say to one another all the time.

So, you've been influenced by them. You cannot help but have been influenced by them. You've been influenced by Calvin. You've been influenced by Luther. At least most of this audience has read a couple paragraphs of Calvin, though I'd be willing to bet the majority have not read the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

I haven't read all of Calvin. I haven't read all of his commentaries, for example. Great resource, but I haven't. And so, the very idea that you would actually have to read someone's book to be influenced by them is tremendously naive.

If you are in a church in America that interacts with or is a part of the Black Church, whatever that's called, whatever that means, you've been influenced by Cone one way or another. You may not know it directly, but the seminary professors and university professors all know Cone.

Now, your church may be pastored by a man who didn't even go to Bible college, but he has interaction with others who did. And so, that influence becomes mediated person to person to person. It may be seven generations down the road before it gets to you, and it may no longer be super accurate, but you're still being influenced.

You're still being influenced. I mean, he's called the father of Black theology in the United States. You've been influenced. Now, here's the issue. The modern millennial, the ZGen, seems to be proud of his or her ignorance of their historical background.

And if you don't know how you've been influenced and who you've been influenced by, you cannot critically analyze them. You can't filter things out. So, we want to, for example, examine any kind of influence that would influence our exegesis of the texts of Scripture.

But if you don't know anything about your history, you don't know what's come before you, you can't filter those things out. There's nothing to be proud of about how little you know about what defined the very categories that make you who you are.

That should be something to be ashamed of, not proud of. And so, every one of us is influenced in this way, and the wise person is going to garner as much information as possible, given where God has put us in our lives and in the midst of our responsibilities, to know what framed our language, what framed our categories, what framed our theology, what framed our worldview.

And the more you know about that, the better off you are when looking at other worldviews, being able to go, oh, well, hmm, I see that in this particular area, there's a fundamental difference between us, and it's because of this.

It's because of this area, and wow, the contributions of this person. All of a sudden, you can now start building bridges to other people. You can communicate with greater clarity. You can analyze arguments better.

Doesn't seem like analyzing arguments is much of a big thing these days, unfortunately. But seeing that just reminded me, I've threatened to do this before, and I think I'm going to. It is absolutely time to work through a basic outline on something called logic, logic.

Formal fallacies, bad argumentation. What's modus ponens? What's modus tollens? What's the law of the excluded middle? What are these things? I gotta go watch a movie. They are the laws of thought. And what happened last week?

Now, there have been various people attacking me. People like Steve Hayes. Oh my gosh, Steve, dude, that was one of the worst things that's ever appeared on TriBlog. I mean, you can't even pretend any longer to be even slightly unbiased at all.

I mean, you missed the forest for the trees so badly on that. It was just shameful. I'm sorry, dude, you've lost it. But there are people out there who should know better, who just reacted to the fact that 99 of the response to that tweet was not based upon a logical, calm reflection of the actual statement of the words.

It wasn't. Now, there's a spectrum. There are people who weren't overly emotional, but were still not rational. And then you had the people who just, you know, just huge cloud of emotion. And then you can't reason with folks like that.

But here's a fact. The fact is that if you were willing to become charitable, fair, and dismiss identity politics, you could have read that tweet and perfectly understood my point, my argument, and its validity.

There is a way to read that tweet in that way. If you're calm, fair, unbiased, don't bring in identity politics. There's no question about that. That's not even disputable. There was nothing inherent in what I said that would cause a fair-minded person to go any other direction.

But there are a lot of unfair-minded people out there. That's the point. And so when I responded to people, when I responded to people, that's what I would push on. Okay, can you show me, please, where in these words, where is this back up your accusation?

You made this accusation there. What's the grounding of this? Let's be logical. Let's be rational. And in our day, the call for logic, rationality, consistency is considered to be arrogant, mean-spirited, offensive.

You just can't hear yourself. You just can't hear yourself. No, I recognize that in today's world, asking for that kind of thought is not popular, but I don't have any choice. I don't have any choice.

The scriptures, I believe, call me to have the mind of Christ. Are you saying he was irrational? The one who made the universe and all its laws calls me to violate those laws and not think like him just because my society has chosen to do so?

I can't do that. I can't do that. So let's keep that in mind. Anyway, so there's the Keisha Atkinson thing. Let's do something fun before I do something more serious again, the thing I mentioned earlier.

But I had an interesting give and take with Dr. Moeller yesterday, a day before yesterday. And some of you will remember that a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Moeller on the briefing, which is going to wrap up here, he always takes July off.

So for everybody, that's just part of your morning routine. July is that one month where you just get the jitters. But I don't know, about a month or so ago, he had a story at the end of the briefing about dodgeball.

And you've heard the stories about bullying and, you know, it's because somebody has to win. Somebody has to lose and all this stuff. And I love to dodgeball. Dodgeball was great. Those playground balls that we used for kickball, dodgeball, whatever, you know, the way they do bing when you hit them, that sound, any of us from the 60s and 70s, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I was pretty good at dodgeball. And, you know, there were some kids that were better than others, but it was a game that pretty much everybody could play. You know, it was sort of the equalizer. Everybody could have fun with it.

And yeah, when it pinged off your face, made especially loud ping, especially when you heard it. We had a variation on dodgeball. Our PE teacher called it murder ball. Murder ball. Okay, well, there you go.

Well, PE teachers, that's a whole other subject. Anyway, so he had this thing about dodgeball. And so I linked to an Amazon thing of a dodgeball and sent it to him. And he follows me on Twitter. And so he responded to it.

And he said, hey, let's make this happen. Let's challenge the Armenians to a dodgeball tournament on the lawn at the cemetery. And of course, everybody went crazy. We could sell tickets to this. And it was fun.

So yesterday, day for yesterday, he posts this tweet that I have up. And it's a picture of a Whataburger with fries and a Coke. And if you don't have Whataburger in your area, well, Whataburger, I like Whataburger.

Whataburger is pretty good. I mean, if I had a choice between Whataburger and Arby's, I'm going to go to Arby's. But Whataburger. And I remember when we first moved out here, everybody says, you got to go to Whatever.

You got to get Whataburger. It's like, well, OK, it's yeah, there's sometimes really, really good burgers. But, you know, it's just it's a burger and a fry joint, but not all states have them. So anyway.

So Albert Mueller puts, honestly, I had to do this. If I left Texas without doing this, Riley M. Barnes would be ashamed of me and then tagged Whataburger. Well, I had to respond to that. And so I respond and said, well, there goes your girlish figure.

I thought you were in training for the 2020 Olympics dodgeball competition. And so he responded, well, I will need calories to burn in the great dodgeball championship game. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

So I appreciate when when when Dr. Mueller sort of lets the the Christian worldview analysis thing slip and and has some has some fun. So, yeah, there you go. OK, so here's the here's the thing that I just know I've talked about this.

I just Rich doesn't remember it. And I looked at the program we did from Living Waters and it wasn't there. So maybe I didn't. I don't know. But I'm going to do it again and I'm going to keep it short.