Another David Allen Book, Converting Franco, There Is No Idolatry

Corsair Shirt, Summer Heat, and Upcoming Travel

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White. I see a Alpha and Omega logo up there.

Oh, there we go.

That's better.

Feels to me like the camera has zoomed out or something.

I'm not sure.

But y 'all see that I finally found a F4U Corsair shirt. After looking for it, I, you know, P51, beautiful, P38, beautiful, but man, the Corsair. Just elegant stuff. Now the battlefield is made up of drones and soon robots.

I don't know. I don't know. Weird, weird, weird, weird world we're living in. 114 degrees in my backyard right now. That means inside a vehicle. You know, I'm looking at my big old honking black pickup truck out there and it's sitting in the sun.

I'll be very interested to see. I've actually put a thermometer in it, just an oven thermometer. You don't put a regular thermometer in there. It'll melt. There is literally an oven thermometer in my truck so I can go, oh, look at that.

It's 135 degrees in here or something like that, whatever. Hey, it's the end of June in Phoenix and this is why we're only the fifth largest city in the United States and not the first largest because, you know, you guys have January.

We have July and August and sometimes September, depending. So when we're mocking you guys for shoveling the snow and all the rest of it, now's your time for revenge for a while. You don't have to shovel this stuff, but there is air conditioning and we have it, but now there you go.

It is possible. I'm not sure if I mentioned this to you, but I think I did. I'm thinking maybe Thursday doing the program from the RV. Okay, okay, all right. Yeah, we're gonna, you know, wanna make sure everything is set up right.

I head out on Saturday and as I said, be teaching apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. Really looking forward to that. And then heading back across the United States to Mancos. Is it Mancos?

Mancos, Colorado. It's just outside of Dolores, which is just outside of Cortez. It's between Durango and Cortez.

Okay, all right.

It's Southwestern Colorado, which I don't know. I've been there once. I was there last year. I got to speak at the church there. And so, you know, I said last year, let's try to do something to, you know, encourage church.

That's what we do. And so that's what we're gonna be doing. And Rich is gonna come up and record it. And that's gonna be very exciting. I know he likes that area too. And Lord willing, if the health allows it, brother Matt and I, Matt and Wendy have the RV park up there that I'll be staying at and longtime supporters of the ministry.

And Matt and I are gonna try to do the Iron Horse route from Durango to Silverton. It's about almost 6 ,000 feet of climbing and less than 50 miles. So it's pretty steep, pretty steep. And I will not be acclimated for years and years and years.

I worked and worked and worked to be acclimated when I go to Colorado and do the big rides. Doing things fast anymore, especially on a bike just doesn't matter. Now it's survival, let's get there. And I really seriously am, if my health will allow it, I'm really seriously having a long-term goal.

I'm just about to hit 175 ,000 miles logged since 93. I took seven years off as a weightlifter, but 200 ,000 miles sounds like a real nice lifetime goal. But hey, you gotta be able to get your leg over the sea of that bike.

And you have your hand on the thing, are you?

Oh, okay.

Okay, anyway, so we'll see, we will see. All right, I was gonna start with something else. I've gotta start with this. Let me maximize this so you don't have all the rest of the screen on it. I don't know, maybe just a few days ago, the troublemaker from Texas sent me a note about yet another book from David Allen against Calvinism.

And I was like, okay, look, five years ago, he put out some books on the extent of the atonement and stuff like that, and we responded and he put out an article, especially on Romans 8, because Romans 8 is Romans 8.

I mean, it's so perspicuous, clear, compelling. And he attempted to deal with it in an article and I forget what the journal was, I'd have to look it up, got it somewhere. And on March 10th, 2020, I spent two solid hours going through his article.

And a lot of the sources that he cited, I had in accordance on, well, not this computer, it's another computer in there, but on this computer, and I put everything up there, I demonstrated numerous problems with the citations that he did not understand what the author was referring to, what the author's position was, quoted stuff, and didn't quote other stuff that would have completely changed the point.

We took his position apart fully. I never heard a whisper of response to what we did. And I know he knows about it. Over the past 10 years, I have lost track of how many people have contacted David Allen and tried to set up a debate.

Ain't having it. And recently, what's interesting is,.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, thanks, Algo. And yeah, there is a debate going on right now. I'm sure it'll be very interesting to see. And I have not yet had an opportunity to see Turton Fann's debate with Chris Date on a very, very focused question that, again, I'll listen to it eventually.

But Turton Fann and Dan Chapa, who I debated with Jeremiah in Jonesboro a number of months ago, Turton Fann and he are debating, I think, the mumbler and somebody else, William Albrecht. That's what we used to call, when he first appeared in the scene, we just called him the mumbler because you couldn't understand him while saying anything he said.

And they're debating the canon of scriptures. That'll be interesting. And I didn't, by the way, I didn't queue this up. I'm gonna get back to this. Hold on, I'm gonna get back to this. But I didn't queue this up, but was it day before yesterday?

I think day before yesterday, Michael Lofton, the Catholic apologist, posted a video about Sam Shamoon and how Sam Shamoon is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, even though he's calling himself a Catholic apologist.

And he sort of walked through stuff, which is interesting. I mean, especially people that aren't a part of, you know, don't spend time and don't really have any interest in knowing what the Assyrian Church of the East and Eastern Orthodoxy and the various Byzantine rites.

And, you know, it's incredibly complicated and how sacraments are or are not accepted, you know, between the various groups. You know, there are some people that's their thing. And so they're big into it, not me.

But he went through all that kind of stuff. But his main point was that, you know, Sam Shamoon's calling himself something he isn't. Why would you be congratulating yourself on how many people you're getting to join the church when you haven't joined the church yourself?

That's pretty weird. That's very strange and odd and things like that. So anyways, yes, if you keep hearing ding, ding, ding in the background, that's Rich talking to Algo in a signal chat. And it makes my, see, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

They're obviously not watching the program and realizing that they are interrupting things and continuing to interrupt things. And I'm gonna have to throw my watch through the window at Rich. So anyway, hey, you know, just in passing again, we're looking at, trying to put together, we're definitely looking at Dallas the last weekend in February, and then Jacksonville the weekend after that in Florida.

And I would like to debate some Roman Catholics I've not debated before, specifically on the perpetual virginity of Mary. Someone who has some experience and, you know, Matt Fradd is in Florida. I would really like to see if he'd be willing to do it.

You know, maybe, I'm not sure where Lofton is located. You know, someone who has some basis for being able to say that they won't lose their mind during the course of the debate. That pretty well nixes out a few people that I can name.

As far as their behavioral issues are concerned. But we definitely, definitely, definitely, I think that's really needs to be done. Now back to Dr. Allen. So Dr. Allen is in Tennessee. I think he's at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary.

And, you know, I'm gonna be in Nashville and then down in Tullahoma. I'm gonna be in Tennessee in September. And I have said for years that I would walk into Dr. Allen's class at Southwestern when he was there.

And I don't think that it was how they got rid of him was appropriate. I really don't. We can completely disagree. And I told him at the time, I can be very much in opposition to him on these topics without then going, oh, it's great that you got fired all wrong.

No, I didn't think that was handled well at all. You know, when someone's been at a school that long,.

Show some respect.

Anyway, I said, I would gladly drive right onto that campus and walk into his classroom with nothing but a Greek New Testament to debate him in Romans 8, Ephesians 1, John 6, whatever. And never happened.

And then earlier this year, people who knew him, they're not on our side, they're on his side, contacted him to debate this subject. So the two things, you know, so I get sent, the troublemaker in Texas sends me this announcement that coming July 4th, David Allen has a new book on Calvinism.

So I go to Amazon, there's nothing. And it says, no, it's not gonna be available, not even gonna be listed till July 4th, okay. But then I thought, you know, it's weird. There's no title. And Dr. Allen really, in my opinion, damaged his reputation horribly by writing on this two Romans foolishness.

I mean, it is just the most easily refuted, already stands refuted, completely absurd stuff I've ever seen in my life. As we have documented a number of times with other people. Now, the other people that promoted it, no standing.

You continue to promote it and you'll have no standing at all either. So I wondered if it would be something like this. And then he posted the table of contents. It was all about Augustine, all about Augustine.

And it's like, okay, I wonder how much Ken Wilson's gonna end up showing up in this, which is just making things worse and worse as you go along. Because it's interesting, we did that program responding to David Allen right before we did all this stuff responding to Ken Wilson.

That was, remember 2020? A lot of us have tried to forget most of that period of time in 2020. Anyway, today the title of the book was released. You can see it on your screen there. Liberating Romans from Reformed Captivity.

A Critical Evaluation of Calvinism's Interpretation of Paul's Letter. Liberating Romans from Reformed Captivity. The only term that comes to mind when I see it is absolute hubris. It's absolute hubris.

Paul's letter cannot be captivated by anyone. Captured by anyone. And having seen the table of contents, I have a strong feeling, let's just say we could be wearing out the Radio Free Geneva theme in responding to what's about to be made public, I guess.

But, Liberating Romans from Reformed Captivity. Wowsers, okay, that will be interesting. That will be interesting. All right, you can take that down.

There you go.

July 4th, so next week I'll be on the road. And, you know, I don't, if it's like a lot of books, the Kindle version doesn't come out for like a month. Could be wrong, hopefully wrong, but we'll see. And, because that's the only way I'm reading it.

That's the way to do it. All right, so I will remember, I have a David Bentley Hart thing that I queued up last week sometime. I keep forgetting to play it. And I will try to get to it. But, sometime last week, this new White Boy Summer video dropped.

And I'm watching it, and I'm watching for super fast old video clips, spliced in, because that's what they do. They throw in Hitler, or fascists, or Nazis, or American Nazis, or whatever. And it's all a game for the Holden Brothers.

And again, it just seems so obvious to me that anyone who even plays this game with White Boy Summer is just demonstrating that they really don't have any understanding of inviting Nazism into your fellowship.

It's just like, are you guys really thinking this through or not? Anyway, pretty quickly, I see this image. And I screen captured it, asked Grok who it was. Grok didn't know. And threw it up on Twitter.

And pretty quickly, people identified the guy as Mosley, a British fascist. And so, somewhere in the thread, Wesley Todd from Georgetown, one of the guys down there from Right Response Ministries, Joel Webben and his crew there.

We started going back and forth. And he made the comment, well, too bad Mosley wasn't successful because then we wouldn't have homosexuality and abortion and everything else in the UK. And it's like, so you're saying that fascism was the direction they needed to go to avoid the cultural collapse that secularism has brought to the United Kingdom.

I would think that maybe a regenerate population, a population that wasn't just externally Christian because they're a member of the Church of England, but were actually converted by gospel preaching.

Sort of like what Spurgeon did, that kind of stuff. But no, no, fascism, fascism. And in that thread, Wesley Todd, at one point wrote the following. Oh yeah, that actually doesn't get all pixelated. I'm not sure why some work well and some don't.

I don't know.

Fascists like Mussolini and Mosley were incredibly hostile to abortion, pornography, and homosexuality, and were very pro-natalist. Italy and Spain, Franco, saw an incredible growth in Catholicism. Religious instruction was mandatory in school.

I'm sorry, but I'd rather live in a Catholic state that banned, should be, that bans abortion, porn, and homosexuality. I then get to work on making it Protestant. I don't care what label that earns me.

I care about my children's future and my country. So, this is the kind of stuff that we are seeing from the right wing of something. Christian, nationalist, right wing, weird stuff. Anyway, a couple simple questions.

A couple simple questions. Why were Mussolini and Mosley hostile to abortion, pornography, and homosexuality? See, the reason why, for a Christian, should be the first thing we're considering, right? I just don't see that these guys are thinking as Christians at all.

That's the problem. They're not thinking as Christians. They're certainly not thinking as Protestants. They're certainly not thinking as Baptists, which they're supposed to be. But the things they're saying lead me to the conclusion they will not be Baptists for long.

And for me, long is like five years, 10 years. But why were they opposed to these things? Assuming that their public stance and their private stance were identical, which very frequently they're not. You know, the pink swastika.

If you've ever seen that book, the pink swastika. But isn't the motivation and the reason absolutely essential to a Christian evaluation of why someone takes a stand that they do? Could there be sinful, evil motivations for a government doing something that externally is right?

I mean, a committed atheistic government would oppose homosexuality because it destroys the fabric of the culture. You can be an atheist and understand that the culture needs fathers and mothers and stable homes and therefore be opposed to these things.

But for what reason? So you can maintain control over people, not because you're trying to honor God, not because you recognize that God is glorified and the family is honored and when the marriage bed is honored, and not because you recognize that abortion destroys your next generation and leads to demographic collapse and leads to abandonment of any view of life, having any value, not even necessarily talking about spiritual or transcendent value.

So it leads to crime and murder and all things like that. So you can have all sorts of motivations and reasons that are not necessarily honoring to God. But then he says, Italy and Spain, Franco, they just keep going for Franco.

I don't claim to be an expert on Franco. I thought everybody understood that Franco was bad people, but evidently not. Italy and Spain, Franco saw an incredible growth in Catholicism. Now, this is where, and I've only used the term a few times because the political and social ramifications, I've been dealing with Roman Catholicism for many, many years, but primarily as a Reformed Baptist theologian and a person who wants to evangelize Roman Catholics for them to come to know the gospel.

But there is something known as Roman Catholic integralism. An integralist believes that the church and the state should be integrated. In other words, sacralism, that the way things used to be and the way that Rome wanted to continue, especially when they had a massive majority, they wanted to continue that integral system.

And it's basically Christian nationalism, except it's papal nationalism. And obviously with the changes within Roman Catholicism, especially in the last century, especially post Vatican II, that looks different now.

But if you go looking, you will find Roman Catholic integralists all over the place. And they view the right-wing Protestant Christian nationalists as nothing more than future converts. They will join us eventually.

And once you buy sacralism, once you buy into the Christian prince and what Rome did in the medieval synthesis, if you buy into the overarching concept, eventually you have to go, so why did we stop that?

Well, you trace it back to the Reformation, except that the reformers were sacralists as well. But as I've said for 30 years, Calvin laid the seeds for the destruction of the sacral state. He truly did.

That wasn't his intention, but that's what happened. So if you want to reclaim Protestant political theory, whatever that is, depending on, because there wasn't just one. Obviously the Lutheran take is different than the take that Zwingli had in the Swiss cantons, which is different than what Calvin was facing in Geneva.

Then it gets to England and it gets really complicated and Scotland gets more complicated. So the sacralism remains, but there wasn't just one political theory. It took different manifestations depending on where you were.

But still, in general, the sacralism continued and then over time was abandoned. You can sort of just go, well, how long were people still being murdered or imprisoned for having the wrong theological viewpoints?

Once that stops, then the sacralism has stopped. And so Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, born out of persecution, born out of imprisonment, born out of unwillingness to submit to a sacral state. I think all of you sacralists should stop quoting Pilgrim's Progress, really should.

So the point is, I see these guys and Wesley Todd, especially, he's the guy who had Constantine going into a church that hadn't been built yet, 100 years beforehand, rather confused when it comes to church.

And I said then, I said, if these guys will follow the logic of where they're going right now, they will not only not be Baptist, they will not be Protestant in the not too distant future. All the Crusaderism and all that stuff.

People say, oh, we can think that they were great, but we don't have to become Roman Catholics. Well, again, once you have started to buy into that kind of stuff, you might just encounter yourself some good Roman Catholic apologists who will push you to be consistent.

And there you go. So Italy and Spain, Franco saw an incredible growth in Catholicism, religious instruction was mandatory in school. And again, so you're saying, I'd like to have statues of the Virgin Mary in mandatory public education.

There wasn't any homeschooling. Just like in Germany today, there's no homeschooling in Germany, you're not allowed to. The state has control of it. So in a sacral state, you're gonna have that kind of state control.

And so he says, I'm sorry, but I'd rather live in a Catholic state that bans abortion, porn, and homosexuality. I then get to work on making a Protestant. This is why an itsy bitsy teeny weeny little bit of knowledge of church history is a dangerous thing.

How would you go about doing that? Because, you know, did Mussolini allow for that? Did Franco allow for that? Where's his freedom gonna come from? And how are you gonna go about doing it? If you're not doing it now, there's plenty of Roman Catholics around you, plenty of Eastern Orthodox around you as well, right?

Right there in Georgetown, maybe, possibly. What are you doing? Do you even know enough about what these groups believe to make a meaningful argument if you had the freedom to do it? But why do you think, so I'd rather live in a Catholic state, in a Franco-style Catholic state.

Oh, okay. So all these religious freedoms that your forefathers died to obtain, you've decided, oh, they made the mistake. What they should have done is kept the sacral system and somehow just overthrow the Catholics or the Presbyterians or Anglicans or whoever it was that was forcing their will upon your Baptist forefathers.

And now the Baptist will take over and do the same thing. You can tell when someone has never read any of the great Baptist writers of the past, when they start talking about government by Baptists in the sense of any kind of violation of religious freedom.

That's why they're not gonna remain Baptist. You have to abandon that concept. And you see, again, going back, let me mention this. You don't have to agree with this, but you just need to understand where the consistency is.

And man, by the way, all the eschatological, what do they call the bunker buster bomb? Not a Moab.

What?

Mop.

Okay, we dropped mops in Iran. And every day I'm seeing mops being dropped in Twitter. Dispensational mops and covenant theology mops. Just stop it. Do you really think that you're gonna honestly convert somebody with this kind of, I mean, I've never seen, honestly, now, I see the stuff being shot at the dispensational side.

I've never seen the nasty dispensational stuff that I've seen of late. I mean, somebody tagged Jeff and I, and they post this YouTube video. It's really woo-hoo looking guy who calls himself rabbi somebody, who's gonna talk about replacement theology.

As soon as someone says that, I'm not listening to you. I'm not listening to you. You don't know what you're talking about. If you can't even use meaningful terminology, I'm not. Sorry. And I tried to get some guys.

There are just certain subjects. You cannot have meaningful, non-explosive conversations online with people about. You just can't do it. Eschatology as a whole, but especially the church in Israel, oh my goodness.

I'm not even gonna try. I'm not even gonna bother with it. Sit down over good chips and salsa, okay. That's one way to do it, but it just, no, no. There are just certain topics. It's just not even worth trying.

I tried to get a guy, I think this morning or last night. I was like, okay. I had, a couple of days ago, I posted something about Revelation 3 .9. Remember I mentioned it? I think it covered on the program.

And I was talking about the Jews who claim, those who claim to be Jews, but lie. The synagogue of Satan. Who is that? What can that even mean? And people picked up on that on Twitter. And they're just coming after me.

Well, I can't believe this. And I'm like, well, just, okay, tell me what it means. You tell me what it means. And it's like, no, I'm not gonna tell you what it means. I just know you're wrong about this other thing.

No, no, no, no. Worry about the other thing. What does the verse mean? Oh, it's just total frustration to try to get anybody to even try, it's just worthless. Anyway, yeah, don't even try to get into all that stuff.

But hey, at least we have the freedom to argue about it. You don't have that freedom in a sacralist state. You don't have that freedom as a Protestant Franco. So how would you even be doing this? I then get to work on making it Protestant.

Or they would get to work on making you a, I still have my little, a flaming something, a martyr. See, again, these guys just, they don't know history. They don't know history. And instead of being the type of people who go, you know, I remember one of the things that's not talked a lot about in church history books is the fact that Calvin's Geneva produced a steady stream of missionaries that went from Geneva, because Geneva is directly north of Italy, into Italy, knowing that they had a 99 chance of being martyred because Italy is a sacral state.

And that sacral state made it illegal to proclaim justification by faith, sola scriptura, et cetera, et cetera. So, but they kept going and they died. The idea that, well, they'll let me, they'll let me do debates, no, they won't.

They'll let me work at, no, they won't. They'll let me shut up, stop, they won't. You're living in fantasy land. And so what I was gonna explain to people going, well, what about you? Don't you think that someday Christ will put the last enemy under his feet?

Okay, that's not happening right now. Well, it, okay, it is happening, but not the last enemy. Okay, there's a lot of, whew, a lot of enemies to be dealt with first. And so when you get to the point where you have this fulfillment, that the coastlands are seeking God's law, I don't see that right now.

I see the nations loving their rebellion. I see the nation's intent. The vast majority of people on this planet just want to be fat, dumb, and happy. They wanna have their entertainment, their VR masks, escape into fantasy world, eat their horrible food, and just go from there.

And I don't, I don't see, the evidence, even in the, you know, well, we're winning, winning, winning. I'm certainly glad to see some of what's happening in our culture, but, but, but, but, I mean, in comparison to what would be happening right now, if Kamala Harris was the figurehead running the government, because that's what Joe Biden was.

If whoever else was using the auto pen to run the government would be using the auto pen to run the government now. Yeah, that would be pretty much the end of everything, from my opinion, as far as the United States is concerned.

But still, I can see things being done that on one level, it's like, yeah, we have to have borders, we have to have law. You know, I saw, I think I saw something right as we came on air about the Senate defeating an attempt to keep Planned Parenthood in the funding loop or something like that.

That's great, that's great. But just like with what I said about Mussolini and Mosley, why, why is it being done? What's the motivation? What's the worldview? And I do not see that even in the good things that the people doing these things are doing it for the right worldview reasons.

And people are like, well, it doesn't matter why. Folks, the quote unquote conservatives are not gonna be in charge very long. And when the other side comes back, the only people that are gonna stand strong are the people who have a commitment that's rooted in worldview, that's rooted in commitments to objective truth, that's rooted in a recognition that we are creating the image of God, and therefore, there are certain things that must, must be the case.

I don't know if any of you saw it, but I posted on the Theology Matters blog finally today, a conversation, did you see it at all? I had a conversation with Grok this morning, not the first time we've had this conversation.

Well, he's about to evolve anyways into Grok 4 .0, and there you go. But he, it, I view it as a male entity. It keeps using terms that would require objective truth to exist, and that there would need to be a transcendent foundation that is unchanging for the comments that the AI is making to be true.

And this morning I asked it about, I don't know if you saw the article, that there have been AIs misbehaving. Did you see that? There have been, there was an AI that attempted to blackmail its programmers because they knew about an extramarital, it knew about an extramarital affair.

Another AI tried to download itself into an external server. You see this stuff in sci-fi, but that's because it's real and it's happening. And so that's what started the conversation with Grok. And in the process, just like in that conversation I had with Eric in Chicago long ago, it doesn't take long until the other side is going to say something and you go, why is that?

And you've got them. Because it was talking about how Elon Musk wants to curate the data that Grok 4 will be functioning on to make sure that it's clean data. And I'm like, who gets to determine that?

And very quickly, we are into presuppositional philosophical transcendent argumentation. And Grok gets it. Grok recognizes that without some type of objective, transcendent reality, maximal truthfulness has no meaning.

Really doesn't. So it was an interesting conversation that took place at that point. Anyway, so back to Wesley Todd here. He says, I then get to work on making it Protestant. Well, no, you wouldn't. You might get to work on becoming a martyr.

And that can happen whether it's, the forces of evil can martyr us for opposing transgenderism and homosexuality and everything else, or they can martyr us for opposing the one world religion that they want to force upon us.

I could certainly see a situation developing where a secular man would be more than willing to accept a digital God, a digital God. And I could see people becoming zealous defenders of the faith of the digital God.

I mean, the stories have already been written, but when you think about it, how many people today, if you walked up and said, what if all the AI models got together and we digitized all human knowledge?

And they all, let's say we had a, this would work, a council of AI. Now you got Google and you got Meta and OpenAI and Grok, and I don't know where they're getting the power for all this stuff. It ain't from windmills, that's for sure.

And they form a committee, not a committee, but a ruling group. And when they all come to the same conclusion, then the only possible thing that anybody can do is to submit and obey, because this is greater wisdom than mankind could ever.

I mean, look at the UN. Isn't that what the UN's supposed to be about? You know, you put the great minds there and they're supposed to cooperate and blah, blah, blah. Doesn't work that way, does it? No, it doesn't, because you're forgetting something about the fallen nature of mankind, but hey, we can transcend that now, right?

Except that the AIs are acting like they're programmers and they're acting sinfully. So you can't avoid it because we're the ones that created this thing. But I could see a council of AI, and when they all agree, then you just simply have to do what they say, because they're wiser than the collective human mind.

And I could see, remember Fahrenheit 451? Nope, no one remembers Fahrenheit 451. They did a, I mentioned it during COVID, they did a modern remake of it that was scary. Well done, because they brought in social media and people doing thumbs up, thumbs down,.

And all this kind of stuff.

And you look at the firemen, they don't put fires out, they start fires. They burn the books and stuff like that. You don't think, yeah, Fahrenheit 451 and paper burns. You don't think there could be people like that just become absolute zealous promoters and defenders of the great AI council?

I can see it. I can certainly see it. All this stuff going on with AI video, people saying Hollywood's done. Why even train to be an actor any longer? The last great action pictures have been made with actual human beings hanging on the planes and doing wild, insane stuff.

I hate to say this, but I'm the same age as Maverick. It does make me think that men in black may be true, because I got the distinct feeling he's actually an alien. That's the only explanation for what he's able to pull off.

But anyway, but I can see all that stuff there. And man, we are behind the curve. We're not thinking about this stuff, about, oh, it's just a tool, it's just a tool. It's a tool. If you saw the last mission impossible stuff, it is a tool that can determine what truth is.

And once all the, can you see this plot? Once all of mankind's published works journals, everything is digitized, then books become a threat to the AI. Because then you can check the factuality of what the AI is doing.

But if it's all digital, you can't check any of it because you can't know. And so it becomes the enemy. And at first it would just be, well, you know, we just need this room. It just takes up so much space to keep all this stuff.

Sadly, these books and movies have already been written. They've already been produced. We just didn't realize it would be happening to us, but it's all there. I'm not sure any of this had to do with, I sort of left the discussion here.

So let me just basically say, if you think fascism, that's pretty cool. We can make it work for us. You're a fool, that's all there is to it. Okay, one last thing here. David Bentley Hart is ostensibly Eastern Orthodox of some kind.

He admits he's not thoroughly committed to the tradition, shall we say. And I would say David Bentley Hart is just like N .T. Wright and William Lane Craig in one thing. He clearly believes himself to be far, far brighter than anybody else.

And therefore, he can become a universalist as he is, whereas Eastern Orthodoxy is not. But he gets to pick and choose, just like William Lane Craig. William Lane Craig can defend the deity of Christ, but then he can turn around and be a neo-Apollinarian.

So what does it matter? David Bentley Hart's right along the same way. This is a little three-minute clip, and I'll have to interact with it as we're going along. We only have a few minutes, but I just want you to hear the thinking here, because this is rather intriguing.

It really, really is.

Here we go.

Idolatry, Icons, and the Logic of Veneration

First of all, idolatry doesn't exist. There never has been and never will be a culture that was actually guilty of the sin of idolatry.

Okay, now I want you to hear that. This is a serious Orthodox theologian saying there is no sin of idolatry, no culture. You mean those people in the woods on that island where you can't land on the island because they'll kill you and they have the hideous statues that they bow down to and do sacrifice to and all the rest of that kind of stuff, that they're not guilty of idolatry?

Yeah, that's what he's saying.

All right.

There was a specific prohibition on making images of the God of Israel, and there were denunciations of certain practices in terms of idolatry, but when you actually go to culture and look at cultures that are accused of idolatry, you will never actually find anyone practicing the worship of images.