Educated 19 Year Old Muslim Challenges Matt Slick | Apologetics Live 0021

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This is Apologetics Live with Matt Slick and Andrew Rappaport, part of the

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Christian Podcast Community. All right, we are live,

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Apologetics Live, glad that you are with us tonight. We have with us

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Matt Slick, our resident apologist from CARM .org, Christian Apologetics Research Ministry.

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Good place to go for your apologetics questions. And that's what we're here for.

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We're here to answer your questions, any questions that you may have. The link to join is at apologeticslive .com.

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You go there, there is a link to join. Join on in, ask your questions, and we will seek to answer them.

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And Matt, before we get too far into the program, let me read an email that we got today. We got this over at Striving for Eternity, someone who started donating,

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I think she may have been donating to both you and I, to both our ministries, but she gave this to Mrs.

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Rappaport, and it says, and so Mrs. Rappaport gave it to me. It says, it is just a tiny token.

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This is speaking about a gift that she gave to the ministry, she said, it is just a tiny token of my appreciation of what you do online via YouTube.

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I am a great fan of Matt Slick and Andrew Rappaport's apologetics program.

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I've learned a lot watching them. Sadly, there is nothing similar here in Poland.

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I am happy I can benefit from what you're doing there in the

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U .S. Poland is a Catholic country, and we, and there is more and more atheists and secularists too.

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Basically, we are a few years behind the Western countries in terms of worldview. In general, there is almost no biblical

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Christianity, so we produce no such content in Polish on YouTube or on radio.

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By watching you guys, I can prepare myself for what is coming tomorrow and in the few years.

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God bless you for that. I love, I love watching

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Andrew and Matt's interactions and their brotherly love. It's an entertaining community overall.

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I invest in my local church here in Poland, and this is what I feel like doing at the moment.

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So I just wanted to encourage you and let you know that your work has global reach.

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So Matt, you and I are able to encourage someone over in Poland.

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Praise God. Yeah. And also with that, I guess we should, you know, for folks who are watching on YouTube, you can do what's called a super chat.

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That's where you donate during the show. If you put a comment in there, we will read it. There's no comment there, but Kat B just gracefully gave $5.

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The super chat goes to CARM. So anyone that donates there, that money will go to CARM .org.

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That doesn't come to Striving for Eternity, just so you know. There's another $5 one from,

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I can't read it. Someone... Nabotimer. Nabotimer1884. So thank you.

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Thanks, Kat. Thanks, Nabotimer. And so folks, if you have questions, the way to join in is to go to Apologetics Live, click on the link to join the hangout, and that will be how you can ask your questions.

04:06

We try to watch the chat also, but we don't always get to those questions. So Matt, you used to be a

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Catholic, right? No. No. Someone said that or something like that. I was alluding to that on one of the

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Facebook posts. I said, nope. I had to correct him. I was never a Catholic. But you seem to hate the

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Catholics, they say. No, I don't hate Catholics. You must've been Mormon, right?

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Don't hate Mormons. But then why do you speak out against them?

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As I have told people before, it's a theological issue. Roman Catholicism is false.

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Mormonism is false. That's it. And it's a purely theological issue.

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And so, thanks, Jason Manning. And so what'll happen is people will misrepresent me, and that's often the case, as, oh, you hate

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Catholics. No, I don't hate Catholics. I hate Roman Catholicism because it's damnable. And that's it.

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I'm going to propose that which leads people to hell. That's all. So let's give you a chance to explain that a little bit more.

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There's a difference between Catholics and Catholicism. What do you see as the difference, and why can you like Catholics and not like Catholicism?

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Oh, yeah. I've had Roman Catholic friends, and we've hung out and done stuff. You know,

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I had atheist friends, whatever. It's the theology that I'm concerned with.

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And so, like a traditional Catholic says, so God, Matt admits he's never been a member of God's one true church.

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You know, it's just, this guy doesn't have all his theological paws in the litter box. Okay, what kind of fallacy is that that he just did?

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I'm not even sure, actually. It's a form of begging the question. It's not he starts with it.

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Well, yeah, he's doing that. He's assuming it, which isn't the case, but yeah. And so I don't hate

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Catholics. And people say, oh, you hate Catholics. No, I don't hate Catholics. I hate Roman Catholicism. I hate the theology.

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And I say that to people on the radio. I'll say it regularly. Folks, I'm against Roman Catholicism.

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I'm not against Roman Catholics. It's the Catholic theology that I'm against. I was never a

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Catholic. No Catholic beat me up, and I got to resent, you know, resentment or something. No, it's purely a theological issue.

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So there you go. That's it. Yes. And this seems to be a thing on social media these days is that you can't just disagree without having some reason why you were hurt by someone to disagree or something like that, or the argument that you must have some reason for pointing out that you disagree with someone.

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Yeah. And people say, well, what reasons have you got?

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And I go, Karnberg slash Roman hyphen Catholicism. Click. You know, I've done my research.

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I've written a great deal on it. You know, I've compared what they teach against Scripture. I've gone to Vatican website.

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I've looked at their documents. I've gone to the catechism. I've looked at Trent. I've got Trent documents in different forms on my computer.

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I mean, I do my research. I've got catechisms from the Catholic Church, different ones. I've gone through and looked.

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Ott's book, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. I've got Vatican II documents in, you know, hard, not hardback, but paperback form.

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I do my research. That's all it is. And now there are some Catholics who are real, you know, buttheads.

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That's true. But that doesn't mean Catholicism is true or false. So the thing is, it's just a theological issue.

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Roman Catholicism is apostate. It's in the service of the Antichrist. It's leading people to eternal damnation, teaches idolatry, teaches, you know, synergistic soteriology, which means you have to cooperate with God in order to be saved.

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You're saved by good works. It anathematizes the gospel. It's just a false church, and everybody should abandon it and leave that great whore of theological adultery.

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And that's my position. I wish you would really just make it clear what you think. Oh, I could say it much stronger.

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Yeah, you have at different times. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there seems to be an,

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I don't know if you've noticed this, but just seems recently the Catholics kind of went on like a 20 -year quiet period.

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I don't know. Maybe it's with this new Pope or what. I don't know that all of a sudden they're coming out of the woodworks and starting to want to debate again and promote

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Catholicism. Well, in order to debate Catholics, you have to understand the nuances of definitions and the shades of meanings in those definitions that they will play with while they're debating.

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And that's very necessary to understand some things.

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And so over the years, the past few years, I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of Catholics in a lot of areas.

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And so any weak areas of my knowledge have been, as far as I'm concerned, plugged. Of course, there's always things, more things to learn.

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You know what one Pope said, I don't know, you know. But the basics of what the

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Catholic Church teaches is there's some good and there's some bad.

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It teaches the doctrine of the Trinity, the hypostatic union. That's good. The physical resurrection of Christ. That's good. And then it quickly departs from those and promotes the goddess

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Hilary, even though they say she's not a goddess, but functionally she is, and changes the grace of God into works.

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And I'm working on an article on that. Does the Roman Catholic Church change God's grace into man's works?

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And the answer is yes. And I've said it over the radio and I've said it here and other places that I believe, and this is my opinion,

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I believe that there are demonic forces having free reign in the the clergy there and getting disseminated down to the

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Roman Catholic Church of the people to further their damnation. And I believe that.

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Can I prove it? No. But that's what I believe, and I do so based on the fact that the

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Roman Catholic Church teaches so many flaming heresies. And why else?

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You know, it's not from God, so it has to be from someplace else. Okay. Yeah, and we'll give a shout out to Navitimer, I think it was 1884, he says,

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Catholics claim they give us the Bible, yet they don't even follow it.

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So sad how they are misled in their abuse, abuse, sacraments, and heretical beliefs, and we thank you for the fine knowledge you donated.

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Thanks a lot. That's right. Now there's a guy inside here, he says, he said,

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Andrew, I understand that you're hoping a Catholic will be on the show to debate Matt on some particular theological issues. I want to give you and Matt the opportunity to question me about views if you care to.

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So who is this guy? This is the guy that in the chat, they named him, was it,

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I don't even remember what they called him, a bald, angry atheist, I think was, but this is

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John the Atheist. Oh, okay. So yeah, let's go, let's first go in order.

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We'll just see, I'm going to unmute Kat, see if she has any questions. She didn't say she had any, but you're unmuted if you want to ask any questions,

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Kat. Oh, thank you ever so, no, it wasn't the question as much as one of my favorite scriptures is 1

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Corinthians 13, 13, and I know why I enjoy that, and I was just wondering why the two of you, like, what is your take on that?

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How do you interpret that? I mean, it doesn't seem like it's a big, moving scripture, but just, you know, what it is, you know, you think that it's speaking to us or to you guys in general?

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Well, it says, but now faith, hope, love abides these three degrees. So this is love. Well, I believe it. I don't know about Andrew, but, you know,

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I believe it. Love of a good lunch? No, he doesn't love me. No, no, no. He outsmarts me and buys my lunch for me, dinners and things like that.

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It makes me look bad, feel bad. Oh, obviously he doesn't know what that verse means. So, you know, he's got issues.

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Well, yeah, actually, I think, I think let's play something that was said on the, on the council. Let's play this.

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Was Andrew the one that helped you get the podcast back up? Yeah, he did get the podcast. He didn't help me, he did it.

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Don't you think you owe him a dinner for that? Oh, no, he didn't.

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That's right. That was a good one from the guys at the council. It was all in fun.

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They don't know. I've been telling the story about Manti because you had been outsmarting me.

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I hate to admit it, but it's true. I'd smarted me on different things. And so you weren't feeling particularly well one night.

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We're coming back from Manti, went to McDonald's. And so, you know,

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I go, okay, I'm buying my own stinking dinner. Get out of here and try to buy yours, but you already paid for yours.

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So, okay. And so then I put my card in, I can't believe I did this, put my card in and I did whatever

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I had to do, or I did something, but I was mocking you about, I was, I was mocking you. You're not buying my dinner.

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Ha, ha, ha. I do all the thing. The lady gives me the number and I gives me a cup, you know, and I go over to get my my iced tea, whatever it was.

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And she goes, Hey, your card didn't go through and you're right there next to it. I go, no.

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So you went by your card, you put it, I couldn't get back in time. So it was funny.

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There is a Bible verse that perfectly answers that what happened there at that McDonald's pride goes before the fall.

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That's true. That is true. You were just gloating and your card.

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I was, I was gloating. Yeah. You were over getting soda. And Nathan is like, your card didn't work.

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It was like slow motion. I'm running over. And I'm like, Oh. It was pretty funny though.

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I've already got a big kick out of it because this is what happened. Even though the joke was on me, it still was pretty funny.

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So we had probably one of the best people in the order behind the counter.

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She was great. She was ripping on me, right? Yeah. So back to you.

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So there's the atheist guys in there. I don't know what he wants to talk about. He wants to have a subjectivity and objectivity.

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I remember that now. This is the gentleman who had to take calls from his wife. So Kat, do you have anything for us tonight or no?

15:13

Well, no, I just asked about your take on the scripture, but it sounds like John might have something far deeper.

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So we can tackle that later if you want. It was just opinions. And we're going to, we'll try to go in order.

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But yeah, so I guess I will, if you don't have anything, let me turn up Marco's volume and add him in here.

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So Marco, you're, you can unmute yourself. How are you doing,

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Matt? All right. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Like that's grace. Good, man.

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So what do you got? You got your rum DNC hat on? Is that what you got there? No, it's just a party picture that I have with my wife.

16:00

Okay. I was going to ask a question regarding to your article that you have, why

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Jesus was baptized. Yeah. I'm kind of confused into the relationship between Jesus being a high priest under the order of Mark, but you're saying that he had to go, he had to go through all this, the sprinkling of the water, the 30 years old of age and everything.

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It seems like that's by the law, but he said that came before the law. So I'm trying to understand if he was a high priest under Melchizedek's lineage, then why does it have to require the law?

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It seems, it seems to me that he was born in the law of Galatians 4 .4, and he had to complete the requirements of the law.

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He came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Matthew 5 .17, I think made under the law of Galatians 4 .4.

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So under the law, he was obligated to do those things that the law required. And in order to enter the priesthood, he had to fulfill the

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Old Testament requirements. He said in John 5 .39, the scriptures are about him.

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So therefore, we look at the Old Testament, we see that the sacrificial system was typological about the true sacrifice of Christ and the priesthood of the

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Old Testament representative of the true priesthood of Christ. So we look at it that way, then everything falls in place.

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So he was just fulfilling the Old Testament laws. And when John the Baptist said that, you know,

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Jesus need to baptize him, Jesus said, no, let us fulfill all righteousness. Fulfill refers to the law.

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So he had to fulfill that law. That's what he came to do. All right.

17:52

And I had another question about marriage theology. I heard you saying that you were going to speak about marriage theology one day.

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About marriage. Oh, the theology of marriage. Yeah. Do you speak Spanish? Yes, I do.

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Yeah. I'm going to tell you, you mix your verbs. I'm going to teach on that tomorrow night.

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I'm working on the outline and things like that. So I'll be doing a thing and then I'm going to work on it and get to release it.

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In a book form, if it's okay. Because there's a lot to it.

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It's going to take me an hour and a half to two hours to go through it. Yeah, in our church, there's a lot of people that have marriage problems, and I'm trying to help people out.

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And I would like to learn a little bit about the theology they have. Well, what church you go to?

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Where are you? Right now, I'm in a church called International House of Prayer.

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Where? What makes you do that? It's in Elizabethton, New Jersey. Oh, okay.

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Did you say the International House of Prayer? Yes, it's a church.

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Yes, the IHOP. That's bad. Yeah, I heard a lot of things.

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Yeah. Yeah, you want to... That's another topic regarding the marriage thing.

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The way I do it is when I teach this... And let me say how I got to this point of doing it this way.

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And please understand, I am not saying my way is the right way. And if you don't do it the way I do it, that's not right.

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I'm not saying that at all. Not at all. It's just that over the years, as I've done a lot of counseling on that couch back there with people in different places

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I've lived, I've counseled people. And the first time I ever did this, I was talking to a guy in Escondido, California.

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And he and his wife were having problems. His wife wasn't there. And he came over early. And she's going to be there an hour later.

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And we're just talking. And I was listening to him discuss some things. And it occurred to me he didn't understand a certain theological principle about marriage.

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And so he said something else. It's another issue, but it was theological. And I thought,

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I wonder. So I said, let me lay something down for you. And what I did was, I didn't even know I was doing it. But I started teaching theology about the

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Trinity and marriage stuff. I just gleaned over the years reading the scriptures for about 15 minutes, 15, 20 minutes.

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And when I was done, I hadn't even addressed the issue of his marriage problems. Literally, he said to me, oh, now

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I see what I'm doing wrong. And I'll never forget that. And so I'm like, what?

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And he goes, yeah, because, and the light went on. And so that was an accident.

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And so over the years, what I've done is that. And so what I'm going to do tomorrow night is start off with what marriage is.

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It's a three -way covenant. And then I'm going to go into the Trinitarian basis of marriage.

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But I have to talk about God, the nature of God in that. And what marriage is, is a reflection of the character of God.

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And then how God set things up in Genesis, in marriage. What it is,

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Adam and Eve, we learn what the design of marriage is there. And a lot of people don't know what's in it.

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And then the effect of the fall on marriage. You know, it's men and women. And I'll get into the

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New Testament requirements of husbands and wives and their roles in marriage. And then the applications of it in various issues of marriage.

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I'll deal with things like conflict resolution, the true nature of love or resentment, self -justification.

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These are things that I've learned that people have in marriage conflicts. They have a deficit and a misunderstanding.

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The deficit is they don't understand what love truly is and forgiveness truly is. And they don't relate it to Christ sufficiently.

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And the misunderstanding that they have is that they have a right to be angry. A wrong suffered by them from their spouse.

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And I go theologically into the issue of forgiveness and redemption that is in Christ. And we don't have that right to do that.

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And talk about these things and the issue of confession. So this is the basic kind of a thing that I do. It's a theological premise that must be laid and then go into the issues of redemptive work.

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Later on, if that makes sense. It makes sense. I would like to hear more about that.

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That was Emma. I'll let you deal with John. All right. Hey, before you go,

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Marco, you know, I'm in Jersey. So if you want to talk more in depth on some of the things with marriage and other stuff, you could feel free to reach out to me.

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So sure. Through where? Through your website is striving for eternity. For training .org

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or, you know, you could just shoot me an email. Andrew at striving for eternity .org. Be happy to get together with you.

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Oh, thank you, Andrew. All right. Well, I'm going to add John in and let's see.

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Is his his volume is up. And so,

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John, welcome back. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Matt. Yeah.

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Can you get closer to your mic? Is that any better? Much better. Yes. Yeah. All right.

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So your phone is off. Your wife's not going to call. Hopefully not going to call you.

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I let her know. It's like I said before, I got like a hard cut off of a 30.

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I pushed that back a little bit. I'm going to need to leave in about 20 minutes or so. OK. But I understood you had some questions or you want to interrogate me on my position and didn't get the chance to do so.

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Because I don't remember. I know Andrew had some some questions, too, but.

24:23

Yeah, Matt, to refresh your memory, and I'm looking for my notes, actually, because I did have notes from that.

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But Matt, he was talking about objective morality. Yeah, I remember that.

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And yeah, but I already dealt with it and showed him, you know, that he's trying to make everything subjective so that it doesn't have any true meaning.

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But the problem is that God is the ontological essence of truth.

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He is the truth. Truth is that which conforms to the mind of God. He's absolute and immutable and eternal.

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And then morality is the reflection of his character, which is absolute. So to say it's subjective to him as though it could be something else is not correct.

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It's absolute and necessary by his nature and his essence. And he reveals that to us. And then it's an objective reality to us, and we are obligated to follow it, especially atheists.

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Because if you don't, then you will never know the need for redemption in Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead.

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And you're going to go to hell forever if you don't repent of your great sin and rebellion against God.

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And your, no offense meant, your arrogant justification of your atheistic morality in an attempt to exclude

25:37

God. Your machinations won't accomplish that. Okay.

25:54

Yeah. You have any questions for me or anything like that?

26:00

I mean, I can rebut if you want, but I just want to give you the last word because you didn't get that opportunity last time.

26:08

Whatever. I mean, you want to talk more? Ask something. If you don't, you know, we move on to somebody else.

26:13

That's fine. You are lost. And it's not me condemning you.

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It's not me mocking you. It's you're in a state of rebellion against the true and living God. You know that there's moral absolutes.

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We talked about it. You contradicted yourself about the issue of, you know, it's always wrong for anyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure.

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You said yes. And then you try to defend your inconsistency. But because you're an atheist, your mind is given over to the judgment of your hostility towards God.

26:46

The judgment is found and revealed in Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 31. You should check it out. Oh, I've checked it.

26:52

I'm very familiar with the Bible. I was raised, you know, in a sort of Christian home.

27:00

Not exactly. I'm sure you're well familiar with the kind of upbringing

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I had knowing your ministry against Mormonism. And Mormonism is just a cult.

27:17

And it's just a cult. It's a cult that's loosely based upon biblical

27:24

Christianity. It's a major non -religion or non -Christian cult.

27:30

OK, but what I meant by it's just a cult is in the sense theologically you are not exposed to the truth.

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You're exposed to legalism, false gospel, condemnation of the truth, a God from another planet, alien theology because he's from another planet.

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It just screws with people's brains. And as is often the case with Mormons, unfortunately, because Mormonism teaches not to look at facts, not look at evidence, not look at scripture, but look at feelings.

27:58

You know, James 1 .5, you know, if any of you lack wisdom, wear the mask of God. You know, this testimony thing. I bear my testimony to you.

28:04

Joseph Smith is a true prophet. The Book of Mormon is a true book, etc. On Testimony Sunday. And so when you found out

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Mormonism was false or however it worked with you, as is typical with Mormons, not to say it is what happened with you, but it's pretty typical that they become atheists because their hearts have been betrayed.

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And so they judge truth by their feelings. So they turn to their feelings. The same thing led them astray in order to determine another truth.

28:28

It's completely inconsistent, but that's what happens. I would say that might be what happens for some people.

28:34

That's not what happened in my case. Okay. But, you know, I definitely can agree with you.

28:40

That definitely does happen with some people. Yeah. I would take issue with your mischaracterizing my position with respect to absolute morality.

28:55

But we already went over that. I don't think we need to go over that again. No, you wanted your idea, if I can, if I understand it correctly, is that the idea that God's morals are subjected to himself, so therefore it's subjective.

29:07

You want to say all morality is subjective and not absolute, right? Basically, yes.

29:13

So you want to say all morality is not absolute, right? That's correct.

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By its very nature of what it is, it cannot be anything but.

29:24

So all morals are subjective, right? That is correct. Okay. So the statement that all morals are subjective is a moral statement, isn't it?

29:34

No, that is a truth statement. That's not a moral statement. So does truth carry morality value when we're talking about morals?

29:44

No, it doesn't. It doesn't? So when we talk about truth as a moral truth, there's no moral value because even though we say you're saying all morals are subjective, that has no moral value in it.

29:59

That's correct. Okay. Wow. So a statement about morality doesn't deal with morality.

30:06

It doesn't deal with any kind of judgment of value. Yes, it does.

30:12

Yes, it does. No, it doesn't. Absolute values versus subjective values. You're saying there's no such thing as absolute moral value.

30:18

That's a moral judgment. No, it's not a moral judgment. It's simply an evaluative judgment.

30:23

Does this correspond to reality or not? So the Christian God is infinite and absolute and eternal.

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And the Christian God reveals morals based out of his character. So therefore, those morals are absolute and invariant, and you're obligated to follow them.

30:44

Yeah, I understand that that's the position. And it may actually be true that I'm obligated to follow them.

30:50

It may be that, I mean, certainly from the Christian doctrine, they are absolute and universal.

30:56

They apply to everyone except God, apparently. You know, you just completely don't understand the issue yet again.

31:04

They apply to God as if there's some principles that God himself must be subject to. You don't understand the Christian issue.

31:10

The Christian issue is their revelation of his character, of his essence, of his nature. That's how he is.

31:18

It's what he is. He reveals morality based out of his character. He's not subject to those things.

31:25

He just is that. It's a wrong statement on your behalf to say that. Okay, and I can definitely understand your position there.

31:34

I agree that if it's something that is, you know, part of his character intrinsically, then it's not something that he would be subject to any more than any part of character that you might have, you would be, you know, subject to.

31:49

It's just simply who you are. Right. Therefore, since he's the ontological source of our morals, all morals, all absolute morals exist because they reflect their absolute in his character and their objective to us, correct?

32:05

I would disagree with your characterization of them being objective to us. That was a big issue

32:10

I had with your terminology. Well, it's your terminology that's the problem. Objective means it's not dependent upon our subjective belief or existence or anything like that.

32:20

They're objective morals because they rest in the character of God who is independent of us. We're contingent upon him.

32:25

He's not contingent upon us. And so therefore, by definition, the morals that come from him are objective to us.

32:33

And I would disagree with that characterization of objective. But again, we're just retreading old ground there.

32:40

Yeah, well, that's what objectivity means. And the fact is that what you want to do is you're trying to control

32:47

God and the truth concerning God by your definitions the way you want them.

32:52

Actually, no, I disagree. I'm not trying to control God at all. I'm simply determined what the truth is without presupposing as Van Til and Greg Brunson and you do that God is and God has these characteristics and God is the ontological source of all truth.

33:12

Do you presuppose evolution is true? No, I don't. Do you believe evolution is true?

33:19

I am inclined to think that it's probably true, but I don't know. On what evidence? Upon the evidence that the scientists who have investigated evolution have presented.

33:30

Again, I don't, I wouldn't. Have you tested the evidence? I have looked at some small portion of the evidence, but.

33:40

So have you tested all evidences, looked at all evidences? Oh, of course not. So it's an issue of faith.

33:45

You presuppose that they're honest. You presuppose that the evidence is true. That's where the interpretation of the facts is at.

33:52

So everybody has assumptions. You do that. As a

33:57

Christian, I assume God's existence and when I do, everything makes sense. If we assume your position, things don't make sense.

34:04

Nothing makes sense from your position, your atheistic position. And I would definitely disagree with that. You're, you come from a position where you're looking for certainty.

34:12

And as a polygraph like Bantilla found, you can't get certainty unless you presuppose an ontological absolute truth in God.

34:24

And even then, that's from my position, from what I can understand about how we think, how we make the decisions, how we understand things, even that is an error.

34:36

That we don't, we can't simply presuppose and actually arrive at any kind of deductive truth.

34:44

We can't? How do you know that? Again, this is not something that I know in an absolute certainty way.

34:52

So you presuppose it then. No, it's something that I believe as a matter of induction.

35:01

So it's like you presuppose it. Induction is based on subjective experience. That's correct. And so I don't presuppose it.

35:08

I base it upon my experience. So it's more like what you call a methodological...

35:15

So you trust your experience to judge God's existence. I trust my experience to judge anything that is presented to me.

35:25

So if, for example, God were to present himself in some way to me in some manner that I can't, you know, deny that that's actually

35:34

God, I wouldn't have any reason to deny that. But to my experience so far, that hasn't been the case.

35:42

So you judge all things by your own subjective experience. I would say absolutely everybody does, whether or not they will admit it or...

35:51

I asked you about you. You can't say to everybody, you can't speak to everybody. You don't know how everybody is.

35:57

So you can't project your personal experience upon everybody and say, that's how everybody else is because that's how I am.

36:03

That's a fallacy of logic. I asked you specifically about yourself. That's what you do, though. It's not a fallacy of logic.

36:11

It's simply a statement based on induction, again. No. This is the way

36:16

I believe, and this is the way I think. I look at the way other people think, and because we're all human beings, we seem to think and acquire knowledge the same way.

36:26

And so in absence of any evidence to the contrary, then that's where my position resides.

36:33

So what you're doing, what you're doing... Matt, I'm going to have to speak over on Matt Pacino. Okay. So what you're doing is you're using your subjective experience to determine absolute truth.

36:44

Again, I'm not determining absolute truth. I'm determining probabilistic truth, what seems to me most likely the case.

36:53

So most likely. So what's most likely probable is what you experience. The conclusions that I arrive at are what

37:01

I determine to be most probable based on the information I have. But that's a big reservation.

37:07

It's like, I don't know everything. I can't know everything. I'm limited by the subjectivity of my experience.

37:14

And there's no way for me to know everything. So if you don't know, and you're limited by your own subjective experience, and you cannot project onto anybody else any valid truth based on your personal experience.

37:27

I can't project any kind of absolute certainties, but I can say, okay, based on what it seems other people are in general, human beings like myself, and based on how

37:41

I understand that I learned things and how other people have told me they learned things, specifically neuroscientists and other people who are involved with, you know, how do people learn that this is most likely the case.

37:53

I mean, if there is other evidence that can be presented to me that makes more sense, which answers better the questions of how people learn, then

38:04

I would accept that. But to this point, I've not seen that. So what you just said, you don't project any, you don't believe in absolute truths because it's all subjective experience, yet you are sure there's no, there are no objective truths.

38:21

It is an absolute, so you're contradicting yourself. No, I'm not saying I'm sure that there's no objective truth.

38:27

I'm saying that the correspondence theory of truth is that something corresponds to a standard.

38:35

And as I mentioned before, if something exists, then the correspondence theory of truth says any proposition which corresponds to existence is true.

38:44

The problem with that is your standard can only be subjective based on you. So all you have, what your position leads to is circularity, where you're just chasing your own tail.

38:55

The subjectivity of your own experience is what you conclude about others. Because why? Because that's your own personal experience.

39:01

And so that's how others have got to be. Why? Because that's your own personal experience that you apply your rationality to based on your personal experience.

39:09

You don't know if your personal experience is normative. You don't know if your personal experience is accurate. You just think your personal experience is the way by which you're to judge truth.

39:17

And that has all kinds of problems. Empiricism is refuted in that because it just means that subjectivity, it means your own subjectivity is subjective.

39:26

You can't even know if your subjectivity is true. So therefore, you don't even know if your position that you're espousing is true. What you're left with is nothing.

39:33

And then what you're left with is your arbitrary decision to believe whatever you want. And at that point, it's not an issue of logic anymore.

39:39

It's just an issue of your subjective preferences and what you want. And I don't want to argue with someone who's just going to ignore the rules of logic, the laws of logic, offer inconsistencies like you just did, and then just come back with this is subjective, whatever you want.

39:51

It's just, it's useless. You're just going in circles. Well, so the problem with what you said was that I'm left with nothing because I can't be certain.

39:59

And that's simply just not the case. You are absolutely certain? No, I'm not saying

40:05

I'm absolutely certain. I'm saying that I'm not left with nothing because I don't have certainty or absolute certainty.

40:12

You have any absolute certainty in anything? I would say the only thing that I would say

40:18

I have absolute certainty on is my own existence. How do you know you exist?

40:24

Because I'm aware of the fact that I exist. I'm self -aware. That's the only thing

40:30

I can know. So you don't know if anybody else exists then? I don't have any absolute knowledge.

40:38

That's correct. So you don't know if you're not just a brain in a vat someplace? I don't have any absolute certainty that that's the case.

40:45

I suspect that that's most likely not the case. I mean, it would be difficult for me to explain how other people could have other thoughts and ideas that I'm just manufacturing from my imagination.

40:58

But I can't rule that out entirely. You don't know if other people exist, if any crews actually exist, if you're really yourself or just a programmed whatever to think about yourself as being what you are.

41:10

You don't know if you're any particular location. You can't know anything for sure. That's basically true.

41:17

And I believe it's also true of everybody. And so now you don't know if it's true, but you believe it's true of everybody else.

41:25

That's correct. I don't know with absolute certainty. Okay. Okay. Well, welcome to, you know, the solipsism and your old, you know, your world of self -doubt, of lack of knowledge, and a life of inconsistency.

41:43

You rationalize what you want in order to have what you want. And God's given you what you want. You want independence from him.

41:50

And you want a world where you are the king, where you are the determiner of truth, where you are the one who determines what is morally right.

41:59

Because in your personal experience, you subject others to what you think is true, what you think is right.

42:06

And in your solipsistic world, if people don't know what that is, that the mind is one person's mind, he doesn't know if anything else exists outside of himself.

42:13

He's just by himself. That's solipsism. You can't even determine whether your solipsistic idea is true or not.

42:19

There are ways to refute it, but it doesn't make any difference because you're so engrossed and so entrapped in your own solipsism that basically you got nothing.

42:28

You got nothing to offer except doubt, uncertainty, no moral absolutes, and your personal opinions that you want to impose and argue about with other people.

42:39

And you know what? I'm not interested in that. Okay, that's fine. I just wanted to give you the opportunity in case you've seen my last time.

42:48

You seem like you had more to say and I just wanted to give you the opportunity. Well, I just want people to hear the absurdity of the position you hold and what it leads to.

42:57

So anyway, it's called solipsism, folks. And he's a solipsist, which... John, wait.

43:04

Go ahead. No, go ahead. Okay. So John, let me ask you this from your discussion last time with Matt.

43:11

You were basically trying to say that where there's a majority, that's where we're going to get our morality from.

43:18

In other words, when Matt was asking about laws and things like that, you were saying it's based on consensus.

43:23

Is that correct? So I want to be very clear and precise on this. When two people are together, they come to a consensus of agreement in order to behave in a peaceful manner.

43:39

Then that's what morality is, is basically the consensus of agreement on what behavior is allowable and what's not.

43:46

When a society comes together, it's basically the same thing. Okay.

43:52

So let's take a classic society. It's always used, right? Nazi Germany. Can we say that that's right when the society agreed with it?

44:03

Or, you know... We can say that as far as the society, Nazi Germany was concerned, from their perspective, it was right.

44:12

From the perspective of greater Europe and the Western civilization, most of the world, it wasn't right.

44:18

And we fought a war over it for that reason. But if your view is correct, then it would have been wrong for the

44:25

Americans to come in and try to force their subjective morality on someone else, would it not?

44:33

So basically, in that situation, you're saying who has the right to do that.

44:40

And it's kind of like what I was trying to say when, let's say, the whole society was saying, it's okay to cause harm to babies.

44:51

And I said, no, my personal opinion is that that's never right. And I would enforce my personal opinion that all was wrong to harm babies on them, whether or not the majority of society agreed with it or not.

45:07

Yeah, but if it's completely subjective, then if it's right for someone else, you should have no...

45:14

It should be... It's wrong for you to enforce your subjective morality on someone else.

45:20

And so, if I'm in a situation where I am not able to enforce my morality on them, and they're not able to enforce their morality on me, because we're not able to come to an agreement or a consensus, then

45:36

I have to not be in that society, or I impose it upon other people based on my own sense, just like they would try to do upon me.

45:46

Okay, so in that final scenario that you described, then is it that might makes right if the one who can enforce the morality wins, and that makes it right?

45:58

It doesn't make it right, but that is what would happen. In the instance that Matt brought up in the first conversation we had, if somebody comes into the house and puts a gun, and they have the gun, and I just don't have anything, then might make right in the sense that he wins, but it doesn't make right in the sense of any kind of absolute, this is the moral right, or this is the moral wrong.

46:24

Okay, so let me ask the question Matt asked a different way. Is the act of rape always wrong?

46:35

So again, when you're asking, is it always wrong? It has to be compared to a standard if you're going to ask a question of, is it right or is it wrong?

46:45

So if you're asking it according to the standard that you and Matt believe in, the standard of God, as revealed by the

46:54

Bible and such teachings of the Christian church, then it is always wrong, except that I have to say, is it really, when you look at the

47:03

Old Testament? Yeah, there's nowhere in the Bible where it encourages rape.

47:08

I never said that it encourages rape, but there are places in the Bible where it certainly allows for it under certain circumstances.

47:16

No. Here's the thing. Your argument ultimately comes down to might makes right.

47:27

When it can't be decided in a mutual way, and that therefore says rape is right, because rape is always that the stronger wins.

47:39

It's always the mightier wins. If the guy is stronger, he rapes her. If the girl is stronger, she gets out of there.

47:46

So in your view, you could never say rape is wrong. I'm not saying that might makes right.

47:55

I'm saying that might wins, but what's right or wrong, again, in terms of morality, would be a matter of consensus.

48:03

No, but it can't be consensus if you're saying that if a stronger person can force it, because you keep saying it's not right, but you have nothing you can appeal to.

48:15

This is the thing Matt was trying to convey to you. You can't appeal to anything to say it's right or wrong, because once you say it's your subjective morality, and now you're trying to place it on someone else, you can't do that because their subjective morality says it's perfectly fine.

48:31

That's the whole point that Matt was trying to show you how it's circular. I mean, can you prove that your view of secular, sorry,

48:41

I said secular. It wasn't that your view of subjective morality, can you prove that that's right from your view?

48:53

When you say prove that it's right, do you mean prove that it's morally right? Prove to me that your view is correct without appealing to something outside of myself.

49:04

In other words, don't appeal to something that's objective, only appeal to your subjectiveness. Can you do it?

49:11

I'm trying to understand the question. I'm sorry. So can you convince me that something is wrong?

49:19

The argument I was giving you earlier with Nazi Germany, you were actually arguing, and you should go check out the Nuremberg trials.

49:25

You were actually arguing for what the Germans argued in the Nuremberg trials. Their view was completely subjective and that no other country should hold them accountable for what they subjectively agreed to as a nation.

49:38

That's your argument. You actually are arguing Nazi Germany's argument in the Nuremberg trials, the Germans that were caught.

49:45

And yet you say we should step in because it's wrong. But there is no wrong in that scenario that you can apply to them because you haven't agreed.

49:58

The America and Europe, they didn't sit there and sit down and have a consensus. They forced it because they felt that it was wrong.

50:05

And in Nuremberg, the argument made was because there are universal, absolute things that everyone knows is right and wrong.

50:12

That was the argument there. And I understand that that was the argument.

50:18

But basically what happened was the majority of society, world society said, no, you're wrong,

50:27

Germany. What you were doing was wrong and we're going to impose our will and our morality upon you whether or not you agree.

50:35

And I'm saying in that case, might wins. But in terms of moral right and wrong, it's morality is defined by the majority in the society.

50:47

In this case, it was the world. But in terms of an absolute morality, there isn't any such thing under, by my understanding, there simply isn't any such thing.

50:58

It's all subjective. But if it's subjective, then it would be wrong to force your morality on someone else because there's a subjective too.

51:09

Once you've done that, you're appealing to something outside of subjectivity. You're saying that something is wrong for someone else.

51:16

This is what Matt was trying to convey to you. Well, I understand that from their perspective, from even in the example, if I'm the only person that objects to harming babies, from the perspective of society, it would be wrong for me to attempt to force my will upon them and keep them from harming babies.

51:39

But while that is the case that from that society's point of view, that would be morally wrong for me to do, it's not going to change the fact that when there is a disagreement between what

51:49

I firmly believe is right and wrong and what society might firmly believe is right and wrong, if I believe it's passionately enough that this is something that I just can't allow,

51:59

I will step in. And that's what America and the allied forces did in the case of Germany.

52:06

They said, no, this is not okay. Yeah, and this is what scares me for America right now is the thinking that you have, because this is, your thinking is what brought us

52:17

Nazi Germany. And you're saying that America did right. And what did America do? They appeal to what

52:22

Matt and I are arguing, that there is an absolute right and wrong. And what Germany had to be stopped because they appeal to an objective truth, not an objective morality, not a subjective one.

52:36

And what I, you know, it can't seem to get you to understand is that what you can't, once you say that all morality is subjective, then there is no way to apply it to other people.

52:49

Because what you're doing is forcing your morality on someone else, but it doesn't, it's right for them.

52:54

So you would be doing wrong by forcing your morality on them because it's right to them.

53:02

Because every murderer thinks he's right. Every rapist thinks he's right. And while I agree that anybody who's like a person, a murderer or rapist in most instances, there are some who actually believe that they're wrong, but simply feel like they can't help themselves.

53:23

But yeah, sure. They may think that they're right. But as a society, we disagree with them.

53:31

And so we'll do our best to stop them from doing so. That's the whole point of morality is that we are basically saying, these are the rules for living peaceably with one another.

53:44

And if we can't come to an agreement, then the only other resort we have is either separating ourselves or engaging in force.

53:52

And in some cases, we might feel like engaging in force to protect those who are being harmed is the right thing to do.

54:00

In other times, we might feel like it's more prudent to simply separate ourselves and not engage.

54:07

So let me ask you a question. Do you support abortion? Under some limited circumstances,

54:15

I do. Do you support the America changing laws to allow abortion?

54:21

Depending on how those laws might happen. Roe versus Wade. I think

54:26

Roe versus Wade was mostly right, but still not quite there. The whole question of viability was against it.

54:35

The majority of America was against it? The majority of America may sometimes be against what is, in principle, the best thing for individual liberty.

54:51

And we live under a system of government which holds that as its highest values.

54:58

And so in that sense, it seemed like it was the correct decision on the part of the

55:03

Supreme Court. But again, we could have simply enacted an amendment to the

55:10

Constitution. Which would have forbidden it. John. The point...

55:16

Go ahead, Kat. No, I'm sorry. I was trying to squeak in real quick. I wanted to know, John, from your point of view then, what are, for you, the circumstances that are okay to have an abortion?

55:30

For you, in your opinion, what are those circumstances? So the way I looked at it, because I don't see that there is a material difference between a fertilized egg and an embryo that has not yet developed sentiency, does not have the ability to have cognition, that up to that point, it would be permissible.

56:01

Also, if the life of the prospective mother or woman is in danger, that would be a permissible time.

56:11

I would not say that it's permissible under any other circumstances other than her own survival or her long -term health after the point where the embryo or fetus develops sentiency.

56:25

That's basically where my position is. Okay, so I want to keep going down the line of thinking with you.

56:32

So you say that voting for... that a few judges on a court have the right to overturn the majority of people that have consensus.

56:46

So basically, in that particular instance, what the

56:52

Supreme Court was doing was affirming the liberty of the woman to obtain an abortion despite the will of the majority of people to the contrary in a particular issue where her liberty was being unjustly, in their view, curtailed.

57:13

Okay, so I'm going to disagree with that. That's an assumption, but let's go to one that's clearer. Let's go to Prop 8.

57:21

Prop 8 was put to vote by the Californians. Overwhelmingly voted down.

57:27

One judge overturned it. Was he wrong? So again, one judge overturned

57:34

Proposition 8. Was he wrong in the sense of did he violate the

57:41

Constitution of California? I don't know. According to your subjective morality.

57:47

So according to your subjective morality, if the majority is having consensus and there's no argument, therefore, there shouldn't be any...

57:59

there should not be any reason that they try to change these laws. Here you have one person, one judge that has the ability to overturn a majority vote.

58:10

The consensus was against them. So if you're going to stay consistent, you have to say that judge is wrong.

58:17

I don't have to say the judge is wrong if that is a power or something that the judge actually was provided through the

58:27

Constitution. I don't know enough about the circumstances. Actually, the

58:34

Constitution is basically the agreement with the people and those that govern in the positions of power, judges, executive branch, the legislative branch, and so on.

58:45

Yeah, and a judge doesn't have the ability to do legislation. Let me give a quick shout out.

58:52

It's so hard for me to read the font. But Navitimer 1884 gave $10 and said,

59:00

Matt, from the standpoint of apologetics, you can suggest a good way to explain to a non -believer why we who are in Christ believe what we believe.

59:16

And so Matt ended up stepping away. I'll ask him that one again. Matt had to step away to get a phone call.

59:22

So the thing is this, John, is when it came to Germany, you'd say it was wrong and we have to force our view even though there's a consensus.

59:33

Here, I give you some where there's a complete consensus. A judge who is legislating, which he isn't to do, he's to interpret the law, and you don't want to say he's wrong.

59:43

You're trying to appeal that, in this case, the minority has the right. That's an inconsistency.

59:49

And this is what Matt was trying to show you the other weeks. You have a circular reasoning.

59:55

You start with the point that all morality is subjective.

01:00:01

And then what you're going to do, and anytime someone gives you some objective, you just apply that to your subjectivity.

01:00:09

But you're not consistent and it's circular reasoning. So when you have that, these are two different ways you can identify that something is wrong.

01:00:19

Circular logic and the fact that it is, that you can't stay consistent with it.

01:00:26

All right. That's why I gave you these couple scenarios, because I wanted to see if you would stay consistent. Okay.

01:00:33

And I don't know your background to know. I mean, you mentioned you were from, you know,

01:00:39

Latter -day Saint background. You said you wouldn't have the same situation like Matt described.

01:00:47

And there are many that come out of the Latter -day Saints and they turn to atheism because they're told that the

01:00:53

Bible can't be trusted. It's been corrupted. You have to trust the Book of Mormon and all their stuff, which is why

01:00:59

I would kind of side note, but when you said it's somewhat of a Christian upbringing, it really isn't because they would deny

01:01:10

Christianity and say that it fell away and that they had to restore it. Therefore it couldn't be, it's not

01:01:16

Christian. It's something different that had to be restored. But this is the thing that I would want to communicate to you.

01:01:24

It's a little bit of what Matt was saying earlier. I don't know what it is that gives you the desire that you want to try to say everything is subjective.

01:01:34

Most people, it's usually because either there's some sin in their life that they love and they just don't want to be accountable to God or they're so proud and prideful that they don't want a

01:01:47

God of the universe to tell them what to do. And therefore they want to just say everything is just the way it is.

01:01:54

When you appeal to what scientists say and when you were doing that, what you're appealing to is something objective.

01:02:01

It's outside of yourself. Now, once you take that information and you start trying to reason with it, yes, you could say that's subjective.

01:02:09

But the reality is, is that the arguments that are made are not subjective to you until you start to try to interact with them.

01:02:17

They're objective. This is the same thing with morality that you were doing when you were saying something is wrong.

01:02:22

The reason you know something is wrong is because God has given you a conscience so that you would know right from wrong, so that you would know that you've broken his law and you're not in a right state with him.

01:02:35

And the one thing I would want to communicate to you is this. Look, you've come in here.

01:02:42

I know everyone kind of jokingly named you the angry atheist. I don't see you as being angry.

01:02:51

Scripture would say you're angry against God as all unbelievers would be. But I don't see you as an angry atheist.

01:02:59

The bald part, well, sorry, that does fit. But the thing is this,

01:03:06

John, you're probably morally, compared to me, you're probably more moral than me.

01:03:13

You're probably a nicer guy than me. But the thing is this. God does not judge you and I compared to you and I.

01:03:22

He's going to judge us compared to him. That very standard that you want to deny is the standard you're going to be judged by.

01:03:28

And it is an absolute standard. It's one that's outside of yourself. And it's one that none of us can keep.

01:03:35

That's why God himself had to come and die. God himself came as a man to die in our place that though we have broken his law, we could be set free.

01:03:46

You and I both have lied, stolen, done things that are a violation of God's law.

01:03:53

Is that correct? I would say, yeah. Okay. I was thinking you were going to say yeah, because if not,

01:04:00

I was going to ask you if you're lying. So we break

01:04:05

God's law. So you and I both would be guilty, correct? According to God's standard, yes.

01:04:12

Okay. So because God is infinitely holy and infinitely just, the consequence therefore is an infinite consequence.

01:04:22

Now you and I, say you are a perfect human being. You never sinned. You would only be able to pay the consequence for one person because you're a temporal being, right?

01:04:35

So God had to come because he's fully God. He can pay an eternal fine.

01:04:41

He came as a man to live among men so that he would never break

01:04:47

God's law. Now he could be a sacrifice. And now he could be that perfect sacrifice in your place, in my place, that we could be set free.

01:04:56

So he pays that fine. Okay. And that's the difference.

01:05:01

Now, I understand that, you know, as you've been on here a couple times and you want to argue for the subjective morality, but the question

01:05:10

I really want you to ponder and think about not, you know, do it here, but the thing is this, what is it that keeps you from God?

01:05:20

What is it that gets you to where you prefer the way you're living rather than submitting to God?

01:05:28

And I don't expect you to have an answer to that here, at least because I do want you to think about it. It's an important question for you because you and I do not know what day we're going to die.

01:05:37

We do know we're going to die, right? You are going to die one day, correct? I expect so. Yeah.

01:05:43

And so 10 out of 10 people die. I don't know if you know the statistics, but about 160 ,000 people die every day.

01:05:52

And when we think about that, my challenge to you is not to brush it under the rug or think that we could play a spiritual

01:06:01

Russian roulette. Like you were saying, when it came to evolution, well, I just don't,

01:06:07

I'm not convinced yet. I don't have enough information. And that uncertainty, if you want to keep that uncertainty with God, what ends up happening is the moment you die, you get punished.

01:06:21

It's appointed to man once to die and then a judgment. And I don't want to see you being judged before God as a sinner, as someone who has to pay his fine.

01:06:31

I would like to see you, when you stand before God, hearing him say, well done, my good and faithful servant, enter into the rest.

01:06:42

That's what I'd like to hear for you. So, you know,

01:06:48

I don't, I don't know what your challenge is. And that's an internal thing for you. That is subjective.

01:06:56

But I want you to realize that you are appealing to things that are objective and absolute.

01:07:02

When you're saying that something is wrong and we have to force our will. The only way to argue for that is to argue that it's objective.

01:07:13

You're going to push your morality on someone else. That is objective to them. That's not subjective.

01:07:20

And you're appealing to it as being right for them. That's what Matt was trying to communicate to you. You're arguing that your subjective morality is right for them.

01:07:30

Does that make sense to you? I understand what you're saying. I would disagree with the terminology. Basically, I would say that it's not objective, but it's external.

01:07:42

That's, you know, being external is not the same thing as being objective. I understand you have a different position, particularly with respect to the fact that you're saying it's coming from God and God is the absolute standard.

01:07:55

And so I can understand, I think, your perspective, though I disagree with it.

01:08:02

It's with respect to my particular problem, I would say that I have a very strong love of individual liberty and autonomy.

01:08:15

And I'm kind of loath to being subject to others, and especially those which

01:08:23

I do not consider to have my best interests necessarily at heart or who are what seemed to me to be hypocritical.

01:08:31

So with respect to the Christian God, I imagine that it would take a lot of clarification of why exactly the things that are attributed to him in the

01:08:46

Old Testament are either inaccurate, they didn't really happen the way the

01:08:52

Bible says, or explained in such a way that, yeah, it makes sense that it was actually justifiable and right and not contrary to the other characteristics that are attributed to the

01:09:05

Christian God. So while I say that I'm an atheist, like I said before,

01:09:12

I'm a soft atheist. I'm not averse to the idea that there could be a supreme being out there, but I have a difficult time believing in the

01:09:21

Christian conception of that being. Okay, well,

01:09:27

I think one thing is when we look at the difference between subjective and objective, the difference is whether it's external or internal.

01:09:36

And so I would say that is the definition. Now, let me get to some of the objections. So what are some of the objections you have that you say that the

01:09:45

God has done in the Old Testament that you think is, I'm trying to remember the terminology you said,

01:09:53

I want to say you said unfair, but that wasn't it. Like wrong or. Okay.

01:09:58

So basically, there are certain qualities that 1 Corinthians elucidates about what love is.

01:10:08

Okay. And so we have 1 Corinthians 13. It goes through a whole list of what is love.

01:10:15

And then if we contrast those characteristics of what love is against some of the, what you call judgments of God in the

01:10:25

Old Testament, I'm not able to square those. Okay, give me an example.

01:10:31

Sometimes malicious, sometimes petty. And it doesn't make sense to me that a

01:10:41

God who, on the one hand, in the New Testament says, and even in the Old Testament says, love your enemies and treat them with kindness.

01:10:48

On the other hand, goes through and commands the wholesale slaughter of people.

01:10:56

And commands or basically sentences David's child to death because he committed adultery.

01:11:04

I'm unable to square those things with a kind, merciful, loving God. Okay. I'm not able to square the whole idea of absolute, total mercy with absolute total justice.

01:11:18

It seems like those are mutually contradictory. And there has to be, one has to give to the other.

01:11:24

And the idea of an intercessor in the person of Jesus Christ doesn't make sense to me.

01:11:31

Okay. So, do you think it was right for America and the allies and the

01:11:36

European to go into Germany? And was it a right thing to do?

01:11:43

Was it a just thing, I guess, more specifically? I would say that it probably was a just thing.

01:11:52

I mean, I think that there's maybe a lot of histories, a lot of history that we don't really know because it's basically told by the victors.

01:12:00

But I would say that what Germany is accused of and most probably did in their treatment of the

01:12:09

Jews and others that were sent to concentration camps and put in places where they were killed was definitely atrocious.

01:12:19

And I think we are justified in preventing them from attacking the other countries and trying to exterminate the

01:12:27

Jews. Okay. So, there is a sense of justice that could be applied to going in and taking out a country, right?

01:12:39

When they're aggressing against other peoples that are basically unable to flee and unable to defend themselves, and the country is basically, the government is, and majority of society is so hostile against them that they're willing to destroy them.

01:12:56

Yeah, I can see that. That's my position, why I would be hostile against a government that was trying to kill babies or murder babies.

01:13:06

Okay, so, therefore, the arguments in the Old Testament with the Canaanites and others are then justified because God was using a nation,

01:13:16

Israel, as his instrument to act as an element of justice.

01:13:22

So, while that might seem to make sense, it seems to me, and I might be wrong on my reading, but it seemed like his vengeance against the

01:13:32

Amalekites in particular was generations after. So, it's like people who weren't actually responsible for it and that he's punishing as a nation.

01:13:43

It doesn't make sense to me. Well. And then there's the other thing where they talk about, you know,

01:13:49

I'll answer the vengeance upon people until the third and fourth generation.

01:13:55

You know, that seemed like, you know, later on in the Old Testament, that seemed to have been changed, but it seemed like in the beginning, that's kind of how

01:14:03

God was doing things. And part of the justification against his, you know, sending the people in and destroying the

01:14:09

Amalekites. Yeah, but were the Amalekites guilty before God? Again, this goes back to the whole idea that everybody's guilty before God and God would be, quote, justified in killing everybody.

01:14:24

And that's something that I don't accept either. It doesn't make sense to me. Okay. And so, the thing is, is that everyone is guilty, but when you come to nations, right, and deal with nations.

01:14:37

So, in other words, God used the Babylonian nation as a element of justice against Israel, his own people, when they disobeyed and they violated his law and they chose that they were not, they were going to give over to their idolatry.

01:14:52

And in doing so, they were not going to honor the Jubilee year.

01:14:58

Every seventh year, they were supposed to let the land rest and have dependence on God, trusting in God. They didn't do that.

01:15:05

And because they skipped 70 of them, God said, I'm going to bring the Babylonians in. They're going to be an element of justice for Israel to take them into captivity for 70 years and to cure them of their idolatry.

01:15:20

And they did cure them. Israel has never since then had a struggle with, as far as a nation, with the issue of idolatry.

01:15:29

Legalism, yes, but idolatry, no. But God can use nations, not just Israel, but he can use the unbelieving nations as an element of justice.

01:15:41

Now, I understand from the perspective that you have, that Christians have, about God being absolutely just.

01:15:50

I mean, that seems like a presupposition rather than a conclusion. Then anything that he commands, you can kind of make sense of it.

01:15:59

But that's not a presupposition that I make. I come from the other direction where I don't presuppose.

01:16:06

I look at the evidence to say, does this suggest that God is just? Does this suggest that God is merciful?

01:16:13

Rather than presupposing and trying to fit all the evidence to that presupposition.

01:16:19

But you did do that with Nazi Germany. Well, I sort of did that, but not entirely.

01:16:25

Like I said, I'm not 100 % sure. With the idea that they're going in and wholesale slaughter the

01:16:32

Jews, rounding them up, sending them to concentration camps, killing them, it seems like that's not a good thing to do.

01:16:38

Does it mean to me that we should have then completely oppressed Germany or utterly wiped out all the people as a result of what they were doing?

01:16:48

No. No, I don't think that's the proper thing to do at all. Because the thing is that you end up seeing that with Germany, you were saying, okay, we're justified to go in to another nation and enforce our will.

01:17:07

But you're saying God doesn't have that right. But America and the allies and Europeans have that right?

01:17:14

No, what I'm saying, you're talking about whether God has the right or not. If all that God was doing was punishing those people who were harming his people or other people and not forestalling that to future generations and then saying, yeah, go ahead, then yeah, that might make some sense.

01:17:36

That might be just. But when he's punishing the great grandchildren of the people who were violent to the

01:17:44

Israelites as they came out of Egypt, that just doesn't square with me. And so when

01:17:52

I look at that, I say, is this the actions of a just God? It doesn't seem to be that that's the case.

01:17:58

But again, these are issues I have that I've been wrestling with since basically it was part of what led me out of Christianity after I left

01:18:08

Mormonism and led me away from actually diving in and saying, yeah, despite my disbelief in Joseph Smith and his church, it still embraced the

01:18:21

Bible. But I couldn't square these other things with the God of the Bible in making sense to me that this is a being that I could worship.

01:18:31

Okay. So one of the things it seems that you spent, to me at least, listening to you, you spent a lot of time trying to understand these things from an atheist worldview and not a

01:18:42

Christian worldview, that you don't understand the Christian arguments for these things. So that seems to tell me that you really weren't investigating these as thoroughly as you claim.

01:18:56

I mean, I can argue the way other people would make arguments and not have to agree with them.

01:19:02

But if I've studied them out, when I study Islam and I talk on Islam, I get plenty of Muslims that will tell me that I'm not misrepresenting the position, even though I disagree with the position.

01:19:13

The fact that you're not understanding what the Christian position is, tells me you never actually studied it out, but you just conclude it's wrong.

01:19:22

And you're doing it based on what you want. And so my challenge with that is going to be that you want to think through what the argument actually is from the

01:19:37

Christian perspective of the Christian God, before you say, Oh, it's wrong because it doesn't make sense to me. What you're actually doing, and I'm going to put this to you and I don't,

01:19:47

John, I like you, I don't want you to take this the wrong way. Okay. What you're doing is exactly what happened in Genesis chapter three.

01:19:55

You're setting yourself up as if you are like God. It's the very thing that happened in the garden of Eden. It's the very thing that caused

01:20:02

Adam and Eve to sin. They took that fruit because they wanted to be like God. You are subjecting

01:20:09

God to your standard and you're saying he has to make sense to you. Otherwise he doesn't exist or you're just going to deny him.

01:20:19

Instead of just saying, look, the reality is, as Matt showed you, you are appealing to an objective standard.

01:20:27

You are appealing to absolute standards. I know you don't want to admit it, but he's done that with you.

01:20:34

I did that with you. I know that it's clear to us and others who are watching.

01:20:40

It's not clear to you because you keep going back into your subjectiveness which is deceiving you.

01:20:47

Your subjective standard is actually what's deceiving you from believing in the

01:20:53

God of scripture. I don't want to see that for you. I understand.

01:21:04

I could go back and forth on discussions about what it says in Genesis and things like that.

01:21:12

I don't think we'd have much of a fruitful conversation tonight because I got to run. I respect the position.

01:21:20

I disagree with it. I understand fairly well having listened to a lot of Greg Branson and reading presuppositional apologetics, which

01:21:32

Matt clearly seems to be a fan of and you seem to be a fan of as well. Again, it just seems to me like it's approaching the position from...

01:21:48

It's basically begging the question. It's saying, we're going to believe this and then we're going to fit everything in rather than saying, what does the evidence lead us to?

01:21:57

It's more of a deductive rather than inductive argument from something that you've already assumed is the case.

01:22:05

I think that's what you're doing. I think you start with being subjective and then you start with that conclusion.

01:22:12

I'm not approaching it from that subjective because I'm looking at the evidence and saying, how does it best get explained outside of myself?

01:22:20

That's the difference. You're not going outside of yourself. You do it subjectively to enforce the conclusion you have.

01:22:26

Here's the thing. With that, as you look at these things, you're saying it doesn't make sense to you that you're not believing in it, but you haven't studied it.

01:22:38

I'm telling you as one who in asking you to describe these things, you couldn't accurately describe the biblical position of them.

01:22:47

That's the point. My challenge to you is before you deny something, you should at least understand it.

01:22:55

Before you say it's wrong and then somehow God is unjust, you should at least understand the position because you don't.

01:23:04

That'd be my challenge to you. I think that maybe

01:23:10

I didn't explain it as well as I understand it. I think I understand it better than you think I do.

01:23:16

That is merely I disagree with it, but maybe I am mistaken. Maybe I need to look at it a little bit more, a little more deeply.

01:23:26

I think that's about where we need to leave off at this point. I really am later than I intended.

01:23:33

Yeah, you're about an hour later than you wanted to be, but we appreciate you. We've been praying for you and we do hope that you'd listen to some of the stuff and think about what we shared with you.

01:23:45

I appreciate you having me back on and asking your questions.

01:23:54

You've always been charitable and Matt as well, even though we did kind of butt heads a bit.

01:24:02

Have a great night and I think you have a good show the rest of the time. Okay, thank you.

01:24:08

Thank you very much, John. All right. Take care. All right. The next one up is

01:24:15

John, Atomic Apologetics.

01:24:22

Let me add you in here. There we go. John, you have any questions for Matt tonight?

01:24:31

No, but I will have an announcement concerning the after show, but first of all,

01:24:37

I just wanted to make a point from John that I put a quote on the side chat there saying something about Deuteronomy.

01:24:49

Deuteronomy 25, 19, it says, Therefore, when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies around you in the land that the

01:25:00

Lord your God is giving you for the inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek and from under heaven you shall not forget.

01:25:17

So this was written before the actual attack to the Amalekites, and he made that point earlier saying that God was unjust for wiping out this nation.

01:25:28

But the thing is this, it's not just God using Israel to knock out an actual nation, but this was also fulfilling of God's promise.

01:25:42

So if he said this and then he decided not to kill them, then he would be lying.

01:25:50

He'd be going against his own word. Your thoughts?

01:25:56

Well, and that would make him unjust. Exactly. In that case, yeah.

01:26:02

So anyway, I just wanted to let you guys know the council is going to happen, but I'm going to have a guest on, an atheist named

01:26:13

Christopher Mouty. I think you guys kind of know him. You probably know him and all that.

01:26:20

Tell him that. Say, he owes me a sushi dinner. Ah, yes, he does. Yeah. Okay. So he actually had an interview with Kent Hovind just last week, and so it was a really enjoyable discussion and he was just great.

01:26:38

But I'm going to have him on talking about this interview that he had with Kent Hovind and kind of put him to just kind of see how he felt about it.

01:26:50

And Matt, you're welcome to go ahead and join in if you want. But I'm also going to see, I might have

01:26:56

Anthony Silvestro, Dr. Anthony Silvestro join in with me to kind of have a little help when it comes to the counter arguments of evolution.

01:27:08

So anyway, that's about it. So I appreciate you guys' time. And yeah.

01:27:15

Yeah. I heard rumor of that. So I should, since we're taking a little bit of programming notes here, let me give you a programming note.

01:27:22

Folks, next week, I will not be here. I head out, actually head out tomorrow evening, head out to Los Angeles.

01:27:30

I will be, I'll be out with Saturday with Ray Comfort, weather permitting, because it's supposed to rain.

01:27:37

And then Monday, I'll be doing some filming there at Living Waters, answering some of the questions that I thought that John was going to ask about slavery and things like that.

01:27:47

Very easy to answer. And it actually shows God is a good God when we look at slavery in the

01:27:52

Old Testament compared to the slavery many people think is spoken of. But I'm going to be filming out there with them.

01:27:59

Then I'll be at the Shepherds Conference. So Thursday night, I will not be here. I have a friend of mine coming in,

01:28:04

Eli. He will be hosting. And I'm going to see if John or Vincent, if you guys,

01:28:10

I'm going to probably reach out to you just to see if he's not so good with the Google Hangout part. So if you guys need to moderate and help him out, but Matt knows what he's doing now with Hangouts.

01:28:20

But Eli is a good brother. I know Matt got to meet him in Jersey when he came down when

01:28:26

Matt and I were at the South Jersey Apologetics Conference. And so very knowledgeable individual.

01:28:33

I think that just he and Matt are going to be able to give you guys a lot to think about, even if there's no questions in, but bring the questions anyway.

01:28:43

So that will be for next week. Matt, I do got it. You had to go take a call there, but there was a,

01:28:52

I'm scrolling up a $10 super chat that was given by... Oh, cool. Yeah.

01:29:00

I can't pronounce it. You'll have to pronounce it. Navitimer. Whatever you say.

01:29:05

Navitimer. Just think navigation. Navitimer. Navitimer. So Navitimer said this,

01:29:12

Matt, with a $10 super chat. Matt, from the standpoint of apologetics, can you suggest a good way to explain to a non -believer why we who are in Christ believe what we believe?

01:29:27

Well, we do because Christ has enabled our hearts to believe in him. He's gifted us with faith, gifted us with regeneration.

01:29:35

He's caused us to be born again. He's shown his great grace and mercy upon us. And that's why we believe.

01:29:42

So there you go. And I will get, let folks know if you are going to be out in, anyone listening is going to be at Shepherds Conference.

01:29:50

Come find me. Let's chat. Let's talk. Be good to meet. We've been having the super chats, which helps to support

01:29:59

CARM. We've done very well. Thank you all of you guys that have done that. I should let you know that you can help support

01:30:05

Striving for Eternity. If you go to strivingforeternity .org slash donate, you can also go to the

01:30:12

Patreon that we have. Matt Slick, if you look in the description of this video and in the podcast, we have

01:30:19

Matt Slick Patreon page that goes directly to Matt. Why should you give directly to Matt?

01:30:25

Well, let's see. He's moving, which is going to put a cramp in his finances.

01:30:32

You see the look on his face on there, right? Just look at that. So you can help.

01:30:40

And so that goes directly to Matt and to help him with some medical bills and things like that. If you don't know about his wife, she's got a large number of medical bills.

01:30:50

That's why they're having to move. So that goes to Matt. If you want to support the Ministry of Striving for Eternity, you can go to our

01:30:57

Patreon, whether it's our Patreon or our PayPal. What we're doing is we're giving away books based on your donation level.

01:31:04

So a $2 donation will get you the book, What Do We Believe?, which is the picture right there right now.

01:31:10

And if you give a $5 donation, you get What Do We Believe? and What Do They Believe? Then you get $10 donation.

01:31:18

You'll get those two plus the book On the Origin of Kinds written by Dr. Svestro. If you want to give a $20 donation, you get a book that Matt and I contributed to,

01:31:27

Sharing the Good News with Mormons, along with those other three. If you can give $25 a month, what we're doing with $25 a month donations is we're looking for missionaries.

01:31:38

If you know of missionaries that would like to get into podcasting to be a better way of communicating with their churches, what we're doing is we're actually trying to give them $25 a month for one year.

01:31:49

We'll pay for their hosting costs and their equipment. We'd buy the equipment, we'd get them the equipment, and then what we would look to do is get them podcasting to their churches instead of writing emails that no one really reads anyway.

01:32:02

So if people give $25 a month, that's what we're doing with that. So I'm going to bring our friend.

01:32:12

I was going to say, before you do that, I was going to say, hey, Matt, with that $10, you can buy Andrew lunch. I got to find him first.

01:32:23

Yeah. Take a look at Skype, Andrew, but go ahead. If Matt and I were in school, like elementary school together,

01:32:32

I would steal his lunch money so I could buy him lunch. Probably. So, yeah, so I want to, you know,

01:32:48

I know Andrew - Anybody else? Anybody else have any questions or any comments? I mean - Andrew came in just here, so I want to bring him.

01:32:56

I think he's in. Yeah, Andrew, you can unmute yourself. There's our friend from down under. You want to unmute yourself?

01:33:08

All right. I guess he doesn't have a question for you, Matt, or maybe he walked away. He didn't unmute himself.

01:33:15

You know what we forgot to do, Matt? We forgot to talk about your favorite pillow.

01:33:22

That's a good pillow. I love my pillow. So my pillow supports the

01:33:28

Matt Slick Live Radio Show. We sponsor these. They also help with this. So we promote them as well.

01:33:34

So if you guys don't get a good night of sleep, I mean, if you want to avoid, if you want to avoid having, not having enough beauty sleep and looking like Matt Slick, I mean, if you want to avoid that look -

01:33:46

Look who's talking. You need five MyPillows. If you want to avoid that look, then you want to make sure you have a

01:33:53

MyPillow so you could get a good night's sleep. And call 1 -800 -944 -5396.

01:34:02

That's 1 -800 -944 -5396. Order a

01:34:07

MyPillow today. Let them know you heard about it on Apologetics Live. And I see that Andrew unmuted himself. He was probably taking a nap on his

01:34:15

MyPillow and he just woke up. So, Andrew. If I had a

01:34:20

MyPillow, I might have been taking a nap on it. You would. But I was actually trying to figure out how to unmute it because my

01:34:29

Mozilla Firefox will not support Google Hangout and Chrome will not download onto my computer.

01:34:38

Wow. Try Microsoft Edge. Yeah. I tried

01:34:46

Microsoft Edge. It didn't work either. That's because of that first word, Microsoft.

01:34:53

Microsoft is good stuff. You just go to an app, it works. Yeah. I tried to get

01:35:00

Google on both. It said it's downloaded, then it wouldn't download. Anyway, that's the long and the short of that.

01:35:06

And that's why I haven't been able to get on earlier. So, what question do you have for Matt tonight?

01:35:13

Question for Matt. In dealing with that soft atheist, you know,

01:35:18

I think you're doing pretty well. Kind of hope he changes a view pretty quickly because it kind of seems to understand his objective and subjective.

01:35:30

What's the Bible's difference between objective and subjective? And is there any difference in the

01:35:36

Scriptures at all? There is really no declaration of objectivity, subjectivity.

01:35:42

What I did was showed him that God by definition in the

01:35:48

Christian Scriptures, he is absolute. He's immutable.

01:35:54

So, he's eternally what he is, always. And therefore, since the morals that he reveals are just that, revealed, not created.

01:36:05

He's not like, hey, should I have murder being okay or not? Let me think about it. It was not like that. He just reveals the moral essence.

01:36:12

And since he is absolute, those morals take on an absolute quality. And if they're absolute, then they are by definition objective to us.

01:36:23

And so, therefore, we're obligated to follow those objective, absolute moral standards. I presented that to him.

01:36:30

But you see, that doesn't fit in his worldview of pure subjectivity. And so, he's been beaten, but he doesn't know enough to know that.

01:36:41

And so, he goes into this issue of solipsism. And people don't know that. Solipsism is you don't know if anybody else exists, but your own mind exists.

01:36:50

You think, and everything else is an emanation or an image of whatever your mind thinks it might be out there.

01:36:57

That's a solipsistic. Well, if he's going to judge all things by his subjective experience, then what he's doing is subjecting everything to his own mind, his own inclination about what is and is not.

01:37:12

He cannot, therefore, determine if anything else exists, or if anything else is true, or what he's thinking is true.

01:37:18

And basically, he admitted that. Well, that's solipsism. Well, solipsism has weaknesses in it.

01:37:25

And I could go through that, but I'd have to train him in a logic error area that he's not ready.

01:37:33

I don't think he was ready for, because I don't think he can get it. One of the issues here in solipsism is, we have logical absolutes.

01:37:41

How is it that the logical absolutes exist? If his mind is all that it is, then how do logical absolutes exist?

01:37:49

They can only be a part of his mind, but yet he's also, at the same time, illogical.

01:37:56

That sheds doubt upon itself as being something that is true. And then if someone else is illogical, but it's their projection of their own mind, then how is it that that's possible, if his own mind is the author?

01:38:09

So you get these weird kind of questions that solipsism can't really deal with. And it leads to the issue of subjectivity.

01:38:16

He talked about induction. And induction is basically, this is how we see general things happen.

01:38:22

We'll draw conclusions out of it. Basically, it's what it is. Well, you don't know if everything that you've seen is correct, or if what you see happens here happens over there or over there.

01:38:32

You don't know. You're just assuming that's the case. That's the issue of the problem of induction. And it's all subjective, based on his experience.

01:38:39

He's an empiricist, a subjectivist empiricist, which means you really can't know if anything is true or not true, or if anything is right or not right.

01:38:51

And then when I say, hey, look, you're making a moral statement about morals, that there are no absolute morals.

01:38:59

That is a moral statement. And he's saying, no, it's not a moral statement. It's a statement about morals. No, it's a moral statement to say that all morals that exist have no absolute value.

01:39:09

That, by definition, is a moral statement, because you're saying morality is subjective.

01:39:15

That is a moral perspective, subjective morality. So he refuses to see that.

01:39:21

There's so many ways in which he was cornered, but he just refuses. So after a while, you just got to kind of give up and say, you know what?

01:39:28

We're not getting anywhere. We can't get anywhere, because your subjective experience keeps leading you in a circle. That's why

01:39:34

I said to him, you're just chasing your own tail. And you don't even know it. Yeah, well, thinking about that,

01:39:41

Gremlins, I think it's the first one. What's the line? He calls himself, introduces himself,

01:39:48

Ray Pelzer. Make the illogical logical. I couldn't understand you, because you got muffled.

01:39:54

There's a quote from Gremlins, the first one, just before he gets the pet or whatever.

01:40:02

He's trying to sell a thing, an event, something. He introduces himself as Ray Pelzer, and he says,

01:40:11

I make the illogical logical. Well, that's what this guy was trying to do. Trying to make the illogical logical.

01:40:19

And you can only do so much with somebody. Yeah. You know what? I'm just done. You know, I mean, you know, it just, you know, that's it.

01:40:26

Okay. Anyway. Anyway. Yeah. I wanted to get someone new coming in here, and I wanted to.

01:40:34

So, because we don't have too much time. We got about 20 minutes left. I wanted to add Jeffrey. Yeah.

01:40:41

Go ahead and mute yourself. I'll do that. So, Jeffrey, you can unmute yourself. Let me make sure your volume is up.

01:40:48

There you go. We should be able to hear you now. Hey, Jay. Can y 'all hear me? Yeah.

01:40:53

Okay, great. Hey, Matt. Hey, everybody. Appreciate y 'all. Putting out the show.

01:40:59

Let me let my dogs in the house real quick. Matt, I had a question for you. Just a few weeks ago, a caller called in, and they mentioned about Jesus calming the storms.

01:41:10

And you had said something about, you know, we should be careful when we're preaching like that. It sounds real

01:41:15

Joel Osteen -ish, if that rings a bell to you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He calms the storms of your life.

01:41:22

Yeah, yeah. Now, I agreed with what you said there to the guy that we should be real careful about that.

01:41:30

But there were some things that I've been recognizing in the Scripture. When Jesus talks, He says a lot of things about, you know, the

01:41:37

Son only does that which He sees the Father in heaven doing. Yeah, John 5 .19,

01:41:43

John 5 .30, you know. Right on, brother. So, you know, a lot of the things whenever I'm watching, whenever I'm reading

01:41:49

Scripture, and I see Jesus do miracles like from, you know, turning water into wine, to feeding the 5 ,000, to raising

01:41:55

Lazarus from the dead, and just every miracle that I see Jesus do, I do tend to spiritualize those things.

01:42:01

Let me just say that I apply them to myself, you know. I can see every miracle that Jesus done on earth.

01:42:07

I can see that the Father has done that to me in, you know, heavenly places, you know. So, I just wanted to see what your thoughts were on that, you know, as you relate to the spiritual.

01:42:18

Okay. If Jesus walks on water, you know what that means?

01:42:25

No, I mean, I'm interested in what you say about it. Well, what it means is He walked on water.

01:42:31

Right. Why would He walk on water? Well, He walked on water probably to demonstrate

01:42:37

His superiority over creation. Sure. And He gets to the people in the boat. And why are you a little, you know, come on, you know, relax.

01:42:44

They thought it was a ghost. Now, does Jesus walk on the water of your difficulties?

01:42:51

What does that mean? See, what I could do is I could get up and I would never do it. But I'd only do it,

01:42:58

I'd never do it in a real church. But I could do it in a seminar to illustrate. And I could say, someone give me a passage.

01:43:06

And I'll spiritualize it and then make it up as I go. You know, He calmed the storm or He, you know,

01:43:13

Lazarus come forth, whatever it is, right? Okay. And I'd say, what's your name? Come forth.

01:43:19

What it means to come forth in your life, to leave the darkness behind, to come forward and trust in the light of Christ.

01:43:25

And what you, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. I'm making it up as I go. Sure. Okay.

01:43:31

What about like, if we say, okay, the son, Jesus raised

01:43:37

Lazarus from the dead. Okay. If we apply that to our spiritual life, we say, okay, we've seen the son raising

01:43:43

Lazarus from the dead so that we know the father is in heaven raising people to life, right?

01:43:49

Okay. But that's not what it says. Well, if he says that the son doesn't do anything but that which he sees the father doing.

01:43:57

Oh, okay. In that context, that's what you're saying. Okay. So when he's on earth doing earthly things, do you think that there's a relation between what he's doing on earth to what he sees the father in heaven doing?

01:44:10

Like if the father in heaven is raising people to life spiritually, you know, so he comes to earth and he's raising people to life, you know, in the physical sense.

01:44:19

So it's kind of like on earth as it is in heaven, you know? So Jesus, the son is doing what he sees the father in heaven doing, you know, specifically raising the dead, healing the sick, making those who can't walk righteously to walk righteously, making those who can't see spiritual things, et cetera.

01:44:37

What you have to do is stick with what the text says right there in the context. Right. That's it.

01:44:43

Don't apply it beyond what is there. You know, if he raises people from the dead, it's when, you know, if all you had was

01:44:50

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, can you prove that he raises anybody else from the dead? No.

01:44:56

Could you say that the father is raising people from the dead because that's what the son is doing? Well, that's an interesting concept.

01:45:03

And I've been wrestling with that concept a little bit lately. What does it mean when Jesus says you can only do what the father does?

01:45:09

Did the father walk on water? Well, no. Did the father calm the storm with a command? No. Because it wasn't the father who's incarnated.

01:45:19

It's only the son who's incarnated. So what is meant? And to be honest, I'm not sure yet.

01:45:24

I can still think it through and come up with some ideas. Not that my ideas are right, but I think that somehow there's something in the ordination of God, the father, and everything that Jesus has to do, that Jesus sees that and accomplishes all that's ordained.

01:45:39

And I think that's really where it's going to. But he doesn't say it that way. He says, what I see the father do.

01:45:45

And so I need to look into how that's worded and see if there's some pattern there. But, you know, this is how we learn, you know.

01:45:52

So, you know, what I think you should do is, and I appreciate, in fact, when you said, when

01:45:58

I was reading the word, I just go, oh, yeah. I just love to hear people say that. They're reading the word.

01:46:03

They're studying the word. They're reading the word. It's like, I just keep saying that because it just ministers to me to hear someone say that.

01:46:09

It's just wonderful. So praise God. But if it says Lazarus raised, Jesus raised

01:46:15

Lazarus from the dead, or let's say Jesus wept. Okay. The shortest English verse in the

01:46:20

Bible. It's not the shortest verse in the Bible, but it's the shortest English verse. So, okay. Now, if I was just to preach on one verse and I got up in the pulpits that Jesus wept and I preached for 40 minutes about how he weeps for you, how he weeps for here and here, and I've only touched that one verse, it's an illegitimate sermon.

01:46:38

Sure. Yeah, indeed. Because if we could talk about his resurrecting of people, you know, when he raised, come forth.

01:46:45

Well, what we can, what we should do is say, he said to Lazarus, come forth. What does this demonstrate?

01:46:51

It demonstrates his power over death. Now, how that applies to us is verified in 1

01:46:58

Corinthians 15. He has power. He will call us forth in the resurrection. He's a first fruit.

01:47:03

We're going to follow after him. So then we put them together. And instead of saying, you know, instead of saying out of, you know,

01:47:09

Lazarus come forth, and then we get out of that, all this other stuff, we don't do that. We have to go to where it's already said and say, this is what it says.

01:47:17

And the reason we want to do that is because we don't want to exceed what's written. And if we're to say and add point and point and point to Lazarus come forth, that's not in the text, then we can make the text say anything we want.

01:47:30

Right. Yeah. That's the danger. Yeah. Like with the Lazarus thing, you know, um,

01:47:36

Jesus, before he, before he, uh, gives the command to Lazarus to come out, he, he asked him to roll away the stone or he says a prayer to the father.

01:47:45

Right. And then he says to roll away the stone and, and in the same line of thinking, you know, with spiritualizing things, oftentimes wonder when is the exact point that Lazarus was actually raised to life?

01:47:56

Was it when Jesus prayed to the father, you know, and he's, and he said, roll away the stone, you know, the, the heart of stone taken out and Lazarus was then already alive when

01:48:06

Jesus gave him the command, you know, just these kind of things. So, uh, I would, I would assume that it was when he commanded it.

01:48:15

Right. I would think that is it proof? No, I would just say, I would think it was commanded, but someone

01:48:21

I know who's, you know, who's not really smart says it could be this, you know, joke around here, but, but you never know.

01:48:27

It could be, here's a theories, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And, uh, but since he commands things, that should be light and by his speech, things happen.

01:48:34

There's a consistency in his commanding of things. Lazarus come forth. Now it doesn't mean he was resurrected at that point.

01:48:40

Cause like you said, maybe he was already resurrected earlier. We don't know. And Jesus just commanded him to come forth out of his resurrection already.

01:48:48

But since Jesus is the resurrection, I want to, I lean towards the idea of upon his command.

01:48:54

That's when it occurred. That's right. His words are alive. Yeah. But it's not proof.

01:49:00

So even then, is this a good example? Even then I would, by preaching it, I'd say this isn't proof, but this is what

01:49:06

I think. And this is why I think it, I could be wrong, but I think this is the right answer. That's why

01:49:11

I'm saying it. But what I'm teaching them is I'm not trying to insert any things into it.

01:49:17

It's not necessarily there. Right. Okay. That's really good.

01:49:24

I wanted to think about a little bit more about my question in light of your response about how the father doesn't necessarily walk on water.

01:49:31

So, you know, how does that relate to when Jesus says he only does those things, which he sees the father in heaven doing, he walks on water.

01:49:38

It's like, how does that relate to what the father does? Cause like I said, a lot of, in my mind, when I see what

01:49:43

Jesus does on earth, I try to make a connection to what the father is doing in heaven.

01:49:48

So like, cause I want to know what the father in heaven is doing. So I look to see what the son is doing on earth. Right. And I'm always going back to that, you know, as on earth as it is in heaven.

01:49:57

Yes. But was the father crucified? I know it. I know it. No, he was not.

01:50:03

That's an error called patrapassianism. It's actually a word for it. The father was when he was crucified, patrapassianism, and that's a heresy.

01:50:12

So, uh, because we know the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation only, and only occurred with a son.

01:50:17

So therefore there's not the father who's doing this. So we have legitimate reasons to say, wait a minute, what does it mean?

01:50:25

And I, and seriously, that's why when you said it, I go, that's John 5, 19. The reason I know it is because, wait a minute, why does it say that?

01:50:33

Yeah. And I'm wrestling with a little bit and I don't have a great answer. So I need to do some commentary research.

01:50:39

What about like, okay. You know, Jesus says he only does those things, which he sees the father doing in heaven.

01:50:45

Okay. So not necessarily what he, you know, cause Jesus was, was crucified on earth. You know, we can't say that the father was also crucified, but the things that Jesus is actually doing, you know, is what the father is actually doing.

01:50:58

Not what's done to Christ, but. Very good point. And, um,

01:51:05

I wasn't going to bring it up, but good point. Okay. So then, uh, Jesus ate.

01:51:11

Right. Sure. Went to the bathroom. Yeah. You know, so was the father doing those things too?

01:51:16

No. That's why I think it's really only works with the issue of, of, of ordination, or there could be a series of things that the son sees, which is,

01:51:29

I mean, think about what that means. I mean, the son, uh, whatever the father does, he's a son doesn't like manner.

01:51:35

I can't say that you can't say that it's a claim of his deity. Right. And, uh, okay.

01:51:43

And, um, so, uh, let's see.

01:51:49

Yeah. So it's something I'm going to think about it some more. Yeah. Dude, please do. It pops into my head a lot, especially when

01:51:56

I'm, when I'm witnessing the people, uh, I'll, I won't go, you know, real fringe, but I'll, but I will mention that, you know,

01:52:02

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And I believe that that's what the father has done in my life. Uh, I especially like to point out to people that, um, whereas once when

01:52:09

I was an atheist, my water, my life was like water. Uh, whereas since I've become a Christian, you know, it's full of color and flavor and aroma.

01:52:17

So just another thing, and I wanted to see what you, what you thought about, you know, Jesus's words there in John and how that relates to what the father's doing.

01:52:26

So, and you, you've answered that pretty well. Well, I didn't think so, but if you think so, that's good enough for me.

01:52:31

You gave me some things to think about, especially in light of the smaller things, you know, not necessarily Jesus's big, big miracles, but the smaller things and how do those relate to what the father is doing in heaven?

01:52:42

So yeah. Yeah. Worth looking at. But good stuff, man. Good stuff. Good questions.

01:52:49

Before you go, you got to solve, you got to solve a discussion going on in chat. Are you a welder?

01:52:57

No, but, uh, I like the hat. Uh, are you a hunter?

01:53:07

Nope. No, I'm hunting for lost souls for Jesus. Okay. Amen, brother.

01:53:12

Everybody lost. Everyone's like, no, he's a welder. He's got the hat.

01:53:18

All right. So you got to give a shout out to Charlie here in, in chat.

01:53:25

I got to go find it, but, uh, we're talking about my pillow. Charlie had a great comment here,

01:53:31

Matt. He said, well, Matt looks attractive on his, my pillow face down.

01:53:41

That's pretty good. I like that one. Thanks, Charlie, for your support.

01:53:47

Appreciate that buddy. That's good. It's a good thing. He's been like, you're well, that's how

01:53:54

I sleep. Oh, that's great.

01:54:01

Well, Jeffrey, I hope you come back when we have some more questions. And, and, and this is going to be one that where Matt and I will, you know,

01:54:09

I'm going to take even a, maybe a harder line than Matt, because Matt'll take some things like, um, say for example, uh, the offering of Isaac, he will, he will say that is a type of Christ where I wouldn't, there's a lot of similarities there and saying that is a type of Christ that's almost going, it's symbolizing.

01:54:32

So, so there's different ranges of where we draw the line. I'm going to be a lot more conservative than, than Matt and some of those things.

01:54:38

So, but we both agree that, um, you know, like I, I actually would say that when people take the

01:54:44

Lazarus calling, calling someone out of the grave that he says, Lazarus come out and there's a lot of Calvinists that will say that's, that's, you know, salvation.

01:54:52

That's Jesus calling us. It's, it's not, it's, it's, it's, he's calling

01:54:58

Lazarus to come out of a grave. He's not, you know, now if someone says we're dead like Lazarus in that sense, and they're trying to make that connection, that might be okay.

01:55:11

But when they say that this is what it's, what it was about, then it's, then I think it's a problem. So, but well, thanks for coming on.

01:55:19

And, uh, I'm, I'm gonna, I don't know if there, if there's going to be a council tonight, I don't see

01:55:24

John in here. Well, there was going to be a council. He said that. And, uh, so I'm going to kick off after this and go prep for, um, my class tomorrow night.

01:55:34

I guess some things are going to work with some outline information. Okay. So, um, I'll try to get, uh, a link for folks to drop in, but, uh, you know, unless it's a closed group,

01:55:45

I don't know. I do know that Dr. Svestro messaged me and said, he is going to be coming in. He was, and, uh, so this is folks.

01:55:55

If you don't subscribe to Apologetics Live podcast, it is a way you can get these to your, down to your phone and an easy way to get them so that you can listen at your convenience.

01:56:06

What we did do with last week, we had a very long Apologetics Live. I split that into two podcasts.

01:56:13

So the one that'll drop tomorrow is going to be the full discussion with Muhammad.

01:56:19

That was about an hour and 45 minute discussion of Matt going back and forth with Muhammad. The neat thing was, if you listen to that at the end,

01:56:27

Matt gave Muhammad some things to think about. And Muhammad was like, ah, let's kind of put that on the side for now.

01:56:33

Let's put that aside for now. And that was, Matt was talking about the fact that God of the Bible is both just and merciful, but Allah is not.

01:56:40

And then I gave Muhammad some things to think about as far as some contradictions in the scripture.

01:56:46

And he seemed to struggle with that. We were hoping he would come back, but be praying for him. Pray for John.

01:56:53

It seems that John was having some things that he was struggling with there at the end.

01:56:58

Maybe a bit needs to think a little bit more. Charlie's giving a link to Striving for Eternity.

01:57:04

Thank you for that. Folks, if you could help support Striving for Eternity to do these shows and others.

01:57:10

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01:57:17

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01:57:26

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01:57:33

That's who puts this on. And so you can help us by basically by supporting us at strivingforeternity .org

01:57:42

slash donate. Also check out the Christian podcast community. We've just added up a new podcast.

01:57:47

One I think Matt's going to like just the name of at least. It's called Five Solas. It is with James Watkins.

01:57:55

He's been doing a great job. It's one for some of you guys. His second episode, he talks about his testimony going from an atheist to a pastor.

01:58:05

Yeah, he's got a really cool testimony. Yeah, it was very interesting. I don't want to ruin it for everyone, but he attempted suicide and reached out to his jujitsu coach, which is

01:58:16

Pastor Frank Mullis. And he knew he was also a pastor. And I'm going to let you download and subscribe to Five Solas.

01:58:24

Just go search for Five Solas in whatever podcast app. Listen to episode two and you'll hear that.

01:58:30

And on episode three, he has Frank on. So I encourage you guys to be doing that, to check those out.

01:58:37

And so download this one, subscribe to this on podcast. So we appreciate that.

01:58:43

And just to let folks know as well, last minute super chat from Jason Manning with $2.

01:58:51

Support Matt and Andrew on Patreon. Great content. Thank you for that, Jason. And Jason has my pillow.

01:58:57

So, you know, he's a smart individual, Matt. So the thing is, is that we do want to let you guys know that Matt and I are available if your church would like to have us come and speak.

01:59:10

Even if your church wants to come and have us debate, we do that actually kind of regularly. Matt and I debate each other on different topics we disagree with at different churches, showing how we can debate and still be charitable.

01:59:22

Crazy idea for Christians, right? But if you would like to have

01:59:28

Matt or I come out and speak at your church, you could go to strivingforturning .org.

01:59:34

There is a link to book a speaker on the page. And we can also work that out with Matt.

01:59:40

If you want Matt to come and speak, we could do that as well. Because if you're going to try to get to Matt's email.

01:59:47

Yeah, it doesn't work. He's behind. I like what people do with folks will email

01:59:58

Matt and then they text me and say, can you can you text Matt and let him know there's an email. So, so folks, thanks for joining with us.