Conversations with an Atheist

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

I think that what's fascinating

You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here.

Yeah, but what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions, but you don't do it with your own. Because I That may be the case.

And there's that confirmation bias coming up again. This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host, from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

Introduction and the Upcoming Conversation with an Atheist

We are live, Apologetics Live, here to answer your most challenging questions about God and the Bible. We can answer them all right here. Just go to ApologeticsLive .com, scroll down, you can watch there.

You can also scroll down to where it wants you to participate. You just click on the StreamYard duck icon, and that will get you to join us in the discussion. We are going to be planning to have a conversation with an atheist.

A few weeks ago, I was out, and Drew and Chris Hough and Justin Peters were discussing a argument for cessationism. And in that, toward the end, a young man Well, okay, I'm just old enough that everyone's a young man.

But a young man, Evan, came in, really, really articulate, and he had questions. He had been following the program. And so I asked him, he had emailed me, and I reached out to him and said, hey, would you want to spend a fuller time?

And so he should be in here soon. I did email him earlier today to make sure he was coming in. He said, I'll see you soon. We'll talk soon. So that'll be good. I don't know if Drew is Drew is backstage, but his camera's off.

He is taking care of his kids. Oh, no, there he is. Howdy.

Howdy. All right. I'm having to refill

That doesn't look like your normal drink of, you know, Fresca. I would like to see you fill that baby bottle with a Fresca and drink it during the show.

You and everyone else, but it ain't happening.

Well, hey, Drew, thanks to you and Chris and Aaron filling in. I have been traveling a bit, and I should be home for a while, I think. I said I think. I know Thanksgiving will be gone. I do have a debate coming up in Dallas, Texas, while I'll be out there for doing a World View Week conference at a school there.

And on Wednesday, they set up a debate with an atheist. This is November 10th to 14th. And so I'll have a debate. Originally, I asked for the debate topic to be, is secular humanism superior to Christianity?

And he agreed to that. And then I guess we ended up He asked if we could change the topic to be, is Christianity true? So that's kind of I was like, okay, well, we could do either one. I mean, I understand why when you debate people, they don't want to be on the defensive.

Get it? He wants to put me on the defensive. But in this one, I kind of think he lost before we even get started, because I don't know how he's going to explain something being true without God. Just saying.

Right. Yeah.

Truth, Relativism, and the Nature of Morality

That's one of those things, right? Establishment of truth. Well, what is truth? Right? And because we have to have an objective standard by which we measure truth claims. And so you don't just get to make up truth.

You don't get to make up a standard.

It has to Are you saying that you can't have your truth and I can't have my truth? Right. Yeah.

Relativism doesn't exist. And we see this in the church as well, where people say, well, how you interpret the Bible, that's true for you, but that's not true for me. Okay. Well, if relativism is true, then we can't know anything.

Correct. Because there's no objective standard by which to measure your truth claims.

It's kind of like when people tell me, well, the Holy Spirit told me, and I go, oh, Holy Spirit just told me you're wrong. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. He told me too. So now how do we measure who's right or wrong? Yeah.

I love, I mean, the quick thinking, I have a friend, Fred Zaspel, super fast thinker, but basically they're at a conference. The topic of the conference was dealing with Romans 7. So there's two different views of Romans 7 that people will interpret.

One is the view that Romans 7 is dealing with Paul's conversion. I think that's the right view. The other is dealing with our sanctification. And so those are two different views. And John Reisinger had a friend that was in the area, but nobody, he hadn't been to conferences.

No one knew who he was. Fred Zaspel gets up to speak and John Reisinger planned it. And so his friend stands up just as Fred's about to speak. And he stands up and goes, God woke me up at 11 o 'clock last night and told me to come to this conference to say that John Reisinger's view of Romans 7 is right.

And Fred Zaspel, without missing a beat, turns and goes, that's funny because God woke me up at 11 .15 last night and said, I'm sending to you a false prophet. You know, I mean, when you appeal, but I mean, that was in a joking way, but when people appeal like what God has said to me, well, you know, there's no way to, you know, it's the argument, well, since God, it's from God, therefore it's authoritative and we can't speak against it.

I'm bringing in my higher authority, my higher authority. And the problem is, it's like, well, what do I say to that other than no, he didn't. And then that's the cause of the whole other. Correct.

Correct. So Melissa is saying that you got a cool shirt on, strange fire, Facebook user, Facebook user says, Andrew kills me, LOL. Well, I don't know who Facebook user is. I don't plan to kill anybody just for the record.

But if you do want your name to show up Facebook user, unless that's actually your name, Facebook user. Well, Mr. User, you could go to ApologizeLive .com. There is instructions on how to get your name to show up there.

I knew it. I knew it.

It's always one of two people. It's either happy or it's Darren. And which one was it? It's happy. It sounded like happy.

Happy just doesn't follow instructions. That's I will see happy in February at the Open Air Theology Conference on Calvinism. Looking forward to that one. I got to book tickets. I'm going to try to make it.

That'll be good. Everyone and hang out. Yeah. So. So let's see, John is saying, Andrew, I'm praying for Israel. Do you have family there? No, I do not anymore. I don't have any family. I know that now I see Evan is backstage, but his camera is off.

So I'm waiting for him to put it back on. OK, there we go. Evan, welcome. I see you had the camera on, then you took it off.

So, you know, I'm doing all kinds of iniquitous behaviors back here. So I don't want you guys to see. I'm just kidding. It's a pleasure to meet you, Andrew. I mentioned to Drew last time. I'm a big fan of you guys.

I think I see you and I as kind of kindred spirits. I know you're you're a Jew from New Jersey. Originally, I'm a Jew from New York. So full Ashkenazi. OK, good. Obviously, we went different ways a little bit.

Yeah, maybe. But we'll see where we both land in the end. Maybe you'll come. You'll come over. You know, you mentioned about doing things when you're off camera. There used to be a feature on Google Hangouts that I really thought was pretty wrong.

And I'm glad that they don't have that here. But there was an ability, if you took your camera and turned it off, that the host could turn your camera on. Yeah, yeah. And so it was funny because I remember watching, you know, and someone turned someone's camera on.

The guy was sound asleep. Now, I've heard stories of other things being done when people pop a camera on.

Do you remember the Jeffrey Toobin affair on CNN? I don't. Oh, man. Drew, you remember that? I don't. He was a CNN contributor. And during the pandemic, apparently there was an incident where his webcam was on and he was.

And he didn't know. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah. He was a big CNN legal commentator. I'm going to have to look that up now. Well, it became a verb. It kind of became a joke to Toobin.

It means to, you know, do something. Yeah. OK. Well, so, Evan, we wanted to give you the time tonight. I know that we got someone whose name is Homophobic. But so we'll at the top of the hour, we'll bring him in and see what questions he has.

But first, we wanted to, you know, let me just say this, Evan. I listened to the show when you were in and I was thoroughly impressed with the way you communicated your understanding of Christian theology.

I know that I think it was Justin that said the same thing. I mean, you you seem to have a better handle on Christian theology than than many Christians. So, you know, kudos there. I'm just going to test on.

I think it might be. Let me see. Yeah. So you're on your end. I don't know what you're using for a microphone. Is it your laptop, Mike? It's a desktop computer. Is there some kind of feedback? No, there's an echo.

So what usually when you're not so just when you're not speaking, hit the mute.

Take care of the volume down to let me know if this helps.

Well, the thing is, and I'll do I'll test it this way. So what it is is with certain microphones, the condenser mics, it what they do is when they don't hear something, it kind of reaches out further and further and further to try to hear.

And so that's what it's doing. So, yeah, if you just when you're not speaking, just mute. And that'll be good. So so one vote to time to you and try to answer some questions that you you had.

So, yeah, go ahead. Shoot. Like, well, first, Evan, it's really good to see you again. I'm glad you're here. I'm going to drop backstage because I got to deal with this little one. So hopefully later on, I'll be able to pop back in.

Yeah, I hope so.

Yeah. Yeah. So so, you know, we'll he's backstage. If we see a cute little baby, you know, we'll put that right on screen, you know. So so, Evan, yeah, you you had some great questions. I knew you came in toward the end of the show and didn't have a lot of time to to get all your questions answered.

I don't know if two hours would still be enough. But but yeah, so let's you know, what were some of the big questions you have?

Well, let me start off by saying, well, I appreciate your critique of postmodernism at the beginning because I am not I'm not a postmodernist. So I like what you said there. And, yeah, I suspect we'll get to a fraction of my questions.

I just want to say I'm absolutely honored by the fact that this is your last broadcast before Reformation Day. And I mentioned on the last broadcast that I'm a tremendous admirer of Martin Luther and of what the Reformation stands for.

And so the fact that I'm on for the broadcast prior to that is something of an honor. I mean, it's not something I ever hear from atheists about the Reformation and its legacy. Certainly don't hear from Catholics.

And I shockingly don't hear it that much from Protestant Christians as well about the intellectual and theological progenitors of your of your faith. And I know it's funny to hear from me, but I thought it was appropriate to say.

So I just want to give a vindication of the Reformation, even though I obviously don't agree with its ideological and theological fruits. I can appreciate what it stands for. And I think we are all living in the shadow of Martin Luther in some sense.

And far too few people appreciate that.

The Reformation, Luther, and the Roots of Modern Thought

Well, Martin Luther is actually in the shadow of John Huss, who's in the shadow of John Wycliffe. Yeah.

And I mentioned that last time. And, you know, in some sense, he's in the shadow of Peter Waldo. And you can go back to the proto reformer several centuries. I mean, these ideas go back to really the to Paul in some sense.

I mean, there was Augustine Calvinism. Yeah.

I mean, what really made the difference with Luther wasn't so much Luther as it was, you know, Guggenheim, you know, is the printing press that made the difference.

Yeah. And that's that's something that I've come across as I look at it, that, well, there's I almost view it as a triumvirate. I mean, there's Luther. You have a man who has an ideological commitment to the point at which he's willing to die for it.

But you also have a nascent printing press that had been around since about the 15th century with Gutenberg. Huss didn't have that a century prior, which is why it was a regional reformation. So there's that.

And then there's also political reasons. And this this may go into a kind of Marxist materialist analysis that some of the defenders of Luther, like Frederick the Wise, may have not been committed to his theology, but they may have saw a benefit in the temporal realm for standing against Rome and being chief over their own realms.

But as I read Luther, I mean, the term that comes to my mind and it's sort of anachronistic is populism. Like looking at his writings and, you know, prior to him, there's kind of this exaltation of monasticism that kind of the highest calling for a Christian is to be a monk or a nun.

And what he's doing, it seems to me, is to thoroughly infuse every aspect of Christian life with reverence for God and Christ. And so it's not just the monk in the cloister, the nun in the convent living in self-denial who honors God.

You know, he says every time the farmer tills his field or the blacksmith forges a tool or the tradesman plies his trade, all these people are honoring God in their daily toil just as much as the monastics are.

There's no special sanctity afforded for people like that. And so it really is revolutionary in that way. And so I see that as kind of symbolic. And we're kind of the inheritors of that. But we have little understanding and appreciation for it, even Christians, I think.

But like when he stands before worms and here I stand, I can do no other. I think he's laying the groundwork for modern liberalism, small liberalism, you know, our sense of individual consciousness. And it's kind of maybe not a direct path, but I think a path from that to the scientific revolution, to the Enlightenment, to the American founding and to the world in which we find ourselves, for better or worse today.

So I just wanted to give that shout out to Martin Luther here. But yeah, Andrew, since you mentioned you guys alluded to moral relativism at the beginning, I think like any good discussion between a Christian and an atheist, that probably talking morals is a good place to start.

Sure. And I know it's kind of a cookie cutter thing, but, you know, I know you obviously get your morality from the Bible. I will say a lot of things that are politically incorrect, and I'm not going to be vulgar or anything, but a lot of these things that I'll say will have leftists clutching their pearls, I'm sure, but also some things that you may not love.

But I think an interesting place to start is probably the issue of slavery, which I think is illustrative. Because we think of it today as an abomination, and I hear both Christians and atheists say that slavery has always been an abomination.

I think that's a little facile. I mean, it's easy to look back on history and condemn our ancestors sitting in our air conditioning. And so I think obviously slavery is wrong today. We would all agree with that.

But was it wrong in biblical times? I mean, in a strange way, I've heard Christians kind of defend the biblical model of slavery, based on the economic conditions, it was actually the best possible world.

I mean, it's better for someone to be in servitude than to be dead and unable to feed himself. But I find it strange that Christians will defend the biblical model of slavery while also kind of laying a claim to moral absolutism.

Because that, to me, bespeaks moral relativism. If you're able to look back in history and say that slavery in biblical times was acceptable because otherwise people would starve, so if they're in servitude, that's better than the alternative.

I consider myself a moral relativist, and I affirm that position, but I don't see how you can lay claim to moral absolutism and agree with that position that slavery was proper at one time, but it's wrong now.

Slavery, Abortion, and the Ownership of Human Beings

Okay. First, let me just correct one thing that you said just off the bat, and we don't get our morals from the Bible. We get our morals from the nature of God, and that's a major difference. So why is lying wrong?

Because God's not a liar. Not because the Bible says we shouldn't lie. It goes back to the nature of God. And that becomes an important thing because as we're discussing morality being absolute and universal and immaterial, those are three elements of it, well, we get that from the nature of God because God is absolute and God is universal and God is immaterial.

So when we talk of morality, it has to come from a standard that's absolute. Otherwise, like we said in the beginning, we talk past each other. But slavery, let me ask you this, how are you defining slavery?

The ownership of another person, I think broadly we can get more in depth on that, but it's a simple overview.

Let me, just out of curiosity, what's your views on abortion?

Yeah, that's a tough one. I like the old Democrat position, not the one they have now, but kind of safe, rare, and legal. I think it's abominable. I think there may be certain circumstances where I wouldn't necessarily find it morally objectionable.

I don't think the Roe framework was terrible. I mean, I think beyond the first trimester, to me, you're talking about something viable. I don't agree with that, but in the first trimester, I think under the circumstances, I wouldn't necessarily find it objectionable.

Okay. So now let me ask you this, and this is why I asked that question. What would then be the difference between this is my body and this is my property?

Well, bodily autonomy is speaking to one's sovereignty over his own body. A property is something extrinsic to the body. So I own my clothing, I own my goods, but I don't own my heart. I don't own my, a woman doesn't own her womb.

In some sense, she does, but there's obviously a distinction between bodily functions and extrinsic qualities.

But there's another being in there. I mean, you have a human being with a separate DNA. You could have a separate gender, could be a separate blood type, right? So abortion is an ownership issue. The difference between abortion and slavery is abortion, properly carried out, always ends in death, where slavery didn't.

So both are actually an ownership issue. That's why I brought that up. And the reason I did was to just see when we speak of morality and say, well, the Christians would be wrong for saying slavery is always wrong, but the Bible talks about slavery.

The issue of what's the view of slavery, how do we define it? Because if we're going to say, well, it's ownership, well, then abortion's ownership, and we should be against that as well. Now, you're taking a different position than many.

Most will say, yes, abortion, up until the ninth month, even beyond. And then they say it's wrong to say you own another human being.

Sure. But yeah, I mean, there's a distinction to be made there, I think, too, that even other theological traditions, I think the Muslims believe in soulment doesn't occur at conception, but it occurs at some point during the pregnancy.

So the question ultimately becomes when is that a life where it's autonomy?

Yeah, when does a spirit, the immaterial part of human beings come into the body, right? And so this is kind of off topic from what you did, but I'll just try to answer this for folks. There's three views that we'd have, and we being human beings, you either have the view that when creation began, God creates, and he created all the souls that were going to be created.

This would be some modern Judaism would believe this, the more liberal Judaism, Mormonism, and others that believe that all the souls were created, they're up in heaven, they're just waiting to come down to be put into a body.

The other view would be that God, at some point after conception or at conception, creates a spirit and puts it inside of the human body growing in the womb. Now with that, if you hold to that one, you could argue, and some people try to, is to say, well, that happens at birth.

So it's not a child, it's not a human, it doesn't have an immaterial part of them until birth. And so the problem I see with that argument is based out of the Hebrew in Genesis 1 where it says there that God rested on the seventh day from bara, from creating out of nothing.

And if he's creating a new soul, then he hasn't fully rested because he's still creating. And that's why I hold to the third view that God must have, in creation, in the procreation of man and woman, created the process that would create an immaterial part of a human being.

And that then would be at conception. And there's ways we can look in the Bible to say why the Bible supports conception. So those are the three views. Now, if you're an atheist and saying that there is no God, then you end up having to deny, actually, the immaterial part of man in the first place because we're just chemical reactions.

And that has a whole slew of other problems. But to the question of slavery. So you said you define slavery as ownership, right? So when we look at the Bible's view of humans, they weren't treated as ownership.

They weren't property. How would we argue that? Well, when you look in Leviticus, where it talks about the slave laws, you have a case where if I have a cattle and he comes onto your property, you keep him.

I have a slave that comes onto your property, you return him. If my slave goes onto your property, you don't return him. And the reason for that is because the cattle is my property. So you return my property to me, but a human being is not.

The other thing that most people will say against slavery is the fact that the servitude, they're not paid. But in the Bible, they were paid a half day's wages. So the slavery, much of the slavery was, and the best illustration I have used to describe slavery is if you understand Japanese culture, like in the 80s, where you had companies that owned everything.

So if you and I worked for a company, they buy our clothes, our house, pay for education, our cars, utilities, food, everything's paid for by the company. And the idea behind that was so that we would have a desire to work hard for the company because the better the company does, the better we do.

Yeah, it's a zaibatsu, I think you're talking about. But I mean, the distinction is that a slave doesn't have the opportunity to leave the servitude of his master, whereas a Japanese employee in a zaibatsu, in theory, does.

In theory, right? Because if they do, they leave everything behind.

Correct. Well, but so the distinction that you're making, I mean, you would obviously say that 19th century American chattel slavery was categorically wrong, right?

Yeah, I would even say that Roman slavery in the time of Christ was wrong. Even though we see Paul writing, you know, about slaves to obey their masters, accepting the culture that they're in, he didn't say, you know, overthrow it.

But, I mean, slavery is not new. Slavery has been around in every generation. I mean, we have it today. I mean, here's one of the things I find interesting is people who are often argue against slavery are also in favor of pornography.

And the reason I find that interesting is because much of the pornography is dealing with slavery. It's human trafficking, people that are kidnapped, forced into that, not all of it, but a lot of it. And, you know, people don't talk enough about that slavery, which is occurring today in America.

America is the number one country with human trafficking. But when we look at that, that's a slavery. And so I would say I'd be against both. But the slavery in the Bible, much of what it is is an emphasis on the responsibility of the master to take care of someone else's needs, right, to provide for them.

Because in any culture, you're going to have people who are going to be able to manage things, manage property or not. And let's take Mao in China, right? Mao comes in and says, oh, it's not fair that, you know, there's so many peasants working the lands.

We should just give the land to the peasants so that they can own land, so that they can have it for themselves. Knowing full well that much of them, many of them wouldn't know how to take care of the land.

They don't know how to manage it. They know how to do what they're told. But once given freedom, they didn't know what to do with it, right?

This is what's interesting, Andrew, is that, you know, you're talking almost in gradations. I mean, slavery is not a binary, right? It's not just slavery or non-slavery. And so to me, I mean, that sort of bespeaks a kind of moral relativism, which I agree with.

I mean, I think there is, I don't think there's a line of what slavery, a lot of people will define, you know, involuntary servitude in prisons as a kind of slavery. I mean, you know, you don't have bodily autonomy.

So there's a lot of ways we could define slavery and to, you know, categorically condemn it as easy, but to identify what we would actually characterize as slavery is much more difficult. But it sounds like from what you're saying, I mean, if it's about meeting someone's needs, particularly people in a hand-to-mouth subsistence society in which people are, for the most part, incapable of providing for their own, it's justifiable.

But, you know, an antebellum slave owner in the South would make the same case. I mean, do you think that, let's say, a plantation owner in 1850 should have freed his slaves, even though having done so, perhaps they weren't capable of living on their own?

I mean, would that have been a justifiable thing to do, knowing that they were not able to take care of themselves? I mean, servitude was, in a sense, a better condition for them in terms of their ability to survive.

Yeah, because if he frees his slave, they're, I mean, they just get, depending where they are, they just get captured and put back into slavery, especially if they're in the South. Have you ever read the book Twelve Years a Slave?

I saw the film. Okay. So I read the book. So maybe the film has it right or wrong. I don't know. They're not always as accurate from the book. But, you know, one of the things he had said was he was kidnapped.

He was from the North. He was born free, for folks who don't know the story. Back when slavery was legal in the South, here's someone from, I believe, New York, but he played music. He went down to Washington, just on the border where slavery is legal and not legal, doing a concert with friends.

I think most of them were white. But something happened. He wasn't feeling well. He ends up being kidnapped. He's trying to explain that he's free. He's not a slave. And they just start beating him. And they take him South to where now, as he gets into the Deep South, like, you know, there's nowhere for him to run.

He can't argue. He can't make his case. Now, after 12 years, he was set free. Someone recognized him or came to get him. But the point of it was that the first slave owner that he worked for, he said if that was slavery, he wouldn't have thought it so bad.

And what was it? He had a Christian man. And though that unfortunately for him was not much of his tenure, he ended up doing very well under that man. So in those conditions, did he have the freedom to go and do what he wanted?

He did not, you know, in that sense. I always wondered what would happen if he would have just told that man that he really was free.

Ancient Warfare, Divine Judgment, and the Problem of Evil

STEPHAN KINSELLA. You know, something interesting, too. I know you've had some things to say about him, but Doug Wilson, he wrote a book about 20 years ago that was incredibly controversial about Southern slavery.

Does he ever write something that's not controversial?

I don't think he's capable of writing something that's not. But, you know, then this is kind of what I was saying, that I may say things that will make leftists bristle. But I think we get a cartoon depiction of even antebellum chattel slavery, and it was just a parade of horribles.

And, you know, their gradation, like you're saying, I mean, they were benevolent slave owners. I mean, the institution can be evil, but not every instantiation of it was. And, you know, it's possible that some people better off in that condition.

I mean, that sounds like a horrific thing to say to our liberal Western minds. But I, you know, that to me is self-evidently true.

Yeah, I mean, look, what is it that, you know, they blamed DeSantis, but it was actually a black guy that wrote the curriculum in Florida that said that the slaves learned to trade.

Right. And well, W .E .B. DuBois wrote Up From Slavery. And, you know, the idea, I think the passage that was controversial in the DeSantis curriculum was something like, you know, slaves learned a trade from slavery.

I mean, this is the whole thesis of W .E .B. DuBois was that, you know, black people thrive despite slavery, not necessarily because of it, but, you know. Despite it, yeah. And you know the same thing about Jews.

I mean, this is what we can say about Jews throughout history.

Well, this is what we can say about prisons. I mean, the whole idea of prison reform, it's the idea that you get there and they teach you skills. I mean, I think they've gotten away from that, but that was part of the argument was teach people skills so when they get out, they would be more productive to the culture, you know.

And I made a mistake there. It was Booker T. Washington, not DuBois. I was reading DuBois recently, but it was Booker T. Washington. Someone just reminded me in the private chat there.

And so Dee said this, and this came back to the thing that I was saying. There's different types of slavery. Which kind are we talking about? And that's the reason I asked you for the definition, because if it's ownership, I'm going to agree.

I don't believe that you can own another human being. I don't think that we see that in the Bible as the description. And so what we see described in the Bible, slavery was generally the means of employment.

I mean, you go through history. I think it's hard for us as Americans to really grasp the way the rest of the world has lived through the centuries when you really think about it, because we have such freedoms that they never had.

And we cannot conceive what it would be like to not have them. And so you always had cultures where you had a king or a group of people that are the elite and they're in charge. They're the nobles and then the peasants.

And yeah, you'll always have the socialist Marxist groups that they'll say, oh, see, we're for the peasants. But when you actually see that played out, what happens? They just use the peasants so they could be the one.

They use the peasants to replace the leader class with themselves. And then they start oppressing the masses that they were telling the masses, you're being oppressed and you need us. And then they become the oppressors.

Yeah, well, there's a natural human tendency towards that. I think you may call it total depravity. Yeah, well, that and that sort of circles back to what I was talking about with Luther. I think Luther in this kind of as a proto populist was speaking to the plight of the common man and the idea of individual consciousness, even among the peasantry.

But I would like to and we will certainly come back to slavery as this back, but transitioning to something on a related note, I think there are passages in the in the Old Testament in particular, and you know, the passages, you know, first Samuel 15, three numbers, 31, the extermination of the Amalekites and the Midianites, I think in those two passages that speak of exterminating men, women and children and those kinds of things.

I've read Paul Copan on this. I think he's probably one of the most prominent modern authors who speaks about this and defense of it. I'm not really convinced by what he says. I understand. And again, I'm coming at this from a perspective of moral relativism that a lot of like when you see we take the women.

Well, what's the alternative? I mean, if you exterminate all the men in combat, you know, what do you leave the women to fend for themselves? And so there's a sense in which Israel is being benevolent by requiring the women to be married to men.

And so they're not you know, it's not a campaign of genocide necessarily. And under the circumstances, you can't in the ancient world operate a prison camp with modern amenities. I mean, this is, you know, it's not Cape.

There's no capability for that. There's no capacity for it in that society. And so, you know, as a moral relativist, I look at that and I say, you know, I can't. It's a fine line to say I justify that.

But I understand under the circumstances in the ancient world, these practices make some kind of sense. It's easy to sit here and condemn them, you know, but you can't an ancient army can't just capture thousands of men who are against your people and just put them in a prison camp and look over them and treat them, you know.

More than that, more than that, it's it's not just that you can put them in a prison camp. How are you going to assimilate them in? Because when you think of America, America was called a melting pot, right?

There's the whole idea was that people would come to America, assimilate to the American culture. I mean, that's changing now because everyone wants to come in but not change their culture. But the idea is you would assimilate to the one culture.