SRR 108 Hiram Diaz on Critical Race Theory, Part 2

ThornCrown Network

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:02

I do a podcast. I'm not interested in your podcast. The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone.

00:13

When that is at stake, we need to be on the battlefield, exposing the air and combating the air.

00:24

We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make,

00:30

I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.

00:37

We are polemical and polarizing Jesus style. I would first say that to characterize what we do as bashing is itself bashing.

00:57

It's not hate. It's history. It's not bashing. It's the Bible. Jesus said,

01:06

Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

01:13

As opposed to, Blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. It is on.

01:22

We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle. Alright, welcome back everyone to Simple Riff around the radio.

01:34

It's been a while since we've been back on the show. I know we've been on a little bit of a hiatus for these past couple weeks.

01:42

And we've been, I've been on vacation and Tim's had a lot of stuff going on. So, I haven't been able to really focus on that, but I'm really glad to be back on the show with you guys.

01:53

And to talk about some really important stuff once again. And I've got our special guest with us,

02:00

Hiram Diaz once again. And really look forward to talking to him again about his article. And, but before we get into that,

02:08

I do have a few, just a few administrative announcements for folks. We've had some questions about how to maneuver on the website and how to get to the podcast.

02:18

So we are on iTunes. You guys can, if you want to subscribe to any app that you use.

02:24

The podcast app, the, you know, CastBox, whatever you want to use, you can use it.

02:30

You can search for us. The name of the podcast is Thorn Crown Network. And so all the podcasts are there on that one feed.

02:39

So you can subscribe to that one podcast and you get to, you get all of them. You get Semper Ephraim on the radio.

02:45

You get the Protestant Witness with Pastor Hines. And Radio Lux Lucid with Steve Matthews.

02:52

And all, and you know, the two podcasts that Brother Kaufman does on church history and Roman Catholicism and all that stuff.

03:00

And the eschatology stuff. So just, you can search for us and find us there.

03:06

Also some, so regarding the website, we're still kind of working things out. It's a little bit, we're still kind of trying to figure out the tags and how to best categorize the content that we have there.

03:19

So I know some of the pages, they limit, we have square space.

03:26

And so some of the pages are limited by displaying at most 20 items. And so we're still trying to figure out a way to be able to display all of the previous postings.

03:37

And so, but if you search for something, it should come up. The search is comprehensive on the website. So the search is actually, works pretty well.

03:45

It's just that some of the pages, they don't display the full history of posts. So just something to keep in mind, but you should be able to find it if you search for it.

03:55

And with that, so I thank you all for joining us once again. I've got some really exciting news that we hit it off.

04:05

If you listened to our previous episode, when I interviewed Hiram Diaz on Critical Race Theory, had a really good time doing that, really enjoyed it.

04:14

We really hit it off and we have a lot in common with Hiram. And so he's slowly climbing up the ranks in our network and some prefer him on the radio.

04:22

And so we're really excited to have him on board with us and hopefully be more of a regular participant. And so I'm very excited to continue the discussion with him.

04:33

He's very knowledgeable. If you listen to the preview, I think it was episode 103. If you go back and listen to that, that's the first part of this interview.

04:42

We're going to kind of pick it up where we left off from there and continue some of the main points that he covers in the article.

04:49

So without further ado, Hiram, welcome back to the show. Yeah, it's good to have you back on again.

04:58

So I know last time we talked a little bit. There's like six key points to Critical Race Theory that Matthew Mullins was providing, and we only covered like two of them.

05:12

So I want to finish those those main points because I really appreciated how you gave a kind of a running commentary on that.

05:20

And so let me we did the first one. The race is a social construct.

05:27

And so I think we skipped the second one. So let's jump over to that one. I'll just read it and then you can go ahead and give your comments on it.

05:37

Here we go. So point number two is racism is structural. Mullins explains that for CRT or Critical Race Theory proponents, racism is thus not only treating someone badly because their skin color is different from yours.

05:52

Racism is a huge, complicated historical system. It is the very way our world has been organized over time to empower folks who came to understand themselves as white and to subjugate those who fall outside that category.

06:06

So you care to comment on what he's saying there? Yeah, well, basically, the way that we normally view racism is that a person who's racist is basically showing favoritism toward one group of people and showing animosity and hatred toward another group of people based on skin color.

06:25

And usually have other stuff mixed in there with skin color, like culture, language, things like that.

06:31

And there are also presuppositions about the people who you are showing antagonism toward.

06:37

So there's a superiority of one group of people based on phenotypical features, like I said, skin color and those associated cultural things.

06:46

And that's basically how we understand racism. That's how it was understood all the way back in the 50s and 60s with the original civil rights movement.

06:55

But with the advent of postmodern philosophy or the infiltration of postmodern philosophy in things like critical legal studies and with critical race theory, racism was expanded to mean not just those overt actions, but also things as basic as what kind of reasoning you use.

07:15

Right, so we as Clarkians, we employ deduction, and we employ what the secularists and other people unfortunately would call, quote unquote,

07:23

Aristotelian logic, correct? Well, for critical race theory, logic, because it was articulated and developed by white

07:34

Europeans, beginning with Aristotle and his progeny in the medieval era, because of that, logic and logical analysis, deduction, even induction, even probabilistic, quote unquote, logic, things like that, are all part of the white supremacist system.

07:51

So structural racism goes beyond just, here's the police, it goes beyond what you see in things like Black Lives Matter, where they're saying, well, the structure of the legal system is bad, okay?

08:03

That's one part of it, but even that's too superficial, because it goes beyond that. It goes to the level of saying that logic itself is a construction of white

08:12

European males, and it's a way of oppressing people who have a different way of viewing the world. So racism is structural, it goes all the way down to that level, although people won't talk about it that way, but this is where it really goes down to.

08:25

You have people like, you know, we talked a little bit about Al Mohler. One of the things that he said in a video you can find on YouTube, and I mentioned it in the last time, the last podcast we met, where a student asked him about his take on social justice, and he says, well,

08:40

I'm not, he basically says, this is my summary, or my paraphrase, obviously, he says, I'm not with that as far as the secular version goes, but we do need to oppose white supremacy, because there are instances of white supremacy.

08:52

And he's basically agreeing with the social justice warriors and the CRT people, critical race theory people, that there's such a thing as structural racism.

09:01

Well, if he knows his stuff, if he knows his philosophy, he'll know that this goes beyond just an institution that has historically opposed people through indirect means, like laws that would exclude people from advancing, let's say, right?

09:18

Because this is what you hear about all the time. This is on the surface level, right? People say, well, you know, why is it that this person who's

09:27

Mexican, let's say, goes to jail for five years for having a nickel bag of weed, and this white person who's rapist might only go to jail for a week?

09:35

You know, to some extent, that is what they're concerned with. But philosophically, epistemologically, in terms of worldview analysis, it goes beyond that.

09:44

And the structural aspect goes way beyond just the external stuff that you see. You know, for the proponents of this, it goes, like I said, down to the very basic level of even logic itself, even language itself, right?

09:57

Language norms, speech norms, those things are instances of racism. So it goes deeper than just the superficial stuff that you see.

10:07

Right. It sounds just so insane. You just triggered another college experience that I had.

10:16

It's funny because I took a writing class, and my professor was an older woman, and she was a postmodernist.

10:29

And it was interesting because I was critiquing postmodernism, and she really didn't like that.

10:38

She gave me a terrible grade, and I was pretty much her best student. But she gave me a horrible grade because she didn't like that I was attacking postmodernism.

10:48

And then she accused me of imposing my Western understanding of logic on others.

10:55

Okay, so using this rational thought is considered oppressive?

11:03

I mean, I guess to an insane person it would be, but what does that even mean?

11:09

That's just so ridiculous. And in the popular media,

11:15

I know that this is where you get a lot of it, right? Because they say, you can be a racist without even realizing it.

11:23

Apparently, just by participating in the system, you become an implicitly, what is it called?

11:30

You implicitly consent to a system that is partial to others and disenfranchises others, right?

11:39

Other minority groups or whatever. And it's like, okay, folks. And this is one thing that really triggered me when

11:47

I was listening to the MLK50 conference. And that was just something that I was about to blow a fuse because people just have this victim mentality.

11:58

And it's like, when are you going to take responsibility for your own self, for your actions? When are you going to take responsibility?

12:05

Why does it have to be somebody else's fault all the time? When is something going to actually be for you to just...

12:14

I get that there is oppression and there are certain things that happen like that. I get that.

12:20

But to the extent that these people talk about, they're basically blaming everybody else but themselves.

12:27

And it's like, it's your life. And it's not like you don't have the means to overcome.

12:33

There's plenty of stories of folks that have come out from really horrendous situations from the ghettos and all this stuff.

12:40

And now they're very successful people. And this country is one of the places on the planet that most empowers people to do that.

12:51

But this theology of victimhood makes me so nauseous because they try to find ways to accuse the majority group of racism.

13:03

However, they can possibly try to pin racism on somebody else for any little thing that goes on.

13:12

And to make minorities feel like they're being abused or they're being taken advantage of.

13:18

It gets taken to a point where it's just beyond ridiculous. And that's the Black Lives Matter stuff that we talked about a little bit on the first part too.

13:27

It's so out of control now. And the fact that this is in the church coming from somebody.

13:33

This guy is a professor. Where was he? Southeastern? Yeah, South Eastern Baptist.

13:39

Yeah, I mean, he's a professor in a seminary and is promoting this trash. Are you serious?

13:46

So rational thought is considered oppressive now? And you're a Christian? What is this?

13:52

This is just madness. Yeah, well, they buy into the whole different worldview.

13:58

And that's the reason why I wrote the article that we talked about. Yeah. Yeah.

14:34

Right. Well, what they would tell you is that the reason why you're saying that is because you bought into the dominating cultural narrative.

14:49

And you are, you're thinking in categories like responsibility, individual responsibility, which comes from a

14:56

Western mindset, because Western philosophy and Western civilization has put an emphasis on the individual, whereas Eastern cultures and, you know, places in Africa, in traditional indigenous cultures, put a focus on the community.

15:10

So even when you say, when is, when are you going to take responsibility for your actions? They'll say, well, that's, you know, that's just your

15:17

Cartesian Western influence way of looking at things. Seriously, you can't win. It's absurd.

15:23

Yeah. It's absurd, dude. You know, it reduces to power, because basically, what can you do at that point, other than bash each other's heads in with clubs?

15:31

You know what I mean? Like, for all the talk of wanting to be civilized and wanting to get rid of what they call a hegemonic culture that oppresses all other cultures and is violent toward them.

15:41

Well, when you get rid of rational discourse, what do you have left? Insanity. You have abject violence and tribalism, which is the same thing that they're trying to say they're trying to avoid.

15:52

Well, you can't avoid it by doing that. You're going right back into it, you know? Yeah, they'll always try to find a way to one up you somehow.

16:01

It's just insanity. So, yeah, that's very good.

16:09

The third point, colorblindness is a problem, not a solution. We talked about this in the first part. So, if you want to go back and listen to our first episode on this,

16:19

I suggest that you do that and kind of get the background to this, because we kind of tore that one apart already.

16:26

So, let's jump over to point number four, which is,

16:31

I'll read it here real quick. Interest convergence, not pure progress. Mullins relays that interest convergence is the idea that dominant groups only acquiesce to minority interests when those interests converge with their own.

16:46

In other words, CRT proponents believe that, at times, changes in society affecting racial groups are wrongly identified as progress, when in reality, they have only come about because the changes that are in the best interest of the dominant culture, not because they are truly just fair or best for minorities.

17:12

So, what's he saying there? We're all just a bunch of opportunists or what?

17:19

Essentially, that's what it is, yeah. And the irony, too, is that, okay, well, you have this worldview that says there's no rational discourse, there is no universal story that explains all things, meta -narrative, right?

17:33

There is no way of forming a hierarchy of values, of truths, of things like that.

17:39

And then they'll come out with this here, which says, interest convergence, not pure progress. Well, how can you progress if there's no way of establishing a hierarchy, right?

17:48

You see what I'm saying? You see the contradiction there is, well, you don't want to help people progress.

17:54

You just want to do what's in your best interest.

17:59

Well, isn't that all that we have left, right? If you get rid of the idea of transcendence, get rid of the idea of hierarchy of one thing being better than another one, one culture, one way of looking at the world being better than another one, then all you have is interest, self -interest, and interest for your group.

18:19

So, this is a contradiction in terms of the values that they hold. But again, is contradiction something bad?

18:25

Well, they'll say that's only because you're following Aristotle. Wow. So, this is why they can hold these contradictions in their own mind, because who are you to say that contradiction is a bad thing?

18:39

Right. As if logic applies only to us and not to you. I mean, it's insanity. And this reminds me, this really reminded me of when

18:49

I first started to study Gordon Clark and the, I don't know if it's a philosophy, but the concept of egoism, right?

18:57

And it's, I guess it's one of the basic economic assumptions to certain forms of economic philosophies.

19:09

But because a lot of people denigrate the concept that all actions, all of our actions are self -interested in some way.

19:17

I think I heard Robin saying that, right? Have you looked into that, what they've talked about regarding egoism,

19:23

Clark and Robbins? I heard Robbins talk about something in a lecture, and I remember being taken aback because I was, like I told you before in the last one, because of where I grew up, because of the cultural values that were instilled in me, right?

19:40

We value community over the individual. And that was just the thing that I took for granted. And then I listened to John Robbins saying, well, look at what

19:46

Jesus says. He says, what profit is, you know, what is a profit to man if he gains the whole world and he loses his own soul?

19:53

And he's like, he's appealing to self -interest. And it just blew my mind. You know what I mean? Like, whoa, wait a second. He's the son of God appealing to self -interest.

20:01

Exactly. Yeah. So in our culture, there tends to be like a cultural taboo where we think that self -interested actions are somehow bad.

20:11

And it's like, they're not inherently bad. They're bad if you trample somebody else to get to it or to get it.

20:18

I mean, yeah, that's bad. That's sinful. But all actions being self -interested, that's actually an economic axiom,

20:26

I think, that is biblically justified. We, as humans, all of our actions are, as rational creatures, we do things that benefit ourselves and those whom we love and that kind of thing.

20:42

Of course, it shouldn't be at the expense of somebody else. But it sounds like these people are saying like, you can't help that.

20:50

Everything is always going to, if it's benefiting you, then it's benefiting the people you represent.

20:55

And so that, in essence, is going to violate or you're going to level down somebody else's value or whatever.

21:06

And this actually reminds me of another economic theory that I studied in college as well. I keep going back to my college days.

21:13

It's so funny. Because there's an economic theory. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

21:19

I think it's called world systems theory. And they say that this theory basically suggests that if you have a very affluent country like America, and we have a lot of affluence here and a lot of resource consumption.

21:39

So all that resource consumption, other countries have to pay for it.

21:45

And so because we are so affluent and so wasteful and use up so many resources as a country, other countries end up having to pay for that.

21:54

And so that's why basically it's our fault that countries like Africa are in this dire state that they're in.

22:03

Because we keep taking their resources. And you know what I mean? So it's like everything is, there's a limited amount of resources and everything that you use, somebody else is going to be disadvantaged if they're not in the same country that you're living in or whatever.

22:21

And so this kind of really just, you know, it's interesting because, and it's sad because people who don't have hope in God, you know, if you don't trust in God, well, that's all you have is what you see.

22:36

And so it's a very, it's a very carnal, it's a very, you know, empirical sensual way of looking at the world.

22:43

Like what we see is what we have. And, but the Bible, that contradicts the Bible plainly because Jesus said, seek the kingdom, seek the kingdom and His righteousness and all of these things will be added to you.

22:56

And so, and I really appreciate that about Robbins as well. He has a really, in his economic writings, his political writings, he says that because you embrace, the countries that embraced

23:09

Christianity tend to be more prosperous. And that's historically verifiable. That's actually true.

23:15

Like Australia and like America, and a lot of the countries that haven't been

23:20

Christianized or that haven't been, that haven't embraced the gospel, they tend to be, they tend to languish in a lot of poverty and, you know, unrest and things like that.

23:30

And so that's a very interesting, that's a fascinating topic in and of itself.

23:37

But yeah, and, you know, this is just, this is only, we've only covered what, like three, four points now?

23:45

I mean, how much worse is this going to get? Right? So, Well, you know, just to continue to talk about interest convergence and not pure progress is something

23:55

I wanted to add there. Something that you'll notice with, with critical race theory and social justice is there's always a questioning of the motives of somebody.

24:03

There's nothing that's superficial, right? And by superficial, I don't mean it in a bad way. I mean, just like the surface level, right?

24:10

So this is why when, you know, someone who's white, somebody says, Hey, you're racist. And they say, I'm not a racist.

24:16

I have a lot of black friends. And they'll say, see, the fact that you said you have black friends proves that you're racist. The reason why, yeah, there's always like you, you never get out of being racist, right?

24:30

You never get out of being sexist. You never get out of being quote unquote homophobic or transphobic or whatever.

24:36

And the reason why is because philosophically, again, in the background, you have the assumption that the idea in the

24:43

Enlightenment where you can speak directly what it is you're thinking and represent what it is you are and what you're experiencing to other people, in postmodernism, that's completely done away with.

24:54

So everything is subtext, right? Instead of it being the text that's being spoken, what's really being communicated is the subtext behind this wall of culturally acceptable terms and culturally acceptable notions.

25:07

And part of this derives from not only from Friedrich Nietzsche, but also from Sigmund Freud, right?

25:15

When Sigmund Freud talks about the subconscious and the unconscious, the id, the ego, etc.

25:21

The superego. They're lurking in the background.

25:52

And these are the people that contributed to critical race theory, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, these people who rejected the idea that you can be honest ever about what you are, because always in the background is lurking.

26:06

What's lurking there are the hidden intentions, which are always violent, the will to power, the will to dominate, the will to destroy.

26:16

And so the people who are promoting critical race theory now who are Christians need to come to grips with this, you know what

26:23

I mean? That's one of the reasons why they can say, critical race theory, people can say, well, you fought for the rights of black people, you know, hypothetically, right?

26:32

You fought for the rights of black people to get, let's see, to be able to vote.

26:38

And they'll say, yeah, but the only reason why you did that, they'll say, is because you benefited from it. And it's like, is that really the case?

26:46

Is it really the case that just because you can correlate the benefit of the people who promoted black people being able to vote, and, you know, you can correlate the movement for blacks to vote with the benefit that the whites received from that?

27:02

Is it really the case that that's the reason why they did it? No, that's fallacious reasoning, you know what I mean? But again, if you're saying it's a fallacy, it's probably because you've been indoctrinated by Aristotle in the

27:14

Western tradition. Yeah, there's always something that they'll one up you with.

27:20

That's really interesting, because, oh, gosh, what were we just talking about?

27:26

I went blank. Sigmund Freud, unconscious. Yeah, okay, right, right, right.

27:32

So, and it's funny, because Freud and Nietzsche, like, hello, these guys were not upstanding

27:42

Christians at all, you know, so they were fiercely opposed to Christianity.

27:48

I mean, come on, how are you going to be able, how can you reconcile these people's philosophy with Christianity?

27:56

You can't, it's impossible. And we already showed that, like, you clearly showed it in the article, and we already showed that in the previous episode, like, there's no way this stuff can be reconciled with Christianity.

28:09

And it's interesting, too, because to some extent, I guess, because we're Calvinists, you know, we're reformed, there's an element of truth, you could say, to Freud's, the fact that all men are by nature depraved.

28:25

They're all depraved, they're all wicked, they're all evil. Every, you know, there's no question that the

28:30

Bible categorically condemns all human beings as being naturally evil.

28:35

But what they deny, they deny God and regeneration.

28:44

And so, in denying that, you are denying the fact that people can actually be transformed by God and regenerated by God and have pure motives.

28:51

And so, they'll always just assume, but no, because they literally deny the power of God and salvation and regeneration, they're not

29:02

Christian, you know, just in case people didn't know that, they're not Christian. And so, they deny the regenerating power of the

29:10

Spirit operating in Christians that enables us to actually have pure motives, even though they may be still tainted with sin.

29:17

And I'm not saying we're perfect or anything, but we are enabled, we're given a new heart, and that's a fundamental

29:24

Christian doctrine and aspect of salvation, regeneration, that's a primary doctrine right there.

29:31

You can't deny regeneration and still be a Christian, like that's just completely at odds with Scripture.

29:41

Yeah, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, go ahead. Okay. Well, there's another thing, because you'll have these guys who claim to be

29:48

Calvinists and they'll say, well, the noetic effects of sin, you know, and the effects that sin has on your psychology means that you can be the kind of person that Freud is talking about.

29:59

Well, you know, where everything that you do has ulterior motives that are bad, and it's like, well, that's not really what's going on with the doctrine of total depravity, right?

30:09

The idea is not that in every single instance with our neighbor, you know, we're seeking to devour them and destroy them.

30:15

Our primary opposition is to God, total depravity, so that means in everything that we do, even if we have good intentions, which we can, and you know, if we were unbelievers, we could have good intentions, but the good is only for our neighbor and for ourselves, right?

30:31

And the sin is turning away from God and not being thankful, like it says in Romans chapter 1, not acknowledging who God is, not being thankful, and worshipping ourselves and worshipping creation instead of the

30:40

Creator. The idea is not that we can never have pure motives, you know, we can, but the purity isn't the purity that God's love acquires, right?

30:48

It's pure in the sense that what we're saying is what we mean. You know what I mean? Right. And so the guys who are

30:54

Calvinistic trying to smash together the doctrine of total depravity and Freud, that's what they're completely getting all messed up, you know?

31:03

And it's evil that they're even attempting to do that because they're not the same thing, you know? Right.

31:09

I remember Gordon Clark in one of his lectures, he talked about how Freud had a better anthropology than somebody else, I forget who it was, you know, because he said,

31:16

Freud at least recognized that man is wicked, you know? And he was right, and we can agree with Freud on that point, like you said, and we can agree with Freud that we do sometimes, but not all the time, but sometimes we do conceal ulterior motives under, you know, under a friendly face, under amicable speech, right?

31:36

Right. We say one thing and we mean another, like in the book of Proverbs, the Lord tells us that the wicked man, you know, he signals with his hands and he shuffles his feet, and he speaks one way, but in his heart, he's another way, you know?

31:50

Yeah. You can do that. You can do it, but nine times out of ten, we're saying straightforward what we mean, you know, and when we're not doing that, it's pretty clear.

32:00

But for Freud and for the critical race theory people, that's what's always happening. Even when you think you have pure intentions, you're basically the puppet of your cultural assumptions and the culture that you live in.

32:11

Yeah. Right. We're perpetual hypocrites. And that's a sad state of affairs, because if everybody's a perpetual hypocrite, then everybody's going to hell, because the number one sin, and I would say the number one sin that Jesus despised more than anything was hypocrisy, and especially religious hypocrisy.

32:34

And so we all have a serious problem. If what they're saying is true, that we're all just perpetual hypocrites, then that means we're all going to hell, because God hates that pretty much more than anything else, especially religious hypocrisy.

32:55

And I'm really glad you brought up the issue of total depravity, because I know that's a misnomer, that people think that it means that you're completely wicked or that you're as bad as you can be.

33:07

That's not what the doctrine means, like you were saying. A better term is radical depravity, which means that every aspect of your being is corrupt.

33:17

Sin has tainted every aspect of your being. It doesn't mean that you're as bad as you can be, or that we're all as bad as Hitler is.

33:25

It just means that we are completely affected by sin. And yes, as unbelievers, all we do is wicked, and all we do is sin, because even like the

33:36

Bible says, the plowing of the wicked is evil, because it's going against God, and you're not acknowledging God and what you're doing.

33:44

And there isn't just the letter, but also the spirit of Allah that you have to take into account.

33:49

Like Jesus said, if you lust, you've already committed adultery in the heart. There is both that you have to take into account.

33:57

That's a very helpful distinction. This is one thing that has always fascinated me about the

34:11

Bible and about God and about Christianity. It has a perfect system of checks and balances.

34:17

There's like book end doctrines that always help you to show you that if you're going too far in one direction, another doctrine is going to suffer for it.

34:27

And that's one of those things that when you emphasize depravity so much, to the point where you say that everything

34:34

Christians do is still sinful, then you're actually undermining God's power. Because you're saying that God is not doing what

34:43

He's promising to do when He gives you a new heart and causes you to obey Him. Because you will be able to obey, even if it's imperfectly, even if it's not fully perfectly the way

34:53

Christ did, but He will empower you and enable you in a progressive, sanctifying walk with His Spirit living in you.

35:00

He will enable you to walk more and look more like Christ. That's a very important distinction and difference that you see very clearly between critical race theory and Christianity.

35:13

And it's again, not surprisingly, a fundamentally, it's a primary issue.

35:19

We just talked about regeneration. You can't deny regeneration and call yourself a

35:24

Christian, and you can't deny total depravity either. I mean, those are radically fundamental doctrines of the

35:33

Bible. And even consider this, we haven't talked about this, but this is something that needs to be brought up to critical race theory proponents and social justice warrior -ism proponents.

35:46

Is the idea, if that's your view of communication, then what do you do with the scriptures? What do you do with the doctrine of infallibility, the doctrine of inerrancy?

35:55

What do you do with the doctrine of the purity of God's word? You see what I'm saying? What do you do with that?

36:00

Because if the writers of scripture are men and women, or presumably all men, but just for their sake, we'll say men and women or whoever.

36:12

If they're all humans like ourselves, and all we can do is communicate this admixture of some good stuff on the surface, but really some really evil, nasty stuff underneath it, then the writers of scripture are not going to be any different because they're fully human.

36:29

Wow, that's a good point. Scripture is corrupt too. You can't have an infallible pure word of God, you can't have proper exegesis, you can't have proper hermeneutical methods.

36:39

And this is something that actually post -modern theologians, believe it or not there is such a thing, have emphasized.

36:45

And this is why they go to things like process theology, they go to things like open theism, and they become syncretist and inclusivist, because they deny that you can communicate thoroughly, they deny that the writers of scripture are inerrant and infallible.

36:59

And those guys, the post -modern theologians, are only a stone's throw away from the guys who are promoting critical race theory.

37:06

All you need to do is take a few steps and you're in that camp. You know what I mean? Wow. It's inconsistency by the grace of God that these guys haven't gone that far.

37:16

It's only a matter of time. Yeah, it's a matter of time. Yeah. That's an excellent point.

37:24

And it's really disturbing because they are denying that literally, if you're going to be consistent, then yes, you would have to deny the doctrine of infallibility and inspiration of the

37:40

Bible. Because if God moved holy men to write his words down, and he had to use human instruments, and those humans are always flawed, and they're always wicked, and they're always perverse, then that means that they must have inserted some of their own wickedness when they were writing out the

37:56

Bible. I mean, that is so disturbing. Here we have yet another cardinal

38:02

Christian doctrine. You have the infallibility and inspiration of the Bible. And if you deny that, you're no longer a

38:10

Christian. I mean, you're a liberal. That's what the liberals do. Liberals deny inspiration, not sound

38:16

Orthodox Christians. I mean, that's the foundation of all of our belief. I mean, once you deny that, there's no stopping you.

38:24

I mean, wow. I don't know how much worse it can get, but I guess

38:31

I shouldn't be surprised at this point. Wow. So let's jump over to point number five now.

38:43

Yeah, I think we're in point number five. So point number five is whiteness is normative.

38:49

For CRT proponents, whiteness has come to seem normal over time, making everything else non -normal or other.

38:56

To put it another way, whiteness and everything associated with being white has become the standard for how a person should be.

39:03

CRT criticizes the idea that we can be neutral, objective, or colorblind when it comes to race. If we are trying to be neutral, then we are inevitably reinforcing the status quo, or the norm, and the norm is to live and behave like white people.

39:17

Wow. This sounds like number two, actually. A little bit like number two. So what are they saying there?

39:26

I'm saying whiteness is normative. I wish I could give a glossary of these terms, these keywords, because normativity is definitely one of those words with the postmodernists.

39:39

Because, again, there is no transcendent truth. There's nothing transcendent. So what you have are norms, culturally constructed ideas that become normative.

39:47

They become the ruling ideas. In Reformed theology, we have scripture, which is the norm of all norms.

39:55

Scripture puts everything in its proper place. But with CRT postmodernism, the normative things are the products of society.

40:08

So whiteness being normative, like you said, it ties into structuralism, or number two.

40:18

And the idea there is that, again, white European males have become dominant in terms of the way that they think.

40:27

And those ideas, for the postmodernists, for critical race theory, those ideas are not normal.

40:33

They're not natural, let's just say. They're not inherent to the structure of what it means to be a human. They're imposed upon other people when, let's say, the

40:42

Greeks conquered the Persians. We'll say, well, if the Persians started thinking like the

40:48

Greeks, it's because they've been forced to, because they've been submerged. Their culture has been consumed, basically.

40:54

And they've been forced to assimilate to Greco -Roman culture, Greek culture, or whatever. And so whiteness has become normative.

41:02

It's become the thing against which people are compared. So the ideal of what it means to be rational is going to be a white

41:09

European male. The idea of what it means to be attractive is going to be a white European male or female.

41:16

And you see some of this. Some of this is actually the case. When you have a dominant people group in a culture, typically what's considered beautiful is going to be what's going to match up with the dominant culture.

41:29

They have the loudest voice. They're speaking the most. They're producing the most, aesthetically. So they're going to have a bigger influence.

41:36

But this goes beyond just aesthetics. This goes, like I said, to reasoning. It goes to ways of looking at the world, in every case, epistemologically, historically, even.

41:52

So, yeah, there's no neutrality. And as Christians, we believe that there's no neutrality.

41:57

But we believe there's no neutrality toward God. We don't believe that there's always a lack of neutrality when we're communicating with other humans.

42:07

This ties into what we were talking about with, quote -unquote, pure intentions, pure motives, and interest conversions earlier.

42:15

We don't believe that there's no such thing as objectivity in terms of looking at ideas and analyzing ideas.

42:27

Otherwise, we couldn't reason. We believe that in terms of our relationship to God, morally, because of the fall, we're corrupted.

42:36

And there's no neutrality in that sense. And I say this again because there are some Calvinistic guys pushing

42:41

CRT. And there are some Vantillian guys who are

42:47

Calvinistic, Presbyterian in some cases, who are utilizing the idea of non -neutrality in order to support this kind of nonsense.

42:56

Really? Non -neutrality. Yeah, that's not what non -neutrality is. And this is anecdotal, so I don't have any names off the top of my head.

43:03

But I've come across people who are saying, well, what about the fact that there's no such thing as neutrality? Doesn't that tie into how we communicate with each other or how we view the world as a whole?

43:13

It's like, that's not what it means. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's not that we don't have racial neutrality, but that we don't have neutrality when it comes to logic or mathematics as regards our relationship to other people.

43:27

It's as regards our relationship to God. Everything we do as a fallen human being is colored by, is biased by our attempt to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

43:36

That's what it means. But can we have an unbiased view of X, Y, or Z in our relationship to one another?

43:44

Yeah, of course we can. Otherwise, you couldn't even make the claim that whiteness is normative or that it's not normative or that there's neutrality.

43:51

There's no neutrality. You have to have neutrality at some level, right? And it's there.

43:58

Yeah, right. So, it sounds like neutrality in the sense that it applies to both, you know, to everybody.

44:07

Like, it's not something, yeah, right. So, like, it's funny because logic, contrary to what they would say, is actually normative or neutral in that sense, right?

44:17

Because logic applies to everybody. It's not something that you can opt out of. And so, yeah, that makes sense.

44:24

That's helpful. Yeah, like, just to give you an example. Like, one of the things. So, here's an example, right?

44:30

If you go to New York where I grew up and you see people of Arabic descent arguing with each other in the street.

44:39

Let's say they just moved to America from the Middle East. You would think, because of your cultural background, you see them as fighting, getting ready to kill each other, let's say, right?

44:49

Right. Worst case scenario. But if you come to know them as a people group, they are just having a disagreement.

44:56

It's just the way they do things. It's a cultural difference, right? And in Puerto Rican culture, like my culture, you know, loudness,

45:05

I don't like it. But I know that it's part of my culture. And it doesn't, you know, it doesn't always signify something bad is happening.

45:14

You know, it could be excitement in some cases. It could just be a way of communicating and trying to emphasize your point, right?

45:19

Right. So if I were to come along and say, well, you raising your voice to emphasize a point is morally wrong.

45:28

That's the kind of thing that they're talking about with normativity. Whiteness is normativity. Right. Because it's not what white people do.

45:33

Yeah. Yeah. And that's a superficial level that we can agree to say, yeah, it'd be wrong to say somebody's sinning just because they're not doing something in a way that you like.

45:43

Right. But that's not what they're saying. It goes beyond that. It goes beyond that to saying, well, certain moral commandments from God are the product of white

45:54

European interpreters. Wow. Yeah. So if you go along, this is the reason why there's a double standard in some cases when it comes to critical when it comes to social justice kind of stuff.

46:04

Right. Like if you were to say, I don't remember a few years back with James White when he criticized a young black man who was being disrespectful toward police and everybody spazzed out.

46:16

They're like, you can't say that. You can't. Right. Especially because he's not black. And yeah. Well, it's because that's part of it.

46:24

And the other part of it is you don't know his background. You don't know where he comes from. And so you can't subject him to the same sort of criticism that you can subject your own children and your own people to.

46:33

Right. Yeah. Because if you subject them to your criticism, then you're imposing this norm, this set of norms on him that don't apply to him.

46:43

Right. And you're a white guy. So this is, excuse me, this is you making your whiteness normative for everybody else.

46:50

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing they're saying. And like I said. That's terrible. At a superficial level, it makes sense.

46:57

Like the two people arguing in Arabic, yelling at each other. And really what they're saying is, you're dumb.

47:04

You shouldn't have parked in that spot. You know, that's OK. We understand. Like, I shouldn't impose my understanding of what it means to have a decent argument with somebody on them.

47:15

But they're going beyond that. They're saying, like I mentioned, criticizing somebody for something that's obviously immoral.

47:21

Well, you're immoral for doing that because you're imposing a set of standards on them that doesn't apply to them. Yeah, that's really interesting.

47:32

So I've even heard that. I don't remember where I heard this. And I'm not saying it's like it applies to everybody.

47:40

I don't remember who said this, but I've even heard that when you have

47:48

Arab or, I guess, Middle Eastern people in a debate, they tend to view the person who was most expressive and most like projecting the most as the person that won.

48:03

Even if his arguments were worse or whatever, they tend to view the one who is more animated as the one who has the upper hand,

48:15

I guess. And so, you know, I don't know how I haven't witnessed that personally or whatever.

48:21

But yeah, you know, I had an Arabic mechanic who would come off strong, you know.

48:29

And I wouldn't mind it because I'm Middle Eastern myself. I wouldn't mind it. But it's funny because, you know, it's just different ways people express themselves or whatever.

48:38

But as a side note, I heard this funny story from a comedian. He said he's talking about living in the city.

48:46

He's like, look, if you want to know when a person, a person of Middle Eastern descent is angry at you, that's when they're being nice to you when they're talking in a very soft tone.

48:56

It's like they're like, my friend, my friend. He's like, then you're in trouble. If they're yelling at you, then they're cool with you.

49:04

That's funny. Yeah. And, you know, this brings me to another point with respect to.

49:12

Gosh, I went blank again. Can I make another comment? Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, this is something to like, if you if you pay attention to popular discourse, the idea of trans, you know, transgenderism and homosexuality.

49:29

If you say that. If you say that homosexual relationships are wrong, that they're unnatural, and you say that transsexual or transgender individuals are doing something wrong with their bodies and with the way they identify.

49:46

They'll say, well, you're imposing a heteronormative standard on us. See how it's similar.

49:52

Yeah. Right. You can't judge anybody. You can't. Yeah. Nobody's wrong. Everybody's right. Anybody can do what's right in their own eyes.

50:00

And because there's no like like you said in the article that they deny essentialism.

50:05

So there's no universal norms of it at all. So, yeah, I mean, this.

50:11

OK, so this is what's so disturbing. I can't stand this because you like you said, it's a very clear double standard because they hold the people who they hold the majority group with one standard.

50:25

But then they like Black Lives Matter, especially you see this so strongly with groups like Black Lives Matter, because they don't they don't they assume that because you're oppressed or whatever, that you can't be guilty of racism yourself or of making denigrative comments or, you know, to other about other people groups when that's obviously not true.

50:50

I mean, in fact, what's so ironic is that Black Lives Matter are some of the most racist people that I've seen, because it's like,

50:59

OK, why are you going after all these, you know, white cops killing black people when that's like a very small percentage of how black people die?

51:09

Why aren't you protesting the abortion clinics? Because that's the number one cause of like black people dying.

51:18

Abortion clinics, it's black people doing it. And what about black on black crime?

51:24

Like those are the two main, if I remember right, the statistics, those are the two main causes of black people dying.

51:30

And it's like the white cops, the percentage of white cops shooting black people doesn't even add up, doesn't even come close to the number of deaths as a result of aborting babies and black on black crime.

51:44

And you don't where do you see Black Lives Matter in black neighborhoods where the violence is so prevalent and or abortion clinics?

51:53

They're not there because they're the liberals who are promoting that same agenda. And so it's so disturbing because you really see the hypocrisy come out in this point, you know, like they're so radically hell bent on blaming somebody else when in reality, if they looked in the mirror, they would see, hey, why don't you look at what's really going on and stop blaming everybody else for your problems?

52:20

You know, it's like, and I know people, men, people saying that they'll be like, well, you're not black, you're not allowed to say that.

52:28

And also, you know, this kind of attitude is precisely, this is what fosters the tribalism that you were talking about earlier, that it alienates people so badly, because now you're not allowed to talk about anybody else that's not exactly like you, and nobody's exactly like you.

52:48

And so you basically cut off rational discourse, you eliminate the ability for people to have rational disagreements that are different from you and say, you know, like, it's so, this is what destroys, literally destroys societies, because a nation divided against itself cannot stand.

53:10

That was what Jesus said, a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. If there is no unanimity of thought, if there is no universal consensus about some things, then you no longer have a nation, it's going to crumble.

53:27

And that's what you see happening in America today. I mean, it's so bad now that everybody gets offended about everything.

53:33

And you can't talk about anybody else, because they're not exactly like you. And so you're not allowed to judge or whatever, do anything, because you'll be crossing the line.

53:43

And I can't stand that, because that's, in order to go forward, you have to enable that, you have to enable that ability to have rational discourse and disagreement.

53:56

That is fundamentally what it means to be a civilized society. In order to be civilized, you have to be able to respectfully disagree with somebody else who has a different perspective, and do it without shooting or killing each other, or without yelling at each other, violently opposing each other.

54:15

That is what it means to have a civilized nation, a society, where you can disagree without killing each other.

54:24

And sadly, CRT is compounding this error a hundredfold, because of these ridiculous hypocritical double standards that they impose on people, on the majority group, but not on the minority group.

54:42

So, wow. I mean, okay, so now, looks like we're finally at the last point.

54:49

And boy, this is wearing me out. This is so bad.

54:56

But I'm really glad we're getting a chance to really unpack this, because it's just showing how bad it really is, and how utterly contrary to the fundamental doctrines, the cardinal doctrines of Christianity.

55:10

So, the last point here is point number six, which is intersectionality. And we talked about this a little bit before, but here, as Mullins states, quote, intersectionality is the study of how different identity categories overlap, end of quote.

55:32

Consequently, quote, proponents of CRT who study intersectionality typically believe that people living in the intersection of multiple oppressed identity categories face unique forms of discrimination that require equally unique forms of defense.

55:46

And so, I wanted to ask you this. It's a springboard of what kind of goes off of the previous point, because it's like, what is the point of them pointing this out?

55:57

You know, it's like, what are they saying? Like, what's the end game? You know, like, are they saying, what are you supposed to do?

56:05

If you're a white person, and you're not explicitly racist, but you're participating in the system, you're, you know, an accomplice, or you're guilty by association, just because of who you are.

56:18

And so, what's the end game? Like, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to pay people? Are you supposed to pay the minorities some kind of stipend or fund?

56:28

Like, what are they suggesting? Or what are they getting at? What they're getting at is an elimination of laws and rules and quote, unquote, norms that apply to everybody at all times and in all places.

56:43

That's really the gist of it. Because the assumption, again, behind it is anti -foundationalism, anti -essentialism, anti -metanarrative, anti -Logos,

56:53

Christ, theology. And this is specific, if you look at the writing of someone like Jacques Derrida, the

56:59

French philosopher. He explicitly opposes the idea of the Logos, or the Logos, however you pronounce it, who holds all meaning and all things together.

57:10

Because they assume that, now they want society to fall in lockstep with that theorizing that they've done, if that makes any sense, you know.

57:19

Because in practice, we're made in the image of God. We know that there are categories that apply universally. We know that there are rules that apply universally.

57:27

We know these things because God has revealed them to us. Romans chapter 1, right? He's made his moral law known to us.

57:33

He's written it on our hearts. We know it's right. We know it's wrong. We know when we're breaking God's law. We know when we're doing what's right.

57:42

But when you have a worldview that says, no, nothing is held together. Everything is just fragmentary, and it's all imminent, not transcendent.

57:50

It's all horizontal, not vertical. Well, this is how you want reality to look, right?

57:57

So there's a conflict there between how things are actually playing out, namely with hierarchy, with values that come directly from God.

58:04

We see them around us. There's a conflict between those things, which are concrete and tangible, to use that language, that metaphorical language, and the philosophy of the postmodernist, which doesn't work out in reality.

58:16

So as a postmodernist, what do you want to do? As a good philosopher wants to do, you want to impose your will on the world, right?

58:23

You want to make the world according to your image. And I think that's really what's going on. It's a matter of eliminating...

58:29

Yeah, right. I think that really benefits the guy who's working every day, providing for his family, who's under the thumb of an oppressive regime in China.

59:09

Does it benefit him to think that good and evil are illusions? Or does it benefit the ruler who knows that there's good and evil, who's going to manipulate the people to do whatever he tells them to do, because good and evil are just part of the same spectrum?

59:22

It's going to benefit the person with power. Exactly. Yeah, because they won't be motivated to change, to protest.

59:29

On what basis are you going to protest it? If there's no good and evil, then on what grounds are you going to say this is wrong?

59:36

You know, oppression is wrong. That's a very good point. That's true. And that's the thing that's ironic about this, right?

59:41

Is that postmodernists are saying, well, if you impose some sort of transcendent category of morality on us, you're oppressing us.

59:49

But if I take it away and I say everything is allowable, everything's permissible, who does that benefit? It benefits the person who's going to come along and impose his will on everybody.

59:58

Might makes right in that instance. Exactly, yeah. And this is why when Plato philosophizes about, you know,

01:00:05

I think it's in the Republic, he talks about society and what's going to happen. And he basically says we started off with tyranny.

01:00:11

It went to aristocracy. It went into democracy eventually. And democracy, when everybody started thinking that their opinions and everything was equally valid, what happens is the tyrant steps in to reinsert order or to reestablish order,

01:00:26

I should say. And there are some people who actively push for deconstruction, which is what this is, deconstructing society, culture, language, everything for the sake of establishing another power in its place.

01:00:39

And the Marxists wanted to use deconstruction, wanted to use these ideas in order to establish

01:00:45

Marxism. Right. And a person that really needs to be looked at more is a guy named

01:00:51

Antonio Gramsci. I've heard it pronounced both ways. And he had this idea of cultural hegemony, where it's the idea that culture functions in the place of, let's say, physical oppression.

01:01:05

So this ties into whiteness being normative, this ties into heterosexuality being normative, masculinity being normative, and being the, you know, male headship being normative.

01:01:17

And he's saying, if we want communism to succeed, first we have to get rid of the ruling culture.

01:01:23

We have to pull it apart. And we have to give people something in its place. We have to basically take it apart and give them something different.

01:01:31

And so there are people like Gramsci in politics who are trying to do that kind of thing.

01:01:40

So that's another endgame. You know, philosophically, you just want the world to look like you. You want to impose your will on the world.

01:01:47

Politically, it could be the case that people are promoting this because they want to establish a different regime. See what

01:01:53

I'm saying? And some people might say this is conspiratorial, but if you read the philosophers, you won't say that because this is exactly what they say openly.

01:02:24

A basic concept of right and wrong, every human being has that.

01:02:31

And that's why we are without excuse. We know enough about God to be accountable to Him and of His law.

01:02:37

So the moral law is that standard which applies universally to all men at all times without exception.

01:02:46

And so what they really want, like what you were just describing, what they really want is chaos.

01:02:55

They want anarchy. They want no universal set of norms so that people can be held accountable to it because that would fundamentally undermine their conviction that, well, now you're going to set up a parent culture that's going to oppress everybody else because that's not like them.

01:03:11

And they would obviously say that imposing the

01:03:17

Ten Commandments or the moral law as taught by the Bible and by Christianity, well, that's a

01:03:24

Judeo -Christian -Western imposition of norms that is oppressing everybody else who disagrees with you.

01:03:33

That is insanity. That really is insanity.

01:03:39

They want to get rid of all law. That's chaos and anarchy.

01:03:46

That's insane. And of course, we know historically that that won't happen because what always happens is the king of the hill comes and he puts his foot down and he ends up becoming the next tyrant.

01:04:03

And that's exactly what happens when you see the LGBT agenda and how fierce they are in pushing all opposition and drowning the opposition.

01:04:22

Just by disagreeing, they get so fierce that they put other

01:04:29

Christians out of businesses. Anybody who disagrees with them, they will put you out of business.

01:04:34

They'll put you in prison. They will do whatever it takes. And there you have it.

01:04:41

These minorities, that's another good example. The LGBT agenda is so fierce and how it persecutes and completely opposes and oppresses those who disagree, even if they don't disagree in a way that's harmful or sinful against them, they will eat you alive.

01:05:08

It's really disturbing. Going back to the whole norms thing, because I know there's theological terms that I wanted to talk about a little bit.

01:05:19

It's fundamental Christian doctrines. We're talking about moral law.

01:05:24

We're talking about universal standards that apply to everybody at all times. That's what God is going to judge everybody off of.

01:05:31

At the very least, He's going to judge you on that universal moral law that everybody at the core of it will be held accountable to.

01:05:40

And not only that, but there's a theological term called the

01:05:47

Norma Normans, which is the rule that rules. That is the Scripture. The Scripture is the

01:05:53

Norma Normans. It's the rule that rules. It's the rule that's Sola Scriptura. That means that as Protestants, we believe that the

01:06:01

Scripture is the sole, final, infallible rule of faith for all matters of faith and practice for all matters of truth.

01:06:09

The other term is the secondary term called the Norma Normata, which is the rule that is ruled.

01:06:16

Those are secondary authorities like the creeds, the confessions, and things like that. Christianity is fundamentally at odds with what you're describing in the article.

01:06:27

It is fundamentally at odds. We're talking about the Bible. We're talking about regeneration.

01:06:34

We're talking about salvation. This is Christianity 101. It's not some obscure secondary tertiary issue.

01:06:46

It's 101 Christianity, the basics, the most basic concepts that this critical race theory totally violates at just about every point.

01:07:01

Wow. I feel terrible just talking about it.

01:07:08

Just thinking about the consequences of that. That's the worst possible thing that can happen.

01:07:17

I kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier in the previous episode, but if there was a complete opposite to Christianity, I'm convinced this would be it.

01:07:29

This and Satanism, these things go hand in hand because it utterly contradicts

01:07:36

Christianity at every fundamental point, every single point that we've talked about.

01:07:41

It's disturbing. But something that I always thought about was how, in the back of my mind as I'm reading his books,

01:08:18

I'm like, if you take this to this conclusion over here, what results is something similar to what you find in the

01:08:26

Kabbalah or what you find in occultism. I'm just thinking in the back of my mind,

01:08:32

I'm processing it. I'm like, there's a similarity here. So, I look it up and I find out, well, lo and behold, one of the biggest French philosophers for postmodernism was influenced by what?

01:08:40

By Kabbalah and by occultism. I found a book by him in a bookstore not too far away from where I live and I bought it because I'd never seen it before.

01:08:49

It was him and some other philosopher. They were talking. It's like a dialogue recorded. And one of the things he talks about is having admiration for Lucifer because Lucifer broke against the order of the same, which is what they call it, right?

01:09:01

Which is the hegemonic order that God imposed and everything. And so, Lucifer serves as a model for how we should be philosophizing and thinking.

01:09:09

And I'm like, he admits it. He just says it straight forward. And you find it in different philosophers.

01:09:16

You find it in Karl Marx, the same sort of thing is written. I think it was Richard Wurmbrand who records

01:09:21

Karl Marx. He documents Karl Marx's admiration for Lucifer at some later point in Karl Marx's life.

01:09:30

Earlier on, he wasn't a proponent of some sort of nascent form of Saganism. But later on, apparently, he was.

01:09:37

So, there is a connection there. Yeah, that's, man, I'm glad you brought that up. So, it is about as bad as it gets then.

01:09:44

And what on earth, what are Christians doing? Christian scholars and prophets, what are they doing?

01:09:51

Pushing this stuff in the church as if it was gospel truth. It doesn't make any sense.

01:09:58

Yeah, you know, there's a really good book by Kevin Swanson called

01:10:04

Apostate. He talks about Marx there. And he shows the letters and some of the stuff that he wrote.

01:10:12

This guy was literally possessed by Satan. Only the devil would say some of the things that he wrote.

01:10:19

I mean, that guy was literally possessed. Go ahead, I'm sorry. No, no,

01:10:25

I was just gonna say that it's no surprise because this guy is responsible for some of the most, he's probably responsible for more killings than almost any other human being on the planet.

01:10:37

He inspired the world's most notorious mass murderers in the history of the world. And hello,

01:10:44

Lucifer? I mean, wow, that is so disturbing.

01:10:50

But yeah, well, go ahead. Well, and another big influence on the postmodernist critical race theory movement, all that, is

01:10:58

Frederick Nietzsche. Yeah, of course. And if you know anything about Nietzsche, he was literally opposed to Christianity. And he even went so far as to call himself the

01:11:05

Antichrist. He wrote a book called The Antichrist, where he excoriates Christians in Christianity. And he goes so far, you know, he has another book called

01:11:13

Ecce Homo, or Ecce Homo, which is Behold a Man in Latin. Where he is self -identifying as the son of God, in a blasphemous way, because he's doing it to subvert

01:11:24

Christian morality. He even says that if we're going to succeed in society, we have to have a transversal of all morality, basically flipping everything on its head.

01:11:34

You know, instead of searching for truth, you search for lies, or you value lies instead of valuing truth. Instead of valuing what's considered good, you value what's evil.

01:11:44

So Nietzsche had a direct connection to, and it's my own personal opinion that Nietzsche was likewise possessed.

01:11:51

And as a side note, I think it's incredibly ironic that he spent his life calling himself the madman, and he died as a madman, literally.

01:11:58

It's as if the Lord said, okay, you want to be a madman? Yeah. There you go. That's judgment for you. Man, that's scary.

01:12:16

Yeah. is a manifestation of Satanism. Because even in the

01:12:22

Book of the Law, the book that Alistair Crowley wrote, Alistair Crowley was one of the most notorious.

01:12:28

He was a very notorious, I think he founded the Church of Satan. No, that was Anton LaVey, right? He founded the Church of Satan in 66.

01:12:34

But he basically copied everything from Alistair Crowley. And Alistair Crowley, he wrote the book called the

01:12:42

Book of the Law. And the fundamental maxim of the Satanist is do what thou wilt, right?

01:12:49

It's to do whatever you want to do. And literally, that is what postmodernism promotes.

01:12:55

I do what I want. You do what you want. You can't judge me. We're all relative. It's all relative.

01:13:02

You don't get involved. I don't get involved. That's it. And it's chaos. It's anarchy.

01:13:08

It's do what thou wilt. It's do whatever you want. It literally is a manifestation of Satanism.

01:13:13

And I'm so glad that we're tying all this together because even the people that are talking about this, a lot of this stuff gets left out.

01:13:27

It really is so much worse. It is so bad and fundamentally antagonistic to Christianity that it's a form of Satanism.

01:13:36

And you even have, and I wanted you to talk about this a little bit. Can you talk about the white gaze?

01:13:43

Because I know we kind of touched on this a little bit, but there's also the concept of the white gaze. And I haven't heard other people talk about this.

01:13:50

But what does that mean, the white gaze? The idea of the gaze,

01:13:55

G -A -Z -E, the staring, the gazing of the Other, capital

01:14:01

O, Other. It's an idea in philosophy that I think traces back to Jeremy Bentham, a political philosopher.

01:14:09

Yeah, utilitarian guy, right? Yeah, and he came up with the idea of what's called the

01:14:14

Panopticon. And the Panopticon was a way of formatting a prison or structuring a prison architecture so that you had a person or you had a viewing center in the middle.

01:14:23

And then you had the cells all around and the cells could be looked into from every angle, but no one in the cells, they could see each other, but they couldn't see who was in the middle watching them.

01:14:34

And the idea there was that if you're constantly being watched, you will regulate your behavior because you know you're being watched because that is something that we do.

01:14:42

There are things that you do in private that you'll never do in front of somebody else. And they don't even have to be bad things.

01:14:47

It just might be something weird. Or it might be something that other people think is gross, picking your nose, let's say.

01:14:53

So you go to church, you're not going to sit there picking your nose. But in private, you do it.

01:14:59

But if you find out somebody's watching you from a distance, it'll make you freak out. You're like, well, somebody's watching me, I'm not going to do this.

01:15:05

Well, Jeremy Bentham takes that to the nth degree and he says, well, criminals, if they're being watched all the time, they're going to change their behavior.

01:15:12

And so the Panopticon, the prison, is structured that way. It's a good idea because if we know we're constantly being observed, regulated, we're going to self -regulate.

01:15:20

So that goes into something like existentialism later on with Jean -Paul

01:15:26

Sartre, where he basically says that human existence is completely free.

01:15:32

And the only thing that prohibits us from being completely free is the gaze of the other.

01:15:38

Somebody gazing at us and basically forcing us to conform to their assumptions about us.

01:15:44

This is one of the reasons why Jean -Paul Sartre says, hell is other people. That's one of his famous phrases, because in hell, you're being tortured and it's so over the top and it's ridiculous.

01:15:58

It makes me laugh, but I understand what he's saying philosophically. But basically, if somebody is constantly watching you, it forces you to conform to a set of norms, to not be yourself.

01:16:07

And it constrains your freedom, right? So Sartre basically rejects God's existence on the basis of his idea of the gaze of the other.

01:16:15

If God is constantly watching us, then we're not free. But we are free, therefore God doesn't exist. I mean, it's a terrible argument, but that's what he comes up with.

01:16:22

But this ties into postmodernism, because they latch onto the idea as well.

01:16:28

They say, well, systems within society, they fall under the category of what

01:16:37

Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, would call panopticism. It's basically panopticonicism.

01:16:43

Panopticonic Jeremy Bethune and the gaze of the other from Jean -Paul

01:16:49

Sartre. And for Foucault and for the postmodernists, the institutions serve as that all -seeing eye that's constantly scrutinizing everything that you do so that you regulate your own behavior.

01:17:01

And this comes forth in a book called Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. This is one of the masterpieces of Foucault.

01:17:09

This is his magnum opus, one of them, where basically he says, back in the day, torture used to be the way that we got people to behave.

01:17:17

You put somebody on the gallows, everybody watches, and everybody says, hey, I don't want to be that guy on the gallows, so I'm not going to do it. And we even have instances of this in scripture.

01:17:25

You shall stone the person who's done X, Y, and Z, so all Israel will see, and then no one will do that. You conform to God's law on the basis of knowing that you will be punished.

01:17:35

Well, Foucault says, as we progressed, we haven't gotten better just because we have less violence.

01:17:42

What we've done is we've suppressed that violence, and notice the Freudian language here. Redirected it, right.

01:17:49

Yeah, we've redirected it. We have this libidinal impulse, is what Freud would say, to exert violence on other people.

01:17:55

But instead of doing it openly because we know it's not acceptable, the superego is in play here.

01:18:01

We suppress that, and we come up with administrative ways of suppressing other people's freedom.

01:18:08

We have, specifically for Foucault, it was everything that you do in prison is according to a schedule.

01:18:16

You know this is the case. You watch a show on Netflix about prison life. Well, 6 a .m., they have breakfast.

01:18:22

Then they go to the cell for an hour. Then they go to the yard for two hours. Then they go to free time for an hour and 15 minutes.

01:18:28

And Foucault says, well, that's an instance of the gaze of the other. That's an instance of the governmental gaze, let's say.

01:18:36

The institution is serving as a giant eyeball, watching everything you do, scrutinizing you on the basis of whether or not you conform to the norms.

01:18:44

Well, all that ties back into the idea of white supremacy, not in the sense of neo -Nazis, but like we mentioned, white supremacy being the dominant, quote -unquote, white values in society being the norms, white normativity.

01:19:05

But the white gaze basically means if you're a person of color, everything that you do as interpreted by a white person is being scrutinized according to the standard of whiteness.

01:19:16

You see what I'm saying? So these are basically like repetitions of the same thing, just taken from different angles.

01:19:24

So the white gaze is basically the same thing. It's like the other side of white normativity. White normativity says this is how things are, this is how it's supposed to be.

01:19:32

The white gaze says you're not conforming to these things, and therefore you are not part and you should be punished, etc.

01:19:39

And people don't, it's strange and it's philosophically convoluted and there's like a whole history there.

01:19:45

And the only reason why I know about it is because I bought into all this garbage when I wasn't a Christian. But a lot of people don't see it there because it's not their thing, you know what

01:19:53

I mean? And they, like I talked about James White, he didn't seem to know where it came from.

01:19:59

Maybe he did, maybe he was just being sarcastic, you know what I'm saying? Maybe he was just speaking rhetorically when he said, what is that?

01:20:06

I've never even heard of that. But I know for a fact that a lot of people have never heard of that before, and they might take it to be something that's actually legitimate.

01:20:13

In reality, it's not, you know what I mean? It's just another permutation of these philosophical presuppositions of this postmodern world as applied to society and racial relations.

01:20:26

So the white gaze is like that. And you also have the same thing, I should mention this, in feminism, you have the gaze of the male, or the male gaze, right?

01:20:36

And you can apply that to anything, basically. In a hundred years from now, if we keep going the same way,

01:20:41

I could say, well, the gaze of the gay, or the gay gaze, right? As I can say, as a heterosexual,

01:20:47

I'm constantly being scrutinized by these standards of homosexuality that I can never match up to.

01:20:53

Yeah, in a sense, that's true now. And in a sense, that's true now. If you disagree with LGBT lifestyle and homosexuality and all that, you are looked upon as some outdated, outmoded, bigoted, you know, they make you look like scum, and they treat you accordingly.

01:21:14

They will destroy your life, they will destroy your business, they will put you out of business, out of your livelihood, you know, and that's already kind of going on right now.

01:21:27

I really appreciate you giving us the history of that because it has a very twisted sort of consistency, you know, like there's a very twisted, but you can see the flow of thought and how it's progressing or digressing.

01:21:45

It's very twisted and disturbing, really. But, you know, it's interesting.

01:21:51

I didn't know Jeremy Bentham was, he was the one who kind of started talking about that. And I know, you know,

01:21:57

Foucault and Sartre, they were like, I know they really kind of ran with it, but wow, that's fascinating in a very disturbing way.

01:22:06

Yeah, that's very helpful. And I really appreciate you kind of bringing all of that out. This stuff is so, wow.

01:22:15

If people don't see this by now, like, there's no hope for you, you know, like, it's not that hard.

01:22:25

Comparing the two, I mean, it's literally black and white. Like, this isn't difficult. You know, there's no gray area here.

01:22:32

Like, it's literally black and white. It's Belial and Christ. It is

01:22:37

Satan and Christ. Like there's, it's God and the devil. I mean, it is that starkly opposed to everything that is true and right according to the

01:22:47

Bible. So, I mean, you know, that was very good, very helpful stuff.

01:22:54

And so I wanted to kind of close with this because this I thought was really interesting.

01:23:00

Later on in the article, you say this, you say, Yeah, I was going to make a comment about you saying, well, it's all black and white.

01:23:55

That's racist. I mean, you could literally do that.

01:24:01

You know, yeah. And before you get to that, this reminds me of basically what these guys are saying, like SART and stuff.

01:24:10

It's sort of like the philosophical version of peer pressure. You know, it's like, it's like making that a worldview almost like everybody, everybody else's norms are imposed on you when they gaze upon you, especially the majority, because you feel like you're being judged and you're being, you know, you're being like you want to be conformed to this.

01:24:34

You want to be whitenized, you know, like, and, you know, there is a sad history of that.

01:24:40

That is true. You know, like there were some missionaries who colonized other minority groups instead of evangelizing to them and preaching the gospel to them, becoming like them, becoming like Paul said, becoming all things to all men.

01:24:56

They ended up sort of colonizing them. And, you know, the same thing happened with a lot of the Native American groups.

01:25:02

It's a very tragic and heartbreaking story because it really shames the name of Christ. And now a lot of these folks have very bitter antagonistic feelings against Christianity because of what happened.

01:25:14

That's not to say, you know, but that's kind of, that's kind of in the past. And I know a lot of that now tends to be very, you know, like they say that it tends to be more subtle or whatever, because of that, like you described that that bestial impulse to be more overtly violent has been suppressed, quote unquote.

01:25:37

But, but still, it's, it's really, it's just a disturbing view of reality.

01:25:44

It's so, it makes you want to commit suicide almost like it's so hopeless, you know, like,

01:25:52

Yeah, there's nothing there. I mean, there's nothing to hope on in. It's very depressing.

01:25:59

And, and, and I'm not, you know, because you talked about when you came out of that, like you were, it was very depressing. And I don't, it's, yeah, like,

01:26:06

I don't blame you. I mean, what do you have to live for? There's just, it's so nihilistic and brutal and, and just ugly.

01:26:16

But, but yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. What are they, what are they saying here? With the expanding history?

01:26:24

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all that stuff. Expanding history really, as far as I can tell, really comes from Foucault.

01:26:32

He was the main person doing this historiography. And basically what

01:26:38

Foucault was doing was, well, he was, again, criticizing the idea of metanarrative, criticizing the idea that you can tell any story from one particular viewpoint that explains every other point, right?

01:26:49

So history is always written from a particular perspective. By the victors, right?

01:26:54

Yeah, that's the assumption, the victors, right? And for Foucault, excuse me, what you, what you need to look for when you're doing history is not what's being stated explicitly.

01:27:05

Again, remember, there's the Freudian idea of suppression in the background working here, right? So for Foucault, who was a psychiatrist, who was,

01:27:15

Interesting. He was learned in psychology, he was learned in psychiatry, he was a historian, he was a brilliant man, but he was hopelessly lost without Christ, you know, so his thinking was all over the place.

01:27:27

But he was brilliant and he understood Freud and he understood these things and he puts them together.

01:27:32

And so what you have in Freud, excuse me, in Foucault with historiography is this idea that you don't look for what's being told to you on the surface.

01:27:41

Yeah. In a history book. If you have the history of, let's say, no, even with scripture, right?

01:27:46

Let's say you have the history of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. They'll say, well, that's just one thing that's being told to you.

01:27:53

But let's look at, let's look at gaps in the story that might suggest that something else is really going on.

01:27:59

Let's look at the way they worded things here to see if really what they're doing is concealing something that doesn't look good on them, right?

01:28:06

Yeah. And let's see if we can reconstruct what's happening in the background. And sometimes that actually is the case, but it's not always the case.

01:28:13

But for the postmodernists, that's always the case. Right. Right. It's always the case that there's another story being told and there is no dominant story naturally.

01:28:24

Which is funny because that's, I just realized this, that's actually another contradiction because they would deny any kind of norm.

01:28:33

They deny essentialism and yet they say this is a universal, this is a universal aspect of human nature.

01:28:39

Right? It's like that's a contradiction. Yeah. Blatant contradiction. Wow. Yeah.

01:28:46

Keep going. Go ahead. Well, I'm going to quote to you Gene Edward V. in a book called Postmodern Times, A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.

01:28:53

Because he really summarizes it well. He says, Postmodernists also seek to dissolve history.

01:29:01

They no longer see it as a record of objective facts, but as a series of metaphors which cannot be detached from the institutionally produced languages which we bring to bear on it.

01:29:11

And this is from Foucault. That's my introduction. As a result, one postmodern philosopher says we can make no distinction between truth and fiction.

01:29:19

History is a network of language games where the criterion for success is performance, not truth.

01:29:26

So there's no objective truth. History may be rewritten according to the needs of a particular group. And if history is nothing more than a network of games, of agonistic games, agonistic meaning it's from Greek culture, the agonistic games were like wrestling, sparring, fighting.

01:29:47

So if that's all history is, a network of agonistic language games, then any alternative language game that advances a particular agenda or that has success in centering institutional power can pass as legitimate history.

01:30:01

So the idea here is not objectivity, and that's the end of my quote and paraphrase because I kind of mixed it together for the sake of time.

01:30:08

But the agenda here is not just to tell stories that haven't been told.

01:30:16

The person with good intentions wants to do that. And you can do that as someone who's not a postmodernist.

01:30:22

You can be a quote unquote modernist and go back in history and say, hey, wait a second, why is it that whenever I read about Martin Luther King Jr.,

01:30:30

let's say, I'm just hypothetically making this up, you know, they always say X about him.

01:30:35

When I know that there are five or six documents that say Y about him. Why don't they ever mention the Y? You see what

01:30:41

I'm saying? And you can call into question the motivations for that. But again, it would be fallacious to say that's the only reason why history was written the way it's been written.

01:30:50

But you could always object to the way it's been written and say, hey, we should involve these other things, give a fuller account of what's happened.

01:30:56

But that's not what postmodernism is doing. I mean, that's the surface level. What's going on behind it is saying, I'm going to look all the way behind this.

01:31:03

I'm going to pull back the curtain. I'm going to rent, you know, the veil is going to be torn asunder. And I'm going to find, you know,

01:31:10

I'm going to find the man behind the curtain who's really pulling the strings here. And it's not good intentions. It's something bad in the background.

01:31:16

So rewriting history, expanding history has to do with that. It has to do with telling the stories of other people, not from an objective point, but from their point of view, which is going to be the point of view of the oppressed, the point of view of the embittered, the point of view of another group that is still vying for power, let's say.

01:31:39

All these things are counted as legitimate historiographies or histories. And so that's what they're talking about.

01:31:45

And that comes from, again, from Foucault. Foucault dedicated a lot of his time to talking about the gaps in history and what was really happening.

01:31:52

And some of it's enlightening. He has a series of books called The History of Sexuality, where he talks about Victorian England and ancient

01:31:59

Greece and basically a history of sexuality, of sexual norms, and how, you know, in the background in Victorian England, you usually think that it was always, it was really prude.

01:32:10

Right. But in the background of that, there was actually some raunchiness. And then you come to find out like, okay, well, he was right.

01:32:18

And, you know, that's, that's one thing, though. You know what I mean? That happens. But that's not always the case.

01:32:24

For modernists, that's always the case. Yeah, you're always perverted. You're always right. And this is taking us back all the way back to post colonialism again, you know, where they it's all about how these, these other oppressed people groups and their and their perspective and everything.

01:32:42

So yeah, it's, um, what's interesting here is that, um, gosh,

01:32:50

I keep going blank every time I want to say something. Expanding history.

01:32:56

So you're talking about expanding history. And gosh, what was

01:33:02

I gonna say? Expanding history. And oh, right.

01:33:08

So when it comes to history, you know, obviously, history is always selective.

01:33:14

You can't talk, it's impossible to talk about everything that happened. It's always selective. And there's always a bias to the historian writing the history.

01:33:26

But with respect to how a Christian should view history, I really I've always appreciated.

01:33:31

This is one of the most enlightening things I've found from from Clark and the Trinity Foundation. I've always really appreciated this because history is you can't really, apart from biblical history, you can't really say that it's that it's gospel truth.

01:33:49

It's always because it's not revealed truth.

01:33:55

And so the best we can go off of is basically the biblical principle of by the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every truth be established.

01:34:05

You can establish some reliable history with that principle, you know, of establishing two or three witnesses like who saw the event or whatever, whatever happened.

01:34:16

But it's not on the same level as revealed as revelation as the scriptures.

01:34:23

And so that we do know is authoritative history. That's precisely and exactly what happened. Because God is the one telling the story.

01:34:31

But apart from that, you can only go off of the two or three witnesses principle of correlating sources and things like that.

01:34:42

But there's also in a sense in which this is fundamentally opposed to the

01:34:48

CRT mindset, because now you're saying, oh, well, God is imposing his view of history on us.

01:34:54

Yeah, hello, Potter, Clay. He's the potter. He's the one who made us.

01:35:00

He has every right to do that. And so, but apparently CRT proponents would take major issue with that.

01:35:05

And again, you can't be, it's fundamentally opposed to Christianity in every way.

01:35:13

So, yeah, go ahead. If you remember with the whole MLK 50 thing, and the whole idea of making church culture more amicable toward people of color, right?

01:35:24

You'll hear that. And it's like, okay, what does that mean? What does it mean? Well, well, for some black and Hispanic people, what that means is violating the regular principle of worship.

01:35:34

See what I'm saying? How so? Well, with extra things added into the service.

01:35:42

Oh, yeah, right. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not talking about instrumentation, because that's the debate that people have.

01:35:48

Instrumentation, but I'm talking about like, you know, you know, anything that you can find within, let's say, and I'll talk about Hispanic church in primarily

01:35:58

Puerto Rican church, you'll find, I don't know, I can't think of anything on top of my head, but some sort of practice that's cultural, right?

01:36:05

Yeah. Well, does scripture command us to do it? No. Okay, then should we be doing it?

01:36:11

No. But, you know, but some will say, well, we're, we're Latino, so we should be doing this, because it's our culture.

01:36:18

And if you don't let us do it, then that's suppressing our culture. It's like, it's not how it works, dude. Right. But that goes, that ties into the whole idea of God imposing things on people.

01:36:32

Yeah. If you try to say that the way you're viewing things according to CRT is the way things are, then of course you can come along and say, and the way that you reform people who are primarily white, right, of European descent.

01:36:45

Yeah. The way that you're doing that, that's just your white European way of doing it. That whole, that whole regulative principle of worship, then

01:36:52

I don't need to follow that, because that's your thing as white people. That's not my thing as a Hispanic person, as a black person, as an

01:36:58

Asian person. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. But the fact of the matter is we've derived it from scripture. But then if you really want to push

01:37:06

CRT again, you can say, well, your exegesis is based on your white Eurocentric way of looking at the world. See what

01:37:12

I'm saying? Right, right. So it just, yeah, it just falls apart. You know, if you're going to say that the

01:37:17

CRT way of looking at the world is the way it is, then you can't even have church service ordered according to what scripture says.

01:37:24

Because it's a norm. Yeah. It's a norm. It's a regulative norm that you're imposing on the church because God tells you to do it or not do it.

01:37:34

And so, no, they say, well, again, it's opposing basically every doctrine that you can find in the

01:37:41

Bible. I mean, there's no stopping to this. Like, there's no stopping point.

01:37:47

I mean, it's unbelievable how it's opposed at every single point, it seems.

01:37:53

And, you know, what else is interesting is that what really disturbs me is how this is getting pushed in the church, right?

01:38:03

Because now they're talking about expanding church history and bringing in non -white or the writers that you typically study in church history, the main guys like Augustine and the

01:38:17

Reformation and all that stuff or whatever. But it's like, so now they're talking about adding, like, it's just so and I've heard

01:38:25

James White talk about this too. And it's like, you know, of course, there can be some value in trying to discover what other

01:38:32

Christians said. Of course, there's value in that. But that doesn't mean that we don't know what the truth already is.

01:38:41

Like, we already have the testimony of the church, the pillar of the truth, passing down the doctrines that they tried to preserve for the next generation.

01:38:50

And so it's not like we're going to learn anything new. You know, if they said something, then we already have it because it would agree with the

01:39:00

Bible. And if it doesn't, then it was wrong. I mean, so like, there's a really disturbing agenda there that they're trying to say, like, we need to stop listening to so much of the dominant people in church history and start looking at these other guys.

01:39:16

Well, to what end? You know, like, are you trying to, what are you saying?

01:39:22

Like, are you trying to discover some other expression of Christianity that's just as valid as, like, what are you getting at?

01:39:29

You know? Well, look at the movements that have happened so far. You know what I mean? Like, it hasn't just, it's one thing to say, okay, black people,

01:39:38

Hispanic people, Asian people have had less of a voice in terms of something in church.

01:39:44

Let's say, like, whether or not there's multiple languages used in a service, right? Or whether or not, you know, there's certain outreaches to particular neighborhoods that happen.

01:39:56

That's one thing. And I think that's a legitimate thing to talk about, right? Like, as a church that has, let's say, a whole bunch of people that are white, a whole bunch of people that are

01:40:03

Hispanic, a whole bunch of people that are black, the majority being white, but the next in line in terms of numbers being

01:40:09

Hispanic, well, should you have a Spanish service? You see what I'm saying? Or should you have somebody translating? I mean, I think it's a legitimate thing to think about at some point.

01:40:19

But, I lost my train of thought. Yeah, I lost my train of thought.

01:40:24

I hate when that happens. Yeah, I hate when that happens. Yeah, you were talking about the norms imposed in the church, whether you should have language, you know, with a specific language.

01:40:35

Sorry, yeah, like, those things are legitimate. You can talk about those things, and they're under the circumstances, as we would call them, like, confession, right?

01:40:42

Those are the circumstances of worship that are up for us to discuss so that we can have an orderly church service. Right. But the things that have taken off recently are, what, the

01:40:52

Revoice Conference with gay people saying they've been oppressed, right? Their voices have been suppressed in the churches.

01:40:58

In the church. They haven't been given a voice. Right. Transgender people haven't been given a voice in the church, and they need to be heard.

01:41:05

Women haven't been given the opportunities that men have had to serve in the churches. And it's like, Scripture tells you that men alone have the office of teaching.

01:41:13

Right. Oh, boy. This isn't a sexist thing. Oh, boy. It's directly taken from Scripture. But what they want to do, like you said, is, you know, it's, you can't impose that on me.

01:41:23

Right. And since there's no overarching system, there's no overarching metanarrative, set of morals, set of norms.

01:41:29

Well, I can go in and I can question anyone that I want to. And I can find a way to insert myself in there.

01:41:35

And this is why you had, you know, with the MLK thing, you go back to that again. They're talking about Martin Luther King Jr.

01:41:42

as if he was a Christian. He wasn't a Christian. Yeah. He wasn't. Point blank, period. Yeah.

01:41:47

I'm not even going to go into his immoral lifestyle. I'll just go on the basis of his doctrine. The man denied every cardinal doctrine of the faith.

01:41:54

Yeah, kind of like CRT. Basically. Yeah. But you see, they're trying to, they're trying to expand church history, quote, unquote, expanded.

01:42:03

Right. You know what I mean? Like, oh, well, he was a Christian too. Like, because he, you know, because he quoted

01:42:08

Jesus. And he wanted to love people. And Jesus is cool. And he loves people.

01:42:13

So Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian. It's like, no, he wasn't. He wasn't. You can try to twist history as much as you want.

01:42:20

He wasn't. That's like me going back in church history, finding out that Arius was Puerto Rican and saying, well, you guys got to slow your roll and call him a heretic, right?

01:42:27

Because that's my people. And I know how my people talk. And he was probably just saying something in a spicy

01:42:32

Puerto Rican way. It's not the case that he was a heretic. Rank heretic and a perpetual adulterer.

01:42:42

I mean, yeah, that disturbed me so much how they literally whitewashed, pun intended, they whitewashed this guy so badly, because they had a

01:42:54

Q &A session about it too. They had a Q &A session and he said, we want to be charitable. No, we want to be honest, but charitable.

01:43:01

And it's like, nobody touched the fact that he was a rank perpetual adulterer.

01:43:10

And even the movie Selma depicts it, even in the movie Selma. And that's not to say it was a

01:43:18

Christian movie or anything, but even the movie, nobody's denying this, you know, except for those guys, except for the

01:43:25

MLK 50 people. Like they totally swept that under the rug because it contradicts the fact, the whole reason they're having the conference in the first place.

01:43:35

And, you know, the fact that, and so here's what's so funny about it, because they want us, and that's not to say that Martin Luther King didn't have very good arguments from time to time.

01:43:49

Like he made very valid and sound points and used the Bible to justify it.

01:43:55

But that's like Thomas Paine using the Bible to justify his argumentation for liberty and common sense.

01:44:02

The guy was a rank, he hated Christianity. But that doesn't make you a

01:44:08

Christian just because you use it to make a sound argument. And so MLK, and there was things that Martin Luther King said that were blatantly wrong.

01:44:17

Like, you know, the, what did he say? The 11 o 'clock hour on Sundays is the most segregated hour in the nation.

01:44:26

And it's like, well, but what are you saying? Are you saying that every church needs to have the token black guy in it now?

01:44:31

Like, what are you saying? That's not what the Bible teaches, you know? Like, yeah, of course, we should preach the gospel to every creature that's, to everybody.

01:44:39

We shouldn't discriminate the gospel to selectively preach the gospel to some person and not another one.

01:44:46

But, you know, and the fact that the guy wrote his doctoral dissertation, his dissertation on, what's his name?

01:44:55

Tillich, Paul Tillich. Like the guy loved, it's like, what do you, he was a neo -ortho,

01:45:02

I mean, he was a blatant liberal. And so who denied every cardinal doctrine, just like MLK did.

01:45:09

He denied the incarnation. He denied the deity of Christ. He denied practically every cardinal doctrine of the faith.

01:45:15

And it's like, if this guy was honest, he would have stepped down from the pulpit because he was disqualified both in doctrine and in moral lifestyle.

01:45:25

And so this guy had no business being a pastor. But there was an agenda because he was anti -racism and going against, you know, he's perpetuating the agenda that they like.

01:45:40

And so they're willing to overlook all of that and whitewash the guy literally. So it's kind of like what you see happen sometimes, sadly, with even men who call themselves the farm and they look back in church history and they find

01:45:52

Roman Catholics, you know? And they try to baptize them as Christians because those people did good things.

01:45:59

Like somebody that historically as a person, I thought did good stuff was, I think his name was

01:46:06

Bartolome de las Casas. Right. Yeah. You know, he stood up for Native Americans.

01:46:13

He opposed, you know, how the harsh treatment that they were experiencing. And I'm like, wow, that's that's cool, man.

01:46:18

You know what I mean? He did something noble. He did something good. And I'm like, but you're not a Christian. That doesn't make you a

01:46:24

Christian, right? That doesn't make you a Christian. He did something very good. And I can support honoring you for someone who, you know, for what you did.

01:46:32

But I can't just say, well, you're a Christian now because you did something that was honorable socially. Like, no.

01:46:38

Right. You can't, you can't revise history to do that unless you have a critical race theory way of looking at the world.

01:46:45

Yeah, exactly. But as Christians devoted to the truth, to him who is the truth, Christ Jesus, you know, we can't do that.

01:46:52

Yeah. Right. You know, that's funny. Speaking of de las Casas, I remember studying him in college and I thought it seems like he had a, he may have had a born again conversion because he had a very radical, like he came in like with a very conquering mentality.

01:47:07

But then it seems like he may have had a, you know, and I don't know that much about the guy if he remained a

01:47:14

Catholic or whatever he was, but yeah, he did have a pretty radical, like his mind was radically changed when he realized like what they were doing was they are alienating and oppressing and destroying these people's lives.

01:47:31

But yeah, aside from that, that doesn't make you a Christian just because you stand up for other people who are being wronged or violated or whatever the case may be.

01:47:40

What makes you a Christian is believing the very things that MLK himself denied.

01:47:47

And so, you know, hello, the deity of Christ, salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone.

01:47:54

I mean, you can't call yourself a Christian if you don't believe in that stuff. And so, and I wanted to, maybe we can close with this because one thing that really took my attention was changing speech norms.

01:48:06

And because this kind of, this is one example that sort of ties into everything that we've been talking about, right?

01:48:12

The white gaze, like if you don't sound like a white person does, and if you have this thick accent or a very pronounced way, a very strong accent or way of saying things, then that alienates you from the parent culture and etc, etc.

01:48:29

So we need to be changing those speech norms so that we can make these other people feel more comfortable about how they talk or whatever, right?

01:48:35

And this is really interesting because I recently learned this from Thomas Sowell.

01:48:43

And he has some great, excellent material touching a lot about, he writes a lot about race and culture, kind of like Walter Williams does.

01:48:50

And I think they're friends as well. But these guys are brilliant. And they're also black. They are black.

01:48:56

And they destroy just about every single argument that the

01:49:01

CRT people make. It is fascinating to read. It is very, very educational, very informative.

01:49:07

So I highly recommend to our listeners to check out their writings. But Sowell said in an interview, this really blew my mind, because he said that, you know how some black people or some cultures, they say, instead of saying ass, they say axe and things like that.

01:49:24

And so he actually gives the history of that. And it's really interesting, because it doesn't originate with black people.

01:49:30

It originated in some part in Britain. It's like, so even that, yeah, it's really fascinating, because even that, it's like, you're treating it as if it's something to do with this minority group, when in reality, it came from somewhere in Britain.

01:49:45

And it's like, man, it's just so ridiculous. How far these people take this, you know, it's like, just what are you doing?

01:49:56

And his point was like, you know what, if you want to get ahead in this culture, just be educated. You need to educate yourself and learn how to speak in proper

01:50:04

American English, standard American English. There's nothing wrong with that, because that allows you to move forward in society.

01:50:13

And that's what I really appreciate about these folks is that, you know, this victim mentality is only going to bury yourself in a deeper hole.

01:50:20

You're not going to get it's only going to hurt you more than it's going to empower you. So get over it, like get over it, stop playing the victim, and take responsibility for your actions.

01:50:35

So yeah, man, this was really good. I'm really glad we got the chance to really kind of dive deep into some of these topics that doesn't really seem to get talked about even amongst people who are sound and who are saying the right things.

01:50:51

And so is there anything else that you wanted to close out the episode with?

01:50:57

Yeah, I want to say some things and then give just a couple book recommendations on the subject.

01:51:04

Yeah. Well, first thing I want to point out was earlier when we're talking about Satanism, the connection between Satanism, postmodernism, occultism, and social justice and critical race theory.

01:51:15

Something that people do in order to sort of move attention away from the fact that there are connections there, they'll say, well, you're misrepresenting those people by saying that they're

01:51:28

Satanists. We're not saying that they're Satanists. The point is not that social justice advocates and critical race theory advocates are

01:51:36

Satanists. The point is that the underlying way of looking at the world has roots.

01:51:41

Using their own arguments against them. Yeah, implicitly. Yeah, exactly. They may not be aware of it, but that's what the devil said.

01:51:50

I mean, you're saying the same thing. Yeah. I wrote an article years ago called, and you can find that in my blog, inbiospect .org.

01:51:59

It's called the, I think it's like the biblical roots of postmodernism, something along those lines.

01:52:05

And it's basically Genesis chapter 3 and me saying, look, what they do in postmodernism is exactly what the serpent did in the garden.

01:52:11

Yeah. As God really said. Right. And then he goes to the woman, but he tells the woman, he says, did God really say that?

01:52:16

Or is he trying to withhold power from you? What's the real meaning? What are your liberties in this society?

01:52:23

And who says that you can do X, Y, and Z? Right. Seriously? Who cares what God says? Yeah. Yeah. Focus on your sensations.

01:52:29

Focus on your ability to interpret the world as you see fit. You go, girl. Girl power of feminism. Right. Which I think is implicit there, like a radical form.

01:52:38

But yeah, just to clarify that, this isn't conspiracy theory. It's not saying that every person who's a critical race theorist is underneath, like they're having child sacrifices somewhere underneath some university.

01:52:48

But they subscribe to the same philosophical views, the same convictions.

01:52:54

The same philosophical assumptions that are there. Do what you will and do not be oppressed by anybody and anyone, even

01:53:00

God. Exactly. If they tell you to do something a certain way, they are your oppressor and you need to fight against them.

01:53:06

That's satanic. And that needs to be said. I think, sadly, I think a lot of times in order to try to sound reasonable to the culture that tries to reject the reality of spiritual warfare, a lot of times we don't talk about these things, but there is a direct connection there.

01:53:23

And this is something I benefited from from John Robbins and Gordon Clark when they talk about spiritual warfare.

01:53:29

Yeah. They make it known very clearly from the text of scripture that the spiritual warfare is primarily ideas.

01:53:35

Intellectual. Intellectual. Exactly. It's the truth of God coming against the lies of the enemy and the truth of God in apologetics is demolishing those lies and establishing the truth according to scripture.

01:53:47

But that's spiritual warfare. Right. We don't have people crawling on the ceiling with, you know, spinning their head around and throwing puke everywhere like in the exorcist.

01:53:54

That's not spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is the stuff that we see going on right now. People claiming to be Christians and coming in with postmodernism and trying to infiltrate

01:54:02

Christian theology, Christian morality derived from the scriptures with postmodern theology.

01:54:08

Right. Lest you or I or anyone at Throne Crime Ministries or anyone who's supporting this anti -social justice movement, lest we be mischaracterized.

01:54:18

You know, that needs to be said. We're not conspiracy theorizing. Yeah. Good point.

01:54:27

And that's not to say. Now the books that I have in mind are, there's one secular book and two

01:54:32

Christian books. The first book is called Postmodern Theory and it's by Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner.

01:54:41

And that book is really good in terms of giving you an overview of postmodern theory. And by that it means these guys, they look at the big hitters in postmodernism and they look at their metaphysics or epistemology and they look at how those tie into social theory, basically.

01:55:00

You know, when it comes to politics, when it comes to cultures interacting, things like that. They give a very detailed view of that.

01:55:06

That might be advanced for some people, but I think it's worth stumbling through and trudging your way through because you will learn a lot because these guys don't have a

01:55:17

Christian bias. Right. Interesting. If you're concerned about that, they're telling you straight up, this is what postmodern is seeking to do.

01:55:23

This is what critical theory, critical race theory is seeking to do. And so that's a good book, a good reference book.

01:55:29

In terms of a good Christian book, I quoted some of it earlier, it's Postmodern Times, The Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.

01:55:36

And that's by Gene Edward V. Jr. And I found mine at a thrift shop of all places, but you can probably find it on Amazon.

01:55:46

And it's published by Crossway Books. It was published back in the 90s, 1994, which means academically it's up to date, more or less.

01:55:55

Because ideas in academia take a longer time to trickle down. Right. Yeah. The stuff he's talking about is going on right now.

01:56:02

There are whole sections where he's talking about race relations and things like that and the gender war, sexual revolution and all that stuff.

01:56:09

In addition to that, there's also a book by Calvin Biesner, I believe. I always mispronounce his name.

01:56:16

Is it Biesner or Bisoner? I think Bisoner. Bisoner. By Dr. Bisoner. And he was kind enough to send me a copy of it not too long ago.

01:56:24

Nice. Interestingly, I have a friend who went to the same churches in Florida, so he knew him personally.

01:56:31

Said he's a really cool dude. But anyway. Very cool. He has a small booklet called

01:56:37

Social Justice, How Good Intentions Undermine Justice in Gospel. And basically the book is saying social justice is not biblical justice and here are the reasons why.

01:56:46

And if you think that social justice is the same thing as justice, you're going to wind up confusing law and gospel.

01:56:54

So you not only lose a proper biblical juridical philosophy or jurisprudence philosophy, but you also lose the distinction between law and gospel.

01:57:06

So this ties into, again, the cardinal central doctrines of the faith. And Dr.

01:57:12

Bisoner, he does a good job. It's really good because he goes over some of the main passages that social justice warriors and social justice advocates, to be nicer to them.

01:57:22

They try to use the idea of Jesus and the returning ruler, the sabbatical year law, the

01:57:28

Jubilee year law, the sharing of the goods of the Jerusalem church. He goes through and the polling collections, actually, so that there might be equality.

01:57:36

These are sections of scripture that social justice advocates twist to try to say that it proves their position.

01:57:43

And he goes and shows contextually this is not the case. It has nothing to do with what they're teaching. So it's a really good book.

01:57:49

And then he defines justice biblically. And if you want just like a really straight to the point text,

01:57:55

I'd say you start with that one because he just hits it out of the park with that.

01:58:01

It's very short and it's to the point. But those other two books that I mentioned are also good for a more in -depth understanding of some of the stuff that we've been talking about here today.

01:58:12

Excellent. Yeah, it's good stuff. Thanks for that. And I wanted to touch on just a couple points and then we can close it out.

01:58:21

So with respect to, we talked a lot about the spiritual warfare aspect.

01:58:27

And obviously, and I think you would agree with this. We're not saying that a lot of when people talk about spiritual warfare, they tend to primarily associate that with exorcisms and demonic possession and all that stuff.

01:58:40

And it's like, well, yeah, there is that aspect of it. But primarily what we're saying is primarily the battlefield is the mind.

01:58:49

It's the intellectual sphere because and that's what we're wrestling.

01:58:54

We're wrestling against principalities and spiritual things in high places, but the way it manifests itself.

01:59:02

See, this is what people don't realize. When the devil operates, it manifests itself in the intellectual battlefield of the battle of ideas.

01:59:11

That's where the battle primarily takes place. And so when you start disagreeing with the

01:59:17

Bible, you're going to subscribe to something that's fundamentally at odds with Christ. Because if he said, he who is not with me is against me.

01:59:26

So that's fundamentally anti -Christ. That's fundamentally satanic.

01:59:31

And so to do whatever you want instead of what God says, that is satanic. And so because that's what the devil did.

01:59:39

He wanted to do whatever he wanted to do and not listen to God. And so that's what we're saying.

01:59:45

And that's where the battlefield takes place. It's in the mind. It's in the battle of ideas.

01:59:51

And so they tend to think like, oh, well, the satanic stuff is only tied to spirit, you know, child sacrifices and stuff like that.

01:59:59

Well, child sacrifice can take place in different forms. If you don't teach your child the truth, that is a form of child sacrifice because you're handing them over to the devil to do it for you.

02:00:08

And so that's what we're saying. And even Christ himself, he told the

02:00:15

Pharisees, your father is the devil. Did they think that? No, of course not. They said their father was

02:00:21

Abraham. They said their father was Moses. But Christ rebuked them and told them, your daddy is the devil.

02:00:28

And so that's what we're telling these critical race theory proponents. I'm sorry, but what you're saying, your philosophical father is

02:00:36

Satan because that is exactly what the devil did. He questioned God and he said, do your own thing.

02:00:42

And that's exactly what they're saying. And so that's what we're telling CRT proponents. Okay, look at your philosophy.

02:00:49

It comes from Satan. Therefore, your philosophical father is the devil himself. And you need to stop pushing this stuff in the church as if it was

02:00:58

Christian or compatible with Christianity because it's not. It's fundamentally at odds at every cardinal doctrine that the

02:01:04

Bible teaches. And so that's what I wanted to kind of to close out with.

02:01:10

And Hiram, I really appreciate you coming on with us, man. I really look forward to the future discussions with you and having you on as more as a regular.

02:01:18

And it's been really a blessing to have you on with us, man. I really appreciate the work you've been doing, the background and all the studying that you've done.

02:01:26

I really think it's going to be a tremendous blessing and addition to what we to what we promote as people who follow the

02:01:36

Bible, scripturalist and all of those things. So I'm really grateful for you, for having the interview with you.

02:01:43

And I look forward to the future with our future discussions and all of these things and MLK 50 conference and all the race stuff.

02:01:51

And all of the other stuff you've written about as well that we kind of touched on earlier with the annihilationism.

02:01:58

And there's just so much that we can get into that I really am looking forward to in the future.

02:02:04

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's great having you on. And thank you all for staying with us this long and for listening.

02:02:12

And so we'll end it with that and we'll pick it up next time. Thank you.