Radio Lux Lucet 69

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You're listening to Radio Luke's Lucid. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode 69. The title of this episode is
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Thanksgiving Turkeys and the Failure of Socialism. Well, before I get too far into this, just wanted to wish everyone a happy, if not belated,
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Thanksgiving Day. I had hoped that I'd be able to do a Thanksgiving Day podcast maybe on Wednesday night, but I just have to admit
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I was a slacker. I didn't feel up to it. You know, I came home Wednesday night and I pretty much crashed.
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I was just really tired, and I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I slept in until 10 o 'clock in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, and I never do that.
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I never have a chance to sleep in like that. It just felt unbelievably great. So nice.
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You know, it's kind of an overcast day. It was a little bit rainy, and I just woke up, I don't know, probably around seven or eight or so, but I just laid there.
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I don't know. I just played around on my phone a little bit, kind of drifted off to sleep, and it was just so nice just to be able to relax, and it doesn't seem like I've had a lot of chances to do that.
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So I apologize, but I was just really tired Wednesday night, and of course Thursday came, and after eating
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Thanksgiving dinner and all that, I was pretty much in a food coma, and I wasn't really up to doing much there either.
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So anyway, that's kind of my excuse, however lame that may be, for not getting out a podcast or a live stream earlier this week.
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So anyway, happy belated Thanksgiving Day to everybody. You know, it's kind of funny thinking about just sleeping in.
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I remember as a kid, I always hated taking afternoon naps. You know, mom, oh, you got to get in there and take your nap.
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You know, this kind of thing. I don't want to go take a nap. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and of course now that I'm an adult, now that I'm a grown -up, you know,
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I think back about that, and of course I think that I would give probably half my kingdom to be able to take an afternoon nap on a regular basis, and I can't do it.
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So I don't know. Seems there's probably a lesson in there. You know, it seems like you always want what you can't have, and you can't have what you want.
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I guess that's, I don't know, must just be the old sin nature.
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You're always looking for things that you can't have and wishing that you had them, and then you get them, and then you don't necessarily appreciate them.
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But boy, I'll tell you this much. It was sure nice to sleep in on Thanksgiving morning. I really did enjoy that.
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Anyway, yeah, I wanted to hit an update. You know, I mentioned last week on the
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Christmas light display of our neighbors. You know, we have these neighbors that put up these pretty extensive light displays.
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It's kind of one of those take -down -the -power -grid kind of light displays, and they got this.
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I mentioned this really huge Frosty the Snoomy. I mean, this thing is literally two stories high, and it looks to me like they have it out, but for whatever reason, the display's dark tonight, and so they didn't put it up.
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I'm gonna, I promise you, I'm gonna get a picture of this thing sometime here in the next week or so.
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I hope if they blow that up, and I'm gonna put it on here. I'm gonna prove it to you that this thing really is that big.
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I mean, it's just, it's crazy. Really, the hands -down the biggest inflatable that I've ever seen.
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Let's see, what else did I have to say? A little bit of chit -chat here. Oh, I know that there are a lot of people, a lot of Ohio State Buckeyes fans are having a very bad evening this evening.
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Of course, I'm from Ohio. Now, I'm not an Ohio State fan. I went to University of Cincinnati, so I didn't go to Ohio State, so I don't have the following that some people do, but I know a lot of people who do have big
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Ohio State fans, and they had a brutal day today against Michigan. I think they lost, it was like, what, 42 to 27.
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Now, if you know anything about college football, maybe you don't follow college football, but Ohio State -Michigan, that's one of the great rivalries in college football, and it's the biggest game of the year, at least typically it is for,
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I think, for Ohio State fans. And of course, they were in the national championship picture this year as well, but I think by that loss, that probably is going to take them out of that.
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So anyway, my condolences to the Ohio State fans out there who have, that's,
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I know that's pretty disappointing for them. And I actually have friends who are Ohio State fans, I really do. So, you know,
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I hate, sorry for the disappointment. You know, one thing I had hoped maybe is that University of Cincinnati and Ohio State might have a chance to go head to head for the national championship with the
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University of Cincinnati with the Bearcats. My Bearcats are still in the hunt. Now, this is to me, and I've talked about this before, but I'm always blown away.
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I really am. I'm absolutely, truly amazed to even speak of the University of Cincinnati and a national football title in the same sentence.
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That doesn't seem like that should even be possible, but it is. UC actually has a legitimate chance, a legitimate shot to win a national football title this year.
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Now, there's still things that need to happen, and it may not happen, but to even be at this point and to talk about that to me is really amazing.
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And I don't know, maybe there's a lesson in there about, you know, things that you think are impossible may be actually coming to pass.
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So we'll have to see. But anyway, my Bearcats are still in the hunt, so I'm happy about that.
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Oh, and I guess one other thing here too, one bit of news, and I haven't, I wasn't, decided not to go into it in depth here tonight, but we've also got another surprise, surprise, another variant in the
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COVID, another COVID variant, this time the Dread Omicron variant that we're all going to die of.
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And, you know, I guess we may as well just give up right now because it's just going to take over the world. I did find tonight that Pfizer, though, is hard at work and they're going to have a new shot for that.
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So, you know, well, anyway, that's another shot that I'm not going to take. But, but yeah, yeah, we're all supposed to be very much afraid and I guess go hide in our basements here for the next month, just in time for Christmas too.
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Isn't that great? You know, yeah, you know, and I was thinking about this too, but I've got a dear friend, a brother in Australia, and he was telling me how they were, there was real talk about maybe them coming out of lockdown here in the next couple of weeks, but he also added the caveat.
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He says, you know, you never know what might happen. And I saw today where they were talking about, oh, there were some people that tested positive coming to flying into Sydney from,
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I think it was somewhere in the Middle East. And so I don't know, who knows if they're going to, you know, the government down there is going to freak out again and try to lock everybody down.
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I pray that that isn't. And I continue to pray for my friend, his name's
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John and for the Christians, especially the Christians, but just the Australians, but the
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Christians, especially in Australia, because they have had some very difficult things to deal with here over the past year.
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I mean, that has been, and continue to, they have dealt with some of the harshest, really most tyrannical lockdowns of anybody in the world.
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And I hate to see that. And I pray, and it's my continued prayer that the
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Lord would give them some relief. And he has given some relief, at least I know that John's able to go to church right now, which he was not able to do for quite some time.
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So let's pray that the Lord would continue to show a favor and to lessen the burden, continue to lessen the burden of the lockdowns and the tyranny that they have had to deal with in Australia.
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Well, I titled my live stream, my whatever you call this thing, a podcast.
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Yeah, that's what it is, a podcast. Yeah, it's a podcast. Yeah, this thing that I do every week. Yeah, this podcast,
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I titled it Thanksgiving Turkeys and the Failure of Socialism. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the whole thing with Thanksgiving in a lot of ways.
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I mean, Thanksgiving is maybe my favorite holiday. It's certainly the most
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Calvinist of all of our holidays. I mean, it traces back to the pilgrims.
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And let's see here. Yeah, I was just getting something up here on the video, but it traces back to the pilgrims.
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And this is actually the 400th year of the first Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving was held in November 1621.
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And of course, in 2021, this is the 400th anniversary. Now, almost no one has seemed to notice this.
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Nothing has been said about it. I don't know. I'm sure there's probably an article or two out there that's talked about this.
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But I haven't seen anything, just watching the news or just flipping through the internet or something because I haven't really seen much about this that actually specifically talked about it.
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No, that's a big deal. It's a very big deal. But I think the fact that nobody said anything about it really says a lot about the cultural climate that is in our country right now.
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It seems to me that anything Christian, they're trying to banish to the outer darkness where there's weeping gnashing of teeth.
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Now, of course, we get to hear constantly about Antifa and how awesome they are and BLM and how awesome they are.
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And these are a bunch of satanic socialists, maybe even some call them
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Marxist, whatever term you care to use. But these things are supposedly awesome.
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You know, and all the corporations think they're awesome. And they think all of the ideas that they proffer, critical race theory and what have you, that those things are awesome.
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But if you're Christian and you love the Christian heritage of the United States, and I think it is fair to trace the beginnings of our country back to the pilgrims at the colony in Plymouth.
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You know, that we have to completely ignore. We have to pass that over. So we had the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving here this year in 2021.
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Last year was the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. I can't recall the exact date.
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I know it was in the fall, September, October, November, something like that, in the fall of 1620.
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That's a big deal. That's one of the most significant anniversaries in our country's history.
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And yet it passed almost completely unnoticed. And that's sad.
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And I think that as Christians, if the broader society is going to take notice of it, certainly as Christians, as American Christians, we need to point this out and talk about that.
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I am not ashamed of the pilgrims. I am not ashamed of the
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Puritans. In fact, I'm honored to live in a country that was in part founded by them.
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I mean, they did so very much to shape what our nation has become.
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And many of the good things that we have here in America come from them.
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Now, they weren't exclusively the only Christian group that came over. I think about my ancestors.
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I mean, they came over in about 100 years later. I don't trace back to the
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Mayflower, but I did have ancestors in colonial Virginia. They were
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Virginians. That's where my branch of the Matthews family settled was in Virginia. And they were here well before the founding of the
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United States of America. I have family, and I've talked about that before, but I had family that fought in the
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French -Indian War under George Washington. I had family that fought in the
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American Revolution. And I'm not ashamed of these people. I'm honored to be descended from them. You know,
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I don't hate my country. I don't hate my civilization. I don't hate my family. I don't hate my forefathers.
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And, you know, I'm constantly told by, you know, not just me, but anyone, if you happen to share that heritage, you know, that somehow you should be ashamed of it.
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I'm not ashamed of it at all. You know, and I'm honored to be a part of it.
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And I feel a real sense of responsibility to this country.
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I have very deep roots here, not only to maintain the liberties, political, economic, civil, that we have here, have historically had in the
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United States, but even to enhance them. You know, and these things came out of the
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Protestant Reformation. And I've said this many times, and I continue to say it, there's no Protestant Reformation, there is no
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United States of America. Certainly not, and it would be nothing like the country you and I know as the
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United States of America. We are blessed, greatly blessed, to live in a country that had
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Christian founders. And it is the reason we have the liberties and even the prosperity that we have.
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These are blessings from God. And, you know, Thanksgiving is a day of the year, one day of the year, of course, we can give thanks to God any day.
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And as Christians, we ought to give thanks to God all the time, always, and everything give thanks, is what the
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Apostle Paul wrote. But, you know, that's a special day to get together and to give thanks to the
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Lord who, you know, through whose providence the pilgrims were able to survive in a very harsh environment, in an environment where they didn't have a whole lot of support.
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And they realized that it was God's providence that brought them to the place they were.
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And that is something that they wanted to acknowledge as Christian people. And I'm honored to be able to carry on that tradition.
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So anyway, I love Thanksgiving, and I love the message behind it. I love the history behind it. And it's something
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I'm not, not only am I not remotely ashamed of, but I love it and I celebrate it. And I want to be able to share that with others as well.
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Growing up, I never in my wildest dreams ever thought that celebrating Thanksgiving would become an act of almost civil disobedience.
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You know, it's, you know, you're shamed out of it, or you're tried to be lectured out of it.
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I mean, I think about last year and even into this year, and we've been lectured by Anthony Fauci and the
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Covidian cult that basically have to go hide in their basements, you know, wear masks and, you know,
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I don't know, I guess, wait on the radio for instructions from the CDC on, you know, on how many guests, if we even can have guests at all over for Thanksgiving.
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Well, you know, as much as Fauci and some of these other clowns pretend to have authority over the way we celebrate
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Thanksgiving, Anthony Fauci has zero say over Thanksgiving.
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Joe Biden has zero say over how I or any other American celebrates
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Thanksgiving. There's no need to listen to these people. But nevertheless, you know, this year,
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I know last year and certainly into this year, I call them sort of the COVID turkeys. You know, these are the real
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Thanksgiving turkeys. You know, these people were really out there in force this year. And in fact, the one article
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I have up right now on the live stream on the video, it's an article from Axios, and the headline is the
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Thanksgiving bouncers. And just read a little bit of this here. And it says, no one really wants this job, but millions of households may need their own
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Thanksgiving bouncer. The cover charge is negative COVID test done ahead of arrival or outside the front door.
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And so, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, these people show up at your house, and you're going to make them test for COVID. No. Now, I will say this, though.
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I kind of like the idea of a Thanksgiving bouncer. You know, as far as I'm concerned, if you show up wearing a mask, you're out of here.
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We're not doing masks at Thanksgiving. If somebody shows up and asks about my vaccine status or the status of somebody else, out of here.
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Gonzo. If they go on about how much they admire Anthony Fauci, gone.
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Just don't even go there. You know, so yeah, maybe we need it. Maybe we do need a Thanksgiving bouncer.
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But the standards that I would use would not be the standards of Axios. Actually, Axios got a lot of pushback online for this article, and I was glad to see that.
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But of course, the COVID turkeys aren't the only Thanksgiving turkeys out there. You've also got the the
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Wokester turkeys. You've got all these people that want to denigrate Thanksgiving for various reasons, and they're usually political and economic reasons.
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You know, they're the ones that are going out there saying, oh, Thanksgiving is a myth. Oh, Thanksgiving is about genocide. Oh, Thanksgiving is about white supremacy.
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Oh, Thanksgiving is about slavery. And I honestly, I get really, really tired of that stuff.
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And I was actually going to go in and talk some about that. But I wanted to talk maybe a little bit about it, but I'm not going to go on and on about this stuff, because quite frankly,
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I'm just I'm sick of hearing it. And I'm sick of the nonsense and it's patently foolish nonsense as well.
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Let's see here. There's one I was going to try to say. There was a tweet. Oh, yeah, this is a tweet that was put out by CNBC here.
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Let's see if we can go find that. Okay. Yeah, this is
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CNBC. No, this is actually MSNBC. And their tweet was, instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence.
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Gyasi Ross says about the history of American Thanksgiving, that genocide and violence is still on the menu.
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And this was put out, let's see, this was put out on November 20th. So it wasn't right on Thanksgiving Day, but it was, of course, in the lead up to it.
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And it was very, very bad, according to these people. Well, there was no genocide and there was no violence on Thanksgiving.
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And I'm going to talk about that in just a moment here. You know, another item, another thing that you saw here, there's a headline here about San Francisco's indigenous on Thanksgiving returns full force to Alcatraz Island.
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And that's where all these people, they get together on Alcatraz Island of all places. You know, that's, of course, the famous prison that's out there in San Francisco Bay.
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And they get together and they celebrate this on Thanksgiving. And I know Colin Kaepernick's been out there in the past.
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Of course, you know, he's the NFL quarterback that wants to go around with a pouty face all the time and talk about how horrible everything is.
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In fact, he just recently came out with some comment. I don't know, he's talking about how I guess the
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NFL, you know, because he played, he was a professional football player. The NFL is all about slavery.
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I mean, this is a guy that got paid millions and millions of dollars, you know, way more, far more than the vast majority of Americans could imagine ever getting paid.
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And he's out there whining about slavery. I think Colin Kaepernick is one of the most insufferable people that I've ever seen out there in sports.
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And his act gets really old. And he's gone out there and he's done this un -Thanksgiving thing before.
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Now, you know, my thought on all of that is if you really want to go out and go to Alcatraz Island and,
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I don't know, talk about how awful everything is and how awful your life is and how awful the country is.
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Well, you know, when I was a kid, people used to say, it's a free country. Interestingly, not too many people say that anymore.
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I guess maybe that's because it's not so much a free country anymore. I guess it's kind of sort of a free country.
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You know, I mean, if somebody really wants to go out there and do that stuff, yeah, be my guest.
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You know, I mean, I'm certainly not going to say they can't do that. I mean, it's, I guess I would call it, it's a free country.
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It sure doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And for me, you know, I'm going to go ahead and stick with Thanksgiving.
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Here's a comment. In fact, this is from the article and this is from the San Francisco Examiner. She says, it says here that McGill hopes that people think about what the holiday, talking about Thanksgiving, really means and rethink it.
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The idea isn't to do away with the holiday altogether, but remove the celebration of Thanksgiving, instead retaining gratitude for the harvest.
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And of course, you know, what does that really mean? Okay, so we get rid of the celebration of Thanksgiving, which is
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Thanksgiving, not just in some general sense, but Thanksgiving to Almighty God. Instead give, you know, we're going to retain gratitude for the fall harvest.
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Well, gratitude for whom? Well, it doesn't, it doesn't really say, but one doesn't suppose that we're talking about gratitude to the
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God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I guess maybe what is it to some sort of pagan concept of God or to Mother Nature or to something like that.
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I guess that seems to be the thought here, although I can't tell for sure. It doesn't really go into a lot of detail.
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But yeah, I mean, it's one of these things where you've got another person, another group of people that are trying to do their best, they can do the best they can to try to erase the
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Christian heritage from the United States of America. Now, I mentioned before, that you've got all of these people out there and they're trying to tell you
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Thanksgiving's a myth, or it's about genocide, or white supremacy, or slavery, or all of these things.
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Of course, Thanksgiving is about none of those things. It's about giving thanks to God for His providential care for His people.
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And in particular, that celebration started in 1621, where you had the pilgrims giving thanks for a good harvest.
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They had landed a year before and about half of them had died over the winter. And so things were looking pretty grim.
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I mean, you couldn't really get reinforcements very easily.
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I mean, these people were out there, it was incredibly brave of them to do what they did. I like to think that I would have the courage of my convictions to follow that.
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I don't know. But I mean, what they did was a remarkable thing. And they came over to America and they set up shop in the fall of 1620.
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And interestingly enough, it was in the spring of 1621 when they first had contact with some of the indigenous persons, some of the
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Indians that lived in that particular area. And it's kind of interesting, the account of the first contact that they had with any of the natives there.
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And this is taken from a Bangor, Maine historical magazine. This is an account.
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This was written back in November of 1688. I'm just going to read this. And it's actually kind of funny how the pilgrims had the first contact with an
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Indian. And it says here, the pilgrims had only got fairly settled at Plymouth when on March 16th, 1621, to their great surprise, an
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Indian suddenly appeared to them. He walked boldly along by the houses as he went saying, welcome
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Englishmen, welcome Englishmen. He was a tall, straight man with black hair, long behind and short before and none on his face.
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He had a bow and arrows. He was naked with only a leather about his waist. The weather was very cold and they threw a cloak over him.
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He asked for beer and was given strong water, biscuit, butter, cheese, and pudding, all of which he enjoyed.
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So here's this fellow, pops out of the woods one day in March of 1621, speaking
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English and saying, welcome Englishmen. And he asked for a beer. And that's how they got started.
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The name of the fellow, his name was Samoset. And he told them, apparently he had learned to speak
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English from some fishermen that had frequented the area. And he also told them about another fellow who spoke better English than he did.
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And his name was Squanto. And of course, Squanto was a tremendous help to the pilgrims that year, that planting season.
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He helped them show them the best way to plant corn. He showed them as far as where to fish and this type of thing.
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And it was in the fall then of that year of 1621 that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated.
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And the pilgrims were giving thanks to God for his providence. And he providentially provided them through the help of Samoset and the help of Squanto.
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And they celebrated the first Thanksgiving there in the fall of 1621 with the
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Wampanoag Indian tribe. And, you know, it's kind of interesting.
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You hear all this stuff from all these wokesters about how terrible and genocidal and all this other stuff that the first Thanksgiving was.
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And if you look at the historical records of it, it was not a myth. It was a real event.
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I mean, it's very well documented. And in fact, it's almost a model of the kind of tolerance that the wokesters want you to...
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that they're always preaching. I mean, you can hardly find a more disparate group than a bunch of English Puritans and the
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Native Indians. You could hardly find people that would be more different. Instead of getting together and killing one another, they actually sat down and shared a common meal.
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And I think that's actually quite remarkable. And it shows you, you know, that God provides.
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And, you know, I don't know how many of these people actually came, you know, maybe of the
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Indians actually came to know Christ. Squanto apparently was a Christian.
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He had spent considerable time in England, and I think even in maybe
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Spain. But some of the comments, some of the quotes that I've read from him, he apparently was a believer, quite interestingly.
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So, you know, God was at work. And God, not only within the
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Puritan community, but also in the people that they met. And so,
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I mean, this is the type of thing, like I say, we're always lectured about how important it is to, oh, we've got to have, you know, tolerance and diversity and these kinds of things.
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Well, you had it right there, the very first Thanksgiving. You know, it's quite a remarkable event. But, you know, of course, the wolkster and, you know, the critical race theory types, they don't want to see that sort of thing.
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You know, what they do want to do is they want to sit here and denounce the pilgrims as being very horrible people.
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Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the history of the pilgrims was perfect, or that the history of this country was perfect.
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Obviously, it isn't. But one of the problems, and this kind of goes back to not only the way
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Thanksgiving is framed by the wolkster critical race theory types, but also any time any discussion is had about issues relating to race.
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And that is that critical race theory, it's kind of a perversion of Christianity. You know, in Christianity, what we do is we talk about, in Adam, the whole human race fell.
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Well, in this sort of secular, kind of Marxist -y sort of critical race theory that has developed, there is a sort of perverted version of that, in which only white people are fallen, and everybody else in the world is pure and perfect.
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And so it's only the white pilgrims are very, very bad. Everything they did, said, thought was very, very bad.
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And everything that the Wampanoag or any of the other tribes that they met was all very, very good and perfect.
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And this is the way this is presented. And of course, that's bogus, because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
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There's nobody without sin out there. If we say we have no sin, we lie and deceive ourselves.
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That's what the Apostle John wrote. So were the pilgrim sinners? Well, yes, they were.
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Some of them were safe sinners. Maybe they all were. I don't know. Certainly some of them were.
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And were the Wampanoag sinners? Yes, they were. And maybe some of them were saved as well.
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I don't know. But there's this attempt to put all the burden for all the world's problems on these people who were, in many ways, the
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Christian founders of the United States of America. And it was interesting. I was listening to Chris Pinto today, and that was one of the things he talked about.
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I mean, there's a great deal of anti -white racism out there. In fact,
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I'm really stunned by it. I guess I shouldn't be at this point, but it is a bit stunning.
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I mean, for instance, some of the comments you heard in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict when he was found not guilty of the five counts that he was facing.
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And there is all of this stuff about white supremacy, this, and racist, that. And of course, it was all directed to Kyle Rittenhouse particularly, and to white people in general.
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And I think one of the things that Chris Pinto mentioned, and I think he's really right about this, is what they're really attacking ultimately in all of this is they're really attacking
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Christianity. And I do believe that that ultimately is the primary target.
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And I mean, when you read through all of these comments on going after Thanksgiving, I mean, they're trying to strip out any
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Christian idea behind Thanksgiving. And you can see that in that article there in the
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San Francisco Examiner, where it talked about, oh, well, we're going to celebrate the holiday, but we're just going to get rid of the
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Thanksgiving part. And we're going to, I don't know, how did she get it off? We're going to retain gratitude for the fall harvest and gratitude to whom she doesn't really say.
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But we want to get rid of that whole Christian thing. And they want to sort of cast that behind their back.
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And that really does seem to be what's going on here. So let's see here,
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I had a few other things. Oh, yeah, there's one other thing I did want to bring up here. And that is one other thing
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I mentioned, you know, the title of this is Thanksgiving turkeys and the failure of socialism.
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Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about that, because there's one very interesting account that comes out of the early experience of the pilgrims.
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Now, this was going on, this actually, the change
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I'm going to talk about here, actually didn't take place until 1623. So it wasn't dealing with the first Thanksgiving, but it was dealing early on was one of the experiences with the pilgrims.
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And that had to do with the failure of socialism in the Plymouth Colony, and the success of capitalism.
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And there's a piece that I found here. This actually dates back, this is from Forbes magazine, dates back to 2008.
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But it's it's actually still quite a good summary. And the title of it is called
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Lessons from Capitalist Thanksgiving by Jerry Bowyer, who himself was an economist.
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And he writes here, it's astonishing and a little horrifying that America's elites know so little about their country's history. Case in point,
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Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Jared is an influential leftist economic polemicist, and sometime advisor to Barack Obama on economic affairs.
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I debated with Jared dozens of times over the past several years, but what happened this week was especially disturbing. I explained that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation.
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It seems Bernstein never heard about this chapter of U .S. history. He called it an exercise in revisionist history.
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Admitting that he never read the memoirs of Plymouth Governor William Bradford, he nevertheless dismissed the story as untrue.
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But the facts are undeniable, and there's nothing to revise. Bradford's historical account, which
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I quote below, had been read by schoolchildren for over 300 years. And he continues here, he says, the members of the
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Plymouth colony had arrived in a new world with a plan for collective property ownership. Reflecting the current opinion of the aristocratic class of the 1620s, their charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvest to be shared.
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And he quotes here from Bradford, quote, the strong or man of parts had no more in division of vittles and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could.
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This was thought injustice, end quote. And so Bowyer continues here, he says, you probably will not be surprised to hear that the colonists starved.
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Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else's children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women's husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted.
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And he continues here, quote, this is from Bradford, quote, and for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, et cetera, they deemed it a kind of slavery.
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Neither could many husbands well work it, end quote. And Bowyer continues, famine came as soon as they ate through their provisions.
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After famine came plague, half the colony died. Unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes, giving each person a parcel of land to tend for themselves.
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And he again, quotes Bradford, at length, after much debate of things, the governor gave way that they should set corn, every man for his own particular.
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And in that regard, trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family, a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their numbers, number for that end.
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And then says Bowyer, the results were overwhelmingly beneficial. Men worked hard, even though they had constantly pleaded illness.
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Fields were not only tilled and planted, but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with us around the
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Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash, and pumpkin, and to rotate these crops from year to year.
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The harvest was bountiful. A new colonist immigrated to a thriving settlement. And so it's interesting here too.
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This is especially interesting statement. Now I'm going to read here
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Bowyer and then he's going to cite Bradford. This is Bowyer here to begin with. The colonists threw off the statist intellectual fashions of their day.
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They concluded the ancient principles of private properties recorded in the 10 commandments were superior to the utopian speculations of Plato and his 17th century imitators.
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Human nature was a fact of life, self -centered, fallen. No cadre of elite philosophy of kings could change the cold facts of reality.
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Then here's the relevant quote from Bradford. The experience was had in this common course and condition may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's, and that the taking away of property would make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God.
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So apparently the aristocrats in the 17th century at that time in the 17th century were really taking their economics from Plato and they weren't taking their economics from the scriptures.
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And that's one of the really important lessons that as Christians we need not only to learn ourselves but also to teach as well.
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And I think about reading some of the work of Gordon Clark or the work of John Robbins, the work of the
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Trinity Foundation. One of the things that John Robbins very often talked about is he had a saying, he would say that the
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Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth. That is one of the maybe the basic statement or summary of scripturalism.
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That's a philosophy developed by Gordon Clark and named and refined and extended by John Robbins is the idea that the
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Bible has a monopoly on truth. So oftentimes, you know, and I've certainly made this mistake and I think certainly many
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Christians have as well and continue to, is that we have this idea that somehow the Bible is limited to talking about, you know,
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God and Jesus and how to get saved and it's effective only on Sunday morning in Sunday school and maybe in church between the hours of 11 and 12.
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Now the Bible certainly is about God and it's about Jesus and it's about how to get saved. It certainly is about all those things.
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You know, we talk about the gospel of justification by faith alone and, you know, that's how anyone comes into, anyone is saved, anyone is brought into a right relationship with God.
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It's by God's grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ alone. It's not by anything that we do and, you know, praise
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God that that's the case and it's a wonderful thing to be able to talk about on a
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Sunday. But what happens where we go wrong is not in saying that the Bible is about those things, but we think very often that the
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Bible is only about those things. And the fact of the matter is the Bible is a complete view.
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It's a complete system of thought and that system of thought includes things such as politics. It includes things such as economics.
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You know, and if we're to think as Christians, you know, we have to get our economics not from Plato or Aristotle or any other pagan thinker.
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We have to get our economics from the scriptures, from the Bible, from the 66 books of the
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Bible. You know, the Bible alone is the word of God. You know, that's another way of talking about sola scriptura or by scripture alone.
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You know, as Christians, that's where we have to get our ideas about politics.
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That doesn't mean that other people outside of the Bible can't be right, but he can't know that they're right unless you come back and you compare their writings to the scriptures.
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That's what Martin Luther talked about. He called that the writing principle or the schriftprinzip if you want to say it in German.
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This idea that we have to bring all ideas back to the scripture and compare them to scripture and find out whether the scripture approves them or not.
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Now, one of the important things, one of the important takeaways that we can get out of the Bible from economics is that everywhere throughout scripture is it supports private property and condemns socialism.
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You know, there are many examples of this in scripture, and I'm just going to mention a few here just by way of example.
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I mean, this is certainly not limited to it, and I'm not going to go into a great deal of depth at this point. Maybe that's something we can do another time.
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But think about the eighth commandment, you know, thou shalt not steal. That acknowledges that there is such a thing as private property because you can't have theft unless you have private property.
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Think about what Jesus said. It was the parable, I think, of the workers in the vineyard, it's called. And when he hired some men early, this is a vineyard owner, you know, he hired some men early in the day, and he, you know, they said, oh, he'll pay you such and such an amount, and he hired some other people later in the day, and some guys he hired, and they only worked about an hour, and then at the end of the day, he gave the guys that only worked an hour the same amount as the people that he hired, and they worked a whole day, and they came and they grumbled about it, and they said, wow, you know, this isn't fair, blah, blah, blah.
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And the owner of the vineyard replied to him, he said, is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things?
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Well, yes, it is. I mean, that's a rhetorical question. The answer is yes, it is lawful for you to do that. Now, that is a statement of private property.
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That's a defense of private property. Or you think about when
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Ananias, you know, came and he, you know, claimed to have sold a field for such and such, and he gave this money to Peter, and Peter rebuked him for this.
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And when Peter was rebuking him, he said, you know, while it remained, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not in your own control?
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So he's, I mean, Peter's acknowledging that that field and that the money that resulted from the sale of that field, that belonged properly to Ananias.
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You know, he's acknowledging this was your stuff. You own this, and you had a right to do with it what you wanted.
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You know, the sin of Ananias was in misrepresenting his gift. You know, he came and tried to say, oh, you know, this is the full amount for which we sold the field.
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You know, when actually he was keeping back a part of it. Now, he had a right to do that. He had a right to keep back a part of it because it was his.
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You know, Peter acknowledges that. His sin was the fact that he misrepresented the sum that he was giving to saying, oh, yeah, this is the whole price of the field.
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I sold this field, and here's the full proceeds from it. I guess maybe he was trying to make himself look better to God and also maybe to other people in the congregation, and Peter called out his sin.
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I think it's interesting, too, you know, that the same people that want to denounce
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Thanksgiving as a very horrible thing and say all these terrible things about it, these are also the same people who want to push socialism.
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You know, they want centralized control in place of individual liberty. You know, they want state ownership in place of free markets.
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You know, and that's tyranny. I mean, these people are calling for tyranny. Don't let them take away the
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Christian heritage of this nation. You know, you and I as Christians—I mean, maybe just to exhort, you know, my fellow believers, and I'm talking here especially to those people who have a
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Reformed background. You know, this country was founded by Calvinists, and you and I have a special calling to stand up and to speak out, you know, to rebuke people when they talk about error, when they speak error, you know, whether it's error in misrepresenting history, whether it's error in misrepresenting or teaching error in terms of politics.
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You know, they keep wanting to—they love big government. Well, the Bible doesn't teach big government. The Bible teaches limited government.
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You know, as Christians, you know, we're not big government types. We're not anarchists either.
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You know, you've got people on two extremes there. You've got people that, you know, they love government managing every single detail of their lives, and there's other people, you know,
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I think of maybe some—at least some libertarians, you know, they call themselves anarcho -capitalists. Yeah, I think of maybe somebody like maybe
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Murray Rothbard, for example. You know, I mean, to him, he would say things like, all taxation is theft or, you know, the government, you know, the idea of the state itself was somehow wrong.
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And that's not a Christian idea either. I mean, civil government is legitimate. It's a creation of God as a partial punishment—as a punishment and also as a partial cure for sin.
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Now, if, you know, had Adam not fallen, we wouldn't need civil government. But right now, in the state in which we find ourselves, even as saved individuals, even those of us who are saved, who know the
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Lord Jesus Christ, you know, we still have to deal with sin, and we still need to have some sort of a civil government.
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But that civil government is not all -powerful. That civil government has its ministerial—it's not magisterial.
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You know, it's been assigned certain powers. Principally, it's been assigned the power of the sword to punish those who practice evil, and also to praise those that do good—praise the good.
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You know, that is to pass laws that support people doing the right thing.
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But, you know, the government is limited. You know, it doesn't have the ability to run all of our lives.
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You know, and Paul says, you know, this is why you pay taxes. So, I mean, all taxation is not theft. Some taxation is approved by God.
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So we're not anarchists, but we're not totalitarians either. You know, we believe in limited government, constitutional government, and these are things that were, of course, established later on, you know, well after the pilgrims.
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I mean, well after the first Thanksgiving, you know, it was what, you know, 150, 160 years later or so, approximately, you know, before the
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U .S. Constitution was actually written down. But the ideas that brought that about, those were brought over with the pilgrims way back in 1620.
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And, you know, they quickly realized, within a few years of being in America, the folly of socialism and the importance of private property, the importance of capitalism, the importance of free markets.
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And it's because of their Christian heritage. It's because of their Christian understanding of the scriptures. You know,
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John Bradford made that point, or William Bradford, excuse me, you know, he made that point. He talked about the experience that was at hand in this common course and condition may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's, and that the taking away of property would make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God.
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You know, he realized, you know, that it's folly to induce, introduce a system of economics that runs contrary to scripture.
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And I'm glad that he did. You know, the pilgrims admitted their error and they corrected it.
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Thank God. I mean, that's what we should all do, right? I mean, because we all make mistakes, we all sin, but we need to be able to repent.
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We need to be teachable. You know, so that's something else that we can take away from the pilgrims. You know, they were teachable. They learned.
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You know, they learned from the word of God. You know, they realized they were running into problems and they realized that the word of God offered truth and not
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Plato. So anyway, that's just a little, I guess, get on my soapbox there about economics.
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One of my favorite topics. I did want to talk about that as well. So anyway, that's about all
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I have for this week. I just wanted to say thanks to everybody for watching on the live stream. Thanks also for those of you listening to the podcast as well.
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I always enjoy doing this. And until next time we talk, may the spirit of truth guide you in all truth as you read and study