Update/Addition to Bostock Decision Commentary, BLM’s Marxist Abuse of Language, Qur’anic Verbs

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday. Tomorrow's up in the air as far as whether we'll be able to do a program or not.

And I don't know what next week's going to look like at all. I have a gut feeling that next week may be...

I might get to start using the beautiful music that Seb Goldswayne provided for me to record these short little teaching things.

I'm going to be away. The way this year is going, the road

I normally train on this time of year will undoubtedly be closed. Just because every single ride that I was supposed to be doing in July has been canceled due to the

COVID panic. Well, yeah,

I know. That's my concern is that they'll close that road because of fire concerns, wind and dryness.

I'm just trying to mentally prepare myself that I'm not going to be able to climb. I'm just going to have to ride at altitude.

Anyway, the greatest place in the world for you to be, of course, is outside in the fresh air.

But they canceled it all anyways, because it is. Oh, by the way, because of large increases in testing in Arizona, they're pushing the story that we're all about to die again of COVID.

I don't know if anybody is buying it. No, I do. I do, actually. I was out and about today, and there are a lot of very panicked people.

I feel for them. I really do. A lot of cities are just making it now mandatory.

AZ mask up is now the thing. That's how you virtue signal.

So I just ordered two masks. Don't do that. I just ordered two masks with printing on them.

Basically, it says something along the lines of, it's a protest.

I'm really wondering, to be honest with you, if I'll even get them. Take that thing out of your ear. I really, really wonder if the company

I ordered it from won't write to me and say, we're not going to print that. I mean, you could put foul language and anything else on it.

But something tells me, it basically says this is an assault upon my person, my health, and my freedoms, and it's a useless, stupid virtue signaling.

It's not that long. You can't put that much on it. Unless you want somebody really close to try to read it.

That sort of doesn't have a purpose. Anyway, I'd be really, really interested to see if I actually get them.

I really do. All you've got to do is say you're protesting.

Just say you're protesting, and they'll let you do anything. Anyway, so lots of weird stuff going on, and that's changing schedule stuff.

So next week, we may try to do a

Zoom -based program. I just don't know if the

Internet's going to be up to it, where I'm going to be at. We'll see. And if not, then

I will try to do some short things that we can still put something out there and let you know we're still here.

So we'll see. We'll see. I've mentioned before that my mind works in unusual ways, and that evidently there is a review process going on all the time after I do programs.

And that's blank again. And so at some point, maybe

I was listening to somebody else. I don't know. But at some point, I realized that there was an element of what

I had wanted to say about the Bostock decision by the

Supreme Court that I forgot to say, or at least I think I forgot to say. My mental recording does not contain the discussion of this.

That's because I generally do not have anything other than just a single line, talk about such and so, rather than an outline of things like that.

But if you've read the decision and the minority responses, the dissents, there's been a lot of really good discussions about the illogic of the— well, there was with the gay marriage one too, a lot of discussion about just gaping holes in the logic of the majority and everything along those lines, and that's quite true.

But I think if you just sit back for a second and you just sort of listen to the argumentation and listen to what's being said as a

Christian or as any American, say, in the first 150 years, minimally, of the nation's existence.

You know, back when the Bible would be quoted by government officials and things like that, and not just used as a photo op either.

If you just sit back and you just sort of listen to the argumentation, it doesn't take you very long to realize that this conversation really can't get anywhere because we have come to a point in our culture where the very use of the words good and evil have been so completely redefined by our constant social pressure and our social experience that, you know, we're talking about what sex is, not the verb, but the noun, and only one aspect of the meaning of noun.

There can be no discussion on the part of anyone in the Supreme Court any longer. You know, maybe in closed chambers, maybe in their own office, but in the actual discussion there can be no reference made to any type of objective standard in divine truth.

Our society is embarrassed that we ever once believed that. Our founding documents say it, but we're embarrassed by that.

And obviously, what the Bostock decision was about was whether there is such a thing as an objective definition of what a male or a female, what a man or a woman is.

But that was never discussed. That just doesn't come up. It's just not there.

And it can't be there. Not anymore. Can you imagine if anyone actually brought that up and said, hey, let's actually talk about whether there is such a thing as a male or female and whether there is any meaningful defense of the idea that someone can simply identify as a male or female and that that's going to be allowable even if it runs directly counter to all the evidence that exists scientifically in the objective realm?

Can't talk about that. If you can't talk about that, your society has completely lost its way.

It's lost its ground for being able to meaningfully address any of these issues.

So, we as Christians have to be very quick to point this out, but we also have to be very compelling in how we express this.

What I mean by that is the independent fundamentalist

Baptist King James only way of approaching this isn't effective. We do have a clear divine revelation from God on this subject, but how do you present that to people who do not believe there can even possibly be such a thing?

You don't do it by, and this is where the presuppositional apologetics issue comes in, you don't engage any of these subjects by putting the rebel sinner in the place of judge.

And I'm really afraid that in a lot of the current conversation that we're having with our next door neighbor over the fence or I was going to come up with some other places where we'd be talking with people and then

I realized you can't talk to people anymore. It all has to be online. Who talks in person anymore?

I was ordering food. I actually went into one of my little places I like to go to and ordered food.

And of course, the lady is in this mask. I could not understand a word she was saying.

I was just so frustrated. I mean, I sort of had to stick my head under the plexiglass.

What? What? And I still... Whatever. Just give me my food.

We can't have those conversations. And my concern is that even when we do, even those of us that are presuppositionalists tend to be evidentialists in that, for me, the key issues of presuppositionalism are it's the scriptural teaching of the absolute centrality of the existence of God for human knowledge to exist.

The scriptural teaching about the nature of man as a rebel sinner who suppresses truth. And the reality that what all of that means is that an apologist is damaging what he's attempting to do by encouraging a rebel sinner to pretend that he is judge over these issues.

So what I'm saying is when we talk about, for example, transgenderism, and by the way, this is directly associated with Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization, and one of its central tenets is the reality of transgenderism.

That is part of who they are and what they are. Every corporation that's got that stuff out there and links for you to donate, by the way, most of that money ends up in the

Democratic Party's coffers, during election year, just so happens it worked out that way.

Just so happens that all the major sports and everything else are all tripping over themselves to help promote the

Democratic Party in an election year. You want corruption? It ain't the Russians. You've got it right there.

There's where it is. There's a tampering, and it's happening right in front of all of us, and they're going to get away with it, and nothing will be done about it.

That's just the way it is. Anyway, most of the conversation that we're engaging in is inviting rebel sinners to pretend that they can actually define the key issues of what is male, what is female.

These are people who are operating on the foundation of there being no creator, and yet there are people who know the creator exists.

But they and the people around them, they and the people around them, this is something that feeds on itself.

It's sort of a feedback loop. They and the people around them seek to live their lives without ever having to open their eyes to the reality that the

Day of Judgment is coming. And so they encourage one another to say things and do things that deny the reality of that coming

Day of Judgment. Romans chapter 1, they encourage others in the same way, remember? Most amazing passage, almost the most amazing passage in all the

Bible in its insight into the human condition. So the point is, how do you approach this presuppositionally?

Well, you have to appeal to the fact that they will not live consistently in light of the assumptions that they are bringing to this subject of transgenderism, whether God defines our existence or not.

And that can be rather easily done, because that is one area where we naturally recognize the goodness of fatherhood, motherhood.

You have to absolutely, this is why once the left seizes power, for however long that lasts,

I do not believe it can last, it will last longer than it would have 100 years ago because of technology.

It will be more expensive in human lives because of technology. But one thing

I know, we are creating the image of God, and this system fundamentally denies that, and therefore it cannot long last.

It will, it has no internal structure to hold it together outside the evil of man.

And that could be pretty bad. Communism killed 120 million last century, and it seems that we are intent upon seeing if we can do better in this century.

Better, as in more. Let's try for 240, maybe 250. Maybe someday we'll get the idea that communism is an absolutely demonic system.

I understand, Teen Vogue has an article right now.

I could not bring myself to log on to Teen Vogue. I was just too scared to. But I saw the front page of an article in Teen Vogue introducing people to Karl Marx.

And he's just being presented as a man with different economic ideas.

And given the state of public education, there you go. I mean, the teachers believe that too, so there you go.

That's where we are. So, we can't approach this in such a fashion as we are.

We have to press the person about their own createdness. And if they say more than three sentences, if you're listening carefully, they will give you evidence that you can use in that way.

But there are all sorts of human relationships that we have. The goodness of fatherhood, the goodness of motherhood.

All these types of things that we can bring in and demonstrate their incoherence.

Press that incoherence in that situation. It's not just a matter—you know, it's funny, we recognize this presuppositionalism, so we can't just simply throw theistic proofs at somebody.

Let's go for the cosmological argument. Well, I think the cosmological argument is a valid argument in a

Christian worldview. It requires a principle of sufficient reason, which comes from a Christian worldview. So, it's a valid argument in a

Christian worldview. In the same way, the issue of transgenderism, we have the winning argument from a

Christian worldview. The other side has no worldview in which to demonstrate even the importance of the subject.

So, that's what we've got to push. Now, let me connect that to something else real quick. Last night, before I went to bed,

I tweeted something about Black Lives Matter. And I think one of the positives is that, at least for a lot of people, more information is becoming available about Black Lives Matter, the organization, and a demonstration of what it's really all about.

Because while our society has been moving rapidly into an expression of secular insanity, there's still a lot of people in the

United States that will buy that to a point, and then there's still some connections to the past that make them go, when it comes right down to punching the last hole and making the last commitment to just a total obliteration of what the

United States once was. And so, that information is coming out, and the plainly

Marxist orientation, two of the three founding women, Black women, of the organization, open to identify themselves as Marxist.

And when you read their materials, not just that one website, but other websites as well, because it's pretty much been founded in the digital age, and so it's not like you can go back to 100 -year -old printed documents or something like that.

This is only in the past decade. When you go to those materials, it is patently obvious and clear that this is a

Marxist movement, it's a global movement, it's a revolutionary movement, and it is, of definition, affirmative of every kind of anti -Christian sexual concept possible, and especially the concept of transgenderism.

Homosexuality is just a given. But transgenderism, central to the affirmations of the

Black Lives Matter movement. That's why you saw, last weekend, these huge gatherings of people promoting

Black Trans Lives Matter. Now, I don't think most

Americans really get that. I don't think most

Americans can really understand what that's all about. They have not thought about it deeply enough to realize this is an extreme expression of rebellion against the created order that has given form and function to our society all along.

This is one of the most obvious examples of what people are really up to.

I just don't think they get that. But right now, it feels good. And right now, the big thing is,

I was driving out of the parking lot after getting my food, and here's this big old sign in one of the store windows, Black Lives Matter. And so that's what everybody's supposed to do.

If you say Black Lives Matter, and you get, oh, hey, high five, well, what are you saying? One of the things to keep in mind, we mentioned on the last program, and let me emphasize this here, is

I had a guy on Twitter this morning say, I'm sure you mean the organization, not the statement, because that's a transparently true statement.

The organization is trafficking on switching back and forth, equivocating between the sentence

Black Lives Matter and the organization Black Lives Matter. They're equivocating on that.

So if you push back on the organization, they hit you with the sentence and call you a racist and everything else.

If you dare say all lives matter, if you dare say Asian lives matter, if you dare say Hispanic lives matter, police officers' lives matter, firemen's lives matter, nurses' lives matter, whatever, none of those are allowable right now because of the assumed narrative that there is a genocide going on in only one group.

That's the assumed narrative. There is a genocide going on in that one group, but it is being perpetrated by that group against that group.

It's black males killing black males. If you want to call that a genocide, the numbers aren't really genocidal, but they are way, way, way too high.

But the narrative is, no, it's white cops. It's white supremacy that's doing all of this.

That's the narrative. It's a false narrative. It is repeated so often that people who believe it think that they're accepting just given facts, but it's just simply not true.

But that's what is being presented. And so you look at that sentence, and then you look at the organization, and there is such a, again, if you just sit back as a

Christian, there is such a chasm between the sentence and the organization. I mean, we know that transgenderism destroys life.

It does not build up life. The suicide rate amongst transgenders is significantly higher than other portions of the population.

You literally have a movement that is promoting the mutilation of healthy bodies, the giving of puberty blockers to eight -year -olds.

I mean, this is destructive. It doesn't matter whether you're white, black, or anything else, it is absolutely destructive.

And yet it's at the heart of the movement, Black Lives Matter. So you have that aspect, and then you have just the reality that the whole narrative that we're being hunted down and killed, you are by your own people, but you won't deal with that part, so it's easier to blame somebody else.

All of that stuff. But here's the real issue. Well, this is just another issue.

The sentence, Black Lives Matter.

What does matter mean? I mean, it's interesting.

I saw one source today that said it was a Black Lives Matter source, the organization.

And when it defined black, it said anyone who identifies as black. Well, I think we have the solution right there.

Let's just all identify as black. We're all unified. We're done. Cool. No more rioting.

Everything's good, right? Yeah. I know, I know, I know.

It doesn't work that way. But they have to say that, because that's the lingo. It's incoherent.

That's why they can't have debate. They only have screaming and violence.

But anyway, what does... Okay, Black Lives Matter.

Each of these terms has to be defined. But the assertion of the sentence is matters.

Black lives matter. And it's functioning there verbally. It's the verbal element of the sentence.

Black lives matter, but it also has a sort of a substantival element to it.

So what does that mean? And this is what I mean about thinking presuppositionally.

That's what I would engage somebody if somehow a conversation began. I was sitting in a waiting room today.

Car was getting worked on. Nothing wrong with it. Just regular maintenance. And no one's really talking to anybody else.

But if a conversation had started, let's say it's a few weeks from now, you literally cannot go out in public without masking up Arizona.

Which would really be great in August in Phoenix. What? Ice pack, yeah.

You can't breathe through an ice pack. And the conversation has started.

Let's say someone saw my... Let's say I actually get the one I ordered. Maybe somebody doesn't read what it says or misreads it or something.

I get my face mask. And somebody reads it. And we start this conversation.

And they say Black Lives Matter.

Okay, what does matter mean? In their worldview, when you say something matters, upon what basis?

You see, here is a situation where there is still the cultural capital that has been left over from our past.

That's built into our language. It's built into our use of language. Matter.

We can say that something matters only in a worldview where there is purpose and meaning.

The problem is, the guy that kicked open the door for all of this stuff, for homosexuality and transgenderism and massive racism, because he himself was a massive racist, was

Charles Darwin. Darwin believed plainly that the

Black race was an inferior race. Due to genetics.

Well, he didn't know genetics. Due to natural selection, which will then, in Neo -Darwinism, become an issue of genetic superiority on the part of other elements of the human family.

Anyway, we could not have any of this conversation if it were not for the theory of evolution and the

Darwinian worldview that has developed from it. And in that world, all you have to do is listen to Richard Dawkins.

No lives matter. Life doesn't matter. This is a cruel, unfeeling, uncaring, random universe of energy transfer.

Nothing more. There is no more meaning than energy transfer. All chemical reactions are energy transfers.

And the final state of the universe, as it is expanding right now, is called heat death.

Where all final, you know, a star is a concentration of energy that then gives its energy out, and that's how you can have life on a planet.

But they're all dying. Over time, there will be fewer and fewer stars forming.

So that at some point, and I've not seen the current speculation as to how far out this is, but at some point, you have heat death, where everything reaches the same temperature.

There are no more focused places of energy. There can be no life, no organization.

That's it. That is the ultimate end of all things in Charles Darwin.

Well, Charles Darwin had no idea of any of this stuff. He didn't know anything about genetics or anything like that. But that's certainly the end of Richard Dawkins' world.

And so, Black Lives Matter is a meaningless statement in a secular world.

Black is just simply a descriptive of one set of genotype that isn't overly relevant.

Lives, brief transient organizations of organic molecules that results in death, and the redistribution of those organic molecules back into the system.

Matter? Nothing does. There's no transcendent meaning.

There can't be. You are the accidental result of accidental processes.

Life didn't have to start on this planet. It doesn't matter if it continues on this planet.

Eventually, the Sun becomes a red giant and engulfs

Mercury, Venus, and Earth. Someday, from their perspective, given current trends in understanding the current usage of hydrogen being fused into helium in the core of the

Sun, you eventually run out of hydrogen. And then you start fusing helium into the next element, and this causes an expansion of the

Sun because the gravitational pull decreases.

Right now, it's being held together, but that starts to change, and it expands, and Earth gets gobbled up, and that's it.

That's all there is to it. You are literally stardust. And to stardust, you will return.

So, Black Lives Matter is an incoherent, meaningless statement.

All you can do, from the secular perspective, is say, at this point in time, in the billions of years of history of this particular solar system, which is a part of one particular galaxy of 150 billion different galaxies, on one of the smallest of the planets in this solar system, life has accidentally evolved to such a state that, at this point in time, in the current political organization of these random life forms, there is an emphasis upon a certain group of people who share a certain phenotype, given their genotype, and that could change after the election.

That could change 100 years from now. 100 years is a blink of the eye in cosmological terms.

And it has absolutely, positively, no meaning to the solar system, the galaxy, or the universe.

At all. It's irrelevant. That's your secular worldview. That's... So, when someone says, black lives matter, that might be a good question to ask somebody.

What does matter mean? And I'm not talking about a physical definition of atoms and molecules and protons and neutrons and electrons and anything like that.

I'm not talking about the mysterious dark matter or any of that type of stuff. You're saying something.

There's a verbal element in that sentence when you say, black lives matter. Where do you get that from?

And, the problem is, since they've borrowed from our worldview and our language, we now have a hook.

We have a connection. They used our language. They borrowed our worldview.

They always have to. And you get somebody talking long enough, and eventually, they will contradict themselves.

They will borrow from God to hold that mess of a worldview that they have together.

And then you go, gotcha. Because as soon as they say, yeah, black lives matter.

Why? The only way to ground that is because they are created to matter by God.

And once you have God in the picture, then we can finally bring all of this

Marxist critical theory intersectionality madness into the light of what he has said is true.

And what he has said is that stuff isn't. So, there's a consideration of not only the fact that they're playing on they're playing on the fact that people in our society do not think critically.

And so, they'll use a sentence that good -hearted people want to affirm.

Black lives matter. And then, they equivocate to the

Marxist worldview behind it. Even though the very sentence itself to be meaningful has to repudiate the atheistic

Marxism critical theory and everything else that gives life to the movement itself.

That's what was so great about that video. Y 'all saw it. I couldn't find it right now if I tried to, but it was all over Twitter yesterday.

Of this black fella who comes up on all these people of differing ethnicities.

Medical people outside a hospital. They've all got their scrubs on. They're doing some

Black Lives Matter thing and they've all got their masks on and they're doing their social distancing. Because he's black, this one lady actually comes out with a sign and kneels in front of him.

Wow, is that creepy. So, do all black lives matter?

Yeah, all black lives matter. How about black lives that are killed by other blacks?

Do they matter? And a few people are like, well, yeah, yeah.

How about all those black lives killed in the abortuary? Silence. They're looking at each other going, did he say that?

And then he goes, yeah, I thought so. Thought so. It was, it was incredible because it exposed not only the incoherence and hypocrisy of the movement, but the incoherence and the hypocrisy of the people who have been sucked into it.

Who know in their, when, when they're actually forced to think and to stop just going with the emotional flow, that what they're saying really doesn't make any sense.

And they know deep down inside that Asian lives matter. And they know deep down inside that Hispanic lives matter.

And they know deep down inside that they could go to places in the world where those are the people suffering, not the blacks.

But that doesn't help right now. That doesn't help to do whatever it is they've decided they're going to do, which a lot of them are just simply told that it was a good thing to do by their professors at the university.

And so it's just sort of like, well, okay. And unfortunately, most of them at home had never been given a meaningful understanding of why the

United States was founded and why it's done what it's done in the past. And it's imperfections and yet the vital difference between a nation that affirms that our rights come from God versus a nation that affirms that our privileges are granted by a government.

As long as this nation understood that, it remains strong. It no longer understands that and therefore it is being subjugated literally in a matter of days.

In a matter of days. Global historians in the future will point to this time period with awe.

It was it was the time when the bloated corpse finally exploded.

The death had taken place long before that but all of a sudden or you might

I don't know if you saw this I follow a what is that Nature is Scary on Twitter.

Do you follow Nature is Scary? Yeah, I've I've Nature is scary.

There it is. Nature is scary. It's just Nature is scary It's at Nature is scary. And there is stuff that is just but here

Do I dare drag this over here? Yeah, did you see that?

Wait, you're not going to put it up? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I'm not going to tell you what I said. But the the caption on this is

How is this bug even alive? Because the vast majority of its innards are gone.

It's just a shell. But it's still it's still walking on long. I mean, give that give that give that boy some credit.

I wouldn't be doing too well if I lost about two thirds of my innards.

He ain't going to be around for long obviously but wow congratulations to him.

Well that's what happens to a nation that was founded on the basis of the

Judeo -Christian worldview and then decides I'm not going to believe any of that stuff anymore.

We've been gutted and we're still walking along but you can't walk along forever unless something major happens like national repentance a massive outpouring of the

Spirit of God and the vast expanse and advancement of the gospel.

That would do it. That would be an awesome thing if you're not praying for that you need to.

The sad thing is there are a lot of people in the church today that would think that would be a terrible thing. They think that's what's happening right now as we move toward a secular system that will eventually if it's not stopped the totalitarianism which we're already seeing if you dare can you imagine for a second if I worked for a major corporation and did this on the side?

Not possible, is it? Not anymore. Not anymore. If it became known that I worked for a major corporation can you imagine how fast

I would be fired for daring to say 10 % of the things

I say let alone everything that I say we're already there. The totalitarian mindset is all around us absolutely all around us.

Let me give you one more before I switch subjects. I saw this one yesterday.

Sean Patrick Maloney is a representative from the state of New York. He is a homosexual.

People don't even mention that anymore. It's just sort of like well, you know doesn't matter.

Biblically it matters. Biblically it matters. We're talking about a category of behavior and in his case self -identification that is specifically noted in scripture as an example of the effect of sin upon man.

And he is in the government. And we're not allowed to go that might that might sort of impact how he votes on things.

You think? Right. And so he's commenting on the

Bostock debacle from Neil Gorsuch.

And he says and we know what he's saying is Gorsuch and Roberts Roberts especially tends to this is sort of a description of the way

John Paul II was. I don't know if any lot of folks in the audience maybe knew the program or weren't listening 20 years ago but when

John Paul II was Pope this cycle sort of developed where one year you'd get him saying something really weirdly liberal and then the next year there'd be an encyclical that is like the

Council of Trent. And then the next year something oddly liberal and then the next year the

Council of Trent's back. So it was throw a bone this way throw a bone that way throw a and you understand why

I mean Roman Catholicism as an organism if it was a bug it would have this huge lobe on the left and then a smaller lobe on the right but that's made out of like armor stuff and then there's this little itty bitty connection part that holds the two together and that's where the

Pope is and he's trying to hold this stuff together and that's sort of yeah and so what this

Maloney is saying is that what the Chief Justice does is he'll pair things and so he'll give the he just gave the liberals one he just gave and I I tried not to do this but everybody else does it and I keep falling back in they're not liberals they're leftists liberals are for freedom leftists are not these are not leftists okay these are not liberals they're leftists so he's thrown the leftist one out so Maloney is saying look out cause

Gorsuch is big on religious liberty and Roberts is gonna want to throw a bone to the conservatives so look out they may have just given with one hand and they'll take with another and in his doing so he said quote and we know that Neil Gorsuch is a supporter of so called religious liberty which is a bogus term a pretext for discrimination hiding behind the guise of religion quote unquote

I watch the videos it was of course on MSNBC so here you have one of the enumerated foundational rights of the

Constitution of the United States freedom of religious expression freedom of religious belief and for one of the four hundred and thirty some odd members of the

House of Representatives that is a so called religious liberty which is a bogus term a bogus term the totalitarians find their final justification in vindication when everyone bows the knee literally to their ultimate big brother their ultimate authority and a lot of us on the right that's not what we want if you want to reject that God exists you're going to find out eventually

I'm going to do my best to warn you but no skin off my back

I mean I'm going to try to tell you the truth but the fact of the matter is

I can't change your heart that's not you're going to you're going to stand before God someday and God's going to judge that's what scripture says but from their perspective there is no someday that final bowing of the knee has to happen now in this life and then as in 1984 once you bow the knee then your your worth is done and big brother can dispose of you but he can't just kill you because then you would die as one who is standing as a rebel and that's a refutation of their ultimate authority that's an overthrow of their worldview because they've got to break you first and then once you do what politicians police captains everybody else has been doing all across our land you bow the knee you lay down face first on the ground whatever then they're done with you you don't have any meaning to them anymore there's no redemption for you there's no forgiveness you're just now to be sloughed off in whatever way you do that type of thing so so there you go okay oh this is interesting ooh look at that sorry

I don't know can you can you see this this just popped up let me get a little bit bigger 4 ,000 comments son watching spacecraft discoveries keep piling up space .com

which is really neat but I I saw a article last week that one of our solar observatory spacecraft was going to do one of its closest passes and this is a little video it's not as big as it gets really oh just killed it well see you messed me up you're the one trying you're the one trying you're the one saying you gotta do this you're supposed to be good at this you're supposed to be able to just grab this stuff and and make it go you've got all the time in the world to practice this stuff but yeah so there's no expand expand awanda thing here you know that's that's just that's just all there is to it but this is this is a really cool little video that you may or may not get to see

I don't know it really is not up to me all I know is if you know I sat behind that glass window

I would have had this stuff down long time ago that's all I can say that's just you know just just point it out um but uh evidently uh it is uh counting up the number of comets

I guess there's a whole lot more comets than we have seen because a lot of them you don't get to see until they actually enter into the the uh aurora photosphere of the sun and stuff like that and then that's it for them it's like and it's all over so so I guess we're not gonna be able to show that to you so oh thank you yeah so here's uh the uh number three there's number four thousand there's number three 3999 and uh you wonder how many there have been since creation uh there was nobody out there to watch um maybe the angels were watching

I'm not sure if they find that fascinating or not but but now we've got these uh boogers out there that uh are watching all this stuff and uh that's a pretty cool thing very cool thing

I um like I said that happened to just pop up on uh the twitter feed as I was closing something else and uh

I think it's I think it's really awesome that we have these things out there in God's creation seeing these things that no one's ever seen before you know um

I've told you I've got a picture in my room of uh uh the Huygens lander uh landing on Titan circling

Saturn I just think that's just awesome um I think solar physics is incredible um great stuff great stuff anyway all right completely shifting gears if you don't mind um let's see if we can bring that back up good yay

I keep trying to hit the expander thingy because you want things all big and it ends up closing the thing all right this is um this is a website that if you have interest in uh studying

Islam reaching out to your Muslim neighbors one of the best websites to be aware of very informative there are a lot of good websites actually um but this is the corpus chronicum project corpus .quran

.com and as you can see along the left hand side there are number of there's a quran dictionary word -by -word quran dictionary english translations syntactic tree bank ontology of concepts documentation quranic grammar etc etc this is um there is there is not a single go -to program for the quran as yet there there had been one years ago called alim 6 .0

it doesn't even work on any of my computers anymore but when i first started studying islam in 2005 -2006 um that was that was a good good program to have um interestingly enough apps i have an iphone ipad app uh called my quran which is the best i've found as far as um concordancing arabic um you know just looking stuff up it's it's it's good still nothing like accordance or um lagoss or olive tree or any of those things that that just doesn't exist yet but the um corpus chronicum project at least gives you get you something uh and it's uh it's extremely useful i forget how i jumped onto this i i forget what caught my attention along these lines but i was looking at a particular well this particular ayah from the quran the corpus chronicum will give you multiple let's see one two three four five six seven translations uh all in one page which is very useful this is uh surah yunus this is surah ten in the quran and the sahih international which is a it's a salafi um very conservative primarily literal but not always sometimes all of a sudden it just goes jumps right off the cliff um when it's something that would be relevant to defending the theological perspective of translators there's a lot of that actually in yusuf ali and some of the others uh you can pretty much tell where they're coming from they're willing to translate according to tradition a lot of times but sahih international is pretty good and you'll notice it says they have said allah has taken a son exalted as he he is the one free of need to him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth you have no authority for this claim do you say about allah that which you do not know um now notice uh that um yusuf ali which is the third translation down has a different way of putting it it says they say allah hath begotten a son glory be to him he is self -sufficient his are all things in the heavens on earth no warrant have ye for this say you about all of what you know not so i don't remember now why i started looking at the grammar i was saddened to be honest with you when i started looking at this my arabic's almost gone it's just terrible i was putting so much time into it between 2006 2009 or so and meeting with my tutor he would be so disappointed in me um but if you don't use it you lose it there's just no two ways about it i mean the grammar is still there but it's it's terrible but i started digging into it and i wanted to look at the verb allah has taken because what does that mean allah has taken a son so picked all also has allah hath taken and then in parentheses unto him a son shakir says allah has taken a son to himself uh muhammad sarwar really goes out there some p this is like this must be like the new living translation for the for the quran some people have said that god has begotten a son god is too glorious to have a son god is self sufficient to him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth in this you people have no authority do you ascribe to god things which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which which knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of have no have no which have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of have no which you have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of knowledge of which have no knowledge of which you have no knowledge of what

Yeah, right here, 2391, I'm sorry. 2391, Allah has not taken any son, nor has there ever been with him any deity.

If there had been, then each deity would have taken what it created, and some of them would have sought to overcome others, exalted as Allah above what they described concerning him.

So, I found a number of places, Surah 72, 3, 18, 4, 19, 35, 2391, this idea of Allah taking a son.

Now, why would I be chasing Arabic verb forms through the Quran? Well, this is one of the key areas of conversation between ourselves and our

Muslim friends, and given that the Quran functions as the ultimate authority in the

Muslim mind, then what does the

Quran mean? And has later Muslim orthodoxy expanded on, maybe even changed, what the

Quran is actually communicating? I think you find a lot of places where that's the case.

Allah has not taken any son, nor has there ever been with him any deity.

If there had been, then each deity would have taken what it created, and some of them would have sought to overcome others, exalted as Allah above what they described concerning him.

Now, let's have a little test for those of you who are long -time listeners to the program. No, I'm not going to open up the phones and give away the last...

We do still have one CD set of The Forgotten Trinity. We need to come up with a...

You finally did send that other guy his, right? Because he was probably starting to wonder if we were ever going to get around to doing that.

But he got it. Okay, good. How many times did he have to call? No, never mind.

So, here's the quiz. When the

Quran says, do not say three, what is always the next assertion in the text of the

Quran after it says, do not say three? We've gone over this a bunch of times before.

You're not Googling this, are you? Okay, good. Yes, he's

Googling it. I can tell when you open a browser because it's bright.

It's brighter than whatever you have over there normally. You get all this extra light up on you. That's what's going on.

What's the next thing? Every single time

I speak about Islam and what the Quran says about what Christians believe, this is something

I emphasize. Every time the Quran says, do not say three, the very next line is, there is only one

God, Allah. The point being, if I say to you, do not say three, and then my next word is, there is only one blank.

Whatever you fill in there is what I was saying there's not three of. So, if you're a big

Yankees fan, you say, do not say that there are the three greatest baseball teams.

There is only one great baseball team. The Yankees. Now, in the mind of the author of the

Quran, to say three is to say three gods.

Because when he says, do not say three, there is only one God, then the mind of the author of the

Quran, he has no understanding of what the

Trinity actually is. The Trinity is a tri -theistic formulation in his mindset.

Very clearly. And that comes out here too. Allah has not taken any son, nor has there ever been with him any deity.

So, unless these are two different statements, the idea is that a son would be a separate deity.

In fact, it seems like a competing deity. Because it says, if there had been, then each deity would have taken what it created and some of them would have sought to overcome others.

There would have been some type of disharmony, some type of battle going on.

Exalted is Allah above what they describe concerning him. So, this is a

Unitarian monotheist who has no concept of Trinitarianism at all.

Arguing against minimally

Unitarian henotheism and I say Unitarian henotheism in the context of any deity is finite and therefore can only be represented by one person.

Similar to the pantheons of gods amongst the Canaanites, Amorites, Babylonians, etc.

That's what this is. That's what Surah 2391 is talking about.

So, what does it mean to take a son? Allah has not taken any son. They say

Allah has taken a son. He is exalted above this. Elsewhere, when it says

Allah has a son, how can he have a son if he does not have a consort, a wife, a sexual partner?

That's what? Surah 661, something like that. Anyway, it has a 6 in it.

No, you don't need to. That's alright. I could pull it up fast enough if I need to.

The point is that when we talked a little bit about the

Quran a few days ago and the statements being made by Muslim scholars recognizing that the

Quran has a textual history and that the mere dismissal of the

New Testament based upon the fact that we as Christians recognize the textual history of both the

Old and New Testaments, even though the vast majority of Muslims do not recognize the textual history of their own text, if we can get the other side to realize they have to do textual criticism as well, then we can lay aside what is normally used to get around this and say, okay, now that we're dealing with our texts on the same grounds, then let's do the next thing that needs to be done.

And that is when New Testament scholars deal with the intertextuality of the

New Testament and the Old Testament. That is, our text quotes from the Old Testament all the time.

We have, since the beginning, dealt with, well, what version was being rendered?

The Greek Septuagint, almost always. What does that have to do with the Hebrew? Why would it have been that way?

What about divergent readings between the Hebrew Masoretic texts and the Greek Septuagint and issues such as that?

We're dealing with intertextuality and it's a challenging area. I mean, you've seen that Beal Carson edited behemoth of a book talking about the

New Testament's use of Old Testament quotations. It's massive. So, lots and lots and lots of work has gone into that area.

Well, here's the issue. If you're a Muslim, you have to deal with intertextuality too.

Because even though there's almost no meaningful direct quotation from a written source on the part of the

Quran. And you would say, of course not, because Muhammad is passing this on orally.

Well, the only problem with that is the Quran says that the Torah was sent down, the

Injil was sent down, and the Quran was sent down. So, Allah knows what's in each one.

And it's plain that many of the stories, for example, Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah are based on what is found in Genesis 18 and 19.

There's no question about that. So, why do they each take different forms? Why are there differences between what

God says or Lot says or actions that were taken or things like that? There are differences each time it is presented.

But the point is, you are stuck with intertextuality. Your own text makes reference to the

Torah and Injil and tells their respective communities that they are to judge by what is found in the

Torah and Injil. And so, any scholarly study, any in -depth study of the

Quran is going to have to deal with what sources it used. Now, theologically, there are certain

Muslims that say it used no sources at all. It's eternally been written on the heavenly book.

There's no sources to look at. The problem is, as soon as you start looking at manuscripts and doing the textual critical work that is necessary on the

Quran, you can't avoid asking the question, what was the context in which these manuscripts were produced?

And hand -in -hand with that is, huh, okay,

I'm looking at the section of the Quran where Jesus forms clay birds and then breathes on them and they fly away.

Now, what is a serious scholar, and to use

Dr. Kadi's words, western scholar, what is a serious even believing

Muslim but western scholar going to do when you realize that this story is found in sources before the

Quran? Well, the western scholar, now, to be honest with you, a lot of scholars in the east aren't going to care and aren't going to do anything about it at all, but a western scholar has been trained,

I need to take a look at that source and you take a look at that source and you go, huh, it sort of looks like one's dependent upon the other.

It looks like there's verbal parallels and so you're going to, you know, when I wrote whatever a

Christian needs to know about the Quran and I was dealing with this particular text, I tracked down the original source in the original language and translated it for the book and that way you can look at sources and evaluate those sources, right?

Well, that's what the Muslim has to do and that automatically raises the question yeah, but this is clearly not canonical material, it doesn't come from the first century and in fact the

Quran says that the Injil was given to Jesus and this came hundreds and hundreds of years after that so is this something outside the

Injil? and yet it's considered to be authoritative it's found in the

Quran so this starts raising all of these questions which is where the real conversation needs to be going and the standardized answer which is, well, we don't really have the

Torah anymore it's been lost or that's only in reference to what we technically identify as Torah today which would be

Pentateuch and ignores the Nevi 'im and Ketuvim the prophets and writings that's a standard response

I would suggest to you that's extremely anachronistic it's making assumptions about what the author of the

Quran knew that you don't have any evidence that he actually knew those things especially when you talk about the

Gospel when a modern Muslim says to me yeah, well, it's not what you've gotten in the

New Testament the New Testament, that can't be it because you've got four Gospels, there's only supposed to be one

Gospel well, that's one Gospel just because you have four books that tell the one Gospel doesn't mean you have four different Gospels in the sense of four different messages and the early church used the term

Gospel to refer to the entirety of the Christian message and you're talking about someone who only has marginal exposure to Orthodox Christian faith

Muhammad using certain terminology now, the

Salafi, the conservative says none of this is Muhammad's terminology anyway if you stay at that point you're not going to be able to answer most of the questions that are going to be asked about you say there's not a fingerprint of man this is just simply dictated by God so why does

God change the story when he tells the story of Lot why does he use sources that are not what he said they were eventually people start going that would have been

Muhammad's understanding and then you have to start trying to come up with how that fits with some idea of Natsal being sent down of inspiration, revelation and that's where you start getting into perspectives that already exist in Islam in the

West in what would be called liberal Islam but now you're really getting into areas of tremendous controversy that the conservatives just don't even want to talk about they don't even want to go there lots of important issues and they're all related to one another and that's why

I started chasing this particular verb through the

Quran because I want when

I say the author of the Quran understood

Jesus to be this in Christian thought I want to have looked at all the sources that I can look at that are going to be representational of a meaningful and sound

Islamic answer because when I look at the Quran I don't see any evidence that the author of the

Quran understood what is actually contained in the pages of this

New Testament I just don't I don't see it but I want to try to find out and so I want to be one of the ones

I'm chasing verbal forms through the Quran in Arabic rather than just going bah!

I want to know what does it mean to take a son and especially in Surah 23 when it says

Allah has not taken any son nor has there ever been with him any deity is that conjunctive or disjunctive in other words is the second part of the sentence meant to be descriptive of or expansive of the first or are they meant to be two different concepts completely that would require me to think that I'm literally thinking this through right now to try to express it in a proper way that would require me to think that the author of the

Quran somehow had a deeper level of knowledge of what the relationship of sonship was if he's talking about Christianity that's another issue there have been many interpreters especially in the

West who have said this doesn't have anything to do with Christianity this is the 360 idols in the

Kaaba many of which were father, mother, child triads that certainly certainly

I've read even western scholars trying to come up with weird, wild ways around Surah 5, verse 116 let me pop that up here real quick because Surah 5, verse 116 if you're not familiar with it most people are who've watched this program but just really quickly

Surah 5, verse 116 here it is and remember when the disciples said

O Jesus, Son of Mary that's 5, verse 112 why did you go to 112?

English translation yeah, it went to 112 I clicked on 116

I might have clicked on something anyway, and beware the day when Allah will say

O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people take me and my mother as deities besides Allah He will say exalt are you it was not for me to say that to which

I have no right if I had said it you would have known it you know what is within myself and I do not know what is within yourself indeed it is you who is knower of the unseen

I have read what I consider to be next to outlandish interpretations from western scholars, non -Muslim western scholars trying to find some way of rescuing the author from such a blatant misunderstanding of what

Christian theology was at the time of the writing of the Quran because they being non -Muslims don't have the option of saying well this is divine revelation and things like that they're interpreting the

Quran as a historical document in a particular context they want to try to protect

Muhammad from having just blundered in his understanding of what Christian theology is but I don't see any way around it beware the day when

Allah will say O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people this is God speaking addressing

Jesus, the Son of Mary did you say to the people take me and my mother as deities besides Allah so this is

Surah 5 Surah 4 and 5 contain

I think all but 1 or 2 of the places where it says do not say 3 do not say 3 it's right here, so here's your 3 take me and my mother as deities besides Allah the only place

I can find a 3 anywhere in the Quran and the description is as deities besides Allah now let me see here

I'm not sure ok so that's

Minduni besides from Allah Minduni I wonder let me click on that and then go to concordance and I am a wondering myself here nope, doesn't show it at 23 2391 it might have

Min but I'd have to pop up 2391 in 2391 and this is the only thing about the

Corpus Chronicum it's not all that fast to get from one thing to another but I want to see 2391 real quick here when it says and there is not any gods so you have other deities and it's ilahin ilahin plural form the same idea anyways of deities besides Allah sons he did not take to himself a son the deities besides Allah surah 516 did you say take me and my mother as deities besides Allah the constant emphasis in the

Quran on unitarian monotheism though that's not really the issue at that time it's just monotheism monotheism that is part of the constant narrative you're trying to find consistent narratives in the

Quran because it's coming from different parts of Muhammad's life one consistent element is this type of polemic against polytheism but is it a polemic against the polytheism of the

Khaba and was that just simply assumed to be relevant in application to Christianity because I've had many

Muslims say you're still a polytheist you're still a polytheist and they get that from the

Quran where do you find the evidence anywhere that the author of the

Quran really had an understanding of what's actually in the New Testament that is why you chase verbs through the

Quran alright well it was actually enjoyable for a few moments anyways to chase something other than critical race theory and things like that and actually be thinking in the context of witnessing and stuff like that back in the old days

January I feel like a decade has passed since January thank you very much would you get that out of your ear

I just wish you people could see some of the things I have to put up with it's tough we are playing it by ear tomorrow literally all depends on stuff

I'll be honest with you right now it's not looking good but we'll let you know one way or the other whether we're going to be able to do something tomorrow or not like I said next week don't know

I feel badly Seb gets me this beautiful music and we've not used it yet I want to try to do that I don't know how many months ago it was

I asked for a green screen background that would have been nice to have had too why don't you buy one from the

United States we know people who can help with this that would be the way to do it thanks for listening to the program today we may be here tomorrow or may not we'll see