The Notorious Reaction to the Passing of RBG

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

My name is John Harris.

Gonna do a quick episode today. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do one or two more.

Later this week.

Just got a really busy week, so it's difficult to get to everything. But we're gonna do a little bit of a stream of consciousness thing here today. Answer a few questions from patrons that I have on my list.

We're gonna do a few announcements, and then we're gonna talk about the topic everyone's talking about in the political world, which is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And I'm gonna hopefully give you some categories to think about this that I'm not hearing in the normal political discourse.

So, start with an announcement. Why Social Justice is Not Biblical Justice by Scott David Allen. An urgent appeal to fellow Christians in a time of social crisis. I got this in the mail today, and I have endorsed it.

And in fact, I've never had this.

It's kind of weird.

I opened the book up, and on this third page, there's my endorsement. So, pray for Scott David Allen. He'll be in trouble for accepting that endorsement. Anyway, so that is a resource that I commend to you.

And there's a lot of other resources that are coming down the pike. I think since the protests earlier this year, people have realized, we gotta write on this. And it's coming from laymen. It's coming from people that aren't, you know, the people you'd expect to be writing these books are not writing these books, which is interesting.

But you got other people writing them. So I thank God for Scott David Allen for writing a critique. And as you know, my book is coming out. You can still go to Amazon and pre-order that. It comes out October 6th.

I was just talking to the company today, the publishing company, and I'm gonna have another option as well. It's gonna be limited availability, but for those who want an autograph copy, I'm gonna have something on my website.

And so, I'll let you know more as we get closer. Now, another announcement. I will be in upstate New York, Poughkeepsie, New York area, Wappingers Falls specifically at Grace Bible Church there. Gracebiblenewyork .org is the website.

And I will be presenting on social justice at a seminar on Columbus Day, Monday, the 12th of October. If you live in the area, if you're one of the three Christians in that area, you are welcome to come out.

So just wanted to put that announcement out there as well. And we're gonna get started just talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then I'll take some questions from patrons at the end. Oh, oh, oh, no, before that, ha ha.

Yes, yes, we gotta talk about this. So, for all those who are surprised, what was that he just put up there? That looked weird. Yeah, it does. It's a movie poster from a 1950s film called Forbidden Planet, which apparently, I think it's my grandpa's, one of my grandpa's favorite movies or one of them.

And I watched clips of it when I was young. And so my wife and I watched it the other night. And I wanna integrate some things I'm reading, some things I'm watching. So just to give suggestions to you for things maybe that you could be watching or reading if it suits your fancy.

If you don't want spoilers, you're gonna wanna probably go about two minutes ahead because I'm gonna give spoilers. So, I mean, look, I can do that. This is like, you know, we're talking what, you know, over 60 years later.

So I think it's fine for me to do this. Funny enough, Leslie Nielsen's in this movie. If you know like the airplane movies and the police squad show, right? Really funny guy. Well, he plays a serious role in this, which is funny.

You expect something crazy to happen and it doesn't. Here's the premise of this movie though. This is why I'm gonna talk to you about it. It says something about how far we've come as a culture. Because the moral of the story is that evil does not come from the outside.

It comes from the inside. And now they use some Freudian categories. The id is the evil. But here's the basic premise of the film. Spaceship goes to planet. Planet has a scientist on it and his daughter and that's it.

And the other scientists are all gone and they were murdered and, you know, no one knows really exactly why. And it's the home of an ancient alien civilization which is long extinct, but they were very advanced.

So the moral of the story is you can have as much technology as you possibly would ever want. You can be as smart as you want. You can build a utopia, which is what these aliens did. But the problem is you can never eradicate the evil that comes from within yourself.

And so the main character even says at one point in the film, he says, this is why we have law and religion. And I mean, they said that in the film. At the end of the movie, after they had learned their lesson of, oh, wow, okay, this is evil comes from within.

He essentially says, you know, this is showing us that man is not God. So I'm not gonna tell you how they learned that lesson. You can watch it if you want, but that's the premise. And it is cheesy and it is 1950s, you know, terrible graphics.

My wife actually said at one point, she goes, I think George Lucas got some ideas from this film. And I think she's probably right. George Lucas took stuff from a lot of different films and Westerns, by the way.

If you ever watched the movie, The Searchers, there's a scene in that movie that if you watch it and you watch Star Wars, you'll realize, wow, he took from that, you know? And anyway, so Forbidden Planet, there you go.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Evangelical Praise, and the Federalism Problem

All right, let's talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. And, you know, there's some Christians on Twitter that were kind of lionizing her. Jory Micah, Jamar Tisby, Jen Hatmaker, Rebecca Schrader. And I'm not saying they're Christians in the orthodox sense of the word.

They think of themselves that way and they appeal to people who are evangelicals. So I mean it in that sense. And, you know, Rebecca Schrader, you know, maybe she doesn't belong on this list. She's more of a small group leader at J .D. Greer's church who happens to be pro-choice politically.

And Reformation Charlotte has done some articles on her, really because of the connection to J .D. Greer. But the other ones, you know, they have a following. And it's just interesting to me. You wonder, you know, what do you know about Ruth Bader Ginsburg that I don't know?

I mean, I get it. It's sad when someone dies. The Lord takes no pleasure even in the death of the wicked. But, you know, they're not looking at it like, wow, this is so sad and she's in eternity and, you know, just pray for the family.

This is, you know, a warning. They're looking at it as her legacy is so great. And with some worry, some of them, you know, what's gonna happen? You know, her legacy is so important. We can't just have a conservative pack the court now.

And so this is the basic, you know, issue that's going on everywhere right now is who's gonna replace her? And can we wait till the election? Can we try to get Biden to win so we can get someone who had her opinions replace her?

And here's the deal. So if you are wrong about something as fundamental as murder, that's fundamental in God's law, right? I mean, there's a lot of other things in God's law that have regulations upon them that, you know, you could see having an error maybe in a certain area, but still getting it right in another area.

Murder's just not one of those things. You know, profaning marriage and normalizing sexual deviancies, in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she was extreme in all these things on the left side. You know, not something that is a negotiable either.

And it means you have a broken moral compass and you're gonna get things wrong in other areas somewhere. So it's just interesting. She's known for that too. It's not like this is a peripheral issue. She's known for it.

Now she's also known as just kind of a woman's rights advocate, but you see in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's minds and in the minds of pretty much the whole entire left, these things go together. Working for women's rights and working for abortion, I mean, that's the same thing.

Working for, you know, transgender's rights, it's all part of the same soup to them. So Christians who would wanna maybe, not that these people were splicing this up, they weren't dividing it, but if Christians wanted to do that and say, well, we can just separate her radical views on these things, but we can then, you know, admire the good things she did.

Well, I don't know. I don't know that you can actually do that. What good things did she do? Now I wanna give you some examples. These are some like really positive examples. If you were trying to say, hey, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did this and this is really good.

These are some accomplishments. Let me show you here. So here's three opinions, major opinions she wrote. Well, she wrote the opinion for it, for cases she wrote the opinion for. United States versus Virginia.

She forced, she wrote the opinion that forced, Virginia Military Institute to accept women, okay? Olmstead versus LC. She forced, I believe it was the state of Georgia, I think is where this was, to make it so that people with mental disabilities would not have to be forced into certain living arrangements, like institutions that they could have, that they had a right to a community, I guess at taxpayer's expense, to a community kind of living.

And then you had the Friends of Earth Incorporated versus Laidlaw Environmental Services. This one, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but it's just frustrating when you read this. Because it was like, it wasn't even like an issue by the time it got to the court.

Like this company that these environmentalists are complaining is polluting, like isn't even doing anything. Like they're not even in business anymore. But yeah, the environmentalists won. And it was on, basically the idea was that because they would have used it for recreation, if it wasn't as polluted, this particular, I guess it's a river, that it was a violation of the Clean Water Act.

And so in all these cases, you have, Justice Thomas is always on the other end of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, every time. Except in the United States versus Virginia, Thomas recused himself because his son was at VMI.

Surprise, surprise. So what's the thing that holds these together? What's the common thread here? The common thread is really the erosion of any kind of real federalism. And I would encourage you, like if you wanna know more about this, as I'm gonna talk about it a little bit, I would encourage you, check out Brian McClanahan's podcast this week.

And I've listened to one episode, but I'm familiar with the basic understanding he has of federalism. But just listen to his episodes this week on the judiciary and federalism. Because federalism was a great idea that the founders had.

It was one of the ways to divide power up and to localize power and to make people more accountable, which I'll talk about in a minute. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg applies these various laws, and you see this especially with civil rights laws, because they work themselves into everything.

They nationalize everything. When you see Ruth Bader Ginsburg doing this, what she's doing is she's riding roughshod over local custom and tradition, local jurisdictions, state jurisdictions, and everything just becomes national.

And everyone's forced to abide by this national standard. Now, this isn't constitutional. This isn't part of the original intent of the framers. And I'm old school. I think we've been on the wrong track for quite some time with the judiciary.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg really wants to make sure that local issues, like the three I just read, these should be local issues, state issues, that these are under the purview of the national government.

And so she's applying these laws to these specific situations. And things are getting crazy in this regard. We're now applying civil rights legislation to issues like transgenderism from earlier this year.

And so states, local customs, now religious customs, et cetera, they don't mean anything anymore. You end up, and I've noticed this, there's still some regional differences, but a lot of times, you go from state to state and you're seeing the same kinds of corporations, a lot of the same kinds.

I know there are some differences, I know. But you have, there's a lot of sameness. There's just a lot of sameness. There should be more difference. That's the genius of federalism. Different kinds of people can govern themselves differently.

And the United States becomes a big experiment. Maybe Vermont's doing something right that Kentucky can learn from. Maybe Maine is doing something wrong and they can learn from other states. And you have this sharing of information.

But when everything's the same, you don't have that. And there are issues that are constitutional. There are issues that aren't. And I do believe that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is going outside. The incorporation doctrine is really to blame for a lot of this, to incorporate the Bill of Rights into, to apply them to states and local municipalities.

But so this, to me, this is the best you can say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg right here. And to me, I'm saying this is wrong. This isn't right. This is, you know, this is part of the problem with America right now.

The issue that we're in is that you have a one size fits all and no diversity. These people who claim they love diversity so much don't like it when it doesn't suit their agenda. Now, here are my reasons, basic reasons for disagreeing with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This is why I wouldn't lionize her. This is why I would say, yeah, it's sad that she passed away but I'm, you know, don't think I'm gonna honor her legacy. She's against authorial intent. Originalism is what you call it, really, in the legal world.

She doesn't believe that the founders and the founding documents and the world that they were from and what they were trying to communicate at that time really matter as much as pushing her liberal agenda.

She's, like I just said, she runs roughshod over localism. And I wanna give you some food for thought on this because we don't think about this a lot. I think we're so used to the modern state and the assumptions of the modern state that we just, it doesn't even cross our mind that things used to be different.

And accountability, there's much more accountability when you know who represents you. And local, really, it should be more important to go to vote in a local election than it is to vote for a national election.

But that's not the way it is now, but it should be because people that you know personally or that you could know personally, that live in your community, they should have more control over your life than someone thousands of miles away, in many cases.

And so in 1787, 30 ,000 people were represented by one representative, 30 ,000 people, right, per representative in the national government, right? And this is at a time when local and state issues were way more important than national issues.

But even in the national issues, 30 ,000 people per representative. You know what it is today? 747 ,000 per representative. That's a humongous increase. The Supreme Court, now think about this. The Supreme Court has effectively become its own legislature.

It doesn't just apply the law anymore. It legislates from the bench. It's not sending things back to the legislature for clarification or anything like that. It is, it's making law. And the Supreme Court has become this unelected body of nine justices who make decisions for everyone else.

Now here's the representation, right? Here's the, I did the math. It's 36 ,000 ,500 ,771, yeah, per a Supreme Court justice. If you wanted to view it like a representative chamber, which is how they're acting, there's no accountability in that.

And so these are the priests from on high handing down the law. These aren't people that we can, we can't even get at them through an election if they stray from what their job is. So anyway, all that to say, I think there's a point to localism.

I think knowing who your representative is, having access, local issues being more important than national issues, that really gives you more accountability because they're closer to the people, the ones that represent the people.

It also makes for peace because you have, culture can form organically within smaller units. Now if you think about this, this is actually very similar what we have in the United States in some ways to what the children of Israel had.

They had their regions according to tribe. Now, and this was a social ethnic linguistic group that further broke down into tribes based on families. And they could, they had their regions. And so what we had in the United States was a national government, which if you read George Washington's farewell address, it's really based on three things, the United States, the culture of the United States.

If you wanna try to say it's one culture, which it's not, it's more than one. But the commonalities are similar heritage, similar religion, similar language. Those are the three things. And that's been broken down by multiculturalism.

But even within those, in that umbrella, you had differences in the regions, even denominational differences, cultural differences. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not a part of that world, not a part of the world that the founders set up and made the constitution for.

So she's interpreting this document without those things in mind. She didn't care about those things. And most leftists don't, they're totalitarians. So here's the big thing though. Here's, that was a category I just wanted to give you because it's something I'm interested in, but here's the big moral issue, abortion.

Abortion, Exodus 21, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Record

And I wanna read for you, this is Exodus 21, 22, the case law of God's law. And it says this, if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide.

Now, if you go on to the next verse, which I should have included in here, it says this, but if there is any further injury, you shall appoint as a penalty, life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Saying that this is a human, that's what it's saying. This is what God says. What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg say? She joined in the court's opinion, striking down Nebraska's partial birth abortion law in Steinberg v. Carhartt, 2000.

She was in the minority for Gonzalez v. Carhartt in 2007. She joined the majority for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016, which was a case which struck down parts of the 2013 Texas law regulating abortion providers, Ginsburg also authored a short concurring opinion, which was even more critical of the legislation at issue.

In other words, she's got a record. She has got a bad record. I wouldn't wanna be standing before God with this record. Partial birth abortion even, it doesn't get worse than this. I mean, babies that are partially born, and she thinks, yeah, you can still kill them.

This is the person being lionized by Jamar Tisby and Jory Micah. Now, why is this such a big deal right now? Her passing, well, clearly the abortion debate is in full swing, but I think it's more than the abortion debate, and this is why I say that.

I don't honestly believe, and I don't honestly think most people really believe when they think about it that Roe v. Wade's gonna be overturned if we get another so-called conservative on the Supreme Court.

I've seen people like, I'm trying to remember the name of this conservative, Candace Owens. I saw Candace Owens put something like, it's over, conservatives own the Supreme Court. No, they don't. Who's the conservative on the Supreme Court?

Clarence Thomas, which if you think about it, if we use some social justice logic, maybe everyone should just shut up and listen. Standpoint epistemology, right? They don't have the experience that Clarence Thomas does because of his blackness.

Maybe they should just all listen to him. I would, hey, it could work for us, right? He's the only conservative, in my opinion. You have a range after Clarence Thomas, pretty much. Could you see Gorsuch or even Kavanaugh?

I mean, they're some of your best bet, really. Are they gonna try to overturn Roe v. Wade? I can't even see them doing it. So is that really realistic, that that's gonna be the way that abortion will end?

Is that even the best strategy to try to get abortion to end in this country? I don't think so. Now, we fight. I mean, look, I'm an all-of-the-above guy when it comes to ending this. We throw everything we have, every single instrument at our disposal, we use to try to end abortion.

I think the gutsiest thing and the thing that really ought to be looked at more is states just standing up and saying, we're not doing it here. You can't force us to do it. And if the Supreme Court says that we have to allow Planned Parenthood to perform abortions, we're not listening to the Supreme Court.

Now, you think, well, that would cause a constitutional crisis. Well, it's interesting, interesting. The New York Times put out an article today arguing basically against judicial review. That's not the only thing that decides the constitutionality because they're prepping themselves for what they think is a more conservative Supreme Court.

Now, not a court probably that would get rid of abortion, which that's what they're all using. It's an election year. But yeah, with another conservative on the Supreme Court, it's not as likely the left will continue to march as quickly as they are able to march right now.

That is true.

And I'm assuming you get a real conservative on the court. But it's interesting to me, the left loves to pull out these quote-unquote states' rights. They usually say they're racist and they're radical when things are going their way.

But when things don't go their way, they're just as quick to go to secession and states' rights. And there's other ways to test the constitutionality of things. So I think that, honestly, I've thought that for a long time.

I thought, no, states need to stand up. States need to do what actually the constitution allows them to do. And so in my opinion, that's the best way to tackle the abortion issue, tackling it at the state level.

We should probably be tackling most things at local and state levels if possible. But we bought into this modern state assumption that the Leviathan is the one that controls everything. All right, so I think this is more than abortion, all that to say.

I think there's just a whole lot of other issues that the left and the right are thinking about as they're pondering who's gonna fill the seat. There's a belief in totalitarianism underlying this whole debate too, I think, from the left, because they jam things down the throat of the American people through the courts.

That's how they do it. Elections are not their main tool. The courts are their main tool. And so if they don't think they have the courts, they get insecure. This is their God. That's why you saw the woman screaming.

There's a few of them. There's videos going viral on Twitter of women just screaming how horrible this is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died because Trump's gonna appoint a conservative to replace her. This is religious fanaticism at this point.

I mean, they're looking at their priests from on high. These are the people that are going to give them the utopia that they've desired, that they've never gotten. As long as we've had liberals on the Supreme Court, they've never gotten their utopia, but they still think they can get it, and that's the way they're gonna get it.

So there's a utopian strain in this as well. That's really what this all boils down to. It's a religious reaction. Because frankly, the Supreme Court, I don't know if you've heard this story, but when Washington, D .C., all the government buildings in Washington, D .C. were being built, that was one of the things that was overlooked.

Where's the Supreme Court gonna go? Huh, I didn't think about that. So they had to meet, I think it was at the basement. I think it was the basement of the Capitol or something. Because no one just thought, wait a minute, we have a Supreme Court.

It wasn't that important. And it really should become, we need to take the Supreme Court and just thumb our nose at it sometimes. I mean, states, representatives, lesser magistrates, they need to say, you know what?

You're way overstepping your bounds here. This isn't your job to make law. So I'm giving my opinion at this point. That's why this is such a big deal. And those are my thoughts on the notorious RBG as they call her.

Robert E. Lee, Civil War History, and the Problem with Modern Historiography

A few questions from patrons. Let's see, I'll answer two of them today. John, I know you're a big history guy, so I was hoping you could recommend a good book on Robert E. Lee, and also a good book on the Civil War that focuses more on the battles and war tactics used, thanks.

The battles and the war tactics, probably anything by Shelby Foote. Shelby Foote's kind of like the go-to guy for war battles and war tactics, so I would look up his stuff. As for Robert E. Lee, I have this book by, now this is abridged, with a forward by James McPherson, who, yeah, anyway, you know,.

Why couldn't they get someone.

Who actually likes Robert E. Lee to do the forward? But anyway, Douglas Southall Freeman is the biographer of Lee, so it's just called Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman, and he did biographies of Robert E. Lee and George Washington, and if you can get a hold of, I think it's like a four or six, I think it's a six-volume set.

I mean, that's probably worth a lot of money if you can get a hold of that six-volume set. I know someone who has it, and the time it would take to read it would be a lot, but that's the gold standard.

I mean, a lot of times today, people look back on Douglas Southall Freeman, and they say, well, he's just part of the lost cause because he, because he happens to like Lee, and more importantly, he tries to tell the actual story of Lee.

He's not talking about, he's not speculating about stupid nonsense that, you know, sources that weren't even taken seriously until five minutes ago because people wanna rip down Lee, so Douglas Southall Freeman Lee would be the one I would recommend.

I've read a number of Lee biographies, and they range, and the newer ones, honestly, even the ones that try, it's hard to take down Lee. It's hard to vilify him because he's such an honorable guy, but it's to the point now where people are just starting to make up stuff.

There was one, maybe I'll look it up real quick. It was called Reading the Man, I think. Yeah, Reading the Man by, yeah, Elizabeth Pryor Brown was her name. It was just ridiculous, and there's, it got a Lincoln Prize, but the historical profession, guys, is terrible, and one day, you know, I thought about doing this because I've done a little research on it, and I should probably do more, but the critical theory, the social justice, the New Left idea, New Left critique of America, right, that has imported itself into the critical theory they took from that, it's been around for a while, and it really started, in some ways, in history, it's the historical profession, really in the 60s, and Howard Zinn gets blamed for a lot of it, and Howard Zinn should be blamed for some of it, but you got a lot of people stemming from Howard Zinn, Eric Foner being probably the most notorious one, and it's awful.

The historical profession is awful, and Civil War studies may be the most awful, in my opinion. There's others, there's, it's not just Civil War studies now. I mean, there's now all sorts of other historical sub-genres that are getting bad, but Civil War studies is one of the worst, and it has been for a while.

If you actually, if you go and look up one of the, I'm on a rant, I know, but one of the main Civil War historians, quote, unquote, historians, used today to justify what the modern historical, what modern historical historians think of the Civil War, and all their views on that.

I'm not gonna get into it, but is a guy by the name of David Blight, and if you look up David Blight, and you look up what he calls memory studies, so it's not history, we're doing memory studies, you're gonna find the CT stuff.

You're gonna find the critical theory stuff, and it gets introduced to every field in different ways, but it's been introduced in, the new left critique was there, and then the critical theory stuff was introduced, and I just don't, I'm always skeptical, and that's why I like to be tied into as much as possible primary sources when I'm testing things, and how did they treat this source?

That's how I can usually tell if it's a good book or not. How did they treat the source? What did they tell you about the source? What did they not tell you about the source? Good authors, good secondary sources we call them, people who are writing about something using primary sources, they have respect for the sources that they're using, and they're trying to tell you a story, but they're trying to make it an accurate one.

So yes, the other question, I'll answer one more. Hi John, my church is saying things like, Jesus gave up his rights, so we as a church, so we should not be too concerned for protecting our rights, but, I know where this is going, but should give up our rights to concern ourselves with Christ-like service in our communities instead.

I would love your comment on that. My guess is that it's a false dichotomy to say that fighting for your rights are, I think it's opposing, are opposing, or opposes, there we go, or opposes of serving your communities.

Okay, so the question, and I've heard this, the question is, when you start hearing this language of, well, Tim Keller does this a lot, Jesus gave up his power, so you need to give up your power. You gave up his rights, you need to give up your rights.

Are there different working definitions of rights being used? Yes, I think there are. Let's go to the main passage that this is generally, this argument is launched from Philippians 2, the Carmen Christi, it says, Christ Jesus, have this attitude in yourselves, which is in Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant, and being made in the likeness of men, being found in appearance as man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

For this reason also, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. So that's the name of Jesus. Every knee will bow in those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of the glory of God, the Father.

And I almost wonder when people use this argument, hey, what about like the guy in Revelation who comes with the double-edged swords? What about, you know, verse nine and 10? You know, he humbled himself, and then he's gonna be, you know, every knee will bow to Jesus, you know?

So it was the joy step before him, he endured the cross. So this isn't just, you know, there's more to it than he's just giving up, quote-unquote, rights. He's giving up, and really, rights? Yeah, I mean, he's God, right?

So when he came to condescend and become a man, were there things that he gave up? Yeah, there were things. There were certain attributes that he did not. This is the mystery, by the way. That's why I'm struggling almost to phrase this because I'm trying to watch out for heresy.

This is the mystery of the hypostatic union. Fully God, fully man. And yes, he did give up some of the things that he would have had, capacities he would have had in heaven. So are those rights in the sense?

We talk about rights, though. When we talk about rights, especially in the political sense, we are talking about responsibilities. And I would encourage you, go back to the show I did on the founders and rights and responsibilities.

We're talking about things God has commanded us to do, that God wants us to do, and we should have the right to carry out those responsibilities, okay? That's what rights are based in. They're tethered to responsibilities.

And so Jesus was obeying the will of the Father.

When he came.

It was an act of obedience on his part. And it's to accomplish something. It's to accomplish a purpose. And so to then take that and to say, well, that is equivalent to, let's say, the Second Amendment, right to have a gun or something like that, or your right to go out and make a living, or it's not the same.

I think it would be, a more fair rendering would be, actually, let's just read it.

All right, so it's,.

Have this attitude in you, right, which was in Christ Jesus. We read that. And then verse 12, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trebling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

So obey and have Christ's attitude in you. And what's that mean? Well, it means doing nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility, regard one another as more important than yourself. So this isn't just give up your rights.

In fact, in order to love other people, sometimes you have to defend your rights, and you have to defend their rights. It could actually mean the opposite of what some preachers are trying to make it mean, right?

If you're thinking of rights in the political sense, in the American political sense, and tethered to responsibilities. Unfortunately, we have an understanding now that rights are these things that are really just like privileges.

It's something that government gives you the privilege to do something. And if we use the language of privilege, I think this whole thing makes more sense, that there were some privileges that Christ had, and we need to be willing to be sacrificial, just like Christ was, for a greater purpose, to help others, to think of others as more important than ourself, to do the will of the Father, to obey, right?

So we need to be able to sacrifice for those things. And which means giving up some of our privileges, some of our comfort, right? To put comfort and rights in the same, to make those synonyms, it's just not honest, if you're talking about rights in a political sense.

And so, yeah, I think there's some wordsmithing going on when people advance that argument. A lot of virtue signaling going on when I generally hear that,.

People who,.

Because how do you measure that? How do you measure that? I understand there's principles in scripture, but when you're telling someone, you must give up your rights, well, what does that look like in my life?