TLP 353: Speak Like God | Al Mohler, Humpty Dumpty, Aliens, & Your Family

Alright, let's talk a little bit about what we can learn from Al Mohler, Humpty Dumpty, and aliens.

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster.

Family Update, Ministry Transition, and Support

Hey everyone, welcome back. I just want you to know that I really love that you choose to spend this time with us. Seriously, it's a huge honor. I do this because I love God, and I love your family, and I believe with all my heart that the Lord wants to do something amazing in your family, and He wants to use His Word to do it, and I'm just honored that you participate with me.

Today we're bringing a three-part conversation to a close, at least for now. Now, no parenting content is ever really off the table. We'll get back to it eventually, but for now we're finalizing an important discussion about the definition of words.

Hilary Morgan Ferrer and I talked about linguistic theft, what it is, and how viciously dangerous it is. Last time I talked more about how confusing it is when our words don't align with God's definitions and reality, and today I want to share a very interesting consequence that happens to our children's minds when we start playing around with language.

But before we do that, I thought I'd take a minute to catch you up on my family's transition. Back in November, we moved from a Academy for Boys to serve full-time at Truth, Love, Parent. Now, from a family standpoint, everything is great.

It's exciting. We're loving our new life with my parents. We're loving North Carolina. The kids are doing well in their homeschooling. Joe and I have been able to do more dates in the past five months than we did in the previous five years.

Now, I'm not complaining about the previous five years. It was just the nature of the job that we had, so all of this is really awesome from a family perspective. From a ministry standpoint, things are progressing a lot better than I would have liked, but that's to be expected.

My imagination is very robust. I'm trying to introduce TLP to new listeners and churches and families who want to learn how God would have them interact and relate. I'm also counseling and life coaching a lot, and I love that.

Each of the families and individuals with whom I work are amazing, and I thank the Lord for bringing them into my life. I do have more time that I could dedicate to face-to-face counseling, either in person or online, so if you've been waiting to take that step, perhaps you should consider it more.

If it involves family, I'd be honored to step you through what the Lord has to say about it. You may be interested in premarital counseling or pre-parental counseling, maybe marital or just parenting counseling.

I counsel children and teens. Really, whatever you need, the Lord has the answers, and I'd be honored to serve you in that way. The 501c3 process is going well. Please pray for me as I make some really important decisions concerning the future of TLP.

Lastly, financially, the Lord has been providing. I do want to thank all of you who give. One-at-a-time gifts are so appreciated, and consistent monthly giving is absolutely amazing, and the Lord is providing our needs, but it's not without a strain.

Now, thankfully, the Lord is using some surprising avenues for my family's provision. For example, almost everything in North Carolina for which we have to pay is cheaper than it was in Wisconsin. Well, housing isn't, but we're not having to pay anything for that.

However, food costs a lot more down here, and I didn't expect that. Well, the Lord has met that need by connecting us with some charitable institutions that have been providing weekly and monthly food assistance for my family.

So, like I said, the Lord is providing, and we're excited to see what He's going to continue to do. If you watched any of our daily Bible study through James that we were doing on Facebook Live, then you can know that all of the truth about how to respond in suffering has first impacted my life before I shared it with you.

I think it's really providential also to how the Parenting Suffering Children series dropped right before the pandemic. The Lord just knew what truth we would need going into this situation, and I praise Him for equipping me to discuss the topic at this stage of my life in ministry and this stage of life in the world.

So, that gets you kind of caught up on where the Brewster family is now. God is good, He's working, and we're honored to be working alongside Him. Okay, so don't forget that we have free episode notes at TakingBackTheFamily .com.

Those are available for anyone who follows TLP. Of course, we also have other exclusive resources for anyone who joins the TLP family. And if the Lord lays it on your heart to become a TLP friend by giving to support TLP once a month, you can get yourself some free TLP products and services in the meantime, and you should definitely check that out.

Humpty Dumpty, Language Control, and the Master of the Lexicon

All right, let's talk about what we can learn from Al Mohler, Humpty Dumpty, and Aliens. I'd like to start by reading sections of an article written by Al Mohler entitled, Humpty Dumpty, Alice in Wonderland, and the Masters Who Control the Language.

I'll have a link in the description if you want to read the whole thing. This is also presented, I think, on his podcast, so I'm sure you can listen to it somewhere as well. He starts out, Humpty Dumpty once said to Alice, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more or less.

Alice responded to Humpty Dumpty, the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things. Humpty Dumpty retorted, the question is which is to be master, that's all. Yes, which or who is to be master of the language?

That turns out to be one of the most crucial questions of the age. There is incredible wisdom and an embedded threat within that exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. If one is the master of language, then one controls the entire communication system and eventually the entire culture.

To control the lexicon is eventually to control the meaning, and indeed, the entire worldview of a society. The worldview shapes the vocabulary, but make no mistake, the vocabulary shapes the worldview.

Now, we're going to come back to this idea later in the show, but what follows is a singular example which illustrates this main point. Quote, therefore, we have to take seriously an opinion piece published recently in the New York Times by columnist Farhad Manjoo with the headline, It's Time for They.

Now, Mueller continues by quoting portions of Manjoo's column. Basically, Manjoo considers himself to be a man, but he still wants to go by they and them pronouns. Dr. Mueller then offers a critique of Manjoo's post.

Quote, Manjoo's suggestion of a linguistic difference between the language used between the sheets and on the streets might be a bit clever, but it is much too clever when you consider what it is really at stake here.

What he is calling for is a revolution, not only in the language, but in the morality and even the understanding of who human beings are. In the column, Manjoo spoke of those, quote, traditional uselessly gendered pronouns.

Useless. That's very interesting. Is it important when we speak to one another that we speak to one another as male or as female? The honest answer would have to be yes. Often, it is very important, unquote.

Mueller then proceeds to prove from life and scripture that it's very important to retain the gendered use of pronouns. He then moves to Manjoo's argument that anyone who has the ability to think would obviously conclude that gender pronouns need to become extinct.

Mueller continues, quote, Manjoo writes as if this is probably inevitable. He says that many in the society are already adjusting to the singular gender neutral they. He says this makes the singular they a perfect pronoun because he says, quote, it's flexible, inclusive, and obviates the risk of inadvertent misgendering.

And in most circumstances, it creates perfectly coherent sentences that people don't have to strain to understand. Farhad Manjoo claims that we would be morally superior if we did away with gendered pronouns and that there would be no real loss.

But of course, there's an immediate loss. We really don't know as much as we used to know about the person to whom someone is referring. When you speak about they referring to either a male or a female or what Manjoo calls a non-binary person, you really don't know as much as you knew when you referred to someone or heard someone referred to as he or she.

There's a tremendous loss of meaning with the use of they in that sense, but that's actually the point. You can't bring about a moral revolution on gender if the language keeps showing up with those noisome gendered pronouns.

But there's an even bigger problem there. They is plural. It always has been plural. But now Manjoo and the gendered revolutionaries are insisting that we should use they in the singular. Speaking of the resistance to using the singular they, he writes, quote, institutions that cater to snoots generally discourage it.

The Times, whose style book allows the singular they when the person being referred to prefers it, warns against its widespread usage. Quote, take particular care to avoid confusion if using they for an individual.

Unquote. The style book counsels. Unquote. And Mueller continues. Why would there be confusion? Well, because they implies plurality. It implies more than one person. When you speak of they in the singular, you begin to confuse the entire language system.

Just consider this simple English sentence. They are drowning. We need to save them. The obvious response to that situation is to bring about life-saving intervention. So you save one person. Have we saved them?

No. One person is a he or a she. If we are told we need to save them and we save only one, have we failed to save another who needed saving? The confusion becomes obvious. The confusion could be downright deadly.

Manju goes on to say that he himself wants to be referred to with the singular they. That is his own preferred personal pronoun. So I pulled up the biography of Farhad Manju on the website of the New York Times.

It just doesn't work. Just listen to how he is described. Quote, Farhad Manju became a Times opinion columnist in 2018. Before that, they wrote the Times State of the Art column covering the technology industry's efforts to swallow up the world.

They have also written for Slate, Salon, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal. To their chagrin, their 2008 book, True Enough, Learning to Live in a Post-Fact World, accurately predicted our modern age of tech-abetted echo chambers and alternative facts.

Farhad Manju was born in South Africa and emigrated with their family to Southern California in the late 1980s. They live in Northern California with their wife and two children, unquote. So here we have in Manju's official bio on the website at the New York Times an individual who wrote their book, moved with their family, and who is married to their wife.

We should note that this ridiculous exercise only works because we actually do already know who he is. Manju continues by applying this generalist speech to his parenting, unquote. Now, this part I will read.

I want to read Manju's words here because I think they're extremely important for us to understand what he's saying. Manju says, quote, From their very earliest days, my kids, fed by marketing and entertainment and surely their parents' modeling, seemed to hem themselves into silly gender norms.

They gravitated to boy toys and girl toys, boy colors and girl colors, boy TV shows and girl TV shows. This was all so sad to me. I see them limiting their thoughts and their ambitions, their preferences and their identity, their very liberty, only to satisfy some collective abstraction, unquote.

But Mueller protests,.

Quote,.

Mueller continues, Ron Myers, who responded to Manju's opinion in the letter section of the later edition of the Times, wrote, quote,. And Mueller continues,. God, the creator, gets to determine what the creation is and what the creation means.

He made human beings linguistic creatures. We have the capacity for language. Our responsibility, according to the Christian worldview, is to order our language so as most faithfully to correspond to the reality that God has created.

This is a moral responsibility and it is a theological responsibility. It is also just a natural impulse because human beings, made in the image of God, given the gifts of consciousness and language, desperately do want our language to make sense and to be communicable and understandable.

If our language becomes detached from reality, it becomes not only less linguistically useful, it becomes subversive of the very idea of communication. But note very carefully that this linguistic revolution is intentional.

This is exactly what the moral revolutionaries and gender revolutionaries are trying to bring about. If they do not change the language, they cannot change the contours of the worldview, and that's what they are determined to do.

Our language will, if they succeed, no longer correspond to objective reality. It will instead correspond to their newly invented system of gender understanding, or we might say of gender misunderstanding, of confusion rather than of clarity, of self-deception rather than of truth.

I'm actually quite confident that the vast majority of human beings rightly consider sex and gender to be the same thing and that they will continue even as an act of resistance to use he and she in related quote-unquote gendered language customarily and without irony.

What we're facing in this society is not only a meltdown of meaning, but an intentional confusion. This is a revolution that is even now affecting the language and is using language to affect the entire culture.

That brings us back to Humpty Dumpty's claim that when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more or less. When Alice protests asking how words can mean so many different things, Humpty Dumpty pulls the power card.

He understood exactly what is taking place in American society in the 21st century. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master. That's all. That is the real question. Who gets to be the master of the language?

Who determines as master what the language will be? Who determines what words must be used and how these words will be understood? Who determines what words can now be used in order to come entirely in line with the new morality, the new mandates, the new linguistic rules, the new masters?

But remember that in the literary tale, Alice is presented as the one who speaks sense and Humpty Dumpty is the one who speaks nonsense. But we're now living in an age determined to turn that story upside down, unquote.

How Language Shapes Thought and Biblical Worldview

Thank you for your patience as I read through all of that. I think it was really important for us all to hear it and to be on the same page, okay? Last time we discussed how confusing it will be to our children if we don't watch our language and use words the way God wants them to be used or speak of concepts the way he defines.

Today, I want to look at the deleterious effect inaccurate language has on people. Al Mohler said, quote, if one is the master of language, then one controls the entire communication system and eventually the entire culture.

To control the lexicon is eventually to control the meaning and indeed the entire worldview of a society. The worldview shapes the vocabulary, but make no mistake, the vocabulary shapes the worldview, unquote.

We could simplify all of that to say that how we talk controls how we think. Most of us have no problem understanding that how we think controls how we talk. Jesus said that everything that comes from the mouth proceeded from the heart first.

The heart was the ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic understanding of our inner man. Our inner man, the core of our being, is our spirit and our spirit is what produces what modern scientists refer to as our mind.

So our words arise from our thoughts. So how can I suggest that our thoughts are controlled by our words? Imagine with me, if you will, that you are learning your native language for the very first time.

Your mind is a blank slate. You have no linguistic ability to communicate what you think and if we're being honest, your thoughts are as simple as instincts and emotions. Eventually, you learn to navigate basic subject predicate formations and are quickly introduced to your colors.

Your parents teach you the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, but that's all they teach you. It doesn't take long before you find the color green and you start to wonder what color it is, but your parents don't believe it's important to teach you any colors beyond red, blue, and yellow.

What's going to happen? Well, you're going to start viewing all colors within the limited understanding of the primary colors. Your daily involvement with colors will be similar to the average person's response to a tennis ball.

Is it green? Is it yellow? Well, if you only learned about red, blue, and yellow, you would definitely call it yellow. In the same way, the green of one tree may also be lumped under yellow, but the deep green of an evergreen may look blue to you if those are the only words you know.

Eventually, like a colorblind individual, the beautiful panoply of colors will be constrained to just three simple hues. Aaron, that would never happen. I would eventually realize that the new colors are different than the ones that made them and I would probably start calling them by a different name.

Well, not if you lived in a society that only recognized three colors. Let me prove it to you. When you look at frozen precipitation, you likely call it snow. You may use words like blizzard and flurry, but that has more to do with the amount of snow you're seeing.

Of course, there's also hail, but hail is merely ice that falls from the sky during warmer months versus snow that falls from the sky during the cooler months. We may also use adjectives to describe the snow.

Some snow may be heavier and wetter, while other snow may be more dry and grainy, but to most of us, it's still snow. That's how the vast majority of us think. I've lived around snow my entire life and that's how I look at it.

There's really no need for further distinction. But did you know that the Sami people who live far north of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia have over 180 words for snow? Now, I won't try to pronounce any of them, but they have individual words to describe the following.

A hard snowball. A cloud of snow which blows up from the ground when there's a hard frost without very much wind. A very thin layer of frozen snow. A crust of ice on snow formed in the evening after the sun has thawed the top of the snow during the day.

Slushy snow. Loose snow or new snow. The kind of travel surface where frozen snow or ice breaks and cuts the legs of animals like horses or reindeer. A snowfield which has been trampled and dug up by the reindeer.

Untouched winter snow without tracks. The compact snow that follows mild weather. Frost on the pasture. A layer of wet powdered snow. A wet snow that sticks to everything. And a completely massive snow that's not ice.

And the list goes on and on and on and each one of their one words describing snow requires multiple words for us to describe it. I'm going to argue that you do not have the ability to think of snow the same way the Sami people do.

Our vocabulary limits how we think about the subject. I mentioned aliens at the beginning of the show. In the movie Arrival, the heroine played by Amy Adams starts to perceive reality in a completely new way as she learns how to communicate in the native tongue of aliens who recently landed on earth.

It really was an amazing sci-fi version of what we're discussing here. We can't appreciate what it means to be saved if we don't understand what sin is. We can't begin to conceptualize what it means to serve our creator if our language is dominated by nothing but independence, self-actualization, self-sufficiency, the American dream, individualism, and entitlement.

People have literally lost the ability to understand that they were created to glorify God because their vocabulary prohibits them from thinking along those lines. Now I thank you for your patience today, but we have to understand these ideas of linguistic theft and the defining of terms has the potential of making it impossible for your children to think biblically about life.

And we don't want that. We don't want for that for you or your families or your kids. We don't want that for anybody where they are now incapable of thinking biblically about life because their vocabulary has limited them.

Stewarding Family Vocabulary Under God's Definition of Truth and Love

So here's a question for you. Who is the master of your family's vocabulary? If God is not the master of your family language, then the world controls the entire communication system and culture in your home.

When the world controls your family lexicon, it controls the meaning and indeed the entire worldview of your family. This secular worldview will shape your family's vocabulary, but make no mistake, the secular vocabulary also shapes your family's worldview.

Please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets so Christian parents can start to understand how the world is stealing language away from God. And if you need help with the specific dynamics of your home, please write us at counselor at truthloveparent .com.

Remember, if we want our children to grow up into Christ, we must parent God's definition of truth and God's definition of love. To that end, join us next time as we celebrate Easter by talking about war.

Truth. Love. Parents. is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's word for the truth your family needs today.