Apologetics Conference 2016: Why I Believe in Christ (David Wood)

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00:19

Anybody know what apologetics is? Hopefully most of us do. Apologetics is giving a defense of the gospel.

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In 1st Peter chapter 3 verse 15 we're told to sanctify Christ as Lord of our hearts and always be ready to give an apologia, a defense of the gospel, of the hope that we have in Christ.

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But do this with gentleness and respect. So apologetics is giving a defense of the gospel.

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It's reasons for the faith. It's standing up for the truth of God. So we have a tremendous conference planned.

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We hope you guys can make it and stay for the whole thing. It's not only tonight but it's also tomorrow morning and there is a schedule.

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Does everybody have a program? You guys have a program. All right. We would also love to get information from you so we know who's here.

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If you could fill out a card then next year if we do a second one, which this is our first annual so hopefully there'll be a second annual after this, we can let you know when this conference is coming ahead of time.

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We'll send out an email. We'll get the word out ahead of time and we can continue to build this apologetics conference.

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So please let us know your information. Also we have some books for sale. Some of our speakers have written books and those are out there.

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Please look at them and consider purchasing them. Also in the office, right, it's not the foyer but inside one of those rooms we have what

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I call Pastor Jeff's recommended books. Many of them are there. CLC bookstore had let us take them out and whatever we sell you guys can take home and we return the rest.

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So we have some great books on that table if you're interested in reading some good books. So without further ado we are going to call on our first speaker

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Mr. David Wood to come on up. Hey guys why don't you give a hand clap and we're going to welcome

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David Wood.

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Check, check, check. Does that thing work? You got to do that. You got to go check. Good evening.

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Before we get started are there any jihadis in here? They say they're going to chop my head off and I keep telling them where I'm speaking and they don't show up.

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Anyway, so that's good. You know this evening might have turned out very differently if some jihadis had shown up.

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So I guess we can talk about apologetics then. So as it's been pointed out, apologetics is of course, by the way do

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I need to stand in any particular spot? I can move around? Okay, I should have checked on that earlier. Apologetics, basically two kinds.

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You can give a reason, that's the first Peter 315 part, giving an answer for what you believe, for the hope that is in you.

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And that's cool because that's being stated by Peter, right? That's not some great

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Christian scholar, some brilliant philosopher, some brilliant scientist saying, hey you need to be ready with an answer.

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This is a fisherman saying you need to be prepared with an answer. And so this is for Christians in general.

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And if you think about it, you have in the Bible, you have a brilliant scholar, someone like the Apostle Paul who spoke multiple languages and had been educated by some of the most brilliant minds of his time, could quote the pagan poets to the pagans to refute what they were saying.

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So you can imagine that coming from someone like Paul, but we we have it from Peter. And so this is something that Christians in general need to be able to do.

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And if you think about it, if you walked up to Peter, Peter the fisherman, and said, hey Peter, I think Christianity is stupid.

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What do you got to say? I think you're gonna get a pretty good answer back from Peter. So that's that's one side of apologetics.

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And then you have the Second Corinthians 10 part about the demolishing strongholds and so on.

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And that's actually dealing with opposing arguments. People, other people's positions and showing that there are problems with them.

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And so both are very, very important. And I kind of feel like, it's hard to describe, back before Alexander the

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Great, the Persian Empire was viewed as this awesome empire because it was very big and had been very powerful in the past.

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And travelers kept coming back to Macedonia saying, you know that Persian Empire? They're actually really weak.

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Their forts are falling apart and their soldiers are undisciplined and they're all drunk and so on. If you rolled through there with a very tiny, well -trained army, you could wreak all kinds of havoc.

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And that's what Alexander did. He put together a small, well -trained Greek force and just went all the way to India.

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I kind of feel like that's the situation we're in today. And that if you look at sort of the two main groups that are sort of vying for attention, telling you no, this is what you need to believe instead of Christianity, that would be sort of militant atheists.

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You've always had atheists, but if you've been paying attention, they've become much more aggressive in recent years. And they pride themselves on being much more aggressive than they used to be.

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And Islam, of course. So Muslims saying, hey, you Christians, you have your theology wrong.

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You need to believe in Allah and believe that Muhammad's a prophet. And so these are the groups that are sort of saying, hey, you need to believe in us.

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But if you look at their arguments, if you look at the claims, it reminds me of that Persian Empire.

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If you start to look into it, very, very, very weak and very silly claims.

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More so with some of the new atheists than even with Muslims. And if you watch my video, you know what

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I think of the persuasive power of Islam. And what I mean is like the new atheism is like this sort of meme -driven ideology where it's all these little quotes that they all pass around like maniacs and post all over their sites and post all over their

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Twitter feeds and so on. And if you think about them, they're just really, really silly claims.

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And they point to these things as their reasons for not believing.

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And so let me give a quick example. This is the most popular quote I've seen on atheist pages.

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I contend that we are both atheists. So you're talking to us. I contend that we're both atheists. I just believe in one fewer

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God than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why

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I dismiss yours. And almost every atheist

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I know passes this around as some brilliant piece of wisdom. And you can understand in a superficial way why this would make sense, right?

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Well, you Christians, you don't believe in Thor and so on. That's the same reason I reject your God. I think it's just a bunch of silly superstitious nonsense.

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But this is ridiculous on so many levels. I mean, we could spend multiple sessions just on this.

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But look at this part right here. I contend that we are both atheists. This is one of the most popular things atheists say nowadays.

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We're all atheists with respect to these other gods. We just go one God further than the rest of you do.

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So you reject thousands of other gods and you just believe in one. And we just go that one extra step.

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So we're all basically atheists with all these other gods and we just one tiny little step further. Now, how is this silly?

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Let me count the ways. I'm not going to count the ways. I'll just talk about a couple. Take something simple, right? Here's a podium.

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There's a podium. Suppose we have no idea who built this podium. Probably not.

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Probably bought it somewhere and have no idea how this thing was made. So suppose some people say, I say a bunch of people got together and built that podium.

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We'll call that poly -podium builderism. Multiple podium builders. And then

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Jeff comes along and says, no, one podium builder is all you need. One good podium builder can build that thing with no problem.

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So that'll be mono -podium builderism. And then an atheist comes along and says, no one built a podium.

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It just is. And you say, Jeff said, well, that's ridiculous.

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It's ridiculous to say that no one built a podium. He says, aha, you rejected all those other podium builders.

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I just go one podium builder further than you do. I just reject one more. Jeff was already down to one, right?

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That's the bare minimum required to explain something. One. You're not getting lower than the one explanation.

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In going from one to zero, you go from an explanation to no explanation. From common sense to nonsense.

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It's a very interesting difference between one and zero.

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And the atheist is saying, no, no, no. We just go one further. And notice, this would be like me saying, if I were a vegetarian or something like that,

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I say, well, we're all vegetarians with respect to gorilla meat and tiger meat and rhinoceros meat and most of the animals in the world that you could eat.

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We're all vegetarians with respect to those. I just go like three meats further than the rest of you.

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So you're a vegetarian with respect to all those other animals. I just,

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I'm a vegetarian with respect to a couple more. You're not a vegetarian at all, right? You're not, you're not a vegetarian with respect to gorilla meat.

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I am not an atheist with respect to Thor. I'm a Christian with respect to Thor, right?

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There's something else, I believe, that rules me out as an atheist. So, strange claim.

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But then you have the second part. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why

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I dismiss yours. Notice what, notice the massive assumption here, that all religions are claiming basically the same thing and they all have the same kind of support.

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And so if you reject one, you reject all of them equally. And this is just a strange, this is a very strange assumption, because different religions don't even make the same sorts of claims about what they have in terms of evidence.

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Very few religions actually say, here's the evidence that you can examine to know that this religion is true. You're already, you're already narrowed down to just a couple.

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Once you have, once you say, you have religions that are claiming that you can know that they're true based on some sort of evidence.

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You're down to a couple. So Christianity makes a claim that says, here's how you can know. In other words, if you're coming, you're not a Christian, and you say, why should

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I believe that? Christianity says, here's something that you can examine to know that this is true.

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Islam does as well. So you have, on the one hand, a massive difference between what religions are claiming about whether they can even be proven, whether there is evidence for them at all.

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But once you are narrowed down to the few religions that actually claim that you can examine and test them, you notice a big difference here as well.

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If you look at Islam, the main argument for Islam, the main proof of Islam, is what

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I'll call the argument from literary excellence. It's, the Koran is so well written, it must be from God.

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You all just laughed at that. That's in the Koran multiple times, over and over and over again. That's the argument of the

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Koran. Muslims today might use different arguments. That's the argument of the Koran. That was the argument put forward by Allah and Muhammad for the truth of Islam.

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It's so well written, it must be from God. Now, notice, it wouldn't matter how well written the

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Koran was, that would be very strange. I mean, it would be like saying, Mozart's music is so beautiful, it must be from God.

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Shakespeare's plays are so amazing, they must be from God. That would be absolutely ridiculous. It wouldn't matter if Shakespeare was,

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I mean, just, he could be a thousand times better than he is right now. What would that have to do with whether he's writing the inspired word of God?

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As far as I can tell, nothing. And then when you actually read the Koran, and I like what

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Anthony Flew, the famous 20th century skeptic who eventually believed in God, Anthony Flew was asked, after he became a theist, after he believed in God, do you think you'll ever subscribe to anything particular like Christianity or Islam?

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And he started giving comparisons between Christianity and Islam. And he pointed out, he said,

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Paul is a first -rate philosopher. Muhammad was basically an illiterate caravan trader, so he was drawing attention to, because he's a philosopher,

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Anthony Flew is a philosopher, so he's respecting Paul as a philosopher. He said, Jesus is an incredibly attractive charismatic figure.

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Muhammad was not. And then he compared the Bible and the Koran. He says, whatever your position, if you're serious, the Bible is an amazing piece of literature.

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To read the Koran is to do penance. Punishing yourself, reading the Koran is punishing yourself for your sins.

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And I'm not saying this because I disagree with Islam. That's true. I enjoy reading other

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Muslim sources like the Hadith and so on. I think they're very, very interesting. The Koran, oh my goodness. But notice, that's the main argument.

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This is so well written, it must be from God. If it were that well written, that would not mean it's from God. And in fact, it's very, very, very strange, difficult to understand, disorganized, incomprehensible book.

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So that's what happened. So you've got the argument. It's claiming, here's how you can know this is true. And when you examine it, you find out, whoa, this is a very, very bad argument on multiple levels.

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And so you have this difference between religions in terms of some offer evidence and some don't. And even among the ones that offer evidence, you find a very, very interesting difference when you start looking into what they offer as evidence.

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And so I'm going to maintain that Christianity, and specifically the figure of Christ, is completely different from what you find anywhere else.

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And so this claim, by assuming, by assuming that all religions are, sort of, have equal evidential status, shows that the person just hasn't studied religion.

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They don't claim the same things, and they don't have the same evidence. Even if you want to reject them all, you can reject them all, but it's very clear that they're not claiming the same things and don't have the same sort of evidential status behind them.

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Think of another issue. I used to watch this. I watched the first season of a show called

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House. It was about a doctor. And I stopped watching it because every episode was the same.

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They brought in some horrible dying person, and no one knows what to do, so they give him the house, because he's the one that figured this stuff out.

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And then House says, oh, here's what you do. And then they try that, and it doesn't work. And then they try the next thing, and that doesn't work.

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And four or five things they try, and then at the end of the episode, he has this eureka moment when, aha, here's what it is, and then saves the day.

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So that's the same every episode, and the only difference is they can't keep you with the same plot line without raising the drama level, so you have to keep coming up with worse and worse stuff.

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So you have people coming in, blood squirting out of their eyes or something like this in order to keep your attention, even though they're telling the same story over and over again.

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But notice how ridiculous this reasoning would be. If House tries one cure to this disease, it doesn't work.

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He tries another treatment, it doesn't work. He tries another treatment, it doesn't work. Tries another one, then he has his eureka moment and says, aha, give him a shot of this, this will fix it.

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Imagine his little team says, well, House, if you understood why you dismiss all these other cures, now you would know why we dismiss this one, and we're not going to take it seriously.

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You see why this is the same, right? The point of going through all these different tests and so on was to get to the one that's actually correct, to get to the correct diagnosis and the correct treatment of it.

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Same thing with a legal trial, right? It would make no sense. I mean, if a lawyer stood up and said, Your Honor, members of the jury, if you understood why you reject all other accused people in the world as the people who did this crime, you would understand why you can't believe that this person committed the crime either.

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What are you talking about? The whole purpose of the trial is to figure out who did it, right? Figure out if this person actually did it. So it's very strange to say, well, you're rejecting all these, therefore you have to reject this one as well.

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You could even rephrase this and say to atheists, Atheists, if you understood why you dismiss all other non -christian ideologies, you would understand why

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I reject your non -christian ideology. No atheist is going to even take that seriously for a second.

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They're not going to say, Oh, wow, I never thought about that. I reject all these other non -christian ideologies, therefore I have to reject mine as well.

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It would never occur to them. In other words, they would never apply this reasoning to anything else in the world, but as soon as they get to Christianity, the reasoning, the logic all gets turned off and then gets passed around rapidly as your slam -dunk case against Christianity.

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And so this would be, part of apologetics would be sort of pointing things out like this about how silly this is.

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But apart from all this, because now if you say, Well, I believe in Christianity.

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Well, you know, you've dismissed all these other things and you don't go to them. Notice, again, going back to something like the house show or something like that.

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Once you've got the correct diagnosis and the correct treatment, you don't then go on and say,

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Okay, maybe it's all these other things. Once you've found that someone has committed a crime and you've proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, you don't then go and say,

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Oh, let me see how many other people in the world are candidates for this particular crime, unless there are reasons for it.

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But once you've got your guy, you've kind of got your guy. And so if you're looking at the truth about, you know, about God, about the world and so on, once you've got it, it makes no difference that you haven't studied, you know, the religion of Aborigines in Australia or something like that.

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What are you talking about? You have the truth. And this, to give a sort of silly example, if someone brought you evidence against your position, sometimes you can know something is true.

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You can have reasons for knowing something is true. And if someone offered you an alternative, some other position, you could know there's something wrong with it.

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And what I mean is something like this. So let's look at an example. It's working? There we go.

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So we're gonna prove that two equals one here. Most of you believe that two is not equal to one, that one equals one, and two equals two.

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But I can prove you wrong here. So suppose I said there are all kinds of other possibilities for what two equals and what one equals, and I can show you that you've ignored the alternatives here.

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So we'll give a little proof here. If you're not up to date on algebra, don't worry too much about this.

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Those of you who are younger people who are actually taking it right now, then you've got a slam -dunk right here.

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So one, A equals B. So we're defining A as whatever A is,

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B is. So if it's one, then one, two, and so on. So A equals B. We're gonna set that as premise here.

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So if A equals B, then A squared is going to equal AB, right? Because A times

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A will be A squared. But B is A, so A times B will be the same thing over here.

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You can do anything you want as long as you're doing it to both sides. So A squared is going to equal AB. So I can add

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A squared to both sides, since I can add whatever I want to both sides. So that's going to be A squared plus A squared, adding

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A squared to both sides. A squared plus A squared equals A squared plus AB.

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So that's straightforward. I just added A squared to both sides. So over here now I now have two

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A squared, so it's gonna be two A squared equals, same thing over here, A squared plus AB. And now two

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A squared minus two AB. I'm subtracting two AB from both sides, right?

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I'm allowed to do that in algebra. Two A squared minus two AB equals, same thing over here,

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A squared plus AB minus the two AB. And so now

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I have two A squared minus two AB. This is the same thing here. I'm just condensing the other side over here.

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A squared, you had plus AB minus two AB, so that leaves you with minus AB. And now

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I'm just going to take this two out here, allowed to do that. Two A squared minus AB equals, just taking out a one here, allowed to do that, one

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A squared minus AB. And now I'm just going to divide both sides, allowed to do that.

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A squared minus AB, both sides, and then I got two equals one.

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Now, I didn't know what happened here until I just inserted numbers. I said, okay, let me say this equals this, and so on.

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I went through and then you see it. You see what happened in here. The point is, suppose you have no idea what went wrong here.

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I don't think anyone's going to say, oh wow, I guess two equals one. Here I've been wrong all my life.

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They told my teachers lie to me, and so on. But why? You have a pretty straightforward mathematical argument here for why two equals one.

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Well, that wouldn't change you. You'd say, okay, there must be, I don't know what the problem is, there's a problem here. There's something here, because I already know that two is not equal to one.

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Two is two, and one is one. And so if you know that something is true, if you have good reasons to know that something is true, you can know that there's a problem with other positions, like another position saying that this is equal, that two is equal to one.

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So you can know that there are problem with positions just by knowing that you have the truth there, and it helps to look through and actually find out what the problem is.

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And so this can go in a couple of directions, but I grew up as an atheist.

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And this is before you had the new atheists who were really militant and aggressive, so I was kind of that way on my own.

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And much worse though, because I was also not fully sane.

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And what I mean by that is, well, let me go all the way back.

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I was five years old, and I had a dog. I'd had this dog, all

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I can remember. It was a really cool little dog, would go out and fight other animals if I was around and so on. But a raggedy little mutt.

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And one day he gets hit by a bus, and my mom gets a phone call, hey, your dog's over here flattened by a bus. And my mom turns to me, and she hated the dog, but she had tears in her eyes, and she says, oh,

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Goliath is dead. And I thought, why are you crying? It's just a dog.

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And I thought there was something wrong with my mom, right? Like, she's getting all broken up over this dog, and she didn't even like the dog.

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But either way, it's just a dog. Why are you getting teary -eyed over that? So, like, there's something wrong with it. We grew up in the middle of nowhere.

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There's no, I mean, there's no one around us. And so I know my mom and a couple other people, and I thought something's odd about my mom.

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And eventually we moved, and we were around other kids, and one day their dog got hit by, got hit by a car. And they were all sad about it, and they're all sitting on the table crying.

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And I was thinking, wow, this is spreading here. Some, some weird problem here.

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And, and about the same time, about a year after that, I was beside a lake at my grandfather's, and I was watching this, these ants march.

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And they're, they're all marching in a line. And it suddenly became clear to me that these ants were much more intelligent than we thought they were.

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That they're, they're so organized in what they do that they're actually much more intelligent than, than they let on. And I, I rapidly concluded that ants actually rule the world.

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I should have laughed at that when I thought about it, but it made perfect sense to me. I thought that ants ruled the world and had tricked us human beings into thinking that we were in charge.

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And I had these episodes at various points in my life, but it would just suddenly become crystal clear, whoa, ants rule the world.

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I figured it out. Not on any drugs or anything else, just it becomes crystal clear. And that sort of expanded as I got older.

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When I was, I guess, fourth, fourth through sixth grade was the, the animal, the, the pets phase, where I thought that pets were actually controlling us.

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And, you know, cats were in there to watch us and observe us and so on. And they're, they're sent as spies.

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And basically, any time an animal would look me right in the eyes, I would think that it was trying to communicate with me. And it was, it was actually, it was like bragging, like, ha ha, you look at you.

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And so, you could actually catch me when, talking to animals when I was young. I'm on to you.

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I know what you're doing. I know about you. I'm not stupid like the rest of these people. And by the time

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I got into a junior high, I thought I controlled time. I didn't know how I controlled time, but I knew

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I controlled time. Tenth grade, I thought that I controlled the weather. Like, it would, there's a weird sort of a selective evidence process.

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When I would say, I want it to rain, and it would actually rain, then, ha ha, this proves it, right? And then, if it, if it didn't happen, then, oh,

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I did something wrong here. What did I do? How did I, how did, why didn't it happen? Something's messed up here, right? So, for,

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I guess, pretty much all of tenth grade, I thought that I, I believe that I controlled the weather. Whenever it would, something would happen,

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I, how, what did I do? What did I do differently that made that happen? So, this is just, you know, this is, this is some really stupid, delusional thinking.

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And my dog, of course, died when I was little, but as I got older, other things would die, people would die.

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And I would, I would notice over time that I had the same reaction, which is not, which is, so what? It's just a, whatever that was.

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And right before eleventh grade, my, my best friend,

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Jimmy Lindholm, died parasailing. The whole time, since we were in, since we were in sixth grade, he was saying he wanted to, he wanted to try parasailing.

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He eventually tried it, his harness broke, plummeted to his death. And he died, and, and this was, was very different.

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I was walking away thinking, I should be feeling something about this, right?

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It made perfect sense if it's a dog dying or some, you know, distant person I don't know very well. One of my best friends ever dying, and I just,

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I just don't care. It's, it's, there's, there's, I feel nothing about it. And that's when I started thinking, maybe there's something wrong with me.

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Maybe there's, maybe, maybe I have some sort of problem, and that's why

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I'm different. But that didn't last long, because as I was thinking through these things,

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I came up with another explanation for why I'm not bothered by that, and that's that I had evolved to a higher stage of humanity.

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The rest of you, you're all held back by your emotions, right? Which may have some, may have served some purpose back in, you know, for your ancestors, but now we've reached a stage where you can be perfectly rational about things.

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It's coming from a guy who thinks that, you know, animals are communicating with him. You can be perfectly rational, not held back by your, you know, your emotions.

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And so I just ran with that, and, and, and eventually something happened, because I started, well, committing various crimes and so on, and eventually

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I had this amazing breakthrough. This was the following summer.

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I'd broken into a store in the middle of the night, and I was running from police, and they had me, they got me surrounded on three sides, right?

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There was police in front of me, police to the side of me, police behind me, and the other side was the Monongahela River, so they're yelling, stop or I'll shoot, and so on.

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I'm going, no, no, no, you're not, right? And so anyway, I jumped in the river, swam across the river. I was expecting when

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I got to the other side they're going to be there waiting on me, but I beat them across the river, and I worked my way up a hill, and at first I'm just in the patches, in patches of woods and so on.

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I get up out, I finally emerge from a patch of woods, and I'm in someone's backyard, and there's a house in front of me, and then there's a garden right here, so I'm in the backyard.

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There's a garden here, and I need to keep going because, you know, who knows what they're going to come up behind me with, and so I started to walk around the garden, and I just,

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I just stopped and started, I started philosophizing. I thought, why am

29:32

I walking around this garden? I don't, I don't care about these, I don't care about this stuff here. I don't care about the people in that house or, you know, how long it took them to grow.

29:41

I don't care, right? So why am I doing this? Why am I modifying my life to bring it in, into line with, you know, them?

29:48

And so I just, I just sort of trounced through, trounced through the garden, and I got this amazing rush of freedom when

29:57

I did that, like, like I could feel myself changing with every step, like, whoa, people have been telling me to do stuff all my life, and I don't have to do it, and I mean,

30:08

I had already been doing, I had already been breaking rules and so on, but it's like, anything you do, not, not even, hey, don't step on other people's tomatoes, don't, don't do that.

30:18

Why? Because you say so? I don't know, why would I listen to what you, what you say? And that sort of, at first it was this sort of awesome, exhilarating thing, but afterwards,

30:28

I started getting really angry, because I've been living by these nice little rules all my life, because people were telling me to, right?

30:38

Like, like your parents tell you to do this, don't do that, and your teachers tell you to do this, don't do that, and everyone's telling me all these things, that you, you can't do this, because it's wrong, and you believe it, because, you know, you're a kid, you don't know any better, and so once I realized it was all just complete nonsense, that I didn't have to listen to anything any of you said, but you've, you've, you've convinced me to,

31:01

I've been living for years like this, and you brainwashed me, basically, into doing this.

31:08

I was, like, angry at everyone, everyone, the entire world had brainwashed me, and you, you could, this would be different, but you can imagine why you would get mad, if you thought someone was, was brainwashing you, if you think about, you know, something simple, if you just went to a restaurant every week, and you kept going to that restaurant, you thought, oh,

31:25

I love this restaurant, this restaurant's so good, I keep going to this restaurant, and then at some point, you find out that the owners of the restaurant had hypnotized you into coming to their restaurant over and over again, and that you really wouldn't like it, but they hypnotized you into liking it, and so that's why you keep coming.

31:38

You probably get mad, right? Like, I've been tricked, even if you're, even if you love the food there now, because you've been hypnotized into doing it, you're quite happy with the food there, you'd be mad just because they brainwashed you into doing it, and so that's, that's how

31:48

I was my whole life. You guys have destroyed my entire life, making me do all these things that I otherwise wouldn't have done, and so started sort of reacting against all that.

31:58

I concluded that I have to do sort of the opposite of what

32:04

I've been taught. You've been, if you've told me to do something, I need to start doing the opposite of it, and the more enraged

32:10

I became at having been brainwashed all my life, the more I wanted to react, and so I started studying bomb building, which some of you who are around my age might recall, or a little older you might recall the, the anarchist cookbook, where I actually put out a book on here's how you build pipe bombs, here's how you can make a rocket launcher, and so on, they start telling you how to, how to build all these things, and anyway,

32:32

I started thinking going through here that, wow, these chemicals, I'm gonna blow myself up if I, you know, might accidentally blow myself up doing some of this stuff, so this is about the time

32:42

I was starting college, and I decided I was going to become a chemistry major, learn how to build some more high -tech stuff, and going through my first semester there, and I started thinking, well anyone can, anyone can blow up a bunch of people you don't know.

33:00

What is that? That's not really, I mean, lots of people, people do that all the time. You have different bombers who, who do that sort of thing.

33:06

That's weird. Why, why would that, why would that be a problem? And so I, if you really want to break free from what you've been raised to do, and to believe, and to think, then you gotta, you gotta be more, more extreme than that, so my dad was the only relative who was around me at the time, and so I decided

33:26

I was gonna, I was gonna kill my father with a hammer, and I'm gonna skip all the, the gory details, but I did that.

33:36

I tried to do that. I hit him in the head about eight times, seven or eight times with a ball -peen hammer, and I'm about 240 now.

33:43

I was probably about 230 then, so I was, that was much stronger then, by the way, so I did that, walked away, and it was the same thing, you know, with my dog and with Jimmy, that there was just no reaction, but whereas previously, when

34:00

I would do something sort of new and groundbreaking for me to shed the old moral system, before I would have these sort of amazing rush of freedom, like I've sort of stripped away, just felt dead after that.

34:14

I was, it was done. I walked out of there, and I have no rush of freedom now. There's just nothing.

34:19

I have no fee, I have no feelings. I could get angry. That's the only thing I would recognize as an emotion after that, is that I would get angry at people, but I did that, and ended up in a mental hospital, and they gave me diagnoses.

34:34

I didn't know what they were until years later. It was years later when

34:40

I read, well, I read the diagnosis, and it said antisocial personality disorder, and I had no idea what that was.

34:46

I thought it just meant I'm not very social, and I like to, I like to read on my own and not be interacting with people. That's not.

34:52

I was eventually taking a psychology class, and it said, it said sociopath, and I said, what's a sociopath?

35:00

And I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said someone with antisocial personality disorder slash psychopath.

35:06

Whoa! Well, that would make sense then, wouldn't it? I wish people, you know, told me what those mean, because that would make sense of a lot of things in my life.

35:15

So, I was put in a mental hospital at first, and eventually went to jail and went to trial, and all

35:26

I was doing in jail was plotting, right? This is, my dad survived that attack. They had to take him to, this was in Virginia Beach, they had to take him to a different place, in Portsmouth, because they had a world champion neurosurgeon there, but they had to peel his face down and put his skull back together and so on, but he survived.

35:45

And so, I ended up in jail and going to trial, and in jail,

35:53

I ran into a Christian named Randy, and every other Christian I'd ever run into,

35:59

I start making fun of them for being Christians and making fun of their beliefs. They all, they would all back down.

36:05

They would all say, you know, hey, we don't want an argument here, we don't want to, we don't want to argue about this, we don't want a scene, and that makes sense, you don't want to, you don't want to get into it with a big, you know, angry atheist.

36:14

But I was in, I was in jail, and I walked up to a Christian who was reading his Bible, and I said, hey, you know why you're reading the

36:22

Bible? You're reading the Bible because you're born in the United States. If you've been born anywhere else, you believe in something else.

36:28

If you've been born in China, you'd be a Buddhist. If you've been born in India, you'd be a Hindu. If you've been born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim, because people like you believe whatever you're taught to believe.

36:36

And as far as what I believed about the universe, that was a pretty stupid thing of me to say, because I believed everything that I'd been taught about the universe, right?

36:42

I've been taught that, you know, the universe exploded out of nowhere, and life formed out in the ocean. I've been taught, I believed all of this, and I've never questioned it, never really looked into it.

36:49

But I'm pointing the finger at this Christian. You don't know what you're, you don't know what you're talking about.

36:55

Now, as we got to know each other, I found out that, if you're wondering what this guy was doing in jail, he turned himself in for 21 felonies.

37:02

He'd become a Christian, was in the Navy, was out to sea, and then decided to come back and confess to crimes he'd committed.

37:10

So he went in there, confessed to 21 felonies, and he was in jail with, with me. And something interesting happened when

37:16

I started challenging him. He actually, he sits up on his bunk and goes, oh yeah? And then he begins arguing with me.

37:22

And he wasn't any sort of scholar. He didn't, I mean, he was, he was a Navy guy who came back and confessed and so on, but he'd been, look, he'd been studying his

37:31

Christianity. And he started tearing me to pieces, which, and not by being a brilliant philosopher, he just, everything

37:40

I would say, he would go, why do you believe that? He started asking me questions. Where'd you get that from? Show me your source on that.

37:47

Give me your evidence for that. And I had no clue why I believed anything, right? I, this is, and I couldn't,

37:53

I couldn't, I'm just really bothering me. I can't defend anything I'm saying here. And so I, like, started attacking him in various,

37:58

I told people he was gay and so on. He, he would, he would, we ended up being friends.

38:06

We would play cards and so on, but I would always use something against him later when I was angry. He told me that he'd been molested when he was a kid, and then

38:11

I made fun of him for being molested. And his 12 -year -old sister came in there, and I saw just his eyes light up when he saw his sister.

38:17

He was so happy to see his sister had come to see him and stuff. And so I started, hey man, why don't you hook me up with your sister? I could just, you know, just whatever

38:24

I could use to really mess with this guy, and nasty, nasty stuff. Eventually we got into possibly the world's first fasting battle.

38:35

Randy would fast, and he would fast for long periods of time. He would say, when

38:40

I get out, and I'm doing whatever I'm doing out there, and I've got a job, I'm not going to be able to fast for long periods of time, so I need to do that now while I have this perfect opportunity to do lots of, lots of fasting.

38:51

And so he went seven days, nothing but water. I said, all right, I'm going ten, just to beat this guy.

38:57

I wasn't winning with the arguments, so I was going to beat him at fasting, and I did. I'd never, I'd never,

39:03

I don't think I'd fasted a meal in my life, but I went ten days on nothing but rage. Just rage and water.

39:10

And I was different. I would, I'd like pass out, and I got a rash all over me and so on. But I went ten days, and then

39:15

I ate for the weekend, and then I went another ten days just to rub it in. And so we keep going back and forth, and he'd ask me, hey, why do you keep fasting just a couple days longer than me?

39:23

I don't know, I'm just, I'm trying to, you know, become more disciplined and so on. And eventually he went, he went 40 days.

39:30

About 40 days. He said Jesus had done it. He went 32 days on water, and then he drank Kool -Aid for, for the remainder.

39:38

And I knew because we're, we had opposite bunks, and he would give me all his meals when they brought them in.

39:45

So I said, all right, I'm going 42. Going an even six weeks. And now he's like, no,

39:51

I know what you're doing now. Now I know you're trying to beat me. I was like, no, you, it's just, why 40? Got to be 42. Then it's an even six weeks.

39:57

So I was on day number 11 when I had passed out, and they put me in a camera cell. They know

40:03

I had, you know, they know I have a mental health history and have been in a couple of mental hospitals. And so they concluded that I'm trying to starve myself to death.

40:11

I'm sitting there trying to beat the Christian. They think I'm, they think I'm trying to murder myself.

40:17

And they put me in, they put me back there in this cell. And I had, Randy would read these apologetics books, and he would give me the apologetics books afterward and say, read them.

40:25

And I wouldn't, but I had them. And so I get back in the cell. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna destroy this Christianity now. Now I have nothing.

40:32

Now I have no card games to distract me. They got me in a little cell with a camera pointed towards me. And so now I have nothing to distract me.

40:37

I'm gonna read. I'm gonna keep reading the Bible. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get back out of here. I'm gonna destroy this guy. Now think about that.

40:42

Does that really make sense from an atheistic perspective? I'm gonna be obsessed with beating this.

40:49

Who cares? Who cares if you beat this Christian, right? We're all, we're all going to the same place. What, what, what, what sense does it make?

40:56

But atheists don't think about that. You know, the same atheists who spend all day long trolling Christian sites and so on.

41:02

There is no God. Do something else with your life then. What are you, what, it's like, it's like you're gonna be on your deathbed.

41:07

If only I'd mocked a few more Christians. Something. So I'm back there, and I'm in this cell, and I had,

41:19

I had, I had an awesome library, and I had access to the library, and I asked the chaplain at the jail for this set of studies on the

41:28

Gospel of John. And I started going through there, and at first I started eating again because I wanted to get out.

41:34

And then I got mad and stopped eating again. And so I eventually got down to the last weigh -in was 152.

41:41

I know I fasted longer than that, but the times they actually weighed me, I was 152. That might be fine for some of you, but again, that's, that's almost half of me gone right now.

41:53

And so, but by that time I was, I was like, my skin was turning yellow. I had this rash all over me, and I couldn't stop drooling for some reason.

42:03

I don't know, I fasted a long time, and I couldn't stop drooling. And anyway, they keep taking me down there. They keep taking my blood, which

42:09

I'm thinking, I don't have anything to replenish my blood supply. What are you, what are you taking the little bit that I've got left? They once, they took me down there, and they put a, they put a, they wanted to check my heart rate and my blood pressure, and they put it on my finger, and it said

42:22

I was dead. And it's, my blood pressure was so low, the thing said

42:27

I was dead. So they put one around my arm, and then they got, they got a reading. But everything right now is still making, making perfect sense to me.

42:36

And I was, I was, I started reading, and I'm going through the Gospel of John, and occasionally

42:42

I would think, almost sounded like the Bible was mocking me, right? Like I would think, man,

42:48

I'm starving. These guys bring me food every day, and I give it back to them. And I'm starving to death back here, and, and, and people are bringing me food every day, and I'm still starving to death.

42:56

And I would read, I'm the bread of life. You comes to me, we'll never go hungry. And shut up, right?

43:03

I've still got that, I've still, I've still got that Bible where I wrote all sorts of, I'm the master of my life, blah, blah, blah. I got a, got all this.

43:10

It's kind of a side note. I wrote, everything I need is already within me, right? I wrote that in the Bible, everything

43:15

I need is already within me. And one day I flung it, and it landed on some grape

43:22

Kool -Aid, and I picked it up, and certain letters have been smeared off, and it said, everything I need is thin me.

43:28

I was, I, quit mocking me! 150 pounds, right? And so I, but I'm, but I'm reading this and so on, and eventually some things started bothering me.

43:42

And I remember I was just looking around at the room I was in. I was looking at the bricks stacked up.

43:47

I was sitting there thinking, looking at the bricks stacked up, and I thought, if someone told me that these bricks formed in this pattern by, you know, some sort of process of weather or something like that,

43:59

I would think that's the stupidest thing I'd ever heard in my life. What I actually thought was, I would punch him in the mouth. But I mean, that's just bricks.

44:09

That's bricks. I mean, they're simple little bricks. You can imagine how some sort of brick shape might form by nature, but you would never, never conclude that it would form in this kind of pattern.

44:19

And yet I believe that life formed on its own. That's the first thing that started bothering me.

44:27

I know life is more complex than this. Much more complex. Mind -bogglingly more complex.

44:34

The simplest cell is mind -bogglingly more complex than these blocks stacked up on top of each other.

44:41

And I got a, I got a sense for that. You, interestingly, you can actually calculate the odds.

44:46

You can actually calculate the odds of life forming, given everything

44:53

I believed at the time. You can calculate the odds. I never did this, but people have done this since then. And this is something

44:59

I would have, I wish I had known. By the way, that's kind of the part, part of the purpose of apologetics. When I learned everything

45:06

I learned about Christianity, apologetics, I wish, I wish I had known that when I was 14, 15, 16 years old, because I think

45:12

I would have had a very different life. Based on what

45:17

I believed at this time, the simplest known life is 400 to 450 proteins.

45:25

Proteins are what do everything in the cell. So everything that's happening in your cell metabolism, so on, that's, that's little proteins doing all the work.

45:32

They're the machines. The simplest known life is 400 to 450 proteins. It's a bacterium that lives in your urinary tract.

45:39

That's the simplest known life. Scientists hypothesize that you could be a simpler life form, even though it doesn't exist, that you could exist as some sort of life with about 250 proteins doing, you know, basic metabolism, things like that.

45:54

So the simplest known life would be about 250 average length proteins.

46:00

It's the simplest thing we could think of that would be life. It doesn't, again, this is simpler than anything that actually exists as life.

46:07

So the probability of getting 250 of these proteins by chance, and I'm pointing this out because that's how

46:13

I believe life formed. It formed, if you think, hey, I've got 13 plus billion years to work with, an entire universe, obviously weird things can happen, right?

46:25

Improbable things happen all the time. Someone wins the lottery. Yes, most of you do. Someone wins it.

46:31

So why can't life hit the lottery right here, form, out of all the universe and all those billions of years, what's the problem?

46:39

Well, here's the problem. Given everything I believed at the time, the probability of getting 250 average length proteins, this would be, you can actually calculate the odds.

46:50

What's the, what are the odds that this one would form and that this one would attach to this one, this one attached to this one, this one attached to that one, and so on, in the correct order to form some sort of functioning protein.

47:01

And the odds you get are about 1 in 10 to the 164, that's the odds of forming one average length protein by chance.

47:09

And if you need 250 of them, then you raise it to that power, and you get about 1 in 10 to the 41 ,000th power.

47:16

It's the probability of the simplest imaginable cell forming by chance, no other processes.

47:26

Now, if you told me that, I would have said, so what? Obviously, with this big universe and so much time, weird things can happen.

47:33

What's the problem? Weird things like that happen all the time. No, they don't. Not that weird.

47:38

See, we're good with little simple coin flip probabilities. When we start getting big probabilities, our minds can't comprehend them.

47:45

For instance, every time you've ever shuffled a deck of cards, that is probably, except for when they're first in the pack, they're all in the same order.

47:53

Anytime you've ever randomly shuffled a deck of cards, the probability is that that deck, that no deck in the world has ever been in that order.

48:02

We cannot comprehend. What are you talking about? There's so many decks of cards, and they're all being shuffled, and people are playing poker all over the planet.

48:08

No, you could have been, you could have had, you could have everyone in the world shuffle a deck of cards every second for billions of years, and you wouldn't even come close to exhausting the possibilities of a randomly arranged deck.

48:23

And again, lots of people, no, there's no way. Yes, it is. Type in 52 factorial into a calculator.

48:29

That will tell you how many possibilities there are. You're never coming close to exhausting those different possibilities.

48:38

And so this is far, far worse. And we think, oh, there's no problem here. Wrong. So look at an example here.

48:44

So, 10 to the 80th, total number of particles in the entire universe. That's how many particles there are in the universe.

48:50

Notice, this is particles, right? I mean, you think atoms, this is every atom particle in the universe, every star and so on.

48:56

This is all the particles that are in all the stars in all the universe. 10 to the 16th, that's what, that's what at the time

49:04

I would have said is the total number of seconds. That's 13 billion, 13 and a half billion years worth of seconds. 10 to the 43, this is the number of interactions between particles if they're moving at the speed of light.

49:19

So, notice we're setting a maximum for everything here. Simplest imaginable life and maximum number of particle interactions ever.

49:33

I would have had to say, okay, total number of particles, total number of seconds, fastest particle interactions you can have traveling at the speed of light.

49:42

You're granting everything I could possibly believe. And you multiply that out, you get 10 to the 139th possible particle interactions since the beginning of the universe.

49:54

That's every particle traveling at the speed of light interacting. That's the total number of particles. Notice, you're not even close to getting one.

50:02

You're not close to getting one. Medium -length protein by chance, and you're telling me 250 all in the same place at the same time and everything else you would need for a cell.

50:13

The point here is, given what I believed, my belief was ridiculous. It was utterly absurd.

50:19

I had no clue. Yeah, it's wild, but wild things happen, right? No, they don't. Not like this.

50:25

Not like this. There's impossible, and then there's so improbable that it's irrational.

50:31

Believing something impossible, that's irrational. But believing something so improbable that there's no way this is happening, that's irrational too.

50:40

And yet, I took this not as, well, yeah,

50:47

I'm on this side of things. You're an idiot if you don't believe this happened. You religious morons, you're idiots if you don't believe that life formed.

50:56

I mean, come on, huge universe and so on. And how awesome would it be to just lay this out?

51:02

So I didn't have actual numbers, but it started occurring to me. Life, much more complicated than bricks.

51:10

So that was problem number one. Problem number two was going through various interesting things in Christianity.

51:17

Here again, learned much more later, but at the time, it was learning how the apostles died.

51:27

That's what started bothering me, because I had my theory of Christianity. My theory of Christianity was that Jesus' followers were upset that he died.

51:36

They wanted to carry on his mission, so they kept preaching that he rose from the dead. They wanted to carry on his mission. That makes perfect sense to me.

51:44

And I found out how they died, and then something started bothering me. If you want his message to go on, and you decide to make up a story about him rising from the dead, and people start torturing you and cutting your skin off and crucifying you upside down, at some point, you're going to admit that you're making that up.

52:03

And I tried to think of one person in history I could come up with who died for something that he knew was a lie.

52:11

And I couldn't think of one single person who died for something he knew was a lie. Not one in all of history.

52:17

Lots of people died for something I would regard as a lie, but they believed it. That's the key. Now notice this is different, right?

52:23

If a terrorist flies a plane into a building, that doesn't mean that his belief is true, but it means that he believes it.

52:30

It means that he's not intentionally making it up. How are the apostles different? The apostles are different, because the apostles aren't dying for some message that they heard and they believe, right?

52:40

A terrorist heard a message, he believed the message, he's willing to die for the message. A Christian martyr heard a message, believes the message, believes in Christianity, and is willing to die for it.

52:50

The apostles weren't dying for some message they heard, they were dying for something they claimed that they saw. So I think if they were dying for something they claim to have seen, and people don't lay down their lives unless they believe it, they must have seen something.

53:06

What did they see? And that's the question that started plaguing me. What did these guys see? Even if you had one insane person, you have an entire group of Christians who were willing to be tortured and killed for what they believe.

53:18

What did these guys see? They saw something. And it was just cool because scholars who investigate this, and I'm not talking about Christian scholars, even atheists and agnostic scholars, grant certain basic facts that are everything we, a historian, a

53:32

Christian historian, would use to build a case for the resurrection of Jesus. So, look at some quotations here, hang on.

53:44

It's working? Want to just click to the next one?

53:58

Maybe it went to sleep. I got nothing.

54:15

That's weird, I see it changing there. All right, now, is that you or me?

54:46

No, I got nothing. Is that me? Okay, so, on the issue of crucifixion, and there's still a problem,

54:55

I'll just go without it. So, on the issue of crucifixion, these are atheists and agnostic scholars, and notice, in order to have a resurrection, you need basically two things.

55:08

You need a guy who died, and then he needs to be alive again later. That's at least someone rising from the dead.

55:13

Resurrection would be a little bit different because it has a supernatural dimension to it. But if you've got a guy who's dead, really dead, not just kind of dead or, you know, in a coma or something like this, but actually dead, and then he's alive again later, looks like you got a miracle on your hands.

55:26

And so, it's interesting because even the basic facts, even by non -Christian scholars will grant the basic facts, but they'll just deny the conclusion.

55:35

So, Garrett Ludeman, atheist New Testament scholar, Jesus' death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.

55:40

Notice, not just probable, not just, hey, he probably died, that's what happens if you get crucified.

55:46

It's indisputable. John Dominic Crossan of the Notorious Jesus Seminar. There's not the slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus' crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

55:55

Marcus Borg, also of the Jesus Seminar. Jesus' execution is the most certain fact about the historical

56:00

Jesus. Let's see if this, got it.

56:07

Pincus Lepes, Jewish scholar, Jewish historical Jesus scholar. Jesus' death by crucifixion is historically certain.

56:13

Again, notice, these guys are using very strong language, which if you used as a Christian, said, ah, we know this. Ah, you Christians don't know anything.

56:19

You take everything by faith. Especially, you know, with the new atheist crowd who, you don't know anything about Jesus. He probably never even existed.

56:26

Find me a scholar who says that, a person who actually studies, because you clearly don't if you're denying Jesus' existence or certain basic facts about Jesus' life.

56:35

Paula Fredrickson, she's a convert to Judaism. So, the single most solid fact about Jesus' life is his death.

56:42

He was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate on or around Passover in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely crucifixion.

56:51

So again, they're not saying that he probably died. They're saying indisputable, historically certain, things like that.

56:58

And so, no problem there from an atheistic perspective, but there's an additional problem, namely that, oh, one more,

57:07

Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman, you always got to quote Bart Ehrman nowadays. One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the

57:13

Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. One of the most certain facts of history. This is not something that's in doubt.

57:21

So notice, that's even according to non -Christian scholars. This is not a, this, Jesus' death by crucifixion, not a matter of just belief or just a matter of faith.

57:32

This is something that's regarded even by historians as a historical fact. But you start getting to, we're going to the next one?

57:44

I have one of these in my bag. It might, I don't know if it's the computer or, oh, no, it's changing on that.

57:59

It's just the connection with the screen is off. All right,

58:05

I'll keep rolling. You tell me if they pop up. But you have the exact same thing from the exact same scholars who will talk about the appearances of Jesus to His followers.

58:20

The appearances of Jesus to His followers. These people will not believe that Jesus actually appeared to His followers, but they all agree across the board that the followers were convinced that Jesus appeared to them.

58:35

And it's because we know how the apostles died, and we know what they were preaching.

58:42

Lots of people, lots of atheists, especially when I was growing up, this is what lots of people thought.

58:48

I had a different view. I thought that they actually made it up and that it was early. But the most popular for decades was that Christianity developed by a kind of process of legendary development.

58:58

That it starts off something simple, Jesus was just a nice moral teacher, and then as several decades went on, as the decades went on, this story became, you know, embellished and lots of legends were added.

59:15

And so you get Jesus' resurrection a long time after Jesus died.

59:23

And this made sense to a lot of people for a long time. If you've got some, if you had some amazing story about Alexander the

59:30

Great performing miracles or so on, you'd say, okay, yeah, someone invented that somewhere down the line. It doesn't mean that that actually happened.

59:36

If you have several decades, if you have six, seven, eight decades, you can imagine legends developing.

59:41

For instance, our earliest historical source on the life of Muhammad is over a century after Muhammad's death.

59:47

That's a lot, that's a lot of time. You can imagine things being invented along that, along, in more than a century. Interestingly, eventually, once again, critical scholars, it's funny because the atheist and agnostic scholars are the ones kind of doing a lot of the work that, in building a case.

01:00:07

This is the earliest material in the New Testament as far as, as far as its composition. Paul quotes this in 1

01:00:13

Corinthians 15, but he's quoting something earlier. He's quoting something earlier, which is an early Christian creed.

01:00:19

And this creed, not according to me, according to atheist scholars, agnostic scholars. Now, when

01:00:25

I quote atheists and agnostic scholars, I'm not saying, oh, you need to listen to what the atheists and agnostic scholars are saying. I'm not saying that at all.

01:00:30

I'm saying when even the people who disagree with us about almost everything about Jesus say, yeah, that's indisputable, then you know you're dealing with some, some interesting material here.

01:00:40

This can be dated to within, at most, a few years of Jesus' death. And look at what it says.

01:00:48

Paul says, for I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received. So he's talking to the Corinthians, and he's telling them, hey,

01:00:53

I delivered this to you. And he's saying that he received it, and we know when he received it, from the Apostles, during his trip to Jerusalem, and it was already a creed by then.

01:01:01

So you can actually date this very early on. For I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the

01:01:10

Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the

01:01:17

Twelve. And then it goes on to the other appearances. If this works, there we go. After that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.

01:01:27

Then he appeared to James, then to all the Apostles, and last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.

01:01:32

So these little parenthetical remarks are things Paul adds. The rest of it is our earliest Christian material, our earliest

01:01:38

Christian creed that we have. And notice what you have. Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and appeared to Peter, and to James, and to others.

01:01:49

Now if this is within a few years of Jesus' death, you don't have six or seven decades to invent the story of Jesus' resurrection.

01:01:57

You have it at the very beginning. So, and I have them on here, but we don't need to go through them, but I have all the various scholars saying that this is indisputably early material here.

01:02:10

Again, even among people who reject almost everything we would say about Jesus. So this is early material, so it's not late.

01:02:18

It's at the earliest strata, and you know how they died. So you know what they were claiming.

01:02:24

You know the message that these guys were preaching, and you know that they're laying down their lives for it.

01:02:32

And so they really believed it. And so you're back to that question, what did these guys see? What did they see that convinced them that they had seen a risen man?

01:02:42

I kept thinking over and over again, what could it be? What could these guys have possibly seen that convinced all of them across the board that they had witnessed a man who had risen from the dead?

01:02:54

And I couldn't come up with anything other than resurrection. Other people have. Other people say, well maybe he wasn't really dead on the cross.

01:03:00

Those people have never studied crucifixion in their lives. Notice, all the people who studied crucifixion say, indisputable.

01:03:06

We know how crucifixion works. You don't come off of that. So people who actually studied crucifixion, indisputable historical fact.

01:03:16

So it's not just, well you know, Jesus got sleepy on the cross, passed out, and then woke up later in the tomb or something like that.

01:03:22

And if he had, they wouldn't have said, oh the risen Lord, look at him, he's crawling on the ground with blood crawling, flowing out of him.

01:03:32

So he obviously was dead, and then afterwards, what explains the appearances?

01:03:39

You can't say something like hallucination or something. By definition, a hallucination is something that occurs in someone's mind.

01:03:45

It's not out there. If you happen to see something up here that no one else sees, that's a hallucination.

01:03:51

If you're all seeing it, it's not a hallucination. And so if all the apostles think they're seeing this man raised from the dead, you're not dealing with a hallucination.

01:03:59

What did they see? And people have gone to extreme lengths, oh maybe Jesus had a long -lost twin who just conveniently showed up right after he was, that's an actual explanation that there's someone who actually defends that.

01:04:10

But if you're not willing to go to those sorts of extreme lengths, this is a problem.

01:04:17

You've got a guy who was dead, and you've got a guy who a bunch of people, a bunch of eyewitnesses say they saw him alive afterwards.

01:04:24

And again, these historians will not say, the atheists and agnostic ones will not say, yes he rose from the dead, but they're granting all the facts that you would use to say

01:04:32

I see no other explanation here other than resurrection. So that's what

01:04:37

I was stuck with. I realized that what I believed about Jesus was wrong, and that this isn't just a matter of personal faith or something like this.

01:04:46

This is based on historical facts here, and the only thing I could see was that someone had risen from the dead.

01:04:53

The only way I could explain the beliefs of the Apostles. And so the other, so there was that, and then there was one other thing as I'm going through, as I'm going through the

01:05:01

Gospel of John, I kept getting the feeling that Jesus was better than me. I'm glad that most of you would regard that as obvious.

01:05:13

I didn't. I thought I was the greatest person in humanity. I was the pinnacle. I was humanity 2 .0, not held back by my emotions and so on.

01:05:21

I'm the newest thing. Now notice that's already incoherent.

01:05:26

If everything is just matter in motion and so on, what sense does it make to say this is better than this? What sense does it make to say

01:05:33

I'm the best of us completely meaningless human people? Why? What's the standard here?

01:05:40

So I kept reading, and you know, Jesus, there's something better about him than me.

01:05:45

There's something better about him than me. And eventually it just started, it just started clicking. Why do

01:05:52

I, look at me. I'm pathetic. In a period of a couple hours of thinking about this,

01:05:58

I went from, I don't mean that, I was thinking about lots of things for a long, but thinking specifically about the moral issue. Look at me.

01:06:06

Look at what I've gotten myself into here. I'm in here for smashing a man's head in just to do it, because I didn't like what

01:06:15

I was taught. I'm sitting here starving to death. I can't stand up without falling over.

01:06:21

I have a rash all over me. I can't stop drooling. I'm the most pathetic person in the entire world.

01:06:29

And so in a couple of hours, I went from thinking that I was the best person in the world to thinking that I was the worst person in the world.

01:06:35

And once you think, once you realize that, wow, I have destroyed my life. I have nothing to look forward to.

01:06:42

I don't even really care because there's nothing, there's nothing that makes my life matter more than anything else.

01:06:49

Once you start thinking that, and everything's kind of over, but then the thought started, the thought popped into my head that there's actually two possibilities here.

01:06:58

Either I'm this awful person who doesn't care about anyone else and is just falling apart emotionally and everything else, just that's the way

01:07:12

I am, or there's someone out there who can deal with this sort of thing. And once you start thinking like that,

01:07:21

I think you're about that far away from becoming a Christian, because when you look to history, you don't find that all religions are the same.

01:07:29

You find that there is exactly one person in all of history who deals with that sort of thing. The sort of person, oh, you're a guy who walks among the tombs and gashes yourself with stones and no man can bind you and so on.

01:07:39

Hey, stop it. Oh, you did, cool. If you haven't read it, that's the story of Legion in the

01:07:45

Bible. But there's one guy, there's one guy who just takes these completely spiritually, emotionally wrecked people and can do something about it.

01:07:58

And so there's no other option, right? It's Jesus or it's nothing. This is not, hey, they all teach the same thing.

01:08:04

It's Jesus or it's nothing. And so I, after going through all of this,

01:08:10

I wasn't convinced. I saw that, hey, I hadn't thought through my worldview very carefully.

01:08:18

I built my life around there being no creator, no purpose, no meaning, therefore I can do what I want and I don't have to listen to everyone's rules, to thinking maybe

01:08:26

I've got to, maybe I jumped to some conclusions without thinking carefully about those, because I accepted things from various teachers and so on, accepted them without question, and maybe

01:08:38

I should have thought through those a bit more carefully. Believed certain things about Jesus and found out, no, actually

01:08:46

Jesus' resurrection is backed up by historical facts here. And then it really makes my entire worldview, as far as me being better and so on, is completely incoherent.

01:08:58

There's no place for being better than other things in a view where you have no meaning and no standard.

01:09:05

And if there is a standard, obviously Jesus is going to be better than me, so there's no standard, in which case

01:09:10

I'm wrong, or there is a standard, in which case I'm wrong. Either way, I'm wrong. I've got a problem here.

01:09:16

And so it's just Jesus or nothing. I thought, what have I got to lose here? What if I bow down and pray and look at this in my

01:09:24

Bible study series? What if I pray and nothing happens? It's not like I'm getting worse, right?

01:09:30

I'm already at the bottom. I'm already at the bottom of humanity. If I pray and nothing happens, at least

01:09:37

I tried that, and I've crossed that off the list of possibilities, and now I know where I am. So I leaned down on my bunk, and I prayed, and I said,

01:09:48

God, I don't know if I'm going to believe in you tomorrow, but I'll believe in you right now.

01:09:55

If you can do anything with me, you are welcome to it. And I prayed the prayer out of the little pamphlet they gave me, and I sat up from that prayer, and the entire world looked different, like everything was a different color, like I was seeing everything for the first time somehow.

01:10:17

And people talk about a feeling or feeling, you know, a weight lifted off. I had a different kind of, I did have a feeling, but I felt like I had been, like I noticed it as soon as I sat up,

01:10:25

I felt like I had been physically brawling my entire life. I've been, I've had my head stomped in the ground sometimes, but I felt like I'd been physically brawling non -stop for my entire life, and then all of a sudden,

01:10:38

I just sat down and stopped, and all the fighting stopped. And that's what it was like, and I, at this point,

01:10:46

I was like, oh, well, that's nice. Huh, maybe I'll stick with this for a little while, and eventually went off to jail and so on.

01:10:53

I have to wrap up now, but eventually went off to prison. You go from jail to prison, that's long term.

01:11:01

I was sentenced to 10 years, so I go off to prison, and I fell in love with Jesus and Paul as well.

01:11:10

All these guys loved reading about these guys. I got to a point where I was reading three to five hours a day, just the Bible, and then reading other things, and spent years doing that, and I noticed the difference in other people, the way they viewed me over time.

01:11:26

When I first got locked up, and I was sent to my second mental hospital, I was in there, and I was saying some things.

01:11:33

I'm not going to repeat here. I was saying some very nasty things, and a guard heard me, and he goes, if that's what you believe, then they have got you in the right place.

01:11:40

And I was thinking, well, I do believe that, so I guess I'm in the right place here. But that was people's reaction towards me, that you're sick if you actually believe that, and I did believe that.

01:11:51

And so some years went by, and I was walking through the dorm once, and a guy named

01:11:57

Floyd stopped me, and he said, hey Wood, I don't mean to get in your business, but a lot of us are wondering what you did to get in here.

01:12:04

We're thinking, maybe someone disrespected your girlfriend, and you stood up for her, and you hit him.

01:12:10

You hit him too hard, and they sent you to prison for it. And I was thinking, that's what you guys think about me?

01:12:16

That the only way I could end up in prison is if I'm defending a woman's honor, or something like that, because you guys see me reading my

01:12:23

Bible all the time, and you think I'm nice, and so it kind of hit me right there. Whoa, you guys think

01:12:28

I'm nice now? No one's ever thought I was nice. I was always the bad, evil person.

01:12:33

You guys think I'm nice now. And so really, really, just sitting around reading the

01:12:39

Bible all the time, had an amazing transformation. Eventually, I got out.

01:12:44

I go out, and I filled all the paperwork out to start college again when

01:12:50

I got out, and went to, went to Old Dominion University, and I end up in a hotel room with a

01:12:57

Muslim named Nabeel Qureshi, and we're in the hotel, and I'm over there praying, and I say,

01:13:05

God, if you want me to talk to this guy, please let him start it, so no one accuses me of being mean to the Muslim. And a couple seconds later, he goes, so, are you a hardcore

01:13:15

Christian? I said, yes, I am. And Nabeel started challenging,

01:13:23

Nabeel started challenging me on, oh, and you know, the Bible's been corrupted, and Jesus never did this, and Jesus never did that, and I'm just thinking, you have no clue who you're messing with, do you?

01:13:32

I just, I just spent years going through all of this. And so,

01:13:37

Nabeel and I became best friends, and we started going through the material, and so on. One day, Nabeel and I were arguing about the resurrection, and a girl heard us, and she walked up to us and said, you're both right.

01:13:49

Like, what are you talking about? And she said, because, you know, whatever you believe is kind of, you know, religious beliefs have the same status, that if you believe them, then it's kind of true for you, and, you know, it doesn't matter, reality doesn't really matter.

01:14:00

And she was an agnostic, and Nabeel and I both turned on her, like, what are you talking about? I'm saying he rose from the dead, he's saying he didn't rise from the dead.

01:14:11

Those are the only possibilities. One of us has to be right, the other has to be wrong.

01:14:16

Under no circumstances are we both right. And she was really, really mean.

01:14:22

This was, she's one of those people that will make her point, and then once you start making your point back, she starts laughing at you.

01:14:28

We loved arguing so much, we eventually got married, but there's a point to all this, by the way.

01:14:42

I really liked her, and she was an agnostic, but I had years of apologetics training, so I was zeroed in on her, like, oh, you're wrong because of this, this, and that.

01:14:51

Anyway, two weeks later, she's a Christian, and it was cool because she became friends with both me and Nabeel, so now it was like two on one with Nabeel.

01:15:01

Nabeel, extremely stubborn, so we took years, we spent years with Nabeel, going through the evidence, and eventually

01:15:10

Nabeel became a Christian, and he's been working with Ravi Zacharias for years now.

01:15:16

If you want to read that book, it's called Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, but Nabeel became a

01:15:21

Christian, and I thought, cool, I'm done with Islam, because I'd been studying

01:15:28

Islam and going through his sources just because my best friend was a Muslim. That's the reason I was studying Islam, and going through all those sources, that was it.

01:15:38

That was the only purpose. Nabeel became a Christian. I thought, cool, I can get back to dealing with atheism because I was much more interested in the arguments of atheists, and over the period of the next few years, watching

01:15:49

Nabeel take the stand that he took in the face of death threats and family issues and so on,

01:15:57

I kind of realized at some point in there, you see, Muslims have these obstacles. They're taught all their lives the unforgivable sin is to say

01:16:03

Jesus is Lord. It's called shirk, unforgivable sin in Islam. They know that if they leave

01:16:11

Islam, they're at least giving up their families, right? The family's not going to want anything to deal with, want anything to do with them after that, and the penalty in Islam for leaving

01:16:18

Islam is death. It's beheading. It doesn't get enforced much in the West, but as things get more and more radical, you always have to wonder if someone's going to come along and carry out what

01:16:27

Muhammad said is the penalty, but it's easy to look at that and be very negative about that, but the flip side is when someone says, yes,

01:16:38

I've been told all my life that this will get me sent straight to hell, and I'm going to have to give up my entire family and everything, my entire social network, and I may get my head chopped off, but I don't care because I want to know

01:16:50

Jesus. That's someone who's going to lay down his life for Jesus, and so just interesting that I've been dealing with Islam ever since, but it's just because I ended up in a room, in a hotel room with Nabil, and so like all these people who are special right now in my life, this all comes out of apologetics.

01:17:10

You young guys who want a wife, apologetics can help you get a wife.

01:17:20

Oh, but she's an agnostic. She's not right for me. No, no, no, not so quick. Give her the evidence first, and if she rejects it, then you can say, but give her the evidence first.

01:17:31

So anyway, the point here is, if it's why I believe in Christ, the situation of, hey, once you understand why you reject all other gods, you'll understand why

01:17:43

I reject yours, there's nothing like this. There's nothing like Christianity. There's nothing like Christ, not even in terms of what's claimed about it.

01:17:53

Thor does not meet these kinds of, Thor does not transform people, right? Thor does not rise from the dead.

01:17:59

Thor is part of our created order. He's not the one who sustains everything in existence.

01:18:04

Completely different sort of thing, so why do I believe in Christ? It's not, well,

01:18:10

I should reject him because he's like all the others. No, I believe in Christ because he's so clearly different from everything else, and the areas where he's different are the matters where you can investigate and find out that he is who he claimed to be, and so completely different story, and notice that if you look at the atheist objection, the atheist objection is built upon complete ignorance of these differences.

01:18:36

They don't know how Jesus is different, so the great irony in all of this, and it's the same thing

01:18:42

I found in my life, is the people who are saying, you Christians just believe what you heard and you never investigated, you just believe what you were taught to believe, the people who are saying that and sending around these memes and these quotes are people who've never investigated anything in their lives.

01:18:58

They believed what they heard. It never occurred to them to investigate any of this, and they believe by blind faith that they're right without any sort of investigation, and so that's what apologetics, that's the role of apologetics right now.

01:19:14

Show them you don't know what you're talking about. Show them, no, we actually have proof of what we believe, and if we do that,

01:19:22

I think it will change the world because I've seen, not just me, I've seen it change some very, very bad off people, and if it can do that with people looking to imagine what it can do if this all becomes common knowledge and people can no longer send around the sort of silly quotes they send.