Mama Bear Apologetics with Hillary Morgan Ferrer

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Folks, it's my tremendous pleasure to welcome our next guest.

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She is currently the vice president of Women in Apologetics, which is a Christian nonprofit dedicated to equipping, encouraging, and educating women in apologetics.

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She's also the founder of Mama Bear Apologetics, which is an apologetics resource for, let's face it, both moms and dads.

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And she's one of the authors of the book, Mama Bear Apologetics, available right now everywhere. Hilary Morgan Ferrer, welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much for having me, Nate. Well, it's a real treat to have you on. So as I told you a few minutes ago,

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I've been a fan for a little while now, and particularly because, and I've said this for so many years, but it really begins at home.

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Discipleship apologetics training begins with our children at home. I'm a dad, and so I've benefited from your ministry, and I'm just really glad to have you.

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Well, thank you so much. It's always good to hear. So speaking of that, we're just going to jump right in because the focus is your latest book,

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Mama Bear Apologetics. Logan actually is going to start us off with some questions.

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So Logan, go ahead. Absolutely. Well, thank you for coming on the show. I'm also a fan, so I'm really excited to get to do this.

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So the first question I wanted to ask is, the book makes a really great argument for why we should be pro -apologetics, but I was wondering, picking a church and thinking about your church strengths is a multifaceted thing.

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So if a family is at a church that is strong in theology, community, and discipleship, but they really devalue or really don't see the value in apologetics, what do you think could happen to that family's faith in an environment like that?

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And how can a family kind of compensate for that in that scenario? First off, if you are at a church that's strong in theology and community and discipleship,

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I think that's a pretty good church to start out with because there's a lot of churches that really, they just don't even get into theology at all.

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It's like you almost can't do apologetics if you're weak in theology. But I think this really brings up the topic of this kind of discipleship starts at home.

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So it's, we can't be relying on the church to be taking over all our discipleship. So if the church is lacking in some area, this is where parents say, you know what, this is my family, and I'm going to teach them what they need to know in order to have a strong faith.

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Now, that being said, I think there's a lot of people, in fact, most apologists that I talk to have stories of coming from churches that really don't get apologetics.

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In fact, John and I for years would have, we would tell, you know, people ask, oh, what do you do?

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We would say we were into apologetics. And at church events, you'd see them physically recoil. And they would immediately start coming up with all these, well, you can't argue people into the kingdom and, you know, you just really need to love.

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And if you knew everything, you wouldn't, it wouldn't require faith. You name it. We've heard it. We kind of, it kind of turned, apologetics was like this, what's it from the

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Princess Bride? The Cliffs of Insanity. Nobody goes there. It's like, and all these, all these excuses for not doing that.

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So I honestly think it's just a matter of time before church to start really understanding. I think they kind of had the luxury of not being into apologetics.

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And especially with, you know, the last couple of weeks, we've had two fairly well -known, well, one of them was well -known.

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One of them, his organization was well -known. Christian leaders come out and say that they were walking away from the faith.

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And one of them in particular, the one from Hillsong, basically listed off this entire list of things that apologists are talking about constantly, but followed each question with nobody's talking about this.

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And of course, the apologetics community kind of jumped on that and said, this is what we're like banging down the church door, trying to get them to realize.

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And so I think we're going to start seeing more and more stories like that. We see in scripture, it talks about the great apostasy that's going to be happening in the end times.

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I kind of think we're starting to see that happen. And I think people are starting to wake up and realizing, oh, this is causing people to leave the faith.

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Maybe we should start doing something about that. That and the statistics for the youth exodus, which we have throughout the entire, the entire chapter one.

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And we did that purposely because a lot of times people can think, oh, this is a hobby horse or this is something only professionals do until they look at the statistics and they think, holy cow, maybe

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I should do this with my kids. And that was kind of the purpose of having it in chapter one. Yeah.

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That sounds great. It's definitely a great foundation. You get into some really interesting culture stuff too.

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One of those is the term linguistic theft. So I was wondering if you might unpack that a little bit, because you talk about how the culture sometimes takes certain words that might be biblical words, but then applies a different meaning to them.

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I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and then also talk about when we're, we at A Clear Lens, we tried to talk a lot about practical navigating conversations with people we disagree with.

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So I was wondering what your advice would be if we're facing a situation and we realize that we're using these different definitions.

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How do we determine, okay, this is going to be a sort of my hill to die on, so to speak.

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And what's your approach in those kinds of scenarios? First off, when you're having these conversations there, there's a quote by,

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I believe it's Voltaire that I've always loved that says, if you wish to converse with me, define your terms. And being married for almost 13 years, one of the things my husband and I realized is that a lot of times when we were having arguments, we would finally come to the realization that we weren't actually disagreeing.

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We were saying the same thing in different ways. And so when you don't define your terms and it's like you're going to, you can be talking right past each other when you might actually agree.

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Secondly, Dennis Prager has something that he says that he would prefer clarity over agreement. It's like.

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People a lot of times are saying, oh, we have to agree. But if you can at least be clear on what the other position is, you've actually got that's like the starting place that you need to begin with.

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So we define linguistic theft in the book as purposely taking words. And a lot of times this happens with Christian words,

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Christian virtues, taking them into secular culture, redefining it and then putting it back onto the

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Christian. Now that it's redefined to mean something that scripture never intended and said, your Bible says you're supposed to believe in love.

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You're supposed to believe in justice. You know, you're supposed to be against hate and against oppression, oppression. That's what your

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Bible says. And so but now that they have redefined it, now they can try to make you swallow an agenda that the

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Bible would never support because they have changed this word on you. And while I don't think there's necessarily like the phrase he'll die on,

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I think can sometimes be confusing because honestly, you can only die once. And if I'm going to die once, I'm going to make it sure that it's because someone has a gun in my face and they're saying, you know, say that you don't believe in God.

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And I'm going to say, I can't. I do believe in God. And that's a hill worth dying on. Now, a secondary issue would be what are things worth dividing over?

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And this is something that I actually wrote about today, this this concept of unity, the concept of unity, which we are called to have throughout scripture.

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And again, this is another linguistically thefted word because you hear calls for unity all the time, but you never hear people define what we're unifying over.

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And the concept of unity actually entails division because in order to be unified, you have to be divided from its opposite in order to be, you know, if we're going to be unified around the

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Christian message, that means we have to be divided from a non -Christian message. And so if you hear people talking about unity, you need to ask them, what are they talking about that we're unified over?

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But in terms of what is something like if we were going to say hill worth dying on, if there was like one word that I said,

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OK, this is the word that if we can't let anything else go, we can't let this one go. And I would say that is love.

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And the reason is because when when Jesus is talking in the scripture, he says all of the law can be boiled down into two commands.

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Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. If you miss out on the actual definition of love, you've missed the entire point of scripture.

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And so that one, I think, is probably one of the most important ones. And we we do discuss that one in the Mama Bear book, how love has been redefined as this kind of Namby Pamby sort of anything that makes someone uncomfortable is unloving.

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And in order to love, you have to agree with everything that someone says. And you have to affirm everything they say to which

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I would have to answer if if love means that you have to agree with everything that a person thinks is them or everything that they believe.

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God couldn't love any of us because there is not a single one of us that he agrees completely with. So we know that can't be the definition.

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So I would say if there was one worth dying on, it would be that. And you had a couple other compound questions in there.

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I'm trying to remember what they were. So basically, I was wondering what your advice would be for how to navigate these once we recognize, hey, this person is using this completely other definition, kind of how to navigate that in a winsome fashion, how to bring up, well, we're kind of using different definitions here without it kind of just devolving into a nasty argument.

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Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, you can definitely you know, someone can turn into the finger pointer and say, you're using that word wrong.

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And of course, then, you know, fight or flight kicks in and nobody's thinking clearly at that point. And it's just a bad situation.

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I would just say this kind of goes back to Greg Coco's tactics of asking questions of just being you can't or, you know, if the princess bride, if you prefer, you keep using that word.

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I don't think it means what you think it means. We're just just saying, you know, you keep using that word. So how would you define that and let them tell you?

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And this is where the Dennis Prager quote, prefer clarity over agreement, really clarify where they are in order to answer a person.

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You have to know what they're saying in the first place. If you try to answer them before you know what they're saying, they're just going to get frustrated because you either keep mischaracterizing them or you're answering a question they don't have or you're rebutting an argument they're not making.

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All of those are going to basically shut the conversation down. So your number one goal to start out with is to clarify what is it they believe, what is it that they are saying?

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Because a lot of times once you start asking questions, you can actually find a lot of holes in their logic just by asking questions, because outside of the

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Christian world view, there's a lot of incoherence. And so if you can learn how to spot that incoherence and ask it really gently in questions now, you can't do the question where it sounds like, you know, you're leading the witness and you're trying to make a point by asking a question.

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I often say that I think this is kind of easier as a woman because I can be like, oh, that's interesting. I don't quite understand what you're saying with that.

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Could you clarify? I must not be understanding that. You know, I won't be, you know, sometimes

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I'll get that bimboish, but most of the time I won't. I kind of do it.

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But it's easy to kind of play dumb sometimes. And even though it sounds silly, sometimes playing dumb is like one of the best things you can do because you want to get that person feeling comfortable with you.

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And you can you can there's a lot a lot that goes along with self -deprecating humor where you say,

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I don't know at all. I'm not understanding what you're saying. And then they become the teacher who doesn't want to be the teacher to help you understand what they're trying to say.

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My dad used to tell me, you know, let someone talk about themselves and they'll come away saying it was the best conversation they ever had.

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And and so like trying to get someone to clarify what they're meaning, that's that's kind of what you're doing. You're respecting them as a person.

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You're respecting their mind. And it's giving you a way to where you know exactly what it is they believe.

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So you can counter it with the right questions. And then we'll actually expose maybe a faulty worldview behind it.

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Yeah, yeah. That sounds like some fantastic advice there. So speaking of all the

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Princess Bride references, you can tell that the culture part of the book is what I latched on to.

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So you also talk some in the book about approaches to culture, especially stories in culture, so movies especially, but also applying to other media.

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And you talk about having a chew and spit tactic as opposed to, you know, just rejecting anything that we disagree with.

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Unless it's on Pure Flix, I won't watch it kind of thing. Exactly. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the chew and spit method, kind of unpack that for our listeners.

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And also, I'm wondering if you could talk some about how we can keep our children from swallowing something that we intend for them to spit, if that makes sense.

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Yeah, no, that makes total sense. So the chew and spit method. So I compare that in the book to and again,

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I want to clarify right now that this really depends on what age your children are. There's a certain age where you do need to protect them from things.

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You don't need to be introducing things because the age when they're just straight up sponges, that's the time to protect.

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It's when they're starting to actually synthesize information. That's when you can start in the chew and spit. And this may be different ages for different kids.

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So as long as they're in that sponge mood, yeah, just safe and dangerous. You may not watch that.

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You can watch this, but not that. You don't want to start desensitizing them to things. So I just want to say that to start out with.

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And I compare it to like chewing and not chewing. That's gross. Cutting up your kid's food for them, chewing your kid's food.

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That's gross. It'd be like cutting up your kid's food for them at a certain point. That's a that's it's necessary.

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They can't use a knife. They don't know how to do that. But there's a certain age where they need to cut their own food and they need to know how to feed themselves.

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So the chew and spit method is kind of negating the all safe and all dangerous method.

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And I know that this is something that I know my generation grew up with a lot where there was just straight up things that you could and couldn't watch.

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And I think Amy, my new podcast host, mentioned a while back that she remembers how it's like basically if there wasn't what's the word?

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If it wasn't like really graphic sex and lots of language, then it was fine to watch. And she had several friends that got their entire world view from watching

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Friends and Gilmore Girls, which is not a great place to get your worldview from, even though those would technically be safe, according to the 1980s definition, you know, 80s, 90s definition of safe.

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It was not not a great place to get your worldview. So the chew and spit method is recognizing that you're going to have truth and you're going to have error in basically everything that you encounter.

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Now, there are certain things that are just straight up poison. I'm going to say that there is nothing redeeming in porn.

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That's that's a pure spit. You know, don't even go there. There's nothing redeeming you can get from that song. The obvious things aside,

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I would say most media has kind of chew and spit things that you can get from it. And sometimes you have to wait in there and figure out is it does this have anything redeeming in it?

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It looks like someone's asking a question of what age that I think that they start putting things together.

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This would really depend on your kid. I know for me it probably happened earlier than other kids.

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I think a pretty safe age is somewhere between nine and 12. It's where you see them. I think you can kind of know where they are, by what kinds of questions they're asking.

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Are they asking the really black and white questions of, you know, what is this? What is that? Why is the sky blue?

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But once you start hearing them asking synthesis questions, then that's when you know,

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OK, I can start going into these more synthesis kind of things. So the chew and spit just acknowledges that there is messages and everything and there's going to be some good messages and some bad messages.

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And instead of teaching kids to either accept everything and something or reject everything, you're teaching them how to spot what's good and what's bad.

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What I kind of use hand motions, I say identify the good, identify the bad. Accept the good, reject the bad.

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And that is basically if you want to put it into a box, that's what the chew and spit is. Man, that is so good.

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And what I really love about the methodology coming out is, you know, when you get when you give those practical tips, they really are child oriented.

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I have a seven year old and a three year old. And so I immediately saw the application pieces that could go to my boys.

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And that's again, that's the value of a book like this. So if we haven't mentioned this quite yet for our listeners, for the viewers, you need to go get

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Mama Bear Apologetics. This is a really great book. I was telling I was telling Hillary, I got an advance copy.

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So it's right here. And my wife grabbed it out of my fingers and I didn't see it for about a week and a half because she went through the entire book and marked it up and inaugurated it and told all her lady friends at church.

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And it's been such a blessing. So I love hearing that. So let's go to chapter six now.

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So these might be some areas that our listeners would be familiar with having heard our show, having already consumed apologetics to a degree.

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But that application piece for children is so vital. You talk about the lies of naturalism in chapter six.

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What are some of those lies and how can we protect our kids from those lies?

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Yeah. So first off, I want to say that we went through three different titles or subtitles for this one. We weren't sure if we should be addressing naturalism, materialism or scientism.

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So all three of these are very similar. So I'm just going to go real quick about kind of what the differences are between those.

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Naturalism is just the belief that natural causes alone are sufficient to explain the complexity that we see in the world.

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Materialism is the belief that only material things are real. So, you know, the concept of spirits and the concept of God, none of that stuff is real.

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And even if it is, we can't study it. So don't even try. Materialist naturalism brings those two together, makes this beautiful baby of all we have is the material world and natural causes are all that can happen with them.

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And then finally, scientism is the belief that says that we can't know anything. This is called epistemology.

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It's how you get your knowledge. We can't know anything for sure unless we can test it with the scientific method.

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So kind of all these concepts are in in this one chapter. This is a hard chapter to put into thirty two hundred words.

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I mean, there's like, I mean, hundreds, thousands of books written about this. You know, like you could take one one sentence out of the book and that's a thesis of somebody else's 400 page book.

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So condensing this was quite a challenge and I'm very proud of how it turned out. But so one of you are

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OK, what were you asking was what's one of the major lies of that? Right, right. I think one of the biggest ones that I think is well, it's not like it is one of the biggest ones, but I think it's also one of the easiest ones to refute.

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And it comes back to the question that every single child is going to ask at some point, which is who made God. And it comes back to the idea of origins.

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And so everybody is going to go back to origins and everybody has a belief about origins. You have people who believe in multiverse, which is this idea that there is literally a multiverse generator that generates all these universes and all of them have different constants, meaning, you know, different gravities, different cosmological constants, different acceleration speeds, just everything that you have at the beginning.

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They're all different. We happen to be in the lucky universe where all the constants are fine tuned for life.

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This is how people get around what's called the fine tuning problem, which is the idea that it appears that life was that the universe and all the constants were very fine tuned for life as we know it.

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Now, what happens with this is people will answer all these scientific, you know, so called scientific ways for how the universe began versus this idea that in the beginning

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God and what what they say is, well, we have science, you have faith. Well, that's not the case.

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They are starting out with a philosophical concept and we're starting out with a philosophical concept.

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So one of my main points in the book is don't let someone tell you that their philosophical concept is more scientific than their work, philosophical concept.

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It's something called the first cause. They neither of you can have a more provable first cause because we can't go back and recreate this.

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And so I think once kids can realize, oh, well, even no matter what they say, it's coming back to and I go through this in the book, you're always coming back to something that is self -existent, eternal, uncreated and has the is has the capacity to create.

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Those are our three kind of things that have to exist for whatever first cause you postulate that it's it's uncreated, it's self -existent and it's capable of creating.

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That sounds a whole lot like God. But every single thing, I kid you not, everything anybody postulates still comes back to those three things.

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They just say it's something else. So it's like, OK, so the multiverse generator. So you're saying the multiverse generator has been eternal, it's self -sufficient and it's capable of creating.

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How is that more scientific than my view of God? It's not. And so this is one of those things that you don't have to have a

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Ph .D. level knowledge to be able to refute. As John Lennox, I like how

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John Lennox says, you know, nonsense is nonsense. Even when spoken by famous scientists, we have a whole podcast on this that's how educated you have to be to spot nonsense.

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So I recommend going and listening to that podcast because it's all about basically chapter six of this idea of who created

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God. And we've got a question on the on here. It says, I like her quote on page 17.

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Cultural lies are like weeds that want to take over. True. Not just for our kids either.

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Hey, it's true, man. Culture is lies. They take over and they just spread. It's funny how lies spread so much faster than truth, isn't it?

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Oh, yes. Even these really I hope I'm not giving too much away, but, you know, these little little things again,

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I have a seven year old and a three year old, so I'm thinking along those lines. Have your kids draw a picture and when they're done, ask them, how did that picture get there?

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Was it you or was it the crayon? You know, this is brilliant. This is brilliant stuff.

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You're driving the point home, but it's really much more amenable.

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It's much more digestible. Very concrete for them. Very concrete. And I actually did. I have a blog on this and I think it's dispelling the

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God versus science myth, but I actually did this with a group of third through fifth graders and I did two things with them.

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Number one, I had them all draw pictures and I said, how did it get there? Was it the crayon or was it you? And of course they were all like, oh, you know.

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And so we were able to talk about how it was both. It's like there's there's material causes, but there's also a mind behind it.

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And then I had another piece of paper that I had. Literally, I took a bunch of markers and took the tops off and I put it in a drawer and I shook it up a whole bunch because every parent has this drawer that, you know, that all the crayons go and all the markers go and there's some piece of paper there at the bottom that you pull out that's just marked all up.

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You know, no one's going to use this piece of paper. So I took I said, let me see someone's picture. And I took one of the kids pictures and I was like, this is beautiful.

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What is this? And then I held up my picture that I had gotten from the the the box that was shaken with the markers.

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I said, well, look, I was able to get this by just shaking around markers. I mean, there's not that big of a difference between this and this is there.

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You know, why do you have to say a person is required to draw this picture when obviously I can get markings on paper?

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And so we were able to talk about the idea, you know, being able to talk about specified complexity to a bunch of third graders.

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I mean, that's that's that I love breaking it down to that. And they were able to see that so that in the future, when someone tells them, oh, it's just the same thing on a bigger level.

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They're like, hmm, I remember hearing this analogy before. And yeah, that doesn't make sense. So I think put it in a real concrete way is helpful for kids.

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I really appreciate your teacher brain, you know, just recognizing that as being somebody like you.

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But and this is probably, you know, the antithesis of of. Providing, you know, working through these things and getting kids thinking along these lines.

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These are complex issues. This is the antithesis of giving a simple answer. And this kind of leads into my question.

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So in Chapter nine, I'm going to read a quote, says, quote, One of the biggest challenges we face as parents is wanting to have simple answers for our kids.

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What often happens is we give platitudes, standalone Bible verses or what I lovingly call bumper sticker wisdom.

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And we coldly state the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it and go no further. This kind of reasoning assumes a premodern mindset.

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And we are in post postmodern times. Appealing to authority does nothing to convince people of truth.

25:38

Amen. OK, excellent point. Can you explain a little bit more, though, why giving these little simple answers is such a bad strategy?

25:47

Well, I think what it does when you give the simple answers, it tells the kids they don't have to think about this. And life is not simple.

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The moral I mean, this is in the moral relativism chapter. And one of the things that we emphasize in there is the moral landscape is not a simple place to navigate.

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It's not cut and dry and it's not black and white. I mean, there's certain things that are black and white. But just because certain things are black and white doesn't mean everything is black and white.

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In fact, I think I get on people for, you know, just because you find evidence of black and white here. You can't say everything's black and white.

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We have this kind of all or nothing mindset. And I think we naturally do that just because it's easier than having to really think through things.

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And let's be honest. I mean, it's life is complicated enough without having to parse through so many things.

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We we pick up kind of almost like defense mechanisms to simplify our life because our lives are so complex.

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But we have to realize that when it comes to our faith in God, this is not something that we can simplify. God is not a simple

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God. He is a complex God. And he's complicated and it's confusing sometimes.

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And that's why we're going to be able to be with him for eternity and never get bored because there's always something to learn.

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But specifically going down to my notes here. Also, when you're teaching kids to follow authority, this is this again, this is good at a certain age when you're their authority.

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But as they start getting older, they're going to start having other authority. So if what you have trained them is obey authority, you're not going to guarantee that you're always going to be the authority in their life.

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So what are you going to do when they go off and they get new authorities? This is what we see happen with kids in college who have now transferred all the kind of authority from their parents onto their professors.

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And since they have been trained to just go along with what authority says, authority is right. Now that they have a new authority, they're going to go with what that authority says.

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And at that point, I think parents are left kind of kicking themselves in the pants thinking, what did I do wrong?

27:46

Well, you taught your kids to follow authority, not to actually think critically. Yeah, those are terrific points.

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We are getting close to the end of our interview. So, Haylor, I want to just thank you again for coming on.

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And I want to point out before I get into my questions that you've given us two references to The Princess Bride.

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So you already have double thumbs up for me. I've got that whole movie memorized. All right.

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So chapter 10, I want to ask you a question. This is the chapter you talk about, emotionalism. You have a portion in each chapter, by the way, for our audience that's called

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ROAR, where you kind of give some practical application tips. I don't want to kind of spill the beans on what that stands for or anything.

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But in the ROAR portion of this chapter, you point out that one of the messages of emotionalism is that we can't control our own emotions.

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And you say that we might be the first generation that has broadly accepted this idea that emotions can't be controlled.

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So take us into that world. Like what happens down the road? Break down for us what happens if we completely buy into this message?

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Yeah, there's a quote that I can't remember it right now. It was by a psychologist who was a behaviorist.

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I'm trying to think of who it was. But it was along the lines of once a person stops being able to control their own emotions, they have to control the actions of others.

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And it's this idea that I can't control my own emotions. You're the one who is,

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I'm just reacting to what you're doing. And so in order to keep my emotions in check, since I can't control them,

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I need to control your actions. And we see this happening everywhere with trigger warnings and with safe spaces and with, um, nobody can cope with negative emotions anymore because they have bought into the lie that they can't.

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And so if you really truly believe you can't do something, you're not going to put a lot of effort into trying to do something.

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Um, but again, I think we're really the first generation that has bought into this lie because all of culture is based on this idea that, you know, we'll put up with a temper tantrum from a two -year -old because we know that they haven't learned to control their own emotions.

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Now we're a culture that is allowing temper tantrums from college students because the college students have bought into this lie that they can't control their emotions.

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And people are just bowing to it because it's like, it's just like sometimes, I guess with the temper tantrum with the two -year -old, sometimes you just don't even know what to do.

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And so you, you know, the bad choice there is to placate it or to give in. And then that's positive reinforcement of,

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Oh, if I act like this, I get my way. We've essentially taught an entire generation that if you come out and act like this, you will get your way.

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But if they're not necessarily doing it, they don't think of themselves, excuse me, as throwing a temper tantrum.

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They see it as proclaiming their truth. And one of the points in emotionalism is that since we have done away with basically all means of knowing truth, all we're left with is strength of one's emotions.

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And if I can't get you to agree with something based on my argument, I'm going to say it louder so that you can feel how much

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I really believe this. And the strength of my emotion is going to be the thing that convinces you. And we see people using this as a valid reasoning tactic.

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And it's like, Oh my gosh, this is what I call it. I think I even talk about in the book when you go into all caps mode, when someone's like, you didn't believe what

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I said before. If I go into all caps now, you're going to really see how much I mean it. And it's just, it's irrational.

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It's illogical. And we need to be teaching our kids from early on.

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This is not how you make decisions and this is not how you determine truth. Yeah. It's as though the stronger you feel about something, the more it's true.

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And so you just are louder and expressive. That's exactly what people have bought into. And they really truly believe that's how you come to find truth.

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And so we, that's why you have these people with these shouting matches because they're each trying to up each other in emotion and whoever can have the most

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Epic emotion possible, they're the winner of the argument. And so, I mean, that just leads to chaos.

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Yep. So I want to kind of turn a little bit of a hard corner here and go straight to chapter 13, where you talk about Marxism.

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And I thought this was a really cool inclusion in your book. And I really appreciated your approach to it.

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Um, one thing you said though, kind of like struck me and it was something that I recognized just talking to friends and seeing how people talk online and everything, but you phrased it in such a way that it made more sense.

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And something that you said was that, uh, some Marxist ideas sound gospel driven.

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And I think that rings true in a lot of churches today and many in the faith that I'm friends with. And in my experience,

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I think that justice and equality are what draw people into Marxist ideas, the alleged equality.

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From your vantage point though, in your studies of Marxism and how it, the detriments of it, uh, what is it about Marxism that appeals to some

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Christians? Is it all justice and equality or are there other things and where does it go wrong?

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Um, I think that everybody's strength is also their biggest weakness. So I'm going to start out broad and saying that.

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And so I think, uh, there are certain ways of doing politics that are very pragmatic.

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And we do this because this is what works and it doesn't necessarily include as much the humanitarian aspect that we are called in scripture to include, which is, um, but at the same time, it was never government that was supposed to think be the driving force behind that.

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It was supposed to be churches. And it was supposed to be the God's people in Christians that were the driving force behind helping the cause of the oppressed.

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And it's standing up for the, the, you know, we can say the, the widow and the orphan, but I would say we have metaphorical widows and orphans.

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Now it's like, it doesn't have to be just a literal widow and orphan. Um, and so we, it's like, you have these two extremes that are reacting and against each other.

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When I, I hopefully this makes sense. I've said to someone, whenever you have two very different points of view, you actually have four very different points of view because what you're going to have is you're going to have the two different points of view that are moderate and that the two that are extreme and the ones that are moderate versus extreme on the same side right now, at least during our culture are as different as the two moderate views are from each other.

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Does that, does that make sense? Yes, it does. And so what we have is we have these two extremes that are constantly reacting to one another.

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Uh, and I think, uh, Elisa has it in her progressive Christianity that it's kind of like the

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Newton's cradle where you have the, you know, the, the row of metal balls and you do one and it clinks the other like that.

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So you have these two extremes that are constantly reacting. So I think when people have a certain virtue that is the one that they're the most gifted with, and I'm going to say the people that maybe have the virtues of compassion and mercy and they see certain, um, certain ways maybe that government is acting or certain, certain situations they see people are oppressed and they get, it goes back to the emotions of it.

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If this person is downtrodden, if this person doesn't have as much as the next person, they look just merely at appearances of this person doesn't have as much as that person.

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Although there are, there are legitimate times. Like I think that Marxism actually started out with a bunch of legitimate critiques and usually what you're going to have with almost any of these bad ideas is you're going to have a legitimate critique that then answers their critique in the wrong way.

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Um, and I think Marxism is one of those things where it does find a legitimate critique, but it answers it in a completely wrong way.

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But unless we recognize the legitimate critique that they're making, then we're going to be talking past each other.

35:38

So within Marxism, it is just this general idea of equality, oppression, and, um, and uh, yeah, it's mainly those on equality, oppression and fairness, kind of all those different things.

35:51

Yeah. Um, and it can sound like that's what the gospel is after, but that it's such a more complicated landscape that their solutions actually end up destroying all good that was being, being had by the other system.

36:05

It's hard to say. I'm trying to boil this down. It's hard to say without having someone have read the Marxism chapter, but is that making sense?

36:12

No, it is. And I think, I think in the chapter, you do a good job of outlining what the positive critiques were in Marxism and in the whole system and how it uses things like socialism and communism to sort of write those in certain ways, but then ways it falls short.

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So I think, I think you do a good job of laying that out in that chapter. I would, uh, again, I was very happy to see that included in there as a nice little sort of political side of it that, uh, maybe isn't necessarily always included or always thought of in these kinds of books.

36:43

So that was a fun, fun fact for that one. That wasn't in the original book proposal. Um, it wasn't until we got into a lot of the postmodernism and the feminism that Marxism got so obvious that I was like, we actually scrapped one of our other chapters to do the

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Marxism chapter. Um, because I felt like we had to do it because it's so prevalent.

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And I almost feel like it was practically prophetic now with all this stuff that's coming out with socialism and Marxism, but I'm like,

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Ooh, I'm glad that we included that. But again, I think within Marxist rhetoric, they're identifying a legitimate desire to do, uh, what scripture calls us to do, but they're placing that responsibility onto the government and they're finding the ideas of equality and justice.

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Like even one of the pictures that I've seen, I don't know if you've seen this where it tries to show the difference between equality and justice.

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And it has a short guy, a middle height guy, and a tall guy all trying to look over a fence. And you put the same size little milk carton underneath them.

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The short guy still can't see over the fence. The middle guy can barely see and the tall guy can really see.

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And they say that's equality. But then justice would be giving the little guy a larger carton, the middle guy, middle carton, the tall guy, a shorter carton.

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So now they're all the same height. This would be the difference between equality of access and equality of outcome. But what, what people don't realize with that, with that icon is that if you're putting an entire people group in the category of the short guy, you are literally saying that this people group is less than it's like,

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I don't think they realize that that itself is a, yeah, I don't want to use the racist card.

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Cause it's like, it's so overused. But if you've said this entire demographic demographic of people is inherently inferior and unable to reach a certain place, that's, that's, that's not a view of humanity that you really want to be proposing.

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I've seen that that's quite a popular cartoon in like the teaching world.

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So I've seen that quite a bit. And a lot of teachers are really proud to show that off. But I had the same reaction.

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Well, we have reached the end of our interview with you. Again, I'm going to recommend the book, their apologetics.

39:01

It is available everywhere and you really should go out and grab a copy of it. Grab one.

39:06

As a matter of fact, we are going to give somebody a lucky person, a free chance to win a copy of mama bear apologetics.

39:14

Absolutely for free. So simply go to our Facebook page and write a recommendation.

39:20

You can find the recommendation option on our Facebook page. And when you do, you will automatically enter into a drawing to win a free copy of mama bear apologetics.

39:28

And then what you'll do is you'll give that free copy away and go buy 10 more. So that's how that works.

39:34

I love the way you think. So our guest tonight is the author of mama bear apologetics, the founder of that ministry.

39:42

And for more, go to mama bear apologetics .com. Hillary Morgan for air. Thanks so much for chatting with us.

39:48

Thank you for having me. Well, it's such a pleasure. And that's all the time that we have for now friends. We sincerely hope that you take something that you heard and use it to make