October 18, 2005

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll-free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Opening Remarks and Audience Response

Well, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line. It seems like we've missed a few, but we didn't. I was just gone up in Omaha, Nebraska, where it was nice and warm while we were up there, which was sort of a bummer, actually.

If you go to Omaha, you want to be a little bit on the cold side. But then again, it wouldn't have been a whole lot of fun to be riding that nice big Harley in 40-degree temperatures. So, hey, what can we say?

I'd like to welcome all of the Muslims who are listening. My email box indicates that there are quite a number of Muslims who are listening. I'm not exactly certain how many of them are listening with an open mind or open heart or open ears from some of the things that have been sent to me.

I have discovered that within the Islamic apologetics community, you have much the same kind of situation you have on this side of the religious divide, and that is you have folks like Ruckman and Ripplinger on our side of things that aren't exactly dealing with facts overly well, and the same thing is true.

On the Islamic side, you have lots of folks who are very long on assertions and very, very, very, very short on facts and very short on the ability to listen and interact on a scholarly level. And so it has been interesting to see some of the emails that have been sent to me.

It seems that Sam Shamoon definitely has his fan club out there. That is that people who just engage in ad hominem argumentation, that's the only way they can deal with it. I'm used to that myself. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

So nothing overly exciting about that. But we continue with our review of the debate between Sam Shamoon and Shabir Ali. We have been listening to Shabir Ali's opening statement, starting and stopping, and responding to assertions that are being made demonstrating the double standards, the misuse of resources, and we continue with that on the program today.

We are about 34 minutes into the first of the MP3s. I have the right one queued up this time, unlike last time. And we're just about to hear an exceptionally weak attack upon the doctrine of the Trinity, and we'll be responding to that.

So let's continue on with Shabir Ali. So there you have what I would consider to be a, you know, it just makes me wonder how anyone can utilize that kind of extremely simplistic argumentation and yet be the one who says I want scholarly interchange.

If you want scholarly interchange, then he needs to demonstrate some understanding, some knowledge of the subject that he's addressing. On Sunday morning, in about 42 or 43 minutes, I covered my entire opening Trinity presentation for the folks up at Omaha Bible Church.

And when I got to the end, I asked the pastor, Mike, or Pat Avendroth. Mike Avendroth is the church back in Massachusetts, and Pat's in Omaha, and I've gone to both twice now, so that's why I keep doing that.

Pat and Mike Avendroth. Anyways, I asked Pat, I said, so have you ever had anyone teach a Bible study lesson in your church who spoke faster for 42 or 43 minutes than I just did? And he said, I don't think so.

We went through it very, very quickly, but of course, one of the primary issues that we addressed was the definition of the doctrine of the Trinity, which doesn't seem that Shabir Ali, it would be hard for me to not believe that Shabir Ali at least knows what the definition is, and that he knows that we distinguish between being and person.

And I would like to think that he would know that he is assuming Unitarianism over against Trinitarianism without proving it. He quotes passages that are in support of monotheism as if they are in support of Unitarianism.

Those are not the same things. And if you're really going to want to make any type of impact, if you actually honor the truth and want to speak the truth, and if you think you believe the truth, then why don't you deal with the best the other side has to offer in that way?

Again, whenever we view so many attacks upon the Christian faith, whether it be Dave Hunt or someone attacking Calvinism, or whether it's a Muslim attacking the doctrine of the Trinity, why not deal with what actually is there?

The only reason not to do that is because you don't have the truth. That's the only reason to do that. Why not deal with the fact that we distinguish between being and person? And if you want to say you can't make that distinction, well, then make the argument.

But don't just simply ignore it. Don't just simply ignore the definition of the doctrine itself. When Shabir Ali says, well, no one has satisfactorily explained. Well, actually, it's been explained satisfactorily many, many, many times.

Do I think that he's read Warfield on the Trinity? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that the explanation is not there. That does not mean that it has not been explained very, very clearly. When he says satisfactorily, obviously what he's referring to is satisfactorily to him in the sense of allowing him to accept it, which given the fact he then quotes from the Koran, which says do not say three.

Well, we don't say three. We don't say there are three gods. There is only one true God who exists eternally in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There are not three gods.

And so we don't say three. So I guess the Koran wasn't talking about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity then. When it used those terms, even though that's the assumption that is made by many, many people today.

So obviously a very brief reference by Ali. There will be more of this that will come up later on. But that very brief reference was really reprehensible. It really was very, very poor, very, very weak, and really was a waste of time on that level, at least if he's attempting, honestly, to do anything other than to excite his own base.

If he's actually attempting to talk to Christians and convince them that their belief in the doctrine of the Trinity is an error, any knowledgeable Christian would find that, well, simply insulting, let alone would any knowledgeable Christian ever find that to be a compelling argument in any way.

Now, wherever you heard that one before, anyone who has listened to the debate between myself and John Dominic Crossan knows that this, again, is just somewhat of a less scholarly, less polished, less clear presentation of the concept that in point of fact what you have in the four Gospels is only one stream of tradition and that the idea is that you take that stream of tradition and you alter it and you vary it over time.

That becomes the apologetic approach of the Jesus Seminar against the conservative Christianity and here by a Muslim against Christianity as a whole. Does he seek to attempt to prove this? No, he does not.

Does he just simply assume this by quoting various liberal Christian scholars? Yes, he does. Does he respond to any of the conservative discussions of the relationship of the Gospels or anything like that?

Not to my knowledge, at least not in what I've listened to him saying so far, and instead he just simply re-quotes the same sources over and over and over again using that as his primary weapon against basically any passage you would cite from the New Testament, especially from the Gospels in regards to the teachings of Christ.

He can simply dismiss that as the later thoughts of a later writer. Of course, the problem is that the Injil that Muhammad would have had would have been those four Gospels. That Gospel message would have been found in those four Gospels and as we've pointed out before, it is the assumption of the modern Muslim apologist after the period of Islamic expansion that you have this kind of development and this kind of attack upon the New Testament itself.

So that means those Christians are very fond of it.

Of course, the assumption there being that John is the last of the four Gospels, that he's the last written, and hence the information in it has evolved over time. The idea that something could be written that far, and of course the assumption being it was not written by the Apostle John, but the assumption that something could be written that far down the road and still contain primary source material is not difficult to believe, but it is not obviously this is something that they themselves want to attempt to dispute.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hello, what on earth?

Oh, all right, well we will have to... I thought I'd turn that off and I was pretty certain I had. I don't know if it just reinstalled itself or just what, but that was a nice sound. Somebody wants to talk with you.

I guess so. That was my weather thing warning us. Isn't it funny? It's now warning us when we just got shellacked about ten minutes ago.

That's about a half an hour late, isn't it?

That's great, isn't it? Hey, look out, you got nailed half an hour ago. Thank you very much for the weather service at that point.

Either that or that's the heresy meter on your computer there, and it's saying I can't take any more. I can't take any more of that, I don't know.

I know that after it did that, I don't know, six months ago, I went and turned it off, and so the fact that it's turned itself back on may mean that I need to get rid of that particular program and just forget about it because I don't like programs that turn things back on when I've told them to turn those things back off.

Gospel Differences, John, and the Reliability of the Four Gospels

Well, the assertion being, by Shabir Ali here, is that in essence, unless each of the Gospels repeats itself basically verbatim, that if it's found in only one, then it's untrue. This, again, very, very common Jesus seminar type argumentation.

I remember listening to N .T. Wright arguing with Marcus Borg on that very issue, that just because it's found in John, that makes it somehow ahistorical or something along those lines. Of course, you find all of the themes of John in the Synoptic Gospels in various forms.

You find, for example, in Matthew 11, 27, the Gospel of John and Matthew, the relationship of the Father and the Son, and you find Jesus as the Son of God. Mark starts off with Jesus as the Son of God, etc., etc.

So this kind of argumentation is very facile, it's very shallow, not at all convincing or not at all scholarly either in any way, shape, or form. He says to the Christians, the audience, to say amen to the citations of those passages from the Bible.

He says, well, have you ever thought about why it's only in John? Well, because of the same reason that there's only one epistle to the Romans, maybe? Does he apply the same standard, for example, to the Quran?

There's only one accounting of everything there. Does that make that ahistorical? You know, I mean, at least try to come up with some kind of consistent argumentation here. It would certainly be somewhat of an assistance.

Now seemingly, they needed a moderator to tell everybody to shut up at that point. That's, shall we say, excessive audience participation at that point. That's just not necessary, doesn't need to be done.

You need to allow that type of communication to take place because what he's saying is wrong, there's no question about that, but you just have to wait your time to refute it. That's the nature of debates.

They were, but of course that does not mean then that the brief Gospels called Matthew, Mark and Luke, and they are brief, I mean, let's face it, as records of three years of ministry, they're extremely brief and they are meant to be that way.

I mean, remember what we're talking about here. You couldn't go down to Kinko's and run these things off in those days. If you wanted to have a publication, have any type of opportunity for distribution, it simply couldn't be war and peace.

It had to be of such a length as to be handleable in handwriting, hand copying, and given the types of writing materials of the day. So the idea that everything had to be repeated in these brief things, these brief accounts, for it to be true when it is recorded by John, who is writing with a specific purpose in mind that may differ, and in fact differs in a number of respects, from Matthew, Mark and Luke, who each have their own intentions in what they're writing and the audiences that they're addressing and hence what they include and not include.

Again, absolutely no logical or rational reason, foundation for this kind of assertion. Christians should have been saying amen to this from the beginning. Well, they were. If you're going to say they weren't, then how about coming up with some positive evidence to the other side?

But, you know, that's not what you get. You just get these assumptions, as we saw even in the debates with our friends from the Jesus Seminar. No, not every gospel writer would be writing the same thing.

That is simply false. That is ridiculous. They're writing the same message, and there is no contradiction in their messages, but the emphases and what they choose to include and not include changes. When you look at the parallel gospels, sometimes Mark in a passage where Matthew and Luke are relating the same particular incident, sometimes Mark will have more.

And hence, if you just assume literary dependence between the three of them, a gross literary dependence without any other sources or anything like that, then you have to explain, well, okay, well, Matthew and Luke there just didn't want to say as much as Mark did or whatever.

But in reality, the reason for the differences is primarily related to the audience that the author is seeking to address. And so they're not going to be using the exact same words. They're not going to be saying the exact same thing.

They're not going to put them in the exact same order. Listen to how people would relate. For example, I was just noticing last night that one of the young men that attended the Omaha Bible Conference put up a blog article about what I had said.

Now, it's interesting to look at the order in which he put things. Now, some people, very orderly in their thinking, would do it only chronologically. Other people, for purposes of interest and things like that, might focus upon personal conversations and then include theological issues that were raised at various and sundry points in time as well.

It all depends on what the person is attempting to communicate and why they are attempting to communicate those things. That's just all there is to it. There is no logical basis for saying they would all have to say the same thing.

No, they do not have to say the same thing. When you have four witnesses who come into court and they repeat each other's words verbatim without difference, that's evidence of collusion. That's evidence that you only have one witness there, not four.

Not the other way around. The statement is simply false. Well, again, the assumption being that since you have such high Christology in John, again, this is such old German liberalism that it's almost crusty in its formulation and its assertion.

But again, once again, you assume Mark is first and then you put Matthew and Mark somewhere in between. You put John way down at the end and say, see, Mark's view of Jesus isn't as high. Well, actually, when it starts off describing the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and you have Jesus Christ commanding the waves to be still and having supernatural insight in the second chapter into the very thoughts and hearts of men, I completely disagree.

It is an issue of how could, even in Mark, how could in Mark that kind of assertion be made concerning any simple mere prophet? See, from Shabir Ali's perspective, none of the gospels, none of the gospels could possibly be accurate in what they're saying because they all have a view of Christ far above that which he is willing to accept on the basis of the Koran or his reading of the Koran.

And so really the fundamental, the highest authority here in reading documents written in the first century is a document written in the seventh century. Let's make sure that we understand this. Shabir Ali's highest authority comes 600 years later.

That's very clear. That's very obvious. No one can actually question that. That's the final authority. And so anything that comes before that has to simply be amended, shall we say. It has to be rejected.

Even if it's not fully rejected, it has to be amended on the basis of what comes later. This is the circular reasoning that is inherent in the Islamic position where the Koran has made the final authority even over those scriptures that came long before it so that the assertion of change is made and then you have to get into the Uthmanian revision and all the rest of that stuff.

It's not the original picture. The Koran brings us back to the original.

So though every single gospel, the entirety of the New Testament testifies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. No, he's not the Son of God. The Koran brings us back to the original. Well, show us the original.

Show us the original. You can't. This is simply an assertion. It's circular argumentation. I take the Koran as my final authority and so therefore I'm going to do this. The problem is, as Sam had already pointed out and as Ali is really dodging in answering, that is not consistent with the viewpoint that the Koran itself presents of the scriptures.

Now, what is the only way to logically put all this together? That the Koran contradicts itself. That Muhammad contradicted himself. That he was ignorant of the Christian faith. He was ignorant of certain facts.

That's just the only way to come to any type of meaningful conclusion on the basis of the data as it exists. But since you can't come to that conclusion from the Islamic perspective, then you have to start picking and choosing what you are and are not going to believe at that particular point in time.

The Koran brings us back to the original truth. Now, what about that Jesus died as a ransom for many? That everyone is responsible for his own demise. Well, that's interesting.

Corrects that. You mean contradicts that. It's a different religion. It's a different faith. There's no way to put the message of Christ in the Gospels and the Apostles together with the message of the Koran on the issue of salvation itself, the nature of man, the penalty of sin, and the means of redemption.

They are completely different things. And the question then becomes which one is commensurate with the prophets who came before. And when you look at the Old Testament, when you look at the argument of the book of Hebrews, that these were shadows and signs of what would come, and you look at the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament and you see what they're pointing to, and you read the prophecies of Isaiah and things like this, you don't have Isaiah prophesying of the Koran or of Muhammad, but you do have Isaiah prophesying of the suffering servant who, by his death, justifies the many.

Those are things that you have. You do not have any references to Muhammad or the Koran in the Scriptures, despite some very entertaining but exceptionally bad attempts to, for example, turn the paraclete of John 14 and 16 into a reference to Muhammad and things like that, which just, on a scholarly level, just collapse in an almost laughable fashion.

It's almost entertaining to read some of these attempts to come up with some connection there. But the reality is you have prophetic-inspired connection between the Old and New Testament. You have no connection between the Old and New Testament and the Koran at that point in regards to its doctrine of salvation, the understanding of blood atonement, and so on and so forth.

So, again, whatever the Koran says is the original teachings of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus recorded by his immediate followers are not the teachings of Jesus. That's the entire argument here. And, again, no evidence is provided.

This is just simply, well, this is what I believe, and so that's what I'm going to argue. Of course, the idea of the just repenting and you will be forgiven, not only are there issues there in regards to whether that is fully consistent with everything the Koran says, more importantly, why can a repentant sinner be forgiven before a holy God, given that his law has been broken?

What about the penalty of that law? Upon what grounds does Allah forgive sin? Is Allah's holiness compromised by the forgiveness of sin without the punishment of that sin? How does that work? Those are questions that are raised.

Now, part of the problem here, and this is one of the things that Sam himself is going to say, is he's throwing out so much stuff all at once, there's no way in half the time you could ever even begin to address all these things.

And so it does seem rather clear to me that, at least in this debate, it is Shabir Ali's intention to, in essence, do damage control, after Sam's opening statement, with the Muslims in the audience. He's not really seemingly overly concerned about the Christians in the audience, because this kind of argumentation just wouldn't go very far with any type of Christian who knows what they believe and why they believe it.

Okay, let's stop right there, because when Shabir Ali thinks so much of himself that what appears cruel to him becomes the standard of biblical theology, we need to stop it right there and say, whoa, wait a minute, I don't care what things appear to you.

The issue is what scripture teaches. The question is an old one, and that is, a ransom in human context is paid by one party to another party, and so therefore if Christ is a ransom amount that is paid, then that must be paid to someone.

And you know that in early church history, for example, there is the ransom to Satan theory, the idea that this was a ransom paid to Satan to release men, etc., etc. The problem is that that's causing the analogy to walk on all fours.

The error is found in trying to read into the divine situation what would be necessary only in a human context. The ransom that is paid, quote-unquote, is what the debt to God's holy law was. It's not a transfer of some gross kind of payment or money between two human beings.

It has to do with the debt that is incurred and the slavery that results from one's sin. That is a slavery to sin. It is the debt of the broken law, and it is the perfect sacrifice that pays that debt, not in the sense of transferring something to someone else, but it fulfills the holy demands of the law of God.

And so the idea that, well, if this is paid to God, then he looks cruel. Well, it's not paid to God. It is, in fact, coming from him, the very fountainhead of all of redemptive decrees and all of the redemptive work of God as the Father, the Son, the Spirit.

But the Father is the one who is described in Scripture as the one who reconciles us. He is the one who sends the Son, etc., etc. He is the fountainhead. And so it is not that this is somehow paid to him, which makes him look somehow mean or nasty.

And what God appears to human beings, God appears mean and nasty to human beings when hurricanes strike and when earthquakes come along. The problem there is that mankind has a very, very poor view of God and of his sin and of justice, and therefore a very bad vantage point upon which to have any kind of meaningful view of the subject.

So when he says, well, that appears to make God evil, and the Koran helps us to avoid that appearance. Well, if we want to start talking about what God appears to be in light of human teachings, in light of the teachings of religion, boy, howdy, could we go to town on Islam.

Look at its view of women, and look at its view of marriage, and look at its entire view of the promulgation of its faith by the sword, etc., etc. I mean, if we want to start talking along those lines, we can go on forever and ever and ever.

But that's not the point, and that wasn't the debate as well. And you don't determine divine truths based upon how something appears to you, whether Shabir Ali likes that or not. We will continue in reviewing the opening statement.

I think we're getting pretty close to the end here, if I recall correctly, of the opening statement. And then we'll be able to listen to Sam Shamoon's response, even though it's much shorter. And we're going to take our break right now.

We'll be right back.

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Continuing the Debate: Shabir Ali's Opening Statement

And welcome back to Dividing Line. We are listening to the debate between Shabir Ali and Sam Shamoon. And we continue with Shabir Ali's opening statement.

Or do you pay the price of the devil? In which case it looks like the devil is on equal par in terms of God and I am quite human. Is it trinity, the subject of Judaism, or me?

No one can explain them. I just tell you that. Just believe me. No one can explain them. Wow. Meaningful academic debate would be, here is how they have been explained. I am going to demonstrate that I have taken the time to find out how they are explained.

And here is where I find those explanations self-contradictory, incoherent, in the context in which they were offered. Shabir Ali is not capable of doing that. He simply hasn't done the required work to be able to make the kinds of assertions that he is.

People have explained these things, explained them fully, and explained them compellingly. And he may choose to remain ignorant of those things if he wants to. That is his choice, of course. No one can force him.

At least in Christianity. I suppose in Islam you could. But no one can force him to learn these things and to interactively represent these things. But to stand in a debate and to claim, no one can explain these things.

It is just beneath anything that could be called a really sound academic debate.

I am not familiar with the Bible. I often think that when people like Travis come up here and they preach to us that the Bible is 100 the Word of God, they are not quite familiar with the Bible. In fact, if a book describes history using sexual imagery, those parts of that book cannot be the Word of God.

Now this, we heard this because I messed up last time. I had the wrong MP3 loaded. And we heard a question that brought this out. And once again, this goes back to a section in Ezekiel that makes reference to sex organs and to the idolatry of the people of Israel.

And as I mentioned them, it goes back to the history of the nature of that idolatry. It was gross idolatry. It would have fit well in San Francisco, let's put it that way. And the scriptures make reference to it.

And since, A, that refutes, Shabir Ali is wrong, it's not gratuitous. If that's what's going on, if that's the nature of the idolatry that's going on, that's not gratuitous. I reject him having any authority to determine something is gratuitous.

Especially since he doesn't show any familiarity with the background so as to handle the text rightly. That's the first thing. Secondly, though, again, we have this idea that, well, I'm going to choose what is offensive and non-offensive to me.

And my subjective feelings will become the mechanism whereby I decide these things. Well, there's all sorts of things that I could find in the Quran that are offensive to me. That's not relevant. The issue is, can God give a revelation in which he deals with man in his sin where man is in his sin?

Sin is dirty. Sin is ugly. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible that's very difficult to read. But you know what? It's no more difficult to read than the newspaper today, if the newspaper is giving you the details of what's going on in this world.

And so, this kind of arbitrary argumentation, it's facile, it's shallow. It has no meaning to it. It is non-substantive. Now, there is probably one of the cheapest debating tricks you could ever hear.

My opponent's going to get up. I have knowingly dodged most of his opening presentation. I have knowingly thrown out as many subjects as I possibly can to keep the debate from being focused on the actual subject.

And then I am going to challenge Sam to come up here and read an entire chapter of the Bible, which will, of course, exhaust the vast majority of the time period he has to point out all of the various and sundry mistakes that I've made.

Now, you know, when I hear a Christian using that kind of argumentation, I am embarrassed for that person. I'm embarrassed for them. And if you're a Muslim, you should be embarrassed that Shabir Ali did this.

It's just silly. It is so obvious what is going on there that he should have been called on the carpet and said, that's ridiculous, you don't say, I challenge my opponent to get up here and to read a chapter from the Quran.

You have a limited amount of time, and you're going to get up there and read an entire chapter from the Quran. That is truly amazing. But, of course, his point is that this particular chapter has difficult stuff in it, and it's talking about idolatry in a context that, you know, it's not exactly the kind of thing you would discuss over the dinner table.

Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Ali, but God's a whole lot bigger than you think he is, and he can actually address the idolatry of his people in the context in which they're committing it. I'm sorry your God can't do that.

I'm sorry he's too small to do that, but the God of the Bible is big enough to do that, and whether you're offended by that or not is irrelevant. Standing before his judgment throne someday, that kind of prudishness is not going to get you very far.

Now, how much time has he spent on this so far? How is this relevant to the issue? It's not. Has he provided a scholarly grounds for this display? No. This is grandstanding. This is just trying to do damage control with your own audience, and it shows you really aren't overly concerned about the other audience.

You're just sort of, you know, doing the damage control thing. Now, let's just listen to this very last little story. Again, after you've done, you know, we've done 57 moderated public debates so far.

After a while, you just start getting used to the people who use cheap debating tricks. Cheap debating tricks. And here comes a cheap debating trick. You've gone through, you've done your best to do the scattergun approach, throw everything out there you possibly can, and now you want to throw something emotional in.

Okay, you want to throw a little emotional bomb in that has absolutely positively zero evidentiary value. No value at all to the debate. But you want to throw it in there to make sure to keep the emotions riled up so that people aren't going to really be able to hear real well.

And here it comes. So, you've got a Christian who converts to Islam, and it's because I read the Koran. Well, you know, I've seen people, because I read the Book of Mormon, I became a Mormon, or I read the Bhagavad Gita.

That's why, how is that relevant as far as providing meaningful evidentiary value here? It isn't. And you may recall that when we had a fellow on the dividing line about two years ago who had converted to Christianity from Islam, upon reading the New Testament, he then went into why that was.

And, of course, Muslims then imprisoned him and persecuted him and beat him and did things like that, because that's what Islam's about. But he explained why he had converted. He talked about important issues, about what it presented about Christ and the differences.

It wasn't just, it made me cry. It was a heartfelt recognition of the substance of the New Testament teaching concerning Christ over against the lack of that presentation of Christ found in the pages of the Koran.

So, there's the difference, a very, very large difference. Well, we continue with all the loud Islamic applause here. And next, we will allow Sam to pick up. Now, I'm not sure if I'm going to be doing any interruption here, but his comments span the two MP3s.

So, if there's a little bit of a break there, it's because I'm moving from one to the other one.

If you perceive and speak something that might be difficult for the other part, I'd like you to come to n3-islam .org where all the points that Shabir Ali brought up went on today on the web, reviewing point by point what he said, because in ten minutes, I won't be able to address them all.