Reframing our Apologetic

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And I gotta share it now, and it's really a no -brainer.

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It's one of those situations where you think, why haven't we done more of this? I'm sure someone else has thought about this.

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I'm sure lots of people have thought about this. I'm sure I've even talked about it before, but it just, it came to me so clearly this morning.

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So I need to share it in that clear form that it's in my mind. So here it is. I've been thinking about Wes Hough, and the

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Joe Rogan podcast, I talked about it on the podcast yesterday, my podcast, and I don't wanna repeat everything, but I was very positive about what happened.

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I still am. I haven't changed my mind on any of that. I think it's great that Wes Hough has been platformed. And he specifically got to share information about textual criticism.

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You don't find people from that field of apologetics in mainstream places.

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And to have someone who's a textual critic go from a nobody, essentially, to now he's the most famous apologist in the world currently is crazy.

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You don't expect it from textual critics. I love that. That's great. Here's the thing though, and I mentioned this on the podcast yesterday, he was a bit weak on some of the social stuff.

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And I expect that, right? Like the whole apologetics industry, I think on social issues is dedicated to reconciling

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Christianity with liberalism. That's it. Like whatever perception of Christianity you have, that it's bigoted and it's mean and God is mean, it's all wrong.

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You're all confused about it. Get that thought out of your head that it's your grandma's church where they are so against homosexuality.

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That's not who we are. We actually want to accept everyone and love everyone. And yeah, we do have some doctrines, but don't pay attention to those.

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Or if you do talk about them, yeah, we do have doctrines and they're for your own good because God loves you and we would never be mean about it, right?

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We would never treat you the way that we treat, I don't know, someone who's quote unquote racist or someone who's an adulterer or pick any sin of your choosing.

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Like we wouldn't treat a homosexual person that way. Don't think that we would do that, right? So you all know this, you're all used to it.

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You've all read the books. You've all listened to my podcast where I talk about this, but it's not just on that issue, right? It's also on feminism.

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So they're in the dark ages, in the ancient world, women were treated like property.

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They weren't even humans. That's what you often hear, which is a curious thing to me because you could point out that some societies treated their women perhaps as subhuman, but it's often framed as across the board.

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Every society didn't think that the females in their society were human. Well, usually it's just that the females had a subordinate position in some kind of a familial or social hierarchy.

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It's not that they didn't say they weren't human, but that sets them up to make the next step, which is, and the

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Omago Dei teaches that women are human, which means they should have full equality in everything apparently, right?

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So they should have the right to vote. They should be in the military if they wanna be, they should be in politics. They should do anything they wanna do.

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If they wanna have a career and they don't wanna stay home and raise babies, that's perfectly fine. They can put their babies in daycare or public school and who cares, right?

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So that's usually the step is like, that's what the Omago Dei means. And so it benefits a

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Christian apologist to approach modern people with very egalitarian assumptions in their mind about how society should be arranged.

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And everything's just equal and there's no, we don't take into account any of these creation norms. And then to say, yeah,

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Christianity agrees with you. All those ideas in your head about what's really nice, wouldn't you know Christianity said it at first and everyone else disagrees with that.

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In the ancient world, they disagreed. Up until recently, they disagreed. It's only in Christian societies where you see women treated well.

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And I've always been kind of like torn, okay?

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I've been torn on this because there is some truth, like, especially when you go to the Islamic world, right? And you see the way that women are treated in that world, there's some cruelty there.

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And you compare Christian societies and you say, well, you know, Christians are nicer. And I think there actually is an apologetic value to some of this.

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The problem I have though, is that it's framed, it's specifically framed for 21st century egalitarians and trying to appeal to their notion of equality as if that's the chief moral good and that will justify the religion.

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And beyond that, that will show that Christianity is true because it matches that, it substantiates that, it justifies that.

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And other religions can't do it. They can't do it because they don't have the Imago Dei. I think it's the ground that we're arguing from that I'm concerned about.

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It's not that you can't say, look, the fruit of Christianity is good. People follow

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Christ's law, look, things work better. But here's the thing, if people follow Christ's law, you don't get 21st century egalitarianism either.

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That's a huge gaping hole in this whole thing. If you're trying to convince people who are 21st century secular egalitarians, you can't come to them and tell them that you're right about that and Christianity matches that because they're gonna know if they do just a little bit of digging, that is not true at all.

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Christianity traditionally has not been like that. Christianity, the people who argued for some of the quote unquote advances that we have in women's lib have not been

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Christians, even the ones that use Christian arguments. And here's a good way to figure this out.

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First wave feminism is usually viewed as the good kind of feminism. Third wave is the bad kind. Second wave, you don't talk about, right?

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That's how it usually works. Go read the Seneca Falls Declaration. Do any bit of research about Seneca Falls. I've obviously,

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I've read that, but I've also gone to the place where it all happened. I've been at the Women's Rights Museum in Seneca Falls.

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I remember when I was there, I talked extensively to the National Parks guy. I think he was getting uncomfortable because I was asking him all these questions.

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But if you look into that, I mean, they're having seances in the basement. This is not a

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Christian movement whatsoever. They may claim some Christian things, but if you look at the versions of Christianity they're claiming, if you look at, for example, the

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Women's Bible, they're cutting out all the things they think are sexist, right? This is what it is, that marriage is slavery.

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It's not just about getting the right to vote. This is the popular sunshine and roses tale we tell ourselves about it to try to make it out like, well, these were a bunch of evangelical

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Christians just like us. Well, yeah, I mean, you could certainly make connections to the second great awakening, but to what extent was that even this great move of orthodoxy?

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It relies on your audience's ignorance to make that point. And so I don't,

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I'm not accustomed to making it. I think, like I said, I think that like I'm torn because I think that you can at some point say, look,

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Christianity produces good when you follow God's law. I think we should be able to say that unapologetically.

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And that would include in the way women are treated. But why do we jump to that one? Why is that the one that we wanna talk about?

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And we wanna like say that we're the best at really treating women well, because we know that that's what 21st century secular humanists, pagan, whatever, egalitarians want.

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So we try to reconcile Christianity with some form of liberalism or some form of social justice. That's why we do that.

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When I say we, I don't mean me. So that's been going on in the Christian apologetics world forever, right?

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And it's the same thing on slavery. It really is because what they'll do, and I'm gonna play a few clip in a minute,

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Wes Hough tried to do this as well, not just with, he didn't go down the path of, women were treated better in Christianity.

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He also went down the path of, and Christianity eradicated slavery. You wanna thank someone for slavery not being around, thank

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Christianity. And I was thinking about this and I was thinking, I mentioned on the podcast yesterday,

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I think you can say that, yeah, Christianity undermined labor systems in which people do not take responsibility.

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So Christianity undermines socialism. Christianity, I think, undermines anything that would restrict people from obeying

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Christ's commands. That's really the bottom line of Christianity. So does that, I was actually toying around this in my head because I don't know if I've heard other people articulate it this way, but is that really the thing that Christianity brought to the table?

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I think it may be. I think more study would need to be done on that, but I'm comfortable saying, okay, yeah, Christianity values people being able to have the freedom to obey

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Christ's law and take personal responsibility. Self -government, right? This is a very

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Christian thing. Sure, I get that, right? But it doesn't mean that you can't have hierarchies in societies.

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It doesn't mean that there aren't employer -employee distinctions and stuff like that. It just means, though, that in general, we want people to be independent.

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We want local control because there's more accountability because we believe man is evil.

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We know that there's opportunities for more evil the more power someone has, right? So all these things, I don't need to review everyone and make everyone bored on this because I talk about these things, but I think in Christian societies and in Anglo -Protestant societies in particular, you do see this.

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So I'm on board with, I guess, saying, if you wanna say it undermined slavery, certainly undermined the slave trade,

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I would say, but here's the problem. It's the same problem. It's what ground are you arguing on? What ground are you arguing from?

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Where are you standing as you make this claim? And oftentimes, the claims are so overboard.

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They're ridiculous. Christians were crusading in the early church against slavery. The point could be made that because of the spiritual equality of slaves with their masters, that Christians, I guess, undermine the institution.

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I've heard people say that, but it's a... If you look at history, these labor relationships in the pre -modern times just kept going.

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I mean, you could call them other things. You could say it's serfdom. You could say that you have kind of a feudal arrangement, but you're basically looking at very similar labor relationships.

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People aren't... They don't have the freedom to just move up to the next area and get a different job with a different employer.

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For the most part, for most of human history, people are just born into the station they're born into, and that's the way it is.

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And tough luck, right? But the thing is, if you read, and this is where it gets dangerous, because you challenge the liberal myth.

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The liberal myth is everything's the dark ages until they came along, and they've corrected things like slavery. But if you start actually digging into the conditions in feudal systems and even in slave arrangements between relationships between masters and slaves in Christian context, you're gonna find there is a difference between Christian societies that include these kinds of hierarchies and pagan societies that have these labor hierarchies.

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And Christian societies tend to, this is just a fact, they tend to treat slaves or servants or serfs better than the alternative in pagan or Muslim societies.

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So that's similar to, I guess, what Westhuff was saying about women. They were treated better in Christian societies.

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So I could say that, right? I could say, well, look at the conditions. They're better in Christian societies.

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I could say, well, look, it's in Christian societies or societies influenced by Christianity where this sort of was dissipated and went away.

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But the thing is, I know if I just said that, I wouldn't be telling the whole truth. I would be misleading probably whoever it is

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I'm saying it to. Because I also know from my own historical research that the antislavery movement, well,

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I shouldn't say antislavery. The abolition movement in the United States was primarily motivated by people who were not

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Orthodox Christians at all. In fact, the people that they were arguing against had more Orthodoxy generally than they did.

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What do you do with this? I actually just finished a book on John Brown, which was making this point over and over and over again, that even

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John Brown, who's supposed to be the quintessential Calvinist had, I don't even think you could call him an

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Orthodox Christian. He even tampered with the gospel. And he wouldn't even attend a church unless it was like, no church was good enough because it wasn't antislavery enough.

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And very similar to the social justice warriors today. But he got in with all these transcendentalists and Unitarians and so forth that their gospel was completely different.

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They had given up on scripture. They weren't Christians in any meaningful sense, except for they had really retained some of the,

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I guess, cultural symbolic things. But they weren't

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Christians in the Orthodox sense of the term. So there's an attempt to recruit all of those guys to they were the evangelicals.

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Cause that's like second grade awakening stuff. And again, you also have to examine the second grade awakening.

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This wasn't the biggest Orthodox move people try to frame it as. So all this to say, and I know there's probably people screaming at their phone right now.

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They're listening and like, John, you're wrong because I'm challenging everything. And I get that. That's why I've done a lot of videos on some of these things.

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And that's why I did a two long videos specifically on slavery and abolitionism for patrons. If you're a patron, you can go to worldviewconversation .com

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forward slash. So no, sorry, patreon .com forward slash worldviewconversation. That's what it is. And you can view those.

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But all that to say, I think that I'm still trying to appeal to someone who's a 21st century egalitarian who thinks that we've come so far and they want to credit anti -Christianity with that.

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They want to say it's because of egalitarian humanist thinking that we've gotten here.

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We've overcome Christianity to get this far. And so the apologist comes along and says, no, all the things you think are good about paganism, egalitarian, pagan, secular, whatever, that is fundamentally

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Christian. And so change the category in your head, put that in the Christian category. And all the things that you think are bad about Christianity, you put that in the pagan category, right?

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So it's trying to, without, and I get why this is appealing, without shifting someone's moral thinking, you don't have to get into the ethics of the question at all.

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You can just try to switch places. So the Christians switch the places with the pagans. All the things you think are good are attributed to Christianity.

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All the things you think are bad are attributed to paganism. Then you don't have much work to do. You just rearrange the chairs and now whoever it is is on your side.

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It's just not faithful though. Like Christian societies, still, the most Christian, thoroughly

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Christian societies do not reflect 21st century egalitarian assumptions, even on that.

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People today try really hard to go back into the historical record to recruit as many of the most

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Orthodox Christians they possibly can to make this narrative work. In fact, many today,

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I think, have tried to use the Covenanters that way because they think, well, the Scottish Covenanters were against slavery and there's some,

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I think there's some problems with that narrative too, but the ones who are smart enough to realize that the abolitionists in the

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Northeast who were Unitarians and so forth weren't really good representatives of Christianity, they'll try to find another group that they can appeal to and say, if everyone would have been like them, they were the true

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Christians, right, and everyone else wasn't. Like Frederick Douglass, that famous quote from Frederick Douglass that like what purports to be

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Christianity isn't Christianity. They buy into that. Like, oh yeah, like, okay, so we have to throw out basically a whole

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Bible belt. Like those guys weren't Christians. It was these crusaders, crusading kind of like egalitarians that were involved in the women's rights movements and anti -masonry and eventually the temperance movement, anti -slavery and all of that, like these reform movements, like that was true

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Christianity. And I think you could probably credit more of that to enlightenment thinking.

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You could try to trace some of it to Christianity by saying, well, there's like a, behind this, they're making some Christian arguments.

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They're saying this is about love. They're saying there's a higher law and that must be God's law. And you could say, well, look at the ones who did quote scripture because that was the lingua franca at the time.

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Everyone did. Even atheists to promote their stuff, like Tom Paine, right, how to quote scripture because that's what the audience resonated with.

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So that's not that significant, but okay, right, they did quote scripture, usually out of context for a lot of these things.

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But like, you just ignore the other side of the argument and you just focus on the ones you want to be the heroes and try to paint them as Christians.

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So everyone gets that. So Westhoff, I'm not criticizing him, but I'm realizing like, okay, so like Westhoff does some of these same things, right?

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If you go to what Westhoff's recommended page on his homepage, right, LGBTQ plus issues.

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Is God anti -gay by Sam Halbury, first one. You got Kevin DeYoung's book. What does

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God's, the Bible teach about homosexuality? That's a book I think where Kevin DeYoung actually does argue for some kind of a sinless same sex attraction, if I'm not mistaken.

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How sexuality, how sexual, oh, Holy Sexuality in the Gospel by Christopher Ewan. I have not read that.

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My understanding is Christopher Ewan used to be somewhat compromised on these things and he has now gotten like so much better. In fact,

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I've corresponded with him a little bit and he's like all about exposing Preston Sprinkle and stuff.

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So like, I'm very positive about Christopher Ewan. I just don't know if that book, like what era that was from and probably a lot of good things in it, but can you be gay and Christian, Michael Brown.

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I would say Michael Brown's from what I've read is pretty good, Outlasting the Gay Revolution, Michael Brown. I've read the first one by Brown and it's good.

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A Queer Thing Happened to America, Michael Brown. Okay, so there's some good things here, but then in addition to Sam Halbury and the

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Kevin DeYoung thing, you got Ed Shaw, Greg Coles, Rebecca McLaughlin.

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I don't know about David Bennett. So I don't know what to say about him, but I know exactly,

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Greg Coles one like just blows me away. Like Greg Coles, that is a horrible book, Single Gay Christian.

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I did a whole review of that book on this podcast. He even at the end is saying that, well, you know, gay marriage, maybe, maybe that's okay.

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Like I would never say anyone's not a Christian if they're in a gay marriage. I mean, we argue about Calvinism and Arminianism, gay marriage, that seems like less of a jump than those things.

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Like it's, that book is nuts guys. And yeah, so it's on the list. All right, fine, I got it. But he's also got, you know, other good stuff, right?

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He's got, you know, James White here, his stuff about homosexuality. So like, there's just a lot of different things here.

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Some good, some terrible. And so what does that say about someone like Wes Huff?

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Well, I'm not trying to read it. I don't know what it says. Like, it's probably not the area that he studied deeply.

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He's a textual critic and he's great. He's got a great recall of information and he can, I wouldn't want to debate the guy.

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If he wants to, I'll do it. But I mean, it's like, he's the kind of guy like you would want to prep for a little because he's just got those answers on the tip of his tongue, right?

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There's very few people like that that can remember what they've read and they're, and I thank God for that. But I just think we need to be honest that look, he's not an expert on everything, right?

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And he's going to repeat the things that are pretty much part and parcel to the evangelical world.

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This is just how people think about these things. Tom Holland is one of the guys that Wes Huff references, like, oh, this guy, he understands slavery and he can explain it.

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And how Christians were against this stuff. Listen to what Tom Holland says, this is super key. In the span of a century, what had been a kind of mad minority opinion by the beginning of the 19th century is convulsing parliaments, is convulsing presidencies.

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And over the course of the 19th century, we'll see slavery, something that every, as a

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Muslim sheik said to a Royal Naval officer when the

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Naval officer demanded that he abolish slavery, he said, but why would we, every age has accepted slavery.

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But essentially this kind of, that is bred of a radical Protestant idea of the flame of the spirit, illumining the heart and enabling people to see what should properly be done.

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That is something that has, that because first of all Catholics and then Muslims are not

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Protestant, it's been kind of universalized. But essentially the - I'm speeding it up to 1 .25

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to get through it faster. Just behind it is this kind of radical Protestant interpretation of how the spirit can move people to act properly.

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That in turn, of course, draws on the mainstream of Christian inheritance. Now there's one very big difference between attitudes towards slaves in the pre and the post

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Christian period. All right, this is a guy named A .C. Grayling, okay? And he's arguing against it.

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Now listen to what A .C. says in response to this. Aristotle's father -in -law had been a slave. He rose to be the ruler of the city state in which, to which

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Aristotle went after studying with Plato. That was a not uncommon thing, not to become a ruler of a city state, but to be freed and to become, eventually to become citizens and to be able to play a full role.

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I cannot imagine a black slave in 18th or early 19th century America ever been given that opportunity.

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And this is after 1 ,500 years of Christianity. I mean, I'm afraid to say that to look at the

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Quakers and the evangelicals of the 18th and 19th century, not a moment too soon did their consciences come to prompt them to do something about slavery.

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But it seems to me itself to be a proof of the fact that the conscience, the outlook, the ethics of the

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Christian period, in that respect, as in many others, was very different from the other. Do you think that then the - All right, let's stop.

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I'm gonna interrupt Justin Briley. This is actually a good argument. He's saying, look, you're talking about 1 ,500, it's really more than that.

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You're talking about 1 ,700 years of Christian society and this is just the way it is.

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This is like, and now all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we've realized what the spirit of God does in a heart and what the conscience is about and we're against slavery, right?

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So I'd prefer they parse things, like they separate the slave trade from the chattel slavery.

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Usually gets in this one bucket of, everything that's bad about slavery is in that bucket.

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Masters who would have even freed their slaves and been nice to their slaves, they're in that, like everyone's in that bucket.

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But anyway, so I'm gonna just take this as this is a labor arrangement and Christians are supposedly the ones to figure out finally this is wrong.

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Everyone else thought it was right, Christians figure out it's wrong, but the argument against it is, well, yeah, but took you guys how long?

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1 ,700 years and then he, this is on purpose. He chooses the Quakers because the Quakers are one of those early identifiable groups that were very anti -slavery.

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Now, a lot of them were, their theology wasn't, like modern evangelicals don't even tend to want to claim them because of how outside orthodoxy they could be.

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But even if you go with them, right? They're saying that, and that this inner light that they believe that people had, right, that led them to challenge slavery.

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He's saying like, they came on the scene and it's like right at the time the enlightenment's happening when this really is, when this gets going.

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Curious, right, interesting. Why then, why is it that it's at this point?

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And let's hear the rebuttal to that. Impetus against slavery was not primarily a Christian one, but was something more of a rationalist enlightenment sort of philosophy coming to bear, even if it was having a

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Christian expression. Yes, I think so, because it was in the, towards the end of the first third of the 18th century that a

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Quaker, I forget his name now, but he was a Huguenot who had gone temporarily to England and then on to North America. And he was a teacher, and in the evenings he taught the children of slaves and found that it was, that what he'd been told about the lower intellectual capacities and so on of black children than white children was just simply false.

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And it was he who began to agitate a bit among the Quakers at that period. And this is, it's not an accident that this is in a period of time when the grip of the major religious denominations, like for example, the

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Catholic Church or the Calvinists over the minds of people and their insistence that they adhere to a particular way of looking at things.

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This was the period when that was loosening. And so it made it possible for people then to think differently, even about those doctrines.

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So essentially the argument is because we were becoming less Christian in a way, less dominated by Christianity. So I don't know about that last part, that the, because control was easing up, the, you know, the

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Reformation, I guess, would have, you know, led to this anti -slavery impulse or something. But either way, timing is there, you know, the

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Quakers are a group that was somewhat influenced by idealism,

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German idealism. And the question would be, was it the German idealism and this idea that man is free in an egalitarian sense, in an autonomous sense that led to the overturning of arrangements like slavery.

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And if that's the case, then it's not the Christianity so much as it is the, a mystical inner light that promotes this kind of human freedom.

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It's this impulse for human freedom that did it more than it was Christianity.

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Christianity has, you know, had a chance to do it for centuries, but they believed in a certain kind of order, that there was a certain hierarchy that, that was not, that was,

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I guess, compatible with slave surf and, you know, systems that involve some kind of a feudalism.

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That slavery was ultimately overturned. What's your view on that? Couldn't be, I mean, it's so fundamentally, it's so clear that the anti -slavery movement is an evangelical one.

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That's crazy to me. That's crazy to me. Look, why is that? How is that so clear? We hear this over and over and over, but it's not usually argued for, except to use like little quotes from, look, this person quoted the

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Bible or something, right? But you can't actually, I don't think, get into the actual theological beliefs of many of the key figures, like William Lloyd Garrison, or I was reading just recently, like I said, about John Brown or Julia Ward Howe or Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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You can look at some of the British anti -slavery guys, especially the anti -slave trade guys, like, for example,

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William Wilberforce, and I think you can probably find, I haven't studied him deeply, but I think you could find some of that.

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But there were definitely some objective things that the slave trade, which was a newer thing, by the way, at that point, that had not been happening, at least in the

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Christian world, that they found objectionable. And there were things that were objectionable. So, but even like, what did

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I read the other day? That even John Newton, after he got saved, he was involved on the slave ship.

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Like it's usually promoted like, oh, he was even a slaver. And then he became a Christian.

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And actually, that's not the order of it. He actually was involved afterward. And it wasn't until like decades and decades later, he expressed some regret.

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It's just not, historically, it's generally not the story you're told. And we can't go into battle with atheists and people like this while telling like a half story, or we're gonna get called on the carpet.

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Like Tom Holland's, I think, getting called on the carpet here. And absolutely, there were any number of freed black slaves who toured around Britain, who became lions of the hour, who were celebrated and feted.

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Absolutely, they were. I mean, what happens though, is that this great evangelical impetus, which sees parliament petitioned, which sees

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Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, rather like Theresa May, having to go and negotiate Brexit when she doesn't believe in it.

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He had to go and negotiate with the Congress of Vienna to argue that slavery should be abolished, even though he didn't particularly believe in it. Castlereagh's genius is that he is able to persuade the

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Catholic powers that they too should have a stake in that because he captures it in the language of rights, which derives from Catholic canon law going back to the 12th century.

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So he's able to do that. So he deceived the Catholics. They didn't wanna get rid of slavery, but he deceived them into thinking it was part of their religion.

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It's also the case that he is able to draw on elements within, let's call it the enlightenment tradition.

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There you go. There you go. This is it, right? Right here, I think the whole argument that Tom Holland's trying to forward is given up.

29:16

He's forced into, if he wants to be intellectually honest, he has to go to, well, yeah, I mean, the enlightenment tradition really does deserve credit for this, but then the move is going to be, but the enlightenment, that's really a

29:28

Christian movement. Watch. Which absolutely also recognizes that people are born free and equal.

29:35

But in turn, I think it's important to ask, where do these ideas come from? And I think that this really is the kind of the nub of the disagreement between us, that Antony sees this, the enlightenment, as a kind of a radical break with what had gone before.

29:49

Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right, I would say. I mean, radical, yeah. I mean, I could, it depends on which thinker you're talking about, but I could go with that.

29:58

That there is a kind of middle age of superstition and darkness that intervened when all these book -burning monks appeared and started ransacking everything.

30:05

And then in the 18th century, praise the Lord, the light comes on and everyone is enlightened.

30:11

My perspective is that the enlightenment is simply another iteration of a series of convulsions that have racked

30:17

Christian civilization and are bred of deeply Christian theological concepts. And it's in that sense that the international law that emerges to deal with the abolition of slavery is able to fuse

30:29

Protestant, Catholic, and enlightenment traditions, because ultimately all those traditions are bred of the same matrix.

30:37

Okay, so there's now, so it's not even just that Christianity is responsible for the enlightenment, but that there's this common ground between Christians and enlightenment thinkers and Catholics, and it's the idea that everyone's born free and equal.

30:50

See where this free and equal doctrine gets you, right? Like that's what's eroding all the boundaries that exist in our society.

30:57

So John, it's easy for you to, oh, all right, one last thing. Someone, I haven't read the book yet.

31:03

Maybe I should, maybe I should read the book and do a critique or something. But Tom Holland's book on Dominion, he says this, "'The retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply "'any necessary retreat of Christian values.'"

31:15

Okay, so Christian belief, Christian values, two different things. "'Quite the contrary, even in Europe, "'a continent with churches far emptier "'than those in the

31:22

United States, "'the trace elements of Christianity "'continued to infuse people's morals and presumptions "'so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence.'"

31:31

So they don't even know, they're kind of acting like Christians. "'Like dust particles so fine "'as to be invisible to the naked eye, "'they were breathed in equally by everyone, "'believers, atheists, and those who never paused "'so much as to think about religion.

31:44

"'Had it been otherwise, "'then no one would ever have got woke.'" Have got woke?

31:51

My goodness, I guess he's in favor of wokeness on some level.

31:56

Some other guys were saying like he's in favor, like he's pro -LGBT and stuff. Well, I don't know.

32:03

But here's the bottom line, and this is what I wanna say at the end here. Because someone might say, John, what would you say?

32:10

It's easy to throw rocks. And here's the thing, I don't know exactly, well, I do know what I would say, but I don't know if there's really, really great resources out there, at least not recent resources to try to answer these objections without reconciling

32:24

Christianity to liberalism. But if I was gonna write something, this is what it would be. I would start with the fact that we've been deceived into thinking that our own liberal world is somehow superior to what came before it in every way.

32:43

And it's easy to think this way because of technological innovations and advances,

32:49

AI, for example, right? I can go and ask a question, it'll spit out an answer. I mean, people couldn't do that in the 1800s.

32:56

I couldn't have a computer write my homework paper, not that I've ever done that, if I wanted to.

33:02

But it's easy to think, wow, we have planes and trains and spaceships and electric cars and everything progresses that way, right?

33:13

Morality too, like we have better relationships. And there's some things I think technology has helped with, obviously.

33:20

Even like agribusiness as maybe as unhealthy as some of the agribusiness practices are, we can feed a lot of people using a little bit of land.

33:28

Like there's a lot of advances that I'm grateful for. But here's the thing, morality doesn't always advance like that.

33:34

And I think we are deceived, this is the deception of the modern narrative. We are deceived into thinking we are so much better morally because we ignore, and we're used to the abuses that exist around us.

33:49

And I mentioned a few of them. I mean, there's so many you could talk about, but the government's bigger now than it was a century ago.

33:57

The government takes more of your money than it did a century ago. And your ability to feed yourself and your family, which means you're having less children because of restrictions, vehicle restrictions and all kinds of things that make it hard for people to have bigger families if they want to.

34:15

You are more subject to the state than you were a century ago or two centuries ago when it was supposedly such a horrible time, right?

34:25

So we keep inching closer and closer to civil slavery. That's a type of slavery. It's just, we don't recognize it that way.

34:32

But it's more difficult to move around. It's more difficult to go places and operate within the economy because we're not bringing as much home as we could be.

34:45

We also have, I think, as I said before, we've outsourced some of the slavery to other countries.

34:53

Sweatshop labor, slavery for minerals in Africa. We enjoy smartphones. We enjoy clothes that were constructed by essentially slaves in other countries.

35:02

And it's so impersonal. They can treat them however. They can treat them like a number if they want, right? That's also the problem with civil slavery.

35:08

You're treated like a number. There's no personal element there. Harder to, I mean, there's cruel people that can do it, but it's harder to look someone in the eye and treat them in a horrible fashion sometimes, at least for a lot of people, than it would be to treat a number.

35:21

And that's what you are. I think the prison system is a good example. We did not have the kind of prison system even, well, 200 years ago, we did not have this kind of prison systems that we have today, where you're in there forever.

35:37

We don't have swift sentences. You become a ward of the state and you're robbed of your dignity.

35:44

And you are in many places employed doing whatever constructive things there are, like building license plate and stuff.

35:51

You're just a slave of the state at that point. So we don't think of that as slavery, but what is it?

35:57

I mean, how would you categorize it? I mean, someone owns you essentially. There's, I think in generational welfare, you can look at that and see some of the harmful effects of that.

36:09

I mean, you don't even have the dignity of labor in that. You're just, you're on the dole and this happens generationally.

36:16

It's rare for someone to break out of it. You can, you should, but it's difficult.

36:22

Everything around you is reinforcing, stay on the dole. And so people who are involved in that, you could look at that as a type of slavery as well.

36:31

We don't think of any of these, these are all labor things, but we don't think of any of them that way. What about the immigration stuff? What about all these people pouring across the border?

36:39

And even the legal immigration, not just the illegal. The illegal is bad. I lived in California and worked there for a bit and you go to a

36:47

Home Depot or a Lowe's or it's just people hanging out there all day, day laborers who, they're very happy if they can get 150 bucks or something.

36:56

And they live in squalor, many of them. They'll get a home and a couple of families will rent it. I mean, it's, you're talking slave conditions here.

37:06

And this is for the benefit of American businesses, especially corporations when it comes to like the

37:13

H -1B stuff. Like they would love to fire American workers. In fact, I've had people reach out to me, say that's what's happening.

37:18

I was fired, I'm skilled laborer and I'm training my replacement who's from some other country. And they're just living in squalor, basically.

37:26

They're satisfied with living in much worse conditions and they're just gonna do my job now.

37:33

And it's like, okay, well, we're incentivizing that kind of thing. We're not, it's not like Elon says, bringing the best and brightest minds to America.

37:39

I mean, that would be a cruel thing, right? Because don't you want those other countries to have the best and brightest minds? You wanna steal them from those countries? No, it's about trying to give corporations less overhead so they can have people from other countries do the job because they have a different standard of living.

37:54

And that's what it is. So, what is that? I guess it's not technically slavery because I guess the person could leave if they wanted to, right?

38:02

But what are we doing? We're benefiting off of people's labor. Many times there's exploitation involved, especially in the illegal immigration stuff, especially the sex slavery that comes with that.

38:12

Oh my goodness, more slaves today than there ever have been. But it's, you don't think about it all that much, do you? It's happening all around us.

38:18

It's happening in the major cities. But that's a kind of slavery, right? And then there's all, obviously there's, as Christians, we know there's spiritual slavery.

38:27

You're either a slave of Christ or you're a slave of the devil. And how many vices have we allowed to be illegal that were not legal?

38:33

Pornography is legal now. How many people are slaves to porn? You say, well, that's not slavery. You could choose not to do it.

38:38

Yeah, when you're addicted to drugs, methamphetamines, pornography, alcohol, all these things that, you know, marijuana, all these things that have been legalized and I would say encouraged in some places, they end up putting people into positions that are, scripture will call them slaves to sin, slaves to vices and so forth.

39:01

That has an effect on your economy. We don't, I'm just saying things off the top of my head. These are all things that are worse.

39:09

They're either exacerbated or they're unique to the liberal order we live in now. And we don't even think about them.

39:15

They don't count. We don't think that, we don't look in horror at what's happening in our inner cities.

39:22

We don't look at Philadelphia or Los Angeles or even, you know, places like, you know, the outskirts of Las Vegas where people who have all these addictions, gambling addictions and stuff live in hotels and live on debt.

39:36

I mean, debt slavery, there's another one. How much is the United States in debt? How much are individuals in the United States in debt?

39:41

That's called slavery in Proverbs. And yet we have a system that frankly encourages that kind of thing, that consumerism.

39:50

So, you know, what do you say to all of this? These are things that I think those in the 19th century, if they could see how we live today, they'd be horrified.

39:59

They couldn't believe some of the things that we accept or that we allow. And they would say, you think you're morally superior to us?

40:07

But I think that's part of the deception really. Every age has sin.

40:12

Every age has terrible things. I think you could, you know, we don't, Christians don't want slavery around. And I think one of the main reasons for it as much as possible is we, like I said at the beginning, we do value personal responsibility.

40:26

And we think that things are best handled when people are making decisions that will actually affect them personally.

40:33

It takes responsible people for self -government though. It takes responsible people to even have a democracy. So we recognize that you need virtue, you need religion.

40:41

There's all kinds of conditions you need and we don't necessarily have all those conditions. So there is gonna be labor disparities.

40:48

There are gonna be people who are, they're not suited to live in responsible ways on their own, but we want the maximum amount of people that can do that.

40:57

That's what we want. And so Christians, you know, many,

41:03

I pointed this out before, but many Christians who were not abolitionists were also wanting to get rid of slavery.

41:09

Not much of it because of the reasons I just mentioned. And I think that what we've tried to do is we've tried to tell 21st century egalitarians, you guys are right on morality and Christians agree with you.

41:24

And it's gonna become, it is becoming more and more hard to do it. You may have thought it worked with slavery.

41:29

I don't think it did, okay. You may have thought, well, it works with women and women's rights and liberalism and women's liberation.

41:35

Okay, all right, I don't think so, but you may think so. Is it really working on the LGBT stuff? Now we're getting into territory where, oh goodness,

41:43

I really got to twist scripture, like major twistings of scripture to try to make it fit.

41:50

And you're never gonna make it fit. It's better, I think, to critique and to say, look, we live in a horror show when it comes to, the things you think are so good about 21st century egalitarianism, they're not.

42:01

They're just not. This is where our Christian apologists need to focus their attention. This is what we need to be writing books on, critique the 21st century egalitarians, critique liberalism, show its defects, show where it's wrong, show how, as we've gotten away from Christianity, we are engaged, we're in trash world, right?

42:19

That's what we're, we're going towards that. That's the progression. We're going towards evil. We're going towards vice.

42:24

We're going towards a nightmare. We're going towards death, a death spiral where we don't even have children and we don't even believe in children anymore.

42:31

And our birth rates aren't even sustaining our populations. How about that? That's not a society you wanna live in, is it?

42:38

I mean, if that's what you want, then keep choosing that. But if you want to break free from your addictions, if you wanna take personal responsibility, if you want to have families and enjoy children and be productive and have the purpose that comes with being part of something bigger than yourself, something transcendent, if you want to, something that's also morally righteous in the sight of God that you'll be judged in eternity for, and God will say, well done, my good and faithful servant, enter in the joy of your master.

43:11

I just, I think that, I'm not even giving you like comprehensively, this is what we should do.

43:19

I'm just trying to point people in the right direction. Like, why don't we create these kinds of arguments? So when those things come up, we go on the attack.

43:25

We go on the offense and say, yeah, you know, Christians in the 19th century recognized that there were abuses and sins within slavery, objectively speaking, that were,

43:38

I should say, associated with slavery that they wanted to get away with. Slave trade, you know, even

43:44

Dabney said it was an iniquitous traffic. So, you know, we can look at that and say, look, there were things that fell short of a

43:52

Christian standard and the Christians at the time recognized that and were wanting and looking for ways to rectify these situations.

44:00

But it doesn't mean that whole cloth, we were just egalitarians and against, like Christians were just against any kind of labor hierarchies or against any forms of slavery.

44:10

That's just not accurate to what came before that time. That's how Christians for the majority of the time since Christ, for the most part, haven't had these kinds of questions or issues.

44:21

They've just accepted whatever labor arrangements existed in the societies they were born into. And they tried to be

44:26

Christians in them, just like Paul instructed them to be. Isn't that something? So, you know, you can't look at what

44:31

Paul teaches about slavery or what Jesus talks about slavery in the parables or what the patriarchs, like, you know, there's all this ink spilled about, it's not the same kind of slavery.

44:41

In the Old Testament, it's not the same kind of slavery. And most of the time I look at those things and they're inaccurate, they're not true to what the text actually says, especially when they come to Roman slavery, like trying to make that seem so much better.

44:53

It was just so much better than like 19th century slavery. The slavery that you don't like, that's not what Paul was talking about.

44:59

It's like, well, yeah, like sex slavery was common in Paul's day, obviously against the

45:05

Bible, but like that system had a lot of evil things attached to it. I mean, there were no gladiatorial arenas where you watch slaves for entertainment kill each other in Alabama in 1830.

45:15

I mean, I'm sorry. Like there's smart people who just aren't, they'll see through it.

45:21

They'll see through it. So I say, we go on the offense. We admit, we say what the Bible teaches and where labor relationships and the treatment of women, and where even if you can find examples of treating homosexuals in evil ways, where these all fell short of what the

45:37

Bible says, we can admit those things without making these broad sweeps that justify 21st century egalitarianism.

45:45

That's the thing I don't wanna do. And that's the thing I see being done. We've adopted a history that justifies 21st century egalitarianism and we make ethical arguments to reinforce 21st century egalitarianism to Christians.

45:58

So I am begging people out there who are apologists to start doing the work that I'm suggesting here on all of these things.

46:06

Hey, are women better off today than they were 200 years ago, as far as the way they're treated?

46:13

You might be able to, some ways maybe, but across the board, is it better since Christianity has waned in society or worse?

46:19

I saw a study, I think I mentioned this like three times on the podcast. I saw a study the other day about how women are less happy in the workforce and children are less healthy on average when their mothers are in the workforce.

46:32

That's just one little thing. I mean, how many things could we research to show that Christianity actually, when it was more prevalent, things were better for everyone and it was a better society, right?

46:49

So again, I'm not making like super big conclusions. Hopefully you don't think I am.

46:55

You can hear what I'm saying here. Like I'm pointing in direction, in directions. I'm saying, this is the direction we should walk and this is what we should be examining.

47:03

And yeah, that's it. That's the thought. That's the hot take that I have. Hope that was helpful in thinking through some of these things.

47:11

And maybe there will be some apologists out there who will start crafting materials for how to engage people who ask questions like doesn't the

47:18

Bible support slavery? Doesn't the Bible support mistreating women? Doesn't the Bible, isn't the Bible anti -gay? Isn't the Bible against transgenderism?

47:25

And you can start saying, you know, yeah, hey, there are hierarchies in scripture and men are the leaders in the home and in the church and in society more broadly.

47:38

That's what you see in scripture. Those are the examples given. It's a shame for women. Multiple passages talk about it's a shame when women are the ones defending, exercising military skills and so forth.

47:52

That's not for them, right? So yeah, okay, let's not shy away from that teaching. Now let's talk about whether the

47:59

Bible's idea on these things is better for women than your 21st century egalitarian assumptions about it.

48:04

Challenge the assumptions. They may not like that. It's not as easy as just, you know, not challenging the morality and just switching places.

48:11

But we gotta be honest. And that's how the cookie crumbles. That's the end of the podcast. That's all I wanted to share.