Report from Around the World, “First Century Mark” Fragment That Isn’t, the Mockumentary, & the SBC

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Wednesday, and let's see, I landed, what, 22 hours ago from, well, it started in Belfast at three o 'clock in the morning and through Heathrow to Phoenix.

So this trip was Phoenix, Heathrow, Joburg, Lusaka, Joburg, Heathrow, drive to the Midlands, fly to Glasgow, back to the Midlands, from Birmingham to Belfast, Belfast, Heathrow, Heathrow, back. Wish I had gotten miles for all that, the big segments I did, but the shorter segments, not so much.

So let's just say I've had enough of security lines for a while, you know, putting those liquids in the bags and did run into one really, really overzealous security guy. Evidently a whole group of security guys.

You know, it's really funny, you'll run into particular airports where, thank God, they are in charge, do as we say. This one guy, he emptied my bag. I mean, if there wasn't, I had to repack the entire thing, except for the one thing that I think he was looking for, which were my connection cables, because I have to connect all sorts of different projectors and sound systems, and I've got a bunch of different things I have to recharge with different, you know, it'd be nice if we all used the same connector, but no, it doesn't work that way.

And the funny thing is, you know, he found all my vitamins and my Advil and, you know, my Mucinex and sinus stuff, and he found all that, didn't find what he was looking through, still put it through, and it flew through.

It was like, oh, this is great. I get to repack the entire bag, and it did not do any good in finding anything at all. There wasn't anything to find, but at least it would have been nice if they had looked at what they were supposed to be finding.

Anyways, that's neither here nor there. We are here in one piece. Just really quickly, just thanks to everybody. I mean, there's just so many people. If I started taking the time, all the different churches that I spoke at, and I mean, I'm thinking back at the first weekend in Johannesburg, in Davyton and Benoni and places like that, and that seems like half a lifetime ago.

It's weird how time, you know. Though the Sunday afternoon debate, the first Sunday with the King James Only guy at the pastor's house, I started talking at 7 .30 that morning. I got done at 8 o 'clock that night.

Twelve and a half hours. I almost had no voice left. That was definitely the longest Lord's Day of my life. But where that King James Only guy came from, I have no earthly idea. I found out after that he's a big Steven Anderson supporter.

Yeah, great. I wouldn't have really wasted my time on that. But anyway, everybody down in South Africa, I had a great meeting with Dr. Yordan on the P45 PhD project, and that was exciting. And man, have I, two primary topics this entire trip.

I mean, I gave over and over and over and over again. All my Islamic stuff. And I've never given my Jehovah's Witness presentation more often in a short period of time. They're everywhere down there. They're everywhere.

And in the townships, you know, in the real poor areas of South Africa, Zambia, same thing. They have township type cities where you don't really have paved roads. Most of the housing is shacks made of metal.

Frequently the roofs are held on with worn out tires, that kind of thing. A lot of people live in those township type things, and the Jehovah's Witnesses are on almost every corner. And every time I've been asked to speak at a church in those areas, and they know I know something about Jehovah's Witnesses, that's what I'm asked to address.

It's really, really interesting. Almost nothing about the Mormons, though I think I did see some Mormons someplace. But anyway, so really busy time, though when I'm in, especially in South Africa, when I stay with the family in Randberg, there's two places in this world where I have other homes, where I'm just as comfortable there as I am at home.

And one's in Randberg, and the other's in Evergreen, Colorado. So you put those two together, and those are two places I can just, you know... Rich is in the other room going, and nowhere else! Yeah, it's a whole lot easier for me to stay in a hotel than in a home.

But those are two places where it's actually flipped around. It's pretty unusual, but that's the way it is. Anyway, so great time down there. Zambia? Wow. I now realize what a blessing sidewalks are. Because they don't have sidewalks in Zambia.

As I was flying in, I'm looking down out of the plane, and I'm sort of looking at the roads going, most of those are not paved. And African Christian University is actually on an unpaved road. And I drove over it a number of times in a Land Rover-type thing.

And just about, I mean, you have to be strapped in and holding hard and hope that your neck doesn't get broken. I mean, it's just, whew! I guess people like to go on four-wheeling. I don't. No way. Four-wheel drive is not my thing.

And just a very different culture. Great people. Loved the guys down there. Had a great time with Vody Balcombe. Had dinner the first night over at his house, and got to meet his dog. His dog got to meet a gate, which then met Vody's toe.

That's a whole other story I'm not going to bother to tell right now, even though it hurt. Anyway, had a great time with him and all of that. And enjoyed doing the lectures for the Scholars Week at African Christian University.

Great students there. Some young guys there did a podcast with me, and they were asking about my family and stuff. And once I started talking about Summer and I mentioned Sheologians, the guy interrupts me, he's like, wait a minute, Summer's your daughter?

I listen to Sheologians all the time! And I'm like, well, it has come to the point where I am Summer's father. That's all I am now. Who are you? I'm Summer's father. Oh, cool. Yeah, nice to have you here.

So that's pretty much how that works. And even in Belfast, on Monday morning when I was speaking, there was an audience question about women and stuff like that and teaching and things like that. And I made reference to Summer and I did it in such a way as I wanted to see who I was talking about.

And she had a bunch of fans in the audience there in Belfast. So yeah, that was pretty cool. But I spoke at Lusaka Reformed Baptist Church. And by the way, do not even bother, if you ever have the opportunity of speaking in Zambia and you're doing public speaking, do not concern yourself about attempting to get any type of response from your audience.

Because it is Zambian culture to sit respectfully, pay attention, listen well, and don't react at all to anything that is said. You just sit there. And I'm not even talking about like Reformed Baptists are normally the chosen frozen.

I'm talking way beyond that. I mean, you will not get an amen. You can drop the best humor on the planet. No response. None. And in fact, I was at one church in the morning and I was doing something on the early papyri.

And I always do this thing where I show P46, which contains Paul's epistles. I always talk about Hebrews and I say, now, given this is Paul's epistles, what do you think? Do you think it contains Hebrews or doesn't contain Hebrews?

And I always take a poll. And normally what happens is you'll get about two thirds of the people will vote one way or the other. But there's always a group of people in every audience just sit there and you can't make me vote.

And it's like, nothing's going to happen to you. You know, I mean, no one's taking pictures and going, look, he got it wrong. But there's just there's just certain people just sit there. And well, guess what?

In Zambia, I went, so how many think it contains Hebrews? No hands go up. How many think it doesn't contain Hebrews? No hands go up. Nobody. They all. Obviously, I violated a cultural taboo by asking someone to actually respond during a presentation.

So I did actually get used to that because I use humor, believe it or not. People are shocked by that. I actually had one guy. I forget where it was. I think it may have been in the UK. Say, I'm amazed you have a sense of humor.

It's like we do do some funny stuff on the program once in a while. But anyway. So, yeah, that was interesting. That was that was a real interesting thing. But they're doing a great, great work down there.

And but, yeah, I'm very thankful to have sidewalks, even though somebody said even if they invented sidewalks and installed them, all people would do would be to build huts on them to sell things. So you'd still be walking in the street anyways.

It's just it's just a cultural thing. And yeah, people get hit all the time, but they have no rights. They have no pedestrian rights. So you get hit, you get hit. Tough luck. And it's like, ooh, OK. Yeah.

So and I did manage. It has been more than seven days since I left Zambia and I do not have malaria. Vodie Balkan taught me or talked me out of finishing the malarial meds. They were they weren't killing me.

I did. I did take the good stuff, but it definitely puts you off your game. And if I had to take them for the seven more days afterwards, that would have been really ugly. That would have caused problems.

So he said, I've been here for two and a half years. And besides, that was dry season. I don't remember seeing any mosquitoes. So though I did, I did use the netting at night just in case. But yeah, that was that was definitely the farthest I've gone that direction.

You know, we generally have a rule around here that I don't go where you can't drink the water. But we definitely broke that rule on on this trip. But it was great to meet everybody there. And then off to off to England and Johnny Woodrow, who just obviously, you know, has, you know, fantasies of being like the big boss, you know, I mean, you know, just just crush the guy, work him work him till his till he's he's drooling and then ship him off somebody else.

And I mean, we, we, we did we did. We did a lot of videotaping and, and teaching and, and stuff like that. And yeah, we did a lot of that. Up in the left, Leftborough, Leftborough, a little town, there's a university there.

And it was interesting to see. I've never been to the Midlands before. And then we flew up to Glasgow and, you know, did a fair amount of teaching there. The nice thing was I did get to go see Jim Handyside, a wonderful pastor there from Annie's Land.

And even they enjoyed, they really enjoyed getting to meet Jim. He's, he's a treasure. He's a great guy. And then back to there. And then we spoke in Leicester and then flew out of Birmingham to, to Belfast, where we had already had to ask the church there, please, we didn't realize that you had scheduled an entire day of teaching on a completely different subject.

With the night being the debate on the last night of a 20 day trip overseas. So we cut that back to just the morning. But so I did teach that morning, but at least I had the afternoon, could take a nap, could get some rested.

The video of the debate will be up eventually. That's all up to All Saints Church in Belfast. Thought it went real well. Well attended. It was, it was enjoyable. I did a little live Facebooking for the stuff where I could.

It was helpful. And so, and then yesterday's trip home, hey, my bags didn't get lost and my flights were on time. That's all you could ask for because everything else did not work. Everything we tried to do to make it an easier trip backfired on us.

And I got to wrestle, wrestle those, even the checked bags, up and down lifts and onto trains and all the stuff we were trying to help me to avoid doing, we ended up doing anyways. So yeah, it was a tiring trip, but we, in the future, we've just got to try to cut back on how many times you go through airports.

Go to one place, you can do a little traveling around and stuff like that. But if you can hang your clothes up for a while, it really does help because packing, repacking, repacking, repacking, repacking, repacking, repacking.

Some people enjoy that. That's not my thing. That's not my thing. So, but it was enjoyable. It was great to meet the saints all over the place and looking forward to seeing the video of debate number 162 with Peter D. Williams on indulgences and his rather strong statements.

They all heard it during the, I guess we could call it the second debate because it was a second debate. We basically did a second debate during the questions that left indulgences and started dealing with appeal substitutionary atonement and issues like that.

So that's rather fascinating. What happened while I was gone? Well, you know, I will confess, I'm glad that I sort of had an excuse not to be involved in all the Twitter wars and all the other stuff going on since I wasn't doing the dividing line and things like that.

Most of the social justice warriors went off after somebody else to attack. Maybe they realized that, you know, when the guy's lecturing in Zambia, that might not be the best time to be attacking him for his white privilege.

That doesn't really look real good in that situation. So we'll wait till it's a better time to do that. But certainly as I was observing stuff, the one thing that really caught my attention, of course, was right as I'm leaving, FCM hits the news, first century mark.

And this is something we've talked about in this program many times before. We played years ago the debate between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman, and we discussed the announcement on Dan's part regarding a fragment of Mark from the first century.

Now, what's fascinating is, you know, I just read through a couple of articles on this subject that have updates and secondary updates and tertiary updates and so on and so forth. There are still an awful lot of unanswered questions here.

I mean, you had all this stuff about how this fragment had been found in an Egyptian funerary mask. And I even remember that Bart Ehrman was like, how dare they destroy an Egyptian funerary mask just to get papyri out of it and stuff like that.

And lo and behold, there was stuff about fragments being for sale, and there were other fragments from Hebrews, and it was a collection and all this stuff that was running around for years. And then when the fragment finally is published, and I guess you're not supposed to show the picture from what I'm reading.

I have it. I guess you can't get it anymore, but I got it. But there's 28 letters. There's 28 letters. Now, don't get me wrong. Evidently, it's a valuable find because it's from Mark 1, and we did not have any papyri from this time period of Mark 1.

P45, the papyrus I'm working on, doesn't contain anything from Mark 1. So P45 was considered the earliest. As far as paleography goes, I'm not an expert, but I am doing graduate-level work in papyrology and textual criticism.

And given my rather minimal skills in that area, it does strike me that there are fundamental similarities in the letter formation and style of this small fragment and what is found in P45. But there's 28 letters.

So it's useful. It again confirms the general reliability of the text in that there's nothing outrageous here. It doesn't tell us anything shocking. And it's now one of the two earliest papyri witnesses to the Gospel of Mark.

But as far as the first century stuff, how it was found, this actually isn't all that unusual. The Indiana Jones thing is sort of how things were for quite some time. Antiquities dealers and wheeling and dealing, unfortunately that kind of stuff actually does take place.

And here I think we have an example of it. And hey, on this program, I said when I announced it was first made, A, you don't present something like that in a debate where the other side has never even heard of it and cannot respond to it and it has not been vetted on a scholarly level.

I said that from the start. I said that when Jay Smith presented as yet unpublished material in his debate with Shabir Ali. I said that's not fair. The other side made that to us. That does not give us the right to return the favor.

That was just not fair. So that was a no-no. But then I said, look, folks, until this stuff is published and vetted and analyzed and debated, P52 remains our earliest papyrus. You might want to argue about one or two of the others, but you just don't go there.

You don't jump into these things. We have to be consistent. It doesn't matter if the other side is not consistent. We have to be because we're not being judged by the other side. We're being judged by the one that we're serving.

So the first century mark is out there. It's just not first century. It's the beginning of third century. Maybe end of second, but probably beginning of third century, just like P45. I'm not sure. I think I saw which papyrus number it's going to be.

And so in Nessie Island 29, whenever that comes out, there in Mark 1, there will be a few little references to P whatever it is, 137 or 139 or 140. I don't even know which one it is. And it'll be there.

And that's good as it should be. But, yeah, that was a big story that ended up not being so much a big story. OK, let's get ourselves in complete trouble here, but I don't think it is in complete trouble.

So starting a few weeks ago, I guess about 20 days ago, a series of videos began to be posted on YouTube, put out by David Wood, Volcab Malone, a gentleman that I do not know, a third individual, Sam Shamoon is involved in a tertiary, well, somewhat a tertiary sense.

I don't know if exactly how he was involved. Sort of looks like he recorded his stuff someplace else. But then there was the one in the mosque and Sam was there for that one, allegedly in a mosque. Anyway, it's called Islamicize Me and obviously it was meant to be released during the month of Ramadan.

Ramadan is wrapping up and so it was meant to be coordinated with that as far as the timing is concerned. And so, you know, my feed follows lots of stuff on the subject of Islam. Interestingly enough, I have not seen any Muslim comments on it as yet.

So I started watching these things and most of the time you're just left sitting there going, did that just happen? Did I just watch that? David described it as a mockumentary, not a documentary, a mockumentary.

And that's what it is. This is the most mocking material since the Jack Chick style cartoon books that Bob Mori put out a long time ago. So it's continuing the Bob Mori, because it's the same material.

The comic book stuff that Mori did was primarily focused upon stories in the Hadith. And I have mentioned on this program many times before that there are all sorts of things in the Hadith that need to be analyzed in light of the Islamic claim that Muhammad was the best of all creatures.

That he's the example, that the analysis of his life, that it was actually Allah's intention that his life be lived in such a way as to provide us with the example that all people are to use in all cultures.

There is so much deeply cultural stuff in the Hadith that has almost no meaning outside of that culture. It's very backwards, backward looking, very backwards in its orientation. And of course, to Westerners, much of this will strike us as absolutely insane.

One of the things that Mori mentioned, and there was an entire video on this, was the Hadith where if a fly lands in your food, you are to submerge it because it has a disease on one wing and the cure for the disease on the other wing.

Well, what can we say about something like that? That's obviously untrue. And if a Muslim were to try to defend that and say, well, yeah, here's an example of it. That's why you should submerge the fly in your food.

I suppose a person that would go that far is then worthy of being mocked if they end up puking their guts out, which is what happens in the films, because you get sick from the food. But it just strikes me that from a Christian perspective, if you're going to address something like this, the best way to do it is to keep...

First of all, you don't need to be producing videos showing projectile vomiting as a result. There have been so many things that... I think it was number 19 about the breastfeeding. It was just indefensible.

Absolutely indefensible. I mean, I've read all of Bukhari, I've read all of Muslim, I've read major portions of Jami 'at, Tirmidhi, and soon Abu Dawud. And I know there's all sorts of stuff that if you just wanted to be really king of mockery, I've commented to people.

I learned more about Muhammad's wife's menstrual cycles reading the Hadith than I ever wanted to know, I can assure you of that. And so if you want to go there, there's plenty of material to go around.

Plenty of material. I just don't know what that's supposed to accomplish. I don't think that the gospel is actually promoted by the use of mockery. And yes, the other side does mockery, but that doesn't give us the right to use it.

The prophets used mockery, but they were speaking from God. And when you become a prophet, let me know. The temptations on that level are far too great for me. Maybe you guys are much more mature, grounded elders in the faith than I am, but too great a temptation for me to indulge in the sins of the flesh.

And certainly what I've watched in a number of these videos, far, far, far over the line. I don't know how anyone involved in the videos can expect any serious-minded Muslims to ever engage them again in debate or anything along those lines.

But the other thing is, and this is a real problem in my perspective, and that is, this could be used in reverse. One of the things that keeps me from addressing, at least certainly in that type of fashion, so much of what's found in the Hadith, is the fact that I know that we have to be able to consistently provide an answer for materials, for example, that are found in the Old Testament that many people find to be extremely troubling.

This is one of the reasons I'm, again, very thankful that I don't just do apologetics. As some of you know, over a couple years ago, I did a whole series of sermons at PRBC on the Holiness Code. And I tackled some of the hardest texts in the Old Testament that are incredibly offensive, backwards, to the modern mind.

I even addressed the one where, if a woman reaches out and grabs a man's manhood when two men are fighting, her hands would be cut off. Now, an atheist could very, very, very easily produce the kind of mocking, deriding video about the Bible that are being produced about the Hadith.

And we would have to ask for fairness and balance in analyzing the background, placing it in its historical context, and then making a meaningful discussion about modern application in our day, in light of our understanding of the nature of God's law.

In the same way, the serious-minded Muslim can make the same appeal to contextualize and make modern application. Now, there are some pretty amazing stories of what goes on at Al-Azhar in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, where you get some really interesting imams that are still in the 7th century Arabian mindset that will argue that you should immerse the fly, and will argue that the breastfeeding stuff, and a completely, utterly indefensible video, and then further references afterwards to temporary marriages in the Hadith.

And there's a situation where you have a wonderful opportunity to accurately represent what was said in the Hadith, what Muhammad did, what he allowed his men to do, and then to contrast that with the Christian perspective on marriage.

Because just as in the nature of God, Islam represents a U-turn. You have Judaism, you have what happens with Christ in history in the Incarnation, and then Islam comes along and does a U-turn and says, No, no, we're not going to accept that awesome stuff that God did because they didn't understand it, didn't know what it was about.

In the same way, in regards to marriage, what you have in the New Testament is just this high, high Christ in the church, and oh, it's awesome. And then Islam does a U-turn, back to polygamy, ease of divorce, whole nine yards.

Again, total ignorance of what Jesus taught. Well, here's an awesome opportunity to exalt Christian teaching, to exalt the Christian doctrine of marriage, and to contrast it with what's in the Hadith, and just how far from anything revealed by God this would be.

You don't do that by mocking it and representing it and talking about getting STDs and fuzzing out genitals. I can see atheists doing this. I don't understand what has gotten into these guys' minds. I don't get it.

I cannot imagine any time in my entire adult life that I would have gone, Yeah, that's a good idea. I think I'll join up on that. No, no, no, no. So, here are opportunities to do good things, to approach the subject in a meaningful fashion, and to make good points.

I mean, everything they've brought up, I was predicting, well, I bet you'll go for this and they'll go for that. I was predicting where it was going to go. Because, again, you read the Hadith, you run into this kind of stuff, and it strikes you as very strange.

If any modern Westerner reads the entire section about how you cleanse yourself after you go to the bathroom with an odd number of stones, not an even, it's the same thing with eating dates. You should only eat an odd number of dates.

Well, okay, so Muhammad had some weird ideas. Okay, when someone pushes him as being the example of all things, then instead of mocking him and opening up the door for a mockery of the Old Testament and any of its antiquities and things like that, contrast him to Jesus.

Draw somebody higher. But I'm, whatever is true, honest, just, good, lovely, good report, think on these things, that alone would be enough to keep you from even writing the scripts to this stuff that is being put out right now.

And so, you know, I've done work with David Wood in the past. I've been on programs with him. We've done debates, not he and I, but been involved in debates, he and Nabil. And Volkav's been in this studio a number of times, not very long ago.

Like I said, I don't know the other gentleman. Sam's continuing on his wild-eyed campaign against me. The man's even, not only has he been posting Stephen Anderson, just recently he was promoting Gregory Boyd, open theism.

I don't even know what's going on there. But I just have to be just very straightforward saying to everyone that I cannot see how any Christian elder, how any Christian leader, how anyone who has been set aside to gospel ministry can look at these and go, yeah, that's how we should approach other folks.

Even in the text, even in the Classicus Locus, 1 Peter 3 .15, when we are told to give an answer, the hope is in us. Don't you see the rest of the sentence? Yet with gentleness and reverence. There is nothing gentle or reverent in these videos.

And so I must not only distance us by the fact that we have done work in the past. And the thing that really bugs me here, I look at David's testimony video. So well done, just brilliance. And to then sully that, because that's the only way I can see it.

It just saddens me. It just really, really saddens me. There is a way to approach these subjects that allows you to look a Muslim in the eye and say, I really do care about you. And I honor the fact that you're made in the image of God.

And I call you to truly the highest standard in analyzing the truth. Because when you do follow that highest standard in analyzing the truth, you will find that Islam is inconsistent and Christianity is true.

You can't do that when you approach somebody with this type of mockumentary. And so I don't know how long it's going to be going. I saw a video today about how at the end of this, they're going to actually made it a vote, an internet vote, as to whether the guys are going to succeed or not succeed in killing Robert Spencer.

That's how I guess it's going to end. And I guess Robert Spencer is going to be involved because he does a lot of stuff with these guys. And so there you go. Needed to address it. No one had actually contacted me as yet.

I'm not sure if anyone, no one. Okay. No one's, I think everybody in our audience already knew where we would stand on this. But I think it needs to be put out there directly. We do not support mockumentaries.

We had nothing whatsoever to do with this and would never promote the idea that this kind of mockery is consistent with the Christian profession, that we follow him who is the truth. And so that's why we don't do that kind of thing.

And we will not. So did you wish to, or are you just listening?

The only thing I want to contribute here is that I, some of the comments in the comm boxes. I haven't looked at the comments. I recognize some of the names. And I'm not going to give you a context as to how I recognize some of the names.

And I'm just personally, I watched one episode, episode 13, and was utterly floored that professing believers were doing this. And then to read the comm boxes of people that I know to be professing believers who found it so humorous and thought it was so great and couldn't stop applauding.

I don't even know what to do with it. I just didn't even know what to do with it. I didn't either. But I felt it needed to be addressed. So there you go.

The First-Century Mark Fragment and the Need for Scholarly Vetting

Okay, two more things. We only have 20 minutes left. Well, actually 19. Because somebody has to get out of here today. I imagine, I hope it's because you've got a dinner or something planned. That's going to be Friday.

Oh, okay. Okay. Well, someone has been married for 20 years today. And I'm sitting back going, that was 20 years ago. Wow. Man, I still remember that day. And I was really concerned that your knees were so tightly locked.

Because I think I said something to you about bend your knees. Bend your knees. Bend your knees. Because I just didn't want to see the eyes cross and boop. I've seen this before. Okay. I did not want to see that happen.

So congratulations on 20 years. We're only a few days away from 36 for me. But I was never called Jim the Tingle. As Rich was called Rich the Tingle by my kids. So that's great. Anyways, two more things.

You are not allowed to be balanced and try to be unbiased and fair and look toward the future. Anything you say on Twitter. I don't remember checking a comm box that said only radicals may post here. I made a comment when the first news came out about the Supreme Court decision about the Baker.

And it called it a narrow decision. All I looked at was the title and the first two lines. And I realized they were saying narrow as in the decision has a narrow field of coverage. From the court's perspective, this is not setting a precedent.

There was a specific sort of mitigating circumstance in the behavior of the Colorado authorities that shot them down. The scary thing is, given what Kennedy said, if that stuff wasn't there, it could have gone the other way.

And even with the other justices, even with Gorsuch. And so it was almost like, hey, come on, quit being such a downer. Let's let's let's party. Let's be happy for just a day. And I'm like, I'm sorry, but I'm a realist.

And I don't fantasy football. Not into that, you know, and fantasy Supreme Court stuff. None of that either. I actually want to know what the decision was, what it's what its scope is, narrow or broad.

And what the arguing was, what are the what did you know, if Thomas had to write what Thomas had to write, then Thomas sought to listen to him. You know, I was just shocked at the people shooting back at me.

Conservatives shooting back at me when I'm just going. Facts, please. Logic. Consistency. Something. Maybe. I just see this as a temporary. Quote, unquote, victory. But I don't see it as as a defense of our religious liberties.

And I don't have any reason to believe that if. The socialist communist, also known as Democrats, put forward a. Charismatic. If they have one charismatic candidate for the next presidential election.

Every one of those leftist old fogies will retire the day after a Democrat becomes president of the United States and a Democrat will become president United States. Now, if Trump gets another term or something like that, those old folks will start injecting themselves with with formaldehyde just to preserve themselves until he's out.

And you know it. And so I'm sorry if if I'm a realist, but we've entered into a time period where words don't have meanings anymore. And the whole reason that we are hoping for conservative judges is a recognition that words don't have meanings anymore.

That the that the the guarantees of the of the amendments of the Constitution mean nothing. To those on the left. And you're not going to you're not going to have 50 years of Republican presidents. It's not going to happen.

So. Sorry for pointing out the the fly in the ointment to use something from the last conversation. Which we can submerge completely in this stuff and it won't make any difference because it's all poison anyway.

But. I was just I was just really surprised at some of the responses to that. It's a brief respite. Nothing more. It just isn't anything more than I'm sorry, but. I've not seen anyone provide any documentation from the actual decisions themselves and the comments from the justices to substantiate any kind of anger toward me for going.

Well, it's better than it going the other direction in light of the obvious reality of the of the Colorado abuse of this man. And there was. So on that level, it's great that they slap those people around and said, you people are are idiots.

But all that does is it teaches it teaches the leftists that they have to hide their animus toward Christianity. And then they'll get away with it as long as they cloak it in the right language. That's what's dangerous about it.

Sorry to have noticed it and to call it to your attention. But that's the way that is. My my son calls me Debbie Downer, but I'm sorry. Debbie Downer is normally right about her facts. It's just just not really good about when she expresses them.

So let's just if you don't know who Debbie Downer is, don't worry about it. OK, last thing. Wow. It's interesting for those of you who are a Southern Baptist these days. I I knew a little ahead of time what was coming down with Paige Patterson.