Collision w/ Jeff Durbin: Activist vs Michael Knowles

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00:00

What's up, everybody? I am Pastor Jeff Durbin. This is Apologia Studios Collision, and today we are interacting with a video with Michael Knowles as he debates a viral pro -choice activist.

00:11

This should be fun. Let's do it. All right.

00:27

So this is Michael Knowles, who actually has put out some pretty good stuff. I actually I like the guy. He's done some pretty good work.

00:33

And so he is debating a viral pro -choice activist. And this is a portion of this discussion that actually runs like over two hours long.

00:41

That I thought would be helpful to interact with. So let's take a look. But as I said before, the leading cause of death for pregnant people is homicide.

00:49

And I bring that up because you cannot. Leading cause of death of pregnant people is homicide.

00:55

Interesting. She said pregnant people. I think it's only women who get pregnant.

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And so you'll actually hear her a lot throughout this interview saying that pregnant people, it's it's a pregnant woman.

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Women get pregnant, not men. It's actually physically, biologically impossible. And that much should be obvious.

01:14

You shouldn't have had to said that maybe even 10 years ago. But here we are. Pretend like you understand the situations that people find themselves in.

01:23

People's lives. So what you're telling me. So here you have a pro -choice activist talking a lot about people's lives and how people's lives really matter.

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And so that should be the thing we key in on. The most we have these discussions is the borrowed capital.

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When you have somebody pulling on somebody's emotions to say, hey, we need to really care about these people's lives.

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I mean, that's precisely the issue that we're talking about. Actually, you're borrowing from me capital for me.

01:50

I'm the one that cares about people's lives. You're the one that should is saying that we should be able to take them out at will.

01:58

But if a woman is threatened with murder by her boyfriend because the boyfriend doesn't want her to be pregnant or something like that, that that is why we need to basically give those women the option to kill their baby because their psychopath boyfriends might murder them if they don't murder their own child.

02:20

That's what you're telling me. The solution is to these murderous boyfriends that you're describing. Are you minimizing the threat to someone's life?

02:28

Oh, I just think that I don't think the the. No, Michael's doing a fantastic job. First of all, I want to just say good for Michael using the proper terminology.

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He's using the proper terminology murder. That's what we're talking about. The unjustified taking of human life is murder.

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And so good for Michael, making sure that he's standing firm on the proper definition in this argument.

02:52

So that's really, really important. He's doing a phenomenal job of that. The solution to a boyfriend threatening to kill a girlfriend if she doesn't kill her own child is to encourage the girlfriend to kill her own child.

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We're not encouraging her. We are giving her the access to that option. Wouldn't it be better to send in the civil authority to arrest the murderous boyfriend and protect the mother and the child?

03:13

See, that's fantastic. And that's exactly the point. When we have this argument and someone uses the emotional argument against us like a murderous boyfriend or in the instance of, say, rape, a woman is raped.

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We need to give her the option to be able to murder the child. It's really important as we're having this discussion to make sure that we key in upon the most important aspect.

03:35

And that is that we should be pursuing the criminal in this. We shouldn't be victimizing the child.

03:42

And so what this woman is arguing is that we now in an instance with a murderous boyfriend or with somebody who, say, commits rape is that we actually need to create more victims.

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We have somebody who's being victimized. And so the solution is to victimize the child rather than saying we should uphold justice and we should pursue the murderous boyfriend or we should pursue the rape, the rapist.

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And actually, in many states across the country, you have that kind of provision in the law. You are not allowed to encourage somebody to murder somebody.

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You are not allowed to tell somebody to murder somebody. That's actually a crime. And so what we should be doing is giving equal protection to all humans from fertilization, protecting them the same way that our lives are protected.

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And we should be saying that we uphold the law as it stands and that we don't permit murder or threats of murder.

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And so we should go after the people who are threatening murder or who are committing murder, or we should go after the rapist.

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We shouldn't be punishing the child for the crimes of the father in the instance of rape. And we shouldn't be creating a second victim when the mother is being victimized by the murderous boyfriend.

04:48

And so what Michael is actually pursuing here is an actual just response to the emotional problem that this pro -choice activist is bringing to bear on the situation.

04:59

He's actually saying we should establish justice. And that's the key issue when you have this debate, is that you need to say no.

05:05

Look, if we want justice, let's pursue real justice. And real justice is going after the principal who's involved and actually promoting the crime, pursuing the crime.

05:15

We go after the principal. We don't create a second victim, which is what she's arguing. We should be able to create other victims.

05:22

Perfect world, yes, but we don't live in that world. What if the mother who is afraid of being murdered by her boyfriend wants to keep her child, but she's afraid that she's going to get murdered so she feels that it'll just be sort of safer for her to go kill the child, even if this there was a video of this that just went viral recently of a clearly abusive boyfriend who was trying to throw his pregnant girlfriend into a car to go get an abortion.

05:44

It went viral, I think, about six months or so ago. And the woman clearly doesn't want to get the abortion.

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And the boyfriend really wants her to. It's the exact situation that you're describing. You think that the solution to that is to make it easier for the woman to get the abortion, to make it easier, to give the murderous boyfriend what he wants?

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So this is really important to emotional arguments are generally bad, but emotional arguments that are built upon a foundation of truth that pull on the proper emotions of an image bearer of God are right to use.

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And so what Michael is doing here is he's actually giving now a story, a scenario that will touch the heart of the image bearer.

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Right. So you touch the heart of the image bearer to say, here's a story. This is unjust. What's your solution?

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And in his in this case, his is actually an emotional appeal that is valid. It's valid because it's actually standing on a solid reference point.

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And that's that image bearers of God have value, dignity and worth. We should love our neighbors, not not harm them.

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Love does no harm to its neighbor, scripture says. And so Michael now is actually giving a scenario that properly pulls on the emotions of the image bearer and says,

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OK, what do we do? What's actually just here? And what's actually just in this scenario is to go after the person who is who is trying to commit murder, who's trying to encourage murder.

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We should go after that guy. We shouldn't have a society where we don't go after that guy.

07:11

He has immunity, but we actually victimize the baby. And so this is a very well done argument in terms of appealing to proper emotion that are properly grounded.

07:24

What I am saying. Well, no, because this entire thing is about consent. It's about the I don't think it's about consent.

07:30

I think you don't seem to respect consent. No, I think consent is important. So, OK, here we go. She says you don't seem to respect consent.

07:38

Wait, what's happening here? Let's let's all gather our thoughts for a moment here and let's think about what's happening here. She says this is all about consent.

07:45

You don't seem to respect consent. Actually, he's on the side of the table that says consent is the most important thing.

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And so what she's doing here, once again, is she's borrowing capital from the other side that doesn't actually belong to her side because her side fundamentally denies that we need to have the consent of every human being.

08:09

What she actually says is that there's you need to be partial. You need to say to the older human beings, these women, you need to make sure that you have their consent, unconditional consent.

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You need their consent. But for these smaller human beings, their consent is irrelevant.

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What Michael Knowles is arguing is that consent actually is the principle. Bodily autonomy is a real thing, and it's vitally important.

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And consent is very important. So he's actually arguing for the position of consent is important and bodily autonomy, because he says that the consent of the child is being completely thrown to the wind.

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It doesn't matter. The child's life, the child's value, the child's dignity, the child's consent is irrelevant.

08:56

And so what you need to do in these arguments is that when you have somebody on the other side that is standing on a different foundation that shouldn't be using those things, you need to make sure that you pause the conversation long enough to say, excuse me, one second.

09:10

What you're standing on, your position doesn't allow for what you're arguing. And so what you're doing is actually borrowing things from me that actually will work only with what

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I'm standing on in order to use them against me emotionally. And so she shouldn't be talking about bodily autonomy.

09:29

She shouldn't be talking about consent because that is not comporting with her worldview.

09:35

And so that's vitally important to point out. Well, you think it's the heart of the issue. I think the baby's heart is the heart of the issue.

09:43

I think the baby's life is the heart of the issue. And you think consent plays a role in moral judgments, but it's not the only criteria that we consider when we come to moral decisions.

09:51

So can I ask you, why do you find it so easy to have compassion for a fetus or a baby that is non -autonomous and has absolutely no awareness of its own existence?

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But you find it so difficult to expand, expand that compassion towards pregnant people.

10:10

Well, so there's the pregnant people again. We're talking about pregnant women. So when she there's a lot of euphemisms in this debate, people like to use to get around what actually is taking place.

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Like we talk about reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, rather than the unjustified taking of human life or the killing of another human being.

10:29

And so use words like fetus and those sorts of things. Now, thankfully, in this moment, because he's been using the word so much again.

10:36

Great job, Michael, on that, because he's been using the word so much baby murder.

10:42

Now she's forced to place that in her conversation as well. She'd like to just say fetus. But now she says fetus or baby.

10:48

But actually, that was kind of stuttering because fetus is a Latin word that means baby or refers to the newborn offspring of a creature in reference to a human.

10:58

It's a baby. So it's the baby or the baby. I mean, you're speaking Latin than English, but you're saying the same word baby or baby.

11:06

But what she's arguing here is that you have compassion for the baby, but not for the woman.

11:13

And that is actually just not the case. The position is a fundamental position that all human beings have value.

11:24

All human beings deserve equal protection. All human beings need to be loved. And what she's suggesting is that the human being who isn't fully aware, who isn't even maybe in a moment of consciousness, that we should really disregard their value and their dignity and their worth because they're not as self -aware as this older human being.

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And so this is a form of what people would call ageism, right? This age is more valuable than this age.

11:54

But also it is terrifying to get into a place where you actually suggest that because a human being may be at a stage in their life and experience where they are not fully aware, not conscious, that we should be able to kill them.

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Not conscious. So we should kill them. We should we should have the ability to kill them. It's very important to point this out, that this is a dangerous thing to infuse into the minds of your community.

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That if we have human beings that are not fully self -aware, they are not fully grounded in their belief system.

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Some people have said that this child doesn't have a fully formed belief system yet. So we should be able to kill them. We're in big trouble because we've been here before in history over and over and over.

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It's like waves on the beach. They just keep rolling in and then there's a moment where it recedes and then it rolls back in again.

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We've been here before in history with tribes against other tribes. You don't look like me. You don't believe like me.

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You don't behave like me. And so I will just slaughter you at will, maybe completely in an unjustified way.

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Or you have instances fairly recently in our history. I mean, I was just watching the movie

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Emancipation with Will Smith, and that is a powerful, powerful film that you cannot help but get tears watching or feeling the just absolute righteous indignation against that kind of evil in history to say to this human being over here, because he has black skin and looks different than me, that you're not worthy of my protection.

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You are actually beneath me. I can kidnap and enslave you.

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I can kidnap and enslave your children. I can abuse you. I can beat you. Why?

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Because you are not fully human like me. There's something about you that hasn't risen to the level of my humanity.

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And so you are less human than me. You see, we have this in history all the time in America and our system.

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In this country, we had this abomination of slavery where they kidnapped and enslaved our black brothers and sisters.

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God's law forbids such a thing. God's law actually says that's worthy of capital punishment. But you did tragically in this nation have white people who drew a circle around their color and they drew a smaller circle around black people.

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And they said, we are valuable because we look like this. We appear like this. We have this background or this ancestry and you have a smaller circle around you.

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So you are less valuable, less human. We also had this problem fairly recently, of course, in human history with the

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Holocaust. What was that? It was another indication of human beings drawing a circle around themselves and their group, and they're saying to the other people, not really human, parasite, which is exactly what they called

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Jewish people, our Jewish brothers and sisters. They said, you are a parasite. They said to black people, you are beasts.

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This is just a problem in human history. And we need to put it under the feet of Jesus and repent of this stuff.

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And she's trying to infuse the idea that if a human being is small, it's young, it's not fully formed, it doesn't look like me, then

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I shouldn't value it. And it certainly isn't worthy of protection. That is a horrific concept to infuse into the minds of your community, and it will lead to absolute betrayal and it will lead to absolute destruction.

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Hey, what's up, guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at Apologia's All Access at ApologiaStudios .com.

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