No Creator, No Humanity, or, Of Apes and Men

And greetings, welcome to the dividing line. I assume we're on. I can't see anything. Oh, there we go. Now I know. Oh, it's all pixely and stuff, but... Oh, well, we didn't test all that stuff. That's okay.

We're here. I'm looking some stuff up here. And just to make sure that I'm not misleading folks. Yeah, there we go. Okay. See the background there? Don't know where I could put this thing. It's huge. It's humongous.

Ginormous, as Bart Ehrman said in our debate so long ago. But that is the... When I did the Calvinist Batman program, something was mentioned about the Romans wall poster from Mission Aware. And I said, well, is it in Greek?

Well, no, it's not in Greek. Well, that doesn't count. Well, there it is in Greek. The only thing missing is it says Romans in English instead of Greek. That would be the one thing, you know. But that is the entire text of Romans.

I'm not sure. I'd probably say that's like 12 point font. I mean, that's a normal print size, I would say. And you can fit all Romans into that space. Now, I wonder, what if the Lord tarries for a long period of time?

What if there's still a long time to come and 2 ,000 years from now? Let's say this building is dug up and it was... Let's say there's some massive tectonic thing that causes Phoenix to be buried like Pompeii was, okay?

And they dig up this building and they find this well-preserved. How would you categorize this as a manuscript or a text? That's the question. Are there any textual variants? Well, I guess it depends on what your standard is, huh?

Could be a little bit more complicated task.

Well, you have to keep in mind they would find two things. They would find that and a lot of duct tape. So put those two things together and try to determine what information you could derive from that.

Well, we're not going to be able to leave it there. There's really no place in here. The room's too small. We'd have to take down one of the... We'd have to cut in half one of the things on the wall over there or something.

Don't think that's going to happen. But I appreciate the gift and we went and got it framed. Looks cool. Looks cool. It's big. It's very, very big. Missionalware .com is where you can get that. I'm looking at it right now online.

Sized for standard frames. Yes, well... Standard, very, very large frames. Very, very big frames.

Anyway...

So a couple of... Will you discuss your thoughts about the street preacher who was hit in the head with a bat? I don't know. I've never heard anything about it. I got hit in the head with a sign by a street preacher.

Good old Lonnie smacked me in the head with a sign up in Salt Lake City. But I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway...

A couple of years ago, in February of 2012, an article was published. I reposted it on Facebook with a comment. It was an article from the Journal of Medical Ethics out of Oxford that said that newborn babies are not actual persons, do not have a moral right to life.

The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when born. Well, not a whole lot new there. But many people made note of this. And it's sort of like a topic that you just...

Well, you know, there's some weird people in the world and isn't that terrible? And then you have to go on and... You know, I was walking up to my car. I think it was Friday. Was it Friday? Thursday or Friday.

I'm walking up behind my car and I happen to be at enough of an angle. I see that the right rear tire has a nail in it. And my little light didn't come on. It seemed to have... Well, it was a screw actually.

And it seems like it seated itself just perfectly. It wasn't even leaking. But you don't leave it in there. So, you know, I had to spend a fair amount of time at Discount Tire and getting stuff taken care of.

And, you know, life goes on. You got to go do what you got to do. And so, you know, some weird Oxford ethicist who can't think straight, you know, and think you should be able to look at your newborn baby and go, You know, yeah, I think we'll...

That doesn't look promising. And go ahead and euthanize it. You know, we just... You don't expect to be sitting next to them at the tire shop. You know, it's like it's a different world. This is the real world where you have to get tires fixed.

And does that world really exist? Well, we got a good illustration of how those two worlds do exist and how they relate to one another over the weekend. You've seen the video. I'm not going to play it again.

But you've seen the video of a four-year-old boy. I don't know how he got in there. We can have conversations about where was mom, where was dad. I'm sure mom and dad, if there is a dad involved these days, feel really badly and are very embarrassed.

But somehow little junior got into that gorilla cage. And it looks to me like the kid fell a long ways. Into this moat. Into this water.

And...

We can have conversations about how in the world can a four-year-old get into one of those places in the first place. I mean, haven't you ever heard of chicken wire? Fencing? Something? We can have conversations about all that stuff.

And a lot of people want to talk about that.

Okay.

It's obvious. He should not have been in there. And... Could more steps have been taken to keep him from getting in there? Sure. Whatever.

But...

The real question came up.

And I...

I about lost it yesterday. When... Jeff Durbin made a comment. Matt Walsh made a comment that sort of went viral on Facebook. And it all came down to the reality that... Some of us are starting to realize that...

Not just a small vocal group. But a very large percentage. Maybe even a majority. Of the younger generation. That same generation where you see this massive ethical, moral, worldview swing. Where these are the people that think that a third of the human population is homosexual.

These are the folks that have no connection whatsoever to the generations that have gone before them. Don't know who won the Civil War. World War I. World War II. And don't think it's relevant. Because nobody back then had iPods and iPads.

So how could they be relevant? This generation, I've been trying to explain to people. And I think it's just sort of people figure it's the filler. Between the more important topics that I'd be addressing.

But this is the first American generation that has been thoroughly secularized. Last night I had a bunch of... I'm going to try to control my terminology. A bunch of people on Twitter just demonstrating their abject incapacity to think.

It was just frustrating to no end. Proving everything I was saying. And not even realizing they were proving everything I was saying. But they just couldn't grab hold of the reality. They were saying, well, the generation before them.

You need to blame them. Whatever the younger generation is, you just have to blame the generation before. What we're seeing. People are sitting around going,.

Well, but what's changed so much?

I mean, yeah, we've seen this trend over time. But now it just seems like we've hit this patch of oil. And we're just flying. We're just skidding so fast. And it's the proverbial jump off the cliff. And we're accelerating and accelerating.

And all the different illustrations we've used.

What's going on?

We just don't understand. It's obvious. It's obvious.

This is the first generation that has been freed from the restraints of a worldview that civilized us. This is the first generation where there is no creator. You have no moral responsibility to any higher authority than that which exists between point A and point B.

That's why men can pretend to be women. And government authorities will now fine you your entire life savings if you dare say that.

People are wondering, where did this insanity come from?

The insanity comes from the fact that when you have a culture that embraces a worldview that recognizes the existence of a creator and hence a moral and ethical law that exists above and beyond the gray matter between my ears, that you have a civilized society.

But when you lose that, you no longer have a civilized society. You have a barbaric society.

And you have a dehumanized society.

The irony is that it's called secular humanism, but the only reason it's called humanism is because man becomes the measure of all things, because there's nothing else by which to measure anything. He becomes the default measure of all things, but he's insufficient for the task.

And so you end up with nihilism. You end up with no purpose. I was just illustrating. And I got to remember to go back to the gorilla. I know I'll get there eventually. But I got a little late start this morning.

I'm trying to stay physically fit in the middle of, I've got some medical stuff going on right now. It's not a super big deal, but it's frustrating and can be very painful. So I can't really get out on the road to ride right now.

So I'm riding inside. I'm thankful I have an excellent trainer. And I'm really thankful for a program called Zwift right now. It's making it worthwhile. And I'm really not losing any fitness. But I got a little late start today.

And so I sort of had to grab a bite to eat while driving in. I went by Sonic, okay? If everybody wants to know. I got a Sonic breakfast burrito with bacon. Yes, real bacon, not even veggie bacon. For those of you who are veggie bacon haters.

Man, there are a lot of veggie bacon haters.

It's cultic.

It's absolutely cultic. It is just an irrationality. It's hard to understand. Anyway, even Rich is going out there. Amen, amen. Anyway, so I went by Sonic. And, oh, by the way, the orange juice was 94 .7 ice.

I mean, I may have gotten two slurps. That was expensive. Anyway, I pull in. I'm looking right now at a video showing my car out there, making sure that it stays there. And pull in, put up the shade screen.

I need to finish my burrito. I don't want to wrap it up, bring it in, and unwrap it and all the rest of that stuff. So I'm sitting there listening. I happened to switch off the talk radio and went to a sports reader.

I just wanted to see what was being said about the NBA Finals and Game 7 last night between Oklahoma City and Golden State Warriors and so on and so forth. Well, for some reason, I don't know why, this sports show decided to have this guy on that Albert Moeller had talked about this morning.

Or the morning before. No. Is it yesterday or today? I forget which edition of the briefing it was. They actually had the guy who decided to live as a goat. British guy. One of those few times where the British accent did nothing to make this guy sound any smarter.

It only made it all the more amazing. I guess is the only way to put it. So, they had this guy on. And you can just tell. You can tell the British guy doesn't really understand what ESPN is all about.

Or what ESPN radio is all about. And you can just tell by the questions that the guys are sort of sitting there going, Really? Is this for real? And he's sort of answering them like he's actually being interviewed by your standard wacko leftist liberal media types.

Like, oh, this is just so insightful. You wanted to live as a goat. Honestly, folks, I can't even. I mean, the prosthetic limbs. Learning to eat grass with his mouth. Having a second stomach made filled with the digestive juices of goats.

So he could spit the grass into that and then drink the results. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's what I'm listening to. Now, I will leave this world firmly believing that anyone who does that is insane. I cannot, I will not adapt to a culture that goes,.

Wow, that's really interesting. What insights you could gain from that? No, that's insane. I have no respect for a person like that.

None. I cannot have respect for such a deluded, mentally ill individual. I can have some sympathy, except he's making money off of this.

He's written a book.

What's it called? Something about a vacation from being human or something. And you can just tell, even the guy's ESPN. Look, ESPN, by the way, ESPN, stop shoving your progressive idiocy down my throat, okay?

I am so sick of ESPN's socialism. I don't even know which ends up. But anyway, so I'm listening to this and it absolutely dovetails with this article from 2012 and what happened in that gorilla pit. Because I dared mention something.

I had some just, I don't even know how to describe the two women that came after me last night on Twitter. Just singing the praises of utter human autonomy. Bodily autonomy. That's why it's a good thing.

Abortion's a good thing because it affirms my bodily autonomy. I have to keep reminding myself that person will stand in the presence of a holy God and answer for that perversity. And the resultant punishment, I don't even want to imagine.

So you had that going on. And it was just those two women so totally robbed of womanhood. Of everything that's good and beautiful and right about being a mother and being a woman and nurturing and all this.

Devoid of it.

Why?

Because they have been dehumanized.

All of this goes back to the same thing. If you don't have the creator of the humans, you no longer have humans. All you have are accidental animals. That's all you have. You can pretend that secularism will give you some type of a foundation to come up with some kind of meaning and basis for human life having some kind of transcendent meaning.

But there is nothing that's transcendent. It can't have transcendent meaning. And so last night, I'm following some of the threads about this guerrilla. And the virulent, vitriolic, vicious, I'm coming up with all the V's here, responses that thoroughly secularized Westerners, primarily young women, were posting about how since that gorilla is one of a vanishing species, and that four-year-old kid, there's billions of us, that clearly the gorilla had much more value than the child did.

Much more value. Now thankfully, the folks at the zoo are still humans. And so it wasn't a difficult call for them. But 20 years from now, when those virulent, vicious, cultic, totally secularized millennials are in charge, that kid's toast.

You gotta understand, that 450-pound gorilla, if you saw when it went through the water and dragged that kid like a rag doll behind, it's surprising he survived that. He could have broken his neck any second.

But a gorilla like that could tear that child into pieces in two or three seconds. Could do that to a fully grown male. Fully grown man. They're that powerful. And the point is, that for many people, you know, we all sat back and we chuckled at the video a couple months ago.

Where you go onto a college campus and you go, so if I self-identify as an 8-foot tall Asian female, is that okay with you? Sure, if that's how you see it. And we laughed. It's like, really? How disconnected from reality are these kids?

For all of us, well, they haven't lived in this world very long, have they? And it just doesn't work that way. But now you see the result. Because there is no creator. Value is only what you assign. There cannot be no objective moral value.

There cannot be shared cultural values. That's why now, whatever the state says becomes the ultimate good. And we're right back to the Stasi prison and all the horrific horrors of the 20th century. Because we've already forgotten in 50 years.

Less than 50 years, in some instances. Like the Stasi prison functioned until the 80s. We've forgotten. And maybe just never recognized that what civilizes is a recognition of who we are as creatures of God.

No creator, no creatures, no morality. And you start to understand why there were people very seriously arguing. It's just a kid. I'd never heard of this eight before, but now it's the most important thing on the planet.

And we need to have vigils now and mourn his laws. And I would never have given a dime to support him and didn't care. But now he's been shot.

Oh, the world is horrible.

And anyone who still has some level of common sense.

But see, common sense, folks. How do you define that?

Common sense is based upon the fact that there used to be a common worldview. That made sense out of the world. And so when... Is that really Goatman? Is that really Goatman? Some strange Georgian just posted a picture.

And it does look like someone who's trying to act like a goat. By the way, the animals seem to be smarter than we are. Because Moeller mentioned... What was the other guy who tried to live in it? Was it a raccoon?

I think it was a raccoon. And he sort of in an offhanded way mentioned that the guy himself said they could never... While they tried, they could never get any other raccoons to come close to them. That's because they're smarter.

So tell me, Goatman, which bathroom do you use while shopping at Target? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm afraid that does sort of sum up... How are we going to expect this culture to move forward when these are the things that we are discussing?

And you know what's really frightening? This culture has nuclear weapons and the ability to alter the human genome. And this technology is now in the hands of people who have no moral guardrails left.

None.

And so human cloning, all the stuff that brought about every zombie apocalypse movie or TV series ever is right here right now.

It is.

I mean, let's just be honest. Does make me wonder a little bit about those plagues. Maybe it's time to get out my Hal Lindsey books. Do a little reviewing.

Oy, oy, oy. Oh, my.

I don't even know what to say. I don't get this one. What y 'all think would have happened to this gorilla? I don't know. I don't get that one. I've seen it twice now and I don't get it.

Anyway.

So there was a... There you go. There was a... Last evening, just listening to all of that,.

I was...

It was sad. It was very, very sad. Another story, I think this morning... Let's see, what's the date? Well, it was updated May 31st, but... A Presbyterian USA minister in Oregon who says he doesn't believe in God and doesn't require his members to believe either, remarked in a recent article that he is offended by those who assert that he is not a Christian.

Someone quipped that my congregation is BYOG, bring your own God. I use that and invite people to bring their own God, or none at all, wrote John Shuck of Beaverton's Southminster Presbyterian Church in a guest post for Pathios last week.

Well, if it's on Pathios.

Wow.

While the symbol God is part of our cultural tradition, you can take it or leave it, or redefine it to your liking. Shuck first came out as an unbeliever in 2011, generating controversy as to how one could serve as a minister and not believe in the Bible.

Well, not in the PCUSA. The concept of God is a product of myth-making, and God is no longer credible as a personal supernatural being, he wrote in a blog post on his site Shuck and Jive. Jesus may have been historical, but most of the stories about him in the Bible and elsewhere are legends.

Shuck reiterated his unbelief in his article, I'm a Presbyterian minister who doesn't believe in God, on Tuesday as he asserted that belief-less Christianity is thriving. Sure it is. We all have been trained to think that Christianity is about believing things, he wrote.

Its symbols and artifacts, God, Bible, Jesus, heaven, etc., must be accepted in a certain way, and when times change and these beliefs are no longer credible, the choices we are left with are either rejection or fundamentalism.

But Shuck says that although he rejects the Bible as being literal and denies the existence of heaven and hell, he takes offense when people tell him that he's not a Christian. Even though I hold those beliefs, I am still a proud minister.

But I don't appreciate being told I'm not truly a Christian, he stated. Many liberal or progressive Christians have already let go or de-emphasized belief in heaven, that the Bible is literally true, that Jesus is supernatural, and that Christianity is the only way.

Yet they still practice what they call Christianity. However, others state that Shuck's assertion that one can be a Christian without faith and the saving power of Christ is faulty.

Really?

And that his words make evident that he does not understand what it means to be a Christian. And it goes on from there. Well, yeah, you think? You know, it was ten years earlier, it was some Anglican priest in England, you know, that came out as an atheist, and then they couldn't get rid of him.

And just so happens PCUSA collapses on everything and has atheist ministers.

There's probably a connection.

Probably a connection between the two. I would think. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows? Anyway, we are going to, this week, we're going to have a barbecue this week. That's what we're going to do. We're going to have ourselves a barbecue.

Are we going to cook up some Easterners?

We're going to cook up some Easterners. That's right. It's ReformCon week here in Phoenix. And so I'm going to be, we're going to do another dividing line tomorrow. Is that going to be alright?

Yeah. Yeah, it works for me. I can adjust.

So we're going to get our two dividing lines in. ReformCon starts Wednesday night. I'm actually preaching at my church Wednesday night, so I can't be there. But I'm speaking Thursday morning. I think everything I do is on Thursday.

If I think about it.

Maybe. Anyway.

So I started noticing the weather. And I started seeing that, yeah, it's going to be June. And it's going to get hot. It's going to get really hot. And then I started watching. And I'm not sure if this one has it here.

Yeah, here's weather. Let me see if I can grab something here just for the fun of it. Yeah, here we go. Desktop presenter. And let me see here. Window. And Safari. See, you got that? So today, it was really nice.

It's been really nice the past couple days. Upper 90s. Got down to, I think it was like 71 this morning. Check this out. Today, 99. Wednesday, 104. Thursday, 108. Friday, 114. Saturday, last day of ReformCon, 117 degrees.

Sunday, 115 degrees. Now, look. Anything over 112 is hot even for us Phoenicians, okay? Why don't you get into 113, 114. I think the high. Did we hit 116 last year once? I don't remember. Maybe 114. That's a hot summer's day.

No two ways about it. But 117 is only 5 degrees below the all-time high. And that was June 26, 1990. I remember it well. Since my anniversary is June 25th, we were doing something for our.

Anniversary.

And it was basically hiding indoors. Because it went 115, 118, 120, 122, 120, 118, 115. It was a very, very warm week. And more or less toward the end of June, beginning of July. This early in June, 117?

I'm not sure if that will be a record or what. But there are certain people, especially back in Georgia, that I want to make sure are out and about, at least for a few minutes, at about 2 .30, 3 o 'clock on Saturday.

I've got to arrange it somehow. Lock them out of their car, do something to make sure that they get to experience a true Phoenix summer. Because you've got to realize, 117 outside, standing in a parking lot on Blacktop, it's not 117, I assure you.

That Blacktop is sizzling around 200. And the inside of your car, if it's been closed up, sitting in the sun, is a minimum 165, 170. And all these guys coming in from back east don't know what a shade screen is.

And I can just see them trying to drive their cars if they haven't had a shade screen up and that steering wheel's been sitting in the sun. You know, either get a shade screen or bring some hot pads. One of the two, because that's really the only way it's going to work.

So it's going to be fun. What am I... I just looked at channel. Plot twist, the gorilla used to be a human but undertook surgery. You know? There was a day when it would have been, oh, that's silly. And then we just had the story about the guy living as a goat.

So...

I don't even know. Don't even know what to say anymore. What am I going to be discussing? Well, I'm going to fire up the phones here, actually. The one guy that we do not need to take any phone calls from is that guy in Georgia.

Because he was asking earlier if I was going to take calls. And, well, actually, you know what? Hold off on that. There was still one story I haven't gotten to yet. I'm sorry. We'll see if we have time for it.

But he was asking if I was going to take calls and then was asking the channel, so what should I ask? So, I mean, that goes well below the cutoff point of stuff. What am I going to be talking about at ReformCon?

I'm going to get dangerous. I'm going to get dangerous. For a long time, I have wanted to address basically what is we talked about in the program many times before, elements of it. But my plenary presentation will be on hyper-Calvinism, what it really is, why it's particularly pernicious, and why hyper-Calvinists don't like me and never will, and I don't like them either.

Then my breakout session will—there's not going to be any difference between the two as far as the level goes. The second session, then, will be on the issue of hypo-Calvinism, Amaraldianism, not discussion of Amaraldianism, but the issue of the demand by certain hypo-Calvinists that you publicly affirm contradiction and incoherence in the decrees of God.

And I'm going to look at the very interesting—what was the date on that? It was 1950—boy, it's way down here too. It's going to take me a second. It was over 60 years ago. The OPC presented a paper. Well, it was a paper presented to the OPC, to the General Assembly.

And—oh, why can't I find it here? Well, I had it open in the other—okay, it can't be that far back. Well, that's—it can be, I suppose. And it was on the subject of the free offer of the gospel, and there were two sides presented.

They weren't as far apart as some people would like to think they were, but it raises the issues in a pretty clear way. And it also deals with 2 Peter 3 .9, some of the texts that are relevant at that point that we will get into in that section.

So I'm sort of—I'm dealing with the two sides of the same coin, in essence, dealing with the dangers of hyper-Calvinism, but also responding to those who say if you hold to a high Calvinism, then it inevitably results in—there it is.

It inevitably results in hyper-Calvinism, which it does not. So it was 1948. So this is a report submitted to the 15th General Assembly of the OPC in 1948. It was taken from the Minutes Appendix, pages 51 through 72.

It's available at opc .org if you want to look it up, if you want to have it on your iPad or something for my presentation, or read it beforehand, or whatever else it might be. It is a very interesting and useful article, and if you want to be prepared for that presentation.

And then there's going to be a Q &A that I'm going to be involved with. I think me and John Sampson will be doing, which is appropriate given how many times John has sat here, I suppose, that we will be doing that.

So that's what we'll be doing at ReformCon. Well, that's what we plan to be doing. Fact of the matter is, you know, I mentioned to Jeff Durbin last week, have something hiding in your pocket because, you know, these bodies, they are what they are, and things happen.

So we'll see. We'll hopefully be able to do what we need to do this coming ReformCon. One other thing, and I'm not sure how much time I'll spend on this, but I have mentioned more than once, I will tell the story.

There are people watching this program right now, and the only reason they're watching is because they are obsessed with trying to find ways of attacking yours truly. There are people doing that. I am thankful the vast majority of folks watching the program or watching the program, listening to the program, because they appreciate the things that we're going to be talking about, and they like a discussion from a Christian worldview.

Some of you work in situations where it's actually a joy for you to get to listen to a program where you know you're never going to hear profanity. You work in an environment where that's all around you, and it's actually a treat to be able to listen to something where you know you're not going to be assaulted by what you're hearing.

But there are a couple of you, and some of you are Muslims. I saw a video. I didn't watch it, but I saw a link to a video a couple days ago. Certain Muslims, not all, thankfully, but certain Muslims adjust.

I don't know. I can't imagine a life where you sit around watching The Dividing Line just looking for a way to piece things together, take cheap shots at me, but you know who you are, and I know who you are, and I pity you.

I really do pity you. If you happened to post stuff online where you addressed even a small portion of the number of topics and the breadth of topics that we talked about here, I can't imagine what it would be like for me to be sitting around, investing my time, watching your stuff to try to find some way of taking shots at you.

I can't understand it. And I feel really sorry for people like that. I really do. It must be sad. But there are Christians who do the same thing. There are Christians who do the same thing. I'm not talking about the nutty folks in monasteries in upstate New York who clearly have way too much time on their hands, which may tell you something about monasteries.

There are actually Christians. What did I do? Join here twice? Yes, I guess I joined twice, didn't I?

There we go.

I just disconnected. Am I still here? Still here?

Yes.

Okay.

Anyway, there are Christians who basically act like stalkers. I guess I can understand this one, and it's Rich's fault. I'm just going to be upfront about it. It's Rich's fault. I did a debate last year in Dallas, and we talked about it briefly, I think, afterwards on the program.

Probably the week I got back, just did a report on it, and moved on from there. But some other people continue to talk about it, and therefore it's sort of like, what are those little animals you're not supposed to feed after midnight or something?

They're really cute and snuggly, and then you feed them after midnight, and that's what we've got here.

Gremlins.

Is that what it is?

Okay.

Very tall gremlins. On the 28th of May, so just a few days ago, a certain recent graduate with a D .Min. degree from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where you're going to get pretty much one perspective on Calvinism anyways, posted an article on Facebook.

It was on Saturday. It was on Saturday. And on Saturday is when Justin Brierley releases the audio from the Unbelievable Radio broadcast, and as you recall, when I was in London, we did two programs. We did the program with John Sanders on open theism.

And then afterwards, we recorded a grill James White program, where, you know, one guy had a serious question, and the others were just there to push their particular agenda, which was very strange, very odd.

And the one guy was Unitarian, who had initially been a member of the Church of England, and then became a Oneness Pentecostal. If I'm recalling the right person here. Became a Oneness Pentecostal, and now was a quote-unquote Biblical Unitarian.

And eventually, what came out was, his whole argument is that if the deity of Christ was true, then pretty much every sermon in the book of Acts would be about the deity of Christ. And since, in his opinion, every sermon in the book of Acts is not about the deity of Christ, and that terminology such as Son of God is only a Messianic title, and there is no significance of kurios, you can't really look at Acts 20, 28, etc., etc., then you shouldn't believe in the deity of Christ.

Well, in dialoguing with this individual, I pointed out that, for example, who's one of the primary people, who are some of the primary people preaching in the book of Acts? Well, you got Peter. Peter, 2 Peter 1 .1, clear reference to the deity of Christ.