AAC: 21 Aug 2026 (Q&A)

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Topics Covered

  1. What role did the Opium Wars play in relations between the West and China, and how morally legitimate was the British involvement in them?
    • ::::
  2. The Things of This Life
    • ::::
  3. Genetic Relation Between Random Whites and a Mixed Couple With a Mixed Child
    • ::::
  4. Looking for a new home
    • ::::
  5. Question about the nature of morality
    • ::::
  6. Your take on C.Kirk’s deαth and Candace’s theory?
    • ::::
  7. In what quantifiable, measurable, and observable ways did Christianity benefit pagan Europe/europeans? I have a pagan friend that I go back and forth with
    • ::::
  8. Have u read “The Black Sun” and generally what do u make of the historic association of NS w occultism? (Could you specifically comment on the Black Sun symbol they apparently put in a castle?)
    • ::::
  9. do you think the current model of pastors being paid for simply being pastors is biblical or is a pastor being bivocational a better model?
    • ::::
  10. unsure if you wrote my questions down so here they are again. is baal = satan = saturn? what do you know about saturn demon? i know the star of remphan and black cube are associated with saturn.
    • ::::
  11. how can i “stay in the lines” in regard to the law whilst writing about the Jews. i want to be safe and not get in trouble. to be more like you and karl radl as prime examples.
    • ::::
  12. Corey, can you speak on the pacifism of Christianity. I’m seeking proof that the religion is not pacifist at it’s core.
    • ::::
  13. Did you watch the debate on the Curse of Ham with Dale Partridge and the individual struggling with sanctification last night?
    • ::::
  14. I have some friends who we’ve watched your debates, I was wondering how we could trace the continuity of the genealogy of the curse of Ham?
  15. In the case of not having access to a Lutheran Church, only Baptist churches, should I go to the Baptist church and abstain from the Lord’s Supper?
  16. Should churches return to using one common cup of wine and one common loaf of bread for Communion?
  17. Why do you think Christianity never trickled down to the masses in China despite them having had two Christian leaders in the past (Sun Yat-Sen & Chiang Kai-Shek).
  18. What is the proper solution to the seemingly out of control situation with companies buying up farms, homesteads, etc. to build data centers?
  19. Q
  20. Q
  21. Q

Transcript

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WEBVTT

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It is the 21st of August, 2026.

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I am Corey J.

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Moller, and this is At Any Cost.

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This is episode 39, a Q&A episode.

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And I do not believe that I have any housekeeping, so I can get right into the questions this evening.

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All the levels look good on my side.

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I will just check very quickly before I actually get into the questions that YouTube has not disabled the comments like it did two weeks ago, which was a lovely feature on their part.

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Okay, it looks like comments should be working on YouTube and everywhere else, so I don’t know how you’d let me know, but try to let me know in the chat if they’re not.

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At any rate, the first question…

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I see the question about the intro and outro music for Lutheran Lectionary recordings.

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I don’t remember off the top of my head, so I’ll have to check that one.

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I will reply to that one after the show.

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But the first question for the actual stream is one that has been pending for a little while, and I’ve been putting it off because it’s going to take a little longer to address, but it is very important considering the current state of things.

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And the question was originally about…

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Let me see if I can find the actual wording here.

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Question one.

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What role did the Opium Wars play in relations between the West and China, and how morally legitimate was the British involvement in them?

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I’m actually going to expand this one because I think it’s a fair expansion, first.

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And second, it’s not just the Opium Wars.

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You have to understand the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation, which is what they call it.

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So that kind of tells you some stuff to start off.

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But you have to understand that whole time period and the interaction of various players in order to understand the modern Chinese mindset with regard to the West.

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And there’s a caveat, there’s an asterisk there next to West, and I’ll get into that as well.

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So the major events will be the First Opium War, the Second Opium War, and then the Century of Humiliation, which basically spans those.

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So, the Century of Humiliation is 1840 to 1949, the First Opium War is 1839 to 1842, and the Second Opium War is 1856 to 1860.

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And the historical background, basically, you have to start by understanding, of course, the period of colonization, the spread particularly of the British Empire and its trade, and at this point, the British own India.

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That’s also important because, obviously, opium partly grown in India, particularly the opium that would wind up in Britain.

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But the way that this starts off is you have a huge demand in Britain and in the British Empire generally for tea, for porcelain, and for silk.

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Well, tea, porcelain, and silk are largely Chinese products.

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And so what happens, because this is also an era in which you’re using gold and silver, right, as your currency?

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And so most of this trade was denominated in silver, so you had huge outflows of silver from the British Empire into China.

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The British obviously don’t like this, because in a time of hard currency, how much currency you have is actually physically limited.

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They can’t do anything really to generate more, except physically mine it somewhere and turn it into currency.

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So this is a problem for the British.

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The British decide to solve this by taking Indian, largely Indian opium, and shipping it into China.

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What actually happened was, it was so successful that the outflow of silver reversed.

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And so you actually had a positive inflow for the British and a negative outflow from the Chinese.

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Now, the Chinese, of course, objected for a number of reasons here, not just because they were losing all their silver, that was a huge part of it.

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A lot of this gets cast into moral and other terms, but at the end of the day, a lot of it was about really two things, sovereignty, which in the Asian sense also includes not losing face, and money, hard currency.

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But at any rate, a Chinese commissioner, my Chinese is not good, so if I mispronounce some names, it’s just what it is.

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My Chinese isn’t, I have very limited Chinese.

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So Lin Zexu objected to this.

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He destroyed about 20,000 chests of opium.

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This is a lot of money, this is a huge amount of opium.

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And technically speaking, under international law, that is an act of war, so the British were not entirely out of line in doing what they did, which was declare war.

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This was the start of the first opium war.

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The British won decisively, as is the case for basically every single conflict up until that 1949 demarcation of the end of the century of humiliation.

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Basically, the Western powers just trounced China in every single engagement.

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This leads to the Treaty of Nanjing, which is what seeded Hong Kong.

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So you can see how that set up what has happened in recent years that was in perpetuity.

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And then it opened five treaty ports.

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These were ports where Western powers is eventually expanded to additional nations, not just the British, but this was basically free trade ports, where the Western powers could trade with China on favorable terms.

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In fact, on most favored nation status, which is a technical sense.

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It just means that the nation that has MFN status is treated at least as well as whichever nation is treated best.

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This crops up all the time in, this is still a thing in modern international law.

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China also had to pay a large indemnity for the war, for the conflict, and British and other European citizens were granted what is called extra-territoriality, which means they’re not subject to the law of the nation in which they’re residing, in this case China, but to the laws of their home nation.

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So British subjects could only be subjected to criminal penalties, whatever it happened to be, under British law, not under Chinese law.

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This, of course, did not make the Chinese happy, and then we have the Second Opium War, which starts with the Chinese doing a similar thing.

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This time, they seize a vessel that is shipping opium, arrest the Chinese crew and some British, and refuse to return all of it.

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And they eventually return some, but not all of it.

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This leads to the Second Opium War.

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This is the casus belli, the sort of spark that starts it.

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Of course, China loses again.

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You have additional territory that is ceded.

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You have various other treaty provisions, similar to the first one.

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One of which is an imposition of not the modern sort of freedom of religion, but something akin to it in the same sort of family.

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Christians and others were allowed to evangelize and to practice their faith, which is something that had been suppressed here and there, not necessarily consistently, but had been suppressed by the Chinese.

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This plays into something later that’s important, that’s why it’s noted here.

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Instead of all the provisions of the treaty, that one’s important to bear in mind.

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So, subsequent to this, you have essentially what is the equivalent in Asia of the rush for Africa.

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You have the carving out of spheres of influence by various European powers, really about six or eight main players, and largely building railroads infrastructure in their spheres of influence over which they exercise not just control but ownership.

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China, of course, objects to this.

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This is part of what leads to what is called the Boxer Rebellion.

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This is a major rebellion of the Chinese, both against some of the Chinese domestically and against the European powers.

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You have eight European powers that come together and completely crush the Chinese.

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It’s not even close.

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Jumping ahead a little bit, and I should note before we do that, the Boxer Rebellion, why I said the freedom of religion thing was important, the Boxer Rebellion was also a domestic anti-Christian pogrom.

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They killed probably 30,000 to 35,000 Chinese Christians.

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That was part of the argument for that particular rebellion.

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There were also some weird eschatological claims and things, but it was largely anti-Christian and anti-Western.

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Jumping ahead a little bit, you come to World War I.

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And the reason that World War I matters is that one of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was that Shandong, the German sphere of influence in China, was transferred from Germany, as punishment of Germany, to the Japanese.

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This leads to obviously increasing, there was already plenty of it, but increasing hostility toward the Japanese.

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And this is that caveat I mentioned in the beginning.

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You have to recognize, when the Chinese speak of the West, they don’t just mean, you know, white guys.

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They don’t just mean Europeans.

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They include the Japanese in that.

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In their conception, Japan is part of this cabal that has suppressed and, you know, destroyed China.

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They even go as far as to say there’s destruction of Chinese cultural heritage and things like that.

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They include Japan.

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So recognize that animosity is there, not just for us, but also for Japan.

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And then, of course, this is further exacerbated by the Chinese invasion and occupation initially of Manchuria and then of more of China in 1937, lasting until 1945.

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Then, of course, you have that four-year period before the Chinese take over the Chinese communists, which is the Nationalists versus the Communists.

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It’s the Chinese Civil War.

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But to give you some numbers, so you can kind of place these things in perspective and understand the Chinese overplay and they overstate what has actually happened, what has happened historically.

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And I recognize there’s a little bit of sun there.

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I need to put up a curtain at some point.

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But the first opium war, 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese die, right?

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Six hundred-ish British casualties, that’s including only a handful, a handful of dozen died as a result of actual fighting.

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Disease got the rest.

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Pretty standard down through war, even up until modern times.

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The second opium war, 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese died.

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Several hundred British and the French were involved this time, so that’s British and French casualties.

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So again, massively one-sided in terms of losses.

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Boxer Rebellion.

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A hundred thousand Chinese die, that’s including the 30,000 to 35,000 Christians who were killed.

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So you could probably subtract that from the total because they weren’t really fighting on the Chinese side.

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Here’s where the numbers start to get important, because you have to understand how much they overemphasize the Western conflicts in their cost versus downplaying what happened in their own history.

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So the Taiping Rebellion, which was another domestic issue that China had, 20 to 30 million died in that.

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Some estimates are as high as 60 to 80 million, but it’s at least around 25, 30, say, as a conservative estimate very supported by the historical facts.

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The Japanese invasion was 15 to 20 million.

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You can see why they are still angry about that.

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The Chinese Civil War was at least 5 million.

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That was the Nationalist versus the Communist.

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Could have been significantly more.

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The records aren’t very good for obvious reasons.

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The Communist won.

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So hard to tell.

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Great Leap Forward, as best as we can tell, killed tens of millions.

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That was just a Communist domestic policy.

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And then the so-called Cultural Revolution killed several million as well.

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So, pick any of the actions domestically of the Chinese against themselves.

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More Chinese died in those than all of the Western actions combined, by an order of magnitude at least.

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But this leads into the modern Chinese view of the West.

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It has basically formed it, because this is the propaganda that is taught in all of their schools.

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All of the Chinese are raised on this as their education.

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And so, they view the West through this lens, because again, this is a mandatory part of Chinese education.

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So, when you, for instance, have Western powers criticizing human rights violations by the Chinese communists and things like that, it is always from the Chinese perspective, viewed as a continuation of this policy of the West of suppressing the Chinese, turning them into vassals, etc.

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It’s never viewed as being genuine, it’s always viewed as being mercenary, which is part of why it’s not ever effective, right?

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They view it purely as something where the West is trying to, again, impose a new century of humiliation on China.

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That’s always their concern, and I’ll get into that near the end of my remarks on this.

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The Chinese are also taught that only the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, saved China.

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They’re taught that the Chinese were stood up again, that they were again part of the great powers, as it were, due to the actions of the communists and nothing else.

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Some irony in this, of course, because the majority of the reason the Japanese were expelled from China is, one, they were losing against the United States in the Pacific Theater, and two, the nationalists in China were actually fighting against them and having some success.

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The communists weren’t.

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So the communists claim credit for what the nationalists in China actually did.

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But their real concern is that past humiliation and not repeating that.

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That is, you know, losing face, big thing in Asian politics.

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There is a similarity here, you will notice.

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And perhaps you’ll notice it even better if I point out that one of essentially, not necessarily word for word, their maxim, but a sort of mindset they have is never again.

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They believe that this should never again happen to them.

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And where have you heard that before, right?

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Well, with the Jews and the Holocaust.

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Very similar mindset going on here.

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You have this propagandized version of history that is then used as warrant to hate the West, and particularly also to hate Christians, incidentally, in both cases, and the slogan is never again.

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There’s a similarity there.

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The Chinese have a little more historical warrant, certainly, than the Jews, but they still overemphasize it in a way that’s certainly impermissible.

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Now, some criticisms of, some additional, I guess, criticisms of this view of the Chinese that they advance, they teach in their schools, their propaganda.

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One, there’s no such thing as China, as a nation.

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China is an empire.

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China has 56 ethnic group, recognized ethnic groups.

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This is officially recognized by the Chinese Communist Party.

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One is the Han Chinese.

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One is the Manchu.

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The Manchu are important because they are actually the ethnicity that was largely the source of the Qing Dynasty.

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The Qing Dynasty, spelled with a Q, is the one that was in charge during both of the Opium Wars, the one that is sometimes blamed by the Chinese Communist Party for being weak, not modernizing fast enough, not responding quickly enough, etc.

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So they are sort of, they’re an important player, but they’re Manchu, they’re not Han, right?

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The Chinese Communist Party is largely Han Chinese, although the Han Chinese are actually reproducing more slowly than all of these minority groups, ethnic groups in China.

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So they’re slowly losing power, but that will also play into how they’re going to behave domestically, of course.

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The disputed territories, one of the other reason the Qing Dynasty is important, the disputed territories, so Hong Kong in particular, Taiwan, certainly, these are areas that were actually conquered by the Qing.

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They were relatively recently conquered and became part of the Chinese Empire.

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There’s some history there, it’s complicated in some cases, but they’re not Han Chinese, right?

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They’re not like uppercase C Chinese, but the Chinese view them that way.

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This is a big part of their mentality, because they view, for instance, Taiwan is the outstanding one, right?

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They got Hong Kong back, Taiwan’s outstanding.

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Every day that Taiwan remains not part of China, in their conception of it, is an assault on them.

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It’s an affront to them.

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They’re losing face, because they don’t have this territory they view as being rightfully theirs.

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And so, they will eventually move to retake that.

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The question is how exactly they’ll do it.

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Usually, the Chinese, in this case, are relatively rational actors, so if they can retake it through referenda and through political means, they would prefer to do that to war, but they could also take Taiwan in about a day, if they really wanted to.

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Another fact that is ignored in the historical narrative that’s very important.

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China had been producing and consuming opium for over a century, before the British got involved.

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So in their propaganda, they basically say that the British introduced opium to the Chinese, which is just a lie.

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It’s flat out wrong, because literally for a century, they had actually been importing a bunch of it from neighboring countries, and they had sort of the same problem that the British had with regard to tea.

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They hated how much they were spending on this, the outflow of capital, and so, in this case, hard currency.

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And so what they actually did was they started to produce it domestically.

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Their domestic production had actually exceeded their imports at the point where the British got involved.

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So did the British exacerbate an existing problem?

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Absolutely yes.

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Did they introduce the Chinese to opium?

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Absolutely no.

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And then beyond that, just I would emphasize again, the fact that the Japanese are viewed as part of the West.

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So that’s not going to come naturally to your mind, perhaps, but bear that in mind when the topic of China comes up, because they think of sort of a solid anti-Chinese block, including Japan.

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But then to answer the other part of the question, sort of the outline of how we got to where we are, and how you have the Chinese view of the West in light of these things.

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But then the actual second part of the question asked by the questioner, was it moral for the British to be involved in this way?

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I think they exceeded their moral warrant.

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Was it fine to impose colonialism, and then to allow evangelization of Christianity and things like that?

00:19:34.080 → 00:19:35.060
Yes, that’s fine.

00:19:36.260 → 00:19:41.300
Was it fine to balance your budget by getting more of the Chinese addicted to a hard drug?

00:19:41.760 → 00:19:44.940
I think it’s pretty easy to say no, they should not have done that.

00:19:45.280 → 00:19:55.820
They should have found some other way to balance that trade imbalance with regard to tea, porcelain, and silk, instead of just getting a bunch more of the Chinese addicted to opium.

00:19:57.060 → 00:20:14.280
Now, the Chinese, of course, blow this, again, vastly out of proportion, because they lie about numbers, they downplay their own internal politics, they downplay so many different things, many of which I went over, and then they really just…

00:20:14.780 → 00:20:20.600
It’s not even exaggerating, it’s they just outright lie about what happened with regard to Western involvement in China.

00:20:21.020 → 00:20:24.800
But it has become the founding myth of the CCP.

00:20:25.540 → 00:20:31.600
The CCP makes claims about continuity with the Qing and previous dynasties, complete nonsense.

00:20:31.920 → 00:20:35.740
It sort of claims to have the mandate of heaven.

00:20:36.580 → 00:20:47.740
It’s kind of squirrely with whether or not it has that, but the problem is the common people, particularly in the hinterlands, view the CCP as having the mandate of heaven and being tied to economic prosperity.

00:20:48.040 → 00:20:58.000
And so that partially drives their psychology and their policies, because if they lose that prosperity, they will be perceived as having lost the mandate of heaven.

00:20:58.440 → 00:21:04.880
And that always leads to rebellion in China’s history, and usually tens of millions dead, depending on the era.

00:21:06.820 → 00:21:21.460
But the reality is that the modern view of the West that’s held by China is formed by the opium wars and the century of humiliation and the conception of the West as including Japan and being anti-China.

00:21:21.900 → 00:21:23.700
And they’re big complaints.

00:21:24.300 → 00:21:26.900
In essence, they have four big complaints.

00:21:27.300 → 00:21:31.820
And with what I just gave you, you can judge whether or not these are legitimate complaints.

00:21:32.160 → 00:21:37.300
They argue that drugs and moral degradation were introduced to China by the West.

00:21:37.560 → 00:21:45.180
They argue that the unequal treaties that were imposed on China were onerous and an insult.

00:21:45.640 → 00:21:50.980
They argue territory that was rightfully Chinese was amputated by the West.

00:21:51.100 → 00:21:56.540
So Hong Kong, Taiwan, Kowloon attached to Hong Kong, a couple other places.

00:21:57.240 → 00:22:00.040
And they argue there was cultural destruction.

00:22:01.080 → 00:22:05.380
Now, were some cultural relics destroyed in the course of the wars?

00:22:05.400 → 00:22:05.920
Yes.

00:22:06.420 → 00:22:12.840
The old, I think it was called the old Summer Palace, was destroyed during the Second Opium War, I believe it was.

00:22:13.340 → 00:22:23.100
And there were some volumes of an encyclopedia that were destroyed in Beijing as a result of that city being conquered and occupied.

00:22:23.320 → 00:22:25.460
So yes, were some things destroyed?

00:22:25.460 → 00:22:26.920
Of course, it happens in war.

00:22:27.320 → 00:22:31.920
Was there a deliberate program by the West to destroy Chinese culture?

00:22:32.180 → 00:22:33.560
There’s no evidence of that.

00:22:33.960 → 00:22:36.720
So that’s the Chinese mindset.

00:22:36.720 → 00:22:40.160
The reality is not really identical to what they believe.

00:22:40.720 → 00:22:44.100
But ultimately, that doesn’t matter, because this is what they’re taught.

00:22:44.300 → 00:22:47.380
This is what they believe with regard to the West.

00:22:47.380 → 00:22:49.720
Excuse me, and this is how they view the world.

00:22:49.820 → 00:22:55.280
So if this is how they view the world, they’re going to behave according to this world view.

00:22:55.880 → 00:22:58.640
So were the British wrong to push opium?

00:22:58.820 → 00:23:03.380
Yes, you should not push hard drugs because they’re bad, right?

00:23:03.380 → 00:23:06.460
As a Christian, you shouldn’t want people to be addicted to hard drugs.

00:23:07.040 → 00:23:13.000
But that’s one of those means that you really probably should not use.

00:23:14.340 → 00:23:19.180
If it’s an active war, maybe there are some caveats there, but this was not an active war, right?

00:23:19.440 → 00:23:21.120
This was a trade imbalance.

00:23:21.320 → 00:23:23.120
They should have handled it in a different way.

00:23:23.960 → 00:23:35.120
But that is what has set the stage for how China views the West, and how they view the world, and how they will continue to interact with us, because it’s what they taught and what they actually believe it.

00:23:38.480 → 00:23:53.600
And I guess I should have prefaced it by saying this is the sort of thing where you could teach an entire year of a graduate seminary on this era in Chinese history, and all of the intricacies and the intrigue and the involvement of the different European players.

00:23:53.600 → 00:24:08.020
But that will at least give you an overview of it that gives you a functioning view of how this happened and an accurate one, so you can sort of gauge how China is behaving on the world stage and how people are behaving in relation to China.

00:24:08.520 → 00:24:19.220
In fact, if you remember the core of my answer, you will be better informed on China than most of our politicians, which is another problem.

00:24:19.220 → 00:24:30.200
But question two, the godly pursuit of this life or pursuits of this life.

00:24:30.540 → 00:24:37.080
I wrestle to find the proper line between fighting to win here and now and being prepared to face the end of our race.

00:24:37.680 → 00:24:41.760
Looking at Hitler’s righteous cause, I struggle with why God allowed the wicked to win.

00:24:42.240 → 00:24:51.340
If God moves us to a similar response, how should we hold the possibility of failing in our hearts without doubting God or defecting from this righteous cause?

00:24:53.120 → 00:24:56.320
So, I would say, read Job.

00:24:56.320 → 00:25:00.460
That is always going to be part of my answer when it comes to something like this.

00:25:00.880 → 00:25:03.140
You can also read certain parts of history, right?

00:25:03.260 → 00:25:06.440
North Africa used to be European that fell away.

00:25:06.440 → 00:25:11.400
There were many Christians in the Middle East, and they were killed mostly by the Jews.

00:25:12.520 → 00:25:17.340
Just because you are faithful and righteous does not mean that you will win in this life.

00:25:17.680 → 00:25:23.220
That’s not how it works, because we live in an evil and fallen world, and sometimes the wicked win.

00:25:24.000 → 00:25:32.240
So, winning a war is not necessarily intimately linked to being faithful to God.

00:25:33.100 → 00:25:41.540
Winning a war is a matter of being capable of winning a war, and we should bear these things in mind given where the country is currently headed and the West is currently headed.

00:25:41.960 → 00:25:49.200
I do think that God will not let us fail, and I think that he can’t, because he made promises to Japheth.

00:25:49.640 → 00:25:51.860
We are the sons and daughters of Japheth.

00:25:52.120 → 00:26:03.340
Those promises did not have a termination date, and so he can’t let all of us pass away, unless this is the actual end times, in which case everything passes away.

00:26:03.780 → 00:26:08.880
I don’t think it necessarily is yet, and so God is bound by the things he has promised.

00:26:09.100 → 00:26:11.200
And so I do believe that we will win.

00:26:11.560 → 00:26:22.240
We’re really fighting over the contours, the nature of that win, and I would prefer it to be the best win we can obtain, instead of just barely squeaking by.

00:26:23.300 → 00:26:27.280
So I don’t think that despair is ever the right mindset.

00:26:28.040 → 00:26:30.700
Ultimately, Christians win regardless, right?

00:26:30.700 → 00:26:37.840
I know that some people hate that answer, it’s true, but I always add it with the caveat that we should still endeavor to win here in time as well.

00:26:38.560 → 00:26:45.840
Because it is not the Christian approach to abandon the here and now just because we win ultimately in the eschaton, right?

00:26:46.020 → 00:26:47.940
That’s not an appropriate way to look at it.

00:26:48.560 → 00:27:08.000
So, you know, live your everyday life, but also with the orientation toward where things are going, the reality of the times in which we live, and what will need to be done in the not-so-distant future in order to secure a victory that’s worth having.

00:27:08.340 → 00:27:20.120
I would also add that you should listen to the episode on normalcy bias from Stone Choir, because we really touch on this exact topic in that one.

00:27:20.120 → 00:27:22.040
So I would say go and listen to that one again.

00:27:23.000 → 00:27:24.180
I’ll add that into the show notes.

00:27:24.180 → 00:27:25.320
I made a note for myself.

00:27:29.760 → 00:27:31.400
Question three.

00:27:33.400 → 00:27:38.280
Genetic relation between random whites and a mixed couple with a mixed child.

00:27:39.020 → 00:27:47.280
Could you explain how a white father with a child born from a marriage to a black woman is more genetically related to any random white man than his own child?

00:27:47.880 → 00:27:53.760
Yes, the child is 50% his, but what else is creating this distance between him and his child?

00:27:55.420 → 00:28:14.480
So the way that this works, without delving necessarily too deeply into genetics right now, is genetically speaking, a race is sort of a more or less fixed set of genetics, of inheritable characteristics.

00:28:14.600 → 00:28:19.260
So genetics, your genome, your phenotype is the expression of that.

00:28:19.260 → 00:28:25.480
And so whites are phenotypically white, because we have the genetics to produce the various things that make us fair-skinned.

00:28:27.020 → 00:28:32.740
You share a huge chunk of your DNA with everyone else in your race.

00:28:32.960 → 00:28:45.080
You share a huge chunk with everyone else who’s a human being, but it is above and beyond that baseline, whatever 90% it is that you share with humanity generally, that you share with your race.

00:28:46.100 → 00:29:00.000
If you then have a child with someone from another race, any random individual in your race will be more related to you because of that shared pool, as it were, of genetics that really is what is your race.

00:29:01.100 → 00:29:06.540
Your child doesn’t have that because he has it split between your race and your wife’s race.

00:29:06.960 → 00:29:13.180
That’s why you will be more related to a random person from your own race than to your own child.

00:29:13.580 → 00:29:17.620
Now, are you going to have 90-plus percent share with your child?

00:29:17.760 → 00:29:24.720
Of course, because that’s the case within a species, within the species of humanity, human beings, right?

00:29:26.180 → 00:29:31.880
But we’re not talking about the percentage of the 100, because that’s irrelevant, right?

00:29:31.880 → 00:29:36.920
Because if all of humanity, let’s just say for the sake of argument, shares 90 percent, right?

00:29:37.580 → 00:29:43.340
Well, the 90 percent isn’t what differentiates me from every other member of my species.

00:29:43.740 → 00:29:46.900
The 90 percent is shared, only the 10 percent matters.

00:29:47.180 → 00:29:57.840
And so if you’re talking about, say, a 2 or 3 percent difference between the races, that’s huge, because you’re talking about 2 or 3 percent of 10 percent, not of 100 percent.

00:29:58.060 → 00:30:00.880
So you have to bear in mind what’s being discussed, right?

00:30:01.080 → 00:30:06.220
When you’re talking about, say, cross species, then that percentage is going to be wider.

00:30:06.220 → 00:30:12.500
But even then, you share a significant percentage of your DNA with dogs and cats and goats.

00:30:12.840 → 00:30:14.240
We’re all mammals, right?

00:30:14.540 → 00:30:15.940
We share that DNA.

00:30:16.360 → 00:30:21.780
So we wouldn’t say that, you know, it’s the 100 percent of the DNA that matters.

00:30:21.780 → 00:30:29.260
It’s that differentiating percentage of human versus goat, or in this case, the different races of men.

00:30:29.640 → 00:30:42.260
So that’s why you are going to be more closely related, genetically speaking, to a random member of your own race, then to your own child if you marry, particularly someone who is of a distant race like white versus black.

00:30:44.000 → 00:30:57.120
Now, if you’re talking about, say, English and Russian, much less of an issue, because already significantly more overlap in total, as opposed to between whites and blacks, which are about as distant as you can get.

00:30:57.720 → 00:31:05.600
There’s also a very good chart going around that shows the different human races mapped onto a graph.

00:31:05.900 → 00:31:10.700
And so it will show you the distance between, say, whites and Africans, which is basically the biggest you can get.

00:31:10.900 → 00:31:16.260
And then also where your child would fall if you married someone from that other race.

00:31:16.520 → 00:31:18.760
And so that’s the genetic distance.

00:31:19.040 → 00:31:24.040
The little circle that is your race, everyone who’s a member of your race is within that.

00:31:24.240 → 00:31:29.280
So you’re much closer to them than to your own child if you marry someone way over here.

00:31:29.880 → 00:31:32.340
So maybe someone can find and share that image.

00:31:32.340 → 00:31:36.660
I don’t think that I have it saved, but there are plenty of ways you can generate this.

00:31:36.700 → 00:31:42.820
FST is one of the standard measures of genetic distance between individuals or populations.

00:31:44.720 → 00:31:54.120
But that’s how you can be more distant from your own child genetically than from your neighbor, assuming your neighbor is as he should be your own race.

00:31:56.500 → 00:31:57.840
Question four.

00:31:58.800 → 00:32:01.940
I currently reside in a state that has poor demographics.

00:32:02.040 → 00:32:11.360
I find having to deal with these people on a daily basis to be very tiresome, and I can’t help but feel as though the poor demographics made it more difficult for me to find a suitable wife.

00:32:11.720 → 00:32:12.980
That’s definitely true.

00:32:13.580 → 00:32:15.280
Would you recommend moving to Tennessee?

00:32:15.460 → 00:32:16.740
Do you enjoy living there?

00:32:16.740 → 00:32:24.420
A part of me wants to move to the Midwest, the land of my ancestors, but the particular state from which my family hails has very high taxes.

00:32:26.540 → 00:32:36.880
So we definitely address this in a number of episodes of Stone Choir, and the general rule is that it’s best to stay around family, where your family has lived for a long time.

00:32:37.740 → 00:32:54.220
But, that being said, there are times where wisdom dictates you should move, because there are so many problems where you are, and it’s trending so rapidly in the wrong direction, that you can do nothing about it except leave.

00:32:55.100 → 00:32:59.320
Maybe it can be fixed in the future, but that is a greater undertaking than an individual.

00:32:59.320 → 00:33:02.460
So wisdom sometimes will say you need to move.

00:33:03.200 → 00:33:12.940
If you’re in a particular state, I don’t know which state you reside, but I can guess which Midwest states, given the high tax issue, although they’re all not particularly low tax these days.

00:33:14.320 → 00:33:29.020
I would say move where you have family or some connections so you can get back on your feet quickly, you have a job, you have a way to provide yourself, you have a community around you, and go from there.

00:33:29.720 → 00:33:41.320
Things are going to change a lot in the next 10, 15, 20 years, so you’re not really planning for the next 500 years right now, you’re planning to survive what’s coming.

00:33:42.160 → 00:33:53.820
And in that sense, move to somewhere that has decent demographics, and again, has those networks that can support you with regard to job prospects and things like that.

00:33:54.580 → 00:33:55.480
Tennessee is great.

00:33:55.980 → 00:33:56.640
I like it here.

00:33:56.640 → 00:34:02.260
I’ve got family, been living in the hills here for hundreds of years, so it made sense in my case.

00:34:02.700 → 00:34:15.040
But I’m not going to say you, no, you can’t move to some part of the country if you don’t have close cousins, because ultimately, all Americans, and by Americans, of course, I mean racial Americans, are your cousins.

00:34:15.960 → 00:34:24.680
It’s better to live close to close family, but by all means, if opportunity presents itself, moving somewhere like Tennessee makes perfect sense for some people.

00:34:26.560 → 00:34:27.980
Just be ready for the humidity.

00:34:29.040 → 00:34:31.920
And also, I had a bear walk through my front yard two nights ago.

00:34:32.060 → 00:34:34.120
So, as long as you’re fine with those things.

00:34:38.740 → 00:34:40.800
Question five.

00:34:42.180 → 00:34:52.920
I was talking to a pastor about slavery slash genocide, basically racism by proxy, and it became clear to me that one of us had a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality.

00:34:53.620 → 00:35:05.940
My understanding was basically that something was either inherently good or inherently evil, and the fact that God cannot or will not sin basically meant that he could or would not do something that was inherently evil.

00:35:06.700 → 00:35:18.500
His belief seemed to be that nothing was really inherently good or evil, and that anything God does is basically automatically cleansed for him and made to be not evil, but that it doesn’t make it not evil for us.

00:35:18.860 → 00:35:22.760
Are you able to explain the proper understanding of how this actually functions?

00:35:23.160 → 00:35:24.500
That argument from…

00:35:24.500 → 00:35:29.780
argument, I should put in quotations, that argument from your pastor comes up all the time.

00:35:29.780 → 00:35:45.340
I don’t know who started it, what the source is, but it’s not only wrong, it’s blasphemous, because the nature of morality is that morality flows from God’s nature, because God is his nature, right?

00:35:45.340 → 00:35:57.860
God is what we would call attributes, what are known philosophically and theologically as the transcendentals, goodness, beauty, truth, unity, and being, if we want to use the fourth and the fifth, we don’t really need those ones here, we just really need goodness, right?

00:35:58.000 → 00:35:58.700
And truth.

00:36:00.160 → 00:36:13.700
So, something is good if it aligns with God’s nature, if it is oriented toward its proper end, which is an end that God has set for it, in accordance with its nature, its nature being a good thing created by God.

00:36:14.820 → 00:36:18.780
But without, I guess, delving into some of that stuff, it gets a little complicated.

00:36:19.300 → 00:36:25.580
You really just have to understand that core reality, is that morality flows from God’s nature.

00:36:25.920 → 00:36:27.560
God’s nature is unchanging.

00:36:27.740 → 00:36:30.300
So, that which is good will always be good.

00:36:30.500 → 00:36:33.020
That which is evil will always be evil.

00:36:33.480 → 00:36:36.800
It’s not good by virtue of God having done it.

00:36:37.100 → 00:36:40.340
It is that God is good and would never do something evil.

00:36:40.340 → 00:36:45.900
We’re speaking in human terms, of course, because it’s not would or could.

00:36:45.900 → 00:36:48.720
It’s that it’s incoherent to say that God would sin.

00:36:50.980 → 00:36:57.580
We don’t have the human terms for it, so the best we can say is wouldn’t or couldn’t, or whatever it happens to be, won’t.

00:36:58.040 → 00:37:02.760
Whatever terms we use, we’re approximating the reality instead of saying it exactly.

00:37:03.220 → 00:37:15.220
Because again, the best way that I’ve explained it, and the best way I’ve found to explain it, is that just because you can string some words together and it sounds like a sentence doesn’t mean it is.

00:37:15.880 → 00:37:19.320
So, you know, the purple canoe sleeps briefly.

00:37:20.420 → 00:37:21.520
That’s not, right?

00:37:21.520 → 00:37:22.760
That sounds like a sentence.

00:37:23.020 → 00:37:24.040
But it’s not.

00:37:24.400 → 00:37:31.620
And so, God does not sin is a true statement, but in that case, it understates it.

00:37:31.980 → 00:37:37.320
Saying God will not sin is also kind of true, but it’s incoherent.

00:37:38.700 → 00:37:42.380
The real incoherent one is when you get into God cannot, right?

00:37:42.600 → 00:37:44.560
Because God can do all things.

00:37:44.900 → 00:37:54.580
But the sentence, God cannot sin is technically true in a certain sense, but it’s also incoherent because you’re saying God who can do all things cannot do something.

00:37:54.880 → 00:38:00.080
It’s not so much cannot as it is nonsense to say that God would sin.

00:38:00.340 → 00:38:01.760
God is goodness.

00:38:02.240 → 00:38:05.200
God is the very ground of that which is good.

Transcript

2/3

00:38:05.360 → 00:38:13.220
You can’t have something that is good if it is not aligned toward God, aligned toward the ends for which God has created it.

00:38:13.520 → 00:38:15.780
That’s the very definition of that which is good.

00:38:16.560 → 00:38:34.940
So, your pastor is using a pastor, so maybe not your pastor, but this pastor was using a mercenary sense of it, where I understand part of why they try to do it, because then they can say, well, genocide was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it’s evil, right?

00:38:35.480 → 00:38:36.300
That’s their goal.

00:38:36.380 → 00:38:39.480
Slavery was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it’s evil.

00:38:40.580 → 00:38:46.060
It’s a mercenary attempt to explain away the Old Testament instead of believing the Old Testament is God’s truth.

00:38:46.240 → 00:38:50.340
So, ultimately, what they’re actually doing is denying that objective morality exists.

00:38:50.520 → 00:38:54.420
This is sort of a command theory of morality.

00:38:54.420 → 00:38:56.080
God can say anything he wants.

00:38:56.080 → 00:39:03.900
So, under this sort of interpretation, this is a way you can actually argue with someone who advances this, thou shalt not kill.

00:39:04.140 → 00:39:09.840
God tomorrow, under this man’s conception, could say, thou shalt kill, and now it’s moral.

00:39:10.140 → 00:39:12.740
Notably, we mean murder when we say kill in the sense, right?

00:39:14.240 → 00:39:15.200
Would that be moral?

00:39:15.980 → 00:39:18.200
The answer is no, and God wouldn’t do it.

00:39:18.240 → 00:39:19.660
But that’s what this man is saying.

00:39:19.660 → 00:39:25.360
So, you’re basically a reduction to absurdity is what you’re arguing against here, to defeat his point.

00:39:26.020 → 00:39:30.420
But the whole reason they’re doing it is to dismiss the Old Testament and the parts that make them uncomfortable.

00:39:30.840 → 00:39:33.300
And they’re blaspheming God.

00:39:33.300 → 00:39:36.280
They’re saying God changed or God could change.

00:39:36.700 → 00:39:40.300
They’re saying God isn’t God, and they’re saying morality isn’t real.

00:39:41.400 → 00:39:51.980
And that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to men not being men, men deciding they’re women, or they’re children, or they’re a dog, or a goat, or whatever it happens to be.

00:39:52.380 → 00:39:55.760
It’s the same sort of nonsense saying that truth doesn’t exist.

00:39:55.900 → 00:40:03.480
It’s merely a declaration that is true, in a sense, because of the declaration for some bounded period of time.

00:40:04.280 → 00:40:07.660
So, yes, you were arguing correctly, and this pastor was absolutely wrong.

00:40:09.540 → 00:40:10.700
But it is a common…

00:40:11.640 → 00:40:13.280
I don’t even want to call it an error.

00:40:13.860 → 00:40:15.280
It is a common evil.

00:40:15.280 → 00:40:19.020
It is a common wickedness that someone started.

00:40:21.780 → 00:40:23.100
Question 6.

00:40:24.880 → 00:40:26.260
Make a note for myself here.

00:40:27.880 → 00:40:32.340
What is your take on Charlie Kirk’s death and Candice’s theory?

00:40:32.380 → 00:40:37.860
I can answer the first part of that, but not the second, because I don’t pay any attention to Candice Owens.

00:40:38.740 → 00:40:43.420
So I don’t know what she has been saying or not been saying.

00:40:43.420 → 00:40:46.260
But I was very clear very early on.

00:40:46.260 → 00:40:55.200
I don’t know exactly the timeline, how long it was before I said something after his murder, his assassination.

00:40:55.580 → 00:40:57.480
But I said bluntly that it was Israel.

00:40:57.640 → 00:40:58.660
The Jews murdered him.

00:40:59.000 → 00:41:05.040
And that was made very obvious by the fact that Netanyahu was bragging about it almost immediately.

00:41:05.280 → 00:41:07.480
And I highlighted that in a post on X.

00:41:07.480 → 00:41:11.280
So I’m sure someone can find that and add that to the show notes.

00:41:11.880 → 00:41:17.680
But if you understand how Jews brag and how they behave publicly, he was absolutely bragging about having done it.

00:41:18.280 → 00:41:22.260
And so, that is my belief, that has not changed.

00:41:25.440 → 00:41:27.420
Question seven.

00:41:28.040 → 00:41:35.740
In what quantifiable, measurable, and observable ways did Christianity benefit pagan Europe or Europeans?

00:41:36.080 → 00:41:38.900
I have a pagan friend that I go back and forth with.

00:41:41.280 → 00:41:47.860
There are really two answers to this, and I’ll get the sort of secondary one out of the way briefly, because it’s the shorter answer.

00:41:48.340 → 00:41:52.920
The second is that truth matters whether or not it benefits you.

00:41:53.640 → 00:42:02.800
The measure of whether or not something is true is not a mercenary calculation of whether or not you will benefit from adhering to that truth, right?

00:42:03.180 → 00:42:05.560
Something is true objectively.

00:42:05.940 → 00:42:14.780
So, the question, initially, in this case, the secondary concern, but the initial question, is, is Christianity true?

00:42:15.260 → 00:42:17.940
Not, does Christianity benefit?

00:42:18.380 → 00:42:23.920
But then, to get on the benefit, incidentally, Christianity is both true and does benefit, right?

00:42:24.660 → 00:42:33.860
So, for one, we had the establishment of an objective morality in parts of Europe that did not previously have it.

00:42:34.220 → 00:42:39.800
Now, there were certain tribes that behaved very well prior to Christianization.

00:42:40.160 → 00:42:42.140
Were they improved by Christianization?

00:42:42.140 → 00:42:43.020
I would say, yes.

00:42:43.600 → 00:42:49.940
But that doesn’t mean that they were wild, crazy, feral animals before they were Christianized, right?

00:42:50.100 → 00:42:52.500
Tacitus, for instance, I’ve used this example many times.

00:42:52.500 → 00:43:02.420
Tacitus remarks upon how highly esteemed marriage is among the Germans, and that adultery is basically unheard of, and that indeed, they execute adulterers.

00:43:02.420 → 00:43:08.560
So, were they behaving according to the moral law without having the Christian scriptures?

00:43:08.660 → 00:43:14.560
Absolutely, that was a good thing, because, do remember, the law is written on your heart, whether you’re a believer or not.

00:43:14.560 → 00:43:21.480
You have a conscience, and even the pagans had a conscience, the heathen, the unbelievers.

00:43:22.300 → 00:43:29.180
But is there a benefit to having the fullness of that moral law written out for you?

00:43:29.180 → 00:43:30.520
Well, the answer is yes.

00:43:30.740 → 00:43:35.380
It is more beneficial to have it written out than to just have it in a fragmentary way.

00:43:35.900 → 00:43:49.320
But with regard to concrete benefits, I always point out that the height of life, quality of life, things like that for Europeans, was not Rome.

00:43:49.560 → 00:43:50.940
It certainly wasn’t Greece.

00:43:51.420 → 00:43:52.820
It was the Holy Roman Empire.

00:43:53.160 → 00:43:58.380
That was the height of the quality of life in terms of the things that actually matter.

00:43:58.380 → 00:44:02.020
I know there will be people who will object and say, oh, we’re more materially comfort.

00:44:02.020 → 00:44:02.460
Sure.

00:44:02.740 → 00:44:07.620
I’ve got an AC vent directly above me right now because it’s still like 86 degrees outside.

00:44:08.000 → 00:44:12.340
Am I materially comfortable in ways today that I would not have been in the Holy Roman Empire?

00:44:12.740 → 00:44:13.220
Sure.

00:44:13.720 → 00:44:16.160
Technological advance has brought some benefits.

00:44:16.480 → 00:44:21.480
But with regard to quality of life and the things that matter, are we better off?

00:44:22.660 → 00:44:24.080
Look at the depression numbers.

00:44:24.080 → 00:44:25.580
Look at the anxiety numbers.

00:44:25.740 → 00:44:27.000
Look at the marriage numbers.

00:44:27.000 → 00:44:28.740
These things are all abysmal.

00:44:29.200 → 00:44:32.580
So have we benefited from the de-Christianization?

00:44:32.620 → 00:44:33.540
Obviously, no.

00:44:34.340 → 00:44:36.360
Did we benefit from Christianization?

00:44:36.600 → 00:44:45.240
I would say obviously, yes, because we had that upward trajectory until we started to reject Christianity, until we started to apostatize.

00:44:45.460 → 00:44:49.360
And also bear in mind, when did European power peak?

00:44:49.940 → 00:45:00.060
It peaked at the end of the period of colonization, which was a spread of Christianity over the face of the earth, after centuries of being Christian.

00:45:00.920 → 00:45:06.280
Our power didn’t peak under the various pagan groups that preceded Christianization.

00:45:07.240 → 00:45:10.000
We didn’t get to the moon as pagans.

00:45:10.200 → 00:45:14.400
We got there and had the Lord’s Supper on the moon.

00:45:15.200 → 00:45:16.960
That’s what we did as Christians.

00:45:17.300 → 00:45:22.900
The height of our civilization, regardless of how you look for it, is going to be found when we were Christians.

00:45:23.240 → 00:45:28.060
And as Christianity has declined, so has our civilization.

00:45:28.580 → 00:45:46.680
So, the argument, I don’t even know where you would start to try to make the argument that there was a peak under paganism, because the best thing you could argue is that Rome was okay if you were an upper class noble and you lived in the inner part of the empire.

00:45:47.540 → 00:45:50.360
If you lived in the hinterlands, life wasn’t great.

00:45:50.600 → 00:45:53.400
If you were the lower classes, life wasn’t great.

00:45:54.740 → 00:46:05.800
Rome was a brutal society where basically unless you were part of the patrician classes, unless you had immense wealth and influence, it wasn’t great to live in Rome.

00:46:05.960 → 00:46:07.480
And Rome was better than Greece.

00:46:07.940 → 00:46:14.040
So I don’t know how you could argue that we have this sort of peak at any point under paganism.

00:46:14.240 → 00:46:24.060
It’s really just a romantic misconception of our history in order to arrive at, obviously, his desired conclusion is Christianity is bad.

00:46:24.320 → 00:46:26.040
He’s making a mercenary argument.

00:46:26.120 → 00:46:32.540
He’s not actually setting forth facts to arrive there, because the peak of our civilization was Christendom.

00:46:33.200 → 00:46:36.880
We had the best quality of life under Christianity.

00:46:37.160 → 00:46:40.480
Things have declined as we have become less Christian.

00:46:40.940 → 00:46:43.520
So Christianity is true.

00:46:43.520 → 00:46:48.120
I think that’s the more salient matter, because the truth matters even if it doesn’t benefit you.

00:46:48.560 → 00:46:58.460
And then, incidentally, Christianity does also benefit you, because if you adhere to God’s laws, and you behave in a Christian way, you will have a better society.

00:46:58.860 → 00:47:03.140
But, yes, you don’t have to be Christian to behave in a moral way.

00:47:03.200 → 00:47:05.040
Christians have never said that’s the case.

00:47:06.100 → 00:47:13.840
It is better to have the fullness of the law than to have the fragmentary bits of it that are discerned through human wisdom.

00:47:14.520 → 00:47:24.200
So, it’s better to be Christian than not to be Christian, both in terms of adherence to the truth, and in terms of the comforts of life, and having a better life.

00:47:26.980 → 00:47:30.060
We’ll pull out some questions here from the chat now.

00:47:45.380 → 00:47:55.180
A question about Pope Gregory that I will leave for next week, because I want to look at exactly what’s being asked there.

00:47:55.180 → 00:48:00.560
Just going to add a few questions to my ongoing list, so I don’t lose them.

00:48:25.220 → 00:48:29.180
I will answer this one, because I can answer this without having to…

00:48:30.660 → 00:48:32.820
Question, where are we?

00:48:33.360 → 00:48:34.440
Question eight.

00:48:37.620 → 00:48:39.980
Have you read the book The Black Sun?

00:48:39.980 → 00:48:44.920
And generally, what do you make of the historic association of national socialism with occultism?

00:48:45.520 → 00:48:49.440
Could you specifically comment on the black sun symbol they apparently put in a castle?

00:48:50.300 → 00:48:55.840
So, I have not read that book, so I can’t comment on that book.

00:48:56.460 → 00:49:01.900
But the relationship of occultism and national socialism is blown wildly out of proportion.

00:49:02.420 → 00:49:07.540
Were there a handful of individuals who were interested in some occultic nonsense?

00:49:07.700 → 00:49:08.780
Yes, there were.

00:49:09.860 → 00:49:16.820
Overwhelmingly, however, the leadership were traditional Christians, and they were mostly Roman Catholic and Lutheran, a handful of reformed.

00:49:16.820 → 00:49:24.740
But the overwhelming majority of the leadership of every part of national socialist Germany was Christian.

00:49:25.160 → 00:49:30.560
And Germany itself was 95-plus percent Christian during and after the war even.

00:49:30.700 → 00:49:33.960
In fact, it went up during the national socialist period.

00:49:34.380 → 00:49:42.220
So the occultic thing is blown out of proportion in order to demonize national socialists, primarily in the mind of baby boomers.

00:49:42.640 → 00:49:44.380
They were the ones who really bought into that.

00:49:44.680 → 00:49:53.320
The younger generations aren’t buying it because they’ve been seeing the actual speeches and hearing the actual words and have access to the actual documents.

00:49:53.600 → 00:49:58.340
There was a question last week about the Hitler Youth Meetings when they were held.

00:49:58.560 → 00:50:02.340
The baby boomers were apparently told they were held on Sundays to conflict with the church.

00:50:02.800 → 00:50:04.760
The reality is we still have the documents.

00:50:04.760 → 00:50:06.500
They were held on Wednesday and Saturday.

00:50:06.880 → 00:50:09.480
So it’s just not a thing.

00:50:09.840 → 00:50:12.860
Did you have a handful of weird individuals?

00:50:13.300 → 00:50:13.780
Yes.

00:50:14.040 → 00:50:19.200
Would it perhaps have been better if they’d been shoved in an attic somewhere further away from the center of power?

00:50:19.260 → 00:50:23.580
Probably yes, but by and large, they were sidelined and told to cut it out.

00:50:24.220 → 00:50:29.840
Like Hitler personally told a number of individuals to cut it out with the pagan nonsense because it was annoying him.

00:50:30.180 → 00:50:32.220
And it was just, it was nonsense, right?

00:50:32.460 → 00:50:38.780
He is literally the source of the LARP meme of calling neo-pagans LARPers.

00:50:39.140 → 00:50:40.680
That’s literally from Hitler.

00:50:41.160 → 00:50:42.700
That’s a quote from him basically.

00:50:42.700 → 00:50:47.680
So no, the occult stuff, the accusations are not real.

00:50:48.600 → 00:50:52.060
And the black sun is just a stylized symbol of the sun.

00:50:52.060 → 00:50:55.280
We have symbols of the sun all the way back through history.

00:50:55.760 → 00:51:07.240
The Hockenkreuz is partly a Christian symbol and partly just what happens when you look at the rotation of certain heavenly bodies over the course of a year, the four seasons, right?

00:51:07.480 → 00:51:16.120
And before people get weird about that and think, oh, you can’t look at the stars and literally in scripture, it says the stars are created for signs.

00:51:17.360 → 00:51:18.680
I went into this previously.

00:51:18.680 → 00:51:25.020
We don’t know and understand exactly how that worked because that was lost to history, but it’s still there.

00:51:25.020 → 00:51:25.960
It’s still in scripture.

00:51:25.960 → 00:51:31.420
There’s nothing wrong with using symbols from God’s creation, as long as you’re not worshiping them, right?

00:51:32.160 → 00:51:38.000
Using the sun as a symbol, very common in heraldry back for centuries through Christendom.

00:51:38.420 → 00:51:40.300
That’s not identical to worshiping the sun.

00:51:40.300 → 00:51:41.440
So I don’t object to the symbol.

00:51:41.440 → 00:51:42.280
I think it’s fine.

00:51:42.640 → 00:51:45.240
Just, you know, don’t worship the sun.

00:51:57.360 → 00:52:06.740
Question nine, do you think the current model of pastors being paid for simply being pastors is biblical or is a pastor being bivocational a better model?

00:52:07.200 → 00:52:18.160
So we have the clear example, right, of Paul and Paul contrasting himself with others, and he says that he is working for his own keep, right?

00:52:18.160 → 00:52:23.860
He’s a tent maker, and others are not doing so because they’re preaching the gospel and sustaining themselves that way.

00:52:23.860 → 00:52:27.560
So both exist in scripture, both are fine.

00:52:27.560 → 00:52:28.500
You can do either one.

00:52:29.580 → 00:52:36.180
Do I think it’s better to have a bivocational pastor these days, perhaps, but under ideal circumstances?

00:52:36.180 → 00:52:58.300
I don’t think so, because if you have a pastor for an average, a good average, not necessarily whatever average is right now, but for an average size congregation, that’s a full-time job, because you are supposed to know the state of the families in your congregation, you’re supposed to spend time with them, you’re supposed to talk to them, pray with them, do all these things.

00:52:58.600 → 00:53:04.400
You’re supposed to care for the sick, you’re supposed to teach, you’re supposed to prepare your sermon, you’re supposed to have a midweek lesson.

00:53:04.700 → 00:53:08.160
There’s a lot of work if you’re a pastor and you’re doing your job.

00:53:08.520 → 00:53:15.300
So I think it’s better to have pastors who are dedicated to that, that is their sole job.

00:53:15.620 → 00:53:19.420
However, that being said, other than obviously being a father and a husband, right?

00:53:19.420 → 00:53:20.900
You have to do that as well.

00:53:21.640 → 00:53:30.560
That being said, I don’t think men should go into the pastorate until they are second career, because I think you need that life experience and you need to be a little older.

00:53:30.880 → 00:53:35.600
You need to have a few gray hairs for the other men in the congregation to take you seriously.

00:53:35.800 → 00:53:42.400
They’re just not going to take you seriously if you’re a 21 year old fresh out of graduate school, and they probably shouldn’t take you seriously.

00:53:42.700 → 00:53:46.340
I don’t care if you’re a prodigy, they probably should not take you seriously.

00:53:46.820 → 00:53:50.680
Go out and actually live something of life first.

00:53:51.220 → 00:53:55.300
It’s going to give you a perspective you don’t have if you spent all of your time in academia.

00:53:56.760 → 00:54:04.920
Granted, pastors are usually less of that kind, that’s more of the theologian, but still, I think it’s better if the pastor goes into it when he’s in his 30s or even 40s.

00:54:23.320 → 00:54:27.940
I’ll briefly touch on this one without going in into too much depth.

00:54:30.000 → 00:54:36.940
Is Baal, or Ba’al if you want to pronounce it technically correctly, Satan, and Saturn, are they identical?

00:54:37.320 → 00:54:39.200
What do you know about Saturn?

00:54:39.200 → 00:54:42.620
I know the star of Remfan and Black Cube are associated with Saturn.

00:54:42.620 → 00:54:45.620
So getting back into the occult, I guess.

00:54:46.320 → 00:54:54.540
Some of this stuff, you don’t want to delve into it too deeply, because delving into the occult and the demonic is always bad for you.

00:54:55.120 → 00:55:00.900
And it’s one of the sort of caveats or downsides of, say, being an exorcist.

00:55:00.900 → 00:55:02.520
You’re going to have to deal with these things.

00:55:03.020 → 00:55:04.200
And you don’t want to.

00:55:04.260 → 00:55:05.480
I’ve gone over this many times before.

00:55:05.480 → 00:55:06.920
There’s such a thing as bad knowledge.

00:55:06.920 → 00:55:08.300
There are things you don’t want to know.

00:55:08.760 → 00:55:16.960
But it is worth knowing that there are connections with regard to these symbols and these practices historically and even today.

00:55:17.320 → 00:55:22.780
So the black cube is definitely associated with Satan and with Saturn.

00:55:23.440 → 00:55:28.860
So you see that in a number of different cultures, you see it particularly among the Jews.

00:55:29.220 → 00:55:31.460
That’s why they have the little black cube on their heads.

00:55:31.460 → 00:55:39.240
They’re not doing it to be pious or to store scrolls and be true worshipers of God.

00:55:39.640 → 00:55:42.040
They’re revealing in public what they are.

00:55:42.520 → 00:55:46.000
They are Saturnists, they are Satanists.

00:55:46.100 → 00:55:47.160
That is what they are.

00:55:47.540 → 00:55:50.980
So is Baal and Satan, are they identical?

00:55:51.320 → 00:55:52.400
Not necessarily.

00:55:52.480 → 00:55:55.900
And do remember that Baal just means Lord historically.

00:55:55.900 → 00:56:13.300
So sometimes it was a title that was just applied to whichever local god was the god of a given tribe, and then it morphed over time into the great god, as it were, of that region being Baal was the highest one for many different peoples.

00:56:14.140 → 00:56:18.300
But sometimes that means Satan, but it does not always mean Satan.

00:56:18.300 → 00:56:19.980
It could mean some other demon.

00:56:20.500 → 00:56:25.860
We don’t know exactly what the relationship is, like the one-to-one relationship behind the scenes.

00:56:26.040 → 00:56:27.740
You know, this name is this demon.

00:56:28.280 → 00:56:30.240
God has not given us that information.

00:56:30.380 → 00:56:31.520
We don’t need to know it.

00:56:32.340 → 00:56:34.120
So, are they worshiping demons?

00:56:34.320 → 00:56:34.760
Yes.

00:56:34.760 → 00:56:36.580
Are they ultimately worshiping Satan?

00:56:36.760 → 00:56:37.260
Yes.

00:56:37.920 → 00:56:39.460
That’s what’s important to recognize.

00:56:39.460 → 00:56:56.660
And then you start to recognize where these occult symbols pop up, because, like I said many times before, it very much seems to be the case that God has required them to broadcast their plans to a certain degree, not to operate totally in the shadows, to give us a chance to respond to it.

00:56:56.660 → 00:57:00.920
And we’ve sort of been failing to respond accordingly for quite some time.

00:57:01.900 → 00:57:05.920
But, excuse me, yes, that’s very clearly demonic.

00:57:05.920 → 00:57:10.360
And what the connection is exactly with Saturn, I don’t think we know.

00:57:11.340 → 00:57:12.520
But it’s certainly there.

00:57:25.280 → 00:57:27.600
A follow-up question, sort of.

00:57:30.540 → 00:57:35.860
How can I stay in the lines in quotation marks, in regard to the law, while writing about the Jews?

00:57:35.860 → 00:57:41.420
I want to be safe and not get in trouble, to be more like you and Carl Radel as prime examples.

00:57:41.480 → 00:57:48.080
So, it obviously helps if you’re familiar with the actual law in this area.

00:57:48.080 → 00:57:53.800
And the law is very clear about what counts as, you know, incitement to violence or things like that.

00:57:53.800 → 00:57:56.860
You obviously can’t incite violence, you’re not allowed to do that.

00:57:57.340 → 00:57:59.840
So, you can’t discuss.

00:58:01.340 → 00:58:10.020
And the thing is, you can, I want to be careful here, not necessarily because, legally speaking, but this is also an important part of it.

00:58:10.580 → 00:58:16.620
Legally speaking, you have certain bounds to what you are permitted to say in public.

00:58:17.260 → 00:58:23.700
And basically, you’re not permitted to incite imminent lawless action, is essentially the standard.

00:58:23.700 → 00:58:34.100
But if you are so inclined, you can go read the case and pull out the greater extent of that holding, the fuller holding, not just that summary of it.

00:58:34.100 → 00:58:35.880
That is an inaccurate summary, though.

00:58:36.460 → 00:58:44.880
And so, it’s not enough if you’re just a crazy person yelling on the street corner, but there’s no risk of inciting imminent lawless action.

00:58:45.240 → 00:58:46.860
But obviously, you don’t want to be that guy.

00:58:47.620 → 00:59:04.460
However, there is a second layer to it, practically speaking, because you are not just subject to the law of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court, you’re also subject to the terms and conditions of every service you’re using, right?

00:59:05.060 → 00:59:11.300
So, you know, right now, I’m streaming to YouTube, Twitch, Kik, Rumble, and X.

00:59:13.140 → 00:59:30.760
I am subject to the terms of service of those various platforms, and so I cannot run afoul of those with what I say, or they will terminate my account, and then I can’t stream, and then you can’t listen to my answers to the questions, unless we find some other platform that will not ban me.

00:59:31.020 → 00:59:37.100
So, the question isn’t with regard to something like this, is it legal for me to say it?

00:59:37.300 → 00:59:41.500
It is, is it permissible according to the requirements of the platform?

00:59:42.240 → 00:59:56.520
So, generally speaking, as long as you are factual in your analysis, and you’re not making inflammatory statements inciting people to violence, you’re probably not going to run afoul of the rules, right?

00:59:56.740 → 01:00:09.800
Sometimes there are topics you can’t discuss, and more likely than not, you’ll be demonetized regardless, even if you’re very careful about how you discuss things, you’ll probably be demonetized for talking about naughty subjects, right?

01:00:09.800 → 01:00:11.240
Subjects you’re not allowed to address.

01:00:11.580 → 01:00:16.760
And in some cases, it’s not even subjects related to, say, the Jews or religion or something truly controversial.

01:00:17.040 → 01:00:19.920
It could just be something advertisers don’t like, right?

01:00:20.020 → 01:00:23.900
So, there are a number of different layers to it, and so it sort of depends on what you’re doing.

01:00:24.580 → 01:00:32.240
If you’re just writing and publishing books, don’t run afoul of Supreme Court precedent and the actual state of the law with regard to the Constitution.

01:00:32.520 → 01:00:39.860
If you’re streaming, you have to comply with the terms of service, the regulations, the policies of the platforms you’re using.

01:00:40.000 → 01:00:46.760
So, it’s an answer that it depends, which is the standard attorney answer, but it is the reality, it’s an accurate answer.

01:00:47.260 → 01:00:51.020
So, stay factual, stay objective.

01:00:51.560 → 01:00:57.880
Don’t veer into polemics too hard in the sense of inflammatory language.

01:00:57.880 → 01:01:02.740
Polemics fine, as long as it’s not, you know, standing up and advocating for something, right?

01:01:04.000 → 01:01:10.240
And, you know, euphemism exists in English, and it has a use, it has a utility, I employ it.

01:01:10.620 → 01:01:15.440
It is one of the ways that you can speak the truth without immediately getting the banhammer.

01:01:15.440 → 01:01:18.700
So, some men are suited for it, some aren’t.

01:01:18.700 → 01:01:21.340
That’s a wisdom call for you to make for yourself.

01:01:35.480 → 01:01:42.340
Question 12, I think I’ll probably try to do, I don’t know how many more questions, but trying to get through some of the ones in the chat.

01:01:44.200 → 01:01:47.580
Question 12, can you speak on the pacifism of Christianity?

01:01:47.860 → 01:01:51.820
I’m seeking proof that the religion is not pacifist at its core.

01:01:51.820 → 01:02:02.940
So, the accusation that Christianity is pacifist isn’t even really historically an accusation leveled against Christianity.

01:02:03.280 → 01:02:13.720
It’s a modern accusation, and it largely comes from groups like the Quakers and others who were pacifist, and to some degree the Amish and the Mennonites and things like that.

01:02:14.840 → 01:02:16.740
They’re just misinterpreting scripture.

01:02:16.760 → 01:02:22.960
The overwhelming majority of Christians have never, for a second, entertained Christianity as being pacifist.

01:02:24.280 → 01:02:32.820
I think one of the best ways to approach this, perhaps, would be to point out the distinction between private enemies and public enemies.

01:02:33.780 → 01:02:38.100
Of course, there’s also the enemies of God, which are kind of public enemies, but slightly different thing.

01:02:38.700 → 01:02:42.260
You can, of course, go and listen to the Stone Quirt episode on that.

01:02:42.260 → 01:02:46.020
I will try to remember to put that in the show notes.

01:02:48.720 → 01:02:53.260
But the short version is that your private enemies are the ones you are to forgive.

01:02:53.420 → 01:02:57.620
This is where part of the accusation of Christianity being pacifist comes from.

01:02:58.560 → 01:03:00.160
You are to forgive your private enemies.

01:03:00.160 → 01:03:04.260
Your private enemy is your neighbor who borrows your lawnmower and never returns it.

01:03:04.940 → 01:03:05.400
Right?

01:03:05.860 → 01:03:10.220
You go ask him for the lawnmower, but you forgive him for not returning the lawnmower.

01:03:10.220 → 01:03:12.260
You forgive him for denting your tool.

01:03:12.500 → 01:03:14.480
You forgive him for annoying you.

01:03:15.400 → 01:03:19.460
You cannot forgive the people invading your country.

01:03:20.180 → 01:03:21.720
They’re not your private enemies.

01:03:21.900 → 01:03:23.080
They are public enemies.

01:03:23.080 → 01:03:24.340
They are enemies of your nation.

01:03:24.340 → 01:03:25.780
They are enemies of the state.

01:03:26.180 → 01:03:27.980
You are not permitted to forgive them.

01:03:28.660 → 01:03:30.700
In fact, it’s insane to say that.

01:03:31.200 → 01:03:40.420
And the example that I’ll use, that’s the best example, so just go ahead and use this one for people who try to argue that, oh, you just have to forgive all enemies.

01:03:40.920 → 01:03:44.300
Okay, can you forgive Satan for rebelling against God?

01:03:45.860 → 01:03:46.820
Satan is your enemy.

01:03:47.460 → 01:03:51.320
Satan is the arch-enemy of Christians, of mankind.

01:03:52.300 → 01:04:01.140
You are not permitted to forgive God’s enemies, and so if there is an enemy you are not permitted to forgive, then you are clearly not supposed to forgive all enemies.

01:04:01.340 → 01:04:04.700
It would, in fact, be a sin to try to forgive Satan.

01:04:05.100 → 01:04:11.840
So, you have to bear in mind that there are different kinds of enemies, and you are not commanded to forgive all of them because it’s not your place.

01:04:12.400 → 01:04:14.640
And then, you can look down through history.

01:04:14.640 → 01:04:20.580
Christians have always taken up arms to defend their nation, to defend Christendom, defend their homes, defend their lives.

01:04:21.020 → 01:04:27.720
You have duties to defend these things, because these things have been entrusted to you by God, right?

01:04:27.820 → 01:04:35.580
And so, when Scripture says, thou shalt not murder, there are positive requirements that come along with that.

01:04:35.680 → 01:04:38.300
Defending your neighbor’s life is part of that.

01:04:38.620 → 01:04:40.120
So, that’s defense of others.

01:04:40.440 → 01:04:41.980
You are God’s slave.

01:04:42.440 → 01:04:45.960
You are not permitted to let God’s property be destroyed.

01:04:46.260 → 01:04:47.540
You have to defend yourself.

01:04:47.540 → 01:04:48.640
That’s self-defense.

01:04:49.040 → 01:04:58.180
Christians have always believed in these things, in this hierarchy of loves and duties, and pacifism has no place in Christianity.

01:04:58.480 → 01:05:01.220
It used to be we executed pacifists.

01:05:01.520 → 01:05:03.500
It was considered a capital offense.

01:05:04.140 → 01:05:06.540
And we should maybe go back to that in some cases.

01:05:06.740 → 01:05:09.860
Maybe it would stop the nonsense of men trying to spread that lie.

01:05:10.160 → 01:05:12.680
Christianity is very obviously not pacifist, though.

01:05:27.760 → 01:05:29.740
Let’s see, I’ll put this question in my…

01:05:30.300 → 01:05:38.160
Question 13, did you watch the debate on the Curse of Ham with Dale Partridge and the individuals struggling with sanctification last night?

01:05:38.940 → 01:05:40.540
I did not watch it.

01:05:40.540 → 01:05:43.260
I heard that it was kind of a dumpster fire.

01:05:43.960 → 01:05:46.840
So I assume that was an accurate assessment given the men who told me that.

01:05:47.120 → 01:05:49.280
But no, I did not personally watch it.

01:05:52.280 → 01:05:58.260
But yes, that, the individual whom I also debated was certainly an experience.

01:05:59.300 → 01:06:00.640
Question 14, related question.

01:06:00.640 → 01:06:04.220
I have some friends who watched your debates.

01:06:04.220 → 01:06:08.640
I was wondering how we could trace the continuity of the genealogy of the Curse of Ham.

01:06:09.000 → 01:06:15.300
So this one’s actually pretty easy to trace because there are really three great races of men on earth.

01:06:15.660 → 01:06:23.340
You have the Europeans, the Asiatics in the broad sense, sort of the British sense of Asian, and the Africans.

01:06:23.980 → 01:06:27.280
Now, there are subgroups within that, and at the periphery you get mixtures.

01:06:27.600 → 01:06:31.920
But those are the three groups, and those just correspond to the three sons of Noah.

01:06:31.920 → 01:06:40.400
You’ve got Japheth as Europeans, you’ve got Shem as the Asiatics, Modulo, you know, the Arabs are part Hamite, and then you have Ham as the Africans.

01:06:41.040 → 01:06:46.440
So it really is just, I mean, you can basically tell by skin tone for Japheth versus Ham, right?

01:06:46.940 → 01:06:54.220
Not necessarily at the periphery for some of the Shemites, they’re fair skinned, but you can certainly identify the sons of Ham on site.

01:06:54.420 → 01:07:03.740
So it’s really not difficult, there’s also, like I said previously, you can see this with genetic studies, different populations and how distant they are from one another.

01:07:04.060 → 01:07:10.580
And the Africans are very clearly more distant from everyone else than other groups are from each other.

01:07:10.820 → 01:07:15.580
But it’s not difficult to identify the, the different groups descended from the sons of Noah.

01:07:16.200 → 01:07:24.060
Except, like I said, at the periphery where you’ve had the admixture over centuries, then in some cases, they’re descended from two, like the, in scripture, we see that, right?

01:07:24.620 → 01:07:28.220
The Arabs are descended from a union of Ham and Shem.

01:07:28.220 → 01:07:31.220
That’s very clear in scripture with the son of Abraham.

01:07:31.220 → 01:07:38.500
So, but yes, I don’t think it would be difficult to identify which groups are descended from Ham.

01:07:57.880 → 01:07:59.700
Question 15.

01:08:00.960 → 01:08:08.100
In the case of not having access to a Lutheran church, only Baptist churches should I go to the Baptist church and abstain from the Lord’s Supper?

01:08:08.100 → 01:08:10.000
That would be my recommendation, yes.

01:08:10.760 → 01:08:24.380
And I’ve gone into this in some depth previously, so I would say listen to the times where I’ve been asked about attending X denomination instead of another, because I’ve specifically gone over the Lord’s Supper.

01:08:24.380 → 01:08:34.760
And basically the issue is that you don’t want to give a false public confession, but like I’ve said, there are times where maybe I wouldn’t be uncomfortable communing at St.

01:08:34.760 → 01:08:37.980
Anglican Church, because they do confess the real presence.

01:08:37.980 → 01:08:42.020
Granted, it’s sort of in the reformed sense, which we disagree with as Lutherans.

01:08:42.460 → 01:08:56.040
But the question, as I pointed out previously, would be, am I making a public confession of the doctrine that is being preached, or am I making a public confession of my unity with these men as brothers?

01:08:56.400 → 01:09:00.900
So maybe in the sense of like Anglicans, I might be comfortable doing that.

01:09:01.420 → 01:09:02.960
For Baptists, typically no.

01:09:03.580 → 01:09:12.340
And on top of it, Baptists typically don’t have the Lord’s Supper because they’re often using grape juice and not wine, so they’re disobeying God with the very thing they’re doing.

01:09:12.640 → 01:09:13.820
So I would not partake.

01:09:13.820 → 01:09:18.720
I would not partake, but I do believe many of them are brothers, of course, just to make sure that’s clear.

01:09:18.720 → 01:09:22.980
I just believe they’re brothers in error, and they’re in deep error with regard to the Lord’s Supper.

01:09:23.300 → 01:09:26.040
So I would recommend not participating.

01:09:26.320 → 01:09:29.140
But you can certainly go and worship God with them.

01:09:59.160 → 01:10:02.960
I suggest with IQ studies, I take it up with the scientists.

01:10:02.960 → 01:10:13.460
They are among the most reproducible studies ever conducted in any field, other than something like physics, where it’s just the laws of the universe.

01:10:22.120 → 01:10:24.580
Question 16, I guess, is related to 15.

01:10:24.780 → 01:10:26.980
The interjection there was not really a question.

01:10:27.260 → 01:10:32.620
Question 16, should churches return to using one common cup of wine and one common loaf of bread for communion?

01:10:32.620 → 01:10:34.440
I think that is the better symbolism.

01:10:34.660 → 01:10:35.860
It’s not required.

01:10:35.860 → 01:10:37.760
This is adiaphorin, right?

01:10:37.760 → 01:10:45.620
This is something that is neither required nor prohibited, just like you can use white wine or you can use red wine.

01:10:45.620 → 01:10:48.100
Scripture does not say which wine it was.

01:10:48.600 → 01:10:52.760
Is the symbolism of red wine better because it is the Lord’s blood?

01:10:53.100 → 01:10:53.840
I think so.

01:10:54.380 → 01:11:02.240
But there have been times where Lutheran churches have used white wine specifically as a confession against the error of other groups.

01:11:02.520 → 01:11:03.960
That happened in Germany, for instance.

01:11:03.960 → 01:11:06.660
You’ll go to churches and it will be Riesling instead of a red wine.

01:11:07.740 → 01:11:10.340
Or maybe you don’t have red wine, but you have white wine, right?

01:11:10.900 → 01:11:11.780
That’s permissible.

01:11:11.780 → 01:11:13.660
Does it have to be unleavened bread?

01:11:13.700 → 01:11:15.240
No, it can be leavened bread.

01:11:15.240 → 01:11:17.840
Does it have to be the wafers?

01:11:17.840 → 01:11:19.220
No, it can be a common loaf.

01:11:19.800 → 01:11:29.260
I think insofar as the symbolism and the purpose, and it’s not just the forgiveness of sins, it’s also the unity of the church, particularly the local church body.

01:11:29.660 → 01:11:34.580
As far as those things are concerned, I think the common cup and a common loaf are better.

01:11:34.960 → 01:11:37.400
And then you have the broken for you, right?

01:11:37.400 → 01:11:38.840
The Lord’s body broken for you.

01:11:38.840 → 01:11:41.720
There’s more of a symbol there when you’re breaking the loaf.

01:11:42.160 → 01:11:46.060
So I think that’s optimal, but is it necessary?

01:11:46.060 → 01:11:46.360
No.

01:11:47.280 → 01:12:03.440
So, as we start to return to more traditional and better churches, whether it’s taking over existing ones or starting up a home church that turns into a proper church in the sense of owning a building and things, I think this is probably the way to go, and I think it’s a better way to do things.

01:12:17.960 → 01:12:20.980
Maybe a couple more questions for this stream, I think.

01:12:21.100 → 01:12:25.920
Sort of a follow-up question from the introductory monologue, I guess, about China.

01:12:26.340 → 01:12:33.480
Question 17, why do you think Christianity ever trickled down to the masses in China, despite them having had two Christian leaders in the past?

01:12:35.400 → 01:13:03.800
I think that there are, quite frankly, a lot of reasons, but if I were to give, say, three reasons, I would say that the first one is just that the hinterlands were never really evangelized in the same way and to the same extent as the coastal regions, because the Europeans dealt with the coastal regions, those were the trade cities, as I went over in the introduction to this, the first question for the episode.

01:13:05.340 → 01:13:18.940
I would say the second part would be that because you didn’t have any of that Christianization, you never had any sort of pressure for others to think about Christianity.

01:13:18.940 → 01:13:20.800
They didn’t have any exposure to it.

01:13:21.100 → 01:13:33.920
There’s a little bit now because there are people who are sending Bibles, and the Chinese Communist Party kind of vaguely tolerates Christian evangelization, although surveils you extremely heavily if you are a Christian pastor there.

01:13:34.660 → 01:13:53.320
And I think that the traditional, their old pagan religions just had enough weight that they stuck around, and there was never any real, like I said, no real pressure with regard to Christianity.

01:13:53.680 → 01:13:59.500
And so, you didn’t have enough people converting in to build that momentum to change the society.

01:13:59.860 → 01:14:17.800
And then third, and perhaps the most important, like I said, they murdered 35,000 Chinese Christians at one point during the Boxer Rebellion, and then they had pogroms during the Cultural Revolution, and they suppressed and surveilled and sometimes just assassinated Christian pastors.

01:14:18.340 → 01:14:32.720
Communism, born out of that and sort of the intellectual progeny of that modulo of the Jewish involvement, of course, in the Chinese Communist Party, very anti-Christian and has suppressed Christianity.

01:14:32.720 → 01:14:51.460
And I think that’s probably the biggest fact, because if you look at the places even in Europe where you had the most thorough communist sort of destruction of traditional society and control over the culture, they still haven’t recovered with regard to Christianity.

01:14:52.120 → 01:14:54.480
Look at East Germany versus West Germany.

01:14:55.760 → 01:15:01.020
Communism destroys the soul, and I think that is a large part of what happened in China.

01:15:02.140 → 01:15:06.780
And unfortunately, Confucianism kind of set the stage for that to be ushered in.

01:15:17.220 → 01:15:20.860
I think that may be the final question from the chat.

01:15:20.860 → 01:15:25.520
So let me see if I can pull out one last question that’s not too long.

01:15:33.820 → 01:15:36.760
Someone asked me about data centers.

01:15:36.960 → 01:15:40.980
I guess I’ll comment on that one very briefly because that’s kind of a complicated topic.

01:15:40.980 → 01:15:44.700
But I’ll make this the last one for this stream.

01:15:46.120 → 01:15:48.500
Add that to my notes here.

01:15:56.480 → 01:16:09.160
So the final question, what is the proper solution to the seemingly out of control situation with companies buying up farms, homesteads, et cetera, to build data centers?

01:16:16.240 → 01:16:29.720
I don’t want to get into the AI topic right now because the AI topic is not only expansive, and this is question 18, I guess I should say, for the sake of the record and the transcription.

01:16:30.980 → 01:16:37.580
The AI topic is complicated, and I don’t necessarily want to get into it because it will take quite a lot of time, actually.

01:16:38.000 → 01:16:53.280
But with regard to sort of what’s zoning laws, really what we’re talking about in regulatory law, the issue is that we just have very bad regulatory law and very bad zoning law, zoning law being a subset of regulatory law in much of the country.

01:16:53.480 → 01:16:56.900
And so they’re not prepared to deal with these issues.

Transcript

3/3

01:16:57.100 → 01:17:00.460
They don’t have the local competence because they’ve never dealt with it before.

01:17:01.000 → 01:17:11.880
And so men who are competent, if you are in these areas, you need to get involved on these local boards who will oversee and hear these issues.

01:17:12.200 → 01:17:21.940
Now, excuse me, recently we have had some individuals at the state level and at the national level who have been trying to address the issue to some degree.

01:17:22.720 → 01:17:24.600
But it’s not just data centers, right?

01:17:24.860 → 01:17:26.660
You have massive warehouses being built.

01:17:26.660 → 01:17:30.640
You have things that don’t fit the location in which they are built.

01:17:31.360 → 01:17:41.100
We need to have better land use regulations, so these things are done rationally, in a way that benefits the population, and not just these giant corporations.

01:17:41.100 → 01:17:46.980
Part of this is a problem with capitalism, and if you have enough money to throw out something, you can generally get your way.

01:17:47.380 → 01:17:57.900
And part of it is just, we don’t have competent men involved in these things anymore, so it’s mostly incompetent men, and often men who are very easily bribed.

01:17:58.780 → 01:18:07.980
You know, the kind of man who can be bribed with a single nice dinner and a bar of scotch, and a bottle of scotch, rather, is the kind of man on a lot of these boards.

01:18:08.080 → 01:18:15.560
You don’t want that man in charge of the decision of saying, sure, you can build a data center here in the middle of this neighborhood or whatever it happens to be.

01:18:16.480 → 01:18:23.600
So complicated issue, but it has to be solved by changing the laws.

01:18:23.920 → 01:18:42.360
Now that’s assuming that everything doesn’t go sideways and things get solved in a different way, but if that doesn’t happen, and it probably will, but in the interim, it is solved by involving competent, moral men in the decision making process and making sure these things are done as they should be done.

01:18:42.620 → 01:18:50.260
And from my perspective, corporations should not own giant chunks of land, farms, homesteads.

01:18:50.520 → 01:18:54.960
Corporations should be absolutely banned from owning private residences.

01:18:55.420 → 01:18:58.980
Black rock should be shattered into a million pieces and scattered to the winds.

01:18:59.740 → 01:19:08.960
But these are very real problems, and they will take time and a lot of effort to fix because things have been allowed to fester for so long.

01:19:09.280 → 01:19:10.900
But get involved.

01:19:11.160 → 01:19:19.720
You can probably get involved in your local, whatever it happens to be, zoning commission, whatever regulatory body it is.

01:19:20.280 → 01:19:29.000
They probably have open seats, or very few people vote for the position, and maybe you, your family, and like your cousins could get you elected.

01:19:29.320 → 01:19:30.760
That’s the case in a lot of places.

01:19:30.760 → 01:19:35.520
So get involved, because at the local level, you can do a lot.

01:19:35.960 → 01:19:38.640
Maybe you can’t get elected to the state level or the national level.

01:19:38.640 → 01:19:39.840
Everyone always focuses on that.

01:19:39.840 → 01:19:47.540
But by and large, the people making a lot of decisions that affect your everyday life are probably 15 minutes down the road.

01:19:47.960 → 01:19:51.040
So you can get involved, you can do a lot of good for your neighbor.

01:19:51.540 → 01:20:00.420
Christians should absolutely be involved in these things and making sure that they are being done in a way that is consonant with morality and consonant with what is best for your neighbor.

01:20:00.580 → 01:20:03.820
This is one of the ways you can serve your neighbor in a very concrete way.

01:20:04.260 → 01:20:10.440
So I think that’s the short version of how to deal with that issue and what’s going on.

01:20:11.800 → 01:20:16.120
But I think that will be it for this week.

01:20:16.120 → 01:20:20.320
I see there are a couple more questions that have come in in the chat.

01:20:20.320 → 01:20:23.360
I will copy those over so that I don’t miss them.

01:20:25.940 → 01:20:31.920
But as always, thank you for submitting questions and for participating in the chat.

01:20:33.160 → 01:20:40.460
If I did not get to your question or I missed your question, which is entirely possible, please go ahead and submit that on the forum.

01:20:40.460 → 01:20:53.740
The forum is always the best way because I can mark those as having been answered, and I have a record of them in a way that is not subject to whatever YouTube decides to do with the stream comments and things like that.

01:20:55.200 → 01:21:09.540
But you can submit the questions any of a number of different ways on X in reply to, say, the stream during the stream in the chat, telegram, or again, forum is the preferred way to do it.

01:21:10.720 → 01:21:12.420
At any rate, it is Friday.

01:21:12.420 → 01:21:15.820
I try to do these on Thursday or Friday, just depends on how my week goes.

01:21:16.140 → 01:21:17.740
Usually winds up being Friday.

01:21:17.740 → 01:21:19.600
That’s just the reality of it these days.

01:21:20.200 → 01:21:23.860
But given that it’s Friday, go out and enjoy your weekend.

01:21:23.920 → 01:21:32.220
Try to spend some time outside if it’s not too unbearably hot where you are, and there’s not a bear in your front yard, as apparently happens around me a lot now.

01:21:33.020 → 01:21:39.400
At any rate, I always enjoy giving answers to these questions, and I will see you all next week.

01:21:39.400 → 01:21:43.560
Go to church on Sunday, and until then, God bless you all.

Transcript

2/3

00:38:05.360 → 00:38:13.220
You can’t have something that is good if it is not aligned toward God, aligned toward the ends for which God has created it.

00:38:13.520 → 00:38:15.780
That’s the very definition of that which is good.

00:38:16.560 → 00:38:34.940
So, your pastor is using a pastor, so maybe not your pastor, but this pastor was using a mercenary sense of it, where I understand part of why they try to do it, because then they can say, well, genocide was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it’s evil, right?

00:38:35.480 → 00:38:36.300
That’s their goal.

00:38:36.380 → 00:38:39.480
Slavery was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it’s evil.

00:38:40.580 → 00:38:46.060
It’s a mercenary attempt to explain away the Old Testament instead of believing the Old Testament is God’s truth.

00:38:46.240 → 00:38:50.340
So, ultimately, what they’re actually doing is denying that objective morality exists.

00:38:50.520 → 00:38:54.420
This is sort of a command theory of morality.

00:38:54.420 → 00:38:56.080
God can say anything he wants.

00:38:56.080 → 00:39:03.900
So, under this sort of interpretation, this is a way you can actually argue with someone who advances this, thou shalt not kill.

00:39:04.140 → 00:39:09.840
God tomorrow, under this man’s conception, could say, thou shalt kill, and now it’s moral.

00:39:10.140 → 00:39:12.740
Notably, we mean murder when we say kill in the sense, right?

00:39:14.240 → 00:39:15.200
Would that be moral?

00:39:15.980 → 00:39:18.200
The answer is no, and God wouldn’t do it.

00:39:18.240 → 00:39:19.660
But that’s what this man is saying.

00:39:19.660 → 00:39:25.360
So, you’re basically a reduction to absurdity is what you’re arguing against here, to defeat his point.

00:39:26.020 → 00:39:30.420
But the whole reason they’re doing it is to dismiss the Old Testament and the parts that make them uncomfortable.

00:39:30.840 → 00:39:33.300
And they’re blaspheming God.

00:39:33.300 → 00:39:36.280
They’re saying God changed or God could change.

00:39:36.700 → 00:39:40.300
They’re saying God isn’t God, and they’re saying morality isn’t real.

00:39:41.400 → 00:39:51.980
And that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to men not being men, men deciding they’re women, or they’re children, or they’re a dog, or a goat, or whatever it happens to be.

00:39:52.380 → 00:39:55.760
It’s the same sort of nonsense saying that truth doesn’t exist.

00:39:55.900 → 00:40:03.480
It’s merely a declaration that is true, in a sense, because of the declaration for some bounded period of time.

00:40:04.280 → 00:40:07.660
So, yes, you were arguing correctly, and this pastor was absolutely wrong.

00:40:09.540 → 00:40:10.700
But it is a common…

00:40:11.640 → 00:40:13.280
I don’t even want to call it an error.

00:40:13.860 → 00:40:15.280
It is a common evil.

00:40:15.280 → 00:40:19.020
It is a common wickedness that someone started.

00:40:21.780 → 00:40:23.100
Question 6.

00:40:24.880 → 00:40:26.260
Make a note for myself here.

00:40:27.880 → 00:40:32.340
What is your take on Charlie Kirk’s death and Candice’s theory?

00:40:32.380 → 00:40:37.860
I can answer the first part of that, but not the second, because I don’t pay any attention to Candice Owens.

00:40:38.740 → 00:40:43.420
So I don’t know what she has been saying or not been saying.

00:40:43.420 → 00:40:46.260
But I was very clear very early on.

00:40:46.260 → 00:40:55.200
I don’t know exactly the timeline, how long it was before I said something after his murder, his assassination.

00:40:55.580 → 00:40:57.480
But I said bluntly that it was Israel.

00:40:57.640 → 00:40:58.660
The Jews murdered him.

00:40:59.000 → 00:41:05.040
And that was made very obvious by the fact that Netanyahu was bragging about it almost immediately.

00:41:05.280 → 00:41:07.480
And I highlighted that in a post on X.

00:41:07.480 → 00:41:11.280
So I’m sure someone can find that and add that to the show notes.

00:41:11.880 → 00:41:17.680
But if you understand how Jews brag and how they behave publicly, he was absolutely bragging about having done it.

00:41:18.280 → 00:41:22.260
And so, that is my belief, that has not changed.

00:41:25.440 → 00:41:27.420
Question seven.

00:41:28.040 → 00:41:35.740
In what quantifiable, measurable, and observable ways did Christianity benefit pagan Europe or Europeans?

00:41:36.080 → 00:41:38.900
I have a pagan friend that I go back and forth with.

00:41:41.280 → 00:41:47.860
There are really two answers to this, and I’ll get the sort of secondary one out of the way briefly, because it’s the shorter answer.

00:41:48.340 → 00:41:52.920
The second is that truth matters whether or not it benefits you.

00:41:53.640 → 00:42:02.800
The measure of whether or not something is true is not a mercenary calculation of whether or not you will benefit from adhering to that truth, right?

00:42:03.180 → 00:42:05.560
Something is true objectively.

00:42:05.940 → 00:42:14.780
So, the question, initially, in this case, the secondary concern, but the initial question, is, is Christianity true?

00:42:15.260 → 00:42:17.940
Not, does Christianity benefit?

00:42:18.380 → 00:42:23.920
But then, to get on the benefit, incidentally, Christianity is both true and does benefit, right?

00:42:24.660 → 00:42:33.860
So, for one, we had the establishment of an objective morality in parts of Europe that did not previously have it.

00:42:34.220 → 00:42:39.800
Now, there were certain tribes that behaved very well prior to Christianization.

00:42:40.160 → 00:42:42.140
Were they improved by Christianization?

00:42:42.140 → 00:42:43.020
I would say, yes.

00:42:43.600 → 00:42:49.940
But that doesn’t mean that they were wild, crazy, feral animals before they were Christianized, right?

00:42:50.100 → 00:42:52.500
Tacitus, for instance, I’ve used this example many times.

00:42:52.500 → 00:43:02.420
Tacitus remarks upon how highly esteemed marriage is among the Germans, and that adultery is basically unheard of, and that indeed, they execute adulterers.

00:43:02.420 → 00:43:08.560
So, were they behaving according to the moral law without having the Christian scriptures?

00:43:08.660 → 00:43:14.560
Absolutely, that was a good thing, because, do remember, the law is written on your heart, whether you’re a believer or not.

00:43:14.560 → 00:43:21.480
You have a conscience, and even the pagans had a conscience, the heathen, the unbelievers.

00:43:22.300 → 00:43:29.180
But is there a benefit to having the fullness of that moral law written out for you?

00:43:29.180 → 00:43:30.520
Well, the answer is yes.

00:43:30.740 → 00:43:35.380
It is more beneficial to have it written out than to just have it in a fragmentary way.

00:43:35.900 → 00:43:49.320
But with regard to concrete benefits, I always point out that the height of life, quality of life, things like that for Europeans, was not Rome.

00:43:49.560 → 00:43:50.940
It certainly wasn’t Greece.

00:43:51.420 → 00:43:52.820
It was the Holy Roman Empire.

00:43:53.160 → 00:43:58.380
That was the height of the quality of life in terms of the things that actually matter.

00:43:58.380 → 00:44:02.020
I know there will be people who will object and say, oh, we’re more materially comfort.

00:44:02.020 → 00:44:02.460
Sure.

00:44:02.740 → 00:44:07.620
I’ve got an AC vent directly above me right now because it’s still like 86 degrees outside.

00:44:08.000 → 00:44:12.340
Am I materially comfortable in ways today that I would not have been in the Holy Roman Empire?

00:44:12.740 → 00:44:13.220
Sure.

00:44:13.720 → 00:44:16.160
Technological advance has brought some benefits.

00:44:16.480 → 00:44:21.480
But with regard to quality of life and the things that matter, are we better off?

00:44:22.660 → 00:44:24.080
Look at the depression numbers.

00:44:24.080 → 00:44:25.580
Look at the anxiety numbers.

00:44:25.740 → 00:44:27.000
Look at the marriage numbers.

00:44:27.000 → 00:44:28.740
These things are all abysmal.

00:44:29.200 → 00:44:32.580
So have we benefited from the de-Christianization?

00:44:32.620 → 00:44:33.540
Obviously, no.

00:44:34.340 → 00:44:36.360
Did we benefit from Christianization?

00:44:36.600 → 00:44:45.240
I would say obviously, yes, because we had that upward trajectory until we started to reject Christianity, until we started to apostatize.

00:44:45.460 → 00:44:49.360
And also bear in mind, when did European power peak?

00:44:49.940 → 00:45:00.060
It peaked at the end of the period of colonization, which was a spread of Christianity over the face of the earth, after centuries of being Christian.

00:45:00.920 → 00:45:06.280
Our power didn’t peak under the various pagan groups that preceded Christianization.

00:45:07.240 → 00:45:10.000
We didn’t get to the moon as pagans.

00:45:10.200 → 00:45:14.400
We got there and had the Lord’s Supper on the moon.

00:45:15.200 → 00:45:16.960
That’s what we did as Christians.

00:45:17.300 → 00:45:22.900
The height of our civilization, regardless of how you look for it, is going to be found when we were Christians.

00:45:23.240 → 00:45:28.060
And as Christianity has declined, so has our civilization.

00:45:28.580 → 00:45:46.680
So, the argument, I don’t even know where you would start to try to make the argument that there was a peak under paganism, because the best thing you could argue is that Rome was okay if you were an upper class noble and you lived in the inner part of the empire.

00:45:47.540 → 00:45:50.360
If you lived in the hinterlands, life wasn’t great.

00:45:50.600 → 00:45:53.400
If you were the lower classes, life wasn’t great.

00:45:54.740 → 00:46:05.800
Rome was a brutal society where basically unless you were part of the patrician classes, unless you had immense wealth and influence, it wasn’t great to live in Rome.

00:46:05.960 → 00:46:07.480
And Rome was better than Greece.

00:46:07.940 → 00:46:14.040
So I don’t know how you could argue that we have this sort of peak at any point under paganism.

00:46:14.240 → 00:46:24.060
It’s really just a romantic misconception of our history in order to arrive at, obviously, his desired conclusion is Christianity is bad.

00:46:24.320 → 00:46:26.040
He’s making a mercenary argument.

00:46:26.120 → 00:46:32.540
He’s not actually setting forth facts to arrive there, because the peak of our civilization was Christendom.

00:46:33.200 → 00:46:36.880
We had the best quality of life under Christianity.

00:46:37.160 → 00:46:40.480
Things have declined as we have become less Christian.

00:46:40.940 → 00:46:43.520
So Christianity is true.

00:46:43.520 → 00:46:48.120
I think that’s the more salient matter, because the truth matters even if it doesn’t benefit you.

00:46:48.560 → 00:46:58.460
And then, incidentally, Christianity does also benefit you, because if you adhere to God’s laws, and you behave in a Christian way, you will have a better society.

00:46:58.860 → 00:47:03.140
But, yes, you don’t have to be Christian to behave in a moral way.

00:47:03.200 → 00:47:05.040
Christians have never said that’s the case.

00:47:06.100 → 00:47:13.840
It is better to have the fullness of the law than to have the fragmentary bits of it that are discerned through human wisdom.

00:47:14.520 → 00:47:24.200
So, it’s better to be Christian than not to be Christian, both in terms of adherence to the truth, and in terms of the comforts of life, and having a better life.

00:47:26.980 → 00:47:30.060
We’ll pull out some questions here from the chat now.

00:47:45.380 → 00:47:55.180
A question about Pope Gregory that I will leave for next week, because I want to look at exactly what’s being asked there.

00:47:55.180 → 00:48:00.560
Just going to add a few questions to my ongoing list, so I don’t lose them.

00:48:25.220 → 00:48:29.180
I will answer this one, because I can answer this without having to…

00:48:30.660 → 00:48:32.820
Question, where are we?

00:48:33.360 → 00:48:34.440
Question eight.

00:48:37.620 → 00:48:39.980
Have you read the book The Black Sun?

00:48:39.980 → 00:48:44.920
And generally, what do you make of the historic association of national socialism with occultism?

00:48:45.520 → 00:48:49.440
Could you specifically comment on the black sun symbol they apparently put in a castle?

00:48:50.300 → 00:48:55.840
So, I have not read that book, so I can’t comment on that book.

00:48:56.460 → 00:49:01.900
But the relationship of occultism and national socialism is blown wildly out of proportion.

00:49:02.420 → 00:49:07.540
Were there a handful of individuals who were interested in some occultic nonsense?

00:49:07.700 → 00:49:08.780
Yes, there were.

00:49:09.860 → 00:49:16.820
Overwhelmingly, however, the leadership were traditional Christians, and they were mostly Roman Catholic and Lutheran, a handful of reformed.

00:49:16.820 → 00:49:24.740
But the overwhelming majority of the leadership of every part of national socialist Germany was Christian.

00:49:25.160 → 00:49:30.560
And Germany itself was 95-plus percent Christian during and after the war even.

00:49:30.700 → 00:49:33.960
In fact, it went up during the national socialist period.

00:49:34.380 → 00:49:42.220
So the occultic thing is blown out of proportion in order to demonize national socialists, primarily in the mind of baby boomers.

00:49:42.640 → 00:49:44.380
They were the ones who really bought into that.

00:49:44.680 → 00:49:53.320
The younger generations aren’t buying it because they’ve been seeing the actual speeches and hearing the actual words and have access to the actual documents.

00:49:53.600 → 00:49:58.340
There was a question last week about the Hitler Youth Meetings when they were held.

00:49:58.560 → 00:50:02.340
The baby boomers were apparently told they were held on Sundays to conflict with the church.

00:50:02.800 → 00:50:04.760
The reality is we still have the documents.

00:50:04.760 → 00:50:06.500
They were held on Wednesday and Saturday.

00:50:06.880 → 00:50:09.480
So it’s just not a thing.

00:50:09.840 → 00:50:12.860
Did you have a handful of weird individuals?

00:50:13.300 → 00:50:13.780
Yes.

00:50:14.040 → 00:50:19.200
Would it perhaps have been better if they’d been shoved in an attic somewhere further away from the center of power?

00:50:19.260 → 00:50:23.580
Probably yes, but by and large, they were sidelined and told to cut it out.

00:50:24.220 → 00:50:29.840
Like Hitler personally told a number of individuals to cut it out with the pagan nonsense because it was annoying him.

00:50:30.180 → 00:50:32.220
And it was just, it was nonsense, right?

00:50:32.460 → 00:50:38.780
He is literally the source of the LARP meme of calling neo-pagans LARPers.

00:50:39.140 → 00:50:40.680
That’s literally from Hitler.

00:50:41.160 → 00:50:42.700
That’s a quote from him basically.

00:50:42.700 → 00:50:47.680
So no, the occult stuff, the accusations are not real.

00:50:48.600 → 00:50:52.060
And the black sun is just a stylized symbol of the sun.

00:50:52.060 → 00:50:55.280
We have symbols of the sun all the way back through history.

00:50:55.760 → 00:51:07.240
The Hockenkreuz is partly a Christian symbol and partly just what happens when you look at the rotation of certain heavenly bodies over the course of a year, the four seasons, right?

00:51:07.480 → 00:51:16.120
And before people get weird about that and think, oh, you can’t look at the stars and literally in scripture, it says the stars are created for signs.

00:51:17.360 → 00:51:18.680
I went into this previously.

00:51:18.680 → 00:51:25.020
We don’t know and understand exactly how that worked because that was lost to history, but it’s still there.

00:51:25.020 → 00:51:25.960
It’s still in scripture.

00:51:25.960 → 00:51:31.420
There’s nothing wrong with using symbols from God’s creation, as long as you’re not worshiping them, right?

00:51:32.160 → 00:51:38.000
Using the sun as a symbol, very common in heraldry back for centuries through Christendom.

00:51:38.420 → 00:51:40.300
That’s not identical to worshiping the sun.

00:51:40.300 → 00:51:41.440
So I don’t object to the symbol.

00:51:41.440 → 00:51:42.280
I think it’s fine.

00:51:42.640 → 00:51:45.240
Just, you know, don’t worship the sun.

00:51:57.360 → 00:52:06.740
Question nine, do you think the current model of pastors being paid for simply being pastors is biblical or is a pastor being bivocational a better model?

00:52:07.200 → 00:52:18.160
So we have the clear example, right, of Paul and Paul contrasting himself with others, and he says that he is working for his own keep, right?

00:52:18.160 → 00:52:23.860
He’s a tent maker, and others are not doing so because they’re preaching the gospel and sustaining themselves that way.

00:52:23.860 → 00:52:27.560
So both exist in scripture, both are fine.

00:52:27.560 → 00:52:28.500
You can do either one.

00:52:29.580 → 00:52:36.180
Do I think it’s better to have a bivocational pastor these days, perhaps, but under ideal circumstances?

00:52:36.180 → 00:52:58.300
I don’t think so, because if you have a pastor for an average, a good average, not necessarily whatever average is right now, but for an average size congregation, that’s a full-time job, because you are supposed to know the state of the families in your congregation, you’re supposed to spend time with them, you’re supposed to talk to them, pray with them, do all these things.

00:52:58.600 → 00:53:04.400
You’re supposed to care for the sick, you’re supposed to teach, you’re supposed to prepare your sermon, you’re supposed to have a midweek lesson.

00:53:04.700 → 00:53:08.160
There’s a lot of work if you’re a pastor and you’re doing your job.

00:53:08.520 → 00:53:15.300
So I think it’s better to have pastors who are dedicated to that, that is their sole job.

00:53:15.620 → 00:53:19.420
However, that being said, other than obviously being a father and a husband, right?

00:53:19.420 → 00:53:20.900
You have to do that as well.

00:53:21.640 → 00:53:30.560
That being said, I don’t think men should go into the pastorate until they are second career, because I think you need that life experience and you need to be a little older.

00:53:30.880 → 00:53:35.600
You need to have a few gray hairs for the other men in the congregation to take you seriously.

00:53:35.800 → 00:53:42.400
They’re just not going to take you seriously if you’re a 21 year old fresh out of graduate school, and they probably shouldn’t take you seriously.

00:53:42.700 → 00:53:46.340
I don’t care if you’re a prodigy, they probably should not take you seriously.

00:53:46.820 → 00:53:50.680
Go out and actually live something of life first.

00:53:51.220 → 00:53:55.300
It’s going to give you a perspective you don’t have if you spent all of your time in academia.

00:53:56.760 → 00:54:04.920
Granted, pastors are usually less of that kind, that’s more of the theologian, but still, I think it’s better if the pastor goes into it when he’s in his 30s or even 40s.

00:54:23.320 → 00:54:27.940
I’ll briefly touch on this one without going in into too much depth.

00:54:30.000 → 00:54:36.940
Is Baal, or Ba’al if you want to pronounce it technically correctly, Satan, and Saturn, are they identical?

00:54:37.320 → 00:54:39.200
What do you know about Saturn?

00:54:39.200 → 00:54:42.620
I know the star of Remfan and Black Cube are associated with Saturn.

00:54:42.620 → 00:54:45.620
So getting back into the occult, I guess.

00:54:46.320 → 00:54:54.540
Some of this stuff, you don’t want to delve into it too deeply, because delving into the occult and the demonic is always bad for you.

00:54:55.120 → 00:55:00.900
And it’s one of the sort of caveats or downsides of, say, being an exorcist.

00:55:00.900 → 00:55:02.520
You’re going to have to deal with these things.

00:55:03.020 → 00:55:04.200
And you don’t want to.

00:55:04.260 → 00:55:05.480
I’ve gone over this many times before.

00:55:05.480 → 00:55:06.920
There’s such a thing as bad knowledge.

00:55:06.920 → 00:55:08.300
There are things you don’t want to know.

00:55:08.760 → 00:55:16.960
But it is worth knowing that there are connections with regard to these symbols and these practices historically and even today.

00:55:17.320 → 00:55:22.780
So the black cube is definitely associated with Satan and with Saturn.

00:55:23.440 → 00:55:28.860
So you see that in a number of different cultures, you see it particularly among the Jews.

00:55:29.220 → 00:55:31.460
That’s why they have the little black cube on their heads.

00:55:31.460 → 00:55:39.240
They’re not doing it to be pious or to store scrolls and be true worshipers of God.

00:55:39.640 → 00:55:42.040
They’re revealing in public what they are.

00:55:42.520 → 00:55:46.000
They are Saturnists, they are Satanists.

00:55:46.100 → 00:55:47.160
That is what they are.

00:55:47.540 → 00:55:50.980
So is Baal and Satan, are they identical?

00:55:51.320 → 00:55:52.400
Not necessarily.

00:55:52.480 → 00:55:55.900
And do remember that Baal just means Lord historically.

00:55:55.900 → 00:56:13.300
So sometimes it was a title that was just applied to whichever local god was the god of a given tribe, and then it morphed over time into the great god, as it were, of that region being Baal was the highest one for many different peoples.

00:56:14.140 → 00:56:18.300
But sometimes that means Satan, but it does not always mean Satan.

00:56:18.300 → 00:56:19.980
It could mean some other demon.

00:56:20.500 → 00:56:25.860
We don’t know exactly what the relationship is, like the one-to-one relationship behind the scenes.

00:56:26.040 → 00:56:27.740
You know, this name is this demon.

00:56:28.280 → 00:56:30.240
God has not given us that information.

00:56:30.380 → 00:56:31.520
We don’t need to know it.

00:56:32.340 → 00:56:34.120
So, are they worshiping demons?

00:56:34.320 → 00:56:34.760
Yes.

00:56:34.760 → 00:56:36.580
Are they ultimately worshiping Satan?

00:56:36.760 → 00:56:37.260
Yes.

00:56:37.920 → 00:56:39.460
That’s what’s important to recognize.

00:56:39.460 → 00:56:56.660
And then you start to recognize where these occult symbols pop up, because, like I said many times before, it very much seems to be the case that God has required them to broadcast their plans to a certain degree, not to operate totally in the shadows, to give us a chance to respond to it.

00:56:56.660 → 00:57:00.920
And we’ve sort of been failing to respond accordingly for quite some time.

00:57:01.900 → 00:57:05.920
But, excuse me, yes, that’s very clearly demonic.

00:57:05.920 → 00:57:10.360
And what the connection is exactly with Saturn, I don’t think we know.

00:57:11.340 → 00:57:12.520
But it’s certainly there.

00:57:25.280 → 00:57:27.600
A follow-up question, sort of.

00:57:30.540 → 00:57:35.860
How can I stay in the lines in quotation marks, in regard to the law, while writing about the Jews?

00:57:35.860 → 00:57:41.420
I want to be safe and not get in trouble, to be more like you and Carl Radel as prime examples.

00:57:41.480 → 00:57:48.080
So, it obviously helps if you’re familiar with the actual law in this area.

00:57:48.080 → 00:57:53.800
And the law is very clear about what counts as, you know, incitement to violence or things like that.

00:57:53.800 → 00:57:56.860
You obviously can’t incite violence, you’re not allowed to do that.

00:57:57.340 → 00:57:59.840
So, you can’t discuss.

00:58:01.340 → 00:58:10.020
And the thing is, you can, I want to be careful here, not necessarily because, legally speaking, but this is also an important part of it.

00:58:10.580 → 00:58:16.620
Legally speaking, you have certain bounds to what you are permitted to say in public.

00:58:17.260 → 00:58:23.700
And basically, you’re not permitted to incite imminent lawless action, is essentially the standard.

00:58:23.700 → 00:58:34.100
But if you are so inclined, you can go read the case and pull out the greater extent of that holding, the fuller holding, not just that summary of it.

00:58:34.100 → 00:58:35.880
That is an inaccurate summary, though.

00:58:36.460 → 00:58:44.880
And so, it’s not enough if you’re just a crazy person yelling on the street corner, but there’s no risk of inciting imminent lawless action.

00:58:45.240 → 00:58:46.860
But obviously, you don’t want to be that guy.

00:58:47.620 → 00:59:04.460
However, there is a second layer to it, practically speaking, because you are not just subject to the law of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court, you’re also subject to the terms and conditions of every service you’re using, right?

00:59:05.060 → 00:59:11.300
So, you know, right now, I’m streaming to YouTube, Twitch, Kik, Rumble, and X.

00:59:13.140 → 00:59:30.760
I am subject to the terms of service of those various platforms, and so I cannot run afoul of those with what I say, or they will terminate my account, and then I can’t stream, and then you can’t listen to my answers to the questions, unless we find some other platform that will not ban me.

00:59:31.020 → 00:59:37.100
So, the question isn’t with regard to something like this, is it legal for me to say it?

00:59:37.300 → 00:59:41.500
It is, is it permissible according to the requirements of the platform?

00:59:42.240 → 00:59:56.520
So, generally speaking, as long as you are factual in your analysis, and you’re not making inflammatory statements inciting people to violence, you’re probably not going to run afoul of the rules, right?

00:59:56.740 → 01:00:09.800
Sometimes there are topics you can’t discuss, and more likely than not, you’ll be demonetized regardless, even if you’re very careful about how you discuss things, you’ll probably be demonetized for talking about naughty subjects, right?

01:00:09.800 → 01:00:11.240
Subjects you’re not allowed to address.

01:00:11.580 → 01:00:16.760
And in some cases, it’s not even subjects related to, say, the Jews or religion or something truly controversial.

01:00:17.040 → 01:00:19.920
It could just be something advertisers don’t like, right?

01:00:20.020 → 01:00:23.900
So, there are a number of different layers to it, and so it sort of depends on what you’re doing.

01:00:24.580 → 01:00:32.240
If you’re just writing and publishing books, don’t run afoul of Supreme Court precedent and the actual state of the law with regard to the Constitution.

01:00:32.520 → 01:00:39.860
If you’re streaming, you have to comply with the terms of service, the regulations, the policies of the platforms you’re using.

01:00:40.000 → 01:00:46.760
So, it’s an answer that it depends, which is the standard attorney answer, but it is the reality, it’s an accurate answer.

01:00:47.260 → 01:00:51.020
So, stay factual, stay objective.

01:00:51.560 → 01:00:57.880
Don’t veer into polemics too hard in the sense of inflammatory language.

01:00:57.880 → 01:01:02.740
Polemics fine, as long as it’s not, you know, standing up and advocating for something, right?

01:01:04.000 → 01:01:10.240
And, you know, euphemism exists in English, and it has a use, it has a utility, I employ it.

01:01:10.620 → 01:01:15.440
It is one of the ways that you can speak the truth without immediately getting the banhammer.

01:01:15.440 → 01:01:18.700
So, some men are suited for it, some aren’t.

01:01:18.700 → 01:01:21.340
That’s a wisdom call for you to make for yourself.

01:01:35.480 → 01:01:42.340
Question 12, I think I’ll probably try to do, I don’t know how many more questions, but trying to get through some of the ones in the chat.

01:01:44.200 → 01:01:47.580
Question 12, can you speak on the pacifism of Christianity?

01:01:47.860 → 01:01:51.820
I’m seeking proof that the religion is not pacifist at its core.

01:01:51.820 → 01:02:02.940
So, the accusation that Christianity is pacifist isn’t even really historically an accusation leveled against Christianity.

01:02:03.280 → 01:02:13.720
It’s a modern accusation, and it largely comes from groups like the Quakers and others who were pacifist, and to some degree the Amish and the Mennonites and things like that.

01:02:14.840 → 01:02:16.740
They’re just misinterpreting scripture.

01:02:16.760 → 01:02:22.960
The overwhelming majority of Christians have never, for a second, entertained Christianity as being pacifist.

01:02:24.280 → 01:02:32.820
I think one of the best ways to approach this, perhaps, would be to point out the distinction between private enemies and public enemies.

01:02:33.780 → 01:02:38.100
Of course, there’s also the enemies of God, which are kind of public enemies, but slightly different thing.

01:02:38.700 → 01:02:42.260
You can, of course, go and listen to the Stone Quirt episode on that.

01:02:42.260 → 01:02:46.020
I will try to remember to put that in the show notes.

01:02:48.720 → 01:02:53.260
But the short version is that your private enemies are the ones you are to forgive.

01:02:53.420 → 01:02:57.620
This is where part of the accusation of Christianity being pacifist comes from.

01:02:58.560 → 01:03:00.160
You are to forgive your private enemies.

01:03:00.160 → 01:03:04.260
Your private enemy is your neighbor who borrows your lawnmower and never returns it.

01:03:04.940 → 01:03:05.400
Right?

01:03:05.860 → 01:03:10.220
You go ask him for the lawnmower, but you forgive him for not returning the lawnmower.

01:03:10.220 → 01:03:12.260
You forgive him for denting your tool.

01:03:12.500 → 01:03:14.480
You forgive him for annoying you.

01:03:15.400 → 01:03:19.460
You cannot forgive the people invading your country.

01:03:20.180 → 01:03:21.720
They’re not your private enemies.

01:03:21.900 → 01:03:23.080
They are public enemies.

01:03:23.080 → 01:03:24.340
They are enemies of your nation.

01:03:24.340 → 01:03:25.780
They are enemies of the state.

01:03:26.180 → 01:03:27.980
You are not permitted to forgive them.

01:03:28.660 → 01:03:30.700
In fact, it’s insane to say that.

01:03:31.200 → 01:03:40.420
And the example that I’ll use, that’s the best example, so just go ahead and use this one for people who try to argue that, oh, you just have to forgive all enemies.

01:03:40.920 → 01:03:44.300
Okay, can you forgive Satan for rebelling against God?

01:03:45.860 → 01:03:46.820
Satan is your enemy.

01:03:47.460 → 01:03:51.320
Satan is the arch-enemy of Christians, of mankind.

01:03:52.300 → 01:04:01.140
You are not permitted to forgive God’s enemies, and so if there is an enemy you are not permitted to forgive, then you are clearly not supposed to forgive all enemies.

01:04:01.340 → 01:04:04.700
It would, in fact, be a sin to try to forgive Satan.

01:04:05.100 → 01:04:11.840
So, you have to bear in mind that there are different kinds of enemies, and you are not commanded to forgive all of them because it’s not your place.

01:04:12.400 → 01:04:14.640
And then, you can look down through history.

01:04:14.640 → 01:04:20.580
Christians have always taken up arms to defend their nation, to defend Christendom, defend their homes, defend their lives.

01:04:21.020 → 01:04:27.720
You have duties to defend these things, because these things have been entrusted to you by God, right?

01:04:27.820 → 01:04:35.580
And so, when Scripture says, thou shalt not murder, there are positive requirements that come along with that.

01:04:35.680 → 01:04:38.300
Defending your neighbor’s life is part of that.

01:04:38.620 → 01:04:40.120
So, that’s defense of others.

01:04:40.440 → 01:04:41.980
You are God’s slave.

01:04:42.440 → 01:04:45.960
You are not permitted to let God’s property be destroyed.

01:04:46.260 → 01:04:47.540
You have to defend yourself.

01:04:47.540 → 01:04:48.640
That’s self-defense.

01:04:49.040 → 01:04:58.180
Christians have always believed in these things, in this hierarchy of loves and duties, and pacifism has no place in Christianity.

01:04:58.480 → 01:05:01.220
It used to be we executed pacifists.

01:05:01.520 → 01:05:03.500
It was considered a capital offense.

01:05:04.140 → 01:05:06.540
And we should maybe go back to that in some cases.

01:05:06.740 → 01:05:09.860
Maybe it would stop the nonsense of men trying to spread that lie.

01:05:10.160 → 01:05:12.680
Christianity is very obviously not pacifist, though.

01:05:27.760 → 01:05:29.740
Let’s see, I’ll put this question in my…

01:05:30.300 → 01:05:38.160
Question 13, did you watch the debate on the Curse of Ham with Dale Partridge and the individuals struggling with sanctification last night?

01:05:38.940 → 01:05:40.540
I did not watch it.

01:05:40.540 → 01:05:43.260
I heard that it was kind of a dumpster fire.

01:05:43.960 → 01:05:46.840
So I assume that was an accurate assessment given the men who told me that.

01:05:47.120 → 01:05:49.280
But no, I did not personally watch it.

01:05:52.280 → 01:05:58.260
But yes, that, the individual whom I also debated was certainly an experience.

01:05:59.300 → 01:06:00.640
Question 14, related question.

01:06:00.640 → 01:06:04.220
I have some friends who watched your debates.

01:06:04.220 → 01:06:08.640
I was wondering how we could trace the continuity of the genealogy of the Curse of Ham.

01:06:09.000 → 01:06:15.300
So this one’s actually pretty easy to trace because there are really three great races of men on earth.

01:06:15.660 → 01:06:23.340
You have the Europeans, the Asiatics in the broad sense, sort of the British sense of Asian, and the Africans.

01:06:23.980 → 01:06:27.280
Now, there are subgroups within that, and at the periphery you get mixtures.

01:06:27.600 → 01:06:31.920
But those are the three groups, and those just correspond to the three sons of Noah.

01:06:31.920 → 01:06:40.400
You’ve got Japheth as Europeans, you’ve got Shem as the Asiatics, Modulo, you know, the Arabs are part Hamite, and then you have Ham as the Africans.

01:06:41.040 → 01:06:46.440
So it really is just, I mean, you can basically tell by skin tone for Japheth versus Ham, right?

01:06:46.940 → 01:06:54.220
Not necessarily at the periphery for some of the Shemites, they’re fair skinned, but you can certainly identify the sons of Ham on site.

01:06:54.420 → 01:07:03.740
So it’s really not difficult, there’s also, like I said previously, you can see this with genetic studies, different populations and how distant they are from one another.

01:07:04.060 → 01:07:10.580
And the Africans are very clearly more distant from everyone else than other groups are from each other.

01:07:10.820 → 01:07:15.580
But it’s not difficult to identify the, the different groups descended from the sons of Noah.

01:07:16.200 → 01:07:24.060
Except, like I said, at the periphery where you’ve had the admixture over centuries, then in some cases, they’re descended from two, like the, in scripture, we see that, right?

01:07:24.620 → 01:07:28.220
The Arabs are descended from a union of Ham and Shem.

01:07:28.220 → 01:07:31.220
That’s very clear in scripture with the son of Abraham.

01:07:31.220 → 01:07:38.500
So, but yes, I don’t think it would be difficult to identify which groups are descended from Ham.

01:07:57.880 → 01:07:59.700
Question 15.

01:08:00.960 → 01:08:08.100
In the case of not having access to a Lutheran church, only Baptist churches should I go to the Baptist church and abstain from the Lord’s Supper?

01:08:08.100 → 01:08:10.000
That would be my recommendation, yes.

01:08:10.760 → 01:08:24.380
And I’ve gone into this in some depth previously, so I would say listen to the times where I’ve been asked about attending X denomination instead of another, because I’ve specifically gone over the Lord’s Supper.

01:08:24.380 → 01:08:34.760
And basically the issue is that you don’t want to give a false public confession, but like I’ve said, there are times where maybe I wouldn’t be uncomfortable communing at St.

01:08:34.760 → 01:08:37.980
Anglican Church, because they do confess the real presence.

01:08:37.980 → 01:08:42.020
Granted, it’s sort of in the reformed sense, which we disagree with as Lutherans.

01:08:42.460 → 01:08:56.040
But the question, as I pointed out previously, would be, am I making a public confession of the doctrine that is being preached, or am I making a public confession of my unity with these men as brothers?

01:08:56.400 → 01:09:00.900
So maybe in the sense of like Anglicans, I might be comfortable doing that.

01:09:01.420 → 01:09:02.960
For Baptists, typically no.

01:09:03.580 → 01:09:12.340
And on top of it, Baptists typically don’t have the Lord’s Supper because they’re often using grape juice and not wine, so they’re disobeying God with the very thing they’re doing.

01:09:12.640 → 01:09:13.820
So I would not partake.

01:09:13.820 → 01:09:18.720
I would not partake, but I do believe many of them are brothers, of course, just to make sure that’s clear.

01:09:18.720 → 01:09:22.980
I just believe they’re brothers in error, and they’re in deep error with regard to the Lord’s Supper.

01:09:23.300 → 01:09:26.040
So I would recommend not participating.

01:09:26.320 → 01:09:29.140
But you can certainly go and worship God with them.

01:09:59.160 → 01:10:02.960
I suggest with IQ studies, I take it up with the scientists.

01:10:02.960 → 01:10:13.460
They are among the most reproducible studies ever conducted in any field, other than something like physics, where it’s just the laws of the universe.

01:10:22.120 → 01:10:24.580
Question 16, I guess, is related to 15.

01:10:24.780 → 01:10:26.980
The interjection there was not really a question.

01:10:27.260 → 01:10:32.620
Question 16, should churches return to using one common cup of wine and one common loaf of bread for communion?

01:10:32.620 → 01:10:34.440
I think that is the better symbolism.

01:10:34.660 → 01:10:35.860
It’s not required.

01:10:35.860 → 01:10:37.760
This is adiaphorin, right?

01:10:37.760 → 01:10:45.620
This is something that is neither required nor prohibited, just like you can use white wine or you can use red wine.

01:10:45.620 → 01:10:48.100
Scripture does not say which wine it was.

01:10:48.600 → 01:10:52.760
Is the symbolism of red wine better because it is the Lord’s blood?

01:10:53.100 → 01:10:53.840
I think so.

01:10:54.380 → 01:11:02.240
But there have been times where Lutheran churches have used white wine specifically as a confession against the error of other groups.

01:11:02.520 → 01:11:03.960
That happened in Germany, for instance.

01:11:03.960 → 01:11:06.660
You’ll go to churches and it will be Riesling instead of a red wine.

01:11:07.740 → 01:11:10.340
Or maybe you don’t have red wine, but you have white wine, right?

01:11:10.900 → 01:11:11.780
That’s permissible.

01:11:11.780 → 01:11:13.660
Does it have to be unleavened bread?

01:11:13.700 → 01:11:15.240
No, it can be leavened bread.

01:11:15.240 → 01:11:17.840
Does it have to be the wafers?

01:11:17.840 → 01:11:19.220
No, it can be a common loaf.

01:11:19.800 → 01:11:29.260
I think insofar as the symbolism and the purpose, and it’s not just the forgiveness of sins, it’s also the unity of the church, particularly the local church body.

01:11:29.660 → 01:11:34.580
As far as those things are concerned, I think the common cup and a common loaf are better.

01:11:34.960 → 01:11:37.400
And then you have the broken for you, right?

01:11:37.400 → 01:11:38.840
The Lord’s body broken for you.

01:11:38.840 → 01:11:41.720
There’s more of a symbol there when you’re breaking the loaf.

01:11:42.160 → 01:11:46.060
So I think that’s optimal, but is it necessary?

01:11:46.060 → 01:11:46.360
No.

01:11:47.280 → 01:12:03.440
So, as we start to return to more traditional and better churches, whether it’s taking over existing ones or starting up a home church that turns into a proper church in the sense of owning a building and things, I think this is probably the way to go, and I think it’s a better way to do things.

01:12:17.960 → 01:12:20.980
Maybe a couple more questions for this stream, I think.

01:12:21.100 → 01:12:25.920
Sort of a follow-up question from the introductory monologue, I guess, about China.

01:12:26.340 → 01:12:33.480
Question 17, why do you think Christianity ever trickled down to the masses in China, despite them having had two Christian leaders in the past?

01:12:35.400 → 01:13:03.800
I think that there are, quite frankly, a lot of reasons, but if I were to give, say, three reasons, I would say that the first one is just that the hinterlands were never really evangelized in the same way and to the same extent as the coastal regions, because the Europeans dealt with the coastal regions, those were the trade cities, as I went over in the introduction to this, the first question for the episode.

01:13:05.340 → 01:13:18.940
I would say the second part would be that because you didn’t have any of that Christianization, you never had any sort of pressure for others to think about Christianity.

01:13:18.940 → 01:13:20.800
They didn’t have any exposure to it.

01:13:21.100 → 01:13:33.920
There’s a little bit now because there are people who are sending Bibles, and the Chinese Communist Party kind of vaguely tolerates Christian evangelization, although surveils you extremely heavily if you are a Christian pastor there.

01:13:34.660 → 01:13:53.320
And I think that the traditional, their old pagan religions just had enough weight that they stuck around, and there was never any real, like I said, no real pressure with regard to Christianity.

01:13:53.680 → 01:13:59.500
And so, you didn’t have enough people converting in to build that momentum to change the society.

01:13:59.860 → 01:14:17.800
And then third, and perhaps the most important, like I said, they murdered 35,000 Chinese Christians at one point during the Boxer Rebellion, and then they had pogroms during the Cultural Revolution, and they suppressed and surveilled and sometimes just assassinated Christian pastors.

01:14:18.340 → 01:14:32.720
Communism, born out of that and sort of the intellectual progeny of that modulo of the Jewish involvement, of course, in the Chinese Communist Party, very anti-Christian and has suppressed Christianity.

01:14:32.720 → 01:14:51.460
And I think that’s probably the biggest fact, because if you look at the places even in Europe where you had the most thorough communist sort of destruction of traditional society and control over the culture, they still haven’t recovered with regard to Christianity.

01:14:52.120 → 01:14:54.480
Look at East Germany versus West Germany.

01:14:55.760 → 01:15:01.020
Communism destroys the soul, and I think that is a large part of what happened in China.

01:15:02.140 → 01:15:06.780
And unfortunately, Confucianism kind of set the stage for that to be ushered in.

01:15:17.220 → 01:15:20.860
I think that may be the final question from the chat.

01:15:20.860 → 01:15:25.520
So let me see if I can pull out one last question that’s not too long.

01:15:33.820 → 01:15:36.760
Someone asked me about data centers.

01:15:36.960 → 01:15:40.980
I guess I’ll comment on that one very briefly because that’s kind of a complicated topic.

01:15:40.980 → 01:15:44.700
But I’ll make this the last one for this stream.

01:15:46.120 → 01:15:48.500
Add that to my notes here.

01:15:56.480 → 01:16:09.160
So the final question, what is the proper solution to the seemingly out of control situation with companies buying up farms, homesteads, et cetera, to build data centers?

01:16:16.240 → 01:16:29.720
I don’t want to get into the AI topic right now because the AI topic is not only expansive, and this is question 18, I guess I should say, for the sake of the record and the transcription.

01:16:30.980 → 01:16:37.580
The AI topic is complicated, and I don’t necessarily want to get into it because it will take quite a lot of time, actually.

01:16:38.000 → 01:16:53.280
But with regard to sort of what’s zoning laws, really what we’re talking about in regulatory law, the issue is that we just have very bad regulatory law and very bad zoning law, zoning law being a subset of regulatory law in much of the country.

Transcript

3/3

01:16:53.480 → 01:16:56.900
And so they’re not prepared to deal with these issues.

01:16:57.100 → 01:17:00.460
They don’t have the local competence because they’ve never dealt with it before.

01:17:01.000 → 01:17:11.880
And so men who are competent, if you are in these areas, you need to get involved on these local boards who will oversee and hear these issues.

01:17:12.200 → 01:17:21.940
Now, excuse me, recently we have had some individuals at the state level and at the national level who have been trying to address the issue to some degree.

01:17:22.720 → 01:17:24.600
But it’s not just data centers, right?

01:17:24.860 → 01:17:26.660
You have massive warehouses being built.

01:17:26.660 → 01:17:30.640
You have things that don’t fit the location in which they are built.

01:17:31.360 → 01:17:41.100
We need to have better land use regulations, so these things are done rationally, in a way that benefits the population, and not just these giant corporations.

01:17:41.100 → 01:17:46.980
Part of this is a problem with capitalism, and if you have enough money to throw out something, you can generally get your way.

01:17:47.380 → 01:17:57.900
And part of it is just, we don’t have competent men involved in these things anymore, so it’s mostly incompetent men, and often men who are very easily bribed.

01:17:58.780 → 01:18:07.980
You know, the kind of man who can be bribed with a single nice dinner and a bar of scotch, and a bottle of scotch, rather, is the kind of man on a lot of these boards.

01:18:08.080 → 01:18:15.560
You don’t want that man in charge of the decision of saying, sure, you can build a data center here in the middle of this neighborhood or whatever it happens to be.

01:18:16.480 → 01:18:23.600
So complicated issue, but it has to be solved by changing the laws.

01:18:23.920 → 01:18:42.360
Now that’s assuming that everything doesn’t go sideways and things get solved in a different way, but if that doesn’t happen, and it probably will, but in the interim, it is solved by involving competent, moral men in the decision making process and making sure these things are done as they should be done.

01:18:42.620 → 01:18:50.260
And from my perspective, corporations should not own giant chunks of land, farms, homesteads.

01:18:50.520 → 01:18:54.960
Corporations should be absolutely banned from owning private residences.

01:18:55.420 → 01:18:58.980
Black rock should be shattered into a million pieces and scattered to the winds.

01:18:59.740 → 01:19:08.960
But these are very real problems, and they will take time and a lot of effort to fix because things have been allowed to fester for so long.

01:19:09.280 → 01:19:10.900
But get involved.

01:19:11.160 → 01:19:19.720
You can probably get involved in your local, whatever it happens to be, zoning commission, whatever regulatory body it is.

01:19:20.280 → 01:19:29.000
They probably have open seats, or very few people vote for the position, and maybe you, your family, and like your cousins could get you elected.

01:19:29.320 → 01:19:30.760
That’s the case in a lot of places.

01:19:30.760 → 01:19:35.520
So get involved, because at the local level, you can do a lot.

01:19:35.960 → 01:19:38.640
Maybe you can’t get elected to the state level or the national level.

01:19:38.640 → 01:19:39.840
Everyone always focuses on that.

01:19:39.840 → 01:19:47.540
But by and large, the people making a lot of decisions that affect your everyday life are probably 15 minutes down the road.

01:19:47.960 → 01:19:51.040
So you can get involved, you can do a lot of good for your neighbor.

01:19:51.540 → 01:20:00.420
Christians should absolutely be involved in these things and making sure that they are being done in a way that is consonant with morality and consonant with what is best for your neighbor.

01:20:00.580 → 01:20:03.820
This is one of the ways you can serve your neighbor in a very concrete way.

01:20:04.260 → 01:20:10.440
So I think that’s the short version of how to deal with that issue and what’s going on.

01:20:11.800 → 01:20:16.120
But I think that will be it for this week.

01:20:16.120 → 01:20:20.320
I see there are a couple more questions that have come in in the chat.

01:20:20.320 → 01:20:23.360
I will copy those over so that I don’t miss them.

01:20:25.940 → 01:20:31.920
But as always, thank you for submitting questions and for participating in the chat.

01:20:33.160 → 01:20:40.460
If I did not get to your question or I missed your question, which is entirely possible, please go ahead and submit that on the forum.

01:20:40.460 → 01:20:53.740
The forum is always the best way because I can mark those as having been answered, and I have a record of them in a way that is not subject to whatever YouTube decides to do with the stream comments and things like that.

01:20:55.200 → 01:21:09.540
But you can submit the questions any of a number of different ways on X in reply to, say, the stream during the stream in the chat, telegram, or again, forum is the preferred way to do it.

01:21:10.720 → 01:21:12.420
At any rate, it is Friday.

01:21:12.420 → 01:21:15.820
I try to do these on Thursday or Friday, just depends on how my week goes.

01:21:16.140 → 01:21:17.740
Usually winds up being Friday.

01:21:17.740 → 01:21:19.600
That’s just the reality of it these days.

01:21:20.200 → 01:21:23.860
But given that it’s Friday, go out and enjoy your weekend.

01:21:23.920 → 01:21:32.220
Try to spend some time outside if it’s not too unbearably hot where you are, and there’s not a bear in your front yard, as apparently happens around me a lot now.

01:21:33.020 → 01:21:39.400
At any rate, I always enjoy giving answers to these questions, and I will see you all next week.

01:21:39.400 → 01:21:43.560
Go to church on Sunday, and until then, God bless you all.