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October 12, 2025 • 133 mins
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want you to picture a reverend. He's a Christian nationalist.
He routinely spreads lies that the United States was founded
as a Christian nation. He is affiliated with the notorious
Black Robe Regiment, a Christian nationalist effort to recruit quote
Patriot pastors and whose leaders spoke at the Jericho March,

(00:20):
an event which paved the way for the January sixth insurrection.
In fact, the person I'm describing falsely claims that the
twenty twenty election was stolen. He openly supports the January
sixth erection insurrectionists, and even wrote a love ballad for
the rioters. He has argued that Congress should always open
with only Christian prayers. He is an outspoken opponent of

(00:42):
public education, urging parents to homeschool their kids. What if
I told you that every day he travels to public
schools where he preaches to students and leads them in
prayer while school is in session, with permission from school administration.
How's that possible? Well, last year, Florida passed a school
chaplain bill allowing schools to appoint untrained, uneducated pastors to

(01:05):
counseling roles inside schools instead of you know, qualified, educated
counselors who use evidence based methods. The Hernando School District
is the first to officially embrace this program by appointing
the person I just described, Reverend John Jack Martin. This
is a national epidemic. At least three states have passed

(01:26):
laws allowing public schools to have chaplains, and over a
dozen more are debating similar legislation. The organization behind all
these bills, the National School Chaplain Association, and its parent company,
Mission Generation, openly declare their mission to target students, to
win converts and influence them until quote the saving grace

(01:47):
of Jesus becomes well known. Because of them, Florida is
now a state where teachers can't tell any student that
gay people exist, but where school chaplains can tell students
that two year old myths are facts, that the election
was stolen, and that only people who believe in Jesus
go to heaven. What do you think should this person

(02:08):
or anyone like him be allowed anywhere near school children
in any capacity, much less an official one. Is this
the proper practice of Christianity? Call us to chat about
this or anything else, because the show starts now. Welcome, Welcome,
Welcome Now, everybody. Today is October twelfth, twenty twenty five.

(02:31):
I'm your host, the Cross Examiner and joining me right now, Justin.
How are you doing, man?

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I couldn't be better. I'm happy to be on a
screen with your friend, and I'm excited for what we're
going to be able to get into here.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Absolutely, I am absolutely thrilled to be working with you again.
I was telling you beforehand, I didn't quite get to
finish my praise of you. But for those of you
haven't seen at you're in for a treat. Justin knows
the Bible mostly inside and out, much better than anybody
I've ever known, and better than that, more important than that,
he is a very good communicator. So I'm eager to

(03:05):
have people call in and talk to Justin about Justin,
about their beliefs, whether they be Christian or otherwise, and
we'll both try to engage in a conversation about what
you believe and more importantly, why you believe it. But first,
let me tell you that The Atheist Experience is a
product of the atheist community of Austin. It's a five
oh one c three nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion

(03:28):
of atheism. Critical thinking, secular humanism, and the separation of
religion and government. So justin any particular hot topics you're
hoping to talk to people about today.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Well, I think you already know my favorite. Anytime someone
bring up the Bible, I get a little bit excited. Yeah,
I mean, honestly, even if we agree on what it says,
because it's just an interesting document if you love history.
But I'd love to hear about how like Christianity's actually true,
or you know, Jesus like rose from the dead or

(04:03):
fulfilled all these prophecies. That'd be great, you know, anything
like that I think is something that the audience would
enjoy and at least I would.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, same here. I love to get into why people
accept those claims and what evidence they have. So why
don't we jump straight into a call? We do have
somebody on the line, Gohan, If I'm pronouncing that correctly,
He him from Texas, wants to talk about the uniqueness
of Christian claims that other religions do not have. So

(04:32):
I'm going to go ahead and pull him into our call. Gohan,
can you hear us? Did I get your call topic correctly?

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yes, sir?

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Okay, why don't you start us off, what would you
like to talk about?

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Well, just to say hi to both of you guys.
I think this's my first time talking to both of you, so.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Hello, but nice to meet you.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Other than that, yeah, since as well as far as
like I've been on other calls before, and one question
I get asked why I don't believe and every other
I think there is so many nikness to the claims
of Christianity that other religions don't have. I think the
main one being that the claim is we can dispute

(05:11):
it if this is correct or not. But the claim
is that these guys who wrote things down or in
the position to either be lying or telling the truth,
they could not.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Have been that's your assertion that they couldn't have been
mistaken correct.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
They could either be lying or tell the truth.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
So it's the lunatic legend, liar or lord or all
of the l's right. So justin I'm sure you're familiar
with this. Would you like to ask Gohan some questions
to clarify his position.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, So, first of all, we don't know who you're
talking about. I presume you're referring to the disciples, but
I don't know if we can connect the claims of
Christianity directly to the disciples. Mark was our earliest gospel.
He was in a disciple. Luke probably the latest gospel,
if not John, Luke wasn't a disciple. Maybe John wrote John,

(05:57):
but there are multiple authors that are identified in chapter
twenty one of John, which leads me to believe that
John didn't write John. He's also said that John's illiterate
in the Book of Acts, as well as some of
the other disciples, so I'm not inclined to believe that
John could be traced back to John. Matthew. Have no
reason to believe that Matthew wrote Matthew. He copies his
own conversion story in the third person directly from Mark,

(06:20):
minus the changing of the name from Levi to Matthew.
I'm just not convinced at all that the claims of
the supposed disciples are even from the supposed disciples. We'd
have to connect those dots first.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Honestly, I think that's fair, And I used to be
in your vote of well. At first, I used to believe, like, yes,
everybody wrote exactly how they said it, And then I
used to be like, no, we have no idea.

Speaker 4 (06:42):
I who wrote this.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Stuff, and now I'm currently believing, Yeah, most likely he
seems to be the guys I think. But this is
kind of regardless of that. This is the fact that
the claims are made that these people couldn't have their own.
So let's just say, the claim is that Peter claims
to have eaten with Jesus after the death. Do you
agree that that's a claim that people say Peter has made.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
It certainly a claim that people say Peter might have made,
but I have no reason to believe that Peter even
made such a claim. I also don't think it matters because, like,
if we're just testing the idea that the Biblical narrative
is true, the problem is it's so riddled with other issues.
I don't think it's a trustworthy narrative. It's got so
many contradictions historical errors, lies about the Hebrew Bible that

(07:28):
i'm it's I personally cannot believe that it is authored
by the Holy Spirit.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
I don't believe it was offered by the Holy Spirit.
I believe it is offered many specifically, most of them
are authored by who we believe it.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
And were they not moved by the Holy Spirit.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Well, I mean you could say everything was moved by
the Holy Spirit. I mean, I'm still not going to
say that means they're offered by them. But this is
kind of regardless of that. This is the fact that
the claim is that Peter claims to have eaten with Jesus.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Okay, let's take that. Let's take that claim. Let's take that.
What evidence do you have that that actually happened?

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Are you asking for the evidence that the claim is
accurate or outside of.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
But well, the claim is what matters, right, because I
know there's a meta question that you called, and it's
also very interesting of well, somebody who claims that this
happened is either a lying or truthful or all of
this sort of stuff. But first we need to start with,
like did it actually happen? What evidence do we have
that it actually happened? Because we can only judge whether
somebody commenting on it is right or wrong if we

(08:30):
know whether the event actually happened or not.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
I think that's fair, But that that's not where I'm
trying to go, Like, I'm not trying to go with
a biblical support, which I do believe there is an
evidence to support biblical claims. I'm trying to say that
these claims are you need to christiate it that like,
whereas Islam there's not a claim like won't believes Jesus
didn't die. There's no there. There's definitely a way they

(08:56):
could have been mistaken in there.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Well, let's do this then, let's let's let's shortcut to
what I know will be just in in mas question.
Let me just shortcut real quickly. I'm going to grant
you that Christianity makes unique claims that no other religion makes.
Why does that matter?

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Because then I can try to see it based off
these claims. Take these claims like athaverasity and if I
have reasons to trust this, this separates Christianity from any
other religion. These claims are unique to Christianity that no.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Other religion religion has unique exactly go ahead religions if
they were. If they were not unique from one another,
it's all be one thing. So uniqueness isn't a valuable
concept here.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
No, I would say that like the clans of Islam,
like today, I've been mistaken about the identity about Jesus
not being christible.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Well, I'm not questioning whether or not Islam understands Jesus properly.
We're just saying, are the religions unique? Yeah? Obviously, I
mean only in Islam do you get the idea that
God's prophets split the mood into It's a very unique claim,
is it true? No, the uniqueness isn't relevant.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Why could they have been mistaken?

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Listen, they they were mistaken, they were deceived, they were lying.
There's lots of different categories you could put the claim into,
but the reality is the uniqueness of the claim has
no bearing on whether or not the claim is valuable.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
I think the unique thing about Christianity is that if
the disciples made those claims, they couldn't have been misdake.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Why is that? Give us your logic there? That's the
part I'm curious about. Because somebody made claim hold on,
let me just clarify. I just I want you to
explain this. So person makes claim X, whatever it may be,
and your conclusion is because somebody made claim X, they
can't be mistaken about the truth value of claim X.

(10:44):
There's something missing in the middle. How do you get
from the first premise to that conclusion? I make claim X,
therefore I can't be wrong about claim X.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
Correct? I would say, if claim MAX has any wiggle
room for interpretation or being mistaken.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Well, now you're getting into a tall edge. That's just
a tautology. You just said, Well, it only counts if
claim you can't be mistaken about claim X. If claim
X is true, therefore the person making that claim is true. Well,
that's just tautology. You're what I want to know is
without us knowing whether claim X is true or not,
your argument is because they make this claim, therefore they

(11:21):
can't be mistaken about that claim, and that doesn't logically
follow for me. So could you explain that to me?

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Sure? So, I'm not saying because they made claim X
that it's true. I'm saying because they're making claim X,
it's definitely no mistake. It could either be a but
it's definitely not option to see a mistake.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
And you can oh, okay, okay, Well, and I don't
agree with that. I understand you now, Sorry, no, no,
I understand that. Justin, did you have a question there?
I want to hear more from Ghan, but I want
to make sure we jump in on this moment. If
I would understand your gohand it's because I made claim X,
whatever it is either I'm lying if it's wrong, or

(11:56):
I'm right and it's right, but it's not a genuine
I believe that claim makes is true, but I am wrong.
It's not a mistaken belief. Am I understanding your assertion there?

Speaker 4 (12:07):
Yes, sir?

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Okay, justin what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, I mean, I vehemently disagree. There are all kinds
of people that claim to have seen apparitions and it
turns out that the apparition was them having some poor
post mortem grief or something of that nature. The brain
all the time thinks that things are happening that are
not happening. This is like the basis for psychosis. So

(12:30):
and we've got a long history of post mortem psychosis episodes.
So I don't think we can just rule out that
somebody within the group didn't have some kind of apparition.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
I'm going to agree with that. I'd like to hear
go Hans response, But I want to give another personal example.
When I was thirty nine, I was diagnosed with stage
four cancer. I had to have a fifteen hour surgery,
and when I woke up from that, I'm in the
ICU for many days, and the nurse in the ICU
was trying to steal my stuff, and I was trying
to tell my family that the nurse was trying to
steal my stuff. And eventually, when I was able to

(13:02):
speak enough and say, Hey, this person's giving me bad looks.
They're trying to steal my stuff. They're definitely not giving
me the medicine I need and all of this stuff.
A friend of mine, who was a doctor, went and
consulted with the attending physician. He came over and said, yeah,
two days ago, we put you on new meds because
we couldn't bring your heart rate down some pain relievers.
We're taking you off of those because you're having hallucinations.

(13:24):
The instant they changed my meds, I realized, Oh my god, Like,
this person's the nicest person in the world. And I
would have sworn under oath, under the penalty of law.
Under like I'm a lawyer, I would risk losing my
license to practice law. I would have sworn that they
were stealing my stuff and wanted to basically kill me.
Under your argument, that never happens, but I've experienced it firsthand,

(13:47):
and Justin pointed out lots of examples where this happened.
So how do you account for that?

Speaker 3 (13:51):
I think those are both fair points. I'm sorry pretty
your nurse and for you for going through that. But
as far as the whole idea of hallucination or not,
I feel like that And again this is a huge
leap for you guys, but this hacount of more just
for the sake of argument agreeing that the claims have
been made and those are the claims. So like, the
claim isn't that I've seen Jesus. The claim is from

(14:14):
Peter that you know, me and a couple of the
other disciples. Yeah, we all ate with Jesus, so it's
not a hallucination because we all saw the same thing.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
But that's just him telling the story. How do we
know what even happened? How do we know that they
agree with him?

Speaker 3 (14:27):
But that's my point is that, like, that's the claim.
So based off of that claim alone, that hey, it's
not just in my head because person bobbed down the street. Also,
he was there with us when we had dinner. Like
that proves if there's multitude, that's not a hallucination. So
either he's lying about having dinner with him, or he's
telling the truth he can't.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Or he's mistaken or he's mistaken, right. I mean, I
don't understand how you're ruling out error.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
And it can't be a psychosis if it's like.

Speaker 5 (14:58):
What if it's a transcription error, I can't have the
same dream you're having.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
But if it's a transcription error. What if it's a
translation era, a transcription error, a writing error, a smudge
of the ink, Like there's all sorts of ways a
statement can be wrong without it being a lie or true, right,
Like there's all sorts of things where we know that
this claim that's in the Bible. And as you said,
I ate, I ate dinner with Bob, and Steve was

(15:24):
there too. I made a bunch of claims. I ate dinner,
it was with Bob, Steve was there. Right, that's three
different claims. I could be wrong about one of them,
two of them, all of them, and I could genuinely
believe I'm right, or I could be lying to you.
Who knows. I just don't understand how you're saying. You
can't it can't be a mistake.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
So I just want to point out Marly Cook, and
I apologize for but again, I don't want to change
the course of the conversation. It's important to recognize that
Peter never said this. To be exactly clear, this comes
from the Book of Acts. This is Luke saying that
Peter said something. We don't have any writings from Peter
saying this.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
So I mean there's like, this is just one example
and off the top of my head, I don't know
exactly one off the top of my head, but just
examples of the multiple disciples eating with Jesus after the
resurrect or the quarter. And so that is a claim.
And yes, they could who maybe like transcribed it wrong, But.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Who made the claim? Who made the claim? Is what
Justin's asking.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Yes, I think that's a fair question. Is like who
wrote the books? And it's like, I think that's technically
a separate topic.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
It can't be.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
I'm sorry. I want to make a point here about this.
So what we're getting to is evaluating the truthfulness or
the whether or not I should accept a claim as
true right, And we do this every day. I see
that the light is green, therefore I can cross the street.
I need to evaluate my understanding that the light is green, right,

(16:56):
And I've got a mechanism for doing that. I'm out
on the savannah. I believe my My tour guide tells
me there are no tigers out in the tall grass.
I need to evaluate that claim. Some claims are more
important than others, right, mundane claims where the consequence of
me accepting the claim is so low. I might accept it,

(17:16):
if not just even tentatively. Right, if you tell me
you had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, I might
accept it, even though I don't know. There's no reason
for me accept it. I don't know you. I do
know that there's things called tuna fish and that you
make sandwiches out of and people eat things like lunch.
But if you later tell me that Elvis gave you
the sandwich, now all of a sudden, I'm not gonna
believe you, Right, So I need to know what the

(17:39):
claim is, who made the claim. All of that plays
into me evaluating whether or not the claim is reliable,
and whether I should accept it is true, accepted it tentatively,
or reject it. That's how we go about everything in
our lives. So it seems like you're trying to make
an exception here that we don't need to know who
makes the claim. And I don't understand that, am I

(18:00):
misunderstanding you.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
To try to continue with your example of the tuna
fish sandwich with Elvis. Sure, so let's say you claim
to have em the tuna fish sandwich and you also
claim that Elvis was there giving it. Is there any
way you can mistaken that that was Elvis or just
maybe it was an Elvis in person?

Speaker 1 (18:21):
I can Here's I'm going to reply. First of all, yes,
and I also believe, and this may get to the
core of the issue, anybody can be mistaken about anything.
Do you agree with that?

Speaker 3 (18:34):
Not entirely? No, I think logic is pretty bound.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
I'm talking about things that they witnessed. Logic aside, like
I think you have to accept that one plus one
equals too, and that A is not B and b
and A is not not A and all that, But
logic aside. If you're talking about what we've been talking about,
which is eyewitness accounts, those sorts of things. My experience
professionally in reading is that anybody could be mistaken about

(18:58):
anything on a massive scale or a small scale. So
do you agree with that with respect to eyewitness testimony?

Speaker 3 (19:05):
I'll say that it's not non zero they say non
zero number. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Like the number of what very low.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
The chance that if three people make the same claim
they could have been mistaken instead of lying, we're telling
the truth. There's a non zero chance that it could
be a mistake. But like so, you'd have to evaluate
each and then you have to kind of see what
to lower that chance of it being a mistake. And
I think the more people who testify to seeing the

(19:34):
same thing lowers that chance of its stake.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
So, justin how many Muslims are on the planet, I
mean a billion, many billion.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Many millions, probably close to a billion billion Muslims.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
It's more than Christians. I think. Maybe I'm wrong, but
a whole bunch of them will testify that they have
experienced some sort of Holy Spirit equivalent, right, two billion billion?
With the two billion Muslims will testify that they've experienced something,
they've had a personal exposure, when they they've they've experienced
when they've prayed to Allah, that miracles have happened, all

(20:06):
sorts of things like that. Using your logic, the argument
add popular aarm. The more popular a claim is, the
more likely it is to be true. The Muslims have it, right,
isn't that correct?

Speaker 3 (20:18):
So quote fairy clues. It's not a popular aarum. It's
like not how many people believe that in religion X?
How many people believe or or a witness to situation?
So like for Muslims, how many people alive? Wellness is
to the moon's splitting?

Speaker 1 (20:34):
And gotcha? Okay, how people?

Speaker 3 (20:37):
How many people were a witness?

Speaker 2 (20:38):
A Hadith says a bunch of people witnessed it. So
this is I think this is a problem with like
such miraculous claims. There's always going to be a number
of witnesses. So for example, uh, there's a guy that
Herodotus wrote about way back when the other Roman and
Greek historians wrote about him. His name was Aristeus, and
he supposedly died in a fuller shop that's where they

(20:59):
make so and then he made post death appearances to
a multitude of people. So many people claim to witness
and interact with the resurrected Aristius that they set up
a statue of him next to the statue Apollos. And
it's written in almost all of the Greek and Roman histories.
Pliny the Elder talks about it, Apollonius, Diodorus of Sicily, Plutarch,

(21:24):
just about all the Classics. Herototis writes about it. He's
got a lengthy write up about it, and he says
that this was it was a commonplace, many many multitude
people claim to have communed with the resurrected Aristeus. But
the reality is, like, you wouldn't accept that as being true.
So like, we're treating your claim the same way you
would treat any other claim of a miracle.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
There's two minor differences. And thank you for this example,
but one people having a claim of eating with him.
Was it all separate or was it all out? Like
it was separate. Hey, there's a chancefer hallucination if it's
all out. He appeared to people like I can't.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
He appeared to entire groups of people.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Okay, so if there are groups appearances as well, I'm
looking then for the people.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
They're common, you know, the most common way that it happens. Right,
you want me to tell you why these things happen
in the ancient world, go for it. Postors. We've got
lots of evidence from the ancient world that impostors would
pretend to be dead people, and all you had to
do is look a little bit like the person that
you're pretending to impostor the most famous of them, not
certainly not the only one like Zeumoxist could be included,

(22:36):
but Nero. There's the legend that Nero resurrected from the dead,
and so many people believe this legend, that people thought
it was true because people that looked like Nero or
claim to look like Nero would appear to people that
were favorable to Nero, and they were inclined to believe it,
so much so that one of the last and most

(22:56):
successful ones in the eighties appeared to the Parthia and
even convince them to make preparations to go to war.
And we don't get to hear the rest of the
story after that. We're not sure how many of them
actually went or if there was just a little bit
of a minor uprising. But the reality is the guy
looked like Nero, he sounded like Nero, he had the
same skill set as Nero, and that's all it took

(23:18):
to convince a military to make preparations for war.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
And I think that's a fair example. It actually talks
about the example before. And I still want to thank
you again for talking about herotitis and those other examples
which I did not know about before, but I do
know about Nero, so thank you for talking about the
other ones as well. Like as for Nero, people who
got convinced of I still ask is there any way?
They say, mistake is an impossible Now, the Disciples traveled

(23:44):
with this guy for three years.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Is there any Yes, yeah, I'm going to cut you off.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yes, there's a way. There's absolutely a way that they
could have been mistaken.

Speaker 4 (23:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
I'm going to agree with you on a point I
want to make. I want to make your point for you,
but then I also want to show you where I
think that you're missing a hole. But I agree with
you that. Let's take my practice in the area of law.
If I'm trying to prove a point and I call
one hundred witnesses to attest to a thing, the jury
is more likely to believe that that thing was true

(24:17):
than if I called one witness. Right, that's just human nature.
The more people who get in front of the jury
and claim a thing, the more likely it is that
the jury will believe it. However, if I put a
scientist on the stand that says X is true, and
then I bring in one hundred drug addicts that are

(24:38):
obviously not right in the mind, and they say that
X is not true, the jury's not going to believe them, right.
So what I'm the point I'm making here is it's
not just the numbers game, which is what you seem
to be arguing, like the more people that did this thing,
or saw this thing, or claim this thing is true,
the more you should believe in it. I agree that

(25:00):
human nature, but we also through experience figure out that
there's a quality element to testimony, and I think we're
missing that. And that's what we started with way long ago,
when we asked who made these claims, how are they documented,
how were they transmitted from when people saw them to paper,
and then how were they translated, and all of these things,
So the quality of this testimony is unavailable to us.

(25:23):
We don't know how quality it is. So I think
you're reaching beyond what is reasonable into a space where
you have unqualified and there's no chain of custody, there's
no person here to testify how this document got created
and how this story came to us, And then saying
because this story depicts a bunch of people agreeing, therefore

(25:47):
they couldn't be mistaken, And I think that's a bridge
too far? Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (25:50):
It does? I still have some follow up questions. I'm
not too sure how long we have, but.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
We have other callers. But this is a great conversation.
I'll tell You've been a really honest and straightforward person
to talk to and I love it, so please please
do ask us your next question.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
You guys are great. But as far as I asked
if there was a way that the disciples could have
been eating with an imposter, and you said, yes, there is,
you'll show me. I would like you to try to
show me how the person eating with them who claimed
to be Jesus and have wounds in his side, and
and how that could have been.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Have you heard of just so stories?

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (26:27):
Kind of?

Speaker 6 (26:27):
Okay, go for it.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
So just so stories are stories. This is who did them?
Rudrid Kipling, I think did the just so stories. Originally
they're stories that explain a thing after the fact. And
they started out with animals, like it's a kid's story
that says, well, this giraffe got caught his head caught
in a crocodile, and he pulled and he pulled and pulled,
and that's why giraffes have long necks. And when we

(26:53):
get into these sort of stories where we say, well,
there's three people and they're eating with a guy they've
known them for three year. Are you telling me that
there's no way they could have been you know, they
could have been mistaken And it smells like a just
sore story where it's constructed to say this is the
only way it could have happened. Right, it's just sort
of an after the fact story to explain this. And

(27:16):
my answer is pen and Teller. If you go to
a pen and Teller show, right, if you watch documentaries
or read books by pen and Teller, these are very famous,
perhaps the most famous magicians in the world. They are
experts at deception. If you combine what you learn from

(27:37):
reading what magicians do for a living, which is to
convince people they are seeing something they have not, which
includes by the way imposters. It's a very common practice
in magic tricks to have the girl in the box
disappear on stage and appear at the back of the
audience and walk forward. And there's lots of ways you
do it, one of which is twins, one of which
is people who look very similar to each other and

(27:58):
the audience believes it granted this is in the moment,
it's not people who have eaten from him, for with
him for every three years or whatever.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
It may be.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
But when you combine the psychology of what's going on
there with my experience in the law, which is the
lengths to which people will go to deceive other people
and trick other people, also the lengths that people will
go to tell stories for credit, social stature, to sound
important things like that, you come up with a whole

(28:28):
bunch of questions about, Okay, I don't think that it
would be normal that somebody could be easily deceived, But
could they be deceived? I have to allow for that possibility,
And you seem to say no, you can't even allow
for the possibility that some combination of circumstances could come
about that could cause the people to be mistaken or deceived.

(28:49):
Is that is that where you are.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Again, you're very close to a couple of months stands.
So I would say that I still have not heard
you to me that you could tell me how they
could convince an impossible what you've told me, Like, I'm
not saying it's a zero percent chance, I'm saying it's
a non zero percent ran it's just really low for

(29:11):
me to believe that the men who traveled with this
guy for three years, who ate with him, talked with him,
could be deceived by someone else coming in saying I'm
actually the same guy who just died, and you actually, yeah,
go ahead, put your hand in my side or in
my fingers, because I have holes here. So yeah, Like
it's possible that maybe somebody had the same holes and

(29:33):
look exactly like Jesus and could convince somebody that walked
with him for three years that they're actually Jesus. I'm
just not convinced by that claim.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
But go ahead. You're assuming the stories are all true.
That's a false assumption, like you're assuming that somebody stuck
their hands in the holes of Jesus. I have no
reason to believe that these stories are all true. The
only question on the table right now is whether or not,
if you knew somebody for some time period, if you
could be convinced that they were actually risen from the dead.
The an impostor and the clear answer from history is yes,

(30:02):
it happened all the time.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
It happens. It happens today a lot. In Africa. There
are many many people pastors in Africa who have been resurrected.
It happened in the eighties a lot in India. There's
an interesting curve with the advent of cell phones and
portable cameras where these miracles have decreased suddenly over time.

(30:25):
But it still happens today that we get claims in
the news that this pastor died, was away for three days,
and now there's twenty people around him saying that's the
guy he died. I saw him die, we buried him,
and now he's alive.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
So I understand the suggestion that is a big leap
to say, hey, everything we ran down is true. But
I do think technically that a separate topic, which is
why I'm saying, like no other religion has these claims,
Like if I treat the names.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Of no other religion claims that somebody was resurrected. Is
that what you're saying, that somebody was resurrected and inspected
by people.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
They don't claim to have grew hallucination group appearances of.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
They certainly do. Simply not true. This is what false statement,
simply a false statement.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
I'm tempted not to I'm tempted to say, you know,
let's say you're true. Let's say it's true. Like, let's
say it's true that no other relution religion claims that.
Let's say we give you all the toys to play with.
I think Justin is probably right. Like in my mind,
I can think of Greek mythology and lots of things
where this has happened, and it's a pattern. But let's

(31:33):
say it's true. So what No other book claims that
the Ring of mor Door was forged to fool all
the races of Middle Earth. That doesn't mean that it's true.
No other book claims that.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
I love the refspondal, and I don't mean to demean
anybody's religious beliefs by that, but I mean it's the
first thing that came into mind. Just because there's a
unique claim doesn't give it any way. In fact, one
may argue, at least in the science realm, if you
come up with a unique claim, you're going to be
subject to further scrutiny, not less scrutiny.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
So I don't think this is by itself anywhere close
to supporting the way of Christianity. But I do think
it's evidence in favor of Christianity, and it's again, it
does not support the way of it. But you can
put it to the Christian scale. For hey, yeah, Christianity
is true. You can put it on the Christian side
as the Christianity.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
I don't think so. Your strongest point doesn't even work
with the Bible. Your strongest point is that if you
eat and drink and spend three years with somebody, then
you couldn't be fooled by an impersonator. But the same
people that followed them for three years didn't recognize them
after he resurrected. In fact, Mary Magdalen was there at
the tomb and she thought it was the gardener, right.

(32:50):
People after he resurrected didn't recognize them, he said himself,
and before he died, then impostors would come in Mark thirteen,
and then the other all of it courses, He says,
be aware that no one leads you astray. Many will
come in my name and say I am he, and
he will lead many astray to me. I feel like
this obviously is only in the text because it was
written long after he was dead, probably seventy seventy two

(33:12):
seventy three, and impostors, if Jesus had already been doing
exactly what Jesus said he would do, and it just
seems clear that one of them was successful.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, and so Gohan, I do think at this point,
I think we're at a good stopping point. I really
do appreciate the call. I do think I would suggest
going and reading up on similar events and other religions
to sort of see if we're right or wrong on that,
and calling back at a later time to further discuss this.
It's an interesting topic, but I really do appreciate the call.

(33:41):
We do have other callers to get to, though.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
I understand. I want to thank you guys both for
being patient with me, and I put it on, came back,
and I want to try mister Justin's show up maybe too.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Absolutely, he's brilliantly all right, thank you so much for
having me. Thank you all right, bye bye. We have
other calls to get to, but I do have a
few quick announcements to read if you'll give me a
moment here we do. We are an online show, and
as you know, you can help us out by pressing
the like on the video, subscribing to the channel, enabling notifications,

(34:16):
and comment below on things like who your favorite caller
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Another way to support us is by sending super chats.

(34:37):
You can get them in and we will read as
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(34:58):
save the best for last. I want to send a
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show together every week. We've got video operators, audio operators there.
They are note takers, call screeners, chat moderators, everybody that
keeps this show going as of volunteers. We really really
appreciate it. The show would not happen without them. So

(35:20):
thank you guys, we really appreciate it. Okay, let's see
where should we go. We've got a couple of calls here.
I think we're going to go with this one real quick.
We're going to go to Pan has been in winning
a while from Florida, Florida. The statement here is going
to be tricky. We're gonna talk to them for a second.

(35:41):
I want to make sure there we understand their points. Satanism, atheist,
hell Bound November twenty seventh, twenty twenty six, will be
endgame purgatory. So Pan, do I have your name right?
And could you please explain me what you want to
talk about?

Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, Pan, Greco Roman God have taken a human host,
weak minded Giles.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Okay, all right, we're we're gonna drop him. I just
thought we would check that out, obviously.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Pans, Yes, he's been in Bibing.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
I think so. Like the call Scraiders warned me that, hey,
this guy might not be the great, but it's it's
good to take a quick break and compare and contrast
go hand with Pan. Right, It's it's you never know,
they might say something that makes a great clip. But
thank you, Pan. I do hope that you get to
help you need whatever that may be. For the record,
I don't think that on November twenty seventh, twenty twenty six,

(36:42):
anything special will happen? Is that a particular non election day, right,
that's mid terms? I don't know think so who knows?

Speaker 6 (36:50):
All Right?

Speaker 1 (36:50):
So we also have let's see Mary from North Carolina
experiences as a younger person that at the time seemed
supernatural but has explanations now as an atheist. So Mary,
she hear from a North Carolina Are you on the
phone with us? Do I have your call? Topic?

Speaker 5 (37:11):
Right?

Speaker 7 (37:11):
I am. I am on the phone with you. Thank
you for taking my call.

Speaker 8 (37:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (37:15):
I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist home and as
a child I had two experiences. The first one was
I saw what I was praying, I saw three men
at the head of my bed that were blowing. I
got scared and asked my mother and she attributed it
to something like the amount of transfiguration. And then later
on I was praying on my knees by the bed

(37:35):
and I felt a hand on my shoulder and I told
her somebody was in the room, and she just said
it was an angel, you know. But I've since been
diagnosed orderline personality disorder, and I think that was undiagnosed
when I was younger. But the most significant experience was
when My daughter was sick one time and she was crying.
I asked the Lord to pray, and asked the Lord
to show me what she was seeing. And the hair

(37:57):
on the back of my neck stood up, and so
I took her to my bed, and I saw a
black shape come from her room into me, and then
immediately I was sick. And my excuse for that now
was I was already sick. I ended up in the
hospital for six weeks with sceptic and you know, I
was already sick and hallucinated, but at the time I
viewed it as that made me sick. And to look

(38:18):
back on experiences with a new worldview since I've deconstructed,
it's just very interesting. I know that our brain can
see things that aren't there, can feel things that aren't there. Man,
I was praying and thought I was praying to a
real entity. You know, I can't explain how that would
have happened.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
But how do you feel about the people who told you,
the people around you. This is a common call that
we get. Where people grew up, they had some brush
with hallucinations, mental illness, just normal everyday weird occurrences that

(38:55):
we can't explain, and the people around them, supply of framework,
of some sort of religious structure. I E, oh, you
felt somebody touched you. That was not some sort of
muscle spasm. It wasn't a mental hallucination. It was an angel.
And they supply a ready made framework for you to
plug your experiences into. Do you feel that that hurt

(39:18):
your speed to diagnosis? Do you feel it helped? Did
it give you comfort? Do you resent it now? How
does that make you feel?

Speaker 7 (39:25):
I went through a period of resentment, and you know,
I lived in a family that didn't believe in psychiatry.
I disclosed something to my tenth grade teacher when I
was younger, and she sent me to the school therapist,
and the school therapist took me as far as he
could and said that I needed to get therapy to
deal with what has happened. And I told my parents,
and of course we wouldn't go see a psychiatrist, so

(39:47):
they took me for deliver instead. And there is a
lot of resentment for that. But you know, they both
didn't pass, and before they did, I was able to
make peace with them because I was raised in a cult,
and you know, they left it in their life.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Lady Justin I know has some experience researching and investigating
cult behavior as well. I'm sure Justin you've come across.

Speaker 4 (40:09):
This, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
I mean, the fun thing about coults is that they're
all kind of the same, just different flavors of the
same thing. So your experience is certainly not unique.

Speaker 7 (40:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (40:20):
Yeah, And I was able to, like I said, my
father in his later years knew I didn't believe like
he did, and we were able to just not speak
about those things, so that resentment I was able to
deal with.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
I'm very glad for you because all too often you
hear stories where that resentment doesn't go away, the parents pass,
and then it's going to be unresolved forever. So at
least you did have that moment. So I want to
thank you for your call. I want to let you
know you're not alone. I'm sure Justin you've heard lots
of similar stories. I know I have. I'm very happy

(40:52):
for you that you has nothing to do with your
religious beliefs. I'm very happy that you were able to
find peace with your parents, and that you have a
diagnosis that you can work with, and you have a
framework now that lets you be open minded about exploring
causes and not locked into just one explanation that has it,
in my opinion, a decent chance at being wrong, at

(41:13):
least when it comes to mental health. So thank you
very much for your call. Anything, Oh great, I appreciate that.
Anything you wanted to add, Justin before we move to
the next caller.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
No, but I really appreciate the context because the idea
that you because our last caller was a good example
of this. He couldn't believe that somebody could experience some
sort of hallucination or mental phenomenon, but reality is, it's
super common in your living example of it.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
All right, thank you, Mary. I really appreciate your call.
Glad you're well, absolutely okay. We have more callers we're
going to jump into. We have let's see Brian from
South Carolina. He him, why did God not to restart
creation when Adam and Eve disobeyed and state I don't.

(42:06):
Oh wait, that's the wrong caller and no disobeyed period.
All right, So Brian, do I have your question? Correct?

Speaker 6 (42:13):
You do?

Speaker 4 (42:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 9 (42:14):
Yeah, I mean, of course it's more to say, but
that is the gist of it.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
I'm going to turn it over to Justin. What's your
best explanation if you put on your theist hat, their justtion.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah. So you know, if you ask a theist, they're
going to say, well, because of free will, right, God
didn't want to intervene into free will until humanity was
a completely lost cause. But the problem with that notion
is that God would have known already that humanity was
going to be a lost cause and he was going
to have to wipe him out, so he probably could
have just not made any of them and just started

(42:44):
with with Noah. But you know, the free will notion
is kind of a silly argument because I can just
show you all the Bible passages where you clearly don't
have free will, Like the clearest example is Romans chapter nine,
and in Ephesians chapter one, Revelation chapter seven. There's so
many examples where God just outright tells you that it

(43:04):
was decided for you before the foundation of the world,
that you know, you get even as a theist, you
kind of have to figure out that determinism is real.

Speaker 5 (43:13):
Were your thoughts there, bro I mean, the way the
way that I think about it is, you know, God
knew he had a defective product instead of you know,
going back scrapping it and going back to drawing board.
He you know, he agreed, he gave it the green light,
and uh and and you know, sent it out into
the world. And we know that God is fine with
clean slates. You know, he flooded the world to start over.
And we know that God is fine with capital punishment

(43:34):
in light of singular mistakes, you know, engulfing two children
in flame for burning the wrong incense and turning a
woman to salt for looking back as she flee the city.
And you know, I just I just think if God
knew that this creation messed up immediately, you know, why
not why not start over? And and uh, you.

Speaker 9 (43:52):
Know respect, so why not point the put those points
into different talents and try again with humans and better
before you.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
Tell them to create?

Speaker 9 (44:00):
And I'm still the world. So I I thought that
that would be a fun a fun argument to have
with a theist. I apologize for being another atheist caller,
but I just I wanted to see what you guys
have to say.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
No, it's it's it's fun to sort of theory craft this.
Like Another possible explanation is if you look at the
story of the Bible, it is a story of a
god who is not omnipotent and all knowing, right, it's
a theory of It's a story of a god that
is more like the animistic gods of old, a god
that comes up and tries to do things and then

(44:32):
runs into problems that he didn't anticipate, and then tries
to fix those problems, and his anger at making a
mistake explains some natural phenomenons like floods or thunderstorms and
things like that. It feels very you know, mundane as
far as religious beliefs go. I know I'm slightly oversimplifying,
but that is a possibility that the story of the

(44:55):
Bible is somebody who can do some stuff, but isn't
that good at it, and he had to restore multiple times,
you know, kick you out of the garden book that
and work flood the world. I promise, I promise, I'm
never going to flood the world again. Here's the rainbow
to prove it. And now I just do minor things
like the Asian flood that killed hundreds of thousands of

(45:15):
children and people, you know, ten years if ago, fifteen
years ago. But that that's not you know, never mind
that ignore those natural disasters. So that's a valid explanation
as well is that people have the character of God wrong.
I don't know where you fall justin on what is
the most popular interpretation, like the free will. One never

(45:38):
really struck it with me because they want to have
it coming and going both ways. They want to say, well,
the reason God can't reveal himself to us is because
we would be forced to worship him and fall down
our knees, and we wouldn't have the free will to
choose whether or not to believe him. But then you say, well,
wait a second, wasn't Satan and all of his court
cohorts in the presence of God in heaven and didn't

(46:01):
they have the free will to rebel? And they want
to say ignore that. And then we come to these
stories that you're talking about where it's like no, no, no, God,
God wants everybody to have free will and that's why
he killed them all.

Speaker 4 (46:12):
Lot.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
It's like, I don't get it. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2 (46:15):
Justin, Yeah, I mean it's kind of a hopeless mess.
And I think the way like honest theologians fix this
is they go and they get rid of the platitudes
like God is all knowing, He even knows your thoughts.
They get rid of some of these notions and they
minimize some of the omni properties of God, and so they.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
Change it to maximal. Right, he's not omnipotent, he's maximally powerful,
but that they use that word to say, he's as
powerful as a god could be within the constraints of
the story and logic. So when you ask, can God
make a burrito so hot that even he couldn't eat it?
They can say no, because that's beyond maximally powerful God.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
Yeah, so the only way to really fix is you
have to limit God and open theism. A pretty good
job of this, this kind of the idea that God
doesn't actually know everything that's going to happen. He's working
in unison with mankind to reach his goal, which is
why we can explain some of the failures where God

(47:15):
wants a particular outcome, he doesn't get the partict outcome,
and then he goes back to the drawing board. All
this makes sense and open theism, But the minute you
go to like a real Greek philosophy type of God
that's super transcendental and knows all things, is pervading all things,
and it's all powerful, that God concept is entirely untenable,
and that God doesn't really show up in the Old

(47:37):
Testament and the Hebrew Bible. You've got a God that
really isn't as omni as we like to think God is.
There's a great book that touches on this called When
Gods Were Men by Esther Hamori. Doctor Ester Mamori is amazing.
She recently wrote a really good book that's popular about
the evil entities of the Bible. But the reality is,

(47:59):
when the Old test period was afoot, they didn't have
this concept that God was like this immaterial, transcendental entity
that could do or think or know all things. That's
something that later people put onto God by using you know, philosophy.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
I'm reminded of the story of the Iron Chariots. If
I have it correct, the army with God on their
side lost to the bad guys because the bad guys
had iron chariots. Do I have that right?

Speaker 2 (48:26):
Justin yeah, Judges of one nineteen. I believe he's like,
off the top of my head, there's another passage in
tecond King's three where God gets his rear end hand
into him by the gods of the Moabites because they
sacrificed the child on the wall to the god of
the Moabite, and so obviously yahweh couldn't stand up to that.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Oh who could?

Speaker 6 (48:52):
Man?

Speaker 1 (48:52):
All right, So I think we have lots of options here,
Brian on why he didn't restart. You can pick your
favorite and ask ask a theist about it and see
how they do. I think the best way to approach
it is to do what Justin did, because if you
get into the I find that, if you get into
the minutia of the story itself, then they will characterize
the story however they want to characterize it. And if

(49:14):
you abstract out to just say, well, let's look at
the Bible as a whole. It's a story of failure
and adjustment. It's like a It's like the coach of
the Bad News Bears, right, like, I can't get these
kids to play right at all. We're back to the
drawing board. You you're fired, and let's replace the whole team.
And that seems to be the god we're dealing with
a drunken little league coach.

Speaker 9 (49:35):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, hey, guys, thank you
so much for your time and everything else to do.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
I appreciate it.

Speaker 9 (49:41):
Very much.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
All right, thank you so much. I appreciate it. On
to the next caller. Let's see, we've got Mike from
another person from South Carolina. That's my home state. No
pronouns given. Currently, the question is currently what is the
greatest threat or treat? It says treat. I guess that's
a type so threat to separation of church and state.

(50:03):
So let's ask Mike, Mike, do I have it right?
Is it threat or treat for separation of church and state?

Speaker 6 (50:11):
Maybe you've got to retype thereat threat?

Speaker 1 (50:15):
Okay, maybe I don't know.

Speaker 6 (50:17):
I am curious what your motivation is that something that
should cross one of the reasons here. I was wondering
why you guys show up to do all these video things.
It's tough enough for me to try and catch up
with you all every other week, and yet you're here
all the time. So I'm asking what your motivation more
or less, but you said one of the problems Christianity
was thought it was great it was a threat to

(50:38):
separation of church state. Could expand on that.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Well, I don't find that to be a problem with
Christianity generally. I find it to be a threat with
christian nationalism, and that is distinct from Christianity. So Christians
would encompass everybody who, whatever definition you want, is a Christian,
and that varies from Christian to Christian. Christian national as
a subset of Christians who believe that they should and

(51:04):
they're morally, if not empowered to do so, almost compelled
to take over the levers of state and use it
to bring about a Christian theocratic government, one where Christianity
is taught is the truth in public schools, one where
Christianity is the justification for public policy. If you imagine
a world in which you can be convicted of violating

(51:26):
the statute called Leviticus twenty one as a crime, that
would be sort of a Christian nationalist state. So Christian
nationalists are the problem, not Christians. Does that make my
position clear?

Speaker 6 (51:38):
Yeah? That's interesting. How do you know when you've got
a Christian nationalist on your hands.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Because they say, I think we should take over the
levers of state and make us make this a Christian nation.

Speaker 6 (51:50):
But you know this is founded on Christianity. When you
talk about Leviticus, you've talked about people that want to
bring back old school stoning. Everybody is that it there's
a spectrum.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
I want to go back to something you just said.
This is all founded on Christianity. I didn't understand that
as far as the country.

Speaker 6 (52:08):
But before we answer that, you're concerned about them bringing
back Old Testament punishments. Is that the concern or no?

Speaker 1 (52:15):
I think I explained it before. I want to use
the levers of the state to make Christianity the official
religion of the government, to teach Christianity is truth, and
its schools of public school children, to favor Christians in
public dealing with the government. All of these things are
part of Christian nationalism. Basically a theocracy. If you imagine

(52:36):
the best and worst parts of the theocratic governments throughout
history and in our current time, that is what you're
dealing with with Christian nationalists.

Speaker 6 (52:45):
I have never met anybody that wants Christianity to be
the religion, because the Church of England is what we
came from and it's a disaster by the way. It's
throwing out the real Christian right now. The Church of
England is in England, but I don't know anybody that
wants Christians. It's just going to get I'm sorry, go ahead, we.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Are real Christians. You said, the Church of England are
sorting out real Christians. Who are the real Christians? Are
you there?

Speaker 4 (53:07):
A Christians?

Speaker 6 (53:08):
People? Real Christians are that's a fair question. Real Christians
are Christians that adhere to the Bible as far as
Jesus teachings. And then and then yeah, you know you
they're not the one.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
Catholic Church would disagree. The Catholic Church, the people that
gave you the Bible, would say you need tradition and Bible.

Speaker 6 (53:27):
Well, the Catholic Church did give us the Bible. They
were teaching in Latin and trying to keep everybody confused.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
For that's irrelevant. Address address the question. I don't want
you to dodge this one. This is very important. You
are asserting ostensibly, you are asserting that you know what
a true Christian is. And every time I've talked with
somebody like that, it ends up in a spot of
either no true scotsmen, or moving the goalposts or defining

(53:53):
a circlar circlear circle that other people wouldn't agree with
that appear to share the same faith. So let's talk
about this. What do you mean by true Christian? You
said adhere to the Bible? What do you mean.

Speaker 6 (54:06):
People that follow Jesus and believe that Jesus is God
in the flesh and they follow his teachings.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
You say follow teachings, that's a fuzzy word. What do
you mean by follow teachings?

Speaker 5 (54:17):
Well?

Speaker 6 (54:17):
And Jesus says to forgive not just seven times, but
seven times seventy When Jesus says, I'm the way, these.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Are examples of things Jesus said. But what I'm asking
you about is what do you mean when you say
follow Jesus? You are talking about some verb thing that
a human today would do. What would they do? Follow
certain instructions that you think came from Jesus that are
listed in the Bible, or just believe that Jesus was

(54:45):
the son of God and that belief in him is
enough to follow him. What do you mean by follow Jesus?

Speaker 6 (54:50):
I think you just nailed it. Yeah, just somebody who
believe that Jesus is the son of God. And if
you don't follow him, then you're not a Christian. You're
just kind of reading the Bible.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
If somebody believes that Jesus was the son of God,
that means they're a true Christian.

Speaker 6 (55:04):
That's part of it, yes, not the whole Satan believes
that Jesus is the son of God. So there's a
big audience that believes these son of God. But believing
it and following it, there's that.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
Okay, so we're back at following. So now the definition
you gave for following is distinct from following. So I'm
trying to nail down what you mean because this is
very important. So one element appears, but not every element
appears to be believing that Jesus is the Son of God.
What else is on the checklist of what I have
to do to be a true Christian man?

Speaker 6 (55:32):
You know, I know you're a lawyer and this is
this is your thing. But I think it's pretty straightforward.
I mean, we can fill in the gap. I don't
want to get into how there's forty thousand different Christian denominations.
I think that's it is asking Jesus to forgive you
of your sins, and then following Jesus with the rest
of your life, repents and then goes in the more
if you can, but everybody does, that's okay.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Christian is to be clear, I'm not doing lawyerly things.
I'm just doing logical thing. I'm just trying to understand.
You made a claim. You had this throwaway line of
real Christians are true Christians, and that's a big heavy statement,
so you don't get to throw that out without us
asking questions. So I'm sure, Justin you run into this
all the time. The checklists I've heard are except that

(56:15):
Jesus is the Son of God checklist item one. Maybe
people will add on that believe in the afterlife or
repent of your sins, that might be another thing on
the checklist. But my understanding is this checklist is a
two thousand year old debate and nobody agrees. Is my
understanding correct?

Speaker 2 (56:34):
Justin? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (56:36):
Is that an understatement in the case.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Even the early Church had to fight it out?

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Gotcha? So what are the categories that you would use? Justin? Like,
where would you want to go with this definitional thing,
because I think we have to define this first before
we can then go back to Christian nationalism, because I
don't want to get into a state of saying, well,
it's not Christian nationalism because of the people who are
doing it are not true Christians. We need to define
true Christians for and then maybe I'll say, Okay, it's

(57:01):
not Christian nationalism. It's fake Christian nationalism. But it's still
a problem.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Right. I would just refer to this as semantic fog.
It doesn't actually do anything for any argument. All it
does is try to muddy the waters to prevent you
from getting to some sort of logical conclusion. The reality is,
if you just say, here's what Christianity in general does,
and I'm not going to distinguish between you, the only
real Christian live and the other Christians, I'm going to say,

(57:25):
here are Christians. They fit the mold of Christianity. They
fit Romans ten, nine and ten. They've confessed with their mouth,
and they believe in their heart that Jesus Christ is
the Lord, and they was raised from the dead, and
he died for their sins. They believe that stuff that
makes them a Christian. You can argue all day about
how you don't like the fact that one group requires
water baptism another group doesn't require water baptism. But the

(57:46):
reality is, the bare minimum requirement to be a Christian
is that you repent of your sins and then you
confess Jesus Christ. That's the bare minimum. If you've done that,
I'm willing to call you a Christian even if I
agree with some of your secondary and tertiary opinions.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Is that fair, Mike? Is that a fair definition for
you for us to move forward?

Speaker 4 (58:07):
Yeah? I think that is fair.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Okay, So using that definition, anybody who's trying to make
that the official policy of any branch of the government
or give favor to people who claim to believe those things,
that would be Christian nationalism. And then you said, I've
never met anybody that wants that. Well, you're very lucky.
I think you've seen them on TV. You've heard of
Project twenty twenty five. You've seen Donald Trump, you've heard

(58:30):
of Ron DeSantis, You've heard of all these people who
and I can't go on beyond that, but you've heard
of all these people. We are a charity and we
can't get into electioneering. They're not running for office right now.
I opened this show with an example of Christian nationalism.
People trying to with a thousand cuts do away with
the First Amendment separation of church and state, hiring chaplains

(58:51):
of the Christian Faith not hiring in Florida. They made
them volunteers so they could avoid one type of lawsuit
volunteers and allowing them to come into public schools and
preach to kids about the truth of Christian claims. That
is the government teaching its children that Christianity is true.
That is a step along the way to a theocracy.

(59:12):
Do you think that that's a problematic I.

Speaker 6 (59:15):
Think you're reaching. You're trying to say if somebody has
an opinion or they are a Christian, then they absolutely
positively can't say anything about it. It's supposed to be
You're not supposed to the government is not supposed to
advocate a certain type of religion could be Christian, could
be Muslim, or they're not supposed to deter you from
doing it either.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
So I've got a story for you about your it
could be Muslim thing. Right, hold on a second. I
want to get back to that, but I want to
address the point you just made before we forget about it.
So this is what the Christian nationalists will say, We've
just created a statute that is agnostic as to what faith,
but it will be faith based.

Speaker 6 (59:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
So it's not that you can hire a bunch of
atheist pastors or get atheist volunteers to come in and
teach the atheististic point of view, right, it is just
just any chaplain of any faith. That's the claim, that's
how they write the law. They did that in Australia
in twenty eleven. The Australian population is at that time

(01:00:13):
was about sixty four sixty five percent Christian, and they
made the same claims. Then this is not about Christianity.
This is about counseling and faith based stuff and all
of that. I'll give you one guess as to what
percentage years later after they'd hired all of these chaplains
or accepted them in volunteers. Keeping in mind that the

(01:00:34):
population of Australia with sixty five percent Christian, what percentage
of the chaplains were in schools were Christian? Do you
have any idea what that number was? I have no
idea ninety seven percent.

Speaker 6 (01:00:45):
I don't know where you're going with this.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Where I'm going is what I hear time and time
again is you're being alarmist. That's a categorical error. This
is not Christian nationalism. This is just one local law
because it's any faith could be a chaplain. Therefore it's
not Christian nationalism. This is all cover and it is
documented time and time again throughout history, and in Australia

(01:01:08):
is a very good analog. They have a very conservative
part of their population. They are very independent. Like the
United States, they still have that sort of frontiersman attitude.
They made all the same promises that the people in Texas,
the people in Florida, the people in Oklahoma are making
as to why we should allow chaplains in schools. They

(01:01:30):
swore it would be multi denominational. And then after the
law was passed, the rubber on the road, the people
pulling the levers, made it a basically uniform all Christian
chaplaincy preaching to kids in their schools, in government schools,
that is against what the founding fathers wanted. They explicitly

(01:01:51):
made a law before the Constitution even existed in Virginia
to fight this sort of shit, and then they embody
that law, the Bill for Religious Freedom and for the
Virginia Colony, into the First Amendment. And ever since then,
Christians who want government to force religion down their citizens'
throats have been trying to get away with these sorts

(01:02:13):
of things. And it is only since the current Supreme
Court came into power due to Mitch McConnell's shenanigans that
they are now getting what they want. They are getting
death by a thousand cuts of the First Amendment for
this exact purpose. To put it another way, if they
didn't want the government involved, they wouldn't be doing any
of this, but they are. That's my point. Does that

(01:02:36):
make sense?

Speaker 6 (01:02:36):
Yeah? I can't. I can think of a million things
that'd be a lot worse than this, somebody talking about
the Bible. But to your original point, in Australia, they
passed this law and said they could have people talking
about religion.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
And let's clarify, you're softening this. This is not people
talking about religion. These are pastors, explicitly chaplains higher or
volunteering to give counseling to students who need counseling instead
of trained counselors. Here's an anecdote from Australia. A girl
who was suffering from an eating disorder went to her

(01:03:12):
chaplain because it was the only counselor available. And you
know what he told her, you're just hungry for the Lord.
That's the counseling she got. That is one story out
of a million. There's a whole bunch of papers in
Australia about this. When the rubber meets the road, this
is what happens. And the reason we have laws against
even letting it start happen is because eons of experience

(01:03:35):
have shown to us that when you let it creep
in a little, if you give a definitional excuse for
it to happen, all of a sudden, the doors of
wide open. Everybody runs in and starts. It's like cigarette
companies marketing to kids. They know they want to get
them early. The National Association for School Chaplains is in
their mission statement says we want to get people into
schools so we can convert them to being Christians. This

(01:03:58):
is not a mystery. We want the power of the
school letting us to letting us trap a captive audience
and preach to them about the truth of Jesus. This
is not people talking about the Bible in an academic sense.
I am all for a comparative Religions class in public schools.
I think the Bible should be in schools in those contexts.

(01:04:18):
Let's read the Bible, Let's read the Koran. Let's read
any text and compare and contrast with poetry and with
other mythology. That's great, but that's not what this is.
This is you're a kid in distress. You would go
see a counselor, but instead you're going to pastor Jack,
who's going to tell you you're just hungry from the Lord
and you need to pray to Jesus. That's what's happening

(01:04:39):
in the schools. After Australia did this, years after STDs
and schools went up, teen pregnancies went up, and it
was all because the pastors were discouraging the kids from
sex education, safe sex, all of those things. You can't
deny what happens on the ground when you let this
stuff into the door.

Speaker 6 (01:05:00):
Couple of things on the SuDS and all that. You're
sure about that you got your data on that. That
was the only mitigative.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
I'll give it to you. Let's say that never happened. Continue.
I don't have it at my fingertips. That's what I
remember from my research. I did a whole episode on this,
But I might be wrong on some facts. Continue.

Speaker 6 (01:05:16):
Sure, I can see something changes and then there's unintended
side effect. Sure, but I mean, it'd be nice to.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
Prove it, all right, If you're going to throw away
these sentences. Let's go back to the South. What is
the cause and effect here the Southern the more religious
estate is in the United States, the higher the STD rates,
the higher drug addiction rates, the higher divorce rates, the
higher the teen pregnancies rates, every measure of health is lower. Now,

(01:05:41):
I am readily going to admit we don't know which
way the causation arrow goes, but I do know it's
been that way since pre Civil War. That everywhere we
look in the world, every country, every world, where we
keep religion out of schools, where we teach good health,
where we teach science, where we teach sex, said, all

(01:06:01):
of those metrics get better. So let's not throw away
these little lines about well, maybe this one stat's wrong,
maybe that one stat's wrong. We know what's happening. The
conservative Christian movement for decades has openly said we want
to put Jesus back in schools. We want the power
of the government, which in the sixties we were forced
to retreat from because we used to read Christian payers

(01:06:21):
and schools and tell people that they need to be
Christian in schools, and the Supreme Court told us we
couldn't do that. They have been working for decades to
change that, and they have now done so. And they
are putting chaplains in school who are going to do
exactly what happened in Australia. And if you don't, you
don't accept that, then you're either naive or you're.

Speaker 6 (01:06:39):
In on it. Now, wait a minute, is it only
Christian pastors? Pastors are allowed in Australia and only Christian?

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
No? No, As I said, the bill is written to
get past the critics. It's written to say anybody can apply.
But what happens when the rubber hits the road. Ninety
seven percent of the pastors of the counsulers in in
Australia ended up being Christian when the population was sixty
five percent Christian. That's not by accident. It's not because

(01:07:09):
the Muslims didn't apply. Is the bureaucracy takes care of
a lot of the well, you know, they just didn't
quim or they weren't interested, right, bureocracy.

Speaker 6 (01:07:18):
And maybe you're right, Maybe you're right, but you're saying,
wait a minute, they're screening out non that's a different claim.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Is that?

Speaker 6 (01:07:24):
Is that what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
I'm saying there's two facts. One they made the argument
that this is okay because the legislation was non denominational,
and fact two is, in the end, what they said
would happen, which we would have we would have multi
faith representation across the schools, did not happen. We only
had Christian representation. You can be the judge as to

(01:07:47):
why that happens. But I think if you're going to
ask anybody to believe that that was just oopsee a
statistical anomaly that we see elsewhere around the world, I
think people are not going to buy that.

Speaker 6 (01:07:58):
What's stopping the achs from going there and speaking of
the kids and go they're not, Well, then.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
I'm not stopped you.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
I'm saying we none of us should be going in
and talking about religion to public school students. That has
nothing to.

Speaker 7 (01:08:10):
Do with them.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
We have been going back and forth. I'm sorry, what's
your take? Justin?

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
I know I love in the conversation, this is in
your your wheelhouse that I love it, But I'm confused
about why you think atheists are going to go into
schools and teach kids about atheism.

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
I would never presume to go into a public school
and tell kids you shouldn't believe that a god exists.
I would never, in my wildest dreams think that that
was appropriate morally. Okay, on many levels, governmental wise or
parent wise, right, but Christians are doing it to students
with the power of the government.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
We leave the brainwashing to the religious cults.

Speaker 6 (01:08:51):
We don't do that, don't well, I mean you guys
and say be skeptical. Wouldn't that be a nice counterbalance
if you went in there, if you got time for this,
don't you don't need No, No.

Speaker 1 (01:08:59):
The government shouldn't be involved in it. Sorry, go ahead,
justin I need to conflimse.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
You don't need an atheist specifically to teach students to
analyze things properly, like a good foundation in science and
a good foundation in logic, which should be part of
the curriculum. Were already take care of that. You don't
need representatives from atheismo coming into the schools to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:21):
Atheismo.

Speaker 6 (01:09:22):
I like that, apparently you do. If you're out numbered
ninety seven percent to three, you guys better get in there.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
I mean, okay, now I'm taking. I'm not taking. I
don't think we can take Mike seriously after that, Really.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
I don't, Mike, why do you think our goal is
to make everybody an atheists. I think you have so
many assumptions about our worldview. You don't even know our worldview.

Speaker 6 (01:09:45):
I was asking you about it. I was like, why
why do you care about Christian naturalist?

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
And then because I don't want the government. I don't
want the government giving tax breaks to only Christians. I
don't want the government telling my child that they're going
to go the hell if they don't accept Jesus. I
don't know why this is so hard.

Speaker 6 (01:10:03):
That's not what you said before.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
You never talked about that is exactly what I said.
I'm just giving you actual examples that.

Speaker 6 (01:10:08):
Your actual examples were writing laws for Christians and having
a theocracy.

Speaker 4 (01:10:12):
I don't want what do.

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):
You think taxes? What do you think tax breaks come from?

Speaker 7 (01:10:15):
Those?

Speaker 1 (01:10:15):
Are laws? Come on now, Mike, come on. Tax breaks
for Christians is a legislative event. Right, allowing people to
teach that Jesus is true comes from the law. Right,
the legal system has to allow it, especially because we've
tried for two hundred and whatever years to prevent it.
So to overcome that it takes a very concerted effort

(01:10:36):
to do so, and it's all out in the open.
It's all out in the open. You can go read
Project twenty twenty five. You can go read all of
the conservative Christian movements that have been trying to do
this non stop, and it is finally a point where
they have a foothold and we need to sit up
like prairie dogs and pay attention. That's my point. If

(01:10:57):
you honestly agree with me that the gout government should
not be teaching, let's start with this. Do you agree
that no, there should be the government should be neutral
as far as religion goes. It shouldn't opine as to
the truth of a religion. It shouldn't favor one religious
group over another. Do you agree with that?

Speaker 6 (01:11:16):
I think yeah. I think we covered that with the
First Amendment, separation of Church and State. Yeah. I believe
in that they shouldn't be pro for it and advocating
a certain religion, and they shouldn't be holding you back either.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
So yeah, right, And what is that? What does holding
back look like? Does saying hey, we're not going to
have government employees teaching children that the Bible is true.
If we say that's the rule, government employees cannot on
the clock as part of a classroom class teach that

(01:11:46):
the Bible is true. Is that separation of church and
state that's proper, or is that somehow holding Christianity back?

Speaker 6 (01:11:52):
I think you got a point there. I think teaching
that it's true now they've crossed the line. I would
agree with that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Okay, that's what I'm a goat. I think justin you're
against it too.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
I think, yeah, yeah, I'm not a pro indoctrination for
the kids. I think many religions, not.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
Just christian Right. Yeah, you wouldn't want it. You wouldn't
want a Muslim going in and doing it, right, muscle,
did you?

Speaker 5 (01:12:13):
Justin?

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
No, this is something for your home. This is something
that your If your parents don't have the balls to
teach you their religion, then that's that's on them. But
I think when it comes to like matters of faith
and things like that, that's that's on your that's your
parents job. It's not the job of the schools to
try to create religious adherents.

Speaker 6 (01:12:32):
Totally. Cow. I agree with you, guys.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
Listen.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
I'm all for freedom of religion. By the way, Like,
just to be clear, Mike, I'm all for I don't
want to stop anyone from from having the freedom of religion,
but I do want to not have it forced on people,
especially not our kids. And I want people to be
able to learn to think critically. That's what I want.

Speaker 6 (01:12:54):
Yeah, I got two reasons that I don't want to
force on. First of all, we turn into a theistic government,
they're going to screw it up and they're going to
teach garbage and get off course, like immediately in twenty
years or left.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
Yes.

Speaker 6 (01:13:05):
And then the other one is it opens the door
to every other religion. I'm not a big fan of Islam.
I don't like how they treat everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
So and those are fair. I will quote Thomas Jefferson.
I referenced this in orient earlier, but pre constitution. So
after declaration of Independence, pre constitution, Virginia is considering a bill,
a law that would say, hey, we're going to take
some money and hire teachers of the Christian faith to
go teach Christianity in public schools in the colony of Virginia. Jefferson,

(01:13:36):
Madison and others rose up against it. Wrote these what's
called a what was it a protest in demonstrance against
the bill, and the bill was suspended. The consideration of
the bill was suspended for a year while they published
their papers and argued it. And Jefferson introduced the bill
I referenced, which is a bill for religious freedom. And

(01:13:57):
the bill says, basically, you can can't spend money like
the government can't tax people, to then take that money
and use it to teach the truth of a religious faith,
whatever religious faith that would be. And he made a
very portant, very important point that I think you will
resonate with you, Mike. He said, even if the government,
and I'm quoting him very loosely here using some made

(01:14:21):
up fancy language, even if the government would take the
monies out of my pocket to give them to a
preacher of my own faith, that government is depriving me
of giving the money to that preacher whose particularities I
might agree with. And what he meant by that was
if I'm a Protestant and you're teaching prodatistimism and you're

(01:14:42):
taxing me to pay for that, that's still tyranny. He
used the word tyranny when he described that, because he's
pointing out, you're depriving me of my ability to choose
the preacher down at the preacher level that I might
agree with on any particularity. And this is why when
Texas introduced a chaplain bill, the very first lawsuit that

(01:15:04):
was filed, the plaintiff was a preacher, a Christian preacher
in Texas. This is the point. It's not just when
you're in the in group that you have to worry.
It's okay, we make Christianity the official religion, and all
of a sudden they adopt the Christian excuse me, the
Catholic Bible, and everybody disagrees with that. In fact, that
actually happened in Louisiana. They voted to make the Holy

(01:15:26):
Bible are They passed a bill or were considering a
bill to make the Bible the official book, you know,
the official crap they come up with states the official
Book of Louisiana. And that measure ended up collapsing because
nobody could agree on which version of the Bible should
be the official version. And that's where separation of church
and state comes into play, not as between atheist and

(01:15:48):
religious people, not as between Muslim and Christian, but from
this preacher to that preacher, Jefferson says, even making that difference,
the government distinguishing that or favoring that, that is tyranny,
and that would be the point of why we don't
want the first toe over the line towards Christian nationalism.

Speaker 6 (01:16:07):
Except if it's volund here, then you're on a you
know it's a toe. But I don't know. I'm not
going to defend that. I do agree with keeping the
government and the any religion separate and that Project twenty
twenty five and Trump and I don't know. Again, I
think you'd be lucky to find it. I mean twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
I thought that was dead.

Speaker 6 (01:16:24):
That was like a propaganda thing. Trump's going to go
all these times.

Speaker 7 (01:16:27):
I will.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
I can't use names, but a certain highest level official
mentioned it last week and called it great after denying
that he knew anything about it during the election. Search
the news.

Speaker 6 (01:16:37):
Yeah, but nobody's doing it. They've had what.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
No, there's a website dedicated to tracking every policy proposal
in that document. They're currently forty eight percent complete with
all of the proposals in the document.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Google the Project twenty twenty five tracker, I think is
I don't remember the exact name, but i'll if you
be a I'll give you a high press example. Okay.
My area of practice in the law when I practice
law was FDA regulatory law. Right. Project twenty twenty five
talks about FDA, Health and Home Human Services, all of

(01:17:16):
those people, and says all agencies basically, and says what
we need to do is get rid of the experts
and install loyalists who will try to push for these
particular agendas. And they are very smart. In Project twenty
twenty five, they do not mention the word Christian except
for two or three times. They talk in sort of

(01:17:37):
abstract language. But when you look at the organization that
created Projects twenty five.

Speaker 6 (01:17:42):
They.

Speaker 1 (01:17:45):
Well, the Parentage Foundation came from a group of conservative
Christians who were pissed off at Nixon because he wasn't
conservative and Christian enough. So that's the people that wrote
Project twenty twenty five. And now when you look at
what they've done is they have gotten rid of expertise
at ever level. They have fired many people I've known
who work at the FDA who know what they're doing,

(01:18:05):
and they've installed morons who are loyalists. This is what
you do when you want to bring down the guard
rails of a government. And I used to respect the FDAI.
I argued against them. My clients were people who would
have problems with the FDA. They were importers of goods
that thought they were being too strict or whatever, But
I respected them immensely. Every single one of them were experts,

(01:18:29):
had high level degrees, and their chief concern above all
else with the health and safety of the drugs, medicine, cosmetics,
medical devices of not only the US, but the world.
Because they knew the heavy burden they bore that many
countries piggyback off of FDA regulations because they don't have
a sophisticated science program in their country, so they just say,

(01:18:50):
we'll do whatever the FDA does. And that is being
destroyed as not a goal of Christian nationalism, but as
a goal to weaken the guard rails and expertise in
the government itself. And if you look everywhere throughout the government,
that is what's going on. And meanwhile, they are enacting
regulations and policies executive orders that are pushing religion into government.

(01:19:16):
And the Supreme Court was specifically created by McConnell to
facilitate that. And they've already struck down the Lemon Rule,
which was used to for decades to separate church and state.
This Supreme Court has done away with that, and now
they're using basically made up bullshit that nobody can agree
upon what they actually mean when they write about it.

(01:19:39):
So Project twenty twenty five is very real. Please do
go research it. It's one of its many goals is
towards Christian nationalism, but its main goal is weaken expertise
in government and install loyalists who will look the other
way when we try to do the other stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:19:58):
Gay question for you, do you think that the FDA
is like impervious to corruption like by advisors? No you
think no, not at all, no money like all of them.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
Well no, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Can I Can I talk to you a little bit
about that? First? I actually not to say too much
about my past life as an engineer, but I actually
worked with the pharmaceutical companies that have to go through
FDA approval. I personally have multiple machines that I've designed
have to go through FDA approval, and it's a very
robust process. I'm not saying that somebody couldn't get paid

(01:20:30):
off or corrupted, but it's a very robust process. The
amount of checks that are in balance aren't just because
the government wants checks and balances. It's because the insurance
companies that have to cover the liabilities for the manufacturers
need the checks and balances too. So there's actually the
whole supporting cast outside of the FDA with checks and
balances and procedures in place, that one rogue FDA employee

(01:20:55):
is not likely going to pooh pooh the whole process.
In fact, there was a deadline we missed for a
project way back in like twenty sixteen. We just missed
a deadline. We couldn't get it on time. We had
to wait another two years to get FDA approval because
that was just how the process worked. They were going
to bend for us, it didn't matter how much money

(01:21:15):
we had.

Speaker 6 (01:21:16):
Well, I mean, I've got an experience with that, to
a friend of mine, I took them over a decade
to get something approved FDA all that. So, yeah, I
mean there's that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:23):
It's hard.

Speaker 1 (01:21:25):
I readily accept that government capture. Agency capture exists in
every agency at every level, the same way that insurance
fraud happens at all insurance companies, and the same way
that welfare fraud happens in all welfare systems and food
stamp food aid fraud happens in all systems. That's just
a given. You do. What you do is you do

(01:21:46):
the calculus right. You optimize the curve of how much
effort you're going to put in to trap and catch
the bad stuff without spending too much. Right, we don't
want to spend It costs a million percent more to
catch the ninety eight or ninety ninth percent of fraud,
and it just at some point isn't worth it. And
I recognize that I'm not an idealist. But the FDA works.

(01:22:09):
The world follows the FDA. Our engineers work, the engineering
system works. Our buildings don't fall down like they do elsewhere,
our roads work, our electrical grid works. Is it perfect? No,
But it not being perfect isn't a reason to say
we shouldn't have experts. It's always open to capture. That's

(01:22:30):
human nature. You put enough internal affairs resources into trying
to capture most of it, and you get on with
your life.

Speaker 4 (01:22:36):
All right.

Speaker 6 (01:22:36):
I got a last thing, but we won't talk about it.
Probably out in Europe UK. This is for you. Cross examined.
A couple of months ago, we talked about how they're
clamping down on free speech. You said you might look
into it. Did you have a chance to look into
that at all?

Speaker 1 (01:22:49):
You know, I have not had tide. I don't recall,
to be honest, I don't recall that conversation. So maybe
you could remind.

Speaker 6 (01:22:56):
Me, Oh it was yeah, it was a throw away comment.
But I was like, oh, man, understand, and you can't
pray within a next to an abortion clinic.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
It's oh, well that's not true. That's not true. That
was debunked, That story was debunked. What happens, just like
in the US, what happens is something happens right, and
the headline will be person arrested for praying right or
person arrested for being an atheist, whatever, like that's the
headline that goes everywhere. And then you dig into the
details and you realize, oh, it wasn't for praying. It

(01:23:25):
was for trespassing, or it was they were violent or
something like that. And in this particular case, where in
I want to say London, I don't remember, in England,
somebody was arrested. In the headline from the Conservative press
was person arrested for praying. But when you dig into it,
if I recall correctly, it was trespassing or violence they'd
been warned before. It wasn't for praying, it was for

(01:23:49):
what they were doing while praying. So always be skeptical
of headlines on either end of the spectrum because what
sells blood, death, and sex, that's what sells. So they're
not going to be honest in their headlines at all
on any side of the spectrum.

Speaker 6 (01:24:03):
It's new now they're sending out clips of guys preaching,
and if they say something about the Bible or anti Islamic,
then they're saying you're causing distress, and they're getting warning.
After the warning, then they come in and they you know,
take you.

Speaker 1 (01:24:14):
Down, and yeah, go ahead and create a website post
all of that stuff, make the world know about it.
I think in the process of doing that, i'd be
I'm going to be your first supporter if that's going on.
Really legitimately that's what's going on. But I think in
the process of doing that and diving into that content rather,
you know, I don't depend on tiktoks and memes, Go

(01:24:35):
look at the studies, Go pull up the court documents,
look at the records of the police file, see what
actually happened. And I'd be willing to bet a decent
amount of money that what's going on is you may
have one or two cases of over zealous cops, right.
You see it all the time in the United States.
Cops come up and arrest people on the street for
taking pictures in public, and that's totally legal, but they
arrest them and then that county gets sued and they

(01:24:57):
lose the lawsuit because it's constitutional. There's going to be
some percentage of that anywhere you give anybody a badge
for any reason. But in the process of investigating that
and creating your website, of England is now arresting people
for praying. I would be willing to bet that you
will find that they're demonstrating without a license, like anybody
if they're talking about anti nuclear preaching, it has nothing

(01:25:20):
to do with the content of their speech and has
to do with the time, manner, place of their behavior.
I'd be willing to bet.

Speaker 4 (01:25:26):
But we are.

Speaker 1 (01:25:27):
Yeah, I know it doesn't. I know it doesn't. Isn't
that fascinating how the information you're getting doesn't look like that,
but the information I get looks different. We are both
getting information from the algorithm. I'm being fed facts that
are different than you are being fed facts, and I'm
not saying my facts are right. I'm saying, go look
at the actual documentation and read up on that before

(01:25:51):
you accept whatever the algorithm's feeding you. Because what I've
learned over the last four or five years is I
used to assume that you and I, or somebody who's
a pro man guy whatever, we were seeing the same
facts and coming to different conclusions. I no longer believe that.
I believe that through the algorithm and now upcoming AI slop,

(01:26:13):
you and I are seeing different facts, and that explains
why we see don't see eye to eye on a
lot of things. So the way I fight that is
I go look at original documents. Go look at the
actual documents. Don't rely on a TikTok video, don't rely
on a meme, don't rely on a video that somebody
posted on Facebook. You can learn very easily how to
go find the court documents, find neutral reporting, and go

(01:26:37):
and look at what actually happens in the long run,
because the story you get from the witnesses on the
street on day one are going to be very different
from what the person confesses to, admits to, testifies to
when they actually are under oath so I don't. I
have tried to cut myself off from the algorithm. I
suggest you do too. Go to the original documents and
then if you've got something. The world and including us,

(01:27:01):
the atheist community of Austin, supports the separation of church
and state. We would be utterly against that behavior. However,
I suspect we will find what we usually find, which
is a few crazy cops and a bunch of people
getting arrested for behavior, not for the content of their speech.
But we do have to go on justin. This has
sort of been my call. I'm so sorry about that.

(01:27:22):
Do you have anything to add before Mike drops off?

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
I loved it. I was like watching a master chef
create the created favorite recipe.

Speaker 1 (01:27:30):
And Mike's been great. Mike here a great interlocutor. I
really appreciate your questions. I do really think that you
make some good arguments and observations, and I do want
to hear back from you.

Speaker 6 (01:27:42):
Yeah, hey, what did you call me? Interlockeder?

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
You're doing interlockutor. It's the person you're sort of conversing
with or debating.

Speaker 6 (01:27:50):
I know that's good word.

Speaker 1 (01:27:51):
I like it all right, Well, thank you so much, Mike.
We really appreciate it. Justin, do you have any time
for We've got more callers on the line. This is
going along, but if you're all right, we can take
some more.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
Mom said, I got no curfew, and I we can
do this a.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
Whole night, all right, we get to play together. So
this is going to be right up your wheelhouse. I
think we've got Chris he Him from Arizona. We have
another caller on the line. I'll ask you to wait.
I do want to answer your question as well, but
for now we'll do Chris hee Him from Arizona. Who
wanted to bring up they say the miracle of the
Sun in Portugal in nineteen seventeen. I think that's commonly
known as the Miracle of Fatima. If you think it's

(01:28:27):
a good argument against or for Catholicism, slash, I assume
Christianity as a whole. To educate our listeners, and Chris,
you and Justin can confirm this. This is when seventy
thousand people claimed to have seen the Sun changed different
colors and zigzag on the sky and do stuff that
if it actually happened, everybody would have been thrown off

(01:28:48):
planet Earth due to physics. But is that my understanding, Chris,
that's the one. All right, your call, Chris, Tell Justin
what you want to talk about, because I'm sure Justin
wants to talk about it.

Speaker 10 (01:28:57):
Yeah, Justin, I follow you quite a bit. This is Piranha.
The tarantulas are still coming for you anyway, with I
hear like, I listened to a lot of the deconstruction stuff,
and I never hear the miracle of the sun come
up from either side. And I would think I would
hear it as an argument from one side or the other.

(01:29:18):
And I'm sure you can. I mean, I'm sure it happens,
and maybe I just haven't seen it, but I was
just kind of curious to your thoughts on that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
So typically only Catholics bring up the apparitions because it's
more in line with what Catholic theology teaches usually has
something involving Mary, and like Orthox, Protestants don't really care
about Mary. But that being said, I learned about the
apparitions growing up in Catholic school. And even when I
learned about them in Catholic school, we got to do
some deep dive investigations and we learned that there's still

(01:29:47):
kind of a matter of faith there are people that
agreed with what they heard, and there were people who disagreed.
So even like the dancing of the Sun at Fatima,
there were newspaper and documentaries made at that time interviewing people.
We've got lots of interviews with people that said, yeah,
I went, I didn't see anything. It didn't happen, right,

(01:30:09):
And so the reality is.

Speaker 10 (01:30:10):
You've got what's that, Sorry, I've seen some of that.

Speaker 2 (01:30:12):
Yes, yeah, yeah, So you've got a huge group of people,
some of them claiming I didn't say anything. Some of
them said I stared at the sun and it started
moving around, which you would expect if you were staring
at the sun like that. You're not supposed to be.
That's not going to your eyes are not going to
be seeing straight. And then we've got other things too,
like if you zoom out and look at the big

(01:30:34):
picture right Supposedly, like the goal of these apparitions are
to probably bring people into the faith, bring people into
the fold, but they almost exclusively only happened to people
already believe, Like the marine apparitions and whatnot almost exclusively
happened to solely Catholic communities, the same way past life
regressions almost universally only happened in Hindu culture. So people

(01:30:58):
are willing to believe these religious phenomenon because they already
work into their held religious framework. That's why it doesn't happen.
That's why, like there's never been a religious apparition at
like an atheist gathering. That's why you don't hear about
atheists getting possessed by demons, because it's just not part
of our brain doesn't include that typically as a possibility, right,

(01:31:20):
But if your brain already think that it's a possibility,
it's likely to hallucinate it. One of my favorite like
mass you know, mass panics to compare this to is
the Dancing plague in the sixteenth century in France. Nearly
one hundred two hundred people dance themselves into exhaustion in
days for days, dancing in the streets, believing that the

(01:31:41):
Holy Spirit God was compelling them to get out of
their houses and dance. There's even reports that some people
died in the dancing plag They're not entirely confirmed whether
or not people actually died, but the reality is, like
these mass hallucinations, they happen all the time. And the
last thing I'll say, sorry, this is a long way
to the last thing I'll say is it's silly to
me that a god would use some weird distraction like

(01:32:05):
having a visual dancing song, not a real dancing son.
The sun certainly couldn't be dancing in the sky. Shit
would happen that everybody on the planet would see. So
it's obviously just a visual apparition. But why would he
go through that trouble and then say, fuck all about
the three million children that are dying of starvation right now?
Why is he giving a couple people in the Fatima

(01:32:26):
apparition this visual experience, but then he's allowing all kinds
of horrors to unfold. Two hundred thousand people dying in
Haitian earthquakes. The math doesn't really math for me.

Speaker 10 (01:32:37):
Yeah, well said, I mean, honestly, I'd say the biggest
miracle with the whole Fatoma thing is the fact that
seventy thousand people got together on the word of three
shepherd children. But I mean, it really surprises me that
I don't hear it come up more as like trying
to think the best way to put this, Like when
people talk about the supposed witnesses of Jesus that people

(01:32:58):
don't bring up the seventy thousand people pople supposedly saw
the Sun dancing in the sky, like I would just
think it'd be a more common, like a more common
talking point. So I was just kind of curious what
you guys think about that.

Speaker 1 (01:33:09):
I it's coincidence you called with our earlier caller who
was talking about the more people who claim to have
observed or witnessed a thing, the more likely that thing
is true. I literally the remember the reason I remembered
it was seventy thousand people is I sat there and
googled the Miracle of Fatima to try to remember the

(01:33:29):
number because I was going to bring it up with
him as an example of Okay, so seventy thousand people
claim to have seen the sun dance, that if it
actually was happening, either the Sun was moving and we
would have everybody on the planet would have seen it,
or the Earth was moving and we would all been
thrown into space. Which one was it? But I didn't,
So it's very it's a very common point that I
bring up as well. So I'm right with you on

(01:33:51):
the Hey, I think people don't bring it up because
it's so obviously false that at best, we could say
God inner feared with somebody seventy thousand people's brains according
to the press, and we have all the problems of translations, transcription,
chain of custody, of the testimony, all of that stuff
that we don't know the exact number. But God messed

(01:34:12):
with people's brains to make them believe the son was
dancing around. And then we're back into Justin's point, which is,
and ten thousand people, ten thousand children are starving to
death on this planet every single day.

Speaker 4 (01:34:22):
So sure, why you think you've got bigger fish to fry, Like,
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:34:27):
Yeah, yeah, to quote tim mention, so God took a
break out of giving babies a malaria to pop down
to your local area and cure your cataracts. That's what
the argument is, Like, that's what we're doing. So no,
I don't think that I give much weight to it.
And I also note that this was seven, nineteen seventeen,

(01:34:49):
and since we've had a proliferation of cameras, we've seen
miracles die off in a correlative level. So I know
correlation doesn't imply causation, but that's an interesting data point
that we don't see this stuff anymore, and when we do,
our first thought is, wow, how did the AI do that?
Or that's interesting special effects, and inevitably we're right.

Speaker 10 (01:35:10):
Yeah, definitely, I think the reason I think, honestly, I'm
more surprised it doesn't come from Catholics more often, being
that it happened supposedly in nineteen seventeen, it being so recent,
I would think, you know, because every you know, one
of the big things that people point out is that,
oh well, all the miracles seem to have dried up
after about the time of the New Testament. But you know,
it's just just something I've kind of wondered about, and

(01:35:32):
I was curious what you guys thought. Appreciate you guys
having me up.

Speaker 2 (01:35:35):
Great question.

Speaker 1 (01:35:35):
Thank ye, thank you, thank you very much. We really
appreciate it. I'm reminded of the Uh. There's a comedian
back in the seventies and eighties called Father Guido Sarducci.
His bit was he was this New York Italian father,
a priest. He wore the get up and everything, and
one of his jokes was about the church declaring things miracles,

(01:35:55):
which they did. The Pope declared some miracle in the
thirties and reaffirmed it in the forties or something like that.
So this is an official miracle according to church. He's like, yeah,
they're trying to canonize this person. And to be a
saint you have to prove three miracles and only I
hear only two of them can be card tricks. And
so that's kind of what we're dealing with here.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
To be there, we've got crazy, crazier stuff the Church
would validate, like having the Holy Prepise of Jesus the foreskin.
I mean, their system of validation is pretty thin.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
Yeah, let's send an investigator who better well fin not
find a very good reason not to call it a miracle.

Speaker 8 (01:36:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:36:38):
Yeah, we have another caller, Kenny from Oklahoma. He's asking
where did the first law schools get their common law? So,
Kenny from Oklahoma, do I have your question?

Speaker 6 (01:36:53):
Right?

Speaker 10 (01:36:54):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (01:36:55):
Basically, First of all, I just want to tell the
cross examiner that I agree with him operation and church
and state, because I like the idea of rendering Caesar.
What is Caesar's in God? What's God? The government has
a row and religion has a row, and if you
cross these then you get Thomas Jefferson's problem. Where have

(01:37:15):
you have maybe a state religion developed, and then the
other founding fathers that were religious worried about losing their
religious freedom. And that's what a lot of individuals from
England came over to America for it was religious freedom.
And so I concur with that. But my question involves
the origin of common law around in early America. That

(01:37:35):
was common during the time of the Revolutionary War. And
my understanding is we got our common law here from England,
the common laws of England. Well, where does England get
their common law? There's two sources. This is kind of
a question answered thing. I want to see if you
know the two sources, because I looked it up.

Speaker 1 (01:37:57):
I don't know the history as well well as possibly
I should, but I'll give you what I understand and
you can educate me. So for our audience, the term
common law is a term of art. Right, common law
does not mean law that is common. It's a term
of art. So common law is judge made law from

(01:38:19):
long ago. In England. It started with the Magna Carta,
which was in the I want to say twelve hundred.
Somebody can correct me on that. I think it's early
twelve hundreds. So Magna Carta is sort of the start
of saying, hey, we're not going to deal with this whole.
Whatever the King says is law is law. And what
spawned from Magna carta is a judge system, a court

(01:38:40):
system where judges would travel in circuits where we get
circuit court judges from. They would travel circuits hearing complaints
and cases in the name of the king. And the
problem that arose is what we have today, which is,
if I hear if my case about your ox tread
upon my crops, and I'm in front of Judge Smith,

(01:39:04):
I might get a different ruling than if I'm in
front of Judge Martin. So the judges started recording what
their rulings would be, all right, So these are called records,
and they started adopting common rules of not only how
their courts would behave like, hey, we'll accept this as evidence,

(01:39:25):
but we won't accept that as evidence. But they also
started saying, well, if, for example, an early case I
read on common law is, hey, you're chasing a fox
in a forest, and then another hunter who wasn't chasing
the foss comes along ahead of you and traps the fox.
Who gets the fox right, two different judges might come
up with different answers to that. But once they started

(01:39:47):
recording their answers, they started coming up with the common law.
And everybody spoiler alert. If you started chasing the fox
and somebody else caught it, it was still your fox.
That's what they deemed fair. That became the common law.
You multiply that by a million decisions and we start
coming up with some consistency, and sooner or later people

(01:40:07):
started writing it down and these rules that would move
from court into the legislature. At some point, when you
start getting into legislatures that are actually doing their job,
they would say, you know, this court has come up
with this rule, this circuit has come up with this rule.
That's a really good rule. We should make it the law,
like official law, and then they would pass a statute

(01:40:28):
and it would be even more entrench But the common
law is just all the let's call them common sense judge,
made whatever you want, laws that were in effect and
had the force of law at the time. That is
the law that was in effect in America when we
declared independence. All of the forefathers, all the founding fathers,
i should say, of the United States, most of them

(01:40:50):
were lawyers. They knew the common law because they were
practicing law at the time, and we said in our
founding documents our law shall be the common law of England.
So when I go to study a law and if
it gets down to some common law issue like who
gets the fox, I might have to go back and
look at some record from a British court and introduce

(01:41:13):
that in my argument in an American court and cite
the founding documents of our country to say this comes
from common law. Here's how common law was practiced back then.
Therefore my client gets the fox. So that is where
common law in this country came from, and it still
applies today. If an issue has not been legislated and
a statue been created to address a particular issue, but

(01:41:36):
that issue was addressed under common law, common law still applies.
Does that answer your question?

Speaker 4 (01:41:42):
Okay, that helps, because that case by case presentation you
gave there certainly points back to the ontological origin of
the law. And I was looking for two things. Just
simply say that one one was nature that William Blackstone
put in his commentaries on the Law of England. He
stated that the two sources are nature and revelation. He

(01:42:03):
specified revelation was holy scripture. And what my point was
is that culturally, our American culture is definitely culturally Christian
to some extent, just like Richard Dawkins made perfectly clear
that he was culturally a Christian. He couldn't escape that
being a child and resident of England that had a

(01:42:23):
lot of the Church of England's principles placed in the
government and political thought and everything else. So he believed
that he was a cultural Christian. He just didn't believe
in that God existed, that Christ was the son of God,
or miracles and stuff like that, because that doesn't compute
with a science only view. He was a naturalist and
there's no reason for me to believe that he would

(01:42:45):
believe in those But my point is is that William
Blackstone made it really clear and his commentaries on the
Laws of England were used in our first law schools,
such as Harvard's first law school, and the Laws of
England that pred those law schools, and this was the
commentary that explained those laws and how they were used.

(01:43:06):
And you're giving me a good correspondence deal, but I
didn't get a causation.

Speaker 1 (01:43:12):
Well, let's clarify when you use the word causation. You're
making a presumption there. Blackstone said that these things come
from nature and revelation. Your homework for today is to
go find everybody that disagreed with him. So you can't
just point to Blackstone and say Blackstone said it air

(01:43:32):
go that's the cause. That was Blackstone's opinion. When I
took law classes, I would learned about hold on a second,
hold on, I'm going to mute you here for a second.
When I took laws, when I was to law school,
I learned about Blackstone. Blackstone is a very well respected jurist,
sort of the jurist of English common law. Absolutely, but

(01:43:53):
I don't agree with him that we get it from revelation.
I think he came up. He was raised in a
context of Christianity, Thomas Aquinas. I'm sure Justin can talk
to us about things like the Church's position on natural
law and all that stuff, and Blackstone was almost assuredly.
I haven't read his biography, probably steeped in that and

(01:44:14):
would naturally point to that as a cause. But I
don't give that any weight. What I what I give
weight to is his reasoning and the reasoning of all
the circuit judges that came up with laws like our
federal rules of evidence don't allow hearsay. Why is that
because our common experience as humans realize that hearsay evidence,

(01:44:35):
the probative value of it, the value that would be
have as testimony, is vastly outweighed by our common experience
that it is extremely unreliable. And therefore we had a
common law rule that hearsay evidence was not admissible under
normal circumstances, and then we made a bunch of exceptions
where it could be admitted, like it's a dying declaration

(01:44:56):
and things like that. So I agree with all of
his reasoning, agree with him that it is that way
because of revelation. So does that make sense to you?
I want to throw it over to Justin. Did you
have any sort of education training into the Church's position
on things like natural law or where how the intersection
of religious law and state law.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
Well, we have to take church history in seminary, but
we don't get into a lot of specifics on that
kind of thing. That'd be like a specialty course that
I didn't take. But I'm not really sure, and this
is just me personally. I'm not really sure anything in
this particular talking point is meaningful. This kind of like saying, well,
somebody did something good, that person was a Christian, therefore,

(01:45:40):
yea Christianity. That's what I'm kind of feeling right now.
But like, we would never accept the argument for any religion.
We wouldn't say, you know, the Islamic Empire helped pioneer
new mathematic inventions, different types of algebra and things like that,
different medicines, But we wouldn't say, yay Islam, you know.
I mean, like we're not going to credit is with that, right.

(01:46:00):
I just I think it's kind of use.

Speaker 1 (01:46:02):
Numbers in America is therefore we're in Arabic country, right.

Speaker 2 (01:46:06):
I just think it's disingenuous to say, well, this person
that did a thing happened to be part of a religion,
Therefore the religion has something to do with it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:14):
Go ahead, Kenny, I believe that.

Speaker 4 (01:46:15):
Okay. Dane, professor of law on Harvard around this time
Joseph's story, said there's never been a period in which
common law did not recognize Christianity as lay in its foundations.
John Adams said he lied to you basically what.

Speaker 1 (01:46:32):
He lied to you, Rehnquist. I'll quote, I'll quote, Chief
Justice Rehnquist said, this country is the founding of this
country and its laws is based exclusively on Christianity. You
need to let people talk here. I know we talked
a while, but let us get to you the founding.
All right, We're going to hold you off for a second. Renquist,

(01:46:53):
much more recent, right, Chief Justice Rehnquist said the Christianity
was the foundation of all of our laws in the
United States. If you go and read all the history
of this, that's just demonstrably false. So instead of quoting
people here and there who say things, which is basically
you know, you're making these arguments from authority kind of thing,

(01:47:14):
I want to understand what justin asked of you, which is, so,
what so people who are Christians said they think Christianity
caused some stuff. So what what should we do with
that information?

Speaker 4 (01:47:26):
Well, I'm just agreeing with Richard Dawkins that religion has
an influence on law and society and government, and the
Christianity most certainly had an influence on the how these
laws started in America. And to say that absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:47:41):
But my question is what do we do with that?
How should that inform our actions today?

Speaker 4 (01:47:46):
Okay, well, it helps us get a very clear perspective
of where religions row is involving government without it encroaching
on the government. So that supports your side, helps your side.
But the fact of the matter is that I'll know
too many atheists that have viewpoints on the law or
ethics that can't be originate from the principles of religion,

(01:48:09):
especially the Torah and Alura.

Speaker 2 (01:48:12):
The Torah says you can own slaves. We had to
unhook ourselves from the Torah.

Speaker 6 (01:48:16):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:48:19):
You can't say that we were relying on the ethics
of the Torah. And then when I bring up one
part of the ethics of the Torah, like, oh well,
so so so what if women didn't have autonomy? So
what if you could rape a woman as long as
she wasn't already betrothed? So what if you could own slaves?
So what if you had to burn your daughter alive
if you were a priest and she was found sleeping

(01:48:41):
with somebody? So what that if she didn't bleed on
a sheet on her wedding night, we get the stoner.
So what about all these horrific laws that come from
the Hebrew Bible. There's a lot of shit in that
Bible that you wouldn't like if we actually turned them
into laws.

Speaker 1 (01:48:53):
So, Kenny, I had to mut you again because you're talking.
So are you still talking? Did you hear anything that
Justin said?

Speaker 6 (01:48:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:49:00):
All of it?

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
Okay? So so can you respond? But rather hold on?
I want to I want to frame this because you're
going off on what about isms? So let's frame this.
Let's keep this focused. All right? Wow, can you please
respond to Justin and him pointing out you said, so
the Torah, especially the Torah, was an ethical foundation of
our law. He pointed out one major problem with it

(01:49:24):
amongst many and you said, so what can you please
respond to that with a little more substance.

Speaker 4 (01:49:29):
Yes, yes, Entitle twenty one criminal law, it's a misdemeanor
crime to use the lord's name in vain in the
way they defined it in law. Was saying, God damn,
Now you can't use the lord's name in vain according
to that law. But that's a modern law, and that's
just an example of something that we set aside and
we don't worry about enforcing.

Speaker 1 (01:49:49):
And no one enforces that law, and so there's do
you know why we don't enforce that law? Hold on, Kenny,
we don't need it. Do you know why that that law?

Speaker 4 (01:50:00):
Do we need slave laws? What do we need slave law?

Speaker 1 (01:50:03):
Kenny? Kenny, Kenny? Do you know why we don't enforce
a law that says you can't take the Lord's name
in vain? Do you know why we don't enforce that law?

Speaker 6 (01:50:14):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:50:14):
I don't have to know. It's just silly to me,
and it doesn't have anything to do with it.

Speaker 1 (01:50:19):
If you don't care about the reasoning behind a point
that you yourself brought up, why should we take you seriously?

Speaker 4 (01:50:25):
Boney, that's not true. I don't agree with that.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
You brought up the law. I asked you why we
don't enforce it, and you said I don't care.

Speaker 4 (01:50:33):
You can't extend Christianny when it comes through before me.

Speaker 2 (01:50:36):
Yeah, we can. Let me ask you something. Fine, Can
you find me one law in the US that came
from the Bible that doesn't exist outside of the Bible
or prefore the Bible. Because most of the laws that
you like that come from the Bible already existed in
culture prior to the Bible. Can you find one that's.

Speaker 4 (01:50:53):
Not find one that's not in the culture, or find
one that is.

Speaker 2 (01:50:56):
Find when that's not already in the culture. Find me
a law from the Bible that that Americans actually follow
that we can't find outside of the Bible somewhere that
that was literally thousands of years before the Bible was written.
We already had those law codes, obviously the most famous
of which would be like the law code of Hammerabbi.
The law code of Hammurabbi doesn't allow you to commit

(01:51:17):
murder either. That was written almost a thousand years prior
to some of the law codes in Deuteronomy.

Speaker 4 (01:51:24):
Are we saying that we got that the law you're
saying that there's it's unequivocal that we got the laws
of Moses from the code of Amarabi. Is that what
you're telling me?

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
Because I know I'm saying that that specific law is Obsoletely,
that specific law is found in the code of Hammerabbi,
It's found in all kinds of law codes. It's not
unique to the Bible. It's not even remotely unique to
the Bible.

Speaker 4 (01:51:48):
It doesn't matter if it's unique. It only matters if
it's original.

Speaker 2 (01:51:51):
No, it's not original. The Code of Hammarabi was written
a thousand years prior to the Toruma.

Speaker 4 (01:51:56):
That doesn't mean that's where Moses got it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:58):
I never said that Moses got What I'm saying is
we don't need the Bible to come up with a
law saying that you shouldn't murder each other. The Bible's
not vital for that.

Speaker 4 (01:52:06):
Well, I never said that. I'm just saying I'm talking
about causation that we did get common law of England
from the scriptures, because John Adams says so, and Story.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):
Says no one cares about that. Try to focus. The
challenge that I gave to you, Kenny, was that can
you find a law that we have in America that
we could only have got from the Bible. We didn't
get it from something outside of the Bible. We don't
need the Bible to know that we shouldn't murder each other.
Almost all ancient societies already have this on the law

(01:52:38):
books way before the Bible. So try another one.

Speaker 4 (01:52:41):
Well, I don't believe that that proves any It does.

Speaker 2 (01:52:44):
It demonstrates that the Bible is not necessary for some
of these foundational laws. So your point is that we
like somehow we're relying on the Bible for our laws,
But you can't show me a single law we have
that we're actually reliant on the Bible.

Speaker 4 (01:52:59):
For why don't you read Book one of Jones's stories,
I mean, excuse me of William Blackstone's commentary and seep
as one.

Speaker 2 (01:53:06):
Why do I care about William Blackstone? I'm asking you,
can you find me a single law that is actually
reliant on the Bible that I couldn't find from some
other culture prior to the Bible. And in fact, almost
half more than half of the Ten Commandments show up
in the forty two Confessions of Mahat. A number of
them also show up way before that in the Sumerian
Righteous Sufferer poem. These these cultural things that we find

(01:53:31):
in the Hebrew Bible, like the Ten Commandments, we're everywhere.
In fact, if you read Exes twenty two, they literally
follow the law code of Hammurabi. You can see that
the laws as they're listed in the Book of Exes
twenty one and twenty two, they're copying the order of
the laws out of the law code of Hammurabi. The
Bible is reliant on the law codes that came before it.

(01:53:53):
It didn't come from God. It's a plagiarized law code.

Speaker 4 (01:53:57):
Well, are you familiar with the concept use in the
Mosaic literature called inverted parallelism.

Speaker 2 (01:54:03):
There's synonymous parallelism. Inverted parallelism, I think is something you
probably made up. Parallelism in Semitic languages.

Speaker 4 (01:54:11):
In commandments, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:54:12):
Been Parallelism in Semitic languages is just when you have
a repetition of lines where you slightly change some of
the words, you can have an inverted parallelism. Sometimes even
gets referred to as like a mirism, but an inverted
parallelism is still the same thing. It's a matter of
repetition using opposite ends.

Speaker 4 (01:54:32):
Okay, well that was from Justin because I can't tell
because my TV doesn't sync with my phone.

Speaker 1 (01:54:39):
Yes, that was justin, Okay Justin.

Speaker 4 (01:54:42):
Let me let me comment on that. Inverted parallelism as
it applies specifically to the Ten Commandments, is that the
First Commandment and the Tenth Commandment has something in common
the Second Commandment.

Speaker 2 (01:54:52):
And oh, that's not called that's not inverted parallelism. That's
not what that means.

Speaker 10 (01:54:56):
Yeah it is, No, it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:54:59):
It's called structure in Semitic languages, what you're referring to
as a chiastic structure.

Speaker 4 (01:55:05):
Yeah, it's chiastic, but it's inverted parallelism is going on there.
There's there's a parallel. And what the parallel is is
that Commandment one, am I am I being heard because
you are Commandment one and Commandment ten has something in common.
And what that is is a sin or crime in thought.
You have thought word indeed in the middle of those commandments,

(01:55:27):
because it works from the outside end the middle comm.

Speaker 2 (01:55:30):
That is not remotely true. That's some nonsense that Christians
think up where to make themselves feel special.

Speaker 4 (01:55:38):
It was a Jewish scholar that came up with it.

Speaker 1 (01:55:41):
You keep citing people that say things as if this
creates a reality. I want to go back here. We're running,
we're late, We're going to have to end the call.
But I want to go back to our So what question?
All right, so let's grant you all the toys. I
don't agree with them, but let's let's give you all
the toys to play with. And that Christianity is where

(01:56:03):
we get the majority of modern laws. Let's just say
that even though I don't agree with that. So what
what do we do with that information?

Speaker 4 (01:56:11):
Well, I just want to acknowledge so that there's a
positive Christian influence on the law and government in relationship
to the separation of church and state. The Christian teaching
tells us what to do with that, and that even
agrees with atheism when they want to separate church and state.
And there's two the two principal reasons Madison gay for
separation church and state agree. One of them agrees with

(01:56:32):
Thomas Jefferson's concern and the other one agrees with the
more religious founding Father's concern.

Speaker 1 (01:56:38):
And basically, okay, well, thank you for that comment. I
think what you said is you want us to acknowledge something,
so I will acknowledge that you're making some interesting points.
We are running out of time, I apologize justin Do
you have any other comments here at the end?

Speaker 2 (01:56:52):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot I can say, but
I know we're at a time. But the whole discussion
is kind of silly. If the discussion is Christianity influenced
the legal system, I agree. It influenced the legal system
so that we can keep and maintain slaves. It influenced
slave trade so that we had entire states secede from
the Union and blame their biblical foundation for that. I mean,

(01:57:16):
you just read the speeches of Jefferson Davis and others.
They clearly cite the Bible as the foundation for slavery.
So yeah, I agree Christianity did influence laws. Did some
Christians like the separation of church and state? Yes, specifically
the Protestants. The Reformation saw a huge push to separate
church and state. And that's because the other Christians were

(01:57:38):
murdering the other Christians. The separation of church and state
came because Christianity was so violent. Other Christians didn't want
to be murdered by other Christians. That's why the separation
of church and state happened. Because they're violent and they
created violent laws. As early as Theodosius the Second, they
were forcefully baptizing Jewish people and they were literally murder

(01:58:00):
people that associated with Arias. Yeah, the rich has always
been a murderous entity.

Speaker 1 (01:58:05):
I was going to go to that same point when
he brought that up. I'm like, Oh, the Christianity is
universally in favor of separation of church and state. Tell
that to the people who died during the Crusades, right,
Like Christianity spread by the sword. So I'm not sure
what you're talking about. Now. We can make arguments about
back then versus now, But I would then make the
argument of Okay, well, presumably this was God words, God's word.

(01:58:27):
Only are you saying that it was so confusing as
to be wrong? And people just mistook the Bible to hey,
endorsed slavery like it says, spread the faith through the sword,
like they did all of these sorts of things. So
I think you handled that very well justin yes, it
did influence the law, and we will acknowledge both ends

(01:58:48):
of that. I will acknowledge that morality that exists in
Christianity does influence our law, but I also will acknowledge
that that morality existed prior to the Torah.

Speaker 6 (01:58:58):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:58:58):
I think it was Bill Ingersoll. Robert Ingersoll was an
attorney in the mid to late eighteen hundreds who said,
and I've pulled this up here because it's right on points.
Some Christian lawyers, some eminent some eminent judges have said
and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation
of all law. Nothing could be more absurd. Long before

(01:59:20):
these commandments were given, there were codes of law in
India and Egypt, laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery, and fraud.
Such laws are as old as human society, as old
as the love of life, as old as industry, as
the idea of prosperity, as old as human love. All
of the ten commandments that are good, we're old. All

(01:59:42):
that were new are foolish. And this is from the
eighteen hundred. So you can cite Blackstone, all cite Ingersol.
I think you can go I did do a story
on this. Go back and find these tablets from eight
hundred years before the Torah, where we have things like
if you murder somebody, this is the punishment. If you steal,

(02:00:05):
this is the punishment. Strangely, there wasn't this thing about
like raping women. That was fine, but that's where all
the laws tend to come from, and it vastly predates
anything in the Torah and is suspiciously duplicative. So I
wanted to thank you justin for the handling most of that. Kenny,

(02:00:25):
I think you need to do some homework on your
ask right, asking us to just acknowledge something that I
think doesn't have any real world implications is okay, but
you've refuse to acknowledge the other half of it. You
want us to give you credit for the hits and
not count you against the misses and that's just not fair.
So justin any other thoughts on that before we wrap up.

Speaker 2 (02:00:47):
Yeah, I love the way you ended that. It kind
of reminds me of like some guy who took one
hundred shots and he's like, I just made fifty baskets. Well,
you also missed fifty baskets as well.

Speaker 1 (02:00:57):
I did, but don't tell people that, Kenny, say that again.
You just missed fifty bastings. That's your life.

Speaker 2 (02:01:02):
Go, you just missed fifty baskets.

Speaker 6 (02:01:05):
So what.

Speaker 1 (02:01:09):
That summarizes the call I made? I made one basket?
Oh did you get a lot of that in your studies?
Do you geting coming and with this level of bias
or slant?

Speaker 11 (02:01:24):
No, no, no.

Speaker 2 (02:01:25):
If you go to a good academic seminary or Bible college,
they don't really engage in as much of the apologetics
the apologetic. When you go to a seminary, the goal
is to give you all the tools necessary to do
your own thinking, to do your own theology, to become
your own theologian. And so they really focus on Greek,
Hebrew history and other secondary principles so that when you

(02:01:48):
pick up the Bible you can actually interpret it. Probably
a good seminary unless it's like super denominationally specific, isn't
really interested in telling you what to believe. They want
to train you to do everything yourself.

Speaker 1 (02:02:00):
That's a good point. Did you enjoy your time there?

Speaker 2 (02:02:03):
Actually, I really loved it. I loved the learning process.
I had a great time at seminary. Even when I
was in church ministry, I had a great time in
church ministry. I don't have any bad memories from being
in the church. But the reality of the matter is
I love truth and it just turns out that Christianity
is not true.

Speaker 1 (02:02:21):
Yeah, I agree. I don't see any good reason to
believe it's true either. And I have a lot of
very dear Christian friends. They're all good people. I don't
think they want the government taking over religion. And I
think a lot of our callers today were sort of
sensitive about that that, you know, sort of this so
what attitude is sort of betraying of not wanting to

(02:02:42):
recognize that when the rubber hits the road. What matters,
in my opinion is we need to keep our faith
out of our public policy making, and that means don't
let it get a toe hold in government, because we
would rather know where certain diseases come from based on science,
rather than oh this person needs an exorcism or something

(02:03:04):
like that, which is where you get when you allow
that to creep in. So I want to thank you, Justin.
This has been absolutely fabulous watching you work. I really
had a fun. I would love to be back on
it anytime here and we will make the producers. I
think you're on a lot. I've seen they've recognized your talent.

(02:03:24):
You're on a lot on the Athey experience. I think
you're on next month as well, fairly soon, is that right?

Speaker 2 (02:03:29):
I think so.

Speaker 1 (02:03:30):
Yeah, So keep an eye out for Justin. He's a
superstar I do have. We did get some super chats.
I'm sorry I haven't read them earlier, but I am
going to read them. They were we have a document
or we we list them, and I was not oriented right,
So I apologize for the delay here. But we did
get some Zurif moonpaw for two dollars said Jesus is
a divine soul sorcerer Lich. I've always appreciated that that humor.

(02:03:54):
It's sort of this definitional thing that it's intended to
poke people like you're poking the bear, like Hey, it's
a zombie. Right, This meets the definition of zombie, and
they don't like that. I don't know how productive it is,
but it sure is funny when you when you think
about it.

Speaker 2 (02:04:08):
There's a really funny line from the heretic Emperor Julian
when he talks about Christians being upset that they don't
worship Jesus, but he rephrases it says that they get
bent out of shape if you don't properly adore a corpse.
It's like a corpse is a hot move, buddy.

Speaker 1 (02:04:29):
You know it evokes in my head, it evokes emperor's
new clothes. Right, you're not properly adoring then the new
clothes on the emperor, Like, don't you see them? It's
the same thing. That's a really good way pointing putting it.
That's good. We also had Joe Jiggitty for two dollars.
Doug would never lie to you. Igneus is bliss. I

(02:04:52):
don't know what that is is that you're thinking. Card.

Speaker 2 (02:04:54):
Doug is behind me on the shelf. He's got googly
eyes that Doug.

Speaker 1 (02:04:59):
I know, Doug.

Speaker 2 (02:05:00):
Doug is the rock of salvation with his Coreydemptik's Sharon Stone.

Speaker 1 (02:05:06):
I love Doug. Jason Jones gave ten dollars. Thank you
very very much, Jason. I've seen every single Atheist Experience show.
Thank you Justin and the Cross Examiner for this new one.
You are welcome. I hope it comes in in the
top one thousand shows best shows in the history of
the XP plug here. If you want to look at

(02:05:28):
old shows, you can go to the XPU website the
ACA website and look at all the old stuff. You
see the same issues over and over again, but you
see each person's, each host's unique take on each one,
and some may resonate better with you than others. So
Justin does it one way, I do it another, everybody
does it differently, and it all sort of combines to
make this great tapestry that's available on the ACA website.

(02:05:51):
Doctor Joanne Ketch sober coach for professionals. Now, does that
mean she's a coach who is sober and she coaches
professionals or does she coached professionals on how to be sober?

Speaker 2 (02:06:02):
A little bit of both. Doctor Joe's a good friend
of mine and she is in fact sober. Okay, Yeah,
she's a licensed therapist she's got a PhD. She knows
to talk about it. She works with a lot of
people recovering from addiction. Addiction, yes, and also from deconstruction.
You can see why we cross paths.

Speaker 1 (02:06:24):
Absolutely. Yeah, I'd be fascinated to hear from her on
the intersection between addiction and religious beliefs. That's that's got
to be a fascinating topic. So she gave nine to
ninety nine, one penny less than Jason. I got to
point that out, doctor Joan, But thank you, that's very,
very generous. Four out of ten are about God. I
think she's talking about the Ten Commandments. I assume why

(02:06:46):
didn't he give up one or two that say, don't
own people, don't sexually assault. I assume that that means essay,
but narcissism won't make room for that one hundred percent
I could. There's first three are like I'm a jealous
God type of commandments right about me? Yeah, change two
of them to own other humans's property and don't rape anyone.

(02:07:08):
Just don't do either of those. And look at that.
Atheists making the Ten Commandments. I won't say infinitely, but
orders of magnitude more moral than it exists now in
the Bible, and it's hard to get people to disagree
that that would be an improvement. It's always a good
take to say, hey, what if we took these two
and just said, like, change the three into one and

(02:07:28):
then don't own other people's property and don't rape anybody.
And it's hard to find anybody that disagrees that would
be better. But to be fair, it wouldn't be like
a round ten number.

Speaker 2 (02:07:39):
We couldn't. It was base ten falls apart at that point.

Speaker 1 (02:07:42):
Well it's not now. If you go to Louisiana, they
passed a law to put the ten Commandments in the classroom,
and when you count them, there's actually eleven because yet again,
what happened they couldn't agree on which ten? So yep,
and then we have Gretchen z for three dollars and
eleven cents. I don't know if that's a message. What
a chuckle fuck? I think she's talking about me. I'm sorry,

(02:08:04):
Gretchen for whatever I did. I apologize. I will chuckle less.

Speaker 2 (02:08:10):
Gretchen's a friend of the channel. I know you're talking
about the it's an inside Joey from a prior live
stream on my channel.

Speaker 1 (02:08:17):
I love you Gretchen. Goodness, thank you Gretchen. Very generous
from everybody. Uh so that's it. That's going to wrap
up our show. I see we did get another caller here.
I'm sorry, Jerry, call back another time. We are definitely
way over. I've had a lot of fun with you, Justin.
I would like to bring up our backup post if
we have a moment. Is Jamie there, mister Jamie? How

(02:08:41):
are you now? Jamie's coming at us is my studio
in Austin and the studio Mike is not under his control.
They don't trust him, so they had to unmute him.
So how are you doing, Jamie?

Speaker 11 (02:08:54):
I had comments about some of the calls, but all
of that was blown straight out of my head with
my just casually denigrating my homeland and making sweety comments
about the Anglican Church. I wonder you feel the same
way about Episcopalians here in the UK, because it's the
same religion. Chief, And I think I actually think I

(02:09:14):
was backing up you two when he last called, and
he was talking about Islam in the UK and how
that's been treated and how it's an invasion and stuff,
and I'm like, man, Mike, weh I got such a
hate boner from my homeland. Yes, we can agree that
there's certain things that are happening over there that are
a little bit or well Ian. Not a big fan
of some of the digital sensorship stuff that's going on

(02:09:36):
right now, but I was there last year, and I
don't know whether they would the cops were just having
a break or something, but no one was stopping me
and Richard Gilliver of Talk even Fame from having a nice,
lovely conversation with some Jehovah's witnesses on a steep street corner,
and it didn't look like it was riot police coming
to stop the seven Seventh Day Adventists handy out pamphlets

(02:10:01):
on the corner of New Street, which is literally the
most busy foot thoroughfare in the city of Birmingham, so
the busiest street in the second biggest city in the country.
I don't know where you're coming from, because I wasn't
seeing all the oppression you're talking about. But I.

Speaker 1 (02:10:19):
Do have a question for you. Did I have it
right in my recollection of the person who was arrested
for praying, were they in fact trespassing or doing something else?
And that was in fact, what they were arrested for,
are you not.

Speaker 11 (02:10:30):
They were praying in a manner that they were saying
that please save these poor souls from the burning depths
of health, for their depravity to mothers going in to
get abortions. And they were doing it in the front
door or basically across the street. They were essentially harassing
people outside of outside of clinics. So yeah, they were

(02:10:53):
taken away for public disorder, not for praying.

Speaker 1 (02:10:56):
Right, Okay, yeah, that's usually the case. I will say,
we are are in a unique spot in the United
States as far as freedom of speech goes. Other countries
around the world have made different judgment calls as to
where the line is, and they make some recognition that, yes,
speech of a certain type, if you get to extreme
Nazi nationalists, kill people type of rhetoric, can actually be

(02:11:17):
against the public good and they will arrest people and
put them in jail for it. And that's a judgment
called that those countries have made.

Speaker 11 (02:11:23):
One last thing, because I know there are certain statutes
that prevent certain religious speaks, not all religious speech is
made free speech in the UK, and that's why, Yes,
you might say that's oppressive, but it's also the reason
why the westpro Baptist Church can't do what they do
in the UK, and also the scientologists can't really do

(02:11:46):
what they do in the UK. And maybe you call
me missed the high behind the skirts of the government,
but I'm pretty glad that people are stopping those parasites
from praying on p and those bigots spouting their hatred.
But maybe I'm just one of those.

Speaker 1 (02:12:05):
I think it is interesting because whenever I talk to
anybody else from a legal background around the world, I
recognize my own bias from being raised in the United States,
where you're expected to have the thickest skin possible and
everybody has to be a John Wayne tough when it
comes to this sort of speech. You know, you go

(02:12:27):
to Great Britain, you can get thrown in jail for
using racial insults, for example. And people are surprised by
that because they think, oh, US and Great Britain were
very the same. No, they make very different public policy
decisions and they do change over time. But we need
to recognize that would I agree with somebody being arrested
for just simply praying? No, would I agree for somebody
being arrested for repeatedly harassing people that were minding their

(02:12:48):
own business. Probably, I don't think harassment's a good idea,
So I thank you for explaining that. Any other comments
on it before we go?

Speaker 6 (02:12:57):
Wow?

Speaker 11 (02:12:57):
So anybody we do think that beans were bricks food
and biscuits should be dunked in tea? So fucking what
do we know?

Speaker 1 (02:13:03):
Nothing?

Speaker 2 (02:13:04):
You just pull this all right one, Jamie? I love you,
but I don't know the one thing we might not
build agree on is whether or not the biscuit and
a cookie or the right names.

Speaker 11 (02:13:13):
For your starting TI podcast on that we just don't
have fun justin.

Speaker 1 (02:13:19):
All right, everybody, Well, thank you so much to the
cast crew, all of our hosts here, and we will
see you next time. Bye bye. Please start.

Speaker 2 (02:13:33):
Start watch Talkie than live Sundays at one pm Central.

Speaker 1 (02:13:44):
Visit tiny dot c C, slash y t t A
and call into the show at five one two nine
nine two four two.

Speaker 2 (02:13:51):
Connect to the show online at tiny dot c c
s hauled
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