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Glen Scrivener Pressed on his Debate with Alex O'Connor: Full Breakdown || SLP635 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: The first thing people see is the dumbest thing I say.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: When everyone else comes to the UK, they say, well, I've come to a Christian country.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: Have a look.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, Glenn, you idiot! The lights go on.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: How are you feeling?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think he might be my favourite YouTuber.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: So it's been a great privilege to meet you finally in the flesh.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: The topic you were debating.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did Christian faith give us our belief in kindness, equality, freedom, and consent?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: My biggest problem with Christianity as responsible for these developments is its attachment to Judaism.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: But let's not get caught up on that verse.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well no, but this is what I'm saying, is this is my issue.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think you're going to the Bible in a way that's alien to the way that anybody has ever gone to the Bible.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: Once you read the Bible as a narrative that culminates in Christ, you've got a very different document on your hands.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: The true son, the seed of Abraham, the heir of the cosmos, that jeez.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: And they knew.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: What did he say there?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: The heir of the cosmos.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: That jeez.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And they knew.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Did he say Jesus?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: You then go to the issue of consent.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're going wrong, Glenn, respectfully.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: That is what Paul is describing here.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: That is not what Paul is saying describing.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think a can of worms has been opened here.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, when Alex was going through that, I was looking at it and going, oh cramps.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Is that really what that passage is saying?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: Alex is right that this is not identical with the modern view of consent.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: I hope this won't be the last time we get to do something like this.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think my my one reg I have a lot of regrets, actually.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: The one thing I would love to see with Alex, I think, is.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was the 23rd of September 2025.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The three of us, you, me, and Naomi Brahm from Speak Life, we went to Oxford, Yarnton Manor, so that you could record a conversation with Alex O'Connor, posted by Justin Briley as part of his new series called Uncommon Ground.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Two and a half hour conversation.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: It was meant to be one and a half, but yeah.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: We could go.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: The whole thing has just gone out on YouTube.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth saying that we're recording this actually significantly before people have seen it.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't know what bits people are going to be focusing on.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: We don't know what you hate about me right now.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: So we'll just have to we'll just have to guess about what people are hating about about me.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, let's see how many we we get right.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The topic you were debating was the question: Did Christian faith give us our belief in kindness, equality, freedom, and consent?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The lights go on.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're about to begin this conversation about it, so Connor.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: How are you feeling?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: My mind goes completely blank.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um really my I mean, a lot of people will think it it didn't really fill up much in the following two and a half hours.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: But whenever I'm doing anything like that, and like even if I know what I'm about to say, like you don't know what's gonna happen in a in a two and a half hour conversation.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I guess it's okay for your mind to be blank because you need to be responsive.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: But but even if I'm meant to be giving a talk and even if I'm meant to sort of fill the next hour with with thoughts, um, if you ask me three minutes before I'm about to do something, I am at my my most zen.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: Like I'm just utterly, there's just mmm.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, yeah, but I was I was I was too nervous going in, and I think I think it kind of shows.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: I I I I I was too nervous and I went into serious mode.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Should we start by watching the trailer?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: Let's bring it at the front.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: The first thing people see is the dumbest thing I say.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: When everyone else comes to the UK, it's like, well, I've come to a Christian country.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: Haven't I think that?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: The way we think of charity today, hospitals the way we think of hospitals today.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Christians are rescuing the discarded infants from the dust bins of the streets and raising them in.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Unthinkable.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Without having come through centuries and centuries of Christianisation, that might be the development that you're making on Tom Holland.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: These same aspects of morality can appear in other civilizations and cultures.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: I just really want to know where you think these other people got it from.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: My biggest problem with Christianity is its attachment to Judaism.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Ex 2229.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: That can't be it.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Who has overturned patriarchy more than Western society?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you can point to like the gay rights movement, to feminism, even to industrial abortion, and still say that, you know, ultimately.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's not there's some Christian influence going on here.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're mischaracterizing me there.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: We we are the heirs of a tradition that makes us see slavery as obviously wrong.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: You have to also own the Christian element of the anti-abolitionist movement, which is just as strong.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Who is actually misreading the story of the Exodus?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the abolitionists?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the Black Church, is it?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Black Church got it right.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that they did.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Because they know what they're doing, don't they?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: They know what they're doing.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: Justin Briley, Peter Byrum, all that yeah, that think faith crowd, they know what they're doing.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing the world has seen of uh this conversation.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Any just thoughts on that trailer?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, j yeah, just they they they pulled out the thing that I immediately regretted, having said it, you know, during during the uh the dialogue where I say, you know, anyone who comes to Britain is is uh consciously coming to a Christian country and thinks of it in those sorts of terms.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um that that is to overstate the case massively.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, what kind of studies am I drawing on there?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: And and even if it were the case, um, you know, I've got all my work ahead of me um in in terms of showing how uh relevant that is to to the uh to the topic at hand.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: But um yeah, so that this is what happens, you know, in two and a half hours.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: You'll say stuff, and um yeah, yeah, but uh yeah.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: So the first thing people see is the stupidest thing Glenn says.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: If that if that's why you're angry with me, I'm sorry.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So should we start by watching Alex summarising your view?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think he did a stellar job apart from one word, but we'll see.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to me that that Glenn is proposing what has come to be quite a popular view at the moment, especially among Christians, but also among some secular historians.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: I just hate my listening face throughout this whole thing.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: Just I just I just hate What do you mean?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm I'm just trying I'm trying to lean in, but now I see it.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's it looks like I'm leaning with my chin and just kind of I don't know, it it just looks so superior.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: I just want to smack that face.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: The finger on the mouth, is it?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: The finger on the mouth, like I'm saying that I'm not speaking.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's a sign that I'm not speaking, I'm listening.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: But we all do stuff that we don't realize we're doing.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, but I do wonder how yeah, I do wonder how like intangibles like that contribute to people's reception of a debate.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and how it comes across.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: Body language.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Body language let us know what you think.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: Now is that the thing you hate me for?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: If so, once again, I'm sorry.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: I interrupted Alex.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: You were saying, Alex, Western civilization, um warts and all, as it were, the good stuff, the bad stuff, just the nature of of the West, is more thoroughly indebted to Christianity than at least has been given credit for in the past, you know, sort of hundred or two hundred years in in academia and enlightenment thinking, that what we often perceive of as secular advancements against church doctrine and religious thinking uh is in fact a blossoming of the Christian spirit.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: So when we look at things like uh Enlightenment values and freedoms and equality and all of these kinds of things, and we think of them as you know, Enlightenment thinkers asserting these against religious influence, they're actually secretly wearing Christian clothing, hence the air we breathe, because you don't even notice that it's there.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's been so successful, in other words.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So what was the word?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: The word was blossoming.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: And um and that's what I say in the debate, like straight away, I I I say, Alex, you've done a great job, but I would not say blossoming.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't think uh every development in the West is a blossoming of Christianity.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you can point to like the gay rights movement, to feminism, even to industrial abortion, and still say that, you know, ultimately makes you very much.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're mischaracterizing me there.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: You mischaracterise me there, quite quite substantially there.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: I I think it's uh it's a totally pagan practice, which we are um heading full steam towards.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think euthanasia is another kind of pagan practice.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: I just think the the way you are able to forward some some quite pagan ends in a modern society, and there's lots of pagan stuff that we do, um, you do tend to have to use some Christian language in order to do it, or Christian-ish language in order to do something profoundly unchristian.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: I go out of my way in the Air We Breeze to say, you know, West is not best, and while the West does depend on Christianity, Christianity does not depend on the West.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: And there are plenty of um things that are more in line with the spirit of Christ in other Christian traditions that have flourished in other parts of the world, all that sort of stuff.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: But but also not every development that has happened in the West is a blossoming, it's it's not a coming to fruition of Christianity.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: There are very clearly developments that have happened that are quite beyond the bounds of Orthodox Christianity.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and so I kind of make a little distinction between, well, there's Tom Hollands of circa 2018, 2017, when he's starting to write Dominion and he sort of writes in the New Statesman about things.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: There's Tom Hollands of 2026, who's in a different place again, and there's, you know, Reverend Glenn Scrivener, um, a confessional Christian, um, who definitely does think there's all sorts of developments that have happened in the West that are far beyond the bounds of Orthodox Christianity.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's quite a helpful thing to to establish, isn't it?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: That you're not saying that every direction the West has gone since uh Christianity has arrived has been uh kind of flourishing, but that actually it can get distorted and go off in all sorts of wrong directions.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: So my my book finishes the the last two chapters are all about this.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so The Kingdom Without the King is chapter nine that's all about how we've tried to sever ourselves from the roots.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: The Christian virtues are now kind of divorced from the story that birthed them, they're divorced from one another, they're running amok in the world, and we get to the place where trans rights are human rights, is you know, a statement that is, as I say here, unthinkable without the Christian Revolution, but miles you know across the line from what whatever Orthodox Christianity is saying about men and women and gender, right?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I go out of my way, both in the book and in this dialogue, I think, to kind of say the developments we see in the West are unthinkable without the Christian Revolution.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: That does not mean at all that they are a blossoming of Christian thought.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's the disagreement that keeps coming back in this conversation.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's where we get stuck, really.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if we could go now actually to a part where Alex talks about the sin committed on both sides of this debate.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because this might be a good way in some of the things.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: The sin I think both both sides, as it were, commit on this issue is I think I forgot he said sin is to say that in the same way that you might say exposure in the ancient world, it does seem to be that we have records of Christians being the ones who are sort of anti-this.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: But just to explain what exposing means for those who perhaps aren't familiar with the terminology.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Exposing infants, largely girls, the disabled, leaving them in a rubbish dump to sort of die of exposure and be taken by dogs, or putting them down a well or drowning them in rivers, killing them.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: It does seem to be that we have records of Christians being the ones who were sort of anti this, who are sort of the antidote to exposure.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, yeah, happy to grant that.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't want to overstep the influence of Christianity in particular over the entire development of the Western tradition.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way I might want to talk about the way that the church has stood in the way of a number of important uh instances of progress towards the West today.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't mean moral progress in an objective sense, I just mean movement from where it was to where it is.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: And this this is the interesting dance that we are in, where certainly the the force of the rhetoric coming from Alex uh seems to be based on the fact that the church has stood in has stood in the way of what is objectively good and true and beautiful.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: Except that Alex doesn't believe in what is objectively good and true and beautiful.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so he has to kind of row back from that.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll we'll get onto that when we get onto his sort of ethical emotivism and whether that's any help in these kinds of conversations.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean, the first acknowledgement that Alex makes uh about the standing against infanticide points, I th I think is vast.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: I I think that is a huge contribution um to Western civilization, to the world that's been rolled out through international law.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: But but the first peoples who have ever outlawed that practice were Christians, and it then led to a radical rethink of what does orphan care mean and that sort of thing.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um it it was a profoundly biblical movement.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Alex is happy to grant that.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's interesting.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to pin down exactly the nature of your disagreement here, because obviously you're a Christian, Alex wouldn't call himself a Christian.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Alex is happy to grant that Christianity has profoundly shaped our values in the West.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So is it that you just go further?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: I guess what he then doesn't want is for Christians to take uh the credit for every single progressive development that the world has ever seen.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I can see that if if he does think that Christians are basically saying, um, do you like this development in the West?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's a blossoming of Christianity.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um whereas, you know, I'm I'm very happy to say that, for instance, while I think the civil rights movement um was a profoundly Christian thing, led by the Reverend Dr.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Martin Luther King Jr., I don't think that other marches that seem like um Selma are the same.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think Stonewall is the same as Selma, and I certainly don't think that the Stonewall charity in the UK is like Um the Civil Rights Movement and those sorts of things.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not trying to claim that every single development that claims to be progressive is in fact Christian.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: I would say that our very notion that progress is good is a profoundly Christian one.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, can I just establish at this point this is all very well.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Who cares?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Who cares?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: You're right, not to say that in a flippant way, but um, you're obviously not debating here is Christianity true?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are the stakes of this debate?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're trying to argue um the degree to which our values have been so utterly shaped by Christianity.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Alex is willing to grant some of that.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's not he's not an atheist agnostic who says religion poisons everything, which is what you're gonna debate Stephen Woodford on very soon.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: But he has questions about the degree to which your thesis is right.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Do Christians need to agree with Glenn Scribner on this?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: No, you absolutely don't.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: And and I'm predicting that in the comments to this debate there'll be a whole bunch of people saying, I'm a Christian, but I don't agree with Glenn and I don't understand why he's debating this topic.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's fine.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: I I I and I can see why they might say that.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it would be a bit like, if you ask me, it would be a bit like being a missionary to Cairo and not caring about Islam.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: To be a missionary to the post-Christian West and not understand the post-Christian West would be a little bit like being a missionary to the Muslim world and never studying Islam.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: And and you could do wonderful things if you're a missionary to the Muslim world and you could lift up Jesus in all sorts of ways, but then you're going to start to be heard to say certain things by your Muslim hearers.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you don't understand where they're coming from and why they're objecting in the sorts of ways that they're objecting, I don't think you'll actually get very far as a missionary.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: I think I am a missionary to the post-Christian West, and I'm really trying to understand it quite a lot.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think there are several myths that are imprisoning our secular friends that we really need to release them from.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: There are several myths, such as the church are the baddies, right?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: In the story, the the church is absolutely cast as this benighted force for evil that has shackled us for so long and stood in the way of this thing called progress, which exists as this sort of um transcendent ideal, but we don't believe in transcendent ideals.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think the myths that are imprisoning our secular friends are that the church of the baddies, that modern secular values are self-evident, that we are neutral and that we are born neutral, and that it's just obvious to believe in compassion and equality and progress and freedom.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and those myths are so they so grip the mind that even when such a sensible and modest thesis like Tom Holland's thesis can strike people as outrageous, you know.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think actually, um the the ones who are reacting disproportionately are those who are finding Tom Holland's thesis to be outrageous or something that need that needs to be, you know, countered in any way.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_03: I th I think Tom Holland is saying something very, very pedestrian that 20 centuries of Christianization has done a number on us, and that the road that got us here went through profoundly Christian terrain, and that that that has marked us.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think that is the really obvious thing.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: And to object to that is the the remarkable thing, to object to that and go, like so why why why would people object to that?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think people object to that because they still live with certain myths that the church of the bad guys, that people are neutral, that you can organize your culture according to secular principles that are self-evident and self-reinforcing, and and and that you can continue a society without actually attending to its spiritual roots.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um and what strikes me in this conversation is that whenever the shoe was on the other foot, and and Alex was asked, well, what positively can you contribute to, you know, how would Alex have ended the slave trade?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: How would how, you know, what what could an ethical emotivist or any other kind of secular ethicist, what could they say to the practice of infanticide?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: And when those answers are wanting, I think it becomes very obvious why this subject is really important.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it also explains why we are seeing so many people coming to faith in the post-Christian West precisely by paying attention to what Tom Holland is is is raising.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: The Ion Hirsiellis of the world and the Louise Perry's of the world and the Mary Harringtons of the world and the Neil Fergusons of the world, they they are pulling at these same threads and they are they are finding Jesus at the other end of it.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now, that might not, if you're a Christian listening into this, that might not be your way of um of going into the gospel with people, and it's it's not even the the m the predominant way that I do it either.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: But as a missionary to the post-Christian West, I think we all need to be grappling with these kinds of issues.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: You don't have to agree with me, but I think you do have to grapple with all the issues that this this conversation is is surfacing.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, thank you.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, you've convinced me that this was worth having this conversation.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we went to the pub and we had a good time with Alex, and it was yeah, and it was worth it for that.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: But we had a great day.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: But no, this is this is helpful.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we should get to where Alex's objections maybe really bite.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: He kind of goes to the Bible and just questions really?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: This text is the foundation for compassion, equality, consent, etc.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so he pulls out things in the Bible that are, what should we say?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: Objectionable, you know.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Strike the modern hearer as uh discordant.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right, yeah.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's hear him set this up.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: My biggest problem with Christianity as responsible for these developments is its attachment to Judaism, to the extent that in the early church, Marcion famously thought that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same God of Jesus.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: He produces this text called the Antithesis, where he compares the doings and sayings and doings of the Old Testament God and Jesus and says these cannot be the same kind of person.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as you've got this attachment to this Jewish tradition, I find it very difficult to square how you have these kinds of condemnations that Christianity allows people to have of Roman practices, without them similarly indicting the God that I'm told is the God that sort of came down into the into the figure of Jesus.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: They sort of have this excusability with the Jewish God.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now you might say that the very means by which they're able to look at the Jewish God and say, these are things which trouble me and things I don't like, you know, is essentially Christian.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: But if that's the case and you're kind of left with a paradox as to what you're talking about when it comes to Christian values.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he then goes back to the issue of infanticide, which you brought up earlier, and he was happy to grant, you know, Christians played a big role in in challenging that practice.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he he goes to the Old Testament and he pulls out first of all a verse from Exodus.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Exodus uh chapter twenty-two, verse twenty-nine.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's this very strange injunction to sacrifice your children to God, which is like immediately renegotiated where God says, you know, as with the Lamb.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Please pull it up.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of debate about exactly what that means.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Some people think that this actually would be an instance of you will um uh I I forget the term, but you you know, you sacrifice someone else in their place, but on the eighth day you give your firstborn to the Lord.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's literally remembered as sacrifice to animals as well.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: While you're looking at that, I'll give you another example, because that one's a bit more controversial, but you know, I could easily point to it, especially as an ancient reader looking back and saying, like, look at what was present there.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, Christianity itself is predicated on a human sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of Jesus.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now I could say look at this strange intuition that nobody thought, you know, like nobody can it seems to sort of have a qualm with this kind of thing.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, in some Old Testament passages, Israel does end up having a qualm with human sacrifice.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a renegotiation of the principle.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I could say, but look, then you have this Roman tradition which looks at the human sacrifice of the Gauls and says, no, that's terrible, we're going to invade and we're going to civilize them and say, see, so the the sort of respect for the sanctity of humans and the abolition of of human sacrifice, we're really indebted to the Romans for that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would just be a bit too simple.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it absolutely would.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: And and this is why Did you find the verse?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Are you are you talking about Exodus 22 29?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: I th maybe I've got the birth wrong.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: What does that say?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: Look it up at home.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Exodus 22 29.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: You shall not delay to offer from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: That can't be a what's next?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: Seven days it will shall be with his mother on the eighth day.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: On the eighth day I'm sorry.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: On the eighth day you shall give it to me.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: The firstborn in the same way that you do with the oxen and the sheep so it's but they were they were ransomed and and I don't know what the what the price was but but that was the the cost of that life was given towards the temple as as money.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: In exactly that's what they say but in in that particular instance it's even within Exodus you're doing yeah elsewhere in Exodus.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: Elsewhere okay before we set up Exodus 22.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_03: First of all I I say and I make clear in this and I should have returned to it and just kept on returning to it the Jews were against infanticide.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: The Jews were against infanticide in the centuries before at the around the year dots I mean Philo was against it.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: He thought infanticide was worse than murder right worse than because it it's such a helpless image bearer of God right that you are murdering and thou shalt not kill right and so the Jews were remarkably against infanticide when almost nobody is against infanticide.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's significant.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: So even people who believe the Old Testament and not the New Testament were still against infanticide.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right and and so so d so Alex saying that we need we need to ditch the Hebrew Bible and the the problem is the attachment to Judaism.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well well A does he think that infanticide is wrong and if so why one of one of his favorite philosophers and somebody who he has learnt a lot of moral philosophy from is Peter Singer who is pro-infanticide.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: And interestingly I agree with Peter Singer that it is Christianity that has given us our taboo against infanticide and you know both I and Peter Singer think that Christianity has shaped our moral standards.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's just that he thinks it's an unfortunate thing and I think it's a wonderful thing.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_03: Now I want to ask does does Alex you know agree with Peter Singer that infanticide is sometimes acceptable?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously Singer would use words like involuntary euthanasia, ethical involuntary euthanasia, um aka infanticide right so where where has anybody ever stood against this practice such that it is it is just so abhorrent to our modern Western liberal secular minds that you know that that there's this practice called infanticide.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: Where has that come from?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: It has always come from the people of the book people of the Old Testament and the people of the New Testament.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: Now there's one thing I'll grant to Alex and I think he's absolutely right and Christians need to do a lot better when we say the Bible has given us this view of infanticide or this view of slavery or this view of sex and sexuality or whatever it is.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because what we can do is is a very reductionistic thing.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas I think what we really want to be heard as saying is that the the scriptures as a whole culminating in Christ and him crucified and with centuries of reflection upon this this scriptural corpus has given us the these views on you know infanticide or or whatever it is.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think Christians themselves we have often sort of said look the biblical view on X, Y, or Z.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then we might have offered a proof text or we might not have even offered a proof text.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so it becomes it becomes difficult to to sort of show people how is the Bible relating to the ethical standards that the people of the book are taking so if if if he wants to um if he wants to foreground that as an issue I think I think that's something that Christians can own and say we need to do a lot better.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the thing that Alex needs to to then figure out is if he thinks the Old Testament is pro-infanticide, how did they get to the view in at least by the first century BC that the Romans were entirely wrong and it was an abhorrent and it was you know the people of the book didn't read the book the way that Alex was reading the book.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: At the center of the human story stands a man who doesn't just claim to be one more person from this world.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: He keeps saying he is our maker and he has come in person.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: We want to immerse you in another way of seeing and to show you a different vision for God, the world and you without assuming any prior knowledge we'll be looking specifically at the vision for life that Jesus gives us the meaning of life is to know the love of this God.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: This is the beating heart of the Christian story.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Do you want in on this?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: The three invite you in the two determine the world.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: Be one with the Son of God discover life according to Jesus at 321course.com So interestingly at at the end uh Justin sort of asks is there anything you want to go away and think think harder on and and I I said I'll go away and think harder on Exodus 22 and Alex seems to sort of say oh you know it's it's not a big deal or you know that kind of thing.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Exodus 2229 2229 I think it's easy to say that that's not I I think it probably was but it's it's easy enough to say that it's not but it's interesting.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know it it just seems like you can raise all sorts of things in the Bible even if that verse was on Alex's side a lot more again you would have to you would have to show why that reading is necessary or that it was widespread and and then you would have to explain why the people of the book were actually anti-infantic which is kind of what like the whole debate is not really about that verse.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: The whole debate is the movement of the people of the book has contributed to our moral sensibilities.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think that point stands whatever you do with Exodus 22.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay so you're saying both atheists and Christians can have the problem of sort of cherry picking verses from the Bible rather than taking the full sweep of scripture culminating in Christ.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah yeah yeah yeah and and Alex kind of agrees with you on that maybe that's kind of what he's trying to illustrate in plucking this verse out of context.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not get caught up on that verse.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: Well no but this is what I'm saying is this is my issue with with I think you're going to the Bible in a way that's alien to the way that anybody has ever gone to the Bible.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like like to go into a verse and take out of it as as a a timeless principle that stands by itself and probably could cause somebody to kill their son.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's just not the way I mean you know Christians you know that they don't read their Bibles that way.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: You must know Christian history you know that that's not the way that Christendom has read the Bible or Judaism.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Or Judaism are you right about reading the Bible that way and the rest of the what I'm what I'm doing is I'm showing it's it's a bit too simple to I think Alex's thing is I'm trying to demonstrate because obviously the the view the the sort of approach that I'm taking here you will see as illegitimate and I think is illegitimate to some degree.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's got some even within Exodus but yes.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes but then Exodus is a series of of sort of renegotiations over scriptural history.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean that's that's Dan McClellan language renegotiations.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not the first person renegotiations yeah it's Dan McClellan but anyway.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of respond to him by going back to the issue of uh Abraham and Isaac and uh showing I suppose trying to demonstrate well yeah you do need to take this story within the context of the entire scriptures culminating with Christ and that changes how that passage comes across this is the weirdest thing I do but let yeah let's let's let's check out let's check out the weirdest thing I do.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: They might be used to it.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: The famous story of Abraham and Isaac of course Abraham doesn't sacrifice Isaac in the end but it's the willingness to commit indeed the sacrifice of his own child in reverence to this sort of strange ancient philosophical belief that they have which we would never recognize today that you should sacrifice your own children on on behalf of your philosophical convictions.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: So the the the whole issue is Abraham is promised a seed he and Sarah are totally childless and after barrenness miraculously they finally have a son he is the seed of Abraham which is utterly messianic terms he is the the heir of the cosmos the hope of the world here is um this child and then God goes and tested Abraham and says Abraham and he said to him here I am take your son your only son Isaac whom you love go to the land of Moriah Mount Moriah is where the temple is so a mountain in the region of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you now even within Genesis you're thinking but he's the hope of the world he's the heir of the cosmos he's the seed of Abraham and he's being told to be sacrificed and somehow through that sacrifice what?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: Because the the whole world is going to be blessed through this famous golden child.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_03: And he's to be sacrificed as a burnt offering which is a sacrifice of atonement on a mountain in the region of Jerusalem as the story progresses the son has the wood on his back the father has the fire and the knife the tools of judgment and he's trudging up a mountain in the region of Jerusalem on his way to become a sacrifice of atonement this one who is the seed of Abraham who is the heir of the cosmos.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: Abraham says we will worship there and then we will come back to you which the New Testament picks up as he seems to have some kind of trust that through sacrifice and out the other side somehow the chosen one will come back to us and obviously in that moment the angel of the Lord intercepts judgment and says now I know that you fear me because you uh have not withheld from me your son your only son and he provides the ram in the thicket as a substitute for Isaac the promised child.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so on that occasion the ram is sacrificed but Abraham had said a lamb will be provided.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so the whole the whole thing ends with verse 14 where's verse 14 eyesight failing.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: So Abraham called the name of that place this mountain in the region of Moriah the Lord will provide and it is said to this day on the mountain of the Lord it shall be provided what shall be provided the Lamb the true son the seed of Abraham the heir of the cosmos and they knew which What did he say there?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Did he say Jesus?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: The seed of Abraham the heir of the cosmos and they knew which Yeah Jesus is that what he said the seed of Abraham the heir of the cosmos and they knew which mountain it was going to be on and so this is a Christian way of reading the text but I think it's a Christian way of reading the text that it is utterly consonant with the Hebrew details and and and but the way that Christians read Old Testament texts is not that oh here's an injunction Abraham was told to do this very strange thing that as as you say the Lord says it never entered my mind to you know to think about human sacrifice in the past and and yet narratively we are being told something about Christ and him crucified and this is the way that Christians read scripture right yeah not as Abraham was told that so I guess I can kill my son.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Of course yeah hmm very good I I was sitting uh just out of shot uh while this conversation was happening and as you went to Genesis 22 I was like oh I think I know what Glenn's gonna do here but yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you were on board with the weird yeah yeah yeah well yeah I I I'm glad you brought this up because I like I I think it might strike some people as weird that I like took this you know detour you know to to one particular you know obscure text but I I think it was just important a because you know Alex has said he wants to jettison Judaism in the Old Testament and because of the ways in which the Bible was being spoken of as this kind of grab bag of of kind of principles that you you take out.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: Once you read the Bible as a narrative that culminates in Christ you you've got a very different document on your hands.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the people of the book who read the book like that that have changed the world.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: It is it is not the book read as Alex reads the book that has changed the world.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: And those two things are are are radically different.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Alex knows that to some degree but it but but I but I do think it's just important to say the Bible read as a narrative culminating in Christ is the thing that has changed the world.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I and and that might explain so much of you know where we miss each other in this in this conversation.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: The next part of the conversation we're going to look at you talk about human rights.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you argue that this idea of human equality and that we should grant rights to every member of the human family is a Christian idea fundamentally Alex pushes back on that and says actually aren't rights just people who have been oppressed throughout history have eventually had enough and gone you know what I don't want this anymore and that's what's brought about the change.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_03: Should we go to that clinical I can agree with so much of what Alex says here.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think that when you look at the history of rights you're not looking at a blossoming of Christian tradition.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think what you're looking at is people beginning to assert their own self-interest.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the the the the case in point for this right like if you want to look for a a a sort of archetypal origin of rights talk in the UK it's gonna be Magna Carta Right?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the Magna Carta what happened you know like there's this incompetent king who the barons are all really upset with and he's charging them too much money and so what do they do?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: They show up with their swords and they say you have to stop doing this and you have to agree to abide by the certain kind of rules that we're all going to agree to and you're gonna be below the law.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the king with you know five hundred swords in his face goes okay fine and that's where you get the birth of rights.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a bunch of people sat around having you know meditating and praying and going, you know what, I think that God would want us to have these rights.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: What why like if if the gender equality concerns of 2025 are important to you in which culture or civilization would you rather live?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: One that has a Christian tradition behind it or one that has not?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well it depends.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean what other kind of traditions are you talking about?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: Was it Islam around the world is a very venerable tradition?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think I wouldn't mind living in a in a Buddhist uh tradition for example in in terms of gender equality in terms of right speak in the Well there's not the same kind of right speak in the It's not the same kind it's not the same kind that's yeah that that's the whole thing.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now the the the first thing he he says I think the way of this world is absolutely about power players and it's about dominance as other examples Alex gives uh the suffragette movement um women eventually you know deciding enough is enough and he talks about the Haitian in Haiti the slaves revolting it was an uprising of the slaves that was successful and that brought about change.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: Not necessarily people you know being ideologically driven as it were yeah well I mean the reason why the Haitian uprising worked was because all the French were otherwise occupied with um you know heads rolling and bloods uh spilling uh down the streets of Paris all in the name of liberty equality and fraternity like the reason why the Haitian uprising um wasn't quashed by the French is because um they were defending enlightenment values uh in Paris and then and the French Revolution was was uh a pace there and you know they they took their eye off that at that point.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: And and so yes um power plays are largely how world affairs operates um and Magna Carta there are lots of other things going on with Magna Carta but one of them is just cynical power plays absolutely that is the way people ordinarily work.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: But then there are I would say remarkable times when the powerful cede their power to the powerless such as the abolitionist movement in Britain.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: There are remarkable times when it is not in the interests of the powerful to outlaw infanticide because if you've got a disabled child it's going to be very costly for you now to raise that child.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: But the powerful ceding power to the weak so that they can serve them, that's a remarkable thing.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: And what I want to point to is A, if that's a remarkable thing and if we like that, then there is some there seems to be some kind of transcendent value of compassion at that point.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: And who has taught us that we should do that when nature is read in tooth and claw and would actually lead us to eliminate the weak.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: So there are power plays that is the way of the world very naturally another thing I would say is that if if with Magna Carta because there are swords at the neck the king will finally submit to the law isn't it extraordinary that in the Bible Deuteronomy 17 the king submits to the law with no swords at his neck right and that within the Bible the king being under the law is foundational and it's absolutely not copied by Hammurabi.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: Hammurabi gets a gets a name check in in this you know conversation as though Hammurabi is um some kind of progressive um you know I ideal the king is not under the law with Hammurabi and the law is not equal.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody's not equal under the law and the king is not under the law for the Hammurabi code.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: But within the Bible there is this sense that the king reigns by a social contract and even medieval theologians around the time of Magna Carta are writing about the social contract by which the king reigns that is language that doesn't really show up again in in in enlightenment terms and until 500 years later in terms of social contract.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so yes there are there's power plays but there's also a a theological tradition that says yes kings ought to be under the law.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes they forget that and they need to be reminded by the sword but isn't it interesting that in Deuteronomy with no swords the king is under the law and and so yeah those are some of the things I'd say.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now for the most part in this conversation Alex is critiquing your thesis basically that that Christianity has been the foundation for so many of our values there is one point in the conversation where Justin kind of puts it back to Alex and says well as an emotivist Alex how would you provide a foundation for these values?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just uh clarify what is an emotivist and what does it mean for Alex to be an emotivist?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well as opposed to so there's moral realists they believe there are real values in the world ethical values and some of those are objectivists and some of those are uh relativists um but over against the realists are several brands of non-realist non-cognitivist uh ethical positions one is emotivism which basically says that when you say uh slavery is wrong or infanticide is wrong um you're not making a truth claim um you're not even saying something that is truth apt it's it's not the sort of statement that can be called true or false even if you say I don't like slavery, that could be true or false because um it could be true that you don't like it.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: But but ethical statements are for the emotivists just expressions of emotion.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you believe that slavery is wrong with a capital With ultimate sense.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Alex is effective thinks that what he's doing there is effectively going boo slavery.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah but if if people are feeling that that's um unsubstantial and and not a way to actually address the issue of should you hold slaves or not, I think you're right.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why I ask Alex like what would you do as a moral emotivist, as an ethical emotivist, um in terms of abolition and and should we watch that clerk?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Let's have a look at it as as an emotivist what would you have said in 1800 if you were in the House of Commons and you were called upon William Wilberforce is sick, Alex O'Connor needs to address uh the the abolitionist cause what would what would you say from your I'm not sure what I would have said.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure if I would have been an emotivist in the 1800s because I don't think the position had been invented yet.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I might have believed in some kind of objective moral principle that I might have appealed to.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: I might well have been a Christian and appeal to those principles too but I might not have been.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: I might have been like Lincoln a man who privately was reported to sort of have no belief in Jesus as personal Lord and Saviour but just had a conviction that something about this was wrong.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what I what I would have said at the time.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the f but whether or not I could have rightfully condemned slavery then or done so now, I think is a separate question as to whether Christianity is the historical force that caused that abolitionist movement.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: So Alex effectively going Yeah I I don't know how I would have grounded a belief that abolition is is the thing to push towards but that's not really what I'm here to offer in this debate.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just challenging your claim that Christianity provided Foundation for abolition?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_03: To me, the the emotivist position is not really it's not the sort of thing that you can found an abolitionist movement on.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that the fact that Alex struggles with this question demonstrates that.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's not the sort of thing that would found a movement for moral progress.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because what is progress if there's no ideal to which you're tending?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure that Alex operates purely as an emotivist.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_03: And and I I I sensed you rowing back from the idea of progress.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think I think we've at some point we were talking about sort of moral progress towards sorts of things certain sorts of things.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think that on your view, the idea of some kind of objective ideal to which we're tending might not be consistent.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course, no, yeah.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: Of course.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_03: Of course.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I think that that for me raises the question, um are you?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like your sensibilities are towards being outraged with the same kind of outrage that all three of us kind of feel when Exodus 21 is mentioned, or you know, certain verses in in the Old Testament.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: I I think our emotions are all piqued by these things.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: And and I I guess I just return to the the point that um it it seems fairly obvious to me that what it is that we three share at that point is not a meta-ethical theory at all.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um we we have quite different meta-ethical theories and very similar moral intuitions.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I think those moral intuitions um have a historical and you know history behind them, and and that's that's why we're having the debate that we're having.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: Took me a long time to say that, yeah, uh Alex doesn't believe in progress.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't believe in something to which to which we tend.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but he's he's expressing emotions very forcefully about um how terrible the Bible is at various points.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_03: He seems to have some fairly strong moral intuitions.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think he I don't think he at that point just wants us all to say, oh, so you don't like slavery or jazz music.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like you're not just expressing an opinion about about something that could be either here or or there.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: I think at that point he wants to be taken seriously as something more than an emotivist.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he recognizes that something more than emotivism is required in order to forward the abolitionist cause.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_03: At that point, um, I think the Christian comes along with good news and says, hey, come on to Team Realist.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it was Team Realist that sort of ended slavery.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: And even somebody like Lincoln, I mean, Lincoln takes something like the the quite secularized language of the Declaration of Independence, and he preaches to his nation that, you know, nothing that has been stamped with the divine image is intended to be imbruted by its fellows.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's something like that.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: You can you can Google imbruded and the divine image, and you'll you'll get the the Lincoln quote.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: He believes in a divine image in people, and therefore they cannot be treated in certain ways because of metaphysical convictions that he has, and a meta-ethical conviction that is quite different from Alex's.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_03: So it's I I don't I don't think I don't think ethical emotivism is anything to help in this situation.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, what it does is, you know, if you and I are having a conversation about what should be done or what should not be done, an ethical emotivist just comes in and wants to play a language game and wants to tell us what we mean when we say should and shouldn't.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: And you're like, cool, that's that's I I like your language game.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's important to try and try and sort out what we're talking about when we're using these terms, but we're trying to have a conversation about what we should do.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: We're trying to save you know 12 million people from being trafficked across the Atlantic.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: We don't need to be told at that point, oh, when you said X, you were just you know expressing Y.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: You want to stop having conversations about conversations, you you want to have the actual conversation.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we are having a conversation about a conversation here, but that's true.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to YouTube, baby.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I just think ethical emotive is like a lot of it gels with Christianity in in terms of this is indeed how we function, right?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so much of my purported morality is virtue signalling, and so much of my purported morality is gut-driven.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because you do feel emotional an emotional response to the issue of slavery or murder or something.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: So emotions are part of it, but all of it.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and does does it track a truth, a metaphysical truth?
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it was those who believed in the metaphysical truth of things like the divine image that were the ones who actually got off their backsides and and and you know, and ended slavery.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think further in the conversation, Alex kind of clarifies that his issue with the idea of the Bible being the foundational document for ending slavery is well, lots of Christians or people who called themselves Christians owned slaves and use the Bible to kind of justify that.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so Alex mentions the Old Testament, the fact that the Israelites, though they were freed from slavery, they then took slaves while they were in the wilderness.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Alex says that the New Testament is is better.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the things that Paul says, you know, there is neither slave nor free, etc.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can see why the abolitionists were drawing firepower from from that.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: But could could Paul have not gone further uh in in sort of explicitly stating that slavery is a is a wrong practice that we need to work uh to abolish.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Paul doesn't seem to do that.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what should Paul have written?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's yes.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's the question I wanted to ask Alex, and I guess we can see what he says.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's check it out.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: What what should Paul have written?
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I don't know.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I I mean No, you you you sounded very sure about what you thought Paul said.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm what I'm saying is that if you want to claim that Paul is in part responsible for for this abolitionist tendency, then you have to say that that's what he should have written.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't I don't have to do that because it's yeast working through dough, right?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, yeast working through dough.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Jesus in Matthew chapter 13, uh he gives two little parables about how the kingdom in fact, it's an extended parable the whole of the chapter about how the kingdom grows from seeds being scattered, and then by the end of chapter 13, he kind of says that from the smallest mustard seed grows the largest plants.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_03: And even the birds in the in the field that had been pecking away at the seed at the beginning of Matthew 13 are perching in its branches.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_03: And this this is one of the ways that Jesus describes what's going to happen.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: Even those who are against the kingdom end up enfolded within and depending upon the kingdom that Jesus has grown.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is kind of what post-Christian So this sense that even in the Bible it's gonna be a gradual rather than an overnight thing.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: And yeast is the very next parable that he uses, like yeast working through a batch of dough.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um that that is what Jesus predicts about how um change will happen, and it is what we have seen.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_03: Christianity has ended slavery both in the the long slow burn of the sacramental way, medieval Christendom basically it dissolves away.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_03: It dissolves away.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it was legislated.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: You're baptizing every member of your household, you're kissing them, you're eating with them.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's you know, and and there are other there are other you know economic factors at play, and plagues are smashing through things, and and and that's going to have massive uh social implications as well.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: But in Christendom, it melts away, it comes back through the new world slavery, it is abolished again.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: Christianity has done it twice.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: Now, like if I was thinking about this analogy th this morning.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like, if if I one way I could say to you about um going to the moon, right?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: I I could say to you, um, did you know that NASA between 1958 and 1972 failed to get to the moon as much as it did get to the moon?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of trying to trying to land some kind of spacecraft on the moon, do you know they they failed a heck of a lot?
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Christians have been on the wrong side of this question quite a lot, but the the overarching um message that you should receive is that no one has walked on the moon except the NASA astronaut.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_03: Only Americans have walked on the moon.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's it is these Christian ideals that have proved themselves to be remarkable remarkably abolitionist in in ways that others haven't.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: And we're having an argument about the Bible not being sufficiently abolitionist.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: And this this seems to be proving the thesis, right?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: That we are the New Testament not being sufficiently abolitionist, and the and the Old Testament.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: The whole the whole Bible culminating in Christ crucified would be a really bad place to turn if you're trying to if you're trying to justify the abolitionists.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: We we aren't gonna get to agreement on this.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for example, on the NASA thing, right?
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: If if it it's not just I mean, I understand what you're saying.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, NASA have been to the moon and there are times when they've tried and failed or not tried at all.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: But imagine if there was a period where NASA was proactively discouraging people from going to the moon, like China or someone is just wants to go to the moon, or someone in NASA wants to go to the moon and and NASA go, no, no, no, don't do that.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because the the essence of our organization tells us to be able to do that.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_03: You would still ask NASA, like what how do you get to the moon?
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_03: They they would they would still be the people you would look to.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: Alex is a master of uh taking your analogy and kind of expanding it, isn't it?
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so so in your analogy, the moon represents abolition and people straining to get to what well are they?
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_03: Who yeah, who is?
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_03: Is China is China trying to get to the moon and others uh uh stopping them from getting there?
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I don't think that's the case.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: And and it's we can be very utopian about this.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um in an ideal world, here is what Paul should have written, here is how Christendom ought to have unfolded, this is what God should have done in order to end the end the slave trade.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: All we've got to go on.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_03: And at this time, at this point, I I think I sound um a lot more prosaic, and actually the the skeptic starts to sound a lot more kind of utopian.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_03: Let's just be prosaic and look at the history.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_03: There's just no one else who's done it.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_03: There's just no one, you know.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: And of course Christians have been on the wrong side of this debate.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_03: But when we go over to other cultures, nobody's on the right side of the debate.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: That it that ought to be remarkable.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_03: It so often gets kind of shooed away and and uh kind of dismissed when when you say, okay, Christians, some Christians were abolitionists, but others were pro-slavery.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but nobody else was abolitionist.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like it like the there's there's not an argument in these other cultures.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's just slave societies.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: And so it it should not be like pushed away.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_03: It should be it it is egregious that Christians have been on the wrong side of this and Christians need to own that, but it is also remarkable, and skeptics need to pay attention to that.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's so it's a Christian rocket.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: There were sadly quite a few Christians who were maybe trying to sabotage the rocket.
• 55:11
  unknown: Right.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: People who called themselves Christians, you know, owning slaves.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: But but it was a Christian rocket.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is that really true that no other culture has tried to abolish slavery or considered it wrong to own people as slaves?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the I mean the Haitian Uprising is an interesting example of and I mean Spartacus was a slave's uprising 2000 years ago, which was just sort of quashed by the Romans, but not as an ideological movement.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_03: And the and the Haitian uprising is is less of a of an ideological movement.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, slaves don't want to be enslaved, right?
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think it's a I think it's a quite different thing to say um, because of the nature of human beings, this is a thing that ought not to happen.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: In the same way that it's one thing to say, to believe in Magna Carta for you know metaphysical or theological reasons.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's another thing to say, well, um I don't want that guy to be king.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna be king instead, right?
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_03: The the there's there's all sorts of power plays in this world where people are trying to upend things that are unpleasant.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: But an ideological movement that says, no, but that's wrong.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: The wholesale thing is wrong because of certain metaphysical beliefs about the nature of humans.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's such that now we're not all going around thinking I would own slaves if I could.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: If it was legal, you know, I would we're like it's it's not just that our arms have been twisted into not wanting to own slaves, it's that we actually consider it to be an abhorrent practice.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: Unthinkable.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_03: People that humans aren't those sorts of people.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like people are not property.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now, where do we get that idea?
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_03: It is so obvious to us now that people are not property, but but why?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um does not nature itself teach you that some are born to rule and others are born to be ruled over, so said Plato, right?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like like nature itself teaches you this sort of this sort of thing.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_03: And and Plato would say to you, well, of course, when you look out at a population, some people have their lives together.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_03: Some people really don't have their lives together.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it's better that they get told what to do.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_03: And Aristotle would say we could go to war in order to enslave you because uh uh it would be it would be better for you, Thomas.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: If we just led you out to the slaves' quarters.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um Yeah, the these things that we take to be so commonplace, so natural, so self-evident, um, just weren't that.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_03: Only a few hundred years ago, and it and it has been Christian principles that have overturned it.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a remarkable thing.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: You then go from the issue of slavery to the issue of consent.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: Alex brings it.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: Alex brings it up.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the the debate had already kind of overrun quite significantly here.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: Alex clearly had wanted to touch on this.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because to be fair, it was set up at the start that you would get to consent to recheck out just in a moment.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what, I'll give you- I'll give you one thing in closing.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: I promise we'll close it.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is and i it's it's not quite a tangent.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um the one thing that we didn't touch on, which I'm not going to open up as a can of worms, is the concept of consent.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I'm bringing it there is because we've already talked about this concept of equality, and I was saying like it seems to not matter what you say, you can sort of draw a Christian idea to it.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think the most egregious example of where I think you're going wrong, Glenn, respectfully, because that's what we're here to discuss, is where you think I'm going wrong, where I think you're going wrong, is summarized in your discussion of consent, wherein you quote 1 Corinthians where Paul is is giving quite a revolutionary claim in in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, where he says that firstly he says a fairly standard thing for the Greco-Roman world, which is that women's bodies do not belong to them, but they belong to their husbands.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: But then he says this revolutionary thing, likewise, husbands, your bodies do not belong to you.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: They belong to your wives, and it seems extremely revolutionary.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is endemic.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is this is a an archetype of what I'm trying to talk about.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: I am willing to grant that that is genuinely revolutionary and radical and progressive and brilliant for women.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: Progressive progressive in the in the in the sociological sense of of how people consider progressive.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yet I would not want to overstate the case, which I believe you then don't want to do, by saying that the very next thing that Paul says uh is is verse 5 of chapter seven, where he says after this authority of the bodies, he says, do not deprive one another, that is, sexually.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Except perhaps by agreement or mutual consent is the translation you have in your book, for a set time to devote yourselves to prayer and then come together uh again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: But Paul says, and you quote this, Paul says that your bodies belong to each other, do not restrict yourselves from each other sexually, except perhaps for a time of mutual consent.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: You then say and look at how extraordinary it is that consent has been thrust into the bedroom and how revolutionary that is.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: But this to me right is such a a sight of hand.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because what did Paul just say?
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you think that that's an example of consent being thrust into the bedroom, as you say in your book?
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, because your your body does not belong to you alone and think about what Paul said that you are not to deprive each other sexually except by mutual consent.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: That is the only the only way that you're able to deprive your wife or your wife can deprive you of sex is by mutual consent.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's not consent to have sex, it's consent to not have sex.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's mutually consent to prayer.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: There is not mutual consent to not have sex.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: If I want to have sex with my wife and she doesn't want to have sex with me, well we don't have the mutual consent to withdraw each other, so she still has to have sex with me.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: What do you call it when a man wants to have sex with his wife, she doesn't want to have sex with him, but she has to have sex with him anyway.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a word for that.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: That is what Paul is describing here.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: That is not what Paul is saying.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is consent being thrust into the bedroom, I think, is a perfect example of the overstep the wife's.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think a can of worms has been opened here.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we might have to have a quick the wife's body does not belong to her alone.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: The the husband's body does not belong to him alone.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_03: So people can see the the the fullness of what I say at that point.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you did very well in the moment, by the way.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I think um you made some really helpful points, but I'll be honest, when Alex was going through that, I was kind of looking at it and going, Oh crumbs, yeah, is that is that really what that passage is saying?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh it's yeah, consent to abstain rather than consent to have sex.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there is mutual consent to pray, which is the only opt-out really for sex.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_03: He's very pro-se and he's very pro-prayer.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so, but that abstention, um, which is aimed at Corinthians who themselves were very ascetic and denying the body, and basically they were saying, as the chapter begins, that you know you shouldn't have your own wife, right?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so Paul is concerned for particular members of the Corinthian church who've decided that it's that they're so super spiritual they'll never have sex.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_03: And and so Paul is saying to them, look, you might think you're super spiritual because you're going on a prayer and fasting, you know, thing and you're fasting from sex as well, but you didn't ask your spouse about it.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like you need you need to, by mutual agreement, make that decision, but he's already, by pr the the principle of the thing is already there in verses three and four that husbands don't belong to themselves, they belong to their wives.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_03: Wives don't belong to themselves, they belong to their husbands.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_03: They they're going to have to, by mutual agreement, figure out sex.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_03: He's also adding in, and you also have to take in, you know, mutual by by mutual agreement whether you're going to do this prayer thing, which fasts from sex.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_03: So Alex is taking the mutual consent thing to apply only to prayer, which is an abstention from sex.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas I think taken in context, beginning from verse 1, and especially taking account of verses 3 and 4, mutual agreement is baked into the entire thing, both sex and prayer.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_03: But Alex is right that this is not identical with the modern view of consent, right?
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_03: The modern view of consent is that my body belongs only to me.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_03: And my wife's body belongs only to her, and then there's this thing in between us called consent, right?
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a quite individualized vision of consent, and the consent talk that your teacher gives before prom, right.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_03: The PE teacher in Mean Girls, right?
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_03: Who doesn't want to be there.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_03: You will get chlavidia.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's a modern notion of consent in which consent is the only barrier between um you and sexual abuse, and and just you with a with a stranger and alcohol is involved, um, but but consent is the the one thing that's that's stopping rape happening.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: And um, well, thank God that there is such a thing as consent.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the intellectual genealogy um by which we get to our modern view of consent runs right through the heartland of Christianity.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's not exactly what Paul is saying, because he's not he's not treating us as these atomized individuals who then hook up with one another if there's this thing called consent.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_03: He's talking about head and body, mutual, you know, kind of relationships.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what husband and wife are in Paul's terms.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_03: So you've got to take in Ephesians chapter 5, and you know, husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's it's even more revolutionary than verses 3 and 4 of 1 Corinthians 7 in terms of what husbands are to do and how they are to serve and defer to their wives.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_03: Utterly revolutionary, and you don't get the rest of the gender equality stuff without this kind of pauline material.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_03: Alex is right to say that a modern consent vision is um different from a 1 Corinthians 7 consent uh position.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_03: But it still is by mutual agreement.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_03: I I I absolutely think both sex and prayer, Paul is in favor of both, um, and mutual consent is at is at the heart of both.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: He's right to say that modern conceptions are not identical with with the ancient conceptions, but I I don't think the modern conceptions are thinkable without the Christian conceptions either, and marital rape is out no matter whose conception you're talking about.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the idea that Paul would be in favour of a a husband compelling his wife into having sex when she doesn't want to.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: You you don't get a sense of that from Paul's writing.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely not.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean not only from verse from verse three, well, it's not it's not his body.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um his body belongs to his wife, so his wife gets to say no, right?
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_03: But her body is his, so he gets to say no too.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: And at that point, there's got to be a negotiation.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_03: And Paul says, Can you?
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: Please negotiate in a pro-sex direction and not in the ascetic fasting direction that you have been doing.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's what 1 Corinthians 7 is doing.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_03: And even with 1 Corinthians 7 in mind, no, a husband you know cannot force himself on on his wife.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly from an Ephesians 5 point of view, a husband cannot, you know, enforce himself.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_03: Nor in any of the other, you know, household codes, whether it's in Colossians or 1 Peter.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, these were revolutionary in the time and they set in chain the kinds of thoughts that we have about male and female and sex um that we still live live with today, and and I think we should be grateful for that.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh good.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, that's helpful.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've I feel much more uh encouraged by this situation.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, you've clearly thought about it some more since the conversation.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: In the moment, how do you feel?
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: Where you're kind of like, oh crumbs, this is a bit of a can of worms that's being opened up.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh that?
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, we were we were already well over half an hour over the time that I thought.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_03: I was quite tired, and you know, and away in a way we went.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_03: But um, you know, I d if it gets people talking about things that are good to talk about, then then that's fine.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: After that moment, you had some final grapplings that kind of retrod a lot of the issues of the debate in the space of about two minutes.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was quite incredible to watch.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_03: These are all new to me, by the way.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_03: This is I mean, I was there, obviously, but I've forgotten, I've forgotten grapplings.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's precisely that chapter, and together with Matthew 19, is the Christian sexual revolution um that has completely upended our ideas of the human person and of the individual and of equality.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think you get feminism of the kind of variety that we get without this intellectual genealogy.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's it's a good idea.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think they would have done it anyway.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_01: We I think those women would have.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: They would have done that anyway.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's the untestable hypothesis, right?
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_03: That is that is to say, we've had we've had history A behind us.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to tell another story, however unlikely that that story is, and I think we would have gotten to here anyway via that other route.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't got to that other route.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think it's that unlikely.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe I'm wrong, and maybe it's um unfalsifiable or unprovable, but maybe that is just the nature of history.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in the same way we were just talking about slavery and you know why it is that in the Enlightenment, or around the time of the Enlightenment, you know, Christianity does it again, or maybe once again it's because slavery is also like like economically necessary for so many societies, and around about the time that we start developing farming technologies that might allow us to do away with it, suddenly the slavery gets a lot of insight.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a slave trade.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a case of people asserting their own self-interest against oppressive systems and trying to protect France.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_03: There were the economic arguments, and Napoleon said, no, actually, slavery is good for the economy, and so back it comes.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_03: Was he wrong to bring back slavery because it was good?
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: He dreamed that it was good for human flourishing.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it was right or wrong is separate from the question of whether it was indebted to Christianity.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the very point.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to call time.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: That was quite like a good thing.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's that's quite the you're right.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's like in Les Miserables when they start singing over one another.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_03: Recapitulation of theme A, recapitulation of theme B, woven together.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: People might conclude from moments like that of spirited exchange that your relationship with Alex is quite fraught.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's gone from strength.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what's it been like since this was the first time we met in person, but we we'd been back and forth in in messages very chummily, very happily.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I think our relationship's only improved since since then we went to the pub.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_03: After that, uh I've uh gone and met Alex a couple of times since then and and had great chats with him.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_03: So um yeah, I still I still admire his work and and I think the the one thing I would I would love to see with Alex, I think, is he has gone on a journey.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like he doesn't want you to know that he's gone on a journey, but he has gone on a journey, right?
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_03: From the anti-theist days, in which he used to take somebody like an Aquinas, let's say, and um think that Aquinas was silly and wrong.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I think he's now in the in the place of thinking, I think Aquinas might have been wrong about a great many things, but I don't think he was silly.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_03: And he has a lot more intellectual respect for an Aquinas.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_03: These Christian thinkers aren't ridiculous.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_03: They're not ridiculous.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: They are worthy of our attention, and let's let's take them on their own terms.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I I I think it it is so much to his credit that he's he's come out of the anti-theist, new atheist kind of mood to a much more respectful mood.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_03: He has made that change, and that does make Christians, you know, hopeful that he's becoming a Christian, and I recognize he's not becoming a Christian.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm very very aware of that.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_03: But I think if he were to take the Bible a little bit like Aquinas, if he were to approach scripture in the ways that I'm talking about here, as the the the sweeping narrative that culminates in Christ and Him crucified, and pay attention to that with the respect that that corpus really um demands, I I think it would do him much spiritual good.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and so I I I don't see him doing that currently, but I think he can I think he clearly have those he has those muscles to flex.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_03: He's already done it with a whole bunch of Christian theology, which he now treats with respect.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think if he were to take the Bible with that kind of respect, um I think it could could be transformative.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm well done for for doing this.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's uh no small thing to sit down for two and a half hours and have a pretty intense uh discussion.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think Justin uh tried to tried to interject at quite a few points, but he was probably torn between really wanting to move things on, but also wanting to allow you to flesh out your points.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it covered a lot of ground.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_03: We covered a lot of ground.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_03: It was great.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think my my one reg I got a lot of regrets actually.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um just even that like resting face.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_03: Look at that jutting out of face.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well yeah when you talk to me, that's your like that.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_03: But I I think I was about 180% too serious in this dialogue, stroke debate.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I I just I I just think um yeah, and that and that just led yeah, in in silly places.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think taking a breath, and you know, of course you're nervous, you're you're you're debating a guy who can take on 25 people at once and win, you know.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so the there were nerves at play, and that you know, you're part of a a series in which Richard Dawkins is taking part and all this kind of stuff.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so I went in with serious Glenn mode, and I kind of wish I'd gone in, I don't know.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we've done a lot of episodes of the Speak Life podcast kind of addressing Alex's videos, so yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: There was quite a lot of build-up to this as well, I guess.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Can I just share very briefly my embarrassing Alex O'Connor story in the pub after we recorded this?
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just said to him, um, because we were deciding what we were gonna eat, and I said, Should we go for a Nikki Chando's?
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh by which I meant cheeky nando's, but I'd swap the letters around.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_00: People would assume you are a dad.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: They just they just if they didn't know, if they didn't know, that's I mean But he looked a bit perplexed and he was like, Wait, Chandos, um, that's a restaurant in London.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because he has a friend in London who apparently says to him, let's go for a Nikki Chando's because there is a restaurant that's called Chando's.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um He was trying to work with what you gave him, which was which was not a lot.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_03: So credit to Alex for that.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Alex, for doing that.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_03: We humour him the rest of the time.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for in September.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_03: You you humoured Thomas.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I don't know how much help I was on this uh trip.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think Naomi had a a more interesting conversation with him.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Naomi, it's great.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, great stuff.
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh thanks for chatting.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm Thomas Thorogoods.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this has been the Speak Live Podcast.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're Glenn Scrivener.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I still am.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's been fun to kind of reflect on this, uh, I guess, as it goes out to the public now, and it'll be interesting to see who knows how people receive it.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_03: People be so angry, and then they're the then they'll come to this video and they're like, they didn't even talk about the thing that Glenn said was so stupid.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me what it is, and maybe we'll talk about that.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for watching, everyone.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do subscribe if you'd like to stay in the loop, and we will be back soon.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.