Latest / The Becket Cook Show / The book of books is making a comeback! with Larry Alex Taunton

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The book of books is making a comeback! with Larry Alex Taunton · The Becket Cook Show

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Life Audio.
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  Speaker 2: You are listening to The Beckett Cook Show with your
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  Speaker 2: host Beckett Cook. For more information about Beckett and his ministry,
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  Speaker 2: visit his website at Beckettcook dot com. To help support
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  Speaker 2: star rating.
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  Speaker 1: Hey guys, welcome to the show today. My guest is
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  Speaker 1: Larry Alex Taunton. He's been on the show at least once,
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  Speaker 1: maybe twice, and he has recently written a piece in
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  Speaker 1: The Federalist called The title of the article is called
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  Speaker 1: outrage over Texas teaching the Bible is anti intellectual, very
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  Speaker 1: very interesting read, and we're going to get into all
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  Speaker 1: the details. And if you don't know Larry Alex Taunton,
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  Speaker 1: he is a freelance columnist who's written for USA Today,
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  Speaker 1: Daily Wire, First Things, The Atlantic, CNN, The American Spectator,
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  Speaker 1: and so on, et cetera, et cetera. He's written several
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  Speaker 1: books and he is also the host of the podcast
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  Speaker 1: Ideas Have Consequences, which is great but first award from
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  Speaker 1: our sponsor. Please welcome Larry Alex Taunton.
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  Speaker 3: Pleasure to be with you. Beckett Cook.
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  Speaker 1: So this is this was a fascinating article that you wrote.
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  Speaker 1: This column outrage over Texas teaching the Bible is anti intellectual,
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  Speaker 1: And this is in the Federalist, as I mentioned in
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  Speaker 1: the intro, and you say in the first paragraph, you say,
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  Speaker 1: outrage over the Texas State Board of Education's requirement that
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  Speaker 1: Bible be included in the K through twelve curriculum isn't
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  Speaker 1: just anti God. It speaks to a lack of understanding
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  Speaker 1: of what made the West great. So that's kind of
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  Speaker 1: the premise of it.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, very much so.
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  Speaker 1: And talk about before we get into the details of that,
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  Speaker 1: talk about who is Forest McDonald and tell us that story.
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  Speaker 3: Ah well, Forest McDonald, Uh, he was a character. Forest
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  Speaker 3: McDonald was a famous historian within you know, his history circles.
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  Speaker 3: He was a professor of mine, guided my graduate thesis.
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  Speaker 3: In a sense, he wasn't he wasn't the guy who
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  Speaker 3: who oversaw the subject per much per se. But the uh,
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  Speaker 3: the writing of it. And I was fascinated by McDonald
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  Speaker 3: because I was very fortunate, first of all, that he
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  Speaker 3: chose me to be one of his students. He was
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  Speaker 3: the kind of guy he testified before Congress during the
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  Speaker 3: impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton to explain what high crimes
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  Speaker 3: and mister meanors mean in the Constitution. He was a
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  Speaker 3: constitutional historian, early American history historian. He was a guy
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  Speaker 3: who had incredible attention to detail. I learned so much
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  Speaker 3: from him about writing. And I will never forget Beckett.
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  Speaker 3: In a class, there was just just three of us,
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  Speaker 3: four including him, and five including his wife who served
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  Speaker 3: as his editor. And he holds up a copy of
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  Speaker 3: Barbara Tuckman, also a famous historian. She'd written a book
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  Speaker 3: called A Distant Mirror, and A Distant Mirror is a
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  Speaker 3: history of the fourteenth century. And then he takes it
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  Speaker 3: very demonstratively, and he flips to her preface, her forward,
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  Speaker 3: and he reads from it a quotation, and I think
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  Speaker 3: you have that quotation right in front of you.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. The quotation is, while I this is from Barbara Tuckman,
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  Speaker 1: while I recognize Christianity's presence in the Middle Ages, it
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  Speaker 1: requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, it's an incredible statement. And by the way,
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  Speaker 3: I've read quite a lot of Barbara Tuckman's many here
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  Speaker 3: may recognize that name. She wrote a mega bestseller called
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  Speaker 3: The Guns of August that was published in nineteen sixty
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  Speaker 3: four but still in print, and it, you know, it
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  Speaker 3: continues to sell and it's a terrific read. But it
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  Speaker 3: to me, a statement like that is kind of like saying,
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  Speaker 3: I'm writing a history of the Yankees, but I need
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  Speaker 3: to make it clear that I don't really understand baseball,
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  Speaker 3: though I know it's fairly important to this subject. To me,
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  Speaker 3: it's just an astonishing admission. And anyway, he took it.
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  Speaker 3: He read that. He clearly had sat down to read
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  Speaker 3: her book, and you know, as an author, he took
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  Speaker 3: very seriously the forward preface, and then he took it
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  Speaker 3: and he threw it on the table and he said,
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  Speaker 3: read no further, because she's admitting to you that she
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  Speaker 3: has no authority to write a book like that. She
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  Speaker 3: has assumed that because she's not a Christian, she's not
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  Speaker 3: particularly religious, she assumes it's unimportant to her subject, and
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  Speaker 3: therefore she's telling you she doesn't understand the mindset of
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  Speaker 3: the Middle Ages of the fourteenth century in particular. And
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  Speaker 3: I always remembered the lesson from that with McDonald because
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  Speaker 3: McDonald was a very exacting scholar. He demanded excellence, and
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  Speaker 3: that meant more than just in the writing. He had
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  Speaker 3: an expectation that you take very seriously the past, the
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  Speaker 3: figures in the past, they deserve a certain integrity that
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  Speaker 3: you apply to them when you were studying them, when
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  Speaker 3: you're writing about them, and you make some serious effort
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  Speaker 3: to try to understand them. And so for me, that
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  Speaker 3: had real, real events. When we're talking about the Texas
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  Speaker 3: State School Board. What's going on here?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and when, by the way, when does that go
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  Speaker 1: into effect?
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  Speaker 3: You know, I don't know, that's a very good question.
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  Speaker 3: I would assume that since they just approved it, that
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  Speaker 3: that would mean that it would go into effect this
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  Speaker 3: coming autumn.
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  Speaker 1: And who is Tiffany Clark.
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  Speaker 3: Tiffany Clark. Tiffany Clark is a Democrat member of the
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  Speaker 3: Texas State School Board. The school board voted overwhelmingly in
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  Speaker 3: favor of this curriculum. And again, it wasn't just the Bible.
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  Speaker 3: They didn't just meet and say, hey, let's get the
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  Speaker 3: Bible into schools. They were approving a very broad curriculum
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  Speaker 3: and the Bible sections of the Bible, not the entire Bible,
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  Speaker 3: but sections of it were required. And the board overwhelmingly
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  Speaker 3: approved this proposed reading list, and Tiffany Clark, along with
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  Speaker 3: a few others were vote call and opposing it.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and uh, you say, you say that what is
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  Speaker 1: this quote? If you have oh you talk about drag
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  Speaker 1: Queen story Hour has no place in the curriculum. What
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  Speaker 1: you say one might reasonably say that drag Queen story
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  Speaker 1: Hour has no place in the school curriculum. And then
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  Speaker 1: you say that if you you know, if you have
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  Speaker 1: one meaning the Bible in the classroom, but you're very
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  Speaker 1: unlikely to have the other.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, what I'm kidding at And there is that here's
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  Speaker 3: Tiffany Clark. Solly, do you remember Dana Carvey's iconic church lady? Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: in that fish?
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  Speaker 1: Isn't that special fish?
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  Speaker 3: Tiffany Clark? Listen. I couldn't find any video of Tiffany Clark,
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  Speaker 3: but I would be disappointed if she doesn't sound like
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  Speaker 3: the you know, the church lady. But a woman who
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  Speaker 3: doesn't go to church. I mean, this is this is
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  Speaker 3: a woman. She's a democrat. Uh, clearly has an agenda.
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  Speaker 3: And what's obvious to me. I mean, listen, if if
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  Speaker 3: morality or you know, some kind of unity or whatever
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  Speaker 3: it is that seems to be on her mind really
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  Speaker 3: mattered to her. Where I find no record of Tiffany
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  Speaker 3: Clark complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour, which took place
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  Speaker 3: in multiple, uh several Texas public schools. I don't see
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  Speaker 3: her complaining about any of that. But now that the
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  Speaker 3: Bible has been mentioned, she's like, oh, egads, I mean,
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  Speaker 3: we can't have the Bible twerking trannies. That's okay. The
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  Speaker 3: Bible is banned literature. And there's where you see what
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  Speaker 3: their real motives actually are Backett and the point that
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  Speaker 3: I'm trying to make here and saying, you don't have
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  Speaker 3: one or the other. If you have the Bible, if
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  Speaker 3: it is, if it plays a real role in your schools,
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  Speaker 3: it's highly unlikely that you're going to have Drag Queen
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  Speaker 3: Story Hour. And the left, sometimes I think, understands these
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  Speaker 3: things much better the people on the right, dude. Hence
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  Speaker 3: the reason they target the Bible again and again and again.
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  Speaker 3: And I should say that the Quran has been passed
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  Speaker 3: out in loads of Texas public schools. I don't see
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  Speaker 3: Tiffany Clark complaining about that either, even though it plays
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  Speaker 3: zero role in the development of Western civilization. None but
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  Speaker 3: here she is, you know, complaining about this. And so
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  Speaker 3: if a school is going to host drag queen story,
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  Speaker 3: how are you better bet they don't want the Bible
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  Speaker 3: to play any kind of role in that.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, by the way, did you have when you were
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  Speaker 1: growing up? Did you have Bible in your classes? You know?
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  Speaker 3: As I recall, I was thinking about this, as I
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  Speaker 3: was was preparing for this discussion, as I recall, you're
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  Speaker 3: from the Midwest, Am i am? I right about that?
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  Speaker 1: Yeh, I'm from Dallas, Texas.
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  Speaker 3: Okay, excuse me, Okay, so you're from a red state.
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  Speaker 3: That really is more of what I meant. You're from
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  Speaker 3: a red state. And I think you're a little young
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  Speaker 3: than I am. Beckett. When I was a kid, Yes,
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  Speaker 3: we we had the Bible. I went to public schools
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  Speaker 3: and I learned the Lord's Prayer in public school. We
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  Speaker 3: we we were taught to say, you know, one nation
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  Speaker 3: under God. We did the Pledge of Allegiance every morning
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  Speaker 3: in what was called home room, you know in those days.
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  Speaker 3: And I wouldn't say that all my teachers were necessarily Christian.
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  Speaker 3: In fact, I know some of them weren't. I had
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  Speaker 3: some Jewish teachers, probably some who were were were not
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  Speaker 3: believers at all, but they were all deeply influenced by
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  Speaker 3: Christian ethos. That is to say, they had inhaled deeply
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  Speaker 3: of that. And if you behaved in a way that
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  Speaker 3: wasn't really in line with that, you could expect there
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  Speaker 3: to be some, you know, some consequences from that from
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  Speaker 3: teachers and such. You, if it didn't involve discipline, might
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  Speaker 3: involve them expressing their disap appointment, you know, in your behavior.
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  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after this short break. Yeah, I
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  Speaker 1: mean I went to uh Jesuit Catholic schools from k
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  Speaker 1: K through twelve and uh, well.
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  Speaker 3: It's hard to know.
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  Speaker 1: Not so much. It was more like Thomas aquinas you know,
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  Speaker 1: and that kind of the Bible. Yeah, there wasn't a
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  Speaker 1: lot of Bible, but we did, I mean we and
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  Speaker 1: we said the Lord's Prayer in Latin every day, and
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  Speaker 1: we said the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school and
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  Speaker 1: as you said, in homeroom. And what's interesting about my experience,
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  Speaker 1: especially in high school at Jesuit was an all boys school.
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  Speaker 1: And I always thought, I always, you know, think about this,
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  Speaker 1: and I think Jesuit, whether or not it made my classmates,
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  Speaker 1: uh citizens of heaven or not. It made them really
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  Speaker 1: good citizens of this earth.
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  Speaker 3: That's a good way to put it.
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  Speaker 1: I like that all of my classmates, I mean, I'm
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  Speaker 1: telling you all of my classmates from Jesuit. I think
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  Speaker 1: the graduating class was ninety people. But they're all super
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  Speaker 1: productive citizens, very responsible conservative. You know. It's like, that's
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  Speaker 1: what it does. I mean, that's you know, that's that's
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  Speaker 1: kind of one of the outcomes of having having a
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  Speaker 1: Bible training in school.
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  Speaker 3: No, it's it's it's a restraint, isn't it. And yeah,
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  Speaker 3: my arguments of my first book, The Grace Effect, A
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  Speaker 3: central argument that I'm making in that book is this
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  Speaker 3: Beckett that every intelligent person I know believes that human
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  Speaker 3: nature is the same the world over. So having settled
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  Speaker 3: on that, the question becomes what ideas serve to restrain our,
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  Speaker 3: you know, evil impulses, and which one serve as a
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  Speaker 3: kind of gasoline on the fire of human nature. And
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  Speaker 3: I've always argued that secular ideologies like say, communism, Marxism, socialism, fascism,
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  Speaker 3: and things like so let's say Islam, they these these
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  Speaker 3: are like fire on the the excuse me, They're like
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  Speaker 3: gasoline on the fire of human nature because they give
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  Speaker 3: justification to evil conduct. Whereas the Christian faith, the Bible specifically,
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  Speaker 3: you may not become a Christian, but if you were,
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  Speaker 3: if you were steeped in the traditions contained in scripture,
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  Speaker 3: they do serve to restrain you because it serves as
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  Speaker 3: a reminder of what's right and wrong. And when I
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  Speaker 3: was debating, you know, back when we were doing loads
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  Speaker 3: of debates, and I was debating guys like Christopher Hitchens
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  Speaker 3: and UH and Daniel Dennett and UH, Michael Shermer on
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  Speaker 3: television or before large you know audiences, studio audiences, I
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  Speaker 3: often argued that it was so interesting that these guys
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  Speaker 3: in many ways shared my moral outlook, but they had
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  Speaker 3: no basis for it. So they would talk about the
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  Speaker 3: importance of human dignity and freedom right, and you know,
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  Speaker 3: Christopher Hitchins was opposed to abortion and UH. But you'd
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  Speaker 3: always want to ask the question, and that's based on
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  Speaker 3: what exactly you see, So they had they had absorbed
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  Speaker 3: a certain measure of the Christian faith, not not not
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  Speaker 3: to the point that they became Christians, but a point
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  Speaker 3: that it did shape their view of the world.
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  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, there they were just running on the fumes
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  Speaker 1: of of of the Christian culture. And it seems like
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  Speaker 1: isn't Dawkins now coming around a little bit and appreciating
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  Speaker 1: Christian culture now that Islam is taking over his country.
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  Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting you say that. Richard just occasionally
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  Speaker 3: I still have contact with him. I would never say
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  Speaker 3: that we're friends, but we have moments where we're friendly.
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  Speaker 3: And that is because I've known him now for gosh,
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  Speaker 3: almost twenty years. And Richard Richard is reasonably you know,
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  Speaker 3: he's honest. He has a certain integrity about his his atheism.
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  Speaker 3: He's very reluctant to admit he's wrong. But I think
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  Speaker 3: he's slowly starting to recognize because of Islam's advance in
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  Speaker 3: his own country. He's recognizing that the Christian faith has
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  Speaker 3: served as a bulwark against barbarism. And as the Christian
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  Speaker 3: faith kind of declines in not kind of, but but
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  Speaker 3: accelerates in his decline in Britain, he's seeing, you know,
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  Speaker 3: a rising you know, kind of totalitaryismarianism, of violence. He's seeing.
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  Speaker 3: Of course, he's right, gangs that just recently reported on
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  Speaker 3: by a Member of Parliament, Rupert Lowe in the UH
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  Speaker 3: in the the infamous low report, and I think Richard
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  Speaker 3: is starting to think, you know what, I preferred it
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  Speaker 3: when the people on the wall had a Christian worldview
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  Speaker 3: and I could misbehave within that. Now he's not quite
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  Speaker 3: sure what to do. I remember doing an interview with him,
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  Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe ten years ago. We're on camera
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  Speaker 3: where at Oxford University, and I said, do you ever
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  Speaker 3: receive any death threats from Muslims? I have? And he goes, stop, stop,
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  Speaker 3: stop the cameras. You can't ask me that. And I said,
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  Speaker 3: why can't I ask you that? He said to somebody's
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  Speaker 3: going to see this and they're gonna, you know, then
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  Speaker 3: they'll then they'll they'll actually do that. He recognizes that,
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  Speaker 3: you know, he used to paint all religions with the
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  Speaker 3: same broad brush. Right now he knows better. But I'm
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  Speaker 3: afraid it may be too late for his country.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember he was on I think it was
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  Speaker 1: Piers Morgan or a few years years ago. Someone put
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  Speaker 1: this question to him as well about Islam and he
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  Speaker 1: and he said, he just said, I can't answer that question.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah he does now, but now he does. Now he's
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  Speaker 1: actually willing to talk about it, and he's he's he's
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  Speaker 1: been more a little more vocal about it lately. So
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  Speaker 1: that's interesting.
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  Speaker 3: It's an interesting I wish somewhere, somewhere deep inside me,
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  Speaker 3: there's a part of me that wishes, you know, because
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  Speaker 3: I've I've been combatant with him on so many occasions.
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  Speaker 3: You know, he from time to time will will watch
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  Speaker 3: maybe a podcast, or he read an article that I
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: wrote about John Lennon's song Imagine, in which I had
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: said that that song is the contrary of a great song.
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  Speaker 3: It's terrible song.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the most commy song ever written.
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely, and he read it and offered me a very thoughtful,
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  Speaker 3: reasonable reply to that. And hence there's a there's a
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  Speaker 3: reason there's a part of me that wishes that that,
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  Speaker 3: at least on the issue of Islam, you could align
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  Speaker 3: with him and fight against the enemy, because it's very
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  Speaker 3: definitely a common enemy.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. And so back to this article, you say that
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  Speaker 1: you say one suspects that Miss Clark, miss I love you,
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  Speaker 1: but Miss Clark really means it really means is the
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  Speaker 1: Bible is the only religious text on the list that
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  Speaker 1: anyone takes seriously, and therein lies the critical real objection
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  Speaker 1: to its inclusion. After all, the curriculum contains several religious
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  Speaker 1: texts of Greek and Roman mythology, Like's fable Fables, Pericles's
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  Speaker 1: funeral Oration, Beowulf, Hawthorne, et cetera, and so so talk
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  Speaker 1: about that, I mean, because because I think a lot
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  Speaker 1: of people don't even understand that there there are these
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  Speaker 1: other techs that are already in the curriculum. Yeah, because
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  Speaker 1: Christianity is true, it's the one that's threatening.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. That's a very good way to put it
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  Speaker 3: back in the The fact is, I mean, I spent
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  Speaker 3: a fair amount of time reviewing this list. It's online,
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  Speaker 3: it's available, you can look at it several pages long
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  Speaker 3: in a PDF. And bear in mind, I taught for
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  Speaker 3: many years, so I'm I'm kind of familiar with what
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  Speaker 3: a list ought to look like, you know, for this
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  Speaker 3: this age group, what the what the lit list should be.
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  Speaker 3: And as always, looking through it, I thought, okay, so
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  Speaker 3: you've got you know, at least one of the Transcendentalists.
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  Speaker 3: I here, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and transcendentalists weren't Christians, you know,
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  Speaker 3: Hawthorne Emerson are the most prominent of them. There's was
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  Speaker 3: kind of a syncretic blend. Their religion was kind of
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  Speaker 3: a syncretic blend of Buddhism and hint Doism. And they're
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  Speaker 3: on the list. There they are. And then you have
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  Speaker 3: an addition to that, you know Beowulf, which is full
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  Speaker 3: of paganism. And by the way, I think these readings
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  Speaker 3: should be there. That they're not Christian, but I think
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  Speaker 3: they should be there. I would have students read Hawthorne,
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  Speaker 3: I would have them read Emerson, I would definitely have
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  Speaker 3: them read Beowulf. I'd have them read Greek and Roman mythology.
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  Speaker 3: So these belong there. But she doesn't say anything about those.
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  Speaker 3: Her criticism is aimed at the Bible. And that is
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  Speaker 3: because the Bible is the one religion that's represented on
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  Speaker 3: the reading list that people take very very seriously. And
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: that's what it is that bothers her. But you see,
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: that's the very reason it should be on the list.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: And the example I give is, you know, you know
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: a kid in Texas, to use an old Southern phrase,
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: you can sling in a dead cat in Texas without
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: hitting a church. I mean, they're they're all over the place,
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: right and if a there, they dot the lone star
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: state like oil rigs and if you're to understand anything
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: about them, why they're there, their influence on your country,
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: upon Western civilization, it all starts with the reading of
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: the Bible. You need to you don't have to believe it,
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: but it's important. I mean, Mark Twain, for instance, is
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: on the list. Twain was very hostile to the Christian faith,
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: and yet it was Twain who said that the Bible
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: is the book of books. He said, is the most
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: loved and the most hated book in the world, but
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: it is the book of books. Twain himself recognized the
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: importance of it. I think Twain would be horrified by
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: an attempt to remove the Bible. Christopher Hitches we just
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: mentioned before. Hitches wrote a fascinating article upon this on
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: the supremacy of the King James version of the Bible
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: and its importance and shaping language and the English language.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: You know, so it isn't just we're not just talking
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: about you know, a bunch of pastors and churchgoers who
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: see the significance of the Bible in all of this. Ms.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: Clark kind of backhandedly suggests that this is all, you know.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: The reason they want the Bible included is so it'll
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: be taught, She implies, like a sermon on Sunday or
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: you know, vacation Bible school lesson. That's a lie, and
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: she knows it's a lie. We're talking about the Bible
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: being taught as literature.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you talk about you talk about you say
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: only a Christian culture could have produced the likes of
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Hume Rousseau, given Marx, Nietzsche, Russell Sartre and so this.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: And also you say that Augustine antelm Aquinas Chaucer, Shakespeare,
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: Milton John, Don, John Dunn, Dickens, Dosaevsky told story people
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: without having some knowledge of the Bible. You won't even
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: understand some of these texts.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: You can't hope to understand the Western literary canon without
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: some working knowledge of the Bible. An example I give
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: there is, you know, Faulkner's Absolute Absolute. I mean, you
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: can't even understand that title. You can't even understand what
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: that title is talking about. A Christian who's familiar with
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: that story, King David and his rebellious son who eventually
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: was killed. A Christian could could reasonably guess what the
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: broad outlines of a novel like that are about. I mean,
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: matcha trying to understand. You know, Shakespeare, which has numerous
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: biblical illusions, Dostoyevsky, there's a there's a funny line you
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: know in uh and by the way, this is just one,
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: but it's one and just just immediately comes to mind.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: And The Brothers Karamazov, where one of the characters mocking
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: another character just spoke up, says ah Balem's ass finally speaks. Yes,
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: that's a reference. That's a reference to the Book of Numbers.
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: You won't you won't get that. You won't understand that.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: And my point about the skeptics that I mentioned there
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: is that they're all like Richard Dawkins, like Christopher Hitchens.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: They were shaped by the ethos of a Christian culture
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: that they eventually rebelled against. And that's why when we're
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: talking about dawkins bestseller two thousand and six best seller,
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: The God Delusion, his targets the Christian Faith. It's not Islam,
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: it's the Christian Faith. It's not Himduism or Buddhism. Those
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: are very much, you know, in the periphery of that book.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: His focus is the Christian faith. And it's because he's
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: aware that in I mean, this is changing, but in
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: Western civilization. It's the one that's taken most seriously and
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: hence the one that he wanted to attack. But you know,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: we're we're talking about guys who you cannot understand them,
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: be they Christian or otherwise, you cannot really understand them
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: unless you know something of the Bible.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Yes, and you you talk about a conversation you had,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: if you can recount this, this conversation you had with
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: Vishal mago Walde. It's hard to say his name.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: Talk about that, Vishal Mongolwati, Yes, just a Vishal. Yeah,
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: Vishal Mongolwadi is an interesting guy. He is an Indian scholar.
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: That is India the country, and he was an interesting guy.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: I met him on one occasion while we were speaking
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: a conference together in Saint Louis, And you know how
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: there are these breaks in these conferences, and so we
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: were we were having dinner or drinks or something, and
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: I was very interested in what he'd had to say.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: I'd heard his talk and he had written a book.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: Can you give the title right there, the full title
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: that's right there in the article.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: It is the book that made your world, How the
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Bible created the soul of Western civilization.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: Great book, great book, and Mangalwadi brings to the table
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: an outsider's perspective of Western culture. And he was making
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: a point that I thought was quite profound. I said
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: this in an interview with John Stossel on Fox News,
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: and it seemed to give him some pause to think
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: about it too. But he made the point that the
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: line we hold these truths so else be self evident,
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: that all men are endowed by their creator were certain
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty in the
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: pursuit of happiness.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: And all men are created equal by the way, all
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: men are created equal. Oh did I say that, Yeah.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: That all men are created equal and are dowed by
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: their creator with certain unalienable rights. Anyway, Mongolwati said that
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: that statement is a laughable statement outside of a Christian
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: culture self evident, it's self evident that men are created equal.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: He says, our culture in India is based on the
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: idea that's exactly the opposite, that there's nothing self evidential
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: about the equality of man. We look around and say, well,
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: there's massive intellectual, physical, material, social differences inequalities among men,
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: and so when we look at a statement like that
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: that says is self evident. We go that's insane. It's
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: not self evident, unless, says Mongolwadi, you are you are
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: appealing to. In this case, he was a broader You
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: know that the family fathers were appealing to a broader
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: Christian culture, both in the United States and in Britain,
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: to say, essentially, we know the law says we can't rebel.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: We get that, but there are are laws that supersede
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: those of men, and those laws say, the laws that
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: we can be taxed without representation, that British soldiers can
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: be billeted in our homes without our approval, that we
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: can be abused. Those laws say that the existing laws
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: of Britain that are enforced on this land are damnable
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: because we were created equal in the eyes of God,
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: and that God that he's appealing to, of course, was
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: the biblical God. And so mango Wadi says, that statement
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: only makes any sense if the other people that you're
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: appealing to share those assumptions, which are essentially Christian assumptions.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: And that was kind of my earlier point about Dawkins
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: and Hitchens, because they would agree with that statement, they
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: would quibble with you know, based in God and created
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: and all those kinds of things. But they believe they
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: agree with the sentiment, but they have no basis for
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: agreeing with the sentiment because they only believe it because
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: they've inhaled deeply of a Christian culture and so they've
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: adopted a lot of those assumptions. And I thought Mongo
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: Wattie's point was profound because you remove that, you remove
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: the Christian basis, the Bible as it were, from the culture.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: He says, what you end up with is mass inequality, and.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: That's what you end up with. The cast system in
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: India is what you end.
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: Up with, precisely. And by the way, that's where the left,
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: that's where they're taking us. I mean, we're moving increasingly
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: into uh into a place where we're really talking about
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: a kind of electronic, a driven u last system, and
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: that's that's kind of what they want. But it's you know,
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: I find it really amusing Beckett that even when we're
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: talking about the left with things like Black Lives Matter,
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: for example, and the whole trans movement and all that,
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: they're arguments, they're not Christian arguments in the sense that
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: what they're pushing for is Christian, but their arguments are
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: based on certain kind of Christian assumptions because they're appealing
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: to fairness. And it used to kind of make these
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: kind of points to I occasionally have students, you know,
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: who declare themselves atheists and so on, and just to
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: illustrate the point, to try to get them thinking, I
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: can recall a couple of times I didn't do this frequently,
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: but a couple of times taking a student's paper somewhat
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: playfully but they didn't know the joke initially, and writing
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: like D minus on it and giving it back to
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: them and when it actually makes not fair, yes, when
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: it actually was maybe deserves to be or an a.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: And I wait for the for the protests, and the
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: student comes up to me and says, this isn't fair.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: You know I did. I really did a good, really
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: good job on this, And I said, you know you did,
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: and you I could put an A on it because
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: it's a work, but on what is your appeal to fairness?
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: Based on what? And it's It was always an effective
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: way to get a student to begin thinking about ah,
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: you know, I see the point you're making here. And
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: then of course i'd changed the grade and you know,
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: give them the grade that they had actually earned. But
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: just simply making the point that there have to be
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: absolutes upon which our morality is based. It can't just
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: be based on your own vague inner promptings, because other
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: people have vague inner promptings. What's to make mine more
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: important than yours? It has to be something external to
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: us that we go there's the law that says you
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: can't do that, or I can't do that, or we
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: you know, deserve this. By the way, it's interesting to
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: note Force McDonald, who I never knew to be a
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: religious man at all, though some have told me that
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: at the very end of his life perhaps he did
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: become somewhat religious. But it's worth mentioning him again here
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: because McDonald in talking about the very thing that we're
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: talking about here, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: and so forth. One of McDonald's central arguments is that
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: government does not bestow rights. It can only recognize existing rights.
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: And he would really drive that point home that do
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: not look to government as you know, some sort of
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: benevolent a ruler, some benevolent entity that gives you rights.
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: When the founding fathers of this country rebelled and went
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: to war with Britain. They were going to war because
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: they believe they had inalienable rights you see, that were
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: bestowed from above, They're given by God. And that's you know,
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: a very very important, you know part of this. They
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: weren't arguing, you have to recognize give us rights. No, no, no,
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: we're going to force you to recognize the rights you
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: already have.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, when you have a materialist worldview, a Darwinian
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: materialist worldview, there's nothing to base your rights on. There's
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: literally your zero zero, there's no basis whatsoever. So the
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: strong eats of the weak. So it doesn't make it
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to me how the left defines rights
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: or on what basis they defined rights, Like, how how
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: would you explain that phenomenon.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: I think it comes back to, you know, something we're
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: touching on here, and that is that so many of
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: the you know, the major figures on the left, not
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: all of them, but are products of a Christian, a
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: Judeo Christian worldview. They don't recognize it, they don't honor it,
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: they don't give any kind of acknowledgment to God for it.
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: But they are and this is this is a a
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: a theological concept known as common grace and common grace
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: that that term is never used in scripture, but the
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: concept is there and it's it's it's there. For instance,
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: when Jesus says in the Sermon on Them Out that
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: the that the sun shines, you know, on the crops
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: of the believer and the unbeliever alike. The rain falls
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: on the crops of the believer and the unbeliever alike.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: We can both enjoy, you know, after going for a
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: long bike ride or more mowing the grass, whether you're
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: believer not, you can enjoy the refreshment as you just did,
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: you know, of a cool drink. We can all enjoy friendship.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: It's not just believers who get to enjoy that, meaning
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: that God's grace is such that he bestows it on
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: believers and unbelievers alike. And one of those things comes
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: in the form of conscience. That's Romans two fifteen, which
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: tells us everybody's been given a conscience, you know, So
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: God's law has written upon the hearts of men. That's
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: what Paul is talking about there. And it's also given
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: in things like a kind of morality that might be bestowed
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: upon us through religious instruction or or perhaps through your
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: educational system as you were in as I was, doesn't
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: make you a Christian, but it serves to restrain you
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: somewhat from what you might otherwise be. And I love
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: the remark that Evil and Law the great novelist, you know,
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: Brideshead revisitors.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: I love Brides It's one of my favorite levels.
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I he you know, he he became very
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: serious about his faith, converted to Catholicism, and he someone
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: told him on one occasion what a horrible man he was,
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: and he had a reputation for being a very unpleasant character.
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: And I loved his reply. And his reply was, yes
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: I am. And imagine how much worse I would be
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: if I were not a Christian. Meaning our Christian faith
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: doesn't make me good, it doesn't make you good. It
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: makes me less wicked than I might otherwise be. And
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: when you remove that, you're removing a restraint. It's like,
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: you know, just just you're you're you're on a wild
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: horse and you just let go of the reins, and
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: that's not going to play out particularly well. And so
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: we want the Bible in school for kids because guys
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: like you and I we recognize that it's significance, it's
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: important intellectually in the development of your people, but we
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: also recognize that it's that it is as sharp as
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: a two edged sword, and they can't engage it and
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: come away unchanged by it. It doesn't mean that they'll become believers.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: They may even become very hostile to it is, say
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: Christopher Hitchett said he did in his own education where
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: he was taught elements of the Bible. But I think
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: it's I think it's incredibly important.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we need to we need to have
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: it in all public schools. It's it's so I don't know,
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: it's just it's so vital for all the reasons we've
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: been discussing, but also as as you just mentioned, just
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: that kind of restraint that and we can see I
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: think in nineteen sixty three, was it the Supreme Court
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: struck down or made it struck down that Bibles could
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: be taught in school, that the Bible could be taught
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: in school. And you can kind of see from that
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: from that year the decline of the culture, the decline
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: of education, the decline of every everything in the culture.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: So we've got to get the Bible back in school,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: not just in Texas but at every state. Tell the
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: story about when you were teaching as a graduate. You
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: were teaching Western civilization as a graduate student, and you
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: you had some you ran into some issues, and the
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: blue Hair mafia, as you call it, came back for you.
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I will. I taught when I was when I
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: was in graduate school, and I'm sure that this is
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: still the program these days. But as a graduate student,
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: they assign you, you know, loads of classes that you
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: teach while you know, some professor goes off to write
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: a book and in exchange for a little bit of money,
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: and you know, they waive your tuition. And so I
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: was teaching, you know, two hundred and forty students in
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: Western civilization major research you know institution, and then later
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: in a prestigious though decidedly leftist preparatory school. So I
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: was teaching European history and some Russian literature and things
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: of this nature. And I would require my students as
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: by the way, my one of my Jewish professors, who
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: I as far as I know, is agnostic, maybe even
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: maybe even an atheist, but he would require of Western
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: civilization students. So I working for him because he set
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: the curriculum, not me would require it. You know of
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: students as well, and that's a few key passages you know,
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: in scripture. And so when I was when I was
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: teaching at the preparatory school level, I would have students
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: not all, not not every year all of this, but
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: various selections, things like the Sermon on the Mound, and uh,
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: the creation story in Genesis one and two and Actodus twenty,
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue. I would have them read
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: the Crucifixion, a story as contained to John chapters nineteen
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: through twenty one. Meaning if you're to understand why there's
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: a church over there that ten thousand people attend every Sunday,
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: this is the South, this happens. It starts with this.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: If you're to understand that crucifix that you're wearing around
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: your neck very decoratively. I've often asked dudes, you know,
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: what do you think of that?
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: What is that?
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: Why do you wear that? And frequently they don't know,
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: they're just wearing it because they like it, And I say, well,
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: that actually has quite a lot of significance. You do well,
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: you know, to understand what it means. It's not just
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: simply a decorative things.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: They've probably thought Madonna, the pop singer Madonna came up
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: with a crucifix or something.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yes, And in fact, I think I think
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: you're exactly right. You know, I thought it was very
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: important that students were to have some understanding of this.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: And I'll never forget one of my students who was
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: I think he was born in this country, but his
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: family was from China. He was he was the very
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: first generation to be born in this country. And he was,
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: by the way, an exceptionally bright kid. I think he went.
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: I think he eventually went to Harvard and nice kid.
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: And I had assigned John chapters nineteen through twenty one,
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: the story of the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, you know,
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: of Jesus and this. He was very conscientious student. He's
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: going to read what has been assigned. And I'll never
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: forget him coming in to class and saying to a
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: student was from the Middle East, and he said, did
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: you read this? Did you read this? It says this
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: guy came back from the dead. This is a this
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: is a wild So and as I heard that story,
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: and this is Alabama, by the way, so as I
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: hear the story, I was going, oh, my gosh, his
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: education has been so hyper secular that he's this biblically illiterate.
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: And again, I want to emphasize a very bright kid,
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: but he had had no Biblical knowledge whatsoever. And I
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: realized if these students, and he was an exception, by
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: the way, the others I'm sure had, you know, various
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: levels of Biblical knowledge. There were, you know, some Christians
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: in my class, but not very many. And I just thought,
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: if they're to understand the fall of the Roman Empire,
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: if they're to understand the Middle Ages, if they are
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: to understand the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, if
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: they're to understand Martin Luther King Junior's appeals in the
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: Civil Rights movement, if they understand the abolitionists, if they're
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: understand the Gettysburg Address, if they're to understand Eisenhower's you know,
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: famous Crusade speech which was which was issued to all
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: soldiers prior to D Day, you have to know something
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: of the Bible. And I mean to me, to me,
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: if you probably think of a better example than this
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: back but to me it would be like I remember,
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: my kids were all into Tolkien. I wasn't. I didn't
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: grow up reading Tolkien, but my kids loved Tolkien, and
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: then when the movies came out, they wanted to go
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: see them, and of course I did, and I love them.
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to imagine being dropped into, say the third
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: installment of that trilogy, and trying to understand anything that's happening.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I would.
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: I would come away going, well, they're good guys. Are
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: the bad guys? I think I can identify them. This
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: ring is very significant and the only place it has
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: to be destroyed, and it can only be destroyed on
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: this mountain, so I would get something from it. But
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: there would be a lot of other background material that
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: they would understand, having read the books and watch the
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: first two movies, that I would be utterly clueless about.
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: And that's what it's like, approaching the Western literary canon
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: without the Bible. And you mentioned the blue hairs. I
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: was waiting for them to protest. I think only one
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: of them actually had blue hair, but I was waiting
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: for them to protest my use of the Bible, which
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: they did. They went to the head master and complained
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: that I was using the Bible, and I actually was
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: kind of like, yes, yes, this is a fight I want.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: I want this fight. I will with relish take on
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: the lot of them, and anyway, I just went. He
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: was an interesting guy. He was a kind of a
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi kind of Atholic. I own
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: private conversations with him. He didn't believe in having or
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: l He wasn't best and agnostic, so he wasn't really
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: a serious, you know, Catholic, but he did, you know,
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: observe a certain measure of ceremony and liturgy. And when
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: I went in and spoke to him regarding this, I
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: wasn't sure what his reaction would be, if he would
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: just be hostile towards me that I was using the
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: Bible and class and I laid out for him that
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: the Bible was more important than the whole rest of
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: the entire Western literary canon combined. And he was a
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: superbly educated, classically educated man. And his response to that
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: was to say, true, absolutely true, are you carrying Are
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: you teaching it in there as a like a Sunday
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: school class. I said, no, I'm teaching it. And then
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: I would lay out because in order to understand this,
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: that and the other I'm teaching it as literature. His
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: response was, carry on debate over and I was, you know,
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: I was permitted to carry on in any teachers or
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: for that matter of fact, excuse me parents. And there
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: were a few who complained about it. He would shut
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: them down right away. And so you can't. Mister Thom's
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: absolutely correct. You can't possibly hope to understand later historical
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: events in the United States and in Western literature unless
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: you know this. It doesn't mean you have to believe it,
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: but you have to believe they believed it.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. I love that you pushed back.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Now you quote Neil Ferguson, and just to kind of
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: to explain what this quote means, he says from his
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: book The West, and I think it's of civilization, the
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: West and the rest. The heart the quote is the
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: heart of your culture is your religion, Christianity. That is
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: why the West has been so dynamic. Christianity is the
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: reason for your success. What is it getting at there?
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: It's this is actually really really fascinating because you remind
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: me of yet another Western classic of sociology, and that's
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic in the Spirit of Capitalism,
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: which I was required to read in graduate school, state
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: institution hostile to the Christian faith. And yet here I
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: was assigned another reading, the context of which you can't
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: possibly understand unless you know something of the Christian faith
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: in the Bible. And Ferguson, who's I think he's at
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Now, he was educated
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: at Oxford and taught for many years at Harvard, but
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: he's a historian. And I don't know if he you know,
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: who he's married to, or at least was is I
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: in Hersi Ali He at one time was an atheist.
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: I don't know if that remains the case. She has
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: since become a Christian, I know, and so I'm curious
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: to know about his his own spiritual journey, if there's
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: been anything like that. But at the time of his
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: writing this book, to my knowledge, he was a best
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: an agnostic. I might be mistaken on that, but I
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: think that is correct. And Ferguson was arguing, he argues
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: in that book Weber's thesis. He's arguing that the West
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: has been defined by the Christian faith. And you see
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: that maybe this feels a little too academic, but it
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: fascinates me. Max Weber was a German sociologist. He also
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: was an agnostic, so not a Christian, and in nineteen
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: oh four he published his very famous thesis at Least
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: in Academic Circles that defined American academic outlook on history
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: for at least half a century. And that's the Protestant
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: ethic in the Spirit of Capitalism, and the the thesis
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: of that book is essentially this that the rise of
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: capitalism is due to the Christian faith, specifically Protestant even
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: more specifically to Calvinist theology. And that is because, says
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: said Weber, that's because a Protestantism and Calvinist theology saw
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: work as honorable, any work that was honest as being honorable,
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: and the accumulation of wealth might very well be a
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: sign of God's blessing. And so you see that echoed
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: in statements from people like Benjamin Franklin, again a Deist
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: but heavily influenced by the Christian faith. A penny saved
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: is a penny earned. It's this kind of philosophy, and
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: so this is what Weber argued. Weber was then looking
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: at the world and going, how do we explain the
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: decline again nineteen oh four, How do we explain the
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: decline of all these European Catholic powers, Spain, in France
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: and Italy that once dominated the world, And now we
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: see this little island in the North Atlantic that dominates
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: twenty five percent of the Earth's service. Now we have
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: a country on the rise that may become the most
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: powerful of them all, that just fought its last Indian
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: War only twelve years before eighteen ninety two, has now
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: gone to war and in a quick six weeks war
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: with Spain amputated some of her colonies. How do we
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: explain that the low countries, the banking countries, and the
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: dominance of Protestantism. Well, he said, it's because of the
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: ethic of Protestantism. This is what this is what brought
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: this about. And so Ferguson's book is kind of a
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: restatement of that. And Ferguson's himself was saying, this is
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: what put the West ahead of everybody. That during the
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: Age of Discovery, the West took a giant leap forward
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: of other civilizations. And this is what we mean, Beckett,
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: when we say that all civilizations are not equal. All
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: cultures are not equal, and it's the Christian faith that
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: set the West apart. It said, study science. What is
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: it the Kepler said, is to think God's thoughts after him.
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: You should study the world, you should explore the world.
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: You should have dominion over nature. This is very much
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: a strong biblical argument, and I think it's David Starkey,
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: excuse me, Rodney Stark. David Stark, he is an atheist
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: historian who wrote a biography of Elizabeth. But David Stark,
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: Rodney Stark rather just said it again. He is a
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: Baylor and he's now dead, and I think, boy, I'm
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: talking about a lot of agnostics. He may have become
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: a Christian before he died, but Rodney Stark was an agnostic,
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: and he wrote a very important book of that sort
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: of echeves the same sentiment that when we study the West,
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: what we see is that the that the Christian faith
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: when it was kind of absorbed into the culture, not perfectly.
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: I mean, he still had, you know, many evil things
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: that happened. But his argument was what did the West do?
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: The West learned as a result of a mindset that
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: was given to them from the Bible that said that
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: the universe, that all of creation was intelligible because it
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: had been created by an intelligence, and thus there was
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: a logical a framework to the world itself. And Stark
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: points out that this is not true of Islam, which
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: point that their their God is is arbitrary. It's not
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: true in Eastern mysticism, where everything is unknown and unknowable,
• 52:57
  Speaker 3: and so he gives examples where he's says the West
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: didn't didn't invent the compass in the sense that the
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: Chinese had been using it to find mystic north. But
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: he said it was it was Westerners who saw its
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: application that went well beyond the way it was being used.
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: They realized, you can you find true north, you navigate
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: using this, and it was the West that did that. Gunpowder,
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: for example, was being used merely again for you know,
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: sort of entertainment purposes. It was Westerners who looked at
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: and its application can go way beyond that. And he
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: gives he gives instances of this to just keep going
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: and going and going. But all this is just by
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: way of saying that how can you hope to understand
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: the West without understanding the Bible? And it's Ferguson. Ferguson
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: is arguing in this book that you can't. And even
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: others like vish aal Mongowati and the Chinese scholar, the
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: young named Chinese scholar that you just quoted, they see it,
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: they see it, and they recognized it. For the West
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: to be destroyed, you have to destroy its moral and
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: intellectual institutional foundations, which you're founded on the Bible.
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, And not to bring up Dawkins again, but I'm
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: going to you moderated a debate between John Lennox, who's
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: going to be on the show in a couple of months.
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: But John Lennox and Richard Dawkins. I was just how
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: you were.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I love good guy.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: My apologies you you might The debate was at the
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Oxford Museum of Natural History and basically, uh, Dawkins was
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: asserting that Christianity played no role in the rise of
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: science and Lenox I think Lenox pointed out that the
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: building that they that you were debating and UH was
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: funded by a biblical society, Right, is that correct?
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: That that's that's absolutely correct. That debate which took place
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: I think in two thousand and eight. I'd organized that
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: and I chose the Oxford Museum of Natural History is
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: the place for it to take place, because that's where
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: Wilberforce and Huxley debated in eighteen sixty, a very very
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: famous debate that took place there in one of the
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: rooms upstairs. In this case, I rented the entire.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: Museum for I saw that to date, I remember that debate.
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: Oh did you okay? Very very interesting. And I placed them,
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: you see the photographs taken by National Geographic. I placed
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: them under the t rex. There's a just big t
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: rex and I put them both right underneath it, and
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: then we underlt it, you know, which gave it this
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: kind of awesome you know, it's kind of and the
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: museum really doesn't have hardly any place to sit, so
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: there's just you know, some of the ticket holders are
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: sitting there, but we let students get into the gallery
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: above and watch, and I'm asking them questions and taking
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: questions from the crowd in it. This one particular point,
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: Dawkins seemed to score a point because the crowd accepted
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: that what he said was true because he the meaning
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: he carried it in the moment. If you watch it,
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: you'll come away thinking Lennox must be wrong because Dawkins
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: said it was such confidence, such self assurance that you know,
• 56:23
  Speaker 3: the museum had nothing to do with the Christian faith,
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: and John wasn't prepared for this to come up at all.
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: That you know, this this a free ranging discussion, and
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: John's just drawing from his memory and he says, I'm
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: pretty sure it was built with funds from the Bible Society.
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: And Dawkins just scoffs and you know, waves it off
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: of the next the next day the papers, there's a
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: funny article that was published called is Richard Dawkins still Evolving?
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: And uh? And that particular Alder article laid out here's
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: what Dawkins said, here's Lennox's buddle and by the way,
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: Dawkins was one hundred percent wrong. And then it lays
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: out the history of the museum and that that article
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: was written by Melanie Phillips, who, by.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: The way, I love them, I love melody develops Mellie
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: Phelps's She's says one of my favorite quotes. She said
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: that Rousseau is the greatest villain in history of all time.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: John Jack Rousseau is the greatest villain of all time.
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: Well, she's got a point there. Paul Johnson, the late
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: British historian Paul Johnson, in his book called Intellectuals more
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: or less argues the same thing, and certainly, certainly his
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: ideas had serious negative consequences for Western society. But Melanie
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: went in actually did the research on that and realized
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: Dawkins is one hundred percent wrong on this. And it
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: was embarrassing, you know, for Dawkins, because he'd stated it
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: with absolute, you know, assurance that this was the case.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: But the museum had been built by one of the
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: regius professors there of medicine, and he wanted students, he says,
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: to essentially study God's creation that they might better understand it,
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: and that they might better understand him. Meaning the Christian
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: faith is anti intellectual. Any Christian who thinks that doesn't
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: understand the Christian faith at least on that level. That's
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: that's not part of what the Christian faith is. God
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: invites us to reason with him. God invites us to
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: explore his creation. What did God say to Adam? You
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: name him? You gelem that when you want to call
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: that over there? What do you want to call this
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: over here? It's a wonderful aspect of what it is
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: to be a Christian because a Christian faith isn't anti intellectual,
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: and that's the reason that it was the West that
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: produced both capitalism, science, and the development of government's English
• 59:03
  Speaker 3: common law, for instance, where you're innocent, you're presumed innocent
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the state,
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: not on the accused. Again, these are all things they
• 59:17
  Speaker 3: want to kick out and destroy and get rid of.
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: But all that is predicated on a biblical worldview. And
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: one of the things that I think is so important
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: about this, Beckett, and I just want to make sure
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: I get this in is if you're listening to us
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: have this conversation and you think, well, this is just
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: much too you know, erudite for me, know this that
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: the Christian worldview is a worldview that says that I'm
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: obligated to treat you, whether you're a Christian or not,
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: whether you share my assumptions about life and the world
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: or not, that I'm obliged to view you as an
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: object of God's special creation who was made in His image,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: And that makes a difference in the way that I
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: treat you. It means that I am to render to
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: you a certain measure of respect until something should happen
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: to to to change that, and that I'm not to
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: equate you with animals, you're not and you just mentioned Darwinism. Uh.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: Then again, this has always been my argument with so
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: many of these atheists who like Dawkins. Of course they
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: worship Darwin, and Darwinism is void of morality. There's no morality.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: And I'll never forget a debate I had with a
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: Harvard philosopher some years ago who was he was an
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: expert on Friedrich Nietzsche, and I'd read a lot of
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: Friedrich Nietzsche and he was enjoying, you know, are back
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: and forth. This was taking place via email, and I
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: was saying, you know, but I was going somewhere, but
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't. I was kind of keeping my
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: powder dry, as it were. It's a very Southern trick
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: to pretend you don't know anything and then you know,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: ambush somebody. And so here I am in this conversation
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: with this guy. We're talking about Nietzsche, and I'm saying,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: you know, and Nietzsche, there's a definite connection between Darwin
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: and Nietzsche. And he's like, oh yeah, yeah, very very definitely.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: And I said, and then there's a connection with Wagner,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: and he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a connection there,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 3: and there's a connection with probably some influence on Karl Marx.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: He goes, yeah, yeah yeah, And I said, and then
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: later with the Nazis, and of course he went apoplectic.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: You know at that point, it's like he wanted to
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: say that that flow of thought had just abruptly stopped
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: when it reached the twentieth century. And I was just
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: simply pointing out. You can argue that Hitler didn't properly
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: understand Nietzsche. I would argue he did, But why did
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: the Nazis honor his sister, who was still alive. Why
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: did they? Why did they why did they revere her?
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: Why did they make a point of honoring her? And
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: it was because they understood this much about Nietzsche. You
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: can argue that they didn't understand some other things. They
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: did understand this that there is no governing morality in
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: this world. If there is no god, to quote dos Zoevsky,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: if there is no immortality, there could be no virtue,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: and all things are permissible, meaning if there is no God,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: there's no ultimate right wrong, and I can do anything,
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: I can get away with the Nazis got that, and
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: they also understood from him his argument about the Oberman
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: or Uberman that there are that there are, at least
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: a Nietzs' view, there are some people are sort of
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: above others, and then there's kind of a subspecies. And
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: they go, Aha, it's the Slavs, it's the Gypsies, it's
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 3: the Jews. Yeah, we're we're the superior race. So you see,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: when you remove the Bible, when you remove the Christian
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: faith from society, whether you believe in it or not,
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: you are setting yourself on a course for absolute barbarism.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, look at the twentieth century is Stalin
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: and Paul pod and Chairman Mao, all of them. I mean,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: it's just it's a it's it's undeniable. When you remove
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: God from the equation, this is what happens. It's like,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: it's obvious. So and you uh will end here because
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: you you in this piece with this this statement the
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: Bible is the prequel to everything.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm kind of proud of that. I came up
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: with that on my own that I like that.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: I like that, it's very good.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: But you know, as I was thinking about as it
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: relates to all of this. I was thinking about, you
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: know that it's a precursor to other things. Yeah, it's
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: it's a it's a prior reading. And then I thought, no,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: it really is the prequel to everything, certainly everything Western.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: I mean, our own Supreme Court, our own Supreme Court
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: has you know, carved into its walls, you know, the
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: the you know the Ten Commandments, the the wall itself.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: You know, how are you to understand that imagery? How
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: do you understand any of that? Uh? It all comes
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: from a reading of the Bible. Now, you don't have
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: to believe it any more that I believe BeO Wolf, uh,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: any more that I believe in Athena or Zeus or
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: Wotan or or any of those. But it's worth reading.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: And that's because those things had an impact on the
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: development of Western civilization and the Bible most of all
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: because it is it is the prequel to understanding everything Western.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: You just you just can't possibly hope to navigate it
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: without it. And it's it's fascinates me back at that.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 3: I increasingly meet people who are have you know, been
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: to Ivy League institutions, and they don't have any idea
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: of the Bible, and I will share this little story
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: with you. I was speaking at a university. I won't
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: name it, but I was speaking at university as to
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: students who are supposed to be in the ministry track.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: That is, these are people are eventually going on to
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 3: serve in some kind of ministry. And I had chosen
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: to talk about Acts Chapter ten as well as the
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: Declaration of Independence. I was making a point between the
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: two of them. And the point I was simply making
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: is that when the authors of the Declaration of Independence
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: said that we hold these truths to be self evident,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: that all men are created equal and are endowed by
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: their careator all men, I said, you know, they didn't
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: fully understand the import of even what they were saying.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: I said, because, and I said to the suits, because
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: what group of people class? What group of people were
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: not included in that? And of course immediately they said, well, slaves,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 3: And I said, yes, a civil war had to be
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: fought where roughly six hundred and twenty thousand Americans had
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 3: to die to bring about the thirteenth and fourteenth Amendments.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 3: And then you go to Acts chapter ten, and there
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: you see Peter sitting on the rooftop, and he has
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: this weird dream about a tablecloth coming down and these
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: animals on it and so on, and then somebody tells
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: him that he's to come with him, and this guy
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: takes Peter. Peter goes along with him, and then he
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: goes and he comes to this Roman soldier, so a gentile,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: and Peter's like, and again I'm very much paraphrasing this,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: but Peter is kind of like, what do you want.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: I'm not even supposed to be here. You're a gentile.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: And the guy says, I don't know. You tell me, brave, brave,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: you showed up. And then Peter realizes. He goes, oh wow,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: I realized that God shows no partiality. And he shares
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: the Gospel with this man. He and his whole household
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: are saved. And then Peter realized the boy, I'm going
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: to be in trouble when I get back to Jerusalem
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: to have to explain to everybody why a gentile is
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: now a Christian because their previous understand meaning that when
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: at Pentecost Peter, the Holy Spirit speaking through Peter, speaks
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: of how God has poured out his spirit on all flesh.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: Peter himself didn't seem to understand the import of that
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: anymore than the framers of the Declaration of Independence all
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: flesh he did. He seemed to think it meant all
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: Jewish flash, and clearly what the Holy Spirit meant was
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: all flashps Jews. So here I am here, I am
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 3: saying this, and then I, uh, so I'm making this
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 3: biblical reference. And then I go back to to the
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 3: Declaration of Independence, and I said, so as you can see,
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: I said, old war had to be fought to include
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: you know, black people, you know, into those rights. I said,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 3: what other group of people is still alienated from those rights? Well,
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: now they were really thinking, and go on, you know
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: legal aliens. I said, no, no, not illegal aliens, but
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: what other group of people? And they couldn't answer, And
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: I said, well the unborn. Now I thought that I
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: was speaking to biblically literate people. When I referenced tax ten,
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 3: it was clear they had no idea what I was
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: talking about. Zero. But now when I'm mentioned now, when
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: I mentioned the unborn, I said, you know, now, the unborn,
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: those rights have to be extended to them. The professor
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 3: of that class went bonkers and stood up and said
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: this lecture is over. This lecture is over, and and.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: And I'm a Christian university, right.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you're at it. You're at You're at a university
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: with students who are themselves future ministers of the Gospel,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: who are quite clearly biblically illiterate and are being coached
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: in a very woke way. And I said to this
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: professor as I was leaving, I said, you are not
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 3: making future ministers of the Gospel. You're making social justice warriors,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: which are not the same thing. Because these students don't
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: know the Bible. They don't know the Bible, and they've
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: all been coached clearly to believe that abortion is a
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: quote unquote right. And that the larger point that I'm
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: simply making here, Becket, is just simply to point out
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: the fact that that even among our ministers these days,
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: so it's not just a Texas public schools, we increasingly
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 3: find that even among many of our ministers and people
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: who call themselves Christians, that there's a high level of
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: biblical literacy. And that's because the Christian faith has been redefined,
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: not in not literally, but among those who would think
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: that they're Christians, it's been redefined is some kind of
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: vague adherence to ideas like tolerance and diversity and love
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 3: and so on, absolutely severed from their biblical meaning rather
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: than actual belief in Jesus Christ in obedience to him.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's a I love that you made that
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: point in that class, and I hope it's that it
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: sticks with the students who are there that day.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: We can hope.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: But it is professor who went bonkers when you said that.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: But we're going to leave it there, Larry, Alex Tunton,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: thank you for coming on and talking about all these things.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: Very fascinating, Becky.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 3: It's always a pleasure to be with you, and we
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: got to get you on ideas have consequences sometime soon.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mentioned that in the so how can
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: people find ideas have consequences?
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: It's on YouTube my channel, and it's posted also on
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: X every Tuesday morning at I think it's eight am
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 3: Central time. Is posted there and you can check us
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: out over there. And where your helmet, Becket? Where are
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 3: your helmet when you're cycling? You don't?
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: You will, I'll try. I'll try to do it all right.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Larry, appreciate it.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 3: Take care of brother.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: Wait, don't touch that dial. Please like and subscribe, and
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: also please consider becoming a patron on Patreon. For as
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: little as five dollars a month, you can really help
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: us out on the show. The link is below and
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: we so so appreciate it. Thank you.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Beckett
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: Cook Show. Your support makes this content possible. All episodes
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: of The Beckett Cook Show are also available on YouTube.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 2: For more information about Beckett and his ministry, visit his
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: website at Becketcook dot com.
• 1:12:24
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• 1:12:26
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• 1:12:29
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