SPEAKER_1: I assume there is audio now, so I will simply re-say what I have already said, for those of you who are not lip readers.
SPEAKER_1: I assume there's audio now.
SPEAKER_1: I know the chat will catch up here in a minute or so.
SPEAKER_1: Someone said it's better, so I assume that's good.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, anyway, welcome to the At Any Cost podcast.
SPEAKER_1: It is the 11th of December, 2025.
SPEAKER_1: This is the seventh episode, also the seventh Q&A episode.
SPEAKER_1: And I have quite a few questions tonight, 40-something questions.
SPEAKER_1: I know I will not get through all of those this episode, but it means that I have questions for future episodes.
SPEAKER_1: And I will, of course, save those, like I've done in the past, for questions to which I did not get in other episodes.
SPEAKER_1: Just a little bit of housekeeping before I start.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, as always, questions can be submitted on the forum.
SPEAKER_1: The link should be in the description on all platforms.
SPEAKER_1: Hopefully it's there.
SPEAKER_1: So everything seems to be working.
SPEAKER_1: Everything's green on my end, so I will get into the questions here.
SPEAKER_1: Let me just pull up that first question.
SPEAKER_1: It's about good works and unbelievers.
SPEAKER_1: You have said a few times before that the Lutheran understanding of good works, that they are not counted toward unbelievers, or that they are actually not good works, but instead filthy rags.
SPEAKER_1: Which is just a quote of scripture, of course.
SPEAKER_1: But you have also said the weight of sin against God is infinite, so no number of good deeds could make up for it.
SPEAKER_1: It seems to me that the view in which one's good works count towards themselves, yet this is an infinite whole, so it's an impossible task, would be both consistent with Christian redemption, also go over better in the ears of an unbeliever.
SPEAKER_1: What problems does this view present?
SPEAKER_1: Why is the more severe form more accurate, and in what ways?
SPEAKER_1: So, there are a few questions here, and it's one of those subjects that there's a little bit of nuance in what exactly is being said and what exactly is meant, because, a different pen here, are good works good in and of themselves?
SPEAKER_1: The answer to that is both yes and no, and I'll get into sort of the meta issue here after speaking first about good works proper.
SPEAKER_1: Because the meta issue is really the question, but there are things that are good in and of themselves, because they are good.
SPEAKER_1: Everything created by God is good.
SPEAKER_1: So, human beings in their nature are good.
SPEAKER_1: Which sounds kind of crazy to Christian ears, because we're used to thinking about human beings as fallen and sinful, and it's a different sense of nature.
SPEAKER_1: It's in our essence, in the thing that God created, we are good.
SPEAKER_1: Now, we are corrupted by the fall and by original sin.
SPEAKER_1: And so, we are not good in that sense.
SPEAKER_1: Our nature is corrupted, but it is a good thing that was corrupted.
SPEAKER_1: Similarly, I'm going to take my tea bag out of my tea here before it gets bitter.
SPEAKER_1: But similarly, with regard to good works, and this gets into the sort of meta issue here, the status of the individual matters.
SPEAKER_1: This is something that we used to recognize in our laws and elsewhere.
SPEAKER_1: I've used the example before of crimes that are enhanced by the status of the person against whom the crime was committed, which is obviously relevant for sin, because sin, all sin, is committed against God, against you, against you only have I sinned, to use the psalm.
SPEAKER_1: And so, with regard to certain crimes, the most obvious example, probably the best example, is treason.
SPEAKER_1: Because there are different kinds of treason, historically at least, because what ultimately is treason?
SPEAKER_1: Treason is betraying someone to whom you owed a duty.
SPEAKER_1: Now we have high treason, which is treason against your sovereign.
SPEAKER_1: Used to be treason against the king, now it's treason against your country, or whatever it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe you still have a king, depending where you are.
SPEAKER_1: But you have high treason, and you have petty treason, which is just French for small in this case.
SPEAKER_1: It's not petty like, you know, unimportant.
SPEAKER_1: So petty treason would be treason against someone who is your head, basically.
SPEAKER_1: Historically the most common one would have been children murdering their parents, usually their father, or a wife murdering her husband.
SPEAKER_1: That is not just murder, it's also petty treason.
SPEAKER_1: Similarly, with regard to sin, because sin is committed against God, the transgress of sin is infinite, which again is correctly stated in that question.
SPEAKER_1: It's why you can never pay back the debt that is owed.
SPEAKER_1: You can never pay back an infinite debt with any amount of finite payments.
SPEAKER_1: And so, human beings being finite, we can't ever render an infinite amount to God, which is why Christ had to die, because Christ being God, his death of infinite value.
SPEAKER_1: So, that balances the scales.
SPEAKER_1: So, the question then of whether or not a person can do a good work, a truly good work, matters with regard to the status of the individual.
SPEAKER_1: If the individual is in good standing, as it were, with God, which is to say in Christ, because that's the only way to be in good standing with God.
SPEAKER_1: So, if you're in Christ, you have your slate wiped clean with regard to sin.
SPEAKER_1: Your sin is not counted against you, because Christ's righteousness is imputed to you, because you are in Christ.
SPEAKER_1: It's an issue of headship.
SPEAKER_1: Those who are still fallen, those who are still not righteous, according to imputed righteousness, do not have good works, because everything they do is sin, because they are sinners.
SPEAKER_1: An important point here that I've commented on before, I've raised it many places, but it bears repeating.
SPEAKER_1: You do not become a sinner, because you sin.
SPEAKER_1: You sin, because you are a sinner.
SPEAKER_1: Now, that's true of everyone, except Adam, because Adam became a sinner, because he sinned.
SPEAKER_1: For the rest of us were born sinners.
SPEAKER_1: In sin did my mother conceive me, again to quote the Psalms.
SPEAKER_1: And so, we sin because we're sinners.
SPEAKER_1: In order for our good works to actually have merit before God, we have to be cleansed of being a sinner.
SPEAKER_1: Which means we have to be in Christ.
SPEAKER_1: Those who are not in Christ, therefore, cannot have works that are actually good.
SPEAKER_1: It's the distinction between whether something is good per se.
SPEAKER_1: So, feeding your children is good.
SPEAKER_1: Starving your children is bad.
SPEAKER_1: Doesn't actually matter if you're a Christian or a non-Christian.
SPEAKER_1: Those two things remain what they are.
SPEAKER_1: Good to feed your children, bad to starve your children.
SPEAKER_1: But, the good act, the good work, does not count for you before God unless you are in Christ, because you are a sinner.
SPEAKER_1: So, it's sort of two different things there, and there's a nuance, but it's important to understand the nature of it.
SPEAKER_1: To some degree, it's not something that has to be raised with, say, new believers.
SPEAKER_1: This is something that's more meat than milk.
SPEAKER_1: But, once you progress in the faith, it's important to understand the reality of how bad and corrupting sin is.
SPEAKER_1: And anytime you minimize sin, what are you also inevitably doing?
SPEAKER_1: You're minimizing Christ's sacrifice, which you never want to do.
SPEAKER_1: And so, it is necessary to understand the depth of the depravity of sin, and the corruption of it, and what it does to the individual, and the fact that an individual who is still living in that sin, not to say that those of us who are in Christ are sinless, it's just not counted against us because of imputed righteousness, but if you are still living in that sin, you cannot truly do anything that is good because you are still a sinner.
SPEAKER_1: So, for those who are new to the faith, it's not something on which we should focus.
SPEAKER_1: No, we can point out that, yes, there are things that are good in themselves because God created them.
SPEAKER_1: All of the things God created are good.
SPEAKER_1: The things that God tells us to do are good.
SPEAKER_1: So, if we do them, we've done something good.
SPEAKER_1: But it's not counted unless you're in Christ.
SPEAKER_1: I believe that answers that question.
SPEAKER_1: Let me pull up the second question here.
SPEAKER_1: This is from last week, I carried over a question.
SPEAKER_1: And I do try to give preference to questions that are on the forum simply because that helps me as I've pointed out before, but anyway.
SPEAKER_1: Was the Tetragrammaton in the Old Testament Hebrew or text, or was it a Masoretic addition?
SPEAKER_1: If the latter, what is the origin, how did it end up there?
SPEAKER_1: I don't have to deal with the if the latter bit, because yes, as far as we can tell, and we do have fairly good proof for this, is the Tetragrammaton was present in the Ur text when that existed.
SPEAKER_1: So for those who aren't aware what Ur text means, it just means the actual Old Testament in the Hebrew that God gave to Old Testament Israel that was lost and destroyed.
SPEAKER_1: Incidentally, the final copies of it destroyed with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, burned on the temple steps no less.
SPEAKER_1: So, judgment from God there.
SPEAKER_1: And the Tetragrammaton, for those who don't know, it just means four letters.
SPEAKER_1: It's just Greek.
SPEAKER_1: Incidentally, it's Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew or anything.
SPEAKER_1: So YHWH in English, Yod He Vav He in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_1: And I don't care if I pronounce this correctly because it's Hebrew and I don't care.
SPEAKER_1: But some of the Septuagint papyri do, in fact, have in Hebrew letters the Tetragrammaton.
SPEAKER_1: The issue is, as we pointed out in the episodes on the Septuagint and elsewhere, we don't know the vocalization of it because the Hebrews decided they were going to be more pious than God and not use God's name.
SPEAKER_1: They probably thought they were getting around the commandment not to take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain because, well, we're not using it at all, so we can't take it in vain.
SPEAKER_1: Probably their rules lawyering, trying to Jew God.
SPEAKER_1: But some copies, like I said, of Septuagint papyri do have it, and so we can rely on that, but all it gives us is the letters.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't give us the vowels, so we don't know what it is.
SPEAKER_1: But what we do know is that the inspired Greek text translates it as Lord, Kurios, and so we know to call him Lord, God, all these other names that he has.
SPEAKER_1: So we shouldn't use that.
SPEAKER_1: I wouldn't say that it's wrong to use the four letters on something.
SPEAKER_1: For instance, they're on the cover page of the Book of Concord, but they're not transliterated, vowels aren't added, it's just the four letters.
SPEAKER_1: Another interesting point with regard to the translation of that, and particularly the Greek, in this case specifically the Greek, there are some texts that have it translated as transliterated into English, IAO.
SPEAKER_1: So iota, alpha, omega, not the other O, but the last one.
SPEAKER_1: Which is perhaps interesting because that's essentially one of the names God uses for himself.
SPEAKER_1: I am the alpha and the omega, to quote Revelation, the beginning and the end.
SPEAKER_1: So, sort of an interesting point that is translated sometimes is that as well, which does not sound like, you know, Yahweh or whatever it happens to be, IAO.
SPEAKER_1: It's not the same thing.
SPEAKER_1: I know some people have tried to make that argument, but they honestly don't even sound similar.
SPEAKER_1: So, is it present in the Urtext?
SPEAKER_1: Sure, but still without the vowels, because Hebrews and Abjad, they don't write down their vowels at all at that point.
SPEAKER_1: They didn't even die of diacritics yet.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, where should a Christian attend church if there are no faithful congregations nearby?
SPEAKER_1: I've answered this one a number of times, but this is one of those that definitely bears repeating, and I don't know that I've answered it in this format yet.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, I believe I have not, except in passing.
SPEAKER_1: If you do not have a faithful congregation nearby, you should start a house church, or you should find a house church.
SPEAKER_1: There's nothing wrong with doing that.
SPEAKER_1: House churches are perfectly acceptable.
SPEAKER_1: If your house church does really well, and grows, and I hope that it does, or the members of the church just have a lot of children, then you can acquire a building.
SPEAKER_1: Nothing wrong with that.
SPEAKER_1: If you happen to have a man who is sufficiently competent among you, ordain him.
SPEAKER_1: There's nothing that stops you from doing that.
SPEAKER_1: The congregation calls, the congregation ordains.
SPEAKER_1: The bishop is not the one that has the power from God to do that.
SPEAKER_1: The bishop, if you have a system that is an Episcopal system, you have a bishop in your system, then he does that as a point of Christian order.
SPEAKER_1: It's a matter of good order in the church.
SPEAKER_1: But during times like this, that's not necessary, and it could very well be harmful, probably, because most of the bishops are, in fact, not faithful, sort of regardless of which church body is in view.
SPEAKER_1: The Roman Catholic bishops are faithless, the Anglican bishops are faithless, the LCMS equivalent of bishops are faithless, so that's the reality of the situation.
SPEAKER_1: Start a home church.
SPEAKER_1: Perfectly acceptable.
SPEAKER_1: You're going to avoid a lot of the issues, and eventually, perhaps, then you'll be able to acquire a church building, maybe from one of these mainline churches as they go under.
SPEAKER_1: One of the biggest ways in which ELCA currently makes money is selling old church buildings.
SPEAKER_1: So...
SPEAKER_1: The next question.
SPEAKER_1: When did you become a Christian?
SPEAKER_1: I can answer that one in two words, in utero.
SPEAKER_1: So for that one, I would definitely say, I was a Christian from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_1: I was born into a Christian family, raised as a Christian, never been anything else.
SPEAKER_1: Now, I was not raised Lutheran.
SPEAKER_1: I did become a Lutheran later in life, but I've been a Christian my entire life.
SPEAKER_1: So...
SPEAKER_1: The next question.
SPEAKER_1: For your confident faith daily devotions, which book could I buy to get the same in print form?
SPEAKER_1: What daily prayer routine addition to daily readings and devotion, if any?
SPEAKER_1: So, the answer for that, specifically, I read the lectionary, the daily lectionary readings from the Treasury of Daily Prayer, which is very similar to many other daily lectionaries across a number of denominations.
SPEAKER_1: But it is specifically the Treasury of Daily Prayer.
SPEAKER_1: I'll put a link in the show notes.
SPEAKER_1: And that is from Concordia Publishing House, the publishing arm of the LCMS.
SPEAKER_1: I am currently reading the Old Testament, so the Psalms and the Old Testament reading from NETS, which is a translation of the Septuagint, which is just the new English translation of the Septuagint.
SPEAKER_1: That's available for free online, or you can purchase a hard copy.
SPEAKER_1: They're relatively reasonably priced.
SPEAKER_1: They're not great print quality, but they're good enough.
SPEAKER_1: The New Testament readings, I just read the ESV.
SPEAKER_1: ESV is fine.
SPEAKER_1: I do fix some of the things it does that are, I would say, wrong.
SPEAKER_1: They're kind of quirks, more than being wrong, but definitely some of the translators had an agenda.
SPEAKER_1: And so the biggest one, I never say Gentiles, because Gentiles is not an English word.
SPEAKER_1: So it's completely ridiculous that we have it in our English translations of scripture.
SPEAKER_1: As I put it out before, Gentiles is basically of the nations in Latin.
SPEAKER_1: Well, we have all the words of the nations, or whatever it happens to be, whichever noun case it is, to the nations, of the nations, from the nations, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_1: We have all these things in English, it should be translated.
SPEAKER_1: And so I follow sort of the same thing that Luther did, depending on the context for the term, and there are a couple of different terms there, actually.
SPEAKER_1: There's ethnicos and ethnos, but you either have, essentially, nations, heathen, or peoples.
SPEAKER_1: And really, you can get away with just heathen and nations is sufficient.
SPEAKER_1: There are a couple of places where it's kind of awkward in English to say either of those, and so people sounds better, but, or peoples, plural.
SPEAKER_1: So I do change that when I'm reading, but I just do that on the fly while I'm reading the text, because it's not accurate to say Gentiles.
SPEAKER_1: It's misleading, it's Judaizing.
SPEAKER_1: We should not be doing it.
SPEAKER_1: But other than that, the only other thing that I mentally change, and then obviously speak the corrected form, there are some places where the translators were uncomfortable with the word slave.
SPEAKER_1: Now, yes, the Greek doulos can mean servant or slave, but it generally has the meaning, at least the nuance, of slave more than servant.
SPEAKER_1: Not always, because certainly when, and for instance, some of the letters, you have Paul speaking about us being servants of Christ, perhaps that's a little more servant.
SPEAKER_1: There are times where Christ is contrasting things, and it seems like servant is perhaps meant more so than slave, but there are also times where very clearly slave is meant.
SPEAKER_1: And so I will change that if it says servant, I'll change it to slave.
SPEAKER_1: And even the ESV, some versions of it, do indeed have slave.
SPEAKER_1: So that's something that they have gone back and forth on that one.
SPEAKER_1: And then finally, for the readings from the Book of Concord, which is the final bit of the Daily Devotions, I use the Reader's Edition, second edition.
SPEAKER_1: You probably won't be able to find the first edition, so it hardly matters which one.
SPEAKER_1: If you have the Reader's Edition, it's going to be the second.
SPEAKER_1: The reason that I like that one primarily for people is that it's the one I recommend for anyone who is new to Lutheranism or these theology issues, because it has a lot of helpful material in the book.
SPEAKER_1: There are essays on various topics, there's history, there's context, all these things that even most Lutherans simply will not know.
SPEAKER_1: At least not all of it.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's very helpful to have those materials.
SPEAKER_1: As anyone who knows what a Reader's Edition is, not the Reader's Edition of the Bible, which is just the Bible with all the formatting removed, basically, so it reads like a normal book.
SPEAKER_1: But a Reader's Edition of any other work is typically something that is accompanied by explanatory essays, lots of footnotes, helpful materials.
SPEAKER_1: That's what the RE2 of the Book of Concord is.
SPEAKER_1: Now, that's not the same translation as is available on thebookofconcord.org, which is the website that I maintain for the Book of Concord.
SPEAKER_1: That one is the Triglotta English, because it's in the public domain.
SPEAKER_1: The Reader's Edition second is not in the public domain.
SPEAKER_1: I did ask CPH if they would let me add that to the Book of Concord website.
SPEAKER_1: They said no.
SPEAKER_1: So that's why it's not available on there yet.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe one day they will.
SPEAKER_1: We can hope.
SPEAKER_1: Next question, sort of related.
SPEAKER_1: Will you be recording a daily Septuagint version of the Bible in 2026?
SPEAKER_1: That is currently the plan.
SPEAKER_1: I think I will probably use the nets.
SPEAKER_1: There are some quirks in the Lexham edition that I don't really like.
SPEAKER_1: But the problem with all the currently existing editions is that they're either really old, sort of like the original King James, which would be the Brenton edition, and Brenton also does some weird stuff, where sometimes he pulls from the Masoretic for seemingly no reason.
SPEAKER_1: He just felt like it.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe he was translating and remembered what he'd read.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know what happened there.
SPEAKER_1: They're the ones that are very academic, like nets, and to some degree the Lexham, LES2 at this point, the second edition of it.
SPEAKER_1: And there are none that really flow well as natural English.
SPEAKER_1: But of course, I've critiqued the ESV for the same thing.
SPEAKER_1: It can be stilted at times, because they tried to make the English follow the Hebrew, which is what they were using, the Masoretic, and in the New Testament, the Greek grammar, which doesn't work in English, because English grammar is different from both Greek and Hebrew grammar.
SPEAKER_1: So it sounds stilted.
SPEAKER_1: So there are problems with all the editions currently available.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying they're unfaithful.
SPEAKER_1: The nets basically is very faithful.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think I've found anything where I truly objected to their translation decisions.
SPEAKER_1: It's just stilted because it's meant to be sort of overly literal in an academic way.
SPEAKER_1: And the biggest challenge there, for me personally, as I'm going to be reading it aloud, they translate some of the names extremely literally from Greek into English, which makes them unpronounceable, or just they sound completely crazy.
SPEAKER_1: I can't remember exactly what it is now, but Nebuchadnezzar is something completely insane in the Nets edition.
SPEAKER_1: And so I'd have to decide if I were going to just change those mentally as I'm going through from what I know from reading other editions of scripture in English.
SPEAKER_1: In some cases, you know, you get a list of names, and it's difficult to do that because maybe you don't remember them all, and they're very different in the Greek.
SPEAKER_1: So there are some challenges there deciding which one.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, the short answer is, I do intend to do the readings from the Septuagint for the next series, as it were, of the Through the Bible in a Year.
SPEAKER_1: Probably the Nets.
SPEAKER_1: Possibly the Lexem, but probably the Nets.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, question seven.
SPEAKER_1: What is the best way to prevent my daughters from mixing, please, something specific instead of read the Bible or something like that?
SPEAKER_1: Of course, I'm going to go something more specific than that, because just read the Bible is not actually going to solve all your problems.
SPEAKER_1: There are other things you have to do in life.
SPEAKER_1: They are still really young, so this is entirely preventative, not reactionary.
SPEAKER_1: I'll probably write something more substantial on this in the future.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, I'll make a note of that, because I definitely should do that at some point.
SPEAKER_1: But there are some things I can say now, some concrete things you can do, that will be very helpful.
SPEAKER_1: One, of course, is going to be to inform them of the consequences.
SPEAKER_1: Inform them their children will be less fit.
SPEAKER_1: Inform them their children will be less related to them than any random individual they pass on the street, who is of their same race, of course.
SPEAKER_1: Inform them of all these various problems they are going to encounter if they go down that path.
SPEAKER_1: Inform them of the reality of domestic violence and other things like that.
SPEAKER_1: To some degree, you can very well reason with them even though they are teenage girls.
SPEAKER_1: That's going to be challenging, of course.
SPEAKER_1: There are some difficulties there.
SPEAKER_1: But you can still reason with them, particularly when it comes to talking to them about what will happen to their children.
SPEAKER_1: They are going to have that natural maternal instinct.
SPEAKER_1: All women have that until propaganda and the world beats it out of them.
SPEAKER_1: So, you can appeal to that, and that's entirely natural.
SPEAKER_1: It's a thing that you should do.
SPEAKER_1: You, particularly in the case of white daughters, you can point out eye color, things like that, things that they simply will not be able to pass on to their children if they marry outside their race, if they miscegenate.
SPEAKER_1: And obviously, one of the easiest steps you can take, not perhaps easiest, but certainly most effective, simplest, if not in the execution than in saying it, stating it, keep them away from non-whites.
SPEAKER_1: If you keep them away from them, they're not going to have the opportunity to fall into that particular sin, that particular path.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, there are times where very frequently it is sin, so I'm comfortable saying that.
SPEAKER_1: Not always.
SPEAKER_1: I've explained per se and per quote before, so I won't go down that rabbit trail here, because that would eat up ten minutes of the time for this episode, and I don't want to do that here.
SPEAKER_1: And then I guess the final recommendation, we marry them off early, do not give them that opportunity, that window of time where the world is going to appeal to their irrationality, to get them to do things that they will regret for the rest of their lives, and that have consequences they probably cannot undo.
SPEAKER_1: Definitely cannot undo in many cases.
SPEAKER_1: So I think that's sort of a general recommendation for fathers who have daughters, because of the state of things in the world.
SPEAKER_1: Marry them off early.
SPEAKER_1: You're going to avoid a lot of problems.
SPEAKER_1: And though I'm not saying, you know, 16, but 21.
SPEAKER_1: Marry them off early.
SPEAKER_1: Solve many of these problems for yourself.
SPEAKER_1: And for her.
SPEAKER_1: She will eventually thank you when she realizes what you did for her and what she got to avoid.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, I think I will write something more substantive on that at some point in the future.
SPEAKER_1: I think that's something that needs to be addressed.
SPEAKER_1: And I know that I also need to write something more substantial on interracial marriage and the intersection with theology and morality.
SPEAKER_1: But for now, next question.
SPEAKER_1: With usury robbing us all, very true, would there be a realistic way for Christians to pool money and buy out each other's loans?
SPEAKER_1: Not necessarily debt forgiveness, but an organization that effectively refinances at 0 percent.
SPEAKER_1: I can certainly think of ways that you could play games with the financial and legal system and accomplish that goal.
SPEAKER_1: But you would be shut down by the same financial and legal system pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_1: So, could you manage to erase a substantial chunk of debt for a certain number of people?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is yes.
SPEAKER_1: And you could manage to do that with relatively small amounts of money.
SPEAKER_1: But it would probably have a negative impact on the credit scores of the individuals you help, which probably won't matter for many because getting rid of the huge debt is better than retaining the probably not great credit score.
SPEAKER_1: But certainly better than what it will be.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, those things rebound as long as you play the game, unfortunately, but it is what it is.
SPEAKER_1: It's the reality of the situation which we find ourselves.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, the issue would be is that you would be shut down.
SPEAKER_1: And so it would have to be quite a few individuals pursuing this so that they could each get a certain amount of work done before getting shut down.
SPEAKER_1: Because once you get shut down, they're never letting you do it again.
SPEAKER_1: You'll never get away with that again.
SPEAKER_1: And it may have financial consequences for the person who is responsible for the entity you set up to do this.
SPEAKER_1: And they would potentially go after you for fraud depending on how you execute the plan.
SPEAKER_1: So is it possible?
SPEAKER_1: To some degree, yes.
SPEAKER_1: Is it practicable?
SPEAKER_1: I would have to say probably not.
SPEAKER_1: We really have to have political power to ban usury.
SPEAKER_1: And that means the charging of any interest, incidentally.
SPEAKER_1: Not the charging of unreasonable interest.
SPEAKER_1: That was a redefinition that came from, I won't name names here because I'm not looking to get into that theological fire right now, but that came from only a handful of hundreds of years ago, where it was changed from the charging of any interest to the charging of exorbitant or excessive interest.
SPEAKER_1: The traditional understanding of Christians and the church and the plain meaning of scripture is, the charging of any interest is prohibited.
SPEAKER_1: Because money is not productive.
SPEAKER_1: Money is not fruitful.
SPEAKER_1: Money is sterile.
SPEAKER_1: It should not produce new money.
SPEAKER_1: Next question, sort of shifting gears, but not entirely since it's still politics.
SPEAKER_1: I'll take a sip of, perhaps ironically here, I guess, tea.
SPEAKER_1: And you'll see why I said ironically here in a second.
SPEAKER_1: How big of a threat is China to the West?
SPEAKER_1: Is there a possibility of war?
SPEAKER_1: And if so, how can it be prevented?
SPEAKER_1: I think the only reasonable answer to that is that China, currently and for the foreseeable future, is the second greatest threat to the West after the Jews.
SPEAKER_1: Which is, yes, to say they are a larger threat than Islam, ultimately.
SPEAKER_1: Now, of course, the Muslims in our lands are a problem, but that's a very eminently solvable problem.
SPEAKER_1: Even if some people may find it distasteful, it's solvable.
SPEAKER_1: China is a bigger threat.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason China is a bigger threat is because China has a population of over a billion people who recognize themselves as Chinese, who believe themselves correctly to be Chinese, even though they have a number of different ethnic groups under that umbrella, they're still all Chinese.
SPEAKER_1: They're just not all Han, basically.
SPEAKER_1: Although more and more of them are as the party policies progress.
SPEAKER_1: So lots of people know who they are, kind of work together, but at least follow orders to some degree.
SPEAKER_1: So, are they as innovative?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: Are they as creative?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: Do they have the history of being a military power in the same sense as the West?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying they have no military history, of course, because they do.
SPEAKER_1: They certainly have fought wars.
SPEAKER_1: They've won some wars, usually against themselves, but they are certainly a threat today.
SPEAKER_1: And the biggest reason they are a threat today is because of not the technological advantage, but the technological foundation.
SPEAKER_1: It's very important to note that basically, the entire world today is reliant on chip manufacturers, fabs, located in Taiwan, which isn't China, right?
SPEAKER_1: Except it is China, let's be honest.
SPEAKER_1: But the issue is, if China went to take Taiwan, we can't stop them, not reasonably.
SPEAKER_1: Now, we could stop them, but it's in a way that we don't want to do.
SPEAKER_1: China knows that, but China is a rational actor.
SPEAKER_1: Another reason that they're sort of a threat, because they're one of the only handful of rational actors on the stage at this point.
SPEAKER_1: So they recognize, if they go after Taiwan right now, or if they'd gone after Taiwan the past handful of decades, it would possibly precipitate a major conflict, a potentially nuclear conflict, because it's worth remembering, the parties involved in nuclear powers, and more nuclear powers will get dragged in.
SPEAKER_1: And there's always the risk of a chain reaction with Taiwan kicking off a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, which is just two groups of Indians nuking each other, but it is what it is.
SPEAKER_1: And China being rational actors, they don't want to do that.
SPEAKER_1: They would much rather take Taiwan and have Taiwan be intact, because the biggest point of taking Taiwan from the Chinese mindset, and I don't sort of want to go into a full graduate level political history and political science course here on China, but the biggest thing for the Chinese with regard to Taiwan is that the fact that the nationalists took Taiwan, were able to flee, and set up shop on Taiwan, take sovereign Chinese territory, is a major loss of face.
SPEAKER_1: And that is still a thing in Chinese society, all traditional Asian societies.
SPEAKER_1: There's some nuance.
SPEAKER_1: The Chinese and the Japanese aren't exactly the same when it comes to losing face, and neither are the Koreans, but losing face is a big thing in Eastern politics.
SPEAKER_1: It's not as much of a thing in Western politics.
SPEAKER_1: We used to have it, to some degree, with regard to honor and loss of honor and slights to honor.
SPEAKER_1: It's different in the Asian context.
SPEAKER_1: Now, there's also the mandate of heaven.
SPEAKER_1: I could get into that, but it's sort of tangentially related here.
SPEAKER_1: But they lost face because the nationalists were not totally defeated.
SPEAKER_1: The nationalists took a very important part of China for China's international reputation in their eyes, and their own view of themselves.
SPEAKER_1: Now, mind you, the island was not very good when the nationalists took it.
SPEAKER_1: They have built that up into what it is today.
SPEAKER_1: Hellscape that the cities are, they've still done something impressive.
SPEAKER_1: And so, China needs to take that according to their own mindset, but also according to their calculations for ongoing conflicts with the West and others, because they don't simply want the influence of being right next to Taiwan with guns that can shoot Taiwan from the mainland and other things like that, and certainly a massive army that could overwhelm Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: They want to have actual control, immediate control over those resources, particularly all of the chip manufacturers, because that controls the modern world.
SPEAKER_1: The chips in basically everything you're using were probably made in Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: Handful of other places in some cases, but probably Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: Some of the things I have here are German made, but the phone on my desk, Taiwan, the chip in it.
SPEAKER_1: My iPhone, probably Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: So the stuff on which we rely, relies on hardware made in Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: And so China, if they take Taiwan, is in a position to have a continuing supply of these chips, whereas we would not.
SPEAKER_1: And this is not something where we can just spin up a new fab and have it ready in five years, or ten years, maybe ten years.
SPEAKER_1: But even ten years would be a challenge, because the number of men on the planet who actually understand what is going on in those fabs and how to rebuild them would fit on a double-decker bus.
SPEAKER_1: It is a small number of men.
SPEAKER_1: China, incidentally, also knows that and has contingency plans.
SPEAKER_1: You can imagine what they are if they don't manage to take Taiwan.
SPEAKER_1: So, yes, China is our biggest actual threat in terms of, you know, near-peer.
SPEAKER_1: They're not really a near-peer, but it's sort of an interesting dynamic.
SPEAKER_1: They're powerful enough to be a threat.
SPEAKER_1: So, they are the biggest threat in that sense.
SPEAKER_1: After, of course, the Jews.
SPEAKER_1: The Jews are a threat for a different reason.
SPEAKER_1: Because the Israeli military is not a threat to us.
SPEAKER_1: We could wipe them out in three hours if we really felt like it.
SPEAKER_1: They are dangerous for other reasons.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, they have nuclear weapons.
SPEAKER_1: Their nukes aren't great, but they do have them.
SPEAKER_1: And they have enough to cause serious damage.
SPEAKER_1: China is more of a threat because of the industrial might, the population, the ambitions, and a number of dozens of other things.
SPEAKER_1: The ambitions are sort of a change from the history of how the Chinese viewed the world.
SPEAKER_1: Because for a long time, and I said I wouldn't get into the political science stuff, but here I'm going anyway.
SPEAKER_1: For a long time, they sort of viewed themselves as the center of the universe.
SPEAKER_1: That was their mindset.
SPEAKER_1: And so why would I go anywhere?
SPEAKER_1: I am the center of the universe.
SPEAKER_1: I am China.
SPEAKER_1: I don't need anyone else or anything.
SPEAKER_1: And then, of course, being conquered by the West a number of times, they recognized that, oh, maybe we're not the center of the world, and maybe there is a rest of the world out there, and it's relevant, and it matters.
SPEAKER_1: So they shifted to have international ambitions.
SPEAKER_1: That's playing out a number of ways.
SPEAKER_1: Another way that China is a threat, of course, is that China has a lot of stuff in our, for instance, electricity grid, that's a huge vulnerability for us, incidentally, where they could sabotage us at the offset of a war.
SPEAKER_1: They could shut down our grid.
SPEAKER_1: That would be a major disadvantage for us.
SPEAKER_1: The problem with that, and China recognizes this as well, because again, they're rational actors, they've thought this through.
SPEAKER_1: Well, what's the game theory here?
SPEAKER_1: What happens if you're the United States, and you get dragged into war with China, and China shuts down your electrical grid?
SPEAKER_1: Well, now you have a huge problem, because from the US perspective, a long war now gives China an advantage, because our infrastructure is damaged, and we probably can't bring it back online, incidentally.
SPEAKER_1: If they manage to blow enough transformers and things, we literally do not have the stockpile or the manufacturing capacity to replace them.
SPEAKER_1: What does that leave us as options?
SPEAKER_1: Long war gives China the advantage.
SPEAKER_1: Short war gives us the advantage.
SPEAKER_1: Well, now you have to go 100%, because now you have to win before those problems with your infrastructure actually become problems for your military.
SPEAKER_1: It raises the risk of an actual nuclear exchange.
SPEAKER_1: So the question is, will China do that?
SPEAKER_1: Do they want to do that?
SPEAKER_1: I don't think they want to, but they might run the calculation to decide, we'll roll the dice, because it maybe looks to them like it would be advantageous.
SPEAKER_1: So yes, China is a major problem, and trying to address that problem is extremely difficult, because we have allowed them to become the problem they are, because we have invested untold billions of dollars into China.
SPEAKER_1: We gave them all the technology they have.
SPEAKER_1: We built their infrastructure.
SPEAKER_1: We have created this monster, and it is a monster we will eventually have to confront.
SPEAKER_1: So is there a way to avoid the conflict?
SPEAKER_1: The only way to avoid it is China collapsing.
SPEAKER_1: Their ambitions do not stop unless they collapse.
SPEAKER_1: So, there are a number of ways to do that.
SPEAKER_1: That is sort of a high-level political issue, and I don't know that we have the men currently in positions of power who are competent enough to do that.
SPEAKER_1: But the reality is that, yes, China is a major threat.
SPEAKER_1: And I know some people are probably listening and thinking, well, about Russia.
SPEAKER_1: Russia is not really much of a threat.
SPEAKER_1: Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons, so Russia could cause an immense amount of damage to the world with those nuclear weapons.
SPEAKER_1: But absent that, they're not much of a threat.
SPEAKER_1: Their military is not very strong.
SPEAKER_1: They can't project power very well.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, look at what's happening in the Ukraine.
SPEAKER_1: That's not very impressive for the Russian military.
SPEAKER_1: So the reality is that Russia is just not that much of a threat.
SPEAKER_1: They fund PSYOP campaigns and cause problems and sow division and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: But, you know, the Jews are a lot better at it.
SPEAKER_1: They're a much bigger threat than the Russians.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe Russia deserves to be in the top five, but they are nowhere near China.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, the next question is also sort of related.
SPEAKER_1: Do you think there is a genuine chance of victory, which is to say actual states, he says ethnostates here, but obviously, it's almost a little redundant.
SPEAKER_1: The case of states is not truly, ethnonationalism is, but anyway, ethnostates arise and triumph globally, the reduction of the Negro invasion, the radical left finally no longer a threat, no more trans agenda, et cetera.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, I do think we have very good odds of victory.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know about global victory for other peoples as well, but I'm not as concerned about them, honestly.
SPEAKER_1: I'm concerned about my people.
SPEAKER_1: I'm concerned about us here in the United States.
SPEAKER_1: I'm concerned about Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe.
SPEAKER_1: That's basically it.
SPEAKER_1: I'm concerned about the European parts of the world, because they're my people.
SPEAKER_1: They're the ones for whom I should have concern.
SPEAKER_1: Again, concentric circles of care for people.
SPEAKER_1: They're my cousins.
SPEAKER_1: I care about them.
SPEAKER_1: I want what is best for them.
SPEAKER_1: So do I think that we have chance of a genuine victory?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: And I think that God is on our side, because even if it were not true that we were the only actual Christian part of the world, which we still are today, it would still be true that God made promises to Japheth and to his children.
SPEAKER_1: And God's word never fails.
SPEAKER_1: His promises never fail.
SPEAKER_1: He cannot do otherwise than preserve us.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't mean he preserves us as masters of the entire world, which is where I want us to be again.
SPEAKER_1: That is our rightful position, but is only our rightful position if we are Christian again, if we obey God, if we deserve that position, because we are faithful to God's commands.
SPEAKER_1: God's promise does not entail that we will be masters of the entire world.
SPEAKER_1: It entails that we will be Christendom, and so we have to have control of some sort of territory to actually be Christendom.
SPEAKER_1: But I want a grander victory than mere survival.
SPEAKER_1: I want a restoration of everything that we once had, and perhaps more.
SPEAKER_1: That is the position in which our people should be, and so that is what I want.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, the short answer to the question is, I do believe that there is a chance, and I do believe that we will win.
SPEAKER_1: The next question, I'm actually going to take a sip of tea.
SPEAKER_1: I'll mute my mic so you don't have to listen to me sip tea.
SPEAKER_1: I guess there's another irony here, I'm sipping tea and now I get to talk about the Constitution.
SPEAKER_1: Little more tangential that time, more abstracted, but how should Christian nationalists view the Constitution?
SPEAKER_1: How should we go about convincing people to stop idolizing it?
SPEAKER_1: I think that second part sort of answers the first part a little bit.
SPEAKER_1: But my problem with the Constitution is exactly what is asked in the second question there.
SPEAKER_1: People idolize it.
SPEAKER_1: They have made it into an idol.
SPEAKER_1: And it's almost an idol in the sort of traditional, you could call it, but the sort of ancient sense of people are praying to, worshiping this thing with no real thought behind it.
SPEAKER_1: They're just doing the thing.
SPEAKER_1: They're going through the motions because in this Constitution case, how many men who say they love the Constitution have ever read the thing?
SPEAKER_1: I'm not even saying understand it, or have studied it.
SPEAKER_1: I'm saying simply sat down and read it once.
SPEAKER_1: Ask the next one who tells you he really loves the Constitution.
SPEAKER_1: Ask him the last time he read it.
SPEAKER_1: Watch him stumble around and fumble to try and find an answer that isn't an outright lie, because he probably hasn't read it.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not saying that you can't say that something is good, or you believe it's good.
SPEAKER_1: You can't say, I know it's good, because you haven't read it, but if you haven't read something, you can still believe that it's good.
SPEAKER_1: Right?
SPEAKER_1: There are classic novels.
SPEAKER_1: Men haven't read.
SPEAKER_1: They believe are good.
SPEAKER_1: So can you believe the Constitution is good without reading it?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, but if you are going to be one of those men who is so dedicated to the idea of the Constitution, you should probably read the document and at least know what it says, or at least try to understand it, because some of the language is old.
SPEAKER_1: Men are going to have trouble understanding it.
SPEAKER_1: Some of the language is legal and technical.
SPEAKER_1: Men will have trouble understanding that.
SPEAKER_1: So, how do we deal with the issue is sort of a more difficult question there.
SPEAKER_1: Obviously, I sort of answered the question with how I view it.
SPEAKER_1: I think that it is an idol.
SPEAKER_1: I think that it is a problem.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that it survives.
SPEAKER_1: It's not good for us, for our future.
SPEAKER_1: It's inadequate.
SPEAKER_1: Is it per se bad?
SPEAKER_1: I would even go so far as to say yes, because some of the things that it enshrines do run contrary to Christianity.
SPEAKER_1: At least in terms of their interpretation.
SPEAKER_1: I think also in terms of their essence for some of them, because they are an outgrowth of the Enlightenment.
SPEAKER_1: And the Enlightenment was very much anti-Christian.
SPEAKER_1: I know Woe is called it the enluciferment, which is kind of more difficult to say, which is why it makes me feel bad.
SPEAKER_1: But when you write it, it looks very nice in writing.
SPEAKER_1: It's just a little difficult to say.
SPEAKER_1: But really, it's the same name, because what is Lucifer, the morning star, the light bringer, right?
SPEAKER_1: So he masquerades as an angel of light.
SPEAKER_1: Well, the enlightenment, I don't even need to tell you what that means, because it's the same words in English.
SPEAKER_1: So that's sort of the problem with the Constitution, is that it's an outgrowth of those views which were almost explicitly, and in some cases, particularly in the French cases, explicitly anti-Christian.
SPEAKER_1: And so I don't think that Christians can preserve it in good conscience once they recognize the reality of it.
SPEAKER_1: And so how do we go about disabusing people of these beliefs?
SPEAKER_1: How do we go about getting people to stop idolizing the Constitution?
SPEAKER_1: I think part of it is a generational thing.
SPEAKER_1: Boomers generate, you know, boomers, again, it comes back to that so often, but boomers love the Constitution, they think.
SPEAKER_1: It's the same problem, as I said before, where they haven't read the thing.
SPEAKER_1: But boomers love the Constitution.
SPEAKER_1: Right-wing boomers, of course, I'm not talking about the left.
SPEAKER_1: The left pretend to love it when they can use it as a cudgel against the right.
SPEAKER_1: That's it.
SPEAKER_1: But they're always mercenary with their beliefs because they have no beliefs.
SPEAKER_1: However, younger generations don't care as much.
SPEAKER_1: I know that I always say GenX doesn't exist, which I still say, GenX does not exist.
SPEAKER_1: GenX is split.
SPEAKER_1: You have the older GenX, they're young boomers.
SPEAKER_1: And you have the young GenX, they're old millennials, basically.
SPEAKER_1: There's nothing that really defines GenX in such a way that I think they should be divided into an explicit generation.
SPEAKER_1: Also, incidentally, I think chopping people up into generations is an artifact of modernity, and I don't think it's good.
SPEAKER_1: It is the reality, though, because the boomers were a distinct generation, developed in a distinct time with distinct beliefs and all these things that set them apart from everyone else.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, from everyone else, because they're set apart from their entire history, because they rejected and denigrate it.
SPEAKER_1: So, the boomer's the one to love it.
SPEAKER_1: Millennials and younger don't care as much, I say, as a millennial.
SPEAKER_1: So, do we have a real problem with getting rid of the idolization of the Constitution?
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that we have as much of a problem as some might think, because millennials and younger, the men who are going to be open to our ideas at all, who are going to come over to our side, they want to win.
SPEAKER_1: They want a good future for their children and for their grandchildren.
SPEAKER_1: They don't care about preserving this particular document or that particular document.
SPEAKER_1: If it's standing in the way of what needs to be done, and what we need to accomplish for our people, I don't think millennials love any problem burning the thing.
SPEAKER_1: I wouldn't.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, I've said publicly, that's what I do, because burning idols is what God commands.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't think it's going to be a real problem.
SPEAKER_1: There are those where you kind of have to slow walk them through, well, look at this part, and then look at what scripture says, and then look at this part, and look at what scripture says, and you can kind of get them to recognize, well, maybe there are some problems here, because it's saying the exact opposite.
SPEAKER_1: That's troubling in some ways.
SPEAKER_1: So you can get some people to understand the reality of this thing in which they have invested a mistaken belief, but in many cases, it doesn't matter, because it's that generational divide, the boomers will die off, to be blunt, or at the very least, retire and live a life in retirement, not involved in this stuff.
SPEAKER_1: So, yes, the Constitution has become an idol, but it's not going to last, so it doesn't matter that much.
SPEAKER_1: Take another sip of tea before I get to the next question here.
SPEAKER_1: So the next question is about, let me see this here.
SPEAKER_1: Next question, similar to Gettl's ontological proof, is there an absolute proof for Christianity specifically?
SPEAKER_1: So I'm not going to go into Gettl's ontological proof, modal ontological proof, because, well, there are a number of reasons.
SPEAKER_1: I just won't go into that here.
SPEAKER_1: But is there, in essence, that proves the existence of God?
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so that's, absolutely it does.
SPEAKER_1: It proves the existence of God, it's entirely sound.
SPEAKER_1: We can prove God exists.
SPEAKER_1: And so there are a number of arguments for that.
SPEAKER_1: There are probably six or seven that I like.
SPEAKER_1: That's one of the ones I like the most.
SPEAKER_1: But is there a proof for the Christian God specifically?
SPEAKER_1: Because there is a difference between proving God exists and proving Jesus Christ is God, right?
SPEAKER_1: We all recognize those are two different claims.
SPEAKER_1: So, I would say yes.
SPEAKER_1: And the issue is, I don't know if I want to get into the argument right now, because it takes a while to present.
SPEAKER_1: But I can give the basic outline.
SPEAKER_1: There are really two arguments I would make.
SPEAKER_1: The first argument is the scriptural argument, which is just pointing out all of the things that people who are interested in this sort of apologetics will already know.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture is very clearly not written by men alone.
SPEAKER_1: There is an organizing intelligence behind it that exceeds human capacity.
SPEAKER_1: And so, you have to recognize that Scripture was written by a being that is greater than man.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't prove the Christian God, because it just proves God of some kind wrote Scripture, because you could have a God who wrote Scripture is not the Christian God, right?
SPEAKER_1: That's sort of getting into the weeds a little bit, but you can at least prove that Scripture is supernatural.
SPEAKER_1: And in proving that Scripture is supernatural, you certainly lean toward the Christian God very heavily.
SPEAKER_1: This is something, for instance, that you cannot do with the Book of Mormon, or with the Koran, or with the Talmud.
SPEAKER_1: So that would be my first proof.
SPEAKER_1: And I know that many atheists and agnostics and others, they don't like that argument, but quite frankly, if they're an atheist, they can't understand Gödel anyway.
SPEAKER_1: So at this point, you've already lost them.
SPEAKER_1: You're going to need to convince them with some other proof.
SPEAKER_1: The proof that I personally like the most, and this is actually one that I've sort of developed, but the proof that I like the most for the Christian God is that you can actually build up from first principles to the necessity of the Trinity.
SPEAKER_1: And I do believe that in doing that, coupled with traditional philosophical arguments, so for instance, with regard to God being the good, God being the true, coupled with that, you can prove the existence of the Christian God, the Triune God.
SPEAKER_1: The basis of the argument would be just sort of an outline form.
SPEAKER_1: You go starting from probably the infinite regress, I think that's probably the best one, just to get quickly to the proof of there being an ultimate being, an absolute infinite, which is the best way, I think, to describe God in that philosophical sense.
SPEAKER_1: Well, once you get to that, then you start asking the question, okay, if this God is unitary, would he ever do anything outside himself?
SPEAKER_1: And I think the answer necessarily is no, because I think a unitary God would be perfect and contained within himself in such a way that nothing would ever be externalized.
SPEAKER_1: He would simply exist and be all of existence for all time.
SPEAKER_1: Time also not existing, but speaking in human terms.
SPEAKER_1: So then the natural extension from that would be to ask, and I'm giving obviously the rough sense of this, not the full philosophy, but the next question obviously would be, okay, we don't have a unitary God, do we have a dual God?
SPEAKER_1: Do we have a God in two persons?
SPEAKER_1: And I think, again, the answer is necessarily no, because I think that you have the same problem, but abstracted one level when it is only two persons.
SPEAKER_1: Because with two persons, you have the inner relationship of the persons, imperfection, self-contained, wholly within itself, never externalizing anything.
SPEAKER_1: It's simply a back and forth between the two persons.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't think that solves the problem either.
SPEAKER_1: But I think once you get to three persons, you inherently, in the nature of that jump from two to three, solve the problem of the fact that external things exist, which is really the problem I'm getting to.
SPEAKER_1: And anyone who's versed with philosophy is going to recognize the problem here.
SPEAKER_1: But, and by problem, I mean the problem to which I'm offering the solution, not the problem with the argument, which I don't believe exists.
SPEAKER_1: With regard to that jump from two to three persons, you have an externalizing of the relationship, because basically you have an imparting of what is in essence movement, sort of a metaphysical movement in this case.
SPEAKER_1: But you have a movement inherent in the relationship between and among three persons that is not there in the simple back and forth between two.
SPEAKER_1: And so the three persons of the Trinity explains why we have anything external to God.
SPEAKER_1: And so if you have the necessity of a triune God for the existence in order to explain the existence of a universe, because the universe being external to God in a certain sense, we know the universe exists, how do we explain that?
SPEAKER_1: If you can build up that philosophical argument to saying that a triune God provides an explanation for that, and then you sort of come along side that with the argument that God is good, God being the absolute infinite, good having existence in itself, having proper existence, not being sort of parasitic like bad or evil is on other things and getting off of the philosophical weeds, but it's the nature of the subject, if you can come alongside it with that argument, that it is only the good that has that substantial existence, and then you have the triune god, necessarily a god who is good, god being goodness, we've already established that at this point in the argument, you're dealing with this hypothetical person, then necessarily he is going to leave proof of his existence in creation.
SPEAKER_1: You are going to be able to find him because the deus absconditus or the hidden god, whatever argument you want to use, that's not a good god.
SPEAKER_1: A god who hides himself from his creation, who does not make himself known in some way to the things that he has created, is not a good god.
SPEAKER_1: That's the demiurge.
SPEAKER_1: I don't believe that exists, and I don't think it's philosophically coherent either because you're saying that evil has a substantial existence, which evil is a deprivation of the good, not an essence in itself.
SPEAKER_1: And so once you've established that, well, then you start looking.
SPEAKER_1: Are there other triune gods?
SPEAKER_1: Have there ever been any other triune gods?
SPEAKER_1: The answer is no.
SPEAKER_1: The god of scripture is the only triune god.
SPEAKER_1: And so if you can establish philosophically the necessity of the Trinity, and you can establish philosophically, this one's the easier part, that the absolute infinite is necessarily good, then you look for the consequences of that in creation, in the world as we find it, and you find only one triune god.
SPEAKER_1: And I think that that necessarily leads to the conclusion that the Christian god is the only god, is the true god.
SPEAKER_1: I think it's absolutely unassailable philosophically, logically, and so anyone who understands Gettel's proof for the existence of god is going to be able to follow that as well.
SPEAKER_1: I believe, I firmly believe that, since it takes a certain sort of man and a certain sort of mind to understand Gettel in this case.
SPEAKER_1: So someone who can do that can certainly follow that proof.
SPEAKER_1: At some point, I'll outline it more formally, but that's the brief version of it.
SPEAKER_1: So the next question, I think we've been going about an hour, so I don't know if I'll do one more question or maybe two or three.
SPEAKER_1: I don't, apparently OBS does not actually have a running timer.
SPEAKER_1: That's a neat feature.
SPEAKER_1: So, at any rate, I will move on to the next question, at least do one more.
SPEAKER_1: Do you consider Mark 16, nine through 20 to be inspired text?
SPEAKER_1: If Mark 16, 16 is regarded as not inspired, does this weaken the Lutheran doctrine of baptism?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I do think that they're inspired, so I'm not sure that it would be relevant with regard to weakening the case for baptism.
SPEAKER_1: I can answer it in the hypothetical, I guess.
SPEAKER_1: If that part of Mark, and I'll read the verse, so people who are unfamiliar with it know what I'm talking about here.
SPEAKER_1: Many of you will already know it, of course.
SPEAKER_1: Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, we use that in our apologetics for the sacramental understanding of baptism, because it says whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, which of course leads into the Lutheran position of, is baptism necessary?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, but not absolutely so, but yes.
SPEAKER_1: I've explained that before, so I won't go into that now.
SPEAKER_1: If, as some argue, some try to say that the longer ending of Mark is not actually inspired, Lutherans don't believe that, Roman Catholics don't believe that, I don't think Anglicans believe that, I don't know how many have it in their confessions that the longer ending is part of Mark, or things like that.
SPEAKER_1: We don't have a canon in our confessions as Lutherans, so, which sounds weird to some people, but it's just how we've always done things.
SPEAKER_1: If you assume, for the sake of the hypothetical, that this is not in scripture, this is something that was added by someone else at some point, and it's not inspired, it shouldn't be there, right?
SPEAKER_1: I don't think it weakens our case for baptism at all.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that this verse is necessary to the Lutheran case for baptism, because there are many other texts that deal with baptism specifically in a more expansive fashion than this one, because this sort of mentions it almost in passing, right?
SPEAKER_1: It's important, because it's straight from the mouth of Christ, and of course, all scripture is breathed out by God, right?
SPEAKER_1: But some portions are more valuable to us in certain circumstances than others.
SPEAKER_1: Some are more important than others.
SPEAKER_1: I'm perfectly comfortable saying that.
SPEAKER_1: Some books of scripture are worth more than others.
SPEAKER_1: But in this case, there are plenty of other places that address the doctrine of baptism, the nature of baptism as a sacrament.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think you need this one to build the argument.
SPEAKER_1: Because, yes, there's something to the power of cumulativeness, right?
SPEAKER_1: That's what I was doing with James White in that debate and why he got so uncomfortable when I kept asking those questions about things God cannot do, because it's hammering home the point.
SPEAKER_1: And so that's part of the tactic when dealing with baptism, of course, because you can just keep listing these verses about baptism that very clearly teach it is not just water.
SPEAKER_1: It is not something that man does.
SPEAKER_1: It is something that God does.
SPEAKER_1: This one is important, but it is not necessary.
SPEAKER_1: There are other verses that do more for our argument.
SPEAKER_1: So, I don't think it weakens the argument.
SPEAKER_1: It's the short answer.
SPEAKER_1: If this were hypothetically not part of scripture, we could lose this and still have our doctrine be the exact same thing that it currently is with regard to baptism.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see what the next question is.
SPEAKER_1: Next question is a short one.
SPEAKER_1: I'll answer this as well.
SPEAKER_1: Were the Khazars ethnically Jewish in any way?
SPEAKER_1: I did touch on this in a previous episode.
SPEAKER_1: But we'll answer it again, and then just link to that as well.
SPEAKER_1: The short answer is no.
SPEAKER_1: They were not.
SPEAKER_1: Now, did some Jews integrate into the population?
SPEAKER_1: It seems like yes.
SPEAKER_1: And did some of the upper class convert to Judaism?
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Do we have any evidence for a wholesale conversion of the people to Judaism?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: Do we have any evidence for a wholesale migration of that group?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: And are the Jews Kazarian?
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: You can look at their genetics, you can look particularly at Y DNA, you can look at all of this evidence, and incidentally mitochondrial as well in many cases.
SPEAKER_1: So it's not just the male line, it's also the female line in some cases.
SPEAKER_1: Although with admixture, largely actually from southern Europe, Italy, in many cases, not from Eastern Europe, not from Kazzaria.
SPEAKER_1: But you can look at the DNA, you can look at the hard evidence, and they actually come from the Middle East, the Near East.
SPEAKER_1: That's where they're from.
SPEAKER_1: So they are related to the ancient Israelites.
SPEAKER_1: And you can see that also in their behavior.
SPEAKER_1: They behave the same, it's the same people, they're doing the same things.
SPEAKER_1: They're still giving God the middle finger and trying to ruin everything around them.
SPEAKER_1: That's who they've always been.
SPEAKER_1: And it is who they will always be.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see what else we have here.
SPEAKER_1: I think that may be it for this episode.
SPEAKER_1: There are more of the questions here that I have, of course, but I will not get to all of them tonight since we got through a handful here, not quite half of the 40-some-odd questions that I have going.
SPEAKER_1: But I think I will call it here for tonight.
SPEAKER_1: It's been over an hour so far, and I try to keep these to, you know, an hour, hour and a half maybe.
SPEAKER_1: Just depends on the questions and how long I go.
SPEAKER_1: If it's a more complicated answer, then I like to answer a few more questions so that it's not just one really long answer.
SPEAKER_1: But I will prepare answers to some of these because some of these are going to take a little bit longer, and some of them I think I have to look at some things.
SPEAKER_1: I have some questions about things where I haven't, like translations of scripture I've never looked at.
SPEAKER_1: So those I'll have to prepare the answers for next time.
SPEAKER_1: But I think I will call it here.
SPEAKER_1: Don't want to keep any of you too long as well.
SPEAKER_1: So, thank you for your time, and thank you for those who submitted questions.
SPEAKER_1: Again, questions can be submitted on the forum.
SPEAKER_1: That is the preferred method.
SPEAKER_1: The link should be in the description for the video, regardless of which platform you're using.
SPEAKER_1: And it's also linked in my Telegram chat and elsewhere.
SPEAKER_1: So, I think that is it for this week.
SPEAKER_1: I will be back next week, probably right about the same time, to answer more questions.
SPEAKER_1: That'll be episode eight.
SPEAKER_1: So, again, thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you for the questions.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you for those who submit questions for the next episode.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know if I will get to them necessarily, if there are additional questions, because I still have so many to answer, but I will just keep adding them to the list.
SPEAKER_1: And if you submit them on the forum, then other people can vote on them, and so they can sort of rise to the top.
SPEAKER_1: I'll try to prioritize those ones, unless they're, again, something insane.
SPEAKER_1: But it's mostly been avoided thus far.
SPEAKER_1: The questions have been very reasonable.
SPEAKER_1: They've been good questions that I think it's important to answer them and have the answer available for people.
SPEAKER_1: As always, the audio will be available probably tomorrow, maybe Saturday.
SPEAKER_1: Just depends on when I get that done.
SPEAKER_1: The audio is a little bit higher quality than the stream, simply due to bitrate restriction and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: But the audio-only version can be found at podcast.coreyjmoller.com.
SPEAKER_1: That's also my website, incidentally, without the podcast in the front.
SPEAKER_1: And I think that pretty much covers it for this week.
SPEAKER_1: Again, thank you to all of you, and have a great evening.
SPEAKER_1: I will see you next week.
SPEAKER_1: God bless.