Dr. Voti Bakam is a skeptic who came to Christ, an outsider who speaks the language of outsiders. He's unafraid to challenge the current social justice movement, and continuously demonstrates the Bible's enduring relevance, without trying to reshape God in man's image. On this Sunday special, I sit down with Voti to discuss his unusual path to faith, biblical masculinity, and the woke pastors who have infiltrated Christian churches around the world. Plus, he explains how he came to find his true calling to live and teach in Africa. This episode of Ben Shapiro's Show Sunday Special is sponsored by Genusil. Go to Genusilsil.org/SundaySpecial and save over 70% off your most popular package. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special on Sunday, wherever you get your shows, and become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron patron! You can also join our bi-monthly FB group, and join the conversation by using the hashtag on that hashtag , and find out who is getting the most out of this deal? in the comments section below. Thanks so much for listening and supporting the show! Ben Shapiro is a Christian and a Zealous Zealous Christian. - Ben Shapiro - The Benny is a Friend of God's Law and a Christian in Christ and a Friend Of The Earth. . Thank you Ben Shapiro, Jr. - Sunday, September 15th, 2019 Music: "Sole Lady" by Jeffree Starz, 2019, November 15, 2020, Music by Jeff Perreporch "Thank You, Thank You, Mr. by Mr. James Mays, Jr., Jr., & Mr. & Sr. & Ms. ? (Recorded by , ) Thanks, Meets Me, & by Ms. & Gird Up? & So Much More? (feat. ) - Thank you, Ben Shapiro Jr., June 18th, July 5, 2019? - July 6, 2019 & So, So, I'll Be Thanked, (A Little More So Much So Much, & & Good, & Good So, & I'll Say So, And So, and So, etc., etc., & And So On & So On, & So & So So, Much So, Good So Much
00:00:00.000Christians hear things like social justice and, you know, racial justice, and it's like, yeah, you know, of course, you know, we're for that.
00:00:34.000Raised by a Buddhist single mom in Los Angeles, Dr. Vadhi Bakam came of age during the height of Malcolm X and felt a pull toward the growing black nationalist movement.
00:00:43.000However, a conversion to Christianity in college completely reshaped his worldview.
00:00:47.000Vadhi is a skeptic who came to Christ, an outsider who speaks the language of outsiders.
00:00:53.000Vadi is a former pastor, author, and educator, currently serving as dean of the School of Divinity at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia, a university that seeks to transform Africa through biblically-based education.
00:01:04.000Whether teaching on the history of the Bible or marriage and family, he aims to help ordinary people understand the significance of seeing the world through a biblical lens.
00:01:12.000Anyone who's heard him preach knows his conviction of word and spirit.
00:01:15.000He's unafraid to challenge the current social justice movement, and continuously demonstrates the Bible's enduring relevance without trying to reshape God in man's image.
00:01:23.000On this Sunday special, I sit down with Vadhi to discuss his unusual path to faith, biblical masculinity, and the woke pastors who have infiltrated Christian churches around the world.
00:01:31.000Plus, he explains how he came to find his true calling to live and teach in Africa.
00:01:46.000This episode of Ben Shapiro's Show Sunday Special is sponsored by Genusil.
00:01:50.000Go to GenuCell.com slash Sunday right now and save over 70% off GenuCell's most popular package.
00:02:05.000One of your big sort of causes is the fight over social justice.
00:02:10.000Obviously, the term social justice is very contentious.
00:02:12.000So how do you define social justice, and what do you think is wrong with social justice?
00:02:16.000Yeah, I mean, I think social justice classically is defined as the redistribution of wealth, privileges, and opportunities.
00:02:27.000Social justice is about equity, not equality, right?
00:02:30.000Not what we all grew up with, you know, equal opportunity, but equity, equal outcomes.
00:02:35.000So it's redistribution with a view toward Achieving equal outcomes for various specified groups.
00:02:45.000Again, there's a lot more, you know, involved in that, but that's the basic definition of it.
00:02:49.000And how do you think that that comes into conflict, because you've talked a lot about this, with Christianity and religious practice generally?
00:02:55.000Because there are obviously a lot of social justice-infused Christian teachings.
00:03:00.000Yeah, it's awful, but I think the clearest conflict is seen, you know, when Jesus in one of his parables talks about the parable of the talents, right?
00:03:12.000And you have the owner who gives, you know, different talents to different workers, right?
00:03:17.000There's one, and then, you know, there's two, and then there's five.
00:03:21.000He comes back, and one of them has done better with his talents than the others.
00:03:26.000And he doesn't take from the one who did poorly.
00:03:29.000Or take from the one who did well and give to the one who did poorly.
00:03:31.000He actually takes away from the one who did poorly and gives it to the one who does well.
00:03:37.000I refer to that parable because it really flies in the face of the idea that the Christian attitude ought to be equal outcomes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
00:03:49.000The Christian attitude is justice writ large, right? God's justice, the righteous and equal
00:03:56.000application of God's law, but not equal outcomes.
00:04:00.000So, when it comes to group redistribution, which is really what I think social justice
00:04:04.000is very into, obviously social justice has an individual component. There are people
00:04:08.000who believe that every individual should come out evenly, which essentially amounts to communism.
00:04:12.000But it seems like in today's day and age, it's more about group redistributive justice.
00:04:16.000groups who have been put upon, there are certain groups that have more systemic power.
00:04:20.000So how do you reconcile the reality, which is that certain groups have been put upon
00:04:26.000and certain groups have discriminated against those groups, with solution making that doesn't
00:04:31.000violate the precepts of individual justice?
00:04:34.000I think for most of us, we would say, show me the injustice and I will gird up with you
00:05:25.000We don't just say, hey, you guys, you know, stop making so many violins and we're going to make—no, we just say, hey, they're good at that.
00:05:31.000You know, most people are not as good at that as they are.
00:05:37.000But this idea that somehow any kind of disparity among groups is, you know, just sort of a de facto injustice, that's hugely problematic.
00:05:48.000And how do you think that that's impacted, particularly black Americans?
00:05:52.000So this has obviously come up in the context of multiple groups, but most prominently in the United States, the issue that the Biden administration has taken up is the idea that black Americans have been left behind by the system.
00:06:02.000And now we have to have systems that are put in place to redress this.
00:06:05.000You see on a more specific level in California, in Illinois, there are places that are actively talking about, for example, slavery reparations to make up for the injustices of the past.
00:06:37.000My family's been in America since, as far as I can tell, around the early to mid 1700s.
00:06:45.000So, if we were talking about, you know, at the end of slavery, Saying and doing something at the end of slavery for those members of my family who experienced that, then I'm, yeah, I'm all with you.
00:06:59.000But talking about that now, I think it's inappropriate for a number of reasons.
00:07:04.000Number one, because how do we determine, you know, who and what those individuals are?
00:07:08.000But number two, there have been a lot of legal redresses over the years to address those issues.
00:07:16.000And I think thirdly, there are issues in the black community, for example, that we know
00:07:23.000contribute to some of the disparities.
00:07:25.000For example, when you have almost 75 percent of black children born out of wedlock, and
00:07:30.000we know that regardless of a person's ethnicity, there are consequences to that. There are
00:07:37.000consequences in terms of incarceration, in terms of dropout rates, in terms of drugs,
00:07:42.000alcohol, violence, you know, and all these sorts of things.
00:07:45.000Well, if we know that those things are there, my big problem with the social justice crowd
00:07:49.000is if everything goes back to social...
00:07:53.000social justice, then there are some things that ought to be addressed that don't get
00:07:59.000addressed because we blame the wrong cause.
00:08:02.000So how do you think that message has been received?
00:08:04.000I've seen it received in a couple of different ways in the United States, obviously.
00:08:08.000One is that people feel actually empowered by that message because it suggests that they
00:08:12.000actually have more in their hands than they thought they did.
00:08:14.000It's not sort of shadowy, nefarious forces that are out to get them.
00:08:18.000Most of these decisions are actually things that you can do in your own personal life.
00:08:21.000There's no shadowy historic force that's forcing you to impregnate a girl and take off.
00:08:40.000It gives them something to direct their opposition to.
00:08:42.000How do you think the message is actually received?
00:08:44.000You know, I usually get eye rolls and here we go again with the victim blaming.
00:08:50.000I usually get people who will accuse me of, you know, being out of touch.
00:08:56.000Of course, you know, here I am, and obviously, you know, I don't know what it's like to have some of those kind of disadvantages.
00:09:04.000And those people obviously don't know me, who I am, or where I'm from, because I very much know what it's like to have those kinds of disadvantages.
00:09:16.000I don't worry about how people take that as much as I worry about doing something about the problems that exist.
00:09:26.000I believe that black people are capable.
00:09:30.000I don't believe that black people are utterly dependent.
00:09:34.000On the government or people of goodwill.
00:09:36.000I believe that black people are absolutely capable.
00:09:39.000I was raised by a single black mother who was absolutely capable, who did everything that she could do to see to it that I had advantages that she didn't have.
00:09:50.000So I don't worry about, you know, the talking heads who would immediately dismiss that idea as much as I worry about People who would hear, and people who would respond, and people who could be helped, actually, by addressing these issues that need to be addressed and can be addressed individually and within families.
00:10:14.000Because obviously, given the experiences that you've talked about a little bit here, and I want to hear more about those, from your childhood and growing up, the vast majority of people who grow up in those circumstances don't end up at the same sort of conclusion that you do politically or with regard to values.
00:10:27.000So how did you end up with this set of values?
00:10:30.000You know, there was a long and winding road.
00:10:33.000You know, when I was younger, I would have been more in the sort of black nationalist vein.
00:10:40.000If you think about, you know, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I would have been more on the Malcolm X black power side.
00:11:30.000Of recognizing the things in my life that I had believed, that I had taken on board because of what I had been told, much of which was not accurate or true, and then looking at the Scriptures and being serious about what it meant to be a follower of Christ.
00:11:50.000And so slowly, that began to change my worldview.
00:11:54.000And then, of course, you know, through my education and other things, and then through being a student of history.
00:12:00.000That just began to change my worldview as well, and becoming aware of, in some instances, nefarious actors who benefit greatly from convincing black people and others that our problems are from outside.
00:12:23.000Part of that process was when I got old enough This is before I even became a Christian.
00:12:29.000I got old enough to find a little trouble in Los Angeles and my mother shipped me out and got on a Greyhound bus for three days and went from Los Angeles, California to Beaufort, South Carolina and lived for about a year with her oldest brother.
00:12:45.000Who was a retired drill instructor in the Marine Corps.
00:12:48.000He had done 22 years in the Marines, two tours in Vietnam, his first time having a man in the house, and it was a life-altering experience.
00:13:02.000He was self-reliant, you know, taught me how to hunt and fish and, you know, everything else, and taught me how to train a dog, you know, those sorts of things.
00:13:11.000And that, you know, had a great deal to do with it as well.
00:13:14.000So, let's talk about that for a moment, because, you know, obviously we now live in a society that really disparages the value of fathers.
00:13:21.000I mean, the basic idea is that any family formation unit is totally equivalent, that you don't need a mother, you don't need a father, two fathers might do it, two mothers might do it, seven people might do it, a society might do it.
00:13:32.000But what the studies tend to show is that the best outcome, particularly for young men, is if they have a father in the home, and if they don't have a father in the home, then a surrogate father nearby.
00:13:42.000And why do you think society has moved so far so fast away from this when it's so obvious?
00:13:47.000I mean, it is perfectly obvious that the effect of not having male figures around is devastating for young men.
00:13:54.000Because we're more moved by and committed to ideologies and narratives than we are to truth.
00:14:04.000Especially when you start talking about, you know, social justice movement, critical theory.
00:14:09.000You know, when you have as a foundational idea that People who are appealing to absolute truth are part of, you know, this oppressive hegemonic power.
00:14:26.000But then when you also have this powerful narrative that men are unsafe, that the patriarchy is inherently oppressive.
00:14:35.000Then that tends to override any evidence to the contrary.
00:14:39.000So you talk about these studies that point to outcomes for young men, that just doesn't carry as much weight as the passionate feminist who sees the patriarchy as the root of all evils.
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00:17:36.000The God who created us, he created us male and female.
00:17:40.000And so you cannot understand maleness apart from femaleness, right?
00:17:46.000You have to understand what it means to be a man, first of all, by what it means to be made in the image of God, and second of all, by what it means to be made as this counterpart to a woman.
00:17:57.000And this idea that God created us to be priest and prophet and provider and protector, God designed us that way.
00:18:05.000And when you take us away from that, like, you know, we're bigger than women, we're stronger
00:18:09.000than women, you know, we have all of these things that allow us to take advantage of women.
00:18:14.000They get pregnant, you know, we don't, we can just walk away from it and, you know,
00:18:18.000leave them with that. There are so many things that if left unchecked, they do allow for this
00:18:28.000And so what we have to call men back to is this understanding of manhood that is outside of themselves.
00:18:36.000And you being a man is not just about who you think you are or even who you want to be.
00:18:42.000It is about you pointing back to the one who made you.
00:18:44.000It's about you pointing back to the purpose for which he made you.
00:18:48.000And it's about you pointing back to the relationship that he intends for you to have with the opposite sex.
00:18:54.000And, you know, one of the things you mentioned is men not wanting to be married.
00:18:58.000That's an incredibly important part of the picture of what it means to be a man.
00:19:04.000This idea that we would be in a relationship, that we would be the head of a household, that we would be, like I said, priest, prophet, provider, protector, within that context.
00:19:13.000All of that gives us not only purpose, but it gives us greater understanding of what masculinity is all about, and it also keeps it in check, and it protects women.
00:19:31.000People are fighting against traditional roles.
00:19:33.000And the result is you leave women unprotected and you leave men unchecked to do whatever they will with those women.
00:19:41.000So let's say that you've talked to many, many young men, obviously, across the nation.
00:19:45.000And let's say that you're faced with a young man who's been brought up in a family without a father, just by a mom, somebody like you when you were young.
00:19:55.000And that person is saying, listen, I've had a rough life.
00:20:12.000Like, if a man is honest, men don't yearn to just sit in their mother's basement and play video games.
00:20:20.000In fact, when we sit in the basement and play video games, we like to play those kind of video games that simulate You know, the actions and activities of masculinity, right?
00:20:33.000And so, that's the first thing I want to say to them.
00:20:37.000There's a God who created the world and a God who created you.
00:20:41.000And so, I want you to come back to that.
00:20:43.000The second thing that I want to say is that, you know, don't buy the lie that says you have to have it all figured out before you can begin to exercise any kind of manhood.
00:20:55.000Nothing could be further from the truth, right?
00:21:34.000So those are some of the things that I would want to talk to a young man about and ultimately to point them Again, to the God who made them, and to point them to Christ, who wants to redeem that manhood.
00:21:47.000Christ who is the ultimate picture of manhood.
00:21:49.000All of the stuff that you're saying, the feminist movement says, obviously this is antiquated, it's not worth it, it's patriarchal, it's discriminatory.
00:22:55.000We take all of this, what we're talking about right now, incredibly seriously.
00:22:59.000And my religion essentially tells me that practice precedes belief, right?
00:23:03.000I mean, we are big into, you perform these commandments, and whether you believe in these commandments or not, you are going to perform them, and then the belief comes later, right?
00:23:10.000There's whole sections of the Talmud that are devoted to this idea that basically, before you believe, you gotta practice.
00:23:16.000And then, when you find yourself walking in the ways of God, Then you realize that the ways that you're walking are, in fact, God's ways, and then it means something to you.
00:23:23.000We're a society without patience, though, and that wants the belief very often to precede the actual action.
00:23:28.000And so what we forget is that if you're not acting in a godly way, you are acting, by definition, in an ungodly way.
00:23:34.000And so if you do that, then you will end up in that belief system as well.
00:23:54.000It's the first commandment with a promise that it may be well with you and you may live long in the land, right?
00:23:58.000And then verse four, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
00:24:04.000What's interesting about that is before The text talks about the relationship between husbands and wives, and it's pointing, you know, to the gospel.
00:24:13.000It's assuming, you know, that you're Christian.
00:24:15.000But that section right there, it really points to law.
00:24:19.000The idea that children, when they're being brought up, they have to be taught how to behave before they believe.
00:24:26.000Exactly what you're talking about here.
00:24:30.000In order for that to happen, you've got to have a structure, and not just a structure, but that structure of the family actually has to have a direction.
00:24:42.000Otherwise, children are just sort of left to their own devices.
00:24:46.000So again, this goes back to what we're talking about with the idea that we need structure, that we need order, that we need leadership, that we need mentoring, that we need discipleship, but that we also need a standard.
00:24:57.000You know, one of the things that is so odd about sort of the current moment is that we constantly say what we pursue is diversity.
00:25:02.000We want diversity and we have to recognize other people's diversity.
00:25:05.000But what we've actually done is we've flattened human beings into androgynous widgets who
00:25:09.000apparently have the same level of development from the time they are one to the time that
00:25:22.000And that's not the way that life actually works.
00:25:24.000I mean, as you are pointing out correctly, in my view, life is a series of roles and
00:25:29.000those roles are provided to you by your biology, which was implanted in you by God.
00:25:33.000And that is the way that society works.
00:25:35.000And when we sort of arrive on this earth and we're told, make your own way without any of those structures, you're no better off than, and there's an actual phrase that's used in Hebrew called tino chenishba, a baby born in a forest.
00:25:44.000The idea is that a baby born in a forest has no actual moral obligations because there's no structures around them.
00:25:49.000It's literally the biblical excuse for not being responsible for your own sin.
00:25:53.000And we've created an entire society of babies in the forest by deliberately removing the parents and the home and this church and structures from around them.
00:26:01.000And then we wonder why people are wandering around aimlessly.
00:26:04.000And they're insecure, and they have more problems with mental health than any other generation has ever had before.
00:26:11.000You know, I'm sure you remember the famous experiment.
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00:28:52.000I mean, we all like to be liked, right?
00:28:55.000And so you just sort of start carving off the edges of the truth at first until eventually you're doing things for clicks and for likes and not for your calling.
00:29:11.000I think for, you know, over a generation now, we've had people, you know, people in the ministry, people in our churches, it's not like, you know, they're born and dropped into a theological training institution, right?
00:29:27.000No, they're born, and the overwhelming majority of them are educated by the government all the way through university, and then maybe they'll go to seminary.
00:29:36.000But the worldview that these guys are taught From, you know, beginning almost to the end, is this, you know, sort of Gramscian, neo-Marxist, you know, worldview.
00:29:50.000And it infects the way that they view the scriptures.
00:29:55.000It infects the way that they view their calling.
00:29:58.000And then I think the other thing is, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of pressure out there.
00:30:03.000And a lot of people just They can't take that pressure.
00:30:15.000The only reason I do it is because there's something that's more important, right?
00:30:21.000There's a calling that's more important.
00:30:23.000And I think people are struggling because of this and suffering because of it.
00:30:26.000Now, back to what we talked about earlier with social justice.
00:30:29.000You know, Christians hear things like social justice and, you know, racial justice, and it's like, yeah, you know, of course, you know, we're for that.
00:30:42.000Marriage equality, well, am I for marriage in equality?
00:30:47.000And when you have weak and faulty worldviews, and then seductive language, And then you have leaders with unclear voices.
00:31:04.000I wonder also if religious leadership, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, if what religious leadership started off by doing was worrying because there were kind of members of the flock who were on the fringes of the flock and they started wandering away.
00:31:16.000And so they followed those members of the flock into the mountains and they worried so much about making sure that they bring those people back in that they decided the only way to actually keep these people members of the flock is to broaden essentially the fence.
00:34:43.000But this goes to what you were saying earlier about people not wanting to speak up because now there's that label.
00:34:51.000And it's not just Christian nationalism, it's White Christian nationalism, right?
00:34:58.000And, you know, I don't know if you've seen, I know you've seen these oppression wheels, right?
00:35:02.000These wheels where they have, you know, the various groups and, you know, on the outside there's the oppressed group and the inside, you know, there's the oppressor group.
00:35:10.000And, you know, whatever these wheels are and however many oppressed groups they have, one of the oppressor groups is always white.
00:35:17.000One of the oppressor groups is always Christian, and one of the oppressor groups is always nationalist, right?
00:35:24.000So when you talk about white Christian nationalism, you have a triple oppressor group, right, just in the name.
00:35:32.000And so now if people want to, you know, celebrate the overturn of Roe v. Wade, all you have to do is say, white Christian nationalism, and all of a sudden they back off, right?
00:35:49.000Yeah, no, it really is pretty incredible.
00:35:52.000One of the great leaps that you hear constantly, particularly in the abortion debate, is you can make an entire argument about why the life of the unborn should be protected without reference to the Bible, without reference to God.
00:36:02.000I do it literally every day on my program.
00:36:04.000And the minute that you say that you are pro-life, they immediately say, ah, you're doing that because you're a religious bigot.
00:36:20.000But that's not what I'm talking about right now.
00:36:21.000But you are so eager to hit... How do you think that being a religious person turned into an actual insult and dirty word that is supposed to forbid you from public life?
00:37:05.000Come on, come on, talk about the religious argument.
00:37:07.000Because what I want to do is I want to show them that they're liars.
00:37:11.000Because Stacey Abrams was going to churches, right?
00:37:16.000Quoting scripture, making her argument for abortion, and nobody was saying, oh, You know, you can't bring your religion into—they don't have a problem with religion.
00:37:30.000They don't have a problem with the Bible, right?
00:37:33.000They don't have a problem with Raphael Warnock when he does it, right?
00:38:19.000It's about speaking in the name of God, something that God clearly is not saying.
00:38:22.000And this has become habit from politicians On a routine basis, that they will cite the Bible to a proposition that is completely anti-biblical.
00:38:30.000You'll get Barack Obama citing the least of these in reference to transgenderism or gay marriage.
00:38:34.000While the Bible has more to say about these particular topics than a rather vague verse from the book of Mark, is it?
00:39:09.000Until you are not spouting the leftist, progressive, neo-Marxist ideology, then all of a sudden, you know, separation of church and state, and you need to stop.
00:41:16.000It is actually necessary to transgress all the rules, which means that the point isn't that we believe what we're doing is right.
00:41:21.000It's that what you are doing is bad and wrong, and so we will go out of our way to do anything we can do to undermine the institutions that you promote.
00:41:29.000And then, of course, the results are dire, and their immediate Their immediate move is to blame the bigotry of the institutions that they've been steadily attempting to undermine.
00:41:38.000And then to establish their own institutions so that they can exercise the authority that they just said last week was inherently evil.
00:41:48.000So what kind of institutions do you think they're seeking to set up?
00:41:50.000Because it's unclear to me exactly what their utopia looks like.
00:41:54.000I know that right now their first step is destroy everything, level the ground.
00:41:58.000It's almost nihilistically destructive.
00:42:13.000It's not that they have this idea of new institutions.
00:42:17.000They just have the idea of them being in power of whatever institutions exist.
00:42:23.000Okay, so how does that manifest in terms of politics?
00:42:26.000We've been talking a lot about religion and the religious community, the hijacking of churches and sort of the hollowing out of the church, but in terms of politics, obviously this has led to an extraordinary amount of political polarization in the United States.
00:42:38.000As you get rid of the social fabric that used to be shared in church, people are now rushing to political party to sort of fill that gap.
00:42:45.000What do you see as the future of politics in the United States right now?
00:43:54.000Again, because it's the hegemonic power.
00:43:57.000So you go on the average college campus today, and I think you have a glimpse of what it could look like, or what it does look like, rather, when the inmates run the asylum.
00:44:10.000So one of the big moves, obviously, in college campuses when you have professors who say they're smarter than your parents, than your pastor, than everything else, is they rely on the fact that they have degrees to basically say that everybody who's religious is stupid.
00:44:27.000What they're doing is an excuse for overriding those religious values and allowing you to experience whatever subjective pleasure you wish.
00:44:34.000But the case that they make is essentially, if you believe in religion, you're an idiot.
00:44:39.000The only thing you can believe in is a materialistic conception of the universe in which you're essentially pre-programmed by biology to do particular things.
00:44:48.000And the argument that they make is essentially you're an idiot to believe in God.
00:44:52.000A college student comes home, comes to your house, and starts telling you that God doesn't exist, that the Bible was written by a bunch of idiots in caves thousands of years ago.
00:45:02.000What's your chief argument to people who are purporting to object to the Bible or object more broadly to the existence of God and his providence in the universe on an intellectual basis?
00:45:14.000Yeah, what I want to do is I want to show them that that's all based on presuppositions, right?
00:45:19.000The last thing that I want to do is get down on their level and say, okay, fine, let's just leave that aside.
00:45:27.000No, I want to say to them, all of that is based on presuppositions.
00:45:31.000You're taking leaps of faith back there in order to get here and make that argument.
00:45:36.000Your presuppositions have been tried before, and they've led to catastrophe.
00:45:42.000Mine is based on presuppositions as well, but my presuppositions has led to Western civilization.
00:45:48.000So that's the first thing that I want to say.
00:45:50.000The other thing that I want to say is, I'm not coming at this blind, right?
00:45:54.000I choose to believe the Bible because it's a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.
00:46:01.000They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.
00:46:10.000So, again, this is not just, you know, close your eyes and hope you feel something, you know, type stuff.
00:46:16.000We do not have a God who calls upon us for blind faith.