On this week's episode of The Quarantine, the crew talks about a recent viral video that has been making its way around the internet. It's a viral video about a man who lost his faith and how he handled the situation.
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00:02:42.000Actually, we do want to talk about something because it's been making the rounds on YouTube throughout the whole sort of YouTube blogosphere.
00:02:47.000And you brought this to my attention, Audio Wade.
00:02:51.000You said, hey, I would like to maybe do a podcast yourself on Explain.
00:02:57.000Yeah, so the Rhett and Link, famous on YouTube, I think they have like 16 million subscribers, recently came out, did a couple of videos about their spiritual deconstruction, is the word that they've used.
00:03:13.000So yeah, they did a couple of episodes on that, each one about an hour and 45 minutes, just going through their stories of basically how they lost their faith.
00:03:20.000And they came from very different points of view on that.
00:03:24.000But yeah, that's and I thought that warranted at least a response.
00:03:28.000Well, I think it warranted a response because, and I wanna be really clear, as a Christian, obviously, we wanna speak to these people, everyone who's in this boat, out of love, compassion, we care, of course.
00:03:38.000And Christians, we all believe that our worldview is correct, namely because we also want what's best for people.
00:03:43.000And obviously, creating distance between yourself and God, we don't view as being best for you.
00:03:50.000Now, that being said, I also think, based on what we've, and we'll get to some clips here, based on what we've been watching, Um, that sometimes these people also need to be intellectually challenged, not emotionally coddled.
00:04:04.000Uh, so I think that's pretty important here.
00:04:06.000And there were a lot of questions that were sort of asked that weren't really answered.
00:04:10.000And this is a big thing that you see the term deconstruction.
00:04:12.000That's sort of the terminology that's used a lot now from these, uh, really sort of the, like freedom from religion foundation.
00:04:17.000I don't know if they use it exactly, but a lot of these places.
00:04:30.000But in the comments section, let us know if you've ever had a crisis of faith, or how you maintain faith, or what your worldview is as a Christian.
00:04:37.000Because sometimes I just go, oh, that's a different perspective.
00:04:56.000So before we continue, and yeah, this might be a little bit, I don't want to say scholarly, there'll still be dick jokes, but let's go for context to Rhett and Link explaining it off the bat, why they left the Christian faith.
00:05:08.000This is when I adopted what I'm going to call California Christianity.
00:05:15.000To get at what Link was getting at here a second ago.
00:05:18.000In LA, even within the Evangelical Church, I think there is this sort of, because you're in this incredibly diverse place with so many different perspectives, You really can't maintain a Christian faith in a place like this without at least some sort of realization that there's a lot of gray.
00:05:40.000It's not about having it all figured out.
00:05:43.000It's not about being completely certain.
00:05:47.000At this point I was like, okay, you know what?
00:05:49.000I think this is probably where faith comes in.
00:05:52.000You know, it makes sense to me that this might be where faith comes in because I am sitting here trying to prove this stuff out, but shouldn't I just have faith first?
00:06:06.000And then maybe these answers will be given to me by God?
00:06:25.000And I'll be honest, I would not have asked that question if I was in North Carolina.
00:06:28.000You know, we were working out of this little basement studio, just putting stuff on the internet, and once we started to actually, our world got bigger when we started to meet other creators.
00:06:41.000I remember when we met Michael Buckley the first time, he gave me a hug.
00:06:47.000And I remember thinking, this is the first openly gay person I've ever hugged.
00:06:53.000And I don't know what... I know what I'm supposed to believe about this guy that I'm hugging, but this... And it was a crisis moment for me, because I was like... Because Jesus would just facepalm him.
00:07:08.000I didn't feel right for me, and let me clarify, I didn't feel right for me to render judgment of him Because what I wanted to do was hug him back and actually mean it.
00:07:23.000But there was... I had been... The belief that I was ingrained with didn't allow me to... Sounds like wrong belief.
00:07:41.000Yeah, that must have been really hard.
00:07:44.000Okay, so a couple of things that need to... I want to say this as a jumping off point, and this is with a lot of Christians, and by the way, no surprise here, they try and cut it off at the pass, that people who come from small rural areas, from small Christian towns, go to California or start working in the entertainment industry, and they say, I know people are going to say, you went to California and became a sort of a liberal, woke liberal, or whatever they say, but that's not what happened.
00:08:07.000You basically said that you had never had any personal experience with someone of a differing viewpoint or differing lifestyle, Michael Buckley.
00:08:14.000He was the guy who used to do the show.
00:08:34.000As a matter of fact, it would be more un-Christian of you to not be able to hug this person and mean it.
00:08:39.000And so this is important because this is often used, and I understand that everyone has their own sort of journey, or people talk about it this way, but listen, you cannot say that you had to abandon your faith because of what the faith teaches, or what the Bible teaches, or what Christ teaches, because you had ingrained in you something that was not at all biblically correct.
00:09:02.000And this is also used, by the way, as a jumping off point where they say, well, we know there are some decent Christians out there who are pro-LGBT.
00:09:13.000But the insinuation there is that anyone who is a Christian who believes in the fundamental roles of men and women in a marriage and a nuclear family must hate gay people.
00:09:24.000Just like you can hug someone who is promiscuous, which as Christians we don't agree with, and love them.
00:10:07.000We judge these faiths by the texts that they say that they go by.
00:10:12.000Sometimes you're going to have a misinterpretation of that, and somebody's going to go off and form a religion that believes if you can survive a snake bite, you're truly holy, and that's the religion that we're going to have.
00:10:21.000And so we're not going to put them out and say, well, that's Christianity, and we're going to judge that.
00:10:25.000I was like, we're going to go to that one scripturally based.
00:10:26.000Doesn't the Bible say something about not testing me?
00:10:30.000Lord, if you are true, you will protect me from this snake bite.
00:10:38.000So, I mean, I want to make sure that we're being fair, but also for the people out there that are watching this, even if you're an atheist and you have no faith whatsoever, we'd love to hear why maybe you don't have a faith.
00:10:48.000Maybe you've done some research and you just don't want to.
00:10:50.000But with these guys, what they're doing is they're putting out stories about their journey through this process.
00:10:56.000Yeah, their personal experiences, and I think they're bringing up points that are very easily challenged.
00:11:01.000Again, we're approaching it with love, and we understand that people have crisis of faith, and so we're not beating them over the head saying, you're wrong, you're wrong, how dare you?
00:11:06.000We're just talking about what they are saying to everybody else.
00:11:10.000There's a lot of feel, there's a lot of touchiness to it, there's a lot of slow storytelling that kind of draws you in, and there's nothing wrong with that, that's a personal story for those guys, but it's very short on, let's dive into these issues on these podcasts at the very least.
00:11:23.000Well, my main point here is, if you convert from a religion, from a faith, because you don't agree with what is prescribed in that faith, well then you better be sure that it's what is prescribed.
00:11:32.000And not hugging gay guys is not in there.
00:11:36.000Do you realize, I've worked in the entertainment industry since I was 11 years old, on the set of Arthur, and I was doing voice work behind the scenes, I was taking sips, it was just, almost my takes of doing voiceovers were between huggings of gay guys.
00:11:50.000But I think that's also the danger of keeping young Christians very sheltered and not allowing them to be challenged at a young age.
00:11:57.000So what I see is the personal experience trumping all when we're talking about issues of faith.
00:12:05.000And it doesn't all come down to personal experience.
00:12:07.000And whether they realize that or not, that is part of the California Christianity.
00:12:12.000They're being sheltered in a different way now.
00:12:14.000Yeah, so they moved away from North Carolina where they said that they felt sheltered in some way, but yeah, they are very insulated there.
00:12:20.000They're also very insulated in California.
00:12:22.000It's just different people insulating them.
00:12:41.000There was a Pentecostal youth group at one point, and that was a whole different thing.
00:12:44.000That was the only church within a five-mile radius of me at that point.
00:12:48.000And then, of course, I didn't fit in with people in the entertainment industry.
00:12:51.000So just because you feel like you don't fit in somewhere, or people might disagree with you in Hollywood, doesn't mean that you fundamentally abandon your principles.
00:12:59.000So I think we do need to get a little bit more into why it is that they had these doubts, or what the reasons would be.
00:13:06.000If there is any reasoning, as opposed to feelings, I think that's the next clip.
00:13:10.000Yeah, well, they talk mostly about those reasons during the first 45 minutes or so of the interview, and it's mostly just sort of quoting experts or quoting books that Rhett said he read.
00:14:17.000Yeah, so I want to be clear, and I do encourage everyone to go and listen to the show, listen to the reasoning, but like you said, it's not really any one piece of evidence.
00:14:26.000It really does come down to, oh, we're experiential.
00:14:28.000Yeah, very much so, and there's something that we saw in there that he said that we found out that there was a lot of gray when we moved to California, and I'm very puzzled by what he means by gray.
00:14:58.000Right, and so we talk about this, the Bible does have, you know,
00:15:02.000I've said this a lot to you guys in our offline conversations.
00:15:04.000We should be firm where the Bible is firm, and we should hold it loosely where the Bible holds it loosely, right?
00:15:09.000We should make sure that we're not firm on things that the Bible is not, and then the opposite.
00:15:13.000If the Bible's loose on it, we shouldn't be firm.
00:15:14.000And so there are places where specifically he ends up talking about the LGBTQ plus community, and that's how he says it, and saying, you know, this is one of those things.
00:15:24.000And I'm like, well, the Bible is not gray here.
00:15:26.000The Bible has never been gray about what sin is and is not, right?
00:16:21.000It's not like you were saying, well I was a secularist and then I learned, you know, someone came knocking on my door, got off his bicycle with a helmet and short middle management shirt and a tie and brought me the Book of Mormon and then I said I'm pro-life.
00:16:35.000And so for me it's what changed where all of a sudden There's this gray.
00:16:39.000And if what you would use as an example is, well, now it was gray because I had to hug a gay guy and I felt like I should be repelled by him.
00:16:49.000And I think the danger here is applying your own hang-ups and your own issues and offering that as any sort of prescriptive advice to people out there who may be struggling with their faith, because that is not Yeah.
00:17:02.000That's a lot of the reasons that personal people that I've seen leave the faith or say that they're atheists is that they say all these things like people are hypocrites and they're liars and they do these things that are inside of the Christian faith and you're talking about people.
00:17:27.000We have another clip to get to and then we'll come back and sort of dissect this a little bit more.
00:17:31.000I understand that it is unreasonable to expect Christianity to be a set of scientifically verifiable principles.
00:17:38.000It is a faith, implying that some sort of believing without seeing is involved.
00:17:43.000And more specifically, Christianity is a relationship with Jesus, and relationships are not well-defined or experienced scientifically.
00:17:55.000I don't think it insignificant that the deeper I have dug into Christianity with a thirst for the truth, the more difficult it has become to have faith.
00:18:05.000In fact, for me, it has become impossible.
00:18:10.000And that was kind of the reckoning for me.
00:18:12.000When I jumped ship, I didn't jump to another boat.
00:19:47.000Right. Yeah. Well, so he said something about science, and this is something that we talked
00:19:51.000about just a little bit. But he said, the deeper I dug into science, the more I couldn't kind of
00:19:57.000buy my faith, so to speak. Right. I'm paraphrasing kind of what he was trying to say there. And,
00:20:01.000you know, some people will make some pretty easy mistakes when they look at the Bible.
00:20:07.000They'll make the Bible out to be a science book when the Bible never claims to be a science book, right?
00:20:12.000And it doesn't discredit what the Bible says about scientific matters if it does address them, right?
00:20:18.000But it's basically saying like, look guys, this is not like cellular biology.
00:20:21.000This isn't freshman bio 101 that we're trying to accomplish here.
00:20:24.000We're trying to, God has obviously chosen stuff to communicate to us that he feels is very important.
00:20:29.000But Wade, you and I were talking about this and really the crux is there are wonderful It's pillars of the faith that have different opinions on some of the science discussions that happen within scripture.
00:20:41.000But I had a question, my church has something called Great Questions, and people can come in and ask any question.
00:20:46.000It can be atheists, it can be people who seek, you know, have a deeper relationship, people who are on the fence, like whatever it may be, we've had everybody come in.
00:20:53.000And this person asked me, they said, you know, I don't believe in evolution, can I still, or I do believe, sorry, in evolution, right, so they believed in evolution, scientifically taught.
00:21:03.000And it floored me, and I had this response to it, and I had it again when you and I started talking about it before the show.
00:21:10.000I wanted to kill this question, and there was a reason for it, and I understand that it sounds like it's over the top, but I said, look, when you get to heaven, right, and you're standing before God, do you think He is going to say, did I do it in six days?
00:21:24.000It doesn't mean that that question isn't something that we can't discuss and have a really interesting conversation about, but at some point with that, we have to understand that certain things are very important.
00:21:34.000They're crucial to the faith, and certain things are debatable.
00:21:38.000We can debate about those things and still be Christians.
00:21:40.000I'm wondering what he's talking about here with science, because there are plenty of scientists out there that are Christians, and there are plenty that are not, obviously.
00:21:48.000And you can listen to what both of them have to say, and then you can test what they say.
00:21:52.000All the Christian scientists aren't wrong.
00:21:54.000All the other scientists aren't wrong.
00:21:55.000We're not talking about Christian scientists.
00:22:06.000And I think that that does illustrate that debates like this are not ultimately decided by the evidence.
00:22:13.000It's ultimately decided by what you bring to the evidence, which is what your worldview is.
00:22:17.000And the amount of who you trust, what you trust, if your baseline trust is in the Bible or if your baseline trust is in the world standards, that's going to make the difference.
00:22:27.000So, the specific evidence is about the age of the earth.
00:22:29.000I believe in a young earth, but that's not something that is a decisive issue as far as, like, what I'm saying is, like, it's, I can't prove that to somebody who has decided to not believe that.
00:22:40.000Just like I can't prove that the Bible is true.
00:22:43.000And there are some things, and I do want to be clear, they never really bring this up, there are some things that can be proven that are undeniable by people across the spectrum.
00:22:51.000There's a lot of deferring to experts, right, that you Well, you know, I read this book, or I heard this person, and I understand there's a value in experts.
00:23:00.000Particularly, like, I am someone, if we know in this program, I always try to seek out the best at whatever it is, whether it's someone who's doing something technical on the editing side, whether it's someone for research, whether it's someone who's really good at actually finding and securing a location.
00:23:12.000Security, like, we really try and find the best folks.
00:23:32.000And the reason I bring this up is, if you play basketball, not many people who play basketball, you know, at a, I don't know, local park, get to play with Michael Jordan.
00:23:41.000Not many of you, even Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen.
00:23:43.000The thing is, in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I get to do that.
00:23:45.000Like, I've actually gotten to hit the mats with people like Marcelo Garcia, Buchecha, these guys who are multiple-time world champions.
00:23:51.000The Michael Jordans of this sport either come in and do seminars, so you get to experience really, really brilliant people, the best that the world has to offer.
00:23:58.000And I have, at some points, performed certain techniques and someone goes, well, don't do it that way, do it this way.
00:24:03.000I go, well, why would I do it that way?
00:24:04.000They say, well, just look at my medals.
00:24:09.000This was a very specific instance where someone said, well, look at, trust me, I know, do it this way.
00:24:13.000The very next tournament this guy went on, who was a former world champion, got smoked by doing it the way I was doing it beforehand from another expert.
00:24:19.000In other words, today's expert can be tomorrow's ignoramus, because this idea that scientific progress, you were talking about this, is linear, it's not always.
00:24:35.000Yeah, Thomas Kuhn talks about this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
00:24:38.000It's essentially, the myth of scientific progress is, it's not some kind of hockey stick graph of, like, everybody was idiots for a long time, and then now we have this explosion of technology.
00:24:47.000Really, there's, every 50 or 100 years, some new paradigm, just because, like, an entirely new paradigm is taken on.
00:24:53.000I mean, one illustration of that is the coming ice age in the 1970s.
00:25:22.000Which will bring us to our next clip here pretty soon where they talk about how all societies have some kind of moral good core.
00:25:31.000Well, not only is that not true, but guess what?
00:25:32.000Not all societies have sought out knowledge with the same importance.
00:25:38.000That's why you have people who had aqueducts, you have people who had used the wheel, and you have people who hadn't even domesticated horses here when we're talking about Native Americans, because pantheism didn't encourage people to go forward, be fruitful, multiply, and to explore the questions of the universe.
00:25:52.000That's why the early scientists were Christians.
00:25:54.000And I understand we can say that's a different period in time, and now these people are actually trying to halt science.
00:25:58.000I understand some people might have those arguments out there, but there is no historical There can be no historical denial of early scientists who were deeply Christian, and philosophers, by the way, a lot of them.
00:26:09.000And there can be no historical argument about the impact of the Bible, the impact of Jesus Christ.
00:26:14.000And for me, when we talk about history, the easiest thing, when you read the early persecutors of Christians, This to me was the most convincing case because I had read a lot of sort of the Christian apologetics books, and I don't want to get too into the details here, but what really convinced me was when I started reading the anti-Christian writings of early Christian, and they all accepted the idea that Jesus Christ was—you can read these right now.
00:26:37.000You would probably know the names better than I would.
00:27:05.000The fact that people were arguing against this exploding faith, trying to quell it, saying, all that happened, but this is why it doesn't matter to the degree that you think it matters, for me, was very convincing, in tandem with the rest of the historical context, and in tandem with archaeological discoveries that we've since had.
00:27:25.000I mean, a big one was the Kingdom of David.
00:27:34.000But for the longest time, up until, I don't remember the year when they discovered the slab, and then more evidence about the Kingdom of David, people often argued against the Bible and would say, well, you know what, the biggest case is, if we're going to talk about historical evidence, David, this crazy ruler of this kingdom, there'd be something, and then there was.
00:27:50.000And then they've since sort of moved on to the arc.
00:27:53.000So because you're on the edge right now, doesn't mean that you won't find it eventually.
00:27:56.000And that's not proof positive that it means that it's real, but it is something to keep in mind when you're making arguments that can be very temporary.
00:28:05.000And I think that Rhett and Link do that quite a bit.
00:28:07.000And again, I say this out of love, but I just don't think the arguments that they make cut the mustard.
00:28:11.000This is another one that is very common.
00:28:13.000We see it among all sort of SJW woke leftists, not saying that they are
00:28:18.000that, but then we have another clip to get to that, but this idea of sort of situational ethics or moral relativism.
00:28:37.000But I think that it's a much more natural and organic process than, there's a book, I read it, and now I know what to do.
00:28:44.000I think that's why those core qualities of what makes a human good exist in cultures everywhere.
00:28:53.000You find a culture in the middle of the Amazon that's never been exposed to the gospel or any sort of religious system outside of what they believe.
00:29:01.000Are they gonna think that murdering is great?
00:29:11.000You can also go down the base, just go down a few Amazon Basin walks, I guess, and you'll find tribesmen who are munching on some guy's testicles like it's a snack pack, okay?
00:29:30.000This idea that morality is universal, no, it's not.
00:29:34.000And I can tell you that certainly for me, and I know this is an argument that you hear from people like Hitchens and Dawkins, well then you're just a horrible person if you need God to tell you not to do those things.
00:30:37.000They didn't say Alexander the Merciful, because that would be Alexander the Pussy, right?
00:30:42.000Mercy was not a value until modern Christendom.
00:30:45.000It's still not a value in much of the third world or non-Western civilizations.
00:30:50.000It just shows me that to make a comment like that, it's wishful.
00:30:54.000You're hoping that there is good throughout cultures throughout history, and that's just not proven to be the case.
00:31:00.000If you study history at all, what you see is that, left to our own devices, we're very evil, and evil tends to manifest itself as selfishness.
00:31:09.000You have kids, you know that people are not inherently good.
00:31:20.000Everybody hears that there's a toilet paper shortage and they go and buy every single piece of frickin' toilet paper they can find and they have two rooms full and their neighbor has none.
00:31:28.000That's the kind of condition humans tend to exist in.
00:31:32.000We've only recently gotten to a place where we don't kill each other on sight, okay?
00:31:36.000It's not goodness and culture throughout the world and throughout history at all.
00:31:40.000And you will find that out if you just do a cursory study.
00:31:41.000Well, I'm actually pretty glad because I used to, you know, I was on YouTube back in 2006 and it was a sort of wave of atheists.
00:31:47.000You know, common saying, if God is real, why do all these horrible things happen to good people?
00:31:51.000Why does he allow these things to happen?
00:31:52.000And then, of course, I don't need a God to tell me not to kill someone.
00:31:55.000And these have been debunked since sort of the modern wave of people who aren't even necessarily Christians, but Christian sympathists and sort of the new right, I guess, conservatives, libertarians, all these people who understand the value of Western civilization and how it was spawned by Christendom because these shared values have created what we know and love.
00:32:13.000It's widely accepted, it's been debunked, this idea that morality is the same across cultures.
00:32:18.000So this is frankly very rudimentary, but I guess it works in California.
00:32:21.000Yeah, and technological advancement is something we were talking about earlier.
00:32:24.000And technological advancement is a moral good.
00:32:27.000It actually—like being resourceful, looking at the things around you,
00:32:30.000and making things, making new stuff that makes people's lives better, that is a moral positive.
00:32:34.000So it's not like there's morality over here and scientific advancement over here.
00:32:45.000And I think that's how you end up getting backwards when you have things like communism, or you have things like socialism, because now you've conflated.
00:34:04.000No, we weren't the nicest, but the whole thing was they just thought a lot of these people, I believe they were the Canarsies, if I'm not mistaken.
00:34:40.000That was the cornerstone of Christianity and really just the God of the Bible is that every individual is valuable and unique and has rights that are given to them by God, their creator.
00:34:51.000And it's not the whole that you're looking at.
00:35:17.000And this is where we kind of get to the...
00:35:23.000I will say this because I think a lot of people out there hopefully you know we do this obviously mug club behind the paywall for people who are paying members because there's more buying this is difficult to have this conversation and sometimes we'll do an ongoing series of mass Mondays so use a promo code quarantine to get your very steep discount yes but this is something that a lot of people may not understand who aren't Christians out there. I think that a lot of atheists think
00:35:47.000that Christians exist in this monolith. Like we're all, you know, the mom from Carrie
00:35:51.000where, you know, we get the entire silverware drawer in our bosom by the end of the film.
00:35:57.000This has been creeping into the Christian Church for a long time, the social justice sort of leftism.
00:36:06.000And that's because, unfortunately, they've been trying to water it down.
00:36:10.000And I don't mean necessarily water it down.
00:36:12.000Frankly, strip elements of the faith that are pretty important to make it palatable to places like California, so that people don't get hurt feelings.
00:36:20.000Which is why, if there's nothing else that you take from this, it is that the experiential cannot trump understanding why you believe what it is that you believe.
00:36:28.000You need to have a reasoned basis in your faith.
00:36:33.000You need to understand and be able to articulate and defend your beliefs, or you have no business espousing them.
00:36:41.000So, that being said, this is sort of indicative of what we've been talking about.
00:36:45.000It's not just Christian conservatives and SJW left.
00:36:48.000A huge portion of the church, I would wager probably most members of churches in Southern California, at the very least in my experience, are a part of that amalgamate of the social justice where you're left.
00:37:17.000There's a lot of stories of trauma because as people were sort of developing their identity and self-actualizing, they were doing it in an oppressive environment.
00:38:10.000Yeah, I went to an Ethiopian church when I was in Los Angeles, and I went to a church in Jamaica, Queens, where they actually came and canvassed for a local congressional candidate, because they don't really care about the 501c3c4 there.
00:38:24.000This is an exercise, I will say, in not insulting people, because I obviously want, there are a lot of insults that I want to make, not only about the, but the host, with Philip DeFranco, everyone, but I'm just going to try and be as... So that's my, my point is, that's my baggage.
00:38:36.000That is your cross to bear right this minute.
00:38:44.000I'm not saying it because he looks like a gay European soccer player bear.
00:38:50.000What I am saying is that if you look at, and this is so, for people out there, please, please listen, the Christians out there, please don't be afraid to comment this and feel like you're letting them in.
00:39:00.000The truth is, the hairdos that they had when they started on YouTube were the exact hairdos that you would expect a youth pastor to have in that era.
00:39:07.000That kind of Blink-182, but really you listen to MXPX so your parents don't get mad and you have the bangs and then all of a sudden it switches to now the Trimmed on the sides and high on the top in the middle and then it'll probably switch to a verse like the original Terminator where the bangs will be really short and I'll have some of the mullet the point is
00:39:23.000They're values in Silicon Valley and apparently are just as cyclical as the styles.
00:39:29.000And if you look at the kind of content that comes from Rhett and Link where you can describe, and they describe it as brand friendly, you can describe the entire, I guess, sort of mission statement of the content of Rhett and Link is Brand friendly YouTube trend chasing.
00:40:06.000Yeah, and one of the things you said about traumatic experiences for a lot of people and that they didn't necessarily experience that same kind of issue because they were straight, white men in the church.
00:40:16.000Look, there are plenty, there's a lot that we have to own as Christians, right?
00:40:20.000Because sometimes our brothers and sisters do and say things that we very much disagree with.
00:40:44.000Like women aren't welcome at the church?
00:40:45.000Do you know that women could claim sanctuary, by the way?
00:40:49.000They were allowed to claim sanctuary for a long time.
00:40:51.000Women are very well treated at the church.
00:40:54.000And this is something that's also important.
00:40:55.000If you mean to say that it is offensive for a church to believe in traditionalist roles,
00:41:01.000If you believe it is sexist to have expectations of women in the church, just as they have of men.
00:41:06.000In other words, they have expectations of accountability, of transparency from men in positions of leadership, right?
00:41:12.000They have small groups, they have a board of elders, and they expect women to also serve in the church.
00:41:17.000There are expectations of both men and women, and yeah, this is absolutely true, the Christian faith does not see men and women as fundamentally interchangeable.
00:41:25.000We do believe, going back to your point, that they're unique, intrinsically, fearfully and wonderfully created, and so we believe in complementarianism.
00:41:33.000I get that's offensive today, but it's not because we hate women.
00:41:36.000If you look at Jesus in his preaching, the first feminist, the guy was hanging around with women.
00:42:25.000So let me put it this way, what if I walked into a church, what if I walked into their church, like their ideal church, what would the response be if I said, well look guys, I'm a serial liar, I don't care about lying, I think it's okay to lie all the time, and I really don't, are you going to confront me with truth?
00:42:56.000It's not me you have a problem with, it's God if you disagree with that.
00:42:59.000And Wade has a good point, but here's a perfect example of Gerald and I, and I know I give Gerald a tough time, but Gerald is someone I very much trust.
00:43:05.000He was a groomsman at my wedding, and we've talked about these issues quite a bit, and I'm willing to bet substantially more than a dollar.
00:43:11.000But do you remember, I think we've talked about this on air, we were outside, at the patio, outside of a Chili's.
00:43:22.000How you were, you were, you were, you were, you were... I was acting, I wasn't going, like, I was, I was earlier in the dating... You were, you know... Yeah, I was, well, no, no, no, I'm not, like, sleeping around, that was not what was happening.
00:43:33.000I was confessing, like, hey man, I'm having a problem, I'm not being the person that I wanna be, and this is what's going on, and you're like, well, Stop being a dick.
00:43:42.000I said, I love you and I think that, listen, you need to be consistent with your values.
00:43:51.000And I told you, I wouldn't say this if you were an atheist because it wouldn't matter.
00:43:54.000But I know you're telling me this because it matters to you and because I love you, I think you need to live this way or you're not going to find the woman that you want.
00:44:53.000It's that Philip DeFranco has gone in his entire life to the barber and said, give me the child number two.
00:44:59.000So yeah, so he mentions whiteness as if there's some kind of hierarchy in Christianity.
00:45:04.000Like, I mean, yes, there is racism in people who call themselves Christians, but before Christianity, I mean, white people were sacrificing each other to trees.
00:45:14.000It's not some kind of inherent hierarchy in Christianity.
00:45:27.000Doesn't mean that it's necessarily consistent with their values.
00:45:29.000And again, this idea that somehow you are less qualified to speak on an issue or that God expects you to shut up because of your skin color, that is not biblical.
00:45:44.000And it almost might as well be the book of Southern California, the book of the entertainment industry, the book of the woke left, because it is dogmatic.
00:46:40.000So Penn actually, you can YouTube this, he actually said, look, if you believe what you say you believe, Christians, like if God is real and there is a heaven and a hell, he goes, it'd be like somebody standing out in the middle of the highway and you seeing a truck coming at them and you don't warn them to get out of the way.
00:47:06.000If somebody who is gay, or somebody who's a liar, or somebody who God has said, hey, this is sin, comes and says, hey, these are the things that I do.
00:47:12.000Is it more loving to say, oh, God doesn't care?
00:47:20.000And in culture, we think the more loving thing to do is just to accept everybody the way that they are and say that there is no truth for us to look at and say, well, what does God say?
00:47:29.000What does God say about how this will work best for all of us?
00:47:31.000Yeah, so it really does come down to who you trust.
00:47:33.000Do you trust the culture who says, be nice to everybody or treat everybody and, you know, be nice, at least with that kind of definition?
00:48:14.000The archetype of the left, what they are talking about now, what these people worship effectively in the entertainment industry, is the archetype of the perfect, woke, Entirely enlightened, inoffensive social justice warrior leftist.
00:48:28.000The archetype is someone who uses all the right acronyms, who includes everybody, who supports diversity quotas, when really there should be some kind of a financial bill to help with a growing virus pandemic.
00:48:39.000The archetype there is, this is the perfect, this is the ideal.
00:48:42.000Even if you say that you don't believe in a God, or you don't believe in any scripture, you still do have an idea as to what is right.
00:48:48.000Because if you don't believe there is a right and wrong, Then this doesn't apply to you.
00:48:53.000But if you believe that there's right and wrong at all, that does mean that somewhere down the line, if you question it long enough, there is an ideal.
00:50:29.000I think there's a giant sort of shift that's happening culturally, and I think that we may be arriving at that sometime, but it doesn't exist right now for me.
00:50:37.000But what does exist is an openness, is this curiosity.
00:51:22.000He's shown that he's essentially replaced an old thing with trying to build a new utopia, and that's his new religion.
00:51:30.000That's also the danger of organized and centralized planning from a government, because that's a big reason when you look at Stalinistic, when you look at, I'm saying Stalinist, but communism, right?
00:51:40.000Communism is a distinctly atheist idea, because it's this idea that the collective is more important than the individual.
00:51:57.000Communism does not believe in the power of the individual over the collective, and they believe that it is the government's job to centrally plan these communities so that people find purpose through what now?
00:52:07.000Nothing more than community, culture, and what the government has devised for them, and that's why it was so important that they would shut down churches and literally nail the doors shut.
00:52:17.000When people say that religion has killed more people than anything else throughout the history of mankind, first off, a lot of these religious wars were fought over territory, they were fought over all kinds of reasons where you happen to have people from different religions,
00:52:28.000worldviews on either side, but you would have to look at just the regimes in China
00:52:32.000and Russia and the hundreds of millions of people.
00:53:42.000And so he said something that resonates with me.
00:53:44.000And that's why I will say, yeah, and I want to go right, I want to go back to your point there, but that's why it's so important to get back to the idea of there's universal right and wrong.
00:53:52.000When we talk about the linchpin, that is it.
00:53:54.000And I love, I love that that is so easy To discredit, and I love that so many people who are not Christians recognize the value of Western civilization right now.
00:54:03.000That's sort of been this awakening of Donald Trump and this populism.
00:54:06.000People who weren't Christians, but they go, you know what?
00:54:07.000I see the difference between us and the Islamic world.
00:54:09.000I see the difference between us and even continents like Africa, and you see what goes on there.
00:54:14.000And the idea of Western European American civilization and our values, because values are not universal.
00:54:22.000And if you Understand that, and if you are able to point out that moral relativism does not work, that there isn't a universal good and we have to live in a society that agrees upon that, nothing else that Rhett and Link can possibly stand.
00:54:36.000And I think that's why it's so important to say, well, why do you believe there's a universal right and wrong?
00:55:07.000Let me just make a quick point about that.
00:55:10.000Religion is not based on your feeling, right?
00:55:12.000Being a Christian, believing in God is not based on your feelings about this, right?
00:55:17.000It's really irrelevant, like, your feelings, like, oh, it resonates or it doesn't resonate.
00:55:20.000Like, truth cannot resonate sometimes with you because it's hard, because you don't necessarily want to change how selfish you've been to get around it, right?
00:55:27.000The first time I used a wet wipe when I went to the bathroom, I realized that I had been so inconsiderate all this time.
00:55:38.000So I worked in a ministry, and it was the new believers, basically.
00:55:41.000So if you raised your hand, you walked down, you said the prayer, we would have you come back to a room, and we'd talk to you for a minute just to say, hey, great, we're so excited for you.
00:55:49.000But we would ask a question that would always become very telling to me over time.
00:55:53.000How many of you, is this your first time committing your life to Christ?
00:55:57.000And we'd get probably 25% of the hands, 30% of the hands would go up.
00:56:00.000And that meant the rest of the room, had made an emotional decision at some point.
00:56:43.000Come back and receive forgiveness, repent.
00:56:44.000Then it comes down to your actions that define it.
00:56:46.000Just like when you fall in love with someone.
00:56:47.000Listen, this is something that a lot of women At some point, every man who loves you more than the earth itself is going to fall out of that feeling of love with you, if only temporarily.
00:56:58.000There are times when you get into a fight with your wife or your husband.
00:58:12.000That's why the Bible talks about doubts.
00:58:14.000That's why the Bible talks about faith.
00:58:15.000That's why the Bible is prescriptive in how you should approach your marriage, how you should approach your finances, how you should approach your business.
00:58:22.000All of these things because it understands that we are human beings who live in a very physical world with tangible decisions that have to be made.
00:58:31.000Did you have something else you wanted to say?
00:58:32.000I was just going to say that that's why it's important to have a baseline level of trust.
00:58:36.000Through all of the doubts, through all of the confusion and things like that, having a baseline trust in God, even through the questions, is the only way to go.
00:58:43.000And questions are encouraged in the Bible.
00:58:45.000Acts 17.11 actually makes a point that, like, these guys are better than these guys, right?
00:59:11.000And search the scriptures to see if what you're hearing is true, if what the culture says is true, or what your priest says is true.
00:59:17.000My goodness, sometimes people can be wrong.
00:59:19.000It's not saying don't trust anybody, but it's saying, hey, receive it.
00:59:22.000Trust it, but then go and make sure that it lines up with what I have told you is true.
00:59:26.000And by the way, for those of you out there maybe listening and saying, man, it seems like a really high bar not to, like this feeling of love and sometimes you're not gonna love.
00:59:33.000God made it very clear that that's exactly what he did for us, right?
00:59:37.000He said that Christ died while you were yet sinners.
00:59:40.000There was nothing about you that was need, like that I should like and want to redeem.
00:59:46.000Like your actions weren't warranting any of that.
01:01:00.000The thing that we're finding out right now, and it's one of the key reasons that so many people are leaving the Church, is that that tension can only lead to the tension being broken.
01:01:11.000You know, and I think the way it's going to be broken is that, just like I said earlier, many different issues that the Church has held out on, even the most conservative denominations a hundred years from now, No one except a fringe cult is going to be anti-LGBT in a hundred years.
01:01:29.000If you just look at history and the way things progress culturally, eventually the church says, okay, we'll incorporate that, too, because if we don't, we're going to die.
01:01:39.000But I think because the church is being really slow to do that, and it's kind of causing an existential crisis and a crisis of just The way that they see the Bible, the young people are just saying, I'm out.
01:02:30.000The only thing that can happen is tension and break.
01:02:31.000And by the way, this is a danger when you talk about there's this mass exodus.
01:02:34.000I don't have the sources in front of me, but actually in the United States, there's actually a kind of resurgence of Christendom with a lot of young people.
01:02:40.000But for sure, beyond any shadow of a doubt, what was her name, the lesbian who was just on the show?
01:02:46.000So Arios Garcello brought this up, and I think we have an overlay from USA Today that for the first time in several decades, the young Americans, they have a more negative view of the LGBTQ community than people who've come before them.
01:03:39.000If this is the crux, like in a hundred years, none of these churches are going to say, Oh, we'll just incorporate.
01:03:43.000How do you incorporate it without changing the word of God in several clearly defined, like what pages are you going to rip out of your new Bible?
01:03:51.000Because you can't leave Romans in, you can't leave Leviticus in, you can't leave other parts of the Bible in that are very, very clear.
01:03:57.000They really want that to change in the church.
01:03:59.000And this is something that I've talked about and Dave Rudin was surprised when I said, I don't support gay marriage.
01:05:35.000But no, the point I was making is when they say something about the LGBTQ thing is because they've desperately tried to thrust that upon the church.
01:05:40.000And this is what I was talking about with Dave Rubin.
01:05:41.000I said, you have this in Canada where if a pastor says, I'm not going to marry two guys, Stephen Boisson was one of the pastors in Canada, you can be jailed.
01:05:47.000Now, that being said, people haven't really argued before because men now cohabitate.
01:05:53.000Men and women, like, they live together before they're married.
01:05:54.000That's relatively new when you take into consideration sort of... Shacking up?
01:06:00.000Which always, by the way, shocks me when someone calls into Dr. Lore and like, I'm living with my boyfriend.
01:06:06.000I did not know what Dr. Laura was going to say!
01:06:12.000Society changed, but they never really tried to thrust that upon the church.
01:06:15.000It's like, well, people are living together and you don't do it, you're traditionalists.
01:06:18.000But the same-sex marriage thing was something they tried to thrust upon the church because of this worldview that men and women are fundamentally different.
01:06:23.000And I'm not talking about the entire gay community.
01:06:25.000I'm talking about those who are the sort of gestapo LGBTQ Nazis who, by the way, now aggravate Lesbians and gay people on the left who just want to live and let live.
01:06:37.000And that's why they've really tried to thrust it into the church, because it pulls at the thread.
01:06:41.000If they can, they can get a foothold saying, well, no, hold on a second.
01:06:44.000It's actually hate speech to say that men and women are different, and that a man and a man is not the same in the eyes of God as a man and a woman.
01:06:51.000But the church needs to stand strong and say, well, in the church, it's not.
01:06:54.000The state can say sure, but the church doesn't.
01:06:57.000And Christians should recognize that there's a play being run on them, and that's the play.
01:07:02.000The play is they're taking advantage of our willingness to sort of go, okay, yeah, that's fine, and just keep retreating, and they're using that, again, to gain the upper hand in the culture, so that the left-wing, like you said, the sort of totalitarian-minded people have this inherent impulse, and that's to try to keep people down.
01:07:21.000I love how you said, you said, they're, they're what?
01:08:24.000Do I need to go through albums with you?
01:08:27.000I think, so, you know what, listen, we've been going, and let us know, I want to hear how much people, whether you're a Christian, whether you're not, this is the kind of stuff that's available on Mug Club.
01:08:32.000Tomorrow, we will have, I think, more of a standard, yeah, standard show like you've come to know on Thursday.
01:08:37.000Sometimes we do a scrapyard, where we take all of the crap that was too offensive to make a show, and we shove it into Tuesday.
01:08:44.000And the reason we do it is because often the Photoshop's are too offensive, so we just have Smooth Manny from Columbia just do them as cartoons.
01:08:52.000So that'll be tomorrow with a guest, a show that you've come to know and expect.
01:08:55.000And of course, Morning Drive, Good Morning Mug Club.
01:08:58.000Check the schedule, available at ladloscreditor.com.
01:09:00.000I think what's most important here is, first off, I would gladly host Rhett, Link, Philip DeFranco.
01:09:08.000This doesn't come from—none of this comes from a place of hate.
01:09:12.000It comes from a place of love and wanting what's best for people.
01:09:15.000And listen, I would be remiss if I didn't tell people that, yeah, I think what is best for everybody—man, woman, child, gay, straight—is to have a personal relationship with God.
01:09:24.000And when—Lord, I call him Good Guy God.
01:09:34.000But if anyone here, maybe you don't need to, but I certainly would acknowledge that in my moments of weakness that I've had, where particularly as someone who struggled with depression, understanding, that is, that is A safeguard.
01:09:45.000That is a guardrail of, you know what, actually I was designed for a purpose.
01:09:50.000And I do think, and I have known a lot of Christians who've also struggled with suicidal thoughts or tendencies and thought, you know what, hold on a second, I don't have the right to do that because this really isn't my body.
01:09:58.000So it may not be of value to you in Southern California, but it is to a lot of people.
01:10:03.000I think that particularly for me in moments of weakness where maybe I don't have the answer,
01:10:06.000having that trust that, okay, this is, you know what?
01:10:09.000I don't necessarily know each individual step, but I do know the prescription for what I
01:10:15.000need to do to achieve what is morally right.
01:10:18.000And I look at scripture and that helps me make decisions when sometimes decisions are
01:10:33.000I mean, as someone said, this is not my own original quote.
01:10:35.000I don't know who said it, so please don't get mad at me for not attributing this to you.
01:10:38.000They say, listen, you cannot continually water down the message of Christ and the value.
01:10:46.000You can't continually water down the medicine and then be shocked when it doesn't work.
01:10:50.000When someone turns to it for answers and they don't have them.
01:10:52.000And so everyone out there, even if you've grown up as a Christian your whole life, I know people say grow up, you always have to choose to follow Christ.
01:11:06.000But even if you've been raised with that and you've never had a crisis of faith, you need to have it be based on reason. You need to be able to reason your faith. You
01:11:15.000need to understand intellectually why it is that you believe what you believe, and you need
01:11:20.000to be able to defend it. I don't mean go out and argue with everyone because you're always going
01:11:24.000to find someone who's more qualified than you to argue. But it has to be more than an emotion.
01:11:30.000Otherwise, you just become a byproduct of your environment, and then you find yourself subjected to the whims of moral relevancy.
01:11:38.000And I don't think you're going to like the way that one ends up.