Ep. 195 - Sex Abuse Crisis In The Southern Baptist Church
Episode Stats
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173.87314
Summary
Alexandria Ocasio-cortez is trying to backpedal and come up with excuses for her, for some of the insane stuff that was in the Green New Deal proposal that she unveiled on Thursday, but the excuses are pathetic and dishonest.
Transcript
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, a sex abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Church.
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We will discuss all the details on this latest and horrifying report of sex abuse in the church.
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Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to backpedal and come up with excuses for her,
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for some of the insane stuff that was in the Green New Deal proposal that she unveiled on Thursday.
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But the excuses are pathetic and dishonest, so we'll get to the bottom of that today as well on the Matt Wall Show.
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Remember, if you want to get the whole show, to subscribe on iTunes or become a premium member of The Daily Wire.
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And that way, if you're watching on Facebook, you only get 15 minutes.
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If you want the whole thing, you can do that on iTunes or on The Daily Wire.
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I only know that they happened because The Daily Beast sent out a tweet outraged that the wrong race had won Album of the Year.
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But worst of all is how a black person still hasn't won Album of the Year in over a decade.
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I don't pay attention to this stuff very closely.
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But I'm pretty sure minorities and women win the big Grammy Awards all the time.
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So is there really a diversity problem with the Grammys?
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So I went and looked it up just out of curiosity.
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And first of all, a black man won Song of the Year this year, which is a big award.
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A Puerto Rican man won Album of the Year last year.
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Three black men or groups have won over the last 15 years.
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Women artists have won seven times over that time span.
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By the way, whoever wrote this article for The Beast,
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I just want you to think about the process here, okay?
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And they thought, okay, how can I turn this into a race thing?
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how long it's been since a minority won Album of the Year.
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And then they would have seen that, oh, a black...
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You know, black people have won three times over the last 15 years.
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No, instead, they decided to structure their complaint
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So rather than complaining about a lack of minorities winning,
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they singled it out to black people in particular.
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And rather than complaining about the last 15 or 20 years,
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And if a black person had won, say, nine years ago,
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There hasn't been a black person winning in the last eight years.
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This is basically how the identity politics sausage is made.
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I want to talk about something else, something much more important.
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The Houston Chronicle published a report over the weekend
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about widespread sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Church.
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The story and the details are eerily familiar to anyone
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who has followed the scandals in the Catholic Church,
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which I have very closely, as I think you know.
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So let me read now a little bit from the Huffington Post article on this.
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It says, according to the three-part investigation,
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the first installment of which was published on Sunday,
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about 300, 380 Southern Baptist pastors, ministers, youth pastors,
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Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers
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have faced allegations of sexual misconduct since 1998.
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More than 200 of them have been convicted or took plea deals,
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Nearly 100 are currently in prisons across the nation.
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The victims of the accused number more than 700, the report said.
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They include teenagers and children, some as young as three,
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who were molested or raped inside pastor's studies and Sunday school classrooms.
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Many victims said their stories of abuse were ignored or silenced by church leaders.
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One victim, who alleged she was raped and impregnated by her pastor when she was a teen,
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said her church leaders had urged her to get an abortion.
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When she refused, they threatened her and her child, she said.
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Dozens of pastors, employees, and volunteers were reportedly allowed to return to work
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in Southern Baptist churches despite being dogged by sexual abuse allegations.
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Let me give you some more, just some sort of bullet points.
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This is now from the Houston Chronicle, which, as I said, they had the original report about this.
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It says at least 35 church pastors, employees, and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior
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were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades.
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In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints
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or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
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Several past presidents and prominent alert leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention
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are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints
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Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit.
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Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager
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and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with the student organizations,
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The name of this nonprofit is Touching the Future Today, Incorporated.
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Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts,
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exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors.
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Some victims, as young as three, were molested or raped inside pastors' studies
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A few were adults, women and men, who sought pastoral guidance
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and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.
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When you have a widespread scandal like this and you have efforts to silence victims,
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which is what is happening here, and which is what always happens in these kinds of cases,
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you can be sure that there are going to be more victims, a lot more victims,
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Okay, because only the victims who were not successfully silenced are counted.
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But any victim who was successfully terrorized or intimidated or humiliated or shamed into keeping quiet
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Now, if the Catholic Church scandals have taught us anything, it is that.
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In fact, Catholic Church scandals have taught or shown us quite a bit.
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Speaking of which, anyone who's followed me for any amount of time knows that I have been very, very, very,
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very vocal about sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
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I have spoken at rallies denouncing bishops for their inaction.
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I have called as much attention as possible to this issue.
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I have spoken in the harshest imaginable terms about the guilty parties and those who aid and abet the guilty parties.
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I've called out the Pope, the bishops, the cardinals, everyone.
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Now, I only point that out so that you understand.
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And as I said, if you've been following me for a while, you already know this, that I am not someone who's looking to deflect from the Catholic scandal, who's looking to ignore it.
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In fact, you know, I reached a point where people were complaining to me and saying, will you stop talking about this issue?
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I went through a period of like a month where I felt like I was writing about it every day.
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But I thought I needed to because this can't be ignored and it needs to be exposed.
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So I'm not someone looking to deflect or change a subject or, you know, a whataboutism, nothing like that.
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So when I point to what's happening now in the Baptist church, that's not my point.
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My point is, I don't want those in the Southern Baptist church to make the same mistake that Catholics made for so long, which was to be in denial, to insist that it's not so bad, to claim that anyone pointing to the problem must just be anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, they must just have a grudge, whatever.
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However, I don't want to see those same mistakes made, and it looks like they are being made.
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And not just in the Baptist church, by the way.
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As I've mentioned in the past, this is not just a Catholic problem.
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The three largest insurance companies who insure many of the Protestant churches in the U.S. have reported that there are about 260 sex abuse claims made against Protestant church leaders every year in this country.
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This is a problem in the church, in Christianity.
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Now, it's obviously not just a Christian problem either.
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Yes, there's a sex abuse crisis in the public school, in the universities, in Hollywood, in the media, even in our doctor's offices.
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But the churches should be an exception to that.
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Now, I'm not saying that churches should be a place where only perfect people go, because if they were only for perfect people, then nobody would ever go to church, right?
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But there's a pretty wide gap between perfect person and sex predator.
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Okay, there's a pretty wide chasm, and there's a lot of room in between.
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Churches should be a place where you can go and be safe and be away from all of that.
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Yeah, we can look around and see, oh, every single institution where there are adults and children, it looks like there's a sex abuse epidemic.
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But we can't use that to deflect and say, well, you know, it's happening with everyone.
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You know, I tell you, I was I was pretty troubled yesterday.
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I sent out a tweet yesterday calling attention to this issue because this report just came out over the weekend.
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And I think it's something we all need to look at.
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I said, a new report finds that over 300 Southern Baptist church leaders have been accused of sexual misconduct since 1998.
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To put that in perspective, the Catholic sex scandal in Pennsylvania implicated 300 Catholic clergy over a period of 70 years.
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Yes, Pennsylvania is a smaller area, fewer churches.
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The issue in the Southern Baptist church is more recent, more immediate, which isn't to say that it's worse.
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I was simply trying to highlight the urgency and the immediacy of the problem in the SBC.
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And the point is, people were viscerally outraged, instinctively outraged about the Pennsylvania scandal.
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OK, the fact that it was that a lot of it was old, that a lot of it was from years ago.
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That didn't stop anyone from being from being extremely angry and demanding action.
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And so what I'm hoping is that that same kind of visceral reaction, the same level of anger and outrage and calls for change will arise also over this issue in the SBC.
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Because if you wanted to, when you looked at what happened in Pennsylvania, it was a huge story.
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Christians all across the spectrum were outraged.
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They were, you know, if you wanted to, you know, if you want to find a way to really split hairs and actually look at what was being reported and you wanted to find ways to diminish the severity or, you know, deflect, you could have because you could have said, well, most of these are, you know, they've already put things up.
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But most of this stuff is from, you know, we're talking about a lot of these cases happened 40 years ago and blah, blah, blah.
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And there were some Catholics who did try to do that.
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Most people said, yeah, you know what, but who cares?
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Even if something happened 40 years ago, it still happened.
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The problem is, you know, the tweet that I sent out, it did engender a lot of outrage, but at me.
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Lots of people took the time to lecture me on my inappropriate comparison and to scold me for my wording and to insist that, no, the Catholic thing is so much worse and let's still talk about that.
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You know, a lot of people were getting mad at me about a tweet I sent out.
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And so just out of curiosity, some of them, I went to their pages to check to see if they had tweeted anything about the SPC scandal at all, aside from just lecturing me about the way in which I called attention to it.
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And what I found, of course, is that a lot of people who were taking time out of their day to lecture one guy for the manner in which he called attention to this crisis had not themselves taken any time to call attention to it themselves.
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And this is something I've found, you know, not just yesterday, but any time I've tried to call attention to the sex abuse problem in other churches, I have found that a lot of people are very resistant to it.
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They want to think that it's just a Catholic thing.
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Today, I posted a link to the Houston Chronicle article with a, you know, this time just a link with a simple caption saying this is the tip of the iceberg.
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You know, there's, there's, so just keep that in mind.
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Did you make a similar comment after the Catholic scandals emerged?
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I know you're embarrassed about the Catholic Church's decades of abuse, including thousands of innocent children, but to point to another denomination and saying, hey, look, guys, we're not the only ones that like raping little boys is pretty sad.
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This humbling moment for American Protestants could bring Catholics and Protestants closer together and possibly even help end anti-Catholic bigotry unless Catholics like you continue doing whataboutism.
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I'm neither Baptist nor Catholic, but seriously, what's your point, Matt?
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Whether it's one or one billion doesn't matter.
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I don't understand the direction you're heading with these tweets.
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Do you understand why SB leaders decline to act?
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Headquarters mostly direct creation of event content.
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They're going to have problems like any other group.
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Are you biased against a Baptist church for some reason?
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Excuse making, deflecting, pipe down, don't talk about this.
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I mean, this is just, you know how pathetic that is?
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That I could post an article to, hey guys, look at this crisis going on.
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They don't want to think that these things could be happening close to home.
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It's the same reason why no one wants to hear about the sex abuse crisis in the public school.
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I mentioned recently how, you know, I wrote an article a few months ago about the sex abuse
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crisis in the public school because that's a problem, I would think.
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And thousands of them are being sexually abused, according to every statistic you'll find.
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Tried to write an article about it, and a lot of the responses were, why are you talking about this?
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Why, no, let's talk about the Catholic Church instead.
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Well, we've got to be better than this in the church, in the Christian church.
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And if we continue having this attitude, nothing will ever get better.
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And like I said, in the Catholic Church, this is the attitude that a lot of Catholics had
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You know, these scandals first erupted back in the early 2000s, back, I don't know, 15 years ago or something.
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And I was a kid back then, but I remember, I remember how a lot of Catholics reacted to it.
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Most Catholics you come across are not so defensive about it anymore.
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And they're going to be the first ones to bring up this problem and to demand change.
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And, and, but it did take a while to get to that point.
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Let's check in briefly with the saga of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal.
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You remember last week when the proposal, the plan was released and we had a glorious time
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The thing was just so fantastically insane that it almost had a certain charm to it.
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You know, it was, it was kind of cute in a way.
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But it's like when my two-year-old, the other day, my two-year-old came up to me to present
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And so I took the pocket lint and I said, oh, wow, thanks.
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And then I threw it away as soon as he turned his back.
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And so you were tempted to do the same thing with the Green New Deal because it was,
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there was something almost, almost adorable about it, that it was just so childish.
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And so you were almost tempted to say, oh, wow, really good, good job, nice, nicely done.
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But then you realize that the people who came up with this deal are actually adults in Congress
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And then once you realize that, suddenly the whole situation becomes quite a lot darker.
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Um, so the nuttiest part of the plan was this FAQ, Frequently Asked Question, sheet that
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was published by Cortez's congressional office.
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And it contained all the stuff about, about giving money to people who are, quote, unwilling
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And it had stuff about farting cows, getting rid of farting cows and so on.
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Um, so then mysteriously on Friday, the FAQ sheet was gone from the website, taken down.
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And Cortez and her, and her people started claiming that it had been doctored by Republicans,
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And Republicans had managed to doctor the document and somehow post it on their website.
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Um, that's what they originally claimed anyway.
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And then, which of course was insane and people were making fun of that.
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So then they backpedaled and they said, oh, no, no, no, that was our proposal, but it was
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Problems remain, even if it was just a draft proposal.
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First of all, the rest of the plan is still insane, even without the farting cows and the
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Um, second, this rough draft excuse, that just means that if this is a rough draft, then,
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then it just, it gives us a look at what they really have in mind and what they really want
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So in many ways, if it was a rough draft, which I don't believe for a minute, by the
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way, that it really was, uh, I think they're just lying to, to, to cover their butts here.
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I think they put this thing out in all seriousness and people just, it got such a reaction and
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everyone was just laughing at it, which is really the last thing that you want, right?
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When you, when you put out a legislative proposal, it's, if people disagree with it or angry about
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But if people are just laughing hysterically at the, at the proposal, well, then, you know,
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Um, so I think that happened and then he just took it down and now they're lying to
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But even if it were true, okay, even if this was a rough draft, then it's actually worse
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in some ways because it would mean that they unintentionally revealed their true plans and
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actually showed us, they actually showed us the difference between how they present the
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plan to the public or how they meant, how they wanted to present it to the public versus
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what they actually want to do, which doesn't make them or the plan look any better.
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So if you're hearing that, oh, that everyone was freaking out about it, it's a rough draft,
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All right, before we wrap up, I want to look at a few emails, um, check the inbox.
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If you want to send a message, email to the show, you can do that at mattwallshow at gmail.com,
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He says, Matt, I recently got into a debate with an atheist about how God doesn't exist
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because if we do not believe in God or Jesus, we cannot make it into heaven.
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He proceeded to cite the Bible by saying in John 14, 6, no one can come to heaven but through Jesus.
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His proof then that God does not exist is, uh, what about people who never heard about Jesus,
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Native Americans, Aztecs, et cetera, um, being damned to hell for eternity because they were never given
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the moral compass that is Christianity, and how can God damn people to hell without hearing the word of God?
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I tried to explain that, one, he was not there among those natives who he is referencing.
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How can he know they were never given the moral compass?
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Two, Western civilization is founded on Christianity and is more successful than any other civilization
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ever conceived, including natives and Aztec civilizations.
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I didn't feel satisfied with the explanation I gave him.
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What rebuttals do you have after hearing his argument?
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Your second point about, your second point about the success of Western civilization is true,
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but that really doesn't have any bearing on whether or not God exists, right?
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Um, but, also, this isn't really an argument about the existence of God.
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Um, your friend is not making an argument that has anything to do with the existence of God.
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Because even if he were right, and it's unfair or unjust or whatever for people who've never heard of Jesus
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to go to hell, that would do nothing to disprove God.
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Um, you know, maybe if, if, if he were right about that, and that does nothing, does nothing at all about,
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So it's, it's, it's got nothing to do with the subject.
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Um, but I think the more important point here is that no serious or thoughtful Christian
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believes that all of the millions or billions of people who existed and died in parts of the world
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where the gospel never reached automatically went to hell, um, a serious or thoughtful Christian
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is not going to make that declaration as if they know, right?
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Now, you may have unserious and unthoughtful Christians who will say stuff like that,
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but I think your atheist friend has a responsibility to engage with the serious Christian arguments,
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uh, not the unserious ones, because that's called a straw man otherwise.
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Um, now the gospel didn't make it to this hemisphere until 1400 years after Christ.
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Um, and it took another several hundred years before it had reached every corner of this part
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And it absolutely is not a Christian teaching that all of those people went to hell for all
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eternity for, because they didn't hear something that they never had a chance to hear.
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Now, scripture teaches us that no one goes to heaven, but through Christ, which means that
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Christ decides he is the, calls himself the doorway.
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Um, he decides who, who, who is going, who, uh, the gates of heaven will be open to and,
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So are we going to sit here and say that Christ cannot, is not allowed to, doesn't have the
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power to admit someone who didn't fully know him in life into heaven?
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Um, are we going to say that Christ can't put such a person with the sheep?
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And, and, um, that's not the traditional Christian teaching and most Christians won't say that.
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Third thing, people are judged based on the information available to them.
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So what that means is, uh, yeah, if nobody ever told you about Jesus and you weren't there to
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see it for yourself, then there's no way you could possibly know unless he appears to you,
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but it, you know, it's in some sort of vision, but outside of that, which would, which would
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also be, you know, in that case, you're still being told about it.
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So if nobody tells you about it, then you're not going to know.
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Everyone, everyone knows basic right from wrong.
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This is the natural law that God has written on our hearts.
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So that even an Aztec could follow this law, could live by it, even if they don't know fully
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what they're doing or who they're obeying, they still have it there in their heart.
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Um, so while a person can't be blamed for not believing in Christ, if Christ has never
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been presented to them, they can be blamed for committing objective acts of evil because
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Um, they are without excuse as far as that goes.
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And as proof of this fact, just look at any civilization that's ever existed on earth.
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It is a remarkable fact that they all have the same fundamental kinds of laws, all of them.
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Um, okay, they all outlaw murder, they outlaw rape, they outlaw theft.
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Um, they, as a society, they encourage heroism, they encourage courage, generosity, virtue.
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Or what about those Aztecs who were committing human sacrifices on such an enormous scale?
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No, it's just that it wasn't considered murder to kill a Jew or, or to, you know, commit a human
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They might've tried to pretend that it wasn't, but it still was, objectively speaking.
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My point is only that the Nazis, even the Nazis, as depraved and evil as they were, they still
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felt the need to kind of work around this natural law that was on even their hearts.
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So even they weren't going to come out and say, yeah, you know what?
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Instead, they tried to rationalize that murder wasn't murder.
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Murder is illegal in this country, but you can still kill babies.
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But the people who do it feel, feel the need still.
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You know, no one is going to come out and say, yeah, you know what?
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No, they're conscious because they have, they have that, they have a conscience.
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They, they, they recognize at some level that it's wrong.
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And so they feel the need to kind of rationalize, work around it.
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But the fact that they feel the need to make those rationalizations at all really tells you
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So ironically, you know, the Holocaust and abortion, they really only prove the existence of the
00:30:24.440
moral law, the natural law, because even the propagators of those kinds of evils still
00:30:32.580
And if there was no such law, if there was no natural law, if there was no fundamental
00:30:38.340
moral truth, which by the way, also proves the existence of God, because what is that
00:30:47.660
And if it was really totally based on society, it was completely arbitrary, completely subjective.
00:30:52.900
Then when you look around the world, especially when you go back 500 years and you find that
00:30:57.440
the two, you know, that the two hemispheres were separated and there was no contact between
00:31:02.580
them or hardly any contact, what you should find is vastly different laws.
00:31:07.620
I mean, you foot, you should find civilizations where murder was okay.
00:31:15.000
Like there was no, you know, it was, but you don't find that, which is pretty incredible
00:31:27.080
From Daniel, he says, Dear Matt Walsh, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for what you
00:31:32.180
I'm a Christian who has often been impressed by the genuine thoughtfulness and insight
00:31:38.840
I'm just reading this to compliment myself, I guess.
00:31:41.940
Uh, you recently recommended reading The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.
00:31:46.020
Being that C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors, I gladly picked up the book.
00:31:49.700
I enjoyed following Lewis's reasoning throughout the book and especially found my thinking shifting
00:31:54.840
on how I look at God in that he is the creator and I am the created object desperately in need
00:32:01.040
I am a mechanical engineer working at a firm which designs power plants.
00:32:04.960
What I am daily struck by is the pretentiousness of those I work with.
00:32:08.240
I am unsure of how often you've been around engineers, but they like to act as if they
00:32:15.120
Speaking as a professional engineer myself, I can assure you that the engineers truly do
00:32:20.520
Being a conservative-minded Christian in the workplace, I have found that I am treated
00:32:23.560
as ignorant when bringing up anything dealing with God or politics.
00:32:26.960
This is frustrating and disappointing in that my faith is not a blind faith, but rather
00:32:31.720
However, even when presenting a perfectly reasoned, thorough argument, it is quickly dismissed
00:32:38.360
Encountering this on an almost daily basis, I am reminded of Psalm 119, I have more understanding
00:32:43.840
than all my teachers, for thy testimonies are my meditation.
00:32:47.360
I understand that the only way to truly know the world around us is to understand and know
00:32:52.780
However, since my co-workers refuse to know God, they quickly dismiss and deride views
00:32:56.900
that do not line up with their narrowly constructed and logically inconsistent mindsets.
00:33:01.040
I want to thank you for exposing and seeking truth and to let you know that you are a
00:33:09.720
And we certainly need Christians like you who are in those environments as hostile as
00:33:31.700
She says, Hi, Matt, you raised a question on Twitter a while ago about what would happen
00:33:35.540
if we split a brain in two and transplanted it into different bodies.
00:33:51.420
It's a question originally posed by a philosopher whose name I cannot remember at the moment.
00:33:56.400
But the idea is to kind of get at the nature of consciousness and to understand consciousness.
00:34:06.360
We know that a person can survive with half a brain.
00:34:09.360
We also know about the split brain phenomenon where something goes wrong in the brain and
00:34:16.480
essentially the two sides disconnect from each other and then you end up with a literal
00:34:20.620
split personality, almost like two sides of a personality that don't recognize or even
00:34:26.040
know about each other because the two halves work independently of each other.
00:34:31.820
We also know, theoretically, that it will probably one day be possible to perform a brain transplant.
00:34:40.440
Taking a brain out of one body, putting it into another.
00:34:43.660
We're a long way from that, but hypothetically, theoretically, it could be possible.
00:34:51.440
What if you were to take half of my brain and transplant it into someone else's head?
00:35:08.040
And yes, I know I've opened myself up to jokes about how I only have half a brain to begin
00:35:15.500
But once you've gotten those jokes out of your system, what's the answer to the thought
00:35:24.040
I would have to say, this is why I posed the question and didn't answer it because I don't
00:35:28.620
I would have to say, I would have to assume that, well, this is kind of a cop-out answer,
00:35:35.460
but I guess the answer is that it just couldn't ever be possible to do that.
00:35:42.020
And even if it's theoretically, medically, scientifically possible, it wouldn't actually be possible.
00:35:48.300
Because it's not possible to split a person's soul into.
00:35:55.320
And we know that in this life on Earth, our soul is somehow inextricably linked with our
00:36:02.260
Now, we don't understand that relationship exactly.
00:36:05.320
The mind, the soul, whatever you want to call it, the soul and the mind, the soul and the
00:36:10.640
brain are not just dualities, but also a harmony.
00:36:15.320
We know the soul is immutable, you know, indissoluble, cannot be cut in half.
00:36:24.880
So I would have to say that God would not allow something like that to work.
00:36:29.860
I guess another way of putting it is that this is something that even if it were physically
00:36:40.640
And so it just couldn't happen, which is a totally lame answer.
00:36:50.160
If anyone has an answer to that question that doesn't require you to compromise on the idea
00:36:56.200
of a soul and yet is a better answer than mine, then I'd be interested to hear it anyway.
00:37:14.200
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, a new Democratic fresh face comes out as a blatant anti-Semite
00:37:19.480
AOC lies about her own Green New Deal and Virginia settles into place.