Is there a war on Christmas? Yes, of course there is. It's now fashionable in some conservative circles, where people care what the New York Times thinks that the War on Christmas is some crazy illusion of conservatives.
00:01:04.640So if you went into a department store to get a watch like this, you'd probably be paying $300, $400.
00:01:09.160Movement has innovated. They've shaken up the whole watch industry by selling direct to you online.
00:01:15.040You can finish your holiday shopping and get a movement watch for someone on your list.
00:01:19.840Now, the company was started by these two broke college kids who wanted to wear nice, stylish watches,
00:01:26.000but they couldn't afford them, as broke college kids want to do, so they started their own watch company.
00:01:32.340You know, this is American ingenuity at its finest.
00:01:36.080It's a great time and a great price point for Christmas.
00:01:39.680You can give someone a really high-quality gift for a reasonable price.
00:01:43.360They begin at $95, and at such great prices, you know, there's classic design, there's quality construction, there's styled minimalism.
00:01:51.540You don't usually get that for under $100, so I would take advantage of this.
00:01:55.480They've sold over 1 million watches in 160 countries and today.
00:02:01.140This Christmas came early for you guys because you will get 15% off plus free shipping and free returns by going to mvmt.com slash covfefe.
00:02:13.460That is C-O-V-F-E-F-E, mvmt.com slash covfefe.
00:02:19.040I recommend doing it just to type in the promo code, but I think you'll like the watches when you get there.
00:02:24.340It's got a clean design, great fashion statement.
00:02:26.400Now is the time to step up your watch game and to step up the watch game of that man in your life who just, you know, doesn't keep track of time, doesn't really dress like an adult.
00:02:53.080It's now fashionable in some conservative circles where people care what the New York Times thinks to say that the war on Christmas is some crazy illusion of conservatives.
00:03:02.120And I'm, you know, I'm not that kind of conservative.
00:03:05.960And I think, wait, wait, don't tell me is clever.
00:03:08.480I'm not one of those middle state rubes who pays attention to the degraded culture belched out every year by our sophisticated bettors on the coast.
00:03:19.400Of course there is a war on Christmas.
00:03:21.000To begin, here's the first bit of evidence.
00:03:23.080Barack Obama struck the word Christmas from the White House Christmas card.
00:03:27.180A quick look back through history shows this is not the norm.
00:03:30.380Calvin Coolidge wrote in his 1927 White House Christmas card,
00:03:34.220The real spirit of Christmas, if we think on these things, there will be a born in us a savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
00:03:44.180FDR wrote some variation of Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs. Roosevelt each of the 150 years he reigned in the White House.
00:03:52.440As 1950 ebbs to its close, our hearts turn once more to Bethlehem and to the coming of a little child, the divine infant that brought love to a weary world.
00:04:03.440Six paragraphs later, six paragraphs later, he concluded, quote, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill, peace and goodwill toward men.
00:04:12.320Eisenhower wrote a curt, typical season's greetings for Christmas and New Year.
00:04:19.240The pieces of LBJ's card available still don't show the wording, but given his preference for four-letter epithets, that's probably for the best.
00:04:26.560Language on the other cards is hard to track down as well until we get to George W. Bush, who included verses from Psalms on the Christmas card.
00:04:33.740Then we get to Barack Obama, who not only struck mention of Christmas entirely, but according to his own White House social secretary, tried to ban the creche, the nativity scene, from the East Room of the White House.
00:04:55.340That's how you know that there is a war on Christmas.
00:04:57.500As school districts will replace Merry Christmas and Happy New Year with the vague happy holidays, retail outlets, work environments, Christmas parties have become vague holiday parties.
00:05:07.860In many circles, particularly in the cultural centers of the country, to say Merry Christmas has become a political act that expresses to the retail worker or the acquaintance your political and politically incorrect point of view.
00:05:21.480And if you harp on this long enough, as I do, as I do every year, you will inevitably get the same reply.
00:05:27.500Well, yeah, but why shouldn't the greeting be more inclusive?
00:05:31.620You know, not everybody celebrates Christmas, you know, and that's the moving of the goalposts.
00:05:36.460First, there wasn't a war on Christmas.
00:18:41.160First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men,
00:18:48.400for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.
00:18:55.360This is good and pleasing to God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
00:19:01.440Now Paul asks others to pray for him all the time, in Romans, in Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians.
00:19:09.120And he prayed for others. We see that in 2 Thessalonians.
00:19:12.260Christ himself tells us to pray for others.
00:19:14.780He says, quote, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
00:19:18.500Why wouldn't he tell them, I'll just have them pray to me directly.
00:19:21.120No, he says you have to pray for others. Pray to whom? Pray to him.
00:19:24.220Jesus regularly supplies for one person based on the faith of another person.
00:19:29.160So in Matthew we see Christ says, oh woman, great is your faith, be it done for you as you desire, and her daughter is healed.
00:19:36.260So it's not the daughter praying, it's someone interceding for the daughter and praying, and based on the woman's faith, the daughter is healed.
00:19:43.220We don't hear about the daughter's faith, we only hear about the mother's faith.
00:19:46.160Matthew, another in Matthew, Lord have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly.
00:19:51.340In Mark, teacher, I brought my son to you, that he has a spirit that makes him mute.
00:19:55.280In Luke, do not fear, only believe, and she, your daughter, will be well.
00:19:59.820So one thing we also know from James is that the prayers of the righteous work especially well.
00:20:05.880So James says the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.
00:22:09.960Usually the first person to get angry and start screaming in an argument is the one who doesn't understand really what you're arguing over.
00:22:31.400It's either completely meaningless like excretion or it's murdering a baby.
00:22:37.700And I think you have to explain those premises because if you explain those premises and it's perfectly logical and compassionate from there and then you just debate the premise.
00:25:21.160When you look into this, it seems that it's largely because a lot of those people can't afford to post bail.
00:25:27.700So the wealthier people who are jailed can post bail, but these poor people can't, and that creates racial disparities.
00:25:34.260There's also evidence that shows blacks serve longer sentences.
00:25:37.480One of the reasons behind this is, ironically, are mandatory minimums.
00:25:42.120So mandatory minimums have an important motive.
00:25:45.680They have a good motive, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
00:25:48.460It's the idea that certain crimes are so bad, they have to have a minimum sentence, and then you can play around with it from there, and it's up to the judge, and it's up to the parole board or whatever.
00:25:57.880But the mandatory minimums seem to have created some racial inequality.
00:26:13.580It's much more dangerous to individuals and communities.
00:26:16.560Nevertheless, it creates disparities in drug sentencing.
00:26:19.680The thing that you should begin with here when you're talking to your friend is to suggest that perhaps the cause of these disparities is not the man.
00:26:31.760It's not an intentional move on the part of the government or of white people or whatever to create racial disparities and to imprison black people.
00:26:38.860The situation is obviously more complex.
00:26:41.060We've just talked about two examples of this.
00:26:42.760So if the situation is more complex, then we need to look at what is causing these disparities.
00:26:58.540And just tell them to hold their judgment for one second.
00:27:04.000And if you don't take the easy, silly answer that it's institutional racism, I think you're more likely to arrive at a serious answer, and then you can fix the problem.
00:28:32.500What is the best response to atheists who say it's irrational to believe in a god because when you make an assertion, you have to prove it?
00:28:40.880In other words, you have to prove a positive.
00:28:43.740The burden of proof is on the believer.
00:28:45.500This is something Christopher Hitchens and the new atheists like to say.
00:28:52.220First of all, one point you might bring up to these people is that every culture around the entire world for all of time has believed in a remarkably similar version of divinity and metaphysics and God.
00:29:07.620It seems to be baked into humanity just as thirst is baked in, just as hunger is baked in.
00:29:13.560And then the second thing I would point out is we take so many things on faith all the time.
00:29:18.860This is evidence that a little bit of learning is a dangerous thing.
00:29:23.720People have learned a very basic version of induction or a very basic version of the scientific method, and so they think that you can prove everything using the scientific method.
00:29:34.500But obviously this breaks down when you get to the scientific method itself.
00:31:24.560And maybe ask yourself, why is it that everybody throughout all of history, practically, and all of the great geniuses have believed in God?
00:31:32.320Why is it that Isaac Newton spent the last 30 years of his life interpreting scripture?
00:31:36.440Why is it that Blaise Pascal believed so much that he offered the great wager?
00:31:41.660Francis Bacon, Leibniz, Gödel, all of the great scientists and mathematicians, why is it that they all believed?
00:31:48.560Why is it that Bertrand Russell, the greatest logician of the 20th century, couldn't make an argument against the ontological argument for God's existence?
00:31:57.520I'm seeing a lot of coincidences here.
00:31:59.680So tell them to think a little more deeply about it and point out all of the faith that they take anyway that they don't even know about.
00:32:27.000There's nothing hypocritical about that.
00:32:28.920There is nothing hypocritical about saying all men are created equal and then those same men, for purposes of reality, of creating this government,
00:32:38.840compromising their philosophical purism to create a country that would get rid of that institution in fairly short time.
00:32:47.520This is a conflict, I think, between philosophical idealism and metaphysical realism.
00:32:53.160It's an error that the rationalists fall into.
00:32:56.200So they think, well, I have this purity of thought.
00:32:59.040And they kind of preen about it and they get on their moral high horse.
00:33:02.300And then whenever men, real people in the real world, do something that doesn't live up to their philosophical purity,
00:33:27.400And look, in the Constitution, they built in a provision that within a short number of years,
00:33:34.480they would stop the importation of slaves from Africa.
00:33:37.600This question of slavery was already built in.
00:33:39.420And by the way, the Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise to, I suppose, in a way, help the black slaves.
00:33:46.300But really, the question had little to do with the slaves themselves.
00:33:49.400It had everything to do with representation between the North and the South in the Federation in the United States.
00:33:55.540So the South wanted to count black slaves as citizens for the purpose of population numbers and representation in Congress,
00:34:04.500but not count them as citizens when it comes to giving civil rights to citizens.
00:34:09.440So they had no rights, but they wanted more representation.
00:34:12.420And the Northerners said, that's ridiculous.
00:34:14.520If you don't treat these people as human and you don't treat them as citizens, you don't get to count them as population.
00:34:19.320And they arrived at this compromise to create the greatest, most free, most equal, most fair, most just, most prosperous nation in the history of the world
00:34:29.440that has given countless benefits, philosophical and material, to the citizens that were excluded and were harmed and oppressed
00:34:39.100and also to the rest of the world since then.
00:36:23.860Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
00:36:31.280Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day.
00:36:37.100For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
00:36:41.580Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.
00:36:47.120It goes on, when many of his disciples heard it, they said, this is a hard saying, who can listen to it?
00:36:54.500So Jesus responded, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, he said, do you take offense at this?
00:37:02.440There is so much built into this scene about how hard the saying is, that clearly Christ is not saying this is a symbol and it means whatever.
00:37:10.480It's a saying that is very hard to understand.
00:37:13.320It's so hard he tells us it's hard to understand.
00:37:15.260They tell us, the people who heard it tell us it's hard to understand.
00:37:18.740And then he goes on and says, I'm telling you guys, it's real flesh, it's real food, it's real blood.
00:37:24.560Now, no one questioned the transubstantiation until centuries, well over a millennium later after the Protestant Revolution.
00:37:36.820Everyone is to recollect himself before eating this bread and drinking this cup because a person who eats and drinks without recognizing the body is eating and drinking his own condemnation.
00:37:48.740He says the blessing cup that we bless is a communion with the blood of Christ and the bread that we break is communion with the body of Christ.
00:37:56.920He clearly believed in the transubstantiation and the real presence in the bread and the wine.
00:38:13.760He said, I know you don't understand what I'm saying, but I'm telling you it's true and you're going to think it isn't true, but it is true.
00:38:20.720The other reason, there are many good arguments for the transubstantiation and not very good arguments against them, for the real presence.
00:38:36.500Martin Luther makes great arguments for the real presence of the body and blood in the wafer.
00:38:42.180But obviously, if you put it under a microscope, I don't know what you would find.
00:38:45.420That isn't really the question that's being said.
00:39:03.000So at the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, the symbol and the symbolized, the poetry and the criticism were united.
00:39:10.240And as civilization developed after the fall from Eden, as civilization moved on, those two became further and further away, the symbol and the symbolized, the physical and the metaphysical, and the poetry and the criticism.
00:39:26.600As language evolves, we see that this happens.
00:39:28.860This is what Owen Barfield wrote about in Poetic Diction.
00:39:30.940It's what Edwin Bevan wrote about in Symbolism and Belief.
00:39:34.300We have to understand the nature of those symbols.
00:39:37.800Only in Christ, only in the incarnation, do we see this come full circle.
00:39:42.500So the symbol and the symbolized, the poetry and the criticism, separate fully the metaphysical and the physical until we have the person of Christ, who is fully God and fully man, who unites those two.
00:39:52.320And he gives us sacraments to live in that.
00:39:57.600It's why he makes a point of doing it as his last action before he's put on the cross.
00:40:02.660He is enshrining this heaven and earth touching one another, the metaphysics and the physics touching one another regularly for the believers.
00:40:11.080And this is why St. Paul has such joy when he talks about it and takes it so seriously and says that if you don't recognize this, you're eating your own condemnation.
00:40:19.380There's much more to talk about with the Eucharist, but we have to move on.
00:40:22.200Next question, philosopher King Knowles.
00:40:24.140The USCCB, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, recently published a letter in which they called the new tax plan, quote, unconscionable.
00:40:31.820As a devout Catholic, I tend to look to my bishops to inform my politics, but I'm having trouble grasping their stance this time.
00:40:37.500How can I, as a religious person, justify my support for the tax bill, despite church leadership condemning it?
00:40:44.920So with regard to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, I was talking to a priest friend of mine, and he told me that he enjoyed my blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, very much.
00:40:55.200And he was inspired to write his own called The Wisdom of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops.
00:40:59.800I mean, no disrespect to the bishops, but when they weigh in on politics, sometimes they get a little wacky.
00:41:07.260And we should obviously have great reverence for the leaders of our church, especially when they're speaking on matters of the church and of theology and of doctrine.
00:41:17.860And when they're weighing in on politics, they don't have any special political expertise.
00:41:23.520They aren't granted special political knowledge or smarts.
00:41:27.960And so I would read them on other topics before I would read them on politics, and I wouldn't get too worried about it.
00:41:36.220I am Christian and love the holiday season.
00:41:38.760However, some of my Christian friends say it is going against scripture to put up a Christmas tree, referring to Jeremiah 10, because it's pagan.
00:41:45.720Now, I've tried looking into this, but it seems there are good arguments on both sides.
00:41:50.840Can you explain further and what you think about it?
00:42:00.160As you might be able to intuit, especially if you watched the show yesterday, I really like Christmas trees and lights and holly and definitely mistletoe.
00:43:09.920It's because of the difference between idolatry and a piece of art.
00:43:14.300So if you bring in a Christmas tree because you're going to worship it and dance around it and ask all of the gods and demons to give you nice presents or something, don't do that.
00:43:25.540But if it's a tradition and you aren't worshiping the tree, you aren't worshiping the graven image or the picture or the statue, it's there as a reminder, as a piece of art that inspires you to look beyond a tree or beyond a piece of art toward heaven, toward God himself.
00:43:42.680That's a wonderful thing, and you don't need to worry about it, but I know that it can be scary and confusing when you see something that basically says, don't have a Christmas tree, and you have to figure out, well, what do they mean by this?
00:43:53.660The essence of it is in what you're worshiping, what the culture is looking to.
00:44:10.320Speaking of Another Kingdom, Another Kingdom is doing very well on iTunes.
00:44:14.100We're shocked, as Hollywood is figuratively and literally burning to the ground, somehow my podcast with Andrew Clavin, Another Kingdom, has shot to the top and gotten 1,200 or 1,300 reviews.
00:44:25.480Please, please go over there and leave a review and tell your friends and send it around.
00:44:35.840It would be a great joy to look around the smoldering of Hollywood, figuratively I'm speaking, of course, and to have some conservatives get a show out of it.
00:44:45.160So please go over there, Another Kingdom, by Andrew Clavin, performed by me.