Viral TIKTOK Atheist REACTION： Dr. Jeremiah Johnston
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
5
sentences flagged
Toxicity
23
sentences flagged
Hate speech
44
sentences flagged
Summary
Jeremiah Johnston returns to discuss the Shroud of Turin and his new book, Woke Religion Tik Toks. Plus, a pair of ancient Roman dice, a copy of the Holy Bible, and much more!
Transcript
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I am very, very pleased to be joined once again by one of the great guests we've ever had on our shows.
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Jeremiah Johnston, who is famous in the Michael Knowles show universe for his excellent explication of the Shroud of Turin.
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And so if you haven't seen it yet, if you're one of the few people who hasn't seen that yet, you have to go.
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Someone stopped me in the street the other day.
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Jeremiah Johnston interview with Shroud of Turin.
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We are going to analyze with Jeremiah's great expertise, woke religion TikToks.
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But before we get to that very, very important work, you've brought some goodies.
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I want you to open it like you're opening your Bible.
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This is a facsimile that was issued by Pope John Paul II.
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So the Codex Vaticanus, for people who don't know, is one of the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Bible.
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This is five years after the Council of Nicaea, 325.
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Remember, my area of expertise is paleography and codecology.
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The fascination that there is no difference, truly.
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It's 98% text stable, meaning the Bible you open at mass literally matches this with a 98% accuracy.
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When I was an atheist, I used to say to Christians, I say, well, no, look,
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I mean, it's been so many years, so many translations.
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And, you know, I'd have to kill you if I told you I got it.
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Who, what sort of underground networks at the Vatican are you plugged into?
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I can't confirm or deny, but I'm with the Brotherhood.
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I love that phrase, that the nearest relative to...
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They say, well, how do you distinguish Christianity from other religions?
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I say, other religions really begin in poetry or philosophy.
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And, but in terms of literary genres, Christianity begins in journalism.
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I don't know if you remember, but all four Gospels.
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I'm not saying they're the ones that were gambled in front of Jesus.
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Yeah, this is, I just acquired this, again, through my antiquities dealer.
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You can see the punched, so these are made of bone.
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All four Gospels record the fact that the executioners were so desensitized to the fact
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that the author of life is dying before them, and they begin to gamble for his clothes.
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I actually, I don't want to tell tales at a school, my stepbrother and I, we would roll
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This puts you in the world of Jesus, though.
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What's really striking to me is that dice, 2,000 years ago, looked the same.
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They were a little smaller, otherwise they look exactly the same.
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We were in the drive-thru and one of my triplets said, Dad, they stink really bad.
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So these are the kind of artifacts that I bring out in the Jesus discoveries, because I want
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people to know that if we cannot believe that Jesus died and rose again, based on the evidence
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outside the Bible, we shouldn't believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
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This was a labor of love doing this book, because there's photographs throughout it.
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I got all the permissions from all the archaeologists that help us really understand how these bring
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I wanted the book to bring, like, do you feel closer to Jesus now that you've held dice?
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We were talking a little bit earlier, because I've had a lot of conversations with my friends
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A friend of mine has given me quite a number of holy relics, first-class relics.
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I was telling a Christian friend of mine, I mentioned this to him, and he recoiled.
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He said, oh, I don't really like, I don't like the relics.
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But there is a certain strain that has been around since antiquity of iconoclast or a kind
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of Christianity that says, no, no, we should only focus on spiritual things, not physical
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But, you know, Christianity is an incarnational faith.
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So for me, when I hold the dice, when I examine whatever, even a facsimile of this 1700-year-old
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Bible, it speaks to the fact that, you know, we're soul, we're spirit, and body.
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I can feel, you know, like people touch the hem of Christ's garment.
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Jesus in Matthew 19 says, it's easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle.
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It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, thank you, than for a rich man
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You're holding a Roman needle, and you can imagine him holding that.
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I know it's first century because of the square shaft.
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Put it against your wrist and just get the feel.
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They would reuse crucifixion nails on all of their prisoners.
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So can you imagine, there's DNA on this, there's rust, and the reason that it's bent, Michael,
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is they would want to minimize movement but maximize torment.
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So they would adjust the nails while the victim was being crucified.
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Even the nails that put our Lord and Savior on the cross had probably been used on others
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You somehow always have the greatest goodie bag.
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We're deep in Lent, walking steadily toward Holy Week, the cross, and the resurrection.
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Yes, from food, but more often from what's poisoning your interior life.
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Gossip, constant scrolling, cynicism, complaint.
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Freeze the heart and make space for grace.
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Spend intentional time in prayer and meditate on God's love for you.
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So, without further ado, I want to just talk about this all day.
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Let's engage others here, specifically heretics, through woke TikToks.
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But the Bible says those who say they love God but hate their neighbor are lying.
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You cannot follow Jesus Christ while actively supporting politicians or policies that hurt your neighbor.
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You know, like cutting their food aid or their health care.
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But the Bible says my power is made perfect in weakness.
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That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the religion.
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Instead, what the gospel is about is creating peace through the presence of justice.
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Besides, Christian power is really just about propping up people who are already wealthy and powerful, usually straight white men.
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But Jesus says love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
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More than the error is the cringe that bothers me.
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But would you like to take any particular aspect of his argument?
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I've never said any of those things that he claims I've said.
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Secondly, what we just saw was a 101 heretical example of doing what's called eisegesis.
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Let me put a gay-looking, woke perspective on it.
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He said that to follow him was to hate your mother, Luke 14.
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You've got to hate, which is a Greek idiom of preference, your mother, your father, your brother, sister, meaning you've got to put me first.
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There's a special place in hell for people that do that.
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It is beyond the pale that anyone would actually listen to that.
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But unfortunately, so many people listen to that kind of terrible preaching.
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That person is committing spiritual adultery right now.
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They are an apostate, and they are committing spiritual adultery.
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Yeah, even the first one that came to mind, it was one of the first or second example,
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where he's having this imaginary conversation with a MAGA person that doesn't really resemble a real MAGA person.
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But then he says, well, you can't be a Christian when you're harming your neighbors.
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And so the Republicans who want to cut food stamps, which they don't even actually want to do that.
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But let's just say, you know, you can make an argument to reform welfare programs.
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But you say, okay, man, but your side is calling for the wholesale slaughter of babies in the world.
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Elderly people, sick people, even young people.
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And, you know, not only can you point to much of Scripture that would argue against that,
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but also we just know, because Christianity has a lot of archaeological evidence and documentary evidence,
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we know that abortion has been explicitly prohibited by the Church since the apostolic age, at least.
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And, again, what is ridiculous about this is to use Scripture, this person's demonic,
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to use Scripture to try to say that Christianity doesn't care about people.
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Do you know if you and I were sick in the first century, we'd go to the Temple of the Asclepius, have to pay for healing.
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Modern health care comes out of the cut and thrust of the Christian movement.
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In fact, the word hospital we get from the Knights Hospitaller.
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I was just at WEF at the World Economic Forum speaking in Davos.
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Speaking of demons, do we have to brush any off you?
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And I made it clear to all those individuals, the event horizon of free enterprise,
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of forgiving debts, loving your neighbor, being generous, that event horizon comes from one moment.
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It's the resurrection of Jesus Christ in this amazing syndicate called the Church.
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I'm sure you had raucous applause at the World Economic Forum.
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Christian nationalists walk around with a mouthful of scripture and a heartful of hate.
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He didn't tell us to love our doctrines and our creeds.
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And there was no exception to that commandment.
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Love thy neighbor, regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or immigration status.
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One of my favorite theologians, Barbara Brown Taylor, once wrote,
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When my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor.
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Not once in the entire Bible does Jesus ask us to worship him.
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He says, you know, Jesus told us to love our neighbors.
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He doesn't tell us anything about loving our religion.
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Religion, to quote our good friend St. Thomas Aquinas,
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is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.
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And before our Lord tells us to love our neighbor,
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the more important commandment that he gives is actually to love God above all things.
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Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
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My opponents have a mouth full of scripture and a heart full of hate.
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And yet, it's a good turn of phrase, but I think it applies much more to him than to his opponents.
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This guy, I guess you would have to, you look at all the things he promotes using scripture so sacrilegiously.
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He promotes slaughtering infants, mutilating little kids.
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LGBT, awful sorts of sacrilegious and blasphemy.
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And I guess the question I would have to say is,
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does James Tallarico sound more like Christ or the Antichrist?
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And I want at James, I would debate him any place, any time, any day of the week,
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with two hands tied behind my back, blindfolded, because he twists scripture.
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You can look this up with Open Doors, which is an international religious freedom network.
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President Donald J. Trump is the most pro-religious freedom president of all time.
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Out of any sitting president, nobody has been for more.
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He spoke at the UN when no other sitting president would.
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And my pastor, Jack Graham, sits on the Religious Freedom Commission there in Texas.
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And I can tell you this, everything that that man just said is false.
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That's kind of like the line of Joe Pesci in My Cousin B.
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Nobody can actually say for certain that anything doesn't exist.
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But I'm an atheist in the same way as I'm an a-leprechaunist and an a-fairiest and an a-pig unicornist.
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So you're not 100% sure God doesn't exist, but you're sure enough to make it practically...
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I'm as sure as you are sure that fairies and leprechauns don't exist.
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And do you see an equivalence between the idea of God and the idea of a fairy and a leprechaun?
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This was, 20 years ago, this was what passed in the, not among intellectuals, but among kind of polite, yuppie society.
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When I was a teenager, this kind of stuff really got me.
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It took me away from the church, helped take me away from the church for 10 years.
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That was at the height of what was called New Atheism, the four-horsemen of the New Atheist Movement.
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The evidence that we have for God is unimpeachable.
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The evidence that we have for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as we've already said, is unimpeachable.
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It is a historical fact that Jesus rose from the grave on April 5th, AD 33.
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The resurrection and the crucifixion are the best established fact of the ancient world.
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So for him to compare God and the evidence for God with the tooth fairy or leprechauns.
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The thing that drives me crazy, because Richard Dawkins is supposed to be intelligent and is, I guess, educated in his field of study.
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It's evolutionary biology topic for another time.
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But it just, that statement, well, I don't believe in God because you don't believe in leprechauns.
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Oh, you know, which is Reddit-tier, fedora-tipping atheism.
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I remember Alvin Plantinga, the Calvinist philosopher, he was asked what he thought of the New Atheists.
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He said, I think they're far inferior to the old atheists, like Bertrand Russell.
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At least Bertrand Russell was somewhat logical.
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And Bertrand Russell said he couldn't find a flaw in the ontological argument for God.
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What Dawkins seems blithely unaware of is that, one, this question of the supposed tension between faith and reason is one that has been taken up over the centuries.
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And that the arguments for God's existence generally rest on natural reason.
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So much so that the Catholic Church declares in the first Vatican Council that the existence of God, not necessarily the resurrection, the person of Christ, the Trinity, the mysteries,
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but the mere existence of God can be known with certainty strictly from human reason in light of the created world.
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You know, St. Thomas Aquinas famously has his five ways, his most famous and his favorite one rests on empirical evidence, observing change and motion in the world.
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I have a book called Unimaginable, What the World Would Be Like Without Christianity.
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And without getting into terrible detail, he had some serious childhood trauma.
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And when you look at the new atheists, most of them have broken relationships with their dads.
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Well, you know, Hitchens was public about this.
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He missed the call, and then she stuck her head in an oven.
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And so, I don't want you to think that he doesn't believe in God for an intellectual reason.
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Just crazy to say, you know, well, you know, I just didn't know proof of it.
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You're putting yourself out there as the great debunker of Christianity.
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You're not engaging with the most basic arguments of the question that is supposedly at hand.
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When there are signs of physical maturity, it becomes permissible for the husband in Islamic law
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to have marital relationships or consummate the relation with his bride.
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And this is the example of the prophet, peace be upon him.
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Is there anything in Islam that prevents you from a man marrying a five-year-old that started precocious puberty?
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You can arrange a marriage even as an infant, but that doesn't mean that sex is allowed.
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Could a man have a marriage to a five-year-old consummate it if she started precocious puberty?
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If she starts showing signs of physical maturity, then yes, that's permissible.
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So this is something that becomes biologically impossible because precocious puberty...
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I have a study that shows it goes as early as 11 months.
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Well, that's something that the parents would not...
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See, the thing about Islamic marriage is that parents are involved at these ages.
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I've read the Quran, so you don't have to, by the way.
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Everything he just said is endorsed by the Islamic trilogy, which of course is the Quran, Sirah, Sunnah, Hadith.
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And there are four specific ayahs that actually endorse what he just said in the Quran.
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So I want to make sure that people understand this is not an aberrant form of Islam.
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If they actually read the Quran, they would see that sex slavery is not a bad thing.
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It's funny because I remember I read the Quran at 14.
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I don't think I made it all the way through, but I read a lot of it at 14 because everyone at the time, this was 2004, was saying that Islam is a religion of peace.
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So let me read it, and I was disabused of that popular misconception, but I read it, and then I read a little bit about the origins of Islam.
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And what's interesting about it is it clearly begins as a Christian heresy.
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It seems to be heavily associated with various ancient heresies, including Nestorianism.
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And you have this thought, especially reading my main man, Dante.
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Dante curiously puts Muhammad with the schismatics.
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As if Islam is just a schism from a break-off of Christianity, which I kind of think it is.
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And you think, what if, instead of encountering heretical monks or encountering heretical versions of Christianity around the Arabian world,
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what if Muhammad had been exposed to an Orthodox guy, a guy who really believed the real religion?
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You could have a world in which Muhammad was a great figure of Christianity.
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Where Arabia was Christian, where Islam didn't exist.
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And it could have happened, you know, woulda, coulda, shoulda.
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Sometimes people, to tie it all back around to these ideas, they'll say, you know, it's so crazy in the Middle Ages or antiquity.
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You know, you read Thomas Aquinas on the heretics.
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He had 36 descriptors for him in the book of Jude.
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It's just, you know, in our free speech kind of era, we say, what's the thing, you know, what's so bad about these bad ideas flowing around?
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And Islam, I would encourage people to check out my debate with Ineat Bangawalu, who is publicly supportive of Osama bin Laden after 9-11 and Adnan Rashid, a Hadith scholar.
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And I just mopped the floor with them because all I did was keep quoting the Koran back to them.
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What they're saying, the kefir, you and I are the kefir.
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And you can do anything you want to the infidel.
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And if you go inside the Dome of the Rock, you will see incised on the ceiling of the Dome of the Rock, they believe that Islam is the culmination of Judaism and Christianity.
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And it's curious, too, because the Jews are famous for, infamous for denying the resurrection.
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And then I think of, I think it's Philippians 3.18.
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I'm Catholic, so we don't do chapter and verse that way.
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But I think it's somewhere around there where St. Paul writes.
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He says, there are many who are walking now, and I tell you, even weeping, who deny the cross of Christ.
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Yeah, denying the resurrection is one thing, bad in itself.
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But to deny the crucifixion, an error in some ways worse because it's on the cross in which Christ conquers death.
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I mean, I know atheists who will tell you the best established fact of the ancient world is Jesus' death by Roman crucifixion.
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I'm going to say it until I'm blue in the face.
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It's April 3rd, which incidentally this year on Good Friday is April 3rd, the very day that he was crucified in AD 33.
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But I want people to know this is not an aberrant.
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Islam is the greatest threat to Christianity around the world, and they have grand designs, and they have the money to pay for it.
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If you are Protestant, atheist, Muslim, or any religion that is not Roman Catholicism, you will not go to heaven.
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Okay, so your Pope that you claim is infelible.
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The same exact message is then reaffirmed by Pope Eugene IV.
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There is a tiny theological loophole that might change that.
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According to Catechism 847 and Lumen Gentium 16.
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Noah, why should we believe you and the Catholic Church?
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We have 2,000 years of church history to back up our theology.
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Ah, so you say 2,000 years validates y'all's view, but the Roman Catholic Church today isn't the same church as before.
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And didn't Paul have to write letters to the early church because they were getting corrupted?
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Okay, well, we might have to, I actually don't know that we actually have different views on this.
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The claims that the debunker is making are, he's getting at stuff, which is that the early church, they all disagreed.
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And actually what I love about the apparent dispute between Paul and Peter in Acts,
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what I love about it is Paul is much more of a theologian than Peter.
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Paul is, in many ways, he's like more the active player than Peter is.
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And yet, he brings these questions to Peter because, you know, the role of the Pope is misunderstood.
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The Pope is not necessarily, we've had good theologians.
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Yes, we've had very good theologians, but not always.
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But sometimes the Pope is, you know, a guy who has to keep things together.
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There's a famous phrase attributed to Augustine, which derives from his teaching, though he
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didn't literally say this, which is, Rome has spoken, the matter is settled.
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But one of the calls of the church is that the church be unified.
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You know, it's just why we have ecumenical councils and all that.
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So there is a teaching which is extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
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Which, in principle, I think every Christian would agree with, because the church is the
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And some would, some kind of disagree over the nature of the body.
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And to the point of the Catholic in the first video, he says, well, because of the Second
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Vatican Council, there is an understanding that the, you know, basically not all of the
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Protestants are necessarily damned to hell, or the Eastern Orthodox, you know, that's
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because of goodwill, because of all sorts of reasons.
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So the debunker's problem is the one that gives me issue here, because he's blithely
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In favor of a kind of pure private judgment of scripture that I think is Protestantism gone
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And it's where many people are, especially in the online church age.
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And I want to remind people, Acts 11 and Acts 15, two Jerusalem councils were held as early
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as the book of Acts, and brother James of Jesus hosted them.
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There were disagreements, healthy disagreements.
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Oh, we need to take care of the widows and the poor.
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But Michael, the reason I love you and your show is you actually get beyond the soundbites
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And the gospel says in Romans 10, 9, my nine-year-old triplets just memorized this.
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If you believe in your heart that Jesus rose from the dead and you proclaim that Jesus
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So that's if you're a Catholic, if you're an Eastern Orthodox, if you are a Protestant,
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I believe there are believers in all of the, I believe in the unified church and the power
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There's a very interesting conversation to be had on the sacramental aspect of it.
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And you, being a Protestant, have maybe more than any Protestant friend of mine, and I
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have many of them who yell at me all the time, but you have a keen appreciation of the
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Yes, because it's an act of worship and it brings you close to Jesus and you understand
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Let's see if those TikTokers want to react to our reaction, to the guy's reaction,
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What is the difference between Orthodox and Catholicism?
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So, theologically, there are a number of differences, but I'll tell you why we claim
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We were one church until the year 1054, where the Great Schism took place.
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And of course, for a couple hundred years before that, things had started to split up
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The Roman Catholic Church historically can claim to be part of that original church, but theologically,
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In the Roman Catholic Church, they've changed and added one thing, the infallibility of the
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Pope, we don't believe that the Pope is infallible.
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We believe that when Christ spoke to Peter and said, I give you the keys to the kingdom
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of heaven, he was actually talking to all the disciples who are his successors.
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And we, the clergy of the Orthodox Church, are the successors of the apostles through
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You might think ordination wasn't in the Bible, but it was.
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It's called in Greek, keretonia, which means the laying on of hands, and that's how
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Okay, can I take this one for a second, Michael?
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So, Eastern Orthodoxy, and again, there are two things I appreciate about Eastern Orthodox,
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and there are seven reasons I'm not an Eastern Orthodox.
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I actually just gave a talk on this on YouTube.
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And I love the fact that one-third of our 5,800 Greek New Testament fragments are protected
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right now by the Greek Orthodox Church in many persecuted lands.
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Mount Athos alone has over 1,000 Greek manuscripts.
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And so, let me say that for any Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox who's watching, I appreciate that.
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There's actually seven reasons I'm not a Greek Orthodox, but the main one is they don't
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And do you know that the Eastern Orthodox Church, Michael, has become one of the greatest
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So, you go to places like we have ministries where we go to Romania, and we go to other
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places where they believe you don't even have to have an act of faith to be an Eastern
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I could baptize you Eastern Orthodox if we live in Romania.
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You never have to express faith in Jesus of any kind, and you're Greek Orthodox and you're
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So then we're going to persecute anyone who tries to give you the gospel, even imprison
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you for trying to lead you to a personal relationship.
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So, they've gone from being persecuted themselves, you look at the Bolshevik Revolution, you look
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at all of it, and now they're one of the greatest persecutors of non-Eastern Orthodox Christians.
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And that's one of the biggest reasons I'm not an Eastern Orthodox.
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Beyond the fact they have no theology that's unified.
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And I got in trouble because I made this claim.
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I said, you know, the Eastern Orthodox, they flirted with every heresy.
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And I did, but it was actually misinterpreted because as much as I would like to be chauvinistic
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in my religious views and kind of mock the Eastern Orthodox, I really have a great deal
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I don't love, they don't have chairs in their churches.
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I like it because, look, I don't want it to be too Islamic or anything.
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But I like the idea that one is sort of kneeling or standing or, you know, I actually,
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Jesus sat when he taught the Bible, just so you know.
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But I, the East, maybe just it was a geographical fact.
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And so they would, they'd go in, they'd go back home, they'd disagree with the councils.
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Very interesting, speaking of that previous video, one of the great battles in the Middle
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Who, Boniface VIII was claiming a lot of temporal power.
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Dante said, no, there's actually a distinction between the temporal and the spiritual power.
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The temporal power should be illuminated by the spiritual power.
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He writes this in Monarchia, but they're distinct.
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Monarchia, which was then put on the Index of Prohibited Books, but then taken off the
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index by, I think it was Leo XIII, who was an inspiration for Leo XIV, the current Pope.
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All sorts of interesting reasons as to why that happened.
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But because of that, I do think the East has been subjected to a lot of bad political
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Look what happens at St. Catherine's right now.
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He says, look, when Jesus is talking to Peter and he says, here are the keys to the
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kingdom of heaven, I read that as he's talking to all the apostles.
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It was kind of funny, because the way he himself phrased it was, when he's talking to Peter,
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he's saying, all right, well, he's talking to Peter.
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And the Eastern Orthodox can point out all of the problems and difficulties and struggles
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Very few people are more sensitive to that than I am.
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But this is something we see in the ancient world, is that our Lord wants unity, I think,
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This is not to diminish the role and the responsibility of the other bishops.
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But, yeah, if your point is, it's hard and slow going and problematic to have a unified
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church, and these guys in Rome, they mess things up sometimes, and they...
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You know, when we recite the creed, even without the filioque clause, which should be in the
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creed, and anyway, we say at the end, what do we say we say?
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We say we believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.
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Realistically, we have no way of actually knowing who this belonged to.
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It's not like we have a sample of Jesus' DNA to compare it with, but what we do find
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from a close examination of the blood is that it's not blood.
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It's just dye made from red ocher and vermilion.
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Blood stain pattern analysis shows that the stains don't make any sense and are unrealistic
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The shroud's fabric was made from a herringbone weave, one far more complex than any type of
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fabric we see used in burials during the first century.
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Radiocarbon dating methods from three independent sources place the actual age of the shroud
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between 1260 and 1390, the same time when it first went on display at a French church.
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Based on these facts, we can be supremely confident that the Shroud of Turin is a fraud.
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But even if it were real, it wouldn't prove anything.
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This is a hold my diet Coke moment, if you don't mind.
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Okay, the blood samples were done by two Jewish hematologists, Heller and Adler.
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And we can even distinguish the post-mortem blood from its separation from the serum where
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So again, Barry Schwartz, who is the documenting photographer of the Shroud of Turin, who was
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a Jew, for 17 years, even after he took the photograph, do you know what caused him to
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Even though he was the documenting photographer, it was the blood.
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6% of the world's population is type A-B blood.
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Because so much has happened since we talked about the Shroud last time.
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I told you that the British Museum suppressed the raw data of the carbon dating of the Shroud
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And by the way, the irony of his last name is not lost on me.
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He took all of the factors, and I actually have a picture of it in my book that is so
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fun because actually his factor, Bruno Barberis is a mathematician at the University of Turin.
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And he put a mathematical equation to all of the aspects of the Shroud, the crucified man
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and how they match up with what scripture says about how Jesus was crucified.
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He said there is a 1 in 200 billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus from the Bible.
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And what is the first thing that you think of when you see the face on that coin?
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This is the first coin that ever had the face of Christ on it.
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So by the way, 700 years before the supposed carbon dating, what's the source material
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Remember sketch artists in a criminal defense, you know, they would sketch a criminal.
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This is like four times what's accepted in a court of law to match the Shroud of Turin.
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And I want to say something else that is so important.
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Waxous dating, wide angle x-ray scattering has shown that the Shroud is in fact 2,000 years old.
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There's actually five different ways that we date the Shroud that I write about in my book.
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The Shroud is the greatest gospel evangelism tool I've ever seen, Michael.
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This is, you know, it takes a lot to really impress me.
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Are you going to have to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls?