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I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Who Was the REAL St. Patrick? PLUS Is Leftism Bad for Your Mental Health?
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Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot to cover today. Several subjects. First of all, who was St. Patrick? As you can see, I'm wearing my festive green Oregon Ducks 3/4 zip that they gave me when I was there in 2024. I figured, why not? It's a perfect day for it. We're going to get to St. Patrick. We also have a question about Bible errors, alleged errors in the Bible, and even a question about Israel. But before I get to all that, I want to dive into an article that I saw on World magazine that has some very interesting points in it and it relates back to a podcast we did a few weeks ago. The title of this article by Thaddeus Williams, who teaches I believe I want to say it Biola. The title is why Leftism is Bad for Mental Health. And the subtitle is An Ideology that Politicizes Real Trauma Leads to Minds Immersed in Fear. Now we're going to put a link to this article with its corresponding links within the article that go to some studies that Thaddeus cites. We'll put it in the show notes. But let's take a look at what he says here. He says this that study after study shows that our friends and family on the political left, and by the way, I would argue the theological too, quite frequently they're the same friends and family on the political left are not doing well in terms of mental health. The general the General Social Survey Cumulative cross Sectional data set tracked this phenomenon since 1972 and found that, quote, extreme liberals, unquote, had a 150% increase in mental illness compared to moderates. A study from a team of Columbia University epidemiologists found that depression rates among liberal female teenagers have far outpaced all other demographics. A litany of studies demonstrate demonstrates that far higher levels of happiness, well being and meaning in life for people on the right. Now let me pause right here. I don't think Thaddeus is arguing, and I'm not arguing that people on the right or people on the left are better or worse in terms of who they are as people. We're all made in the image of God. What Thaddeus is arguing here is that what you believe about certain theological and or political things can lead you to mental health conditions that are negative. That's the argument here. So let me keep reading. Surely such data calls for a deeper analysis, but there is one often ignored factor that I believe. This is what Thaddeus Williams is saying. That I believe accounts at least partially for the disparity. It is the way in which leftist ideology and recruitment strategies over generalize and politicize personal traumas. To see the point, ponder how phobias work. A trio of brain regions function together as what doctors have called the OH center. At the genesis of many phobias, we find lived experiences that light up the brain's OH center like a Christmas tree. He says A very scary childhood sickness, a panic attack in a tight space, or a humiliating social moment can rewire a brain for germaphobia, claustrophobia, or social phobia. He says exclusive therapy has proven positive outcomes for phobics. Why? Because the anachrophobe who learns to pet a tarantula learns that not all spiders are out to kill him. The germaphobe eating chips from a communal party bowl learns that she won't drop dead from Ebola. Rational cognitive therapy also has a solid clinical track record of helping people heal. When our brain's OH center ignites, our brain's assessment center goes dark. Pause on that for a second. Our assessment center? What? What does that mean? In other words, we. We seem to lose cognitive ability to make rational conclusions. When our OH center ignites, it short circuits our thinking. So suddenly we have a phobia or we get fearful about something. Anyway, go back to the article. He says cognitive therapists have helped people spark their assessment centers so we can challenge the catastrophic signals of our OH centers. In short, good psychologists help phobics un. Generalize. Pause on that word for a second. Ungeneralize. This is what we were talking about on this show a few weeks ago, that what you can't do is generalize from individual incidents to a whole group. Back a couple weeks ago, whenever we had this. Maybe a couple months ago now, I can't remember when we did this podcast, we were talking about the fact that you can't take individual incidents that you see, say, on social media and generalize them to an entire group. This was done quite frequently about a month ago, month and a half ago with ice, you know, we saw some confrontations that ICE had in Minnesota, and people were generalizing from individual incidents where they didn't even have the complete context for those individual incidents. And they were saying that all ICE people are bad, or all ICE law enforcement is evil, or ICE is murdering everyone. This is not the way good social science research is done. You don't take individual incidents and overgeneralize them to an entire group. You need good survey data that takes a random sample and figures out how a particular group is behaving by this random sample Sample to say a 95% confidence level. This is all social science statistical work that needs to be done. Either that or you talk to everybody and, and evaluate everybody in ice and you can't, you can't generally do that. You got to use survey data. What you don't do is you don't take individual incidents and generalize them to an entire group. In my day we used to call that prejudice. We used to say, oh, you see one thing, one guy in a particular group doing a wrong thing and you go, oh, everybody who is in that particular group does. Does those wrong things. That's what we call prejudice. So what Thaddeus is saying here is that good psychologists help phobics un. Generalize. He goes on to say this. They help people internalize the fact that specific traumas should not be generalized in a way that the whole world begins to feel more traumatic than it already is. Trauma from this spider does not mean all spiders are out to kill you. Leftist ideologies, whether they come in the form of critical race theory, gender theory, or more general social media social justice doctrine, do not exact or. Or do the exact opposite of what good psychologists aim to do. Leftist ideologies overgeneralized that spider bit. You listen to all these other stories of lethal spider bites. Here are some Facebook groups, podcasts, public protests and college courses to remind you daily, the spiders, or rather the racist, the Islamophobes, the bigots, the capitalists and the patriarchal oppressors are all out to get you. The brain's assessment center is bypassed. Anyone questioning whether spiders are out to get you is probably a spider himself. The OH center ignites and leftist ideology tolerates nothing that might stop the flames from spreading until the whole brain turns to ash. This is well written, Thaddeus. Good, good job on this. Yes, the whole brain turns to ash and, and this is what social media does, ladies and gentlemen. This is me speaking now, not, not Thaddeus Williams. This is what social media does. The OH center ignites and leftist ideology. Ideology tolerates nothing that might stop the flames. Social media tolerates nothing that might stop the flames. And this can equally be done on the right. Obviously you could get people who have a right wing view of everything and they think anybody on the left therefore is evil and everybody on the left is doing these evil things the left does and vice versa. This is not the way that you get to the truth by overgeneralizing. Back to the article. If left is. If. Well, let me pause for a second. He's saying this is more prevalent on the left because it appears that people that hold a politically leftist ideology do this more than people on the right. Okay, so this article is making that case, and that's what the data show. But we have to be fair that sometimes it's done on the right as well. All right, let me continue. If leftism has us seen ourselves primarily as oppressed, then most everything around us will look like oppression. This is where the authority leftism grants to lived experience factors in. All right, let me pause right here. Lived experience. This is a kind of a. A phrase that critical theorists use. You should only be listened to because you have a certain kind of lived experience that we're interested in. So if you're a minority, your lived experience is more important than, say, the white heterosexual Christian male's experience. We don't have to pay any attention to him, just you, if you're a minority. All right, let me continue. If a little boy, call him Johnny, has been convinced that most, if not all, spiders are out to get him, then imagine what Johnny will experience the next time he spots a Danny Long Legs under his bed. He will experience fear from that spider. That is clearly an existential threat. He truly feels it. It's out to get him. The only problem is, is that Johnny's reality is not reality. Daddy Long Leg spiders are harmless to humans. Unquote. He says Johnny's reality is not reality. Phoenix Hayes and I are just putting the final touches on a book that will be coming out in September. Just to preview this book, it's called the War on Reality, how to Recover Truth in a Culture that Celebrates Lies. There is a war on reality, ladies and gentlemen, and we're going to unpack that further in that. In. In that book. And of course, course, we'll talk much more about it when it's about to come out in September. It's already posted on Amazon, but it, as I say it, comes out September 8, called the War on Reality. But this is a problem. It's a problem that people have such a distorted view of reality. And one of the ways they have a distorted view of reality is they overgeneralize. They see one thing, and they apply that to everybody who is associated with that one thing they saw. And many times that one thing they saw isn't even true. It's not the complete picture. All right, let me go back to Thaddeus Williams article. He says some will read me as saying there's no such thing as gender discrimination or racism. It's a conspiracy fobbed on us by Left wing media or the Marxist infiltrators. That is not what I'm saying. There are real creepy spiders with venomous bites in the world. There are real misogynists and real racists out there in Our post Genesis 3 world. In other words, our fallen world. When they strike. It is the Christian mandate to listen and love those that are struck. Thadia says, my point is that to love people. Well, especially people who bear the wounds of racism, sexism or other sinful isms, we must be careful not to inadvertently pour salt in their wounds with an ideology that generates or that generalizes their trauma. As one former leftist describes his experience, quote, we saw insidious oppression and exploitation in all social relationships, stifling our ability to relate to others or ourselves without cynicism. Unquote. Yeah, if you think everybody is doing what you believe you saw in one short 15 second video. Yeah, that's going to make you absolutely mentally crazy. You're going to feel like everybody's out to get you and everybody in that group is evil. And how could you support anybody that associates with this one group, whether it's ICE or somebody else? Oh God. Oh, this is awful. Yeah, you're living in a constant state, state of stress, of anxiety, of cynicism. That's why the mental health condition of people that have this view, this leftist ideology view that overgeneralize, are so miserable. Thus continues, if leftism has us seen ourselves primarily as oppressed, that most everything around us will look like oppression. In short, leftism, for all its claims of empathy, is fundamentally cruel. It adds psychological oppression to the already suffering. The more we come to think that reality is best understood as the oppression of the bigots, capitalists and sexists, the more our brains are literally rewired for a chronic state of fear. In that state, the leftist will believe he has been traumatized by the person who made a thoughtless comment who thereby embodies all the evils of the West. All right, let me pause right here. Article's not quite done. All the evils of the West. Yes, every society has fallen, Every society has its troubles. Every society is made of sinners. There's going to be no perfect society. East, West, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, Christian, whatever. There's always going to be trouble. But I find it, I find it just really almost bordering on the absurd to say the let the west is the source of the items that the left protests. In fact, the left wouldn't be able to protest without the freedoms that we have in the West. This America is the freest most prosperous country in the history of the world. And yet people are trying to make the case that the system that we have here, while it's not perfect and never will be, somehow needs to be protested while the cultures that are trying to take down the west, if those cultures were to take over, say, Sharia law from Islam, the very people that are protesting the west would be executed themselves. I mean, get some perspective, please. We just had. We just had Bill Federer on. And in the second program, which was part two of the History of Iran, what nobody ever told you about the history of Iran. I read what Sharia law in Iran is like from one of Bill's. Bill Federer's posts. Go back and watch that. It's at the beginning of the program. If you think the west has problems, if you think America is somehow evil, you need to go look at what Sharia law is like in Iran and then see if you ought to be maybe protesting that kind of government rather than the government we have here. All right, let me go back to Thaddeus Williams, last two paragraphs of this article. Again, the article is called why Leftism is Bad for Mental Health. And he includes links in there that show this is what the data show. It's just not his opinion. He goes on to say, of course, Christians on the right must not play the same cruel game in reverse, raising generations to live in chronic fear of those evil secularists, liberals, Marxists, evolutionists, immigrants, homosexuals, or whatever. Fear must never be a prime motivator in any thoroughly Christian justice. We must not teach any ideology, left or right, that pumps enough wattage into people's OH centers to light up Times Square. That would be mean. And failing to love. God commands us to fear not. Over a hundred times throughout the Bible, God is not only pro justice, he's also pro fearlessness. And we should be, too. If we advance ideologies that generalize people's painful experiences, leave them chronically triggered, and set their OH centers ablaze, then we should not pretend that we are doing the kind of justice Scripture commands. All right, that's the article from Thaddeus Williams from World magazine. We'll put the link in the. In the show notes. Now, this isn't to say that there aren't certain ideologies there that we ought not want in America. I just mentioned one of them. Radical Islam. Sharia law. Yeah, that we don't want that in America. It's not only anti scripture, it's anti United States Constitution. So there are things to be concerned about. There are ideologies to be concerned about. But that doesn't mean that every single Muslim you meet is going to affirm that kind of Sharia law. Although I will say this, history does show that in most cases, when Islam takes over, most of the freedoms that we enjoy here in the west enjoy here in America that are enshrined in our Constitution go away. That's just the facts. That's history. That's not Islamophobia, which is a bogus term anyway. Islam is not a race. It is an ideology. And there are Muslims from every different ethnic and racial group out there. So it's not a race. But it might be a good idea to be against an ideology that takes away all the freedoms that you enjoy here in America. Just the freedoms in our First Amendment. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition to petition your government. You can't do that in Iran. They'll murder you. You can't petition your government. They tried that in January. Over 30,000 people were murdered. Yet I don't see any of the leftists out there protesting that. What are they protesting? They're protesting that two people that obstructed ICE in Minnesota were tragically killed. But everybody now in ICE is evil, according to. To many on the left, and they're not protesting anything that goes on in Iran. So let's be consistent. Let's not try and overgeneralize. We can look at history and we can look at what people say. And if. If history and what people say actually leads to taking away freedoms, maybe we ought to believe that. But let's not overgeneralize that. One thing you see on the Internet, one thing you see on social media, even two or three things is true of the entire group. That's not the way you do good social science research. That's not the way you find out the truth. All right, we're going to get to St. Patrick's here in a minute, but I. I want to point out that we've got a number of things coming up that I want you to know about on the calendar here. We're going to be going to Element Church this weekend. That's out near St. Louis. It's actually in Wentzville, Missouri, I believe. Let me find the exact. Yeah, there it is. It is in Wentzville, Missouri, which is just outside. It's like 30 minutes outside of St. Louis. Hope to see you guys there. It'd be Saturday night and Sunday morning. Then next week we're going to Grant Colorado Mesa University If God, why evil? And then I need your prayers for this, ladies and gentlemen, because we're going to go to Utah Valley University, where Charlie was murdered. That's going to be on Thursday, March 26. It'll probably be 9pm Eastern Time, 7pm Mountain Time. I don't know what kind of response we're going to get there. I don't know how I'm going to react to being there, but I know that there's a lot of people in that area that feel guilty about what happened to Charlie, even though they didn't had nothing to do with it. It was Tyler Robinson, it appears to be the one that pulled the trigger there. But why would this happen in this, in this community known for nice people, Mormons? Why, why, why would this happen? And why would God allow it to happen? And why have we seen since the murder nothing but slander, accusations, lies and confusion? What's the way forward? What's God's solution to all this? We're going to cover it that night and take questions. We have room for a thousand people. The campus is mostly Mormon, so I don't know if they're going to want to come out and see an evangelical talk about the evidence for Christianity and the address these questions about evil. But we're going to give it a try. We just can't let Satan win. We're going to plant a flag in that campus, so pray for that. And then the following week we are going to be at Ole miss on the 31st. That's in Oxford, Mississippi, as you know. And then Rochester Institute of technology on the 9th of April, RIT. Sorry, that's not the 9th, it's the 2nd of April. So the 31st for Ole Miss, the 2nd of April for RIT and then what do we got after that? Oh, we're going to be in Louisiana in Alexandria, Louisiana on the 7th. For a college down there, I think that's Louisiana Christian University. It is. And then the following week will be in New York City, the Big Apple. We're going to be at King's Church. That's going to be in Manhattan. My friend David Engelhardt is the pastor there. Much more coming up. Check all that out. And I want to mention in April, we're starting online CIA, the Cross Exam and Instructor Academy. I'll be one of the live instructors, as will Alisa Childers, Natasha Crane, Bobby Conway. And you'll get the benefit of a number of other instructors, people like David Wood and Greg Kokel and Brett Kunkel and Richard Howe and Alan Parr and several others who are going to be on video. There's 19 hours of video in this online CIA course. And you're not only going to get presentations from those people, you're going to be able to present to us via Zoom and we're going to evaluate your presentations. You can also take a non presenter track. But if you want to be evaluated as a presenter and get better at answering questions, take the online CIA. The in person CIA is July 30th, 31st and August 2nd. August 1st, I should say three days in the middle of the summer here in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can go to crossexamine.org See more crossexamine.org See More about that there. And you can also see the online CIA course at cross examine.org just click on on on on. Easy for me to say. Click on online courses. All right, let's now talk a little bit about St. Patrick. Right now as we record this. It is March 17th. It is St. Patrick's Day, hence the green quarter zip. St. Patrick lived from about 385 to 461 AD and he's originally from Great Britain. It's just important to know a few facts about this guy because it's not all about drinking green beer in some pub somewhere. All right, I know we've gotten a long way from what St. Patrick really did. And I'm going to read some of what the great Bill Federer had in one of his recent emails. You ought to sign up for his emails on American Minute because you know, Bill knows history more than any hundred historians I know. So just a short little history on St. Patrick because he did so many great things from. Well, you'll see what Bill says here. It's, it's quite an amazing life. He was from Great Britain and at the time Rome had pulled many of its soldiers back to Rome to protect the empire or protect Rome. And that left some of their lands vulnerable to attack. And while when St. Patrick, when Patrick was about 20 years old, a group of druids from Ireland came and raided his town and took him prisoner and took him back to Ireland to be a slave. And here is what Bill Federer writes about this. For six years, Patrick herded animals for a Druid chieftain. The druids were these pagan people who were involved in all sorts of odd pagans practices, occult practices. And Bill says that Patrick later wrote in his life story called The Confessions of St. Patrick, we actually have a book written by this guy. He said this, this is what Patrick said after I came to Ireland every Day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed. The love of God. And his fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened and my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers and almost as many in the night. And this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains. And I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain. There the Lord opened the sense of my unbelief that I might at last remember my sins and be converted with all my heart to the Lord, my God, who comforted me as would a father, his son. Then St. Patrick had a dream, or Patrick had a dream, wasn't a saint at this point. He had a dream and he wrote this. One night I heard in my sleep a voice saying to me, it is well that you fast. Soon you will go to your own country again, back to Great Britain. And again a voice saying to me, see, your ship is ready. And it was not near, but at a distance of perhaps 200 miles. Then I took to flight. I went in the strength of God, who directed my way until I came to that ship. So Patrick ran away and found a ship that was taking wolfhounds back to Europe to sell as hunting dogs, and they let him come along. Eventually, he made his way back to Britain, where he was reunited with what was left of his family. So he leaves. He's taken as a slave. He's taken from Great Britain to Ireland. He tends sheep as a slave for about six years. He goes back to Great Britain. And then when he was about 40 years old, he had another dream calling him back to Ireland as a missionary. Now imagine. Suppose you're a prisoner in, say, Iran, and somehow you escape, and 15 or 16 years later, you have a dream. You need to go back to Iran and be a missionary. You'd be like, that's going to take some courage, right? Anyway, here's what Patrick wrote about this again in his book Confessions. In the deep of the night, I saw a man named Victorious coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one. And while I was reading, I thought I heard the voice of those near the Western sea call out, please, holy boy, come and walk among us again. Their cry pierced my very heart, and I could read no more. And so I awoke. Patrick said goodbye to his family, and he returned to Ireland. He confronted the Druids and converted chieftains. Yet the druids tried to ambush and kill Patrick nearly a dozen times. Here's what he wrote. Daily I expect murder, fraud or captivity, but I fear none of these things because of the promises of heaven. The merciful God often freed me from slavery and from 12 dangers in which my life was at stake, not to mention numerous plots. God is my witness who knows all things even before they come to pass, as he used to forever warn me of many things by a divine message. I came to the people of Ireland to preach the gospel and to suffer insult from unbelievers. Oh, stop right there. I came to preach the gospel and suffer insult from unbelievers. I came to do this. You know, Jesus says that when people insult you when they say all sorts of nasty and wrong things about you, great is your reward in heaven. He says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Peter says that you are called to suffer for Christ. And here's what. This is what Patrick is saying. I came to priest the Gaza and suffer insult from the unbelievers. Gee, in America we can't even suffer insult from somebody unliking us on a social media post. That's too traumatic for us. And here's. Here's St. Patrick saying, I'm going to suffer. I'm going to preach the gospel and suffer. He goes on to say, I prepared to even give my life without hesitation and most gladly for his name. And it is there that I wish to spend until I die. And here's what Bill writes. Bill Federer. In 30 years of ministry, St. Patrick is credited with baptizing 120,000 people and founding 300 churches. He used the three leaf clover to teach the Trinity because you have one plant with three leaves on it, so you have one God with three persons. He used that to preach the Trinity. At least that's the. That's the idea anyway. That's what's been said about him anyway. Despite his great achievements, Patrick struggled with an inferiority complex. He wrote, I had long had it in mind to write, but up to now I have hesitated. I was afraid lest I should fall under the judgment of men's tongues, because I am not as well read as others. As a youth, nay, almost as a boy, not able to speak, I was taken captive. Hence today I blush and fear exceedingly to reveal my lack of education, for I am unable to tell my story to those versed in the art of concise writing in such a way, I mean, as my spirit and mind long to do, and so that the sense of my words expresses what I feel, unquote. Actually, I thought he expressed himself quite well. There Right, so. But isn't it interesting that here's Patrick worried? Look, I'm an unlearned band. How many times do we see in the Bible that God uses the weak? Moses couldn't even speak. He stuttered. God used him. He. He doesn't, he doesn't always pick. In fact, most of the time he's picking people who are, who are secondary or tertiary characters. Look, who did he, who did he pick to write gospels? Mark. Why didn't he pick Peter to write a gospel? He picks Mark, who is a friend of Peter. Why Luke? I mean, Luke said. Yes, okay, Luke is a, is a physician, but he's not one of the, not one of the 12. I mean, if you're making this up, you'd have Thomas write it or, you know, Andrew or somebody, Somebody who's, who's one of the 12. Now there are apocryphal gospels that come later that people attribute to Peter and to Thomas, but they're forgeries. They're 100 years after those guys were dead. But it goes to show you, God uses the weak. He doesn't always use the strong or the people that are well educated. Sometimes he picks just average fishermen to do his work. This is not a argument not to get educated. Quite obviously we're supposed to. But God can even use people that are not. And he used Patrick. Bill Federer goes on to say, Patrick was one of the first major religious leaders to speak out strongly against slavery. Having himself been a victim, he's considered one of the first abolitionists. And he condemned the deeds of Korotychus, who was a tyrant king in Britain who had carried off some of Patrick's converts into slavery. And he called these deeds of this ruler, this tyrant king, quote, wicked, so horrible, so unutterable, and exhorted him to repent and free the converts. He actually wrote this guy, and here's what he wrote. He said, I Patrick, a sinner, very badly educated. But he wrote to this king, he said this quote, you prefer, you prefer to sell these people these slaves that he took from Ireland. You prefer to sell them to a foreign nation that has no knowledge of God. You betray the members of Christ, as it were, into brothel. Ravenous wolves have gulped down the Lord's own flock which was flourishing in Ireland. And the whole church cries out laments for its sons and daughters, unquote. Wow. He went after this British king. Bill goes on to say this. When the Irish converted to Christianity, they abandoned their pagan druid laws, which Patrick replaced with Bible based Latin Irish laws. And in the longer piece, I'm not reading the whole thing from Bill. We'll put it in the show notes. He goes on to say that Patrick, in this way, due to the ripple effect, actually helped influence laws in the United States. Because when you influence Ireland and therefore then Britain, you're actually influencing the United States. Over 1300 years later, Patrick wrote this in his confessions. Patrick the sinner, an unlearned man, to be sure. None should ever say that it was my ignorance that accomplished any small thing. It was the gift of God. And Bill Federer writes, patrick's influence was profound. That over 1500 years later, there is still a date on the calendar to remember him. It's today. It is March 17th. That's the day he died. Not the day he was born, the day he died. March 17th. 461 is the date, the most accurate date we have. The World Book Encyclopedia said this of St. Patrick, quote, he found Ireland all heathen and he left it all Christian, unquote, St. Patrick. That's why we celebrate St. Patrick, because he was a preacher, a fearless one who converted the pagans to Christianity in Ireland in the four hundreds ad. How this has to do with drinking green beer, I don't know. But we can. We can cause our traditions to overpower the truth, quite obviously. But There you go, St. Patrick. I have Irish in my history. My grandmother was Irish. And apparently I want to say 13 to 14% of Americans have some Irish ancestry. The only other foreign country that has as many or more would be Germany, I believe. So happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. All right, let me go to a couple of questions. Now, Darren writes in and he says, I reached out and I'm looking for resources. Are there any discussions about the difference in the gospel accounts and the angels at Christ's resurrection? I understand the thought that eyewitness accounts might be different and the writers would have written about other eyewitnesses. Written about other. I'm not sure what you mean by that, Darren. Maybe you mean would have written their own accounts if they were eyewitnesses or had other eyewitness sources. That's true. Okay, is there any additional information or videos that could help me better respond to this claim or is it worth addressing? And the claim is that there are a different number of angels at the tomb during the resurrection in the women's encounter. So Darren writes in. Yeah, this is a common supposed contradiction, Darren, but it's not a contradiction. And let me give you a resource on this. My co author, Dr. Norman Geiser. Gee, how long has it been now? 33 years ago, wrote a book called at the time it was called When Critics Ask. Now it's called the Big Book of Bible Difficulties. He wrote it with another seminary professor by the name of Tom Howe. And the seminary is Southern Evangelical Seminary. Still a great place to get a degree. That's where I got my degree. S. Edu. Ses. Edu. All the courses are online now, so you don't have to move to take classes from ses. Trust me, it's a great place to get an education. Anyway, those two gentlemen wrote this book, and let me just read you. It's a very short, very short response. They go verse by verse where there's a question, is there a contradiction here or is this just a difference? There's over 800 of these in this book, the Big Book of Bible Difficulties. And here's what it says. Matthew 28. 5. Why does Matthew say there was only one angel at the tomb when John says there were two? And here's their solution that they put, put. Matthew does not say there was only one angel. John says there were two. And whenever there were two, or ever there are two, there's always one. It never fails. The critic has to add the word, word only to Matthew's account in order to make it contradictory. But in this case, the problem is not with what the Bible actually says, but with what the critic adds to it. Matthew probably focuses on the one who spoke and said to the woman, do not be afraid. John referred to how many angels they saw, and she saw two angels. That's John 20, verse 12. Yes. Not every difference is a contradiction. And so, look, we do this all the time. You know, you're, you're, you're. You say he was at the party. Well, John was there. Oh, John was at the party. Okay. Does that mean only John was at the party? No, I just mentioned John. Okay? Matthew was there, too. So was Sheila. All right, if you keep asking me questions, I'll tell you everyone what was there. And this is sometimes called spotlighting. You're just going to spotlight one person in your account. You're not going to tell everything about everything in every situation. That would be impossible anyway. You know, it would be. It would take you longer to record an experience than it would to actually experience it. So if you were to, say, everybody that appeared at a certain place, if you were to exhaustively try and describe what, what happened at this certain place, it would take you longer than actually just experience it. So when we're writing an account on anything, we're we' are already limiting what we could say about it. And Matthew does not contradict John. He just points out the one angel perhaps that was talking or the one angel that he saw or, or someone else saw, or he's not saying there was only one angel there also another way of looking. It could be that he saw one angel and then another angel appeared later. We don't know. It doesn't, doesn't tell you. But it's not a contradiction. Differences in details are not always contradictions. They're actually evidence that these are eyewitness accounts. Because no two eyewitnesses tell you everything about a particular event in exactly the same language in every detail. One of the examples I like to give is the fact that the Titanic eyewitnesses disagreed over how the Titanic sank. Some of them said it, it went down hole and others said it broke in two and then went down. What are we to conclude from those? Obviously in this case they are contradictory. But what are we to conclude from that particular situation where you have one group saying, oh, it went down hole, another group saying, no, it broke in two. Okay, they one is right and the other's wrong in this case. But are you to conclude, therefore the Titanic did not sink? No, you're still going to say, okay, they all agree it sank. They just disagree on one of the details of how it sank. The same thing is true, by the way, of these resurrection accounts. What does everybody agree on? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Everybody agrees that Jesus rose from the dead. They all agree on that. What they may disagree on are some of the peripheral details, details that are not going to change the essential fact that Jesus rose from the dead. No one says, oh, you know, Jesus didn't rise from the dead yet. There are people out there who try and look at these, what appear to be contradictory accounts and say, oh, therefore we can't trust anything these documents say. That's nonsense. You would never do that with any other account. Because everybody knows that eyewitnesses don't record every, every detail in exactly the same way or notice every detail and record it. And by the way, you can explain why the Titanic eyewitnesses differed. First of all, it was dark. Second of all, they were in shock. Third of all, it probably depended on their perspective. If they were a beam of the ship, they could probably see it break apart. If they were on the stout, the bow or the stern, they probably couldn't. It just looked like the whole thing went down. We know through water archaeology, however, that the Titanic did break in Two, because it was found in two separate locations. One half of the ship was found quite a distance away from the other half of the ship. I think about a mile or so. So we know from archeology what actually happened. But what nobody should conclude from discrepancies in eyewitness details is that the essential event actually occurred. Everybody agrees the Titanic sank even though the eyewitness disagreed over how everybody agreed there was a resurrection. Even though you can find differences between the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, those differences don't negate the central point any more than differences in how the Titanic sank negate the fact that it actually did sink. So don't let that pull you off. The main point is, or the main point which is, is that these were eyewitnesses who all agree on the big issue, but they describe the peripheral details differently. And that's what you would expect from eyewitness accounts. J. Warner Wallace, the cold case homicide detective. Drive this home. Drives this home in so many ways. You know, when he catches or when he discovers someone who's been murdered and there are eyewitnesses, he always separates the eyewitnesses. Every, every good police officer would do this because they don't want the eyewitnesses talking to one another and ironing out their story. They want every detail because not every eyewitness sees it exactly the same way. They agree that guy shot the other guy, but they may, they may differ on some of the details relating to the shooting and they don't want those details to go away. Look, if every one of the Gospels described everything in exactly the same way, what would all the critics be saying? Collusion. They got. They just copied from one another. You know, this is a complete copy job. They're not even independent. Now, if they were too divergent, they'd go, well, we can't trust these at all. I think that they ex. And this is what J. Warner Wallace concludes, that these documents, which we call the Gospels, have exactly the kind of variation in them with the essential truths all being the same of what you would expect from eyewitnesses. You would expect them all to agree on the main point, but have these differences. So, Darren, get the book, the Big Book of Bible difficulties. Also, I think there's a website. I haven't been there in quite a while, but I remember there was a gentleman who compiled a number of these supposed differences. I think the website might be called Inerrancy. See if you can find it. Google it. Figure, figure out. Or duck, duck, go it. See if you can find out duck, duck, duck, duck. Go it. See if you can find this website. Because he goes through in a similar way to what Geisler and how do in the big book of Bible difficulties they go through all of these supposed contradictions and point out no, they're not really contradictory. So check that out. I'll also put in the show notes a YouTube video from one of our events. I think it was at UNC Wilmington, where I had a skeptic say, oh, what you're saying isn't right. These are contradictory. The title of that YouTube video is the Titanic and the Resurrection. What's the connection? We'll put the link to the YouTube Q A in the show notes as well, Darren, so you can check that out. All right, let me go to our final question here. This comes from William. He says, I'm a born again Christian of the most high God. He says, I'm a child of the most high God. Thanks be to the Lord Jesus. My wife and I have been discussing Israel very often lately. I accepted Jesus as my Savior and the Lord a couple of years ago, and I'm greatly struggling with these three questions. Number one, should we. Should we as Christians support Israel? Number two, is it wrong to not support Israel since they do not believe in Jesus and in some cases mock him? Number three, how do I support someone, not just Israel, but all people who do things that I cannot support? I ask these things as someone who is against Israel already. And then he goes on with some nice comments. Well, thank you, William. Actually, we're going to. We're going to talk about a lot of this in our next podcast with Robert Furrow, the pastor of Calvary Chapel Tucson, in the Friday podcast. So I'm not going to say a lot about it here. We're going to take what he has written in a book and investigate a little bit and have some back and forth on it. But let me just give you a brief overview or say a few comments. Your first question, should we as Christians support Israel? The answer is yes. But support does not mean that you agree with Israel on everything. To bless anyone means that you tell them the truth. If you want to bless somebody, you don't blindly support what they do. As the proverb says, an enemy multiplies kisses, but wounds from a friend are good. If you want to help somebody, you tell them the truth. When they are doing something wrong, you tell them and you don't support the wrong that they're doing. The question is, okay, what is Israel doing wrong? That can be debated no government does everything right because we're all full of fallen people. All right? So blessed does not mean that you blindly support anyone. Secondly, is it wrong not to support Israel since they do not believe in Jesus and in some cases mock him? Okay, when you say in some cases mock him, who do you mean? Do you mean the leaders or certain people in Israel? There's certain people in America that mock Jesus quite obviously. So I, I don't know what that really means, but let me point out that 100 of the kings of ancient Israel did not follow Yahweh. 100%. 19 out of 19, 8 out of 20 in the Southern kingdom of Judah were good. That means 12 out of 20 were not. So if you're going to say that you can't support a nation because their leaders aren't following God, then you could never support Israel at any time because they were apostate so often. In fact, when you look at the Old Testament, what do you see? You see Israel continually sinning and God continually correcting them. Why are there so many prophets? Because there are so many kings and people who are sinning. You don't need prophets when everybody's following Yahweh. You need prophets when they're sinning, when they're falling away. And Dennis Prager, who is not a Christian, as you know, but he does believe the Old Testament. He's a. A Jewish man, conservative, by the way, had an horrific fall and now is paralyzed, but appears to be at least doing some work again over there at Prageru. Anyway, Dennis Prager said this. One of the reasons I believe the Old Testament is true is because no people group would ever invent such an embarrassing history of themselves. Yeah, exactly. Who's going to make up that they were continually falling away from Yahweh, continually being rebuked, continually being judged. They were sinning all the time. Nobody's going to record that. I just took my second trip to Israel, I mean to Egypt, a few months ago. When you go to the Egyptian monuments, you know what they are? They're monuments of propaganda about how great the pharaoh is and how great the current pharaoh is compared to the last pharaoh. They never record anything embarrassing. They always record victories. They never record defeats. That's why you're never going to hear anything officially from the pharaohs about the Exodus, because officially that didn't happen. According to them. They can't record that. They're just putting out all the positives and they're inflating those. In fact, by the way, we do that Today, don't we? I don't care who's in the White House. The White House press secretary is never going to say that the President has done anything wrong. It's always going to be positive. Every political party in our country now, both the Republicans and the Democrats, they only. They only spin everything positive. You never hear embarrassing stuff. They suppress that. But the Bible doesn't suppress it. Both the Old and the New Testaments don't suppress any of that. They just tell you the truth. Now, how do I support someone? The third question. Not just Israel, but all people who do things that I cannot support. Well, again, support doesn't mean that you approve of what they do. Support means if you love them, you're going to correct them. Love does not mean approval. Paul says that love always protects, love always perseveres. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. This is 1 Corinthians 13, the passage that everybody reads at their wedding, but nobody obeys. Love does not mean approval. If you're approving of evil, you're enabling evil. In fact, you know what the Old Testament says? I think this is Leviticus 19. You know the Old Testament says, love your neighbor as yourself. Yeah. Jesus wasn't the first to say that. It says that in the Old Testament, just before then the verse before that says, rebuke your neighbor who's doing evil, so you are not guilty of his sin. What? If you don't rebuke your neighbor, you're guilty. In other words, you need to rebuke people who are doing wrong. That's how you support them. You don't enable people to go down evil. The evil, a path of evil. No parent is a good parent if you. If you approve of everything your kid wants to do. If your kid wants to do evil, you don't support him by doing evil. This is the fallacy of I'm for you. Whatever you want to do is fine. Love. Love is love. Love just means I approve of everything you do. Nonsense. That's a lie from the pit of hell. If you love someone, you'll correct them. And you might want to say to someone who you're trying to correct, hey, can I ask you a question? Sure, yeah, go ahead. Hey, if I were about to do something that would hurt me and hurt others and would be wrong, would you love me enough to tell me? Well, yeah, of course. Okay. Can I do that for you right now? Then say what you need to say right now. You say you're against Israel already, William, but whenever you want to talk about modern day Israel and what's going on over there. Of course it's messy, but I always ask people this question. Have you read the Hamas charter? Have you read it? If not, do not pass go. Do not pay, do not collect $200. Stop what you're doing and go read the Moss charter. You can find it online. We'll put it in the show notes. Just read it. You want to know who the genocidal folks are? It's Hamas. Read it. They, they want all Jews dead. They don't want a two state solution. One state solution, no Israel. They get everything. This is not going to end until God takes place. They say in the MOS Charter. All of these conferences about two state solutions, waste of time, Vain waste of time. They say their solution is the genocide of the Jews. Now again, this doesn't mean that everything Israel does is right. I'm s simply saying they're on record as saying they want to wipe out all the Jews. That's the Hamas charter. Read it. Before you say you're against Israel. Read it and we'll talk more about this issue of Israel, particularly from a theological perspective. But if we want to just leave the Bible out of it. In terms of eschatology at this point, when you look at what's going on over there, you've got a group that wants to wipe out the other group who has been defending themselves against the genocide that was taking place on October 7th of 2023. Now the question is, are the Israelites currently, and have they been involved in, in activity that goes above and beyond just eliminating the threat and striking back? Are they doing war crimes as well? That's a question we need to investigate. That's a question you need to answer. But to say that I'm against Israel when you haven't read the Hamas charter, I'm sorry, you're uninformed. Okay? What else is Israel supposed to do? Are they supposed to defend themselves? Are they supposed to try and get Hamas out of Gaza? They gave Gaza to the, to Hamas or to the Palestinians in 2005 and they immediately put Hamas in charge. Read the, read the Hamas charter. Then we could talk further. And as I say, this coming weekend in the Friday Saturday podcast, we're going to talk a lot more about this from a theological perspective. But even if you were to leave eschatology out of it, I think you're going to see it's not Israel that wants to eradicate the people, the Palestinian people, but it is Hamas that wants to eradicate all of the Jews. It's in their charter and it, it comes from radical Islam. This has been going on for 1400 years. Again, not to overgeneralize. Not all Muslims believe this, but a significant minority does. All right, friends, don't forget we've got online CIA coming up. Please pray about next week, Colorado Mesa University, also. Also Utah Valley University, where Charlie was murdered. They will be live streamed. Pray they go well. Pray I can bring the message of truth and grace to people that need it. All right, thanks for being here. Lord willing, we'll see you here next time. God bless.