← I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Why Be Thankful for America? Fascinating Historical Facts with Bill Federer
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- [00:03]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, what is special about America? What is American exceptionalism? Why should Americans be thankful despite any problems we have in our country? What is unique about America? Is it unique? What's unique about our Constitution that other countries don't have? And when you're having conversations this holiday season over the table, what are a couple of points you can make in a, in a non offensive way to say, you know, there's really something special about America. It's not that the people are any better than anywhere else, but our form of government is. And what grounds do I have to say that? We're going to get into it with my friend, the great Bill Federer in this show here today. But before I do, I got to give you a little update. I was out at Boise State last week. I had a great session there and then another session at Restored Church in Eagle the following day. And while I was out there, Megyn Kelly's team reached out to me and said, frank, can you come to the event with Megan and Erica Kirk on Saturday night, which happened to be November 22nd? And I tried. My voice was going on me. I said, give me 24 hours. Let me see if I can recover at all. And thankfully, due to the Lord's grace, I did. So he said, sure, I'll definitely come down and, and lend any hand I could do in support of Erica and Megan. And so I just had a little intro and a little prayer to this event. There were about 6,000 people there. It was the last of Megan Kelly's tour stops this year. Charlie was supposed to be with her at one of these events. And since Charlie's now in glory, obviously he, she had to find somebody else. So she asked Erica and it was in a, an arena there in Glendale next to the State Farm arena that had the memorial service in. In fact, I think the arena we were in, which full would probably be 15 or 20,000, was the overflow arena for Charlie's memorial service. In any event, we had, as I say, a full house as it was oriented there, about 6,000 people. And I think Megan will be releasing the interview that she had with Erica you hear in the next day or two. You've probably seen some clips of it already. But Erica, very poised despite being in mourning, is a very strong leader and the future is bright for TP USA despite this awful tragedy. And I'll tell you, grief comes in waves. When I got home on Saturday, actually Sunday, because it was a, I only had two hours of sleep that night. My family threw a little birthday party because I was, my birthday was when I was on the road and it was happy, but also just grief came over me for this, not just for Charlie being murdered, but for Erica and her two children. So continue to pray for Erica and tpusa because they are trying to get Americans to realize how special this country is, despite the faults we have. Every country has faults. But when you look at where we came from and our founding fathers, it's quite inspirational and quite unique in the history of the world. One other thing I want to say about Megyn Kelly, those of you who followed Megan a little while know she is razor sharp on so many issues. And she's been reading I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and some other apologetics books. And she wants to learn more about Christianity. She's Catholic, as you know, and she has a wonderful family. Two of her kids were there, very bright, very polite. And she said, frank, can you, can you help me with this? Can you, I want to get to know what you do and get to know you better because she's started to watch our YouTube channel and read some of our books. And this is the Charlie effect, ladies and gentlemen. There are people now from all over the world that are now more interested in Christianity because of Charlie's bold stand. Now, I'm not saying Megan wasn't a Christian. I'm just saying she, she wants to learn more now because of Charlie. And so we're going to do whatever we can to help her and anyone else that wants to learn more. Anything we can do, we're going to do. But with that said, let me bring in my favorite historian of all time, it's the great Bill Federer. And Bill has spoken so many times at TP USA because there's nobody like Bill. He knows history like any 10 historians I know. And his website, by the way, is american minute.com american minute.com Bill, give me a broad overview of why Americans should be thankful this Thanksgiving. What's special about America, and then we'll get into the details.
- [05:27]
B
Yeah, well, a few years ago, I decided to do a project. I would go back to the beginning of the invention of writing and see what the most common form of government is in recorded human history. And so writing was invented around 3,3400 BC and we're around 2080. So that would be around 53,5400 years. That's secular history books. Not that you can trust Google, but you can Google it says, when was writing invented? And it'll pull up 32 to 3400 BC. So Sumerian cuneiform on the clay tablets in Mesopotamia, they had 1500 cuneiform characters. You take a stick, poke it in clay. That was the beginning. Writing started as an accounting method. The first invention ever was the plow. Cain was a tiller of the soil. And then once you had grain, they began to count it. But anyway, the plows turned into weapons. They started killing each other. People gravitated together for protection, and they formed the first cities. Anyway, Egyptian hieroglyphics were invented around 3,300 BC, and they had. They had 3,000 hieroglyph characters only 1% of Egypt could read. And then China had 10,000 characters only for court records. The Yellow Emperor began the Chinese characters. So really, when you think of it, five, maybe 6,000 years of recorded human history is not that long. I use the term 6,000 because many of the founders use that phrase, 6,000 years of recorded history. And so think of it. 6,000 years is just 60 people living 100 years each back to back, right? Or 100 people living 60 years, however you want to slice and dice the numbers. But the fact is, 60 people living 100 years each back to back, that's not that long. And so my question was, what's the most common form of government? Well, the first recorded instance is in the plains of Shinar in the Mesopotamian Valley. It's Nimrod. And the Jewish commentator Josephus said Nimrod wanted to build the tower so high that if God destroyed the world again with a flood, he could survive on top. And so the Tigris, Euphrates rivers is just down the mountain from Ararat, right where Noah's Ark traditionally landed. And so since the population of the world was centered there, and Nimrod wanted to control it. Cause he made everybody in town bake these bricks. In a sense, he was the first globalist. He was the first One World Government guy. Here's the population of the world. He wants to control it. And God comes down and confuses the languages. And the people scatter into language groups that turn into nations. Lo and behold, nations were God's invention to postpone a One World government. But every generation you have some Nimrod, Pharaoh Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan, Tsar Maharaj, a Genghis Khan, some king that wants to conquer other nations. And if left unchecked, he'd have been happy to conquer them all and make himself the Antichrist, so to speak. And so in that sense, death is a blessing because they die off and the devil has to start from scratch. And but he does have the latest military and technological advancements. And so I track them. So you first have Assyria and then Babylon and then Egypt with pharaohs, and then you have the Neo Assyrian, right? Nineveh is the capital. That's where Jonah went. In 700 BC, Assyria took the 10 northern tribes of Israel captive. And that was the biggest empire in the world. But then it's conquered by Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, it has the biggest empire in the world. And it's conquered by Cyrus of Persia, he has the big empire in the world. And then Persia's conquered by Alexander the Great, he's got the biggest empire in the world. Around 333bc they keep getting bigger because with the latest military advancement, kings can kill more people, right? So instead of king killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, iron weapon, phalanx spear that the Greeks had, Scimitar sword that the Muslims had gunpowder, that the Chinese invented the stirrup, that was invented in either ancient India or, you know, Mongolia started as a loop around your big toe. And then it gradually got more sophisticated. But the weapon keeps improving. But it's that same fallen nature of Cain, kill and Abel. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger because the weapons improve. Around 2 BC or so, Augustus Caesar wanted to have a worldwide tracking system. It was called the census and a tax enrollment. If he could have had access to 5G and cell phones and facial recognition software, he'd have been tempted to use that. And so these. And then you have Attila the Hun, 450 A.D. he's got the biggest empire. And then Islam comes along and conquers from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, conquers Spain, they've got the biggest empire. Then Charlemagne in the 800 AD has got the biggest empire, controls all of Europe. And then you have the Vikings around 1000 A.D. they've got the biggest empire. Boats with low keels that go up every river in Europe. And. And then Genghis Khan in the 1200s, he kills 30 million people. From Korea to Hungary to Russia, he's got the biggest empire. And then you have the maritime empires, the sea based, so you have Portugal, Henry the Navigator, and then you have King of Spain, has the biggest empire. Philip of Spain, the Philippines are named after his son. But finally. And then the king of France, Louis xiv, the Sun King. But then finally the king of England has the biggest empire that planet Earth had ever seen. The sun never set on the British Empire. They had India, a quarter of the world's population Right there. Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, British Guiana, Canada, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica. All right. In America, the king of England was a globalist. He was a one world government guy with him at the top. And America's founders didn't like that. So they broke away and flipped it and made the people the king. So America is an experiment of a polarity, change in the flow of power, set it top down ruled by kings. It's bottom up ruled by we the people. And so we have to figure out, well, where did America's founders get these ideas? Because they're sort of unique. They got them from the New England pastors who had congregational forms of church government that got their idea from the Reformation, who got their idea from the ancient Israelites the first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king. So lo and behold, the first instance in world in recorded human history, right? We're talking about records, the first instance in recorded human history of millions of people and no king was ancient Israel around 1400 BC they come out of Egypt and they come into the promised land. And for four centuries, no king, it's called the Hebrew Republic and everybody's taught the law and everybody is personally accountable to God to follow the law. The one pharaoh, and you were over there in Egypt and I talked to a couple people that went over with you and they were totally fascinated with what you shared. But the one pharaoh, Merneptah, had the Merneptah stele S T E L E. And that's a stone monument with carving, but it's the first record on a monument of the name Israel. And it's in hieroglyphs. And so this one pharaoh, Merneptah, conquered into what is today the promised land, and he conquered this one kingdom. And there's a little hieroglyph for a king with his castle, and he conquered another kingdom and there's a little hieroglyph with the king in his castle. And then he conquered into Israel and there's this little symbol for people. It's like we went in there and conquered. We're not quite sure what we conquered. There wasn't really any king, but it was just a bunch of people. But we conquered.
- [13:46]
A
But even Bill, before you go any further, we're going to show a short video of the Merneptah Stella, because as you say, we were over there. So we'll play that. Now check this out, ladies and gentlemen. This is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in history related to the Bible. This is the Merneptah Stella. There was a pharaoh in Egypt by the name of Merneptah. He came right after Ramses II. And this Stella, this victim statement comes from 1208 BC. So this thing is over 3200 years old. And if you look down here, you can see how it's kind of worn more black because people were actually touching the inscription that mentioned that Israel as a nation had been laid waste by pharaoh merneptah in 1208 BC. Well, how could that be if the Exodus took place in the 1200s, like many people say? The much more consistent date for the Exodus, according to the Bible and archaeology, is the Exodus took place in the 1400s B.C. particularly according to the Bible, 1446 B.C. that would have given the Israelites enough time to get into the land and become a nation, so later Merneptah could brag that he had beaten them. This is amazing. It's 3200 years old and it's got Israel on it. So, Bill, I found it fascinating that Merneptah, the pharaoh who succeeded Ramses the Great, actually on his stela, where he's bragging about how he's defeated all these peoples, he actually, in the writing, says that Israel doesn't have a king, and that's accurate at the time, which I just find archaeologically fascinating. So, anyway, continue with what you were saying.
- [15:42]
B
Yeah, it's one of the greatest archaeological finds in history, that it actually confirms the Bible that now in what we call it's the time of the Judges, it's actually the time when the people are living according to Moses law, and. And the Judge simply judges according to the law. They don't have a dynastic system of heredity, ruling, and God can raise up. So this period called the Hebrew Republic was studied by the Puritans. I mean, meticulously. So much that Puritan scholars were nicknamed Christian Hebraists. Right. So you have the Old Testament is in Hebrew and Aramaic. Aramaic, and then it's translated into Greek with the Septuagint, the 70 scholars. And then the New Testament was in Aramaic, but then written in Greek. And so as the church grew, you had St. Jerome translate the Bible from Greek into Latin. But as the, you know, Chinese began to build the Great Wall of China and the Huns could no longer attack into China. They turned westward. And it started a domino effect of displaced tribes across Central Asia that spilled over the Roman borders. Rome fell, but now you have Visigoths and Ostrogoth and Anglos and Saxons and Jutes and Franks and Lombards, and they're all speaking other languages. They mixed in a little Latin because they conquered Latin areas. So they called them romantic languages, not because they kiss, but because it had a little Roman Latin in there. And so the people spoke German and French and Dutch and English. They didn't speak Latin. And so now the Bible is in a language they can't understand. And then Martin Luther. Well, first you have Erasmus. The Muslims are invading Greece and the Greek scholars flee west. Sultan Mehmet II conquers Constantinople, the largest Christian city In Europe, in 1453, turns the largest Christian church in the world, The Hagia Sophia. 160ft high and 102 foot across dome, turns it into a mosque, and they destroy graves. And so you have these Christians fleeing the Byzantine Empire, fleeing Greece and going to Florence, Italy and into Europe, and they're carrying with them their Greek art and architecture. So we call it the Renaissance, the rebirth of interest in Greek stuff.
- [18:13]
A
And that was. Bill, was that 1453? Do I have the date correct? What is the date?
- [18:18]
B
That's when Constantinople fell to the Sultan Mehmet II, who was only 21 years old.
- [18:23]
A
And so he converts the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
- [18:27]
B
Yeah, four acres of gold mosaics they cover with whitewash and cran verses.
- [18:31]
A
And if you go there now, you can still see this. But it was a museum for a while and I think didn't the head of Egypt didn't need to convert it back to an active mosque now.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:45]
A
Even though it was built as a church. Okay. This is in Istanbul, ladies and gentlemen. So it was Constantinople at the time it fell in 1453. And then you saying that people fled from there and. Continue your thought there, Bill, go.
- [18:59]
B
Yeah, so they fled into Europe carrying their Greek New Testaments. And that's when you had the scholar named Erasmus. He translates the Bible from Greek into Latin. And so this is a fresh translation. And they're beginning to see new shades of meanings on words. You know, the one word that had been translated, priest, is now being translated minister. And the word that was translated, church ecclesia is now being translated congregation or assembly. And this sort of fuels Martin Luther, who is friends with Erasmus, and he starts the Reformation in 1517. And so he translates the Bible into German. William Tyndale translates the Bible into English. And so the first step is they're thrilled they can read the Bible. But then in the 1500s, they begin to study a particular part of the bible. That first 400 years out of Egypt, before they got a king, this Hebrew Republic and It's a whole genre of scholars again called Christian Hebraists. So if we analyze this 400 year period, so the norm is kings, we analyze this. Ancient Israel was the first nation with private land ownership. Because wherever there's a king, you never really own the land. It's always conditional of you staying on the nice side of the king. You cross the king, he will take away the land and kill you. But if you own land, you can accumulate stuff. The Bible called that being blessed. And you can give away some of your stuff. The Bible called that charity. And then ancient Israel was the first nation that could read. So where Egypt had 3,000 hieroglyphs, only 1% of Egypt could read. And reading and writing was the scribes secret knowledge. They actually kept it secret on purpose. So they were needed as a class of scribes to interpret this. But they had 3000 hieroglyphs. Sumeria had 1500 cuneiform, China had 10,000. When Moses comes down the mountain, he has the law in a 22 character Alphabet. First letters of left, second letter of Beth. So easy to learn, kids could read. So ancient Israel is the first literate population in world history. And so not only could everybody read, everybody was accountable to enforce the law. And so the verse everyone has memorized is Leviticus 19:18. Love your neighbor as yourself. The verse right before it says confront your neighbor directly so you will not be held guilty for their sin. So they're loving each other and they're confronting each other. It's like a parent, you love your kid, you love your kid, but every now and then you got to confront your kid and correct them. So ancient Israel had a self policing system. Everybody's taught the law, everybody helps enforce the law. And they had no police. When a crime was committed, you would get the accused and the elders and you would go to the city gates and you have the trial immediately. There were no prisons and then they had no standing army because every man, not only did he help enforce the law, he helped defend his community. And so every man had a sword upon their thigh and they were ready at a moment's notice to defend their wife and family and community. And so ancient Israel had a bureaucracy free welfare system. What's that? Well, in Egypt, if you need land or if you need food, the government comes and gives you food in exchange for your land, in exchange for your cattle, exchange for your lives. But in ancient Israel you need food. Well, everybody leaves the corners of their field, the gleanings for the poor people to pick through, like Ruth, this way the poor were taken care of in a decentralized manner. And so you study this Hebrew Republic period, and it's fascinating.
- [23:05]
A
Let me mention one other thing about that bill that I think a lot of people miss. They say, well, ancient Israel prescribed a care for the poor, but the government was not involved. There was no government per se. It came from God himself. It required private citizens who had land to leave the corners of their field for the poor. But notice the farmers did not gather the grain and hand it out to the poor. The poor were required to harvest it themselves. So it wasn't a handout situation. It was charity. But the people that received the charity had to work for it. And our government, or many people, many Christians in our country think that the commands to take care of the poor in the Bible are commands to government. Are they commands to government or are they commands to individuals? The church.
- [24:02]
B
Yeah, well, I wrote a book on socialism and I go through that exact question. And so in the Bible, God gives land to individuals, permanently titles the land to each family. So if they get in a pinch and sell it every 50 years, it automatically returns back to that family. And if you own land, you can accumulate stuff and then you can be charitable with this stuff. But in the Bible, God gives commands to five groups. Individuals, families, business, church, and government. The commands to the individuals include taking care of the poor. The commands to the families are mostly relational. Husbands, love your wives. Children, submit to your parents. Business commands are things like do an honest day's work and don't hold back wages. The church is definitely commanded to take care of the poor. And they did. They immediately started feeding orphans and widows and through the centuries started hospitals and medical clinics and dug wells and villages. And there's no command in the Bible for the government to take care of the poor. The command to the government's the shortest. Protect the innocent, punish the guilty. There's no command for the government to be involved in education. There's no command for the government to be involved in healthcare. What's happened is the government has usurped the church's role and the church has led it. But if you look at missionaries, go to other countries, they do all the other stuff. They preach the gospel, but they start schools, they start hospitals. The church does. And so the early believers voluntarily sold their personal property and laid it at the feet of the church to distribute. They didn't have the Roman government involuntarily take their property and lay to defeat a pilot for the Rome here, Roman government. Here's a little More money for you to spread your empire.
- [25:53]
A
No, hey, let me just make one other point about this, because I think this is so misunderstood among Christians today. Christians confuse commands to individuals with commands to government. For example, I think a lot of people, when they look at, say, illegal immigration, they go, well, aren't we supposed to welcome the foreigner? And aren't we supposed to turn the other cheek? And aren't we supposed to take care of the poor and all this? What they don't seem to realize is there are commands to government and commands to individuals, and they're not the same. And if you confuse those two, you're going to frustrate the purpose of both the individual and the government. For example, if you tell the government to turn the other cheek, you're not going to have justice. You're going to have injustice and anarchy run the world because the government can't turn the other cheek. The government's role, as you just said from Romans 13, Bill, is to punish wrongdoers and to protect the innocent. If the government were to turn the other cheek, meaning not punish wrongdoers, meaning not protect the innocent, then there would be anarchy. And our founder, the founder of our Constitution, James Madison, said it best. He said, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. We need a government to carry out its role, which is to protect innocent people from evil, to punish wrongdoers. The government's role is not to turn the other cheek. The government's role is not compassion. The government's role is law and order. The individual may decide to turn the other cheek, but even Jesus, when he was struck, he did not turn the other cheek. Jesus said, who hit me? Turn the other cheek had to do with personal insults. As a Christian, you don't need to retaliate with another personal insult. You can turn the other cheek, but the government can't do that. And so it's critical that people understand the difference, because otherwise you're going to wind up voting for things that you think the government ought to do, like turn the other cheek, when in fact the government ought not do that. If it does do that, you're not going to be able to protect the innocent. Sorry for that little rant, Bill, but I just have to say that because I think there's so much confusion around that.
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B
Yeah, well, James Madison agrees with you. He said in 1794, Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. And then there's Davy Crockett. He was a Tennessee congressman before he went and fight in the Alamo, where he died. But Davy Crockett, there was a fire in Washington D.C. and Congress was going to vote and rebuild Georgetown with taxpayer money that was collected from all across the country. And Davy Crockett says Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it. He says we have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity. But as members of Congress, we have no right to appropriate a dollar of public money as charity.
- [28:56]
A
Now, who was it? Was it Margaret Thatcher who said the problem with socialism is you run out of other people's money? Yeah, something like that. Now, now, friends, we are not. I just got to clarify something. We may agree as Christians that we want to have a social safety net from the government, but it's not commanded by the Bible. We may say, okay, there are certain extreme circumstances we may be for a social safety net, but the social safety net should not be a hammock. And a lot of people use it as a hammock. We just found out there's what. How many millions of people, 42 million people are getting food stamps, Bill. In our country, 42 million are getting food stamps. And what are they spending a lot of that money on? Junk. Total junk. And they think they're entitled to it. It should not be a hammock. It should be a hand up, not a handout.
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B
Yeah. And historically, the safety net was the extended family and the churches.
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A
Exactly.
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B
And so when immigrants would come to America, there was no government handouts. It was their extended family and the church that would take care of them. And as a result, it kept their family identities together. Right. The Italians, the Polish and German. And also it helped to. They would pass generationally on. So each generation would send their kids to school and then they would build a business and so forth. Here's a quote from Calvin Coolidge. It does not follow that because something ought to be done. The national government ought to do it. We need to take care of the poor. Yes, but it's not the government's job. It's the church's job. We need to take care of the immigrant. Yeah, we need to do all that stuff. But it's not the government job. Because whenever the government gets involved, you have politicians that want to get elected and they will want to funnel the benefits in exchange for votes. And so it becomes a tool. Here's a quote from Gerald Ford. He says, people say, why don't you expand that program and spend more federal money? I look them in the eye and Say, do you realize that a government big enough to give us everything we want is a government big enough to take from us everything we have? And then there's an interesting quote from Justice Anton Scalia and he says this. The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor, but the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. The transformation of charity into legal entitlements has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude. He said it is not my place or purpose to criticize the development, only to observe the that they do not suggest the expanding role of government is good for Christianity. So here's a Supreme Court justice saying that the church used to do all the social programs they had the Fed, the soup kitchens and the shut ins and the World War II maimed soldiers and they did all that stuff. And it was under FDR's new deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare state that the government took away the church's role.
- [32:16]
A
And the problem is it doesn't help the recipient long term. It makes them wards of the state. It doesn't do anything for their own personal dignity that through the gifts God has given them, they can make it on their own. Instead, it tends to create victims. It tends to create people who are dependent. Now obviously there can be extreme exceptions to this, but unfortunately the macro view is it's been a great negative driver. It certainly destroyed fathers in the home. As people get more and more money for having fathers out of the home, single motherhood has skyrocketed. Has skyrocketed and, and crime has increased because kids with fathers not in the home just commit plurality or majority of the crimes out there. And it's just, it's a disaster. And no politician wants to deal with it because it seems so unkind to reduce handouts to people when all we're getting is more of the same. As it's been said before, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. We keep giving handouts for single motherhood and lack of fathers. We're going to keep getting the same negative results. Tragically.
- [33:33]
B
Yeah. And you know, didn't mean to change a pivot, but Muslims, immigrants coming into Europe and America, there's a certain percentage of the fundamental ones that have their four wives and put them in four different apartments and tell them to go down to the welfare office and say the husband is not around. Then they get welfare checks and when the husband visits his different wives, the more children they have, the larger the welfare checks get. And here he is living with his harem, and it's all on state expense.
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A
And didn't we just see out of Minnesota that a whole bunch of money is going to actually a terrorist group in the Middle East?
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B
Right.
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A
Taxpayer money. We'll put the. The link to the story in the show notes. And we don't have the time to go down that rabbit hole right now. But, Bill, I mean, we've gotten a long way away from the system that the Jews had back during the period of the Judges. But I want to ask one question about that, a clarification question, because as we all know, or many of us know, the last verse of the whole book of judges is everybody did what was right in their own eyes. What went wrong in that system of government where you didn't have a king, you didn't have police, you had people governing themselves when they fall away from the Lord, you wind up getting anarchy as well. So if someone were to say, well, that wasn't the right form of government either, Bill, what would you say?
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B
Yeah, it didn't work because the priest went. Woke up.
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A
Okay, all right.
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B
Yeah, the Levite priest, they went rainbow Church. They're like, oh, there's no sin anymore. I mean, here's Eli, the high priest. His own sons are sleeping with women in the very tent where the ark of the covenant is. Another Levite with a silver graven image in the house of a guy named Micah. And it's like, okay, there's a Levite with a graven image. Isn't that one of the commandments? You're not supposed to have them, right? The Levites weren't following the law. And then the terrible story of a Levite with a concubine. The law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe. Here's a Levite with somebody he's not even married to, and they're traveling and their house gets surrounded by sodomites. Something about that behavior that appears at the last stages of a people ruling themselves and the poor concubines raped to death. And by the time you're grossed out with that story, you read the line, every man did that, which was right in their own eyes. Why? Because the priests stopped teaching what was right in the Lord's eyes. They lost the fear of God, they lost the knowledge of the law, and it turned into this chaos. And then out of chaos, you get people saying, we want some strong leader to come in and restore order. And so they all go to Samuel the prophet, and they say, self government system is not working. Anymore. We want to be like the other countries. We want a king. Samuel cries, and the Lord tells him, they did not reject you. They rejected me. So God's original plan for his people was to not have a king. Everybody taught the law, and everybody personally accountable to God to follow it. You know, I tell people, imagine if you could download a behavioral app on your iPhone. It would monitor your heart rate, blood pressure, voice volume, and gps. See somebody's in the real close vicinity, and it sees it skyrocketing, and it runs this algorithm. You're about to lose it, blow your lid, and yell at this person. And it sends you an alert. Don't lose your temper. And you're like, okay, okay, I'll calm down. And then the app is monitoring your bank account. It's a little low. And then it gps, it sees you're in a store with expensive items and nobody's in the vicinity, runs this algorithm. You're being tempted to steal. Sends you an alert, don't steal. So think of the law as a behavioral app. And the Levite priests were the computer geeks that helped everybody to download this app. Now, where do you get that? Well, Apple Store, Google Play, double click on the side, right? Precept upon precept, line upon line. And so everybody in Israel downloaded the law app and it worked. But wait a second. Now that you downloaded it, what would motivate you to use it? Well, Israel had the key ingredient. There is a God who is watching everyone. He wants you to be fair, and he's going to hold you accountable in the future. You're about to steal, nobody's around, there's no police, there's nobody. And you know you can get away with it. And then you think, God is watching me. He wants me to be fair. He is going to hold me accountable in the future. Maybe I should hesitate stealing, and it creates a tiny thing in your head called the conscience. If everybody in the country believes this, you can maintain order with no police, with no king who rules through fear. Right? And it worked for four centuries in Israel until the priest went woke and everyone did what was right in their own eyes and they demanded a king. One interesting story is Saul is pouting that his son Jonathan became friends with David. And he turns to his soldiers and goes, you soldiers know about this and you're not snitching and telling me? One soldier, Doeg the Edomite, says, king, I'm your friend. I saw David go to this town, and the priest there gave him some bread and the sword of Goliath and Saul said, that's all I need to hear. Tell the priests to show up. Well, 70 priests come. He turns to his men, says, kill them. And the men hesitate. And Doeg, the Edomite, goes out there and kills them all. What just happened? The soldiers were operating under the old system where every individual is accountable to God to follow the law. And the law says you need two or more witnesses before he condemns somebody to death. There's only one witness, Doeg. So they're hesitating. They still have a conscience. Say, okay, the government is telling me to do this, to kill, and I'm accountable to God. And God says, there needs to be two witnesses. They're hesitating. They have a conscience. Doeg the Edomite says, king, I'm going to surrender my conscience to you, the government. If you tell me to kill, I'll kill. Tell me to kill the baby in the womb, I'll kill it. Tell me there's no more male and female. Tell me kids can be 72 genders and it can change every day. And there's no whatever. I'm just a bunch of mush. You blow the trumpet, I bow to your statue. You tell me to bake bricks for your Nimrod tower, I'll bake them. I'm just a bunch of mush. Right? And so God is jealous. He doesn't want the government between you and him.
- [39:42]
A
Right?
- [39:42]
B
He wants to have you personally accountable to him. This only works with the God of the Bible. It doesn't work with Greek gods like Aphrodite, the goddess of love, when she has temple prostitutes. How are you going to be accountable to that God? No, it's a just God. Now, God knew the Israelites would sin. And rather than them walk around waiting to get judged once a year, they had the day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and they brought the blood of the sacrifice and sprinkled it on the mercy seat in the temple. And everyone's sins in the nation were forgiven for the past year. And they all started the new year off with a clean slate. Right? And obviously that is foreshadowing Jesus. We're forgiven not just the past year, but our whole lives and all eternity.
- [40:23]
A
Let me Fast forward now 2700 years later to John Adams, almost 18, 2800 years later, from the period of the end of the judges to our Constitution. Wasn't it James Madison who said, our Constitution is only for a holy, religious and moral people. It is inadequate to govern anyone else. In other words, we needed a populace that had a conscience. We need a populace that knows God is watching. It seems to me even with our constitution, we still need people to self regulate themselves.
- [40:57]
B
True, right. So I got a degree in accounting, so I like to graph things out. So you take a line. One side is total government, the other side is no government, right? You can't get people say, oh, socialism, fascism, this isn't that. So forget all that. One side is total government with power concentrating into one person's hands. And he rules top down through fear. And the other side is, is absolutely no government, which would be chaos unless the people have internal morals, virtue. So you have this sliding scale and then it's like, you know, you have your axis, your x and Y axis, but then you have this line that goes diagonal. So the more virtue the people have, the less government they need and they can have more freedom. But if they give up the virtue and there's more chaos, then they're gonna want a stronger government to restore order. It's a teeter totter, right? The less external restraints means the population needs to have more internal restraints. It's like a parent tells the teenager, you're a good kid, you have internal morals and, and here's the car keys, you can come home whenever you think it's right. But if you don't follow those internal morals, drink, drive, party, you're going to be pulled over by the police and controlled behind bars. So teenager, you are going to be controlled either voluntarily from the inside or forcibly from the outside. Same way with a nation. We're either going to be voluntarily controlled with internal morals, accountable to a just God, or we're going to teach the kids there's no God, there's no right and wrong, there's no morals. You don't even know if you're a boy or girl anymore. And we shove these kids out on the street, they have no guidelines. And they say, I want what you have. And they kill somebody. And we're like, government, do something. And the government comes in, says, okay, we're going to restore order by taking away your guns, we're going to take away your freedom of speech. Because that way you won't say something that'll set the other person off. We're going to limit you, we're going to track you everywhere you go. And they'll take away and then boom, you're back to a King Saul.
- [42:51]
A
That's where we're heading. We have the nanny state now. There are so many rules and regulations that are added to the US code every year. We're probably all in violation every day of something, some nanny state rule because we've lost our ability to govern ourselves and now we want a strong man to come in. In fact, Bill, you've talked about this before. You said this in a previous show. You said this goes all the way back to Plato's Republic, that the people in power, if they want to control you, they will do two things. They will make you afraid, fear. And then they will solve the problem with free stuff. Can you unpack that?
- [43:33]
B
Yeah. So there's two ways to take rights and freedom away from people. Fear and free stuff. I wrote a book on socialism actually dedicated to the Charlie Kirk and we did an interview on it and he had it all dog eared, so he read it, you know, but there's two ways, fear and free stuff. It's like the way a drug dealer takes over a neighborhood. He can come in with guns and get everybody in fear, or he's so nice he's giving away free drugs until everybody gets hooked. And then you want some more free drugs, you're going to have to sell yourself into slavery, into prostitution. In Texas they have lots of wild pigs. And so I was reading how to catch pigs in the Wild. You, you put a post in the ground and throw some corn down and the pigs come eat the corn, ignore the post. Next day there's two posts and the pigs ignore them and eat the corn. Next day, three posts, four. You start putting them in a semicircle and the pig, you know, and then finally there's just a little opening and the pigs come squeeze through the opening and they're eating the corn. And you shut the gate and you caught yourself some wild pigs. You catch them through dependency. So you can either come in with tanks and take over the country or you can destabilize the economy. It's called the cloud. Piven strategy. Some Columbia University professors, Richard Claude Francis Piven, and you intentionally get everybody in the country to sign up for welfare and sign up for Obamacare and sign up for this, that and the other. And then you say, okay, if you want to continue to get this, you got to get a shot and you got to let us know if you have any guns in your house. You got to fill us out. Do you ever feel really sad sometimes. And if you're unstable, we're going to flag you and raid your house and take. Right. I mean, but people incrementally give up their freedom. Why? To keep the free stuff going. So you backdoor into socialism. You know, I tell People, you know, what if older fish could tell younger fish to stay away from shiny things dangling in the water, but they can't. So every new generation of younger fish sees that shiny thing and they're caught. Socialism is a shiny thing dangling in the water. Free food, free clothes, free education, free welfare. Free is the most attractive word in the English language. But there's a hook. You give up control of your life.
- [45:39]
A
I just saw some stats. The gov, the mayor's race in New York City with the Muslim socialist Mandami. Do you know that 81% of women between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Mandami? 81%. Not the same on the male side. What is the difference here between the male side and the woman's side when it comes to voting for socialism?
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, it's a popular.
- [46:15]
A
What's going on there?
- [46:16]
B
It's a popularity contest. This was first seen when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had the first televised presidential candidate debate. And Kennedy put on makeup and Nixon didn't. And the bright studio lights made Nixon look like he had these heavy bags under his eyes.
- [46:38]
A
He was sweaty and.
- [46:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so everybody that heard the debate on radio said Nixon won hands down. Everybody that saw it on tv, particularly the women, said Kennedy won. And they realized it has nothing to do with content. It's just a popularity contest. It's a fashion show, right? And it's, you know, American Idol, it's something like that. And so you realize that it has nothing to do with content. So you can have a candidate like Kamala Harris, these others that give word salads. It's literally a term called obfuscation. Obfuscation, intentionally being obscure so that you can say something and say nothing and either side can sort of think you're on their side. And so it has nothing to do with content. It's just a popularity contest. And, and so that's why it works when you have a dumbed down populace. And so that's why they want to dumb down the people in the schools and have the grades get lower. And they do this intentionally. You know, I tell people I ran for Congress three times, I didn't win, came close. I could talk all about that, but I noticed something that you would have both sides spending a long time planning to redraw congressional district maps. But then they found out that, you know, it's a whole lot easier. All you have to do is let crime go up in the city and pro family people will leave. And pro small business people will leave. Well, gee, pro family Pro small business. They tend to be a higher percentage Republican. Who's left in the city? More people on welfare? Well, they tend to be a higher percentage Democrat. And so if they let crime go up, the Democrats get a monopoly on city politics. And when there's an election, whoever wins the big city wins the entire state. And whoever wins the state gets all the electoral votes for the state. And the President's elected by electoral votes.
- [48:42]
A
Let me go back to the Mandami thing because I think, I don't know if it has much to do with intelligence. Although the populace is dumbed down, we do tend to vote on image rather than content. But I think it partially has to do with what Ali Beth Stuckey talks about. Toxic empathy. That women are more, more oriented toward caring and men are more oriented toward protection. And so why did so many more women vote for Mandami? Because he seemed to care more. Not that his plan would actually alleviate pain and suffering, quite the contrary, socialism never works. But the idea that he cared more and he wanted to make buses free and he wanted to make sure these bad ICE people weren't coming in and taking our friendly illegal immigrants away, it seemed like, oh, we're more caring if we vote for Mandami. And it seems like ladies are more oriented in that direction, as Ali Bestucky puts it, where men are more oriented to. No, the government needs to punish wrongdoers and protect innocent people from evil. Thoughts on that?
- [50:00]
B
Yeah, they study the population and they find out what issues will move the population. They do polling, like continuous polling, and they analyze the issues and they simply can, can lie it, it doesn't really matter. In many countries they buy votes and they just said, okay, here's vote for this candidate, you get more money and they, they end up staying in power. But it is, and of course it's.
- [50:33]
A
It'S, it's a problem in our country, especially the social media driven sound bite culture that we're in. People are not informed on the issues. If we don't know in our country that socialism doesn't work after a hundred million people were dead in the last century, put killed mostly by socialistic, communistic regimes, I don't know if there's much hope for us, Bill given. I mean, I always ask people, when was the last time you washed a rental car? And everybody goes, I never washed. Yeah, why didn't you? Why have you never washed a rental car? Because it's not yours. You don't own it, you don't care as much. Why do we think that a system where you can't own private property is going to bring more prosperity. It's not. It's going to bring more neglect, more starvation, more poverty. And ultimately it's going to bring in a strong man who is going to take away your rights and probably kill a lot of people because that's what's happened with it in the past. And people just don't want to believe that, but it's true. In fact, Bill, I want to ask you one more question and then we're going to wrap up and we're going to continue this on the next podcast, which will be the weekend podcast. We have so much more to discuss. But I want to ask you this, this is a loaded question. Bill. I just got back from Egypt, okay, just last month and I discovered that the Average Egyptian makes $303 per month. Average Egyptian worker makes $303 per month. The average American worker makes nearly $5,000 per month. Why is that?
- [52:20]
B
Well.
- [52:22]
A
From a historical perspective and an economic. Why is that?
- [52:26]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you go back to the Bible and the pharaohs took the land away from the people and then the people became wards of the state. We think that that model has changed. But actually for the 2000 years of Egyptian pharaohs, that model stuck. That the pharaohs owned everything and owned the people. And then when Alexander the Great conquered his one general, Ptolemy took over control of Egypt. And so you had several centuries of Greeks ruling Egypt and they owned everything. They owned the people, the cattle, the land, and the people are not allowed to have guns. But then it went into a cultural mentality of the big governments or like in China they've had 5,000 years of emperors. Now they just call them Xi Jinping and communist party members. But it's the same structure of the government dictates everybody's lives. And so in Egypt it went into their culture that the government controls everybody. Now you did have a Christian mark that wrote the Gospel. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John evangelized in Egypt. And for six centuries Egypt was Christian until the Muslims invaded. Amir ibn Alas invaded in the 630s, 640s. And the Muslims came in and literally cut out the tongues of anybody caught speaking the Coptic Egyptian language. Coptic is the Egyptian word for Egyptian. And so then they would get all the church leaders in a church and then burn the church down. And so you had the Arabs take over Egypt and then they began to institute this top down form of government and then they destroyed Egyptian monuments. In 832 A.D. there was a sultan in Egypt that saw these pyramids and there was a tunnel that went to a stone wall. And he said, nobody builds a tunnel that ends at a stone wall. There's gotta be something behind it. So he had his men build a fire in front of that stone wall and kept it burning and burning and weakened the stone and they'd hack through it, hack through it until they finally found a room full of gold. And so they decided to raid every monument they could find. And they said that anything that was pre Islam was pagan and to destroy it. And so they destroyed and defaced and all these Egyptian artworks, so much so that nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphs anymore.
- [55:10]
A
You know what I think about that?
- [55:11]
B
Wrong.
- [55:12]
A
They shouldn't have done that. Bill, who was the sultan that said about the Alexandrian library at the time? He said, if there's anything in the library that's congruent with the Quran, it's superfluous. If anything is in the library that contradicts the Quran, it's blasphemous. So burn the whole library down. Who was that?
- [55:32]
B
That was Khalif Umar. Yeah.
- [55:35]
A
Thanks, Kelly. Khalif Umar.
- [55:37]
B
Yeah. Every book that does not agree with the Quran, destroy every book that does agree with the Quran is redundant because we have. So it supposedly took six months to burn them all, but.
- [55:47]
A
And then they were religion of peace, ladies and gentlemen.
- [55:50]
B
And they conquered North Africa, which used to be Christian, St. Augustine of Hippo. And then they conquered Spain, held it for 700 years, and then they conquered Syria, which used to be Christian. And then obviously Turkey. All seven churches mentioned the book of Rebbe. Did you know one of the pilgrim ships was captured by Muslim pirates? Really? In 1625, the Pilgrims saved up 800 pounds of beaver skins, put it on a ship, sent it to Europe for trade, and a Turkish man of war captured it in the English Channel, took the beaver skins and the crew down to Morocco and sold them into slavery. The sultan in Morocco was Muley Ismael, and he had 25,000 European slaves that he had captured. Built him a huge palace at Mekanez, like a model after Versailles. And then he had 500 wives that bore him a record 1,042 children. And then you read the stories of Muley Ismal. And if he came out dressed in yellow, the slaves knew that somebody wasn't going to live through the rest of the day because he would hunt his own slaves just for fun.
- [56:52]
A
Charming.
- [56:53]
B
Bring a change of clothes after it got too bloody. And anyway, was it Thomas Sowell who.
- [56:59]
A
Said that there were more whites taken in slavery into Africa than there were blacks taking out of slavery to America? I think that may have been Thomas Sowell.
- [57:09]
B
Yeah, up and through the 1600s, the 1700s is when you had Arab Muslim slave markets selling Africans to the slave traders. Timbuktu, where the canoe meets the caravan. Niger, Mauritania, the Khartoum, Zanzibar coast. These were all Muslim slave trading cities where they would sell Africans. Muhammad was a white Arab. Muhammad owned black slaves, and they sold them throughout the Ottoman Empire. But then after Columbus discovers the New World, you have greedy Spaniards enslaving Native Americans and a Catholic priest, Bartolome de las Casas, contemporary of Martin Luther, Bartolome de las Casas spends his whole life to get the king of Spain to stop the enslavement of Native Americans. And when he's finally successful, that's when some greedy people say, well, where can we get more slaves? And someone said, Africa. And so that began the transatlantic slave trade. Horrible.
- [58:05]
A
You see, I wish Bill Federer knew more about history. Ladies and gentlemen, we could talk forever, but we got to wrap this one up. Just to put a bow on this bill, we started by asking the question, what should Americans be thankful about this Thanksgiving? And you said essentially that we're the really first people, first government in history. But I, I, before we go, we're going to unpack that further in the next podcast. I, I just, I want to address something that people have said. Well, wasn't Greece a democracy? Was that a people first government? Can you just hit that particular objection and then we'll finish up and continue this in the next podcast? Yeah.
- [58:47]
B
Demos means people crossing means rule. So democracy, the people rule. And in Athens, there were 6,000 citizens, and every citizen had to be at every meeting every day to talk about every issue. Totally time consuming. And if you didn't keep up with what we're talking about today, you're called it idiotus. And since it was the people altogether, they could be swept up in emotion. So Socrates talks about a battle and the admiral won, but in a storm, he was not able to rescue all the sailors. He comes back, and instead of a victory parade, the people get upset that their family member wasn't rescued, and they whips up the city into a frenzy and they kill the admiral. And Socrates is saying this democracy is mobocracy. And then after they kill him, they feel bad about it. Right? And so that's when Plato said that democracy is too unstructured and we want a structured form of government. And he came up with the philosopher king and his arms. And he's the head of gold, and the arms and chest of silver are his administration. They're the ccp, they're the ruling class. And then everybody else is the absolute abdomen of iron and bronze. And that's where you the first reference to socialism. Everybody owns everything in common, but it's the ruling class that decides who gets what right. It's discretionary. He who holds the purse strings has the power. And so Alexander the Great, he had his dad, Philip of Macedon, bribe some citizens of Athens with money to betray their own city. And so when Philip is conquering Thebes and Amphipolis and these different cities and he's headed toward Athens, and the people would get together, the 6,000 say, we got to get our military up to speed. And these paid traders would say, wait a second, I hear Philip's not such a bad guy. He's not conquering cities, he's liberating them. And the people like him and these paid traders would gather around themselves what Lenin later called useful idiots, like college students, like from the river to the sea. What river? What sea? Well, we really don't know. We just got a text from Indivisible that supposed to show up here, right? And it so divided Athens that when Philip of Macedon came to the gates, they couldn't mount a defense. And they opened the door, he comes in and takes over. And the people of Athens don't get a chance to rule themselves again for 2000 years. Right? Because after Philip, you got Alexander the Great and his empire ruling it, and then you got the Romans ruling, and then you got the Byzantines ruling, and then you got the Turks ruling, and then they finally get free after World War I, but then they, they side with the wrong side and they get free after that, but then they get in debt. And so now they're not free anymore. The globalist bankers more or less control them. So people ruling themselves is very rare in world history. And so the Athenian democracy, one notable thing, as I mentioned, it was the people ruling. But they had no concept of a just God and rights from a creator. They had a whole bunch of fickle deities. You don't get rights from fickle deities. And again, how are you going to be accountable to Aphrodite, the goddess of love when her temple has temple prostitutes? There's no concept of a just God. And so Plato says that this democracy is only going to work as long as the people have virtue. And he says people really don't have virtue. Because if you give them a choice of giving up their life or giving up their virtue, they'll always give up the virtue to save their life. Right? People say, oh, I don't. I don't need God. I'm just a good person. I said, would you be willing to die for your good person views? Well, you know, push comes and stuff. Maybe I'll change my views. No. And, and Plato, this is 380 B.C. he said, if someone was born who truly had virtue, the world would crucify him.
- [62:32]
A
Wow. Plato said that 400 years before Jesus.
- [62:36]
B
Yeah.
- [62:37]
A
Wow. But reminds you just reminded me.
- [62:39]
B
So a republic is where you take care of your family and your farm and you have someone in your place that goes to the market every day. They're your representative. Easy way to remember is republic begins with three letters, Rep. Representative begins with three letters, Rep. So a republican form of government is a representative form of government. You're still in charge. You're just ruling through representatives. That frees you up so you can do other things during the day instead of keeping up with what everybody's talking about today. And so republics could get larger. And because it was one step removed, the people could have a passion. But by the time the representatives met and talked about it, the passions would cool. And so republics were less subject to change. Now in America, we have a constitutional republic, which means that the representatives are limited. They can't just vote whatever they want. They're limited by this Constitution. But the big addition is the Declaration. The Constitution is the bylaws of how to accomplish the mission statement of the Declaration.
- [63:43]
A
That's right.
- [63:44]
B
The Declaration says that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and God is not a respecter of persons. Right. So we're all created equal. And anyway, so the mission statement is, rights come from a Creator. Therefore, the purpose of the government is to guarantee to you your Creator given rights. And if there's no Creator, your rights come from the group and the state. And what the state giveth, the state can taketh away.
- [64:11]
A
Those aren't rights if they don't come from God. They're just preferences. And Bill, we're going to have to leave it there. But we are going to continue this conversation at the regular podcast, which drops on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, you have to be thankful to be an American. And as I say, we'll unpack more of the reasons in the next podcast. But you live in a country that secures individual rights, including freedom of religion and freedom of press and freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, freedom of association. These freedoms you have because we have a constitution and we have a republic, and we have more prosperity and more freedom than any other country in the world. Can we improve? Of course we can. But if you want to tear that whole thing down, there's nothing better that you can reconstruct in its place. And world history shows that. So be thankful. And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, as Paul says in Romans 1, if you don't give thanks to your Creator, you're going to be given up to your own desire, and that's ultimately going to lead to your ruin. And you cannot be happy if you're not grateful. If you don't have gratitude, you're going to have a bad attitude and everybody's going to be miserable, not only you, but everybody around you. So thank God for his blessings on this country and this form of government. And as I say, we're going to pick this conversation up with the great Bill Federer on the next podcast, his website, American Minute.com. american Minute.com you ought to subscribe to his email every day. It's fabulous. And we're going to have a lot more with Bill right after the day after Thanksgiving. God bless you guys. We'll see you here next time.