Transcript: Episode 0007

“Through the Window: On Frame”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:30 – 00:00:39:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

00:00:39 – 00:00:43:	I am Corey J. Moller, and I'm Woe.

00:00:43 – 00:00:47:	Today we are going to be talking about the concept of frame.

00:00:47 – 00:00:52:	It's a term that came from psychology and Corey is going to define that in a minute.

00:00:52 – 00:00:58:	But to begin, I'd just like to give a brief example to sort of set the frame for this discussion.

00:00:58 – 00:01:03:	So imagine that you are overlooking a large grassy field.

00:01:03 – 00:01:04:	It's a featureless field.

00:01:04 – 00:01:10:	There's no discernible objects there, except for a bison in the center of the field.

00:01:10 – 00:01:13:	It's a big 2,000 pound animal right in the middle.

00:01:13 – 00:01:15:	You can see it clearly.

00:01:15 – 00:01:20:	And about 100 yards away to the west, you can see a man facing that bison.

00:01:20 – 00:01:24:	So as a man, he's facing east towards the bison in the field.

00:01:24 – 00:01:26:	You can see all of this.

00:01:26 – 00:01:33:	Now, picture in your mind a sort of a penciled in diagram like you might find in a textbook

00:01:33 – 00:01:38:	where there's a plain, there's a rectangle about halfway between the man and the bison

00:01:38 – 00:01:40:	that's perpendicular to him.

00:01:40 – 00:01:44:	So there's a rectangle that's basically the man's field of view.

00:01:44 – 00:01:45:	So it's going to be pretty large.

00:01:45 – 00:01:48:	It's going to fill up everything that he can see.

00:01:48 – 00:01:52:	It's going to be a good chunk of the size of the field itself.

00:01:52 – 00:01:57:	And then picture four lines from the corner of each corner of the rectangle back to the

00:01:57 – 00:01:59:	man's head.

00:01:59 – 00:02:03:	So what that rectangle is showing is his field of view.

00:02:03 – 00:02:08:	It's what he can see in his visual field.

00:02:08 – 00:02:10:	It's anything outside of it.

00:02:10 – 00:02:12:	He can't see or at least can't see clearly.

00:02:12 – 00:02:16:	It might be in his peripheral vision, but what's inside the rectangle is what he's going

00:02:16 – 00:02:18:	to recognize and see.

00:02:18 – 00:02:23:	So as he's looking through that rectangle, it's invisible to him, but visible to you,

00:02:23 – 00:02:25:	he sees the bison clearly.

00:02:25 – 00:02:30:	So his frame is that he can see the field, he can see the sky, and he can see the bison.

00:02:30 – 00:02:34:	You can see all those things plus the man.

00:02:34 – 00:02:38:	Now imagine that he rotates 90 degrees clockwise.

00:02:38 – 00:02:42:	So instead of being on the west, he's now to the north of the bison.

00:02:42 – 00:02:46:	But rather than continuing to face it, he continues facing east.

00:02:46 – 00:02:52:	And so that rectangle moves with him, that frame of reference is still facing in the

00:02:52 – 00:02:53:	same direction.

00:02:53 – 00:02:55:	It's still the same distance from him.

00:02:55 – 00:02:58:	But what is inside his frame of reference now?

00:02:58 – 00:02:59:	There's no bison.

00:02:59 – 00:03:01:	All he sees is the sky in the field.

00:03:01 – 00:03:08:	And from his point of view, from his frame, he's not in any danger, but you as sort of a

00:03:08 – 00:03:11:	kind of a god mode observer, you're looking down and you can see that there's a 2,000

00:03:11 – 00:03:16:	pound mammal, you know, 100 yards from him that could potentially charge.

00:03:16 – 00:03:22:	So frame is asking yourself, is there a bison there or not?

00:03:22 – 00:03:26:	From your frame, from your perspective, from your point of view, there is.

00:03:26 – 00:03:28:	There's a field, there's a man, and there's the animal.

00:03:28 – 00:03:31:	From his point of view, from his frame, there isn't.

00:03:31 – 00:03:34:	And it's because of what is in that rectangle.

00:03:34 – 00:03:37:	So that's a that's a limited portion of it.

00:03:37 – 00:03:43:	It's just sort of setting the very basics for when we're talking about frame in terms

00:03:43 – 00:03:47:	of discourse, we're not talking about what you can see.

00:03:47 – 00:03:50:	We're talking about what you can say and about what you can think.

00:03:50 – 00:03:57:	So when a conversation is framed, the terms that are permissible, the ideas that are accepted,

00:03:57 – 00:03:58:	are part of that frame.

00:03:58 – 00:04:02:	They're the things that sort of define the scope of the discussion.

00:04:02 – 00:04:07:	It's the reason that virtually all of these episodes that we have done have specifically

00:04:07 – 00:04:09:	talked about the definitions of things.

00:04:09 – 00:04:13:	Of course, as you've said many times, you have some choice comments about the definitions,

00:04:13 – 00:04:18:	the terms at the being of a contract, and what sort of power that gives you.

00:04:18 – 00:04:23:	Essentially, if I'm drafting a contract, or even if you don't let me draft the contract,

00:04:23 – 00:04:26:	I don't need to draft it, let someone else draft the contract.

00:04:26 – 00:04:30:	If I get to define the terms at the beginning of it, I don't care what the rest of the contract

00:04:30 – 00:04:31:	says.

00:04:31 – 00:04:35:	If you get to define the terms you win, as long as you know what you're doing.

00:04:36 – 00:04:40:	In the reason that we're talking about this, we're going to talk about things in terms

00:04:40 – 00:04:50:	of winning and frame control, but as Christians, we're not doing this advocating manipulation.

00:04:50 – 00:04:54:	Some of the things that we say, if an evil man is doing it, and often it is evil men

00:04:54 – 00:04:59:	doing it, they are absolutely using this tool to manipulate, to control.

00:04:59 – 00:05:04:	As you said, you can have a perfectly good contract, and if you maliciously alter the

00:05:04 – 00:05:09:	definitions, the terms, you can make it do something terrible, even if the drafter of

00:05:09 – 00:05:13:	the contract had no such intent.

00:05:13 – 00:05:15:	We're not advocating using us for evil.

00:05:15 – 00:05:21:	We're having an understanding and applying frame correctly for two very important reasons.

00:05:21 – 00:05:26:	One, so that you were not misled when you're in conversations with others.

00:05:26 – 00:05:32:	When you're having any sort of discussion, if someone is being sloppy with the frame

00:05:32 – 00:05:35:	or if they're shifting it, or if they're trying to rigorously control it in a way that

00:05:35 – 00:05:42:	precludes your points for me to be acceptable, you need to know that that's going on so

00:05:42 – 00:05:44:	that you can combat that directly.

00:05:44 – 00:05:49:	The other is that if you're sloppy, if you're committing logical errors, if you're committing

00:05:49 – 00:05:57:	framing errors, you can unintentionally, inadvertently mislead people by framing things poorly.

00:05:57 – 00:06:02:	You weren't trying to mislead, but you will mislead simply because you said things in

00:06:02 – 00:06:08:	such a way that you accidentally prevented the right conclusion from being reached, and so

00:06:08 – 00:06:11:	framing things properly, it's completely natural.

00:06:11 – 00:06:17:	We do it all the time without thinking about it, and in conversation, it's a fluid thing,

00:06:17 – 00:06:20:	like it's not as rigorous as a legal contract.

00:06:20 – 00:06:24:	There's, you talk about ideas, and if you realize that maybe you're not using the same

00:06:24 – 00:06:28:	definition of a word, you rewind and say, so are you meaning this when you say that,

00:06:29 – 00:06:33:	so that you can have the same shared frame, the same shared perspective, so that you make

00:06:33 – 00:06:36:	sure you're actually understanding and discussing the same thing.

00:06:38 – 00:06:43:	I think errors happen a lot more often in these discussions, at least when we're talking about

00:06:43 – 00:06:48:	fellow Christians, or just those who have not wicked intentions, not necessarily good intentions,

00:06:48 – 00:06:53:	but at least neutral. There are those, of course, as mentioned, who have wicked intentions,

00:06:54 – 00:06:58:	who are acting out of malice, but I think it's most often just sloppiness.

00:06:58 – 00:07:00:	It's not thinking about things accurately and thoroughly.

00:07:02 – 00:07:08:	Yeah, reason, I've mentioned before, reason is a skill. It's a gift from God that is distributed

00:07:08 – 00:07:16:	unequally. It's also a skill. It's a tool that must be used and honed, and just because you may be

00:07:16 – 00:07:21:	born with thick capacity for reason, doesn't mean that you can just reason things out and you're

00:07:21 – 00:07:27:	going to do a good job, particularly when you're dealing in an adversarial situation, where someone

00:07:27 – 00:07:32:	else is framing things in such a way to mislead you, whether intentionally or not. As you said,

00:07:32 – 00:07:37:	when it's unintentional, that's even worse, because there are lots of cases where pastors

00:07:38 – 00:07:44:	mean well, they believe that they're speaking truthfully, and they will frame things in a way that

00:07:44 – 00:07:51:	doesn't violate their conscience, but it doesn't necessarily even sound wrong, but the way that

00:07:51 – 00:07:56:	the conversation is framed includes you from actually getting to the truth of the matter.

00:07:56 – 00:08:02:	And so for us, this is about reaching the right conclusion. When you're having a debate or an

00:08:02 – 00:08:09:	argument with someone, if you're doing it properly, it should not be to win. It should not be

00:08:09 – 00:08:15:	simply to score the most points and to prevail. If you're having a good debate, like a proper

00:08:17 – 00:08:26:	moderated two sides with opposing viewpoints, a really good debate would be one where one side

00:08:26 – 00:08:31:	made the point so clearly and concisely that the other side conceded not only that the first

00:08:31 – 00:08:37:	side had won, but that he had changed his mind, that he realized that his arguments were not as good

00:08:37 – 00:08:43:	as the arguments on the other side. So it's very important to me personally to always be right.

00:08:43 – 00:08:47:	And when most people hear that, you're going to think, well, you think you're always right.

00:08:47 – 00:08:53:	No, I always want to be right. And very often that means I need to change my mind, because the

00:08:53 – 00:08:58:	givens that I brought into the conversation, maybe they aren't born out. So framing things in a

00:08:58 – 00:09:04:	clear manner is about arriving at truthful conclusions. And if that means you have to change your

00:09:04 – 00:09:09:	mind at the end of it, thank God you're right about more things than you were when you started.

00:09:09 – 00:09:15:	So to seek to be right is not simply about trying to win. It is about trying to come out the other

00:09:15 – 00:09:21:	side of a conversation closer to or with the truth and grasp than you began. And that's why

00:09:21 – 00:09:26:	this is so important, because if you fail to frame things well, you can very easily be misled

00:09:26 – 00:09:33:	and end up in the weeds. I guess we can move on to the psychology of this. Now there are a lot of

00:09:33 – 00:09:39:	things that we could address when it comes to psychologists deep field. But just for the basics,

00:09:39 – 00:09:45:	essentially what we want to go over is what is called framing effect. And a few related matters.

00:09:46 – 00:09:55:	Framing effect is the most basic form of it. If you frame something with positive connotations versus

00:09:55 – 00:10:02:	negative connotations, people will select the positive connotations significantly more frequently

00:10:02 – 00:10:08:	than the negative connotations, even if the two things that you are offering are in fact the same

00:10:08 – 00:10:15:	thing, just slightly different emphasis. So to make that more concrete, if you went to the doctor

00:10:17 – 00:10:22:	and you were told that you have some disease, some ailment, and you need to have a surgery.

00:10:22 – 00:10:29:	If you are told the surgery has a 50% chance of success versus there is a 50% chance the surgery

00:10:29 – 00:10:35:	will not be successful. You are more likely to opt to have the surgery in the first case where

00:10:35 – 00:10:41:	the doctor tells you that the 50% chance of success. Same exact outcome because if there's a 50%

00:10:41 – 00:10:48:	chance of success, that means there's a 50% chance of failure and vice versa for emphasizing the

00:10:48 – 00:10:55:	negative. But psychologically, human beings are wired to choose the positive and there are a lot

00:10:55 – 00:11:01:	of reasons for this. Relatedly, you're more likely to choose the positive if it is a certain gain

00:11:01 – 00:11:07:	versus probabilistic. So if you tell someone there's x percentage chance of the good outcome versus

00:11:08 – 00:11:13:	there's an absolute chance of this good outcome, even if the absolute chance is smaller than the

00:11:13 – 00:11:19:	probabilistic one, people will choose the certain one. And to give a concrete example of how this

00:11:19 – 00:11:27:	sort of field is used in your everyday life in order to manipulate you essentially. If you go to

00:11:27 – 00:11:33:	almost any store anywhere and look at the options of what you can buy, there'll be different levels.

00:11:34 – 00:11:39:	They want you to buy that middle one and that's why there's a middle one because they know

00:11:39 – 00:11:46:	psychologically if you are given three options, you usually will choose the middle option because

00:11:46 – 00:11:51:	you'll think to yourself, well, the top of the line options to expensive, so maybe I won't get

00:11:51 – 00:11:56:	that one. But I am willing to spend a little more than the bottom option, so I'll pick the middle

00:11:56 – 00:12:02:	option. That's why there are three sizes of popcorn and three sizes of soda at the movie theater

00:12:02 – 00:12:08:	and everything else. This is psychology. This is framing because you're looking at it. Well, these

00:12:08 – 00:12:12:	are my sets of options. This is a totally artificial construct why you have these three options.

00:12:13 – 00:12:18:	But they know if they give you these options, you'll pick the one they want you to pick and that's

00:12:18 – 00:12:22:	usually the one that has the highest margin for them. There's tons of literature on this. You can

00:12:22 – 00:12:27:	easily find papers on it. I'll link one in the show notes just a brief one from American Express

00:12:27 – 00:12:34:	showing this is very well known thing. You see another similar thing when you go and get fuel.

00:12:34 – 00:12:43:	It's never two dollars and ten cents a gallon. It's a dollar ninety nine. That's their goal.

00:12:43 – 00:12:48:	And that's why you also have at the end of that you'll notice nine tenths because they have shown,

00:12:48 – 00:12:54:	they have proven psychologically that if it ends with a nine, for whatever reason, your brain

00:12:54 – 00:12:58:	doesn't roll over and go, there is no functional difference between a dollar ninety nine and two

00:12:58 – 00:13:03:	dollars. You just look at that first significant digit. You look at that one. And so you're more

00:13:03 – 00:13:08:	likely to make the purchase. And it's just again, this is all psychology. You have to give one more

00:13:09 – 00:13:15:	example of how this works in the real world. We all know what spin is.

00:13:16 – 00:13:25:	Spin is just framing in the field of politics and public relations. So corporations do it too.

00:13:26 – 00:13:32:	But you'll have people, their whole job, the spokesperson, the entire job is just to spin things

00:13:32 – 00:13:37:	to frame them in such a way that people look at them as not being as bad as they are or as better

00:13:37 – 00:13:44:	than they are. And that's just psychology. It's just framing. It's making you think about something

00:13:44 – 00:13:49:	in a certain way. And so it's important to step back and actually look at what is being done

00:13:50 – 00:13:54:	and why they want you to think about something in a certain way and whether or not maybe you

00:13:54 – 00:13:59:	should do that or should not do that. So one of the examples that occurred to me earlier today

00:13:59 – 00:14:03:	is something that we've been talking about a lot lately with regard to

00:14:04 – 00:14:10:	Christianity and Christian doctrine, Protestant doctrine, particularly the Lutheran distinctive

00:14:10 – 00:14:20:	or the Lutheran focus on law and gospel. And so that law and gospel is a tool that can be brought

00:14:20 – 00:14:29:	to any text or any situation to distinguish the law is that which shows our sin.

00:14:29 – 00:14:35:	This is what Lutherans are taught in Catechism class. The law shows our sin. The gospel shows

00:14:35 – 00:14:41:	our salvation. The SOS. That's the basic shorthand you're given as a kid. And the premise is that

00:14:42 – 00:14:48:	we know correctly that we cannot save ourselves. We cannot justify ourselves before God. And so

00:14:49 – 00:14:56:	it's crucial when we're looking at scripture that we not inadvertently trip over ourselves and

00:14:56 – 00:15:03:	try to interpret a passage in such a way that we think, oh well, maybe this means I can save myself.

00:15:03 – 00:15:10:	And this was this was one of the principal battles that the Lutheran Reformers had against Rome

00:15:10 – 00:15:18:	in the 16th century was that the Roman Catholic Church had lost any semblance of the proper

00:15:18 – 00:15:25:	scriptural understanding of justification. And so the writings of the earlier Formers,

00:15:25 – 00:15:31:	particularly the Lutherans, were very heavily focused on justification, on law and gospel,

00:15:31 – 00:15:37:	on making sure that no man, no one who reads the book of Concord, which was what was produced by

00:15:37 – 00:15:44:	1580 by the Lutheran Reformers, if you read that and you believe it and you should because it's

00:15:44 – 00:15:49:	all straight from scripture. It's basically just a big Bible study. There's no possible way to

00:15:50 – 00:15:54:	read the book of Concord and come out the other side thinking, yeah, maybe I can save myself,

00:15:54 – 00:16:01:	maybe I can do a little bit to earn my salvation. That is framing the question in a good way.

00:16:01 – 00:16:08:	It's taking to understand that the law is God's eternal will and it's an eternal will that

00:16:08 – 00:16:15:	we cannot fulfill perfectly. Jesus was born a man in order to fulfill it perfectly in our

00:16:15 – 00:16:21:	stead because none of us could, because our will and our nature is turned ever against God

00:16:21 – 00:16:27:	until God comes and gives us faith and gives us a renewed spirit where we are able to then turn

00:16:27 – 00:16:35:	towards Him by faith. And this is where the law, gospel, distinction, I want to say it falls apart,

00:16:35 – 00:16:42:	but it becomes misused because law versus gospel, for one thing, shouldn't be said in the first

00:16:42 – 00:16:48:	case. They're not in opposition. That's really a, that's the kind of the rebirth of the ancient

00:16:48 – 00:16:55:	heresy of minickianism, whether you have the demi-erge of the Old Testament and then you have Jesus

00:16:55 – 00:17:01:	born a New Testament as the new, more loving God. And that was a, it was a heresy that was dispensed

00:17:02 – 00:17:06:	with. But the premise still lingers where a lot of people think, well, yeah, that Old Testament,

00:17:06 – 00:17:10:	there's a lot of law in there, there's a lot of rules and thank goodness for the New Testament

00:17:10 – 00:17:19:	where we're set free from all those rules. Unless you read the red letters. Yeah, yeah, if you

00:17:19 – 00:17:23:	actually pay attention to what Jesus said, there are still rules, but the, and that's the important

00:17:23 – 00:17:31:	distinction. There are still rules because God's law, God's will is eternal. What the, the distinction

00:17:31 – 00:17:38:	of law and gospel is that the rules don't save you. We don't obey God so that we can be saved.

00:17:39 – 00:17:45:	We obey God because we are saved. So when you read, for example, the epistle of James, which I

00:17:45 – 00:17:50:	hope people, you know, will pick up and read after this episode, just as a good example. It's just

00:17:50 – 00:17:55:	a few pages long, you know, it's probably about eight, ten minutes to read the whole thing. James

00:17:55 – 00:18:00:	is an epistle written to a church, written to believers. And there's a lot of law and he says,

00:18:00 – 00:18:06:	here's what you guys need to be doing. Now, is he saying that so that they can save themselves?

00:18:06 – 00:18:13:	No, they're already saved. They are post justification. If you can say it that way, they are,

00:18:13 – 00:18:19:	they are, they are Christians living the Christian life. And part of the Christian life is asking,

00:18:19 – 00:18:26:	what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live? So Lutherans have long been allergic to James

00:18:26 – 00:18:31:	because there's a lot of law and there's a lot of, you need to do this. But of course,

00:18:31 – 00:18:37:	you just mentioned what Jesus says is a lot of law and a lot of you need to do this. But

00:18:38 – 00:18:43:	the reason that frame is applicable to this is that it's not about saving yourself. It's not

00:18:43 – 00:18:49:	about you need to obey the law so that you can be saved. It is about God has saved you,

00:18:49 – 00:18:55:	God is your creator, your creature. What is our response in the Christian life? And we know

00:18:55 – 00:19:02:	that faith is given as a gift and that the good works that we do were prepared for us by God to do

00:19:02 – 00:19:08:	them. So we're not seeking credit for the good things that we do that God gave us. We simply

00:19:08 – 00:19:16:	want to know what does God want. And the framing error that is very incredibly common among Lutherans

00:19:16 – 00:19:22:	is to take this law gospel dichotomy and try to apply it everywhere to try to make every single

00:19:22 – 00:19:27:	question a question of justification because in the 16th century, that's a lot of what was going

00:19:27 – 00:19:32:	on both with Rome and then with some of the other post-reformation sects. You had controversies

00:19:32 – 00:19:38:	about, well, can we save ourselves? How much do we do? And so, yes, that is a very important

00:19:38 – 00:19:43:	distinction, but it's not the only one in the Christian life. And the fact that Lutherans are

00:19:43 – 00:19:50:	given this very powerful and important and true tool doesn't mean that it can be misused.

00:19:50 – 00:19:55:	The frame of law in gospel is a valuable tool in the context of dealing with

00:19:55 – 00:20:02:	sociological questions, of dealing with questions of salvation. It is totally inappropriate.

00:20:02 – 00:20:06:	It is completely misused when it is applied to questions of the Christian life.

00:20:07 – 00:20:13:	It's typical when you're talking to a Lutheran to say, hey, you should obey God. And they say,

00:20:13 – 00:20:18:	well, what do you think I can save myself? And like, it's just a knee jerk reaction to apply

00:20:18 – 00:20:24:	the law gospel dichotomy and think that the person they're listening to is trying to say,

00:20:24 – 00:20:30:	you can save himself, which is nuts. Like, no Lutheran would ever think of that or say it. And yet,

00:20:30 – 00:20:38:	the framing of law and gospel is so powerful in the mind of the well-catechized Lutheran

00:20:38 – 00:20:42:	that they end up kind of retarded because they'll just apply it all over the place where it's

00:20:42 – 00:20:47:	totally irrelevant. And we're talking about frame just in general today with that specific

00:20:47 – 00:20:53:	example, because it's, that's a good demonstration of how something true can suddenly become false.

00:20:54 – 00:21:01:	Law gospel is true in the context of soteriology. It is false in terms of the Christian life. It has

00:21:01 – 00:21:06:	no place there. But a Christian Lutheran in particular, in good conscience, will bring the

00:21:06 – 00:21:12:	law gospel distinction to everything because it's his hammer. He knows it's going to work and he

00:21:12 – 00:21:16:	knows it's important. He doesn't remember why. And so he's just swinging the hammer at everything

00:21:16 – 00:21:23:	he sees. And it does tremendous harm because you end up with people arguing against God and saying

00:21:23 – 00:21:28:	that either God doesn't want us to do anything, which is a clear denial of scripture or

00:21:29 – 00:21:33:	just falsely accusing the people they're talking to of trying to save themselves when nothing

00:21:33 – 00:21:39:	could be further from the truth. So framing is situational. It's contextual. It's not simply,

00:21:40 – 00:21:46:	it's not a tool that can just be used like a hammer. Well, it is, framing is understanding that

00:21:46 – 00:21:51:	it's not just a hammer that it can also be a nail pillar. You have, you have different aspects of it,

00:21:51 – 00:21:55:	depending on where it's being used. And there's some cases where you don't want a hammer at all.

00:21:55 – 00:22:00:	If you're working on glass, you probably don't want a hammer anywhere near it. And that's perfectly

00:22:00 – 00:22:06:	fine. Understanding the frame is understanding that the tool is suitable to the job and that you

00:22:06 – 00:22:12:	don't take the tool to every job if it's not applicable. So when it comes to framing, people are

00:22:12 – 00:22:19:	actually relatively familiar with framing, even if they don't recognize the term, even if they don't

00:22:19 – 00:22:26:	recognize the actual underlying psychology, because there are so many examples that are related

00:22:26 – 00:22:31:	to framing in our everyday experience and in our academic experience for those who've had

00:22:31 – 00:22:38:	any of that, what it is sometimes called as gradualism is one way that this plays out. And that

00:22:38 – 00:22:49:	will be that via framing, you have the acceptable range of beliefs or views, obviously the center

00:22:49 – 00:22:56:	being the consensus as it were policy to use the term typically used with the overton window

00:22:56 – 00:23:01:	and we'll get more into that. And then you have less and less acceptance as you go out until you

00:23:01 – 00:23:10:	get to the unthinkable. Now, if you are a member of a group that wants the unthinkable on either end

00:23:10 – 00:23:18:	of this spectrum to be policy, you do not start, at least if you're competent, you do not start,

00:23:18 – 00:23:24:	by advocating for the unthinkable. Because if you do that, people will double down against you and

00:23:24 – 00:23:32:	you will never get anywhere. Instead, you change things slightly, a little bit at a time. One of the

00:23:33 – 00:23:39:	examples it's often used to illustrate this is the boiling frog. If you stick a frog in a pot of

00:23:39 – 00:23:45:	cold water and slowly heat it up, he adjusts to the increase in temperature over time. If you throw

00:23:45 – 00:23:52:	him into boiling water, he will try to jump out. Another example that some may know, I think this

00:23:52 – 00:23:57:	one is probably a little for the older generations more so than younger, the camel's nose. If you're

00:23:57 – 00:24:03:	in a tent and a camel sticks his nose under the edge of your tent, if you ignore that, you will soon

00:24:03 – 00:24:08:	have an entire camel in your tent. You may not have cared about the camel's nose, you probably

00:24:08 – 00:24:14:	care about having the entire camel in your tent. And so it's habituation, it's gradualism, you're

00:24:14 – 00:24:21:	changing things slowly over time, you're changing that frame, you're moving that window in order to

00:24:21 – 00:24:27:	get people to accept something, they would never have accepted. So sometimes called the slippery

00:24:27 – 00:24:34:	slope, shifting baseline, there were terms for this in communist countries in eastern Europe how they

00:24:34 – 00:24:42:	enacted policies to slowly stamp out opposition and change society. And it's a playbook, it's

00:24:42 – 00:24:51:	something that's very, it works. It works on all of us because everybody wants to be

00:24:51 – 00:24:57:	reasonable. Everyone instinctively wants to be in the center. We're social creatures, we don't

00:24:57 – 00:25:06:	like the idea of being on the outside because it's not so much the case today, but in the history

00:25:06 – 00:25:13:	of human civilization, if you're cast out, you may well die. If you are outside of the social

00:25:13 – 00:25:18:	group, it's not simply social death, it may be physical death because there may be nowhere else for

00:25:18 – 00:25:24:	you to go. And the idea of the rugged individualist dies quickly when you're off alone in the woods,

00:25:24 – 00:25:29:	they're very, very few men who can actually pull that off. And so we have an example.

00:25:29 – 00:25:35:	Exile used to mean something. Yeah, it was, it was usually a death sentence. And so we, we have an

00:25:35 – 00:25:44:	instinctive, both social and even deeper than that need to belong to, to be in a community where

00:25:44 – 00:25:49:	our views and our values are shared. And where we are not going to be seen as the outlier,

00:25:49 – 00:25:55:	because when you're the outlier, well, you may be getting closer and closer to the edge where

00:25:55 – 00:26:01:	maybe, maybe social and physical death awaits you if you keep going. And so there are, there are

00:26:01 – 00:26:07:	laws and there are social mores and there are these different frames that are used in a human

00:26:07 – 00:26:13:	society to keep things within the acceptable bounds. And those things will vary by culture, they'll

00:26:13 – 00:26:19:	vary by nation. But they all behave the same way, which is to sort of keep people kind of

00:26:19 – 00:26:24:	corralled in the middle. And in a good society, that's a beneficial thing. If we had a Christian

00:26:24 – 00:26:30:	society, we would be corralled in the center of obeying God, of doing what God wants. Instead,

00:26:30 – 00:26:37:	we have a society where doing what God wants will get you fired, saying what God says will cost

00:26:37 – 00:26:42:	you your bank account, it will cost you your livelihood, it will make cost to your house,

00:26:42 – 00:26:50:	it could cost you your life. And the control of discourse goes directly to where those lines

00:26:50 – 00:26:57:	are drawn. As you, as you said, they move, they, they move in history. And I think it's important

00:26:57 – 00:27:05:	particularly for Christians to recognize that this moving, we, as Christians, we want, we typically

00:27:05 – 00:27:10:	if we're doing a good job, if we're trying to be Christian, we try to frame things in terms of

00:27:10 – 00:27:17:	our faith and to make sure that our moral pronouncements match with scripture. But as you can see,

00:27:17 – 00:27:25:	as these things are reframed in a society, very often, things that used to be morally permissible

00:27:25 – 00:27:32:	are today morally impermissible. For example, slavery used to be morally permissible. For thousands

00:27:32 – 00:27:38:	of years, it was considered morally permissible for some people in some certain certain situations

00:27:38 – 00:27:45:	to be kept as slaves, to be literally property of others. That was moral. That was considered to be

00:27:45 – 00:27:52:	in accord with scripture. And churches upheld this for thousands of years. Then in the 1800s,

00:27:52 – 00:27:58:	that went away. Now it's one thing for the law to change. Laws can change. The countries can do

00:27:58 – 00:28:06:	what they want. There are reasons to change laws. That's fine. What is not fine is for a person to then

00:28:06 – 00:28:14:	make the retroactive claim that morality has changed or worse to say the morality hasn't changed and

00:28:14 – 00:28:19:	all those in the faith before us were immoral when they believed they were immoral. Because if

00:28:20 – 00:28:26:	if all the people who said one thing did so with a clean conscience and now we come along in

00:28:26 – 00:28:32:	current day and we have the diametrically opposed belief about something that we hold in good

00:28:32 – 00:28:40:	conscience. One of those is damnable. One of those views nailed Jesus Christ to the cross to pay

00:28:40 – 00:28:46:	for because it was a sin. And as Christians, we must face head on that it has to be one of them

00:28:46 – 00:28:53:	and we must recognize the implications of what it means if it's either either we are sinning

00:28:53 – 00:29:00:	today by holding certain beliefs where we say the morality has changed or we must condemn all of our

00:29:00 – 00:29:05:	fathers in the faith as unrepentant sinners because they held a belief that we condemn.

00:29:05 – 00:29:13:	So see the over 10 window, the window of what is acceptable discourse gets shifted first socially

00:29:13 – 00:29:20:	and then legally and then morally. And then retroactively, we try to say, well yeah, morality says

00:29:20 – 00:29:24:	that this is the way it has to be. And we try to find justifications for it in scripture. And

00:29:25 – 00:29:30:	that is a terrible place to be as a Christian because suddenly you've turned scripture into a wax

00:29:30 – 00:29:35:	nose where you can make it fit any face. You can make it look like anything you want. You just decide

00:29:35 – 00:29:39:	what you want and then you go find the verses to support it. That is not what the Christian should

00:29:39 – 00:29:45:	be doing. And yet it's what we find very commonly today because the frame is being controlled by

00:29:45 – 00:29:51:	those outside the church. And then we adopt it. We adopt their frame. We import it. We say, oh yeah,

00:29:51 – 00:29:56:	this moral value, I hold that too because I'm a moral person. And then we find it in a place

00:29:56 – 00:30:01:	where it was never found before. Maybe all the church missed it for thousands of years. They missed

00:30:01 – 00:30:06:	this slavery. It was a sin. If that's the case, then say so outright say that all those people

00:30:06 – 00:30:13:	are burning in hell because they live lives of unrepentant sin or deal with the fact that you are

00:30:13 – 00:30:21:	importing an amoral frame into a moral framework. And that simply can't work. If God is changing,

00:30:22 – 00:30:27:	He's not God. And that's the bottom line when it comes to talking about morality shifting.

00:30:27 – 00:30:32:	And a lot of these frame discussions will ultimately boil down to for the Christian.

00:30:33 – 00:30:39:	Did God change? And we have to answer that question. The answer is clearly no.

00:30:39 – 00:30:45:	Scripture is abundantly clear that God does not change. And so if we're changing our morality,

00:30:45 – 00:30:49:	where are we getting it from? What is the genealogy of the ideas that we are spouting,

00:30:49 – 00:30:53:	that we are claiming come from a Christian frame? Because that's not where they originated.

00:30:54 – 00:31:00:	And just as humans, we are very good at either justifying what we have done or

00:31:00 – 00:31:05:	excusing it after the fact. And we need look no further than Genesis.

00:31:06 – 00:31:09:	The beginning to see human beings doing this, to see this in action.

00:31:10 – 00:31:16:	What did Adam do when he was confronted by God? Well, no God. This woman that you gave me,

00:31:16 – 00:31:22:	he's blaming Eve and God. He's already attempting to reframe things and say, well, no,

00:31:22 – 00:31:28:	it wasn't me. I didn't do this. I didn't sin. It was the woman that you gave me. And so ultimately,

00:31:28 – 00:31:37:	God, you are responsible for what you did. And that is the human tendency to try and justify

00:31:37 – 00:31:43:	what we are doing instead of looking at it objectively and realizing, no, no, actually, I did sin.

00:31:43 – 00:31:50:	I am wrong. I need to amend my beliefs and my actions instead of attempting to justify them.

00:31:53 – 00:31:57:	And to look at how quickly this overt and window can shift, because it can happen

00:31:58 – 00:32:06:	pretty quickly, even within the lifetime of an individual. In 2008, California had

00:32:06 – 00:32:11:	Proposition 8. Now, if you want to look for it, you have to use the year because the numbers

00:32:11 – 00:32:19:	do get recycled. Proposition 8 in 2008 in California was a proposition to define marriages between

00:32:19 – 00:32:30:	a man and a woman. And it passed. That's California in 2008. Now, homosexual marriage, so-called,

00:32:30 – 00:32:36:	is the law of the land for the entire nation. That's how quickly things can change.

00:32:37 – 00:32:43:	If you have people who are working hard to shift that window, which is usually the media and

00:32:43 – 00:32:47:	the academy and many others, abetted by Christians who do not think.

00:32:49 – 00:32:53:	Yeah, you can go back and look at what Obama said when he was running for president,

00:32:53 – 00:32:58:	what he said is a senator in 2006, as it relates to Sodomite, so-called marriage,

00:32:59 – 00:33:04:	he would be unperson today for saying those things. And he was on the left. He was further

00:33:04 – 00:33:09:	to the left than most of the Democrats when he was saying those things. And now 15 years later,

00:33:09 – 00:33:16:	not only is it the law of the land, but in the majority of our own churches, it is seen as

00:33:17 – 00:33:23:	if not ideal, at least list it. It's seen as something will love his love. And if these people

00:33:23 – 00:33:28:	love each other, who are we to judge? And even if they say, well, sure, maybe it's not a marriage

00:33:28 – 00:33:33:	in God's eyes. Yes, it's still definitely a marriage for civil purposes. And that's a good thing.

00:33:33 – 00:33:39:	I don't want to interfere with their relationships. Who am I to judge that? That's inside the church

00:33:39 – 00:33:43:	that this has happened. Yeah, they're at the acceptable or the sensible level. The

00:33:44 – 00:33:52:	may as well list what the the stages are. Within the Overton window, how the range of discourse

00:33:52 – 00:33:59:	is parsed is essentially you have, it starts out as unthinkable. When it's no longer unthinkable,

00:33:59 – 00:34:03:	it's radical. When it's no longer radical, it's acceptable. This is where many Christians

00:34:03 – 00:34:08:	are today with the idea of homosexual marriage. When it's no longer just acceptable,

00:34:08 – 00:34:13:	well, then it's sensible. And then it becomes popular. And then it becomes policy. And this obviously

00:34:13 – 00:34:19:	can go one way or the other left or right. And so many Christians today with regard to these

00:34:19 – 00:34:25:	things that have changed in the culture are at the I don't personally want it, but it's acceptable

00:34:25 – 00:34:29:	or it's sensible. It makes sense for policy for the government to do this. And that's where they are.

00:34:31 – 00:34:37:	In within the within the Christian context, that policy demarcation at the far end for Christians

00:34:37 – 00:34:44:	becomes morality. So today, there are still Christians, but in the world, in the workplace,

00:34:44 – 00:34:50:	you cannot condemn side of my marriage or you will be destroyed in most cases. But in the church,

00:34:50 – 00:34:55:	there's still some people who speak out against it a lot are okay with it, but there are still

00:34:55 – 00:35:01:	opposition to it. But if you looked at a lot of the articles talking about side of my marriage

00:35:01 – 00:35:08:	and the rulings and the laws as they were passing, they would all harken back to the 60s to loving

00:35:08 – 00:35:17:	V. Virginia where interracial marriage was codified as being legal for the first time. There had been

00:35:17 – 00:35:27:	a ruling in 1883 after the 14th Amendment on equal protection had been passed where laws against

00:35:27 – 00:35:34:	interracial marriage against miscegenation were upheld by the Supreme Court. And then between 1883

00:35:34 – 00:35:44:	and 1967, the culture changed. The Overton window shifted. And finally, the law was struck down.

00:35:44 – 00:35:48:	Now, the law didn't change. The Constitution didn't change. What changed? The people's

00:35:48 – 00:35:54:	changed. People's hearts changed. And so that's a case where I'm sure there are people listening

00:35:54 – 00:35:59:	for it to hear a man who claims to be a Christian, to even use the word miscegenation,

00:35:59 – 00:36:04:	may make your skin crawl and may sound like a truly evil thing to say. And that's a perfect

00:36:04 – 00:36:10:	illustration of the Overton window shifting because today to say miscegenation is unthinkable.

00:36:10 – 00:36:16:	It's outside of the Overton window. It may be something that is said, but it is never said by

00:36:16 – 00:36:22:	polite people. It's never said by Christians. It is an evil thing that is only said outside of

00:36:22 – 00:36:27:	the fringes, out in the wilderness, in the cursed earth where there is only damnation and suffering.

00:36:27 – 00:36:35:	That's where those ideas are, where if you look back in 1966, and even after loving V. Virginia,

00:36:36 – 00:36:41:	the Supreme Court had to change it because the legislatures wouldn't change it because most

00:36:41 – 00:36:48:	people were still opposed to it. So the majority not only felt that it was a moral issue going in

00:36:48 – 00:36:53:	the opposite direction, but they were fine with it. And yet in just a couple generations,

00:36:54 – 00:37:01:	the Overton window, the frame of what is acceptable discourse has shifted. Now, the claim made today

00:37:01 – 00:37:06:	is that morality changed, I guess. I mean, God doesn't change, and God's absorbed some

00:37:06 – 00:37:14:	morality. But somehow what was immoral in 1950 is today moral to the point that is necessary

00:37:14 – 00:37:21:	to destroy someone who would even question whether that was a good thing. And so those who tie

00:37:21 – 00:37:28:	Sodomite marriage back to the miscegenation ruling are exactly right. It's a part of a continuum

00:37:28 – 00:37:33:	that they see clearly. It's a continuum that they have been moving. And now they're it's being

00:37:33 – 00:37:39:	shifted further. They're seeking to allow par at polyamory. They're seeking to allow children to

00:37:39 – 00:37:47:	have sex with adults, which was an inevitable result. And when when someone talks about the slippery

00:37:47 – 00:37:53:	slope on one hand, there's a possibility for exaggeration. There's a possibility for extrapolation

00:37:53 – 00:37:59:	that's not justified. On the other hand, as we have seen repeatedly over the last couple generations,

00:38:00 – 00:38:05:	it usually gets born out where the thing that was unthinkable and insane, that you would have

00:38:05 – 00:38:12:	pedophiles in public discourse. Today, it was it was just outed in the last week. The man

00:38:13 – 00:38:20:	Twitter, Yoll Roth, Roth, who was in charge of censoring individuals like Cory and myself,

00:38:20 – 00:38:27:	he's an open homosexual. He's an open Sodomite. He's an open pedophile. Now he hasn't been caught

00:38:27 – 00:38:33:	dittling children. But his PhD thesis was on how do we get kids on Grindr, which is a Sodomite

00:38:33 – 00:38:41:	hookup app. And that was what he pursued at Twitter to increase the engagement of children with

00:38:41 – 00:38:48:	homosexuals who sought to have sex with them. That's pedophilia. That's happening at the

00:38:48 – 00:38:55:	upper echelons of our society today. He was a rich man. I think he was a VP. He was worth millions

00:38:55 – 00:39:01:	of millions of dollars. He's not now cast. We are outcasts for saying that's a bad thing. And yet he

00:39:01 – 00:39:06:	is at the heights of modern accomplishment as a very well respected person. He's writing now for

00:39:06 – 00:39:11:	New York Times and others. He's right in the center of the Overton window advocating homosexuals

00:39:11 – 00:39:16:	having access to minors for sexual purposes. That's how quickly it changes. And they're not going

00:39:16 – 00:39:25:	to stop there. It never stops because the shifting of the Overton window were told today in a

00:39:25 – 00:39:32:	beautiful example of framing that this is progress, that it's progressive, that a society will naturally

00:39:32 – 00:39:39:	progress from more restrictive to less restrictive. And so whenever someone calls these things

00:39:39 – 00:39:45:	progress, they're framing. They're controlling the frame of your mind and your your ability to think

00:39:45 – 00:39:52:	about these things by saying the fact that now men and women of different races are free to marry

00:39:52 – 00:39:57:	is a good thing. That's progress. The fact that men are now able to marry men is a good thing.

00:39:57 – 00:40:03:	That's progress. The fact that soon men will be allowed to marry children is a good thing. That's

00:40:03 – 00:40:09:	progress. That's the shifting of the Overton window always inexorably in the same direction. You

00:40:09 – 00:40:15:	notice that none of this progress is ever in terms of us living more godly lives. And so that when

00:40:16 – 00:40:20:	men begin to advocate things like Christian nationalism as a reaction and response,

00:40:21 – 00:40:27:	well, that's outside the Overton window. That's an evil that's unspeakable and must be destroyed.

00:40:28 – 00:40:34:	As long as you can keep moving that center, that juicy center of what's permissible for debate,

00:40:34 – 00:40:38:	even if there's strenuous debate against it, if you can combat it,

00:40:40 – 00:40:45:	you ultimately will win. If you're using the shifting of frame for evil purposes,

00:40:45 – 00:40:50:	and so this is a weapon that has been used against us, and because people want to be reasonable and

00:40:50 – 00:40:56:	want to be centrist, they don't want to be disliked. They don't want to be castigated. They don't

00:40:56 – 00:41:01:	want to be called extremist. You just sort of get out of the way. You keep your mouth shut.

00:41:01 – 00:41:06:	You don't want to be judgmental. You don't want to be unloving. And they keep chipping away.

00:41:07 – 00:41:14:	And they can do it because we seed the frame. We seed the frame to people who are using it as a weapon

00:41:14 – 00:41:20:	to destroy Christendom. And that's the reason that we're focusing on this. It's not about manipulation.

00:41:20 – 00:41:26:	It's about having a bulwark of defense against the most evil things that are happening in our world

00:41:26 – 00:41:33:	today. And this is not exactly a new issue in human affairs. We can go all the way back to

00:41:33 – 00:41:40:	Ovid. Prinkipi East Obstras, et cetera, speak a phoenix. Resist the beginnings and consider the end.

00:41:41 – 00:41:49:	This has been a problem in human society from the beginning. If you look at any of the ancient

00:41:49 – 00:41:56:	empires, great civilizations, they didn't collapse overnight. They had a slow,

00:41:56 – 00:42:05:	often orchestrated, societal, and particularly moral collapse that eventually led to civilizational

00:42:05 – 00:42:13:	collapse. We are very far along in the moral collapse. And it is orchestrated. This has an

00:42:13 – 00:42:18:	animating intelligence behind it. Now there are those who will, of course, say that, well, now you're

00:42:18 – 00:42:22:	just a conspiracy theorist and human beings couldn't possibly organize these sorts of things over

00:42:22 – 00:42:26:	multiple generations and centuries, and you're absolutely correct on the latter count.

00:42:27 – 00:42:34:	Human beings cannot very well organize these things over long periods of time with millions of

00:42:34 – 00:42:44:	people involved. But Satan can, he doesn't sleep, he has plenty of time on his hands, and he doesn't

00:42:44 – 00:42:51:	die. So there is an animating intelligence behind this. And as was said, the goal is to destroy

00:42:51 – 00:42:57:	Christendom. And if you just take a little piece of territory to time, well, Christians won't notice.

00:42:58 – 00:43:05:	It weird, the media all seemed to be praising homosexuality and these homosexual clubs and

00:43:05 – 00:43:11:	all these things. But that's just leftists being weird. No, it's not. They were constructing

00:43:11 – 00:43:18:	an narrative. They were building the future they wanted to see. And they moved on already from

00:43:18 – 00:43:24:	pedophilia. They are still working on getting that one legalized. But they moved on to

00:43:24 – 00:43:32:	beastiality and sex bots and all manner of other things because there is no bottom when it comes

00:43:32 – 00:43:39:	to evil. There is no ground. There is no floor. Things can always get worse. And that's where we

00:43:39 – 00:43:45:	find ourselves today. And you can look back and see them doing this. For instance, I want to just

00:43:45 – 00:43:51:	want to mention the pedophilia issue. Salon ran some articles. It's been more than a decade to go

00:43:51 – 00:43:58:	now. Maybe even a bit more than that. But they ran up the flag to see what people would do. It's also

00:43:58 – 00:44:03:	deliberately shocking because if it shocks you the first time and it shocks you the second time,

00:44:03 – 00:44:08:	it shocks you a little less the third time. And so that was their goal. But they ran up that flag.

00:44:08 – 00:44:12:	They wanted to see what would happen. And they're still working toward it. They always telegraph

00:44:12 – 00:44:19:	what they're going to do if you pay attention. There's another good example of reframing

00:44:19 – 00:44:26:	that is dominating a lot of the political discourse for the last decades, really. And that's

00:44:26 – 00:44:39:	the term immigration. There's a moral aspect to immigration today where people, Christians in

00:44:39 – 00:44:48:	particular who have adopted the frame of the the left will take what was once a stranger,

00:44:48 – 00:44:54:	what was once an alien, which what was once a person sneaking across the border in the middle

00:44:54 – 00:45:02:	of the night illegally for the purpose of coming into our country and taking our money on welfare

00:45:02 – 00:45:08:	and stealing our jobs by stealing social security numbers and identities so that they could get

00:45:08 – 00:45:14:	away with it. That's a series of criminality by a criminal who's illegally in a place where

00:45:14 – 00:45:21:	they're not welcome where they do not belong. And the reframe is to say, well, that's an immigrant.

00:45:21 – 00:45:28:	And immigrant is a really powerful word word because the root of it is migrate. And even if people

00:45:28 – 00:45:34:	don't think explicitly in these terms, we sort of know instinctively when you hear immigrant,

00:45:34 – 00:45:41:	you hear migrate and you think, well, you know, large animals migrate like bear and moose may migrate,

00:45:41 – 00:45:47:	elk migrate, birds migrate. Well, if that's happening in nature, that's a perfectly natural thing

00:45:47 – 00:45:54:	to happen. Therefore, it must be perfectly natural for people to migrate. And of course, we know in

00:45:54 – 00:45:59:	the past that there have been migrations of people following herds typically. Yeah, it's when the

00:45:59 – 00:46:05:	American Indians would migrate. It wasn't because they were looking for welfare in another state.

00:46:05 – 00:46:10:	It's because they were following the bison herd. Bison would migrate. They would mood with them

00:46:10 – 00:46:18:	because that was their source of food and fuel and clothing. So you have a category of people who

00:46:19 – 00:46:28:	are engaging in criminal activity. They're rightfully called alien. Alien is the legal term for them.

00:46:28 – 00:46:35:	It is the normal English term for them. But that word has not only fallen out of disfavor,

00:46:35 – 00:46:41:	but it's actively attacked to say that someone is an alien. Well, you know, now we have, you know,

00:46:41 – 00:46:48:	UFO stuff in pop culture. So to say a person is an alien, you're accused of dehumanizing them.

00:46:48 – 00:46:56:	When that's not the case, an alien is a stranger. An alien is alienated. They are in one place where

00:46:56 – 00:47:02:	they do not belong, separated from the place where they do belong. But when you reframe and you

00:47:02 – 00:47:07:	call them an immigrant, well, suddenly that's a natural thing. Immigrating. Well, I mean, that's

00:47:07 – 00:47:12:	where we're a nation of immigrants, right? We were all immigrants at one point. Well, my family

00:47:12 – 00:47:17:	wasn't. My family was year over four years ago. They built the place that others immigrated to.

00:47:18 – 00:47:26:	So that reframe lets you get away from the question of, are these people breaking the law?

00:47:26 – 00:47:31:	Are these people coming with hostile intent? Regardless of whether they're breaking the law

00:47:31 – 00:47:35:	or coming with hostile intent, do they have any business being here in the first place?

00:47:36 – 00:47:41:	And when you reframe and say, oh, well, they're immigrants, the natural inclination in the mind

00:47:41 – 00:47:48:	of the here is say, well, of course, everyone's welcome. America is is not a nation. It has no,

00:47:48 – 00:47:53:	there's no posterity here. As we talked about in the episode on Christian nationalism,

00:47:53 – 00:47:59:	it's a shopping mall. All you have to do is sign the guest book that says you take the oath of

00:47:59 – 00:48:05:	citizenship and ta-da, you're an American. That's how we all became American, right? No. There's

00:48:05 – 00:48:11:	not remotely what happened, but it's what is thought in the modern mind today because of the reframe.

00:48:12 – 00:48:22:	And Christians will go even a step further. They will take this leftist framing of the illegal alien

00:48:23 – 00:48:27:	cast them as an immigrant. And what does the Christian want to do once to morally justify it?

00:48:28 – 00:48:34:	So even though the genealogy of the idea of these people being immigrants comes from hostile

00:48:34 – 00:48:42:	foreign powers seeking to destabilize our country, the naive or the malicious Christian will go

00:48:42 – 00:48:47:	to scripture and find passages about sojourners and say, well, gosh, I mean, these immigrants,

00:48:47 – 00:48:52:	these modern immigrants, that's just sojourning. That's straight from scripture. And sojourners

00:48:52 – 00:48:57:	are protected by God. It's a, it's a blessed thing, right? I mean, it's in the Bible as a good thing.

00:48:57 – 00:49:03:	So therefore, we as Christians cannot oppose it or we stand condemned. So they will shift the

00:49:03 – 00:49:09:	overtune window even further from alien used to be normal. Now it's bad. Immigration and immigrant

00:49:09 – 00:49:14:	are good, but sojourners best when, whenever you're criticized by a Christian because

00:49:15 – 00:49:22:	who can argue with the Bible? Well, it's funny when you look at the word that's you, the word in

00:49:22 – 00:49:30:	Hebrew that is sometimes translated sojourner in most of the translations. It also means alien.

00:49:30 – 00:49:36:	It means foreigner. It means people who are, again, they're alienated. They are not where they

00:49:36 – 00:49:46:	belong. And the passages where God exhorts Israel to protect the sojourner, it would be as though

00:49:46 – 00:49:57:	if I found Mexicans who had snuck across the border in my backyard, the prohibitions that God

00:49:57 – 00:50:03:	gives to protect sojourners would exhort me not to go beat them and steal their stuff just because

00:50:03 – 00:50:08:	they don't belong here. That hasn't changed. That should not be in the heart of a Christian. If you

00:50:08 – 00:50:13:	find someone who doesn't belong where they are, you shouldn't set upon them because they're in

00:50:13 – 00:50:19:	outlaw and seek to harm them. That doesn't mean that you should not seek to write the wrong that

00:50:19 – 00:50:26:	they have done by being where they are in a place that they shouldn't be. And so it's funny what

00:50:27 – 00:50:34:	the passages on sojourners also say things like, if a sojourner blasphemes, you were to stone him to

00:50:34 – 00:50:41:	death. Now, do these guys who exhort us to love and to cherish the sojourner on our land

00:50:41 – 00:50:47:	want to listen to that part of the Bible? Because if they're advocating that we execute blasphemers,

00:50:47 – 00:50:53:	I'm all in. You send all the sojourners if you want. If we can execute blasphemers on our lands,

00:50:53 – 00:50:59:	that is what Christian nations should be doing. Now, again, I'm not advocating for an individual

00:50:59 – 00:51:08:	to harm anyone, but the state should properly execute blasphemers and as Lutherans, we totally

00:51:08 – 00:51:12:	ignore this because again, we don't want to believe our own confessions or the Bible. We just want

00:51:12 – 00:51:18:	to believe the parts that will advocate our political positions. The confessions directly talk

00:51:18 – 00:51:24:	about blasphemers being executed by a godly prince and it is commended and it is said that it is

00:51:24 – 00:51:31:	necessary. Yeah, that is in a number of places in the confessions anywhere you see, depending on which

00:51:31 – 00:51:37:	translation you have, you may see Hangman or you may see Master Hans. And that's just the German

00:51:37 – 00:51:42:	euphemism for the Hangman. And even in the fourth commandment about obeying your parents,

00:51:42 – 00:51:46:	that is mentioned, if you will not obey God, if you not obey your parents, then obey the Hangman.

00:51:47 – 00:51:53:	This is a very serious matter and realistically most of the so-called immigrants that we have in

00:51:53 – 00:51:59:	this country would be subject to execution as blasphemers. Very few of them are Christian.

00:52:00 – 00:52:06:	There are some, certainly there are some, but we have a lot of Muslims and others coming across

00:52:06 – 00:52:13:	the border who are very much not Christian and are very much blasphemers. But just to go back briefly

00:52:13 – 00:52:20:	to the issue of if you find foreigners in your lands, the treatment they deserve, the treatment they

00:52:20 – 00:52:26:	weren't is going to depend on whether they are in fact sojourners, if they are passing through for

00:52:26 – 00:52:33:	some reason, then you have to figure out why they're passing through. But in our case today,

00:52:33 – 00:52:41:	many of them are just outright invaders. They are here to plunder and that's war, that's not a

00:52:41 – 00:52:47:	sojourner. So they would deserve very different treatment from a sojourner. They are not subject to

00:52:47 – 00:52:52:	the biblical injunctions with regard to sojourners. They would be subject to the biblical injunctions with

00:52:52 – 00:53:00:	regard to enemies. And you know the etymology of sojourner, but most people probably want, and this

00:53:00 – 00:53:08:	is where I want to get back to what a powerful reframing it is to reframe the alien to the immigrant

00:53:08 – 00:53:11:	and then the immigrant to the sojourner to bind the conscience of the Christian.

00:53:12 – 00:53:17:	To sojourn, the definition when it came into the English language was to stay temporarily

00:53:17 – 00:53:24:	to reside for a time, to visit. And it came from Latin, from the word subterranare,

00:53:25 – 00:53:31:	where the root there is diurnal. You might know that, it has to do with a day. Sojourn is an

00:53:31 – 00:53:38:	entirely temporary thing. And in fact in scripture it was a legal category. The notion of someone

00:53:38 – 00:53:43:	sneaking into your lands and then just doing whatever and being welcomed was alien. If someone

00:53:43 – 00:53:48:	snuck into your lands, they would be properly executed. If they were a sojourner, they had a legal

00:53:48 – 00:53:54:	right effectively the the ancient version of a green card saying that they were permitted in that

00:53:54 – 00:53:59:	land while they were there. They were subject to that land's laws. And that they had to leave.

00:53:59 – 00:54:05:	It was a temporary status. So note the note the powerful reframing that these

00:54:06 – 00:54:11:	so-called Christians are doing where they reframe the immigrant as a sojourner.

00:54:12 – 00:54:16:	They're trying to bind consciences by saying, well, this is a biblical category, ignoring the fact

00:54:16 – 00:54:23:	that the biblical category was implicitly and necessarily temporary. If these were actually

00:54:23 – 00:54:27:	immigrants, if they were migrating, there's no such thing. There's no one migrating into North

00:54:27 – 00:54:34:	America today. That's not a thing. But even if they were migrating, they would continue to move.

00:54:34 – 00:54:39:	As you said, Corey, that's not their goal. Their goal is to come here and to stay and to have anchor

00:54:39 – 00:54:46:	babies and to get jobs and to get homes, displacing our own brothers according to the flesh who can no

00:54:46 – 00:54:51:	longer afford homes because people who have been subsidized or receiving them. And then to

00:54:52 – 00:54:57:	ta-da, they've become American in a couple generations and then no one can argue with that.

00:54:58 – 00:55:04:	That's the power of reframing. You can take something that was once not only unthinkable,

00:55:04 – 00:55:10:	but illegal and subject to death and turn it into a morally protected category that a Christian

00:55:10 – 00:55:18:	is told he is obligated to defend or he'll go to hell. So that reframe, that's a nilis that

00:55:18 – 00:55:24:	reframe. That is something that's evil is done with the intent of harming us as a nation, as a

00:55:24 – 00:55:31:	people. But it's a beautiful example, I think, of the power of doing it. If you take someone who's

00:55:31 – 00:55:35:	an alien, well, aliens, like, they should go away, immigrant. Well, I don't know. I mean,

00:55:35 – 00:55:41:	I wore my ancestors' immigrants. I'm not sure what to do about that. And then they get upgraded

00:55:41 – 00:55:47:	to Sojourner, ignoring the fact that Sojourner's had to leave. Well, if it's a Sojourner, you know,

00:55:47 – 00:55:53:	I got to give him my cloak, right? I mean, Jesus says, you're the God said that they should be,

00:55:53 – 00:55:57:	you should love them as you love yourself. Now, that meant that you shouldn't starve them,

00:55:57 – 00:56:01:	you shouldn't beat them, you shouldn't take advantage of them. It didn't mean that they got

00:56:01 – 00:56:07:	to live on your couch. And that's what these guys who will call these people Sojourners or even

00:56:07 – 00:56:12:	immigrants are trying to do. They're trying to say that, well, sure, maybe I couldn't force someone

00:56:12 – 00:56:17:	to live on your couch, but I can sort of force someone to live in your country because we got a lot

00:56:17 – 00:56:24:	of room. That's basically their argument. That is an overthrow of the law. It is an overthrow of

00:56:25 – 00:56:32:	of what is the right of every nation to protect its borders, to protect its own people against

00:56:32 – 00:56:40:	foreign invaders. And invaders doesn't necessarily imply intent. It doesn't need intent. If they're

00:56:40 – 00:56:48:	there and they don't belong, they're invading, they're doing harm by virtue of being in a place.

00:56:48 – 00:56:53:	And yet what we're saying here is outside the over 10 window mouth. This like the things that we're

00:56:53 – 00:56:59:	saying are categorized as evil and unthinkable, whereas calling them Sojourners and immigrants,

00:56:59 – 00:57:06:	even though neither word applies, that is the only accepted form of discourse. That is the power

00:57:06 – 00:57:13:	of frame. That is the power of reframing the discussion in your own terms of the contract,

00:57:13 – 00:57:17:	the Constitution can say whatever you want. I'm going to redefine the terms and I'm going to get

00:57:17 – 00:57:25:	the outcome that I desire. In some ways, I actually prefer the left on these issues, not in terms

00:57:25 – 00:57:31:	of what they believe, but in terms of how they behave. And the reason I prefer them is because

00:57:31 – 00:57:40:	they're just more honest. If a leftist is arguing against slavery, for instance, an issue that does

00:57:40 – 00:57:47:	come up, he will simply flatly say that all of our ancestors who practiced slavery or at least

00:57:47 – 00:57:53:	approved of slavery did not condemn slavery were evil men. And some of them will even say evil men

00:57:53 – 00:57:57:	who are now burning in hell, which coming from a leftist is rich, but that's a separate matter.

00:57:58 – 00:58:07:	I prefer that to what we get from some supposed Christians who will not argue, honestly,

00:58:07 – 00:58:12:	will not say that what these men did was evil from the perspective, the wrong perspective,

00:58:12 – 00:58:17:	but the perspective of the person advancing the point. He'll say, well, they were mistaken.

00:58:17 – 00:58:24:	They didn't understand this long list of excuses, which is ridiculous because our ancestors by and

00:58:24 – 00:58:30:	large were better educated, more Christian men. They knew better than modern Christians.

00:58:31 – 00:58:35:	And yet Christians today will try to condemn these men, but they won't do it honestly. So I

00:58:35 – 00:58:39:	prefer the leftist to will just honestly come out and tell me that he wants to kill me. The

00:58:39 – 00:58:46:	honesty is a little refreshing sometimes. Yeah, and they're not lying in the name of God,

00:58:46 – 00:58:51:	which is the biggest problem in the church, where these people are trying to bind consciences.

00:58:52 – 00:58:58:	Yes, which is deadly, particularly to the Christian, because again, if the Christian doesn't understand

00:58:58 – 00:59:05:	how a subject is being reframed, if they don't understand how the discourse has been altered

00:59:05 – 00:59:13:	in its terms to leave them with no out, well, you do find that your conscience is bound.

00:59:13 – 00:59:17:	If you don't really think about it, and if you just sort of trust what your betters,

00:59:17 – 00:59:23:	what your pastors and others tell you, you have no out. And so the reason that we advocate

00:59:23 – 00:59:30:	understanding frame is that as we talked about last week, God commands us to be as wise as

00:59:30 – 00:59:38:	serpents and as innocent as doves. In terms of the illegal alien on your in the land, the your

00:59:38 – 00:59:43:	ancestors owned, you should be as innocent as doves in terms of not going out and beating them

00:59:43 – 00:59:48:	and stealing from them. And you should be as wise as serpents in terms of understanding that they are

00:59:48 – 00:59:53:	aliens who do not belong there and must be physically removed. And that both of those are

00:59:53 – 00:59:58:	godly things, not to hurt them, not to beat them and not to hate them. And that's the thing,

59:58 – 01:00:04
that it's not hate to say that you showed up on welcome and you're living on my couch now,

01:00:04 – 01:00:12:	you need to leave. It's not hate for me to tell you to get out. It's my right as a Christian

01:00:12 – 01:00:17:	to say it's time for you to go. Even if you were welcome for a short period of time, even if you

01:00:17 – 01:00:22:	were welcome to sojourn on my couch, if I invited a friend over and he spent the night, that's great.

01:00:22 – 01:00:28:	If he spends a year, we're going to have a different conversation. And it's not that my morals have

01:00:28 – 01:00:33:	changed is that the conduct of the other person has has altered the equation and the Christian

01:00:33 – 01:00:41:	who is wise as a serpent is free and is obligated to understand these things and then to act in a

01:00:41 – 01:00:46:	Christian way. And that is not to be bound in your conscience by men playing rhetorical tricks

01:00:47 – 01:00:53:	on you that will get you bound up and in knots. So you don't know what to do, but you probably

01:00:53 – 01:00:57:	just got to go along with it because what they said sounded pretty Jesusy and you don't want to go to

01:00:57 – 01:01:03:	hell. You don't want to be mean. When it comes to the use and the abuse of so many of these terms,

01:01:03 – 01:01:08:	the left obviously don't care. They've gone all in on the redefining terms in order to shift the

01:01:08 – 01:01:12:	window as we have been discussing. And that is one of their tactics, of course, is just redefining

01:01:13 – 01:01:19:	terms. If you redefine the terms of what is unthinkable into something that is

01:01:20 – 01:01:26:	will not acceptable yet, but maybe not totally unthinkable, you've moved the overton window

01:01:26 – 01:01:31:	without actually having to do anything other than change the term, which can be very effective.

01:01:32 – 01:01:37:	And it is important for Christians to notice when that is being done. Someone who is playing

01:01:37 – 01:01:43:	fast and loose with terms is probably trying to deceive you. He could just be stupid. That does

01:01:43 – 01:01:50:	happen, but he probably is trying to deceive you. He probably is acting out of Alice. So Christians

01:01:50 – 01:01:57:	have to be, again, wise as serpents. An example of this that is happening. And this is something

01:01:57 – 01:02:01:	that would actually probably, if I, this something if I said while I was living in Germany, I could

01:02:01 – 01:02:07:	potentially be deported from Germany for saying it. There is a term in German for someone

01:02:07 – 01:02:15:	who has moved to Germany and been given citizenship, but isn't German. It's Papiodeuch,

01:02:15 – 01:02:20:	a paper German. And you could use the same thing, and you could call paper Americans, someone who

01:02:20 – 01:02:24:	has a piece of paper saying, I'm an American, but that piece of paper doesn't really make you

01:02:24 – 01:02:28:	American. That's not what it means to be American. It means something more as we've discussed in

01:02:28 – 01:02:35:	other episodes. But that term is something that you aren't allowed to use in Germany because it

01:02:35 – 01:02:40:	is considered hate speech. And if you engage in hate speech as someone who is sojourning in Germany,

01:02:40 – 01:02:46:	someone who is not a legal citizen, you can be kicked out of the country. You can have your

01:02:46 – 01:02:53:	paperwork revoked. But what I want the point I want to make here is they're trying to redefine

01:02:53 – 01:03:00:	that term. They are taking it from the traditional sense of someone who is German only because of

01:03:00 – 01:03:11:	the piece of paper to mean German officialies, the legalistic style of some German documents.

01:03:12 – 01:03:19:	They're doing exactly what happened in 1984. They're trying to change the terms, the definitions

01:03:19 – 01:03:28:	of the terms so that the crime thing is impossible. Just remove the definition of the word. And you

01:03:28 – 01:03:32:	can see this happening in real time. There are people who know exactly what this word means,

01:03:32 – 01:03:37:	what it's supposed to mean. But now it's starting to pop up with the other definition

01:03:37 – 01:03:43:	in dictionaries. And so that is one of the ways you can move this window. You can reframe things.

01:03:43 – 01:03:48:	You don't have to use new terms. You don't have to use new arguments. Just redefine things.

01:03:48 – 01:03:57:	And you can move. We see that today. Homosexual marriage. They redefined what marriage means.

01:03:58 – 01:04:07:	Marriage means a man and a woman. Now it doesn't because now legally it means a man and a woman

01:04:07 – 01:04:11:	or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. And soon, who knows what else will be added to that

01:04:11 – 01:04:17:	definition? Five men, one woman, five men and a donkey. They'll change it. They'll keep changing the

01:04:17 – 01:04:25:	term and make the unthinkable acceptable and then the acceptable into policy. You mentioned a

01:04:25 – 01:04:31:	minute ago that there's sometimes when people are doing this and that's a good example of duplicity

01:04:31 – 01:04:38:	of utter dishonesty. I want to read a passage here and this is the worst case for someone

01:04:39 – 01:04:47:	deliberately reframing an argument and using whatever rhetorical trick they can to deceive you

01:04:47 – 01:04:52:	where you're interacting with them. You are hopefully a Christian. You're trying to be honest.

01:04:52 – 01:04:57:	You're trying to pursue truth. The person that you're talking with, see if any of these

01:04:57 – 01:05:03:	descriptions sound familiar to anyone that you've ever interacted with where you're trying to

01:05:03 – 01:05:12:	argue in good faith and they were trying to chuck and drive and to land blows and to stab and to

01:05:12 – 01:05:19:	faint and to win a fight not to seek truth but simply to win the argument. Listen to this and see

01:05:19 – 01:05:26:	if it rings true for your own personal experience. The more I debated with them, the more familiar I

01:05:26 – 01:05:31:	became with their argumentative tactics. At the outset, they counted upon the stupidity of their

01:05:31 – 01:05:36:	opponents but when they got so entangled that they could not find the way out, they played the

01:05:36 – 01:05:42:	trick of acting as innocent simpletons. Should they fail in spite of their tricks of logic, they

01:05:42 – 01:05:46:	acted as if they could not understand the counter arguments and bolted away to another field of

01:05:46 – 01:05:51:	discussion. They would lay down truisms and platitudes and if you accepted these, then they

01:05:51 – 01:05:56:	would be applied to other problems and matters of an essentially different nature from the

01:05:56 – 01:06:01:	inoriginal theme. If you faced them with this point, they would escape again and you could not

01:06:01 – 01:06:07:	bring them to make any precise statement. Whenever one tried to get a firm grip on any of these

01:06:07 – 01:06:12:	apostles, one's hand grabs only jelly and slime which slipped through the fingers and combined

01:06:12 – 01:06:19:	again into a solid mass, moments afterwards. If your adversary fell forced to give in to your

01:06:19 – 01:06:24:	argument on account of the observer's present, and if you then thought the last you had gained

01:06:24 – 01:06:29:	ground, a surprise was in store for you in the following day. They would be utterly oblivious

01:06:29 – 01:06:34:	to what had happened the day before and would start once again by repleting the former absurdities

01:06:34 – 01:06:40:	as if nothing had happened. Should you become indignant and remind him of yesterday's defeat,

01:06:40 – 01:06:45:	he pretended astonishment and could not remember saying anything except that on the previous day,

01:06:45 – 01:06:51:	he had proved his statements were correct. Sometimes I was dubfounded. I do not know what amazed me

01:06:51 – 01:06:56:	more, the abundance of the verbiage or the artful way in which they dressed up their falsehoods.

01:06:57 – 01:07:02:	Now, I've argued with people like that in the past and I didn't know what was going on. It was

01:07:02 – 01:07:08:	very frustrating because again, I was arguing in good faith I wanted to pursue the truth. Even if

01:07:08 – 01:07:13:	the truth was that I was wrong and I needed to be clarified by the other person making a different

01:07:13 – 01:07:22:	point, what I got instead was insanity. For a while, it drove me insane. I couldn't understand

01:07:22 – 01:07:30:	the mindset of the person I was talking to because it was an alien form of thought and reading that

01:07:30 – 01:07:36:	quote was really revelatory because in the context of framing, it was like, yes, well, that's exactly

01:07:36 – 01:07:42:	what happens in so many of these discussions. The person who was talking in that passage was

01:07:42 – 01:07:51:	talking about one group, but it's a form of discourse, of dialogue that has kind of become normal

01:07:51 – 01:07:58:	today where again, people want to win. They don't want to pursue truth and that's never what any

01:07:58 – 01:08:03:	Christian person should pursue. You should want to be right. And if that means you have to change

01:08:03 – 01:08:08:	your mind, then change your mind. If you're wrong, you need to repent. You need to get on the right

01:08:08 – 01:08:15:	side of things. But just because someone is, seems to be making a convincing argument, take a look

01:08:15 – 01:08:21:	at their givens, take a look at whether they've reframed in such a way that you have no choice but

01:08:21 – 01:08:26:	to agree with them because they've hemmed you in. If you get hemmed in by someone who's being

01:08:26 – 01:08:33:	duplicitous and deceptive, you will end up confessing falsely to something that is evil.

01:08:33 – 01:08:39:	And you'll do it with a clean conscious, if not maybe a troubled one, but you'll do it willingly

01:08:39 – 01:08:44:	because you felt like you had no choice because of the conversation that led to that point.

01:08:44 – 01:08:52:	So the convincing arguments that are that you accept, it's not enough for them to be convincing.

01:08:52 – 01:08:59:	They have to be valid. They have to be based on actual reason and not on emotional appeals or

01:08:59 – 01:09:03:	on the twisting of language so that you have no choice but to agree with something that

01:09:04 – 01:09:08:	if you had had it presented to you in a different way, and it is in the case of,

01:09:08 – 01:09:12:	you know, do you want the small medium or large? If there'd only been the smaller large,

01:09:12 – 01:09:16:	you would have chosen differently. But because you was presented to you in a certain way,

01:09:17 – 01:09:20:	in your mind's eye, you were kind of hemmed in. There was only one obvious choice.

01:09:21 – 01:09:27:	Don't let that happen when you're talking to someone because it opens you up to manipulation,

01:09:27 – 01:09:31:	to abuse, to being deceived. And if you can be deceived, you can be damned.

01:09:32 – 01:09:37:	Satan wants to trick you. And as we talked about last week, any trick will do.

01:09:37 – 01:09:43:	Big one small one like as long as you start buying into lies, which includes reframing falsely,

01:09:43 – 01:09:48:	you will eventually slide far enough down the slope that you can't even see that you are

01:09:49 – 01:09:54:	sitting side by side with Satan and with his friends and doing things that you never would have

01:09:54 – 01:10:00:	done if you had not been tricked those years before by that one simple real little reframe of a

01:10:00 – 01:10:05:	word that you didn't really think about it. And so you bought it and everything that flows from

01:10:05 – 01:10:12:	that naturally. Yes, it's a slippery slope, but slopes are real. If you've ever been on a hill

01:10:12 – 01:10:19:	that was icy, slippery slope is it's inexorable. Once you lose your grip, you're going down the hill

01:10:19 – 01:10:25:	and you're not going to stop until you hit something at the bottom. And we see that with so many

01:10:25 – 01:10:32:	things that have happened in the relatively recent past, homosexual marriage is a great example

01:10:32 – 01:10:43:	because the initial requests were not demands really, but they were not for equal so-called

01:10:43 – 01:10:50:	recognition under the law. The initial demands were that those in a homosexual relationship should

01:10:50 – 01:10:57:	have some of the same legal rights as those in an actual marriage. And so it was well,

01:10:57 – 01:11:05:	life insurance should permit you to name your so-called husband if you're a man. And so people

01:11:05 – 01:11:11:	didn't object to that. That seemed like a minor thing. Okay, fine, we can make that change. And then

01:11:11 – 01:11:18:	the demand was that, well, health insurance benefits should cover your partner so-called. And so we

01:11:18 – 01:11:25:	made that change and on and on and on and on. And eventually you get to today where you have

01:11:25 – 01:11:33:	marriage redefined, you have Christian adoption agencies being driven out of their work. And so

01:11:33 – 01:11:40:	you have children who could have been adopted into good families who will not because they are

01:11:40 – 01:11:44:	accused of discriminating under the law because they will not adopt out to homosexuals.

01:11:47 – 01:11:51:	The slope is almost always slippery and it just gets worse.

01:11:51 – 01:11:57:	And all of those steps along the way, each of those concessions was perfectly reasonable.

01:11:57 – 01:12:01:	Like, oh, well, that makes perfect sense. That's just a small thing. Why wouldn't we do that?

01:12:01 – 01:12:07:	There's no harm in that. The harm was done the very moment that any man, woman, or child conceded

01:12:08 – 01:12:16:	that marriage was not the sexual union of a man and a woman blessed by God for the purpose of

01:12:16 – 01:12:23:	procreation. As soon as that definition was abandoned, as soon as it could be any other permutation,

01:12:23 – 01:12:29:	the whole shooting match was lost. And everything that happened downstream, down the slope,

01:12:29 – 01:12:36:	down that isely slippery murderous slope was inevitable because you gave away the whole thing

01:12:36 – 01:12:44:	at the starting bell. You gave away the fight when you gave away what it meant to actually be

01:12:44 – 01:12:51:	married, which is a sexual union between a man and a woman. That, when it is listed, is the

01:12:51 – 01:12:57:	foundation of society, all of it. It's the foundation of the family. It's the foundation of the state.

01:12:57 – 01:13:02:	And guess what? The people who seek the destruction of the state, who seek the destruction of the

01:13:02 – 01:13:07:	family for the sake of doing evil. They know what they're doing. Satan knows what he's doing by

01:13:07 – 01:13:12:	undermining this. So when they say, oh, love is love. Let me show you this rainbow, which by the

01:13:12 – 01:13:17:	way is not really a rainbow. It's got six colors. God's rainbow have seven colors. Think about

01:13:17 – 01:13:23:	this later on what the significance of those number changes are because that matters. When they

01:13:23 – 01:13:29:	have these false flags, literally, that they, these banners that they fly and these slogans that

01:13:29 – 01:13:35:	they chant, they're all reasonable. They're all pretty. They always appear as an angel of light.

01:13:36 – 01:13:44:	And it's the premise that they're trying to sell that is the deadly poison. And Christians who are not

01:13:45 – 01:13:52:	aware of how these fights are actually taking place in the world are spiritually and intellectually

01:13:52 – 01:13:59:	disarmed. And they're vulnerable to not only not fighting evil, but to actively participating in

01:13:59 – 01:14:05:	evil with a clear conscience. Because if you buy the frame of the evil, then it becomes yours.

01:14:06 – 01:14:11:	And suddenly you go find a Bible verse that it turns out, said that that was moral all along.

01:14:11 – 01:14:15:	And why did we notice that before? Well, great. Thank God for this progress that we've made in our

01:14:15 – 01:14:21:	religion. Where now we have we have new and more moral ways of doing things. Christianity does not

01:14:21 – 01:14:27:	progress. Christianity does not evolve. Christianity does not have more morality today than yesterday.

01:14:27 – 01:14:34:	If you want to try to be more moral than God, you're going to go to hell. And I often speak like

01:14:34 – 01:14:44:	this and I don't mean to be brutal or blunt or forceful for the sake of drama or something. But

01:14:45 – 01:14:50:	again, the slippery slope is real. You buy you into a little thing. You're going to get what comes

01:14:50 – 01:14:55:	along with it because you're going down that icy hill. You don't have any breaks. There's nothing

01:14:55 – 01:15:01:	you can do except for spin and hit something at the bottom. You don't have a choice except for

01:15:01 – 01:15:06:	not going over the hill in the first place. And that requires knowing that there's a hill there

01:15:06 – 01:15:11:	that it's icy and that there's damnation at the bottom of it. And yes, I'm mixing my metaphors

01:15:11 – 01:15:19:	terribly. I love doing that. But it's this is life and death stuff of the soul, not only of the body.

01:15:19 – 01:15:25:	It's not just that will society is going to get a little bit worse. It's that these people who can

01:15:25 – 01:15:32:	get you to agree to evil things. They're getting you to deny God. They're reframing in such a way

01:15:32 – 01:15:37:	that it sounds Jesusy and it sounds loving and it sounds nice. And if you fall for their refram,

01:15:38 – 01:15:43:	it becomes your religion and you call that religion Christianity when the genesis, the genealogy

01:15:43 – 01:15:49:	of that religion is Satan. It's not God. These things are not found in scripture. None of them.

01:15:49 – 01:15:54:	They are found in the world. They are found in the mouths of the most evil people in the world.

01:15:54 – 01:16:01:	And the fact that they're being found in the mouths of Christians is horrifying and it needs to stop.

01:16:01 – 01:16:07:	And it will only stop when people recognize and speak against these sorts of evils. When it starts,

01:16:07 – 01:16:12:	not when it gets so bad that you're like, oh, wow, we got to do something about it now. You fight

01:16:12 – 01:16:17:	the first moment that the reframe occurs. You fight the moment that the evil is introduced. Not

01:16:17 – 01:16:22:	when everyone suddenly realizes how bad it could actually get. But then it's going to be too late.

01:16:22 – 01:16:27:	And in the case of homosexual marriage, where we basically capitulated,

01:16:28 – 01:16:35:	wasn't actually with the pride parades, which is noteworthy because what they call the pride parades.

01:16:35 – 01:16:41:	Satan's mask is never perfect. He always lets things slip. If you have people doing what they do

01:16:41 – 01:16:49:	at pride parades and calling them pride parades, maybe think about that and mortal sin. But where

01:16:49 – 01:16:59:	we actually capitulated had almost nothing to do with homosexuality, we capitulated when we stopped

01:16:59 – 01:17:06:	opposing birth control. Because that's where we undermine the nature of marriage, what it meant

01:17:07 – 01:17:14:	to be man and wife, what it meant to have a family. And from there, that was the beginning of

01:17:14 – 01:17:22:	the slippery slope. Because once you decouple marriage from procreation, well, then why does it

01:17:22 – 01:17:29:	matter if you literally cannot procreate in this union? And that was the beginning of the slippery

01:17:29 – 01:17:37:	slope when it came to this particular issue. And some Christians did fight that battle. We do

01:17:37 – 01:17:43:	have to give credit. The LCMS fought long and hard on that one. The boomers capitulated,

01:17:44 – 01:17:53:	largely in the 60s. But before that, our forebears did fight that issue. They didn't win, but they tried.

01:17:54 – 01:18:02:	And it's important to note, as Christians, God does not tell us, go win the battle. In fact,

01:18:02 – 01:18:06:	a lot of times he tells us to go lose the battle. But you still have to fight the battle.

01:18:06 – 01:18:11:	God is the one who will fight for you and he and exactly you never give up, you keep fighting.

01:18:11 – 01:18:17:	God may carry the day for you, he may not. Ultimately, he will. But you don't have the option

01:18:17 – 01:18:24:	to stop fighting. Make the enemy bleed for every inch. Because the enemy will not stop fighting

01:18:24 – 01:18:31:	and neither Christians, we are not permitted to do that. God is truth, beauty, goodness, truth. We

01:18:31 – 01:18:35:	will keep bringing up the transcendentals until people are saying them in their sleep.

01:18:36 – 01:18:44:	If you yield on the truth, you are necessarily yielding on God because God is truth. There is no

01:18:44 – 01:18:50:	falsehood in God. There are no lies in God. Lies cannot stand in his presence. And so if you are

01:18:50 – 01:18:56:	buying into the lies of the world, you are buying into things that are against God, you are opposing

01:18:56 – 01:19:03:	God. You are renouncing Him. And that is why these things matter. That is why you do not let people

01:19:03 – 01:19:10:	reframe things and shift things away from what was good, what is good. Because good doesn't change.

01:19:10 – 01:19:14:	The truth doesn't change. Beauty doesn't change. Because God doesn't change.

01:19:16 – 01:19:23:	You're absolutely right about contraception, about birth control. And that led to normalizing divorce.

01:19:23 – 01:19:29:	Because if it wasn't about procreation and the formation of families, then it just becomes

01:19:29 – 01:19:35:	a social arrangement. It becomes a financial arrangement. And maybe in some cases divorce should

01:19:35 – 01:19:40:	be allowed. We have plenty of pastors who are divorced. And even though that is an ontological

01:19:40 – 01:19:48:	impossibility, it is something that is virtually never spoken against today. The majority of our

01:19:48 – 01:19:53:	pastors use birth control is demonstrated by the fact that most of them don't have seven or eight

01:19:53 – 01:20:00:	kids. You can tell which pastors have a scriptural view of birth control by how many kids they have.

01:20:00 – 01:20:07:	Yeah, these are millennials. These are guys who may still be having kids in five or ten years.

01:20:07 – 01:20:11:	Some of them end up with clans of 20 and I hope they do because there are some of the best theologians

01:20:11 – 01:20:16:	that we have in the Missouri Senate today. Those are the guys who are filling pews. It's the guy

01:20:16 – 01:20:22:	with one kid and then another adopted one from Venezuela that is the real problem because he

01:20:22 – 01:20:29:	didn't just capitulate on one evil thing. He capitulated on a whole bunch of them because as you

01:20:29 – 01:20:39:	said, there are no lies in God. The morality, the religion of today, which is not Christianity,

01:20:39 – 01:20:45:	says that hate is evil. That killing is evil. Per se. Those things are utterly impermissible

01:20:45 – 01:20:52:	under any circumstances and that lying or that adopting false beliefs, well, you know, lies,

01:20:52 – 01:20:58:	but you know, beliefs are malleable. They can be whatever. When you read scripture, you will find

01:20:58 – 01:21:06:	that God hates. There are things that God hates. To hate is one of the properties of God. It is not

01:21:06 – 01:21:11:	the one that we emphasize because that would be bad news for us. We want to emphasize the gospel

01:21:11 – 01:21:19:	and not the law, but God hates whatever is contrary to God's nature. Sin, which is contrary to God's

01:21:19 – 01:21:27:	nature, he hates. God will kill you because of your sin, which he hates. And he will kill you because

01:21:27 – 01:21:33:	he loves you because just as Adam was cast from the garden so that he can no longer eat from the

01:21:33 – 01:21:39:	tree of life because then he would have lived forever alienated from God. What God did was he

01:21:39 – 01:21:47:	sent him away so that he could die so that the sin and the evil in Adam's life would have a

01:21:47 – 01:21:53:	finite end that could then be redeemed by Christ, propitiating sacrifice on the cross and that

01:21:53 – 01:21:58:	in eternity, Adam would be given a new body and you would be given a new body and we will be

01:21:58 – 01:22:04:	given a second chance where there's no chance of sin where all we can possibly do is obey God. But

01:22:04 – 01:22:13:	that love of God does not negate the fact that God hates and God kills as well. God killed everyone

01:22:13 – 01:22:20:	on the planet and an act of hatred for their evil in the flood. Apart from eight people, four men

01:22:20 – 01:22:26:	and four women were spared from the flood for the sake of continuing the promise of Genesis 315

01:22:26 – 01:22:34:	that he would send her a deemer in the fullness of time. So God will hate and God will kill

01:22:34 – 01:22:41:	God will never lie. There's no portion of any lie that is possible anywhere in God. And yet

01:22:41 – 01:22:48:	today we've inverted that. We've said that God never, never hates. God never, never kills. But God,

01:22:48 – 01:22:54:	yeah, I mean, morality changes. If morality changes, then God's a liar. That's really what you're

01:22:54 – 01:23:01:	saying. And so these things that we call Christianity, we call morality, they're not from God. The

01:23:01 – 01:23:10:	genealogy of those things has another source. And reframing those evil things in Christian terms

01:23:10 – 01:23:15:	by sprinkling Jesus dust on evil stuff, you know, reframs and lets people who are Christians

01:23:15 – 01:23:21:	who are not being wise of serpent, who are just being lazy and gullible, let's them fall for

01:23:21 – 01:23:27:	things that will ultimately separate your soul from God and eternity. And no one wants that.

01:23:27 – 01:23:31:	There's nothing more hateful than wanting someone to go to hell. We shouldn't we're forbidden to

01:23:31 – 01:23:38:	that. And it's sometimes it's hard because you know that when an evil person continues to be evil

01:23:38 – 01:23:44:	and they die in their evil, they will pay for eternity for every evil act they did, every

01:23:44 – 01:23:50:	careless word they spoke. I've committed many evil acts and I've said many word careless words.

01:23:50 – 01:23:55:	Jesus paid for all of those so that I won't have to because I received that gift through faith.

01:23:55 – 01:24:01:	Those who reject that sacrifice will take it upon themselves to pay the eternal price for those

01:24:01 – 01:24:07:	things. And that is a truly terrifying thing. And as Christians, we're not to wish that on anyone,

01:24:07 – 01:24:12:	sometimes that's hard. But it is a terrifying reality that those who

01:24:13 – 01:24:21:	use these tools of manipulation and of rhetoric for the sake of advancing evil, they're heaping

01:24:21 – 01:24:26:	condemnation upon themselves. They're nailing Christ to the cross with those sins, but they're

01:24:26 – 01:24:30:	also accumulating punishment and attorney for those sins because they will pay for them if they

01:24:30 – 01:24:36:	don't repent. And so Corey, you know, I both pray for the repentance of all of these people to

01:24:36 – 01:24:41:	cease their evil for the sake of the world, for the sake of the church, and for the sake of their

01:24:41 – 01:24:48:	own souls. But if they will not cease, then may Master Hans visit upon them in a legal manner as

01:24:48 – 01:24:54:	soon as possible to rid us of the evil in this world, because the sooner that they stop doing

01:24:54 – 01:25:07:	the evil, the better off we'll be, and the better off they'll be even if they go to hell.