Transcript: Episode 0007

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Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

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I am Corey J. Moller, and I'm Woe.

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Today we are going to be talking about the concept of frame.

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It's a term that came from psychology and Corey is going to define that in a minute.

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

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So imagine that you are overlooking a large grassy field.

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It's a featureless field.

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There's no discernible objects there, except for a bison in the center of the field.

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It's a big 2,000 pound animal right in the middle.

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You can see it clearly.

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And about 100 yards away to the west, you can see a man facing that bison.

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So as a man, he's facing east towards the bison in the field.

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You can see all of this.

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Now, picture in your mind a sort of a penciled in diagram like you might find in a textbook

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where there's a plain, there's a rectangle about halfway between the man and the bison

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that's perpendicular to him.

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So there's a rectangle that's basically the man's field of view.

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So it's going to be pretty large.

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It's going to fill up everything that he can see.

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It's going to be a good chunk of the size of the field itself.

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And then picture four lines from the corner of each corner of the rectangle back to the

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man's head.

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So what that rectangle is showing is his field of view.

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It's what he can see in his visual field.

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It's anything outside of it.

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He can't see or at least can't see clearly.

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It might be in his peripheral vision, but what's inside the rectangle is what he's going

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to recognize and see.

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So as he's looking through that rectangle, it's invisible to him, but visible to you,

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he sees the bison clearly.

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So his frame is that he can see the field, he can see the sky, and he can see the bison.

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You can see all those things plus the man.

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Now imagine that he rotates 90 degrees clockwise.

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So instead of being on the west, he's now to the north of the bison.

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But rather than continuing to face it, he continues facing east.

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And so that rectangle moves with him, that frame of reference is still facing in the

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same direction.

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It's still the same distance from him.

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But what is inside his frame of reference now?

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There's no bison.

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All he sees is the sky in the field.

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And from his point of view, from his frame, he's not in any danger, but you as sort of a

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kind of a god mode observer, you're looking down and you can see that there's a 2,000

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pound mammal, you know, 100 yards from him that could potentially charge.

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So frame is asking yourself, is there a bison there or not?

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From your frame, from your perspective, from your point of view, there is.

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There's a field, there's a man, and there's the animal.

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From his point of view, from his frame, there isn't.

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And it's because of what is in that rectangle.

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So that's a that's a limited portion of it.

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It's just sort of setting the very basics for when we're talking about frame in terms

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of discourse, we're not talking about what you can see.

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We're talking about what you can say and about what you can think.

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So when a conversation is framed, the terms that are permissible, the ideas that are accepted,

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are part of that frame.

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They're the things that sort of define the scope of the discussion.

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It's the reason that virtually all of these episodes that we have done have specifically

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talked about the definitions of things.

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Of course, as you've said many times, you have some choice comments about the definitions,

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the terms at the being of a contract, and what sort of power that gives you.

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Essentially, if I'm drafting a contract, or even if you don't let me draft the contract,

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I don't need to draft it, let someone else draft the contract.

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If I get to define the terms at the beginning of it, I don't care what the rest of the contract

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says.

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If you get to define the terms you win, as long as you know what you're doing.

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In the reason that we're talking about this, we're going to talk about things in terms

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of winning and frame control, but as Christians, we're not doing this advocating manipulation.

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Some of the things that we say, if an evil man is doing it, and often it is evil men

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doing it, they are absolutely using this tool to manipulate, to control.

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As you said, you can have a perfectly good contract, and if you maliciously alter the

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definitions, the terms, you can make it do something terrible, even if the drafter of

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the contract had no such intent.

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We're not advocating using us for evil.

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We're having an understanding and applying frame correctly for two very important reasons.

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One, so that you were not misled when you're in conversations with others.

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When you're having any sort of discussion, if someone is being sloppy with the frame

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or if they're shifting it, or if they're trying to rigorously control it in a way that

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precludes your points for me to be acceptable, you need to know that that's going on so

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that you can combat that directly.

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The other is that if you're sloppy, if you're committing logical errors, if you're committing

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framing errors, you can unintentionally, inadvertently mislead people by framing things poorly.

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You weren't trying to mislead, but you will mislead simply because you said things in

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such a way that you accidentally prevented the right conclusion from being reached, and so

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framing things properly, it's completely natural.

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We do it all the time without thinking about it, and in conversation, it's a fluid thing,

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like it's not as rigorous as a legal contract.

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There's, you talk about ideas, and if you realize that maybe you're not using the same

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definition of a word, you rewind and say, so are you meaning this when you say that,

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so that you can have the same shared frame, the same shared perspective, so that you make

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sure you're actually understanding and discussing the same thing.

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I think errors happen a lot more often in these discussions, at least when we're talking about

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fellow Christians, or just those who have not wicked intentions, not necessarily good intentions,

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but at least neutral. There are those, of course, as mentioned, who have wicked intentions,

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who are acting out of malice, but I think it's most often just sloppiness.

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It's not thinking about things accurately and thoroughly.

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Yeah, reason, I've mentioned before, reason is a skill. It's a gift from God that is distributed

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unequally. It's also a skill. It's a tool that must be used and honed, and just because you may be

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born with thick capacity for reason, doesn't mean that you can just reason things out and you're

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going to do a good job, particularly when you're dealing in an adversarial situation, where someone

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else is framing things in such a way to mislead you, whether intentionally or not. As you said,

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when it's unintentional, that's even worse, because there are lots of cases where pastors

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mean well, they believe that they're speaking truthfully, and they will frame things in a way that

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doesn't violate their conscience, but it doesn't necessarily even sound wrong, but the way that

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the conversation is framed includes you from actually getting to the truth of the matter.

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And so for us, this is about reaching the right conclusion. When you're having a debate or an

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argument with someone, if you're doing it properly, it should not be to win. It should not be

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simply to score the most points and to prevail. If you're having a good debate, like a proper

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moderated two sides with opposing viewpoints, a really good debate would be one where one side

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made the point so clearly and concisely that the other side conceded not only that the first

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side had won, but that he had changed his mind, that he realized that his arguments were not as good

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as the arguments on the other side. So it's very important to me personally to always be right.

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And when most people hear that, you're going to think, well, you think you're always right.

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No, I always want to be right. And very often that means I need to change my mind, because the

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givens that I brought into the conversation, maybe they aren't born out. So framing things in a

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clear manner is about arriving at truthful conclusions. And if that means you have to change your

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

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So to seek to be right is not simply about trying to win. It is about trying to come out the other

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side of a conversation closer to or with the truth and grasp than you began. And that's why

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this is so important, because if you fail to frame things well, you can very easily be misled

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and end up in the weeds. I guess we can move on to the psychology of this. Now there are a lot of

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things that we could address when it comes to psychologists deep field. But just for the basics,

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essentially what we want to go over is what is called framing effect. And a few related matters.

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Framing effect is the most basic form of it. If you frame something with positive connotations versus

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negative connotations, people will select the positive connotations significantly more frequently

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than the negative connotations, even if the two things that you are offering are in fact the same

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thing, just slightly different emphasis. So to make that more concrete, if you went to the doctor

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and you were told that you have some disease, some ailment, and you need to have a surgery.

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If you are told the surgery has a 50% chance of success versus there is a 50% chance the surgery

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will not be successful. You are more likely to opt to have the surgery in the first case where

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the doctor tells you that the 50% chance of success. Same exact outcome because if there's a 50%

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chance of success, that means there's a 50% chance of failure and vice versa for emphasizing the

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negative. But psychologically, human beings are wired to choose the positive and there are a lot

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of reasons for this. Relatedly, you're more likely to choose the positive if it is a certain gain

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versus probabilistic. So if you tell someone there's x percentage chance of the good outcome versus

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there's an absolute chance of this good outcome, even if the absolute chance is smaller than the

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probabilistic one, people will choose the certain one. And to give a concrete example of how this

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sort of field is used in your everyday life in order to manipulate you essentially. If you go to

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almost any store anywhere and look at the options of what you can buy, there'll be different levels.

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They want you to buy that middle one and that's why there's a middle one because they know

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psychologically if you are given three options, you usually will choose the middle option because

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you'll think to yourself, well, the top of the line options to expensive, so maybe I won't get

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that one. But I am willing to spend a little more than the bottom option, so I'll pick the middle

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option. That's why there are three sizes of popcorn and three sizes of soda at the movie theater

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and everything else. This is psychology. This is framing because you're looking at it. Well, these

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are my sets of options. This is a totally artificial construct why you have these three options.

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But they know if they give you these options, you'll pick the one they want you to pick and that's

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usually the one that has the highest margin for them. There's tons of literature on this. You can

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easily find papers on it. I'll link one in the show notes just a brief one from American Express

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showing this is very well known thing. You see another similar thing when you go and get fuel.

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It's never two dollars and ten cents a gallon. It's a dollar ninety nine. That's their goal.

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And that's why you also have at the end of that you'll notice nine tenths because they have shown,

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they have proven psychologically that if it ends with a nine, for whatever reason, your brain

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doesn't roll over and go, there is no functional difference between a dollar ninety nine and two

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dollars. You just look at that first significant digit. You look at that one. And so you're more

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likely to make the purchase. And it's just again, this is all psychology. You have to give one more

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example of how this works in the real world. We all know what spin is.

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Spin is just framing in the field of politics and public relations. So corporations do it too.

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But you'll have people, their whole job, the spokesperson, the entire job is just to spin things

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to frame them in such a way that people look at them as not being as bad as they are or as better

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than they are. And that's just psychology. It's just framing. It's making you think about something

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in a certain way. And so it's important to step back and actually look at what is being done

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and why they want you to think about something in a certain way and whether or not maybe you

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should do that or should not do that. So one of the examples that occurred to me earlier today

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is something that we've been talking about a lot lately with regard to

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Christianity and Christian doctrine, Protestant doctrine, particularly the Lutheran distinctive

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or the Lutheran focus on law and gospel. And so that law and gospel is a tool that can be brought

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to any text or any situation to distinguish the law is that which shows our sin.

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This is what Lutherans are taught in Catechism class. The law shows our sin. The gospel shows

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our salvation. The SOS. That's the basic shorthand you're given as a kid. And the premise is that

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we know correctly that we cannot save ourselves. We cannot justify ourselves before God. And so

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it's crucial when we're looking at scripture that we not inadvertently trip over ourselves and

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try to interpret a passage in such a way that we think, oh well, maybe this means I can save myself.

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And this was this was one of the principal battles that the Lutheran Reformers had against Rome

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in the 16th century was that the Roman Catholic Church had lost any semblance of the proper

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scriptural understanding of justification. And so the writings of the earlier Formers,

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particularly the Lutherans, were very heavily focused on justification, on law and gospel,

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on making sure that no man, no one who reads the book of Concord, which was what was produced by

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1580 by the Lutheran Reformers, if you read that and you believe it and you should because it's

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all straight from scripture. It's basically just a big Bible study. There's no possible way to

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read the book of Concord and come out the other side thinking, yeah, maybe I can save myself,

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maybe I can do a little bit to earn my salvation. That is framing the question in a good way.

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It's taking to understand that the law is God's eternal will and it's an eternal will that

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we cannot fulfill perfectly. Jesus was born a man in order to fulfill it perfectly in our

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stead because none of us could, because our will and our nature is turned ever against God

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until God comes and gives us faith and gives us a renewed spirit where we are able to then turn

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towards Him by faith. And this is where the law, gospel, distinction, I want to say it falls apart,

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but it becomes misused because law versus gospel, for one thing, shouldn't be said in the first

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case. They're not in opposition. That's really a, that's the kind of the rebirth of the ancient

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heresy of minickianism, whether you have the demi-erge of the Old Testament and then you have Jesus

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born a New Testament as the new, more loving God. And that was a, it was a heresy that was dispensed

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with. But the premise still lingers where a lot of people think, well, yeah, that Old Testament,

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there's a lot of law in there, there's a lot of rules and thank goodness for the New Testament

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where we're set free from all those rules. Unless you read the red letters. Yeah, yeah, if you

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actually pay attention to what Jesus said, there are still rules, but the, and that's the important

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distinction. There are still rules because God's law, God's will is eternal. What the, the distinction

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of law and gospel is that the rules don't save you. We don't obey God so that we can be saved.

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We obey God because we are saved. So when you read, for example, the epistle of James, which I

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hope people, you know, will pick up and read after this episode, just as a good example. It's just

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a few pages long, you know, it's probably about eight, ten minutes to read the whole thing. James

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is an epistle written to a church, written to believers. And there's a lot of law and he says,

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

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No, they're already saved. They are post justification. If you can say it that way, they are,

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they are, they are Christians living the Christian life. And part of the Christian life is asking,

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what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live? So Lutherans have long been allergic to James

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because there's a lot of law and there's a lot of, you need to do this. But of course,

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you just mentioned what Jesus says is a lot of law and a lot of you need to do this. But

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the reason that frame is applicable to this is that it's not about saving yourself. It's not

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about you need to obey the law so that you can be saved. It is about God has saved you,

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God is your creator, your creature. What is our response in the Christian life? And we know

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that faith is given as a gift and that the good works that we do were prepared for us by God to do

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them. So we're not seeking credit for the good things that we do that God gave us. We simply

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want to know what does God want. And the framing error that is very incredibly common among Lutherans

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is to take this law gospel dichotomy and try to apply it everywhere to try to make every single

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question a question of justification because in the 16th century, that's a lot of what was going

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on both with Rome and then with some of the other post-reformation sects. You had controversies

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about, well, can we save ourselves? How much do we do? And so, yes, that is a very important

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distinction, but it's not the only one in the Christian life. And the fact that Lutherans are

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given this very powerful and important and true tool doesn't mean that it can be misused.

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The frame of law in gospel is a valuable tool in the context of dealing with

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sociological questions, of dealing with questions of salvation. It is totally inappropriate.

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It is completely misused when it is applied to questions of the Christian life.

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It's typical when you're talking to a Lutheran to say, hey, you should obey God. And they say,

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well, what do you think I can save myself? And like, it's just a knee jerk reaction to apply

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the law gospel dichotomy and think that the person they're listening to is trying to say,

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you can save himself, which is nuts. Like, no Lutheran would ever think of that or say it. And yet,

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the framing of law and gospel is so powerful in the mind of the well-catechized Lutheran

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that they end up kind of retarded because they'll just apply it all over the place where it's

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totally irrelevant. And we're talking about frame just in general today with that specific

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example, because it's, that's a good demonstration of how something true can suddenly become false.

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Law gospel is true in the context of soteriology. It is false in terms of the Christian life. It has

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no place there. But a Christian Lutheran in particular, in good conscience, will bring the

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law gospel distinction to everything because it's his hammer. He knows it's going to work and he

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knows it's important. He doesn't remember why. And so he's just swinging the hammer at everything

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he sees. And it does tremendous harm because you end up with people arguing against God and saying

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that either God doesn't want us to do anything, which is a clear denial of scripture or

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just falsely accusing the people they're talking to of trying to save themselves when nothing

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could be further from the truth. So framing is situational. It's contextual. It's not simply,

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it's not a tool that can just be used like a hammer. Well, it is, framing is understanding that

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it's not just a hammer that it can also be a nail pillar. You have, you have different aspects of it,

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depending on where it's being used. And there's some cases where you don't want a hammer at all.

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If you're working on glass, you probably don't want a hammer anywhere near it. And that's perfectly

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fine. Understanding the frame is understanding that the tool is suitable to the job and that you

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don't take the tool to every job if it's not applicable. So when it comes to framing, people are

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actually relatively familiar with framing, even if they don't recognize the term, even if they don't

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recognize the actual underlying psychology, because there are so many examples that are related

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to framing in our everyday experience and in our academic experience for those who've had

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any of that, what it is sometimes called as gradualism is one way that this plays out. And that

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will be that via framing, you have the acceptable range of beliefs or views, obviously the center

22:49.400 --> 22:56.040
being the consensus as it were policy to use the term typically used with the overton window

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and we'll get more into that. And then you have less and less acceptance as you go out until you

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get to the unthinkable. Now, if you are a member of a group that wants the unthinkable on either end

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of this spectrum to be policy, you do not start, at least if you're competent, you do not start,

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by advocating for the unthinkable. Because if you do that, people will double down against you and

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you will never get anywhere. Instead, you change things slightly, a little bit at a time. One of the

23:33.880 --> 23:39.480
examples it's often used to illustrate this is the boiling frog. If you stick a frog in a pot of

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cold water and slowly heat it up, he adjusts to the increase in temperature over time. If you throw

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him into boiling water, he will try to jump out. Another example that some may know, I think this

23:52.440 --> 23:57.960
one is probably a little for the older generations more so than younger, the camel's nose. If you're

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in a tent and a camel sticks his nose under the edge of your tent, if you ignore that, you will soon

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have an entire camel in your tent. You may not have cared about the camel's nose, you probably

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care about having the entire camel in your tent. And so it's habituation, it's gradualism, you're

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changing things slowly over time, you're changing that frame, you're moving that window in order to

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get people to accept something, they would never have accepted. So sometimes called the slippery

24:27.240 --> 24:34.600
slope, shifting baseline, there were terms for this in communist countries in eastern Europe how they

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enacted policies to slowly stamp out opposition and change society. And it's a playbook, it's

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something that's very, it works. It works on all of us because everybody wants to be

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reasonable. Everyone instinctively wants to be in the center. We're social creatures, we don't

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like the idea of being on the outside because it's not so much the case today, but in the history

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of human civilization, if you're cast out, you may well die. If you are outside of the social

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group, it's not simply social death, it may be physical death because there may be nowhere else for

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you to go. And the idea of the rugged individualist dies quickly when you're off alone in the woods,

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they're very, very few men who can actually pull that off. And so we have an example.

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Exile used to mean something. Yeah, it was, it was usually a death sentence. And so we, we have an

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instinctive, both social and even deeper than that need to belong to, to be in a community where

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our views and our values are shared. And where we are not going to be seen as the outlier,

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because when you're the outlier, well, you may be getting closer and closer to the edge where

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maybe, maybe social and physical death awaits you if you keep going. And so there are, there are

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laws and there are social mores and there are these different frames that are used in a human

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society to keep things within the acceptable bounds. And those things will vary by culture, they'll

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vary by nation. But they all behave the same way, which is to sort of keep people kind of

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corralled in the middle. And in a good society, that's a beneficial thing. If we had a Christian

26:24.200 --> 26:30.520
society, we would be corralled in the center of obeying God, of doing what God wants. Instead,

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we have a society where doing what God wants will get you fired, saying what God says will cost

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you your bank account, it will cost you your livelihood, it will make cost to your house,

26:42.200 --> 26:50.360
it could cost you your life. And the control of discourse goes directly to where those lines

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are drawn. As you, as you said, they move, they, they move in history. And I think it's important

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particularly for Christians to recognize that this moving, we, as Christians, we want, we typically

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if we're doing a good job, if we're trying to be Christian, we try to frame things in terms of

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our faith and to make sure that our moral pronouncements match with scripture. But as you can see,

27:17.560 --> 27:25.960
as these things are reframed in a society, very often, things that used to be morally permissible

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are today morally impermissible. For example, slavery used to be morally permissible. For thousands

27:32.840 --> 27:38.360
of years, it was considered morally permissible for some people in some certain certain situations

27:38.360 --> 27:45.480
to be kept as slaves, to be literally property of others. That was moral. That was considered to be

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in accord with scripture. And churches upheld this for thousands of years. Then in the 1800s,

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that went away. Now it's one thing for the law to change. Laws can change. The countries can do

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what they want. There are reasons to change laws. That's fine. What is not fine is for a person to then

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make the retroactive claim that morality has changed or worse to say the morality hasn't changed and

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all those in the faith before us were immoral when they believed they were immoral. Because if

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if all the people who said one thing did so with a clean conscience and now we come along in

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current day and we have the diametrically opposed belief about something that we hold in good

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conscience. One of those is damnable. One of those views nailed Jesus Christ to the cross to pay

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for because it was a sin. And as Christians, we must face head on that it has to be one of them

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and we must recognize the implications of what it means if it's either either we are sinning

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today by holding certain beliefs where we say the morality has changed or we must condemn all of our

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fathers in the faith as unrepentant sinners because they held a belief that we condemn.

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So see the over 10 window, the window of what is acceptable discourse gets shifted first socially

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and then legally and then morally. And then retroactively, we try to say, well yeah, morality says

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that this is the way it has to be. And we try to find justifications for it in scripture. And

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that is a terrible place to be as a Christian because suddenly you've turned scripture into a wax

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nose where you can make it fit any face. You can make it look like anything you want. You just decide

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what you want and then you go find the verses to support it. That is not what the Christian should

29:39.800 --> 29:45.800
be doing. And yet it's what we find very commonly today because the frame is being controlled by

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those outside the church. And then we adopt it. We adopt their frame. We import it. We say, oh yeah,

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this moral value, I hold that too because I'm a moral person. And then we find it in a place

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where it was never found before. Maybe all the church missed it for thousands of years. They missed

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this slavery. It was a sin. If that's the case, then say so outright say that all those people

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are burning in hell because they live lives of unrepentant sin or deal with the fact that you are

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importing an amoral frame into a moral framework. And that simply can't work. If God is changing,

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He's not God. And that's the bottom line when it comes to talking about morality shifting.

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And a lot of these frame discussions will ultimately boil down to for the Christian.

30:33.560 --> 30:39.160
Did God change? And we have to answer that question. The answer is clearly no.

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Scripture is abundantly clear that God does not change. And so if we're changing our morality,

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where are we getting it from? What is the genealogy of the ideas that we are spouting,

30:49.640 --> 30:53.800
that we are claiming come from a Christian frame? Because that's not where they originated.

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And just as humans, we are very good at either justifying what we have done or

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excusing it after the fact. And we need look no further than Genesis.

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The beginning to see human beings doing this, to see this in action.

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What did Adam do when he was confronted by God? Well, no God. This woman that you gave me,

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he's blaming Eve and God. He's already attempting to reframe things and say, well, no,

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it wasn't me. I didn't do this. I didn't sin. It was the woman that you gave me. And so ultimately,

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God, you are responsible for what you did. And that is the human tendency to try and justify

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what we are doing instead of looking at it objectively and realizing, no, no, actually, I did sin.

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I am wrong. I need to amend my beliefs and my actions instead of attempting to justify them.

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And to look at how quickly this overt and window can shift, because it can happen

31:58.600 --> 32:06.600
pretty quickly, even within the lifetime of an individual. In 2008, California had

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Proposition 8. Now, if you want to look for it, you have to use the year because the numbers

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do get recycled. Proposition 8 in 2008 in California was a proposition to define marriages between

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a man and a woman. And it passed. That's California in 2008. Now, homosexual marriage, so-called,

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is the law of the land for the entire nation. That's how quickly things can change.

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If you have people who are working hard to shift that window, which is usually the media and

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the academy and many others, abetted by Christians who do not think.

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Yeah, you can go back and look at what Obama said when he was running for president,

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what he said is a senator in 2006, as it relates to Sodomite, so-called marriage,

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he would be unperson today for saying those things. And he was on the left. He was further

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to the left than most of the Democrats when he was saying those things. And now 15 years later,

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not only is it the law of the land, but in the majority of our own churches, it is seen as

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if not ideal, at least list it. It's seen as something will love his love. And if these people

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

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

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

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that this has happened. Yeah, they're at the acceptable or the sensible level. The

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may as well list what the the stages are. Within the Overton window, how the range of discourse

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is parsed is essentially you have, it starts out as unthinkable. When it's no longer unthinkable,

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it's radical. When it's no longer radical, it's acceptable. This is where many Christians

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are today with the idea of homosexual marriage. When it's no longer just acceptable,

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well, then it's sensible. And then it becomes popular. And then it becomes policy. And this obviously

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can go one way or the other left or right. And so many Christians today with regard to these

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things that have changed in the culture are at the I don't personally want it, but it's acceptable

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or it's sensible. It makes sense for policy for the government to do this. And that's where they are.

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In within the within the Christian context, that policy demarcation at the far end for Christians

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becomes morality. So today, there are still Christians, but in the world, in the workplace,

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you cannot condemn side of my marriage or you will be destroyed in most cases. But in the church,

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there's still some people who speak out against it a lot are okay with it, but there are still

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opposition to it. But if you looked at a lot of the articles talking about side of my marriage

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and the rulings and the laws as they were passing, they would all harken back to the 60s to loving

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V. Virginia where interracial marriage was codified as being legal for the first time. There had been

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a ruling in 1883 after the 14th Amendment on equal protection had been passed where laws against

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interracial marriage against miscegenation were upheld by the Supreme Court. And then between 1883

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and 1967, the culture changed. The Overton window shifted. And finally, the law was struck down.

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Now, the law didn't change. The Constitution didn't change. What changed? The people's

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changed. People's hearts changed. And so that's a case where I'm sure there are people listening

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for it to hear a man who claims to be a Christian, to even use the word miscegenation,

35:59.640 --> 36:04.760
may make your skin crawl and may sound like a truly evil thing to say. And that's a perfect

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illustration of the Overton window shifting because today to say miscegenation is unthinkable.

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It's outside of the Overton window. It may be something that is said, but it is never said by

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polite people. It's never said by Christians. It is an evil thing that is only said outside of

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the fringes, out in the wilderness, in the cursed earth where there is only damnation and suffering.

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That's where those ideas are, where if you look back in 1966, and even after loving V. Virginia,

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the Supreme Court had to change it because the legislatures wouldn't change it because most

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people were still opposed to it. So the majority not only felt that it was a moral issue going in

36:48.520 --> 36:53.560
the opposite direction, but they were fine with it. And yet in just a couple generations,

36:54.120 --> 37:01.480
the Overton window, the frame of what is acceptable discourse has shifted. Now, the claim made today

37:01.480 --> 37:06.840
is that morality changed, I guess. I mean, God doesn't change, and God's absorbed some

37:06.840 --> 37:14.600
morality. But somehow what was immoral in 1950 is today moral to the point that is necessary

37:14.600 --> 37:21.320
to destroy someone who would even question whether that was a good thing. And so those who tie

37:21.320 --> 37:28.200
Sodomite marriage back to the miscegenation ruling are exactly right. It's a part of a continuum

37:28.200 --> 37:33.240
that they see clearly. It's a continuum that they have been moving. And now they're it's being

37:33.240 --> 37:39.240
shifted further. They're seeking to allow par at polyamory. They're seeking to allow children to

37:39.240 --> 37:47.000
have sex with adults, which was an inevitable result. And when when someone talks about the slippery

37:47.000 --> 37:53.720
slope on one hand, there's a possibility for exaggeration. There's a possibility for extrapolation

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that's not justified. On the other hand, as we have seen repeatedly over the last couple generations,

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it usually gets born out where the thing that was unthinkable and insane, that you would have

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pedophiles in public discourse. Today, it was it was just outed in the last week. The man

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Twitter, Yoll Roth, Roth, who was in charge of censoring individuals like Cory and myself,

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he's an open homosexual. He's an open Sodomite. He's an open pedophile. Now he hasn't been caught

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dittling children. But his PhD thesis was on how do we get kids on Grindr, which is a Sodomite

38:33.720 --> 38:41.480
hookup app. And that was what he pursued at Twitter to increase the engagement of children with

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homosexuals who sought to have sex with them. That's pedophilia. That's happening at the

38:48.520 --> 38:55.160
upper echelons of our society today. He was a rich man. I think he was a VP. He was worth millions

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of millions of dollars. He's not now cast. We are outcasts for saying that's a bad thing. And yet he

39:01.080 --> 39:06.600
is at the heights of modern accomplishment as a very well respected person. He's writing now for

39:06.600 --> 39:11.880
New York Times and others. He's right in the center of the Overton window advocating homosexuals

39:11.880 --> 39:16.840
having access to minors for sexual purposes. That's how quickly it changes. And they're not going

39:16.840 --> 39:25.800
to stop there. It never stops because the shifting of the Overton window were told today in a

39:25.800 --> 39:32.520
beautiful example of framing that this is progress, that it's progressive, that a society will naturally

39:32.520 --> 39:39.080
progress from more restrictive to less restrictive. And so whenever someone calls these things

39:39.080 --> 39:45.800
progress, they're framing. They're controlling the frame of your mind and your your ability to think

39:45.800 --> 39:52.520
about these things by saying the fact that now men and women of different races are free to marry

39:52.520 --> 39:57.640
is a good thing. That's progress. The fact that men are now able to marry men is a good thing.

39:57.640 --> 40:03.000
That's progress. The fact that soon men will be allowed to marry children is a good thing. That's

40:03.000 --> 40:09.480
progress. That's the shifting of the Overton window always inexorably in the same direction. You

40:09.480 --> 40:15.560
notice that none of this progress is ever in terms of us living more godly lives. And so that when

40:16.120 --> 40:20.760
men begin to advocate things like Christian nationalism as a reaction and response,

40:21.880 --> 40:27.560
well, that's outside the Overton window. That's an evil that's unspeakable and must be destroyed.

40:28.760 --> 40:34.440
As long as you can keep moving that center, that juicy center of what's permissible for debate,

40:34.440 --> 40:38.760
even if there's strenuous debate against it, if you can combat it,

40:40.120 --> 40:45.320
you ultimately will win. If you're using the shifting of frame for evil purposes,

40:45.320 --> 40:50.600
and so this is a weapon that has been used against us, and because people want to be reasonable and

40:50.600 --> 40:56.520
want to be centrist, they don't want to be disliked. They don't want to be castigated. They don't

40:56.520 --> 41:01.880
want to be called extremist. You just sort of get out of the way. You keep your mouth shut.

41:01.880 --> 41:06.840
You don't want to be judgmental. You don't want to be unloving. And they keep chipping away.

41:07.720 --> 41:14.280
And they can do it because we seed the frame. We seed the frame to people who are using it as a weapon

41:14.280 --> 41:20.680
to destroy Christendom. And that's the reason that we're focusing on this. It's not about manipulation.

41:20.680 --> 41:26.200
It's about having a bulwark of defense against the most evil things that are happening in our world

41:26.200 --> 41:33.400
today. And this is not exactly a new issue in human affairs. We can go all the way back to

41:33.480 --> 41:40.360
Ovid. Prinkipi East Obstras, et cetera, speak a phoenix. Resist the beginnings and consider the end.

41:41.480 --> 41:49.000
This has been a problem in human society from the beginning. If you look at any of the ancient

41:49.000 --> 41:56.120
empires, great civilizations, they didn't collapse overnight. They had a slow,

41:56.120 --> 42:05.320
often orchestrated, societal, and particularly moral collapse that eventually led to civilizational

42:05.320 --> 42:13.640
collapse. We are very far along in the moral collapse. And it is orchestrated. This has an

42:13.640 --> 42:18.040
animating intelligence behind it. Now there are those who will, of course, say that, well, now you're

42:18.040 --> 42:22.600
just a conspiracy theorist and human beings couldn't possibly organize these sorts of things over

42:22.600 --> 42:26.600
multiple generations and centuries, and you're absolutely correct on the latter count.

42:27.320 --> 42:34.920
Human beings cannot very well organize these things over long periods of time with millions of

42:34.920 --> 42:44.120
people involved. But Satan can, he doesn't sleep, he has plenty of time on his hands, and he doesn't

42:44.120 --> 42:51.400
die. So there is an animating intelligence behind this. And as was said, the goal is to destroy

42:51.480 --> 42:57.560
Christendom. And if you just take a little piece of territory to time, well, Christians won't notice.

42:58.920 --> 43:05.160
It weird, the media all seemed to be praising homosexuality and these homosexual clubs and

43:05.160 --> 43:11.960
all these things. But that's just leftists being weird. No, it's not. They were constructing

43:11.960 --> 43:18.200
an narrative. They were building the future they wanted to see. And they moved on already from

43:18.200 --> 43:24.200
pedophilia. They are still working on getting that one legalized. But they moved on to

43:24.200 --> 43:32.440
beastiality and sex bots and all manner of other things because there is no bottom when it comes

43:32.440 --> 43:39.240
to evil. There is no ground. There is no floor. Things can always get worse. And that's where we

43:39.240 --> 43:45.880
find ourselves today. And you can look back and see them doing this. For instance, I want to just

43:45.880 --> 43:51.640
want to mention the pedophilia issue. Salon ran some articles. It's been more than a decade to go

43:51.640 --> 43:58.680
now. Maybe even a bit more than that. But they ran up the flag to see what people would do. It's also

43:58.680 --> 44:03.800
deliberately shocking because if it shocks you the first time and it shocks you the second time,

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it shocks you a little less the third time. And so that was their goal. But they ran up that flag.

44:08.040 --> 44:12.920
They wanted to see what would happen. And they're still working toward it. They always telegraph

44:12.920 --> 44:19.560
what they're going to do if you pay attention. There's another good example of reframing

44:19.560 --> 44:26.840
that is dominating a lot of the political discourse for the last decades, really. And that's

44:26.840 --> 44:39.400
the term immigration. There's a moral aspect to immigration today where people, Christians in

44:39.400 --> 44:48.920
particular who have adopted the frame of the the left will take what was once a stranger,

44:48.920 --> 44:54.680
what was once an alien, which what was once a person sneaking across the border in the middle

44:54.680 --> 45:02.040
of the night illegally for the purpose of coming into our country and taking our money on welfare

45:02.040 --> 45:08.360
and stealing our jobs by stealing social security numbers and identities so that they could get

45:08.360 --> 45:14.600
away with it. That's a series of criminality by a criminal who's illegally in a place where

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they're not welcome where they do not belong. And the reframe is to say, well, that's an immigrant.

45:21.000 --> 45:28.280
And immigrant is a really powerful word word because the root of it is migrate. And even if people

45:28.280 --> 45:34.840
don't think explicitly in these terms, we sort of know instinctively when you hear immigrant,

45:34.840 --> 45:41.720
you hear migrate and you think, well, you know, large animals migrate like bear and moose may migrate,

45:41.720 --> 45:47.960
elk migrate, birds migrate. Well, if that's happening in nature, that's a perfectly natural thing

45:47.960 --> 45:54.040
to happen. Therefore, it must be perfectly natural for people to migrate. And of course, we know in

45:54.040 --> 45:59.880
the past that there have been migrations of people following herds typically. Yeah, it's when the

45:59.880 --> 46:05.640
American Indians would migrate. It wasn't because they were looking for welfare in another state.

46:05.640 --> 46:10.120
It's because they were following the bison herd. Bison would migrate. They would mood with them

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because that was their source of food and fuel and clothing. So you have a category of people who

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are engaging in criminal activity. They're rightfully called alien. Alien is the legal term for them.

46:28.280 --> 46:35.960
It is the normal English term for them. But that word has not only fallen out of disfavor,

46:35.960 --> 46:41.400
but it's actively attacked to say that someone is an alien. Well, you know, now we have, you know,

46:41.400 --> 46:48.520
UFO stuff in pop culture. So to say a person is an alien, you're accused of dehumanizing them.

46:48.520 --> 46:56.280
When that's not the case, an alien is a stranger. An alien is alienated. They are in one place where

46:56.280 --> 47:02.120
they do not belong, separated from the place where they do belong. But when you reframe and you

47:02.120 --> 47:07.080
call them an immigrant, well, suddenly that's a natural thing. Immigrating. Well, I mean, that's

47:07.080 --> 47:12.600
where we're a nation of immigrants, right? We were all immigrants at one point. Well, my family

47:12.600 --> 47:17.400
wasn't. My family was year over four years ago. They built the place that others immigrated to.

47:18.360 --> 47:26.120
So that reframe lets you get away from the question of, are these people breaking the law?

47:26.520 --> 47:31.320
Are these people coming with hostile intent? Regardless of whether they're breaking the law

47:31.320 --> 47:35.640
or coming with hostile intent, do they have any business being here in the first place?

47:36.200 --> 47:41.880
And when you reframe and say, oh, well, they're immigrants, the natural inclination in the mind

47:41.880 --> 47:48.280
of the here is say, well, of course, everyone's welcome. America is is not a nation. It has no,

47:48.280 --> 47:53.320
there's no posterity here. As we talked about in the episode on Christian nationalism,

47:53.320 --> 47:59.320
it's a shopping mall. All you have to do is sign the guest book that says you take the oath of

47:59.320 --> 48:05.080
citizenship and ta-da, you're an American. That's how we all became American, right? No. There's

48:05.080 --> 48:11.480
not remotely what happened, but it's what is thought in the modern mind today because of the reframe.

48:12.280 --> 48:22.440
And Christians will go even a step further. They will take this leftist framing of the illegal alien

48:23.080 --> 48:27.960
cast them as an immigrant. And what does the Christian want to do once to morally justify it?

48:28.520 --> 48:34.680
So even though the genealogy of the idea of these people being immigrants comes from hostile

48:34.680 --> 48:42.040
foreign powers seeking to destabilize our country, the naive or the malicious Christian will go

48:42.040 --> 48:47.800
to scripture and find passages about sojourners and say, well, gosh, I mean, these immigrants,

48:47.800 --> 48:52.440
these modern immigrants, that's just sojourning. That's straight from scripture. And sojourners

48:52.440 --> 48:57.160
are protected by God. It's a, it's a blessed thing, right? I mean, it's in the Bible as a good thing.

48:57.160 --> 49:03.560
So therefore, we as Christians cannot oppose it or we stand condemned. So they will shift the

49:03.560 --> 49:09.640
overtune window even further from alien used to be normal. Now it's bad. Immigration and immigrant

49:09.640 --> 49:14.360
are good, but sojourners best when, whenever you're criticized by a Christian because

49:15.160 --> 49:22.040
who can argue with the Bible? Well, it's funny when you look at the word that's you, the word in

49:22.040 --> 49:30.360
Hebrew that is sometimes translated sojourner in most of the translations. It also means alien.

49:30.360 --> 49:36.600
It means foreigner. It means people who are, again, they're alienated. They are not where they

49:36.600 --> 49:46.840
belong. And the passages where God exhorts Israel to protect the sojourner, it would be as though

49:46.840 --> 49:57.640
if I found Mexicans who had snuck across the border in my backyard, the prohibitions that God

49:57.640 --> 50:03.320
gives to protect sojourners would exhort me not to go beat them and steal their stuff just because

50:03.320 --> 50:08.680
they don't belong here. That hasn't changed. That should not be in the heart of a Christian. If you

50:08.680 --> 50:13.640
find someone who doesn't belong where they are, you shouldn't set upon them because they're in

50:13.640 --> 50:19.880
outlaw and seek to harm them. That doesn't mean that you should not seek to write the wrong that

50:19.880 --> 50:26.920
they have done by being where they are in a place that they shouldn't be. And so it's funny what

50:27.480 --> 50:34.040
the passages on sojourners also say things like, if a sojourner blasphemes, you were to stone him to

50:34.040 --> 50:41.480
death. Now, do these guys who exhort us to love and to cherish the sojourner on our land

50:41.480 --> 50:47.720
want to listen to that part of the Bible? Because if they're advocating that we execute blasphemers,

50:47.720 --> 50:53.720
I'm all in. You send all the sojourners if you want. If we can execute blasphemers on our lands,

50:53.720 --> 50:59.560
that is what Christian nations should be doing. Now, again, I'm not advocating for an individual

50:59.560 --> 51:08.520
to harm anyone, but the state should properly execute blasphemers and as Lutherans, we totally

51:08.520 --> 51:12.920
ignore this because again, we don't want to believe our own confessions or the Bible. We just want

51:12.920 --> 51:18.520
to believe the parts that will advocate our political positions. The confessions directly talk

51:18.600 --> 51:24.600
about blasphemers being executed by a godly prince and it is commended and it is said that it is

51:24.600 --> 51:31.800
necessary. Yeah, that is in a number of places in the confessions anywhere you see, depending on which

51:31.800 --> 51:37.320
translation you have, you may see Hangman or you may see Master Hans. And that's just the German

51:37.320 --> 51:42.040
euphemism for the Hangman. And even in the fourth commandment about obeying your parents,

51:42.040 --> 51:46.520
that is mentioned, if you will not obey God, if you not obey your parents, then obey the Hangman.

51:47.480 --> 51:53.880
This is a very serious matter and realistically most of the so-called immigrants that we have in

51:53.880 --> 51:59.480
this country would be subject to execution as blasphemers. Very few of them are Christian.

52:00.520 --> 52:06.600
There are some, certainly there are some, but we have a lot of Muslims and others coming across

52:06.600 --> 52:13.720
the border who are very much not Christian and are very much blasphemers. But just to go back briefly

52:13.800 --> 52:20.440
to the issue of if you find foreigners in your lands, the treatment they deserve, the treatment they

52:20.440 --> 52:26.760
weren't is going to depend on whether they are in fact sojourners, if they are passing through for

52:26.760 --> 52:33.800
some reason, then you have to figure out why they're passing through. But in our case today,

52:33.800 --> 52:41.240
many of them are just outright invaders. They are here to plunder and that's war, that's not a

52:41.240 --> 52:47.240
sojourner. So they would deserve very different treatment from a sojourner. They are not subject to

52:47.240 --> 52:52.760
the biblical injunctions with regard to sojourners. They would be subject to the biblical injunctions with

52:52.760 --> 53:00.360
regard to enemies. And you know the etymology of sojourner, but most people probably want, and this

53:00.360 --> 53:08.360
is where I want to get back to what a powerful reframing it is to reframe the alien to the immigrant

53:08.360 --> 53:11.880
and then the immigrant to the sojourner to bind the conscience of the Christian.

53:12.760 --> 53:17.880
To sojourn, the definition when it came into the English language was to stay temporarily

53:17.880 --> 53:24.440
to reside for a time, to visit. And it came from Latin, from the word subterranare,

53:25.080 --> 53:31.960
where the root there is diurnal. You might know that, it has to do with a day. Sojourn is an

53:31.960 --> 53:38.200
entirely temporary thing. And in fact in scripture it was a legal category. The notion of someone

53:38.200 --> 53:43.080
sneaking into your lands and then just doing whatever and being welcomed was alien. If someone

53:43.080 --> 53:48.280
snuck into your lands, they would be properly executed. If they were a sojourner, they had a legal

53:48.280 --> 53:54.360
right effectively the the ancient version of a green card saying that they were permitted in that

53:54.360 --> 53:59.400
land while they were there. They were subject to that land's laws. And that they had to leave.

53:59.400 --> 54:05.880
It was a temporary status. So note the note the powerful reframing that these

54:06.200 --> 54:11.160
so-called Christians are doing where they reframe the immigrant as a sojourner.

54:12.040 --> 54:16.680
They're trying to bind consciences by saying, well, this is a biblical category, ignoring the fact

54:16.680 --> 54:23.000
that the biblical category was implicitly and necessarily temporary. If these were actually

54:23.000 --> 54:27.640
immigrants, if they were migrating, there's no such thing. There's no one migrating into North

54:27.640 --> 54:34.520
America today. That's not a thing. But even if they were migrating, they would continue to move.

54:34.520 --> 54:39.800
As you said, Corey, that's not their goal. Their goal is to come here and to stay and to have anchor

54:39.800 --> 54:46.760
babies and to get jobs and to get homes, displacing our own brothers according to the flesh who can no

54:46.760 --> 54:51.880
longer afford homes because people who have been subsidized or receiving them. And then to

54:52.920 --> 54:57.560
ta-da, they've become American in a couple generations and then no one can argue with that.

54:58.360 --> 55:04.040
That's the power of reframing. You can take something that was once not only unthinkable,

55:04.040 --> 55:10.280
but illegal and subject to death and turn it into a morally protected category that a Christian

55:10.280 --> 55:18.120
is told he is obligated to defend or he'll go to hell. So that reframe, that's a nilis that

55:18.120 --> 55:24.200
reframe. That is something that's evil is done with the intent of harming us as a nation, as a

55:24.200 --> 55:31.320
people. But it's a beautiful example, I think, of the power of doing it. If you take someone who's

55:31.320 --> 55:35.640
an alien, well, aliens, like, they should go away, immigrant. Well, I don't know. I mean,

55:35.640 --> 55:41.160
I wore my ancestors' immigrants. I'm not sure what to do about that. And then they get upgraded

55:41.160 --> 55:47.880
to Sojourner, ignoring the fact that Sojourner's had to leave. Well, if it's a Sojourner, you know,

55:47.880 --> 55:53.320
I got to give him my cloak, right? I mean, Jesus says, you're the God said that they should be,

55:53.320 --> 55:57.080
you should love them as you love yourself. Now, that meant that you shouldn't starve them,

55:57.080 --> 56:01.080
you shouldn't beat them, you shouldn't take advantage of them. It didn't mean that they got

56:01.080 --> 56:07.400
to live on your couch. And that's what these guys who will call these people Sojourners or even

56:07.400 --> 56:12.840
immigrants are trying to do. They're trying to say that, well, sure, maybe I couldn't force someone

56:12.840 --> 56:17.400
to live on your couch, but I can sort of force someone to live in your country because we got a lot

56:17.400 --> 56:24.760
of room. That's basically their argument. That is an overthrow of the law. It is an overthrow of

56:25.400 --> 56:32.600
of what is the right of every nation to protect its borders, to protect its own people against

56:32.600 --> 56:40.840
foreign invaders. And invaders doesn't necessarily imply intent. It doesn't need intent. If they're

56:40.840 --> 56:48.760
there and they don't belong, they're invading, they're doing harm by virtue of being in a place.

56:48.760 --> 56:53.800
And yet what we're saying here is outside the over 10 window mouth. This like the things that we're

56:53.800 --> 56:59.800
saying are categorized as evil and unthinkable, whereas calling them Sojourners and immigrants,

56:59.800 --> 57:06.760
even though neither word applies, that is the only accepted form of discourse. That is the power

57:06.760 --> 57:13.400
of frame. That is the power of reframing the discussion in your own terms of the contract,

57:13.400 --> 57:17.800
the Constitution can say whatever you want. I'm going to redefine the terms and I'm going to get

57:17.800 --> 57:25.800
the outcome that I desire. In some ways, I actually prefer the left on these issues, not in terms

57:25.800 --> 57:31.080
of what they believe, but in terms of how they behave. And the reason I prefer them is because

57:31.080 --> 57:40.280
they're just more honest. If a leftist is arguing against slavery, for instance, an issue that does

57:40.280 --> 57:47.640
come up, he will simply flatly say that all of our ancestors who practiced slavery or at least

57:47.640 --> 57:53.320
approved of slavery did not condemn slavery were evil men. And some of them will even say evil men

57:53.320 --> 57:57.720
who are now burning in hell, which coming from a leftist is rich, but that's a separate matter.

57:58.600 --> 58:07.480
I prefer that to what we get from some supposed Christians who will not argue, honestly,

58:07.480 --> 58:12.520
will not say that what these men did was evil from the perspective, the wrong perspective,

58:12.520 --> 58:17.480
but the perspective of the person advancing the point. He'll say, well, they were mistaken.

58:17.480 --> 58:24.280
They didn't understand this long list of excuses, which is ridiculous because our ancestors by and

58:24.280 --> 58:30.520
large were better educated, more Christian men. They knew better than modern Christians.

58:31.720 --> 58:35.480
And yet Christians today will try to condemn these men, but they won't do it honestly. So I

58:35.480 --> 58:39.800
prefer the leftist to will just honestly come out and tell me that he wants to kill me. The

58:39.800 --> 58:46.280
honesty is a little refreshing sometimes. Yeah, and they're not lying in the name of God,

58:46.280 --> 58:51.160
which is the biggest problem in the church, where these people are trying to bind consciences.

58:52.280 --> 58:58.840
Yes, which is deadly, particularly to the Christian, because again, if the Christian doesn't understand

58:58.840 --> 59:05.400
how a subject is being reframed, if they don't understand how the discourse has been altered

59:05.400 --> 59:13.080
in its terms to leave them with no out, well, you do find that your conscience is bound.

59:13.080 --> 59:17.640
If you don't really think about it, and if you just sort of trust what your betters,

59:17.640 --> 59:23.480
what your pastors and others tell you, you have no out. And so the reason that we advocate

59:23.480 --> 59:30.760
understanding frame is that as we talked about last week, God commands us to be as wise as

59:30.760 --> 59:38.360
serpents and as innocent as doves. In terms of the illegal alien on your in the land, the your

59:38.360 --> 59:43.640
ancestors owned, you should be as innocent as doves in terms of not going out and beating them

59:43.640 --> 59:48.920
and stealing from them. And you should be as wise as serpents in terms of understanding that they are

59:48.920 --> 59:53.960
aliens who do not belong there and must be physically removed. And that both of those are

59:53.960 --> 59:58.920
godly things, not to hurt them, not to beat them and not to hate them. And that's the thing,

59:58.920 --> 01:00:04.440
that it's not hate to say that you showed up on welcome and you're living on my couch now,

01:00:04.440 --> 01:00:12.360
you need to leave. It's not hate for me to tell you to get out. It's my right as a Christian

01:00:12.360 --> 01:00:17.880
to say it's time for you to go. Even if you were welcome for a short period of time, even if you

01:00:17.880 --> 01:00:22.840
were welcome to sojourn on my couch, if I invited a friend over and he spent the night, that's great.

01:00:22.840 --> 01:00:28.360
If he spends a year, we're going to have a different conversation. And it's not that my morals have

01:00:28.360 --> 01:00:33.880
changed is that the conduct of the other person has has altered the equation and the Christian

01:00:33.880 --> 01:00:41.000
who is wise as a serpent is free and is obligated to understand these things and then to act in a

01:00:41.000 --> 01:00:46.920
Christian way. And that is not to be bound in your conscience by men playing rhetorical tricks

01:00:47.000 --> 01:00:53.240
on you that will get you bound up and in knots. So you don't know what to do, but you probably

01:00:53.240 --> 01:00:57.240
just got to go along with it because what they said sounded pretty Jesusy and you don't want to go to

01:00:57.240 --> 01:01:03.560
hell. You don't want to be mean. When it comes to the use and the abuse of so many of these terms,

01:01:03.560 --> 01:01:08.040
the left obviously don't care. They've gone all in on the redefining terms in order to shift the

01:01:08.040 --> 01:01:12.520
window as we have been discussing. And that is one of their tactics, of course, is just redefining

01:01:13.480 --> 01:01:19.880
terms. If you redefine the terms of what is unthinkable into something that is

01:01:20.600 --> 01:01:26.760
will not acceptable yet, but maybe not totally unthinkable, you've moved the overton window

01:01:26.760 --> 01:01:31.640
without actually having to do anything other than change the term, which can be very effective.

01:01:32.360 --> 01:01:37.720
And it is important for Christians to notice when that is being done. Someone who is playing

01:01:37.800 --> 01:01:43.480
fast and loose with terms is probably trying to deceive you. He could just be stupid. That does

01:01:43.480 --> 01:01:50.120
happen, but he probably is trying to deceive you. He probably is acting out of Alice. So Christians

01:01:50.120 --> 01:01:57.560
have to be, again, wise as serpents. An example of this that is happening. And this is something

01:01:57.560 --> 01:02:01.560
that would actually probably, if I, this something if I said while I was living in Germany, I could

01:02:01.560 --> 01:02:07.480
potentially be deported from Germany for saying it. There is a term in German for someone

01:02:07.480 --> 01:02:15.080
who has moved to Germany and been given citizenship, but isn't German. It's Papiodeuch,

01:02:15.080 --> 01:02:20.200
a paper German. And you could use the same thing, and you could call paper Americans, someone who

01:02:20.200 --> 01:02:24.760
has a piece of paper saying, I'm an American, but that piece of paper doesn't really make you

01:02:24.760 --> 01:02:28.360
American. That's not what it means to be American. It means something more as we've discussed in

01:02:28.360 --> 01:02:35.400
other episodes. But that term is something that you aren't allowed to use in Germany because it

01:02:35.400 --> 01:02:40.920
is considered hate speech. And if you engage in hate speech as someone who is sojourning in Germany,

01:02:40.920 --> 01:02:46.760
someone who is not a legal citizen, you can be kicked out of the country. You can have your

01:02:46.760 --> 01:02:53.800
paperwork revoked. But what I want the point I want to make here is they're trying to redefine

01:02:53.800 --> 01:03:00.840
that term. They are taking it from the traditional sense of someone who is German only because of

01:03:00.840 --> 01:03:11.000
the piece of paper to mean German officialies, the legalistic style of some German documents.

01:03:12.040 --> 01:03:19.080
They're doing exactly what happened in 1984. They're trying to change the terms, the definitions

01:03:19.080 --> 01:03:28.120
of the terms so that the crime thing is impossible. Just remove the definition of the word. And you

01:03:28.120 --> 01:03:32.680
can see this happening in real time. There are people who know exactly what this word means,

01:03:32.680 --> 01:03:37.160
what it's supposed to mean. But now it's starting to pop up with the other definition

01:03:37.160 --> 01:03:43.160
in dictionaries. And so that is one of the ways you can move this window. You can reframe things.

01:03:43.720 --> 01:03:48.040
You don't have to use new terms. You don't have to use new arguments. Just redefine things.

01:03:48.680 --> 01:03:57.400
And you can move. We see that today. Homosexual marriage. They redefined what marriage means.

01:03:58.440 --> 01:04:07.080
Marriage means a man and a woman. Now it doesn't because now legally it means a man and a woman

01:04:07.080 --> 01:04:11.240
or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. And soon, who knows what else will be added to that

01:04:11.240 --> 01:04:17.080
definition? Five men, one woman, five men and a donkey. They'll change it. They'll keep changing the

01:04:17.080 --> 01:04:25.880
term and make the unthinkable acceptable and then the acceptable into policy. You mentioned a

01:04:25.880 --> 01:04:31.480
minute ago that there's sometimes when people are doing this and that's a good example of duplicity

01:04:31.480 --> 01:04:38.680
of utter dishonesty. I want to read a passage here and this is the worst case for someone

01:04:39.640 --> 01:04:47.160
deliberately reframing an argument and using whatever rhetorical trick they can to deceive you

01:04:47.160 --> 01:04:52.760
where you're interacting with them. You are hopefully a Christian. You're trying to be honest.

01:04:52.760 --> 01:04:57.800
You're trying to pursue truth. The person that you're talking with, see if any of these

01:04:57.800 --> 01:05:03.160
descriptions sound familiar to anyone that you've ever interacted with where you're trying to

01:05:03.160 --> 01:05:12.600
argue in good faith and they were trying to chuck and drive and to land blows and to stab and to

01:05:12.600 --> 01:05:19.240
faint and to win a fight not to seek truth but simply to win the argument. Listen to this and see

01:05:19.240 --> 01:05:26.040
if it rings true for your own personal experience. The more I debated with them, the more familiar I

01:05:26.040 --> 01:05:31.160
became with their argumentative tactics. At the outset, they counted upon the stupidity of their

01:05:31.160 --> 01:05:36.360
opponents but when they got so entangled that they could not find the way out, they played the

01:05:36.360 --> 01:05:42.040
trick of acting as innocent simpletons. Should they fail in spite of their tricks of logic, they

01:05:42.040 --> 01:05:46.440
acted as if they could not understand the counter arguments and bolted away to another field of

01:05:46.440 --> 01:05:51.800
discussion. They would lay down truisms and platitudes and if you accepted these, then they

01:05:51.800 --> 01:05:56.440
would be applied to other problems and matters of an essentially different nature from the

01:05:56.440 --> 01:06:01.960
inoriginal theme. If you faced them with this point, they would escape again and you could not

01:06:01.960 --> 01:06:07.160
bring them to make any precise statement. Whenever one tried to get a firm grip on any of these

01:06:07.160 --> 01:06:12.920
apostles, one's hand grabs only jelly and slime which slipped through the fingers and combined

01:06:12.920 --> 01:06:19.000
again into a solid mass, moments afterwards. If your adversary fell forced to give in to your

01:06:19.000 --> 01:06:24.200
argument on account of the observer's present, and if you then thought the last you had gained

01:06:24.200 --> 01:06:29.240
ground, a surprise was in store for you in the following day. They would be utterly oblivious

01:06:29.240 --> 01:06:34.600
to what had happened the day before and would start once again by repleting the former absurdities

01:06:34.600 --> 01:06:40.280
as if nothing had happened. Should you become indignant and remind him of yesterday's defeat,

01:06:40.280 --> 01:06:45.560
he pretended astonishment and could not remember saying anything except that on the previous day,

01:06:45.560 --> 01:06:51.480
he had proved his statements were correct. Sometimes I was dubfounded. I do not know what amazed me

01:06:51.480 --> 01:06:56.600
more, the abundance of the verbiage or the artful way in which they dressed up their falsehoods.

01:06:57.480 --> 01:07:02.360
Now, I've argued with people like that in the past and I didn't know what was going on. It was

01:07:02.360 --> 01:07:08.280
very frustrating because again, I was arguing in good faith I wanted to pursue the truth. Even if

01:07:08.280 --> 01:07:13.720
the truth was that I was wrong and I needed to be clarified by the other person making a different

01:07:13.720 --> 01:07:22.360
point, what I got instead was insanity. For a while, it drove me insane. I couldn't understand

01:07:22.360 --> 01:07:30.840
the mindset of the person I was talking to because it was an alien form of thought and reading that

01:07:30.840 --> 01:07:36.520
quote was really revelatory because in the context of framing, it was like, yes, well, that's exactly

01:07:36.600 --> 01:07:42.760
what happens in so many of these discussions. The person who was talking in that passage was

01:07:42.760 --> 01:07:51.000
talking about one group, but it's a form of discourse, of dialogue that has kind of become normal

01:07:51.000 --> 01:07:58.760
today where again, people want to win. They don't want to pursue truth and that's never what any

01:07:58.760 --> 01:08:03.000
Christian person should pursue. You should want to be right. And if that means you have to change

01:08:03.160 --> 01:08:08.600
your mind, then change your mind. If you're wrong, you need to repent. You need to get on the right

01:08:08.600 --> 01:08:15.800
side of things. But just because someone is, seems to be making a convincing argument, take a look

01:08:15.800 --> 01:08:21.400
at their givens, take a look at whether they've reframed in such a way that you have no choice but

01:08:21.400 --> 01:08:26.600
to agree with them because they've hemmed you in. If you get hemmed in by someone who's being

01:08:26.600 --> 01:08:33.080
duplicitous and deceptive, you will end up confessing falsely to something that is evil.

01:08:33.080 --> 01:08:39.800
And you'll do it with a clean conscious, if not maybe a troubled one, but you'll do it willingly

01:08:39.800 --> 01:08:44.680
because you felt like you had no choice because of the conversation that led to that point.

01:08:44.680 --> 01:08:52.840
So the convincing arguments that are that you accept, it's not enough for them to be convincing.

01:08:52.840 --> 01:08:59.640
They have to be valid. They have to be based on actual reason and not on emotional appeals or

01:08:59.640 --> 01:09:03.800
on the twisting of language so that you have no choice but to agree with something that

01:09:04.840 --> 01:09:08.680
if you had had it presented to you in a different way, and it is in the case of,

01:09:08.680 --> 01:09:12.440
you know, do you want the small medium or large? If there'd only been the smaller large,

01:09:12.440 --> 01:09:16.440
you would have chosen differently. But because you was presented to you in a certain way,

01:09:17.240 --> 01:09:20.920
in your mind's eye, you were kind of hemmed in. There was only one obvious choice.

01:09:21.480 --> 01:09:27.160
Don't let that happen when you're talking to someone because it opens you up to manipulation,

01:09:27.160 --> 01:09:31.960
to abuse, to being deceived. And if you can be deceived, you can be damned.

01:09:32.920 --> 01:09:37.160
Satan wants to trick you. And as we talked about last week, any trick will do.

01:09:37.160 --> 01:09:43.800
Big one small one like as long as you start buying into lies, which includes reframing falsely,

01:09:43.800 --> 01:09:48.840
you will eventually slide far enough down the slope that you can't even see that you are

01:09:49.480 --> 01:09:54.600
sitting side by side with Satan and with his friends and doing things that you never would have

01:09:54.600 --> 01:10:00.120
done if you had not been tricked those years before by that one simple real little reframe of a

01:10:00.120 --> 01:10:05.240
word that you didn't really think about it. And so you bought it and everything that flows from

01:10:05.240 --> 01:10:12.680
that naturally. Yes, it's a slippery slope, but slopes are real. If you've ever been on a hill

01:10:12.680 --> 01:10:19.560
that was icy, slippery slope is it's inexorable. Once you lose your grip, you're going down the hill

01:10:19.560 --> 01:10:25.480
and you're not going to stop until you hit something at the bottom. And we see that with so many

01:10:25.480 --> 01:10:32.280
things that have happened in the relatively recent past, homosexual marriage is a great example

01:10:32.440 --> 01:10:43.640
because the initial requests were not demands really, but they were not for equal so-called

01:10:43.640 --> 01:10:50.760
recognition under the law. The initial demands were that those in a homosexual relationship should

01:10:50.760 --> 01:10:57.240
have some of the same legal rights as those in an actual marriage. And so it was well,

01:10:57.240 --> 01:11:05.720
life insurance should permit you to name your so-called husband if you're a man. And so people

01:11:05.720 --> 01:11:11.560
didn't object to that. That seemed like a minor thing. Okay, fine, we can make that change. And then

01:11:11.560 --> 01:11:18.360
the demand was that, well, health insurance benefits should cover your partner so-called. And so we

01:11:18.360 --> 01:11:25.800
made that change and on and on and on and on. And eventually you get to today where you have

01:11:25.800 --> 01:11:33.720
marriage redefined, you have Christian adoption agencies being driven out of their work. And so

01:11:33.720 --> 01:11:40.200
you have children who could have been adopted into good families who will not because they are

01:11:40.200 --> 01:11:44.200
accused of discriminating under the law because they will not adopt out to homosexuals.

01:11:47.240 --> 01:11:51.000
The slope is almost always slippery and it just gets worse.

01:11:51.320 --> 01:11:57.720
And all of those steps along the way, each of those concessions was perfectly reasonable.

01:11:57.720 --> 01:12:01.000
Like, oh, well, that makes perfect sense. That's just a small thing. Why wouldn't we do that?

01:12:01.000 --> 01:12:07.960
There's no harm in that. The harm was done the very moment that any man, woman, or child conceded

01:12:08.520 --> 01:12:16.920
that marriage was not the sexual union of a man and a woman blessed by God for the purpose of

01:12:16.920 --> 01:12:23.080
procreation. As soon as that definition was abandoned, as soon as it could be any other permutation,

01:12:23.720 --> 01:12:29.160
the whole shooting match was lost. And everything that happened downstream, down the slope,

01:12:29.720 --> 01:12:36.760
down that isely slippery murderous slope was inevitable because you gave away the whole thing

01:12:36.760 --> 01:12:44.280
at the starting bell. You gave away the fight when you gave away what it meant to actually be

01:12:44.280 --> 01:12:51.240
married, which is a sexual union between a man and a woman. That, when it is listed, is the

01:12:51.240 --> 01:12:57.320
foundation of society, all of it. It's the foundation of the family. It's the foundation of the state.

01:12:57.320 --> 01:13:02.200
And guess what? The people who seek the destruction of the state, who seek the destruction of the

01:13:02.200 --> 01:13:07.480
family for the sake of doing evil. They know what they're doing. Satan knows what he's doing by

01:13:07.480 --> 01:13:12.600
undermining this. So when they say, oh, love is love. Let me show you this rainbow, which by the

01:13:12.600 --> 01:13:17.960
way is not really a rainbow. It's got six colors. God's rainbow have seven colors. Think about

01:13:17.960 --> 01:13:23.480
this later on what the significance of those number changes are because that matters. When they

01:13:23.480 --> 01:13:29.560
have these false flags, literally, that they, these banners that they fly and these slogans that

01:13:29.560 --> 01:13:35.640
they chant, they're all reasonable. They're all pretty. They always appear as an angel of light.

01:13:36.520 --> 01:13:44.680
And it's the premise that they're trying to sell that is the deadly poison. And Christians who are not

01:13:45.640 --> 01:13:52.520
aware of how these fights are actually taking place in the world are spiritually and intellectually

01:13:52.520 --> 01:13:59.400
disarmed. And they're vulnerable to not only not fighting evil, but to actively participating in

01:13:59.400 --> 01:14:05.640
evil with a clear conscience. Because if you buy the frame of the evil, then it becomes yours.

01:14:06.280 --> 01:14:11.160
And suddenly you go find a Bible verse that it turns out, said that that was moral all along.

01:14:11.160 --> 01:14:15.640
And why did we notice that before? Well, great. Thank God for this progress that we've made in our

01:14:15.640 --> 01:14:21.240
religion. Where now we have we have new and more moral ways of doing things. Christianity does not

01:14:21.240 --> 01:14:27.720
progress. Christianity does not evolve. Christianity does not have more morality today than yesterday.

01:14:27.720 --> 01:14:34.840
If you want to try to be more moral than God, you're going to go to hell. And I often speak like

01:14:34.840 --> 01:14:44.040
this and I don't mean to be brutal or blunt or forceful for the sake of drama or something. But

01:14:45.160 --> 01:14:50.920
again, the slippery slope is real. You buy you into a little thing. You're going to get what comes

01:14:50.920 --> 01:14:55.960
along with it because you're going down that icy hill. You don't have any breaks. There's nothing

01:14:55.960 --> 01:15:01.720
you can do except for spin and hit something at the bottom. You don't have a choice except for

01:15:01.720 --> 01:15:06.280
not going over the hill in the first place. And that requires knowing that there's a hill there

01:15:06.280 --> 01:15:11.640
that it's icy and that there's damnation at the bottom of it. And yes, I'm mixing my metaphors

01:15:11.640 --> 01:15:19.640
terribly. I love doing that. But it's this is life and death stuff of the soul, not only of the body.

01:15:19.640 --> 01:15:25.160
It's not just that will society is going to get a little bit worse. It's that these people who can

01:15:25.160 --> 01:15:32.120
get you to agree to evil things. They're getting you to deny God. They're reframing in such a way

01:15:32.120 --> 01:15:37.640
that it sounds Jesusy and it sounds loving and it sounds nice. And if you fall for their refram,

01:15:38.200 --> 01:15:43.960
it becomes your religion and you call that religion Christianity when the genesis, the genealogy

01:15:43.960 --> 01:15:49.960
of that religion is Satan. It's not God. These things are not found in scripture. None of them.

01:15:49.960 --> 01:15:54.520
They are found in the world. They are found in the mouths of the most evil people in the world.

01:15:54.520 --> 01:16:01.000
And the fact that they're being found in the mouths of Christians is horrifying and it needs to stop.

01:16:01.000 --> 01:16:07.160
And it will only stop when people recognize and speak against these sorts of evils. When it starts,

01:16:07.160 --> 01:16:12.200
not when it gets so bad that you're like, oh, wow, we got to do something about it now. You fight

01:16:12.200 --> 01:16:17.320
the first moment that the reframe occurs. You fight the moment that the evil is introduced. Not

01:16:17.320 --> 01:16:22.200
when everyone suddenly realizes how bad it could actually get. But then it's going to be too late.

01:16:22.200 --> 01:16:27.480
And in the case of homosexual marriage, where we basically capitulated,

01:16:28.760 --> 01:16:35.000
wasn't actually with the pride parades, which is noteworthy because what they call the pride parades.

01:16:35.960 --> 01:16:41.320
Satan's mask is never perfect. He always lets things slip. If you have people doing what they do

01:16:41.320 --> 01:16:49.880
at pride parades and calling them pride parades, maybe think about that and mortal sin. But where

01:16:49.880 --> 01:16:59.000
we actually capitulated had almost nothing to do with homosexuality, we capitulated when we stopped

01:16:59.560 --> 01:17:06.600
opposing birth control. Because that's where we undermine the nature of marriage, what it meant

01:17:07.160 --> 01:17:14.360
to be man and wife, what it meant to have a family. And from there, that was the beginning of

01:17:14.440 --> 01:17:22.760
the slippery slope. Because once you decouple marriage from procreation, well, then why does it

01:17:22.760 --> 01:17:29.320
matter if you literally cannot procreate in this union? And that was the beginning of the slippery

01:17:29.320 --> 01:17:37.080
slope when it came to this particular issue. And some Christians did fight that battle. We do

01:17:37.080 --> 01:17:43.800
have to give credit. The LCMS fought long and hard on that one. The boomers capitulated,

01:17:44.520 --> 01:17:53.240
largely in the 60s. But before that, our forebears did fight that issue. They didn't win, but they tried.

01:17:54.120 --> 01:18:02.040
And it's important to note, as Christians, God does not tell us, go win the battle. In fact,

01:18:02.040 --> 01:18:06.040
a lot of times he tells us to go lose the battle. But you still have to fight the battle.

01:18:06.840 --> 01:18:11.000
God is the one who will fight for you and he and exactly you never give up, you keep fighting.

01:18:11.720 --> 01:18:17.800
God may carry the day for you, he may not. Ultimately, he will. But you don't have the option

01:18:17.800 --> 01:18:24.760
to stop fighting. Make the enemy bleed for every inch. Because the enemy will not stop fighting

01:18:24.760 --> 01:18:31.560
and neither Christians, we are not permitted to do that. God is truth, beauty, goodness, truth. We

01:18:31.560 --> 01:18:35.000
will keep bringing up the transcendentals until people are saying them in their sleep.

01:18:36.360 --> 01:18:44.200
If you yield on the truth, you are necessarily yielding on God because God is truth. There is no

01:18:44.200 --> 01:18:50.280
falsehood in God. There are no lies in God. Lies cannot stand in his presence. And so if you are

01:18:50.280 --> 01:18:56.760
buying into the lies of the world, you are buying into things that are against God, you are opposing

01:18:56.760 --> 01:19:03.240
God. You are renouncing Him. And that is why these things matter. That is why you do not let people

01:19:03.240 --> 01:19:10.440
reframe things and shift things away from what was good, what is good. Because good doesn't change.

01:19:10.440 --> 01:19:14.840
The truth doesn't change. Beauty doesn't change. Because God doesn't change.

01:19:16.680 --> 01:19:23.800
You're absolutely right about contraception, about birth control. And that led to normalizing divorce.

01:19:23.880 --> 01:19:29.640
Because if it wasn't about procreation and the formation of families, then it just becomes

01:19:29.640 --> 01:19:35.880
a social arrangement. It becomes a financial arrangement. And maybe in some cases divorce should

01:19:35.880 --> 01:19:40.920
be allowed. We have plenty of pastors who are divorced. And even though that is an ontological

01:19:40.920 --> 01:19:48.360
impossibility, it is something that is virtually never spoken against today. The majority of our

01:19:48.360 --> 01:19:53.560
pastors use birth control is demonstrated by the fact that most of them don't have seven or eight

01:19:53.560 --> 01:20:00.280
kids. You can tell which pastors have a scriptural view of birth control by how many kids they have.

01:20:00.280 --> 01:20:07.000
Yeah, these are millennials. These are guys who may still be having kids in five or ten years.

01:20:07.000 --> 01:20:11.560
Some of them end up with clans of 20 and I hope they do because there are some of the best theologians

01:20:11.560 --> 01:20:16.520
that we have in the Missouri Senate today. Those are the guys who are filling pews. It's the guy

01:20:16.600 --> 01:20:22.760
with one kid and then another adopted one from Venezuela that is the real problem because he

01:20:22.760 --> 01:20:29.080
didn't just capitulate on one evil thing. He capitulated on a whole bunch of them because as you

01:20:29.080 --> 01:20:39.160
said, there are no lies in God. The morality, the religion of today, which is not Christianity,

01:20:39.160 --> 01:20:45.800
says that hate is evil. That killing is evil. Per se. Those things are utterly impermissible

01:20:45.800 --> 01:20:52.680
under any circumstances and that lying or that adopting false beliefs, well, you know, lies,

01:20:52.680 --> 01:20:58.280
but you know, beliefs are malleable. They can be whatever. When you read scripture, you will find

01:20:58.280 --> 01:21:06.040
that God hates. There are things that God hates. To hate is one of the properties of God. It is not

01:21:06.040 --> 01:21:11.080
the one that we emphasize because that would be bad news for us. We want to emphasize the gospel

01:21:11.320 --> 01:21:19.400
and not the law, but God hates whatever is contrary to God's nature. Sin, which is contrary to God's

01:21:19.400 --> 01:21:27.560
nature, he hates. God will kill you because of your sin, which he hates. And he will kill you because

01:21:27.560 --> 01:21:33.960
he loves you because just as Adam was cast from the garden so that he can no longer eat from the

01:21:33.960 --> 01:21:39.880
tree of life because then he would have lived forever alienated from God. What God did was he

01:21:39.880 --> 01:21:47.160
sent him away so that he could die so that the sin and the evil in Adam's life would have a

01:21:47.160 --> 01:21:53.880
finite end that could then be redeemed by Christ, propitiating sacrifice on the cross and that

01:21:53.880 --> 01:21:58.920
in eternity, Adam would be given a new body and you would be given a new body and we will be

01:21:58.920 --> 01:22:04.680
given a second chance where there's no chance of sin where all we can possibly do is obey God. But

01:22:04.760 --> 01:22:13.240
that love of God does not negate the fact that God hates and God kills as well. God killed everyone

01:22:13.240 --> 01:22:20.280
on the planet and an act of hatred for their evil in the flood. Apart from eight people, four men

01:22:20.280 --> 01:22:26.840
and four women were spared from the flood for the sake of continuing the promise of Genesis 315

01:22:26.840 --> 01:22:34.520
that he would send her a deemer in the fullness of time. So God will hate and God will kill

01:22:34.520 --> 01:22:41.720
God will never lie. There's no portion of any lie that is possible anywhere in God. And yet

01:22:41.720 --> 01:22:48.680
today we've inverted that. We've said that God never, never hates. God never, never kills. But God,

01:22:48.680 --> 01:22:54.280
yeah, I mean, morality changes. If morality changes, then God's a liar. That's really what you're

01:22:54.280 --> 01:23:01.400
saying. And so these things that we call Christianity, we call morality, they're not from God. The

01:23:01.400 --> 01:23:10.040
genealogy of those things has another source. And reframing those evil things in Christian terms

01:23:10.040 --> 01:23:15.560
by sprinkling Jesus dust on evil stuff, you know, reframs and lets people who are Christians

01:23:15.560 --> 01:23:21.080
who are not being wise of serpent, who are just being lazy and gullible, let's them fall for

01:23:21.080 --> 01:23:27.720
things that will ultimately separate your soul from God and eternity. And no one wants that.

01:23:27.720 --> 01:23:31.080
There's nothing more hateful than wanting someone to go to hell. We shouldn't we're forbidden to

01:23:31.080 --> 01:23:38.760
that. And it's sometimes it's hard because you know that when an evil person continues to be evil

01:23:38.760 --> 01:23:44.840
and they die in their evil, they will pay for eternity for every evil act they did, every

01:23:44.840 --> 01:23:50.040
careless word they spoke. I've committed many evil acts and I've said many word careless words.

01:23:50.040 --> 01:23:55.960
Jesus paid for all of those so that I won't have to because I received that gift through faith.

01:23:55.960 --> 01:24:01.640
Those who reject that sacrifice will take it upon themselves to pay the eternal price for those

01:24:01.640 --> 01:24:07.560
things. And that is a truly terrifying thing. And as Christians, we're not to wish that on anyone,

01:24:07.560 --> 01:24:12.120
sometimes that's hard. But it is a terrifying reality that those who

01:24:13.240 --> 01:24:21.160
use these tools of manipulation and of rhetoric for the sake of advancing evil, they're heaping

01:24:21.160 --> 01:24:26.600
condemnation upon themselves. They're nailing Christ to the cross with those sins, but they're

01:24:26.600 --> 01:24:30.920
also accumulating punishment and attorney for those sins because they will pay for them if they

01:24:30.920 --> 01:24:36.600
don't repent. And so Corey, you know, I both pray for the repentance of all of these people to

01:24:36.600 --> 01:24:41.400
cease their evil for the sake of the world, for the sake of the church, and for the sake of their

01:24:41.400 --> 01:24:48.680
own souls. But if they will not cease, then may Master Hans visit upon them in a legal manner as

01:24:48.680 --> 01:24:54.520
soon as possible to rid us of the evil in this world, because the sooner that they stop doing

01:24:54.520 --> 01:25:07.720
the evil, the better off we'll be, and the better off they'll be even if they go to hell.