Transcript: Episode 0083

This transcript:
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WEBVTT00:00:37 – 00:00:39:Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.00:00:39 – 00:00:40:I am Corey J.00:00:40 – 00:00:41:Mahler.00:00:41 – 00:00:44:And I'm still Woe.00:00:44 – 00:00:58:On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing a number of related concepts, beginning with treason, betrayal, traitors, and the flip side of that, which is duty and honor.00:00:58 – 00:01:07:The reason that we're tackling this is that I realized a couple of weeks ago, I saw a post go by on my timeline where someone posted something about treason.00:01:07 – 00:01:14:And as I saw it go by, it was directly related to actual national treason, you know, the proper term.00:01:14 – 00:01:25:And I realized when I went by and I posted this in response, that I think most Christians don't believe that something such as betrayal actually really exists.00:01:25 – 00:01:34:I think that there's been such a collapsed view of morality among modern Christians, that the idea that you could betray something doesn't really register.00:01:34 – 00:01:42:It's not just a Christian problem, but we of all people should know better, because Judas is the betrayer of Christ.00:01:42 – 00:01:44:That's effectively his title.00:01:44 – 00:01:51:I don't only call it a title, but he is the betrayer of Christ, Judas the betrayer, or Judas the traitor.00:01:51 – 00:01:57:And he's a traitor because Jesus is high king, and he was a betrayer because he was his friend, he was his teacher.00:01:59 – 00:02:03:And so, as Christians, we should have every sense that it's absolutely possible for there to be real betrayal.00:02:03 – 00:02:21:And the problem is, when you don't think that betrayal is possible, it opens up the door to all manner of evil behavior that today we see people who call themselves Christians, not only approving, but actively participating in, and in many cases, profiting from.00:02:21 – 00:02:27:And so we're going to talk today some about things that are going on in Springfield, Ohio, and elsewhere.00:02:27 – 00:02:28:It's not to be timely.00:02:28 – 00:02:33:We had planned on doing this episode a week ago, and I apologize that we missed last week.00:02:33 – 00:02:38:We sat down on the day we normally record, ready to record, and suddenly everything just fell apart.00:02:38 – 00:02:40:We fought for an hour and just couldn't get it working.00:02:40 – 00:02:49:The next day, we sat down to record, and right as we were about to, something came up and it delayed for a few hours, and just, all right, let's do it the next day.00:02:49 – 00:02:57:And then the following day, we tried once again, and it wasn't going to work, and we realized we were only going to have four days before the next episode was due.00:02:57 – 00:03:01:And as we've said before, we'd rather focus on quality than quantity.00:03:01 – 00:03:05:So I apologize that we didn't deliver two weeks back to back.00:03:06 – 00:03:07:We missed something.00:03:07 – 00:03:14:But we had already planned on discussing this before the Springfield thing happened and before the Will Spencer situation evolved.00:03:14 – 00:03:20:So it worked out in our favor that we can point to those examples, but this isn't at all ripped from the headlines.00:03:20 – 00:03:22:It's a general theory episode.00:03:22 – 00:03:29:But we think it's a vital one because in a lot of ways, it ties together many of the previous episodes we've had, and we'll point some of those out as we go.00:03:29 – 00:03:41:But when I began preparing for this episode, I did what I often do when we're talking about words or concept and looked up the etymology, and there's no big breakthrough here.00:03:41 – 00:03:43:I'm not going to tell you any cool trivia.00:03:43 – 00:03:47:The words treason, traitor, betrayal, they mean exactly what you think they mean.00:03:47 – 00:03:49:So there's nothing novel there to say.00:03:49 – 00:03:53:And that's good because that's the way you would hope things should be.00:03:53 – 00:04:03:When we're communicating clearly and we're using a shared language, you should be able to assume that when I say, this is treasonous or this is betrayal, you know exactly what I mean.00:04:03 – 00:04:07:And so we'll talk about some of the nuances and shades there, but it's what you already think.00:04:07 – 00:04:08:So good.00:04:08 – 00:04:12:That means that when these words are used, they can be used clearly.00:04:12 – 00:04:22:And part of the reason for talking about some of the distinctions is that while these concepts are very important, it's equally important that we not overuse them.00:04:22 – 00:04:26:So to give you an absurd example, first I'll begin with a basic definition.00:04:26 – 00:04:32:Treason is something that can only really occur functionally in the political context.00:04:32 – 00:04:39:You can be a traitor to your country because there's a duty that's inherent, there's headship and duty attendant to that.00:04:39 – 00:04:44:So there's someone above you, you betray them in a fashion that's called treason.00:04:45 – 00:04:51:It's important not to abuse that term, like to give an example at the extreme opposite end, you're listening to Stone Choir.00:04:51 – 00:04:53:Many of you probably listen every week.00:04:53 – 00:04:57:You ever get tired of us, you're like, I don't care anymore, I don't like them anymore.00:04:57 – 00:05:00:You stop listening, you're not a traitor to Stone Choir.00:05:00 – 00:05:06:It would never in a million years occur to either Corey or myself that you have betrayed us by not listening or whatever.00:05:06 – 00:05:09:Like that's just, that's insane because there's no duty.00:05:09 – 00:05:17:And so I point out that silly example because it's important not to call something treasonous or betrayal when it's not.00:05:17 – 00:05:20:If there's no duty, those things just don't apply.00:05:20 – 00:05:21:Maybe other things apply.00:05:21 – 00:05:23:In the case of a podcast, you just get tired of it.00:05:23 – 00:05:24:Fine.00:05:24 – 00:05:25:I've gotten tired lots of podcasts.00:05:25 – 00:05:27:That's not betrayal.00:05:27 – 00:05:28:Life goes on.00:05:28 – 00:05:34:So by bringing up the subject, we don't want everyone to start running around saying, this is betrayal, this is betrayal.00:05:34 – 00:05:35:Not the point.00:05:35 – 00:05:40:But the point is that we have to recognize there are cases where it does occur and nobody sees it.00:05:41 – 00:05:46:Because the concept is basically gone from our society.00:05:46 – 00:05:49:And on the flip side, we've talked a lot about duty.00:05:49 – 00:05:54:It's very frequently a subject that comes up peripherally, but crucially.00:05:54 – 00:06:07:Peripherally is not the main subject of the episode, but crucially because duty to God, duty to neighbor, duty to family, whatever duties we have are supposed to dictate our behavior.00:06:07 – 00:06:10:They're supposed to be the rule by which we live our lives.00:06:11 – 00:06:20:Whether we're Christians or not, and Christians above all other men have the source of the understanding for those duties that's missing in the pagan world.00:06:20 – 00:06:22:And it's not that the pagans live without duty.00:06:22 – 00:06:33:They often live, in many cases, more dutiful lives than Christians, because what modern Christianity has become is basically license for despising duty.00:06:33 – 00:06:35:Oh, I have the gospel.00:06:35 – 00:06:36:I believe in Jesus.00:06:36 – 00:06:39:So it doesn't matter how much I let my neighbor suffer.00:06:39 – 00:06:49:It doesn't matter that I don't hire the man who's my next door neighbor and my brother, because there's somebody who's cheaper, who's from overseas, who's just moved in.00:06:49 – 00:06:50:That guy is going to save me 5%.00:06:51 – 00:06:53:Well, my duty is to capitalism.00:06:53 – 00:06:54:My duty is to profit.00:06:54 – 00:06:55:My duty is not to blood.00:06:55 – 00:06:56:It's not to neighbor.00:06:56 – 00:06:58:It's not to the people in my church.00:06:58 – 00:07:09:So the reason that it's crucial is that their Christians are acting in despicable, evil ways, and they think that they're just fine because they go to church on Sunday, and they sing hymns, and they, you know, say the creeds.00:07:09 – 00:07:14:They do the right stuff except for living a Christian life.00:07:14 – 00:07:19:And so this is one of the occurring themes on Stone Choir.00:07:19 – 00:07:31:To believe in God, to believe in Christ's sacrifice on the cross that pays for all the sins that we commit, yours and mine every day, all the things that we know, all the things that we don't know, all the things that we're going to do later.00:07:31 – 00:07:33:God already paid for those on the cross.00:07:34 – 00:07:38:All we have to do is believe that and receive that forgiveness by faith.00:07:38 – 00:07:42:But when we say that's all we have to do, we're only talking about salvation.00:07:42 – 00:07:44:I don't have to do anything else to be saved.00:07:44 – 00:07:50:When I believe that Jesus died for my sins, I receive the gift of salvation that was prepared for me.00:07:50 – 00:07:56:But I still have other things to do because I am saved, because I do belong to God and I have a duty to Him.00:07:56 – 00:08:09:And so the reason that Judas' betrayal of Jesus was treasonous as well as treachery is that he had a duty to him, both as God, and he knew he was God.00:08:09 – 00:08:14:He was there witnessing all his miracles, witnessing his preaching, and yet he was a dirtbag.00:08:14 – 00:08:16:He was awful all the time.00:08:16 – 00:08:20:And this is something that is only captured in John 12.00:08:20 – 00:08:26:I'm going to read this passage because it's not, there's a detail here, if I remember correctly, isn't reflected in the other gospels.00:08:26 – 00:08:30:And when these readings come up, this is one that's not usually used.00:08:30 – 00:08:31:Listen to this carefully.00:08:33 – 00:08:39:Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was whom Jesus had raised from the dead.00:08:39 – 00:08:41:So they gave a dinner to him there.00:08:41 – 00:08:45:Martha served and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at the table.00:08:45 – 00:08:52:Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.00:08:52 – 00:09:04:The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume, but Judas Iscariot, one of the disciples, he who was about to betray him said, Why was this ointment not sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor?00:09:04 – 00:09:13:He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, having charge of the money bag he used to help himself to what was put in it.00:09:13 – 00:09:26:So this is a crucial detail, because if you read the Synoptic Gospels, they all tell the same story, but they leave out the part that Judas said it, and he was a thief, and that the fact that he was a thief was his motivation.00:09:26 – 00:09:32:Now this is right before he betrayed Christ, but this betrayer was also a petty thief.00:09:32 – 00:09:35:He was a scumbag who was stealing from the disciples.00:09:35 – 00:09:37:He was stealing from Jesus.00:09:37 – 00:09:42:Money was being given to them so that they could help the poor, so they could do whatever their mission required.00:09:42 – 00:09:46:He was pocketing it and using it for his own purposes.00:09:46 – 00:09:54:And this is why he stirred up all the other apostles to object to that gift that was given on Jesus' feet.00:09:54 – 00:09:59:And so when you read the other Synoptics, it just says that the apostles were upset, and they were.00:09:59 – 00:10:07:They were upset that this had been given to waste, and Jesus explained why what she had done was beautiful and would be remembered from all time whenever the story was told.00:10:09 – 00:10:21:The crucial detail that's only connected in John is that Judas' motivation for being the first one to say that, to say, look at what waste this is, was not concern for the poor, it was greed.00:10:21 – 00:10:26:He saw money being poured out on Jesus' feet that he could have embezzled.00:10:27 – 00:10:28:And that was his motivation.00:10:28 – 00:10:38:And so we have a satanic false betraying deceiver among the twelve before he was possessed and actually betrayed him in the garden.00:10:38 – 00:10:43:And the purpose of his deception was to steal and everyone went along with it.00:10:43 – 00:10:44:Why?00:10:44 – 00:10:45:Because it was plausible.00:10:45 – 00:10:46:It was a plausible argument.00:10:46 – 00:10:48:He said, hey, this is wasteful.00:10:48 – 00:10:49:This is something valuable.00:10:49 – 00:10:54:Look at all the good we could have done with it if we'd used these riches for some other purpose.00:10:55 – 00:10:57:And that sounded really Christian to everyone else.00:10:57 – 00:11:01:Now, doesn't this sound like many of the problems we have in our churches today?00:11:01 – 00:11:08:Someone with evil motives, maybe just one voice with evil motives, will say, hey, look in this direction, we got to do this thing.00:11:08 – 00:11:10:And they're going to slather it in Jesus' butter.00:11:10 – 00:11:12:They're going to make it seem very appealing to everybody.00:11:12 – 00:11:13:It's like, oh, yeah, we got to do that.00:11:13 – 00:11:15:Obviously, it's a gospel issue.00:11:15 – 00:11:16:We have to, we can't have anything nice.00:11:16 – 00:11:18:We have to give it all away.00:11:19 – 00:11:23:We don't always have Jesus there to say what's actually going on.00:11:24 – 00:11:27:And Jesus knew that Judas was a thief, and he just let it slide.00:11:27 – 00:11:28:He didn't say anything at the time.00:11:28 – 00:11:31:John records it later on because he knew.00:11:31 – 00:11:40:This is important because in the church, everywhere, really in every institution, we see this in the churches, we see this in our government.00:11:40 – 00:11:48:Wherever you have trust, where men have put their trust in institutions, say this is here for a purpose, it's going to preserve whatever.00:11:48 – 00:11:50:It's going to preserve education.00:11:50 – 00:11:53:It's going to preserve the neighborhood, the church.00:11:53 – 00:11:58:It has a specific duty to us as an institution.00:11:58 – 00:12:07:And then you get a couple guys in there who have hearts of Judas, who have hearts of embezzling and betrayal and murder, and they say all the right things.00:12:07 – 00:12:10:They say the right things for the wrong reason.00:12:10 – 00:12:14:Now, what Judas said was wrong, but it was at least a plausible argument.00:12:14 – 00:12:16:And so I highlight this because everybody went along with it.00:12:16 – 00:12:19:The other disciples say, obviously, don't pour that stuff out.00:12:19 – 00:12:21:That's valuable.00:12:21 – 00:12:29:The motive of the man who initially put that idea in all of their heads was not for the poor, it was for his embezzling.00:12:31 – 00:12:48:When we are processing the situations that we now face today as individual men in all these scenarios, every possible realm of duty and just daily life that you have, big and small, there are going to be voices who are going to be saying the right things for the wrong reasons.00:12:48 – 00:12:51:And unfortunately, most men aren't equipped to see through that.00:12:51 – 00:12:58:They can't clearly see, okay, well, this guy is doing something that seems right, but I actually know there's something else going on.00:12:58 – 00:13:01:Therefore, we have to do something other than what he says.00:13:01 – 00:13:13:The absence of honor is what makes these things possible because the flip side of all of this whole conversation is that the idea of honor has basically died in the West.00:13:13 – 00:13:21:It's still, you know, if you're a Southerner, you're yowling right now because in the South, there's an semblance of honor that's preserved.00:13:21 – 00:13:25:I'm half Tar Heel, but I was raised a Yankee, I'm a Yankee.00:13:27 – 00:13:33:There's an aspect of honor that is preserved in Southern culture, but it's not remotely the same as what it was in past centuries.00:13:33 – 00:13:37:Because there are bits and pieces that are preserved very salutarily.00:13:37 – 00:13:39:We need that back everywhere.00:13:39 – 00:13:44:But there's a lot more that's also missing in the Southern notion of honor culture.00:13:44 – 00:13:47:So what I'm talking about goes back further.00:13:47 – 00:13:55:But the point that I'm making here is that what we've done is we've sequestered the notion of honor to basically things like honor codes.00:13:55 – 00:13:59:You have some prep school or an elite institution.00:13:59 – 00:14:02:Virtually everyone historically is going to have been white.00:14:02 – 00:14:04:And they'll have something that's called an honor code.00:14:04 – 00:14:06:And it's usually taken very seriously.00:14:07 – 00:14:14:And those honor codes are something that shows up in mass media that we point to and say, well, that there's honor there in that place.00:14:14 – 00:14:17:Also in the military, historically, honor is a huge deal.00:14:17 – 00:14:20:You know, the things that men do for honor, they wouldn't do for other reasons.00:14:20 – 00:14:30:Some of the things that the military, the men on the ground have to do, they're not doing it for profit or for glory, but they'll do it for the honor that is a private thing.00:14:30 – 00:14:33:It's a thing that's accorded to them by their fellows.00:14:33 – 00:14:39:And it's something that is intrinsic to the conduct itself.00:14:39 – 00:14:46:The world that we have today has no notion of honor, which means that as long as nobody's looking, whatever you can get away with is fine.00:14:46 – 00:14:58:And in the south, in the church, in the elite institutions, pretty much everywhere now, what you can get away with is really the barrier of entry for what is morally illicit.00:14:58 – 00:15:02:The idea that when no one's looking, I wouldn't behave badly, well, that's honor.00:15:03 – 00:15:06:And that's a limited thing.00:15:06 – 00:15:08:Not everyone has honor.00:15:08 – 00:15:09:Not every culture has honor.00:15:09 – 00:15:11:Not every race has honor.00:15:11 – 00:15:18:And that's where this stuff gets really difficult, because things that are intrinsic, like the notion of honor, can't be taught.00:15:18 – 00:15:25:You can't teach someone who has no notion of reputation or honor to do it, or to value it, or to hold it, or to preserve it.00:15:25 – 00:15:29:All they understand is that no one's looking, so I can do whatever I want.00:15:29 – 00:15:41:And so today's episode is just discussing these concepts as a whole, as the idea that we live in a world where no one thinks betrayal is possible, and no one thinks that honor is achievable.00:15:41 – 00:15:58:And those two things by themself, apart from morality, apart from the law, apart from anything else, if you live in a world in a society where no one can betray, like that's just not a thing, there's no betrayal, because there's no duty, and no one can really live with honor, because as long as no one's looking, it didn't really happen.00:15:58 – 00:16:00:You know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.00:16:00 – 00:16:04:It's a billion-dollar slogan, and it's despicable.00:16:04 – 00:16:05:That's absolutely despicable.00:16:05 – 00:16:06:It's dishonorable.00:16:06 – 00:16:08:That's a word that used to mean something.00:16:10 – 00:16:11:Today, we've created a society.00:16:11 – 00:16:20:We live in a society, and we perpetuate a society, including in our churches and all these institutions, where these are just taken for granted.00:16:20 – 00:16:21:There's no betrayal.00:16:21 – 00:16:23:There's no backstabbing.00:16:23 – 00:16:26:And the idea of being honorable is not a thing.00:16:26 – 00:16:38:With those removed from the board, with these concepts that we're talking about today, removed from the possible sources of action and motivation, everything else that we see today is going to happen.00:16:38 – 00:16:40:It's inevitable.00:16:40 – 00:16:52:The things we see in Springfield, Ohio, the things that we see in our churches, the betrayal, the backstabbing, the treason at the highest levels down to the lowest levels, it's all inevitable because, well, you can't really betray.00:16:52 – 00:16:53:You don't have any duty.00:16:53 – 00:16:57:And the idea of even acting or thinking honorably is alien to men.00:16:58 – 00:17:05:So, we want to just put back in people's minds that these things are real, that they're consequential, particularly in their absence.00:17:05 – 00:17:06:Because that's what we're facing.00:17:06 – 00:17:09:We're facing the absence of these concepts.00:17:09 – 00:17:21:So, we hope that by reintroducing them, at least a little bit more of the discussion, more men will take seriously, hey, nobody's looking, but I should still do the right thing because it's the right thing to do.00:17:21 – 00:17:25:It seems like a basic dumb thing to say, but it's apparently a big ask.00:17:26 – 00:17:30:So, that's basically the ask for today's episode.00:17:30 – 00:17:48:When you hear the word honor, some of you may have thought of the concept of a shame versus a guilt society, because of course, sometimes the shame societies are called shame honor, which is really kind of inverted, because honor plays more of a role with regard to guilt societies.00:17:48 – 00:17:54:And I'll add a map to the show notes so you can see roughly how that maps onto the world.00:17:54 – 00:17:58:We're not going to get into the details of that.00:17:58 – 00:18:01:It's not really a theory, because it's just a reality about the world.00:18:01 – 00:18:04:Different societies view these things in a different way.00:18:04 – 00:18:15:But essentially, honor maps onto the guilt societies almost perfectly, and it is essentially a Western concept with some few exceptions.00:18:15 – 00:18:21:In the shame societies, it's more about not losing face, which isn't quite the same as honor.00:18:21 – 00:18:30:But as Woe said, honor is something that has essentially disappeared from most Western cultures.00:18:30 – 00:18:38:Now, there are some vestiges of it here and there, but it's almost become a joke at this point.00:18:38 – 00:18:42:In fact, it is used as the butt of many jokes in our society.00:18:43 – 00:18:50:And in reality, you cannot have an actual proper civilization, and the map that I will put in the show notes will show this.00:18:51 – 00:19:00:You cannot have a proper civilization without the concept and the concrete reality in the culture of honor.00:19:00 – 00:19:04:And honor and loyalty are essentially synonymous.00:19:04 – 00:19:09:We're going to use them somewhat interchangeably, because they essentially are.00:19:09 – 00:19:24:The way in which you have a difference with regard to honor among different groups of men or women would be essentially by gender, by sex, and by where you are in the social hierarchy.00:19:24 – 00:19:34:Part of that is very straightforward, very simple, because you owe duties to those who are higher in the hierarchy and different duties to those who are lower in the hierarchy.00:19:34 – 00:19:42:And so honor is going to play into that differently, how you are loyal to those above and how you are loyal to those below.00:19:42 – 00:19:54:And the difference for men and women primarily boils down to the fact that women have a smaller sphere, properly speaking, because the sphere for the woman is the home, is her family.00:19:54 – 00:20:02:The sphere for some men is much larger than that, not for all men, because, of course, most men shouldn't be involved in politics.00:20:02 – 00:20:09:Our system is perverse in that everyone is expected to be involved in politics to some degree.00:20:09 – 00:20:10:That's simply not how it should work.00:20:10 – 00:20:20:Politics is something that should be reserved for a certain subset of the population, because they have duties with regard to that.00:20:20 – 00:20:23:The godly prince has a duty to rule correctly.00:20:23 – 00:20:30:The average man does not have a duty to rule correctly because he has not been given that authority by God.00:20:30 – 00:20:37:Our current system attempts to spread that authority around, which there are problems with that, which we are not getting into today.00:20:37 – 00:20:39:It's not the topic for this episode.00:20:40 – 00:20:52:Another aspect of this, though, and drawing in one of those episodes that Wo mentioned, because many of our previous episodes tie into what we are discussing here, but the episode on capitalism.00:20:52 – 00:20:58:Because capitalism is essentially an economic system devoid of honor and devoid of loyalty.00:20:59 – 00:21:04:Because the only thing that matters in capitalism is profit.00:21:04 – 00:21:07:The entire goal is the maximization of profit.00:21:08 – 00:21:14:And in fact, legally speaking, if you are a corporation, you are beholden to your shareholders to maximize profit.00:21:14 – 00:21:24:And you can in fact be sued if you engage in behaviors that would be considered honorable and moral, but are not maximizing profit.00:21:24 – 00:21:27:There's a Supreme Court case on that.00:21:27 – 00:21:29:More than one, but one main one.00:21:29 – 00:21:34:And so the economic system that we have starts to bleed over into our social system.00:21:34 – 00:21:45:And so that lack of honor, that lack of loyalty in the economic system inevitably trains men to behave in that way in all aspects of life.00:21:45 – 00:22:00:You are not going to behave dishonorably and without any loyalty with regard to economic matters, and then turn around and drop all of that and behave as a loyal, honorable, upright man in all of your other dealings.00:22:00 – 00:22:02:That's simply not how human beings work.00:22:02 – 00:22:13:You're being trained to behave in one way or the other, and we see that because you could probably just map the growth of capitalism in the West and the decline of honor.00:22:13 – 00:22:21:Now, there are obviously other things that played into that decline of honor in the West, but that is a huge driving force behind it.00:22:21 – 00:22:36:Because every single day, every time you engage with the economy, which you do constantly, it's anytime you're buying anything, anytime you're selling anything, you are engaged with the economy every day, at least unless you're a hermit.00:22:36 – 00:22:41:And so you are being trained to think and behave in a certain way.00:22:41 – 00:22:55:And we see the disastrous consequences of that, because if you don't have this honor that underlies your culture, if you don't have this pervasive sense of loyalty, then you wind up with many of the problems we see today.00:22:55 – 00:23:13:If we still had a society that was honorable and that had loyalty, if you had men who were trained to be loyal to their own, which is essentially what you're supposed to be, it's what loyalty means, in essence, if we had that, we wouldn't have all of these problems with so-called immigration, for instance.00:23:13 – 00:23:22:You would not have entities that exist in this country to import hostile foreigners, because that's not only disloyal, it is dishonorable.00:23:22 – 00:23:26:In fact, it is also, it's a betrayal and it is treason.00:23:26 – 00:23:31:These are problems we would not have if we still had these concepts of honor and loyalty.00:23:31 – 00:23:34:And these aren't foreign concepts to Christianity.00:23:34 – 00:23:38:These are core concepts to Christianity.00:23:38 – 00:23:40:Because what is it that you owe to God?00:23:40 – 00:23:43:You owe loyalty to God above all else.00:23:44 – 00:23:46:That's fundamental to the Christian.00:23:46 – 00:23:48:That's the heart of the Christian faith.00:23:48 – 00:23:53:I know there are some who are going to be screaming with their hair on fire because that's not the gospel.00:23:53 – 00:23:55:No, it's not.00:23:55 – 00:24:01:Because the Christian life isn't just the gospel, as we have made so abundantly clear in many episodes now.00:24:01 – 00:24:05:The Christian life is the what then.00:24:05 – 00:24:08:You become a Christian when you believe the gospel.00:24:08 – 00:24:10:It is the faith that makes you a Christian.00:24:10 – 00:24:12:But then, what do you do?00:24:12 – 00:24:17:The what then is the Christian life, and so that is extremely important.00:24:17 – 00:24:22:And the core of that is first and foremost loyalty to God.00:24:22 – 00:24:24:That's what the first two commandments are.00:24:24 – 00:24:26:It's what the third commandment is as well.00:24:26 – 00:24:35:But then, after that, it's all loyalty to the various people within the hierarchy of society to whom you owe duties.00:24:35 – 00:24:37:You owe duties to your parents.00:24:37 – 00:24:40:You owe duties to your fellow citizen, not to murder them.00:24:40 – 00:24:42:You owe duties to your spouse.00:24:42 – 00:24:45:You owe duties to your neighbor with regard to his spouse.00:24:45 – 00:24:48:You owe duties to your neighbor with regard to his goods.00:24:48 – 00:24:49:These are all duties.00:24:49 – 00:25:00:These are all forms of loyalty up and down that social hierarchy that are fundamental to the Christian faith, that are basically what the Ten Commandments teach.00:25:00 – 00:25:01:That's the moral law.00:25:01 – 00:25:08:The moral law flows from God's nature and is unchanging, and the heart of it is loyalty and honor.00:25:08 – 00:25:10:That's how Christians should behave.00:25:10 – 00:25:12:That's how Christians used to behave.00:25:12 – 00:25:18:For centuries, Christians in Christendom valued these things extremely highly.00:25:18 – 00:25:26:This was a core part of our culture, and it has simply been allowed to fall away over the decades, over the centuries.00:25:26 – 00:25:31:It has been assaulted from many different angles for different reasons.00:25:31 – 00:25:41:We could look at particular wars in our past that deliberately and directly attacked these concepts and undermined them.00:25:41 – 00:25:47:But by and large, if you look at this, you can very clearly see we are dealing with enemy action.00:25:48 – 00:25:56:This is Satan attempting to undermine the necessary foundation for a Christian society, for a Christian civilization.00:25:56 – 00:26:02:Because if you don't have these things, perhaps you'll run on momentum, you'll run on fumes, as it were, for a while.00:26:02 – 00:26:05:That's what Western civilization is currently doing.00:26:05 – 00:26:09:It is continuing along on the basis of momentum alone.00:26:09 – 00:26:19:Because the foundation is gone, to mix my metaphors here, but we have removed the foundation on which Western civilization rested.00:26:19 – 00:26:21:It is eventually going to collapse.00:26:21 – 00:26:23:It's in the process of collapsing.00:26:23 – 00:26:25:You have to restore the foundations.00:26:25 – 00:26:30:You have to restore these fundamental matters if you are going to rebuild.00:26:30 – 00:26:34:Scripture has something to say about the man who builds on the sand.00:26:34 – 00:26:38:If you do not restore the foundation first, you are building on the sand.00:26:39 – 00:26:49:And so we have to have these concepts of honor and loyalty and what they mean in the concrete, not just what they mean in the abstract, because of course honor is one of those things.00:26:49 – 00:26:53:Sometimes it's difficult to explain what exactly is honor.00:26:53 – 00:27:01:You almost can't explain precisely and extensively, or at least comprehensively, what honor is.00:27:01 – 00:27:05:It's one of those things you have to know it because you have to have it.00:27:06 – 00:27:11:And so explaining honor to a man who has no honor is almost an impossible task.00:27:11 – 00:27:21:But at the same time, we can explain what the core of honor is because it is almost, as I said earlier, synonymous with loyalty.00:27:21 – 00:27:24:And we all know what loyalty is, at least to some degree.00:27:25 – 00:27:29:As I mentioned already, that's going to display itself differently.00:27:29 – 00:27:32:It's going to come out differently for different people.00:27:32 – 00:27:38:again, for women, that's going to be primarily a matter of chastity and fidelity because her sphere is the home.00:27:38 – 00:27:46:For men, it's going to be broader because men are out dealing with the world, dealing with other men, perhaps dealing with the state.00:27:46 – 00:27:48:And so those circles are going to be larger.00:27:48 – 00:27:53:And so the concept of loyalty is more encompassing for a man than for a woman.00:27:53 – 00:27:56:But we understand what loyalty is.00:27:56 – 00:28:00:It is the fulfilling of duty to one to whom a duty is owed.00:28:01 – 00:28:10:And the flip side of that, of course, is that betrayal is that failure to fulfill a duty to whom a duty is owed.00:28:10 – 00:28:19:Now, of course, it's something more than just failure because there's a difference here between something that is done with intent and something that is done with no intent.00:28:19 – 00:28:33:And so if you just fail because you didn't have the capacity to fulfill a duty, that's a fundamentally different matter from being malicious, from deliberately subverting, from causing harm intentionally.00:28:33 – 00:28:34:That intent matters.00:28:34 – 00:28:42:And so when we speak of betrayal, we almost exclusively mean something that is done with that malicious intent.00:28:43 – 00:28:52:And then with regard to treason, some of you may have thought, well, what about petty treason if you have legal training or something like that, or just like to read old books?00:28:54 – 00:28:57:Treason is essentially the betrayal of your head.00:28:58 – 00:29:02:And so it is someone or something, because you can betray a nation.00:29:02 – 00:29:06:It is someone or something to whom one of the highest duties is owed.00:29:06 – 00:29:15:And there's that betrayal of someone who has headship over you and is obviously higher in the hierarchy, because they would need to be in order to have headship.00:29:15 – 00:29:19:And so first and foremost, we think of high treason.00:29:19 – 00:29:22:High treason is betrayal of the sovereign.00:29:22 – 00:29:27:That would be to murder the king is high treason, for example.00:29:27 – 00:29:30:To betray your nation is high treason.00:29:30 – 00:29:34:Petty treason is the betrayal of your head.00:29:34 – 00:29:39:And so petty treason would be if you are a child, the betrayal of your father.00:29:39 – 00:29:44:If you are a wife, the betrayal of your husband, because he is your head.00:29:44 – 00:29:54:In some cases, sometimes this has been extended with regard to other headship relationships, but those are the core ones that deal with petty treason.00:29:54 – 00:29:59:And so just bear in mind, we're typically speaking of high treason when we say just treason.00:29:59 – 00:30:01:That's how it has come to be used in English.00:30:01 – 00:30:08:When treason is said by itself, it implies very heavily high treason, not petty treason.00:30:08 – 00:30:10:But they are of the same kind.00:30:10 – 00:30:12:They are just different in degree.00:30:12 – 00:30:21:And so the concept, the crime that is treason, is not just something that applies to the king or to the nation.00:30:21 – 00:30:28:There are other minor in the sense of smaller, not in the sense of less morally significant.00:30:28 – 00:30:29:That's a tangential issue.00:30:29 – 00:30:31:We'll set that aside.00:30:31 – 00:30:41:Minor instances of treason, they can be committed by basically anyone in society, because everyone in society has some head somewhere.00:30:41 – 00:30:44:There's some form of headship relationship for every person.00:30:44 – 00:31:02:Now, if your father has passed away and you're a man, you probably only have the godly prince as your head at that point, and Christ, obviously, because you probably don't have anyone over you if your father's passed away, assumingly your grandfather is also gone at that point.00:31:02 – 00:31:06:And so petty treason isn't really on the table, as it were, for you.00:31:06 – 00:31:12:But for most men, for most of those in society, petty treason is something they could very well commit.00:31:12 – 00:31:16:And this is another thing that we seem to think, it doesn't really matter.00:31:17 – 00:31:22:It's just completely thrown aside, because we don't care about the commandments anymore.00:31:22 – 00:31:25:Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father.00:31:25 – 00:31:28:That's about petty treason.00:31:28 – 00:31:31:And you may think, well, my father is my head, how can I betray my mother?00:31:31 – 00:31:35:Because when you betray your mother, you're betraying your father.00:31:35 – 00:31:36:They are one flesh.00:31:36 – 00:31:38:To betray one is to betray the other.00:31:38 – 00:31:40:And so that is, of course, still petty treason.00:31:43 – 00:31:53:Incidentally speaking, of course, adultery is also petty treason, because that is one of the greatest betrayals for a woman against her head, against her husband.00:31:53 – 00:31:54:That is a form of treason.00:31:54 – 00:31:58:That is a form of the highest sort of betrayal.00:31:58 – 00:32:01:And our society seems to think that's unimportant.00:32:01 – 00:32:03:We allow no fault divorce.00:32:03 – 00:32:07:We say you can just leave if you feel like it.00:32:07 – 00:32:16:We don't have criminal laws that punish adultery anymore, unless you're in the military, which is a weird special exception at this point.00:32:16 – 00:32:19:But we should have laws that criminalize adultery.00:32:19 – 00:32:20:That's what Scripture says.00:32:20 – 00:32:23:That's what God wants.00:32:23 – 00:32:26:He considers that an abhorrent crime.00:32:26 – 00:32:29:That is not something that we are free to simply ignore.00:32:29 – 00:32:40:Now, we don't have to import the exact civil punishments that are in the Old Testament, because the civil law does not apply word for word, as it were, to Christians.00:32:41 – 00:32:50:But we should certainly take it as very highly persuasive what God said should be the punishment for Old Testament Israel for these particular sins.00:32:50 – 00:32:54:At the absolute least, we should punish them in our laws.00:32:54 – 00:32:59:You cannot have a functional society if you don't deal with these issues.00:32:59 – 00:33:14:There are certain forms of betrayal, and certainly treason, we all recognize, must be punished, but there are certain forms of betrayal that must be punished if you are going to have a functional, and certainly if you are going to have a Christian society.00:33:14 – 00:33:35:If you remove these sorts of laws, and particularly if you remove honor and loyalty from your society, that is what takes you from being a Western country, a Western civilization, and turns you into one of the many other countries that deal with shame instead of guilt.00:33:36 – 00:33:43:Because once you've removed honor and loyalty, it's really a matter of, am I going to get caught?00:33:43 – 00:33:46:And if I get caught, will this make me look bad?00:33:46 – 00:33:51:Will I lose face with regard to other members of society?00:33:51 – 00:33:55:It's not a matter of, is this right or wrong?00:33:55 – 00:33:56:Should I do this?00:33:56 – 00:33:58:Is it wrong to do this?00:33:58 – 00:33:59:Is this a sin?00:33:59 – 00:34:01:That is what a guilt society is.00:34:01 – 00:34:03:It's more that matter of, will I get caught?00:34:04 – 00:34:08:And if you get caught, does it really matter?00:34:08 – 00:34:17:Because in those societies, they will absolutely go ahead and do something that is morally wrongful with a high likelihood of getting caught, if they won't lose face when they're caught.00:34:17 – 00:34:18:That's what matters.00:34:18 – 00:34:22:If you will look worse to those around you, then it won't be done.00:34:22 – 00:34:28:And now, this has a great deal of applicability with regard to, say, international affairs.00:34:28 – 00:34:35:This is something, this is not a theory, which what I'm saying is, it's not a theory that's made up out of whole cloth.00:34:35 – 00:34:39:This is not something that someone just sat in a room and came up with and thought, well, maybe, no.00:34:39 – 00:34:46:This is something that is taught to diplomats and used by our foreign service, because this is a very real thing.00:34:46 – 00:34:58:You can handle various members of different societies by recognizing that if they are going to lose face, they are going to be more willing to cooperate with you.00:34:58 – 00:35:02:It's not to say you can blackmail them, although, of course, that has been done historically.00:35:02 – 00:35:08:It is to say that you have to approach these things differently, because these are very real cultural differences.00:35:10 – 00:35:17:But the shame society is not compatible with Christianity, because that is not what Christianity teaches.00:35:17 – 00:35:26:What Christianity teaches is there is right and there is wrong, and that it is incumbent on you to do what is right, even when no one is looking.00:35:26 – 00:35:30:It doesn't matter if you're alone in the middle of nowhere in a field.00:35:30 – 00:35:40:I don't know how you're necessarily going to commit any particularly heinous sins at that point, but it is incumbent on you to act correctly regardless of the circumstances.00:35:40 – 00:35:43:That is the difference between the guilt and the shame.00:35:43 – 00:36:06:I said I wouldn't get into it that deeply, but this is just sort of an overview of how that works, and it is very relevant, because if you map the world with regard to those two things, you will essentially see which societies care about honor and which societies do not, and it essentially maps on to which societies have at least historical connections to Christianity.00:36:06 – 00:36:15:Now, of course, it's not just Christianity, because a big part of culture is going to be biological, because culture is downstream from race.00:36:15 – 00:36:17:We all recognize that.00:36:17 – 00:36:26:You can look at the culture of any given country, and it's the way it is, because the country is comprised of a certain nation, of a certain race.00:36:26 – 00:36:37:However, Christianity plays a role in this, because Christianity is going to be the foundation of your moral system, at least if you've set your country up correctly.00:36:37 – 00:36:41:What is happening in the West is Christianity is being removed.00:36:41 – 00:36:45:It is no longer the foundation of our moral system.00:36:45 – 00:36:54:And so these underpinnings, these essential parts of the foundation that you cannot remove without having the whole structure collapse, are being eroded away.00:36:54 – 00:36:55:They are being removed.00:36:55 – 00:36:58:Some are basically gone.00:36:58 – 00:37:04:And the structure is simply staying because nothing has come along quite strong enough yet to knock it over.00:37:04 – 00:37:13:And each time you remove more of that foundation, you remove more of those supports, it's going to take less and less of a storm to knock the whole thing over.00:37:13 – 00:37:14:That is where we stand today.00:37:15 – 00:37:34:And not just Christianity has been eroded away, but our culture as a whole has been eroded away, because some of the European tribes, for instance, were commented on by Roman historians and others as being particularly morally upright with regard to certain things.00:37:34 – 00:37:39:Sexual morality was one of the ones that was noted by particularly tacitus with regard to the Germanic tribes.00:37:39 – 00:37:46:Adultery was essentially unknown and harshly punished, even when they were not Christian.00:37:46 – 00:38:00:And so even that racial heritage, that biological heritage has been eroded away by these essentially post-war corruptions, what we see destroying our culture from within.00:38:00 – 00:38:05:And as Christians, we should be at the forefront of attempting to restore these things.00:38:05 – 00:38:09:Honor and loyalty should mean something to Christians.00:38:09 – 00:38:19:And not only should they mean something, they should be things for which we advocate in the strongest of terms and things that we exemplify in our own lives.00:38:20 – 00:38:33:So when Corey said that adultery should be illegal, so when Corey said that adultery should be illegal, I'm sure that some people, those of you who are historically ignorant, probably got nervous at that, maybe you laughed.00:38:33 – 00:38:35:Sounds ridiculous.00:38:35 – 00:38:42:Because sure, adultery is a moral matter, sure, it's in the Ten Commandments, but you can't have laws to say that sort of thing.00:38:42 – 00:38:54:Well, until Maryland struck down its anti-adultery law in 1974, and California followed in 75, adultery was illegal in virtually every state.00:38:54 – 00:38:57:And those laws went back to the colonial era.00:38:57 – 00:39:03:It was illegal to commit adultery before the Constitution was passed, or before it was created.00:39:03 – 00:39:06:The Constitution was never really passed, but that's a matter for another day.00:39:07 – 00:39:16:What's conspicuous about this is that even before those laws were struck down, states beginning in the 60s stopped enforcing them one by one.00:39:16 – 00:39:20:So they left the laws on the books, but they just didn't enforce them.00:39:20 – 00:39:36:There are still states to this day where it is a per se crime to commit adultery, but they never enforce the law anymore because they think it's unconstitutional, which is fascinating because those laws predate the Constitution itself for centuries.00:39:36 – 00:39:43:Under the Constitution, they were enforced, and yet, in our modern way of thinking, well, that's unconstitutional, that's obviously wrong.00:39:43 – 00:39:50:You should shake your finger at them at church, but if somebody wants to cheat on her husband or his wife, that's a private matter.00:39:50 – 00:39:53:It's a private thing between people consenting adults.00:39:53 – 00:39:55:Isn't that where some people's minds went?00:39:55 – 00:39:57:That's nonsense.00:39:57 – 00:40:01:These things are criminal matters because they're moral matters.00:40:01 – 00:40:08:The fact that we have separated the two so far is what makes it possible for people to think that there's no such thing as betrayal.00:40:08 – 00:40:12:To think that adultery is just, you know, things just didn't work out.00:40:12 – 00:40:14:Somebody found a better deal.00:40:14 – 00:40:24:The idea that the law would be enforced to put those people in prison or to beat them or to fine them, whatever's under the statute at the time, it's unthinkable today.00:40:24 – 00:40:26:It wasn't unthinkable to our parents and grandparents.00:40:27 – 00:40:34:And to many of you who are listening now, we have plenty of people who are alive in 1974 who are listening that can maybe remember that.00:40:34 – 00:40:36:This was our country.00:40:36 – 00:40:40:This was the country that was burned down by the generations previous to us.00:40:40 – 00:40:58:That's why we did those episodes talking about generations and about inheritance and about the difference between respecting an elder as an elder and yet at the same time recognizing that many of our elders are unfit for anything except for a rocking chair.00:40:58 – 00:41:04:And even that in many cases more than they deserve in terms of earnings.00:41:04 – 00:41:14:We accord that honor to them because they're older, but they have burned down the country that we are inheriting and the many of you are younger than Corey and me are inheriting.00:41:15 – 00:41:24:It's happened because there was a complete loss of any sense of honor or betrayal, which is quite incidentally a loss of honor and an act of betrayal.00:41:25 – 00:41:27:So, you see why this matters?00:41:27 – 00:41:40:When laws that existed for centuries, that kept people in check even when their hearts were wicked, that made it possible for the state to say, this is undermining the very fabric of society.00:41:40 – 00:41:47:Today, we in the church have to fight a rear-guard action against many in the pulpits who scream, you can't make that illegal.00:41:47 – 00:41:49:We got to reach those people with the gospel.00:41:49 – 00:41:50:Absolute nonsense.00:41:50 – 00:41:52:Absolute nonsense.00:41:52 – 00:41:54:The law is for the transgressor.00:41:54 – 00:41:57:The gospel is for the penitent.00:41:57 – 00:42:06:When we have transgressions that are burning down families, that are burning down communities, churches, and entire civilizations, that's not a gospel matter.00:42:06 – 00:42:08:That's a matter for the sword.00:42:08 – 00:42:15:And Cory and I make so many people angry when we talk this way, but it is the entire history of Christendom.00:42:15 – 00:42:17:We're not the weird ones.00:42:17 – 00:42:19:We're the bad guys for saying, you know what?00:42:19 – 00:42:24:What people were doing 200 years ago or 100 years ago, that was actually okay.00:42:24 – 00:42:26:That shouldn't be controversial.00:42:26 – 00:42:34:That should be the least controversial thing in the universe, to say, I respect what my great grandparents held as laws and morals.00:42:34 – 00:42:43:Doesn't mean they were perfect, but to say everything they did was wrong because the post-war consensus says, we have to go the other direction, that's, as Cory said, that's enemy action.00:42:43 – 00:42:44:That is new.00:42:44 – 00:42:45:It's modern.00:42:45 – 00:42:50:And it's so entrenched in our hearts now that we can't think of anything in terms of betrayal.00:42:51 – 00:42:53:Our forefathers certainly didn't betray us.00:42:53 – 00:42:55:The boomers didn't betray us.00:42:55 – 00:42:57:There's no such thing as betrayal.00:42:57 – 00:43:05:We are faced with a situation where we have to identify that these things are occurring, and we have to trace the roots back to who is causing them.00:43:05 – 00:43:14:Because in every one of these conversations, you're going to have that Judas holding the empty money bag, saying, I need the money that's over there on that table.00:43:14 – 00:43:20:This is what many churches are doing today in an act of betrayal against the younger generations.00:43:20 – 00:43:30:By going to the older people who are getting well up in years, they are looking at estate planning, if they have enough money for that sort of thing, and what are the churches doing?00:43:30 – 00:43:33:They're saying, oh, your kids can take care of themselves.00:43:33 – 00:43:34:Your kids are just fine.00:43:34 – 00:43:36:You don't need to worry about their inheritance.00:43:36 – 00:43:38:We have this program over here.00:43:38 – 00:43:47:It's a wonderful program where we're giving free cars to Somalians in Ohio so they can get to the job that's being paid for by an NGO that was taken away from an Ohioan.00:43:49 – 00:43:50:I was born and raised in Ohio.00:43:50 – 00:43:52:I take that personally.00:43:52 – 00:43:54:My family lived there for 200 years.00:43:54 – 00:43:55:And Ohio is not special.00:43:55 – 00:43:56:It's everywhere in the country.00:43:56 – 00:43:58:The same thing is happening.00:43:58 – 00:44:06:It's just that thanks to one of my friends on X this past week, that particular story blew up, but it is a microcosm.00:44:06 – 00:44:13:The cat-eating haitian demoniacs in Springfield, Ohio, they're everywhere.00:44:13 – 00:44:19:Maybe not in the numbers of 20,000 in a town of 60,000 before they showed up, but they're everywhere.00:44:19 – 00:44:21:They're being shipped into the Heartland.00:44:21 – 00:44:23:There's nowhere for anyone to hide.00:44:23 – 00:44:25:And the church is like, oh, come, come.00:44:25 – 00:44:26:Why?00:44:26 – 00:44:27:Because there's money.00:44:27 – 00:44:30:There are NGOs from overseas and in this country.00:44:30 – 00:44:36:There are federal programs that are flowing money through the coffers of those churches.00:44:36 – 00:44:39:And sometimes it's an official program, and sometimes it's just something they do on the side.00:44:40 – 00:44:45:The LCMS has what they call an RSO, a Registered Service Organization.00:44:45 – 00:44:50:It's not an official organ, but it's officially recognized as a way for these things to happen.00:44:50 – 00:45:06:And so you will have these RSOs, and every denomination does the same thing, where they're taking federal grant money, they're taking money from NGOs, and they're using it to commit what is, according to the UN, an actual act of genocide.00:45:07 – 00:45:12:We'll link in the show notes the UN document that covers the definition of genocide.00:45:12 – 00:45:18:And if any of the five prongs are met, you have what they call a genocide.00:45:18 – 00:45:20:That is what's being done in our communities.00:45:20 – 00:45:21:Why?00:45:21 – 00:45:22:Because they're white.00:45:22 – 00:45:27:All of this, when we're talking about this displacement, is fundamentally racial.00:45:27 – 00:45:30:1964, the United States was about 90% white.00:45:31 – 00:45:33:Today, it's maybe 55.00:45:33 – 00:45:34:That didn't happen organically.00:45:34 – 00:45:38:That was a very deliberately targeted betrayal.00:45:38 – 00:45:39:It was treason.00:45:39 – 00:45:41:It was high treason.00:45:41 – 00:46:02:Because one of the interesting things about the way treason is treated legally, even in the United States, where we don't have a king, we don't have a sovereign, but there's still a recognition that to commit treason against the nation is a greater crime than murdering hundreds or thousands of people.00:46:02 – 00:46:08:When you betray the nation, you are in effect murdering everyone at once.00:46:08 – 00:46:12:And that is why treason is treated more seriously than anything else.00:46:12 – 00:46:17:Unfortunately, there hasn't been a single treason execution in this country since, I think, 1862.00:46:17 – 00:46:21:It was during the Civil War, someone was tried and executed for treason.00:46:22 – 00:46:39:The Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were the last people who were executed for espionage because they stole nuclear secrets from our nation and gave them to the United Soviet Socialist Republic.00:46:39 – 00:46:41:They were Jews, of course.00:46:41 – 00:46:49:Virtually all of the traitors, virtually all of the betrayal that occurred in that period with communism was Jews, overwhelmingly.00:46:49 – 00:46:51:There were very few exceptions where it was in Jews.00:46:51 – 00:46:52:And they were born here.00:46:52 – 00:46:57:They were born to so-called Russian Jews who emigrated before they were born.00:46:57 – 00:46:59:So they were US citizens.00:46:59 – 00:47:03:They had every right under the law to be here.00:47:04 – 00:47:10:I'm glad that they were executed for espionage and not treason, because it wasn't treason.00:47:10 – 00:47:19:It was in the sense that espionage is just a special category of treason, but treason implies a sense of duty, as we said earlier.00:47:19 – 00:47:23:The Jew in this country has no duty to this country, and they always make that clear.00:47:24 – 00:47:35:There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of all manner of evil being done, and when the heat gets too high, they run home to Israel.00:47:35 – 00:47:41:Israel has more people fleeing prosecution than almost any other country on earth, because they don't extradite you if you're a Jew.00:47:41 – 00:47:44:It's just not going to happen.00:47:44 – 00:47:55:And so when people like the Rosenbergs betray this country, betray the trust that they had as natural born citizens, they were not in fact committing treason, because they had no duty to America.00:47:55 – 00:47:57:They were not ever Americans.00:47:57 – 00:48:02:They were first and only ever Jews, because that's how that works.00:48:02 – 00:48:08:And so when they were executed for espionage, it was because they betrayed this country, but it wasn't their country.00:48:08 – 00:48:14:They were being loyal to their own people by stealing our secrets to weaken the United States.00:48:15 – 00:48:20:That's why it's important to be clear with these terms, because if there's no duty, then there can't be treason.00:48:20 – 00:48:28:Now, there may well still be betrayal, which is the sense of betraying trust, which was absolutely the case.00:48:28 – 00:48:29:They were trusted Americans.00:48:29 – 00:48:40:They achieved access to those nuclear secrets, and they stole them, and they used them to our detriment because they hate us, because that is what is in their blood.00:48:40 – 00:48:52:We did an episode two months ago or so now with Will Spencer, where we had coordinated about six and a half hours on his show, and we used it as our content one week.00:48:52 – 00:48:54:And it was a great conversation.00:48:54 – 00:48:55:It was a six and a half hour conversation.00:48:55 – 00:49:00:I had been talking to Will for seven or eight months at that point in private.00:49:00 – 00:49:03:I had never said in public that we were friends.00:49:03 – 00:49:09:He has on paper a bigger platform than we do, and I never do anything to ride coattails.00:49:09 – 00:49:11:If someone wants to listen to Stone Choir, that's great.00:49:11 – 00:49:13:That's your private business.00:49:13 – 00:49:16:I would never try to exploit that and say, hey, look how cool we are.00:49:16 – 00:49:17:People listen.00:49:17 – 00:49:18:Not our bag.00:49:20 – 00:49:26:When he invited us to come on his show, on his After Dark special, Behind the Paywall, we thought, sure, they'll be interesting.00:49:26 – 00:49:28:It'll be nice to reach a new audience.00:49:28 – 00:49:34:And I knew that Will and I were basically on the same page about most things, not everything, but that's fine.00:49:34 – 00:49:36:Nobody's on the same page about everything.00:49:36 – 00:49:39:That's a bizarre, unnatural notion.00:49:39 – 00:49:40:Like just, that's inhuman.00:49:40 – 00:49:45:Corey and I aren't on the same page about everything, but if we want to argue, we'll do it in private.00:49:45 – 00:49:47:It's much more interesting to argue in private with friends.00:49:48 – 00:49:54:So, the idea that if someone doesn't agree with absolutely everything that someone says, you some have to make an excuse for it.00:49:54 – 00:49:55:It's this modern verbal take.00:49:55 – 00:49:58:I don't even know where it came from, but we all do it now.00:49:58 – 00:50:01:I'm doing it right now saying, why all these don't agree with everything?00:50:01 – 00:50:04:Like, it's just, it's a default rote response when you talk about somebody.00:50:04 – 00:50:05:It's idiotic.00:50:05 – 00:50:09:You don't agree with everything I say, or you wouldn't be a human being.00:50:09 – 00:50:10:You'd be a robot.00:50:10 – 00:50:13:I don't want you to agree with everything I say.00:50:13 – 00:50:16:I want you to think about what I say, and then agree with the parts that are right.00:50:16 – 00:50:21:And they're all right, and you'll figure that out later, but that's not my concern.00:50:21 – 00:50:25:When Will and I talked, he talked about being Jewish.00:50:25 – 00:50:27:All four of his grandparents are Jewish.00:50:27 – 00:50:32:He was raised Jewish, bar of mitzvah, the whole nine yards, and he claimed to be a Christian.00:50:32 – 00:50:34:Like, okay, fine.00:50:34 – 00:50:34:Great.00:50:34 – 00:50:36:I finally have another Jewish friend.00:50:36 – 00:50:38:He's a Christian.00:50:38 – 00:50:40:I have no problem with anything that he's saying or doing.00:50:40 – 00:50:41:Whatever.00:50:41 – 00:50:42:He's not doing a bunch of sneaky Jew stuff.00:50:43 – 00:50:47:He's just telling people to basically be decent men.00:50:47 – 00:50:49:I have no problem with that.00:50:49 – 00:50:55:We went on a show, and within a few hours of us going on, he backstabbed us very publicly.00:50:55 – 00:50:57:He pulled down the episodes.00:50:57 – 00:51:03:He published this screed against Corey in particular, trying to divide Corey and me as though that's possible.00:51:03 – 00:51:04:I'll tell you this.00:51:04 – 00:51:06:I have more loyalty to Corey than anyone else.00:51:06 – 00:51:09:If I have a problem with him, you're never going to hear about it.00:51:09 – 00:51:12:Because if you come at him, you're coming at me, period.00:51:12 – 00:51:16:So the notion that someone could divide us is preposterous.00:51:16 – 00:51:19:Loyalty means brother first.00:51:19 – 00:51:23:And for whatever reason, I guess he thought that he could exploit that.00:51:23 – 00:51:28:So he was trying to play me against him to divide us, which was incredibly stupid.00:51:28 – 00:51:30:He's not very bright.00:51:30 – 00:51:35:And he went after us, basically, saying it was a bunch of genocide and Nazi stuff.00:51:35 – 00:51:44:And he immediately, as soon as he pulled on the episode, said, next month I'm going to be doing an anti-Hitler episode, and I'm going to be laying there, all this stuff.00:51:44 – 00:51:49:And so we called it out at the time, but didn't really say much about it.00:51:49 – 00:51:54:And, you know, he was making threats about attacking specific things we had said.00:51:54 – 00:51:56:OK, whatever.00:51:57 – 00:52:13:This past Friday, just after we would have published today's recording about betrayal, if we had finished last week, I'm glad we didn't, because we get to address this directly, he published the anti-Hillers stuff that he had promised, and went full Jumeaut.00:52:13 – 00:52:20:Right down the list, talking about Holocaust denial, being low IQ, and just all the CNN stuff.00:52:20 – 00:52:29:Which I found fascinating, because in the many months of discussions I'd had with him, in private, completely privately, he said the exact opposite.00:52:29 – 00:52:39:He had his own personal secret theory about the Holocaust, that he was so paranoid of sharing, that he said he wouldn't discuss it unless he was away from phones.00:52:39 – 00:52:40:So I never heard what it was.00:52:40 – 00:52:49:But I can tell you for a fact, based on his description of how paranoid he was about what he thinks actually happened in the Holocaust, it wasn't whatever he put up last week.00:52:49 – 00:53:01:And so I was offended on behalf of our listeners who were all being called low IQ for saying the true things about 20th century history that I called them out.00:53:01 – 00:53:04:I said that Will Spencer was a liar, a slanderer and a coward.00:53:05 – 00:53:10:And I said, I have months of DMs that prove that he's a liar.00:53:10 – 00:53:12:And I said this publicly, I didn't publish anything.00:53:12 – 00:53:15:I said, well, you're a liar and I can prove it.00:53:15 – 00:53:17:And I specifically called him out.00:53:17 – 00:53:23:And the whole reason I'm talking about this is to explain my conduct because some people were concerned it's right to have questions.00:53:23 – 00:53:29:Because if you just look at one thing, you would think that what I did to him next was betrayal.00:53:29 – 00:53:42:I told him and I gave him three hours, I know for a fact that he saw the posts, I said, Will, you're a liar, I have screenshots from DMs that prove it, ask me not to publish them.00:53:42 – 00:53:49:This is crucial because if I had just blasted out what he had said in private to me, that would have been a betrayal of trust.00:53:49 – 00:53:51:I would never do that to anyone.00:53:51 – 00:53:59:In the seven or eight years I've been online, I've never once taken anything that someone said to me in private and made it public, certainly not to go after them.00:53:59 – 00:54:03:In fact, I didn't even take those screenshots until Friday afternoon after he published.00:54:05 – 00:54:07:I wasn't looking for a set up.00:54:07 – 00:54:16:When he did that, when he attacked us directly, I'm like, okay, this man's credibility is a key factor in him trying to destroy our credibility.00:54:16 – 00:54:25:So if we're going to have a contest over who's more credible, his lies in public versus what he said truthfully in private are entirely germane.00:54:25 – 00:54:27:So I gave him the opportunity.00:54:27 – 00:54:31:I have screenshots, approve Will Spencer a liar, ask me in public not to publish them.00:54:31 – 00:54:35:Had he simply tweeted back to me, don't, no one would have ever seen them.00:54:35 – 00:54:53:And so after several hours, after the deadline passed that I had given to him, and I know he saw it, I began publishing screenshots that proved that everything that he said about us, directed at us, about the subjects we were talking about, where bald face lies, were the exact opposite of what he himself believes.00:54:53 – 00:54:54:I'm not going to go into the details.00:54:54 – 00:54:55:If you don't want to see it, it's fine.00:54:55 – 00:54:59:Because it's not about Twitter drama or anything else.00:54:59 – 00:55:02:It's about the fact that I would not betray anyone's trust.00:55:03 – 00:55:06:If you talk to me in private, it's private, period.00:55:06 – 00:55:07:I absolutely mean that.00:55:07 – 00:55:09:And I meant it in Will's case, too.00:55:09 – 00:55:16:But when he attacked my credibility, when he calls me a low IQ Nazi in public, effectively, that's the thing.00:55:16 – 00:55:21:These guys won't name names, they won't say, this guy is, until we punch back most of them.00:55:21 – 00:55:26:I said, Will, tell me not to publish those screenshots to prove you a liar.00:55:26 – 00:55:28:He couldn't even do that, and so I published them.00:55:28 – 00:55:35:Because at that point, he had given me permission by not saying no, he had said yes.00:55:35 – 00:55:45:And it was necessary for me to do that, because the things that he said contra the programming that we have done in the past were all riddled with lies.00:55:45 – 00:55:50:He quoted open Luciferians, he used fabricated evidence.00:55:50 – 00:55:51:It was a disaster.00:55:51 – 00:55:56:And so his credibility is a key part of that, because all of this is about credibility.00:55:56 – 00:56:05:Reputation, slander, whether or not someone is acting honorably, a lot of times you just have to have confidence in the man himself.00:56:05 – 00:56:07:You can't know it's in someone's heart.00:56:07 – 00:56:13:And so I would have kept in confidence, as things he said, if he'd simply asked me to.00:56:13 – 00:56:19:But if you come after us, and if you come after the truth, we're going to make it hurt.00:56:19 – 00:56:21:Because it's not self-defense.00:56:21 – 00:56:28:This is about everyone who is standing up against these lies that have been told for the last 40 or 50 years.00:56:28 – 00:56:39:Every time a man stands up as we have stood up, and calls BS, and said, this pack of things, this is dishonorable, you're actually betraying the trust of those to whom you're speaking.00:56:39 – 00:56:41:Because most people don't know any better.00:56:41 – 00:56:44:Whatever the last thing people heard is what they're going to believe.00:56:44 – 00:56:47:That's why we frequently say, don't just believe what we say.00:56:47 – 00:56:53:Because if we're the last voice in your head, sure, you're going to be right, but I don't want you to be haphazardly right.00:56:53 – 00:56:58:I want you to struggle with the things that bother you and then realize that it's true.00:56:58 – 00:56:59:And then at that point, it belongs to you.00:56:59 – 00:57:01:It's got nothing to do with us or anyone else.00:57:01 – 00:57:06:The truth does not have a possessor, but it does have attackers.00:57:06 – 00:57:13:And when Will Spencer made himself an attacker of the truth that we have shared here, he made himself a part of the fight that is ongoing.00:57:13 – 00:57:20:And when we do things like this, I'm making the defense here that we're doing it in defense of you.00:57:20 – 00:57:22:My reputation is forever destroyed.00:57:23 – 00:57:25:I will never get my reputation back.00:57:25 – 00:57:28:I had a great reputation till two years ago, and I'm fine with that.00:57:28 – 00:57:31:It's despicable, but I didn't do any of this.00:57:31 – 00:57:37:Corey didn't do any of this so that we would be liked by friends, by enemies, by anyone.00:57:37 – 00:57:40:Telling the truth is honorable.00:57:40 – 00:57:47:It is the highest honor that we can accord to you is to tell you the truth, even knowing that you're not gonna like it.00:57:47 – 00:57:49:It's all of God.00:57:49 – 00:57:53:We tackle tough subjects specifically because no one else will.00:57:53 – 00:58:02:And we make the reasonable simple case, because once you hear it, you're like, well, yeah, I didn't know that Bonhoeffer was a Christ-denying demon.00:58:02 – 00:58:04:I didn't know that he was a betrayer.00:58:04 – 00:58:09:I thought he was a Lutheran theologian, and he fought Hitler, and what a great guy.00:58:09 – 00:58:24:When you hear the truth about the man, suddenly when guys like Will Spencer, who went full Jew mode listing Churchill and MLK and Bonhoeffer, listing these wicked men as pillars of his religion, I take that as true.00:58:24 – 00:58:25:It's true.00:58:25 – 00:58:27:He's proven it's true.00:58:27 – 00:58:33:These men are all proving it's true that Christ deniers are their martyrs and their saints.00:58:36 – 00:58:43:When we look at these situations in the church, remember, until the afternoon that he betrayed me, I thought we were good friends.00:58:43 – 00:58:46:I considered him a good friend, not just a friendly.00:58:46 – 00:58:47:We talked about a lot of stuff.00:58:47 – 00:58:52:Private things, things that were embarrassing, I deleted the thing, I never took any of the screenshots.00:58:52 – 00:58:55:I would never have said anything to embarrass him.00:58:55 – 00:59:02:The sole purpose of exposing the narrow set of things that I did was to prove I'm a liar.00:59:02 – 00:59:08:Because you can call me a lot of things, but you call me a liar, and I will draw blood.00:59:08 – 00:59:11:I take that incredibly seriously.00:59:11 – 00:59:14:And you should too, as a matter of honor.00:59:14 – 00:59:17:If your word means nothing, then keep your mouth shut.00:59:18 – 00:59:20:And for some men, that's the best they can do.00:59:20 – 00:59:22:Some men don't have anything to say, and that's fine.00:59:22 – 00:59:42:But if a man opens his mouth and takes a risk, and is attacked for it, and has his reputation destroyed in its lies, then I will defend such a man, and I will, even if it's me, if it's Corey, if it's anyone who has defended us in public, the precious few who have, that is something that's honorable.00:59:42 – 00:59:44:And the betrayal is always coming from within, because it has to.00:59:44 – 00:59:46:You can only betray if there's trust.00:59:46 – 00:59:47:Will betrayed me.00:59:47 – 00:59:49:I didn't betray him.00:59:49 – 00:59:51:He betrayed me by backstabbing us.00:59:51 – 00:59:53:And you know what?00:59:53 – 00:59:56:I went from having one Jewish friend to zero Jewish friends.00:59:56 – 00:59:59:And I promise you this, it will stay that way until the day I die.00:59:59 – 01:00:05:The one man that I gave a chance who pretended to be a Christian who did that, okay, lesson learned.01:00:05 – 01:00:09:I'm happy to be a public fool for the sake of being an example to everyone else.01:00:09 – 01:00:11:Never make that mistake.01:00:11 – 01:00:14:Because when push comes to shove, it's Rosenberg's all the way down.01:00:16 – 01:00:24:If you don't believe that betrayal is possible, and you don't believe that honorable conduct exists really, then everything I just said is nonsense.01:00:24 – 01:00:30:It's just like this guy got mad at that guy, and they were having a spat, and should have handled it in private.01:00:30 – 01:00:35:If you think betrayal is possible, then the question is who betrayed whom, and who acted honorably.01:00:35 – 01:00:39:And again, I didn't know any of that stuff was going to happen.01:00:39 – 01:00:42:We picked the topic for this episode two weeks ago.01:00:42 – 01:00:52:So when I give these examples to acknowledge publicly that that looks superficially, in a very narrow sense, like an example of betrayal, but I was not the betrayer.01:00:52 – 01:00:54:He was.01:00:54 – 01:00:57:All he had to do for me not to say that publicly was say don't.01:00:57 – 01:01:00:And no one would have ever heard anything about this.01:01:00 – 01:01:04:Because remember, I knew all that stuff when he backstabbed me two months ago.01:01:04 – 01:01:05:I kept my mouth shut.01:01:05 – 01:01:07:I wasn't out for blood.01:01:07 – 01:01:15:It was only after he came at the truth that we had shared that others had believed and said you're low IQ and stupid if you agree with those guys.01:01:15 – 01:01:19:I will go to bat for that every time.01:01:19 – 01:01:25:And it's important at some point for there to be men with both honor and a sense of belligerence about these things.01:01:25 – 01:01:33:Because every time men come after the truth, and you have guys who just want to be academic about it and say, oh, well, you know, let's have a debate.01:01:33 – 01:01:35:Let's kind of settle things out.01:01:35 – 01:01:37:We should all try to get on the same page.01:01:37 – 01:01:42:If you're not willing to draw blood for what is true, why even bother believing in the first place?01:01:42 – 01:01:47:Not as a first step, but this stuff is getting more and more serious.01:01:47 – 01:01:56:The stuff that's happening in Springfield and everywhere else in this country is life and death, and is downstream from the episodes we've been doing for two years.01:01:56 – 01:02:10:Everything that we've talked about, nations inheriting faithfulness or faithlessness, talking about generational curses, talking about what happens when you worship demons for centuries.01:02:10 – 01:02:13:haiti is exhibit A there.01:02:13 – 01:02:17:haiti murdered and raped every white person on the island.01:02:17 – 01:02:27:They sacrificed them, they cannibalized them, and they consecrated the nation of haiti to Satan, and they renew that consecration annually.01:02:27 – 01:02:34:Voodoo is the primary religion in haiti, where they claim to be, I think, 90 plus percent Roman Catholic.01:02:35 – 01:02:36:They say, oh, we're Christian.01:02:36 – 01:02:38:Like, okay, fine, I believe you're Christian.01:02:38 – 01:02:40:And then they practice voodoo.01:02:40 – 01:02:41:They practice cannibalism.01:02:41 – 01:02:44:They rape anything that moves.01:02:44 – 01:02:50:They are subhuman in all possible descriptors except for theologically.01:02:50 – 01:02:53:And that is to their eternal damnation.01:02:53 – 01:03:01:I wish for their sake that they were not human, because then they wouldn't go to hell for the pact with the devil that they carry on every moment that they exist.01:03:01 – 01:03:07:And so if you haven't listened to previous Stone Choir episodes, I sound like I'm just completely insane right now.01:03:07 – 01:03:30:But if you understand that worshipping demons for centuries has consequences, if you understand that having an IQ of 67 takes all possible human conduct off the table, if you understand that there are certain populations that have an overwhelmingly greater degree of propensity for violence, then suddenly it's not quite as confusing what's being done to our neighborhoods when these people are imported.01:03:31 – 01:03:33:And the people who are importing them know that.01:03:33 – 01:03:38:They know exactly what they're doing when they bring Africans onto our soil.01:03:38 – 01:03:40:They know that they're bioweapons.01:03:40 – 01:03:44:There's a term that I've used in multiple past episodes, and I'm renewing it here.01:03:44 – 01:03:50:To bring an African onto our continent is to deploy a bioweapon, because they can't help themselves.01:03:50 – 01:03:55:They're going to do what they are, just as we do what we are wherever we go.01:03:57 – 01:04:02:There are certain things that are intrinsic that you can't talk a man into or talk him out of.01:04:02 – 01:04:05:And these matters are the very heart of that.01:04:05 – 01:04:17:And so I'm sure that some of what we're saying here today is going to alienate people, but this is in some ways a synthesis of almost every previous episode, because the rubber is meeting the road in real time in current year.01:04:17 – 01:04:27:I don't know what things are going to look like a year from now, but right now, if you're looking at the timeline, you understand what's happening if you've been listening, because we've laid it out clearly.01:04:27 – 01:04:28:Before was an emergency.01:04:28 – 01:04:36:We've explained why these things are happening, and what's going to happen next when these population groups are thrown together.01:04:36 – 01:04:46:And that's why Jews like Will Spencer fear us so much, because we're telling the truth about the treason and betrayal that is being enacted on our soil that's going to destroy everything.01:04:46 – 01:04:48:It's going to destroy church.01:04:48 – 01:04:49:It's going to destroy neighborhood.01:04:49 – 01:04:52:It's going to destroy the entire country.01:04:52 – 01:04:53:That's big ticket.01:04:53 – 01:04:55:It doesn't get more important than that.01:04:56 – 01:04:59:And some people think, oh, that doesn't sound like the gospel.01:04:59 – 01:05:03:As Corey said, it's not the gospel, except that it's true.01:05:04 – 01:05:12:Whether or not something is the narrow John 3.16 gospel is not the be all and end all what Christians can say.01:05:12 – 01:05:19:Christians have an obligation to tell the truth in every time and every place, even when it makes people angry, especially when it makes people angry.01:05:19 – 01:05:22:Because if you're angry at the truth, something serious is going on.01:05:25 – 01:05:44:One of the best ways to assess whether or not a world view in particular, I'll decline to use the German this time, but whether or not a world view or a particular theory of how things work is correct, is its explanatory power.01:05:44 – 01:05:53:If you look at a way of explaining something and it doesn't explain it, it's wrong, obviously.01:05:53 – 01:06:03:If you have a theory that says if x, then y, and you find x, but you don't find y, this is very basic logic.01:06:03 – 01:06:07:This is the first class you take in a logic course.01:06:07 – 01:06:12:Your theory is wrong, because you just proved it wrong.01:06:12 – 01:06:26:When it comes to the world, when it comes to the current state of the world in particular, there are a number of competing theories about why things are the way they are, why things are going the way they're going.01:06:26 – 01:06:39:If you buy into any of the alternative theories to what we have been saying through all of these episodes, you will find they do not explain the current state of the world.01:06:40 – 01:07:05:If you use the theories that came out of the Enlightenment, if you double down on equality, on egalitarianism, on fraternity, as they use it, not as it should be used, etc., all these various things, and then you look at the state of the world, you realize that those theories don't actually explain anything.01:07:05 – 01:07:16:Because if the French Revolution and the things that it claimed were good, then the current state of France would not be the current state of France.01:07:16 – 01:07:22:And for those who have not been, it's even worse than you see online.01:07:23 – 01:07:25:Paris, for instance, is no longer French.01:07:27 – 01:07:36:And unlike some nations, Germany in particular, the capital city in France is a huge part of France.01:07:37 – 01:07:50:Americans won't really think that because Washington, DC is not that big of a city in terms of population, in terms of city size, and even in terms of cultural influence in the US.01:07:50 – 01:07:58:With regard to France, Paris is number one, period, on every metric, and it's no longer French.01:07:58 – 01:08:06:That is the outcome of what they advocate, but their worldview cannot explain why the outcome is so bad.01:08:07 – 01:08:26:The things that we have said, if you believe them, and if you look at the current state of the world, and if you trace back, you will find that what we have said in these various episodes across a number of years now, have essentially perfect explanatory power.01:08:27 – 01:08:39:If you believe there are racial differences between and among the different groups of men, then you understand why you can't just mix them at will, and have equivalent outcomes.01:08:39 – 01:08:47:You can't take the population of Germany, and swap it with the population of Somalia, and wind up with a space program.01:08:48 – 01:09:01:That's not how this works, because race is real, because there are biological realities, because IQ, because intelligence is heritable, as are disposition and any number of other traits.01:09:01 – 01:09:08:And so if you're not a race realist, none of what is happening in the world is going to make sense to you.01:09:08 – 01:09:19:If you aren't a Christian, very little is going to make sense to you, but not just a Christian, a Christian who actually believes the things that God has written to us in his word.01:09:19 – 01:09:38:Because for instance, if you deny that there are generational curses, it's going to make very little sense why some countries are such disasters, because yes, you can explain a lot of it with intelligence and various things like that, but they're even worse than those things should predict.01:09:38 – 01:09:48:The state of those countries cannot be explained by resort to intelligence alone, by resort to their defective cultures alone.01:09:48 – 01:09:50:Of course, how do you explain culture?01:09:50 – 01:10:00:This is sort of an aside or a tangent, but you'll have those who argue, this is very common to hear these days, oh, it's just cultural.01:10:00 – 01:10:01:The problems are cultural.01:10:01 – 01:10:06:If you just fix the culture, what produces culture?01:10:06 – 01:10:10:Not one of those men can ever explain to you.01:10:10 – 01:10:12:What is the source of the culture?01:10:12 – 01:10:14:Culture is downstream from race.01:10:14 – 01:10:17:Culture doesn't just fall out of the sky.01:10:18 – 01:10:22:If you trace this back, where are they saying the culture started?01:10:22 – 01:10:24:Where did it originate?01:10:24 – 01:10:25:Whence did this come?01:10:25 – 01:10:33:There has to be something that creates the culture, and what creates the culture is the people, is the race, is the nation.01:10:33 – 01:10:35:Culture is a product of the nation.01:10:35 – 01:10:38:The nation is not a product of the culture.01:10:38 – 01:10:50:If you take Germans and take them from Germany and drop them into Africa, you'll wind up with German culture, with some allowances for temperature.01:10:50 – 01:10:55:Because obviously clothing and some things like that will have to change, but the core of the culture will be German.01:10:58 – 01:11:04:We know that's the case, because we did that with Germanic peoples in South Africa.01:11:04 – 01:11:07:They didn't produce an African culture.01:11:07 – 01:11:11:They produced a European culture, a Germanic culture.01:11:11 – 01:11:18:We took people from various parts of Western Europe and dropped them into North America.01:11:18 – 01:11:20:And what did we wind up with?01:11:20 – 01:11:26:Well, we wound up with an Anglo-Saxon culture, because culture is downstream from race.01:11:26 – 01:11:32:If you don't believe that, you will not be able to understand what is happening in the world.01:11:32 – 01:11:48:And if you don't believe that communion with demons has very real consequences, and not just for the person doing it, but generational consequences, then you can't explain the incredible wickedness of most of the world.01:11:48 – 01:11:55:In fact, you will be unable to believe that sort of wickedness, which is the case with many supposed Christians today.01:11:55 – 01:12:04:They cannot even comprehend how wicked haiti is, how wicked haitians are, because they do not believe in the demonic.01:12:04 – 01:12:06:They do not believe the Word of God.01:12:06 – 01:12:13:They do not believe there are curses, and there are long-term consequences for communion with demons and rejection of God.01:12:14 – 01:12:24:If they believe that, they would be able to believe the current state of the countries that have engaged in that, the populations that have done that over many generations.01:12:24 – 01:12:30:And these are not things that are fixable, which is another major part of this.01:12:30 – 01:12:39:Because most Americans, and in fact most Western Europeans, have been propagandized to believe that everything can be fixed.01:12:39 – 01:12:41:There's always a fix.01:12:41 – 01:12:42:This is particularly Americans.01:12:42 – 01:12:45:It's not as much Western Europeans, but it's both.01:12:45 – 01:12:47:It's crept into their cultures as well.01:12:49 – 01:12:59:Because we all want to believe, or at least our society wants us to believe, that if we just dump enough resources into something, that if we just try hard enough, we'll fix these problems.01:13:00 – 01:13:06:This feeds into many other areas, because for instance, this is why you have mistaken beliefs about intelligence.01:13:06 – 01:13:21:You'll have those who believe, well, if someone of average intelligence just applies himself really, really hard for 20 years, he'll be, no, he will never be able to match what a genius can do in a week, because there is a fundamental difference between the two.01:13:23 – 01:13:25:Every single man listening knows that.01:13:25 – 01:13:30:And the reason he knows that is because it is directly comparable to machinery.01:13:30 – 01:13:33:And we can all relate to that.01:13:33 – 01:13:39:For the women, perhaps a different example than machinery, but the men will immediately understand an example using machines.01:13:39 – 01:13:54:If you have an earth mover weighing some number of tons, some large number of tons, it is going to be able to do in an hour something that a man with a shovel could not do in a year.01:13:54 – 01:13:58:Or more, if you have one of the particularly large earth movers.01:13:58 – 01:14:05:It doesn't matter how much effort the one puts in, the other will always be able to outclass it.01:14:05 – 01:14:06:And that's only a difference in degree.01:14:06 – 01:14:11:We're speaking about a difference in kind here with regard to some of these things.01:14:12 – 01:14:23:And so as far as explanatory power goes, if you don't have an actually accurate worldview, it will have no explanatory power.01:14:23 – 01:14:27:That is exactly what we see from all of the competing worldviews.01:14:27 – 01:14:35:They all advocate things that are contrary to reality, and so they cannot explain the current state of the world.01:14:35 – 01:14:42:That's how you end up with people saying that men can be women, or that a black can be American.01:14:42 – 01:14:48:And I know that that particular phrase sets people's hair on fire, but it's a simple statement of fact.01:14:48 – 01:14:57:Because the term American, and this is something that we have been propagandized out of believing, but the term American is a racial term.01:14:57 – 01:15:12:It is as ridiculous to say that an African can be a German, or an African can be a Frenchman, or an African can be Irish, as it is to say that an African can be American, the term African American is complete nonsense.01:15:12 – 01:15:18:Yes, we have used it before, because it is a particular way of describing a group that is here, but they are not American.01:15:18 – 01:15:33:The same as I can never be Chinese, I can never be Japanese, I can never be Korean, I can never be Somalian, or any of some hundred plus other ethnicities, some hundred plus other races.01:15:33 – 01:15:36:I cannot be those because I am not those.01:15:36 – 01:15:41:And no, God could not have made me that either, because you are essentially what you are.01:15:41 – 01:15:44:If you are German, you are German.01:15:44 – 01:15:46:If you are French, you are French.01:15:46 – 01:15:51:A piece of paper is not what made you that, it is your blood that made you that.01:15:51 – 01:15:58:And that is something we used to recognize in our laws, because it used to be just sanguinis, which is, say, the law of blood.01:15:58 – 01:16:06:You were what you were because you were born to certain parents, not because you were born on a particular piece of soil.01:16:06 – 01:16:13:Now, those used to coincide, because you used to have a nation and the soil, and they're one and the same, blood and soil.01:16:13 – 01:16:19:We no longer have that, because we have multi-ethnic, multi-cultural abominations.01:16:20 – 01:16:23:If you look for those in scripture, you'll find them.01:16:23 – 01:16:28:They are usually the result of being cursed by God.01:16:28 – 01:16:31:God brings in foreigners to destroy nations.01:16:31 – 01:16:34:He doesn't bring in foreigners to benefit them.01:16:34 – 01:16:36:Diversity is not your strength.01:16:36 – 01:16:39:Diversity is your curse from God.01:16:39 – 01:16:46:This is another thing where if your worldview does not encompass that, you will never understand why things are the way they are.01:16:47 – 01:16:54:And as a Christian, you will miss the fact that God is telling you to amend your ways.01:16:54 – 01:16:57:As a nation, we need to repent.01:16:57 – 01:17:05:We can look at the world, we can look at the current state of our country, and recognize we are under a curse from God.01:17:05 – 01:17:09:The entire Western world is under a curse from God, not just the Western world.01:17:09 – 01:17:20:There are plenty of other parts of the world with so-called immigration problems, but in particular the Western world, we are under God's curse because we have turned away from him.01:17:20 – 01:17:27:And part of that curse is to have foreigners rise higher and higher in your lands while you sink lower and lower.01:17:28 – 01:17:32:And if you think that I am misstating scripture, that was a quote.01:17:34 – 01:17:48:This is the reality of what scripture teaches, and a correct worldview will give you the explanatory power to understand why things are the way they are and what you should do not just as a man but as a Christian.01:17:48 – 01:17:51:Because scripture is not silent on these issues.01:17:51 – 01:17:53:We have addressed this in many previous episodes.01:17:53 – 01:17:57:Scripture speaks directly to many of these things.01:17:57 – 01:18:04:Wisdom also speaks to them because, of course, as I have mentioned many times before, God did not write one book.01:18:04 – 01:18:05:He wrote two books.01:18:05 – 01:18:07:The second is Nature.01:18:07 – 01:18:09:God spoke nature into existence.01:18:09 – 01:18:15:It is his second book, or it is his first book, depending on how you want to look at the two.01:18:15 – 01:18:20:As we have mentioned before, when God speaks of his own glory, he does not appeal to his word.01:18:20 – 01:18:22:He appeals to creation.01:18:22 – 01:18:25:So, perhaps, nature is his first book.01:18:25 – 01:18:28:It is the one on which he seems to lay the greater importance.01:18:28 – 01:18:32:And I think we should take God's assessment seriously.01:18:32 – 01:18:42:He points to the grandness, the awesomeness of creation in order to prove to Job his glory, and in order to prove to Job his smallness.01:18:44 – 01:18:47:That is what God does in the pages of scripture.01:18:47 – 01:18:49:And so, there is truth in nature.01:18:49 – 01:18:54:There is truth in God's first book, as well as his second book.01:18:54 – 01:19:03:Yes, we will never deny that scripture, the written word of God, the Bible, is absolutely essential, because in it is contained the gospel.01:19:03 – 01:19:07:The gospel is not contained in nature.01:19:07 – 01:19:08:And so, you must have scripture.01:19:08 – 01:19:11:It is absolutely essential for Christians.01:19:11 – 01:19:13:But you cannot ignore reality.01:19:13 – 01:19:16:You cannot ignore nature.01:19:16 – 01:19:19:Grace does not destroy nature.01:19:19 – 01:19:22:It also doesn't restore nature.01:19:22 – 01:19:23:We know this.01:19:23 – 01:19:25:We all know this.01:19:25 – 01:19:30:When you become a Christian, if you have missing limbs or missing organs, they don't regrow.01:19:32 – 01:19:35:God will return those to you in a perfected form in the next life.01:19:36 – 01:19:44:But in this life, the consequences of sin, and whether it is personal sin or hereditary sin, doesn't matter.01:19:44 – 01:19:46:Both of those have consequences.01:19:46 – 01:19:53:The reason we grow ill, the reason we grow old, and the reason we die is sin.01:19:53 – 01:20:00:Not just our personal sin, but the sin that we have inherited from our forefathers, the sin that we inherit from Adam.01:20:00 – 01:20:02:Original sin is the reason we die.01:20:04 – 01:20:11:All of these things have to be incorporated into your world view, or nothing is going to make sense.01:20:11 – 01:20:20:And that explanatory power is the number one way that you can test any theory or any world view.01:20:20 – 01:20:30:Because necessarily that which is correct will be able to explain why things are the way they are, and also predict things that are coming.01:20:30 – 01:20:31:That's a key feature.01:20:33 – 01:20:47:One of the ways that scripture, in fact, the way that scripture says to test the spirits, to test prophets, to test if someone is speaking a word from God, is whether or not the things that he says come true.01:20:47 – 01:20:50:Because not a single word from God will fall to the ground.01:20:50 – 01:20:52:All of it will come true.01:20:52 – 01:21:04:For a world view, if it is correct, if it is accurate, it will be able to predict things, in a way that a false world view will not be able to do.01:21:04 – 01:21:26:But to return to the issue of our present society of civilization and loyalty and honor, if you do not have a society, if you do not have a civilization that functions on the basis of loyalty and honor, then you are going to be reduced to the civil law.01:21:26 – 01:21:27:That's it.01:21:28 – 01:21:34:You are going to be reduced to the threat of being fined or imprisoned.01:21:34 – 01:21:35:That's not a civilization.01:21:35 – 01:21:38:That's basically a prison.01:21:38 – 01:21:48:That is not the way that Christians should comport themselves, and that is not the sort of society in which we should want to live, and which we should leave to future generations.01:21:48 – 01:21:59:But that is where we stand today, because honor and loyalty have fallen by the wayside, and now it is essentially just whether or not you will get caught, and if you get caught, how bad the punishment will be.01:21:59 – 01:22:07:again, this is something that our economic system encourages, and it has bled into our social systems as well.01:22:07 – 01:22:28:In fact, we see this with regard to personal behavior, with regard to sexual ethics, because many times, the primary concern for many men these days, and by this I mean both men and women, I mean the general sense, is whether or not they will be caught, not whether or not it's wrong, but whether or not anyone will be able to find out their sin.01:22:28 – 01:22:37:And that is absolutely not how Christians, particularly, but how any man or woman should comport himself or herself.01:22:38 – 01:22:49:And just to expand on what was said earlier about adultery, for those who think that, oh, we couldn't possibly criminalize it, I'll give you a list of just a handful of countries, and when they decriminalized adultery.01:22:51 – 01:22:55:Italy decriminalized adultery in 1969.01:22:55 – 01:22:59:West Germany decriminalized adultery in 1969.01:22:59 – 01:23:03:Malta decriminalized adultery in 1973.01:23:03 – 01:23:06:Luxembourg, 1974.01:23:06 – 01:23:09:France, 1975.01:23:09 – 01:23:11:spain, 1978.01:23:11 – 01:23:13:Portugal, 1982.01:23:13 – 01:23:15:Greece, 1983.01:23:15 – 01:23:17:Belgium, 1987.01:23:17 – 01:23:18:Switzerland, 1989.01:23:19 – 01:23:21:And Austria, 1997.01:23:23 – 01:23:40:It is only relatively recently, and starting in the cursed decade that is the 60s, that these things have been decriminalized, that we have started to uncouple our positive law, our civil laws, from the moral law.01:23:40 – 01:23:50:Because in part, this was bringing in the accursed consent framework for dealing with these matters, but that's a tangential issue for another day.01:23:51 – 01:24:02:But as soon as we unseat our positive law from the moral law, we can no longer truly call ourselves certainly Christian, but we also cannot call ourselves moral.01:24:02 – 01:24:08:And it is only a matter of time before this sort of pervasive wickedness catches up with us.01:24:08 – 01:24:38:Because just as there are longitudinal and generational consequences of communion with demons, which we see throughout much of the world, particularly in Africa and in the inner part of Australia certainly, but just as there are consequences for that communion with demons, there are consequences when you uncouple your laws from the moral law, when you base your law on anything other than God's eternal unchanging nature.01:24:38 – 01:24:45:And as Christians, we should absolutely advocate that all of our laws be based on the moral law.01:24:45 – 01:24:56:We shouldn't have carve-outs or exceptions where we've decided that as a culture, we're just going to tolerate this sin, or we're just going to say that this isn't so bad, we'll permit it.01:24:56 – 01:25:03:We'll allow people to act contrary to God's law in this place because it's convenient or it's profitable.01:25:04 – 01:25:07:Christians cannot make exceptions for these things.01:25:10 – 01:25:14:Now, we have to be careful with what I just said.01:25:14 – 01:25:29:I am not saying, for instance, that we cannot support any political candidate who does not have a perfect track record, who does not have perfect Christian positions on every issue, because politics is not a matter of perfection.01:25:29 – 01:25:38:Politics is a matter of the possible, and this is something that is difficult for a particular kind of Christian to recognize, particularly Anabaptists.01:25:39 – 01:25:46:But politics being the art of the possible, you have to do that which is best at a given time.01:25:46 – 01:25:51:And what is best is going to be what moves the ball in the direction of the good.01:25:51 – 01:25:54:It's not always going to be perfect.01:25:54 – 01:25:59:You may go down the field diagonally instead of straight, say.01:26:00 – 01:26:01:That's fine.01:26:01 – 01:26:02:You're picking up yards.01:26:02 – 01:26:03:You're making progress.01:26:03 – 01:26:06:That is the goal in politics.01:26:06 – 01:26:09:The goal is to be moving in the right direction.01:26:09 – 01:26:16:And the man who can move the ball in the right direction is the man you need at that time.01:26:17 – 01:26:23:The man who can move the ball is the one who can get the ball, which is to say he is the one who can win.01:26:23 – 01:26:35:Because a man who is perfect on all of these issues, but cannot possibly win, is not better than the man who is flawed, but will move the ball in the direction we need it to go.01:26:35 – 01:26:42:And so for Christians, when it comes to politics, we have to recognize it is a matter of wisdom.01:26:42 – 01:26:51:It is not a matter of going down a list and checking a whole bunch of boxes, some hundreds of boxes on, well, is he right on this moral issue, and this moral issue?01:26:51 – 01:26:55:No, the question is, is he better than the alternative?01:26:57 – 01:27:03:That seems like a horrible question to ask for certain Christians, but that is the reality of politics.01:27:03 – 01:27:13:And dealing in fantasy instead of reality is itself wickedness, because what you are actually doing is supporting the worse outcome.01:27:14 – 01:27:21:You have to support what is possible, what is better, not what is perfect.01:27:21 – 01:27:31:That is simply the reality of politics, and it is going to be the reality going forward for the foreseeable future, and probably so long as life continues on this planet.01:27:31 – 01:27:33:We live in a fallen world.01:27:33 – 01:27:37:We are not dealing in absolutes.01:27:37 – 01:27:42:We are in the sense that as Christians, we have to believe that which is true.01:27:42 – 01:27:53:But when it comes to translating those things into the political realm, things are messy, undoubtedly messy when dealing with millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people.01:27:56 – 01:28:06:We have to make wisdom calls when it comes to politics, because the goal is simply for each day to be an improvement on the last.01:28:06 – 01:28:11:If we are making progress, that is good.01:28:11 – 01:28:13:If we can make faster progress, great.01:28:13 – 01:28:20:But if we're making progress, that ultimately is the goal, because the alternative is to be going in the other direction.01:28:21 – 01:28:25:This is similar to what we have said a number of times about the Christian life.01:28:25 – 01:28:29:The life of every man is always moving Godward or Hellward.01:28:30 – 01:28:36:Similarly, politics is always moving in the right direction or the wrong direction, which again is just Godward or Hellward.01:28:39 – 01:28:42:And some Christians think that, oh, politics doesn't matter.01:28:42 – 01:28:51:That's, they won't call it the left-hand kingdom, because then they'd have to recognize that they are the two hands of Christ, and that he has control of both.01:28:51 – 01:28:53:But they'll say, oh, it's politics.01:28:53 – 01:28:54:It's not the gospel.01:28:54 – 01:28:54:It's not a gospel issue.01:28:54 – 01:28:55:We can ignore that.01:28:55 – 01:28:56:It's not the church.01:28:59 – 01:29:03:That is so fundamentally foolish that it would be difficult to overstate.01:29:04 – 01:29:21:Whether or not a country is Christian, whether or not a country is ruled in an orderly and proper fashion, whether or not we live in peaceful and organized times or we live in chaos, all of these things contribute to whether or not we persevere.01:29:23 – 01:29:38:If you live a life surrounded by other Christians who help you in your walk, who help teach you the faith, who help keep you steadfast, who pick you up when you fall, you are more likely to run the race and persevere than if you were going it alone.01:29:38 – 01:29:41:That is the simple fact of the matter.01:29:41 – 01:29:44:And yes, God also says he will not lose anyone from his hand.01:29:44 – 01:29:45:Christ will lose none of his sheep.01:29:46 – 01:29:50:We have to hold these things in tension because that is what scripture teaches.01:29:50 – 01:30:06:So our overall goal should be to construct our societies, to set up our civilizations such that we maximize the outcome that more men are Christian, that more men persevere, that more men run the race successfully.01:30:06 – 01:30:09:That should be our goal as Christians.01:30:09 – 01:30:12:And part of that is indeed winning in the political sphere.01:30:13 – 01:30:17:It is not simply a matter of right teaching in the church.01:30:17 – 01:30:24:Because if you have right teaching in the church, but you lose absolutely every part of the culture, you will lose the church too.01:30:24 – 01:30:26:Because that is exactly what we did in the US.01:30:26 – 01:30:29:That is what we see happening today.01:30:29 – 01:30:31:It's not that the church was subversive.01:30:31 – 01:30:35:It's not that the church failed, although it failed in a certain sense.01:30:35 – 01:30:39:Rather, it is that Christian men failed to control the culture.01:30:39 – 01:30:41:We failed to maintain control of the culture.01:30:42 – 01:30:59:And so, after having lost the culture, having lost all of the universities, all of the various cultural institutions, having lost politics and everything else, now finally Satan is coming for the church, because he's doing it from a position of strength.01:30:59 – 01:31:09:If we had not lost those things, if we had not effectively abandoned the left-hand kingdom, we would not have the problems we have today in the right-hand kingdom.01:31:10 – 01:31:19:We are having to fight on two fronts, because our forefathers completely and utterly failed to defend the left-hand kingdom.01:31:19 – 01:31:22:And so as Christians, we don't have that option.01:31:22 – 01:31:24:We have to fight for both at the same time.