Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome in to Think Deeper, presented by Focus Press. It is just two of us today. Will is out. We went to record earlier in the week and he was sick and there's a lot of sickness going around. And so he did get better, but then he's out of town. He's visiting. We're recording this on a Sunday and he is visiting a congregation that he used to work with and still has a lot of friends there. And so all the best to Will. We miss him on this one, but it's just Jack and I today, so we're actually really excited for this one. This was. We. We kind of looked down the list. Like, we do this probably put what, 12, 16 episodes ahead of time. We look down the list at which ones would we want to do maybe without Will? Is there any that we think we can get away with? And this one's one of those that is very much in Jack's wheelhouse.
I'm going to be asking a lot of questions. He's going to be explaining a lot. I'm going to let him talk on this one. And so we thought that might be a good one just for the two of us. So I can shoot back and forth with. With Jack on this and let him explain a lot of these things. Because Jack is very much the logical guy. He knows all the fallacies. He calls them out. He has written on a lot of these things. He has discussed a lot of these things. And so when we get into logical fallacies, Jack, why is this maybe a passion of yours? And why do you think this one matters so much for us to report?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: You have to be able to understand what's going on. You ever see those things with, like, street magicians and, you know, pick a card and that kind of thing, and they're really good, but the people who know what they're doing can see, like, instantly, like, oh, that's. That's where he hid the card. I don't. I don't know those things. And so every time I'm like, wow, look at what he did there. But it's just not impressive. You don't get taken in by it if you know exactly what to look for, when they're going to do it, what the move looks like.
False doctrine spread by people being taken in by things that sound really good.
You start with Eve in the garden. It was pretty straightforward. His argument was essentially, nuh, you're going to be happier if you do it this way.
He still uses that tactic, but for Christians to subvert the church, he's way craftier than he had to be there. He will make something look, as the scriptures say, he disguised himself sometimes as an angel of light. He can make himself look really good. And you look at what he did when tempting Jesus. He quoted scripture. And I think some of these logical fallacies, it's kind of the same thing. It's twisting, it's. And I'm not so cynical to say that everybody who's wrong about anything is trying to pull something, that they practice this strategy. It's just that Satan can get us to fall for these things and repeat these things. And I've had things like this before that I believe that I don't believe anymore. I've kind of changed my thinking on because you realize I got swindled. I got like, he pulled the card out on me. And the better you are at this, the better Christians are trained at seeing sleight of hand.
The stronger you are, the better you're going to be equipped to not fall for these things.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is so much in the culture, it's inundated our culture where you see a lot of these just pop up naturally, like you said. I don't think that there's a lot of evil people out there that are just plotting all of these things. I just think that based on our schooling or based on maybe the way we've grown up, the way that we've argued back and forth with people, you naturally pick up on these tendencies. On all of these fallacies, we got. I don't even know. I didn't count. We got like 10 of them listed. If we don't get to all of them, we'll get to some in the. The after show, of course, right in the deep end. But it is a. It's very sad to see how many people can end up falling for these fallacies, specifically Christians. But we don't realize it. Like you said, we don't really realize it. And so you're looking at it. Everybody knows. We'll briefly touch on everybody knows things like ad hominem and why that's a fallacy, which is you just attack the person. Well, you're stupid. Right? Well, that doesn't really solve anything. Those are the easy ones. We probably know one, maybe two of these, but we're going to get into some that maybe are lesser known that I think we show up. They show up a lot in the church and we got to be careful of that. We got to be careful as Christians because the world will use this. And we're Seeing this, we've talked about the he gets us commercials, things like that. They use some of these logical fallacies to trick us into accepting those things and thinking that we're the bad guys if we stand up against it. That's all based off of logical fallacies. That's why I think this matters so much.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%. And I don't know, you want to just go ahead and get into them. Yeah, because you bring up he gets us. And we've done plenty on that, so we don't really need to spend time on it. But it is. I think we're going to start with this one because it might be the primary. Like the premier, most used one is the Mott and Bailey. M O T T E, if anybody wants to Google this, and Bailey. And that actually is like a medieval castle structure in which there was kind of the village, the low kind of area, and then on the high, a very fortified castle. And that's how this argument works, is you put out something that's kind of less. It's not very easy to defend. It might be controversial. And when people come after the controversy and say, I disagree with that, you retreat to the castle and pretend that's what they're attacking. So to give a. A couple of, like, easy to see examples is the. The men and women are equal. And also that means we should have women preachers. Well, if you say, well, hang on, I don't think we should have women preachers, what do they immediately start doing? Oh, you don't think men and women are equal. So the, the Bailey, the, the little village is. Women should be able to preach. Well, that's pretty hard to defend. Right. That's like, scripturally, you got to do a lot of gymnastics to get there. And so when somebody says, I disagree with that, they abandon that and go back, switch to the other thing of. So you don't think women and women are equal. Well, that's pretty. Then you look like a bad guy because you're saying women aren't equal to men. And so that's a really easy, obvious one. But there's a number of ways the love everyone. Well, don't I. We're supposed to love everybody. Exactly. Amen. We're supposed to love everybody. Therefore, you should march in the pride parade.
Hang on now. Well, what, you don't love everybody. And it seems so dumb when you frame it like this, but it really works. It really makes you look like a bad guy, like you're attacking really, again, easy things that we should all Be able to agree on.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Well, we talked about immigration, right?
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Love your neighbor means we should just let everybody in the border. And you go, I don't think we should let everybody in the border. So you don't love your neighbor. Whoa, whoa.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: You know, it doesn't work that way.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Love your neighbor is like, how many times has that been trotted out in the last five years for everything? And. Yeah. And every single time it's like, well, I don't think that's what love your neighbor means. And they immediately start saying, you don't love your neighbor. You don't love your neighbor if you don't observe this thing the government tells you to do. If you don't believe in this, if you don't want this to happen, you don't love your neighbor. Like, we can argue. We. If you're being honest, we should argue about what is the best way to love our neighbor. Not I'm the one who does and you don't. Right.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: You see this with servant leadership as well. Like, you know, servant leadership means that we should just keep everybody happy. I don't think we should keep everybody happy. So you're not a servant leader. You know those type of things, or they. They trot out. You recently had this online of like, well, Jesus is a. He was a servant, he served, and he's a leader. And therefore, you know, our modern understanding of servant leadership, which I think is, as we've talked about, grossly misunderstood our modern. Like, so you're not. You don't believe in servant leadership. You don't think that we should be like Jesus? Like, I'm not saying we shouldn't be like Jesus. I'm saying servant leadership means something different. And when you trot that out as to keep everybody happy, and we have a problem with that. So you say we shouldn't be like Jesus. That's not at all what we're talking about. You also had here empathy.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: What.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: What do you mean by empathy? When it comes to Moton Bailey, that's.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: A really interesting one because there's been a couple of books written about it. One just came out called the Sin of Empathy, and the guy was being, I think, intentionally provocative. He's not saying it's always a sin to be empathetic, but that sin, empathy can become a sin. And sometimes people call it untethered empathy, that it's not grounded in truth. And so a person comes along and says, this is my experience, and I'm really hurt by it. Well, empathy just says, well, go Help them out. And somebody like one of those TED Talk speakers that's really popular, millions of views had this, this illustration of it of persons down in a pit and they're saying, man, I'm really in this pit. I'm really feeling it. Well, empathy means jumping in the pit with them. And this author, Joe Rigney makes a really good point of that's untethered empathy. What you need to do is keep one foot out of the pit, grounded on truth, and reach in to help them. You still care to help the person, but you want to help them out of that, not help them wallow in it. Not any of those things. Well, if you don't do that, then it's totally subjective. It's totally. And so you've seen this with like abuse cases where people come out, the believe all women thing. Right? Empathy says, well, we just gotta, yeah, the Me Too movement, we've got to believe them. Well, how many people were falsely accused and careers destroyed? Yeah, some of the accusations were real, some of them weren't. But if you just go in and say, well, just listen to their story and agree with them and validate them and all that, you're going to end up with some untruths. But that's the Martin Bailey thing of you don't care about this person. You're not. You don't have empathy for this person. Like, well, no, I want to help them. I'm the one who cares about them. And so I want to help them find truth because I believe truth is what really helps somebody out of a tough situation. And so that's so easy to weaponize in that way though.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: We've talked about therapy culture, me as a therapist, you know, it obviously I. We just differ on some of this stuff. And obviously I don't take all therapy to be a problem. But Brene Brown was the person that you were talking about about jumping in the pit with him, who is huge in the therapy world. And I do think therapy really messes us up on this. The therapy culture with the Moton Bailey and the, well, we should just love everybody and by love everybody, let everything go. Well, we should just be empathetic. And that means we don't have any standards or that means we're not standing up for truth in the matter because that might really hurt them. Which actually I'm going to jump to one if you're good with it. I wanted to jump to the second one, which is actually one yet on the bottom. That's the appeal to emotion because I do Think that that's. It's kind of the back end of this, of if you do call out some of this stuff, they'll just appeal to emotion on this. Because I was thinking about that with. They'll appeal to emotion or they'll appeal to maybe an emotional experience or something. And that trumps everything, because that's. The other Brene Brown thing is. Well, you can't really understand my experience, right? You see this in race, you see this with lgbtq. You can't possibly know this. And so any logical discussion we're having, any argument we're having, all of a sudden, I cut you off the knees because I'm appealing to emotion, I'm appealing to my lived experience to. To where I'm coming from. And so with this idea of empathy, you have to be empathetic to me because you can't understand where I'm coming from. Meaning you can't hold me to any standard.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Right?
[00:10:28] Speaker B: See this a lot creeping into the church. We did see this with blm, a bunch of. That kind of. That. That terminology, that thinking of, we can't understand any of this stuff. So we go, hold on a second. I don't think that's right. I don't think blm, maybe that's not the best thing we can do. But you, hey, you don't have any right to speak because that's their lived experience, and you can't speak to that. And I think that's really detrimental. And I know that's not exactly the same as Mott and Bailey, but you know what I mean, it's kind of close.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah, well, because again, just by saying that. Well, then you don't think black lives actually matter. Like, that's the Bailey, the Mott and the Bailey. Right?
[00:11:01] Speaker B: That's exactly it.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: And so, yeah, and the appeal to the same thing, the therapy culture with abuse, somebody might come in and say, I was abused. That's a really bad thing if somebody was abused. But the first thing you need to do is establish, were you? And sometimes it's, you know, somebody said something kind of not nice to me, and next thing you know, like, we've let them tear their entire life down, get a divorce or whatever else, and nobody stopped to ask what actually happened here? What are the two sides of the story? Are we sure? And all of these things. And immediately. But even by talking about this, it's. So you're okay with abuse. Like, you're. You're going to side with the abuser, that kind of thing. Like, this is not healthy. For anybody. And like, what? The truth is not afraid of exposure. The truth is not afraid of dialog. And if somebody, if somebody really was put through that, yeah, we need to know and we need to handle it. But if just because they claim it doesn't mean it works. Well, the appeal to emotion is, wow, I can't believe you would say. And that. That's the form that this takes a lot of times of. You're even going to have that discussion? You're even going to ask that question? Yeah, actually, because I care about the truth. And so again, the LGBT thing, you're saying they can't get married or one that this one's been popular lately. It's in the, the, you know, kind of political discussion right now. In vitro fertilization, ivf.
You don't think my child should exist? I didn't say that, but I'm not sure, like, going forward. This creates a lot of embryos that are destroyed or suspended in frozen, you know, time. And that's. We believe life begins at conception. So what are you going to do with it? Like, that's the really hard part about this, is the, the tweet length version makes this all very simple when you actually have to ask the questions, do some digging, figure out what's all really going on here. What is the nature of this controversy? It gets a lot more complicated. And so people want to side for the tweet line thing. Well, it just helps families.
But what is the right thing to do? What is the. Let's put all of the cards on the table, not just the emotional card, because, yes, I understand it's a very difficult situation emotionally. That doesn't rule out everything else, that doesn't override every other concern.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: And that underlines a big point here, which is, yeah, your emotion does matter. We're not saying that emotion doesn't matter. Has no place, you know, the. We talked about it before, the Ben Shapiro facts. Don't care about your emotions. There is a level of truth to that and there's also a level of, we understand this is really difficult, but your emotion doesn't trump. This is. Dad had a friend used to talk about the tyranny of emotion. And whoever gets the most emotional wins. Basically, like, if I can retreat to my emotional castle, kind of Lamont Bailey, if I can go all the way back to that, you really can't attack me. You can't say anything against me because that, you know, I'm emotional about it. And so you see this a lot in the culture, especially lgbtq Things like that, they get highly emotional, they scream you down. And in the end of discussion, we're not saying things like IVF aren't emotional, but we're saying, as you said, the truth isn't afraid of questions. The truth is. And the truth really is not the facts don't care about your feelings. Like, the truth is the truth, whether you emotionally feel it or not. And sometimes that's the discussion that has to be had, which is, look, I'm here for you. We can empathize in the emotions, but that doesn't take away from truth. And so that's where the Mott and Bailey and the appeal to emotion is. Jack, give us some.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Well, no, just on that one other point is.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, go for it.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: The experiential knowledge. Well, you're not allowed to speak to this because you haven't been in my shoes. Yeah, like that's not an advantage. That having skin in the game actually makes it harder sometimes to see to. To make a.
This, you know, an objective. What am I trying to say? You know, speak to objective truth because there is subjectivity. There's the outcome that you really, really want to have happen. Well, I really want it to happen to happen that people can pursue this and have the family or whatever else I want, but maybe not as much as somebody in that. And so. Or the racial thing, like you say, well, it's never happened to you, so you can't speak to this.
That doesn't change the truth, but it's the appeal to emotion. And man, I've had people argue with me of like, wow, you know, they use that word, wow. I can't believe you'd say that. Like, that's not an argument. And people bring that into the church and again, female leadership or whatever else. And. And these appeals to emotion. Well, I've got a daughter and I don't want to tell her that she's not allowed to. That's not, that's not the question. And that's really the issue here. So the next one we do need to get into is the false dichotomy that you create or false dilemma is another thing. It's called you create two choices, both of them bad or one less bad than the other. Like to justify. And so you see one a lot. Hey, we were called the wind Souls and not arguments or the political thing. Political engagement. You know, we were called to. To expand the kingdom, not to, you know, change the nation. Like those aren't mutually. It's not one or the other like exclusive yeah, it's not. Well, the sky is green and not blue. Like, or blue and not green, I should say. You know, like, there are things where it can only be one or the other, you know, but it's like, you know what? You're supposed to put ketchup on a burger and not mustard. Like, that's. What if I want both? Like, that's right. So again, it's creating. It's trying to eliminate an option they don't want by pretending it's. You're not able to choose multiple things.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Yeah, you see that? Especially like you said, the wind. Souls arguments. Like, it immediately shuts you down and it immediately causes you to. Oh, yeah, you're right. Like, we have the authority, the upper. The upper hand, the high ground. Like, we're winning souls. And I don't know about you trying to win an argument like, I can't do both. I can't. I can't be on the side of winning souls. I agree with you that we should win souls. That doesn't mean that I just give up every argument ever because it's on, you know, on behalf of souls. They're really appealing to kind of this.
To something bigger than what's at hand. And so they put these as false dichotomies so as to get you off of whatever you're focused on in the moment. Like, it's almost like a sin to be myopic. It's a sin to want to. To do something in the culture. It's a sin to try to change the nation or to go vote or something like that. And people don't get that crazy with it. Some people do, but, like, it's a sin to get politically involved because, hey, we're supposed to just care about the church. Like, well, why can't I do both? You see it a lot. But another one you see on kind of a different end is, well, I'd rather have Andrew Tate masculinity than effeminate men.
Why do we have to put as though there's not another option, as though you're either effeminate or you're just a jerk like Andrew Tate. Like those. That's a false dichotomy. You can't necessarily put those things together. There's a bazillion one. Other options that. That you could have or any other example you want to use. But, like, can't we find a man who's not effeminate but who's also masculine in a godly way? Well, yeah, we can, but that doesn't Work for the sake of discussion. So they're trying to bring about, oh, you'd rather just have an Andrew Tate. And so it's like, no, I didn't say that. We get this on the gym podcast. You know, I didn't say those things. Like, I'm not, I'm not for that guy. We are adamantly against the guy. So don't act like we are. We're trying to have a different way, a new way. Well, not a new way, an old way, but you know what I mean? Like, we're trying to. To say that. But the false dichotomy cuts you off of the knees. And that's what you notice with a lot of these. All of these are intended to cut you off at the knees. They're intended to end the discussion, to kind of do the slam dunk, the, the gotcha button that just ends all discussion of, well, what now? I can't stand on any of these. We got a lot more to get to. But on any of these, I can't stand the mic drop moment. And everybody in this culture is looking for mic drop. So for a brief discussion before we get into the other ones. Why do you think that is? Like, why are we obsessed with mic drops in this culture rather than actual back and forth debate?
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the short attention span. I mean, people talk about the, the Lincoln, Lincoln Douglas debates, you know, Abraham Lincoln. And what was it, like, three or four hours that they would just stand up there going back and forth? Look at our presidential debates today. I mean, like, they just yell at each other for two hours and, like, cut over each other. That's all we can do. Like, you can't sit down and like, let's put the facts on the table. Because the other thing, I really hate this about social media as some, as a veteran social media arguer, the like button is the worst thing in the world. Because then you get people chiming in. It's like, oh, well, he got six likes on his comment, you got four. And so, like, you're losing. Like, that's not how it works. Like, that's, you know, or people will do this on, on Twitter. They'll put a poll up, like, who believes this? Like, of course your followers are going to vote your way like that. You didn't win anything here. Like, this is not. We're trying to get to truth. And that's kind of the hard part. And like, you say the mic drop. And so the mic drop incentivizes platitude level thinking. It incentivizes you keeping it on that. That you can put on a bumper sticker. I'd rather win souls, not arguments. And to your point about being myopic, one of the ways we do this is things that are ranked. We take the more important thing and pit it against the less important thing. And it's like all of them, all of the above. Okay, Right. Like, this is not one or the other. We need to keep the rankings in the right order. We talked a few weeks ago about the ordo amoris and that you love your children more than the stranger. And you're supposed to love the stranger, but not as much like that. Yeah. Again, there's a broad conversation to be had here, and we just want to boil it down to a bumper sticker. And so win souls, not arguments. And man, I've seen a lot of people go, you know what? They're right. We really aren't supposed to win arguments. Like, didn't Paul say that we are tearing down strongholds and every lofty thing and argument raised up against Jesus Christ. Like, literally, we're here to win arguments and not. Not spend all day debating. But, like, this is part of the Christian life. Is Paul showing up on Mars Hill and being like, yeah, you got all these gods. Let me tell you why you're wrong. He was trying to win an argument on Mars Hill. Peter was winning an argument in Acts 2. Like, but so he's winning souls and winning an argument. Like, you can put these things together.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: And you see is a gamaliel. That was that Acts 4, where he's like, hey, let's just hear these guys out where they go in, and once again, they're trying to win an argument in front of the Sanhedrin. They're trying to let them know of the hope that's in them. As Peter talks about being ready to make a defense argument is normal. But once again, if you're running it through our culture's lens, argument naturally means confrontation. Confrontation means I hate you. No, it doesn't. It doesn't have to mean that. But that's where we have taken any of the arguments in our culture, which is why we want the slam dunk. We either want to back away. The other thing is you kind of get into a fight flight response. You either have the jerks that want to fight everybody or the flight, or you have those in the middle, which is a freeze response of kind of like, what do I do here? You know, you're just kind of watching it back and forth. We don't have A great understanding of, like, I and you and I, Jack, I don't know, I'm calling your name. You and I have been called out where it's like, well, Jack and Joe, are, you know, you guys still good? We had Buddy come to come to us at church after our last argument. Like, hey, are you guys still good? Like, of course we are. We can go back and forth. We went to the gym. I saw you, like, literally eight hours after that, you know, at the gym. The next morning after we recorded perfectly fine. We can have this argument because we have put it in our culture that any argument that we have with one another naturally means, I'm angry with you, I don't like you, all of this stuff. I don't think that's true. So when we have Christians that go, well, win souls, not arguments, they're very much afraid. And this is why all the logical fallacies come in. They're very much afraid of the confrontation. That that means, that means you're not going to be able to win souls. That's not true in the least. We can have arguments and know that that's okay. What we need to be careful of as Christians is all of these slam dunk, you know, like, hey, we're just going to end the argument right here. Mic drop moments. We have to learn to live in a little bit of confrontation. Paul was highly confrontational. You cannot read First Corinthians and come away thinking, Paul did not. He was shying away from controversy. He even says, I'm a lot more impressive, you know, in my writing than I'm, than I am in person. But on the other hand, man, he's, he's just throwing darts at these people. Like, this is really confrontational. That's okay, because he's calling them out in the ways they need to. And instead, in these days, I really don't think we like that. So we're willing to shut it down by any means necessary. Which kind of takes us to three.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: No, no, I want to talk about that for a minute because it's very timely. Just days after the showdown in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President. That's a great President Zelensky. And I mean, they're going at each other, obviously. And I don't care which side of this that you're on.
One of the things you would see people freak out about is I just, I'm so embarrassed by that. Like, what do you think happens behind closed doors with world leaders when nuclear war might be at stake?
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Like, like, we're not allowed to passionately argue about these things. But it's like, oh, that's just so embarrassing. This is the real world. It's okay. Like, you should be able to, you're a man, stand in there like. And like both sides were given and taken and people were like, no, no, this, we should not argue, we shouldn't talk this way. Like, how do you think Jesus's showdowns with the Pharisees and Sadducees went? Now Paul, I mean, look at Acts 20 where people are rioting and they're arresting people and they're grabbing people around. Like Paul was like Mr. In the clutch kind of thing, you know, like the, the, the world's about to burn down and Paul's sitting there trash talking the high priest and stuff like that. Like, I mean, yeah, this we have to be able to, to kind of recapture that. Like we're so insulated in this world. And, and so that's the two things that Satan really zeros in on is people don't like confrontation. Therefore the, the first thing that gets thrown out is going to win. People also have really short attention spans. And so a one liner. Boy, people will go for those one liners all day long. And that's. I've kind of gotten away from it. I've been too busy.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: But the.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: I was doing those memology under reviews shorts on. Yeah. Because it would take a meme where people think, oh this is brilliant. And like, no, it's not. There's another guy, the red. Was it red pen something. A guy that does that and he just marks all over memes, like all the theological inaccuracies of it. It's really handy to say, you know, people share something as if it's brilliant. Like the. We don't have a false dichotomy to bring us back around. We don't have a soul. We have a body. We are a soul. Like you were created both. Adam like was both of those things. And there's a lot deeper thing to get into there. But it, boy, it just sounds good. And it sounds like you're being really spiritual and all that. Like you just fell for a false dichotomy. Like don't, don't pit good things that God created against each other. And yeah. So a lot of bad ideas sneak in these back doors of short attention span and an inability to stomach confrontation.
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[00:25:54] Speaker B: That is a. That's interesting as you're talking about that, like maybe this gets us in. And I think I said number three. It's number four at this point is the straw man. And I was thinking about this because the ultra spiritualizing everything, this is where you get in a lot of straw man. You specifically see this with new heavens, new earth, which is kind of like, hey, I just want to be with Jesus. Like, I'm more spiritual than you. Because speaking of bodies and souls, it's a perfect transition of, no, we're going to have new bodies. Jesus had a new body. We're going to have this, we're going to walk in. I mean, where we stand on this is fairly confrontational with people, but they look at it. I don't know about you, apparently, you know, some people just don't want to be with Jesus. That's where I want to be. Like, you're kidding me. That.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: You know what, he's holding that.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah, nobody's holding that. Like, you don't understand the argument at all. So you straw man this argument and want to beat us up for an argument that we're not, we're simply not making. But they can over spiritualize things. That's. I don't know about you, but you know, I just, I think it's very easy what God says. It's like you're, you're maybe getting into marriage, divorce, remarriage, you're getting into some other things that. Well, there's just a lot of debate surrounding stuff. Well, I don't know about you, but boom, boom, boom, boom. And then they just listed as though this is the easiest thing to understand. Like you're not understanding any of the arguments that are being made. How could you possibly say this? You know, it's. God makes it super clear that there are some things that are unbelievably clear in scripture. Things like baptism are very, very clear things. I think like women's roles are very, very clear. There are certain things that are more challenging it bears discussion on this stuff. And unfortunately, the people that get into the straw man, they take these sound bites, the, the one little clip where they take the, you know, the general understanding of something, they haven't done any of the research to understand it. And then they want to take the moral high ground, the spiritual high ground and throw it out there as though. Yeah, I understand your position. No, you don't. Instead of steel manning it and really coming from where I'm coming from and understanding this is a nuanced discussion. There's this and there's this and there's this. They want to overgeneralize. They want to over spiritualize. They throw out their big thing of like, well, it's just nice and easy. Boom, boom, boom. No, it's not. So straw man. To me, of everything on this list, this one probably frustrates me the most. And you do see it, you do see it with.
To be honest with you, I think people with. We've got in trouble for a specific podcast we did coming up on two years ago, believe it or not. But.
And I think when they looked at our side of it, they had. People wanted to see what they wanted to see. They very much straw manned our side of it. Like you just want to, you know, have your lifestyle. What lifestyle? We clearly said this is not the case. So they take the straw man. That's a little ad hominem as well. But they take the straw man argument and they didn't want to engage with any of the nuance, any of this discussion. Man, it just drives me nuts when people do that.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you brought up the New heavens, New Earth one. I, I saw an hour long program debunking it. At no point did they say anything that the other side believes. That that makes me more prone to believe the other side. Like if you can't explain. And it's kind of funny, Tim Keller, who I am, was, you know, the late Tim Keller, I'm not a fan of him, but he had this principle and he violated all the time. This is why one of the things, he was very manipulative in all these ways, but he, this was a great principle. Never describe the view of an opponent in a way he or she will not own. So you should be able to say, I think what you believe is this and rattle it off. And the person go, absolutely, that's 100%. Couldn't have said it better myself. If you can't do that, you're not arguing with their thing. You are arguing the straw man version that you Created to beat up in your head and pat yourself on the back and all of your buddies come in and pat you on the back and go, boy, you really took down, just really destroyed that idea. Like you haven't once answered a single thing the other person believes. You believe what you want them to believe, what you think they do. Like the dumb version. And I don't know if there's a fear there of like, man, if I actually digest it, if I read their books, if I look at it through their eyes, I might actually come around and I don't want to do. I don't know. I don't know why somebody wouldn't do that. There's no point in having the argument if you can't express the other person's view, if you cannot explain how they got there. And the argument there is, there was a tweet the other day about Christian nationalists. You know when, when they read Revelation, it says people from every nation, tribe and tongue will enter into heaven. And you know, basically it, it's gonna destroy them or whatever. Like, do you know anything about this belief? Like you boy, he did the mic drop. And it's like, yeah, we're the ones who believe in nation, tribe and tongue. We're the ones who believe that distinct peoples from around the world.
Like I had another buddy was talking about, boy, Christian nationalism. Such a bad idea. The idea that America is God's favorite nation. Like that's not it at all. Like that's not right. So how about you ask what it is, then figure out, then come back and see if you want to argue with it.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: Still, that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The over spiritual look, I just think everybody can go to heaven and that it's really not about other Christian or other nations. It's not all about America. Like stop over spiritualizing this and making me look like I'm some, you know, horrible person. Because yeah, I think that America should be a Christian nation ruled by Christians. That would be fantastic. You don't, you can't say what my side is. You're going to over spiritualize to your side and make me look like I'm some, you know, some heathen because of what I believe. Like please understand my side first. Please understand it.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: But is this, that doesn't mean you're going to agree. Like you don't have to agree, but you need to be able to say it in the way the person would say it themselves.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: Correct. You were talking about though, like, we don't go, why that is. And we don't really go to other sources to figure out the other side of it. We do this with every part of our life, though, the confirmation bias. Like, we will go to maybe Fox News or we'll find our favorite websites or favorite news sources or follow the same people on Twitter. And so you're going to get. Or X, sorry, Will would correct me if you were here. Like, you're going to get the same mouthpieces pretty much, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The same talking points from everybody else and you come out. That's the only thing that, you know, we don't do a great job of accepting all sides. And okay, where do I stand on this? And I think a lot of it, actually, if you, if you boil down, I think a lot of us, we are afraid to have a mind of our own. In some ways, we do appeal to authority quite a bit. We appeal to the people that we want to appeal to. So I'm going to figure out, I don't know what I'm supposed to believe on the Israel, Gaza situation. So tell me what, like Matt Walsh believes. Bud Ben Shapiro. Tell me what, maybe I hope nobody's going to Rachel Maddow, but, you know, you might go to that, because that's where I'm going to understand what I'm supposed to believe. And the problem is, the more you do that, the less you can understand the other side in the least. And you're starting to see this with this Russia, Ukrainian or Russia Ukraine situation and what you were referencing at the White House, you're starting to see that where you can tell who's been ingesting what, like where everybody's news sources are from because they start representing the other side, which is not true in the least. Well, Trump's just trying to get us all killed. He just wants World War iii. Like, I don't think you understand where he's coming from. Then you have the other side that it's like, well, he's great. There's another side to this as well, which agree or disagree. It's good to know maybe the, the Ukrainian side, the Zelinsky side, so you can make this determination for yourself. But, you know, the easiest thing to do is just go to your favorite news source and they'll tell you what you're supposed to believe so you can kind of shut your brain off. You don't actually have to engage with any of this. I think that's how strawman takes place, is you just, you never engage with the other side when it comes into that. So that's our fourth. We still got, I think, four more.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: To go to them. I think we jumped over the guilt by association. Yes, we did that. You know, you can kind of humorously put, oh, you're drinking water. Hitler drank water too. Like, therefore, you must be associated with that kind of thing. But you see, people make this argument of, oh, well, you believe that. Well, you know, who else believes that is such and such heretic. You know, somebody who believes.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: It's like there's a cato or something.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And there's this spectrum of beliefs that is so broad that somebody might disagree with somebody. 99. But they agree 1%. I mean, like, even Satan quoted scripture. If I quote the same psalm that he quoted to Jesus, am I like, am I on Satan's side? Now?
Sometimes the, you know, the blind squirrel finds the acorn thing. Sometimes people who I disagree with on all kinds of things have said things that are correct. But the kind of, well, you're sounding like so and so or you're. You're, you know, such and such church. They. They did that one thing one time. And, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of small groups. I talk about that in church reset. But that was a thing for a while of. Well, you church. Re. I'm not sure the. The church, small groups, the other church crosstown, you know, they're. They got small groups and they let the women speak in theirs. Like, we like, what if this church doesn't do that like that just because you look similar to the other one. And this is closely tied to slippery slope, which we'll get to in a minute. But the guilt by association is, oh, well, you quote so and so or you were in the same room as so and so. You know, things like that.
That doesn't necessarily mean somebody is hook, line and sink are on the same side as the person that they quoted.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: But this goes to our last point, which is everybody finds the people that they want to go to kind of get their own biases confirmed. This is why quoting non church Christ. Yeah, this is why quoting non church Christ authors is like anathema to a lot of people in the church. I'm sorry, you did what? Like, I got in trouble one time for quoting C.S. lewis and for mentioning Francis Chan. As I just attributed that it was a Francis Chan illustration and was told, hey, you know, if you can just not use the names, we don't want to cause anybody to stubble. Why are we afraid of that? Why are we afraid of using. I was Just attributing the illustration. I didn't even make it, you know, I was making my own point with it. But we're really afraid of the non Church of Christ. And so we stay in our circles and we're shocked when we, you know, when we seem almost cult like to certain people because we don't want to go outside of it. But we're afraid of guilt by association. We're afraid that. Oh, so you believe like C.S. lewis? No, I don't believe down the line like C.S. lewis. I think he's got some really good stuff. He thinks about scripture in a way that just a lot of people don't. I think John Piper's got some good stuff. You got to be very careful with him. Very sparing. But I think, you know, 10% of John Piper is brilliant. Doesn't mean I believe the guy's a Calvinist. I don't believe a lot of what he believes, but he's got some really good information out there. I'm not afraid of that because once again the truth will stand. And if I'm looking at it going, man, the guy's a Calvinist. That doesn't write him off completely because what would somebody find about me and go, oh, you believe what Joe Wilkie believes?
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Write that off. Right.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: You know, wow, you're on. Well, I would like to get the benefit of the doubt of I'm not always going to be right. I know I'm not always right on these things, but just because I say something doesn't necessarily make it wrong. If or somebody quotes me, it doesn't mean that they believe everything that I believe. It just if we took it upon ourselves rather than using other people as the example, I think we'd see what we're talking about. It could be anybody in the brotherhood of like, just because you quote him doesn't mean you are 1000% down the line on board with everything he says with. With a brotherhood brother. Right? Well, yeah. Okay, so why can't we do that with anybody outside the brotherhood? Well, that could be a problem. Right. Which actually gets us into. I don't know if you have more to on guilt by association.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: But that gets us into slippery slope, which is. They look at it as the slippery slope. This is a legitimate fallacy.
You know, you'll. You'll see the goofy ones of which I have believed where you project the songs on the. It just. I don't know. I know you guys have gotten out of me for this before, but when people were doing the Paperless hymnals and doing the song like it to me kind of started toward liberalism. And yes, I realize that's kind of.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: A joke at this point. Progressive and.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly like it became the progressive. Progressive churches were the ones doing, I guess. And so you look at it as, well, it's a slippery slope. If you get the paperless signals, next thing you know, you're going to be progressive at, you know, inviting women up on stage. That's false. That's wrong. But that's kind of how the slippery fallacy, slippery slope fallacy works. That's what people think we're doing with a lot of the stuff that we push is it's a slippery slope.
Jack, tell us what the, like, give us. And I keep saying your name. I guess I'm used to having three of us on there. So, sorry, sorry, I have to call it what is a positive example or maybe a better example of that. But also, how can you tell what the difference is? Where does it. Because people would say we are a slippery slope. Well, because we believe in the aforementioned podcast or because New Heavens, New Earth, they might look at us as being progressive and we are on a slippery slope. How can you tell what's what?
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Yeah, this is considered a logical fallacy by a lot of people. It's not inherently a logical fallacy, but it can be. And so I guess you're asking is, what is the fallacy version? What is the real version of the slippery slope? It all depends on the principle you're basing it on. If. And so it's similar to the idea of correlation is not causation. You know, like, boy, I passed five cars today that were. They were all white, and every one of them had a driver who was bald. Therefore, driving a white car makes you lose your hair. Like, no, that's not quite how that works. On the other hand, sometimes when you can figure out a causative effect that brings a bunch of things together of, you know, hey, I just saw five guys that all bought the same shampoo, are all bald. You know, you can put things together. I, you know, I'm. These are very surface level, going over it quickly kind of thing. So years ago, the LGBT thing, the, the tolerance and man, there's a slippery slope. There's a slippery slope. You know, where there's going to lead, it's going to lead toward, you know, sexualization of children. It's going to lead toward all kinds of different things. And they said, oh, that's the slippery slope. You know, logical fallacy. It's not going to go that way. What made it that way is the principle remained the same throughout. Love is love. It's not your business what people want to do. You can't stop them. That it's consenting individuals. Those principles have been brought along every single step of the way. And so that's how you get to where you are here. The idea, what is the principle that says putting the songs up on the projector is going to lead to a women, woman preacher? Well, you can say, well, innovation. Well, you know, innovation is having a building. Innovation is having microphone like speakers. Yeah, yeah. So nobody says having microphones means you're going to have women preachers. I don't think anybody does. Maybe they do.
And so like what if, if you can draw a consistent principle that says here's how you're going to get from there to there. Now you can say, boy, a lot of churches that do that do end up there.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: That.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: I'm not disputing that. But that's correlation and not causation.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. That's interesting. That's a, that's a good. I love that idea of the principle. I guess I hadn't really thought about that. The principle remaining the same and the same thing for us. I think people look at the principle as us asking questions and kind of challenging the ways they. And the things that that have come before all of the traditions, all the customs. And they look at we're challenging scripture. So I think that's what they think of us. On a slippery slope is the people that think that we're.
[00:40:31] Speaker A: It's the idea there's a doctrinal checklist and anybody who's like, well I don't agree with that one. It's like now you're off the checklist. How far can this go? Like right, that one box. I agree with you on all the other ones. But like this is a non essential. I'm allowed to disagree on this one without it looking like I'm going to accept all the other things. And if you can tell me the principles by which this is going to lead me in 20 years to being totally apostate. Because same thing. Like the emerging church movement. Emerging church movement 15, 20 years ago. There were people at the time like, yeah, this is going to end up really, really bad. All these, they're rejecting doctrine, they're throwing off doctrine. And at the time it was, no, they're not. No, they're not. That's slippery slope fallacy. Well, one of the biggest few of them are Just totally done with Christianity. One of the biggest authors was bragging about how he preached the wedding for his gay son. And so it's like, yeah, all the slippery slope charges were exactly accurate. And at the time they told you the principle that was going to get you from here to there. That's how you use the slippery slope.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great. I don't have much more to add to that. I think it's just important for people to know the difference there, where you can start looking at it as, yes, check off the principle. And, you know, as you said, like with us, I don't think we're on the slippery slope. So. But something to be aware of, that the check, check, check the box mentality or checking it off the list mentality, that doesn't necessarily equal slippery slope. You still have to go off of the principles at play. Next one we have on the list, which I think is number, what, six, seven. I think seven maybe is circular argument. And you've gone off on this one quite a bit before, this idea of begging the question because we always say, well, it begs the question and then it drives you nuts because you go, that's not actually begging the question.
[00:42:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:06] Speaker B: I think, I think maybe. I hope I'm right on this. This is correlated to circular arguments, the actual use of begging the question. So explain what begging the question is and then maybe get us into how we see circular arguments at play.
[00:42:19] Speaker A: Right. So usually when people say they mean, it raises the question. Well, this begs the question, how did such and such. No, no, no. Begging the question is when you make a claim, but you're begging the question of what's your basis for that? You know? Well, as we all know, like, well, hang on a second. How do we all know that? You haven't established that. That's question begging. And so the circular argument is where somebody basically. Well, we know that because we know it essentially, or that thing is bad because it's bad. Well, how do you know it's bad? Well, because I know that it's bad. Well, how do you know that it's bad? Because it's bad. Like, this is all very simplistic, but, you know, you might see somebody say, well, how do you know that the Bible is true? Well, because it says it's inspired by God. Like, well, so does the Book of Mormon. So, you know, how do you back that up? Well, because it says that. Well, how do you know that what it says is believable? Well, because it's you know, you get in the circular thing and begging the question, you're not ever answering the question. Well, how do you essentially show your work, show the math of how you got there? And so you can do that with Christian evidences. You have to be careful not to just kind of. I know it because I know it like that. That's not the answer. You can do that with different sins. Well, it's bad because it's always been bad. Like, well, but give me book, chapter, verse on that.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: But this is what drives me nuts about modern Christianity in a lot of ways, like the church, Christ and how we handle this is we do this more than we think we do. I think it's the same thing with. When I ask people, well, why is fornication wrong? I'll ask young people, why is fornication wrong? To sleep together before marriage?
Because God says it. Well, why does God say it's wrong?
You know, like they don't know. It kind of just comes back around because he says it is. Like, yeah, I know, I know that he says why does he say, like, we don't know the why behind these things. So we have a whole generation of kids that have grown up that end up making these mistakes, you know, doing these bad things. They don't ever really know the reason why. Because the reasoning a lot of times is just circular. Like, well, because the Bible says so. Well, why does the Bible says so say so? Because God put it in there. Well, why did God put in it? Because he wanted to say so. You know what I mean? Like, however it works, it's just we don't really ask why. I know this is pet peeve of mine. I've gone off of this before, so I don't want to go off too much, but.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Well, I mean, on a certain level, the Bible says so is good, but you're right and that like, we should be able to stand behind it and. And again show our math.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Well, I think there's a reason why God has. There's. For every last thing, there's a reason why God said, don't do it. And there are very clear reasons. If you study scripture, there are very clear reasons why fornication would be wrong, especially going back to the garden, things like that. But it's for all sorts of sins. Well, why? Well, because it's bad. Then you have things that, you know, I don't. We don't have to get into any specific examples, I suppose things that aren't necessarily sins but that are associated with bad. But we don't really know why. Well, because they're bad. Exactly as you said. And so this goes both ways. The circular argument sometimes is just circular and sometimes the circular argument is just you haven't dug deep enough to really understand the why. And I think there are two separate sides there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of how it seems is sometimes we use it as a way to shut down conversation when. No, let's just dig a little deeper. We'll get to the understanding of it. And other times when we're circular, like it really just has no logical basis to it. You're just using this to kind of build whatever it is and you're really firm and we kind of appeal to emotion in those moments. You're really firm on this, but you don't actually have a reason why. You just want it to be that way. And so I think the circular argument is both sides of those. You know what I mean? We have to know what's the difference? Is there substance underneath the argument being made?
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Yeah, I've done this before where I just tell people, treat me like I'm stupid because they kind of do that. Well, everybody knows this. Well, I don't again, treat me like I'm 5 years old. Explain this thing to me. Well, you should know like, but I don't. Okay. And so if you can't explain it to me in basic terms and it's just kind of a, it's supposed to be a, you know, self evident. Everybody knows this. Like it doesn't work that way. Like you should be able to stand behind the claims that you're making, whether you're claiming something's a sin or, or it's the way we should do something. Well, everybody knows that. Like I think sometimes that's where we get into trouble is just asking the basic questions. Just hey, like I'm not, I'm not trying to pull something. And I know that's kind of the issue is a lot of times the just asking questions is somebody trying to pull something.
I just like let's let's lay it all out so everybody can see how we got there. And I think for some people, that is slippery slope. It's like you're going to. You're. You're about to. You're trying to pull something. And as long as you end up agreeing and coming back to what the scripture says and all that, okay, you know. But I don't know, being afraid of questioning, being afraid of laying out the truth of why you believe what you believe, that's never a good sign. And even if you're on the right side, it's going to look like weakness and maybe dishonesty to somebody who isn't there.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: Right. If you have the truth, you have nothing to hide, nothing to run from. No, you shouldn't ever fear a question. That's why we always say question everything. We can question baptism. It will hold up under the weight of the questioning. Like, yeah, it's pretty rock solid. But if we never question it, which is what a lot of times we get into. Like, youth groups are afraid of questioning some of these things, I think, and I know I'm dunking on the youth right now, but that's just where you see it a lot is we don't want to question these things. And so we grow up just not really knowing the reason why. And then we'll appeal to. Which actually is a different fallacy. We weren't going to get into too much, but like the bandwagon fallacy. Well, this is just the way. Either this is the way it's always been or the bandwagon fallacy is, well, everybody, everybody knows this exactly as you're talking about, or everybody's doing. Everybody knows this. Well, we all know in the church that this is the case. Like, okay, as you said, do we actually know it? And then we're just appealing to the bandwagon. We're appealing to everybody else to try to. That doesn't make it right. Well, if everybody else jumped off a bridge. Right. But there's a legitimacy, there's a truth to that, of just because everybody else believes this. There's a lot of things that people believe that weren't right. I mean, at one point, the earth being flat was the predominant view in the world. So was that right just because everybody else believed it? No. Sometimes we can get into that in the church where we will say, well, we just all know, well, that's just the way that we've always believed, or that's just what everybody believes. Like, but we don't know why. And so when you're dealing with logic and you're dealing with arguments, if you can't prove your work, if you can't understand why, you're gonna have a really difficult time convincing anybody down to the core. You may convince them initially. And this is what we do, is we get kids to be convinced, maybe 0 to 18, and then they get into college and they start hearing all the, well, why is this? What about this? Have you considered this? And they have no concept of how to handle any of the questions at play. And so the, and the teachers know this. They know exactly what questions to ask. And basically 10 out of 10 are logical fallacies that if the kids are aware of this, they go, okay, hold on a second, you know, but if they're not, man, it really gets them into this. And so all of the circular reasoning or the appeal to the bandwagon or whatever it may be that we do, or this is the way it's always been, or because God says so we're not helping ourselves by shutting down the discussion or by answering the simple way like we have to be building. And sometimes it's going to be arguments, sometimes it's going to be, wow, I don't even know the answer to that. Go find the answer and let your kids know it's okay if you don't initially know the answer. We'll go find the answer. There are reasons for why God says that. And if you can get that across to the kids and to the average Christian, we're going to be okay, right? We're going to be okay.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: At the heart of this whole thing in this episode is how to have deeper discussions. Because again, it, it really looks like somebody trying to pull something. Anytime that you're coming in, questioning things, changing anything, you have that term change agent, like, hey, why? Why do we do this this way? We sure about this? This belief over here, or, you know, is there room for disagreement on this? Or things like that? And people immediately start going, what, where are you going with this? What, what's going on?
That's not healthy because anytime questions are asked, like, you need to be able, as we just said, you need to be able to answer them. On the other hand, that is usually how the change agents work is come in and just start pushing and prodding and what about this over here? What about that over there? Really trying to recruit people, the emotional thing and things like that. That's why you need to know all these things. You need to know the difference between honest discussion, opening up the scriptures, trying to get it right by God and examining the things that we do. And the classic the restudy, we got to restudy this and end up always bringing in the thing that they wanted to do in the first place, always making the change that it was very clear they were pursuing by the restudy. And so if you're not familiar with these things, you're going to get taken one way or the other. You're going to get entrenched in maybe some wrong ideas and just never be able to be moved off of them because you're just suspicious of everything or you're just going to be, you know, an open door to whatever comes in. And there's, there's that old phrase about, you know, and it's a Chesterton thing, having an open mind is like an open mouth that the purpose is to close it down on something solid. And because there's the other phrase, some people are so open minded their brains fall out. Right. Well you don't want to be closed minded to where you're wrong about something and God wants you to get it right and you, you're just not open to it. On the other hand, there's some people that it's kind of like, well I've got an open mind toward everything. I'll just listen to any that like I've seen people do this that like grew up in legalism and then just every new I like they're getting out of legalism. Every new idea that comes down the pike, like, okay, I believe that, I believe that, I believe that. I believe, yeah, I'm all for everything. Like, come on, you gotta again, close mindedness is not good. Absolute open mindedness is not great. You have to be able to get good at closing your mind on something solid. Like when it's time to have it closed, close it.
[00:52:18] Speaker B: I was thinking about that from a diet standpoint. You see this so much with like a kid has never touched sugar until they get out on their own and then they balloon to £300 because they just don't have any concept of how to stop that. Like it's everything tastes good. They want to try every experience, they want to try every flavor of ice cream and everything. And yeah, that doesn't happen a ton but you do see this like people that grow up in crunchy homes or whatever where they kind of go off the deep end with food. Then you have the other kids that all they do is eat sugar growing up and that's really unhealthy as well. And I think this is to your point of you can be ultra legalistic or have your mind so open. It's kind of both ends of the spectrum. In neither situation do you come out with a lot of health. So we fight against, and this is where we go back and forth on our podcast is we'll fight against maybe the ultra legalistic, you know, and say, hey, we should maybe not have the checklist all the way down. We need to be thinking about these things. And then of course, it's a slippery slope to this side. But if we fight against progressives, then, you know, or against having your mind too open, then you know, the people that maybe thought that we were great on that end. So I'm not saying that this is all about the way our podcast works, and I don't want to keep bringing that up, but I think there's the reason this is important is it does go to show, and I'm sure we've used some of these before, but it does go to show. Like this is. It's important to know why these things matter, like why every one of these gets used in the day to day. Like, if you go on Facebook right now, you'll see, I guarantee you if you look in any discussion, you'll probably see 3, 4, 5 of these things cropping up. And then when you look at, you know, even in our podcast, we want to always make sure we are down the line on this because we can tell. We can see in Christianity kind of the shift toward logical fallacies and the drop the mic moments. We don't want to have a drop the mic. We're here to think deeper on things. We're here to open up discussion and say, maybe we are off on this. Let's talk about some of these things. We don't think we're wrong, but if you think we're wrong, that's okay. We're open to those discussions because we really do want to open discussion in the church. And I think that, to me, is maybe the key to this episode and the key to our podcast is, man, let's open up lines of discussion. Let's see if we can come to a better way. But what is the guiding principle? Let's be like Christ. Let's be like Christ. Let's get a strong church, strong families. If we got a bunch of Christians being like Christ and glorifying God, everything is good. Everything ought to come back to that. Any of these fallacies, like any church discussion or anything surrounding Christianity ought to come back to that principle. Is this drawing me closer to Christ? And if it's not, then your principle is off. And man, you'll fall for anything in.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: That, even at that. And I'm not disagreeing with you, but that's where somebody's going to come along and be like, you know what? Jesus would welcome people. Jesus would embrace every. Jesus wouldn't judge. Jesus wouldn't. And so you have to know again, all the ones we started with, see through emotional manipulation, see through the Moton Bailey, see through those things that are like, you have to know Jesus as like, let him define himself. And so many times the culture is defining him. Our tradition is defining him, whatever it may be.
This might be the most fitting episode in line with our title of all the Think Deeper podcasts, because it really is like, here's how you navigate modern Christian discourse and not get taken, not get tripped up by these things and having the humility. Hope we have the humility. I hope everyone does to say, you know what, I might not be right about everything, but also I'm pretty sure on a lot of things that I don't want to be moved off of that. And I can see when somebody's trying, you know, to move something. So, like, have the open discussion, entertain the open discussion, keep your principles pretty firm, but also understand when a play is being run. I guess is the main takeaway I would give you from this episode is learn these things. Learn what we're doing is giving you the enemy's playbook. I mean, like, you see that with NFL players, the best quarterbacks are the ones that know their own playbook but also know the defense's playbook, right? They know what the defense is going to do. They know where everybody's going to be. If you know how Satan is going to try and bring error into your church and it's through emotional manipulation and false dichotomies and Martin Bailey's call it out. Be willing, you know, understand and the other side of this, be willing to be the bad guy. Be willing to be the guy that's the, the big meanie who says we're not doing that. Like, I, I see what you're where this is going and I don't agree with it.
[00:56:35] Speaker B: I think that's a great wrap up. We have two extras I think we'll get into in, in the deep end, moving the goalposts. And we briefly touched on appeal to authority. But I think that has a specific way we do it in the church that'll be good to discuss on the deep end. So stay tuned for those if you have not joined, make sure. To go to folkspress.org backslash+ Correct.
[00:56:55] Speaker A: Yeah, Blus, sign up for.
[00:56:57] Speaker B: There you go. To sign up for Focus Plus. So I was coming up with a think fast on the fly because I don't think either of us prepped for one.
[00:57:03] Speaker A: Oh, that's right.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Will is out. Will is out today. And I was thinking, who would be the best podcast guest? Non biblical. Non biblical. Because it's easy. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. No, we wanted non biblical. Best podcast, best guest that we would love to have on for one of our episodes. Who do you got? I'm putting you on the spot here.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: Oh, man, that. You really are putting me on the spot. So, like, somebody to come talk Christianity with us.
[00:57:27] Speaker B: Yeah, Christianity specifically. Yeah, I mean, Paul McCartney would be cool or something like that, but yeah, specifically, specifically for Christianity, like, who would you want to come discuss theology? Discuss Christianity, some. Some curious thing. And while Jack's thinking about this, for all of our deep things, anybody that's online, feel free to post your answers. But for all our deep thinkers, get that in as well. Make sure to put that in your comment. I. I'd be curious to know who you would love.
Of all history, all time history, who would you like to have.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: Wait. Of all history.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: It could be all history. Not even. Yeah, not even just live today. I'm talking all history.
[00:58:00] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, you really made that harder.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: I mean, I had two.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead. While I'm still thinking, I actually thought C.S.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: Lewis would be a ton of fun to have on here because of all the books that he's written. I think it'd be very interesting to pick his mind on some of the stuff. He also is, like, into Orthodoxy, slight, like high church, you know, Orthodox, Anglican. Is he Catholic?
[00:58:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: The. The one of the big.
[00:58:23] Speaker A: English.
[00:58:24] Speaker B: Yeah, English. There you go. I was thinking him or I was thinking somebody like either Augustine, I think would be fun, but I don't know enough about him to fully be able to have him on. Josephus would be a lot of fun, too.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:58:36] Speaker B: Talk about all of the history that we don't necessarily know. And I need to read more Antiquities and such, but I think that would be a lot of. A lot of fun to have something like that. And of course, English, the barrier would dissolve and everything.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: Right, right. Who would you have. I mean, Alexander Campbell would be a blast, right? I mean.
[00:58:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. That'd be a great one.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: See what he thinks of Think Deeper podcast. I don't know how much you'd agree with us. Disagree that that's. He'd be a fun one. Very much a fireball.
Well, since you picked Luther, I can go outside off the board out of the churches of Christ. Luther would be really interesting.
You know, he lived quite a life and had a lot of weird beliefs. So as a. Again, a fireball in his own right, he'd be a pretty hot takes on the mic kind of guy as well. So we'll go with Martin Luther.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: Put me to shame.
[00:59:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. Yeah. No joke.
[00:59:26] Speaker B: I would. I wouldn't be the crazy one. No, those are good. That'd be fun.
[00:59:31] Speaker A: Go back to the. The. Which one was it? The associate guilt by association fallacy. The slippery slope fallacy. We are not blanket endorsing any of the things that all of those people just said.
[00:59:42] Speaker B: Correct. Good call.
[00:59:43] Speaker A: It's just interesting people who might be fun to come on and argue with us or whatever the case may be. So that's a really good thing.
[00:59:50] Speaker B: Fast.
[00:59:51] Speaker A: That's an interesting one. It'll be interesting to get Wills. Hopefully he'll be able to join us for the deep end and we'll put him on this. Well, he won't be on the spot as I was. That.
[00:59:58] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:59:59] Speaker A: Off the top of my head, but that was good. But yeah, if you've got one, drop us a comment on YouTube, Facebook or Focus. Plus anything else.
I'll close by saying this weekend, Lord willing, I will be in Hartville, Ohio. I think it's between Cleveland and Akron. So if we've got any deep thinkers up in that direction, come and say hello at the Hartville Church of Christ. And if there's nothing else, we'll talk to you guys on the next one.
