Shownotes Transcript
Good Friday, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, has done more to alter and change history and the nature of language and law, ethics and discourse, scientific exploration, hospitals, medicine, war conduct, war persecutions.
the nature of jury trials. Almost everything that we take for granted that has now become almost a standard across much of the world takes place because of the event today and most businesses are still open. And I find that very surreal to me. ♪♪
All right, we're back for another program on Things Hidden, and today is Good Friday, so we're celebrating that, thinking about that topic today. And I have two friends of the show. I don't think they've been on. Maybe they have. Maybe they have. We'll have to talk about it. Yeah, they have, actually. We did that on Christmas. We have Shannon Braswell with BrightNews.com and Jason Jones of the Vulnerable People Project. How are you guys doing?
Doing good. Doing well. How are you? Doing great. Doing good over here as well, my friend. Thanks for inviting us on. Yeah, Jason, tell us, where are you at? It's like, where in the world is Carmen Sandiego for you? Every time I call you, you never know what you're up to. Oh, well, I'm in one of the most beautiful places in the world, German Hill Country of Texas. Oh, wow. The Germans just live in the hills like that? They're hiding from the command sheet, but they're here. Wow.
It's a beautiful, historic German community. They've been here since the 1840s. Very Catholic community. We have the worst fest in New Braunfels, which is probably one of the best Oktoberfests in North America. And it's where Texans come to vacation because of our rivers and our beer. And you can drink beer in our river, which people seem to love. Wow. And how about you, Shannon? How are you enjoying your Good Friday?
It's good, man. It's a nice day here in Seattle. I have to say, it's kind of a little bit surreal how little businesses have a holiday. They take it off for Good Friday. There's not very little. Everything's still functioning. And I'm like, this is the most...
I guess it's equally as important, I guess, in some sense, as the resurrection. But it's such a consequential moment in history, even if you don't believe in the Godhood of Jesus. Good Friday, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, has done more to alter and change history than
And the nature of language and law, ethics and discourse, scientific exploration, hospitals, medicine, war conduct, war persecutions, the nature of jury trials, almost everything that we take for granted that has now become almost a standard across much of the world.
takes place because of the event today and most businesses are still open and i find that very surreal to me how about you yeah you know i i'm sorry go ahead shannon oh no go ahead jason it's cool i was raised uh with no religion so i didn't know you know i was completely illiterate uh when it came to christianity didn't really know what what good friday was barely knew what easter was
But, you know, what's interesting is so it's not strange to me because I guess for most of my life, Good Friday wasn't even a day. I wouldn't even I really probably wouldn't register much at all with me to hear hear the words together. Good Friday. But the state of Hawaii is the only state that it is a state holiday. So all state employees in Hawaii get Good Friday off, which I think is wonderful. Yeah, that's that's that's that's actually pretty cool.
Wish I could move there. Um, I, uh, yeah, I mean, you know, like Jason, um, I mean, I, you know, I, I did grow up religious, but, um, you know, we didn't really observe a lot of the, you know, um, the holy seasons, you know, or the, the Lenten season. So, you know, I think especially like our generation millennials, um,
You know, maybe some of us kind of, you know, grew up knowing the Bible, you know, knowing the sort of biblical canon and everything, but didn't really observe any particular period of time except for pretty much Christmas, the day of Christmas and then the day of Easter. So, you know, the whole time of Lent, you know, being a time of reflection and
you know, what is it? Prayer, penance and and charity, you know, was not really we weren't that that wasn't something that we thought about, you know, I mean, especially as children. You know, it for me, the strength that, you know, I get from this is that every, you know, all Christians are observing this period of time, you know, in some way or another.
And that is encouraging, you know, to know that, you know, your, your fellow brother or sister is, you know, with you in this, in this time, you know, timeframe. And, you know, it's just a, it's just a good time, I think, to, you know, to think about, you know, everything that is sort of going on in your life and everything and how to, I guess, I suppose, you know, give it to God, you know, and that's the,
the, the, one of the hardest things to do, you know, cause we want to be in control. We want to feel like we're in control of our lives, you know, and be in control of our lives, you know, and sometimes we aren't and that, you know, can weigh on us. But I think during this time, you know, during Lynn, you know, this is a time where you can say, you know, like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to just give it to the Lord. So that, that has been
you know, what I've gotten out of this. - Dayson, where are you, where's your mind now in this holy season? - Well, you know, I guess, unfortunately or fortunately, I don't know, my wife and I were talking today about how horrible, you know, what horrible Catholic parents we are because
we let our children go today. They wanted to go to Austin, um, to go shopping for vinyl records at some great new record shop they founded. And, uh, their friends in our little Catholic community, all their parents were like, no, it's good Friday. You're not going to go out with your friends looking for records. And I said to my wife, I don't know, maybe not be the best Catholic parents. I don't know what we're supposed to do in this situation, but, but for me, you know, I, first of all, I love, uh,
This is my, you know, to me the most beautiful week of the year. And when I first became a Christian, I didn't understand why Easter was more significant really for us in our liturgical calendar than Christmas coming from the secular world. I didn't really understand that. And now it's to me the one week of the year I love the most. But this Easter, this Lenten season for me, unfortunately,
I really have, I committed to go to daily mass and I didn't make very many daily masses. I committed to a daily rosary. That didn't happen. And not as an excuse, but, you know, work has been pretty overwhelming serving the persecuted church. So just this week in the Nineveh Plains in Iraq, we saw Iranian militias.
displace the Christian governors from historic Christian villages. We see that, you know, and we serve the persecuted church in Iraq. We see the continued brutalization of the church in Gaza and Christians in the West Bank in Gaza
In Sudan, we have Christians fleeing Khartoum into the Nuba Mountains. In Nigeria, just this week, we had another massacre. In India, in the past couple of weeks, we've seen an uptick in brutality from Hindu nationalist extremists against Christians. And so I guess my heart has just been with the persecuted church,
This morning I was reading an old book on missions. It's called Missions in the World Crisis by Fulton Sheen, and it was written in the early 1950s. And Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, this was in the early 1950s, he said, you know, the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, but the gates of hell will prevail against China, Russia, and
the United States, governments. We have no promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the nation states and empires of the world, and even whole communities of people will lose their faith. He mentioned that in the middle of the first century, we had hundreds of bishops in North Africa. And by 800 AD, I believe it was down to five bishops.
I mean, he said, can you imagine now there may come a day where instead of the United States and Europe sending missionaries to Africa, we will have Africans sending missionaries to the United States. Well, that day has arrived, right? I think all of us, if you're Catholic, you've had a parish with at least one Nigerian priest or one Indian priest. And my Catholic parish in the hill country of Texas, where normally they were really committed to German priests,
Now we have a Mexican priest, a Nigerian priest, and an Indian priest. And so to Fulton Sheen's point, you know, this Holy Season, this Good Friday, I'm really just thinking about the mystical body of Christ and how when one part of the body suffers, we should all suffer. And the truth is, in my lifetime, I've never seen such a Christian's face, such, you know,
I've never seen the church suffer so much from Central Asia, across the Middle East, across Africa. In China, we've had 12 bishops disappeared. Countless thousands of Catholic lay people have been disappeared. But here in the West, we're just kind of out to lunch. We've just been really decadent.
and self-obsessed, and we really don't think about the persecuted church. So in my narrow world trapped in my apostolate, this, you know, Lenten season and this Good Friday, I'm really just, my mind has been in my work and in our service to the persecuted church. Yeah, there's so many wildfires, and, you know, it becomes dehumanizing to us when we have to
watch these things and then just act like, I mean, I know Jason, in your case, you're not acting like it in some sense because you're actually having an involvement with people over there. But, you know, when I saw that text exchange and I saw the kind of the text exchange and the signal chat between JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz and all these other fellows, I
That was notoriously leaked by the Atlantic or whatever. And they said, oh, we just bombed, or Pete Hegg said, I don't know who, I think it was Walls or somebody said, yeah, we just bombed the whole apartment complex where this Yemeni guy was going into, you know, and blew up the whole complex. And they were just like, yeah, that's awesome. You know, and I was talking to myself, I was like, God, what a demonic job all of them have to do, you know?
You know, that's just really demonic. Imagine that you're one of those people right now who had to be in a text chat room where some dude who's, you know, involved with a Yemeni people just blows up the whole apartment complex. And you're like, yeah, let's go get a latte, go to lunch. You know, it's like, yeah, that's great. Just blow up a whole apartment complex. Like you don't you don't do that without being totally shamed.
demonically scarred when you have to have such a cheapened view of life to do your job. I don't think Christianity is compatible with any of the roles that those individuals in that chat room hold, really. At least as the government that we are under is constituted today, I don't think there's any room for Christ's
you know, if that's what you're required to do is be like, yeah, we're going to just, you know, and that's just one little thing, you know, but then when you talk about the, the 1 million people dead potentially and soldiers between Ukraine and Russia, I mean, and we don't even bat an eye and, and we're still debating whether we're going to keep going or not, you know, and I'm thankful that there's some, you know, folks in power who seem to want to stop the madness and,
But whether it's that conflict and then we have reports that Trump and a few of his people, including Tulsi and I guess Vance, pushed back against the idea of striking Iran. Israel wanted to do that. And I guess it's been delayed for now. But you think about it and you're like, what kind of –
government has this prerogative to strike as an option another country because they think that they can have a nuclear weapon. I've been hearing that they're going to have a nuclear weapon any minute since I was a kid. And they've been hyping us on these Fox News boomer shows since I was a middle school kid. The question is, Dave, are
are our coastlines going to be flooded by global warming or are we going to be nuked by iran first because both are eminent both are just going to happen any day now yeah they've been they've been saying that iran was frothing at the mouth remember that guy makhmud amadimajad yes i was told daily when i was in high school that that man was the reincarnation of adolf percy hitler
Yeah. And that he was going to obliterate my life at any second he had the chance to. And I would watch his little beady eyes on videos and be like, dear God, he didn't even seem, you know, I was like, I don't understand it. What is this guy up to? He seemed pretty, pretty chill.
But they wanted this guy forever, you know? But you were close. You were close. It was Benjamin Netanyahu that wanted to upend your life forever. But fortunately, unlike my son who had to go fight in Iraq and Syria, you weren't lured into that. Yeah.
Well, you're going back to when I was a kid in the 70s. And I'm not kidding you. I don't remember what propaganda I was consuming. But I would take pictures out of magazines of the Ayatollah Khomeini. And I would staple his picture to garden sticks. And I would put garden sticks with his pictures and the different pictures of other mullahs in my backyard. And I would low crawl around in my camouflage and my BDUs and my dad's old army helmet and my BB gun.
And I would low crawl through the mud, you know, taking shots at the Ayatollah Khomeini. And I guess because, you know, I was being prepared for the idea that, you know, this man wanted to kill me. And so I was trying to kill him before he got me. Wow. And that's in the 70s. Yeah. Isn't it? You know, I always found it interesting that if you, you know, think about the United States and Iran as sort of these vestiges of...
an old conflict that's been going on for almost a thousand or whatever, 1500, you know, since late antiquity or antiquity, you know, you got the Romans who eventually become the Byzantines were still Romans, you know, and then you've got the Iranians who, you know, back then were called the Sassanids. Right. And, you know, the way that I think, uh,
We see ourselves as sort of, on the one hand, carrying, you know, the religious and spiritual message of Christianity, right? But then at the same time, we have carried on sort of the Roman, you know, system, you know, legality, you know, taxes, you know, what is that thing when they do a census, you know, military, right?
You know, all of these Roman columns in the Capitol buildings, right? You know, we keep Latin as sort of our vestige of, you know, the, the, the, you know, our glorious past, you know, Greek is our, you know, language of, of learning and wisdom. Right. And for the Iranians, you know, you know, the Roman empire became Christian, right? The assassinate empire eventually becomes Christian.
Muslim. So it's, it all, it seems to me that, you know, we've had sort of this antagonistic relationship with, you know, Iran for a very long time. And you can say that, you know, it's, it's, it's become spread, you know, spread out. And so I think it's, you know, I think in that way, it's, it's very interesting, you know, to think about it like that. Like,
Maybe this is something that we just still haven't gotten over, you know, and not, and we're not able to overcome sort of our, what is it? Pride, you know, and wanting to be, you know, the inheritors of the, of the, of the Roman empire or something like that. So, you know, our designated enemy is always, you know,
It has been for a long time, Iran. You know, now it's China, you know, or Russia or whatever. I mean, we designate enemies all the time, you know, but I'm just saying, I think in this context, when we talk about Iran, we're talking about right now, you know, it's interesting that that's been a longstanding, you know, our longstanding mimetic rival for a long time.
You know, I don't know. I don't know if that makes sense, but. No, it does make sense. And it's actually comforting. Right. I get so frustrated at where is the church? Where are the adults in the room with so much suffering in the world? And we think back to some glory day. You know, you'll see these oddballs on social media saying,
I'll post an article or something about persecution of Christians in Gaza or in Iraq or Syria, and they'll say, time for the new crusades. We need to reform the Knights Templar, blah, blah, blah. I mean these guys can't do two push-ups or look to see their toes. And – but then you have to remember during the crusades –
European Crusaders attacked Christian communities along the way. They attacked Christian communities in the Holy Land. In World War I, the USCCB in its original incarnation was created, was founded, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, to lure Italians and Germans into supporting the most counterproductive, disastrous war in human history, World War I. I remember during the first, I'm sorry, during the second Iraq War,
the USCCB and its agents and Catholics like George Weigel were leveraging, you know, their influence to advocate for the invasion of Iraq, even though St. John Paul the Great opposed it and correctly anticipated that it would lead to the ethnic cleansing of Christians and minorities in Iraq. And tragically, even the head of the USCCB at the time, I believe he was the executive director, his son ended up dying in that war, tragically, in Iraq. So,
you know, when we can look through the history of Christendom, we can look through the history of the church from the first century until today, and we realize this is just our vocation. And I really appreciate what Bishop Fulton Sheen said in his book, Missions in the World Crisis, and that there's an ebb and flow, and we have to just not despair, and we are apostles in the midst of this darkness. And I, you know, I struggle with
I don't want to come across as sanctimonious, always pointing fingers at, you know, bishops or anyone else for why aren't you saying more, doing more. And I don't want to despair or become despondent. And so when you put it in its historical context, you say this is just the role of the vocation of the Christian in the fallen world. And it's only, as Tolkien would say, it's only going to get worse. Yeah. You know, I have a question. You know, it's so...
The thing is, you know, I think about, okay, you know, America sees like the Middle East and everything as sort of a, you know, a threat to its, I don't know, to its power or something, right? And at the same time, you know, we're all Christians, so we're talking in a way that, you know, is trying to move towards being more Christ-like, right? So we say, well, we want to be nonviolent. You know, we want to
be more loving and everything. But, you know, on the flip side, it's like, OK, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is when when is it when is it when is it OK or when should it be OK to defend oneself against something that is a perceived threat or maybe is a real threat? You know, so, you know, OK, like me and you, David, you know, we grew up
you know, when the Iraq war and everything was just starting, you know, so, you know, for me, I didn't really know what was going on at the time, you know, and everything. But now I see all the disastrous, you know, effects and everything that, you know, all the things that have happened over time. I guess what I'm trying to ask is, at what point do you sort of
Do the whole just war theory thing. Does that make sense? What I'm asking? Like, yeah, I mean, obviously we're not pacifists, but there is no just war anymore. Right. I mean, we, we see no, we can just look at the state of Israel, right? The state of Israel is,
There has never really I think it's fair to say there has never been a state that has shown such blatant disrespect for innocent human life as the state of Israel. Never, never. You can't look. I mean, I guess maybe the United States and our strategic bombing and World War Two and our dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But they just bombed a Christian hospital this week.
In December, they bombed seven churches in Lebanon. They recently bombed the oldest church in Syria. They bombed every church in Gaza. They bombed every Christian school, every Christian hospital and flattened 90 percent of the Christian homes in Gaza and killed 10 percent of the Christian population. They've killed more journalists than have been killed in all the wars, including World War Two.
On both fronts, since 1939 until today, they've killed world food kitchen workers. And the latest atrocity to have been revealed is they buried alive ambulance drivers. So I don't think we have to worry that the United States or the United Kingdom or Israel or Germany is going to be too cautious about
in defending civilian lives. You can look at George W. Bush for as atrocious as his foreign policy was and as disastrous as his decision to invade Iraq. Under the Bush administration, there was one civilian killed with drones. Under the Obama administration, we had hundreds and hundreds of children killed with drones and thousands of civilians. You know, it seems like with each new decade and with each new war, the combatant to non-combatant ratio
goes in the wrong direction ever since World War I. So you would think with technology, and we're so proud of our moral sense, that it would be getting better with every war, not worse. And then you can look in the threads of the columns that I write criticizing Israel for killing civilians and targeting civilians. You can read the comments where people are like, kill them all. Does Nagasaki ring a bell?
And, you know, then I'll go look at the profiles of the people. I'm like, what kind of lunatic could post something like this? And there'll be a picture of them like reading their Bible, drinking a cup of coffee, quoting Spurgeon or something. And you're like, who are these poor souls that seem to be immune from any influence of the Holy Spirit?
to illuminate their intellect or to awaken. In fact, there is a talking point, I'm sure you both have seen it, that Israeli surrogates are using in the media that says we can't win hearts and minds with people that don't have hearts or minds. That's one of the talking points you will hear in the mainstream media. Douglas Murray has repeatedly said, as other prominent people have said, they are a cult of death. They are a people of death.
Could you imagine? They're talking about Palestinians and Arabs broadly.
By the way, which couldn't be the furthest thing from the truth. You know, I've been to Palestine. I was just recently in the West Bank just a couple of weeks ago. Charlie Kirk's like, I'd be afraid to walk around the West Bank. I walked all over the West Bank and I couldn't have felt safer anywhere on Earth. I don't know what these people are talking about. I don't know where they get these crazy ideas that Arabs or Palestinians wake up every morning chanting like death to America.
And just because they show us the same news clips a thousand times, you know, you could just send it. If Al Jazeera sent a film crew to my house, my 11 year old every day since he was four does PT every morning on his own.
He taught himself the Russian national anthem on the piano. He studies the armor of all the countries in the world, but he's obsessed, especially obsessed with Russia. I think I'm raising a little neocon against my will. I don't know where this kid came from. He's like obsessed with Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia with my 11 year old.
And every morning we homeschool, he finishes his work. He puts on his helmet, his BDU. He grabs his airsoft rifle, puts on a rucksack and he runs to the woods where he meets his friends patrolling for ISIS. Now, how easy would it be to come and film my son and his friends playing and then show it a thousand times on Al Jazeera? Americans are a death cult to train their children to kill Arabs, you know?
And this is the type of the propaganda that we are subject to. But then conversely, you can hear what people on our quote unquote, our side say people like Douglas Murray, who calls all Arabs a death cult. People like Jonathan Kahn, who says the Palestinians are the reincarnation of the Amalekites. This Gnostic crap that promotes racial hatred is,
is accepted in the mainstream Christian community. And these books are New York Times bestsellers. And this is really quite frightening. I say it's not that we don't have a worry about the rise of anti-Semitism. I definitely worry about the rise of anti-Semitism. But we have accepted anti-Arab prejudice to the point, to point it out, people look at you like you're absurd.
Well, Jason, Douglas Murray calls them a death cult because, of course, they're a violent death cult, and therefore we need to kill them all. I mean, I've heard that. You guys have probably heard similar things too. And I haven't heard it once. I've heard it over and over and over again, whether it's on Christian radio, in the comm boxes, or at homeschool events in my own community. Yeah, now that's interesting that you say that because kind of like where I live is sort of the –
In Seattle, it's sort of the exact opposite. You know, we are—it's a very liberal place, you know, very anti-government and everything, but it's also very pro— I don't—you know, I'm trying to figure out the way to say this because the thing is, is that they're pro-Palestinian, and I think the reason why they're pro-Palestinian is because—
Not because they really care about the fact that the Palestinians are being hurt.
but because it's sort of another bandwagon to get on for another victim. Like, does that make sense, what I'm saying? It's intersectionality. And I've seen that with my own eyes when I go to these liberal events. And I actually recently just wrote a column about this last week, criticizing the social justice left and the social conservative right, saying they're basically all participating in intersectionality. Yes. Okay. Can you explain that a little more, like the whole thing of intersectionality? Because it's like,
That sounds kind of like to me what Rene Girard would call like doubles or something like that. Is that the romantic rivals? OK, yeah. And they are right. Like, it's exactly right. So I live in Texas where people are like, I'm white. I'm Republican. I'm conservative. I love the Second Amendment. And Israel's our ally and everything good, holy and wholesome, like we're on the team.
They don't even need to be indoctrinated in the heresy of Christian Zionism. It's just, it's like flat tax or fair tax or second amendment and pro-life and Israel. It's co-branded. It's, it's, it's in the same frame. It's in the same file folder.
And then for the left, it's the same thing. And it's really kind of uncanny because Palestinians are socially conservative, right? They're very religious. The oldest Christian community in the world is there. And I have friends who are Palestinians who are like, Jason, you know, I go to these rallies and I feel so uncomfortable because all of our supporters who aren't Palestinian are very strange to me. But you take your friends where you can get them, you know?
And that's how they feel. I just went to a liberal event and it was my pastor who's really famous, Reverend Munther. He's an evangelical Palestinian pastor in Bethlehem.
And he wrote a book called Christ in the rubble. It's a powerful book. He comes to America and only the quote unquote progressive groups met with him. And I have to say, I went to one of the events or a few of the events and one of the events, especially I was so disappointed. It was a main line Protestant denomination. Each one of them got up there and took longer to speak.
about their commitment to the Palestinians and how much they hurt. And they went on and on and on and on, like eating into the time of the speaker, which to me was very thoughtless. And then as soon as like Reverend Munther finished speaking, even though they were just really effusive in their like praise, it was like up eight o'clock events over, you all have to leave. But all these people want to talk to Reverend Munther, they all wanted him to sign books. And that's when it struck me. And I talked to some of my Palestinian friends there. I'm like, oh, this is just intersectionality.
I'm supporting an ally. Why? Because I'm stealing the clout or the rightness of the cause of the Palestinians to advance my pet project, whatever the heck their pet project is, whether it's and it usually has to do with sexual perversion, which which is ironic because the Palestinians are just a very simple, traditional, wholesome, religious people, whether they're Christians or whether they're Muslims or
And they're not violent. They're not radicalized. Those progressives, especially those women, they have some kind of like self-flagellation construct about they can endure the hardship of social conservatism if it's in the form of an Arab or a Muslim.
It's like penance for their Western privilege, you know? Well, I think they think it's cute, you know? It's like when you go to the Mexican restaurants, you want them to wear the traditional clothing. Oh, isn't that cute? But it's intersectionality on both sides. And the sad truth is there's a lot of truth on both sides. There's a lot of vulnerability on both sides. The joke that I tell in public, like on radio and in speeches, which I shouldn't probably tell, is
You know, there are those who say they love the Jews, but they just hate Arabs. And those that say they love the Palestinians, they just hate Jews. And by God's grace, I hate Arabs and Jews. And so let's just agree not to kill kids. You know, that's the joke. But, you know, I do think there's just a lot of that. And this is the this is where I would say even this Holy Week. My son said something to me funny the other day because we were talking. I don't even know what we were talking about. I think it had to do with Gaza and Israel.
And my son said, Dad, you've been nerfed by Christianity. I didn't understand that expression. He goes, you've been nerfed, Dad. I said, what does that mean? He goes, it's a gamer expression to mean that like your capacity to be violent has been eliminated or reduced.
And I said, and thanks be to Jesus, because I have a volatile personality. I'm prideful. I'm tribal. I love and want to protect my own. I can be thoughtless to the interests of others. I can be prejudiced and bigoted. In fact, I wrote an article called Help. I'm an anti-Palestinian bigot, where I wrote in detail how I'm a bigot against Palestinians, Arabs generally, Palestinians specifically. Yeah.
And, you know, in a week like Holy Week, I am just really thankful to God for grace. And as my son has said, I'm really happy I've been nerfed. And I'm thankful for a teacher like Rene Girard that I never got to meet in person. But, you know, and I know all of us are because, you know, that's the way.
Jesus's people would understand things in their own time 2,000 years ago as they would sit under a rabbi like Jesus. And if, you know, a teacher is what the rabbi means. And I consider Rene Girard a rabbi in that sense of that word of like sitting under the tutelage of an actually great rabbi because Jesus
It's clear to me that the Bible does not interpret itself. You cannot put it on the coffee table and say, speak. And a lot of people like to do fortune cookie Christianity where they turn to a random page in the Bible, put their finger on it, say, oh, this is my fortune cookie for today. And it says, and Jesus wept. Oh, okay, what does that mean? Oh, God.
I'm going to be weeping for how much money I win on the lottery or whatever stupid thing. But, you know, people just socially, you know, make whatever they want out of Christianity. Christianity is like a sandbox, you know, and you can get in that sandbox with all of its little shovels and beat the hell out of each other with it. Or you can construct something. Right. And it's important about the rabbis that you have or the Rene Girard types that you have to help shape you, because otherwise you're
If you read the Bible the wrong way, you're going to be looking for Amalekites under every corner. And everybody you hate is an Amalekite, you know, because you're reading it. It's like looking through a telescope the wrong way. You know, you're looking at it with the big lens, looking down into the other side. And you're not looking at what you're supposed to look at. You're looking at it wrong. And the Bible is we are not people of the book. We're people of the person of Jesus. The word is incarnate, is alive.
and, and dwells among us. Right. And that Holy spirit though, unfortunately, uh, you know, it's, it doesn't come on autopilot, um, like a, like a instinct, you know, if you have a cat and you have a cat with its mother long enough for a first few weeks, you know, it can, it can do what cats are going to do for the rest of its life. And it does it pretty well, but humans are not the same way. Like you have to really, um,
You really have to be blessed with the right environment to understand the gospel because Jason and Shannon, as you know, you can live with a nonviolent family that doesn't spank or whatever, anything you want. But if you're not reading the Bible with a good teacher or at least—and I get it, there's traditions, but there's plenty of people—
You know, people talk about traditions in the church, right, in the Catholic Church or Orthodox Church who are not into the more vicious Christian Zionist type warmongering, but yet they're still going along with various wars. I mean, look at all the Orthodox boys who are going off and getting themselves slaughtered, sometimes against their will, I understand, in Russia and Ukraine, but
I mean, what a damning indictment on orthodoxy that a nation of Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Orthodox could not figure out how to not do what they just did, which is kill a million of their people. I mean, we're still talking about 9-11, and that was a horrible atrocity. You know what, 4,000 people killed, and yet they just killed a million of their people, and what are we—we don't even act—
Like, what is that not an indictment on the state of orthodoxy in those countries? I don't care what their excuse is. And the same goes for all these other, you know,
branches of Christianity. I mean, you can go to all the best little, you know, Oh, I go to this church. Yeah, we do. I go to mass or whatever. But what does it really do to you? If you don't, uh, you know, have eyes to see and ears to hear what the actual implication of the cross of Christ is. It's not, it is not a license for God to, to drink blood, you know, and that's a slander against Abba the father.
that he needed to beat the tar out of his son to love you? I mean, if we're going to teach that to people around the world, no wonder we have this twisted, idiotic Christianity that justifies this war over here and even the progressives. Take that same exchange economy model of God and justify killing Russians and smiling about it or justify ignoring people with vaccine injuries. Oh, they are unpersoned.
People are dying of turbo cancers and pains and sufferings, but these people are, you know, they unperson as they suffer. And all of this is a consequence of slandering God. And if we don't have right teachers to carry on the flame, thank God for Rene Girard. You know, it doesn't mean he got it all right. But I mean, wow, what a figure for pushing people towards actually looking at the cross and
truthfully and not this, this demonic perversion that so many people twist themselves into, you know? Yeah, no, I agree. I was just on Catholic votes podcasts and I was able to share that, that I'm really grateful to Renee Gerard to help me really understand what it is to be a Christian. Like I read him as like pastoral theology. That's how I read Gerard. I think it's interesting that, you know, we, we, you know, have these sort of like a,
What did you call it, Jason? The whole thing of, you know, I've got the liberals here, you know. Oh, the intersectionality. Yeah, the internet intersectionality. You know, I think it's interesting how people don't see how they're both sort of, you know, hunkering down. And then they become sort of a lot, you know, they become very much alike, right?
You know, and I think it's more, you know, it's kind of like, I guess, you know, I'll give an example, like a family or something, you know, and the more that one hunkers down, then the other one is going to hunker down on their views. You know, and they say, well, you know, I'm right. It's like, well, you know, you're trying to do a power move over me. So I'm a fight against that, you know, so I'm right.
You know, and I feel sympathy for both sides, you know, and I think that, you know, it's OK to say that, like, you know, they've both suffered and everything. And, you know, you think about the history of all of this. And, you know, the one thing I want to say, and I don't want to scapegoat the British, but I do feel like they started all this and then they handed it off to us.
And, you know, my thing is, it's like, why shouldn't they be forced to deal with the problem that they caused all the way back in the 1940s? You know, I mean, they earlier. I mean, it goes, you know, there was the Royal Commission of 1909 commissioned by the queen where they were given a three part report saying that to control the Middle East, we have to foment religious differences. We have to foment.
ethnic differences, and then we have to foment sectarian differences within the religions and the ethnic communities. And then the coup de grace and the way they worded it was very striking. They didn't say Jews. They said Europeans who think of themselves as Jewish. It was something really oddly worded.
We need to create a Jewish state and lure them to the Middle East so that we can create permanent enemies for them and we can have a permanent enemy for the Arabs. Wow. You know, and it's there. And then you have the Sykes-Picot Agreement. You can't hide from these things. And then you, up until, what was it, in 2017, it was, I always get it backwards. Is it timber, sycamore, timber, or timber, sycamore, where...
We now know, thanks to the Trump administration's declassification, that the United States funded every side of the Syrian civil war. We funded al-Qaeda. We funded ISIS. Not only that, we funded Boko Haram. We funded Hamas. We funded Hezbollah. So we funded that in Afghanistan and the Taliban. So you look back to the 1909 commission, and then you go to 2017, and you have CIA funding every side of Afghanistan.
you know, the experience of war. And then, you know, this week we see the last 40,000 Christians in the Nineveh Plains probably, you know, are witnessing their last gasp. And the church in the West is just out to lunch. We're just, but I guess this is really nothing new. Yeah, but so now that's my thing right there, right, Jason? Like, okay, this is where I get back to the whole thing of like the whole, you know, like a, you
you know, the conflict or defense or just war or whatever, you know, as Christians in the West, what is our sort of obligation to our brothers and sisters in, in say the Middle East? Because, you know, we're, I guess, I guess short, are we supposed, should we go there and, you know, fight back the, say the,
Muslim groups and the Jewish groups to defend the Christians? You know, should we make this, should we make an aware, you know, should we make people more aware of the fact that there are Christians living in this region and they're suffering, you know, for political, you know, imaginations that are going on between, you know, more powerful institutions than Christians
Most of the Christians in Iraq were ethnically cleansed before George W. Bush left office. So when the U.S. was there in force, right under our noses, the Christians were being ethnically cleansed. The Christians did much better under Saddam Hussein in 750 years of the Ottoman Empire. 750 years of the Ottoman Empire and Saddam Hussein, the Christian did better than they did under the United States in Iraq.
We literally are funding Israel to drop bombs on our churches. Their snipers are killing our women while they're in church, shooting them. Yeah, I just, I don't, you know, it's heartbreaking. And many times, you know, in the Middle East, it's not as people have been taught. My friend, Khalil Sagaya, who works with us, his sister was killed by the IDF.
a year ago last week. And it was Muslims, his Muslim Palestinian friends that were trying to rescue her and they were being shot at. When two Christian women were shot by an Israeli sniper, it was Muslim men that rushed to try to rescue her. It was the Muslim Peshmerga and Russia and Iran that did most of the heavy lifting to defeat ISIS to liberate the Christians in Iraq and Syria and the Yazidis as well.
So the world is much more complicated than we would believe. You know, it was Israel and Hungary, of all countries, Hungary that we're told is this great Christian country. Israel and Hungary partnered with Azerbaijan to ethnically cleanse one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, the Armenian Christians in Artsakh. You have Ambassador Huckabee, who wakes up every day and prays to Jesus and wants to make God happy, who denies that the Palestinians exist as a people. Yeah.
And this is like cookieville. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm wondering where they get in their theology from. I mean, is this sort of a Protestant? No, it's what I said earlier. All the different. Yes. The Huckabee one is that Protestant one. But all most of the Christians, unfortunately, even the, you know, or Catholics and Orthodox, too.
have a violent view of God that flattens the obvious intentions of Jesus into a kind of transaction. And they butcher it by saying he came as a suffering servant, but when he comes back, he will be Hulkamania running wild on you.
And so they take those revelation passages about his garment will be soaked in blood. That means, in my view, that he's showing up and that's what we do to each other. But in their view, he's whooping so many people, stabbing and smashing and killing because he didn't really mean it on the cross. That wasn't the existential indwelling of God's glory.
of God's disposition towards violence, like the Bible obviously is teaching. No, they twist it and say, no, he was only doing that as the suffering servant mode, like an espionage. I'm going to come in and I'm going to pretend, I'm going to act like I'm really nice and really kind so that I've got all the excuse in the world to blast every person who looks at me wrong when I come back.
That's the view of most, if they think through it, you know, if they even go to that point, that's the disposition, unfortunately, of most Christians. They believe that God is a God who demands blood if you impugn his honor. But that's not the God revealed who comes in the manger, okay? That's not a God—
And to be fair, although it's probably dominant in the minds of most Protestants in America today because of media, Protestant media that's controlled by the Christian Zionists, most Christian Protestant denominations, this is not their theology. Right. This is a new heresy that developed in the 19th century and really erupted in the 20th. But who shares this view of Jesus as general religion?
against Satan and the Antichrist slaughtering his way across the earth with Islam. So they hold, they're so bigoted and they have such a big, the Muslims are a cult of death, but their vision of Jesus is really the same
Islam, that Jesus returns in the midst of the battle against the Jal and leads us to victory. And Islam also teaches that in the last days it will be Christians and Muslims together united against the Antichrist. And Isa or Jesus will lead us to victory in this great battle. But I don't want to go out that way. I want to go out like the Piatah.
I want to go out holding and caring for the suffering, not brutalizing the damned. Yeah. And I have a violent temperament. So I don't know who these people are that are attracted to this stuff. That's the one thing that gets me. I find it repulsive. I'm like, dear Lord. Yeah. And I look at the calm boxes and I see what people say. And I'm like,
I've never met anyone in my life that talks like this in reality. Is this what people are harboring inside? What is this weird thing? I think it's a romanticism. You know, when you're not, you know, when you don't, when you don't, when you've never seen, you know, someone or, you know, chaos break out in a community and stuff like that, when it's not in front of you.
you know, and all you're being told about these regions and, you know, everything is from social media. You don't really get a sense of like how this, how violent, you know, things are over there. And so I think people here in America, you know, we just sense that like, oh, well, that is a bad region. You know, that is a,
you know, a horrible region and they've been fighting each other for a long time. You know, you know, we should, we should, you know, we need to get our gear up and, you know, beef up and, and, and, and, you know, get ready for war, you know, type of thing. But I don't think any of these people are really prepared to deal with, you know, any of that.
You know what I'm saying? It reminds me of that. Remember that movie? It was on Netflix and it was this German kid and he was going to war and he was excited in the beginning. He's like super excited. And he's like, I get to serve them, you know, the fatherland and everything, you know, and then he gets there in the trenches in World War One, you know.
And he's seeing all his friends, you know, getting, you know, basically. All quiet on the Western front. All quiet on the Western front. Yes. And, you know, he was all elated and everything. And then by the end of it, he was like, I'm done. I'm done. You know, just. But it's not, you can't, you can't sequester the issue as a problem of just Christian Zionism, because as we know, the other churches have violent,
dispositions about God's character embedded into their eschatology in a different way, oftentimes. It may be a little bit different, but a lot of them have a view of God which I think is much more closer to paganism than it is the actual spirit of the thrust of the narrative from Old Testament to New Testament. And that problem needs to be addressed in the nicest and whatever way possible
Because it's not, you know, again, where's Christian Zionism causing the Ukraine and Russia war? Okay, both sides treating each other like garbage for years. Yes, instigated, but so what? I mean, at what point are Christians supposed to be the smartest people? Not intellectually in an IQ sense, but we're supposed to have revelation from God.
the key to all knowledge as Rene Girard calls the Bible. And yet we are like idiots that are used as cockfighting roosters by other people, you know, globalists and military industrial complex. Look at the hatred that they've been stoking between Christian Americans and Muslims for a long time. Look at Sirhan Sirhan, an obvious patsy to a much more complicated network of
I can't wait. You know, those documents were released today, brother. Yeah, I know. And I haven't seen what they say, but I guarantee you the spoiler alert, Suryan Suryan wasn't the mastermind behind the assassination of RFK.
but he was a scapegoat, right? And he may have had some kind of role, but he was a scapegoat and he was a Palestinian. I mean, think about how long they've been seeding this hatred between Americans and Palestinians for a long time. You look at Hulkamania in the 1980s and the 70s when you had the Sheik and the Iranian and they kept trying to push that narrative. Chuck Norris movies. God bless Chuck Norris movies.
But, man, he made a lot of movies about how the Iranians were going to kill us and they were terrorists in the 80s. And he did his job well. I blame – I love Chuck Norris. I think he's one of the greatest human beings that have ever walked the earth. He's a kind man. He's a gentle man. He's a beautiful Christian man. But his movies in the 80s really –
the groundwork for a lot of my bigotry against Aaron. That's why he endorsed Mike Huckabee. That's why he endorsed Mike Huckabee in 2008. Unfortunately, I like Chuck too. I don't have a problem with him as a person. Look, Mike Huckabee is a beautiful person. And this is the thing about these virulent ideologies of evil, that good people can be captured by them. I think Huckabee is a better man than me. He's a better Christian than me. I think he is a better husband and probably better father than I have been.
I think he wakes up and in all sincerity tries to order his life to please the Trinity, to please our creator, God, and our brother, Jesus Christ. But the problem is this wicked, despicable, virulent, vicious, cruel ideology. It's not a theology. It's an ideology of evil, Christian Zionism.
That foments a brutal ethno-nationalism that's vicious and Gnostic. He accepts it. And it's sold. I call these people the pumpkin spice Gestapo because I just picture a bunch of guys in turtleneck sweaters sitting around in some like an Oshkosh, Wisconsin at a Christian bookstore shopping.
And it smells like pumpkin spice candles. They're drinking their lattes. It smells like Seattle. Huh? It smells like Seattle. Yeah, yeah. And they're studying their Jonathan Cahn books. And they're watching Pastor Hagee. And they're worried about blood moons and all of this insanity. And they're good, kind, gentle people that are naive and have been captured by
by this wicked, brutal ideology that is anti-Christ. Like Christian Zionism is clearly anti-Christ. It denies that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all the promises to Abraham. And it weaponizes our faith to brutalize the literal descendants of the Jews that accepted Jesus. And that's what the Palestinians are. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for saying that last piece, because I was going to ask...
I was going to say something about that. My personal thoughts on that, which is, I think, you know, we talk some like, and this is not, you know, Nam Chomsky was like, well, you know, it doesn't matter who the real Jews are or whatever. Like, you know, I, I consider myself Jewish. That's the tradition I was, you know, raised in and everything. But, you know, I think to myself, like, but it is important because that's the whole reason why a lot of this shit is going on. Right. Like,
everybody sees themselves as some sort of tribe that
They can name themselves in the Bible or something. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of the Hebrew Israelites. I grew up around the five percenters and the nation. So yeah, I grew up hearing about all of this, and I stumbled across Armstrong's books at a used book sale as a teenager, and it caught my attention. So I'd read it, and it obviously was very kooky and not attractive at all.
But yeah, it is interesting how everyone wants to be God's chosen people. Yeah. Isn't that something? And they all, they all, it's like, they want to demarcate, you know, like, oh, you're from this tribe. You know, you're the lost tribe of Dan. You're the lost tribe of Naftali, you know, and all this type of stuff. And it's so interesting to me how like everybody, even Christians want to be somehow demarcated.
related to the bible in some way you know some black people think oh well we're the descendants of the ancient egyptians so we don't like any of you you know type of thing and you know i i just find that interesting how it's kind of like in that way the bible has sort of become a stumbling stumbling block too for for people who think that way you know they don't see themselves as um
you know, born again in Christ, you know, and, you know, seeing themselves, you know, they said, well, my, you know, my identity is in Christ. No, there I, you know, for them, it's like my identity is in this biblical text and,
you know, and I, and I belong to the, you know, Philistines or the, that's because they don't have, again, if the Bible is a sandbox and you can do what you want in it, you can grab a shovel and hit somebody with it. You can use it to justify this or that, but the,
But that tendency to unionize and then to try to say that we are the special team is a kind of, and that happens with America, right? We have this special city on a hill. That's biblical language, right? We're the new Zion and all this. And all these different groups have this disposition. And really what it's about is a mimetic rivalry towards Jesus and his body.
Right. Because it's it goes back to the same typology that we see in the Old Testament between rival brothers, Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers rivaling over him in his favor. And Jesus is that brother that has the favor of God. And humanity is always trying to form some kind of collective bond.
twin brother be like, no, no, but I am special, you know? So it's always kind of like elbow Jesus out of God's view, you know, like I'm special and we get to kill people. And because they don't want the Jesus that says, well,
Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Do not resist evil with violence. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. They don't want the Jesus who forgives his enemies while they're torturing him because that means they have to give up their false God made in their own image. And so every group is trying to look in the Bible like a sandbox and say, oh, see?
I see me there. And that's just the same position that Cain had. That's the same position with Jacob and Esau's story, Ishmael and Isaac, right? What did they do? They always call
You, the person that's the brother who's disfavored by God, if you're against them, right? You're a citizen of, you're a descendant of Cain. You're a descendant of Esau. You're a descendant of Ishmael, right? I need the glasses that these people have because I see the, you know, when I read in scripture, you know, that the seed falls on rocky soil. I'm like, oh my gosh, I think I'm the rocky soil.
There's a wicked and haughty generation that's violent and adults and hates their parents. Oh my gosh, that's me. Oh no, I'm in scripture again. Like I don't know where these people pick up the Bible and they find themselves always, you know, I don't know if it's grace or just Gerard or what, or I don't, I want to be, I want to associate with the, that, you know, the reason I went to
the West Bank and oversaw our deliveries of trucks into Gaza in January was because I was invited to the inauguration. And I wanted an excuse not to go to the inauguration. I didn't want to go to the inauguration.
I would have rather been in Gaza delivering trucks or in the West Bank in Bethlehem with Christians having their homes stolen by settlers. And I did that. And I did that. And I did that for two reasons. One, I'd rather be there. And it was a good excuse. Sorry, guys. I'll be in the Palestinian territories. But I also wanted to bring my – I wanted them, when they were at their little parties, to go, man, Jason should be here. Oh, he's in the West Bank right now.
But I don't know what is this weird desire. I don't know where this desire comes from for them to want to be the, you know, to find themselves. I'm lucky because I'm of Northern European descent. So I know in the first century what my ancestors were doing. They were running around naked clubbing people, right? They were jumping off of little boats in France and stealing women. So I can't pretend that I descend from some great lost tribe of Israel and that I in some way
have this special relationship with god and i think that's fine by me i don't you know i don't know they could fit you in somewhere jason they'll find a place for you you know what i'm saying oh no that's the christian identity movement right i know there are these there's this whole idea that the that yeah that the british are uh like one of the lost tribes like give me a break but by the way what does it matter
What does it matter? And that's what the Palestinians tell me. They get mad at me. I get chastised by Palestinians. Stop saying we descend from the families that were in the upper room in the book of Acts. I'm like, but you are, you are, is that all your blood? I know there were Arab invasions in the sixth and seventh century. You know, obviously we're all mixed up. But inevitably every Palestinian Christian, especially,
We'll have, it's just impossible not to, to have ancestors that walked with Jesus Christ himself. Yeah, yeah. It's inevitable. Yeah, that's like, you know, the Lebanese, you know, there's this, like, you know, because I find a lot of people who live in the Levant, you know, they'll say, we're not, we're not Arabs. You know what I'm saying? We're, we're.
We're Phoenicians or something like that. Yeah, that's true. The both are true probably, but yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. They won't let you tell a Palestinian that. They will always check you. And then I asked them, why do you not allow us to say that? They said, because we have been the victims of the weaponization of our faith. Yeah.
Okay. And we're not going to let it because then they will quote scripture where it says there is no longer Jew or Gentile. Yeah. We are one in Christ. And the only people in the world that seem not to take pride in finding themselves in the Bible are the people who can most clearly point to themselves. And that's the Palestinians. Yeah. Because they're probably like, man, we're tired of everybody else wanting to appropriate this thing.
And then we get backlash for it. You know what I mean? Like, just leave us alone. Like, we don't need y'all to, you know, proselytize.
Guys with big hats and sunscreen come down there and say, we're the indigenous people. You sure need a lot of sunscreen for an indigenous person, my friends. Yeah, like an anthropologist that just came in. Like, I got a new opportunity for y'all, man. These are the real Israelites, right? Yeah, yeah, everyone is. It's not just, look, you said there's the 5% Nation, the Hebrew Israelites, there's the Christian Identity Movement.
It's kooky. But it really is interesting. Everyone wants that special relationship with God. Right, right. And that's the thing is they don't want to say – they don't want to admit that they can have that special relationship with God in Christ. Because in Christ means following his nonviolent, self-emptying way, and nobody wants to do that, including us.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'm definitely not going to be, I'm definitely one of the first person to say that sometimes. But you know what, man? It's like, you know, it's like at some point you'd say, look, we may be having our problems with our egos, but, you know, let's at least start with not going along with killing people with mass slaughter, right? You know, let's at least try that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I find hard to understand.
I want to close with this. I want to ask, like, has the story of Good Friday, has Jesus failed in his mission of trying to save the world? 2,000 years later, I have people who are not religious who message me whenever I write about Christianity or whatever. It's like there's this feeling that, you know, it's not right.
It's not successful. You know, it's it's it is what it is. Is that true in your view? Can we let's land the plane with that question? I think it's sort of a thing where Christians have to be active. You know, if we see it as a failure, then that's what it's going to be. You know, if we continue to strive for the faith and spread the good news and and speak, you know, in the way that we've been speaking, then
then it will succeed, you know? And, and so, yeah, I mean, I think it's all about how we take up our cross, you know, that all depends on, on us, you know, if we don't do anything, then yeah, it will, it will fail in a way, you know, God will still have the ultimate glory, you know, but we perhaps, you know,
I mean, yeah, I think it's all about human action. It depends on what we do. Are we going to really live by Christ's teachings and his, you know, words and deeds, you know? Or are we going to just say, well, yeah, that's a great story. And yeah, man, I wish I could...
you know, pray for me, brother. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hanging in there, you know, and everything. And, and that's okay. You know, I think we, it's okay to say that sometimes, you know what I'm saying? It's like, dude, I'm really struggling and I'm having a hard time, uh, even just, you know, like yesterday, you know, and I'll end with this, you know, I went to the, uh, you know, Monday, Thursday mass, you know, and, um,
I wasn't completely present there. My mind was really on some other stuff. My life and everything and other things that are going on in the world and everything. And so I wasn't present. But I think at the same time, it's a struggle. And we have to struggle in our personal life and in the world we live in
to fight for the good news, you know, or to struggle for the good news. Because ultimately that's what it is, right? This is good news, you know, that Christ is coming in the world. He's redeemed the world. You know, we are saved. By his stripes, we are healed, you know? And so I think that's the ultimate thing is it depends on Christian actions and behavior, right?
Yeah, I would say that obviously as a Catholic, Christ succeeded. But if I were to step back and look at it just as an anthropologist, I would say, and I do this often, I do spiritual exercises where I'll think of the world through other theologies or think of the world as, or think of some theological problem as through different religious traditions or as an atheist or agnostic. And so if I were to think of Christ dying on the cross,
And I've thought of this before. What if none of this is true? What we believe about our faith. I am absolutely grateful for Jesus Christ because nobility is linked to being gentle and being kind and being self-sacrificing and being a servant and is self-willed and is violent and is selfish of his human being that I really am. Um,
I find that my desire and my nature is to correspond to what Jesus Christ exemplifies. So that means, to me, points to that it's really true. Our faith is really true. And to have, you know, our faith is our creator, the second person of the Trinity died on the cross and
Out of love for us and that I am to be a servant. I'm to be kind. I am to be gentle I am to kiss lepers. I am to take risks in love and service to other that is what it is to be chosen What a grace I can't imagine if I had a worldview or a religious tradition That told me I was better than others that others should be subordinate to me that divided the world and
between those who are good and those who are evil, instead of what Solzhenitsyn said, that the line of good and evil doesn't run through religions or doesn't run through races or classes, it runs through the human heart. And I am grateful for that. And I did this spiritual exercise recently. What if the God of Jonathan Cahn and Mike Huckabee was God?
A vicious tribal God, cruel and brutal and small and petty, vicious God. How obnoxious must be our understanding of Jesus Christ to this vicious little God? And so I'm grateful. Yeah, I think to me, Good Friday is obviously Easter Sunday.
objectively is the most important day in the liturgical calendar. But for me, in a very human sense, this day, Good Friday, is the most important day because it really drives home the lesson that I most need to learn, which is to subordinate my will to the other and that I was created to love, to be gentle, to be kind. That's why I was created.
And that's what this day teaches more than any other day of the year. Amen. I appreciate it. Take care, guys. Thank you. You too. God bless you, gentlemen. All right. You too, brother.