Who is America’s "god" now? | Easter Special | 4/17/22

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments, it's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

All of history's strongest empires are no more.

The Mongol Empire, it's gone.

Roman Empire fell.

The Ottoman Empire,

that's finished.

And the British Empire, from rising sun to setting sun, dissolved.

America?

Well, she's not down yet.

Well, technically, we're not an empire.

Shut up, Karen.

The point is that every society that has ever led the world has diminished or collapsed.

And in those times, it's a scary and exciting time to be alive.

As Dickens wrote, it was the best of times.

It was the worst of times.

America is not the unsinkable ship we thought she was.

And the iceberg is not just close, we've already hit it.

If you think the currency is unstable, have you looked at our kids?

Child suicide doubled between 2007 and 2017.

Self-harm among preteen girls is up 189%.

Americans can't afford family vacations.

But it's kind of fine because the family fell apart a long time ago.

We live in a time where every woman of the year this year is a man, and every man is told he's an oppressor.

Our Ivy League students want more censorship, and our government wants more surveillance, all while we grow more and more isolated, depressed, and unstable.

We've lost our way, America.

We've lost our unum.

And nobody really knows how to get it back.

While all of this is going on, the brave new world is accelerating towards us at an incredible speed.

Futurists, dreamers, and innovators foretell a future where man and machine become one.

A world more virtual than physical.

A world where technology extends life beyond death and intelligence beyond our universe.

Some say we'll colonize Mars

before 2030.

Others say we have have to do that because we got to get off this planet before we link to computers.

But one thing is certain.

Life as we know it is changing forever.

Are we ready?

If we don't enter into this brave new technological era with some collective moral agreements, then our advancements will overtake and doom us.

If we can't define the difference difference between a man and a woman, can we know the difference between man and machine?

What are the ethics of this new world?

What is life?

How do you live in a virtual world?

What gives us meaning?

Are we just giant pieces of meat being driven around by machine brains?

Are we a dwelling place for God?

Are we just a sum of what we've experienced or do we have immortal souls trapped in mortal bodies?

If all of the data of who I am can be downloaded, does that mean I live forever?

Is that even me?

Or is there something more to me, something

that could never be downloaded, reproduced, or preserved?

If a machine can deduce, communicate,

abstract out ideas, imitate,

infer patterns.

If they can write poetry and art,

tell us they love us.

Is that real?

Are they human?

If they respond to touch and seem to make friends,

if they say, I am lonely,

are they any different than us?

If a car is driving itself and there's no time for that car to stop, Elon Musk is on the right and the President is on the left, and Mother Teresa is in front of us, who should the car hit?

We as humans won't be able to decide, but MIT is already working on that.

Because the car will be fast enough to decide who lives and who dies.

My question is, what moral standard are they using?

Ours?

Because I don't know what our moral standard is anymore.

According to the NIH, artificial intelligence will be used more extensively in healthcare in 10 years.

But don't fear the machine.

Fear the programmer.

Someone somewhere in the world of big tech is developing the technology that literally will be making life and death decisions.

Do you trust that guy?

Do you know who that guy even is?

Because soon it just becomes an algorithm.

Where did that programmer get his values?

Are they the same as mine or yours?

Also in the NIH website is a report that scientists now are using CRISPR technology for human enhancement.

They are genetically modifying babies in test tubes, and they say it's working.

Genetically tailored humans.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, and the Pentagon went ahead and admitted we have seen UFOs.

Nobody really paid any attention.

But can I just ask the question, if aliens come down with a higher level of intelligence, are they our masters?

Are we like animals to them?

Or are we all created equal?

Who decides?

Well, God does.

But do we believe in God anymore?

And And how could we even make this case to aliens or a machine if we're not living it now?

We don't believe in God as much as we used to.

According to Pew Research Center, the secularization, the shift is now evident in the American society.

So far in the 21st century, we show no signs of slowing.

Pew's religious landscape study breaks the data down by age group.

They found that each new generation cares about God less and less.

The generational declines, belief in God, frequency of prayer, importance of religion in one's life, and even frequency of feeling spiritual peace and well-being.

Our nation is abandoning the God of our founding.

So where do we go to answer huge questions about right and wrong, life and death, meaning and values?

Without a God to order our society, a God that empowers you, not the government, not special interests, but you,

Who's going to step in to fill that gap?

And will that person empower or enslave?

As America shakes off our religious foundation in the name of freedom, we have not freed ourselves from dogma or religious strictures.

Far from it.

We've just introduced new dogmas, new strictures.

There is a new religious cult in America.

It's wokeism.

Is this our new God?

It is accepted wisdom that you cannot serve two masters, but it should be equally regarded that everyone serves someone or something.

So one God must perish, and in its death all of its traditions, histories, and decency will be buried along with it.

Is this what we want?

Because this is the choice in front of us now, the elephant in the room, the root of our problems and solutions.

Not to just question

and think,

but come up with an answer.

And if you think you don't have to answer this question, no answer is an answer.

The good news is this has all happened before, and if we know the results, perhaps we can change our thinking to change our course.

So today, as we enter in this new era, an era rife with ethical debates, a crisis of meaning, and the last ditch efforts to remain

functioning in the world.

We have to ask the question, who is America's God now?

We aren't the first country to attempt nationally to rinse that God ride out of our hair.

There's really nothing new under the sun, and although we sometimes remember the problems of the past, we then go on to tell ourselves, ah, it's not going to happen here, or this time

it's different.

So, in doing that, we rarely remember any of the solutions, and in that way, we doom ourselves to repeat our failures over and over throughout history.

This is our country, our freedom, our children's future.

We should all have to give informed consent.

Do we want this new world order, the Great Reset, or any of its other names or prophets, CRT, BLM Inc., wokeism?

If not, we can stop the cycle, but we have to recognize the pattern first.

So let me take you back to the French Revolution in the 1790s.

The French Revolution was the result of many things, but religious unrest was undeniably one of them.

When the Cathedral of Notre Dame was stormed by angry revolutionaries, they decapitated 20 statues because they thought they were beheading French kings, but they were actually statues of kings of Judah.

It's kind of a clever irony.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame represented everything the revolutionaries hated.

Not only was it religiously significant, but the cathedral was the symbol of the monarchy.

Henry VI of England was crowned king of France there.

Religion and politics had corrupted each other in the pursuit of power, and people could hardly tell the two apart.

In the revolutionaries' rage against the establishment, they were eager to destroy all connections, not just to the church, but to God himself.

This would prove to be a real challenge, considering most French citizens were Catholic.

Catholicism was the state religion, and the church owned a lot of property.

Yet, people had grown tired of the church and its guiding hand in the nation.

The vision of a de-Christianized France captured the minds of the revolutionaries.

They massacred and jailed priests, made public worship illegal, and rushed to destroy every symbol of religion left standing.

The cathedral itself became the the site of the anti-religious festival, the Festival of Reason, which mocks Catholicism and suggested Parisians worship the principles of the Enlightenment instead.

This festival was the opening ceremony for the first state-sponsored atheistic religion, the cult of reason.

The new atheistic religion

held their launch party at the cathedral to send a very clear message that reason would replace traditional religion by any means necessary.

The bishop of Paris and the clergy were forced to attend the festival and publicly renounced their religion and promised to henceforth only recognize the public worship of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

What Constantine had done in the name of Christianity, the French did in the name of reason.

But the great irony in the fallout of the French Revolution was that the revolutionaries thought they were freeing themselves from religion, but in reality, they just swapped oppressors.

Absent the Catholic Church,

new and still quite demanding, secular religions stepped in to fill the gaps.

It was Maximilien Robespierre, a prominent leader of the French Revolution, who was wholly unimpressed with a cult of reason and proposed instead the cult of supreme being.

Where the cult of reason insisted on a world without God, the cult of supreme being accepted the existence of a supernatural deity, but professed that this deity didn't interfere with men's lives.

There was a God to stir the people, but only men could tell them what to do.

How convenient for Robespierre.

This new cult organized the ordinary people and

instilled in them proper morals and patriotism.

It was the transitory ideology between the worship of a God and the worship of a country, or worse, the worship of country's leadership.

Robespierre doubted the cult of reason could actually handle the work of organizing society, so he peppered this new cult with recognizable religious undertones in the hopes of inspiring the masses.

This new religion came with rituals, virtues, commandments, and holidays, including the festival of the supreme being, where Robespierre gallantly climbed up a papier-mâché mountain and sang revolutionary songs while the ordinary people looked on from below.

One of Robespierre's critics actually said, it is not enough for him to be in charge.

He now has to be God.

So why did the French leap from one religious order to the next?

Is it possible that in their zeal to get rid of anything resembling church, they took for granted the role religion plays in ordering society?

They removed the iron fist of the Catholic Church.

But it appears they had no plans of what to replace it with.

They miss the do unto others, forgive others, and serve part of the faith.

So the opportunistic ideologies of men stepped in as an alternative.

They replaced the idea of forgiveness with the guillotine.

Are we not doing the same thing today?

Are we not experiencing a digital beheading for those who betray the gods of our new society?

It's ironic that we look now at what's happening in Paris again.

There was a fire in the great cathedral of Notre Dame,

and it destroyed everything that had been rebuilt after the temple of reason.

A fire destroyed it this time,

and it's being rebuilt.

And it once again has become a new temple, not to God,

but a temple to social justice,

a temple to equity,

a temple to earth.

Have we not just done exactly the same thing that the revolutionaries did when they killed God?

Wanted to rid themselves for something that would be better?

A utopia where everyone would be free?

When churches become political

and the government uses that,

when political

government becomes the church and the church becomes the government,

we make bad mistakes.

And sometimes we throw the baby out with the bathwater and we swing, as they did in their fervor in France, too far in the opposite direction.

When we come back, why Nietzsche was right, but not for the reason everybody else says he was right.

The Glenn Back Program.

Today, part one of a five-part series

where we ask what God is it that we are worshiping now?

Because as

Michelle Obama said, Barack knows that we have to change our traditions, our language,

we have to change everything,

and we have.

But can we just stop and pause for a minute and ask, is this the direction we want to go?

And are we worshiping a new God?

Absent the discussion of whether or not God is real is the discussion of whether or not cultures need some sort of faith to bind them together morally.

And do the people find that themselves or is it inflicted upon them?

Regardless of a person's belief in God, if you ask them if there are things that they could do to make their life worse, everybody could rattle off a few things.

I mean,

murdering someone would come to mind.

That would make life much worse.

So would, you know, abandoning a child or abusing an elderly person.

These are the kinds of actions we almost universally agree would make life worse and we shouldn't do them.

But on the reverse, there have to be things that we can do to make life better.

And those things must be universal.

They must conform to, as our founders put it, some sort of natural law.

We already know these things.

Because those are the actions we point to when we say, and we all agree, that's a good person.

But where do we derive good from?

Is it something that we're born with?

I used to think these rights are self-evident, but I'm not sure anymore.

I think maybe we have to be taught what is good.

Why is murder wrong?

Why isn't it murder when I put my dog down?

Why is it everybody knows how hard that is, but they don't question your right to put your dog down, but now putting your mom down would be different.

Why are humans more valuable than a dog?

I think we still have some national morals that bind us together, that prioritize human life, but those are quickly dwindling, quickly.

Last month, we may have universally agreed that teaching kindergarteners about sex

and transsexuals transsexuals is wrong.

Shouldn't do that.

Not a good idea.

But this month, I don't know.

We used to agree that a man shouldn't be allowed to bunk with a woman in a women's prison

because sex will happen.

But California,

they can't figure out why the trans women

The people who were men, still are men, somehow or another, they've been introduced into the prison, but the women suspiciously, strangely, almost miraculously are finding themselves

pregnant

in an all-women's prison.

Colorado just passed a law saying that unborn babies have no rights and can be aborted at any time without restrictions.

We are so far away from safe, legal, and rare,

which should show us that the slippery slope is real.

But my question is, have we hit bottom yet?

We have taken moral agreements for granted.

We have not paid attention to our national values or tended them.

We expected them just to naturally sustain themselves.

That hasn't worked.

Can we count on knowing right and wrong innately?

Or do we need something that guides us?

Is right and wrong decided individually?

Or do we have to agree on it?

For example, if I only believe that murder is wrong, but my neighbor who wants to kill me does not,

then I think we're going to struggle living in a neighborhood together.

A nation requires at least a minimum level of moral order.

or else the system collapses.

Look what's happening in our cities.

The question of our time is actually how much order do we need?

Terrible things, yes, have been done in the name of God and religion, but let's not forget

the horrid things done under the umbrella of a godless system like Nazism and communism.

Communism alone is estimated to kill up to over 100 million people last century.

The only thing that beat communism at death was disease.

Yet I argue that our ideas of morality are not conceived of independently.

Morality is received from the wisdom of others throughout history.

In America, our morality has

Judeo-Christian framework, a framework many of us have just taken for granted.

This morality is baked into our system of government through the protection of natural rights, the freedom of religion, the value placed on human life, equal justice, and so on.

There's a God-shaped hole in all of us.

As Aristotle said, nature abhors a vacuum.

He meant this as a physical principle.

But it is aged into an idiom that basically means if there's a hole, it's going to be filled.

We see this in practice when somebody tries to quit smoking.

The smoker doesn't usually quit the habit without forming a new habit.

That's because we humans are more motivated by positive actions than negative ones.

When I want to smoke, I'll chew gum instead.

More powerful than when I want to smoke, I just am not going to do it.

That's not going to work.

In religious circles, there's a concept that inside every every person there is a God-shaped hole.

And if God doesn't fill that hole, something else will.

And it's usually not something real good.

In Matthew 43, Jesus warned of this in a cautionary tale.

He told his disciples, he said, an unclean spirit came out of a man and then traveled around looking for somewhere else to live.

It didn't find anywhere.

So it went back to the man and found that the hole he was living in before was still totally empty.

So he grabbed seven more unclean spirits and they all moved back in together.

And the man was worse off than he was before.

The man in the parable neglected to fill his hole and his life was much worse because of it.

It's

kind of like what happened during the French Revolution.

The French revolutionaries destroyed institutions without understanding the role of those institutions and the importance that they played in holding their nation together.

And in the end, they weren't better off.

They were far worse off.

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Yeah, the man who wrote the Antichrist, that's a surprise on Easter week.

The man who railed against Christianity.

He's remembered for his work The Madman, in which he wrote, God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

How can we console ourselves?

The murderers of all murderers.

Now most of us know that line.

Time magazine in the 1960s came out and they celebrated.

They made it just God is dead.

But the sentence that he followed the murderer of all murderers with is important.

Who will wipe this blood off of us?

What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

What festivals of atonement?

What sacred games shall we have to invent?

It is not the greatness of this deed.

It is the greatness of this deed that is too great for us.

Must we not become gods simply to appear worthy of this?

Nietzsche, in that sentence, asked the question that we should be wrestling with today.

Absent God,

How do we atone for our sins?

Well, we have to become gods ourselves.

In our society,

we're already answering that question,

but too many people are not realizing it.

There is a new God in town.

Who can take our guilt away?

The cult of wokeism?

We now have people going to the mob on Twitter to absolve their guilt when they sin against its religion.

Worse yet,

is there even forgiveness in this new religion?

The high priests of wokeism,

what's his name, Ex Kendi,

they will tell you if you are white, you will always be guilty.

Does this religion have forgiveness?

And who grants that forgiveness?

If you look at modern culture, you see we are trying in every way we can to absolve ourselves of guilt.

Do we give acknowledgments to every Native American tribe,

hoping that we feel better about us existing?

We apologize for assuming that someone who looks like a man is a man.

We've started to say things like, ah, as a cis white male,

I feel it's best for me to keep my mouth shut to make space for other, more marginalized voices.

We try to atone for our skin color, but you can't.

Our sex, but you can't.

Our families, our friends, our ancestors, even our old Facebook photos or posts.

We will confirm even the most outrageous ideologies if it means we can separate ourselves from guilt.

When Nietzsche said God is dead,

don't interpret that as God is dead and all is well.

No need to give that any more thought.

We're good.

What he meant was that belief in God was dead,

and it was our fault,

and that without God everything about humanity humanity must change.

Barack knows.

Throughout our history, we have organized ourselves around the belief in God.

Belief comforted us in death.

It gave us hope despite oppression.

It inspired us in battle.

Most importantly, the battles that were being fought with inside our own self.

God gave us the ideal model for our lives.

The model for the Judeo-Christian world was Moses and Jesus.

But most people,

even people that claim that that is their faith, don't really even understand who those people really were.

More and more Americans don't know anything about them.

Who is our role model?

As we've reasoned God out of our lives, we have incidentally diminished a crucial part of what holds us together as human beings, the part that looks upward

to align itself with something better, with holiness.

I see what Nietzsche wrote as a warning to us about the vacuum left when we remove God from a God-shaped hole.

Gang, I have news for you.

We've already removed him.

What are we replacing him with?

Do we still hold any truths to be self-evident?

America was never special because every single American believed in God, although many did.

What made us special was Americans agreed to participate in a culture that was formed by those who did believe in God and expected us to behave as if there was a God.

I've known many people who don't believe in God.

They're good people.

Most people hate it when the government encroaches on their personal liberty.

The government doesn't have a right.

Says who?

There is no quality justification.

for individual liberty without God.

In America, atheists are are equally protected by it because

God, somebody bigger than the government, provided those rights equally to all of us.

Before we lose our freedom or worse, our souls, America needs to consider again the role of God and moral order in our nation.

This week, Easter week, and the week of Passover,

we look at our new God and our old God

and ask

which one of these will empower us.

Tomorrow,

it's not about some mass conversion to a single

faith, but

we have to look at our old system and its hierarchy.

It's

an America always had God at the top.

Tomorrow, we look at science.

Yesterday.

Wish you could become a morning person?

You know the type of before the sun, early morning runs, first one to the office with donuts and a smile?

How do they do it?

Easy.

With a new Galaxy Watch 8, sleep tracking and personalized insights from Samsung Health help you improve so you can wake up to a whole new you.

One who, dare I say it, skips the snooze?

It's possible.

Train your sleep with Galaxy Watch 8.

Learn more at Samsung.com.

Requires compatible Samsung Galaxy phone, Samsung Health App, and Samsung account.

In part one of this series, we looked at what seems to be a missing moral code, a code that we

all had.

Our society no longer seems to function.

Crime rates, suicide rates among our children, and basic common decency seem to be in rapid decline, as is common sense.

Maybe it's because we're finding ourselves with less and less in common.

Is it all really about politics?

Is it really just we have to elect the right party and then they'll fix it?

Can a society once based on the individual survive the policies that protect the collective over the individual?

Can the individual survive the vicious mob mentality of that same collective?

Yes, our politics have changed.

Our ability to muster a mob literally within a minute through social media

has had game-changing effects on all of us.

But I think there's something more that is missing.

This week, I'm searching for America's God.

In the past, it wasn't that all Americans agreed or believed in God, and certainly we never were in lockstep on religion.

However, as we talked about yesterday, America's moral code, which helped the individual self-regulate, came from an understanding of a universal right and wrong, Judeo-Christian ethics.

So if we no longer have that moral code,

what's filling that space?

Who or what is our God?

Today I want to look at our relationship with science.

And before we begin, it's important to point out that we are looking at science, not the science.

We can and should embrace the scientific method, but there is no such thing as the science.

As it would have one believe that science and its conclusions are final, and they are almost always not final.

Science gives us just the best explanation currently available for those questions of the physical world.

And when those seeking honest answers, not political ones, or as in the Dark Ages, religious answers,

which technically religious answers were political as the church had enormous power in the state apparatus,

perhaps our problem,

perhaps all of our problems, stem from the lack of understanding and pursuit of those things that cannot be found under a microscope,

but rather only upon reflection

of the why

as well as the how and what.

We estimate that human understanding can account for about 5% of the universe.

5%.

And that's our estimation.

It's probably a lot less than that.

And within that 5% is something labeled dark matter, which I think is just a fancy way of saying, ah yeah, we don't have any clue on what it is.

There is clearly some sort of unknown energy that holds the universe together, but we don't know what it is.

And it's much more than everything else we can see.

Dark matter outweighs visible matter six to one,

which means most of what we, quote, know, we actually don't know.

Whether we label it energy or God, we agree that there is some unknown force holding our galaxy galaxy together, and we can't fully comprehend what, or who, or

how it even works,

but many of us want to desperately.

Most of the world still is a cosmic mystery to us, just like it was when the Greeks were writing their myths, or the Hebrews when they passed down the story of creation.

Each generation does its best to answer these questions.

Who am I?

I?

Where am I?

What should I be doing?

Why do I exist?

Are we alone?

I believe there's a duality to reality, that material things have spiritual significance.

In reality,

if a home was the site of a horrific event, murder, sexual assault, torture, it's considered a stigmatized property.

There are even, in some states, requirements to disclose the horrific events to a potential buyer.

In 2021, Realtor.com found that 80% of Americans would not live in a home where a murder took place.

Why?

There's no material explanation for that.

Just because somebody was murdered in a house doesn't mean the house is a murder house.

It's not affected once it's been cleaned and cleared.

But most people think that's just not the case.

We don't want to buy the murder house.

There's some unexplainable, non-material energy there, some people think.

There are so many mysteries in this world that can't be explained by only looking at the things we see.

We also have to consider the things that we do not see and how these two realities work together.

With science rapidly advancing discussions of religion, faith, philosophy, our

meaning

have failed to keep pace.

We can calculate light speed, but we can't figure out how to keep our families together.

Medicines extend our lives, but we don't really know how to fill the extra time.

Yet,

I believe if we allow them to work work together, science and faith are natural allies.

At their best, they're both fundamentally based in an honest curiosity about the world.

They both inspire endless questions and a general sense of awe about how masterfully this universe is put together.

When I was young,

The biggest question was,

are we alone?

Every campfire, maybe we stopped asking this because we don't sit around campfires enough anymore, or we live in cities where we can't see the stars and feel small.

But we would sit around a campfire and everyone would start to talk about the meaning of life.

And it would always end up with somebody looking up at the heavens and saying, What a waste of space if we are alone.

We used to talk about those things, and people were

a little apprehensive of what it would mean if we could prove alien life, because what would that do to our God?

What would it do to our religion?

In 2019, the Pentagon began to release information on what I believe is the biggest story in the history of mankind.

The physical proof of intelligent life previously unknown to us.

They verified it through three-point high-tech tracking systems that we now have.

We also verified that we have physical material and technology that experts say most likely come from outside of our solar system.

Yet you say that to people and it's not widely spread.

Why?

Is it because science has become about politics and has lost its partner of philosophy and religion, which encourage us to answer the biggest questions of who am I and what is the meaning of life.

In a culture that loves to talk about following the science, I say don't follow it,

chase it.

We have made a huge mistake pitting religion and science against each other, as if you had to choose just one of these lenses to view the whole world through.

I guess we thought the material truth discounted a spiritual truth or vice versa, but that is not the case.

The practical study of the material world is an amazing and extremely important endeavor.

It has extended our lifespans and taught us what our bodies are literally made up of.

But science doesn't comfort us in death.

Science is cold.

It doesn't fulfill our need to belong.

It doesn't provide us with the why.

Just the how.

Similarly, religion doesn't teach us how to transplant a lung or calculate velocity or even how to get from one place to another.

It doesn't do that.

It's not its job.

It's like science is a knife and religion is a spoon.

You don't eat steak with a spoon and you don't have soup with a knife.

If you did, you would assume the utensils are

irreparably broken.

That's where we are.

You wonder why such useless utensils even exist.

If America is facing an energy crisis, we should turn to science and the material world for solutions.

But if America is facing a crisis of of meaning, then we have to find our answers somewhere else.

It is truly a tragedy when this nation belittles the collective function of faith in our society, or when they refuse to examine physical realities.

It leaves us with only a fork for our soup or a spoon for our steaks.

The scientific method cannot produce proper values, nor can the Bible teach you how to split an atom.

Yet we benefit from both of those things.

There's archaeological evidence that we may have started believing in the supernatural as early as the Paleolithic period over two and a half million years ago when we buried our dead in what looks like what may have been preparation for something after death.

Of course, we don't know for sure, but from what we can study, it seems like humans have been talking about God or gods for a very, very long time.

There are evolutionary anthropologists who argue that human beings evolved for belief in God.

Listen to this.

Evolutionary biologist Bridget Alex wrote in an article in Discover magazine that there are three distinct human traits that make humans ideal candidates for belief in God.

We learn by imitation, we infer intentions, and we look for patterns.

So let me break those down.

Patterns.

We see patterns in the cycle of life, from the sun cycles to the seasons to traffic patterns.

And those times we say to ourselves, oh, I see where this is going.

We probably do know where it's going because we recognize the patterns of how it has gone before.

Infer intentions.

Humans can look at what they see and infer what they don't see.

We rely rely on juries to do this in murder trials, for example.

It's a miraculous trait, and we do it all the time.

It not only helps us navigate human relationship, it also

encourages us to look at the world and infer its intentions,

which leads us to consider God.

Imitation

If you've ever had the privilege of raising a child, you know babies learn to walk, talk, and eat just by watching other people and repeating what they do.

As we get older, we don't stop imitating.

It just gets more complex.

This is where the images of Moses and Jesus come in.

Imitation was an evolutionary beneficial, it was evolutionarily beneficial because it helped us advance.

We didn't have to remake the wheel or rediscover fire with every new human being.

We could just imitate whoever and whatever somebody else knew and pick it up where they left off and in the same vein if we saw that our ancestors moral code was working we just imitated them

but today we're rejecting inherited wisdom in exchange for change and reimagining

But to just blindly reject our ancestors ideas without thorough examination is not only foolish, it defies the natural human trait that got us this far.

Of course, course we don't just imitate each other.

We also imitate God or at least we try to.

This is where religion comes in and the important figures.

In Islam,

who is Muhammad?

He was a man with a sword.

In

Judeo-Western culture, who is Moses and who is Jesus?

Did they come with a sword?

Jesus,

at worst, worst, was just a great man.

And people throughout our

generations

have done their best to imitate the way he lived.

The story of his ministry is the perfect imitation.

Religious instinct can even be seen now in our brains.

There is an entire field dedicated to studying this neurotheology, where the scientific method is applied to study spiritually through our brain scans.

Scientists check out the brains of nuns, Sikhs, atheists, and it turns out our brains actually respond to religious rituals like prayer and meditation.

It seems either through design or evolution

we are

we are designed to respond to these things.

You could understand that from a secular world view.

It proposes that our brains have adapted to believing in God

over time.

Or as a religious person would make sense of that, if God is real, then he designed our brains in a way which we could connect with him.

But the neuroscientist Andrew Nürberg wrote, if you contemplate God long enough, something surprisingly happens in the brain.

Neural functioning begins to change.

Different circuits become activated, while others become deactivated.

New dendrites are formed, new synaptic connections are made, and the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience.

Perceptions alter, beliefs begin to change, and if God has meaning for you, then God becomes neurologically real.

Listening to him in long form, it doesn't seem like he is proposing that faith can be explained away as a trick of the mind.

Rather, he is observing that the human brain responds to faith as if it's part of its job.

Knowing that tells us something about who we are.

That's pretty amazing when you think about it from biology to our brains.

And believing in God has played a huge role in shaping the human race for a very long time, but now we're becoming less and less interested in God or religion.

Have we evolved to keep up with a lack of faith?

Or are we going to be left with biological and neurological processes with nowhere to channel them?

Thinking of humans as broader society over a long period of time, should we be worried about basically quitting God cold turkey?

The answer is yes.

But is it God or religion that we need, and how much religion do we need?

And what is religion, by the way?

We try to answer that next.

The Glenn Bach program.

My dad never liked to talk to me about God.

He would talk to me about

first things,

not God.

God created the earth.

Well, that means all kinds of different things to different people.

What came first?

What was first cause?

What caused it to be created?

What caused that to be created?

Language is really a very difficult thing to navigate, especially when you get into religion or God.

There's many connotations of the word religion, and most of them are negative now in America.

It's popular among the young, hip, well-connected to shake off the dusty title of religious in exchange for the less tainted title of spiritual.

But the word religious, as it was meant in the past, may be the key to understanding the chaos of our modern culture.

Although some may say that America suffers from a lack of religion, I say exactly the opposite.

America today is hyper-religious, and that is our downfall.

We all have very different experiences with the word religion, both positive and negative.

You have to think of religion as a tool.

It can be used for good, as it has, or it can be used for evil, as it also has.

Emile Durkheim, French sociologist who is cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, defined religion as, quote, a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and things forbidden.

Beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called church.

Now he says church, but he wasn't talking about Christianity.

Church is kind of a stand-in word for a religious community, which is a crucial part of the definition of religion itself, a community.

There are other definitions of religion, but for the sake of argument, let's use this one.

For it to be a religion, according to Durkheim, it has to be a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite.

So,

for it to be a religion, you have to have things that are sacred and things that are

forbidden and things that you do.

And both of these things should work in conjunction to bind a community together.

This will help you understand the entire world today.

Now, understand, this is how even though there is no deity in Buddhism, Buddhism is still considered a religion, just the same as Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.

Buddhists practice separate out of

the holy from the profane.

They create rituals based on that separation, and that unifies a community of followers.

Thus, we call it a religion.

So with that as the definition of religion, I find it hard to believe that most Americans are truly not religious.

I think we're very religious.

It's just that many have not clearly identified what their religion really is.

If you want to understand America today, instead of thinking of our culture as non-religious, think of our culture as hyper-religious, as if religious inclinations are seeping into part of our society.

In many ways,

Americans suffer from religious inclination

behaving like trains off the track.

Our

culture has

minimalized the traditional religion without accounting for our natural religious instinct.

And so that instinct has to go somewhere.

Where does it go?

Politics is now religion.

Race is a religion.

Gender is a religion.

Whether you vax or mask is a religion.

It's either sacred or profane.

Religion is everywhere.

If you consider every moment, every political belief, as a religious struggle, it will help you understand why we seem to be behaving so irrationally, why facts no longer seem to matter, because everything is our religion.

Jordan Peterson said that ideologies function as crippled religions.

They have the same kind of power, but not the level of symbolic complexity.

The ideas haven't been tested and refined across time, so they usually aren't as good, but they are still very powerful.

There are ideologies in the United States that have taken a religious place in our culture.

so if we are religious

who and what is our God

God could be money politics fame social justice or anything that consumes your focus whatever wakes you up in the morning and keeps you awake at night that's likely your God good or bad

in that way

It isn't that modern America is godless.

It's that we don't know, or at least haven't named, which God we serve.

If you don't know which God you serve or which religion you follow, it isn't because you aren't practicing in that ancient evolved human practice.

It means you aren't really in control of it, which makes you vulnerable to anyone's religion or anyone's God.

Emil Durkheim thought religion was eternal,

but the form it took could change over time, that human beings' religious instincts may be channeled in wholly new directions from one generation to the next.

The old gods would die and the new gods would take their place.

And this happens with every human being.

Reminder, this is God in air quotes, God with a lower G as the object of your worship.

You can make any person, place, thing, idea a God.

And Durkheim noted that God changes from generation to generation or could.

So if the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was America's God during our founding generation and for a very long time,

as we see the effects of immorality,

of a lack of common sense, of take it on faith and never argue about it, or you're punished,

who is America's God now?

In the Bible, there's a recurring false God in the Hebrews neighboring lands

called

Baal.

I think he may be America's God, at least in a conceptual way.

You may hear the word Baal.

It's actually pronounced Baal.

I'll explain in a minute.

But it is describing an ancient pagan deity.

And in many ways, you'd be right if that's what you think.

But the word Baal or Baal

is not only describing a single god, but a pattern of belief.

This is important.

There are multiple documented Baals.

It's best to think of...

Baal or Baal as a representation of idolatry with multiple subcategories falling underneath it.

Idolatry just means worshiping the wrong God,

or probably a better way to say it is

you're devoted to the wrong principles.

You're basing your life on a lie or your priorities are out of whack.

You're going the wrong way, missing the mark, aiming the wrong direction.

Got it?

Baal is a Hebrew word that basically means owner or master.

I don't know if I can say that.

No, it's not a real estate transaction, so I can use the word master here.

It implies exactly what master might mean.

In this case, it does mean making you into a slave.

It implies complete ownership in a very strong sense.

I love the oral tradition of Judaism.

I love Hebrew.

Because not only do the words have meanings, but the letters within the words also have meanings, and they create a word picture.

Also, very important words have the opposite meaning if you read them backwards.

This is it's as if G-O-O-D meant good and D-O-O-G meant evil.

But English is not God's language.

It's not that complex.

So since the Hebrew alphabet has no values, the letters that comprise the word Baal

are consonants, bet

and lamed

we call them B and L

so the opposite of Baal

B L

is L B

which the Hebrew word is essentially whole heart The word Baal, B L, means the exact opposite.

It's the opposite of all heart.

It's

valueless and nihilistic.

The word Baal is describing a belief system that says, I am the center of a valueless existence.

That is the picture the word is painting and the mental framework or belief system that is being baked into our culture.

I am the center of a valueless existence.

Does that not describe America?

Our modern pitfall is believing or or acting as if we believe that each of us is the god of the world without meaning, a world where there is no truth beyond our own personal experiences.

A world without real value outside where each of us personally assign that value.

Each of us is encouraged to be the god of a meaningless reality.

We are increasingly embracing a subjective understanding of truth and goodness and beauty.

We are at war with each other like the gods of ancient myths.

We determine the value of beliefs by force and coercion because we believe there is no objective truth, no real beauty, no goodness.

Our values are determined by a court of public opinion rather than given to us by God or even inherited from the wisdom of the past.

The court of public opinion is an unbridled and emotionally volatile democracy.

It doesn't matter what the facts of a case are.

Truth is not the point.

Truth is subjective, thus dead.

But my truth is worth defending to the death.

And that's why misgendering someone is described now as violence, because it's an attack on the only real meaning left in the world, which, according to our culture now, is what I decide is meaningful.

This is how the spirit of idolatry, the spirit of Baal, is manifesting today.

This new way we look at the world is spiritual.

It is not material.

It is religious or it is insanity.

When someone is driving alone in their car with a mask on,

that's not a decision based on logic.

That's based on faith and following your spiritual leaders.

When a man declares himself a woman and the culture clamors to affirm him, that's not science.

There is no material justification, it is based on faith of a new religion.

When it's widely accepted and repeated that racism is the connective tissue of modern American society without requiring the facts to back this claim up,

then what we are dealing with is a strongly held system of beliefs,

a religion.

When the abortion debate no longer centers on the question,

is the baby alive?

but instead degrades into a discussion of the relative value of that baby's life, in comparison to the burden of the mother, then we know our culture has given itself over to valueless, godless understanding of the world.

Or worse, we see ourselves as God.

The battle of our time

is spiritual.

It's not material.

It is a battle of belief.

When you start understanding that wokeism is a religion,

not a

political philosophy, a religion

that will punish all those

that don't believe,

you will understand we are being dragged back to the dark ages.

And as we devolve into a culture that accepts each of us as a kind of demigod of our own reality,

how could the entire foundation of our

nation not fracture at the seams?

Society is fracturing over the most central problem: who do we serve?

And tomorrow, I explore what

and who I believe America's God has become, the cult of wokeism.

Tomorrow.

This fall, explore California in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

From the stylish Camry to the adventure-ready RAV4 or the spacious Grand Highlander.

Every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complimentary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Visit your local Toyota dealer for a test drive.

Toyota, let's go places.

See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

So we've gone over the fact that America suffers from a lack of religion or is it

hyper-religious religiosity?

We have too much religion.

That's what we're suffering for.

Because politics is a religion.

Race is a religion.

Gender today is a religion.

Even COVID,

it's a religion.

And the mask, that's just a symbol of your membership to that faith and your piety.

Did you ask the wrong question?

Did you question what happened to the BLM Inc.

millions?

You didn't actually suggest that the Hunter Biden laptop was worth looking into, did you?

Did you not blindly accept the new normal?

If you don't mask, post the BLM black box, vote for the right politician or worse,

you didn't use the new correct woke religious terminology that seemingly was just introduced yesterday, you'll find yourself without a job or a future.

Did you grumble?

Did I hear you grumble when told you had to attend the company's latest race equity training meeting?

Did you speak out at the school board meeting against CRT or any of its spawn?

Have you not yet confessed your whiteness, your privilege, or the sins of your race?

This new religion offers no forgiveness.

We are living in the age of a new inquisition.

Mob trials.

They're mock trials really run by the mob.

They're no real hearings.

It's not an actual trial.

Just mobs shrieking, witch!

And if they don't burn your life at the stake, you will most certainly be banished to the new leper colony through the process of being deplatformed, defriended, defamilied.

Some of what is happening in our nation is way beyond our idea of religion.

However, if you look at the facts, what half the country has joined is a religion.

It has its own doctrine, its own practices, its own language and high priests.

Yet this religion

that's whipping our nation into a frenzy

Really fits our modern understanding of a cult.

If you do forensics on it, it is the definition of a cult.

If we fail to grasp this, our families and our friends who find themselves under the spell of this cult right now

will only run deeper into their arms.

Once you understand you're dealing with a cult,

It requires us to change our behavior or it will only help the cult leaders.

We have to understand what a cult is in order to find the way to free our loved ones from its deadly grip.

The difference between a cult and a religion is pretty unsettled.

The word cult is usually associated with a niche group of freaky people who follow some charismatic man into a bunker and end up sacrificing babies or whatever.

But when I first joined my church, I talked to Billy Graham about this.

He thought it was a cult for years.

It was a cult.

All really a cult is, is something that disagrees

with the accepted norm.

That's the way it used to be defined.

And yeah, then my church, I guess, would be that.

But that's not a freaky follow some guy into the woods and build an outpost.

That's...

Billy understood that, and

my faith is no longer on his list of cults.

Before he died, he removed it.

Now,

a cult could just be smaller, newer, less organized religion, but that's not what we're talking about here.

There was a write-up about me in Newsweek this week saying that wokeness is a cult, which is right, and I'm not the first person to say it.

Africa Brooks She's the first one that I saw that had this in an open letter titled, Why I'm Leaving the Cult of Wokeness.

In it, she said, What I'm truly afraid of is existing in a world that forces me to submit to an ideology without question.

Otherwise, I'm to be shamed or pressured to shame myself and cast out of the community.

A world that tells me that because I inhabit a black body, I will forever be oppressed and at the mercy of some omnipresent monster called whiteness.

That is, because of the color of my skin, I'm a victim of an inherently racist system by default.

And me rejecting the narrative of oppression means that I am in fact in denial.

How empowering.

The dread of the prospect of a world where context,

nuance, critical thinking, meritocracy, mathematics, science, rationality are just considered tools of white supremacy, and the rule is that you're not allowed to question or argue this senseless statement, especially if you're white.

A world that is conditioning you and I to believe that we will always be trapped in some weird hierarchy because of our race, our genitals, our physical abilities, our neurodiversity or sexuality and our politics.

And that if we don't agree on every single thing, it's a sign that we are interacting with an enemy, or at at very least, someone to be widely suspicious and judgmental of, instead of another complex human being worthy of being seen and heard.

This absolutist, authoritarian world is being fiercely crafted under the guise of social justice, and I want no part in this.

When someone steps out of line or dares to think differently, you will often have the pleasure of being told that you are in denial and you have some kind of internalized disorder, internalized racism, internalized anti-blackness, internalized misogyny, internalized sexism, internalized homophobia, internalized transphobia, internalized white supremacy.

That means nothing can be questioned.

It's becoming dangerous, and to address reality

is even more so

because you either agree and comply

or shut up.

It's exhausting, she writes, and honestly, I have better things to do with my time.

Not to mention, it's killing us.

Well, she is right.

It is killing us.

So, how do we get out?

Well, I'll get there, but I first want to make sure you understand what a cult is.

How do experts know what a cult is?

Because you're not going to be able to fight against this cult if you don't understand what it is.

We go there in 60 seconds.

America's cults

COVID-19 broke us.

People who were once reasonable began to call for the banishment of the unvaccinated from civil society.

Death was divided by vaccine status and treated accordingly.

Information was censored for our own good.

Anyone who questioned the leader or fell out of line was deemed as dangerous or literally accused of murder.

Stephen Assan developed the BITE model, B-I-T-E model, among other things, studying the brainwashing in Maoist China.

BITE stands for behavior, information, thought,

and emotional control.

It identifies the patterns used by cults to manipulate their members.

There are 50 attributes to watch out for.

Listen to some of these and compare them to your experience just during the COVID-19 pandemic, let alone everything else that is happening.

Here they are.

The 50 attributes

for a cult.

They dictate where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates or isolates.

Financial exploitation, manipulation, or dependence.

They restrict leisure, entertainment, vacation time.

I'm thinking of all the Fauci talks.

Permission required for major decisions.

Rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.

Discourage individualism.

Encourage groupthink.

Impose rigid rules and regulations.

Instill dependency and obedience.

Deliberately withhold information.

Distort information to make it more acceptable.

Systematically lie.

Minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information, including the Internet, TV, radio, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, and media.

Minimize, discourage access to critical information.

Minimalize access to former members.

Keep members busy so they don't have the time to think and investigate.

Control through cell phones with texting, calls, internet tracking.

Compartmentalize information into outsider versus insider doctrines.

A.

Ensure that information is not freely accessible.

B.

Control the information at different levels and missions within the group.

C.

Allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when.

Encourage spying on other members.

Impose a buddy system to monitor and control other members.

Report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership.

Ensure that individuals' behavior is monitored by group.

Extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including newsletters, magazines, journals, audiotapes, videotapes, YouTube, movies, and other media.

Require members to internalize the group's doctrine as the truth.

Adopting the group's map of reality as reality.

You're not questioning the science, are you?

Instill black and white thinking.

Decide between good versus evil.

Organize people into us versus them, the insiders versus the outsiders.

The use of loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge and stop critical thoughts and reduce complexities into platudinous buzzwords like follow the science.

Rejection of rational analysis critical thinking constructive criticism forbid critical questions about the leader the doctrine or the policy

labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate evil or not useful make the person feel that problems are always their own fault never the leaders never the group's fault promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness such as identity guilt you're not living up to your potential potential.

Your family is deficient.

Your past is suspect.

Your affiliations are unwise.

Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish.

Social guilt and historical guilt.

Do you think we have a cult on our hands yet?

You shun those who leave.

I'm thinking about all my friends who are now my friends, who thought they were my enemies, and then they left the cult.

Shunning of those who leave.

Fear of being rejected by friends and family.

Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins.

Let me say that one again.

Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins.

Phobia indoctrination.

Inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader's authority.

How many friends do you have that are that way?

No happiness or fulfillment possible outside of this group.

Terrible consequences if you leave, hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc.

So that's basically all of them except for rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping.

And

I don't think we have that going on.

What's scarier is that most of us have gone along with all of this stuff, even for just a little while.

As a nation, as a world, we're still going along with it in many ways.

And we haven't yet come to the truth that this is a cult.

Look at anti-racism.

Anti-racism requires blind obedience to leaders like Ibram X.

Kendi, who can arbitrarily assign or remove guilt based on his own perception.

The work of being an anti-racist never stops.

There's always more internalized racism to uncover and implicit bias to reveal.

Can you ever be forgiven?

Can you ever be cleansed?

No.

Because the moment you say you're not a racist, it's taken as a proclamation of guilt.

And then the cycle can just begin again.

It's cult initiation 101.

It's reprogramming.

And it's really hard to come back from it.

But it can be done.

So how do you

disempower a cult?

Well,

there is actually a couple of really great examples.

Let me tell you one.

Megan Phelps Roper.

She was only five years old when she stood on her first picket line in Kansas and she had a sign that read, Gays are worthy of death.

Now, she's five.

She has no idea what it said, nonetheless, what it meant, but her mother had brought her there and handed her that sign, so she waved it around happily.

She was making her family proud, and at five years old, that's better than candy.

Well, almost.

Megan is the granddaughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Do you remember them?

They are the

responsible party for horrific statements like, Jews killed the Lord Jesus.

Now the Jews are carrying water for the F-word slur against homosexuals.

That's what they do best, sin.

Or this super, super classic, America, land of the sodomite damned.

Well, if you are...

If you were aware of the news, you know, in the early 2000s, you remember the Westboro Baptist Church.

They have become infamous for their lack of humanity.

They used to protest military funerals, wish death upon others.

And all because they are so convinced that their crusade is holy that they feel empowered to be as rude and inhumane as they want.

They feel that hate directed at the right people

is holy work.

Megan lived for 27 years under the Westboro Baptist Church.

She brandished signs saying things like, thank God for dead soldiers, God hates you.

She was actually the face of the movement.

She was going to be the next leader of of the Westboro Baptist Church.

She believed.

And she battled it out on Twitter with the naysayers on behalf of the whole congregation.

But it was those Twitter battles that ended up being her saving grace.

Now wait a minute.

The Twitter battles?

I know how ugly Twitter battles can be.

That's going to get me out of a cult?

No, no.

Listen.

The usual crowd of angry people came out on Twitter, and they all yelled at her, criticized her, threw hate right back at her.

That's what she was expecting.

But not everyone did that.

There were a few who never lost their humanity.

Their message was, we're all human beings worthy of love and respect, including you, Megan.

They didn't condone her hate.

or tiptoe around her misunderstandings, but they saw beyond them.

She was a person who had trapped herself in the toxic ideas that she inherited.

But, most importantly, she was a person.

Two men went above and beyond.

One named David, who had a blog named

Julicious,

another

named Chad,

who became her husband.

What began on Twitter as a verbal rock throwing fight slowly evolved into real conversation, one that appealed to Megan's humanity.

All they did was ask her honest, not accusatory, honest questions.

It made Megan feel respected and heard.

She could let her guard down now.

She may have thought, I'm going to get these guys in.

But she let her guard down because these people were not there to fight.

They were there to understand.

And that changed everything.

The questions they asked inspired questions in herself.

Because there were holes in her thinking that she hadn't considered.

And given the right environment, she felt safe enough to really wrestle with those questions.

One day, David met Megan on the picket line to give her some food from a market in Jerusalem.

A Jewish man brought treats to the woman who who held signs that said, your rabbi is a whore.

He was a person to her now.

He was a nice person.

He was a smart person who could debate her on the Bible.

He was a Jew.

And there was no way for her to reconcile this.

Her whole reality unraveled from there.

Imagine being like her and realizing that you have inherited lies from the people that you thought loved you most.

Knowing the truth now meant leaving those people, maybe forever.

You think I might lose some friends.

She was losing her whole identity and her whole world.

She was the church's rising star.

And she knew after I leave the church, I'll just be another one of them,

another outsider.

Megan and her sister left Westboro Baptist Church in 2012.

Since leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan has said she sees the tactics of her former cult all over our public discourse.

The cult mentality spreads across social media like a virus, and although it's slower in real life, it's spreading there too.

So she gave us some advice.

One,

don't assume ill intent.

Megan really truly believed she was doing the work of God with the Westboro Baptist Church.

I can't imagine it, I can't imagine you do either, but that's all she knew.

And it would be really easy, and I know I did.

I assumed that the woman tweeting Thank God for AIDS was a horrible person who had horrible intentions.

But the two men that chose to believe otherwise changed Megan's life forever.

Two,

ask honest questions.

We can't assume we know why people believe what they do.

And even if we really do know,

by asking honest questions,

we get them

to ask questions of themselves.

Questions indicate sincere interest and respect, and in the best cases, might lead the other person to ask, what you think.

Three, another hard one, Stay calm.

Don't yell.

Don't freak out.

Don't lose your cool.

You don't have to hold back on the truth, but if anger is in the driver's seat, expect a wreck.

4.

Make your case.

Your opinion may not be as self-evident as it seems, or even as self-evident as it should be.

Why should men not be in women's prison?

I don't even have to think about that.

But if I'm talking to somebody who absolutely does not understand that, how do I make sense of that for them?

First, I have to ask them all kinds of questions.

How did you get there?

Tell me how you believe that, what you believe.

We have to make the complete case every single time.

No one had made the case to Megan that what she was doing was harmful.

When she did, by someone she perceived as a non-threat,

she changed her mind.

The Bible says, be as wise as serpents, but also as gentle as doves.

Have you noticed we haven't seen a lot of

big news from the most homophobic group I've ever seen?

the most radicalized group outside of the Klan?

We haven't seen much from the Westboro Baptist Church.

I'm wondering if that's because

two men

befriended somebody honestly, loved them, asked them honest questions,

and their leader left.

How many conversations do you have every day with people you disagree with if you understand that what they are a party to is a cult and they don't know it, nor will they believe it when you tell them that.

And everything that they are told means if you question them, you're the enemy, so I can't listen to you.

How many conversations have you had that if you understand they're in a cult and you understand how

to deprogram?

How many of your conversations will change?

We can't be naive, but we can't give up on people prematurely.

It's tempting to look at the person tweeting that the unvaccinated people just deserve death.

It's really tempting to look at that person and say, wow, are they evil and past hope?

But are they?

What have we done

if we just assume that they're past hope?

What if they aren't?

Coming up in a few minutes, James Lindsay joins me.

He has studied this through and through, and we can discuss it.

It's one thing to recognize the cult-like tendencies that pulse through American politics and work to stop it, but the real question is,

what made us vulnerable to cultic authoritarianism in the first place?

Why is it we keep misplacing our religious instincts?

Because all of us do it, even if in small ways, we are all vulnerable to tribal and yes, even cultic inclinations.

So is this whole religion thing just too dangerous to play around with?

Should we abandon it altogether?

Or is the abandonment of religion what got us into this mess in the first place?

It was 1798 when John Adams wrote a letter to the Massachusetts militia.

He said, quote, We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.

Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and it's wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams said our representative republic needed not only moral but religious people to survive.

Because if they're not going to be restrained by the government, then people must foster the discipline to restrain themselves.

And religion played that role in our society for a long, long time.

I'm not suggesting that we all convert to one faith or, God forbid, the government impose faith on us.

But we need moral agreements.

We need a plumb line to guide our nation.

And we need to come to it of our own free will.

Generation to generation, we are losing our spiritual well-being.

Our nation is undergoing a cultural revolution, a technological revolution, a sexual revolution.

What we need is a spiritual revolution, a spiritual restoration, a great awakening.

But what does that look like?

Well, after God delivered the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, they didn't go straight to the promised land, far from it.

For 40 years, they wandered in the desert while God prepared their hearts.

You see, they still had a slave mentality.

They had bad habits.

They needed time to work that out.

But the new generations forgot the God who had parted the sea, sent the plagues, and freed them from Pharaoh.

So they worshiped new gods.

gods of meaningless realities.

That would always lead to destruction for them.

And then they would beg God to take them back.

And he would.

And a generation later, the people would forget again, rinse, repeat.

Joshua was one of the Bible's mightiest warriors.

He spoke to the Hebrew people, and he said, if you love God, follow him.

If you love Baal, or if you love another God, follow him.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

That's really what early Americans said.

Other nations, other people could choose a God for themselves.

You saw how poorly that went.

But America said, as for this nation, we will humble ourselves before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

God

was with our founding generation.

We call it divine providence.

Because it just doesn't make sense without God.

How could we have done all of that on our own?

We couldn't have.

But we are the new generation, and we have forgotten the God of our ancestors.

We have forgot the prayers, the devotion, the miracles, and we're reaping those consequences.

But just because the God of our founders worshiped

believes in free will,

we have a choice to make.

Just like the Hebrews, we can decide, do we like our new gods

or would we like to serve a god we called on to found this nation?

So halfway through the Civil War, we were losing badly.

And Abraham Lincoln had a great awakening in himself.

And a proclamation was passed by the U.S.

Senate.

I want to read it to you and tell me it doesn't fit our situation today.

A proclamation by His Excellency Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, for a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer.

Whereas the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of Almighty God in all of the affairs of men and nations, has, by resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation.

And whereas it is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and their transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truths announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven,

but we have forgotten God.

We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, multiplied and enriched and strengthened us.

We have vainly imagined in our deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Intoxicated now with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Abraham Lincoln

I asked the Senate to pass that resolution just,

what, two months into COVID.

They wouldn't do it.

Today, words like humiliation and repentance are completely misunderstood.

For some, they're associated with shame, guilt, fire, brimstone, and for others, it's just a get-out-of-jail free card on your way back to doing whatever it is you want at the strip club.

But it is neither one of those things.

Hebrew, the word for repentance is teshuvah, which literally means to turn.

It's about changing what you do, just as much as it is about the condition of your heart.

When we repent, we turn around and start over in the other direction, the right direction.

And that's not easy.

I mean, it takes incredible faith to humble yourself

and turn and start walking in a different direction.

It's not easy, but it's possible.

At the beginning of the series, I started it by talking about what was happening in France at the Revolution.

But now let me take you to the other example where it went wrong, where people said, God is dead,

and filled that void with something else, and it was Nazi Germany.

No matter what you read or what you hear, the left has distorted the Nazis.

Hitler was not a Christian, but he knew he couldn't take out the Christian church head-on.

So what did he do?

They infiltrated from the inside, eroding its values and its relevance from within.

Over an afternoon lunch in his headquarters in 1942, Hitler said, and I quote,

I do not care in the slightest about the articles of faith.

The organized lie has to be broken in such a way the state becomes the master.

You can't rush things.

It has to rot away like a gangrest

limb.

We need to get to the point where only idiots stand behind the pulpits and only old women sit in front of it.

And the healthy youth are with us.

End quote.

Hitler expected Christianity to slowly suffocate and die under the duress of the state and in its own inaction and irrelevance.

But in the meantime, he would use that institution to spread his propaganda.

It took him about six months before they took the picture of Jesus off of the altars in Germany and replaced the Savior with the new Savior, Hitler.

Unfortunately, they spread it, mostly thanks to the movement called the German Christians.

Under the influence of the German Christians, the church went to work right away to rinse that Jew right out of Jesus' hair.

Spread the good news of Hitler.

German pastor Hermann Grunner preached, Hitler is the way of the Spirit and the will of God for the German people to enter the church of Christ.

What's truly shocking is that the German Christians were at work in the church before Hitler took power.

They were priming the congregations by slowly shifting the focus away from God in the Bible and creating a new Aryan God.

German Christians insisted that loyalty to the Nazi agenda was, at its core, Christian and a matter of faith.

Hard to imagine that everyone behind the pulpit or sitting in the pews agreed with this, but So many said nothing.

Miraculously, some did finally break break their silence.

It was Martin Niemoller.

He sat back, actually, as Hitler installed his dictatorship.

He didn't intervene until the German Christians started to Aryanize the Bible and purge the Bible of all Jewish elements, including the entire Old Testament.

See if this sounds familiar.

They were reimagining the Bible.

They were reimagining Jesus.

He became a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, anti-Semitic Aryan.

This is when Niemuller had enough.

He helped organize a movement called the Confessing Church, which challenged the German Christians and insisted that Nazism not make demands of the church itself.

Although Niemuller was primarily focused on Nazi intrusion into the church, Other prominent leaders of the movement called for the followers to challenge Nazism on every front.

One of those guys was a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer was the guy who diagnosed the German church and said they suffered from a theology of cheap grace.

They wanted redemption, but not really repentance.

They wanted to live in any way they wanted and wear the covering of God like a cheap rain poncho.

Then the Third Reich collapsed and the gods of the copybook headings returned.

And the church had no idea how to pick up the pieces.

Reconstruction quickly turned punitive towards Germany.

Life for the Germans under Hitler was hell.

But the hell continued after his failure.

The German people had been the victims of unprecedented psychological capture.

And for those who woke up, they were not only left with the collapse of their nation, but they were shouldering the most unbearable guilt.

The international church leaders had a decision to make.

Would they ostracize the Germans as their political counterparts had?

Should the people of God handle these obscene circumstances the same way or differently?

The church, like every German, needed a new start.

So the believers did the only thing they knew would work.

After the Third Reich collapsed, the gathering of Christians took place October 19th, 1941 in Stuttgart, Germany.

At the gathering, Bonhoeffer was praised for his unwavering faith.

He wasn't there.

He had just months before been executed in a concentration camp.

Pastor Niemoller preached that the Nazis alone were not to blame, but the church itself.

not because they were Christian, but because they had abandoned their Christianity.

Would the Nazis have been able to do what they had done if church members had truly been faithful Christians?

From this event sprang forth the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt on behalf of the church.

And here's what it said.

With great pain, we say,

By us, infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries.

We did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the national socialist regime of violence.

But we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.

Following the collapse of Hitler's regime, the faithful Germans professed that they had failed as a body of believers.

Their failure,

their failure

was extraordinary,

but not so much, because this happens time and time again.

We all fail on extreme levels more than we care to face.

But what was extraordinary was their ability to look at their failure in the face and choose to change.

They just did it too late.

The Christians of Germany were called to repent on their knees, and miraculously, some answered that call.

Here's why

I wanted to end this series with this.

Right now,

we have

bastardized our faiths.

Our faiths are silent.

Some have been infiltrated by wokeness.

As we told you yesterday, wokeness is a cult,

it is a religious movement to a false God.

A God that puts you at the center of the universe, but the universe is meaningless.

Your truth, not the truth, your truth, but that truth is worth nothing.

Are we going to go down in history as a group of people that failed to see

the answers, even though it was staring them in the face.

Are we really prepared to write our declaration of guilt in the future?

We should start preparing for it now.

People of God, do you want to have to apologize for watching evil rise in our nations all across the world and say nothing?

Religious leaders, can you continue to be silent as God and goodness is attacked from all angles?

Is your job really?

Is that really what you worship?

Or will you do the things that Niemohler did or the things that Bonhoeffer did?

America, have we hit rock bottom yet?

Please tell me we have.

I'm an alcoholic and my mother...

my mother committed suicide.

She was also an alcoholic, addicted to prescription drugs as well.

Her bottom was death.

And you can't stop anybody from, I mean, if you're suicidal and that's your bottom, and you're hooked on drugs or whatever, and that's your bottom, nobody can stop you.

But I hope our bottom is not that.

Are we there yet?

Because this isn't working, and everybody knows what we're doing right now is not working.

Conservatives are supposed to conserve the best ideas from the past.

Not all of it, just the best parts.

Have we done that?

If we continue on this past path of least resistance, of non-action,

I shudder to think what our letter of apology will sound like.

I wrote one just to have it handy.

I apologize for standing by why millions of unborn babies are slaughtered.

I said nothing when activists tried to re-segregate our nation.

I even helped sometimes.

Israel was slandered and attacked and I ignored it.

I didn't protest when my sh church was shut down, but the liquor store was allowed to open.

I was apathetic to the government trampling on my congregation's rights.

I couldn't really be bothered to comment as young people permanently mutilated themselves after being told that they were born in the wrong body.

I outwardly participated in every destructive social movement to protect myself.

I leaned on my own understanding.

I acted in my own self-interest.

I did what everybody else was doing.

I didn't have the faith to resist.

I lacked the spiritual spiritual countenance.

And because of my inaction, the body of God became crippled.

The people lived without love and died without hope.

I was not part of the Calvary when it finally came.

I apologize, and may God forgive me.

I don't want to ever, ever have to say those words and mean them.

Maybe you should write yours yours today.

And then

do what Abraham Lincoln said.

Become humble.

Know who the real power comes from.

Repent,

because that's what Easter is all about.

This is the most holy holiday of all holidays for Christians.

It's not Christmas.

Great, the baby was born, prophecy fulfilled, that's great.

But what he did thirty-three years later

in giving us the opportunity to begin again, but we as an individual, we as a country, cannot begin again unless we are humbled and have hit our bottom and say, I surrender.

My way has not been the right way.

I tell you now, the kingdom of God is at hand.

In the end, we all have the right, the privilege,

and the responsibility to choose our own path.

There's not going to be a single person left on the sidelines.

As Bonhoeffer said back then,

not to speak is to speak.

Not to choose is to choose.

And as for me and my house,

we will serve the Lord.

David Barton joins us now from Wall Builders.

He obviously didn't get the memo that it's Hawaiian Shirt Day here in the studio, but welcome, David.

I want to talk to you a little bit here on Good Friday and Easter weekend.

We've been, I don't know if you've heard the segments all week,

but we started looking at America's God.

We're not, it's not that we don't have enough religion.

We have more than enough religion.

It's just a false God.

It's wokeness.

And

we've got to change that.

The big problem here on a great awakening is our churches are asleep.

Do great awakenings happen when

are they led by the church or are they led by the people?

It's interesting.

They're led by individuals usually, and the church is usually the one who opposes the most.

Isn't that?

And so, like, you take a George Woodfield.

I mean, he is a minister, but he preached outside primarily first because nobody let him inside.

And so he needed to preach outside later because he had 10,000, 20,000 of the crowd, so he needed something.

But

at the first, man, they hated him and they opposed him.

And the same with Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening, the same with Lorenzo Dow and Charles Clay and all these things.

And these awakenings are always, the first one led to the American Revolution.

Yeah, it led to it, and it's really kind of interesting.

It gave, what it really did was it gave people backbone and they started standing for what was right.

And then the other side responded and came after them.

Right.

And so it's not like they started anything.

They just finally got some courage and had some convictions and stood stood for it.

I think most people, and that's the problem I think with most churches, is I do not want a church to tell me who to vote for.

I do want

information.

I do want my church to say, look,

here's what the scriptures say, which leads you to this value.

How do you apply that value across the board?

Is this person,

and you don't even have to get into the people's names, are these people following these values?

Yeah, you really want the church, as you're saying right there, to help you think through things, to really give you a thinking process.

Now, I'm going to say I don't have any problem at all if the church wants to tell me who to vote for.

And I do that from a constitutional standpoint because I don't want a church thinking it has less rights than a union.

No, no, no, no.

I'm saying as my personal view is, you know, I just, gosh, I just don't want everything to be political.

However,

I do want them to do, and I'm going to do it.

I want clarity.

I want clarity and boldness from...

Right.

They preached about abortion.

They preached about,

I mean, most of the stuff that is in our Constitution is directly from Scripture or directly from preachers that had made that concept popular because it is in the Bible.

Well, if you take the Declaration of Independence, historians have documented that every single right set forth in the Declaration of Independence had been preached from the American pulpit by 1763.

So 15 years before the Declaration, every right in the Declaration had already been covered in the pulpit.

And that's why John Adams says, our pulpits have thundered.

And he listed a bunch of preachers by name who were very specific on that.

But you take any right in the Declaration, it was already seen as a biblical right.

So is this why we feel like

our churches are so empty?

Oh, they are empty.

It's interesting.

And I'm speaking as a Christian.

We know lots of other faiths.

Great.

Speaking as a Christian,

or in the year 2000, 85% of Americans professed to be Christians.

That's their self-identification.

Last year, it was 65%.

So it's a 20% drop in 20 years.

And when you poll the people who left the church and say, why did you leave?

Two out of three said, because it has no relevancy.

I get nothing that I can live with on a daily basis.

And I totally agree with that.

I mean, when I look back at what the pastors did in those days, and I brought in a bunch of stuff outside the collection.

These are all sermons.

These are all sermons.

And these are all sermons.

And by the way, these are all sermons that were preached in times of what we would call revival, the first or the second great awakening.

And what you'll find is what they connected the dots on was relevancy.

And you can just almost not find a single subject that they didn't cover from the pulpit, even if it was super controversial.

And so, you know, if I just, I'll try to read through some of these.

So

here's a history sermon, which I think is cool.

This is a sermon about pilgrims and what the pilgrims contributed.

We haven't had that.

We need that since we got 1619.

Here's a sermon by Charles Chauncey, who's one of John Adams' favorite preachers, about the Boston Massacre.

So this is in the news, and this is preached just

a couple of weeks afterwards.

This is called a century sermon.

This is looking at the last history, what's happened in the country in the last century.

So we were big into history, so this is the last century.

This is a sermon on the moral view of railroads.

The moral view of railroads.

Yeah, because what he did is say, okay, what are the the biblical principles of transportation in the Bible?

Let's see what the Bible says about transportation.

Well, here's the new technology.

How does it fit with the principles?

So he goes into principles of transportation and then says,

for or against railroads.

Actually, he saw very positive things that could come from railroads.

Here's one on science, snow, and vapor, which is a Bible verse out of Job.

Here's one on the murderous bloodshed at Lexington.

This is a sermon that was preached three years after Lexington Concord.

So they're covering news stories.

Here's a sermon on the opening of the Great Bridge over the Connecticut River.

So here you've got architecture.

Here is a sermon on the infirmities and comforts of old age.

Now,

everybody's got to deal with growing old, but I haven't heard a sermon on that.

What do you do and where are you headed?

Here's a sermon on the impolicy and the injustice of the slave trade and the slavery of the Africans.

So we're right in the middle of cultural issues at that point in time.

Here's a sermon on the relation of the medical profession to to the ministry.

All the health care codes are the Bible, and there's a bunch of them.

I mean, that's why the Jews were always blamed when disease broke out.

They didn't get sick.

They didn't get sick.

That's right.

Because they followed the health codes of the Bible.

There's a great book that came out way back in 1961 by Dr.

S.I.

Macmillan.

And he said, you know, when God gave all these health codes in the Bible, he said at the time, the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Babylonians all said, look how backward these people are.

Look at their health codes.

And God at the time, in Exodus 15, 26, 26, after he gave the health codes, he said, if you'll do the things that I've told you here, I'll put on you none of the diseases that I put on the Egyptians.

In other words, you'll have a whole different health system than what everybody else has.

And

that's what they stuck with.

And so that's the kind of sermons we had was here's the Bible and health.

I haven't ever heard anything on that in my lifetime.

Here's a sermon, Dr.

Jonathan Mayhew.

He's one of John Adams' favorite preachers.

And it's the great fire in Boston.

Anything that was in the news, they covered from the pulpit.

Always gave a perspective on it.

Here's a sermon on the execution of Henry Blackburn for the murder of George Wilkinson.

So a guy being executed.

Let's see

whether that's right, wrong, or indifferent.

Here's a sermon on the death of General Lafayette.

So if a famous person died, we looked at that.

Here is a sermon.

Let's see.

Here is a sermon on the Christian patriot.

So responsibilities of government.

And here's a sermon on the Christian use of property.

Here's a sermon on the divine right of the American government.

Here's one on the transatlantic telegraph.

So a sermon on the lane of the transatlantic telegraph.

Here's a sermon on the civil war as seen from the pulpit.

Here's one on immigration and the modern immigrant.

Can you imagine

going to church and hearing a sermon on

AI?

Yeah.

You know, on the ethical use of AI or quantum computing or the internet that just didn't end in porn.

You know what I mean?

Like the railroad and things.

And the bridge and all of that.

And the bridge, all of these things.

We are not.

And I think this is my biggest problem with faith right now, going to churches, is

they're not.

We have, in my lifetime, I have never seen a time where there are more unanswered, even unquestioned, moral

quandaries.

We are on the precipice of we don't even know how to define life, and we're about to reinvent life.

You know, we don't know the basic defense or stance on really huge questions.

I've never seen this before in my life.

That's the way churches will become relevant again.

It's where we are at this point in the country because there's 384,000 churches and senior pastors in America.

And people like George Barnett polling 500 a day, what we find is 72% do not even agree with the scriptures.

They don't even think the scriptures are valid or have any influence.

How many?

72%.

So what that leaves you is 107,000 pastors that say we believe the scriptures and we believe that it's relevant.

So with 107,000 pastors, that's 28%.

Polling done with 500 a day to say, okay, do you think the Bible addresses all issues that happen around you?

And depending, and we gave 14 issues, and depending on what the issue was,

between 91 and 97% of those pastors said, yes, the Bible does address those issues.

And then we said, okay, have you addressed that issue from the pulpit, or do you have any plans to address that issue?

And 90% said, absolutely not.

Those are political things.

We don't cover that from the pulpit.

But wait a minute.

You just told me that was in the scriptures and you're not going to say what the scriptures say.

So what we find is only 2.8% of pastors today do anything related to relevancy, applying the scriptures to what's going on in the culture.

These guys, by and large, have talked themselves into a position of silence, and the result is that you see people now with their faith is completely compartmentalized.

Here's my faith on Sunday, but here's not my faith on Wednesday or Tuesday or Thursday afternoon or anything else.

And so, faith is no longer relevant.

You don't get this kind of relevancy anymore that we had.

So, David, give me just two minutes on the impact of

just people who

probably have never voted before or one church getting together and saying, I want the school board, we're going to stand up.

Can you give...

I can give you a lot more than one, but I'll just take you real quickly to Yonkins Race in Virginia.

312 churches got together last January and said, look, we need to have a difference.

What Northam did, he just passed a bill that says, if you try to abort a child and you don't do it and it lives, it's okay to kill it after it's born.

And they gave a standing ovation for that measure.

And that's just a wicked measure.

I mean, that's just bad.

And so 312 churches, most of them real churches, got together and said,

this is not good.

We got an election coming in November.

And so back in January, they started looking and they said, okay, let's find people who sit in our pews, in our churches, and again, these weren't large churches.

And let's find people who have never voted for, who haven't even registered to vote.

And let's get them registered and have them vote for the first time.

And they did, and they had 77,000 people out of those 312 churches who had never before voted who voted for Yonkin.

Yonkin won by 66,000 votes.

Wow.

So right there, out of tens of thousands of churches in Virginia, 312 little churches did that.

They didn't stop there.

They said, by the way, they said first In 1 Timothy, we're told that an athlete is not crowned unless he runs according to the rules.

So what are the rules?

And they looked at elections, and 1,300 people from the churches got trained as election judges and election officials.

They identified 5.2% of the votes cast as fraudulent.

Now, you take out 5.2% of fraudulent votes, and there's the election again.

I mean, there's just so many things they did.

So, I guess the difference is I don't ever want to be a church where, and I think some churches have become this on the left, where the God is the government.

Right.

And I guess that's why when I say I don't want to hear,

you know, I don't want to hear who to vote for or, you know, politics.

I guess I just don't want my church to preach that God

is the government, that we have to have the government to do things.

The church should be a restraint on government and

should be a way to get the people in who understand Bill of Rights restrains the government.

More freedom for people, whether they believe or not.

David Barton, the founder of Wall Builders,

and you can follow him at wallbuilders.com or Twitter, David Barton.

WB.

David, as always, thank you.

This is really a time of choosing.

That's what Ronald Reagan said in the 1960s.

It's a time for choosing.

And it is.

It's a time to decide who you are, what you believe, and what you will stand up for, not just against, but for is more important.

Back in,

well, back in the olden days when we all gathered on the lawn or the the mall in Washington, D.C.

at the steps of Abraham Lincoln, um,

we talked to you about the Black Robe Regiment.

And there is something going on now with a lot of religious people.

They are starting to wake up.

I want you to know the nationalblackrobe regiment.com is up and uh really has a whole bunch of information on it.

You can also follow it on Facebook at National Black Robe Regimen on Facebook.

They have things like COVID-19

versus religious liberty and liberty.

They also have

legal resources there as well, as well as a lot of those sermons, if not all of those and more, up on the website that David was just talking about.

Know your rights as a church.

The Liberty Council, pastor do's and don'ts.

And it is a way for pastors, and you know it's probably gonna be a lot of pastors that like in the old days were kicked out of their churches fine do it

do it

because it is important now for people to stand up for the things they truly believe if you believe that truths are self-evident the ones that we have always had in this country and built this country on then it's time to stand up humbly, peacefully, but with the strength of truth

coursing through your veins.

Back in a minute, the rest of the news of the day.

This is the Glenn Back program.

Today, we're going on a journey.

They say that time itself does not exist as we know it

as we understand it.

It only really exists as something called space-time.

It's really only a point on a giant map.

Something that we can use to find out where we are, where we've been, or where we're going.

So let's unfold space-time and trace our way back.

First, maybe just a couple of years.

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the United States who's conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda.

On my orders, the United States military has begun striking.

People who knocked these buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

Now back even further.

Princess Diana died right now.

I did not have this vast right-wing conspiracy.

He is O.J.

Simpson.

He is armed with a gun.

Mr.

Gorbachev chairs down.

Elvis Presley died today.

Well, I'm not a crook.

I burned everything I've got.

Because of what has happened in Munich during the past 40 years, eight or nine terrified living human beings are being held prisoners.

A second shot, the third total shot, hit the president's head.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!

Dr.

Martin Luther King has been shot to death in Memphis a short time ago.

An American aeroplane dropped one dime on Hiroshima.

Hiroshima.

Allied naval forces,

supported by strong air forces,

began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

December 7th,

1941.

A date which will live in infamy.

Back farther still, even before Marconi, when the air was silent.

Back past the signing of the Declaration of Independence, past the age of enlightenment, before Martin Luther hung his protest on the church doors, before Columbus rediscovered the fact that the world was round.

We go past Newton, Galileo, the Dark Ages, the Crusades.

Back to a time before books, when most of the world couldn't read or write, and history was oral.

We leave this world now where we can hear and see a lone protester standing in front of a tank in a country on the other side of the planet and we can see it live.

To a world seemingly simple yet brutal beyond our understanding where news was spread from mouth to mouth.

We stop here

at approximately 29 of the Common Era.

We stop at a small walled city in the Middle East.

It's around 10 o'clock at night, just a couple of days before Passover.

The meals are being prepared, the night's meal had already been eaten, and most in the city are asleep.

One man, however,

is not.

It's strange.

He's younger than I am.

He's about 30.

He's awake and alone in a garden.

His friends who have been with him for several years are just a few yards away.

They slumber underneath the star-filled sky.

They still don't know that even though they sleep, the world is about to wake.

Eleven of twelve men sleep beside a hill.

One man, awake.

He couldn't sleep, for

he knew.

He was in a garden in prayer, praying so hard about what he knew was about to come, praying so hard that blood actually dripped from his pores in the place of sweat.

Back at the hill, when he returned, he begged his friends to wake and pray with him.

They didn't know how serious his request really was.

They had no idea what was just to come.

He pleaded with his friends, why will you not rise and pray with me?

He asked this again before returning to the garden alone.

He knelt there on rocky soil, his hands clasped, his head bowed.

Twilight dew draped his neck, the horizon still and black.

He prayed.

He prayed even harder, for the sky would eventually turn purple, then light blue, and he knew what awaited him.

Back to the hill once more, his friends asleep.

He begged his friends, rise, rise and pray with me.

I need you now more than ever.

They said they would, but shortly after he left, they fell asleep again.

The dawn was even closer, and he knew his time was running out.

Now over the hill they marched like flowing lava burning in the night's solace.

The 11 are surely awake now.

They have sworn their faith to him, but he knows, he knew this wasn't true.

They'll weaken and he'll be forsaken.

Forsaken by the same men who just swore their undying devotion.

The torchlights grow brighter, the hourglass running low.

The clanging of the metal swords and spears, the sound and the vibration of the march deep down from their feet to their spine, creating a shallow vibration, leaving them quivering.

The soldiers approach.

The one is grabbed and kissed.

Betrayed with a kiss.

A kiss wearing the mask of loyalty.

One of the men leaps forward, draws his sword, cutting the ear off one of the soldiers.

He raises his hand.

No,

peace.

Take me now in peace.

For this is my purpose.

This is my being.

This is the reason I came.

Now, one of them, Peter, strays.

While his friend is being persecuted for crimes he didn't commit, he stands by a fire.

denying any relationship he has as he tries to blend in with the common people.

A woman approaches.

Didn't I see you with him?

Peter says, surely I don't know him, but you're from Galilee.

For the third time, Peter says, I do not know this man.

Now Jesus is pulled back and forth between the two who will determine his fate.

They can't see any crime, but they still question, scourge, and mock him.

Aren't you the king?

Silence.

Then here is your crown, says one as they give him a crown of thorns and press it into his head.

He stands before the judge, who could condemn him for no crime, but it is Passover.

He says to the crowd, you, you can choose.

One I will release.

Him as the king of the Jews, or

Jesus, standing silent, his eyes to the ground, is condemned to death.

Jesus now carries his cross through the stone-clad streets to the place known as the skull, the place where he will soon die.

His back torn, his head bleeding beneath his thorny crown, the women cry out loud as he passes.

He pauses for a moment and comforts them.

Do not weep for me.

Rather, weep for yourselves.

His mother looks on as huge nails are driven through his hands and his feet.

They raise the cross and slam it into the ground.

It is at this point that all four writers of the gospel struggled with a description of the crucifixion, as I have.

They described with the only words that I could use,

And

they crucified him.

He now hung on the cross as the soldiers bid lots on his clothing below.

Next to him, two criminals hang, but they are simply tied to the cross.

One of them says, You're the son of God.

Save us now.

Save all of us.

The man in the middle does nothing,

for he had a purpose.

The afternoon passes.

His skin stretched.

He wept.

He begged for water, and they gave him a sponge on a reed filled with vinegar.

In a moment, where he showed us that he was truly human, he cried out and said,

My father.

My father, why have you forsaken me?

The sky began to grow dark.

It was approaching three o'clock on a Friday afternoon

when Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, spoke once more

and only once.

His last words,

it

is finished.

So today,

People all over the world

do as I do now.

I thank that lone carpenter for dying.

Dying on that Friday afternoon.

So I

may live.