Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And
I'm still Wo.
On today's Stone Choir, we are going to be discussing how you
can safely ingest new novel information that flies in the face of
what you knew yesterday.
Another way of putting it more simply is what do you do
with these conspiracy theories?
Last week we talked about one of the biggest conspiracy theories of
the twentieth century.
If you don't believe what we said, then that was a completely
insane episode out of left wing and also has to be very
evil because of the nature of it.
If it's not a conspiracy theory, if it's actually true, then it
reshapes how you view things.
And one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode today
is that we've done a number of episodes, maybe not quite that
earth-shattering in the past.
You know, when we talked about Michael Martin Luther King Jr.
being a heretic, he was never a Christian a day in his
life. And by the way, the civil rights movement was invented by
the Soviets to undermine America.
Those are facts.
That's like it's it's both a conspiracy theory and a fact.
You have to deal with how do you work through that, especially
when everything that everyone knows says the opposite of it.
So we wanted to discuss today
What is important for us as individuals as we're taking in new
information? Because every day in the world there's a new fad diet,
there's some new scientific discovery that upends everything we knew.
There's some political or historical revelation.
And they all have the effect of
unmooring us from reality.
Where we basically feel like I can't trust anything.
And ironically, that's sort of one of the things that's undergirding a
lot of the episodes of Stone Choir.
We're going back and looking at things and saying, well, they were
saying this for, you know, the last hundred years or two hundred
years, but if you look before that, they were saying the opposite.
So one of them is a lie.
So although we do a lot of episodes that are kind of
destabilizing in terms of what I thought I knew turned out not
to be true.
We don't want people to feel completely unmoored from reality.
It's we try to interleave the the really serious stuff with episodes
that don't hammer you as hard because frankly the very fact that
the news cycle is dominated by this sort of disruption psychologically is
itself psychological warfare.
It's effectively a low grade form of torture which will Which we'll
be getting to towards the end of this episode.
Uh this episode's not gonna be real long.
Uh we had originally planned on doing bot and offer this week,
but as Corey and I were getting into the research for that,
we realized that it's gonna take more research because there's just there's
both so much wrong with the things that he said, and there's
a degree of subtlety to the way he hit a lot of
it that we want to make sure we get that one right.
Simultaneously, we are both tuning in to the Missouri Synods Triennial Convention
that began on Sunday, so we're a little bit disrupted.
So this episode is not going to be a real long one.
We're not going to do another three-hour marathon.
We just want to talk about what do you do when someone
comes along and says something like last week's episode?
Because some people break, some people ingest this new information and it
kind of shatters them.
They, you know, it's it's called red pilling in a lot of
cases, you know what that means.
Some people turn that into their identity, and suddenly whatever is red
pilled is the new thing and the only thing, and they will
then only believe things that are both consonant with this new red-pilled
information and they don't want to know anything else.
And that's also insane.
Like, as Christians and as honest men, our fundamental pursuit should be
what is true?
What is truth?
And that the challenge of all these things that are told as
lies publicly and things that are confusing, where they mix lies with
truth, is that if you are able to filter through that and
realize some people are lying, some people are mistaken, and some people
are telling the truth.
And there's an intermixture of those, and there are reasons for each
of those.
If you're not doing a really good job as an individual of
just filtering your own inputs, you're going to absorb information that's false,
you're going to believe things that are untrue.
Or you're going to have some mixture of truth and untruth.
It may drive you crazy.
As we said, like there are guys who believe the things that
we said last week which are true, but then that becomes all
that they can think about.
And that's part of the reason we saved it.
Like we're we're well over a year into doing Stone Choir episodes.
We always knew that we wanted to tackle the Holocaust, but we
didn't jump into it right away because first of all, everyone to
think that this was like the Holocaust podcast, which is not.
This is fundamentally a podcast about religion and Christianity in truth, but
as Christians, that's every day.
That's twenty four hours a day.
It's not just on Saturday.
And so there's other other things that we all deal with in
our lives that also need to be consonant with our Christian faith.
And rejecting lies and embracing truth and balancing our focus
in our daily lives is a key part of that because you
can spend your time listening to podcasts and thinking about stuff and
studying, but you also have duties.
God gives you other things to do.
Now, maybe you're blessed that your duty, your vocation in life is
to focus on that stuff.
For most people, that's not the case.
You have a job, maybe it's tedious, maybe it's really important, maybe
it's both, but you have to provide for your family and you
have to do other things.
You can't get bogged down in tedious details that don't seem immediate
or relevant.
So we have the luxury on a podcast of being able to
talk tackle some of those subjects like one of the early episodes
we did was on the neglected matters in scripture.
We'll do a kind of an ongoing series of those things where
we specifically made the point in that episode we're not We're not
saying this is the meat of the Christian life.
We are saying these are a few doctrines that are in scripture
and nobody really talks about them.
Or when they do talk about them, it's just kind of way
off in the distance.
And all scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for
rebuke and reproof and correction of error.
And when we start throwing things away or deleting things or minimizing
them, we get into trouble.
And so when we talk about scripture explicitly, we want to go
back and look at some of the things that modern Christians don't
really take seriously.
And as we're looking elsewhere in life, we have these things like
today we're going to be s discussing in some detail just to
give you a preview Uh the moon landing, uh the you know,
space race in general.
Uh we're gonna be talking a bit about flat Earth.
We'll be talking briefly maybe about nukes, whether or not they're true.
Basically kind of going down the list of the things that Owen
Benjamin has been inserting into the the Zeitgeist because those are pernicious
lies that are really driving people insane.
So they get lumped in with things like last week's episode.
And that's one of the reasons we want to tackle this next
was that
it's important as we are listening to things not to too quickly
jump onto things that are brand new but to weigh them to
to evaluate them based on reason and on what we can understand.
And so as we go through some of the details of some
of these things that are lies that are being produced today, we're
going to contrast them with some of the other things that are
true that we've talked about in the past to illustrate how superficially,
it may seem like the moon landing and what happened in the
forties in Germany are on the same level, but when you look
at the details of the fact, they go in a completely opposite
direction in terms of veracity and verifiability.
So as we work through this, we're not g this isn't gonna
be a debunking episode, it's just gonna give some examples of how
as we talk about these subjects, or as you hear about them,
it's okay just to set it aside and not pay attention.
If you don't want to hear it, that's completely fine.
Somebody starts raving about whether it's the Holocaust or the Moonlanding or
whatever, it's fine to tune out.
What's not okay is to say those people are all crazy, I
don't believe any of it.
Because if you want to engage in the veracity of the subject,
you have to actually engage in the facts.
You can't just say, They're nuts, I don't believe them, because one
of the things that all these things collectively do is convince us
that anyone who talks about any of these things are crazy.
That's why a lot of these things end up in the same
bucket. You have people believing completely insane things.
Like the the gimmick from a few years ago, the birds aren't
real. There's some guys like it was it was a it was
an open prank that some people then sort of turned into either
just a personality or they wanted to believe it because hey, it's
one more revisionist part of history.
And so we want to try to equip you today to just
filter out with a few simple heuristics.
Am I being deceived here or am I learning something new and
what do I do with it once I learn
it? So
one of the conspiracy theories that really crops up constantly in the
US context and abroad as well, there are actually some countries where
an even higher percentage of the population would say they don't believe
in this, and that is whether or not the moon landings actually
took place.
There are a lot of reasons that are given, none of them
are good, but there are a lot of reasons that are given
by people why they do not believe that the moon landings took
place. Now part of this, of course, is because of all the
other things that we are subjected to in our daily lives, we're
bombarded with lies.
We have lies about the COVID vaccines, vaccines, and quotation marks here.
We have lies about what happened with the pandemic, we have lies
about so very many things.
So people will go back and say Well when did they start
lying to me?
And so if they started lying to me about the world wars,
well why would I believe them about the moon landing?
But as Wo said in the introduction, the moon landing is a
very different thing.
Not only because it is just a very different thing from a
war or something like that, yes, it takes place in the Cold
War context, but it's not itself a war.
It is demonstrable that man landed on the moon.
Unlike some of the historical claims, where as soon as you subject
them to any sort of serious analysis or critique, any sort of
criticism, they fall apart.
If you look at the claims around World War II and you
actually subject them to scientific analysis, they immediately collapse.
The opposite is actually true with the moon landing.
If you subject
the moon landing, and we have a wealth of information, we'll get
into there are those who say they destroyed records, they didn't destroy
the records, they recycled the tapes and for those who don't understand
technology, that may not make sense.
We'll get into that though and explain why that is what you
do. But if you actually subject the moon landing claims using the
evidence on hand and there is still evidence today that you can
use, it's very obvious it did take place.
We did land on the moon.
And one of the best examples, we won't bury the lead, we'll
just start with one of the best ones, we left retroreflectors on
the moon.
Now, in case you don't know what a retroreflector is, a retroreflector
is essentially a very specialized mirror.
If you go into your bathroom and shine a flashlight in the
mirror, you know that it will reflect basically at an angle opposite
the angle at which you shine the light into the mirror, which
is to say it will bounce off at a different angle unless
you are
directly in line with the mirror, in which case you'll blind yourself,
so maybe don't do that.
But the reason for that there's some physics we don't really need
to get into, but a regular mirror is basically just the one
pane. It reflects at an angle
relative to the angle at which the light is hitting the surface.
A retro reflector is designed not to do that for a very
specific reason.
A retro reflector is designed so that over a wide angle it
will reflect light received
back at the sender.
Now this is useful for many reasons.
You actually probably own a retroreflector somewhere in your house.
If you own a bicycle, you probably have a retroreflector.
Those are used as the reflectors on bikes, and the reason for
that is very obvious.
If you have someone who is driving up behind you, you want
the light from the headlights on that vehicle to reflect back at
that vehicle so you're visible.
If you put a standard mirror, they would just reflect off at
some wild angle, unless the light source happened to be directly in
line with the mirror.
Well, we left retroreflectors on the moon.
The reason we did that wasn't to prove we went to the
moon, because those who were actually designing that mission and the hardware
and placing them weren't thinking about crazy people coming along later and
saying this never took place.
Rather they wanted to be able to bounce a laser off of
it and receive it back, obviously.
Same device that sent the laser out, so that you can tell
how far the moon is from the Earth.
Because now we can get extremely accurate readings of the distance from
the Earth to the Moon.
However, this is a retro reflector.
It's just sitting on the lunar surface with maybe a thousand dollars
worth of hardware you could go in your backyard and prove that
man went to the moon.
Not only that, you can prove, if you know a little bit
of math, exactly how far it is from where you are standing
on the Earth to where that retroreflector is sitting on the moon.
That's absolute concrete proof that man went to the moon.
God didn't place a retroreflector on the moon and wait for us
to discover it.
We built that on Earth and took it to the moon and
placed it there.
One
of the things when people attack the idea that we went to
the moon, which is almost a separate question from the fact, and
that's one of the goals, is to say they don't simply want
to deny that we did.
They want to deny that it's even conceivably possible the humans could,
which is immediately where the conversation goes.
It's not simply we didn't do it, it's impossible for us to
have done that, which is is another part of this conversation.
But it's important to acknowledge that there are two things going on
simultaneously, and that's frequently the case with these things.
the way that people attack these subjects is the opposite of the
way that we attacked the subject last week.
So we're gonna I'm gonna give a couple examples by contrast.
As I mentioned, Owen Benjamin is one of the chief I'll say
architects, but like he's he's one of the chief ringleaders of the
current idea that it didn't happen.
He's certainly not the first.
He's a very smart guy.
He's very intelligent.
He probably has a genius level IQ.
he's also a comedian.
He is he spent his life getting punchlines and when you deliver
a punchline and you get people to laugh, there's a short circuiting
effect that occurs where you present your joke, you present the body
of what it is you're doing, and then you land the punch,
and the immediate response is for people to reel and laugh and
like, oh, and then they go off and it goes on.
You know, the joke is over, the whole story's over.
The laughter is the acknowledgement that it's done and there's no rational
processing of what came before it.
And that's a crucial part of the arguments that are used by
these people saying that it didn't happen.
One of the chief examples that they will give is to say
when Apollo eleven was on the moon, they had a phone call
with Richard Nixon.
And the comedians will say, I can't even make a phone call
work well from my car on the highway.
And so if in 2023 you can't get a cell phone with
all this modern technology to connect a call.
How could Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty nine with a tin can
have a phone call with astronauts a quarter million miles away?
Well
that's a punchline.
That's a cheap shot.
It's the easiest, stupidest question to ask.
And if someone has no knowledge of anything, like, oh yeah, well,
that makes sense.
I I use a cell phone every day and it I hate
it. It's terrible.
It doesn't work.
You know, it's it's comedian level
rationality. I don't even know what to call it.
It's just it's garbage.
You can go and listen to the so-called phone call that they
had. It was clearly scripted.
It was timed, it
was
it was an even more laggy version of what Corey and I
do when we're doing this podcast.
This isn't really a conversation.
We're not in the same place.
We take turns talking 'cause there's enough lag that we don't want
to interrupt each other.
In the cases where we do where we do try to interact
live, usually there's some stumbling over each other.
They were careful to avoid that.
So if you actually go listen, I we'll we'll put in the
show notes the actual conversation that the astronauts and President Nixon had
in nineteen sixty nine.
Just listen to how it goes.
Because the comedian will tell you, oh, they had a phone call.
If you listen to it, A, these were
incredibly powerful, incredibly sophisticated radios with directional antennae, carefully
tuned in a program that today is worth I think like a
hundred and seventy five billion dollars.
This is not your cell phone.
We're talking about the very best communications technology that was possible in
nineteen sixty nine with no wattage limit, which is a big deal.
Your cell phone would always have connectivity if it had a hundred
watts of output.
It doesn't.
That's one of the key differences.
But all you have to know is that when you listen to
Nixon and the astronauts talking.
They're not talking.
Nixon gives us a speech that's like a minute long, and then
the astronauts give a canned response that's like twenty seconds long or
something. It wasn't a conversation.
They each gave brief statements and they took turns doing it.
That's not a phone call.
So
even by itself, just that one thing, ha ha, it's a phone
call. That doesn't work on in the on the moon.
It doesn't work in my neighborhood.
That's the level of argumentation that you get from people who are
denying what is easily the most well-documented event in all of human
history. I don't say that with any exaggeration.
The amount of documentation that went into into the entire process of
the Apollo program, including the launches and the return of those vehicles,
it's indescribable how much data they had, radios, telemetry, just unfathomable amounts.
And unfortunately, you know, the we just passed the fiftieth anniversary of
the moon landing and then this was back in the news a
couple of weeks ago because we just passed January twentieth of this
pat of this year, which was of course the day that we
landed on the moon in nineteen sixty-nine.
There was a website that was set up for nineteen for twenty
nineteen for the fiftieth anniversary.
Unfortunately it's defunct now.
I'm I'm heart heartbroken because it was really cool.
It was a website that basically was replaying the entire Apollo 11
mission from several hours before launch until its return.
So you could go to this website and you could jump between
audio and video sources from every camera that they had available, every
microphone they had available.
You could see the telemetry in real time.
You could scrub back and forth in time.
You could just see the the raft of data that was sent
back to Earth and it was kept on Earth as part of
this enormous project.
Just inconceivably huge project.
So and that's that's a fraction of the data that we have
as as Corey alluded to, some of the data was lost.
Yeah, it's a government program.
You ever hear government records getting misplaced?
That's not a conspiracy.
That's the realest part of the whole story.
To say they're covering something us up because they lost records.
I there's nothing I find more believable than that.
And even at that, there's all this data.
And again, it's it's available elsewhere, but it's just really nice that
that website existed.
You can go see the bones of it still.
But even now, the telemetry data is is widely available.
As we talked about last week, if someone wanted to fake an
event, is the the event we talked about last week, if the
Germans had wanted to cover up what they did and they falsified
records by going in and modifying or deleting things, it would never
withstand any sort of forensic scrutiny.
And that's absolutely the case with the Apollo missions.
They were going out into space.
One of the key parts of that is that everyone can see
space. They the moon is not over the United States of America.
Everyone on a planet gets a shot at the moon.
Everyone on the planet with a radio receiver or today a laser
transmitter can do the same things that we could do.
And in nineteen sixty-nine when the astronauts were there, anyone with a
radio receiver that was correctly set up and strong enough would be
able to pick them up.
Now that wasn't common in nineteen sixty nine, but you know who
did have it?
The Soviet Union.
The Soviets were paying a great deal of attention to what we
were doing in space.
Because as Corey said, that it was part of the the Cold
War. This was a military endeavor as far as as far as
the Soviets were concerned.
So one of the chief chief arguments from silence in all this
is that if we had pretended to go to the moon and
we hadn't, and we had been transmitting fake radio data from either
moon orbit or from low Earth orbit, the Soviets would have known
and they would have told the world.
Because everything that the Soviets did at the time when they were
a communist empire was to try to demonstrate to the world that
communism was supreme over all of our forms of life.
That atheism atheist communism was the way humanity was going to be
ruled in the future.
They were the first into space.
They were the first to orbit.
They did things before we did.
Their rocketry program was more advanced.
We were playing catch up when we did the Apollo and Gemini
missions. So they would have absolutely mocked us very publicly.
If there was a shred of evidence that they could have collected
from space that we didn't do this, it would have been everywhere
in 1969.
You wouldn't had to wait for some idiot comedian fifty years later
to say, Oh, by the way, they didn't do it.
The Russians would have told that before most of us were born.
On a technical note, about the supposed loss of data, and one
could argue that it is a loss of data.
Many of the reels would simply have been reused, and that sounds
crazy to
the modern home user, let's say, of technology, because you think, well
I just store everything on my hard drive and it seems to
have infinite space.
Perhaps not your phone, you've run into a lack of space on
your phone, and that's a good example.
If your phone fills up, you clear it and reuse the space.
The same thing happens with certain systems that have high volumes of
data passing through them.
The best modern example would be a surveillance system.
When you set up a surveillance system, yes the cameras can be
somewhat expensive, but the real expense winds up going into the back
end where you actually store that data.
I won't get into the specific numbers that much because no one
really cares about the math.
But the core point is that you are going to have a
limited amount of space to store the data that you are collecting.
And you aim for X days of retention.
So if you have an incident that occurs you want to have
back 90 days, say.
And so you calculate your storage needs and you have enough storage
for 90 days.
Well, what happens is
the video from 91 days ago drops off and gets reused for
your current day.
And that keeps happening.
You're cycling through that storage space.
They did the same thing back when they had reels or whatever
else they happened to be using, magnetic tapes, because they didn't have
an infinite number of them.
And back then it was very expensive to make more of them,
and they were large, and you had to store them somewhere, and
they're somewhat delicate.
So the fact that they were reused and that some of the
data were lost is not at all surprising.
That is exactly what you expect to happen with that kind of
system. And the joke about you know, my phone drops all the
time and blah blah blah, okay fine
If you wanted to build a system that was completely rock solid,
you could do it.
And it wouldn't even be that expensive today.
Earlier I was looking at some hardware for something completely unrelated, but
You can set up a 10 to 20 kilometer link for about
$2,000
that will be completely stable.
You could have a constant stream of data over this with no
interruptions, and it has enough throughput to do a little math.
There's enough throughput in that to fill your hard drive, if you
have an average size hard drive, in about two hours.
That's a lot of data.
Which is to say that if you wanted to build a system
that was completely stable, you could do it.
The phone system, your cell phone, is not completely stable and reliable
because of cost.
It's the same thing as when you're storing X days worth of
video of surveillance.
You could store it indefinitely.
But the cost keeps going up because you're going to have to
buy new storage every time you fill your old storage.
Well the phone system, the cellular system, could be entirely reliable if
that's what we wanted, if that's what we needed.
We have systems like that for emergency services and things that are
more sensitive to drops in quality or just entirely drops in service.
We don't do it because of cost.
The cost of building out that sort of system is extremely prohibitive
unless you live in an area that is extremely dense.
For instance, when I lived in Southern California, I had nearly perfect
cell service basically everywhere I spent my time, unless I was hiking
in the middle of nowhere.
Obviously in the depths of Sequoia National Forest, okay fine, I don't
have service there.
But everywhere in LA and in the surrounding areas, perfect service.
Because of density.
It makes sense to build out the network where you have literal
millions of users.
Now I live somewhere that is significantly more rural.
My service here happens to be pretty good But there are many
places around where I live now where I don't have very good
surface. Because of the cost, it would not make sense to build
it out.
And so it makes perfect sense that you would have
Good connection for something like the Apollo mission, which is critical, and
yes, your cell phone doesn't perform to the same standard.
It's insane to compare the two, and as Woe mentioned, the point
is the joke.
It's a It's a joke being told by a comedian.
Aha, it's funny that my cell phone drop service no really it's
actually a wonder device that I have in my pocket that can
do this virtually unlimited list of things that were inconceivable forty years
ago. Certainly inconceivable a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago.
But yes, haha, it doesn't work all the time.
Okay, fine.
We understand the joke.
Don't let the joke become warrant to believe something that is insane.
Because then you've just made yourself the joke.
Why would you take a joke from a comedian and turn that
into one of your actual beliefs about the real world?
That is an insane thing to do.
Another common example that comes from the folks who say that we
couldn't have gone to the moon is the Van Allen belts.
You may have heard the term before.
They're these belts of ionizing radiation around the Earth.
They're it's radiation that's held by the magnetism of the earth itself
that does exist in places in lethal levels.
And so the theory from guys on Twitter and YouTube who are
not nearly smart enough to actually do any of this math is
that the earth is surrounded by this murder cloud and no one
can possibly transit that cloud or they're all die instantly because it's
radioactive. NASA was worried about this.
They were worried about the Van Allen belts.
They knew about them, they knew of their existence.
They had correctly modeled them in the 60s.
So So that they knew that they were uneven.
There are these multiple layers and pockets of radiation that are unevenly
distributed because
the galaxy and the solar system are basically
to well as an allusion to the flat earth thing later They're
kind of a pancake.
They're basically f oriented in a flat fashion.
So the Earth's radiation belts, the Van Allen belts, are oriented basically
towards the sun.
They're oriented with the poles of the earth, so it's not quite
a line, but more or less it's off to one side and
the other.
So you have up and down and you have left and right.
Yeah, north, south, east, west.
That's important because the van Allen belts are not perfect spheres.
We're not talking about electron shells around a neutron.
We're talking about a torus.
it's a r it uh it's a round donut, basically around the
earth of yes, lethal levels of radiation.
So NASA mapped it.
They made sure that they understood all the risks.
One of the other things that you'll hear from the Benjamins of
the world is they would have had to have so much lead
shielding they couldn't have possibly taken off.
We'll link a video in the show notes that goes in briefly
in just a bit of details, and it talks about some of
the specifics that you can go Google if you actually care about
the science.
If, for the sake of argument, these idiot idiotic internet comedians were
right, and you would have needed very thick lead shielding to protect
the astronauts from the radiation, the scientific fact is that if they
had had heavy lead shielding, it would have actually increased the amount
of radiation they would have been exposed to.
Because although the lead shielding would have kept the ionizing radiation on
the outside of the lead shielding, the lead shielding itself would have
been emitting wreck x rays inside the spaceship.
So the light aluminum skin and the mylar sheathing and the other
things in this tin can of a of a spaceship, that's not
a joke.
That was real.
It was incredibly light, not only because it had to be, but
because it could be.
And the materials that they used, they did the math, they were
careful, like they didn't they didn't
space. They were careful.
They didn't kill people.
They'd already killed three guys in the oxygen fire in uh Gemini.
They wanted to make sure they didn't have that happen again.
By anything.
Like they you know, these were it was a PR thing.
It was a human thing.
It was just it the mission was to send men to the
moon and bring 'em back alive.
Everything that went into that mission was important to him, and that
included not having radiation poisoning.
So what do they do for the Van Allen belts?
They made sure that the spaceships had the appropriate materials to minimize
as much of the radiation that they were going to be exposed
to as possible, and then they went around the belts.
They cut through the edges of the Van Allen belts where it
was not lethal, and they did it quickly enough that they were
only exposed for a total of about six hours inside any portion
of the belt, and all three of the astronauts were wearing dosimeters,
so they knew how much radiation they were exposed to.
Their entire trip through the Van Allen belts in the deepness of
outer space with no magnetic shield from the Earth protecting them, they
received less radioactivity exposure than a nuclear worker would today in a
nuclear plant.
It was a completely safe, innocuous, not even interesting level of radiation.
It wasn't like they couldn't do that.
You know, if they went up every day, yes, they would start
to get into levels, it would be dangerous.
But for the trips that they took and the they went once,
they went through it for about two and a half hours one
way and about three and a half hours the other way.
And in between, they had several days of rest, and so their
bodies were able to repair some of the damage that may have
been caused by the radiation.
Because another problem with that sort of radiation is it's the continuous
exposure that causes that causes your body to break down.
our bodies are constantly being injured and damaged.
We have cells that are dying all the time.
Our body's always cleaning up some mess, some injury internally, and we
never know about it.
So they took all those things into account.
So just as these two very brief examples, you have radioactivity and
you have haha phone calls.
When you examine those gotcha claims, they disintegrate.
There's a very plausible explanation.
And
on the flip side, when you look at all the proof that
it actually happened, it's overwhelming.
So the gotchas fall on their face and everything that the guys
want to ignore is staring you right in the eyes.
Last week's episode, by contrast, the opposite is true.
See, if all the bodies are missing and there have been all
these millions killed, that's a That's a big deal.
That's not a phone call.
And that's part of the reason we wanted it to contrast these
is that if you just bucket these together as these are crazy
conspiracy theories that guys on the internet make up, and I don't
know what to believe, it's all crazy.
I don't want anything to do with it.
If you just like I said, if you just want to check
out completely, that's fine.
But if you want to engage in the veracity of these things,
take a look at the claims.
If six million bodies vanish, that's a big deal.
If something that someone calls a phone call and was it was
called a phone call at the time, but it wasn't.
It was it was a scripted radio transmission.
One guy pressed the button and talked for a minute or two,
and then the other guy responded when his time was up.
All of the possible gotchas fall apart.
I used to work in tech, I used to work at Apple.
I've done demos before.
Sometimes parts of demos are faked, not in the sense that the
could the thing couldn't be done, but the at the exact moment
that you were asked to present it, maybe it wasn't in a
pus in a state that you could make it work as well
as it was gonna work in the work in the end.
Now I'm not saying that the moon landing was a demo, but
some of the other minor gotchas are that there's there's videos that
were taken inside the capsules at different distances from the earth.
And you can do the math on the size of the earth
and say, well they were this far away when they When they
were saying they were this far away.
It's important to keep in mind that the astronauts, every minute of
that three-day journey was scripted because this was not a canoe trip
down a river.
They had to do certain things at precise intervals at certain moments,
or they would all die.
It's rocket science.
We're talking about being in space where one accident, one mistake can
potentially kill you.
Something we miraculously were able to recover from on Apollo 13 when
a whole bunch of things went wrong.
And they did recover because they were brilliant men and they were
hard workers and they had enough of a safety margin to make
it back.
And frankly, God saved their lives too.
I mean, you can't humans can't take all the credit for that.
But the difference between the so-called conspiracy theory where the couple gotchas
blow a hole in everything, and something like the moon landing where
the gotchas are themselves inane, it's it's not even apples and oranges.
it's apples and elephants.
And
on the topic of radiation, I think a lot of people get
the wrong conception of radiation and radiation risks.
If you are an international traveler, you have increased exposure to radiation.
Because when you fly, you are outside some of the protection of
the Earth's atmosphere because you are above much of it when you
are flying at altitude, particularly if you are taking international trips where
you are at altitude for many hours.
And so you have an increased risk of cancer over the long
term because of that travel.
The same thing is very true for astronauts.
Astronauts, in some cases, face an increased risk of cancer.
Now, we may get into nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
It's not always true that being in the vicinity of nuclear energy
is going to result in an increased risk of cancer.
For instance, our submariners actually have a decreased risk of cancer.
Because our nuclear submarines are designed in such a way there's no
radiation risk for the crew.
They don't have any exposure.
They actually have less because they are protected by the volume of
water and the metal tube.
They're actually getting less radiation than you would just being on the
surface on an average day.
I'm getting more right now from the Now from the open window,
well the unshuttered window next to me, obviously not open, it's very
warm outside.
But
radiation risk is a matter of longitudinal risk.
It is exposure over a very long period of time, unless you
have an acute exposure Chernobyl, for instance.
But one of the reasons that people get this wrong is they
don't understand Understand longitudinal risk.
It's not just acute risk, it's not like being poisoned.
Yes, it is poisoning over a long period.
So yes, you could compare it to a mild toxin, but it's
not like cyanide poison where you take it and you die.
This is one of the reasons when Japan had their their nuclear
incident in the wake of the tsunami, many elderly volunteered to help
clean up.
If you are already elderly, you
don't run the risk of that longitudinal increase in cancer the risk
of cancer, well, really cancer because we all eventually get cancer if
you live long enough.
But you don't run that risk if you're already elderly, because it
is the dose over your life that increases the likelihood of getting
that cancer.
And we mistakenly believe that some anyway, that somehow we can just
remove all of these risks.
There were very real risks, including radiation risks for these astronauts.
Yes, they did as much as they possibly could to reduce those
risks, but they couldn't eliminate them.
In the end analysis we were blasting human beings into a vacuum
in a metal tube.
We'd already sort of done so and learned many things obviously from
submarines because that's the best comparison for this submarine versus spacecraft because
both are dealing with a very inhospitable external environment that if you
do anything wrong you're going to die.
If you get a hole in your craft you're probably going to
die. But for instance, to compare these these radiation risks, to understand
them perhaps a little better, there's actually a monument I guess this
tangentially ties into last week's episode since it was built in nineteen
thirty six and in Germany.
But there is a monument on the campus of St.
George's Hospital in Hamburg that has a list of, I think it's
up to maybe 400 names now, of those who died learning about
basically X-rays.
These technologies, when we are experimenting with them, when we are first
learning to use them, have very real risks that come with them.
And the astronauts knew those risks and undertook them.
So when people say that, oh well you couldn't do it because
of X, Y, and Z, no, that's a risk that you run.
You account for the risk, you minimize the risk, but you can't
eliminate it.
And so it's not an argument against the moon landing that there
was some sort of risk involved in radiation exposure.
That's going to be the case with human spaceflight unless we figure
out some way to totally mitigate radiation, which we have not done
yet. That's actually one of the biggest hurdles
in getting men to Mars
because that is significantly more radiation exposure than just a trip to
the Moon.
The Moon's not that far away.
The three day trip not very long.
A six month or more trip to Mars.
That is an immense exposure to the hard radiation of vacuum.
Unless we discover some new way to mitigate
that. And
I think that a a key element of all of the various
details so-called in the conspiracy theories that we're talking about today is
that they rely on the person listening not being intelligent, not being
smart enough to either understand the variables or to even have
any conception that such a thing is possible.
And so when you say cell phone, ha ha ha, everyone's like,
Yeah, I know what a cell phone is, Corey talked about.
Like it's there are different degrees of engineering required for different things.
And you spend the money, you get the results you want.
There's nothing abnormal about that.
that's how everything works.
It's you know the the joke in
racing used to be you can spend cubic inches or you can
spend cubic bucks.
You can have an incredibly exotic engine that can go really fast,
or you can have a really big engine, and you'll get similar
results. When these punch lines are thrown out and these these stupid
little gotchas like cell phones, and you know, one of the other
things is that they were on the moon and why are all
the pictures of the sky black?
Why aren't there any stars?
Well, have you ever seen a difference in what your eyes can
pick up in the daylight versus at night?
Your eye has an iris.
Your eye has light sensitivity.
In fact it has two different sets of sensors, one for regular
light and one for low light.
Because in regular light you can see color and low light you
really can't.
So your eyes switch between the rods and cones depending on how
much light is available, so that you can still see something.
In space, when they were on the moon, it was always the
middle of the day.
There was no nighttime anywhere at any time they were in space.
They were always in full one hundred percent sunlight, which meant that
they were at the maximum possible eyeball saturation and cameras have even
less um dynamic range than our eyes do.
Cameras are stopped down considerably compared to the range of a of
a human eye.
And so a camera, if it can see, for example, the Earth
clearly, without the Earth being completely blown out to the point that
it would just be shining white, there's literally no possible way for
the same camera to show stars in the background and the Earth.
It's one or the other because of the difference in the albedo,
the difference of the brightness of the objects.
So if you don't know anything and you don't care to learn,
and maybe you're not smart enough to understand, and I don't refer
to intellectual capability to be insulting.
God made some people does not be to be smart enough to
worry about this stuff.
Don't let someone like Owen Benjamin prey on your inability to understand
a lot of the scientific details to convince you that something that
obviously happened couldn't have happened.
It's just th that's the key element here.
When the claims that we made about Martin Luther King and the
claims the claims that we made about the Holocaust were simple.
They're not fancy scientific claims.
Cookie math.
If I have four ovens in five years, how many cookies can
I bake?
That's not tricky.
That doesn't rely on any secret knowledge.
It's the opposite of what's going on here.
And so again, they seem similar if you're just thinking, wow, crazy
guy on the internet's telling me something.
The difference is in the quality of the questions.
The quality of a question of where did all the bodies go
is fundamentally different.
Fundamentally different than the quality of the question, how did they make
a phone call from the moon?
it there's no possible comparison.
And so you as a listener, I think one of the important
things is is this guy just preying on my scientific ignorance?
And as we said at the beginning of last week's episode, don't
just believe what we say because we say it or even if
it seems convincing.
Uh one of the really heartening things that came from last week's
episode, we got a ton of feedback from people saying basically it
took them aback, because people had never heard maybe they'd heard one
or two bits of pieces, but most people had never heard any
of that.
And they weren't necessarily gonna believe it right away, but the thing
that was consistent about a lot of the feedback was that everyone
who heard it took pause because
Suddenly, things that didn't make sense before are starting to make sense.
And that's another contrast between something that's true, where there's actually a
legitimate concerted effort to deceive us, like COVID, for example, and something
that's a lie, like denying that we'd landed on the moon, when
it's plainly visible and plainly obvious and easily proven.
In in the narrative, there's the same amount of proof for both.
You know, one thing, you know, we could have done another three
hours like last week with completely different sets of facts, completely different
information, and still blown your minds the same way.
There's that much incredibly obvious stuff.
One of the things I didn't mention was that if you go
to Google Ngrams and search for Capital H Holocaust, the word doesn't
appear until the mid-60s.
Compare that with the Moonlanding.
If you search for Moonlanding, in nineteen sixty nine everyone was talking
about the moon landing, and it wasn't because they were faking it
in real time.
In the show notes for this episode, we'll have we'll have a
few links to some different breakdowns from different groups of people about
how when you look at some of the speculative denials of what
happened, it falls apart.
One of my favorite ones is from some movie special effects guys.
Because the big claim is that well, we didn't go, we faked
the whole thing, it was all it was all a stage.
It was movie producers, it was Stanley Kubrick faking the whole thing.
These guys said that with current technology we could not fake it
as well as they did.
They said it would have been cheaper to actually go to the
moon than to fake it as well as they did.
They the the technology absolutely didn't exist to fake the specific details
that you could have only gotten right if you were actually on
the moon.
There's things about the alignment of the light and reflections that you
can only have if your light source is millions of miles away.
It can't be a light source that's hanging up on the ceiling
in a sound stage.
And so the quality of the questions and the quality of the
evidence is fundamentally different.
And so one of the the key themes of this episode is
that when you're weighing these things, if you want to delve into
crazy guys on the internet telling you stuff for the first time,
if you're willing to do that, it's okay to assume up front
that it's all crap.
Assume that you're being lied to.
I do.
Frankly, it's part of why I'm good at thinking.
I assume that anything that anyone tells me, I assume every part
of it is false, and I try to pick it apart.
Now it's not abrasive and it's not crazy, it's just I have
a filter where anything that's true is only going to get through
because I've picked it up ever I picked apart all the pieces
that could possibly be false.
The reason I fell for the narrative of what we talked about
last week was that I never did that.
People said, hey, this happened, like, okay, whatever.
When I looked at it critically, when I scrutinized it, it disintegrated.
I was I became curious about the moon landing a few years
ago for the same reason.
I always assumed it was true.
I believed it was true.
All I everything I never heard said it was true.
All these people suddenly start saying, Oh, it's fake, it's all made
up, it's insane, it's crazy, they're lying to you, man.
Like, okay, I don't believe that, but I'll go look at your
evidence. And so I did.
I spent a while looking at the evidence the same way I
looked at last week's evidence, and what I found was the exact
opposite. When you actually look at the raw materials, it it's just
inconceivable that it could have been faked.
Never mind that it wasn't.
We have all the physical evidence that it was.
We have reams just a virtually infinite amount of proof.
There was no way to fake it.
You know, one of the things I looked at I've never seen
written about, but I was one thing I personally came up with
was
there were multiple Apollo missions where we sent men up and they
went into orbit.
And even the narrative that says that we never went to the
moon 'cause we couldn't leave the Van Allen belts still says that
we sent men up into outer space, because obviously everyone saw Saturn
V rise and then saw the Apollo capsule come back down.
That means the guys went into at least low Earth orbit.
Well, when you go up into space in the low Earth orbit
and then you come back down, you have a re you have
a return trajectory.
And you can look online.
I don't we won't want this put this in the show notes.
It's not important.
But when I looked, I found that for the Apollo missions where
the astronauts went up into space and just circled the Earth, they
had one return trajectory.
It was and it was it was a relatively shallow if I
remember correctly.
And then we have another one for the missions where they returned
from the moon.
And the numbers for the return trajectory for the moon were off
by like fifty degrees.
It was a massive difference.
I can't remember which direction, but it was substantially different to the
point that if Apollo eleven had only gone into low Earth orbit
and faked it, their return trajectory would have been physically impossible.
They wouldn't have been able to return to Earth on the trajectory
they did unless they'd been coming from the Moon.
So like I that was something I just dug into myself because
like I'd never seen anyone talk about it.
But when I found that data, it seemed like that's a pretty
obvious example.
Someone who's intelligent is going to find that and say, Yes, this
adds up, or it's a lie.
You know, if if all their turn trajectories had been identical, I
would have needed for my own edification an explanation for how that
could be possible because it wouldn't make sense.
When I saw the new two numbers were wildly disparate for low
Earth orbit versus lunar return trajectory, I'm like, okay, here's just another
piece of evidence that it wasn't even typically used that when I
look at it, like, yeah, it all adds up.
Even the stuff nobody's talking about adds up.
That's what you'll find when something is true is in the nooks
and crannies where no one's looking and no one's talking, it all
still makes sense.
That's how reality works.
The truth is true everywhere in every direction.
And a lie, even if something can be convincing to someone in
some narrow point, it falls apart as soon as you step back
just a little
bit.
Obviously we aren't going to try to go over every single objection
supposed objection that has been raised to the moon landing.
That's not the goal of the episode, and we don't want to
spend six hours talking about the most insane things you've ever heard.
But I think there are two that are worth addressing quickly simply
because they are very easy to address and they're completely ludicrous claims.
The first is that the footprints are obviously fake.
That's what they try to argue.
And they argue this for a number of reasons.
One, they'll say they're much too defined, they're too perfect.
If you are so inclined, I don't recommend doing this, but if
you are so inclined to prove this is possible, buy a bag
of flour, go outside, don't do this in your kitchen, go outside,
dump it on the ground, put on your hiking boots, and step
in it.
You'll reproduce the same sort of footprint that we see in the
photographs from the moon.
Because the dust on the moon is very fine and flower is
fine, that's the sort of footprint it produces.
But another thing that they will argue about the the footprint, the
bootprint. Well the pattern the tread doesn't match the boots.
That's because they mix up the boots in question.
The astronauts had one set of
gear, one suit that they wore in the spacecraft, and they put
another over it to go out on the moon.
Because of course you would do that.
You don't wear the same clothing for everything, clearly not when you're
going into hard vacuum.
And so the boot prints that you see are from the exterior
boot that goes over the interior boot.
Well, they're mixing up the two.
These are just very easy things to show the claims are just
silly. If you actually look at the evidence, they're just silly.
They're very easy to dismiss.
But the other is that they will argue about the shadows on
the moon and the way that the light source appears in relation
to objects in shadows.
This is something that if you are a photographer you can just
skip the next minute or whatever.
Because this is something you already know.
The concept that you need to understand here, there are a handful,
but the core one is vanishing point
Now, if you live somewhere like the Northeast, you're not going to
have experienced this as much in the natural environment or the man-made
environment as if you've lived somewhere like the southwest.
And the reason for this is the most obvious example in daily
life is going to be a desert road or a very long
stretch of train tracks.
If you look at two parallel lines that run for a long
distance off toward the horizon, they are going to appear to converge
as they go.
They aren't converging.
It's your perspective that makes it look like they are converging, and
where they supposedly converge is called the vanishing point.
This is used in art, it's used in photography.
But that is what is happening on the moon with some of
these shadows in the perspective of the cameras.
You have a single point of light, obviously the sun, and then
you have a vanishing point away from that, away from the perspective
of the camera, which is going to cause certain effects.
It's going to look like things are moving toward or are oriented
toward this point, this vanishing point, when they aren't really.
It is an effect of perspective.
It is not something actual in the physical environment.
There are certain things that you see in one way because that's
how your visual system processes it.
That's how this is just how things interact in the real world.
But if you go and examine it, it's other than what you
saw. And this is one of those examples.
It's not saying don't trust your eyes.
It's just saying recognize what your visual system does, recognize the limitations.
You don't have infinite range on your vision.
So there's going to be a point at which you can no
longer see something.
And if you've stood on the shore by the ocean or a
large lake or something like that or top of a mountain, you
know intuitively that there's a point out in the distance where you
can no longer see beyond that, or I guess if you're in
the middle of the country where it's just completely flat, then you've
also experienced this.
But that's what's happening with those photographs.
It's not that they're on a stage in Hollywood that they have
a bunch of lights set up and that you have different shadows
because of that.
That claim is also ridiculous for another reason.
The men working on the space program who program were highly intelligent.
If they had wanted to fake this material, they wouldn't have screwed
up something as simple as lighting.
The claim is just ludicrous on its face.
And that's the case with the the rest of the things we're
gonna talk about today.
We're not we're not gonna spend any more time on the moon,
but we did talk a little bit about radiation.
One of the other things that's been pushed more recently by the
same group is the claim that nukes aren't real.
Just like birds aren't real, nukes aren't real.
Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, it's all fake and never existed.
Some permutation of that.
You know, the the theories about how it was faked vary, but
the gist of it is that there's no such thing as nuclear
weapons. It was all invented as a psyop to scare people as
part of the Cold War.
Amusingly recently, when Benjamin put some of his so-called proof out for
this, even his own fans dragged him for how retarded this one
was. He claimed the the claim was that there was the videos
of the atomic detonations where the government set up cameras and they
built Potemkin villages that they leveled so that they could see the
effects of a blast at various ranges on typical residential construction.
Because it's one thing to know it's going to do to a
military bunker that's hardened.
It's another thing to know what it's going to do to just
a you know a stick frame house.
And so there's videos you've all seen in slow motion of these
barns and homes just being completely leveled by the blast wave from
the nuclear detonation.
One thing to keep in mind, when
when a nuclear bomb is detonated in the atmosphere, the explosion
radiates outward.
Obviously there's there's radiation coming from the center.
There's the explosion itself, there's the force also coming from the center,
radiing it radiating out equally in all directions roughly.
As that explosive force moves through the atmosphere, it compresses the atmosphere
in front of it.
What that means is that the air right in front of the
explosion gets compressed a lot.
There's a difference in the explosive space between regular explosive and what's
called high explosives.
It has to do with the velocity of the detonation above everything
else. You can hear this time sometimes when you hear different audio
of different types of explosions.
Some of them just sound kind of boomy and some of them
have a lot of a crack.
When When a nuclear detonation occurs, the air in front of the
detonation is compressed so that it is denser than steel.
the air itself, the wave of air in front of the wave
of explosion.
Because remember the explosion is creating a vacuum behind it, it's pushing
everything outward.
And so at the edge of the explosion you have a blast
wave. And the blast wave isn't the explosion.
The blast wave is actually the compressed air that has the density
of steel house for a great distance.
And so when you see those buildings being flattened.
It is the function of the explosion, but it's actually the air
that's been compressed to the density of steel or close to it
that's hitting those buildings.
So it's just air.
It's just like the big bad wolf blowing, huffing and puffing and
blowing on the house, knocking it over.
Except that when it's going faster than the speed of sound and
it's compressed to the density of steel, it's like be hit being
hit by a freight train.
And so there's the video of the houses being flattened and there
were cameras pointed at the houses.
And so Benjamin and some others have claimed, well, how could how
is it that they could build a house that would be flattened
but the camera was fine?
The cameras were fragile, how could it possibly f survive?
Everybody dragged him forward because it was such a stupid take.
Those cameras were five miles away, in specially reinforced bunkers, particularly oriented
away from the blast itself, shielded as much as possible from the
blast, and they were five miles using extreme telephoto lenses to look
at the buildings that were flattened.
And so again once again, this is just an example of when
when a narrative is true and someone comes up with nonsense evidence
like this, it just crumbles.
it's almost stupid on its face.
And as soon as you look at it, it's like, how could
anyone possibly fall for that?
But if your mind is primed so you're like, well someone says
that this the government lied to me about this thing too, if
you get to the point that you're just willing to believe any
time someone tells you something is a lie, you're functionally every bit
is demoralized as if you believe You believed everything that they told
you was true.
if you're just believing everything unthinkingly, uncritically, that's the danger spot.
And
disbelieving has the same effect.
If you disbelieve every single thing that anyone tells you, no matter
how much evidence is brought before you, you're in the same boat.
You're unanchored from reality.
And that's the real danger of all this.
Not only does it deceive people about something like you know, this
is a religious podcast, we're not saying if you don't believe in
the moon landing, you're going to hell.
We're saying if you're falling for really dumb excuses for some of
these things, it's putting you in a position where you can be
easily deceived.
Because people are going to come along and say, oh, well, here's
the next thing they lied to you about.
And frankly, you know, as I said earlier, it's kind of ironic
for that to be coming from Corey and me on Stone Choir
because a lot of our episodes are specifically about that.
But it's why we're very careful to lay out a simple case
for this where you can go look at the evidence for yourself
and it doesn't fall apart.
We could make elaborate arguments for our the things we claim.
We don't.
We make simple, straightforward, verifiable arguments because truth is not esoteric.
Truth is not hidden.
It's not secret.
It's just right there.
And it's the lie that requires complicity from everyone for it to
propagate. The truth, just like the truth of their Apollo reentry trajectories,
it's just sitting there waiting for someone to look.
And when you look, you're like, well, yep, there it is.
that makes perfect sense.
We want the arguments that you're willing to accept to be those
arguments that are predicated on truth that are based on something that
adds up and aren't simply going along either because the Because the
everyone says believe this because everyone says to believe it, or if
you're in the minority camp, don't believe anything they tell you.
Everything they're telling you is a lie.
You shouldn't fall for that either.
you're you're in a bad way either in either case.
So when you look at stuff like are nukes real?
Is the moon real?
Is space real?
There are literally people who believe that space is fake and gay.
They think that outer space doesn't exist, which on a matter of
theology directly contradicts scripture.
Scripture repeatedly has God pointing to the heavens, to creation in the
sky, the stars, all the wonders of creation outside of the earth
as examples of his glory.
So when you say space is fake and gay, you're denying scripture.
You can't do that.
God put that stuff there to declare his glory.
And when he talks to us in scripture, he says, look it
up. This is how awesome I am.
Look at the stars and see my glory in them.
They testify to me.
When we on the earth are saying I don't believe anything's real,
you either become a nihilist or you become a Gnostic, but you're
ultimately going to become
led down a path of spiritual decay.
It's not just about getting tricked or falling for some meme on
the internet.
It's about being unmoored from the things that actually do matter.
And so don't lose your bearings as you're navigating this stuff.
Just it's fine to treat things lightly and to work through them
casually. Don't fall for things and don't disbelieve things either because no
one agrees with them.
you have to think.
That's there there's no shortcut for this one.
You just you have to think things through.
And if you know that you're just not equipped for that sort
of thing, and some people aren't, God did not equip some people
for doing a lot of heavy thinking.
That's fine.
It's nothing to be ashamed of.
But don't then go listen to Owen Benjamin run his mouth for
two hours and say, yep, this is I believe all this.
I'm not going to spend any time investigating the science, but this
adds up that this comedian is definitely telling me the truth.
No, he's he's selling something and he's entertaining you.
I don't care about entertainment, but don't lie to people when you're
entertaining them.
Related to nuclear explosions and the shock wave and that front of
compressed air.
Some people have spun up crazy theories about the lines that appear
in some videos of nuclear explosions.
This again is one of those things that is very easily explained
on the same level as the boot prints on the moon.
When they were conducting one of the nuclear tests, one of the
scientists noticed that a cable that was used as a tether for
a balloon, one of the measuring devices, appeared to have a break
in it.
But as the video progressed, as the frames progressed Progressed, the brake
moved along the cable.
Well, brakes don't move along a cable.
If a cable breaks, the brake is where it is.
And so obviously it's an optical illusion.
And the optical illusion is going to be caused by basically incandescence,
the compression of the air, that wall Of air expanding outward, the
shockwave. It's causing refraction with the light.
And so they decided to use this because it's very difficult to
see where that border is when you're trying to see how quickly
the mushroom cloud, how quickly the explosion, whatever it is you're measuring
at the time, how quickly that's expanding.
Even when you're using a camera that takes ten thousand frames per
second, which one of the cameras they used did that.
But they figured out an ingenious way to test this, to make
it easier to see where the edge of that shockwave is.
And it's very simple.
They use smoke rockets.
So
right before, as basically as tight a tolerance as they could get,
right before the nuclear detonation, they launched smoke rockets, that's what you
see. Those lines are smoke trails.
And the reason they look bent is because of the effect that
I just described, this refraction of the light dealing with that wall
of compressed air moving outward.
And so they use that as a way to measure how quickly
the shockwave was expanding.
And so that's what those are.
Those are literally just smoke lines created by smoke rockets.
They were used in order to test some of the numbers related
to the explosion, how quickly things traveled.
It's not some weird
I I've seen all sorts of crazy claims, won't won't go over
the exact claims themselves, but it's not a conspiracy.
It's literally just making it easier to see the edge of the
shockwave.
So
the last one we wanted to touch on just briefly today is
Flat Earth.
It's probably the stupidest of the entire bunch, and it's also probably
the most pervasive and persistent.
It i in part because there's historical warrant for it.
At some point in the past people didn't necessarily understand that the
world was a globe, that it's a sphere, incidentally like every other
heavenly body ever discovered.
And so you know, that's a historical claim.
That that's a it's it's a sort of claim that we do
make on Stone Choir in other circumstances to say, well, everyone believed
this for a long time
and then somebody comes along and believes something else.
What do?
Somebody got it wrong, who got it wrong?
the difference is that when it comes to whether or not the
earth is flat, people for thousands of years have understood that it
was a globe.
We've understood that we had a shape that was not a pancake.
I alluded to that o before.
The Milky Way in every galaxy is basically like a pancake.
It's not two dimensional, but it's oriented as a as a disc.
that's what God does for certain types of patterns.
And other patterns are globular.
The moon is a sphere.
The sun is a sphere.
All the heavenly bodies are spheres.
Why? Because that's how gravity works.
Gravity the collection of mass in space causes there to be a
center of gravity.
And then all of that mass naturally orients around the center.
And the more that orientation is self-reinforcing, the the more it collapses
until you eventually have almost a perfect sphere.
Now, obviously as creationists, we believe that God put all those things
together, but he didn't put them together haphazardly.
He put them together pre-assembled for us.
He gave us a globe and put Adam and Eve on it.
There are other heavenly bodies that are being formed today, or you
know, were formed in the past and we can see the light
appearing today.
So the physical rules, the physical laws of the universe established by
God in creation are consistent everywhere.
I think the stupidest thing about clinging clinging to the
basic lack of understanding about how the heavens and the earth worked
from ancient ancient days, is that when you get new evidence, you
incorporate it.
And when when it makes more sense than the explanation you had
before, you're run with it.
And literally nothing that we know about anything would actually work with
a flat Earth.
we couldn't have gone to the Moon if the Earth were flat.
All the math would have been completely off.
None of it would have worked.
And as soon as they took off, they would have seen it.
That's it's one of the things it's part of the reason that
those two conspiracy theories travel together is that the moon landing had
to be fake.
Because if you put somebody out there and he looks back over
his shoulder and says, Hey, that's a globe, it proves it wrong.
Like that's that's not big-brained.
You know, forget the geniuses that it took to put a man
in space.
Once there's a dude sitting up there looking out a window, you
don't have to be a genius to see that it's not a
pancake. It's actually a globe.
When you can make out
the continents and you can see the oceans and you can know
that's not the whole earth.
That's only a part of it that I recognize.
The other part's gotta be on the other side.
The moon's the same way.
Except the moon is tidally locked, so we only ever see one
side of the moon.
The earth is turning, the sun is turning, we can see them.
Everything that we know about everything only works if the earth is
a globe.
And so this I think is the one that frustrates me the
most, and it's the one which online I have the least patience
for, which is to say zero.
If someone pops up in my mentions and says, oh flat earth,
blah blah blah, they're blocked within a half a second.
I want nothing to do with anyone who is spouting this.
that stuff for the for the very reason that we we were
talking about in the Generations episode and the reason we're doing this
point this episode if you get to the point that you are
a believing completely insane trivially falsifiable things like the earth is flat,
you're no longer capable of discerning reality at all.
It it's effectively transmissible schizophrenia.
If I can feed you lies and I can fracture your mind
so that suddenly you can't tell real from fake, I've destroyed you.
you're still alive.
You might still be going to work, but as a human being,
you're a gibbering idiot.
You can be cajoled into doing anything at that point.
If you'll fall for that sort of lie, uh
you're you're lost.
And I I don't block to be mean, it's just I want
nothing to do with it.
And I'm s I'm severe about it online because I want to
get across that this is not a small matter.
It's not a matter of salvation.
It's not that if you have the wrong cosmology or the law
long wrong idea about the shape of the earth, you can't go
to heaven.
Obviously, there were people at some point that had no idea, they
didn't care.
Whatever. It's not salvific.
However, if you crack your head open, you're gonna let demons in.
If you start letting lies in like this stuff that's so trivially
falsified, it's a danger to your soul for the other reasons.
Cause some when you crack your head open, whether it's with DMT
or it's with stupid YouTube videos or stuff Or stuff like the
paranormies, eventually something evil is gonna say, Hey, this this is a
a waterless space, this is wide open, I'm gonna come here and
I'm gonna have a party.
That's the danger, and that's why I care because uh i can't
reason with someone who's beyond reason by definition that's that's tautological if
you will if you will reject plain facts and accept plain lies
i cannot have a conversation with you.
Maybe somebody else can.
I hope someone will try, but it's not going to be me.
it's all we can do to try to get these things across
to people who haven't yet lost their minds, and to try to
protect some people from going down the path of losing their minds.
Because that's that's what fundamentally happens.
You start making up these crazy stories, and they are crazy.
That's the reason we're talking about this right after last week's.
Because everyone says that last week's is crazy too.
When they get lumped together, people throw up their hands or either
like you said, either they believe everything or they deny everything.
They're independent facts or they're independent lies.
And when someone's lying to you, the the gate the goal is
always to to harm you.
Lies are always told to harm people, whether it's to steal or
just to deceive or to humiliate, or maybe just to soften them
up so that later on something worse can happen to them.
But it's never good for you.
It's why Cory and I are so adamant about the truth, even
even when it makes people really dislike us.
No one likes hearing the truth most of the time.
It's not popular to say something unpopular.
And these that's part of the trick is that these things like
flat earth are also unpopular.
So they say, look, it no one likes us either.
We must be right.
We must be edgy.
We must be in the vanguard of the truth because everyone thinks
we're insane.
Well, unfortunately sometimes it's true.
Some t some people need the padded room because they're so far
gone that you gotta bring them back forcibly.
You can't bring them back with reason.
I
think part of the problem when people discuss the supposed flat Earth
is they mix up
a few different types of narratives.
And so they'll take mythology, which figuratively or symbolically describes the earth
as being flat, and take that as a scientific treatise.
These are very different things.
If you're reading European mythology and it describes The earth is as
a disc and you have the world tree in the center, it's
not giving you a literal description of the physical world.
This is mythological.
And the same thing is true in various other mythologies as well.
There's no need to go into the details of those.
But you have these descriptions that are poetic, you have that in
the Greeks, or symbolic.
They're not meant to be taken as a literal description of the
actual physical shape of the earth.
Yes, historically there were some people who did literally believe that the
earth was flat.
They had r no reason not to believe that because they didn't
have evidence one way or the other.
Because in their daily experience, there wasn't really
I wouldn't say a way for them to test it because it's
very easy to test.
But there was nothing in their daily experience that would conclusively show
them no the earth is actually round.
It must be round.
You could explain it as being round or being flat, with what
say the average peasant saw in his daily life.
However, using only high school math, you can figure out not only
that the Earth is a sphere, it's actually an oblate spheroid, but
we'll say sphere because saying the other one sounds silly and it
takes too long.
But you can figure out that the Earth is a sphere and
you can not only figure out the shape, you can figure out
the circumference of the Earth.
It's not very hard to do.
And it was calculated many centuries ago, and there were also many
who believed that the Earth was, they believe correctly, the earth is
a sphere, Pythagoras being one, Aristotle being another, many medieval scholars
could list many names, but the Greek gentlemen, who actually calculated
the circumference of the earth, the first of which we know, was
Eratosthenes, and he was born in two seventy six BC.
So this was thousands of years ago, and he calculated the circumference
of the earth within two percent.
And he did that with nothing more than
a well a well, an obelisk, and some Greek dude that he
paid to walk eight hundred kilometers
and count his steps.
So what he did
was he measured the shadow in one location in Egypt, and then
measured a shadow in another location in Egypt at the same time.
Now if you do that, you can figure out the angle at
which the light is hitting the obelisk by the shadow it is
casting, and if you compare the angles, you can figure out very
easily using just again high school math
whether the surface is flat or round.
Because if it's flat, the shadows will be the same, because you
have one source of light, the sun, hitting these two
whatever they happen to be, he would use an obelisk or something
similar. You could do this with a stick if you were so
inclined. But the shadows will be the same.
You're dealing with the same angles, if they're the same height, it'll
be the same length, and that's the case if the earth is
flat. As it turns out, the shadow in the first location where
he was located in Alexandria, was significantly longer.
Because the earth is a sphere, and so the light is hitting
them at the same angle, but they are located in different positions
on the surface of a sphere.
And so the shadow cast is different.
I'll link a video in the show notes that will explain exactly
what he did.
It's from Carl Sagan.
You can say whatever you want about him, but the information is
accurate in the very short video on this.
And so he calculated the circumference of the earth, and as I
said, he was off by less than two percent.
This is not This is not something that is difficult to do.
This is not something that you couldn't go out and do right
now if you were so inclined.
This doesn't even take five hundred or thousand dollars worth of hardware,
which is what you'd have to do if you wanted to bounce
the laser off the retro reflector on the moon, still very doable,
more expensive.
This can be done with some sticks, some time, and a lot
of walking, and then a little bit of math.
We know that the Earth is a sphere.
If you've flown anywhere, you've seen that the Earth is a sphere.
You can tell when you're in a plane, the Earth is a
sphere, there's no doubt.
If you live near the ocean, you can tell the Earth is
a sphere because you can watch ships sail over the edge.
They're not sailing over the edge, they're not falling off the disk.
They're simply sailing over the horizon
because they are sailing far enough away that the curvature of the
earth hides them from your view.
The same thing happens if you're out in the ocean and you're
approaching or receding from an island, or if you or if you
have the misfortune of having wind turbines, windmills out in the water
where you are, you can see that you can see the top
of them in some places, and if they're farther away, then they
start to disappear beyond the horizon This is something that is very
easily verified in modern life.
There's no reason to believe that the earth is flat.
It just makes you sound like an insane person.
Of course, that's the point.
Because if you start to believe things that are insane, you start
to become untethered from reality itself.
You become untethered from the truth.
Do you Just because you have been lied to about a great
many things in life, and that is most certainly true, we've gone
over a number of some of the big ones and some small
ones. But just because you've been lied to about certain things in
life does not mean that you've been lied to about everything, particularly
something that you can go outside and see with your own eyes.
Go stand on a really tall mountain and you can see the
curvature. Or go stand next to the ocean or just a large
lake. This is something you can see and verify with your own
eyes
relatively easily.
I think one of the things that people have trouble with
is the sheer scale of space, including the Earth itself.
The Earth's diameter is about a little over seven thousand nine hundred
miles across, depending on where you measure it.
I think it's about seventy-nine twenty-six at the at the equator.
When you see videos from low Earth orbit, for example when Jeff
Bezos took his rocket up when he he did his launch, he
went up sixty-six miles.
Sixty-six miles is a long way to fall, but in terms of
a globe that's over 7900 miles across, he barely got off the
surface. And so when you do see videos from great heights, there's
there's a perceptible curve, but it's very small.
As Corey said, there are various examples you can see from the
ground, and it becomes clearer the higher you go.
But no matter how high humans go, up to the point of
you know, the space shuttle when we had one and the space
stations, they're all in low Earth orbit.
They're only a couple hundred miles up.
That's not very far at all.
If you're up two hundred and fifty miles and the planet is
seventy nine hundred miles across,
you're small in terms of distance relative to the immensity of the
planet beneath you.
Which is I think one of the things is tricky when people
see stuff from space.
One of the one of the things that will happen when you're
looking at video from space is that camera lenses themselves will impart
a degree of curvature.
And it's easy to misread the curvature from
a camera lens and mistake that for the curvature of a planet
because
it will it's swap.
You know, if if you see if the camera seems like it's
has shows a curved horizon and you pan across, it's actually possible
if it's a fisheye lens for the curvature to swap.
So the the it looked like the horizon was in one direction
and then it will curve in the other direction.
That means that it's a fisheye and it's not a neutral perspective
from the camera.
We don't need to speculate on whether or not the Earth is
a globe.
There's literally a satellite in orbit right now
at a high Earth orbit.
It's at 22,000 miles away.
So it's three times further away from Earth than the diameter of
Earth. That's more than enough distance to get some perspective.
It's called Himawari Nine, it's a Japanese satellite that they put up
in order to monitor weather patterns because in Japan, you know, they
get a lot of typhoons.
It matters to them a great deal to detect and predict if
there's a possibility of severe weather coming from the sea because they're
surrounded by it.
So there's a camera up there continuously transmitting the entire globe in
color. All the time.
You can find videos on on YouTube.
we'll link one of them.
I know if there's a there's a live feed somewhere, a almost
live feed showing the regular transmission of this data.
You can see the thing turning.
It's twenty two thousand miles away, looking back over its shoulder at
us. It's looking at the planet that God created for us.
So again, like this stuff is so trivially falsifiable that someone has
to believe that everything they're hearing is a lie in order to
believe any of what they tell you about this stuff.
And as I mentioned at the beginning, fundamentally there's an element of
mind control to shaking someone's confidence in reality, to to snatching them
away from what they know and substituting some other thing.
As I said, something Corey and I are sensitive to because this
podcast doesn't certainly intend to dislodge you from reality, but we intend
to carve out those places where what we perceive as reality has
been malformed, which again is it it's what the flat earth guys
are trying to do too.
It's potentially a noble cause, but you have to also be right.
It's not just enough to say I want to be a red
pill dispenser.
I want to tell everyone all the hard truths.
Well, whatever.
Tell the truth.
And if the truth is hard to swallow, that's maybe a separate
conversation. The truth shouldn't be hard to swallow if it is, there's
probably something else going on.
I want to read this quote.
It came up on 4chan about eight years ago on the subject
of John Oliver's show from Comedy Central.
You know, it's a 30-minute show where they'll do brief skits and
he talks about the news and everybody laughs.
This description of how that show is conducted, I think, is a
great microcosm of how some of this stuff plays out and how
our perceptions get twisted by just how information is coming into us.
So the post reads as follows The subject of John Oliver came
up when a colleague, a fellow psychologist, and I were discussing politics
a few months ago.
Although we were both in agreement regarding the general inanity of the
HBO show, my friend was surprised when I explained that the real
insidiousness of its unmistakably hypnotic structure and pacing.
I ended up pulling up an episode or two off YouTube to
show her what I meant.
All the segments I've ever seen from this show follow the same
repetitive format, present some argumentation and facts, quote unquote, for about ten
seconds, then quickly follow these up with a snarky quip, which themselves
overwhelmingly take the form of complete non sequitur or otherwise absurd metaphor,
before any rational processing of the preceding argument can take place in
the mind of the viewer.
Further telling is that the only beats or mental pauses in the
show's pace exist solely to highlight the approving laughter of the studio
audience. Repeat the same basic formula without variation 20 to 40 times
in a row, and you have one of the twelve to twenty
minute segments that form the backbone of the show.
The end effect is obviously not to deliver information, but rather to
literally teach the viewers on a subconscious level to mentally associate derisive
laughter with any person or opinion that is at odds with the
narrative's take on the chosen issue.
And it accomplishes this by maintaining a strict adherence to a roughly
20-second cycle in which a stimulus is presented and response is cued.
This is the sense in which the show is fundamentally hypnotic in
effect, even more so than its precursors in the genre, Daily Show,
Colbert, etc.
To my mind, Oliver's show is representative of the media's increasing mastery
of the methodologies of mass conditioning.
In fact, it is almost such a perfect technical accomplishment that I
would almost have to admire it on technical grounds, which moreover is
in the hands of the entirely wrong people.
I think that this exemplifies one aspect of what goes on when
you have guys like Benjamin and others who they're fundamentally just trying
to get attention, they want to make people laugh, fine.
It's one thing if it's entertainment, but if entertainment becomes the backbone
of your belief system, your toast.
That's not that's not how you approach reality.
It's not how you approach anything important.
And so
when
things that get called conspiracy theories all get labeled the same and
they all get packaged together, the ridicule element of the Oliver show
comes into play.
Because the same guys who are telling you that the Earth is
flat and we didn't land on the moon and nukes aren't real,
a lot of those are also telling you what we told you
last week.
And naturally, if you discredit any of those claims, you know that
the person is full of crap.
And so if the person is full of crap, why would you
want to believe one of their harebrain claims, even if it happens
to be true?
You're not ever going to pay attention because once you discredit one
of them, you're out.
Don't Don't listen to liars.
Don't listen to crazy people.
I completely advocate that.
Stay away from people who are selling insane things.
It's bad for you.
It's bad for your soul.
It's bad for your mind.
Part of the reason that these things are permitted to exist in
public discourse is that it creates this tar pit where guys who
are willing to listen to things like last week's episode
can't differentiate between true revisionist history that says, you know what, here's
some very fundamental facts that undermine the whole thing.
That looks to the the same to their mind as when someone
comes along and say, Did you know there was a camera recording
of a nuke explosion?
And cameras are nuke proof, so that means that nukes aren't real.
Or they say that Earth is flat and I can prove it,
and here's this diagram, or here's some math that you can't understand.
And if they're strident enough or they seem smart enough, they're never
very smart.
That's another thing.
Corey and I watched a bunch of videos from these people in
preparation for this.
They're all dumb.
Oh, and Benjamin's not dumb, but he's not he doesn't he don't
I don't think he believes this stuff.
I think he's just a straight up liar.
I think he knows that he's deceiving people.
It doesn't matter because everyone else down downstream, they're dumb.
they're they're not intelligent men.
Again, I don't want to be cruel by saying that, but some
some men are not equipped to handle orbital mechanics.
If your first instinct would not be to say, I wonder what
the return trajectory was from an Earth orbit versus a moon orbit,
maybe you're just not equipped to tackle these subjects, and that's fine.
But don't let someone come along and give you a bad explanation
for why you should disbelieve an obvious thing.
And so by permitting insane, clearly falsifiable
claims to exist alongside
things like last week's episode like the Holocaust, which is it's also
an insane claim.
It's also plainly falsifiable, except it's in the opposite direction because what
we were told was the thing that was manufactured.
Whereas they want you to believe the same thing is true of
things that are clearly provable.
And that's why fundamentally this all comes down to individuals weighing evidence.
We described you last week as jurists.
We're all jurists every day.
We're the finders of fact with whatever's coming in.
We shouldn't just be neutrally absorbing everything and say, okay, I believe
the next thing I read.
Okay, that's fine.
It's particularly pernicious because anyone who's an expert in a field, whenever
they read something in the newspaper, is always going to tear his
hair out.
Because if you know something about the field, you know how poorly
written the article is.
And yet you go on to read the very next article and
just sagely scrub your your chin and say, yes, I'm better informed
now that I've read about this.
They get everything wrong.
Reporters are not bright people, and they're also deceptive, and they're entertainers.
They're there to sell a narrative and to sell advertising.
So
don't let someone create an environment where you can get swept up
by someone saying, I can't believe anything, it's all lies.
Just as you shouldn't be falling for everything that the newspaper prints
or anything else.
I don't want to say be skeptical all the time because that
can lead to the sort of red pill overdose that causes you
to lose your mind, but just make sure it adds up and
be inquisitive.
It's okay to say I need to see more proof before I'm
gonna buy that.
That's a perfectly reasonable thing.
But if someone who's always credible comes to you with something, it
should have more weight than someone who's a comedian.
It's two fundamentally different purposes, and you should receive what they're telling
you differently.
Both in the last episode and in this episode,
in
a very
core sense what we are dealing with is propaganda.
In the last episode we dealt with propaganda we could call it
positive propaganda, the creation of a lie.
In this episode we're dealing with negative propaganda, which is the destruction
of the truth.
Both of course result in the destruction of the truth ultimately, but
coming at it from different angles.
This is Marxist propaganda.
Now, it's not to say that all of those who are engaged
in this are willing or witting Marxists, of course they're not.
Many of them are just idiots.
Some of them are malicious, many of them are
just dumb.
But the end result is the same.
The baby boomer generation was the perfect Marxist generation in the sense
that they were completely demoralized, so propagandized that they basically lost the
ability to hear the truth if it runs counter to what they
were told.
That's of course the goal of Marxist propaganda.
However, or I guess I should say that was the goal, now
there is
a modified version of that goal.
The goal of the current generation of propaganda is to deprive you
of the ability to process the truth.
It's not simply to instill lies in you, because if you instill
lies in someone and make them basically impregnable when it comes to
the truth, you've accomplished one sort of thing.
But if you make it so that a person cannot even process
the truth at all, you've accomplished something different, and if you are
a malicious actor something greater.
If you start to uncritically believe all sorts of insane claims, you
lose the ability to process the truth.
You become untethered from reality.
But you can accomplish the same by not believing anything.
So again, as was mentioned earlier, you can become a nihilist, believe
in nothing, or you can become so wildly credulous that you assess
nothing, just everything is true and I accept whatever I'm told.
Neither outcome is good.
Neither outcome is something a Christian should permit himself to become.
As a Christian, you are told to test the spirits.
That doesn't just mean claims about religion.
You should test every truth claim insofar as God has made you
capable. If God is not made you capable, then you need other
men in your life whom you can trust, who can assess those
claims for you.
It's why it's vitally important to know whom you can trust and
whom you cannot trust.
If you can trust a man and he understands the subject, then
you can trust the conclusions
he he draws out of that subject the conclusions that he shares
with you.
And that is
part of what all of us need to do when it comes
to these subjects, because there is no single man who can assess
all of these claims and understand all of them?
By that I don't mean the claims in this episode or the
claims in this podcast series or the podcast more generally.
I mean all of the claims in the modern world because all
of us are specialized to some degree in what we do, and
you cannot specialize in everything.
There was an era in the past when the wealth of knowledge,
the sum total of the store of human knowledge, was small enough
that one man could in fact master all of it in his
lifetime. It would take a particularly gifted man, of course, but it
was still possible.
That is absolutely not possible today.
The average man would struggle to master a single field today, given
the store of knowledge that we have.
And so there is no way that anyone can tell you reasonably
that you must go out and become an expert in everything and
assess everything.
That's not what we're saying.
That would be to drive you into sheer insanity because it would
be or probably despair because it would be absolutely unattainable.
What you have to be able to do is assess the reliability,
and the truthfulness of other men, so you know whom to trust,
and also use what God gave you to assess claims.
Now, as with the medieval peasant and the shape of the earth,
there are going to be things that do not matter to you.
You don't have to worry about those if they don't involve you,
if they don't matter to you.
But when there are claims that are advanced that make claims about
God's creation, that make claims about Christianity, that make claims about your
nation, your history, your people, you have to be able to assess
those to some degree.
Some of the claims that you need to assess are going to
be relatively simple.
As I mentioned with the shape of the earth, you could literally
go out and with high school math figure out the shape of
the earth if you just have a bit of patience and don't
mind some walking.
Those are the sorts of things where it's just inexcusable to believe
what is false, because what is true is so readily verifiable.
If it is a more esoteric claim, and you don't have reason
to believe one way or the other, then don't believe one way
or the other.
You don't have to take a stand on every single issue, despite
what social media has led some people to believe.
If you don't know about a subject, you don't have to have
an opinion on it.
I don't have any opinions when it comes to quantum chemistry.
I don't know enough about the field to have any opinions, and
so if you asked me a question about something in that field,
I would say I don't know.
And that is a fine thing to say.
In fact, the men you should never trust are the men who
never say I don't know.
Because those men are definitely lying to you, because every man
has to at times say, I do not know, because there will
be things you do not know.
You're not an expert in everything.
I'm not an expert in everything.
Woe isn't an expert in everything.
No man is an expert in everything.
And so an honest man must be willing and able to say
I do not know.
No
The claims we're talking about here, and the reason we picked these
ones, these are the sorts of claims that are designed to make
you doubt reality itself, to drive you into insanity, to make you
incapable of assessing the truth.
And that's why it's important to get these ones right.
You don't need to know everything about the moon landing.
You're not a seven-year-old learning about diamonds.
You don't have to memorize every single fact.
But the core reality it is vital to get that right.
We did go to the moon.
We did land on the moon.
We left evidence of the landing on the moon.
Not litter.
We may have left a little of that as well, but we
left retro reflectors.
We left proof.
We have proof of nuclear weapons.
We have video, photos, eyewitness accounts, we have extensive proof that they're
real. We know the shape of the Earth, because again you can
calculate it, and we have satellites in orbit feeding real time images
of the surface of the earth.
I will link the one that was mentioned in the show notes.
And so as Christians, these sorts of claims, we need to get
them right.
Because if you lose the ability to assess truth in one area,
that will spread to others.
You will lose the ability to assess truth in other parts of
your life.
And Christianity, fundamentally, at its core, is a truth claim.
Because the truth claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is God.
Jesus Christ died on the cross.
Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitute for you.
And if you have faith in that,
in those facts, in those statements of truth, then you will be
saved. Now, of course, I'm not saying that you just have to
know only the history.
I'm not making that theological claim.
Yes, I recognize that it is notitia, ascensus, and fiducia, you must
know the truth, assent to the truth, and trust in the truth.
is the trust, it is the faith that saves.
But Christianity fundamentally is a truth claim.
And again, I mentioned the transcendentals in the last episode, I won't
go over that again, but truth matters, because truth is the nature
of God.
And so it may seem like this episode we went over some
things that are perhaps a little crazy, which they are, or you
may think, why does this matter?
And I've just gone over why it matters.
Because as Christians, the truth matters.
Because God is truth, and our religion is the truth.
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all
truth.