Listener Feedback 001

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Woe. Today we're recording episode twenty-seven of Stone Choir. We realized last week that we had hit the twenty-sixth week mark, which if you're a math PhD will realize that means we've been doing this for half a year at this point. Uh we didn't miss a couple weeks when my fancy new microphone died on me early on. So it's slightly past the six months mark. But since we're right at about a half a year into this, we thought that we would take a pause for one week and do kind of a listener appreciation episode. So we're gonna spend some time today on the reader listener mailbag going through some emails and some messages we've received, talk about some

1:17 of the feedback that we've gotten, uh then in the towards the end we'll talk a little bit about some of the listener stats and just kinda give you an idea about what's going on behind the scenes and uh how you can help spread the word. So to begin, uh we're just going to start right in with uh some of the questions. These you know, these have been piling up for six months, so some of these are a little older. Uh to everyone who sent feedback, you know, DMs, emails, whatever, we do really appreciate it. All the kind notes we've gotten. We're not gonna read those obviously, but we get regular messages from people all over the world, uh, from probably about half Lutherans, half non-Lutherans, all very supportive and encouraging.

1:54 And I we truly appreciate appreciate that. Uh Corey and I have been under a lot of stress from having tackled these issues. Uh our own church despises the fact that we are speaking publicly about these things and we've been punished for it. We've been censored for it. and so having people say, you know why you're doing good work, please keep it up means a lot because you don't have any reason to say that apart from the fact that you think it's true. So thank you for encouraging us and helping to keep us in the fight. So again, we'll uh we'll dive into some one of the the very first message I think we have recorded from way back in the the annals of history. So for the first question from listeners, we have a question about anonymity

2:35 and pseudonymity in light of what we said about the genealogy of ideas, which is to say how do you test the genealogy of an idea if it comes from someone who is anonymous or pseudonymous? And that is a good question. Ultimately how you would do that is you look at the source of the ideas that person is presenting because he is not the ultimate source Source. No man to whom you speak is going to be the ultimate source on issues like this. He could be the ultimate source on a piece of fiction or something like that, some idea that can be intrinsic or specific to an individual. But that's not going to be the case with the sort of issues we're tackling on this podcast because the issues we're tackling are

3:25 are are bigger issues, they're grander issues. And so you're always going to be able to trace those back to scripture, to natural revelation, to logic, philosophy, things like that. And if you trace it back to those sources, that's what we're saying you need to test. That's the real genealogy of that idea because it comes through the man who said it to you, but he got it from somewhere. And so even if that man happens to be pseudonymous or even anonymous, look at the source of his ideas. On this podcast, I'm not anonymous or pseudonymous, woe is pseudonymous, but we couch everything we say, we ground everything we say in scripture and in creation. And so that is the actual source. We are going back to God as the source of what we're

4:18 saying. And so even if you are dealing with pseudonymity, you can still look at those ultimate sources and trace that genealogy of ideas. And we did an entire episode on pseudonymity, why I am pseudonymous for now, although the LCMS has doxxed me and so they have uh it seems like they've kinda backed off on their initial plan to feed my information to Antifa when the Makaira Action Blog was set up. That was certainly the plan. And that's what was done to Corey. Uh I have a feeling that they got some more lawyers involved and they've kind of gotten cold feet about risking the legal ramifications of doing that to a layman. Uh It's an important question. It's a valid question. You know, me in particular.

4:59 I'm pseudonymous. What am I hiding? That's so we did the episode on that, and then the episode uh later on on why we're Lutheran and why we're doing this podcast in general. It is important to know to whom you're speaking. Um you know, one of the one of the things that that comes up online frequently on Twitter in particular is the early life check. You know, you hear somebody saying something, you know, maybe they were a trusted source in the news or some sort of media format, and suddenly out of nowhere they say something completely horrific and anti-Christian. you're like, where did this come from? And you look up their early life, and guess what? Their grandparents came from Russia and Poland, and they were Jews, they

5:41 were Jewish refugees. Every single time is a meme on Twitter because it seems like virtually every time some random person says something horrific, it turns out that their grandparents were Jewish. At some point that pattern becomes relevant. And so, you know, the question, what am I hiding, is completely relevant. What am I hiding? I'm hiding my my home address, my physical address, because I've had you know five years, six years now of people making physical threats against me, saying that they would kill me, that they would do harm to my family. You know, I'm not afraid, but you know, when someone says they want to do horrible things to you, you you don't completely ignore that. You know, it's I'm positioned in such a fashion that I'm

6:26 not worried about my physical safety much, but that doesn't mean that there's zero threat. So So the flip side of the of the genealogy thing is that back to what Corey said, I'm not the origin of anything I say. I mean I'm the I'm the vessel, I'm the mouthpiece conveying it to you. But the fact that I have no name, I have no credentials, I have nothing upon which to base any perceived credibility that you might assign to me. So you have no reason to listen to me whatsoever. I'm not going to say I've got this degree or I went to this place or I do this thing professionally and so I'm an expert and you should listen. It's a complete opposite of when for example a pastor says, Hey, I have an M div, I have a collar, it's very important

7:11 you listen to me because God is speaking when I speak to you. I am binding your conscience by what I say. By being pseudonymous, I completely forego even the possibility of being able to do any of that. All I can do is try to make reasoned arguments. And reason is something that shows up particularly in the New Testament when Paul was going to the to the Jews and to the Gentiles and arguing with them, he frequently used reason, the Jews in particular, it says that he reasoned from scripture. And in that case it was the scripture was the Tanakh. It was the what we have today is the thirty nine books of the Old Testament. Those were the scriptures from which Paul reasoned with the Jews of that day to say, hey, all these prophecies, all these things, Jesus

7:54 fulfilled them, Jesus' life was the embodiment of these things, therefore he is the Christ who is promised, the Messiah. He used reason. Now, you know, God was with him, he wasn't going to speak falsely. Nevertheless, many of the things that Paul said when he was preaching and speaking didn't need to be direct divine revelation because Scripture was the divine revelation that he was using. So when he made a logical argument from Scripture, it wasn't by his own authority that he was preaching, it was by the authority of the word of God. Now, I'm not saying that to compare what we are doing here to Paul preaching. This isn't preaching. This is a podcast. We're just we're talking about the Bible.

8:35 But ultimately what we're talking about is what God has given to all of us, to the whole world. The Christian church in particular values scripture. We value the word of God. And so, as Corey said, the arguments that we make should always be rooted in scriptural truth, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually derived directly from scripture. That's something that's come up a couple times recently that I think is worth pointing out explicitly. You can make claims that aren't in scripture that are true. I I think one of the one of the hermeneutics that Lutherans bring to a lot of questions that can be valuable, but it's also becomes kind of a hamstring when it's not understood correctly.

9:21 Is the idea that what we perceive as the law of God is always either, you know, it's a command or a promise. So if there's not a command from God or a promise from God, it's in a different category. And the problem is that a lot of these things that Corey and I point to as natural revelation. By that I mean facts, scientific facts, like you you you have ancestors, they came from a place, they have a genealogy, you know, they have actual genes going back in time. Their properties attendant to that. That's you know revelation is is kind of a fancy way just saying it's an obvious truth. It's in reality. You don't need the Bible to tell you everything is true. You need the Bible to reveal the things that you can't derive

10:06 from a truthful observation of creation. So you know, one of the recent criticisms that came up against Stone Choir, uh thankfully, you know, uh one of our opponents went on issues et cetera and and devoted an hour to trying to debunk us and it was it was the best hour long advertisement we could have possibly hoped for because we sounded completely sane and reasonable and their arguments were just there were no arguments. It was just kind of hysteria. But one of the things that they tried to claim was that we were using things like Acts 1726, which talks about the dwelling places of men and the boundaries thereof, or Revelation seven nine, where the nations, you know, the various races appear before the throne.

10:51 They called those proof texts when we use them as though we were trying to impose something by saying, Well, acts says that there are borders and Revelation says that there are races. Therefore we as men are trying to impose these things. Those aren't proof texts. The reason that there's not a lot of scripture assigned to those topics is not that they're not real. They were just asides mentioning something that's obvious. Yeah, those are done. There are boundaries and dwelling places of man. And God says, I take credit for those. All of the nations, all of the races of men are represented in heaven, but for the throne of God. God said it's already done in eternity. So there's nothing for us on earth to do to affect that.

11:38 We're simply pointing to that because it's an aside in scripture that simply recognizes reality. So there's no prescription there from God to say you must do this. And we don't point to those things to make that case. We're just saying it's done. It's already there. You know, it's the same as you know, if you listened to us last week and if you read any of Job when God was responding to Job, one of the points that he made was that you know the glory of the horse's mane testifies to my glory. So if I tell you that a horse's mane is something beautiful and that God did it, am I making some sort of that a command or promise from God? No, I'm just saying this is beautiful, it's a part of creation.

12:16 God did it. And by the way, God also specifically points to this thing. There are other things that aren't listed in in that monologue from God in Job that equally testify to his glory. You know, there are things that were unknown at that time and mention some of the stars, some of the constellations. There's stuff further out in space and no one could see with the naked eye then, so God wouldn't have mentioned it. When we see them now, they testify to God's glory just as those things that are mentioned. So natural revelation Revelation is a part of God's revelation. It's not salvific, but it does proclaim God's glory. And so when we point to those things, it's not a denial of Christ. It's saying, look how big and amazing God is, and he still

12:59 cares about us. So that that gets back to, you know, where's this stuff coming from? It's not coming from Cory or me. We look at the Bible and we point to things that in many cases have been neglected for a while. In the case of the issues around race, they never really mattered because all the races were naturally separated according to the boundaries of their dwelling places. And it was only in the last couple centuries that mass movement of human beings and recently the artificial mass movement of human beings caused them to be dislocated and slammed together as neighbors where it never occurred in human history. So we are now confronting things that no Christians have ever faced before. Yeah, you might have port cities where there was a smattering

13:41 of travel or maybe some contact, but that was a very specialized thing in a local particular place. And frankly, a lot of th those sorts of cities tended to be hotbeds of some of the worst idolatry, because as people were coming from afar, they're bringing their gods with them. Those cities tended to become more pagan. And that's something that's preserved to this day as well. You know, the big poor cities tend to be raunchy. They send they tend not to be great places. That's because it's hard to preserve a homogeneous Christian culture when you have all these foreign influences. So yes, we're talking about some things that the Christian church has not talked about much because it didn't have to.

14:20 Now that doesn't mean that we're necessarily right because you know we're not we're not inventing new theology. We're just taking what God has always said and applying it to the new problems today, which is I think the basis of all theology ultimately. You also touched on there an issue that comes up constantly, and that is what exactly is meant by sola scriptura. And I did a video on this at some point in the past, we've linked it previously in the show notes. Sola scriptura is in the ablative, which I will continue to say that until people get tired of hearing the word ablative, but it means by scripture alone. And what it means is that doctrine is determined by scripture alone. It does not mean that all truth flows from scripture alone.

15:15 That is an abuse of sola scriptura, and there are those who make that argument today that's not the case. Because as we keep pointing out, God appeals to creation, creation declares the glory of God, creation has truth content. There is such a thing as natural revelation, and so you don't have to look to Scripture for all truth. Scripture alone reveals the gospel, because nature doesn't reveal the gospel. The natural world does not tell you that Christ died for you, atoned for your sins, was a substitute for you. There's nowhere to find that in creation. But creation can tell you a lot of other things, and so it is perfectly fine to look to creation for the truth content that God has placed there.

16:03 And so it is important to bear in mind that sola scriptura means that doctrine is determined by scripture alone, not that all truth comes from Scripture alone. And so the second question is about the common refrain of one race, the human race, and the issue of intermarriage, which convenient timing since that just blew up on Twitter with a tweet that I made on Friday. But the issue of one race, the human race, is that it is a conflating of terms or really senses of one term here, because the term race can apply to humanity generally because we are all of the race of Adam. We're actually all of the race of Noah, because Noah is the patriarch of all living, being the father of the three men who stepped off the Ark and went on to have children.

17:02 However, there's also a race of Japheth, a race of Ham, a race of Shem. And so you can use the term race to mean these smaller groups or the larger group, and those who argue for one race, the human race, are using it maliciously. They are doing it in an attempt to erase these actual real distinctions between and among the races of men by appealing to the fact that we are all descended from Adam. Yes, we're all descended from Adam, but that's not the final word of truth on these matters. Because if you're German, you are in fact very different from someone from Uganda. Yes, you are both sons of Adam, but you have differentiated over a long course of years, centuries, millennia, and so you are distinct.

17:58 And so it is more meaningful to speak of the race of Ashkenaz, which would be the Germanic or the German peoples, depending on how you interpret that history there, or the race of the various sons of Ham, Egypt, descended from Egypt, one of the ones that's easy to remember. We have to be careful when we use these terms and when the opponents use these terms, because they are used to deceive. You can use a term that is an accurate term that is a meaningful term, but you can use it in a deceptive way. And when someone tries to argue that there's one race, the human race, well they're saying something that is trivially true, but it is also false because in context it is used to mislead. And so it is more meaningful again to speak of the individual

18:52 races that have come to exist over a course of time due to differentiation, because that is how God designed it. We're not talking about speciation, we're not talking about neo-Darwinian evolution or modern synthesis, whatever particular arguments you're using, whatever modern formulation of Darwinian theory, because it's due to a loss of information over time that you have these races. It's not due to mutation and then selection against the mutation, because that's a creation of new information, and there is no proof of that. It's logically impossible, but that's a more complicated argument for another time. Due to a loss of information over millennia we have the different races instead of the one race that you had when Adam

19:44 and Eve were in the garden. But of course, the different races already existed to some degree on the ark, because some of that genetic difference comes from the wives of Noah's sons. And we can see this in the various DNA, in the various groups of human beings, the three great groupings, being of course Europeans, Asians and Africans essentially. Because you have the Neanderthal DNA in Europeans, you have Denisovin in Asian populations, and you have the so-called ghost DNA in the African populations. That's just DNA from the wives of Noah's sons. And to tie the genealogy of man to the genealogy of ideas, everybody understood this until about fifty years ago. It's only within the last well closer to today than even fifty

20:34 years ago that suddenly everyone forgot that human beings are different, that there are different groups of people from different places cases and that that is consequential. It never had to be discussed much among theologians because it was so blindingly obvious that no one it was never a controverted statement. It to so for someone today to say, well, in the sixteen hundreds they didn't talk about race, well, that's arguing that a fish doesn't talk about water. When something is so pervasive, so a fundamental part of existence that it doesn't bear discussion, it's only when that fundamental part of existence falls under attack, under existential threat, from a hostile alien force, that it requires a defense.

21:22 So, yes, we are saying things that haven't been said to before. And yes, that should always concern anyone. You shouldn't be hearing new arguments in theology, with the exception of an acknowledgement that Satan gets a vote. Satan doesn't sit on his laurels. You know, the fight the Luther and the other reformers had in the 16th century against Rome's false teachings about how we are saved. Satan had been doing pretty well at that point, and then he got his teeth kicked in. He lost a lot of ground on the soteriological battle. Basically, all Protestant doctrine since then has more or less rested on those laurels and said, okay, we got that soteriological problem solved. We're done. We're good.

22:11 We know how we're saved. We're gonna lock that in for all time. And as the centuries have passed, men have gotten dumber and dumber and less able to recognize that Satan doesn't sleep, and Satan's not stupid. He's not gonna make the same attack again when there's a new attack vector. And so in the post-Enlightenment world, as all of these egalitarian thoughts about humanity have become so pervasive that they shifted from being niche philosophical arguments among the intelligentsia to today they're seen as moral platitudes that if you defy them you'll be excommunicated. That was a shift in theology that happened without anyone f lifting a finger. There was no fight. The fact that you went from the 16th century to the 21st

23:01 century with fundamental paradigm shifts about how we look at our relationship to God and our relationship to each other there should have been a fight. We should have fought all along. And there were some men who did fight against the Enlightenment, but they lost. And part of that was that one of the key elements of the Enlightenment was democracy, was that everyone gets a vote, everyone gets a voice. And so when everyone can chime in and say, Oh well I think, oh well here's my opinion, oh well here's what I want to do, suddenly suddenly the men who had been fighting over these things, some well, some poorly, like when I say intelligentsia, that is not flattering coming from my lips. I not a fan of having a brain trust sorting things out

23:45 for everyone else. On the other hand, everyone else is even worse at it. So whether we're talking about professors or we're talking about pastors or theologians, we need some of the brightest men dealing with the subjects, and we need them to be faithful to scripture. They don't need to do anything new if they're honest about the facts in front of them and they're honest about scripture. And so this shift along today, you know, race is one of the primary things that's being attacked. The reason we devoted those episodes and the election episode before that, and the Christian nationalism episode before that, it's really a seven-part series with those those together specifically because Satan knows what he's doing.

24:25 As he's continued to move the pieces around the board, race is now the battleground. And it's one that virtually no Protestant theologians are equipped for. And that is increasingly a problem. Uh, just in the last week online, a bunch of the reform guys have been fighting out the definition of Christian nationalism. And on kind of the leftward side, you know, they're not very left, but like within that relative small sphere, the guys who are further left are calling the guys to their right racists for talking about Christian nationalism. And what are the guys on the on the right side of that sphere doing. They're saying, no, no, we're not not racist. Christian nationalism has nothing to do with race.

25:06 It has nothing to do with nations. They're basically civnats with Jesus. And that's a disaster. The idea that there can be magic soil, that when you move to a place, you just magically become something new, even if it's completely alien to everything in your past. That's trannyism. That's saying I used to be African, but now I live in Detroit and so I'm an American. That's the same as saying I identify as a woman, even though I was born a man. It doesn't work. Now there are different aspects of human and biology that are going on here, but fundamentally when when you say that one thing can just become something else because it decides to be, or because it agrees with an idea. You know, that the US is a proposition nation.

25:50 That was invented, by the way, in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. It was invented by, surprise, Jewish immigrants. Yeah, the melting pot. That was from a Jew named uh Zwangli. I can't remember his name. I can remember his face. he's hideous looking human being. But what he said in his play in about nineteen oh eight called something about the melting pot, was specifically to convince the blood citizens of America that having this continuous stream of aliens from Europe coming in had to be good because look at all the people who came here before that were also different. Well, Germans are different from the English in some ways, but not a lot. the Jewish immigrants who came to this country on other hand were

26:38 much more different. They had some European blood, but they were also Jewish by culture, Jewish by religion, Jewish by language, and they brought something that was alien to this nation, and it became very important for them to dilute and destroy the notion that American was anything other than I want to live in America. And so now 120 years later we have people who are trying to describe civ Christian nationalism in the same terms. They're not understanding that they're part of a a PSYOP that began many generations before they were born. And so it's one of the reasons that the almost the first qu episode we did of Stone Choir was about Christian nationalism, specifically to make the case for the nationalist part of that.

27:24 national, natal, same root. The root is the Proto Indo European word for gene. It's literally descent. So you can't have Christian nationalism if you deny the race as a part of a nation. And you know, we have discussions about where's that in the Bible? Well, I guess if you ignore all of the genealogies in the Bible and you ignore all the parts of the Bible that specifically refer to nation, sure, maybe you could say race isn't there. But it's the same thing. It's the same thing. And the fact that white can be called a race and English can be called a race doesn't mean that at most one of them exists and the other can't. You know, we t we talked about in the Christian nationalism episode. There's a there's a winnowing process.

28:10 It was literally the definition in the Webster eighteen twenty eight, saying, you know, the the race of Adam, the race of Noah, the race of Charlemagne, on down as you winnow through the passage of time, but it's always lineal descent. A nation always has a root. You know, Jesus was the rod of Jesse's stem. It came down through the lineage that was it was patrilineal. It was a bloodline. That was important to God. And it wasn't just the one thing about Jesus. That's not the only time that's that that's ever mattered. It was the most important bloodline, but it wasn't the only one. They're all bloodlines. Yeah, there were seventy nations in the Old Testament. There are seventy nations to whom the disciples are sent out in

28:51 the New Testament. That's how God works. We don't get a vote. And so for us to come along today and say one race, the human race, we're all the same. We didn't get that from scripture. We got that from the 60s and from the 90s and from today. We're not talking about hip parade radio. We're talking about theology being evolved in real time before our eyes. That is a big problem, which is why Corey and I started this podcast to talk about this stuff that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable be to be confronted with on one hand, someone saying something that seems like it might have some foundations, and on the other hand, you have the whole world saying that's a lie and it's evil.

29:29 Well, when we talk about the genealogy of ideas, it's because a hundred years ago no one thought anything different than we're saying today, apart from the few people who had begun to adopt the melting pot idea that was inserted by a foreign element into the American psyche. That was enemy action. That was destructive. And today it's so pervasive that we have to battle against seemingly the the the immune system of the of our own people. But it's not an innate immunity. It's a it's an artificially induced immunity to something true. So that's why we jump over some periods of history specifically to say if this is true, it will always have been true. And when you look back one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years,

30:13 many of these claims fall apart. That's why. The play you mentioned, the melting pot, gets even better if you look at the materials that were used to promote it. It it's basically a vision of hell. And it also gets better when you know his first name because his first name was Israel and his name was Israel Dzongvil. So thank you. Yep. No, it's it's worth looking up. look it up on Wikipedia and you know it's that's that is inserted today into the eternal record of the United States of America. And we're told that it was always there. it wasn't always there. My ancestors who came here in sixteen eighteen, sixteen twenty, sixteen thirty, they'd never heard of that. They left England and they landed in England, and they were English.

30:58 Nothing changed. There was no melting pot for them. And yes, some Dutch came and a few Swedes came and I'm descended from them too. That was what we were sold as being the melting pot, but those were all Western European Christians as a fundamentally different type of thing than complete aliens by culture, by religion, and by descent. And so yes, there are subdivisions, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that there's a real thing behind it. And so the other part of this question was the issue of of interracial marriage and I think I addressed that well enough in the the podcast episode that I put out recently so I think I'll just link that in the the show notes. But just the very quick summary of it is that per se

31:49 not a sin, not explicitly banned by Scripture as a sin in itself. However, in context, often a sin due to wrong motives and things like that. The what I'll link in the show notes will go over it in greater depth, but that is the the short version of why Christians should generally avoid interracial marriage. And yes, of course, there are the health reasons and other things like that, but those are mentioned in what I will be linking in the show notes. And it's also effectively brand new and it's heavily propagandized only in the last ten, fifteen years. I mean, a lot of it's only in the last five years. If you go look at TV shows even fifteen years ago, the composition of the couples and the advertisements and everything else is radically

32:37 different than it is today. And that was propaganda too. So they were pushing the interracial mixing propaganda then, but it wasn't so overt. Today, it's hard to find any sort of advertisement for anything, including our own churches, where it's not a black man and a white woman together. It's usually that coupling. In reality, that virtually never happens. it's incredibly rare. And yet if you look at the advertisements and you look at TV and movies, you would think it was universal. And so that is the reason that that people are so vehement about defending something that it's alien. I mean when when we were on issues et cetera hosted, I mean we we you know they didn't have our permission or anything,

33:20 not that they needed, but when they played our clips, most of the responses were hysteria about interracial marriage, even though it didn't have anything to do with the clips. They devoted an hour mostly to defending interracial marriage as as what? As Christian theology? Corey makes the case in the episode, but you know, in the in the podcast he's gonna link. Suffice it to say if something basically didn't exist fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and still barely exists today, maybe you can have a discussion about whether or not it's a good idea without somebody saying you're going to hell. And the fact that it's it's the paramount moral issue in these people's hearts and minds makes you wonder what God they're serving.

34:03 Because there's not a God that existed a hundred years ago. If the issue didn't exist, if the so called sin didn't exist, there was no fight. the this principle of faith that's so deeply held by these people that they lose their minds. You know, Corey blasphemed on Friday. He blasphemes virtually every Friday before he logs off Twitter. That's not blasphemy against God. It's blasphemy against the idols of this day. He deliberately posts something carefully worded and antagonistic to get people riled up and everyone bites the bait every time because those are the idols of this day. They're not God. They're not from God. What he's saying is consistent with scripture. It's carefully worded, and it's always bait.

34:44 And if you people were a little bit smarter and you took you took seriously that Corey is intelligent, that he's good with words, maybe you wouldn't get so riled up when he said something you didn't understand. Because instead of continuously attacking this obvious bait. Like I see it and I just I shake my head. I know it's gonna just be a a firestorm and it's unpleasant. You know, we don't we don't censor each other's timelines. I wouldn't post some of the things he posts and he probably wouldn't say some of the things that I say. Doesn't matter. It's not criticism. It's just that there are different approaches to thing. But what what you cannot doubt is that when he posts something about interracial marriage as a subject that is largely alien to all

35:25 of human existence. It's happened, but it's incredibly rare. It's infrequent. It's never been considered a moral matter. And everyone loses their minds. You know, it's we're we're told when Benghazi happened. We were told that it was because there was some video that was made, a movie was made that said something blasphemous about Mohammed or whatever. And so everyone rioted and everyone murdered. That's effectively the sort of response that saying things like interracial marriage is generally a bad idea today elicits among most Christians. That's not normal. That's a response to a blasphemy against a God that even if Corey were wrong about what he says about interracial marriage, I believe

36:05 he's correct. I think that his explanation is perfectly sound. Even if he were wrong, the degree and the vehemence of the response against it is so far out of proportion that you have to ask yourself, what is the animating spirit behind the people who are so mad about this? Why this one subject? And the answer is very simple. It's on your television, it's on your newsfeed when you see ads over and over again showing mixed couples, you see black people continuously. Most people think that the blacks are thirty or forty percent of the US population just based on what they see in ads. It's about twelve percent, twelve to thirteen percent. They've always been in the 10 to 12, 13% range. That's been consistent as the US has grown.

36:48 They've never been more than that. But when you look at ads, you would think it was seventy-five percent of people because you can't have a TV show without one anymore. Now I I I I've mentioned previously I watched The Wire three or four times. I like it. It's virtually all black characters. I don't hate black people, but don't pretend that there's something that they're not. The reason I like the wire is that it was realistic. There were some smart ones, there were some dumb ones, there are some violent ones, there were some decent ones. It was an honest portrayal of the human condition in their community. That's not what you get on TV when it's always the black science guy or the black computer guy.

37:26 On the IQ episode we demonstrated that that's preposterous. It virtually never happens. And the fact that you know a guy doesn't disprove the fact that there are only one point two million African Americans with IQs above 115. That's not very smart. Like if you're one fifteen, great, God bless you. You can do uh pretty much anything that's useful in this world. it's still not very smart. He's not nearly smart enough to do the sorts of things that are portrayed in the media all the time. the the expert that knows Latin and Greek off the top of her head and she's a computer hacker and she's really good, you know, with medicine, it's always the black girl who's twenty five years old. That's gaslighting.

38:05 That doesn't happen. You know, on one hand it's fiction, whatever. On the other hand, when it convinces people that that's actually what's happening in the world, and then they make moral pronouncements against brothers in Christ for saying, hey, maybe that's kind of silly. That's when it becomes a problem. And that's why this artificial manufactured consent for these things exists in the mass media. It's to convince you that something's always been the case when it's virtually never been the case. And so yeah, when we come along and say, yeah, that's nonsense, we're gonna get yelled at. We know that. it's part of why we're here, is to get yelled at so that after the yelling dies down, there can be an actual conversation

38:40 about the reality of what's in the world, about creation, about what's revealed in creation. I actually want to read the ending, just the last paragraph or so, maybe two paragraphs, of the play The Melting Pot. Maybe not actually comment on it much, but those who are paying close attention and who have been listening all along Will notice that this is an open hellmouth. And so to give a little background about the play, it's about a Russian Jewish family flees a pogrom in Russia, comes to the US and I'm not going to give you a spoiler warning because it's a play, and you're supposed to know plays before you go to see them, and I hope you never have to see this play. But the Jewish son of the family winds up falling in love,

39:32 as it were, with the Russian daughter of the man who led the pogrom against his family back in Russia, because of course it's as contrived as could possibly be. But at any rate, David is the Jewish son and Vera is the Russian daughter. And so here is the last bit of the play, David speaking. It is the fires of God round his crucible. There she lies the great melting pot. Listen, can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth. The harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight, Ah what a stirring and a seething, Celt and Latin, Slav and Tutan, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow, Vera, Jew and Gentile, David, yes east and west

40:22 and north and south, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross, how the great alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame, here shall they all unite to build the republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem, where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward, peace, peace to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent, the god of our children give you peace. And then just as an extra little touch, the play ends and is played out with my country tis of thee. I there really is just no need for a comment.

41:11 Yeah. You're that that's a that's a litmus test. If you see that in your response that sort of determines which which side of everything you're on. The uh next question that we had addressed in part uh we had a few different questions about hymns. Some of them referred specifically to you know, there's some hymns in the in the current the Lutheran service book, the L S B, the hymnal that talk about the human race, that talk about one race of Adam and they're asking what we think about those. The first thing I'll say I think the primary thing I'll say about any hymn you find in your hymnal is look at the bottom of the page and see what year it was written. If you want to know what I think about the theology of

41:54 it, tell me what year it was written, tell me what language it was written, and I can give you a pretty good idea of what the theology of it will be. Now in particular some of the worst hymns in there that are deliberately one race the human race propaganda, one of them that was was highlighted on Twitter in the last couple weeks. Was written in 1969. It's a brand new hymn. I mean there there are hymns in our hymnal from the second and third centuries, just a couple. But I think those are treasures. I think anything written in nineteen nineteen sixty nine should be set on fire without even reading it. I don't care what it is. If it was good, we can invent it again, but that decade should be erased from human memory.

42:36 So yeah, there's some stuff in the hymnal. That doesn't make it authoritative. Yeah, it's that's one of the problems with churches publishing stuff in their own name is that By having the imprimater of your church and having said that it's gone through some sort of doctrinal review, it binds your conscience. It says, Oh, you disagree with this? You must must not be a good Christian. Well, I disagree with some of the newer hymns. Not all of them, and there's some great hymns that are newer, but not many. There are much better hymns that are older. And that's part of the reason why. You can't any any place in time that produces a hymn, there's a reason someone wrote that song. They wrote it for a purpose.

43:14 Yeah, we have some hymns from the air of the plague where I can't remember you, Geor Corey, you probably remember which one, but there's a hymn where a man wrote it alongs hymn as he had he'd buried most of his family and most of his town, and he was under tremendous suffering, and so knowing that context for that hymn makes it all the more beautiful. When you know that a hymn about racial racial consolidation was written in nineteen sixty-nine, that tells you something very different about what message you're supposed to receive. So they're good hymns and they're bad hymns. Uh a related question was are hymns that are written by women teaching by women? I personally I think probably it's not in the top fifty list of

43:57 issues that I think we need to solve. I think that they're much bigger issues to fix. And I pray for a day when we can worry about whether we need to get rid of the hymns that were written by women. The answer is I think probably yes, but that's not where I'm gonna start. I'm gonna start with saying, hey, maybe maybe people need to believe the Bible and in general, and then we can work our way down from there. That really sort of covers the the issue of hymns and except for the tangential issue of should we be using hymns that were written by if you're Lutheran, by non Lutherans, and the answer is as long as they're doctrinally sound. Many of them are not, and so we should probably not be using them.

44:41 But the ones that are doctrinally sound are of course fine, and you mentioned hymns that are a little more modern in terms when they were written that are still good. The obvious one would be thy strong word is fairly modern, but still quite good. No. being written that was in the sixties as well, I believe. So we one exception. Yeah, I I know exactly. It's like we can think of one good hymn that was written in the sixties. But The knaxalt hymn. Exactly. there actually there were a couple related questions to do we think that women shouldn't be able to sing in church or to speak responsibly in church as that teaching. No. That that's a public celebration. Yeah. Yeah. That's women being silent in the church.

45:28 When you look at those passages, it's not talking about corporate worship. The questions are about the issue is should women be speaking interactively in study? And so the Paul specifically says, God specifically says if she has a question, she should go home and ask her husband. Doesn't even countenance the idea of her having her own opinion. It's as if she has a has a question, she should go home and ask her husband there. So that's obviously not something that's happening during the church service proper. And that's obviously not related to singing, to chanting, to responsive readings. Corporate worship is the body of Christ unified together publicly, speaking with one voice, confessing what God has said back to him.

46:11 That's beautiful. That's good. That is for every son of God, male or female. And of course, that answers the question of using the magnific or any of the other songs in scripture that are originally spoken by women. Of course they are recorded by men, because all of scripture was written by men and they are inspired by God, which is the ultimate reason that we should use them, and of course we do use the magnificat in the evening service. But those are of course totally fine to use. I believe the the hymn writer you had in mind was Philip Nikolai. He was that's right. Uh pastor lived through the plague. He's commemorated on the twenty sixth of October along with Hermann and Gerhard, other hymn writers.

46:56 I think one of the things underlying some of the questions about what do we think about women doing X, Y, or Z, they didn't seem to be hostile questions, but I think there's a perception of us sometimes that we are woman women haters or something. I actually got a DM yesterday from a lady who thanked me for for the show and for, you know, speaking faithfully on these matters, we've gotten feedback from a number of women who've they take no issue with what we say. Now there are some that I'm sure do, but you know, it's funny, we think we mentioned before, we get DMs all the time from mixed race guys, from non whites, from non Lutherans, from women, all the people who the world tells everybody else hate us because

47:41 we hate them hate them. The people that we're supposed to hate don't think that we hate them. And the people that we're told that we hate like s at least some of what we're saying. They can listen and they get value from it. You know in the in particular case of the number of the mixed race people, that was one of the points that Mori Corey makes in his about thirty minute podcast that he'll link on the previous question is that mixed race guys frequently thank us for speaking clearly on race. You know, when race mixing is pushed on parents, they say, Oh, it'll be beauti beautiful, your children will be beautiful, everything will be wonderful, it's gonna be a new dawn of a new age, it's gonna be great.

48:19 That's what they're getting from the world and from CNN. Their kids have a different experience. And their kids, by and large, understand that their experience is to the degree that they suffer from alienation. It's not because the world is mean, it's because they're divided between two nations. And when a man has two nations intersecting in himself, his own person, ultimately he basically has to pick one. And that's that's a that's a difficult choice that no man should be faced with. You know, we talked about our own genealogies in the past. I'm mostly English and partly German. I don't have to pick either, 'cause it's far enough back that I'm just American by birth, by genes, but there's no conflict between

49:04 the guys who spoke German and the guys who spoke English in my past. They were able to coexist side by side as neighbors. And then when they all started speaking English, they basically became one finally. So that's not an inherent conflict. The guy who is, you know, half white and half black or half Asian and half white, he has a much bigger internal struggle because he understands intrinsically he doesn't completely belong to either community. And so when these guys talk to us privately, they're generally thankful. And part of the reason is that we're the only men in some cases that they've ever heard who will speak honestly about these things. They're thankful to hear a Christian speaking honestly.

49:47 So for all the people telling you that we hate and that people hate us, the actual experience we have with you the listeners getting to us and telling us largely says the opposite. I mean you know, I I guess if somebody hates us and thinks that we hate them, they're maybe not gonna send a message at all. But the messages we have received had not only been supportive, they've been They've been tremendously thankful. I do find it a little funny as someone who enjoys opera to be accused not by the people who are questioning us, but by those who accuse us, by those who attack us on various platforms that I don't like women singing. How many times have I linked things that were soprano or other bits of pieces of music from operas and such in our chat?

50:31 So and if God didn't want women to sing in the service, we would have an injunction against it. Women are not to speak in the service because women are not to teach. They are They are to remain silent because they are supposed to ask their husbands at home. Scripture is very clear about why these things are the way they are. But women are part of the body of Christ, and so they do participate in the service in insofar as it is appropriate for them to do so, and that of course includes singing along with the congregation. And the congregational singing would be much impoverished if women were not singing as well. We are in fact much impoverished by the fact that we no longer use the chorrals that separate male and female voices, and so

51:17 you can get that distinction between them more clearly. Of course part of that is a lack of men in the services who actually sing, and yes I do intend to shame those of you who don't sing in the service you should be doing so. If you don't sing particularly well, practice or sing anyway. There are plenty of men who don't sing very well. That's one of the great things about being part of a congregation or a larger choir. The individual imperfections are hidden by the fact that you have more people singing. The larger the number of people you have singing, the better it sounds when it comes to choral pieces. That's just how it works. Listen to a large choir sometime, if you've never done that, it

52:03 is far and away a better thing than if you just have a small handful of people singing. So yes, you should sing in church, whether you are a man or a woman. We have the tangential question about whether or not we should be using the Psalms, and the answer is yes, of course. And it was the emphasis of the question was: are we neglecting to use the Psalms? And I would say yes, most churches are in fact neglecting to use the Psalms. In the Lutheran Church we do use that as an intro it, and sometimes there's responsive bits that are the Psalm, and we do have other bits of the Psalms in the Divine Service smattered here and there, scattered about. But yes, we should be using the Psalter. Because as scripture says, we're to use Psalms, hymns, etc., and so

52:50 we should be using them because the Psalter is the original hymnal of the Church. We should be employing it, we should be singing it, or at least chanting it because whether or not it works particularly well sung in English is an open question, but it can certainly be chanted and we should make use of it. It is scripture, we are commanded to use it. And it's also important to note that the word psalm literally just means song. So the Psalms of David were David's songs. And yes, they're a special category of songs, the psalms are, because you know, they're inspired by God. They're one of the most pivotal parts of all of scripture. But fundamentally, they're just songs. And so the fact that the church has always had other songs

53:37 that were also sung is also important to us, particularly as Lutherans. And as I mentioned, you know, we have hymns in our hymnal. They're not Lutheran hymns. they're hymns from, you know, the two hundreds and three hundreds and four hundreds AD. It was the very earliest church was singing some of the songs that we sing to this day. That's an important part of the Christian heritage, the Western Christian church has these things as its treasures. One of the accusations leveled against the Lutherans by Rome was that we were singing people into the faith. And I think that is a great a great accusation we should wear with pride. One of the the first hymnals that was in the vernacular was produced

54:24 largely by Luther, he wasn't the one who printed it and actually produced it, but he worked with the man who did and produced many of the hymns that were in it. And that was in fifteen twenty four. That was even before the Reformation got into full swing. Obviously that was after fifteen seventeen after the theses had been posted, but before fifteen thirty when the Augsburg Confession was presented. And so very early on Lutherans recognized the importance of teaching Christians via music, via hymns. Because as was mentioned, you are going to remember things better if they are set to music. That is just how human memory works. In addition to the question about the Psalms in particular, there were

55:11 two other minor questions, one partly in jest that came from this particular questioner. One was do Lutherans have a category for non Lutheran theologians other than terrible? And the answer to that is yes, of course, we call him Philip Melanchthon. And then the other question was whether I am partly joking about that, just for those who aren't familiar with the struggle that we had in Lutheranism when Philip Melanchthon attempted to reconcile to be ecumenical with the reformed there are some things that happened in that pursuit with which Lutherans would not agree. So partly in jest, partly serious. But the other part, the other question here was whether there are different levels of punishment in hell and where do we get that

56:03 from? There are a few different places you get that in scripture. There is the one where Christ speaks of various servants being varying levels of honest or dutiful in their tasks and the amount of the beating they will receive if they are not. And then there is of course Revelation twenty, which speaks of the books being opened and the deeds of the dead being assessed. What you have done in life will be assessed at the judgment, and you will be rewarded or punished accordingly. And so for those who are not in Christ, there will be varying degrees of punishment because you are paying for your sins, because your sins are not covered by Christ's blood because you're not in Christ. And so you are paying for those sins.

56:54 Each of those sins will take you an eternity to pay. But your eternity is going to be worse if you have more of them or if you have worse sins. And so that's where we get the doctrine of the varying degrees of punishment in hell. Yeah, I'm sure that question came in before we did the recent episode on Episode on all sins are not equal, and we discussed it at some length, but that was all what the whole episode was about. Not only are the degrees of sin different, but obviously the degrees of punishment will also vary. It's you're still either damned or you're saved. That's a binary. But heaven and hell will not be equal for those who are in those places. God is not egalitarian. There's no equality anywhere.

57:37 There's a place of honor in heaven, there's a place of honor wherever God goes, and he bestows that upon whom he chooses. And so we don't get to whine about well that's not fair, that's not equal. Yeah, you're right, it's not fair or equal. God dispenses his gifts as he wishes, and we are duty bound as creatures to receive them in thanksgiving, and anything else is sin. The uh last question we're gonna touch on was uh someone asked us about our thoughts on monasticism. He said he's he understands a concern with regard to perpetual vows, but would something like short term monastic houses of work, prayer, and study be a useful tool for young men in the church. This goes back to one of my stock answers of what problem

58:18 are you trying to solve? Yes, I I do think that you know a period of prayer and study and reflection away from the wicked world would benefit young men, you know, particularly as they're exiting as they're entering adulthood and in transitioning into the real world. On the other hand, I don't think you need monastic houses to do that. I think a young man who's been raised well by faithful a faithful father is gonna have been doing that his entire life. When a son is is raised in a manner that is focusing on prayer and work and study, he's gonna keep doing it. Your children are going to be raised up by their parents to do what they're gonna do for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. So if you get to be 18, 19, 20 and you decide

59:04 you need to bolt on some prayer before you get going in the world, it's already too late. You should have been doing that all along. And if we lived in a world where that were actually happening, the need for that sort of spiritual halfway house would basically vanish. Men would be properly formed as they entered adulthood without needing a time out. And you know, you even if you don't have great parents, if you're a young man, you can still create this for yourself. Spend less time on the internet, spend less time on your phone, spend more time in nature, spend more time reading the Word of God and studying. Spend more time seeking out sound sources of doctrine. and reflect and judge your own actions according to what you're seeing

59:55 in scripture. And if you find that you can do better as a matter of conscience, work on that. Work on your own self-development. That's, you know, there are many passages, particularly in the New Testament, really in all of the scripture, talking about athletes as an example of godly formation when the body is disciplined, it's same it's the same as the mind being disciplined. All of these things are beneficial. You know, we're not just souls stuck in meat. And we're not just bodies with no immortal soul. God puts all of these things together in one. We have a body, a mind, and a soul. Those are the words we use for it. We're not ex exactly sure how those are constituted in such a way that you can subdivide them.

1:00:39 It doesn't matter. Those are philosophical questions that frankly I find kind of toxic because you go down that rabbit trail and suddenly you want to try to derive conclusions that are supported by the evidence. We know that if the body dies, the soul departs. We know that if you fracture someone's mind, the whi the the body can wither and die. We know that you can destroy a soul in place and leave just a shell of a human being through horrific things that are done to some people. All of those things are bad things. So let's focus on just not doing that, preserving the body, the mind, and the soul together as God's put it together and in the context of a young man being raised up or a young

1:01:21 woman, focus on living a godly life as you are being brought up. You shouldn't get to your adulthood and realize you need to play spiritual catch-up. If you get to that point and you need to, yes, you should absolutely play spiritual catch up, but proper formation of our youth obviates the need for nunneries and monasteries. As Lutherans, we of course do object to perpetual vows and to monasticism generally, and so we would not approve of monasteries or nunneries. However, just go camping, take your Bible with you. Go out in nature, sit there and read. If you need some time away to spend time in the Word, do it. There are easy ways to do it. You don't even have to go particularly far. Go to a park and sit with your Bible Now, are there

1:02:14 benefits to having some time off from the world away from things to focus on God? Of course, absolutely. But again, you can do that by going camping with your Bible. You can go on a men's retreat. There are various things you can do that are not monasticism. And I will link it in the show notes. It's actually one of the longer articles in the Augsburg Confession is the one in which we condemn monasticism. That's Article twenty seven. I'll link both the confession and the apology of it. It is one of the longer articles because it was a very serious problem at the time and remains so in the case of Rome and the East, so for the pre Reformation sects. And so no we would not approve of monasticism, but there are

1:03:05 certain practices that are associated with the monastic life that are not bad. So taking time away from the world to focus on God is entirely fine. Separating yourself entirely from the world to supposedly focus on God is not. Because all you're doing is separating yourself from your neighbor and refusing to actually serve God in the ways that He has told you to serve Him Him and pretending that you have made this holy life for yourself when in fact all you're doing is rebelling against God. As a historical note, it's important, I think, to mention that monasticism for both men and women as it was practiced by the time of Luther, a lot of that was specifically financial. It was a financial trick employed by the Roman Catholic Church basically

1:03:55 to interrupt inheritance because since the monks and the nuns couldn't inherit property, if they could get the the descendants of someone in the church, and everyone was in the church, to become non-inheritors, it pretty much guaranteed that their property upon their death would be transferred to the church. So it was actually a financing, it was a fundraising drive. They would steal their children, commit them to lifelong vows of of these obscenities and then oh by the way when you die we'll take all your property. So it was one of the main w ways that the Roman Catholic Church enriched itself. So today we don't think about or talk about that stuff and we think, oh, you know, there's the there's a monastery and they're

1:04:36 praying and they're you know making beer or whatever. That was a small part of it. That was a machine, it was a financial machine. So if you want to try to have Try to have some trad fantasy, get serious about looking at what they were actually doing as there was a great deal more to it. And oh by the way, abortions were very common in nunneries, and sodomy was very common in the monasteries in the fifteen hundreds. That's something that's referred to obliquely in the Book of Concord. It also goes back another five hundred years before that. Saint Peter Damien, one of the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church himself condemned the the obscene sexual abuses that were occurring within those places in the Roman Catholic Church.

1:05:20 So these places that we're told, oh, it's just quiet reflection on God and prayer. No. The vast the vows of celibacy led directly to egregious sexual sin, as they always do. One important point that I just as an aside that I think is worth making, celibacy is a gift from God. It is a specific gift. If you hear my voice, you are almost certainly not celibate. It is so rare. You've probably never met anyone who's celibate. Well, that doesn't make sense because you you know you're listening and you're not a fornicator. Yes. That's exactly the point. Celibate is not the antonym for having sex. Celibate is basically, what is referred to today as is asexuality. It's someone who has no desire whatsoever for the opposite sex.

1:06:10 That is incredibly rare. And now today, when people talk about being asexual, a lot of them just have mental problems. I'm not saying all the people who say they're asexual have a gift from God. Most of them probably have a demon. But God has on occasion made people who simply do not have any desire. If you have ever had sexual desire for a member of the opposite sex, you are not celibate. You are simply not a fornicator. So if you have desire and you burn with desire, you should be married so that you can live a godly life and that desire can be fulfilled in a godly fashion. The opposite is not celibacy. So it's it's just a point to make because I it's I think it's very dangerous when we conflate that term and then try

1:06:55 to hold people to impossible standards. Young men, you're not celibate. you're not married. And the implication of not being married is that you're not having sex. That should be the default. If you're not married, you're either being chaste or you're being a fornicator. And then if you are married, you should be having sex, except for periods of abstemption with the agreement of both parties. That's what God says. Everything else is weird and sinful. So just stick to the basics. It's not complicated. So to wrap up, we just want to talk a little bit about the progress we made in in growing the audience for this podcast in the last six months. We went from absolutely nothing, no advertising budget, no curb appeal, no

1:07:44 reason for anyone to listen to us. I've said before in private that when we started this I I hoped that we would get past the point that most of our friends would be kind of pity listening. Yeah, so if we got if we got past about fifty listeners every week I was gonna be pretty happy. That was kind of the first threshold for okay, we're somebody's actually paying attention and maybe they care. We very rapidly blew past that. Uh the growth has been very, very steady week over week and month over month. And it's been entirely word of mouth. It's been you, the listener, sharing it with friends, you know, people at church, coworkers, just friends you know, uh you know, sometimes individual episodes, sometimes recommending the entire podcast series as a whole.

1:08:26 We're very thankful for all of that. Um we never wanted to do this just to be shouting into the void, but at the same time it's it's very much appreciated that people see and hear some value in what it is that we're saying. And I I think that the feedback that we've gotten has been very much along the lines of what we set out to do, which was to talk about the things that almost everybody else is afraid to talk about. Talk about them in an intelligent fashion, in a a fearless fashion, that just goes through things that are actually impactful in the world and shed some light on them, not new light. You know, the we make the case as often as we can. We're not saying anything new about this. We're saying things that generally have everyone used to think and then

1:09:11 at some point they went away. As Christians, we should want to be connected with what Christians have always believed. That's always an important question. So today, you know, we going from zero, going from, you know, me and Corey being the only listeners every morning as we as we had prepped the show to make sure it sounded good and one of the things that was important to us was the audio quality. Uh it was hilarious to me when Issues etcetera put those clips of us on their show. Our audio quality was actually better than theirs somehow in the same recording. I don't I guess that's a function of you know they have how they have their voices compressed and stuff, but it actually sounds really good.

1:09:49 And that was important to us. You know, we C Corey and I both spent a fair amount of money on mics and in hardware and software, specifically so that this could This could be listenable because we knew that the things that we were gonna be saying were gonna be hard to hear. We wanted to make sure that actually hearing them would at least be an easy experience. So I I think we pulled that off. I'm happy with how it sounds. Uh there was some somebody making fun of my voice yesterday. I don't like my voice either, dude. It's what God gave me. It's what I got. Uh the fun he he d someone specifically said I was low T. Well, whatever. The irony is that a lot of my voice is below about a hundred hertz, but I have to chop it all off because

1:10:28 it doesn't come through as a pleasing baritone on the mic. It just comes through as boomy. So I I have to chop all the low end of my voice off, not because it's you know, a pleasing rumble. It would just it sounds bad. You know, I I've done it both ways and listened. It would m sound much worse if you heard all of my voice. So you're hearing some of the higher stuff, but that that's typical in audio. Generally, you have to roll off at about 100 hertz. We cared about that stuff. So I could make myself sound deeper. I am not using a voice changer. This is what I sound like all the time. The funny thing is that before I bought this really fancy mic, I had a much lower rev regard for my voice because I'd

1:11:05 only ever heard shoddy recordings of my voice. So I was actually pleased that when I recorded it on good equipment, it didn't sound as bad as I thought. And it's worth noting that none of you have ever heard your own voice until you've heard a recording. What you hear in your head is not only going through the air to your ears, but it's also going straight through all the meat in your head to your ears. So there's a muffled version of your voice going straight from your voice box into your eardrum without passing through the air, which is why all of us sound really weird on recordings. That's what everybody else hears. So I wish you could hear the sound of my voice in my head. I think it sounds better, but yeah, that's not real.

1:11:45 That's not who I really am. This is who I really am. When we when we got set, we wanted to make sure it sounded good because we wanted to we want it to be a good podcast. We want it to be listenable and enjoyable. Uh I've listened to thousands of hours of podcasts and wanted to make sure that this was worth listening to, you know, in addition to the content, but that it was just sound good and be easy to hear. So thank you for those who have have complimented us on the on the sound of those things as well. And so just to give some rough information about sort of how many listeners we have, how many total downloads and things like that. I want to start off by pointing out that we do not actually have particularly invasive tracking setup.

1:12:28 So a lot of this is some math on my end and a bit of guesswork, admittedly, because we just don't have invasive analytics. We're not tracking every single download and where it was downloaded and the device and all of that stuff. We're not doing that. that's not our goal here. You do that if you're trying to sell your podcast to advertisers and one we're not and two probably a fairly limited pool of advertisers if we were so inclined. I can think of maybe one or two who would actually be interested, but not something we have in mind. We as as we mentioned, this is not something we're doing to make money. If we were doing this to make money, you would have to conclude that we're both idiots.

1:13:15 Because this is one of the worst possible ways you could try to do that. Because we are going to offend basically everyone at some point. Everyone has idols, and we're going to step on all of them. But anyway, to look at some rough numbers. If I look at the total number of downloads and then do a little bit of math to figure out the actual ultimate number. We have somewhere between seventy and seventy five thousand total episode downloads so far. Now I I don't have a complete breakdown of that by episode because I was not tracking that initially. I was just tracking the total number of downloads. And so you know, do some very simple math. If you have seventy five thousand total, that's about twenty nine hundred

1:14:12 downloads per episode, if you assume the episodes are equal. They're not, some have more downloads than others. But that is about right on track now that I have per episode information because we're at right around 2100, say for episode twenty two, and a little less for episode twenty three, and a little less than twenty-three for twenty-four, because we have a long tail on these episodes. People are continuing to download them as they remain up. But we are getting right around 1200 to maybe 1500 depending downloads right away on release day. And so that represents the number of people we have who have subscribed in the various podcast apps, which we're quite pleased with that number. It's a good number.

1:15:03 And then even more so with the number of, like I said, the long tail, the number of people who are continuing to download, share these episodes, listen to them weeks, months after the fact. We do not have a podcast where people are just listening on the day of release, deleting it and then ever thinking about it again. Which of course is not what we want. We don't want people to never think about these issues again. These are important issues about which Christians should be continuing to think. And so some will return to these episodes when they have questions, or when someone else asks a question, they want to provide an answer. Here's an episode about this specific question. And we see that.

1:15:48 We see spikes in downloads for certain episodes sometimes where someone has shared it somewhere. Sometimes we happen to notice the share, sometimes we don't, because some of these are shared in group chats to which we are not party. But we know that this is being shared, that the information is being spread, and it has basically all been organic at this point. We've been boosted a few times by people on Twitter and elsewhere who've liked the content, but it has been an entirely organic thing how this podcast has spread and grown. So the reason we're talking about this is that y if you are listening, we just want you to know and you're in good company. You know, if you happen to stumble across us and have

1:16:31 no idea if it's just two crazy guys shouting into a microphone and then you, you know, basically with a uh shortwave radio tuning in in your your cabin. It's not that isolated. there are thousands of people who are listening right along with you and some of them are hate listeners. You know, like the the guy I mentioned who was making fun of me yesterday. Whatever, dude. I'm glad you're listening. I think it's hilarious that we have hate listeners because They're keeping up with the latest episodes. They're listening. They're listening to every word we say. And all they can do is make fun. There's been no serious critique of our content. Even when we were on issues, etc. last week. It wasn't a serious cr critique.

1:17:10 It was it was absurd. I it was it was laughably goofy. You know, they would play a very charitable clip. I was very thankful that when Jeff edited those clips, he was very fair. He put our entire argument on the air, which shocked me, because the other guy who was on there had not done that on his own show, which was even more ham fisted. So that So they would air a complete clip of of us making an argument and then Todd would say, So what did we just hear? And then the other guy would make some absurd comments that had literally nothing to do with what we had just said. It was like I said, it was the best unpaid advertisement we ever could have hoped for. And so I hope that lots of people will will discover us

1:17:50 as a result of them trying to make fun of us and saying we're heretics and whatever. If you're listening, at least you know some of you think we're heretics, some of you hate us and want to ma make fun of us. We're glad you're listening. I hope that something we say will reach your heart too, because this isn't coming from us. we think that what we're saying is conconant with what God has said. So to everyone else, which is a majority of our listeners, certainly thank you very much for sharing it, for uh recommending it to others, for spending the time listening to our voices. You know, it's it's flattering and humbling that anyone would care what we have to say. I've said in the past, you know, I spend most of my

1:18:26 time getting called retarded for saying this stuff because people don't get it. And it's nice for us to have the opportunity for a long form discussion to Make the case clearly. You know, when people have asked me in person to defend some of the things that we've said here, it it's a little puzzling to for someone to think that a two hour episode could fit in to part of a a conversation that's not going to be that long. The nice thing about us being able to sit here and talk is that we can cover all the bases, at least ones we think are important. That's I think that's I think one of the best examples is Corey's tweet from last Friday about interracial marriage. It was like one sentence, got six hundred thousand plus views, got

1:19:09 the whole world riled up condemning him. And then on Monday you did uh you know, about a half-hour podcast where you just discussed your explanation for it. And the people the few people who listen to that explanation, most of them like, okay, I can see that argument. That's the way this stuff works. You can't have a good discussion on Twitter. You can't have a good short form discussion. You can light a fuse, you can shine a light, but that's all it does. To actually have a serious discussion about this stuff takes time. And so we're appreciative to everyone who would spend the time to actually hear us out because that's you know that that's important. It it's important to whatever it is that you think you want

1:19:46 to focus on, spend some time on it. And we're glad the folks would spend some time with us. One of the things I wanted to mention is discoverability. Um, you know, if you listen to us, if you happen to listen on the web, please subscribe through whatever your platform's podcast player is. Those subscription stats help the engines of recommendation to recommend podcast other people. Yeah, we put Stone Choir shows up with issues, etc. And uh a number of other shows. Some are related to religion, some aren't, which is great. Yeah, I'm glad that there are people who have diverse interests who are also tuning into this. Uh we show up in the Christianity podcast listings. If you use one of those, we're gonna ask you to take

1:20:32 a few minutes. well not even a few minutes, take you know, twenty seconds, to go and please leave a five star review. Uh we don't say five stars because you necessarily agree with everything. It's just that on a scale of one to five, if you want to say what you actually think and you say like a three or a four, it drags down the score in such a way that when someone glances, you know, just like on Yelp or anything else, five stars like, Oh, that's amazing. That must be a great show. If you get down to four point eight, people are thinking, um, yeah, maybe. If something's like a three and a half, people think that's mediocre. I'm I'm not gonna waste my time. And we've had right now we have like fifty six s reviews

1:21:08 on the IOS uh listings and we have a score like four point five. We had a we've had a few hate listeners leave some comments and their feedback, you know, one star reviews. There will be more of this now that we're mentioning it. We had debated for a while whether we would say anything because some of the people who are so filled with hate will want to prevent anyone from discovering this podcast. But now that we're mentioning it, it is important for you if you listen and you like it at all, please leave us five stars. It's cheap. It's easy. And it will help improve discoverability. You know, if we could get up to five hundred reviews of whatever numbers, that makes a big difference in the engine saying, hey,

1:21:47 this is something you could check out because as great as word is of mouth has been. One of the fascinating things we've gotten in feedback from the show is that people, you know, as recently as this week have said, I knew what you guys were like on Twitter. I wasn't sure what to expect on the podcast. What I got was completely different than what I expected. We're sane, yeah. Arguably, as as sane as intelligent men can be. We're reasonable. we make our cases calmly and clearly. So folks who just kinda stumble onto the podcast generally like it. You know, we're stomping on idols, so there's absolutely content that that's going to set people's hair on fire and they're gonna hate it. It is what it is.

1:22:26 I'm I'm not worried about that. But if you like the show, if you would like other people to dis to discover it, please take a minute and leave a five star review on whatever service you use, if it's Spotify, Google, Apple, whatever. That helps other people find us and help to continue to spread a message that we think is worth hearing. And if you're listening, hope you hopefully you do as well. I know that some people have commented, I've had DMs and other things. They've said that I am a different person on Twitter versus on the podcast versus on my own podcasts. And I would reject the frame that I am a different person. It is the different media warrant a different approach. And this is related to something that I've mentioned before.

1:23:15 We have a sort of flattening of behavior, of conduct in the modern context, particularly in the US for various reasons. So people behave, dress, speak the same everywhere these days, and that's very unusual. That is not historically how human beings conducted themselves. You did not dress, act, and speak the same way on Sunday morning at church as you did at the pub with your friends after work on Friday or at home with your wife and children. You tailored these things to your audience to the environment. And that is just exactly what I'm doing when I engage in a certain way on Twitter because Twitter Twitter, the only real use of Twitter, unless you're purely using it for some sort of entertainment,

1:24:07 which I guess you can do that. But the way to engage on Twitter is that you actually have to get people to read what you say. You have to get them to want to respond to it. And so you you have to get them to engage with it. Otherwise there's really no purpose in it. You're just shouting into a void. And so I engage in a certain way to get that response because if you don't get the response you can't teach because you don't get the person to listen. And so, as was mentioned, yes, only a handful of people are going to bother clicking through. Through and listening to the full explanation, but I did get the person to think about the topic. That is now something that has at least come up in his

1:24:51 mind, and maybe at some point in the future he will be willing to listen more on that topic. And so yes, I do engage in a different way in different contexts, and that's just the way that everything has been done historically. That is, I would say, the proper way to do things. the tweet you mentioned that I mentioned earlier in the episode as well, I think it's kind of burned itself out now. It's at uh three quarters of a million views. Who knows? Someone could pick it up and it could hit a million by the time this podcast episode is released tomorrow. But I well exactly that's that's how you engage. You get people to respond to it. And so, yes, I am more polemical on Twitter than I am on this podcast, because the point of this podcast isn't pure polemics.

1:25:39 We do engage in polemics to some degree, but it's not pure polemics. Twitter is largely polemical. And so I'm going to say things on Twitter that are going to set your hair on fire from time to time. But that's Twitter. That's just what it is. Speaking of setting your hair on fire, the last thing we wanted to mention ties into something you said a minute ago. When we first started Stone Choir, uh within a few weeks Corey had a number of of DMs requesting some sort of tip jar or something. And so he eventually set it up uh I think largely just kind of as an experiment, and we didn't know if anyone would use it. We've never mentioned it before anywhere. As we said, you know, in the paywalling episode and Corey said

1:26:23 earlier, this is not a money making enterprise for us. However, we do have a donation link at the top and the bottom of at the top of your page and on the Stone Choir page in the footer. It's there so that if you would like to support what we're doing, you're able to throw us a few bucks. We're not asking for anybody's money. We're not saying you're a freeloader if you don't send us any money. And I d mentioned this in the specific context of smashing idols and lighting hair on fire because if we haven't offended you yet, I'm certain at some point we're going to. So before anyone would ever even consider sending us a dime, which we're not asking for, but if you say, oh, there's a tip jar, I want to send them a few bucks.

1:27:06 If you would send us five dollars or whatever, and then in two months we say something that you find incredibly offensive, you're like, I hate those guys, I feel so ripped off and betrayed. If If you think that you could have that response in the future, please don't send us any money. I would much rather you not feel burned by us saying what we think is the truth because you you know didn't send us anything. So we're only mentioning it now because we've had n a number of people who have sent us gifts, all of whom have been very generous. And we want just take a minute to acknowledge that. You know, so far that what they have sent has basically just kind of been vanishing into a black hole and we we decided

1:27:44 that's not really fair. So to each and every one of you who've sent anything, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. It means a great deal. Um it's already offset the costs of what we had put into building you know their not studios, but like our you know microphones and setups and stuff. We're very thankful for that. I've sent people money before, you know, just for similar things, so I totally get it. Like you're voting with your wallet. We're only mentioning this to say thank you. There are about 30 things that I would tell you to give money to before I would say to give us a dime. So the fact that we're mentioning this is not a solicitation. We had to mention it to be able to say thank you

1:28:22 to those who've given anything. There are a whole lot of things that need our money. You need your money more than we do. For those of you who voted with your wallets by saying thank you for what we're doing here, we're eternally grateful. It's very generous of you and it is greatly appreciated and it's humbling. And in a way it's also kind of incrementally enslaving us because if if you say, Hey, this is valuable, here's a few bucks, to me, that tells me I'm on the hook to continue to deliver. So I appreciate I appreciate the the enslavement. It's a good reminder that what we're doing here is is not for ourselves. It's something that we're doing for God's glory and we're doing it for your edification and to know that that's actually happening is is

1:29:02 very rewarding. So thank you. I guess that's also a peek behind the curtain as to how I make some of the design decisions for the site and such because at first I had those who asked about the ability to donate, and so I generated a donation link, and it wasn't really anywhere on the site, but it was available for people if they really wanted to find it. But then people kept asking me about it, so I put it in the footer. But then people kept asking me about where it was on the site. So then I also added a donate link to the top, in part to head off having to answer where the link was. And so that's a peek behind the curtain as it were to part of my design philosophy, which is to head off questions.

1:29:48 Yeah. But now we look like grifters because we're putting donate links everywhere. It's literally just so if you want to use it, we're we're not gonna put the donate shank link in the show notes. We're not gonna tell you where it is. Don't go looking for it. Don't worry about it. But for someone who's frustrated by that, you know where to find it. But it's exactly we're literally just we're saying thank you to folks who have who have taken advantage of that because it's it's humbling and rewarding. And like you said, it has offset the the cost of the hard work Hardware certainly and the the software cost as well Aaron Powell Which is something we never expected. I mean, that's not we've said from the beginning, it's not why

1:30:24 we're doing it. We're not going to change anything about what we do. I will probably never mention it again. So if if if someone new does donate, we're never gonna we're never gonna I'm not gonna say never. I I think it's unlikely that we'll say anything for at least probably the rest of this year. Um because that's not the point. the point is to try to be faithful to God's word and to share that with as many people as possible. And when we set this thing up originally, we did it, you know, the Corey the hosting that Corey set up is designed to be resilient, uncancelable. You know, we're not using any third party podcast host, which is the reason we don't have any invasive podcast statistics.

1:31:02 If we're using one of those hosts, we would get lots of metrics about stuff. We're both data guys, so we love that stuff. We've foregone having access to it because A, it'd be easy to cancel us, and B, we don't want to be creepy and and Snoopy. But we're curious about where people are coming in from, so we harvest what we can in a in a privacy protecting manner. But ultimately none of this is about numbers and it's not about self glorification. It's just about these are these are ideas we're spreading to steal the TED Talk theme once again. This stuff matters. And it matters in ways that you know, we don't think these things should necessarily be showing up in most sermons, most Sundays. We don't think this is the meat of the Christian faith.

1:31:46 I want to make clear that that's not what we think about this stuff. You know, we devoted five episodes to race. Race is not our hermeneutic for reading the Bible, but Satan is attacking race, so we had the to address it. And a lot of people got a lot of value out of those episodes. That's why we're doing it. These are not necessarily the primary doctrines of Christianity, but Satan has learned to go after the trimary doctrines, that stuff's mostly been shot down in the past. We have Pat answers for shooting down Satan's attacks on the primary stuff. So he's moving down the list. He's moving on to secondary things because it turns out, if you can get someone lying about anything, eventually you'll get them lying about

1:32:30 everything. So Satan's not dumb. He's not resting on his laurels. We're trying to fight a rear guard action here against evil attacks on the church itself. Because as long as people are adopting views from the world and confusing them with Christianity, that's a wide open door for Satan to just run wild. there's nothing stopping him once he sneaks in like that. So the seemingly eclectic set of issues that we've talked about in the past, and you know, it's always going to be kind of a weird grab bag. It's not that we're scattered, it's that there's a pattern of where Satan is going at after the Christian faith. And it looks random, which is why people aren't picking up on it. There's no direct connection between slavery and feminism unless you listen

1:33:14 to feminists and then they tell you. You know, we've been accused of lying about that one. that's literally what those people are saying. So the random grab bag of stuff that we talk about, it's what's happening in the world. So as long as the battle continues to move and evolve, we'll continue to shine a bright light on it so that if someone wants to hear what's you know what's coming next next where the attack is, we can hopefully arm some of you to be able to at least see it and seeing it is is all I would ask. Even if you don't agree with our conclusions, at least to know that hey, there's something going on here that I didn't know about before. That might be important. Like Corey said with his tweet, you know, maybe something we say

1:33:53 it goes in one ear and out the other, and a couple of years from now, it comes up again in your life in some other context. You're like, oh, I remember hearing about this. Wait, there's something going on here. I should take it seriously. That's why we're talking about this stuff. You might not believe us today, but down the road, many of you who maybe disagree about some of these things today, I hope and pray you're going to find yourself agreeing because we're not terribrained about this stuff. We're just we're looking where the attacks are coming and we're saying, hey, this is important too. It's not as important as Christ on the cross, but if you start denying how your own body is created, pretty soon Christ's body

1:34:31 doesn't need to be on the cross at all 'cause we're all just spirits. And what's this body stuff about? It's very easy to have some minor peripheral error turn into absolute blasphemy against God. Satan knows what he's doing. So we're continuing gonna continue to be weird. We're gonna continue to be saying things that are upsetting. We're gonna continue to light people's hair on fire, not to be antagonistic, not to be trolls, but because the spirit of this age is completely at odds with the history of the Christian faith. And we're not claiming to be re great repristinators that are reviving something that's been lost, but you know, you read your Bible. When I read my Bible, like like I've said before, I read

1:35:11 my Bible and I find stuff that I'm guilty of, and it smacks me in the face. And I find other things that I have never heard in church. I'm like, Well, if my pastor says he preaches the whole council of God and he never says this, what's going on? And sometimes that's just the basis for some of these episodes. You're like, I've never heard that before. That's really weird. And we go looking and we find that it was on the timeline for hundreds of years and then it vanished. That's interesting. And as a church that claims to be rooted in Christ's eternal word, that's a matter of concern. So we're going to continue the same format, the same style, same mode of thought and approach, and we hope you'll stick with us

1:35:48 and we'll hope you'll share with all your friends and family. Yes, the summary then is hear us today, believe us tomorrow. Yep, that that's a story of my life. it's why I don't get upset when people don't believe me or, you know, say mean things. That's fine. I'm I'm used to good friends thinking I was stupid, you know, for a decade or more. And then eventually they'll come around and realize I was right about something. I told them ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Like oh and sometimes I don't even get any credit and that's fine. we're not neither Corey nor I care about credit. This we in private we tell people we're basically doing this stuff so that we can say the things that are true, we can

1:36:25 take all the blame, we can start the conversations, and then whatever happens to us, if we get shot down and immolated, faithful men can come in the breach behind us and can speak about these things, and we will borne the brunt of the punishment that they would have endured if they were the worst ones to sp the first ones to speak about it. So we're going through the door first. We know it's gonna hurt, we know it's gonna suck, we're doing it anyway, 'cause it's important. And we're hoping that other men are gonna follow behind us and say, you know, I'm sure they don't agree with everything. If you agree with anything, move the ball a little bit further down the field. Take what is true in scripture and tell people about it, even

1:37:04 if they've not heard before, even if it upsets them, maybe especially if it upsets them. Now for a pastor, there's a right and a wrong way to do that, but ultimately if your people, if your flock has false beliefs in their hearts, those need to be replaced by true beliefs. That's your job as a shepherd, as a pastor. That's our job as Christians when we see a Christian brother erring to say, hey man, you're not on a good path. Not to say you're going to hell if you do this, just to say this is not good for you. It's going to bear bad fruit. I don't want to see you get hurt. So these conversations are they seem less important today than they will in the future. And we're thankful to everyone who's shared.

1:37:46 If you've listened once some of the episodes, I I think most, if not all of them, are worth listening to a couple times. To be honest, I've I've listened to all of our episodes several times on part just to review what I've said myself, but also so I can you know use use it as a library and a framework for building on what we say in the future because all the stuff is tied together in non-obvious ways, and we're gonna continue in the coming years to make the case that there's something going on here that's not just about Lutherans, it's about all of Christianity. Yeah, we have we have Catholics listening, we have Presbyterians, Baptists, non-denominational. I've had messages from every corner of Christianity saying, Hey, thank

1:38:27 you for what you're saying. I've never heard anyone speak about scripture as clearly as you guys, and I really appreciate it. And we appreciate hearing that because like I said, there have been many times when those thoughtful messages have come when we are really getting kicked in the teeth. So to those of you who have said nice things, to those of you who have donated, reviewed, it's deeply appreciated, it's humbling. Uh it's not something we ever expected. Like I said, if if if it had gone beyond our our small set of friends, we would have been happy because we would have known that we were laying the groundwork for later on there would be a corpus of this content available that somebody would stumble

1:39:02 across and say, Hey, there's something good here. It's grown beyond our expectations and that's by God's grace. And I I expect that that will continue to to grow and to uh expand beyond places we could possibly imagine. So thank you to each and every one of our listeners. You are appreciated and and we thank you for your time. And so I think we'll end with an anecdote, not a personal one this time, but an anecdote, a Lutheran one, that sort of explains our outlook on this and how we view what we're doing and what we expect the results of this to be. When Luther was asked, and he was often asked this question, if he was worried about the consequences or worried about how to reach people, worried about

1:39:49 how to teach the laity, who knew very little, if anything, of the faith, because of the failures of Rome. When he was asked those sorts of questions, he would respond that he wasn't worried, and that he was enjoying his time drinking beer with Melanchthon, because he read the Word of God, put out the truth, and then the rest was in God's hands, so he felt secure. And that's the same way that we look at this. Our duty is to read God's Word, to recognize God's truth, to speak that truth as best we can, and the rest is in God's hands. And so we don't have to worry about it, and we don't worry about it. Because God will work everything together for the good.