Through the Window: On Frame

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. Today we are going to be talking about the concept of frame. It's a term that came from psychology and Corey's going to define that in a minute. But to begin I'd just like to give a a brief example to sort of set the frame for this discussion. So imagine that you are overlooking a large grassy field field. It's a it's a featureless field. There's no discernible uh objects there except for a bison in the center of the field. It's a you know big two thousand pound animal right in the middle. You can see it clearly. And about a hundred yards away to the west, you can see a man facing that bison. So there's a man, he's facing east towards the bison in the

1:24 field. You can see all of this. Now picture in your mind a sort of a a penciled in diagram like you might find in a textbook where there's a plane, there's a rectangle about halfway between the man and the bison that's perpendicular to him. So there's a rectangle that's basically the man's field of view. So it's going to be pretty large. It's going to fill up you know everything that he can see. It's going to be a you know a good chunk of the size of the the field itself. And then picture you know four lines from the corner of each corner of the rectangle back to the man's head. So what that rectangle is showing is his field of view. It's what he can see in in his visual field. It's anything outside of it he can't see or at least can't

2:11 see clearly. It might be in his peripheral vision, but what's inside the rectangle is what he's going to recognize and see. So as he as he's looking through that rectangle that's you know invisible to him, but visible to you, he sees the bison clearly. So his frame is that he can see the field, he can see the sky, and he can see the bison. You can see all those things plus the man. Now imagine that he rotates 90 degrees clockwise. So instead of being on the west, he's now to the north of the bison. But rather than continuing to face it, he continues facing east. And so that rectangle moves with him, that frame of reference is still facing in the same direction, it's still the dis same distance

2:54 from him. But what is inside his frame of reference now? There's no bison. All he sees is the sky in the field. And from his point of view, from his frame, he's not in any danger. But you as sort of a you know, kind of a god mode observer, you're looking down and you can see that there's a two thousand pound mammal Camel, you know, 100 yards from him that could potentially charge. So frame is asking yourself, is there a bison there or not? From your frame, from your perspective, from your point of view, there is. There's a field, there's a man, and there's the animal. From his point of view, from his frame, there isn't. And it's because of what is in that rectangle. So that's a that's a limited portion of it.

3:37 And that's just sort of setting the very basics for when we're talking about frame in terms of discourse, we're not talking about what you can see. We're talking about what you can say and about what you can think. So when a conversation is framed, the terms that are permissible, the ideas that are accepted, are part of that frame. They're the things that sort of define the scope of the discussion. It's the reason that virtually all of these episodes that we have done have specifically talked about the definitions of things. Whereas you've as you've said many times, you have some choice comments about the definitions, the terms at the beginning of a contract, and what sort of power that gives you.

4:18 Yeah, essentially if if I'm drafting a contract, or even if you don't let me draft the contract, I don't need to draft it. Let someone else draft the contract. If I get to define the terms at the beginning of it, I don't care what the rest of the contract says. If you get to define the terms, you win, as long as you know what you're doing. And the r and the reason whether that we're talking about this we're we're gonna talk about things in terms of winning and free frame control, but w as Christians, we're not doing this advocating manipulation. some of the things that we say, if an evil man is doing it, and often it is evil men doing it, they are absolutely using this tool to manipulate, to control.

4:59 Is as you said, you can you can have a perfectly good contract, and if you maliciously alter the the definitions, the terms, you can make it do something terrible, even if the drafter of the contract had no such intent. So we're not advocating using this for evil. We're advocating understanding and applying frame correctly for two very important reasons. One, so that you were not misled when you're in conversations with others, when you're having any sort of discussion, if someone is being sloppy with the frame or if they're shifting it, or if they're trying to rigorously control it in a way that precludes your points from even being acceptable, you need to know that that's going on so that you can combat that directly.

5:44 And the other is that if you're sloppy, if you're committing logical errors If you're committing framing errors, you can un in an unintentionally, inadvertently mislead people by framing things poorly when you weren't trying to mislead, but you mill will mislead simply because you said things in such a way that you accidentally prevented the right conclusion from being reached. And so framing things properly, it's completely natural. We do it all the time without thinking about it. And in conversation, it's it it's a it's a fluid thing. Like it's not as rigorous as a legal contract. There's you talk about ideas, and if you realize that maybe you're you're not using the same definition of a word, you rewind and

6:26 say, so are you meaning this when you say that? So So that you can have the same shared frame, the same shared perspective, so that you make sure you're actually understanding and discussing the same thing. I think errors happen a lot more often in these discussions, at least when we're talking about fellow Christians or just those who have not wicked intentions, not necessarily good intentions, but at least neutral. There are those, of course, as mentioned, who have wicked intentions who are acting out of malice, but I think it's most often just sloppiness. It's not thinking about things accurately and thoroughly. Yeah, reason I've I've mentioned before. Reason is a skill. It's a gift from God that is distributed unequally.

7:09 It's also a skill. it's a tool that must be used and honed. And just because you may be born with the capacity for reason doesn't mean that just that you can just reason things out and you're done gonna do a good job. Particularly when you're dealing in an adversarial situation where someone else is framing things in such a way to mislead you, whether intentionally or not. And as you said, like when it's unintentional, that's even worse because there are lots of cases where pastors mean well, they believe that they're speaking truthfully, and they will frame things in a way that doesn't violate their conscience, but and it doesn't necessarily even sound wrong, but the way that the conversation is framed precludes you from actually

7:55 getting to the truth of the matter. And so for us, this is about reaching the right conclusion. When you're having a debate or an argument with someone, if you're doing it properly, it should not be to win. It should not be simply to score the most points and to prevail. If you're having a good debate, like a proper, you know, moderated two sides with with opposing uh viewpoints, a really good debate would be one where one side made the point so clearly and concisely that the other side conceded not only that the first side had won, but that he had changed his mind, that he realized that his arguments were not as good as the arguments on the other side. So it's very important to me personally to always be right.

8:43 And when most people hear that you're gonna think, well you think you're always right. No, I always want to be right. And very often that means I need to change my mind because the the givens that I brought into the conversation, maybe they aren't borne out. So framing things in a clear manner is about arriving at truthful conclusions. And if that means you have to change your mind at the end of it, thank God. You're right about more things than you were when you started. So to seek to be right is not simply about trying to win. It is about trying to come out the other side of a conversation closer to or with the truth and grasp than you began. And that's why this is so important, because if you fail

9:23 to frame things well, you can very easily be misled and end up in the weeds I guess we can move on to the psychology of this. Now there are a lot of things that we could address when it comes to psychology. This is a deep field. But just for the basics, essentially what we want to go over is what is called framing effect and a few related matters. Framing effect is the most basic form of it. If you frame something with positive connotations versus negative connotations, people people will select the positive connotations significantly more frequently than the negative connotations, even if the two things that you are offering are in fact the same thing, just slightly different emphasis. So to make that more concrete, if you went to the doctor

10:16 and you were told that you have some disease, some ailment, and you need to have a surgery. If you are told the surgery has a fifty percent chance of success versus there is a fifty percent chance the surgery will not be successful, you are more likely to opt to have the surgery in the first case, where the doctor tells you there's a 50% chance of success. Same exact outcome, because if there's a 50% chance of success, that means there's a 50% chance of failure. And vice versa for emphasizing the negative. But psychologically, human beings are wired to choose the positive. And there are a lot of reasons for this. Relatedly, you're more likely to choose the positive if it is a certain gain versus probabilistic.

11:02 So if you tell someone there's X percentage chance of the good outcome versus there's an absolute chance of this good outcome, even if the absolute chance is smaller than the probabilistic one, people will choose the certain one. And to give a concrete example of how this sort of field is used in your everyday life, in order to manipulate you essentially. If you go to almost any store anywhere and look at the options of what you can buy, they'll be different levels, they want you to buy that middle one. And that's why there's a middle one. Because they know psychologically, if you are given three options, you usually will choose the middle option because you'll you'll think to yourself, well,

11:47 the the top of the line option's too expensive, so maybe I won't get that one. But I am willing to spend a little more than the bottom option, so I'll pick the middle option. That's why there are three sizes of popcorn and three sizes of soda at the the movie theater and everything else. This is psychology, this is framing, because you're looking at it. Well, these are my sets of options. This is a totally artificial construct why you have these three options. But they know if they give you these options, you'll pick the one they want you to pick, and that's usually the one that has the highest margin for them. There's tons of literature on this you can easily find. Papers on it. I'll I'll link one in the show notes, just a brief one.

12:26 From American Express, showing this is very well known thing. You see another similar thing when you go and get fuel. It's never two dollars and ten cents a gallon. It's a dollar ninety-nine. That's their goal. And that's why you also have at the end of that you'll notice and nine tenths. Because they have shown, they have proven psychologically that if it ends with a nine, for whatever reason, your brain doesn't roll over and go, there is no functional difference between a dollar ninety-nine and two dollars. You just look at that first significant digit, you look at that one, and so you're more likely to make the per purchase. And it's just again, this is all psychology. And to give one more example of how this works in the

13:12 real world, we all know what spin is. Spin is just framing in the field of politics and public relations, so corporations do it too. But you'll have people, their whole job, the spokesperson, the entire job is just to spin things, to frame them in such a way that people look at them as as not being as bad as they are or as better than they are. And that's just psychology. It's just framing. It's making you think about something in a certain way. And so it's important to step back and actually look at what is being done and why they want you to think about something in a certain way and whether or not maybe you should do that or should not do that. So one of the examples that occurred to me earlier today is

13:59 something that we've been talking about a lot lately uh r with regard to Christianity and Christian doctrine, Protestant doctrine, and particularly the Lutheran distinctive or the Lutheran focus on law and gospel. Um Um and the re so that law and gospel is a is a tool that can be brought to to any text or to any situation to distinguish the law is that which shows our sin. This is what what Lutherans are taught in in uh catechism class. The law shows our sin, the gospel shows our salvation. The SOS. That's the this basic shorthand you're given as a kid. And the the premise is that we know correctly that we cannot save ourselves, we cannot justify ourselves before God. And so it's crucial when we're looking at scripture that we not

14:53 inadvertently trip over ourselves and try to interpret a passage in such a way that we think, oh, well, maybe this means I can save myself. And this was this was one of the principal battles that the Luther and the Reformers had against Rome in the 16th century was that the Roman Catholic Church had lost any semblance of the proper scriptural understanding of justification. And so the writings of the early reformers, particularly the Lutherans, were very heavily focused on justification, on law and gospel, on making sure that no man, no one who reads the book of Concord, which was what was produced by 1580 by the Lutheran Reformers, if you read that and you believe it, and you should, because it's all

15:44 straight from scripture. It's basically just a big Bible study. There's no possible way to read the book of Concord and come out the other side thinking, yeah, maybe I can save myself, maybe I can do a little bit to earn my salvation. That is framing the question in in a good way. It's taking to understand that the law is God's eternal will, and it's it's an eternal will that we cannot fulfill perfectly. Jesus was born a man in order to fulfill it perfectly in our stead because none of us could, because our will and our nature is turned ever against God until God comes and gives us faith and gives us a renewed spirit, where we are able to then turn towards Him by faith. And this is where the law gospel distinction I won't say it

16:35 falls apart, but it becomes misused because law versus gospel, which for one thing, shouldn't shouldn't said in the first case. They're not an opposition. That's really a that's the kind of the rebirth of the the ancient heresy uh Of Minicianism, where you have the demiurge of the Old Testament, and then you have Jesus born in the New Testament as the new, more loving God. And that was a it was a heresy that was dispensed with. But the premise still lingers where a lot of people think, well, yeah, that old testament, there's a lot of law in there, there's a lot of rules, and thank goodness for the New Testament where we're set free from all those rules. Uh yeah, unless you read the red letters.

17:17 Yeah. Yeah. if you actually pay attention to what Jesus said, there are still rules, but the and that's the important distinction. There are still rules because God's law, God's will is eternal. What the ru the distinction of law and gospel is that the rules don't save you. We don't obey God so that we can be saved. We obey God because we are saved. So when you read, for example, the Epistle of James, which I hope people you know will pick up and read after this episode, just as a good example, it's just a few pages long and you know it's probably about eight, ten minutes to read the whole thing. James is an epistle written to a church, written to believers, and there's a lot of law in it. He says, here's what you guys need to be doing.

18:02 Now, is he saying that so that they can save themselves? No. They're already saved. They are post-justification, if you can say it that way. they are they they are Christians living the Christian life. And part of the Christian life is asking, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live? So So Lutherans have long been allergic to James because there's a lot of law in it and there's a lot of you need to do this. But as Corey, as you just mentioned, what Jesus says is a lot of law and a lot of you need to do this. But the reason that frame is applicable to this is that it's not about saving yourself. It's not about you need to obey the law so that you can be saved. It is about God has saved you, God is your creator, you are a creature.

18:51 What is our response in the Christian life? And we know that faith is given as a gift and that the good works that we do were prepared for us by God to do them. So we're not seeking credit for the good things that we do that God gave us. We simply want to know what does God want. And And the framing error that is very incredibly common among Lutherans is to take this law gospel dichotomy and try to apply it everywhere, to try to make every single question a question of justification. Because in the sixteenth century, that's a lot of what was going on, both with Rome and then with some of the other post-Reformation sects. You had controversies about, well, can we save ourselves? How much do we do?

19:35 And so yes, that is a very important distinction, but it's not the only one in the Christian life. And the fact that Lutherans are given this very powerful and important and true tool doesn't mean that it can be misused. The frame of law and gospel is a valuable tool in the context of dealing with soteriological questions, of dealing with questions of salvation. It is totally inappropriate, it is completely misused when it is applied to questions of the Christian life. it's typical when you're talking to a Lutheran to say, hey, you should obey God, and they say, Well, what, you think I can save myself? And like it's just a knee-jerk reaction to apply the law gospel dichotomy and think that the person the they're listening to is trying

20:24 to say he can save himself, which is nuts. Like no no Lutheran would ever think that or say it and yet the the framing of law and gospel is so powerful in the line of in the mind of the well-catechized Lutheran that they end up kind of retarded because they'll just apply it all over the place where it's totally r irrelevant. And we're talking about frame just in general today with that specific example because it's that's a good demonstration of how something true can suddenly become false. Law gospel is true in the context of soteriology. It is false in terms of the Christian life. It has no place there. But a Christian, a Lutheran in particular, in good conscience, will bring the law gospel distinction to everything because it's a it's his hammer.

21:10 He knows it's gonna work and he knows it's important. He doesn't remember why. And so he's just swinging that hammer at everything he sees. And it does tremendous harm because you end up with people arguing against God and saying that either God doesn't want us to do anything, which it is a clear denial of scripture, or just falsely accusing the people they're talking to of trying to save themselves when nothing can be further further from the truth. So framing is is situational. It's contextual. It's not simply it's not a tool that can just be used like a hammer. Well it is framing is understanding that it's not just a hammer, that it can also be a nail pillar. You have you have different aspects of it, depending on where it's

21:52 being used. And there's some cases where you don't want a hammer at all. If you're working on glass, you probably don't want a hammer anywhere near it. And that's perfectly fine. Understanding the frame is understanding that the tool is suitable to the job and that you don't take the tool to every job if it's not applicable. So when it comes to framing, people are actually relatively familiar with framing, even if they don't recognize the term, even if they don't recognize the actual underlying psychology. Because there are so many examples that are related to framing in our everyday experience and in our academic experience for those who've had any of that. What it is sometimes called as gradualism is one way that this

22:37 plays out. And that will be that Via framing, you have the acceptable range of beliefs or views, obviously the center being the consensus, as it were, policy, to use the term typically used with the Overton window and we'll get more into that. And then you have less and less acceptance as you go out until you get to the unthinkable. Now if you are a member of a group that wants the unthinkable on either end of this spectrum to be policy, you do not start at least if you're competent you do not start, by advocating for the unthinkable. Because if you do that, people will double down against you and you will never get anywhere. Instead, you change things slightly, a little bit at a time. One of the

23:33 examples that's often used to illustrate this is the boiling frog. If you stick a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat it up, he adjusts to the increases in temperature over time. If you throw him into boiling water he will try to jump out. Another example that some may know, I think this one is probably a little for the older generations more so than younger, the camel's nose If you're in a tent, and a camel sticks his nose under the edge of your tent, if you ignore that, you will soon have an entire camel in your tent. You may not have cared about the camel's nose, you probably care about having the entire camel in your tent. And so it's it's habituation, it's gradualism. You're changing things slowly over time.

24:17 You're changing that frame, you're moving that window in order to get people to accept accept something they would never have accepted. So sometimes called the slippery slope, shifting baseline, there were terms for this in communist countries in Eastern Europe, how they enacted policies to slowly stamp out opposition and change society. And it's a playbook. It's something Something It is absolutely it yeah, it works a deliberate can yeah, it worked. It works on all of us because everybody wants to be reasonable. Everyone instinctively wants to be in the center. we're social creatures. We don't like the idea of being on the outside because it's not so much the case today, but in in the history of

25:06 human civilization, if you're cast out, you may well die. If you are outside of the social group, it's not simply social death. It may be physical death because there may be nowhere else for you to go. And the the idea of the rugged individualist dies quickly when you're off alone in the woods. There are very, very few men who can actually pull that off. And so we have to do exile used to mean something. Yeah. It was it was usually a death sentence. And so we we have an instinctive both social and even deeper than that need to belong, to to be in a community where our views and our values are shared and where we are not going to be seen as the outlier. Because when you're the outlier, well you may be getting closer and

25:54 closer to the edge where maybe maybe social and and physical death awaits you if you keep going. And so there are there are laws and there are social mores and there are these different frames that are used in a human society to keep things within the acceptable bounds. And those things will vary by culture, they'll vary by nation, but they all behave the same way, which is to sort of keep people kind of corralled in the middle. And in a good society, that's a beneficial thing. If we had a Christian society, we would be corralled in the center of obeying God, of doing what God wants. Instead, we have a society where doing what God wants will get you fired. Do saying what God says will cost you your bank account.

26:39 It will cost you your livelihood. It will may cost you your house. It could cost you your life. And the control of discourse goes directly to where those lines are drawn. As you as you said, they move. they move in history. And I think it's important particularly for Christians to recognize that this moving we as Christians we want we typically if we're doing a good job if we're trying to be Christian, we try to frame things in terms of our faith and to make sure that our sure that our moral pronouncements match with scripture. But as you can see as these things are are reframed in a society, very often things that used to be morally permissible are today morally impermissible. For example, slavery used to be morally permissible.

27:32 For thousands of years it was considered morally permissible for some people in some certain certain situations situations to be kept as slaves, to be literally property of others. That was moral. That was considered to be in accord with scripture. And churches upheld this for thousands of years. Then in the eighteen hundreds, that went away. Now it's one thing for the law to change. Laws can change. Countries can do what they want. There are reasons to change laws. That's fine. What is not fine is for a person to then make the retroactive claim that morality has changed, or worse, to say the morality hasn't changed and all those in the faith before us were immoral when they believed they were no moral.

28:18 Because if if all the people who said one thing did so with a clean conscience and now we come along in current day and we have the diametrically opposed belief about something that we hold in good conscience. One of those is damnable. One of those views nailed Jesus Christ to the cross to pay for because it was a sin. And And as Christians, we must face head on that it has to be one of them and we must recognize the implications of what it means if it's either. Either we are sinning today by holding certain beliefs where we say that morality has changed, or we must condemn all of our fathers in the faith as unrepentant sinners because they held a belief that we condemn. So see the the overton window, the the window of what is

29:09 acceptable discourse gets shifted first socially and then legally and then morally, and then retroactively we try to say, well, yeah, morality mor the morality says that this says that this is the way it has to be and we try to find justifications for it in scripture and that is a terrible place to be as a Christian because suddenly you've turned scripture into a wax nose where you can make it fit any face, you can make it look like anything you want. You just decide what you want and then you go find the verses that support it. That is not what the Christian should be doing, and yet it's what we find very commonly today. Because the frame is being controlled by those outside the church and

29:47 then we adopt it. We adopt their frame, we import it, we say, Oh yeah, this this moral value I hold that to because I'm a moral person and then we find it in a place where it was never found before. Maybe all the church missed it for thousands of years. They missed this slavery was a sin. If that's the case, then say so outright. Say that all those people are burning in hell because they live lives of unrepentant sin. Or deal with the fact that you are importing an amoral frame into a moral framework and that simply can't work. if God is changing, he's not God. And that's the that's the bottom line when it comes to talking about morality shifting. And a lot of these frame discussions will ultimately boil down to

30:32 for the Christian, did God change? And we have to answer that question. The answer is clearly no. Scripture is abundantly clear that God does not change. And so if we're changing our morality, where are we getting it from? What is the genealogy of the ideas that we are spouting that we are claiming come from a Christian frame because that's not where they originated. And just as humans, we are very good at either justifying what we have done or excusing it after the fact. And we need look no further than Genesis, the beginning, to see human beings doing this, to see this in action. What did Adam do when he was confronted by God? Well no God, this woman that you gave me, he's blaming Eve and God.

31:19 He's already attempting to reframe things and say, Well, no, it wasn't me. I didn't do this. I didn't sin. It was the woman that you gave me. And so ultimately, God, you are responsible for what you did. And that is the human tendency to try and justify what we are doing instead of looking at it objectively and realizing, no, no, actually, I did sin. I am wrong. I know I need to amend my beliefs and my actions instead of attempting to justify them. And to look at how quickly this Overton window can shift, because it can happen pretty quickly, even within the lifetime of an individual. In two thousand eight, California had Proposition eight. Now if you want to look for it you have to use the year because the numbers do get recycled.

32:12 Proposition eight in two thousand eight in California was a proposition to define marriages between a man and a woman. And it passed. That's California in two thousand eight. Now, homosexual marriage, so called, is the law of the land for the entire nation. That's how quickly things can change. If you have people who are working hard to shift that window, which is usually the media and the academy and many others, abetted by Christians who do not think. Yeah, you can you can go back and look at what Obama said when he was running for president and what he said as a senator in 2006 as it relates to sodomite so called marriage. He would be unpersoned today for saying those things. And he was on the left.

33:03 He was further to the left than most of the Democrats when he was saying those things. And now fifteen years later, not only is it the law of the land, but in the majority of our own churches, it is seen as if not ideal, at least licit, it's seen as something well love is love. And if these people love each other, who are we to judge? And even if they say, well, sure, maybe it's not a marriage in God's eyes, yes, it it's still definitely a marriage for civil purposes. And that's a good thing. I I don't I don't want to interfere with their relationships. Who am I to judge that? That's in inside the church that this has happened. Yeah, they're at the acceptable or the sensible level. The May as well list what the the stages are.

33:48 Within the Overton window, how the range of discourse is parsed, is essentially you have it starts out as unthinkable. When it's no longer unthinkable, it's radical. When it's no longer radical, it's acceptable. This is where many Christians are today with the idea of homosexual marriage. When it's no longer just acceptable, well then it's sensible, and then it becomes popular, and then it becomes policy, and this obviously can go one way or the other, left or right. And so many Christians today, with regard to these things that have changed in the culture are at the I I don't personally want it, but it's acceptable. Or it's sensible. It makes sense for policy for the government to do this.

34:29 And that's where they are. And within the in within the Christian context, that policy demarcation at the far end for Christians becomes morality. So today there are still Christians in the world, in the workplace, you cannot condemn sodomite marriage, or you will be destroyed in most cases. But in the church, there's still some people who speak out against it. A lot are okay with it, but there are still there's still opposition to it. But But if you looked at a lot of the articles talking about sodomai marriage and the rulings and the laws as they were passing, they would all hearken back to the sixties, to Loving v. Virginia, where interracial marriage was codified as being legal for the first time.

35:16 There had been a ruling in 1883 after the Fourteenth Amendment on equal uh protection had been passed, where laws against interracial marriage, against miscegenation, were upheld by the Supreme Court. And then between eighteen eighty three and nineteen sixty seven, the culture changed, the overturn window shifted, and finally the law was struck down. Now the law didn't change, the constitution didn't change. What changed? The people's change. People's hearts changed. And so that's a case where I'm sure there are people listening to hear a man who claims to be a Christian to even use the word miscegenation may make your skin crawl. It may sound like a truly evil thing to say. And that's a perfect illustration of the Overton window shifting, because today

36:08 to say miscegenation is unthinkable. It's outside of the Overton window. It may be something that is said, but it is never said by polite people. It's never said by Christians. It is an evil thing that is only said outside of the fringes, out in the wilderness, in the cursed earth where there is only damnation and suffering. That's where those ideas are. Where if you look back in nineteen sixty-six and even after Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court had to change it because the legislatures wouldn't change it because most people were still opposed to it. So the majority not only felt that it was a moral issue going in the opposite direction, but they were fine with it. And yet in just a couple generations, the Overton window, the frame

36:56 of what is acceptable discourse has shifted. Now, the claim made today is that morality changed, I guess. I mean, God doesn't change, and God's a source of morality, but somehow what was immoral in nineteen fifty is today moral to the point that is necessary to destroy someone who would even question whether that was a good thing. And so those who tie sodomite marriage back to the miscegenation ruling are exactly right. It's a part of a continuum that they see clearly. It's a continuum that they have been moving, and now they're it's being shifted further. They're seeking to allow polyamory, they're seeking to allow children to have sex with adults, which was an inevitable result. And when when someone talks about the slippery slope, on one hand, there's a

37:50 possibility for exaggeration, there's a possibility for extrapolation that's not justified. On the other hand, as we have seen repeatedly over the last couple of generations, it usually gets borne out. Where the thing that was unthinkable and insane, that you would have pedophiles in public discourse today it's it was it was just outed in the last week. the man uh twitter joel roth roth who was in charge of censoring individuals like corey and myself he's an open homosexual he's an open sodomite he's an open pedophile now he hasn't been caught diddling children, but his PhD thesis was on how do we get kids on Grinder, which is a sodomite hookup app, and that was what he pursued at Twitter to increase the engagement of children with

38:41 homosexuals who sought to have sex with them. That's pedophilia. That's happening at the upper echelons of our society today. He was a rich man. He was, I think he was a VP. He was worth millions and millions of dollars. He's not an outcast. We are outcasts for saying that's a bad thing, and yet he is at the heights of modern accomplishment as a very well respected person. he's writing now for the New York Times and others. He's right in the center of the Overton window advocating homosexuals having access to minors for sexual purposes. That's how quickly it changes. And they're not gonna stop there. It never stops because the shifting of the Overton window. We're told today in a in a beautiful example of framing that

39:28 this is progress, that it's progressive, that a society will naturally progress from more restrictive to less restrictive. And so whenever someone calls these things progress, they're framing. they're controlling the frame of your mind and your ability to think about these things by saying the fact that now men and women of different races are free to marry is a good thing. That's progress. The fact that men are now able to marry men is a good thing, that's progress. The fact that soon men will be allowed to marry children is a good thing, that's progress. That's the shifting of the Overton window always inexorably in the same direction. You notice that none of this progress is ever in terms

40:12 of us living more godly lives. And so that when men begin to advocate things like Christian nationalism as a reaction and a response, well, that's outside the Overton window. That that's an that's an evil that's unspeakable and must be destroyed. As long as you can keep moving that center, that juicy center of what's permissible for debate, even if there's strenuous debate against it, if you can combat it, you ultimately will win if you're using the the shifting of frame for evil purposes. And so this is a weapon that has been used against us. And because people want to be reasonable and want to be centrist, they don't want to be dis disliked. They don't want to be castigated. They don't want to be called extremist.

40:58 You just sort of get out of the way, you keep your mouth shut, you don't want to be judgmental, you don't want to be unloving, and they keep chipping away. And they can do it because we seed the frame. We seed the frame to people who are using it as a it as a weapon to destroy Christendom. And that's the reason that we're focusing on this. It's not about manipulation. It's about having a bulwark of defense against the most evil things that are happening in our world today. And this is not exactly a new issue in human affairs. We can go all the way back to Ovid. Finkipi is obstra etrespike finem resist the beginnings and consider the end. This has been a problem in human society from the beginning.

41:45 If you look at any of the ancient empires, great civilizations, they didn't collapse overnight. They had a slow slow, often orchestrated, societal and particularly moral collapse that eventually led to civilizational collapse. We are very far along in the moral collapse. And it is orchestrated. This has an animating intelligence behind it. Now there are those who will, of course, say that, well, now you're just a conspiracy theorist and human beings couldn't possibly organize these sorts of things over multiple generations and centuries, and I you're absolutely correct, on the latter count. Human beings cannot very well organize these things over long periods of time and with millions of people involved.

42:36 But Satan can. He doesn't sleep, he has plenty of time on his hands, and he doesn't die. So there is an animating intelligence behind this, and as was said, the goal is to destroy Christendom. And if you just take a little piece of territory at a time, well Christians won't notice. It weird. the media all seem to be praising homosexuality and these homosexual clubs and all these things, but that's just that's just leftists being weird. No, it's not. They were constructing a narrative. They were building the future they wanted to see. And they've moved on already, from pedophilia, they are still working on getting that one legalized. But they've moved on to bestiality and sex bots and all manner of other things.

43:29 Because there is no bottom when it comes to evil. There is no ground, there is no floor. Things can always get worse. And that's where we find ourselves today. And you can look back and see them doing this. For instance, I want to just want to mention the pedophilia issue. Solon ran some articles. It's been more than a decade ago now, maybe even a bit more than that. But they ran up the flag to see what people would do. It's also deliberately shocking because if it shocks you the first time and it shocks you the second time, it shocks you a little less the third time. And so that was their goal. But they ran up that flag, they wanted to see what would happen. And they're still working toward it.

44:11 They always telegraph what they're going to do, if you pay attention. There's a another good example of reframing that is dominating a lot of the political discourse for the last decades, really, and that's the term immigration. There's There's a moral aspect to immigration today where people, Christians in particular, who have adopted the frame of the the left will take what was once a stranger, what was once an alien, which w what was once a person sneaking across the border in the middle of the night, illegally for the purpose of coming into our country and taking our money on welfare and stealing our jobs by stealing social security numbers and identities so that they could get away with it.

45:10 That's a series of criminality by a criminal who's illegally in a place where they're not welcome, where they do not belong. And the reframe is to say, well, that's an immigrant. And immigrant is a really powerful word because the root of it is migrate. And even if people don't think explicitly in these terms, we sort of know instinctively when you hear emigrant, you hear migrate and you think, well, you know, large animals migrate, like bear and moose may migrate, elk migrate, birds migrate. Well, if that's happening in nature, that's a perfectly natural thing to happen. Therefore it must be perfectly natural for people to migrate. And of course we know in the past that there have been migrations of people following herds typically.

45:58 Yeah it's That's w when the American Indians would migrate, it wasn't because they were looking for welfare in another state, it's because they were following the bison herd. Bison would migrate, they would move with them because that was their source of food and fuel and clothing. So you have a category of people who are engaging in criminal activity. They're rightfully called alien. Alien is the it's the legal term for them. It is the normal English term for them, but that word has not only fallen out of disfavor, but it's actively attacked. To say that someone is an alien, well, you know, now we have you know UFO stuff in in in pop culture. So to say a person is an alien, you're accused of dehumanizing

46:48 them. When that's not the case, an alien is a stranger. An alien is alienated. They are in one place where they do not belong, separated from the place where they do belong. But when you reframe and you call them an immigrant, well suddenly that's a natural thing. Immigrating. Well I mean that's we're we're a nation of im immigrants, right? We're all we were all immigrants at one point. Well my family wasn't. My family was here over four hundred years ago. They built the place that others immigrated to to. So that reframe uh lets you get away from the question of are these people breaking the law? Are these people coming with hostile intent? Regardless of whether they're breaking the law or coming with hostile intent,

47:32 do they have any business being here in the first place? And when you reframe and say, oh well they're immigrants, the natural inclination in the mind of the hearer is to say, well, of course, everyone's welcome. America is is not a nation. It has no there's no posterity here, as we talked about in in the episode on Christian nationalism. It's a shopping mall. All you have to do is sign the the the guest book uh that says you you take the oath of citizenship and ta da, you're an American. That's how we all became American, right? No. That's not remotely what happened, but it's what is thought in the modern mind today because of the reframe. And Christians will go even a step further. They will to they will take this leftist framing of the illegal

48:22 alien cast them as an immigrant, and what does the Christian want to do wants to morally justify it. So even though the genealogy of of the idea of these people being immigrants comes from hostile foreign powers seeking to destabilize our country, the the naive or the malicious Christian will go to scripture and find passages about sojourners and say, well gosh, I mean, these immigrants, these modern immigrants, that's just sojourning. That's straight from scripture. And sojourners are protected by God. It's a it's a blessed thing, right? I mean it's in the Bible as a good thing, so therefore we as Christians cannot oppose it or we stand condemned. So they will shift the overturn window even further from alien used

49:06 to be normal, now it's bad, immigration and immigrant are good, but sojourner is best when whenever you're criticized by a Christian because who can argue with the Bible? Well, it's funny when you look at the word that's you the the word in Hebrew that is sometimes translated sojourner in most of the translations. It also means alien. It means foreigner. It means people who again they're alienated. They are not where they belong. And the passages where God exhorts Israel to protect the sojourner, it would be as though if I found Mexicans who had snuck across the border in my backyard. The prohibitions that God gives to protect sojourners would exhort me not to go beat them and steal their stuff just because they don't

50:03 belong here. That hasn't changed. That should not be in the heart of a Christian. If you find someone who doesn't belong where they are, you shouldn't set upon them because they're an outlaw and seek to harm them. That doesn't mean that you should not seek to right the wrong that they have done by being where they are in a place that they shouldn't be. And so it's funny what the the passages on sojourners also say things like if a sojourner blasphemes, you are to stone him to death. Now, do these do these guys who to who exhort us to to love and to cherish the sojourner on our land want to listen to that part of the Bible? Because if they're advocating that we execute blasphemers, I'm all in.

50:48 You send all the sojourners if you want. If we can execute blasphemers on our lands, that is what Christians, Christian nations should be doing. Now, again, I'm not advocating for an individual to harm anyone, but the state should properly execute blasphemers. And as as Lutherans, we we totally ignore this because again we don't we don't want to believe our own confessions or the Bible. We just want to believe the parts that will advocate advocate our political positions. The confessions directly talk about blasphemers being executed by a godly prince, and it is commended, and it is said that is necessary. Yeah, that is in a number of places in the confessions. Anywhere you see, depending on which translation you have, you may see

51:33 hangman or you may see Master Hans. And that's just the German euphemism for the hangman. And even in the fourth commandment about obeying your parents that is mentioned. If you will not obey God, if you not obey your parents, then obey the hangman. This is a very serious matter, and realistically most of the so called immigrants that we have in this country would be subject to execution as blasphemers. Very few of them are Christian. There are some, certainly there are some. But we have a lot of Muslims and others coming across the border who are very much not Christian and are very much blasphemers. But just to go back briefly to the issue of if you find foreigners in your lands, the treatment they deserve, the treatment they want

52:20 is going to depend on whether they are in fact sojourners, if they are passing through for some reason, then you have to figure out why they're passing through. But in our case today, many of them are just outright invaders. They are here to plunder. And that's war. That's not a sojourner. So they would deserve very different treatment from a sojourner. They are not subject to the biblical injunctions with regard to sojourners. They would be re They would be subject to the biblical injunctions with regard to to enemies. Yep. And you know the etymology of Sojourner, but most people probably won. And this is where I want to get back to what a powerful reframing it is to to reframe the alien to the

53:07 immigrant and then the immigrant to the sojourner to bind the conscience of the Christian. To sojourn, the the definition when it came into the English language was to stay temporarily, to reside for a time, to visit. And it came from Latin, from the word subduranare, where the the root there is diurnal. You might know that. It has to do with a day. Sojourn is an entirely temporary thing, and in fact in scripture it was a legal category. the notion of someone sneaking into your lands and then just doing whatever and being welcomed was alien. If someone snuck into your lands, they would be properly executed. If they were a sojourner, they had a legal right, effectively the the ancient version of a green card, saying that they were permitted

53:54 in that land, while they were there, they were subject to that land's laws, and that they had to leave. It was a temporary status. So note the note the powerful reframing that these so-called Christians are doing, where they reframe the immigrant as a sojourner. They're trying to bind consciences by saying, well, this is a biblical category, ignoring the fact that the biblical category was implicitly and necessarily temporary. If these were actually immigrants, if they were migrating, there's no such thing. There's no one migrating into North America today. That's not a thing. But even if they were migrating, they would continue to move. As you said, Corey, that's not their goal. Their goal is to come here and to stay and to have

54:39 anchor babies and to get jobs and to get homes, displacing our own brothers, according to the flesh, who can no longer afford homes, because people who've been subsidized are receiving them, and then to ta-da, they've become American in a couple generations, and then no one can argue with that. That's the power of reframing. You can take something that was once once not only unthinkable but illegal and subject to death, and turned it into a morally protected category that a Christian is told he is obligated to defend or he'll go to hell. So that reframe, that is a that's a an illicit reframe. That is something that's evil, is done with the intent of harming us as a nation, as a people. But it's a it's a beautiful example, I think, of the power

55:29 of doing it. If you take someone who's an alien, well, aliens like you know, they should go away. Immigrant, well, I don't know. I mean, I weren't my weren't my ancestors immigrants. I'm not sure what to do about that. And then they get upgraded a sojourner, ignoring the fact that sojourners had to leave. Well, if it's a sojourner, you know, I I gotta give 'em my cloak, right? I mean Jesus says that you know the God said that they should be you should love them as you love yourself. Now that meant that you shouldn't starve them, you shouldn't beat them, you shouldn't take advantage of them. It didn't mean that they got to live on your couch. and that's what these guys who will call these people sojourners or

56:07 even immigrants are trying to do. There's trying to say that, well sure, maybe I couldn't force someone to live on your couch, but I can sort of force someone to live in your country because we got a lot of room. That's basically their argument. That is an overthrow of the law. It is an overthrow of of what is the right of every nation to protect its borders, to protect its own people against foreign invaders. And And invader doesn't necessarily imply intent. It doesn't need intent. If they're there and they don't belong, they're invading. They're doing harm by virtue of being in a place. And yet what we're saying here is outside the Overton window now. This like the things that we're saying are categorized as evil and

56:56 unthinkable. Whereas calling their so them sojourners and immigrants, even though neither word applies, that'll that is the only accepted form of discourse. That is the power of frame. That is the power of reframing the discussion in your own terms of say, you know, the contract, the Constitution can say whatever you want. In some ways I actually prefer the left on these issues, not in terms of what they believe, but in terms of how they behave. And the reason I prefer them is because they're just more honest. If a leftist is arguing against slavery, for instance, an issue that does come up, he will simply flatly say that all of our ancestors, who practiced slavery or at least approved of slavery, did not condemn slavery, were evil men.

57:51 And some of them will even say evil men who are now burning in hell, which coming from a leftist is rich, but that's a separate matter. I prefer that to what we get from some supposed Christians who will not argue, honestly, will not say that what these men did was evil from the perspective, the wrong perspective, but the perspective of the person advancing the point. He'll say, well they were mistaken, they didn't understand, they this long list of excuses, which is ridiculous because our ancestors, by and large, were better educated, more Christian men. They knew better than modern Christians. And yet Christians today will try to condemn these men, but they won't do it honestly, so I prefer the leftist who will just

58:36 honestly come out and tell me that he wants to kill me. The honesty is a little refreshing sometimes. Yeah, and and they're not lying in the name of God, which is the biggest problem we have within the church. Where these people are not doing it. They're not trying to bind consciences. Yes. Which is deadly, particularly to the Christian, because again, if you don't if the Christian doesn't understand how a subject is being reframed, if they don't understand how the discourse has been altered in its terms to leave them with no out, well they there you do find that your conscience is bound if you don't really think about it and if you if you just sort of trust what your betters, what your pastors and others tell you, you have no out.

59:21 And so the reason that we advocate understanding frame is that as we talked about last week, God commands us to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. In terms of the illegal alien on your in the land that your ancestors owned, you should be as innocent as doves in terms of not going out and beating them and stealing from them. And you should be as wise as serpents in terms of understanding that they are aliens who do not belong there and must be physically removed, and that both of those are godly things. Not to hurt them, not to beat them, and not to hate them. And that's the thing, that it's not hate to say that you showed up unwelcome in you're living on my couch now, you need to leave.

1:00:05 It's not hate for me to tell you to get out. it's my right as as a Christian to say it's time for you to go. Even if you were welcome for a short period of time, even if you were welcome to sojourn on my couch, if I invited a friend over and he spent the night, that's great. If he spends a year, we're gonna have a different conversation. And it's not that my morals have changed, it's that the conduct of the other person has has altered the equation. And the Christian who is wise as a serpent is free and is obligated to understand these things and then to act in a Christian way, and that is not to be bound in your conscience by men playing rhetorical tricks on you that will get you bound up in in knots so that you'd you don't know what to

1:00:52 do, but you've you probably just gotta go along with it because what they said sounded pretty Jesus y and you don't want to go to hell. You don't want to be meaningful. it comes to the use and the abuse of so many of these terms, The left obviously don't care. They've gone all in on the redefining terms in order to shift the window, as we have been discussing. And that is one of their tactics, of course, is just redefining terms. If you redefine the terms of what is unthinkable into something that is well not acceptable yet, but maybe not totally unthinkable, you've moved the Overton window without actually having to do anything other than change the term. Which can be very effective. And it is important for Christians to notice when that is being

1:01:36 done. Someone who is playing fast and loose with terms is probably trying to deceive you. He could just be stupid. That does happen. But he probably is trying to deceive you. He probably is acting out of malice. So Christians have to be, again, wise as serpents. An example of this that is happening, and this is something that would actually probably if I this is something if I said while I was living in Germany I could potentially be deported from Germany for saying it. There is a term in German for someone who has moved to Germany and been given citizenship but isn't German. It's papier Deutsch, a paper German. And you could use the same thing in English, you call paper Americans. Someone who has a piece of paper saying I'm an American,

1:02:22 but that piece of paper doesn't really make you American. That's not what it means to be American. It means something more as we've discussed in other episodes. But that term is something that you aren't allowed to use in Germany because it is considered hate speech. And if you engage in hate speech as someone who is sojourning in Germany, someone who is not a legal citizen, you can be kicked out of the country, you can have the the your your paperwork revoked. But But what I want the point I want to make here is they're trying to redefine that term. They are taking it from the traditional sense of someone who is German only because of the piece of paper to mean German officialese, the legalistic style of some German documents.

1:03:11 They're doing exactly what happened in 1984. They're trying to change the terms, the definitions of the terms, so that the crime think is impossible. Just remove the definition of the word. And it's you can see this happening in real time. There are people who know exactly what this word means, what it's supposed to mean, but now it's starting to pop up with the other definition in dictionaries. And so that is one of the ways you can move this window, you can reframe things. You don't have to use new terms, you don't have to use new arguments, just redefine things. And you can move we we see that today. Homosexual marriage. They redefined what marriage means. Marriage means a man and a woman.

1:04:02 Now it doesn't, because now legally it means a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, and soon who knows what else will be added to that definition. Five men, one woman, five men and a donkey they'll change it, they'll keep changing the term and make the unthinkable acceptable and then the acceptable into policy. You mentioned a minute ago that there's uh sometimes when people are doing this, and that's a good example, of duplicity, of utter dishonesty. I want to read a passage here, and this is the worst case for someone deliberately reframing an argument and using whatever rhetorical trick they can to deceive you where you're interacting with them, you are you know hopefully

1:04:50 a Christian, you're trying to be honest, you're trying to pursue truth, the person that you're talking with, see if any of these descriptions sound familiar to anyone that you've ever you've ever interacted with where you're trying to argue in good faith and they were trying to shuck and drive and to land blows and to to stab and to faint and to win a fight, not to Not to seek truth, but simply to win the argument. Listen to this and see if it rings true for your own personal experience. The more I debated with them, the more familiar I became with their argumentative tactics. At the outset, they counted upon the stupidity of their opponents, but when they got so entangled that they could not find the way

1:05:35 out, they played the trick of acting as innocent simpletons. Should they fail, in spite of their tricks of logic, they acted as if they could not understand the counter arguments and bolted away to another field of discussion. They would lay down truisms and platitudes, and if you accepted these, then they would be applied to other problems and matters of an essentially different nature from the original theme. If you face them with this point, they would escape again, and you could not bring them to make any precise statement. Whenever one tried to get a firm grip on any of these apostles, one's hand grasps only jelly and slime, which slipped through the fingers and combined again into a solid mass moments afterwards.

1:06:16 If your adversary felt forced to give in to your argument on account of the observers present, and if you then thought that at last you had gained ground, a surprise was in store for you on the following day. They would be utterly oblivious to what had happened the day before, and would start once again by repleting the former absurdities as if nothing had happened. Should you become indignant and remind him of yesterday's defeat, he pretended astonishment, and could not remember saying anything, except that on the previous day he had proved that his statements were correct. Sometimes I was dubfounded. I do not know what amazed me more, the abundance of their verbiage or the artful way in which they dressed up their falsehoods.

1:06:57 Now, I've argued with people like that in the past and I didn't know what was going on. It was very frustrating because again, I was arguing in good faith. I wanted to pursue the truth. Even if the truth was that I was wrong and I needed to be clarified by by the other person making a different point. What I got instead was insanity. And it it for a while it drove me insane. I I couldn't understand the mindset of the person I was talking to because it was it was an alien form of thought. And reading that quote w was really revelatory because it it w in the context of framing, it was like, yes, well that's exactly what happens in so many of these discussions. And the person who was talking in that in that passage was

1:07:42 talking about one group, but it's a form of discourse, of dialogue that has kind of become normal today, where again, people want to win, they don't want to pursue truth. And that's never what any Christian person should pursue. You should want to be right. And if that means you have to change your mind, then change your mind. If you're wrong, you need to repent, you need to get on the right side of things. But just because someone is seems to be making an convincing argument, take a look at their givens. Take a look at whether they've reframed in such a way that you have no choice but to agree with them because they've hemmed you in. if you get hemmed in by someone who's being duplicitous and deceptive,

1:08:28 you will end up confessing falsely to something that is evil, and you'll do it with a clean conscious, if if not maybe a troubled one, but you'll do it willingly because you felt like you had no choice because of the conversation that led to that point. So the the convincing arguments that are that you accept it's not enough for them to be convincing. They have to be valid. They have to be based on actual reason and not on emotional appeals or on the twisting of language so that you have no choice but to agree with something that if you If you had had it presented to you in a different way, as in the case of, you know, do you want the small, medium, or large, if there'd only been the small or a large, you would have

1:09:12 chosen differently. But because you was presented to you in a certain way, in your mind's eye, you were you're kind of hemmed in. There's only one obvious choice. Don't let that happen when you're talking to someone because it opens you up to manipulation, to abuse, to being deceived. And if you can be deceived, you can be damned. Satan wants to trick you. And as we talked about last week, any trick will do. Big one, small one, like as long as you start buying into lies, which includes reframing falsely, you will you will eventually slide far enough down the slope that you can't even see that you are sitting side by side with Satan and with with his friends and doing things that you never would have done if you had not

1:09:55 been tricked those years before by that one simple real little reframe of a word that you didn't really think about it and so you bought it and everything that flows from that naturally yes it's a slippery slope, but slopes are real. If you've ever been on a on a hill that was icy, slippery slope is it it's inexorable. Once you lose your grip, you're t you're going down the hill and you're not gonna stop till you hit something at the bottom. And we see that with so many things that have happened in the relatively recent past, homosexual marriage is a great example. Because you the initial requests were not demands really, but they were not for equal so-called recognition under the law. The initial demands were that those in a homosexual relationship should have

1:10:51 some of the same legal rights as those in an actual marriage. And so it was, well, life insurance should permit you to name Your so-called husband if you're a man. And so people didn't object to that. That seemed like a minor thing. Okay, fine, we can make that change. And then the demand was that, well, health insurance benefits should cover your partner, so called. And so we made that change. And on and on and on and on. And eventually you get to today, where you have marriage redefined, you have Christian adoption agencies being driven out of their work, and so you have children who could have been adopted into good families who will not because they are accused of discriminating under the law because

1:11:42 they will not adopt out to homosexuals. The slope is almost always slippery, and it just gets worse. And all of those steps on along the way, each of those concessions was perfectly reasonable. Like, oh, well, that makes perfect sense. That's just a small thing. Why wouldn't we do that? There's no harm in that. The harm was done the very moment that any man, woman, or child conceded that marriage was not the sexual union of a man and a woman blessed by God for the purpose of procreation. As soon as that definition was abandoned, as soon as it could be any other permutation, the whole shooting match was lost. And everything that happened downstream, down the slope, down that icy, slippery, murderous slope was inevitable because you gave away the the whole thing

1:12:36 at the starting bell. You gave away the fight when you gave away what it meant to actually be married, which is sexual union between a man and a woman. That, when it is licit, is the foundation of society, all of it. It's the foundation of the family, it's the foundation of the state. And guess what? The people who seek the destruction of the state, who seek the destruction of the family for the sake of doing evil, they know what they're doing. Satan knows what he's doing by undermining this. So when they say, oh, love is love, let me show you this rainbow, which by the way is not really a rainbow. It's got six colors. God's rainbow has seven seven colors. You think about this later on what the significance of those number

1:13:20 changes are, because that matters. When they have these false flags, literally, that they these banners that they fly and these slogans that they chant, they're all reasonable, they're all pretty, they always appear as an angel of light. And it's the premise that they're trying to sell that is the deadly poison. And Christians who are not aware of how these fights are actually taking place in the world are spiritually and intellectually disarmed and they're vulnerable to not only not fighting evil, but to actively participating in evil with a clear conscience. Because if you buy the frame of the evil, then it becomes yours. And suddenly you go find a a Bible verse that it turns out said that that was moral all along.

1:14:11 And why didn't notice that before? Well, great. thank God for this progress that we've made in our religion where now we have we have new and more moral ways of doing things. Christianity does not progress. Christianity does not evolve. Christianity does not have more morality today than yesterday. If you want to try to be more moral than God, you're going to go to hell. And I I I often speak like this and I I don't mean to be brutal or blunt or forceful for the sake of of drama or something, but again, the slippery slope is real. You buy you into a little thing, you're gonna get what comes along with it. Because you're going down that icy hill, you don't have any brakes. There's nothing you can do except for spin and hit something at

1:14:58 the bottom, you don't have a choice except for not going over the hill in the first place. And that requires knowing that there's a hill there, that it's icy, and that there's damnation at the bottom of it. And yes, I'm mixing my metaphors terribly. I love doing that, but it's this is life and death stuff of the soul, not only of the body. It's not just that well society's gonna get a little bit worse. It's that these people who can get you to agree to evil things, they're getting you to deny God. They're reframing in such a way that it sounds Jesus-y and it sounds loving and it sounds nice. And if you fall for their reframe, it becomes your religion, and you call that religion Christianity.

1:15:42 When the genesis, the genealogy of that religion, is Satan, it's not God. These things are not found in Scripture, none of them. They are found in the world. They are found in the mouths of the most evil people in the world, and the fact that they're being found in the mouths of Christians is is horrifying and it needs to stop and it will only stop when people recognize and speak against these sorts of evils when it starts, not when it gets so bad that you're like, oh wow, we we got to do something about it now. You fight the first moment that the reframe occurs, you fight the moment that the evil is introduced, not when everyone suddenly realizes how gat bad it could actually get. By then it's gonna be too late.

1:16:23 And in the case of homosexual marriage where we basically capitulated wasn't actually with the pride parades, which is noteworthy because well they call them pride parades. Satan's mask is never perfect, he always lets things slip. If you have people doing what they do at Pride Parades and calling them pride parades, maybe think about that and mortal sin. But where we actually capitulated had almost nothing to do with homosexuality. We capitulated when we stopped opposing birth control. Because that's where we undermined the nature of marriage, what it meant to be man and wife, what it meant to have a family. And from there, that was the beginning of the slippery slope. Because once you decouple marriage from procreation, well then why does it

1:17:23 matter if you literally cannot procreate in this union? And that was the beginning of the slippery slope when it came to this particular issue. And some Christians did fight that battle. We do have to give credit. The LCMS fought long and hard on that one. The boomers capitulated, largely in the sixties, but before that our forebears did fight that issue. They didn't win, but they tried. And it's important to note, as Christians, God does not tell us go win the battle. In fact, a lot of times he tells us to go lose the battle, but you still have to fight the battle. God is the one who will fight for you, and he and exactly you never give up, you keep fighting. God may carry the day for you, he may not.

1:18:14 Ultimately he will. But you don't have the option to stop fighting. Make the enemy bleed for every inch. Because the enemy will not stop fighting, and neither can Christians. We are not permitted to do that. God is truth. Beauty, goodness, truth. We will keep bringing up the transcendentals until people are saying them in their sleep. If you yield on the truth, you are necessarily yielding on God because God is truth. There is no falsehood in God, there are no lies in God. Lies cannot stand in his presence. And so if you are buying into the lies of the world, you are buying into things that are against God, you are opposing God, you are renouncing him, and that is why these things matter. That is why you do not let people reframe things and shift

1:19:05 things away from what was good, what is good, because good doesn't change, the truth doesn't change, beauty doesn't change, because God doesn't change. You're absolutely right about contraception, about birth control, and and that led to normalizing divorce. Because well, if if it wasn't about procreation and the cre and the formation of families, then it just becomes a a social arrangement, it becomes a financial arrangement. And you know, maybe in some cases divorce should should be allowed. We have plenty of pastors who are divorced. And even though that's an ontological impossibility, it's it's something that's virtually never spoken against today. The fact that the majority of our pastors use birth control is

1:19:50 demonstrated by the fact that most of them don't have seven or eight kids. You can tell which pastors have a scriptural view of birth control by how many kids they have. Yeah, they literally Yeah. and these are millennials. Like they these are guys who may still be having kids in five or ten years. they some of 'em may end up with clans of 20 and I hope they do because they're some of the best theologians that we have in the Missouri Synod today. Those are the guys who are filling pews. it's the guy with with one kid and then another adopted one from Venezuela that is the real problem because he didn't c just capitulate on one evil thing, he capitulated on a whole bunch of them because as you said, there there are no lies in God.

1:20:31 we the cr the morality, the the religion of today is not which is not Christianity, says that hate is evil, that killing is evil per se, that they're those things are utterly impermissible under any circumstances. And that lying or that adopting false beliefs, well, you know, you you don't want lies, but you know, beliefs are malleable, they can be whatever. When you read scripture, you will find that God hates. There are things that God hates. To hate is one of the properties of God. It is not the one that we emphasize, because that would be bad news for us. We want to emphasize the gospel and not the law. But God hates whatever is contrary to God's nature. Sin which is contrary to God's nature, he hates.

1:21:21 God will kill you because of your sin, which he hates, and he will kill you because he loves you, because just as Adam was cast from the garden, so that he can no longer eat from the tree of life, because then he would have lived forever, alienated from God. What God did was he sent him away so that he could die, so that the sin and the evil in Adam's life would have a finite end that could then be redeemed by Christ's propitiating sacrifice on the cross and that in eternity Adam would be given a new body and you will be given a new body and we will be given a second chance where there's no chance of sin, where all we can possibly do is obey God. But that love of God does not negate the fact that God hates

1:22:10 and God kills as well. God killed everyone on the planet in an act of hatred for their evil in the flood. Apart from eight people, four men and four women were spared from the flood for the sake of continuing the promise of Genesis three fifteen that he would send a redeemer in for the fullness of time. So God will hate and God will kill. God will never lie. there's no portion of any lie that is possible anywhere in God. And yet today we've inverted that. We've said that God never, never hates, God never, never kills. But God, yeah, I mean, morality changes. If morality changes, then God's a liar. That's really what you're saying. And so these things that we call Christianity, that we call morality,

1:22:59 they're not from God. The genealogy of those things has another source. And reframing those evil things in Christian terms by sprinkling Jesus dust on evil stuff, it reframes and lets people who are Christians who are not being wise as serpents, who are just being lazy and gullible, lets them fall for things that will ultimately separate your soul from God in eternity. And no one wants that. There's nothing more hateful than wanting someone to go to hell. We should we're forbidden to do that. And it it's sometimes it's hard because you know that when an evil person continues to be evil and they die in their evil, they will pay for eternity for every evil act they did, every careless word they spoke.

1:23:46 I've committed many evil acts and I've said many were careless words. Jesus paid for all of those so that I won't have to, because I receive that gift through faith. Those who reject that sacrifice will take it upon them themselves to pay the eternal price for those things. And that is a truly terrifying thing. And as Christians, we're not to wish that on anyone. Sometimes that's hard. But it is a terrifying reality that those who use these tools of manipulation and of rhetoric for the sake of advancing evil, they're heaping condemnation upon themselves. They're nailing Christ to the cross with those sins, but they're also accumulating punishment and attorney for those sins because they will pay for

1:24:30 them if they don't repent. And so Corey, you and I both pray for the repentance of all of these people to cease their evil for the sake of the world, for the sake of the church, and for the sake of their own souls. But if they will not cease, then may Master Hans visit upon them in a legal manner as soon as possible to rid us of the evil in this world, because the sooner that they stop doing the evil, the better off we'll be, and the better off they'll be even if they go to hell.