The Problem of Evil is a Problem for Atheists | Jay Watts

In an enlightening episode, I engaged in riveting discussions with Jay Watts, founder and president of Merely Human Ministries. Notorious for his energetic delivery, Jay shared personal experiences from his journey, transitioning from a self-proclaimed atheist to being a profound believer. He touched on his struggles growing up amidst broken family ties and dealing with the consequences of nihilism, and his transformative discovery of objective morals. The discussion further ventured onto profound societal trends—especially tribalism and secularism.

Our conversations also wound its way through poignant existential questions of morality, good versus evil, and God's existence. These were examined against a background of philosophical thoughts, with Nietzsche's 'ubermensch' theory and Dostoevsky's depiction of existentialism being particularly noteworthy. Our discussion finally rested upon exploring the Christian worldview's explanation of evil existence and the persistent human longing for justice.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Because of that, there is, to me, this pain that I feel when I see people buying
into this idea that we have to destroy our political enemies and the people that are against us.
Because, and I understand where it comes from, because they see great evil being
done in the world and they just want somebody to bring justice or stop it.

(00:22):
Well, hello everyone. Today I get to talk to my friend Jay Watts.
Jay is the founder and the president of Merely Human Ministries.
Jay seeks to give an answer to one of the most important questions in life,
which is what does it mean to be human?
What is the source of human significance?

(00:42):
Where does human value come from? And the ethical outworkings of that as it
relates to things like abortion and other biotechnical moral issues.
Jay is a fun guy. He is lively. He is never short on energy,
or he at least hides himself really well when he does.
But we had a lively conversation ranging from his days as an atheist to the

(01:07):
problems of evil immorality in Nietzsche.
And is there an optimistic outlook for us here in the United States where more
and more people are adopting some kind of secular outlook on life.
What does that mean for meaning and morality? What does that mean for peace?
Does it help us explain and understand the tribalism that is rising in our country?

(01:33):
It was a fun discussion. So here we go.
Jay, I'm always interested in kind of how people got to where they are, why they do what they do.
You travel, you speak, you write, you engage some really important issues.
If you've always been like this, was like 12-year-old Jay interested in the

(01:54):
kinds of things that, I don't know, how old are you, man? You're my age.
You're older, aren't you? I'm older.
You're much older than me. That's right. I'm much, much older, yeah. Yeah.
Would 12 year old Jay be just as interested as much, much older than Mike Sherard
Jay is, or how did you end up where you are?
I think 12 year old Jay was a bit of a wreck. I was, when I was younger,

(02:17):
I was an atheist and so I grew up.
So probably about 12 was when that started to happen.
I was just, I always say I was just clever enough to get into a lot of trouble.
And so, and my family was broken up and I did, my mom was dealing with that
as best she could. My sisters were older and hung out with each other.
So basically I was left alone a lot when I was younger.

(02:38):
I was one of those latchkey kids who just came home and made life for themselves.
And the problem was when you ask, was I interested? I don't know if I think
interest is a, is a, would be a weird way of thinking about it for me now looking back on it.
I was aware enough of things that the way that I was processing them without
any kind of direction started to send me down a bad path. So,

(03:00):
yeah, I always did enjoy reading how things work.
I mean, I literally had the set of books, how things work.
My dad got those for me and always enjoyed thinking about things.
But the problem is that kind of enjoyment deteriorates when you get to questions.
I can remember going in. My mom had this couch in her room and I would go in

(03:22):
there in the middle of the night and sit on the couch and tell her I'm having
trouble sleeping because I'm.
I'm struggling with like the expansion of the universe, right?
I mean, this idea of how fast it's accelerating.
And I am. It's an unsettling thought. And if the vastness getting larger,
yeah, that could keep you awake at night.

(03:43):
I'm this tiny little nothing. And so that led for me to a really destructive view of myself.
I mean, by the time I was 17, I think I'd already determined a few things.
The universe is unfathomably massive and old, and I am crazy young and going
to die the second I come into existence in a cosmic scale.

(04:06):
And I'm a carbon blip on a tiny little rock on this incomprehensibly large universe.
And so if I lived to be 17 or if I lived to be 70, it doesn't make any difference
at all. And so that led to a fairly self-destructive period.
I think there was a combination of sort of an ingrown nihilism in me.

(04:29):
And at the same time, that's Elvis axiom, you know, live fast,
die young, leave a good looking corpse.
I mean, so I had both of those things going together.
So where did that kind of ingrained nihilism come from, this outlook of nothing
matters, life is meaningless?
Panelists, were you, were you, was your family religious, you know,
growing up to 12 or per se, or what, what do you think, where do you think that

(04:51):
nihilistic outlook came from?
I think it just came from undirected thinking. I mean, well,
it seemed logical to me, right?
I mean, if the universe was an accident and there was no purpose or no point
or no meaning, everything that we were doing was just, I mean,
I was, by the time I was headed to college, I was, I was my last couple of years,
it took me two years to graduate high school in the sense of of senior class.

(05:12):
I took senior class twice because the first time I skipped like 93 days of 180
days and it was mostly because I couldn't bring myself to go to school.
I would be driving down the road and it's like, why would I go?
It's all meaningless. It's all pointless.
I might as well just go do. And I realized, I realized the school didn't care.
I grew up with those TV shows where they had a truant officer that was out there patrolling the world.

(05:35):
And as soon as I figured out that wasn't true, I was like, nobody cares that
I'm not at school. Nobody cares what I'm doing.
So I would just go do other things. I would go hike. I would read books.
I would do all sorts. But I wouldn't go to school. I took two weeks off for spring break.
And I don't know how I thought all this was never going to be found out.
But I remember when it all came to a head and I had to recover to graduate from

(05:57):
high school. school, but when I went to college, to me, it was just the logical
extension of the world that I lived in.
And I would say that my family was ill-prepared to talk to me about this,
but no, we were not a Christian family except nominally, right?
We were nominally Christian in the same way everybody that lives in Georgia
kind of was at that point.
But we didn't go to church. There wasn't a lot of conversations about God in the household.

(06:23):
And there was nobody to answer the things that I was asking.
This was pre-apologetics, right? I mean, this was before the big apologetics
boom, and you could go out and get a bunch of books.
There wasn't any idea of equipping somebody that was going through what I was
going through. And I was alone anyway.
I was sort of detached from all of the important relationships in my life,

(06:44):
even though all of those people love me and I love them.
So this is not an indictment against them. All of us were doing our best to
deal with what was going on in our lives.
But as a result of that, it's just just undirected thing. There was no one to
catch for a point counterpoint.
It just kept going. And it's so clear. And you said, friends,
so you said it seemed like the logical outworking of an atheistic worldview.

(07:08):
If there is no God, life is here randomly, not on purpose. There is no purpose.
And so it seems to be this without anything transcendent, something from beyond
that makes objective moral facts and values a reality.
Nihilism, I think, is just the logical conclusion and outlook of that.

(07:30):
So it seems to me that I'm starting to see almost that forehorsing of the apocalypse happening.
Running its course like it didn't it didn't it didn't work in a sense,
meaning there's always been about roughly 10 percent or so of the U.S., the U.S.
Public that identifies as atheists. And it's still right about there.
Yeah. What's interesting to me, though, is and I think this is part of it.

(07:55):
It's this notion of I can't accept the nihilism that is almost necessarily true if there is no God.
And I'm starting to see the rise of people trying to ground objective moral
facts and values in something transcendent or something objective.
Even recently, like Jordan Peterson has been doing this. You know,

(08:17):
he's not a professed follower of Jesus Christ, but he absolutely believes that
morality is objective and he believes in something transcendent.
It's not really clear to me what he thinks that is, but he was even having a
conversation with Sam Harris. And, of course, Sam Harris thinks that you have
to ground morality in something objective.
Otherwise, nihilism is the only other choice.

(08:40):
Was any of that maybe a part of you coming to Christ?
Or how did you, what ended the nihilism and the atheism and turned you towards
Jesus and a belief in an objective reality, true meaning, true purpose, things like that?
Yeah, there was that. I mean, the sense of, I remember sitting around and wrestling
with something like what I would later get the verb, the language to be able

(09:04):
to say something like the moral argument for God.
But, but that was one of the things, there was two things that really set me off.
One of them was the idea, like I was deeply, the problem of evil was something
that really affected me when I was younger.
The idea that people believed that there was a good God in the face of all of
this horrible evil and suffering.

(09:24):
And I would see probably I could both identify that what I would have considered
my own personal suffering is low on the totem pole for what other people were focusing on.
But it was real, right? I mean, I didn't have the happy household that everybody
else around me seemed to have.
I didn't have this family that was doing well, or at least not with me.

(09:45):
I mean, if they were doing well, they were doing well in other relationships
in the family, but I was not fitting into that. There was a sense of foreignness,
of alienness to the world that I lived around me.
And so all of this led to the problem of evil landing on me pretty hard.
So one of the things that started to lead me away from atheism was that sense that I...

(10:07):
I hated the way that the world was, but there had to be a way that the world
ought to have been for me to have been deeply bothered by it.
I mean, it was Dawkins' old thing about the idea that the world is exactly how
it should be and the sense of randomness and violence and death and destruction
and all that is just a part of the form of things.
I saw that, but I didn't like it. And to not like it meant that there was something

(10:31):
more there that I had to wrestle with, something, the idea that there's an ought
that is missing in the way that I see the world.
And I do think, with all respect to my atheist friends who try to ground objective
morality outside of it, I do think that if the world is materialistic,
naturalistic, methodological naturalism, if that's the world that we're living in,
then I think I just have the opinion that objective moral values have no place

(10:56):
in that universe at all. And that's the way I was when I was younger.
If you want to talk about my knowledge of what was going on with the progression of philosophy,
I did think Nietzsche was interesting because he comes at the end of a lot of
people who are abandoning certain parts of Christianity and the faith,
but they're trying to hold on to certain principles in there because they know
it's necessary for ordered society. society.

(11:16):
And finally Nietzsche shows up and he says, you're all kidding yourself. This is ridiculous.
And so I would say that there is where I could see that sense as well,
that I had that sort of vicious consistency that I would say,
even if it means that all of this is an illusion and the violence is just the way of the world,
embrace that. But it bothered me.
And so that started to make me think more deeply about it. So that was one of

(11:39):
them. There were two things, but that was I was one of them. Yeah.
Admire is probably not the right word of, of Nietzsche. And I got reprimanded.
I got reprimanded by a summit student for calling him Nietzsche.
So I've been practicing and working hard to say Nietzsche.
So I'm not being one of these pompous people in your face, right?
I'm literally trying to avoid a reprimand at a future date from another 19-year-old

(12:02):
student. Let me tell you something.
One of the things I would tell anybody that comes at me with how to pronounce
European names is we're going to fail miserably no matter how we try.
And so just like – there are actually academic papers written about how to pronounce Augustine.
Is if it's if it's augustine if it's
augustina if it's augustine and and

(12:23):
when i finally i wanted so badly to pronounce his
name correctly and i read about it enough to realize i'll never
will so i'm just gonna say whatever i'm gonna say that's funny maybe you just
gave me permission to go back to and like the can't can't thing i have a bunch
of friends like his name is kant and then i would talk to europeans and they

(12:43):
would say can't and then and i was like okay i'm just just going to say whatever comes out of my mouth.
And if you've got a problem with that, I was like, look, you're never going to get it right.
So you might as well just embrace whatever comes out of your mouth.
You knew who I was talking about. Language serves its purpose.
Let's move on. That's so funny.
Well, Nietzsche, I don't want to use the word admire, but in a sense I do.

(13:06):
I admire and I appreciate intellectual honesty and consistency because it just
seems to be far too too few people do that.
Christians, of course, included that people don't think through the consequences of their belief.
And they just put, they force together contradictory ideas and lack the ability to see it.

(13:27):
And one of Nietzsche's hobbies, now I'm going to go back and forth and that's
going to be all over the place. This is so stupid.
But one of his, it seems like hobbies was to ridicule and mock atheist hubris
that he, you know, he kept, he would call them, like, especially the English,
he would call them English fatheads, which is like, whoa, did he really just
drop that on them back then?

(13:48):
Because he believed, right, if God does not exist, and you know,
he writes about this in the parable of the madman, that the death of God,
something he, of course, was happy that society was proclaiming,
right? Nietzsche came at the end of the enlightenment.
So this was kind of already existing. It wasn't like he proclaimed something
new and people were like, whoa, wait, no, he's kind of just stating matter of

(14:09):
fact that what a A lot of the academics of his time, the philosophers of his
time were starting or were advocating and come to that conclusion themselves.
And he, you know, in the parable, the madman, he says, you have greatly underestimated
the consequence of this.
It's an apocalyptic or a cataclysmic kind of event, like as if the earth was unchained from the sun.

(14:32):
What is up? What is down? And that was one of Nietzsche's more clever,
you know, artistic ways. And he was a big admirer of the arts.
It's interesting to me that the thing that kind of kept him out of nihilism was the arts.
And he had such, he was in awe of artists and wanted so desperately,
I think, even to be one himself.

(14:52):
So it's interesting to me, maybe we can come back to this. why in a nihilistic
outlook, why something like the arts would give him a bit of sanity for just a bit of period of time.
But he concluded if God does not exist, there is no metaphysical grounding for objective morality.
All morality is simply power plays.

(15:14):
We need to ditch them and look within.
One of his lines he kept saying is you must create tables of value for yourself.
Are you Are you strong enough to do that? Are you able to be,
of course, the ubermensch,
the superman, which is a person who is able to resist the moral pressures of
society and look within and create tables of value, his phrase again,

(15:38):
for themselves and live that out.
Now, Nietzsche didn't offer any political theory on how that would work.
What would a society of a bunch of supermen look like? It would be sheer chaos
or some form of tyranny, I would imagine. imagine.
But my big point here is I can appreciate Nietzsche's honesty.
And if I were to come to believe that God did not exist, I don't see any way

(16:02):
around Nietzsche's conclusions.
And I would either, I think I just know myself, I think I would go one of two
routes. I would go take the Kurt Cobain route, or I would become Thanos.
And I would try to enslave, not enslave, I would try to create a world of my
own choosing using whatever means I thought were best.

(16:24):
You know, I, I was probably the slow, slow Kurt Cobain route,
right? I was just like, if you, if you live a sort of random life,
it's just going to end anyway, right?
It's not, there was nothing about the way I was doing things that was designed
to be a lasting enterprise.
And so the, the slow suicidal route going back to, you know,
Kirilov and Dostoevsky's possessed or, or the demons where he said the only

(16:46):
Dostoevsky obviously ahead of his time, right?
I mean, he, he was writing things that would ultimately become existentialist philosophy,
philosophy but but he you see some of the
philosophers wrestling with kind of
fleshed out in the art i was thinking about that when you were talking about nietzsche's
love for art you see their philosophy wrestled through
in dostoevsky books when for example crime and

(17:08):
punishment is a lot of nietzsche's nihilism right in this sense of
particularly the idea that the the main
character's motivation for murder is that
he has determined that there are some people that
are just superior to others and that those people run
the advancement of society that that's how society advances
is through these super people that are

(17:29):
able to make steps outside of morality
and that he believes or reasons himself in the story that
it's his duty to transcend the current morality so that he can push things forward
so he tests whether or not he's one of these great men by committing murder
and then ultimately he has to live in a world where the objective moral moral

(17:50):
evil that he's done consumes him psychologically and to the point that he is driven to repentance,
this open, you know, crazy repentance.
So, and you see, it's interesting in.
You saw with a character that Dostoevsky created, you see parallels between
him and actually Nietzsche's life later on were very similar incidents,

(18:11):
this nightmare that he has about a horse, and it actually ended up happening in Nietzsche's life.
And so Dostoevsky, to me, is one of the great geniuses for seeing how these
ideas of humanity that were percolating at that time or being embraced by certain
groups would ultimately destroy them.
And going back to Kirov, who was, Kirov is in the book, The Possessed,

(18:31):
which is kind of a precursor to the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution.
And this idea of terrorism as a way to advance a superior world through Russia.
And Kirov comes to the point that, look, this world's terrible.
The only act of true freedom that we have, echoing other philosophers before him, is suicide, right?

(18:52):
And then when you get to Camus, Tolstoy wrestles with that.
Camus wrestles with that. But Kirov in the book just insists that there's only
one expression of true freedom, and that's the freedom to leave,
to check out and have nothing to do with this anymore.
And so that was kind of the path that I was on. It was self-destructive.
It was a long path. It was like, like if you ever been around,

(19:12):
I mean, I've, I've known a lot of people with substance abuse and had people
close to me who I dearly love drink themselves to death. It's a slow suicide.
That's all they're doing. They don't want to put a gun to their head.
So they just drink themselves to death.
And I was in that mode of enough bad choices will eventually lead to an early
checkout. And that was fine with me.
I do. I do think the nice thing about Nietzsche though, is that he sort of.

(19:33):
To me, like you said, admiration for him. I have a deep admiration for him because
he saw where philosophy was going and he came in and said, as one guy who's
a Nietzsche expert once told me, a friend of mine, he said he was less a philosopher
than he was a prophet, right?
And he shows up and he says, you all want to hold on to the roots of our morality and society.

(19:56):
You want to cling to it because there are aspects of it that you think are necessary.
But for us to embrace this enterprise, as you're talking about,
we have to recognize the nature of the cataclysmic shift of thought that we're
going through. And it's going to almost destroy us.
But at the other side of it, we will find some stability.
Man, we could just spend a bunch of time on this. But I agree.

(20:18):
I absolutely agree with you that especially if you read, here's another English
word name I'm going to mispronounce.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Yeah, or Zarathustra, either way. Yeah, yeah. Zarathustra, thank you. Yeah.
Which was his book he was most proud of. He certainly writes like he's a prophet.
He talks about himself as a prophet with this expectation and outlook that like

(20:44):
some of the biblical prophets,
they would go to a bunch of people who would not listen and reject and then
suffer the consequences of not heeding the warning.
He took on that role and did not have a positive outlook outlook for what his
philosophy would lead to.
And I think at best his hope was, what if I can find a handful of people that

(21:06):
will come away with me, listen to me teach on a mountain and begin living out this world view.
So you're on this path, I love the phrase, I've never heard before,
a slow suicide. I think that's so descriptive.
You've got this sense, this nagging sense of the problem of evil,

(21:28):
but from not the it causing you to not believe in God, but from to me,
I think the moral argument and the existence of evil is one of the most compelling
reasons to believe that there is a God.
Because if there is no God, then there is no objective evil.
But we were constantly confronted with things that we go, no,
it's not that I just don't prefer this.
It's not like when I come across great evil, it's not like I went,

(21:51):
oh, I don't like the way that tastes. Like if you ate some kind of food that
you don't prefer, now you look at it in a different way.
It's a different experience. Something is being violated here.
Something sacred, maybe the, you may not use that language that it doesn't matter what I think.
It doesn't matter what I feel. It doesn't matter where I've come from or what
time in history I'm living in.

(22:11):
What I'm beholding is absolutely wrong.
So that, that idea is, is troubling you as an atheist, but you said there were
a couple of other things.
Two other things I think maybe you said that really caused you or brought you
to a point of believing in God's existence or a follower of Jesus.

(22:32):
Or maybe I won't put words in your mouth. I'll let you maybe explain that.
And I agree with you about the moral argument strength. It is interesting how
if you talk to people, if people who came to the faith later have different
reasons, and for some of them, the moral argument, they just dismiss it out of hand.
For me, it's still today is something that's so powerful because it's just,

(22:53):
it's a basic recognition that there are things that one human being can do to
another that are objectively wrong, that are evil by any definition.
And that if we, if we lack the capacity to call them evil, then there's something
impoverished about the way that we understand the world as far as how we're
processing good and evil.
And that's one of the things that I was talking about this just last weekend

(23:14):
when I was speaking to a large, I spoke to a large group in D.C.
And then did a Q&A afterwards for hours where people were just coming up and talking.
And I kept telling them, it's not
that there are not alternatives that are offered that could explain it.
It's that those explanations are impoverished if they don't have the power of
being able to say, not preferable, not wrong, but evil. There are things that happen that are evil.

(23:38):
And that's a different level of condemnation because it's a violation of everything
we were meant to be and how we were meant to treat each other.
And that draws, I think, to a base level,
the recognition of what the Christian worldview does offer is a deep understanding
of what evil between man means and an understanding of why it is so deeply disturbing to us.

(24:02):
Because it's a violation of what we are created to be.
The greatest commandments that God has given us to love him and to love our neighbors ourselves.
It's the very foundation of what we are created to be.
And when we live in enmity with it by mistreating our brothers and sisters,
by not just not loving them, but by hating them, destroying them,
raping them, whatever you want to say, then it's

(24:22):
Then it's not just, I don't just need an explanation for why it's wrong.
I need an explanation for why when someone has done wrong in a movie,
50, 60, 150, 200 people sitting in that movie theater are just sitting on the
edge of their seat, waiting for the justice to come and cheering when it's delivered.
Because whether or not we agree with the way that justice is meted out in that

(24:43):
movie, and most often or not, I disagree with it because there's no grace or
mercy from Christ in there.
But there is a deep recognition there that that audience and everyone in it
is operating on a shared value system.
And when they recognize wrong has been committed, they seek and desire appropriate
justice for what has happened and rejoice when they see it. So that's when I

(25:05):
see people who dismiss the moral argument for God. I'm like,
look, I get it. It doesn't have to move you.
God has all sorts of different ways to reach different people.
But it's more than just being able to understand what makes things wrong.
It's comporting with the way that we experience the world around us and this
explanation of why we sense evil and why we need it.

(25:27):
We need justice in the face of that evil, desire it. And because it goes beyond
just this, the ability to categorize right and wrong, it goes into good and
evil and comporting with what God made us.
What do you think is that deep, I think, longing for justice that's wrapped up in evil?

(25:47):
And it's not just that we want the evil to stop.
And sometimes the dark side of us maybe moves into something like vengeance,
where we want to see the people that caused harm suffer themselves.
But there's something even deeper than that, purer than that,
that I think most people experience.
And it would be justice, reconciliation.

(26:08):
What is that? And why do you think that is so common?
Well, I mean, for, I think if you look, let's look at David,
like King David and the Psalms, the Psalms where he was calling for justice, right?
You see the level of calling. And I wish I could remember, I wish I was more
prepared to talk about this than I am because there's- You're not prepared with

(26:29):
every Bible verse that's ever meant anything to you and- Memorized and ready to say immediately.
But his- Come on, dude. dude. His desire for justice becomes so strong in there
that he says, even if I'm destroyed at one point, even if I am,
even if I am called out onto this and judged for it as well,
I need your justice, bring your justice.

(26:50):
And so there is that sense that, that where I went to from, as I started to
gradually move away from this, this embracing of the, there's no such thing as right and wrong.
I started to recognize it's, it's either there's no such thing as right or wrong or there's deep evil.
And it's one of those two things, because I knew I was acquainted enough with

(27:12):
the bad of the world that I know sometimes we like to think of ourselves as suffering.
Or I remember one time when I taught this Sunday school and I left for a weekend
and somebody else came in and they tried to do things like that,
the way they thought that I would do them.
And there was a disaster that happened and they treated the kid and it went
wrong. And they were trying to do clever little punishments like they saw me do.

(27:33):
But it embarrassed this kid. So we had a meeting and it came up and the parent
of the kid that was embarrassed kept using, he's, he's been humiliated.
He's been, and it's like, okay, I said, I'm, I'm before we go any further.
I think if you, if we read history well enough, we know that there are humiliations
that people have been put through serious, deep humiliations.

(27:57):
I'm thinking of the, the humiliations of oppressed group people like to Jews
during the Holocaust or something like that.
I said, I think we have to be careful about our language here,
because let's not attach a stupid thing that happened in this classroom with
these terminology that is meant to draw forth the really deepest,
most horrible offenses that human beings go through.
Was he mistreated? Yes. Was he embarrassed? Yes. Was he humiliated? No. Was he abused?

(28:23):
No. No. So let's get, if we get our language back to where we recognize the
level of offense that we're talking about, then we can have a reasonable response
and maybe a reasonable path forward from this point.
But so to me, when you say, what is it?
It only makes sense if it's a violation for the very purpose of what we are.
And that's why I say it's so powerful in us and why I think it's so shared across

(28:47):
because the purpose for which we exist,
and you and I have talked about this before and i see my mission in this
world very clearly in the sense that if god is allowing me to do anything it's
just to say to love your neighbors yourself and that i wake up in the morning
and that's my guiding principle and that's the thing that i see being done poorly
in the world that i want to address more than anything else that the person

(29:08):
next to you whether you know them or not has has inestimable value.
And they matter on a way that's difficult for us to understand,
impossible for us to fully grasp, because they're in a relationship with God.
It may be a bad relationship right now because of decisions that they're making,
but we are all of us, every single one of us, in a relationship with the creator

(29:29):
of the universe under the Christian worldview is our understanding.
So if that's correct, which it seems to me that it is because the world seems
to testify to that truth,
then that means all of these violations that we're talking about where where
we hurt and abuse and mistreat and neglect the people around us and the world
around us is more than just, I ought to have been treated better.
It's a violation of the very purpose for which we exist, which is to love God

(29:52):
and to live in a community of love and respect where we're worshiping the God
that made us. And that's a violation.
And that purpose is bigger than human flourishing. Yes.
And so that's when you say that there's, you know, Oh, I forget the language
you used, but impoverished.
Yeah. What did you say? Yeah.

(30:15):
If you cannot use proper categories like good and evil and deep evil,
if you don't have that within your worldview to describe some of the nature,
even if you have an explanation,
if you don't have that explanation, that language, those word choices,
then it's just an impoverished view.
It doesn't do everything necessary to describe the world that we live in. We don't just see wrong.

(30:35):
We see evil. and those are two different things
to me all right so let me uh and that
doesn't answer the question you actually asked me by the way that's just another
side trail that's what clever people do they answer the question they want to
not the question that was asked i'm happy to get to that question too no no
so what about though okay you're certainly going to be the critic that says as, no,

(31:01):
no, what we're experiencing.
And I think they might even grant and concede, yet experiencing at this deep,
deep level is simply the conditioning of an evolutionary process that has human
flourishing in mind, if you will.
And so over the countless, you know, countless number of years.

(31:23):
Through an evolutionary process, human beings have adapted this sense because
it leads to human flourishing.
How do you handle that objection? What do you think about that?
Yeah. Number one, I think human flourishing is probably going to be a very poorly
defined idea in that worldview because we have to then understand what does it mean to flourish?

(31:46):
How many human beings need to flourish? So let's look at it as opposed,
let's take it out of human relationships and go to chimpanzee relationships
for a second right if you look at how chimpanzees treat
i i'm not a fan of chimpanzees i think that they're violent horrible
creatures and and and probably you watch
videos of them but they go to war i always hear this american you know human
beings are the only animals to go to war it's ridiculous chimpanzees do and

(32:08):
they're much better at it than us as far as they don't care at all about the
people that they're attacking the other chimpanzees when they just destroy them
and fight them and and so So something like that makes more sense then in the sense, well,
how does one troop flourish? It kills the other troop.
How does one chimpanzee family flourish?
Well, it destroys those who were going to be in opposition to their collection of resources.

(32:31):
Flourishing then becomes something in that world, a dynamic that's just whoever
has the power to be able to eliminate,
because I don't even see at that point why it would be necessary to bring in
unless, of course, if you look at some of the great empires of the past,
like the Persian empire, to some degree, another, the Roman empire did this similar things.
Alexander certainly did similar things where it's just, I don't want to fight

(32:51):
all the time. So if I defeat you and take you over, you get to live in my community.
As long as you just abide by the rules and recognize that you're now my citizen
and not a citizen of what group that you were before.
But then it becomes a question, well, what is flourishing? How many people have
to flourish? How many people have to destroy to get to that flourishing?
It doesn't take into account an an individual life.
It starts to look at human beings as a collective. And there's a great book

(33:14):
that's trying to understand objective morality.
And Mark Linville was one of the contributors. So it's one of those four views of morality.
And I wish I could remember the other three, but they're looking at it and trying
to understand how we can understand the existence of morality in our world.
Is it fake or is it something that we just do?
And then one of them is that idea of connected in some way to a larger flourishing of a group.
And Mark Linville, I thought, pointed out something very interesting in his essay there.

(33:36):
He talked about the idea that, But let's look at rape then, because any concept
of flourishing that doesn't have within it some idea of the dignity of the individual human being.
Is going to understand the wrongness of rape and how it contributes or takes
away from the flourishing of the whole.
And so as you look at all of these different moral views that were offered in

(33:58):
that book, every one of them had some explanation tied to some concept of human
flourishing and the betterment of society for why something like rape would be wrong.
But only one that recognizes the independent dignity of that human being that
was violated can ground the wrongness of rape in the violation of that individual.
And which, by the way, again, starts to make all that other things feel like

(34:21):
they are too weak to handle what we're talking about.
Because any definition of why rape would be wrong that doesn't center on the
idea that that human life was wrong, that that particular woman or that man,
whoever, whichever was raped, they were wronged.
It was a violation of their dignity that they hold equally with all other human
beings that share it across all humanity.

(34:41):
They have a dignity, that idea of the intrinsic value of a human life, right?
And the violation of that individual is grounding the wrongness of it,
not because it would be wrong for a lot of people in society to be raping each
other, not because it wouldn't contribute to human flourishing.
And so there's concepts of it that become, I remember one time hearing somebody

(35:02):
describe reading Noam Chomsky as trying to hold mercury in your hand,
that he just, his arguments are slippery and they're moving all over the place.
And I feel like when you talk about human flourishing, it's going to have a similar idea, right?
That it sounds great when we talk about it as an answer to this problem.
But at the end of the day, the more we try to lock down on a clear understanding
of what flourishing is without some guidelines that are giving to us from a

(35:25):
transcendent idea of what we were meant to be, it's going to be like trying
to hold mercury. It's just going to slip from us in every direction.
It's one of the inherent flaws in utilitarian ethical frameworks,
right? What is happiness?
Is it shared equally? How do you measure it and then move it to well-being,
which is what Sam Harris has done?
He's the end of the line here up to this point in the history of these consequentialist

(35:47):
utilitarianists. And right. It's a bit elusive.
And part of my problem, too, is kind of like the self-awareness of let's let's
say let's assume for the sake that it's true that evolution did condition this
us to think this way. Well, I'm now aware of it.
Why am I bound to that morality beyond self-serving interests?
So it becomes an ethical framework that at its core is selfishness.

(36:11):
Yeah. And it's going to be a power move anyway.
You know, I thought Bill Craig talks about the idea of that you can account
for the existence possibly of the, of objective values, but you can't get to
accountability or duty.
You can just get through this idea that they exist in some abstract realm and,
and, you know, in some Kantian sense, if I were reasonable, I would,

(36:31):
I would ascend to want to be reasonable and to recognize their existence.
But Craig says there's no reason to, right? I mean, there's no.
Can you imagine the kind of instability and the lack of peace that would exist in that world?
Because all you would have would be a bunch of powerful people that are aware
that the rules of the game really aren't binding.
But we're going to, from time to time, agree to abide by some social contract or global contract.

(36:57):
I mean, that's a social contract that covers the whole globe.
Only as far as it serves my interests. Oh, heck yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So could you, when would you ever go to sleep having any sense of peace?
Now you might go, there's no, that's the world we live in right now,
but at least in the world that we're in,

(37:17):
there is the hope for peace because of the belief in something objective that
we can all come to know and agree to live by something that grounds our deepest
hopes and desires and fears in the the sense of evil.
It grounds it in something real and objective, not something that's only real in a subjective sense.

(37:38):
So yeah, I'm with you and we could spend a ton more time here.
To me, the problem of evil...
There is one more thing I wanted to say about that really quickly,
though, because what you just said, I think, leads us to sort of the humanist experiment, right?
The idea that if we can just see that humans bring meaning from human beings
themselves, that we generate meaning for our existence and we don't need a transcendent

(37:59):
source for that value or those roles.
And I wanted to bring it up because I've always thought it was funny.
I grew up, my dad was a huge Star Trek fan.
And so he and I watched Star Trek, like the original series,
had it all on tape. We would go to the movies together.
He loved Star Trek, which is a big humanist manifesto, right?
That we're going to unite humanity and ultimately go out and explore the universe.

(38:20):
But he and I would joke about it because he was still somewhat captivated by
the ideas of Roddenberry and hope for humanity through this humanist experience
where we'd find meaning within ourselves and see beauty in our flaws and all that stuff,
which is one of the recurring themes in the conversations. Like,
yes, we're flawed, but we're beautiful.
Our flaws make us beautiful, which is anti-Christian in this sense because our

(38:40):
flaws are sins against God and ultimately we need redemption.
And so you see the conflict between them. But what always cracked me up about
the Star Trek universe was that this utopian vision of humanity finally uniting
and launching ourselves out into space so that we can then go to war with other beings, right?
I mean, it's like, we're now united, so let's go find other people.

(39:02):
And if they disagree with us, we're going to go to war with them,
like the Klingons and the Romulans and the Borg or whatever.
You know, we finally got over our problems here on Earth and united in this
humanist utopia so that we can then unite and take on enemies.
We'll find other people we've got problems with.
That's right. Let's go kill them now.
You're never going to escape a sort of tribalism that comes with that worldview.

(39:25):
It's just always going to be there. Tribalism will ultimately take over because
sooner or later, there's going to be some conflict of flourishing in societies.
And the only way to settle that will be power. I think that's why tribalism
is on the rise in the United States right now and probably not just here,
but certainly, you know, Americans are feeling that we are growing in tighter and tighter groups,

(39:47):
these silos where we don't want to have anything to do with people that are not a part of this group.
And it is it is related to this when you don't have that shared vision of something
transcendent that grounds meaning and purpose.
All that is left is power.
And, you know, I was wondering if we'd have a chance to talk about about literature

(40:09):
and its connection here to some of these issues. But George Orwell wrote a great essay.
I'm trying to blank on the essay now. Notes on the Way. That's what it was called, Notes on the Way.
And he is writing somewhat, you know, talking about this Nietzschean idea of the death of God.
And he's got this powerful couple of sentences when he says,

(40:32):
you know, for hundreds of years, we were sawing on...
We were, oh, why am I drawing a blank on this, man? This is where I'm like you.
Why shouldn't I come ready with all these quotes?
Should everything be memorized? We sawed and sawed and sawed on the branch we were sitting on.
And much to our surprise, we cut through a lot quicker than we thought.

(40:53):
And we came down crashing.
But unfortunately, the thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses.
It was a cesspool of barbed wire.
And of course, he's describing the 20th century. and one of the consequences
that he thought that came from society severing itself from the Christian worldview.
Now, Orwell, again, a humanist himself, he was not a Christian.

(41:14):
So it's not like he was saying, hey, let's all go back to following Jesus.
It was an essay lamenting that they had no plan for how to deal with this.
And he goes on to talk about one of the consequences of when you kill off the
heavenly father is that mankind has no reason to view each other as a brother anymore. more.
And so him writing this essay is kind of in this aftermath, the wake in this

(41:37):
Nietzschean parable of the madman sense of what have we done?
We better figure this thing out because we just fell into a cesspool of barbed wire.
And Orwell's essay didn't really offer any hope.
But that's the power of someone like Orwell. George Carlin was similar,
I think, with Nietzsche.
So this guy, Nietzsche, Carlin, and Orwell, which seems weird company,

(42:01):
but if you think it's a screenplay based on that, if you look at it at some
point or another, all of them in one way or another expressed this sense that
there was a detachment from their judgment, right? Right.
They were they were looking at it from a seat where they were able to see everything
going on. And no, they didn't have answers.
What they saw that clearly was that in going from Orwell to Carlin.

(42:23):
Right. I mean, Carlin says he realized that he just wasn't a part of that.
He just didn't want to be a part of the game at all.
And that gave him the clarity of being able to be a judge of it and to sit on
the outside and to condemn all the ways that he saw it. Again.
Not a Christian, not somebody who believed in God, but he had a clear understanding
of when power was being misused to oppress people.
Certain populations and i think what orwell said what you

(42:45):
just as you quoted orwell was something i was thinking about right before you quoted it
in our conversation prior to that when you started to tribalism without
any sense of equal dignity of human or of independent humans then what happens
is there's no reason for me to show restraint there ultimately will be no reason
for me even if i'm wreck if i recognize that that the evil actions of a particular

(43:06):
person or culture or country have required us to stand against them.
There has to be some part of us that recognizes them as valuable and that our
efforts to wage war will only extend so far as necessary to stop the evil that
they were bringing to the world.
And not that we go to the point, because you'll see all these people online
as the world devolves and then on to unthinking digital swarms,

(43:31):
as Jeffrey Bilbrow calls them, right?
These digital swarms that pop up and everybody starts screaming about
how should we react sometimes people hear about a population that they
don't like and then we should just turn their home into glass right
we should nuke the whole population we should get rid of them entirely
well okay that would make sense in a nichian view
if we just realize that they're going to be ultimately destructive to the world
just get rid of them altogether and not have to deal with it but if you come

(43:54):
from it that even though there are an error deep error even though they may
be evil deeply evil that they have the opportunity for redemption if we can
stop them only to the extent necessary.
Fight them right now to stop the advancement of evil they're spreading into
the world, and then hopefully have a chance to tame that sense through a proper

(44:16):
understanding of what their role in the world is in the sense that you and I and all of us,
no matter what side of nationalism we find ourselves on,
are equally loved by God in the sense that...
Christ died for all of us and for all of our sins.
And we may not equally respond to that. We may not find redemption through it,
but all of us are potentially the objects of that redemption.

(44:38):
And we should try our best to lay that out in front of people and to give them the ability to do it.
And so if we see people in that sense, that they may be the objects of God's redemption,
they may be those people who are one good day away from being exactly in the
relationship they ought to be with God, reunited through him,
like reconciled back to him through Christ,

(45:00):
his resurrection of Christ, then that changes the way we see even our enemies
and brings a different way of even if it's necessary to wage war.
And I'm not a pacifist. I wrestled with this a lot after I became a Christian.
And I'm not a pacifist for reasons that we don't have time to go into here.
But it does, that sense of restraint that comes with seeing people through that
does does require us then to deal with them differently.

(45:23):
Tribalism unhinged from any sort of idea of equal dignity just makes them the
competition for resources.
There's people that are threatening my flourishing by existing maybe in a smaller group.
We have no restraint in how we deal with them. Proper understanding of what
it means to be human being introduces restraint automatically in a way that

(45:44):
without it, and that's what I think Orwell is seeing there in what you're talking
talking about, it's just going to be a free-for-all. It's going to be terrible.
It will end with only power reigning.
Tribalism Unhinged. That's a great book title, by the way. Maybe we,
maybe you want to write, maybe we write that together.
So yeah, this understanding of what it means to be human is,

(46:06):
it's the issue of our time.
And I think it's, it's one of the things that really motivates me in, in this work.
You know, there's some Christians that, you know, don't, they don't buy into
kind of the work that we do with the philosophy, the understanding of history,
the argumentation and by argument, I don't mean yelling and squeezing. I mean, screaming.

(46:28):
I mean, here's my conclusion that is supported by my premises and my reasons
and whatnot, because I, I don't buy into this notion that as long as you get
people into heaven, you can let this world go to hell.
That, that is said with a level of naivety and a lack of appreciation for just
the general calling that all mankind has to have dominion over this earth.

(46:51):
The trajectory that our country and the world is on is not a good one.
And some Christians are like, well, I've read the end of the book.
That's where it goes. No, that's a stupid reading of the end of the book.
History is not like a straight line of it's only going to get worse.
No, there's periods of time of history where things are better and worse.
And it's an obligation of Christians, morally speaking, in terms of how they

(47:12):
honor God by by loving their neighbor, by seeking their good,
not just letting society go to hell in a handbasket.
And the more that our civilization loses an understanding of what it is to be human.
The more we're going to see the kinds of things that we're seeing in the world
today grow. And I'm seeing it a ton in the younger generations.

(47:33):
I don't know if you're seeing this too, but I'll never forget one conversation
among many, but this one just kind of stands out where I was,
after giving a lecture, I was a high school age student or maybe just going
into college, come up to me afterwards.
And he's like, yeah, I agree with your talk.
I just don't believe that God exists. And what he meant by I agree by this talk

(47:54):
was that if God does not exist, there is no good reason to believe in objective morality and whatnot.
And so we worked through what that meant for the problem of evil and what that
meant for things like the Holocaust and what can you actually call that evil
and what do you call that. And his conclusion was, no, I can't call that evil in an objective sense.

(48:14):
I would just say that that's the way their society wanted to do it.
And so anyway, so we go, he's just, he's bought into this.
And then I love this question he asked me at the end. He goes,
so what do you think that means about me?
And it was such a sweet, honest question because he was like,

(48:35):
are you gonna now, what do you, hate me? Do you think less of me?
And I said, well, because what I believe is true, I believe that you were made
in the image of God, which instills you with unimaginable value.
So I'm going to always treat you with respect, but I'll fight to my bitter end
to see that you're never running a country or any organization of any kind of power.

(48:59):
I will fight you because of the kind of world you will create.
And he loved that answer and he respected it.
But right, that's what comes with the Christian worldview. view,
this strength to say, no, I will stand up and oppose evil, but I know there's
a line that I will not cross.
Because you were made in the image of God, and that gives you unimaginable value,

(49:23):
the same kind of value that I possess.
And that idea brought such freedom and flourishing to the Western world.
Tom Holland seems to be in the news all over the place, and not Spider-Man Tom
Holland, the historian Tom Holland, who grew up Anglican, left the faith.
And to my understanding, he still not has returned, though he's famous for saying,

(49:46):
in in terms of ethics and morality, I am proudly Christian.
And what he means by that is he understands that the ethical framework that
the West largely operates under is a Christian one.
And he compares this to the time of the Roman Empire, where might makes right
was the normal ethical kind of standard.

(50:08):
And why shouldn't it be? Going back to this notion of what could evolution produce?
I'm fine with the idea that evolution can produce a might makes right in this tribalistic sense.
And Rome certainly lived that out better than anybody ever has, probably.
And I mean, there's some other powerful, you know, empires and whatnot.
But, you know, they didn't invent crucifixion, but they certainly,

(50:29):
I think you could say, perfected it.
And it was one of the ways they would display their might and warn their enemies,
don't cross Rome or you go to the cross.
And in that context, Jesus Christ, the very son of God,
goes to the cross willingly willingly for his
enemies i mean i flipped the world upside
down because what greater love has anybody

(50:51):
ever seen don't use your might to exploit your
enemies lay down and surrender your might
and die for your enemies um and then jesus told his followers to go love like
that and as tom holland who still is not a believer you know in the existence
of god maybe things have changed but But he said that was like a depth charge

(51:13):
that we're still feeling the ripple effects today.
And so this work and maybe dovetailing into a real explicitly merely human ministry is what you do.
That's why it's so important for Christians today to be able to articulate well
what makes human life valuable, what makes human life meaningful.
Because the consequences of abandoning a Christian worldview on this point are catastrophic.

(51:38):
Yeah. And one of the things I'd like to bring up the Roman Empire.
Think about Alexander and his empire.
Think about the Mongolian empire, the great Khans.
They're the best you can hope for.
If there is no objective moral values in the sense that they are powers that
tame the world and made it safe for certain travel, like the Persian empire, the Mongolian empire,

(52:00):
the Roman empire, what they did with more than just conquer was they made it
safe in some sense or another. They tamed the world, but how did they tame the world?
They tamed the world by defeating their enemies, subjugating them,
putting them in a position where they had to do what they were expected to do
based on the rules of that particular empire or else they would be destroyed, right? Right.
The, the, the, what you were just touching on, I think was what I was thinking

(52:23):
about right before you started to talk about, which is such a beautiful thing.
The way that Jesus waged war on the world was to win people, right?
I mean, he was, it was to fight for people. He didn't fight for real estate.
He didn't fight for borders. He fought for people.
And, and there's, that's the difference between the way that those wars are waged.
The best you can hope for outside of that type of Christian worldview or understanding

(52:47):
of the equal dignity of other human beings is that a somewhat benevolent power
will come into place and will hold back or restrict the evil actions of other
individuals based on a pure power principle,
a principle of reciprocity. You do bad, you will pay for it.
And then Jesus comes along and says, we're going to wage war by winning them, by go out and get them.

(53:09):
They are what matters. They are the prize that I sought through the cross and the resurrection.
And that changes the dynamic of how we fight. And I do,
I am disturbed by how many Christians have bought into this idea of seeing our
ideological or political enemies as the bad guys to be roundly defeated and

(53:30):
to see them only in a negative light when I am a bad guy. I was the bad guy.
I was on the other side of all of this, and it wasn't through somebody coming
along and some ultra-powerful dude coming along and putting me in my place.
It was through a recognition of all that was good in this world and that I could

(53:50):
be in some way in relation to it.
That was, that was a huge deal to me was to recognize and, and Kirilov,
I mentioned him earlier in Dostoevsky.
He actually says something like this when he says, cause I went through,
I think the same thing, but came out of a different answer.
Kirilov saw Jesus and he said, there was the only good thing that's ever existed in this world. And,

(54:13):
and we killed it. And so he sees that as such a condemnation on the world that
he can't bring himself to want to live any longer.
And that's where he comes to this desire to kill himself as an expression of his freedom.
For me, when I saw the only good thing I'd ever truly seen in this world,
which was when I finally saw Christ, that's the way I felt about him.
The first truly, honestly good thing I'd ever genuinely seen and understood its goodness, right?

(54:39):
This is more than than just love of a puppy or something where you see something
cute this is more than seeing a landscape and seeing it's beautiful this was
seeing a human being and saying they are good they they are good in a way that
i didn't even know existed prior to seeing them.
There was the response for me unlike kirlov which was to kill himself because
he condemned the world for destroying it was to see him and to think i want

(55:02):
to be with him right i mean i want to be with him.
He's my, he's what I want to, if I'm going to have to be committed to something
for the rest of my life, it's that guy right there.
That's what I'm going to be committed to. He's better than anything I've ever
seen better than any person I've ever heard of.
He gets, he gets my commitment from here on out.
And, and because of that, there is to me this pain that I feel.

(55:26):
When I see people buying into this idea that we have to destroy our political
enemies or the the people that are against us because,
and I understand where it comes from because they see great evil being done
in the world and they just want somebody to bring justice or stop it or to limit it.
And they know in their mind that the person that's going to be able to limit
that has got to be somebody powerful and somebody that's willing to stand up

(55:49):
and speak out against it.
And, and, and they're looking for somebody tough where when we're looking for
is the living saying, I've already got my guy to do that. And that's Jesus and he's still alive.
And so all I need for it to get in line with him and to reach them in that way.
I want for me, the rest of my life has been in ministry to try to treat the

(56:10):
people that I'm talking to the way I hope somebody would have treated me when I occupied their space,
because they recognized one person for and specifically recognized that Jay Watts,
if he ceases to believe what he does and begins to believe in Christ and.

(56:32):
Could be a force for good. He doesn't just have to be an enemy to defeat it.
He is a potential ally to do great things.
And they told me that one time, and I thought, you're crazy.
I'll never believe what you believe.
That's nuts. But they're like, no, no, no. I see in you someone who could do
so much good in the world.

(56:52):
And I get emotional just thinking about that now because Because I owe so much
of the good that I've experienced in my life to one Christian who saw me not as an enemy to defeated,
but as a possible ally for good in this world, that all I needed was to be able to see goodness.
And that's the way Christianity fights.

(57:13):
That's the way that we wage war on evil, that people are not to be defeated.
We're not to defeat other human beings with good arguments.
We're not beating them down. We're winning people with good arguments by being
the people that we ought to be in Christ.
So how do we get to that point to see people not as enemies,

(57:40):
but as potential allies,
our fellow brothers and sisters in this grand scheme, but within a more narrow outlook?
They could be brought into the family of God.
How do we get there, even in light
of the fact, I don't know what your experience is with the church, Jay.
The church is filled, my experience, filled with fighting, people not looking

(58:02):
for allies, people employing the same dirty tactics of things like tribalism.
Forgiveness and grace does not seem to be in the church very often,
which is just a stupid thing to have to say. say. Of course, of course it is.
And now I'm saying it, you know, maybe it's not a fair, true representation

(58:23):
in a picture, but there's an awful lot of it.
If within the church, we aren't able to overcome the offenses we encounter from
one another and to see each other as allies, how the heck are we ever going
to have this for people that maybe in some true sense are enemies of,
Yeah, I think it's hard, right?

(58:45):
I mean, if I had an answer to that, I'd be a more impressive human being than I am.
I would say that for me, I'll think of a couple of conversations I've had over the years.
Many years ago, I was in West Monroe, Louisiana, and I think it was Greg Kokel
and Bob Stewart, and I was on stage, and there may have been one other person.
We were doing a panel discussion after an apologetics conference,

(59:08):
and this woman stood it up. And she said, I'm just afraid.
She said, I'm so afraid for my kids about the world that we live in.
I'm so afraid about what they're going to have to face tomorrow.
And I don't know how to combat it.
And then Bob and Greg gave lovely answers, right?
But I remember thinking, as I was listening to their answers,

(59:28):
they're covering the apologetics and academic approach to this question.
When they got done, I said, I'm going to try to answer you just as Jay,
Jay, not as the apologetics guy, I'm not afraid of the world.
I reject it. And those are two different things.
I reject the world and all the hold that it has on me because I think Jesus is just better.

(59:51):
I like him more than I like the world. And I think in there,
I think that's one thing that has to happen is that we have to put put up a good fight,
but we have to also have to embrace this idea that Jay can't win this.
That's just not in Jay's power.
Jay's not a strong man. He's not coming to save the day. I'm just a guy that God has given grace to.

(01:00:17):
And in my part in this world, I have an option every day to treat people like
the objects of God's love and potential allies in this battle as somebody that
can be reconciled to God, to treat them as if grace and mercy may be just a
minute minute away for them.
I mean, that's how fast it can happen, right?
Grace and mercy could just be a minute away from the most vile sinner,

(01:00:38):
the person that we think is irredeemable.
God could be just right there having a hold of them.
So I have the option of treating people like that and just refusing to participate
in the world and the way that the world would want me to respond to all these
things because I like Jesus better and I'm not afraid of losing real estate here.
And I think part of that too has to be.

(01:01:00):
Our loss can be meaningful, if that makes sense. I was in Indonesia one time doing a mission trip.
And I was brought in because the guy who was leading this Indonesian pastor
said, I think you'd be really good at talking to people that are going to hate
you because you talk about abortion.
So I want you to talk about these things that'll make Indonesians hate you.

(01:01:21):
But it'll get them thinking, and that's what I need. But they said,
you're having a weird effect on some of the Indonesian population.
We thought you'd do really well in the universities, but we didn't think that
the villagers would care about you, but they seem to like you.
So we want you to do a gospel rally.
And so they took me to this town and there was, there was this tiny village
up in the mountains of Java and, and all of these, they were taking buses to

(01:01:44):
these surrounding villages and overwhelming majority of Indonesia is Muslim. Muslim.
And so as I'm walking around with my translator, there's this guy with a machine
gun at the edge of the town, at the village that we were in.
I said, hey, what's going on with that guy? And the translator talks to him.
He turns around and he said, hey, there's some radical Muslims in the area.
And if they hear about us, they may come to stop you tonight.

(01:02:06):
And by stop us, you mean kill us.
You mean they will come and kill us all, right?
And he said, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I said, okay, does, did they think that's going to happen?
And I asked the guy a question and the guy said, eh, you know,
he said, I don't, he said, he doesn't think so, but it may happen. I was like, okay.

(01:02:27):
And, and there's something that happens to me as I stopped for a second and
thought about two things.
Number one, I was asking them, do we think the machine guns are a good look, right?
If we're preaching the gospel and he said, they're going to protect protect
their village. There's nothing you can do about that. I said, okay.
So number two, though, as I'm thinking about it for me, if I knew that they

(01:02:49):
were right and it was going to happen, and there's no way that guy with the
machine gun is going to stop all of them from coming.
And that preaching the gospel tonight to these villagers in Indonesia means the end of me.
Am I okay with that? And then I said, if my kids find out that dad died preaching
the gospel to a a bunch of strangers in a village in Indonesia,

(01:03:11):
there's nothing that I could do with my life that'll preach the importance of
the gospel to me more than that.
If my legacy that I leave to my young kids at the time they were younger is
that the gospel means so much to dad that he died for it, then that loss has meaning, right?
And every time my kids see me suffer for the gospel, It has meaning.

(01:03:34):
And every time they see us hold on to the a Christian way of treating our neighbor
in the face of all of this going on in the world, even if it means we lose for a time.
It has meaning. Our losses can have meaning.
And if we could just get past both the fear of losing and the idea that our
losses can have a deeper meaning that may bring greater joy down the road.

(01:03:58):
And my kids understand then, and they already do, that they're not afraid of
the world either, that it's their job to pick up the mantle that dad and mom gave them.
And as we diminish, they increase and it becomes their mission field now.
And as we disappear, we've left a group of people that are ready to take their place.
And it may not mean winning in the conventional sense, but it will mean winning

(01:04:20):
because we won't have let go of Christ in the midst of a world that's trying
so desperately to make us afraid and angry and to pry us away from him. I think that's key.
I think inherent to love and forgiveness is loss.
Forgiveness always costs costs, loving people, not of course in the emotional

(01:04:44):
romantic sense, but in the enacting of the will to seek somebody's good,
it always comes at a cost.
And that's the hardest thing to get over because rather than be willing to lose
and be harmed, we will inflict pain so that we don't lose.
And of course, this doesn't mean that things like pacifism or then,

(01:05:08):
And of course, this is different.
And I think people here, we know what this means.
When you're wronged, how can you respond in love and grace, seeking forgiveness
and reconciliation, even if it comes at great cost?
It's not an easy path, but it's the one that the Father of Jesus must walk.
It's the path that he is on, and he has shown us that way.

(01:05:31):
One of the greatest compliments I've been given was from a friend who didn't,
or maybe she intended it as a compliment,
but when she was talking about me to some people and didn't know that I could hear her words were,
I have seen him suffer when he didn't have to and not cause somebody else to suffer.

(01:05:55):
Her. And man, you just, you hope other people do see that, right?
But if you don't even do it because you want the recognition,
but you do hope that your family, your friends, your wife, your kids see that
I've laid down my life here in a meaningful way.
And I, and even maybe our family has suffered loss because of that.

(01:06:18):
But we have done this because of the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ,
we've experienced his love and want to love other people that way.
Man, it's not easy, but what if?
The millions of people in this country that called themselves Christians displayed
the kind of love that Jesus did.
What would that do in this world?

(01:06:38):
I can't even begin to imagine the peace and the joy that would come to so many
if we were able to love like that.
And loss, you were talking about, because that's just a beautiful thing.
When we tell somebody they're wrong, there is loss in our relationship with
them. because when I was speaking, I changed some of what I say.

(01:06:59):
There's about 60% new material in a recent talk that I gave on abortion,
which was interesting because I decided I had a new list of ground rules.
But the first of the ground rules was that we only fail.
The only failure is if we don't say anything. The only way to fail is to say
nothing. That was what I said.
That's the only path to failure is to say nothing.
That was the first ground rule that I gave. And one of the reasons for that

(01:07:21):
is, look, you don't have to be afraid that when you tell people they're wrong,
they're going to get mad at you.
They are going to get mad at you And and
you don't have to be afraid when you tell somebody that they're wrong
that they're going to hate you They are going to hate you and that
you're going to experience loss and relationship in the short term But hopefully
the end of that is that those people who you're talking to And i'm willing to
endure their anger and i'm willing to endure their hatred if at the end of it

(01:07:44):
They can be reconciled to god and they can be reconciled to the truth They can
live more in accordance with the truth They can live more in accordance with the reality of Christ.
If all of those things are the end results of me being hated or disliked for
a little while, then bring on
the hatred and the dislike. I can live with that. I can handle that loss.
And it was a great, as far as dealing with being wronged, Gandhi had a great expression.

(01:08:07):
I remember reading Gandhi's autobiography, and I took this expression because
he borrowed so much from so many different places.
And one of the people he borrowed a lot from was Jesus. He rejected Jesus as Lord.
Some people say there's a popular thing that went around for years where they
said that Gandhi said that he rejected Christianity because of Christians. That's not true.

(01:08:30):
Gandhi was a smart guy. He understood the gospel. He was actually a pretty prideful
guy. He hated the idea of having to repent.
He hated the idea of repentance to Christ. He couldn't stand that idea.
He just thought that that was a linchpin for him as to why he couldn't ultimately
become a christian when you read his autobiography He states this explicitly
but one of the things he says in there that I think is just a beautiful phrasing
Which he talks about the ability,

(01:08:51):
learning the strength to pocket an insult,
To take an to take an insult And just put it in your pocket and let the whole
thing end right there to not feel the need to to.
To get justice, not feel the need to lash back out, to not feel the need to
set the record straight.
And man, I learned something deep from Gandhi about being a Christian from that.

(01:09:15):
The idea that there are times in life where you're insulted and that the best,
most Christlike response to it is not to defend yourself, not to bow up and be ready to fight.
None of those things is to take the insult, to stick it in my pocket and just
let it end there and to just move on with with my life.
And I thought, man, what a great way of understanding our Christian responsibility

(01:09:37):
sometimes in the face of the loss that we'll experience.
Because you're right, it's not passivism and it's not weakness.
It's not like I don't refuse to tell people you're wrong. My whole job is to
tell people they're wrong in different ways.
And oftentimes it's about some of the most controversial and divisive issues the world faces.
And so I'll never stop speaking the truth, but I'm just always going to speak

(01:10:00):
it in a way that recognizes that my efforts in and sharing the truth are to
hopefully to win the audience that's hearing that ultimately to a place where
they can be an ally for the truth and not to defeat an enemy so that they can be cast out.
Well, Jay, I think that's a good place to stop. We're going to have to talk again.

(01:10:21):
I'm really interested in talking with you about some of the great pieces of
literature and how they wrestle with this.
And we touched on that a bit today, but I really wanted to dive into that,
but we'll have to do that at another time.
I appreciate you, man. You're doing good work.
And I have told some friends,
the reason why people have been chirping at me for some time to do a podcast

(01:10:44):
and when I set out finally to do it, the motivation was I need at least an hour
carved out in my week, every week, that I can hang out and talk with my friends.
So I've enjoyed this, Jay. It's good to see you, man. Thanks for coming on.
And thanks for the work you do.
I appreciate you having me on, man. Till next time.

(01:11:05):
Music.