A Crisis of Discernment (Ep. 905)

Let's be honest, most men drift. We wake up, we scroll, we work, and then we just rinse and repeat. And we know we're softer than we should be. That's why I built the 31-day resilience reset. This is not a devotional. It is a field manual for men ready to stop drifting and start fighting back. So, for 31 days, you'll train your spirit, mind, and body with scripture, prayer, and daily challenges that forge real resilience. Go to www.undaunted.life/31. life/31day to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life/31day. Start your reset today. This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. Yes. If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. That is Proverbs 2:es 3-5. Guys, we're so happy to have you here today. Thankful for our donors. Guys, if you're a donor to Undon Life, thank you so much. If you're not, hop on board, help us out. undawn.life/donate. Also, leave a fivestar review of this show and share this with a friend. So, we got a lot to cover today. I've really been thinking about the subject matter for a very long time, but I did just want to share my Easter experience. Okay, so I'm recording this a little bit before it's coming out to you guys because we have some interesting releases for interviews uh before we get to this episode. But I just want to talk about what Easter Sunday was like for me for me because for Christians, obviously Easter is one of, if not the most important day on the calendar. Obviously, it's it's the most important event in the history of humanity, in the history of the cosmos, and that is when Jesus resurrected from the grave after being killed, murdered on a Roman cross just a few days before then. And so, we're getting ready and even like the night before we weren't even sure if we were going to go to church, which might sound crazy, but of all the days to not go to church, I kind of almost feel like Easter and Christmas are kind of those days cuz that's when everybody in their dog decides to show up cuz those are the two boxes they need to check. especially if you live in Oklahoma, just check the Eastern Christmas box and then people won't, you know, be bothering you about whether or not you go to church all the time. And so we were like, you know, what do we want to do? Cuz there were, you know, there was an extra service time later in the day. But then we were like, hey, do we just want to host some people over at our house so that we can have some spaces in the parking lot opened up because it does become a little bit of an issue in our parking lot getting in and out cuz we only have, you know, a one-way uh street, you know, coming in and out and, you know, it's kind of kind of a thing. Well, we wake up. Well, I say we, the boys decided they wanted to wake up early on Sunday morning. So, there we are. We're looking at the clock and it's like, "Babe, I think we can make it to the 8 a.m. service, which is not our normal service." And so, we get up, we get around. And on the way to church, we normally listen to music just to kind of, you know, let the boys, you know, ham it up a little bit, and we put on some Phil Wickham. And, man, I was like kind of getting, you know, choked up with the the Phil Wickham songs because obviously Phil Wickham, you know, he spends a lot of time in the Bible. You can tell the lyrical content is obviously very theologically driven. And when we get to church, obviously it's a little bit of a mad house even for the 8 a.m. service, but uh normally we have James and Elijah, our 5-year-old and our four-year-old, they are in, you know, with the kids program or whatever. But for Easter, because of the influx of a lot more kids, they didn't have any child care or any, you know, kids church for James' age. And so this is going to be the first time ever that sweet baby James was going to be in service with us. And so we were like, "Okay, how are we going to traverse this and all that?" man, he was he was so happy all morning. He was so sweet all morning. And I mean, he just was in there like a champ. He didn't know kind of what was going on. It was a whole bunch of new stimuli in there. He didn't know any of the songs and all that. And I just got to tell you again, you you know, I've talked about my issues with contemporary Christian music and how a lot of people present music at churches and all that. And you know, the the style of music that's played even at my home church is not my favorite. It's just not, you know, what I prefer. I prefer stuff that's much heavier, stuff that's normally not going to be played at church. But I just got to tell you, the the worship band at Faith Bible over the weekend absolutely murdered it. They did so good. I mean, we don't normally have a choir, but we had like a little I don't know, 12, 15 person choir up there. The the song selection was spectacular. They did several different melodies. And I mean, as we're going through these songs, like kind of like with the Phil Wickham stuff, I I'm feeling myself just like choking on every word like, and I'm like, man, if I start like really belting this out and singing, like I'm I'm just going to like fall to pieces or whatever. And then it's so hard to even describe, but it was it's something I'll probably remember for the rest of my life. The medley, I forget what song they transitioned into, but they transitioned into How Great Thou Art, which is one of the greatest Christian hymns of all time. And the transition was so beautiful and it was so incredible. And just the spirit of God was just obviously very everpresent in that place. And then sweet baby James during how great thou art reached up and grabbed my hand and just started holding my hand. This was on his own valition like I didn't I didn't reach down for him. He you know it wasn't he just kind of reached up and grabbed my hand. And you know some of some of you have probably experienced this. You have these moments that are just really really core memories for you especially in your spiritual walk. It could be something you experienced during a worship service or some sort of a conference or or you know any number of things on a mountain top. whatever. But it was like even in that moment, it was almost like heaven opened up a little bit and just showed me like that feeling of having my firstborn son right there holding my hand. And I'm there with my wife and I'm there with the congregation. And you can actually hear the congregation singing because the music isn't so loud, right? And you can actually see the congregation because the lights aren't turned down. The house lights are up. And it was congregational singing of a classic hymn, not some song that's going to be forgotten about in two or three months whenever we get the next influx of CCM songs or whatever. And then just to be there and to be singing that song on resurrection day, it was just an absolutely incredible thing. And so I just wanted to share that with you guys because, you know, when you run into these moments, some guys will have these kind of moments where whether they're in the dark night of the soul and, you know, God's there and shows up or whatever, we don't normally share it with other guys. And so I want to share with the guys in my life and obviously want to share it with you as well. Now, I know you guys love the quick hitters where I get into some stuff that's going on in culture. We're not going to have time to really hit that today. So maybe at the end of this month, I don't know, it'll be like two months worth of quick hitters. That'll be like a seven-hour episode. But we we'll have a lot to get to then whenever we eventually get to that. But before we get into the main subject for today's podcast, just to delay even a little bit further, I did want to discuss a recent Instagram post that I made that uh let's just say uh it caused a lot of conversations for a lot of people. And so the meme is it's a sixbox meme and it's David Beckham and his wife Posh Spice. I don't know what her her actual name is, Mrs. Beckham. Anyway, and so the meme is you've got, you know, you've got her on one side. She'll make some sort of statement and then it's David Beckham being like, you know, be honest. And then it's her making another statement that's a little bit softer than the initial one. And then it's him saying be honest and then she finally says what she means and then he just says thank you. Okay, so that's that's the meme. And people will put different things in the talk box there. But Landon, if you'll go ahead and put this one up here. uh go ahead and put the one that I made up there on the screen. Okay. So, I'll go and read it for those of you that are just listening to this on Spotify or whatever, but it's her saying, "I have church hurt." And then it's him saying, "Be honest." And then she says, "A pastor harmed me." And then he says, "Be honest." And then she says, "He told me to stop sinning." And then he says, "Thank you." Okay, so most people got the joke because memes are jokes, right? This is meant to be funny, but it's also meant to make a point as well, which I'll get to here in just a second. But there were several people, again, I don't really go into the comments and search through them, but there were several that were kind of getting some play. And apparently, there were a bunch of people that didn't know how memes or satire worked. Like one guy, some blue check mark guy, he thought he nailed me, right? He was just like, "Well, that's not true in in all circumstances. That's not always true." And I was like, "Memes don't always describe every person and every circumstance possible. You got me guilty, right? You haul me away, right?" And so a lot of people, I don't know if they were being purposefully obtuse or if they really are just kind of like, you know, doss when it comes to their mental capacity. But the caption that I had for this meme was most quote unquote church hurt circumstances. So this is what I mean. I mean, most people when they claim church hurt were not actually hurt by the church. Okay. Now, what I'm not doing with this meme, what some people thought I was doing, because again, they don't know how words work, is they thought I was belittling belittling people that were hurt inside of a church, which I obviously would never do. If you were harmed by an authority at church, by a pastor, by an elder, by a youth leader, something like that, whether you were uh taken advantage of sexually, whether you were physically harmed, whether you were emotionally abused or spiritually abused or all that, those are all incredibly serious things. But the larger point that I was trying to make that I think a lot of people really understood is that church hurt, quote unquote, church hurts, is not a thing. It's not actually a thing. Like I I actually think that the entire concept of so-called church hurt, it's a scheme from the devil to keep people away from the bride of Christ. I mean, just think about it a little bit. I'll tease it out. You're not hurt by a place. You're hurt by individual people, right? So, so let's just flow in a scenario. And I know this could be a little close home for some people. So, I'm not meaning uh to be, you know, derisive or to cause any pain, but let's let's just use an extreme example to kind of make my point. Let's say a high schooler, right? A 16-year-old girl is sexually assaulted by her high school basketball coach. Okay? Do you know what no one says? No one says that that girl has basketball hurt. No one says that that girl has school hurt. No one says that she has sports hurt. Right? Now, yes, there are people that are harmed by what institutions do, but the infraction, the sin, the assault was perpetrated by a person. So, you look at it, there are plenty of institutions like school districts that have covered up sexual assault by teachers, right? For for any number of reasons, right? We've seen the Catholic Church moving pedophile priests around so that they wouldn't have to face any retribution or or face the the crimes that they committed. But again, the institution itself is not sinning. The people inside of the institution are right. An institution, the institution is inanimate. A a church or a school district or a camp or whatever. Those are inanimate things. It is because here's the thing. You can't put some, you know, church camp on trial if there was a sexual assault that occurred. You put the assaulter on trial. The scenario with the 16-year-old high school girl, you know, sexually assaulted by her coach. You You don't put the entire school district on trial. You don't put the high school on trial. You don't put the gymnasium on trial. You put the coach on trial. Right. And I think Satan, because again, Satan's very, very crafty father. like he he he's just he's incredibly good at making sure that people don't do the things that they need to do. And he's using the sins of some church officials, again, priests, uh elders, deacons, whatever, to make former churchgoers and just regular old non-churchgoers stay away from the church altogether. Right? Because with this concept of church hurt, it's taken on kind of like a, you know, a mind of its own because usually it was like, oh, you know, I don't want to go to church. There's just a bunch of hypocrites there. But I think people have enough, you know, personal awareness to realize that they too themselves are hypocrites. They like they don't ever keep to their own standards or anything like that. But it's just one of those things that I just wanted to kind of elucidate further why I posted a meme like that because again, people misunderstood, thought I was like, you know, being derissive of people that were actually hurt inside of church situations or something like that. And a lot of people were not really fans of the me using the word most because I would say that most people that claim church hurt were not hurt by the church. Back to the original point of the meme, you'll have a pastor or a u you know whether it's the lead pastor, you'll have an elder in the church, maybe a deacon, uh maybe just another leader or an employee of a church. They'll say things to somebody for their benefit which all come around to basically being like hey you need to stop sinning in this particular way like stop sinning towards this particular person stop doing this particular thing and someone's like ah these judgmental Christians are at it again telling me to stop sinning how dare they and then they categorize that as church hurt but I think we would all do well to realize that as a category church hurt simply doesn't exist. Hey guys, real quick. I know a lot of you train for very specific things. So maybe you've got a mud race coming up, a mountain hunt, a 5K, or maybe you just want to keep up with your kids, or you just don't want to let the old man in. But for a lot of you guys, whether you're working out at the globo gym, or even your garage gym, you get there and you just don't know exactly what to do. 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And she was basically like, "Look, we we just got this thing going on in culture right now where people are just believing the things that they hear without trying to see if there's anything substantiating the claims, whether there's any validity or truth there." And I just feel like we're we're in this inflection point. And I was like, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot, too. Really, guys, since last year, I've been thinking a lot about discernment in our culture, discernment in individuals, discernment as society, discernment within Christianom with Christians and things like that. And so, kind of what I do sometimes whenever I I feel like we're going back to the old school style of the show where I don't do, you know, a main topic and then quick hitters where I just stick on one main topic. I did the James Tarico stuff a while back a few weeks ago and now we're doing this. But basically, I will have a note on my phone and I will just collect my thoughts. Typically, when I lay down asleep, I'm like, "Oh, shoot." And then I'll just open up the note on my phone and I'll just jot things down. There's no really like organization of the thoughts. It's just next thought, next thought, next thought, next thought as I try to like gather my overall philosophy about all of this. And really, there was an inflection point for the beginning of my consideration of this crisis of discernment that we're currently living through. And that was September the 10th of last year and that was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. So after Charlie was shot in front of the entire world, uh there was an immediate and widespread manhunt that began to find the person of interest that was caught on multiple security cameras, multiple surveillance videos, and within about 33 hours, right, very quickly after the shooting, Tyler Robinson turned himself into police for shooting Charlie Kirk. So he was accompanied by his parents and it was actually his father that recognized his son from the surveillance footage that was released. Apparently there was a lot of family discussions that happened and they went and turned themsel he turned himself in peacefully. Right. And to date right to date all of the evidence suggests that Tyler Robinson was the shooter that killed Charlie Kirk. So that's the surveillance footage. A rifle that belonged to Robinson was found on his escape route. Robinson's DNA is on the rifle. Robinson's DNA is on the shell casing that was found at the scene. The marks on the gravel rooftop left by the shooter's feet, knees, and elbows, which showed, you know, a prone shooting position, match the body size of Robinson. Robinson sent many text messages to his furry gay boyfriend and made posts on Discord where he suggests his own guilt, and this is exactly what the prosecution is going to argue. The official affidavit also says that Robinson confessed to the crime to family members in private conversations and through text messages. And also, this is huge, by the way. Most people don't know this. Do you know who will be testifying for the prosecution when the Tyler Robinson trial begins? His furry gay boyfriend and both of his parents. So to reiterate, the only real tangible evidence, the you know, the kind that can actually be used by a prosecution team in a court of law, points to Tyler Robinson as the murderer of Charlie Kirk. But within days of Charlie's murder, maybe even hours, conspiracy theorists began to make their way around the internet to begin banding about these different ideas, just throwing things against the wall. And there were a lot of claims. A lot of these happened immediately. And over the next several days, weeks, and months, we've gotten so many different claims. Like, there had to be a second shooter. The bullet didn't match the gun. Right? This is a a claim that can only be made by someone that doesn't even understand basic ballistics. The United States government was in on it. It was a deep state hit. You know, the FBI and the CIA, they did it. The Trump administration was involved. This was Ukraine. Somehow, it was a false flag op meant to distract us from something. uh the confession messages that Tyler Robinson sent to his boyfriend and on Discord were faked, that it was an inside job, that TPUSA was involved, that Charlie Kirk's own security detail was involved, and there are many other different claims that have been made, of course, but there were two of the most popular conspiracy theories. I guess these would be the top two concerning the situation. The first is that it was a MSAD operation by Israel, so the Jews did it, right? And the second, which is the most egregious, is that Erica Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow and mother of his children, was involved in the assassination of her husband. Okay? And here's what all of those claims have in common. There's not been a single shred of evidence presented that could be used in a court of law, which is very important, which would suggest the guilt of anyone or any other group other than Tyler Robinson. Not one single piece of evidence. Not one. Now, if evidence comes to light that proves some of those theories that I just, you know, listed earlier, we are all, all of us, me included, welcome to change our minds, right? Because that's what you should do whenever you are presented with new evidence because that's how this works. But up to this moment, there has been zero evidence that can be used in a court of law that has been presented up to this point. And all this kind of circles the drain to the same question, which is if all the available evidence points to a single person being responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk, then why are there so many people that believe with their whole heart that Tyler Robinson either wasn't the shooter or that he didn't act alone? Why is that? Well, there are two main reasons that we're going to look at today. The first reason is that you need two kinds of people and that are involved in this case and those are conscious nefarious actors and useful idiots. The second main reason is in general people in modernity are suffering from an almost complete lack of discernment. So in other words, we have a societywide crisis of discernment. So let's get back to the first reason. I talk about two kinds of people needed for situations like this. The first are conscious nefarious actors. Okay, so I've talked about this a lot on the show, but you know this is I want to really really lay it out here on this one. So what is a conscious nefarious actor? So this is someone that is really smart. They know what they're saying is wrong. They know it's immoral. that they know that it's harmful, but they spread their message and ideology anyway for their own gain. Okay, so what kind of gain could this person get? It could be money, could be fame clicks followers clout winning spite, you know, there's a lot of different reasons why they would do this, but it's all for their own benefit. So, how does a conscious nefarious actor do this? So, they make claims or statements in the form of a question. That's one thing that they like to do. So they'll just, well, I'm just asking questions. They'll throw something out there that is a statement, right? But they just plaster a question mark on the end of it. Right? Now, here's the thing. If somebody is always just asking questions, but they refuse to ever make a clear declaration of what they believe, that they they refuse to say the name of the person they're implying they're talking about. they refuse to give their actual opinion on a situation, you should at the very least be skeptical of that person, right? I mean, we don't live in in an age of actual journalism anymore where you have, you know, journalists that you just want to ask the questions because they're just trying to get to truth. No, it's a bunch of pseudojournalists that are trying to drive clicks and so they're just going to ask these questions that are actually statements in order to get people to pay attention to their content. No, more. So, I actually remember this uh this was back in the day. We all know this was like 2011, 2012 or whatever. I remember this show being on television and I was like watching it with my dad uh you know at his house or something like that. It was uh Jesse Ventura. So former pro wrestler and I what was he the the governor of Minnesota or whatever? Jesse the Body Ventura. So the the name of the show was called Conspiracy Theory, right? And so apparently Jesse Ventur is like, you know, really deep on a lot of different conspiracy theories and things like that. That's just kind of his thing. Now I remember watching the show cuz obviously it's very dramatized. There's a lot of music. And so I remember one thing in particular. He's he's in the middle of the desert in uh you know, Nevada or somewhere Arizona, somewhere like that. And he drives up, there's this fenced in area and there's this long road that kind of disappears over the horizon and all that. And he goes up to this locked gate and there's like a little receiver there to where you can hit the button. And obviously there's dramatic, you know, that he's even driving out there and like I know that there's something behind this fence and you know we're going to get to the bottom of this and blah blah blah and you get out there. And so he gets all the way out there, right? And he hits the little button and somebody says, you know, "Hello, how may I help you?" And he goes, "I would like access to your facility." And the person's like, "I'm I'm sorry. Do you have a clearance code? Do you have blah blah blah?" And all that. He's like, "No, I don't have that. I'm just here to ask questions." Right? And and of course, whoever this person was was like, "Well, sorry, sir. you can't have access to this. We're going to have to ask you to leave the premises." And then so eventually after some heming and hawing, you know, he gets back in and then, you know, they they drive down the road probably a quarter mile and then they set up for his like little, you know, to the camera interview or whatever and he goes, "Well, they obviously must be hiding something cuz they wouldn't just let me inside." Which is one of the dumbest things anyone could possibly say. That'd be like Jesse Ventura coming to my house, knocking on the door, and I crack the door open and go, "What's up?" or I, you know, say howdy dur through the ring camera or whatever. And he's like, I would like to come inside. I'm like, sorry, you're not invited. I'm not going to let you in my house. I don't know who you are. And then he's like, well, I just have some questions. Oh, okay. Well, you know, write me a letter. Send it to me in the mail. Shoot me an email or something like that. And for him to conclude by me not letting him into my home that I'm hiding something somehow. Now, maybe it's because you don't need access. Maybe it's because there is no there there and you don't need to be here for any reason, right? But again, he's just asking questions, but obviously, you know, he's basically going all the way to the end and saying, "Well, they must be hiding something if they're not allowing me access." It's ridiculous. But also, conscious nefarious actors, they will make these big claims, right? And, you know, promises about the information that they're going to reveal to the world only to not deliver or I guess move the timeline to reveal further information well into the future. Okay? And so, they constantly get you jinned up. They're like, "Oh, hey, wait on Monday's show." like just just come on back on Monday's show. I'm finally going to give you the thing that I've been promising and then you get to Monday's show and there's nothing. And then also conscious nefarious actors, they will appeal to secret knowledge. Okay? You'll hear them say things like, "If you knew what I know, or you're not going to believe what I have to tell you, you know, I'm going to leak some some information that might get me killed." And then kind of their favorite thing is, well, I have a source dot dot dot that basically says, you know, whatever. Now, conveniently, they never name their source. Now, obviously, if you have a source that is maybe a whistleblower or presenting some information that could be, you know, potentially dilitterious to the actual source, you don't want to just be, you know, throwing their name out there. Like, I obviously understand that. But it's very interesting to me that we never see any of the sources for any of these conspiracy theorists, the people that are actually, you know, propping up a lot of these conspiracies. They never name their sources and their sources never come forward because you would think if the source had something to say that could change the outcome of a criminal case, right, that could prove someone's innocence or prove someone's guilt, you would think they would want to come out and go on the record with that information. And yet they don't they don't go on the record. Certainly not in a court of law. They may not even go on a podcast and talk about it, right? So they kind of hide behind their sources and then the sources are never brought to light. And you know as as human beings, don't we just love things that aren't knowable, right? You have people that are talking about all these different things like these, you know, pseudo gospels like the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of of Mary, the gospel of Peter, and you know, the, you know, book of Enoch and some other different things. not the first book of Enoch, but the second and third book of Enoch. We just love things that are gnostic, gnostic, like secret things. Like, we want to believe in the Gospel of Thomas. We want to believe that Jesus said all these things publicly that was recorded and written down and heard by his disciples and apostles, but that he pulled a special apostle, you know, to the side, like, "Hey, Thomas, yeah, I said all that, but also here's some stuff, right? Here's the real stuff." We just love that. We love it's like we're drawn to it. We're not really drawn to the things that can be known. We we want to know about the things that are mysterious, but also conscious and nefarious actors, they will introduce circumstantial evidence to seow confusion. And so they'll talk about a bunch of things that aren't actually related to the claim that they're making or the question that they're asking, but then they just present it and just kind of drop it in there because they want you to either draw conclusions from that or at the very least they just want to leave everyone confused because it's actually to their benefit. Because if you stay confused, they can continue to promise you that you're going to be the one that unravels this entire mess for them, right? So, they're going to stay, you know, attached to you. Conscious nefarious actors will also use really, it's just the conspiracy theorist's superpower, which goes something like this. The conspiracy is larger than we previously thought. Isn't that always the thing? Right? And so I I've talked about this before, but let's say they're they're making a claim about an individual person, but then there's no evidence to prove any of the claims that they're making about this individual person. Then they'll be like, "Well, the conspiracy obviously is larger than I thought, right? Here's a larger group that's involved, right? It's it's this size of group." So maybe it was about an individual police officer. Now we're talking about the entire precinct. And then there's no evidence and there's no there there when it comes to the precinct or anyone being involved in some kind of conspiracy. And they're like, "Oh my gosh, the conspiracy is larger than we even thought before. The entire city's involved. All the city's politicians and all the those people and all that." And then there's no evidence to prove that. And then it's like, "Oh, well, it's even bigger. It's the it's the entire federal government is involved in this individual circumstance somehow." Then there's no evidence for that. And then and then they just SAY, "OH MY GOSH, IT'S EVEN BIGGER. THE DEEP STATE, the nameless, faceless, deep state, they're in in charge of it." And then they they can't prove anything about the deep state. And then they just start talking about they they are out there. This nameless faceless group of they that are responsible for this individual circumstance. The conspiracy is always bigger than previously thought. And it's so convenient because when you widen the array of what we're even looking at and trying to investigate, it becomes almost impossible to disprove the nonsense that you're spewing. And and another thing that a lot of these conscious nefarious actors do is when they are called out for their lack of evidence, they just move the goalposts, right? And they claim that the heat that they're getting is a coordinated smear campaign or it's an op, right? It's false flag. And it was because they were getting close, right? Oh, I was getting so close. And now, you know, all these people are making fun of me because I don't know how to pronounce words. and oh, these people are kind of getting after me because of these 17 other stories that I claimed without evidence and they were all proven to be bunk and false. Oh, that's just a smear campaign. They're just scared that I'm so close to exposing them, right? So, you're actually seeing a lot of things like what I just described from Tucker Carlson who like my gosh, like what's happened to that guy in the last year or two? Ian Carol, uh you have Dave Smith. And so if you don't know who Dave Smith is, he's a comedian, but he's also a pseudo political commentator. And the thing is is if your main job is comedian, but you also have political, you know, ideas and thoughts and philosophies, like I'm okay with that. You can have your opinions. That's fine. Like if you coach, you know, high school football and you also want to have an opinion on local tax policy, yeah, you're you're actually able to do that. Like I'm fine with that. But what Dave Smith does is he likes to take the clown nose off and put it back on when it's convenient, right? So when he gets backed into a corner, when he with some of his ideas and when he's challenged, he likes to put the clown nose back on and be like, "Ah, I'm just a comedian. Just comedian with an opinion, right?" You know, I've seen people do that before. I've seen Bill Burr do that. I've seen Joe Rogan do that. I've seen the Ovon do that. It's like they get backed into a corner where they obviously don't know what they're talking about and it's like, "Oh, clown knows." So Dave Smith is especially nefarious. But of all the most egregious violators of this conscious nefarious actor thing, the most egregious violator regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the most nefarious of the conscious nefarious actors is far and away Candace Owens. Obviously, as I was describing some of the things earlier, I'm sure a lot of you picked up on, yeah, this is just Candace Owens's thing because Candace Owens has had a fairly large platform for a while, right? uh she was doing so with TP USA and then I think she went to PragerU and then she was with Daily Wire and then she went solo. She's done some interesting things with the Blexit movement. She's done some interesting uh journalistic things with Black Lives Matter and different things like that. But my gosh, I guess she found her calling in life, which was after her supposed best friend Charlie Kirk was murdered. The same Charlie that apparently hadn't spoken to her in a very long time uh before he passed away. that when her best friend was killed, she found her meaning in life. And that was she was going to get to the bottom of who really killed Charlie Kirk. Because it can't just be the person who's pointed out as it pertains to all the evidence, which is Tyler Robinson. It's got to be somebody else. It's got to be this larger group of people and an even larger group there and then even a larger group after that, right? And her profile has grown considerably. Her audience has grown considerably. At one point last year, she had the number one podcast in the world, right? She overtook Joe Rogan for a short period of time for the number one podcast in the world. And we've seen this with, you know, Tucker Carlson, audience has exploded. Dave Smith, audience has exploded. Ian Carol, audience has exploded, right? And with Candace Owens specifically, she's made a lot of claims about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And it's kind of it kind of boggles the mind that you could just keep coming up with claims, but she's talked about how Tyler Robinson is a psych footage that was released in order to find Tyler Robinson was edited or doctorred. That there was a coordinated cover up of the crime scene, like a scrubbing of the crime scene. That it was an inside job. She's implicated Erica Kirk, TPUSA, insiders at TPUSA, his security team. That the shot came from below. that it could not have come from the angle that Tyler Robinson was shooting from on top of the roof. That multiple governments were involved. So obviously Israel, she's not a big fan of Israel or the Jews. That France was involved. The France, the French Foreign Legion, that Egypt was involved. And that all of this is also tied somehow to this nameless, faceless, evil cabal of international sex traffickers and child sacrificers. She's claimed that the United States military and the government was involved, that the FBI fabricated the evidence that has been presented so far to the public, that the wrong person was arrested, right? Tyler Robinson shouldn't have been arrested, but who should have been arrested? She doesn't say. And that Kirk was targeted his entire life, right? That he was from from the time he was a child, that he was surrounded by agents just waiting to take him out, that he was marked for destruction since childhood, right? She also says that Charlie knew that this would all happen because Charlie was a time traveler. She also claims that Charlie Kirk has visited her in her dreams. You want to talk about an unfalsifiable claim? That's another thing that conscious nefarious actors will do is they will put a claim out there that can't be falsified, but it's basically, yeah, trust me, bro. And she also said that there was cult involvement in the assassination because of the repeated appearance of the number 33, right? The number 33 keeps popping up and obviously that means there's cult involvement here. Now, what evidence has she presented that could even vaguely be considered proof of any of those claims? Natada. Nothing. Again, certainly nothing that could be presented in court. And guys, there's actually an easy proof. Well, there's actually two easy proofs that that clearly show that she's not presenting anything that could be used in a court of law because number one is that Tyler Robinson's defense team, which is looking for any and everything to exonerate their client, right? That's that's what a good defensive attorney does and defense attorneys do for their client. They have not tried to use any of Candace Owen Candace Owens's evidence in Robinson's defense. None of it. None of it. Because if what Candace was saying was true or provable, then why wouldn't the defense team pick up on this? They have Twitter accounts. They have YouTube accounts, it's because there's nothing there. And the second easy proof is that no one else has been arrested for their involvement in the crime. No one else. Not anyone on Charlie's security team, not any local law enforcement, not anyone at TPUSA, not Erica Kirk. Right? But again, remember they can always run back to their superpower. The conspiracy is bigger than I previously thought. You know, other people would have been arrested, but they're being protected by who? They, right? That's always the claim. And also, what motivation would any of these people or groups that she implicates have to do, you know, something so sinister, right? And having done it in plain sight, what would their motivation be to pull off something like that? Shrug emoji. I don't know. They speculate but they can't actually elucidate. Right? So those are the conscious nefarious actors. But then we need to talk about the second group of people and those are the useful idiots. So what is a useful idiot? So useful idiot is a person with low IQ andor high goal ability. You can be high IQ with high goal ability, right? who trust what the conscious nefarious actors say without trying to determine if the claims of the conscious nefarious actors have any truth or validity. That's what a useful idiot is, right? And there certainly are more of them than there are conscious nefarious actors because one conscious nefarious actor can control a bunch of useful idiots. And these useful idiots have a lot of the same key characteristics. So one of them is that they operate on emotion and not logic. That that's pretty standard, right? Because if you're easily whipped up with emotion, then the logic part of your brain will automatically turn off. And this is really an overall capital F feminine thing. And you know, Ali Best Stucky, Alisa Childers, Katie FA, they've all pointed this out at one time or another that this is especially bad with women or people with a feminine temperament, right? Which should be a shock to nobody because in the main, right, women react emotionally more than men do. Men react logically more than women do, right? And so these useful idiots, they they have this overall kind of feminine temperament where it's easy to get them whipped up with emotion and then that makes them more controllable. But also another characteristic of these useful idiots is that they think that if it's plausible that it's also probable, which those are not the same thing because you can just make up a scenario of something that is plausible, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily probable. But they make the leap. So is it plausible that this group let's take the the countries I listed earlier or that you know Candace Owens has implicated that Israel, France, Egypt and the United States, the governments of those entities all got together to take out Charlie Kirk for what reason they would want to take out a political commentator. Don't know. They don't really tell us. Candace certainly hasn't. But is it plausible that there could have been coordination from four different countries with four different interests and the people therein that have their own individual interests they came together to take out one specific person and to do it in front of the entire world? Yes, it's plausible. It's even possible. Is it probable? No. No. And here's the other thing. Let's take the people that operate on logic the most. They they don't operate on emotion. Are all the people literally all the people whether they're conservative political commentators, liberal political commentators, you know, just atheists in culture with large platforms, podcasters, pastors are all these people that are viewing the claims of someone like Candace Owens and thinking, "Man, she might have a mental illness. Man, she might be being controlled by a demon right now. Man, she's certainly not a Christian, but she's and doing these horrible, evil, horrific things like claiming that Erica Kirk was involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk. Are all those people wrong? This gets back to the plausibility and probability thing, right? It's it's plausible that all these people could be wrong and one person could be right, but is it probable? This is like the inverse of the other situation. The odds of it being probable are are absolutely not. that all these other people are wrong, but this one person is right. Again, goes back to the superpower for conspiracy theorists, but also these these useful idiots. They will close out dissenting voices, okay? They will basically even refuse to believe that it's even possible that they're wrong, that it's even possible that they are being lied to, that it is not possible that they are being manipulated and potentially by a foreign nefarious actor, right? That's using social media to sew discord in this country. And with that, these useful idiots will refuse to change their position when they are presented with contrary evidence. So conspiracy theorists, you know, the person that they've glommed on to, they present this this thing, right? This claim usually in the form of a question, and then it becomes this person's truth, this this useful idiot's truth, and then a logical, sane, emotionless person presents the evidence that disproves the claim, they refuse to believe it. That's just part of the conspiracy theory. You're just trying to control me, right? That's a useful idiot. but also useful idiots. They ignore AAM's razor. Okay, so if you're not familiar familiar with AAM's razor, that's occams razor. So it's a philosophical principle that's attributed to William of AAM. So he was a 14th century philosopher which states that among competing explanations, right? So take a circumstance among competing explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions should be preferred. Okay, this isn't always the best thing to do, but most of the time it is. So, basically, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Okay, so let let's say you've got, you know, let's just make it easy. Let's say we've got two potential explanations for this circumstance. And let's say this explanation has two assumptions that are levied onto it. And this one has 50 50 things that all have to be simultaneously true to prove this explanation. The explanation with the fewest assumptions should be preferred. Okay? So the one with two should be preferred over the one with 50. Right? That's how AAMS's razor works. Useful idiots don't have any place in their brain for AAMS razor. And also part of the reason why that is is because useful idiots, they see theories in and of themselves as evidence. So one of their favorite purveyors of truth, right? They will posit a theory, right? A hypothesis. Well, a hypothesis normally means that you're it's an educated guess. A lot of these theories are certainly uneducated, certainly ignorant. They'll posit a theory and the person, the useful idiot, will look at the theory as evidence proving whatever it is that needs to be proven. Right? But I take you back all the way to episode 860 of this podcast. Every year in January, the first podcast of the year is the top 20 ways to avoid being a crappy man. Well, the number one thing, the number one way to avoid being a crappy man in 2026, the first thing that I said was hold your sources for truth to a high evidentiary standard. Okay? So, if you say this is my theory, this is why it's true, you have to provide the evidence. You have to undergur the claim or the theory, the philosophy or the worldview with evidence. And one of the things that we're seeing now which is leading to this crisis of discernment is that we are not holding our sources for truth. the people that are saying the truth, we're not holding them to a high evidentiary standard. And and before we move on really to the the next point overall that's that's leading to this crisis of discernment, I actually want to go to an example that I saw because in September of last year, so this was, you know, a week and a half after Charlie Kirk was was murdered on uh on X, someone with the the name Christina period. So her uh I guess her handle is Cosmopolitics. Okay, so she's a blue check mark person. and I don't even know how many followers she has, but we're actually going to go ahead and put this uh tweet up on the screen. So, Landon, let's go ahead and put this tweet up on the screen. So, you can see the tweet there. I'll go ahead and read it for those just listening to the podcast. Did y'all know Erica Kirk is banned from Romania because her evangelical group was accused of trafficking children out of Romanian villages? Birds of a feather, I suppose. So, this was also tied to Jeffrey Epstein somehow. And if you if you kind of go to the end of the Jeff Jeffrey Epstein thing, then that would mean that Erica Kirk was helping traffic children when she was a child herself. So the the claim is insane. But this tweet got five million views. 5 million. Now this is a complete falsehood, right? This is a liel against Erica Kirk. But many people, I don't know how many, five million people saw it. Are there thousands? maybe tens of thousands that just believe this to be true. Is it possible that there's hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions that believe this to be true, that Erica Kirk was involved in trafficking children out of Romanian villages? Unfortunately, that's what a lot of people believe. And here's what a bunch of the dumb dums that believe that would say or have said. Well, if it's not true, then Erica Kirk would obviously sue this person. But Erica hasn't sued, so it must be true. when talk about strange logic. But even if we ignore the fact that these same people would claim that if Erikica Kirk did indeed sue this woman, that would mean that Erica was trying to silence her, which would be evidence again in their minds that Erica Kirk is guilty of this. But let's just play along, okay? Let's say Erica Kirk does sue this person for what she posted a week and a half after her husband was murdered. Here's what would likely happen. So Erica Kirk sues this random person on X for defamation. Now right from the beginning, Erica is behind and her entire uh team of lawyers are behind because proving defamation of a public figure which Erica is by a private citizen is almost impossible to do. It's almost an impossible hurdle. That's just a start. Okay. But let's say they just plug through and Erica's attorneys, they can easily prove that the statement made about their client is abjectly false. But that's not the legal question at hand. You see, Erica's attorneys would also have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this woman posted this information knowing that it was not true. Okay? Now, needless to say, it's incredibly incredibly hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what was going on in the head of the woman before she made the post. Okay, but let's say Erica Kirk's attorneys are able to get over that hurdle. Again, almost impossible. Let's say they get over it. They would then have to try and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this woman made this post maliciously and that her intent from the beginning was to defame and harm Erica. Okay, this too would be incredibly hard for them to prove, almost impossible. But let's say her attorneys are amazing and they're able to get over that hurdle. Now, Erica's attorneys would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Erica was damaged in some way by this post and not just damaged in the ethereal. They would have to actually calculate these damages and come up with a number, right? A financial number. And let's say that Erica's attorneys are able to do that. Now, this malevolent woman, this malicious woman would have to have the funds to pay the damages that were made by her posting what she posted. And the likelihood of this private citizen, this woman having those funds would be very, very, very low as well. So, the best case scenario is that Erica Kirk sues. She spends months in court racking up attorney's fees the entire time only to win a settlement that the guilty party is unable to pay. So, it's a lose-lose situation because if she wins the case, she actually loses time and money. And whether or not she sues this woman actually doesn't matter because a bunch of soft-headed morons believe that the woman posted this thing and that it was true to begin with. So, there is no winning here for Erica. And that's just one example. is Erica Kirk like she could hire every attorney in existence and probably not have enough time, money, nor billable hours to be able to go through all of those cases of things that have been posited about her that have defamed her. She she suffered liel defamation. She's never going to be able to get out from underneath all of that. So to move on, I'm talking about the reasons why we're having this crisis of discernment and you know the reason why we're in this predicament. And the second one is that in general people in modernity are suffering from an almost complete lack of discernment. Like we are in a societywide crisis of discernment. Okay? Knowledge and information does not equal wisdom and discernment. I'll say that again. Knowledge and information does not equal wisdom and discernment. We think that the more things we know, the more information that we have in our fingertips or whatever, that that's going to equal wisdom and discernment. But having the knowledge and the information does not tell you what you should do with it. And really the key here is wisdom is a gift from God. Wisdom is a gift. I mean guys, we see this all throughout scripture. So James 15, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. Proverbs 2:6, for the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. 1 Corinthians 1:30. And because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Ecclesiastes 2:26, for to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy. Daniel 2:21, he changes times and seasons. He removes kings and sets up kings. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. Ephesians 1:17, "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him." First Kings 4:29, "And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breath of mind like the sand on the seashore." And guys, that's just a a sampling of what the Bible has to say about wisdom and the source of it. And here's the thing about the crisis of discernment that we're seeing in modernity. It's going to be significantly exacerbated with the continued ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Okay, so I've said this on the show quite a bit before. You've heard me refer to this, but I'm actually going to read a passage from chapter 7 of John Tyson's most recent book called Fighting Shadows. So, let's go to that chapter here. According to an article in the New York Times, hundreds of thousands of men in their late 30s and early 40s stopped working during the pandemic and have lingered on the labor markets sidelines since. Andy Crouch's observation about the three large shifts that have driven the development of our modern world over the last thousand years seems relevant here. He talked about the three expansions of power. The first occurred in 1397 when in Florence, Italy, the first bank was created, settling in or setting in motion a shift from wealth as land to wealth as money. The second shift in 1769 was the invention of the steam engine. Work changed forever. Work once done by bodies was increasingly accomplished by machines. The third shift occurred in 1948 when Claude Shannon published his landmark paper, a mathematical theory of communication, which set in motion a new age where knowledge is no longer based on wisdom but on information. All three of these things represent disconnects. Okay, so those are the three big disconnects. And as I've talked about before, I add a fourth one because we have to. That's AI which will soon be combined with quantum and you know who knows how soon but soon and it's in the process of causing this shift. Humans think and create and the shift is now AI machines think and create and don't we see this all the time now? I mean all of us have at least seen some local news story some anecdote or maybe even their personal life. something that a human used to think up and create and do that now is just a prompt in chat GBT or Claude, right? They used to work with an artist to create some sort of a piece or something in the computer. Now they tell Gemini to do it for them, right? They're trying to see what's going on in the local news. Maybe they would go to a local news station or or or watch something. Now they just ask Rock, right? Humans think and create. And now it's AI machines think and create. Okay. And guys, what this is doing is it's changing what it means to be human because we are sentient. We are the only emotionally aware beings on this planet. And we're giving up revelation from God. We're giving up influence from God for ease of use. Right? And this is how I've described it. And this is another thing that I'm doing a lot of thinking on that I'll probably do a full episode on later. But AI is is a lure, right? It's gorgeous. It's shiny. It looks amazing. But what do allures have? Hooks, right? Because AI is luring you in with, well, hey, you don't have to write that email. Just just have Claude do it for you. And hey, how about you just buy a little Mac Mini and hook it up and you this could be just be an agent, an unpaid agent that can do your work for you. Hey, why would you go read all these books? just grab the PDF, toss it into Chat GBT, and have ChatGBT prepare your podcast interview for you. Like, hey, why write that paper? Why go through all that process of figuring out your words and how to use them when you can just throw a prompt in, then poof, there's your five paragraph essay for your high school English class, right? It's because if you stop working the muscle, the muscle will atrophy. Is that not true? If you stop working the muscle, the muscle will atrophy. If you stop using your brain, your brain will not fire on all cylinders. Your brain will not be strong. Your recall will not be strong. There's not enough, you know, neurogum that you can eat or energy drinks or neutropics that you can take. That's going to counteract the fact that you have taken your foot off the gas when it comes to the development of your own brain. I mean, I used to say it was the guys that hadn't read a book since high school and they're like proud of that. Somehow a man sitting there in their 40s with their beer bell belly and titties and they're just basically like, "Yeah, yeah, I haven't read a book since high school, man." And it's like, but and you're proud of that. You like your body has gotten older and bigger and uglier and nastier. And your brain is basically on the same trajectory and you're thrilled about that. Now it's different. Now it's why would I do that if the if the AI can do it? Why would I do the research if the AI can do it? But I had someone ask me the other day cuz I was describing to them how I put together these long episodes and they were just kind of like and you're just doing that yourself. Like why aren't you why aren't you using an AI for it? I was like because it's my work because even a bot that really knows a lot about me doesn't know me. And you know who the bot also doesn't know? You. When I'm preparing an interview for a guest, I'm not just asking them the questions that are interesting to me. I'm taking all of you consuming this content right now into mind and consideration and I'm asking the question that you would ask if you were in my shoes, right? You're telling me some AI chatbot, some large language model is going to be able to pull that off? Absolutely not. And here's the thing that we're fast approaching with AI guys. There's going to be a time where there's a dividing line between it people that have really plugged fully into the matrix or people that are otherized. Right? So you have whatever your IQ is, right? But if you just take this chip, just let us put it into the base of your brain, right? Then you'll have an endless IQ. You'll be able to understand and speak multiple languages. Your recall will be immediate. You won't even have to use words to communicate with someone else. You can just use your thoughts and can send it over to them, right? And then there's going to be these these backwards old school people clinging to their guns and Bibles. Barack Obama clinging to our guns and Bibles that are refusing to get the chip, right? It's kind of like the people that refuse to get the jab. But no, we're not getting the chip, right? Well, societyy's going to be like, "Fine. You're going to be sitting there basically like a chimp playing with your own feces while we're solving the universe's greatest mysteries and coming up with things that people never thought possible. Are you ready to be otherized? Because it's coming. And all this comes down to the question which is so what about Christians, right? We spend a lot of time really setting all this up. But what about Christians? Are Christians susceptible to all of this as well? Of course they are. Of course they are. Like we will buy the cultural narrative fed to us, right? We will buy these worldviews and philosophies without thinking them through and without digging in at all. So, case in point, I'm going to describe someone to you and then ask you some questions. And if you've listened to the show for any length of time, you probably know where this is going. But let's just call this person person X. And I'm about to list the things that person X does not believe. So, person X does not believe these things. They do not believe in the divinity of Christ. They do not believe in the virgin birth. They do not believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Right? They don't believe in the resurrection. They don't believe in the existence of a literal hell and they don't believe in the second coming of Christ. So armed with that information, here's my question. Is person X a follower of Christ? Is person X a Christian? And armed with that information, right, you would have to say, well, well, no, person X is not a Christian. Like, how could they be? They don't believe in core cornerstone Christian doctrine. Well, let's go ahead and do the big reveal of Person X. Person X is Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. in his own words, his own speeches, conversations, and writings said he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the existence of a literal hell, and the second coming of Christ. I've got news for you. If you don't believe those things, you don't believe in Christ. You may know things about him, but you don't believe in him. And you'll just hear these people, but MLK is a Christian. He he clearly has to be. Like, you have to ask yourself, can you be a Christian and also not believe in cornerstone Christian doctrine? No, that's not how this works. But then people be like, but look at his title, Kyle. MLK is a reverend. He's a reverend. Well, guys, are you aware that there are going to be a lot of pastors and priests and church elders and deacons in hell? A lot of them. You've heard other pastors talk about that. You even heard my pastor, Mark Hitchcock, when he did our interview here a month or so ago, right? He talked about how there's going to be a bunch of people that have titles that business cards that say pastor and there's a church logo on there, but these people are not saved. They're not followers of Christ. Some of them don't even believe in God, right? But then these people say, "But Martin Luther King was such a great upstanding moral man." Well, did you know that we have certifiable evidence that Martin Luther King Jr. was a heavy substance abuser, that he cheated on his wife multiple times, cheated on her, that he participated in orgies with women and men, and that he participated in a rape. Did you know any of that? Did you know any of that? I mean, people love to talk about the, you know, sketchy circumstances and personal moral failings of people like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, you know, these slave owners, but they don't want to talk about Martin Luther King Jr. Why is that? But with most Christians, they can't be bothered with any of that evidence or any of that information, right? Because we can't spend any time considering the evidence that points to the exact opposite way that the culture has already decided upon. And that's essentially where a lot of Christians are stuck. And what is the main reason why Christians are so susceptible to being misled? Well, in general, we lack discernment, right? That's the overall theme of this episode. But specifically for Christians, why do Christians lack discernment? Well, we own plenty of Bibles. We just don't read them. We have Bibles on the shelf, but the spines are intact and not broken in. And I can actually prove this to you. So, in 2025, last year, Legionir Ministries, they partnered with publisher Lifeway and they did something called the state of theology. I think they do this every year, but this is a survey that was given to self-described evangelicals. Okay? Now evangelicals can have a lot of different definitions and there's a lot of debate on the different definitions but this is how the survey right the legionir ministry survey defined evangelical. So evangelicals were defined by the research group that they believe in these following four statements. The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their savior. Jesus Christ's death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin. And only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their savior receive God's free gift of eternal salvation. Okay, so those are all the things that these people believe. But now we have to actually look at these different findings. Okay, look, there were a lot of key findings from this, but I want to kind of like break it down to a smaller group. So guys, just get ready to throw up in your mouth. 64% of, again, evangelicals, I'll stop doing the scare quotes, but 64% of evangelicals agree with the statement, everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. 64% of evangelicals agree with that. Also, 53% a majority of evangelicals agree with the statement, "Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature." And 53% of evangelicals agree with the statement the Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being. But also 98% of evangelicals agree with the statement there is one true God and three persons. God the father, God the son, and God the holy spirit. So how do you go with those last two? Then you have 47% of evangelicals agree with the statement God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. which is insane because in order to identify as an evangelical for the survey guys and remember they had to agree with the statement the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe and 100% of the evangelicals surveyed agreed with that statement because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to participate but then again we had 47% almost half of them said that God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity Judaism and Islam we'll move on 61% of evangelicals agree with the statement every Christian has an obligation to join a local church. 65% of evangelicals agree with the statement, "God created marriage to be between one man and one woman." 54% of evangelicals agree with the statement, "Christians should not allow their religious beliefs to influence their political decisions." Just astonishing. Okay, but let's actually go back through these statements and see what the Bible has to say about them. So, 64% of evangelicals agree with the statement, "Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God." 53% of evangelicals agree with the statement, "Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature." So, let's go to Psalm 5:15. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Romans 5:18 and 19. Therefore, as one trespass led to the condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous. Then Ephesians 2 1-3. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind. And we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. We're by nature, guys, children of wrath. So, but we have so many believers, evangelicals that agree with that statement. 53% of evangelicals agree with the statement, the Holy Spirit is a force but not a personal being. But then again, 98% of them agree with the statement there is one true God and three persons. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Let's go to John 14:26. But the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Sounds pretty personal, right? John 16:13-14. When the Spirit of the truth comes, so he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. And then Romans 8:26, likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray, for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. Now, 47% of evangelicals agree with the statement, "God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam." Let's go to John 14:5-7. Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him,"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my father also. From now on, you do know him and I've seen him." So guys, just think about this. Even in Jesus's own words, he's like, "No, Judaism by itself, they don't have it. Islam, they don't have it. No other religion has it. I have it. and the only way to eternal life is through me. And 61% of evangelicals agree with the statement, every Christian has an obligation to join a local church. Okay, so there's a direct reference to this in scripture and then there's an assumed one. So let's go to the direct one here. Hebrews 10:24-2. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as in the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near. So that's direct like no you have to be part of a local body of believers. But then there's the assumption of that in something like Ephesians 4:15 and 16. Rather speaking the truth and love. We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped when each part is working properly makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. And then 65% of evangelicals agree with the statement. God created marriage to be between one man and one woman. So Genesis 2:24, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And then Jesus actually affirmed this in this part of Genesis in Matthew 19:4-6. He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, "Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God is joined together. Let not man separate. 54% of evangelicals agree with the statement. Christians should not allow their religious beliefs to influence their political decisions. Right? So we should just kind of keep out Deuteronomy 64-5 here. O Israel the Lord our God. The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. So you have to kind of ask yourself, how can we do that if we leave entire parts of this world like the world of politics out? How can we love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our might? Colossians 3:17, "And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." So guys, whatever you do includes working, how we treat people, and yes, how we vote and participate in this the political sphere. Okay? And so you've got all these things happening just again that there was more in that uh state of theology, but I just wanted to point out some of those things. But some of you might say, "But but Kyle, I've heard even from you that Bible sales have never been higher. So so how is this happening?" To which I would say, well, yeah, that seems to be the case. But if your Bible just sits on the shelf next to your copies of, you know, Atlas Shrugged or the five love languages, it's not really doing you any good, is it? And so, what are we to conclude from this? And the conclusion is that evangelicals in the West have an incredibly high rate of Bible ownership with an incredibly low rate of biblical literacy. And what does this lack of discernment and low biblical literacy lead to? Well, we lack the ability to identify false teachers and heresy, right? It's exactly where this goes. So, you'll buy the Joel Ostein book and just believe what he says. You'll listen to the Andy Stanley sermon and not notice that his views on LGBTQ plus stuff doesn't jive with scripture. Like you'll hear a speech from Democrat US Senate candidate James Terico, right, that I just talked about a few weeks ago and you're going to think, "Yeah, that guy's making some compelling points." Because if you don't know, James Terico is a seminarian. He loves to use scripture obviously incorrectly and out of context all the time when he's making his speeches advocating for things like chopping off the healthy breast tissue of young gender confused girls and killing babies while they reside in the wombs of their mothers. But he uses the Bible to substantiate his claims. But I mean guys, you'll listen to certain Hill Song United or Bethl Music songs or Elevation Worship songs and then you're just going to start singing along with the aiblical and in some cases heretical lyrics because you lack discernment. And it also leads us to be caught flatfooted when someone in our, you know, atheistic culture tries to tell us that God and Christianity and that the Bible that they're bad because of some kind of argument that they just made up. You're caught flatfooted. They will quote scripture to you wrongly and you don't catch it because you're not familiar with it. Right. And for Christians, you know, I would say that a lot of us fall for the that's probably good enough trap. It's a it's a trap we fall into. Yeah, it's probably good enough. So, we don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we go to church occasionally and the pastor reads it to us. Like, we don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we go to a Bible church. We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because our pastor does and his off time and then he puts it all together and then feeds it to me. Like, we don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we listen to Christian podcasts. We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we listen to Christian radio. We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because our favorite Instagram influencers are Christians and they post scripture every now and then. We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we get a verse of the day that's just text directly to our phones every morning. Like we don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we've read it before, right? At least some of it, right? We don't need to read the Bible for ourselves because we kind of already know what it says. I mean, just go back to legionir mystery survey. That kind of disproves that. So the that's probably good enough trap leads us away from the Bible and towards things that are at best Bible adjacent. And why do we do this? I mean, if we're being honest, we're kind of lazy, right? I mean, reading the Bible takes time and we're very busy, right? We're busy. Reading the Bible takes effort because it's not always super easy to understand. Reading the Bible might actually convict us, convict us of sin, and we don't like that very much. Reading the Bible makes us have to reckon with where we put ourselves in reference to what it says, right? Isn't that the thing we've seen all the time? I love the way that Joby talks about it. He'll take his Bible and he says, "Where are you in reference to this book? Do you put yourself on top of it? Your opinions and your feelings and stuff on top of it, or are you below it? Are you subservient to what this says even if you don't like it? Because you can't put yourself in line with it. You're either on top of it or below it. And where will you be? Right? But my hypothesis is that I think all those things are true that we're lazy and you know, we think we know everything already and all that. But I think that the main reason, guys, that we don't read our Bibles is because we don't actually believe it's the word of God. We we don't really believe it. Like we may know some history and some facts about you know the different writers and on how many continents and over how many years and you know how it was translated and from this language to this language and eventually got to English and then we have our favorite version and you know there are even Bibles that we've bought for other people and you know we we know stuff about the Bible but when we when it comes time to actually read it we don't really believe that God wrote it. We don't believe that God breathed it. We don't believe that God inspired the men who actually put pen to paper. Right? We don't believe it. That the people that put ink to scroll were basically writing down exactly what God told them to write down. Because if we actually believe that was the word of God, don't you think we that we might read it? You've heard people say this before. It's like, you know, people want to hear a word from God. It's like, well, we'll read God's word. And they're like, well, no, I want to hear him audibly. It's like, okay, well, read God's word out loud, right? If you want to hear God audibly talk to you, talk about it out loud. Say it out loud. Grab a buddy, grab your neighbor, grab your wife here, read this out loud to me. There, God's audibly talking to you now. And that's just it's a sad state of affairs that people that would even purport to be evangelicals to believe all the things that I listed earlier about what it means to be an evangelical don't spend any time in his word. And they have plenty of excuses as to why they wouldn't. But here's what I want to leave you with today. This is how we can start to fight against the crisis of discernment. So I'm going to actually talk to two groups. So I'm going to talk to Christians here in a second, but first I want to talk to non-Christians. So for non-Christians, okay, if you're listening to this still, hold your sources for truth to a high evidentiary standard. Okay? It's what I tell all kinds of people to do. If you hear a claim, if you hear a philosophy, if you hear a worldview and something in you is like, I don't know if that's true, okay? You have to ask for evidence. Excuse me, sir or ma'am. You you made this claim. Uh it seems rather grandiose or maybe I don't quite fully understand it. What is your evidence for this? Right? So as a non-Christian, just hold your sources for truth to a high evidentiary standard and that'll certainly help you with your discernment. And then also the number one question you should ask yourself when being presented with information is by what standard? By what standard? So to the truths, by what standard do you make that claim? By what standard are you appealing to to make your moral claim of what someone should or should not do? By what standard are you able to tell me what I should or should not do? Like by what standard is your argument compared to? Right? So for non-Christians out there, hold your sources for truth to a high evidentiary standard and always keep this question in mind. By what standard? But now for the Christians. If you're not already studying the Bible on your own daily, consuming it, reckoning with it, how about you start reading it as if it was actually the word of God? You may not actually believe it, but do it as if it's true, as if God's way of communicating directly to you is through this word. Read it as if it's true. Because man, I see a bunch of people like I'll over hear women even talking in church about the the books that they're reading and and these three 400page novels, right? These junk novels, you know, these these thrillers, these horror things, right? Ever like any of those types of things, but they don't have time to read the Bible. They have time to scroll social media. Like all of us get caught doom scrolling, me included. They don't have any time to read the Bible, right? I just don't have any time. Just don't have the time. Right? Well, start reading as it as if it's true. Because you read that novel as if it's going to entertain you, whether it does so or not, but why don't you read the Bible as if it were going to infuse you with what God wants for your life and what God wants to show and reveal to you. And for those of you that are already studying the Bible in whatever whatever form or capacity, I want you to go farther than you think you're currently capable of. Okay? So when you become a Christian, your sanctification process begins immediately. Your righteousness has been imputed because of Jesus's finished work on the cross. But sanctification is a lifelong process. Whether you die at some point or whether you get raptured, you are sanctifying and you are on the sanctification journey the entire way. And what does sanctification require? Discomfort. So, for some of you, right, think about this. Like, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, like someone's like trying to change their body, and it's like, well, there's not a whole lot of different things you can do. You can either, you know, you got to add, you have to have progressive overload is what it's called. So, we're either we're either going to up the weight you do every week or we're going to up your working sets. It's basically all you can do. So, for some of you, it's going to be it's going to make you uncomfortable if you read more in a day than what you're normally used to. Maybe you're a chapter a day person or a psalm and a proverb a day person. Maybe you're going to go beyond that. For some of you, it may be all the way up to and including learning Greek or Hebrew so you can read some of the original manuscripts. For some of you, it might be just signing up for some sort of disciplehip class or guided Bible study at your church. For some of you, it might be getting, you know, the Logos Bible study software. Maybe you I mean get the Unda Life, you know, bundle undon or what is it? blogos.com/dawnedlife, something like that. You know, Google it, you'll find it. Like, it's like 200 resources and you start pouring through those. Maybe you start studying a systematic theology. May like maybe you're going to lower your golf or your jiu-jitsu or your hunting budget for the year and you're going to invest in some theological training. Maybe you're going to take some some classes at a reputable Bible college, maybe an online course of some kind. You're going to do something to push yourself beyond what you thought possible. Because your sanctification is going to require discomfort and that's probably going to help you because the reality is is the only way out of this crisis of discernment is that we have to realize that we should be tethered to truth and truth is undergurtded by evidence. Okay? Evidence is undergurtded by facts. Because here's the thing, you've probably heard people make this philosophical discussion that uh Cliff guy that goes and talks on, you know, college campuses of people or whatever. He's made the same before. He's like, you know, do you understand I can't prove almost anything to you? He was talking to this one student. He's like, I can't prove that you and I are even having this conversation right now because I can't prove that this isn't even a this isn't a simulation of some kind. I can't prove that you and I are actually beings, right? But truth is undergirled by evidence. Evidence is undergarded by facts. So you can't prove it, but you can provide evidence. Is is the and is the evidence available able to substantiate the truth claim? And here's the reality too. Our faith as Christ followers isn't just faith either, right? It's faith undergurtded by evidence and facts, things that are knowable, right? Because there's no more certifiable fact in all of modernity or in the ancient records than that there was an itinerant Jewish rabbi named Jesus from Bethlehem that had 30 years on this planet where he lived in relative obscurity, three years of public ministry, that he was arrested by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish Sanhedrin, that they had multiple trials under cover of darkness, that he was scourged with a cat of ninetailes, that he was killed on a Roman cross, and that he was placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arythea, a tomb that ended up being a borrowed tomb because he went in on a Friday, and on Sunday he came out of the tomb alive. Those are all certifiable historical facts. But don't miss this. You could believe in everything that I just said and not be a Christian and not be a follower of Christ. What I just elucidated is what I've seen plenty of atheists elucidate. So, how's that even possible? It's because they know things about Jesus, but they don't know Jesus, right? They've not pushued, right? Thank you, Joby, so much for teaching that word to so many people. They have not transferred their faith from themselves for their goodness and morality and salvation onto the finished work of Christ at the cross at Golgtha. They have not done that yet. So, if you're listening to this today and you know stuff about Jesus, but you don't know Jesus, you make the decision today, and I know that language is uncomfortable for some people, just deal with it. You make the decision today to transfer your faith from yourself and into the finished work of Christ on the cross. You put your faith for your salvation and what he has done and you will be imputed with the perfect righteousness of Jesus. Okay? And if you are already a Christ follower, start acting like it. Start acting like it. Start reading the Bible as if it's true. Start attending church as if you were meant to be part of a body. Start sharing your faith with other people as if their eternity depends on it. Start loving your wife as Christ loved the church. For the ladies out there, my ferenters, start being there as a helpmate made fit for your husband. Raise up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. be discipled as you are discipling others and continue on in your sanctification journey as you encourage your brothers and sisters to do the same. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive fivestar review. If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me an email to info@undded.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming. www.undaunted.life. The music on this podcast is the song Conqueror by the Christian metal band Void Awaken. Be sure to stream their music on Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever else you get your music. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness. Keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. Keep seeking the Lion of Judah. Start now.