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Seth Dillon: A Case for Mockery and Sarcasm

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose
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Seth Dillon: A Case for Mockery and Sarcasm

October 14, 2023
Knight & Rose Show
Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Seth Dillon, CEO of the famous website "The Babylon Bee". We discuss the effectiveness of mockery and sarcasm for opposing censorship by the secular left. We discuss what role apologetics played in building Seth's Christian worldview. We also discuss how Christians can build a view of the world that takes the Bible seriously in every area.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2023/10/14/knight-and-rose-show-41-babylon-bee-ceo-seth-dillon

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Music attribution: Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Transcript

All right, so my name is Wintery Knight. I'm one of the co-hosts of The Knight and Rose Show, which is a podcast about Christian worldview and apologetics. And our guest today is Seth Dillon.
Seth is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, the world's most trusted, factually accurate
news source. Today, we'll be asking Seth some questions about mockery and the art of making a case for the Christian worldview. Seth, thank you so much for joining us today.
Great to be here, man. Is that your legal name, Wintery Knight? It's my alias. It's served me well over the years.
I was going through the legal immigration
process. The worst thing that you want to avoid in that case is getting deported. So you lose your job while you're on a work permit and you get deported.
So we did not want that.
I'm trying to remember how many years ago I came across your blog initially. When did you start your blog? I started my blog in 2009.
Yeah, it's still going. Although if you're like me, you're
probably running into problems with being kind of de-platformed by big social media. We've had a few issues with that.
Yes, indeed. Okay, Rose is here. Hey, Rose.
Hello, I am here. Very good. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and get started with the questions.
We have
a lot of questions and we really are curious to find out what you think about all these things. So the first question is, you're the CEO of The Babylon Bee. What inspired you to, or inspired you, I should say, to invest in The Babylon Bee? And why do you think it's become so influential? Well, in terms of what, you know, I actually, I didn't want to invest in The Bee initially.
That wasn't what I wanted to do. Like, I mean, well, I mean, I didn't want to own it, I guess I should say. I wanted to invest and I didn't want to actually buy it and acquire it and own it and run it because I had no idea what I was doing when it came to running a media site.
I had never done it before. I just thought it was a really amazing thing
to see Christians doing comedy in a way that wasn't cheesy. It was actually effective.
It was going viral. It was getting attention. It's so refreshing and rare to see that.
So
when I first started seeing headlines like Holy Spirit, unable to move through congregation as fog machine breaks, that kind of stuff going across my Facebook feed and it was getting a lot of traction and engagement. I thought to myself, man, this is really cool. I wish I had started this site.
And so with very little hesitation, I almost immediately reached
out to the founder of The Bee, Adam, who you may be familiar with. Do you know Adam? Yes, I do. Yeah, Adam is a really great guy.
He's a really good friend of mine now. Didn't know him at
all. Initially, I just reached out and I said, hey, what you've got is awesome.
Looks like
you're just running like a simple WordPress blog right now. And I'm interested in seeing if there's ways we can partner to try to grow this thing. Like, do you need funny? What do you need? How can I help? He didn't really have any reason to know me either because I hadn't become any kind of a public personality yet.
That didn't happen until I owned The
Bee. So he was a little wary about who I was and whether he could trust me. And at the time, they were trying to acquire The Bee.
They ended up backing out of that
deal largely because of Facebook censorship. And they're concerned with having another platform that had all its eggs in Facebook's basket. That's where Bad One Bee got all of its traffic from.
So they backed out of that deal. And Adam called me back a month
later or so and was like, hey, if you want to come to Michigan and meet me, we can sit down and talk and see if we can work something out. But I don't want an investor.
I want a buyer. I want to sell this thing. So this was two years into The Bee's life.
He started it in early 2016. He and I met in 2018, started 2018. And we hit it off.
We argued and debated Calvinism and talked about how we converted to Christianity and when and told our life stories and ended up kind of hitting it off and working out a deal. So that's the story of how I got involved in The Bee initially. But at the time, there was just two other people involved working on the site, like actually as their job.
So it
was a very, very small operation. And we built it all from there. Wow.
Yes, indeed. And I think it was a great idea because the way that the culture is going, it's sometimes hard to engage some of the challenges that we face. But mockery seems to have provided us with a tool for doing that.
Yeah, an effective tool, I think. Yeah, I think so. So I have a question.
I have some friends who utilize mockery and
sarcasm in various areas of ministry. And they are frequently they say they spend probably half their time defending their use of mockery to Christians in particular. But I'm wondering, have you experienced criticism for using mockery and sarcasm to promote your ideas? Yeah, it's not it's not like we're just getting bombarded with criticism over it.
But it is a
common criticism. I'd say it's one of the most common criticisms. We get hate bail and negative feedback for a variety of reasons.
Oftentimes, when we make a political joke and you know,
it steps on somebody's toes or makes them uncomfortable. Mockery, though, is it's something that a lot of Christians find objectionable because what they see in the B, you'll find this all over the place. There's a lot of YouTube commentary on the Babylon B, how we're, you know, we're mean and cruel and we're, we're making fun of things that shouldn't be made fun of or made light of.
And, and you know, it's not being done in the right
spirit, and it's not beneficial, it's not fruitful, etc. So we get a lot of that, a lot of people challenging us and saying, you know, how can you how can you sleep at night when you're, you know, mocking people for a living. And I guess on the one hand, I do think a lot of Christians feel pressure to think in those terms, because we have so much cultural influence right now telling us that we need to be tolerant and compassionate.
And that means when
something comes across our field of vision or comes into our world that we disagree with, the response is not to speak the truth even in love, it's to be affirming and tolerant of whatever it is, even if it's really, really, really bad for some reason. And I couldn't disagree with that more strongly. I don't think I don't think it's loving at all to affirm someone when they're wrong, especially about who and what they are, whether or not they're, you know, made in God's image as a man or a woman, for example, with this whole transgender stuff, like there's there's a lot of issues where the loving thing to do is to speak the truth and to expose the bad ideas that need to be torn down before they gain a lot of traction and are taken seriously.
I think it's it's catastrophic when bad ideas are taken seriously. And the
best illustration of that is these teenagers right now who are regretting their gender transition surgeries. I mean, why did they have it in the first place? Because we took bad ideas seriously, they believe that they were a girl trapped in a boy's body.
That's not even possible to be it to
be a girl is to have a girl's body. That's what it means to be a girl. So, you know, speaking the truth is, I think a loving thing, even if it's uncomfortable, I think the truth is highly offensive.
Your goal should never be to not be offensive. I don't think that we should
be, you know, just tearing people down and making them feel bad about themselves on purpose. But but but the purpose of our mockery, what we're doing with satire, I think that the mission of the satirist, especially the religious satirist is to take a scalp to these social cancers and cut them out before they kill the host.
And so I think it's your art, you are cutting people,
but not for the purpose of wounding them and hurting them. It's for a healing purpose. Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, both Rose and I are come come up Christianity from non Christian backgrounds. So we kind of compare what we read in the Bible and with what we see in the church.
And we often find these
differences. A lot of times in the church, especially today, there's this great concern about what will the non Christians think of me? And boy, I really hope that they notice that I'm signaling virtue right now. But let me ask you another question related to this.
So do you think that, like, according to the Bible, like that Christian should find mockery to be a useful tool? Well, I mean, you do see examples of it in the Bible. I think the Bible is filled with a lot of scathing rebukes and hyperbole and sarcasm. You know, there are some specific examples of, you know, mocking absurdity in the Bible.
And so I don't think that I don't
think that, you know, you can you can certainly point to passages to where it talks about being gentle in how you approach people and and exercising the fruits of the spirit and all of those things. But there is a time and a place for confronting people with harsh truths or exposing the hypocrisy or absurdity of their position. And I think, you know, you can you see that with Elijah, you see that with Jesus himself.
He had he had a number of scathing
rebukes for people, you know, he talked about how it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. You know, he was he was brutal in the way he addressed these things and used parables and this kind of imagery to kind of draw these things out. And, you know, some will say that, well, you know, you're not a prophet, you're not Jesus.
So, you know, you can't have that kind of you know, who are you to take
that approach? I just think that the Bible does establish that these are effective means of communicating truths in powerful ways. Absolutely. Yeah, you actually mentioned the two examples that I use the most frequently when this comes up in conversations with people, Elijah, and and then, of course, when they say, well, you know, what if Elijah was wrong or whatever, and I appointed Jesus, but I was it was funny.
I mean, he's he's challenging these prophets by
suggesting, well, maybe their God is off relieving himself somewhere, taking a nap. And he's awakened, you know, it's it's like he's he's being like witty and exercising humor in tearing down, you know, what their false beliefs. And and I think that was it's extreme.
It's a powerful
passage. It really is. It's absolutely hilarious.
And he's doing it with the purpose of demonstrating
the truth to people. And what he's what he's bringing, drawing people away from our ideas that are not all that unlike this whole transgender movement that you mentioned. I mean, he these false prophets were cutting themselves.
And the first Kings 18 talks about how they were bleeding all
over the place because they were cutting themselves as they were dancing around, yelling, screaming and cutting, calling on their false gods. And so that's not healthy. And so he starts mocking this horrible idea and in a hilarious and powerful, memorable way to point people to the truth.
And I love that. I think that's what the Babylon B does. I absolutely love you guys.
Yeah. And I think it's there's a great quote that I throw out all the time. It's not the first time I'm quoting it.
But GK Chesterton said that humor can get in under the door while
seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. And I think it's a great way of putting it because what he's trying to communicate there is that humor is it's disarming and it's and it is memorable. It makes a point in a creative way that causes you to stop and think rather than someone just, you know, trying to beat you over the head with logic and reason and facts and whatever.
It's it's a more more disarming way of delivering the package of truth. And in a way, I do think it's very difficult to reason with people to argue and reason with people who have abandoned rationality intentionally. Like they've they've thrown it out the window and they're trying to say that to make five.
Well, you're not really going to make a lot of headway
reasoning with people who've given up on reason on purpose. So but what you can do is ridicule their bad ideas so that other people don't take them seriously. Right.
Right. Yeah. I also something that's occurring to me now is I also appreciate how
you can help us laugh at ourselves as well.
There have been several times where I read,
you know, about things that I've seen or even done in the church and taken with a bit of exaggeration or humor or whatever. It's good to be able to laugh at ourselves. If we're if we take ourselves too seriously as well, you guys don't just criticize bad ideas, but you kind of, you know, make light of some things that are a little bit humorous about, you know, the way we maybe do or some things like that.
And I think
really healthy to be able to take us, you know, to kind of take a step back and just have some humor about ourselves that we have to have humor in this world that is so serious and, you know, oftentimes dark and scary. Well, that's an important point. I mean, look at how culture shifted just in the last decade or so.
You now have standup comedians who
are afraid that people are going to charge the stage and punch them if they make a joke that's offensive. Like there's this new expectation that everybody has the right to not be offended and we all deserve to live in a little safe space where our feelings will never be hurt. And this extends to the world of humor and comedy.
People used to be able to sit there in
an audience while a standup comedian was on stage laughing at them and pointing out absurdities about them in the audience. And they would laugh at themselves and they were willing to laugh at themselves and they were willing to make jokes about the opposite sex and stereotypes and things of that nature because it's kind of it's a healthy way of examining ourselves and recognizing and acknowledging our own faults and our own shortcomings and our own hypocrisy. Like that is a valuable thing and growing your character.
If you never engage in that exercise
and you're completely unwilling to ever laugh at yourself and you take yourself that seriously, you'll never build resilience of character. You'll always be hypersensitive. Everything will always trigger you.
And then you end up in therapy sessions for the rest of your life
crying and then dying your hair blue and then changing your gender. Yeah, it would be really nice if if Christian leaders and Christians even in the pews just understood the advantage that we can offer to non-Christians by giving them a safe place to joke about these things and talk about these things. Yeah, and it is it can't be overstated.
I mean,
we are all passengers on the ship of fools from time to time. And so I think it's I think it's very healthy. The church needs levity too.
You know, the church needs to be willing to laugh at
itself and take itself as seriously. I think it's part of the reason why the big was so successful right out the gate is because it was willing to do that. And there were still enough people in the church who were willing to say, look, this is funny.
It's making fun of us. But it's funny,
it's self-deprecating. And that's a good thing.
It's okay to laugh ourselves. In fact, it's a
lot worse if we're taking ourselves so seriously that every little thing offends us. Great.
Let me
ask you a question and switch gears a little bit. Many of the people I've noticed who oppose mockery also oppose the use of evidence when defending the claims of Christianity. I noticed that recently you tweeted out a list of scientific evidences for a creator and designer.
And many
of those evidences were based on recent scientific discoveries. So I just want to ask you, do you think that the progress of science has made theism a better description of reality than atheism? In a word, yes. You know, there's what year was it? The time came out, we think cover that said God is dead.
Something like the long 1980s. I want to say a while ago.
Yeah.
But that was kind of like it was becoming a popular idea that that science had buried God
that science had put the last nail in God's coffin because it had somehow because it had explained so many intractable problems. And I, when I look at the scientific evidence, especially the evidence of, you know, the 20th century and, and even more recently, the problems that we're looking at here, like how did the universe begin? You know, where did life come from? How did consciousness arise from unconscious matter? You know, what's the origin of the information and DNA, like all of these problems, why is there, why are there, why are there moral truths? Why are there moral duties and values? You know, like all of these problems, the majority of them, not all of them, because I don't think morality necessarily plays into this bit of the conversation. But most of these issues have only become more intractable as science has advanced.
And by that,
I mean, like, for example, with the problem of the origin of life and DNA and information, Steve Meyer does an excellent job of illustrating this problem. You know, it's, as we have learned how life, what is necessary, the building blocks for life to arise, as we've learned how complex that is. And it's not just complexity, there's specified complexity involved there in the information content of the DNA molecule, these instructions for, for building, you know, body plans.
And all of these things have been uncovered
as science has advanced. And we've learned that there's, there's language, the most advanced and impressive software code ever written is at the core of life itself. And so when science uncovers that and opens up that box, we see something that it was much easier to believe in the past that somehow there was some, you know, primordial ooze that life arose out of when we didn't understand exactly what was required for life in the first place.
But now
that we do, we realize that this is a much bigger problem than we thought. And so I think you can that also happens when you it's also an issue when you look at the universe itself, how it came to exist, how it came to be fine tuned, you know, so much of what we've learned as physics and astronomy have advanced, is that these problems are far greater than we originally thought. It's not true that the universe just always existed.
And it's just a brute fact that we
have to deal with. It came to exist at a finite point in the past. And we have to deal with that.
And so I think the advances of science have only made it more clear that naturalistic explanations for these phenomena are insufficient. The gaps are too, the chasms are too wide to be bridged, even by, you know, allowing for extended periods of time. Yeah, definitely.
The more discoveries we make in these areas that you mentioned,
the more it is a challenge to the worldview of naturalism. And for people who maybe haven't heard of all the areas that you were talking about, you did a great job. And that guy that you mentioned, Stephen C. Meyer, he's my favorite on these topics.
Yeah, he's great. He just had a great hit an amazing interview with Joe Rogan recently, too. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to watch that yet.
But yeah, yes,
I had this with Rogan. And it was a really great conversation. Yeah, it's great.
It was excellent.
It's great when these things get get into, for the more mainstream forms like that. I texted at all of my neighbors, I posted that in our company slack, and got a lot of likes.
Like, I think,
if people aren't aware of what we know, when these things are happening, it's probably good to plug yourself in. And so that you know, that these things are happening. And then you can share it with all of your family and friends.
Because that's the way I think we're going to
change minds is by having someone who knows about these things, have conversations with more mainstream people, where we don't come across as fundamentalists. But instead, we're saying, hey, these are the discoveries and the facts that we're looking at. And here's how our views are changing to adapt to how we know the real world works.
I was just gonna say, and I think Christians can take a cue from, from Stephen Meyer as well, in the way that he was able to explain his beliefs without sounding like a fundamentalist. We don't have to sound like a fundamentalist. We don't have to just, you know, quote Bible verses and say that we have this blind faith or whatever.
There are such good reasons as we've
been talking about. And so I would I would just love to see more Christians able to communicate that even though even even if they're not, you know, able to do it in the same type of with the same type of depth and complexity and excellence as Stephen Meyer, there are a few pretty straightforward, simple arguments that we can all be. Yeah, that's true.
It's tough, tough to match him in terms of how articulate and knowledgeable he is.
But but what he does emphasize, I think this is an important point, which a lot of people miss, but what the kind of reasoning that he's employing with his arguments is standard scientific reason. He's just he's making an inference to the best explanation based on what we know.
So he's not making like claims with with certainty. He's not appealing to blind faith. He's saying, you know, these these things are best explained, for example, by intelligence rather than some unintelligent source.
And that's just could you if you just if you're
dedicated and committed to waiting for some other answer to come along and you're never willing to say, well, based on what we know, this is an inference, the best explanation must be intelligence. If you're committed to some kind of a naturalistic explanation and say, well, I'm going to wait until we have that naturalistic explanation. Well, then you're just begging the question in favor of naturalism.
You're not following the evidence
where it's currently pointing. I think everybody has a responsibility to construct a worldview based on what we know right now. Yes.
And what we know right now
tends to favor a creative point to because that is a frequent response is that, well, you know, I'm confident that there will be because because they will say, science has been so successful at explaining things in the past. You know, we used to think thunder was God's bowling in the sky or something like that. You know, and science has disproved that it will eventually disprove everything.
Well, that's a blind faith in science. You've got
you've got these unbridgeable chasms that keep getting wider and you just keep digging in harder with your faith in science. You're not following the evidence where it currently leads.
Yeah, it's funny to me how frequently someone will accuse me right out of the gates of just believing in God because of a God of the gaps, you know, that that's the phrase that like to use this God of the gaps. You're just putting God wherever there are gaps. Anything you don't understand, you just attribute to God.
And then I'll explain scientific evidence that led me to
conclude that the best explanation for the scientific evidence is a designer and creator with intelligence. And, you know, before long, I'm hearing what you just said, you know, well, one day we science will discover it and figure it out. Well, well, that's a science of the gas argument.
You are now doing what you accused me of 30 seconds ago. Yeah, it's a fallacy.
Definitely.
So related to that method of reasoning that you talked about, I think it's called
abductive reasoning, where you get go for the best explanation of the facts that everyone, you know, accepts. There's another place in Christian projects where we do that. So I think it's good to start with a scientific evidence for a creator and designer that we went over.
But that is it's helpful because it gets us to the point where we have a supernatural being who can then perform miracles. And I think this is important because Christianity, the truth of Christianity in particular, as opposed to the other monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam, kind of hangs on historical miracles such as the resurrection. So, Seth, how would you argue for the resurrection with someone who didn't accept the Bible as inspired or inerrant? I don't think I definitely don't think, in fact, it'd be hard for me to think of somebody.
Can you
think of somebody who argues for the resurrection on the basis of the fact that the Bible is inerrant? I don't think that that's usually part of the argument, right? It's usually, they're usually examining it by saying that these are the historical facts and the Bible's reliable. It's a reliable witness to what the facts are, but they're not hinging it on inerrancy, for example. Right.
So, you know, there, I think, you know, the evidence for the
empty tomb and the postmortem appearances and the origin of the Christian faith, when there was, all kinds of reasons why, if this was just a legend or fabrication that none of this would have happened, I think that you can establish lines of evidence using the New Testament documents as just historical documents that are reliable when it comes to establishing these facts. I don't think that you have to try to convince anybody first, oh, well, let's start, I think it'd be very foolish to try to suggest that, you know, you have to prove inerrancy first before you can get to those things. I think if we can at least agree that these are reliable, historical documents.
So, I think you have more, your work is really cut out for you in suggesting
or showing that the Gospels themselves are reliable. I think a lot of people have come to believe that Jesus, for example, didn't even necessarily exist. And so, you know, have to have some of those conversations first, some groundwork for suggesting that the New Testament itself is reliable.
I think I love Gary Habermas and Michael Kona, William Lang Craig on this one,
because they use what is known as the minimal facts argument. And so, you know, they'll talk about how scholars of all different worldviews, historians of every different religion, worldview background, faith commitment agree to several. There are actually several dozen, but you can make the case using just like four facts that virtually all historians agree to.
And you mentioned some of them. The ones I like to use are, just because they're so solid and so universally accepted, that Jesus was crucified. Okay, you're going to be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that Jesus wasn't crucified if there is a historian who has actually studied the evidence.
Muslims aren't going to buy into that
if they just blindly believe the Quran, but anybody who studied the historical evidence is going to agree to that. People of all different worldviews and backgrounds who are historians of the evidence are going to tell you that the disciples of Jesus believed they saw him appear alive after his crucifixion. So they may not believe that he actually appeared to them, but they're going to admit that they thought the disciples believed that Jesus appeared to them.
They're going to admit to you that the skeptics, James, the brother of Jesus, and the enemy of Christianity, Saul of Tarsus, ended up becoming followers of Jesus because of something they saw, something that happened. And they're going to agree that the message of the crucifixion and the resurrection was preached very, very early within at least a couple years of the crucifixion, the events themselves. And just with these facts that virtually everybody agrees to, we can ask the question just like we did with science, just like we were talking about Stephen Meyer, what is the best case, what is the best explanation for this evidence? All of the thoughts and ideas that have been proposed have been refuted by atheists themselves, by agnostics, by non-Christians, things like hallucinations or Jesus had a twin, or he didn't really die.
All of these things are just ridiculous and have been
successfully refuted. And so I actually love sharing the minimal facts argument that kind of goes right back to that same idea, what's the best explanation for the facts? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Back to something you said, Seth, about first-person consciousness and objective, objective moral standards, objective moral duties. You said that you run into non-Christians who kind of help themselves.
So these ideas, how do you approach, you know, a countering number
on those topics? Dr. Seth M. Brandt On topics like consciousness morality, is that what you're referring to? Yeah, those kinds of things, free will, even human rights. Seth M. Brandt Well, I love, this is where I love C.S. Lewis' approach to the question of, you know, miracles and, you know, in his book, Miracles, where he starts out talking about, we need to determine whether or not miracles are even possible. What kind of worldview makes the most sense? And he starts analyzing, you know, naturalism versus supernaturalism and weighing them against each other.
And some of the problems that he points out with naturalism, which is, you know, just this worldview that nature is all that exists. That is this closed system. There's nothing beyond it, nothing transcendent.
There are no supernatural beings or whatever. He
starts highlighting some of the problems of naturalism. And I think it's, this is actually, he offers my favorite argument.
It's my favorite apologetic argument is the argument from Reason,
where he talks about how if the universe is this closed system where everything reduces to, you know, physics and chemistry and every cause has an effect. And if you trace all of the current events back to the beginning, each of them had a cause before that, and a cause before that, and a cause before that. In that environment, there's really just at bottom physical causes and effects that account for everything.
And there's no room for things
like reason and morality at all. And he shows how naturalism is self-defeating by showing that if naturalism is true, then we've undercut reason itself, which is what we would have to rely on in order to arrive at the conclusion that naturalism is true. And it's such a powerful argument because it literally gets behind and around every other argument that we could have.
But it's important because it kind of lays the groundwork for that question that you're talking about, how you answer those types of questions. There are these things, you know, people take it for granted that they can think, that they can draw inferences, that they can reach conclusions. Everybody tries to argue with you.
Atheists try to argue with you, you know, metaphysical
naturalists will try to convince you of their position. Even as they're denying that such a thing is rational inference, like logical insight into what a conclusion could be following from premises, like that has no causal power on their worldview. It's all things happening underneath the surface.
It's the changes that are happening in your brain. The entire history of the universe
explains the current mental state that you're in. And so how can you even trust your brain to reach logical conclusions, you know, it undermines all of that.
And so I love the way that I think
it's Geisler and Turek put it, you know, this is stealing from God. These ideas that we can establish moral facts or that we can reason and rely on our rational inference, you know, all of that requires that a worldview other than naturalism is true. You have to affirm some other worldview in order to get these things.
And so I think that's extremely powerful. And it's my
favorite argument, the argument for reason. I think the moral argument is probably the most powerful and convincing because, you know, everybody has moral objections to things.
And
they may suggest that there's some kind of relativistic framework that we should all buy into, but they will try to apply their morality to you as if it's some kind of objective standard. And they'll make excuses for whenever they do something that they think violates the moral law. And so because we all have this innate moral sense, and so many of our positions and so many of these arguments hinge on moral issues, I think the moral argument is maybe the most impactful.
But I think the argument for reason addresses a lot of those things.
Well, I just want to make one comment. I think it's also interesting that probably the most common objection to Christianity that apologists tend to hear today is an objection from evil.
Like if there is such, you know, since there's so how could a good and loving and powerful God allow such evil? And yet, this comes back to, you know, your question, what makes you think there's such a thing as evil? Why would you call something evil? What? Why don't you just say your opinion? Where'd you get that from? Where's that come from? Yeah, I think that evil, I think that evil, if it does, if it is, if there is such a thing as evil, then it's proof that God exists because you can't call, you can't call something evil unless there's a standard of good to compare it with. And in a on metaphysical naturalism, I see no reason to think that properties like good or bad or evil should apply should attach themselves to anything that happens. It's all just a bunch of physical bottom, these physical events that had a lot of atheists acknowledge that, you know, it's the Richard Dawkins talking about how the universe is just we're all dancing to the tune of our DNA, and it's all just blind, petty, listen difference, and there is no real good or evil.
He at the same time has all kinds of moral positions that
he, he will offer his own scathing rebukes of anybody who disagrees with his moral positions. But but that is really an entailment. I think it's an entailment of naturalism or atheism is that there really is no moral realm like that any any moral beliefs that we have about what's really good and bad or illusory, if that worldview is true.
And so, you know, to have objections to
Christianity and say, Oh, well, there's evil and suffering in the world, I think the only way it's possible for there to be evil in the world is if something like Christianity is true. And by the way, it offers an answer to that problem. Right? Exactly.
Very good. All right. So let me ask you
this question.
So you are a person who has applied your personal view to a large number of different
topics. You've talked about them tonight. You talked about transgenderism.
I know that you are
you're very articulate on the pro life issue. So there's there's probably a long list of these areas, some of them policy, some of them moral, some of them cultural, that you've kind of applied Christianity to and you've come up with different views. And I was just wondering, do you think that that's an important thing for Christians to do? And why is it so important for you? You know, why have you done this? And do you think that other it's part of the normal question? Yeah, when you're talking about these kinds of issues, you can't really check your worldview at the door, your worldview is going to have, it's going to come to bear on what you think about them.
And why you think these things, I mean, there's, there's a lot to say right now about family and relationships and sexuality and marriage and the sanctity of life and, and the whole concept of social justice and all of these things that we're that we're debating and talking about. And and much of it, to go back to the previous topic that we're just talking about on the issue of morality, much of this has to do with morality. And one thing that I think that we can agree with, with some people who may disagree with us on religion side of things, you know, Christianity in particular, is that we do want humanity to flourish.
And we don't want bad things to be
happening to people, we want people to be happy and healthy. And we want to reduce suffering, you know, like what is the what are the best, what are the best solutions to delete to human flourishing? Well, in order to come up with that, you really have to understand what the root problem is, what are we trying to treat? What problem are we trying to treat? And a lot of the problem, a lot of what we're trying to treat is the effects of sin. So I think a Christian worldview can't be checked at the door when you're trying to deal with problems that are rooted in sin and evil.
And you've got to address what the what the what the biblical solution is to those
things. And I think it's I think it's reasonable and rational to do that. And, and you're on good footing when it when it comes to though, you know, issues like pro life is a good example, because that's something I talk about very frequently, you don't have to appeal to your case, you can, but you certainly don't have to, you know, there are arguments that you can make, you can refer to, you can refer to common sense, you can refer to science, and you can point out the horrible logical errors and flaws and fallacies and the other sides reasoning without ever referring to your Christianity or the Bible.
And so, you know, but but Christians, I think,
absolutely have an obligation to and I think it's indispensable, there's no way around it, you're gonna bring your worldview to these topics. Yeah, I love I love that you use the worldview, I am because, as you said, you know, Christianity is it applies to every single area of our lives. It's not something we do on Sunday morning, it's not just some series of rituals or whatever.
But our our view of Christianity that I believe is entirely biblical is God is the boss.
He has views about every area of knowledge. When Jesus was on Earth, he was focused on obeying the Father in everything.
And he experienced suffering while while doing that. And it's our
job now as as God's ambassadors as Christ ambassadors on this earth, to understand his interests, to champion his interests in all of these different areas. And to have a comprehensive Christian worldview that applies to absolutely every area, whether we're talking about science, morality, free speech, economics, any of these things.
I love how you model that in
your life. Thank you. Well, I mean, it comes down to speaking the truth.
Because you know, you
tell the truth to people that you love. And one of the ways of I think it's a lot more important, loving your neighbor, they'll tell you that the way to love your neighbor is to wear a mask and social distance and get vaccinated. Some Christians will tell you that's the way to love your neighbor.
But I think I think there are much more dire things that we need to be worried about.
And a lot of that in a lot of the way that you love your neighbor through those things is by speaking the truth. Two do not make five men cannot become women.
You can't be a girl trapped
in a boy's body. You know, our culture is cultivating confusion. And then and then once that confusion takes sets in, you know, we're treating it with affirmation.
And it's just
absolutely insane. It deserves mockery. It deserves ridicule and needs to be confronted with the truth.
And so I think it's vitally important. Yeah, I think that's it's just so
it's so contrary what you've communicated and what we believe is so contrary to where I think most of like Christian culture seems to be today, which is that Christianity is is all about making them feel happy and comfortable and popular, making their own plans, whatever those may be, work out making them, you know, materially wealthy right now and comfortable and just giving them kind of everything they want. And I think that it's not a coincidence then that that when things don't go easily and smoothly in a fallen world shocker that, you know, then people are like, how could God exist when something's hard in my life? Right.
And and yet I so I think that
all those objections even are just stemming from a false worldview. And it feels to me like a lot of that is so like there's so many Christians who haven't actually picked up and read the Bible. How can you read the Bible and think that Christians are supposed to have it easy? Right.
Exactly. It's really difficult to do. And there's actually overlap.
I think there's
overlap with that in the secular world's kind of obsession right now with this safe space mentality that we're supposed to be comfortable and insulated from things that that could hurt our feelings or hurt us. You know, I don't I don't think that we benefit from that. And that the Christian teaching is that, you know, we our character is built through these challenges.
It draws us it can draw if we allow it to, it can draw us closer to God and make us better people. Look at a look at a story like Corey Ten Boom and the suffering that she went through in concentration camps and how her how her faith remained like firm and unshaken in that. And then and then the life that she was able to lead after that and the people that she was able to influence with her message.
I mean, that's just profound. She suffered unimaginably. So,
you know, the expectation that we're supposed to be happy or healthy and wealthy if we place our trust in God or something is just so wildly and insanely unbiblical.
Obviously, there is
ultimately in the end going to be, you know, every tear will be wiped away and there will be joy and restoration and redemption, but not necessarily in this life. Right. Exactly.
Well, let me ask you a follow up question about that. So mentioning Corey Ten Boom, she was somebody who lived, you know, in a very difficult time, a difficult period in Germany that was not at all friendly to Christians. I was just going to, you know, we've been talking a lot tonight about the use of mockery and evidential apologetics.
And I've noticed lately in the culture that we're seeing a lot of weaponization of government against Christians and conservatives. And I was just wondering if you thought that there were some sort of role for Christians to use mockery and evidential apologetics to kind of counter the confidence that the secular left has in attacking our rights, attacking our freedoms. All right.
Well, let's let's get a little more specific. What are some examples that
you're thinking of? Are you thinking of people who are like protesters at an abortion clinic who get arrested or something like that? Like government overreach? Yeah, getting predone rated by the FBI, peaceful protesters. Right.
Pastors refusing to shut down their churches and facing penalties and things like that.
That happened a lot in Canada. And as well, what about the parents at the school board meeting saying, I have an interest in how my kids are educated and then having the Department of Justice and the school boards kind of collude to label them as domestic terrorists.
Yeah. We've been talking about mockery to bear on a on those issues. But I honestly, I think the most powerful thing in those cases are the people who refuse to bend the knee and remain firm in their conviction.
You know, they have they have they have not just the Constitution on their side. They have basically emboldened other people, I think, when they actually have a backbone and they stand up. And that is that will that will have the best, the biggest impact on actually changing things because the more people stand up and the more they get a backbone and the more they refuse to comply as we say on on Twitter or X, I'm going to say X, do not do not comply.
Do not comply. I think that's that's absolutely necessary. I think a lot of a lot of
Christians have shown that they're willing to kind of defy those orders, especially when it comes to the practice of their religious freedom.
And without that willingness, if they're really
just kind of passive and allow themselves to be trampled on, that just gives the people in power all the more power. So the important thing, I don't know, I don't know how effective mockery is in that case. I mean, we do make jokes about that kind of stuff.
But the biggest thing is just
to be to be bold and to stand up against it, even if it means it's going to cost you something. It's the weirdest thing to me when people act like they're courageous right up until it costs them something which isn't actually courage at all. It's not it's only you're only courageous if you're willing to pay a price for what you're doing if you're putting yourself at risk.
And
that courage is contagious. It really is. It is.
And from the beginning, I think of,
the Apostle Paul talking about how his being in chains was emboldening the brothers and sisters in Christ, causing them to go out and be bolder in their faith and to speak the truth. And we've seen that all throughout church history. And we, you know, Tertullian is known for saying the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
What we've always seen, even when it's not that extreme,
that blood is drawn, is that when Christians are willing to stand up for truth for their convictions, that it emboldens other people. It does. And you know what, it can have an impact.
I mean,
in our case, we look, I would never say that we're persecuted in a way that a lot of other Christians are persecuted. But we have faced these challenges where, for example, we made that joke about Rachel Levine and referred to Rachel Levine as our pick from Man of the Year, which was misgendering and hateful conduct. You know, they wanted us to delete that.
And our
position was, well, first, this is a joke, right? It's just a satire. Second of all, it's true. Rachel Levine is in fact, a man, the definition of man is a male human being.
So it's true. And it's
funny. So why would we delete it? You know, it's ridiculous.
So we refuse to delete it,
even though it meant that we wouldn't get our Twitter account back. And as far as we knew, we would never get our Twitter account back. We would remain in Twitter jail forever, unless and until the richest man in the world came along and bought it and said, no, I'm going to restore the Babylon B. And that happened to happen.
But we couldn't hope for that. We couldn't expect that.
We didn't plan for that.
We just stood on our conviction that it wasn't the right thing
to bend the knee to the tyrants who want to try to control what you're allowed to say and think. And that you can't say that two and two make four. They want you to say two and two make five.
So I mean, taking a stand like that, even though it's a situation where, well, it's just our Twitter account, you know, it's not like we weren't being tossed in prison. We were just being tossed in Twitter jail, which is is it inconvenient? Is it costly for our business? Is it is it a bad thing? Sure. But, you know, being being committed to speaking the truth in those cases where it costs you something does embolden other people and it can actually facilitate change.
Absolutely. I think we're I think we are at least an example of that.
Yeah.
So this will be my last question then related to this. What sort of pressure or
persecution do you foresee for people who do take following Jesus seriously? And I think for you in particular, you know, what do you see coming down the pipe in terms of challenges to you and your company? I mean, probably just more of what we've already experienced. There is kind of there's a very serious cultural war going on right now.
There is a war on reality, reason, truth.
And so anybody who's willing to speak it is going to be a target, especially if you have a large audience and you're and you're doing it effectively, you know, they'll do anything they can to tear you down and see you and deplatform you and silence you if they can. So I think that's really the primary threat right now that people like us face is is having our reach or our voice in some way limited or silenced because we're saying things that we're not supposed to be saying.
And that's just what does it communicate about how secure they are in their position that they can only that they can only silence the people they disagree with instead of actually engaging with their their points or just laughing off their jokes and saying, oh, well, I don't think that joke is I don't even think that's that funny. You just don't laugh at it. You know, why do you have to silence the person who made the joke? Are you really that threatened by it? I think I think it conveys a lot of insecurity.
But that's the main thing. I mean, you know, the word persecution
is very strong. I'm not sure I would necessarily use that word for a lot of what is happening here, but it does apply in some cases, for sure.
It's definitely a case where I think the normal
Christian life has to have some measure of disapproval for those people who take Christianity seriously and speak its truths and defend it. And no one should be discouraged by that. I am certainly not discouraged by the fact that people are attacking me.
In fact, I say this,
you know, if the New York Times or, you know, these these heads of these big tech companies that are cracking down on misinformation, hate speech or whatever, if they liked me, then I would be concerned. The fact that they're attacking me means I must be doing something right. Yeah, I totally agree.
And I think, you know, I think that if our generation
is so uncomfortable with the absence of disapproval, if we're so uncomfortable with disapproval, if we're so scared of being put in Twitter jail that we're willing to be silenced, if we're willing to just hide in our homes and say, OK, we won't say anything. We won't do anything anymore. We'll take down our blogs.
We'll do this. We'll do that. The next generation,
our children are going to be the ones who experience real persecution.
So we can pay
a small price right now or they can pay a huge price. And people will say that's not fair. That's not fair.
When I talk about the women's sports issue and I say, you know what,
women need to be willing to give up their sports to keep them. And what I mean by that is they have to say no to this stuff. They have to refuse to compete with men.
When a man jumps in the pool,
you don't jump in the pool. Don't swim against him. Wait and wait until the men are gone and then swim against other women.
And that might mean that you have to sack some championships.
It might mean that you're off the team for a while. It might mean that you never play again or compete again.
But if you're not willing to take those kinds of measures and actually
have it cost you something, then nothing will change. That's the way to solve these problems. It's the best and quickest way to solve these problems is by being willing to make that kind of a sacrifice.
And I never argued that it was fair, but I will say that it's necessary.
And that's a crucial distinction to make. We're not asking anybody to do something that's fair or easy.
Speaking the truth when it has consequences, for example, is not the easy
thing to do, but it's often the right thing to do. And there's a lot to be said for the fact that I think people ask all the time, like how can we help with these situations where we're censored or deplatformed or whatever? What can I do to help? Should I subscribe? And like, no, just speak the truth boldly. Because if you don't do that, if we don't have lots of people doing that, then everyone who does is an outlier and they're easy to squash.
If there's millions of
us doing it, then they lose all their power. We can take it away from them. We only give them more power when we censor ourselves, we're doing the tyrant's work for him.
We have to stop doing
that. Absolutely. Yeah.
Well said. Definitely. That's a great thought for us to end on.
Seth Billen, thank you so much for talking today about mockery and apologetic listeners. If you enjoyed our discussion today, we would just encourage you to check out the Knight and Rose show at KNI, GHT and Rose show a podcast where Rose and I discuss how to help Christians develop their worldview and how to make a case for Christianity using evidence. We hope we'll see you there.

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