Moloch, Mormons, and Mike Lee

Senator Mike Lee keeps accusing his opponents of sacrificing children to Moloch, so this week we ask who — or what — Moloch actually was, why abortion and child sacrifice are not the same thing, and the uncomfortable places child sacrifice really does turn up in the Hebrew Bible. Then, after the Pentagon quietly declined to list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian, we dig into the bigger question underneath the fight: who actually gets to decide what counts as "Christian"? Turns out the answer is nobody — which makes the whole boundary-policing exercise a lot more about identity and power than about theology. Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Watch every episode on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So:https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, shop.com is giving away $1 million in Shop Cash.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  A lot of you are familiar with Shopify, which hosts a lot of cool entrepreneurs' websites. Now, shop.com is combining them all together. It has all the stores that you love and lets you track every order in one spot. So now, 1,000 shoppers are each gonna win $1,000 in Shop Cash, just in time for the holidays.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Get gifts for everyone on your list, or maybe get yourself something a little merry and bright.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Woo-hoo!

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Find exactly what you're looking for at shop.com.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, stocking stuffers, cookware, toys, everything you're gonna need for the holidays, you're gonna find on shop.com.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  From cult favorites to the world's biggest brands, score sweet deals and checkout fast, all at shop.com.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com, shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary, restrictions apply, official rules available at shop.com.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  None of these people have rubbed a piece of paper on a Mormon and said, "Ha, it turned pink, not a Christian."

• 1:19Speaker 01

  What if they weigh the same as a duck?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Then they're a witch.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Oh, that's not a Mormon. Okay, that's not a Christian thing, that's a witch thing, right?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  There's overlap. Now, don't get me wrong, there's overlap.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Things are good for me, not as good as, you know, people who get to gallivant off to Rome or whatever. But I'm doing great.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Look, I put in the work, okay?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I need to, well, I, I, I need to put in more work, I guess. Although when I go to Rome, I get to like, just do whatever I want.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're there for fun. I, I, that's what I mean by I put in the work. My, my, I get home and people are like, how was your vacation? And it's like, it's not a vac- What? I was, I was working. Yes, I got to have dinner at lovely restaurants and got to have some of the best carbonara I've ever had, but it was work, damn it. So.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Well, let's do, we have more work to do, unfortunately. And that is going to be, we got, we got a couple of fun things to talk about. It is an all Mike Lee, uh, day today. And I, I hope that doesn't make everyone turn off their, uh, their pod blasters. Because, uh, we, but yes, both of our segments are inspired by that storied senator from the great state of Utah. Mike Lee, who, uh, you and I, I, I'm, I think it's fair to say, not big fans.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Not big fans. And, and to my, um, to my amusements, Mike Lee is also not a big fan of mine. He has blocked me on Twitter. So.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  So, so you can't, you, you can't, uh, tag him in this, but you know who can? Everybody else.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Everybody else.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Mike Lee is.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  At based Mike. Based. Oh my gosh. It's so gross. Mike, you're so gross. Uh, he's, so he's a gross human. We don't like to, you know, we're, we're not afraid to get dip our toes in the political sphere, but that's not what we're talking about.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Uh, he has, he has wandered into our sphere. So, uh, so we're gonna, we're gonna take that as jumping off point. The first thing we're gonna do is a twisted scripture because Mike Lee will not stop.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Comparing people, saying that people are sacrificing things to Moloch.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So we're gonna, we're gonna get into that. We're gonna figure out who slash what Moloch is, or if Moloch it was, is whatever. And what, what, we'll try to sort of discern whatever the heck Brother Lee is trying to say with all of that nonsense. And then we're gonna talk about the fact that the US government decided to not, decided that Mormonism, which is Mike Lee's religion, is, it's not a Christian, a Christian religion.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  So we're, we're gonna talk about that in, in the second half of the show. That'll be our taking issue. And we'll talk about what, what, what makes a Christian? What is Christian? What is this Christian you speak of?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  So we'll get to that in the latter half of the show, but for now, let's dive in with Twisted Scripture.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so Twisted Scripture, we got Moloch. I'm pretty sure that's one of the bad guys in the Masters of the Universe movie. Is that right? Is, he's the red one, right?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I couldn't pick him out. I couldn't pick him out. Goat man, goat man was, yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Although if you're Mike Lee, it's cow man. Because my, well, I'll just dive in with sort of what got me steaming about Mike Lee and about this concept, which is that the Democrats, like at the Democrats, recently tweeted a thing, talking about James Talarico. I think we've mentioned him on the show before, but.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  James Talarico is a, is a senate candidate in Texas. He's got a slim, like it's, it's unlikely that he's, that he's gonna win, but if our Texas people get out there, he might actually, he might have a chance. So.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  He's, he's running against the guy who was impeached by his own party's House of Representatives for like a laundry list of, of, of corruption. Yes. Corruption. He's, he's openly corrupt.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Openly and, and kind of like excitedly corrupt. He revels in his corrupt.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Defiantly just a corrupt human being. Um, and, and yet we have a pastor and, and all around decent human being and people are like, he can't pull it off. Like this is where we're at.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Way to go Texas. Way to make us believe that the, the bad guy can win in that. However, so the Democrats tweet a picture of Talarico and they say, Texas colon, James Talarico is the only candidate who will put you first. Okay. Fine.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yes. Not, not the most earth shattering rhetoric, uh, but you know.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  But I mean, you know, that's the Democrats for you. They constantly snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. But then Mike Lee decides to step in and his play on it is James Talarico will put you first on the altar to Moloch.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And, and he included in that a.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  A very famous image. It is used an awful lot on social media.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  This kind of sepia tone looking, uh, probably wood carving from the, the late 19th century, showing a bunch of worshippers and one of them is, is holding out an infant and there's a, a bronze, uh, hybrid anthropomorphic bovine statue seated there that has a fire.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  That means a cow headed dude.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Cow headed dude, holding out arms and the idea is that the baby gets put on there and, and is burnt up in the, in the process.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And this time Mike Lee went cool and had Grok make it animated. So.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Oh, did, did.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  So like it's got like

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Causing it to

• 8:27Speaker 01

  The fire, the flames are burning.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Oh gosh. Yeah. So the, the flames are rising as, and, and the wind is, is billowing the, the robes. So good grief.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So there you go. Uh, why is he, why is Mike Lee talking? First of all, I don't know what, what, what we should do is we should just mention that because I, lefty that I am, big guy who like, likes, you know, I follow politics from the left and I am a, a left wing guy. And there are dog whistles on the right that I know about. And then there are dog whistles on the right that I don't know about.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Cause they're stupid.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Like, well, yeah. So, uh, this is a dog whistle that I wasn't aware of. And so I had to do some research.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  And, uh, and the research that I did pointed to the idea that, uh, at least the political operatives on the right, people like based Mike Lee are using the image of this, this character that they believe that named Moloch as an abortion stand in.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  People, they're talking about the idea that abortion is, uh, they're framing it as a child sacrifice.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And so they're saying that, that people who have abortions are sacrificing their children to an evil god.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And therefore they are evil and therefore Democrats are evil. And therefore anyone who wants women to have reproductive rights are evil.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And they're all worshippers of Moloch.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Uh, so Dan.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Yes, sir.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  How does that line up with the Bible? I feel like, I feel like he's got it right. At the very least, I went and looked up some scriptures and found, for instance, in Second Kings,

• 10:27Speaker 01

  a whole thing about, "You shall not give up any of your offspring to sacrifice them to..." And in the NRSVUE, it says, "Molek."

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Molek or Moloch, yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So, uh, so there you go. It's right there. Don't sacrifice your offspring to molek. So, Mike Lee is right, and we should just end this episode.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  The problems with this rhetoric are legion. And, and we can start with the fact that the, the attempt to rhetorically equate abortion to child sacrifice is problematized by the fact that abortion takes place before birth, child sacrifice takes place after birth.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  There's a big difference between those two things.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  And there's also the problem of the fact that if we go look in the Hebrew Bible, as we've discussed before on the program, the Hebrew Bible does not treat a fetus as a full legal and moral person. It treats it as a piece of property.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Whose, whose accidental destruction is recompensed by the payment of a fine. And in the exact same passage where it's saying, "The accidental destruction of a fetus is recompensed with the payment of a fine," it says, "The accidental destruction of the mother, who is injured in the act."

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Who presumably is a fully born human.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. That's the death penalty.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  So they're, they're drawing a pretty clear distinction between born humans and fetuses. One is, is a full legal and moral person. The other is not, is property and property of the husband, because the fine is paid to the husband.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And, and this agrees with a lot of other ancient rhetoric where abortion is, is primarily punished legally. As a property crime against the father. In other words, when they didn't like abortion, it was because it was taking away the father's property. And but a father could cause that. In fact, in in most ancient societies, and and we're not sure exactly what the situation would have been in Israel and Judah, a father could expose and the life of a newborn if he was not interested in it. So so societies that said a woman can't have an abortion would have said a father could cause it.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  A father could do these things. So the there's a lot more complexity. The water is a lot muddier when it comes to what's going on with abortion in the Hebrew Bible. But what is very clear is that child sacrifice and abortion are two very different things. So this is this is an attempt to rhetorically collapse a very clear distinction between two different types of beings, one a fetus and one a born human. It is a is a means for people to cheerlead to among their own group. It's it's a way to preach to the choir by basically just ginning up this, oh, yeah, we think that abortion is child sacrifice.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  So we're going to go out there and and just baffle thoughtful people capable of critical thought by by spreading this rhetoric around.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Well, and let's let I, you know, we have talked about this in the past, but it's important to note that the that the history of this is that evangelical Christians and and even, you know, Mike Lee, the LDS and stuff, had a far more nuanced and far less adamant view of abortion before around 1980, before the late 70s and early 80s.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  When they decided, when, you know, people in leadership positions on the right decided to use it as a political wedge issue, which they which it never had been before. And so like, most evangelicals, most most Baptists, most, most of like, most of Americans other than Catholics.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  We're pretty meh about the whole thing. They didn't care.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  You, you had like Criswell, I don't remember Criswell's first name, but I, I think this, this was an evangelical leader who actually came out in support of Roe v. Wade.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  And then over the next decade decided, no, this is, uh, this is of the devil. Uh, and, and in no small part because of the machinations of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyerk and others who got together and concocted a plan to create this wedge issue to galvanize the rise of a religious right that would facilitate, uh, more right-wing authoritarian Christians in government. And I, initially their goal was to stop the government from taking away their funding because of the white supremacy that governed their universities. Uh, the, the government was saying, hey, if you want funding, if you want students to be able to get loans

• 15:39Speaker 00

  and, and grants and things like that, you have to allow black students in your universities. And, and they were like, I beg your pardon, sir. And, um, uh, you know, we're, uh, not going to have it. And so that was kind of the catalyst for all of this. And, uh, yeah, there's, there are, uh, there's a lot of scholarship on, on how the evangelical, uh, approach to feelings about abortion have evolved. And, uh, the LDS church formally, officially endorses abortion in cases of incest, rape, uh, and threats to the life

• 16:20Speaker 00

  of, uh, and the, the long-term health of the mother. And so there are, it's, it's a, it's a grayer area. Um, but obviously Mike Lee is using this as, as an identity marker, as a flag that he can wave to rally around the troops to agree that, uh, James Talarico is the devil incarnate.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  And, and, and this is, this is like the quintessential wedge issue for right-wing authoritarians. And I, um, many listeners of the show will know that I ran for my state legislature twice in 2018 and 2020. And

• 16:57Speaker 00

  I don't know how many doors I knocked on and talked to people where we arrived at a point where they were like, "Yeah, I pretty much agree with you on most of these things over and against the other person." And they would even be like, "I know the other person is not going to listen to us and is more or less corrupt." But they would say, "But I could never vote for someone who approves of abortion." Like, that's, in terms of a wedge issue, that's the magic bullet.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really did a good job wedging that one.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Yes, this one is incredibly effective because you can do whatever you want. And they will not vote for the other side because of abortion, because they have been conditioned to think that this is the ultimate disqualifier. Up to and including a serial adulterer, a rapist, a pedophile, a serial sexual predator, who is now talking about how much they love inflation and makes a bunch of promises, lies about literally everything, looked at a solar eclipse.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. To be clear, we've switched off of Mike Lee to Trump. I just want to make sure that we're not making accusations against the wrong person or whatever.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Right. Mike Lee is, you know, far more intelligent than Donald Trump is, but this is an illustration of the degree...

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It's a low bar, Dan.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yes. This is an illustration of the degree to which they will tolerate corruption, immorality, pure evil, rather than vote for someone who approves of abortion, wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Right. Not even promoting abortion, not saying, not pro-abortion, just pro the right.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house. We are-

• 19:04Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've heard the construction too. We're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this because we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances and we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually make a plan. And then even though it took

• 19:48Speaker 00

  some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can try to do that on your own, or you can use a phenomenally useful tool like Monarch to do something like that. Monarch is set up exactly for that kind of financial planning. They have things like their debt pay down simulator and visualizer to help you track your progress, which I, this is brilliant. The fact of the matter is that all of these concepts are so ethereal, it's hard to sort of wrap your head around it a lot of the time. And with this visualizer, you can see how that debt is going to go down. You can actually simulate your freedom occurring in front of your very

• 20:56Speaker 01

  eyes. And I think that is an amazing thing. Monarch has other things like- You can watch your timeline move. You can play out the options. You can choose the fastest way to alleviate your debt. Most apps just tell you what you've spent and how much debt you're in. Not Monarch. Monarch even has an AI assistant that will tell you, help you with anything to do with your finances. You can ask, how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford the vacation that I want to do? And it'll walk you through it all. It's super easy. It's super useful. I love it.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code DOGMA at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code DOGMA.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  We've made that point, but I do want to get into, who is this character of Moloch or Molek? And what are we talking about here?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  This is not a character at all.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  What? How dare you, sir?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  I dare.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw a picture.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a wood cutting.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And everything.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  There was, there was never any deity named Moloch that was worshipped in the ancient world, at least as near as we can tell. And the references in the Hebrew Bible to Moloch as a deity are actually just references to a word that refers to a specific type of sacrifice, a Mulk sacrifice. And one of the reasons we know this is because we have inscriptions, these are from Carthage, they're written in a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, that talk about, oh, this is a Mulk sacrifice offered to Baal, for instance.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  And then we have the remains of an infant. And so the word Mulk is just a noun, it just refers to a specific type of sacrifice. However...

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Now, are we, sorry, I know that several of the ancient Semitic languages, including Hebrew, just didn't have any vowels.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  So it was just sort of the M sound, the L, the L sound and the K sound.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  So when you say Mulk, do we know that that's how it would have been pronounced? Or are we just sort of? Guessing at, in the same way that Molek or Moloch is just kind of best guess as to?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  So we, we, we know that it's probably a single syllable noun. So we know it was consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant. That's how a lot of what in biblical Hebrew we call segelit nouns. That's how they were vocalized anciently, anciently. Ancestry, where did that word come from? Ancestry. And, and we know this because of a number of different factors, including how the words function in different declensions and in different relationships with other words, but also in transliteration and into other languages. So for, and so for instance, you might find a text that is Semitic language, but it's written in a Greek script where they

• 24:08Speaker 00

  do have to include the vowels. So that would tell us what vowels they, they were using in that time period. But we, we also know that how nouns, what kind of, kinds of vowels were usually used for what kinds of nouns. So it's, it's a very, very educated guess. Now, when it comes to Molek or Moloch, we have to use like the septuagint's transliteration of that as a name is one of the indicators that those were the vowels that were, that were used. But this is, we, we have no good data that indicate this was the name of a deity. All

• 24:49Speaker 00

  of the indications are that this was a noun that referred to a specific type of sacrifice. So instead of saying this is a, this is an offering to Moloch, these passages should all be read as this is a Molek offering. It is an offering as a Molek or Molk or whatever.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So that word should be, should, and I guess this is just a standard, like a translation issue where it looks ambiguous enough that it could go, it could go different ways. Is that like for, so, so the Leviticus 18 passage that I just read, 1821.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to understand, like, you know, I'm not reading out of NIV here. I'm in, I'm in NRS VUE and they're still saying, you know, offspring, you shall not give your offspring

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  to sacrifice them to Moloch.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yes. This is, uh, this is a very, very traditional reading. Like there, there are a bunch of things where scholars are like, "Yeah, that's wrong. It just hasn't filtered its way down to Bible translations." So for instance, uh, what is the, the disease, uh, leprosy?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  That's, that's today known as Hansen's disease.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  That's not in the Bible anywhere. The word that is commonly translated leprosy has nothing to do with Hansen's disease. But we, and we know this, but we just kind of leave it because it's traditional.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, and that annoys an awful lot of, of folks.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  I'm noticing, by the way, that when I click on the, the footnote for this thing, it says, it's instead of sacrifice them to Moloch, it says, the Hebrew says, to pass them over to Moloch, which could mean something very different. Pass, like you, like what you're saying, Pat, could very much be, you Pat, don't give them, like pass them over to the, to the, uh, to the act of Moloch.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's, the idea is pass them over as a Moloch offering.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  So, so yeah, the verb there is actually caused to cross over. And the idea is you are, uh, like literally physically, uh, handing over or passing over, uh, like onto an altar or, or something like that.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  But there, there's only one passage that a lot of people will point to as kind of like, aha, this is what actually proves it's a deity. And that's in 1 Kings 11:7, where it talks about Solomon built a high place for Kemosh, the abomination of Moab. And so abomination is, is, um, a substitution for the God of.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Uh, and for Moloch, the abomination of the Ammonites on the mountain east of Jerusalem. So that would,

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would seem to identify Moloch as the God of the Ammonites and the name of a deity.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  The only problem is, uh, we know who the God of the Ammonites was, and it was not Moloch. It was a God called Milcom. And if you look two verses earlier in 1 Kings 11:5, it says, "For Solomon followed Asarte, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites." So this is just a textual corruption where the final mem on the name Milcom fell off. And we're left with M L K, uh, which could mean king. Or as we see in the, um, the Maseratic text, it is understood as a reference to the name Molek. If we go to the Septuagint, they fixed the problem by saying they're kings.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Which, um, would actually indicate that it was, uh, yeah, they, they interpreted it as kings. And, and we have, there were like two or three other passages where it very clearly says Milcom is the god of the Ammonites. So, uh, so there's not a good case to make that, that any deity was ever worshipped in the ancient world with child sacrifice. However, or named Milcom, named Molek.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  However, as we've talked about before on the show, there is a good case to make. In fact, I think it is correct that the god of Israel demands child sacrifice.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  In the Hebrew Bible.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I was thinking we might need to bring that up because, yeah, because, yeah, I, there's so many, you know, when you hear all of, you know, people like Mike Lee talking about they're sacrificing their children. And only, only the most evil ever people in the, in, in the history of the world would, would do child sacrifice. I got bad news for you, bro. So talk about that a little bit.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, well, there are a few different things to talk about, including the fact that within Judaism, as well as within Christianity, central events of the entire faith are child sacrifice.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Uh, like Jesus is a child sacrifice.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Uh, he's an adult sacrifice.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  You can dress it up. Offspring sacrifice. You can dress it up in, in a lot of different ways rhetorically, but it is God offering their child, their son as a sacrifice.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  And, you know, that, that's pretty clear. And then, uh, the Akedah, this is Abraham's offer of, of Isaac. I think we've talked about this on the show before as well. Right at the last second, God goes, psych, just kidding.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  And.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  I just wanted to see if you'd do it.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I didn't know you were gonna do it, man. That was crazy.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  But. When we look at the text, as we've discussed before, it's a little fuzzy on what exactly happened because you have, it talks explicitly about Abraham and Isaac. They walked on, they went up the mountain, they did this, they did that. Whatever happens, happens. And then it says, so Abraham returned to his young men. Two go up the mountain, only one comes down. And there are medieval and later Jewish traditions that actually understand the sacrifice to have taken place. Because Isaac vanishes from the narrative for a bit. And so there's this idea that, oh, he was sacrificed and he lived in heaven for a couple of years before he was reconstituted on earth.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Or there's one where the ashes, he was burnt as a burnt offering and the ashes were scattered around the grasses of Moriah and the dew mixed with the ashes and Isaac, you know, kind of was again reconstituted.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Like a phoenix rising.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Yes, rising from the ashes. And so anyway, even within Judaism, child sacrifice is kind of central to the story.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the Exodus starts with God just sacrificing all the firstborn sons of Egypt to himself.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  And here's where it gets really weird. Then God gives the covenant code to Israel, which we see in Exodus 20 as the 10 commandments. Exodus 21 and 22 and a little bit of 23 have the covenant code. And the end of Exodus 22 sounds an awful lot like a command to offer child sacrifice.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Because it says in English, verse 29 in English, it's verse 28 in Hebrew. "You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses, the firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same." With your oxen and with your sheep, seven days it shall remain with its mother. On the eighth day, you shall give it to me. Obviously, with the oxen and the sheep, "give it to me" means "sacrifice it to me." Right. So it sounds like that's what is being referred to in terms of the firstborn. Now, everybody immediately, or at least people who are informed about their Bible, will immediately go, "Wait a minute, Exodus 13 and Exodus 34 say you're supposed to start

• 32:56Speaker 00

  walking in that direction, and then at the last moment, you go, 'Just kidding, I'm gonna pay you money, and then I don't have to sacrifice my child.'" Or they'll point to numbers where it says, "This is really about dedicating the child to priesthood service," or something like that. So we have circumlocutions of the commandments. Now, I think the majority of scholars agree that the covenant code is the earliest legislative stuff in all the Hebrew Bible. And so these other passages are coming from later, and they're having to renegotiate what's going on here, because they've found this peculiar commandment that says, "I want your firstborn kids." Right. And they're like, "Oh, we don't like that."

• 33:39Speaker 00

  And presumably, nobody was doing it, so... Yeah, we have no data that indicates that there was actually the sacrifice of children going on in Israel. This kind of thing did happen in the ancient world. Sure. It was more likely than not, any child you successfully gave birth to was not going to live past a year. And so, the calculus of this frequently resulted in, "Well, maybe if we sacrifice the firstborn, then God will bless us so that other children will survive." Yeah. That was the calculus.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  And whether or not it worked, but we have, in the later renegotiations, they're substituting things, money, or priesthood service, or something like that. But notice that the foundation is still child sacrifice. Yeah. We've just shellacked, you know, a hard left, right at the last second, over it. We've just said, "Just kidding, don't actually sacrifice the kid," which betrays that, underlying all of this... Is something buried deep in Hori antiquity that actually said, sacrifice your kids?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  You don't need to say, let's pretend to have them sacrifice their kids. If that was not actually what you wanted initially, you can just not have a commandment about sacrificing your child.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  If nobody's even talking about sacrificing children, you don't need to have any commandments about it.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not like somebody's like, you know what? Here's what we gotta do. We're gonna command them to sacrifice their children. And then say, just kidding, right at the last second. And then, because everybody around the boardroom table would have been like, why don't we just? Not command them to, yeah. If you just want the money, just say, yeah, you gotta pay this money if you have a kid. If you just want the priesthood service, you can just say, yeah, you gotta give your child over to priesthood service. You don't have to say, well, sacrifice them, just kidding. We're gonna leap in in the last second and say do it. So. The rhetoric that Mike Lee is appealing to here is just transparently ignorance and emotive. This is, this is just an attempt to try to get people to hate.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Democrats because they would like abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. And, and one of the biggest giveaways that they don't really care about abortion as anything other than an identity marker and a wedge issue. Is that we know what reliably reduces the occurrence of abortion. It's things like comprehensive sex education. It's things like greater access to women's healthcare. It's things like greater access to contraceptions. And guess what? Three things. The people who rail against abortion are also railing against those things. Yeah. So they don't want. Abortion to happen at lower rates.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  If they were serious about abortion, they wouldn't be calling, they would call the pill an abortion prevention pills. They wouldn't call, they wouldn't be calling those, you know, yeah, you shouldn't be using that. But they're not serious about any of these things. They're serious about having a wedge issue.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  And getting elected.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Works great to. To fire up their electorate.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and unfortunately, the voting public is a larger portion of the voting public than I am comfortable with, is happy to be like, sure, I'll, I'll just imagine that you're the devil incarnate because you, you think abortions ought to be safe, legal, and rare, even if the guy I'm ultimately going to elect literally rapes children.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  It's baffling to me, and, and it is so disgusting, and I am embarrassed and ashamed that we put into office such a profoundly immoral and profoundly corrupt person.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of a profoundly immoral and profoundly corrupt person, we've got more Mike Lee to talk about. So I think you and I should move on to our taken issue.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  So yeah, Dan, Mike Lee is mad. He got mad. But one of the things that he got, the thing that he got mad about is that the United States government, specifically the Department of War, or Department of Defense, if you want to be.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Rar. The Pentagon. Pete Hegseth, or Keg's Breath, as, as the kids are calling him.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  As he's fondly known.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Scotchy Pete, as I like to call him, has, has decided that Mormons, specifically, people of your faith, Dan, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aren't Christian.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Now, this came in the form of a, first of all, Hegseth decided that there were too many religions. It's unruly. It's unwieldy.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And so he took a list of, of different religious designations that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 to 220.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Reports vary on that list.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  And this is a list of, of religious denominations. Groups. And then there was a code, like a, a two letter code that was associated with them in an effort to help chaplains be able to identify the religious faith of a given member of the military.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Right. So, so like, just so that like, you know, if you're a Catholic and the chaplain there is needing to see to your, to your needs, your ecclesiastical needs, he needs to know if, if he should give Catholic last rites, or if he should call someone else over if, you know, because to give a Jewish, Jewish soldier Catholic last rites would be a, a bit of a faux pas.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  We'll call it that.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yes. A party foul on.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And there's literally no good reason not to have every person's religion available. We have enough two letter combinations to make that happen.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  But Hexeth decided, no, we're shaving it down and released a, a list of, of the new, very shaved down 31 now categories of religion.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  And the original list had a bunch of things. It was like Christian hyphen Methodist, Christian hyphen Catholic, Christian hyphen Jehovah's Witness, Christian hyphen blah, blah, blah. And then its own category was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Without that Christian thing at the front. So people like Mike Lee and our other Senator, Chris Stewart, raised holy hell and blah, blah, blah. And, uh, and so the Pentagon then released the list again, but without listing all of these different things as Catholic or as, as Christian.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Christian. Yeah. They, they didn't say, okay, Mormons are Christians. We'll add the label. They just said, fine, we'll take the Christian label off.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  And so you have now a list of denominations and know this is Christian, um, super category.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Right. And also, yeah, like you say, no one at the Pentagon, no one at the White House, no one in the US government said, oops, sorry, of course you're Christians LDS.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  No one has said that. So

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I think, I think that this is a really interesting moment for the LDS people, but it's also an interesting reason to, or reason for us to talk about what the heck is a Christian?

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and part of, some people have pointed out Pete Hegseth's pastor is Doug Wilson. We've talked about Doug Wilson in the past. He is a piece of work.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  That's one way of saying it.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  A bygone era, yes. But he is very much Mormons aren't Christian. And so there are those who think that Doug Wilson's influence may have trickled down into the categorization of Mormons as, as not Christian on this Pentagon list. But, but yeah, it does, it did start a debate on social media that is still raging on Twitter.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Among the least qualified commentators, which, which is where, you know, that's kind of, Twitter is like, if you want to find the highest concentration of people who have no business speaking on certain issues, that's where you go.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Well, people who have no business speaking on certain issues, who are willing to portray themselves as experts on that issue.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  I think, I, yeah, it's shocking the amount of certainty that you see in, in social media circles, especially on X.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  That, from people who have just nothing but vibes guiding them.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  And, and so there, there are an awful lot of people who, who are like, well, of course Mormons aren't Christian. And, and you have a bunch of different cases that they're trying to make. Most of them center on the Trinity. But others center on, you know, they'll, they'll rattle off a list of things that make Mormonism not Christian, including a doctrine of deification. Study your history, Christians. Deification was a central part of, of ancient Christianity.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And by that, I just want to clarify that what, there is a central Mormon theology that, that.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Humans, us, we, through a belief in, in the teachings of the gospel can become gods ourselves.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Well, through the principles and ordinances.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And ordinances.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Because not just beliefs, that would be, that would be a very Protestant way to approach it, that a lot of Mormons would disagree with. However, again, this is something that's, is actually in a lot of Orthodox traditions and we find in earlier Christianity now, that does not mean that that early Christian version is a proto Mormon doctrine.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  The first thing I ever published was a paper called Latter Day Saints and Patristics, where I basically wagged my finger at Latter Day Saint apologists and said, "Stop identifying patristic ideas about deification and things like that as proto Mormonism. It's not." So, but mostly people are focusing on concepts of deity and particularly the Latter Day Saint rejection of the triune God or the Trinity. The Nicene Creed, basically, is, is supposed to be the essence, the very beating heart of what it means to be a Christian, which is bad news for everybody before Nicene, who is now no longer a Christian.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  All the way down to Peter James.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Decristified, along with any, anyone who happens to, you know, follow the teachings of Jesus now, but happens to take a Unitarian view of the Godhead or whatever.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, and, and guess who got left right out of the, the list when it was whittled down to 31? Unitarian Universalists.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  So, they, they were just, they were just omitted. There were, there were other groups that were like combined into other groups. The, the UU's, Unitarian Universalists, just deleted.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Out completely. I was, I was eliminated.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Atheists, yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Atheists are no longer on the group. They, they left agnostics, which just feels like they're, they're, you know, they're, they're just winking and then kicking. You know what I mean?

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no pagan category either. The, the pagans were...

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Pagans, Wiccans, all of those sorts of people are, are out.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. But, but the biggest problem with this, that I have with this idea of, of course they're not Christian, even though like Jehovah's Witnesses are listed as Christians.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  And, and I don't, I think people would have more of a... Informed Christians should have more of a problem with including Jehovah's Witnesses

• 46:24Speaker 00

  than with Mormons saying, "Yeah, we're Christian." But here's the thing, there is nobody, and there is no combination of people, who is in charge of the boundaries of Christianity. No person has ever existed-

• 46:39Speaker 01

  I thought you said it was Doug Wilson. I thought you said he was in charge of it.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Doug Wilson is in charge of Doug Wilson. And to the degree that he has actual ecclesiastical institutional authority over who belongs to his particular church, he has a say over whether or not someone is a member of his particular group. And that's true more broadly as well. You know, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the authority to decide whether or not I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  That's true. And if you decided that your belief system, as a member of that church, differed far enough from what they've decided is their central belief system, he could make the decision to kick you out.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Yes. And there are a lot of people who have wondered why on earth that has not happened yet. But that is neither here nor there.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  It's a little here and there.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  The issue is, none of these people have the authority to declare who is or is not Christian. There's only one person who has ever existed who would hypothetically have that authority, and we ain't heard from him in 2,000 years. We keep leaving messages saying, "We've been trying to get in touch with you about your car's extended warranty." And he's, we've been ghosted, basically. Ghosted by the Holy Ghost.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Jesus has not clarified regarding that. And we can't look to the New Testament for any help, because it doesn't really tell us where the boundaries sit. And so-

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Well, because the New Testament didn't imagine a sect called Christianity.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  We don't see that until late in the Book of Acts.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  And the word "Christian" only occurs a couple of times. So yeah, it's just not considered. And so when it comes to who is or isn't a Christian, the folks who look into religious identity, and look into membership and boundaries and all that kind of stuff, the folks who study this, myself included, would say that self-identification ought to be the most important factor. Not the only factor-

• 48:46Speaker 00

  But the most important factor. And, and then you, you know, it radiates out to, um, to other factors as well. But none of these people have, you know, rubbed a piece of paper on a Mormon and said, "Ha, it turned pink, not a Christian."

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Like, it doesn't work that way. None of them can dip a Mormon in acid and say, "See the reaction? That means not a Christian." It doesn't work that way. So really, all they're doing is preaching to the choir.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  What if they weigh the same as a duck?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Then they're a witch.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Oh, that's not a Mormon. Okay. That's not a Christian thing. That's a witch thing, right?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  There's overlap. Now, don't get me wrong. There's overlap.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  But, and, uh, yeah, we won't go there. But, um, it's just, it's not how it works. You don't get to decide beyond yourself and whatever group you might happen to have any kind of institutional authority within. And, and so it's really just a person who's a part of a, a collection of social identities, speaking to the other people who are part of the same identities, saying, "We don't like them. That's correct. We don't like them." They do not speak for all Christianity. They're just trying to use this as an identity marker to curate and advance their own standing and their own access to power and resources within those social identities, which is really what Twitter is doing, is giving people an opportunity to, to costly signal

• 50:15Speaker 00

  and, and engage in credibility enhancing displays.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Well, and it's so, it's always been so interesting to me that all of the, you know, there, these people are sitting in their church or sitting, you know, they're in the pews and they're all just furiously saying, "Ha, ha, we're the best. We're the only real Christians. All these other ones are fake or all these other ones are doing it wrong or whatever." And yeah, I get that you have that they want to draw their own boundaries. They want to say the, you know, they want to delineate a series of necessary and sufficient conditions that may that, you know, if this is met and this is met and this is met, but this is excluded and this is then no, you're not quite there.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  But as you say, when they do that drawing of a boundary, whether it's pointing at Nicaea or pointing at this, that, or the other political hot button issue and saying, you have to believe this or that on that issue to qualify. What they're saying in essence is the opposite of what they think they're saying, which is that it's a thing that's decided after the fact. Like, like Nicaea, if you, if you're pointing at Nicaea, you're admitting that a group of, a group of people who kind of all disagreed with each other got together, you know, struck out this word and that word and kind of shook hands on it and just,

• 51:44Speaker 01

  you know, nobody was fully comfortable with it. And that's sufficient to define your religion?

• 51:51Speaker 00

  And, and

• 51:51Speaker 01

  To define this category?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  And imperial authority had to come in and, and be the one to enforce it as well, even though they, that imperial authority switched allegiances a bunch of times.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Uh, in, in the process. So, so yeah, it's very clearly historically contingent, but they don't, they don't want to acknowledge that. And, and I, I wish they would, I wish they could see that they're, what they're arguing over is, is meaningless as well. Who cares?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  If Mormons are, are labeled Christians by the Pentagon? Like, it doesn't change anything about their life. It is only relevant to your identity politics, to trying to curate your own standing. And, cause does, does it hurt anybody to say, yeah, they're Christian. We still don't like them.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  They're not our kind of Christian.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  We disagree with them.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, we think they're dumb. Uh, you know, we, we, we don't like that they've got those extra books of the canon. We don't like the polygamy. We don't like, uh, all this other stuff about them. You, you're still allowed to say those things if you acknowledge that, that Mormons are Christian. Uh, it, it just, it demonstrates that this is just about.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Playing in a social club.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and, and, and making sure that your, your social club is exclusive.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the no homers club. All over again.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Cause, because it's, I don't know if you remember that episode, but he was like, but you got that other homer. And he's like, well, it's no homers. We can have one.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  We can have one.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  It's like, but, but you got the Jehovah's Witnesses.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  It's no reformation era ers or whatever. Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, we can have one restorationist.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Restoration.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Branch of Christianity. But it, to me, it shows how petty and really how petty this all is. This is, this is all just about, oh, we want to, we want to meet the man. So we're the, we're the real Christians and everybody else is a, is a pretend Christian. Like this is, this is playground behavior writ large and, um, you know, playing out on, on Twitter of all places.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I, I, I do.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And in, and by, among senators.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Excuse me.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think that, uh, one, you said, who cares whether, you know, whether this group or that group labels themselves as Christian. I think though, that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints should care.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Because this was, I don't, I don't think there was anything accidental about this at all. This was a decision that was made purposefully to exclude them. And honestly, I, it shocks me that more LDS people aren't standing up and saying, hey, you don't respect us at all. Like they're, they're one of the most reliable right wing voting blocks in the country.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. I mean, I think, I think white evangelicals are the only group that, that voted for Trump in higher percentages.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yet they're, uh, they're willing to just stomp all, they don't respect the LDS. They, you know what I mean? Like the, the right wing of this country. Doesn't just sees it as a joke.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's just about structuring power.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  They'll, they'll accept the, uh, the votes of Latter Day Saints. They'll let them, help them, uh, gain power. But yeah, they don't want them. They don't like them. And, and which is why I have said, you know, Maga Mormons, you made this bed, you sleep in it. Um, you've been told for years, they don't want you. You're trying to hitch your wagon to evangelicalism to gain greater access to, to power and resources socially and politically. And they couldn't care less about you. They don't want you.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  More to the point, they hate you.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  They don't respect you. They do care because they want, they enjoy not liking you. So, all right, yeah, there you go.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I think it's problem, I'll, I'll just find, last thing to say.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  I think it's problematic when the majority of the things that you're doing in exercising your religion is trying to clarify who you don't like and who doesn't belong.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  That's not a productive.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  To be religious.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Yes, that's not, that's, you don't find that in the Sermon on the Mount. That's, it's, it's a terrible way to be religious and it shows that really these folks are religious only because they see it as a social club that has value for them.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Especially, especially if you're calling yourself Christian, because it seems to me that if you're calling yourself a Christian, then at very least, one of the necessary conditions of that, if we were to say that there were any, would be, uh, being a follower of Jesus Christ. It feels like that is, that's gotta be in there somewhere.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  And if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, it seems to me that like. He had a pretty strong thing to say about loving everybody and finding better ways to love people. And, uh, and, uh, he didn't, I, I don't remember him saying Democrats are evil. I, I think he might've thrown it in somewhere, but I don't remember Jesus saying that.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll do you one better. In Mark nine, uh, Jesus's disciples come up to him and say, "Hey, these other people were, um, were trying to, uh, say they follow you, but they don't, they're, we don't like them. They don't follow us. So we told them to, uh, to get out of here." And Jesus says, "No, no. Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink in my name, because you belong to Christ, will not lose their reward." Like, the New Testament says

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  That you shouldn't run people off, uh, just because they don't follow Jesus the exact same way that you do. Um, and, and yeah, the whole, the whole, uh, different Christ thing that, that is also used to, to talk about this is so bafflingly stupid.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  All right. So, uh, I believe that what you've just said is that it is the official policy of the Data Over Dogma Podcast, that a Christian is someone who will give you water.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  That is, that is the essence, yes, of Chris.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Are you willing to give water to these people? All right.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Look, I'm, I, when, when I have, I have a no soliciting sign on my door and I still get solicitors almost every day.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  And I, and without fail, when I say, um, and, and sometimes like I know that a lot of people are, they're trained to not leave until they've, uh, they've had three no's.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Um, and so sometimes I'll be like, I appreciate what you're doing. No, no, no. Okay. You can satisfy the requirements of your job. I will always say, can I offer you a bottle of water or something? So you can say, cool, because I think that that is what Christianity is supposed to be about. Winning arguments on the internet is is a pretty silly brand of Christianity. Do better.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. There you go. Well, if you would like to become a part of keeping this whole thing going, you can you can get offer us a glass of water in the form of becoming a patron of this show. The way you do that is you go over to patreon.com slash data over dogma, where you can choose what level you want to be. And you can get on fun rewards like an early and ad free version of every episode, or at a certain level, you can get the after party, which is our bonus patrons only content that we do every week just for you guys. So head on over to patreon.com slash data over dogma

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  for that. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks for Sam. Thanks for Sam. Thanks to Sam for helping us out on the YouTube. And we'll talk to you all again next time.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Data over dogma is a member of the airwave media network. It is a production of data over dogma media LLC copyright 2026 all rights reserved.