The Speak Life Podcast, sharing Jesus in everyday life. Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Speak Life Podcast. It's just me, Paul, here today, although you're gonna be hearing from Glenn in some recordings in a moment. We're in the summer kind of season now, and so uh various members of the team are away at different points. And so, what we've done for our summer podcast is we've trawled through the archives and we found some video content uh that has been out there uh that we think would make great podcast content. And so, what you're gonna be getting over the next few weeks is some of that content uh put into audio form for your uh your listening pleasure. Um, and so today um we've got some uh videos by Glenn or or the audio from Glenn that he did on Jordan Peterson back, uh I believe it was kind of September, October time 2018. Now, this is five videos where Glenn speaks about a debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. Um, and you can watch the videos still on our YouTube channel. If you head over to the Speak Life YouTube channel, you can actually find a dedicated playlist that contains all five videos. But as I say, we've got all the audio here, and through the five uh kind of talks, Glenn addresses um various topics that came up through the discussion um between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, um, including uh how they deal with or how they perhaps fail to deal with relativism, um, thoughts on Old Testament wars, um, whether what the Bible says about human sacrifice, uh whether the Bible condones slavery, and also just their views on religion. So, well, like I say, we've put all of those five together in one kind of sitting here for you, so you can listen to them um at your own leisure. So I hope you'll enjoy these and uh enjoy some of the other podcasts we've got coming over the summertime.
SPEAKER_01I'm a Christian minister who's been watching Sam Harris for many years and uh and watching Jordan Peterson for the last couple of years uh with great interest. And so I I've loved to see the debates that have been held very recently, a couple in Vancouver, and then one in Dublin, and one in London, where the two men have got together to talk about ideas. How brilliant that we live in an age where two people decide to come and discuss depth in in-depth ideas, and thousands of people come on the night, and then millions more discuss it online. We live in an age where the spoken word is very, very powerful, and people are listening at length to deep ideas. And I'm thrilled about that as a Christian minister. I just think so often uh we in the church we feel like we've got a message to tell, but people don't want messages, right? They don't want to be preached at, they don't want truth, so we just try to sugarcoat the bitter pill of truth and we offer them entertainment and then try to scrowbar in the truth later. And I just think, you know, events like the Harris versus Peterson debate go to show that you know what, actually, people want truth, they want to debate, they want messages, um, they want to think deeply about ideas. And so that's brilliant. And the other thing that was brilliant about these debates is uh it got two men who disagreed about things to actually discuss in fruitful ways. I I thought it was a fruitful discussion. And I thought the way that they did that was really interesting, because I I just discovered last week about what you do to socialize rabbits. Um, if you get two different rabbits from two different litters, um, they're probably gonna tear each other in a frenzy of fur and blood, and it's not gonna be pretty. What you really need to do is you need to acclimatize them to one another. So, what you do over the course of maybe a week or longer is you put them in two hutches side by side, and there's a big partition wall, but they're both looking at the same thing. They're both in the same environment, and they're both having the same common horizon, the same common task, you might think. Um, and and that's really important for getting them to get on with each other. And then what you do is at some point you swap the hutches, and so one rabbit goes to the other's hutch, the other rabbit goes to the other hutch, and they they smell one another's stuff and they inhabit the world of the other rabbit. Until at some stage you can remove the partition and they're best friends forever. Isn't that interesting about how you can get people to get on with each other across divides? And I thought this debate did that because I thought both Harris and Peterson are facing a common vision. Um, they both want to be moral realists, they both want to say that there is an objective moral reality. Some things are better and some things are worse, and you can say that, and we don't need to get lost in the swamp of relativism, which leads eventually to nihilism. You don't you don't want to go down that road, and neither of them want to go down that road. And so, in in their common task of avoiding relativism, they have this common horizon. And then what they did in the debates is they did swap over at points in the in the second debate, um, they steel manned each other's position. Uh, what is steel manning? Well, it's the opposite of straw manning. If I straw man your position, I put it as weakly as I possibly can, as most ridiculously as I possibly can. Um, and uh but that of course does not lead to a good argument. What you really need to do is steel man the other person's position, i.e., put their position as absolutely strongly as you possibly can. And so what we're gonna see first is uh first Harris steelmanning Jordan Peterson's position, and then Peterson steel manning Harris's position. And I think we'll both see uh how important and how um how really valuable steel manning is in getting people to see one another's perspective. And it'll also give us a great little encapsulation of what the two men believe.
SPEAKER_05Clearly, I don't understand how valuable stories are, how deep they go, how the degree to which stories encode not only the wisdom of our ancestors, but quite possibly the wisdom born of the hard knocks of evolution of the species.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_05So there's no telling how deep the significance of the information encoded in stories goes. And there's a class of stories that are religious stories, and they're religious for a reason, because they're dealing with the deepest questions in human life. They're questions about what constitutes a good life, what's worth living for, what's worth dying for. Uh these are things that if each individual just thrust from onto the stage of his own life, uh not knowing where he is, and tasked with figuring out how to live all on his own, or even in a uh in a collection of of uh others who are similarly unguided by ancient wisdom, uh this is not knowledge we can uh we can recapitulate for ourselves easily. And so we we we edit or ignore the these ancient stories at our peril, at some at minimum, at some considerable risk, because we don't know how much, we don't really know what baby is in the bathwater. And uh so we should have immense respect for these traditions.
SPEAKER_04Sam believes that there are two fundamental dangers to psychological and social stability. Um, religious fundamentalism, essentially, on the right, and moral relativism and nihilism on the left. Sam's argument is that we require a value system that allows us to escape these twin dangers. One stultifies us and the other leaves us hopeless, let's say. And that value system has to be grounded in something real, and the only thing that he can see that actually constitutes real in any provable sense, and there's a certain amount of historical and conceptual weight behind this claim, is the domain of empirical facts as as they've been manifested in the sciences and technologies that have made us incredibly powerful and increasingly able to flourish in the world. And so I would say that's Sam's argument and his and his criticisms of my position.
SPEAKER_01So you write my next book, I'll write yours. So here's my summary of their two positions, and I'm going to employ um some biblical conceptuality to the frame. And I I hope you see that whether you believe in the Bible or not, that actually it serves the discussion. Okay, what I see both men doing is looking at the realm of the flesh. Okay, the flesh in the Bible is just our biological reality. You look down at your biological reality and you see strengths and you see weaknesses. You think you see things that lead to the flourishing of the species and you see things that drag you down to hell, sort of, you know, to use the Peterson kind of terminology in that sense. So the the flesh is just our human abilities, our biological realities. And both men are looking at the flesh and they want to be able to say this is better than that. Right? Because there are different expressions of the flesh across different cultures. And you don't want to get to the point where one culture says, um, hey, we believe in protecting and honoring this minority group, even though they're weak, even though they're feeble, even though they might not help us flourish in a hundred ways. It is really important to us that we honor their common humanity and we protect that minority. That's one culture. Another culture says, hey, well, each to their own, because like we've gassed our minority and we've soared to heights unknown in terms of you know the flourishing of our society. And we've actually found that that persecuting and doing away with that minority has really helped us. But, you know, each to their own who's to say what's right. Now, both Harris and Peterson, they want to say what's right, right? They want to say that this culture is better than that culture, and therefore that this culture should move towards that culture, should ascend. There is uh an up, there is a true north. So both Harris and Peterson they want to say that there's something above the flesh that adjudicates the flesh and that is able to say what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is evil. Um now, for both of them, that thing that is above, you could demonstrate, you could you could call that thing the logos, right? The logos is another biblical uh word that Peterson uses quite a lot. The logos is the Greek word for word. Uh it's also sort of the word for meaning, it's the word for rationality, it has that kind of semantic range, it's the word from which we get the word logic. Um and for Peterson, he kind of sees that there is a word that has emerged from below, and we'll see what that is in a second. And for Harris, he sees that there is a word that has emerged from below and yet stands above the flesh and can judge all things and adjudicate, and that word will save us from the swamp of moral relativism. My point though is neither of them save you from moral relativism. Okay? Neither of them can actually do what they want to do, and at the end of the video I'll tell you uh who can do what Harris and Peterson can't do. But first of all, let's think about uh Peterson's word. Who is the Logos according to Peterson? Well, Peterson believes in uh uh the 3.5 billion year um emergence of humanity, well, the the species, in terms of myths and mythological structures. And in the West, the great hero, the great archetypical hero is Christ, the Logos. And he is the one who can judge all other people.
SPEAKER_04He puts it like this You have an inbuilt structure, it's deep, it's partly biological, it's partly an emergent consequence of your socialization, and you view the world of facts through that structure, and it's a structure of value. Now, that structure of value may be derived from the world of facts over the evolutionary time frame, but it's not derived from the world of facts over the time frame that you inhabit, and it can't be.
SPEAKER_01So the wisdom of the ages has emerged over immense stretches of time and has been encoded in these stories, this these myths, and you can examine the myths across the cultures and you can find these archetypal heroes, and Christ is the hero of heroes, he is the logos by whom we can judge what is up and what is down, what is good and what is evil. And so, in this way, Peterson says, we can have a logos, we can have something above the flesh that judges the flesh, and therefore we avoid the nihilistic swamp. Except that he doesn't. And he can't. You see, Harris points out again and again that the logos that Peterson has identified is really just a Judeo-Christian idea. It's not the universal that Peterson is seeking.
SPEAKER_05Good and evil do not have the same meaning in the East. Buddhism and Hinduism do something very different with good and evil.
SPEAKER_04I'm willing to accept your definitions of good and evil for the world.
SPEAKER_05No, but it's not the truth is there's just not even evil is just ignorance on some level. And again, Harris says this. Because if you if you take the Buddhist framework and map it onto this continuum, you don't get good and evil. You get essentially wisdom and ignorance.
SPEAKER_01And other cultures just do not conceptualize religion the same way that the Christian West does. Peterson is slowly waking up to this fact.
SPEAKER_04For a lot of my life, I was, I would say, more interested in the universal truths expressed in religious belief across different cultures. But I've become more and more aware of the important distinctions between the religious cultures, maybe in the last ten years.
SPEAKER_01But still Peterson operates as though all religions were basically like Christianity. And it just isn't the case. An honest look at the religions of the world does not look at basically Christianity in different dress, right? That's not what the religions of the world are like. They are really radically different conceptions of ultimate reality, right? And that presents a huge problem for Peterson, because he wants a universal figure at the top of his hierarchy of values. He wants a universal figure who can judge all flesh and say what's right and what's wrong. But it seems like he's got a very located logos, right? Because it's it's just this Christian idea. You go over to the East, and there is no concept of good and evil in the same sense as you have in the West. And so Peterson has a real problem. Especially as uh an evolutionary psychologist, he's going to want to say that Buddhism is perfectly adapted to that environment in which it has emerged. And Hinduism is perfectly adapted to the environment in which it is. Um, Islam, the same, Christianity, the same. And therefore, he's he's just lost the universality of the logos that he that he seeks. And so I I think Peterson is going to have to admit, if he's true to his evolutionary psychology, he's going to have to admit that the logos is not the universal judge that he seeks. But Harris, he also has a problem. See, Harris's logos is rationality. Um, and that is what the word logos means. It does mean, you know, logic, rationality, that kind of thing. And so for Harris, in the Enlightenment, what we have is emerging from the flesh has been this enlightened mind that is able to look at all the moral landscape around it and is able to judge better and worse, you know, higher and lower. And uh and and this is where we have thrown off the shackles of our ancient history, and certainly we can throw off the shackles of the nonsense of religion. And now, as enlightened humanity, we stand above the moral landscape and we can adjudicate good and evil, right and wrong. Um, but Peterson shows the problems with this again and again and again. Peterson says, you are not this dispassionate observer of the moral landscape. You are not outside the system as you look at the moral landscape. You are absolutely embroiled in this flesh, embroiled in in these processes by which you have emerged, and therefore what you're looking at is just a a tiny fraction of what the moral landscape really is, and all of it is being colored by your a priori assumptions. That's a phrase that Peterson uses again and again in these debates. A priori just means at the beginning of, right? Before you even look at the facts, you've already got values in mind, and you cannot look at the facts without those values in mind. It's a point that Peterson makes repeatedly.
SPEAKER_04But what you said was, okay, here's these belief systems that are ancient and complex, and we can step outside of them, and there's this transcendent rationality that we could all aspire to that would solve the problems. It's like, okay, what is it?
SPEAKER_05What is it exactly? It is at a minimum to value uh all of the variables that conspire to make the one life we know we have.
SPEAKER_04Okay, you can't value all those variables.
SPEAKER_05Well no, we can we we're doing it right, we do it every day in how we organize our own.
SPEAKER_04And it's the nature of that a priori framework that we haven't been able to have a discussion about. That you cannot view the world without an a priori structure. And that a priori structure has a dogmatic element. And so you can't just say, well, let's get rid of the dogma because you can't perceive the world without a structure. I still need an answer to the question about what it is that's this transcendent, transcendental, rational structure without an a priori uh an a priori dogma. Because I don't see it.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's not well again, this uh we we touched on this a little bit last night in that at some point we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. At some point we make a move that is not self-justifying and is not justified by any other move that's more rudimentary. Right. That's a statement of faith.
SPEAKER_01So this is a problem for Harris. We do not look at the moral landscape uh the the way a scanner looks at a barcode and just reads off these these sort of the these neutral facts from which we can then ascend to values. No, the values are at the very beginning of the process. You don't go from facts to values. Actually, you have to go from values to facts, always. This has just been pointed out by every moral philosopher going, you know, whether they're whether they're a believer in in Orthodox religions or or not. Everyone points out the fact that actually you don't begin with facts, you actually begin with a priori assumptions. And Sam Harris even admits this, and he says you've got to begin with certain intuitions. Uh that there's got to be this framework that you begin with. And Harris says you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Um, but that is just an admission that you don't go from facts to values. Actually, you go from values to facts. And Christian theologians have noticed this down through the centuries. We've spoken about faith-seeking understanding, which is precisely what we're talking about in this debate. Faith-seeking understanding. I have certain a priori assumptions about the logos, right? About the rationality of the cosmos and about how that relates to my mind and how that relates to the world that I'm observing. I need those a priori assumptions that are faith positions, but then it's a case of faith-seeking understanding. That's the way it must be. It's just the nature of the case. And if Harris thinks that he can go from facts to values, um, he is absolutely mistaken. Actually, you have to go from values to facts. Okay? So there is an in-principle objection to Harris, and I think it is a catastrophic defeater for his position. But if that wasn't bad enough, Harris doesn't just have an in-principle problem with his project, uh, he also faces the problem of its workability. You see, what Harris wants to notice in the moral landscape is simply human suffering, right? Simply my perceptions of the pleasure or pain that I get out of, the well-being that I have in certain scenarios. And Peterson again and again points out that that is a very limited way of assessing what is good and evil. Good and evil applies not just to the pain that I feel in a situation, that that phrase evil might also apply to the pleasure I find in inflicting pain on someone else. So Peterson says this.
SPEAKER_04Because the question is, what's bad about hell? Now you say the suffering. It's like, fair enough, man. True enough, but not true, but not true enough. So in in Donald Trump.
SPEAKER_05What's also bad about hell?
SPEAKER_04The actions that put you there, the malevolence that generates the problem.
SPEAKER_05Okay, but that that's part of the suffering.
SPEAKER_04So I mean, no, no, it's not. No, it's not. It's not the same as the suffering. It's not it's not the having your hand cut off. It's the pleasure that's derived by the person who cut it off.
SPEAKER_01So Harris says that he can he can factor those different things into his calculus. That yeah, there is the bad of experiencing pain, and there is the bad of inflicting pain. Um and and he says that he can all factor that into his calculus, but but those are apples and oranges, and and how is he going to weigh them? What value structure is he going to bring to bear on that calculation? Um it's not at all obvious it will need a value structure prior to it. And so, again, this is a defeater of uh Sam Harris's position. But if that wasn't bad enough, um there's also another problem with Sam Harris's position in that we are just no good at measuring the moral landscape.
SPEAKER_04And the the black box problem is if we could measure well-being. It's like, yeah, that's a big problem, Sam. Like we have measures of well-being and they're terrible. Yeah. Like if you yes, they are. No, no, no, no. I'm agreeing.
SPEAKER_05I I don't think I don't think it's but it's not a problem for my thesis. It's uh we don't have measures for anything we care about, really.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but I mean, if if your if your thesis is that if we had the measures of well-being that were appropriate, we could use them in a positive way. And the response is, but we don't have those measures, it's like, okay, well, then what do we do?
SPEAKER_01So Harris's position is just a non starter. It doesn't get off the ground because there are In principle, objections to his entire enterprise. But also, he's got measurement problems. He doesn't know what to measure, and that's going to need value structures applied to that question. And his measurement techniques are not fit for purpose. So his project just does not work. But also, it does not avoid the nihilistic swamp that he wants it to avoid. You see, Harris, he very much goes eastwards in his conception of good and evil. And I guess he has to, because he is a committed determinist. He does not believe in free will at all. And therefore, he's very much liable to say that evil actions, or what we would call evil actions in the Christianized West, what we would call evil actions are just biological malfunctions. And he gives this example of the mass murderer, who actually, it turns out, has a tumor pressing on his brain. He doesn't see that as one interesting example and as that being one factor in the mass murderer's crimes. He sees that as being an allegory for all evil.
SPEAKER_05The reason why evil is susceptible to total deflation is if you agree with me, uh evil is a category of human misbehavior, human intention that we don't understand significantly at the level of the brain. But if we did understand it totally at the level of the brain, then every evil person we had in the dock at trial would be just like Charles Whitman with his brain tumor after he shot up uh everyone at uh the University of Texas, right? So like he he's at he's the prototypically evil mass murderer, but he's complaining about uh this change that overcame his personality, and he thinks it would be good, it would be a good idea that if after the cops kill me, you autopsy my brain because I don't know why I'm doing any of this, right? And lo and behold, he had a glioblastoma pressing on his amygdala, and all of a sudden it made sense of his behavior in a way that a full understanding of psychopathy or every other variant of human evil would make sense of it in a way that would be deflationary ethically. And then you would look at, so then you look at someone like Saddam Hussein, or the the the the worst evil person you could imagine, and you would say, well, he's actually unlucky. You know, there but for the grace of biology, go I. Because if I had that brain, if I had those genes, if I had those influences that gave me those synapses, I would be just like him. Now, if you think there's some other element that gives us free will, and and now then then you and I are disagreeing, then that's a factual claim that's at variance with mine. But but if we are just on some level malfunctioning biological systems when we're being evil, then a complete understanding of evil would cancel that category.
SPEAKER_01You see, adopting Sam Harris's framework um will abolish the category of evil. Um and at that point, I I think we are heading towards the relativistic swamp. So I think that both Harris and Peterson have uh have failed to avoid what they want to avoid. Um so then let me suggest a solution, okay? The solution is still the logos, right? They both got that right. They've got it right that we need to rise above the flesh, and they've both got it right that we need a logos that adjudicates among the flesh, but their logos emerges from within the system and can never escape the system. And therefore they cannot escape the relativism inherent in that project. We do need a transcendent logos. We absolutely do. Um, good news, we've got one. Uh John chapter 1, verse 1 says, In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning, and through him all things were made. Wonderfully, in verse 14, it says the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. So there has been this gift of uh an adjudicator that can tell us right and wrong, uh, a light by which we can judge darkness. But that light is not shut off from us just because we are flesh and he is the Logos. That Logos comes to us in grace and in mercy, and and this is what we really need. I don't just need to know what is good, I need forgiveness for my evil. I don't just need uh uh a perceptual structure by which to ascertain what is light, right? I need him to shine into my darkness, to help me and to heal me. And I'm afraid that with Peterson and with Harris I don't get that. But with the Bible, which as Peterson says has absolutely shaped the world that we live in and has shaped the enlightenment that Sam Harris so prizes, within that Bible story, there is a solution to the problem. Harris and Peterson have not avoided the relativistic swamp. But in Jesus, you have someone who descended into our swamp in order to get us out. Well, in my next video, I'm gonna talk uh about some more issues because you might be thinking, right, well, if we go with Christianity, then what about all Sam Harris's um objections to Christianity? What about slavery, right? What about uh Old Testament wars, right? Uh what about this practice of sacrifice? Um these are all objections that Sam Harris brings to Christianity, and it's worth dealing with those in the next uh video. But for now, if you want to escape from the swamp of relativism, I say come to Jesus. See you next time. This is the second video I've done on the Jordan Peterson-Sam Harris debates. You might want to check out number one before diving in here. In brief, here's where we got to last time. Peterson and Harris both want to be moral realists. They both want to make objective moral judgments about our lives. Some things are better, some things are worse. To do that, they both posit a logos that exists to adjudicate this realm of the flesh, the realm of our biological reality. For Peterson, the logos is the archetypal Christ figure. For Harris, the logos is enlightenment rationality. But actually, for both men, their logos is actually from below, and in the end, they therefore cannot escape from the relativism that they fear. In the next videos, I'm going to discuss how Harris and Peterson both get religion wrong. Harrison values religion too little, Peterson values religion too much. Yes, even as a Christian minister, I think Peterson values religion too much, way too much at times. We'll get to that. But here, and for the next three videos, I want to address three serious objections that Harris makes to the Christian faith. There's Old Testament wars, the practice of sacrifice, and slavery. Here's the point about Old Testament war that was raised in the Vancouver debates by the moderator there, Eric Weinstein.
SPEAKER_02What does that do to Moses' laws of war? This is not a narrative, this is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land. If you intend to take over that land, you kill everybody, right? There are other rules in there about uh killing husbands and taking the wife or it's a brutal document. Absolutely brutal. My point would be I don't I don't know that reading that portion um in light of the end, even if you call the end the New Testament, I don't know that it changes Moses' laws of war and their acceptability.
SPEAKER_01What do we do about Old Testament wars? Well, the first thing to say is that I too get a lump in my throat reading the book of Joshua. There is hard stuff here. And it's made so much harder to me by my belief in Jesus. I followed the guy who said, put down your sword, but he also said, take up this book, this book meaning the Old Testament. It's supremely Jesus who gives me my difficulty in reading Joshua, and actually it's Jesus who gives the West, it's conscience when it comes to warfare. When Parliament debated whether to bomb Syria earlier this year, there were two very strong arguments, and both of them were thoroughly Christian. There was the more pacifist strain that said violence never solves anything, and that tradition goes right back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, the just war tradition that expresses something that basically says, look, sometimes violence does solve things. The state bears the sword, and sometimes there is justification for wielding that sword in a righteous cause. That's a thoroughly Christian tradition founded in places like Romans 13 and expressed powerfully by Augustine. So you've got these two strains going on. Both sides are thoroughly Christian. And the West, when it comes to warfare, is shaped by the New Testament profoundly. But as I often say, the Bible is such an immense influence on our culture that even our problems with the Bible have been given to us by the Bible. Right? It's the New Testament that has given us a problem with the Old Testament, a problem so-called. Peterson makes that point. He says we have to read these wars in context. It's the way you treat any document. You need to read the story in its context, especially the context of the New Testament.
SPEAKER_02I don't know that it changes Moses' laws of war and their acceptability.
SPEAKER_04Well, hypothetically, if you take the New Testament seriously, it does. Because it's a su it's a document that supersedes it.
SPEAKER_01The stories of Old Testament wars come in the flow of a grand narrative, and you really need to understand the narrative. You can't come in halfway through and understand it. That would be like coming in at the end of Star Wars Episode 4, seeing the Death Star explode, and saying, what a reckless and unjustifiable expression of violence. You know, you wouldn't say that. You need to understand the context. The context is that Israel were David and the Canaanites were Goliath. The Israelites were a bedraggled mob of ex-slaves who go into battle against the military installation of Jericho with a bunch of priests, some temple furniture, and playing the trumpet. That is their strategy. They are pathetic. It would be like Malawi declaring war on the United States and waging war by singing at them. The historical context is that for 400 years, Canaanite cultures were involved in child burning and other grotesque evils. The Lord gave them centuries to repent of it. That's considerably longer than any other just war ever launched. He then, through his people, visited them with a one-off, unrepeatable judgment. It had nothing to do with race, this was not genocide. Later on, when the Israelites were guilty of those same sins, they too were judged in just the same way. Now, when it came to these wars, every Canaanite who ever sought mercy from the Israelites was spared. Now, certainly prior to the conquest, God speaks the language of total destruction. Yet Paul Copin and others have shown that this was well understood in the day as militaristic hyperbole. The language of driving out precedes and predominates over the language of wiping out. And when Joshua sums up his achievements at the end of his conquest of the land, he considers that he has done just what Moses has commanded. This, in spite of the fact that the Canaanites were not fully driven out, let alone wiped out. So there's context to these wars. But then supremely there's the context of the New Testament, and this is vital. You see, along comes a guy called Joshua. That's what the Hebrew form of the name Jesus is. Jesus is Joshua, he's the new Joshua. He comes to planet Earth to wage war against evil, and how does he do it? Well, for instance, in Luke chapter 19, Jesus, Joshua, right, entered Jericho. Okay, wow, that's evocative. And he annihilated his enemy called Zacchaeus. He annihilated him by making him his friend. And this is the way that the Old Testament pencil sketch is fulfilled. Jesus wars against evil, not with the sword, but with cheek-turning love. And the church inherits his kind of mission. We must not take up the sword. In the Old Testament, there were these pencil sketches, these kings, priests, temples, and armies, portraits of the coming Christ, and in their own contexts, they were just wars, but they picture for us the victory of Christ that is at the cross and the bloodless army who will fight with forgiving love. That's who the church is. And then the question becomes very interesting because I as a Christian now am very wary of military activity. I wish we hadn't bombed Syria because of Jesus, right? Because of the New Testament, because of the way that the narrative develops. But let's get rid of the Bible. Without the Bible, will you be more willing or less willing to go to war? I'd say you'd be more willing to go to war because if there is no higher adjudicator between nations and cultures, all becomes about power. And war is the result. Which goes to show that the real problem is not millennia old wars, it's the human heart today. That's the problem with Old Testament wars. In the next video, we'll look into sacrifice. See you in the comments. Last time we looked at the first of three objections that Sam Harris makes to the Bible in his debates with Jordan Peterson. The first objection was Old Testament Wars, and here we're gonna look at the issue of sacrifice, in particular, human sacrifice. Here's how the subject came up in the debate.
SPEAKER_04So human beings have made sacrifices. It seems to be a standard practice all around the world. And in the biblical narratives, they would often sacrifice something of value, like a like a valuable animal. Well, like a child. Start let's start with that. Well, well, no, no, no, look, look, I'm not I'm not making light of this. I know that human sacrifice was a part of this.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but that's again, so just to just to give you a crib on where my mind goes here is human human sacrifice is as old a religious precept as we know about. It's a cultural universal. The the other sacrifices are derivations from it. Circumcision is a surrogate for the far more barbaric act of human sacrifice. And you know, it it answers every test you would put to it with respect to its archetypal significance, it's its i i its compelling uh presence in stories across all cultures, but the horror is that it actually has taken place in all these cultures.
SPEAKER_01In the Bible, God says repeatedly that he is appalled by the practice of human sacrifice. In Jeremiah chapter 32, for instance, he talks about the other nations, and he says they sacrificed their sons and daughters to Molech, this god of the nations. They sacrificed their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind that they should do such a detestable thing. God could not be clearer that he is anti-child sacrifice. It was one of the chief reasons he gave for entering into the just war against Canaan. They sacrificed their children. God says that is detestable, it is unconscionable. God never countenanced child sacrifice. And now you're thinking, but what about Genesis 22, right? At the beginning of Genesis 22, God says to Abraham, Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain in the region of Moriah. Now, of course, in Genesis 22, you'll know that God stops him from actually carrying this out. But is this an example of a biblical contradiction? Was God here tempted by the detestable practice of child sacrifice, and then he just didn't have the heart to go through with it? Was there a morning in the history of the cosmos where God did endorse child sacrifice? No, not even for a morning. And the key is to figure out who Isaac is. Isaac is the offspring of Abraham. Starting in Genesis chapter 12, God has promised that the offspring of Abraham will save the world. And as soon as you say offspring, you want to ask, is that one person or many? If Abraham sort of reaches into his wallet and says, you know, let me show you a photo of my offspring, you don't know whether there'll be one kid in the photo or a whole clutch, and that's the point. The offspring of Abraham is both singular and plural. The many offspring of Abraham are the Jewish nation, and they will save and bless the world. But the singular offspring of Abraham is Jesus Christ. And he, representing the nation as the king of the Jews, he will save and bless the world. So the offspring of Abraham is plural and singular. But when Abraham and Sarah have Isaac, they would have been very aware that they were holding in their arms the offspring. All Israel and the Messiah himself were in their hands, so to speak. And you're like, well, don't drop him, right? He is the salvation of the world. How closely will you want to protect dear Isaac? And then in Genesis 22, we see God tell Abraham, I want this hope for the nations to be sacrificed on a hill in the region of Moriah. Moriah is in Jerusalem, right? So what's going on? God says there's going to be a sacrifice of the offspring of Abraham, the hope of the world, the beloved son, and it's to take place on a mountain in the region of Jerusalem. On that day in Genesis 22, the Lord prevents that sacrifice, but he says, on this mountain the lamb will be provided. So it's an incredible prophecy of the cross, 2,000 years in advance of it happening. It's showing us how the offspring of Abraham will bless the nations by being a sacrificial lamb, dying on a mountain in the region of Jerusalem. He is the beloved son who will die for the world. Abraham did not have to sacrifice his son. God did. And this is why the God of the Bible is so different to the surrounding cultures. Sam Harris is right to say that child sacrifice is a human universal, except in the Bible. There, God does not expect you to give your son, he gives his son. That's why Peterson's response to Harris was unconvincing. He wants us to uphold that human sacrifice must have had some utility in our evolutionary history. I just say no. I just say it's a detestable, unconscionable evil. And it has things backwards. We don't sacrifice our sons. God sacrificed his. Next time we'll talk about a third objection to Sam Harris and the the objection that he brings to the Bible. What about slavery? See you in the comments. We've been looking at three objections that Sam Harris has brought to the Bible in the course of his debates with Jordan Peterson. We've thought about what about Old Testament wars, we've thought about the issue of sacrifice, and now what about slavery? Here's how Sam Harris raised the issue.
SPEAKER_05Slavery is condoned in the Bible, in both testaments, and in the Quran. There's no getting away from that. Now you can say, well, it's not the central thrust of any of these books, but if you if you go to the books and try to figure out what the creator of the universe wants with respect to the owning and needless immiseration of other people, right? He expects you to keep slaves and he's told you how to do it.
SPEAKER_01Now, straight away it's not a particularly rational argument from Sam Harris because he's not careful in his assessment of the evidence. Firstly, we must differentiate between the bondservants of the Old Testament, the Greco-Roman practice of slavery where slaves could own property and purchase their freedom, and the transatlantic slave trade, an unequalled race-based horror of the 17th to 19th centuries. That was something quite different to anything in the New Testament or the Old. For a start, the transatlantic slave trade would have been and should have been unthinkable based on both Old and New Testaments. Both testaments outlaw man stealing, right? You cannot kidnap people and sell them as slaves. It was a capital offense in the Old Testament. Well then, what is this Old Testament slavery that Sam Harris speaks of? It cannot be like the chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade. Well, it's a real question in the Old Testament whether the word for slave should be translated as slave. Perhaps bond servant might be a better word for this time-limited service, where if you were in debt, you could sell yourself to a master for a time. You might want to take issue with that, it's an age-old philosophical question. Can you sell yourself into slavery? But in the Old Testament, it is not West Africans that are being stolen from their homes en masse and shipped as chattels to a plantation in Georgia. That would have been as unconscionable to an Old Testament believer as it is to you and me. In the New Testament, the Greco-Roman practice was again very different to the transatlantic slave trade. And in that context, Paul, writing the New Testament, did what I reckon Sam Harris would do if he found himself in a culture that practiced Greco-Roman style slavery. See, Paul insisted that everyone was equal. He forbade masters to mistreat their slaves. He told slaves to get their freedom wherever they could. And more than this, he went further than Sam Harris could have gone. Paul taught that God himself had stooped down to the level of a slave so that all of us could be liberated at the deepest level. Paul inverted the hierarchy that the Greco Roman world took for granted. The Great One became the lowest so that the lowest might be raised up. That was the depth charge that Paul dropped, as historian Tom Colland has called it. The depth charge that was the death of slavery as it worked itself out in the history of the West. You see, in History, that depth charge came to fruition, as both Eric Weinstein and Jordan Peterson note.
SPEAKER_02But clearly most of the traditions in which it's written into the holy book don't practice slavery, and the people who uh who adhere to these belief systems wouldn't defend slavery. So clearly there is the capacity for an update mechanism.
SPEAKER_05Well, no, but not really. I mean, they've been forced, they've had it beaten out of them, right? I mean, that we we fought a civil war in the U.S. to get rid of slavery.
SPEAKER_04But it was Christians who abolished slavery in England, though. It was Christians who were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in England.
SPEAKER_05There are Christians on either side of everything. I mean, there's no one else to do the job about it. Wait a minute, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_01It's not true that Christians were on either side of everything. In other parts of the world there were no Christians anywhere, and slavery continued unopposed. Only in the one place where there have been Christians has slavery ever ended. And that is a stunning achievement. Slavery is a human universal, but there is one instance of it being overturned. One, Christians did it, evangelical Christians did it. And it wasn't by returning to classical values. The Greeks and the Romans were adamant that slavery was natural. Plato and Aristotle both said that nature teaches you that some are born to rule and some are born to be ruled over. Some people, it's obvious, don't have the capacity to run their lives. Just look at them. It's obvious they need masters to tell them what to do. Some people are born to be, in the words of Plato and Aristotle, they're born to be living tools. Some people are like shovels or pitchforks. You can use them. That's basic Greek thinking when it comes to slavery. The classical world was never going to end slavery. Islam was never going to end slavery. What did the West do that made it able to end slavery? Well, it embraced the story of Jesus. See, if you are anti-slavery, come on home to the only people in the history of the world who have ever ended the practice. Peterson says this.
SPEAKER_04But it was specifically Christians who were using their Christian belief as a justification for eradicate the slavery.
SPEAKER_05The problem was they were actually on the losing side of a theological argument. And it would be much better, I think you would agree, if one of the Ten Commandments had been don't keep slaves.
SPEAKER_01Sam Harris says it would be nice if don't keep slaves was one of the Ten Commandments. The Bible is much clearer than that. On page one, we are told that all people, highborn and lowborn, men and women, we are all in the image of God. On page one, the equality of all peoples is settled. And that's my challenge back to Sam Harris. On the basis of the Bible, I can say that all people are equal and that no people are born to be ruled over or born to be a living tool. But on what basis do you rule out slavery, Sam Harris? On what basis do you champion the utter equality of all people? You see, equality is a precious Western idea, but you don't get it outside the Bible. To the ancient Greeks, our idea of equality seems nuts. Okay, an ancient Greek, you you go to an ancient Greek and you'd say, okay, so this person is stronger than that person, but they're both equal. And this person is smarter than that person, but they're both equal. The ancient Greek would say, well, equal in what sense? What do you even mean by the word equal? The Greeks did not think the way that we think. So how can Sam Harris affirm the equal value of people? See, I'm not hopeful, especially given the conversation that he had with Peterson about the glass. Here's how this conversation about the glass unfolded.
SPEAKER_05Right. So if I if I tell you, well, this glass, this isn't just an ordinary glass, I know it looks just like that one, but this is the glass that uh Elton John drank from his last concert here. Right? Right, right. Uh so you know what do you want to pay me for it, right? Right. It it could be that, you know, you're just the biggest Elton John fan ever, and you it's worth quite a lot to you. Now that is it's a kind of F and F, it's not value intrinsic to the glass, but it is it is it is a where's the value located? Well, it's a measure in in the change this provokes in your experience.
SPEAKER_01So we value things, but we don't always value them according to their material structure. Sometimes we value things because of their position in a hierarchy of values that involves other persons and and their value judgments and how we value their value judgments. So Elton Glass, Elton John's glass is worth more than the contents of that glass. Okay, that's that's good news because when I look at a human being and I wonder what their worth is, I do not want to limit their worth to the material contents in front of me. See, here's a bag of protoplasm, right? A human being. And I could probably get about 20 bucks for the minerals that are inside that bag of protoplasm. But we know that people are worth more than 20 bucks, right? So here's hoping that people can be valued not according to what's inside them. Here's hoping that there is a value system that will accord people dignity that goes beyond their material structure or their particular strength or intelligence. He is hoping there is an Elton John out there that actually is connected to the human person, whose connection to that person gives that person supreme value. I hope there is an Elton John out there, right? Of course, that's not how the analogy is developed in the in the debate. In the debate, Harris says that the glass is like the land of Palestine.
SPEAKER_04Do you think they're any more irrational than the claim that that class is worth something with the other thing? No, it's just no no, it's like that.
SPEAKER_01According to Harris, it's irrational to attribute to objects values that can't be seen in the objects themselves. His example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the land. They need to get over themselves. It's just a strip of land, it's just real estate, right? Well, okay, I'm I'm sympathetic to some degree to that comparison. Okay, compare the glass to that strip of land, that bit of real estate. Alright. But look what Harris does with the analogy.
SPEAKER_05The the true analogy here, the complete analogy, is rather like we're about to fight over Elton John's glass, and Elton John was never here. Right. Well.
SPEAKER_01And everybody claps. But everybody claps when they think that the glass is Palestine. Would they clap if they knew that the glass was the human person? Because if the glass represents the human person, then Sam Harris has said something absolutely catastrophic to human dignity. If Elton John was never here, if there is no greater person outside to give us dignity, then we really are the sum total of our contents. The glass is just a glass, virtually worthless. And the human person is just a bag of protoplasm, virtually worthless. Sure, some might have strength, some might have intelligence, but at that point, the person with more strength and more intelligence is more valuable than the weak and stupid person, right? And suddenly equality is a fantasy. Get rid of Elton John, and the glass must be valued on its own merits. Get rid of God, who makes us in his image, and we must be valued on our own merits. And some are stronger and some are weaker. Some are smarter, some are dumber. Some are born to rule, and some surely are born to be ruled over. Harris says he would like a commandment outlawing slavery. The Bible does better than that. On page one, it puts value on every human person, highborn and lowborn. At its center is the Lord who became a slave to free us all, and in the end, there is a vision of all people from all cultures gathered together around one table to feast and to toast our cosmic liberation. What does Harris have? He has a glass and no Elton John. That's not a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's the end of human dignity, human rights, and human equality. There's a reason that only Christians have ended slavery because only Christ can do it. Next time, we will conclude our comparison of Harris and Peterson. In our fifth video, we're gonna show that Harris values religion too little and Peterson values religion too much. See you next time. This is our fifth and final video comparing Peterson and Harris in the debates that they've just been having in Vancouver, in Dublin, and in London. In this video, I just want to compare them on the question of religion. I think Peterson values religion too highly, and Harris values religion too little. Peterson values religion too highly, and really he has to. As an evolutionary psychologist, he sees religion as an emergent part of our history. It is the storytelling that has been reflecting on 3.5 billion years of evolution and codifying truths of our existence that transcend our tiny time frame. Therefore, religion has been an essential part of our evolution, and therefore it must be adaptive to our survival. Since that's the case, Peterson has to own the religious impulse across all cultures, no matter how repugnant some of those religious expressions have been. So his attempt to redeem child sacrifice, a universal across human cultures, is tortuous and kind of disturbing. No, I I would never imagine.
SPEAKER_05But my work would be much easier if you did that.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes, yes. And the work of journalists as well, although they've tried that pretty much anyway.
SPEAKER_04So right, that would be that would even be worse than enforced monogamy, hypothetically. So, okay, so see, I'm let's say that I'm trying to give the devil his due, and I'm trying to understand from an evolutionary perspective, like a cognitive behavioral evolutionary perspective, let's say, why that particular set of ideas would emerge and in many, many, many places, perhaps autonomously, or once having emerged, would spread like wildfire. It's like because I'm not willing to only attribute it to ignorance. Now, we could attribute it to ignorance, no problem, man, but but there's more going on there because it is a human universal.
SPEAKER_01As a Christian, I don't affirm the religious impulse as such. I I'm not particularly attached to religion or even the concept of God. I'm like a woman who's like dead against marriage, but I've met a guy and so I've kind of gotten married. Why? Because I now believe in the institution of marriage. No, it's just he's converted me. It's the same with institutional religion. I'm I'm not favorably disposed towards human religion, but I've met a guy and he's kind of converted me. But that means that I don't have to own every universal practice of human religion. I don't think human beings are the measure of all things. And therefore I can point to things, even things that are human universals, and I can say that's wrong. Because my adjudicator of good and evil is above our universal human experience. Peterson's ad adjudicator is not. Peterson's adjudicator emerges from the ground up. And if it truly is a human universal, then it has proved its utility in the struggle for survival and it can't easily be jettisoned. Peterson does not do a good enough job of distancing himself from the evils of religion, and in fact, methodologically, he can't. Peterson values religion too highly. Therefore, he just ends up endorsing a whole bunch of religious-sounding terminology that he just doesn't have to. When Harris asks him to define God, Peterson defines every mystery in the history of mystery. The results were not just a word salad, but a whole word grocery store.
SPEAKER_04So God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time, as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of time frames, but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now. So God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. That's a fundamental element of hero mythology. God is the highest value in the hierarchy of value. That's another way of looking at it. God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure. God is the voice of conscience. God is the source of judgment and mercy and guilt. God is the future to which we make sacrifices and something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation.
SPEAKER_01God is lobster of lobsters, the tidier of rules, and he will have his vengeance in this life or the next.
SPEAKER_05Right? And just I'm wondering what percentage of religious people who would say, oh yeah, I believe in God and it's the most important thing in my life, uh, what percentage of those religious people do you think have in mind a God of the sort you just described?
SPEAKER_01But if Peterson values religion too much, Harris values religion too little. In the four debates, his main references to the impact of religion were ISIS fighters, Aztec priests, tarot cards, and astrology, right? That's what Sam Harris thinks of when he thinks of religion. It's so ridiculous that in Dublin, one of Europe's great cities, Harris relates how he was walking through the city and he came across an example of religion that he thought would be germane to the debate that night. And you think, oh yes, what did you see, Sam? Did you see churches, cathedrals, universities, schools, hospitals, charities, all founded by Christians? I mean, even the Guinness Brewery has a fascinating Christian origin. Look it up. But no, none of that struck Harris as a good example of religion. You know what he picked on? Harris noticed a woman on the street sitting at a trestle table doing tarot cards readings, right? And that was his example of religion. Only Sam Harris can walk through Dublin and think that religion's influence is best expressed by a street hustler. And it makes me doubt that Harris is investigating these issues in good faith. He seems to be falling majorly for confirmation bias as he addresses the evidence on religion. While he champions rationality, his own prejudices are so influential he fails to be rational. It's ironic, isn't it? He wants to build a world where everyone simply rationally assesses the evidence and makes good moral choices, and yet he is exhibit A for why that cannot work. We're just not neutral observers in the world, and Sam Harris, ironically, is one of the most biased observers going. And he's the most he's the most biased observer going of the very thing that he wants to teach us about. Rationalists, it turns out, aren't that rational. I mean, take this example of how he approaches another human universal sport.
SPEAKER_05The World Cup is on right now, and we we you know literally billions of people care down to their toes what happens to this little ball as it traverses a lawn, right? And if it goes into the net, it really matters, and if it fails to, it really matters. It always matters if we hit the target, Sam. But this is this is something we have manufactured to care about, right? No, it's something that speaks to us unclear. It's quite literally a game. This is a game that people are playing, but some people take it in taking it further than you you uh that than than seems truly rational is part of the fun. That's but but the f it but the people who can't turn that off.
SPEAKER_04Soccer is a metaphor.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but there but there are people who there, you know, there are people you know the the fullback who kicks an own goal and then goes back to his you know South American village and gets murdered, right? He's surrounded by people who are taking the game too seriously.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_05I I agree. Yes, and so my problem with religion is that so much of the time we're meeting those people. And we're and we're and we're not criticizing those people. We have no place to stand to criticize those people because we're so attached to the game.
SPEAKER_01Billions of people enjoy the beautiful game, and Harris can only think of football hooligans. And he can only think of that one time when disgruntled fans shot a Colombian footballer, right? See, Harris's rationalism says everything must be assessed by brute facts. But that commitment to brute facts is a universal acid. It won't just burn through religion, it'll burn through sport, art, the humanities, and actually, as we pointed out in our first video, it burns through morality and even science too. Because facts are not everything. You actually need values, you actually need a priori commitments, faith positions. To even begin rationally assessing the world, to insist that all things must be rationally justified is to burn away at the foundation of all inquiries, even rational inquiries. This comes across in his analogy with the bookshop.
SPEAKER_05And what I'm perpetually in contest with, uh even in conversations like this, is the sense that the rules need to change just a little bit for this class of books. That means literally this side of the bookstore, right? There's like you any other part of the bookstore, well then there's no barrier to honest conversation. But you move over here, you've got this shelf of books, there you you you you have to hold your tongue. Right? There we can't pick and choose. We can't say that while we can say that Shakespeare wrote some fantastic plays, the best plays ever written, and some are actually not that good, right? We can't say that about God. Right? We have to find some tortured way to make the most of his diabolical utterances.
SPEAKER_01I've got three problems with this bookshop analogy. I mean, first, um, where does Sam Harris live where religious books are given more credence than all the others? Like, is is he living in Tehran? Like, really? I have to say, in my local bookshop, the religion and spirituality section is the same section as the food and well-being section, which says something about where we place diet and exercise in our modern world, but that's another video. But but nobody in my world takes that section more seriously than, for instance, the science section, right? I just don't recognize the world that Sam Harris is so afraid of, where religious people and views are treated as sacrosanct. In my corner of the world, if a view is even suspected of being religiously motivated or derived, it is not protected, it is it is derided, it is demonized, right? That's the first thing. Secondly, Sam Harris should know that it's the science section that is actually sacrosanct today. He should know that because he wrote a book on moral philosophy called The Moral Landscape, and he wrote it as a neuroscientist, never once engaging with philosophers, be they religious or secular, but swanning in as a scientist into the field of moral philosophy, which is at least two and a half millennia old. And Harris espoused in that book a theory that has been put forward before. I don't know if he knows this, but but 200 years ago Jeremy Bentham had a kind of a scientific consequentialism. But but Harris doesn't even seem to know who's on his side, and he certainly doesn't seem to know that the fundamental tenets of his argument have been devastatingly critiqued for thousands of years. But he swarms in as a neuroscientist and says science can deliver to us moral objectivity, and suddenly he's a New York Times bestseller. It doesn't matter that no other moral philosophers of note think Harris has done anything to progress the the study of moral philosophy, and plenty have slammed its arguments. Nevertheless, the moral landscape earns him millions because it is presented as scientific, right? You tell me which section of the bookshop is privileged over all the others. You know, and Harris should know, it's not philosophy, it's not theology, it's science, right? But finally, as Sam Harris imagines his rationally ordered bookstore, he tells us that we can study Shakespeare, but we know how to sift good plays from bad plays, and he wants that same standard to be applied to every section of the bookstore. Fine, I agree 100%. Every section of the bookstore should be like that. The religion section should be especially like that. There are plenty of religious books I would like turfed out of the religious section of my bookshop. There are good books and there are bad books, but Sam, we need to interrogate that little word good and that little word bad. By what standard are we making these judgments? It is not self-evident. We need value structures that cannot be built up merely from the facts. We need a priori commitments, we need faith positions, we need a standard to apply to the books that renders them good and bad. And your standard, Sam Harris, is blatantly biased, non-obvious to the vast majority majority of human civilization, and it is in principle impossible to be derived from brute facts. The trouble is, Sam Harris, you don't want an end to the priesthood. You just want you and your friends to wear the robes.
SPEAKER_00Well, that was Glenn's thoughts on Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris's debate. You can actually watch the whole debate online as well. Um I believe if you find our YouTube channel with the videos on, you can find the link to the original debate within the description of each of the videos. Like I say, there'll be more of this over the summertime, more of these kind of archive um archive uh videos and the audio from them. Um just to remind you that starting in just a few weeks at the beginning of September, we have the Speak Life Foundry, our new internship program. We've got six interns coming from all around the world who are coming to join us and uh as we kind of seek to forge evangelists and evangelistic media that will reach the world. And so we're well underway with that. Um but we need your help and specifically we well, we need your prayer, of course, we need your prayer, but we could really do with your help on our finances as well to run this project um costs a lot of money. Um, and so if you feel you could give to us um maybe a one-off gift, please do head over to speaklife.org.uk forward slash foundry. So that's F-O-U-N-D-R-Y. And do think about donating there. You can also get a free gift there. Um, I believe at the moment it's Glenn's ebook, Christ in all of scripture. So that's a great, that's gonna be a great thing to pick up for free there. That's a little gift to you uh to thank you for supporting us in our work. Do praise God for the the interns. Um, we've heard from a number of them who've had various trusts uh get back to them to say that they will support them with a bit of money towards uh their cost for the year, which is great. But please do keep praying. We've got three at the moment who are awaiting uh visas, and we're waiting to hear back on that. And we really want to pray that that's gonna go ahead quickly, and the answer will be uh a yes to them that we won't have any delays and things like that. So, thank you very much, guys. Um, enjoy your summer. We'll see you next week for another podcast. Bye now.