2Are ALL Apologists Liars? #news #the star news # celebrity #science #

Hello and welcome to my channel, Vice Rhino here. Did you know that Christian apologists are a bunch of liars? I mean, not all of them, of course, but man, it is a lot of them. And before you run down to the comment section to declare that all of them are, in fact, liars, I would just like to point out that I did a brief stint as an amateur Christian apologist myself. And I can tell you that I 100% believed everything that was on my website. Sure, much of what was there was the result of me believing someone else's lie. So it was kind of a lie laundering. But had my life taken a slightly different trajectory, my YouTube channel would have ended up being the honest version of Matt Powell. OK, maybe I wouldn't have been that bad. I would like to think that I'm not enough of an idiot for people to make montages of the stupid things that I've said. But in space, wouldn't it be a different scenario based on the fact that, you know, the the the space and the air in the space is much different than the air we have here? They believe that rocks evolved, that you had smaller rocks that somehow morphed into larger rocks. That out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of fire leap out. The dinosaurs they've discovered have the dragons they've discovered have chambers in the back of their head where they can breathe fire. But that's just a couple of things. I mean, if it's about survival of the fittest and we evolved from African-Americans into other Americans, what about the African-Americans that are still alive today? Well, I don't see anything wrong with quote mining. I believe if we study history, you know, the Confederates were able to shoot pterodactyls, T-Rex. They had short, stubby arms. And apparently now the chickens able to do a handstand with those arms. Think about this. We have more in common genetically in certain areas with a gorilla than with an ape. Yet they say genetically we evolved from apes. We can tell based on genetics. Honestly, John, I don't know a ton of technical terms. I'm very simple when it comes to science. I just enjoy simple science. Though I have said my fair share of stupid ----. So a montage could be made. Difference between me and Powell is that I would find it hilarious. My point is, I know that not all apologists are liars because I used to be one and I wasn't. But I'm at a stage in my career where I'm not sure that I want to keep giving apologists the benefit of the doubt. My policy used to be that I'd assume that they were being honest, but we're just mistaken unless there was evidence that they were actually lying. But I have seen that play out so many times now that I am seriously reconsidering that policy. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to examine some times when I've caught apologists in some rather blatant lies. So let's go. Where should we begin? How about Calvin of Answers in Genesis Canada? Their two most recent videos, as of this writing, have been entirely culture war nonsense. You know, the tired old trope about how belief in evolution leads to everything that they think is currently wrong with society. Nothing worth responding to on its own. But just get a load of this clip here. And simultaneously, watching most of our country's leaders act the complete fool and seeming to hyper focus on issues that don't help our current social or economic situations whatsoever. For those of you listening to the podcast version, while he was talking about current world leaders not helping our social or economic situations, he was showing B-roll of three people. Those people were Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This video was released on June 19th. None of those people have the kind of political power he was talking about. You want to talk about a leader who doesn't seem interested in doing anything to help our economic situations? Do you know why gas prices are what they are right now? It definitely isn't because of any of the people that he is trying to link with our economic situation. Turns out when you start a war with a country that has the ability to choke off the world's supply of oil, that makes oil prices go up. Who could possibly have known? Aside from, you know, literally every economist and politician to come before Trump. But they are blaming a bunch of people who had nothing to do with the Iran war for consequences of the Iran war, and then complaining that they aren't doing anything to fix it from their current position of non-power. How the **** is Biden supposed to lower gas prices right now, my dude? What do you expect a bunch of former politicians to do about the current political situation? And why is the main guy who is in charge of the most powerful nation in the world not being included here? Now, I do actually know why they're not including Trump in their scaremongering montage. It's because they are ideologically tied to him, and their comfort with Trump exposes another lie. They don't care about adhering to their principles. They are quite willing to compromise there, as long as the person they support who violates the principles enables their political goals. Things like outlawing abortion, restricting rights for LGBTQ people, eroding public education, stuff like that. With cultural norms such as typical roles for males and females, marriage between one man and one woman as a permanent covenant, sanctity of life, rewards for good deeds and punishment for crimes, etc. All of which were originally based on Scripture being turned on their heads. If they think that a politician can help them attain their goals, then it doesn't matter that he's been divorced multiple times and has cheated on every single one of his wives. It doesn't matter how prominent he is in the Epstein files. It doesn't matter that he is an adjudicated rapist. What does matter is that he has directly enabled the curtailing of rights for women and LGBTQ people. I'm old enough that I remember the Clinton impeachment. I was attending a fairly conservative Christian school at the time, and I remember several of the teachers making points about how we can't trust a politician who would be unfaithful in private because his private indiscretions speak to a deeper moral problem that will taint his political work. But now that the guy in charge is friendly to Christian fundamentalists, suddenly his private behavior doesn't matter. We're all sinners, after all. We must forgive him. Christianity is all about extending grace to people who need it. Except LGBTQ people or women or children who would like to eat lunch at school or anyone of a religion other than Christianity or those of no religion. OK, so I guess it's functionally only about extending grace to those who are in your in-group. Also, remember how Answers in Genesis has that article about how they think lying is always wrong to the point where they wouldn't even lie to a Nazi to save a Jew? I'm not bringing that up to point out their hypocrisy. Not today, at least. But let me read you an excerpt from that article. Quote, Suppose a Jew comes to your house in Nazi Germany and seeks refuge. Shortly thereafter, the SS knock on your door and demand that you turn over any Jew who is in your home. Will you lie to the SS or tell the truth? This example is cleverly constructed to solicit the response that you will lie to protect the Jew in your home. Using the Jew in this argument is designed to elicit the maximum emotional response. The Nazis also hunted down sexual deviants like homosexuals, transvestites and lesbians, as well as the intellectually disabled or physically impaired in their eugenical quest for the master race. This paragraph says more about the values of the people at AIG than the author likely intended. What I get from this is that they would have a much easier time turning LGBTQ and disabled people over to the Nazis than they would to a cisgendered heterosexual Jewish person. It also shows what I have now come to understand to be a sloppiness that is pervasive throughout Answers in Genesis. First and least important, but my pedantry won't let it slide. They use the adjective illicit, which is used to describe something which isn't allowed when they meant to use elicit, a verb that means to draw out or bring forth. They are homophones. So when speaking, they sound the same, but their meanings are quite different. They also have homosexuals and lesbians as two separate categories, despite the fact that lesbian is just a word that means homosexual woman. So that's rather redundant. Transvestite is also an outdated term. And speaking of outdated terms, you may have noticed that I didn't read the last sentence verbatim because I'm not comfortable with slurs. I'm sure their defense for most of this would be that they were using the terminology that the Nazis would have been using. But it seems to me that using Nazi terminology to describe Nazis persecuting people that you apparently also want to persecute isn't really great for optics. So this is an organization that is actively working towards a goal of persecuting marginalized groups, though they will at least claim to care about people with disabilities. And they are willing to lie in furtherance of that goal and support politicians who violate many of the values that they claim to hold. One final example of AIG lying before we move on in the second part of their culture war video. Calvin said this about Canada's medical assistance and dying laws. And countries like my own Canada have instituted horrific procedures such as our medically assisted dying made program, which is a euthanasia platform that's constantly being expanded to target more and more of our population, including the elderly and mentally challenged children, many who have no advocate and can't defend or speak out for themselves. Now, whether or not you agree with medical assistance and dying is completely irrelevant here. I am just pointing out Calvin's lies. The eligibility requirements for made are freely available to anyone who cares to do two seconds of searching. There are five criteria you must meet in order to be eligible, and you must meet all of them. First, you have to be eligible for socialized health care. Second, you have to be at least 18 and mentally competent, which they define as being capable of making health care decisions for yourself. Third, you have to have a grievous and irremediable medical condition. Fourth, you have to make a voluntary request for medical assistance and dying, which cannot be the result of outside pressure or influence. And fifth, you must give informed consent to receive medical assistance and dying. Now, given these criteria, how in the world would that target mentally disabled children or people who can't defend or speak out for themselves? He said it's continually expanding. But the only expansion of this law has been the expansion of safeguards to make sure it can't be abused. There is also a proposed expansion to include people solely suffering from a mental illness whose implementation keeps getting delayed. Again, regardless of your opinion on the law itself, Calvin is lying about it. All right. Who else do we have? Well, an obvious choice, since I've already brought him up, would be Matt Powell. So let's get him out of the way. Here he is at the end of a response video that he made to lifestyle vlogger Anna Campbell. Anna, you know, Lord bless you. I hope that this I hope that this video finds you. And I hope that you see it and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and now shall be saved. You're not like a typical atheist that I typically deal with. And so I want to just let you know that, you know, Paul and I here on the show today, we wish the very best for you. So there you go. Anna isn't like the typical atheist that he deals with. Where's the lie? Well, here's a brief clip from the end of Anna's video that Matt was responding to there. Do I believe in God? Yes. Do I believe in a higher intelligent power that is not only with us, but is us and we are it? Yes. Now, would you say that that's the sort of thing that an atheist would be likely to say? Obviously, and definitionally not. Matt took her 19 minute and 46 second video and cut it down to seven minutes and 34 seconds when he responded to it, as we can briefly see when he begins playing her video at the start of his, which is not an inherently bad thing to do. I once responded to a Mike Winger video that was nearly an hour and a half long. And before I scripted my response, I went through his video and cut out a bunch of irrelevant stuff. The cut that I did respond to ended up being 36 minutes long. But the issue here is one of substance. What I was cutting out of Mike's video was him repeating himself and going off on unrelated tangents. What Matt was cutting out of Anna's video was anything that she said that made it too obvious that she isn't an atheist. He used this video to say that the things that atheists believe are based in magic or fantasy and played her explanation of why she believes in a deistic god with any references to the deistic god that she believes in removed as supporting evidence of the magical thinking of atheists. He couldn't find an atheist that would say it in a way that would be useful for him. She seems like she might be moldable. But I mean, Matt Powell is just some silly little guy. As far as I can tell, nobody really takes him seriously. But how about someone like Alan Parr? His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers, and he regularly has guests like Frank Turek, Elisa Childers and Mike Winger, just to name a few. Here he is explaining that slavery in the ancient Hebrew world was primarily a voluntary welfare program of sorts. In the Hebrew culture, slavery was primarily volitional. So in other words, if a person was too poor to provide for themselves or if they were in debt, they would oftentimes hire themselves out to someone who was richer, who could provide for them or pay off all of their debt. Others would choose to be slaves to ensure that all of their basic needs were met by their master. Either way, slavery in the Hebrew culture was volitional. Notice the Bible verse he has displayed there. I'll go ahead and read it as he's showing it. Exodus 21, five through six. But if the servant declares, I love my master and I do not want to go free, then he will be his servant for life. OK, that doesn't sound so bad. A servant decides to remain a servant because of how much he loves his master. Right. Wait a second. Why are there a bunch of ellipses in the verse? Let's go ahead and look it up for ourselves, shall we? Huh. Alan seems to have left out some of the words, quote. But if the servant declares, I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free, then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life. Alan seems to have left out the part where the master physically disfigures the servant in order to make him a servant for life. And what was all that about a wife and kids? Where did they come from? Well, maybe we can find out by reading some context. Starting at verse two, quote, if you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free without paying anything. If he comes alone, he is to go free alone. But if he has a wife, when he comes, she is to go with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master. And only the man shall go free. But if the servant declares, I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free, then the master must take him before the judges. Then he will be his servant for life. So if we actually read the full passage without chopping bits out of the middle, then we see that a Hebrew servant can be given a wife during his tenure. But when he goes free, his wife and any children that he had with her remain the property of the master. So if he actually wants to stay with his family, he has to give up his freedom for the rest of his life. But Alan presented this as the servant loving the master so much that he's just content to be a lifelong servant. And it's not like Alan was just unaware of this context. He chose not to show it, and he never addressed it in the video. He was lying to make the Bible look better than it is. But I mean, hey, this verse is just talking about servants, right? Not slaves. Well, this part I can't prove definitively, but given his apparent comfort with lying about what the Bible actually says, I am convinced that he chose to use the NIV translation specifically to avoid the use of the word slave, because the thing is, this passage is describing a situation where someone can be coerced into providing a lifetime of unpaid labor. The word for such a person is not servant. It is slave. And my preferred translation, the ESV, uses that word, quote. But if the slave plainly says, I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free. Then his master shall bring him to God and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost and his master shall bore his ear through with an all and he shall be his slave forever. But sure, Alan, this is a totally voluntary system intended to provide welfare for the poor. Give me a break. And I mentioned that Alan had Frank Turek on. Have I caught Turek in a lie? Yes, but his are a bit more subtle than blatantly editing the text of the Bible to make it more palatable. The example that comes immediately to mind is his story about the time he got fired from Cisco and Bank of America for having written a book about why being gay is bad. Well, I'll let him say it. Wouldn't want to leave myself open to the accusation of lying about what someone was saying in my video about people lying now, would I? So here's that clip. Back in 2011, I was fired from two companies that I was doing corporate training for. I was fired from Cisco and Bank of America because I had written a book called Correct, Not Politically Correct, How Same Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone. Now, from that story, you'd think that he actually worked at those companies as an employee. But when you check out his LinkedIn page in 2011, he is listed as being the owner of the Austin Group, whose clients include Bank of America. So what it actually looks like is that he wasn't an employee of Cisco or Bank of America. He owned a company that they sometimes contracted with to put on leadership seminars, and they didn't renew the contract that year, possibly because of the complaint they received from the person that Turek refers to as the homosexual manager. Sorry, that's how he actually refers to the person in his article, Sex at Work. In this podcast, it's just an anonymous someone. If he were fired and was explicitly told during the process that he was fired because of his religious beliefs, as all of the articles about the event say, and 100% of which are told from Frank's perspective, then he could easily have sued them for wrongful termination. But it was far more valuable to Frank to be able to use this as a culture war moment. There are two possibilities that I see with this. Either he wasn't told that he was fired because of the book and a lawsuit would reveal that fact, or he was. But being able to use the story as part of his culture war shtick was more valuable to him than winning a lawsuit would be. And you can't really say that you've been canceled for your non woke opinions if you win that lawsuit. So best not to even sue in the first place. Or I suppose the third option, and most likely in my opinion, is actually that he wasn't an employee. He was an independent contractor, and the companies decided not to contract with him again. And if that third option is the case, then I hope an analogy will suffice to explain why Frank isn't entirely honest about it. Imagine I was a speaker and I regularly gave talks to the staff of cross examine.org, and then they found out about my atheist YouTube channel and decided they didn't want me giving talks to their staff anymore. So they stopped hiring me for that. I'm sure Frank would argue that this is well within their rights. They don't have to hire contractors who have a fundamental conflict and values with them. And I might even be inclined to agree with that. Now, this lie is, at the end of the day, rather inconsequential on its own. But it does show that Turek is willing to at least bend the truth to make it suit his narrative. But then there's a different kind of lie, the kind where if the person were just some random schmuck, they might simply be mistaken or uninformed about what they're saying, but they aren't just some random schmuck. They have advanced credentials in a relevant field. They couldn't have made it through the schooling necessary to receive those credentials without learning that the thing that they are saying is wrong. So they aren't just wrong. They are lying. For example, here is Dr. And so there is that process that's happening today that clays in that respects do slowly settle out of stagnant water. So their argument is if you have all this clay that became shale, you know, hundreds of feet of shale in one location or thousands of feet of shale. Shale is the most common sedimentary rock on Earth. And there's a lot of it. And so just to get layers that are 500 to maybe a thousand foot thick or more, they're arguing that would take millions of years for that to slowly settle out of solution and has to be a lot of stagnant water or near stagnant water. So clay particles settle out of stagnant or near stagnant water when forming shale. And that is one of the reasons we know the Earth is old. With how slowly shale forms, it would take millions to billions of years to make the amount of it that we see on the Earth. Except that's not entirely true. I mean, it is true that given what we know of rock formation, the Earth has to be billions of years old in order to accumulate the rocks that have formed. But specific to the deposition of clay particles, it is a pretty basic fact of geology that there are several depositional environments that can deposit clay, many of which are not stagnant or near stagnant. Maybe he was generalizing. Except, no, he wasn't. The whole point of that line of argumentation was to bring up an experiment where the researchers observed clay particles being deposited in water that was moving at one foot per second. You really see in the real world there has to be moving water. And they found out you have to have water moving at least a foot per second to get these little laminations or these little thin layers. When I initially responded to this video, I was unable to find such an experiment. He didn't name the experiment or the researchers. So there's not really a lot to go on. Today, I did find a paper that he might have been talking about, but it still doesn't really match what he said. They were looking at scenarios in which clay could be deposited on a riverbed. And while they didn't really talk about overall speed of the water, the shear velocities they were looking at do have some that were around the one foot per second or 0.3 meters per second to use civilized measurements. But it wasn't the kind of deposition that would result in shale. The clay particles only made up about one percent of the deposition by mass, and they were only deposited in localized protected zones. But all of that is rather beside the point. He has presented a scenario where the geologists are ignoring that clay can be deposited in water that is moving. And in spite of the evidence to the contrary, they won't update the textbooks. They'll see the textbooks. Even though this has been happening like 2007, 2008 has been publications on this. People really aren't grabbing onto it because it does go against the old earth ideas that. Wow, clay's really hard deposit by moving water. That seems to fit more with catastrophism, seems to fit more with a global flood. And so there's a lot of textbooks. They're just they're not even bringing that up. However, if we open the textbook, A Practical Guide to Introductory Geology from 2020, we find this handy dandy little table that shows the various sediment types that can be expected in various depositional environments, and several of the ones that include clay are environments that would definitely involve moving water like river deltas and tidal flats. He is relying on the fact that most people don't know enough about geology to contest what he's saying, even though to have a Ph.D. in geology, he has to know that what he's saying is not true. That's what we call a liar. Now, let's move on to someone who's a little bit more slippery. Mike Winger. Here he is doing one of his ten questions live streams where he answers questions from his audience, taking one about divine The hiddenness and silence of God is causing me doubt. Is there any advice or help you can offer such as that? God is silent now because revelation has been completed with the New Testament. Thanks. The main thing I'd like you to notice about that question is that the person was asking for themselves. Hey, Mike, I am struggling with this problem. Please help me. The first thing he does in his response is to reframe it from. Here's a problem that you, a believing Christian, are experiencing into the divine hiddenness argument is a philosophical argument that nonbelievers use. The hiddenness of God is one of the it's simultaneously a philosophical argument against God's existence, or at least against God's love. And on the other hand, it is also a very emotionally heavy and influential argument. He then goes on to treat this as though the divine hiddenness argument is being made by someone who is not a Christian. So if you had a sincere nonbeliever, a nonbeliever who was sincerely looking and searching for God, but not finding God, that would perhaps prove that God doesn't really love them and want them saved. After that, he explicitly states that he's talking about God hiding from this hypothetical person. This is the divine hiddenness thing. God's so God's hiding from this person, this this hypothetical person. Remember, the person who asked this question was not a hypothetical person. They were a Christian who was starting to have doubts because despite the fact that they had been diligently seeking God, God seemed to be ignoring them. But it gets worse when addressing the actual divine hiddenness argument. Mike says this. I've seen atheists who bring a divine hiddenness argument, and the way they do it, it's as though the argument was an afterthought to their atheism. And they say to me how sincere they are. I'm not saying every atheist is like this. I'm merely giving one example of one way this can play out. They they they say like, hey, I'm going to spend a little time like really praying, really going to church, even really maybe singing worship songs as a way of later being able to say, hey, I sought the Lord. I really tried. And that confirms my atheism one more time. Perhaps the agenda here was a way of proving themselves right about God all along. So here we have a slippery kind of lie. He didn't outright tell a falsehood, but he did completely reframe the question in order to avoid having to deal with the hard truth that there are Christians who sincerely seek God but don't find him. Such a thing is impossible for someone like Mike. So rather than actually answer their question, he pretended that they were actually talking about some hypothetical atheist friend of theirs. Somehow, he still managed to get worse. But I've already left the link to the video where I respond to that one in full. So I'm not going to rehash it here, though he does explicitly say that the kind of person that the questioner is is a kind of person who does not exist. So on top of being dishonest, he also took someone who was coming to him for help in their time of need and then said that they are a kind of person who can't exist. So we've seen apologists unambiguously lie about facts that are easy to check, lie about the positions that are held by people they respond to, lie about the actual words of the Bible, lie about their backstory, lie about their field of expertise and lie about what they themselves said mere seconds before they started lying. Why do I feel the need to make this video? Well, firstly, it's because I wasn't lying when I was an amateur apologist, but I was being lied to. I believe the professional apologists to my own detriment. And there are apologists who do sincerely believe what they are saying. But like me, they believe it because they were lied to by people that they trusted. And I won't always be able to tell the difference. So despite what I said in the intro, I will still be giving people the benefit of the doubt, even though I'm tired of it. But more than my annoyance at not being able to distinguish between the liars and the victims of the liars and my butthurtness about having believed liars myself at one point, we're left with a rather important question here. If Christianity were actually true, would we expect the professional defenders of the faith to have to resort to lying in order to do their job? The fact that so many of them can't argue for Christianity honestly suggests to me that they don't actually believe it. Why they argue for a thing that they don't believe is up for debate. My money's on money for most of them. But I don't see how you can lie in defense of something while still believing in the thing that you had the lie to defend. In my view, the mere existence of apologetics is evidence against the Christian God's existence. But the fact that so many of them have to resort to dishonesty just makes it so much worse for them. That's it for this one. Today's comment of the day comes just from everyone who is complaining about the inconsistent volume in last week's video. I apologize for that. We've been switching away from Adobe products recently, and unfortunately, Adobe's audio tools were good enough that in most cases, a single button press was all that was needed to fix up everything for YouTube. But what happened last week is that I got too focused on making sure my release schedule is consistent, and I sacrifice quality for the sake of the schedule. My life has been crazy busy recently. And while I did notice the issue in that video with plenty of time to either fix it myself or send it back to Piper to be fixed, I got busy with kid and family stuff. I didn't get around to it. And then I realized that if I didn't upload it when I did, I wouldn't have time to fix it before it was supposed to be published. And so I made the call to have it go up on time rather than correct the issue. Going forward, I will prioritize quality over the schedule so that we don't end up with those sorts of issues in the future. I'm also going to attach a poll to this video because I'm not actually sure what to do about last week's video. YouTube doesn't let me update it once it's up in order to fix it. I'd have to publish a new video, which is the sort of thing that people find annoying. So should I republish it with the fixed audio or should I just leave it be at this point? Also, if you're listening on the podcast, I haven't checked in a while, so I might be wrong on this one, but I'm pretty sure Spreaker, which is my podcast hosting service, allows me to change the audio out after the fact. So if you were annoyed by it on the podcast last week and you want to listen to it properly, it should be fixed by now. So you can just go like redownload it. And it should work, hopefully, if they still have that feature. Anyway, back to the YouTube people. Should I fix it or should I just leave it? Let me know by voting wherever YouTube puts the voting thing. I don't think I've ever actually seen those before, but I know it's a thing they can do now, so I'm going to do it. Thanks for watching. I'll be back next Friday with more. But if you need to get your right to fix him before then, I live stream with service every Wednesday at 830 Eastern on my other channel, The Watering Hole. Thanks to Piper for being my editor. And special thanks, as always, to my patrons, Christian Badalado, Ross Sheldon and all the rest who are the lies that are told by the apologist that is my channel. If you'd like to prove me wrong by virtue of your existence, you can join us on Patreon for as little as a dollar per week over at Patreon.com slash Vice Rhino or by supporting the channel in one of the other methods that can be found at links.vicerhino.com, which is also where you'll find links to my other projects. If for whatever reason you want to send me stuff, my P.O. Box address is in the description. See you next time.