Welcome to episode 36 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose continue our discussion on how to choose a worldview. We discuss a specific and early passage from the Bible about the Messiah, and whether Jesus is the best match. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 36:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose continue their discussion about whether all religions are equally valid paths to God. In this episode, we look at a passage from the Bible that makes many specific predictions about the Messiah. We’ll discuss whether Jesus is a good match for the predictions in the passage. Then we respond to objections from a well-known skeptic. This episode is the fourth in a five-part series.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

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Music attribution:

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

I’m always vigilant when the people in law enforcement target religious people. It’s especially a problem when the bigotry is coming from the top of federal law enforcement. Christians pay the salaries of these people through our taxes, and what do we get in return? We get labeled as domestic terrorists. Our homes are broken into in pre-dawn raids. Assault rifles are pointed at our pets and children.

Here’s the story from the Daily Signal:

FBI Director Christopher Wray may have lied under oath concerning the FBI Richmond office’s Jan. 23 memo citing the Southern Poverty Law Center in urging investigation of “radical traditional Catholic hate groups,” Rep. Jim Jordan suggested in a letter sent Wednesday.

The issue is that Wray tried to minimize the scope of the FBI’s investigation into Catholics:

On July 12, Wray testified to the House Judiciary Committee that the memo represented “a single product by a single field office, which, as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.”

He says it was a “single field office”, but the memo reveals collaboration between multiple field offices. In other words, he apparently lied under oath, and the investigation was apparently much bigger than he wanted people to believe:

Yet on July 25, 2023, the FBI produced a version of the Richmond document with fewer redactions than an earlier version the FBI had produced. “This new version shows that the FBI’s actions were not just limited to ‘a single field office,’ as you testified to the Committee,” Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in his letter to Wray.

[…]The less-redacted version of the memo also “explicitly states that FBI Richmond ‘[c]oordinated with’ FBI Portland in preparing the assessment.”

“Thus, it appears that both FBI Portland and FBI Los Angeles field offices were involved in or contributed to the creation of FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists,” Jordan added.

“First, they went after moms and dads at school board meetings. Now, they’re going after traditional Catholics. When’s it going to stop?” Jordan told The Daily Signal.

I think it’s time for taxpayers – the people who pay the salaries of the FBI employees – to ask whether we are getting good value for the money we are paying.

Remember this story from Daily Wire?

FBI agents reportedly raided the home of a pro-life activist in Pennsylvania on Friday and arrested him.

A group of between 25 and 30 FBI agents raided the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of pro-life activist Mark Houck early Friday morning, his family told LifeSite News. Houck is the leader of a nonprofit group that provides sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics in Philadelphia.

[…]“The kids were all just screaming,” Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie, told LifeSite. “It was all just very scary and traumatic.”

Ryan-Marie Houck told the outlet that the group of agents in SWAT gear arrived in 15 vehicles outside the family home at around 7:05 a.m. Friday morning. The agents quickly surrounded the house and began pounding on the door, demanding they open up. Houck reportedly tried to get the agents to calm down, noting that his seven children were scared, but the agents kept shouting. “[T]hey had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” his wife said.

Houck and his wife asked the agents why they were there, to which the agents allegedly replied that they were there to arrest him. His wife asked for a warrant, but “they said that they were going to take him whether they had a warrant or not,” Ryan-Marie Houck recalled.

What did he do to get his house raided by 25-30 armed FBI agents in 15 vehicles?

This:

According to his wife, Houck was providing sidewalk counseling at abortion centers in Philadelphia last year, and had taken his then 12-year-old son. On multiple occasions over weeks, a “pro-abortion protestor” allegedly shouted vulgarities and insults at the boy. Houck repeatedly told the protestor not to speak to his son, but the protestor continued to encroach on the boy’s personal space, still spewing vulgarities. Finally, Houck shoved the man away, causing him to fall down. The protestor was not injured, but tried to sue Houck. Though the case was thrown out this summer, it was somehow picked up by the DOJ, Ryan-Marie Houck said.

Why would we have people who are showing this high level of dishonor and immorality in federal law enforcement? Isn’t it time to fire them all and start from scratch, hiring people who actually have some fidelity, bravery and integrity?

One of my readers is an expert at the moral argument, and wrote a number of articles about his experiences talking to non-Christians about it. He comes from a liberal Christian background, so his views and experiences are not the result of growing up in a conservative Christian environment.

In the first article, he talks about what theists mean when we say that atheists can’t rationally ground objective morality:

They misunderstand us to be implying that they are immoral people. But this is not at all what we are saying. Since we believe that the moral law is incumbent upon every human, and is woven into the very fabric of our souls, we are not at all surprised to find even atheists dancing to its tune (to mix my metaphors). The fact that atheists very much want to be thought of as good people is only a tacit admission that they understand that there is such a thing as “good” and that it is good to be good. But if morality is merely a human convention, then the most that an atheist can be claiming is that they are morally fashionable.

There’s no moral credit for doing that.

In the second article, he talks about whether atheists can “reason” their way to correct moral views, if their conception of reality says that the universe and humans are accidents:

A chance ethical system cannot do the trick if it is true that there are right and wrong answers. If there are indeed objectively right answers to moral questions, then reason is certainly an ally, since it can help us to assess the conditions and marshal our intuitions, but it does not in itself make the answer right. Neither does an ethical system make right answers; it can only (if legitimate) help us to navigate through real passes with real reefs and currents. But you could never say that any ship of history had hit a reef unless you were first willing to admit that things such as ships and reefs actually existed. That’s a very big pill to swallow for anyone committed to a purely material world, where truth and ethics extend no farther than the will and imagination of the biochemical flukes we call “humans.”

In the third article, he takes on the argument by atheists that much of the moral evil in the world is due to theists:

When asking whether a behavior is caused by a belief system it must first be determined if that behavior is consistent with the beliefs in question. For a religion like Christianity there is some hope of doing so, since it is founded upon certain doctrines and is in possession of a guidebook — the Bible — to which one might appeal in making a ruling. For this reason a strong case can be made that most of what is commonly credited to Christianity is actually a violation of its fundamental principles. It is not consistent with Christianity; it is antithetical to it. And if something is inconsistent with a thing it is hard to make a case that it is caused by that thing.

In the fourth article, he talks about how atheists misunderstand the purpose of acting morally in Christianity:

The irony is that Christianity does not even teach that we win heaven by virtue of our good works. In fact, it may be the only religion that explicitly rejects such an idea. For example, Islam actually teaches that our good deeds must outweigh our bad, and Eastern religions teach that we must work our way to enlightenment through various moral and spiritual practices. By contrast, Christianity teaches that we must put aside our futile thoughts of measuring up to God’s perfect standard and throw ourselves upon the mercy of His court. We have but to accept, as spiritual beggars, the provision He has made to cover our sin and win our righteousness in Christ.

Good works come as a result of our love and gratitude toward our creator and redeemer; they are not the cause of our redemption. The Christian ideal is to be good for God’s sake, not for the sake of what He can do for us. God is not to be confused with Santa Claus. To think otherwise is to make the mistake that Satan made regarding Job’s motivation for righteous living (Job 1:9-11).

In the fifth article, he talks about whether atheists can rationally ground the claim that they are “good” at morality:

As it turns out, most atheists who like to think of themselves as moral do so with a sense that they are saying something particularly meaningful. The implication is that they have access to moral knowledge that they are committed to put into practice. It is something like saying that you are a good baseball player, which refers to a particular game with known rules and objectives that you skillfully follow. If this is not true, then a moral atheist is just asserting that they follow their own desires; they are saying little more than, “I do what I feel like doing, and whatever I do I call ‘good.'”

It might be a fun activity to read these posts, then find an atheist and ask them whether they are a good person, and what do they mean by “good” and “evil”.  Ask them whether they are making free decisions, and how can that be possible if they are just made out of matter. The moral argument is the most accessible argument to discuss with non-Christians.