Truly understand or know God unless you directly engage with how God himself reveals himself. So you have to engage with God's revelations in order to come to the understanding of God. So natural theology, which is accepted in Catholicism, is kind of then rejected. It's because God is not like other things in nature that you could rationally understand. God is very distinct from those things. You have to
rely on scripture in order to understand God. So therefore, you can't say that Muslims worship the same God, because no matter what they worship, it is not the God that is in the revelation of the Bible.
And I just put up the Paul did Anoniasis arguments prove that Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God. All right, we've got Jay here. Let's bring Jay in.
All right, yours?
What's up?
Jay in the payroom?
Hey, what's up?
Thank you guys for bringing me on. I appreciate that. Uh, I didn't mean to be annoying. I mean, it's y'all show. Of course you you don't have to bring me on, but I appreciate it.
I always appreciate having pastor Randy Boles, and.
Well, I'm here to set y'all straight, because the course we all worship Jesus even if we don't know him. If we just come down to the Monster truck rally this weekend at my megachurch.
Truck a Pillar versus Ford Zilla, thanks to watch those commercials. Yeah, all right, so we got this. We got this. Poll up, ladies and gentlemen, Jay, our audience is clearly biased in favor of the idea that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.
Well, I think you were right when you said that the polls could reflect a lot of Protestant perspectives. And I have to say that the Protestants have been pretty spot on on this one versus the Catholics, because all the Protestants I've seen, for the most part, have the correct take that it's pretty clearly intuitively just not the case that it's the same deity being quote worshiped. And then, like you said, there could be some you know, Ortho bros.
As well in the polls, but there's just something I think innately confusing about the idea that it is the same God, given how different that theology is. So I think and you guys probably already touched on this, but the question was worship, and in Orthodox theology particularly, worship is not just mental assent, and so there was a constant equivocation going on between the idea of mental reference or abstract conceptual pointing at or intending a thing versus
the worship of the thing. And that's why it was very important to talk about out the magisterial statements of the Roman Catholic Church in terms of how they're supposed to view it, because remember Roman Catholicism does have a lot of intellectual schools. You've got Tomas, you've got Scotis, et cetera. But ultimately it's supposed to be guided by the magisterium. And that's kind of what I came to debate.
We were going to split it between FDA and I. I would take the magisterial side and then took the linguistic, philosophy and epistemology side of it. But to be more specific about FDA, he's working from a paper by a guy named doctor garibe And the reason he's relevant is that both Gariby and doctor Trent had studied under Swinburne.
And it's Swinburne, who is a Tomas who came up with this idea that there's a rational core doctrine of what makes up natural theology's idea of the essential core attributes of identifying the one God, and so Gariby argued that in his paper, if you could demonstrate that there is no rational then the whole natural theology project falls apart. And one of the arguments that he makes, there's many. It's a pretty long paper. It's really good. I recommend
anybody read it. But one of the arguments that he makes is that you kind of assume from the outset what's in question. If you think that, oh, well, of course Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have the same core doctrine because they all believe in a monotheistic omnipotent, omni president, et cetera. You start listing these omnis and so forth, eternal, free, good, creator, personal,
et cetera. But the problem is that, first of all, some of these attributes don't actually apply to a law, not at least in the way that the Orthodox conception of them, or even the Roman Catholic conception of them eventually fleshes them out. For example, Allah when we talk about as a creator in the Korean you know, Allah is also the creator of evil. Evil seems to have
a kind of an actual substantial existence. So even the notion of what a creator is and Islam is kind of already right there, very different from what it is in Christianity, perhaps Judaism. You have this idea that God desires to be worshiped and obeyed, But what that means to worship and obey, this is one of Swinburn's core
doctrines for natural theology, is very very different. In Islam, it's a submission to a kind of Arab war lord version of a deity, and in Christianity it's worship involving sacrifice.
Islam does not have a notion of sacrifice. And so that's why I kept pinting out that if the premise of the debate is how or the question of worship do they worship the same God constantly through the debate, you would hear and I've heard Roman Catholics ever since, just going back to this idea that well, Muslims assent to the mental notion of there being one God, but the debate was not just about sin and referent or
abstract conceptual pointing out and intending a thing. It was about worship, and God specifically is worshiped through sacrifice, whether we want that or think that in Islam notoriously doesn't have that. So ironically, Protestantism, which does admit the sacrifice of Christ, is much closer to our position as Orthodox.
You could argue even Judaism perhaps than the Islamic conception, which is further removed just on the question of worship, because you would have to restrict the whole debate and the idea of worship to an assent to propositions. And in the Tomistic conception, I'm not saying that they don't believe that worship is about sacrifice or the Mass or whatever Christ they do. But if you ask Aptomis or
Roman Catholic like, what is the faith? Usually it's cashed out as assenting to the propositions of that the magisterium proposes for beliefs.
So that's what the faith is.
And so their idea is, if you can get a Muslim to assent to this proposition, this proposition, this proposition, this one in common, then aren't we referring to the same entity? And you absolutely were spot on, David, in the way that you described the argument that FDA is presenting there that because God's more like an abstract object.
Not that he is, but he's more like that than a sort of an empirical natural object, that to get one thing wrong is enough to disqualify the reference, whereas in empirical objects you could conceivably get multiple things wrong and still be referring to an attending the same object. But God is more like something like a set, and not saying that God is a set. But even the argument that we have a core set of doctrines, I mean, for an orthodox Christian, triad would be a core doctrine.
So it's very odd that triad is God being Trinity or God also being God the Son. It's odd that that would not be an essential core identifier or thing that picks out this reference. And I think you would have to go in that direction to argue it. And I think they just never did really establish that. And last thing I'll said, I mean to keep rambling on it is y'all show it on me to barge in.
But when he talked about something like a conjunct or a set, FDA was basically just saying that if you think about, say the niceing Creed, you know, or something like the way that God is described in the Creed, I believe in one God, the Father, and then it talks about the Trinity. Right, that's kind of a set that you could say defines the Christian conception of the
deity of God. And even though a Muslim might have sent to agree to certain propositions like eternal and God is omniscient or whatever, although you could actually argue that because even to me it argues that God isn't omniscient. The Koran speaks of Allah updating his knowledge and kind of being limited. So I'm not even sure you you
could argue that Allah is omniscient. But regardless, it's more like a set of So if you had a set of like if you had a set of numbers right one to six, and if I just take out one of those numbers, even though there's the other five still in common, it's actually a different set because I've taken away one of the numbers of the set.
And so he's.
Arguing that the way that we ought or speak of God is more like that than it is like an empirical object like Clark Kenton Superman that you could be confused over. And so when you remove those essential attributes, even if it's one essential attribute, it actually fails to
obtain hitting the reference. And that's FDA's argument. So the other thing that Garribee points out is that it's kind of like and this is more in the domain of the critique of natural biology, is it's kind of like a card game.
He says, if.
You think about go playing Go Fish and if you think about playing poker. Between the two, there's a lot of things in common. There's cards, there's rules, there's strategies, there's techniques, et cetera, betting or whatever. But there's no common card game between the two card games. Just because there's a bunch of things in common. They're they're mutually exclusive, unique sets of games that are determined by the rules
and structures of that game. So if you start taking away rules, it's you know, even if you take away one rule, well it's no longer poker, it's no longer go Fish. The game is pretty much kind of spoiled.
At that point. And that's I think what FDA was trying to argue.
Did they I don't I don't know what The response to that would be because the examples that people give when they want to say, hey, you can have you can have completely different, even contradictory descriptions and still be referring to the same thing, and then him saying, yes, in this world where you where you, you have other means of knowing that you're talking about the same thing.
You can say we're talking about the same thing, even if we're describing it differently or in a contradictory fashion, and him saying, but that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about something where oh, here's how we know we're talking about the same thing. We've got your idea or what you know, your creed or whatever, and so if yours is different, that's what you got to go on, and so you're not talking about the same thing. Did they respond to that.
Yeah.
What I recall is that the response is because they come from a perspective of empirical theology. And I'm not saying they're empiricists, but tomistic philosophy and theology is very empiricist empirically based, and so from them, the perspective is that the only things that you do know about God, whether it's the natural revelation that you get through causation in the natural world and reasoning back to the original cause, or whether it's the text that you read in scripture.
They're all empirical and so you're really just sort of piecing together from created causation things that you can derive about this ultimate principle. So there's natural revelation or natural theology, and then supernatural theology from scripture and tradition and the
Roman Catholic system. So but for them there they would not I don't think they would grant the argument that God is more like an abstract object and not a natural object, because their theology kind of prioritizes God like a natural object.
One question that I have, Jay, I think there's also something like this I think came up. I didn't watch the whole debate, but I think I saw a clip or something like that. But somebody might argue that the way it is qualified that Muslims would not be described as worshiping the same God because they get certain certain
core aspects wrong. Would wouldn't it be wouldn't it jeopardize or wouldn't this also be in some way or the other applied to for example, from the Orthodox of you to to Catholics or others who for example hold the idea of the filioque, or or to Orthodox or to Oriental Orthodox Christians for example, who have even if if you want to reduce it to semantics who have a different description of the nature of Christ for example.
Yeah, and I just got someone someone raised up the I just wanted to put it on the on the screen there because we've got the same thing. But Heisenberger, actually, I can put these in the middle and they don't block people. Heisenberger here said something pretty similar considering FDA's argument, couldn't certain Christians not be considered worshiping the same God
since their exact mental views of God are different? And even further, as I was pointing out earlier, I mean, you'd have millions of Christians who believed in some sort of differences in terms of things God has done or how God created or something like this. So wouldn't I mean that we're all worshiping different gods?
Basically, Yeah, this is actually in both of you guys's questions, you actually anticipate where the debate goes. So the next section of the debate ends up being about knowing God through sort of empirical data, and they end up debating about the Eucharist because FDA argues, well, no, you also, as a Catholic, believe that you are empirically encountering God in the Eucharist because you believe that it's body, blood, soul,
and divinity. And that becomes a really interesting kind of detour because they end up saying, as Thomas, not really even though they do believe in the real presence in the Eucharist, it just kind of goes weird.
I'll put it that way.
You can determine for yourself how you think that section goes. But then the debate goes to this question and they press FDA on this.
You know, what wouldn't this mean then.
If you have a heterodox conception of the deity, that that would also then kind of negate it, and you would it would be basically another kind of false God or idol. And actually we would argue as Orthodox that yes, in the traditional patristic argumentation, at least in the Orthodox Church, and what you see in people like saying Gregory Palamas. Palmas has a really good discussion of how heresy creates a kind of a mental idol that is the replacement
fake God. So an idol doesn't have to be, you know, a statue of the thuggy cult Collie or whatever like in Timbala Dooom, and idol can also be a kind of a mental conception that is an idol ideologry you could say, so, yeah, actually FDA argues that. But to be really clear here, that doesn't mean that everybody who's got something wrong is a heretic, because in our theology and anthropology we would also say that heresy is something that is not so much a sin of knowledge as
it is mainly a sin of obstinacy and will. So you have to be obstinate in the rejection of truth to be a specifically a heretic. And that's why you see, for example, when Basil is writing against the Arians who are basically Chose witnesses or even basically proto Muslims, because the Oxford Handbook of Islam says that Islam comes out
of Arian Christianity. Even the Arians, Basil says, have essentially erected a false God, so it's no longer the same reference, even though they might intend to be worshiping the one True God. If I think a rock, you know, is the one true God or the Kabbah, or so if I think Iraq is the one true God and I worship it as the one true God, like, it's not me accidentally worshiping Jesus for the Trinity, because it's still an idol, And so you can also have a heterodox
conceptual idol as well. Now we don't know god men's hearts. God only knows men's hearts, and so we can't sit here and like judge every single individual Protestant. But a person who obstinately persists creates their own kind of idol.
This, this is the This is what I meant earlier when I said that that within the Orthodox theology, the discussion here generally seems to be focused much more on something something deeper than about what what what can be on the surface or you know, legally be said to be true or you know, what could be considered appropriate
for example. What I'm trying to say is when father Deacon and Ayas made his point here, it seems to really bring forth the difference in what the Orthodox side is actually talking about and what the Catholic side it is actually talking about. So, uh, the two seem to have a completely completely different understanding of what it actually
means to worship God in the sense. So uh, the Catholic side simply says, well, you know, if they direct themselves towards Our God in one way or another, and you know, say that they do, then to us they worship God, whereas in the Orthodox from the in the Orthodox perspective, it is it goes much further than that in order to be qualified as worshiping the same God. Because you have to be right.
There when you said meta earlier, you said, it's like a bigger it's holistic versus the kind of like bottom up, like the Rumman Catholic project is kind of like a bottom up, and then the other perspective is just holistic.
So I think you're absolutely right.
Yeah, and that's why we have the Eastern Orthodox Protestant Brotherhood alliance.
On this on this issue.
It's weird because, like you know, for so many years you wear, oh, the Catholics and the and the Protestants are so close, I mean Catholics and Orthodox are so close, and then it's like this comes.
Up in the last few days. It's like we will every Protestants or like we're on the same.
Page, wouldn't you say that this is also one of the grievances that Protestants have had historically with the Catholic Church and what kind of developed to this level as well, where hre where the Catholic Church went a little bit far in terms of scholasticism and uh legalism and making everything, defining everything with one hundred percent rationality and not letting it go unless you can, unless you can totally rationally
define it. And Christian theology is generally a little bit different from that.
Yeah, like a Quinta said, you know, it's almost like by the Middle Ages they want a kind of a scientific definition of win exactly within the mass the confecting of the euchars actually occurs, and it's like, how are
you going to scientifically define that? It's like, you know, in the Orthodox conception, it's like there's no scientific like, oh, it's at this point and then if you and then if you scale it down, this is the essence of the mass, And I mean that's literally this Inroolic Roman theosism, you have mad form, an intention, and all of those are necessary to have a sacrament. So it's very like you said, it's very scientific, or at least it tries
to be. And yeah, absolutely, like the paradigms determine even things like the worship, Like we don't we wouldn't restrict the worship to merely mental assent. And I'm not saying that they restricted to that. But in order for this argument to work that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, worship has to be restricted to mental assent. To God
is won, God is eternal. But wait a minute, worship is according to you know, the Book of John and the Book of First John, like directed to the Son who directs us to the Father, and it's in the Holy Spirit. So you can't really divorce this trinitarian relationship from worship in the Christian scheme. And that's that's what you would have to do to retool this idea that well, they're not worshiping the Trinity or Christ, but they're worshiping
these sort of like abstracted attributes over here. But in orthodox Trinitarian theology, like there's no attributes that come to you from the essence of God that aren't Trinitarian attributes. So Basil says, for example, that all the energies that come down, or the attributes or operations that come down to us from God come to us in the mode of from the Father, through.
The Son and the Spirit.
So the attributes are in the mode of the triad from where they come. So there could never be attributes divorced from or understood abstracted from God is triad. And once I read Loski saying that, I read Loski saying that a long time ago when I was still Roman Catholic, and I was like, whoa, I never thought about that. And Loski's like, not just an Orthodox do like he
studied under Etiangilson, who was like the premier Tomas. So you had somebody studying under the top tone who became, you know, very famous Orthodox theologian, and so he knew Tominism very well to critique it, and that kind of transformed this whole discussion natural theology for me.
So this, this is why you could basically say that if you don't, if you don't, well oh yeah, one second, I don't know how long everyone wants to go.
I'm good all night long, but I'm dying of thirst and I need some more betveror so you guys go ahead and chat for a second while I grab some water.
Okay, okay, so this is why, No, I forgot my thought. No, no, this is this is why. So this is why you would say that if unless you have the right, unless you know God truly through the through the revelation, through the way he reveals himself, and therefore then established correct worship as you just described it, you could describe any other form of worship as idolatry. Whether the Liberator, Yeah.
John Damascus wrote a book, sen John Demscus wrote a book called on Heresies, and he goes back to the very beginning in Genesis and he says, when Adam and Eve fell, that's the beginning of paganism and idolatry. And he says that's the original heresy. And he argues as satan as a kind of heretics. So basically, even all the world religions could generally be speaking, be classed as heresies.
And so that I think ties into this notion that you're saying right there, Like if you look at Romans One, the way that a Roman Catholic or a Tomas would usually explain Roman's One, where Paul's talking about the pagan world. Roman Catholics usually execute that as kind of like the highest elements of pagan society, like Plato and Aristotle were able to sort of reason from the created order to a principal, first principle, a monad, a first cause, or
something like that. But in the Orthodox perspective, it's more so like if you read Singer or Palomas on it, it's like, no, no, no, it's not a problem in their intellect, it's a problem in their heart or their news. So Paul says that they exchanged the worship and love of the true God, going back to Adam and Eve for universal idolatry, and Paul says in verse twenty five that they changed the truth about God into a lie
and worshiped and served the creature, not the Creator. So that's specifically saying that when you go after false gods, like Deuteronomy thirteen says, or Deuteronomy eighteen, you know, God warns the Israelites. He says, do not go after other gods, or else you're no longer worshiping me. Right In the Song of Moses, Moses says that they sacrificed to devils, to gods they didn't know, and they forsook the God.
They did know the one true God. So we would argue that those are texts kind of making the same point. Like Paul says the First Corinthians ten. He says, the things that the gen tele sacrifice, they sacrificed to devils and not to God. And so every heresy, every false religion is basically making a fundamental mistake in not worshiping God the way that He has to be worshiped according to the Tin Commandments.
Wow, I was just gonna.
This is actually a very Hebrew principle. This is this is like.
For example, your camera went out, buddy, Oh.
It's my my battery died on my Yeah, I'll fix on a second.
But yeah, it's a Hebrew idea that like it's not all intellect, it's actually more of a heart problem. And this is what I tried to stress in the debate too, is like it's not really an error in reasoning, it's more so a spiritual kind of a heart issue.
I liked.
Yeah, so it seems like there's kind of two different arguments running. One is kind of more of a relational one and more is like understanding the attributes of God, but you're kind of blending them though with the idea of worship.
In Eastern Orthodox.
But I really like the first argument where you're talking about just the intuition of how this doesn't seem like the same God, because intuition is a huge part of language, and really what we're arguing about is like what this term God, how it should be used, and the idea that you were talking about putting it into a story. And I had that same contention where like, the way
we'll understand God is in a story. In the Christian story, he's worshiped with sacrifice and with love, and he's wanting this loving relationship, and that's so completely different.
And so.
It would be like knowing a person in my normal life and they just get so many facts completely wrong about me. At what point do I just say they don't know anything about me? Where it's like they, you know, they think that I want them to go and kill people so that they can sleep with hoories for all eternity. It's like, at what point do you just say that they just don't have any knowledge of me?
You know?
Yeah, And again, even knowing you could equivocate on that because in the passage in John four with the Woman of the Well, Saint Futini, right, Jesus is talking to her and he says very specifically that you do worship this thing, this idea that you have of the God of Jacob, but you don't know it.
So there has to be.
Some kind of knowledge in order for her to quote worship,
but it's not a true knowledge. And this is where in scripture will find pretty consistently, both Old and New Testament, two different notions of no. Right, like Adam knew his wife Eve, that's an intimacy, that's an intimate knowing, and that's the true kind of knowing that we're talking about here, knowing God in a true loving way, love and adoration way, versus what James says about the demons who know God but do not love God and cannot love God.
Right.
And I think the best argument that actually ended up being made on my side of things in the day was the topic of Jake. When Jake came up, I pointed out that, and I think this is a key point that you guys will definitely understand. And the reason this is resonating with people like David and ap very well in terms of not agreeing that it's the same deity being worshiped is because you guys know, you know, you know Islam. The people that were talking about they don't.
I don't think they actually know much about Islam, because, for example, Tomashevsky, he didn't seem to know much about it at all, especially not the history of the He thought that that the Middle Ages was the early period of Islam. The medieval popes were already into a well developed, you know, warfare based movement and religion on the part
of Islam. It wasn't early. And so what that means then is that if you understand that Islam, for example, rejects that God is father, Allah is no father, has no sons, then you can't even say that it's the same reference of the God of the Old Testament anymore, because that would be one of the fundamental things that say a Jew or you know, ancient Hebrew would say, well,
you know, Yahweh is our father. And if a Muslim is from the outset saying that that Islam is predicated on rejecting the Trinity and rejecting the deed to Christ, then the religion is not like a pagan Even if I granted natural theology and where we're talking about a pagan who's out in the middle of nowhere, and he happens to reason from the created order that there must be some first thing that is not what Islam is. Islam is already a religion that has some knowledge of
Christianity and explicitly rejects it. So that's why it was so I think damning to point out Jake the Muslim metaphysician, because Jake used to be in our discord for many years and he acted as if he was interested in Orthodox Christianity and all this, and really what he's doing is learning what our theology was.
Right.
So when Jake had a very i would say, pretty advanced idea of what we believe the Trinity is and the dety of Christ and all that, I would say amongst the Muslims, I don't. I mean, I think he's kind of kooky, but he probably understands the Trinity better than all the other Muslims. But he explicitly rejects and does not at all love God, the Trinity, or love Jesus.
So the idea that he's still worshiping the same deity just is patently absurd, And they affirmed that in the debate, and I think that was probably the weakest point, and I think people are noticing that that just makes absolutely no sense. Jake knows a lot about the Trinity, but he doesn't know the Trinity in a loving, intimate sense. And that's exactly what happens.
With the woman at the well. Jesus says. The Samaritan conceptions.
That you have, they might be of a God, but it's not the one that the Jews have, because salvation is of the Jews. And that's very important because that restricts the conception and the worship to a specific way.
And that's the point.
Well, they're just so drastically different it gets ridiculous. It's you either have to say that's two different gods, or you have to say the word God basically does not mean anything at all.
That's and at that point you would be at the position like perennialism or something, or or you would be at this position like, well, all religions then are just unknowingly worshiping God. And some of the Vaticans, some of the post Vatican two statements actually do say that. In fact, I found one today and it was actually Lofton that that was making this point.
So props to.
Michael Lofton, because I mean there's post Vatican two documents that I've got right here that say that basically the Holy Spirit is operating in Islam and other religions to say people in the religions.
That can be true, but there's still not the same God, you know. And I think even a Muslim might have an earnest prayer that they're trying to get to Allah and God would hear it and take it as a prayer coming to him. But that does not mean that the God of a law is the true God of you know, that created creation.
Well, I think again, like even if you did, like or the actually might say that the Holy Spirit could reach anybody and anybody could be given a revelation of Christ. We've heard, you know, for example, many Muslims who these stories have been going around for a long time that Muslims sometimes have dreams and Christ comes to them and they learned that Islam's fall. So that's definitely possible, but that's still some kind of specific like revelation of the
person of Christ. And even in the Roman Catholic Church. This is interesting. I've found this in Denzinger. I think it's very pertinent to this discussion. You can go back to the seventeen hundreds in the Roman Catholic Church, and there were certain doctrines that were considered quote absolutely necessary to receive quote the faith and baptism. One of those was, according to the Holy Office under quote Clement in the seventeen hundreds, you had to quote admit.
This is for the baptism of Muslims or Muhammedans.
If a Muslim or Mohammedan wanted to be baptized, the response to the Holy Office is that they must first be told the Trinity and the Incarnation, the two quote central doctrines of the faith. And then there's another question, a proposition that comes up earlier in the sixteen hundreds in Denzinger. Is faith in just one God necessary or must there be also the confession of God as the
rewarder and belief in the Trinity and the incarnation. Least so, Rum at least at one point, did not think that having the faith was merely having some assent to the idea of a generic creator. It was also necessary to profess the that the trend of the incarnation to receive baptism, and thus to receive the Catholic faith.
Jay, have you ever read the I spoke about it earlier during the stream, But the Declaration Dominusisus, published in two thousand by the Catholic Church, approved by John Paul the Second, it seems to I don't know, I've I've kind of I haven't read the whole thing through. I've
only looked at certain parts of it. I want to go through it, but it seems to actually kind of disagree and contradict with the idea that these that that Cameron or Trent or the other guy were presenting, And it seems to actually elaborate on the position of the Catholic Church and seems to say that they don't actually properly worship or that they don't actually they worship the same God, they actually lack the assent to God.
So I don't know.
I have to watch the whole debate to see how that fits in.
But it's a great question.
I haven't actually thought about this document since I was used to be a tradcat, so I'm not I'm not even sure I'm looking at it now. I don't remember exactly what what all is going on, but I would I would just simply say that when I was looking at a lot of the medieval texts and the medieval councils.
You especially have that one.
From fourth Ladder and Council No Council of vienn excuse me, Council VNN is the one that said that the Muslims adore their reprobate faithless prophet Mohammed who is and then it was also called Antichrist earlier on by Innocent the third.
It's like, I mean, just look at the change of language right like between if you're Antichrist, which is consistent with first John talking about how if you don't confess Christ coming in the flesh as fine son of God, you are spirit of Antichrist versus this idea that well, you know, we're all kind of on a spectrum, and you know, maybe you worship God sixty percent, but the Catholic Church worships God one hundred percent. It's like, you
either do or you don't. Like, I mean, you can have false conceptions, but in terms of what defines worship, I think you're gonna say my point is simply that the Catholic Church has said a lot of different things, and so you can kind of paste onto it what you want, like if you want to be like Mother Teresa, where you can go into Hindu shrines and pray, which he actually did on record. If that's what you think
Catholicism is, it can be that for you. If you think it's medieval crusaders following Innocent the Third to fight anti Christ Mohammed, you can make it into that. So there's enough documentation to kind of like paste together type of Roman Catholic system that you want. And that's I think both a strength and a weakness. I don't think it's true, but it's a strength because a lot of people can find ammo to make it what they want. But it's also a weakness because at a certain point
it's like, what exactly is Romatholicism. Is it calling a crusade in multiple crusades for many centuries to fight against the godless race of the Heathen Sarras and Muslims, or is it pacha mama Like we're praying, you know, to this human sacrifice idol, and we're gonna notice it's the same argument. The argument for why pacha Mama is okay is like, well, but it's kind of like Mary okay, But like every action, I mean satanic abuse, right or something like that, like if I human sacrifice, if I'm
in the Thugie call we watched Temple of Doom. Well there's some I mean there's some sacrifice going on. They have a liturgy, right, so there's.
Some things in common, so like what's wrong with it?
That was like when they did the watch Himama thing, like there was actually Roman callies were arguing it's okay because it's kind of like Mary, she's a goddess.
And she you know, likes to be honored and you know whatever. It's like. But no, it doesn't work like that.
Like it's not a thing where it's acceptable because there's some things that are similar. It's like there's a specific way that God has always been worshiped and it can't be mixed with the ways that the gods of the nations are worshiped.
So they might both be like necessary beings. But I don't think it's it helps because it feels immoral to me because it would be like you know, calling God saying that he's affirming everything Mohammad did, sleeping with.
Kids, mass murder.
So it would be like if I said, you know, jay Dire is a mass murderer and the mass murderer jay Diar, then thinking up has to be the same guy, because the real Jay Dire and the one I'm thinking are both human. It's like, just because your conception of God is necessary being, doesn't mean it's the same God. It feels it feels immral to attribute the horrible actions of a lot to God. It feels like satanic to me, deceivers right.
Yeah, the counterpoint I'm making this argument as well, and I also posted about this earlier when I made a list of how of how the Islamic God is different from the Christian from our from our understanding of God.
While I can talk about the moral differences and how the Islamic God is completely morally messed up, the counterpoint that Catholics in this discussion, for example, would bring up probably is that is that they can have a completely warped, completely messed up understanding of God while still turning toward the same God and therefore being described as worshiping that
same God from their perspective. But then again, we have to have a we have to have a long discussion about what do you mean by worship?
Yeah?
I think this, Yeah, I mean God can draw and does draw anybody at all times who's sincere and sincerely seeks him. You know, Paul says this in Act seventeen when he's talking to the Pagan philosopher, you know, the Greeks and everybody says, you know, God has set the times in the seasons and the nations, and you know, arranged providence such that if anyone should seek out right, that he should that he might be found. So I think God does meet us where we are, but.
We don't conclude from that.
I don't think that therefore anything counts as getting you to that referen And I mean, I just think that the way of the evidence and so many passages is just the only thing I can think of that even kind of speaks this way as Romans one. But even that, I think is the heart being darkened. And Paul specifically says they exchange the worst but the true God for darkness,
and they're in Pagan darkness. So even though they might get some things right, it's sort of like, I mean, there's a great critique that Father surfrom Rose has of Hinduism in the book Orthodoxy in the Religion of the Future, and he says the push for the sort of ecumenist one world religion movement is first premised on the idea that will many of the religions believe in one God.
And he says, but if you look at the way that the Hindus conceive of that one God, and by the way, Vatican two in no Stratat actually says, Hindus seek have a flight to the to God capital ge and love and trust. So even it almost acknowledges like Shakti, which is a version of Hinduism, which is quote monotheistic. And it's like but I mean saying that you're monotheistic, but also having this like pantheon of other deities in a kind of hinnotheism. I mean, at this point anything
could be monotheistic. You see, it can be so broad as to encompass. I mean, you know, you know there's theistic Satanists, right, there's people that the who work yeah, exactly, the Temple of Set believes there's one God. He created everything, he sustains everything. I don't know about all the other attributes. But like, and they say, but it's Set. It's the Set of Egyptian theology, which is the Satan of the
Jewish Hebrew Christian Bible. So would we conclude then that as these people do in the day, that they're like, yeah, it's still worshiping the Trinity.
It's like, that's still Accidentally, it's just ludicrous to.
Me, especially as a religion premist on rejecting the Trinity in the deed of Christ. I think that's the hardest thing for them to really get over, because.
Jesus says, you know.
Jesus says it in John five, John eight, and then in one John two it says, if you don't have son, you know the body.
So we were all kind of visibly confused when I keep forgetting his name. But the second Catholic speaker when he yeah, when when he said that that they wouldn't qualify everything as believe as worshiping the same God. For example, he wouldn't, uh, he wouldn't describe Mormons as worshiping the
same body. And we were all a little little bit confused about that because it seemed from Trent Doherty's reasoning that Mormonism would have to be described as worshiping the same God as well, and uh, from from everything else that they described, let's leave aside all the all the implications of Mormon theology and how we can describe that Mormon theology results in actually worshiping like an infinite number of gods that are kind of in the loop or
whatever you want to call it. They do claim to worship the God of Abraham, and they do claim to be monotheistic. They do claim to it does it does emerge within the car takes of the Bible narrative and so on. So it seems rather arbitrary that they would say we don't qualify Mormonism as worshiping the same goal.
And this is that point of the core doctrine thing. It's like, okay, so what's the core doctrine? Oh well, it's clearly Richard Swinburne's nine or ten list. Okay, but if we're going to include the Mormons, like doctor Trent does, then it can't be that ten list because the Mormons miss.
About half of those right.
Because God the Father is a man with a body, who's created and who evolved to become God.
That's the official Mormon doctrine. For those that don't know.
Matter is also eternal, so God is not when a Mormon says creator, it's the architect rearranging existing premium materia. They do not believe that God created matter. Matter is also eternal, and Mormonism so they believe in many principles and so it is fundamentally polytheistic. Even though a Mormon says our one God, though, is God the Father. Who's a dude, just a dude. So it's like, well, so does that count as a model. So in other words,
it's arbitrary exactly. So for doctor Trent, Mormons making the cut for Thomas Chevsky because he's a Thomas Mormons do not make the cut.
They don't get enough of the quote essential attributes.
And then even even when coming up with a list, there's to include Islam, he had to be kind of arbitrary by not including like God is triune or something like that. And so that's kind of the issue with you. If you're going to say, hey, if you if you have if you have this on your list, then you're you're in, and if you don't have this list, then
you're out. Well, you know who's making the list. Here, who's making the list, And you can easily add one thing and rule out Muslims, and you could easily take off a few, and then you get Mormons back in there and so on, and so yeah, Trent's Trent's argument. Basically, I don't even understand how how Trent's argument would rule out polytheists. I mentioned this earlier, Like.
Debate progresses, he actually says that if you worship he says literally, that you can worship God and demons at the same time.
He makes this argument that yeah, he said.
He says that because Israelites, for example, at one point were including Yahweh amongst the pantheon. They were worshiping demons and Yahweh, and so he was arguing that sea so it's it's so Muslims are worshiping even if they got it wrong, even it's still the same. But that's not the same, And that's the whole The point is that when God castigates the Israelites again, this is where the
golden calf comes in as a great example. It's like, no, you can't say the golden well, here's here's your Yahweh. Here's this you know, golden calf right here right? I mean it, It just doesn't work.
It would be like sleeping around with a bunch of people and then being like, but I'm still married to my wife, which is actually that's the metaphor.
The Old Testament, wild stuff, wild stuff.
You want to talk about it? Should I jump into some.
This is the this is the issue that I just want to I just want to go back to that point just for a second again. This is the issue where I mean when, when, when when Trent says that that you can worship demons and also worship God, and you that you are worshiping the same God, and to you and to us, this is and of course completely unacceptable. This once again brings to the surface the whole difference
between the whole difference of the two perspectives. As I said, the whole that that the meta which we are arguing about, versus the very surface level worship that they are talking about.
Yeah, last thing, I don't want to take too much, y'l. Tom. I appreciate you having me on.
Last thing I would say is just and I'll let you guys move on and finish her the debate. But I was saying, so a lot of them were using this analogy of like, okay, so look like let's say there's Superman, there's Clark Kent, and you can get the
reference wrong, but it's still the same. But this was funny because the in this if you use the Superman's story, this doesn't really work very well because Superman is actually cal L Right, So he's actually this sort of deity that's tricking people with two different identities that aren't really who he is.
Right.
Some people know him as Superman, but some people know him as cal Ls, as Clark Kent, but he's actually cal.
So this analogy that they kept wanting.
To go back to actually works to disprove the position because it means that basically, the true God is sort of like hiding amongst the different religions, right, and you don't actually you're actually worshiping him, but you don't know even though you think you're worshiping you know, colleagues. Actually, I mean so that analogy I don't think worked very good for them, and.
I thought of a better. Now I'll leave you guys with this.
Here's my last analogy for the for how I think this really works, And I'm gonna say it's the Bill Cosby analogy. So let's say that people think that Bill Cosby is the great American comedian. It's nineteen seventy eight. Funny dude, Yeah, right, even though this is not true.
But let's just say that Bill Cosby is like the premier comedian in nineteen seventy eight, and these group of clever marketers come up with this idea that no, actually didn't you know the whole time the real source of the comedy was his cousin, Charlie Cosby, and he's the real funny man. In fact, he's ten times funnier. And here look at all these posters we've got, and doesn't it.
Look like him. It's his cousin.
And they just took pictures of Bill Cosby and they tweaked it a little bit with nineteen seventy eight photoshot whatever that was, and they put a hat on him and that he's still got all the.
Same feeble fobbles, ebels, abew jokes and a haha haa.
And they sell the ticket one hundred dollars to sell out the stadium and people come. Turns out there is no Charlie Cosby.
It was a gimmick and it's a fraud. It's a fake.
There was only Bill Cosby the whole time. But these demonic marketers came up with this clever con and this clever scam. And that is I think the key point that you guys understand because you know Islam so well. Most of the Roman Catholics that we're talking about in this sphere, except for perhaps Shamun, who has seemingly completely changed his position on this, by the way, they don't actually know what Islam teaches. And I didn't know ten
years ago. I thought, oh, Islam's very similar. You know, they think there's one God. But once you really get into Islam and see how different it is, then you see it's just kind of silly to say this, and it Bill Cosby fake Charlie Cosby scam, I think is a much better analogy. And after you debate the Muslims a bunch, as you guys have a million times more than me, like you realize this is a con. As you said, perfectly, that's the way better. It's a it's
a scam. It's like you know, a fake, you know, blue Market special and Kmart version of something versus the original. That's a better description than the Superman Clark Ken analogy.
Well, the funny thing is both of the analogies that you just gave, the whole Superman analogy and also the Cosmy analogy would actually totally make sense and point to what a true god if Allah was a true god. Considering that Allah is a deceiver works perfect.
It's a deception.
It's like it's like a it's a con it's not, it's not We're all looking at the same thing trying to kind of see through the fog and figure out what it was. It's like there's this one true thing, and then there's these con men copies of it.
Hey, I think you could actually uh, I think you can use someone else for the Bill Cosby thing, because uh, remember Gallagher. I think he had like a twin brother or something like that who used to tour as him. But I mean you might be able to like.
Oh, he smashes canthe lopes. It's way better than smashing watermelons.
You gotta I forget the story because this was a long time ago. But I think Gallagher eventually had to like sue his brother for stealing his act and pretending to be him because he's still Gallagher, right, that was his name too, So I think it was something like that. You could actually because there you had, you actually had someone who was a different person who was nevertheless imitating what did.
He like rip him off? And he tried to do the same type of stuff.
I forget that. I forget the details, but I think, yeah, he would. He would also tour as like Gallagher and stuff like that.
And then he's like, wait a minute, you can't perfect. Yeah.
Back where I did criminal law, my partner had a case where the client was saying, no, it was my twin brother that did the crime. Turned out actually his twin brother really did do the crime, arrested for it.
All right.
Mc craig John McCrae has a twin brother. He said that was just natural if one of them got in trouble. No, that was my brother and you couldn't tell who did it, so you didn't get in trouble.
Yeah, Well, thank you guys.
I appreciate you letting me come and yap and uh come on, and I'll let you guys continue on with if you don't if if you get if I keep yapping, it'll never happen.
So this is a long, longest question.
So we are we even going to continue We're reviewing this. I't know.
No, We're not going to go through the debate anymore. I am going to go through super chats. AP, I know you're sick, uh, so I can basically stay here by myself or anyone who wants to hang out. Can I'm going to go through super chats.
What day it's been four and a half hours.
Jeez, it's been a long time, man. No, AP, you're sick. You're sick. Man, you want to go to sleep or something, Go to sleep. I'm basically going to be up. I'm going to be up all night anyway, so I don't.
Yeah, yeah, he waived.
He did, like a little well, thank you, Jay. That was very very helpful and very very good.
Actually, and yet, now did you even tell him that tomorrow you're going on with his nemesis, Cameron Bertuzzi