Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 529 | Why Bad Ideas Deserve to Be Mocked | Guest: Seth Dillon

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Today we're talking to Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, the most true and factual website in history. We discuss the role of satire, the new book, "The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness," and how humor is uniquely positioned to counter authoritarianism. The Bee is always getting in trouble with the Left, and while it's funny to see progressives freak out about obvious satire, there is a more sinister motive; if the Left can get enough people to believe Seth's website spreads right-wing disinformation, they can more easily de-platform the Bee. We end on a different subject, hashing out some of the differences between Calvinist and Arminian views on predestination. --- Today's Sponsors: Alliance Defending Freedom has challenged the private employer vaccine mandate in court, but they still need your help. Protecting our cherished freedoms from government overreach is why it's vital you join in supporting ADF. Go to ADFLegal.org/ALLIE & make a tax-deductible donation to their Freedom Fund. Annie's Kit Clubs send special supplies & instructions you need for your kids to make something. Kits arrive in your mailbox once a month & are super convenient — they're designed for children so that your kids can make them on their own, but they're a great way for the family to spend quality time together! Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 75% off your first shipment! Good Ranchers exists to support local American farms that help you make great American meals for your family. They're here to put America FIRST at the dinner table! Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE right now & you'll get 10 FREE bistro filet medallions with your order. Or, better yet, subscribe & save $25 on each box of mouth-watering American meats for life! --- Show Links: "The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness" https://amzn.to/3DLNN9S The Atlantic: "The Christians Who Mock Wokeness for a Living" https://bit.ly/3nE0AFE --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

Hey, guys, welcome to relatable. Happy Wednesday. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. So I know that you're probably busy cooking, baking, preparing, hanging out with your family. We'll have a short episode today. And it's going to be a fun one that I'll get you in the mood for, you know, a light, a hard. enjoyable time with your family on Thanksgiving. I am talking to Seth Dillon. He is the CEO of

the Babylon B, the satire site. I have had the honor of writing several times for the Babylon B over the years. I have loved them, but a fan of them for a very long time, they're Christian, conservative, just all out funny people. And they're just genuinely good people. Like the people behind the Babylon B are as great as their headlines. And so, you're going to enjoy this conversation. We're not just going to talk about the woke scold and the pearl clutching that now tends to come from the left side of the aisle and the importance of satire and humor and all that kind of stuff. We're also towards the end of the conversation going to talk a little theology. We're going to talk about predestination. We're going to talk about

Calvinism versus non-Calvinism or Armenianism and where we disagree, he and I disagree, on the topic of predestination. And yet, obviously, we share very important. important things in common, namely Christ. And so it's a fun, productive conversation that I know you guys are going to really enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Thank you so much for listening to relatable. I am so grateful for you all. We will be back next week with all new episodes covering all the craziness that is bound to be going on in the news. So for now, without further ado, here is my guest, Seth Dillon. Seth, thank you so much for joining us.

First, just in case there are a few people out there who don't know you, can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Yeah, thanks for having me, Ali. I am the CEO of the Babylon B, which is the world's best and greatest, most factually accurate news source. It is. Fake news you can trust. Yeah, I mean, I run the business side of things.

you know, Kyle Mann, who you know our editor-in-chief runs like the content team and is really responsible for that side of things. I run the business and represent the company. And so, yeah, I've been doing that since I took over in 2018, so going on four years now, which is pretty awesome. And, yeah, the B started in 2016. So I took it over from Adam Ford, its founder. Yeah.

And it's really exploded under your leadership over the past few years. Has it surprised you how much it has taken off, or did you see the potential right away before you decided to join? I mean, I saw potential. That's why I got involved. It was already kind of taking off. It was going viral and, you know, people are sharing these articles millions of times and the site was getting millions of views. So it had a huge amount of potential. I didn't necessarily think that it would get to where it is.

I mean, I'm like, I'm going on Tucker Carlson now every now and then. and he's talking about how we're the funniest site on the internet. I mean, I wasn't expecting that kind of stuff to be happening. Elon Musk is retweeting us and talking about us quite a bit. Yeah, he's a big fan. So I never expected any of that. I don't think anybody did. And, you know, you never know what you're getting into with this stuff.

But there's clearly a reason the B is successful. The B is successful because it's pushing back on the left's ideology. And obviously, you know, we make jokes at the right, too. We make fun of, you know, even ourselves, Christian church and culture. But what resonates the most and what gets shared the most are these jokes that we're making that you're not supposed to make. You know, nobody's willing to make them if they're politically incorrect. The targets of them are very well safeguarded and protected. And people are really hungry for real kind of natural, raw humor that isn't filtered through the whole PC thing.

So I think that's really part of the main reason that the bee has really taken off is that it's this refreshing take on satire and mockery and ridicule from a, perspective that, you know, not a lot of people are doing it. I think my favorite reaction from typically the left to you guys is just that that's not funny and explaining why it's not funny, especially if it's something about AOC, maybe being unintelligent or something like that or a headline that they see as racist. And they take this whole Twitter thread to talk about why the Babylon beat is not funny. And I love how you guys respond to that. It's never, oh, let me explain this joke or, well, let me put a caveat behind that.

It's just like, well, if you don't get it, we're not going to explain it to you. And then you just double down and keep going. I think that maybe as much as just the humor behind the Babylon B is what people love, is the attitude behind it. Just like, we don't care. We don't care what you think. We don't care who gives us pushback. We're going to keep telling these kinds of jokes.

Don't you think? Look, it's in character for us to respond that way. I love the way Kyle handled that interview that you did with the Atlantic. Yes, me too. They were asking him. They're like, okay, you wrote this joke. Why is this funny? Tell me why this is funny.

I mean, what a weird, like, you come across as such a humorless scold to tell a comedian to explain to you why his joke is funny. And the really interesting thing is that there are obviously millions of people who think that our site is funny and that our content is funny because they read it, they share it, they laugh. So if you don't think it's funny, well, that's your opinion. It's one of those subjective things. It's like somebody saying somebody who likes vanilla more than chocolate ice cream. demanding that you explain to them why chocolate is better. You know, it's like, well, that's my personal preference. Right.

So it is fun to just kind of like repeat the joke and say, well, here's the joke. This is why it's funny. And then let them stay stupefied and dumbfounded about it. It's kind of fun to do that. But there are times we have to take it seriously. Like when we had to send a demand letter to the New York Times, for example, because they call us a far-right misinformation site that traffics and misinformation under the guys of that tire.

You know, that's the kind of thing where, It's like, okay, we will make jokes about that, and we have made jokes about New York Times and CNN and some of the stuff that they've said about us. But there's also, there comes a place where you have to, like, draw a line and say, okay, our business could legitimately be threatened by these misrepresentations. Because if the social networks are taking fake news really seriously and we're being characterized that way, we could get booted off the social network. So, you know, that was a situation where it's like that demanded a response.

Hey, this is Steve Dase. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or

where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Let's analyze that a little bit because I've noticed that the leftist media will do this, not just with the Babylon B, but when I made that little satirical video with AOC back in like 2018, I got all of these very incensed and serious emails the next morning, totally unexpected to me from the Atlantic BuzzFeed, these mainstream outlets saying, you know, How do you feel about spreading this kind of disinformation? Like, how do you feel about duping so many people? You know, they're very serious and they're acting very mad about this.

And then they act like it wasn't intended as satire that I actually intended for people to think that I was interviewing AOC, which is just ridiculous. But they know. Like, the journalists know that the Babylon be a satire. They knew that the video that I did was satire. So why did they do this? Why did they pretend to not know? Why do they pretend that they don't know that it's supposed to be a joke? What do you think is behind that?

Well, it's nefarious. I mean, like with the word I used for the New York Times, you know, I said it's actually malicious because they do know better. I mean, they do. We had, in the case of New York Times, they actually did a profile piece on us where they came to our office. They interviewed our guys. They took pictures of us. Like, they had written about us before. They covered us before.

And then yet over the course of time, continued to just keep going. back to this, you know, ooh, maybe they're this undercover misinformation outlet that's just pretending to be a satire site, you know, trying to get the promotives. I mean, in that case, it's really obvious why they're doing it. It's if they can get you labeled misinformation, then they can get you de-platforms. It's really that simple. And so they try to act like there must be some, if they just treat it as satire, like satire is very permissible.

It's very allowable. It's not harmful. So they have to try to find a way to make it seem harmful. So they'll either treat it as misinformation, or they'll treat it as hate speech. Those are the two things that, you know, it's punching down. You're making fun of people that you're not supposed to make fun of. Punching down.

That's the phrase that they use constantly. Even if you're criticizing or making fun of like a congresswoman, you're punching down somehow. Yeah. You're punching down on people. You know, the whole idea there is that these people are marginalized and oppressed and you have all the power and you're making jokes at them and that's not fair. And really, honestly, it's not.

the other way around this whole situation with Dave Chappelle perfectly illustrated it. He's one of these people. He's got enough of a platform in a position and enough of a following that he's like, anybody else would have been completely canceled. And when you have this situation where the people who are complaining that they're marginalized or oppressed have the power to get you canceled, they are actually the oppressors in that situation. I've said it before, like if you have the will and the power to punish people who

merely make jokes about you, then you're the one who's really in control there. Power dynamic is really flipped on its head, and they're trying to act like victims. So they're actually creating a bunch of victims in their wake with all that nonsense. Yeah, I remember you saying that. I watched you say that on Tucker Carlson, and I thought that was such a good point. You know who has at least the cultural power, but probably the political and institutional power, too, by looking at who you're not allowed to make fun of. And Dave Chappelle made that point when he responded to all of the backlash about his special.

he said, well, I'm the only one that's not allowed in the Netflix building. All of these people showed up to work. He's the only one that's not even allowed to go in. And yet, people are accusing him of punching down by saying that a woman is a woman. And I think because of that, I am seeing what seems like a shift. People used to think that everyone on the right that, you know, we were the pearl clutches. Like, we were the ones that couldn't take a joke and that you're not allowed to make fun of our faith. You're not allowed to make fun of our values, whatever it is.

is we were the ones who were no fun. And it was everyone on the left who was just like, oh, yeah, you know, we're going to be crass. We're going to push the limits. All the comedians consider themselves on the left. But now you're seeing people, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, other comedians. I think a lot of people who probably still identify as independence being like, you know what, I'm still probably not a Republican, but I know I'm not on the left, who are at least

coming out as anti-woke. And now it seems like, really. really the only people who can tell a good joke are people on the right because people on the left will freak out even if you use a euphemism like, let's go Brandon. They can't even take that. They can't even take it. Do you see that shift happening too, that it's really kind of conservatives who now almost have the monopoly, or not even conservatives, but just non-leftist, like Bill Maher even now is kind of part of that camp who are the ones telling the good jokes? I love Bill Maher, by the way, in some of the comments that he's made about cancel culture.

he's right on the money. It's one of these situations. Look, our new book, The Babylon B Guide to Wokeness, is a top seller in religion categories, a bunch of different religion categories, which I find is kind of funny. It's like, it feels like confirmation to me that wokeness really is a religion, that we're telling so well in these religion categories. It really has, it's flipped. You know, you've got this situation where one of these people's really tightly held personal values

are really guarded closely by a lot of people. They don't like to see them held up to scorn or mockery or ridicule. The left has adopted all of these values that have really become very religious for them. And so it really is like the shoes on the other foot here where they're in a situation where the pearl clutching is happening from that side. But they've created all these rules about things you can and can't say and things you can and can't joke about that are really stifling comedy.

And I think there's going to be a revivaling comedy from the other side. People are going to find that there's plenty of demand for really. real jokes that really don't care if they're offensive, you know, comedy is offensive by nature. It's going to, it's going to make somebody bristle, but you want to, you want to be able to laugh at yourself. It's a healthy thing to be able to, like, look at yourself in the silly things that you do or say or believe and, like, laugh at yourself a little bit. That's fine. That's a healthy exercise. So I think it's important for people to kind of push back. I love what Chappelle's doing. I love how Bill Maher's doing it. I'd like to see more people really push back on that,

and then kind of hopefully bring things back to the middle because they've gone very extreme where there's so much you're not allowed to think and you're not allowed to say. Yeah, I think that those comedians, even though I as a conservative Christian, don't have all the same values as someone like Joe Rogan or Dave Chappelle. They play such an important role, though, in the so-called culture wars. They inject sanity into these insane conversations and people listen to them that wouldn't necessarily listen to me because they don't agree with me, theologically or even politically.

But when you have someone who is liberal in most ways saying, hey, you know, everyone here came out of a woman, like everyone here was born from a woman. Then I do think that there's a really important cultural role that they play and kind of shifting the Overton window back over. It gives people cover. And I think the Babylon B does that too. Like it gives people cover. They feel like, oh, okay.

So it's not just me. who thought that this whole thing was absurd. Other people think that's absurd, too. And so even though the Babylon B, I mean, you tell jokes, I think that there is a very serious role and a very seriously important role that the Babylon B takes on in these culture wars and in changing the political narrative. Do you think so? Yeah. Well, I mean, the way that I describe it, when I, like, there's kind of a twofold mission with satire, you know, you want to make people laugh, but you also want to make them think you want to challenge, you know, the status quo. There is a lot about satire. You know, one of the main effective things that it does is it challenges the power structures

and speaks truth to power. But I try to summarize our mission statement as really being very simple. It's to ridicule bad ideas. And that's exactly what you're saying. It's to go after these things that are really, they have harmful effects in society. Right. It results in speech suppression, even like self-censorship. People are censoring themselves and doing the tyrants work for him. And so, you know, I think anybody who's out there ridiculing these ideas and ridiculing this kind of rigidity that's there and all these restrictions that are there is going to embolden other people to speak out and feel comfortable believing what they believe and having a right to say what they believe. So, yeah, there is some to that. Yeah. That it's a little bit more.

You know, the onion defines satire as being a smart eye saying it's for a lot. saying it's for a higher purpose. Yeah. I don't know if I can say that on your show. Can I say that on your show? We'll have to believe it out. But yeah, you know, there really is, in a sense, a higher purpose to it. There really is because in our case, at least, we are trying to ridicule that ideas.

And I think that's a moral good. You know, I think so, too. And there are a lot of Christians, like, when I've done those fake DNC ads in the past, of course it's fun. Like, you guys know this. The left makes it super easy to ridicule their ideas. It's actually hard to even make them satirical. all you have to do is say this is what their ideas are and they're ridiculous.

All you have to do is put them on display, sands all of the euphemisms that they use to try to kind of like sanitize and normalize their ridiculous absurd views like defund the police. You don't even have to lie or exaggerate to do satire about left wing proposals. And so when I do the DNC, go ahead. In fact, it's hard to. It's hard to exaggerate it. Yes, it is. It's actually challenging to exaggerate it. It's easier to just uncover it and expose it for what it is.

Yes. And I think that's one thing that makes people mad is that and they'll just kind of give you general anger that that makes me mad. But if you ask them, well, what was incorrect? Was there anything that I said in this particular video that was not a democratic policy or not a position that someone on the left holds? And also a reaction that I get and I'm sure actually I know you guys do from people who profess to be like progressive Christians or whatever. but Christians will say, well, that's mean. You might be right, but that satire or that sarcasm is mean, and that's not loving your neighbor, and that's not kind. And then I take such issue with the tone police who are actually angrier about someone making fun of this really bad, really destructive and sometimes evil idea, like men having access to women's bathrooms. They're more mad about making fun of that and the tone that someone uses to make fun of that

then they are the evil idea itself. And that really bothers me about some Christians. Yeah, I think that's an important point, too, is that it's, you know, what is your goal? Is your goal to hurt people and make them feel stupid and bad about themselves? Or is your goal to protect people and actually push back on something that's harming people? In our case, you know, when I'm talking about ridiculing bad ideas, I'm not talking about, like, ridiculing people mercilessly and making them feel terrible about themselves. I'm talking about ridiculing ideas that are going to actually hurt people.

And so, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's silly to care more about the fact that someone's making those jokes. And first of all, on the other side of it, they are perfectly happy to make jokes at your expense that completely make you look silly or stupid or to even hurt your feelings personally. They don't care about your feelings. It's just certain people in protected groups, their feelings matter more than everybody else's feelings for some reason. So that's not fair either. But really, yeah, from that perspective, the Christian perspective of, you know, this isn't loving your neighbor,

but this is nice. It's not loving to your neighbor to lie to them either. It's not loving. It's not loving to treat skin color like it's the most important thing about somebody. It's not loving to deny the differences between the sexes. It's not loving to teach people to deny reality. To teach little kids to start transitioning just because they once played with a doll, that means they must be a girl. It's not loving to put them on that path. And so to ridicule the act of putting them on that path is immoral good. I just wonder what Bible sometimes these people are reading because I know for me, like when I read Jesus's words to the apostles, when people ask him what I think are legitimate questions,

and he responds in a way sometimes that's super off-putting sarcastic, or he doesn't answer directly. He responds with a question. He uses different rhetorical devices in order to get his point across. We see that throughout scripture. And it's not the 11th commandment that we. you should be nice. We can be kind, we can be loving, we can speak the truth without this kind of euphemistic, overly nice, but won't say what's real language that I think a lot of Christians resort to at the expense of the people who are suffering on the other end of these bad ideas.

Yeah. No, I think you're right. There's plenty of examples of it in scriptures. There's, there's examples in the prophets too. It's just, it's, it's replete with examples of exaggeration being used, hyperbole being used, ridicule and mockery being used. And, you know, I mentioned before, I said something recently about how, like, we need to bring back shame in the sense that, you know, there is shameful behavior. There are shameful things that people are doing. And rather than, like, talking about that or calling that out, you know, we're trying to act, like, in this present moment in our culture, like, nothing is shameful.

Like, there is no shameful behavior. Like, anything goes. And I think, you know, satire has a role to play. and kind of keeping clear in our minds like moral boundaries of what's good, what's right, what's too extreme. And so, you know, that's kind of, it's one of the important elements of it. I mean, obviously, you want it to be fun and funny. You really want it to be fun and funny.

But sometimes, you know, you've got to hit on these issues, you know, with kind of a deeper purpose. Yeah. We're definitely in this cultural season of wanting to destigmatize and normalize every kind of egregious behavior. And some things need stigma. Like some things have a stigma because they should be stigmatized. Not everything. Maybe some things do need to be desigmatized. That's fine.

But some things have a stigma for a reason. Some things aren't normalized because they're not normal. And we don't need to make them normal. And I think healthy shame does play a role in kind of giving us those boundaries. All right. Let's look at your book. Wokeness. The Babylon B guide to wokeness.

I said that I'm triggered by the cover just because the raised communist fist in Che Guevara, his face really triggers me. And there's a lot in this book that really triggers me because, I mean, it's just funny. It's just funny. The animations are funny. But I am reminded that the ideas that you guys are making fun of really are as bad as they seem. Tell me about creating this book, everything that went into it, why you guys made it. Also, how long did it take?

Because it looks like it's pretty extensive. Okay. You'd be surprised. I mean, the guys that we have working for us are so productive creatively. That is awesome. They can put out a lot of material in a very short period of time. Some of this is just kind of tapping into a lot of ideas that we've already dealt with and exposed and talked about on the beat quite a bit.

But this was really a joint effort between Kyle, our editor-in-chief, and Joel Berry, our managing editor, and then all of the illustrations, everything, are done by our creative director, Ethan Nicole. And so the three of them just work together on structuring this thing. And it's just, I mean, like, at this moment in time when you have, like,

wokeness just surging in popularity, and also at the same time, like the left trying to distance themselves from it now because there's been so much backlash to what's going on here, especially with, like, critical race theory being taught in schools, everything that just happened in Virginia

with that election. The conversation is, like, coming to a head right now, where people are trying to decide, is wokeness a good thing or isn't it? Yeah. And so to have a satirical guide come out by the Babylon B that just kind of ruthlessly ridicules wokeness and expose, but like you said, you don't even really have to exaggerate it that much.

There's a little bit of exaggeration in this book, but when you read it, it's really, we're doing what you did in those videos where you're exposing a Democrat platform. We're really just saying what they say. Yeah. Like they have really said that 2 plus 2 is insisting that 2 equals 4, is true is racist. It's why it's a pussy.

Yeah, they literally treat your skin color and your gender and sex as being the most important things about you. They literally do that. So this book is just kind of highlighting that in a really kind of obnoxious way without any euphemisms or anything exposing it for what it is. Oh my gosh. I just opened to page 104. So if you're listening with kids, maybe don't listen to this part.

And maybe this also isn't a book to read to kids. I'm just going to read this one part, okay? Earth rape. How it works. Warning, disturbing. Inhale, attacker premeditates crime. He's he will perpetrate on victim. Prepars for assault. Rest. Attacker charges up CO2 blasts from inside the black, empty void that once held a soul. Exhale, Earth is raped. Just breathing. Rape Europe. Yes. But it actually, I mean, it makes a point. It makes a point about how ridiculous these climate extremists are about the toll on the earth that human beings are making. This is basically what they say.

Yeah, you're evil for existing and breathing, right? That's basically what they say. Same thing for being white. You're evil for being white. You know, just your skin color. So, yeah, but that one that you just read, it's like, it's illustrated too. It's like this whole graph and illustration. It's, you know, that adds a lot to it.

So it's a fun book. It's a great gift, especially for the holidays that we got it out in time. But it's selling like crazy. So people need to buy them before they're off the shelves. That doesn't surprise me at all. So definitely everyone get the Babylon, B, guide to wokeness. Y'all's first book, I think, was how to be. be a perfect Christian, right?

Yeah. I've got that one too. I went back in like 2017. Yeah. That was a while ago. That was a while ago. But everyone should get both of them. You can get it, you know, wherever.

I'm sure that you get your books. Okay. Let's talk about a little bit with the time that we have left. One disagreement that I know we have, which is a different subject than we've talked about. Calvinism. Calvinism. I am a Calvinist. I believe in predestination.

You do not. And I don't expect this to be necessarily this long-winded theological conversation. But I'd love for the audience to just hear kind of the differences in what we believe about that. So you can start. What's your position on predestination and Calvinism? Well, so, I mean, part of the problem is there's a lot of like misunderstandings of what the other side believes. A lot of caricatures that people throw around. And, you know, people aren't always the most charitable in treating the other side of this.

you know, this is a long debate that goes back centuries. There's been Christians on both sides of it for a long time. I think it's really, I think it's healthiest if we come to this conversation like this saying, look, you know, I'm not going to assume that you have illimotives or that you haven't read the Bible or that you're uneducated. And that's why you believe what you believe. I think we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt and say, hey, look, you know, honest Christians who've studied their Bibles for a long time and reach different conclusions on this stuff. Yeah. As far as like predestination election goes, you know, I believe that the Bible.

Bible is very clear that election is a thing. It is a biblical thing. The question is whether or not election is unconditional and individual as opposed to corporate, for example. Like when you try to answer the question, well, who has God chosen to save? I would say that the Bible is pretty clear on that. He's chosen to save anyone who believes in Jesus Christ. That's who he's chosen to save. So belief in Jesus Christ is what puts you in that elect the body, not some unconditional decree of God from before time began, that there are certain people that he would select, certain individuals that he would and then sovereignly regenerate them and bringing them into that fold. So you read, and I totally agree with everything that you said, by the way,

I have a lot of good, awesome Christian friends that I learned from who are not Calvinist and who, you know, aren't, who don't believe in every point of tulip. And so completely agree with you. We have more in common than we disagree on. So that's why it's kind of fun to talk about. And the most important thing in common. We have Christ in common, which is the most important thing. And we both agree.

The differences are out on the periphery. Yeah. Right. We both agree that it's by grace through faith. It's kind of what precedes that that I think that we disagree on, whereas I read something like Ephesians 1, in love, he predestined us for adoption as sons. And I read Romans 9 to mean, I guess you could call it corporate, but it is individual predestination, that there is an elect. And elect sounds like elite, but of course, that's not what we mean by it. We just mean that God predestined to people that he's going to predestined. And while we do believe it is by grace through faith, we believe that he gives grace that then leads to the faith of salvation and that there's nothing

that we can add to our salvation. So me saying that, well, if I hadn't believed or if I hadn't mustered up the strength to believe that I wouldn't be saved, that to me is kind of giving myself credit for my salvation. Whereas Calvinists would say, no, no, no, no. It is only because God predestined you. And here's the, like, here's the conundrum that I find myself in when I try to see, like, your position. And so maybe you can kind of work this out for me. I'll try. Yes, you can try because I haven't been able to either. So we agree that God is all powerful, that God is all knowing, and that God is omnipresent.

We believe all of these things about God. Yes. So if that is the case, then how can he, if he forenose. something, which we know that he does because he is all knowing. And if he is not limited by time and space, he's everywhere at once, then how is his foreknowledge not the same thing as predestination? Because he can do anything he wants to. If he can do anything that he wants to, then he could cause someone to believe in him, but he is choosing not to. Like he could cause anyone he wants to believe in him. We know that he turned Pharaoh's heart into a heart.

of stone. And so if he can do that and he chooses not to do that for some people and he chooses to do it for other people, then how is that not predestination? That's a very big question. Wow. Well, outloaded into that. Well, where to begin? Okay, so first, let me take a step back, first of all, and address something that you said earlier because this is, I think, one of those caricatures. And some of it is just like a way of thinking about things. But when we talk about, like, somebody exercising faith and, you know, you meant, I think you used the words like mustering up the strength or something like that. It has nothing to do with personal strength. First of all, you know, people who disagree with Calvinists about predestination and election, you know,

the five points of tulip, they would still say that salvation is all of God and it's by grace alone and that God, you know, God has to initiate. God initiates. Man merely yields or resists, right? So if I'm yielding and no longer fighting the life, who's trying to save me while I'm drowning. I'm not saving myself. He's still saving me. I've just stopped resisting him so that he can actually get me out of the water. So, you know, when you yield to God who's drawing you and wants to save you, that's not a situation where you have anything to brag about. You know, Paul contrasts faith with works. He doesn't, he doesn't say that faith itself is a work. It's literally just saying, I can't do anything to earn my salvation. I need you to save me and yielding

to him and allowing him to do that. And that's a response to God's drawing on people's hearts, the Holy Spirit, the power of the gospel unto salvation being preached to them. That's a response to that. It's not man initiating and saying, you know what, I've decided I need salvation and coming to God on his own. So that's one point. On the point of like God's foreknowledge and him knowing, I agree that God knows everything, I would say that God, whatever you freely decide to do, God infallibly forenows.

So, you know, God knows everything that's going to happen. And that's just the nature of him being God, is that he knows everything that's going to happen. I don't think that that amounts to fatalism where, you know, because God knows that it's going to happen, means that God determine it. There's a very big difference between God knowing what you'll infallibly, knowing infallibly what you will freely do and God determining that you do it. I think there's a massive difference between those two things. But he could stop anything, correct? He could stop anything from happening that he wanted to stop from happening. And so if he's choosing not to.

then, this is not necessarily a question that I have a perfect answer to, but if God chooses not to stop something, which we know that is within his power to do, then isn't there a bit of responsibility? Isn't there a bit of determinism in that? And him withhold, like, choosing not to act? You say that there's a big difference between foreknowledge and predeterminism. And I do agree with that. I agree that the Bible speaks to that, that the Bible shows God is completely sovereign, also holds man responsible for his actions.

So there's a little bit of like concurrence there. And Romans 9 talks about that sovereignty of God kind of in this tension with what human beings decide to do and their responsibility for the things that they do. What I struggle with is if God is totally like I think of it like this. Like I love, I thought that your lifeguard analogy was really, really good. I think people are going to benefit a lot from that. The analogy also that I think of has to do with drowning in a pool actually. So if you have a babysitter who is babysitting a child and the child walks outside, walks into the pool and drowns, parents come home, obviously awful thing.

The only way that you would not hold that babysitter responsible for what happened is if that babysitter was constrained in some way so that babysitter didn't have the power to save that child or if somehow the babysitter didn't know or the babysitter wasn't there, all of those would be. be irresponsible things, but those three things we know we're not true about God. Like, we know that God is all powerful. We know that God is there. We know that he is capable that he has the knowledge to do something. So in the same way that that babysitter would still be held responsible, even though the babysitter didn't push the child into the pool, their capability of being able to save that child from the pool does hold them responsible.

So wouldn't God... There's just an argument you're making. Yeah. Yeah. So, like Alvin planning up, if you're familiar with him, he... he put together this argument called the free will defense. It's not really original to him, but he really formulated and structured the free will defense to explain how there can possibly be evil when God exists and he's omnipotent, omniscient, you know, like how is it possible that

we have evil? The answer, the one possible answer, an answer that I think is biblical, is the fact that he's decided to create free creatures. So when we talk about like sovereignty, you know, a non-Calvinist like me would agree that God is sovereign. But when it comes to, you like human freedom, a lot of Calvinists think, okay, well, if he's, if he's sovereign, it means he's got to control everything. He's got to control everything. He's got to determine everything that happens. I don't see any reason why God couldn't, in his sovereignty, exercise divine self-limitation and allow for free creatures to exist, to live in an environment where love and goodness and joy and suffering are all possible because he sees some great good in that.

And if he decides to do that, in his sovereignty, decides to do that. I don't think that you can default him for that if he's determined that he thinks that there's some good to that, that it's better to have that than to not have that. And so, you know, when God is being patient with us because he's not willing to any should perish and desires that every man and commands that every man everywhere repent and believe, I think he's being genuine. He's being sincere. He wants everybody to repent and believe. And I think that Romans is a beautiful picture. If you zoom out of like specific passages that focus on, you know, God will harden whoever he wants to harden. And and, you know, if you zoom out from those specific passages, he'll have mercy on whoever he wants to have mercy.

Later on, it talks about how he wants to have mercy on them all in Chapter 11. What Paul's burden is there is to show, you know, that the Jews are really objecting that Gentiles are being grafted in, that they're enjoying, that they're entering into this covenant with God, too, through Jesus Christ. It's supposed to be this exclusive thing. It's being opened up. God is arguing, who are you to question me? How can you question me that I've opened it up to everybody? that I want to have mercy on more people.

The election was originally with Israel, and that's a corporate thing, and then it became in Christ, and opened up to Gentiles. That's a corporate thing. It's a larger corporate thing, and the one led to the other. So I see Romans 9 as really being Paul's burden to widen the scope of God's mercy and include the Gentiles in it, not just the Jews, and to do so through Jesus so that anyone who believes can be saved. and it's ultimately his desire that all be saved and he'll have mercy on all.

And the reason that they're not is because he's not being deterministic. He's not forcing Christ on anyone. He's allowing you to either yield or resist. So I think that really comes down to the key differences. And it's just, you know, what is God's desire? I think it's really clearly stated biblically that God's desire is for all to be saved. Like I said, I think we agree on so much more than we disagree on. When I look at Romans 9 and those surroundings,

chapters when he's not just talking about Israel and he's not just separating Israel and Gentiles. He's separating faith from lack of faith because he says not all Israel is Israel. And he talks about how it is, you know, by grace through faith, even though it doesn't use the same terminology that it does in Ephesians 2. Talks about how it is through faith that both Gentiles and Jews are now coming together and are reconciled to God and are reconciled to each other. So because of that, because the distinction there is not primarily between Gentiles and Jews in those chapters, but between those who have faith, Gentiles and Jews and those who do not. And then he says that people are going to say, okay, but how is that fair that he makes

vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy unsaved and saved? Who can resist his will? How is that fair, basically? And Paul answers kind of like what you said. Who are you? Who is the clay to answer back to the potter, why did you make me this way? Now, I think, like you said, we have maybe differences in interpretation there and, you know, there are other passages in love. He predestined us. And I guess you would interpret that as meaning kind of collectively. He predestines the saints. He predestines, I don't know, the Gentiles to be saved, whereas I would look at that more individualistically. But I think, I think that's where we'll leave it. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to so clearly articulate your thoughts. I think people will benefit from it. Maybe one day we can have a longer exclusively theological conversation.

That would be fun. Yeah, it would be. You know, I appreciate you giving me the chance to talk about it. You know, a lot of people don't want to touch these things because it can get so heated. But I think if you, you know, if you just have an open heart and mind to hear what other people have to say, it doesn't have to get that way. Yeah, definitely, especially when you have Christ in common. All right. Where can everyone find you, support you, the Babylon B, your book, all that good stuff.

B, we're easy to find. We're all over everything. B.com. We're on Twitter, Instagram, everything. Myself, I'm B. Chief on Instagram, and I'm on Twitter as Seth Dillon. Yeah, I think the main thing I'd want to push is our book. Go buy the Babylon B Guide to Wokeness. It's a top seller right now. We actually hit number 14 on the all books on Amazon.

That's awesome. That was pretty impressive. Our publisher's thrilled with that. Go make it number one. That would be pretty cool. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Seth. Thanks for talking to us.

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