The Eric Metaxas Show - Is Atheism Dead? (Encore)

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Eric dives into IS ATHEISM DEAD?, which presents overwhelming evidence from both the world of science and biblical archeology that our universe is a result of an Intelligent Designer. (Encore Presentation)

to the Eric McTaxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, I claim that this is my show. In fact, I even named the show, the Eric Mataxis show, but here's the thing. Every now and again, I have, you know, the little people. I like to call them Albin. Thank you. Albin is a producer on this program, and he has a comedy career in his own right. He interviews people, and I thought, Albin, I can't interview myself.

about my book. No. But you had suggested maybe you wanted to interview me about the book. And since I get to decide, you know, the programming, I thought I could say yes. I could say yes to that. Really? And you could interview me about the book. But I got to be honest with you.

It makes me very nervous to be on this side of the table. You should be. So to speak. Yeah, because you're on the same side. You're always on, of course. But, well, I guess we have to announce today is the official launch day for the book. Yeah. Now, we're going to re-air this, but today is the first time.

So this is great. This is the first day of the rest of the life of this book. That's true. Think about that. Wow. Just do the math on that one. Yeah. Now, the crazy 1497 price I did find out.

You thought I was lying or blowing smoke, which is a kind of lying. I did find out that that is not going to last forever. I think it's going to go away in a week. If you go to Ericmataxis.com and you click on those links to get us scroll down, but there's a few links where the book. book is 1497, that's 45% off. Yes. That I was told yesterday is, in fact, as I feared, a limited offer. So if you want the book, you've pretty much got a few days to get it at that price. And I keep saying, you know, why not, why not get 100 copies for Christmas? Why not? Why not? It's not

going to kill you. Okay, so, Albin, I'm ready. I'm scared what you're going to ask. Here we go. Is atheism dead? Now, I want to start off with a quote from the back of the book, because this is very important. This kind of hones us in on what's going on. Homes us in. Homes, Holmes, Holmes, Watson Holmes. Okay. Hugh Ross, he's a big scientist. He said with great oratorical skill and an irrepressible humor, uh-oh, metaxus engages lay readers with the story of how recent discoveries have made atheism scientifically, historically, and philosophically untenable. And what I like about that, it divides the book into the three natural parts that you have done here in your writing of the book. It's divided into three parts like gall.

It is. And the gall of you to put it all together like that. Well, when he says irrepressible humor, it's not entirely irrepressible. I can repress most of it. But there's a lot of Three Stooges-style jokes in the book. A lot of rough physical comedy. There's some pie throwing. A lot of illusions, if you're really paying attention to the great soupy sales.

and a lot of Hal Roach, our gang kind of gags in the book. And a Harpo Marx quote of all things. Actually, that's true. That's true. That is true. There is a Harpo Marks quote in the book. Who are you going to believe? No, no, it wasn't Harpo. Harpo didn't speak.

It was Chico. Chico. Oh, boy, that's a, I flip. Okay. Anyway, part one. I want to ask you a couple questions out of part one. Now, I'm serious when I was reading this, because part one is about outer space and inner space in a way.

And when I was reading it, I felt like I was on a higher plane, like kind of metaphorically and also not physically, certainly. But in there, you start talking about the planets. And the fact that after the Big Bang, everything kind of stretched out and became the various planets. And only in our solar system, in our galaxy, and I guess ostensibly in all the galaxies, only in one place can life have happened on this planet.

So I want to start at the beginning about life itself. Right. Okay, the question of how did we evolve from non-life? Right. That was the big question back in 1952, right? And we've had Dr. James Tour on the show talking about abiogenesis, right? Right. So can you explain abiogenesis and the whole idea behind that.

Yes, I can. Next question. Okay. Now, the next question is all about... Oh, next question is would I explain it? Yeah, would you. Yes, I would. Okay.

Please do that. Okay, here's the thing. You made the common mistake that I actually write about in the book. This is so creepy. This is so interesting. In a funny way, this little thing, the little slip-up you made, which I write about in the book, gets to, in a sense, the thesis of the whole book. And here's what it is. You said, how did life evolve from non-life? Right. Okay. Now, what? Whether you believe in evolution or don't believe in evolution or don't care, whatever, it doesn't matter because I don't write about evolution in this book at all. But you have to define what is evolution. Evolution, according to those people who believe in evolution, typically is using the process of natural selection you see change over time. What does that mean? We hear the standard story, right? If there's a bunch of giraffes and the ones with the longest necks can get the most leaves,

and they tend to survive the giraffes with shorter necks, we call them oxen, they don't survive. I shouldn't joke. But the point is that that's the concept of evolution is that over generations, okay, species change. And then some people say, oh, species don't just change within species, but they actually can become other species. so a frog can become an oak tree, although it takes a huge effort on the frog's part. He's got to want to be an oak tree. But the point is, in all seriousness, evolution can only happen if it does happen with life. Yes. But we never asked the question, and this is what you were getting at,

what about before there was life? Scientists say on the planet Earth, four billion years ago, there was no life. and then suddenly, boom, there was single-celled life. The simplest life imaginable is one cell. That's all you need and it's life. And we've seen it. We know what it is. And science tells us without any blinking, they just go,

there's no doubt life came into existence four billion years ago on the early earth. Okay, so here's the question. How did that happen? and what's funny is people will say, kind of like you did in miss speaking, they'll say... By the way, I put evolve and quotes in my notes. So people say, well, it's the process of evolution from non-life. And you say, ah, ah, there's no such thing as evolution from non-life. If you want to have any kind of evolution, it has to begin with life.

Because life reproduces, and in every generation there's potential for change, and so there can be change over time. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about there is no life and then there is life. There is no way you can describe that as evolution. But when I did my research on this chapter about James Tour and all this stuff, I discovered that three of the main places where you look up the definition of what they call abiogenesis, right? Bio is life.

Genesis is the beginning of. abio genesis is no life genesis, right? So you have no life, and then you get life. They say they use the word evolution. They say it's the evolution from non-life to life. And I thought, these are dictionary definitions. We're talking to Wikipedia. We're talking to Miriam Webster's.

They all, now the reason I'm making such a big deal of this, you'll see, is that they have imported this concept, the fuzzy concept of evolution, which many of us have all kinds of questions about, but they've said, no, no, no, we can't have questions about that. Everybody knows it happened. And they basically imported it backwards into a time before there was life. In other words, they act like it's a mystical principle in the universe.

They don't say where it comes from. They have zero proof of the idea that anything could evolve from non-life to life, but they still use the term. And that gets at the heart of the whole book, is that what you really have here is not science. You have philosophy. And it's philosophy masquerading as science. You have people saying, I don't believe in God.

There is no God. There is no way God created life. Therefore, I've got to figure out some naturalistic way that it happened. Now, when you get into the details of abiogenesis, it's comedy. I mean, at the whole James tour, we ran his interview with me the other day. It's actually funny because they're grasping at straws, grasping as stars. But what amazes me is that they actually use the term evolution almost to kind of fool you a little bit. Like, you know, it was one of the, it just happened.

And you think, well, how did it happen? It's churning water four billion years ago with no life in it. And then suddenly it just magically churns into a cell, which is one of the most complicated things imaginable. We're out of time. We'll be right back. Hey folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start, they lose money. In fact, they don't even break even until about four to five months after if you keep ordering it. Friends, that's huge. People don't keep ordering Relief Factor month after month if it doesn't work. So yes, Pete and Seth are literally on a mission to help as many people as possible deal with their pain. They really do put their money where their mouths are. So if you're in pain from exercise or even just getting older, order the three-week quick start for 1995. Let's see if we can get you

at a pain too. Go to Relieffactor.com. Relieffactor.com or call 800-500-500-8384. Relieffactor.com. I use it. It works. Folks, welcome back. I might be the host of the show, but Albin is interviewing me about my book, which is brand new. It's called His Atheism Dead. Albin, when you asked that question before. I'm grilling you, yeah. When you asked that question, I gave the long answer.

I know you do. If you want me to give the short answer, just say so. Oh, okay. Well, here's a follow-up. I love this because one of the atheistic scientists who realized he was trapped, he couldn't say this, he then came up with the theory that aliens from another planet came and established life on this planet. Now, how can you straighten him out? What can you say? This is the this is this is so funny, folks. This is why, I guess I hope people read the book because we really

don't have time to give you these details, but this is hilarious, right? It's kind of like asking a kid, right? He brings home a bong and some marijuana and you say, what are you doing with that? And he says, oh, oh, Jimmy left it in the mailbox. And you're like, well, that's who? That's who Who's Jimmy? Where did he get it from? Why did he leave it in Europe? Like, what are we talking about? I don't really care about that. When somebody says, there's life on Earth, where did it come from? People say, aliens brought it here. Next question. And you think, you've answered nothing. You haven't told me, first of all, how do the aliens come into being, their life, ostensibly? You haven't told me how they came to bring it here. But this is part, again, this is part of what the book gets at.

There's a creepy, and I really mean this, there's a creepy. dishonesty that the scientific establishment, now of course, this is by no means all scientists, but a number of dedicated materialists or atheists are so afraid of looking at the evidence that they will come up with any crazy answer just to shut you up. So this idea, who was it? I think was Francis Crick. I mean, this is one of the discoverers of DNA. So around 1972, That's what did it. When he discovered DNA, he said, whoa, I just blew my own theories out of the water. No, but that's actually true. That's actually true that DNA is so complicated that you suddenly realize there's no way life can just whoop, whoop, whoop, like it's way. Because of DNA coding, thanks to Francis Crick and Watson, it's so unbelievably complicated that science effectively has zero answers, which today they have no answers, right?

But even in 1972, they knew they had no answers. So they asked him, and he says, oh, yeah, I think aliens brought it from some other place. And you think, are you joking? Like this is like a junior high school student trying to blow smoke at the teacher because they didn't do the homework. Yeah. And if you say aliens brought it, anybody says like, well, that's very nice. But I'm still asking you, how was the life formed? Not who carried it here.

not what suitcase or what spacecraft. We're asking, how did life come into being from non-life? To this day, and this is why I find this stuff so funny, and James Tour, by the way, I wrote this book in part because of him. No one knows. I mean, no one knows how life came into being from non-life. But nobody even asked the question because everybody's so embarrassed that it's just one of those things you don't bring up.

And people like Dawkins, the art. arch atheist, the new atheist, he said, oh, we're working on it. Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on a lot of things, yeah. You know, one of the miracles you talk about in science and all that is the miracle of water. And my favorite thing, because, you know, we all say, like, well, how does it freeze and get bigger and how does it float above the water and all that? But what I love this is the viscosity of water. I just love that when you explained it, or Dr. Auteur did, where when water goes over rocks and

things, it starts to break it down into the minerals that are needed for the plants to eat, and then the animals eat the plants, and they get the iron ore and all that stuff. You know I'm not kidding this when I say this, that like when somebody reads something that I wrote and gets it the way you just did, I'm thrilled. Because when I was writing that, I was thinking, I hope people really understand how amazing this is. Because none of us has ever thought of this. Nobody ever thinks about viscosity.

Many people don't know what it even means. What's viscosity? Okay. It wasn't James Tour. It was Michael Denton. wrote a book on water. Now there's other places where this is mentioned, but I never heard this in my life.

And when I read this, I said, this is so insane. I've got to talk about this. So here's what it is, folks. Water, which we take for granted, has these bizarre properties that you'd never even think of. You just take it for granted, right? It happens to be just viscous enough,

just thick enough, that when it runs old, over things like rocks, it is able to erode the rock. Okay. If it was less viscous, which is to say thinner, it would just run over the rock and it wouldn't do any erosion. But water erodes rocks. It then carries the particulate that it has eroded with it.

And then that acts like sandpaper as it continues to erode other rocks. And what happens is that as the water perfectly viscous, viscous, erodes rocks. It carries the metals and the minerals in these rocks and in the soil along with it. So that as far as the water goes, it carries nutrients, which get deposited miles and miles away from where it originated and from where those rocks are. So if you are a plant or an animal living in a place,

far away from those rocks, the water carries the minerals and the metals and every good thing down through the erosion process all the way to you. And the plant lives off of that and thrives off of that. And then the animals eat the plant and the animals get the minerals. And I thought to myself, this needs to be taught in schools because this is a bizarre thing that if water was slightly different, and this is just one property. Oh, yeah. The fact that it freezes and goes above the water so the fish underneath can still live in the wintertime is another incredible thing. That's another one that. Yeah.

Who thinks about that? Like you think ice floats. Obviously it floats. You just look at a lake in the winter. It floats. I never thought of this. Most liquids, when they become solids, they sink. Yeah.

Most liquids, when they become solids, they get more dense and they sink. Not water. Now, water, and this is really nuts, water like just about everything else, as it gets colder and colder, it actually does get denser, just as you'd expect. But at 39 degrees Fahrenheit, okay, it's coming down, you know, 70 degrees, 60 degrees, so it's getting denser and denser and denser. When it hits 39 degrees, it reverses course. and suddenly flips and becomes less dense as it goes down to 32. And at 32, it freezes and it is dramatically less dense than liquid water and it floats. And you think, I mean, anybody who knows chemistry would say that's an anomaly.

That's very strange. But what's even stranger is if that weren't the case, there'd be no chance for life on Earth for many reasons. They say that if things were to freeze from the bottom up, Right. The way you'd expect them to if water didn't float when it turns into ice, it would kill a lot of the life and also would have a runaway freeze effect. But also the other thing is that because it freezes, it protects the water below from the even cooler temperatures above. I mean, it goes on and on it. And I wrote a whole chapter on it.

I said, ladies and gentlemen, you're not going to believe this, but water could be exciting. Yeah. Now, I want to jump into the second part of the book because that is, that is a whole chapter. actually my favorite. It's where you take a look at biblical archaeology and all the things that have been discovered. And my favorite chapter, I'm going to just jump to it right now, is the discovery of the home where Jesus grew up with Mary and Joseph. And I said, oh, come on. Did they discover a dradle that's had Jesus' name on? How did they know? Yeah. But you start the chapter. This is why I love. You start by addressing that. You're saying like basically, yeah, how do they know? I mean, Nazareth was some small out-of-the-way

place in the Bible. None of this stuff. makes any sense until you look at the details. And then when you start looking at the detail, each step, you get blown away more and more and more. Like, why is it this house and why would it be that family and how do you know? It is straight up nuts. I mean, again, when I wrote this, I often don't talk about this in interviews because I thought it's too much of a stretch for people to believe. They're just going to bat it away. Yeah, you have to take them step by step.

It's like saying I found the skull of Noah and his three sons. Yeah. and Hams was misshapen. No, let me just say it's so weird that when I read it, I said, I think I'm making a mistake. Let me look into this. Yeah, because I thought you were making a mistake. I said, come on, this is kind of be, you're surmives,

and you're just saying, well, maybe, but no, the evidence is specific. Well, it's so insane. First of all, what I say is that when you think about what happened in the first century, it's obvious that anybody who knew Jesus and his mother, new Peter, whatever, once Jesus is crucified and resurrected and ascends into heaven, suddenly all these people are half nuts, if not nuts. They are just crazy. They've seen the Messiah. He rose from the dead. They're telling everybody, they don't care if you kill them or torture them. They've seen life, eternal, death was destroyed. So they fear nothing. and they realize that they've been chosen by God to live in this amazing time. So what would be the most natural thing you'd do? You would preserve these sacred sites.

You'd say, well, Jesus grew up there. Let me show you. He was a friend of mine. I saw him walking on the road to Nazareth many times, and let me show you where he lived. Let me show you where all of that stuff happened. We rarely talk about it. When we come back, I'll fill in the rest of the details. In case you haven't been paying attention,

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It is real, it is physical, it's always been valuable since the dawn of time. Legacy Precious Metals is the company I trust for investing in gold. They can help you roll your retirement account into a gold-backed IRA where you still own the physical gold. They can also ship gold and precious metals safely and securely to your house. Call Legacy at 866-5281903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Okay, so we're talking about... Oh boy, Eric. The discovery of the home in Nazareth where Jesus grew up.

Now, again, this sounds like, hey, we discovered Santa's Workshop of the North Pole. Come on, check it out. It sounds insane. And to me, when I read it, I said, this doesn't make any sense. But first of all, what I find funny is that it wasn't discovered until extremely recently. Right. Like literally a year ago, the book was published. So nobody knows about this.

It was during COVID times. there's so much strangeness surrounding it that I guess that explains why nobody's heard about it. Yeah. But anyway, I was talking about the home where Jesus grew up with Mary and Chosen. Which you would think for sure there's no way that that could have been preserved. But what I discovered, as I did all this research into archaeology, and obviously the middle third of the book is all about biblical archaeology, but you realize strange things. I mean, you realize that people then weren't any different than they are today.

So the people who lived and who knew Jesus or who lived right after he ascended into heaven, they were nuts with this stuff. They said, this is the most amazing thing. So there is no doubt that any place associated with him was revered by his followers who were in the many, many thousands and growing. And there's several things that you point to that are solid evidence that this is the house. One of the things is the shape of the bricks that were used to make that house, that particular house, were only made by a craftsman.

And Joseph did that. He was a craftsman. Well, actually, I'll go backwards to say, people would say, how would you know anything? How do you know find any house in the first century? Here's what I meant to say was that they preserved these places. The one thing that I was shocked at, I never heard this, that in 1968, they found in Copernium the house of Peter.

Yeah, that one's great. And you'd say, what are you talking about? How come I didn't know that? Well, if you go to a trip to the Holy Land, maybe you went there and, you know, you didn't tell me. But they find these places. Why? Because they were so revered at the time that they memorialized them. They would build a church over the site to preserve it.

It was such a holy place. Sometimes, 500 years later, they'd build a bigger church over that church. I mean, they so revered these spots. Now, you've got a couple things going on. you got the Romans wanted to wipe out Christianity. Right. So the Romans often would go to these spots and like bulldoze them effectively, wipe it out or even worse, build a pagan temple on top of it.

They did that in the place where they did this at Herod's temple on the, on the sermon mount. They built a pagan temple up there, you know, like right after Jerusalem fell in 70 AD, at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. they built some pagan temple. They would always build pagan temples to desecrate the Christian sites. But ironically, of course, by doing that, they preserve the Christian sites because you say, oh yeah, you see that, you know why that pagan temple is there? Because beneath it is the ruins.

And in the book, you have some photographs and you have graphs and all that explaining all that. So you can actually, you take people through like you're the archaeologist and you're looking at it. I try. Yeah, I try. And so it explains a lot of these. I like that when they found the Bama, the Bima seat, the Bima seat where Pontius pilot sat and the pavement basically where Jesus stood. This is one of the craziest things. That is incredible. But just to finish up the Nazareth thing, there were two extremely holy sites in

Nazareth. One was, they call it the church of the enunciation where Mary grew up, and there were churches built over that, and you can go see that today. This other one, which ostensibly was where Jesus grew up with Mary and Joseph, was a church was built on top of it. Another church built on top of it, but then in this eighth century, the Muslims came in and destroyed it totally. So it wasn't until the 1880s that some nuns from France came to build a convent in Nazareth and excavated. And you know what? I don't want to tell the rest of the story yet. For this one, you got to read the book.

But you can't believe this stuff. Folks, read my footnotes. Find out where I got this from. You were just referring to something. else now that I oh the bea seat yeah this is this is slightly more controversial where there's some people that would dispute this but it doesn't it seems to me right there's a guy named titus kennedy i've had him on this program before he's an archaeologist uh he says that the antonia fortress where people typically if you take a trip to jerusalem they'll take you there to say this is where the

via del Rosa began this is where jesus had his trial whatever they now say that's totally wrong the pavement the gabatha lithostrato where this all happened happened is from 100 years after Jesus. The right place is far on the other side of Jerusalem where I guess Herod's Palace, right? And it makes more sense, as you explain in the book. I mean, the details are extraordinary, but they show the very spot, the very pavement. And then there's this Bima seat, which is where Pilot would have literally sat to preside over this unbelievably historic, mythical moment in the history of the world. And you think, have we lived long enough that these things are being uncovered?

And there's a lot of that in the book that I said, this is being uncovered in our lifetime. A hundred years ago, people didn't know about this stuff. So it's kind of exciting. And my theory is that more and more is coming out in science and in archaeology. One thing I want to mention, and I think this is such a beautiful thing, it's called the Silver Ketif of Hinon. scrolls or something like that. First of all, the discovery of it by this recalcitrant... This is one of the funniest stories.

When I discovered this story, a lot of times I'll discover something, right? And people have written about it, but I realized, but wait, wait, wait. There's a story behind the story. And they never tell the story behind the story. And I have to dig it out if you can find it. I found the story of what happened. When we come back from the break, I'll tell the story. In 1979, they discovered one of the most amazing.

discoveries in or around Jerusalem, one of the greatest discoveries ever. But how it was discovered is, to my mind, unbelievably hilarious. So we'll be right back. Go Dutch treat. You were sweet. Darker Shane, darling, don't know. Save those lies, darling, don't explain. Folks, Eric Matakas here. somebody just handed me a piece of paper with insane information on it.

But I know it's true because the other day I literally got a phone call from Mike Lindell telling me, Eric, you got to check out. And then he tells me about this towel special, right? And he says, you've got to tell your audience, you got to, okay, so here's the special. $39.99, if you use the code Eric, normally $109.99. We're talking about the towels that work. We've talked about this before. It's a technology where the towels actually do the job of being absorbent and, you know, you know that whole thing. So they're amazing towels, but you can get a set of six towels for $39.99.

You have to use the code, Eric. Go to mypillow.com. Click on the new radio listener specials. And or you can call 800, 978-3057, 800-978-3057. Use the code, Eric. And usually when I do interviews, I don't get to tell these stories because I've got a glance over the top. But you just asked me about one of my favorites. I mean, I can't tell you how much joy he this.

I just laugh every time I think about it. But this was the discovery in 1979 of what's called the silver Ketef Hinnom Scrolls. And what that means is these are incredibly tiny silver scrolls that were so tiny they were worn as amulets. and they had the priestly blessing, the erronic blessing, where the priest would say, the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his countenance to shine upon you and give you peace. I mean, it's this holy thing from the scripture, okay, written in silver in really proto-Hebraic, because this is from, you know, 650 BC. Anyway, but how was it found?

Yes. I if you read books in archaeology it'll sort of tell you oh this was discovered here here by so and so and so so and so okay but somehow in my research

because I have fun doing the research I discovered this weird backstory and the more I dug the funnier it became okay here's the story the guy whose last name oh gosh what is it

it's Barack I can never say his name it's well we'll come to it yeah I have the book here Right. But anyway. It's not Jacob's Stafford. No, it's a 28-year-old guy studying archaeology in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

So he's a nobody. He's six years from his Ph.D., but he gets this idea in his head that below St. Andrew's Church outside the, just right at the outskirts of Jerusalem, there are some old caves and burial caves or whatever. They've all, they looked like they've been excavated, there's nothing there. but he has a hunch that there's more to be found there. But he doesn't have any credibility or anything to get real archaeological students to help him. So he has to be really humble and say, you know, I'll take anybody who can help me. Gabriel Barker, I think it's Barkai, Barkai.

He has to go. And some, this is like a joke, some archaeology club of 12 and 13-year-olds, they volunteer the kids, the kids can help. help you. So how'd you like 12 and 13 year olds, annoying 12 and 13 year olds, to help you on this big dig? So they do the dig. They find nothing. He's disappointed. And he says, well, you know what, at least to, we've got to photograph all these chambers, even though we found nothing. There was one kid that was so annoying to this barcai that Barkai was like ripping his hair out. And he says, I can't take another minute of this annoying 12 year old name Nathan. So here's what I'm going to do. All of these caves need to be photographed. The most distant one, or one of the distant ones, Cave 25, he sends Nathan there, and he's really stern with him, like angry, like, hey, I've had enough out of you.

I want you to clean that chamber. It's going to be photographed. I want it to be so clean that your mother could use it as a kitchen. Like, he really threatens the kid because this kid was very annoying. So Nathan trundles off to this distant place, and the joy, of course, is that it's far away and we're not going to hear from this kid for two or three hours while he's doing what we told him. But he takes a hammer with him, which a guy, you didn't realize. Here's a weird thing. Nobody noticed. But the kid is so annoying that to go clean the cave, he just happens to

hide a hammer on his person. And when he's bored in this sacred chamber, okay, there's nothing there. It's got a stone floor or whatever. He takes the hammer out. Nobody knows this. He's all alone and starts smashing the floor with the hammer. Now, this alone, I find it funny. The only reason he's there is because he was so annoying. They sent him as far away as possible. Yeah. Okay?

But if he wasn't annoying enough, he had a hammer with him and decides to use the hammer to smash the floor. The board, Nathan, smashes the floor with the hammer so hard that it cracks. It wasn't supposed to crack. And he finds a hidden chamber. He sticks his hand in the hidden chamber and is dragged into the bowel. of hell itself. Just kidding.

He puts his hand into the hidden chamber. Yeah. And he pulls out some stuff, some like little ceramics. He now is like, hey, this is what I'm here for. I'm not here to clean. I found, you know, treasure. So he runs to Barcai and tugs on his shirt. He's like, hey, hey, look what I found.

You could see Barcai. I could picture his hair standing on end. Like, what is going on? Yeah. The annoying kid is back with some ancient treasure. So they run back to the place. Barkai sees that what he assumed was an empty place was in fact hiding this stuff. And the annoying kid was so annoying that he smashed the floor open or whatever.

So he sends the kid home and they spend days now excavating this secret hole. And they pull out treasure after treasure. And the greatest treasure is what we described. An unbelievably tiny silver scroll so delicate that they couldn't unwrap it for three years. They didn't know how to have the technology without destroying it. But they could read the words inscribed in silver. Now, if it's inscribed on anything but silver, it doesn't last. So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are amazingly old, they're not this old.

This is even older. So this is the first extant writing from the Hebrew scriptures ever discovered, thanks to the annoying 12-year-old Nathan. He's probably in his mid-50s right now, and he doesn't know he's famous. When they first translated it, they thought it said America runs on Duncan. That's right. But they were wrong with new technology. They were able to see that it's the ironic blessing. And keep you, that's from Numbers, Chapter 6.

There's more to the story, but I just find it hilarious that the kid was so annoying, as 12-year-old boys can be, that he is sent like under threat to this secret chamber. And if he hadn't been sent there, and if he hadn't brought his trusty hammer, to smash the floor he's supposed to be cleaning to this day. And I'm just blown away that the one that survived and the one that they could read is that, that blessing, that we all need today, that the Lord bless and keep you and make his face shine upon you and give you peace. Jonathan Kahn ends his, ends his, his, every day, every week. Except now he's bearded and we wouldn't know.

We don't know. We'll be right back. Well, my daddy left home when I was three, and he did. leave much tomorrow and me, just this old guitar and an empty bottle of boo. Hey there, folks. In the life of an author, the day that his book launches is a very exciting day. So I am very excited. You can tell I'm just excited. This is the book, is atheism dead, and Albin has been very generously asking me questions about it. There's just so much in here. There's one thing in here, because we were running out of time.

But there's one thing in here. First of all, I'm not kidding. when I say this, that if you go to, I think it's the Baker book link at my website, Eric Mataxis.com, this should be 45% off. I think it's this week only that I was told, what, yesterday, that it is a limited time only $1497 instead of $28. If you're thinking getting copies, please don't miss that, because that's an insane price. But you wanted to ask me something about Richard Dawkins as we close.

Yeah, Richard Dawkins, he apparently said that atheism, the belief in atheism doesn't lead anyone to violence, but there's a thing called scientific atheism that you mentioned in the book and you can do a lot of pushback with that statement. First of all, we don't have time,

but I'll just say this. That is one of many things that Dawkins and Hitchens in particular say that are so preposterous, so ludicrous, that they're really offensive because anybody who knows anything about history knows that they're lies.

What he said is a lie. the most evil figures in the world, Stalin, Hitler, Mao. They have murdered millions, not thousands, many millions, in the name of state-sponsored atheism. Many of those they murdered were Christians. I'm writing a piece about it right now to come out with the book, but that atheism when enforced leads to ugly stuff. Now, it's okay to be an atheist on your own. You want to be an atheist? ahead. But the point is state-enforced atheism is the opposite of freedom, which cannot be

enforced. It's a free thing. When you start trying to push Christians out of the public sphere, as they are doing all over this country right now, it leads to every bad thing. So the fact that folks like Dawkins and Hitchens would pretend to be ignorant of this is a joke. They know the history, and they know that even in their own countries, there's a lot of coercion going on. We may not have the killing fields of Pol Pot yet, but the point is that the trend is always to persecute people unless you really believe in religious liberty. And atheist regimes are absolutely committed deeply to wiping out religious liberty. So let's be clear. In this country right now, we're seeing religious liberty being canceled. So,

since we're ending here, at least this hour. I think we hit our goal for Christian Solidarity International. But that's like the minimum, folks. We want everyone who ever listens to this program and their friends to go to metaxis talk.com, you want to do more than pray when you can. And in the case of CSI, if you go to our website, metaxishtoncult.com, click on the banner, you can give. And I am exhorting you right now. please go to metaxis talk.com.

Please give a Christian slave, enslaved by Muslim radicals, but Christian Solidarity International has a way not just to free them, but to set them up in a life of freedom. All the information is at the website metaxis talk.com. Here's the phone number 888-253-3522. 888253-3522. Let me spell that. 8-8-8-8-253-3-35-22. God bless.