The Eric Metaxas Show - William Federer (continued)

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

William Federer of AmericanMinute.com continues providing a "history lesson" surrounding the likes of Elihu Yale, Timothy Dwight, Lincoln, Darwin, the Nations of Israel and America... and a few others.

Welcome to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Bill Federeramerican Minute.com. So, Bill, we're having a wide-ranging conversation on purpose because this is a delightful romp through the centuries, through the millennia of history, understanding how we got to be where we are today, where American liberty and self-government come from. And you've made the case extraordinarily well, even in this short time, about how we get it from ancient Israel, which most people don't know. This is a fact.

This is not your interpretation. This is fact. But other than you and Oz, Guinness, I can't think of anybody who's written about this. Are there any other books that I'm missing where people have written about this in a way that we would want to read it? I don't know. Well, there definitely are, especially some of the old ones. Again, from 1517 to more or less 1617, you have a century where the scholars that you Europe, James Harrington.

And so they're writing on the Hebrew Republic, so much so that they're called Christian Hebraists. One of the famous Puritan Christian Hebrayists was being put in prison, and they told me he could have two books. He picked the Bible and the Jerusalem Talmud. And they became such scholars that later rabbis would quote them. And they would study mamanities. They would study, you know, all the different Mishnah and all the different

Jewish writings because they were fascinated with this period how you could have a country with no king and how you would give the rights to the people and then the people would. And so Israel's model was dependent on the priests teaching the law. It's sort of like I have a cell phone, right? And everybody has GPS and you download a GPS app and it can get you from point A to point B all by yourself in the car. meet anybody. Imagine if you could download a behavioral app that would tell you how to act in real time. Instead of saying, you know, turn left to 50, you know, yards ahead, it would, it would see you eyeing something on the table and it would run this algorithm that your bank account's low and you're thinking of stealing and it would say, alert, alert, don't steal. And then it would monitor your blood

pressure and it sees that you're about to lose your temperate somebody, you know, say alert, alert, don't blow it, lose your time. So imagine it. And then the Levites were the computer. Geeks that help you to download the behavioral app. So everybody in Israel had downloaded. They had memorized the Ten Commandments. They memorized the law. It was on their heart. So they could self-govern themselves without anybody following them around, without any police.

And the key ingredient to the whole system is there's a God who is watching everyone. He wants it to be fair. And he's going to hold you accountable in the future. So you're about to steal. Nobody's around. You know you can get away with it. And then you think, God is watching me. He wants me to be fair.

He's going to hold me accountable in the future. Maybe I should hesitate stealing. And it creates something in your head called a conscience. If everybody in the country really believes this, you can maintain complete order with no, please, maximum liberty. Women can go anywhere without fear. You don't have to lock your doors because everybody believes God's watching him. He wants them to be fair. He's going to hold them accountable to the future.

So this was the model. But of course, you see how. how people like Marx take that idea and they say, oh, by the way, there is no God. It's a lie. And we have governments and religious leaders are simply using this to keep people under control. Folks, that is the lie, ironically, because of course there is the God watching us and he loves us. This is so fascinating. I want to keep going eventually. Maybe in the next segment, I want to get to February since we're talking in February and talk a little bit about some February events. But I also wanted to get to Timothy Dwight. So I know that's where you're going. Keep going.

So the model is that everyone was taught the law. But over time, the priests in ancient Israel stopped teaching the law. You said they did? Yeah, here's Eli, the high priest. His own sons are sleeping with women in the very tent where the Ark of the Covenant is. He's not even teaching the law to his own kids. Then you have a story of a Levi with a silver graven image in the house of a guy named Micah. The tribe of Dan comes along and takes the graven image and tells it's Levi, come along with us. You can be a priest to our whole tribe. And you're reading through the story in the book of judges scratching your head saying,

what's this Levi doing with a graven image? Isn't that one of the commandments you're not supposed to have them? And then the terrible story of a Levite with a concubine. The law says the Levite is to marry a virgin of his own tribe. Here he is with a woman he's not even married to. He's not following the law. They're traveling. They're in a house that gets surrounded by sodomite.

Something about that behavior that appears at the very last stages of a people ruling themselves. This casting off his self-restraint. They bang on the door, the poor girls raped to death. And by the time you're grossed out by the story, you read this line. every man did that which was right in their own eyes. Why? Because the priest had stopped teaching them what was right in the Lord's eyes. They lost the knowledge of God.

They lost the fear of God. All they had left was raw human passion. Everybody just yields themselves to this unrestrained, you know, avarice and greed and lust. And it turns into chaos. That's when they go to Samuel the Prophet. And they say the self-government system is not working. We need a king. We need a strong government restore order.

And Samuel cries and the Lord said, they did not reject you. They rejected me. And by the way, that's exactly what happens. Ladies and gentlemen, just so you're tracking it home, if you do not govern yourself, if you do not have virtue, if you do not have that kind of a system working, someone will govern over you. Someone will rule over you. So the reason our government has grown in America and your freedoms have decreased and decreased

and decreased and decreased is because we, the people, have taken our eyes off the ball. We've forgotten about this idea that we have to have virtue, that we have to have genuine liberty. We have to act on virtue. We have to be free and govern ourselves. The less you do that, the less you know that you need to do that, the more it simply goes away and people will rule over you. And of course, that's where we are right now. But I believe that there's hope just because of conversations like this, people are waking up. Bill, maybe we should leap to the French religion to Timothy Dwight, unless you had something else. Go ahead. Well, it was just one story of King Saul, and he's now the king, and he's pouting that his son Jonathan became friends with David,

and he's turned to his soldiers. He goes, none of you guys care about me. One soldier, Doeg, the Edomite, says, King, I care. I saw David go to this town. The priests there gave him some bread and the sword of Goliath. And Saul says, bring those priests to me. The priests show up, he turns to his soldiers and says, kill them. The soldiers hesitate. And Doeg Diedemite goes out there and kills them all. What just happened?

The soldiers had been operating under the old system where everybody is accountable to God to follow the law. And the law says you need two or more witnesses before you condemn someone to death. There's only one witness, Doe. And so these soldiers are still hesitating. They have a conscience. like, okay, King, you're telling me to kill. There's only one witness supposed to be two. I'm a personally kind of a guy. Doa, the Edomite says, king, I'm going to surrender my conscience to you. You tell me to kill, I'll kill. You tell me to kill the baby in the womb, I'll kill it. You tell me there's no more male and

female, fine. You tell me that, you know, I'm just a bunch of bush. You, you blow your trumpets and I'll bow to your statue, right? Whenever you get tyrannical kings, they want to insert themselves between you and God. They want to dictate your morality. And God's a jealous God. He doesn't want the God. He doesn't want the government in between you and him. And this is why the founders fled to America in the first place. They didn't want a king telling him, you have to believe what I tell you. I'm going to burn you at the sake. They go, no, we got a conscience. And so this is where we're facing today. And the government says, look, you have to push abortion. Even if you're little nuns, the sisters of charity and you've taken vows of chastity, the government's going to force you to participate in paying for killing babies.

And even if you have a moral hesitancy toward doing a transgendered surgery, if you're a doctor and you want to keep your job, you've got to do it. If you have a moral hesitancy toward getting vax, we don't care about your conscience. You just do what we tell you to do. In other words, there's this push for the government to say, look, we want to be your morals. We want to be the King Saul and you just act like Doeig and do what we tell you. And it is sort of, it gets serious when we look at the military, because historically, whenever you purge the military of people with conscience, The next step is to use the military to force their agenda. But that's for another discussion.

Well, this is just so important. We'll be right back a final segment, I think, with our friend Bill Federer. Ladies and gentlemen, don't go away. 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 end. anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day.

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We're talking to Bill Fetterer American Minute.com. Bill, so much powerful information here. Let's just keep going. Well, if you want to jump into Timothy Dwight, he again was Yale. Now, why is this important? Yale has, on its coat of arms, Hebrew characters, truth and life, but it's actually the Hebrew Yeram and Thelman, which were referring to the high priest, and he'd have a special vest with a little bag that had two stones, and they think that one would get hot, but it basically was a yes or no, so they would ask the Lord questions, and they would get the yes or no answer, and he was the high priest.

But this is what Yale has on its coat of arms, and they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard. And even in the 1600s, some of their, you know, commencement addresses were given in Hebrew or some of these. In the 1700s, because, of course, Yale didn't exist in the 1600s, but I know you knew that. Well, you were talking about what? led up to Timothy Dwight. And you were basically saying that, and this is very important for people to understand, the battle between the ideas of the French Revolution and the ideas of the American Revolution. I talk about this whenever I'm talking about William Wilberforce, how England in the 18th century really fell into a kind of paganism because they had internalized

the ideas of French Enlightenment rationalism, which puts God at a distance, very different from Christianity. And so when Timothy Dwight comes to be the president of Yale at the end of the 18th century, 1795, I was amazed to be reminded of how dramatically the student body at Yale and the elites in the colonies in that, just a few years after our own revolution, had shifted over to this French Enlightenment rationalism, which leads, and this is always makes sense, right, leads to debauchery, to sin, to disrespect for your fellow human being. It's ironic because the French, you know, they thought that they had it all figured out. And we often in our country today conflate the French and American revolutions like,

hey, wasn't it wonderful? Let's celebrate Bastille Day. Yeah. The motto of the French Revolution was liberty, equality, fraternity. It sounds nice, only it doesn't work. It's mutually exclusive. Liberty is experienced individually. And fraternity is their word for socialism.

It's the group, the collective, the club, the mob, the state. And equality can be understood two ways. In America, it was equal treatment before the law. In France, it was everyone having an equal amount of stuff. and if the fraternity, the group, the mob, thinks you have too much stuff, equity, it can use the power of the state to trample your individual liberty, confiscate all your stuff, redistributed, and kill you. And so they first decided to take away the lives of King Louis the 16th and Queen Marie Antoinette.

And then that didn't turn things around, so they chopped off the heads of all the royalty. It still didn't turn around. so they chopped off the heads of the wealthy. You have money, we don't, you're selfish. Then they chopped off the heads of the businessman and farmers. You got food and supplies, we don't, you're selfish. Then they chopped off the heads of the hoarders. You got extra food.

We don't have enough. You're selfish. Then they chopped off the heads of the clergy, because they were speaking out against the head chopping off stuff. And then they chopped off the heads of the former revolutionaries, the ones that used to chop off heads but got tired of it. So I'm out there to blame. 30,000 people had their heads chopped off.

in Paris, France. They were chopping while. They even invented a special machine called a guillotine to do it nice and clean. And if that wasn't bad enough, they sent their army to the Vendee, a rural area hundreds of miles away, and they killed 300,000 men, women and children. It's considered the first modern genocide. And it became a model for every socialist revolution since. You kill off the old order, kill off all these people that are stuck because we want to do something new and wonderful and it's just going to be great. We're just going to have to kill out of it. But what happens, it turns into chaos. And then out of that chaos, they got their dictator named Napoleon who put a crown on his own head and ruled as an emperor. So they wanted

to get rid of that king when they without, so democracy, their attempt at democracy, without the people having morals and virtue. And the only thing that really empowers you to have morals and virtue is accountability to God. But without the people having moral, and virtue turns into chaos. And out of that chaos, they got their version of a King Saul and his name was Napoleon. And so during this time, you have the founding fathers in America going through shock. They're like, we thought France was just wonderful and just on the forefront, the avant-garde. They're like, you know, the progressives and they're great.

And then all of a sudden they witnessed the reports coming across of this bloody butchery. And so it was during this time that Yale President Timothy Dwight, the fourth, gives a speech, and he talks about what's going on. Now, Dwight, for those that are not familiar, began reading the Bible when he was four years old, entered Yale when he was 13 years old, graduated at the age of 17 in 1769. and then he was at Tudored Yale, and he gave the valedictorian address in 1776, talking about how Americans were people who have the same religion,

the same manners, the same interests, the same language, the same essential forms and principles of civil, the civic government. So he mentioned... Now, by the way, Bill, I just have to say, because of you, because of American Minute.com, I was reminded of Timothy Dwight, and I started looking into him. And I realize, I mean, I realize many things. First of all, he probably knew Nathan Hale, because Nathan Hale was at Yale during this period when Dwight was teaching there. Also, I realized there is

essentially no good biography of Timothy Dwight. Whatever exists is pretty awful, actually. And I thought, when I read your account, I said, this is such an amazing figure. It's kind of shocking that nobody has written a good biography of him. I'm tempted to do it in my spare time. And since I don't have any spare time, I'm going to ask you to please do it. But seriously, this is, it's amazing information to hear you say that, I mean, here we have Rochambeau, the Marquis de Lafayette. We have Franklin and Jefferson traveling to Paris. And yet, their style of revolution was ultimately utterly antithetical to our own. And a lot of people don't know that. A lot of people don't know how horrible it was. And the story of Timothy Dwight underscores this, that he comes to Yale. He sees that in 17, by the 1790s, many of the Yale students have adopted this way of thinking, which is, it's not just godless, it's anti-God. So tell us the rest of the story. What does he do? Yeah, they would call it French infidelity or the deism or rationalism. And it was, so prior to the American Revolution, we had a first grade awakening revival. And we were claiming, we got rights from a creator. The king is infringing on our creator given rights. Therefore, we're justified in rebelling against the king. Well, prior to the French Revolution, they had a period that began with Voltaire, where he mocked Christianity, made fun of it in his plays, made fun of the,

the Christian faith, and he had a brilliant wit. And so he would use it to sort of make fun of Christianity. And he got control of academia, which was the public opinion molding. They were the influencers of the day. Today we talk about influencers for different groups. And, well, Voltaire co-opted the influencers of his day to push this. And so what happened during the French Revolution is you had people not just rebelling against the King of France.

and rebelling against the church, which was Catholic, but they decided to rebel against all churches and all organized religion and even God. And, you know, you had Thomas Payne, his age of reason, and all this stuff. And so there was a group called the Jacobins, and they met on a street called Jacob, and that's where they got their name. And they were anarchists. They were like, tear everything down, tear it down, tear it down. They were the Antifa BLM of the day.

And no, they never asked the question, what's going to take it, place. We don't know, but it's going to be wonderful. It's like, maybe we need to put a little thought into this. But after our revolution, we had an open door. Anything French, French was good. It was great. It was the in style. It was the, and so you had this open door for French, and it began to come out on the college campuses. And you began to have these kids turning into deists and atheists and so forth. And lots of different stories. One of my favorite, is Adonairm Judson, who was a student at, wasn't Yale, it was another college, but he had a friend talk him into becoming an atheist. And he graduates valedictorian of his class. And he's traveling

across New York. He's now a teacher at an iron Judson. And he's staying at an inn before motel sixes, right? I mean, big house, rooms, and they rent them out. And somebody across the hall was just groaning all night. And it sounded like the guy was dying. And Adam Judson was like covering his ears and finally got quiet and he went to sleep. The next day he's checking out. And he said, what happened to that guy? He died. Oh, I'm so sorry. What was his name? Well, the name was Jacob Eames. And that was the same Jacob Eames that had talked at an arm judge into becoming an atheist. Holy guacamole. I want to hear more about this. Fortunately, we get to continue our conversation with Bill Federer American Minute.com. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it.

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They can also ship gold and precious metals safely and securely to your house. Call Legacy at 866-528-1903 or visit them online at Legacy. P.m. Investments.com. Talking to Bill Federer. Bill, you just shared an amazing story about the hero, the missionary, Adonairum Judson. I did not know the story that you just told that he had become an atheist. And then the man who led him into atheism took his own life within a few feet of Judson. I mean, you can't make that one up. No, it was a powerful story.

And he went on to become missionary. He was the first foreign missionary to India, but really to Burma and started a missionary movement in the early 1800 called the Haystack Revival and 5,000 young people went out to missionaries around the world, Hawaii, the Caribbean. It was sort of like all the woke energy today. Imagine that being harnessed to go around the world and spread the gospel and start schools and start missionary, orphanages and medical clinics. And it changed the world.

Unfortunately, that young person, energy is hardest for the destruction right now. Anyway, so Timothy Dwight, during this time, he takes over his president of Yale. And from some reports, there's like no professing Christians in the student body, which is only a couple hundred students. And rather than him sit in his ivory office, he would come down at the lunch table. And he would listen to the students say all their skeptical stuff. and after he would listen patiently, he would say, okay, I listen to you, now you listen to me. And one by one, he would refute every one of their arguments. So much so that within a few years, virtually the entire student body became Christian again,

and a good percentage of the students went on to become ministers and missionaries themselves. And so this is part of what's called the Second Great Awakening Revival. there were even two Hawaiian boys, Henry Opukwaya, all right, and Thomas Hopu, and they hopped on a whaling ship in Hawaii, and they wound up in Connecticut, and they wound up meeting Timothy Dwight, and they ended up coming to faith in Christ, and Thomas Hopu translates, you know, the Bible and scriptures, and then, you know, anyway, long story short, it starts the missionary movement to Hawaii. But Timothy Dwight was the academic leader during the second grade awakening revival. While on the Kentucky frontiers, you had all the country preachers, and they would have literally 25,000 people show up in the woods. And they would have platforms built. Every 50 yards, you have another preacher. And they would, you know, some would be praise in the Lord.

Others would be on their face repenting in tears. and it would be all emotional and some people would criticize it, but then the reports were that the people kept their faith after their emotional experience. So it was not a fleeting thing. So you had this emotional frontier revival, but then you had the academic Timothy Dwight, second grade away, and it took place in academia. It's just an amazing story. We just have moments left. And since we're, we're just a moment's we're into February, I thought, what can we share that as appropriate to the season? Maybe you can mention Abraham Lincoln being born on the same day as Charles Darwin.

I forgot that. That's kind of crazy. That's a whole other comparison. But February 12th, 1809 is the exact day that Lincoln and Darwin were born. and Lincoln's best known for freeing the slaves. And saying that all men are created equal. Well, Darwin's best known for saying all men are not created. They evolved and they're not equal because some are more evolved than others. See, people don't talk about that. I talk about that more and more.

If you buy into the idea that Darwin's story is true, that we got here by accident, evolution is the reality, then it is only logical and scientific to conclude that some groups are more evolved than others. And guess what? Many people believe that. It led to genocide, to eugenics. It led to Hitler. It's only after the Holocaust that people found these ideas so odious that they said, well, we'll be against racism, but we're no longer going to connect Darwin's ideas.

ideas to eugenics, to racism, to genocide. We're going to try to have, you know, we're going to be against racism, but we're still going to believe in the ideas that led to racism. And we will not ever discuss the fact that it doesn't make logical sense. And I think it's important to discuss that and to show people that apart from the God of the Bible, racism is, you know, it's where Darwin leads us. It's where it's where atheistic science or scientism leads us. And Lincoln's also best known for his Gettysburg address that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom. And then Lincoln also is the one who put the phrase in God we trust on our coins. And Darwin's evolutionary theory is used to undermine belief in God.

And if there's no God, you don't have any creator given rights. Where do your rights come from? Oh, the group, the social contract, the state, the collective, the mob. Okay, well, all I got to do is sway the group and I can take away some people's rights and give more to other. No, our founder said that this God of the Bible, and it's just, interestingly enough, it's just the God of the Bible. The Islamic Allah God does not believe that infidels are equal to believing Muslims. It does not believe women are equal to men. Even Mohammed said that a woman's mind is deficient and it takes two women to testify in court against one man.

It's the God of the Bible that says that male and female are made in the image of the creator. And this creator says there is no respect of persons in judgment. Richard Port, everyone is to be treated exactly the same. These are biblical concepts. Bill, I hate to stop you from talking. Just a joy to have you. Folks, go to American Minute.com. Bill Federer, thank you so much.

Thank you, Eric. Folks, Eric Metakas 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. 3999, if you use the code, Eric, normally $109.99. cents. 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 3999. You have to use the code, Eric, go to mypillow.com, click on the new radio listener specials, and what you can call 800, 978 3057, 800, 978 3057. Use the code Eric. Hey, Albin. Hey, Eric.

Listen, we had a segment here where we could talk about anything, and I thought, let's make this one of those special, a reader writes, a listener rights, a viewer writes, because we get emails from people. I read every single email. I want to make this clear, folks.

up to this point in my career, I'm able to still read every email that you write. I'm grateful for them. We cannot answer most of them. Albin answers some of them, but really we're very busy, as you would guess, but we're delighted to get them and to read them. But I thought, you know, once in a while I get one that's so encouraging that I thought I want to read it on the air and maybe comment on it. a woman named Sally wrote to me, I got this yesterday. And the message subject is a new faith confirmed. She says, and this concerns my book, is atheism dead ultimately.

But here it says, as one who sat on the fence of whether God was real, I watched your interview with Tucker Carlson and immediately bought, is atheism dead and a fish out of water? Obviously, those are my two books. A fish out of water is my memoir of how I came to faith that came out about a year ago. She writes, what you said and how you spoke of the Bible, and this is she's referring to the Tucker Carlson program, what you what you said and how you spoke of the bible grabbed my heart and soul after all of this together with much prayer i know capital k-no-w god is real and i thank you so much for leading me in the right direction for me to fully accept and believe in god i feel he is with me all the time and i thank

him for all his blessings may god bless you wow i just want to say that uh you know when i get when i I got that email, I thought, this is literally why I do everything that I do. Nothing could touch me more than the idea that some random person is watching Tucker Carlson and that what I said on that show led that person to God. You know, it's interesting, Albin. How much money do we get for every person that accepts God? Yeah, exactly. Oh, gosh. So clearly, ladies and gentlemen, the reason I say this is because I want people to understand that this is why we do what we do. And we don't always talk about God, but I know what it is to not know God. I know what it is to not know whether it's possible to know God.

I remember, and I write about this in fish out of water, I remember, you know, being exactly the same person I am today, at least roughly speaking the same person close to it. And remember thinking logically, you know, there are people who claim to know God. And it seems to me that maybe they're nuts or maybe they're just not very logical because we don't know if God exists, but even if God does exist, the idea that I could know God and have a relationship with him, that seemed to me beyond the pale, logically speaking. And that's exactly where I was. And so I remember vividly, and that's why I wrote Fish Out of Water, because I wanted

to recount those memories of what it is like to be a decent person trying to figure things out, wondering whether anyone really could figure things out, and sort of living your life. And most of us live our lives in a distracted way because it's the route of least pain. I don't want to think about the meaninglessness of the universe or whatever it is. So I just try to lead my life and we follow the pleasure trail, right? whatever gives me some kind of good feeling, some kind of positive thing. We tend to do that. We're distracted away from the horror that I don't know why I'm on the planet.

I don't know if there is a God. I don't know whether you can know whether there is a God. So obviously once God made himself clear to me, once he revealed himself to me, I said, I want to let other people know this because I I know that there are tons of people like me who are just really wondering if you could even know. So it was fun being on Tucker Carlson because now some people know that he has an hour-long show. It's on Fox Nation. You need a subscription.

I'm not subscribed to Fox Nation. But he played clips of it during the week leading up to Christmas. Yes. But the whole show, I've never watched the whole show, but my memory of the conversation. with him over that hour. It was very wide-ranging, as I sometimes can be, if you let me. And I was hoping and had prayed with Suzanne that there'd be somebody listening out there who might benefit from what I had to say.

So to hear from this woman, Sally, that it was that conversation that I had with Tucker that led her on this path. I just want to say, folks, that's why I do whatever it is that I do. And it gives me such joy. When I read this last night, I thought, what a huge, huge encouragement to me just to keep going. Yeah, and Eric, I know you probably weren't thinking of this, but you can get both of those books, oddly enough, if you go to shopmetaxis.com. They're bundled together. Oddly enough, it's crazy. Well, I actually was not, it didn't even occur.

occur to me to go there. I didn't think it occurred to me because I don't want to I don't want to pollute this conversation. I know. You've already polluted it. You know, well, look, shopmetaxis. com. People can get like Eric Mataxis show mugs and whatever, but yes, you're right. Those books are available. They're both autographed. Yes. So you can get them other places, obviously. But if you want both of those books to be autographed, that's, it is a great price. But really, honestly, I just want audience to know how much it means to me that someone stumbled across this conversation and what I had to say led them in this direction. And I'll say why, because it's why we're on the planet, folks. And if you don't yet know that, I want to help you figure that out because it changes

everything. Once you know that God is real, it's not a philosophy, it's not a fantasy, there is nothing more central to our existence. It is the center of why we are here, and it helps us make sense of everything else. So this email from Sally to my website, Eric Mataxis.com, completely blessed me, and I said, I'm going to share it today, and now I've shared it. You can go to Ericmataxis.com yourself. Thank you. Hey there, folks. We've come to the lightning round of Ask Mataxis, and go. Go. How do you feel about the metaverse? I'm against it. Next. What are your goals for 2022?

What are my goals? To have a mainstream national TV talk show. To have the Bonhofer film produced and in the can. I think that's going to happen. And to, I guess, to visit the dentist every six months. That's those are the three. Okay. That's good. Thoughts on Kanye's diss track released a few days back.

Let me just say, I love Kanye so much. I want to meet him and get to know him. I love that guy. His faith is real. And so my thoughts are, I don't know. Okay. Have you ever had any doubts about your faith? No.

I've had struggles. I've had questions. But when I came to faith around my 25th birthday, It's just so real that I don't, you know, when people said, do you have doubts about your faith? My faith is really an intellectual faith. It's a visceral, you know, when you meet Jesus, like actually meet him, you may have a million questions, but like fundamental doubts on whether he's real. By the grace of God, no. Okay.

Get ready to play favorites. Who had a greater impact on their culture, Wilberforce or Bonhoffer? That's easy. Bonhofer had, like, no impact on his culture. That's the problem because the German people. didn't listen to him. Wilberforce had a tremendous... Actually, most of my Wilberforce book is about all the other stuff that he had, the effect on the culture, not just the slave trade. So that's kind of an easy one. The answer is Wilberforce.

How is your dad's health? P.S., you are the best podcast, Truth, with a little bit of sassy. Comedy. Sassy? Yeah. It's like I'm wearing a sassy hairstyle. What is that sassy? Thank you. My dad, he's doing much, much better. I cannot tell you. how kind that is for you to ask that. But thank you. Favorite meal. Usually the next one. There's an untucked shirt under that suit jacket, isn't it?

Yeah, I disapprove of that whole untucked shirt thing. But it's not like a moral issue, but I'm not an untucked kind of guy. And this ties in. Eric, where do you get your fine menswear? That's a weird question. Where do you get your fine menswear off of the Internet? Many different places. I don't know.

I feel like I need to write about this. I think I need to write about this. Are you writing seven more women impatiently waiting? Absolutely love all your books. You know what? I've written most of seven more women, and we had, Zondervan was going to publish it,

but they decided not to, which is strange, but that's their right as a publishing house. So it is not currently slated to be published. I don't know why Zondervan made that decision, but we were doing it. And so I don't know when it will come out. It will come out.

I care very deeply about that series, seven men, seven women, seven more men and seven more women. But the answer is I don't know. Okay. Do you believe in a literal seven-day creation? You know, I get this question all the time. do I believe in a literal seven-day creation? And that's the most ridiculous thing.

Everybody knows God did it in six days. So the very idea that somebody who calls himself a Christian would not know that is outrageous. Outrageous, I tell you. Albin, can you believe that we even get questions like that? I don't know. Okay. How do I sign up for the newsletter, softball? Ericmataxis.com.

And I do want to say this, since we got knocked off of YouTube, a lot of people say, yeah, I used to see you on YouTube. but folks, please, please sign up for the newsletter at ericmetaxis.com. Fortunately for us, we're out of time. Thank you.