Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Today is January 5th, 2023. For a short, we're setting up a tentative plan to go to Japan.

I'm not going to believe this. Maybe even Scotland. That's for another thing. We have a guy who's a travel planner. He has a travel planning business. Anyway, he wants me to go to Japan. We're going to go to Japan.

We'll put some information up on that. There's actually a Christian history in Japan. A lot of Christians were murdered for their faith, murdered for their faith. There are churches over there. I'm supposed to go over and do some speaking, teaching, maybe preaching. A lot of fun.

I love doing that. Also, in about six weeks, I'm going to Israel. That'll be interesting.

Then in July, I'm supposed to go to Southern California, do some preaching and teaching, and go to a memorial service, and maybe go to Scotland this year. The same guy who's arranged the Japan thing said, You know what? We're talking. He just brought it up. He goes, I've got to get there.

We have people who want to go there and do a tour. I go, You're kidding me. Then I was explaining some stuff. Just a lot of stuff going on.

You never know. Again, I want to say thanks to all the people who supported us in the matching funds drive for the end of the year. It really came in very helpful. Praise God. The first part of the year is always difficult because we have to pay the missionaries. We have insurance we have to pay, and that's several thousand dollars. Insurance for lawsuits and defamation and things like that. It's just a standard thing that some ministries have.

Because of what I do, when I say things like the Biden crime family, that's what I believe, or Roman Catholicism is not Christian, or Joyce Meyer is a heretic, which I believe is true. People say, You can't say that. We're going to sue you. Okay, well, that's what it is. So we have a policy for that.

We pay it once a year. Let's see. What else? I can't think of anything. I think that's about it. Why don't you give me a call? 877-207-2276.

The first part of the year is often slow. I'll tell you what. If you want to e-mail me questions, you can do that. All you have to do is just e-mail me at info at karm.org. You can just ask a question, and I'll read it over the air. I've got some of these e-mails in here. Let's see.

Mike, what? Happy New Year. You were kind enough to offer your response to my grants question.

Maybe some, I don't know, Freemason Grant. I don't know what that is. Well, I think somebody else is talking to somebody else. We have several people who enter e-mails. So I was looking online on my e-mails. I found one of my accounts, which I haven't looked at for a while.

It's kind of a, I put stuff there, account, and there's 47,000 e-mails there. I was like, Oh, my goodness. So we have to go through some of the stuff, and we will check it out.

Oh, that reminds me. We have an apologetics course. I'm looking at an e-mail that says that someone wants to pay for somebody else to do the apologetics course. And we have three online schools, if you're interested. You can go to, let's see, learn.karm.org, and we have three schools. So if that sounds like something you want to check out, you know, a school on theology and one on apologetics and one on critical thinking. And what you can do is you can sign up for those.

They're $33 each or all three for $75. And if you can't afford it, just e-mail us and say you can't afford it, we'll give it to you for free. That's how it is.

We use it to keep the lights on, but if people can't afford it, we want them to study. And so these took me months and months to write, and I actually started two weeks ago a school on hermeneutics, how to interpret scripture. And as soon as I started, you know, the deluge of other things came in. So, you know, for most people, they have this break called Christmas, and someone mentioned this weird word to me. I had to look it up. Vacation, I think is how it's pronounced. So I had to look that up.

What is that? And I understood then at that point that people actually stop working for extended periods of time and then don't do much. And I thought that's an interesting concept.

I've got to check that out, because maybe I should try that sometime. And let's see, I think that's about it. Okay, if you've got any questions, give me a call, 877-207-2276.

Somebody wrote in, let's see, it's been many years since I've contacted you, but I occasionally check out your site when I'm searching for answers. On this occasion, I'm looking for clarity and primary doctrinal beliefs. There's a lot of helpful information on this page, but I'm troubled by it. I will explain. In the introduction, you have five points.

Actually, I've moved over to seven, but that's another thing. Then in the scriptural support, you have six points, where being born again is one of them with only one verse supporting it. Oh, that's because I didn't update the first part of the article. Is being born again a primary doctrine or not?

Yes, it is primary. I'm rather surprised to see no mention of God as Creator or an explanation for the fall, because these are the basics of the faith. There's all kinds of stuff.

I could put that in there. God is the Creator and things like that. Are they not primary doctrines? Not the way I defined them, but if not, what is sin? Why do we even need a Savior?

I don't think the person understands what the issue is. What I did was, when I was reading through the Bible, I discovered that there were certain things that God said were necessary doctrines. He'd say it through Jesus or Jesus would say it to the apostles. So I noticed this. I started writing them down, and I'd read the Bible study. I would go, oh, look at that. There's another one.

It took me a couple of years to collect it. So what I found was that there are places, for example, where Jesus says, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sin. And so there's a consequence. You see, if you don't believe this, you're going to die in your sin. So that's a statement with a punishment or consequence for denying it. And how about 1 Corinthians 15 and 14, where Paul says, if Christ be not raised, then our faith is in vain. So there are statements that the Bible makes that have a warning or a condition of necessity upon them. And so that's why I call them primaries, because the primary doctrines are the ones that have a statement plus a warning or consequence for denying them. So I call them primary. Now, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a primary, because nothing in the Bible says, Thou shalt believe in the one God through distinct simultaneous persons. So it's a secondary essential to Christian faith.

It's derived out of the whole of Scripture, and it certainly is true. In fact, it's not a primary, because there's no warning attached to it. Now, we could stretch it and say that you've got to believe in the true God, that by definition the true God is a Trinity. But the Bible says in Exodus 20, You shall have no other gods before him, and if you do, you'll be cursed.

And so believe in monotheism and the one true God. These are primaries, because there's warnings with them. And that's how I distinguish between primary and secondary essentials.

I'm the only one I know who does that. Others will say, Yeah, these are all essentials. And they are. The Trinity, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, they're all essential doctrines, and they are. What I've done is just called them primary and secondary. The primaries are the ones that have a warning with them, and the secondaries are derived out of the rest of them but don't have a warning attached to them in Scripture.

That's why I do it that way, just for clarification and better discussion of those. And born again, unless you're born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God, so that's a primary. Over the years, I've modified this thing, and I've added, first it was five, then it was six, now it's seven, and I think it's one of them, was born again. Unless you're born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God, so that's a primary. And the Trinity is a secondary along with the virgin birth, because nothing in the Bible says, Thou shalt believe in the virgin birth, or else you'll die in your sins.

It just says in Matthew 1.25 that he kept her virgin until Jesus was born, and so the virgin birth is there. So just stuff like that, and that's what I was getting at. All right, if you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276. Look at Gary from Nashville. Welcome. You're on the air. Thanks, Matt.

Hey, I wanted to run something by you. I was evangelizing, and this one lady was talking about a pastor that had the upside-down cross. I couldn't confirm it. It was David Jeremiah.

I couldn't confirm that, and I seriously doubt it. But does that mean you reject Jesus? It can or it cannot, because the Satanists... The Satanists will use an upside-down cross as a denial of the truth and efficacy of Christ's sacrifice, but Peter was crucified upside-down. So sometimes you might see an upside-down cross as a designation of martyrdom, specifically in relationship to Peter. So in that sense, it's not a denial. It's an affirmation. So it all depends on what the intention is. Now, if I had a church, I would never have an upside-down cross because it's so easily misunderstood.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to go to one either. I remember when I was doing research on the Catholic Church that the Baltimore Catechism, I believe it is, had a picture on one of the pages of an upside-down cross. And I remember going, what the heck? And I was really shocked by it, you know? And then I looked and read the context, and I go, oh, okay, gotcha. I get what they're doing. So, you know, stuff like that. Okay, yeah, it's explained, you know.

And that's all that is. Go ahead. I told her, I said, the Spirit wouldn't have me listen to him because I would be, you know, I wouldn't be listening to him. I would be able to discern pretty well now who I listen to and who I don't. Well, your discernment's not that good if you're listening to me. No, it's good, man.

Hey, I wanted to run something by you, too. Is it Muslims that, who is it that they pray to rocks like five times a day? They pray to rocks. Well, they don't pray to rocks.

They don't do that. No? No, the Kaaba is a stone. Oh, and someone brought up a very, very interesting observation about the housing of the stone. The stone is supposed to be either a meteorite, but it's the location where Abraham went up or received knowledge or Muhammad did or whatever. And so they have these different things.

And so they pray in the direction of the Kaaba, of the cube. And someone made an observation. I've got to be careful how I say this because, and I saw this. I saw the picture and I went, that's true.

And the housing of the stone has a resemblance of female genitalia. I'll just leave it at that. Oh, man. Wow. Now, it could be a coincidence. It doesn't really mean anything.

But since Muhammad had all these wives and he said to the Muslim warriors, you can have up to four women and who you right-hand possess and you can do what you want with them, it makes you wonder. There's the break, buddy. Okay? Got to go.

All right, man. Hey, do you want to give me a call? Four open lines, 877-207-2276. We'll be right back. It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. All right, everyone.

Welcome back to the show, Four Open Lines. If you want to give me a call, 877-207-2276. You can also email me a question if you have one, info at karm.org, that's C-A-R-M dot O-R-G. Check it out if you haven't already.

It's a good website. Let's get to Eric from Utah. Eric, welcome. You're on the air. Hey, how's it going? It's going, man. Hanging in there. So what do you got?

Nice. So there's always been like a curiosity and, forgive my ignorance, some of these questions. But, you know, in the beginning where the creation of the earth was made in seven days. But there's also, you know, I'll say quote unquote evidence that the earth has transpired over, you know, millions or billions of years forming with rock formations, all that jazz. So I didn't know if it was like, you know, in our human minds, if it's the literal seven days or if there's like specific, I guess, eras that transpire over time. Well, let's talk about it. And, you know, the Bible does seem to suggest a very young earth.

I have no problem with that. And I love science. I don't judge the Bible's truth by science. I judge science by the Bible's truth. Science, so people can recognize, is a philosophy.

They might say, no, Matt, you're just an ignorant jerk. No, it's a philosophy. And they don't realize it because science is not based upon things that it can prove, it's based upon things that can't be proven, for example. The uniformity of nature, it assumes that everything in the world and everything in the universe operates the same way. It's called the assumption of uniformitarianism. And they can't prove it's true, but they assume it is true. They assume the validity of rationality, laws of logic and things like that.

But you can't use laws of logic to validate them. And they use logic and regularity in order to make observations. And then they do logical inferences because this is part of what the scientific method is.

And then they assume that there's going to be an objective means of reporting data that scientists see. So these are philosophical assumptions. And people don't realize that the basis of science is philosophy.

The foundations upon which it works is philosophical. All right, well, that doesn't mean, though, that it's not valid. It just means that it's based upon things that scientists itself can't demonstrate are true. And yet what science does is it looks at the created world and then makes observations on the created world and then has hypotheses. A hypothesis is not a theory. A hypothesis is an untested idea. And once the idea has been tested and then you have repeatability, it becomes a theory. Theories are pretty much believed to be true, but they're technically open to being changed.

Okay, so what does the evidence say? Well, for example, there are things that are difficult in the evolutionary model. The pre-Cambrian fossils were of single-celled organisms. But suddenly in the Cambrian period, there appears 40 new phyla, which are body types, like a fish, a bird, a snake, a horse.

These are all body types. And they suddenly appear at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Now, some might say that there's a five-million-year transition between the pre-Cambrian and the Cambrian period. Some have said that. But the rock stratus shows a very significant and pretty quick transition according to their dating.

It's not enough time for the fossil, on their evolutionary model, it's not enough time for 40 new phyla to appear. It's not possible. It doesn't work genetically, with cladistics, with other things. It just doesn't work. It's a problem. There's also the problem of...

I'll get to dating methods here in a second. There's a problem of carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,730 years, which means that if we have a gram of carbon-14, that within 5,730 years, or at that mark, one gram has become a half a gram. And so what this means is that for 100,000 years, there should be no carbon-14 left in anything that was once alive. Period. The problem is carbon-14 is being found in coal shales, which is supposed to be millions of years old, and diamonds, which is supposed to be like 990 million years old.

So there are problems in that. Then we have contradictory dating methodologies of rock strata. So Plicacine rock layer is supposed to be 1.6 million years old, but by the rubidium strontium dating method, it's 773 million years old. And the upper myosin to pliocene lava, by the potassium argon dating method, is 5 to 9 million years old, but rubidium strontium, it's 31 to 39 million years old. Pliocene to holocene lava, which is stratigraphically dated, that means they look at it and judge what its date is, less than 5 million years old, but the rubidium strontium method gives it over 570 million years old.

And it goes on. The point is, and I can read a lot more to bore you, the point is that the scientists using their technology get wildly different numbers for rocks that are dating. Well, why is that? Well, it casts doubt on the reliability of these ideas, plus the idea that carbon is found in things that are supposed to be millions of years old and it can't be?

It can't be. Why is that? There are issues, but you don't hear about them.

You don't hear about them. And human DNA, the mutation rate is such that within, I think it's 200 more generations, the human genome won't be viable anymore. I can go on.

I can go on and on. There's volcanic activity problems. There's erosion problems. There's the galaxy in the universe problem. Check this out. Tully and Fisher's maps show the galaxies within 100 million light years of Earth are concentrated into what they call filaments. On a large scale, clusters of galaxies are also concentrated into vast supercluster complexes. The supercluster complexes directly contradict the homogeneity assumed by the Big Bang.

And I can go on and read more. What they're saying is there's not enough mass in the universe in order to account for the coalescing of the galaxies to form galaxies and to be in superclusters. I can get into more detail about that. So they've invented something called dark matter to explain it. Dark matter is the theoretical invention of astrophysicists to explain the present state of galaxy formation and supercluster arrangements because they need more mass and gravity to explain the present galaxy arrangement. And then there's the problem of why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate. Galaxies are moving away from each other at an accelerated rate. They're accelerating, but they shouldn't be doing that.

If the universe is true that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, then everybody in the universe exerts gravitation force and every other one is all coming up in the center and they should all be pushing in towards the center, but they're not expanding faster. There's the break. Hold on buddy, look at that. I let you go. Hey folks, we'll be right back after these messages. Please stay tuned. Music It's Matt Slick live, taking your calls at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick.

Welcome back to the show for Open Lines 877-207-2276. Eric, you still there? Yes, sir. All right. I know I gave you a lot of stuff there, and I got a lot more to talk about too. Do you have any specific thing you want to focus in on? I mean, the dating methodology is a problem. Not anything that I'm able to, what's the word, counter for it.

I mean, there's a lot of knowledge, like you said, that I'm lacking in in terms of that, but I'm just kind of more curious on, you know, it's not a literal seven days, 24-hour human days. Sure. Why not? That was lying. God can certainly do it. Really? Yeah, God can certainly do it in 24-hour periods. You can do it in 24 seconds.

I don't doubt that. I just didn't know if there would be, I guess, 24 hours, whether it's, you know, 3,000 B.C. or 2,023 A.D.

So still the same hours in the daytime. Don't put too much credence in science. Science is what's called provisional. Provisional means the theories are temporary. Now, some science, I mean, has just produced incredible benefits. And we can have quantum computers, we can have radio and things like that.

No problem. But when it comes to interpreting things that are so very old, then you have to adopt non-repeatability. That's the issue. Science is a method of observation, theorizing, or hypothesizing, and then developing a test to validate or invalidate the hypothesis. Once the, and then you modify the test, and you either prove the hypothesis or you support the hypothesis or you invalidate the hypothesis. Once the hypothesis can be repeated or the evidence repeats in support of the hypothesis, it moves into the realm of theory. Theory is then basically accepted, but it's still provisionary. What this means is it's provisionary in the sense that later on, more information can come up that can falsify that theory.

That's what we mean by provisionary. But to back up, repeatability and experimentation is one of the ways of validating the issue of a hypothesis to a theory. How do you repeat observation of ancient events? This is a problem. So in the Cambrian explosion, for example, how is it then that they could observe anything?

Well, they can't. What they'll do is look at rock strata, and they'll see different levels of complexity in biological structures. The smaller ones are in the bottom. The bigger ones, more complex, are in the top.

That's how it works. Of all things, I have a clear bag of cereal, and I noticed this years ago that I'd use this big bag, and I'd use it once every now and then. One day I was looking at the bag of cereal, and I noticed the fine elements were at the bottom and the coarser ones were at the top.

The reason is because with jiggling, the fine stuff is going to filter down. Well, what would be the case that would cause that? Well, a flood would certainly do that. A flood. And then when you introduce this to people about science, oh, that's religion.

You can't have that. Let's look at the rocks. Have you ever seen rock strata in these evolution shows?

They'll show like the Grand Canyon. Sometimes they'll show rocks that maybe have 30 layers, and they're all bent and swirled equally. Well, that means that it was mud that was laid down and then was bent and solidified. You can't have that form like that over millions and millions and millions of years.

It just doesn't work. So what they'll do is they'll say, okay, let's look at the flat layers. Now, think about the flat layers. What do you see when you see a flat layer? It's flat.

Why would it be flat? So you might have, we could walk up to a rock strata, and I'm just going to say, just for the sake of argument, let's say every 10 centimeters there's a new era of rock. Every 10 something. Let's pick every 10. Maybe 9, maybe 8, maybe 10, maybe 12.

But let's just average them 10. And we look left and right along this rock face, and we see that they're all horizontal. They're horizontal. We don't see them jiggled.

We don't see them with divots. Why is that important? Because if a layer of sand, mud is there and it takes millions of years to form, then erosion, earthquakes, wind, water would cause those flat layers to not be flat but to be all jiggly and divots and chunks taken out where rivers have moved. But why is it you have rock strata that are so flat and layered so pristinely and it's up like 500 million years of rock strata and it's just equal?

Why is that? There's a problem. And then there's what's called polystrate fossils. They sometimes find single fossilized trees vertically growing through hundreds of millions of years of rock strata. And then I can tell you more, too.

There is more. They found soft, flexible nerve tissue in Triceratops bones. They're finding soft tissue in the bones of dinosaurs, of course, supposed to be 60 million years old. How is that possible? Soft tissue in the bone marrow of things that are like 60 million years old.

It's not supposed to be fresh stuff like this. You don't hear about it, but it's a fact. And then we have the problem of the human ancestors, the humanoid ancestor line. There's a lot of problems there. So you've probably heard of... I could go over them, but I mean, I've got a list of them.

I'm looking at it right now. One of my biggest challenges to evolutionists is, of all things, the woodpecker. Have you ever heard me talk about the woodpecker?

I have not, no. How does a woodpecker evolve? What's the best explanation for a woodpecker? It's designed or evolved. The woodpecker's tongue goes down its throat, down by the vertebra. It leaves the mouth area.

It goes down by its throat, next to the vertebra in the neck, comes back up around the skull and the back between the skin and the scalp and the skull, and there's a groove in the skull where the tongue goes, and it goes back around the head, over the top of the head, down over the forehead between the eyes, and then down through a nostril, and then out the tongue. How does that evolve? How does it aid in survivability? And there's other complexities there. And there's other things like this that show great difficulty for evolutionary biology to explain, because a mutation is supposed to aid in survivability.

A tongue for a bird stuck in the back of its skull doesn't aid survivability. So how does it survive? What's the best explanation? Who's designed?

No problem. And we can go on and on and on about this. And you can get a book, Icons of Evolution, and you can read on that, and you can see these icons. They're not what they're cracked up to be. There's a lot of problems with evolution. And then we haven't even gotten into information structures.

How does that work? How does information form in biological structures? And mathematical odds? Oh, it gets immensely difficult.

Immensely difficult. I could explain more, but I won't bore you. Okay? Yeah, I love science. My notes on science is 44 pages. It's just on my notes. Yeah, there seems to be a lot of information, but it seems the information is only in theory until something else comes along that can be quote-unquote proven, and then a new theory arises from the other.

Yeah. Now, that's not to say they don't have their explanations for things, but the fact is that science is provisional when it comes to evolution. It's not been observed.

Yes, it has been observed. And that's up for debate, too, even among the scientists. And there's a lot of stuff. A lot of problems. Anyway, I can go into it.

I've got a lot of quotes and various things from the experts. Yeah. No, you're all right.

So I just stick with... I say the Earth is not millions of years old. I don't believe it's millions of years old. I don't.

That I deny openly. I don't know how old it is. I don't have any problem with a few thousand years old. I don't have any problem with a hundred thousand years old.

I don't know how long things existed before God created Adam, but it seems to be 24-hour periods, and I have no problem with that either. Okay. All right, buddy, there's a break. All right, man. We've got to go. Talk to you later. God bless.

All right, folks. We open lines 877-207-2276. Be right back. It's Matt Slick live. Taking your calls at 877-207-2276.

Here's Matt Slick. Everybody, welcome back to the show. Last segment of the hour.

Two open lines 877-207-2276. Let's get to, let's see, that would be Rudolph from North Carolina. Rudolph, welcome. You're on the air. Yes, sir.

Happy New Year to you, and not necessarily a question, but when you were talking about radio carbon dating, I actually know why it's different among scientists, and the reason why I know it is because I listen to ICR geologists, and he explains why they found out what scientists were doing, and even though the secular scientists don't agree with it, I found out why they have different numbers for radio dating. And where's that? And where's that? It comes from because they had to, that's why, every time they tried to make it fit their evolutionary scale, it kept not fitting. So what they did was they changed it to fit the, what they want to work with the numbers. So that's why they're different every time, because, what's that?

That's why it's different every time, because they had to use different forms of radio dating to make it fit their evolutionary scale. Right. They get conflicting information and irregularities within the methodology.

Yes, sir. And you don't hear about those. I know you don't because it doesn't fit their secular science, but also the thing you were talking about in the DNA, the reason why the DNA gets weaker is because every time you make a breath of God or something, it gets weaker, but when you do it, it doesn't get stronger, it gets weaker. There's a growing list of scientists, there's a growing list of scientists who are rejecting the evolutionary theory. It's growing. They just look at the science and say it's just not working.

And also, one more thing before I go. Yes, sir, one thing before, I want to, the reason why you were talking about the scientists believe in the expansion of the universe, do you know where that comes from? That actually comes from the big bangs.

That's why it's expanding. That's what they claim it is. I don't believe that, but that's where it comes from. Yep, and there's problems with the big bang theory, that's why they invented dark matter, dark energy.

And they say there's supposed to be evidence for it. Okay, well, let's see, you know, that's okay. But the vastness of the universe is such that it's just so varied, so many things in it, that in my opinion, just my opinion, you have to be really blinded to not see the creative work of God.

He's there. Right, of course you do. You know what it says in the Word, a fool has taken thought, says no God.

A fool. Yep, Psalm 14. Yep, that's true. Oh yeah, one more thing before I leave. After all this time, in evolution, they have never now run down until one transitional animal in all of history. They claim that they have them. I'll just tell you though, they claim they have them, but the issue is no undisputed one. Because some scientists say here's one, and other scientists say that's not it.

And they argue amongst themselves. So it's been offered, but there's no... What's the transitional animal? I've had evolutionists tell me this is a transitional form, they'll give me these peer-reviewed articles, and I say peer-reviewed means that scientists of the like mind are reading these things. They're not being peer-reviewed by intelligent design advocates, are they? No, because they're not peer, exactly. So it's kind of an echo chamber to some extent.

So the transitional forms and like are presupposed as being necessary, and so they look at evidence and make it fit the presupposition. That's what's happening. Okay? Okay. Okay. All right, buddy. Well, take care, and it was a good show for you, brother. Nice talking to you too, Rudolph.

God bless. All right, let's get to Rachel from Utah. Rachel, welcome, you are on the air. Hello? Rachel, I did click the right button.

Something about washing Jesus' feet, but I don't hear you, Rachel. If you're talking, I'll talk a little bit longer, see if you come on and put you on hold and maybe go to the next person. So let's do that. Let's go to Alex from Utah. Alex, welcome, you're on the air. Hey, Matt, how are you? Doing all right. Hanging in there, man.

What do you got, buddy? Good to hear. Hey, my younger daughter had a question. We were watching Passion of the Christ, and in the scene where Jesus is getting whipped, she was wondering, even though it's not in the Bible, if it was culture at that time for Mary to have to clean up the blood from Jesus, whatever was left over, and then clean him up as well. You mean at the crucifixion? Both at the crucifixion and then in the show, after Jesus is whipped, Mary cleans up his blood. Wait, he's wept?

I don't understand the one word. After Jesus wept, she cleaned up the blood? That's what I'm hearing, so I don't understand. No, it's whipped. Oh, whipped with a whip. Okay, thanks. I'm hearing loss.

Sorry about that. She cleaned up the blood. Most probably not, but I don't know. That's a good question.

I don't know, because they would be under the control of the people doing the punishment, and it might be the case that others were allowed to clean them up a little bit, but I don't know of anything. I've not heard of that, and it's not mentioned in the scripture. So in the Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson is a traditional Catholic, which is very problematic, and he inserted some Catholic stuff in there. I can point it out to you when I see the film. I've only watched it once. It's too hard to watch, but I'm glad that the film was made nonetheless. It was a very compelling film. There are some stories about how the guy on the cross, the actor almost died up there, and he almost died, and the only reason he didn't is because people saw one guy on the set between takes, and they said, I think he's in trouble, because the guy, he couldn't talk.

He was in such distress from being up there. Anyway, all kinds of stuff. So I couldn't tell you about that with the history of how that was done, if it was a possibility or not. So I don't have an answer for you there. Okay. I sure appreciate it. He's been wanting to ask you that question for a while.

Thank you for taking that home. Charlie's putting in, he says, tradition says Saint Veronica wiped Jesus' face on the Via della Russa. So there's traditions.

It doesn't mean that traditions are true, but I'd be interested to know if there was a custom where it was allowed for the relatives to clean up the person being beat up before they're crucified. I don't know. So who knows? Okay?

Maybe someone out there knows. All righty. All right, man. Thanks. Thank you.

Okay. All right, let's get it to Brian from South Carolina. Brian, welcome. You are on the air.

Hey, thanks, Matt Slick. I just had a question about Pastor John MacArthur out of California. Okay.

Maybe off topic, maybe not calls you're looking for, but I'll ask anyway. I don't know if you're aware of the allegations against him that are 20, 40 years old. Okay, what are they? You may have heard of them.

Okay. No, I haven't. Allegations have been made against him. It was like 20 years old of him harboring known child molester or at least one pastor that's been known to molest his own children or something to that effect.

Okay, so I don't know if that's the case, and I do know this. I used to know a guy. We were roommates, and he never did anything wrong, and he was accused by a woman of doing something wrong in that regard, and his house was vandalized. His car was vandalized. He lost his job just because she accused him. That's all. Just made an accusation. He lost everything.

That's why we were roommates. And so it's easy for people to make an accusation, and an accusation against an elder must be by two witnesses or more than the evidence must be examined. So what would be the reason for someone to allow someone like that in the church?

What conditions are going on? Was there work with officials? Was there work with psychologists? Was it even true? So all this has to be verified, and if it can't be verified, we have to be careful not to spread gossip. I'm not saying yes, no, true, false. I'm just saying I don't know.

We have to be very careful. And that's it, you know? Yeah, and it's quote unquote a crazy woman.

I don't know her, of course. It's just a story I recently heard. It's all allegations online. Nothing substantiated. And he hasn't publicly spoken about it. Yeah, I would dismiss him.

I believe he'd be wrong. Yeah, and if people could make accusations. I've been accused of things. They're just not true.

That's not true. And, you know, public figures get accused of things. Someone says, hey, you got accused. You must be guilty. What?

What are you talking about? And that can happen. So you just have to roll with the punches, clarify things. Now, what I do is I was told legally that every now and then I need to answer an allegation, demonstrate it's not true. In case there's a legal action where I'm in court, the prosecution can't say, Matt, you never defended yourself, therefore it must be true.

And if we can demonstrate there is a history of defending, no, it's not true. Not every single thing, because you can't do every single thing. But then it's better for you. And I was told by a lawyer to do that. That's one of the reasons I answer critics on, uh, on calm periodically, just for that reason. So anyway, and that makes sense.

And it's shocking that it's shocking how many even past so-called pastors than they even got their M. Does on social media, just burning them at the stake already, just on accusations. And like you said, you know, nothing. He can ignore it. Maybe that's the strategy he's going with. Well, what they're supposed to do, what they're supposed to contact him after they're supposed to do, not spread gossip.

That's what you're supposed to do. So if I was researching this, I would contact them and say, Hey, my name is Matt select from carm.org. I'm researching this issue. Is there any information you can share about this regard? Is it true or false?

Is it underpinning? You can't speak for legal reasons or what? You know, that's what I would do. Let's see what they say. That's what they're obligated to do.

They should just repeat something. Okay. All right. Hey, what can I look forward to? When are you having a debate coming up or something like that? No debate set up because they take too much time. I'm getting less and less interested in debates. I think the idea of written debates I might want to do for a while, but we'll see what happens.

I may be going to Israel and then maybe Japan and then maybe Scotland and California. Next year, things are getting busy all of a sudden, so we'll see what happens. Okay. All right. All right. Sounds good, buddy.

Take my call. Okay, man. All right, God bless. Well, Rachel from Utah, we don't have time to get to you because we're at the top of the hour and that's it.

Lord, I mean, the music's going to start any second. I hope you guys enjoyed the show and may the Lord bless you. And as usual, I like to say, by his grace, we're back on the air tomorrow and hopefully we'll talk to you then. Have a great evening. God bless everyone. Good night.