Audio only:
In this episode Trent lampoons comedians who attack Christianity under the guise of comedy.
Transcription:
Trent:
Comedy is pretty subjective, but in today’s episode, we’re going to refute the objective nonsense pedaled by comedians who just want to ridicule or try to refute the faith. Now, there’s nothing wrong with poking fun at Christian culture before they got involved with politics. The Babylon Bee primarily made fun of modern evangelicalism, but these comedians were going to talk about today aren’t even trying to be funny. They just want to attack Christianity under the guise of comedy, and so we’re going to point out what’s wrong with their laughably bad arguments. First, here’s Sarah Silverman.
CLIP:
Christianity is super old, but it’s crazy. I mean, it’s born a sinner by being born. You are a sinner and you’re going to hell, but you can just apologize and then you can go to heaven. No big deal if you’re a murderer, same thing. It’s just apologize and go to heaven. You can be Hitler and go to confession and say, forgive me, father, I killed 6 million Jews, and the priest would just be like, no problem. Say 10. Heil Marys and Hitler goes to heaven.
Trent:
When it comes to salvation, I love watching non-religious people try to say God is unfair. On the one hand, they think it’s horrible. God would send someone to hell. On the other hand, they think it’s horrible that God would allow some sinners to repent and go to heaven, but this leads to the question, which sins should God forgive and which should he not forgive? Many of these critics will just offer an arbitrary standard of a good person or someone as good as them, which I refuted in my previous episode on the one fallacy that sends most people to hell. The self-serving nature of the good person standard is evident in Silverman’s case given who she is merciful towards. In this other monologue, she expresses being torn about condemning Louis c K’s sex scandal with women he masturbated in front of because well, Louis CK is her friend.
CLIP:
Here’s where I’m at on it as of this moment. It could change tomorrow, and if it does, I will keep you posted. One of my best friends of over 25 years, Louis CK masturbated in front of women. He wielded his power with women in fucked up ways sometimes to the point where they left comedy entirely. I love Louis, but Louis did these things. Both of those statements are true, so I just keep asking myself, I can. You love someone who did bad things. Can you still love them?
Trent:
If this were somebody else, Silverman would have zero empathy for him, but that’s what makes God so good. He doesn’t only love his friends. God loves the entire world and he desires the salvation of every single person. There is no sin too big for God to forgive and no person beyond God’s transformative and redeeming love. If you ever tell yourself that God could never love or forgive, you know that that’s not true. That evil thought comes from the devil. Ask God to bind it and free you from its influence in your mind. Next, we have George Carlin who thinks he has a knockdown argument against the pro-life position.
CLIP:
Here’s another question I have. How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion and when it’s a chicken, it’s an an omlet
Trent:
Because ding dong, chicken eggs are not fertilized. When you eat an omelet, you aren’t eating an embryonic chicken, but when you abort a pregnancy, you kill an embryonic human being and some eggs people eat are fertilized. In Southeast Asia, there’s a snack called balut, which are fertilized eggs typically from a duck, and you can tell that’s not a potential duck. It’s just a really tiny duck. In the same way, a fetus or embryo is not a potential human. He or she is a tiny human who is the victim of murder when he or she’s aborted
CLIP:
Is a fetus, a human being. This seems to be the central question. Well, if a fetus is a human being, how come the census doesn’t count them? If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage, they don’t have a funeral? If a fetus is a human being, how come people say, we have two children and one on the way, instead of saying we have three children, people say life begins at conception. I say life began about a billion years ago, and it’s a continuous process. Continuous just keeps rolling along.
Trent:
Life may have been around for billions of years, but an individual’s life is not that long. I would’ve asked George Carlin, how old are you? Why would you only start counting at the moment you left your mother’s womb? How does your location change your value? Were you not a human five minutes before that time? We celebrate birth, not because it’s the moment we came into existence, but because birth is the moment. Our existence changed from being a private exclusive one with our mothers to being a public one that can be shared and more easily documented with other people, but our life before birth was still life. And when that life ends in miscarriage, for example, many people do have funerals in this case, but so what? Many people had no emotional reaction to George Carlin dying in 2008 or to the millions of other people who die every year. But that lack of an emotional reaction doesn’t mean those people. Were not people we speak about unborn children with potentiality like I have a child on the way, or we don’t count them in a census because they have a high risk of mortality. Carlin even notes this.
CLIP:
80% of a woman’s fertilized eggs are rinsed and flushed out of her body once a month. During those delightful few days she has, they wind up on sanitary napkins and yet they are fertilized eggs. So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who’s had more than one period is a serial killer. Consistency. Consistency
Trent:
Throughout most of human history. Half of all children did not make it past the age of five, but that didn’t mean they weren’t human beings. People over the age of a hundred have very high rates, but that doesn’t mean it should be legal to kill people over the age of a hundred for any reason. Just because people are likely to die does not give you and I the right to deliberately kill them via something like dismemberment. Well, moving on to a less gruesome subject. Here’s Patton Oswald’s complaint about people who base their morality on what the Bible says.
CLIP:
Just because you like something in a book doesn’t mean you can have the thing you like in the book happen in real life. That’s what crazy people want. I can’t go to the White House with a bunch of green lantern comics and go, I want a green lantern ring. I saw it in a book. I like make the thing in the book. I like be here now. I would be justifiably tased if I did that. Nobody would go, Hey, we have to respect his beliefs. You’ve got to respect everybody’s beliefs. No, you don’t. That’s what gets us in trouble. Look, you have to acknowledge everyone’s beliefs and then you have to reserve the right to go. That is stupid. Are
Trent:
You kidding me?
Yeah. We shouldn’t make every law in the Bible the law of the land, but some laws like thou shall not kill or thou shall not steal will be pretty good. We can use reason to determine which biblical precepts would be good for society as a whole to adopt through civil law and which precepts should be adopted through the church or even through the individual’s private devotional life. But more importantly, Oswald is completely inconsistent because he does not believe it’s okay to insult people for believing a delusion. I know this because he apologized to his transgender fans for simply taking a picture with Dave Chappelle who had the audacity as a comedian to make fun of transgender people. So according to Oswald, if a Christian wants the government to protect the unborn via legislation or legislate the correct definition of marriage, then that Christian is just as nuts as someone who wants comic books to be the law of the land, and we don’t have to respect their beliefs.
But if a man with a penis says, I want to be a woman, call me a woman and let me change in a locker room in front of little girls, well then we have to respect her beliefs and say, okay, ma’am, write this way. So get over yourself. Oswalt, even though I will admit your epic Star Wars filibuster from a 2013 episode of Parks and Rec was pretty awesome. I’m going to give you that. And you know what else is awesome when you subscribe to the channel and it’s really awesome when you support us@trenthornpodcast.com for just $5 a month. You get access to bonus content and you help us grow and stay sponsor free. So if you have benefited from our content, consider just making even a $5 monthly gift or an annual $50 gift@trenthornpodcast.com. Next up, we have the worst argument from Ricky DVAs in his informal debate on religion with Stephen Colbert,
CLIP:
But science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction in any holy book in any other fiction and destroyed it, okay, in a thousand years time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book right and every fact and destroyed them all in a thousand years, they’d all be back because all the same tests would be the same result. That’s good.
Trent:
No, Steven, it’s not good. That’s an idiotic argument. First, DVE is just saying that we should only trust facts that can be replicated scientifically, and if we destroyed all books, we would eventually rediscover scientific facts. Actually, we probably wouldn’t do that because different cultures on earth haven’t made equal scientific advancements, so accidents of history can keep scientific knowledge from being discovered. Also, scientists are freaking out that even when they’ve discovered something through repeated testing, they often can’t repeat that continually in laboratories. This is something called the replication crisis, but even if Dravet were correct, it’s not like you can only believe in science because it’s discoverable and other forms of knowledge aren’t. It isn’t just science that’s repeatable. If you got rid of every philosophy book, people would still ask basic questions about reality that would lead you back to the classical arguments for the existence of God.
DVA is correct that if you got rid of fiction like Shakespeare from written texts and people’s memories, the works of William Shakespeare would never return. But if you destroyed all works of history, those works of history wouldn’t return either, but that would not prove the historical events they describe, be they Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Hannibal crossing the Alps, or Christ dying on the cross, and his disciples proclaiming his resurrection. That would not prove that those historical events never happened in the first place. Finally, I’ll leave you with a clip that takes a jab at common atheist attitudes from comedian Jeff Allen, who used to be an atheist but is now a Christian,
CLIP:
Was a shallow, vacuous, empty vessel. I really was, and I didn’t have anything to talk to this man about until I found out because of his wealth, he had access to some of the nicest golf courses in America. He was actually a member, a Merefield village here, and that’s all I needed to hear. He was my new best friend. What I didn’t know about him was he was a fundamentalist Christian, and I didn’t know that. And we’re sitting on the fairway one day just talking and we’re talking about life, we’re talking about this, we’re talking about that. And then he brings up the Bible and I said, I don’t give me the Bible. I don’t want to hear the Bible. And he says, what do you mean? And I says, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in that garbage. And he says, well, what is it about the Bible you don’t think is true? And I said, I don’t know. I never read it. And he said, well, you’re not an atheist. You’re a moron.
And I have to tell you I would’ve hit him except that I would’ve lost access to Merefield village. I wasn’t going to do that. And I asked him to explain himself and he said, well, to be honest with you, a true atheist is not only a biblical scholar, but is scholarly in all the face of the earth. And after a long intellectual journey has come to the conclusion that there is no God of the universe, you on the other hand want to circumvent the entire intellectual process and just come to the conclusion that there’s no God that’s lazy and moronic. I didn’t know what to say.
Trent:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.