In this episode Trent sits down with Catholic YouTuber Keith Nester to bust the myths perpetuated by fundamentalists and atheists that Catholicism is nothing more than recycled paganism.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
So, every Easter, I hear that Easter is just a celebration of the pagan deity, Ishtar. Every Christmas, I hear the Christmas trees are pagan. And then throughout the year, I always get emails from people saying, “Hey, my friend told me that a lot of what we believe is actually comes from paganism, like when pagans converted under Constantine, that’s where the Catholic Church developed.” Or I know an atheist who says that Jesus never existed. The story of Jesus is ripped off from pagan mythology. So, in today’s episode, we’re going to bust those myths.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And on today’s episode, I want to share with you an interview that I did on Keith Nester’s YouTube channel. Keith has a great YouTube channel. He also has a website, down2earthministry.org, so be sure to go and check it out.
Trent Horn:
And Keith asked me to come on his show to bust this Catholicism is actually pagan myth. So, without further ado, here is my interview with Keith Nester on is the Catholic Church pagan?
Keith Nester:
Yeah, it’s been just an honor to know that I was going to get a chance to run through this stuff because this is one of those issues that I find that you don’t find all the answers to this type of stuff in your general introduction to Catholic apologetics.
Trent Horn:
No, you don’t. They claim that Catholicism and Christianity are pagan derivatives, is something that is spread across a multitude of books. In my own books, I cover these various arguments in different books.
Trent Horn:
So, my book, Counterfeit Christs, I talk a lot about the idea that Christianity itself is based on pagan myths and other things like that. And my book, Hard Sayings, where I talk about Bible difficulties, I relate to some of the similarities between stories in the Old Testament and other ancient Mesopotamian accounts. And then when I talk about Catholicism in my books like Case for Catholicism or Why We’re Catholic, I talk about the arguments Protestants sometimes make.
Trent Horn:
So, it has encouraged me to think I may write a book in the future, I’ve got like 20 of them in the hopper, on why we thought about writing just on Catholic conspiracy theories themselves. And some of these pagan theories are in there. So, maybe that will come to fruition one day.
Keith Nester:
I remember the first time I heard this argument, I was in high school and hanging out with one of my good friends who was not a Christian, and he was one of these guys that liked to always have this sort of one-upmanship in arguments and he was, “Oh, well, don’t you really know, and really, let me just give you the full story.”
Keith Nester:
I grew up in the church. My dad was a pastor. So, to me, knowing about Jesus, knowing about God was just part of my life. But when I encountered this friend, I remember he handed me this book one day, and it was a book called Christianity Before Christ. I’d never seen anything like and he’s like, “Well, don’t you know that everything that you believe about Jesus is really just recycled paganism. And it all was ripped off. The church ripped this stuff off from these ancient religions.”
Keith Nester:
And then he had these weird names, Zoroastrianism and Mithra. And I’d never heard that before, and I was blown away. And I didn’t know how to answer that. I’m completely at a loss. Because in my youth group, we never talked about that kind of stuff, Trent.
Trent Horn:
I know. It’s a shame. I feel like sometimes for youth groups and youth preparation, especially with middle school and high school students, we can turn it into a kind of glorified Sunday school, as if all we are supposed to do here is tell the stories.
Trent Horn:
And that’s fine when children are little. I mean, I have a six and a four-year-old, and I show them the Hanna Barbera Greatest Bible Stories of All Time videos, and they’re awesome by the way. I hate things like Veggie Tales and stuff like that.
Trent Horn:
But it’s epic. They get the guy from Up, Ed Asner, to do the voice of Joshua. And they got these big-name celebrities to do it. I’m like, “Yeah, treated with some respect.” I mean, say when the kids are little, we tell the stories. But as we grow older in our faith, even starting in junior high, we should be saying, and here’s how we know the stories are true. Or here’s how we go deeper into the story to understand what is being expressed in different ways here.
Trent Horn:
And so, yeah, when people say this, I will find something that’s a bit ironic. Like you have a friend who tells you and this happened to me, too. When I was in high school, a friend said, “Hey, watch this videos, Zeitgeist.”
Keith Nester:
Oh, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and it’s all about conspiracy theories. And part two is about how Jesus never existed. And so, it’s ironic you have these people who will say, “Oh, I don’t believe it just because it’s in the Bible.” But, “Hey, look at this book or this video.”
Trent Horn:
And they believe everything that book or that video says uncritically while trying to claim that we are the gullible ones for following the Bible, yet they pick something that they accept and just believe whatever it says without double checking the sources. Because if they did, they would see they’ve been misled.
Keith Nester:
You know Trent, that’s one of the things that I’ve seen you do and heard you say so many times in your debates with people that to me is one of the most critical foundational elements of apologetics is being able to recognize when people are holding Catholicism or Christianity to a different standard than they do everything else.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Keith Nester:
And I find that like a lot of Protestants do that when it comes to, we want to be so skeptical about the claims of Catholicism, but that same skeptic attitude they don’t have when it comes to some of their own claims about Christianity. It’s like selective skepticism.
Trent Horn:
Right. And this is a subject for another book I’m thinking about. Usually each day I try to write about 1500 words and I slot it into whatever book I think it would make do. So, you get an interview of my writing life.
Trent Horn:
But I noticed this, Protestants will say, “Look at all the historical evidence for the rest of the miracle of Christ’s resurrection.” And I’ll say, “Okay, well, what about the evidence for these well attested miracles related to the saints, like the miracle of Fatima, which has really good.” I mean, I don’t believe every story about every saint. Some of them, we don’t have really great historical evidence for. But some we’ve got really, really good evidence. Like the miracle of Fatima, we have contemporary accounts. We don’t even have that for the resurrection.
Trent Horn:
And yet Protestants will say, “Oh, well, that’s this or that’s that.” And I have seen this double standard. This shows up with the argument from paganism. Usually, it’s more Protestant fundamentalists will do this. But they’ll say, “Okay, look, the idea of the Virgin Madonna, there’s pictures of Mary holding Jesus. Well, that’s just like Isis and Horus, and all these other images of women and the male savior child, that’s just paganism.”
Trent Horn:
And I would say, number one, images of mothers and children are a universal norm in reality. You would find people would venerate the source of life that we all had. But number two, if you’re going to say, “Okay, I don’t even marry in dogmas because there’s these pagan cults that venerated women or female deities.” Then you’re going to have to throw out the resurrection, because what atheists will do is they’ll say, “Hey, what about this god, this dying and rising god or that dying and rising god?”
Trent Horn:
So, you’re right, Keith. When Protestants attack Catholicism over alleged pagan parallels, they leave themselves open to being refuted by atheists who could do the exact same thing to them. So, then you either have to reject both or I would say, “Hey, your answers against the atheist, who’s trying to do this pagan parallel argument, a Catholic can offer the same thing if you’re trying to make that against our doctrines.”
Keith Nester:
Yeah. I think that’s huge. I mean, it goes back to the foundational idea of why do we believe what we believe and why do we think that certain views, where do we come up with our ideas of what reality is?
Keith Nester:
And I’m not talking like the matrix or something like that. I’m talking about within, when we talk about issues of faith, issues of revelation from God. We’re coming from with this, we have two fronts. Like you talked about, you have the atheist front on one side and then you have the Protestant front on the other side.
Keith Nester:
But really, at the end of the day, I would say that the Protestant has a lot more trouble. Because like you said, those same arguments, they’re going to have to turn that on themselves. But why do you think this is a thing? Where do these claims even come from in the first place? And on what basis do people make these claims?
Trent Horn:
There’s a wide variety of them. But what’s ironic about this, that the claim that Catholicism or Christianity are just recycled pagan ideas, these arguments themselves are recycled arguments.
Trent Horn:
They’re the same arguments that pop up. Like if you see somebody making this argument in 2021, you can find somebody like Christianity before Christ that you mentioned, John Jackson, those arguments go all the way back to the early 20th century. People like Rensburg and other people who the early 20th century, they were arguing or late 19th, early 20th century, they were saying, “Hey, look, Christianity is purely derived from pagan mythology.”
Trent Horn:
And they tried to find all of these sorts of parallels and human beings are kind of wired. So, you’ll get into conspiracy theories. We try to find patterns because we want to make sense of the world. And so, we think, “Okay, I found a pattern here and I found this pattern, but the problem is the patterns are superficial.”
Trent Horn:
So, in 1961, there was a guy named, Samuel Sandmel, and he published an article in the Journal for the Society of Biblical Literature, which is still a very large publication today. And he called this exercise Parallelomania. And he was chiding people saying, “Hey, look, just because you think these two things are related, if they sound similar, it doesn’t mean that they are.”
Trent Horn:
And in fact, this whole school of thought trying to say that Christianity is just a pagan religion, it died in the early 20th century. You don’t find serious academics at universities, or people with PhDs in the relevant subjects arguing for this because as the 20th century progressed, scholarship came to rediscover the Jewish roots of Jesus that understanding the New Testament, it’s deeply rooted in Judaism. And Judaism was incredible, especially Second Temple Judaism when Jesus lived, was incredibly hostile to pagan influences.
Trent Horn:
To give you an example, there was an incident in Jerusalem when golden shields were erected in the city that had inscriptions to Caesar as a god. And the Jewish leaders considered this blasphemous to have these inscriptions glorifying the emperor as a deity in their city in these golden shields.
Trent Horn:
And so, they rioted. And Pontius Pilate had to take them down to avert a huge riot. And that left him a bit on edge, which led to the predictable events that we read in the gospels where Pilate kind of rolls over to the Jews that are attempting to start another riot.
Trent Horn:
So, they’re getting that worked up about that. You just couldn’t imagine them saying, “Oh, our rabbi has been executed. Let’s just now believe a bunch of pagan myths that we’ve tested our entire lives.” It just simply doesn’t make sense.
Keith Nester:
Yeah. I’ve always wondered about that because at the core of that argument is this idea that what we believe as Christians must have happened, must have come much later than the events that are being described in the gospels.
Keith Nester:
Because like you said, you don’t go from, I hate paganism and I’m willing to die, rather than pinch incense to Caesar to all of a sudden, now I’m mining these ancient pagan scrolls to create a new religion out of nothing that I’m trying to convert Jews into by telling them, it’s the fulfillment of, but I’m going to use all this pagan garbage that they would hate anyway. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Trent Horn:
No, it doesn’t. And so, that’s an important element to consider. When you’re comparing these stories to try to say, okay, you should ask someone who says, “Oh, it’s just ripped off of this or that,” versus you should ask, “Okay, well, when did this happen?” It would be one thing if Jesus died in the ’30s, the 1st century.
Trent Horn:
And then the first proclamation of the resurrection was in the year 120, 100 years later. With most ancient figures, the first miracle accounts we get of them are much later, even centuries later. That’s time for legend to kind of creep in. But the resurrection was proclaimed in … Well, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was written in the ’50s, that’s 20 years. When he describes the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he’s passing on a creed, something he received from other people that has been dated to within five years of the resurrection. So, there’s just not enough time.
Trent Horn:
So, one thing to point out is, okay, where was the time for this dramatic overhaul for these beliefs to creep in? And then number two, we should be hesitant in trying to say, “Oh, Christianity, it has absolutely nothing to do with paganism whatsoever.” Well, you don’t want to make that sweeping claim either because as Christians, we believe it’s okay to baptize pagan culture, to practice what Pope Saint John Paul II called inculturation.
Trent Horn:
So, let me give you an example here. This is something that Protestants sometimes, some anti-Catholic works, they quote Cardinal John Henry Newman. And Newman says here, “Temples, incense, votive offerings, holy water, blessings of fields, sacerdotal vestments, like what priests wear, dot, dot, dot are all of pagan origin.”
Trent Horn:
And so, these anti-Catholic writers in the early 20th century, see, even Cardinal Newman says it’s pagan. But if you go back to the original quote, where the ellipses are, the three dots, Newman says, “And the ring in marriage,” because Protestants also, I used to ask somebody, why do you give your spouse a ring when you’re married? Where is that in the Bible? It’s not.
Trent Horn:
That was an element that was first promoted by the Ancient Egyptians because they believe that the vein that goes down your finger, on your ring finger goes all the way to your heart, and that the ring itself is an unending symbol. But we see there’s nothing wrong with using that because it doesn’t contradict the faith to say that marriage ought to be unending, at least in this life, that it is something that is permanent, and bonds us to another person. So, we [inaudible 00:14:48] that element.
Trent Horn:
So, we have to point out a two-pronged approach, I guess. Show where the parallel arguments fall flat or where there is a parallel but it’s trivial. We’re baptizing something that’s just a way of celebrating a common mystery or understanding of reality.
Keith Nester:
So, especially like I would call in the Neo-Calvinist Protestant reformed world right now, they have something that they refer to as redeeming the culture, okay? I don’t know if you’ve heard that terminology before.
Keith Nester:
But when I used to be a pastor, and a lot of the guys I would run around with sort of in that world and it was huge. And what they described, redeeming the culture was it was more about methodology than it was theology. They would say, “Okay, well, our churches need to look like things in the culture, so that we can redeem the culture.”
Keith Nester:
So, they would take music that was like music that’s in the culture, and they would try to take that. And it was viewed as this really noble, innovative, creative way to preach the gospel to people was to say, “Look, we’re going to take things that are familiar to this culture, and we’re going to co-op them for the gospel and use them for ministry.”
Keith Nester:
And everyone’s like, “Yay, that’s great, good job.” But when that’s happened in historical ways, like we’re going to use the vestments or the wedding ring or whatever, now, we want to point our fingers at that and say, “Well, no, it’s never okay to do that in the past, but it’s okay for us to do it here in the present.”
Trent Horn:
Exactly. So, to give you an example, the first places where Christians worship communally, they did worship in synagogues until they were kicked out of them. They would worship together in people’s homes. So, the first churches were house churches. And the pagans had temples, sometimes very opulent temples.
Trent Horn:
But by the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, then Christians were in a position to build their own temples. If the pagans can add these opulent temples, why shouldn’t we have one to glorify God?
Trent Horn:
In Rome, the Pantheon, Pantheos means all gods, it’s a temple that was dedicated to all the gods. And then Christians retrofitted it, built it, took it over, to dedicate it to all of the holy ones of the true religion, or already giving example, the 8th century, like people say all the Christmas tree, that’s just pagan stuff, yada, yada.
Trent Horn:
Well, no, its roots all the way back in the 7th and 8th centuries to St. Boniface, the apostle to Germany, who cut down a tree that was being worshipped, saying, “The tree you should worship is the tree of eternal life.”
Trent Horn:
And that’s the farthest we get back. The Christmas tree rally has more of its roots in 18th, 19th century. But it’s like, “Hey, instead of worshiping trees, a tree can be a symbol of everlasting life, because it’s an evergreen tree. And the lights point us to the light of Christ, and they guide us.”
Trent Horn:
Once again baptized taking, what is good in the culture that is at least not antithetical to the gospel and baptizing it, that we’ve done that for 2000 years.
Keith Nester:
Yeah, and people are still doing it today. Okay. So, let’s talk for a second about some of these myths and some of these religions. I mean, what do you see when you look at some of these? Are there any similarities between what we believe and some of these … What are some of the things that people are saying when they say Christianity is recycled religion? What are some of the similarities?
Trent Horn:
Well, some of the similarities they point out are similar in name only, so they’re superficial. So, that’s one problem. The other problem is sometimes there are very specific similarities, but the flow of the copying is in reverse. It’s not Christianity copying paganism. It’s paganism copying Christianity.
Trent Horn:
So, I’ll give an example. Mithraism would be a good example of that. So, Mithra or Mitra, was a figure that was worshiped in Persia originally, in what is now modern day Iran. Before later in the 1st and 2nd centuries after Christ becoming an object of worship, especially among Roman Centurions. So, he’s known for conquering the bowl as this cosmic savior figure.
Trent Horn:
So, some of the similarities are superficial. You’ll watch documentaries that say Mithra was born of a virgin except, no Mithra was born emerged fully grown from a rock. I mean, I guess a rock is a virgin in the most strained sense of the word. But you see, it’s superficial here.
Trent Horn:
Or here is Mithra with 12 disciples. Well, no, in the images, it’s just Mithra with 12 figures, it’s probably the Zodiac. It says nothing about disciples. And there’s no crucifixion., there’s no resurrection.
Trent Horn:
Things that do become similar such as the communal meal that involves receiving bread and wine and things like that. Justin Martyr is describing these things, but it’s taking place in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Roman Mithra, the Roman Mithra, that stuff develops after Christianity. So, the flow of copying is going in the direction.
Trent Horn:
The same thing happens with Apollonius of Tyana, as people will hear this from scholars like Bart Ehrman. They’ll say, “Oh, Apollonius was a 1st century miracle worker who claimed to be the son of god, and his disciples believed he rose from the dead.”
Trent Horn:
And it sounds really similar until you realize that Apollonius, the story of Apollonius was written, I believe, in the 2nd or 3rd century, several 100 years after Jesus to justify a temple that’s being built to be a competitor to Christianity. So, either the parallels are superficial or the copying is going in the wrong direction.
Trent Horn:
And a lot of times, Keith, when people will try to point out, the ones are just flat out false, not just that they’re superficial, but they’re false. That people will try to say the Egyptian god, Horus was crucified. That never happened. That comes from amateur 19th century scholarship. Gerald Massey is a one-man source for bad Egyptology in this area. And it’s been recycled by other people over the past 140 years.
Trent Horn:
And so, when people bring this up to you, when they say, “Oh, this is a copy from this, this is a copy from that,” you should ask the person, “What is your source, your primary source to show you these ancient religions predated Christianity and believed in these very specific things related to Christianity?” And nine times out of 10, they can’t give you a citation. They’re just taking it on faith, reading from this anti-Catholic or anti-Christian author they’re quoting from.
Keith Nester:
That’s absolutely huge, Trent. And I want all of my listeners to really hear what Trent is saying there. You guys, you can’t just receive some anti-Catholic claim from somebody. No matter how confident they seem, no matter how eloquent they are, when they say something like this, you have to question it.
Keith Nester:
And I remember for me, a huge moment in this was when I was learning about church history and world history and things. And I encountered the claim, and I still encounter it probably every week you guys, where someone wants to say the thing, like the narrative, of course, is that early Christianity was a lot like what Protestant ism looks like, until Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and then blended all this stuff together to co-op all these pagan myths, and then bit with his power to enforce this, to use it for political power.
Keith Nester:
Friends, I’m just going to tell you an objective thing that I learned about this that blows that whole thing up was, of course, Constantine never did that. He didn’t make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. He just merely said that it was going to be tolerated, so that people weren’t going to be able to be killed for being a Christian.
Keith Nester:
But that’s two completely different things. But yet people bring that claim, as though that is central to this argument that Constantine decreed that this is now you have to be a Christian, just like before, you had to be a pagan, now you have to be a Christian.
Keith Nester:
But people listen, you’ve got to question these things. And when you start to see this stuff fall apart, it should give you a pretty good indication that maybe some of the other things that you’re being told as though their objective truths really aren’t true in the 1st place.
Keith Nester:
And I think that’s a huge difference that we have to understand is when someone is making an opinion claim, okay, or they’re describing their opinion, and they’re saying, “Well, I’m not really sure I can buy that,” versus, “No, here’s what happened.” Osiris, or who would you say Horus or Osiris was crucified?
Trent Horn:
Well, although people say that Horus, the Egyptian god, Horus was crucified. They also say that Osiris … Well, they say that Osiris rose from the dead. Even though Osiris did not rise from the dead, his body parts were scattered all over Egypt. They were then reassembled so that he could rule in the underworld, which is zombification. That’s not glorious, resurrected life.
Trent Horn:
But you’re right. You have to go back to all the sources and ask them specifically, where is this? So, with the Constantine claim, that’s very common. The idea that Constantine created Christianity, which you’re right, that wasn’t until under Emperor Theodosius at the end of the 4th century made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Trent Horn:
But what takes the wind out of the sails of that thesis and you see Jack Chick, and other fundamentalists promoting this, what takes the wind out of the sails is they’ll say, “Confession to a priest, the mass, the Eucharist, the Pope. All of these things are just things that were done in paganism, and then we’re incorporating to Christianity by Constantine.” You can find all of that stuff in the church fathers long before Constantine.
Trent Horn:
The priests saying mass and receiving confession of sins is explicit. And let’s take a St Cyprian for example, over 100 years before Constantine, even earlier than that you read and Justin Martyr, Ignatius of Antioch.
Trent Horn:
So, one way to bust that myth and people say “Oh, Constantine invented this stuff.” To say, “Hey, wait a minute, how did Constantine invent this and bring it into Christianity?” When you see the Church Fathers talking about it 100, 200 years earlier.
Trent Horn:
In fact, there was a guy, Ralph Woodrow, he wrote a book called The Two Babylons. He tried to revive this guy, Alexander Hislop, who wrote a book on the Babylonian, The Two Babylon, the idea that the Babylon the evil woman in Revelation is the church, and it’s all pagan. And he did this 19th century scholarship, and it’s horrendous.
Trent Horn:
So, Woodrow wrote a book defending it. And then later, he did more research saying, “Wait a minute, this is all wrong.” And so, I think he called it Babylon Mystery Religion. And he wrote a second book, recanting the first one when he actually looked into the historic details.
Keith Nester:
Yeah, that’s huge. And we have to remember, friends, we can’t let someone hijack the narrative of where Christianity came from without showing. And we can show them the church fathers. We can show them these things and say, “Look, this is the truth.”
Keith Nester:
But what I find to be the case is that people tend to find what they’re looking for. And if you’ve got a Protestant who hates Catholicism, and in their minds, there’s no debate, it’s just a closed idea that Catholicism is bad 100%, they’re going to glob on to any kind of claim that sounds good, even though it might not even be true. They’re not going to check it out. They’re just going to receive it. Because they’re just going to say, well, it has to be that way.
Keith Nester:
And I remember when I was a Protestant trying to convert a buddy of mine, who was Catholic, when I was trying to make him a Protestant, I would quote some of these things to them. And it wasn’t because I had done all this work and read all the sources. It was just because that’s what I saw on a Jack trick [crosstalk 00:26:55] the Jack Chick tract, that’s hard to say.
Trent Horn:
[crosstalk 00:26:59]. Yeah. He’s the most famous comic book artist in the world though I think. Those little tracks.
Keith Nester:
Did you ever see those when you were a kid? Did someone ever handled, like put them on your windshield at church or something like that? You’re looking at it, you’re like-
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. We have some good material at catholic.com. My friend, Jimmy Akin, wrote a whole little book just on those tracks, but they really do center in these kinds of conspiracy theories.
Trent Horn:
And Keith, once I met a Protestant pastor at a park who was passing them out. And I said, “You might want to get better material than this.” It’s really rife and conspiracy theories that the Jesuits are trying to take over the world or something like that.
Keith Nester:
Oh yeah.
Trent Horn:
And he said, “You’re Pope is a Jesuit, isn’t he?” As if it was like some kind of a checkmate moment as like, you have a good day, here’s my book, Why We’re Catholic. I pray that he reads it.
Keith Nester:
I remember those tracks and books. When I was a kid, and my dad was a Methodist pastor. So, we weren’t like fundamentalist anti-Catholics or anything like that. But I somehow got on this mailing list of some apologetics groups in California. They were sending me these line drawn pictures and it looked like some guy in his basement on a real typewriter and then Xerox the copy, and turned it into a book.
Keith Nester:
And one of them I got was, it was like, Roman Catholicism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. And it was all of these things. And a lot of it had to do with the cult of these ancient pagan goddesses and I didn’t know any different. I was just like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess that must be true, then.” Because I wasn’t coming from a place where I was really trying to do any research. I was just receiving what I was told.
Keith Nester:
And I think a lot of people when they grow up in that, they don’t think that they should look into it. They just hear what they’re told. And what I want to make sure everybody understands is because I know a lot of you guys out there are getting this type of material. I mean, this whole idea came to me when someone sent me a message they had received from someone describing these arguments.
Keith Nester:
And so, I know this stuff’s out there. Guys, I want you to get Trent’s books and look into these things. Look at some of the material from Catholic Answers and how they do such a great job of just presenting objective facts, and you can’t argue with that. You can’t say, this wasn’t what Christianity taught, because you can look and see what the Church fathers taught.
Keith Nester:
But just remember, guys, you’re always going to find people who hate the Catholic Church so much that they don’t care about reality. They don’t care about truth. What they care about is trying to save you from what they think the horrible evil Catholic Church is.
Trent Horn:
Right. And what’s important is when you’re talking to these people, sometimes it’s not as helpful to say, “You’re wrong and here’s why.” But to ask them, “Okay, so you’re saying Catholicism came from this, how do you know that’s true? How do you know they did believe this and that it did come from this? Where is your evidence for this?”
Trent Horn:
Because then, you can plant a little bit of seed of doubt in there, which can be more effective than just telling them they’re wrong or getting angry with them and pointing that out. So, yeah, as I said before, you can note that the differences are superficial but similar, or maybe they’re really, really similar, but the facts are just totally wrong.
Trent Horn:
In some cases, though, you may have. It could be a coincidental similarity, these things happen. For example, in 1898, there was a novel released about the world’s most luxurious ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank in the middle of the ocean. And in the novel, the ocean liner was called the Titan. And that was 14 years before the Titanic sank.
Keith Nester:
Nostradamus right there or something?
Trent Horn:
Well, it’s way more accurate. It’s way closer than any of those promises original prophecies, but it’s a coincidence there. So, you have to look at all of the elements that are there, and in a charitable way when engaging people on these subjects.
Trent Horn:
But another one that I do want to bolster once again, especially when we’re talking to our Protestant friends, or even our atheist friends, is that all religions are going to have some similar elements to them. Religion is just man’s response to God.
Trent Horn:
And so, when human beings respond to God, even when you look at and you compare aborigine religions or I think John [inaudible 00:31:31], the Catholic theologian called them cosmic spirituality. They have similar elements then. As a human being, you want to be awestruck at creation. You want to offer sacrifice to the deity you believe in. That’s a universal human instinct. If you recognize God and his goodness and grandeur, and you recognize your human lowliness, you want to offer something in return to the deity.
Trent Horn:
So, the fact that Christianity is built on the sacrifice of Christ and the mass is a presentation of that sacrifice, people will say, “Oh, look at the sacrifices in paganism and this other stuff.” Well, yeah, but that’s a part of the human condition. We all want to turn back to God in some way. But Christianity has showed us the authentic and fullest way to be able to do that with the God-given intuition that we have.
Keith Nester:
Yeah. See, I kind of look at that stuff, Trent, as evidence, especially with atheists, okay? Not so much with Protestants. But with atheists, I look at that and I see that as a reason to believe in God. Because I think to myself, if all that was true, was just the natural reality that we can see the material world, how do you account for the fact that throughout all of history and human civilization, there has been this concept of religion and this concept of creator, this concept of God.
Keith Nester:
It really ultimately serves no evolutionary purpose to believe in a being that created you and in a being that wants you to sacrifice because that’s not very survival of the fittest-ish to give of yourself and you should be pushing your power on other people, if that’s true.
Keith Nester:
And so, when I see these similarities, even and when I see this concept, I look at that and I go, “This is there because God put that on. The human heart is built into what it means to be human to know, look up at the sky and know that there’s more to the universe, to us than just what we can see with our eyes and feel with our senses.” So, to me I look at that and I go, “That’s a reason to believe in God.”
Trent Horn:
Right. So, the similarities can be evidence of a common cause. CS Lewis called this myth become fact that these stories of dying rising gods, while none of them are like Christianity because none of the gods die for sin, and they don’t rise to glory as a mortal life. They’re kind of stuck in a constant cycle of fall, winter and spring with the crops. It points towards that, that ultimate fulfilling truth.
Trent Horn:
This also is helpful when we look at scripture because some people will say, “Well, look, you’ve got elements of scripture that are stolen from other pagan myths.” The most famous example of this would be the story of the flood in Genesis chapters 6 through 8.
Trent Horn:
And so, people say, “Look, that’s just like, The Epic of Gilgamesh.” You have a lone flood survivor. This is just a ripped off story. It’s not divinely inspired. And the way we respond to that is well actually, the Epic of Gilgamesh ripped it off from an older epic, the Epic of Atra-Hasis. So, there’s a lot of flood stories and Mesopotamia at this time.
Trent Horn:
So, if you have a lot of people describing a catastrophic flood and a single group of survivors, I would say that’s evidence for some kind of a flood happening. And geologists have discovered very large ice dams in the Black Sea that 10,000 years ago, wherever the data is, if they collapsed, they would have inundated the entire area and it would have made sense giving rise to flood areas and things like that.
Trent Horn:
But what I would say is, okay, you’re right. There’s superficial similarities here, and that there’s a giant flood and a few survivors. But there’s core differences. So, in the Epic of Atra-Hasis, the gods flood the world because human beings are noisy and they can’t stand them. It’s just like I have a noisy neighbor, and there’s multiple gods.
Trent Horn:
And the gods, by the way, natural hazards, they’re scared of the flood, they run away from it. But in Genesis, God, singular, floods the world as an indictment of human sin. But he had encouraged previously, very clear in Genesis, be fruitful and multiply. So, the author of Genesis seems to be purposely subverting the anti-life and polytheistic ideas of his pagan neighbors. So, sometimes the borrowing is intentional to make fun of the competitors.
Trent Horn:
And so, to give you to understand this, in Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII, so you might say to me, “Oh, Trent, that’s just modernist views of scripture or blah, blah. You’re departing your post Vatican to modernism level.”
Trent Horn:
Well, no, and Humani Generis that was written and what is like, 1950, not 1950, but it was written before the Second Vatican Council, Pope Pius XII said, “If however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations, and this may be conceded, it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.”
Trent Horn:
So, Pius told us, yeah, they might have purposely borrowed from the competitors when they were writing, but as a way to show their deficiencies and the superiority and the true God who’s revealed himself.
Keith Nester:
Well, wouldn’t it make sense that if there was a worldwide flood, that people from other parts of the world would have written something about it or had an idea of it or said something about it and incorporated that into their religious worldview?
Trent Horn:
Well, certainly, yes. Especially if it were a global flood, you would definitely expect that. The church has not explicitly said how Christians are to interpret the flood. You could interpret it as a global inundation of the entire Earth. You could also interpret it as a local flood that destroyed the world of the sacred writer, that in scripture, the earth or the land, could refer to the entire area that the author knew. Either way, would still have one of those Black Sea dams collapsed, would have gone all the way through Mesopotamia.
Trent Horn:
So, either way, you’re right. The multiple accounts are evidence for it. And the differences show the ancient authors is subverting what’s going on. And also, to correct myself, I was right. Humani Generis was written in 1950, I quick checked that.
Keith Nester:
I was going to say something about that, Trent.
Trent Horn:
Well, thank you. Thank you, for-
Keith Nester:
I didn’t know. Okay, so and I’ve heard about the epic Gilgamesh thing. I remember studying that in school. But are there any other things like that out there, too? We have multiple sources about the same type of event?
Trent Horn:
No, I mean, we have different sources. I’m trying to think of one that would come to mind. What’s interesting sometimes though is to contrast to the creation, contrast these ancient myths.
Trent Horn:
One I think is helpful is when you contrast Genesis to the other creation myths. Most creation myths or what are called cosmogonies, they usually describe the creation of the world as a byproduct of divine reproduction, that the gods kind of hooking up with each other, or is the byproduct of the gods engaging in war with each other.
Trent Horn:
But in Genesis, it’s just this single act of Yahweh, of God, acting in a way to bring about the world from nothing by his own power. And then what’s interesting when you go further on in the Psalms, you see descriptions of Yahweh fighting Leviathan.
Trent Horn:
So, some atheists will read this and say that Yahweh crushed the head of the dragons like, “Oh, are you saying dragons exist?” Well, no. It’s like, if I tell you that Jesus is stronger than Superman, is that true? Well I ask you, is that true?
Keith Nester:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
He is stronger than Superman. But that doesn’t imply that Superman really exists. I’m just saying a lot of people like Superman. But guess what, I like Jesus, he’s even stronger than Superman and he’s also real.
Trent Horn:
So, when you make these kinds of comparisons to what other people in popular culture adore, it doesn’t mean you’re endorsing what they believe it. And that’s important when we read through scripture and see the description of how Yahweh, these beings like the dragon or Leviathan, were supposed to be things that were enemies of the ancient gods. In the Bible, they’re described essentially as God’s pets. He’s not scared of them at all, because he’s not scared of anything.
Keith Nester:
Yeah, I mean, you see things in the Old Testament about he is a God above all gods. It doesn’t mean they’re other gods, it just means that people have this conception of all these guys. And we’re just saying that our God, the one true God is above everything, even above those other gods which we’re not, again, it doesn’t mean that we say they’re real.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so, when the Israelites went into Canaan and they entered in there after the Exodus and went to Canaan into the promised land, there came to be an identification that God had revealed his name as Yahweh.
Trent Horn:
But when they entered Canaan, God’s name also came to be identified with El, E-L. Because in Canaan, El was the high god, the high deity of all the other gods, because the Israelites are saying, “Oh, El is your God above all the gods? He must be Yahweh. We’re talking about the same thing here because your way is God above other gods.”
Trent Horn:
That’s why the chosen people who are God’s chosen people are called is Israel. Those who struggle with God, with El. But to the recognition of that fact does not commit the ancient Israelites to some kind of polytheism or henotheism.
Trent Horn:
Now, the ancient Israelites did struggle with idolatry. So, at least in the early stages of salvation history, they were tempted to worship other gods. God progressively revealed themselves first as, look, I am the greatest of all the gods. And then at least by the time of Isaiah, if not earlier than that, you have the fullest that I am greater than these gods because there is no other gods like me, Isaiah 43:10. The other passages there that clearly affirm biblical monotheism.
Keith Nester:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a slam dunk I think when you look at that to say, well, Ancient Judaism was polytheistic, or whatever. I mean, no, that’s not at all. But again, it goes back to looking at the facts, looking at objective things that are not just speculations, but the way people communicate with each other.
Keith Nester:
We sometimes look back I think at the scripture and we don’t give people the ability just to communicate the way that we all communicate today. That everything in the scripture is written down.
Keith Nester:
And we want to be so biblical that we want to remove hyperbole. We want to remove metaphors. We want to, oh, well, this, this. We want to even remove sometimes exaggeration, as though that there’s error when sometimes someone’s exaggerates as a way of communicating truth, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong.
Trent Horn:
And we live in a culture, it’s important. And Pope Pius XII talks about this in his encyclicals like Providentissimus Deus and others on interpreting scripture. We cannot import our culture back onto these ancient cultures when we’re trying to understand them.
Trent Horn:
For example, we live in a really exact culture. I mean, you and I not only do we know what time it is, I know what time it is where you are and you know what time it is where I am. We know how long that we have been talking. We know how many people live in the cities where we live through an exact census. The ancient Israelites did not have that kind of exactitude, nowhere near it.
Trent Horn:
And so, they’ll frequently use it, like you said, exaggerated numbers, exaggerated language in order to underscore the points that they’re trying to make. So, when we read scripture, when we read through church history, read the church fathers, let them speak in their time in place and understand what they’re asserting.
Trent Horn:
And when you do that, you do see parallels sometimes. Sometimes the author is comparing or contrasting with the surrounding culture. But then other times you see the superiority of either what is revealed in the Old Testament or in the New, and you see its superiority to the surrounding culture, and its uniqueness that ultimately comes from divine inspiration.
Keith Nester:
Amen to that. Yeah, we got to be careful of stuff like that. I mean, I remember hearing people say things like, “Well, the Bible says that a thousand years is like a day of the Lord.” So, that means that anytime you see a day, that’s a thousand years and people start to do these weird countdowns in the Bible using these formulas where they hinge everything on their own reading of what was in the mind of the author when they wrote that.
Trent Horn:
They got to read the whole thing, because a day is a thousand years is what St. Peter is reflecting on to say, “Hey, look, the Lord is coming. We don’t know when the judgment will be because God acts squaring his own timetable.”
Trent Horn:
So, yeah, so you’ll try to read that back into Genesis chapter 1, what are the length of the days. But the author of Genesis 1 doesn’t seem to be writing his narrative in a chronological sequence because even at the time of St. Augustine, the Manichean heretics said that the God of the Old Testament was this evil idiot, basically.
Trent Horn:
They were saying, the God of the Old Testament made the material world which sucks, so don’t worship him. He’s evil. The God of the New Testament who’s we really should be worshiping, and Agustin is saying, “No, that’s the same God.”
Trent Horn:
And the heretics say to him, “Okay, but he’s dumb. In Genesis, he makes the light on day one, but the sun on day four. Where does the light come from, smart guy?” And Agustin says, “Well, he’s not trying to write. The sacred author isn’t writing in chronological order.” Austin even said, “The author has separated in time what God did in a single instant.”
Trent Horn:
So, even back then, you have the church fathers and others defending against critics making arguments that I find on atheist websites today. Like I said, the same objections get recycled over and over and over again.
Keith Nester:
There is nothing new under the sun.
Trent Horn:
Ecclesiastes.
Keith Nester:
Yup, yeah. Okay. I want to switch gears for a second here. And you mentioned Christmas trees earlier.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Keith Nester:
Another thing that of course we’re still in Easter season here. But we always see these arguments around the time of Easter from our anti-Catholic buddies who always want to say things like, “Oh, here we go again, with all you Catholics who worship bunnies and eggs and Ishtar all of that garbage.”
Keith Nester:
And this whole idea of certain things that we do with regard to holidays, Christmas trees, Easter whatever it might be as being complete pagan in origin. And even still, some of them would say contemporary practice that whatever we’re doing with those things now is still pagan. I mean, how do you respond to that?
Trent Horn:
Right. So, when we’re talking with Protestant fundamentalist friends, there’s actually others who go further than this. So, Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter.
Keith Nester:
Or birthdays. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Or birthdays. They don’t celebrate birthdays. So, you can say, your Protestant fundamentalist friend, who probably does celebrate Christmas and Easter, maybe not with the other accoutrements. But I bet they probably celebrate people’s birthdays. Yet, the Church fathers actually were very hesitant to celebrate birthdays. So, that’s why this comes up like, “Oh celebrating when Christ was born. Was he born on December 25th?” There’s different arguments related to that.
Trent Horn:
But the early church fathers were not as concerned about celebrating the day Christ was born because birthdays were more of a pagan celebration. The Bible only records to birthdays, Pharaoh celebrating and Herod celebrating his birthday.
Trent Horn:
So, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are on to something a little. If you’re going to be a Protestant fundamentalist, you can’t even celebrate birthdays because they really are a pagan element that Christians have come to baptize.
Trent Horn:
So, when you look at these other things that are brought up, you’re right. A lot of times, the facts are just completely wrong. The Easter Ishtar one is the most explicit one of that. So, people will say that Easter is just a celebration of this Babylonian deity, Ishtar, who was a fertility figure dying and rising to new life, things like that.
Trent Horn:
The major problem with this is that calling the celebration of Christ rising from the dead, Easter, that doesn’t happen until the early Middle Ages. Because and in fact, in most languages today, I go to a Byzantine Catholic Church, we don’t call it Easter, we call it Pascha or Paschal.
Trent Horn:
In most of the languages, Easter is called Pascha, Paschal, because that references back to Christ being the Passover, the Paschal sacrifice. So, Easter comes from Ostern, which is a Germanic word that was developed centuries later.
Trent Horn:
And I love it, it’s like no. On the meme, it says, we don’t call it Ishtar. I’ve never met somebody who celebrates, Christians who celebrate Ishtar.
Keith Nester:
I’ve never met either.
Trent Horn:
It’s Easter. Ishtar is not even connected with the bunny. She’s connected with the lion and the six-pointed star. All of the facts are just wrong. She goes down to the underworld, then is rescued and I think her brother, her husband, her sister, I forget which one, ends up going down to the underworld in her place over and over again, which once again goes back to the seasonal cycle. The Easter Bunny is interesting because that one is derivative. It comes from the Easter hare, H-A-R-E, that was celebrated that Lutherans came up with this.
Keith Nester:
What?
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Keith Nester:
Are you kidding me? The Lutheran started that? Those stinkers.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, they said the Easter hare, he was kind of like elf on the shelf that the Easter hare was this bunny who would see if children were good during the Easter season and then they would be rewarded afterwards.
Trent Horn:
And so, that’s where it began. It was kind of just like Christians today might do elf on the shelf doesn’t mean we believe this elf exists or it’s just something that was incorporated into the story. But it has nothing to do with the original proclamation of Easter or anything like that.
Trent Horn:
It’s something that’s fun and we can impose image on springtime, new life. We have our ultimate new life in Christ. We look backwards and see these things, but they were not the source of the original belief which was grounded in the historical reality of Christ’s resurrection.
Keith Nester:
Yeah. I think that’s just hilarious. I didn’t know that thing about the Lutherans and the hare. But it’s so funny how people just spout this stuff off like they know that it’s true. And they know that there’s this big conspiracy. The whole Ishtar Easter thing, because it kind of sounds the same, Ishtar, Easter. And it’s almost like you’ve discovered this truth where now we got you. And I think a lot of it is sort of like that got you idea with Christianity.
Trent Horn:
But it’s so silly. It’s so silly. When you have to remind people that English has not been the universal language for humanity for all of history. It’s like when mythicist say, “Wait a minute, Jesus is the Son of God. And Egyptians worshiped the sun, S-U-N. They sound the same.” Well, you’re right, but in the Egyptian the word son S-O-N and S-U-N sound, nothing alike. So, when people try to find this, they’re taking a very intellectually lazy way to try to make these comparisons.
Keith Nester:
Well, a lot of these guys are the same ones that are like, “Hey, if the King James was good enough for Paul, it was good enough for me.”
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Thankfully, they’re in a very, very small minority, those who would think that … You’re right. There’s some people think the King James version of the Bible is the only inspired word of God and even more radical fringe who would think that the only inspired word of God is the English King James Version that has been around for 2000 years, inexplicably.
Trent Horn:
But I mean, there are others who will take this even in the Catholic world. They’ll try to elevate the vulgate for example to say that it’s some kind of super translation of the scriptures. Even though the church does not have an official translation, the vulgate has a pride of place in the history of the church.
Trent Horn:
But nowadays, we have discovered more manuscripts to be able to help us. There’s people who read the Douay-Rheims. It’s a wonderful translation, but it does have its deficiencies that other newer translations have been able to amend. But I don’t need to open up more of a can of worms on this.
Keith Nester:
Well, yeah. I mean, now you got me thinking. Because when I became a Catholic, I thought, all right, the hardcore Catholics read the Douay-Rheims because that’s like the vulgate was the official Bible translation from last. So, it’s not the official. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that the church does not have currently an official translation of the Bible. There are a variety of translations that are used that have different varying qualities to them. I find there’s elements of the Douay-Rheims that are very beautiful in their prose. And that put forward theological truths in a very explicit way that I do enjoy.
Trent Horn:
But there’s going to be other ways that they’ve been articulated that because language changes over time, you’re going to lose the meaning of it with other audiences if you don’t know what suffer the little children to come to me like, well, what does that mean? We don’t talk like that anymore.
Trent Horn:
And so, when I’m studying, for example, the translation that I enjoy using the most would probably be the Revised Standard Version Catholic edition. So, when you look at biblical translations, there’s two philosophies, formal and dynamic. Formal would be, all right, I’m going to try to pick the English word that most corresponds to the Ancient Hebrew or Greek. And I’m trying to get word for word. The dynamic translation tries to get idea for idea.
Keith Nester:
Thought for thought. So, word for word or thought for thought.
Trent Horn:
Exactly. And so, there’s benefits between them. Like the New American Bible, which is typically read in the liturgy is more thought for thought, because you’re reading it in public liturgies, things like that. The RSV is more word for word along it. And so, there’s going to be a spectrum obviously. So, at the far end of thought for thought is a paraphrase Bible, like the message, which is not a Bible. It’s not reliable for anything.
Trent Horn:
And the other hand would just be a literal … It’s just you took the Greek and you put the English words on them. But that would be so difficult to read. And also, you wouldn’t get what you’re reading. For example, in the Old Testament, it says that God is long of nose. It’s like well, to praise God. Oh, you Lord, you are long of nose.
Trent Horn:
And so, what we translate it nowadays we translate that slow to anger. Because in Ancient Israel, the people who were the most patient, and the people who acted calmly and weren’t rash were the elders in the community.
Trent Horn:
And you could tell they were older because as you get older, the cartilage in your nose and your ears gets weaker and it starts to droop. That’s why people like sometimes say when you’re older, your nose gets bigger. It doesn’t get bigger, the cartilage droops more because it loses its strength. So, when the Bible says God has long of nose, that means he’s slow to anger like the elders in our community yet even more so than them.
Trent Horn:
So, there’s an idea. Some people say, “Oh, I don’t want thought for thought, I’ll just do word for word.” But if you’re not from the culture, you’re going to miss it unless someone points these things out to you.
Keith Nester:
Exactly. And I think that’s kind of the theme here to what we were talking about with, all this paganism stuff, too, Trent, is a lot of these arguments require that we import our cultural ideas and understandings on some things that are objectively real and true, some things about like if you talked about Horus, he was killed, but his body parts were scattered. He wasn’t raised from the dead like Jesus Christ in their … Of course, none of that are really true, right?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Osiris’ body is scattered.
Keith Nester:
Osiris. Yeah. Sorry.
Trent Horn:
Horus has resurrected, he’s brought back to life from after a scorpion bite.
Keith Nester:
Yeah. But what we’re saying is what people do is they take these ideas that we have now the way we talk now and the way we think now, and then they place that over the top of these mythological ideas or whatever, and then say, now we’ve got a comparison. Therefore, Catholicism equals paganism. The really, really horrible way to do biblical understanding science apologetics, whatever you want to call it.
Keith Nester:
And here’s where this ultimately lines up for me, is we have to be more willing to embrace this truth, more willing to go into the direction of what is real, not bury our heads in the sand and just receive a jack trick, click track, chick track, all that stuff. We have to look and your point earlier about, “Hey, how do you know that? What are your sources?” So, I guess, that’s really the bottom line.
Keith Nester:
Trent, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. Like I said, before, you were you’re a guy that has really meant a lot to me and my own studies over the years, as I came into the church. And even since then, more so really, honestly, because when I converted, it was like now everybody wants to bring all these arguments to me and do all these things. And a lot of times, I’ve looked towards your material as a way to answer people.
Keith Nester:
So, I want to thank you for your work with that. And just can you let our audience know a little bit more about what you’ve got going on, what you have in store and where people can find out more about you?
Trent Horn:
Sure. So, I have my own podcast, the Council of Trent that’s available on iTunes and Google Play. I do three episodes a week there. And that’s also available on YouTube at our Council of Trent YouTube page. So, I do that during the week.
Trent Horn:
I also have several books that I’ve written. Those are available online, wherever you can get good Catholic books. And you can always find a lot more of my work also at catholic.com, but I’m doing a lot of work with the podcast right now. So, definitely encourage your listeners to check out the Council of Trent either on iTunes, Google Play, or on YouTube and they can become premium subscribers, get access to bonus content at trenthornpodcast.com.
Keith Nester:
Awesome. And yeah, I mean, that’s a must listen to. If you’re a person into apologetics, you want to learn about your faith, the Council of Trent is something that you just have to subscribe to that and listen to it.
Keith Nester:
For me, I listen to it when I’m traveling, when I’m doing different things. Because your episodes aren’t like three hours long. You get to the point. You talk about really important things and I appreciate that.
Keith Nester:
Well, once again, Trent, let me express my thanks to you for being here. And just to let you know, that you’re appreciated. Your work, it’s accomplishing many things. I had some friends of mine recently who had been a part of the church I used to be before I became a Catholic. And they contacted me and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about becoming Catholic.” I was completely blown away.
Keith Nester:
And they came over to the house. We talked and I gave them a copy of your book, Why We’re Catholic. And they joined this year at the Easter Vigil. It was awesome. And I know that was a very helpful thing to them. So, thank you for that.
Trent Horn:
Praise to God. Hey, guys, thank you so much for watching. Be sure to check out Keith’s channel and go to his website, down2earthministry.org. I think he has a lot of great content. You definitely you should go and check it out.
Trent Horn:
And then be sure to click subscribe so that you get all the new content that we’re going to be putting out there and you can help the channel grow and spread. So, hey, thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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