ALL Major Religions EXPLAINED in Under 90 Minutes (ft. Dr. Frank Turek) | Live Free with Josh Howerton

Every other world religion is trying to work their way to God if they believe in God at all. In Christianity, God works his way to us. Most major religions are about how you seek God. Christianity at its core is about how God seeks you. God wants us to be people that are good because he is good. But that's actually not the point of existence. The point of existence is to know and worship the God who created us. Well, hey, Live Free Nation. Before we jump into the episode, this podcast is recorded right here at Lake Point Church in Dallas, Texas. But the Live Free Nation is spread all over the country and all around the world. So if you've been watching and thinking, man, I wish I could be part of something like this. We want to invite you to take a simple next step. And that is join us for church online. Every weekend we stream our services live on YouTube, Facebook, and our church online platform. And it's more than just watching a service. There are live hosts in the chat. Prayer teams ready to stand with you. And people all around the world worshiping together in real time. And so whether you're exploring the faith. Back to church. Or just looking for a place to start. Church online is a great way to jump in and experience what God is doing here at Lake Point. We would love to see you in the chat this weekend. And now, enjoy the podcast. Well, hey, welcome back to another episode of the Live Free Podcast. My name is Carlos Arraso. And today I'm here with Pastor Paul Cunningham. And, Paul, today we have a very special guest that I'm about to introduce in a very special way. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Man, he is a Christian apologist. Best-selling author of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. And a founder of Cross-Examined. But here's how I call him. He is the Jedi Master of Apologetics. Whoa. A heavyweight champion of Christian debate. The cross-examiner of atheism. The man every college skeptic eventually has to deal with. Dr. Frank Turek. Yeah, welcome back. Welcome back. Well, thank you. I got to ask you guys. What's it like being two-thirds of the best podcast in the world? Come on, man. Come on, man. It is. I mean, think about this. You know, Mortimer Adler, many years ago, was asked. He asked this question when he was pulling together the Great Book Series, because in the Great Book Series, the biggest entry is about God. And he was asked, why is the biggest entry about all these great thinkers, why is God the biggest subject, the subject with the most written on it? And he said, I suppose it's because that more implications come from the answer to the question, does God exist and who is he? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Than any other question you could ask. That's great. And so what we do here, you do here, and of course, Josh does here on the Live Free podcast, is talk about God and what it means, what God means to us and how we should live. There can't be anything more important than that. That's exactly right. He's the center of the universe. He's the center of all creation. Everything revolves around him. We were actually just sharing the other day, I think you showed Mr. Beast reached how many subscriptions? Yeah, Mr. Beast literally just hit 500 million subscribers on YouTube. Mm-hmm. And I said, man, if he can do that to entertain people, I think we can do that to preach the gospel. Exactly. So we only got to multiply it by 500 right now? Is that it? We only need 499 million subscribers. A million more? All right. So hey, one more. We're all about one more. One more. But the point of that was not to take a slam at Mr. Beast. The point of that was to your point saying, man, if God is the center of everything and everything that's related to him, why wouldn't we want to talk about it? And why wouldn't we want as many people possible to hear about that? That's right. And if God doesn't exist, then nothing ultimately matters. That's right. That's right. We all wind up in the same place in the dirt. Exactly. It doesn't ultimately matter whether you wind up as a missionary or a murderer, ultimately, if there is no God. But if God does exist, then that topic is the most important topic we can talk about. Let's go. 100%. And that's why we're grateful that you're here. And I think, Frank, you've set a new record. I think you're the guest that has had the most appearances in Live Free. I am blessed. Yes. Your pace setting. You're like, this is the third time you're here. I am blessed. Right, man? Last episode that we did with you. We had people comment all over. They loved having you here. I got a couple comments. Jacob said, Frank is one of the most influential titans of the faith in my life, starting over a decade ago. Sarah said, Dr. Frank's Josh impressions are impeccable. Hey, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Hey, come on. Let's wrap up this pod. Come on. Oh, we just started. We can't wrap up. They are impeccable. All right. Good. I love Josh, by the way. I love him. I think it's mutual. I told him. I said, if we could just get every pastor to be like Josh, the world would be Christianized. Every pastor. What do you mean by that? Well, because Josh is a pastor that rightfully knows that every single area of life should be governed by what Jesus and the apostles say. That every area of life. It's not just what you do at church or at home. It's what you do at work. It's what. It's what you do online. It's what you do in the voting booth. It's what you do in the community. Your life should be completely governed by what Jesus and the apostles say. The Bible. Yeah. Right? That's right. And I think too often, many Christians and even some pastors act as if, no, we're just here to talk about spiritual things. Yeah. We're not here to talk about things that are outside of the spiritual, when in fact everything relates to the spiritual in some way. We're not here to talk about. We're not here to talk about politics. We're not here to talk about what you're doing at work. We're only here to talk about maybe just what you do in church and maybe just what you do in the home, but don't let it affect the government. Don't let it affect other areas of your life. And I think people are misled by that. That's right. I think, I think the Bible ought to be our guidebook for what we do in every area of life. It's not a private faith. It's something that you literally should influence every single aspect of your life. Every single decision you make. Yeah. That's right. Faith is personal, but it's not private. There's a key distinction there. That's right. On that note, today, we're going to talk about the Bible. We're going to be asking the question, since we have Dr. Frank Turk with us today, is God a moral monster? We're going to be asking, hey, what about those passages in the Bible that are a little bit more difficult? And it seems like God is mean, according to some people. Why are there so many religions? This is the special All Religions Explained in Under 60 Minutes episode. Aren't all religions, Frank, just saying the same thing, right? Like some people, we'll go there. I know you got some thoughts. Okay. I got a thought. He's already. He was about to come back. He's ready to go. Ready to go. I saw it just. The meter changed. I love that. And then we're going to, like I said, we're going to explain all major religions in hopefully under 60 minutes. The podcast is probably going to be more than that, but just that particular section. And we're going to be answering frequently shouted questions on all of these. A couple of things before we do, man, we're excited because Paul and Frank, July 11th, we are starting our At the Movie series. This is in the Gospels, you see Jesus using stories to illustrate biblical truths. What we do in this four-week sermon series is we use movie clips to illustrate biblical truth. Nice. We have fun with it. We have fun with it. Characters in the lobby, popcorn drinks for everyone. Obviously, in addition to worship and Bible teaching and more, don't miss four weeks at the movies. Can you tell us one of the clips you might be using at this point? I would love to tell you right now. And we. Oh, you know. I think there's been some, something's happening right now. You know. Sorry. Oh, okay. I hope you caught it. Oh, okay. I was like. No, I didn't know you were doing this, but you know, I have a book on how Jesus is in the movies. It's called Hollywood Heroes. Oh, okay. Oh, come on. How your favorite movies reveal God. Yeah. My son and I wrote it. He's also a seminary grad. That's awesome. But you'd be shocked to learn. Well, you wouldn't be, but the people out there might be shocked to learn that the major movie franchises of the past 50 years have all stolen from the greatest story ever told. That's it. Whether they know it or not. Exactly. Whether you're talking about Batman, Iron Man, Star Wars, you're talking about Lord of the Rings, of course. You're talking about Harry Potter. Harry Potter? You would be shocked to learn. That's another podcast, by the way. Yes. You would be shocked to learn that J.K. Rowling took the. He took the entire storyline out of the Bible. She admits it. It's the idea of all the lowercase stories are ultimately pointing to the capital S. That's right. Ultimate story. And Carlos, I don't know if you're about to go here, but just in case you weren't, I want to say like, number one, if you're in the DFW area, you're going to have to come in person. This is a sermon series that we will not broadcast because of copyright issues. So if you want to be a part of At the Movies, you've got to come and be with us in person. But hey, if you already know Jesus and you call Lake Point home, here's what I want to encourage you is not just to plan on coming, but I want you to be asking, who am I going to bring with me? This is one of, if not our best series the entire year to bring someone who is far from God, but close to you, because we just feel like we put the truth of God in a very accessible way that anyone can understand. So this is the perfect time if you've been waiting to invite someone to church, they can come to know Jesus or at least be exposed to Jesus. This is the best series for it of the year. And if you are a part of the Live Free Nation and you are not within driving distance as well, then come hang out. We got a free gift for you as well. We'd love to meet you. Also, we do a giveaway every single week. So if you're on YouTube or Spotify, shout out to other people joining there, comment hat, and we'd love to. Pick several winners to give away some free hats for Live Free. Also, if you want to purchase them, you can go to livefree.shop or text the word hat to 20411 to find our daily Bible reading plan, plus the weekly sermon and an early release of the Live Free podcast. You can download the Lake Point Church app, text the word app to 20411. Do people get a free hat, really? Yeah. Yeah. Every single week. Yeah. We love it. I know we gave you some last time. I got one. I wore it on one of my own podcasts. We love it. The Live Free podcast. Wore it on the I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast. Hey. Pastor Mike did another phenomenal job in this sermon series. So, Frank, this sermon series is called En Fuego. That's French for, you know, that's not true. Although Carlos speaks French, by the way. He impressed me the other week. Can you speak a little bit for us right now? I'm putting him on the spot. Oh, my goodness. Je peux parler français, oui. Oui. I'm excited to practice that in a couple weeks. That sounds right. I have no idea. Literally, nobody speaks French. - I know French too, souffle. It's my favorite French word, maybe. Chocolate mousse. That's great. I mean, it is. I mean, you are correct. En fuego, but it's not French. En fuego is Spanish for on fire. And this is a sermon series on fire, obviously, but also on anger. We had the first couple of weeks talking about anger. And then this last weekend, we talked about the fire of God and how the Bible says God is a consuming fire, which means that God never changes, but when you experience God, he changes you. And so the story from this weekend, so if you haven't checked the sermon, you can go back and find it. It's from 1 Kings 18, and this is where there is a drought. And this is the prophet Elijah, which, by the way, this is very timely. We didn't know this was going to be. The prophet Elijah challenges King Ahab to a showdown to determine who is the true God. And this is Elijah versus 450 prophets of Baal. There's two altars that were prepared. The prophets of Baal are literally all day cunning themselves, crying out to their gods for them to show up, but nothing happens. Elijah prays a simple prayer. And with all the odds stacked against him, the Bible says that there's fire literally coming down from heaven and consumes the sacrifice. And then the Bible says Elijah had the false prophets arrested and executed. We're going to, I'm going to ask you about this in just a second here. And eventually God ended the drought by sending things. But the whole point of the story, amongst other things, is there is no God like the God of the Bible. That's right. And this is literally what 1 Kings 18:39 says, "When all the people saw this, they felt prostrate and cried, 'The Lord! Jehovah, He is God, the Lord, He is God!' This is people that did not know God, recognizing the true God after they saw Him work." Exodus 15:11 says, "Who among the gods is like you, O Lord? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?" Psalm 95:3, "For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods." And so, and then he tells the people of Israel, Elijah says this, "Hey, make up your mind who's going to be your God." Hmm. And so, Paul, anything else that stood out from the sermon to you? Yeah, a couple of details. I mean, one, it's just kind of a flex move, I feel like, on the part of Elijah, is not only does he call, like that simple calling of the fire down, he douses it with water and a ton of water, which, by the way, it's in the middle of a drought. Yes, a huge drought. It's a huge drought. He said, "Put some more water on this thing." A huge drought. He's like, "Put some more, put some more on," because it's like, if you're not much of an outdoor person, that's not usually something you would do if you're wanting to start a fire. You want dry wood, the driest wood possible. So he douses it almost as a flex. It's like, "Hey, you're not doing anything, but I'm going to flex. I'm going to have this douse it, and then God's going to consume it," and it does. I just love that little detail. After mocking the other gods, by the way. Yeah, like he basically says, "Oh, maybe your God's in the bathroom." You know, maybe that's why he's not responding and stuff like that. It's kind of, if you like trash talking in sports, this is like a great trash talking, like, just story in the Bible, great back and forth. A little insensitive. The other thing, and maybe this will transition even to the question I can pose for Frank, because I know you've gotten questions like this before, not just about stories like this, but other stories that seem to be like it, and especially in the Old Testament. We do have to remember that while Elijah does, in a sense, call for this confrontation, he says, "Hey, let's settle for all where we stand." When you actually read the greater story of what's happening here, King Ahab and then his Queen Jezebel are evil people, evil, evil people who are actively persecuting God's people and his prophets. And so in the next chapter, actually, it's funny, after this huge thing, Elijah gets discouraged because his life is threatened, but then he has this moment where he's alone with God, and he says, "God's people have put all of the prophets to death, and I'm the only one left." Only one left. Only one left. Now, God does say, "Hey, actually, I have reserved some over here," but still, the idea of, like, these people have been killing and persecuting God's people and his prophets, like, a ton. So we do have to remember in this story that Elijah is not a genocidal jerk. He's a person, if anything, he's been the one being persecuted. All right, let's settle once and for all whose God is the true God. But that being said, Frank, when people sometimes read stories like this now, it just seems to make God, like, this moral monster, like this mean guy. I mean, you've got stories like this, you've got the Canaanite conquest. Last week, we talked about the flood, and we kind of ran out of time at the end when we were talking about some of the moral problems that, for some people, this causes. But, yeah, what do you do with stories like this where it seems like if God were to do this today, it's like if he were to put to death 450 people of another religion that were, like, their leaders, like, "Oh, like, this is awful. This is genocide. This is persecution." Like, what do you do with this when people are like, "Hey, doesn't this make God seem mean and, like, a genocidal maniac?" What do you say to that? I think the first question that we need to ask somebody that brings this up is, "What do you mean by evil?" Okay, they're coming up with an evil scenario, and it depends on their worldview. If they believe in God, they can say, "Well, evil is a lack in good, and God is good, and it appears like God is going too far here." They'll say that. But too often, this kind of objection comes from atheists. I had a situation. I was at University of Central Oklahoma. This had to be almost 10 years ago. This atheist woman was asking me a question about this. "I can't believe in the God of the Old Testament because he does stuff like this, you know, he kills people." And I asked her this question. I said, "Before we go any further, can I ask you, what is your position on abortion?" And she said, "Oh, I'm pro-choice." And so then I asked her, I said, "Let me ask you a question. When God plays God in the Old Testament and he decides who lives and dies, you're claiming he's immoral. But when you play God right now and you decide who lives and dies with regard to a baby in the womb, you think that's a moral right that you have. Can you justify this for me?" Now, of course, she couldn't because there is no justification. We use this phrase, "You shouldn't play God." What does that imply? It implies that God has an ability or a right to do certain things that we don't have the right to do. If God is the ultimate judge, he can take life. He can take life anytime he wants. In fact, if Christianity is true, if people don't die, they just change location. They go from this life to the next life, and that's up to God when that happens. Now, in this case, as you point out, Paul, there's a lot of evil going on between Ahab and Jezebel, and they've pulled people away from the true God, Yahweh. And so there's a showdown, and God says, "Choose who you're going to follow. You're going to follow Yahweh," or Elijah says, "You're going to follow Yahweh or you're going to follow Baal?" And they decide to follow Baal. Okay. This is called judgment, and in America, we think God is a cosmic candy man. He's all squishy love, but no judgment. He's no justice. The very reason we need a savior is because God is just. If God is not just, he can look the other way on sin and just say, "There's no sacrifice, so we don't need a sacrifice. You're in. That's not a just God." So God is just, and he judges these people rightfully. God can take a life anytime he wants. In this case, it has to do with justice. And people say, "Well, God is all evil in the Old Testament." No, he's not. He's judging people. And another thing we need to remember, the Old Testament covers thousands of years of history. The New Testament covers about 60. There's a lot more time to do evil in thousands of years. You're going to see a lot of periods of judgment in that period of time. Not as much time in about 60 years, although hell is talked about in the New Testament, and Jesus says basically the city of Jerusalem is going to get judged. When Jesus comes back, there's going to be a judgment as well. So if you think Jesus was tough in the Old Testament, just wait till he comes back. He is going to judge. So this is judgment. This is not unjust for God of the universe. That's right. The difference is that we would say murder is the unjustified killing of someone. So even I think that was brilliant, even turning the question on them and saying, "Hey, what do you believe on abortion?" Because the reason we believe that is wrong is because that is the unjustified killing of an innocent baby who has done nothing. That's murder. That's murder. The Bible does not say, "Thou shalt not kill." It says, "Thou shalt not murder." And that is murder. God can kill anytime he wants. He's the author of life. He can take it. In this case, it's for a reason. It's because they've been unjust and they're leading the people away from the truth. Exactly. Whereas in this case, this is what you're hearing is like, God is just, and really, he is a judge who exercises that justice. In fact, we would consider judges in our society, if awful things like this were happening, and they were not holding the people who were accountable for that, we would consider them awful. Unjust judges. So actually, if they weren't doing it, we would say, "You're unjust," which that's something I like to do as well. You know, it's about turning it on them and asking them a question. When I get questions like this, usually, like you said, from skeptics, although even sometimes it's Christians who maybe they're just, again, reading it through a very modern lens and haven't really encountered this idea yet. As I say, what would you have God do in this situation? It's like, let's just talk about this right here. Let's move this to like right now, we're in the year 2026. Man, what if there was a society that was actively persecuting Christians? And they were actually, these people were actually sacrificing their children to Molech. Yeah, they were sacrificing their children. And let's say God did nothing. What would you be crying out to God? Why doesn't God. Bingo. Yeah, why doesn't God do something? And here's a situation where God does something, they go, "He shouldn't have done that." Exactly. And so this is one of those, and we hit this a little bit, but kind of only just teased on it last week with Noah's flood. This is one of those situations where if God does nothing, like, well, there can't be a God because he did nothing. Well, there can't be a God because he did it, not only like the exact way that he did it. It's just saying, "Hey, I think God is the one on the throne, and he is the only just and good judge who always does what is right, even if it doesn't seem right to us, it's always the right thing to do." And that's why we like Jesus so much because God's judgment is real. That's why the cross is so horrid. It's Jesus taking upon himself the judgment of God, the righteous judgment of God in our place, because at the end of the day, it's not that God judges innocent people. people is that there is no innocent people. There is only one that was innocent and that's jesus and he received that judgment and you and i should be receiving that judgment but we don't and that's called mercy and so that again it all points back to a good and faithful god so on that note uh we have a lot to cover today they say uh that if you don't want to ruin a party don't talk about religion in this episode we're going to talk about all the major religions and explain every single one of the major religions in hopefully under 60 minutes so it's going to be really fun uh we did an episode where we explained all christian denominations you can go find it it's it's fun this is the religion version of that so uh frank i can't think of anybody else to have this conversation with today uh let me let me start with this if somebody is asking uh this conversation why do we even have so many religions today yeah well i think part of that goes back to romans chapter one where paul talks about the fact that we suppress the truth and unrighteousness to go our own way we know that god's invisible qualities are clearly seen so that men are without excuse in other words we know there's a god in fact when people say how do you know god exists i say i know god by his effects because if there's an effect there has to be a cause so if creation is an effect and it is there has to be a cause a creator and if space time and matter had a beginning the cause must be spaceless timeless and immaterial right if if there's design in the universe that's the effect there has to be a designer if there's design in life there has to be a designer if there's a moral law written on the heart uh there's got to be a moral law giver right if there's evidence of man predicting and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead that's the effect there's got to be a cause who can create and resurrect somebody from the dead those first three things i mentioned creation design and morality everybody knows whether there's a they've seen a bible or not because that's just part of what's called natural revelation or you might say god's works god has two revelations he has two revelations he has two revelations he has his word but before he has his word he has his works okay it's also called natural revelation and everybody has that paul you got the passage there yeah i was gonna say this is really important for although they knew god they did not honor him as god or give thanks to him but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened this is romans 1 21 claiming verse 22 to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal god for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things so just briefly then keep going i was like i've got the passage and the next chapter romans 2 he talks about the law written on the heart that's the natural law yeah so from creation design and morality we know there has to be a creator who's moral and has designed things so he's going to hold us accountable so everybody knows there has to be some sort of being out there and some people interpret that in different ways but all these different world religions are attempts in some respect to explain how certain effects exist and some explain them better than others i think from a rational perspective so part of it has to do with the human heart trying to create a world that we want yeah another has to do with the idea that god has created and designed certain things and it's put a moral law in place and so now we're trying to if we're following the truth properly trying to explain those things by a reference to a creator who's moral okay uh and if you go to the bible i mean the bible also talks about the fact that people have these different idols that they are trying to worship that they want to get certain things in this life and they think if i pay homage to a certain idol or if i pray to a certain person my crops are going to be better they're still using cause and effect notice that that if i pray to certain gods or deities i'm i'm going to get what i want here on this so part of that is what paul is talking about in romans one instead of praying to the true deity they've set up their own to try and get an effect they want here on earth yeah that's good well i think kind of putting together some of what you said there's the idea of hey everybody and we'll get to atheism in a bit i would still say everybody has a sense that we had to get here somehow and the vast majority of people across human history believe in some kind of a deity or some kind of something that put this all into motion there had to be some kind of an ultimate cause kind of a cause or something like that so i think that's what paul's trying to do i think that's what paul's trying to do i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think that's what paul's trying to do and i think they begin kind of getting together and codifying that and that's how you get religions and so once sin enters into the picture instead of accepting god for who he is and that if we've been made in his image so we need to know who he is instead we begin remake him into our image would you say that's kind of an accurate yeah and i would also say it kind of goes back to that podcast you guys did not long ago why are there so many denominations yeah for the same reason there's so many non-christians it's not a it's not because the truth is not perceived i think it's because the truth is not received it's good right say it one more time frank it's not because the truth is not perceived it's because the truth is not received that's right that that we want to have it our way so we'll uh we'll come up with justifications for believing a certain thing when in fact if we were honest with ourselves and followed the truth where it led we would wind up at least with a some sort of theistic god you don't get all the way to jesus with just natural law or we would say a natural revelation or god's word works because you need historical information to know that jesus exists we can talk about the witness of the holy spirit another time but you would need some historical information but the fact that there's a deity out there a being that created and sustains the world and is a moral being everybody automatically knows that what they do with that from that point on there's a lot of reasons they go in different directions yeah but i don't even know why the livery podcast is doing an episode on all these religions because at the end of the day don't they all just teach the same thing like frank i've heard a lot of people say that they don't know the truth they don't know the truth they don't know the truth it's like you know it's like an elephant and then like one religion kind of grabs the trunk the other the religion kind of grabs the the other leg and then the other leg and then everybody's claiming like oh i know the truth and then they're touching you know something very different and then they're all arguing hey it's the same elephant is that true the story that carlos is referring to i want to hear you say frank is like there's this old like fable it's like oh it's like all these blind people and one's holding the tail and it's like oh it's like a snake and one's holding the tusk oh it's like a rhino and so on and so forth and so the idea is oh they're actually all touching the same thing they just can't see it what would what would you say that frank well the problem with that particular parable is you can show there's a problem with the parable by asking one question and the question is what is the perspective of the one telling the parable the one telling the parable says all these blind men think they have the truth but they don't because they only have a piece of the truth you know one thing thinks it's a wall another thinks it's a snake another thinks it's a rope another thinks it's a it's a tree whatever but the person telling the parable knows they're all wrong because he can see it's an elephant right everyone's blind but me yes everyone's blind but me right so the parable actually doesn't work it backfires yeah because the person telling the parable knows that those people are all wrong it's actually an elephant but i like to say this i know people will say this you know religions they all teach the same thing they teach you how to love one another and to which i yeah they all teach they you ought to they ought to love one another the only thing they differ on is the nature of god the nature of man sin salvation heaven hell and creation outside of that they're exactly the same wait in fact we have uh there's a quote there from two years ago i just want to make sure i wanted you to respond as you're about to tell us oh wait you don't have that one did i not send you that quote hold on i'm gonna keep going let me add to that actually they don't teach you how to love one another they don't teach you how to love one another i was going to say okay because you know satanism doesn't islam doesn't right you're supposed to submit in fact islam allah's not a god of love all right you can't call them love so there are religions that don't teach you how to love one another that the truth of the matter is religions agree superficially they disagree significantly on the essentials think of what i just said i know it was kind of in fun but the nature of god the nature of man sin salvation heaven hell and creation outside of that they don't teach you how to love one another that the truth of the matter creation these world religions differ on those issues now some are more similar than others the theisms are more similar than the non-theisms to one another obviously we can get into that but no religions are superficially the same fundamentally different this is what pope francis said in september 13th 2024 he said all religions are a path to reach god there is only one god and our religions are languages paths to reach god some are sheik muslim hindu christian they all they are different ways to god all right give me heresy for 500 even yeah even my catholic friends will admit this is heresy yeah okay they will and i have many catholic friends i i brought up in the catholic church that's absolute heresy yeah that he would be he would be burned or swallowed with the ball followers yeah in the elijah story yeah by saying that wow okay they're not all going up the same mountain so to speak you know you hear all roads lead to rome first of all that's not true it's not even it's not even good analogy all roads don't lead to rome i tried to get to rome here on highway 30 and i wound up i wound up in texarkana i never got to rome he ended up in italy texas well even like although you know i'm agreeing completely, but if I could even kind of come and say, yeah, I'll pass the lead to God in the sense that eventually everybody from every religion is going to stand before God at judgment day. And I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm actually saying, so yeah, the question at that point is, is did you have the right ideas about God? I'm like, well, why does that matter? I'm like, well, if God is a personal God, if he's a personal being, here's what I know about personal beings, including the three of us at the table, including my wife, I've used this analogy before. We want to be known and loved for who we really are. My wife, if I were to say, and I've done this before, I'm not going to do the picture like I did before, but if I were to say, man, I love my wife, Frank, you've never met her, but let me just describe her to you. I described some of the superficial, but still things I loved is she's six feet tall. She's beautiful, blonde hair, blue eyes, kind of like Norwegian descent. Like if my wife was listening to right now, she'd be getting really ticked because my wife is like five foot three. She is so beautiful, but she has got brown hair, brown eyes, got a cute little Southern twang. She'd get mad because even though I would still be calling her Amy, I'm describing someone who is not my wife. My wife wants to be known and loved for who she is. I'm describing someone who is not my wife. I'm describing someone who wants to be known and loved for who she really is. If God is personal, he wants to be known, loved, and worshiped for who he really is, not for who we want him to be. And the same way that my wife would get ticked at me, God, frankly, yeah, he gets mad. He is angered by the fact that we worship him not as who he is, but who we want him to be. Another thing, just to kind of expose the, I think some of the silliness of this from a different angle. I was reminded every time, like basically this is kind of talking about relativism is you're like, oh yeah, I just believe whatever you want. It's all ultimately kind of the same thing. That always sounds good until people actually, to your point, disagree on something. And so we'll get off of religion for a second. Can we put a picture up of the dress? So a little over a decade ago, there was a massive, it may have been the first example of like rage baiting online, Carlos, where people were debating fiercely online over what the color of this dress was. What do you guys see right now? Frank? I see the color of the dress. Kind of brown and blue. Okay. Brown and blue. It's a blue, black and blue. Yeah. That's what you see. See right now I'm seeing white and gold. And this is the normal thing that happened is all these different colors. And what was interesting is no one was saying, well, you know what? You see whatever you want to see. I'll see what I want to see. People were getting enraged that they weren't seeing the right color, which was the way that they happened to see it. And so actually what happened was some research was done because, you know, the thing about this, we can actually figure out what color this dress is. By the way, you're wrong, Paul. You're seeing something that's just not true. Exactly. So all of a sudden we're no longer relativists. All of a sudden our way is the right way. Well, you know- By the way, half of the people watching this right now will be like, what? I know. People are getting angry right now, the fact that I see it white and gold. Well, here's what's interesting is we can actually find out the color of the dress. You know how? We go back and we ask the maker and designer of that dress and the actual dress is black and blue. And so the idea is, is there is an objective, one true, in this case, two true colors that it is, but there is an objective colors that make up this dress. And anyone who says that's wise, even if you see it differently, it doesn't matter. You're seeing it wrong. So I'd say, hey, and the you don't get to make God whoever you want him to be. He is who he is. And it's upon us as humans to worship and love him as he is. You know what I think might be motivating the Pope's statement, just to be fair here, is that I really think it's a statement about morality. And the reason I'm saying that is because he's trying to say that God wants all to be saved and God does. And those world religions don't believe in Jesus. So somehow he's going to reach, Jesus is going to reach all of those people through God. And he's going to reach all of those people through God. And he's going to reach all of those people through those religions. I mean, it may be motivated by what he thinks is a good end. However, what he's leaving out is the fact that God is perfectly just and perfectly loving. And according to his revelation, he's not going to force anybody into heaven against their will. So if somebody doesn't want to be with God in the afterlife, they will not be. And the way to get to the afterlife is through Jesus. It's impossible for God to be unjust in the afterlife. And it seems like the Pope may be motivated by saying it would be unjust for those people if they were to go to hell. No, it wouldn't if indeed they didn't really want to go to heaven and be with Jesus. Okay. And justice is a good thing. There's only two things you can get in the afterlife. You can get justice, you can get grace. Does anybody really want justice from an infinitely just being? I don't. I'd be toast, right? I've been unjust. I've been unjust. I've been unjust in the last 10 minutes. Okay. So I think it's motivated by a moral issue rather than a strictly, say, theological reading of the Bible. He's not agreeing with, he's not even agreeing with the Catholic Church. No. And in fact, the Catholic Church has disagreed with itself. In 1302, they said the only way you can be saved is through the Catholic Church. In Vatican II, they said, no, there's separated brethren who can be saved. Okay. Even good Muslims, good atheists, what he's trying to say. So it's a contradiction from this. It's a contradiction with the scriptures. It's also a contradiction over the original teaching of the Catholic Church. Okay. So now that we have established that all religions are not teaching the same thing, which I think is very clear, and we're about to elaborate on this, what we're going to do, we're going to go through each one of the major religions one by one. And then here's what we're going to do. We're going to show a visual representation that we got from ChatGPT. And so this is what we got from Artificial Intelligence. We're just going to show a visual representation that we got from gonna see what you didn't draw these i did not draw okay that's good no no for sure uh i'm not that good and then uh we're gonna talk about the founder what do they believe what's wrong with the world how do you fix it according to this religion who is jesus for this religion and then we're gonna do it like a quick rapid fire frequently asked questions for each one of them and before we jump in just a few caveats one in terms of being why we're doing this is to show that there are differences um and to highlight these maybe to in a few places say hey here's where we believe that these are wrong in a different place we're not saying that none of them has any truth by the way i think you've said this before there's difference they contain some truths that we would agree on but they are not capital t truth right yeah in fact let's let's distinguish between a system of truth and a system of error yeah okay um from if if christianity is true if it's true just assume for the sake of argument on this podcast we do we think it is true i've written a book on it okay let's let's assume it's true if christianity is true then all non-christianities are false but it doesn't mean that every non-christianity yeah is actually teaching everything wrong yes like for example if christianity is true islam is true there is a god islam is true you ought to pray islam is true you ought to get 2.5 percent of your income to the poor just like christians believe that's really i know we all pause we're like we're like we're like we're like you ought to give yeah that's what they believe that's what they believe two percent okay christians give actually yeah no i mean there's a system of truth but i might have some errors in my understanding of it christianity is true but i might have some errors in understanding there may be a worldview like say islam out there this system of error that has some truth there's some true things in islam but where they disagree with the christian worldview they by the law of non-contradiction they have to be wrong exactly and then with that actually i'm glad that you brought this up in terms of they have truths that one of the other big reasons we wanted to do this was to say hey i think there could be some points of good connection that ultimately one of the reasons why we're doing this is we want to help christians be able to know what other people from other faiths believe and how to share the gospel with them we're going to hit some of that at the end but one thing that helps is if you know some basic framework from which you can then do that the apostle paul does this then carlos will let you go and get us going the apostle paul does this in act 17 he's with the athenians with pagan polytheists and yet he knew enough of the stuff that he was able to make connections with and he was able to make connections with them and he was able to make connections with them in order to preach the gospel to them so the next hour the next 60 minutes which is about to officially start now the clock is going to start now that we're actually diving into these is we want to highlight these so that you can be more informed but not just that you know more but that you can articulate your faith better well hey before we get back to the episode i want to tell you about something coming up at lake point that we're really excited about this summer we're hosting at the movies a four-week sermon series where we'll use movie clips and stories to illustrate powerful biblical truths it's one of the most fun and creative experiences we do all year here at lake point and it's designed for the entire family and so every weekend at our physical locations we'll feature unique movie themed experiences fun characters in the lobby for both kids and adults incredible worship and practical teaching from the word of god and of course popcorn and drinks for everyone so whether you are here and maybe you're a long time church goer someone who's been away from church for a while or maybe you're looking for an easy way to invite a friend neighbor or co-worker to church this right here is the perfect series for you at the movies is an in-person only event and begins july 11 and 12 and continues through august 1 and 2. and so if you're in the dallas area we'd love for you to join us at one of our campuses you can find service times locations and more information by texting the word atm to two zero four one one now let's get back to the conversation are you going to take christianity yeah well we all i got i got the photo so training the photo here's the chat gpt visual representation of of what uh chad gpt thinks is uh christianity or at least there you go an expression of it so this right here according to chad gpt is the three branches of christianity if you are not watching uh you can video you need to switch to that real fast you can come to youtuber into spotify so on the let me explain what's going on here because this is i'm interpreting what chad gpt has given us on the left is protestantism he's got uh pastor josh jesus changed my life he's got atomic habits uh oh look there's uh i don't have enough faith to do anything reading your book reading your right under winning okay there you go uh and he's got his mug it says what does it say but first prayer a little heart okay great so then And these are the three main branches of Christianity. You've got Protestantism, Catholicism, and this is what Pastor Josh would look like as Father Josh. Real quick, I just have to say this. It looks like he could be Father Mike's brother in that picture. It does. I thought it was when I glanced at it. Just going to say that. He kind of looks like him. And then on the third, on the right, he's Pastor Josh if he was an Orthodox Christian. Which I think I can speak for all of us. Pastor Josh, we want you to stay on Team Protestant. But if you can get that beard, that would just take it to a whole nother level. We need to ask him if he can get that beard. We need to ask him. So, okay, let's just go right now. Let's go founder. What do they believe? What's wrong with the world? How do you fix it? You start us off, Carl. Okay, well, founder. I'm going to go first. Founder, Jesus Christ. Paul, go ahead. Well, you got the easy one. Wow. Thanks for volunteering yourself for like, oh, yeah, Jesus Christ. First century. So what's the next category that we're hitting? Founder, what do you believe? Yeah. Obviously, for each of these, we can't say everything. No, of course not. We'll be here forever. So we're going to highlight the big thing. So what a Christian believe is that there is one God who eternally and distinctly exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus is God incarnate, meaning God in the flesh who died and who rose again in order to save sinners. We'll get into this in a second about what we believe what's wrong with the world. And then we are people who believe that salvation is by grace through faith. Anything you guys would add to that? Obviously, there's so much more to what we believe, but it's like, if you're going to be a Christian, you have to believe, we would say, in the Trinity, the idea of one God who'd eternally exist as three distinct persons, each of whom has always existed. So the Son didn't come into existence at some point. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always existed. Jesus is God incarnate. He came in the flesh to die and rise again for sinners, and we're saved by grace through faith. What else would y'all add? I would add short three-sentence summary of Christianity. God created it. We broke it. Jesus fixed it. Right. Okay, Jesus fixed what? Evil, sin that we brought into the world. So our problem is sin, and Jesus is the answer to sin and evil. In fact, Christianity is the answer to the problem of evil. As we get into these other religions, we'll see they're trying to deal with the problem of evil as well. Christianity is the answer to the problem of evil. If no one had ever sinned, there'd be no reason for Jesus to add humanity to his deity and come to earth and live the perfect life in our place so he could take our punishment upon himself. And then we could trust in him and not only be forgiven, but given his righteousness. That's good. If we were not sinners, we wouldn't need that sacrifice, but we all are. So sin is our ultimate problem, and Jesus is our ultimate solution. That's good. And it's all by grace. This is where Christianity is going to differ, as we'll see as we go through this, from every other world religion. Christianity is all about grace. You don't achieve salvation in Christianity. You receive salvation. It's free. It's a gift. It's given to you. In Christianity, God works his way to us, and he pays the price for us. It's simply received. It's not achieved. A word that we use often to summarize what you just said that you'll find in the Bible is the idea of the gospel. The word in the original language literally means the idea of an announcement or of good news. And I think it was J.I. Packer who once put it in the shortest, best way I remember, is the gospel is how God saves sinners. How God saves sinners. And it's these things that actually happen. And so even to summarize what you did is Jesus came and he lived the perfect life none of us could live. He died the death that all of us deserve to die, but then he was raised to life so that we could live. It's each of those things. And so I think to your point, so much of the other religions that we're going to cover is ultimately about what we have to do. And yet God is the one who fixed his own problem by doing what we could not do and by taking the punishment that we received and that we deserve. And so whereas the other religions are very much about, you need to do this, the message of Christianity is about, this is what God did for us. And then you need to receive that. Most of the religions are do this, do this, do this, Christianity is done, done, done. And because it's done and what he's done for us out of gratitude, then we will do good works to serve people and serve God and bring people into the kingdom. Yep. We'll circle back to that. Go ahead. You may have something to add. I was going to highlight something to help distinguish us from groups that may claim to be Christian, but are not. But I'll let you add anything else you got. Well, so everything you guys just say, basically we're laying the foundation. We'll circle back to some of these themes as well. We're going to be contrasting some of these other religions with what we're just describing right now with Christianity. Let me just real quick ask you this, and then I'm going to ask you about some of the people that say they're Christians, but they're not. Why so many, I know we did a whole video on this, but quickly, why so many denominations? I think the same answer, as we mentioned, same different religions. And the fact is, is the fact there are a lot of people out there who are not open to the truth. It's not about receiving the truth, or I should say perceiving. They can perceive it, but they don't want to receive it. In fact, Jesus spoke about this very forcefully, where he said, you're nullifying the word of God on account of your traditions. We have so many traditions, even in the Protestant church has traditions that really aren't biblical. And so they break into these different denominations based on traditions rather than the scriptures. Although I will say this, and you guys did a brilliant job of this when you did, we'll put, we'll put the whole show in the show notes, right? On denominations. But Paul does talk about disputable matters, right? Disputable matters in the church. In other words, secondary and tertiary issues, there's room for different viewpoints. Follow your conscience, which allows these different denominations to actually be a blessing to people because we'll agree on the essentials, but the secondary and tertiary issues where I may feel strongly about, and you don't. I'll go to one church, you'll go to another, but we'll still be brothers in Christ. I've also noticed this, however, that this question comes usually from two camps, usually from the Roman Catholic camp, which they won't admit it, but there are denominations within the Roman Catholic church that are called orders, right? You've got Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, et cetera, right? Okay. And the interesting thing, as you pointed out, I think on the podcast about this, Paul, that the beliefs of the Catholics in the pews. All right. are so far away from the official Roman Catholic doctrine, so while they don't go to different churches, they could. Yeah. Aren't you glad we have a pope to keep us unified, believing all the same things? Right, but they're not believing all the same things. They don't believe all the same things, yeah. So that's the interesting thing. So it comes from Roman Catholics. Yeah, I mean, it's still a good question. The second place it comes from is normally atheistic liberals who claim to be champions of diversity, to which I say, what's the problem with a little bit of diversity? That's right. You don't want diversity. Diversity, there's too much diversity in Christianity for you, too much flexibility. You know, it seems to be a bit of a contradiction here. Yes, there you go. God can adapt into all of these different scenarios and still hold on to the essentials, but we can have these differences and worship slightly differently. And I'll say this, I know we got to hit some other questions, but we got to do it in 60 minutes or under. I know that's our goal, so I got to be careful, Carlos. I'm here to push you. You're here to push me. That's fine. I'll keep this fast. But oftentimes what people will appeal to, and probably more from the Catholic side, or even sometimes well-meaning people in our churches, well, hey, Jesus, pray that we all may be one. And the assumption there is for us to be one and to be unified, we all have to be within the same organization, with the same leader. I would challenge that because if you go, I believe, to Ephesians, where Paul talks about one Lord, one faith, one baptism, what makes us one is not that we're all under the same quote-unquote denomination. The unity that we still all have as brothers and sisters of Christ across denominations are, hey, do we all have one Lord, meaning Jesus Christ? One faith, I would say. These are the primary things. On that podcast, which you can go and listen to, we get way more in-depth. There's primary issues, first-order issues, where if we disagree, even if we use the same words, we have a different faith. There's second-order issues that are things that if we disagree, it's going to be hard for us to be in the same church. If you want to do infant baptism and I don't, that's going to be really hard for us to do church at the same place or in the same denomination. Those are the things that people usually divide over. But it doesn't mean that I'm still not a part of the same faith as you. We still have the same Lord. We still have the same faith in the sense of the primary issues and the same, then in one baptism, the idea of, hey, all people who are believers in Jesus, we are all part of the family of God. And so that's just one thing I would just explain to people is in terms of the idea of, oh, we're all supposed to be one. One does not have to mean we're all part of the same denomination. There's things that bind us together no matter what denomination you're in. On that note, I'll give you 60 seconds. What about Mormonism? Yeah. So this Mormonism, and I'll also include Jehovah's Witnesses, these people would claim to be Christians, but they're simply not. They're simply not. A few things of why. One would be a distinguishing mark of Christianity since the earliest days until now has been belief in the Trinity. Both of these groups reject that. And here's maybe, I know earlier you asked a question, a kind of, sometimes it's good to ask questions when people are pressing you, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got a question. So I wrote this one down to make sure I got it right. So if I was talking to a Mormon and said, oh, you got to be honest, if I were to say if a Muslim in Norway said that I still believe in Allah, that Muhammad was his prophet, I still practice the five pillars of Islam. Allah has given me new revelation that he is an actually a compilation of multiple gods who all happen to agree with each other. And that's why he's one. Muhammad was a prophet, but he's not the final prophet. There's actually an ongoing line of prophets of whom I'm the next. Would Muslims consider that person a Muslim? Absolutely not. Basically what I'm doing right there is to say, hey, if you say that you are one thing, but you reject everything that is the hallmark and distinctive thing of that thing, even if you claim to be it, you're not it. Yes. Does that make sense? Yes. And I think there's a thing. Or there's a way to ask people questions rather than even make statements on this. Like if a Mormon. and said, well, I'm a Christian, I would ask, then why are you at my door trying to convince me to join your church if I'm already going to church? We're all Christians here. Okay, number one. Number two, if you're a Christian, why are you saying the Bible's corrupted? And number three, if you're a Christian, why are you adding to the Bible? And if you're a Christian, why are you saying God the Father has a body, a physical body, and there are many gods? That's not a Christian doctrine. Christianity is monotheistic. It's not polytheistic. So I would ask those questions. Here's an interesting way of looking at something like Mormonism or some of these other what we call cult groups that started maybe with Christian language and some Christian theology but have diverted. They do four things that are associated with the four functions of math. They add to the Bible, so now you got the Book of Mormon, right, and Pearl of Great Price, those things. They subtract from Jesus. So Jesus is not the second person in the eternal trinity, right? And he's the spirit brother of Lucifer. They multiply requirements for salvation. Oh, now you got, yeah, you got grace, but it's only as far as grace can go. Then you got to do all these good works, and there's three different levels of heaven. By the way, that's not in the Bible either, right? And by the way, we're not on the first level with them as Christians. So we're all Christians, but they get to be with Jesus and we don't. That's right. And the fourth, the divide function is they divide the loyalties of the believer. Now your loyalty is to the church of the Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And for you to get to the ultimate heaven, you got to be in that church going through their system in order to get there. Because you were saying at lunch that Mormons don't believe that Christians are going to be with Jesus, just Mormons will be, right? Yep. Jesus is in the ultimate level of heaven, only faithful. To your point, you have to adhere to all the things that you have to do to be there. And then the rest of us Christians, even though apparently we're all Christians, we don't get to be with Jesus forever, only they do. So that's another, yeah, keep going. Right. But I will say I love Mormons because they're such great citizens and great people. Yeah. I just think asking some of those questions can point out the distinctions. I mean, they come along 1800 years after the Bible's created, the New Testament is, saying now suddenly what you've learned so far is wrong. We're going to tell you where it's wrong and we're going to add to it. Yeah. Paul said in Galatians 1, even angel comes to you and tells you another gospel, don't believe it. Both Mormonism and Islam have the same source in the Bible. Yeah. And I think that's a very good point. I think that's a very good point. Okay. So we got Christianity, check. We're going to keep moving here. Judaism, we have a visual here to help us out. This is from ChatGPT. This is what it seems to be a Jewish scholar, likely a rabbi. He's like in a study room. He's got the Torah there, the Talmud, the Mishnah, and then some other books as well. Star of David, and then there's a shofar. Yeah. Basically, this is. Thank you, ChatGPT. All the things. Yeah. All right. Let's go here. Founder, what do they believe? How do you fix it? I'm going to take the easy one because since you did the last one. Okay, great. Carlos's contribution to the last one was Jesus. Well, I'm moving the conversation forward. Go ahead. I'm messing with you. All right. So the founder, I mean, it is God is ultimately the founder, but God through Abraham. God through Abraham sometime between 2100 and 1800 BC. Frank, I'll let you give more of an overview in terms of what they believe, their views of what's wrong with them. Well, here's one of the problems. And one of the problems is Old Testament Judaism is impossible to actually practice today because there is no temple. You can't bring a lamb to the temple. And so since the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, Judaism has migrated toward more synagogue-related Judaism, obviously, non-temple-sacrificed Judaism, and more toward the Talmud than the Old Testament. And so there are different, and Paul, you're more skilled on this than I am. There are different sort of denominations of Judaism. I can give a quick rundown and then let you keep going is, yeah, I mean, well, and I think we've said this on a podcast one time where, you know, Pharisees get a really bad rap for very good reasons, but actually it was Pharisees who helped Judaism survive after the destruction of the temple. Because to your point, when you have no temple to make sacrifices, all of a sudden it became very synagogue-centered, which guess what? That was the Pharisees' home turf. And so then now today you have really a few main groups. You have Orthodox Jews, including within that, like ultra-Orthodox and then kind of semi-Orthodox. They really are trying to keep as much of the Old Testament as they can. So very big on ritual purity of food, a lot of things that we'd find in the book of Leviticus. But to your point, they can't sacrifice animals. They can't do any of that in associated with feast or in order to cover their sins. Then you have conservative Jews who aren't going to be as strict on all of the very minuscule purity laws, but they are going to try to keep kosher food. They are obviously going to keep the Sabbath and stuff like that. Then you have Reformed Jews who they may keep the Sabbath nominally, but just not going to have as many requirements. So you can kind of see basically you've got a, you kind of got Orthodox really trying to keep as much as they can. And then the more you go further away, they're going to get a little bit more loose with what they have to keep. And then you have many, and this way I have to remember, many secular Jews who they're barely practicing at all. Some are atheists. Yeah, some are atheists. For them, Jewish is more the idea of that's their ethnicity than it necessarily is their religious practice. That enough? Yeah, I think so. Carlos, what do you think is, I know you guys get emails, sometimes I get emails, there are people out there saying, well, this is a demonic religion, Judaism. How would you respond to that? Yeah, we would say that it is not, that's not how we would put it. We would say that Christianity comes from Judaism. The gospel and the cross and what happened to Jesus on the cross does not make sense if you remove the Old Testament. And so Jesus even came and he said that he came to fulfill the word of God. Not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. And so we would say that Judaism was fulfilled in Christ. And that's why, again, everything in the Old Testament points to Jesus. We would not label it as a demonic religion. We would say it all points to Jesus, which is very different. Yeah. In other words, there's a difference between false and fulfilled. Yes. And so if something has been fulfilled, but then you are not taking part in the fulfillment of it, then you in a sense have an incompletion. A complete religion. So it's not a false religion or demonic religion. It's an incomplete one because they haven't accepted the Messiah. Is that kind of you? Yeah, that's the direction I was going in because I think it's horrid that we get Jew hatred coming even out of Christian camps still. I mean, obviously we're getting them from Muslims. We're getting Jew hatred from secular people. We're getting Jew hatred even from Christians. And I'm going, there's got to be a demonic element to this. Why is this group of people, they only number 15 in the world? They have one small piece of land over there. There's like 54 Muslim or 57 Muslim countries in the world that have hundreds of times the size of land. And for some reason, that little Jewish state has to go, according to these folks. These people who are claiming. Let me go real quick through these. Do Jews need Jesus to be saved? Everybody needs Jesus to be saved, of course. Yes. They're chosen, but they're not favored. They're. God used the Jews to bring forth the Messiah, but God is not going to force the Jews into heaven against their will any more than anyone else. That Jesus is the sacrifice. Without the sacrifice, you've got to pay for your own sins. Yeah. Okay. This one's obviously a bigger question, and we actually have addressed this in other episodes as well. We can also drop that in the show notes. Arthur, help me out with that. Are modern Jews still God's chosen people? I would say yes, Jews are still God's chosen people. And for people who say that Jews in Israel now are not in any way connected to Old Testament Jews, then why has there been persecution about Jews or on Jews for the two millennia they've been outside of the land? They had to be identified in order to be persecuted. So yeah, they're the same people. Yeah. I think, and again, we go into it deeper in the episode, but just to do a brief recap of something we said there, 1 million percent they are, but we do have to define what we don't mean and what we do mean by that. We don't mean, and you already hit this, that Jewish people are automatically saved. No, they have to believe in Jesus just like anyone else, including you and me and Carlos have to believe in Jesus in order to be saved. We don't mean that Judaism, the practice of Judaism is a legitimate substitute for faith in Jesus Christ. No, you can be sincere and you have to believe in God. And we also don't mean that we have to support everything the modern state of Israel does. What we mean by God's chosen people is that God chose Israel to bring the Messiah into the world. So Jesus Christ came up out of Israel. And we also believe that God still has promises for Israel that remain to be fulfilled. Now there's disagreement in Christian circles that which promises are going to be fulfilled, but here's what pretty much anyone who has to be faithful to scripture has to admit that in Romans 9 through 11, we see the idea that in the future, there is going to be a mass conversion of Jews to Jesus. And that is in part how those promises are going to be fulfilled. So God has not given up on his people. Literally, it says that in the book of Romans. He has not rejected them. He has got a plan for them in the future. And that is a huge part of which is going to be them coming to faith. Let me say maybe one or two things that we maybe didn't hit just to be clear on. And then I think we can go on, I think maybe to Islam is Jewish people would also very much say, Hey, what's wrong with the world is human sin. And they would also say covenant unfaithfulness. So human sin is permeated in the world, but then Israel has been called to play a as part of how they would view that and then if big thing in terms of how they view Jesus, again, there's so much distinction between different groups and different people. We're given broad swaths here. They would view Jesus as a good teacher, but that he was not the Messiah. He was not the divine son of God. And so faithful practicing Jews are still looking for a future Messiah that will come. You do, if you've ever heard of, if people are listening to this, well, hey, I've heard of this group called Messianic Jews. Typically what that is referring to is people who are Jewish by ethnicity, but they believe that Jesus was the son of God. In other words, they are Christians. Yeah. And the idea of a crucified Messiah has been so radical. That is not what Jewish people have been expecting for this sent one from God, anointed one from God to ultimately end up being crucified in such a brutal, humiliating way. That's just, again, the New Testament talks about how that idea would be so, so radical that it'd be difficult for Jewish people to believe it. That's one reason we know it's not an individual. It's a self-invented story. Nobody's going to put their Messiah on a cross like a crucified criminal. That's right. Right? You know, I mean, it's, anyone who's hung on a cross, according to Deuteronomy 21, is under God's curse. Yep, there you go. And Jesus was under God's curse, the curse of sin we all put him under. That's right. No one would invent this Messiah. This is not made up. And Jews wouldn't have said, yeah, this is our Messiah. We saw him rise from the dead, unless it really happened. And for faithful Jews to all of a sudden basically commit and worship Jesus and Christianity exploding from Jesus. Judaism, as we were talking about, that is unheard of. Not going to happen unless he really rose from the dead. Unless he really rose from the dead. To highlight something, then I think Islam, this is going to be a lot of your home turf, Frank, but you're going to get to on a lot of this. Did you say Islam? Islam, yeah, I think is what we're hitting next. Before we get there, just to highlight something, because this will, I think, distinguish through some of the other major religions we'll get to here on the back half of this segment, which is Christianity and Judaism are founded in history. And so in other words, it's not simply a collection of abstract ideas about God or the universe or morality. Right. Instead, it's the belief that the real God who really created the universe has really acted in human history and then who we are responding to as he acts in human history. And so Jewish people believe that, obviously, through the Old Testament. But then Christians, to your point, come around and said, hey, there's this guy named Jesus who claimed he was the Messiah and he said, you're going to kill me on the third day I'm going to rise. And then he did it. Okay. So then they're reacting to something that actually happened. Or we have to say it either did or it did not happen. If it did happen, everything changed. If it didn't happen, okay, move on with your life. The Apostle Paul himself says this in 1 Corinthians 15. If Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. So I do think that's an important thing to say with both Judaism and Christianity is these are rooted in events in history that either happened or they didn't. If they didn't happen, well, go do whatever you want to do then. So, all right. Keep moving quickly. We got another visual. So this is we did Christianity check. We did Judaism check. Now Islam is next. This is a visual over here of Islam. According to ChatGPT, this is a photo. This is a photo representing a Sunni Islam imam. They got the five pillars up there. Yeah, they got the five pillars. Five pillars on the left. I see that. He's wearing a traditional tunic. He's got the Quran, other collections of teachings for Islam called the Hadith. Yep. He's got these green things are prayer beads. Look, that's a Jeremiah 2911 mug right there. That's what it says. Oh, the plans I have for you. Plans to give you hope in the future. No, it's not. Oh, okay. I was going to say, wait, wait. Either he's reading Arabic or I don't know. I was about to be like, man, that's a flex. I didn't know you read Arabic. I was like, man. If I'm not mistaken, that white mug says, praise be to God. I'm totally butchering this. I apologize. And so that would be a visual representation. Let's go through real quick. Who is Jesus for this religion? Frank, I'll let you cook on this one. Okay. Muhammad, born 570 AD, allegedly got a revelation in 610 AD. He tried to say there's one God. And a lot of people didn't like that because at the time, they were worshiping many gods, polytheism. So they threw him out of Mecca in 622. And he went on up to Medina. And in 630, between 622 and 630, he was raiding caravans that came on their way to Mecca. And he would divide the booty up with his followers. He eventually took Mecca by force, although not many resisted him in 630 AD. And then he died in 632. And according to. According to Muslim. It's called the Standard Islamic Narrative. The Quran, he didn't write it, Muhammad. It was dictated to him. He said it. Other people wrote it down. It was compiled after he died in about 650 by the third Caliph Uthman. This is the Standard Islamic Narrative. Now, my friend, Dr. J. Smith, who's been working evangelizing Muslims for years, thinks that there's a lot of historical holes in the Standard Islamic Narrative. But let's say for the sake of argument, it's true. Okay. He's just saying there's one God. This turns out, actually, to be a Christian heresy. It's basically Arianism. And you'd be an expert on commenting on that. And John of Damascus, who wrote exactly 100 years after Muhammad, in 732, basically says Islam is Arianism. It's basically the God for the Arabs. They wanted to have a God, and this God would be the God of the Arabs. And it's. Meaning, Paul? Oh, the idea that Jesus is not the eternal Son of God, that he is not God himself, but is a creation just like us. So if you kind of think of it like this, if you can imagine a whiteboard, on the one side is the Creator, and on the other side is everything else that is created, Jesus would be on the side with us, that he is a creation just like we are. Now, he might be a higher creation in that sense. He is the Son of God. That's what they would say, as the New Testament says. But that doesn't mean that he is literally divine. Yeah. And there are two. There are two basic sects of Islam now. There are more than two, but the two major are Sunni and Shia. The Sunni, about 80%. They think that Muhammad's successor should have been elected, where the Shiite, more, say, Iran would be Shiite or Shia. They think that Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali, should have been followed. And so Muslims have been fighting Muslims over that to the death. In fact, Muslims kill more Muslims than non-Muslims, typically. There's also, as we know, this concept of jihad. Now, not officially in the. We had it up there a minute ago, but the five pillars of Islam. One is there is no God, there is no God but God, or Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger. That's the first. The second is five times of prayer a day. The third is obligatory almsgiving or charity for the poor and needy, 2%, just like Christians believe. Yeah, interesting. And the fourth is fasting during Ramadan. And the fifth is. If you can do it, at some point in your life, you got to go to Mecca and do the Hajj. So those are the five pillars of Islam. They think there is a paradise and hell in the afterlife. And you don't know if you're going to make it. First of all, non-Christians are not going to make it. Islam is just as exclusive as Christianity in that regard. You're going to. But we all believe the same thing. We're going to burn in hellfire. No, no, no, apparently not. And. Yeah, there's a. In the Quran, there's literally a verse that says that if you. Something along the lines. Help me out here, Frank. Go ahead. Yeah, chapter five. It just says non-believers are going to burn in hellfire. Yeah, there you go. So it's pretty clear. Yeah. And the only way you can be sure, because Allah is arbitrary. You may think your good deeds outweigh your bad, but if Allah says no, you're not going to make it. The only way you can be sure that you're going to make it into the afterlife, the paradise, and get the 72 virgins and all that, is if you die as a martyr in jihad. Sounds like quite a. That's in the Hadith. Yeah, that sounds like quite an incentive. That's quite an incentive, then, to do martyrhood. Yes. So let me ask you this. We already kind of touched on this, so we're going to probably do it quick. Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God, since Allah is just. The word of Allah just means God, right? What would you say? Any Christian and Muslim scholar, if they're honest, is going to answer no, because, first of all, Allah is not triune in Islam, whereas in Christianity, Yahweh is triune. So, in fact, they think one of the greatest sins is shirk, that's to put partners with God. Now, they actually do that unknowingly. They say the Quran is eternal, just like Allah, so they do put partners with God. It's been put this way. In Christianity, God becomes a man. In Islam, God becomes a book, right? And to be very stark about it, in Christianity, God's son dies for you. In Islam, your son dies for God. Explain that. Well, in Christianity, God sends his son to take your punishment upon himself, but in Islam, you're urged to have your son die for Allah in jihad. Which, see, we said earlier, is the only surefire way. Only surefire way. It's the only surefire way to do it. To avoid surefire. Exactly. And so, I think even. I think, you know, here's maybe what. Hey, can I say one other thing? No, no, keep going, keep going, yeah. People are going to get all mad for me for saying this. If I've said anything wrong, correct me, but what I'm telling you is the truth as I understand it, okay? And I've done a lot of research into Islam. Yeah. So, it doesn't mean. Do all Muslims believe this? No. Just like we might say not all Christians believe basic Christian doctrine, but here's the facts. Here's a question that a lot of people ask about this conversation. Is Islam a religion of peace? And is terrorism rooted in it or a distortion of Islam? Why don't you take that one? I will definitely let you guys take that one. I did not come ready for this one. Carlos, I see a theme of your. Honestly, I would have loved to take it if I was ready for it, but in this case, I know Paul is more ready than me, so. No, you're good. Okay, so a few things here. Number one, we need to. to distinguish between Islam and Muslims. Too often when we're having this conversation, we conflate the two. Now, they're obviously very closely related. Islam, meaning the organization of their beliefs and practices found in the Quran. Muslims who may not actually apply all those things. So there are, to your point, so many, if not the majority of Muslims are very peaceful people. And yet, let me just read some things from the Quran. Fight those who do not believe in Allah. This is from Surah 929. Among the people of the book, which would be the Bible, until they pay the jizah, which is basically this fee, with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. So that's basically saying oppress them and if they fight against them until they're actually willing to pay us a fee. It gets worse, Surah 839. Fight them until there is no more and religion is holy for Allah. Again, violent. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. That's Surah 812. Now, Muslims may say, well, hey, these are for verses around battles of the early history of Islam. And I'm like, well, hey, but what changed? Because we were talking about earlier, like there's the Old Testament that we saw, obviously God does things that seemed violent, but that was very contextual. But in the New Testament, we see a totally different way that God now is at work. Hey, what is that is that has changed for you? So in other words, when we look at the Quran, we see that the way that Islam has historically spread has been through coercive violence and either repent or you have to pay a fine or even worse kind of a thing. And so I would say, hey, you have to eventually begin asking yourself, and Frank, I feel like you can come in and do a better job than I've done on this one, is something, a bug in your mind, bug in the system, or is it a feature of the system? Is it something, because even within Christianity, there have been people who have been violent. We would say, hey, but if you actually look at the teachings of the New Testament, you would say they're not in line with them. Whereas I'd say, hey, if you look at the actions of violent Muslims, you would say, hey, it seems like it fits with what you would find in the Quran. Anything that you would like differ, that's like you could knock this one out. Well, as you'd say, not every Muslim would believe in this. Just like Christians claiming to be Christians might not agree with every doctrine in Christianity. So thankfully there are moderates and liberals, liberals in Islam, because they will not take the Quran literally. But the passages that you quoted from are the later surahs. Look, the Quran is divided into 114 surahs from largest to smallest, except for the first is not the biggest. What does that mean, Frank? It's not a chronological book. It's put together in size of surahs or chapters. Chapters, okay. And there are more peaceful surahs that have been abrogated by later surahs, which appear to be the more violent ones. Like surah nine is a late surah that Muhammad was now preaching violence. And so that violence is what his followers have followed on. And there's 1400 years of history for this. This is not the so-called Islamophobia, which is a bogus term anyway, because Islam is not a race, it's an ideology. And there are people from every different ethnic or religion, or racial group in Islam. It's an ideology that isn't purely religious. It's also a political ideology, a geopolitical ideology that wants to submit the world to Sharia law. And that is what 1400 years of history shows us. And it is what they will tell us too. In fact, I just had Martin Sedra on my show, who is a former Muslim, not a former Muslim, but a Coptic Christian from, from Egypt who had to flee Egypt because his family was being persecuted by Muslims because they were Christians. He's in Australia now. And he says that they have a plan to obviously take over Europe and eventually the United States in a political way. And so it's not unwise to be against an ideology that wants to take away your freedom of religion, your freedom of speech, your freedom of press, your freedom of assembly, your freedom of association. But tragically, that's what Islam has done for 1400 years. And by the way, we're giving you an overview. This is, this book right here, The Compact Guide to World Religions, right here. It's 30 years old, but it's still a great book put together by Dean Halverson. Yeah. And there are many scholars in this book. So if you want an overview of these world religions, it's right here. And we got to move on, I think, to Hinduism next, but mainly just hitting a couple of things within this. You got to see, at least originally. Hey, let me say one thing. We're transitioning now from theism. Here, here, here's a way to, to, to, conceptualize three great religious viewpoints. One is theism, that's God made all. The next is pantheism, God is all. Yes. And the third is atheism, no God at all. That's great. All right. So we just did three of the major theisms. Now we're moving to a pantheistic worldview or religion called Hinduism. So take it away. Oh yeah, no, actually, real quick though, is on Islam, because I know we gave a ton of details for that, but it's fitting because it's one of the major pressing issues of our time. If you could kind of sum up so much of what we said, I'd say, Hey, early Islam. And it would still say is today, it was a correction. I mean, they say they saw polytheism, which is not true. There is one God and that one God does not have a son. So it was correcting polytheism around them. And it was correcting Christian. At least that's what they thought it was. And for them, the problem is people fail to submit to Allah. So then the answer to that is for people to submit the way they do that is by following the Quran. And by the five practices you laid out, I just, I feel like we'd given a lot of people, a lot of things. I wanted to bring it all. All together and kind of just lay that out real quick. - Can I mention one thing about how to reach Muslims on this? - Yeah, that'd be great. - Okay, just one. There's many different directions you can go. It's something called the Islamic dilemma. - We actually, we have a version of it. I think you may phrase it differently, but it's basically, why don't you walk people through this? It's actually a really good thing. - Yeah, the Islamic dilemma, here it is. The Quran affirms the Bible is the word of God. And I usually quote Surah 5:46-7 on this. And the problem is, is that the Bible contradicts the Islam and the Islamic view of Jesus across just two chapters. In Surah 5, it says, "O ye people of the book, "you have no ground to stand on "unless you stand on the law and the gospels." In other words, the people of the book are the Christians and the Jews when Muhammad is getting the supposed revelation in the 600s AD. He's saying, "Believe your book, it comes from Allah." But in the chapter before that, Surah 4:157, it says, "Jesus never died, so he couldn't have resurrected "from the dead, he was taken straight to heaven." So on one hand, in Surah 5, they're saying, "Believe the Bible." On the other hand, the Quran itself contradicts the Bible. So here's the dilemma for Muslims. If the Bible is true, quite obviously, the Quran is false and Islam is false, right? But if the Bible is false, the Quran is still false. Islam is still false because it's telling you to believe a book that's false, the Bible. - This is the dilemma. - So this is called the Islamic dilemma. I've used it in Saudi Arabia, I've used it in Egypt, I've used it in Israel with Muslims. I just asked them the question, "Why does the Quran tell you to obey the Bible "when it contradicts the Bible?" And none of them have a good answer. I'm just planting a seed, right? Just plant a seed. - We'll get there 'til the end on how to, what does that look like for all of these. Let's move on. So Hinduism, here's a visual real quick. This is ChatGPT, again, provided. You have multiple gods. Interesting, the, is it the swastika? - It looks like it, doesn't it? - Yes. - It can look like it. But people don't need to conflate this with Nazism. - Well, to my understanding, it was taken by the Nazis, but it's been a symbol that's been used in Hinduism for years prior, obviously. - Long before that. - That's right, so, which is interesting. Let's keep going here. So real quick, founder, what do they believe? How do you fix it? - Yeah, this can be a tough one, I think, for Christians to wrap their minds around 'cause it's so foreign and it's very different. Whereas these other ones we've covered, we could point to a very specific founder, very specific set of beliefs. It's not that with Hinduism. You have no single founder. Instead, Hinduism is a broad term that we use for a family of beliefs that, I like to think of it the United States. You have multiple different states that are very different, but there are some things that unite us. Some things that you would unite Hindus would be things like karma, reincarnation, the idea of an ultimate reality called the Brahman. And we're gonna dive into some of what those things mean, maybe in the FAQs. But another thing that would unite them is basically this belief that we are all trapped in a cycle of rebirth. And that isn't just true by the way of us individually. They see all of history this way, that history has, I think, four cycles that it moves through and it starts off really good in the first cycle and it gets increasingly bad. The whole thing is reset and we start over, but then people are trapped in these as well. So if that's the problem with the world, well, guess what? What's the solution? You have to escape that cycle. How do you escape it? Usually through enlightenment, devotion, or spiritual discipline. By doing enough good things that you accumulate enough of what they would call good, karma so that you can escape the cycle. And so in terms of then how they would view Jesus, they'd see him as like a wise teacher or a guru or one manifestation of the gods of many. One thing I can go ahead and hit here, 'cause I think this may have been one of our questions, 'cause you mentioned, oh, there's multiple gods. This is again, one thing that may, if you ask a Hindu, hey, do you believe in millions of gods? Well, you're gonna get a different answer depending on which one you talk to. Because some Hindus actually do believe in multiple different gods that are distinct from each other. Other Hindus, believe that there is one single ultimate reality. I guess you could say for lack of a better term, a god called the Brahman. And all of the others, Vishnu and so on and so forth, or Krishna, they're all just manifestations of that one. So again, this is just one thing, Christians, you gotta know. If you're talking to someone from the Hindu faith, don't assume everything that they automatically believe. This is where asking them good questions will be really helpful to you, because depending on the Hindu you're talking to, they could believe very different things. What else would you add, Frank? - I was gonna say, on one hand, they could be considered polytheistic. On the other hand, could be considered polytheistic, I mean, pantheistic, meaning that. Everything is God. We're all God. We just forgot. We're God, but we forgot kind of thing. But let's talk about this karma concept for a second. Karma in this rebirth is you come back in a form based on how morally well you did in your previous life. So if you come back as a rich person, you must have been good in your previous life. If you come back as a roach, okay, you didn't, right? Now, I have a couple of questions for people that believe this. The first question is, in my first life, what was I serving for? I didn't have any karma, so where was I placed? Secondly, who's keeping track of all this? It would seem like you'd need a being like God to keep track. Okay, Carlos did this, and Paul did this, so I'm going to put them at different levels in the next life. In other words, who's the administrator of this whole system? Thirdly, what is the moral standard by which you're making these judgments? It would seem like you'd need a being like God. And fourthly, the practical element of this, and Mother Teresa saw this when she went over there decades ago, she would try and help people out of suffering, and people would tell her, no, if you do that, you're interfering with their karma. You're going to make them come back in a worse level in the next life. She at least began to transform their thinking over there, because the thinking in karma is, you don't help suffering people. If you help them, you're actually hurting them, because you're putting them at a worse level in their next life. This is the thinking behind it. And what I've noticed, I don't know if you've noticed this, Carlos, maybe on YouTube, Frank, is karma's become a catchphrase for something that Christians will even say as a joke, but it's like, hey, if I try to trip you in the hallway, and then I fall down, that's karma. That's kind of a thing. And so we have to understand that for a Hindu, karma is not so much that, it's really more to like, what I do in this present life affects my next life. And what Christians would say, we don't believe in karma, but we do believe that our actions have spiritual consequences in this life and in the next one. But the next life is not a reincarnated life. The next life is life in eternity in one of a couple of places. There's Hinduism karma, and then there's cultural karma. Honestly, most people probably are not thinking Hinduism karma when they use that phrase, but they do believe in it. And we're about to talk about spiritual benevolence. Well, not religious in just a second. But they'll think, well, you know, karma means you do bad things, Frank, you will get bad things after because of what you just did. It's like what you sow, you reap. That's right. And so they'll say instant karma, right? And so one, a couple of things. So we believe as Christians, Galatians chapter six, verse seven, whatever one sows, you will also reap that. That's called the consequence. But in terms of like karma as a rule of life or a principle of life for you, the gospel is actually the opposite of karma. The most innocent person got the worst outcome at the end of the day. At the cross. That's Jesus. He's the best, most perfect person. And he got the absolute worst outcome that denies karma completely. In fact, we are people of, we receive grace, which means that even when I did wrong, I received God's goodness and mercy and it followed me. And so karma says that you get what you deserve. Christianity says that you get what Christ deserves. And again, that's called grace. Hebrews chapter nine, back to what you guys were saying, also says it is appointed for one man to die once. And after that comes judgment. Yes. All right. We need to, we need to keep going. Those are good insights. I'll hold it. You did an amazing job. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Keep, keep going. Let's keep, let's keep going. Buddhism. Buddha. Okay. Here you go. We got a visual first. Oh yeah. Is that me? Wait, what's this? Okay. Listen, that is Buddha Cunningham. He has more hair than I do. So I don't even know if that's an accurate representation of me, much less me as a Buddhist. May all be well. May all things be happy. Okay. Take that thing off. Wait. Oh, okay. There's the right one. Okay. That's great. There we go. This is a very orthodox show. We have Trinity putting these up. Oh, okay. You're right. Trinity. There you go. May all, all, what does that say? All beings in, be free from suffering. Look in the bottom right there. There you go. They got the Eightfold Path. There it is. The Noble Eightfold Path. See it up there over the, over the right shoulder. Oh no. It changed. It used to be Paul. Now you have glasses. Who's that? I don't know. Well, you know, I mean. Somebody less cooler than Paul. Less cooler than Paul. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. Okay. Let's, let's go ahead and tackle this. Who is Jesus for the Buddha? Yeah, the Buddha was from about 563, circa 563, we're not exactly sure, to about 483. So fifth century BC. And the key here is life is marked by suffering. And the way you get out of suffering is you've got four noble truths and an Eightfold Path that will lead you out of awakening. Now part, there's a problem here, from just a logical perspective, they, they don't think the self really exists. Yes. And the self is an illusion. So how a self gets out of suffering, if a self doesn't exist, I don't know, but you're supposed to try and get out of the suffering by what you see in the Bible. the back wall there, the right view, the right intention, the right speech, the right action, the right livelihood, the right effort, the right mindfulness, and the right concentration, if you follow those and you can get rid of your craving, get rid of your desire, then you will eventually get rid of the suffering that you have. If you kill desire, you kill suffering because you don't want anything. And if you do these eight things, you can achieve what is often called nirvana. And for them, then you get to escape, not life immediately then, but do you get to escape? Because they would also believe that life is cyclical, that you believe that you are reborn. And so for them, this is the way out. Define nirvana, Paul. It's hard. Some people, really, the word nirvana, believe actually, Frank, do you remember the etymology of it? Well, no, I don't remember the etymology of it, but I do know that the problem is when you achieve nirvana, you don't exist. So you don't really achieve it because you don't exist to start with. And you don't exist in the end. Everything's an illusion. The problem is to know an illusion, you'd have to be in reality to know an illusion. You can't have illusions unless you have some reality. I found it. I had it in my notes. It literally means to quench or to blow out. And so it's the extinguishing of our passions and our desires and of our attachment to reality. The extinguishing of ourselves. Exactly. And so the idea is there's two innocent stages. The first is the stage I achieve in this life, but I honestly still exist. But then when my life ends, then I. I end. So there is no next life. So that's even one thing helping people understand. But see, what I don't get, Paul, and maybe I don't understand it completely, to say I want to get to nirvana when I don't exist to begin with, how is that explained? That's what I don't understand. There's kind of some circular logic here. Okay. Because even like, well, no, but even it kind of goes back to, I think, what you did so well with Hinduism. And I often tell people Buddhism and Hinduism are separate, but in a sense, Buddhism was an easier, less endless path of getting to nirvana. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at, is getting out of the cycle of rebirth than the others. But actually, I love what you brought up, which there's some issues is, hey, in order to escape your karma, it seems like there has to be someone outside of you evaluating your karma. Well, just who is that and where did they come from? Some Buddhism strands would identify there are some heavenly beings, but again, I'm kind of like, and where do they come from? Right. And others don't. Others are atheistic. Yes. Other forms of Buddhism. And so in my experience, Buddhists and Hindus are very comfortable with, oh, it's a little bit of a mystery. Like, because to you and me, this kind of seems. It seems like circular logic. It seems like we're just going to keep repeating itself. And they say, yeah, that's kind of the point. Whereas I'm kind of like, I started to give you a great answer there, but I haven't honestly gotten a good answer myself. What do you got, Carlos? I'm going to ask you the next question. A 60-second question. He's trying to keep us going. I guess we got a couple more. Is Buddhism compatible? By the way, we can't say everything on all of these. This is kind of obvious. And a lot of these likely will do a full episode at some point. So if you're watching this or tuning in right now, let us know in the comment section, which one should we do? Next. Because I know there's so much on all of these. We're all kind of like, ah, we're not going to say more. Let me just ask this last question, 60-second answer for you guys. Is Buddhism compatible with Christianity? Well, some parts might be, but not all of it. Just like all of them, right? Overall, no, because it denies the self. It has morality to it, just no source of morality. You know, it talks about, you know, right intention, right view, right conduct, that kind of thing. That's all good. But it. It denies the ultimate creator. And so it's just like we said before, viewpoints that if Christianity is true contradict Christianity are false where they contradict Christianity, but not necessarily false where they don't contradict Christianity. Yeah, I think a few things here. It's like Christianity teaches God exists. Buddhism says there is no creator God. Christianity teaches that humans are sinners, and that's our biggest problem. Buddhism says actually it's attachment to the illusion of reality that is the problem. Christianity teaches that salvation comes through Christ. Buddhism teaches that the solution is enlightenment to escape the sinless thing that actually doesn't really exist. That's. See, that's the. And so in other words, you say, is it compatible? The contradictory part of it. Yeah. And so like, here's how I tell people is a lot of times, and we'll get to this with more of people who are kind of syncretistic and combine them all. A lot of times they would just put their cards on the table. They would believe that the ultimate goal of life is just simply be a good person. Now, I do believe that God wants us to be people that are good because he is good. And as a result of that, you will be good. if that's the main goal well then no these can't be compatible because they lead you to two different goals to do different ends we're gonna go check on buddhism we're gonna go to the next one uh atheism here's the visual uh here's what we got right now oh what is this wait take a second to like see what's going on here just take it in we got dawkins we got we got sam this has got to be a mistake hey frank let me ask you wait hold on hold on do you have enough faith to be an atheist no no that's the right one that's what we meant but frank if you check out in the back to the towards the right do you see can you can you read it can you really see what it says this man will convert me to christianity no he won't i think he's gonna use that man god but god can use all of us he can use that that's right man he got we got a couple posters here atheist beliefs and science we trust got a couple books here the god delusion richard dawkins cosmos skeptic atheist humanist we got a neil degrasse tyson bust you this is really good i didn't even notice that this is really good the the shirt says think question seek truth be kind uh we'll talk about that in just a second uh we stand for equal rights free speech what else social justice uh none of those things which you can justify without a standard beyond us i'm gonna ask you about it peace and tolerance as long as you agree with us yep science not science not silence okay so let's go quick uh because these are the questions that i wanted to ask you frank because this is your field uh founder what do they believe what's wrong with the world uh how do we fix it who is jesus well obviously there were people way back in old testament times who didn't believe in god there you go because you know the psalm says the fool says in his heart there is no god so there were unbelievers there were unbelievers among some of the ancient greeks there but in the modern age disbelief or unbelief in god really began say in the 1700s i thought it was capped off in a big way by nichi in the late 1800s who essentially tried to live out the implications of atheism that there's life has no meaning uh there's no purpose life is just nothingness and he kind of went mad yeah trying to live it out but here's what nichi actually predicted he died in 1900 he famously said we've we've killed god and uh not meaning literally but belief in god and the problem is he put it this way god is dead and we have killed him he predicted that the 20th century would be the bloodiest century in history because of that and he turned out to be right well yeah because atheistic regimes like stalin lenin mao and paul pott they all rose to kill millions of innocent people not that atheism uh says you have to kill innocent people but it allows the killing of innocent people because there's no moral standard beyond the dictator and there's no eternal consequences for anything i do uh frank what do you mean when you say i don't have enough faith to be an atheist i'm using faith in the sense the atheists use it like richard dawkins who was in that image would say that faith is believing something either against the evidence or you just don't have any evidence that's not faith in the bible faith in the bible is trusting in what you have good evidence to believe but when i say yeah i don't have enough faith to be an atheist i'm saying that evidence for god and christianity is very strong so for me to be an atheist i have to be blind i have to have blind faith to be an atheist but i just don't have enough faith blind faith to be an atheist the way i like to talk about my son i got in an interaction on this recently and it's like imagine if we're just walking on the beach and we come across this really complex object um and one of us believes that oh obviously the most simple logical explanation is that this randomly came together it is randomly came together and the other one is no it seems like this is very complex very designed to like a fine-tuning process it's more obvious that someone created this and fine-tuned to exactly the way it is and let's say we're arguing back and forth and eventually everybody starts gathering around us who do they think is going to think the crazy person for insisting on their viewpoint the person who thinks it all just randomly came together in something very complex and so i think that's the idea is that because often often goes with this is hey is is actually our atheists more rational or are they more rational or are they more rational because at the end of the day you have to believe one of two things either everything came from nothing randomly but by the way it never happened again nothing none of that has ever happened again none of that none of things spontaneously appears in front of us ever any any time after that or everything was created by someone intentionally which by the way that happens every day all the time yeah and so to me the more rational viewpoint is the one that actually still exists today and that happens all the time not the one that has never happened again since it apparently has never happened again atheists don't that's the biggest problem they don't have a cause they don't have an ultimate cause well i was going to ask you some of the posters said uh fight for justice kindness uh equality tell me why that seems to be a problem because justice kindness and equality are not really moral categories that are objective unless god exists because you need a standard outside of yourself otherwise it's just your opinion to say you ought not murder people you ought to be just to people it's just your opinion against somebody else's opinion there has to be a standard beyond us that we're obligated to obey and that standard can only exist if god exists in order to say you ought not murder you ought to have give people equal rights whatever your claim is moral claims objective moral claims only make sense if god exists but wait frank uh atheism is not a religion we just don't believe in religion what do you say to that no atheist you know they'll say oh i lack a belief in god yeah it's atheist right like no theism so what do you okay well first of all if you just lack a belief in god that's a psychological state of your mind you're not telling us anything about what's outside of your skull it's just your psychological state so who cares but here's i i avoid the whole semantic thing by simply asking atheists this question here's a proposition god exists do you agree with that proposition if so you're a theist do you disagree with that proposition if so you're an atheist if you don't know you're an agnostic all right let's stop playing word games here it's one of those three right but the other thing is to say atheists don't just lack a belief they have positive beliefs atheists will say things like well i believe all that exists are materials of course immediately when they say that they're using non-material things to say that like the laws of logic right those are not made of molecules right they believe a lot of them believe in a multiverse right that's how to explain the fine tuning of the universe or they'll say they believe in macroevolution those are positive beliefs they need to give evidence for they just can't say oh i don't think your worldview is true my co-author and mentor geisler used to say this it's easy to smell a rotten egg it's hard to lay a better one yeah yeah right you can throw rotten eggs at people all day and say i don't like your worldview it's wrong well what worldview do you have i don't have a word no you have a worldview everyone has a worldview let me just read this one paragraph from we've got a new book coming out in september called the war on reality recovering truth in a world that celebrates lies my co-author phoenix hayes is very witty so here's the way she writes about atheism she says atheism in the beginning there was nothing and then for no particular reason something exploded into being no cause no plan no mind behind it just an accidental cosmic firework show that kicked off space time and matter where did the universe come from no idea just be grateful it showed up and then she says this fast forward a few billion years and planet earth's razor thin life permitting conditions are explained by a very scientific sounding term known as luck that's what richard dawkins actually said atmospheric conditions somehow came just right for non-living chemicals to bond together to form proteins these disorganized proteins though through a lot of time and luck eventually combine in such a way that that life emerges from non-life a naturalistic miracle that even intelligent scientists can't replicate it's kind of like what you were saying there you go well it's like i want to tell people it's like show me gravity and if they're honest like well i can't show you gravity it's just the best explanation for what we can see by what we can't see and i'm like huh effects that sounds familiar yeah that's great that sounds like faith there's something invisible that's the best explanation for what is visible right yeah that's called faith we got atheism check last one uh spiritual but not religious here's the here's the visual there you go this is uh somebody from california according to chat gpt spiritual but not religious you got everything happens for a reason you got crystals chakra energy the universe uh candles uh focus on your flow i think it's what it says uh the universe has your back the universe has you you are the magic you are the magic uh okay so you're enough so what uh what's going on here founder what do they believe what's wrong with the world obviously this is not officially a religion the founder is you that's right the founder is you you from the universe yes i call this the cafeteria approach to god or to spirituality because if you go to a cafeteria you can take a little bit of all the foods that you want and leave the things that you don't like and so and nowadays it's honestly in a sense kind of going back to where we began at the beginning which is this idea of oh they're all the same and so with that even if we walk through what we just did over the last 60 minutes um people would say okay well yeah some of them are different and then therefore i'm going to take what i like and leave what i don't and so that's the idea of the cafeteria approach this is about me i'm choosing what's true and that's the idea of hey you live your truth you do you i'll do me kind of a thing and so at the end of the day if i'm the one picking them then i guess i must be god because i'm picking what is true and what is not true kind of a thing and so yeah so this i'd say it's actually um i tell people this is um a little bit of reminds me of elsa uh from frozen and her idea of let it go. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free. So I'm only free if I get to pick anything I want to do and anything I want to believe. So yeah, that's a little bit of what I would say here is basically it's like, I'm spiritual. I do believe there's a God, but I don't want to be religious because then guess what? Other people get to tell me what I have to do and believe. I want to tell me, I want to be God. Yeah. And the Bible says that there is a Holy Spirit and there are unholy spirits. And so you want to be very careful, very watchful with what kind of spirits you are inviting into your life. Especially when it comes to a lot of these, again, if it's not the Holy Spirit, what kind of spirit is it? And so, man, I'm hesitant. It's interesting because people think that now we live in a post-Christian society. And in some case, that is true. There is some truth to that. But at the same time, we also live in a post-secular society, which means that atheism, that kind of didn't work. So now there is a pursuit for Christianity. And it's not Christianity, but it's some other sort of spirituality. Again, you want to be mindful of that. Well, in the War on Reality book, we have a tagline. If this kind of view had a tagline, it would be, why choose one religion when you can contradict them all? But it goes back to a story. I was actually in Dallas about 10 years ago doing a seminar, and somebody came up to the book table and said, do you have a book on Buddhism? And I said, why? And the lady said, well, I have a friend who was a Christian, but now she's a Buddhist. And so I want a book to help her. And I said, I don't know your friend at all, but let me just ask you one question. Did your friend who used to be a Christian suddenly start doing something that the Bible prohibits? And she said, oh yeah, she just moved in with her boyfriend. I said, you don't need a book on Buddhism. She's not a Buddhist because she thinks Buddhism's true. She's a Buddhist because she wants to have spirituality without moral accountability. Yes. Right? If I had to guess, and 99 times out of 10, I would say, out of 10, I'm right. Yeah. Okay. That's the issue. You want to be spiritual. That's all the upside. With any of the negative, somebody can tell me what to do and how to live my life. Now, as you mentioned earlier, Paul, which is a wise insight, that God gave us, he's our designer and he knows what we're designed to run on and how we're designed to live. Mm-hmm. And so he gave us a revelation, and that revelation helps us live our lives according to his design. And the same thing is true when we get a new car. I know none of us read the manual, but the manual's there for a reason. It comes from a designer. And if we want to use the car in a right way, we should read the manual because the designers know how it was designed to run and how it's designed to maintain. Who writes a book after they buy a new car that, you know, Ford is evil and manuals poison everything? Right? Nobody does that, right? Because it's not a moral thing, right? But we're kind of doing the same thing with God. If the Bible is God's special revelation, and I believe it is, it's sort of like a manual. It helps us understand how the designers set this universe up and how we should live. We shouldn't rebel against it, but many of us do. Frank, I want to give you, because we keep landing the plan. Oh, there's more to speak here. Give us in one minute, why is Christianity true and what sets it apart from literally every other religion that we live in? Well, as you said before, Christianity is based on historical events that you can investigate. That's important. It's not just someone's philosophy. You can see if this really happened. And you only need to establish two basic facts to show that what C.S. Lewis would call mere Christianity is true. Number one, God exists. And you can know that from what we talked about earlier, the three great arguments, creation, design, and morality. We know there's a being out there that created and sustains the world, and he's moral. And the second fact, after does God exist, is did Jesus predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead? And the answer to that is yes, because you can look at the evidence for that. If those two facts are true, Christianity is true. And if Christianity is true, then the solution to life is not effort, it's not achieving, it's receiving. You don't achieve it, you receive it. God created it, we broke it, Jesus fixed it. And so that's why this is the greatest message of all time. The greatest message of all time is, that you are going to be forgiven and given God's righteousness by simply receiving a gift. There you go. It's grace. Let me echo everything that we just said over here as we continue to finish this. When you start comparing Christianity with every religion that we just talked about right now, it is overwhelming how different they are at their core. They're all different, and Christianity stands out in so many different ways. Most major religions, like you said, Frank, at the core are about how you seek God. Genesis literally starts with God saying, Adam, where are you? The name Adam is the name of the first man, but it also means humanity. So it's literally God saying, humanity, where are you? It is God seeking you. And he doesn't just call for you, he comes for you. This is why Jesus said, I came to seek and save the lost. No other religion has a God who enters suffering, bears suffering, defeats suffering through a cross and a resurrection. And unlike other religions, the cross is a resurrection. for me. Pastor Josh as he rests. I pray you'd bring him back refreshed. We thank you for Pastor Paul and Pastor Carlos and Trinity and the entire team here who do a wonderful job every couple of days putting together another great show that helps make disciples of people. I pray you'd bless the Live Free podcast and Lake Point Church and all those who are now trying to copy Lake Point, and they should because they're doing great work here. We're emulating Jesus. Help us to emulate you and be ambassadors for you and have this message of truth go far and wide. We pray for people in other belief systems as well. We pray that we've accurately described what they believe in general terms. We couldn't go into detail, so we pray people would seek the truth and find the truth, and the truth is in you. Thank you for saving us. In Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Live free, brother. All right. Live free. Thank you, brothers.