Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Carlos Araso

Most major religions are about how you seek God. Christianity, at its core, is about how God seeks you.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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.

Carlos Araso

Well, hey, Lit Free Nation. Before we jump into the episode, this podcast is recorded right here at Lake Pointe Church in Dallas, Texas. 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, coming 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 Araso, 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? I'm ready, man. He is a Christian apologist, bestselling author of I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and a founder of Cross Examine. But here's how I call him. He is the Jedi master of apologetics.

Dr. Frank Turek

Whoa.

Carlos Araso

A heavyweight champion of Christian debate, the cross examiner of atheism, the man every college skeptic eventually has to deal with, Dr. Frank Turek.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah. Welcome back.

Carlos Araso

Welcome back.

Dr. Frank Turek

Well, thank you. I got to ask you guys, what's it like being two thirds of the big best podcast in the world? Come on, man.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Thank you.

Dr. Frank Turek

It is. I mean, think about this. You know, Mortimer Adler, many years ago, was 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? Than any other question you could ask.

Carlos Araso

That's great.

Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 subscribers? Subscriptions?

Carlos Araso

Yeah. Mr. Beast literally just hit 500 million subscribers on YouTube. And I said, man, if he can do that to entertain people, I think we can do that to preach the gospel.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly.

Dr. Frank Turek

So we only got to multiply it by 500.

Carlos Araso

Right now, we only need 499 million subscribers. All right, so, hey, one more. We're all about.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

One more of that was not to take a slam at Mr. B. Is the point of that was to your point saying, man, if God is the center of everything and everything is 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's right. And if God doesn't exist, then nothing ultimately matters. That's right. We all wind up in the same place in the dirt.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly.

Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Carlos Araso

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.

Dr. Frank Turek

I am blessed.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

You're pace setting.

Carlos Araso

You're like, this is the third time you're here.

Dr. Frank Turek

I am blessed.

Carlos Araso

Right, man, Last episode that we did with you, like, we had people comment all over. They loved having you here. This is. 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. Dr. Frank's Josh impressions are impeccable.

Dr. Frank Turek

Hey, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Come on, let's. Let's. Let's wrap up this pod. Come on, let's go. We just started.

Carlos Araso

They are impeccable.

Dr. Frank Turek

All right, good.

Carlos Araso

And so, man, today's gonna be I

Dr. Frank Turek

love Josh by The way. Yeah, I love him.

Carlos Araso

I think it's mutual.

Dr. Frank Turek

I told him, I said, if just get every pastor to be like Josh, the world would be Christianized.

Carlos Araso

Every pastor?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

What do you mean by that?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 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, Right?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's right.

Dr. Frank Turek

And I think too often many Christians and even some pastors act as if. No, we're just here to talk about spiritual things. We're not here to talk about things that are outside of the spiritual, when in fact everything relates to the spiritual in some ways. 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's right.

Dr. Frank Turek

I think the Bible ought to be our guidebook for what we do in every area of life.

Carlos Araso

It's not a private faith. It's something that literally should influence every

Dr. Frank Turek

single aspect of your life, every single decision you make. Yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Faith is personal, but it's not private. There's a key distinction there.

Carlos Araso

On. On that note, today 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. We'll go there. I know you got some thoughts.

Dr. Frank Turek

Okay.

Carlos Araso

I got.

Dr. Frank Turek

I got a thought.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

He's already. He was ready.

Carlos Araso

He's ready to go.

Dr. Frank Turek

Ready.

Carlos Araso

I saw. I saw it.

Dr. Frank Turek

Just.

Carlos Araso

The demeanor changed. I love that. And then we're going to. Like I said, we're going to explain all major religions and hopefully under 60 minutes, the. The pod 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 things before we do, man. We're excited because Paul and Frank, July 11, 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Nice.

Carlos Araso

We have fun with it. Characters in lobby, popcorn drinks for everyone. Obviously, in addition to worship and Bible teaching and more. Don't miss four weeks at the most.

Dr. Frank Turek

Can you tell us one of the clips you might be using at this point?

Carlos Araso

I would love to tell you right now. And we, you know, I think there's been some. Something's happening right now, you know, Sorry.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Oh, I hope you caught it.

Dr. Frank Turek

Hope you caught it. Okay. 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Oh, okay.

Dr. Frank Turek

How your favorite movies reveal God. Yeah, my son and I wrote it. Who's also a seminary grad.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's awesome.

Dr. Frank Turek

But you'd be shocked to learn. Well, you wouldn't be, but 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly.

Dr. Frank Turek

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

Carlos Araso

another podcast, by the way. This is a different conversation.

Dr. Frank Turek

You would be shocked to learn that J.K. rowling took the entire storyline out of the Bible. She admits it.

Carlos Araso

Yes.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Of all the lowercase stories are ultimately pointing to the capital S ultimate story. And car. I don't know if you're about to go here, but just in case you weren't, I want to say, like, if, 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 got to come 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 so they can come to know Jesus or at least be exposed to Jesus, this is the best series for it of the year.

Carlos Araso

And if you are part of the Live Free nation and you are not within driving distance as well, man, 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 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Do people get a free hat? Really?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah.

Carlos Araso

Yeah. Every single week.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah.

Dr. Frank Turek

Wow.

Carlos Araso

We. We left. We. I know. We gave you some.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I got one.

Dr. Frank Turek

I've been. I wore it on one of my own podcasts.

Carlos Araso

We love it.

Dr. Frank Turek

Word on the honor having a Faith to be an atheist podcast.

Carlos Araso

Hey, Pastor Mike did another. Another phenomenal job in this sermon series. So, Frank, this sermon series is called En Fuego. That's French for, you know, that's. I'm not. That's not true.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Although Carlos speaks French, by the way.

Carlos Araso

Trust me.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Can you speak a little bit for us right now? I'm putting him on the spot.

Carlos Araso

Oh, my goodness. I'm excited to practice that in a couple weeks.

Dr. Frank Turek

That sounds right.

Carlos Araso

Literally nobody speaks French.

Dr. Frank Turek

I know French too. Souffle French word. Maybe chocolate mousse.

Carlos Araso

That's great. I mean, it is.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I mean, you are correct, but it's not French.

Carlos Araso

Spanish for on fire. And this is a sermon series on fire, obviously, but also on anger. We had the first couple weeks talk 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 First Kings 18. And this is where there is 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 cutting 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 gonna. I'm gonna 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's right.

Carlos Araso

And this is literally what First Kings 18:39 says. When all the people saw this, they fell 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, 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? And so, Paul, anything else that stood out from the sermon to you?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, a couple of details. I mean, one that 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 flood 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's a huge shroud.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

It's a huge.

Carlos Araso

Put some more water on.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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. Dries 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 a little bit more. I'm going to have his douse it, and then God's going to consume it. And it does.

Carlos Araso

I just love that after mocking the other gods, by the way.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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. It's kind of. If you like 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. 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, is. 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, these people have put all of the prophets to death, and I'm the only one left.

Dr. Frank Turek

Only one left.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Only one left. Now God does say, hey, actually, I have reserved some over here. But still a bad day 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 the 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 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 you were to put to death 450 people of another religion that were like, their leaders, like, oh, this is awful. This is genocide. This is persecution. What do you do with this when people are like, hey, doesn't this God seem mean? Like a genocidal maniac? What do you say to that?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 the University of Central Oklahoma. This had to be almost 10 years ago. And 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. 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 anytime he wants. In fact, if Christianity is true, 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 gonna follow. You're gonna follow Yahweh. Elijah says, you're gonna follow Yahweh, you're gonna follow baal. And they decide to follow baal. Okay? This is called judgment. And in America, we think God is a cosmic candyman. 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. 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. Of course, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's right. The difference is that we would say murder is the unjustified killing of someone. So even I think that was a 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's murder.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, that's the murder.

Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 are 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 him and ask him a question. When I get. 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 their pastors. And.

Dr. Frank Turek

And they were actually. These people were actually sacrificing their children to molech y.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

They're sacrificing their children. And let's say God did nothing. What would you be crying on?

Dr. Frank Turek

Why doesn't God.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Bingo.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah. Why doesn't God do something? And here's a situation where God does something. They go, he shouldn't have done that.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly. And so this is one of those. And we, we hit this a little bit, but kind of only just teased on it last week was 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. But if he does anything, well, there can't be a God because he did it. And I don't like the exact way that he did it. It's just really. 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.

Carlos Araso

So that's why we like Jesus so much, because God's judgment is real. That's why the cross is so horrid. It's. 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, is that there is no innocent people. There was 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 again, it all points back to a good and faithful God. So on that note, we have a lot to cover today. They say 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. We did an episode where we explained all Christian denominations. You can go find it. It's fun. This is the religion version of that. So, Frank, I can't think of anybody else to have this conversation with today. Let me start with this. If somebody is asking this conversation, why do we even have so many religions today?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 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, there's got to be a moral law giver. Right? If there's evidence, a man predicting and accomplished 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 they've seen a Bible or not, because that's just part of what's called natural revelation. Or we might say God's works. God has two revelations. He has his word. But before he has his word, he has his works called natural revelation. Everybody has that. Paul, you got the passage there. You want to.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, I was going to say this 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,

Dr. Frank Turek

the next chapter, Romans 2. He talks about the law written on the heart.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's the natural law.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 why certain effects exist. And some explain them better than others, I think, from a rationale perspective. So part of it has to do with the human heart trying to create a world that we want. Another has to do with the idea that God has created and designed certain things and 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. And. 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 going to get what I want here on this life. So part of that, that is what Paul is talking about in Romans 1. Instead of praying to the true deity, they've set up their own to try and get an effect they want here on Earth.

Carlos Araso

Yeah, that's good.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Well, I think kind of putting together some of what you said there is 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 thing. But then when sin is introduced, I've heard it said before that God created us in his image. But the second sin is introduced, we begin trying to make God into our image or into the image of something else. And then so it's the question of, like, how did these religions go up? I was like, well, if you get groupings of people who believe similar things about who God is and what's the problem with the world, 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 we've been made in his image, so we need to know who he is. Instead, we begin remaking him into our image. Would you say that's kind of inaccurate?

Dr. Frank Turek

And I would also say it kind of goes back to that podcast you guys did not long ago. Why there's so many denominations, for the same reason there are so many non Christians. It's not because the truth is not perceived. I think it's because the truth is not received.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's good, right?

Carlos Araso

Say it one more time, Frank.

Dr. Frank Turek

It's not because the truth is not perceived. It's because the truth is not received that we want to have it our way. So 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 some sort of theistic God. You don't get all the way to Jesus with just natural law, or we would say natural revelation or God's 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.

Carlos Araso

Yeah, but I don't even know why delivery 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 it said this way. Like, isn't it true that it's like, you know, it's like an elephant, and then, like, one religion kind of grabs the trunk, the other religion kind of grabs the. The other leg, and then the other leg, and then everybody's claiming, like, oh, I know the trut. 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?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 you say to that, Frank?

Dr. Frank Turek

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. One thinks it's a wall, another thinks it's a snake, another thinks it's a rope, another thinks it's a tree, whatever. But the person telling the parable knows they're all wrong because he can see it's an elephant.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Right? Everyone's blind but me.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yes, everyone's blind but Me, Right. So the parable actually doesn't work. It backfires 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 all to love one another. And to which I respond, yeah, they all teach 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.

Carlos Araso

Wait, in fact, we have a, there's a quote there from two years ago. If you can pull it up. 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? Hold on, I'm going to keep going.

Dr. Frank Turek

Keep going. Let me add to that. Actually, they don't teach you all to love one.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I was gonna say.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 him love. So there are religions that don't teach you all to love one another. 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. 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, and we can get into that. But no religions are superficially the same, fundamentally different.

Carlos Araso

This is what Pope Francis said in September 13, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

God.

Carlos Araso

Some are Sheikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christians, they all, they are different ways to God.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

All right, give me heresy for $500 even.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah, even my Catholic friends will admit this is heresy. Yeah, okay, they will. And I have many Catholic friends I, I, I brought up in the Catholic Church. That's absolute heresy. That he would be, he would be burned or swallowed with the BAAL followers in the Elijah story by saying that, that, 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 a good analogy. All roads don't lead to Rome. I tried to get to Rome here on Highway 30 and I wound up in Texarkana. I never got to Rome.

Carlos Araso

You ended up in Italy. Texas.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Well, even, like, although, you know, I'm agreeing completely, but if I could even kind of come and say, yeah, I'll pass. Lead to God in the sense that eventually everybody from every religion is going to stand before God at Judgment Day. Okay, yeah, 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? 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. Let me just describe her to describe some of the superficial but still things I loved. She's 6ft tall, she's beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes, kind of like Norwegian descent. Like, if my wife was listening to right now, she'd get really ticked because my wife is like 5 foot 3, 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 must 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. In 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 though, I think some of the silliness of this from a different angle. I. I was reminded every time, basically, this is kind of some. About relativism is like, oh, yeah, just

Dr. Frank Turek

believe whatever you want.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 over what the color of this dress was. What do you guys see right now, Frank? I see the color of the dress.

Dr. Frank Turek

Kind of brown and blue.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Okay, brown and blue.

Carlos Araso

It's blue. Black and blue. Yeah.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's what you see.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

See, right now I'm seeing white and gold. And this is the normal thing that happened is all these people were seeing 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 happen 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.

Carlos Araso

You know, you're wrong, Paul. You're seeing something that's just not true.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly, exactly. So all of a sudden, we're no longer relatively. All of a sudden, we're no longer relativists. All of a sudden, our way is the right way. Well, you know, and by the way,

Carlos Araso

half of the people watching this right now be like, what?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 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 sells. That's why even if you see it differently, doesn't matter. You're seeing it wrong. So I'd say, hey, and the same thing is, like, 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 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 life. 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, justice is a good thing. There's only two things you can get in the afterlife. You can get justice or 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 in the last ten minutes. Okay, so. 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

No.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 here. So it's a contradiction from the A. It's a contradiction with the scriptures. It's also a contradiction over the original teaching of the Catholic Church.

Carlos Araso

Okay, so now that we have established that all religions are not teaching the same thing.

Dr. Frank Turek

No.

Carlos Araso

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 Chat GPT. And so this is what we got from artificial intelligence. We're just going to see what you didn't draw, please. I did not draw.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Okay, that's good to know.

Carlos Araso

No, no, for sure. I'm not that good. And then we're going to 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 going to do it like a quick, rapid fire frequently asked questions for each one of them.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And before we jump in, just a few caveats. One in terms of, again, why we're doing this is to show that There are differences. And to highlight these, maybe to in a few places say, hey, here's where we believe that these are wrong in different places. We're not saying that none of them has any truth. By the way, I think you've said this before. There' difference. They contain some truths that we would agree on, but they are not Capital T truth. Right.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah. In fact, let's distinguish between a system of truth and a system of error. Okay, 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 assume it's true. If Christianity is true, then all non Christianities are false. But it doesn't mean that every non Christianity is actually teaching everything wrong.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yes.

Dr. Frank Turek

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% of your income to the poor, just like Christians believe. No, that's really.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I know we all pause.

Dr. Frank Turek

We're like, we're like, you ought to give. Yeah, that's what they believe. 2%. What Christians give, actually give. I mean, there's a system of truth, but I might have some errors in my understanding of it. Christianity is true, but I may 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, by the law of non contradiction, they have to be wrong.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly. And then with that, I'm glad that you brought this up in terms of they have truths. 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 Acts 17. He's with the Athenians, with pagan polytheists. And yet he knew enough of the stuff that he was able to make connect 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 that you can be more informed, but not just that you know more, but that you can articulate your faith better.

Carlos Araso

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 longtime churchgoer, 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 11th and 12th and continues through August 1st 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 20411. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Dr. Frank Turek

Are you going to take Christianity?

Carlos Araso

Yeah, well, we all. I got the photo, so training. Here's a ChatGPT visual representation of what ChatGPT thinks is Christianity or at least there you go, an expression of it. So this right Here according to ChatGPT is the three branches of Christianity.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

If you are not watching the video, you need to switch to that real fast.

Carlos Araso

You can come to YouTube or into Spotify. So let me explain what's going on here because this is. I'm interpreting. Interpreting. What ChatGPT has given us on the left is Protestantism. It's got Pastor Josh. Jesus changed my life. He's got atomic habits. Oh, look, there's. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Look at that.

Carlos Araso

Reading your books, right under winning. Okay, there you go. And he's got his mug. It says, what does it say? But first, prayer, little heart. Great. So then these are the three main branches of Christianity. You got Protestantism, Catholicism. And this is what Pastor Josh would look like as Father Josh.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Real quick, I just have to say this. It Looks like he could be Father Mike's brother in that.

Dr. Frank Turek

I thought it was when I glanced at it.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, just gonna say that.

Carlos Araso

Just gonna say he kind of looks like him. Yeah. And then on the third, on the, on the, on the right, he's Pastor Josh. If he was a Orthodox Christian, which I can.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I think I can speak for all of us. Pastor Josh, we want you to stay on Team Protestant, but if you could get that beard, that would just take it to a whole another level.

Carlos Araso

We need to ask him if he can get that beard.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

We need to ask him.

Dr. Frank Turek

So.

Carlos Araso

Okay, 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?

Dr. Frank Turek

You start. You start us off, Carl.

Carlos Araso

Okay, well, Founder, I'm going to go first. Founder, Jesus Christ. Paul, go ahead.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Well, you got the easy one.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah, well, wow.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Oh, thanks for volunteering yourself for like.

Dr. Frank Turek

Oh, yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Jesus Christ first century. So what's the next category that we're hitting?

Carlos Araso

Founder, what do you believe?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, what do they believe? Obviously for each of these, we can't say everything's going to 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 in terms of 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 eternally exists 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?

Dr. Frank Turek

I would add short three sentence summary of Christianity. God created it, we broke it, Jesus fixed it.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Right.

Dr. Frank Turek

Okay. Jesus Christ 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, 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. 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 and he pays the price for us. It's simply received. It's not achieved.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

A word that we use often to summarize what you just said that you'll find the Bible is the idea of the Gospel. The gospel, the word in the original language literally means the idea of an announcement or of good news. And I think, I think it was JI Packer who once put it in the shortest, best way I remember, the Gospel is how God saves sinners, how God saves sinners. And it's through 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 fixes own problem by doing what we could not do and by taking the punishment that we received him, 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 it.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah, 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.

Carlos Araso

Yep, we'll Circle back to that. Go ahead.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 to you.

Carlos Araso

So everything you guys just say, basically, we're laying the foundation. We'll circle back to some of these as well, that 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 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?

Dr. Frank Turek

I think the same answer as we mentioned, same different religions. And the fact is the fact there are a lot of people out there who are not open to the truth. 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. 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 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. They're called orders, right? You 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 are so far away from the official Roman Catholic doctrine. So while they don't go to different churches, they could.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah. Aren't you glad we have a Pope to keep us unified, believing all the same things Right.

Dr. Frank Turek

But they're not believing all the same things. 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. Diversity. To which I say, what's the problem with a little bit of diversity? That's right, you don't want 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And I'll say this, I know we gotta hit some other questions because we gotta do it in 60 minutes or under. I know that's our goal. So I gotta be careful.

Carlos Araso

Carlos, I'm here to push you.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

You're here to push me. That's all. I'll keep this. But oftentimes what people will appeal to, and probably more from the Catholic side of this, or even some sometimes well meaning people in our church as 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 to be. These are the primary things on that podcast, which again, go and listen to it, 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 one baptism. The idea of, hey, all people who are believers in Jesus and like we are all part of the family of God. And so that's just one thing I would just explain to people is. 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.

Carlos Araso

On that note, I'll give you 60 seconds. What about Mormonism?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, so this is this Mormonism and 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 to kind of. Sometimes it's good to ask questions when people are pressing you, right?

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, I've got a question. I wrote this one down to make sure I got it right. So if I was talking to a Mormon and said, all right, 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, but 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yes.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Does that make sense?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 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?

Carlos Araso

We're all Christians here, right?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 only as far as grace can go. Then you gotta do all these good works. And there's three different levels of heaven. By the way, that's not in the Bible either.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Keep going. 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 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yep. Jesus is in the ultimate level of heaven, only faithful to your point. You have to adhere to, 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. Yeah, keep going.

Dr. Frank Turek

But I will say I love Mormons because they're such great citizens and great people. I just think asking some of those questions can point out the distinctions. I mean, they come along 1,800 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. Paul said in Galatians, one even angel comes to you and tells you another gospel, don't believe it. Both Mormonism and Islam have the same source in the sense there's one guy getting a revelation from some kind of angel. No verification outside of that, after Scripture

Carlos Araso

was already written, obviously.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

So glad you pointed that out.

Carlos Araso

That's great. 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.GPT. this is what it seems to be. A Jewish scholar, likely a rabbi. He's like in a study room. He's got, he's got the Torah there, the, 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 Chat GPT.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

All the things. Yeah.

Carlos Araso

All right, let's, let's go here. Founder, what do they believe? What's wrong with the world? How do you fix.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I'm going to take the easy one through because since you did the last one.

Carlos Araso

Okay, great.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Carlos's contribution to the last one was Jesus.

Carlos Araso

I'm moving the conversation forward.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 B.C. frank, I'll let you give more of an overview in terms of what they believe, their views of what's wrong with the world, all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Frank Turek

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, no temple. You can't bring a lamb to the temple. And so since the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. judaism has migrated toward more synagogue related Judaism, obviously non temple sacrifice 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 where 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 a 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, 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 the things that we'd find in the book of life, Leviticus. But to your point, they can't sacrifice animals, they can't do any of that. And 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. And then you have many. And this is what I have to remember, many secular Jews who. They're barely practicing at all.

Dr. Frank Turek

Some are atheists.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, some are atheists. For them, Jewish is more of the idea of that's their ethnicity than it necessarily is their religious practice. That enough?

Dr. Frank Turek

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?

Carlos Araso

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, we all the Old Testament. Everything in the Old Testament points to. To Jesus. We would not label it as a demonic religion. We would say it all points to Jesus, which is very different.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

In other words, there's a difference between false and fulfilled.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yes.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And so if something has been fulfilled but then you are not taking part in the fulfillment of it, then unisons have an incomplete 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 gotta be a demonic element to this. Why is this group of people, they only number 15 million 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. For some reason, that little Jewish state has to go. According to these folks, these people who are claiming.

Carlos Araso

Let me go real quick through these. Do Jews need Jesus to be saved?

Dr. Frank Turek

Everybody needs Jesus to be saved. Of course. Yes, they're chosen, but they're not favored. Meaning God used the Jews to bring forth the message Messiah. But God is not going to force the Jews into heaven against their will any. Any more than anyone else. That Jesus is the sacrifice. Without the sacrifice, you've got to pay for your own sins.

Carlos Araso

Yeah, 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 helped me out with that. Our modern Jews still got chosen, Frank.

Dr. Frank Turek

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. Persecuted. So, yeah, they're the same people.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, I think. And we. 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Christ.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

No, you can be sincere and you can still be sincerely wrong. 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 9:11, 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 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 part in the world and they haven't been faithful to the covenant is part of how they would view that. And then a 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.

Carlos Araso

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.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's one reason we know it's not an invented story. Nobody's going to put their Messia on a cross like a crucified criminal.

Carlos Araso

That's right.

Dr. Frank Turek

Right. You know, I mean, it's. Anyone who's hung on a cross, according to Deuteronomy 21, is under God's curse.

Carlos Araso

There you go.

Dr. Frank Turek

And Jesus was under God's curse, the curse of sin we all put him under.

Carlos Araso

That's right.

Dr. Frank Turek

But 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.

Carlos Araso

And for faithful Jews to all of a sudden basically commit and worship Jesus and Christianity exploding from Judaism as we were talking about that is unheard of,

Dr. Frank Turek

not going to happen unless he really

Carlos Araso

rose from the Dead really was to

Pastor Paul Cunningham

highlight something that I think Islam. This is going to be a lot of your home turf, Frank. You're going to. You're going to get to. On a lot of this.

Carlos Araso

You say Islam.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Islam, yeah, I think is what we're 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, 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. 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, came 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 changes. 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 e 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.

Carlos Araso

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 Chat GPT, this is a photo representing a Sunni Islam imam.

Dr. Frank Turek

They got the five pillars up there.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Five pillars on the left.

Carlos Araso

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.

Dr. Frank Turek

Look at, look at. That's a Jeremiah 29:11 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 okay.

Carlos Araso

I was going to say, wait, wait. Either he's reading Arabic or, I don't know.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I was about to be like, man, that's a flex. I didn't know you read army, if

Carlos Araso

I'm not mistaken, that white monk 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. Founder, what do they believe? What's wrong with the world? Who issues for this religion?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Frank, I'll let you cook on this.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 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 Arianism, meaning Paul.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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.

Dr. Frank Turek

And 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. And 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 amount or charity for the poor and needy, 2%, just like Christians believe. 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 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

But we all believe the same thing.

Dr. Frank Turek

We're going to burn in hellfire. No, apparently not.

Carlos Araso

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. Something along the lines.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Go ahead.

Dr. Frank Turek

Chapter five. This says non believers are going to burn in hellfire. There you go.

Carlos Araso

So it's pretty clear.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 that's in the Hadith. Yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That sounds like quite an incentive then to do martyrhood.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yes.

Carlos Araso

So let me, let me ask you this. We already kind of touched on this. So we're going to probably do a 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?

Dr. Frank Turek

Anything. 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.

Carlos Araso

Explain that.

Dr. Frank Turek

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,

Pastor Paul Cunningham

which we said earlier is the only surefire way.

Dr. Frank Turek

Only. Only surefire.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

It's the only surefire way to do it.

Dr. Frank Turek

To avoid sure fire.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Exactly. And so I think even, I think, you know, here's maybe.

Dr. Frank Turek

Hey, can I say one other thing? 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. So it doesn't mean all Muslims believe this. No, we might say not all Christians, but believe basic Christian doctrine.

Carlos Araso

But 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?

Dr. Frank Turek

Why don't you take that one?

Carlos Araso

I will definitely let you guys take that.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I did not come see a theme of your.

Carlos Araso

Honestly, I would have loved to take it if, if I was ready for it. But in this case, I know Paul is more ready than me, so good.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I think. 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 being 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, in fact 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 9:29Among the people of the Book, which would be the Bible until they pay the jiza, which is basically the this fee with willing submission and fill themselves subdued. So that's basically saying oppress them and if they fight against them until they are actually willing to pay us a fee it gets worse. Surah 8. 39. 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 8:12. 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, 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.

Dr. Frank Turek

You.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Is is something a 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 different.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 Christianity. So thankfully there are moderates and 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.

Carlos Araso

What does that mean, Frank?

Dr. Frank Turek

It's not a chronological book. No, it's put together in size of surahs or chapters. And there are more peaceful suras that have been abrogated by later surahs which appear to be the more violent ones. Like Surah 9 is a late sura 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 ra. It's an ideology. And there are people from every different ethnic 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 Egypt who had to flee Egypt because his family's 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 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 Halvorson. And there are many scholars in this book. So if you want an overview of these world religions, it's right here.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Now, we gotta move on, I think, to Hinduism next. But mainly just hitting a couple things within, is you gotta see, at least originally.

Dr. Frank Turek

Hey, hey, let me say one thing. We're transitioning now from theism. Here's a way to conceptualize three great religious viewpoints. One is theism. That's God made all. The next is pantheism, God is all. And the third is atheism. No God at all.

Carlos Araso

Great.

Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Oh, yeah. No, actually, real quick, though, is on. 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. It's a. Hey, early Islam. And it would still say is today. It was a correction. Mean they say they saw polytheism, which is not true. There is one God, right? And that one God does not have a son. So it's. It was correcting polytheism around them, and it was correcting Christianity. 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've given a lot of people a lot of different things. I wanted to bring it all together and kind of just lay that out real quick.

Dr. Frank Turek

Can I mention one thing about how to reach Muslims on this?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, that'd be great.

Dr. Frank Turek

Okay, just one. There's many different directions you can go. It's something called the Islamic dilemma.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 really interesting.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah, the Islamic dilemma. Here it is. The Quran affirms the Bible is the word of God. And I usually quote Sura 5:46.7 on this. And the problem is that the Bible contradicts 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 600 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, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Right?

Dr. Frank Turek

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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

This is the dilemma.

Dr. Frank Turek

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, 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.

Carlos Araso

We'll get there till the end. On 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. Is it the Swatika?

Dr. Frank Turek

It looks like it doesn't it?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

It can look like it, but people don't need to conflate this with not.

Carlos Araso

Well, to my understanding, it was taken by the Nazis, but it's been a symbol that's been used in, in, in Hinduism for years prior, obviously before that. That's right. So, which is interesting. Let's, let's keep going here. So real quick, founder, what do they believe? What's wrong with the world? How do you fix it? Who is Jesus for this religion?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yeah, this, this can be a tough one, I think, for Christians to wrap their minds around because it's so foreign and it's, 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 have used 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 going to 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 what they would call good karma so that you can escape this 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 because I think this may have been one of our questions because 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 going to 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 our lack of a better term, a God called the Brahmin 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 got to 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 who you're talking to, they could believe very different things. What else would you add?

Dr. Frank Turek

I was gonna say, on one hand, they could be considered polytheistic. On the other, it could be considered polytheist. I mean, pantheistic, meaning that everything's 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, and 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, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 like, hey, if I tried to trip you in the hallway and then I fall down, be like, karma 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 we 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 places.

Carlos Araso

There's. There's Hinduism, karma, and then there's cultural karma.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yes.

Carlos Araso

Honestly, like, in. Most people probably are not thinking Hinduism, karma when they use that phrase, but they. They do believe in it. Like, in terms of. And we're about to talk about spiritual but not religious in just a second. But they will think, well, you know, karma means you do bad things, Frank. You will get bad things after because of what you just did.

Dr. Frank Turek

So it's like, what you. What you sow, you reap.

Carlos Araso

That's right. And so they'll say karma. Right. And so one. A couple of things. So we believe as Christians. Galatians, chapter 6, verse 7. What everyone sows, you will also reap that. That's called a consequence. But in. In terms of, like, karma as a. 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 cross. That's Jesus. He's the. The. 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Yes.

Carlos Araso

All right, we need to keep going.

Dr. Frank Turek

Those are good insights.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

I'll hold it. You did an amazing job. Yeah.

Carlos Araso

Oh, okay.

Dr. Frank Turek

Yeah, Keep going.

Carlos Araso

Let's keep going. Buddhism, Buddha. Okay, Here you go. We got a visual first.

Dr. Frank Turek

Oh, yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Is that me? Is that me?

Carlos Araso

What's his name is.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Okay, listen,

Dr. Frank Turek

that is Buddha. Cunningham is playing games here.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

He has more hair than I do, so I don't even know if that's a accurate representation of me. That's me as a. As a Buddhist.

Dr. Frank Turek

May. May all things be happy.

Carlos Araso

Okay, take that thing.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Wait.

Carlos Araso

Oh, okay. There's the right one.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Okay, that's great.

Dr. Frank Turek

This is a very orthodox show. We have Trinity putting these up.

Carlos Araso

Oh, okay. You're right. Trinity. There you go.

Dr. Frank Turek

May all things be happy. May all. What does that say? All beings be free from suffering. Look in the bottom right there.

Carlos Araso

There you go.

Dr. Frank Turek

They got the Eightfold Path. There it is, the Noble Eightfold Path. See it up there over the right shoulder? Oh, no, it changed.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And I've got that.

Dr. Frank Turek

It used to be Paul. Now you have glasses.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Who's that?

Carlos Araso

I know. Well, you know, I mean, somebody less cooler than Paul.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Less cooler than Paul. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that.

Carlos Araso

Okay, let's go ahead and tackle this. Founder, what do they believe? What's wrong with the world? Who is J?

Dr. Frank Turek

The Buddha was from about 563. Circa 563, we're not exactly sure, to about 483. So 5th 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, there's a problem here. From just a logical perspective, they don't think the self really exists 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 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, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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.

Carlos Araso

Define Nirvana, Paul.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

It's hard. Some people really, the word nirvana believe. Actually, Frank, do you remember the etymology of it?

Dr. Frank Turek

Well, no, I don't remember the entomology 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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, of our desires, and of our attachment to reality.

Dr. Frank Turek

The extinguishing of ourselves.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 end, so there is no next life. So that's even one thing helping people understand.

Dr. Frank Turek

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, how, how, how is that explained? That's what I don't understand.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Circular logic here. Okay, even like. Well, no, but even it kind of goes back to, I think what you did so well with Hinduism. I often tell people Buddhism and Hinduism are separate, but in a sense Buddhism was an easier, less endless path of 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 to be someone outside of you evaluating your comma. Well, just who is that and where did they come from? Some Buddhism of strands would identify there are some heavenly beings, but again I'm kind of like, and where do they come from?

Dr. Frank Turek

Right. And, and others don't. Others are atheistic, other forms of Buddhism.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 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, yeah, so I didn't give you a great answer there, but I haven't honestly gotten a good answer myself.

Dr. Frank Turek

Not.

Carlos Araso

I'm gonna ask you the next question, a 60 second question.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Just trying to keep us going.

Carlos Araso

We gotta, we got a couple more. Is Buddhism compatible, by the way? We can't say everything on all of these like this is kind of obvious. And a lot of these, likely we'll 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 we're there's so much on all of these. We're all kind of like, ah, we not want to say more. Let me just ask this last question. 60 second answer for you guys. Is Buddhism compatible with Christianity?

Dr. Frank Turek

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 right intention, right view, right conduct, that kind of thing, that's all good, but it denies the ultimate creation, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 something salvation comes through Christ. Buddhism teaches that the solution is enlightenment to escape this in this thing that actually doesn't really exist. That's.

Dr. Frank Turek

See, that's the. Yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And so in other words you say, is it compatible?

Dr. Frank Turek

Contradictory part of it.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And, 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 to simply be a good person. Now I do believe that God wants us to be people that are good because he is good. But that's actually not, not the point of, of existence. The point of existence is to know and worship the God who created us.

Dr. Frank Turek

And as a result of that, you will be good.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

And so 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.

Carlos Araso

We're going to go check on Buddhism, we're going to go to the next one. Atheism. Here's the visual, here's what we got right now. Oh, what is this? Wait, take a second to see what's going on here.

Dr. Frank Turek

We got Dawkins, we got Hitchens, we got.

Carlos Araso

That's a, that's, this has got to be a mistake.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Hey Frank, let me ask you.

Carlos Araso

Wait, hold on, hold on.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Do you have enough faith to be an atheist?

Carlos Araso

No, no, that's the right one. That's what we meant.

Dr. Frank Turek

There we go.

Carlos Araso

But Frank, if you check out in the back to the. Towards the right. Can you. Can you read it? Could you really see what it says?

Dr. Frank Turek

This man will convert me to Christianity. No, he won't. Only the Holy Spirit.

Carlos Araso

I think God's gonna use that, man.

Dr. Frank Turek

But God can use all of us.

Carlos Araso

He can use that. That's right, man. We got a couple of posters here. Atheist Beliefs and Science We Trust. Got a couple of books here. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Cosmos Skeptic, Atheist, Humanist. We got a Neil DeGrasse Tyson bust. There's a really good even.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Notice that this is really good.

Carlos Araso

The shirt says, think question, seek truth, be kind. We'll talk about that in just a second. We stand for equal rights, free speech. What else? Social justice.

Dr. Frank Turek

None of those things which you can justify without a standard beyond us.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Peace of tolerance. As long as you agree with us.

Carlos Araso

Yep. Science. Not science, not silence. Okay, so let's go quick, because these are the questions that I wanted to ask you, friend, because this is your field, Founder. What do they believe? What's wrong with the world? How do we fix it? Who is Jesus?

Dr. Frank Turek

Well, obviously there were people way back in Old Testament times that didn't believe in God.

Carlos Araso

There you go.

Dr. Frank Turek

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. 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 Nietzsche in the late 1800s, who essentially tried to live out the implications of atheism, that life has no meaning, there's no purpose, life is just nothingness. And he kind of of went mad trying to live it out. But here's what Nietzsche actually predicted. He died in 1900. He famously said, we've killed God. 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. Because atheistic regimes like Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, they all rose to kill millions of innocent people. Not that atheism 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

Pastor Paul Cunningham

no eternal consequences for everything. I do.

Carlos Araso

Frank, what do you mean when you say I don't have enough faith to be an atheist?

Dr. Frank Turek

I'm using faith in the sense the atheists use it, like Richard Dawkins, who is 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. That's a great distinction. Yeah, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. I'm saying that the evidence for God in 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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 and one of us believes that oh, obviously the most simple logical explanation is that this randomly came together. It just randomly came together. And the other one is no, it seems like this is very complex, very designed to like a fine tuning process is more, more obvious that someone created this and fine tuned to exactly what it is. And let's say we're arguing back and forth that 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 Austin, Austin goes with this is. Hey, is, is actually. Are atheists more rational? I'd say no, they're more irrational. Because at the end of the day you have to believe one of two things. Either everything came from nothing, 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 anytime 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 atheists don't.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's the biggest problem. They don't have a cause. They don't have an ultimate cause.

Carlos Araso

Well, I was going to ask you. Some of the posters said fight for justice. Justice, kindness, equality. Tell me why that seems to be a problem.

Dr. Frank Turek

Well, 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 give people equal rights. Whatever your claim is, moral claims, objective moral claims only make sense if God exists.

Carlos Araso

But wait, Frank, atheism is not a religion. We just don't believe in religion. What do you say to that?

Dr. Frank Turek

No, atheists, you know, they'll say, oh, I lack a belief in God.

Carlos Araso

Yeah, it's atheist, right? Like no theism. So what do you.

Dr. Frank Turek

Okay, well, first of all, if you just lack a belief in God, that's a psychological, 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 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 no, 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 Geissler used to say this. It's easy to smell a rotten egg. It's hard to let a better one. 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? Oh, I don't have a worldview. 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 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 fireworks 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 became just right for nonliving chemicals to bond together to, to form proteins. These disorganized proteins, though, through a lot of time and luck, eventually combine in such a way 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.

Carlos Araso

There you go.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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.

Carlos Araso

Yeah, that's great.

Dr. Frank Turek

We see effects.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That sounds, sounds like faith. There's something invisible. That's the best explanation for what is visible, right? Yeah, that's called faith.

Carlos Araso

We got atheism. Check. Last one. Spiritual but not religious. Here's the, here's the visual. There you go. This is somebody from California. According to ChatGPT, spiritual but not religious. You got everything happens for a reason. You got crystals, chakra, energy, the universe, candles. Focus on your flow. I think it's what it says.

Dr. Frank Turek

Vote the universe has your back.

Carlos Araso

The universe has. You are the magic.

Dr. Frank Turek

You are the magic.

Carlos Araso

Okay, so you're enough. So what, who, what's going on here? Founder, what do they believe? What's wrong with the world? Obviously this is not officially a religion. Explain.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That is you.

Dr. Frank Turek

That's right. Oh, yeah.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Founder, is you.

Carlos Araso

You from the universe?

Pastor Paul Cunningham

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, that you don't like. And so, and nowadays it's honestly, in a sense, kind of going back to where it 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, 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, 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 get 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 I tell people this is a little bit of. Reminds me of Elsa 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 just 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.

Carlos Araso

Yeah. And the Bible says that there is the 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. If it's not the Holy Spirit, what kind of spirit is it? And, and, and so, man, I'm, I'm hesitant. It's interesting because people say, you know, 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 the atheism and all like that kind of didn't work. So now there is a pursuit for spirit spirituality. And it's not Christianity, but it's some other sort of spirituality. Again, you want to be mindful of that, frankly.

Dr. Frank Turek

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, 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. Right. If I had to guess, and 99 times out of of 10, I'm right. Okay, See, 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. 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 is 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 runs, writes a book after they buy a new car, that Ford is evil and manuals poison everything. 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 designer set this universe up and how we should live. We shouldn't rebel against it, but many of us do.

Carlos Araso

Frank, I want to give you. Because we keep landing the plan, 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 just talked about?

Dr. Frank Turek

Well, as you said before, Christianity is based on historical events that you can investigate.

Carlos Araso

That's important.

Dr. Frank Turek

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 Christian Christianity is true. Number one, God exists. And you can know that from what we talked about earlier, the three great 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's 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.

Carlos Araso

There you go.

Dr. Frank Turek

It's. It's grace.

Carlos Araso

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 it is. They are. At their core, they're all different. And Christianity sends out in so many different ways. Most major religions, like you said, Frank, at the core, are about how you seek God. Christianity at its core, it's about how God seeks you. Genesis literally starts with God saying, adam, where are you? The name Adam is the name of the first, but it's also, 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 core message of Christianity, you mentioned this, Frank, recently, is not what you need to do. It's here's what has been done for you. Buddha's last words reportedly were strive on with diligence. Muhammad's message boils down to submit. That's the meaning of the word Islam. Rabbis would say, keep the law. Hindu gurus would say, fulfill your dharma. Jesus, on the other hand, said, it is finished on a bloody cross. Virtually every major religious founder points beyond himself to a path, a teaching or a system. Jesus points to himself. Buddha said, I am a teacher and points to enlightenment. Muhammad said, I am a prophet and points to Allah. Moses said, I am a messenger and points to Yahweh. Jesus said, I am God. Before Abraham I am, and points to himself. That's a big difference. And here's the last one. The Bible says in 1 John 4:8 that God is love. Again, united to this in Islam, Allah is Merciful, but he, Allah is not love. In Hinduism, you have ultimate reality, Brahman, an impersonal force or energy. You also have other gods portrayed. Portrayed us loving, but it is conditional on good works, rituals, or karma. In Buddhism, there is no personal God who is love. Only in Jesus, we see that love is not something that God does from afar or from a distance. Love is who God is as he comes near. And he does so in a personal and intimate way. And this is why. Romans 5, 8, God shows His love for you and me this way, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us only. Only Jesus does that. And so as we wrap. Last question, Frank, how do you share this with people with one question?

Dr. Frank Turek

You only need one question. Works for every one of these faiths. The one question is, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? Just ask that question.

Carlos Araso

Wow.

Dr. Frank Turek

Because that's the thing that separates Christianity from every other world religion. Religion. You can investigate it and discover whether or not it's true. You can do that.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

That's good.

Dr. Frank Turek

And so ask it. If people hesitate or say no, it's not a head problem, it's a heart problem. They don't want it to be true. So that's the question I use on college campuses all the time. Start there. Now, a variant of this question. If you want to take Christianity out of it because people think they have a negative idea of what Christianity is. The variant of the the question is this. If Jesus really did predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead to prove he was God, would you follow him? It's to see what they say. See what they say. Is it yes or no? If they hesitate or say no, you just need to pray.

Carlos Araso

One of the things I appreciate about you, Frank, is that, you know, in the Internet you see a lot of people fighting and debating and there is a place to debate arguments. The Bible calls us to debate arguments and to demolish arguments. But the Bible also causes to love people. And, you know, we never want to get to a point where we're destroying people and loving arguments. We want to love people and destroy arguments. And so I think you do that well. And I think it's an encouragement for us as well and for people joining right now, tuning in and kind of learning some of this stuff to be like, okay, let me use some of this stuff. So I can. We're called to go use this stuff not to destroy people, but to love people and destroy arguments for the sake of their souls, because we want them to meet Jesus. And so that's who we are. And I think you embody that well. So, man, I just want to thank you for that.

Dr. Frank Turek

This you guys do every week on here, and so does Pastor Josh, and I know he's going to be back next week, but people here who are just watching this. Now, I want you to go back and start where Carlos started talking, like four or five minutes ago, because that was a brilliant summary. So if you want to summarize everything we talked about, go back and listen to what Carlos. Carlos just said. See, this is why this is such an important podcast, ladies and gentlemen, talking about the most important issues for eternity right here on the live free podcast. And isn't it amazing? It's called Live Free. You can live free because you don't achieve it. You receive it. It's free right here.

Carlos Araso

Let's go. Frank, would you pray for us?

Dr. Frank Turek

Father, we're so blessed to be to. Able. Able to have a free country where we could present this. We're coming up on our 250th anniversary. We pray that Christians would acknowledge what we have here in this nation and do what they can to preserve our religious freedom. I thank you for the live free podcast and all the listeners out there who are becoming disciples through this show and through the scriptures and through the Holy Spirit. I pray for Pastor Josh as he rests. 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 Pointe Church and all those who are now trying to copy Lake Pointe, and they should, because they're doing great work here. We're emulating Jesus. Help us to emulate you and be ambassador, 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.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Amen.

Carlos Araso

Amen. Live free, brother.

Dr. Frank Turek

All right.

Pastor Paul Cunningham

Live free, brothers.

Carlos Araso

Sam,