So this begs the question of what the heck is a Christian anyway, and what is Hegseth doing?

[chuckles] Yeah, it is...

Look, the, s- what I have said in my own commentary on this is the MAGA Mormons have made this bed, and they need to sleep in it because they've, uh, those of us in the church who, who don't appreciate, uh, Donald Trump and, and don't think we ought to have, uh, a, a serial sexual predator as our leader have been saying to other members of the church for years now, "They don't want you.

They want your vote.

They want your money.

They want what they can extract from you, and then they will discard you." Uh, and the, this is the first step in that direction.

And so this is the bed that they have made.

Tell me how we come to understand, or how you have come to understand that the Bible doesn't say the story that we think is the story.

So Dan, what do you, what do you wanna say to that?

I, I think this is where you and I would probably disagree because, um, I, I mentioned, uh, at the beginning that I wanted to look at when, when monotheism developed and, uh, for my second master's degree, and ended up going in a different direction.

However, when monotheism begins has always been, um, a focus of mine, and I've got the, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, their essay on monotheism I wrote and published last year, where I discuss, uh, the development of the concept.

And, and I argue that it's actually not in the Bible.

What-- Henry More came up with the term 1660, the grand mystery of godliness.

There is one God rhetoric, uh, that you've referred to in the, in the Bible, in Second Temple Jewish literature, in early Christian literature.

But I, I think that you see a, a, um, an effacing of this willingness to acknowledge a second God, as Philo calls it.

this same divinity

A different issue of does the Bible say that abortion is murder?

I don't think the Bible says any such thing whatsoever.

In fact, I think the only passage that's in the Bible that I think directly comments on the personhood of a fetus would go the other direction.

This is Exodus 21, verses 22 through 25, where we have this legislation about what to do should two men who are fighting injure a pregnant woman.

And there are two outcomes that are described.

One is the injury causes the woman to miscarry her child, in which case the penalty is that the husband, the father, assesses a fine.

And it seems to be arbitrated to ensure that it's not exorbitant.

Um, does the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination?

Uh, (laughs) so, so my question is, is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy?

Certainly not.

Um, there are, there are certainly times when in narratives God will say, "Show no mercy," or something like that.

Like, there...

And, and these are particularly problematic passages where God says, "You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, uh, the suckling baby.

Show no mercy." And so I, I think you could, you could s- interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that, but I think we can, we can point out that's a bad narrative and that's a, that's a bad message.

There's certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin, just in, in general.

And it seems that, like, that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, uh, well, A, like, a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who, who engage in the prosperity gospel.

H- how did you end up doing, uh, this type of work, for lack of a better term, fact checking, uh, people's conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram?

Yeah, that was- was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school.

Um, in fact, I think from- from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else, 'cause I- I have taught at, uh, at some universities, but never, uh, on a full-time basis.

I- I don't have a tenure track position or anything like that.

But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school, was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible.

There's a very big gap between those two.

And the more I learned about the Bible and- and academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me.

Uh, (laughs) so, so my question is, is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy?