Importing the Third World | (Ep. 414)

In this episode, Douglas Wilson returns to the question of immigration, arguing that the real issue is not immigration versus no immigration but rates of immigration. He then explores the morally neutral verb metastrepho, to turn, showing how turning from vice to virtue is repentance while turning the gospel is to pervert the gospel of Christ, before concluding with a review of Plato’s Revenge and its case that the spiritual world is a necessary, empirically demonstrable reality.

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What is Plodcast?

In the Plodcast, pastor Douglas Wilson covers anything related to theology and culture with his usual entertaining style. Whether it involves talking about Chestertonian Calvinism (not an oxymoron), the benefits of a Classical Christian education (not in that order), or the latest pomosexuality farce, the plodcast aims to apply all of Christ to all of life, for all the world. Douglas Wilson is an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian (pretty much in that order) and is politically to the right of Jeb Stuart.

Yeah, it's God. God don't ever do. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 414-414. So last week we talked about Minnesota fraud. And when you have the amount of money that's available from a country that is as rich and prodigal as ours is, and you have massive numbers of immigrants who have access to welfare benefits and that sort of thing. I mean, immigrants by the hundreds of thousands and by the millions. And that happens, you are just asking for trouble. Right? You're just asking for trouble. And the central problem is not this immigrant or that one. The central problem is the total package. Now I've used this illustration before and I may have used it on the podcast, but our online discussions of this whole subject have gotten so heated and so irrational that I think that it's important for us to go over the basics again. The issue is not immigration versus no immigration. The issue is rates of immigration and as I'm never tired of saying, buy what's standard. Let's say you imported just to make this situation very stark. Let's say you imported two million people from a third world country and you flew them all to a state, an American state that only had one million people in it like Wyoming. Okay? Let's say you took two million people from Ethiopia or two million people from Somalia or two million people from Nigeria and you dropped them down in Wyoming. And native, the Native Americans would be one million people and the immigrants are two million people. You've not just imported an individual immigrant and then multiply that individual many times over. You've also imported Somalia. You import the third world. If you import third worlders, you import the third world. The issue here is quantity. The issue is quantity. And because at a certain level, your ability to assimilate that quantity goes all to places, goes all to pieces. You can't assimilate anymore. The soil is saturated. You can't take anymore. So the illustration I've used, perhaps before, is let's say you are a Christian couple. You've got a couple of kids of your own and you and your wife decide that you want to minister to hurt and kids by taking in a couple of foster children. And so you do, you volunteer for the program. You go through the training and you take in a couple of foster children. And let's say it's going very, very well. Your kids are thriving. The foster children are thriving. Everybody's doing good. You've got four kids in the home and you're on top of it and you're loving everybody. Now let's say in this little happy scenario that one day a bus shows up in the front of the house with 28 new foster children and a guy from the government who says you have to take on these 28 new foster children. Now as dad is out there arguing with the bus driver, arguing with the government worker who's dropping these kids off, he is saying, we can't afford them. We can't take them. We have no room for them. This is not tenable. What would you think if the government worker then accused him of racism or accused him of being hostile to foster kids? Well, he's not hostile to foster kids. He was in the system because he already had two foster kids. But his response is, look, we were loving our own children and we were loving these two foster kids. And I think if it's myself that says it, I think we were doing a pretty good job. But if you drop these 28 kids off, we're not going to be loving anybody. Nobody is going to get love, care and attention. It's going to be a state of nature. It's going to be a state of anarchy. And so what's the difference? The difference is not foster children versus no foster children. The issue is quantity. Basically, you have imported so many foster children that you broke the system. And that's what's happened with immigration in the United States. We have imported so many people from other places that we have broken the system. And once the system is broken and you've established a pattern where you can't complain about these immigrants because to complain about, especially if you've got a government job, especially if you've got a government job in a blue state, if you complain about the immigrants, then you're tagged as a racist. You're the problem, right? You're the problem. And so consequently, the most flagrant abuses start to be committed and where justice is not executed upon the criminal, they're the heart of man is filled to do evil. Basically, people have come to believe that they've got this immunity shield and they can do the most outrageous things in front of everybody. And nobody can say anything because to say something would be to be a Trump supporter or to be a mega or to be a racist. The one thing that gives me hope about the future is in the long run, stupidity doesn't work. In the long run, stupidity is not a strategy. So continuing on with the podcast episode 414, there's some verbs that are morally neutral, but they can represent something quite sinful depending on where you place them. Our next entry in our hematological studies falls in this category. The innocent meaning of metastropho, metastropho, METAS, TRE, PHO, metastropho means simply to turn, simply to turn. But what are we talking about? Turning from what to what? If you turn from virtue to vice, that's a bad thing. If you turn from vice to virtue, that's repentance. In fact, the word conversion comes from Latin Converto, I turn around. So to turn from vice to virtue is repentance, that's a good thing. To turn from virtue to vice is the backslide or to apostatize. So what are we turning from and what are we turning to? There are two examples in the New Testament that are not describing sin, and then we'll come to the one that is. So in Acts 2-20, the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before that great notable day of the Lord comes. So the sun shall be turned into darkness, the moon will be turned into blood. So that's not a sin. Now this is the judgment that is the result of human sin, but the judgment itself is true and righteous. So that kind of turning is not morally problematic. The verb is also used when James is urging his readers to a spirit of repentance. Be afflicted and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning. There's a verb. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness. That's in James 4-9. So there you're turning from vice to virtue and you're turning from vice to virtue in a spirit of repentance, lamenting your previous evil behavior. The one instance where it's clearly referring to a sin is found in Galatians 1-7 to be exact, where our translators rendered it as pervert. To tinker with the gospel at all is a grievous sin. To shade the truth in a gospel presentation is a very serious sin indeed. So Galatians 1-7, Paul says, speaking of the gospel, the false gospel of the false teachers there, they've got this gospel which is not another, not another gospel, Paul saying, but there be some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ. So they would trouble you and literally would turn the gospel of Christ. Well, if the gospel is a glorious holy thing as it is to take that gospel and turn it, is to twist it, is to pervert it. No bueno, no good. So for our book review for the podcast, podcast 4-14, is a small book called Plato's Revenge, written by a gent named Klinghofer. Now, this is a book about some of the ramifications of intelligent design. It's about some of the ramifications of intelligent design. And it begins with the story of the gentleman, I don't know if you remember this episode from a few years ago, is that he was an editor of one of the Smithsonian's journals. And he published a peer-reviewed article in it by Stephen Meyer, a intelligent design advocate. Now the article was peer-reviewed, the article met all the standards and whatnot, but he published it and he got in a world of trouble for doing this thing. And this book sort of follows that that gent was sort of sent on a pilgrimage and an intellectual pilgrimage as a result and started asking questions that the materialists would rather you not ask. So why Plato's Revenge? What the book is arguing for is that the human genome, the human DNA, although human DNA is a vast library, it is not vast enough and does not account for everything that happens. Right? Put another way, there are non-material aspects to genetics. Not everything that you are is driven by the mechanics of DNA. And this is the sort of thing that is demonstrable where the outputs are not in line with the inputs. So if you have a, you know, you're familiar with garbage in, garbage out, right? Well, you also have to reckon with how much garbage in, how much garbage out. If you are taking a, some mechanical operation, like a desalination plant where you're turning saltwater into freshwater. So let's say you're inputting a gallon a minute into this machine and you're getting 10 gallons of freshwater out. Okay, you're putting in a gallon of saltwater a minute and you're getting 10 gallons of freshwater out a minute. It wouldn't take too long before somebody running this thing would say, hey, something else is going on. Something else is going on. The inputs that we, the inputs that we can count, the physical inputs that we're putting in do not account for everything. Right? It's way more happening than can be explained by these inputs. So this, this book, Plato's Revenge, it's not, it's an accessible book. If you, if you are well read in creationist literature and intelligent design literature, this book will be easy to follow and it is remarkable in that it shows, it demonstrates that the necessity of the spiritual world is something that can be empirically shown. The necessity of the spiritual world is something that can be empirically demonstrated. Yeah, it's God. God don't never change. He's God.