Wisdom Wednesday – Ben Carson

Ben Carson Is Right How To Fix PC

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “I always try to tell listeners, and I always try to be consistent in this, I’ll have a horse in this race.  My horse is the truth.  If the truth differs from what my opinion may be, I have to then have the humility to defer to the truth.  The truth of the matter, and the historical record is so crystal clear on this.  It’s not worth debating or even arguing.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  . . . Ben Carson.  Before we get your comments on this and we talk about this from a philosophical point of view, let’s play digital media file 2A — we’ll do one at a time.  Let’s do 2A first so everybody is on the same page with this, so we know exactly what it is we’re talking about.

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Dr. Ben Carson: Regardless of their religion or affiliation, if they embrace American values and they place the Constitution at the top level, then I’m supportive of them. That was what I said first. That part nobody heard. By implication, that question being asked, if my initial response didn’t answer the question, then he was saying: What about somebody who is of a faith that does not traditionally separate church and state, that traditionally has a theocracy, that traditionally treats women in ways different than we do, treats gays in different ways than we do, subjugates other religions? Obviously that would not be something that would be consistent with American values and our Constitution.

[end audio file]

Mike:  So much there to unpack.  First of all, what faith is it that separates Church and State?

David Simpson:  It’s called secularism.

Mike:  Right.  So it’s the civil religion of the United States is what separates Church and State.

Simpson:  Yeah.  That’s what’s sad.  I think he has in his mind — actually, I think you agree.  I think Ben Carson is sincere.

Mike:  I totally do.  I only approach this from the point of view that there are some things in here that he’s saying, and the next clip especially, where he is right in the ballpark, he’s right there.  I don’t know that he realizes or other people realize just how close he is to that truth that you and I talk about all the time.

Simpson:  This might help.  I’ll lay this out and then we can go to the second clip.  He has a false dichotomy in his mind that the only two choices are a theocracy and a separation or a civil society.

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That’s not true.  There is a third way, which is the traditional way of all of Christendom, which is where you had the civil authority had its realm and the ecclesiastical authority had its realm.  Where they intersected, the ecclesiastical authority would advise on what was proper and moral.  They would keep the civil government from committing its own set of sins.

Mike:  Like sanctioning abortion, for example.

Simpson:  Little things like that.  Small, little things that pop up every now and then.

Mike:  Sanctioning sodomitical marriage.

Simpson:  Right.  They would go and ask: Hey, big guy, is this right?

Mike:  Then the big guy would go: How about no?

Simpson:  It wasn’t a marriage between the two because the Church has always said they should be separate, but in the sense that they don’t have the same domain.

Mike:  That is so important to understand and to know.  This began to end — this ended, what David just described, this ended in English-speaking climes anyway, it ended in the 16th century.  Henry VIII began it.  His son Edward VI continued it.  Mary of Tudor tried to reverse it.  Then Elizabeth I came in and cemented the deal and the secularized state version that we have today, we have currently been possessed of.

Simpson:  Oddly enough, Mike, what actually happened was he did create a theocracy.  He made himself — that’s right.  He made himself — so that’s what shows you that if you try to divorce the two things, you do not end up with a theocracy.  You actually end up with a secular society that recognizes no authority above the civil government.

Mike:  That’s what Henry did.  When he made himself — he was like: Well, I reject the Pope, but I’ll be the Pope of England.  I’ll be the head of what’s called the Church of England or the Anglican Church today.

Simpson:  And where did that devolve to?  It devolved to us.

Mike:  Exactly.  I always try to tell listeners, and I always try to be consistent in this, I’ll have a horse in this race.  My horse is the truth.  If the truth differs from what my opinion may be, I have to then have the humility to defer to the truth.  The truth of the matter, and the historical record is so crystal clear on this.  It’s not worth debating or even arguing — as a matter of fact, I can’t even imagine a scenario under which people would try and argue against, like Monsignor Calkins’ great book that we are going to republish, The English Reformation, which told the story that you and I basically just covered here.  To review here, prior to Henry VIII, England, as it existed, was a monarchy.  It was handed down from bloodline to bloodline, in the same bloodline for generation to generation.  Because Henry — Henry, by all accounts, before he lost his mind, was as devout of a Catholic as anyone ever was.

Simpson:  He was a great defender of the faith.

Mike:  He was a great — the Pope declared him —

Simpson:  He actually wrote —

Mike:  He wrote him a letter.

Simpson:  But he wrote an argument against Luther and all the shenanigans that was going on with that.

Mike:  In Germany at the time.  So Henry, by all accounts, was a very faithful, very pious man.  He just had a problem with lust.  Not only did he lust after women that he wasn’t married to, but he thought that he had to — there was something in his mind.  I can’t remember exactly where he got it from.  He thought he had to have a male heir.  He could not pass it on to a female.  Catherine of Aragon had given him Mary Tudor.  That wasn’t good enough.  He needed a boy.  Catherine of Aragon would not produce the male.  I think he produced one who was stillborn or died in infancy or something to that effect.  So then Anne Boleyn comes in.  And the one after Anne Boleyn.  Of course, he starts beheading them when they don’t do what’s supposed to happen here.

Prior to Henry VIII of England — his reign was 1518 to 1547, somewhere around in there.  Prior to Henry VIII, England, as a country, as a sovereign entity, subjected itself to exactly what David said, the ecclesiastical authority of Rome.  Here’s a great example of this.  Henry does not get to marry Catherine of Aragon if the Pope at the time doesn’t dissolve the prior marriage to King Philip, which was Henry’s brother.  Henry’s brother, King Philip, was married to Catherine of Aragon.  Of course, Philip died and Catherine said: We never consummated.  Then, of course, the Pope had to sign off on it.  How ironic that in order to get into trouble that he got into, Henry has to first go to the Pope and get out of the first marriage and then legally marry Catherine of Aragon.

Simpson:  I think he may have gotten his second wife, if it wasn’t his third.  In other words, he’d already been through the arrangement.  He pretty much signed a pact saying: Yes, this is what I want.  This is the end of the story.  This is my wife.

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Mike:  What happens after this is when Elizabeth takes over, Elizabeth then becomes the queen or the head of the Church of England, basically.  She then starts telling the Parliament: You need to do this, you need to do this.  They start passing the supremacy laws, penal acts, and all these things.  What happens then, and the great irony of ironies, is that now you’ve rejected the authority of the Vicar of Christ on earth, the Pope.  Then you have now gone to the vicar of whatever and the sovereign head of the State of England, which was Henry, Edward, Mary, and now Elizabeth.  What happens is that the Puritans, whose grandparents would have been Catholics, the Puritans go: Wait a minute.  We are our own Pope.  You guys have way too much pomp and circumstance.  We don’t like the gold.  We don’t like the crown.  We don’t like the silk and all that stuff.  So then they rejected authority.  David, it just kept rejecting from there until where the only authority that would be recognized is something like a constitution.  That’s where we’re at today.

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Simpson:  That was the fallback, right?  In other words: Wait a second, we see that we have a disintegration of a society because society can’t exist without authority, so everyone is rejecting everyone else’s authority.  I know, let’s go with the law.  We’re going to claim that we can have a written law that is supreme.  That’s the concept, right?  Here’s the problem.  What makes that law true?  Why is it right?  We have a Supreme Court to tell us when it’s right and when it’s wrong and how it’s supposed to be interpreted.

Mike:  How’s that working out for you?

Simpson:  How are they going to know?  What binds them?

Mike:  They just know, man.  They’re Supreme Court guys, like they act all Supreme Court-ish.

Simpson:  Look, if you think about this at all, you realize that’s true.  What should we be arguing for?  Which is what you said just a moment ago, which is we’ve got to be arguing for the truth.  And who is the supreme truth, the only truth, the truth, the life?  People will say that’s because you believe in Christ and you believe in the church that he founded.  Okay, show me a competitor.  Show me somebody else who resurrected himself.  Show me somebody else who even claimed to be God and then proved it with miracles.  I’m open to discussion, I am.

End Mike Church Show Transcript