Sevan Matossian (00:01):
10 years behind you. That’s what’s going on. I’m finally learning stuff that you said 10 years ago. Some of us are slower than others.
Russell Berger (00:12):
Like what?
Sevan Matossian (00:14):
Oh,
Russell Berger (00:17):
Not to pay attention to things people say on social media.
Sevan Matossian (00:20):
Baby killing is bad.
Russell Berger (00:22):
Oh,
Sevan Matossian (00:23):
Yeah. Yeah. What took me so long? What took me so long?
Russell Berger (00:30):
Hey, you’re not alone on that.
Sevan Matossian (00:32):
What took me so long? SI told you that 10 years ago. You shouldn’t, shouldn’t kill babies. I know. Fuck I know. Hey, welcome
Russell Berger (00:45):
To the team.
Sevan Matossian (00:46):
Thank you. I’m slow. Oh, look at my live stream to Facebook just isn’t working. I bet you that’s a
Russell Berger (00:58):
What’s going on here?
Sevan Matossian (00:59):
Hey. Oh, where are you? I like your background. I like your outfit. I like everything about you right now. Look
Russell Berger (01:04):
At you. You like my style?
Sevan Matossian (01:06):
Yeah.
Russell Berger (01:07):
Yeah. I’m in my office at home.
Sevan Matossian (01:09):
In what state is that?
Russell Berger (01:11):
North Alabama. In Huntsville, actually, just outside of Hansville.
Sevan Matossian (01:17):
So when I knew you, I think you moved there and you’ve always been there. Did you used to live in Santa Cruz for a second or no?
Russell Berger (01:28):
Yeah. Yeah. We lived in Capitola for two years.
Sevan Matossian (01:31):
Okay, that’s what I thought.
Russell Berger (01:32):
Okay. Yeah. We moved back here where my wife was having crazy health problems and we just needed to be near family. So that was like 20 13, 20 14. Came back here.
Sevan Matossian (01:43):
And that’s where you were born?
Russell Berger (01:47):
No, no, I was born in Groton, Connecticut Navy base. That was a Navy brat. My dad was on subs.
Sevan Matossian (01:55):
Oh no shit.
Russell Berger (01:56):
So we bounced all around and I ended up in a couple places in the southeast. Went to high school in Atlanta, and then my mom, her family is from Huntsville and my wife and her family are from Huntsville. So we just ended up back here.
Sevan Matossian (02:11):
And you have two kids and how old are they now?
Russell Berger (02:15):
My daughter is 15 and my son is 13.
Sevan Matossian (02:18):
Holy shit.
Russell Berger (02:19):
Yeah. That’s how I feel.
Sevan Matossian (02:22):
I was just thinking about that the other night. Last night, I was telling my wife, I go, oh man, there’s going to be a time when I just can’t just scoop ’em up and cuddle ’em anymore. God thirteens getting there, right?
Russell Berger (02:33):
Yeah, it’s getting there.
Sevan Matossian (02:34):
You can’t just pick him up and just hold him. He’ll be like, what are you doing? I’m my own.
Russell Berger (02:40):
My son’s a 13-year-old. He is still a kid. He’s in the teenage years now, and it’s weird because all of the other kids, his age in the neighborhood, kids that he meets who go to public school and have cell phones with social media and do all that crap,
Sevan Matossian (03:02):
Public school,
Russell Berger (03:03):
He’s so different from them that he can’t interact with them. He still wants to climb trees and go fishing and play with trucks, which is, I love it. I don’t want that to change.
Sevan Matossian (03:15):
So they think he’s the weird homeschool kid, or do they like him? Do they kind of look up to him? They’re like, damn, he still got his swagger. I wish I had that.
Russell Berger (03:23):
Yeah. It’s funny. My kids are liked by the homeschool kids and my kids will tolerate, sorry, my kids are liked by the public school kids, but my kids will tolerate and sometimes not tolerate the public school kids in the neighborhood they don’t know how to interact with, they’re like, Hey, let’s go out to the creek and throw rocks and stuff. And they’re like, no, I want to play Fortnite.
Sevan Matossian (03:45):
They need a bowl of Cheerios.
Russell Berger (03:46):
Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (03:50):
My kids trip on the other kids too. The other kids really like them. You’re right. The other kids really like them, and my kids are really nice. Obviously they don’t spend half the day fighting and competing with other kids.
Russell Berger (04:01):
Really? My kids are the fun, dangerous kids in the neighborhood.
Sevan Matossian (04:06):
If the Frisbee goes up in the tree, they want your kids there. Your kids will go up and get it.
Russell Berger (04:10):
Yeah, that’s right.
Sevan Matossian (04:11):
Yeah. Someone has to climb a fence. Someone has to talk to the cops or an adult. Your kids can do that.
Russell Berger (04:15):
Somebody’s got to pick up a snake or, yeah.
Sevan Matossian (04:18):
God, that’s so cool.
Russell Berger (04:20):
Yeah. Your kids are homeschooled, right?
Sevan Matossian (04:22):
Yeah. One of them went to kindergarten before he was homeschooled, so he got a little experience and the other two have never been, my wife signed him up for this, I don’t know what to call it, but it’s like a literary class. It’s basically you read a book at home with your kids and then you send your kids somewhere else for three hours and then all the kids get in the room and then they talk about the book. That’s awesome. And that was the first time my kid, that’s the longest my kids have ever been away from me or my wife, even though my wife was just downstairs. It was crazy. They came out like new people. They came out all shit. We spent three hours by ourselves. It was crazy.
Russell Berger (05:02):
Yeah. People ask me, what do you do for homeschool curriculum? And I assign books. My kids read books and make ’em write reflection papers and answer questions aside from the math that we outsource. You can get an amazing education from reading good books.
Sevan Matossian (05:20):
Do you think the public school system can be, in a perfect world, do you think it can be saved or do you just think that it’s a mistake to just, it’s going down the wrong path, sending kids in large groups to be educated by the government?
Russell Berger (05:35):
Yes.
Sevan Matossian (05:37):
So both you think that there is somewhere where you could have some sort of education program that’s solid for your kids. What about this? What about before we get to that, what about this thing? And I know people are going to be like, Hey, the world’s not set up like that. Not everyone can do that, but there is this weird component that I realize until I started homeschooling. It’s like you found some girl, you fell in love with her, you fornicated with her and had kids, and now you’re going to send them away to let someone else raise them for eight hours a day for 15 years. I mean, it doesn’t sit well with me anymore. It’s like, wait a second. Those are my, it’s like I admire the guy who takes his dog everywhere. The guy who has the border calling the Jeep with no leash, and it just goes everywhere with him and you’re like, fuck. That’s a good life for him and the dog as opposed to just
Russell Berger (06:34):
Meanwhile, his kids are being raised by the government.
Sevan Matossian (06:39):
Something just seems awful. Don’t have kids if you don’t want to raise them. To me,
Russell Berger (06:47):
The family is designed the way it is for mother and father to raise their children and sending your kids off to public school. I think for most, I can understand why some people would do that. I understand there’s some situations where if you
Sevan Matossian (07:06):
Work at seven 11 and you have a nine-year-old kid, bring your kid to work with you. He needs to start working the register, stalking the shelves, seeing the guy. Why does the guy who smoke cigarettes have his teeth missing? How come the drunk guy’s really nice, but fucking smells like he pooped his pants? Why did the price of chewing gum go up from a dollar to $5 a pack in the six years? Just take your kid to work with you at seven 11. Why not agree?
Russell Berger (07:30):
It’s called an apprenticeship.
Sevan Matossian (07:31):
Yeah.
Russell Berger (07:32):
Yeah. I want to be sympathetic towards people who maybe just haven’t thought well about this and think it’s the best option for them. But I also like to sit down with that person and explain why I think they’re probably wrong.
Sevan Matossian (07:47):
My kids were going to a public school that was $2,300, sorry, private school. That was $2,300 a month. So that ends up being $7,000 a month for three kids, and it’s a Montessori school. Then of course there were half the kids who went there were on scholarship or got to go for free. I live in Santa Cruz. When I lost my job, there was no way that was going to happen anymore. Oh yeah. I just brought everyone home.
Russell Berger (08:12):
Isn’t it better?
Sevan Matossian (08:13):
Yeah. I watched my wife teach my kids how to read and write and do math. I can’t even fucking believe it. She’s like, I didn’t do it, did it? I’m like, no, you did it.
Russell Berger (08:22):
Kuman did it. Yeah. The public school systems are a disaster. I’d like to abolish ’em just completely, but don’t think that’s ever going to happen. But there are ways that we could make that better. And a big part of that is localism. The communal school was the model for a hundred years. He had a local community that paid a tutor. A teacher would give ’em room and board, give ’em a salary, and they just shuttled all their kids down to the end of the town and they sat in a one room schoolhouse and learned together that the community controlled to an extent who was teaching and what they were teaching.
Sevan Matossian (09:03):
How does that comport with getting rid of schools? I’m sorry? You said you’d abolish schools, but now you’re saying you would have a school.
Russell Berger (09:09):
Yeah. I’m not against communal schooling. I’m against the federalization of the public school system
Sevan Matossian (09:15):
For the
Russell Berger (09:15):
Department of Education. I can’t remember when they were stood up. It wasn’t that long ago is a big part of the problem of why public schools are mostly terrible. So yeah, I don’t want my kids in a public school and my kids don’t want to be in a public school. And it’s crazy. I think there are a lot of people now who have started homeschooling their kids at a young age and they see the contrast. They see the way their kids behave differently, the way they’re actually learning stuff, the way they’re getting to spend quality time with their kids and teach them values that the school system is probably not teaching. Maybe also undermining and yeah, it’s like when you walk out of a room that smells like garbage, and then you come back in, you’re like, oh, wow, that was terrible. And I just got used to it
Sevan Matossian (10:08):
Because I’m in Santa Cruz and my kids are always out doing things. I know a lot of the other parents, so you start seeing a lot of the other parents, you’ll see them in jiujitsu or soccer or just wherever at the park or at the 4th of July parade or at tennis because all the parents are taking their kids to different places, trying to figure out what their kids should be involved in. And there’s this one group of these two kids, eight and six, who are kind of on the same circuit as us, their parents. We became friends and their kids are sort of now doing everything we’re doing. And at first they’re like, man, this is a lot that you’re doing with your kids. I’m like, well, you got to pull your kids out of school if you want to do this circuit. And so they ended up pulling their kids out of school and they can’t even believe what happened to their oldest daughter. Total problem child completely went away. And it was basically her just trying to compete with the other kids at the school and lying had set in and exaggerating and being mean to people in order to impress other people. And they said, shit, all that shit went away. All the behaviors went away. And I was like, maybe that’s why it’s so easy, parenting so easy for me. Maybe it’s because I always say I have discipline and structure around my kids and crazy boundaries, but maybe it’s just, just not learning shit from other kids.
Russell Berger (11:20):
I think that’s probably right. Yeah. We joke
Sevan Matossian (11:22):
Parent.
Russell Berger (11:25):
We joke and say the government’s raising your kids in public school. It’s actually other kids raising your kids.
Sevan Matossian (11:30):
Right, right. Good point. Right?
Russell Berger (11:32):
30 kids in one teacher, they’re being raised in this tribalistic youth group that’s mostly influenced by TikTok. And what do you get? Like you said, you get competition, you get performative behaviors, you get lying, you get abuse. It’s the norm. I mean, it’s probably what it’s like in prison.
Sevan Matossian (11:55):
Yeah. When we say competition, I’m not talking about competition like you and your buddies are down at the creek trying to see who a good, who can kill the most butterflies with rocks. Yeah. It’s not like that at all. It’s who can bring a cell phone to school who has the most expensive shoes? Yeah, it’s crazy shit. Great point by Dan, his first ever on the show. But I mean, I guess even a broken clock is wrong, right? Twice a day. It’s not about where they go to school, it’s about what examples are set at home every day. I don’t agree with the first part of the sentence, but yeah, man. The examples at home are
Russell Berger (12:28):
How are they getting those examples at home? If they’re at school from seven to three 30?
Sevan Matossian (12:32):
Right. Well,
Russell Berger (12:34):
You can try and make up for it with the little bit of time you have with your kids at the end of the day when they’re tired and hungry. But I’d rather have more time with my kids to influence them and shape them.
Sevan Matossian (12:46):
And when you’re tired and hungry,
Russell Berger (12:48):
Right,
Sevan Matossian (12:49):
You’re tired and hungry and they’re tired and hungry. In all fairness, when my kids are home, I’d say 80% of the time they’re at home. That’s their time. They’re in the backyard. They’re like, fuck, I’ve been with you all day. I’m going in the backyard. Or me and my brothers are going to go in the garage and see you can jump the highest or some shit. So I mean, they don’t even want to be with me. Do you let your kids watch TV wrestle?
Russell Berger (13:18):
We watch TV together and we only do it occasionally and we do it as a family thing. We have one television in the house. It’s in my wife and my bedroom, and we don’t actually have cable. We just basically stream YouTube or whatever video we want to watch with them. And yeah, we do it as a communal thing. We’ll get on YouTube and play quiz games, the guest, the movie by the soundtrack quiz game, or we’ll watch some stupid meme video and see who can laugh. Go the longest without laughing. We’ll watch some documentaries, but yeah, we don’t watch a lot of television.
Sevan Matossian (13:53):
Do you let ’em do any Disney stuff? Do you let ’em watch Trolls or Batman or any of that stuff?
Russell Berger (14:00):
No, and the best part is they don’t have a taste for it. They don’t want to watch.
Sevan Matossian (14:04):
Wow.
Russell Berger (14:05):
It’s just like good food. You feed your kids good food and they eat garbage, and they’re like, yeah, I get why people eat that, but it makes me feel bad. It’s the same thing with media. What media they consume shapes their tastes, and when they get something that’s radically different and not good, they can sense it,
Sevan Matossian (14:24):
But you had to start ’em off like that. You had to be strict like that. So I’ve let my kids watch some pretty shitty TV and they’re into some pretty shitty tv. There’s this movie called Trolls, and although they’ve probably only been to the movies, I don’t know, 10 times in their life, they did go to the movies and see that movie on a snowy day in Idaho and holy shit, man, they’re so into it. That’s funny. They want to come home and watch it over and over, but food a hundred percent, they’ll see a bowl of ice cream and they won’t run to it. They know. They’re like, Ooh, that’s not going to, somehow they figure it out better than I did that. That’s not going to make me feel good.
Russell Berger (14:59):
You have to balance that. You don’t want to completely remove all of those temptations and experiences from their life. Then they’re going to leave your house and be like, what’s all this good stuff dad’s been keeping from me forever? You won’t let them figure it out on their own. Give them a little bit of a leash at some point.
Sevan Matossian (15:16):
Well, on Halloween, pretty much I tell them, Hey, when we come back, you can eat candy, but when you wake up in the morning, it’s all going to be gone. And usually five pieces in the last probably three Halloweens, they’re sick,
Russell Berger (15:31):
They’re done.
Sevan Matossian (15:32):
Yeah, they’re done. They’re bombed. They’ll even say, why’d you let us do it, Mike? My kid goes to public schools. No, your kid only goes to one public school, but I hear you. My kid goes to public schools and our neighborhood kids also and our neighborhood kids also. So all of ’em go to public school. They all play outside more than video games. It’s the parents, parents, parents. I went to public school. I didn’t play video games well until they came out and I played outside all day, but my mom was at work and boy, I learned some crazy shit from those kids. I learned some crazy shit and I saw some crazy shit and some crazy shit went down.
Russell Berger (16:12):
Yeah, I just want to repeat that. Yeah, it’s not just the public school, I get that. But when you’re exposed to bad behaviors and bad values and the undermining of your values from 7:00 AM to three 30 each day, you really have to be very loud and very assertive with your parenting to overcome that. You’re fighting a losing battle in terms of just time and influence with your kids, so you can be the greatest parent in the world. And then again, from the entire time they’re at school, they’re absorbing. They’re absorbing all of the things around them from their peers, and it is going to have an impact on their behavior.
Sevan Matossian (16:53):
Listen to this, by the way, this wasn’t supposed to be a homeschooling show. Augustus Link public schooling will most likely give you normal kids. What do you mean? Like septum ring blue hair and want to try normal. I hear you normal, but homeschooling will either result in a very well-behaved. Kids like Sevans are completely batshit crazy depending on who’s teaching. Listen, if you’re smoking crack at home and that’s the reason why your kids are homeschooled, yeah, they’re going to end up not
Russell Berger (17:25):
What we’re talking about.
Sevan Matossian (17:27):
But boy,
Russell Berger (17:29):
You send your kid to public school and suddenly they are wearing cattier and they want to pee in a litter box.
Sevan Matossian (17:34):
I live in a small town, I think, I don’t know, 30,000 people. My neighbors have donkeys. There’s turkeys running wild in the streets. But I am 17 miles away from the headquarters of Apple, one of the richest company in the world.
Russell Berger (17:57):
Never heard of them.
Sevan Matossian (17:58):
But I see the kids on the corner, and first I wouldn’t want my kids dressing like that and behaving like that. The shit I see, no, I can’t even fucking believe what I see, especially from the girls. I cannot fucking believe what I see.
Russell Berger (18:18):
Yeah, girls have it hardest for sure. I mean, I started homeschooling my kids because we wanted them taught from a Christian worldview. And public schools are not religiously neutral. They’re teaching your kids from the religion of secularism.
Sevan Matossian (18:32):
What does that mean? What does that mean? Secularism
Russell Berger (18:36):
Just a religious view that it’s sort of a self-deception. It’s the view that you can be religion free, you can be free of religious biases, and you can teach the world from a religiously neutral perspective. Not only is that not true, but it itself becomes a religion that values humanism and human reason and autonomy and hedonism, and that’s taught in public schools by default. It’s by design.
Sevan Matossian (19:06):
Hold on a second. We’ll get to the girl thing. I want to go into that secularism thing in a second. So
(19:14):
Are you saying that everyone has to have a religion? Just like if I ask you what’s in your mouth, you can say nothing or you can say my tongue or you can say tobacco. Yeah, you could say a piece of ice cream to someone to say, I’m not religious, is to say I don’t have a mouth. They’re just a fucking liar. Everyone has to do, you have to have a religion. I think I’m just starting to understand maybe that that’s a true statement in the last five years, that to say you don’t have a religion, then that becomes your religion. And I’m like, oh, shit. That’s bizarre. One more thing I’d like to throw out there is since I wasn’t raised with a religion, is that why I didn’t learn about values until I was 45? Because people, I hear people say always they have values and morals, and I’m like, I don’t think I have any of those. But then recently since I had kids, I realized I started having values.
Russell Berger (20:10):
So people
Sevan Matossian (20:11):
Who are religious get values. It comes with values when you’re aware of your religion.
Russell Berger (20:15):
So you were correct when you said everybody has a religion. If you say, I don’t have a religion, you’re making a religious claim, you’re making a claim about religion. It is part of your worldview. And really this comes down to how you define religion, secularists. This secular humanism is what it used to be called. It was a self-defined religion and is now backing away from that over the last several decades. That view says that you can be without religion, but then they just replace all of the things that religion is with secular ideals and values and epistemology. And so it is a religion. It just tries to be a religion without any reference to God. Give me
Sevan Matossian (20:56):
An example. So when you say the earth was created from Big Bang, if I say I’m not religious, and then I say, what do you think? That’s
Russell Berger (21:04):
A creation myth. You have a story of creation that’s part of your religion.
Sevan Matossian (21:08):
Okay, so you do have a religion, want to, and as you
Russell Berger (21:10):
Said, you weren’t raised with values, but you have values. You had a moral standard by which you judge behaviors around you. You just didn’t have it structured and codified and written down somewhere or taught to you in a formal way. Everybody has that,
Sevan Matossian (21:27):
Right? Right. So if I saw a kid getting picked on at school, sometimes I would cry and those were because somehow I had values or morals that were being, or I feel like I’d have to go over and stand up for the kid.
Russell Berger (21:42):
I mean, we
Sevan Matossian (21:44):
All, but no one ever explained to me what that is. I guess my mom would say, treat people how you want to be treated. She’d always tell me that
Russell Berger (21:51):
Something like the golden rule, we all have moral intuitions written on our heart. By God, we’re born that way, and we walk around with ’em, and yes, they get corrupted by our own sin and our own selfishness. But some element of that exists in every human being, and everybody walks around with their own moral reasoning and makes judgements about things. And those are all fundamentally religious beliefs. So when your public school teaches your kid, hey, it is not only morally acceptable, but good and worthy of celebration that this little boy is taking hormones and wanting his penis cut off. He’s actually a little girl. Inside that public school is teaching your kids something theological about design and about the teleology of human existence, about what a human is, and basically about what should structure our identity so that public school is teaching us that we have a poetic or an internal identity like you are what you feel you are not, you are what reality around you says you are. And that public school is also teaching something about morals. You must celebrate this behavior that is a moral imposition on our kids. And so all of that is religious, whether they claim it is or not.
Sevan Matossian (23:09):
Caleb, can we see what moral is? Just one second. I need to help with some of these words. Yeah. Wow. So there’s a demand on taking a moral position when they say a lesson, especially one concerning what is right or prudent, that can be derived from a story, a piece of information or an experience, a person’s standards of behaviors, beliefs concerning what is and not acceptable for them to do.
Russell Berger (23:33):
So that second entry is the one that all people have and is fundamentally part of your religion.
Sevan Matossian (23:42):
So is it a complete misnomer? Is it just completely not true? If someone says, I’m not religious, are they really saying I’m just not conscious of my own religion?
Russell Berger (23:53):
That’s correct. Or they’re using a very peculiar and specific definition of religion that only is those religions that they want to reject and not their own.
Sevan Matossian (24:04):
So when you look up religion too, Caleb, thank you. So maybe religion is your internal rules of behavior.
Russell Berger (24:12):
It’s an aspect of what your religion is aspect. So religion encompasses all sorts of things. What do you believe is right and wrong? Why do you think we’re here? What’s the meaning of life? Where do we come from? Who are we obligated to obey when we do these right and wrong things? Where are we going when we die? All of these are religious questions and everyone who has an answer to any of that has a religious perspective, has a religion.
Sevan Matossian (24:36):
The belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers.
Russell Berger (24:42):
That is a modern definition that is heavily influenced by secularism, which is the attempt to carve out this special realm of beliefs that is free from First amendment violations. So if I say I’m secular and I have all these religious views, but I can convince you that that’s not a religion, well now I can teach it to your kids and your tax dollars will pay for it.
Sevan Matossian (25:04):
Oh, wow.
Russell Berger (25:06):
Now, I’m not teaching a religion in public schools, but there’s a Supreme Court case that determined this. There was actually about, I think it was in the sixties, there’s a Supreme Court case saying, Hey, secular humanism is a religion. Why are we having our kids taught this in public schools? And the Supreme Court went with the secularists when they backed away from the definition of, Hey, we’re a humanist religion. They dropped that and the Supreme Court said, yeah, they’re not a religion. They can teach it.
Sevan Matossian (25:34):
Wow. There’s something I want to play with you that’s fucking crazy. Along those same lines, can you pull up Caleb, my Instagram? I don’t know who this is. I saw this on Instagram on Rebel News, and it’s a guy from Canada. Yeah, listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Do you view this as a parental rights issue at
Randall Garrison (25:59):
All? Well, I’d like to say first of all, there’s no such thing as parental rights in Canada. There are parental responsibilities, and in Canadian family law, the primary responsibility of parents is to support and affirm their kids. Children have rights in Canada, and these kind of policies restrict the rights that children have in Canada. Do
Sevan Matossian (26:15):
You view, listen, watch this. Do you view parental rights as an issue at all? Play one more sentence, Caleb, here we go. A
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Rights issue at
Randall Garrison (26:23):
All. Well, I’d like to say, first of all, there’s no such thing as parental rights in Canada.
Sevan Matossian (26:27):
One more
Randall Garrison (26:28):
Parental responsibilities,
Sevan Matossian (26:29):
One more.
Randall Garrison (26:30):
And in Canadian family law, the primary responsibility,
Sevan Matossian (26:33):
Canadian family law. So did he just say, the government owns your kids, not the parents. When he says they’re run by Canadian family law. Sure.
Russell Berger (26:43):
Law. So what he just said is, the only rights you have are the rights that Canadian government has agreed to give you.
Sevan Matossian (26:51):
Yeah.
Russell Berger (26:52):
Your rights are not based on anything outside of what we say.
Sevan Matossian (26:56):
That’s some crazy word. Fuckery. Randall Garrison.
Russell Berger (27:01):
Hey, you know how people will talk about the Second Amendment and be like, yeah, it’s for hunting and sport. This is why we have a Second Amendment.
Sevan Matossian (27:10):
So when this guy comes and takes your kid, you just fucking, yeah,
Russell Berger (27:13):
There’s a second amendment so that you can defend yourself against status like that. And so you can uphold the first amendment.
Sevan Matossian (27:20):
What is the status?
Russell Berger (27:22):
Someone like him who is, I’m presuming this guy’s religion is worship of the state. So think about it. Where do your rights come from as a human being?
Sevan Matossian (27:36):
I guess a cooperation from other, my neighbor not coming over here and beating me up and taking my shit.
Russell Berger (27:41):
So that’s an application of your rights. That’s how you can see you have them, but where do they come from? They don’t come from your neighbor. Then your neighbors could all get together and say, yeah, we have rights. But that seven guy, he’s not human. He doesn’t have rights,
Sevan Matossian (27:54):
So I don’t know where they come from.
Russell Berger (27:57):
They come from your creator. They’re inherent in you by design. This is what the Declaration of Independence acknowledges that by design we are created
Sevan Matossian (28:07):
By God. That’s not true though. That’s just like a supposition, right? That we make.
Russell Berger (28:12):
Oh no, it’s true. You don’t have to agree with it, but if you don’t ground your rights as an image bearer of God in you inherently is just the fact that you’re a human being who breathes and exists. If your rights are based on anything else, then you end up with what that guy just in that clip said, which is actually, no, your rights come from the government, and if your rights come from the government, then we can just determine at whim which ones you have and which ones you don’t. This is why abortion is a problem.
Sevan Matossian (28:43):
Before you go too much further, you’re touching on something, which is the reason why in the last 10 years I’ve really accepted Christianity. Even though I’m not a Christian. I understand the crazy importance of it for my freedom. I’m like, okay, I haven’t been called by God. There’s no one talking. I’m open to it. I just haven’t been called at all. But so can you go back and touch on that more? Why is it important that we have this, what I call a supposition, that we were born with rights?
Russell Berger (29:27):
Yeah. So we’re created with inherent dignity and value as image bearers of God, every single person on earth. That supposition was the basis for things like what our founders put in the Declaration of Independence, that we have inalienable rights given to us by our creator.
Sevan Matossian (29:44):
Yeah, that’s the word. Inalienable
Russell Berger (29:46):
Rights. And so when you recognize that your dignity and value, your humanness, that the image of God in you comes from something external to what any of us think about it, then when I stand up.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
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