Gallup and Rasumussen polling groups are repeatedly showing that America's trust in the mainstream media is at an alltime low. Why is that? Moreover, America's Founders said they'd rather have a Press without a Government than a Government without a Press. Why? Why frame it like that? Why is a free (and truthful) press so critical for a nation? Then Mark and I move on to discuss the ways that Christians get programmed and played by the Media: emotion over logic, incrementalism, over-simplification, fomenting tribalism, mis-reporting, and more. But we don't just analyze the knotty situation, we also offer means and sources of discernment. Along the way Ed shares what a policeman friend of his said about the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Come laugh and think with us!

Gallup tells us that somewhere between 60%-70% of Americans identify as Christians; that's pretty great. The Barna Group recently produced poll results that showed Idaho was #7 in the nation for the percentage of its citizens who embrace a Christian worldview, 7%. Alabama came in first with 12.6% of their citizens holding a Christian worldview; those are fairly paltry. And those two studies together clarify that while there are tens of millions of American Christians, a much much smaller percentage of them actually embrace a biblical worldview. Why? Well, as this series has asserted, because a massive slab of Christians live programmed by the Matrix. How does that happen? Significantly by Scripture twisting. In this conversational episode Mark and I discuss various kinds of Scripture twisting, some big-picture hermeneutical issues that cause the Bible to be erroneously interpreted, and the distinction between those who intentionally bend the Bible to their aims versus those who just misread it. Come laugh and think with us!

We might be stunned to realize it, but the characteristic of nice never shows up anywhere in the Bible. God is never called nice. Christian virtue, the fruit of the Spirit, never includes nice. Jesus was never described as nice. There aren't even any biblical stories about someone being nice. So why then is it so prevalent in Christian sub-culture today? Or worse, how does being nice make us susceptible to being manipulated and programmed? How does the quality of nice—and neither Mark nor I are against nice people!—lead to resentment? How is nice compared to kindness? Come and think with us about how NICE is a marvelous way for Christians to get sucked into the Matrix.