Certain people love posting the Young Guns cover, now they can post this. October 2007: Three backbench Members of Congress take the photo, launch the brand, and build momentum. Two Speakers. One VP Nominee; Chairman of Ways and Means. Two Majority Leaders. Two Whips. Largest landslide election win since 1946. Not bad for three rank-and-file Members. #DealWithIt

🚨BREAKING: @FBI arrested a 17yo for allegedly plotting to assassinate @RepKeithSelf and stage a terror attack in Texas on behalf of ISIS. Grateful beyond words Keith and his family are safe. Radical Islam is already tearing through Europe. America's next if we don’t stop it.

A lot of supposedly smart people are revealing their ignorance in saying that the issues discussed in this video are either heresy or demonstrate an unfamiliarity with Christian theology. But the view described is simply traducianism: held in one degree or another by Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, the later Luther, John Milton, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, Augustus Strong, Gordon Clark, Millard Erickson, and Norman L. Geisler, just to name a few. So it’s not a fringe belief, even if not the dominant one (i.e., creationism). Traducianism believes that both the body and soul come into existence by the generative powers of the human zygote. The zygote does not just have biological potential but soulish potentialities as well—and that God has designed it this way. This is not to say that God is not involved: God is the primary cause of the creation of a new person, body and soul, and the parents are the secondary cause. But the relationship of these two causes is one of divine concurrence, not occasionalism: God concurs with the procreative sexual act of the mother and father and the generative powers of the combined sperm and egg. So even on traducianism, God knits us together in our mother’s womb. Traducianism has the advantage of explaining the corruption of the soul without positing that God is responsible for creating a fallen (defective) soul, or resorting to the proposition that it is the body which corrupts the soul when the two meet (which of course would naturally lead to a form of ascetic gnosticism, i.e., the body is evil and material desires must be shunned). Traducianism also has the advantage of explaining why children are like their parents *in non-physical ways.* There is a spiritual likeness, not just physical. Finally, one of the fascinating consequences of traducianism is that of origin essentialism, which holds that each person is a unique expression of their parents’ genetic material at a specific moment in time such that had you been born a month earlier or a month later, you wouldn’t be you—you would be a different person. Now, on creationism, God’s special act creates a soul and places it in the body during conception and early gestation. Since on Christianity the essence of the person is their soul, not their body, this means that on creationism you could have been born at any time, to any parents, in a totally different body, in a different culture, etc. On creationism, alternative possible worlds are not just mental exercises but worlds with you in it that God could have actualized. On traducianism, there is only one possible world history in which you exist: the one that currently is. This means that the chances of your existence are staggeringly unlikely—virtually zero—yet here you are. You could not have been born to any other parents; you couldn’t have been born at any other time; you couldn’t have any other body or spiritual/mental qualities. You are utterly unique, a true miracle. It’s mind-blowing, but also a testament to God’s awesome power and wisdom. Anyway, if you’re curious to learn more, read my analysis on pp. 68-83 in the text linked below.