The Biblical View of Immigrants

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Cecil Cicirello (0:53)

What about us sending weapons and arms and training people in other countries to terrorize their own citizens? And then they flee those places and come here. We create a lot of problems in the world, and then we close our doors when we don't want to see the problems that we created.

Dan Beecher (1:09)

I love that we're proposing a You Broke It, You Bought It view of immigration.

Cecil Cicirello (1:15)

That's a great way to put it.

Craig Mousin (1:16)

I'm going to quote you on that. I love that.

Dan McClellan (1:23)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:24)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:26)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:38)

Things are good, man. We've got some cool guests on the show today, and I am eager to ask some questions. So I'm just going to dive in and introduce who we got here.

Dan McClellan (1:49)

All right, let's do it.

Dan Beecher (1:51)

These are the two gentlemen that make up the Lawful Assembly podcast. This is Cecil Cicirello and craig Mousin. That's Reverend craig Mousin JD, if you want to get all kinds of crazy about it. These two guys are... Cecil is, like me, a ding-dong with a bunch of other podcasts out here. They're an atheist, a secular humanist. And craig, you are a professor at the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University, your assistant minister for immigrant justice at the Wellington United Church of Christ.

How many more appellations and affiliations do you need before you're done? That's what I want to know.

Cecil Cicirello (2:45)

And hold on now, before craig goes, you went to all the trouble to ask him. When you... Here's what I want you to say. It's spelled P-O-D-C-A-S-T-R. That's what I do. You are a podcaster.

Dan Beecher (2:59)

That's right.

Cecil Cicirello (3:00)

That's pretty much the only thing I do. What I did was I found really smart people to talk to. And that's what I got in, craig.

Dan Beecher (3:07)

And you're actually a wonderful podcaster. People should check out Cognitive Dissonance, which is an amazing show.

And you're also on Citation Needed, which is a great show. So some really good content out there. But today, we're going to be diving into this show, which is the Lawful Assembly, and sort of talking about one point of crossover that your show and our show kind of have. Regardless of the atheist and the believer dynamic, which I don't know how you guys think that's going to work, because honestly, what do you guys just yell at each other every episode? Is that all you do? It just seems impossible.

Cecil Cicirello (3:44)

I think our listeners would want more of that, actually. Our listeners want more of that, to be honest. They want more yelling.

Dan Beecher (3:49)

Yeah. Everybody that I tell about our show, they think, oh, it's going to be a debate show. And it's like, no, I just defer to Dan on everything.

Craig Mousin (3:57)

That's what I do, too. wait a second there.

Dan Beecher (4:04)

So the reason that we wanted to have you guys on is because, craig, you have made a particular study of immigration, especially here in the United States. You are a lawyer. You are also a minister who specializes and focuses on issues of immigration. It seems to be a kind of a big deal these days. You know, we just had, as we record this, we just had a couple of days ago the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. And this, you know, immigration was a really huge issue in that debate and continues to be politically.