The Ben Shapiro Show

00:00:00.000 I think morality is good for civil coexistence, but morality alone will not save this society unless we develop an accountability to our creator, not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that life at its core is sacred. not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that Hello and welcome.

00:00:26.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

00:00:28.000 Our special guest today is Ravi Zacharias.

00:00:30.000 He's author of over 25 books.

00:00:32.000 His newest book is The Logic of God.

00:00:33.000 He's a cultural apologist on behalf of Judeo-Christian values.

00:00:36.000 Ravi, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:00:38.000 You may be the guest most requested by our audience.

00:00:40.000 So I'm very excited to have you here.

00:00:41.000 Thanks for making the time.

00:00:43.000 Must have been my family who were riding in.

00:00:46.000 Well, I want to jump right in because there's a lot I want to cover with you.

00:00:48.000 Why don't we start with this?

00:00:50.000 You're obviously one of the most prolific debaters when it comes to religion and the presence of God in the universe.

00:00:57.000 You've debated a bunch of folks on the secular atheist side.

00:01:01.000 Who's the toughest debate you've ever had in terms of Well, you know, in the earlier days, I remember doing a couple of debates, courtesy of Emory University and so on, and overseas.

00:01:11.000 I debated some Islamic scholars in the city of Hyderabad, and Hindu scholars as well.

00:01:17.000 I moved away from the debating format, Ben, years ago, because I really felt it was nowhere near as effective as an open forum.

00:01:27.000 is where you give the privilege of the audience to ask you the questions and give them the opportunity to challenge what it is you're saying.

00:01:35.000 Otherwise you're pitting one intellect against another and whoever has read one more book can do better on the whole thing provided they've got the eloquence on their side.

00:01:44.000 So I think the toughest debaters to deal with are those of Contrary religious worldviews, where the animus becomes very intense and where the audience can be more provocative.

00:01:58.000 I've done dialogues of that nature.

00:02:01.000 No really difficult question, Ben, over the years of nearly 46 years of traveling this globe.

00:02:08.000 The questions are the same, although the relevance of issues has changed a little bit.

00:02:13.000 So, I would say the religious counter-perspectives, especially of a monotheistic stripe, they become tough because you're navigating very carefully one wrong word.

00:02:24.000 And that has now shifted into the open forum model where you're asked questions which are pretty point blank, but you're not necessarily given the privilege of a dissenting view while they themselves would call for the freedom of choice on all views.

00:02:39.000 So that would be my answer to your question.

00:02:42.000 I feel the tough ones are those who believe in absolutes, but from a different transcendent perspective.

00:02:49.000 You've answered thousands and thousands of questions from members of the audience.

00:02:54.000 What's the question that you receive most often when you do your events?

00:02:57.000 Well, you deal with it very much in your own book, which, by the way, I should say one of the finest I have read.

00:03:03.000 I need to go back to it.

00:03:05.000 I was reading it as I was preparing to come here.

00:03:08.000 What an amazing sweep of sensitive knowledge, Ben, that God has given to you.

00:03:15.000 You know, I think it ought to be required reading if any university professors have the courage to do it.

00:03:20.000 But as I look and do these navigational things, the two toughest questions to me, you know, once upon a time, the cosmological, the teleological, and all of these ontological arguments We're richly debated on the campus, but now there are more culturally sensitive issues that are raised.

00:03:42.000 However, the one thorn in the side of the theistic framework is the problem of evil, the problem of pain, the problem of suffering.

00:03:51.000 And I think what someone once said, virtue in distress and vice in triumph has made atheists of mankind.

00:03:58.000 I think it's the most real question, frankly, and many of the philosophers who ultimately, David Hume himself, you know, Did away with the notion of a sovereign first cause?

00:04:10.000 For them, this was the thorny question.

00:04:13.000 So to me, how can an all-powerful and an all-sovereign God and an all-good God allow so much of pain and suffering in this world?

00:04:24.000 I think it's a legitimate question, but that's the one Today it's much more cultural issues, so many things that you've dealt with.

00:04:31.000 I think the relevance of a moral law that Judeo-Christian worldview invokes, that we are not just beings intended to reason, but reason morally.

00:04:43.000 Those are the debates, I think, the two issues, and I think they are connected.

00:04:47.000 So, let's talk about the problem of suffering and pain.

00:04:50.000 Obviously, there have been a bunch of religious thinkers who have taken this on.

00:04:53.000 It's always puzzling to me when you hear secular humanists and atheists suggest that it's a revelation that this is a problem for religious thought.

00:05:00.000 Obviously, it's been a problem for religious thought since the very beginning.

00:05:02.000 What do you think is the best answer to that very difficult question?

00:05:07.000 Well, you know, Job is the one who wrestled with it the most.

00:05:12.000 Job, to me, came up with a very incredible answer.

00:05:16.000 That's, to me, a softer touch today, but I think a profound touch for those of us who have that knowledge of God.

00:05:24.000 To him, when he said, I had heard of you by the hearing of my ear.

00:05:27.000 Now I see, have seen you, I abhor myself and I'm horrified and he repented.

00:05:32.000 That relationship with God, same as with Habakkuk, you know, they struggled with these issues but that divine encounter gave them a pair of eyes so that they could see to the problem from a very different perspective.

00:05:47.000 God is, God acts, God changes.

00:05:50.000 That's what Habakkuk came up with, you know, the actuality of God in distinction to atheism, the eventuality of his working in distinction to deism, and the eternality of his perspective in distinction to pantheism.

00:06:02.000 So the question itself is well answered within the Judeo-Christian worldview.

00:06:07.000 But I think as a culturally relevant apologist, this is the way I deal with it, Ben, And I found it to be quite effective because the wheels start turning.

00:06:17.000 I was at the University of Nottingham years ago when it was first thrown at me.

00:06:21.000 And a guy stood up and he just said, how can you possibly talk of a good God, of goodness, When there's so much evil in this world, how can you talk about a God that actually exists in this kind of evil and this kind of suffering?

00:06:36.000 That, of course, Richard Dawkins and all of them raised the same.

00:06:39.000 So I looked at him and I said, let me ask you this.

00:06:42.000 You're talking about evil?

00:06:44.000 He said, yes.

00:06:45.000 I said, when you say this evilly, aren't you assuming that such a thing is good?

00:06:49.000 He said, yes.

00:06:50.000 I said, when you say that such a thing is good, aren't you assuming that such a thing is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil?

00:06:58.000 He paused for a moment on that one, and then I referenced him to Bertrand Russell's debate with Copleston, in which Copleston looked at Russell and said to him, how do you differentiate between good and bad?

00:07:09.000 And Russell said, the same way I differentiate between blue and green.

00:07:13.000 And Cobblestone said, but wait a minute, you differentiate between those colors by seeing, don't you?

00:07:17.000 He said, yes.

00:07:18.000 He said, how do you differentiate between good and bad, Mr. Russell?

00:07:21.000 He paused, and he said, on the basis of my feeling, what else?

00:07:25.000 I think that was the weakest point of Russell's debate.

00:07:29.000 So when I looked at him, he said, all right, I will agree to you that there is a moral law on the basis of which we differentiate between good and evil.

00:07:35.000 I said, evil, therefore good.

00:07:37.000 Good, therefore, a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate good and good evil.

00:07:40.000 I said, but if you posit a moral law, you must posit a moral law giver.

00:07:45.000 But that's whom you are trying to disprove and not prove.

00:07:50.000 Your whole point is invoking a moral law, which you cannot invoke without a moral law giver.

00:07:56.000 So your problem of evil actually disappears with the false assumptions that you're making.

00:08:00.000 Do you know, Ben, he paused and he looked at me and he said, what then am I asking you?

00:08:07.000 I was with William Lane Craig, whom you had on your program.

00:08:11.000 William Lane Craig and I were on a program with a physicist by the name of Bernard Lykan and a pantheist by the name of Jitendra Mohanty, sponsored by Emory University years ago.

00:08:20.000 And this was thrown back at me.

00:08:22.000 Why do you need to posit a moral law giver?

00:08:26.000 All right, we'll grant you there is this abstract moral law.

00:08:28.000 Why do you need to pause the moral law giver?

00:08:30.000 And my answer is this, Ben.

00:08:32.000 Every time the problem of evil is raised, it is either raised by a person or about a person, which means the questioner assumes persons have intrinsic worth.

00:08:47.000 And that is an assumption they cannot make in a random evolutionary universe with no primary mind and personal being as our creator.

00:08:57.000 So if we have the random collocation of atoms, how do we attribute essential work to ourselves?

00:09:02.000 So the person component is vital to the question and so the moral law needs a moral law giver if persons are to have essential worth.

00:09:11.000 So to me, the problem of evil when it is raised is a self-stultifying problem because it has to assume a framework that it cannot arrogate to itself in a random universe without personal value.

00:09:25.000 So how do we get from the idea of the moral lawgiver and a God who is present in the universe to what exactly that moral law is?

00:09:35.000 So there's sort of the God of the philosophers, this is obviously puzzled a lot of religious philosophers, there's the God of the philosophers, the sort of unmoved mover, the The being that generates a unity to the universe and an order to the universe.

00:09:49.000 How does that translate over into the sort of moral law that we practice or that we should practice?

00:09:54.000 Can you just do all of this on the basis of reason alone, just looking at the universe through natural law or do you need something like revelation?

00:10:00.000 I think that's a great question.

00:10:02.000 In your book, I think you have brilliantly given that dialectic of reason and purpose and meaning.

00:10:08.000 They are inextricably bound, and you really cannot have one without the other.

00:10:13.000 The way we get to it is something like this.

00:10:16.000 I do two frameworks on this, Ben, as an apologist dealing with the Judeo-Christian worldview.

00:10:22.000 We all need to know the truth.

00:10:24.000 Ultimately, we are in search for the truth, you know, where we need to accept the fact.

00:10:29.000 But how do we get to the truth?

00:10:31.000 And philosophers of old have told us there's the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.

00:10:37.000 Correspondence applies to particular statements.

00:10:41.000 Coherence applies to a cumulative presentation of those statements.

00:10:47.000 So when you go to a court of law, the correspondence and coherence theory are always brought to bear in determining guilt or innocence.

00:10:54.000 But how do we get to it?

00:10:56.000 I say there are three ways of logical consistency Empirical adequacy and experiential relevance.

00:11:04.000 Is my argument logically consistent?

00:11:06.000 Is there any empirical basis for me to believe what I am believing?

00:11:11.000 And is there any experiential relevance to all of this?

00:11:14.000 But then this has to be applied to the four questions of life.

00:11:17.000 Origin, meaning, morality and destiny.

00:11:20.000 Where do I come from?

00:11:22.000 What does my life really mean?

00:11:24.000 How do I distinguish between good and evil?

00:11:26.000 What happens to a human being when he or she dies?

00:11:29.000 That closing chapter in your conversation with your daughter is brilliant, you know.

00:11:33.000 The question of eternality even comes into the mind of a little one.

00:11:37.000 There's that intuitive drive towards that origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

00:11:43.000 Pursuit, truth.

00:11:44.000 Correspondence, coherence.

00:11:46.000 Logical consistency, empirical adequacy, experiential relevance.

00:11:49.000 When you form a worldview, these are the four questions you have to answer by applying the notions of truth.

00:11:57.000 So with the moment you say the word revelation, you know, ah, this is one of those dinosaurs who actually believes a book dropped out of heaven, and so on and so forth.

00:12:05.000 It's not as simplistic as that.

00:12:08.000 You take the revelation of God that has come across a millennium and a half of revelation.

00:12:14.000 You apply these tests and you see that the existence of God presents a framework for the existentially undeniable questions that we struggle with.

00:12:25.000 Those very questions are legitimized because of the value that we lay claim.

00:12:29.000 So yes, there's reason and revelation, but not some kind of pie in the sky, by and by, but propositional truth.

00:12:38.000 That is put to the test by a scrutinizing mind.

00:12:42.000 And the Judeo-Christian worldview, Ben, I believe.

00:12:45.000 I was raised in a counterculture to this.

00:12:47.000 I wasn't raised in either of those worldviews.

00:12:51.000 I was a naturalist.

00:12:53.000 I was a skeptic.

00:12:55.000 And I ended up on a bed of suicide when I was 17 years old.

00:12:59.000 Desperately looking for the very thing your book talks about, you know, that individual value and that individual purpose and a belongingness to a community and so on.

00:13:08.000 And it was then when the Bible—I couldn't even hold the Bible, by the way, because my body was dehydrated.

00:13:14.000 I had taken some poison that emptied me of all the water, moisture in my body.

00:13:20.000 And then to see how God, through the flow of history, and of course, even though we have our differences, we have a common background in communion with God.

00:13:29.000 Both of us have that goal.

00:13:31.000 And in the person of Jesus Christ, I found that answer.

00:13:34.000 And so my relationship to the person of God.

00:13:38.000 As Joe pointed out, as Habakkuk pointed out, that relationship is key because some answers to life transcend the propositional nature of things.

00:13:50.000 They don't violate it, but they transcend it.

00:13:53.000 So I think you get to the answer of who God is, not just by some leap of faith, which we sometimes attribute to people.

00:14:02.000 Mine was a very reasoned study of scriptures, and the reasoning that we applied was a rational type, but the importance was there was a moral reasoning behind the whole process.

00:14:13.000 So you don't just get to it by either reason or revelation.

00:14:17.000 It's the confluence of both in proper balance.

00:14:20.000 So in a second I want to ask you about the nature of the moral law.

00:14:24.000 Has it evolved?

00:14:26.000 Which part of it has not?

00:14:27.000 Which part of it is eternal?

00:14:28.000 Which part of it is evolving due to human reason?

00:14:31.000 I'm going to ask you about that in just one second.

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00:15:48.000 So when we talk about the Judeo-Christian moral law, one of the questions that I get from folks like Sam Harris or like Michael Shermer is, all right, let's assume that there is this eternal moral law that corresponds with some form of eternal truth and a lawgiver.

00:16:03.000 So, So why has that law evolved over time?

00:16:05.000 So to take for example, the example that they like best is slavery.

00:16:08.000 So originally the Bible contemplates that slavery is part of life and then over time we've decided that not only is slavery not a part of life, slavery is a grave evil that ought to be fought wherever it exists.

00:16:20.000 How do we justify evolution in the Judeo-Christian framework of morality?

00:16:25.000 Well, it's of course the metaphysical extrapolation of the naturalistic interpretation of the very origin of life.

00:16:32.000 So, when you talk about the evolution of humanity itself, they want to talk about morality itself also sort of evolving.

00:16:42.000 I think it becomes a circular argument.

00:16:45.000 The argument that somehow we were valueless to start with and just happened to be on this radar screen of time and that we developed all these things over a period of time, I think is a false view of the beginnings.

00:17:00.000 In fact, though, you know very well as a scholar within the Jewish framework, the very concept of slavery, a very different, very different idea of what we interpret as what slavery is all about.

00:17:13.000 And when you talk about Paul talking about how to treat the, quote, slave in the household and that he was willing to be there present and even redeem this person, in a socio-economic framework, that you have these kinds of terms used and systems used, we are bound to make blunders.

00:17:33.000 So then I would turn the question on its head and say, all right, if you believe that we have evolved more morally, why is it in the 20th century that we killed more people in warfare?

00:17:44.000 than all of the previous 19 centuries put together.

00:17:48.000 So it is not an honest representation of how we have actually come into believing in moral framework.

00:17:56.000 In fact, there are some things now that we have reversed over 5,000 years of civilized history for thousands of years.

00:18:04.000 Some people never believed some of the things that we have begun to believe.

00:18:08.000 So I would say that, to me, The most important phrase, Ben, in the Ten Commandments.

00:18:17.000 I don't believe there's a better moral framework that starts with the very being of God and all the way to the sacredness of my life, my neighbor's life, my neighbor's marriage, my neighbor's property.

00:18:30.000 I mean, this goes back, you know, to 3,500 years ago.

00:18:35.000 The most important phrase to me, Ben, in that is, I am the Lord your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

00:18:47.000 is prior to righteousness.

00:18:50.000 And then righteousness leads on to worship.

00:18:53.000 So when you get to Exodus 20 and you're dealing with that beautiful moral law, and then you move five chapters later and you move into the tabernacle and the framework of reference, I think it is the change of heart that is the only answer to the moral framework.

00:19:10.000 And here's the scary thing.

00:19:12.000 God did not send us his message to make bad people good.

00:19:18.000 Morality alone will never save us.

00:19:20.000 Sometimes in the name of morality, people have done some horrible things.

00:19:24.000 It is the fact that the heart is in need of redemption.

00:19:29.000 In need of forgiveness, and it is redemption that must precede righteousness.

00:19:35.000 So to talk about morality having been involved, when you go back 3,500 years ago, and the moral law is given to us, it was because people had already violated that relationship with God.

00:19:48.000 So I say, it's far from morality evolving.

00:19:53.000 Right from the beginning, we have known what it was all about.

00:19:56.000 So what happens in the first three chapters of Genesis happens in this world every day.

00:20:01.000 What happened in the Temptation Saga, Ben, I think is very critical.

00:20:05.000 And your book points out what has happened as a result of this flaw, okay?

00:20:11.000 In the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die.

00:20:16.000 That's the Word of God.

00:20:17.000 But the enemy of our souls comes and says, uh-uh, you will be as God, knowing good and evil.

00:20:23.000 That has been the battle for millennia.

00:20:26.000 What is the battle?

00:20:27.000 To allow God to be God or to play God.

00:20:31.000 And in the defining good of evil, and what happened when they are confronted?

00:20:34.000 I didn't.

00:20:37.000 I didn't, the serpent.

00:20:38.000 This idea of violating the authority of God and becoming autonomous, and then blaming everything else, this has not evolved.

00:20:48.000 This goes back over three millennia long, and we have challenged it every day in this victim culture.

00:20:56.000 What are we doing?

00:20:57.000 It's not my fault.

00:20:58.000 It's this person's fault.

00:21:00.000 We don't believe in absolutes.

00:21:01.000 We have autonomy.

00:21:02.000 So on the one hand, we claim to be autonomous, but when we go wrong, we blame somebody else.

00:21:07.000 It's someone else's enormous.

00:21:08.000 So I do not accept this idea that it is somehow evolved.

00:21:14.000 You go back millennia ago, and you see the value of human life and the value of a moral law millennia back.

00:21:20.000 So, in your worldview, do you make a distinction between that which is sinful and that which you consider immoral?

00:21:27.000 So, this is a sort of deep philosophical issue in the religious community.

00:21:30.000 Is there a difference between doing something that the Bible considers sinful and doing something that is moral on some sort of naturalistic level?

00:21:38.000 The difference between hurting somebody else and, for example, engaging in a consensual behavior, this is obviously taking a modern example, engaging in a consensual behavior that doesn't hurt a third party, per se, but maybe a sin against The natural law or sin against the Bible?

00:21:52.000 I think sin is a vertical term.

00:21:56.000 It is not merely a horizontal term.

00:21:59.000 When David sinned with what happened with Bathsheba and he falls on his face before God in Psalm 51, what does he say?

00:22:06.000 Against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.

00:22:12.000 Nathan confronted him.

00:22:14.000 Sin is a vertical thing.

00:22:15.000 Morality can very easily become a horizontal term.

00:22:19.000 And I think this is where we are getting grounded, literally and figuratively, Ben.

00:22:25.000 When we only talk about a moral framework, if you go to India today, moral reasoning is very different to that of, say, the moral reasoning of the West.

00:22:35.000 And sin, to me, is a violation, not of something abstract.

00:22:41.000 It's a violation of a personal command.

00:22:44.000 There is no sin in God.

00:22:45.000 That means there's no contradiction in God.

00:22:48.000 God is a self-existent being.

00:22:51.000 It is impossible for him not to exist.

00:22:54.000 He exists eternally.

00:22:56.000 So if I am to be in keeping with that will of my heavenly Father, when the prodigal son returns, what does he say?

00:23:05.000 I've sinned against heaven.

00:23:09.000 In that order, we take the vertical and make it horizontal.

00:23:14.000 And you know, our moral struggle these days, Ben, to me, which is very deep, by the way, and if I may just digress for just a moment.

00:23:23.000 I remember the first time I came to the West Coast.

00:23:25.000 It was in the 70s.

00:23:27.000 I was an undergraduate in Toronto at that time.

00:23:30.000 And I have to say to you, yesterday as I walked through Los Angeles, this state is a microcosm of the collision course in which we are headed culturally.

00:23:44.000 Probably one of the most beautiful states anywhere in the world.

00:23:48.000 It's got the mountains, it's got the oceans, it's got the deserts.

00:23:51.000 Finest minds in this country, from cyber capacity to artistic splendor, all of this.

00:23:59.000 And yet, what did I see yesterday as I walked?

00:24:02.000 If you had taken me back to Calcutta, 40, 50 years ago, I would have been walking past many homeless and thinking to myself, how are we going to solve this problem?

00:24:13.000 So what we have done in debunking the notion of sin and talking merely morality, we have ended up with a dead-end word that people really cannot relate to.

00:24:25.000 In fact, if you want to end a discussion with a press reporter, just use the word sin.

00:24:29.000 And that's it.

00:24:31.000 I swear, frankly, I like what you've done in your book.

00:24:34.000 To me, when I'm talking to a person and they say to me, what do you think is wrong then?

00:24:40.000 I say, it's a violation of purpose.

00:24:43.000 We have violated the purpose for which we have created.

00:24:46.000 They can connect much more with that existential rub.

00:24:50.000 And then, of course, they look at you and say, what do you mean by violation of purpose?

00:24:53.000 I say, if you take a car and run amok, In a crowd of people and kill them?

00:24:58.000 Can you blame General Motors for it?

00:25:01.000 Some will say, that's not why I fashioned this car.

00:25:03.000 It was for transportation.

00:25:04.000 So we've run amok in what we have done with our values.

00:25:08.000 And then we blame the Creator for it.

00:25:10.000 So I think morality is good for civil coexistence.

00:25:16.000 What Calvin talked about, the fourth use of the law type thing.

00:25:19.000 But morality alone will not save this society unless we develop an accountability to our Creator, not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that life at its core is sacred.

00:25:33.000 The desacralization of life is at the core of what has happened.

00:25:38.000 We do not know what it means to be human.

00:25:41.000 And in losing that definition, as Chesterton would say, we were our feet firmly planted in midair.

00:25:47.000 So when we look at the role of government in all this, there's a really interesting debate that's broken out in the conservative movement right now between one wing that's more libertarian, and I will admit I'm in this wing, the wing that still defends classical liberalism, and a sort of fusionism, the idea that rights are important And rights are important because we have duties.

00:26:07.000 And the duties are to be imposed socially, but not necessarily by government.

00:26:11.000 And then there is a group of folks on the right who argue in convincing fashion that liberalism may in fact be part of the problem.

00:26:18.000 That if you have a liberal free society, this grants the ability for people who oppose traditional morality to tear down the structure, to tear away at community, that the individualism that is integrally Connected to liberalism, that that individualism tears away at a lot of the same communal values.

00:26:35.000 And so what you end up with is an atomistic society in which there is no community, no common moral fabric.

00:26:41.000 You end up with the rights without any of the duties and that eventually ends in exactly what you're talking about, the sort of breakdown of society.

00:26:48.000 So where do you think the proper role of government is in either enforcing morality or not enforcing morality?

00:26:55.000 What has to be done socially and what can the government be encouraging or should it be encouraging?

00:26:58.000 And that's the tough question of our time.

00:27:01.000 But what I know for greater certainty, what they ought not to be doing, and then we can move to what we can be doing.

00:27:08.000 You know, when you think of liberalism and or conservatism, it all depends on where you're talking.

00:27:15.000 You know, if I'm talking to the mullahs in Iran, may the heavens preserve us from that kind of conservatism.

00:27:22.000 You know, it's a demagogic conservatism that has not even understood what respect is for people of dissenting opinions.

00:27:31.000 So, I often put it this way, Ben.

00:27:34.000 Instead of right and left, we need to be thinking up and down.

00:27:38.000 I remember talking to a former governor and senator, and I was actually in Washington meeting one of the people who meets with more leaders around the globe than anybody else, and I just finished meeting with him.

00:27:51.000 Okay?

00:27:52.000 A few minutes.

00:27:53.000 And then I went out, my wife and I having donuts and coffee with this gentleman.

00:27:57.000 I'll never forget what he said.

00:27:59.000 I won't quote his name, but he looked at my wife and me and he said, there's one word that's dividing us here on Capitol Hill.

00:28:07.000 Just one word.

00:28:09.000 He said, that word is God.

00:28:11.000 If God exists or doesn't exist, if God doesn't exist, Ben, then these terms liberal and conservative actually become purely pragmatic words.

00:28:23.000 You know, you look at what happened under Stalin's Russia.

00:28:27.000 He was a believer in God at one time, seminary student, and he clenched his fist towards the heavens, which was literally the last gesture Before he died, his daughter and others standing in front of him clenched his fist towards the heavens one more time, threw his head back on the pillow, and he was gone, having taken the lives of 15 million of his own people.

00:28:49.000 I remember telling this story to a Russian general in Moscow during the days of the Cold War, and the tears were running down his face.

00:28:56.000 I said, is that what you want?

00:28:58.000 So the term right and left there meant something completely different.

00:29:02.000 But to the point of your question here, we at least have to agree on one definition, and until that we will not progress.

00:29:12.000 What does it mean to be human?

00:29:16.000 Are we just, on a grade and a hierarchy, a better animal?

00:29:22.000 Or are we something essentially different?

00:29:26.000 Until I answer that question, it cannot answer my question on why marital fidelity is important, why I need to be a good father, why I need to be a good citizen.

00:29:36.000 I think you touched a little bit of this in your book in talking about what citizenship actually means.

00:29:43.000 And I think you go back to the Socratic description and all, you know, you've got the person who just thinks autonomously, the idiot.

00:29:51.000 You think of the others who think tribally, their small group, and then you think of who is a good citizen.

00:29:56.000 The one who is a good citizen is willing to rightly accept the value of every human life and even to coexist different worldviews.

00:30:06.000 We took secularization evicted God, then we faced pluralism and pluralization, and we took it to mean relativism, and then we went to privatization where we were told that faith should be made private.

00:30:21.000 So the key to me is redefining whether secularism is really at the core of what our government should be, or will we honor the fact of our founding fathers that this was made for a moral people.

00:30:35.000 This was made for those who had the freedom to believe.

00:30:38.000 You privatize faith, you will ultimately privatize morality, and you will then publicize the destruction of one another.

00:30:46.000 The whole key to me is, are we a secularly conscious people, or is there a transcendent framework of value for me and you with All of our differences that we can cordially sit back and even agree to disagree and give each other a hug and say, hey man, here we go.

00:31:05.000 Can I say one more point to this footnote, Ben?

00:31:07.000 I'll tell you what the mistake is.

00:31:09.000 The two words egalitarianism and elitism.

00:31:13.000 Egalitarianism bringing quality.

00:31:15.000 We are meant to be, as human beings, having that egalitarian right.

00:31:20.000 All human beings are created equal.

00:31:23.000 Elitism, but we do not believe all ideas are equal.

00:31:28.000 Some ideas are superior to other ideas.

00:31:31.000 Naturalistic framework has ended up reversing this in our time.

00:31:36.000 We have made an elitism of people and an egalitarianism of ideas, and that has put us on a collision course.

00:31:44.000 And so the elitists will tell us whether our ideas are good or not.

00:31:49.000 That's reverse.

00:31:51.000 I have to respect a person made Imago Dei, but I can say to them, your ideas and mine are not the same.

00:31:57.000 Let's reason them through and see why.

00:32:00.000 That egalitarian elitist tension is a tension with which we are living, having to reverse the poles of the current and short-circuiting life.

00:32:08.000 I talk with a lot of college students just the way you do, and many of them ask the question, you know, is your suggestion when you talk about religion, there can't be a good atheist or a good secular person?

00:32:17.000 I always say, well, I don't know a single religious person who believes that there can't be a secular person who acts well and acts in concert with public morality.

00:32:25.000 It's a silly question, but it does raise the secondary question, which is, okay, well, if I'm a good secular person, I don't believe in God, but I still abide by a certain level of morality, what makes God necessary to my life?

00:32:36.000 Why should I think about God as opposed to just sort of behaving in the way that we all sort of agree commonly is good?

00:32:41.000 I think it's a great question, but it hangs on the peg of one flaw, and that peg says autonomy is all that really matters.

00:32:50.000 being autonomous, that I'm a law unto myself.

00:32:54.000 First of all, your disclaimer is very valuable.

00:32:59.000 I believe there are many good people that I have met who are skeptics, who are non-believers in God.

00:33:05.000 Sometimes they put us Christians to shame, you know, when I see some of the courtesy and the generosity of some of them well-received.

00:33:14.000 But the fact of the matter is they are using a word that is only self-referencingly defined.

00:33:21.000 I am a good person.

00:33:24.000 How do I decide that?

00:33:26.000 And if I am only going upon my own reason, you know, in some cultures they love their neighbors, in other cultures they eat them.

00:33:36.000 Both of them may think that they are good and that they are doing good.

00:33:41.000 Think of what we are doing today while considering ourselves a good culture.

00:33:48.000 It is unthinkable some of the decisions we are making at the highest level of lawmakers, and yet we call ourselves good?

00:33:58.000 It is not a self-defining motive.

00:34:01.000 First of all, if I believe goodness is purely on my definition, I have to give that prerogative to every other human being.

00:34:09.000 Even the naturalistic framework of Immanuel Kant, you know, the universalizing of a principle, would apply right here.

00:34:17.000 But the fact of the matter is when I... I'm a cross-cultural person, okay?

00:34:21.000 Even within India, I was raised in the North, born in the South.

00:34:26.000 The color tension, Ben, the tension between the complexions of people while I was growing up.

00:34:33.000 I come from the South, so I'm darker complexion, but I moved to the North.

00:34:37.000 It was tough.

00:34:38.000 And in some parts of India, that is still so.

00:34:40.000 And you see the matrimonial column.

00:34:44.000 wanting to marry a wheat complexion, whatever that means.

00:34:48.000 You know, my brother used to say, is this a whole wheat or what we're talking about out here?

00:34:54.000 We've got all these tensions that go on.

00:34:56.000 So cultures have different values and self-referencing behavior.

00:35:00.000 Once upon a time, the Sati system in India, thank God it was abolished.

00:35:04.000 You know, where the wife had to burn herself and the pyre of her husband and so on.

00:35:08.000 They thought they were being good people.

00:35:10.000 So to say I am good is a highly risky statement if you do not believe in absolutes.

00:35:18.000 It is a relativistic term and if you say all truth is relative, then it is a self-destructing statement.

00:35:26.000 It destroys itself.

00:35:27.000 Is it an absolute or is that statement relative too?

00:35:30.000 So I say, yes, many good living people who are skeptics and have done wonderful things in this world, but to give oneself the prerogative of defining good leads to a world of chaos that is given everywhere else.

00:35:45.000 Here's what I say.

00:35:47.000 America talks a lot about rights, but we have not yet defined what is right.

00:35:55.000 My rights stand on the bedrock of an absolute definition of what is right.

00:36:03.000 And that's why people like Bilbo Force and others were at the forefront of fighting slavery, because it was wrong.

00:36:11.000 Nobody had the right to inflict that on any human being.

00:36:15.000 So that's my answer.

00:36:17.000 My answer is that there are good people, but they're living beyond the foundation on which their lives are standing.

00:36:24.000 So let's talk for a second about rights.

00:36:26.000 So you mentioned rights there.

00:36:27.000 And obviously there's been a lot of talk.

00:36:29.000 The United States is very ensconced in a lot of rights talk.

00:36:32.000 There are a lot of thinkers who have been very critical of this.

00:36:36.000 There's a book called After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre in which he talks about the movement of rights beyond sort of its natural law basis.

00:36:44.000 And the counter reaction from the folks on the secular humanist left to conservatives has been, well, what you actually want is a theocracy.

00:36:51.000 You guys define right.

00:36:52.000 You say that there is a right.

00:36:54.000 Where are you getting this idea that there is a right to do wrong?

00:36:56.000 What is a right except the right to occasionally do something wrong or do something with which we disagree?

00:37:03.000 If you truly believe in a Judeo-Christian framework, why not cram that down on everybody else?

00:37:08.000 And that's what a lot of secular humanists attribute to religious people.

00:37:11.000 It is a desire to do that from the top down.

00:37:14.000 So let's ask that basic question.

00:37:15.000 What is the value of rights if you do know what's right?

00:37:18.000 And I think MacIntyre does a good job even in some of the titles of his books.

00:37:22.000 You know, Who's Justice?

00:37:23.000 What Morality?

00:37:24.000 Those kinds of things that he brings out and was writing prolifically and several others.

00:37:29.000 Yaki was another one of those authors in this whole area of ethical reasoning.

00:37:34.000 First of all, I think anyone who enforces a religious worldview upon another one is probably in belief of a very ignoble worldview because God himself gave us one of the greatest gifts we have been for you and me, the freedom to believe and the freedom to disbelieve.

00:37:54.000 But one thing he did not give us was to disconnect the entailments of those two options.

00:38:02.000 He gave me the freedom to believe but gave me the logical outworking of what will happen and the freedom to disbelieve and the logical outworking of what will happen.

00:38:13.000 I think the fact is this concern has been violated by the critic of the theistic ideas rather than by the defenders.

00:38:27.000 You know it better than most people here.

00:38:29.000 Go into a university campus today and who has to go in with high security and high protection, okay?

00:38:36.000 It is those who want to talk about the rights that we all really have, but we have a conservative view of life.

00:38:43.000 Those who Don't believe in that theistic framework.

00:38:48.000 They are not coming with protection because they are not being mocked.

00:38:53.000 They are being listened to very carefully.

00:38:55.000 So, enforcement of any kind of belief is not in keeping with the mercy and the grace of God himself.

00:39:06.000 You know, there's a guy, whom I won't name, who is violently opposed to any proclamation of the Judeo-Christian worldview on military bases.

00:39:16.000 Okay, so he founded this organization and fights anybody who wants to come and speak at military bases.

00:39:22.000 I've spoken at all of them.

00:39:23.000 I've not spoken at one.

00:39:25.000 At the Air Force Academy.

00:39:26.000 So I went to see this guy.

00:39:28.000 I visited him in his home city, and had two big German shepherd dogs on either side of him, you know, and then he looked at me and said, they like you.

00:39:36.000 I said, I wish I could say the feelings are mutual.

00:39:39.000 So we started discussing.

00:39:42.000 But you know, I said to him, in my conversation, I said, forget what you have against Christianity, and you've written a lot about it.

00:39:49.000 I said, what do you have against Jesus?

00:39:51.000 What do you have against God?

00:39:54.000 He said, because he holds a gun to your head and tells you you either believe or else.

00:40:02.000 I said, that's strange.

00:40:04.000 Isn't that what you're doing on the military academy campuses?

00:40:08.000 You hold a gun to their head and say, if you don't do what I'm telling you to, I'm going to take you to a court of law and ruin your family order.

00:40:15.000 I said, you got it wrong.

00:40:17.000 I said, God doesn't do that.

00:40:19.000 He is the one who tells you he gives you the privilege of your freedom to disbelieve.

00:40:25.000 I said, you are underestimating the intelligence of your military academies in thinking those cadets sitting in front of me don't have the intelligence enough to make up their own minds after we have presented our talks in an open forum.

00:40:38.000 Why do you think they're that dumb then?

00:40:40.000 Are you sending them to defend the whole nation when you think they can't even make the decision of such a thing?

00:40:46.000 Do you know what he looked at me?

00:40:47.000 He said, I like you.

00:40:49.000 He took me out for lunch, came to visit me in Atlanta along with his wife, and he said, I will never stand in your way again.

00:40:56.000 You can go to any one of these, and I'm about to go to Wiesbaden and do a forum there.

00:41:00.000 So I think we have to rationally and courteously talk.

00:41:06.000 If civility goes out of the marketplace, Ben, then what we've got is violence at the most sophisticated levels of the freedom.

00:41:15.000 So as I look at our society and say, am I forcing you to believe what I'm saying?

00:41:21.000 Not one bit.

00:41:23.000 We give you the freedom to reject, but let's at least be civil in the process.

00:41:28.000 Now here's what I say to the staunch skeptic.

00:41:31.000 If you really want the next generation to carry on the values to live and let live, and to have the courtesy of truly allowing those who come into our shores to be given respect, no matter what their belief system is, then you better believe that our moral values have an absoluteness to them.

00:41:53.000 If you truly believe in relativism, the America as you know it is finished.

00:41:58.000 And the truth is that they don't actually believe in relativism, even the ones who purport to believe in relativism, because they still suggest that their value system is the highest, obviously.

00:42:05.000 It's a self-defeating proposition.

00:42:07.000 But this does raise another question that you see very often in the debate between religious and non-religious, and that is the debate over free will.

00:42:14.000 So you mentioned that the religious worldview takes into account the idea that You're given the choice.

00:42:19.000 The Deuteronomy says that you choose to hear between life and death, and you're enjoined to choose life.

00:42:23.000 But that's a recommendation, not a compulsion.

00:42:27.000 There is a new breed of thought that I find maybe the most dangerous of any of the breeds of thought, and that is the outgrowth of a full-on scientific naturalism-scientism.

00:42:36.000 The idea that we don't have free will, that effectively we are just a cluster of cells moving meaninglessly through the universe.

00:42:44.000 To support this proposition, what you see a lot of the advocates doing is appealing to scientific experiments, the Labatt experiment, the experiments that suggest, for example, that you, that your brain is activating before you even know what you're thinking, that you're not making a conscious decision, that effectively you are just a series of firing neurons that thinks that you are willed, in the sort of Spinoza phrase.

00:43:06.000 How do you respond to accusations that human beings, there is no Truly innate value to human beings, basically we're just a piece of meat that has some firing electrical neurons.

00:43:15.000 Well, I would just ask him a simple question, is what you're saying true or purely determined?

00:43:20.000 You know, is this just the neurons firing that have made you come to this conclusion, or do you actually believe there's an objectivity to it that transcends everyone else's objectivity?

00:43:31.000 It's a wonderful backdoor exit for taking human responsibility.

00:43:37.000 How do, why do we even have our courts then?

00:43:40.000 They're just, you know, firing neurons.

00:43:43.000 They're behaving by predetermined ways.

00:43:46.000 About a month ago, I was in the most dangerous prison, what used to be the most dangerous prison in America, the Angola prison in Louisiana.

00:43:54.000 This is my third visit.

00:43:55.000 They have nearly 6,000 prisoners, and 85% of them are on life without parole.

00:44:01.000 Pretty hard laws out there.

00:44:03.000 And we were walking past every cell in death row.

00:44:06.000 It's a very sobering thing, Ben.

00:44:08.000 I'm sure you've been to places like that.

00:44:10.000 One tiny little, almost just an exaggerated cage, really.

00:44:15.000 A toilet, a bed, and a table.

00:44:18.000 And I'm talking to one man.

00:44:20.000 He puts his hands through.

00:44:22.000 He had been there already for 18 years.

00:44:24.000 And he asked me to pray for him.

00:44:26.000 They read.

00:44:27.000 That's all they can do.

00:44:28.000 They read books.

00:44:30.000 And then I heard the voice ringing forth through the corridor.

00:44:36.000 Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

00:44:42.000 I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see.

00:44:46.000 I looked over and the guard there was wiping the tears away.

00:44:49.000 OK, so three or four of us walk over towards him.

00:44:53.000 And I look at him, and he is bellowing this thing out, a fine, beautiful African-American voice, you know, powerful, poor guy.

00:45:04.000 All races are represented there.

00:45:06.000 The first guy I met was from the white race, 18 years, waiting on death row, and yet this guy is singing that song.

00:45:12.000 So I said, how long have you been here?

00:45:14.000 He'd been there somewhere near 20 years.

00:45:16.000 His bed was covered with crosses.

00:45:20.000 Simple twine, a cross wound with twine.

00:45:26.000 And I said to him, are you making those?

00:45:27.000 He said, yes, sir.

00:45:29.000 And he gave me two of them.

00:45:31.000 And then he said, I've also painted this.

00:45:33.000 And he gave me his painting.

00:45:35.000 I asked him how he was doing and the whole story of the redemption that he found being there.

00:45:42.000 And by the way, Dead Man Walking was filmed right there at Angola.

00:45:47.000 And looking at his eyes, I was broken inside.

00:45:50.000 I said, what went wrong with this life?

00:45:53.000 How did it go wrong?

00:45:54.000 But here in every cell is a Bible.

00:45:57.000 And last time I went, one of them said to me, if this Bible had been in my high school, it probably would not have been needed here in my cell.

00:46:07.000 What a story.

00:46:09.000 And what were his neurons firing then?

00:46:14.000 Is transformation also just predetermined?

00:46:18.000 Or is it something we applaud and say, this man is now free to truly walk out after being freed from his inner slave?

00:46:27.000 So this sense of determinism.

00:46:29.000 Yeah, it goes back to, you know, B.F.

00:46:31.000 Skinner and some of these others who came out in the 70s.

00:46:35.000 It was just another backdoor escape to justify that we are the way we are.

00:46:41.000 If that is true, then we ought not to be mocking Anyone who believes to the contrary, because they too are predetermined to wire that way.

00:46:51.000 The moment you make a hierarchy of ways, you no longer believe in determinism.

00:46:57.000 You believe in an objectivity on the basis of which to define somebody's subjective response.

00:47:02.000 I mean, one of the things that I always find ironic about this particular argument is that people seem to exempt themselves.

00:47:07.000 It's all, everybody else is predetermined.

00:47:09.000 When it comes to me, I wrote this book.

00:47:11.000 It was I who created this population.

00:47:14.000 It never applies inwardly.

00:47:16.000 Okay, so let's talk about an area where we disagree, and that is on the veracity of the New Testament versus the Old Testament.

00:47:21.000 So let's start with some kind of the broader philosophical framework.

00:47:26.000 What do you think that Christianity adds to the world that Judaism didn't in the first place?

00:47:31.000 First of all, I want you to know how proud I am to have friends like you and Dennis Prager, Michael Medved.

00:47:39.000 I'll be back with Dennis again.

00:47:41.000 I think I remember Dennis's comment when we were talking on this.

00:47:44.000 He was brilliant, what he said.

00:47:46.000 He said, when Messiah comes, I will just have one question.

00:47:49.000 Have you been here before?

00:47:52.000 And I think that is what it'll really boil down to.

00:47:56.000 I don't like to say the word add because it seems like it is something superimposed that wasn't there.

00:48:04.000 I think it was already there, Ben.

00:48:06.000 Of course, my own upbringing was so different.

00:48:10.000 It was like my ancestors were Orthodox Hindu priests generations ago from the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood.

00:48:17.000 I think it is that one verse, one line, that the moral law hangs upon, I am the Lord your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

00:48:25.000 That redemption motif, I think it moved beyond the metaphor from Egypt, although it was real.

00:48:33.000 It moved beyond the blood sacrifices, and it moved the very person of the Son of Man that Daniel talked about.

00:48:42.000 And the perfection of the law, which was not violated, but affirmed and endorsed.

00:48:48.000 So what I see in the person of Jesus Christ are two very real things, Ben.

00:48:55.000 Number one, it is the fact that He embodied that which was the purest that was called for by this very rigorous 613 system of laws that were given.

00:49:12.000 And if you move down even to Habakkuk, Which is then quoted three times in the New Testament.

00:49:20.000 From 613, David reduced it to a handful.

00:49:23.000 Isaiah reduced it even more.

00:49:25.000 Micah brought it down to three.

00:49:27.000 To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before your God.

00:49:30.000 But the Habakkuk phrase of the just shall live by faith, which I understand is more correctly represented as by his faithfulness.

00:49:38.000 You know, that when you move into the person of Christ, two things happen.

00:49:43.000 The law is honored.

00:49:45.000 And not debunked, but the relationship question.

00:49:50.000 You know, when you give the four propositions in your closing chapter, you know, starting all the way from purpose and then in relationship, The most moving moment in your book is when you talk to your daughter, okay?

00:50:05.000 I loved it.

00:50:06.000 I'm a grandfather of five.

00:50:09.000 And my grandson Jude, brilliant guy, he uses words like hypothesis and all of that.

00:50:15.000 He's only about, he's turning eight tomorrow, okay?

00:50:18.000 When my daughter Naomi lost her car case, she stopped going crazy in the house, slapped her forehead and said, I must be losing my mind.

00:50:30.000 Little Jude, who was five and a half then, stood in front of her and he said, Mommy, whatever you do, please don't ever lose your heart because I'm in there.

00:50:40.000 That personal relationship, as much as I value and love the law, I need to go beyond that to relationships.

00:50:49.000 And so here's what I say.

00:50:51.000 The most beautiful moment in the New Testament to me.

00:50:54.000 If I were to choose one moment or two, first I would want to listen to Jesus' talk on Emmaus Road, because he connects all the dots going back to the beginning.

00:51:04.000 Brilliant history lesson.

00:51:06.000 You would love it, I think, as he talked on Emmaus Road.

00:51:09.000 But the second moment was when he was on the Mount of Transfiguration.

00:51:13.000 Who does he bring with him?

00:51:16.000 Moses and Elijah, two of the most thundering prophets for whom he was the undertaker.

00:51:24.000 Okay?

00:51:24.000 We don't know exactly what Moses was buried in.

00:51:27.000 Elijah goes up on chariots of fire, but then he goes to the cross.

00:51:33.000 I know I can't pay for myself.

00:51:35.000 The redemptive factor of the purest paying for the impure.

00:51:40.000 Not that there was no penalty, but he paid it and then rises again from the dead.

00:51:45.000 To me, it's a composite that doesn't violate what preceded.

00:51:50.000 I think it completes it.

00:51:51.000 And to me, the attractiveness, and I really appreciate you even giving me the opportunity to share it.

00:51:57.000 Let me give you an illustration of this.

00:51:59.000 I was in Jerusalem some years ago.

00:52:01.000 You may know the name of Moshe Sharon, the well-known scholar on Islamics in Israel.

00:52:06.000 I was writing a book on an imaginary conversation between Jesus and Muhammad.

00:52:13.000 It'll be released posthumously.

00:52:14.000 I've got it written, okay?

00:52:18.000 So I'll tell you what he said to me.

00:52:20.000 Great man.

00:52:21.000 He's probably written more on any inscripture in stone than any other human being around there.

00:52:29.000 He looked at me and he said, Mr. Zacharias, you're a very clever man.

00:52:32.000 He said, well, I'll tell you something you don't know.

00:52:34.000 I said, there's a lot I don't know, sir.

00:52:35.000 He said, well, let me tell you something.

00:52:37.000 He said, you don't know about me.

00:52:39.000 He said, I'm now a professor.

00:52:41.000 He said, but I used to work for the Mossad.

00:52:45.000 He said, Mr. Zacharias, you're a Christian, I'm a Jewish man, but we both have one thing in common.

00:52:52.000 I said, what's that?

00:52:54.000 He said, communion with God.

00:52:57.000 I said, you're right.

00:52:59.000 My goal in life is to have communion with God.

00:53:01.000 He said, so is mine.

00:53:02.000 He said, but I picked up extremists who would go and blow themselves up.

00:53:07.000 And what people don't know, he said, they would have a leaden girdle around that midsection so that they could protect what they felt they were going to use in paradise finally.

00:53:19.000 He said, that's a different world.

00:53:23.000 That's a different worldview.

00:53:25.000 He said, you and I can talk because we have the same goal, communion with God.

00:53:30.000 But if a person thinks of an erotic and essentially driven eternity, I'm not on the same page with that person.

00:53:36.000 We have completely different goals.

00:53:38.000 So I say, to me in Christ, I see the completion of the story because I hunger, not just for propositional truth.

00:53:50.000 Jesus comes down from the mountain, and Peter goes, what does he say?

00:53:54.000 But now we have the word of the prophets made most certain, and you would do well to pay heed to it as a light in a dark place.

00:54:01.000 So I think it is a completion, and my friend Prager was absolutely right.

00:54:07.000 When the Lord returns, I'll say, truly, have you been here before?

00:54:11.000 But my goal would be to get there before he returns.

00:54:14.000 I'm 73 now, but that's my answer to you.

00:54:18.000 So I do want to ask you, you know, one of the issues that now comes up routinely and I saw it with my book.

00:54:24.000 I know that you've experienced it as well.

00:54:25.000 If you mention Judeo-Christian civilization, if you mention Western civilization, there's a whole school of thought out there now that this is effectively just a form of racism, that this is a form of white supremacy, which comes, I think, as an ironic accusation toward both you and toward me.

00:54:40.000 But that attempt to paint Even the term Judeo-Christian civilization is inherently exclusive.

00:54:49.000 Do you think that that reflects any accuracy?

00:54:51.000 In other words, what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian worldview from some of the other religious worldviews?

00:54:56.000 You mentioned early on that when you have debates with folks or discussions with folks who are of other monotheistic faiths, that those tend to be some of the hardest conversations.

00:55:07.000 Where do you think that the Judeo-Christian worldview diverges from some of the other faiths with which you've discussed?

00:55:12.000 You know, I think we're also paying the penalty of our flaws.

00:55:18.000 Historically, the Church has made huge blunders.

00:55:22.000 You point out some of this in your book as well.

00:55:25.000 How do we hide from that?

00:55:26.000 What it really showed, and even the way they handled scientific progress at times, which was not well done, It actually ends up proving the depravity of man.

00:55:36.000 It doesn't prove who Jesus is, what the Bible actually teaches, but it proves what we become as human beings when we give to ourselves power over everybody else.

00:55:46.000 So I say we have to own up our mistakes, but we have no more mistakes made than those who are of a counter-perspective.

00:55:55.000 Which are the two most rogue regimes in the world today?

00:55:59.000 If you go back to the 20th century, more people were killed in communist countries than any democratic, capitalistic system put together, and you know that well.

00:56:11.000 You put the slaughter of people between China and Russia alone, and then you bring in Vietnam and Cambodia.

00:56:17.000 I was in Vietnam in the 70s, not as a fighter, but as working with the chaplains.

00:56:22.000 I was only in my 20s.

00:56:23.000 I saw what was happening.

00:56:25.000 I was in Vietnam a few weeks ago, and they themselves talk about what is being done to them under this heavily atheistic regime.

00:56:32.000 The fact of the matter is to point this finger against those of a Judeo-Christian worldview shows a prejudice that is not in keeping with history.

00:56:41.000 Why is it people come to the shores of this country?

00:56:44.000 I came here when I was 20 years old.

00:56:47.000 It came through legally, came through going through the hoops, came through answering questions because we saw some ethical norms here and less corruption in the political process than from whence my brother and I were coming.

00:57:01.000 He was 22 and I was 20.

00:57:03.000 And the fact of the matter is people don't realize it was the bequest of that Judeo-Christian framework.

00:57:09.000 When China, before this particular one, who's quite demagogic, was starting to send their scholars over to here, you talk to almost any Chinese at that time, you know what he would say?

00:57:21.000 We were thinking of why is this country so ethically driven and has the values of human life, contrary to mine.

00:57:29.000 When Tocqueville came, whom you mentioned too, What did he say?

00:57:33.000 That we were a people of faith.

00:57:35.000 We are now throwing out that which engendered our values.

00:57:41.000 And now we think we can have values without that foundation.

00:57:45.000 Yes, mistakes have been made, but greater mistakes have been made by those who denied the existence of God.

00:57:52.000 Every one of us believes in God.

00:57:53.000 Everyone.

00:57:55.000 The only difference is whether you believe in the real God or end up deifying ourselves.

00:57:59.000 Okay, now, what about the other perspectives, especially the pantheistic worldviews?

00:58:06.000 One famous Indian politician just recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we give freedom to whatever you want to believe, and go on and on.

00:58:14.000 Well, that's very noble, if that is the case.

00:58:17.000 But then we should revisit that and talk about, should we be making anti-conversion laws then, if we make anybody give people the freedom to believe?

00:58:25.000 Why then are we barricading Anybody who wants to choose otherwise so we have to think these things through and so what I say is Freedom to believe or to disbelieve.

00:58:37.000 And we ought not to have a theocracy, because dictating religious belief is the best way to kill that belief, as Europe finally evicted, you know, the priest and the king, as it were.

00:58:49.000 So I believe you give the freedom to believe, and the biggest place we need to be given this privilege is in our academic institutions.

00:58:58.000 If universities would open their door to intelligent dialogue with our differences, I believe things will change.

00:59:06.000 It is the fact that they have blocked out a prejudicial description of what the Judeo-Christian worldview is all about.

00:59:13.000 Think of it this way.

00:59:14.000 When the Judeo-Christian worldview was reigning, yeah, we had our views on sexuality, but we weren't sending people to jail.

00:59:22.000 Or the whole process.

00:59:23.000 Now when relativism holds sway, we are bringing everybody out of the woodwork and what they did 20, 30, 40 years ago because we just want to see them in jail.

00:59:30.000 It just goes to show you that what you said earlier, we all have our absolutes.

00:59:34.000 We only bring them out when it serves our own purposes.

00:59:38.000 It is not the Judeo-Christian worldview that is to blame.

00:59:41.000 It is the way some people use their belief that I think engenders this kind of prejudicial reaction.

00:59:49.000 So, in one second, I want to ask you a final question.

00:59:51.000 I want to ask why secularism seems to be, and is statistically, in the ascendancy, given the fact that there are all sorts of internal contradictions in this philosophy.

00:59:59.000 I want to ask that final question, but if you want to hear Ravi Zacharias' answer, you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:00:04.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.

01:00:10.000 Well, Ravi Zacharias, it's really an honor for you to be here, and I really appreciate your time, sir.

01:00:14.000 Thank you so much, and Godspeed.

01:00:15.000 God bless.

01:00:16.000 God bless you, Ben.

01:00:17.000 So nice to meet you.

01:00:18.000 Thanks for the freedom.

01:00:19.000 I appreciate it.

01:00:26.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:00:29.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:00:31.000 Associate producer, Mathis Glover.

01:00:33.000 Edited by Donovan Fowler.

01:00:35.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.

01:00:36.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:00:38.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:00:40.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

Ravi Zacharias | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 60

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