TRIGGERnometry - Why Evil Triumphs - Dennis Prager

00:00:00.720 A very interesting thing occurred to me in high school.

00:00:04.660 Not everybody hated communism.

00:00:06.660 And I thought, I don't understand.

00:00:08.240 If you hate Nazism, why don't you hate communism?

00:00:10.500 Everybody hated Nazism for good reason. 0.95

00:00:12.820 And then I realized one of Prager's rules of life.

00:00:16.320 Those who don't fight evil hate those who do fight evil.

00:00:20.720 Wisdom begins with understanding that human nature is not basically good.

00:00:25.500 If you think human nature is basically good, you cannot be wise.

00:00:30.740 It's not that we're evil, it's just easier to do the wrong thing.

00:00:34.660 Good intentions without wisdom leads to evil.

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00:01:10.100 Dennis Prager, welcome finally to Trigonometry.

00:01:13.480 Is it finally?

00:01:14.620 So you've been on my show, but I haven't been on yours?

00:01:17.960 Yes.

00:01:18.300 Oh, well, it's wonderful. I'm delighted. Thank you.

00:01:22.300 Well, and we've known each other for a while, and you were one of the people we were very keen to hear from.

00:01:28.100 We want to have a very substantive and in-depth conversation about what the West is and its Judeo-Christian roots and all the things that you are very eloquent on.

00:01:37.100 But before we do, we'd love for our audience to know a little bit about you and how you came to be who you are, think what you think.

00:01:44.500 What's been your journey through life?

00:01:45.820 So I'll give you the really big picture, and you'll tell me if you want more details.

00:01:51.880 So I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

00:01:54.820 I've been in California for 40 years.

00:01:57.340 I fled New York.

00:01:59.340 And I will admit that there are exceptions, but when I'm asked why I left New York, what didn't I like about New York?

00:02:07.520 I answer, New Yorkers.

00:02:08.920 There are many wonderful people there, like everywhere, but that is the big – New Yorkers think that New York is the center of the universe, yet it is among the most provincial places I have ever been to.

00:02:27.540 And I've been to 130 countries in all 50 states.

00:02:30.420 It's – it's not true.

00:02:33.260 They're not the worldliest people.

00:02:35.800 Anyway, okay.

00:02:37.400 It was not an important thing, but I –

00:02:39.220 We've just lost 10% of our audience there, Dennis.

00:02:41.180 Thank you.

00:02:41.360 I know.

00:02:41.800 No, no, no.

00:02:43.260 Many New Yorkers agree with me.

00:02:45.220 But yes, that is a danger.

00:02:46.960 I'm well aware that I have a New York audience.

00:02:49.580 There used to be.

00:02:51.040 Okay.

00:02:51.620 Anyway, I grew up there.

00:02:52.620 I grew up an Orthodox Jew, a modern Orthodox within the parlance of denominations.

00:02:57.660 And I went to yeshiva, which is an intense Jewish education, half the day in Hebrew, half the day in English, until I was 19.

00:03:05.740 And I – it was – I thank God for that education.

00:03:14.540 It was formative.

00:03:16.740 Having said that, it was – it was quite – it was quite provincial.

00:03:23.660 In that everything – my whole life was Orthodox Jews.

00:03:29.120 It was like a cocoon.

00:03:30.440 And I'm not saying this negatively, because people love that.

00:03:33.900 People love the blanket of intense community.

00:03:38.100 I – my nature, I take no credit for it, but it was built in from an early age.

00:03:45.140 I wanted to know the other.

00:03:47.000 However, I wanted to know, for example, Christians.

00:03:50.540 It was – I ached.

00:03:51.400 I used to interview the mailman, or the postman, as you would put it, because he was like the only non-Jew in my life with any regularity. 0.74

00:03:59.580 I would – I would – as an – in elementary school, I would interview him.

00:04:03.380 What is it like?

00:04:04.200 Tell me about your family.

00:04:05.680 Tell me what is it like to go to church.

00:04:07.920 So, anyway, I ended up in California.

00:04:15.000 The dominating impulse in my life – there were two, and they're very related – is from a very early age.

00:04:22.940 I really was who I am at 13.

00:04:27.360 And one is I hate evil.

00:04:29.560 I mean, I really hate evil.

00:04:31.700 And, therefore, at a very early age, I hated communism.

00:04:37.500 And a very interesting thing occurred to me in high school.

00:04:41.480 Not everybody hated communism.

00:04:43.860 And I thought, I don't understand.

00:04:45.680 If you hate Nazism, why don't you hate communism?

00:04:47.980 Everybody hated Nazism for good reason. 0.95

00:04:50.920 Why don't – do you know how many people they've slaughtered?

00:04:53.700 Do you know how many people they've enslaved?

00:04:56.120 And then I realized that one of Prager's rules of life, those who don't fight evil hate those who do fight evil.

00:05:07.960 So, what I found was the people who didn't hate communism often hated anti-communists.

00:05:14.860 And that's when I knew in high school I was still a liberal Democrat, but I was anti-left.

00:05:22.340 You know, I never flirted with the left.

00:05:24.160 I thought I was a liberal because I was a Jew in New York.

00:05:27.300 What was I going to be?

00:05:29.560 So, number one is hating evil.

00:05:32.740 Number two, my division of the world is not ethnic or national or religious.

00:05:39.200 And I am a religious Jew, but I don't divide the world by religion.

00:05:42.320 I divide it, as Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning,

00:05:46.480 there are only two races, the decent and the indecent.

00:05:49.760 That is how I believe God divides the world.

00:05:52.400 That is how I divide the world.

00:05:55.640 I don't care if you're a Jew or a non-Jew, if you're white, if you're black, male or female. 0.96

00:06:01.060 It is of no consequence to me. 0.97

00:06:03.900 Are you a decent or an indecent human being?

00:06:06.740 So, these were the animating impulses.

00:06:08.880 I began going to the Soviet Union.

00:06:13.480 My public life started when I was 21.

00:06:16.920 Since my turning adult, I have been a public figure.

00:06:22.900 I don't know what it's like not to be.

00:06:25.180 I started lecturing at 21 because Israel sent me to the Soviet Union because of my knowledge of Russian,

00:06:31.260 which I studied in college, and Hebrew, which I'd studied my whole life,

00:06:35.900 to meet with Soviet Jews and dissidents.

00:06:38.960 And I came back to America and I started lecturing on the Soviet Union and the rest, so to speak.

00:06:49.420 Because history got into radio and then PragerU was born.

00:06:54.840 Does that answer your question?

00:06:58.080 It does.

00:06:58.540 And it brings up a very, very interesting question that I think both Francis and I have noticed in doing what we do,

00:07:06.120 because we've tried to seek the truth.

00:07:08.080 We've tried to speak out against things that we thought were wrong.

00:07:11.880 And one of the things we found very quickly was the people that we considered our friends

00:07:16.120 and the people that we considered to be allies or on our side or share the same values

00:07:20.780 were very angry at us for challenging things that we thought were wrong.

00:07:27.240 And you said just now that the people who don't fight evil, I don't remember the exact way you said it.

00:07:34.660 Yes, the people who don't fight evil fight those who do fight evil.

00:07:37.620 Yes.

00:07:38.380 And why is that?

00:07:41.620 That's a great question.

00:07:43.200 I think the answer is psychologic, but I'm not certain what the answer is.

00:07:51.380 If I'm fighting evil X and you're not, I'm putting you in a difficult position morally.

00:08:03.340 So you have two choices.

00:08:06.000 Either, you know what, I should fight X because it's evil,

00:08:08.800 or deny how evil X is and also diminish the stature of those that are fighting X

00:08:19.380 because they have to rationalize they're not fighting.

00:08:24.660 Why did they not fight communism?

00:08:27.640 So communism, well, it's not that bad.

00:08:31.060 I mean, there's good intentions of equality, which is an awful intention.

00:08:34.920 It's not even a good intention.

00:08:36.580 But that's another issue.

00:08:37.980 And you, you're fanatics, you're extremists.

00:08:45.300 So I have to justify my moral failure.

00:08:52.140 So I either have to acknowledge it's a moral failure that I didn't fight communism or whatever, or Hamas. 0.94

00:08:59.020 The hatred of Israel, Israel is fighting evil. 0.73

00:09:01.660 So vast chunk of humanity is not fighting that evil.

00:09:07.660 So they must diminish Israel's moral status and claim that, oh, yeah, well, you know, Hamas is not a wonderful organization,

00:09:17.140 but the poor Palestinians, what are they going to do?

00:09:20.040 So this is a mirror of what I grew up with.

00:09:24.680 Israel is the anti-communist of my youth, fighting the evil of our day, which is Islamic terror, as you know, in Britain. 0.99

00:09:36.520 I mean, and what we just saw in the Netherlands.

00:09:38.240 I mean, it's just unbelievable that it's the Israeli press, which is not hysterical, called it a pogrom against Israel fans of an Israel team that was there.

00:09:48.460 So it's human nature not to fight evil.

00:09:54.820 Dennis, what do you mean by evil?

00:09:57.680 Because it's a word that—

00:09:58.460 What do I mean by what?

00:09:59.460 Evil.

00:09:59.920 Oh, evil?

00:10:01.040 Yeah.

00:10:01.500 It's so interesting.

00:10:03.480 You may not know this being Brits.

00:10:05.420 There's a famous American story.

00:10:07.200 I don't remember the Supreme Court justice, but he said something to the effect.

00:10:11.480 I can't define obscenity or pornography.

00:10:14.420 I don't remember which word it was.

00:10:16.360 It was pornography.

00:10:17.420 It was?

00:10:17.900 Yeah.

00:10:18.040 I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it.

00:10:21.140 I think everybody knows what evil is when they see it.

00:10:26.420 But it is unjust harm done to another.

00:10:34.340 That's it.

00:10:35.340 The unjust is important because not harm, although that's interesting that even that is in our moral confusion, you know, well,

00:10:46.900 maybe the Brits were wrong for bombing Germany, maybe America was wrong for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

00:10:53.880 This is now not an idiosyncratic position.

00:10:59.800 People's moral compass, I'm sorry to say, on the right, since you don't care where we have to be critical of, and I'm with you.

00:11:16.740 That has to be acknowledged.

00:11:18.000 That has to be acknowledged.

00:11:19.120 And one of the things I think that one of the crises that the West is facing is it's lost its moral framework.

00:11:28.200 It doesn't know what evil is.

00:11:31.020 It doesn't know what it means to challenge evil because it's got it doesn't understand anymore.

00:11:36.940 Well, what the left has done, the left is organized moral confusion.

00:11:43.300 And what the left has done has redefined all of these terms.

00:11:48.500 So we don't have good and evil.

00:11:50.480 We have white and black, poor and rich, colonialist and colonized. 0.99

00:11:56.840 Those are the distinctions rather than good and evil.

00:12:01.420 And so Israel has everything going against it. 0.50

00:12:04.280 It's West versus East. 0.86

00:12:05.840 It's strong versus weak.

00:12:08.120 It's theoretically white versus non-white, although half of Israel is not white.

00:12:12.860 Nobody likes to acknowledge that fact.

00:12:15.900 And it's colonizer versus colonized.

00:12:18.900 So the educated class doesn't speak in these silly traditional terms of good and evil, but rather of colonizer and colonized and so on.

00:12:31.080 And it's a great point.

00:12:32.520 But I think what's tied underneath all of this is the fact that we are becoming more secular as a society.

00:12:39.360 Oh, well, yeah.

00:12:40.580 Now, now my life's work has is really been to teach the consequences of secularism.

00:12:48.200 And that's my that's really essentially my life's work.

00:12:52.980 And so I within the last couple of years, I I learned a line.

00:13:00.620 It is attributed to G.K. Chesterton, but nobody could find if he really said it.

00:13:06.140 I think he did because it's a it's a Chestertonian line.

00:13:09.660 But I'm only noting this because I didn't come up with it.

00:13:12.960 And I'm very adamant about citing sources.

00:13:15.460 I don't want to take credit for anything.

00:13:17.320 That's not my idea.

00:13:18.700 But it's brilliant.

00:13:20.120 When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.

00:13:24.400 They believe in anything.

00:13:26.480 The proof.

00:13:28.220 Only secular people say men give birth.

00:13:31.540 Not all secular people say it, but only secular people.

00:13:35.020 There is no religious Jew or Christian who says men give birth.

00:13:38.260 I don't think the Muslims would say either.

00:13:40.540 To be fair.

00:13:41.660 Yeah.

00:13:42.100 No, no, you're right.

00:13:42.900 I agree.

00:13:43.560 But I'm talking within the Judeo-Christian West.

00:13:45.640 Yeah.

00:13:46.080 Of course, that's correct.

00:13:47.440 But that would only affirm my point.

00:13:49.280 They're religious.

00:13:50.160 Yes.

00:13:50.420 So the the here I give another example.

00:13:58.920 So I gave you the men give birth. 0.98

00:14:00.760 So why why is the West not reproducing itself?

00:14:06.420 People are not making babies, correct?

00:14:08.500 In virtually every Western country.

00:14:11.500 It's they say it's affluence.

00:14:13.380 It's not true.

00:14:14.800 It's secularism.

00:14:16.700 Religious affluent people have a lot of children.

00:14:18.900 And and and, you know, and poor, poor religious and affluent religious religious people have

00:14:28.220 children.

00:14:28.800 If you meet a family with five children in the United States, you will correctly assume 1.00

00:14:33.580 they're either Mormon, Catholic, evangelical or Orthodox Jew.

00:14:38.000 It is inconceivable that there would be a secular family having five or more children or even four or more 0.94

00:14:43.100 children.

00:14:43.400 So the people need to acknowledge.

00:14:49.460 I have never bothered arguing.

00:14:52.340 I brought a lot of people to take God in the Bible seriously.

00:14:56.820 Many, many people.

00:14:58.360 I'm very happy about that.

00:15:00.740 But I've never done it by arguing for God's existence.

00:15:03.900 All of my arguments are for God's necessity.

00:15:08.580 And what are those arguments?

00:15:11.760 As Dostoevsky put it in Brothers Karamazov, where there is no God, all is permitted.

00:15:18.960 Moral chaos must flow because if God is not the source of do not murder, murder is not wrong.

00:15:25.700 You can think it's wrong.

00:15:27.280 You can feel it's wrong.

00:15:29.900 Society may opine that it is wrong.

00:15:33.200 Morality is subjective unless there is a divine source for it.

00:15:37.920 You can be you can be an atheist and acknowledge that.

00:15:40.640 By the way, atheist philosophers till the very recent past did all acknowledge that.

00:15:46.220 If there is no God, morality is subjective.

00:15:49.040 The good and evil objectively exist only if there is God who is the source of moral values.

00:15:57.780 That's why we've become so uncomfortable with the word evil.

00:16:01.280 Right.

00:16:02.020 That's why I think and I say this as someone who is agnostic and Francis is too.

00:16:07.000 But I think it's obvious that evil implies some kind of authority to to to opine on that issue,

00:16:16.740 to say this is 100 percent undeniably wrong.

00:16:21.300 And to say that as a human being sounds too arrogant because who am I to judge?

00:16:27.380 Right.

00:16:28.240 You need something from above that that deigns this into truth.

00:16:34.120 Right.

00:16:34.400 Yeah.

00:16:34.600 Even do not murder.

00:16:36.780 You know, we think, oh, well, of course, obvious murder is wrong.

00:16:39.520 It's not obvious at all.

00:16:40.680 Not at all.

00:16:42.940 You know, take rape. 1.00

00:16:46.740 But war liberates men to do what they want to do.

00:16:50.940 Not all soldiers do this, but staggering numbers in all of war's history did it because there were no sanctions.

00:17:00.460 But if you believe that God doesn't want you to rape, there is a better chance that you won't.

00:17:07.580 Yes.

00:17:07.800 So this takes us back to what we really wanted to speak with you about, Dennis, which is the roots of our civilization.

00:17:14.560 What is the West and where does it come from?

00:17:16.840 Well, Margaret Thatcher said it and she's a heroine of mine.

00:17:20.500 We're a Judeo-Christian civilization. 0.81

00:17:25.960 By Judeo-Christian, I think it's important that people understand why do we use that term?

00:17:29.960 Because there are Jews who don't, there are some Jews who don't like it and there are some Christians who don't like it. 0.76

00:17:34.260 But it is a completely valid term.

00:17:36.380 First of all, they're the only two religions on earth that share a Bible.

00:17:39.060 So, excuse me, by definition, it's a legitimate term.

00:17:45.880 No other, no two religions share a Bible.

00:17:48.840 Islam does not share a Bible with any religion.

00:17:51.680 Hinduism doesn't. 1.00

00:17:53.840 It doesn't happen.

00:17:56.580 But Judaism and Christianity, two-thirds of the Christian Bible is the Jewish Bible.

00:18:01.760 That's a big deal.

00:18:03.000 Well, it didn't stop, unfortunately, a fair amount of Christian Jew hatred and persecution.

00:18:10.780 But that doesn't deny that it is the Jewish Bible is a big part of the Christian Bible.

00:18:19.480 Without the Jewish Bible, there is no Christian Bible. 0.96

00:18:21.680 As I tell my Christian friends, and most of my life is with Christians,

00:18:28.000 Jesus never read the New Testament.

00:18:30.360 He only read the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible.

00:18:35.800 So, yes, they're Judeo-Christian roots.

00:18:39.360 Obviously, there are Greek roots as well.

00:18:41.820 Well, give us a very, very basic history for people who are unfamiliar with all of this.

00:18:47.480 Give us the history of our civilization.

00:18:48.500 Okay, so, in effect...

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00:20:25.380 In effect, you have the origins with the beginning of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

00:20:32.600 You have in 325, the Roman Empire adopts Christianity as a state religion.

00:20:37.300 And that began the long, long road to civilize the barbaric tribes of Europe. 0.99

00:20:46.280 I remember listening to, this was really fascinating.

00:20:50.060 I was listening to a guy give a course on the history of the Catholic Church.

00:20:53.800 And he noted, and it's funny because it was like 14, 15 chapters.

00:21:00.780 It was a long course.

00:21:02.700 And the one thing I remember is, he said, there was one tribe that it was really difficult for the Catholic Church to convert to Christianity.

00:21:13.080 And I'm thinking, okay, which is the Germanic?

00:21:16.520 And he said, they didn't understand why it was wrong to kill. 0.94

00:21:21.200 If you're strong, you kill.

00:21:23.460 And by the way, that's a completely rational argument. 1.00

00:21:26.800 If I can prevail by killing, why wouldn't I kill? 0.93

00:21:31.840 People think because we've been so Judeo-Christianized, they think that those values are instinctual. 0.98

00:21:39.920 They're not.

00:21:42.040 People are so naive.

00:21:46.020 Here's another Prager rule number 473.

00:21:49.600 I just made up the number, but I have a lot of rules.

00:21:52.120 Wisdom begins with understanding that human nature is not basically good.

00:21:57.940 If you think human nature is basically good, you cannot be wise.

00:22:03.040 It is not possible. 0.99

00:22:04.800 Almost everything else you believe will be foolish. 0.80

00:22:08.740 So that's essential to Judaism and Christianity from Genesis,

00:22:15.460 where God himself says, you know, the will of man's heart is towards evil from his youth.

00:22:20.060 God himself makes that declaration.

00:22:23.820 That's a big deal.

00:22:25.720 And so if you don't figure out how to deal with flawed human nature,

00:22:31.920 and I never say we're basically evil.

00:22:34.000 I've never said that, nor does the Bible.

00:22:36.060 But we're not.

00:22:37.080 But the inclination is towards bad stuff.

00:22:41.920 It's easier to cheat on a test than not to cheat on a test.

00:22:45.620 And see, I'll come back to this in one moment.

00:22:49.600 I give real life examples all the time, which is, I believe, one reason I'm effective,

00:22:55.920 because I apply to real life.

00:22:58.120 Two years ago, I was in, I'm in Minnesota a lot, because I just am.

00:23:02.860 I don't know why.

00:23:03.440 I give a lot of talks there.

00:23:04.460 We have a lot of supporters at PragerU there.

00:23:06.600 So I always rent a car wherever I go.

00:23:09.300 I rented a car in Minneapolis, parked my car.

00:23:12.600 And I had, for whatever reason, they gave me the biggest SUV that they had, a Suburban,

00:23:20.520 which is too big.

00:23:22.060 But be that as it may, it was too big for the spot that I was in.

00:23:26.780 I scraped the car next to me as I pulled out.

00:23:29.640 So I had two choices.

00:23:32.820 Just keep driving.

00:23:34.140 Nobody saw it.

00:23:35.400 Or leave a note.

00:23:36.860 I scraped your car.

00:23:38.020 Here's my phone number.

00:23:40.600 And there's no doubt in my mind most people would not leave a note.

00:23:47.700 And I'm not saying this to tell you I'm wonderful.

00:23:50.460 I don't think I'm at all wonderful for doing it.

00:23:53.220 It's elementary decency.

00:23:55.220 But elementary decency is not common.

00:23:59.120 The reason I give this example is it's so much easier to do the wrong thing.

00:24:06.840 That's human nature.

00:24:08.260 It's not that we're evil.

00:24:09.640 It's just easier to do the wrong thing.

00:24:13.380 Anyway, by the way, it's a very sweet story.

00:24:15.480 I left the note.

00:24:17.160 The scratches on the side of your car, they were not as extensive, but they were there.

00:24:22.600 I did it.

00:24:23.580 Here's my phone number.

00:24:25.440 I get a text two days later from a woman whose car it was.

00:24:31.000 And it really is a very sweet story.

00:24:35.260 All she wrote was, I just want you to know, I don't know who you are.

00:24:38.980 I don't even know your name.

00:24:41.460 And I didn't leave my name because I'm well-known.

00:24:43.840 And you never know what that could lead to.

00:24:46.780 But I would have given it eventually, obviously.

00:24:48.960 And she said, I just want you to know how much it meant to me that a person would leave a note that they had scratched my car or whatever, damaged my car in some way.

00:25:00.720 And I told her how much her note meant to me, and I never heard from her again.

00:25:06.040 All she wanted me to know was how goodness moves people.

00:25:12.020 It's a great little story about that.

00:25:14.840 But I give you the story only to talk about human nature.

00:25:18.040 It is just so much easier to do the wrong thing.

00:25:23.440 I'm not talking about murder, although that's easy too, apparently, given human condition.

00:25:28.520 So the West is founded, the beginnings of the civilizational aspect to civilized human beings begins with the church, which is a very flawed institution.

00:25:46.680 But people who speak of its flaws, and I wrote a book on anti-Semitism.

00:25:52.160 I know church anti-Semitism really well, but you have to be honest, it did a lot of good too. 1.00

00:26:02.300 It's a mixed bag, but mixed means good too.

00:26:06.800 And it did.

00:26:08.040 It told the German tribes, hello, here are the Ten Commandments. 0.91

00:26:12.540 And we believe God gave them, and you can't murder.

00:26:16.440 And they were the last tribe in Europe to accept Christianity.

00:26:19.760 And it was over that issue.

00:26:23.300 So those are the roots.

00:26:26.580 Plus, the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness has been essential to Western civilization.

00:26:34.300 And now, with the post-Christian age, post-Judeo-Christian age, the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness is dead. 0.92

00:26:43.540 And I can almost date the beginnings.

00:26:50.400 The late 19th century, essentially, or parts of the French Enlightenment, but the thing I use as the example is music, because I am a musician.

00:27:03.840 I conduct orchestras as an avocation, and atonal music introduced chaos.

00:27:14.000 What's atonal music?

00:27:16.200 Every piece of music is basically harmony, melody, and tonality.

00:27:22.380 Tonality is basically, we're following a key.

00:27:29.060 Happy birthday to you, happy birthday, is in a key.

00:27:32.900 But if there is no key, and I don't have to be governed by the key, whether it's C major, I don't know what, I don't have perfect pitch.

00:27:41.120 I don't know what key I sang that in.

00:27:42.340 And I do happy birthday, there's no key, there's no tonality.

00:27:50.360 So, Leonard Bernstein, whom I don't like, but it doesn't matter, he said something very wise, he's a great musician, said, atonal music is an oxymoron.

00:28:00.860 And by the way, it's not even written any longer.

00:28:03.800 It had its hundred-year take, started at Arnold Schoenberg in Europe.

00:28:08.320 And, but the same in modern art, contemporary art, where, you know, you could stand on a ladder and throw paint on a canvas, and it sells for millions of dollars.

00:28:23.240 This is the Naked Emperor.

00:28:25.100 This is not truth, beauty, or goodness.

00:28:27.480 This is chaos.

00:28:29.540 And it's all a post-religious age. 0.96

00:28:33.160 I interviewed one of the greatest British conductors.

00:28:37.920 He wrote a book on Bach, and even though most of my listeners don't listen to Bach, I still had him on, John Elliott Gardner.

00:28:47.860 And I had no idea what he would answer.

00:28:52.860 I assumed he was, like most musicians, secular.

00:28:56.240 And he might be.

00:28:56.960 And I said, I just like Maestro Gardner, I would like to bounce off a theory of mine that the death of God means we are not going to produce great music anymore.

00:29:13.460 He said, I agree with you entirely.

00:29:15.540 I was shocked.

00:29:17.400 I mean, people could see how many recordings he's done of Bach and others, John Elliott Gardner.

00:29:22.020 The post-God era, you could be an atheist and acknowledge this.

00:29:30.400 And if you pursue truth, you will.

00:29:33.580 I don't know how you produce beauty, truth, and goodness without God.

00:29:38.000 We're obviously not doing a good job with the chaos in our museums, the chaos in our school classrooms.

00:29:45.500 I mean, again, back to men give birth. 0.99

00:29:49.280 Again, this is produced by the secular society.

00:29:56.500 Women saying, I don't want children. 1.00

00:30:00.800 I thought marriage, there was a song when I was a child.

00:30:08.920 It was an American song.

00:30:10.260 I wonder if you're familiar with it, or at least the lyrics.

00:30:13.180 Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

00:30:15.540 That song today would be considered an anachronism.

00:30:21.260 Who the hell thinks that love and marriage go together at all?

00:30:24.860 There's love and there's marriage.

00:30:26.960 I'm pro-love, but I'm not pro-marriage. 0.99

00:30:30.640 And this too is, the West will not survive.

00:30:34.020 Let's put it this way.

00:30:34.900 The West will not survive the decline of its origins, which are Judeo-Christian. 0.98

00:30:39.420 So, that being the case, what should we do?

00:30:45.880 Well, okay.

00:30:47.340 Well, this is...

00:30:50.380 I'm hesitant because it sounds like I'm promoting something I do.

00:30:55.300 But I am promoting something I do.

00:30:56.980 But I want to make it clear, this is not for money.

00:30:59.680 Nobody writes a commentary on the Bible to get rich.

00:31:04.240 I make a good living.

00:31:06.160 It isn't from a Deuteronomy commentary.

00:31:09.460 This is pure work of idealism.

00:31:12.780 But I tell you what I do, and there are many answers to your question.

00:31:20.220 But one of the things I do is, verbally and in writing, make the case for the Bible.

00:31:28.400 As the place to get your wisdom, because without wisdom, there is no goodness.

00:31:34.920 And I want to come back to the wisdom part in a moment.

00:31:38.180 And so, this is coming out right now, the fourth of my five volumes, the Rational Bible.

00:31:44.880 And I call it the Rational Bible because I only use reason.

00:31:49.360 Reason is my vehicle to God, not faith.

00:31:52.580 I know that sounds odd to a lot of religious people, and I understand that.

00:31:56.020 But my faith is, my religiosity, my God-centeredness is 99.9% reason-based.

00:32:07.440 God gave us reason we should use it.

00:32:10.380 I didn't, I don't like, you just, well, just take it on faith.

00:32:14.500 If it doesn't make sense, that's why my commentary is widely read.

00:32:19.640 Because I write in the preface, if anything I wrote doesn't make sense, I failed.

00:32:25.220 I make sense of the first five books, which are the most important books of the Bible.

00:32:31.300 The whole Bible rests on the first five books called the Torah.

00:32:35.120 So, I, you, this was very touching, but not, I'll give you two quick examples since I'm now going to reference me again.

00:32:46.200 Is that okay?

00:32:47.080 I feel a little self-conscious.

00:32:48.600 But, so, two very quick anecdotes.

00:32:53.140 I spoke to young people in the Czech Republic a few years ago.

00:32:59.060 And in front of the group, a young Czech comes over to me, said, I just want you to know, Ben Shapiro brought me to conservatism, and you brought me to God.

00:33:09.580 I was very touched.

00:33:10.800 And just a few weeks ago, I spoke at Brown University in Rhode Island, and a young student, a student at Brown comes over to me, says, hi, I'm so-and-so, I'm from India, which was apparent by his accent and his looks.

00:33:31.080 And he goes, I just want you to know, I'm a Hindu, and you brought me to conservatism, and you brought me to God and Judeo-Christian values, and I'm converting to Christianity.

00:33:48.320 So, this Jew got this Hindu to convert to Christianity, and it's all done because the arguments make sense. 0.99

00:33:58.060 It's not, I don't have the belief, which Christians have, if you have a certain faith, you will be saved. 0.92

00:34:06.240 And I respect that belief, but it's not, that's not how, that's not my approach nor my belief.

00:34:12.300 I want people to adopt Judeo-Christian values to save the world, not to save their souls. 1.00

00:34:20.480 That may be true, but to save the world, because we're going downhill without these values.

00:34:31.040 That's what this Hindu kid came to understand.

00:34:34.280 So, that's what we have, we, so you guys describe yourselves as agnostic.

00:34:46.360 So, first of all, I live in the real world.

00:34:51.260 Some of the greatest fighters for the values I believe in, we believe in, are secular people.

00:34:58.040 You, I assume you guys are secular, given that you say you're agnostic.

00:35:03.480 You know, Douglas Murray, whom I adore, I think is agnostic.

00:35:08.260 I don't, I don't believe he's, he's particularly religious. 0.99

00:35:11.060 So, I'm well aware, and there are a lot of religious fools. 1.00

00:35:15.240 This is all, all true. 0.98

00:35:17.680 But, but, I have, I wrote an, I wrote a piece directed to secular conservatives.

00:35:25.100 And, the thrust of my piece was, will your grandchildren be conservative?

00:35:32.980 And, I suspect that the third generation of secular family member will not be conservative.

00:35:42.680 That eventually, the secularism will gnaw at their conservatism.

00:35:48.820 That's my suspicion.

00:35:50.600 And, and, it's not a perfect litmus test, grandchildren, but it's not bad.

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00:37:34.820 Right, now back to the show.

00:37:38.660 It's an interesting idea.

00:37:40.060 One of the counter-arguments to it might be what we had in the Soviet Union where, you know,

00:37:45.040 I can't remember who we've had this discussion with before,

00:37:47.360 but a lot of my views about the world are really about, well, this is what my parents taught me.

00:37:55.360 This is how they behaved.

00:37:56.620 Right.

00:37:58.420 So I don't have a deference towards people who are older because of religion, but it's because of what I saw around me when I was growing up.

00:38:08.780 I don't walk a woman to her car, whoever she is, in the evening because of religion. 0.98

00:38:15.940 I do it because that's what my parents taught me, and so on and so forth.

00:38:19.280 You know what I mean?

00:38:20.360 But I don't dispute that, you know, a very strongly held religious code is the easiest way to pass on values to the future generation, for sure.

00:38:29.680 Yeah. 0.98

00:38:30.940 Religion, or good religion, there's a lot of crappy religion. 1.00

00:38:35.280 Good religion is the ship that carries the moral cargo. 0.97

00:38:39.740 Yes.

00:38:41.280 And you mentioned, the interesting distinction for me is that a lot of religious people say that you have to have faith.

00:38:50.880 You have to have what an agnostic might call the belief in the supernatural, to some extent, right?

00:38:57.900 Whereas what you're talking about is an argument from reason.

00:39:01.000 So can you expand on that for us?

00:39:03.240 What's the argument for a religious worldview from reason?

00:39:06.960 Well, I've been presenting it, and you sound like it makes sense to you that we do have moral chaos intellectually, if nothing else, but I do believe existentially as well, if there is no God.

00:39:29.400 I mean, if, as, that's why I began, if God doesn't say murder is wrong, murder is not wrong.

00:39:36.240 You may think it's wrong, feel it's wrong, into it it's wrong, all of that is true, but it isn't wrong.

00:39:42.340 There is no right and wrong.

00:39:44.440 There is only opinions about what is right or wrong.

00:39:47.080 And so, when this case is made, an individual may conclude, wow, look, there's no arguing against that fact, but I personally just find it very hard, I'm not saying I, Dennis, but the person may say, I personally find it really hard to believe that there is some divine presence in the world.

00:40:11.340 Okay, that, and so, my answer to that person is, okay, fine, I'm not, I'm not here to persuade you there is a God.

00:40:24.920 I'm here, again, as I said, I'm here to persuade you that we can't live without God.

00:40:28.680 So, I would say to you, just live as if there is, and if you find it after years intellectually impossible, I'll give you an example.

00:40:40.940 I mean, it just, I'm a very, I'm a big behaviorist.

00:40:44.620 My book on happiness, one of my books is on happiness, and my book on happiness is totally behavioral.

00:40:52.920 Act happy, you'll feel happier.

00:40:54.460 It's not an original thought, and it's been said by almost anybody who's thought about happiness.

00:41:00.860 Act religious, you'll ultimately feel more religious.

00:41:05.760 That's just the way it works.

00:41:07.340 To take my religion, if you had Shabbat dinner, Sabbath dinner, Friday nights, for a year, it's hard for me to believe that on the 53rd Friday night, you'll be thrilled to go to the movies.

00:41:20.980 Or not have the Shabbat dinner, because that's, my Shabbat dinner, the same dozen people wouldn't always invite, often non-Jews, to our basic dozen people. 0.98

00:41:37.880 And we met, by the way, the entire lockdown of COVID, we missed two weeks.

00:41:42.880 By the third week, we said, this is ridiculous, and we lived as if there was nothing happening.

00:41:47.940 And it was therapeutic.

00:41:51.440 It was fantastic.

00:41:52.220 I mean, if you have that, it's like, I would say to a parent, you're tone deaf, you can't even spell Beethoven, but you should still give your kid music lessons.

00:42:12.380 And a lot of, that's what parents thought in the past.

00:42:15.240 Just, yeah, I don't really get into this music stuff, but I'd like my kid to at least learn about it.

00:42:25.900 You should do what is valuable, whether or not you emotionally respond to it.

00:42:33.360 So I always, I always tell parents, you know, okay, you're agnostic, you should take your kid to church anyway. 0.81

00:42:42.480 What have you lost?

00:42:46.340 I mean, it's life without a God is chaotic, at least intellectually.

00:42:56.880 There are many fine secular people.

00:43:00.140 You were, I have a strong sense, I don't know what religion your parents were, but I have a strong belief, I'm almost certain, that your grandparents had some religious commitment.

00:43:14.300 And so.

00:43:15.820 They didn't, actually.

00:43:16.740 Okay, so it's very rare.

00:43:18.360 And then their parents did.

00:43:20.440 Your parents didn't get the great values that they transmitted to you from personal intuition.

00:43:27.280 No, no, they got it from a previous generation.

00:43:29.700 Yeah, okay.

00:43:31.020 And that previous generation got it from a previous generation.

00:43:34.200 Yes.

00:43:35.100 But that's why I asked you about the Judeo-Christian West, because I think you, nobody honest would deny that our civilization is dependent on its religious history.

00:43:46.360 I mean, that would be insane.

00:43:47.460 I mean, it's a system of belief.

00:43:50.100 Oh, many people deny it. 0.99

00:43:51.240 But they're stupid, because if you look at it objectively, this is a system of belief, thought, let's say. 0.99

00:43:57.520 Let's call it a philosophical system, even if you want to call it that, that swept the world. 1.00

00:44:03.380 That millions of people fought and died to advance or defend or protect or whatever.

00:44:09.180 The idea that it's not at the core of who we are, that it's not passed down from generation to generation to generation to make this world the way it is, different to other parts of the world to which, unlike most people I've been, where that isn't the case.

00:44:24.400 That would be absurd.

00:44:26.080 That would be the silliest thing that you could possibly say. 0.90

00:44:28.860 Right. 0.92

00:44:29.100 So guess what? 0.87

00:44:30.120 Our universities are teaching the silliest thing that you could possibly say.

00:44:33.860 When the EU made its charter about 10 years ago, it didn't mention Christianity.

00:44:38.360 It described Europe, and it didn't use the word Christian.

00:44:42.280 Yeah.

00:44:44.500 That's a lie.

00:44:46.960 And this isn't you saying that.

00:44:49.080 Mm-hmm.

00:44:49.860 Hello?

00:44:50.880 If it weren't for Christianity, there would be no Europe. 1.00

00:44:53.660 Yeah.

00:44:53.960 That's just, that's a fact.

00:44:55.180 I don't care what you think about religion.

00:44:57.020 That's a fact.

00:44:58.360 You know, one of, as somebody who was raised Catholic, struggles with various aspects of it,

00:45:05.140 one of the most powerful ideas of Christianity to me is the idea of salvation.

00:45:10.300 And I think part of the problem with the West is we don't have any idea what that means.

00:45:18.060 And if you're not invested in your own salvation, then eventually your life will fall apart in the most awful way possible.

00:45:27.740 Yes.

00:45:28.340 Well, that's a, you're an example of the old, the Catholic saying, you know, what is it?

00:45:34.640 You could take the guy out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the guy or whatever.

00:45:38.860 Or once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

00:45:41.120 I was taught by the Jesuits.

00:45:42.940 They said, show me the boy.

00:45:44.040 I think it was at eight, and I'll show you the man at 18.

00:45:46.380 Yeah, that's right.

00:45:47.400 That's another one of their sayings.

00:45:49.700 So I'll just respond.

00:45:52.340 I don't invalidate that theme whatsoever.

00:45:57.640 The, that theme is not a specifically Jewish one.

00:46:02.220 When I speak of Judeo-Christian, I always speak of Judeo-Christian values or ethics, not Judeo-Christian theology.

00:46:11.440 We, we do have different theologies.

00:46:13.960 For me, the salvation question is, and for virtually any, any Jew, is much less significant than for, for a Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic. 0.59

00:46:25.200 The, the, the, um, which, which to my, my Christian listeners, the vast majority of my listeners in my national radio show in America are Christian, uh, it sounds almost bizarre.

00:46:39.940 And I, and I, and I know that, and I adore these people, but I don't judge, I, I really, really don't judge people by, by theology.

00:46:49.820 I, all, you know what, you know what my definition of true religion is?

00:46:53.420 And then I'll get back to salvation.

00:46:54.760 I'm, I'm not evading it.

00:46:56.600 My definition of true religion is, do you produce good people?

00:47:00.640 A religion that produces good people is a true religion.

00:47:03.760 That's it, that, that, there's, it, it's, I don't know, I don't know any other way to measure what, what is a true, how, how, how can an outsider measure a true religion?

00:47:15.280 I, I measure you by your fruit, which is, you know, faith without works is dead, you know, from James in, in the New Testament.

00:47:25.480 So, how, how, how do I get saved?

00:47:30.920 The, the, the, the traditional Jewish answer is, behave well.

00:47:35.820 The, the Christian response is, you can never behave well enough to be saved. 0.73

00:47:41.940 That is the traditional Christian response.

00:47:44.140 But that is, that is not, uh, a, a Jewish pre-Christian view.

00:47:50.080 It's, it's, I don't believe it's a biblical pre-Christian view.

00:47:53.440 It's a, it's a New Testament view.

00:47:56.500 Uh, and, and by the way, I, I don't knock it.

00:47:59.200 I don't, I, it's just not my view.

00:48:03.040 Why do I get joy when a guy says to me, you know, I went back to church because of you, Dennis.

00:48:09.720 Not because I necessarily share the theological dogmas of, of the religion he will embrace,

00:48:19.020 but because I know the odds are he'll be a better human being if, if he becomes, if he goes back to church.

00:48:25.880 Yes, I, I, I really do believe that.

00:48:30.180 I, I, I just spoke today before you, I was on a podcast with a Christian podcaster about my Bible book.

00:48:37.900 And, and, and I, I, I spoke to him about that.

00:48:41.580 I see, because the Christians always ask me, why don't I believe in Jesus?

00:48:46.020 By the way, I'm not offended by it.

00:48:48.380 Frequently, Christians will say, you know, Dennis, you're probably the most prayed for a man in America.

00:48:52.800 And I say, you're probably right.

00:48:54.760 And, and, and much of the prayer is that I'll come to Jesus.

00:48:57.340 And by the way, I don't resent it.

00:48:59.540 I, it only comes from a good place in these people.

00:49:02.440 I don't know why Jews do resent it who resent it, but don't start me on Jews. 0.99

00:49:08.620 I have big problems with a lot of Jews. 1.00

00:49:10.960 It's very sad.

00:49:11.640 It's a sad part of my life.

00:49:14.640 But, but I, I, it's worth talking about for a moment, but I'll, I'll just finish this.

00:49:20.680 So I just, I said, look, I do believe that you're doing God's work as a Christian.

00:49:29.060 And as a Jew, you're the ones bringing the Torah to the world. 1.00

00:49:32.440 The world knows about the Torah.

00:49:35.640 They do know about Numbers and Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Exodus and Genesis because of you.

00:49:42.400 We brought it into the world, but you made the world know about it.

00:49:46.580 We're, we're, we're related whether you like it or not.

00:49:51.480 We, we need each other.

00:49:52.820 So, uh, the, what happened, and, and this is, this is paradigmatic of, of non-Jews too. 0.93

00:50:04.700 Jews who left the belief that the Torah was divine, uh, ended up adopting secular religions.

00:50:16.180 Jews became, Jews became among the founders of every secular religion, whether it's Trotsky, uh, in, in, in the Soviet Union and communism, Marx, who was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis.

00:50:32.480 Of course, he was, he hated Jews too, but it doesn't matter.

00:50:35.960 Uh, and, uh, Betty Friedan and feminism. 1.00

00:50:39.960 If it's an ism, except Nazism, Jews helped found it and certainly helped lead it. 1.00

00:50:48.000 As I say all the time, Jews are the most religious people in the world, but for most of them, their religion is not Judaism.

00:50:55.200 And, and that, that's really, Jews don't abandon religion.

00:50:59.620 They, or to use your term, they don't abandon salvation.

00:51:02.920 They just secularize it.

00:51:04.940 Dennis, this is a side question, but since you brought it up, it's a question I, I, I really wanted to ask you, because I think I've, we've asked it of a number of people, both privately and publicly, and I never get a satisfying answer to it.

00:51:21.760 Why do people hate Jews?

00:51:23.900 Yeah, so I wrote a book, uh, with, uh, a prominent Jewish writer, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, many years ago.

00:51:30.160 The third edition is coming out right now because of October 7th, called Why the Jews?

00:51:34.940 And every, and the reason we wrote it is that virtually everything written on it is wrong, in my opinion.

00:51:48.860 So you, you, I'm, I'm really happy you asked me, and I'm really happy I might give you an answer that's somewhat satisfying.

00:51:57.540 I hope so.

00:51:58.520 I'm sorry, just to add, the reason I asked it partly is what you just said about the Jews having been involved in the various isms.

00:52:07.020 Right.

00:52:07.180 This is a theme that I see a lot of Jew haters use.

00:52:11.980 Yes.

00:52:12.120 There are others, many, many others.

00:52:13.900 Right.

00:52:14.240 By the way, I don't like a lot of these Jews either, but I'm not a Jew hater.

00:52:18.600 No, no, no, no. 0.54

00:52:20.180 A Jew not liker is not the same as a Jew hater.

00:52:24.360 So I'll answer your question after I make the point about that. 0.85

00:52:30.520 Jew hatred is unique. 1.00

00:52:32.560 It's the only ethnic or religious hatred that is exterminationist. 1.00

00:52:38.480 Jew haters want to exterminate the Jews. 0.72

00:52:40.700 Two thousand years ago, the rabbis wrote, which is said to this day by every Jew who has a Passover Seder, it's in the Haggadah, the Passover Seder liturgy. 0.92

00:52:55.300 I'm debating, should I say it in Hebrew?

00:52:58.980 Or?

00:52:59.840 Or just English.

00:53:00.720 English, I think.

00:53:01.580 Yeah, no, no, I'm definitely going to say it in English.

00:53:03.260 Okay.

00:53:03.500 But I don't know if it's worth it.

00:53:05.040 It's, I usually, I rarely do, so I won't bother with the Hebrew. 1.00

00:53:08.600 In every generation, someone arises, or literally they arise, to annihilate us.

00:53:17.180 It's a very rare Hebrew word, but to annihilate, to end us, literally.

00:53:23.320 This is a very interesting thing.

00:53:26.940 The Brits and the Irish hated each other for a while.

00:53:30.440 Germans and Poles hated each other. 1.00

00:53:33.200 You name it.

00:53:35.160 Russians and Ukrainians, whatever it might be.

00:53:37.600 But only to this day, to Hamas, from Hitler to Hamas and before. 0.95

00:53:45.300 Jew hatred is annihilationist. 1.00

00:53:48.020 The Jewish people must be exterminated. 1.00

00:53:50.580 It's unique. 1.00

00:53:51.340 So that just establishes its uniqueness.

00:53:55.460 So if there are non-Jews annoyed with Jews' activism in left-wing causes, I share that annoyance. 0.86

00:54:04.540 But they're not annoyed.

00:54:06.020 I don't hate Jews for that. 0.97

00:54:07.680 I hate those people who mislead people. 0.99

00:54:10.500 I hate Trotsky. 0.94

00:54:11.960 Okay.

00:54:12.460 I do. 0.99

00:54:12.900 I hate his guts. 0.99

00:54:14.300 But I'm not a Jew hater. 0.99

00:54:15.980 I hate Trotsky.

00:54:17.680 I feel that way about George Soros.

00:54:21.080 Okay.

00:54:21.340 But, you know, does it lead me to Jew hatred?

00:54:28.040 That's what. 0.95

00:54:29.940 If every Jew were saintly, Jews would still be hated. 1.00

00:54:37.200 So here is, this is back to your question. 0.77

00:54:40.440 So the Talmud is this enormous work of 60 volumes.

00:54:50.400 I think it's 60.

00:54:53.020 It's as large as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

00:54:58.160 It's in Aramaic largely.

00:55:00.520 It's the second holiest work of Judaism after the Bible.

00:55:05.320 And the rabbis who wrote it about 1,800 years ago, they asked, why are the Jews hated?

00:55:13.780 And you must understand, there are chapters devoted to arcane legal questions.

00:55:22.140 Can you eat an egg that was laid on a Jewish holiday? 0.92

00:55:26.580 Has an entire volume.

00:55:28.820 Okay.

00:55:29.960 You're allowed to laugh.

00:55:31.180 Don't worry about it.

00:55:31.880 It's okay.

00:55:32.460 Yet you would think anti-Semitism would take five volumes.

00:55:38.320 It takes up maybe five lines.

00:55:41.380 Because it wasn't complex.

00:55:44.420 And here I have to use the Hebrew because people will understand when they hear it. 0.85

00:55:48.360 It's a play on words.

00:55:50.200 The word for hatred is sinah.

00:55:52.480 And the word for Sinai is Sinai.

00:55:55.400 It sounds almost the same, right?

00:55:57.720 The great sinah comes from Sinai.

00:56:00.800 The great hatred comes from Mount Sinai.

00:56:05.520 And there was a Catholic scholar who wrote a book on anti-Semitism.

00:56:10.760 Edward Flannery is a priest.

00:56:13.160 He's a bishop.

00:56:14.980 He wrote, the Jews have never been forgiven for introducing a judging God into the world. 0.85

00:56:21.540 No matter how Jews behave, religious, secular, bad, good, there is a metaphysical reality to Jewish existence. 0.96

00:56:38.020 And that is evil focuses on the Jews. 0.75

00:56:41.820 And many, many, many non-Jews dismissed Hitler as the Jews problem to their great error because it ended up with 60 million people minus 6 million, 50, 52 million, 54 million roughly were killed by it as a result of Hitler.

00:57:02.840 And the staggering ramifications of all that suffering.

00:57:07.020 The Jews are the canary in the mine. 1.00

00:57:11.520 For those who don't know, apparently miners would take canaries to the mine. 0.94

00:57:16.000 They would die before the miners knew there were noxious fumes.

00:57:21.180 So the miners saw the canary dying and knew, oh, there are noxious fumes.

00:57:25.040 Let's fight them. 0.66

00:57:25.860 Let's destroy the fumes. 1.00

00:57:28.560 That's the Jew is the miner's canary. 1.00

00:57:30.420 So you have a choice if you're a non-Jew. 0.92

00:57:33.640 Oh, look, the canary died.

00:57:35.820 Too bad.

00:57:38.020 Who knows why the canary died?

00:57:40.520 Or you could say, we know why the canary died.

00:57:43.420 There are noxious fumes that need to be fought. 0.95

00:57:46.880 So it's irrespective, you know, whether Jews are nice or not nice. 0.99

00:57:51.580 Jews are a mixed bag like every group on earth. 1.00

00:57:54.420 There were great Jews, awful Jews. 1.00

00:57:55.860 By the way, I do remind this, because, again, most of my life is to and with Christians. 0.94

00:58:05.680 When a Christian leaves Christian belief, no one calls him a Christian.

00:58:11.460 When a Jew leaves Jewish belief, he is still called a Jew.

00:58:15.920 I'm stuck with George Soros. 0.98

00:58:18.240 George Soros is as Jewish as this glass. 0.96

00:58:21.300 But everyone says he's a Jew.

00:58:23.140 Whereas, you know, nobody says Stalin is a Christian, but he was born to Christian parents in Georgia.

00:58:30.920 He went to seminary as a kid.

00:58:33.400 But nobody says, oh, Stalin, the Christian, he slaughtered 20 to 30 million people in the gulag. 0.67

00:58:39.840 No, they just say Stalin.

00:58:41.980 But if Stalin were born to Jewish parents and rejected Judaism completely, just like Trotsky did,

00:58:47.840 say, oh, Stalin was a Jew. 0.70

00:58:49.480 So it's a double standard, in effect.

00:58:52.200 I'm not blaming people, because Jews also believe that.

00:58:55.560 If you're born to Jewish parents, you are a Jew. 0.92

00:58:57.420 Because Jews are an ethnicity as well as a religion.

00:59:00.880 Christianity is just a religion. 0.99

00:59:02.480 So they get to disqualify whoever they want.

00:59:05.380 We don't get to disqualify anybody. 0.97

00:59:07.220 But the hatred coming from Sinai, the Jews, we have this crappy role that the bad focus on us. 0.96

00:59:23.820 I mean, let's be honest. 0.93

00:59:25.760 Anti-Semites have not been among the finest people in any given society.

00:59:30.300 Is that fair to say?

00:59:31.180 I mean, that's why when Hamas are described as, you know, Palestinian liberation fighters,

00:59:39.040 or whatever other term is used, the absurdity of it, the moral absurdity, they're today's Nazis. 0.59

00:59:45.680 You can finally use the word Nazi for someone who wasn't a German in the 1930s or 40s. 0.98

00:59:52.260 They want to exterminate the Jews. 0.94

00:59:55.320 They claim it. 0.72

00:59:58.820 And Israel, you know, Israel is often charged with being an island of Western civilization in the Middle East.

01:00:05.540 That's exactly what it is.

01:00:07.060 That's correct.

01:00:10.200 It's hated because it's essentially good.

01:00:15.740 That's the irony.

01:00:17.060 I mean, it's not hated by good people.

01:00:19.500 It's hated by bad people.

01:00:22.260 Is every Israeli a wonderful human?

01:00:24.780 Of course not.

01:00:25.720 But it doesn't matter.

01:00:28.000 So when, you know, if someone says, you know, Jews have played a disproportionate role in creating left-wing movements,

01:00:36.800 that's either true or not true.

01:00:38.800 And it is true. 0.71

01:00:40.260 And I'm very unhappy about it.

01:00:42.400 When Jews leave Judaism, and specifically belief in the divinity of the Torah, 0.99

01:00:49.200 that's really what, you've got to believe something is divine.

01:00:53.180 Whether you believe in God or not is irrelevant.

01:00:56.000 My question to people is not do you believe in God, because I know nothing about you if I know you believe in God.

01:01:00.880 I know nothing about you or your values or even your God.

01:01:04.020 But what text did God reveal?

01:01:09.240 That's the question that matters.

01:01:12.360 And so anyway, I hope that partially answers.

01:01:18.720 This is the role Jews have played. 1.00

01:01:21.000 But I don't understand why.

01:01:23.260 You mentioned the sign-out, the introducing and judging.

01:01:26.460 That doesn't make sense to me.

01:01:28.360 I don't understand.

01:01:28.900 Well, because people don't want to be told, first of all, they don't want to be told that they're judged.

01:01:36.200 It's a very, very annoying thing.

01:01:39.440 I have asked my colleagues at PragerU to do an experiment to buy billboard space on American highways.

01:01:50.880 Just 10 billboards across the country.

01:01:53.240 And that would say something like, yes, it is true God loves you, but it is equally true that God judges you.

01:02:02.660 Have a nice day.

01:02:05.540 It will annoy innumerable people.

01:02:10.100 People don't want to be judged.

01:02:12.460 It's huge.

01:02:14.300 And the Jews introduced, not a God who judges Jews.

01:02:18.280 Of course he judges Jews. 1.00

01:02:19.580 Judges everyone.

01:02:20.480 That's a big deal.

01:02:23.820 The Ten Commandments applies to everyone.

01:02:27.300 It was given to the Jews, but it applies to everyone.

01:02:29.680 That's why I'm writing my Torah commentary, and I write in the foreword of the Rational Bible.

01:02:35.440 The idea that the Torah is only relevant to Jews is like the idea that Beethoven is only relevant to Germans, 0.89

01:02:42.260 or Shakespeare is only relevant to the English.

01:02:45.500 It's either universally relevant or it's irrelevant.

01:02:48.500 There's no such thing as only relevant to a group.

01:02:53.520 I don't even understand the concept.

01:02:57.500 Is French literature only relevant to French people?

01:03:00.880 It's an absurdity.

01:03:02.920 Is any art, is any great idea, they're universal or they're worthless?

01:03:08.200 The greatest Bach interpreters today are Japanese.

01:03:10.620 Okay, let me ask a slightly different question, but related.

01:03:16.540 Why are Jews overrepresented in so many different things, good and bad?

01:03:20.520 So, I thought I may have said this to you earlier, Jews are the most religious people in the world,

01:03:28.480 but for most of them their religion is in Judaism.

01:03:30.540 Judaism really created in Jews very powerful forces of very powerful values,

01:03:45.060 which unfortunately, when secularized, can be problematic.

01:03:51.140 Not necessarily, but can be.

01:03:55.680 And so, for example, the love of learning.

01:04:00.600 Do you know Jewish women were literate in all of Jewish history that we have any record of?

01:04:07.940 That is the only group in the world we know of where the women were virtually as literate as the men.

01:04:13.800 If you wanted your daughter to do well, to marry well, it was irrelevant how much money the potential groom had.

01:04:26.480 Was he a Talmud Chacham?

01:04:28.660 Was he a learned student?

01:04:32.640 Brains were valued more than money.

01:04:36.220 Or that was prestige was in intelligence.

01:04:40.680 So, these values carried on. 0.96

01:04:43.180 I mean, the staggering number of Jews who were Nobel Prize winners is ridiculous, 1.00

01:04:48.120 given how small the Jews are in the world. 0.99

01:04:50.640 The problem is Jews dropped the source of these wonderful values. 1.00

01:04:55.060 They dropped Judaism. 0.98

01:04:56.520 They dropped a divine Torah. 1.00

01:04:59.080 And they ended up with a lot of foolish ideas. 0.98

01:05:03.180 But they had still many of these values. 0.98

01:05:06.620 I tell the joke.

01:05:07.840 So, there is no day, literally, in America.

01:05:14.160 It's not true everywhere in the world.

01:05:16.980 But it is certainly true in America. 0.99

01:05:19.300 There is no day of my life that I'm outside of the house and someone doesn't approach me.

01:05:25.100 Oh, I love your work.

01:05:26.680 I'd like a selfie.

01:05:27.920 Okay.

01:05:28.360 It does not happen.

01:05:30.660 So, I've told people for years, how do I know if the person's a Jew or a non-Jew? 0.97

01:05:35.380 Of course I don't.

01:05:36.860 Unless, if they tell me what college their kid goes to, it's a Jew. 1.00

01:05:41.220 No Gentile has ever said to me, you know, my daughter's at Dartmouth. 0.99

01:05:47.300 But Jews, which is terrible. 1.00

01:05:51.140 I've always regarded that as idol worship. 0.94

01:05:54.460 Harvard is a Jewish idol. 0.99

01:05:56.920 Okay?

01:05:58.520 Not anymore.

01:06:00.260 Not anymore.

01:06:01.240 Much less.

01:06:01.840 That's correct.

01:06:02.360 Not anymore.

01:06:02.960 Yes, the idols blew up in their face after October 7th.

01:06:06.080 That's exactly right.

01:06:07.080 But I wrote this and lectured on this for 40 years, that this was idol worship.

01:06:11.800 And I went to Columbia.

01:06:13.280 Okay, so it's not like sour grapes or why I didn't get into one of these places.

01:06:17.660 I was there and I knew it then.

01:06:19.820 I was told men and women are basically the same in Columbia in the 1970s.

01:06:25.200 But, so, and by the way, even the learning thing can be taken too far.

01:06:33.340 I did live in the Orthodox world.

01:06:36.860 I went to the yeshiva world.

01:06:38.280 And they, the learning, even among the Orthodox Jews, learning went too far. 0.89

01:06:44.740 The kids who were most esteemed knew the most words of Talmud by heart.

01:06:50.800 Talmud is, again, this gigantic work, post-biblical work. 0.97

01:06:55.060 And they weren't chosen on character.

01:06:57.840 They were chosen on brains or even memorization ability.

01:07:02.440 So, look, it's, it, the values that made Jews quite successful are all from Judaism.

01:07:16.860 But they have been de-Judaized.

01:07:20.340 Dennis, it's been a fantastic interview.

01:07:25.120 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:07:27.040 The final question is always the same.

01:07:28.920 Yeah.

01:07:29.200 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:07:32.680 Before Dennis answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description.

01:07:38.580 Go to our sub stack to see this.

01:07:40.400 Do you think you can slip some of your brand of common sense into America via the Trump administration?

01:07:47.520 The insignia of Yale University is in Hebrew.

01:07:50.720 I'm amazed Yale students have not rioted.

01:07:53.080 I mean, it's from the Torah.

01:07:54.960 Do you think this is the moment in which Western civilization began to fight back against itself?

01:08:01.720 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:08:04.400 Yes, I will disappoint you.

01:08:10.040 I can't think of any because you hit on the, on the passions of my life.

01:08:17.140 Explaining the, oh, I'll tell you there is one because I alluded to it.

01:08:23.060 I'm glad, glad you have that as your final question.

01:08:29.240 Wisdom is everything.

01:08:32.100 Knowledge is not.

01:08:34.400 But the, the, the crisis, the moral crisis of the university, which are the, the morally

01:08:43.020 most moronic institutions in the West, the universities, that's where people believe 0.62

01:08:50.900 Stalin should be given nuclear secrets. 0.98

01:08:53.800 Not everybody believed it, but that's where they came from.

01:08:56.580 Academia.

01:09:00.800 Wisdom.

01:09:01.360 Wisdom is, is much more important than knowledge and much more important than good intentions.

01:09:10.980 Good intentions without wisdom leads to evil.

01:09:16.100 Vast numbers of people supported communism from good intentions.

01:09:20.300 Vast numbers.

01:09:21.200 And they produced Gulag and Pol Pot and, and, and, and Mao and, and, and, and, and a lesser extent Castro and so on. 0.93

01:09:30.820 Good intentions are worthless without wisdom.

01:09:34.020 They're not worse than worthless.

01:09:35.940 They're harmful.

01:09:37.820 Wisdom is everything.

01:09:39.360 And I'll, I'll, I'll give you a fascinating insight.

01:09:42.600 I, I, I mentioned the Jewish liturgy for the Passover Seder.

01:09:47.980 It's called the Haggadah. 0.59

01:09:49.220 And I wrote one of my, the only non-biblical commentary I wrote is on the, it's called the

01:09:54.220 Rational Passover Haggadah.

01:09:56.160 So there's a story in there, it's thousands of years old, that the Torah speaks about four sons, the famous four sons.

01:10:05.980 Almost every Jew who knows anything about Judaism knows the four sons.

01:10:09.780 So there are four sons, and this is how you speak to each of them to explain the Exodus, because Passover is about the Exodus.

01:10:16.900 So there is the, let's see, there's, there's the evil son or bad son, there's the wise son, there's the son who was simple, and the son who doesn't know how to ask questions.

01:10:30.160 When I was a kid, I realized there's no good son.

01:10:34.540 And, and nobody pointed that out at, at the Passover Seder.

01:10:38.080 There was a bad son and a wise son, not a bad son and a good son.

01:10:42.780 Because the opposite of, of bad, uh, uh, isn't good.

01:10:49.300 It's wise.

01:10:51.000 Hmm.

01:10:52.160 Vast numbers of people mean well and do awful things because they don't have wisdom.

01:10:56.300 And there was, and here, this is a challenge to secular people.

01:11:00.400 There are certainly secular people like you, and I'm not buttering you up, but like you who are wise, but there is no wise secular institution.

01:11:13.660 The, the, the most secular institutions are our universities and they are the least wise institutions that we have in the Western world.

01:11:24.080 There's more wisdom in, in, in, in a, in a rural Iowa church than at Harvard.

01:11:29.900 I do believe, I truly believe that.

01:11:32.320 Partially because they begin with people not basically good and you need a God and so on and so forth.

01:11:36.940 So, yes, I, I, that was, that's the one thing I want to believe people with wisdom.

01:11:44.600 And, and that's, uh, that's a biggie.

01:11:47.420 Good intentions are nothing.

01:11:51.360 Dennis, it's been a pleasure.

01:11:53.600 I hope that's true.

01:11:55.640 It has been a pleasure.

01:11:56.860 It's been a wonderful interview.

01:11:58.040 Make sure to follow us on over to subset where you get to ask Dennis your questions.

01:12:02.720 Is there a way to make institutions like universities less isolated and so less prone to creating an echo chamber?

01:12:11.640 Or is this an inherent flaw in the system?

01:12:14.480 Oh.

01:12:26.340 Oh.

01:12:27.420 Oh.

01:12:27.920 Oh.

01:12:28.200 Oh.

01:12:28.580 Oh.

01:12:29.220 Oh.

01:12:29.580 Oh.

01:12:31.400 Oh.

01:12:31.780 Oh.

01:12:33.080 Oh.

01:12:33.160 Oh.

01:12:33.180 Oh.

01:12:34.240 Oh.

01:12:34.260 Oh.

01:12:35.440 Oh.

01:12:36.380 Oh.

01:12:36.640 Oh.

01:12:37.520 Oh.

01:12:38.840 Oh.

01:12:39.240 Oh.

01:12:39.860 Oh.

01:12:40.500 Oh.

01:12:40.780 Oh.

01:12:42.740 Oh.

01:12:43.900 Oh.

TRIGGERnometry - March 02, 2025

Why Evil Triumphs - Dennis Prager

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