All Episodes
July 15, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:56
Dennis Prager | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 10
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
A good part of my sanity rests on the belief that there is a just God, and if there is a just God, there's an afterlife.
Welcome to the Sunday special with Dennis Prager, who's stopping by first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at ZipRecruiter.
So hiring is challenging.
There's one place you can go where hiring is simple, fast and smart.
It's a place where growing businesses connect to qualified candidates.
And that place is ZipRecruiter.com slash Ben Guest, because I have a guest.
ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards.
They don't stop there.
They have powerful matching technology and ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job.
And then as the applications come in, ZipRecruiter analyzes each one, spotlights the top candidates so you never miss a great match.
ZipRecruiter is really effective.
So effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day.
And with results like that, it is no wonder ZipRecruiter is the highest rating hiring site in the United States.
Right now, My listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address.
ZipRecruiter.com slash BenGuest.
Go try it for free.
We use it here at The Daily Wire offices.
If the show doesn't go well today, we'll be using it again to replace employees.
It's just that simple.
ZipRecruiter.com slash BenGuest.
B-E-N-G-U-E-S-T.
ZipRecruiter.com slash BenGuest.
ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
Dennis Prager, welcome to the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special.
Thanks for coming by.
It's just great Well, I'm really excited to talk Bible with you because we have to bring some holiness back to the set.
Last week, we had Sam Harris and his blasphemy on the set.
So now we get to have the antidote.
Exactly.
Dennis Prager and his godly views on the set today.
Dennis, obviously, if you haven't been watching the news, you haven't followed the Amazon charts, is the author of the bestseller, The Rational Bible, The Book of Exodus.
We're going to go ahead and do all five volumes of the Old Testament, the books of Moses, and he's done Exodus.
It was a huge bestseller.
It sold tens of thousands of copies.
It was number one in the non-fiction list on Amazon.com, which has to be really gratifying since you've written a bunch of bestselling books, but this one is actually a Bible commentary.
So, let's start from the beginning.
What actually made you think, hey, I'll write a Bible commentary and then just release that out into the world?
Well, among the interesting things is, and it's great to be with you, Ben, Among the interesting things is that of all the books I wrote, this is the one I least expected to be a bestseller.
This was written 100% out of idealism.
They're all idealistic books, but there was a hope, and some of them were bestsellers.
But this has been the bestselling book I ever wrote, and it's the last one I expected.
I wrote a book on happiness, on American values, I mean, some good stuff.
But whatever credit I get, I think 50% of the reason is that there is a thirst for exactly that.
Namely, I'd like to actually know what the Bible has to say.
I want it to be rational, which is my entire approach, and there's a thirst.
Look, this is the most biblically illiterate generation in American history, as you know as well as anyone.
The average American home throughout American history, if it had one book, it had the Bible.
They read it to their kids every night.
This was the source of wisdom.
I've asked callers on 33 years of radio, said, I'd like to know, if it's not the Bible, just name a book that is the source of wisdom for you.
And it's fascinating.
You know what people say if they don't have this?
Life experience.
And I go, yeah, but then everybody has to reinvent the wheel.
You mean there's nothing that precedes you that had more wisdom than maybe you do?
Anyway, I know it's the wisest book.
I am convinced of it.
And making it rational, verse by verse, has been my life's task.
I know the Hebrew real well, as you do.
And you know, there are wonderful commentaries by people who don't know Hebrew.
But I think to really do it right, you have to know the Hebrew.
So let's start from the very beginning of the basis for the rational Bible, because I think that you can make a really solid argument that the ethics that the Bible promotes, the ethical monotheism that you promote, that this is based on a certain level of human rationality.
In a little while, I want to talk about human rationality versus God's rationality.
We'll do the rip-throw problem, which stands above which.
But let's start with The basis of Revelation.
So, when you say that the Bible is rational, do you mean that Revelation itself can be rationalized?
That it is rational that a voice came down from the top of a mountain and then proceeded to give a bunch of laws to a dude who's standing at the top of a mountain?
Okay, so you gotta go step by step.
Is it rational to believe that there's a Creator?
I think, as the late Charles Krauthammer said, when I asked him, Because I never asked him about politics.
I figured everybody could hear him on politics.
So I asked him about other things.
And I asked him, and he was a totally secular man.
So I said, what do you think of atheism?
And I thought he'd said, well, maybe so.
I don't know.
He said, that's the most foolish of all possible possibilities.
He said it's absurd.
I mean, he dumped on atheism more than I have.
So, to me, that there's a Creator is purely rational.
So then, that's purely rational.
This didn't come out by itself.
This world, this universe, you, me, Bach, it just didn't happen by chance.
Okay.
Is that a point of faith or is there a rational argument?
No, no, that's purely rational.
I'll tell you where faith comes in, that God is good.
There's so much bad in the world that I admit there's a leap of faith to believing that the Creator is good.
It's no leap of faith to a Creator.
I believe there's a leap of faith to God is good.
But once you've made that leap that God is good, which I think is somewhat rational, after all, why would a bad Creator make a person capable of being good?
It's a bizarre sort of situation.
So if the Creator cares how we live, then the Creator will give us guidelines.
Those guidelines are in the Bible.
That's how I look at it.
Okay, so let's define good.
So when you say that God is good, what do you mean by God is good?
Because obviously you don't mean God is good by human moral standards, because then that would put us, that is the Erypto problem, right?
That puts us above God.
Is God living up to our standards?
And if so, why do we need God in the first place if we're just I think there's a mixture of God's standards and our standards, otherwise we can't understand anything.
If it's purely divine, then we can't understand it.
When Abraham, the first monotheist, the first Jew, argues with God, which, by the way, is one of the reasons I'm in love with these first five books, what is called the Torah.
I mean it.
I'm in love with those books ever since I was a kid.
And I'm not the most traditional guy, but that I fell in love with.
And I love the idea that you can argue with God.
I tell Christians all the time, and that's largely of a huge Christian audience, and I'm a Jew, and I explain, don't forget, Israel, God's people, has a meaning.
It means argue with or struggle with God.
And a lot of Christians forgot that, and a lot, you know, and secularists don't even know that.
There's something beautiful about that.
Let me, can I tell you a quick anecdote?
A Muslim woman called my radio show many years ago, when I was just on in L.A., and she said, Dennis, I know you, we could ask you anything.
I said, that's right, well I'm a Muslim woman and I'd like to know why aren't you a Muslim?
And I told her, I want you to know I am complimented by the fact that you would even ask.
It means you think I've given this serious thought, and I have.
So I said to her, here's my answer.
Islam in Arabic means submit to God.
Israel in Hebrew means struggle with God.
I'd rather struggle with God than submit to God.
There was a moment of silence and she said, good answer, and hung up.
She knew as a Muslim I was right.
That is a huge difference.
So the fact that we can argue with God means that we can perceive God's morality.
So when I say God is good, it is both in His terms and, I believe, our terms.
So when it comes to that standard of good, There are two main sources in Western civilization for the standard of good.
One is the Bible, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the other is this idea of natural law that you see reflected a lot in the founding philosophy.
It's reflected as well in Thomistic thought, this idea that you can look at the universe and you can discern from the universe that there are certain things that are true and certain things that are false.
So, for example, you're an advocate for traditional marriage, and the natural law view of marriage would be exactly this, that God created man and woman to be together, and the proof of this is that they are capable of producing children.
So, when we're trying to discern the good, do we need revelation, or can natural law alone suffice, or are they mirrors of one another, or is natural law itself irrelevant?
So, there are two questions there.
Do we need God pragmatically?
Do we need God philosophically?
You're asking philosophically.
I'm more concerned with the pragmatic, because that's how we live, we practice, we live.
But look, clearly, if we needed revelation from the beginning, God would have revealed the Torah, as it were, or the Ten Commandments to Adam and Eve.
So clearly, God believes it's possible to be good without his direct revelation.
Otherwise, it's not fair to have blamed Kain for killing Abel.
Right.
Kain could have said, hey, hello, you didn't give me any rules.
What the hell am I supposed to know?
But he didn't say that.
So, yes, there's clearly an embedded conscience.
I do believe that.
The problem is it doesn't work well.
And so I always say the Ten Commandments are God's third attempt At trying to get us to be good people, and choosing a people to embody holiness and goodness, which is what is known as Israelite and then ultimately Jewish.
So that's that.
Then there's the pragmatic question.
That's the one I, not struggle with, but that's the one I advocate more.
I begin my introduction, which in and of itself is a book length.
Because the introduction is very important, what I'm trying to do and whom I'm trying to appeal to.
And I begin with a very revealing part of my own life.
Like many people in my late teens and early twenties, and even early teens, I had difficulties with my parents.
What else is new, right?
But I always honored them.
Always.
From the day I left my parents' home at 21 till they died, my father at 96, my mother at 89, I called them every single week.
It didn't matter where I was on earth.
And the reason was one, because I believed God instructed me, honor your father and mother.
And when I tell people who say, oh, I don't need God to be good, really?
Then how come so many adult kids who are angry at their parents don't call them every week?
Believe me, we can all use a commander in heaven to tell us what to do.
So when it comes to that, back to the philosophical question for one second, so to play skeptic since you're the rational Bible guy, so what took God so long?
Why did he need three attempts?
Why does he wait until the revelation at Sinai?
Great question, and I have dealt with that in my mind my whole life to show us why it was necessary.
That's why.
To show us, hey, hello, conscience alone doesn't work.
Look at how bad man got.
Because otherwise, if God had given the Ten Commandments, the Bible, the Torah, whatever, in the beginning, who needs it?
Conscience would be enough.
But conscience failed, and we ended up with the world of Noah, which God destroyed.
And by the way, I defend Noah, that Genesis is coming up.
I do defend God.
God wants us to be good, and if everybody's bad, he's going to start again.
I have a debate with my wife.
You're going to love this.
My wife thinks she shouldn't have saved Noah.
My wife thinks the world is so screwed up that it wasn't... It's dark.
It's very dark, yes.
She is as light as the sun in personality, but her view of... You wouldn't have called that one.
No, you wouldn't have called that one, exactly.
So, with all of that said, for a lot of folks who read the Bible and they don't know a lot about the Bible, and maybe their first experience with reading the Bible is going to be reading your book, when you read the text of the Bible, there's a lot in there that unquestionably is brutal, and it seems to our modern sensibilities Just bizarre.
It's seen the Bible contemplating witchcraft, for example, or the Bible endorsing quasi-slavery.
This is an argument that Sam Harris gave me last week.
He was saying, well, this book, you could do better than this book today.
You could just remove certain sections from this book and that would automatically make it better.
So what's all this stuff in the Bible about slavery?
Well, first of all, since my first volume is about Exodus, I have an enormous amount on the slavery issue.
Right.
The first thing to be said is there's very little slavery.
What the laws are about is essentially a bonded indenture.
Which, by the way, is the way so many people came to America.
People don't know that, but a vast number of the white people who came to the United States came as indentured servants.
They got no pay, they started out life working for somebody for no pay, which you can call a slave if you wish, but they didn't.
And by the way, as I know you know, the word in Hebrew for slave is also the word for servant.
And I wish there had been a distinction in Hebrew, because Moses is called an Abed of God.
That's the word.
And is Moses a slave of God?
Nobody assumes that.
So it's not at all always slave.
It is, but if you look at all the... First, you cannot return an escaped slave.
That's a law in the Torah, a law there in Exodus.
That was immediately a statement of, hey, you mistreat your slave and they escape, you're not getting your slave back.
You kill your slave, you get killed.
I mean, your slave has to have a day off with you on the Sabbath every week.
I mean, this is major stuff.
Why didn't it just say, no slavery?
Because it wants the world to be better.
The Torah is not preoccupied.
And I'm using the word Torah because this is about the first five books.
But my commentary is for people of every faith and no faith.
But there is a realization that you can't ban all bad immediately.
Maybe the Torah wanted us to be vegetarian, so a hundred years from now, when I think most people will be vegetarian, people will sit like a Sam Harris and say, well, why didn't it ban meat eating?
Instead, it humanized meat eating.
It moralized it.
That's what it did to whatever slavery it had.
It humanized it.
Because you can make the world better much more so through evolution than revolution.
Okay, so in just a second I want to ask you about the religious objections to applying rationality to the Bible, because so far we've dealt with sort of the rationalist objections to the Bible itself, and then I want to come at it from the right as opposed to from the left.
But first, let's talk about your dad.
Because it's going to happen.
71% of people say they need life insurance.
Only 59% have coverage, which means at least 12% of people are procrastinating.
And the truth is, you all need life insurance because you're all going to die.
It's hard to break it to you.
And that means you don't have as much time as you think you do.
Procrastinating is normally a bad thing, but if you've been avoiding getting life insurance, procrastinating may actually have worked in your favor because while you're putting it off, policy genius was making it easy.
PolicyGenius is the easy way to compare life insurance online.
You can compare quotes in just five minutes.
When it's that easy, putting it off becomes a lot harder.
You can compare quotes while sitting on the couch watching TV.
You can compare quotes while listening to this podcast.
Just go try it!
PolicyGenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance.
It's placed over 20 billion dollars in coverage.
And they don't just make life insurance easy, they also compare disability insurance and renter's insurance and health insurance.
So if you care about it, they can cover it.
If you need life insurance, you've been putting it off because it's too confusing or you don't have the time, check out PolicyGenius, the easy way to compare top insurers and find the best value for you.
No sales pressure, zero hassle.
It's free.
PolicyGenius.com.
When it's this easy to compare life insurance, there's no reason to put it off.
Go check it out at PolicyGenius.com.
By the way, I just want to add on your behalf.
Uh, that I tell my listeners that, uh, life insurance is a moral obligation.
Well, that's perfect.
So, policy genius.
Life insurance is a moral obligation.
Dennis Prager said so.
You can take it to the bank.
So, let's talk about the, the sort of skepticism of applying reason to the Bible from the right.
So, so far we've talked about, you know, people on, on sort of the secular left, uh, or just secularism in general, who would be skeptical about the Bible itself.
There are a lot of folks in the religious community, the community I grew up in, the community you grew up in, who would say that attempts to apply rationality to the mitzvot, to the commandments of the Torah, is actually counterproductive.
Because now you're placing man above God, and what you are doing is infusing a need, you're implying that God needs man in a way that is not true.
That God gives a certain level of commandment, and now we're trying to reason around it, but as soon as we start using our reason, reason also is a universal acid to a certain extent.
You can reason your way to anything.
So if you start off with a commandment here and you say, okay, well, take, for example, slavery.
And we say, okay, well, we've reasoned our way to slavery is bad using the beginning point of the Bible.
Why couldn't we reason our way to something else?
Why couldn't we reason our way to slavery is universally good based on the Bible?
Because reason doesn't have a lot of limits to it.
So what rules of reason ought we apply that will prevent the destruction of the rules Because if you think that the mitzvot are important, if you think the commandments are important, then either, you know, which ones do we have to keep, which ones don't we have to keep?
Well, first of all, let me explain on a personal note.
My vehicle to God is reason.
I don't have a great emotional bond with God.
I wish I did.
I don't.
My vehicle to God is reason.
My vehicle to faith is reason.
My vehicle to religious life is reason.
So I can't be what I'm not.
If someone doesn't care about reason, then they won't find my book interesting.
But we live in an age where almost everything has to be rationally explained.
I like that fact.
I think it's good.
And there was a book written when I was a kid called We Have Reason to Believe by an English rabbi, Louis Jacobs.
And I'm embarrassed to say I didn't read the whole book, but I am equally embarrassed, but I will tell you the truth.
The title changed my life.
The title.
I can't say that about any other book.
It was a brilliant double entendre.
We have reason to believe.
The obvious is there are reasons to believe.
But the secondary meaning was we have been given reason in order to believe.
And that is what I felt at 20, and I feel today.
That reason is my vehicle.
So let me give you a really good example.
There is a law in the Torah that says if you have a particularly unruly child, a terrible son, you take him to the court, and if they find him guilty, they stone him to death.
And people use that as a great example of how primitive the Bible is, or the Torah specifically.
I used reason to realize, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
That law was a moral genius.
That was the first law in human history to take away a parent's right to kill their child.
That's what the law did.
No child was ever killed in Jewish history by a court.
But what they did was, what the Torah did was, parents, you're still in charge, but wait a minute.
You can't kill your child, only a court can.
So what it did was, it maintained parental authority, but took away forever their right to kill their child.
So it was a staggering moral advance.
I show that with every difficult law in the Torah.
So how do you tell which are the moral advances that we need to move beyond, and which are the moral advances that's as far as we go?
So to take an example, You suggest that let's use the one you just used, just to take the counterpoint.
So your argument is that this is a movement away from parents being able to kill their children willy-nilly, and so you have a court process that's put in place specifically to prevent all of this.
So the goal of the commandment is to prevent the fulfillment of the commandment to a certain extent.
So now take the commandment with regard to the one that's popular today, with regard to homosexuality, for example.
How do we know that that wasn't just a progressive attempt to move away from something worse, but the really progressive thing would be to say that what it's really talking about is we're moving toward monogamy for male couples or female couples, which is the way that some people in sort of liberal congregations try to reinterpret that phrase.
In other words, where does reason stop?
And we say, OK, we've gone far enough.
And where do we say, OK, well, this commandment was written for the time and it was determined to drag people out of a certain level of primitivism.
And now we can drag them even further out of that level of primitivism.
I am... That's in the third book of the Bible, Leviticus.
I devote 20,000 words to that verse.
And this is the gist of it.
The gist is this.
I thought, before I did my research, and I'm sure everyone thinks this, that the Bible simply codified what every other society believed, and that is homosexuality is bad, end of issue.
It turns out, and I learned this from homosexual scholars and pro-homosexual, pro-gay scholars.
This is not from me.
Every society in the world, except for biblical society, said that homosexuality was good.
This was a total revelation.
Ancient China, ancient Incas, ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, anywhere on earth.
I read a book by a Harvard professor, and, you know, this is not my favorite reading, and it's not only because it's very involved, obviously, on ancient Chinese homosexuality.
So this was the rule, like in ancient Greece.
Women were for babies, boys were for fun.
The Torah said it the opposite.
The Torah said wives are for fun.
The Torah in that law eroticized marriage.
It was a staggering revolution in human history.
So, even accepting your logic, let's take the laws of Sabbath to take a less controversial example.
So, there are certain laws of Sabbath that have been made strict over time.
You and I disagree on the interpretation of Sabbath, for example.
You'll drive on Saturdays, I won't drive on Saturdays because there's a rabbinic tradition that you don't drive on Saturdays.
Right, by the way, I don't drive to a ball game, I don't drive shopping, I drive to a Sabbath-oriented thing.
No, I just wanted to make that clear.
Yeah, for sure.
But the question is, at least from the Orthodox point of view or from a fundamentalist point of view, so how does Orthodoxy not slip into Reconstructionism or into reform?
So which laws do you get to abrogate and which laws do you not get to abrogate?
Don't think we can change Torah law.
Torah law, I believe the Torah is ultimately from God.
Whether it was all given at one time or not, even the rabbis themselves differed on when exactly.
Was it through prophets?
Was it later?
It doesn't matter to me.
Who wrote it is more important to me than how it was written.
I believe it's a divine document.
That is, if I didn't, I would never have spent this time and I wouldn't take it seriously.
I believe it is a divine document.
So, I don't believe that not using spark plugs is divine.
I will acknowledge that it is rabbinic.
If you're asking me from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, and by the way, Orthodox Jews love the commentary, as they should.
It brings people to great faith, and I want that.
But it is true that I think rabbinic law can change.
I do believe that.
As for Torah law, for example, I don't smoke My pipe or cigar, which I do every day of the week, I don't do it on Shabbat, because it says do not burn a fire on the Sabbath.
So I just want to make that clear.
I take this stuff very seriously.
And by the way, I show, you'll love this, I show, and it took a lot of research, why is fire, aside from the guy who The guy who picks up sticks on Sabbath.
The issue is only fire.
Why does fire?
What's the big deal on fire on the Sabbath?
Fire is the only thing outside of making a baby that we do ex nihilo.
And so fire represents creation.
And the Sabbath's purpose is to not create, to imitate God, and rest and not create one day a week.
So, and my proof is, you are not banned from fire on the Jewish holy days other than the Sabbath.
That became a rabbinic law later.
But in the Torah itself, only on the Sabbath, because the Holy Days, Passover, Tabernacles, and Pentecost, Shavuot, Sukkot, and Pesach, do not represent creation.
But this does.
Anyway, this sounds a lot convoluted, I'm sure, to a lot of, or at least complex.
It's not.
I make things very clear.
But, yes, I admit that there are laws that, you know, I believe that a dish that has been put in boiling water has effectively gotten rid of its prior foods and can be eaten from.
But, you know, look, I know that the Orthodox, within Jewry, the Orthodox are my allies.
I know that.
And by the way, the Orthodox invite me to speak, knowing that I'm not Orthodox, to their great credit.
Every year at Passover.
That's right.
That's a perfect example.
Exactly.
So, let's talk about why the Bible.
So, what is the proof that the Bible is the best moral system, as opposed to other divinely ordained moral systems?
How do you make that judgment?
Because you're not a comparative theologian, per se.
I mean, you spend time reading about other religions.
Right.
Yes.
From what I understand, you don't consider yourself an expert on various other religions, so why this religion in particular?
The obvious answer is the fruit.
The United States of America was not founded only by Orthodox Christians.
In other words, not every founder believed in the Trinity.
But every founder believed that the Bible was the greatest book ever written, including Jefferson and Franklin.
And Lincoln, it's the one book he had.
He didn't go to church much, but he had the book.
There are people who believed in the Bible who did a lot of evil.
There's no question about that.
But people did evil everywhere.
So the only question mature people ask is not, why was there evil anywhere?
It's, why was there good anywhere?
It's not like, why was there poverty?
That's the norm.
Why is there any affluence?
That's the only question that intelligent people should ask, and the answer is capitalism.
Capitalism is the only thing that creates affluence.
The Bible was the only thing that created moral society.
So, when it comes to God, you've made the argument that you can be a moral person without God as an individual.
Of course.
But you can't build a moral system without God.
That's right.
So, can you explain that a little bit for people who have... Yes, of course.
You know, look, there are good people who believe in anything.
There were good people who believed in Zeus.
But nobody would argue that Zeus made good people.
That's the point.
Of course there are good people who believe in nothing, who believe in anything.
Of course that's true.
And there are bad people who believe in God.
I say that every time.
And yet, all over the internet you will find Prager Says that you can't be good if you don't believe in God.
And I've never said it in my life.
I'd have to be stupid to say it.
There are good atheists.
How many times can I say it?
The answer is there's no limit because they don't want to hear it.
But you can't build a good society without God.
You can have good individuals.
We care, you care, I care, all of us should care about what kind of society we make.
This country, there's a reason there are three mottos, e pluribus unum, liberty, and in God we trust.
Okay?
That's pretty important.
And Franklin did not believe we could have a good society without God.
Franklin's autobiography, his theology—and I just read Thomas Kidd's book on Franklin's theology, just to make sure—is identical to mine.
Identical.
God exists.
God will judge all of us.
That's what I believe.
That's what Franklin believed.
And Franklin is called so-called deist.
Deist is not what people think deist means.
Deist, most people think, is like Aristotle, the unmoved mover, a creator, and then the creator went to sleep or retired to another universe.
That is not what they were.
They believed, they simply weren't orthodox, small o, in their Christianity.
But they believed in providence, in a God who judges, and that God had a role in the founding of America.
Okay, so I want to talk in a minute with you about death, because we've talked a lot about sort of the life-affirming qualities of rationality and the Torah.
First, however, let's talk about your online privacy.
So with all the recent news about online security breaches, it's hard not to worry about where my data goes.
Making an online purchase, simply accessing your email, it could put your private information at risk.
You are being tracked online by social media sites, marketing companies, your mobile internet providers, how they make their money.
Not only can they record your browsing history, they often sell it to other corporations who want to profit from that information.
Which is why I've taken back my privacy using ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN has easy-to-use apps that run seamlessly in the background of my computer, phone, and tablet.
Turning on ExpressVPN protection only takes one click, and ExpressVPN secures and anonymizes your internet browsing by encrypting your data, hiding your public IP address.
Protecting yourself with ExpressVPN costs less than $7 a month.
It's really cheap, and it's really useful.
ExpressVPN is rated the number one VPN service by TechRadar.
Everybody should have a VPN.
It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So if you ever want to use public Wi-Fi, You want to keep hackers and spies from seeing your data?
ExpressVPN is the solution.
If you don't want to hand over your online history to your internet provider or data resellers, that's what ExpressVPN is for.
Protect your online activity today.
Find out how you can get three months for free at expressvpn.com slash ben.
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash ben for three months free with a one-year package.
That's expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more.
Okay, so, Dennis, let's talk a little bit about the afterlife in the Bible, because you mentioned the idea of God judging and the notion that after we die, God basically decides whether we were good or bad.
The Torah doesn't have a lot about the afterlife, actually.
The five books of Moses are pretty vague on exactly what happens when you die.
There are a few sort of vague references or allusions to it, the idea that You know, God kisses Moses and Moses goes somewhere, but you're not really sure where.
And there's obviously, in various different theologies, whole worlds built up around what happens after we die.
So, number one, what do you believe about what happens after we die?
Number two, where does that come from in the Bible?
And number three, do you actually need to believe in the afterlife in order to be good?
Okay, so one at a time.
One of the 850 reasons I'm in love with the Torah, I said, I'm not in love with God, I admit it.
I wish I were.
I've written actually an essay that the hardest law in the Torah is to love God with all your heart.
But with all the suffering in the world, I admit it, I find it hard not.
I hope I'll achieve it one day, but I do love the Torah, ironically.
I really, I'm in love with it, I admit it.
And one of the things I'm in love of is its reticence to talk much about the afterlife.
Because life is so hard, and has been for the vast majority of people, it's very easy to focus on the afterlife and ignore this world.
God wants us to make this world heavenly.
Not heaven, that's not possible.
And not to think about heaven all that much.
However, I will tell you, There is no doubt in my mind that the Torah believes in the afterlife, and I will give you two proofs.
One is that about of six people, it says, when they died, they were gathered unto their people or their kin.
Four of the six people it says it about were not buried with kin or family.
Four of the six.
So, being gathered to their kin cannot possibly be about where they're buried.
Secondly, it says it before they were ever buried.
So the act of dying itself means you are gathered to your kin.
I don't know any other read other than there is a soul that gathers with those that preceded you.
There is no other, I think, fair read to that verse.
Number two is not my argument.
It's Richard Elliott Friedman, who's not an Orthodox Jew, but he is also a very serious scholar of the Bible.
Wrote his own commentary.
And he made the following argument.
I believe it was in an email to me.
I don't know if he actually wrote it up.
He might have.
And he said, Given that the Torah is so preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egypt's values, because that's where the Hebrews grew up, right?
In ancient Egypt.
And it's, you know, like, all the plagues but one are against the gods of Egypt, so it's all a rejection of ancient Egypt.
But he said, the biggest belief in ancient Egypt was the afterlife.
The Torah could have easily just said, reject everything about Egypt, including the belief in an afterlife.
But it said nothing.
The biggest belief in Egypt is not contradicted in the Torah.
So that's a second reason.
It is clear the Torah believes in it, but it doesn't want us to be preoccupied with the afterlife.
The guys who believe they're going to get 72 virgins for blowing innocent people up are preoccupied with the afterlife.
Okay?
The Torah is afraid of that, and for good reason.
Now, you asked another, a part three on that one, right?
Is that?
Yeah.
Okay, good.
So a part three is, do we have to believe in an afterlife to be good people?
Or at least to build a good moral system.
Well, I would put it this way.
Without belief in an afterlife, it would be so obvious to me that God was not good that I would disregard anything that I thought this God said.
If I didn't believe in an afterlife, I'd be an atheist.
Because if God is good, there's an afterlife.
I mean, because it's so obvious.
Torturers have the same oblivion as they're tortured.
Mother Teresa goes to the same place as Adolf Hitler?
What kind of crappy world does this deity make?
I don't want anything to do with him.
I rest my whole case for belief and for sanity on the afterlife.
I admit it.
I fully admit it.
And for those interested, there's a five-minute PragerU video on the afterlife, which I happen to give.
I don't give most of the PragerU videos, but you give, I give.
Good people give.
And there's a five-minute case just for the afterlife.
But I fully admit it, and I know I'm mocked for this, I don't give a damn, but I'm mocked for it.
A good part of my sanity rests on the belief that there is a just God, and if there is a just God, there's an afterlife.
Okay, so let's talk about where the United States seemingly has gone wrong in all of this, because we've become a significantly less religious people.
If you go back to the 1950s, the vast majority of Americans were going to church on a regular basis.
If you look at the United States now, that's just not the case anymore.
Religious numbers, particularly among people my age, have declined markedly.
It's a much more secular country.
What happened?
Why is it that religion seems to have lost its appeal?
Maybe it's coming back, and we'll talk about that in a second.
We'll talk about whether you're optimistic or pessimistic in a second.
But what happened in the 1950s, 60s, 40s?
Why exactly was it that this religious worldview that gave birth to the greatest country in the history of the world, people just decided to toss it overboard?
Because the generation that's called the greatest generation, the World War II generation, which was a great generation, greatest or not, they were great, they made one horrible mistake.
They didn't teach their kids what made America tick.
And part of it was the Bible.
They were so preoccupied with making sure their kids didn't have a depression.
I don't mean psychological depression, I mean economic depression.
And that they wouldn't know war.
That's all they wanted.
Peace and prosperity.
That's all that generation ended up caring about.
So they taught their kids nothing about America and nothing about God and the Bible.
And the results are the chaos that we see today where teachers can't even call their kids boys and girls because of this True.
The ultimate irrationality of denying that there is male and female in the human species.
By the way, I will say this.
I wrote an essay many years ago.
It's on the internet.
How I found God at Columbia.
Then I went back to Columbia and gave this speech.
And I mean it sincerely.
Seeing the moral idiocy that pervades the universities, which are clearly the dumbest of our institutions, I believe that literally.
I wish I didn't believe it.
They are also the most godless institutions in Western civilization.
Columbia, where I learned nonsense in graduate school, Columbia made me realize the genius of a line that you know well, wisdom begins with fear of God.
And that changed my life.
One day walking through Columbia, I remember I asked myself, why am I learning that men and women are not basically different?
That they're basically the same.
This is ridiculous.
How am I learning?
I was at the School of International Affairs.
How am I learning that the U.S.
and the Soviet Union were moral equivalents?
That's what I was being taught.
That they were just two superpowers struggling it out.
It wasn't a battle between liberty and evil.
It was a battle between two superpowers.
And then I realized, oh my God!
There's no wisdom at Columbia because there's no God at Columbia.
I got to believe in God thanks to the irrationality of secularism.
So how do we restore any sort of biblical value?
Is there a way to draw people back to it?
I think there is a, you know, I've seen in my own life, I think there are people who are in search of something eternal and meaningful because they're looking around at the system being presented by What is left of our moral leadership and saying this is a shambles and they're looking for something that actually has some eternal value to it.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic that's going to happen and how is the best way for religious leaders to have an impact in driving that?
I'm not optimistic and I'm not pessimistic.
I wish I could say I'm optimistic but there was a... I was in a major discussion, a dialogue years ago with a great Catholic thinker and a great Protestant thinker And I was the Jew.
I'm not saying I'm a great thinker, but I was the Jew.
And one of them made a very powerful point.
The Catholic, actually it was Robert Novak who just passed away, and he was great.
And he said a very important thing.
He said, Dennis and I are the pessimists because I'm from Eastern Europe and he's a Jew.
We know how bad things can get.
The Protestant, God bless him, doesn't know how bad things can get.
And I've told this to Protestant audiences frequently.
And they've agreed.
They never looked at it that way.
I didn't look at it that way.
Robert Novak brought it to my attention.
So I'm not optimistic and I'm not pessimistic.
I can only say that a big part of the failure is religious people.
They did not make the case for the moral and intellectual necessity of religion They relied on a lot of cliches.
They're nice people, but they didn't know what to do.
That's the reason I feel so committed to this five-volume work.
And the fact that it is a big bestseller, I guess, believe it or not, not personally, but it gives me some reason for optimism.
I don't know the answer, but I know we have to get the message out.
This is the best thing going, and America will die and the West will die without this.
So Dennis has a bunch of things that you do, obviously.
You have the Rational Bible, you have PragerU, which has reached hundreds of millions of people at this point, with your various videos.
You have your radio show as well.
A lot of what you do is politically driven.
It's not just values driven, it's politically driven as well.
So how do you How do you merge?
How do values play into politics?
How much of your politics is driven by biblical concern?
A hundred percent.
It's a hundred percent.
And yet you're not a theocrat, obviously.
That's correct.
Not at all.
The founders of this country, of the United States of America, were giants.
They came up with a line that is so awesome, God wants us to be free.
They merged liberty and God.
Most religious life, Christian or Islamic or any other, did not merge liberty and religiosity.
This country is unique, and we're blowing it.
And I'm going crazy over that.
This is the last best hope of man.
Lincoln was right, and it's being blown.
And you know where it started?
This is the irony of ironies.
Because they didn't give PhDs in America, so in the late 19th century, scholars in America went to Germany, of all places, to get their PhDs.
And there's a basic rule in life, Germany is always wrong.
I'm sorry to say it because I have such close German friends.
They're not on music.
But I'm sorry.
They're not on music.
In fact, I end my essay, but never on Germany.
It's on the internet.
But thank you for Bach.
That is exactly how I end my essay.
That's exactly right.
I mean, but even Merkel, I mean, she's just, she's, she's blew it.
She just blew it.
I, they, they get, so they, these are the, Bismarck gave us socialism, not Marx, and Marx was German too.
But, but anyway, this, so these people get their PhDs in, in the socialist universe, this atheist universe of the German university, come back to America, and the rest is history.
So let's talk a little bit about the modern political tenor.
There are a lot of people who complain right now that morality and politics seem to be completely foreign to one another, and I have a lot of sympathies toward that position.
Not in terms of the positions being espoused, because obviously you and I, I think, agree on 99.9% of all things political, but With regard to sort of the way the politics is being carried on, whether it's people accosting each other in restaurants and screaming at them, or whether it is some of the president's tweets.
There's a feeling that morality has sort of gone by the wayside.
How much of biblical values and morality is character, and how much of it is public policy when it comes to politics?
Because this was a big argument, obviously, in 2016.
It'll be a big argument again, I assume, in 2020.
This is going to blow your mind.
I raised my boys to believe that character was more important than anything.
I'm one of the few Jewish parents who didn't give a damn about my kids' grades.
I mean, didn't give a damn.
I couldn't care less.
All I wanted was good kids.
Because I really do believe character, Uberalus, that character ultimately will determine their lives.
And whether they go to this college or that college or no college is secondary to their character.
And having said that, I don't really care about Donald Trump's sins.
So it sounds like a contradiction.
This is the most important value I taught to my kids, and then the President of the United States, I'm saying it's secondary.
But I live with that.
I live with that conjunction, and ironically, part of it is that I got a lot of my wisdom, if I have any, from the Bible.
God uses King David, who makes, I mean, Donald Trump look saintly.
I mean, Donald Trump didn't have any husband killed so he could sleep with the wife, let's be honest.
King David did.
And then God chooses, who does God choose of all the Canaanites?
Who does God choose to be the one to help the Israelites get into Canaan?
A prostitute!
It's almost the Bible's and God's way of saying, listen, I could take these sexual sinners and I could use them for good.
And I emphasize the word sexual sin because I think that a lot of religious people place too much emphasis on sexual sin beyond all the other areas of life.
I think that's a problematic issue, worthy another hour one day, but it's a big deal.
But it's a big deal.
Anyway, so I care more about America than I care about the character of a president.
Okay, so let me give you the counter-argument.
So the counter-argument is not that the policy that the president espouses doesn't matter, because obviously I'm very happy with a lot of President Trump's policies.
I think the country is winning because of a lot of President Trump's policies.
But there are externalities to public character, meaning that, you're right, I don't care all that much about Donald Trump's peccadillos in the past because Whatever.
It doesn't affect the public discourse, I think, in any serious way.
But when the president says things that are vile about people publicly, or when the president says that, you know, if people come to his protests and they make trouble, you know, punch them in the face or whatever it is.
When this sort of stuff happens, it From a character perspective, not only does it create a problem, I think, for the country, it also creates a problem for a lot of Christians who are tempted to start saying King David instead of just saying, being Nathan.
Saying, like, right, that's wrong.
You're not allowed to do that.
Like, it's tempting to play God in the King David story and say, right, he's King David, as opposed to, well, God gets to pick who King David is.
It's our job to say, right, you're not allowed to take that guy's husband, that woman's husband, and send him out to the battlefield to get killed.
So that he can repent, right?
I think that what's happened, one of the things that I think is driving apart the country is it's not a referendum on the president so much as it's a referendum on evangelical Christians and religious Jews and people who are overlooking, at least publicly, Some of the president's sins in order to maintain a level of, I think, emotional support.
Because I think you can intellectually support what the president does on policy and still say, right, he's acting like a schmuck right here.
And it's that gap that I think is really driving away young people, particularly with regard to President Trump.
Well, I don't want them to be driven away.
I mean, when you said we agree on 99.9%, this might be the point where we have a difference.
I admire the religious community for sticking with Donald Trump.
I have defended them in writing a great deal.
Whether it's religious Christians or Jews.
Because they understand what's at play here.
The fate of the United States of America, the last, best hope of humanity, is at risk here.
I'm not saying they shouldn't vote for him, mind you.
I'm not saying they shouldn't even support him politically.
So fine, so look.
But when he sins, should they say, that is bad what he just did?
Yes, that's fine.
And many do.
But they try to keep a perspective.
And this is where I know I am not for saying this.
I believe there's a civil war in the United States.
There is no joy in my saying this.
I've said this for years now.
I pray that it remains non-violent.
I don't know if it will.
I think there's a lot of people on the left who if they could get away with it would hurt, physically hurt people on the right.
And more so than the other way around, as Alan Dershowitz, Hillary Clinton supporter, lifelong Democrat, lifelong liberal, said to me, and it is on video, in his apartment in Manhattan last year.
He said, let me tell you something, as a Jew, as an American, as a liberal, I don't fear a handful of Nazis.
They mean nothing.
I fear the far left.
And that's how I feel.
And the far left is taking... Nazis are not taking over the Republican Party.
That's an absurdity.
It's a libel.
It's stupid.
But the far left is taking over the Democratic Party.
So there's a civil war, and I am not going to spend my time criticizing the only guy who has saved me from losing the country.
Because if there'd been any other Republican... And by the way, I was against him.
I was, and it's all in print, I was against him during the entire primary.
I said, but I said from my first article, if he wins the nomination I'll support him, because there's no choice.
There is such a war at stake right now.
Nobody else would have defeated Hillary Clinton.
He was the only one, I believe.
I don't think Ted Cruz would have.
I don't think Marco Rubio would have.
I don't believe Jeb Bush would have.
And that was the brink.
Supreme Court-wise, values-wise, you name it, that was the brink for this country.
So in light of that, a moronic tweet or an awful statement is very small The question is why does that always have to be contextualized?
I mean, I can agree with virtually everything that you just said there, but the question that I have is that the next election, the biggest single voting bloc is going to be millennials, it's going to be younger people.
And those people actually take his tweets seriously.
They actually, when he does something that, when he says something, they find bile, that actually matters to them even more so than the policy in many cases.
And what matters even more than that is, I think, So many people on the right who seem to refuse to acknowledge.
I just don't see why you can't do both.
I don't see why you can't say, his policies are great.
I'm thrilled with his policies.
And I wish you would stop doing that.
Or it would be better if you would stop doing that.
Or what he just said was garbage and be better off as a country if he hadn't done that.
That doesn't mean I'm going to turn over the country to this bunch of nutjobs on the left.
But you just contextualized it and that's great.
If you put that in that concept, hey listen, I can't stand what he just said, but frankly the policies are saving the country.
There isn't anybody who supports him who would differ with you.
Right, the only problem is that by saying, the point of the contextualization, I'm making the contextualization to you and to the audience so I can make clear the position.
The problem is that if, let's say he says something about Charlottesville.
And it's something that I find distasteful.
We may have a difference of understanding, and I have perused this a tremendous number of times.
He didn't say there were good Nazis and... He said there were good people on both sides on the Friday night.
On the Friday night.
Wasn't that about statues?
The Friday night was a white supremacist party.
Okay, do you think he was saying that there were good Nazis?
Do you believe he believes there were good Nazis?
I think he was saying there were good people who were marching, not good Nazis.
I think what he was saying is that there were good people who were marching with the Nazis to the statue which I... Okay, so here's my tell-me-even proof that he didn't say that.
Okay.
Because he doesn't believe there's good Antifa.
No, but I think the easy way for him to say things is there's good people on both sides.
Right, but he doesn't believe there's any good Antifa.
I'm not sure that he thinks things through to the extent necessary to actually... Okay.
Whether he does or he doesn't... The point is not Charlottesville, and I'm happy to argue Charlottesville, and we can go back through the text and we'll bring out our Talmuds and we can actually look through the legislative history of what he said, but anything that he said that people find distasteful, particularly, or that you would find distasteful in any other context.
Why can't we just say, that's distasteful?
Here's a good example.
He just went and he met with Kim Jong-un.
He was extraordinarily warm toward Kim Jong-un.
He said really nice things about a guy who was a dictator of 25 million people or so.
He's a butcher.
He's one of the worst people on planet Earth.
And the president of the United States said, he's a strong guy.
Only one in 10,000 people could do this sort of thing.
And as somebody who studied the former Soviet Union, I'm sure you look at this and you go, Well, hold up just a second here.
So, why can't we just say that, and then when it comes time for 2020, say, right, and the overall opinion is, I'll vote for him anyway, because that's that.
But not every day is a referendum on the election.
This I guess is my main point of criticism, because you and I are probably going to vote the same way in 2020, right?
The chances are very good that I vote for President Trump in 2020.
Or this year.
Right, well in 2018 we'll certainly vote the same way.
I'm going to vote Republican in 2018.
In 2020 there's a very high likelihood I'll vote for President Trump barring some sort of cataclysmic event.
All of that said, I do think that there is something deeply important about conservatives pointing out when he does something wrong because otherwise we lose our intellectual credibility and look as though it is our job to become his lawyers as opposed to being advocates for a position for which he is the I understand that, and it makes sense.
You and I both speak a great deal to young people.
I through PragerU, and you through, of course, The Daily Wire, and all of your podcasts, and all of the things you do.
I have a big following, you have a big following.
I don't think they're thinking, gee, this Prager who talks about morality, he doesn't have that much credibility with me because he supports the president.
Because people understand why I do, and I try to make it clear why I do.
So, your worry is not my worry.
But we need you.
You're the last person I would patronize of the six billion people on earth.
So I'm not patronizing you.
We need you terribly.
Remember, though, that there are people on our side who don't... There is one, I don't want to say his name, because I know him pretty well.
And it'll be obvious if anybody wants to research it, but most people won't.
Who said that, who's a lifelong Republican, and said Trump is worse than Stalin.
That's idiotic.
Okay, it is, it's idiotic, and it's very destructive, and there are those who, you know, they've left the party.
George Will, I adore George Will.
He's done Prager University videos, and he's left the Republican Party.
This is overwrought reaction.
The world is dirty, and I wish we had Donald Trump with tremendous style and all the wonderful things you would like, but we have him.
It's sort of like a marriage.
He's a package.
Trump is a package.
This package saved this country from the left taking it over in the last election.
That is so big that I somehow never lose picture of that with the sins that he commits.
That's my position.
Your position is, for our credibility, let's point out each of the sins that he commits.
Fine.
We need you and we need me.
And I mean this quite sincerely.
And yours is as morality-based as mine is morality-based.
But I am so focused on the near death of America that took place in 2016, and I believe that.
I believe had Hillary Clinton, or any Democrat, I don't get it.
Joe Biden, it's irrelevant.
Had any Democrat won then, I had no reason to have faith that this country will not go the way of Western Europe.
Well, it's always great to have you here, and I want to part with one question for you, Dennis Prager, author of The Rational Bible.
So, if you are going to pick your favorite section of the Torah, what is your favorite section of the Torah?
This is just a fun kind of parting question.
That's like, what's my favorite part about my wife?
That's how much I love the Torah.
Well, let's not get dangerous here.
I'm sorry?
Let's not get dangerous here.
Yeah, no, I understand.
I'm crazy about the Ten Commandments.
I am, and I spend a vast amount of time in this, the book that's out, the first one on Exodus, explaining why they alone, they alone, in fact, do not steal alone, would make a good world.
And I guess that's why I began with Exodus, because I'm in love with the Ten Commandments, including Honor Your Father and Mother, which changed my life.
And I hope my kids follow it, too.
Okay, well, Dennis, it's great to have you here.
And obviously, Dennis's next volume comes out next year.
His book on Genesis comes out next year.
Can't wait for the rest of them to unfold.
Dennis, thanks so much for stopping by.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
Export Selection