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Feb. 2, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:16
How the Truth Changes Everything with Dr. Jeff Myers
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Truth Changes Everything 00:04:50
Hey everybody, the truth changes everything with Dr. Jeff Myers.
We talk about why truth is necessary today more than ever.
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The truth changes everything.
I hope you believe that because it's true.
We're going to talk about what is actually true and why does that matter.
Jeff Myers is with us, Dr. Jeff Myers.
Charlie, it's great to be with you.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
We're going to have a fun day.
Yeah.
We're working you.
We're putting you on tour.
So we got a whole hour here and then we're going to Dream City Church in a couple hours and we're going to hopefully have a really big, big group there.
I want to talk about Summit Ministries.
I also want to talk about your book, which I found to be really, really helpful and I really enjoyed.
So, but first, tell us about Summit Ministries and the work you do.
Well, Summit's in Manitou Springs, Colorado, little hippie town right at the foot of Pikes Beach.
We love Manitou.
We have been, Summit Ministries has been there for 60 years.
And during that time, they have focused on helping to equip and support a rising generation to embrace God's truth and to champion a biblical worldview.
So we're not just looking for young adults who believe that Jesus is real, but who take that as the basis of their reality and expand it to everything else.
So we want them to go into law and politics and the military and medicine and science and all these different areas, taking those biblical convictions with them.
The summit's been able to train about 100,000 young people in just two week-long courses.
You spoke at one of them.
We met over at Arizona Christian.
I was really impressed with the kids.
They're really impressive, aren't they?
And the cool thing is, some of those kids are headed off to Ivy League schools.
Some of them are headed off to trade school.
Some of them are going straight into the workforce.
They're all across the spectrum.
But once they learn that they can learn and they love to learn, then all of a sudden they light up.
They want to grow.
They want to read.
They want to ask questions.
They realize every kid is smart, different kinds of smart, but we can all be the sort of people who make a difference.
And you equip them with the proper apologetics background, correct?
And also their ability to reason through these topics, which in Protestant circles is not always done.
Catholics do actually a pretty good job of this.
So tell us about that.
Well, we talk about a biblical worldview.
So a worldview is a pattern of ideas, of beliefs, of convictions, habits that help us make sense of the world and God and our relationship to God and the world.
So everybody operates from a set of patterns.
If you want to be successful in sports, you had better understand the patterns of play your team is using.
And you need to understand the patterns of play that will be operating against you so that you can counteract them.
Same thing is true in business.
Anybody who's successful in business operates based on patterns.
Well, there are patterns of truth.
We can see what's going on in the world.
And if we operate on that, not only do we live more successful life personally, but then we become the kind of people who can watch a television show, immediately figure out what worldview is being presented, and then know how to respond intelligently to it.
So there are two sides to it.
You got to learn a biblical worldview.
Then you have to learn the counterfeit worldviews too, so that you know what you're up against.
And it is summit.org is your website.
Summit.org is the website.
People can go there, sign up for one of the two-week programs.
We're looking for 16 to 22-year-olds.
They do not have to be believers.
We're looking for young adults who have questions.
Good.
If they're not curious, they might not enjoy it that much.
But if they're curious, they say, I got a lot of questions.
I'm not sure what I believe, but I've got a lot of questions.
That's who we're looking for.
That's the kid I was when I went to Summit Ministries as a student.
I just walked in.
I literally said to the director, hope you have a lot of answers because I have a lot of questions.
And he said, we're not afraid of questions at some point.
Oh, I knew I was in the right place.
He'll ask even better questions of you, make you think about things.
So let's talk about your book.
I loved your book.
It's great.
It's called The Truth Changes Everything, or just Truth Changes Everything.
I suppose The Truth is also, it doesn't change the title.
You guys should check it out.
Walking Toward Reality 00:05:34
It's brilliant.
First, tell us why you wrote the book.
Well, I actually wrote it in a difficult season of life.
I want to communicate the truth.
But as I got the contract to write the book, I was also diagnosed with cancer.
Oh, wow.
And while I was trying to figure out the treatment process, I realized, you know, I might not make it.
And if once you realize you might die, then all of a sudden your focus on everything else changes.
The phone call might be the last person that time you get to talk to them.
That's very stoic of you, by the way.
I'm not saying you're stoic, but that's one of their beliefs is a memento mori.
Think about your death every day.
Well, and there's there's some value to it.
My sense now is 14 months in remission that every day is a gift.
But I realized, man, is this the book I want to write?
If this is the last thing I ever get to write.
And I realized, Charlie, this is the most important thing.
If we lose the idea that truth exists and can be known by us, we lose everything.
We lose our own mental health.
We lose our ability to relate to one another personally and we lose our civilization.
So I decided, no, this is it.
And the cool thing from, obviously I'm coming at this from a Christian perspective.
I hope that's not a surprise to anybody.
No, it's welcomed.
From a biblical perspective, truth isn't just a set of logical propositions.
It's not just a mathematical formula.
It's a person.
That Jesus came as the truth.
And it was that personal aspect of truth that actually enlivened people in science, art, medicine, education, politics, justice, and all of those areas to be the ones who really changed the world.
And they did.
And we can still do it now.
That's the whole point behind the book.
Tell us why Christians should study and pray on the word logos.
So the Greeks had this, this is a cool word.
It actually, it's translated word.
That's really a minimal translation.
It's not, doesn't do it justice.
It doesn't do it justice.
You could say it's a thought expressed.
That's a little bit better.
Or spoken truth.
Right.
But when the Greeks looked at the world, there was an obviousness to it.
You're walking down the road.
There's a big hole in the road.
If you keep walking, you'll fall in the hole.
You'll hurt yourself.
There's an obviousness to reality.
If you go up on top of the building and think thoughts of upness and jump, you're still going to go down.
There's an obviousness to reality.
That's the word they used to describe the obviousness of reality.
So in John 1, you only have to, if you can only read one thing in the New Testament, read John chapter 1, because John says, in the beginning was the word logos, the obviousness of reality.
All Greeks would have been tracking with him at that point.
And then he said, and the word became flesh and dwelled among us.
And we observed his glory, the glory as the one and only son of the father, full of grace and truth.
And everybody reading that would have been going, whoa, the obviousness of reality is actually a person.
That changes everything.
And that person was also divine.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, just think about the nature of the incarnation.
I was on a show the other day that was not a believer.
Well, audience, probably mostly progressives.
And I said, now, think about, because he said, if you could just communicate, if you could just broadcast one message to the whole world, what would it be?
And I said, I wouldn't broadcast it that way because you have to go there.
If you want to have diplomatic relationships with another country, you don't just send them long letters.
You go there.
You send a diplomat.
And that's what God has done.
He sent his son into the world.
And entirely aside from the apologetics of that, that is a provable fact that that happened, that Jesus rose from the dead.
These are provable historical facts.
But entirely aside from that, it was people who believed that that developed the idea that we have souls, that our souls say something different about who we are as human beings.
Therefore, every human being has value.
Rights were based on that.
Education was based on that.
Science was based on that.
Science did not rise in rebellion against God.
That's what I was taught in school.
It rose to applaud him.
Yes, that's right.
Yes.
Sir Isaac Newton loved biblical prophecy.
He actually wrote more about biblical prophecy than he wrote a lot.
Yeah, he wrote a lot about theology.
And a lot of other guys did too.
One of the stories I tell in the book is of Robert Boyle.
This guy grew up, I mean, he was a trust fund baby.
He grew up in the castle that had been built by King John.
His father had bought it from Sir Walter Raleigh.
He could have just kicked back for his entire life, but he didn't.
Instead, he became the father of chemistry because he wanted to explore God's invisible nature.
And how do we know that?
Because he actually wrote a book.
He wrote a devotional book, an apologetics book called The Christian Virtuoso on how you can be a good scientist and be a believer.
Yeah, there's, we could spend a whole hour on this, but if you believe that God created the heavens and the earth and the world has order and you want to just, you want to inquire to that order to serve man, that's where science was born, as we know it.
Not to change the natural world.
That's scientism.
That's secular progressive scientism, but to inquire, discover, learn, and appreciate for the betterment of humanity.
That's an inheritance of a Christian tradition.
Well, Kepler said we believe that it brings glory to God when we discover his invisible nature, when we think God's thoughts after him.
And it wasn't.
Truth is the fingerprint of God.
Ancient Hebrew Insights 00:05:20
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So you mentioned the book of John, which is my favorite book to recommend to people.
Yes.
It's my second favorite book of the Bible.
Genesis is my favorite.
And then John and Proverbs is my three-favorite book.
So with you.
Yeah.
Isaiah?
Isaiah.
Yeah, I actually, you know, it's so funny.
Yoram Hazzoni was just on our program.
I don't know if you know him or not.
I do.
And he was so insistent that I have to really study Isaiah.
I really had never had a chance to.
I've read it, but I haven't really studied it.
Obviously, the prophecy is profound and confirms our faith in many ways.
But let me ask you, do you think that, because you're a very studied man and very thoughtful, and your book is very clear, do you think that Christians should understand the Greek tradition to better understand the context and also the language that is used in the gospel?
So understanding the original languages is important.
If you can at least get a commentary, a Bible dictionary, look at some of the words that are being used.
And I would say, so the Old Testament's almost all in Hebrew.
The New Testament's almost all in Greek.
So those are two ancient languages people aren't that familiar with.
The Hebrew, I think, is super important to understand.
I've been talking with a lot of Orthodox Jews about the nature of the Hebrew language.
They believe that it's the prototype language, that all language really came out of that.
Of course, Moses would have been, that was a total groundbreaker, how educated he was.
Yes.
The brilliant philosopher that he was, and then also a leader.
So he's rightly well thought of among Jews and among Christians.
But understanding the original language is really important because what these words mean, like we talked about Logos earlier.
That's such a cool word.
And if you just say, oh, Logos means word, no, you really haven't gotten it.
There's a whole philosophy underneath it.
That's right.
The same thing is true in the Hebrew language as well.
So you want to get a good Bible dictionary, get a good commentary, and then study into these passages and realize the depth.
Every Hebrew word is a whole philosophy of life.
And if you start to connect all the pieces.
And words can have simultaneous meanings.
For example, to honor your father also means to treat them heavily.
The curse is to treat them lightly.
And so there are synonyms and multiple meanings of the root words.
But to go deeper in that, do you think that Christians should at least be aware of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and the Greek tradition that was bubbling up during kind of the Hellenistic domination of the region as Christ ministered?
I take sort of a C.S. Lewis approach to this.
If the Greeks, if Socrates figured out something, it's because he's recognized a truth that exists that's bigger than him.
He wasn't revealing anything new to us.
He was just discovering it.
And if his insights are interesting and good, then we should pay attention to them.
But you've got to understand the philosophers for what they are.
When they think of God, they think of an idea.
They don't think of a person.
They think of a concept.
An abstraction.
An abstractions.
More like a force, but something that it does exist in an ideational way, but it's not something that it can ever relate to you.
It's nothing personal.
And that's when the Hebrews came along.
Then later Christians came along and said, no, it's all personal, that God comes to be with us.
You would see temples.
I mean, we were just recently in Israel.
You see altars.
You see temples.
All this stuff.
And people say, oh, well, the Hebrews had temples and then the pagans had temples.
So everybody had temples.
Well, there's a big difference.
Inside the temples of the Hebrews, there were no statues because God himself was thought to be there.
And that impersonal, immaterial, transcendent nature of God coming to be with us is unique.
I think if I could only understand one thing, I'd rather have people study that than study Aristotle, as cool as he is.
I think that makes sense.
And in the ancient world, polytheism was the norm and the Torah, the books of Moses, saying that there is only a oneness of God, there is one God was a transformational idea and was really a minority opinion at the time.
And this idea of monotheism and having a singular God was not a well-head belief at all.
So we're up against a break here, but the Ts, I do want to get into the nice thing.
So I do want to ask you, though, as you talk about truth and having that centered on Jesus, does, should we study the Torah or the books of the Old Testament?
The Monotheism Breakthrough 00:06:29
Because pastors will email me and or I'll see their sermons like Andy Stanley.
He says we should just forget the Old Testament.
Really not relevant, not important.
Obviously, I think that's nonsensical and silly, but this is important because you do some at ministries and I'm sure you get an objection here or there from somebody who says, yeah, I'm cool with the Jesus thing, but that Leviticus, that's why I'm not a Christian.
So should we study, appreciate, understand the totality of the Bible, or should we just truncate it?
Say, hey, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we don't need Leviticus or Deuteronomy or numbers.
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So, Dr. Jeff Myers, truth changes everything.
Should we just kind of do the Andy Stanley thing and just kind of say, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Leviticus, you're a waste of time.
To me, that's a grave mistake, Charlie.
And I'm not here to pick theological fights, but the truth is all of scripture is inspired by God, the Apostle Paul said, and is profitable for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness.
He was not at that point, as far as we can tell, talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
He was talking about the Old Testament.
When you look at John, again, we were talking about John.
We love the book of John.
You read John chapter one.
It's so powerful.
John chapter one, Andrew goes to his brother Peter and says, we found the Messiah.
A little bit later, Philip goes to his buddy Nathaniel and says, we have found the one Moses wrote about in the law.
And so did the prophets, Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth.
And that's that famous passage where Nathaniel says, can anything good come out of Nazareth?
Like anybody who's watched the chosen would remember that moment.
But in that moment, you realize these disciples believed that Jesus was the one who had been written about in the Torah.
And all of these prophecies from all of time, which were known by everyday Jewish people, including fishermen, were coming true.
And they were coming true in this man.
You cannot, I believe, understand Jesus unless you understand that he was a Jew and that he studied Torah.
How do we know that he studied Torah?
Because when he was 12 years of age, just before age 13, which would be the official...
In Capernaum or something.
He went.
His parents actually were in Jerusalem and they left because they thought he was in the crowd and they realized he wasn't there.
They just came back.
And what was happening?
Jesus was sitting with the teachers of the law.
The scripture there is so fascinating.
It says that they were amazed.
He was asking questions and they were amazed at his answers.
And everybody knows in education, the height of knowing a subject is if you can ask the right questions about it.
Jesus demonstrated a deep knowledge even at age 12 of Torah.
But Christians say we don't need the Torah.
Jesus liked the Torah, loved it, studied it.
Of course.
Quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book.
I asked this question in the audience.
What do the founding fathers and Jesus have in common?
They both quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Well, the founding fathers believed they were forming, they were looking at what the example was of a Hebrew republic.
That's right.
They weren't just looking for scripture verses.
Hey, this proves our point, you know, and people like the Bible, so let's throw this in here.
They were actually looking back and asking, what did when God gave the Hebrews this government, what about it really reflected the human nature of sinfulness, but also the human nature of we're amazing and we are born in the image of God.
Yes.
You know, how do you put together a government like that?
They had a long tradition for doing it.
It had been going on for 100 years or so before the founders actually started to get to it.
You know, Eric Nelson from Harvard University.
I think he did the study, didn't he?
He did a study on this and super well-respected historically.
I have it right here.
It was done like 10 or 15 years ago or something.
It's pretty amazing to look at that.
So, yes.
So the Torah is really significant.
If you don't understand the Old Testament, you cannot really understand Jesus.
That would have been the perspective of Jesus, of the disciples, and of the apostles.
So when somebody says, just set the Old Testament aside, I would say, well, what are your objections?
Write them all down.
Try to understand their cultural context.
It is very different from ours.
No question.
Try to understand, okay, this miracle.
I have a very hard time believing.
Just go ahead.
Write it down all of those questions and then commit.
I'm going to start looking for answers.
Instead of just denying them, I don't want to think about this anymore.
No, this is an invitation to think more.
That's right.
And we are living in a golden age in the sense of there has never been more access to robust, clear, and transparent Old Testament commentary in the history of humanity.
From Prager to Strong's commentary, there is, I mean, if you have a question about Leviticus or I don't understand why Lot and his daughters and that whole thing, it doesn't make any sense.
That can't be the word of God.
Well, hold on, like slow down and read what's really being said here in the original biblical Hebrew.
Write down the objections and find someone that might know something more than you or at least thought about it more than you, right?
I mean.
Yeah, you realize your buddy, your college roommate, may not have all the answers.
And you think, well, let's surely somebody out there has thought this through.
Asking Pointed Questions 00:04:06
To say, I don't understand it, therefore it's not true, is the height of narcissism.
It's the same reason we like, you know, delivery services that bring food to our house.
They will bring me only what I want, only at the price that I want to pay, exactly the way I want it, exactly the time that I want it, or I'm going to give them less than a good review.
All of these things, it's like a kind of a grubhub narcissism that we have going on, where if it's not served up to me in a way that's obvious, then it doesn't work.
At Summit, one of our speakers one time was talking to the students and he looked around.
They looked a little baffled.
And he said, is this going over your head?
And some of them just nodded.
He said, then sit up straighter.
Whoa.
That's what you want.
Yes.
That's it.
For a young person.
Say, we don't feel sorry for you.
This is an invitation to think and you can do this.
Yeah, as it says in Isaiah 1, let us reason together.
So in your book, I'm going to let you make the case.
You talk about being nice.
I'm not a big nice guy.
I have a chapter that's titled, kind of tongue in cheek, how to speak the truth and be nice at the same time.
And the reason I wrote that chapter title was: we've done a lot of research at Summit.
We do a lot of polling.
We're not a polling company.
We just want to keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening in the country.
And we realize the number one reason people don't speak the truth is because they want to be nice.
They don't want to offend.
So that was a response to a lot of data you were receiving.
Right.
People don't want to offend.
And so I thought, well, you know what?
Let me show you how you can engage without being a jerk.
And you can.
You can do it.
Now, you have to ask pointed questions sometimes.
It doesn't mean that nobody will ever get mad.
It doesn't mean that everybody in your life is going to love everything that you say, but there is a way that you can communicate the truth.
If people get offended, here's what to do.
If people aren't believing what you're saying, here's how to demonstrate it in a reasonable way.
Mainly, Charlie, it revolves around asking questions.
So a lot of times people come into a conversation and they think they know more than they do.
And so they just blurt things out, like a bumper sticker slogan or whatever.
And I'm saying this is.
Men can become pregnant.
In Manatee Springs, Colorado, where I live, this is how people communicate their ideas through bumper stickers.
That's right.
Hyper-aggressive bumper stickers.
And they believe if they shout it out, then it's somehow more true because your volume is high.
But if you ask questions instead, you know, hey, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
What do you mean by that?
When you use that term, what is it that you mean?
Using questions like that, you can actually form relationships with people.
Yes.
Now, listen, my town is so far to the left.
Somebody said, I bet they all voted for Bernie Sanders.
I was like, no, you don't understand.
Bernie Sanders is way too conservative for my neighbors.
But we get along.
Why?
Because I can develop this sense of curiosity.
Tell me why you say that.
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
What's your basis for it?
You seem to think that it's, even though you say that there's no truth, you seem to think that this is actually true.
Help me understand why you say that.
And probe.
Jesus asked questions.
A buddy of mine, we went to breakfast once.
He said, Did you know Jesus asked 288 questions in the gospels?
And I just looked at him and said, you counted them?
Yes, I counted them.
288 questions.
Think of the questions of Jesus.
We always hear sermons about the teachings of Jesus.
How many of us have heard a sermon about the questions of Jesus?
Who do men say that I am?
Right.
Yeah.
And even completely random questions.
He meets a blind guy.
Jesus, heal me.
And he just says, What do you want me to do for you?
Can you imagine the disciples at that moment?
Like, he's blind.
Jesus didn't assume that the blind man wanted to see.
He asked him, What do you want to be healed from?
Challenging Postmodern Truth 00:06:58
And there are a lot of people who are sick who don't want to be well.
We understand that from a psychological viewpoint.
Right.
But it took a question to really unearth what needed to happen in that situation.
Meet an alcoholic.
It explains that pretty well.
That doesn't want treatment, obviously, the ones that do.
Well, and the family doesn't sometimes want it either, because it changes the person to the point where the whole family dynamic is disrupted.
So, yes.
So healing has to happen on a number of levels in a very broad context.
Well, there's also an even deeper psychological and theological view, which is you have to want to be helped to get help from God.
You ever wonder why Jesus said your faith has made you well?
Right.
Exactly.
Like, wait a second, you're the son of God.
You're here.
You're the one who made me well.
There's a reason why God doesn't appear to atheists.
I truly believe.
They have no desire.
Like, I'm not going to.
You have totally shunned me out.
Okay.
So let me ask you about one.
What is the consequence when a society, civilization, a people or a generation says, I have my own truth?
Well, there are several different directions it can go.
One is truth then becomes, people still believe in truth, right?
If somebody says there's no such thing as truth, they've just proclaimed a truth.
Truth rises in every situation.
We all use words as if they're meaningful.
Somebody says, well, such and such is unjust.
I don't believe in truth.
You know, whatever serves me is what's true, but I think that's unjust.
Well, what do you mean by justice?
We all assume that there are categories of meaning that exist independent of our ability to perceive them.
The question is, to what end?
You know, the Aristotle we talked about earlier, the talos, what is the end of a human being?
What is our purpose?
What is the teleological purpose?
Why are we here?
So you've got to ask that question.
Well, it's come down to basically four views.
The sophistic view, which is, I'm here to win.
That is it.
Truth is whatever helps me win.
That's the Stanley Fish view.
You know, that guy was a professor of First Amendment of all things.
And he said, you are entitled to your own facts if you can make them stick.
Okay.
That's the idea that truth is whatever helps you win.
The second one we talked about earlier, pragmatism, which says that the truth is whatever works.
Well, the question is, works for whom and in what way.
Pluralism says truth is whatever helps us get along.
And then the other, the final view is deflationism, which is just kind of a cynicism.
That's more of a thing philosophers think.
Nobody else thinks about deflationism except philosophers, but basically they say truth is just an addition to the language that's unnecessary.
If I say the sun rose and then I say it's true that the sun rose, I'm saying the same thing.
Therefore, take out the words truth.
They don't really mean anything.
So you're ending up in one of those directions if you say there's no truth.
And so when the postmodernists will say that you have your own truth, that you get to decide truth, that it is not able to be ascertained objectively outside of your own will, your own experience.
They love that word.
Postmodernism, I have my own truth.
Right.
Yeah.
Postmodernism is one of the counterfeit worldviews that we face.
And it starts off with the idea that, hey, listen, when some people have claimed to know the truth, they hurt people.
You know, Adolf Hitler claimed to know the truth.
He killed people.
Stalin claimed to know the truth.
He killed people.
So the answer postmodernists say is, then we just don't claim to know the truth.
But what ends up happening is you claim to know a truth, which is the idea that no one can know the truth.
Of course, we all know that.
That is a truth claim.
Right.
It's a truth claim.
But then postmodernism says the words we use construct our truth.
That's the truth.
We don't really access a truth that is out there independent of us.
Now, of course, there's nothing about this conversation that makes any sense if its underlying premises are actually followed or actually true.
If words mean only what I want them to mean, then we can't have this conversation with one another.
I can't even have that internal conversation with myself.
M. Scott Peck in the 1970s was a psychiatrist.
And he said, if you're dealing with a mental health issue, the very first thing you have to do is grapple with reality as it actually is.
Exactly right.
You can't just say, well, you have your truth.
I have my truth.
You have your reality.
I have my reality.
The biblical perspective, John 8, 32, Jesus said, if you follow my teachings, you'll know the truth.
The truth will set you free.
That word for truth is aletheia in Greek.
Talked earlier about knowing the Greek words.
That's a really important one because it means reality.
Jesus wasn't saying, if you follow my teachings, you'll like yourself better.
He wasn't saying, if you follow my teachings, you'll know your truth.
He's saying, no, if you follow my teachings, reality itself will open up to you.
You might not like some parts of it, but you need to grapple with it.
That's where the good life is.
He who argues with reality lives in hell, as St. Augustine would say.
So how do you respond then to a college kid that says, I have my truth?
I mean, I hear it all the time.
I'm sure parents hear it.
I'm sure they say, I have my truth.
It's not your truth.
How do you respond to that?
First thing you have to do is ask what they mean by using the word truth.
If they mean your perspective or your opinion, like somebody in my town might say, speak your truth, man.
You know, what they mean is give your opinion, be bold, you know, assert yourself a little bit.
But if you're using the word truth in that situation, you're misusing the word.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So then I start from there and ask, okay, where are the points of agreement?
Science.
Does water boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level or not?
Nobody's ever said to me, well, it's your opinion, you know.
No, they recognize that is correct.
Can the atmospheric conditions change it slightly?
Sure, but we established a scientific fact, okay, historical fact.
Martin Luther King was shot April 4th, 1968.
Nobody ever says, well, in your culture, maybe, you know, no, just, no, that's the, it is.
That's when it is.
We agreed on the calendar.
That's when it happened.
Then I ask, are there moral truths?
And this is where people start to go, nah, not really.
Moral truths are all opinions.
And so I'll ask him, okay, can you tell a difference between these two statements?
Statement A, it is good to care for abandoned puppies.
Statement B, it is good to torture abandoned puppies.
Can you tell a difference between those two statements?
And if they say yes, it's because they know that words actually have meaning, which refutes the entire point of postmodernism, which is that words don't bear any necessary relationship to the things to which they refer.
That's exactly right.
Do you find that line of questioning persuasive?
I find that a lot of people will say, hmm, I haven't really thought about that before.
But they'll talk about justice.
Is justice a real thing?
Is justice a category of meaning that really exists?
Because if it's not, then why are we talking about it?
If I feel, but nobody ever says, well, that's my justice, you know, or that's my murder.
You know, murdering that, killing that person is not murder.
Killing that person.
You know, we don't say that.
We just use the word truth in that way because it seems like it's more of a pluralistic, you know, nice thing to say.
Does Justice Exist 00:00:57
And it's inherently totalitarian at its root.
And that's a great segue to what we're going to talk about tonight.
I do want to talk about that.
And we didn't even touch on this, but when you do not have a society, civilization, generation, or people that can say there is truth, you will get a despot, a dictator, a Caesar, a tyrant, or a czar.
It will happen.
Peter M. Sorokin, the Harvard sociologist who formed the sociology department there at Harvard, wrote a book of the sociology of all civilizations.
And he said, in the absence of a moral absolute, in the absence of existence of God, physical force is the only thing that remains.
And that in some ways, that's the postmodernist pitch, which is just we're just going to go back to tribes.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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