If You Found Out God Was Real, Would You Change Your Behavior? ft. Barak Lurie
Charlie sat down for an in depth interview with his friend Barak Lurie, to dicuss how atheism steals, kills, and destroys. They walk through the proof that God exists, the ways different religions have affected western society, why the country needs God, and so much more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
What are your thoughts about atheism?
A terrific conversation with Barack Lurie about the real-world implications of atheism in a way we've never talked about it before on this program.
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Here we go.
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Okay, everybody.
Very special guest here today about a topic near and dear to my heart and to all of you about atheism.
Atheism, I think, is dying in the West.
We'll talk about that.
Joining us now is a friend of mine, Barack Lurie.
Barack, great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Confused with Barack Obama.
I'm sure you get that a lot.
All the time.
And I do not like it.
I'm sure you don't.
No, you're much wiser, and you believe in God.
I do.
I don't know if Barack Obama does or not.
But okay, so you're the author of a very interesting and important series of books.
Tell us about it.
Yeah, it's called the Atheism Kills series.
There are three volumes.
The first one came out in 2017 called The Atheism Kills.
The next one was in 2019, 2020.
Atheism Destroys.
And the last one that is about to be wrapped up, Atheism Steals.
And what I do there is I try to show the dangers and the consequences of a world without God.
And it's not very pretty.
It's going to be a terrifying world if we were to actually adopt atheism as a governing structure.
And it's not hypothetical for me to say that.
We have ample examples of that, both in the world of fascism and in communism.
They were so overwhelming.
The evidence was so overwhelming that this is what happens when you operate a government.
Without God.
It's a little bit like that old egg commercial.
I don't know if you remember it, Charlie, but you put these eggs in a skillet, and this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.
Well, this is your world on atheism.
It's not a pretty one.
I show in these books that atheism kills on an epic level, beyond belief.
Hundreds of millions of people have died in the 20th century and are continuing to do so.
That has been evidenced by Hitler's reign in fascism, generally speaking.
Hitler was not a Christian, by the way.
And I do want to dive into that later.
It's one that I get quite often.
Oh, it's an easy response.
Communism, of course, was by definition atheist.
You had to be an atheist in order to actually adopt communism.
It was the engine of communism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, said that...
Atheism was the central pivot of communism.
It could not exist without atheism.
Naturally, they wanted to get rid of religion altogether because religion was the ultimate threat to the government.
They wanted you to completely be subservient to the government systems, and therefore what you have to do is just abandon religion altogether.
And that's what they largely successfully did in the Soviet Union and to some extent in China.
But these are really horrific regimes.
And we need to understand that.
Aside from that, which is bad enough, it also destroys everything else that we value, things like truth and logic and science, the concept of family, the concept of relationships, the concept of free speech, for example.
All these things derive because of our belief in God and our values in that.
Even our sense of beauty, our sense of storytelling, of music and art.
None of these things would exist without God.
And one of the things that I always love to ask people to do is to simply ask this question.
Why are things the way they are?
Why do we love music?
And if I were to ask you, Charlie, what music you like, I'm going to get an answer.
Classical.
Yeah, you might like classical.
Somebody might like hip-hop.
Somebody might like rock and roll.
Likewise, if I were to turn to you and I said, you know, Charlie, I've got a great story for you.
You lean forward and you say, uh-huh.
You won't respond by saying, oh, thanks, Brock, but I'm not a story kind of guy, right?
But that only exists among humans.
We don't see that in animals whatsoever.
There is no music in the animal kingdom, no storytelling, no sense of the past or the future, no sense of ancestry or descendants, no sense of obligation.
And these are questions worth asking.
Why do we have them?
So I love all this, by the way.
As you know, this is partially my life's work, too, inspired by our mutual friend Dennis Prager, which is arguing for the necessity of God, not just the existence of God, which I want to build out.
But let's take a step back.
What about you?
What got you into this line of work?
And then I have a more technical question.
So who are you, and why are you interested in atheism and its consequences so much?
Well, in many ways, I'm fighting myself.
When I was much younger, I was an atheist.
I decided when I was 11 years old I was an atheist and I decided I must be brilliant because of that.
Because I figured it out and nobody else could.
Then I went to college and I went to Stanford and I decided to write my thesis on proving that religion has caused more wars and deaths and destruction than anything else.
And I set about to just go ahead numerically to prove my point.
But as I went about this, Charlie...
I discovered I was wrong, like dead wrong, and I was embarrassed.
And I decided that my thesis would be entirely the opposite, proving how indeed atheism was the center of all destruction and killing and mayhem.
What really changed your mind?
Reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.
What about that?
He showed me that I was shallow in my thinking.
As an atheist, that really there is no free will, there is no sense of consciousness without God.
And I believed in free will.
But I'm told nothing good ever comes out of Russia.
It's a terrible place.
I'm told that it's just a gas station with nuclear weapons.
Right, there you go.
I'm kidding, I'm giving a hard time.
Russian literature can be very dark, but very telling.
It's dark.
And I always say that Dostoevsky is fantastic because people think that he's very brooding and dark.
I haven't spent much time with him.
I know the concepts, obviously.
But it's very uplifting, these books.
Surprisingly so.
Crime and Punishment, fantastic book.
Very uplifting in the end.
Same with Karamazov.
But I read these books and I decided that I was really a believer.
But here was the problem.
In college, you end up kind of milling about with a lot of philosophical issues.
You meet some religious people.
I knew these four guys who were evangelical Christians, and we'd always banter about the existence of God.
And I said there was no God, and they said there was, and such.
But we were very respectful of each other.
I have to pat myself on the back about that.
And then when I discovered that there was a God, and I remember going, I decided that I was going to go tell them that I believed in God.
And as I did so, my legs felt very heavy.
I couldn't walk.
It was the weirdest thing.
I didn't know why this was happening to me, but I figured out the reason why.
I realized that things were about to change.
This is changing your belief to understand that there's a God, a creator, somebody who loves you, something that you are responsible for.
It changes your entire sense of obligation.
Everything changes about you.
And so this is not like, I decided I'm going to change my football loyalty to the Patriots versus the Steelers, right?
It's not like that.
This is a world change.
Everything had to change.
And that's why they felt so heavy.
But since then, like I said, I've been fighting myself.
These books that I write is more of a way to be able to convince myself.
I'm the best fighter for atheism, oddly enough.
I always say, I can out-atheist any atheist.
I've got all the arguments down.
I sometimes improve people's atheist arguments, and then I shoot it down.
You have to help me, yeah.
I encounter it all the time on campuses.
So I encourage people to really ask themselves why there is a God.
Seek out God.
It's wonderful to believe in God.
It really is.
But to find Him, that's another story.
Would you call yourself a Christian?
No, I'm Jewish.
Okay.
Yeah.
I deeply, deeply appreciate Christians and Christianity.
Likewise.
I wanted to...
Would you say that you came in contact with God or the idea of God or the concept?
Because coming into a relationship with God is usually Christian language.
That's why I...
Oh, I see.
No, in Judaism we have a relationship with God, absolutely.
Rabbis will often ask you, how is your relationship with God?
Tell me about that depth of the relationship.
And it's no different in Christianity.
Very solid.
So I came to that realization.
So I started off first, you know, understand that there must be a creator.
And I recommend this.
If you want to convince your non-believing friends, take it methodically.
Start off with, is there a creator?
Forget about the God of the Old Testament, God of the New Testament.
The Levitical laws.
Yeah, Levitical laws.
Forget about all that.
Leave it aside.
Is there a creator?
With a capital C. And you'll ultimately have to come to the conclusion that of course there is.
It's obvious.
The math demands it.
The probabilities demand it.
Frankly, it's silly not to believe that there's a creator.
Okay.
So there's three different things that I love to talk about.
The chances of the universe coming into fruition by itself, randomly that is.
And that is something on the order of one out of...
It's so obscene that I can't imagine the amount of zeros that are involved.
Likewise, then, that the Earth would be formed, that the universe would form in the way it has formed, meaning with the gaseous and solidifying of the planets and the orbits around them.
It doesn't have to be.
I mean, it could have been that this universe would be entirely gas and nothing more.
But instead, we have the laws of physics and the laws of chemistry and so on.
So these are things that, again, the probabilities of that would be absurd.
And now you have to multiply those two fractions in order to make it together.
So the chances of the universe beginning in the first place and creating the universe as it did.
Then you have to go, there are many other steps in between, but the next one I'd like to talk about is the chances of life forming by itself, randomly.
And that indeed also is 1 out of 10 to the 125th, I think it was, some obscene number.
And again, you have to multiply that new fraction to the previous fractions.
Yeah, the probability would be if you stacked...
Nickels all across the United States from here to the moon times a thousand and one of them was a red cent and you were blindfolded.
Could you find that one red cent?
That's the likelihood of just life.
Not the fine-tuning of the universe itself.
So you say fine-tuning of universe, fine-tuning of earth, fine-tuning of life.
So there's three gradations of improbability.
Am I articulating that?
And then you get to a place where...
You need a quantum computer for the number.
Right, exactly right.
It is a big, big number.
And not only that, but you have to then go into the question of evolution, right?
That somehow we could explain the intelligence in life and the kind of intelligent life we have today that it evolved to this point.
That's another absurd fraction.
So at some point you have to say, this is silly.
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You know, the old watch on the beach analogy, which is a very apt analogy.
It's very fair.
You have to assume that there's a creator, somebody who left that watch on the beach, somebody who created that watch, and so on.
And you're not just seeing something that was...
Created there by the waves and the sand.
This is not worth our time to do more than 20 seconds.
Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in creation of man?
I believe in creation of man.
I do too.
We'll have you on for a different time because I think that...
Look, I'm not even saying if you believe in evolution, you're necessarily a bad person.
I just personally have the belief of creation.
Yeah, people try to shoehorn evolution in many ways.
They want to have it both ways.
They want to say, well, I believe in evolution, but it's directed by God.
I have a tough time with that.
And that could be right.
Again, I don't...
Anyway, I'm just curious kind of where you're coming from.
And so the math is insurmountable and improbable.
Right.
What would you have to say then?
When a non-believer, and I'm going to put a pin in that word atheist, because I want to get back to that in a second, says that there's multiverses.
Okay, well, the multiverse argument is a manufactured argument designed only because they understand the fine-tuning difficulties.
True atheists know that is the hardest argument.
That is the hardest argument.
And so here they say, well, there are a bunch of other universes.
Correct, which is a...
Profession of faith.
There is no evidence of science, right?
There's zero evidence.
And there might be an infinity number of universes, don't you know, Charlie?
So, therefore, there is a greater chance, therefore, that intelligent life and the way the universe was formed in our universe, that would happen in this universe.
But that is sidestepping the issue.
That is a false argument.
It's a cowardly argument.
It does not reason whatsoever using reason itself.
Which is interesting because one of the things that you learn from, I think you mentioned Frank Turek before.
Yeah, he's terrific.
A great argument.
And he makes the argument, the classical argument, that there's a difference between materialism and immaterialism.
Materialism is what I used to believe in as an atheist, and most atheists have to believe this, that there's only what we know by seeing, touching, hearing, feeling, tasting, and so on.
That is it.
And if you can't do that, well, then it doesn't exist.
But they themselves live in a world where they deal with the immaterial all the time.
Like, how do you smell logic?
How do you taste science?
So true, right?
How do you feel music?
There's a whole bunch of different...
You can only feel its effects.
Right, its effects.
We know it's there, and yet they accept it in themselves.
Philosophy, right?
I mean, how do you eat that?
And even the concept, many atheists will say there's no free will.
In fact, they have to say, if they're an intelligent atheist, like you mentioned, an intelligent and honest atheist has to say that there is no free will.
Why?
Because free will can only be given to you by a creator.
It cannot evolve by itself.
It's free-forming.
It's also like anything else.
If you don't believe in the idea of evolution coming by itself, you can't have free will either.
So agency cannot happen because it would just be nothing more than a bunch of cause and effects.
That's right.
It's tough enough for an atheist to explain how life was triggered by itself, but then to also say that there's free will in that process through evolution or otherwise, it's impossible.
Would you agree free will is fundamental to Judaism?
Yes.
Yes.
I agree.
I think that's right.
And I would say Christianity as well.
And I know Christians that don't believe in free will, but that's not the base of this.
Yeah, I don't understand that.
If there's no free will, then I always say, if somebody's going to argue that with me, well, if I punch you in the face right now, are you going to get upset?
And they'll say, of course I am.
Well, why would you?
I couldn't help myself.
So we inherently recognize free will.
And that was the thing that opened the door to God for me in the first place.
Once I realized that there was such a thing as free will, I knew that I was— How did you come to that conclusion?
I sensed it.
I know that I free will.
Was it a faith claim?
Because some people say free will is a faith, meaning you can't prove it, but you must believe you have it.
I think that's fair to say.
I don't think—I think that not only do I my own agent, but I'm also accountable for my actions.
If you don't believe in free will, then you don't believe you have agency, and therefore, that you don't have accountability for your actions.
And that's what's so tempting, Charlie, about atheism, is that that's its major gift to the atheist, is that you don't have to be accountable.
Right?
It's an addiction.
I say non-accountability is the greatest addiction that there is.
All other addictions flow from that.
So the temptation to simply dismiss Anything.
Any responsibility.
So if you are an atheist, then I always ask, why don't you just sex it up, booze it up, gamble as much as you want, lie and cheat and steal?
Yeah.
Well, those who do are, generally speaking, atheists, is what I found.
I've done a lot of research on this because I'm really fascinated by it.
And a lot of these are correlations, but the correlations are very strong.
The chances of you being an atheist, if you are somebody who routinely commits adultery, routinely steals, routinely cheats on a test, you are very highly likely to be an atheist.
If you are a serial murderer, if you engage in mass killings, if you are a member of the drug cartels, the sex cartels, or the mafia, you are certainly an atheist.
You do not have God in your life.
You may not call yourself an atheist, but you definitely don't have it.
They might even use Christian symbolism.
Well, like in The Godfather, for example, which is one of my favorite movies.
I mentioned it last evening.
It's beautiful.
It's a beautiful movie.
It's a fantastic story, but it does a little bit of a disservice to Christianity.
Almost intentionally, though.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Do you differentiate between agnostic, atheist, and secularism?
Are those three things all synonyms in your view?
The agnostic...
I do differentiate.
There's the atheist who says that there is no God.
Declarative.
Do you notice they're not saying that as much anymore?
Yeah, you brought that up the other day, and I'm fascinated about that.
I want to...
I have two examples.
Yeah, please.
Bill Maher on his show said, no, no, we just don't know.
And I said, what about agnosticism?
He says, no, it doesn't exist.
We're all just one and the same.
Atheism means you don't know.
And then Brett Weinstein on Tucker Carlson's podcast said, we just don't know the answer to a lot of these things, which is...
It's so amazing to me because when I grew up, Hitchens and Sam Harris and Dawkins was always like, no, we know we don't.
We know there is none.
Do you think I'm just overly noticing language, diction choice here, or is there something else going on here?
Look, if Bill Maher and Weinstein are saying that...
Those are only two data points, though.
But if they are emblematic of many others...
And they are near the top echelon of non-God thinking, godless thinking.
Look, it's always a catch-me-if-you-can sort of approach an atheistic ideology.
They always say that, well, on the one hand, I don't know about whether or not there's a God.
On the other hand, there is some possibility of this one way or the other, but you can't really pin them down.
They're like pinning jello to the wall in terms of their positions.
For example, when they start talking about most wars are caused by religion, Then you confront them with the fact that 93% of wars in recorded history have all been non-religious.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
And about half of the religious ones were Muslim-based.
We're going to put that in our campus tour.
So I have a binder of stuff in my campus tour of stuff I hear a lot, but I could just reference to shut these kids up.
So you're going to send me the citation for that?
Absolutely.
It's in the Encyclopedia of Wars.
Wow.
So it's a very straightforward...
Please send that to me.
So please continue.
So they go all over the place.
You never quite know where the atheist is landing, but they want it always, in every way.
They want to say that they believe in morality, for example.
And then you ask them, what is morality?
Why does that matter to you?
There is no morality in atheism.
There's no accountability in atheism.
But they want to insist that there is morality.
When I was an atheist, Charlie, again, I was an honest atheist.
I did not believe morality.
I thought...
Look, whatever you can get away with, so much better for you.
I will play by the rules because I don't want to go to jail.
And that's about it.
And murdering somebody is no more significant than stealing some gum from a 7-Eleven store.
And that was terrifying to me when I realized that.
It was liberating when I discovered that God does expect us to have morality.
And he watches everything you do.
Everything.
And the atheist knows it too.
That's the problem I have with the atheist.
He knows all these things.
He lives, he tries to live or claims to live in a moral world where he doesn't want to cheat, lie, steal, and so on.
Doesn't want to commit adultery on his wife.
But at the same time, his worldview allows him to do all those things without consequence.
They will say, so the...
More articulate evolutionary biologists like Weinstein, who I actually think—he actually is more respectful towards this topic than most.
I have to give him a lot of credit.
He had a good conversation with Tucker.
He would say, we derive our morality based on if everybody else did it, would it be beneficial to the group?
Right.
So, for example, if everyone committed adultery, it would be bad for the tribe.
If everyone killed, it would be bad for the tribe.
If everyone stole, it would be bad for the tribe.
And out of that, we get a belief in the golden rule.
How would you— Yeah, I get this a lot.
Yeah, sure.
Which is, it's bad for you, right?
It's evolutionarily bad.
Right, yeah.
It's necessarily important to be able to enjoy festivals and music and such, because that's evolution.
It's also good that we don't kill each other.
I call this the great Mexican standoff argument, where I don't kill you because I don't want you to kill me.
I don't steal from you because I don't want people to steal from me.
It's a cute argument.
But it doesn't understand, it doesn't have a basis of morality.
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If morality is relative, then if I decide something is good for me, then I will do something awful to you and still feel good about it.
I'll give you an example, and I say this in my book, Atheism Kills.
Where if I'm up for promotion, a job, and let's say I'm an older guy, I'm 45 years old, and there's this young guy who's 28 years old, and he's up for promotion, and so am I. But I've got four kids, and I've got a gambling debt, and I've got to get this job.
If I don't get this job, I'm out in the streets.
What's the big deal if I just put some porn on his computer at work?
Right?
It's not criminal per se, but I need that job.
And he doesn't.
I've got to take care of my family.
That's logical.
Everything I said was logical.
And he, we'll call him Bobby, Mr. 28-year-old, well, he'll get another job one day.
No big deal.
He's got plenty of opportunity.
That's logic.
And that is the mindset of Raskolnikov, for example, in Crime and Punishment, where he decides to kill...
His landlady, because he decides that she's a burden to society.
He'll be doing the society a favor.
See, when you allow that sort of thinking, horrific things happen.
And you murder all the Down syndrome babies.
That's right.
That's what they do in Iceland, by law.
Absolutely.
You must abort a Down syndrome baby.
Oh, I did not know that.
Oh, yeah.
It's by law.
They basically eradicated Down syndrome in Iceland.
And they brag about it.
Wow.
Because why would you want a Down syndrome baby, right?
They're nothing more than a leech on society.
They can't...
Harvest or think or create?
It's frightening to see the way that atheists will logic themselves into positions.
And that's why we need a universal morality.
It's a language that we should all be able to speak.
But they will steal it from us.
They will claim it for themselves.
I could talk to you for hours about this, and I want to.
Can you crisply describe atheism?
If you had to give...
When you encounter it...
Because I ask this for a reason, because now we're going to get into some of the heavier stuff of the 20th century.
Sure.
What is atheism, and therefore how could you ascribe that to Hitler and Stalin and all of that?
So let's do...
To me, atheism and the way I perceived it, the way I ran my life with it, is that there are no gods or God, and specifically the Judeo-Christian God does not exist.
And we are best to not live by the teachings of Judeo-Christianity because it has held us back.
That is the way I define atheism.
So, atheism is somewhat of a new phenomenon, though.
In the ancient world, were there atheists?
Very few.
I mean, if there were, they didn't write about it.
Give me the history of atheism, then we'll get into the last 150 years.
Principally did not exist until the 1880s or so as a practical reality.
Because of a lot of scientific innovations.
Innovations and a lot of philosophies from the German universities.
It's always the Germans.
Right, Blake?
It's always the Germans.
You know, so when it was in The Simpsons, anybody who speaks German can't be that bad.
So anyway, the point is that they created this, they made it more noble.
And the idea somehow that it was majestic.
And so that kind of gained favor across the Atlantic in America, and they started adopting this as well.
And they thought, well, look, we already have a great society, and we need to advance.
We need to move to the next step.
The way they viewed religion is in much the way we might view a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly.
You don't need the cocoon anymore, right?
Fly away, my dear butterfly.
And that's the way they thought of themselves.
They are getting rid of the shackles of God and Christianity and Judaism.
Thank you very much, but we don't need you anymore.
Only to discover that it's more like being in an airplane at 30,000 feet and deciding you don't need a pilot, an engine, or for that matter, wings anymore.
That's what it's like.
So we need to understand that...
Without God, horrific things happen.
It's the very building block of civilization.
But wasn't Hitler Christian?
He was not Christian.
Come on, he had an iron cross or something.
Oh, for sure.
Oh, and the belt buckles.
Never forget the belt buckles.
Okay, so this is fascinating.
I get this all the time.
Yeah, oh yeah.
So in Mein Kampf, he made a reference to Jesus.
However, that was it.
You would think that if he was a Christian, and if Nazism and fascism...
They operated on the fuel of Christianity.
You would think that maybe once in a while they would raise a cross in their parades.
They didn't.
They raised something I consider a crooked cross, a twisted cross into a swastika.
Which was actually an Indian symbol.
Yeah, exactly.
It was like an Indian fertility symbol or something.
Yeah, it's weird.
I don't quite know that.
Quite the connection between the two.
If you go to India, they have swastikas all over the place.
Yeah, it's like inverted, right?
Correct, yeah.
So he didn't do that.
Secondly, he wrote...
He spoke extensively about his contempt of Christianity.
Contempt.
So he said that not only was Christianity a feeble religion, he actually used those words, he had contempt for Judaism, of course.
He tried to slaughter everyone.
He was more than happy to get rid of Christianity as well.
That was his next goal.
You really believe so?
Oh yeah, very much so.
He was already getting rid of a lot of Christians in the camps.
It wasn't just Jews.
Jehovah's Witnesses were targeted.
Yes.
It was gypsies, homosexuals, Jews.
Right.
And Jehovah's Witnesses of all places.
People forget that.
Yeah, they do.
Well, Jehovah's Witnesses were fantastic in the saving and rescuing of Jews.
No, I know, but Jehovah's Witnesses were like in the camp.
Yes, very much so.
A lot of Jehovah's Witnesses died, a lot.
They were very vocal against the Nazi regime.
To their credit.
They could not hold themselves back.
And they suffered greatly because of it.
With deference to Christians, and I understand, look at me, it was a tough time.
I don't expect people to go...
No, no, it was a great failing of the American church.
No, I'm very clear.
And Bonhoeffer is one of the great legends of the 20th century.
And one other thing about Hitler is that people don't know this.
He loved Islam.
He said that it was a great shame that Germany...
He integrated some of them into the military.
Yes, yes, he did.
The Free Arab Army or something.
That's right.
He said what a shame it was that...
Germany had adopted Christianity, which was a feeble religion, according to him, and that it would have been better for Germany to have adopted a much more strong, another strong word that he used, I forget what it was, something like robust, religion such as Mohammedism.
That's what he called it, Mohammedism.
That's what I call it.
Yeah.
As a pejorative.
Yeah.
Well, he meant it as a compliment.
But, of course, we all know that...
Did Hitler really call it Mohammedism?
Yeah.
That's so funny.
Yeah, it's a weird...
Look, Hitler was...
People want to say he was sweet and generous.
I'm tired of talking about him all the time, but there is a weird, disturbing fringe of the internet people that are trying to white knight Hitler, and some of these people pretend to be Christian, and he hated Christianity.
He absolutely hated Christianity.
But then again, at the same time, like, oh no, he was actually Christian, he worked great with the church.
It's the opposite, the Islamic one.
That's very interesting he got along with Islam, because I also find some people are...
Disturbingly friendly with Islam.
That's actually a really good segue.
So let me ask you a critical potential.
I agree with everything you're saying.
Your website says the world without God is a world of chaos, but then who's God?
Is it Allah?
Is it Jehovah?
Is it Adonai?
Is it Jesus?
Is it Buddha?
Right.
Do you believe in monotheism?
Is that the essence?
Monotheism.
When I speak about God, I don't want to keep on, in my books and otherwise, I define it quite well in Atheism Kills and Atheism Destroys, that when I say believe in God, I'm talking about the Judeo-Christian God.
I think Judaism and Christianity are one and the same in this department.
We share the Old Testament, what we call the Torah.
And the Tanakh.
And the Tanakh, thank you.
Great.
You know your stuff really well.
But it's...
It's great, and I feel like my Christian friends are my brothers.
I love them, and we talk together about how God is real and finding Him.
It gives me no greater joy, Charlie, than to find yet another proof of God.
So beyond just my own internal observations, when somebody else...
Reasons with me, like some of your comments have been very helpful, Charlie.
Frank Turek, as you mentioned before.
Phenomenal person.
Gerald Schroeder, he wrote The Science of God, which is a fantastic book as well.
I just eat this up.
But I write about the dangers of atheism because it's...
Look, I'll talk about God all day long, how wonderful God is and how God is real, but I...
My main focus is why atheism is so destructive.
You can't just believe in God.
It's a great school of work that you've positioned yourself.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, I don't know anybody else really focusing on that.
Well, let's talk about our friend Dennis, right?
And we should pray for Dennis.
Dennis, everyone knows he's in a tough spot.
But Dennis has dedicated his work to the necessity of God as well.
Right.
You're a friend of Dennis.
You've gone on his program many times.
Yes.
Do you agree with Dennis that it's more impactful or important to begin...
With arguing about the necessity of God before we get to the existence of God?
I think I always want to be super honest.
That is his contention.
Yeah.
I would...
I mean, it may be a difference without significance.
I think that one needs to realize that there is a God to explain the beginning of creation to yourself and then wonder what that God wants from us.
And then you realize that, yes, God is necessary.
Now, Voltaire said...
And he was no real believer, by the way, but he said if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
And there's a little bit of cynicism associated with that.
I think he didn't really believe in God.
Dostoevsky hated him.
So the idea that we better do this in order to have a civilization made it no different than what I said about myself as an atheist when I was an atheist.
I said, I'm an atheist, but thank God nobody else is.
I only attach to Dennis's argument because when I communicate to the college audience, they're living in a place of moral subjectivity.
And to break them out of that, to at least have them acknowledge that the world that they pretend to care about, always talking about justice, would be worse off without a belief in the divine.
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What I say to people in that department is I say all those things that you care about, that you claim to care about, sympathy, compassion, justice, truth, free speech for that matter, all the other things I listed, they cannot exist without God.
You are enjoying the benefits of God but without pursuing the obligations of God.
And that dog don't hunt for me.
It's a little bit like being in a rowboat.
And there's 10 men rowing, and there's this one guy who decides he just wants to relax.
Well, he gets to go in the rowboat and continue on.
The nine other guys will probably be fine.
But at some point, if everyone stops rowing, where does the rowboat go?
And I really want to push people on that.
Understand your obligation to civilization, to the past and to the present.
We only have one time on this earth, and you've got to make it count.
Most people...
When they say that they don't believe in God, I always correct them.
I say, it's not that you don't believe in God.
It's that you don't want to believe in God.
Very different.
But when they really get down to the core of it, that's the reason.
I agree.
And one of my most effective questions, and I want to spend more time with you, we're running out of time here, is I ask people, if God was real, would you change your behavior?
That's a great question.
Yeah.
I came up with that myself.
I hate that question so much.
And I'll tell you why.
Because I didn't think of it.
It's good though, right?
It's very good.
It's really, really good, Charlie.
It's kind of like Dennis where I was thinking and thinking and thinking about this.
And as a question, if God was real, would you change anything you're doing?
Yeah, it's fantastic.
I do have something similar.
So I'll pat myself on the back a little bit.
But there is a difference between believing in God, even believing in the God fiercely, and knowing that there's a God.
Because if you believe in God, you know, you go to church every week, you're good, you're a good citizen.
There's always the out.
Maybe he's there, maybe he's not there.
But if you know he's there, and he is indeed always watching, as you said, I think you change your behavior in more ways than one.
So it's great to be a believer.
It's necessary to be a believer.
But wouldn't you want to know for yourself?
With great confidence that there really is a God, I think there's such joy to that, and it makes you a better person.
I love living by God's rules.
I know that the Ten Commandments were given by God.
Yes, I agree completely.
It's a joy.
No one can convince me otherwise.
The Decalogue is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, well, I think Christ's teachings are great as a Christian.
But the Decalogue points straight to Christ, moral accomplishments in the history of humanity.
That's right.
And don't you want to be part of this club?
I mean, if you know that God smiles when you live by his commandments, then wouldn't you want that for your own sake and for God's sake?
Now, so somebody once said to me, well, you believe in God.
You're just a...
What is it?
Somebody on a leash.
You're just an...
It's not that you don't believe in God.
You're just a jerk who lives on a leash by God, right?
And that they are better than you for that.
Well, that doesn't float for me because what I have found that when I live by God's commandments, I get insights into God.
That is the greatest gift that God can give you.
We say this in Judaism.
I'm sure it's very similar in Christianity, that whenever you do a mitzvah, It's one of the good deeds you can do.
They're actually commandments.
All 613.
Right, 613.
Whenever you do that, and the classic example is helping a little, little lady across the street, fine.
But I'm talking about things that you don't even necessarily think about, like paying your gardener right away.
Don't wait to pay him a month later.
Pay him right away.
Day laborers pay right away.
But when you do that, and when you express kindness to somebody, God gives you insight into him just a little bit.
You get to peek through the door just for a moment, and it's glorious.
That in and of itself is the reward, and that's the way we live.
Last question.
You've been doing this for years.
Yes.
You have a great body of work, and I'm going to read your stuff.
Thank you for all you're doing, because it's incredibly important to bring people back to the Lord.
Are you optimistic that, versus 20 years ago, that the ethical monotheism of Judeo-Christian worldview...
Is increasing in popularity and influence.
Yes.
And I agree with you.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you why.
Because it's evidence in plain sight.
The atheists are doing our job for us.
In a sense of, let's not have any kids.
Because it's global warming or whatever it is, overpopulation, all that nonsense.
So they're not having kids.
The Christians are having kids.
The highly observant Jews are having kids.
Mormons are having kids.
Catholics are having kids.
And then they're surprised that Gen Z is now more religious than any other generation before.
That's so true.
And if you want the best microcosm to prove this point, look at Israel.
Israel, from 1948 to 1978, super liberal, super progressive, socialist in nature.
And then Likud, which is their version of republicanism, won the seat.
And for the next 20 years, it went back and forth, back and forth.
Likud, labor.
Likud, labor.
Labor is the democrat version in Israeli politics.
And then starting in 2006, it's been nothing but Likud.
And it's getting more conservative.
It's more conservative now.
And that's precisely because...
Massive amounts of religious Jews are there.
They're having kids.
They're voting.
And right of return, people are coming like crazy.
It's fantastic.
Atheism destroys.
Yes.
Atheism kills.
Atheism steals.
Right.
The combo pact.
Yes, exactly right.
It is a very comprehensive sense.
When you read these books, you will know that there's a God.
You will come to God, and you will, at the very least, understand how shallow atheistic thinking is.
And I really think it's going to be a treasure trove for you, for anyone who reads it, to just enjoy God in the way that God wants us to enjoy.
He doesn't want us just to believe in Him.
I think He wants us to activate Him.
God is a verb more than it is just a belief.
Very good.
Thank you, my friend.
Thank you, Charlie.
Barack Lurie, check out his books, Atheism Kills, Atheism Destroys, Atheism Steals.
