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Sept. 8, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:01
AXIS OF EVIL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 170
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The disaster in Afghanistan has fueled the rise of a new axis of evil in the world.
China, Russia, Iran.
Who created it?
I'll tell you. Also, the Taliban is kind of going woke.
I'll explain. I'm going to review the life of a North Korean defector who found in America, surprise, a woke culture, more tyrannical than the one she fled.
I'm also going to continue my discussion of the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard, focusing on his brilliant exposition of the Trinity.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Taliban is...
has formed a new government and they have invited six countries to share with them the joy of making a formal announcement about the structure of the new regime.
And here are the six countries, China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar.
So, if you look more closely, you realize that you've got three blocks here, a new axis of evil emerging in the world.
And you have China, that's one, Russia is two, and the other three countries are now the forces of radical Islam.
We have Iran, we have Turkey, which has Islamicized and radicalized over the last couple of decades, and of course Pakistan.
So what all of this is showing us is that while we locate the disaster of Afghanistan in Afghanistan, there are sort of larger currents that are moving that we should not be unaware of.
Now, the Biden administration appears not only inattentive, but indifferent to all of this.
And they're focused on literally blocking private planes from getting out of Afghanistan.
Why? In part because they're embarrassed that the private companies are able to do what apparently the U.S. government under Biden can't do.
I think it's also the case that they are in some weird way fortifying the Taliban, perhaps preparing to figure out ways to give them money, give them international legitimacy, recognize the Taliban.
Biden himself was a little bit noncommittal when asked about this recently.
Now, Jen Psaki and Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, have both denied that the State Department is blocking the egress, the departure of these private flights.
But Fox News reports a private email that was sent to the organizers of one of these private rescue missions, a guy named Eric Multalvo.
And the email makes it really clear the State Department is not going to give permission and that these private rescue missions can't even go to third countries because typically if you do, those third countries want to make sure that the U.S. State Department has given them clearance to land in those third countries and the State Department says really clearly that we are not going to give that clearance.
So they direct these private companies to go elsewhere, and yet they say, you need to find another destination country, and it can't be the U.S. This is a direct email from the State Department.
And then it says that, but even if you go to a third country, we're not going to approve you landing there either.
So this is what our government is up to.
I mean, just horrific.
And the media is not reporting this, by the way.
They're trying to cover for the Biden administration, no surprise, so that the American people don't realize the callousness of the Biden administration toward our own citizens and our own allies.
But let's turn for a moment to the larger picture here.
And the larger picture is that when powerful countries have disasters, even disasters very far away, they have long-term and broad reverberations.
the Athenians were basically winning, but they launched a kind of reckless expedition against Sicily, not even part of the fight.
The fight was between Athens and Sparta, and this essentially turned out to be a complete disaster and was pivotal to Athens losing the war in the end.
The Roman Empire, although internally rotted by this time, began to do these expeditions among the Germanic peoples of the middle and northern Europe.
They suffered defeats that were quite remote from the empire itself, very far from Rome.
And you might have thought, well, it's not going to have much effect on the Roman Empire, but it did.
It really signaled an overextension on the part of the Romans, and it was the beginning of the end for Rome.
As America goes down, other countries come up.
It's a global seesaw.
But it's not a seesaw that goes back and forth, because very often, once you go down, it's really hard to come back up again.
Here's Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us.
It's ready to invest and rebuild our country.
China is our pass to markets all over the world.
Forget about all the silliness of the Biden administration.
We have a lot of leverage over the Taliban.
We're going to be using our leverage.
There's no leverage. The Taliban have basically decided, listen, we don't care about this idiotic American nation-building model.
We don't want them to build our nation.
We want to build our nation our way.
We prefer the Chinese, let's call it, transactional model.
And the Chinese are much more Machiavellian about it.
They come in and they say, listen, we'll give you money, we'll build your ports, we'll build your railways.
Obviously, we have a lot to gain because we're connecting China to Pakistan through Afghanistan.
So we have all kinds of strategic benefits.
And some of this money is given as loans.
We're going to use the rich copper resources of Afghanistan that we know how to tap.
We will pay ourselves back for any money we put into Afghanistan through this kind of revenue.
The Chinese, you can say, are playing it a lot smarter.
On the international scene than the United States, at least the United States under Biden.
And our allies are getting nervous.
And you can see this. I just see in the Epoch Times, Japan and Taiwan are now having security talks with each other.
Unprecedented. The Japanese have never before sat down with the Taiwanese to say, hey, listen, we are both in the crosshairs of China.
China wants Taiwan.
China wants to immobilize Japan.
Maybe we need to work more closely together.
I think this is not a sign of the strength of the alliance, but its weakness.
Japan is realizing they can't count very much on U.S. support.
Taiwan is realizing the same.
And so the Japanese and the Taiwanese are saying, hey, listen, we need to do what we can.
And India is probably going to be part of these talks pretty soon to neutralize the growing power of China, not just in the neighborhood, but more broadly in the world.
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Apparently, the U.S. State Department is very concerned that it is not making sufficient progress in this direction.
And I kid you not, I read today, this morning, in The Hill, the headline is, State Department voices concerns over all-male Taliban government.
At first, I thought it was a joke.
I was looking for, like, the Babylon Bee headline.
But no, this is the U.S. State Department.
They... They're expressing the concern.
A State Department spokesman says that, quote, And then the statement goes on to say...
The Taliban cabinet, quote, consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women.
So evidently, the Biden clowns believe their own nonsense.
They believe that the Taliban is...
They were saying things like, well, you know, this is the new and improved Taliban.
Well, listen, you know, this is not like the old Taliban in the past.
And at one point, I even saw an article in the Daily Mail saying that the Taliban were vowing to tackle climate change.
So, in honor of all this, I mean, I think we know in reality the Taliban is the Taliban, and they're acting like the Taliban.
They're going door to door to hunt down their opponents.
They have essentially closed down the girls' schools, and the women are back in hijab by law.
So the Taliban is behaving the way the Taliban is.
A spider will always be a spider, you might say.
But what would it be like if you actually had a woke Taliban?
I like to do these kind of thought experiments, you know.
So I'm going to give you my version of the woke Taliban.
And this, I think, would really please the Biden administration.
So here we go.
We in the Taliban are very concerned about our international image.
We are trying to make sure that we improve this.
We have been reliably informed that the temperature here in the desert...
Is one degree hotter than it was 100 years ago.
This is a matter of great concern among us Taliban.
It was hot enough before.
This idea of a one degree increase is very worrying.
Pretty soon many of us are going to have to take down all these robes.
We don't like it. We don't like it.
We have to work on this.
We are also informed by the world that our policies toward women have been...
Let's just say a little bit crude.
We need to reform these policies.
In fact, I was asked the other day by a friend of mine.
He said, this is a friend of mine from Scandinavia.
He said, for centuries, the women in the Taliban used to walk behind the men, and I now notice that they're walking in front.
He wanted to know the reason for this, and I will tell him what it is.
There are many unexploded landmines since the Civil War.
And finally, our policy toward gays is in need of serious revision.
Our old policy, as many of you know, was simply to have gays have buildings fall on top of them.
We wouldn't blow up the buildings on their heads.
And as you can imagine, they did not take to this very kindly.
So we have a new choice-based policy.
The choice-based policy is we are going to have a switch and we are going to invite the gays to activate the switch on their own so that then the building will fall on them.
Now, this may not be seen as a radical change, but you have to realize for us in Islam, we have to take these things slowly.
And so we hope that these measures that we are announcing today...
will help bring about not only international recognition, which we deserve, but some increased aid and support from our friends in the Biden administration.
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Yeonmi Park is a young North Korean defector who escaped from North Korea to China, then from escaped China to South Korea, and she now lives in the United States.
I've been reading her book, which is called In Order to Live, a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.
Bye.
And I've invited her to come on this podcast.
So we'll have her on shortly to talk about her life experience.
But I want to give a little preview of that because it's just so interesting.
Life under tyranny, but also life under freedom.
And then the discovery in America of a new form of tyranny that, in Yeonmi Park's words, is, quote, crazier than anything I saw in North Korea.
Wow. Now, we don't often have a window into what life is like in a country like North Korea.
We have a caricatured view.
You've got this silly-looking fellow who's running North Korea.
Trump called him Rocket Man.
And we have this idea of a thoroughly regimented society.
But what's it actually like to live in a society like that?
And moreover, I've wondered, you know, how does one man, however...
And, of course, Kim isn't all that big and strong.
But nevertheless, how does one man keep a whole country of millions of people under his thumb?
You wouldn't seem to need a massive network of gangsters to be subordinate to you, the head gangster, in order to do it.
Yeonmi Park, of course, doesn't quite answer that question, but what she does do is she talks about the fact that in North Korea, basic concepts that we take for granted, let's say, for example, the concept of love.
She says that there's no such thing as romantic love in North Korea, and the strange thing is she says that with the concept not existing and the word not existing, the thing itself doesn't exist either.
And she says that the only love that is talked about in North Korea, and it's talked about incessantly, is love of the dictator himself.
He is the sort of father of the nation in the most literal sense.
And this is a nation of children who are supposed to be, you may say, devotionally attached to this political father.
Extremely bizarre.
Anyway, Yeonmi Park's father was imprisoned over smuggling.
Smuggling here is basically when the government restricts everything and the black market becomes a form of economic freedom.
Nevertheless, he's thrown in jail.
Yeonmi and her mother are trying to get out of North Korea.
And it's a horrific story.
I mean, they find themselves...
They think that they're escaping, but they find themselves enmeshed in a human trafficking chain.
They're both, in a sense, sold into slavery.
At one point, she's rescued by a group that turns out to traffic her another way.
So this was one group of traffickers rescuing her from another group of traffickers.
Eventually... And unbelievably, she is able to get out.
She crosses the Gobi Desert to Mongolia, and then she ends up in South Korea.
Now, at this point, she invests in her education.
She begins to read, and she really discovers the great ideas and literature of the West.
Specifically, she talks about the fact that she read Shakespeare, she read a biography of Lincoln, she read George Orwell, she read Jane Austen.
So she discovers through literature, not through experience, but literature, a world that is very attractive to her.
A world of civilized people who are exploring genuine human questions, an atmosphere of moral seriousness, an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, and she wants to be part of this.
And she comes to America and she enrolls in Columbia University.
And this is where the plot takes a kind of unexpected turn.
At the beginning, she says she was very much, you may say, magnetically drawn to American freedom.
She says in North Korea, everybody kind of wears a mask.
And what she means by a mask here is not a COVID mask.
She means people hide their own identity.
And they live in sort of fictional identities.
In some cases, people have multiple such identities.
But she says in America, she came to discover the idea of freedom.
And ordinary things, she says in North Korea...
For example, when you're hungry, she goes, hunger is a normal part of living in North Korea.
She goes, I suddenly realize in America, when I'm hungry, I just go downstairs and I eat out.
And just something so simple.
This is not even an exercise of one of the Bill of Rights, per se.
It's merely the ordinary activity of human life.
You go socialize, you make friends...
You find someone to be your life partner.
You're on my part married, an American.
But what she found at Columbia University is the unnerving kind of twist in this narrative.
And that is she found, she says, an intolerance, a closed-mindedness, a political correctness imposed she now knows by the left.
At first she was just puzzled by it.
She says she was actually just puzzled.
Talking about a book by Jane Austen and one of the administrators at Columbia comes and gives her a stern lecture and says, stop reading that book!
And she goes, why should I do that?
And she goes, because that's an anti-colonial book.
You can't read a book like that.
So this kind of intellectual barbarism, amazingly, is now part of the Ivy League.
It's now part of our elite institutions.
And this is Yeonmi Park talking.
She goes, Wow, this is insane!
She says, I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.
At one point she even says, she says that the level of insanity in terms of regulating speech in America is even nuttier, is more extreme than the censorship in North Korea.
I think why?
Because it's so arbitrary.
And moreover, it is censorship that is masked with a kind of covering of virtue.
This is the way to be a good person.
Don't say this. Don't say that.
Don't think this. Don't read that.
Let's tear out the pages of this book.
Let's no longer assign Mark Twain.
And on and on and on.
And so Yanmi Park has become a champion of freedom in the deepest sense.
And by that I mean she is championing freedom not just as a human rights spokesman fighting for freedom around the world, but she's realized that we have now to be part of a group I count myself in this group, Debbie, too, part of a group in America that recognizes that there are great dangers to freedom in this country, and we have to fight for freedom in America also.
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I'm really enjoying the kind of naked fury of the left at Texas right now.
Part of the fury, of course, is over the Texas voter integrity law.
And the very vehemence with which the left is attacking the voter integrity law really tells you kind of all you need to know.
But there's also a lot of fury directed at Texas' pro-life law.
And here is Eric Swalwell.
He goes, What we all feared has finally happened.
I'm reading his tweet. A tyrannical regime is using its power to control women.
Hashtag Texas Taliban.
Now, first of all, if we in Texas are the Taliban, Eric Swalwell, here's my question.
Where's all our military equipment?
Remember the Biden administration gave the Taliban all this stuff?
Where are our Humvees?
Where are our transport planes?
Where are our Black Hawk helicopters?
I'm ready. So apparently we're Texas Taliban, but we're not getting the benefits of being the Taliban.
But, I want to focus here on Swalwell's statement that a tyrannical regime is using its power to control women.
I want to ask, well, where is that tyranny?
The law in Texas is almost an exemplar of the democratic process.
Let's review.
The law passed the Senate first.
That's an elected body.
Then it passed the Texas House.
Of course, that was when enough of the Texas Democrats came back.
But nevertheless, there was a quorum.
It was passed according to the letter of the law.
Democratically passed. It was signed by an elected governor.
It was then upheld by Texas courts in accordance with the due process of law.
The Supreme Court decided not to intervene which essentially kept the Texas. So in other words all the various procedures of democracy have Been carried out. So what does it even mean to say that this is?
tyrannical now I don't think Swalwell would know the answer to that.
He probably wasn't even really thinking very hard when he used the phrase.
He was giving us an intellectual Swalwell, you might say.
But in a sense, I would concede that it's possible, even for democracies, to be tyrannical.
How can that be the case?
Well, the founders recognized that it could be the case.
The founders were worried about two types of tyranny.
Let's call it the tyranny of the one or the tyranny of the many.
The tyranny of the one is, of course, monarchical tyranny in which a single ruler, a dictator, a king, imposes his or her will arbitrarily on the people.
But the tyranny of the many is a more interesting concept.
The founders call it the tyranny of the majority.
And so the founders agree that if you can have a democratic process and even a majority vote and even elected representatives, and they can be tyrannical if—and this is the big if— If they are somehow trampling on a legitimate human or constitutional right.
And this is the key question.
Is, in fact, the right to an abortion a legitimate and fundamental human and constitutional right?
And the answer to that question is emphatically no.
This right appears nowhere in the Constitution.
In fact, if you think about it for a minute, the idea that you're able to sort of kill your own offspring.
We often talk about abortion in separate terms than infanticide.
Debbie and I were talking about this lately.
We're like, wait a minute. Abortion is infanticide.
It is infanticide in the sense that the difference between abortion and infanticide isn't really moral.
It's only geographical. In the case of abortion, the fetus, the unborn, is inside the womb.
In some cases, able, by the way, to survive outside.
But nevertheless, it's geographically inside.
And in the case of an infant who's already born, it's outside the womb.
But in both cases, you're talking about an infant.
So it's infanticide in both instances.
So, how can it be tyrannical to pass a law that protects life and essentially prevents one person in our society from ending the life of another?
I don't think Swalwell has any idea.
He's being frivolous here.
But even taking him seriously...
There is no sense in which this Texas law is tyrannical.
On the contrary, what it's actually giving people is liberty, is freedom, is the right to live their own life.
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Have you been following what's happening with COVID and lockdowns in Australia?
Here's a little tidbit to show you the creepy world that the Australians have created.
This is South Australia, which is one of the six states in Australia.
It's developed, it's now testing an app that is I mean, I wish George Orwell could see this.
People in South Australia download this app.
It combines facial recognition with geolocation.
So the government is able to tell who you are by looking at your face.
And number two, where you are exactly.
So the idea here is that the state, the government, will text you.
At random times.
And after they text you, you have 15 minutes to take a picture of your own face...
In other words, there are all kinds of restrictions about where you have to be.
You can't travel beyond a certain distance.
You can't leave the state.
You can't cross these border checkpoints.
So you have 15 minutes to prove that you are within the kind of, call it the permitted domain.
And if you don't, the police will basically show up in person.
Now, this is revolting enough, but here's the Premier of South Australia.
His name is Stephen Marshall.
He's proud of this.
He goes, quote, I think every South Australian should feel...
Well, I'm not doing the Australian accent, I realize.
I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud, pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.
I mean, this guy who...
I think that every Australian should be pretty proud that we are the first people in Australia to establish gas chambers.
I mean, what kind of absurdity is this?
He's actually boasting about the degree to which he has ultimately turned his own state into a sort of...
New type of penal colony.
And let's remember historically that this is what Australia was set up to be.
I mean, the English decided, you know, in England, and this was in the time of the British Empire, that, hey, things are going very well for us, but we've got some annoying Englishmen, and so let's throw them out of the country.
Let's empty out some of our jails.
You know, there's this piece of land called Australia.
Let's dispatch them over there.
It's a long way back to England.
Probably neither they or their descendants will ever come back.
But who knew that these Australians, and you know, we all have this kind of crocodile dundee idea of the Australian, the guy who loves to be outdoors, the guy who is out in the wild, the guy who carries a big hunting knife, the guy who's sort of a, you might as well call it a down-under version of John Wayne.
But no, I don't know what's happened to Australia.
They seem to have lost this kind of spirit of Australia, the Crocodile Dundee spirit.
And what you have now are these timid, shrinking people.
This is not just going on in Australia.
I should say in New Zealand, they apparently went into a lockdown based upon a single case, a single case of COVID. But in Australia, it's not quite that.
But here we go. New South Wales.
Eight people died of COVID. Two men in their 90s died.
Two people in their 80s.
Three people in their 70s.
Lockdown. Lockdown.
And now what you have to do in New South Wales is you have to...
They use a digital identification that is scanned whenever you go into a business, an office, a workplace.
This is called checking in.
You have to check in. And the premier of this region has basically said that if you don't have...
If you're not vaccinated, then you are in essentially permanent lockdown.
You are in lockdown until we tell you that you're not.
So even the lifting of the lockdowns is only partial.
And what the Australians are doing is creating essentially two classes of citizens and claiming that one class of citizens doesn't have any basic rights.
rights of movement, rights to even show up at work, rights to show up in a bank, rights to basically do anything.
And you now see in Australia, if you watch videos of these on social media, you have basically not just police but military walking on the streets and they're basically issuing fines here, issuing fines there, sometimes violent clashes between police and lockdown protesters.
And you've got to realize that if all of this seems necessary, and Debbie is a germophobe, is like, you know, I don't know.
We got to fight the Delta variant.
But let's remember, we tried this.
The world tried this. We went into a global, a virtual global lockdown in 2020.
Remember that we just need to do this for two weeks.
We're going to just get this virus.
And then the global lockdown persists.
And what happened? Well, we didn't get the virus.
In fact, in many ways, these things made things worse.
So leave aside the catastrophic effects of the lockdown—millions of job losses, businesses destroyed, surging drug overdoses, youth suicide and depression— All of this stuff.
People can't go into the hospital because they can't get other treatments that they desperately need.
Never mind that the World Bank says that this is going to plunge parts of the world into biblical style of poverty that they haven't had in decades.
All of this is bad enough.
So, what Australia is doing is they're facing a pandemic.
And all the hardship and difficulty of dealing with that, and on top of it, they're now facing the trauma of living in a police state.
So, to me, this is taking a bad situation and making it a lot worse.
And, of course, you know that these Australian policies are being scrutinized by Democrats and by people in the Biden administration thinking themselves...
We wonder how much we can get away with bringing that kind of stuff over here because Democrats love the idea of imposing full control, of basically squashing out that spirit of independence and liberty.
That's part of our human nature, it seems, because they know that if they habituate us to conformity, to submission, to turning with supine dependence on the state for deliverance, This bodes very well for Democrats long term.
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The medieval philosopher Peter Abelard, whom I've been talking about for a couple of days now, talking more about his life, and he lived a tempestuous and controversial life.
But he was also a deep and brilliant thinker.
And he is known for his rational expositions, both of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and of the Atonement.
I'm going to talk about the Trinity today and about his views on the Atonement starting tomorrow.
Now, Abelard recognized that the Trinity is a, well, it's a mystery.
He doesn't deny that it's a mystery, and it's a mystery that's not easy to We should think of Abelard's exposition of the Trinity in the context of his broader view of what it is possible under reason to know.
Now, Abelard got into trouble.
In fact, he got into a battle with the Christian monastic, Bernard of Clairvaux, because Bernard of Clairvaux's view was that essentially the Christian doctrine should be taken on faith.
End of story. And for Bernard, this idea that you could take particularly, not just the existence of God, not just the immortality of the soul, but the Trinity, and try to kind of make rational sense out of it.
This was just utterly, not only crazy, but a little heretical.
The idea that a human being could kind of get his head around the idea of the essence of God.
But even though Bernard suspected Abelard of trying to take reason too far, I think that Abelard is, in fact, not guilty of this charge.
And here's why. When you read Abelard's work, he's actually very clear that God is bigger than any human mind can grasp.
Abelard in fact says, I'm now quoting him, God is too great to come under the jurisdiction of human discussion and human intelligence.
So Abelard knows this, and Abelard says in fact that reason needs to be conscious of its own outer limits.
Reason should not, people who think that they can use reason to grasp things that are essentially outside of reason are pseudo-intellectuals.
Abelard calls them pseudo-dialecticians, using the kind of language of the day in which the intellectuals thought of themselves as dialecticians.
And Abelard says that in trying to grasp God's nature, which is inherently outside our complete grasp, we have to use what he calls similitudes.
Similitudes here meaning analogies.
And the analogies are the best we can do.
They're sort of comparisons.
They're ways of us helping to see how something can be the case.
When it seems at first glance that it is utterly impossible.
And Abelard applies this concept of similitudes to the Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity, I mentioned this before, is nowhere explicitly stated in the Bible, but it is nevertheless formally accepted by all the major Christian denominations, by the way, Catholic and Protestant alike.
The idea, and I'm going to state the Trinity in its simplest form, there is one God who exists in three persons.
Now, when you think about that, that's a pretty hard one to explain.
And a lot of Christians don't explain it.
In fact, a lot of pastors, they just say something like, well, that's how it is.
God is one. God is also three.
How God can be one and three at the same time, we're not going to even attempt to tell you.
Take it on faith.
And Abelard finds this insufficient.
Abelard says, basically, we have to do our best to understand our faith.
We may not understand our faith completely, but that's no excuse for not understanding it at all.
If you have someone who's teaching the faith, teaching it to intelligent people, to young people who have questions, and they say, basically, listen, accept this.
Why? We don't know.
We can't explain it to you, and therefore we don't expect you to understand it either.
This is for Abelard, the blind leading the blind.
And of course, this is a kind of gift for atheists, because atheists go look at these Christians.
They're like preposterous.
They believe things that they themselves admit make absolutely no sense, that they can't explain themselves, let alone teach others.
So they're trying to convince us, even though they themselves don't know what they're talking about.
So... Abelard is very keen.
He says, in effect, listen, our best intelligence may not get us all the way there, but that's no excuse for not using our best intelligence to do our best to explain even so elusive a doctrine as the doctrine of the Trinity.
So, when I come back, I'm going to go right to Abelard's defense or exposition of the Trinity, an explanation that I think is very ingenious and also quite convincing.
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The medieval Christian philosopher Peter Abelard believed that he could give, using what he called similitudes or analogies, an explanation that would help Christians to better understand the mysterious concept of the Trinity.
So the Trinity is the idea that there is one God, And Abelard realizes right away that if you're trying to give a clear picture of the Trinity, you have to avoid two dangers.
The danger of moving too much in one direction or the other.
On the one hand, there's the danger of, well, I'll call it polytheism.
And that is that, in trying to explain the concept of the three persons, you end up positing three gods, which is more than one god.
That is a violation of the idea of monotheism, it's polytheism, and of course it is a Christian heresy.
But on the other side, Abelard also realizes there is an opposite danger.
And that danger in his time was called modalism.
And modalism is simply the idea that you talk about one God, but you talk about one God as if he just has three different facets or modes.
That's where the word modalism comes from.
So think about it this way. You could say of me, Dinesh, that I am a husband, I am a father, and I am a filmmaker.
Now, that means those are my three modes, three sort of manifestations of who I am, but obviously I'm only one person.
So, there is a danger here.
Abelard realizes that for God, if you say that God is one, but he just has three different manifestations or modes...
Then you're not doing justice to the fact that in Christian doctrine, there is one God, but there are also three distinct persons.
You have to figure out a way, Abelard realizes, to account not just for the oneness of God, but also for the fact that you have three persons in God.
So Abelard knows that he needs to put forward an idea, a way of understanding, that includes the logic of sameness, You have the same God, one God, who nevertheless subsists or exists in three different and distinct persons.
Now... Abelard uses an analogy that I think brings this into very clear focus.
He talks about, he says, let's imagine a block of wax.
And somebody comes along with a, let's say, a signet ring or some kind of an impression, and they make an impression on the wax.
And so what you have now is you have a waxen image.
Abelard now asks a question, which is worth thinking about.
He goes, when you come into the room and you see that on a table, how many things do you see?
He goes, well, you see one thing.
If you came into the room and you're making an inventory of things in the room, you wouldn't say, hey, I see one wax and I see one image.
You'd just say, I see one waxen image.
And so Abelard has accounted, if you will, now for the singular thing, the waxen image.
That's the oneness of the thing.
But now Abelard says, when you think about the wax and you think about the image, you realize that there are also two distinct things present there.
There is the wax and there is the image.
And how do you know that they're not the same?
Because the things that you can say about the one are not true of the other.
So, let's say, for example, that the waxen image is made of wax.
But the wax isn't made of wax.
Let's say that you say that the wax has an image impressed on it.
But you wouldn't say the waxen image has an image impressed on it.
So Abelard realizes that because you can speak differently of the wax as compared to the image, or speak differently of the image as compared to the wax, you have two distinct things, even in the one thing.
So here's where Abelard is getting at.
He calls the fact, Of the oneness of things, the essential sameness of the thing.
It's essentially the same thing, the wax and image.
He talks about the fact that you've got the wax and you've got the image as being differences in property.
So, the wax and the image have different properties.
You can say things about the one that are not true about the other.
And Abelard now applies this to God, and here's what he says.
He says that God is one.
God is one in the same way that the wax and image is one, but the three persons in God differ with regard to property.
God is essentially the same, but the three persons in God differ with regard to property.
And how do we know this? Because we can say things about the one person of the Trinity that you would not say about the other.
Why? What are those things?
Well, says Abelard, let's look at the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.
The Son of God is begotten.
But you wouldn't say that of the Father.
The Father isn't begotten.
Only the Son is begotten.
So the Son, in that sense, has a different property than the Father.
What about the Holy Spirit? Abelard said the Holy Spirit, now quoting, proceeds from the Father and the Son.
So the Holy Spirit proceeds.
And you would say that only of the Holy Spirit, not of the Son and not of the Father.
So Abelard, by using this very simple, everyday analogy that we can all understand, No big deal.
But nevertheless, is able to use this analogy to illuminate something that is a very big deal.
And I want to sort of...
I've been thinking in the Abelardian mode, and this is one of the great things about philosophy.
It makes you think of your own way of thinking about these things.
And I was talking to Debbie about this, and I said, well, here's my sort of Abelardism, and that is this.
In trying to explain the logic of sameness and the logic of difference.
Think, for example, about...
The chemical that we call H2O. Two molecules, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, and what do you have?
Well, in the solid form, you have ice.
In the liquid form, you have water.
In the gaseous form, you have vapor, water vapor.
Now think about it. When all those three things, ice and water and vapor, are essentially the same.
They are H2O. Their chemical composition is identical.
And yet, they differ.
They differ how? They differ in the exact Abelardian sense.
They differ according to property.
They have different properties.
One subsists in the air.
The other one is fossilized.
In fact, you can take ice and drop it into a bucket of water and the ice will float.
So the ice, in other words, doesn't immediately become water.
It is lighter than water.
And so you have essential sameness and at the same time differences of property.
And what Abelard is doing here is he is taking reason as far as he thinks it can go in order to help the human mind grasp the mystery of the Trinity.
Okay, guys, we're going to do our mailbox today.
And by the way, if you want to send in questions, audio or video preferred, send them to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. I'm watching your podcast, which includes Robert O'Neill.
If who he killed was truly bin Laden, then why did they...
bury the body at sea.
To me, they were hiding something.
Well, I mean, number one, if Bin Laden is alive, well, if I were Bin Laden and I were alive, I'd have a press conference.
I'd be like, hey, here I am, Bin Laden.
They didn't get me. They got a dummy.
They got a surrogate.
That wasn't me. I don't have any doubt that Bin Laden is dead.
I also don't have any doubt that Robert O'Neill...
Is telling the truth that he was not only on the team, but he was the one who shot bin Laden.
The Marines have pretty much admitted that.
They said, well, we did this as a team.
But they acknowledged that this was the guy who actually pulled the trigger.
And I think the reason for disposing of the body in this manner is quite simply this, that if the United States had brought bin Laden's body back here, let's say, he would have to be given some sort of a Muslim burial.
And I know there were right-wingers who were saying, oh, we should desecrate the body and do this and that, wrap it in bacon fat and so on.
But in reality, that would not have happened.
And what would happen is we would have created, in effect, in America, a bin Laden shrine.
And by that I mean you'd have radical Muslims, now devotees of bin Laden, that would be a place to kind of be dedicated to his memory, kind of like Che Guevara has.
His burial place, although originally undisclosed, became some sort of an international shrine to this day.
So I think the U.S. government didn't want that.
They wanted bin Laden to sort of vanish into anonymity and not create a place where he could be revered.
I think that's the motive for why his body was disposed of in that way.
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