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Dec. 21, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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UNDER THE MISTLETOE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP481
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Coming up, I'm going to review the latest Twitter file revelations exposing U.S. propaganda and disinformation abroad.
Does Carrie Lake have a chance with her lawsuit?
I'll discuss that.
Who, if not Elon Musk, should run Twitter?
And theologian Michael Foley joins me.
We're going to talk about the origins of Christmas traditions, including why people kiss under the mistletoe.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
After a terrible and botched and messed up election in Arizona in November, there were a spate of lawsuits filed by the Republican candidates.
Not Blake Masters, who conceded to Mark Kelly, but, was it Mark Kelly, honey?
Yes, Mark Kelly. But Carrie Lake filed a lawsuit, Abe Hamade filed a lawsuit, and Mark Fincham filed a lawsuit.
Thank you very much.
The judge sees as territory that's sort of outside the bounds of the judiciary.
This is the electoral process.
It's for the legislature and the executive branches to work out.
We want no part of it.
We're washing our hands off the matter.
But the Abe Homsday lawsuit, I'm happy to report, is moving full speed ahead and, in fact, may well be the most promising of the three lawsuits.
It's also the case that Abe's margin in that race is a few hundred votes.
It's a very small margin.
And so a very tiny amount of either fraudulent votes or invalid votes, votes that shouldn't have been cast, could be enough to change the outcome of that election.
In the Cary Lake lawsuit, which I've talked about before, there's a lot of meat in that lawsuit.
There were 270, as I understand, affidavits.
There were a lot of eyewitnesses and a lot of demonstrations of the ways in which essentially the Republican vote was suppressed.
The problem is you can have things in the world that are unfair and that are unjust and that are wrong, but are not necessarily illegal.
This is a key distinction.
So let's say, for example, let's hypothetically say that there was a massive goof up.
On the part of the Maricopa County election officials, the tabulator machines mysteriously having worked beautifully during early voting, having worked perfectly during testing, somehow suddenly there's some kind of a power outage and everything shuts down.
And so as a result, there are all kinds of inconveniences.
People have to wait.
They have to go elsewhere to vote.
But Maricopa basically pleads, hey, these things can happen.
This is a disaster.
But on the other hand, we didn't deliberately do this.
And it has the disproportionate effect of suppressing the Republican vote.
Why? Because Republicans choose to vote on Election Day and not in early voting.
Well, a judge could say, well, that's all very unfortunate, but it's not illegal because it's not against the law for a machine to break down.
It's not against the law for the power to go out.
It's not against the law for glitches to occur.
And as long as people do have a chance to cast their vote and nobody is, like, denied their right to vote...
I'm not going to get involved.
And so I mention all this because this is sort of what seems to be going on in the Cary Lake lawsuit.
Now, the good news is that the judge didn't dismiss the lawsuit as he did the Fincham lawsuit and say basically, sorry, Cary Lake, better luck next time.
That was a real possibility.
However, out of the 10 or so claims that Cary Lake made in her Basically, the judge has allowed two claims to go forward.
So there were some claims that were made that the judge basically just decided to dismiss, to ignore.
So for example...
Kerry Lake said that there is a due process violation.
Why? Because we're entitled to a process in which we can cast our votes, and that due process of law was violated.
And the judge goes, no, that's too vague.
I'm not going to go there. And then Carrie Lake said, there's an equal protection violation.
Now, this is a sophisticated argument, and I think it has some merit, where Carrie Lake is saying, listen, if you look at Republicans and Democrats, and you look at their, they should have an equal chance to cast their votes, not just as individuals, but also as groups.
If you have these two teams that are, let's say, playing in a match, and you have rules that disable or disadvantage one team, it's having, you're having an unequal, that's an unequal application of law.
And so there is an equal protection violation here.
But again, I think the judge found that's a little too risky.
He didn't go down that road.
So what he's basically said is, look, I'm going to let Carrie Lake...
Look at these ballots, and it is only a sample of ballots.
He's not letting Cary Lake's team look at all the ballots.
And he says, basically, I'm going to look for intentional violations of the law.
In other words, I'm looking for intentional manipulation of the tabulator configurations.
I'm looking for intentional violations of ballot custody.
My point is that these things, I hope that Carrie Lake can prove them, but they're very hard to prove.
You can prove that something was malfunctioning.
How do you prove that they meant for that to occur?
Well, I guess you can bring in circumstantial evidence.
They were working fine. Mysteriously, they stopped working on the day of the election.
So this is where Carrie Lake is going to press forward.
Now, she seems pretty optimistic.
She was at the Turning Point USA conference.
We won. Our case is going to be heard.
I got to confess that on the balance, as I read what the judge said and decided, I am not optimistic that she will be able to overturn this election result.
People go, well, don't you support Carrie?
Like, of course I do. But I'm distinguishing between what I want to happen and what I think is likely or going to happen.
In life, we should always make a distinction.
The party that you want to win isn't necessarily the party that's going to win or that's likely to win.
So an advocacy of one side is not the same as a prediction of what's going to happen.
So I don't know.
This is a legal case going forward.
I wish Carrie Lake the best, but I do so with some anxiety or trepidation that this does not look to me like it's going to end well, unfortunately.
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A couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk had a very enigmatic and interesting tweet.
He said, And a crime scene.
And at the time, I thought he was referring specifically to the Twitter suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and all the corruption and criminality contained therein.
But it turns out he was talking about a lot more.
He was talking about massive abuses going on Between the government and Twitter, various agencies of the government, and we're still waiting, by the way, for the sort of Twitter COVID file.
That's been promised.
It looks like Elon Musk, maybe partly as a result of that, has become vehemently anti-Fauci.
I can't wait to see that one.
But the latest drop, which, again, comes from a new guy.
This is a fellow named Li Fang, who writes for The Intercept.
And, you know, I should note before I dive into this that the mainstream media continues to ignore this.
I mean, this is outrageous, but they're acting as if it's still 1974.
In other words, the mainstream media is acting like if they don't cover it, It ceases to exist.
Of course, this is no longer true for the simple reason that Twitter is much bigger than the New York Times, is much bigger than the Washington Post.
Quite frankly, when you look at the traction, I'm bigger than the New York Times.
And what I mean by that is that if you look at my Twitter following, the New York Times has a lot more followers.
But look at the traction on the typical tweet that they do, and then look at the traction on one of my tweets and see which one is getting more So I think what's happening is the mainstream media has this delusion that they are the ones who completely set the agenda.
They still have power, don't get me wrong, but they don't have the kind of monopolistic power that they once had and this is a very good thing.
Now, the latest Twitter files drop actually has to do not with the FBI. It has to do with the military, the CIA, if you will, the U.S. Central Command that is sometimes called CENTCOM. And as it turns out, the U.S. Central Command, the U.S. military, and the U.S. intelligence agencies have been using Twitter as a vehicle for, you guessed it, disinformation abroad.
They're putting out basically lies.
And they're not only putting out lies in the sense that their content is lies, but it's a double lie because they're creating fake accounts with fake people who are pretending to be Middle Eastern or pretending to be African or pretending to be Asian.
And so people who see this on Twitter go, oh, wow, this is an Afghan woman and she's really upset about the Taliban.
Oh, this is somebody in Iraq protesting against the Iraqi regime.
No, it's not. It's not someone in Iraq.
It's basically someone at Langley or it's someone in the US military.
Now, look, I mean, it is not a secret that the US military engages in sort of psychological operations.
But let's remember that yesterday, of course, I had a guy on talking about American exceptionalism.
And Part of American exceptionalism is that other people do these official lies.
They do this official propaganda.
They have Pravda and Izvestia under the Soviet Union.
The Chinese don't hesitate to lie.
But we're different.
Why? We don't do those things.
And you think we don't need to do those things.
If we're a free society and they're not, if the Taliban is doing these horrible things and the Syrians are doing these horrible things, well, just describe what they're doing.
What is the necessity of pretending to be someone else?
What is the necessity of saying things like, well, Iran is getting ready to do this, or Iraq is getting ready to do that?
And you know it's false, and yet you're putting it out.
And here's the remarkable thing.
A private company, Twitter, is partnered with you.
They know that you're lying, and they're willing to let you lie on their platform.
Wow. I mean, all of this reminds me, really, I'm going to read you now a line from the end of Orwell's Animal Farm.
Remember in Animal Farm, the pigs claimed to be the noble ones who are going to be saving us from the human beings, right?
From the man. And Orwell closes the book by saying, the creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig.
And from pig to man again.
But already it was impossible to say which was which.
The point being that the good guys and the bad guys who were previously distinguished were a free society.
They're a totalitarian society.
Suddenly it's not so easy to tell.
And Li Fang here in the Twitter files has chapter and verse on this.
The United States is evidently spreading disinformation and lies in places like Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
Now, again, this may not be something of the ordinary guys like, so what?
Well, the so what of this is that when stuff like this comes out, and by the way, you know, 30 years ago, it would be the left-wing media's job and thrill to expose this kind of thing.
So isn't it interesting how the tables have turned and And the left-wing media is now in league with the deep state, in league with the military, perfectly willing to protect these lies, not willing to report on them.
So when I come back after the break, I'm going to look in a little more detail at what's in the Twitter files.
And also a strange question raised by Elon Musk, which is, who should be the next CEO of Twitter?
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The Twitter files on U.S. military disinformation begins with a guy named Nathaniel Kaler working with U.S. Central Command, which is called CENTCOM. And he tells Twitter,"...please whitelist all these Arab language accounts that, quote, we use to amplify certain messages." This is code for lies.
We're putting out lies.
We want you to help us put out lies.
And in the spreadsheet, he sends 52 accounts.
And he asks for priority service for six of them.
One of them, for example, was called At Yemen Current.
Again, pretends to be kind of a website inside of Yemen, giving people information.
But essentially what the military is trying to do here is control the public opinion in Yemen about the impact of U.S. drone strikes.
In Yemen. They're putting out information through this account, pretending, again, to be a Yemeni source.
Yeah, these drone strikes are actually only killing the bad guys.
No civilians really died.
Now, again, I don't know whether any civilians died in the strike or not, but my point is the U.S. military here does not hesitate to be masquerading as Yemenis and putting out the same kind of false information that, for example, Russia is now putting out about the Ukraine.
And it goes on like this.
By and large, we find that this is not just going on in Yemen.
It's going on all over the place.
Now, interestingly, the Twitter files corroborate something that was discovered by researchers at something called the Stanford Internet Observatory.
They had noticed several months ago in a report that a whole bunch of accounts on Twitter appeared to be part of a sort of state-run, meaning U.S. state-run intelligence operation.
The people in those accounts weren't real.
In fact, their faces had been generated through what's called photorealism.
In other words, a practice called deepfakes.
So it looks like a real person, but artificial intelligence has created this non-existing individual.
And these memes and faces and websites were created, by the way, not just on Twitter.
The Stanford Observatory noticed they were on Telegram, they were on Facebook.
And in most cases, there was no disclosure that these were accounts being run by the U.S. military.
And this is the point, that in all these Arabic language accounts and Yemeni accounts and so on, the description is serving Iraqis and Arabs.
So again, people are given the impression that this is a local account run by a local guy.
So this is disinformation.
And remember, I think I said this yesterday, there's a difference between misinformation and disinformation.
Misinformation is when somebody believes something that is mistaken.
And so you're misinformed.
But there's a certain innocence that goes along with misinformation.
Disinformation is a whole different matter.
Typically, disinformation is a systematic knowing promulgation of lies and knowing suppression of the truth.
And apparently Twitter has been an accessory to disinformation.
It's kind of ironic because all these social media platforms say, well, we're actively suppressing misinformation and disinformation.
What's becoming really clear?
No, not only are they not actively suppressing misinformation, they're often suppressing information.
And moreover, they are promulgating disinformation.
And again, Twitter has been honest enough to put it on the table.
Here's Elon Musk. Here's my crime scene.
You check it out. You look at it.
Here are the emails. Here are the texts redacted with the names in some cases.
But nevertheless, right there for the public to see.
This is what makes the news media's refusal to cover all this all so interesting because, again, this is...
This is material of undisputed authenticity.
And we know it's going on at YouTube.
We know it's going on at Google, going on at Meta.
We just haven't seen the crime scene because those people are still covering it up.
Of course, the game is up.
We kind of know that that's what they're doing too, but they haven't fessed up.
I guess that's the point. Now...
Elon Musk is doing such an important job at Twitter that I'm a little pained to say that he ran, in my opinion, a very foolish poll.
Should I stay on as the CEO? He was voted down in that poll, 57, I think, to 43.
And he's decided, well, I guess the people have spoken and I need to step down.
Now, I think that this poll is distorted by a number of things.
In fact, the Babylon Bee was joking that, yeah, Elon Musk was losing until the mail-in vote came in, and then he won decisively, and Joe Biden-style retained his position.
But the reality is that a lot of conservatives fled Twitter after the great banning and great suppression, the great deplatforming of 2020 and 2021.
And so you still have a lot of leftists on Twitter, and of course, a lot of leftists working at Twitter.
And so the point is, who knows if this is an actual vote, but evidently it could be.
Debbie says, well, you know, maybe Elon Musk never intended to really run Twitter.
And that's possible.
I mean, the most important point, of course, is that he has someone who is as committed to free speech as he is.
Apparently, a leading candidate is a friend of mine, David Sachs, who went to Stanford, wrote a book about denouncing political correctness at Stanford many years ago.
Great guy now, kind of a part of the tech and venture capitalist industry.
I noticed Blake Masters did a very interesting thread on his Twitter feed about what he would do to fix Twitter.
But I was reading that and thinking, well, are you sort of auditioning for the job here?
He laid out ways in which he would improve the financial picture of Twitter.
So Blake Masters could be trying to put himself in contention.
Well, either way, the point I want to make is that we need Twitter as a free speech on the free speech frontline.
And I hope that Elon Musk can ensure that it stays that way.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast our new guest, Dr. Mike.
Michael Foley. We're going to be talking about a very interesting and very appropriate for this time of the year book.
It's called Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe.
It's about Christmas traditions.
Now, Dr. Foley is a professor of patristics in the Great Text Program at Baylor University.
He's a professor of theology at the Aquinas Institute.
He's the author of over 400 articles and 14 books.
And well, Debbie wanted me to read this part.
Mike and his wife, Alexandra, live in their adopted hometown of Waco, Texas, where they enjoy spending Christmas holidays with their six children, 12 chickens, two turtles, one dog, and 12,000 bees.
Mike, welcome very much.
Welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.
This is such an offbeat and at the same time, interesting book.
That takes things that people know about and deal with every Christmas season, but they don't know the roots, the origins.
And I've wondered about some of these things for many years.
So let me begin with good old Santa Claus.
I mean, we have Christmas, the birth of Christ in a manger with Mary and Joseph and the wise men, and all of that is in the Bible.
Where do we get Santa Claus?
Well, it starts with Saint Nicholas, who was indeed a real person.
He was a very holy bishop from the fourth century in what is now Turkey.
He was always known as the people's champion.
He had the back of the little guy.
He protected people from unjust imperial taxes, from poverty, from being falsely accused of murder.
There are all these stories about him protecting the little guy.
And then after his death, legends about him only grew and grew and grew.
He became a very popular gift giver during the Middle Ages.
He would visit children on the vigil of his feast December 5th and give them gifts.
But he didn't turn into Santa Claus until the early 19th century, thanks to a handful of American authors in New York City.
What? So you're telling me that Santa Claus, because I assume that the Santa Claus tradition came out of Europe, was imported automatically to America, but you're saying that it's kind of an American tradition.
Say more about that. It's very American and very New York.
So these Americans had heard the stories of Saint Nicholas, thanks to the Dutch influence when New York City was New Amsterdam.
So they knew about Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas.
And what they basically did was they took elements from Norse mythology about Thor and Woden, And they combined it with the Saint Nicholas story.
So, for example, Thor, after whom our Thursday is named, is the god of fire, which is why he's associated with chimneys, and his color is red.
He drives a chariot in the sky pulled by two goats, and when the goats step on clouds, it makes thunder.
And so they basically took these elements and then they took the old stories about St.
Nicholas, they put them in a blender and they turned on the switch.
And somehow that New York tradition then became universalized because, I mean, that was my impression of Santa Claus growing up in India, in Mumbai.
So you're saying that it came out of St.
Nick, it was then transformed in New York and then exported around the world.
That's quite fascinating.
All right, let's talk about Christmas carols.
You lay out in the book the very interesting history of Christmas carols.
Tell us a little bit about the origins of all these Christmas carols that we know and love.
Oh my gosh, there are so many different stories.
I think one of the big surprises is how a lot of these We're born in very surprising ways.
You would think that Christmas carols, they're written during the winter when you're meditating on the Christmas story.
The most popular recorded Christmas song of all time was actually conceived during a heat wave in California in 1945.
Mel Torme was visiting his writing partner And it was July 45.
They're having this terrible heat wave.
He goes into his friend's house, can't find him anywhere, but he sees on the piano a notepad with four lines.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, etc.
And he asks his buddy, what's this all about?
And the buddy says, Mel, I've tried everything.
I had a cold drink.
I took a dip in the pool.
I just cannot cool down.
I figured if I could mentally get myself in a winter space, I could cool down.
And Mel Torme said, well, you've got a great song here.
And within 45 minutes, they finished all the lyrics and added the melody.
That very afternoon, they went to their good friend Nat King Cole.
They played the song for him.
And he said, that's my song.
And that is how the most popular Christmas song ever recorded was produced.
It would never have happened if private homes had air conditioning in 1945.
Unbelievable. Let's take a quick pause when we come back more with Dr.
Michael Foley on why we kiss under the mistletoe and other Christmas traditions.
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You'll feel the difference. I'm back with Dr.
Michael Foley. We're talking about his book, a fascinating book, Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe.
It's really about the origins and stories around Christmas traditions.
We were talking, Mike, about Christmas carols, and you have an interesting...
Sort of account of how these carols sort of, they caught on in Christian Europe.
The Lutherans in Germany were kind of okay with all this, but then there were Protestant, little more radical movements in Protestantism that were sort of against this idea of carols.
Talk a little bit about that and then how carols made a kind of comeback.
Absolutely. And it wasn't just carols.
It was all of Christmas.
So there were several Protestant groups that were very fine with Christmas, and the Lutherans were among them.
They have produced a lot of wonderful Christmas customs or Advent customs, like the Advent wreath, the Advent calendar.
But the Puritans in England despised Christmas with every fiber of their being.
Talk about Grinches.
So when they took power under Oliver Cromwell, they made Christmas illegal and you could be thrown into jail for celebrating Christmas.
So they literally had police Now, was this also true, by the way? You know, we hear, of course, about the Puritans who came on the Mayflower.
Was that hostility to Christmas also part of the Puritan tradition in early America?
Very much so, and it carried over even into the 19th century among the Boston Brahmins.
And Boston was like one of the last cities to recognize Christmas as a legal holiday.
And you had to go, if you were at a public school, you had to go to class on December 25th.
And factory workers, the factories would not only stay open on December 25th, but they started the shift extra early at 5 a.m.
so that the Irish workers could not attend Christmas Mass in the morning.
Remarkable. Hey, why do people kiss under the mistletoe?
Debbie was like, we should bring some mistletoe and do a demonstration, so we apologize that we aren't carrying that off here.
But what's the root of that tradition?
The short answer is the Druids.
They thought of mistletoe as a magic plant.
It was green in the dead of winter.
It had berries in the dead of winter, which is rather rare.
It grew, but never touched the soil.
So they had a custom of making peace under the mistletoe.
And when Christians came to those lands, they added their own signature greeting of peace, which is the kiss.
Fascinating. We're in an era in which we have Christmas and everybody gets into the idea of Christmas, but of course Christmas appears to have become, I would say, overwhelmingly secularized.
Certainly if you listen now to the kind of ads that you see around Christmas, You rarely have ads that refer to Christ or refer to holiness or refer even to the manger.
They tend to be very happy holidays-ish, if you know what I mean.
So my question to you is, are you worried about...
I mean, certainly the roots of these traditions look to be a hybrid of the holy and the profane, of the sacred and the secular.
Are you worried today that we're losing the spirit of Christmas?
And what is one way we can get it back?
Well, you're absolutely right. I am worried, but I worry about all aspects of the plight of Christianity in our post-Christian world.
But I do think there is a way, besides an internal spiritual renewal, that we can get Christmas back on the right track.
And that is to sort of adopt the older model of not celebrating Christmas before Christmas.
You know, we now start the Christmas marketing season earlier and earlier each year.
This year, I saw jack-o'-lanterns and Christmas trees side by side being sold in the store.
We don't even wait for the day after Thanksgiving anymore.
And the result of that is by the time Christmas comes, we're sick of it.
We're sick of the saccharine songs and everything else.
The older model is observe December as Advent.
That is to say, as a time of joyful restraint.
You're still joyful, but you're pulling your punches.
Then... Christmas comes, you pull out all the stops, and you celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, which was this period of unbroken merriment between December 25th and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th.
That, to me, is a much healthier model of joy and merriment and religious piety.
What a fantastic idea and what an interesting book.
It's Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe.
Thanks, Dr. Michael Foley, for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I've been talking about the great impact of Christianity in shaping Western culture and I'm continuing my exploration of the Christian ideal that I've called the affirmation of ordinary life and its consequences.
Well, one consequence is simply the elevation of Of compassion to becoming a core virtue of our society.
Now, I'm not saying that Christianity invented compassion.
Obviously, human beings have the capacity to be compassionate.
But compassion, at least not compassion, compassion understood as a universal ideal.
This is something that Christianity has focused on and other cultures really, really don't.
Think of it sort of this way.
Let's imagine that there was right today a huge famine in Sri Lanka or in Burundi or in Haiti.
What would happen? Well, first of all, you'll notice that there is a tremendous response from Western countries.
You have a deployment of all kinds of aid.
You would have churches getting involved.
You would have Doctors Without Borders on the scene.
You would have the Red Cross, food banks, all of this going on.
Now, the West isn't the only rich part of the world.
There's a lot of wealth in China.
There's a lot of wealth in the Middle East.
Parts of Asia. But you'll notice that those countries do, well, basically nothing.
They look over and go, oh, that's very tragic.
And they kind of move on with life.
Now, why is this?
Is it because these other countries are just cruel and don't care about people?
No. They do care about people.
They care about their own people.
And this is the point.
I remember... When I was growing up in India, we learned a slogan, the tears of strangers are only water.
And this is a kind of maybe rough way of putting it, but the basic idea is, look, your obligations to your family, to your relatives, maybe next in line your neighbors, next in line your own tribe or your own community.
But if somebody from a different tribe, a different country shows up, they have a problem, well, you wish them well, but it's not your problem.
Christianity begins to change this and introduce the notion of, well, universal brotherhood.
And not only is there this idea of universal brotherhood, but we should feel compassion for our fellow man, regardless of whether or not they're in our family or our community or our tribe, maybe not even our country.
Now, if we go to ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity, there was a certain ideal of doing good, which I would describe not as compassion, but as magnanimity.
So what is magnanimity?
Well, Aristotle speaks about what he calls the great-souled man.
And the great-souled man actually helps people.
And he also does all kinds of things, what we would today call social service for the community, for the polis.
But why does he do it?
He does it because he's great.
He does it to express his greatness or his superiority.
Aristocrats in ancient Greece and Rome would fund bats and statues and parks that bore their names.
Caesar famously in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar goes, I'm going to give all the land this side of the Tiber to the Roman citizens.
But this is magnanimity.
This is not the same thing as compassion.
Compassion is fellow feeling.
It means really, well, the actual word means suffering along with other people.
And so we help people in Haiti and Rwanda not because we're better than them, but because we're like them.
Because we are all in the same human predicament.
We're all, as we say, in the same boat.
So Christian humility is the very opposite of classical magnanimity.
The Christians built the first hospitals.
They, well, originally were just for Christians, but pretty soon they were open to everyone.
In fact, in the Middle Ages, Christians would even admit Muslims to Christian hospitals, and these are Muslims who were fighting against Christians in the Crusades.
Today, many hospitals have Christian names.
Think of like St. John's Hospital, St.
Luke's, Methodist Hospital, St.
Jude, Lutheran Hospital, and so on.
And think of relief organizations like the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, even if the organizations have become largely secularized.
And some of them have not become entirely secularized.
I mean the Salvation Army still bears a Christian imprint and nevertheless they, these organizations, even if secular, are the product of Christian influence and they reflect Christian, the spread of Christian influence in society.
This is by the way also true of the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, organizations devoted to service, but the ideal of service is a Christian ideal.
Think of great Christian figures, Vincent de Paul, Mother Teresa, people who have devoted their lives to the poor and to the sick.
And then you ask yourself, where else do you find this?
Let's look in other cultures.
Let's look in other religions.
Let's look to secular society to see if you can find a similar tradition of disinterested, compassionate universalism.
And I don't think you'll find it.
Even when you find it in secular precincts, it is directly traceable, as in the case of hospitals, to the influence of Christianity.
So you don't have to be a Christian believer or even a Christian to acknowledge that this Western faith has done a great deal to improve human life and relieve human suffering.
Drawing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity, I now want to talk about a new idea that Christianity implanted into the world that has totally changed the world. And this idea is so powerful and so enduring that even people who are very distant from Christianity or even people who emphatically reject Christianity—think, for example, about someone who wants nothing to do with Christianity, been there, done that, or someone who's a
militant atheist—even these people, I will argue, embrace this Christian ideal, can't do without it.
In fact, it's kind of at the center of the way that they think and they talk and what they profess to cherish.
This is quite simply the idea of human dignity, of human equality that comes out of the idea of human dignity.
So the equality of human beings, the moral equality of human beings is the fundamental idea that I want to talk about.
And it's, of course, an idea I think that Christians and non-Christians alike cherish.
Now, we don't always follow that idea in practice, but I'm talking about the fact that we believe in it, and we give lip service to it, and we uphold it, and it is one of the central ideals of our society.
By the way, the idea of equality was, of course, the propelling force behind the campaign to end slavery, the movement to introduce representative democracy and popular self-government, and also, by the way, the effort to articulate a successful doctrine of international human rights, human rights that are not limited to one group or one tribe or one people, but apply to everybody.
Now, when I say that I'm going to celebrate this ideal of equality, which I am, it comes with a kind of a warning.
And the warning is that if we as a society and as a civilization move away from Christianity, we're going to be moving away from this ideal also.
In other words, we're going to see an erosion of A diminution of this ideal.
And so, am I suggesting that over time, equal rights, equal dignity, the idea of universal rights will begin to wither?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.
All right. Now, when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, he said, And he claimed that this was a self-evident truth.
Now, hmm, self-evident, really?
How is it self-evident that all men are created equal?
I think if you stood on the streets in most places around the world, let's just say in Addis Ababa or in Rio de Janeiro or in Islamabad in Pakistan and say, all men are created equal, most people would be like, are you insane? People are very different.
Better or worse.
Some are stronger than others.
Others are taller than others.
Some are better looking than others.
Some are sweeter natured than others.
People are different in intelligence, in moral character.
So the idea that there's, not only is there equality, but this equality is like obvious, is a little strange.
Now Jefferson knew this.
He was asserting equality of a special kind.
Human beings, he was saying, are moral equals.
They don't behave equally well, but each of their lives has a moral worth that is no greater and no less than anyone else.
So this is a strange doctrine, right?
The idea that a janitor, a street sweeper, a loader on a dock in Philadelphia has the same moral worth as Franklin, as Jefferson himself.
Each life is valuable.
No one's life is more valuable than someone else's.
Now, this idea of the equal worth and indeed the preciousness of human life, this is the Christian idea.
Where does it come from?
Well, it comes from the idea that God loves us equally.
God created us. He places infinite value on each human life.
He loves everybody the same.
So, in Christianity, you're not saved through your family, your tribe, your city.
Notice that salvation is an individual matter.
God has a sort of vocation, a plan for your life, and that's an individual plan.
It applies to you and to you alone.
And this was an idea that really began in the middle...it began in early Christianity, continued through the Middle Ages, highly stressed in the Reformation by Martin Luther, because Martin Luther stresses the individualism of the Christian journey, which is not only will we be judged when we die as individuals, but also we live our lives We relate to God during our lives individually.
Now, we might worship in a church or communally, but our relationship to God is an individual one.
So, what we're getting at here is that some very powerful ideas in our culture, individualism, equal dignity, equal rights, we see here the Christian roots of those ideas.
Now, we're sometimes told that that's not the case.
Modern democracy and equal rights goes back to ancient Greece, but this is not the case.
Yes, of course, in ancient Greece you had democracy, but as I'll pick up tomorrow...
And demonstrate democracy in ancient Greece first of all coexisted with mass-scale slavery and second of all was a democracy of a very different kind than the democracy we have today.
The democracy we have today doesn't come, at least doesn't come in any direct way, from ancient Athens.
It comes more from the influence of Christianity.
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