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Jan. 17, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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“UN-PEACH” 45 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP497
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Coming up, Maxine Waters, remember, Peach 45.
Well, the House GOP now has a chance to un-Peach 45.
I'll review an interesting article by a conservative making the case against impeaching Biden now.
I'll reveal how the rhetoric of the Democrats unintentionally makes the case for life.
An entrepreneur and motivational speaker, Chris Widener, joins me.
We're going to talk about his idea for building a parallel society on the right.
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.
Hey, do you remember Maxine Waters, her famous Peach 45?
Of course, what she meant to say is Impeach 45.
45, of course, being former President Trump.
And of course, the Democrats tried.
They tried not once, but twice.
They peached 45.
Now, the impeachment didn't really work because it was stalled and it didn't go forward in the Senate.
They didn't have the votes in the Senate for either of the two impeachments.
But now there's a very interesting idea that has been floated to and by Kevin McCarthy, the idea of undoing the Trump impeachments.
Basically, getting rid of them, taking them off the record.
And in other words, unpeach 45.
And I think it's a great idea.
And it's out of the box.
And it's a wild idea.
And apparently the author of the idea is Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma.
He brought a resolution...
To expunge the 2021 impeachment.
By the way, the 2021 impeachment was the so-called January 6 impeachment.
The Democrats tried to make the case that somehow Trump incited January 6.
They never could make that case.
In fact, they then set up the January 6 committee.
It's been labored for about a year now.
Well, more than a year to try to make this case.
They haven't been able to make it either.
And so this is a bogus impeachment, laughable.
In fact, the only guy who was egging people to go into the Capitol was Ray Epps, a guy who has never been indicted.
In fact, a guy that is defended by people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
By the way, the Trump earlier impeachment, which was the 2019 impeachment, was based upon a fake dossier that Trump colluded with Russia.
And it was based upon a phone call in which Trump says a perfect phone call, but a phone call in which the only issue that was raised turned out to be a completely legitimate issue.
Which is the Biden family was collecting $50,000.
Well, actually $80,000 per month.
And Hunter Biden's partner was getting another $80,000 from the Ukrainian oil company called Burisma.
So... Recently, Kevin McCarthy was asked, hey, would you consider undoing the Trump impeachments?
And perhaps to some people's surprise, McCarthy goes, yeah, I'll take a look at that.
I'll consider it. He didn't commit to doing it.
Let me quote McCarthy.
He goes, I would understand my members would want to bring that forward.
He goes, and we take a look at it.
In other words, this is a, well, Well, I don't know if I want to call him a new Kevin McCarthy.
He is the same Kevin McCarthy, but he's certainly invigorated.
And ironically, and this is really to his credit, because I've seen on social media some people going, well, I was very critical of McCarthy and I'm wrong on McCarthy, I have to admit it.
I don't think we were wrong on McCarthy.
In fact, I think what happened here is that the holdouts...
The Gang of 20, as I sometimes call them affectionately, by the way, the Gang of 20 has made McCarthy a different person.
But McCarthy does deserve credit for the way he has reacted.
Because McCarthy could have gone the other way.
Oh yeah, I was forced to agree to these conditions, but I'll be sullen, I'll be reluctant.
I'm going to look at this Gang of 20 as bad guys and try to undermine them in other ways.
No, it looks like McCarthy has approached it like, hey, listen, I need a unified House GOP. I've brought in these guys who were on the outside and were not happy.
It looks like we now have a unified team.
And as part of a unified team, I have to pay attention to their agenda also.
I've got to carry out what I agreed to.
And so rather than do it grumpily and unwillingly, let me do it enthusiastically.
Let me sort of become the leader that they always wanted me to be.
And so McCarthy has been, well, in some ways a changed man.
We haven't seen this Kevin McCarthy in quite a while.
And the only question is, can he keep it up?
So... When I've outlined a few things that McCarthy can and should do, things about investigations, things about moving certain types of legislation forward, not legislation that's going to pass because it's not going to pass the Senate, Biden's not going to sign it, but it's legislation that is aimed at setting this kind of a platform for 2024 and also things that bring facts to light.
Now, So, McCarthy is out the gate beautifully.
And the question is, will he sustain this momentum?
And if he does, he'll be doing not only the GOP House, but the Republican Party generally, and the country, a big favor as we move slowly toward the presidential election.
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Make sure to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. Should the House Republicans move forward in impeaching, opening up an impeachment into Joe Biden?
Now, there's been more talk recently about opening up impeachment proceedings for Mayorkas, possibly Merrick Garland.
I think those are probably both excellent ideas.
I've advocated myself before for a Biden impeachment.
It doesn't matter if it's not going to be carried through.
It doesn't matter if it's going to make it through the Senate.
First of all, there are multiple grounds to impeach this guy.
He could be impeached on the border.
He could be impeached over his actions in Afghanistan.
He could be impeached over the financial corruption.
Now, of course, he can be impeached over the classified documents.
And the classified documents scandal gets worse by the day.
Yesterday, I talked about the fact that it's now come out that Hunter Biden, who claimed that house, the house with those documents, has been paying Biden A rent of $50,000 Per month.
Per month! Now, this is a house that's worth about $2 million.
Someone took the trouble of looking it up on Zillow to see what the rent is for that type of house.
It turns out the rent is $7,600.
Who would pay $50,000?
I mean, think about it. That's $600,000 a year in rent on a house that's worth, let's say, $1.8 or $1.9 million.
It makes no sense.
No one would do it. So, in other words, it's very clear that this money is a kind of funneling of money.
It's a way of getting money to the big guy.
It's giving Biden his 10% share.
And this is something that warrants investigation.
Quite apart from whether it warrants impeachment, it certainly warrants investigation.
Now, the left continues its pathetic efforts to defend Biden.
Here's Neil Katyal, who is a legal guy in the Obama administration.
He goes, imagine if two people borrowed library books and didn't return them.
One forgot about the book, finds it a couple of years later, and then gives it back.
The other guy hangs on to the book.
You can see where this guy is going with this.
And then I quote tweeted.
Here's my response.
Borrowing library books is not a crime.
Let's apply your analogy to robbery or murder and see if it holds up.
Biden committed multiple murders but promptly reported them to the authorities.
Is this a valid excuse?
In other words, if the possession, the negligent possession of classified documents as a crime, then Biden is guilty of multiple crimes because there have been multiple stashes of these documents and...
The fact that he turned them in, and by the way, didn't turn them in immediately, turned them in when he saw fit after the midterms, turned them in when he decided the environment was safe for him to do so.
But even if he turned them in the next day, it wouldn't matter.
A crime is not vitiated or exonerated simply because you announce you did it.
Now... There's an interesting article in American Thinker written by Andrea Whitberg.
And she begins by discussing the classified document scandal.
And she quotes Andrew McCarthy, making a point I've just made, which is he's talking about Biden's so-called defense that the documents were, quote, inadvertently misplaced.
And then McCarthy writes, this is not a defense to the charge of mishandling classified information.
It is tantamount to an admission of guilt.
So the point that McCarthy is making here is that you can't say that you are excused from this behavior because you didn't intend to harm the United States.
That's not, in fact, the valid standard.
The standard is, did you have the documents and were you negligent in possessing them?
That's it. So, this standard, by the way, the left has insisted upon with regard to Trump.
And, obviously, it's the same standard that applies to Biden.
Obviously, it's Biden's DOJ. And so no one thinks that they're going to be as tough on Biden as they are on Trump.
But it may be more difficult for them to be tough on Trump, given all the stuff that's now come out on Biden.
But anyway, come back to the article by Andrea Whitberg.
she basically goes on to say, I don't think it's a good idea to impeach Biden.
And her reason is, she goes, well, if I were a Democrat in the Senate, she says, I would vote to impeach Biden.
Why?
Because Biden is a millstone.
Biden is a fool.
Biden is dragging down the Democratic Party.
And if you got rid of Biden, and she lays out her kind of nightmare scenario, I don't know what I really think about the scenario, but I just thought I would share it.
She goes, well, first of all, Kamala Harris would become the president.
And she goes, what if Kamala Harris picks somebody like Michelle Obama to be the vice president?
So now you have Kamala Harris, and Kamala Harris, of course, is stupid and she's horrible.
But stupid, horrible people do get elected, witness Spetterman in Pennsylvania.
So we are living in an age where you don't have to actually be competent or perhaps even all there in order to find yourself in public office.
And then, says Andrea Whitberg, what do you think of this idea?
Let's just say that Kamala Harris then turns in her papers, and for whatever reason, she's exhausted.
She has to deal with certain types of personal issues.
Michelle Obama becomes the president.
And then she has the possibility of running for two terms.
So this is all kind of the, this is an attempt to say, and of course I laughed out loud when I saw this, where she goes, Michelle Obama in the White House means that Barack Obama will now have his fourth and fifth term.
In other words, she's counting Biden as the third term and then four and five with Michelle.
And she goes, listen, we don't need to go down this road.
We are better off keeping Biden in there.
Let him hang in the breeze, she says.
Let the Republican win the White House in 2024.
for then if you want to go after Biden for violating national security laws.
And she closes the article by saying that keeps America from making a giant leap from the frying pan into the fire.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Recently, the Republican House passed the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which very simply says that if an infant survives an abortion, is born alive, It needs to be taken to a hospital and cared for.
Now, remarkably, only one Democrat voted for this, voted for the protection of born-alive infants.
One other Democrat, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, voted present.
But every other Democrat voted against protecting live-born infants.
Let's remember, they're no longer in the womb.
It's no longer my body, my choice.
They're outside your body and they're alive.
Now, what I find is interesting is that when you listen to the rhetoric of the Democrats in opposing this bill...
It's not even so much that they're championing infanticide.
In fact, it's the opposite.
They're conceding.
I don't think they know that they are, but they're conceding the pro-life case.
It shows the pro-life case is so strong that even when Democrats go against it, they end up conceding it.
Let's take a look at what I mean.
Here's a representative, Hillary Scholten.
Democrat of Michigan, opposing the Born Alive Infants Act.
Here's what she says.
When I read scripture, I turn to Jeremiah 1.5, which states, I knew you before I formed you and placed you in your mother's womb.
It doesn't say the government's womb.
I believe life is precious, but I reject the idea that if I embrace the sanctity of life, I must also be forced to invite the federal government to regulate it.
Let's analyze this for just a minute, because there's a kind of craziness to it.
She's first of all saying, yes, an infant in the womb is not just life, but human life.
And then she's going on to say, it's not the government's job to protect it.
It's not the government's job to protect human life.
Of course it is.
In fact, it is the primary job of the government to protect our life and safety.
Why else do we form governments in the first place?
Why else do we get out of the state of nature and enter into a social contract if not for protection?
So the point is not should government protect life.
Government protects life all the time.
If I walk up to somebody on the street and kill them, I'll immediately be arrested and charged for murder.
Governments protect life.
But the issue really is whether or not the government protection of life extends to unborn life.
And that depends on whether or not unborn children are alive and human.
And so here you have Hillary Scholten saying, yes, they are.
They are human. So she's conceding the pro-life case that A, the fetus is alive and it's human.
And what follows from that is that kind of life obviously deserves protection.
So this is a classic example.
Here's another one, by the way, and this is coming from, of all people, Jerry Nadler, and he argues against the Republican Born Alive Protection Act by saying this.
A hospital is surely a much safer place for them.
No, I'm sorry. He says, the problem with this bill is that it endangers some infants by stating that an infant must immediately be brought to the hospital.
Now, by the way, the infant is in the abortion clinic.
Presumably, it's born alive, and the bill says, take it to a hospital.
Now, why does the bill say that?
Well, for the obvious reason that hospitals exist to preserve and extend life, and abortion clinics exist to terminate life.
So the infant, the unborn, is not safe in the abortion clinic, but would be safer in a hospital.
But Jerry Nadler is acting like the act of transportation, of transporting the fetus.
The now-born-alive fetus from the abortion clinic to the hospital is somehow an unnecessary burden, and his reason for voting against the Republican bill is because there is this kind of troubling attempt to move the now-born-alive infant from one place to another, which could cause presumably some sort of Endangerment.
I'm putting that in quotes.
In fact, of course, the born-alive infant who has just survived a, let's call it a near-death experience, has its best chance of making it, its best chance of having its life protected if it's moved as far away from the abortion clinic as possible and toward a hospital where it actually gets medical care for its own benefit and in its own interest.
The Biden administration has a heck of a New Year's agenda.
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I don't spend a lot of time on health websites.
Well, to be honest, I don't spend any time on health websites.
My health guru is Deborah D'Souza right here.
But in any event, I saw this really interesting item, which includes a picture of people on the beach.
Now, this is Gold Coast, Australia, 1972.
But the meme that accompanies it is, How were people effortlessly thin in the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s?
And the word that caught my attention was effortlessly.
Now the writer goes on to say that people in the past, and this is the recent past, I mean obviously within our lifetime, he says they didn't do crazy diets.
They didn't have any calorie counting apps.
They didn't have to fast.
They didn't even have a gym membership.
And they even ate dessert.
So the question is, here we are in our society now, struggling to manage weight and figure out how to get thinner.
And he goes, this wasn't really a fight.
This wasn't a struggle. People didn't have to go to heroic lengths.
It seemed to happen naturally.
Now he goes on to point out that people in those days, and again we're talking about the recent past, ate food cooked from scratch.
I think that's an important factor.
They ate food that they made.
They ate full fat.
They ate out only as a treat.
So this is actually a cultural shift that people would go out to eat, you know, a couple times a month.
But this idea of eating out, you know, every three days or multiple times a week, this is new.
They didn't eat foods with long ingredient lists.
So this is also a phenomenon of our time.
You look at the box and it's got all this stuff in the food.
So there's an interesting graph here showing the obesity of the United States.
And the United States was, as a society, not obese.
The turning point was in 1980.
And then starting in 1980, you see rising obesity.
It's leveled off slightly in the last few years.
But by and large, Americans have added on a lot of pounds in the decades from 1980 to the present.
And so the writer says, what happened?
Well, U.S. dietary guidelines got introduced.
The food industry created a multitude of low-fat products.
Huge increase in refined grains, added sugar, increase of additives and pesticides, and societal norms changed to eating out.
So people eat out a lot more.
And he goes on to make the point, the writer does, that people now eat out.
Well, some people eat out for pleasure.
I mean, we do. Debbie and I eat out a lot.
But people also eat because they're sad or from boredom.
And he goes on the point that they're never full because the protein and the nutrients have sometimes been removed from the food supply.
Now countering this argument of course is one thought I had was wait a minute it is true that people today live longer than they did before, longer than even they did 30 or 50 years ago.
But see I think that's a separate issue that actually is not about healthy eating it's because of the improvements in medicine.
So improvements in medicine have given us a longer lifespan but the lifespan is a little bit different than let's call it the health span.
The health span is how healthy are you living now.
Now obviously even in the United States I've noticed that there are big differences from one place to another.
Debbie and I were in New York for Christmas with our family, and then Daniel and Brandon as well.
And if you look around New York, you don't see a lot of walruses or porpoises or giant individuals who can barely get themselves into a seat.
New York's got people that are, you know, they've got some people who are overweight, but by and large, people in New York are not fat.
And the question is why?
I think the simple answer to that is they walk.
They walk everywhere. They walk a lot.
And I think probably something of the same applies to people in Paris.
I mean, look at the Parisian food.
It's so rich.
And the Parisians don't go low-fat.
They eat heavy cream.
They do not hesitate to have desserts on a regular basis.
But... They have small quantities.
So if you look at an American dessert, it's a dessert for four people.
And a typical entree in a restaurant when you go out is an entree that is at least two servings.
So it's not a bad rule of thumb sometimes when you go out to EW and I sometimes will share.
Sometimes we'll eat half and take the other half home.
And then coming back to the Parisians, they too walk a lot.
So the combination of eating smaller quantities and walking a lot is probably going to make sure that you don't get to a weight that's going to make you look in the mirror and go, ah!
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast my friend Chris Widener.
He is an entrepreneur, a motivational speaker.
In fact, Chris, I see you're in the Motivational Speakers Hall of Fame.
He's also an author, and we're going to talk about his new book that is called Four Seasons.
A novel.
Chris, welcome to the podcast.
We got to know each other through the world of speaking events, and we've been on the road together at some very cool ones.
And you always strike me as a guy who's coming up with Innovative new ideas.
And I want to talk to you a little bit about an idea that you shared with me that I think is very interesting.
I see it as an idea that is part of a conservative attempt to create a parallel society, to create a society in which we are not subsidizing or dependent on the very bad ideas and the destructive values of the left.
Talk a little bit about your idea and how it might play out.
Yeah, actually it's an idea.
First of all, thanks for having me on your show.
Appreciate it, Dinesh.
You're a good friend and love the work that you do.
Big supporter of yours.
And so it's great to be here.
You know, this idea is an idea that I've had for quite some time, but it was really listening to you speak at a number of those events where you were talking about these parallel economies and how we need to start our own things.
We need to create our own economies.
And then just seeing the canceled culture and seeing how, you know, the left is canceling the right, you know, and it just made me really realize that conservatives need to stick together.
And I started thinking, how can we keep money?
I call it in-house.
How do we keep money in-house?
And there's been communities, mainly communities of faith, who have done this quite successfully for a long time.
Jewish folks do it. If they can work with a Jewish person, we work with the Jews.
Mormons do it. Amish do it.
And they keep the money in-house.
Doesn't mean they won't work with other people, but it does mean that they find a way to keep their money inside of groups that share their values.
So I started thinking, what if conservatives figured out a way to do that?
One of the ways that we're working on, and I think we'll have the whole thing up and running by mid-year this year, is creating local conservative business groups where conservatives can get together.
They can share referrals with one another.
They can share business with one another.
They can become preferred partners with one another.
It's not that I won't go buy something from a store where the guy doesn't agree with me.
But it does mean that if there's a store that's a competitor and I know that I can spend that money, it's going to go towards promoting values that I believe in, I will most likely shift my purchasing to that particular vendor.
So that's sort of the general idea, setting up these groups all across America where we can support one another and drive business for one another.
Chris, I just think it's a brilliant idea.
I mean, I came to the United States as a Rotary exchange student.
And when I got here, I thought to myself, what is this club called Rotary that is sponsoring me?
Why would somebody want to become a member of a club like this?
Now, on the surface, it seemed like this Rotary does social service.
They clean up the highways.
They bring exchange students like Dinesh from Mumbai to America.
But I go, well, is there a broader motivation than that?
And then I realize there is.
Because what happens at Rotary is you show up and you're an engineer or you're a construction guy or you're a doctor.
Well, it turns out that you meet people through Rotary and then they...
They use your services and you use their services.
So it becomes a kind of a business association.
Now, Rotary, of course, is not ideological, but it looks to me like you're taking the same insight and applying it in a new environment in which there is a need.
And I think many of us believe we don't if we can avoid it.
We don't want our money going to a Disney +, or to a Target, or to a company that is...
It's not just that it doesn't support our values, it's aggressively hostile, in some cases, to our values.
Oh, I'll tell you, I know an ice cream store here in Chattanooga.
And when they found out that the owner of this ice cream store was a conservative, they went after her.
They were like, stay away from that ice cream store.
I'm like, ice cream is not conservative or liberal.
It's ice cream. And I started thinking, would a Republican or a conservative ever say, you know, oh, I found out that my dry cleaner voted for Biden.
I'm never going to let him fix my suits again.
Like, we don't think that way.
The liberals think we're going to punish you for being different than us.
Conservatives go, eh, so he's a dumb guy.
He happens to be my dry cleaner.
He makes my suits look great.
And then we continue to go there.
But I started thinking, maybe we should be a little more that way.
Maybe we should take our money and funnel it into the conservative dry cleaner and the conservative ice cream shop.
And again, you're not going to be able to do this perfectly, especially as you get into bigger stores.
But it is the kind of idea that I think has some legs because I also think these groups would not only be places for us to share business, but given the mentality and the pressure on conservatives in modern America, I think it would be a really great place for people to be able to get that weekly shot where they say, I'm with people who believe like me.
I'm not the dumb guy that the press tells me I am.
There are people like me.
We are the silent majority.
And I love that group every week to get a boost in the arm and some praise for the things that I believe in.
Well, Chris, I commend you on this idea, and I think it's something that is definitely worth launching.
And you might find that it catches like wildfire, because I think the timing is right.
I think your diagnosis of conservative psychology is right on.
It's not the kind of thing that we would have done in the past.
I mean, I remember many years ago, I was in Barnes& Noble, and Jerry Falwell's face was on the cover of Time Magazine or Newsweek.
And I remember a bunch of leftists who looked at it and they were like, I can't believe that Time magazine would put Jerry Falwell on the cover.
And I was thinking to myself, what an odd psychology.
Because if you and I saw Jesse Jackson on the cover of Time magazine, we would never have that same reaction.
So this is a kind of a psychological difference between the two sides.
But... The times are different now.
We don't like the fact that the left is not only trying to brutalize us in the culture, but get us to pay for that brutalization.
So, certainly wish you all the best with your idea.
When we come back, let's talk about your new book, I believe out today, called Four Seasons.
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I'm back with my friend Chris Widener.
He's an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and author.
By the way, his website, ChrisWidener.com.
We're going to talk about the book called Four Seasons, and it's FourSeasonsBook.com.
Chris, let's talk about this book, because it's a story, it's fiction, it's, I guess, in the category of Christian fiction, and it's talking about not just the four seasons of summer, winter, spring, and fall, but rather the four seasons of life.
What are those four seasons, and how does this book, what does this book have to teach us, if I can put it that way?
Yeah, absolutely. This is actually, it's the 23rd book that I've released, but it's the first book I ever wrote.
I wrote this book in 1995.
I carried it around on a floppy disk for 15 years, then onto a computer, then into the cloud.
And then my publisher said, what book do you want to do next?
And I said, how about this one?
And so we're launching it.
And it's It's about a billionaire who finds out he has one year left to live.
He has four seasons left to live.
And ultimately, it's about the season of winter, right?
That season in which we all are going to come to, and that's really the premise of the book, is we all know we're going to die.
But you know, at our age, Dinesh, years of my age, we're similar ages, we think, oh, it's going to be 20, 30 years from now.
And so this idea is when it gets scrunched down to a year, how much more focus we have on life, the value of life, the preciousness of life, the The meaning of life and all those kinds of things are now focused for us.
And we now know it's not a Christmas later on or a Thanksgiving later on.
It's our last Thanksgiving.
It's our last Christmas.
It's our last wedding anniversary, our last Easter.
Now those moments And not just celebrations like that, but even the cup of coffee you have with your spouse on the back porch.
All of a sudden, so much more meaning and richness.
And it really stems from something that I wrote in a previous book, that we cannot determine how long we live, but we can determine how well we live.
And this billionaire who finds out he has cancer, he wants to live well that last four seasons of his life.
And that's really what the book is about.
It seems like what you're saying is that in normal life, we live a distracted life.
And by distracted, I mean we act as if we have all the time in the world.
And that when we realize that time is our great scarcity, then we have to look at the value of that time, how you're going to spend your time well.
Absolutely. Now, how are we to think about this?
I mean, let me put the question to you.
If you had exactly one year left to live, or if you were advising someone who did, would you tell them specific things that they should do, or would you just try to produce that reorientation of perspective and allow things to kind of play out that way?
Yeah, I think the life that we would live in that final year would be different from person to person.
In this particular book, he has one daughter that he never really connected with.
There was no problem between them, but they were just very different personalities.
He connected more easily with some of his other children.
So one of his premises for his last year was, how do I establish that relationship with that daughter?
How do I make sure she knows that I loved her and that I care for her and I believe in her?
So he focused in on that.
If a single person finds out they have a year left to live, they don't have to connect those kinds of relationships.
So for some people, I think it might be a life of travel.
I've always wanted to travel and see this world that God created.
I'm going to go on a year-long trip.
For others, it might mean establishing their finances.
You know, maybe they don't have their financial orders in affairs, so they would do that.
Others, it's relationships.
But I think ultimately what it comes down to is what are the most important things about your life?
The kinds of things, and I love how you put it, Distracted.
The kinds of things I've been distracted away from because I always thought there was a tomorrow.
Now I know that the tomorrows may not come.
What do I need to do today to produce that meaning and that value in my life so that it creates a ripple effect after I'm gone?
What role, since we're talking about the category of Christian fiction, you have the interesting phenomenon, of course, in religious believers, which you don't have with secular people, of this life not being the only life.
And that introduces this new element, judgment, moral accountability.
So a secular person might think of it just in terms of like, what are the things that give me the greatest satisfaction or pleasure, let me make sure I do the most of those things.
But you could have a Christian faced with another year of life who says, hey, listen, I need to get my moral house in order.
For example, if I can find people I've, let's say, wronged over the years and I need to make atonement, you know what, that would be a very good thing for me to do.
Because I will have tried to have taken a wrong and made it right.
What do you think of this kind of accounting that takes into account the fact that our end may not be our final end?
our end isn't the final end.
And, you know, we've read the back of the book.
We know how the story ends, right?
The Bible says it's appointed for man to die once and then face judgment.
That's the way it works, right?
We die. We don't know when.
In fact, I always say life is precious because we die, but life is an adventure because we never know when.
And so, In this instant, there we go.
We're now face to face with our maker.
And so whether you're Christian or not Christian, I think you bring up the very important point of you have to get right with God.
And in this book, I wouldn't call this a heavy handed Christian book.
It's not like you're going to die.
You need to come to Jesus. But I put some characters in there, like his son-in-law is a Presbyterian minister.
And so we insert some of these biblical truths into the book about that secondary life.
We have a whole scene where he goes to his last Easter service and the message and how it connects with him.
And his whole family doesn't know yet, but now he's starting to think it through and then how it extrapolates out into the family.
But it's absolutely true that we need to prepare ourselves to live for eternity.
You know, we prepare ourselves to live for today.
We don't prepare ourselves to live for eternity.
And that's where most of our time is going to be spent.
Folks, check it out. The book is called Four Seasons, One Family's Transformation Through Tragedy and Triumph.
It's about the seasons of life that we all face.
The author is Chris Widener.
By the way, the book's website, fourseasonsbook.com.
Hey, Chris Widener, great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks, Dinesh. I appreciate it.
There are a bunch of people in our society who believe that somehow science and religion are not only on separate tracks, but in contradiction to each other, at war with each other.
Religion is based on fate and science is based on reason.
So the notion that these are two Not only separate, but clashing modes of inquiry is popular, but also wrong.
Here's a challenge I have for the people who claim this kind of conflict.
How do you explain the fact that the vast, vast majority of great scientists from the beginning of modern science to now are Christian?
Let's take a look.
Here's a partial list.
Copernicus? Copernicus?
Kepler, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Rene Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Herschel, Jewell, Lyle, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Steno, Pastor, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel.
Think about it. A good number of these scientists were clergymen.
Gassendi and Mersenne were priests.
So was George Lemaitre, who's, by the way, the Belgian astronomer who first proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe in the early part of the 20th century.
Mendel, whose discovery of the principles of heredity.
Would provide vital support for the theory of evolution, spend his whole life as an Augustinian monk living in a monastery.
So where would modern science be without these men?
Some were Protestant, some were Catholic, but all saw their vocation in distinctively Christian terms.
Now, Copernicus, who was, by the way, a canon, a kind of elder in the Cathedral of Krakow, looked at his heliocentric theory as revealing God's scheme for the universe.
Boyle was a pious Anglican who said that the scientist is, quote,"...a priest of the book of nature." And Boyle, by the way, endowed a scholarship for people who deliver lectures that, in a sense, made the case for Christianity in scientific terms.
Newton was virtually a Christian mystic.
Not many people know that he wrote long commentaries on biblical prophecy from both the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, and Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist of all time.
I'm now quoting him. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful deity.
Now, Newton is sometimes associated with the idea of the so-called clockwork universe.
God sort of made the universe like a clock, and the universe runs itself.
This was not, in fact, Newton's view.
His view is that not only did God make the clock, but God is operating the clock constantly.
In other words, God exercises a continuous dominion or supervision of the universe.
It's not a case of God making something and then going on long-term change.
God is an active agent.
The point I want to stress here is that these scientists weren't just...
You could say, well, yeah, they were scientists, but they, you know, happened to be Christian.
Kind of the way that someone's a Christian, but they happen to be a really fast runner, or they happen to be a good architect.
But no, the point I want to make is that not only were these scientists Christian, they saw their scientific work as an extension of their Christian beliefs.
Kepler says that for a long time he wanted to become a theologian.
And then he said, quote, Now behold how through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.
Now very interestingly, before Kepler, people thought that planets moved in circular orbits.
And when Kepler denied that, there were people in Kepler's day who said, well, you're committing a kind of a heresy.
God operates through perfect circles.
God is a kind of great geometer.
And why would he depart from this perfect sphere, the circle, for planetary orbits?
And so Kepler was convinced that his elliptical orbits were We're good to go.
It says, Think about it.
How would somebody even come up with that?
How would you even think of that?
Well, the answer is, and Kepler tells us, he goes, I began from the premise that there is an elaborate geometric formula.
I came to that conclusion based upon faith, based upon my Christian faith.
And since I believe God is a great geometer, he's got a formula at work here, my job is to find out what that formula is, and so he's looking for it.
That's the key point.
And this is, by the way, true of science even now.
Scientists will talk, for example, not just about the fact that a particular equation works, or that it explains the phenomena, or the data, or it makes sense, but they will talk about the beauty, the symmetry.
Almost as if they expect that nature was drawn by a great artist, an artist with an eye, not simply to making things work, making things come out right, but also to the aesthetic beauty of creation.
And scientists, even today, scientists who aren't Christian, look for that beauty in nature.
And I guess what I'm saying is that that is a residue of Christianity.
Here is Einstein's In every true seeker of nature, there is a kind of religious reverence.
Biologist Joshua Lederberg, what is incontrovertible is that a religious impulse guides our motive in sustaining scientific inquiry.
And my point is that this impulse came originally from Christianity.
Yeah. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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