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March 13, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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XI ON TOP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep535
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Coming up, I'll discuss the troubling implications of China brokering a deal between rival nations Saudi Arabia and Iran.
I'll react to the latest Twitter files exposing the censorship industrial complex.
I'll talk about the partial bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, a bank that's gone under, and some good news out of Stanford as I talk about the outcome of an activist attempt to stop a judge from speaking there.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
There's some very big news coming out of China and also out of the Middle East, which is being treated as small news or relatively uneventful news here in the United States.
Here's a headline from the Washington Post.
China brokers Iran-Saudi Arabia detente, raising eyebrows in Washington.
Raising eyebrows in Washington.
Now, this is the kind of foreign policy equivalent of saying your neighbor is having an affair with your wife, quote, raising eyebrows in the household.
I can almost imagine the elevated eyebrow like, well, really?
It's crazy.
It's crazy because something really big has happened and it's being portrayed as if it's nothing more than...
First of all, they don't even treat the event as news.
They're looking at the reaction in Washington as if a bunch of Washington pundits are quizzically looking over at China and the Middle East saying, hmm, this is a little bit interesting.
Maybe we ought to take a look at this one.
Maybe we'll have a commissioner paper about it.
Well, what's the it?
The it here is this.
And you have to put this against the backdrop of how the world has been certainly in the 40 or so years since I've been in this country, but going all the way back to World War II. By and large, it's been taken for granted that nothing important can happen in the world.
A dispute between India and Pakistan, for example.
A kind of flare-up between North and South Korea.
Some agitation in the Middle East.
And America immediately swoops in.
America is the agreed-upon sort of referee, umpire.
The American position often ends up being the position that is ultimately taken.
And this is what it means to be the world's sole superpower.
Now... Suddenly, these rules are changing, and are not just changing in the future, but are changing now.
And this latest example is a dramatic illustration of that.
So Iran and Saudi Arabia are enemies.
It's important to emphasize that Iran and Saudi Arabia are, some people think, well, they're both Muslims, and so obviously they're not enemies.
Well, actually, no.
First of all, the Saudis are Arabs.
The Iranians are not.
Number two, there is huge rivalry for who gets to be top dog in the Middle East.
The rivalry is between the important countries in the region, really namely three.
Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has by and large been in the American orbit.
It's been our ally, and Iran has been our adversary, at least since the Khomeini Revolution of the late 1970s.
So what does it mean that these two adversaries that had no diplomatic relations with each other, they weren't talking to each other, are now coming together, and they're coming together in important ways.
They're going to open up diplomatic relations.
So that means embassies, an Iranian embassy in Saudi Arabia, a Saudi embassy in Iran.
They're also going to begin a trade partnership and a technology partnership while respecting, quote, the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states.
So the Saudis are not going to try to foment dissent in Iran and the Iranians are agreeing not to do the same.
Now, this deal was brokered by China, apparently with some help of Oman and one or two other of the Arab kingdoms.
But the meetings that led to this were held in Beijing.
And there was a so-called, I'm now looking at it here, joint trilateral statement by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the People's Republic of China.
I think that this signals an exit of Saudi Arabia from the Western orbit.
Not to say that the Saudis won't sell oil, for example, to OPEC or sell oil through a cartel system to the United States, but it means that we cannot count on the Saudis anymore.
And really, why? It's because we have pushed the Saudis away.
Mohammed Bilson Sultan, the head of Saudi Arabia, was actually very close to Trump.
He was very close to the United States.
He's known to be a pro-US guy.
And the Biden people have driven him into the arms of China.
This is the undeniable reality.
We're seeing almost no comment to this effect.
We're not even seeing any introspection about it.
How did something like this happen?
And as I say, it's a really big deal.
In fact, I call it, using a chess analogy, it's a global, it's a check on the global chessboard.
Because if China can now go ahead and do the next big thing, an even bigger thing, of course, which is to broker a Russia-Ukraine deal, which by the way, the Chinese are working on, it's checkmate, it's game over.
It means that China has now taken over from the United States as being the great broker of trouble spots around the world.
The Chinese are going to start acting that way because they will have demonstrated, not only in the case of Iran and the Saudis, but perhaps also in the case of Putin and Zelensky, that if you want to make a deal, Xi is the one you need to be talking to.
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A new release of the Twitter files has just come out from journalist Matt Tybee.
Matt Tybee is also the journalist who, along with Michael Schellenberger, testified before the House in a widely seen hearing.
And this one is a really important one.
It's called the Censorship Industrial Complex.
I looked in the New York Times and a couple of other major newspapers to see the coverage of this Twitter files.
No coverage at all.
No mention of it. And so that in itself is very telling.
And I think the reason is that the New York Times, along with A number of other news organizations are part, unbelievably, of this censorship industrial complex.
Now, Taibi goes on to talk about how there is this censorship system, a kind of octopus, that involves the government, but it also involves industry leaders, it involves non-profits, And this is not just a case where these people all sort of toss in suggestions to Twitter or to Facebook or to Google.
There's a formal system of meetings and a formal portal is established for thousands, I mean, long lists of people to be reported and for spreadsheets of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of names.
One of these groups takes credit for getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the run-up to the 2020 election.
So we're talking about a massive censorship operation, one that is really quite unprecedented.
Even in the days of Soviet censorship...
It's not clear that censorship had this kind of reach, in part, perhaps because of the limits of technology.
One can assume that Chinese have a censorship program that rivals or exceeds this, but we are now close to the top of the list.
Taibbi points out a couple of really telling things.
One is that a bunch of YouTube videos are flagged for, quote, anti-Ukraine narratives.
This is important because the claim is not that the tweets are wrong or that they are false or that they are somehow Russian disinformation or even misinformation.
The tweets are merely flagged because they seem to be critical of the Ukraine government.
So, nothing could be more outrageous in terms of suppressing free speech.
You're just suppressing an opinion because it goes against the Biden regime's narrative.
Taibbi points out that you've got all these NGOs involved.
Now, NGOs traditionally were non-governmental organizations that were supposed to keep an eye on government.
They were supposed to act as a check on government, but now they act as partners with government in suppressing speech.
And who are the main malefactors?
The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, and the so-called Alliance for Securing Democracy.
All of these people come together as, quote, Tybee calls it, one team in the great effort to silence domestic opponents.
All of this started when the Aspen Institute had a kind of conference, a confab.
And by the way, again, the Aspen Institute gets millions of dollars from the government.
So do a lot of these other non-profits.
So even though we think of them as independent from government, they are fed by the government and they are often asked by the government to do the government's bidding.
And they constitute, along with the private...
So the private and public sector constitutes a, quote, incestuous, self-appointed truth squad.
Very often the same people are moving from law enforcement intelligence to the private sector, back to law enforcement, back to the intelligence sector.
And these are the people who think they are somehow the guardians of democracy.
Now... The Stanford Internet Observatory, which is one of the big offenders, SIO so-called, these are people that work with tech partners.
They call them tech partners. Like, hey, we're partnering with these groups.
But what they mean is that we are in cahoots with them in suppressing First Amendment rights.
And the tech partners are Google, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter.
And what they try to do is flag posts, remove them, reduce them, or have notices or warnings on them.
And in one remarkable email, you see that they are trying to suppress what?
Well, not just disinformation, but, quote, stories of true vaccine side effects.
I want to highlight the word true.
And then, quote, true posts which could fuel hesitancy.
It doesn't matter, in this case, that the post is accurate.
Yeah, I took the vaccine and yeah, this is what happened to me.
But nevertheless, suppress this guy.
Because we don't want people saying things like that, even though they're accurate.
And number two, if you have a true post that, let's say, refers to a study that says the vaccines don't work that well, true posts which could fuel hesitancy.
So the post is measured not by its accuracy or inaccuracy.
It's measured by what is the likely effect.
And if the likely effect is to fuel hesitancy, it makes people, I don't really know if I want to take this vaccine, even though there may be good reason for that belief, and even though you're reading something that is in and of itself accurate, they nevertheless want to shut you down.
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These are days where you may be thinking to yourself, why didn't I listen to Dinesh and buy gold?
I say this only because we are in something of a banking crisis.
And it began with the second largest bank in US history, Shutting down.
You remember many years ago, Washington Mutual Bank shut down, and that was the largest bank failure in the country.
But we now have Silicon Valley Bank, which you may not have heard of, at least not until now, but it's a huge bank.
And it's a huge bank because it's in Silicon Valley, and it is the bank that's used by a number of these venture capitalists.
So it's got large deposits.
And yet this big bank unraveled and collapsed in about 48 hours.
Now, the way it collapsed is a classic run on the bank.
And by run on the bank, I mean that depositors began to start pulling their money out because they were afraid that the bank was essentially going bankrupt.
And as more people pull their money out, the bank didn't have the money to be able to pay back the deposits.
And now the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has taken over the bank and has promised to do, I'm going to call it a partial bailout.
Now, a partial bailout means that the depositors who have money in the bank...
Are going to get their money back.
But the investors in the bank, the people who own the bank itself, they are not going to be bailed out.
So this is a bailout.
There's no other way to...
Put it. And it may be a bailout that is justified by maintaining the public confidence in banks in general.
There was a little bit of a ripple effect.
In fact, another bank called Signature Bank has also been seized by regulators because it was dramatically affected by what happened at Silicon Valley Bank.
But of course, the government is very eager to prevent this from becoming some sort of a contagion, a kind of bank-run epidemic.
And so, they have said, look, depositors, relax, effective Monday, today.
You can come and collect your money if you want, no problem.
But we're not bailing out the bank itself.
Now, there's been a lot of mutual accusations about how this happened.
The narrative from the left is due to bank deregulation under Trump.
And again, when people say this, they have to point out what exactly was deregulated and what is it that the bank did that would otherwise be covered under regulation that would have prevented this collapse.
The bank, in fact, seemed to be doing what the Biden administration wants.
What does the Biden administration want?
The Biden administration wants the public and the financial community and the investment community to believe that the economy is doing really well.
And since the economy is doing really well, inflation, which has been troublingly high, is going to come down.
And since inflation is going to come down, interest rates are also going to come down.
And therefore, you should confidently buy bonds.
And these bonds are going to retain their value.
But here is a little, well, it's not a secret about bonds because everyone who knows economics knows this.
The price of a bond moves in an inverse direction to interest rates.
Another way to put it is that when interest rates go up, bond values go down.
Now, why is that?
That's because if I get a bond, and let's say it pays 3% over the next 10 years, I can count on that 3% income, and the bond is worth, let's say, $100.
See, if interest rates go to 4% and 5%, nobody's going to want my bond.
Why? Because it only pays 3%, and I'm now getting more on the market from other places.
And so the value of the bond drops below 100%.
Because essentially, it's the law of supply and demand.
Nobody wants that kind of bond.
And so I have to lower the price that I sell it at in order to be able to sell the bond.
And this is really what happened with this bank, Silicon Valley Bank.
By the way, banks make money by taking your money and they pay you little or nothing for it, generally 1% or less in interest.
And then what banks do is they lend that money or they use that money to buy bonds.
Bonds that on the face of it pay more.
But this is the problem. When interest rates go up, those bonds begin to collapse in value.
That's really what happened here.
Silicon Valley Bank bought treasury bonds.
And the White House was telling them that these inflation is transitory.
So they were like, great, you know, this is going to be a no-lose proposition.
But when their bonds began to drop in value, then what happened is that when you look at the bank and you look at its debts, so you look at its assets and you look at its liabilities, and now when you see its bond values have gone down, its liabilities exceed its assets, and this is where the problems begin.
People go, the bank's in trouble.
It's not going to be able to pay us back if we want our money.
Let's go and start trying to get our money back.
The bank goes into a tailspin and then it crashes and burns.
That's what happened to Silicon Valley Bank.
And that's what created the need for the bailout.
Now, this is not the full story of what happened.
There's also a woke dimension to Silicon Valley Bank.
And I'm going to address that issue tomorrow.
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A recent incident at Stanford University shows the state of free speech on the elite American campus.
Now, the Federalist Society, the conservative kind of legal group on campus, invited a Fifth Circuit appellate judge, his name is Kyle Duncan, to come and speak at the university, at Stanford Law School.
But when he showed up to speak, his event was disrupted, and disrupted not really just because of a spontaneous protest, but an organized protest by a group called the National Lawyers Guild, the National Lawyers Guild working in cahoots with professors and deans and administrators.
This is an important point to realize that the students today, it's not like the 60s.
The students blockade the campus and the deans and administrators and faculty all on the other side.
No, we now find that you've got deans and administrators and faculty that are working with the students.
This is how you block the guy.
This is how you get in.
And we'll give you the necessary permissions that you need to get out of class if you need to while this is going on.
So this is how protests are organized these days.
So this protest occurs, and they keep shouting the guy down.
He can't speak. So finally, Judge Duncan says, look, I'm calling for an administrator to come in and kind of make sure that the audience quietens down so I can deliver my speech.
He had apparently prepared remarks.
And the administrator who showed up is a woman named Tyrion Steinbach.
This is a woman who is the Dean of Diversity.
And she shows up and starts berating, not the students who are trying to block Judge Duncan from speaking, but berating Judge Duncan.
And I saw a clip on social media.
She says things like, do you realize how much you're tearing up this campus?
Do you realize the kind of division that you're causing?
And she says things like, are your opinions on COVID and all these other issues worth it?
Is it worth it for you to come here and do this to our community?
This was the tenor and tone and indeed the substance of her remarks.
And the judge is like, yeah, my views are worth it.
I've been invited to speak on campus.
I'm not just showing up uninvited.
It's a legitimate campus event.
I'm sponsored by a student organization.
So you've got to get these students to quiet down.
But that did not happen.
And so it caused something of a legal scandal.
And Stanford has now apologized for this.
There was a letter issued by the president of the university and the dean of the law school basically saying, we are sorry that this happened.
The letter is a little bit wishy-washy, but it does say that the university is committed to free speech.
That it was wrong for Judge Duncan not to be able to give a speech and, quote, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university's commitment to free speech.
Now, while Stanford is issuing this statement of regret, which I think is welcome in and of itself, Stanford doesn't say it's going to do anything to discipline the people involved.
I mean, if a dean acted inappropriately and a free speech is an important value, I mean, think about a dean, for example, who used the N-word of violating the university's commitment, let's say, to tolerance or to respecting the civil rights of others, that dean would be immediately fired.
And in fact, Judge Duncan thinks that this dean of diversity, Tyrion Steinbeck, should be, in fact, removed.
And a number of other people have also called for her dismissal.
But Stanford shows no signs that they're going to do that.
And in fact, in a kind of weird aftermath of the whole thing, an email was sent out from the acting dean of students, a woman named Jean Marino, She was, by the way, standing silently there while the students disrupted Duncan's talk.
And she sends students an email saying that there are, quote, resources that you can use right now to support your safety and mental health.
What? A federal judge on the Fifth Circuit appellate court poses a danger to their safety, to their mental health.
Is their mental health impaired by just listening to what he has to say?
An event that, by the way, is not mandatory.
You don't have to go to it.
So you don't have to even subject yourself to what he has to say if you claim that it's somehow going to trigger you or emotionally damage you.
The National Lawyers Guild has come out defending the protest and they say that they are, quote, they are standing, quote, in support of confronting judicial architects of systems of oppression with social consequences for their action.
They say we're going to disrupt any future speakers who offer this kind of judicial oppression, as they put it, at Stanford.
And they say that Stanford has a choice.
you can side with so-called free speech.
They don't really believe it is free speech.
Or they say you can side with, quote, a commitment to belongingness.
And then it says it cannot do both.
Stanford cannot simultaneously affirm the belongingness of members of its community and at the same time uphold free speech.
Stanford has to go one way or the other.
I think universities like Stanford are now In a very precarious position because free speech, a value once taken for granted, even when I was in college a few decades ago, our views may have been unpopular, but our right to express them was really not open to doubt.
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use discount code AMERICA. There is a sedition trial going on in Washington DC involving one of the Proud Boys. His name is Ethan Nordin.
And in the middle of this trial, an FBI agent named Nicole Miller was testifying and three bombshell pieces of evidence were uncovered that have thrown the whole trial into a tailspin.
The judge actually ordered a halt to the trial to resolve these issues.
And the indication is that the government and the FBI is involved in very serious misconduct.
So let's look at the three things that happened.
Nicole Miller testified that she was ordered by her boss to destroy, her word, quote, 338 items of evidence.
Wow. I mean, this alone.
I was ordered by my boss to destroy 338 items of evidence.
Number two, it became clear from her testimony that Nicole Miller had all kinds of information that That is relevant to the defense that was never turned over to the defense.
This is sometimes called a Brady violation.
Why? Because in a trial, the defense has every right to see the information available to the prosecution.
And in this case, the information was hid, it was deleted, it was not turned over.
In one particular case, one of Nicole Miller's fellow agents sent an email to her to say that he wanted his presence at a meeting or his presence on kind of an email chain to be deleted.
In other words, I'm quoting, the agent requested to Miller, quote, edit out that I was present.
Take me out of this chain.
So in other words, what is this called?
This is called tampering with evidence because an FBI agent can't do that.
You're hiding now from the defense the fact that this guy was present at a meeting.
So you have concealing evidence.
You have destroying evidence.
You also have violating attorney-client privilege.
It emerged during the testimony that FBI agents have been listening in to conversations and reading documents that are being passed between defendants and their attorneys.
Wow, attorney-client privilege is one of the sort of sanctified protections that are given to a defendant.
If I'm a defendant, I'm allowed to talk to my lawyer without the other side snooping on me, doing surveillance on me, listening on me.
Well, the government is now claiming, in two remarkable turns of events, number one, they're claiming that, well, these defendants agreed that we could listen in to their conversations with lawyers.
And this is nothing more than the government, which, by the way, has in many cases been holding these defendants before trial, has been controlling their movements, obviously has easy access to being able to listen to their phone calls.
And the government is basically saying they signed an agreement permitting the DOJ to monitor their communications with attorneys.
Well, obviously this is something that was only done under intimidation and pressure.
Why would someone agree to this unless you're forced to agree to it?
And that's actually what happened here.
Now the government, to try to conceal its witness tampering, its evidence tampering, its basically serious violations of law from the jury...
The Biden DOJ is now claiming that some of the information in question is classified.
Now, they never said it was classified before.
They're only saying it's classified now.
And so we're entitled to suspect, Julie Kelly, who's been covering the trial, does suspect, and I think is right to suspect, that this is just a ruse to try to...
And a ruse, by the way, often these ruses are presented to sympathetic judges who are like, yeah, I think I'm gonna protect the prosecution here.
We don't want the jury hearing about the ways in which the FBI lies to people, deletes 338 pieces of evidence, listens in with the defendant and their lawyers.
I mean, normally judges would be having hysterics, having a legal fit, so to speak, admonishing the government, but none of that is actually happening here.
It's almost as if the prosecution and the government and the judges are working in tandem with each other.
The trial is a show trial with a foregone conclusion.
So very disturbing violations of due process of law.
I'm assuming that there is a record being accumulated here that will also be useful on appeal.
But the very fact that our government is doing these things, is being allowed to do them, and isn't being held accountable for them.
Are all very disturbing developments in the U.S. judicial system.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Jason Brown, and he's a representative of a program that I've actually talked about on the podcast before.
It's called COVID Tax Relief, and the website is covidtaxrelief.org.
But when I first talked about the program, I was a little puzzled by it, so I thought it'd be useful to clarify how this works and what it's about.
So Jason, welcome to the podcast.
It's good to have you.
When I read the ad for COVID tax relief, I was like, wait a minute, what's this all about?
The government is providing funds to people who kept their businesses open under COVID, and it's a pretty substantial amount of money.
So may I start by asking you to talk a little bit about the underlying rationale for COVID tax relief?
What is it about?
Yeah. You bet.
Dinesh, and it's good to see you.
Thanks for having me on. We appreciate the time.
So, to really understand and get your mind wrapped around this, you have to think about when it came out, okay?
So, the employee retention credit was actually part of the CARES Act.
Which came into act in March of 2020.
So what was happening during that time, right?
That's when kids were not coming back from spring break.
Schools were shutting down.
Mandates were being implemented on businesses, which had the trickle-down effect, even if you were deemed essential, right, which was a new term during pandemic.
You were deemed essential.
You still experienced supply chain issues and had to pivot and find ways to stay in business and be successful.
So the most popular way to funnel that money into the hands of business owners was PPP loans.
Right? That was a loan you could take for a couple months of your payroll, and then if you showed that it was used for payroll, you could get it forgiven and not pay back.
Well, inside that same legislation, Dinesh, was...
What was called ERC, or Employee Retention Credit.
And it's essentially a way for business owners to get back some of the W-2 wages that they paid during 2020 and 2021.
And originally, if you did PPP, it automatically disqualified you from doing ERC. You could do one or the other, but they've since changed that regulation.
And so it's kind of blown the hinges off the door.
This is for those businesses that were able to retain their employees.
During 2020 and 2021.
And again, it's only W-2s, so not 1099 or independent contractors.
And like you said, it's not a small amount.
It can be significant. Business owners can get up to $26,000 per employee that they continue to employ during the pandemic.
Am I right in thinking that this is a case where we can't describe this as some sort of a giveaway or a handout for the simple reason that who caused the shutdown?
Well, I mean, I suppose the pandemic did, but the government ordered the shutdown.
In other words, the government...
Put these businesses that were functioning normally beforehand into this position and then ask them, you know, stay open where you can, keep your employees, don't get rid of them, don't fire them.
So when you're responding to government action, the government now is merely stepping in and saying, we're going to partially reimburse you for those costs that you undertook at our behest.
Am I reading the situation right?
You should be the spokesperson for this because you explained it much better than I did just in that 30 seconds.
But it goes actually further than that because some businesses say, well, look, I didn't receive a shutdown.
I'm a construction company maybe and I was deemed essential and I didn't receive a mandate.
But guess what? A lot of your suppliers did, which in turn affected you.
Or the port closures, which were government mandates, which affected you being able to get your supplies.
And postponing jobs and pivoting and finding ways to retain your employees.
And so... You can almost make a case that all businesses out there were affected by government mandates during COVID. And so it's a great way.
I love how you put it.
It's a reimbursement of those wages that you continue to pay despite all those challenges.
I mean, I find it interesting also that we're talking not just about for-profit businesses, but this is a legislation that covers non-profits, it covers churches.
So basically what I'm saying to my listeners and audiences out there, if you add a business and you qualify under this program, so talk a little bit about what covidtaxrelief.org does.
Do you shepherd people through this process?
Because I know with any government program, it's always you got to do some hoops and you got to do some backwards somersaults.
So do you help us get through that?
You're right. And if you try and read that legislation, it's a few hundred pages long and has been changed multiple times.
So it can be a challenging process.
And so what we've done is we've just streamlined it.
And so, listen, if you'll go to COVIDtaxrelief.org, there is an 800 number there.
You can call, but whenever we do these podcasts, of course, the phone lines completely melt on us.
And so you can put your name in there and we'll reach back out to you.
But we'll take you through a short questionnaire that maybe takes 8 to 10 minutes.
And Dinesh, it directly parallels the qualification guidelines that the IRS has laid out.
So we'll be able to tell you, as a business owner, within a handful of minutes, number one, if you qualified, and number two, roughly, we'll give you an estimate on how much you qualified for.
And of course, there's no obligation, but it's definitely worth your time to take a look at it.
Awesome. The website is covidtaxrelief.org.
Jason Brown, thank you very much for joining me.
Great seeing you. Thanks for having us.
I'm beginning my discussion of a chapter in What's So Great About Christianity called The World Beyond Our Senses, Kant, this is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and The Limits of Reason.
Now, the limits of reason are critically important because we can all go around talking about reason and logic, but before you do that, you have to investigate what is the domain, what are the areas in which reason can, as Kant puts it, securely travel.
Now, skeptics and atheists like to think that they are veritable champions of reason, apostles of reason, practitioners of reason, embodiments of reason.
Here's Sam Harris, who says that Christians are, well, only partly reasonable.
Tell a devout Christian his wife is cheating on him or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible and he's likely to require as much evidence as anyone else and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.
Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Now, the reason that these skeptics and atheists think that they've got kind of a corner, a patent, a copyright on reason, is they think that they've got a method to discover whether things are true or false.
And this method is nothing more than empirical examination and empirical testing.
In a word, the scientific method.
Here is Paul Bloom writing in the Atlantic Monthly.
Yes, our intuitions and hypotheses are imperfect and unreliable, but the beauty of science is that these ideas are tested against reality.
That's the key phrase. They're tested against reality.
Now, what do they mean by reality?
Well, here's E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist.
He writes that, quote, outside our heads there is a freestanding reality, whereas, quote, inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts.
Now, let's focus on this for a minute.
Inside our heads, we make pictures and images and representations of those reality, and that's how we apprehend that reality.
The reality is accessible to us because we happen to have, let's just call it a sort of camera or a kind of a equipment inside of us that enables us to have unimpeded access.
This is a key phrase, unimpeded access to that reality.
Now, What we're going to focus on here is a giant assumption that is being made here that is itself highly questionable, untenable, philosophically dogmatic, and most certainly unproven.
So the assumption here is that our minds give us a kind of unrestricted access to the world out there.
There's a world out there, there's a world in here, inside of us, and those two worlds kind of mirror each other.
Atheists kind of arrogantly assume that this is the case.
In fact, they think it's so self-evident it doesn't even need explanation.
If I, you know, wiggle my finger or I spin my pen with my two fingers, there's a pen out there.
I'm making a picture of it inside my head.
What else can the picture be off if not the pen?
And so this kind of obviousology, you can say, is the driving force, not just of atheist rhetoric, Now, if this seems like the only way to see things, I want to emphasize that it's not.
In fact, let's just call this the empirical way.
I'm even happy to call it provisionally the scientific way.
There is another way.
I'm going to loosely call this the religious way.
And here's what I mean. Throughout the centuries, the great religions of the world have held that there are two levels of reality.
There's the human perspective on reality, which is the kind of experiential perspective.
Let's call this reality as it's experienced by us.
There's an element of subjectivity here, right?
It's reality as we humans see it.
Why? Because we're seeing it from a human perspective.
A perspective is nothing more than an angle.
We're seeing it from a particular vantage point.
But there is another way to look at reality.
This is the transcendent view of reality.
Let's call it the God's eye view of reality.
And this is reality itself.
So, being the kind of creatures we are, we don't have access to the God's eye view.
In fact, we see, I'm now quoting Paul from his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 12, we see, quote,"...through a glass darkly." In other words, the human perspective is distorted, it's limited, it's almost like looking around in a cave.
So we live in a fleeting and superficial world of appearances where the best we can discern is how things, not are, but how things seem to us.
And our only expectation of knowing reality itself comes, well, after we die, when perhaps we will be given access to the God's eye view of reality and we can see things as they really are.
And the question I'm going to explore, and I'm going to explore in some detail, is which of these two views, the empirical view on the one hand, which is that there is only one reality and we have full access to it, or the religious view, which is there is...
Reality operating at two levels.
The human perspective and reality itself.
I'm going to explore which of these two is correct.
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