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April 13, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:28
THE FED’S DILEMMA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep557
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, the Fed finds itself between a rock and a hard place.
I'll explain.
I'll show you why a new court ruling throws many January 6 cases into doubt.
There's new information suggesting the Biden White House helped coordinate the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Wow. And I want to argue that Brazilian President Lula's visit to China, going on now, could portend further bad news for America.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, do hit the subscribe button to help share the podcast, please.
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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.
I want to begin today by talking about the state of our economy and specifically about inflation.
And this is a topic that has implications for the country, but of course it has implications for each of us.
Every time we go shopping, every time we buy stuff, Inflation has a say in the price tag.
But not only that, because inflation also has a say in the value of our stocks and our bonds and how the stock market is doing.
And even if you're not a direct investor in the market, If you have a pension fund, you have a 401k, you have a college fund for your son or daughter, this money is invested somewhere.
And typically it's invested, if not by you, then on your behalf in the market.
So all of this affects us collectively, but also us individually in very important ways.
Now, I want to show you something that is not often talked about, but it is the way in which the Fed tries to keep inflation down in a kind of artificial manner that is now causing serious problems.
Normally, the Fed has only one way to keep inflation down, and that is to restrict the money supply.
But restricting the money supply drives interest rates up, and that has all kinds of other bad consequences, right?
If interest rates go up and you're a borrower of money, either as an individual or for your business, you now have to pay more.
So the raising of interest rates puts a squeeze on the economy.
So the Fed realizes that there's a kind of a high price to be paid, We're good to go.
Two decades of almost uninterrupted prosperity, the 1980s and the 1990s, but it was painful to get there.
And of course, we live in an age where the Fed is constantly trying to avoid administering pain, even though pain is sometimes the necessary antidote.
So the government wants to spend money.
The Fed wants to let the government spend money.
But the Fed doesn't want to raise interest rates to squeeze the naturally resulting inflation.
And the Fed wants to think of some other ruse to keep inflation down.
And they've come up with a ruse.
And I want to tell you about that ruse.
This ruse was really invented around 2008, where the Fed created trillions of dollars of money, new money, by printing it, in effect, to deal with the crash of 2008, the real estate speculative bubble.
It was a financial crisis, and the Fed is like, we need a lot of money to solve this problem, but hey, if we pump a lot of money into the economy, immediate and rapid inflation.
So, at that time, the Fed chairman was a guy named Ben Bernanke.
And he goes, listen, what if we pull out kind of a fast one, which is we print the money and we spend the money.
But what we do is we park the money that we've printed and...
At the Fed itself.
In other words, we don't release it into the economy.
We let banks have access to it and we pay the bank's interest.
But instead of investing the money...
See, normally, let's think about how banks operate.
A bank takes loans from you and me.
We put our money in the bank, so the bank gets money.
But the bank can't pay us interest on that money if it just put the money in the vault and let it sit there.
So how do banks make money?
Well, they put your money to work.
So while you're doing other stuff and your money's parked at the bank, they're lending that money out to businesses that are using that money.
So the money is flowing into the economy.
So the Fed is trying to figure out a way to print money that the government can, in effect, spend, but not drive it into the economy, not give it to banks where banks would then lend it to other people because that would, of course, have the predictable inflationary effect.
So the Fed goes... We'll just park the money at the Fed.
And this way doesn't multiply in the normal way.
And these are called reverse repos or reverse repurchase agreements.
It's in effect printing money but then taking cash out of circulation by parking it at the Fed.
Now, if you do this in a small scale...
It's okay if you do this for a billion dollars, $10 billion.
In a large economy like ours, you can actually buy yourself some time, sort of get yourself over the hump.
But the Fed has been doing this now for years.
Over a decade, starting in 2008, here we are in 2023.
And so the Fed has this sort of $6 trillion quarantine that it's put into effect.
It's now costing $275 billion in interest that the Fed now has to pay to these banks because the Fed is, in a sense, repossessing this money and just sitting on it, doing nothing with it.
It's not being put to productive use.
And so...
All of this party that we've had with the spending of 2008 and then, of course, the massive COVID spending, the Biden spending, sending checks to people left and right, all of this has been bankrolled in a way, and the Fed thought it was being really smart in curtailing the bad effects.
But now with $5.7 trillion, nearly $6 trillion just parked in the vault, the Fed has to pay interest on that money that's not being used.
It's become a monster.
In fact, the interest alone pumped into the economy has an inflationary effect.
And the only way for the Fed to deal with that...
Is once again to clamp down, to drive up interest rates, to restrict the money supply.
So the Fed is between a rock and a hard place because it doesn't want to raise interest rates and yet it doesn't want to release more money into the money supply that will drive up inflation.
And so you've got two bad outcomes.
All of this, by the way, the result of very bad policy, not just bad spending policy by the Biden administration and by its predecessors.
But also bad monetary policy by the Federal Reserve.
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Feel the difference. The President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is in China as we speak.
And this is not getting a lot of attention.
There was more attention paid when the French President Macron went to China recently and made some remarkable statements about the fact that Europe should not fully align itself with the United States.
By the way, the New York Times sort of retaliated against Macron by saying he's now very isolated among the Europeans.
I suspect this is not true.
In fact, it's more likely that Macron is reflecting.
Remember, Europe has always had a certain resentment toward the United States, always wanted to maintain a distinctive identity, always wanted to have Europe hang together but hang separately from the United States.
And so Macron, I think, is reflecting what other European leaders are thinking, although maybe not saying so bluntly.
But here's Lula da Silva in China.
And this is part of a Chinese bid to establish real beachheads in Latin and South America.
That's the geopolitical significance of it.
So what is the number one thing that the Chinese Premier Xi wants to achieve with Lula da Silva?
It's very obvious.
Basically for Brazil and China to increase their mutual trade, but to do it in the Chinese currency, in Chinese yen, not in US dollars.
So the Chinese have been very successful in starting to create an alternative currency.
We have the BRICS arrangement with Brazil.
And India and South Africa and China.
And so China wants to sort of get that going and get a flourishing trade between many countries in the world trading with each other and with China.
The Chinese want to trade in yen with themselves, of course.
That's their currency.
But they also want Other countries to trade away from the dollar.
So they don't mind if the Indians and the Malaysians start swapping currencies or trade in something other than the dollar.
They prefer it to be the yen, but most importantly, they don't want it to be the dollar.
Another objective on the part of Xi is to get Lula and to get Brazil into the China Belt and Road Initiative.
What's the Belt and Road Initiative?
Just to remind you, it is the Chinese massive global infrastructure project, in which the Chinese basically say things like, we'll come into Brazil, we'll set up manufacturing plants, we'll create tens of thousands of jobs, we'll build roads and highways.
They often sweeten the bribe, if you will, to the politicians in these countries.
We'll build you a new presidential palace.
We'll build you a new amphitheater where you can now have spectacular meetings for the parliament and for the legislature.
So the Chinese are up to what the Chinese are good at, and that is transactional deals, deal making.
And they don't hesitate to say, listen, we're not gonna be talking to you about human rights, we're not gonna be talking to you about democracy, in fact, don't talk to us about democracy or human rights either.
So this is a purely economic, pragmatic, and as I said, transactional deal.
Now, this is part of other bigger things that are happening around the world.
For example, you've probably heard of the ASEAN countries, A-S-E-A-N, which is the Asian countries.
These are countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.
So these ASEAN countries are now getting together at the ASEAN meetings and figuring out how do we drop ASEAN The US dollar and the euro and the Chinese yen.
In fact, there's been a desire on the part of many of these countries to have a certain amount of autonomy and not be currency pawns of the US or Europe.
Or China, for that matter.
And so their idea is, why don't we develop some sort of a currency in which we just trade with each other?
So I think this is where the world is going.
It's not that the dollar is going to be replaced by the Chinese yen.
It's just going to be that the dollar loses its kind of dominant.
Everybody trades in the dollar.
All trade is converted into dollars and then back into the original currencies.
We're going to see this kind of mishmash of arrangements.
But what it means is it does signal this multilateral or multipolar world that we seem to be moving toward.
In fact, the Prime Minister of Indonesia has even said, listen, we in the ASEAN countries...
We don't even need Visa and MasterCard.
Let's start chopping those off at the block.
In other words, let's start getting rid not just of the currency, but of the credit card system that has been universalized.
Think about it. You can go pretty much anywhere in the world.
Here's my American Express.
Here's my Visa. Here's my MasterCard.
I remember many years ago, I was talking to a guy from another country, and he's like, how did you get an American Express gold card?
He was really shocked. But of course, one way to get an American Express gold card is to be in America and to be an American.
It's much easier to do than to get an American Express gold card in, let's say, Sri Lanka or in some parts of South America for that matter.
So I'm really amazed when I think about all this to see the rapidity of the decline of U.S. influence.
In fact, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s and early 90s, I thought this was almost a singular event in world history.
Never so quickly had a massive global empire kind of unraveled and gone poof.
And I'm not saying the United States is headed for the same fate.
But there are similar indications that our system is kind of cracking up in the same way that the Soviet Union did.
And if so, that's very bad news for us and in some ways very bad news for the world.
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Again, the website, NefariousTickets.com One of the most common charges that is flung against January 6 defendants is the idea of obstructing an official proceeding.
This is a standard charge, and it's a serious charge because it carries, in some cases, years and years in prison.
Now, there's a second charge that is commonly used against January 6th defendants, and that is simply parading in a public building.
But parading in a public building is a misdemeanor, and typically that's going to get you, if prison at all, a very short prison term.
So for the Biden regime, this...
Earlier charge, which is the obstruction of an official proceeding, is the way that they have used.
They have used it really kind of as a battering ram to go after these January 6th defendants saying, you're facing years in prison, you've got to take a plea deal, or in some cases, you go to trial, and by being convicted on this charge, you find yourself facing years and years in prison.
Now, recently there was a very interesting interview.
Somebody who was on the jury in one of these January 6 cases was, I believe, on C-SPAN. At least I heard a recording.
And she was talking about the fact that in the jury...
She was able to convince her fellow jurors to find defendants guilty on this charge, obstructing an official proceeding, not because they, in fact, obstructed anything, because people were raising questions in the jury, like, what did they obstruct?
Was something actually going on when these defendants entered the building?
And the jurors said, basically, I convinced people that nothing has to be going on.
Just by being in the building, they're obstructing a proceeding.
So, think of the logic here.
There's a building, the Capitol.
An official proceeding is underway, but the time of it is considered unimportant.
It's underway that day.
These defendants entered the Capitol.
They might have been there for 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes.
And it doesn't matter if the proceeding was going on at that time.
It could already have been halted.
It may not even have started.
But... The very fact that they're in the building where the proceeding has occurred or is occurring or is scheduled to occur is enough to find the defendants guilty.
Now, this seems a little dubious on its face, and in fact, it is.
So, in Washington, D.C., a D.C. District Court judge looked at this charge and basically said, wait a minute.
This doesn't make any sense because if someone's going to obstruct an official proceeding or interfere with an official proceeding, they have to take some action related to that proceeding.
They have to rush the room, grab the paperwork, start screaming at the people who are engaged in the proceeding.
Where is the obstruction?
Where is the interference?
And so the Biden administration panicked because not only have lots of people been taking plea deals based on these charges, have been convicted on these charges, are serving sentences on these charges, but there are more people scheduled to be charged on these same charges.
So this obstruction is actually a critical charge for the Biden DOJ to go after the January 6th defendants.
And So they appealed it to an appellate court, and this is a high court, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
But very interestingly, upon considering this case, the US Court of Appeals has come out with an opinion that's really three different opinions.
Now, they overturned what the D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols did and they allowed this obstruction charge to go forward.
But when you look at the rationale, you begin to realize that two of the three judges are really not on board with the way in which the Biden regime has been using this charge.
So, the first judge makes it really clear that there needs to be some sort of criminal frame of mind before you can go after someone on obstruction.
Someone must, in fact, intend to obstruct.
Just being in the building is not sufficient.
And this, in fact, was the original rationale when the law was originally passed.
President Bush, who talked about—this was passed under George W. Bush—and he talked about the importance of there needing to be some form of corruption, and there also needs to be a criminal state of mind.
And yet, can you really show that, for example, the shaman guy, Jacob Chansley, he pleaded guilty to obstruction— There was no showing that he had a state of mind to interfere with any kind of proceeding.
In fact, he said he went in there to do shaman prayers so that there would be a kind of spirit of healing all across the capital.
That was his motive.
And no other motive was shown.
By the way, Timothy Hale spent 16 months in the D.C. Gulag before finally going to trial.
He was convicted on the obstruction charge.
He's now serving a 48-month prison sentence.
Matthew Perna committed suicide.
He was facing years in prison over this obstruction charge.
And now, as it turns out, two of these three judges are saying this obstruction charge doesn't really seem to hold up.
Judge Katsis, this is Judge George Katsis, In a strongly worded dissent, basically says, never in US history has this obstruction charge been used in this way.
It's usually used when you're trying to obstruct the criminal proceeding itself.
So, if a bunch of mafia guys are trying to block an inquiry, they're trying to, for example, interfere with witnesses, then they are obstructing justice in that way.
They're obstructing an official proceeding, the proceeding being the trial itself.
And Judge Katzis goes on to say things like paralysis.
Parading or picketing or using a sound truck.
Let's say some guys are outside a courthouse or outside a congressional office or outside of a state office where some proceeding is going on and then they're shouting in a bullhorn.
Are they obstructing?
An official proceeding?
And if so, can they be sent to prison for 5, 10, or 20 years?
So Judge Katz says, because we've never applied the law in that way.
All of this means that the Biden administration is now in a little bit of a conundrum, because these cases are going to be appealed, and I think they're going to be appealed all the way.
And so the question now becomes, if what these judges say is valid...
Even though they narrowly upheld these obstruction cases moving forward now, I think that there's a possibility that as time passes and as other courts look at this and higher courts look at this, this whole obstruction thing could, in fact, be ultimately wiped out.
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The seas are rising as a consequence of carbon emissions and climate change.
I always chuckle when I see headlines to this effect, which seem to appear almost with predictable frequency all over the place.
And here's the latest one. This is from the Washington Post, April 10th, 2023.
Seas have drastically risen along southern U.S. coast in past decade.
Let's go through the article.
Scientists have documented an abnormal and dramatic surge in sea levels along the U.S. Gulf and southeastern coastlines since 2010.
Raising new questions about whether New Orleans, Miami, Houston, and other coastal communities might be even more at risk from rising seas than once predicted.
It goes on to say that this could have far-reaching consequences.
We're seeing the wetlands, the mangroves, the shoreline shrinking.
Quote,"...an already vulnerable landscape that is home to millions of people is growing more vulnerable more quickly, potentially putting a large swath of America at greater risk from severe storms and flooding." Federal tide gauge data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the sea level has gone up 8 inches higher than it was in 2006.
Now, once they look at some data, they talk about a study in the Journal of Climate which says that the sea rise has been about 10 millimeters or 1 centimeter per year.
Right there, you have to pause.
Wait a minute. You're talking about the entire ocean in a particular area, and you're talking about it rising 10 millimeters in a year?
Well, it's 5 inches in total.
And they say this is more than double the global average.
And then, of course, the writer realized this is sounding a little bit silly because what possible effect can a 10 millimeter rise in the ocean have on anything?
I mean, instead of the water going up to your big toe, it now reaches up a little bit toward your ankle.
What's the big deal is the obvious question.
Well, the answer is, quote, while the annual totals might sound minor, even small changes in sea levels over time can have destructive consequences.
It goes on to talk about millions of acres of U.S. coastal land, hundreds of thousands of homes slipping below swelling tide levels.
So here is the point I want to ask.
And that is that these studies, this is not new.
This headline, you could go back, you know, three weeks and find it.
You can go back three years and find it.
You can go back 10 years and find it.
This has supposedly been happening not just at a sort of minor level.
Sometimes there are crises that are gradually accumulating.
You know, Social Security is running out of money.
And in 25 years, there may not be any money left.
It's something we need to pay attention to.
But that's not what the climate people are saying.
They're saying we have very narrow windows of time.
The apocalypse is basically upon us.
In fact, so upon us is the apocalypse that there have been numerous predictions that the world already would have ended.
That the Antarctic and the Arctic would already be out of ice.
That the glaciers already would have melted.
That coastlines, not just in America, but in Australia, in Asia, in Europe, would already have been completely flooded.
And people having to run back into the interior.
And here's my point. First of all, it's not exactly a news memo that this has not happened.
There hasn't been no race for the interior, no abandoning of property.
None of this has actually occurred.
So all of this continues to be, we better watch out because it's going to happen any day now.
And there's a little bit of that.
But my point is, if these studies were reliable, and if their predictions had been borne out in the past, then you would expect everybody who is on the coast to start packing it in.
And yet, as I look at it, Nobody is.
Debbie and I were just in Miami.
We're walking right by the coast and they're talking about, oh, there's some chic new developments coming up over there.
They're building some multi-million dollar condos with spectacular ocean views.
Look at that amazing mansion.
It has walking. You can walk right onto the beach.
And my point is... Don't all those people have access to these studies?
Are they incapable of reading?
Or rather, isn't it also true that many of the people, many of the journalists who write these articles, this is an article in the Washington Post.
So let me ask you this. Is Jeff Bezos not buying any coastal property?
Or put it differently, is he investing heavily in properties in the interior and selling off properties on the coast?
No, he's not doing that.
No one's doing that. So, my point is...
The actions of the real estate market, the buyers, the sellers, the real estate brokers, the whole finance industry that is involved in real estate.
You can buy stocks in real estate, so-called REITs, which invest in real estate properties.
So the behavior of the market tells you that if this were a real threat, Well, the information is available to the market, the market would act on it.
It's a little bit like saying, if the market is facing threats of serious inflation, or if a company is facing threats of serious bankruptcy, what do people do?
They start dumping the stock.
They start selling out of the market.
They begin to figure out, let me get out of the market.
The market's really gonna fall.
Maybe I can get back in when the market is lower.
So the behavior of people who have something to lose.
See, this is the key point.
The writer of this article is Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis.
These guys have nothing to lose.
They're writing an article. In fact, the sensationalism pays, right?
Because the more they scare people, the more it's like, oh, this is an important piece of journalism.
Of course, there's nothing important about it.
It's a regurgitation of things that we see all the time.
But the point I want to make is for people who actually have a stake, for people who have money to lose, they are acting as if this threat is at the very least overblown.
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I want to talk about the role of the Biden administration in the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump's home.
The raid that was aimed at recovering these classified documents and And as it turns out, this Mar-a-Lago raid was coordinated by the Biden White House.
The Biden White House has now demonstrably had its hand, not only in the Mar-a-Lago raid, but also, as it turns out, in the Alvin Bragg prosecution of Trump on a completely different matter.
That's the Stormy Daniels matter.
That has to do with campaign finance.
It has to do with falsifying records.
So you've got two separate cases proceeding against Trump, and yet evidence is emerging that the coordinator, or at least in the coordination loop actively, is the Biden White House.
Now, the reason this is important is because when the Mar-a-Lago raid first occurred, Biden acted like he had nothing to do with it.
He was like, well, this is a decision that's made by the DOJ. It's been approved by Merrick Garland and the buck stops with Merrick Garland.
I'm out of it.
And similarly, when the Alvin Bragg prosecution emerged and Biden was asked about it, he acted like he saw it for the first time in the media.
Same as you and me.
He was completely unaware of it and the White House had nothing to do with it.
And this is something for New York to decide.
And it's a state matter, not a federal matter.
But First of all, it's unlikely that Bragg would have proceeded on his own without some kind of clearance from the Biden White House.
Why? Because of the political ramifications.
Not to mention the fact that Alvin Bragg is bootstrapping his state claims to a federal violation, without which there wouldn't be a felony, let alone the so-called 32 felonies in which every email, every diary entry is a felony.
But my point is, we're beginning to see the way in which the Biden White House is duplicitous across the board.
I mean, we know they're duplicitous.
Every time you have KJP, the press secretary, you can hardly even believe the stuff that comes out of our mouth, brazen lies.
And with Biden, we've seen one lie on top of another.
But on this important matter, the reason this is an important matter is it involves one administration It's essentially going after, not only its predecessor, but going after the leading candidate of the opposition party.
Again, the Salvadoran Prime Minister Bukele made the observation, listen, whatever you think of it, let's leave aside whether Trump has broken the law or not.
When other countries do this, they arrest the leader of the opposition, the U.S. begins to scream, democracy has now died in Nigeria, democracy is now at an end in Myanmar, and so on.
And he goes, you can't say this anymore.
Because you're doing it in your country.
And the point is not only are they doing it, but they are coordinating it.
It's being driven by the Biden regime.
They are ultimately the head of the snake.
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In the aftermath of some disappointing election losses at the state and local level, losses that have been blamed by the media but also by some independent analysts on the Republican position on abortion,
Some Republicans are saying, well, we as a party need to sort of debate what our position is in terms of policy, not whether or not abortion is wrong, but simply the question of how we should come out on it.
If we're going to have state laws that restrict abortion, what should they restrict?
Should they restrict abortion Across the board, all abortions?
Should they make exceptions?
Rape, incest, and the life of the mother?
Should they allow abortion?
Should they be heartbeat bills that outlaw abortion once a heartbeat is detected?
Should they allow 15 weeks, as Florida now does?
So what is the reasonable point to draw the line?
And of course, what is the reasonable point to draw the line in a given state?
It depends, after all, are we talking about a red state and a deep red state or a purple state?
Where you might have a majority, but it might be a more narrow majority that you may be at risk of losing.
So all of this is a question that I think Republicans are now just kind of giving more attention to.
There's an interesting thread by a prominent Princeton professor, Robert George, in which he tries to focus this debate a little bit by talking about what we know and what we don't know about abortion.
And he says, the conclusion of the thread is, we're really not debating whether or not abortion is a taking of a human life.
Rather, what we're really debating is when the taking of a human life should be permitted.
So these are two separate issues, and he makes a couple of really important points that I want to highlight.
And it has to do with our identity, who we are.
So let's think, for example, about Dinesh, the adult human being that was, that's Dinesh.
Now, he says this adult human being that is you is the same living individual who at an earlier developmental stage was an adolescent, a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo.
Now, this seems kind of obvious, but it's worth thinking about.
What he's saying is that no one would say that when I was 40 years old, I was a different person.
I was a different person metaphorically, in the sense that I was at a younger age, but it was still me.
And similarly, when I was 10, it was still me.
And similarly, when I was 1...
And the point that Robert George is making is, it is also true that when I was in the womb, I was still me.
I might not have been given my name yet, but as a person, not only biologically composed, obviously, I was a person in development.
But he goes, the development is ongoing.
He says, listen, by an internally directed process, you develop from the embryonic stage into the fetal stage, into the infant stage, the child stage, the adolescent stage, and finally into adulthood.
He goes, I'm not saying that you existed just when there was a sperm, because that actually is something that belonged to your parent, to your dad.
I'm not saying that you existed when there was just an ovum.
That belonged to your mom.
But he's saying when a particular sperm and ovum came together and created a new human being, then that human being comes into existence.
So, the philosophical point is this.
The terms embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, adult...
Are not references to different entities or beings.
It's the same being, and by the way, a human being, what else, at different developmental stages.
And he goes, pick up any textbook on embryogenesis or development, and it says exactly this.
So, this is Robert George's sort of take-home conclusion.
The real debate about abortion is not whether the unborn are human beings or whether abortion is the killing of a human being.
He goes, that debate is actually settled.
He goes, the debate about abortion is about warranted or justified killing the ethical question, quote, of what we owe to each other as human beings.
So Robert George is not trying to say let's not have a debate.
In fact, he says let's have a debate.
But he says let's have a debate about what is, quote, legitimately debatable.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Let's talk about the reasonableness of faith.
I'm discussing a chapter in my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
The chapter is called A Skeptic's Wager Pascal and the Reasonableness of Faith.
Now, to the philosopher Daniel Dennett, faith evokes images of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
He goes, well, this is appropriate for children, but it's not for adults.
Carl Sagan writes that while science asks us to take nothing on faith, Religion frequently asks us to believe without questioning.
From Richard Dawkins' point of view, faith is, quote, Now, When you think about this,
this kind of hostility to the idea of faith, of taking things on faith, seems a little bit puzzling because in our ordinary life, we frequently make decisions based upon faith.
We trust in authorities.
We take decisions based on their claims, other people's claims, that we don't really bother to or sometimes we can't verify.
So I wasn't present at the Battle of Waterloo, but I'm pretty convinced it happened why I take the word of historians.
They say it. I believe it.
I've never been to Papua New Guinea, but I'm pretty sure it's there.
Why? Because I trust the maps that were made by people who've seen it.
So I express a lot of faith every time I get on an airplane, because I have faith in the guys who do the air traffic control and the guys who fly the plane.
So, so thoroughly do we rely on faith that if you think about it, modern life would be totally impossible if every time you did something, you insisted on evidence and personal verification before proceeding.
How do you know your cereal is safe to eat?
How can you be sure your car isn't going to blow up?
Why should you take it for granted that the person whose voice that you hear at the other end of the phone is really there?
How do you know your vote, this is a tricky one, for a presidential candidate will actually be counted as a vote for that candidate?
Ha ha ha. Now one answer we rely on is that we are part of a system that seems to work pretty well.
So we eat our cereal and we feel okay.
We drive the car and it gets you to work.
And so you can trust technology, banking, maps, because all of these things seem to kind of deliver the goods.
But when you think about it, this is not an argument against religious faith.
Why? Because, hey, religious faith for the believer also delivers the goods.
This is a point that William James, the psychologist William James makes in his classic work, it's called The Varieties of Religious Experience.
He goes, hey, faith in God for the millions who have it is routinely vindicated in everyday life.
People come to trust God for his fidelity and his love in the same way that they trust their spouses through lasting and reliable experience.
In fact, religious people trust God more than they trust airlines or maps or computers.
And this too is based on empirical evidence because hey, computers crash, maps become outdated, airlines screw up, God does not.
Now, this defense of faith that says that faith makes sense because it works, it's pragmatic, we can rely on it in the ordinary business of life isn't fully satisfactory.
Why? Because religious faith isn't just about what works.
What satisfies human wants and needs, it's also about what is true.
When you have faith in God, you're not just saying it's kind of pragmatic for me to believe in God, it makes me feel better, it makes my life go better.
It's that God really does exist.
I have faith that there is a God and there is a transcendent being that created the universe and presides over it and has sovereignty over it.
So, faith makes claims of a special kind.
The soul is immortal and lives after death.
Either that's true or that's false.
There's a God in heaven who seeks to be eternally united with us.
That's either true or it's false.
Heaven awaits those who trust in God, whereas those who reject him are not going to make it there and so on.
So, these claims are true false claims and yet, here's the problem, they seem impossible to verify.
At least they seem impossible to verify based on any kind of reason.
And so, they're in a little different category than claims about, let's say, the Battle of Waterloo, or even Papua New Guinea.
Now, if I wanted to, I could validate my faith in Papua New Guinea.
How? Well, by jumping on a plane and going there.
I can validate my faith in Waterloo, the Battle of Waterloo.
How? By looking at all the historical records and comparing the one against the other and looking for the best evidence available.
But I have no way to know whether my soul will outlive my body or whether there's actually a supreme judge in heaven.
These are things that are outside the bounds of direct experience.
And therefore, they are outside the power of human beings to check out.
The scientists keep saying, well, you need to have a way to verify that.
Well, what if you don't?
Then what? What do you do?
This means that all claims outside the bounds of reason are by definition unreasonable.
But Kant did not say that.
In fact, he said that beyond the precincts of reason, it is not unreasonable to make decisions based upon faith.
So here's the point.
Putting it in Kantian terminology, in the phenomenal or empirical world, in the ordinary experiential world, we can formulate opinions based on experience and testing and verification and reason.
So in that world, in our world, it seems superstitious to make claims based on faith that could be checked out by reason and by evidence.
But outside the phenomenal world, this is Kant's point, These criteria do not apply, just like the laws of physics apply only to our universe and not to other universes if other universes exist.
And so this leads me to my conclusion, or really a question which I'll address tomorrow.
What do you do with true and false claims about God and eternity and life after death and heaven and hell?
Claims that seem outside the reach of empirical evidence.
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