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June 15, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:36
THE COST OF RACISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep601
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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.
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Coming up, I'll celebrate a jury verdict against Starbucks for $25 million for anti-white racism.
Serves them right. I'll reveal a hidden aspect of the Trump indictment that involves bribery on the part of the prosecution team.
And I finally located Biden's missing $10 million.
Remember, where is the money?
I'll also explain what makes Christianity unique among all the religions of the world.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast.
I'd appreciate it. 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 talk in this opening segment about Starbucks and how Starbucks has just gotten stuck with a $25 million verdict that they have to pay for, get this, anti-white racial discrimination or anti-white racism.
It's a very interesting case.
But actually, kind of coincidentally, I was scrolling social media this morning.
I saw a funny thing in the Babylon Bee.
Starbucks engineers very excited because they have almost come up with a coffee half as good as McDonald's.
So, digest that one for you.
But anyway, you know, these corporations act in horrendous ways when there is a race issue involved, and they often will go after the wrong people, and they do it solely because they are trying to look good.
They're trying to prove that they are more anti-racist than the next guy.
Well, in the aftermath of the George Floyd business, it turned out there were two black guys who were hanging out at Starbucks, and they were not buying anything, but they were just spending time there.
And apparently, at one point, they wanted to use the Philadelphia store bathroom.
And some of the employees basically said, you are not really a customer of Starbucks.
Our bathrooms are for customers, and you have to leave.
These guys refused to leave, and so one of the employees called the cops.
Now, of course, because of the sensitivities around George Floyd, there was a big ruckus about this, and there were some protests outside of Starbucks.
And so Starbucks decided that in the aftermath of this...
Well, first of all, the CEO of Starbucks did some major groveling.
This is a guy named Kevin Johnson.
He flew to Philadelphia.
He met with the two black men personally to apologize.
He then also... Apparently, Starbucks shut down its 8,000 stores...
For a period of time.
Why? To give them sensitivity and anti-racism training, all because of this one incident.
And so then Starbucks realized, well, we've got to really prove that we're really anti-racist.
We need to fire somebody.
And so they found a regional manager.
Her name was Shannon Phillips.
She's kind of an upper-level executive and white.
And they said, you're going to be fired because of your mishandling of the situation.
Now, it is this very same Shannon Phillips who filed a lawsuit, and some very interesting details came out in the lawsuit.
First of all, it came out that the Starbucks manager who called the cops was black.
So, Starbucks should have fired that guy, right?
No! They didn't want to fire him because they figured that may make the problem worse for firing a black guy.
We can't fire a black guy. We have to fire a white person.
But there was no white person in sight.
So what do they do? They basically find this regional manager.
Now, this regional manager had nothing to do with the incident.
She oversees a whole bunch of Starbucks locations across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
And so they needed an excuse to fire her.
Why? Because she's not the one who called the cops.
So they basically said that she had not taken action on a racial discrimination complaint that had been filed.
Again, not against her, but against some other guy.
Now she goes on to say that when she looked at this racial incident, the other guy was completely innocent.
This was a guy... Who had worked at the company for 13 years, and she goes, I looked at the incident, there was really nothing there, so I didn't act on it.
So what's going on here is that the woman was singled out because she's white, and Starbucks wanted to sort of fire a white person in a prominent, kind of flamboyant way, and so they got rid of her, and so she sued.
Now, you can actually tell that the jury totally got the picture here because when you look at these damages, $25.6 million, it turns out that a tiny portion of these damages are, quote, actual damages.
Usually, when you go to court, you can get actual damages and punitive damages.
So, what's the difference? Well, actual damages are you got to prove that you actually lost that money, not that you lost it Physically, but let's say, for example, that because you were fired, you couldn't find work for two years, you're paid $70,000 a year, so guess what? You've lost $140,000 in income plus the interest, and so that is an actual damage.
But obviously this woman didn't incur $25 million of actual damages.
So as it turns out with Starbucks, the jury gave a small amount of actual damages and a giant amount of punitive damages.
And what is punitive damages?
The jury is trying to teach Starbucks a lesson.
They're trying to teach Starbucks a lesson that racial discrimination, even against whites, is not okay.
That this kind of double standard where we all have to jump up and down because there's racial discrimination against blacks, but if it's racial discrimination against whites, no big deal.
It's benign discrimination. It's well-motivated.
Starbucks is trying to prove it's anti-racism, Dinesh.
Well, you can't do it that way.
You can't violate the civil rights of people just because you're trying to, well, virtue signal, as the term goes these days.
So Starbucks is absolutely horrendous in this regard, and I think this is a very important lesson to teach them.
Now, I think for conservatives, you know, we often talk about boycotting these stores, they're woke, and so on.
I think a really good thing is for conservatives to start a legal operation that That finds these kinds of people who are victimized by these woke corporations and on a contingency basis sues them all.
Because think about it. You can collect hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars in damages.
This then funds the lawsuits because you collect a portion of that.
The rest of it goes to the plaintiff, the person making the suit.
And then you use that money to file more lawsuits.
So if you want to bring corporate America to its knees, teach them a lesson, make them pay a severe penalty for their vicious anti-white policies and the kind of bigotry that they now habitually engage in, this is the way to do it.
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It's time. I'm continuing my discussion of details and aspects of the second Trump indictment.
Of course, we're talking about the indictment over the possession of classified documents and specifically, allegedly, national security documents.
Now, I've spoken before about how It seems to me these national security documents do not involve national security at all.
An email from Obama about Kim Jong-un possessing nuclear weapons, whoop-de-doo.
Apparently a note from Kim Jong-un himself.
Don't intend to use nuclear weapons offensively.
Again, that's the public position of North Korea, so nothing really all that.
No revelations in that one, let's put it that way.
If you get that kind of a note, it's kind of a memento.
You want to frame it and put it above your toilet in the bathroom, just because it's kind of funny when people, you can see it every day and chuckle.
So in any event, where are these sensitive documents?
You know, military war plans, World War III kind of stuff.
And more importantly, even if the documents existed in Trump's possession, if they're in a locked basement with Secret Service protection in Mar-a-Lago, who's getting them?
Are foreign spies have access to them?
Is China reading these documents?
No, no one even alleges any of this.
Well... What I want to talk about today is the other guy in the indictment who often gets no attention.
It's a guy who works for Trump.
His name is Walt Nauta.
And this guy is a veteran.
He's apparently kind of an aide to Trump, works at Mar-a-Lago as a personal staffer.
He's a Navy veteran. And this is a guy who's also facing some charges.
Some of the Trump indictments apply to him.
And in one case, he is charged on a count that is not even alleged against Trump.
Now, the count on which Noda is charged is called apparently lying to a federal official.
And guess what the lie is?
At one point, they asked him a question and he says, I don't know.
And apparently that line is his, quote, lie.
I don't know. Because they're claiming that he must have known, that he did know.
So the lie is he did know, but he said he didn't know.
And so this is what we're talking about.
This is a guy who is supposedly facing prison for I don't know.
Now, the serious twist here that we need to know about, and this is something that the media is really downplaying...
And in fairness, this is something that is also under seal, is that the lawyer for this guy, Walt Notta, claims that he was approached by Jay Bratt.
Now, who's Jay Bratt? Jay Bratt is the head of counterintelligence for the DOJ. He's a Washington, D.C. guy.
He is the lead prosecutor on this case.
And according to Stanley Woodward, who is Walt Notta's lawyer...
Stanley Woodward says that Jay Bratt tried to bribe me into getting my client, Walt Nauta, to essentially go against Trump.
Now, this is a very serious matter because if true, this would blow the whole case to smithereens.
If it is the case that the chief prosecutor was trying to buy off The lawyer for one of the two men being charged in order to get him to sort of testify and go against Trump.
Now, how was this bribe carried out?
As sometimes the case, it was done in a somewhat subtle way.
Stanley Woodward says that he met with Jay Bratt, and Jay Bratt said, hey, Stanley, and I'm paraphrasing here, this is not the actual language, aren't you up for a judgeship?
And Woodward goes, you know, yeah, I am.
And then Jay Bride apparently says...
Or suggested that this judgeship would be blocked unless he forced his client to testify against Trump.
Let's remember that the DOJ is desperate here.
One of the easy ways you get to make your case is to find somebody close to Trump who will basically say, well, yeah, you know, Trump did this and Trump did that, and I know that for a fact because I'm working with him.
Let's remember that many of the times when people do these kinds of things, they are pressured to do it, and they are pressured to lie.
They're pressured to lie usually in two ways.
One is they get benefits if they lie.
And the other is that they avoid exposure if they lie.
So we won't prosecute you.
We won't bring charges against you.
But guess what? You have to testify against the other guy.
Our whole legal system works this way.
And anyone who's close to it, and quite honestly, I wasn't close to it until I had my own case against the Obama administration, you don't realize how deeply corrupt all of this is.
Someone pleads guilty.
Oh, he pleaded guilty. Well, yeah, but did you know that they were going to put 10 years of extra charges on him, just re-describing the same thing he did seven different ways?
And that's why he pleaded guilty, to get a lesser sentence, because he didn't want to destroy his life and be locked up for 10 years.
So, these legal bludgeons are used against people.
So, evidently, Stanley Woodward has made a complaint under seal, and this complaint is now being investigated to see if there's anything to it.
Um, And I think this is something we need to follow carefully because if it is true and if this lawyer is able to vindicate this point, then it turns out that the DOJ itself is going to be in serious trouble.
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When Joe Biden was asked whether or not he took...
$10 million in bribes.
Now, the $10 million in bribes is divided into two parts.
$5 million went to Hunter Biden, and $5 million went to Joe Biden.
Now, Joe Biden had a very interesting response to this.
You might expect him to say, and well, he did say, it's malarkey, using a very Biden-esque phrase.
But then he said something that sort of was revealing.
Where's the money?
Where's the money? This is kind of like when you're a kid and your mom says, you know, didn't you take the cookies from the cookie jar?
I noticed that there's a bunch of cookies missing.
Well, yeah, but where are the cookies?
You know, you don't see any crumbs on me, do you?
So in other words, the response is a kind of a taunt.
And it's a taunt that is almost daring you to find the money.
It's like, listen, I may have taken it, I may not have taken it, but you know what?
Even if I did, you're not going to find it.
And I can see why Biden might say that.
It's because Biden was really very clever in the way that this scheme was set up.
Let's back up for a moment and talk about the head of Burisma, this guy named Makola Zlokhevsky.
And this guy, Zlokhevsky, is the bribe payer.
He's the guy that's paying money to the Bidens.
Now, why? He's paying money to the Bidens...
Number one, for Biden to use his influence to help Burisma.
But one of the specific ways he wanted Biden to help Burisma is to get a prosecutor in the Ukraine fired who was looking into corruption at Burisma.
That was the motive for paying the money.
A huge energy company gets a lot of...
It's worth more than $10 million for them to shut this irritating prosecutor down.
And we know that Biden did get the prosecutor fired.
Why? Because Biden is on tape boasting about the act.
So the money was paid.
We have the guy who paid the money.
We have the money that moves away from the Ukraine, out of Burisma, and toward the Bidens.
And we have the purpose of the money that is also established.
Biden took the action that the money was paid to occur.
But Biden goes, where's the money?
Show me the money. Find the money in my account.
And, well, I think we found it.
Where is it? You have to look at Biden's tax return.
So I actually have a copy here of a...
A copy of the relevant documents on Biden's 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 tax returns.
And something very interesting occurs when you watch these tax returns.
So here's Biden.
In 2013, he declares income of $409,000 and some change.
2014, $388,000.
2015, 392.
2016, 396.
And all of this seems on the up and up, because remember, this is when Biden is vice president.
So he's only getting a federal salary.
He's got some income from investments.
Jill Biden also works.
So this is a very reasonable salary for Joe Biden and Jill Biden in these four years.
And then we look at the 2017 tax return and something very interesting appears.
On that tax return, you see $10 million.
$10 million. And it appears on the place where you have added business income.
And then you look at the place where it's supposed to tell you where that money came from.
What is the source? And that is blank.
No sources given. At the top of the page, you see some holding companies, so-called shell companies.
So a shell company is an LLC, a limited liability corporation.
You set up a shell company to hide the fact that the money is coming from Burisma.
So what it is is Burisma pays A, A plays B, B plays C, C pays U. And then on your tax return, you just list C. And so the IRS auditor looking at it, for example, goes, oh yeah, okay, well, some American corporation pays the guys some money, not realizing that this corporation doesn't do any work.
This corporation is just a pass-through.
It exists to hide the fact that the money is coming from Burisma in Ukraine.
USA Today did an article on Biden's taxes several years ago.
I don't think they knew anything about Burisma, anything about the bribes.
And they were themselves puzzled a little bit about this $10 million.
And so they casually speculated, and I want to emphasize this is pure speculation, that Joe Biden must have made the money either through speech income or through sales of his book, right?
And then there was also a Jill Biden book.
Now, first of all, Joe Biden did not go on the speaking tour after he left the vice presidency.
Frankly, who would even want to hear from Joe Biden at that point?
I remember Trump was president, so Joe Biden had absolutely nothing to offer.
And Joe Biden's book sales nowhere approximate $10 million.
And so here's Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.
She goes, if he's serious about proving our allegations wrong, he should release his and his family's unredacted bank records and show the American people where all this money is coming from.
Now, I mean, it can't miss our attention that the bribe, and we know this amount from the FBI whistleblower who's referring to the head of Burisma, Zolkiewski is exactly $10 million.
And that is almost the exact sum that appears on Biden's tax return.
So have we found the money?
I'm not saying that we have for sure.
But what I am saying is that that is a very suspicious number.
That's the number we're looking for.
And guess what? The very year that Biden leaves the White House, boom, the number pops up on his return.
So this is something that the House needs to pay very careful attention to.
And go beyond what's Biden's side of the story to let's get Biden's actual bank records.
Let's look at where these checks came from, get the deposit slips, drill down into it, and see if you can get the goods on the crook-in-chief sitting in the White House.
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I want to talk about the Twitter files.
Welcome to my show.
Anything goes. It's not a free speech absolutism.
Elon Musk has been kind of clear when he said that I'm trying to allow speech that is legal, but there are exceptions to this, speech that advocates violence, things that are Now, typically, the examples that I see on Twitter don't fit that.
And I'm hoping that Twitter has a mechanism to resolve these disputes and correct it.
But I do know that the parameters of speech on Twitter are not I can tell you this from my own example.
I always push the envelope, and I push the envelope in the old Twitter as well, probably coming pretty close.
And probably at times, I was shadow banned.
I know Debbie still is under kind of a shadow ban, which is preposterous.
She has been hovering around 100,000 followers, and she can never cross it.
Typically, when I retweeted her in the past, she'd get hundreds of new followers.
And are you at 97?
I keep going. Debbie says she keeps going down, so evidently she is a grave threat to the Republic.
But anyway, the point I want to make here is that there's a new edition of the Twitter Files.
This is a journalist, Aaron, I think it's Mate or Mate, I'm not sure.
He's got a little, he's got that little tiddly.
Mate. Yeah, Mate. So anyway, this is very interesting because it involves Ukraine and And it turns out that the FBI and the old regime at Twitter were collaborating and censoring people for criticizing Ukraine.
So here you have the United States.
I mean, let's look at the broader scene.
The United States is sending all this money to Ukraine.
to fight a war against Russia.
Now, Ukraine does all kinds of restrictions.
Rival political parties are restricted or banned.
There's widespread censorship in Ukraine.
But it's a whole different matter for the Ukrainians to be working with the digital platforms and with our FBI, When I say our FBI, I'm using that somewhat sarcastically because the FBI in no way represents me or represents the interests of the American people.
It's more like a gang.
The FBI is more like armed thugs that are doing their work for the Biden regime.
But evidently, part of this work is to silence criticism of Ukraine in the United States and on social media generally.
So this, I think, is startling because you have a foreign regime that is promoting the censorship of U.S. citizens, censorship that is critical of a war that they're conducting.
Now, again, in any situation, it's one thing for the Ukrainians to say, we're in a war and we cannot have dissenting viewpoints in our own country.
There have been times, including World War I, World War II, where there's censorship inside of a country that is at war, but we are not at war.
And moreover, when there is a war and there are two sides involved, one side may generally be in the right and the other side may generally be in the wrong, but it doesn't mean that one side is absolutely in the right.
We know, for example, that there are literal, I mean, Nazi regiments in the Ukraine that are fighting on the Ukrainian side.
And I'm talking about people who use Nazi symbolism.
They use swastikas.
They do Nazi salutes.
And these are people, and historically, these are groups that were set up when they welcomed the Nazi invasion of Russia.
By the way, Solzhenitsyn talks about this in the Gulag Archipelago.
He goes that there were so many Stalinist labor camps in Soviet Russia that when the Nazis came along, many of these people welcomed the Nazis as liberators.
But whatever the historical context, isn't it reasonable to say, wait a minute, is our money that's going to Ukraine, is some of it actually bankrolling Nazis?
I mean, think of the absurdity of this.
Here you have the U.S. government, well, very worried about white supremacy.
And you take some guy, the shaman guy, wearing skins and walking into the Capitol.
He's a Nazi! Well, does he subscribe to any Nazi tenets?
Well, not really. Is he a fan of Hitler and Himmler?
Not really. Well, we call him a Nazi anyway.
Or if somebody opposes trans propaganda in the school, you're a Nazi!
Because the Nazis didn't really like trans people.
So the point being here that while we're calling domestic Americans, Republicans, Christians, conservatives, Nazis, you have actual Nazis fighting in Ukraine.
And evidently, if you criticize them, the Ukrainians will now work with the FBI and social media to get you restricted or to get you banned.
So this is very shocking stuff.
And of course, what makes it...
Even more disturbing, I won't say shocking because we're used to it, is that our media doesn't report on this.
No reports on the Twitter files.
They act like it doesn't exist.
By the way, there's very little reporting on the Biden bribery scandal.
They act like that doesn't exist.
So even though the House Oversight Committee has bank records, they have chapter and verse, and no one in the media can do a fact check and go, this is wrong, this never happened, this transfer didn't occur.
They know it's true. So they're censoring it, or they're not covering it, not because it's false.
They're not covering it because it's true.
And the truth in this case is really damaging.
I mean, which is more damaging?
For Trump to have some classified documents bearing on national security that went nowhere?
Or Biden taking money from foreign regimes and doing favors, basically renting out U.S. foreign policy that's favorable to Ukraine, favorable to China, favorable to other countries, because this money is coming from Costa Rica.
It's coming from a number of countries into the Biden family.
This is how the Biden family basically went from zero to tens of millions of dollars.
Debbie just reminded me that when Joe Biden got his $10 million bribe, he immediately bought his beach house on Rehoboth Beach.
So, a corrupt operation all the way around.
And the point I'm making here is that censorship is connected to a protection of this corruption.
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There is a new, well, it's kind of a bombshell revelation regarding the origins of COVID. And I say that it's an important revelation because what I mean is it tips the scales with regard to how we got COVID in the first place.
Isn't it really weird that here we are, two and a half years into this pandemic, and we don't know where it came from?
Does that make sense to you?
Does it make sense to you that the best people in the world from multiple countries cannot find the source of a pandemic that clearly killed millions of people and disrupted the entire world's economy?
Are we, as a race, as a human race, that dumb that we can't figure this out?
There have been, from the beginning, two competing theories about the origins of COVID. COVID came out of a natural so-called wet market, the market where they sell fish and they sell, well, animals and animal parts.
This is a Chinese market in the open air.
And so one possibility from the beginning was that maybe COVID somehow mutated from a bat, something like that, and then it was transferred through another animal to humans.
Wasn't it the movie Contagion that talks about the spread of a virus through wet markets?
So that's theory number one.
And that's the theory that, by and large, the Chinese glommed onto.
Well, the Chinese initially basically said, we had nothing to do with COVID. Someone brought it in from another country.
Then they gave up on that, and they're like, well, no, it's coming from the wet markets.
In other words, it's not coming from, well, this is the other theory, the Wuhan lab.
So guess what? You've got COVID. It begins in Wuhan.
And in Wuhan, there is a massive set of laboratories, biolabs, that do this so-called gain-of-function research, which is to say that they take viruses and they soup them up and they play around with them, trying to make them more contagious and more lethal.
Now, the The pretext for doing this is to study these viruses so we can understand them better, so we can come up with better remedies in case the virus got out.
But guess what? Wouldn't it be ironic that the very people playing with these viruses, they're the ones that let it out?
So which of these two theories is correct?
Now, if you talked about the origins of COVID coming from a lab, you talked about a lab leak, YouTube would censor you.
Facebook would censor you.
So these platforms, disgracefully, and I think to their This should really hurt their reputation, were suppressing legitimate debate about the origins of COVID. And they were doing it.
Why? By and large, because people like Fauci were telling them to.
Fauci was basically saying, I think it came from a wet market.
Of course, Fauci had no basis for saying that.
And Fauci knew at the time that the U.S. government was giving money to labs, including the EcoHealth Alliance in North Carolina, And the EcoHealth Alliance was partnered with the Wuhan lab in Wuhan, China.
So, in other words, Fauci had a strong incentive to make this seem like it came from a natural source and not from the Wuhan lab, because if it came from the Wuhan lab, the question immediately arises, did the US government and the US taxpayer have a role in bankrolling this gain-of-function research that eventually got out and basically caused all this havoc?
As we think about which of these two theories is right, it turns out that there's a startling new piece of evidence.
The first three people in the world that we know that got COVID worked, well, at the Wuhan lab.
And this has not been known until now.
It turns out that there is an important study, and a study is reported on by Michael Schellenberger, Matt Tybee, and Alex Gutentag on their substack.
And they have the names of the first three guys who got COVID. Their names are Ben Hu, Youping, and Yan Zhu.
And who are these guys?
They are all researchers in the Wuhan lab.
Now, what makes all of this even more interesting is that there is actually a video...
Two years before the pandemic, of Ben Hu, one of these guys, and he's handling specimens, and it's a video of the guy, and he's hunting for these bat viruses, and he's wearing no protective gear.
Now, the reason this is significant is that if this guy thought, and this guy is one of the supposedly leading gain-of-function guys in China, he is the star pupil of a woman who is sometimes called Bat Lady.
Bat Lady is a woman...
Who has been the pioneer of this gain-of-function research in China.
And I'm trying to find the name of that lady, but it actually doesn't really matter.
This guy, Ben Hu, is looking for specimens.
Now, if he thought I could catch these deadly diseases from the natural wet market, or I could catch them from these sites in the caves where I'm looking, he would have had all this protective gear.
But he didn't think that. He wasn't worried about that.
He knew that the research for gain-of-function was going on in the lab.
And so it's in the lab that he wears protective gear because that's where the danger lies.
That's the significance of this video.
Now, yes, Shi Zhengli.
That is the name of Chinese Bat Lady.
And apparently, Ben Hu is her sort of number two guy.
So he was her star pupil.
And this was a guy quite clearly working on gain-of-function research.
Now... What's really interesting about all this is this information has all been suppressed by the U.S. government, no less than China.
And what makes this really interesting is we know why the Chinese would want to suppress it.
They don't want to make it seem like their guys who were working on gain-of-function got it, and then it got out of that lab.
But why would the United States, which is at the receiving end of this pandemic, Why would the United States, which has had so many victims of this pandemic, not want to know?
And so this remains an important unanswered.
Is it because we were colluding with them to do this research?
Is it that Joe Biden has been bought off by China and he's basically a paid asset that the Chinese have funded and bankrolled and so he's not going to do anything that's damaging to China?
Is it that the World Health Organization doesn't want us to know because it too is beholden to China?
So I don't want to speculate on the reasons why, but I'm simply telling you that this information is apparently known to the US government, known to US officials, but it hasn't come out until now.
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On Locals, you got Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Christian apologetics, focusing on a chapter in my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
And the chapter is called, Jesus Among Other Gods, The Uniqueness of Christianity.
And before we discuss what makes Christianity unique, it's worth thinking about the simple question of, are the major religions of the world kind of the same?
Now, years ago, I remember reading, this was from the Muslim writer Syed Hossein Nasser, and he actually gave a beautiful analogy.
He said that we can think of ourselves as people who are living at the bottom of a huge mountain, and there are all these streams coming down the mountain.
These streams represent, if you will, the different major revelations.
So the revelation to the Jews, the revelation to the Christians, the revelation to Muhammad, the Islamic revelations, and so on.
And he goes, well, listen, none of us can actually see to the top of the mountain.
So we don't know. If God is this or God is that, all we see are the streams that are coming down.
We see the water at the bottom of the mountain, and we're trying to trace our way to see which of these streams goes all the way to the top, which of these streams reflects, if you will, the true essence and will of God.
And he goes... Let's remember that these streams, even though they differ somewhat, are nevertheless coming from the same source.
So here is an Orthodox Muslim making the argument, not that religions are the same, but that human beings are not in a good position to know which one is right.
Now, as I mentioned yesterday, the great religions of the world, why they disagree about theology...
Is Jesus the Son of God?
Yes or no? They agree about much of morality.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, for example, you'll find that some version of it and some version also of the golden rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
You're going to find this in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and so on.
But all this being said...
I also want to emphasize that there are important differences between religions, and you can see this sometimes even in the way that religions use the same word.
So let's look at a word like martyr.
Martyr has a very different meaning in Christianity than it does in Islam, even though both the Muslims and the Christians use the same word, martyr.
Literally, martyr means witness.
But what kind of a witness? Well, by and large, in Christianity, you're a martyr if you sacrifice your life for Christ or for God.
You give up your life voluntarily, sacrificially, if you will, in some ways mirroring Christ's own sacrifice.
That makes you a martyr.
But in Islam, martyrdom isn't understood that way.
Martyrdom is taking up arms and going out and defending Islam and, in some cases, conquering other lands in the name of Islam.
If you die in that cause, you're a martyr.
So, when Khomeini and bin Laden talk about martyrdom, it's a completely different meaning than, say, the Christian understanding of martyrdom.
I remember reading a book years ago by Houston Smith.
It was an analysis of the great religions of the world, and he listed some crucial differences among these religions, which is worth noting.
He says, for example, Buddhism.
Very interesting. It has an ethical philosophy.
It has a sort of a deep understanding of the fact that there is a world behind the world.
But he goes, it doesn't really have a clear concept of the afterlife.
Nor does it have a clear concept of God.
Now, this is complicated because there are a couple of different strands of Buddhism and one of them, the so-called Mahayana Buddhism, does have a concept of God, but the mainstream of Buddhism, the Theravada strain, does not.
There's only one other religion that Christianity entirely embraces as divine revelation, and that, of course, is Judaism.
In other words, Christianity considers Judaism to be part of Christianity.
Of course, Judaism doesn't feel that way about Christianity.
Christianity views itself as superseding Judaism, but then Islam comes around and declares that it has superseded both Judaism and Christianity.
Islam considers Moses and Jesus to be prophets, and Muslims even endorse the concept of Jesus' virgin birth.
But they don't acknowledge Christ as the Messiah, and they don't believe that He was crucified or resurrected into heaven.
So, why am I telling you all this?
I'm telling you all this because it's kind of a way of saying that you've got these different religions.
Let's call them competing claims to divine revelation.
I'm actually not going to try to prove that one is right and the others are wrong.
I'm going to confine myself to a rather simpler task and show We're good to go.
But the Christian recipe is radically different.
And this is really what I want to highlight.
Not what makes Christianity true.
Not to prove Christianity as true.
In fact, it's a little hard to prove any kind of divine revelation as true.
But what I want to show is that this is what makes it different.
And so, the way to look at it is if you understand that this is the problem and this is the common solution offered by all the other religions of the world.
And this is the unique solution offered by Christianity, then you can decide which solution is right for you.
I said in the previous segment that all religions in the world are sort of ways to solve the human problem.
Well, what is this human problem?
I think we can understand it better by looking at the French writer and mathematician Pascal and his great work called The Pensée.
Now, Pascal says that, hey, for thousands of years, human beings have been trying to solve Basic problems.
They've applied a great deal of effort and intelligence to solve these problems.
And what are these problems? Well, we want to have peace in the world.
We want to live in harmony with one another.
We want to raise our children well.
We want our lives to matter.
And Pascal says, hey, we've been at this, working on this for a long time.
So why is it that we haven't solved any of these problems?
In other words, why does the pursuit of happiness, to use the phrase from Jefferson, why is that only a pursuit of happiness?
Why haven't we found this happiness we're looking for?
Now, for a lot of leading atheists, the answer is really simple.
They're like, well, the reason we haven't found happiness is because man is ignorant, because science is making continuing marches toward knowledge, and as we get this knowledge, it will dispel that ignorance and we'll all be better off.
Now, we all know that this is dumb.
This is a half-truth. Not that science does not expand the reach of knowledge, but when it comes to the basic questions of life, scientific knowledge doesn't even matter.
Let's consider the basic questions in life.
Some of the most fundamental things.
Why is there a universe?
Why do we exist? What is our meaning or purpose here?
What comes after death?
How should we live? Now, I ask you, what are the scientific answers to those questions?
And the answer is zip, zip, zip, zip, and zip.
So, the philosopher Wittgenstein said something, I think, quite profound many years ago.
He said that Even if science solves all possible questions and gives scientific answers, which, by the way, will probably never happen because scientific knowledge is provisional, it's revisable, it can change.
But let's say that we got the final answers to every scientific question.
You knew exactly what matter was made of.
You knew exactly what its components were.
You sort of solved these scientific mysteries of the universe.
Even so, says Wittgenstein, quote, the main problems of life remain untouched.
Why? Because he says that it's almost like science is a game that is played on a table and the most important questions in life are off the table.
So, this is really worth keeping in mind because it shows us, on the one hand, the great promise of science, but on the other hand, the great limits of science.
So, to reduce all knowledge to scientific knowledge is to condemn man to total ignorance about a lot of the questions that matter most.
So, how then do we understand those problems, and specifically the problem of good and evil, which seems to be such an important part of why things go wrong in our world?
Well, Pascal says that when it comes to good and evil, man is a weird mixture of both.
Man is simultaneously heroic.
But he's also wretched. He's capable of noble and wonderful thoughts and deeds, but he also plots and performs horrible actions that are unworthy even of the lowest animals.
I mean, think about it. Animals act, and they sometimes act badly, but it's out of instinct.
If a lion falls upon a fawn or a lamb, it's doing it because it's hungry.
On the other hand, think about people who cut other people into small pieces.
Why? Not to eat them, just to get a kind of sick pleasure out of it.
So, part of man's greatness, says Pascal, is his ability to use his own faculty of reason to recognize his own baseness, to recognize that there is an evil that lives within him.
So, let me put the situation kind of a different way.
We all can think of a world, you know, if someone were to say to you, things are not the way they ought to be.
Do you agree? Most people would go, yeah, I agree.
Why? Because we can all envision a world of perfect goodness, perfect beauty, perfect harmony, perfect love, and so on, and we don't live in that world.
So, the world that we want is kind of up here.
Let's call it the divine level.
And the world that we live in is down here.
Let's call it the human level.
So, another way to put it is that there's a big distance, a big chasm between the human level and the divine level.
And all the religions of the world have a common project.
How do we cross this chasm?
And the point I want to make is that the main...
The great religions of the world have a common solution, a common recipe, and that is that we as human beings should build a kind of a ladder, and that ladder goes step, step, step by step by step, and we try to ascend rung by rung to get closer to God.
And religions typically offer all kinds of codes and commandments and ways that human beings can go higher and higher in an effort to move closer toward the divine level.
And Christianity, I want to say, is unique because it inverts this.
Christianity basically says that you can go up this ladder, but it's not really going to matter.
You might get to level 6, another guy's at level 3, another guy's at level 9, but so what?
The distance between God and man is so great that you're never going to be able to get very far anyway.
And so, if this chasm is to be crossed, maybe it can't be crossed, but if it is crossed, basically God has to reach down.
God has to build a ladder and come down to earth.
God has to send an ambassador or someone in his stead, and that bridges the chasm between man and God.
So, when I take this up tomorrow...
I'll go into this in a little more detail, but the idea is that from the Christian point of view, other religions are attempting an impossible project of man ascending to God, which is not possible.
Christianity, in a sense, solves the problem from the other side.
God descends or condescends, reaches down to man through the person of Jesus, and this is how the chasm between the way things ought to be and the way things are is finally breached.
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