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April 2, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CULTURAL CHRISTIAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep802
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Coming up, I'll comment on Trump coughing up the $175 million for bond in the New York Judge Engeron case.
I also want to talk in depth about longtime atheist Richard Dawkins and his remarkable confession that he is a cultural Christian.
I'll have Christian apologist, author, and podcaster Frank Turek join me.
We're going to talk about how Christianity shaped Western civilization in America and what a post-Christian society might look like.
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The big item in the news today is that Trump has put up the $175 million bond.
Wow.
Now, Trump was able to pull it off.
He apparently, well, he had one point and said, I'm going to put it up in cash and he didn't do that.
He probably could do that.
But he found an insurance company linked to a guy who apparently made his fortune in automobiles and auto insurance.
And this guy was willing to float the bond.
So Trump should be good.
And the appeal is going to be pretty slow, probably a couple of years.
But it basically means that Trump's assets are not going to be seized.
And this leftist attempt to take over Trump Tower, maybe make a claim on Mar-a-Lago, try to claim Trump's properties in New York and elsewhere.
None of this is going to happen.
So that's good news. Of course, the bond itself remains outrageous.
Trump's ability to pay is not really disputed.
They should have had a bond of...
Much smaller amount and the purpose of a bond is not to put so much financial hardship on someone that they can't appeal a verdict and in this case I think a very wrongful verdict in the first place.
I'm going to focus in today's podcast on a single theme, and that is the issue of cultural Christianity.
I mentioned yesterday that the atheist Richard Dawkins is now calling himself a cultural Christian.
This is May not be entirely new, but there's a clip going viral about it, and it's a pretty significant departure from the Dawkins who wrote The God Delusion, because The God Delusion was written out of rage against God, against Christianity. It seemed like nothing good comes out of believing in God.
Nothing good comes out of Christianity.
All the religions of the world are delusions, and the only We're good to go.
driven by a realization that Islam, radical Islam, is making powerful encroachments on Western civilization.
We see this in parts of America, places like Dearborn, Michigan, certain parts of New York, in fact even certain parts of Texas, Sugar Land, Texas, we find is becoming, well, some people call it Sharia Land.
And Dawkins is horrified by this because I think he sees that there is a frightening sort of non-Western theological system that is not just a system of belief, but a system of law.
That wants to impose itself through what the Islamic activists call Sharia, holy law, that is antithetical, as Dawkins sees it, and I think as I see it, to Western freedom.
Now interestingly, Islam is not antithetical to Western democracy.
Why? Because you can have Islamic democracy.
Imagine 100 people, they take a vote, and 99 of them, or 75% of them, decide, we all want to live under Sharia.
So we are voting by majority and an electoral majority if need be to impose Sharia law on everybody.
And this is compatible with democracy because democracy simply is a system for ascertaining or determining what is the will of the majority.
And there are many Islamic countries where a majority of people want Sharia.
And so they vote for it.
And so they get it. Now, Islam, so if Islam is compatible with democracy, it is not, however, compatible with liberalism, at least classical liberalism, the kind of liberalism that you and I believe in.
Not modern liberalism, we're talking about the basic belief in freedom of speech.
Freedom of assembly, civil liberty, those sorts of things, the kind of beliefs that animated the American founding.
In this sense, Islam exists kind of uneasily along with the American founding.
Dawkins knows this.
And so he is saying, I don't want Christianity the belief system, but I'll take Christianity the cultural artifact and And the values and beliefs, the values and cultural norms that go along with Christianity.
So I will, after our break, come back with a prominent Christian apologist.
His name is Frank Turek.
And we're going to talk in depth about Dawkins, about Christianity, about cultural Christianity, and about Frank's own book, which is kind of tantalizingly titled, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, but somebody I've known over many years.
His name is Frank Turek.
He's a Christian apologist.
He's a writer, an author, a speaker.
He travels to college campuses, high schools, and churches.
His book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, great title.
You can follow him on X at Dr. D.R. Frank Turek, D-U-R-E-K, and his website, crossexamined.org.
Frank, welcome, thanks for joining me.
I had the pleasure of being on your podcast, gosh, I guess a couple of weeks ago now, and talking about police state.
But thanks for coming on mine.
I wanted to start by asking you about this latest business with Richard Dawkins, a clip that's going viral on social media.
And Dawkins, who is, I suppose you'd say, the most prominent living atheist, author of The God Delusion, someone who launched a vicious attack on the idea of God and on Christianity, basically saying things like, the God of the Old Testament is the worst, most evil character in all of fiction.
That line kind of stuck with me from that book.
Sort of nothing good can come out of Christianity seemed to be the theme of that book, and yet here he is in a very measured tone in an interview, essentially calling himself a cultural Christian.
I wonder if you think that that is a significant admission on his part, and what do you think he's getting at?
Well, Dinesh, you're absolutely right.
This is something that Dawkins actually has been saying for quite a while now, maybe a decade or so, but it's really gone viral in this latest clip.
And he's basically saying that he realizes that Christianity is basically blunting Islam taking over the UK.
He knows the danger of Sharia law.
He says he'd much rather live in a country with Christian values than Muslim values.
So from a pragmatic standpoint, Dinesh, he's pointing out that even though he thinks Christianity is bunk and he doesn't believe a word of it, as he says, he thinks that it's actually a good thing to live in a Christian country, ostensibly Christian country, that has the kind of freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech that you don't have in most Muslim countries.
So he's admitting from a pragmatic perspective that this is a good thing.
Do you think, Frank, that he's making a kind of a lesser evil argument?
Because I think you're quite right.
He's very hostile to the kind of Sharia approach of the radical Muslims.
He recognizes that that's what they want to bring to the West.
Of course, Dawkins lives in England.
You see both in Great Britain and in France, I mean, powerful Muslim lobbies.
Pushing for Sharia districts and areas of Western countries now to be governed by Sharia law.
So I agree Dawkins is recoiling against that.
Do you think he's just saying, hey listen, I would rather have an atheist society, but it doesn't look to be my choice.
Looks like I'm going to have to choose between Islamic society and Christian society, and I'm going to opt for Christian society because I think it is better than Islamic society.
Although, if it were up to me, I would rather have a third option, which is a society free of religion altogether.
You think that's his position?
Well, partially, but I think he's also kind of echoing, believe it or not, what Hitchens said.
And you debated Hitchens and I debated Hitchens years ago, and Hitchens called himself a Protestant atheist.
Now, what did he mean by that?
He meant that although he wanted to freely speak out against Christianity, I think in an implicit sense, he knew that the values that allowed him to speak out came from Christianity.
Much like the UK historian Tom Holland, not the Spider-Man actor, but the historian Tom Holland said in his book Dominion that despite the fact he's not a Christian, his values are thoroughly Christian.
Because in an atheistic society, you're not guaranteed freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of the press or freedom of assembly.
But in a Christian society, at least properly understood, You do have those values.
So I think many atheists are starting to realize that Islam is not the way forward.
Atheism with no moral objective foundation isn't the way forward.
The only way we're going to have human rights is through Christianity.
And Dinesh, I mean, just look at our choices out there.
Is atheism going to guarantee freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press?
No. Is Islam going to do that?
No. Is Hinduism going to do that?
No. Is agnosticism going to do that?
No. Is Buddhism going to do that?
No. Only the Judeo-Christian worldview is going to do that.
And by the way, you pointed that out in your 2007 book, What's So Great About Christianity?
What's so great about it?
It gives us these values.
And I think, of course, it's also true that there is a God and Jesus really rose from the dead.
Welcome to my show!
in which they would say, all right, well, Western civilization is built on Athens and Jerusalem, but all the best values, like free speech, philosophy, independent thought, cross-examination, come from Athens, not from Jerusalem. And so they were using Athens against Jerusalem.
It may be that upon reflection and over the years, the same guys, including Hitchens, now including Dawkins, have come to see, well, wait a minute, you know, it's not entirely true.
Some of the ideas are rooted in Athens, but for example, Athens had widespread slavery.
Athens was not a free society in the sense that we understand it. It was highly regimented.
People who went against the state were ostracized, sometimes for life, banished, exiled, and so on. So the kind of freedom that you and I mean when we talk normally about freedom in the modern sense, that was not a prerogative of ancient Greece and Rome. That came later through the influence of Christianity. So Now Dawkins in the clip doesn't speak about any of this in detail.
He just says things like, well I like cathedrals and old parish churches.
So he's kind of giving you the idea, almost like he sort of likes the feel and Christianity has created artifacts that are familiar to him and he's comfortable in that.
But I think he's understating the case here because what he really means is that The basic notion of equality of rights, human dignity, universal brotherhood, the invention of the university, the invention of the hospital, I mean all of this is the great contribution of Christianity to the West and indeed to the world.
And even women's rights.
And I know Dawkins actually said in the clip, well, you know, Christianity has some problems with women rights when it comes to women vicars and bishops and that kind of thing.
But then he contrasted that to Islam.
And if you look at Islam, as he rightly pointed out, Islam is hostile to women in certain respects.
Whereas Christianity says, well, you have different functions in the church.
A woman and a man might have different functions, but they're equally made in the image of God.
And Jesus was the one that had mostly women as his initial followers.
And early on, as you well know, Dinesh, Christianity was thought to be a religion for women because it was so positive toward women, including the sexual ethic.
As you know, in the Roman culture, a man could have sex with anybody he wanted to, even though he was married, but a woman couldn't.
And the Apostle Paul comes along and says, no, man, you need to be faithful to your wives.
Now, this was revolutionary at the time, and it's interesting that I think that feminism today, Dinesh, Wants women to act more like men.
In other words, be non-monogamous.
But Christianity wants men to actually act more like women to be monogamous.
Now, what's better for society overall?
The Christian view, not the feminist view.
I mean, that's an outstanding point, Frank.
Let me ask you this with regard to Dawkins, and I'm drawing here on a point that is made by the philosopher Nietzsche, who says this.
He says, look, we are living indeed in a Christian civilization in whose values are shaped by Christianity.
But, says Nietzsche, we are also living in a time where a lot of educated people have ceased to believe in God.
This is the idea that God is dead.
And so, as Nietzsche says, we have a contradiction because we have all these values that came out of God, that came out of Christianity.
Nietzsche calls them the shadows of God.
And somehow, we want to get rid of God.
But we want to keep the values.
Now to me, that summarizes Dawkins.
That's exactly what Dawkins said.
He said, listen, religious belief and practice is declining in the West.
He goes, I think that's a good thing.
But then he goes, but I want to hold on to Christian values.
And I think Nietzsche would say, you actually can't do that.
Over time, once you blast away the foundation, then everything that comes with that is going to collapse as well.
And arguably, that's what we're seeing.
The reason we're seeing a decline of Christian values is we're seeing a decline of Christian belief.
So is Dawkins' position incoherent or is it tenable in the long run?
I don't think so. It's kind of like cutting flowers and expecting them to continue to bloom.
If you cut them from the roots, eventually they're going to wilt.
And Nietzsche famously said, I think he died in right about 1900, he said, if we kill God, meaning belief in God, we're going to kill man.
And the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history.
partially because we killed belief in God.
And when you kill belief in God, ultimately man dies.
And that's the problem.
We've severed the flowers of the Christian values from the roots.
And when you do that, you're ultimately going to lose the values as well.
So my job in my ministry is to try and show people that Christianity is indeed true.
That God does exist and Jesus rose from the dead.
And if those two facts are true, Dinesh, then Christianity is true.
And one implication of what we've just been saying is that you can't really have a cultural revival in this sense without having a moral and a spiritual revival.
Because... As you say, you can't have the flower without the root and without the branch and without the source of nourishment.
So people talk about the fact we need to fix our culture.
And it's true. There are some things you can do in the policy realm and perhaps in the cultural realm.
But in the end, isn't it a fact that we need to restore the core belief of the West under God?
Or as Jefferson says, our rights come from the Creator.
And without that kind of root...
No long-term cultural reform is even possible.
Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely.
And he wants Dawkins...
I mean, to his credit, Dinesh, he's at least admitting that despite the fact he doesn't think Christianity is true, he is pointing out that it brings forth great benefits to civilization.
Now, we need to also point out that this doesn't mean in the past...
That Christians have acted morally all the time.
We haven't. Christians in the past have engaged in things that disagree with what Jesus taught.
But that's the illogical outworking of Christianity.
The logical outworking of atheism, it's survival of the fittest.
If I've got more power and you're in my way, I can kill you to get what I want.
When we come back, Frank, let's dive into your book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and the provocative idea that atheism no less than Christianity requires faith.
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I'm back with author, speaker, Christian apologist, Dr.
Frank Turek. His website, crossexamine.org.
Follow him on X, at Dr.
Dr. Frank Turek, T-U-R-E-K. The book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
Frank, let's begin there.
I mean, it's a very, I think, a very arresting title for a book because it sort of hits the atheist at a vulnerable point.
The atheist typically thinks that the Christian is living by faith, which is to say living by irrationality, believing things that can't be supported, can't be proven.
As the fact checkers say these days, baseless statements.
On the other hand, the atheist thinks, well, I'm not like that.
My positions are all based on reason, and so I want to begin by asking you, do you think it is in fact true that the atheist position, and perhaps the agnostic position, maybe you can distinguish those two if they need to be distinguished, do those positions rely on faith, and what is the faith that it takes to be an atheist?
What is it that they have to have faith in?
Well, if we're using faith in the modern sense, which is if you don't have evidence, you just believe blindly, maybe even against the evidence, Dinesh.
In fact, that's how Richard Dawkins has put it.
I think the atheists have to have a lot more faith than Christians.
Why? Because there's... Very good evidence that Christianity is indeed true, that God does exist, and Jesus rose from the dead, and the New Testament writers were recording accurately what they observed, and if that's the case, then Christianity is true, whereas the atheists Have to believe against the evidence, for example, that the universe popped into existence out of nothing and by nothing.
You've probably heard people say, Dinesh, that, you know, you have to have, atheists will say this to Christians, or you're going to say Jesus rose from the dead, or any other claims to Christianity.
Well, that's an extraordinary claim, and you need extraordinary evidence.
They'll say that all the time, right?
But here they are, Dinesh.
Atheists admitting that space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing, and they're saying that it happened without a cause.
Like, for example, Lawrence Krauss says this in his book, A Universe from Nothing.
He says the whole universe came into existence without a cause.
Now that is an extraordinary claim, Dinesh.
Do they have extraordinary evidence for it?
So, what's the evidence that it came into existence without a cause?
There isn't any. They're violating their own principle.
So, if space-time and matter had a beginning without a cause, as Richard Dawkins admits, as Stephen Hawking admits, or admitted, then whatever created space-time and matter must transcend space-time and matter.
In other words, the cause must be spaceless.
Timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, and also intelligent to have a mind to create.
So I always ask people, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
That's what we mean by God.
And isn't it true also, Frank, that the universe embodies and reflects a deep, intelligible order?
I mean if it didn't, it wouldn't take the most brilliant minds of all time, going back to the early scientists and then of course Galileo, Newton, ultimately Einstein, the people who were involved in the quantum, all these guys, geniuses, trying to ferret out the secrets of nature, the laws that are hidden, the hidden program or code of the universe, right?
We don't know of any code that can be generated without a coder.
In other words, somebody has to program the code.
Where do we get the code from?
How does the electron know what to do?
So you have an explanation that would seem to posit that this order couldn't exist by itself.
What does the atheist say about that?
Well, what they try and say is, well, we live in a multiverse, and it just happens to be, this universe happens to be the one that looks designed, but it really isn't.
To which, Paul Davies, who is an agnostic astronomer at Arizona State University, said, the multiverse is a dodge.
The universe looks designed because it is designed.
I mean, imagine positing Just multiplying your possibilities because you can't answer the obvious question that if we have a code, there must be a coder.
If there is design, there must be a designer.
They say, oh, no, there's no designer.
This all happened by chance.
We're just going to multiply the universes out there and try and say that the one we're in just happens to be the one that looks designed, even though it really isn't.
Well, this just proves too much, Dinesh.
Because if there's all these universes out there, that means every possible contingency out there is actual.
There is a place somewhere where Adolf Hitler was Billy Graham and Billy Graham was Adolf Hitler.
I mean, according to this theory, it just proves too much.
So they're really grasping at straws to try and say there is no designer when you look at the incredible complexity of Not only of the design of life, but the design of the universe itself.
In fact, Hawking said this, despite being an atheist and as she said, if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million a second after the Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies.
So, if the universe expansion rate from the very beginning was that infinitesimally different, none of us would be here.
Now, what makes more sense?
If that expansion rate just happened without a cause, or that expansion rate was designed to be precisely where it needed to be?
Seems to me B is the better answer.
Yeah, I mean, let me put it slightly differently or just rephrase what you said because I think it's so important.
What you're saying is that the universe is not just designed in the obvious sense that if you or I were to find a watch, we would be like, that's designed.
Well, that's true. You're saying that the design is at such a fantastic level of calibration that the probability that it could have been assembled by chance is essentially zero.
Yeah. And the atheists are coming along and saying, well, that's actually true.
We can't deny that.
So why don't we posit or imagine that there isn't just one universe.
There are millions of universes.
In fact, there's an infinity of universes.
And since there's an infinity of universes, really all combinations are going to be realized somewhere.
It's kind of like saying if you keep rolling the dice millions and millions of times, you're bound to get even the most improbable combination of numbers because you have an infinity to keep trying, right?
And I guess this comes right back to the title of your book, which is like, which is easier to believe in one invisible God Or an infinity of invisible universes for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
And this is exactly why Christopher Hitchens said this is the hardest argument to answer if you're an atheist.
Why is the universe fine-tuned?
Why is... Why does life exist?
Why do the natural laws, why are they so persistent and consistent?
Laws come from lawgivers, and the laws that govern this particular universe, as far as we know, that's all we have, are so precise and consistent, Dinesh, That this points back to some sort of mind.
In fact, people say, well, Frank, how do you know that God exists?
I say this. We know God by his effects.
If there's a creation, that's an effect.
We're reasoning back to a cause of creator.
If there's design, that's the effect.
We're reasoning back to a cause of designer.
If there's a moral law written on our hearts, that's the effect.
We're reasoning back to a moral law giver.
If there's evidence that a man predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, that's the effect.
We're reasoning back to a cause.
Who could have caused a man to predict and accomplish his own resurrection?
That would be God.
So we're reasoning from effect to cause, and this is what scientists do.
Scientists are always looking for what particular cause caused a particular effect.
And I'm saying that if you're not a theist of some kind, you're ignoring cause and effect.
You're not being scientific.
Do you think, at one point, C.S. Lewis, who relies on the argument from the moral law to the moral lawgiver, that's the essence of the argument in What's So Great About...
I'm sorry, that's the essence of the argument in Mere Christianity, Lewis's perhaps most famous book.
At one point, Lewis intimates, he doesn't say explicitly, but he intimates that the knowledge of God...
Has been implanted in every human heart.
In other words, even the agnostic who says, I don't know, really does know.
The atheist who says, no, there is no God, knows that there is a God.
In other words, I guess the suggestion here is that these are positions that are, I won't say held in bad faith, but I will say that are motivated by something else.
So, in other words, I found that when you prod an atheist enough, you sometimes find that it's not so much that they don't believe in God, but they've got a beef with God.
They're angry with God.
They've got a grudge with God.
And you got the feeling about that from Dawkins as well, because his book is so unremittingly hostile, or as people say these days, hateful toward God, that it's not a normal reaction to something that you just don't believe exists.
You know, we can talk about the fact that unicorns don't exist, or aliens don't exist, but we don't have active hostility to the unicorns and the aliens.
We just don't think they exist.
But the active hostility of the atheist, it seems to be a kind of a giveaway.
Do you agree? Yeah, that's why I always ask people on college campuses, Dinesh.
and I'm gonna be at the University of Buffalo tomorrow night and at Boise State on the 8th of April. I always ask people if Christianity were true would you become a Christian? And sometimes the atheists at the microphone, Dinesh, in front of hundreds of people will say no. No? How is it you claim to be reasonable and you won't believe something that were true?
Because it's not about the head, Dinesh.
It's about the heart. They don't want it to be true.
They don't want there to be a God.
Why? Because they want to be God over their own lives.
They're not on a truth quest or on a happiness quest.
So I always ask them, If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
And many times they hesitate or say no.
In fact, in my second debate with Christopher Hitchens, I said you can sum up Christopher Hitchens' position in one sentence.
There is no God and I hate him.
But... God thinks there is a Christopher Hitchens and I love him.
In fact, I died for him.
And that's really where Christianity goes.
Christianity is all about God coming into this world, adding humanity to his deity, taking the punishment that the creatures he created...
He took their punishment on himself, and then by trusting in him, we can not only be forgiven, but we can be given his righteousness.
Now, that is a great story, and it happens to be true, and yet people resist it.
It's not really about the evidence for God's existence, Dinesh.
It's about the evidence for their resistance that seems quite palpable, as you pointed out.
Nobody writes the unicorn delusion, but Richard Dawkins writes the God delusion.
And what you're saying is that even if Christianity were true, they still prefer to go their own way instead of God's way.
In other words, think of it, if Christianity were true, it follows that the Creator who made you obviously has a better plan for your life than you could devise on your own.
And yet, the atheist, the rebel says, no, even if Christianity is true, I've got my own way figured out better and I want to operate independently of God.
I don't want to be under the scrutiny and the sovereignty of God.
I want to go it my own way.
I mean, I think part of the beauty of Dante's Divine Comedy and so on is he takes the atheist at his own word and he goes, okay, if you want to go your own way, that's how you end up far away from God, which is another definition of the word hell.
God is essentially granting your wish.
God is giving you your choice to be really far away from him.
That's right. That's what it is.
Separation from God. God's not going to force anybody into heaven against their will.
Amazing stuff. Frank, thank you so much for joining me.
This has been very stimulating.
Love to have you come back sometime.
I've been talking to Dr. Frank Turek.
Follow him on X at Dr.
Dr. Frank Turek, T-U-R-E-K, the website, crossexamine.org, and the book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
Thank you, Dinesh. Abraham Lincoln was accused of being, to use a modern phrase, a conspiracy theorist, for alleging a combination, a coordinated effort,
by four prominent Democrats, Stephen Douglas, Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and two presidents, the sitting President Pierce and the subsequent President Buchanan, To do what?
A coordination, a conspiracy to nationalize slavery.
And Lincoln said this is...
He didn't say this is where we are.
But he said this is where we are headed.
And of course, Douglas ridiculed, pooh-poohed, dismissed this as a fantasy.
And so did other Democrats in Lincoln's day, and so do many scholars today.
They say Lincoln was obviously exaggerating here.
Lincoln had no evidence for these claims.
I want to actually introduce the evidence that Lincoln did have.
And first of all, there was a correspondence between the president-elect Buchanan.
Buchanan had just been elected, and he had a correspondence with one of the justices of the Supreme Court.
And the correspondence was over the issue of slavery and over the issues that were ultimately resolved in the Dred Scott decision.
So think about it. This would be similar to the newly elected Biden in 2020 corresponding with the justice of the Supreme Court on what to do in an upcoming case.
Now, Buchanan and Tawny were evidently in communication.
Buchanan was very closely connected to Pierce, because who was Pierce?
Pierce was the outgoing Democrat.
Buchanan was the incoming Democrat.
So this would be like, Pierce is sort of like Obama, and Buchanan is like Biden.
They're obviously closely connected.
They're in the same party.
One is succeeding the other.
So you've got the court.
Connected to the presidency, and then you've got Douglas, and Douglas is promoting a version of the same position, which is popular sovereignty, in the legislature.
So what Lincoln is saying is, isn't it a fact that these are, well, if not the four horsemen of the apocalypse, they're all riding in the same direction.
They all know each other.
They all communicate with each other.
And so I don't have to prove to you that they all had a meeting on a given date to show you that they are pushing for the same outcome.
And what is that outcome?
Well, the outcome is really twofold, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturns the Missouri Compromise, The Kansas-Nebraska Act basically establishes popular sovereignty.
Every territory decides for itself if it wants slavery, yes or no.
Let's remember the fight is over the territories.
It's not right now about the states.
The Supreme Court comes along in the Red Scott decision and says that neither Congress nor any state has the power to regulate slavery in the territories.
So in other words, a slave owner can take his slaves into the territories and those slaves remain the property of the slave owner and neither Congress nor any other state has any say in the matter.
So, this is what Lincoln has in front of him.
He's got the Dred Scott decision.
He's got the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
And Lincoln goes, kind of like, what's next?
What is the logical next step?
Well, the logical next step is to say that not only can Congress not regulate slavery in a territory, but Congress cannot regulate slavery in any state either.
And moreover, slave owners are free to take their slaves not just into a territory, but also into a free state and treat them as property over there.
So in other words, the free states themselves have no power, even in the free states, to restrict the ownership of one man by another.
And Lincoln says if you do that, then basically slavery is legal throughout the country.
And free states have no ability to overturn that because that is held to be a constitutional imperative.
So, now what does Lincoln have to say about all this?
He's not only predicting that this is where things can go, that's obviously part of it, and that's the part where Lincoln is accused of being a conspiracy theorist, but Lincoln is also sort of arguing against this, and this is the essence of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
What is Lincoln's position against allowing this?
of popular sovereignty to govern how the slavery issue is divided.
What is Lincoln's objection?
Now Lincoln summarizes popular sovereignty in a very memorable way.
This is part of the genius of Lincoln.
He can take a relatively complex idea and state it in a single line that is so memorable that you not only remember the line, but you can see how the line perfectly expresses the content of the idea.
Here's Lincoln, summarizing what popular sovereignty means.
He goes, it means that if one man, and Lincoln italicizes one, chooses to enslave another, and another is italicized, No third man shall be allowed to object.
And the word third is also italicized.
So what is Lincoln saying?
Lincoln's saying that popular sovereignty ultimately says that slavery is a matter of group choice.
So if the group decides, let's just say in this case it's Kansas, Kansas decides we want to have slavery.
That means that one man, a slave owner, can own another man or enslave another man and no third man is allowed to say anything about it.
Why? Because the whole scheme has been ratified by the collective decision of this territory, in this case Kansas, to allow this arrangement.
So that's what Lincoln is saying.
One person is taking away the liberties of a second and And every third, fourth, and fifth man must remain silent.
Because this is taken to be a right.
Notice, by the way, that this could be applied exactly to the meaning of the word pro-choice.
Because if we're talking about the abortion context, I can summarize the pro-choice position very much in Lincoln's terms.
That if one person chooses to kill another...
No third man, and in this case the third man could even be the dad, is allowed to object.
So Lincoln beautifully summarizes what is at stake.
And by the way, Debbie and I sometimes talk about this with regard to pro-life.
One of the reasons that the pro-life issue is proving to be a tough one, a liability even at the polls, is that there isn't moral clarity over what is really going on.
What is really going on is not control of your body.
It is ultimately claiming full sovereignty, including the right to kill another person, another body, that happens to be inside your body, but is not the same as your body.
And so, the left...
We'll obfuscate this as much as possible, denying that there is another person involved, denying that there's an independent DNA, denying that under conditions of modern technology, the other person could be extracted from your womb and live independently, apart from you.
And yet, you're claiming that this is a, quote, right to control my body.
And so we need this kind of Lincolnian clarity about what's going on, because once you accept what's going on, The whole pro-choice position collapses because nobody could possibly say, oh, I have a three-year-old.
It's completely dependent on me.
In a sense, the three-year-old is almost an extension of me.
Therefore, I have the right to, you know, go to Puerto Rico and leave my three-year-old unattended so the police will find my three-year-old dead and covered in feces.
I'm actually describing an actual case from the United States.
I think the case occurred, was it Michigan?
Just a few days ago, and the woman got life in prison.
Why? Because that is murder.
You can't do that. So once you accept the full humanity of the three-year-old, admittedly, the three-year-old is not an independent.
They're not an adult.
They don't have full civil liberties.
But on the other hand, they are human.
What else could they be? And the same would apply to a fetus in a womb.
A fetus in a womb is a distinct human being.
And this is what Lincoln is saying here, that a slave is a person.
A slave is a human being.
A slave may not have civil rights, because civil rights are conferred by society.
But a slave does have natural rights, or basic human rights.
And that includes, in the most basic sense, the right not to be enslaved, not to be owned like property by another human being.
So this is the essence of Lincoln's position.
And the implication of it, which I'll develop further later, is that Lincoln is saying that if you're willing to take away the rights of the slave, then what makes your rights so secure?
What if someone comes along who is bigger and stronger, has more power than you do, and they grab you?
And they choose to enslave you.
On what principle are you going to object?
Why are they wrong to do what they're doing when it's being done to other people?
So in other words, Lincoln here is talking about the fact that either we defend human rights against this kind of captivity Or we admit that there are no human rights.
People are not entitled to any kind of basic protection against enslavement.
And that would imperil, Lincoln insists, the rights of the white man, no less than those of the slave.
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