Dinesh D'Souza - IRYNA AND GEORGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1165

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Sept. 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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IRYNA AND GEORGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1165

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	Coming up, Irina Zarutska and George Floyd.
	In both cases, a video sets off a national fire storm.
	I'm gonna contrast the left's reaction to the video of Irina's killing with its reaction to the video of the killing of George Floyd.
	Very revealing.
	I'm gonna argue that Qatar plays a very deceptive double game in the Middle East and Israel is rightly having none of it.
	And Pastor Andy Woods of Sugarland Bible Church in Texas joins me.
	We're going to talk about something kind of whimsical, how he is using AI to answer questions based on his writings and sermons.
	If you're watching on X or Rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	I want to talk in this segment about Irina Zarutska, the young Ukrainian woman who was brutally murdered on a train in North Carolina.
	And also George Floyd.
	Because when you think about these two cases, they are similar in one way and dissimilar in another.
	They're similar in that in both cases you have a powerful juggernaut of national outrage.
	The dissimilarity is that the outrage is coming from opposite directions.
	The case of George Floyd, the outrage from the left.
	Now, many of us were outraged also, at least initially.
	And we were outraged by what we saw on the video.
	The video spoke for itself.
	But as more details came in, um my view, views on the right became more nuanced.
	Uh we realized that George Floyd was himself uh a thug, he was a criminal, uh he was being apprehended for good reason by the cops.
	Uh and um whether or not Chauvin went too far, whether he applied too much pressure, we also realized a little later on that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose.
	He did not die because he was choked to death.
	So there's a public mythology around Floyd created by the left's propaganda machine, and Debbie and I were talking in the way to the podcast, she's like, those guys have a propaganda machine like nothing else.
	And so you've got all these, oh you know, Pelosi and Chuck Schumer all, you know, taking a knee, this ritual of self-abasement, the mayor of um uh what was it uh Minneapolis, I guess, crying at the casket, uh statues to George Floyd, all of this disgusting public paraphernalia.
	And now you have an incident of a very different kind.
	Because here, we're not dealing with a cop who is trying to...
	Uh restrain a bad guy.
	We're talking about a young woman, and I want to put the whole incident somewhat into um slow motion here.
	Because, first of all, if you've looked at some of the photos of this young woman, Irina Zarutska, she's some sort of an influencer, or she is a model, or she is somebody who I mean, she is actually a very stylish person.
	And she's got all these pictures and videos.
	But if you notice, she was an artist, oh, Debbie says she's an artist.
	There you go.
	But if you notice on the train, she is not dressed like that.
	She is dressed down, which is to say she's got like um she's got uh very loose, comfortable clothes kind of pulled over her, she's got a cap on, her hair is put up and ducked, tucked in.
	Uh, she's wearing sunglasses or glasses in order to sort of mute her her appearance.
	So she is taking protective measures.
	That's worth noting.
	And yet, this uh thug approaches her right from behind, just brutally kills her.
	Uh, and what's heartbreaking is you can hear her like panting or gasping for life on the video.
	She essentially holds onto her neck and her head droops down, almost like uh, you know, when you see sometimes on the nature channel a deer that's being mauled, you can actually see the cheetah eating the deer from the from the side.
	And what is the deer doing?
	Nothing.
	It's just standing there, its eyes really big, and eventually its eyes close and it slumps down.
	That is basically Irina Zarutzka in this video.
	And the other thing worth noting is that you've got these people around her.
	By the way, I'm sorry to say, mostly black, and uh, and if you look at them, they are they're kind of looking away like, I don't want to see this, I got nothing to do with this, I'm not part of this, I'm not gonna get involved.
	And a certain measure of outrage has to be directed at those people as well.
	Now I recognize, and uh Debbie and I were talking about this also.
	I said, look, these are people, they're inured to hardship, they're anure to violence.
	There's probably one in every two or every three black moms was at a son go to prison.
	They see drive-by shootings.
	So a little part of you becomes desensitized.
	I recognize that.
	Nevertheless, no one, I'm not even asking for people to confront the thug because he's a big guy, he's got a knife.
	I mean, what can you really do, right?
	Unless you have a gun, uh, you're going to by and large only do harm to yourself, but you could at least call 911, you could at least administer aid, you can at least apply a tourniquet or probably a scarf, try to stop the bleeding.
	Maybe it wouldn't do any good, but you should at least make the attempt.
	They do not make the attempt.
	Uh, and so the whole episode is a kind of snapshot of urban violence under the aegis of the left and of the Democratic Party.
	Now, the left is throwing its usual kind of indignant fit.
	Van Jones um says, you know, people are saying that this is a racial crime.
	People are saying that we know he did it because she's white, and he says, there's no evidence of that at all.
	It's race mongering, it's hate mongering, it's wrong.
	All right.
	Uh, I suppose you could say that you've got a black thug killing a young white woman and motive unknown.
	But let's look back at the George Floyd incident I mentioned earlier.
	Do we know that Derek Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he attempted to restrain George Floyd?
	No.
	There was in fact a trial about this.
	Was there any evidence presented, even attempted, to show that he was a racist or a bigot?
	No.
	The prosecution didn't even allege that.
	So, and yet that was treated from start to finish as a racial incident, as an emblem of the kind of violence that white cops direct toward black uh victims or toward black um people that are stopped and and and wantonly or unjustly arrested.
	Well, I think that by the same token, the tragic death of Irina Zerutskaya, uh Zarutska becomes an emblem of the fact that there is just way too much black thuggery going on among young black males.
	Uh now, admittedly, the majority of the violence of young black males is directed at other young black males or other members of the black community.
	That is in no way to diminish or excuse it.
	Um, but it is also notable that in this case, the guy even said something to the effect of, I got a white girl, I got a white girl.
	He repeated it, and it's on the video.
	Now, Rachel Bade, who is a journalist with one of the political, one of the mainstream, she's like, the full video is so difficult to watch.
	How does this happen in this country?
	How?
	Well, I guess I'll tell you how.
	Um, democratic appointed DAs, Soros DAs, uh catch and release, no cash bail, democratic nominee judges, academic apologists for urban squalor,
	Hollywood, which basically glamorizes this kind of violence, social workers who coddle burgeoning rapists and killers, and journalists like you, Rachel Bade, who routinely make excuses for black thuggery, or who try to downplay it when it's violence that's being perpetrated by blacks, especially against against whites.
	The um the motive of um the killer, I think can safely be ascribed to race.
	Once again, let's try to apply a standard equitable sort of template.
	Imagine if Derek Chauvin had applied his pressure to the neck or to the throat of George Floyd, George Floyd dies, and then Derek Chauvin walks around saying, I got the black guy, I got the black guy.
	Do you think people would be in any doubt about what his motives are?
	Would people say, you know, Derek Chauvin motive unknown?
	No, this would be a hate crime and labeled as such.
	And yet, here in this case, there is a great reluctance.
	Most of the media didn't cover it.
	Then they started covering it, but they covered it like MAGA taking advantage of a video, bag of stirring up the passions, MAGA pouncing, this kind of thing.
	Uh and this is the way that the press is trying to absolve itself for its role in this matter.
	Now, I want to I want to close this um this um opening segment by talking about something far more subtle.
	Uh I was uh quoted rather prominently yesterday in the New York Times in an article about this uh topic.
	Uh here is uh my quotation.
	The reason for the media silence is racial.
	If the killer were white, this would get coverage.
	Of course, if it were a white assailant murdering a black victim, then it would be front page headlines everywhere.
	So this is an accurate quote by the New York Times picking up on something I posted on social media with one exception, and that is in my quotation, the term white is written with a small letter, W small W, white, and black is written with a small B, black.
	I consistently use these terms.
	There's no reason to capitalize them.
	Uh if I say I saw a green car, I wouldn't capitalize the word green.
	If I said Dinesh is brown, uh a brown-skinned man from India, I wouldn't capitalize the word brown, so there's absolutely no reason to capitalize the word black.
	But what the New York Times does is it takes my quote and it keeps white in small letters and it capitalizes black.
	And not only that, but as you look at the article, the word black appears about seven or eight times.
	The term white appears more than once.
	White is always small, black Is always capital.
	And this may seem like a minor thing, but I want to suggest that this itself is a metaphor, is a symbol, synecdoche, for the double standards that have brought us into this current situation.
	The genuflecting before the black man, the idea that black is beautiful.
	We all should tiptoe around the blacks.
	The blacks are great.
	The blacks can't do anything wrong.
	Or if they do anything wrong, it's not their fault.
	We made them do it.
	Society made them do it.
	History made them do it.
	All of this nonsense has got to stop.
	And maybe one of the benefits of this incident, disgusting though it is, deplorable though it is, tragic though it is.
	Here is someone posting on social media, uh, Evan Barker.
	Watching her cry alone with her hands holding her face is one of the saddest things I have ever seen.
	So this woman is really touching people's hearts.
	Debbie mentioned to me that she was looking at the obituary for Irina Karutska, and she says, you will just be amazed at the number of people offering condolences, offering support.
	It will at least hopefully be some consolation to her family that in this new country, which was not her original country, she's originally from Ukraine, but she apparently loved America, wanted to make her life here, and guess what?
	Unfortunately, that life is tragically uh cut short.
	But I really hope that this her death is to some purpose, which is to say it's a game changer when it comes to Americans, not just right wing Americans, not just MAGA, not just Republicans, but all Americans in in our perceptions of what has happened to our country and what needs to be done to stop this crime wave in its tracks.
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	I want to talk about Israel's strike on Hamas in Qatar.
	Here's Debbie a couple of moments ago.
	She's like, some people say cutter.
	And I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's really Qatar.
	And she goes, why do people say cutter?
	And I go, for the same reason that you say squirrel.
	Now, Debbie and I have been having this debate in which I say squirrel.
	And she says squirrel.
	More like a whirlpool, but squirrel.
	And uh, and I go, no, Debbie, it's pronounced it's it's a phonetic word, squirrel.
	Anyway, we will we will take a pause on the squirrel debate and turn back to the strike um by Israel, which I'll I'll discuss in a moment.
	We're actually getting ready, by the way, to go to Israel.
	We're um excited to be going for a um wonderful archaeological event in the city of David.
	It is the uh opening of this sort of biblical super highway, as our friend Zev Ornstein calls it.
	It's the pilgrimage road that Jesus walked on, and many others, by the way, from the pool of Siloam, where you the Jews would take a ritual bath or ritual cleansing and walk uh kind of a half a mile to the temple.
	And we're talking here about the the great temple.
	Now, of course, we have the Temple Mount, which has nothing more than the old retaining wall of the old temple.
	But the temple was originally built by King Solomon.
	This is about 1000 BC.
	That temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, was rebuilt then in the uh fourth or third century BC, but it was it was reconstructed by King Herod.
	Uh King Herod, who, by the way, died uh in about 4 BC, right around the time right after uh Jesus was born when Jesus was very, very, very young.
	So all of this is history come to life, the pilgrimage road recently discovered and and intact to a surprising degree.
	So all of this very exhilarating, wonderful, we're looking forward uh to it.
	And of course, we are also um eagerly anticipating the reception of our new film.
	We're gonna be connecting with some people in Israel about it, but it is coming to the big screen here in America October 6th and October 8th, so the two days right alongside October 7th, and uh see it in the theater if you can, because we make very cinematic movies.
	This is a movie that has spectacular, quote, war scenes, it has brilliant um uh sets.
	Uh it is riveting from start to finish.
	It's very um it's inspiring, and the music will be glorious.
	And so if you can see it in the theater, that would be fantastic.
	Now it's going to be in about 400 theaters, so it won't be everywhere.
	And uh theater tickets will be on the website for sale right around the middle of the month.
	So they're not available yet, but look for them.
	The website is The Dragons, plural, the Dragons Prophecy film.
	And uh then the very next day, October 9th, streaming uh DVDs will be in your mailboxes that day.
	So you can order the streaming, you can order the DVD right now.
	So go to the website, check it out, the trailers on there, there's bios of Jonathan Kahn and me.
	There's a brief summary of the storyline of the film.
	It's very cool.
	The Dragon's Prophecy film.
	Now, this strike on Qatar is stirring the pot, and you have a procession of European leaders, uh, backed up, of course, by the usual suspects like Bernie Sanders.
	This is a violation of international law.
	Um, this is a violation of the sovereignty of Qatar.
	This is the point that I want to dwell on for a little bit.
	Just like 9-11, and of course, we're coming right up on the anniversary of 9-11.
	We're almost at September 11th.
	What's today, honey?
	The 10th?
	Today's the 10th, so tomorrow.
	Uh, but 9-11 was not a an Afghan operation.
	It was conducted out of Afghanistan.
	That's where they had the monkey bars, that's where the terrorists trained.
	Uh, They came from Afghanistan in that sense.
	But they weren't actually from Afghanistan.
	Most of them were from Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia.
	Al Zawari was Egyptian.
	Bin Laden, of course, was Saudi, and there are other prominent Pakistanis involved.
	So the in fact, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, if I'm not mistaken, was a Muslim of Pakistani origin, which is to say of Indian uh origin, but obviously in Pakistan.
	Now, what this means is that when an attack like that is organized, the United States has every right to strike back at Al-Qaeda wherever it is.
	Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, that was, of course, think about the bin Laden raid.
	The United States struck inside of Pakistan to get rid of bin Laden.
	And we didn't attack Pakistan, we attacked Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
	And exactly the same thing is happening here.
	When we think about October 7th, and by the way, in our film, October 7th is brought to life like nothing else.
	I've never seen a, and it's not a recreation.
	We didn't have actors.
	We could have done it that way.
	We did not do it that way.
	We have actual footage of October 7th.
	Some of it taken by Israel, but most of it, the vast majority, taken by Hamas, taken by the terrorists themselves.
	They were proud of it.
	Some of them live streamed it.
	All these videos have been collected.
	Debbie's been collecting it actually for two years straight.
	And we were able to use this video in a very powerful way in this film.
	So you will actually kind of see October 7th.
	You'll be there.
	And it is the necessary prelude to opening this film.
	Now, the um the October 7th attacks were launched out of Gaza.
	But were they planned in Gaza?
	No.
	Were they funded by Gaza?
	No.
	The attacks were extremely well done.
	Terrifyingly so.
	And that's because the planners were some pretty big powerful entities, countries, institutions outside of Gaza.
	These are entities in Sudan, in uh Yemen, in Turkey, in Iran.
	So Turkey has a powerful Islamist or Islamic radical movement, and so does, of course, Iran, and which isn't in the control of the mullahs.
	So Israel, in hitting back at the perpetrators of October 7th, had every right to strike at Iran, had every right to paralyze the source of these attacks.
	And now the role that Qatar plays in all this, not Qatar, but Qatar, is that Qatar is a massively rich country.
	One of the one of the ruling members of Qatar once said to somebody that we know, um, who has been in one of our films, a source that we trust, and he said, the Qataris believe that the Jews are not the chosen people.
	They believe that they, the Qataris are the chosen people, because all they have to do is wave their hands and oil comes out of the ground, and it's tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
	So these people are like, we don't have to lift a finger for life.
	We have been blessed by Allah.
	Allah has made us stinking rich.
	And the Qataris use that influence to do what?
	Well, in America, they use it to make donations, donations with strings, by the way, to universities, to control the media, to control the think tanks by funneling donations to them.
	But they also house Hamas.
	Uh a number of the Hamas leaders hang out in Qatar, they go to restaurants in Qatar, they live in luxury dwellings in Qatar.
	So while Qatar acts like we have nothing to do with all this, we are we are a peacemaking nation.
	We try to play the role of the middleman.
	We are an honest broker.
	This is not the case.
	Qatar is not our friend, it's not on our side, uh, and yet it's very much meddling in our affairs very directly, as it is a kind of uh, I would say it offers hospitality to Hamas.
	And Israel knows This.
	There's a rather chilling scene after October 7th of all these Hamas leaders.
	It's on video.
	And what are they doing?
	They're giving thanks to God for October 7th.
	And where are they doing that?
	In a kind of luxury apartment or in a hotel.
	I'm not really sure the precise location, but the location is in Qatar.
	I'm happy to report that Israel has launched strikes on all the men depicted in those videos.
	Those are, in a way, the bigwigs of Hamas.
	They often don't, they're not on the front line.
	They're not the ones who want to be shot.
	They're not going to come in a glider.
	They're not going to go running into a kibbutz.
	They send young 20-somethings and 30-somethings to do that dirty work for them.
	But they are the orchestrators.
	They are the masterminds.
	And as you know, even from the criminal law in this country, very often the mastermind gets the most severe penalty of all.
	Because the way to think about it is the plot would not occur if it wasn't for the mastermind.
	Nothing would be set in motion if the mastermind didn't say, listen, you drive the getaway car, you crack the code, you go steal the money, you shoot the clerk.
	So the mastermind is the force behind it all.
	And in that sense, we could say that the force behind it all was not in Gaza, but was in Iran and was also, among other places in Qatar.
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	Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict?
	Recorded in the Bible.
	The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
	What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
	Dinesh de Suza went into a war zone to make his new film.
	It offers a new way to understand October 7th.
	Israel, radical Islam, anti-Semitism, and biblical prophecy.
	Could the fate of the world of humanity itself be tied to this place?
	We came back to a land that was largely barren and empty, and we brought it back to life.
	And we're good to keep it.
	The Dragon's Prophecy.
	Isn't just about the Middle East.
	It's about you.
	Because without that Jewish foundation, there is no Christianity.
	Based on Jonathan Khan's international bestseller in theaters October 6th and 8th.
	Streaming and DVDs available October 9th.
	Get the film at the Dragons Prophecy Film.com.
	This film contains graphic violence of October 7th.
	Guys, I'm uh delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, actually a friend of my wife, Debbie.
	It's uh Dr. Andy Woods.
	He is the senior pastor of Sugarland Bible Church in Texas.
	He's also the president of Chaeffer Theological Seminary.
	He is a prolific author of a number of books.
	Um, book on Bible prophecy, I see, a book uh also on voting.
	And the website is Andy Woods Ministries.org.
	You can follow him on X at Dr. Dr underscore Andy Woods.
	And we're going to be talking about um ministry and AI.
	Ministry and artificial intelligence.
	Uh Pastor Woods, thank you.
	Really appreciate you uh joining me.
	And this is our first chance to meet online, so it's really a pleasure to meet you.
	Uh special honor to be here.
	I've been a fan of yours going way back.
	So thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Um let's talk about this uh issue of artificial intelligence.
	As you probably know, there is a segment of people, and and some of these are Christians, but some of them are just uh uh are just political types, and they are very freaked out by AI.
	They think that AI is uh the bane of the uh of the earth, they think that it's going to be the end of us.
	Uh they think that AI needs to be um watched very carefully.
	I'm not sure that they're entirely wrong, but I think what you're trying to show is that AI can be um a tremendous uh tool for good.
	Uh can you talk about how you kind of came across AI?
	How did you kind of encounter it?
	Um, and um, and how did you come up with this idea of connecting your ministry to AI?
	Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I'm in touch with their emotion.
	I mean, I have some suspicions about AI also.
	Yeah.
	But I think on the onset and support and understand that I'm not using it in the production side.
	I'm using it in the data retrieval side.
	And just to kind of make a long story short, uh, I'm the pastor of a Bible church.
	Uh, I've been there since 2010.
	I teach uh three different lessons per week.
	And so you can see how, in the course of time, a big database of sermons and transcripts and PowerPoints would build up.
	And so I have people that basically write to me, really from all over the world saying, hey, uh, you know, I'm I'm researching a topic, the virgin birth or whatever.
	Um what sermon did you cover that in?
	And I'm thinking, well, gosh, 2013, maybe, you know, so I'm going based on my memory.
	And uh it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I'm trying to put stuff together constantly, and I think in I quoted somebody back somewhere when, and I, you know, you just get you know kind of fuzzy on the details.
	So the bottom line is a couple guys in our church, you know, came to me, and this was before the technology had really evolved.
	And they said, Look, we we like you, we like your ministry, we like what you're doing, we see this issue of volume.
	So here's something where you don't have to search for a needle in a haystack.
	It the best way I can explain it is it it functions like an index in a book.
	You know, if you're researching something, you can do it the easy way or the hard way.
	The hard way would be to read the whole book.
	And most of us don't have time to do that.
	And so if we're researching something specific, we you know look for something in the index that would help us.
	So that's in essence how this functions.
	Uh you go to the search box, you type in your question, it thinks for I don't know, a few seconds, and then beautifully and masterfully after doing that fast search of your whole database, it pulls up a very well-written, easy to understand paragraph or a couple of paragraphs on what you've taught on a particular subject.
	And the best part of it is this it will take you to the exact sermon, whether it's audio, visual, and it doesn't just take you to the sermon, it takes you to the exact point in the sermon where you mention such and such.
	And so you click on it and voila, there it's it's there.
	And usually it gives you three or four sources.
	And then if that weren't enough, it gives you uh follow-up, you know, potential follow-up questions.
	And so I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to technology, believe me.
	But when I figured out what this could do, I mean, I was all in, and it just it just cut my workload down considerably in terms of answering questions, etc.
	I mean, I'm laughing because what you're kind of saying is that the AI is the world's expert on Andy Woods, even more so than you are, right?
	Because because you are limited by the reach of memory.
	Uh, You've produced all this work and you made an important distinction.
	You're saying, hey, listen, it's not like I say, uh, I gotta write my sermon on Jeremiah, you know, two verse 10 to 17.
	I'm just gonna have AI do it.
	You do your own production, you create your own content.
	But once you've done it and you've done a lot of it over the years, it becomes like an archive.
	And what AI does is it doesn't just ransack the archive, it knows how to put things together in a way that is true to your message, right?
	You've tested it out and you've discovered, hey, yeah, that is what I said, and it's not distorting my meaning in any way.
	Yeah, it's uncanny how accurate it is.
	And what little I've learned about it from our guys that built this is there's a way to program creativity.
	Do you want it more on the creative side or less on the creative side?
	And initially, not a lot, but maybe I don't know, one percent of the time, we were getting some answers back that were a little off, you know, what we believe.
	And so we just asked it to dial back on the creativity.
	And since we've done that, we've been very happy with the answers.
	Uh, we've been very happy with the amount of people once they see it, you know, they just rave about it.
	I mean, think of yourself.
	Think of all your debates, all your movies, all your books put into a system where I could go on there and say, what does Dinesh believe about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever.
	And boom, there it all is.
	And that's all this does.
	So I I'm not using it to produce, I'm using it for data retrieval.
	So you're right.
	That's an important distinction.
	It it works well for you.
	It would work well for me.
	I can think of some people for whom it would not work well.
	For example, people who have been constantly predicting the stock market, right?
	They're gonna be like, it's gonna go up, it's gonna go down.
	The last thing they want you to do is go back and check on their old predictions to figure out what their record was.
	You know, I encountered AI in a funny way.
	When we do our films, um, I write out the voiceover that's going to accompany the story.
	Uh, and typically I would record these voiceovers on my iPhone and send them in, and they would be kind of layered into the story.
	And once the film is fully put together, I go into a studio and I do the final VO, so-called the voiceover.
	But this time our our producer and our cinematographer goes, Well, you don't need to do that because AI knows your voice.
	I will simply create uh a voiceover for you using your voice.
	And it was eerie for Debbie and me to listen to basically my voice, uh, delivering these lines.
	Now, in the end, I still go into a studio and do it, but the AI is a placeholder, and you can see that this thing is going to break out in all kinds of interesting ways.
	Do you think that that in fact uh pastors and church leaders would do well to figure out ways to harness AI in positive ways because it can be a really powerful tool for the gospel?
	Oh, I I absolutely do.
	I, you know, technology is neutral.
	It's not inherently good or evil.
	It's just like water.
	I mean, I could use it to quench thirst.
	I could use it to drown someone.
	It just depends on how it's used.
	And believe me, I have a I have an antichrist uh belief system that there will be an antichrist one day, and uh this all this stuff is gonna fall into the wrong hands, but that's not today.
	You know, today I've got an assignment from God, which is to preach the gospel to all of creation, and he's put this technology in my hands, our hands, to do things that not even the apostles could do in terms of a worldwide reach.
	And I just think it's foolish to ignore it.
	It's like saying I don't like automobiles, so I'm gonna go back to horse and buggy.
	Well, technology is what it is.
	It weren't, you know, you can't get rid of it.
	It's here to stay.
	And let's use it for Good, you know, I understand people's fear that it can be used for evil.
	Uh, but it's it's it's a it's neutral, is what I'm trying to say.
	So let's take advantage.
	And I suppose one could even take that a step further and say, well, listen, if the bad guys are going to use the the weaponry of this technology for ill, it would behoove us to use this neutral tool uh to neutralize them.
	In other words, to counter the the bad messages and replace them with um with good ones.
	How has your church received it so far?
	Is it so new that it's a wait and see, or are people already like, let's jump into it?
	Let me see one what does Andy would say about whether my pet will be going to heaven or not.
	Right.
	Probably a topic you've been asked about at some point.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, initially you have to break through that false perception that people have of AI.
	You know, you've sold out, you've this and that.
	But once you explain to them, you know, that it's data retrieval like an index in a book, it's their their eyes kind of light up and they they give it a try.
	And maybe uh uh they've never used something like this before.
	I mean, I never had, and you just kind of warm up to it like you do any other piece of technology.
	So I had to, I have had to get through kind of an education barrier.
	And you have the usual list of you know, critics that are going to criticize no matter what you do.
	And you just have to kind of get over it and you know, put up with a few hits and few few rocks thrown your way, which is standard anywhere.
	I know people have thrown rocks at you, probably literally in terms and metaphorically.
	But uh you just say, you know, I'm ultimately I'm doing something good.
	This is helpful to people.
	And as you just kind of press through, the critics kind of start to dissipate.
	I had a mentor many years ago, and I once asked him, like, I said, what you you know, what do you expect of my work?
	Uh, what how are you trying to help me?
	And he goes, Well, I'm trying to multiply Dinesh.
	That's how he put it.
	And I think what I'm learning through what you're saying about AI is that it not only multiplies Andy Woods, but it multiplies your output.
	It multiplies your sermons, it multiplies the answers that you've given over many, many years to questions.
	It sort of brings uh the entire corpus of work that you have very painstakingly assembled really over a lifetime, uh, and it makes it easily digestible, easily available.
	And that that has to make that's it has to be a good thing.
	That must has to make you feel good that the stuff that you've done and worked on for so long is now readily available.
	Yeah, I kind of like to put it this way.
	It gives it gives it a shelf life beyond your immediate audience, you know, because when you put something together, you're thinking of your group and your congregation, etc.
	Well, with all this technology, all of a sudden uh that's not a barrier anymore.
	It wasn't just to your group, it was meant perhaps God intended it for other people as well.
	You know, it's like Paul, and I'm not comparing myself to Paul, of course, but he wrote a letter to the church at Rome called the Book of Romans.
	And probably when he wrote it, he had very little understanding how that book would be used over the last 2,000 years of church history.
	That's and I'm not putting myself at the same level as Paul, of course, but it's just an illustration.
	It's an additional shelf life beyond your original audience that you hadn't counted on.
	So it it's a it's a tool that can be used for good.
	I mean, the analogy really works because you're saying, in a sense, Paul wrote it to like 71 guys in Rome who were members of an or you know, the kind of one of the early Christian churches, and little did he know that hundreds of probably millions of people would be reading those letters all the way down to the down to the present day.
	Guys, I've been talking to Dr. Andy Woods, senior pastor of Sugarland Bible Church in Texas, also president of Chaefer Theological Seminary, the website Andy Woods Ministries.org.
	Uh Andy, thank you very much for joining me.
	Oh, what a joy to be here.
	And thank you for all you guys are doing in the the culture war.
	Much appreciated.
	Absolutely.
	I'm picking up in the introduction of my book Life After Death, The Evidence.
	And last time I talked about the fact that there is such a bemused incomprehension of the traditional belief in life after death that we are a little cut off from our ancestors, and we are a little cut off from the rest of the world.
	Now, how did we get cut off?
	How did we come to this weird point in modernity where we are, in a sense, strangers to those who came before us and those who are in the larger sense in the world around us?
	How did this chasm of understanding open up?
	Well, the answer is that we have seen in America and in Europe, Europe here, including Canada, including Australia, a new way of thinking.
	And I call this the enlightened people's outlook, like EPO.
	The enlightened people's outlook is the way that the sort of elite of society, the academic elite, the political elite, the social elite.
	This is the doctrine taught in the universities.
	You find it in the most kind of prestigious magazines and the electronic media.
	It's like the dominant ideology of elite discourse in the West.
	It shapes the minds of our children in ways that we are becoming increasingly aware of and also disturbed about.
	So I want to spell out this enlightened people's outlook, the EPO.
	I want to spell it out as it relates to life after death.
	So according to the EPO, there is no life after death, and it's a little bit silly to even suggest otherwise.
	We have this life, and that is it.
	And how do we know this?
	Because science has shown us that our true nature and our only uh true nature is the same as that of other animals.
	It's mortal.
	Uh and that means we are mortal creatures, and the EPO would add, we are we are material creatures in the world, creatures with material bodies.
	And when these bodies disintegrate, well, there is nothing left to live on.
	So here's a philosopher Owen Flanagan.
	Once we die, we are gone.
	As for the soul, well, the EPO, the enlightened people's outlook, holds that science has kind of looked and looked and looked and found, well, nothing.
	There is no soul inside of us.
	Uh, and truth be told, it's not even clear that we have any kind of free will.
	We might have the belief that we do, but like other erroneous beliefs, this belief can be shown to be false.
	Free will, I'm now quoting the biologist Peter Atkins, is nothing more than the organized interplay of shifts of atoms.
	As chance first endows them with energy to explore and then traps them in new arrangements as the energy uh leaps naturally and randomly away.
	So this is free will according to a sort of biological definition of it.
	So the EPO, the enlightened people's outlook says, you may you may not like this, you may not agree with it, you may reject it on religious grounds or moral grounds, but guess what?
	Reason and evidence compel us to accept them.
	The enlightened people's outlook derives its confidence from the findings of modern science.
	And according to this view, science is really the best way, if not the only way, to get reliable knowledge.
	Religious claims exist, but they're based on faith.
	Scientific claims by contrast are based on reason, on evidence.
	So while the religions of the world will make competing and contradictory claims, the EPO reminds us, hey, look, is there a scientific, is there a Chinese science?
	Is there a Middle Eastern science or an Indian science?
	No, there's only science because science deals in facts, and facts are facts, as I think it was Aristotle who said fire burns the same way in Greece as it does in Persia.
	That's a fact.
	And so those who would deny science this role, I'm not quoting the physicist Victor Stenger, had better do so on stone tablets rather than the printed page and via smoke signals rather than the internet.
	Science is here claiming the mantle of progress, of technology, of the future.
	And says the EPO, we trust our lives to science every day.
	You get on an airplane, you're trusting that some physicists and engineers have gotten their mathematics right.
	And so, says the EPO, you gotta accept the conclusions of science because they are the closest thing to real knowledge that we are ever going to get.
	Now, what about religion?
	Well, according to the EPO, religion is a kind of nuisance.
	Enlightened people condemn religion, not just for making false claims about life after death, but for invoking those claims to endanger world peace, fostering ignorance, promoting intolerance, social division, conflict.
	Once you're talking to skeptics in this area, it's not long before they bring up Jim Jones, they bring up the Islamic radicals on September 11th.
	Here's Richard Dawkins writing, by the way, a few days after September 11th.
	Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
	So here's a prominent biologist saying we better accept that death is the end, because otherwise we are falling into the spooky claims of religion.
	And it's not only wrong, but according to Dawkins, it's the kind of thing that leads to a 9-11.
	It produces dangerous consequences and violent behavior.
	Let's focus, these people say, this EPO crowd.
	Let's just focus on the problems facing us in the world today.
	Let's not worry about the afterlife.
	Now, who are these people who have these views?
	Well, some of them call themselves skeptics, uh, some of them call themselves rationalists, some of them call themselves agnostics, uh atheists or new atheists, but the even the new atheists, there's really nothing new about them.
	They are the um they are the descendants, and I would say the regurgitators.
	In fact, they are not as good as the atheists of the 19th century.
	Uh, atheism really came to the forefront of Western civilization in the 19th century, and um it was associated with people like Darwin, Huxley, uh, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, um, Jean-Paul Sartre.
	Now, Heidegger and Sarth obviously uh are 20th century uh thinkers, but they they straddled the um the bridge between the 19th and the 20th century.
	So these are the atheists who are standing behind the atheists and skeptics of today.
	And uh and these are people who don't just reject God, reject the afterlife, but they have a philosophy of their own.
	And I'll I'll kind of close today by spelling out what that philosophy is.
	It is the philosophy of reductive materialism.
	Now, by materialism, I don't mean, you know, he's a materialist, all he cares about is money.
	All he wants to do is go shop at the mall.
	I'm not talking about materialism in that sense.
	I'm talking about materialism as the philosophical position that the material reality of the world is the only reality.
	So materialists hold that there's only one kind of stuff that exists: material stuff.
	We know this because material objects are objective.
	They can be verified by the techniques of science.
	Immaterial stuff, if you think about it, is subjective.
	Feelings are immaterial, but they're your feelings.
	They may not be my feelings.
	And I don't even know if you have them.
	If you say you have them, I might believe you or not.
	I don't know for I don't have an objective way to verify what your feelings are.
	Pain, the emotion of pain is immaterial.
	Ouch, ouch, ouch.
	But uh, while that signals to somebody else that you are feeling pain, you in fact may not be feeling pain.
	You can jump up and down as an actor and go, ouch, ouch, ouch, you're not actually feeling pain.
	So there's no objective way to verify what your actual sensations are.
	Uh, and if they differ from the way that you're reporting them.
	Even human beings and other living creatures are collections of atoms and molecules.
	If you look inside of us, we're made up of material substance.
	Inside of the material substance, you have atoms and molecules, and underneath those, if you break those down further, what do you get?
	You get quarks, you get electrons.
	So quarks and electrons are all that exist in the universe.
	There is nothing else.
	Now, reductive materialists do not deny that there are subjective or immaterial experiences, but they just say, look, those things are just caused, or they are expressions of purely material forces.
	So if you have a sensation, I feel love, they go, well, yeah, but that's that's really nothing more than electrochemical impulses inside your brain and inside your nervous system.
	You say, Well, I have a soul.
	They go, Well, not really.
	Your soul is just another word that describes some operations of neurons in your prefrontal cortex.
	So everything ultimately goes down to or reduces to.
	This is the reason we use the phrase reductive materialism.
	It means that you can take even immaterial things, ideas like justice, but they can be reduced to the physical operations inside of your brain.
	Even your mind is nothing more than a kind of uh outflow and a um a penumbra of your physical brain.
	So this kind of philosophy leaves no room for any kind of claim that there's a reality outside of the physical world, that there's a reality outside of our physical sense perception, and there's no reality outside the reach of modern science.
	So if reductive materialism is true, then belief in an immaterial God is a fiction, and life after death is impossible.

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