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Oct. 22, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:15
THE RED AND THE GREEN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1195
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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?
The dragon's prophecy.
Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
Coming up is Zoran Mamdani, a human Islamic victory arch getting ready to position himself right above New York City.
I'll consider the prospects of him winning the mayoral race and what that would mean for New York and for the country.
Pastor Andy Woods of Sugarland Bible Church in Texas joins me.
We're going to talk about what's wrong with replacement theology.
If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumba, 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 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.
Guys, the Dragon's Prophecy is now in its third week, approaching its third weekend, coming up.
I'm actually going to be heading to Austin to do a couple of big podcasts.
And then we're going to Dallas for an event with Prager University.
So, and also sometime with the grandchildren, I'm happy to say it's going to be great.
Danielle is going to sit in for me on Thursday and Friday.
So tomorrow and then also the next day.
If you haven't seen the film, this weekend is a great time to do it.
And go to thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
It's streaming on Rumble.
It's streaming on Salem Now.
It's streaming on the Epoch Times-related platform called GJW.
You can check it out there as well.
Or DVDs.
Here we go.
Order your DVDs.
A great way, by the way.
I'd recommend you do both.
You stream it and then you order DVDs to share.
And also for, hey, it's not too early, Christmas presents.
Christmas is coming up.
What could be better in a stocking instead of giving people just rubbish that you find here and there?
This is something that will have a big impact on someone you give it to, someone who might not otherwise see it.
So here's the DVD.
You can order them online from the website, which will, by the way, link you both to Salem and also to Amazon.
The DVD has been doing fabulous on Amazon.
It was number one of all DVDs.
I'm not sure if it still is, but I believe it's number one of all documentaries for sure.
And so make sure you get it.
All right.
I want to talk about a bunch of things.
And then, by the way, I'm going to have Pastor Andy Woods, a really respected and renowned theologian, talking about replacement theology.
So stick around.
You don't want to miss this.
This is a discussion that's going to be at a different caliber than you normally find in social media or in the normal sources.
Let's start by talking about Zoran Mamdani.
The election is coming up.
It's just, what, a couple of weeks away, if even that.
And it looks like this guy is going to become the mayor of New York.
Now, the reason for this is not because Mamdani has an outright majority.
He doesn't.
He's got about 40-some percent.
And then Andrew Cuomo has like 29% or 30% thereabouts.
But then there is a third candidate, Curtis Slewa, who has something like 20 or 19 or 20%.
So here's what I'm getting at.
In theory, if Curtis Lewa were to drop out of the race and Curtis Lewa's votes went to Andrew Cuomo, Cuomo could win.
And this would be a way to stop Mom Dani.
But the issue to me is actually fairly complicated.
Normally in politics, it's not so complicated.
Politics generally functions by the doctrine of the lesser evil.
And the idea here is that very often in politics, you're choosing between two candidates, and neither of them are that good.
But one is worse than the other.
So you take, even if you have to, the bad guy to get rid of the worst guy.
Or you take the pretty good guy over the pretty bad guy.
Or you take the really good guy over the somewhat good guy.
So you're making a choice of how to make the best option in a given practical situation.
Now, it may seem that in this case, Mom Dani is worse.
And therefore, it makes sense for Curtis Lever to drop out.
Here's the problem with that.
And that is, number one, Andrew Cuomo has made no overtures to the right.
This guy is himself absolutely horrible.
This is a guy who might do a few things to protect, for example, entrepreneurship in New York, tax rates in New York, wealth distribution in New York.
In this respect, economically, he probably would be better than Mom Dani, better in the sense that he is no good.
He's a left-wing Democrat.
So we're choosing here between a left-wing Democrat, very bad, and a socialist, economically, of course, worse.
But this mode of reasoning misses a key point.
And this key point, by the way, was pointed out by Curtis Lewa himself in a very interesting interview where basically Curtis Lewa said, look, you know, you want me to drop out.
Everyone's telling me drop out so that Cuomo can beat Mom Dani.
He goes, first of all, if I drop out, who's to say that all my votes, which are by and large, Republican votes, right-of-center votes, Orthodox Jewish votes, who says that those people are going to vote for Cuomo?
They hate Cuomo.
Cuomo was the one who locked him up and got him fired and killed their family members in nursing homes.
This guy was absolutely disastrous.
Has he ever done a mea culpa?
Has he ever taken it back?
Has he ever said he's sorry?
None of it.
So you're trying to get people to now line up behind that guy on the sole pretext that if not, we get Mom Dani.
And then he goes on to make a second point, which I think is even more important.
And that's this.
He goes, listen, Mom Dani then becomes the millstone around the necks of the Democratic Party.
The point being that Mom Dani will ruin New York, quite likely.
Now, he can't do it all by himself.
Even as a mayor, one person cannot pull down the entire city.
He's not Samson in that regard.
But he will do a lot of damage.
It's fair to say.
It's going to be perilous to be a hedge fund manager in New York.
Jobs are probably going to start fleeing.
People will move to Florida.
Wealth is going to pull out of New York.
Probably the problem of crime is going to get even worse.
The Islamic penetration or infiltration of New York is going to continue.
New York's going to become more like London.
All of this, I am sorry to say, is going to happen.
It is the predictable result of what?
Well, it's a predictable result of a lot of New Yorkers voting for this guy.
I mean, New York has evidently not learned its lesson, right?
You had 9-11, admittedly a quarter century ago, but one would have thought that that would be unforgettable.
If you listen to the rhetoric after 9-11, we will never forget.
Well, alas, many people in the Big Apple have forgotten.
Of course, the Big Apple has brought in a lot of other people, many of them foreign-born.
They were not here at the time of 9-11.
They don't care about 9-11.
Some of them probably cheered when 9-11 happened.
And guess what?
These are now Mom Dani voters.
They're in New York.
They're enthusiastic about somebody like Mom Dani coming to power.
So this is going to be New York's loss.
But maybe it will also be the country's gain because Democrats are now going to have to either disavow Mom Dani, he'll become a serious figure within the Democratic Party.
And that carries its own risk.
They push away the progressive left that's very pro-Mom Dani.
Or the Democratic Party moves toward Mom Dani.
And in that case, it becomes essentially unviable as a national political party.
Difficult for them to win the midterms on a Mamdani agenda.
This is not an agenda that travels very far outside of New York.
Maybe it'll work in New York, maybe it'll work in San Francisco, one or two other blue cities, but probably not anyplace else.
Probably not even in a blue state, not even in Illinois, not even in Connecticut, not even in Maine or New Hampshire, maybe not even in Colorado, maybe not even in California.
Mamdani is what Debbie, my wife, I think very wittily calls an Islamic human victory arch.
And what she's referring to is the Islamic practice of building victory arches.
When the Muslims conquered Constantinople, now called Istanbul, they essentially, Muhammad the Conqueror rode his horse into the Hagia Sophia and they converted this great ancient Byzantine church into a mosque.
When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, they went to the holiest site in Judaism and Christianity, namely the site of the temple, the Solomonic Temple, and they put the Dome of the Rock and now the Al-Aqsa Mosque adjoining that.
So that's an Islamic victory arch.
Well, Mamdani is a kind of walking Islamic victory arch.
And he is calling on the people of New York to enshrine him to kind of preside over the city in much the same manner.
The thing about Mamdani is that he combines the two worst things that we're dealing with in the world, the cultural left and the socialism of the cultural left on the one side and the Islamic radicalism on the other.
He represents both.
He brings the two wings together.
In a sense, you could say that he is a kind of hybrid of AOC, i.e., socialist, with Ilhan Omar, i.e., radical Muslim.
This is the red-green alliance that many people talk about.
Normally, we talk about two different kinds of people who are coming together, but Mamdani himself represents both.
I think he's just as comfortable in the quarters of Democratic Socialists USA.
This is a guy who could be at a communist hangout, fit right in, speak their language, be accepted by them as one of them.
And then he could go with a bunch of radical imams and sit down with them, and they would welcome him and they would all eat halal together.
Remember, Mamdani kind of eating rice with his hands, and this guy will be at home in that environment as well.
So, in some ways, I think he represents what the left has in store for America.
And for this reason, the story of Mamdani is bigger than the story of just New York.
Now, a couple of the things I want to touch on.
One of them is this theft of the jewels at the Louvre.
I don't know if you followed it, but it's a daring heist done by just a few people in a few minutes, something like eight minutes.
The whole thing is pulled off.
All these royal jewels going back to the time of Napoleon have been stolen.
And there are a couple of things I want to highlight.
Number one, a year ago, the Louvre very proudly appointed its first female head of security, first woman to head security at the Louvre.
So the Louvre went full-on DEI, and they were proud of it, and they were boasting about it.
And a year later, the jewels are gone.
Well, there you go.
And the other thing about this is, as I look at it more carefully, you know, one of the beautiful bejeweled crowns was apparently just either dumped or tossed to the side and was found by the French authorities broken, almost as if to say, this is France.
France has taken its own cultural heritage, and you can interpret this as sort of broadly and symbolically as you want, its own history, its own lineage, its own cultural treasures, and it has like defiled them.
It has defiled them with its carelessness, with its lassitude, with its decadence, with its willingness basically to degrade and desecrate its own past.
And so this crown lying in a ditch broken really represents what has happened to France as a country.
I don't know if the burglars were trying to send some sort of a broad symbol like this, but that is actually one way that you can read it.
I also want to say a word about some good news out of the courts, and that is that the appellate court has allowed Trump to deploy the National Guard in Portland.
You might recall that a judge had blocked this.
A judge basically said, no, that, excuse me, Trump is, Trump has a wrong understanding of the facts.
And this is Judge Corinne Immergut.
Trump has a wrong understanding of the facts.
There really is no emergency, and therefore there's no cause to have the National Guard.
Well, the appellate court comes in and goes: first of all, the district court has no right to substitute its own opinion of whether there's a threat or not for the president's opinion.
In other words, judges are not legislators.
The president gets to make a determination of whether this is a problem.
And the court doesn't get to say, well, you know what, in our opinion, the president is wrong.
And I, judge, Karen, whatever her name is, I'm right.
The appellate court goes, that's not how the law works.
That's not what your job is as a judge to make, to essentially play president yourself.
The second thing is that the appellate court pointed out, they said that this district court, this judge, Corinne Immergut, has given a false account of the turbulence in Portland.
She made it sound like, well, there's really not much going on over here.
There's no reason.
And the appellate court goes, actually, there is a reason.
This was a site of considerable domestic disturbance.
And they go on to say, going back to the founding era, presidents would use federal militias to shut down this kind of domestic disturbance, just like has been happening in Portland.
And therefore, says the appellate court, we think that if this case were to go to trial based on the facts that have been presented to us, the Trump administration is likely to prevail.
So what does this mean?
The appellate court is not ruling on the merits here, but essentially what happened is that the U.S. district judge in Oregon had said, I think that the city of Portland is likely to prevail, and therefore I'm issuing an injunction stopping Trump in the meantime pending trial.
I'm going to stop him from being able to send federal troops.
And essentially what the appellate court has done is reversed that and said, no, yes, you can have your trial.
Yes, you can adjudicate the merits of the case.
But we think the opposite.
We think the Trump administration is likely to prevail.
Therefore, this injunction has lifted.
And Trump, in the meantime, for now, is licensed, is completely free to send federal troops right back into Portland.
When I first came to America around 1980, I had $500 in my pocket.
That's it.
Now, if I'd been really frugal and not spent a penny of that money, what do you think it would be worth now?
What could it actually buy now compared to what it could buy in 1980?
Well, the answer, less than $130.
Now, why is that?
Because the U.S. government, through the Fed, is constantly printing money and devaluing your money.
When the government prints money, there's more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.
So guess what?
Money goes down in value.
Money buys less.
The Fed has been added since 1913.
That's why a dollar today can buy just what a few cents could buy in 1913.
And the government continues to print oceans of money.
It really never stops.
Now, an ounce of gold reached a high of $850 in 1980.
It's worth now around $3,900 an ounce.
So historically, over time, we see gold has gone up and up in value.
Dollars have gone down and down.
And what about in the last 12 months?
Gold is up over 40%.
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Guys, one of the issues that has sprung to relevance in social media and beyond is a topic that previously many people hadn't heard of at all, namely the topic of replacement theology.
And as I see it out there, replacement theology is sometimes used in contradistinction to covenant theology or to dispensationalism.
There are a lot of sort of theological terms being tossed out there.
And one of the points I've tried to make here on the podcast and elsewhere is: hey, it'd be really nice to have pastors who are trained and informed about these things way in on them.
And I have one joining me today.
It's Andy Woods, Dr. Andy Woods, senior pastor at Sugarland Bible Church in Texas, also president of Chafer Seminary.
You can follow him on X at Dr DR underscore Andy Woods.
And the website, very worth checking out, andywoodsministries.org.
Andy's the author of multiple books on Bible prophecy, on voting.
I also had him on the podcast a little while ago to talk about how he's being a very cutting-edge guy, using or at least opening up the ability of people to use AI to excavate knowledge out of his old teachings and sermons, all very cool stuff.
Andy, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I want to dive into the theology here.
And perhaps the best way to begin is just to ask you: what is replacement theology?
What is it purporting to replace?
Yeah, well, the term replacement theology, the formal term for it is something called supersessionism, which is a big scare word to a lot of people, but it has a pretty easy meaning.
It's the idea that the church, the body of Christ, an entity that really started in Acts chapter 2, has superseded.
That's where you get the word supersessionism, has superseded all of the promises essentially that God has made to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in what we as Protestants call the Old Testament.
It's better said Hebrew Bible.
The Jews, the Hebrews would call it Tanakh.
As you look at, as you read through that, and you don't have to be a theologian to see it, it's just reading comprehension.
You see these incredible promises that God has made to Israel as a nation.
You know, for example, in what's called the Abrahamic covenant, going back to Genesis 15, they're promised a tract of real estate, you know, from really the Nile to the Euphrates.
And today everybody's talking about from the river to the sea.
And I'm thinking to myself, are you kidding?
That's small potatoes.
Israel's going to have a track of real estate going from modern-day Egypt to modern-day Iraq.
And so, you know, the rest of the Hebrew Bible builds on that.
Every single Old Testament prophet other than Jonah predicts this return of the Jews, the Hebrews, to their ancient homeland, where God is going to start to, you know, fulfill those promises, recycling them from the diaspora, the four corners of the earth.
So when the New Testament starts, it doesn't change that meaning at all.
The church is not a replacement for Israel.
It's just an interruption in God's past and future work with Israel.
But supersessionism says no, no, no.
All of Israel's terrestrial earthly promises have been transferred to the church.
And they use a very allegorical, symbolic, non-literal method of interpretation, you know, to get that to work.
For example, there's a prophecy in Ezekiel 47 about the millennial temple, and it talks about the river flowing from Jerusalem into the Dead Sea and bringing everything in the Dead Sea to life biologically.
And I take that, you know, very literally.
It's never happened.
And a supersessionist would say, oh, no, that's just the, you know, the birth of the soul, you know, when someone is born again, you know, kind of thing.
So that's essentially what they do.
And they end up cutting off Israel as a nation, as a distinctive nation, as a distinctive work in God's future purposes.
And they think that the church, they call us the new Israel, even though there's no New Testament verse that teaches that.
They call us the new Israel.
And so we have superseded Israel.
And very sadly, that's a theology that started to dominate in the fourth century through the writings of Augustine.
And it's very dominant in most of Christendom today.
So that's the simplest definition I know how to give it.
No, I think a good way to try to examine all this is for me to play the devil's advocate a little bit or maybe to play the supersessionist advocate.
Sure.
And what if the argument goes something like this?
Well, surely every Christian would agree that Jesus, although coming out of that Jewish soil, nevertheless creates something totally new.
He is, in fact, the fulfillment of the Old Testament.
And so perhaps to a degree, we could say that that Old Testament is now fulfilled, which is to say completed, which is to say done.
And Jesus inaugurates this kind of new era or this new dispensation, not to mention the fact that you now have, you do have some Jewish followers of Jesus, but the majority of the Jesus followers are now Gentiles.
And the Jews as a group in the majority and certainly through the centuries have rejected Jesus as the Messiah.
And therefore, and this is the big therefore that I want you to focus on, that they have somehow cut themselves off.
They have forfeited those Old Testament promises and pledges, not to mention they forfeited their own salvation.
How would you assess this comeback?
Well, I mean, two things.
First, Jesus and his statements.
You know, if they were right on what Jesus said, I guess I would be on board with that.
I mean, if someone can show me the verse that says, thus saith the Lord, you know, everything in Hebrew Bible given to the patriarch Abram and his descendants has been canceled, then I guess I would jump on board with supersessionism.
But the truth of the matter is they can't find the place in the Bible where Jesus said that.
In fact, I could show you explicit New Testament references where Jesus does not contradict what Hebrew Bible says.
He reaffirms it.
Just one example.
He tells the disciples at the regeneration, you know, the coming of the kingdom, you will, you have followed me, you disciples will reign over the 12 tribes of Israel.
And so that's a very explicit promise, not a cancellation, but a reaffirmation of the land promises that are mentioned in the Old Testament.
You might remember, what was it, James and John?
They were fighting with each other in Matthew 20 around verse 21 over the who's going to be the greatest in the kingdom.
And, you know, Jesus doesn't say, oh, you silly fellows, don't you understand that there is no future kingdom?
The kingdom is now and I'm reigning in your hearts.
He doesn't say that.
He questions their attitude, but he never questions the fact that there's going to be a future kingdom and where Israel's promises will be fulfilled.
So I could just show you countless things like that in the teachings of Jesus.
So I would disagree with what they're doing regarding the reading of Jesus.
The other way I'd answer that is, you know, have they gone so far as to commit a sin that cuts them off from God's covenantal purposes?
That is impossible because the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional.
When God entered into that covenant with national Israel in Genesis 15, he put Abram to sleep.
And God alone, as represented by the oven and the torch, passed through these severed animal pieces.
And that's what you call in the ancient Near East a covenant of malediction, where the person entering the covenant is saying, if I don't fulfill exactly what I said I would do, then let me be severed, like these parallel animal pieces have been severed.
And that's what God is saying.
He's saying, if I don't do exactly what I promised to do in Genesis 15, then let me be torn in half.
And that's why, as you move through the Bible, no matter how sinful Israel becomes, and they become very sinful.
You get to the days of the eve of the Babylonian captivity.
They're sacrificing their own children into a fire to satisfy a God named Molech.
And God is about to send them into discipline, the Babylonian captivity, as a result.
But on the eve of that, God says through the prophet Jeremiah in the heart or height of all of this disobedience, and you'll find this in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37.
As long as there's sun, moon, and stars, Israel will always be a nation before me.
So if you want to get rid of Israel, don't aim your rockets and bombs at Israel.
Aim them at the sun, moon, and the stars, because God has made an unconditional promise, and you can't erase an unconditional promise.
And so, you know, this argument of the Jews behaving badly, yeah, we can find many examples of that in the Bible and in history, but it doesn't erase an unconditional covenant.
So I hope that helps a little bit.
And I suppose you would go on to say that, you know, we rely on God's promises of salvation based upon accepting Jesus as our Savior.
And in some way, even the credibility of those promises becomes suspect if we find that God is a kind of rescinder or taker back of old promises.
So the credibility of God is kind of hanging in the balance here.
Now, what I've seen is I find some people kind of throwing these kinds of things at me.
There are harsh comments that Jesus makes, where he says, for example, probably the most famous is the synagogue of Satan.
Jesus uses the phrase synagogue of Satan.
And the idea here is, well, there you go.
Jesus is repudiating the Jews.
He is denouncing the Jews.
He's distancing himself from the Jews.
And in fact, this is really why the Jews targeted him.
This is why they went after him.
This is how they got him.
How do you make sense of those kinds of passages?
And how should we understand them?
Well, there's a big difference between discipline and relinquishing ownership or possession of something.
And really, the way to understand this is how the Abrahamic covenant, about 2000 BC, Genesis 15, interacts with the Mosaic covenant given at Sinai.
And that's a full 600 years, roughly six centuries later.
And most people, what they do is they take those covenants and conflate them.
But they're two different species entirely.
Genesis 15, which is what we were talking about a little earlier, gives to Israel unconditional ownership of her blessings.
The Mosaic covenant outlines the principles for divine discipline when the nation acts up.
So even with our own children, you know, we discipline our children, but we don't disown the children.
And so when you see these very strong statements, Old Testament, New Testament, even synagogue of Satan a couple of times in the book of Revelation, you have to filter that through the right covenantal lens.
Those are disciplinary statements.
They're very strong.
You know, they're very harsh.
Israel was in the first century nationally a big problem for the early church.
They opposed them constantly.
But that's the Mosaic covenant talking, which outlines the principles for divine discipline, which people can read all about in Deuteronomy 28.
There's blessings for obedience, verses 1 through 14, curses for disobedience, verses 15 through 68.
And that's how to filter those synagogue of Satan type statements.
But you have to understand that typically when you see a statement like that, that's very harsh.
A few verses later, the Lord is going to come along and reaffirm his ownership of the nation of Israel.
So Paul the Apostle in Romans 11, verse 28, makes this statement.
He says, Look, currently Israel is your enemy, speaking of the problems that they caused for the early church, but they are beloved on behalf of the patriarchs or the fathers.
So, under discipline, yes.
Can they be a problem?
Yes.
Is God going to wash his hands of them?
He can't because of the Abrahamic covenant.
So, hopefully, that helps a little bit.
Let's close out on what I think is an important biblical event that bears on all this.
And I don't know if you agree with me.
It has to do with the meeting that Paul has with the apostles to look at the question of to what degree Gentiles who become followers of Jesus need to somehow become Jews first or need to become Jews in order to follow the Messiah.
And as I understand it, the kind of conclusion of this discussion, in which there were some disputed points of view, is: look, the Gentiles don't have to do circumcision.
They don't necessarily have to follow the Sabbath and some of the other dietary and other rituals.
But guess what?
They have to do everything else.
They don't get to jettison the creation account.
They don't get to jettison the Exodus.
They got to keep the Ten Commandments.
They got to follow the teachings of the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets.
And this is really why the entirety of the Old Testament is incorporated into the new.
In other words, if you just look physically at our Bible, if what the supracessionists said was true, presumably we wouldn't even need an Old Testament.
Presumably, we would just take a very slim New Testament, which is about what, one-fifth or one-eighth of the entire Bible, and we'd be done with it.
But that's not the Bible we have.
That's not the Bible that defines Christianity going back 2,000 years.
So comment, if you will, about this meeting between Paul and the other apostles.
And second of all, do you agree that the discussion that we're having is not about dispensationalism.
It's not about Christian Zionism.
It's actually about the mainstream of Christianity.
Yeah, yes.
Well, concerning the Council of Jerusalem, which is what you're talking about there in Acts 15, it comes right after Paul's first missionary journey into southern Galatia.
And what is happening is he's going into these synagogues there in southern Galatia, modern-day Turkey, and he's not getting much of a hearing from the Hebrews.
And so he goes to the Gentiles and preaches the gospel of grace through Christ.
And he has this huge reaction.
And many, many people are getting what we would call saved, justified before God through faith alone.
So then he goes back to Antioch, the sending church there on the southern tip of Israel.
And they got to make a decision.
What are we going to do with all of these Gentiles that are saved?
Because the way it's worked for 1,500 years is you have to go under the law of Moses to walk with Yahweh.
You might remember Ruth did that coming from Moab.
She said to her mother-in-law, Naomi, Your God will be my God, your people will be my people.
And so they're making that kind of a decision there in Acts 15.
And very interestingly, in a book where there's a lot of visions and direct words from God, no word was spoken.
And so they had to reason from the only Bible that they had, which is what we call Hebrew Bible, Old Testament.
And they saw in the book of Amos, James brings this up, that, look, you know, when you look at the kingdom that's coming, Gentiles are going to be full-fledged citizens.
So let's let them in now.
And so that, and by the way, us Jews, we haven't done a great job keeping the law of Moses.
How do we think these Gentiles are going to do much better than us?
So that was the decision that was made.
You don't have to go under the law of Moses to be a member of the church.
Now, we are under a legal system, but it's a different legal system.
It's called the law of the spirit, you know, the law of Christ.
You mentioned the Ten Commandments.
Nine of the Ten are repeated, you know, in the New Testament.
So I think that's what's happening there in Acts chapter 15.
So I have great respect for the law of Moses and the institutions of Judaism, but I don't teach it as something that's mandatory that you have to go under in order to walk with God today.
And then the second part of your question, I'm so glad you brought this up because what our detractors constantly talk about is they call it Schofield Zionism.
And they just keep repeating this over and over again, making it sound like, gee, no one ever thought the way that I'm communicating here until a guy named C.I. Schofield came along and deceived everybody.
The truth of the matter is Schofield, the only thing he did in his Bible study notes, and it's just a, it's just a, it's just a man-made translation with notes, is he encouraged people to take God's promises concerning the nation of Israel literally.
I mean, that was the man's only crime.
And so the laity started to read those notes and they started to take God at his word.
Oh my goodness, there's going to be a restored nation of Israel in God's plan, and we can't allegorize or symbolize this out of existence.
So when people are coming along and they keep saying dispensational Zionism, Schofieldism, their problem isn't with Schofield.
He was just a human being.
Their problem is with God because all Darby, Schofield, et cetera, are trying to do is take God at his word.
And so I guess that's how I'd answer this perpetual charge of, you know, dispensational, Schofield-y, Schofieldianism, Zionism.
Guys, fascinating stuff, as I think you'll agree.
And not only this, but Andy Woods has a sermon that he gave really a few years ago.
So it was not in this immediate context, but it's called The Seven Things That Are Wrong with Replacement Theology.
I tweeted the link out on my X account, but you can probably also get it right off andywoodsministries.org.
And I know that Andy put it out as well.
So on X at DR Doctor underscore Andy Woods.
Check it out.
It's really going to be informative.
It's going to go even deeper and wider than we've covered today.
We just wanted to give you a little appetizer of what you can expect.
Guys, I've been talking to Andy Woods, senior pastor of Sugarland Bible Church, president of Chaefer Theological Seminary.
Andy, as always, thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah, great to be here.
Thanks for taking this issue on and congrats on the new movie.
Hey, I hear you're showing it in your church.
We sure are.
And it's going to be shown this coming Sunday evening, Sugarland Bible Church.
Of course, we can't put it on the internet because of copyright, but we bought the license, I think it is, which allows us to show it to a larger group.
So we're hoping a lot of people will show up and take in that very good movie.
Well, let me mention also that there is a tab on the movie website, the dragonsprophecyfilm.com, for churches to do screenings.
We've organized it through a group that does this kind of thing.
They're very good at it.
So thank you, Andy, for doing it.
I urge other people to ask your church to do a showing.
It's a great way to share the message.
Andy, once again, really appreciate it.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
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We are now in a section of my book, Life After Death, The Evidence, where I'm clearing atheist or skeptical debris.
And what this means is taking atheist objections, skeptical objections, and they might be very clever.
It may not be obvious how to answer these at first glance.
And that's the point of the chapter, to answer them and to show you why these objections are invalid.
And today we're going to take on an objection that is sometimes used by professors, with students, by skeptics, with young people, but it can be used against anyone.
And it's pretty effective.
It goes something like this.
You know, most of us believe that, let's say, we're Christian or we're Jewish.
And we go, well, Christianity is true.
And we believe it to be true.
And we hold it to be true.
But by consequence of holding it to be true, we consider other religions to be either false or at the very least partly false.
And our religion is true from the bottom to the top.
Now, here comes the atheist objection.
How do you know that your religion is right and the other religions are wrong?
After all, your religion has a holy book, but the Muslims have a holy book.
The Hindus have some holy books.
Everybody has a holy book.
The Mormons have a holy book.
So why does your holy book, based on revelation, purported revelation, have a leg up against somebody else's holy book, also based upon a purported revelation?
As a professor might put it to a student, have you actually conducted a comparative survey of all the religions of the world to figure out which one is right and which one is wrong?
No, you haven't done that.
You basically are a Christian because you were born in Dallas, Texas, or you're born in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But you know what?
If you had been born in Kabul, Afghanistan, or in Turkey, well, you would have been born Muslim.
So the point here is that we are born into an environment we often seem to adopt.
People all over the world do.
In India, most people are Hindu.
India is a Hindu country.
In Muslim countries, people generally accept Islam.
So the idea here is that our accepting of these religions is not based upon their truth.
It's based really kind of on geography.
It's based upon where we happen to be born.
And to push this argument even further, in one of my debates against an atheist opponent, and at this point I don't recall who it was, my opponent basically said, Dinesh, you're an atheist.
And I go, well, what do you mean?
And he goes, well, there have been many, many gods who have been put forward in the grand sweep of history.
He says, do you believe in Krishna?
I go, no.
Do you believe in Buddha?
No.
Do you believe in Baal or Thor or Poseidon or Arura Mazda?
I go, no.
Well, he goes, well, you're an atheist.
Well, you're at least an atheist in the sense that you reject 99% of all the gods.
And then the atheist very smugly goes on to say, well, the main difference between you and me, Dinesh, is that I would just add your God to this long list.
So we are back now to the atheist key question, which we're setting about to answer.
If there are so many religions, what makes yours true and the rest false?
Now, this question has a direct bearing on life after death.
It isn't just about religion or about God in general, because it looks like the picture of life after death that we get from different religions seems to conform to the kind of local cultural environment.
So let's look at the Islamic conception, for example, of heaven.
Well, it's like an oasis.
It's like a beautiful pasture in the middle of a desert.
You've got palm trees.
You've got dates.
By dates, I mean the dates that you eat, the fruit.
You've got a clear drinking water.
You've got, well, in some visions of 72 virgins and so on.
American Indians thought of heaven as a kind of happy hunting ground that is populated with deer and buffalo.
The Vikings had a picture of life after death where they do battle in the day and win great glory and then they enjoy these glorious victory feasts and revels at night.
And you can see right here that these appear to be the product of various hopes and expectations, cultural hopes and cultural expectations.
So what the atheist is really getting at here is that, and I hinted at this before, all of this religious talk is a kind of poor version of scientific knowledge.
It is a, it reflects cultural biases and prejudices.
Maybe to some degree, it reflects wishes for this is how I think I would like to live here, and so I'm projecting it onto another world.
And the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in our debate November 2008, this was in Pueblo, Mexico, he goes, religion is a sort of a, like a helping plant.
It kind of was necessary.
People had to search for explanations about the world, and they came up with some really bad ones.
But then science came along and provided better ones, rational explanations.
And this view, by the way, is not just held by Dennett.
We find the astronomer Carl Sagan having argued this while he lived, physicist Steven Weinberg and others.
Now, let's address head-on this geographical critique that our religious views are the product of our upbringing and where we grew up.
I think that this is in fact based upon a fallacy.
So let's state the fallacy very clearly.
The idea here is that the religious diversity that we see around the world undermines the truth of religious claims because you have people in different cultures upholding their own cultural view.
But here I think that we have to say that the presence of all this disagreement in no way implies the absence of truth.
In fact, just because you learned your Christianity in the Bible Belt tells you absolutely nothing about whether your Christianity is true or false.
It could be true, it could be false, but the location of where you picked it up has no bearing on the matter at all.
So the atheist here is guilty of what can be called the genetic fallacy.
Now, when we think of the word genetic, we think it has something to do with like genes or ancestry.
I don't mean genetic in that sense.
I mean genetic in the original sense of the word, which refers to origins.
And what I'm saying really is that the origin of your idea tells you nothing about whether it's true or false.
The source of your idea is meaningless when it comes to ascertaining the truth value of your idea.
You come up with an idea.
Let's say, for example, that the sun will come up tomorrow morning and you can say, I got it from the Bible.
That's a source.
But the sun does, in fact, come up in the morning.
And in this case, it doesn't matter where you got the idea.
It could be that your uncle told you.
It could be that you surmised it on your own based upon the fact that the sun came up yesterday and the day before.
It could be that you read it in a book.
It could be a children's book or it could be a sophisticated book.
The point is it doesn't really matter where you got it.
Either the idea is true or the idea is false.
Think of it this way.
Let's say you're raised in New York.
You're a lot more likely to believe in Newton's inverse square law or Einstein's theory of relativity than if you were raised in Papua New Guinea.
Probably if you took a poll, far more people in New York believe it, and far fewer people in Papua New Guinea believe it.
But does this have any bearing on whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity is accurate or not?
No.
It doesn't matter at all.
It has nothing to do with where you learned it or where you were born or what is the probability that people in one place versus another believe it.
Someone from Oxford, England is more likely to be an atheist than someone from Oxford, Mississippi.
So what?
What does that tell you about whether atheism is true or false?
Nothing at all.
So the point here, and the point is not about religion.
It's not about life after death.
It's a general point, which is that the geographic roots of your beliefs have absolutely no bearing on the validity of those beliefs.
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