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Oct. 30, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:03
THE POPE AND THE JEWS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1201
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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, there's a new scandal, and it's a big one perpetrated by the Biden regime.
It's called Operation Arctic Frost.
I'll tell you what that's all about.
I'll explain how Pope Leo's latest statement on anti-Semitism clarifies that replacement theology is anathema to Catholicism no less than to Protestantism.
And Reverend Chris Toma joins me.
We're going to talk about his new novel about get this, a vigilante priest.
Wow.
If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to this podcast.
I'd appreciate it.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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'ASouza podcast.
We have a new revelation about the left, courtesy or thanks to the indefatigable work of Senator Charles Grassley and his committee in the Senate.
And what he has uncovered is pretty astounding.
Now, to some degree, we have come to expect shameful or maybe shameless is a better word, behavior from the Biden administration.
We know all about the political targeting.
We know all about the prosecutions of January 6th, the FACE Act, the pro-lifers, the prosecution, the multiple prosecutions of Trump.
And yet, in those cases, atrocious though those prosecutions were, there was a predicate.
And by predicate, what I mean is there was some precipitating event.
Even if the case was bogus, you could say, well, they shouldn't have raided Mar-a-Lago, but there were, in fact, classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
So that's what I mean when I say there's a predicate.
Or on January 6th, there were January 6th protesters who were in the Capitol, unauthorized, and some of them did, in fact, break windows or get into fights with cops and so on.
So, this is the predicate.
In the case of the FACE Act, the government argued, perhaps implausibly, but nevertheless, that there were some efforts to block, to obstruct, to disrupt the activities going on in these Planned Parenthood or pregnancy centers.
But what if you have an operation, and we're going to call it Arctic Frost, because that's what the Biden people called it, where you target a wide number of Republican elected officials, senators,
conservative organizations, conservative media outlets, and you get a sycophantic judge to sign off on secret electronic surveillance of all these individuals and groups without a predicate.
We're talking about people like Ted Cruz, we're talking about other senators, we're talking about a wide range of conservative organizations.
And what advanced knowledge do you have that these people did anything?
None.
So, what you have here is a phishing expedition aimed at doing what?
Finding evidence of an attempt to somehow do election rigging, either in the 2020 election or in subsequent elections.
They were looking for election crimes.
What election crimes do they find?
None, because there were none that were being committed, at least not on our side of the aisle.
But the disgrace is the massive wiretapping operation, which was so bad that when it came to Senator Cruz, for example, Jack Smith subpoenaed Cruz's cell phone records from ATT.
Why?
What was Cruz being accused of?
What did Cruz even do to warrant this?
Nothing.
And ATT was ordered by a judge, and guess what?
It turns out to be a judge of a familiar name, one of the obstructionist judges, one of the judges that's gone after Trump.
Yes, you guessed it, James Boseberg.
And he even banned ATT from telling Cruz that his records were being subpoenaed and secretly obtained by the government.
Boseberg apparently told ATT that if you tell Cruz about it, Cruz would destroy evidence and imperil national security.
Absolutely outrageous.
So, needless to say, Cruz is on the warpath.
I saw this morning Senator Ron Johnson is on the warpath, other senators on the warpath.
But my message is it is beyond time.
It's not about time, it's pastime to have real punishment and real accountability.
And I'm talking about things like arresting judges.
I'm talking about things like filing charges.
I'm talking about impeachment.
I'm talking about bringing full public attention and disgrace on these people and going after their law licenses and going after their credentials.
In other words, using all the available tools, not just of law, but also of politics.
I'm talking about hearings.
And so I know Brandon Gill, my son-in-law, is already on top of this because I saw he posted this morning that he is going to be re-upping his impeachment bill for Judge Boseberg.
It's already drawn up, by the way, but now he has a lot more to put into the text as to why this guy needs to be ejected from the bench.
This is a big deal.
Now, when I say it's a big deal, there's a little bit of a problem here because, as you know, there is this big infighting going on within MAGA over Jews and over Israel.
And sure enough, when there is a need for unity, and I quite agree that it's going to take all of us to be able to crush the left.
And here is someone I know, not well, but Rachel Bovard.
I really need the political right to understand how existential Arctic Frost was to our entire movement.
I literally don't care who Tucker had on his podcast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So Rachel's view here seems to be, let's kind of all come together and focus on destroying the left or holding the left in this case accountable.
But the line that kind of threw me off was the statement, I literally don't care.
Because what is going on here is that the so-called kind of groiper group, which in a sense is now headed by Tucker, I suppose you could say by maybe Tucker is the co-chair along with Candice and people like Nick Fuentes and others are kind of in this groiper wing of the MAGA movement.
They're the ones that have created this schism, right?
They're the ones who have basically said repeatedly, and Nick, I'm sorry to say, was again today, he's like, you know, people like Josh Hammer and Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro need to leave the country.
Leave the country?
Well, they're U.S. citizens.
Are you trying to deport U.S. citizens because they're Jews?
So is this the kind of irresponsible rhetoric that now is going to become the mainstream of the Republican Party?
Or to put it somewhat differently, is this rhetoric that we're supposed to like forget and ignore?
And hey, hey, Ben Shapiro, hey, Josh Hammer.
You know what?
We've now come across some Arctic frost documents.
So don't really worry that there are people who want to basically get rid of you.
In fact, who have even talked about killing you?
We need to kill the Jews.
That's not even an overstatement.
Now, Tucker will never say something like that.
Tucker's goal here is to make statements like that okay to say.
So Tucker would say, well, I'm just asking him a question.
Yeah, he wants to kill the Jews, not me.
Of course, when he said that, my reaction was, this is very interesting.
So this kind of poisonous nonsense, I have never seen in my adult life.
And I certainly have never seen it have any kind of hospitality in the Republican Party or on the right.
Look, in earlier years, people would sometimes ask me, well, Dinash, you know, you're a person of color.
Have you ever experienced like racism and bigotry and so on?
And I've been happy to be able to answer, absolutely not.
Even on the precincts of the far right, where I've been all over the right for 30 years, and the right is not racist.
And I would have experience of it if this were in fact the case.
But now what I ask you is this.
Could a conservative Jew say the same thing about the right right now?
Answer regrettably, no.
The conservative Jews would have to say, you're making us extremely unwelcome, extremely uncomfortable.
You are clearly actually trying to push us out of the movement, if not out of the country.
And to me, this is a complete moral disgrace.
And so, you know, Debbie and I were talking about it, and Debbie was like, Well, Danesh, you know, you never even used to be all that pro-Israel.
This was just not even your issue.
Well, it is my issue now.
It's like become my issue, partly because I'm just outraged, not just even about the foreign policy part of it, which is the October 7th and the Hamas, but just the absolute invective that is being legitimized on the right.
And really, Tucker here is the kingpin of it.
I mean, I am, some people are like, well, why don't you lay off Tucker?
Well, the reason not to lay off Tucker and the reason not to lay off Tucker for me as a Christian is because if anyone who's Jewish takes on Tucker, all Tucker's followers basically come out with invective.
You're a kike, you're a Jew, go back, leave our country, your era is over.
You know, take your hook nose and go away.
How many shekels are you getting from Israel?
I mean, this is what you get, right?
You can't really throw this at me because I'm not Jewish.
So it's like we have a responsibility, those of us who are not Jews, to call this stuff out.
And it is worth saying, because there's no way to avoid this, that Tucker has actually become the leading anti-Semite in the United States, if not the world.
And I think he has taken on, it's one thing to even be the leading anti-Semite.
If you were like, you know, cursing the Jews to your family and telling your kids how evil the Jews are, that's one thing.
But I think there's the Tucker project, which is to legitimize anti-Semitism and make it mainstream.
And I think Tucker is confident that he can do it.
I think he in some ways overweighs his own influence.
But I think the Tucker scheme is this.
I've got J.D. Vance in my back pocket.
I've got Turning Point in my back pocket.
J.D. Vance is basically a creation of me.
I helped him get to the Senate.
I recommended him to Trump for VP.
He owes me big time.
He will never reneg on me.
And as for Turning Point, I am the new Charlie Kirk.
I'm stating all this stuff rather bluntly because that is in fact the best way to say it.
I do think that it is important for the mainstream of the GOP and the mainstream of the MAGA movement to reject this anti-Semitic trajectory.
Not to do it is not only to fracture, I think in very destructive ways, the GOP, not only to drive lots of good people away from our camp, but ultimately to make the Republican brand absolutely toxic.
Now, in some ways, you could say, well, the Democratic brand is anti-Semitic.
They've got Ilohan Omar.
They're just all endorsing Mamdani at the last minute.
So the poison is over there also.
But my point is, do we want it to?
In other words, are we going to succumb to a situation?
I mean, when I came to America in the late 70s, both parties were pro-Israel.
They agreed at least on that.
They disagreed about the Soviet Union.
They disagreed about taxes.
They disagreed about a lot of other things, the contras, but they agreed about Israel.
And so think of how strange it would be over this 40 years that the Democratic Party now goes anti-Jew and anti-Israel, and so does the Republican Party.
So the Republican Party once again agrees with the Democratic Party, but this time not about our alliance with Israel, but on the need to cut that alliance, and not on the positive contributions of Jews to the world, but basically agree that the anti-Semites have a point.
And even if Hitler went too far, nevertheless, he went too far in the right direction.
Now, the Pope, I will say, and I'm very happy to see this, has come out against all this.
And it's important that the Pope does it because, first of all, some of these Groipers, including, by the way, Nick Fuentes, are Catholic, and they think that Catholicism is a perfect remedy for what they see as the errors of Protestant dispensational theology, a kind of attempt to lay out the unfolding of the last days and so on.
Well, the Pope is not into any of that.
The Pope is not a Protestant.
The Pope is not into dispensational theology.
And yet, here is the Pope affirming, by the way, a papal encyclical from 60 years ago, but it's being re-inaugurated, re-celebrated now.
The encyclical is called Nostra Etate.
I want to just read a few sentences from it because they're so critical.
A spiritual bond ties the people of the new covenant, Christians, to Abraham's stock.
Thus, the Church of Christ acknowledges that according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets.
Notice how he's anchoring the New Testament in the old.
And he's saying that this is not just some accident of history, one just happened to follow the other.
He's saying this is part of God's quote saving design.
God is the architect of this continuum.
And finally, one more sentence.
In this way, the church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons, but by the gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.
Basically, what the Pope is saying is that the notion that we are tied to the Jews and that what, and we have in the elsewhere it says in the encyclical a love of the Jews.
This is not dispensational theology.
This is Christianity itself.
And so what you have here is the mainstream denominations, the Catholic, the Protestant, coming together and affirming that the New Testament and the Old are part of one single Bible.
In fact, the New Testament is the smallest part of that Bible.
The Old Testament takes up like 80% of it.
And then the four Gospels, the book of Acts, and the other books, the New Testament is a much slimmer version added on to this larger corpus.
And by the way, not just larger in size, but extending over a much longer period of time.
The Old Testament goes from essentially about 4,000 years ago to 2,000 years ago.
And then the New Testament basically goes from 4 BC, which is around when Jesus was born, to about 40 or 50 AD.
So a few years after his death, the Acts of the Apostle.
The New Testament covers a little more than half a century.
That's it.
So very happy to see the Pope at this critical time weighing in on this.
And finally, I'll mention a subject that I'm only going to touch on now, but I will pick up again probably tomorrow in my conversation with Debbie.
We're going to do our normal Friday roundup.
Elon Musk has introduced Grackopedia.
So what is Grackopedia?
Grackapedia is Wikipedia, but not organized or edited by left-wing fanatics to write hit pieces on people like me and Elon Musk and many others, all from a twisted, biased, partisan perspective.
Grackopedia is driven by AI.
It is an AI-created encyclopedia.
And what I want to say is that just having glanced at some of its entries, the entry on George Floyd, and it's interesting to compare.
What does Wikipedia say about George Floyd?
As it turns out, a completely one-sided picture.
Grackopedia, far more balanced.
January 6th, Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia account, completely tendentious, completely untrustworthy.
The Grackopedia account, much more balanced.
So it's not to say the Grackopedia is there, and Elon Musk is not saying it's there, but what he's saying is that the Grackopedia train has left the station and already it's leaving Wikipedia in the dust.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast a friend, the Reverend Dr. Christopher Toma.
He is the senior pastor of our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and School.
It's in Heartland, Michigan.
He's also executive director of a group called The Body of Christ and the Public Square, which is bocps.org.
Reverend Toma has a website, ChristopherToma, T-H-O-M-A.com.
And we're going to talk in a moment or in a little bit about his new book, which is a novel, which is called Ashes to Ashes.
We'll come to that in a moment.
Wonderful to have you on the podcast, as always.
And let me ask you, Reverend Toma, about the feeling that a lot of us have that in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, and this is a theme that Debbie and I also heard expressed many times at the funeral, at the memorial service in Phoenix, that there is a new mood of restoration, some would say spiritual renewal in the country.
Do you think that is genuinely the case?
I do.
I think that after the events surrounding Charlie Kirk, that we're seeing this resurgence.
I think that we have a generation of people who are empty inside.
And when they saw what that emptiness does to someone who has substance, who has a fullness, and that fullness is born from faith in Christ, and it stirs a willingness to face off even with death, I think there's an element of our society, our generation that wants that.
They want to touch or tap into that and know where that comes from.
And all along the way, Charlie's message was, you get that from the Lord.
You get that from Christ.
When the only thing you have to fear is losing Jesus, then death or the challenges that he might have faced on a college campus or something like that are incredibly minute.
So I agree with you.
I think that is happening.
But I would also just, you know, one other thought comes to mind.
I'd argue also that the pushback is increasing because even as the TPUSA groups are starting up on campuses and schools, I know even in my own area, which is relatively conservative, the local school district did anything and everything they could to prevent a TPUSA group from starting.
And it took the young girl, who I know very well, have tried to help as I can along the way.
It took over a year for her.
And even after Charlie's death, they still pushed back.
The superintendent of the district was still fighting to get it in there.
Eventually they did, but it took a lot of work.
You mentioned that part of the need for all this comes from young people feeling hollow, feeling empty, a sort of spirit of nihilism.
What do you think is the root of that?
Is that coming from the indoctrination that these young people are getting in the schools and the universities?
Is it coming from broken families?
Is it coming from cultural communities that no longer have the thick cultural life that they used to, the civic institutions that once sort of made the Tocquevillian institutions, if you will.
How did we get to this nihilistic point before we talk about how do we come out of it?
Yeah, I suppose the premise is there that God is simply being removed from everything.
I mean, plain and simple.
I mean, we think about, you brought up education.
My first thought is the university system.
I mean, the university system began in a cathedral.
You know, it began in the cathedrals and truth was always connected to Christ.
And now look at where we are.
Those institutions are now burning incense to the idol of self rather than God.
So you look at almost anything throughout history, whether it's public charity, whether it's all these things, we've removed God from them.
And when you do that, you have an emptiness that occurs.
But again, part of the problem, though, is that the church over the course of the generations appears willing to retreat when that happens.
They just sort of sacrifice the ground and retreat rather than saying charge, you know, go back, let's take what's ours.
They sort of just kind of let the world take it and make that institution or make that, let's say, event or holiday or whatever you want to say into its own image.
So the church, I think, in many ways is quite, namely the mainstream American church right now is very much guilty of allowing the world to snatch away what's theirs.
And so I think one question we should be asking is why do we keep letting the world take what's ours?
We can re-sanctify.
We can retake these things.
But it actually takes a spine.
It takes some courage.
I think what you're saying, Reverend Toma, is that rather than thinking of Christianity as a kind of a Sunday operation in which the pastor says, you know, this hour and a half belongs to me.
And this is the time where I kind of clean things up for the whole week and send you out into the next week.
You're saying that a Christian spirit needs to brood over the land Monday through Sunday.
I am.
And if Christians are serious about that last portion of their worship service, and I'm speaking from a confessional, conservative, biblical pastor's position or perspective, where we enjoy a liturgy and we have our service ends with a benediction.
Benedicere is the Latin.
It goes well with you.
That benediction is not meant to send you out and say, well, we'll see in a week.
That's God's promise, his name being put on his people and saying, I am going with you to exist in a world where you are now a force to reckon with in that world.
It's not just you're kind of getting by with your head down.
No, I am with you in this world and you are living out that Christian faith in the community, whether it's no matter where it is or what it is, you are carrying who you are, maybe not even what you are, but who you are in Christ out into that world and you're affecting change there.
You're affecting influence.
And I would say too, I'd add to that, if pastors are not preaching in that way, if they're not teaching their people this reality, they're really only working part-time and their salary should probably reflect that.
They might not be hearing it.
And I mean, that's a great point.
And not only that, but isn't it, aren't those pastors who are, let's call them the Sunday pastors, aren't they in effect saying that what they have to teach has basically nothing to do with the world?
Because they don't engage.
I think I saw a little segment where a pastor, this was the Sunday after Charlie's assassination, and he said something to the effect of, well, I'm going to say one thing and one thing only, and that's all I have to say about Charlie Kirk.
And then he addressed the topic for like 17 seconds and in an extremely blasé way, such that you would have thought that this was just a blip on the cultural landscape.
And I think what you're saying is, no, that if we have a living and vital Christianity, it's going to have a lot to say, not just about the next world, but about this world, about your life, about the things going on in Washington, about the war that's going on in the Middle East, about tariffs.
Christianity is a comprehensive view of the world, and it does have moral precepts that are applicable to the entire sphere of human existence.
I agree.
I agree.
And again, part of the problem, well, so I've sort of coined a phrase and I call it confessional apathy.
And it applies mainly to confessional Lutheranism, which I claim to be a confessional Lutheran, which means we subscribe to the historic rites and ceremonies.
We think this is the best way to carry the faith of those who came before us into the future and beyond.
Those are the, that's the, that's the faith that doesn't roll over in the flames when they come.
But as far as confessional apathy, what I mean is that we do have too many guys who will simply say, well, you know, preach the word, administer the sacraments, so word and sacrament, word and sacrament, but let God handle the rest.
Now, that's sort of to assume, going back to that thought relative to the benediction, that somehow when you walk through those church doors, there's some sort of invisible screen there that filters out everything that God has just given to you to empower you for enduring in the world and for being effectual in the world.
When in reality, everything is Christological.
Everything is to be viewed through the lens of the gospel.
And what we're teaching our people when we preach this way is that, well, maybe abortion isn't something the church should be talking about.
That's political.
Maybe we shouldn't be talking about the LGBTQ incorporated jack boots.
That's political.
No, I'm sorry.
These things are Christological.
And if they're Christological, that means the church already owns them.
And it means that the church has a responsibility to preach and teach about them.
13 and a half seconds given as a sort of a passing comment about the martyrdom of one of our own.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
There are people who are hurting, who need to understand Christian suffering, the tentatio, as Luther would call it, in the world.
And here's your opportunity to preach and teach the resurrection, the victory of Christ, and to do it focused on that moment, bringing hope and bringing an, you know, giving an empowerment to go out and be that in the same way that Charlie was.
That takes more than 13 seconds.
That takes a commitment to understanding the Christological nature of what preaching is, what teaching is, what the church is all about.
And I do think we're losing that.
I have other opinions on why, but I think we are losing that in many ways.
Let's talk about your new venture, which is, I don't know if it really represents a departure for you, because I know the things you're talking about, you are, you put into practice.
I've come to Heartland, Michigan.
I've spoken at events that you've organized that explore the intersection of faith and culture and politics.
So I know that that's something that you're very serious about.
You have now and you've and you've written a whole bunch of books and uh and you have a wide set of interests, including, I believe, you are a whiskey man.
You have you haven't converted me to being a whiskey man.
Debbie's trying to get me out of the wine drinking.
So I think if I took off the whiskey, maybe what I'll do is swap one for the other.
You haven't had the right kind.
There you go.
Tell us about your novel.
First of all, the premise of it is absolutely outrageous, and I mean that in a positive way.
I'm eager to read it.
I've been preoccupied with movie promo, like I mentioned to you, but I've got some flights coming up.
I'm going to read it.
As I understand, it's a novel about a vigilante priest.
It's called Ashes to Ashes.
It's available on Amazon.
Give us the scoop about what, well, what got you into this?
Is there some kind of a message you're trying to convey?
Tell us a little bit about the story.
Well, I have to be forthright and say in the beginning, I make the note to my wife that, don't worry, this is not autobiographical.
Nothing that's in there.
I've not done any of this.
Okay.
I also say it is a departure from my typical work.
Now, typically I'm writing about church and state stuff, or I'm writing devotional things, or I'm writing about whiskey, like you said, the whiskey narrative stuff.
But this came to me while I was driving to visit a shut-in on the interstate one day.
I was driving along and the thought popped into my head, kind of what would I do if I'm visiting with someone and then all of a sudden I black out and I wake up and that person is dead.
I don't know where it came from.
My brain is weird that way.
But I sat on that thought for about eight months.
And then when I went to Florida on vacation, I spent about three weeks and popped the whole thing out.
And I have to say, one thing I can do is write a whole lot in a very short period of time.
But it sort of came out in a way that told me I'm supposed to be writing novels.
I should be writing fiction.
It was the most fun I've ever had writing a story.
Now, the premise of it is essentially sort of how it started.
A pastor, a Lutheran pastor in a small town, wakes up, gets called to a home to visit, wakes up, and the person who called him there is dead.
And I don't want to give away too much, but it turns in the direction of him not being able to trust anyone.
And so there's sort of this examination of what a man of the cloth, what a clergyman would do when there's no one around him that he can trust, not the police, not any friends in the community.
And it turns out what he learns, the communities behind a lot of it, what does he do?
How far is he willing to go?
So it's very much a thriller in that sense.
But it's also examining conscience.
Someone asked me if I like crime novels, or I don't.
I've never really read them all that much.
But I think a crime thriller doesn't have to be about car chases and all that kind of stuff.
I think the better ones are the ones where you have a character who's wrestling with conscience and is sort of forced into something.
And when everything else is stripped away, what's left?
What does he do?
So he turns to vigilante action.
And the question throughout the novel becomes something like, you know, is he doing this or is God sending him to do this?
And so that's sort of a question you're wondering about all along the way.
And it turns out he's really good at it.
So The other thing I'd add to it too is people should read it, you know, read it and strap in, because again, it's not what you expect from a guy like me.
When this guy walks into a room and he says to you, I'm here for your confession, you're not leaving that room alive and it's going to be messy.
So it's that kind of a story.
Wow.
And corruption.
Does it lead to, you know, what does it lead to?
Folks will just have to pick it up and find out.
It's definitely theological in that sense.
It also deals with some of the church issues we're talking about, some of the modern mainstream Christendom type questions we were just talking about.
So I mean, I don't know if this was even in your mind, but you realize you are writing in the genre of one of the greatest writers of all time, namely Dostoevsky, whose Crime and Punishment is indeed a theological thriller about a brutal murder and the interior life of the murderer, the perpetrator.
Now, it doesn't go in the vigilante direction, but it goes in the direction of a cat and mouse between the detective and the murderer for hundreds of pages.
So that's going to be in the back of my mind as I pick up yours.
Not that I'm holding you to the Dostoevskian standard, but this is, I think, an inherently interesting topic.
Guys, the novel is Ashes to Ashes, available on Amazon.
Check out the Reverend Toma's work, much wider canvas of work at Christopher Toma, T-H-O-M-A.com.
Reverend Toma, as always, just a great pleasure to have you back on the podcast.
Thanks so much, Dinesh.
It's good seeing you.
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In this segment, we're going to explore the way in which belief in life after death spread worldwide and spread worldwide largely through major religions.
Now, the major religions of the world developed sort of together in a period that is known as the Axial Age.
This period, which begins around the 5th century BC, really around the time of Socrates, even a little earlier.
You see Zoroastrianism develop in Persia, which is now Iran, Confucianism, Taoism in China, Buddhism in India, Hinduism and Jainism, also in India.
And these religions start to develop.
And by develop, I mean they start to grow.
Now, some people think it's really odd to talk about religions as developing, but there's nothing odd in the idea that religious notions evolve.
And by evolve, what I mean is that they build one brick on top of the other.
Most religious believers know this.
They have no problem with this.
In some ways, you could see Christianity building on top of Judaism.
And even within Christianity, you see certain doctrines, for example, the Trinity, which was articulated really only in the fourth century AD.
So more than 300 years after Christ, this is the evolution of Christian teaching.
Now, not to say that the idea wasn't implicit or there in the Bible or there from much earlier, but it is given its full expression and it is adopted officially.
I'm talking here about belief in the Trinity later.
So atheists sometimes present this as being really odd.
Religion has to update itself to bring itself into line with reality.
But if you look at religious development, you see that that's not what's really going on at all.
Very often the teachings are developing internally and not because of, hey, we just discovered that the earth is round and so we now need to come up with a new, not at all.
Science, by the way, also develops.
We speak often about scientific progress.
And the assumption here is that as you learn more, new things are built again on top of the old.
Sometimes you discover that something that was there before needs to be modified.
And so science operates exactly in this way.
We don't judge science today by like the works of Thales or Ptolemy.
So we see that religion, like science, does have built into it the idea that there can be some progress.
Now, by the way, we're not saying that truth itself changes, right?
When you're talking about scientific progress, are you saying that the world itself starts operating under different laws?
No.
What you mean is that our human understanding of those laws gets better.
So there's no like relativism implied here.
And the same is true with religion and God.
No one is saying that the Trinity suddenly came into being in the fourth century.
We're simply saying that the human understanding of the Trinity and its acceptance by ecumenical church councils and its bringing it to the forefront of Christian doctrine, that occurred, that kind of evolution in human knowledge occurred in the fourth century.
Now we see in Judaism a very interesting development from unbelief to belief in the afterlife.
Now, the Jews are the founders of monotheism.
So it seems a little odd that in the beginning, they do not seem to have had a belief in life after death.
They are, in fact, latecomers to that idea.
You look at the Torah, just look at the first five books of the Old Testament, and you'll see there's actually no real explicit mention of the afterlife.
Then you have some later books, Job, Ecclesiastes, and others, and you see some passages that seem to say that we live and we die, and that's the way it is.
That's the way of the world.
No mention of what comes after.
Not a denial of life after that, just simply no reference to it.
And so how did the Jews even get the idea of life after death?
Well, it turns out that through the history of the Jews, you begin to see the idea of justice and the idea of justice emerge out of the frustration that even though people are obedient to God's laws, they suffer.
They don't get the rewards that they might have expected in this life.
And in the times of Abraham, when God blessed Abraham, it would mean he would have large flocks and long life and maybe lots of wives.
But the Jews discovered that your rewards in this life don't always match your level of virtue or even your level of piety.
And so the Jews begin to suffer these devastating losses.
The Assyrian conquest of the northern part of Israel, then later the Babylonian conquest of all of Israel, the destruction of the temple.
This happens in the 6th century BC.
And so the Jews now begin to think a little bit differently.
And they begin to say, well, you know what?
We are not, all accounts are not settled in this life.
There is, in fact, a sort of post-mortem existence.
And the new Jerusalem, it could be, is not going to be established here on earth, but will be established, if you will, in some future realm.
And in the later books of the Old Testament, Isaiah, Daniel, you begin to see the more clear articulations of the afterlife.
Here's Daniel 12:2.
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth to the end shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Now, you won't find a passage like that early in the Bible.
And what that tells you is that through biblical history, this is an idea that is developing.
So the Jews now begin to think that the coming of the Messiah will actually signal the end of the world and the time of judgment.
Before that, they never thought that.
They thought the Messiah is going to come and he's going to rule on earth.
And you're going to have a period of just great prosperity and everything is going to go very well.
And he will have a kind of indefinite reign on earth.
But now you begin to see a somewhat different idea emerging in the latter books of the Old Testament.
No, the coming of the Messiah signifies the end of the world.
By the way, this belief is kind of close if you think about it to the Christian idea that the second coming of the Messiah does also signal the end of the world.
You see, the Jewish and Christian views are quite akin to each other, differing only in that the Jews believe the Messiah is coming for the first time, and we, the Christians, believe for the second time.
Now, there's also a debate going on inside of Judaism between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
And the Sadducees are the biblical literalists.
They read the Torah, they go, We don't really believe in the afterlife.
Why?
Because where is it?
Show it to us in the Torah.
But the Pharisees are the sort of intellectuals, and they make arguments that go beyond the literal.
And they say, for example, we are created in the image of God.
Well, if we're created in the image of God, isn't God eternal?
Isn't God's spirit everlasting?
Well, in what sense do we resemble God?
Then God is not a material being.
We are, but we must have a spiritual dimension that matches God.
Well, why wouldn't that spiritual dimension be eternal just like God?
Why wouldn't it live on forever?
So this is the kind of argument the Pharisees are making in a non-literalist way.
And this debate, by the way, goes on for a couple of centuries.
And ultimately, the mainstream of the Jewish position sides with the Pharisees, sides with the idea of life after death.
And today, most Jews do believe in some form of life after death.
And Belief in life after death emerged really to vindicate God's justice because the idea was: obviously, there are people who don't get justice in this world.
Think of somebody, for example, lives a decent life and they're incinerated in the Holocaust.
Where is the justice?
So the Jews came to say, Well, there's no justice.
No one can say that this was a just outcome, but there is going to be justice in the end, dispensed, if you will, by God in another life.
So I'm quoting the Jewish scholar Abram Newman: the idea of immortality in Judaism arose not to appease man, but to vindicate God.
Now, one final thought for today on this topic, and that is that while the Jews were kind of slow to accept the idea of life after death, they did introduce one new element which has been adopted in Christianity and is very critical.
And that is that the way to understand what the Jews, the innovation of the Jews, if I can put it that way, it is that they took the Socratic idea that our souls live on after death.
And for Socrates, let's remember the soul like escapes the body.
The body disintegrates, the soul lives on.
But the Jews said, no, there's actually going to be a resurrection of the body.
So at the time of judgment, in the Jewish view, God reunites or reconnects the body and the soul.
So the whole person, not just your soul, but you live on beyond the grave.
And this idea, by the way, of bodily resurrection is adopted wholesale by Christianity.
And this is actually not a big surprise because Christianity happens to be the only religion in the world that considers another religion, namely Judaism, to be entirely true.
I say this because there are other religions that claim to incorporate other religions.
So Islam claims to incorporate both Judaism and Christianity.
But Islam changes the story.
Islam will say, well, Jesus is not God.
He may be the Son of God, but really we just look at him as a prophet.
That's it.
Or the Muslims will say, you know, when Abraham and Isaac went up the mountain on Mount Moriah, that really wasn't Isaac.
That was actually Ishmael.
So this is called like doctoring the text.
Christianity does not do that.
It incorporates Judaism unchanged.
And that's why the Jewish scriptures don't really differ.
They may differ in presentation and they may differ in editing or they may differ in the commentary of the rabbis on the Old Testament.
But the text itself is not changed.
Now, another difference that Christianity makes here is that it takes the idea of the resurrection of the body, which the Jews do believe in, but it's not a central doctrine in Judaism.
It does, however, become, in ways that I will describe when I pick this up on Monday, it does become a completely central idea in Christianity.
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