Dinesh D'Souza - THE ROAD TO NIHILISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1204

Nov. 4, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

58:01

THE ROAD TO NIHILISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1204

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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, the road to nihilism.
	I got to say, I think I might have gotten a new and better handle on what is happening in this big debate involving Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, the MAGA right.
	And I want to give you that insight proceeding from the young people in our society who appear to be the targets of this controversy.
	I also have an excellent guest, Michelle Steve, who's going to talk about Mamdani, about the rise and fall of New York and blue cities in general, and the problem of homelessness.
	Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe, hit the subscribe, the follow, the notifications button.
	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'Souza podcast.
	The plot continues to thicken, and things continue to get weirder and weirder so that we have to, and I have to, pull back and try to get a new and better understanding of what is really going on.
	Because what is going on in the surface, I think, is not what is really going on.
	And the earlier efforts that have been made by me and by others to try to get a handle on this situation are to some degree missing the point and maybe in some ways, in some ways, even making things worse.
	Now, coming fresh off the production set of the Dragon's Prophecy, a film that you should see, it is actually the essential starting point of this whole debate, of this whole fight.
	And the way to see it, by the way, the dragonsprophecyfilm.com, you can stream it, you can order DVDs.
	That film has a climactic scene in which you see Debbie and me at the River Jordan.
	We're not alone.
	There are, in fact, a whole group of Africans there, and they are washing their hair and they're singing loudly.
	And so we try to find a quiet spot a little away from them.
	And we are baptized in the River Jordan by a pastor.
	And there is, well, in the film, this is shown to the backdrop of John Rich's great song, Earth to God.
	And this is the way the movie kind of closes out or brings you to the final scene: you have this immersion in the River Jordan.
	Now, let's look at the sort of theological significance of that.
	What do you see?
	Well, first of all, you have the river, the famous river that is in the Bible.
	Jesus is baptized in this river by John the Baptist.
	And that inaugurates something that is truly new, which is baptism.
	But at the same time, you have something that is very old.
	The river itself is much older than Jesus.
	It's been running as long as we know.
	Jesus himself is a Jew, as, by the way, is John the Baptist, as is everyone else who was baptized.
	None of them, by the way, upon being baptized, abandoned Judaism or stopped performing any of the Jewish rites and rituals, stopped, for example, keeping the Sabbath, stopped reading the Jewish scriptures, the so-called Hebrew scriptures.
	None of that.
	The baptism was not seen by Jesus or by anyone around him as in some ways starting a new religion.
	Let's give it a new name.
	Jesus is the first Christian.
	There's absolutely none of this in the Bible.
	And so for Christians, the Christian life incorporates all of this.
	It's built right on top of it.
	And so when some of this debate started, I thought that it was an argument that was theological and political, and it was really about Israel.
	So the theological status of Israel, this whole notion of being a Christian Zionist.
	By the way, I've never called myself a Christian Zionist, but that is a label that is foisted on many of us Christians who believe that there's a continuity between the Old Testament and the New.
	To me, that's Christianity.
	It's not Christian Zionism or anything of that sort.
	But nevertheless, I thought we're in a theological debate.
	Apparently, this kind of idea, which has been around in some form for many centuries, replacement theology.
	The Nazis, in a way, and I'm mentioning this just historically.
	I'm not saying that we're dealing with the revival of Nazism, but the Nazis themselves were great advocates of replacement theology.
	And you can see why.
	They needed the political support of the Christian churches in Bavaria, places like Munich, and yet they didn't want to have this Jewish Christianity.
	And so, what the Nazis called positive Christianity was essentially replacement theology.
	The New Testament replaces the old.
	We want nothing to do with the Jews.
	We can kind of kick that ladder off.
	And Christianity, in a sense, is setting off on a new, not only a new course, but now an anti-Jewish course.
	And so we have echoes of that.
	So I thought we have this theological debate.
	Then we have a political debate which focuses on the actions of Israel, on its claims to the land, on the influence of Israel and Jews in America and on America.
	And as this has gone forward, I've realized that the debate has polarized itself now into the sort of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish camp, and the sort of pro-Israel and pro-Jewish camp,
	which are vociferously defended by people like Ben Shapiro, for example, who just did a full episode of his show on this topic.
	Now, I want to argue that these two camps are in a way strengthening each other.
	Because every time Ben Shapiro makes the case that Israel is vital to America, Israel is providing needed intelligence to America, America can't do without Israel.
	This fortifies the Tucker, Candice, Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gates, and even Nick Fuente's camp, because they then begin to chant, that guy is Israel first.
	And what they mean by this is that we, by contrast, are America first.
	So they have cast this as a debate between people who care more about them than they do about us.
	And this, of course, finds a very receptive ear, particularly among a lot of young people.
	And it is these young people that are the subject of my focus today.
	Now, before I get to the young people, I want to point out that I do not in a way comfortably fit into either of these two camps.
	And here's what I mean: Israel has not really been my topic.
	For people who now are saying, Oh, Dinaj, you're obsessed with Israel, I say to them, Well, let's make a list of all the books I've written over 30 years, 35 years, starting in the early 1990s.
	Do you see the name Israel in any of them?
	I barely mention it.
	I've done books and made films, and most of them focus on the meaning of America.
	And I've done some work in Christian apologetics, but even there, Israel has in no way been the focus.
	So it's in a way not my main issue.
	Not only that, but I am America first.
	And I think I have demonstrated that with books that have exposed cancel culture, which is my first book, illiberal education.
	It was then attacking what came to be known.
	I actually popularized this term, political correctness.
	I've done books attacking affirmative action, my book, The End of Racism, a book celebrating Reagan, a book called What's So Great About America, a book on the rise of radical Islam, The Enemy at Home, my work, Two Books on Obama, who is also the subject of my first film.
	So you can see here that America is, in fact, my obsession.
	And therefore, I see with some dismay this false casting of the debate between America First and not America First.
	In reality, this is a debate inside of America First.
	So I want to actually talk about America First and what America First means, because I think we have lost our sense of what America First is all about.
	Now, we have a lot of young people in this country, and I want to talk about their susceptibility to the ideas of people like Tucker and Fuentes and others.
	These are young people who have, in many ways, been lied to and also have been browbeaten since they came out of the womb.
	I'm thinking here about young people in general, but specifically about young males.
	They've been indoctrinated from a young age.
	They've been propagandized by their elementary school teachers and middle school teachers and their high school teachers and administrators.
	They have seen every ethnic group celebrated except their own.
	And then when they step out into society, they don't see the American dream that their parents saw.
	They look at a dislocated economy.
	They see broken communities.
	Many of them are the products of broken and fragmented, not just marriages, but also cultural breakdown.
	And so, and then on top of it, these young people are lied to by our institutions.
	They're lied to by Fauci, by the CDC, by the NIH, by the FBI.
	And many of us have contributed to the expose of these liars.
	And we have convinced these young people that there are elites in our society embedded in the government, but also in powerful institutions of academia, media, Hollywood, and so on, that don't care about them, don't care about citizens, don't care about working people, have a long list of other priorities.
	And the American citizen is at the bottom of the list, if on the list at all.
	So these young people already believe this.
	And they're not wrong.
	They're not wrong to believe it, by the way.
	And then what happens is along comes Tucker, along comes Candace, along comes Fuentes in his own way.
	And these people are not all the same.
	I don't mean to imply that they are.
	But in a sense, what they're saying to these young people is: listen, you are bitter, you are angry, you are even a little bit nihilistic.
	There's a certain part of you that wants to like burn it all down.
	And we're with you.
	We're with you.
	And not only that, but we have a piece of new information for you.
	You have all these elites who are manipulating the system, this kind of global interconnected system of elites, this uniparty as we often call it.
	But there is a master manipulator, a manipulator of the manipulators, and that's the Jews.
	So in a sense, you can see here what I'm saying is that this faction on the MA right is building on an existing argument and an existing sense of frustration and discontent, but they are doing it by ultimately injecting, you can say, the Jewish element into it.
	And for this reason, I think, a lot of young people are like, wow, that's right.
	All these other people have been shafting us, and you are now giving us a sort of new and deeper understanding.
	We thought we were at the ground floor, and you're showing us that there's a basement level.
	And so for a lot of young people, this seems to be, this seems to hit them with a sense of epiphany or even discovery.
	So where am I going with all this?
	Where I'm going with all this is I am not blaming these young people.
	And I'm saying, moreover, that these young people have been neglected by the mainstream Republican Party.
	And they've been neglected even to some degree in MAGA, which is not speaking straight to their concerns.
	When a lot of young people say things like, I don't care about anti-Semitism, or even let's take a more extreme formulation by Nick Fuentes, who says he's, quote, team Hitler.
	And of course, this causes the Ben Shapiros of the world to absolutely freak out.
	Oh, we have a Nazi in our midst.
	Actually, in my opinion, we don't.
	Nick Fuentes is not really a Nazi.
	I've got to see him up close.
	He's not a Nazi.
	And what I mean by this is he can't really be a Nazi.
	He's a very weak beta male type of guy.
	He's a bit of a pansy.
	He speaks in this kind of tweaky, high-pitched voice.
	He's not going to do what Hitler did.
	Hitler could line up the leaders of his own militia, Rome, Ernst Rome, and basically say, shoot him.
	Hitler had no compunction about witnessing mass-scale slaughter.
	Is Fuentes going to do those things?
	No.
	No one even thinks that.
	Fuentes doesn't think that, nor do any of his followers think that.
	Here's where I'm getting at.
	Nick Fuentes is not a real Nazi.
	What he is, is a Nazi, he's playing a Nazi shtick.
	He is a performance artist Nazi.
	He is doing a Nazi routine.
	And by the way, his followers know that.
	So it's a wink-wink game between him and his followers.
	But evidently, there are other people on the MAGA right, and particularly Jews, and you can understand why they don't get the joke.
	They go, we are dealing with the Nazi problem in the Republican Party.
	And meanwhile, Nick and his followers are laughing, he, he, he, tee, he, he, because to them, being a Nazi is nothing more than striking a rebel pose.
	It's Jimmy Dean, not circa in the 1950s, but circa the early part of the 21st century.
	This is the rebel stance.
	This is the big FU.
	This is the middle finger.
	This is taking the ultimate, I refuse to play by the rules of the establishment.
	So that's the shtick that Nick is going for.
	That is the key to understanding his popularity.
	It is that ultimately he is saying to all these angry, dislocated, lost basement dwellers, these people who, by the way, have a magnified influence on social media, partly because they have no life.
	And the life that they have, they hate.
	They hate their lives.
	And since they hate their lives, they're like, we want to burn it down.
	We want to burn it down because if we're able to burn it down, and by burn it down, what I mean here is destroy the existing configurations of power, whatever new configuration comes out of that is going to be better, at least better for us.
	And so this is the mood and the attitude.
	This is the nihilistic frame of mind that we are dealing with here.
	It is a frame of mind that does need to be addressed, or what needs to be addressed are the underlying concerns behind it that are causing people to want to strike this kind of a desperate rebel stance.
	That is a legitimate issue.
	And I do not think that the underlying concerns of these young people are either misplaced or worthy of being just simply ignored or simply repudiated.
	Now, this being said, I think that the pied pipers who are coming along to purport to be their leaders, not even so much Nick, because Nick is just sort of doing his own thing, but rather people like Tucker and Bannon and others.
	So these guys are trying to capitalize on this nihilism.
	And what they are trying to do is create these discontented, rootless, angry, bitter.
	They're trying to make them into a social media and in some ways to make them a social media militia.
	Because think about it, when you've got nothing to do, when you're staying up all night eating potato chips, you're going to sit around and abuse everybody that you see on social media, including me, including Dana Lash, including all the Josh Hammer.
	And you just let loose.
	You know, Dinesh needs to go back to India and you abuse people's looks and you abuse their families.
	And by the way, you're doing this for eight hours straight, and there are another 300 of you doing the same thing.
	And so it gives the impression that you've got a massive army, not because there are actually tons of people, but because there's a small group of people, relatively small, with nothing to do and a lot of time on their hands.
	And they are driven by this kind of nihilistic or negative energy.
	And what I'm saying is that the very sly leaders on our side, if you can call it our side, that's a topic for another day, guys like Tucker, are: how do I manipulate this group?
	How do I become the Pied Piper of this group and use them as my militia to take over the Republican Party?
	In other words, how do I use them as the goons to beat mainstream Republicans into submission and into silence?
	And how do I ultimately channel their rage and their negative energy to intimidate not just Turning Point USA, not just the Heritage Foundation, but ultimately also the congressmen, the senators, Vice President Vance.
	It could well be that these guys, these leaders have realized, you know what, we're not going to get Trump.
	But Trump isn't going to be here forever.
	There's going to be a big fight for the future of MAGA after Trump.
	That's where we come in.
	That's where these goons can be very useful to us.
	We don't care about them per se.
	We're really not trying to make their lives better in any meaningful way.
	But if we can steer them into battering rams against, for example, J.D. Vance, then ultimately it means power.
	Not power for them, but power for us.
	Guys, Thanksgiving holds so many memories.
	I'm sure it's the same for you.
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	Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
	It's Michelle Steve, and she is the founder of Free Up Foundation.
	She's also the author of Answers Behind the Red Door, Battling the Homeless Epidemic.
	This is actually based upon many years that she spent as the CEO of a Northern California program for homeless women and children.
	She's also a fellow at the Discovery Institute, and you can follow her on X at Steve S-T-E-E-B.
	Michelle.
	Michelle, welcome.
	Thanks for joining me.
	I appreciate it.
	We have a remarkable phenomenon going on in New York City.
	Zoran Mamdani, an avowed socialist, democratic socialist, he says, is pretty close, maybe on the verge of becoming the next mayor of New York.
	And all of this raises in my mind a bit of a puzzle, which is that you have these blue cities, once beautiful, by the way, prosperous cities, places that were tourists, Mecca's, I'm thinking about San Francisco, Chicago, in some ways, New Orleans, New York.
	And these used to be cities that were magnets for the world.
	And yet it seems like in these cities, we have seen rising crime, rising sort of social pathologies, a homeless problem that seems to not only escalate but become kind of more socially aggressive, if you will.
	And yet the people in these cities appear to vote for either more of the same or in some cases, maybe with Mamdani, a guy who might well make all these problems worse.
	Can you offer some insight into the psychology of the voters that seem to be making choices that would run against making their own lives better?
	It's a fantastic question.
	I wish I could authoritatively give you an answer.
	But what I will say is, somewhere along the way, we change the definition of compassion to something that I call laissez-faire neglect.
	Like let them be, let them decide, let government take care of them, let them not have to have a responsibility in their own lives.
	And that is such a detrimental definition of compassion as it relates to the homeless, but also as it relates to the entire country and every issue area.
	At the core of this issue, the homelessness crisis, we've got to remember that these are human beings and human beings are, we need to be productive.
	We need to feel a part of a community.
	We need to be healthy in order to fulfill our potential.
	And we've along the way, again, with this reform definition of compassion, this horrible definition of compassion, we are saying to the homeless, they can just continue to live in misery on the streets.
	And when they decide they want to get healthy, we will help them get healthy, but we're not going to require that of them.
	We're going to, instead, we're just going to put them in an apartment, give them keys to an apartment.
	That is our nation's policy until the president's executive order a couple months ago.
	It's been to give Them keys to an apartment and not address the accompanying issues of homelessness, which are often addiction and mental illness.
	And I, in one of my more recent pieces, wrote that this is what I call laissez-faire neglect.
	We're just letting people stew in disease that do not understand how sick they are.
	And it's not working.
	The country is at the highest point ever in the nation's history of homelessness, up 35% since we put this keys to an apartment policy in place, since we decided we were no longer going to fund as part of their housing treatment services, such as mental illness and addiction.
	The death rate is up 77%.
	It's just been a major disaster.
	And so, to your question, why is this?
	It's because we've forgotten the importance of accountability in human productivity in a lot of our social ills, homelessness being the one we're talking about today.
	Michelle, many years ago, I read a book by the historian Gertrude Hemmelfarb, and it was about the Victorians of the 19th century in Great Britain and their attitude towards social ills, whether it be homelessness or whether it be welfare, whether it would be the group of people that they rather bluntly called bums.
	Their idea was that the government and society has a moral duty to help, but that comes with a reciprocal responsibility on the part of the one being helped to make every effort that he or she can to better their own life.
	And this arrangement was canceled if you didn't have the reciprocity.
	So, in other words, if the guy goes, yes, I want the benefit, but I refuse to work, it's like, all right, then you don't get the benefit.
	And I think what you're saying is that we have a social policy today as a country that is the exact opposite of that.
	It wants to, it offers these benefits, but the benefits are not conditioned upon really anything.
	They not only do not encourage responsibility, but they encourage irresponsibility.
	Am I right in saying that this, because this points to the pathway of how these policies might be able to do better?
	Absolutely.
	It's a thousand percent exactly what you just said is you've got to have both in order for this to work.
	And, you know, I was during the COVID era, I was, you know, Gavin Newsom, you might remember, excluded the homeless from the masking policy.
	And I wrote a lot about this.
	I said, that's ridiculous.
	These are people who should be contributing.
	They need to be contributing to what's happening and saying that they can just be left to their own devices.
	And, you know, it was craziness.
	The homeless, just like all of us, are human beings.
	We need productivity.
	We need purpose.
	We need community.
	And we've got to restore that in our nation's policy.
	And that includes the homeless need to be part of the solution.
	They can't just be given the benefits without being part of it.
	It's not good for them.
	It's not good for us.
	Michelle, is it the case that it used to be that we had a kind of institutionalization policy by and large for people who were chronic alcoholics or addicts or people who had mental illness?
	And that policy was then criticized as being paternalistic, as if to say, you know what, it's as if, you know, the government knows better or society knows better, and these people have civil rights and they have human rights.
	And so the courts basically said, no, you got to turn these people loose.
	And that then resulted in almost the opposite approach, which is to say, since these people have rights, we can't tell them what to do.
	We just have to give them stuff, give them needles, give them food, give them, as you say, keys to an apartment.
	And what this has actually encouraged on the homeless side, as well as on the welfare side, just ultimately many of these social pathologies becoming a lot worse.
	Yeah, you're absolutely right.
	And the president in his recent executive order on homelessness said we need to strengthen our, you know, mandatory compassionate compulsion laws, right?
	We need to strengthen our ability to get people into help who need it.
	One of the things that people don't often talk about in this industry, so about 80% of the homeless are struggling with either mental illness and or addiction.
	On top of those diseases, which are diseases of the brain, which when they go untreated, they get worse, just like cancer gets worse, just like heart disease gets worse.
	But on top of mental illness and addiction getting worse, they're also struggling with a disease called anastognosia, which is a deficit of self-awareness.
	And meaning they don't know how sick they are.
	So we need to strengthen those laws, but there's also been abuse of those laws.
	And I think we all need to pay attention to doing that in a way that prohibits, you know, there will always be a little bit of abuse, nothing's perfect, but prohibits as much as possible any abuse of mandatory commitment, civil commitment.
	But we also need to clear encampments, which the EO has called for, right?
	It's devastating what the conditions people are living in.
	Women are being raped, they're being trafficked, they're being drugged so they don't even realize, you know, what's going on with themselves.
	Pets are now dying from overdose, from fentanyl.
	You know, crime, the taking advantage of people.
	These are horrible conditions that are horrible for the homeless and horrible for the pets, but they're also horrible for the general public.
	We've seen in the last couple months with Irena in North Carolina, the gentleman who murdered her on her way home from work, who had 17, I believe, priors that weren't addressed because in the name of letting him free and letting him decide when he's wanting to get, you know, wanting to get the kind of help he needs.
	It happened in Central Park a couple weeks later.
	A gentleman with, I think, 32 priors, he's only 27 years old, in Central Park in one day lit two people on fire and nearly bit the ear off of someone else.
	So these conditions are horrible for the homeless.
	They're horrible for the general public.
	And that's why the president has said, enough is enough.
	We've had this policy in place for 12 years.
	It's not working.
	We're at the highest point ever, 35%, despite the promise by President Obama that homelessness would be ended in 10 years.
	The death rate is up 77%.
	Crime is up.
	Disease is up.
	And we've got to reverse this.
	So, what the EO does is it says we've got to reprioritize mental health treatment, drug and alcohol treatment is part of the solution to homelessness.
	It was done away with under the Obama-Biden administration.
	We've got to clear these encampments, move these people into treatment, and we've got to restore accountability in the system.
	One of the other pieces that I wrote recently is about a report called Infiltrated that just came out.
	And what we're seeing now, and this report has 52 pages of sources behind it, is that radical left groups have slowly but surely over the last 12 years infiltrated homeless advocacy groups.
	And there's, again, tons of documentation.
	The report's called Infiltrated.
	You can get it at discovery.org or just Google it.
	But what we're seeing is how these groups over the last 12 years have slowly but surely redefined homelessness.
	So you might have heard in the last four or five years the term unhoused, right?
	It was never a term until the last four or five years.
	And then it became an issue of racial oppression.
	And so these terms open the pathways to these radical left groups infiltrating the homeless advocacy organizations, which has resulted in about 700 nonprofits who now take in $2.9 billion in public funding, who are using that funding not to help the homeless as intended, but to fuel radical political agendas.
	And it's just become the report is so important.
	It's important that every elected official digest it, get it in their hands.
	And but again, it's all due to a lack of accountability over the last 12 years in the entire homeless system, starting with the homeless individual.
	I mean, this is so eye-opening, Michelle, because it's so reminiscent of what we found out with USAID and so many of the other corrupt national institutions.
	They realize that there is a cause, and the cause could be foreign aid, it could be global suffering, it could be famine.
	But then, because of that, you get an ocean of money that is designated to solve this problem.
	And so, what you have is all these bureaucratic operations, sometimes in the government, sometimes nonprofits, as you say, they realize there are actually a lot of dollars per homeless person.
	In fact, I bet you if you took the total budget and divided by the actual number of homeless people, you would discover that each homeless guy is getting, you know, would, in a sense, be getting a large amount of money, but they don't get that money because it's siphoned along the way,
	isn't it, by this ensemble of organizations that, as you say, in the name of the homeless, they divert this money to their own political, they essentially create a homeless industry so that bureaucrats are now administering the homeless.
	And of course, I think with that comes the obvious disincentive to ever solve the problem because it's kind of like if the homeless were to go away, the money would go away.
	Absolutely.
	It's the same exact playbook as we saw at USAID.
	And it's now exposed in the infiltrated report.
	And it really, again, Shows the entire void of accountability in the homeless system, starting with the quote-unquote advocacy groups, but going down to government, which they told us the crisis would end in a decade.
	It's at the highest point ever.
	Down to the local government level and down to the individual level.
	There's been no accountability in our system.
	And that's what the EO is designed to do as well: to restore accountability at every level of the system.
	I mean, my suspicion, Michelle, and my fear is that this is really what Mom Dani represents.
	When he talks about democratic socialism and he talks about like, I'm going to lower prices, I'm going to create grocery stores.
	What he's really talking about is taking the model that you just described and multiplying it across the entire sphere of government.
	So you have all this money being diverted, all these bureaucrats.
	Obviously, these are going to be people that he gets to oversee, that he directly or indirectly appoints.
	And so a lot of well-meaning people are voting for causes based upon I'd like to see the homeless live a better life and I'd like to see illegals have a chance to make it in this country and I'd like to see I'd like to see rent prices come down and I'd like to see groceries more affordable.
	So you have a well-meaning cause, you then have cynical bureaucrats swooping in, and then you have massive rip-offs and looting of the treasury and of the taxpayer, all in the name of that supposedly benign cause.
	Guys, I think you should check out this report, Infiltrated.
	It's on the Discovery Institute website.
	Also follow Michelle Steve on X at Steve S D E E B. Michelle, Michelle, thank you very much for joining me.
	Thank you, Dinesh.
	Good luck with your film, too.
	Thank you for producing that.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
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	I'm continuing a discussion of this book, Life After Death: The Evidence.
	And we are in one of the early chapters where I am spelling out the Western and the Eastern views of life after death.
	I'm not defending them or making the case for them.
	I'm just telling you what they are and how they came about, which is pretty interesting in its own right.
	Now, the Western view has a Jewish, a Christian, and I suppose to some degree you could say an Islamic element in that.
	This is the Abrahamic tradition.
	And then we have the Eastern view, which we will come to in a minute.
	But the Western view started with the Jews, who over time came to accept the idea of life after death, but it was never central in Judaism.
	So Christianity makes it absolutely central.
	And it is central in large part because of Christ's own resurrection, Christ being resurrected out of the dead, Christ being alive again, you might say, and Christ also being resurrected in a bodily form.
	It wasn't just that the spirit of Jesus ascended out of the tomb, Jesus himself ascended out of the tomb.
	And remember, when Jesus appeared to his followers, he appeared in a certain kind of renewed human form.
	He had a normal-looking body.
	One of the apostles could touch his hand and see the wound.
	He could eat fish.
	So he was, in other words, able to perform normal human tasks.
	He didn't appear in sort of a spectral or ghostly form.
	He didn't appear to his disciples in a dream.
	He appeared and was like walking among them.
	Now, this is the Christian view for all of us: that we will have in the end new bodies, incorruptible bodies, indestructible bodies, and we will live forever, but we will live forever as embodied souls that are in the presence of God.
	Now, some Christians through the centuries have believed that it's not a resurrected body, at least not for us.
	We only have resurrected souls.
	And the reason for this belief, the reason this belief kind of came into Christianity, is due to the influence of Platonic philosophy.
	In Platonic philosophy, the material body disintegrates and only the soul lives on.
	And so, some Christians, who, by the way, were shaped in their learning, in their studies, by reading Aristotle, by reading Plato, they picked up this idea of the immortality of the soul and they sort of left out the idea of the resurrection of the body.
	Not only that, but the Greek idea of eternity and also to some degree the Jewish idea of eternity were extending time indefinitely into the future.
	Aristotle, by the way, extended time indefinitely forward as well as backward.
	And Aristotle said that there's no reason to think that the universe must have been created.
	For all we know, it could have been there forever.
	So, in other words, eternity stretching continuously and infinitely back in time.
	But this is actually not the Christian view.
	The Christian view of eternity is different.
	It is a realm outside, or you may say beyond time.
	The church father Augustine argued that time itself is not eternal, that God made the universe not in time, but with time.
	Time, in other words, becomes a property of the universe, and you can't really make any sense of the word prior to, but prior to the universe, there really is no, there is no time.
	And what all this means is that life after death in the heavenly realm is not simply an extension of time, but a suspension of time.
	There is no time.
	This is very hard for us to envision because, of course, we live in time.
	Time and space are inescapable dimensions of our experience.
	But nevertheless, conceptually, we can understand that if something is a property of our lives and our world, it is quite possible to have a world in which you don't have those things at all.
	Now, we'll come back to all this, but let's go east a little bit and examine the Eastern religions just to see how they're thinking about life after death.
	And here we get a very different perspective, one that actually bears a little bit of a resemblance to the Greek or Platonic view, but is also distinct from it.
	Now, I want to dispel the idea that you sometimes hear from people that some of these Eastern religions, like Confucianism or Confucianism, you can argue about whether it's a religion, by the way.
	Some people say it's an ethical system, whatever it is.
	Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, some people say, well, these are atheistic.
	They reject the idea of life after death.
	I've read articles by people like Thomas Huxley, who was Darwin's bulldog, a friend of Darwin.
	He says that Buddhism is a system of belief which rejects the idea of immortality.
	This is actually wrong because, well, there's an element of truth to it, but overall it's wrong.
	Now, Confucianism is indeed, as I mentioned, more of an ethical code than it is a religious worldview.
	At one point, Confucius says, you do not know about life.
	He's talking to one of his disciples.
	So he goes, so how can you understand death?
	And here what Confucius is doing is kind of what Socrates was doing.
	He's like, I'm not saying that there isn't life after death.
	I'm asking you to focus on how you should live in this life.
	And that was Socrates' view when he was confronted by the pre-Socratics.
	The pre-Socratics were speculating about this is what the stars are like, this is what the heavens are like.
	And Socrates is like, well, first of all, you don't know anything about that.
	You have no capacity to grasp what the stars or the heavens are like.
	But even if you did, isn't the most important thing to lower your gaze and look at human beings and ask how we should live?
	Isn't that a more answerable question, but also a more important question with real world implications.
	So this is what Confucius is getting at.
	But for all that, in Confucius, you get this idea repeated, and you see this in the Analects, is the phrase, the way of heaven.
	Here's Confucius: Heaven is the author of the virtue that is within me.
	And here's the Confucian scholar Tu Wei Ming writing, Heaven features prominently throughout the Confucian tradition.
	So I think that's enough to dispel the idea that somehow Confucianism is atheistic, it doesn't have a conception of heaven.
	Whatever that conception is, it does have one.
	Buddhism, pretty much the same thing.
	Now, there are two types of Buddhism: the so-called Hinayana or like lesser vehicle Buddhism.
	You see it in Sri Lanka, in Thailand, in Cambodia.
	And that does seem to be largely atheistic or largely godless.
	It focuses very much on human souls.
	It focuses on human spiritual disciplines, but not much attention to God or the afterlife.
	But the main type of Buddhism, which is called Mahayana or the sort of greater part, greater vehicle Buddhism, this is widespread in China and Korea and Japan, some of it in India.
	And these Mahayana texts like the Lotus Sutra and so on, they have a pantheon of celestial beings.
	They inhabit these heavenly realms.
	They come down from the heavenly realms.
	They become active in the world.
	They help people to achieve what is called nirvana or enlightenment.
	And so these Hinayana and Mahayana strains, although they're somewhat different, they do converge in that most of their practitioners, even today, do accept some idea of life after death.
	And in part, you can see why they do that, because Buddhism, like Hinduism, accepts the idea of continuous rebirth.
	So think about this.
	If you die and you're reborn, that's another way of saying there's life after death.
	And then you die again and you're reborn again.
	That's more life after death.
	So right there, you see that, again, we are now in somewhat strange, maybe some would say alien territory, this cycle of births and deaths.
	But nevertheless, there it is.
	Now, I'm not saying that the Buddhists are excited about this because for Buddhism, this cycle of birth and death and rebirth and it goes on and on is not a good thing.
	It's in effect a kind of a kind of a treadmill.
	And the Buddhists say that you have to look for a way to get off the treadmill.
	You have to look to break this unending cycle.
	And the only way you do that is by achieving true spiritual enlightenment, otherwise called nirvana.
	So this is my brief summary of the Western and the Eastern view.
	Now, I haven't completed the Eastern view, which I will pick up again tomorrow, because I haven't talked about the main religion of India, which is Hinduism.
	But we will see that the Hindu view, which by the way, greatly influences the Buddhist view and also influences some of the other religions like Jainism and so on, the Hindu view, is actually very interesting and in its own way, quite profound.
	It's not something that in the end I accept, but I do think it stimulates a lot of thought.
	And as it turns out, there is a very powerful tradition of Western philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, but then continues with the philosopher called Schopenhauer that converges on this Hindu tradition.
	It's not, by the way, that Schopenhauer read the Hindus and was like, oh, wow, they're right.
	They've got a great idea.
	It's that Schopenhauer, working in a completely different tradition and operating entirely within the mainstream of Western philosophy, develops his ideas and his whole system and puts it out.
	And then someone tells him, Hey, guess what?
	You're saying pretty much what the Hindus have been saying for centuries.
	And Schopenhauer is like, what?
	And he goes and checks it out.
	And he sees that although the Hindus and he have come at it from completely different starting points, they seem to have ended in a very similar destination.
	So, what you have here is something that is not only sort of religiously interesting, which is how these Hindus think, but how there is a school of Western philosophy, a very influential school of Western philosophy, that arrives at the same general understanding of life and also life after death as the Hindus.
	And we will pick up on that next time.
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