Dennis Prager defies paralysis and personal tragedy to argue that secular humanism fails because it treats morality as opinion rather than absolute truth. He critiques the Enlightenment's belief in inherent goodness, citing recent shootings in Canada and Maine where mental health excuses ignored human agency. Prager asserts that Christianity relies entirely on Judaism, condemning modern anti-Semitism exemplified by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for demonizing Israel. Ultimately, he frames his own miraculous ability to speak despite nerve damage as proof of divine intervention, urging society to confront evil directly rather than blaming external factors. [Automatically generated summary]
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How are you, Dennis?
How am I?
That's a very complex question.
If there is no God, then who determines good and evil?
Or is there even good and evil?
Losing Charlie and then the diminishment of your voice.
I know people have said, and I have said it too, why?
Why, God, why would you?
Why?
Whether or not Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson is an anti-Semite is a question I don't even get drawn into.
Dennis, my friend, it's so good to see you.
So good to see you.
It is completely mutual.
Yeah.
I have to ask, how are you feeling?
I can give you a few sentences or a book worth answer.
And I'm not, and I'm serious about that.
I have a new mission in life, and that is to help people who have terrible pain in their lives, emotional, psychological, or physical, endure it and even achieve happiness.
I tell you, Dennis, I've heard from friends that they are amazed.
Every day they would come to your hospital room and you're in the hospital and you would have this great attitude.
And your attitude was, what choice do I have?
I mean, I don't want to be miserable.
And I don't know how you do that.
I'll tell you how I do it.
I'm an extremely rational thinker.
The title of my biblical commentary is the rational Bible.
If it doesn't make sense, I don't believe it.
I reject it.
So anyway, I realized from day one, I had only three choices.
Death, depression, and or persevere.
That's it.
Really, there is no fourth alternative.
So I thought about that.
And I don't want to die and I don't want to be depressed.
So I have to persevere.
And I will say this, in my book on happiness, happiness is a serious problem.
I have now vindicated everything I wrote.
And now with much greater credibility, because having endured being paralyzed from the shoulders down, every person with terrible pain in their lives can take what I say very seriously.
You have always been an icon and a hero of mine, Dennis.
And you have just grown in my eyes over the last year watching you even to be a bigger giant.
And thank you for your knowledge and your example for all the years.
Well, I want everybody to know that I was incredibly honored and grateful that you wrote the afterword for my book coming out this week.
Defining Good and Evil00:15:31
If there is no God, the battle over who defines good and evil.
That's the book.
And it is, I don't mean to cut you off.
It is just such a great book.
It is, you can tell you are the tree to Charlie's apple.
It's this great conversation between you and students, so open, so honest.
And I want to get into some of the things you talked about, but one of the things I think we should start with is what is God?
Well, there are a million answers to that question.
God is the only absolute in the universe of relativity.
That's how I put it when I was in England studying in my junior year.
And my roommate, an English kid like me, was a physics major, a physics major.
And he thought that belief in God is nonsense.
So he said, so Dennis, what is God?
And I said, God is the only absolute in the universe of relativity.
And his response was awesome.
He said, oh, he didn't expect that a guy who believed in God could even utter a multisyllabic word, let alone give him an answer like that.
But anyway, but that is the truth.
If there is no God, which is the name of the book, if there is no God, then who determines good and evil?
Or is there even good and evil?
There isn't good and evil.
There are just opinions about it.
I have been asking for 50 years.
I have been asking high school and college students who have a dog, if they would save their dog that they love or a stranger first if both were drowning.
In virtually every instance across ethnic groups, across racial groups, across religious groups even.
The same exact answers.
One-third the stranger, one-third the dog, and one-third didn't know.
So two-thirds of Americans for 50 years, I could pretty positively say two-thirds of Americans would not save the stranger.
And that's what set me off on this.
The reason I would save the stranger before the dogs I own and love is because that is the biblical demand, because we are created in the image of God and animals are not.
Otherwise, I would vote along with the student and I would think that, hey, I love my dog.
I have a relationship with him and I have no relationship with the stranger.
So that's what set me off in this direction.
So I love this part of the book because they have so many follow-up questions and you're so good at the follow-up and having them think it through.
But that's where if you don't have the understanding that the one thing we all have in common is we are all made in the image of God.
So we are all unique and we're all related to one another.
It's how you get down to exterminations of people.
I mean, it goes from that little pond story with the dog and the human into eugenics and everything else, does it not?
Absolutely.
This applies to everything.
When you understand that everyone is created in God's image, doesn't mean people are basically good, by the way, which is a very important point in the book and in my philosophy of life.
And in the Judeo-Christian outlook, by the way, doesn't believe that people are basically good.
Only the secular Enlightenment in France posited that people are basically good.
It's a brand new idea in the history of idea.
So that's what.
Well, why does it matter whether we're basically good or not?
If the belief is that we're basically good or we're not.
Yeah, right.
Oh, it's unbelievably important.
For example, if you believe people are basically good, then you will think as a parent, you don't have to Raise children to be good.
You just have to give kids love.
But if all you give is your kid love, you will have a well-loved barbarian as a child.
It's we're seeing that now.
The product of this thinking is now a lot of these fairly loved and fairly and highly educated.
We have a lot of these well-funded or well-loved barbarians in our society today.
I'll give you another consequence, incredibly important one.
The belief, the widespread belief, especially among the educated, that it's the environment, not the human, that is responsible.
So because we're basically good, we can't blame the person.
We can blame something else.
It's most obvious with guns.
We blame the guns.
We don't blame the user of the gun.
It's the ramifications of the belief that people are basically good, the deleterious consequences are tremendous.
We just had the shooting up in Canada and then one, where was that one in Maine, right?
Of the trans shooters, the Rhode Island, the trans shooters.
And everybody is saying it's the gun, it's the gun.
And, you know, being trans had nothing to do with it.
And I think, Dennis, we are not considering mental health.
We are ignoring people who need mental help.
And we're only making it worse because I think of what you're saying.
Everybody is good.
Just because they're different, it doesn't mean that they're, you know, mentally ill or whatever.
Well, sometimes it does, doesn't it?
Well, obviously, that is true.
Sometimes they are, they are not blamed, obviously.
Let me just say, by the way, as the stepfather, my wife's oldest son, who is 42 now, is autistic and lives with us because he can't live on his own.
He knows right and wrong better than most Harvard graduates.
This notion that the mentally ill do not know that murder is wrong, I don't accept that.
So even that's the case of blaming something else.
Sure, we need more mental health programs.
But again, Their values are as important as the values of the non-mentally ill.
So how do you have values?
How do you know it's wrong if you've never been taught anything?
Do you are you born with this?
That's right.
That's the point.
You don't know right or wrong.
You only have opinions.
I had Jewish kids 50 years ago.
When I was their age, I would have, or a little older than them, I would have them saying that only in their view, in their opinion, were the Nazis evil.
But you can't really say they were evil because it's an opinion.
That's exactly where we are right now.
Yeah.
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Dennis, I have a question.
I've wanted to talk to you.
I'm sure Marissa has told you.
I've wanted to talk to you several times about things and get your opinion.
And one of them is on what we're going through with Iran.
You know, they're killing their own people by the tens of thousands.
At least it's reported.
We're threatening war.
I don't want to go to war, but I also don't want to see people killed.
And I feel like this is what it must have felt like in the 1930s.
How do you know when to step in?
How do you know?
The biggest question is, will it work?
And is there moral justification for doing it?
Tucker Carlson said years ago that anyone who defended the Hiroshima bombing is evil, is evil.
I wrote a column.
This is well before October 7th.
I wrote a column against Tucker Carlson's worldview.
But that's his view.
It's a perfect example of the opinion view.
And so your opinion would be if because that saved more lives than it took and it ended the war, it was justified.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
I just have to tell you, Dennis, your voice is so important.
This book is so good, so important.
And I'm not one to question God because I tried that and it doesn't really work.
I've learned over the years to accept his will and know that it's putting me in the place that I need to be in.
But I have to tell you, losing losing Charlie and then the diminishment of your voice.
I know people have said, and I have said it too, why?
Why, God, why would you why?
Well, I have an answer to that.
And I wrote it decades before Charlie and decades before my accident of November 12th, 2024.
I wrote it then.
Why Tragedy Changes Minds00:09:38
If you have to deal with the problem of tragedy and evil before it affects you, I'll give you a great example.
A woman once called my radio show and she began as follows: Dennis, I have always disagreed with you about capital punishment.
I was against it, and you were adamantly for it.
But I've changed.
And I said, gee, why is that?
And she said, because my brother was murdered.
And of course, I offered her condolences, but that's not all I offered.
I offered a critique.
And I said, so when other people's brothers were murdered, that didn't register in your thinking about God.
It took a tragedy in your life.
What people need to do is to confront these things before it befalls them.
Almost everybody will have tragedy in their lives.
Alienated children, cancer.
It's endless.
And of course, hatred.
So, or I should say, yeah.
This is, we're in the that's the age of feeling instead of the age of reason, correct?
Absolutely.
And it's the age, let's be candid.
It is the age of secularism.
These are ideas that were brought forth by the Enlightenment.
Oddly enough, that people are basically good.
But you're absolutely right about.
I just want to say you're absolutely right that it's also a matter of reason versus emotion.
So was the Enlightenment, I've heard people make this case now, was the Enlightenment an error, a mistake, a bad thing.
The Enlightenment was a good thing with regard to people having to be rational.
But it really inaugurated a period in Western life of irrationality.
It was, was it Descartes?
No, it wasn't Descartes.
It was Rousseau.
No, it wasn't Rousseau.
One of the, anyway, one of the great, one of the great Enlightenment thinkers said when people are forced to have irrational views,
it is because, oh, yeah, when people have irrational views, they will develop any, I don't remember it exactly, but they will adopt evil views.
When people start to think irrationally, bad things happen.
And that's what the.
It's almost Nietzsche's warning for a society that doesn't believe in God, they'll believe anything.
Oh, well, yeah, the greatest quote on that, it's attributed to Chesterfield.
Chesterton.
Yeah, Chesterfield was a cigarette.
And a couch, I might say.
No, I never thought of that.
And the quote, it's not actually from him, but it's attributed to him.
And that is, when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
They believe in anything.
Yes.
Let me take back to the book.
And you were just talking about capital punishment.
Capital punishment, can an unjust society deliver justice in capital punishment?
Yeah, it can, but only if it doesn't provide either witnesses or DNA.
I mean, that's why the Bible in Exodus says that the person shall be put to death, the murderer, by the accounts of two witnesses.
Otherwise, we today have witnesses.
We have witnesses in the chemistry lab.
So that's the way it works.
And it does work.
So one of the things you talk about in the book, If There Is No God, let's take the capital punishment.
You say the scriptures tell us: how can you rely on scriptures?
How do you know scriptures are the word of God if it was written by men who are flawed and are not good, not born good?
Well, you're right.
If exactly, if it was written by human beings who are flawed, then you get rid of it.
Look, I've written four or five volumes on the first five books of the Bible, what Jews call the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
And I make the point regularly that this or that shows the divine origin of the Torah.
I'll give one example.
If people wrote the Torah, and for that matter, the prophets, would Jews have written such a critical, such a critique of their own people?
That is one of the best arguments I have that Jews didn't write it.
It was given to Jews.
I mean, the Jews come out pretty awful in their own history.
It's almost like they had Marxists writing it, their own history.
Well, there's no other example of a group writing its own history and depicting its people as so flawed as the Hebrew Bible.
That's what I'll give you another argument.
The most incredible thing of all the laws in the Torah, and that's where all the laws come from in Deuteronomy is that if a man goes, I'm more or less paraphrasing the law.
Torah Law on War and Rape00:02:23
A man goes out to battle and he wants a woman.
Now, we know how ubiquitous rape in times of warfare is, right?
I mean, a million German women, they say, they say, were raped.
And the Islamic conquests allow them to marry a woman for a day, which is, of course, a rape.
Right.
Right.
So there is this law.
Man goes out in battle and fancies a woman.
This is what he has to do.
He has to bring her to his home.
And she mourns her parents for 30 days.
She mourns her family for 30 days.
She is not to be made privy.
She is to wear the sackcloth of people who are mourning.
And then he can't touch her for 30 days.
Then if he still wants her, after 30 days of her crying, he then can only have her sexually if he marries her.
I mean, it's hard to believe that men would have written this 3,200 years ago.
Yes, especially men.
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Dennis, we're looking at a time where people are not sure about God.
God is so, yeah, I believe God's the only answer, return to God.
And we're starting to see things I never thought we would see in America.
I'm seeing people talk about our society in the West as a Christian nation.
And we are a Christian nation, but we, more importantly, we are a Judeo-Christian nation.
Can you explain what the difference is and why it is important for every American to always stay Judeo-Christian nation?
Glenn, God bless you for asking that question.
I intend to write a major piece on that issue.
Good.
There is no Christianity.
There is no Christ without the Judeo.
Jesus was a Jew.
And as I tell my Christian friends, Jesus never read the New Testament.
Jesus was a Jew.
The gospel writers were Jews.
The apostles were Jews.
Paul was a Jew.
I mean, all the ideas that Christians, all the ideas that Christians use to validate their faith are based on the Jewish Bible.
Yeah.
There is no, so there's no Christian without Judeo.
And the Judeo would not be known in the world without the Christian.
The reason people know about the Ten Commandments all over the world is because Christians publicized it.
We need each other tremendously.
And I believe there's a divine role for both.
So I just want to say, if somebody wants to drop the Judeo, they are untrustworthy as a theological thinker.
Well, we've seen it happen before in history, not any good times.
You know, Dennis, I said when Charlie died, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
I think except for this, I think when Charlie was killed, that was evil striking and trying to silence good.
And I think for the first time in my life, because I went to the funeral, what I expected and worried about would happen, the opposite happened.
I expected that we might kind of drift or we might get angry or whatever.
And there was an explosion of good all over the world.
And when I went to his funeral, Dennis, I've never felt anything like it.
It was like God was there.
And when people were talking about politics, it would withdraw.
It was like an ocean.
And then they talk about God and it would come back in and you could feel the spirit moving.
It was an amazing thing.
Then all of a sudden, we start to get from honestly some people that we know and have liked and everything else, we start getting this intense hatred for Jews.
And in a shocking way, and I've explained it, at least to myself, and I would love to hear you explain.
I feel like there is a, you know, equal and opposite reaction to every action.
So God stepped in after Charlie, but then evil stepped in just as hard.
And it's, I feel like we are for the first time in my life actually watching the heavenly spheres appear and play some things out and use us as, you know, sometimes puppets in a way.
We're watching good and evil for the first time at an epic scale.
What do you think of that?
Well, you're asking the $64,000.
You're asking the $64,000 question.
That's clear.
Part of the answer is that there's a famous Jewish saying from one of the greatest rabbis in Jewish history that the Torah,
and this is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, the Torah is like, the Torah is like rain.
When rain falls, it brings forth beautiful flowers and poisonous weeds.
That's a very important point.
Christians put it that the devil quotes scripture, right?
or can quote scripture, Judeo-Christian religions do not produce, do not necessarily produce good people.
You, you, you.
You have to emphasize that God wants you to be good.
As Micah puts it, the prophet Micah, in the name of God, has God not told you all that he demands from you.
That's all that he demands from you.
Be righteous, love justice, and walk humbly with your God.
God demands first and foremost that we be good.
And if that is not taught, you're not going to get a lot of good.
And, you know, when Candace Owens describes only one country on earth as demonic, and it's the one Jewish country on earth, whatever label you assign to it, it's the opposite of John Adams.
John Adams said, I'm paraphrasing, all the good that Western civilization has brought forth was thanks to the Hebrews.
And that's what people, that's what Christians who are true to Christianity believe and advocate.
That's why it's Judeo-Christian to get back to that point.
But there is a strain of Christendom that is anti-Semitic.
And whether or not Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson is an anti-Semite is a question I don't even get drawn into.
All I can say is that what they're saying is anti-Semitic.
When the only country in the world that you condemn in such terms is the one Jewish country in the world.
When you think about it, why was it 600,000 Muslims were killed in the Syrian civil war by the Assad regime?
Not a word, not a word, nobody even knows about it.
And you know why?
Because it was Muslims who were killing those Muslims.
It wasn't Jews.
The only protests about Killings are when Jews do it on any national scale.
It's so call it what you want.
It's certainly not philosemitic.
It's certainly not pro-Jewish.
With everything you're going through, Dennis, all the pain, all the everything, all the, I mean, what it has taken for you to sit and do this interview, you dictated the last portion, the good portion of this book, while in this condition, worse than you are now.
The Key to If There Is No God00:04:08
There must be something that you want everyone to hear.
If you could summarize it in one answer, what is the key to if there, if there is no God?
What is the one thing that you can push?
Yeah.
Then good and evil don't exist.
They are merely opinions.
That's the takeaway.
Now the book is constant challenges over 50 years made against me by audiences and especially by young people, meaning high school and college age.
So every argument I could think of against my assertion is presented and answered in If There Is No God.
Dennis, it is great to see you.
I love you, my friend, and we pray for you and will continue to do so.
It's good to see you up and speaking.
Well, you can imagine on my end if you'd have told me the day after I regained consciousness after my fall that I'd be doing an interview with Glenn Beck.
Not only an interview, but a video interview.
I would have thought you were smoking some very potent weed.
By the way, I will say it's very interesting.
Every doctor who has commented on my condition, not one of whom was particularly religious, described my ability to speak as miraculous.
They all use the word miracle or miraculous because I didn't even register on the test of the phrenic nerve, the nerve that goes from the brain to the diaphragm and enables people to talk among other things.
I didn't, and I didn't register.
And here I am having an interview with you.
And that I've had no cognitive consequence is also part of the miracle.
So I tend to focus on the miraculous, not on the loss.
I love you, Dennis.
Thank you.
The love is mutual.
And I just ask your many, many listeners and viewers to get, if there is no God, it could be pre-ordered at Amazon.
And you will also get the benefit of Glenn Beck's afterward.
Well, it is a really important book, and I do hope people read it.
I read it, and it is fabulous, Dennis.
It's really good.
Don Imus: At Least I'm Not Fat00:00:41
Thank you so much.
What a different interview.
You know, when Don Imus was at the end of his life and he was in the hospital and he had tubes and everything else running into him, he sent me a picture of him in the hospital looking just horrible.
And the only thing the text said, this is one of the last texts I got from him.
The only thing it said was, at least I'm not fat like you.