Dennis Prager Show - How to be a Shock Absorber of Unpredictable Events
Aired: 2020-04-09
Duration: 08:27


=== Clarity Through Beliefs (07:59) ===

[00:00:00]  You see, having a clarity about life, having a structure of beliefs and values is what enables you to get through the tough times.
[00:00:18]  It is a bank account.
[00:00:24]  You deposit money in a bank or you have equity in a home or you have some other form of savings for rainy days, right?
[00:00:33]  I mean, that's the classic notion.
[00:00:36]  So we're now in rainy days.
[00:00:40]  And one of the reasons that I am capable of dealing with this, one of them, there are others, and I am in a relatively good position.
[00:00:53]  But one of the reasons is that I have a worldview, an outlook on life, which encompasses things like this.
[00:01:08]  I assume tragedy.
[00:01:10]  In my book on happiness, I write, I have a tragic view of life.
[00:01:17]  Therefore, I am crazy happy when things aren't bad.
[00:01:24]  I have never waited for wonderful developments to be happy.
[00:01:31]  Because the wonderful development was no tragedy is taking place now.
[00:01:37]  That to me is...
[00:01:38]  Remember, if nothing's horrific, life is terrific.
[00:01:44]  That's what I've been...
[00:01:46]  If you have taken my ideas seriously, you have a better shock absorber.
[00:01:54]  That's the Dr. Marmer's term.
[00:01:57]  If nothing's horrific, then life is terrific.
[00:02:01]  Why do we have that jingle?
[00:02:03]  I mean, because I've said it so often that one of you put it to music.
[00:02:09]  Ruff's kid?
[00:02:11]  Russ's kid.
[00:02:12]  Okay, Russ, well done.
[00:02:15]  Huh?
[00:02:17]  Yeah, K-I-D-D. In fact, some spell it K-I-D-D-D. Triple D. You are impressed.
[00:02:29]  You should be impressed.
[00:02:31]  Very few hosts would come up with that.
[00:02:36]  That was not a statement of bragging.
[00:02:38]  It was a statement of thinking differently.
[00:02:48]  Thank you, Russ.
[00:02:50]  And now, ladies and gentlemen, we return to Earth.
[00:02:58]  This is all by way of sort of advertising the importance of the Ultimate Issues Hour.
[00:03:05]  It gives you the framework in which life can then not be just a series of shocks.
[00:03:12]  I'm not shocked by bad.
[00:03:17]  My view of the human species is very, very low.
[00:03:22]  That is why I am just delighted.
[00:03:25]  I'm ecstatic when I meet good people, of whom I have met many.
[00:03:31]  Humanity stinks, but there are many wonderful people.
[00:03:38]  So that's the Ultimate Issues Hour.
[00:03:41]  Today's subject is nature.
[00:03:47]  You know, between Yale and the Bible, there's more wisdom in five verses in Genesis than in all of Yale.
[00:04:01]  I pick on Yale because it's the worst of the prestigious universities, but they're all bad.
[00:04:09]  Watch No Safe Spaces.
[00:04:11]  You'll see what's going on at Yale.
[00:04:13]  It's really...
[00:04:15]  We've got some video from Yale that'll rankle your gankle.
[00:04:22]  I've never said that about anything before.
[00:04:28]  Are we battling COVID-19?
[00:04:31]  Yeah.
[00:04:32]  Is COVID-19 part of nature?
[00:04:34]  Yeah.
[00:04:36]  So what's all of this talk about the Gaia, right?
[00:04:40]  The Earth.
[00:04:41]  The goddess Earth.
[00:04:44]  So I'm going to read to you.
[00:04:45]  I rarely do this.
[00:04:46]  Every so often I read to you my column.
[00:04:49]  And that's the subject of today's Ultimate Issues Hour.
[00:04:54]  The Bible is right.
[00:04:56]  Secular society, or much of it, is wrong.
[00:05:01]  When the Bible in Genesis says, you will subdue nature.
[00:05:08]  That's correct.
[00:05:12]  But you know what they did before the Bible?
[00:05:14]  They worshipped nature.
[00:05:15]  And you know what they're doing after the Bible?
[00:05:18]  Worshipping nature.
[00:05:20]  Remember the Time magazine cover with Gaia, the Earth?
[00:05:25]  I mean, there's an actress.
[00:05:27]  Did you see this thing?
[00:05:29]  What is some...
[00:05:30]  Or a model or an actress?
[00:05:32]  I don't know.
[00:05:32]  I didn't know her name, but...
[00:05:34]  Who said, you know, it's not so bad.
[00:05:37]  Maybe it'll kill a lot of people and then we won't be, we humans are despoiling the earth.
[00:05:43]  That's a very common theme among left-wing environmentalists.
[00:05:48]  The human being is really a curse on earth.
[00:05:53]  The biblical view is the earth was created for us.
[00:05:56]  It doesn't mean that we abuse it.
[00:05:57]  That's an absurdity.
[00:06:00]  I mean, you know, my car was created for me, right?
[00:06:03]  I mean, let's be honest, right?
[00:06:04]  That's why the car is to serve me.
[00:06:07]  I am not there to serve the car.
[00:06:10]  But if I don't take care of the car, it will not be able to serve me.
[00:06:13]  That's a given.
[00:06:17]  So here's the column.
[00:06:19]  A statement widely attributed to the great British thinker G.K. Chesterton describes the modern period as perfectly as any single idea can.
[00:06:29]  When people stop believing in God, They don't believe in nothing.
[00:06:33]  They believe in anything.
[00:06:35]  One of these substitute gods has been nature.
[00:06:42]  Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship.
[00:06:50]  Every religion prior to the Bible had nature gods.
[00:06:54]  The sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain, and so on.
[00:07:01]  That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e.
[00:07:07]  Judeo-Christian religions, the more nature is worshipped.
[00:07:11]  Everyone on the left and right cares about the environment.
[00:07:15]  But caring about the environment is not the same as environmentalism.
[00:07:21]  Environmentalism, for most of its adherents, is a secular religion.
[00:07:25]  These people, many of whom refer to and truly regard the earth, As a goddess, Gaia, the name of the ancient Greek earth goddess, worship the environment.
[00:07:38]  The man who, more than any other, started the modern environmentalist religion was James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s.

=== Cameron's Apologia for Pantheism (00:43) ===

[00:07:51]  Almost 50 years later, in 2014, Lovelock told The Guardian, environmentalism...
[00:07:59]  New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described the 2009 James Cameron blockbuster film Avatar as, quote, Cameron's long apologia for pantheism, a faith that equates God with nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
[00:08:25]  That equation of God with nature...