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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:18:02
Shared Scripture
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I was very, very touched just now, and I think I'd like to share it with you folks.
Sean, in a rare emotional moment, said to me, have a good show.
I'm a little overwhelmed.
I just want to say that.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Dennis Prager.
I have a very provocative topic for you.
You know, I think about the big stuff.
I've been thinking about the big stuff since the age of 14. I think as a sophomore in high school, I wrote a paper on Is There an Afterlife?
Not a paper.
What we used to call composition.
I think they call it essay now.
And I wrote in my junior year an essay for my English class.
And the subject was, I want to prove George Bernard Shaw wrong.
Did you know about this one?
I'm laughing because it shows I really, I marched to a different drummer from a very early age.
And what was it about George Bernard Shaw that I wanted to prove wrong?
He said, it's too bad youth is wasted on the young.
And I said, I want to prove him wrong.
I will not waste my youth while I'm young.
And I didn't.
I mean, I played a lot.
I still play a lot.
But that was a very formative time.
It's when I taught myself how to conduct orchestras.
It's when I started teaching myself Russian.
I was a very atypical child, as you would imagine.
My parents had no idea who was living in the same home.
My mother really did at times think I would end up in jail.
And the reason, or a reason, was that I never did homework, which in a Jewish home is definitely grounds for imprisonment.
Alright, welcome to the show here.
So I am preoccupied this week with the question of what...
What are Judeo-Christian values?
It's my column this week, and it was what I recorded for PragerU yesterday.
You know, we've been putting out for 10 years or so, every single week, a video.
Of the 500 that we've put out, I've done 50, so I only do 1 in 10, but still, it's a lot.
I have just recorded what are Judeo-Christian values, and I'm going to bounce some themes off you.
Very few people who use the term know exactly what they mean.
They know more or less what they mean.
It's not at all a dishonest statement or usage of a term.
But what does it really mean?
And why Judeo-Christian?
Why not just Christian?
Or why not just Judaic, for that matter?
So I have thoughts for you, and if you're Christian or Jewish or neither, you will find all of this interesting and provocative.
Judaism and Christianity are the only two religions that share a holy scripture.
That's very interesting.
And again, it's not something people think about.
They know it, but they don't think about it, and they don't realize it's unique.
So take, for example, the other monotheistic religion, Islam.
Islam does not share a holy scripture with Judaism or Christianity.
In fact, it is basic to Islamic belief that the Jews distorted the...
The Old Testament, especially the Torah, the key five books of Moses, and that Christians made up their own New Testament.
And that the only authentic word of God is the Quran.
It's not a criticism in the least, it's just a statement of fact.
So that's why one does not speak of Judeo-Muslim or Christiano-Muslim values.
That's not to say that a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew cannot share some values.
Of course they can.
But a Jew and a Christian could share values with a Hindu and with a Buddhist and with an atheist.
They don't share theologies or beliefs, but they can share values.
That's given.
If you believe in free speech, you share a value, right?
Right.
Number one thing in understanding Judeo-Christian is to understand that they do share a Bible.
That Bible is the Old Testament, as Christians came to call it, or the Hebrew Bible.
Jews call it the Tanakh.
It doesn't matter what you call it.
I'll refer to it as alternately the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible.
That's what they share.
Both traditionally holding that it reflects or is, in fact, the Word of God.
That's a very big reason to say Judeo-Christian.
Now here, however, is a very interesting challenge to Christians.
And especially those who sometimes say, and you can read it in comments on my column, for example, on American Greatness, That prints, if that's the term you can use, my column every week.
Publishes, yeah.
I'm sorry?
Publishes.
Publishes?
Yeah, that's the new.
That's the new term?
Yeah.
They use publish?
That's fascinating.
That's an old term.
So, I read comments, not only on my columns.
I did a whole male-female era yesterday on New York Times readers' comments on a column on men and women.
So I find reading comments at least as educational as reading the piece.
So there are comments sometimes by Christians who will say that there's no such thing as Judeo-Christian, and there are Jews who say this.
There's no such thing as Judeo-Christian values.
They're completely different religions, and of course they...
They're not completely different.
They are different.
Of course they're different.
Completely different?
How can you share a very large chunk of Bible as divine writ and not share a lot?
However, there are Christians who don't realize the Judeo part is valid.
They will say it.
And they will intuit it, but they will not realize it.
And I did a little experiment right before I came on just now.
I googled, love God with all your heart.
And what comes up?
The very, very first thing that comes up, Matthew 6.21.
I have no issue with that.
Oops, it drives me crazy.
Okay, Matthew 6.21.
And then it has Luke 10, Matthew 22, and so on.
Okay.
It's a very interesting thing because it's actually originally a thousand years before the New Testament in the Old Testament, in the Torah.
The first five books, the most important books to Jews of the Bible, and they are the most important books.
That's why I'm writing my Bible commentary on those five books.
So, here's a question for my Christian listeners.
If I would have asked you five minutes ago, or five years ago, where does love...
God, with all your heart, come from.
Would you have said New Testament or Old Testament?
No, you could say, or both Testaments.
You could say that too.
But I suspect that many Christians believe that it is unique to the New Testament.
Likewise, love your neighbor as yourself.
And that too comes from the Torah, from the book of Leviticus.
The book of Leviticus also gave us the one verse that is on the Liberty Bell.
For these reasons alone, it is extremely fair to say Judeo-Christian.
The Christian part, for Jews who may have issues with the term, is that Christianity brought the Jewish scriptures to the world.
That's overwhelmingly true.
That's why Jews and Christians need each other.
And there has been one major Judeo-Christian country, the United States of America.
Will it remain?
It doesn't look like it right now.
And that is the reason for the collapse.
People say men give birth.
And other absurdities, I mean true lying absurdities, because they have abandoned the idea that there is objective truth.
And objective right and wrong.
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Okay, so I'm talking to you about Judeo-Christian values and how important they are.
What Christianity did, among other things, is bring the Judeo to the world.
That's a big deal.
So Jews should certainly understand Judeo-Christian values.
Christians should understand that the values that they preach are Enunciated and enhanced, if you will, from a Christian standpoint, certainly, in the New Testament.
But I did a little experiment here.
I put in love God with all your heart, and all I got were New Testament references on Google.
But of course it comes from the Old Testament.
So does love your neighbor as yourself, so does love the stranger.
So if any Christian has ever had a problem with Judeo-Christian values, it's because they are ignorant.
Of the Old Testament.
And it is an interesting question.
If you're a Christian, when you...
If you got a Christian education, was it both Testaments or was it overwhelmingly New Testament?
I have seen Bibles handed out by missionaries which only have the New Testament in them.
It doesn't make sense to me from a Christian standpoint.
Not just...
Not just from an objective standpoint.
1-8 Prager 7-7-6.
And again, I remind you, the only two religions to share Holy Scripture are Judaism and Christianity.
That's a very big deal.
Okay, let's see here.
Chris in Anaheim, California.
Hello.
Yes, Dennis, I'm happy to talk to you.
Thank you.
What I just find astonishing, really, is that the Christians that you associate with, apparently, believe that you've got to go to only the New Testament.
The Old Testament is the foundation for the New Testament, but then, you know, another statement that you make is that...
Christianity leads you back to the Torah.
But I would like to make, you know, I don't know how I can make this argument with you so quickly, but the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament in your relationship with God.
And the Old Testament was nailed to the cross.
And so to go back...
Back to the Old Testament, we'd be doing the exact opposite of what God wants you to do.
And by not believing in the New Testament and Christ as the Savior now, you're actually denying entry into heaven.
Oh, sorry, it broke up.
Denying what?
I didn't hear the last words.
Denying access to heaven.
Because you've got to believe that Jesus is God in the flesh and gave himself on the cross to save you from your sins.
Right, okay.
And you do not get that from going back to the Torah.
Right, I agree with that.
You don't get that from going back to the Torah.
So what you're doing, and perfectly legitimately, is enunciating a Christian theology.
But I don't know where we differ beyond that.
We differ on the nature of salvation.
For Judaism, it is through deeds, through Christianity, it's through faith.
Although my wife was raised evangelical, and the emphasis on behavior, which is another issue entirely, and I ought to do an hour on that.
I think Christians do themselves a disservice when they say it's all faith, as Luther did.
Luther said even if you murder and do a whole host of other things, it doesn't matter.
Salvation is only through faith.
But Luther is a mixed bag as an individual, but he certainly did something remarkable in creating the Protestant Reformation.
Which is another subject as well.
My subject today is not to say who's right.
I've never addressed that because God will answer that question.
What matters is what Jews and Christians can do as serious Jews and serious Christians to save Western civilization from the vile...
Internal attacks on it from the left.
That to me is the single most important question that we can ask.
Not who's right.
God will adjudicate on that.
What I know is who's wrong.
The left is wrong.
The left is a completely destructive force because it has rejected the values of both our religions.
Even though there are leftist Jews and leftist Christians, there's a leftist pope.
I understand that.
Leftism goes everywhere, and it ruins everything it touches.
That is what I think our focus needs to be now.
Because if the society collapses, we have sinned against our children and grandchildren.
What did your father or mother or grandfather or grandmother do to save the freest society ever developed in history?
And the answer, went to synagogue or went to church, won't suffice.
Those of you who love God must hate evil.
That's in the Psalms for both of us, Christians and Jews.
By the way, I'll be talking about all of this with Eric Metaxas on Monday in Pasadena.
Ask a Jew, Ask a Gentile.
Info is at DennisPrager.com.
Hi, everybody.
Judeo-Christian Values is my topic.
Read my column today.
It comes out every Tuesday.
You can see it at DennisPrager.com.
American Greatness, Town Hall, Daily Wire.
Jewish Press, Jewish World Review, it's, thank God, it's widely republished.
See, I used the word published.
Not printed.
It's also printed, but mostly published.
So I've been thinking about this a lot.
For those of you who have any ambivalence about the term, please understand...
The only two religions to share Holy Scripture are Judaism and Christianity, and that is the Old Testament, which for Christians is certainly quantitatively the bulk of the Bible.
So I did another experiment.
I told you I googled, love God with all your heart.
And what I got was the first thing, Matthew 6.21, then Luke 10.27, And on and on.
No reference at all to Deuteronomy.
Only New Testament references.
And then I did love your neighbor.
That's all I put in.
Love your neighbor.
Mark 12.31.
And Romans 13.8-10.
Mark 12.30.
Matthew 22.34.
Not a single reference comes up to the original source, which is Leviticus.
It's a very interesting experiment that I just did.
Never did it before.
Okay, let's see here.
Pittsburgh, one of my favorite cities.
Susan, hello Susan.
Hi Dennis, it's great to be talking with you.
Thank you.
You were an inspiration to me.
We have a women's Bible class that I've been participating in.
It's very small.
And we were looking for a new subject to study.
And I did not want to hear one more screeching woman talk about vapid studies on videos that we've been working with that are out there in the marketplace, which is interesting.
We also have a tendency in our church to be doing anti-racism kinds of studies.
And so everybody was discussing all these things at our small table.
And I said, how about this?
How about if we do...
Deuteronomy, I'll lead the study.
Because I knew I had your book as my backup.
Go on.
And so I've been doing that.
We're on our sixth week.
And the first week we got through the first 11 verses.
And it was really quite a beautiful and inspiring conversation.
And we're all the way up into, right now, the Ten Commandments.
And this coming week we're going to be doing the two on...
On murder versus killing.
And the other one about false witness.
Look, this is what I live for, that people read my rational Bible commentary.
That's why I've devoted so much of the last 10 years to it.
If people understand these books, their lives will be better.
The world will be better.
I can't thank you enough.
How are they reacting, your small group?
Very, very well.
I thought we were going to skim right through.
Oh, it's very hard to skim my Bible commentary.
I will say that.
We're actually reading Deuteronomy and using yours as a backup.
Yes, I hear you.
Well, of course, that's the way to do it.
Well, thank you so much.
That's great.
So, I'm very open, as you all know about my life, and as one caller put it, I'm transparent.
I intend to be.
So, I'm sitting here in Los Angeles, and a woman in Pittsburgh has a group studying my commentary on Deuteronomy.
That's a very good feeling.
It's zero ego.
Nobody writes commentaries on Deuteronomy for ego reasons.
I can promise you that.
Frank in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hello.
Hello there, Dennis.
God bless you and for all that you do.
Thank you.
He has.
And I wanted to speak about what you said about love God with all your heart and how some Christians don't even recognize that as coming from the Old Testament.
And when I study, and I have my Bible open right now to that very verse, Google must be your problem, because when you look at the text itself, it tells you exactly where these...
Yes, hold on, hold on.
I'll tell you why I address it aside from Google.
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The following hour is dedicated to a truly foolish statement.
I wish I had some of the examples right in front of me, but I don't.
But every one of you has heard some politician and it's usually a politician who says or maybe some columnist although I think it's more politicians Americans have much more in common than That which divides them.
Or a variant of that, or a variation, if you will, is it's the politicians who differ with one another.
The average American, they don't really differ that much from their fellow Americans.
Barack Obama's famous line, there's no blue America or red America, just the United States of America.
And people cheer.
Anyway, he could have said that he'll fundamentally transform the United States of America and people would cheer.
We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
Ah, yes.
Nice middle-class American whites cheering the idea of fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
Where did he say that?
I always forget.
It wasn't Denver.
We heard him in Denver at the gigantic...
I think he said that, I'm not sure, in Chicago, but it was a few days before.
Really?
I don't know.
Well, it was outdoors.
All right, anyway.
No.
How could it be?
It's five days before the election.
Sean, you deserve the punishment room.
We don't have elections in June.
Okay, Sean.
Sean is now...
He is so embarrassed.
His beard is turning...
I'm going to learn to be more professional!
That's what you're going to do!
Now, if you don't understand why Sean is being punished, it's because he said in my earphones...
Something wrong, which is very bad because then I might repeat it thinking he knew what he was talking about.
Because he usually does.
So that is the reason, for those of you curious.
So yes, there are no red states or blue states, just the United States.
Americans have far more in common than they have, which divides them.
All these clichés.
Now, by the way, a lot of clichés are true.
The fact that something is a cliché just means it's so overused or used that much.
But then there are clichés that are not true.
That's called pablum.
So that is the topic of my hour.
If you believe that, you believe pablum.
Here is just an example.
I'm going to give you an example.
Of the latest example, okay?
This is really, this is a winner.
If this doesn't convince you, nothing will.
This is from the Washington Times.
Feds hire, that is the federal government, hires echo grief trainers.
To help employees cope with, quote, loss in the natural world.
The Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service is offering eco-grief, that's ecological grief, training to employees who are struggling with a sense of trauma or loss as they witness a changing training to employees who are struggling with a sense of trauma Now, if you are grieving over Mother Earth being destroyed by climate change,
induced by flatulating cows and humans, you and I have nothing induced by flatulating cows and humans, you and I have nothing in common or very little.
We both breathe, we both eat, we both sleep.
I'm not talking about biological commonalities.
The class will give staffers a chance to define what they mean by ecological grief.
Space!
Ah, space.
That's like safe.
Safe and space.
Oh yeah, no safe spaces.
It's a movie I'm in.
Space to examine their emotional reactions and tools to grapple with those feelings, the agency said in a note to employees in the southwest region where the training is offered.
Those who sign up will be led to, quote, find ways to act while caring for themselves.
All right, well, there's more to it, but we're not addressing that particularly.
I'm addressing the question, do you believe that Americans have more in common than what separates them?
1-8 Prager 776. It is nonsense.
That statement is as nonsensical as men menstruate.
The division in this country is profound and deep.
If you think this country is systemically racist, and I know you're wrong, and you think I'm a bigot for saying that, what the hell do we have in common?
Right?
Staying on race.
If you think that having an all-black dormitory on a college campus is a good thing, An all-black graduation exercise at a college is a good thing, and I think it's a racist, vile thing.
What do we have in common?
If you think Black Lives Matter is a moral, fine, kind movement, and I think it is utterly nihilistic, what do we have in common?
If you think that defunding the police Is good for society, what do we have in common?
The list is gigantic.
1-8 Prager 776. The reason for this subject is clarity.
Living in a make-believe world of lies, there are no red states or blue states, just the United States, and having people clap because they really want that to be true, I want that to be true too.
However, I grew up at a very early age and distinguished between what I want and what is real.
When you can't...
Distinguish between what you want and what is real.
You have decided to remain a child.
I want there to be much more agreement among Americans.
I grew up in an America that had such much more agreement.
Most Americans didn't care if you were a Republican or a Democrat when I grew up.
So what?
You're a Democrat, I'm a Republican.
You're a Republican, I'm a Democrat.
Big deal.
Let's get together with the families.
Let's have a barbecue.
That's not true now.
If you go on, what do they call them?
Not match sites.
What do they call them?
Dating sites, yeah.
You go on dating sites, there are many women in particular who will say, If you are conservative or Republican or like Trump, don't bother responding.
By the way, they're not wrong.
Ironically, they agree with me.
Our differences are so immense now that it is pointless for us to have a date.
Believe it or not, a lot of conservative singles tell me about that.
And they find it somewhat offensive, but I gotta say, I don't find it offensive.
I find it time-saving.
Why would you want to date somebody who thought that way, that if you're a Republican, you hate black people?
What do you have in common with such a human being?
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
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It was October 30, 2001.
Okay.
He feels bad and he should.
Where was it?
That's the question.
Not when was it.
It was obvious when it was.
Oh, God.
All right.
It's not his day.
It took place in a city.
All I want to know is what city that was.
It's not that important, but since you raised it in my earphones, I am responding aloud.
This is a very important subject.
The differences are the greatest essentially since the Civil War.
And I have argued that Americans actually believed in more things in common.
They had slavery as the gigantic divide, and it is a gigantic divide, just for the record.
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Hi, everybody.
This hour is devoted to telling you the truth.
Well, every hour of my show is I'm crazy about the truth.
I mean crazy about it.
I have visceral hatred of lies.
And the subject is Americans do not have more in common than they don't have in common.
That there are no blue states or red states, just the United States.
I wish it were true.
It's wishful thinking.
Okay, everybody.
Let's go to Valparaiso, Indiana, and Scott, hello.
Hi, Dennis.
Pleasure to talk to you this afternoon.
Thank you.
I was just talking about this very same thing with a friend of mine at church over the weekend, and we were just saying and agreeing with each other that the further that our nation drifts from moral truth, the further we will no longer have things in common.
It's sort of like...
It's the Christmas dinner table.
As long as you only talk about sports and music and maybe the weather, everybody gets along.
Oh, not the weather.
No, no, no, no, no.
Weather leads you into climate change.
Well, that's true.
That is true.
But the moment you start talking about traditional marriage or protecting the rights of the unborn or the woke culture that's influencing our schools, as soon as you start bringing that stuff up, you know, the important stuff.
Then there's a rift.
And unfortunately, I think it's going to be a while until there is more that unites us, unfortunately.
Yes, indeed.
I thank you for the call.
Look, I don't believe that you should use Christmas as an opportunity to proselytize for conservative values, just for the record.
That's not at all my argument here.
My argument is that the divisions Are unbridgeable.
And that it is wishful thinking that a mature adult should not be engaged in.
To say we have more in common than divides us.
Take abortion as an example.
I think I am willing to compromise in order to further the cause of protecting The manipulation of language is proof that the
pro-choice side is dishonest because they call it a baby.
When they're talking to a pregnant woman, not a pregnant person, by the way, a pregnant woman, and so they will say, how's the baby, no matter what trimester the woman is in?
But if she doesn't want the baby, then they call it a fetus.
It is a fetus.
I'm just talking about the term that they use.
It's no longer a baby if she doesn't want it.
I've been thinking about moral issues all of my life.
I don't know of any other time where one person determines a moral issue.
I mean, think about it.
The man who is even her husband or her partner, Or with whom she had willing casual sex has no say in the matter for reasons that I do not understand.
And number two, more important, society has no say.
If you think it should die, it dies.
It's an amazing thing.
Is there any other thing?
Well, you can't even do that with a dog.
Society has a say in whether a dog can be killed.
But it has no say in whether a human fetus, I'll even use that term.
There could be civil discussions on this.
Because there are areas of concern that are worthy of addressing on both sides.
But if you deny that there is any worth to the human that is not yet born, then the discussion is pointless.
But I wasn't even thinking of abortion.
I was using these other examples.
If you say that sex is non-binary, that it is okay for doctors to remove girls' breasts when they're still in their teen years if they say they're a boy, what do we have in common?
And that's my subject.
It is not true there are no red states or blue states, only the United States.
It's just not true.
I wish it were.
Fort Worth, Texas.
Eric, hello.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes.
Hey, can you hear me?
Well.
Okay, good.
Well, I just wanted to say that what we have in common is we're all Americans.
I thought that was your deal, your thing.
Okay, we have that in common, but it doesn't mean we share a single important value, and that's more important to me than the geographic fact of living in America.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, we share a lot of the values of Americans.
Yeah, like what?
Well, unbeknownst to you, I suppose, that...
There's a lot of liberals that go to church.
Okay, then it's okay, and this is not at all a criticism.
You probably don't hear me often.
I have a lot in common with liberals.
No, no.
I say that all the time.
The division in this country is not liberal-conservative.
It is left-wing and liberal and left-wing and conservative.
The tragedy is liberals don't acknowledge that.
Bill Maher does.
Alan Dershowitz does.
And maybe five others.
Hi, everybody.
The question on the table is, do you buy the nonsense that Americans have more in common than they have which separates them?
And the last caller said, well...
They do, and the example was liberals.
So I said politely, you obviously don't hear my show, since every single day of the year that I broadcast, I say that liberals and left have almost nothing in common.
The American tragedy is the naivete of the liberal, because they don't understand that they have a...
An existential threat in leftism.
The threat to liberalism is not conservatism.
It's leftism.
Newsweek published my piece.
I just looked it up.
I didn't even know Newsweek published it.
Two years ago, sorry.
Not even two years ago.
Take Dennis Prager's test.
Are you a liberal or a leftist?
Just Google that.
Are you a liberal or a leftist?
Prager.
I have 30...
Two questions that distinguish liberalism from leftism.
I have a lot of anger at the liberal, many of whom are really nice people and lead conservative lives.
I know them personally.
And that is that they are helping to destroy the country as much as the left does, even though they are such nice people.
life.
There aren't many nice leftists, but there are nice liberals.
It's astounding to me that you could be a grown-up liberal and not see the threat that leftism poses to liberalism, whether free speech or America's existence.
So the last caller mentioned that they go to church.
Well, increasingly they don't, as it happens, but that is true.
And the liberal churches and synagogues are disappearing because they either stand for leftism or stand for nothing.
Okay, let's go to more calls here.
Mm-hmm.
Fort Worth, Texas.
Paul, hello.
Hi, Dennis.
Hey, I worked in California for a long time in the construction industry, and as I came up through the ranks, I got to the point as a construction manager where we handle hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts in critical infrastructure, and it was our job to call the balls and strikes on who was right and who was wrong and what gets paid for an extra.
And every single one of my mentors and bosses and all the people I learned from and respected were, without exception, leftists.
Not liberals, but hardcore, anti-Trump, pro-Hillary, you know, all down the line.
It was bizarre.
So now I've moved to Texas.
And the situation has completely flipped.
Everyone that I work with is a conservative.
Right, so the point is?
The point is we are divided more than ever.
Oh yeah, okay, fair enough.
Going to Texas or Florida from California should make that pretty clear.
Okay, let's...
Let me see, I took Eric already.
That was the last call, so thank you, sir.
And let's go to Atlanta.
And Steve, hello.
Hi, Steve.
Mr. Prager, thanks for taking my call.
Appreciate it.
A little while ago, you said that you would not use Christmas or Thanksgiving as a platform to...
Speak to your family and your close folks about religion.
And I say...
No, I didn't say about religion.
I said about politics.
Oh, okay.
Well, politics is religion in some cases, right?
For instance, religion says...
Stop right there.
Religion is politics.
So stop that.
And so, yes.
If you could use religion to speak about politics, and while you have that pulpit, which is, hey, they're in your house eating your food, and they're your family, they trust you because you're a man of God, use that pulpit, absolutely.
If they trust you as a man of God, what if your child...
Yeah, of course they do.
Of course they do.
What does that mean, of course they do?
They're at your house.
They're at your house because you're their parent.
No, because you are the one who has done that every Thanksgiving and every Christmas.
You said something...
Alright, hold on.
I am not following your argument, but I will keep you on.
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Hello everybody, Dennis Prager here.
And I have a guest I don't think we've met, at least not on my show.
And that's a loss for me.
Spencer Clavin, who is someone who is on the young side and believes that we have a great deal to learn from the ancient...
Wisdom of the World, Greek, Biblical, and Roman.
I think I'm summarizing some of his views.
His book is How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
And I will read to you what those modern crises are.
The reality crisis, outside the cave.
Well, no, that's a different one.
No, excuse me.
The reality crisis, the body crisis.
The Crisis of Meaning, The Crisis of Religion, and Regime Crisis.
The book is under 200 pages.
And I don't know if I should tell you or not that he received his Greek and Latin degree at Yale.
Yale's a cesspool, in my opinion, and I want to get his reaction to my comment.
And then he...
Earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature at Oxford.
He's now with the Claremont Institute.
Spencer Claven, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Dennis, thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here, and I look forward to talking to you about the cesspool that is Yale, among other things.
Okay, so I didn't offend you.
No.
Well, I want to know if you're a Harvard man.
I probably should know this, but is that part of the sentiment, or is it just the...
Oh, no, no, not in the least.
First, I went to Columbia, which is a cesspool, too, so that's not the issue.
By the way, now that you mention that, since I'm very committed to being as truthful as humanly possible, I don't think that Harvard has sunk to Princeton's, Columbia's, U of P's, or Yale's low standards with regard to free speech. - I would agree with that assessment.
I mean, now that we know we're both swamp creatures, I guess we can talk about this on an equal footing.
But yeah, I feel in my own education often like Telamonian Ajax, who's a character in Homer's Iliad.
Who walks across the prows of ships because he's really big and so he can stride from ship to ship.
And sometimes I feel that way about my experience of the Academy, but the ships were all kind of sinking behind me, or even as I was walking across them.
So you'll get no argument from me about the decay of the American Academy, the disaster, not just of...
Oh, of course, of course.
Before we get to your book, I'm curious, what did you experience or what is the case today at Oxford?
Well, I have a lot of good things to say about the English system generally and also vis-a-vis this issue.
I think that the kind of wave of...
Again, I would call it cultural Marxism, but the wave of this stuff is going to reach everywhere eventually.
That doesn't take an affirmative stance against it.
I don't think that anybody's going to be safe.
Even when I was there, they were talking about things like tearing down the statue of Cecil Rhodes, for instance, because he was an evil, nasty colonialist who gave all this money to Oxford for scholarships and so forth.
And at that point, the university did come forward and say, no, I'm sorry.
We don't do this here.
We're adults.
We don't scream about issues.
We have conversations about them, and we honor our past even with its complexities and its difficulties.
So there's a lot.
I mean, there are good people left, I think, everywhere.
In all of these universities, there are good professors left everywhere.
But that's not the problem.
The problem is institutional capture, and I do think it's coming for all of them.
But at this moment, you would give a...
Greater bill of moral and intellectual health to Oxford than to Yale.
I think so, yeah.
If it's a choice between those two.
Yeah.
All right, I was just curious.
So, how to save the West.
So, I will be reading your book, and I don't always say this, so just know that.
When did it come out, by the way?
Valentine's Day.
So, perfect gift for your sweetheart.
Perfect gift.
Let's talk about the civilizational decline.
Every wife and significant other is aching.
Actually, my wife, to be honest, my wife, if I said to her, The Greatest Flowers or Spencer Clayton's book on Saving the West, I have no doubt she would choose your book, just for the record.
You're a lucky man.
Believe me, everyone who knows my wife knows how true that is.
Anyway, is your position, the big macro position, we are suffering from not studying the great wisdom masters of the past, and part two, would that mean generally Greek, Roman, and biblical?
Yes to both, and let me elaborate a little bit.
You know, I think we've been...
Sold a bill of goods.
I think we're not just, you know, spontaneously tossing out these great works.
I think we've been talked out of our cultural patrimony in this regard.
I heard you talking at one point about, you know, what divides us.
And I talk in this book about crises.
Which is a word that you hear all the time, you know, crisis of the supply chain, COVID crisis, you name it, everything basically feels like a crisis.
But the word itself, and here's, you know, the first maybe piece of ancient wisdom we can glean is by studying ancient languages.
We learn that a crisis comes from this Greek word, krino, to judge, to make a decision.
And a crisis is a kind of a decision point between Two fundamentally irreconcilable ways of looking at the world, understanding the world.
And it's my contention in this book that our real crises are not actually about the day-to-day news cycle issues, but about those fundamental questions that underlie the news cycle.
And yes, it's my argument that the wisdom of the past is the best place to go.
Think about how those kinds of fundamental questions have been answered well in times before us.
And I define the tradition that I'm working in, the tradition of the Western canon, as belonging primarily to Athens and Jerusalem.
Those are stand-in words.
They're not limited to those two cities.
But when you talk about Athens, you talk about the pagan philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome and those civilizations.
When I talk about Jerusalem, I'm talking about Jewish.
Scripture and wisdom literature and Christian scripture and wisdom literature as well.
The monotheists of the ancient Near East, you might say.
And as I suggest in the book, these kind of two streams meet in Europe and they make the world that we live in.
They become the ground we stand on, the reason that we might even think.
To criticize our forebears for insufficient morality is usually based on some principle derived from the very tradition that we scorn in doing so.
So I'm suggesting in the book that there's another way, and it comes in continuity with this tradition addressing some of these issues we're up against.
So I'd like to bounce a theory of mine off you.
This is why I'm so lucky to have a talk show.
I bounce theories off the finest minds in the world.
How many people get to do that?
Well, unfortunately, I'm sorry you couldn't find one today, but I'll happily stand in.
Oh, my God.
Oh, wow.
I suspect you're Christian.
That is such a Christian response because there's such a fear of pride.
Oh, self-deprecation.
Yes, right, exactly.
Our bugbear.
Okay, yeah.
So, no, no, we all know what a fine mind you have.
So I want to bounce this off you.
A reason that so many don't study the ancient wisdom is that they're put into a position of not being great.
If they were great, and even greater than I, then who am I? But if, as was said when I was your age, don't trust anyone over 30. And that didn't only mean 80-year-olds, it meant 2,000-year-olds.
Huh, right.
So I think it's an arrogance that propels the ignorance of Athens and Jerusalem.
That one feels diminished in the presence of his mind.
Yes, diminished, and by the way, literally so, because why do they always want something new to say, or new to paint, or new to compose?
Because they can't match the masters of the past.
Yeah, that's a really interesting idea, especially when it comes to the fascinating fact that kind of originality as a prime value.
That's it.
That's it.
All right, hold on there.
I want to reintroduce the book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises, Spencer Clavin.
I'm back with him in a moment.
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Spencer Clavin's book, How to Save the West, is up at DennisPrager.com.
He knows Glanton in Greek, and he uses the ancient world to illuminate the modern world in his book, How to Save the West.
So I bounced my theory off you, because I saw it in the field I know best, aside from religion, which is music.
And when they reached an impasse...
With tonality, they went to atonality, which is an oxymoron.
Atonal music is not music.
It's a series of notes.
And the same in art, that there's a real avenue now for the non-talented.
If you could stand on a ladder and throw paint on a canvas, you may end up a very wealthy person.
Right.
And if you can schmooze.
That's the other important thing.
Sorry?
And if you can schmooze appropriately.
Yes, correct.
Well said.
Well, the painted word is part of the schmoozing as that famous book.
Who wrote that again?
Oh, man.
You're not really testing me.
I can't remember.
No, no, no.
I know what you mean.
No.
Wolf.
Yes.
Was it Wolf?
I should have said I was going to guess Wolf.
Yes, yes.
That's right.
Anyway.
So, by the way, you learned Greek and Latin.
Did you learn Hebrew?
I taught myself Hebrew, yes.
And I was going to mention that.
I didn't want to toot my own horn.
That's clear.
Boy, that is clear.
This is like dragging...
It's like pulling teeth getting you to say anything good about yourself.
I'm not here to...
We were just discussing.
I'm not here to talk about myself, but about the great works of the West.
But yes, let me say, you know, the reason I was actually...
Going to overcome my shyness and interject that is because when you go to school to study classics now, that means learning Latin and Greek.
One hopes, at least, it means that.
Some places, like Princeton, doesn't even mean that anymore.
But it used to mean learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
And that's really important.
I discovered how important that was in grad school when...
I realized there was kind of a whole dimension of the tradition missing.
In many cases, a simultaneous, you know, aspect of the tradition that's happening while the Greeks and Romans are writing alongside these guys.
And so, yeah, it's important that Hebrew is a classical language.
So I did learn it.
All right.
So I salute you, by the way.
I only know Hebrew.
I don't know Greek and Latin.
It's my loss, obviously.
So give me an example.
When I know that the West stands on Athens and Jerusalem, but I far can better articulate how it stands on Jerusalem than I can on Athens.
So tell me how it stands on Athens.
Yeah.
Okay.
So these two traditions, I really believe, are kind of coming at the same...
Truths, because truth is absolute and universal.
And as Edmund Burke says, you know, morality is not geographical.
But the other thing that Edmund Burke says really beautifully throughout his work is that we come at these truths in a kind of embodied way.
We live them out in our traditions and in our history.
And so here's an example of something that the West, I think, really learns foundationally from Athens first.
And that is a concept which comes out of the Greek language hylomorphism.
It's made out of two Greek words, hulae, which is just stuff, matter, and morphe, form.
In the Greek tradition, the Greek philosophical tradition, really the whole thing kind of begins in the 5th century BC with the interjection of Socrates into a world of fashionable...
Relativism, much like our world in that respect.
It's very fashionable to hold the idea that there's no such thing as real, stable, absolute truth.
Socrates introduces the proposition that there are Eternal truths.
We can progress toward knowledge of them.
Plato, in memorializing Socrates, places those truths in some kind of higher plane, the realm of the forms, the realm of the ideas.
But it's Aristotle who makes the brilliant, I think, observation that form and matter are always intertwined, that we never experience matter without shaping it into some kind of form.
And in an interesting way, I think, distantly, your observation about music...
is indebted to this Aristotelian idea because it's perfectly true.
Music without tone, atonal music isn't music.
Why is that so?
Why is a random sequence of tones not a piece of music?
Because we don't simply judge by the part, we judge by the whole.
We judge according to the totality, the form that our mind gives, the shape that our mind gives to everything, the shape that we have, which is...
Which is called the soul.
And this is what I kind of dig into in the body crisis section of the book because I think it really answers a lot of the anxiety we're seeing and feeling in young people over the human body, over the sense that this Flesh of ours is kind of a mistake.
And maybe you're born into the wrong sex.
Maybe you should be a robot.
Maybe it's bad to have flesh at all.
This is transhumanism.
It's kind of the next line of defense after transgenderism.
And hylomorphism, which is kind of baked into our whole way of thinking, even if we don't know it, is the answer to this.
I've been now suggesting for a long time that this comes right out of Aristotle, and it does.
I mean, that's a matter of history.
But it's interesting to note that the great expositor of hylomorphism in the later medieval, in the medieval tradition, is Thomas Aquinas, the Christian, who believes that Aristotle here is in line with Scripture, which is a kind of amazing thing if you think about, you know, speaking of Hebrew, the moment in Genesis where God takes dirt, the Adam, And he breathes the nshamah, the breath of life in.
And it becomes a nefesh chayim, a living soul, in that union, in the moment of the union between kind of disembodied spirit and physical stuff.
Neither one is alone enough to make a human being.
The combination of those two is perfectly hylomorphic.
And so, you know...
Do we stand on Athens there or do we stand on Jerusalem?
I would argue we stand on both because both are pointing us toward a foundational and urgent truth.
But as a matter of history, it's from Athens that we kind of really establish that.
Well, all right.
I'll talk to you about Aristotle and God in a moment.
The book is How to Save the West.
Extremely well-written, easily digested, profundities.
Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
As you know, I'm a big fan of ancient wisdom.
I'm a big fan of modern wisdom too.
Wisdom is wisdom.
And your kids get no wisdom in almost any school they go to.
None whatsoever.
They get anti-wisdom.
It started in the 60s.
It started really 100 years ago, but it really came to fruition right after World War II. So he has an antidote, the book How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises by Spencer Clavin.
And indeed, your Hebrew is excellent.
I knew the verses you were citing.
I'm glad to have passed the test.
You did, you did indeed.
I didn't mean to subject myself to it, but there we are.
You didn't even know you were being tested.
I didn't.
And rarely do.
I'm going to ask perhaps a naive question, but I don't care.
I've always wondered about this, given Aristotle's brilliance and profundity.
So tell me, first of all, that I have the supposition correct.
He believed in an unmoved mover, a creator who did not take interest in his creation.
Is that correct?
Yes, the second part of that, the second way of saying that might come under some dispute, but maybe let's ask the question and then I'll talk about whether it's the creator or the unmoved mover.
Well, my question is not relevant if my supposition is not accurate.
Oh, I see.
Yes, Aristotle believed that all motion...
Can be derived from the action of an unmoved mover who is pure, actus purus in the Latin of the medievals, that he is pure action.
And yeah, there's a kind of detachment on the part of this divine mind.
If I said to Aristotle, do you believe in God?
And I wouldn't even mean the God of the Bible.
Just do you believe in God?
What would he answer?
I suspect he would say, I believe in the divine, and that the divine is one, and that the divine is conscious and is a mind.
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think that's what he would say.
So he believes that a conscious being, can I say the word being, created the world?
Yep, an entity.
A conscious entity created the world.
Yeah.
You're really testing me now, but I think the world technically is infinite, has no beginning and end.
Right.
Exactly.
Then I don't understand.
Given that his view was that the universe always existed, why would there even be a need for a creator?
Because there's change in the world.
So the view here, I think, would be that time is not the only dimension.
Outside of time, there stands a pure motion that kind of gives movement to all things.
Maybe a good way to do this would be to think about a particular text, the metaphysics, where Aristotle sort of addresses this question, what is there besides matter, besides motion, change, time, physical extension, and space?
And his basic problem, which is kind of the problem of Parmenides, is why does anything move at all?
And that's what gets him out of materialism, because if there's just matter, it can't move itself.
And it gets him into the realm of Plato's ideas, but he doesn't want there to be a kind of purely abstracted space.
So he says this is kind of like the fact of motion, the ultimate fact of change in the world.
Is made possible by this conscious entity.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Right.
But the conscious entity did not start the world because it's always been here.
Yeah.
Concepts like start, I think, for Aristotle in this context have no meaning.
Not for me, I should say.
I'm not representing my own.
No, no, I fully understand that.
Right.
I acknowledge that it is impossible for those of us who believe in a God who created ex nihilo from nothing.
We can't understand what existed prior to the universe.
What happened five minutes before the Big Bang is not accessible by our minds.
But it is also not accessible that it always has been here.
Always is as inaccessible as began.
Would Aristotle acknowledge that what he believed was not intellectually accessible by a human being?
I suspect he would.
I mean, Aristotle is very...
He doesn't often get credit for this, but he's very insightful.
He's very good about the limits of human discipline and human conception and thought.
He has a kind of a dictum in the Nicomachean ethics that we should seek the level of specificity in each discipline that the discipline itself admits of.
And so he might say that this is a place at which until one achieves the status of basically thought contemplating thought until one transcends beyond all speech and time.
One can't really meaningful.
All right, we've got a break.
How to Save the West, the book is up at DennisPrager.com.
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Dennis Prager here.
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