Dennis Prager Show - Do You Fear Death?
Aired: 2024-10-22
Duration: 04:43


=== Deciding in High School (02:26) ===

[00:00:00]  I am so emotional that I had to figure out how not to have it overwhelm me.
[00:00:13]  Wow.
[00:00:13]  Yeah, I know.
[00:00:14]  It is a wow because I'm so rational.
[00:00:18]  So I'll give you an example.
[00:00:21]  I watched The Diary of Anne Frank when I was 17 on television.
[00:00:28]  It choked me up beyond words.
[00:00:32]  And I said, how am I going to deal with this?
[00:00:36]  I'm overwhelmed with sadness about the Holocaust.
[00:00:40]  And not just the Holocaust.
[00:00:43]  Evil and unjust suffering generally.
[00:00:47]  And so what I decided already in high school, I made most of my big decisions in high school, interestingly.
[00:00:56]  I decided...
[00:00:59]  That what I would do is channel my emotions into action.
[00:01:10]  And that way I feel I'm doing something about what I feel so strongly about.
[00:01:18]  Does this all make sense?
[00:01:21]  Absolutely.
[00:01:22]  And so it was a very conscious decision.
[00:01:27]  To substitute reason for passion.
[00:01:30]  The passions are still there.
[00:01:33]  But I have channeled them, it's the best term I guess, into fighting and into reason.
[00:01:43]  So I just wanted to say that I really, I did fear, to a certain extent I did fear.
[00:01:53]  That my emotions would get the better of me.
[00:01:56]  I'll tell you what, emotions.
[00:01:58]  Sadness over human suffering.
[00:02:01]  That's the emotion.
[00:02:02]  I've come to see death a little differently, and it's because of my faith in God.
[00:02:08]  When I was in Europe this summer, I was in Ireland for a little bit, and I met this beautiful girl, 23 years old, named Eleanor.

=== A Mother's Peace (02:31) ===

[00:02:17]  She's a dressmaker.
[00:02:18]  She's just stunning.
[00:02:19]  So dignified and beautiful.
[00:02:22]  And she told me that her mother died two weeks.
[00:02:26]  Before I met her of cancer.
[00:02:29]  And she handed me a little prayer card, which is very common in Ireland, to have a little prayer card of her mother.
[00:02:35]  And she had these tears sitting on the edge of her eyes, her beautiful blue eyes.
[00:02:41]  And I was just so captivated by her because she never let them fall down, but you could just see her heart was broken.
[00:02:48]  And I said to her, Eleanor, how are you...
[00:02:53]  How are you out in the world after your mother died?
[00:02:58]  And she said, But this priest said to her,
[00:03:26]  the human lifespan is so short.
[00:03:29]  Think about the span of eternity.
[00:03:32]  Think about all of the thousands of years that human beings have been on this earth.
[00:03:36]  And then we each individually come for 50 to 70 years.
[00:03:41]  Let's hope.
[00:03:42]  50 to 100 years.
[00:03:44]  And this priest said, that is a blip on the radar screen of time.
[00:03:50]  That is a...
[00:03:51]  Our earthly minds can't conceptualize it, but it is a tiny, tiny bit of time in the span of eternity.
[00:03:57]  And this priest said to her, it will be faster than the speed of light in the span of time until you're reunited with your family again.
[00:04:07]  I believe that.
[00:04:09]  I really believe that too.
[00:04:10]  And it was this girl telling this to me and I could see that she really believed it.
[00:04:15]  And it was what allowed her mother to have peace in her death.
[00:04:18]  It was what allowed her to have peace through her mother's death.
[00:04:21]  And that permanently changed the way that I view it.
[00:04:25]  Is that how you view it?
[00:04:27]  Oh, totally.
[00:04:28]  I said my sanity preserver is the afterlife.
[00:04:34]  Well, you know, I... Not just for my reconnection with loved ones, that God judges the bad and rewards the good.
[00:04:42]  That's my sanity.