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Jan. 29, 2026 - Dennis Prager Show
01:13:57
Timeless Wisdom: Four Possible Futures for Humanity
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Why I'm Wearing This Kipah 00:03:45
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Hi, everybody.
Since it's a religious, the Torah is here and so on, and we're in a sanctuary, I feel that it's appropriate for me as a Jew to put on a kipah.
So I'm just explaining why I'm doing it.
Hi.
By the way, it doesn't match.
Normally, my kipah does match.
I meant to bring a green one, but I have a blue one.
There's no religious significance to the color.
For those of you who are not Jewish, there is none.
It's not like, isn't there a Catholic hierarchy in the color?
Captain, isn't that right?
Do I have that right?
Is Father Kelly here?
Where's Father Kelly?
Father, am I right about that?
Thank you.
Father, I love you.
Okay.
I'm really happy that you're all here today.
There are a few people that I want to acknowledge presence of.
Some were mentioned.
First of all, I have a big thanks to WNTP.
Would you give it a hand?
They are a great day.
I will never forget.
Happily, I'm on well over 100 stations, and while I certainly know many of them and some of them like NTP really well, and will be broadcasting from there for the next two days.
I don't always know the frequency.
And I'll never forget at a speech here in Philadelphia a number of years ago, I mentioned WNTP 980.
And the big yell from the audience, 990.
And I must say, I was quick.
I said, I'm Jewish.
I can get it for you for $9.80.
I'll never forget that.
So I know the frequency of NTP better than any other station that I am on in the country because of that particular moment.
I want to thank the President not only for your beautiful introduction, but for having me.
She may lose her job tomorrow, but it is a wonderful thing that she's here tonight.
No, no, I'm 99% in jest about that.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
It's an honor to be here at this beautiful synagogue.
And thank you for the beautiful words that you said.
I have a note from the rabbi.
It was given to me, so I'll read it to you from Rabbi Gregory Marks, the rabbi here.
Dennis, welcome to Beth Or.
I'm sorry that I couldn't be here to personally greet you, but this weekend is my daughter's bot mitzvah.
What kind of excuse is that?
I'm kidding.
It's a perfectly good excuse.
And I've got a house full of company.
It's truly an honor to have you back.
This is the part that really, I don't know if many of you members of the synagogue even know this.
It is truly an honor to have you back as you were in my home as scholar in residence in the early 70s.
He's got the wrong guy.
Oh, 90s?
That's a nine.
That's a nine?
Oh, it's back in the 90s.
That's why I was, I mean, I was speaking in the 70s, but I don't think that, yeah, okay, it was the 90s.
All right, Rabbi, thank you.
All right, so that's very beautiful.
Thank you, Rabbi Marks.
I wish he could have been here.
Introducing Alan and Sue 00:04:32
And Mazel Tov, to your daughter and your family.
To all those who made this possible, the two wonderful families that are mentioned, I just will echo, especially for Sally Hurwitz, whom I've been in touch with, a big thank you for all the work that you have done and gone out on a real limb, which I'll talk about as well.
The captain who heads the Willow Grove Naval Air Station here, David Opes, is here.
Captain, would you please stand?
I think you are the first out-of-L.A. audience that I'm introducing my new wife to.
And so, Sue, would you stand wherever you are?
I was really thinking of saying on the radio, come and you'll even meet my new wife.
Because people are curious to meet you.
I mean, I totally understand that, but I just thought, if I can't get you on my grounds, then forget it.
You know, I'm not going to do that.
But we travel together a great deal, and I love when she comes.
Finally, there is somebody I want to introduce to you whom I only met for one period of time.
Last month, or is it no, it's actually almost two months ago, I believe.
I was in, in fact, Sue and I were in, and Alan were in the Dominican.
Alan is my producer.
Did you all know who Alan was when I said Alan?
Isn't that great?
By the way, it's gotten to the point now when I introduce Alan, it's much bigger reaction than I get.
Hey, Dennis, we're here.
But Alan, wow.
I love bringing Alan to speeches just for that.
He's a very retiring type, so he's not used to this acclamation sort of stuff.
Anyway, Alan, Sue, and I were in the Dominican Republic.
One of the new sponsors, and I'm taking sponsors very seriously because I will not recommend what I don't believe in.
Anybody who has a legal product can advertise on my show.
I don't have to agree with them.
I mean, any, you know, I once had a law firm supporting my show, and people said, Dennis, after what you said about lawyers, you're going to advertise for them.
By the way, if you're a lawyer, I love you.
I just want you to know that.
I don't have anything against lawyers that Shakespeare himself didn't say.
And anyway, but in all seriousness, if one supports my ability to speak, I don't have to agree with them.
I thank them.
But I will only endorse what I believe in.
And I've been asked to endorse a lot of different charitable organizations over the years.
And while I love many of them, it's going to take a lot for me to be that impressed.
I was actually overwhelmed.
It was emotionally overwhelming to be in the Dominican Republic to visit a hospital, one of the hospitals that are around the world for Cure International, this group called Cure International, specializing in treating and operating on children who obviously can't afford it in these third world countries, in Uganda, in North Africa, in the Dominican Republic.
And one of those I fell in love with, is the senior vice president for Cure International, Pastor Dale Brentner, and he's here with his wife, whom I didn't meet.
But, Dale, would you please stand wherever you are?
It's a real honor.
And if you get a chance to, if you can debate where you give some of your charitable donations, Cure International deserves it.
It was a very powerful experience.
I know one of the co-founders, Sally Harrison, is here too, and I look forward to meeting you and, of course, Diane.
So, a lot of wonderful people here, and you're all mean a lot to me coming here.
I have a very odd, in the best sense, relationship with my listeners, and I'll be very open with you, and I'll tell you about it, because it has nothing to do with my talk, but it's still, I think, something since you've come to see me in person.
And by the way, how many of you have never seen me before and only heard me?
Would you raise your hands?
Something I Learned 00:02:27
Is it a shock in some way?
Is it like, is this what you imagined?
It's got to, by the way, I want you to know I will not be insulted if you do not look at me.
If you feel more comfortable not looking at me while I speak or staring at a picture of a radio, I can live with that.
I just want you to know.
Because it is odd to hear someone so much and then see them, like, oh, that's what it comes out of?
There's a whole body attached to that voice.
It's so odd.
I know, I know exactly how you feel.
So, I'm very touched.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Hi, Calvin McCullough.
Think fossil fuels are climate villains that the legacy media and establishment politicos ask us to believe that they are?
Think again.
Did you know that fossil fuels power the systems that keep us safe?
From air conditioning that prevents heat stroke to heating systems that protect against extreme cold.
They also provide low-cost power for our storm warning systems, giving us time to evacuate and save lives.
Forget being a villain.
Fossil fuels have literally been the hero in the prevention of billions of deaths and the extension of life.
In fact, over the past century, deaths from climate-related disasters like extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, storms, wildfires have declined by 98% thanks to fossil-fueled infrastructure and technology.
I'm Calvin McCullough, and I just want you to know the facts.
Don't be fossil-fooled.
Get the full picture at oilfacts.com.
Brought to you by NASDAQ Listed Prairie Operating Group, a high-growth, low-cost producer of safe and responsible American energy.
That's oilfacts.com, oilfacts.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
But here's something I learned.
And I'm just going to throw it out as a matter of fact.
It has nothing to do with the talk, but it is nevertheless a phenomenon.
I have some very wonderful colleagues.
I believe truly.
And you know I only say what I think.
I am truly known for that.
Credibility is all I have.
And I am associated with very quality talk show hosts on the Salem Radio Network.
I mean, they're really a series of extraordinary people.
Listeners' Reactions Revealed 00:05:18
And I know it because I listen to them.
When I'm in the car or at home, as a matter of fact, as well, on the internet, I listen to them.
I don't have to.
Nobody knows what I'm listening to.
But there is an aspect to the relationship that I have with my listeners that I think is a little different than most of my colleagues.
And it is no reflection on them.
It's only a reflection on something I didn't even know about till I announced, what was it, five years ago, four years ago, I announced that I got divorced.
And I learned something that shocked me and shocked actually my own radio stations.
Nobody had actually anticipated this.
I was deluged with emails, nearly a thousand.
I mentioned it only once on a Friday at the end of that year.
And I got about a thousand emails, plus, of course, callers that one hour that I talked about it.
And it was typical for the email to say something like this: when I heard you got divorced, it was like when my parents got divorced.
Or I pulled over to the side of the road and wept.
And this was just as much from men as from women.
And I didn't understand it.
I was taken aback.
And there were no critical ones, and including from people who opposed divorce for religious reasons.
But there was none of that.
It was only my heart broke.
And they were surprised at their reactions.
This was what was so interesting to me.
The listeners themselves were surprised.
I mean, after all is said and done, I'm a guy on the radio.
I'm not their uncle or their dad or their cousin or their nephew.
But it opened my eyes, and this was after, I'm on air 27 years, so that was on the air 23 years.
I didn't know this at all.
That for many people who listen, and there's no bragging here, this is not an issue of bragging, it's an issue of acknowledging a phenomenon.
I play a role, some sort of role in a lot of my listeners' lives.
That's astonishing.
It's wonderful.
It's very humbling.
But it didn't change my show because I will never do anything to be loved.
I'm very opposed to that.
As a parent, as a talk show host, as whatever role I would, as a camp counselor, you can't do good if you want to be loved.
That's just a very important factor in life.
You can't run a naval base if you want to be loved.
I'm only saying because you were smiling the smile of acknowledgement while I said this.
It's, by the way, America will not be effective if it wants to be loved.
It's one of the reasons I differ with my fellow Americans who are liberal.
They want America loved.
I don't.
I have no desire for America to be loved.
If it is loved, it means it's doing something wrong.
Leaders are not loved.
They're respected.
Parents, especially for kids, and I don't know if I'll get a chance to talk about this.
I devoted an hour of my show recently to one verse in the Bible.
It's not a religious show, my show, but I happen to think the Bible has wisdom.
So, silly me, I sometimes even make reference to it.
And there is an amazing quote in it: that a man shall fear his mother and father.
It's astonishing.
You're supposed to fear God and fear your parents, and that's it.
You're never told to love your parents.
Never.
Told to love your neighbor, love the stranger, love God, not your parents.
For a parent to do an effective job, they better not seek to be loved all the time.
And that's true for a talk show host, a congressman, a president, or the United States of America, or the captain of a naval base, or whatever you do.
Seeking to be loved means you will compromise your values by definition.
Anyway, so I didn't change, and I didn't seek what happened.
But it is a powerful and wonderful thing that I have this relationship with a lot of my listeners.
And I just wanted to say that, because I'm sure that that's probably true for any number of you who are here tonight.
And I want you to know that I treasure that fact, and I'm very touched that you came.
Okay?
So that's, I don't do this all the time, but I just thought it was appropriate tonight.
I don't even know why I thought it was appropriate tonight.
I just thought it was.
Let me talk to you about the most important subject I kept mentioning on the radio.
This is a big speech.
It is a big speech.
America's Future Trinitarian Conflict 00:14:07
My theory about the future of humanity is that one of four things will be dominant, or there will be a competition between these four things for the future of humanity.
In no order, one is American/slash Judeo-Christian values.
Second is Islam.
Third, secular left values that dominate Western Europe and the intellectuals of the entire Western and Eastern worlds.
And fourth, anarchy, as in Somalia, Rwanda, and right now, frankly, parts of Mexico, where you have the words failed nation, failed state, failed nation, being more and more noted.
You know how anti-hysteria I am, so I would certainly not use that term to describe Mexico now.
But there are parts of Mexico where bad guys are stronger than good guys.
That's chaos.
That's anarchy.
That is the case in all of Somalia.
It is the case in parts of Mexico.
It is the case in the Congo.
It was the case in Rwanda.
Never ever think that massive slaughter is not a human norm.
It is a human norm.
We are spoiled, living in the greatest attempt to have civilized freedom in the history of Earth, the United States of America.
We are so spoiled that we become foolish.
We don't understand that wildness is the norm, not order.
And these four compete.
Islam is competitive because it is by far the most desirous of spreading at this time.
There are Christian missionaries, but Christianity has gone through a look-within phase now, and it has been so attacked in the Christian world, only in the Christian world, that Christians are afraid to evangelize and to missionize.
I mean, the very word crusade was banned from the English language of an American leader.
Now, I'm not equating crusades and missionizing, God forbid.
I'm merely saying, though, that any notion of a Christianity on the move is regarded with great hostility by the educated classes of the Western world.
So you really have the only real mover is Islam.
I mean, Islam is making major inroads in Europe.
I said it to all my European guests, major intellectuals from Europe that I've had on my show.
I bounce my ideas off because if I'm wrong, I want to be told it and stop saying what's wrong.
So I would say to a European on my show, from France, from Germany, from Denmark, wherever, As I see it from far away west coast America, it seems to me that within about 40 or so years, Europe will either have a civil war or it will be Islamic.
And I have not met a European who differed with me.
I'm not saying that many don't, but none that I've had on my show have ever differed with me.
There are parts of England already, the Archbishop of Canterbury, I'll suppress what I was about to say, but it wasn't positive.
And the Archbishop of Canterbury has argued for Sharia in domestic law, in cases of family law, and out of utter and total ignorance, compared it to Jews having their court system in Britain for their divorce laws, for example.
But he truly doesn't know what he's talking about.
Of course, Jews have their own court system for laws, but it plays no role in British life.
You might as well say that Catholics have their own communion, therefore what?
It has no effect on British life.
It's only relevant to Catholics.
And so the analogy was entirely inaccurate.
But now it will be allowed where divorce will be settled not by a civil court, but by an Islamic court for Muslims in parts of Britain.
And given the state of women under Sharia-based societies, that is not good for Western culture.
It is a reversion in the name of multiculturalism and tolerance and so on.
Intolerance advances in the name of tolerance.
Anyway, so we have Islam, we have the secular left, which is also very deeply missionizing, very deeply.
I mean, it has taken over the media, by and large, except for talk radio.
It has taken over the movies, it has taken over MTV, it has taken over the schools.
I mean, one cannot deny secular left ideas are dominant.
Most of your children at a public school or private secular school will have been shown Al Gore's documentary on global warming.
They will not have been shown the British television answer to Al Gore.
They are brainwashed.
The difference between a fundamentalist Christian school and a typical private or public school in America today is this.
The typical private or public school is just as involved in molding the brains of their children as a fundamentalist Christian school, but the fundamentalist Christian school is honest about it.
It admits that's what it's there to do: produce Christians.
The secular left school does not admit it's there to produce secular leftists.
There's an inherent dishonesty in the public school and private schools of America that does not pervade a typical fundamentalist Jewish, an Orthodox Jewish school, which I attended till I was 18.
I went to yeshiva till I was 18.
You'd ask them, what do you want to produce?
They'd say religious Jews.
But if you ask those who only show Al Gore's documentary, do you want to produce Al Gore-like environmentalists?
No.
We just want to show what's happening.
Then why don't you show the alternate?
Why don't you show them that the greatest climatologist at MIT thinks this is nonsense?
Richard Lindsay.
Why don't you show them that the leading meteorologist in Australia has just written a 500-page book with 1,700 footnotes to say that this is all hysteria?
No, no chance.
No chance on earth.
There's a brainwash that goes on, and so you have a powerful secular left movement that dominates, that dominates the Western world.
So you have anarchy, secular left, Islam, and then you have American/slash Judeo-Christian, which I believe is the finest value system ever devised in the history of humanity.
And just to show you that I don't have a real vested interest in that, I don't have an axe to grind because the word Judeo is in it.
I want to explain something which challenges both Jews and Christians.
Judeo-Christian values are more effective than either Christianity alone or Judaism alone in making a better society.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Hi, Calvin McCullough.
Think fossil fuels are climate villains that the legacy media and establishment politicos ask us to believe that they are?
Think again.
Did you know that fossil fuels power the systems that keep us safe?
From air conditioning that prevents heat stroke to heating systems that protect against extreme cold.
They also provide low-cost power for our storm warning systems, giving us time to evacuate and save lives.
Forget being a villain.
Fossil fuels have literally been the hero in the prevention of billions of deaths and the extension of life.
In fact, over the past century, deaths from climate-related disasters like extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, storms, wildfires have declined by 98% thanks to fossil-fueled infrastructure and technology.
I'm Calvin McCullough, and I just want you to know the facts.
Don't be fossil-fooled.
Get the full picture at oilfacts.com.
Brought to you by NASDAQ Listed Prairie Operating Group, a high-growth, low-cost producer of safe and responsible American energy.
That's oilfacts.com.
Oilfacts.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
The Christians of America were the most Jewish-grounded of all the Christians since Christ.
That's one of the things America left when it left Europe.
It left everything in Europe.
It's ironic, we are really engaged in a counter-revolution.
What is happening now is a movement back to Europe, which we were supposed to leave.
It is one of the saddest episodes in American history that Thomas Jefferson's, Thomas Jefferson's recommendation for the seal of the United States was not accepted.
It was the Jews leaving Egypt.
You can see it in any history text outside of the ones your kids study.
That's the truth.
That is the truth, what I just said.
Thomas Jefferson, supposedly a deist who thought all of this stuff was fable, wanted the seal of the United States to depict the Jews leaving Europe.
The Jews, I mean, Jews, that was Freudian, because that's the whole point.
Just as the Jews left Egypt, Americans left Europe.
That's what he wanted to depict.
We are returning to Europe now, unfortunately.
The Christians who founded the United States of America were Judeo-based Christians.
The Christians of Europe were largely non-Judeo-based Christians.
This is the enormous difference.
And these Christians produced the United States of America, the finest attempt to civilize humanity in the history of the world.
The most successful attempt.
The place that offered people of more backgrounds, more opportunities than any place in the world.
You come to this country from Zimbabwe or from Uruguay.
You are regarded as American the day you become an American.
You're even regarded as American before that day.
Third generation Turks in Germany fluent in German are still regarded as Turks.
Or Norway or Sweden or Denmark or all of these wonderful, wonderful left-wing utopian societies.
Nobody cares less about race and ethnicity than the American people.
No one.
They don't come close.
That is how great the experiment is.
And the reason is we have a Trinity.
Christians have a Trinity, but America has a Trinity.
And it took me a good part of my life to figure this out.
It is both the easiest and most accurate way to depict American exceptionalism.
We have a Trinity, Americans.
E pluribus unim, in God we trust, and liberty.
It's on every coin, except the latest dollar, which doesn't have liberty.
I don't know why.
It just doesn't.
The latest gold dollars do not have the word liberty on them.
This has been on every coin.
In God We Trust, E pluribus Unum, Liberty.
That's all you need to know.
Seriously, that is all you need to know about American distinctiveness.
No country on earth ever had those three values as its animating values.
None.
Not close.
Liberty, e pluribus unim, and in God we trust.
Liberty as opposed to equality.
French Revolution was liberty, equality, fraternity.
You can't have liberty and equality as equal values.
It's not possible.
It's not thought through.
It's felt.
The more liberty you have, the less equality you will have.
It's just the way it works.
Because if there's liberty, then Derek Jeter can make 55 times more than any one of you.
You may be discovering a cure for cancer, and a shortstop will still make more money than you do.
That's because of liberty.
That's the way it works.
In Europe, they don't like that.
That's why there's a redistributionist ideal in Europe.
There is something wrong about having rich and poor.
Or excuse me, rich and poorer than the rich.
That's really what it amounts to in the United States.
I remember studying in England for my junior year, and I couldn't believe it how the poor in America lived like the middle class in Britain.
God's Role in Values 00:15:44
I mean, it was astonishing.
Let me tell you a little story about this that'll blow your minds.
That reveals how lopsided our language is about the poor in America.
Not to deny that there were some people in abject poverty, but it's exceedingly rare.
I was the delegate at something none of you would even recall, I suspect, the World Youth Assembly at the United Nations in 1970.
I was 21 years old.
And I was chosen to be the delegate of World Jewish Youth.
And that's how I got there.
Every country and a number of NGOs, non-governmental organizations, had five from every country and one from an NGO.
I was from Benebrith International.
And it was an absolute phenomenon for me to see my fellow youth from all over the world.
Of course, they weren't youth in the case of communist countries.
They were all in their 40s and 50s.
These people had been to youth conventions for 40 years.
It was hilarious.
But I didn't care.
That was fun.
But here is the story that I want to relate to you.
The communist delegates, delegates from communist countries to the World Youth Assembly and from the Third World, who wanted to show how bad America is, insisted that since it was taking place at the United Nations in New York, they wanted to go to Harlem to see oppressed how oppressed blacks live.
So, what are they going to say?
No.
They hired some buses and they took the delegates from all over the world to Harlem.
The overwhelming reaction was they were lied to.
They didn't see Harlem.
It was all a lie by the U.S. government.
Because it's impossible that they had such homes and so many cars in Harlem.
In fact, they went all over Harlem.
I don't mean just 125th Street.
I mean 133rd and 3rd Avenue.
I mean, wherever, any possible nook and cranny.
They could not believe what they saw in all the stores, all the commerce, all the life, all the homes, all the apartments, and all the cars.
It can't be.
Because this is not the vision of oppression.
But it doesn't matter that the term oppression is used, thrown out about the United States regularly, poverty.
What was it?
The last head of the Democratic Party announced that.
In contradistinction to the Republicans, we don't believe that kids should go to bed hungry at night.
See, Republicans believe that kids should go to bed hungry at night.
I was taught this by my parents when I was a young kid.
Dennis, you were to go to bed hungry at night.
We're Republican.
There was, I remember it.
I mean, he got it right.
Anyway, we believed in liberty.
The French Revolution believed in equality.
Of course, we believe we're born equal, but we don't believe in equal results.
Then I pluribus unum.
From many won.
America said race and ethnicity don't matter at all.
Of course, it mattered to slave owners.
Of course, it mattered to segregationists.
And that is the great blunt on American history.
But it didn't matter to our value system.
From the inception, our practices violated our values.
You can't have e pluribus unim and racism.
It's not possible by definition.
If for many won, then, well, blacks count among the many.
So there should be one.
And finally, in God we trust.
God is central to the founding of the United States and its value system.
Just as a Christian is not a normative Christian if he drops either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit, so too, you are not normative in your American beliefs if you drop God.
You could be a wonderful American, a wonderful human, a wonderful parent, a wonderful friend, but you are not normative in your American values if you drop God.
That's just the way it is, any more than if you drop Liberty or I pluribus unum.
That's what we're founded on.
I am curious, since you're a Philadelphia audience, how many of you know what is inscribed on the Liberty Bell?
Raise your hands.
Okay, there are about 500 people here, and there are about 20 hands up.
Okay, that's more than in audiences in Denver or San Antonio or LA or where have you, but it's still nothing.
I'm in the home of the Liberty Bell and you don't know.
And I suspected that.
There is one verse on the Liberty Bell.
One thing is inscribed.
Is it from a secular humanist?
Nope.
It's from the Torah.
Even Jews don't know this.
Jews don't know how Torah-based America is.
America is the most Torah-based country in the world, ironically.
It's from the third book of the Torah, Leviticus.
You shall proclaim liberty to all the inhabitants throughout their lands.
Why was a verse from the Torah chosen by Christians to put on the liberty belt?
Because they were Torah-based, Judeo-based Christians.
That's my point.
American/slash Judeo-Christian values are unique and they are the best value system, but it has very few advocates.
Most people don't know how to advocate American values.
People know how to advocate secular left, Islamic, but not American values.
They don't know what they are, let alone how to advocate them.
And the same with Judeo-Christian values.
I'll explain a few of them.
That's the reason for the talk, but to give you an idea of what we stand for.
By the way, let me just answer one question in advance, the one raised by honest, not anti-Jewish Christians and honest, not anti-Christian Jews.
How, Dennis, can you talk, can anybody seriously talk about Judeo-Christian values?
Jews and Christians believe very different things.
And here is the answer.
The answer is we don't talk about Judeo-Christian theology.
No one ever did.
We talk about Judeo-Christian values, not Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Of course, their beliefs differ.
So do Catholics and Protestants differ in certain beliefs.
That's not the issue.
Protestants differ in some beliefs amongst themselves.
I don't care about that.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about values.
And in that sense, this religious Jew has far more values in common with many Christians than with many secular Jews.
That's the way it is, and vice versa.
That's why I speak half the time in churches and half the time in synagogues.
That's why half my students in my Torah classes in Los Angeles at the American Jewish University are Christians.
And half are Jews.
Because they share the values.
By the way, just on a parenthetical level that you'll find interesting because I love the life of the mind, there is one value and only one that I could figure out where they really differ from their original text, and that is about divorce.
Judaism allows it, and at least in theory, outside of adultery, it is not allowed for Christians, at least in theory.
Christians practice it, most allow it, but some don't.
Judaism always allowed it.
Christianity has at the very most been deeply hostile to it.
Not that Jews like it or anything else.
God says he hates divorce, and I think it's in Jeremiah, but that's a separate issue.
Beyond that, their values are virtually identical.
That's why we speak of Judeo-Christian values.
And the Christians who founded this country were Judeo-based.
That's why his name is Benjamin Franklin, not Luke Franklin.
They all had Hebrew names.
How come there were no Jesuses?
You have Jesus all over Latin America.
That was not a Judeo-based Christianity like in America.
Theoretically, it should have been Jesus Franklin or Jesus Adams.
No, you don't have that.
You have a bunch of Hebrew names, Jedediah and Jeremiah, and my grandparents were certain Lincoln was Jewish.
Avraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln.
I'm totally certain.
Oh, Avram Linkel, a good man, a Yid, a good Yiddish thing in the old country.
The Jews who came over from Europe, like my grandparents, they had this theory.
If the American that was liked, he was Jewish.
That was it.
Remember Ed Sullivan from the Ed Sullivan show?
Ed Solomon.
Every Jew called him Ed Solomon.
I didn't know the guy's name was Sullivan until I was an adult, and I started reading about it.
Then it's the Ed Solomon show is on.
Oh, Ed Solomon.
Ed Solomon.
This is a remarkable country, and that is one of the most remarkable aspects of it.
Was the founding of the country by Christians rooted in Judaism?
Hence, I asked you about the Liberty Bell to give you a classic example.
So, now you know the case for why you can use the term.
Now, what are they?
Okay, I wrote 24 columns on this in 2005.
Go to PragerRadio.com, click on columns.
I get no money for this.
It's free.
I wrote 24 of my 52 columns that year, The Case for Judeo-Christian Values.
So, I can't give you 24 columns worth now, but I can give you in a nutshell some of what is happening.
And my belief is that the culture war in America is over whether or not we continue with Judeo-Christian values or secular left values.
They are in conflict most of the time.
Number one is God.
Now, believing in God means nothing.
When I know somebody believes in God, I know nothing about the person.
I know nothing about his values.
I know nothing about his theology.
I know nothing about him.
Nothing.
There are people who believe in God whose beliefs about everything else are so different from mine.
I mean, the people who slaughter, there are Islamists, and I'm not saying all Muslims by any means, but there are Islamists who believe in God and who say, in the name of God, the merciful, and then they take a knife and they slowly cut a human being's throat till they choke on their blood.
In the name of God.
Do they believe in the same God I do?
Of course not.
My God and their God have nothing in common.
So the fact that I know someone believes in God doesn't tell me anything.
The God of Judeo-Christian values is quite specific.
Number one, and you ask Jews, ask any Christian, do you believe in the God of Israel?
And they will say, of course.
That's exactly who I believe in.
You ask that to others and see if you get that answer.
By the way, this is no criticism, but it's an interesting question to ask a Muslim.
Do you believe in the God of Israel?
Some will say yes, some will hedge, some will say, what do you mean?
But that's one identifying factor.
And for Christians, certainly in America, it has been normative.
The God of Israel is our God.
Okay.
Now, that's not enough.
This God has some specifics that are relevant to Judeo-Christian value.
Number one, this God makes moral demands.
This already is annoying to a generation, my, the dumbest in American history, the baby boomers, that saw God as not a demander and even not as the second characteristic as a judge.
The idea that God judges us is alien to those undermining the Judeo-Christian tradition.
God doesn't judge.
As one very, very liberal rabbi said in the LA Times many years ago on the day before Yom Kippur, we don't believe in a judgmental God.
All right, well, judgmental, I know, has a bad name, but the name of Yom Kippur in Hebrew is not just Yom Kippur, it's Yom Hadim, the day of judgment.
I mean, that's what God does that day.
He judges everybody.
He's not doing anything else that day.
He's just busy judging.
And he's judging, according to Judaism, he's judging everyone, not just Jews.
He's judging everyone on earth on how they acted in the past year.
This God makes moral demands.
This God judges every one of us.
And this God rewards and this God punishes, usually in an afterlife.
And finally, all values come from God.
Ethics come from God, not from man.
That is essential to Judeo-Christian values.
I'm not trying to persuade you that they're right.
I'm simply here to define for you what they are and how they are being undermined by the secular left.
For whom values come from the heart, the conscience, and human experience.
For the Judeo-Christian value system, they do not come from our hearts.
They do not come from human experience.
And they do not come from just our conscience.
In any event, since the conscience is not findable in an MRI, the very notion of a conscience is a bit odd for people who are scientifically restrained or constrained to science.
It's not measurable, findable, or detectable.
Who put it there?
Molecules make consciences?
That's a bit odd.
I have an interview with a Swedish woman in her late 20s who I interviewed because she was Swedish.
Simple as that.
Sweden is the most secular society on earth.
I find Swedes fascinating.
How does the third generation of those utterly and totally secularized think?
Secular Values and Belief 00:16:02
She was one of the people working on one of the cruise ships I take listeners on.
You know, I go with listeners once a year on a cruise.
And so she was working on the ship, and I asked her if I could interview her.
She said, fine.
I thought I was a radio talk show host.
I even played it on the air, and I sent it out to people who subscribe to my lectures.
I get one, I think, every other month or something.
Anyway, I interviewed the woman, and I began with, do you believe in God?
And she said, oh, of course not.
And I said, do you believe in religions?
Of course not.
And then I said, so where do you get your notions of right and wrong from?
And she answered, my heart.
And I wrote one of my columns, PragerRadio.com columns.
I wrote one of my columns on the heart versus God.
It's either God-based or heart-based.
Now, there's a place for the heart and a God-based system, but it's not the place you get your values from.
God gives directives.
This notion is laughed at at the university level.
Laughed at.
I wrote one of my papers at Columbia University, where I did my graduate work in Marxism and communist affairs.
I did one of my papers on a contrast of Judaism and Marxism.
I thought my professor would have a heart attack.
How the hell did a kid get into Columbia who believed in Judaism over Marxism?
I mean, he had never seen anything like that.
It was as if I had made the case for, I don't know, for alchemy.
It's as if I had studied chemistry and said alchemy is superior to chemistry, or astrology has more insight than astronomy.
That I believe Judaism had more insight than Marxism.
To his credit, he gave me a B.
No, and it was to his credit, because I'm sure he got nauseous while he men were sickened because he believed, of course, in the superiority of Marxism.
That Marx was wrong in every single prediction he ever made, so that doesn't matter.
But he was secular and he gave a secular understanding of the world as opposed to a religious one, and therefore it was highly regarded.
And so, where do your ethics come from?
And just, I'll put it to you very simply, as I do when I speak to high school and college kids: if God didn't say thou shalt not murder, how do you know murder is wrong?
There is no answer to that question, by the way.
There is no answer.
You can say you feel it, you think it, so what?
But I feel car X is better than car Y.
I prefer Lexus to Mercedes, just to give some example.
I was going to use GM cars, but I hope the speech lasts longer than GM.
And somebody will say, What is a Buick 10 years from now?
They may not know.
I'm not happy about it, but I'm just saying I now have to use a foreign car example.
But it's all a matter of taste.
I like murder, you don't like murder.
That's it.
Right?
Why isn't that what it comes down to?
There is no objective morality.
There's no absolute right or wrong.
It's all a matter of personal opinion.
I don't like murder, you do like murder.
Have a great day.
And by the way, that is exactly what kids think.
Kids say, I say, were the Nazis wrong, or do you think they were wrong?
They all vote they think they were wrong.
None of them ever say the Nazis were wrong.
Even Jewish kids, they just say, well, we think that they were.
We feel they were wrong.
We think they were wrong.
They weren't wrong in the sense that if someone says two and two is five, that's wrong.
No one says, I think you're wrong if you say two and two is five.
But I think the Nazis were wrong.
That's the way you do it.
That's with the downgrading of the value system to being one of complete subjectivity.
Another example of the Judeo-Christian value is, and I just picked a few good little, not little in the sense that they're not critically important, but very refined examples.
For example, I remember when Berkeley announced that it was declaring the city a hate-free zone.
And I announced on the radio that I can no longer visit Berkeley.
I am banned because I believe in hatred.
Because it says in the Psalms, those of you who love God must hate evil.
So I cannot join a hate-free society.
Because there are certain things my value system demands that I hate.
Evil is what it demands that I hate.
That's a Judeo-Christian value to hate evil.
The opposition value is all hate is wrong.
Hate is wrong.
That's why the two murderers at Columbine had flowers put out for them.
That's why we are in such a non-judgmental, don't hate anybody sphere that you know what has happened before your own eyes?
This never existed in American or world history.
Whenever anybody shoots up a bunch of people, whether it's a terrorist or a crackpot in America, they always include the murderer among the victims.
Twelve dead, including the terrorist, including the bomber, including the shooter, including the stabber.
When did that happen?
Can you imagine if that were done in World War II?
Well, there were, you know, 7 million killed, 6 million Jews, and a million Germans.
Nobody thinks like that, though.
You think about the victims, because you don't want the murderer with the murdered.
But now we do.
So hating evil is just one example of what is an anachronism to Berkeley and is a driving force in this person's life.
People are not basically good.
That's a Judeo-Christian value.
I always know whether a Jew is Jewish in his values or has been more influenced by Yale by the following, or in your case, U of P. If the following happens, if they cite Anne Frank says that after all is said and done, I still believe people are basically good.
God bless the memory of Anne Frank, but this 15-year-old girl did not know as much as the Bible or the Talmud.
They were wiser even than Anne Frank.
And by the way, were wiser than me when I was 15, too.
This is not an insult to Anne Frank, who was a terrific girl who should never have been murdered and whose murder soils the earth to this day.
But she was wrong.
People are not basically good.
It's not a Jewish value.
It's not a Christian value.
God himself says it.
In Genesis, the will of man's heart is towards evil from his youth.
God got sad unto his heart that he ever created man on earth.
Why would he get sad that he created man if man was all that good?
We're not basically good.
We're just not.
I mean, for a Jew of all people, this is what drives me nuts.
There are things about my fellow Jews I adore, and there are things that drive me nuts.
This is in the latter category.
When a Jews after Auschwitz says people are basically good, it proves to me that they have learned nothing from the Holocaust.
Nothing.
By the way, it's a great question to ask a fellow Jew.
What have you learned from the Holocaust?
Give me some lessons to be learned.
Fascinating, fascinating thing for people to work through.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
But this is amazing.
I mean, you see, what Jews learned was there is no God.
So they learned to believe in humanity instead of God.
The upside-down version of history.
God did not build the gas chambers.
People did.
But they ended up believing in people and not God.
An ingenious reaction to the Holocaust on the part of most of my fellow Jews.
I believe in humanity.
What the hell did humanity do for the Jews of Europe?
What did humanity do for the Ukrainians?
What did humanity do for the Rwandans?
What did humanity do for the Cambodians?
What did humanity do for the Russians?
What did humanity do for the 70 million Chinese mouse slaughtered?
Humanity does nothing.
Humanity is morally worthless.
Or is the title of another of my columns, PragueRadio.com, columns.
As a title of one of my columns, I put it: people are beautiful, humanity stinks.
And that's my view.
There are individuals who are just glorious.
There's a beautiful Jewish concept.
You've heard of Lamed Vovnik?
That there were 30, Lamed Vovk means 36.
So there's a Jewish legend there are 36 truly righteous people at any time living on earth, thanks to whom the world continues.
I thought it was a little optimistic, but nevertheless, that's the figure that the Jewish tradition gives.
This is the Jewish and Christian view.
We're not basically good.
That's the reason we need deeply ethical religious systems, because it's hard to make good people.
It's the toughest thing on earth.
It doesn't take effort to make monsters.
It takes effort to make angels.
And that's what you try to do laboriously in every generation: make good people.
That's the whole purpose of Judaism.
And when I look at all the good Christian works that have been done and the people who give themselves up, like going to the Dominican Republic, like I mentioned earlier, and giving up a perfectly wonderful life as an orthopedic surgeon in America to take care of kids' legs in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
They're animated by Christianity.
There's no secular version of these things.
Do you ever notice that?
Where is the secular salvation army?
Where?
I always ask this question: where is it?
If secularism produces good people, how come there are no equivalents to all of these massive religious works that are done?
Where exactly?
Where people for virtually no money devote their lives to goodness.
I don't care if you like their theology or not.
I don't care if people believe that the earth is on the back of a turtle if they do good.
I care if they do good.
If turtle beliefs produce goodness, they beat secular beliefs.
I want to know what produces goodness.
Secularism doesn't.
It doesn't make all people bad.
There are wonderful secular people.
There are wonderful individuals who believed in Zeus.
There are wonderful individuals who believed in anything and nothing.
Of course, that's true.
And there are some terrible religious people.
But in America, the goodness that has been produced has been overwhelmingly produced by religious institutions.
People are not basically good.
And finally, and most important and most controversial, the essence of the Torah.
and taken in its entirety in this value sense by Christians in America certainly.
The most important concept in the Torah is the concept of separate, of different separateness and differentness.
I have a trick question.
It's not fully a trick question, but it's somewhat, which I asked a huge symposium of Christians, including one of the best-known pastors in the world.
I won't say his name.
And I said, okay, raise your hand if you can tell me what God created on the second day.
Nobody ever gets it right, including me.
I got tricked by the same trick question.
God didn't create anything on the second day.
All he did was separate.
That's how important separations are.
Separateness is the essence of the Judeo-Christian universe, of the Torah's universe.
And I will give you four examples, and with this, end my talk.
Number one, good and evil.
They are separate.
They are different.
It is the opposite of one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
It's all relative.
It's all relative.
Some things are relative.
Whether blue is more beautiful than purple is relative.
But not good and evil.
There is a good, there is an evil.
They are separate.
Man and God, they are separate.
We have made man into God, especially the scientific man.
Read Charles Krauthammer on stem cell research.
The man is an agnostic and paralyzed, quadriplegic.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the Washington Post.
If anybody would be for stem cell research and creating embryos in order to get him out of a wheelchair, it's Charles Krauthammer who doesn't believe in God and who is paralyzed.
He's the classic example of a guy who would want this, but he is a morally serious thinker and says, I will not support the creation of embryos, of human embryos, to destroy them, even for the sake of getting me out of a wheelchair.
That's when men become God.
We decide.
If we can do it, we will do it.
Values From The Heart 00:11:56
And anyway, anyone who says that my heart is the source of my values is God for himself.
If God is the source of values and there's no more God and you're now the source of your values, you're God.
In every meaningful sense, you're God.
Third, holy profane.
Kidoshim Tiyu, you shall be holy because I, the Lord your God, I'm holy.
Leviticus 19, 1 and 2.
You shall be holy.
And there is holy and there's profane.
Not in the secular world that we are creating in America for kids.
There's no profane.
The F word is as wonderful as any other word.
There's no profanity, it's a joke.
It's laughed at.
I did something for which God will reward me.
I read the entire 25th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone magazine.
You don't know, I would rather have worked on a beehive than read this.
It was aggressively superficial.
And it was an interview with all of these great thinkers and stars and others.
Almost all of them use the F word in their interviews.
Now, I am not a prude on cursing.
As I always have said, and even on the air, if a piano falls on your toe and you say, gosh darn, you are on a different level than I am.
Okay, I have to say that.
If a guy in the military is looking at a Taliban right now and they're going to start shooting and he goes, oh no, that is awful.
I don't even want to be in his regiment.
I want a guy who's cursing the Taliban as he's shooting them.
So I am not of the belief you never use these words.
But we have now come, we don't use them when shooting life and death.
They're just used as non-descriptive adjectives.
What an effing day.
Doesn't mean anything.
We don't even know, is it good?
Is it bad?
Is it an effing day?
I went in the effing car on the effing day during that effing week, of that effing month, and that effing year.
That's the way it is.
And you hear, so there's no difference between the profane and the holy.
There is no holy.
There is no holy.
The concept of holy speech is gone.
The concept that, listen, I have a big argument I have with a lot of Christians, interestingly enough.
Very interesting to me.
This is one thing.
Jews were more liberal than Christians, but Jews all dress up for synagogue.
Christians have this notion.
You show up at church wearing what you just wore to the movies.
Because God doesn't care what you wear.
Where did you get that notion?
Those are people who get their values from their heart.
That's not a biblical notion.
It's whole chapters in the Bible about what you wore to the temple.
God doesn't care what you wear?
Does he care if you're nude?
At what point does he care?
Bathing suit?
Speedo.
Would he care if you wore a speedo to church?
Is there any level where God does care what you wear?
Does God care if he knows you would dress up far, far more to go to the Academy Awards than to go to church?
See, if you wore your whatever you, your shorts and your t-shirt to the Academy Awards, then I'd say you're consistent.
You don't show respect to anything you go to.
Okay, that's fair.
But if you dress up for the Academy Awards, but not for church, that's a statement, folks.
That's a statement.
But there is no holiness left.
Nothing's holy.
Not even church is holy.
Clothing is a statement of what's holy, what's less holy.
And we certainly have it with regard to language and so much else.
And obviously sex, the idea of holy sex, I mean, you know, to even say those words immediately predates you to the Civil War era.
Holy, but that sex should take place in holy matrimony?
You sound religious, which by definition means primitive.
And that's what they're taught.
And finally, and this is the big one today, male-female.
That's the other separateness that the Judeo-Christian value system holds very firmly.
And God created Adam, that means the human, Zacharam Nikvabarautam, male and female, he created them.
We are different.
The male-female differentness is profound.
That's why the Torah forbids men from wearing women's garb.
It's a Torah prohibition.
Never mix male and female.
They matter.
The battle over same-sex marriage is not over gays and straits.
It is over male and female distinctiveness.
Because the argument at bottom is it doesn't matter the sex of whom you marry.
I have, if compassion for gays could be measured, I will happily have mine measured with any gay activist in America at any given moment.
They have been given a raw deal by every society they have lived in in measurable history.
It has been disgusting.
I fully acknowledge and agree to that.
And it is not fair to a gay that they cannot marry a member of the same sex.
There are many unfairnesses in life.
But between standards and compassion, I opt for standards.
That's a Judeo-Christian principle.
And that is the reason that there has never been a Jewish or Christian thinker in the history of earth who has been for redefining marriage to same-sex.
There is no other example you can give me of where every single Jewish and Christian thinker was immoral.
If it is immoral to be for male-female marriage, then every Christian from Jesus on and every Jew from Abraham to Moses to Maimonides and down was immoral because not a single one of them ever even hinted at the notion of redefining marriage.
Oh, numbers, yes, but that's not a redefinition of marriage.
That's a detail.
Sex is not a detail.
That's a redefinition.
There is an arrogance, forgive me, a deep arrogance.
I am moral.
Every Jew before me, every Christian before me was immoral on this issue.
There is no other example.
Not race, nothing.
And it has nothing to do with race in any event.
There is no difference between a black human and a white human.
There are deep differences between a male human and a female human, but not according to the secular left alternate value system, which is dominant.
Male and female are identical except for the appendages.
I will fight that belief as long as I have the breath to fight it.
The mixture of those two is a very dangerous plane with sexual fire.
Men and women are profoundly different, arguing that they are the same, that it doesn't matter if a kid is raised by a mother and father because mothers are utterly and totally dispensable.
Two dads are just as wonderful.
One gets nothing from a woman that one cannot get from two men.
One gets nothing from two women that one cannot get from, one gets nothing from a man or from a man that one cannot get from two women.
These are remarkable assertions, all because of compassion.
I have the same compassion.
I would be happy to be hooked up to a lie detector on my compassion for gays.
One of the most horrible moments in my American life was when I was a kid and the Barry Goldwater team exposed the homosexuality of a Lyndon Johnson key advisor and blackmailed him.
I was so angry.
I remember how angry I was that anybody would even bother announcing it, let alone him humiliating him and his family.
We all have favorite relatives, you do.
Nobody loves all their relatives the same.
In fact, there are people who don't love any of their relatives.
But one of my most loved relatives is my lesbian niece.
And I love her partner.
Love her.
And I honor their partnership.
That's a fact.
I love them.
I honor them.
But I am opposed to their marrying.
I will not redefine marriage because I love my niece.
I never understand this argument.
I have a gay child, therefore I want to redefine marriage.
That's pretty narcissistic.
What?
It's a non-sequitur.
You have a gay child, and therefore what?
So you therefore feel for gays?
I feel for gays too.
You're not persuaded by people who say my child was murdered, now I'm for capital punishment.
By the way, nor should you be.
If capital punishment depends on your having your beloved ones murdered, then it's not much of a position at all.
It's just an emotional reaction.
Right?
If somebody said, my kid was murdered, now I'm for capital punishment.
No anti-capital punishment person would say, oh, that's persuasive.
They'd say, I'm sorry that your child was murdered, but that has nothing to do with capital.
I'm sorry that your child feels and you feel this way with regard to your child, but that has nothing to do with whether society should redefine marriage.
My argument is not to persuade you that I'm right.
My argue is to persuade you, and this intellectual honesty has to acknowledge that Judeo-Christian values stand on one side and secular left values stand on another on occasion after occasion after occasion.
And they do on this one.
We're losing.
There's no question we're losing.
We're losing on every front on the good, evil, on the man, God, on the male, female, on the holy, profane.
We're losing on the subjectivity of values.
We're losing on the distinctiveness of the American value system.
We're losing on God-based morale.
We're losing on all of them.
And I'm not optimistic.
Not pessimistic yet, but I'm not optimistic.
It's very, very easy to bring down greatness.
It is very hard to create greatness.
Judeo-Christian America created something great for everybody, gay, straight, black, white, Jew, Christian atheists.
It is being changed.
You may want it changed.
You may want us to return to Europe.
I don't, and that's the battle.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Timeless Wisdom 00:00:02
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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