Ravi Zacharias clarifies his role as a Christian thinker rather than an apologist, recounting his transformation from an indifferent Indian atheist to a believer after a suicide attempt and hearing John 14:19. He critiques the internet's potential to amplify evil, argues that atheism lacks an ontic referent for societal truth compared to Judeo-Christian law, and condemns cancel culture as a symptom of lost self-evident truths. Ultimately, Zacharias posits that true happiness stems from internal peace with God, suggesting societal revival requires individual heart changes and institutional shifts, potentially triggered by great tragedy. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Dave Rubin and before we get to it today, here's my weekly reminder to subscribe to our channel and click the bell so that you actually see our videos.
A crazy concept indeed.
All right, joining me today is the founder and president of the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and the author of several best-selling books on Christianity.
Yeah, it's one of those words that have evolved over the last few years and contoured with different meanings now, David.
But it has a rich history when it goes back to the likes of Justin Martyr and Augustine and so on.
Apologetics was part of the curriculum and the discipline of theological philosophical training.
It comes from the Greek word, actually, to give an answer.
Apostle Peter says, for example, set apart Christ in your hearts as Lord and always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within you And to do it with gentleness and respect.
So this is an ordinary fisherman talking about how to answer people with gentleness and respect.
So the word really means to give an answer.
I think it has two senses, making your truth claims clear, and giving the answer to the legitimate questioner.
But you know, it sounds like apologizing, and then it has taken on negative connotations.
If I hear you're an apologist for something, it's immediately, oh wow!
I'm gonna really be dumped on right here.
So we ourselves are thinking whether that term is a good description of what we do.
Historically, it was accurate, but in current usage, I'm not quite sure it's the best word.
Do you have a better phrase then, so the next time I bring you on, I don't have to say it?
Because I do think that that connotation, there's something that in a modern sense, it's like, oh, he's going to come here and explain his view on Christianity, but it will have a but that will lead to something else.
Okay, so before we get into the meat of what your ideas are and things like that, I thought that because so many people on Twitter were asking me to have this conversation, are you amazed at the way information and ideas, both good and bad, can travel so fast now that you can get your ideas out across the world with the click of a button where years ago and, you know, 30 some odd years ago when you started doing this and before that even, that it could take a lifetime to get those ideas across.
I'm wondering if time will tell whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
And the reason is, Good is naturally attractive, but evil is naturally seducing, seductive.
And whether the wrong side of this will triumph someday, because all you've got to do is get one idea out there and you get a following for it, and destruction comes easier than construction.
So I sort of holding out on whether this is good or bad.
I love the fact that if I'm sitting in my hotel room in Delhi,
away from my home in Atlanta, I can Google and find out information
on almost anything that's going on out here.
I love the fact that I can call my children instantly like that.
But at the same time, all the farcical stuff, all the hollow stuff, all the negative stuff, all the destructive stuff that goes on, we're building a culture of hate.
Do you think that that concept right there is sort of everything that a religious thinker, regardless of what religion, is really dealing with?
The sort of battle between, you know, a certain set of ideas versus modernity.
And you don't know, like we're in the internet right now, we don't know which way this is going to go because you can spread the bad just as... I would say more easily you can spread the bad than to spread the good, so to speak.
I think sort of some rebellion finds it easier to find Souls that have got nothing else to do, you know, they're sort of… Shakespeare would talk of them as the rattle of a vacant soul or someone who's just not got enough to keep them busy.
The Torah babble is a good example.
You know, why did God step down to confuse the languages?
Because unanimity in destruction However, it's here to stay and this is only the beginning.
You are an author.
I'm an author.
The value of having access to information is a good thing.
That's why it is important what we do in training the souls and the thinking of people.
I think so, but you know we never ever discussed it.
I played cricket and I played tennis, so I was a sportsman in school.
That's where you really talk after a game or whatever.
I don't ever remember getting into these discussions.
It flows with the culture, but the notion of God as a real entity never entered my mind.
Yeah, maybe during examinations.
You know, God, if you're up there, could you help me?
And so on.
I never took interest, certainly not in the Christian faith, even though my ancestors came from the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood in the deep south.
They were called the Namboodiris.
Then somewhere along the way, there was a conversion that took place into the Christian faith.
And then that was lost.
It became very nominal.
So I was really raised, I didn't have a single Christian friend.
They were all either Hindu, Muslims or Buddhists.
So we never talked about these things.
And then having had a crisis experience in my life, that changed everything.
If you're not doing well there, you're in trouble.
And it's also a culture of shame when you're not succeeding academically.
So I did the horrific thing.
It till this day embarrasses me because I don't like talking about it.
It took me a long while to talk about it.
I attempted suicide when I was 17.
And it was not out of any neurological disorder.
It was not any biochemical thing.
It was a fact that I just didn't have meaning.
There was no purpose in life for me, David.
I was moving towards failure after failure after failure in contrast to my brothers and sisters and to my father.
And so I tried to poison my system.
I thought it was going to be successful.
I just didn't like the way life felt.
And I wanted to kill that feeling.
And to me, the only way to do that was, you know, what they say in Belgium now, there's such a high rate of suicides, they don't call it suicide anymore, they call it opting out of life.
That would have been a good description for me.
But it was on that hospital bed.
A Bible was brought to me.
My body was dehydrated.
I couldn't hold it.
But the man who brought it to me and gave it to my mother and scripture passages were read to me.
And you know, when you're desperate, when you're lying like that, words become very important to you.
And when the words of Jesus were read to me, because I live, you also shall live.
Well, I appreciate you asking these questions because, you know, they are pretty pointed and pretty real to me.
The problem, we often think Jesus Christ came into this world to make bad people good.
That's wrong.
It's not got anything to do with making bad people good.
It's coming to the world to make dead people live.
I was dead to the claims of God upon my life.
I had no purpose.
How do you find purpose without a transcendent moral first cause?
You can only lift yourself up by your own existential bootstraps and assign your own meaning.
The fact that I was created for a purpose, that I had an individual distinctiveness that nobody else had, that God had a purpose for me in life.
These were strange concepts.
Now, of course, I'm looking in retrospect.
When you go back, at that point, my biggest hope was like looking for a lifeguard or a life jacket.
But over the process I found out, and I say this David, I travel, I've covered about 70 countries, I speak hundreds of times a year, the single greatest pursuit of every young person today is the pursuit of meaning.
What does my life really mean?
Even as I'm talking to you, I was talking to a young man yesterday, 18 years old, who got hooked on to pornography when he was 8.
And he says, and I've hated everything that I have become.
And now all I want to do is make an exit.
You see, you take something and warp it into something else.
You empty the reality with something that's hollow.
So that's what I've done with life.
So to me, the biggest change, and my father said this on his deathbed, actually before he Went into the hospital for a bypass and when you lost life, he said to me, what happened in your life is the most incredible thing I have watched happening from being a failure to the different hungers and desires you have.
So what Jesus, I believe, did for me was change not only what I did, but change what I wanted to do.
I never left the top three in the class after that.
I always used to be in the bottom three.
So my hunger has changed, my desire has changed, and I think that is the biggest transformation I noticed.
You said the phrase existential bootstraps, which I like that.
That's kind of interesting.
Do you think some people can do it by themselves?
Do you think some people can grab the existential bootstraps and not have a religious belief or something beyond themselves and still live a good and moral life and a meaningful life, let's say?
So this has come up with many of the people that I've had on the show from a religious perspective, from an atheist perspective, sort of this micro versus macro argument, where all of the religious people that I've had on here have said what you said there, which is that yes, of course, at the micro individual level, you can have atheists, I've got plenty of their books right here, who are friends, who are good, moral, decent people, but almost that you can't organize a society around that, which is sort of, Loosely, that's the Jordan Peterson perspective on this, which I think you probably prescribe to.
Yes, I think Jordan Peterson's conclusions are terrific.
His foundation is weak.
I think that the edifice he has built on his presuppositions, I'd love to get together with him one day because I love his... I will see if I can make it happen.
Could you do that?
It would be an honor because I... I mean, the way he was treated at Cambridge, you know, and his plan to go there is...
I mean, an educational institution to do that to a man of his repute and his capability.
You know, just briefly, the saddest part about that is, you probably know, I was on tour with him for the year.
So I was with him when he found out he was getting the fellowship at Cambridge.
It was the happiest I've ever seen him.
And the idea that, putting aside why they did it, He has spread the ideas that you're talking about here, even if you don't agree with his methods completely.
He has done more to spread these ideas across the world in the last two years than anyone on earth, I would argue.
And so to me, when Peterson talks of absolutes, when Peterson talks of right and wrong, not so much right and left, but right and wrong, his conclusions are very good.
But the only reason I think those conclusions stand is there is an ultimate eternal purpose for life itself.
Otherwise, it's just one ideology against another, especially, dare I suggest, because of a pluralistic society in which we live.
People start from different points in the beginning of the argument, and that, to me, is where I think there is the weakness.
But his conclusions and his arguments I find very persuasive and very likable.
If ultimately the conclusions are right, let's say, and you can argue about the little methods to get there, do you think that can be enough in and of itself?
So you basically, you can't start from the position that we all can have our thoughts and that they're all sort of equal because the conversation can sort of never get anywhere versus that there is some moral authority beyond us.
And then what you may believe related to Jesus is obviously different than say what Dennis Prager believes, but you relish in that conversation basically.
Yeah, and you know, this is really what I'd said in that wonderful conversation with Ben Shapiro, whom I admire so much, a great, great thinker.
And, you know, I said to Ben, there's a struggle going on right now.
It's between the two words, egalitarianism and elitism.
And I said to him, we are meant to be equal as people, but not all ideas are equal.
We have reversed it.
We have made an elitism of people and an egalitarianism of ideas, and that is flawed.
As a starting point.
So if I respect all of my fellow human beings, regardless of what their view is, and see them of intrinsic worth, not worth given by the government or state, but an intrinsic valuable entity, we can converse and dialogue and ultimately truth will triumph in the end.
And so I think it is important to have civility which is lost in America.
What America is witnessing right now is the destruction of sensible dialogue.
It seems to me the amount of emails I get and what I'm reading and from the countries I visited in the last year, it's not just the US, but it's starting to happen everywhere in different degrees.
I think so, but you know it's also happening in the East.
The only difference is in the East it is squelched right from the beginning.
There's no free expression in China.
I mean, China is making huge strides in this world, I think in a demagogic way, globally.
While we're trying to worry about each other's tax returns out here, they are building a global empire and we're not taking note of what it is they're doing.
It's happening even in my homeland in India.
There's a lot of trouble beneath the surface in the invasion of the private belief and so on.
The thing is in America, America is a commercial culture.
Everything spreads faster so we notice it more here and I've now lived here for many years and I'm saddened to see what we are doing to ourselves because this is a great nation.
This is a great foundation.
So I came in here as a stranger and God gave me the blessing of coming here and my raising my family and enjoying success.
I don't think I'd have enjoyed this back where I from whence I came.
But now what we're doing is the vitriol, the invective, the poisonous barbs and statements.
We can't seem to disagree without bringing the person down.
Stay with them.
You know, as a debater, you know, we don't go with ad hominem arguments.
That's a sign of weakness.
Anybody who attacks you personally, David, is telling me they can't deal with your arguments, so they're dealing with you.
So I actually wasn't planning on going here, but I think this is a pretty rich place to move.
So what then do the people that are trying to do what you're trying to do, trying to do what I'm trying to do, that are trying to have conversations, what do you do in the midst of a world that is about ad hominem attacks, personal attacks, what people now are calling cancel culture and mob outrage to silence everyone?
But you are intelligently engaging, and that's what we're doing.
You know, I'm 73 now.
I've been in this work since I was 26.
I've done it for nearly half a century, as long as I've been married.
I've been on numerous campuses globally, Islamic campuses, Hindu campuses, Buddhist campuses, atheistic campuses, and I was given an honorary doctorate from a Marxist university in Peru, you know?
And the first time one of my colleagues went there, they blocked them.
They didn't want to hear them.
And I said, what happened?
How come?
And they said, you know, you're getting us thinking.
Noble thoughts, good thoughts.
You're getting us thinking in the ways that we ought to be thinking.
We've not reached there yet.
So I believe, ultimately, God gave us a book, which means the Word is very important.
And just speaking nearby, the night before I'm speaking to you, the number of young kids Young kids who say, I watched you on YouTube, I've listened to this, I've listened to that.
I think our only hope without coercion is to put the ideas out there and hope that hearts will change and that truth and beauty will win out in the end rather than that which is hideous and that which is false.
Do you think part of this is that the secular world has sort of handed us so much meaningless Crap.
I mean, you know, now there's a sort of renaissance in television, but so many of the movies, everything seems to be infected with some sort of post-modern view of the world.
And that then causes a young person that maybe wouldn't have listened to a 73-year-old a couple years ago now go, well, wait a minute, I saw this on YouTube and that actually doesn't sound nearly as crazy as the stuff that Hollywood's handed me.
You know, one of the nicest things, I don't like to talk about what people say in their compliments, but one of the nicest things a young man said to me, he walked over to my colleague and he said to him, when I'm 73, I hope I can be like that.
You know, that tells me That when they look at what is an ideal to them, they want to emulate it.
They want to be in that way.
But you're right.
Secularism led us to a bankruptcy of values.
It led us not only to a bankruptcy of values, it led us to an impoverished way of conversing with each other.
What do we see on the news?
People fighting, people arguing.
That's not what the news is all about.
Give me the news!
I have the intelligence to figure out what is true and what is right and what is wrong here.
A little bit of human nature also, that isn't just a secular thing, but just that people click things that are, you see something bad, you click it, you see something good, and you just sort of let it go.
That's the battle between religion and secularism, constantly.
You're right to point that out, but I think, if we take the term secularism, or secularization, It's a process by which religious ideas, institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance.
That's the classic definition of secularization.
The very word secular means this worldly.
And so, if I don't respect you as a fellow human being, I'm going to fight you to the bone.
But if I say this man has every right to his belief and the integrity of his belief and to defend it, then I'm not fighting you.
I'm discussing ideas.
But what happens, I think, David, is we put faces to beliefs.
And if we don't like that face, we attack the person.
He doesn't just say, in the days that I was watching it, you know, that Boston Bruins are coming into town.
It's Bobby Orr and Johnny McKenzie and Phyllis Pezzito.
They make it a personal thing because we follow persons.
As soon as you watch a sport, they like to identify an individual who will be the face of that particular team.
Because then you get the adrenaline going.
If you're just talking about two great hockey teams playing each other, the way I think it used to be when the Montreal Canadiens came to play the Toronto Maple Leafs, it was hockey at its best.
So I think the personification of an idea and the embodiment of an idea has created this spirit of negativism.
So they don't tell you what so-and-so passed, what law has been passed.
Who passed it?
Who did this?
Who said that?
And the moment you show the picture of the person, The anguish gets into you, so you're going to fight it whether you like the idea or not.
So I think this personal attack in our culture, the day of personal assassination, that is what has happened in the way we discuss ideas, and I'm not given into that.
When I'm invited to places where they really want to get into a fight or something, I say, no thank you, I'm the wrong person.
I want to have an intelligent conversation and trust the audience to make up their minds.
So as someone that lives in the United States now, that originally from India went to Canada, a couple of things that you've referenced here have sound very in line with the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of the United States, that we have God-given rights, and yet at the same time, these were the men who were guaranteeing your freedom from religion.
That's very much in line with what you're talking about, actually.
Well, the freedom of religion, yeah, and yeah, and when you take that very statement, That we hold these truths to be self-evident.
What do we mean by that?
There are no self-evident truths anymore in our postmodern mindset.
Postmodernity ultimately does away with truth, meaning, and certainty.
So what do we talk about as self-evident?
And then what are the self-evident truths?
That we are endowed by our Creator with these unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Here's what I want to say, David.
No other worldview would have generated a statement like that except the Judeo-Christian worldview, because you break it down phrase by phrase, and so many worldviews would say, no, I don't agree with that.
I think the framers of the Constitution and the writers of the Declaration of Independence said, you know, we put our names with our sacred honor The sacredness of life and the sacredness of your word, this had the potential to be a great nation.
But in the last 50 years, we are seeing this dismantled and falling apart just by the volume of words that oftentimes are incoherent.
You know, it's not, as you said earlier, not just the United States.
I could name four or five countries, too, where there is more a radical type of politicization of ideas that have made the people shocked and surprised with how the particular elections went.
We don't like what we have so we like to try something new.
It's not so much that the politician produces the culture as much as the culture produces the politician.
So where do we change?
My own honest opinion on this, I think it's going to get a lot more worse before it gets better.
But if there is a change, it is going to have to change in the academic world.
What we are teaching our students is bringing itself out into the open.
Our faculty members have to learn to have intelligent disagreement and dialogue, not so program the students into thinking in one particular way.
I don't know if you've read Paul Johnson's book on intellectuals.
It's a very powerful book.
The closing paragraph itself, he's a historian, and he talks about how intellectuals have so shaped and programmed culture, and very often their own private lives are in complete disarray and falling apart and imploding.
I think the answer to your question is Is there hope?
Is there going to be change?
I think so.
Let me give you an illustration of this.
I'm pretty sure this is correct, but I've not verified it.
But a congressman wrote to me and he said, when Ronald Reagan was shot, Tip O'Neill went to the hospital and sat by his bedside and prayed for him, for Ronald Reagan.
They were opponents on a platform of political debate.
But when one of them was wounded with a bullet, The other man came and sat by his bedside and prayed for him.
That would never happen today.
What has changed?
So, my way of thinking, what did it take to change the scourge of slavery?
What did it take to move the scourge of racism in a different direction?
Oftentimes, it took a handful of people.
It didn't take mighty armies.
You can just about name the individuals, you know, whether it was Wilberforce out there or people like Dr. Martin Luther King out here and so on.
They changed history.
I look at my grandkids and I hear statements coming out of some of them which are amazing to me at ages seven and eight.
They'll say things and I say, wow, where did that come from?
I'll give you an example.
My grandson on Good Friday had his teacher wash the feet of the children, first graders.
She washed their feet.
So this little guy, Jude, who is now eight, was seven then, asked her, can we wash your feet today?
So they brought a basin of water.
These little kids put her feet in the basin of water and washed her feet.
And then he says, the teacher wrote this to my daughter.
So you'll never believe what your son, Jude, did today.
They washed my feet.
And then he looked at her and said, your feet are now clean, but your heart is even purer.
And our hearts are purer because we have met you.
When a little one- Seven years old.
Yeah, can make a comment like that, the right time, the right person will arise and change the course of history.
Because our instruments are getting more sophisticated as our capacity is getting more multiplied.
But if our character doesn't keep up with it, we will just have a more sophisticated way of self-immolation and self-destruction.
You know, I had a guy in Canada stand up in the audience and he said to me, I can't buy into this kind of worldview.
He said, I think empirical science all the time.
That's my worldview, the empirical sciences.
So I said to him, I agree with you that empirical science is a very vital discipline in our times, whether it's for health, whether it's for understanding the cosmos, all of these.
I said, but let me ask you this way.
The empirical scientist in the lab is working away at research.
Why should he or she tell us the truth when the research is done?
What of the empirical sciences gives you that imperative to be honest and tell you the truth?
I said, now you're into metaphysics.
So it's not just physics.
So I think the value structure and the character has to start.
Because I assume his response would be something like, well, his code, his internal code of ethics would force him to tell the truth, even if it was against his premise or something like that.
Because, you know, in a cross-cultural setting, that doesn't necessarily follow.
For example, this great thing of identifying a particular gene that they were removing in China, you know, I think you followed that.
And all of a sudden the Chinese government is slapping this doctor with all kinds of fines because he never got permission for it and now they're finding out that the implications of manufacturing that kind of genetic code is fraught with all kinds of dangers.
So the old adage holds true, knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules, the fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools.
Rock musicians told us that.
And musicians are often more logical than those who just do ordinary philosophy.
So I think what it has to start with is this bottom line question to me.
David, what does it mean to be human?
If we don't answer that question, everything else is footnotes without a body of the substance.
So to me, I oftentimes speak on that subject.
What does it really mean to be human?
Why do I have to respect your essential worth?
Regardless of our disagreements.
Why am I sitting across you here actually thinking, I like this guy.
He's a good man.
He's a man who's thinking clearly.
And even if we have our fundamental disagreements, I have to respect your right to your thinking.
And hopefully, in the end, as we dialogue, the truth will have its way.
Yeah, it's funny because I always say to Ben Shapiro, who you referenced before, that whatever our political disagreements are, I suppose if we can remain friends for another 50 years, then maybe one of us will concede a point here or there, which I think we've actually both done over just the course of a couple of years.
But then at the end, it's like, well, then what's the worst that happened?
So you mentioned Judeo-Christian values, and since we've talked about Shapiro and Dennis Prager, who come at this, obviously, from a Jewish perspective, and you can agree to disagree on whatever those outside issues are, but when you walk away from a conversation with someone like the two of them, or someone from a different, from not a Protestant outlook on life, et cetera, do you feel that they're missing something that is an invaluable point to your worldview?
Well, if truth by definition is exclusive, and one disagrees with the other, there is still the necessity of the truth, you know.
Prager, I thought, had a wonderful answer when we were talking.
And he is very respectful to me, as I am of him.
And Prager looked at me and said, when Messiah comes, I will have only one question for him.
Have you been here before?
And you know, I think that tells me how the man is thinking.
But let me give you another illustration.
There's a very great Hebrew scholar in Jerusalem.
I was writing a book on comparative worldviews and I spent some hours with him.
Brilliant guy, Moise Sharon.
He has written more on the inscriptions in the Middle East than anybody else.
Multiple volumes, if I'm not mistaken, 20 or 30 volumes.
And he looked at me at one point and he said this.
He said, Mr. Zacharias, You and I may have our differences, but we have one very essential thing in common.
I said, what is that, sir?
He said, our goal in life is to have communion with God.
I said, I agree with you.
And then he went on to say something fascinating about how he differed from other religious worldviews on that matter.
But not with the Christian worldview.
And that's why I think the Judeo-Christian worldview.
And Ben Shapiro said to me, you know, what was missing in the Old Testament?
What was wrong?
I said, no, it was not wrong.
It was the gradual unfolding of that relationship with God that we were offered and that the grace that is given to you and me right from the beginning has hints of this and the mirror of the law told me my face was dirty, but the mirror couldn't clean my face.
I had to go to the faucet to find a cleansing.
I said, so it's a complementariness and a completion.
But to get to the heart of your question, yes, I would go back and say, you know, there's one link here that is not as strong.
So then from there, without getting too lost in the politics of the day, when I watch these debates or just sort of anything that's happening politically, I always am thinking, well, why would I want these people to have any power over my life?
They don't seem to be addressing anything that really matters, right?
They're not gonna really have an honest, you know, they'll maybe ask them a quick question on faith and they give you some, some glib answer or something like that.
But I think part of the issue right now is that they feel, politicians feel
they can solve all of man's problems.
But you would basically argue these are not even for man to solve in the first place or something like that.
But a good politician is the most difficult job in our time.
And there are good people out there.
I've met them.
I know them.
And they are the ones who grieve most as to what has happened.
Somebody told me from the State Department, I've been here 30 years, I've never seen the mood so toxic as it is now.
We need it.
We need these structures.
But I think we need examples to model it, not just to speak it.
And most of the time, as I said, I'm very troubled about what's happening globally.
I see it.
I see two of the major atheistic religions of the atheistic countries of the world, demagogues in charge of that they're not giving their people the freedom to believe or to disbelieve, while they are increasing their footprint all over America.
I mean, I've said that once or twice and I don't like thinking it.
You know what I mean?
You don't want to think that, that something horrific would have to happen so that it would be the only way we could reset, which of course nobody wants to happen, and yet we find ourselves in this weird thing.
I don't think there's a simplistic answer, but I just go with people whom I know in my own heart.
If everything is going well and then you start worrying about your car, you know, that you bought a lemon and it's not running
properly. But all of a sudden you find out one of your children or grandchildren has just
been hit in a car wreck and their body is shattered. It changes everything of importance
right then. And I know people to They can be arguing and all of a sudden they find out they've got cancer of the pancreas or something and the whole demeanor of life changes.
So that's the way sometimes our attention is brought to what really matters.
I'm hoping what happens individually and relationally with our friends, it seems to be an intimation of how we ultimately wake up to what's happening.
Think of the nuclear threat today.
Who in their right mind would want to see a nuclear war?
You know, we're even just seeing pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and you say they're hell on earth.
But we've got regimes with people who are willing to do things like that.
So, is it going to take some awful cataclysmic event for us to say, stop, everything has to stop, we have to sit down and talk?
I don't know.
The only other possibility, David, is this.
And that, as a man who loves Christ and loves the spiritual world as reality, some great revival breaks out somewhere and hearts get changed and we find a sympathy towards things that really matter, not towards peripheral issues.
What do you think the sort of general state of happiness is, say, across the world, in that, you know, we can look at, we constantly complain about everything, and yes, just in the six years that I've lived in Los Angeles, are there way more homeless people here?
Absolutely.
And, you know, they can talk about climate and all these things, and yet there's so much Counter to that that infant mortality is the lowest has ever been that actually there's more green on earth than we can find all of these different studies We've eradicated most diseases There's less war right now than at almost any time in human history all of these things not to say there aren't bad things But is there a way to sort of measure happiness across time?