Oct. 20, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| The single greatest pursuit of every young person today is the pursuit of meaning. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Ravi Zacharias, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| David, thanks so much for having me. | ||
| I've looked forward to this for a while. | ||
| An honor to be with you. | ||
| It's an honor to have you here. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it as well. | ||
| This is one of those that the internet sort of forced to happen over the last two years. | ||
| You've been on the list of when people just start assaulting me on Twitter, and I mean assault in the best sense. | ||
| Sit down with Robby. | ||
| Sit down with Robby. | ||
| So we finally were able to work it out. | ||
| I'm amazed to hear that. | ||
| So both of my friends went to work, I guess. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So first, when I Google your name, it says that you're a Christian apologist. | ||
| Now we all hear this phrase, and it sounds a little strange to me. | ||
| Christian apologist, as if To do what you do, you have to either apologize for something or feel guilty about it or something like that. | ||
| Can you tell me about the phrase Christian Apologies? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, we pondered it. | ||
| There's not a catchphrase that has come into our mind, but we as a team, I've got 93 speakers who work with me in 15 countries. | ||
| And so we're thinking of, you know, many of them are legitimate philosophers. | ||
| I find that a bit of a glorifying term for myself. | ||
| I'm not a philosopher in an academic sense, but I do some very serious thinking on matters that deal with culture, values, ethics, and so on. | ||
| It's probably the best description is that of a Christian thinker and contextual representative of values and the substrata of culture. | ||
| So we'll find a term. | ||
| Thinker, a Christian thinker, that works for me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I really am. | ||
| In fact, when I was with our mutual friend Ben Shapiro, he surprised me by saying you were the most requested guest to be brought on this program. | ||
| That also quite shocked me. | ||
| Flattering and encouraging. | ||
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But yes, I think... You don't do a Ben Shapiro impression? | |
| My brain doesn't work as fast as his. | ||
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I don't know. | |
| That guy is sort of a rap artist in prose. | ||
| I've watched your dialogue with him. | ||
| That was brilliant, by the way. | ||
| And you know, David, I'll be honest with you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that troubles me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what I'm committed to. | ||
| Okay, so now let's talk about your journey here, because it's been an interesting one. | ||
| You were born in India, and you were an atheist until you were 17, is that right? | ||
| Again, sometimes these terms became floated around in stronger ways than I would like to have. | ||
| I was indifferent to religious claims. | ||
| India is probably the most religion-manufacturing culture on the face of the earth. | ||
| Most of the major isms, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, all of these isms were spawned and raised in India. | ||
| And if India and Pakistan had not separated, they would have been the biggest Islamic nation too. | ||
| So actually religion had no attraction for me. | ||
| That's the best way to put it. | ||
| I felt it was believing the incredible and it was creating more havoc. | ||
| Was that a strange position to hold as a young person in a place that all those isms came from? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So let's talk about that. | ||
| Yes, India is a culture of academic excellence. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That lit up within my heart. | ||
| What passage is that again? | ||
| John chapter 14 and verse 19. | ||
| Jesus is talking to Thomas, of all things, because Thomas was the apostle who went to India. | ||
| And the irony of it is, in that same passage, Jesus says, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. | ||
| No one comes unto the Father except through me. | ||
| It's a pretty exclusive claim, dramatic claim. | ||
| And he went to a land of 330 million deities. | ||
| And he paid with his life to present the gospel message of Jesus. | ||
| So that verse, Jesus said, because I live, you also shall live. | ||
| I latched on to the word live. | ||
| I said, I don't know what this really means, but if God has a different definition of this than I have, I want to know what that is. | ||
| And in a simple prayer, I began my pilgrimage to faith in Christ. | ||
| What was that shift like? | ||
| I mean, if we were writing a movie right now, so there's the young man who, you know, attempts suicide. | ||
| The Bible comes to him in the hospital bed. | ||
| He has the wake up. | ||
| I mean, it sounds like a movie, sort of. | ||
| What was the next shift in that? | ||
| Because it doesn't all just happen immediately. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's an incredible statement for your father to make right before passing. | ||
| Did he have a similar awakening, or once you had an awakening, did it go across your family? | ||
| After that, yeah. | ||
| Actually, my brother and my sister was amongst the first to latch onto this, and then me. | ||
| You know, when Jesus talked to Nicodemus, he made a fascinating statement. | ||
| He said, you can't change on your own. | ||
| You have to experience the new birth. | ||
| Now, I know that takes on a pejorative term in our ways, but the fact of the matter is, new desires, new hungers, a new breathing, a new air. | ||
| And when he watched my life change and what happened, yes, he followed it, which is very unusual in the Indian culture. | ||
| There you all follow your parents. | ||
| Very rare for a parent to follow their children. | ||
| But he asked me to take him to the hospital. | ||
| He was going to have bypass. | ||
| I'm talking about 1979. | ||
| So, you know, you're talking about 40 years ago. | ||
| It was relatively new. | ||
| My dad was overweight. | ||
| He was asthmatic and things had gone wrong physically, but he elected to have surgery. | ||
| But he had this premonition. | ||
| I said, I don't think I'm going to make it. | ||
| He was closer to my older brother. | ||
| I was number two. | ||
| More like my older brother in temperament, but he phoned me. | ||
| I lived in Niagara Falls, Ontario at that time, 95 miles away. | ||
| He asked me to come and take him to the hospital, and on our drive to the hospital, that was the conversation. | ||
| He said, what God has done in your life, and he also had had that transformation through the work of God in his heart. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think they can. | ||
| But it does not have ultimate grounding in a rationally compelling way. | ||
| It has only that, an existential transformation. | ||
| So yes, of course they can, and I have many of my friends who are like that. | ||
| They're good people, they're decent people, and I enjoy those friendships because we have great conversations. | ||
| But the question has to be, David, is what you believe ultimately true or only individualistically true for you and for me. | ||
| And if that is the case, then you cannot absolutize it. | ||
| You can only recommend it as pragmatically workable for the now. | ||
| And then how do you dissuade somebody who by their own existential bootstraps have come to the opposite conclusions? | ||
| There's no ontic referent. | ||
| There's no point of reference to find a solution to what is true and good and beautiful. | ||
| 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 they decided, no, no, you can't stand here. | ||
| And I think he is outstanding. | ||
| You know, I couldn't stand up to his intellectual prowess. | ||
| He's a man of incredible ability. | ||
| And courage. | ||
| And he's from Toronto, you know. | ||
| I'm from Toronto, actually. | ||
| I'm from Delhi. | ||
| I moved to Toronto. | ||
| My family's all in Toronto. | ||
| My wife's from Toronto. | ||
| I have a very great respect for Jordan Peterson. | ||
| But let me give you an illustration. | ||
| In Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, there's a building called the Wexner Center for the Arts. | ||
| Supposedly the first postmodern building. | ||
| And I asked the person, what is a postmodern building? | ||
| I know what postmodern philosophy is. | ||
| What's a postmodern building? | ||
| He said, well, the architect said, if life itself has no purpose, why should our buildings have any purpose? | ||
| And so he built it with no particular purpose in mind. | ||
| You know, stairways that go nowhere. | ||
| I was going to say, where does the elevator go? | ||
| And so I say, he said, what do you think of it? | ||
| I said, I have one question. | ||
| Did you do the same with the foundation? | ||
| You cannot fool with the foundation. | ||
| You can fool with the infrastructure. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Had you not used the word enough, I would have said yes. | ||
| Do you think that's valuable? | ||
| Do you think that's a good way to at least have a culture? | ||
| I can see why you're not going to go with enough. | ||
| Okay, I got it. | ||
| Foundation part of it is to me indispensable because that's what you have built your theory on. | ||
| However, for coexistence, for respectability, for civility, I think it's good and I think that's why I enjoy talking with somebody like you. | ||
| Even disagreement No. | ||
| be allowed provided you don't get disagreeable in the process. | ||
| And I think Peterson is very impressive that way. | ||
| I'd love to talk to him on why he has not moved in that one step. | ||
| See Dennis Prager for example, Dennis Prager and I have had several dialogues. | ||
| You're going through my greatest hits over here. | ||
| Great man. | ||
| Funny, articulate, intellectual. | ||
| But we do agree on one thing as a starting point, that the ultimate pursuit of life at Prager and for me was communion with God. | ||
| And the starting point is that God has a moral law at work in this universe. | ||
| When you start from that, even if you come up with some divergent discussions on who this God is, you can have intelligent debate. | ||
| But if you start purely from an autocracy of good and bad, then you run into a problem in a pluralistic culture. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think that's happening across the West? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That the West is grappling with something. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Because I sense that it may not just be enough to talk about the right ideas. | ||
| That at some point you hit the end of the road with that. | ||
| You're doing it well, David. | ||
| You're doing it well. | ||
| You know, I commend you for it. | ||
| You're not a provocateur. | ||
| You are not stirring up people to be angry. | ||
| I'm a little worse on Twitter. | ||
| In this room, I'm very good. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Wow! | ||
| And San Marcos, an honorary doctorate. | ||
| I was shocked! | ||
| 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. | ||
| So is that though purely the result of secularism or is that the result of just... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let me give you an illustration. | ||
| I'm a great lover of hockey. | ||
| Follow the NHL. | ||
| I mean, in Canada, you have no choice. | ||
| It's hockey night in Canada, you know? | ||
|
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So that's your other religion? | |
| Partially, yeah. | ||
| Except I don't give any offerings in there. | ||
| The thing is, What does a sports writer do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so even in politics, Yes, I was just going to say, I mean, you're talking about cult of personality, which is exactly what politics is about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how do we reverse some of that? | ||
| Because it's very obvious that people are waking up to this. | ||
| People don't want the chaos. | ||
| It's why people are paying attention to all of these things on YouTube. | ||
| I think so much has changed globally, David. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I think the academy has failed America. | ||
| Do you think it can come back? | ||
| Because this is being debated constantly now. | ||
| That academia now is so rotten, that the systems and the gatekeeping is so infected. | ||
| There's a lot of people that I think are making a sound argument that it basically just all has to collapse. | ||
| Of course, what can come on the other side of a collapse could be a lot worse, and that's what we have to work on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is there a way to make that happen, sort of, on a global scale? | ||
| Like, is there, or do you think it also, that's just basically, your view is that it's a bottom-up thing, ironically, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Is that an odd place for a religious perspective to come from? | ||
| I thought I was going to qualify that. | ||
| I said it's a bottom-up in that it has to start from the foundation. | ||
| But it's a top-down. | ||
| It has to begin with a transcendent worldview of who we are in our essence. | ||
| And that's why I think it's consistent. | ||
| God doesn't just change what we do. | ||
| He changes what we want to do. | ||
| So if there was a healthy society that was incorporating all of the ideas that you're talking about, how would it deal with the forces of modernity? | ||
| bottom up, and neither is excluded. | ||
| So if there was a, say, a healthy society that was incorporating all of the ideas | ||
| that you're talking about, how would it deal with the forces of modernity? | ||
| How would it deal with stem cell research? | ||
| And we don't have to get into a specific thing, but all of the things that science brings us, | ||
| and the good and the bad that comes with the internet, how would it actually negotiate that modernity | ||
| and secularism, really? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did he have a response to that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Actually, he just sat down. | ||
| He said, I have to give that some thought. | ||
| 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? | ||
| We agreed to disagree when I'm 94 and he's 87. | ||
| And the truth of the matter is, we can disagree on the law of gravity, but there is the law of gravity. | ||
|
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But it still exists. | |
| We can disagree on the human essence, but there's only one explanation of that human essence. | ||
| So, you know, fascinatingly, Jesus didn't persuade everybody whom he spoke to. | ||
| There were some that walked away, and he looked at some of them and said, will you also leave me at this point? | ||
| He looked at his disciples. | ||
| The cost of truth is huge, but conviction with compassion is indispensable. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He may think the same of me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the way I come at it is this. | ||
| There are tests for truth, and there are objects of those tests. | ||
| And I say it's this. | ||
| There are really four questions of life, David. | ||
| Origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. | ||
| That forms our worldview. | ||
| Where did I come from? | ||
| What does life actually mean? | ||
| How do I differentiate good and evil? | ||
| What happens to a human being when he or she dies? | ||
| And therefore, you put the two tests of truth, correspondence and coherence. | ||
| Are my answers corresponding to reality? | ||
| When my answers are put together, is there a coherence to them? | ||
| And to me, in that Judeo-Christian worldview, it meets the two tests of coherence and correspondence with the four questions of life. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think politics is a necessary evil in our time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wait, what's the second? | ||
| You're talking about China and Russia? | ||
| China and Russia, yeah. | ||
| And what are we doing out here? | ||
| We are fighting each other. | ||
| You know, there's an old adage, how horses fight and how donkeys fight. | ||
| When horses fight, they face each other, form a circle and the attacker comes and they kick against the attacker. | ||
| When donkeys fight, they form a circle with their backs to each other and face the attacker. | ||
| And what do they do? | ||
| End up kicking each other to death. | ||
| And so that's the way we are doing politics today. | ||
| Not all, by the way, there are good politicians there, but throwing the Oil into the flames one after another. | ||
| Think of what the last two years have been spent by politicians doing peripheral stuff while we are fiddling while Rome is burning. | ||
| Here I am talking to you in Los Angeles. | ||
| It grieved me this morning to be sitting having my breakfast in a restaurant with a bowl of cereal and looking at the number of homeless walking by. | ||
| It just crushed me, you know. | ||
| What has brought all this about? | ||
| Let's sit down and find a solution to these. | ||
| Think of the number of people dying because of the opioid crisis. | ||
| Think of our young people who are battling destruction in the family and the home and all of this. | ||
| We're not addressing any of those things. | ||
| Instead, what were your tax returns? | ||
| It looks like we are only following the money trail. | ||
| We are not following the trail of conscience and cultural well-being. | ||
| Well, we seem to be following the shiny object that's ever moving. | ||
| And it provokes those who are with you on your side. | ||
| You know, I've got to punch that guy in the face. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And then what? | ||
| My professor used to say, some people are better at smelling rotten eggs than laying good ones. | ||
| And that's really what we're doing. | ||
| To go back, I think what we need is a test of character. | ||
| Not uniform in our beliefs, but a character that will hold integrity of discourse, if you lose that, you lose the discourse. | ||
| Doesn't it seem though that that would be almost impossible right now to break through the ether, | ||
| which is maybe why you said you think it's gonna get worse before it's gonna get better? | ||
| Yeah, and I think some great tragedy will hit us, and then we will awaken. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like, what else? | ||
| What else would do it? | ||
| It's a good question and a worthy question. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's always a possibility. | ||
| It's happened in history. | ||
| A dramatic change of heart of an individual. | ||
| I see it happening in prisons. | ||
| I see it happening in arenas. | ||
| And if that happens on a massive scale, which is what a Christian would call a revival, then that would be the only hope. | ||
| It's a tough one. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Happiness is treated as a thing to be pursued To me, it's a byproduct. | ||
| It is not, you know, there's an old Hebrew parable. | ||
| God is like the light. | ||
| Happiness and prosperity is like the shadow. | ||
| You walk towards the light, the shadow will follow you. | ||
| You turn your back upon the light and chase the shadow, you will never ever catch up to it. | ||
| We have found means of administering temporary happiness that have actually cost us more in the long run. | ||
| And therefore, I think happiness pursued is seldom attained. | ||
| The good pursued produces the peaceful heart. | ||
| It is really a question of, are you at peace? | ||
| You know, Thomas Merton used to say, man is not at peace with his fellow man because he's not at peace with himself. | ||
| He's not at peace with himself because he's not at peace with God. | ||
| So let me take that middle part. | ||
| If I am creating misery for people around me, and I'm roughing people's lives up. | ||
| You know what that tells people? | ||
| I am the one who's messed up inside. | ||
| It tells me more about myself than about that person. | ||
| That's what I see in our world today. | ||
| People are distributing curses and displeasure because they themselves have no peace within their own heart. | ||
| If I'm at peace in my heart, David, I'm not going to be coming and taking you out to spread some kind of unhappiness or whatever. | ||
| You'll see the overflow. | ||
| We've got to get to what it really matters and that begins with our children. | ||
| If we can impart to our children a peaceful heart, a good and a decent heart. | ||
| Think of For example, a few weeks ago I was speaking at our own institute in Atlanta. | ||
| I'd just had surgery two days before that, so I was very uncomfortable and I'd come off an intubation. | ||
| My voice was still raspy. | ||
| But there was a lineup of people who wanted to say hello. | ||
| And I knew I couldn't stay any longer. | ||
| I'd already been on my feet for so long. | ||
| So I looked down the line and I saw a young boy. | ||
| And they looked very disconsolate. | ||
| So I just waved him over. | ||
| I said, I'm leaving soon, but you look like a troubled man. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Can I help you? | ||
| He said, Mr. Zacharias, I'm 13 years old. | ||
| In 11 days, I'll be 14. | ||
| And in 11 days, I have to go to court and choose between my father and my mother. | ||
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Wow. | |
| That's exactly what I felt, like a stab in my heart. | ||
| And no wonder his face showed it. | ||
| Now that's an issue. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| But we don't address how to build safe places for our children to grow up and feel unintimidated with their honest questions and their struggles. | ||
| But if you're falling apart in your own relationships, how do you impart it? | ||
| to the children. So I just say, if we have nothing to give from within the peace in our own heart, we are only | ||
| distributing more displeasure and unhappiness. Unhappiness | ||
| is also not gained. It's a symptom of what is going on inside the person's life. | ||
|
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I think that's the right way to end a chat. That felt right to me. | |
| Did that feel right to you? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Provided we flip it and say you can find happiness and peace by doing that which God has called us to do. | ||
| So rather than end on the note of unhappiness, on the note of happiness that it can be gained because of the gift of God. | ||
| But thanks so much. | ||
| You made me feel very comfortable here and I hope we can do it again. | ||
| It was an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I would love to do it again. | ||
| Maybe we'll do it either with Ben or with Dennis, or we can get some of the atheists. | ||
| We can maybe try Sam Harris or Michael Shermer and have that conversation. | ||
| We'll do it. | ||
| Yeah, and actually, I'm gonna be in Atlanta in October, so I'd love to come by and say hi. | ||
| Can we do that, David? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let us know the dates. | ||
| If we're in town, I'd be honored to host you there and even maybe speak to our staff and our people there. | ||
| It would be an honor to have you. | ||
| It would be a pleasure. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for coming in. | ||
| We see internet? | ||
| We made it happen. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| For more on Ravi, you can follow him on Twitter. | ||
| He's got good branding. | ||
| It's at Ravi Zacharias. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality instead of nonstop yelling, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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