3709 The Morality Crisis | Dennis Prager and Stefan Molyneux
What happens to morality with a decrease in religiosity and a rise in secularism? Dennis Prager joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the recent Prager University video "If There Is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong," the moral values communicated through religion, the fall of free will in the face of secular determinism, the difference between charity and the forces retribution of wealth and the future of the western experiment. Dennis Prager is the host of The Dennis Prager Show, a bestselling author, syndicated columnist, speaker and the co-founder of Prager University.Website: http://www.dennisprager.comPrager University: http://www.prageru.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/DennisPragerVideo: "If There Is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrcQ_PTkVD4Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I'm here chatting with the one, the only, the iconoclast, Dennis Prager.
He is the host of The Dennis Prager Show.
He's a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, speaker, and the co-founder of Prager University, who have very tasty morsels of intellectual and theological stimulation on YouTube.
The website is DennisPrager, P-R-A-G-E-R.com.
Prager University, of course, is PragerU.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com forward slash DennisPrager.
Prager, thanks so much for taking the time tonight, Dennis.
Pleasure, Stefan.
Thanks.
Now, one of the videos that you did, which really, really caught my eye, was something that I think people have suspected for a long time deep in the sort of soulful bone marrow of what remains of the modern conscience, which is the argument that we have a very, very big problem trying to define universal absolutist moral ethics in the absence of a deity.
I wonder if you could talk to people a little bit about your concerns in this area and how the reasoning goes.
It's so clear and so commonsensical and so universally acknowledged among atheist philosophers.
It's only the non-professional philosophers who normally I like.
I'm not usually, you know, a big fan of academia.
But here is one of the few areas where the professional thinkers got it right.
And the non-professional thinkers are engaged in wishful thinking.
And that is, when I debated this at Oxford with an atheist professor years ago, the first thing he said was, Mr.
Prager is right.
If there is no God, ethics are subjective.
It was a non-issue to him.
It didn't force him to believe in God, nor am I arguing that it should.
All I'm saying is what is pretty much universal among those who think it through as opposed to feel it through.
And that is if, as I put in the title of the video, if God doesn't say murder is wrong, if there is no God declaring murder wrong, then murder isn't wrong.
You can think it's wrong, feel it's wrong, vote it being wrong, intuit it being wrong, but there's no wrong with a capital W. It's wrong in the same way that I would say a BMW is better than a Mercedes.
It's my subjective take, and that's all it is.
Or beauty.
Is there an objective beauty?
No, there's no objective beauty.
And so there's no objective morality.
Okay, go on.
Well, so I've sort of noticed since I've been mulling over what you've said, which I've thought of before, but you encapsulated very well, both here and in the video.
Since the growth of secularism, there has been an increasing emphasis on feelings being the guidance for life.
And I think what you're pointing out, we have this sense, this feeling, this gut intuition, at least those of us who are decent people that, you know, murder, theft, rape, assault, and so on are all wrong.
But in the absence of proof, in the absence of certainty, we have to sort of sub in or call in passions and feelings and intuitions and so on, which are not objective, which are not subject to syllogisms, and which often collide with no particular way of remediating the differences.
That's exactly right.
People don't want to face...
The reality of the situation, because we live in what I call the age of feelings.
So there was an article in the New York Times, and I only cite it being the New York Times because that's not a religious-based journal, to say the least.
David Brooks, writing for them, he noted all the studies that were done by a famous sociologist who interviewed young people all over America, and he found they all, not all, but overwhelmingly, Young people were of the view that they feel what's right and what's wrong.
By the way, I learned this at a very early age when I asked a woman on an airplane who was a vegetarian and said she was a vegetarian because she doesn't think killing animals is right to eat, which I honor.
I honor that view.
But then she said, who are we to say that people are more valuable than animals?
I said, well, wait a minute.
Who would you say first, a dog or a stranger?
And then there was quiet.
And I said, I'm sorry, did you hear my question?
And she said, yes, I'm thinking.
And I'll never forget that.
And I was thinking, she's thinking?
And then I realized, because people say, I love my dog.
I don't love the stranger.
There's no moral basis.
If there is a God that says human life is sacred...
love your dog first, but if feelings determine, then you save your dog.
And it's as simple as that.
Right.
People don't want to acknowledge.
And this, of course, Nietzsche warned about this in the 19th century, that with the death of God would also be the death of certainty regarding ethics.
And I think in the hurly-burly continual competition among various cultures and religions and groups, whether there's some secular on the communist side or religious ideologies, if you don't have certainty in your ethics, if you don't have certainty in your virtue— It seems that in any conflict, the most certain, the most committed, the most resolute group is going to win.
And this sort of acidic termite in the basement eating away of the certainty of Western values, the substitution of feeling for thinking or relativism for certainty, I think has created a grave and perhaps even fatal weakness.
At the root of Western thought, but to the point up here in Canada, we've got a prime minister who says, ah, there's no such thing as Canadian values.
It's all relative.
And it's like, why did people fight so hard to create societies that now seem to be wide open for the world to come and pillage because we don't have any certainty that what was created has any objective value at all?
That's right.
You said it beautifully, actually.
Secularism is great for government, but in every other way, It is the termite of society.
It eats away at the foundations of society, and that is the reason, that and leftism are the reasons, that Western civilization is, I'm not optimistic as Western civilization surviving, and your point about the guy who's the most certain winning is your fundamentalist Islamist.
He's winning in Europe.
There are far more mosques being built than churches being built.
Mosques are being built at the same rate churches are being closed.
And I'm a Jew and I'm saying this.
I don't have an axe to grind, so to speak.
I actually do have an axe to grind because with all of its mixed bag history, Christianity has at least given, and I mean not at least, has given us Western civilization.
And there have been eruptions of evil, but it is the best thing ever.
That has been made yet.
It is the only place that established the idea that human rights come from God, that freedom comes from God.
That's why you talk about Canada, I talk about the United States.
We have a trinity.
It's on every coin in America, every banknote in America.
Liberty, in God we trust, e pluribus unum, from many one.
And those are the three foundations.
You get rid of any one of them, America is over.
For many decades, Dennis, I have been moving in atheist circles, and I have been really trying to stimulate the atheist dedication and curiosity and focus on finding something to replace.
What has been carved out of the heart of Western civilization?
Because there are people who aren't going to believe in a deity, and for those people, we do need to find something that gives them moral certainty.
Now, it's something that I have spent a lot of time on as a philosopher.
I've got a whole book on secular ethics and so on.
But what has struck me recently, and it's kind of a heartbreaking phenomenon, is there does seem to be a sort of Dull-eyed lack of curiosity, a dull-eyed lack of recognition of the need for certainty in the realm of ethics coming from the atheist community.
And this has lent me to be somewhat suspicious of perhaps the unconscious motives of a lot of atheists.
Because the one thing we notice is that, repeatedly throughout history, when religious beliefs Fervor, when religious certainty is swept away, you often will get a totalitarian state in its place.
And if the atheists are focused on attacking Christianity, but without building ethics that can, to some degree at least, replace the power vacuum that the lack of Christian ethics provides, is it remotely possible that they just could be, and I hate to say this because a lot of these people I know well, is it possible that they could be useful idiots for totalitarians?
It is what they are.
And a lot of them are wonderful people, as you pointed out.
The issue is not an attack on them.
And just let me say, I have to say this every time.
The fact that God is necessary for there to exist good and evil in an objective way does not mean that every religious person is a good person or every atheist is a bad person.
I just want to make that clear.
Any more than, did everyone who worship Zeus, were they a bad person?
Yet both the atheist and I acknowledge Zeus wasn't a god.
Nevertheless, there are good people all over the planet.
We understand that.
By the way, I want to just make clear on the certitude.
I'm not certain I'm right.
I'm certain that there is a right.
And there is a wrong.
That's what I'm certain.
We have reason, we humans.
God says, this is my belief, right?
God says, do not murder.
Okay.
So then it is my task as a human to figure out when is murder, murder.
When is it homicide?
When is it a crime of passion?
When is it self-defense?
And so on.
Otherwise, God has to come down to every human being every minute of the day and direct them.
So the God-based principle is, here are absolutes.
You then figure out, in any given situation, whether or not it applies.
So, for example, is it wrong to lie?
Yes.
But was a Polish peasant who saved a Jew and lied to the Nazis when asked, do you have Jews hiding?
Was he committing an evil?
Of course not.
Even though it is normally wrong to lie.
Right, right.
I mean, it is wrong to kill unless it's in an extremity of self-defense, in which case it is right.
So I think this would be a matter of self-defense once removed and I think would be perfectly valid and we would hope that the only thing he had to do was to lie.
But this… I think?
When you get rid of the big truths, when you get rid of the big absolutes, you don't end up with freedom.
You end up with a thousand tiny absolutes all at war with each other.
Because you would think that from the sort of secular side, from the atheist side, oh, we get rid of the big certainties, relativism and so on.
How is it possible in a more secular society that you end up with this political correctness, with this hysteria, with this aggression, with this violence towards free speech, this violence towards people who aren't on the left?
If everything's relative, how How do you end up with this broken shard certainty that's constantly being used to rile people against each other?
These two things don't fit together logically, but they seem to be manifesting socially almost endlessly.
Well, look at the university.
It's the most secular institution in the West, and it's the stupidest.
And I don't mean that as an insult.
It's obviously an insult, but I don't mean it to be an insult.
It's just a fact.
You have more More rock ideas in the university than in any other institution, and the fact that it is utterly secular is, to my mind, the fact that it's godless, as it were, is the ultimate reason.
I went to Columbia for graduate school, and it was there, I wrote, it's on the internet, any of your viewers can see it, How I Found God at Columbia.
It's a brief essay.
And I realized at a certain point, I was being taught nonsense.
Men and women are basically the same.
The United States and the Soviet Union were equally guilty in the Cold War.
Just one piece of nonsense after the next.
And one day, it's literally happened.
One day, I was walking in the sort of quad of Columbia on 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
And All of a sudden, because I kept asking myself, how could such bright people teach such nonsense?
And then a phrase came to me that I got in religious school in first grade from the Bible.
Wisdom begins with fear of God.
And that changed my life.
And I realized, oh, there's no wisdom at Columbia because there's no God at Columbia.
And this, to me, is one of the great challenges that the amoral nihilism and relativism that goes on in a lot of the minds of secular people It strikes me, if ethics are sort of the reason why we are human, what differentiates us from animals, and I think there's a very strong case to be made for that.
I mean, every animal builds a house, we just build more complicated ones.
But as far as abstract, conceptualized, universalized virtue, that is what distinguishes us from the animals.
There is something inhuman about relativism because it lowers us back down to amoral, manipulative resource gatherers and resource shifters.
And that to me is a very chilling thing.
We can't restrain ourselves anymore by internalized moral rules.
And therefore, we get this hysterical shaming and attacking and bullying and so on because we all have to make decisions as a society and individually.
Who gets what?
How do resources get created or shared or transferred?
When you take out the certainty about property rights, when you take out the certainty of free will and self-ownership, when you ascribe all human causality to environmental factors, then you turn into this almost satanic manipulator of the environment in order to create the perfect human being.
And you strip people of moral responsibility, of conscience, of free will.
And this is, to me, a morally insane viewpoint and strips us of that which is most essential in our humanity, which is ethics and free will.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
I'll just give one example on one of the points, free will.
Not only if there's no God is there no objective right and wrong, there's also no free will.
Remember, if there's no God, the only reality is material.
It's called materialism.
You and I are just a bunch of neurons, nerves, and a brain that is a purely physical thing.
There's no such thing as a mind.
It is all brain.
So if we act bad, it's not because we made a choice.
It's because of either our physiology, our genes, or our environment.
In either case, I didn't choose.
There's no I choice.
I is a euphemism for environment and genes.
That's it.
There is no I. That's the reason, by the way, that folks who believe that really don't want to punish criminals, because in their heart, they don't believe they're responsible for what they did.
Right.
Because in the Christian worldview and in religious worldviews in general, even if you come from a harsh background, you still have a direct channel to the divine.
You still have a direct channel to universal morality.
And you're still responsible.
You can't rape a woman and say, well, my parents were bad parents.
It may be the case, but a lot of people have bad parents and don't rape and don't torture and don't murder and so on.
You know, the Islamist butcher out there, the terrorists, they come overwhelmingly from middle class and upper class families.
Even though the New York Times writers constantly speak about poverty in the Arab world as a major fuel of terror, the truth is it has nothing to do.
Islamic terror has nothing to do with poverty.
I don't know about Bin Laden and Co.
were all, came from wealthy families and had great educations and lots of material opportunities.
And this, of course, goes very much to the leftist or Marxist argument that dysfunction, I guess what they would call immorality, but dysfunction arises from a lack of resources.
You know, well, if you grow up poor, they completely ignore the Appalachian Mountains, which are very poor and have incredibly low crime rates.
And then, of course, the great temptation is to say, well, if it's poverty that causes crime, Of course, Dennis, what we need to do is take from the rich and give to the poor, and that way we'll eliminate poverty.
But that strips free will from the rich in terms of charity, and it strips free will from the poor, making them the last domino that falls down in a bloody heap of crime based on all the previous materialistic dominoes that occurred before.
And that means no morality.
But then, of course, if there's no morality, why try to fix anything?
And that, I think, is the paradox that keeps showing up for me.
Well, of course, as you point out, though, they try to fix everything.
That's why there's an ever bigger and bigger government.
The smaller the God, the bigger the government.
That's the state of the Western world.
I'm not talking about the Muslim world.
But in the Judeo-Christian world, the bigger the God, the smaller the government.
America was founded.
It was unique in this way.
And I'm very pro-Canadian.
But America was unique in that it was founded on the notion of limited government.
But the whole foundation, all of the founders, all of them, even the ones called deists, Without God, there is no chance to have limited government.
Because if people don't feel that they are responsible and accountable to God, then they'll be accountable to the state.
That's your choice.
Let's talk a little bit about some of the role of secularism in what I consider to be one of the foundational catastrophes of Western society over the past 50 or 60 years, which is the collapse of the traditional family, the rise of single motherhood, and the sense that The vows that people take regarding marriage, Dennis, of course, it's one thing if you make them in the eyes of God, they have a weight and a gravitas that I think is quite different if you just make them in the eyes of a secular judge.
And the hedonism that seems to be driving the breakup of the family, the hedonism for sexual experiences and sexual variety, and the hedonism for I'm dissatisfied, so I'm just going to bust up my marriage.
And, you know, there are many studies that show people who are unhappy in their marriage and considering divorce, if they stay married, five years later, they look back and say, wow, I'm really glad I didn't get divorced.
But there's this promotion of the hedonism of the moment rather than the deferral of gratification that seems to be embedded in most religious contexts.
I mean, the deferral of gratification to forego hedonism for the sake of getting to heaven is great training in a way for postponing the hedonism of, you know, sexual variety or busting up something because you're unhappy and staying with things for the long run.
And I think this hedonism has kind of wormed its way into people's personal relationships to the point where the stability of the family has virtually unraveled in many communities with all of the cascading dysfunction that results from that.
It's so bad.
The issue transcends the issue of divorce.
At least the people who got divorced got married.
We have vast numbers of young men and women who don't plan to get married.
Because that too died with the death of the Judeo-Christian value system.
There was that famous song, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
But it was only true in a religious society.
It's the same with having children, just as you point out.
The hedonist does not want children.
Children take up your time, take up your money.
You can't eat out with your significant other whenever you want.
You know, you have a vomiting baby to take care of.
And so people are opting not to have kids.
The biggest predictor of whether or not society will have children is not wealth.
This is what they teach at university.
It's secularism.
Religious families that are wealthy have a lot of children.
So the issue, again, is religion.
Right.
It is hard to sacrifice in a secular environment.
That's correct.
And I have this conversation with people on my show all the time, because I have a largely secular audience, and they call up and I say, "What sacrifice are you making for the cause of freedom?
What discomfort are you willfully embracing?
Which fire are you walking towards to maintain all of the hard-run freedoms that our ancestors handed to us from like half-shredded bloody graves?" And the idea of sacrifice.
The idea of doing things that are uncomfortable, of taking a stand that may be unpopular, is something that when I talk about it with religious people, it's like, well, of course.
I mean, that's sort of the point, right?
You know, there is the devil and there is God and you must stand for that which is right.
But among the secular people, among the materialist community, the idea of sacrifice...
You know, they kind of view it the way we look at sacrifices in the Aztec religious community.
Like, that's so anachronistic.
And I just don't think or can't see how we can sustain a civilization in the absence of any conception of sacrificing for a greater virtue.
Well, ironically...
Remember, you quoted Chesterton.
Here's my favorite Chesterton quote.
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
They believe in anything.
And that's really what's happened here.
You have all these substitutisms for Christianity and Judaism.
Environmentalism, where Mother Earth is now what we live for.
We're here for Earth.
Earth is not here for us in this conception.
We're here to take care of Earth.
But no, that's not the case.
We have to take care of the Earth to pass it on to the next generation.
But the earth is here for us.
I'm supposed to use the world.
That is the biblical idea.
It's the antithesis of the environmentalist idea.
No, no, no, no.
The earth is not there to serve you.
You are there to serve the earth, as it were.
Feminism in its most radical incarnation is a substitute religion.
So they do, and here's what I wanted to point out on the environmentalists.
Oh, they do make a sacrifice.
In Germany, it costs a fortune.
To now electrify your own house, just to use electricity, because they have made a sacrifice by not using nuclear power and not using fossil fuels.
So now it's about three times more expensive just to have electricity in your home.
Der Spiegel, the biggest news magazine in Germany, actually coined a term for it, or publicized the term.
I don't remember the word in German, but it is energy poverty.
People are in energy poverty.
They don't have the money to pay for the electricity in their own homes to heat it in winter because of the sacrifice.
They don't make sacrifices to Jehovah.
They make sacrifices to the God of global warming.
But this is what is so frustrating to me, Dennis, is that In a Christian context or in a religious context, the sacrifice would be because of one's own personal commitment to a virtue and you would be sacrificing your own comfort through your own choice, through your own resources.
You know, like if you give to charity, of course, as religious people tend to, you give to charity.
It's your money that you're giving.
It is no virtue to go and steal from someone else and then give it to someone else.
And so even in Germany, I wouldn't consider that to be a moral sacrifice because it's the government passing laws and enforcing things and so on and generally not telling the truth to the people.
So there are all these people who say, yes, sacrifice is important, but we're going to force you.
And the idea that you can force people to do it and end up with a moral outcome is so much against the Christian ethics that I was raised with, that the moment you point a gun at someone, they no longer have a moral choice.
It's all just reactionary.
They're not choosing for themselves, and there's no moral content in obedience to coercion.
And this seems to be such a common idea among the left.
Let's pass a law.
Well, if charity is not doing what we want, let's just pass laws and have a welfare state and force people.
To give to the poor.
And in a religious context, you force people, you strip their capacity for a moral outcome.
But on the left, and according to statism, it seems to be the only way they want to get things done.
Well, that's correct.
That's why you said earlier, and you were right, that totalitarianism is the kernel of leftism.
It's very simple.
The further right, right means small government, and left means big government.
So the further right you go, the more you move to anarchy, which I don't support.
The further left you go, the closer you get to totalitarianism, where the state controls everything.
And in the heart of every leftist, not liberal, I always make that distinction, but in the heart of every leftist, there is a totalitarian desire.
I want to put a thermostat in your home to keep it at the temperature that I think is appropriate.
That's totalitarian.
Right.
And as far as how society is organized, if people don't follow a moral ideal or conscience of their own, then they're going to end up either begging to be told what to do or being told what to do against their will.
We do need a way to restrain our own behaviors, to restrain our own hedonism.
And the one thing that I really object to with regards to atheism is...
The atheists will say that there is no God.
Okay, well, that's one argument and so on, and that's an important discussion and debate to have.
However, they don't much talk about the effects of taking...
Not just God, but free will, individualism, the conscience, the ego, as you point out, from society.
And I know that's consequentialism.
You can't judge the truth or falsehood of a proposition merely by its effects.
But there's such a lack of discussion of the effects that it seems to me kind of chilling.
You do need to talk about what the effects are of this kind of radical materialism, because they are very catastrophic.
The moment you ask what are the effects, you pretty much have left the left.
What are the effects of raising the minimum wage?
Answer, more closed restaurants and more people unemployed.
That's the effect.
It's not debatable.
Now, they'll say, yes, that's true, but it's worth it to give people a quote-unquote living wage.
But the effects issue...
It already means you're, in effect, not on the left.
What are the consequences of X, Y, Z? And that's what I'm worried about.
I am not optimistic.
I think the Western experiment is being shattered by the left.
And secularism is at the root of it.
The left has a tremendous loathing for biblical principles, even though every so often they'll quote love and love and love and love.
But, you know, they don't know their Bible in most cases, or in 99%.
My favorite verse from the Bible, you never hear quoted, those of you who love God must hate evil.
That's, you can't make a loving world if you don't hate evil.
Well, I think that's a very powerful statement and certainly something I share.
And the left is very much addicted to turn the other cheek, even against those who refuse to turn the other cheek.
Tolerance for intolerance seems to be the manifestation of the left.
And the one thing that I was always raised with as a Protestant, as a Christian, was this idea that hypocrisy It's one of the greatest sins, the veneer of virtue while performing the exact opposite.
But the leftists somehow become immune from the self-criticism of hypocrisy in that, you know, they'll say, well, we really, really want tolerance as a virtue.
And then they invite endless hordes of ideologies and societies into the West that are profoundly intolerant and anti-tolerance as a whole.
And in the Christian world, this would be readily identified as hypocrisy, which is, I think, a significant sin.
And yet, on the left, it seems to just, you know, water off and ducks back.
This does not seem to be as strong a pushback in terms of the accusation of hypocrisy than it would be in a religious context.
In a bizarre way, they're a sort of new type of hypocrite.
The hypocrite advocates one thing and then lives another way.
But here is the thing on the left, and I tell this to all my left-wing relatives.
I say to them, why don't you preach what you practice?
We tend to think that hypocrisy is people don't practice what they preach.
But on the left, it's like the opposite.
They practice hypocrisy.
They practice getting married before they have a baby.
They practice going to school.
They practice working hard.
They practice self-discipline.
They practice insisting that their kid do their homework.
But when you say, well, you know what, why don't we insist on that for all communities, including minority communities, then you're a racist.
If you insist on what has made your life in the upper middle class of whatever group you're in, why don't you promote those values for everybody?
That's racist.
Right, right.
Well, I know we only have a short time tonight, Dennis.
I really, really want to thank you for taking the time to talk about this.
It's been spinning around in my brain like some endless orbit.
So I just wanted to remind people, Dennis, of course, is the host of The Dennis Prager Show.
Check out his books, a syndicated columnist, speaker and co-founder of Prager University.
We'll put the links below to the website, to the Prager University website and to Dennis' Twitter account, which is well worth a follow.
Thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate it and hope we can talk again soon.
