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This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
0:43
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:44
Let's get into it.
0:45
All right, guys.
0:46
I have been teasing this episode for a few weeks now, and we finally made it.
0:50
You made it, guys.
0:51
Congratulations.
0:52
We're going to be talking about the conversation that went down between Ben Shapiro and Robbie
0:56
Zacharias.
0:57
This was published on Ben Shapiro's YouTube channel and the Daily Wire channel on June
1:02
21st of this year.
1:04
If you don't know by now, every Sunday, he releases a conversation with somebody, and
1:08
it's usually somebody that we know of, or at least there's a work of theirs, a book or
1:12
a movie or something like that that we're aware of, and he just has more of a long-form discussion.
1:17
For those of you who've been living under Iraq, Ben Shapiro is a conservative political commentator.
1:22
He's an orthodox Jew, he's the writer of the national best-selling, really international
1:27
best-selling book, "The Right-Sided History," and so he's the type of guy that's kind of
1:31
a lightning rod for conflict.
1:33
And so Monday through Friday, he does a normal radio show, and he has the hour-long show that
1:39
he puts out on his podcast, and then he's got the three-hour show that's syndicated across
1:43
the United States.
1:44
This is a guy who is constantly, quote-unquote, "owning the libs," you know, whenever he's
1:49
going to college campuses or doing these debates.
1:51
He's just that type of a guy.
1:53
He's a very a matter of fact type of guy.
1:55
He's, someone called him, he's kind of like the hall monitor, like of Twitter, sometimes
1:59
like that's kind of his personality, where he's just constantly correcting people and,
2:03
you know, correcting the record.
2:04
And so the thing is, is if you only listen to his show throughout the week, you might
2:08
get a little bit of a different viewpoint of him than what might come out on his Sunday
2:12
show.
2:13
Because on his Sunday show, regardless of who's sitting across from, whether it's somebody
2:16
that he agrees with politically or disagrees with or has a different worldview or whatever
2:21
the situation might be, the conversations always end up being very, very interesting.
2:26
And so in this particular episode, he had Robbie Zacharias.
2:29
And so I've mentioned Robbie Zacharias a lot on this podcast, but for those of you
2:32
who don't know, he is, he is the founder of RZIM, which is Robbie Zacharias International
2:37
Ministries.
2:38
And he is one of the foremost apologists on the planet Earth.
2:41
And so he's also gone to a lot of college campuses and done debates, and he does these
2:45
open forums.
2:46
And I just got to tell you that the number of Christians around the world that have
2:50
one been helped and to been created by his Q and A sections of his presentations has to
2:56
be an astronomical number.
2:58
This is a guide that uses a lot of logic, a lot of reasoning, a lot of biblical study,
3:02
a lot of philosophy, teleology, theology, he, he's just a very well read, very smart person.
3:08
But he's also a tremendously engaging speaker.
3:11
And when he's answering questions, he's not just answering the question, he's answering
3:14
the person, right?
3:15
And so at the beginning of this episode, Ben Shapiro mentions that Ravi Zacharias is one
3:20
of his most requested guests, like there were just been tons and tons of people that want
3:24
to see these two get together in chat.
3:27
And so I was also very excited whenever I heard that it was announced that Ravi sat down
3:31
with Ben Shapiro.
3:32
I was very excited.
3:33
I wanted to kind of know how this turned out because again, Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox
3:37
Jew.
3:38
Ravi Zacharias is a Christian and you know, those are going to potentially create some
3:41
issues in terms of the conversation.
3:43
But knowing what I know about those two, I kind of had an idea of how the conversation
3:47
would go.
3:48
But in terms of this podcast for today, what we're going to do is we're going to take
3:51
sections and you know, the thing about it is just trying to narrow it down to the stuff
3:56
that I wanted to talk to you all about was incredibly, incredibly difficult because I
4:00
literally could have talked to you guys about the entire one hour long presentation.
4:04
It was that deep.
4:06
It was that entertaining.
4:07
It was that, you know, intellectually stimulating, but what I'm going to do is I'm just going
4:11
to break out certain sections and then talk to you a little bit more about it because there
4:16
was something a little bit different about this one.
4:18
So he had on a couple of apologists prior to this, apologists, pastors, whatever you
4:22
want to call them.
4:23
But he had John MacArthur on a while back and then most recently he had on William Lane
4:27
Craig.
4:28
And so you would think Ravi Zacharias would just be the latest in kind of this string
4:31
of a type of guy.
4:33
But I will say that this one went a little bit differently and then don't get it twisted.
4:36
I really enjoyed the conversations that he had with John MacArthur and William Lane Craig.
4:41
This one was just a little bit different.
4:42
So what I'm going to try to remember to do, sometimes I'm not that great at it, but I'm
4:46
going to try to remember the clip, like where the clip starts so that if you're watching
4:50
the YouTube video of this, which obviously I've got in the show notes for you so you
4:54
can watch and follow along with that, I want you to know exactly where I'm at.
4:58
So I'm going to try to give you the timing of the clip and then kind of give you an idea
5:01
of how far that goes and then we'll just kind of come in and out and we'll see how it goes.
5:05
So at the beginning, Ben Shapiro asked him a question.
5:08
I can't remember what the question was at the very beginning, but then he kind of got
5:10
to the most pressing question, which really came right out the top, which is, what is
5:15
the question that you're asked the most often, right?
5:18
And so Robbie Zacharice has been all over the world and he's literally answered questions
5:22
for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours, but Ben really wanted to kind of
5:27
get him on what exactly was the question that came up the most often.
5:32
And Robbie's answer was basically the one that we hear all the time, especially if you're
5:35
in any type of apologetic circles or you do any reading in those areas, is the problem
5:40
of evil, you know, the problem of pain, the problem of suffering, you know, how could
5:44
bad things happen to good people?
5:47
And so that was Robbie's answer there.
5:48
But then Ben Shapiro follows up.
5:50
So let's go ahead and get into the first clip here from their interview.
5:53
So let's talk about the problem of suffering and pain.
5:56
Obviously there have been a bunch of religious thinkers who have taken this on.
5:59
It's always puzzling to me when you hear secular humanists and atheists suggest that
6:03
it's a revelation that this is a problem for religious thought.
6:06
Obviously it's been a problem for religious thought since the very beginning.
6:09
What do you think is the best answer to that very difficult question?
6:13
Well, you know, Job is the one who wrestled with it the most.
6:18
Job to me came up with a very incredible answer and that's to me a softer touch today.
6:24
But I think a profound touch for those of us who have that knowledge of God to him when
6:30
he said I had heard of you by the hearing of my ear.
6:33
How I see have seen you, I abhor myself and I'm horrified and he repented that relationship
6:39
with God same as with the Habakkuk.
6:42
You know, they struggled with these issues, but that divine encounter gave them a pair
6:48
of eyes so that they could see to the problem from a very different perspective.
6:54
God is, God acts, God changes.
6:56
That's what Habakkuk came up with, you know, the actuality of God and distinction to atheism,
7:01
the eventuality of his working and distinction to deism and the eternality of his perspective
7:06
and distinction to pantheism.
7:08
So the question itself is well answered within the Judea-Christian worldview.
7:13
But I think as a culturally relevant apologist, this is the way I deal with it then.
7:18
And I found it to be quite effective because the breath of wheels start turning.
7:23
I was at the University of Nottingham years ago when it was first thrown at me and a guy
7:28
stood up and he just said, "How can you possibly talk of a good God, of goodness when there's
7:34
so much evil in this world?
7:37
How can you talk about a God that actually exists in this kind of evil and this kind
7:41
of suffering?"
7:42
That, of course, Richard Dawkins and all of them raised the same.
7:45
So I looked at him and I said, "Let me ask you this.
7:49
You're talking about evil?"
7:50
He said, "Yes."
7:51
I said, "When you say this evilly, aren't you assuming this such thing is good?"
7:55
He said, "Yes."
7:56
And I said, "When you say this such thing is good, aren't you assuming this such thing
7:59
is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil?"
8:05
He paused for a moment on that one and then I referenced him to Bertrand Russell's debate
8:10
with Copleston in which Copleston looked at Russell and said to him, "How do you differentiate
8:15
between good and bad?"
8:16
And Russell said the same.
8:17
We had to differentiate between blue and green.
8:19
And Copleston said, "Wait a minute.
8:21
We differentiate between those colors by seeing, don't you?"
8:23
He said, "Yes."
8:24
He said, "How did you differentiate between good and bad, Mr. Russell?"
8:27
He paused and he said on the base of my feeling, "What else?"
8:31
I think that was the weakest point of Russell's debate.
8:35
So when I looked at him, he said, "All right.
8:37
I will agree to you that there is a moral law, the base of which to differentiate between
8:40
and good and evil."
8:41
I said, "Evil?
8:42
They're for good.
8:43
Good.
8:44
They're for a moral law, the base of which to differentiate between good and evil."
8:47
I said, "But if you posit a moral law, you must posit a moral law giver, but that's whom
8:52
you are trying to disprove and not prove.
8:56
Your whole point is invoking a moral law which you cannot invoke without a moral law giver.
9:02
So your problem of evil actually disappears with the false assumptions that you're making.
9:07
Do you know Ben, he paused and he looked at me and he said, "What then am I asking you?"
9:13
So for those of you that listened to a lot of Ravi Zacharias, a lot of that's going to
9:16
sound familiar.
9:17
So there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that perhaps don't follow Ravi Zacharias'
9:23
podcast.
9:24
I think it's called Just Thinking.
9:25
And he's also had a lot of things on YouTube and all that, but he does use a lot of the
9:27
same stories and some of the same examples that he uses and a lot of that.
9:31
But again, in this one, you get his big idea that I've talked about a lot and I've shared
9:36
a lot with people is that if you posit such a thing as evil, you have to posit such a
9:40
thing as good.
9:41
There has to be another side to that coin.
9:43
I think just about anybody regardless of their philosophical standing would grant you that.
9:48
But then again, you have to differentiate between good and evil somehow, somehow.
9:53
So I think most people would also agree that there's some kind of a moral law, right?
9:58
There has to be a moral law somewhere with which to differentiate between good and evil.
10:03
Otherwise, there's no reason to describe anything as good or evil in that binary sense.
10:08
But then we get into the moral law giverside and before I get into that, one thing that's
10:12
interesting and then I'll get back into the moral law giverside is this is the first time
10:17
we see him make Old Testament references, right?
10:21
Mentioning Habakkuk and you're going to notice this and I'm not going to consider, well,
10:25
I'm really not going to put every clip in here for you.
10:27
But he mentions the Old Testament a lot.
10:31
And so think about the reason why he might be doing that with a guy like Ben Shapiro
10:35
that, you know, takes the Old Testament very, very seriously.
10:38
But let's go and get back into Ravi's answer where he's going to kind of continue this
10:41
line of thinking in terms of the moral law giver.
10:45
I was with William Lane Craig whom you had on your program.
10:49
William Lane Craig and I were on a program with a physicist by the name of Bernard Lykin
10:53
and a pantheist by the name of Jitinder Mohanty, sponsored by Henry Emmer University years
10:58
ago.
10:59
And this was thrown back at me.
11:01
Why do you need to posit a moral law giver?
11:04
All right, we'll grant you there is the abstract moral law.
11:07
Why do you need to posit a moral law giver?
11:09
And my answer is this, Ben, every time the problem of evil is raised, it is either raised
11:15
by a person or about a person.
11:19
Which means the questioner assumes persons have intrinsic worth.
11:26
And that is an assumption they cannot make in a random evolutionary universe with no primary
11:32
mind and personal being as our creator.
11:36
So if we have the random collocation of atoms, how do we attribute essential work to ourselves?
11:41
So the person component is vital to the question.
11:45
And so the moral law needs a moral law giver if persons are to have essential worth.
11:50
So to me, the problem of evil when it is raised is a self-stultifying problem because it has
11:56
to assume a framework that it cannot arrogate to itself in a random universe without personal
12:03
value.
12:05
So there you go.
12:06
I got to be honest with you from the beginning.
12:07
I remember the first time I heard him say about, you know, if you say there's such a good
12:11
as evil, you need to say there's such a thing as good, then you need a moral law with which
12:14
to differentiate.
12:15
And then that means you have to have a moral law giver.
12:17
And for me, I was like, well, I can see the first three.
12:21
But that doesn't necessarily assume that you need to have the moral law giver, right?
12:27
Until I heard him explain it this way for the first time.
12:29
And it's like, yeah, you're either positing this question as a human or you're saying
12:34
this about another human.
12:35
And so intrinsic inside of all of that, there's some sort of worth, right?
12:41
There's some sort of a worth there for you as a human.
12:43
And so philosophically, that's a really important question for a lot of us to kind of reckon
12:47
with and kind of get an idea of what that looks like for us.
12:50
And to be honest with you guys, if you don't take anything else away from this podcast,
12:53
that's an easy one to remember.
12:55
Evil, good, moral law, moral law giver.
12:58
And then walk them right back, moral law giver, moral law, good evil, right?
13:03
You've got to be able to show that to people because I got to say, whenever I talk to any
13:07
of my friends that are atheists or agnostics or anything like that, and if you say it in
13:10
that way, there's not a whole lot they can do to wiggle out of that regardless of how
13:14
smart they are or well read they are, they have to reckon with that.
13:17
They really do have to reckon with that.
13:19
And to be honest with you, I mean, this is the beginning of an hour long podcast, we're
13:23
already going to get into some deep waters and some very philosophical topics and things
13:27
that are really things that you can spend a lot of time, you know, thinking through and
13:31
trying to figure out exactly what it looks like, but Ben Shapiro actually continues the
13:35
discussion about the moral law and the moral law giver.
13:37
So let's go back into here.
13:38
Oh, and sorry.
13:39
I just literally forgot.
13:40
I haven't been showing you where these clips have been.
13:41
So I'll start right now.
13:42
So go ahead and go to the 925 mark.
13:45
If you're following along with the video, we'll get back into the interview here.
13:50
So how do we get from the idea of the moral law giver and a God who is present in the
13:56
universe to what exactly that moral law is?
13:59
So there's sort of the God of the philosophers, this obviously puzzled a lot of religious
14:04
philosophers.
14:05
There's the God of the philosophers, this sort of unmoved mover, the being that generates
14:11
a unity to the universe and in order to the universe, how does that translate over into
14:15
the sort of moral law that we practice or that we should practice?
14:19
Can you just do all of this on the basis of reason alone, just looking at the universe
14:22
through natural law?
14:23
Or do you need something like revelation?
14:25
I think that's a great question and in your book, I think you're brilliantly given that
14:29
dialectic of your reason and purpose and meaning they are inextricably bound and you really
14:35
cannot have one without the other.
14:38
The way we get to it is something like this.
14:41
I do two frameworks on this been as an apologist dealing with the Judea Christian worldview.
14:47
We all need to know the truth.
14:49
Ultimately we are in search for the truth where we need to accept the fact.
14:54
But how do we get to the truth?
14:56
And philosophers of old have told us there's the correspondence theory of truth and the
15:00
coherence theory of truth.
15:03
Correspondence applies to particular statements.
15:06
Coherence applies to a cumulative presentation of those statements.
15:11
So when you go to a court of law, the correspondence and coherence theory are always brought to
15:16
bear in determining guilt or innocence.
15:19
But how do we get to it? I say there are three ways of logical consistency, empirical adequacy
15:26
and experiential relevance.
15:28
Is my argument logically consistent?
15:31
Is there any empirical basis for me to believe what I'm believing?
15:35
And is there any experiential relevance to all of this?
15:38
But then this has to be applied to the four questions of life, origin, meaning morality
15:43
and destiny.
15:45
Where do I come from?
15:46
What does my life really mean? How do I distinguish between good and evil?
15:51
What happens to a human being when he or she dies?
15:53
That closing chapter in your conversation with your daughter is brilliant.
15:57
You know, the question of eternality even comes into the mind of a little one.
16:01
There's that intuitive drive towards that origin, meaning, morality and destiny.
16:07
Pursuit truth, correspondence, coherence, logical consistency, empirical adequacy,
16:13
experiential relevance. When you form a worldview, these are the four questions you have to answer
16:19
by applying the notions of truth.
16:21
So with the moment you say the word revelation, you know, ah, this is one of those dinosaurs
16:26
who actually believes a book dropped out of heaven and so on and so forth.
16:30
It's not as simplistic as that.
16:33
You take the revelation of God that has come across a millennium and a half of revelation.
16:39
You apply these tests and you see that the existence of God presents a framework for
16:45
the existentially undeniable questions that we struggle with.
16:49
Those very questions are legitimized because of the value that we laid claim.
16:54
So yes, there's reason and revelation, but not some kind of pie in the sky by and by,
17:01
but propositional truth that is put to the test by a scrutinizing mind.
17:07
So here again, we get some of the big consistent themes that we get a lot of the times in Robby's
17:12
decorated answers and in a lot of his presentations as well.
17:16
And so guys, you just got to put it out there to you.
17:18
I'm not that philosophically deep when it comes to these things, especially, but you
17:22
know, he lays it out there in a way where it's palatable.
17:24
That's why he's one of the best apologists and presenters that we have in modern Christian
17:28
them. But again, he brings up two huge things here that have a lot involved in them.
17:32
But the first thing is logical consistency, empirical adequacy and experiential relevance,
17:37
right?
17:38
When you look at something, is it consistent that does it follow a logic?
17:42
Does it follow a linear logic?
17:45
Also, is it adequate empirically?
17:48
Can you look at it in multiple different ways empirically?
17:51
And is it relevant?
17:53
Is it relevant to your experience and other people's experience?
17:56
Can it be placed in a multitude of contexts and still work out?
18:00
So when you think about the gospel, obviously the gospel works, whether you have a Western
18:03
worldview or an Eastern worldview or anything in between, right?
18:07
But then the big thing, and this is again, going back to if you have friends who are atheists
18:11
or agnostics, or you'd like to engage in those conversations with people that align
18:14
with that type of a worldview, is the four questions of life.
18:18
And he says this stuff literally all the time, origin, meaning, morality and destiny.
18:23
Those four things, those are the four things that you kind of have to, you have to really,
18:27
really think through origin, where do I come from?
18:30
Meaning, what does my life really mean, morality?
18:33
How do I distinguish between good and evil destiny?
18:36
Where does a human go when they die?
18:38
If you posit a worldview, it has to answer those four questions, or it's not a coherent
18:43
worldview, right?
18:45
I mean, that's kind of the thing that a lot of people that find themselves when you have
18:49
these great, great minds like a CS Lewis or someone like that, that finds their way intellectually
18:55
to Christianity, it's because Christianity has an answer for origin, meaning, morality
19:00
and destiny.
19:01
Like we know where we come from, but we know what the true meaning of life is.
19:05
We know where we get good and evil, and that's not just something that we happened on pawn,
19:10
right?
19:11
And we know where our destinies are, depending upon the choices that we make, you know what
19:14
I mean?
19:15
And so those are things for you guys again, these last two sections.
19:18
If you don't get anything else, re-listen to those two sections either here on this podcast
19:23
or there on theirs, you know, just make sure that you can listen to that as often as possible.
19:28
Because that's one of the reasons why I continue to listen to Ravi Zechariah's podcast on a
19:32
weekly basis and watch his presentations.
19:35
Even though he says a lot of the same things, it's because this stuff is gold.
19:38
This stuff is absolute gold.
19:39
I mean, how often do you just sit there in church and roll your eyes because they said
19:42
the same scripture that you've already read before?
19:44
No, you get something different out of it every time.
19:46
That's why people don't just read the Bible once and move on.
19:49
Like if you really want to have a deep understanding, you continue reading it, you study it.
19:53
You know, that's that type of thing.
19:55
But as we get into the next section here, there's another story that Ravi talks about
20:00
a lot and it's a story that he uses in a multitude of contexts.
20:03
But this leads him to the first mention of our Savior.
20:06
So let's go ahead and get back into the clips here.
20:08
And the Judeo, the Judeo Christian worldview, Ben, I believe I was raised in a counterculture
20:13
to this.
20:14
I was raised in either of those worldviews, I was a naturalist, I was a skeptic.
20:22
And I ended up on a bed of suicide when I was 17 years old, desperately looking for the
20:27
very thing your book talks about, you know, that individual value and that individual
20:31
purpose and a belongingness to a community and so on.
20:35
And it was then when the Bible, I couldn't even hold the Bible, by the way, because my
20:39
body was dehydrated.
20:40
I had taken some poison that emptied me of all the water, moisture in my body, and then
20:47
to see how God threw the flow of history.
20:50
And of course, even though we have our differences, we have a common background in communion
20:55
with God, both of us have that goal.
20:58
And in the person of Jesus Christ, I found that answer.
21:01
And so my relationship to the person of God, as Job pointed out, as Habakkuk pointed out,
21:09
that relationship is key, because some answers to life transcend the propositional nature
21:16
of things.
21:17
They don't violate it, but they transcend it.
21:19
So I think you get to the answer of who God is, not just by some leap of faith, which
21:27
we sometimes attribute to people.
21:29
Mine was a very recent study of scriptures, and the reasoning that we applied was a rational
21:35
type, but the importance was there was a moral reasoning, kind of a process.
21:40
So you don't just get to it by either reason or revelation, it's a confluence of both
21:46
in proper balance.
21:48
Obviously, reason and revelation is a big deal, and he's making, he's doing a really
21:52
good job here, especially if you follow both of these men, you can see what Robbie's doing.
21:56
Okay.
21:57
So he's bringing in personal stories, which, you know, kind of normalizes him as a person.
22:01
He's not an ideology now.
22:02
He's a person.
22:03
And when you talk about reason and revelation, that goes directly back to Ben Shapiro's book,
22:08
The Right Side of History.
22:09
If you haven't read that yet, we did a podcast episode on it several months ago, but you
22:13
should definitely pick that up and read it.
22:14
It's, uh, it's a short book, but it's kind of a long read because it's fairly deep.
22:18
But that's the thing here is he's bringing these things up, but then he also brings up
22:22
his discipleship with Jesus.
22:25
And so this is the first time in this message that are in this interview rather that he's
22:29
talking about Jesus, and again, he's sitting across from a very, very famous, probably
22:34
the most famous Orthodox Jew on the planet earth.
22:36
This guy has gone on record by saying that Jesus Christ was basically a, uh, a heretic
22:42
that was killed for his trouble, right?
22:44
He tried to start a rebellion, um, you know, against Rome and all those types of things
22:47
and basically Rome killed him.
22:49
Uh, obviously that's an oversimplification and a misunderstanding of history, but at
22:53
the same time, that is what this guy believes.
22:55
But you have someone across from him in Ravi Zacharias that is constantly talking to people
22:59
about the gospel and the reality of Jesus and all the things they're in.
23:03
And so that's a, that's a great place right there.
23:05
And then we're going to skip a little bit ahead here in the discussion, but now Ben Shapiro
23:08
is going to get more into a discussion about the evolution of moral law, right?
23:12
So you may have heard it in a bunch of different ways, but let's go and get into how Ben Shapiro
23:15
would describe it here.
23:17
So when we talk about the Judeo Christian moral law, what are the questions that I get
23:20
from folks like Sam Harris or like Michael Schurmer is all right.
23:24
Let's assume that there is this, this eternal moral law that corresponds with some form
23:29
of eternal truth and a law giver.
23:32
So why has that law evolved over time?
23:34
So it's a take, for example, the, the example that they like best is slavery.
23:37
So originally the Bible contemplates that slavery is part of life.
23:41
And then over time we've decided that not only a slavery apart, not a part of life, slavery
23:45
is a grave evil that ought to be fought wherever it exists.
23:48
How do, how do we justify evolution in the Judeo Christian framework of morality?
23:53
Well, it's of course the metaphysical extrapolation of the naturalistic interpretation of the
24:00
very origin of life.
24:01
So when you talk about the evolution of humanity itself, they want to talk about morality itself
24:08
also sort of evolving.
24:10
I think it becomes a circular argument.
24:13
The argument that somehow we were valueless to start with and just happened to be on this
24:20
radar screen of time and that we developed all these things over a period of time, I
24:25
think is a false view of the beginnings.
24:28
In fact, though, you know very well as a, as a scholar within the Jewish framework, the
24:33
very concept of slavery, very different, very different idea of what we interpret as, as
24:40
what slavery is all about.
24:42
And then when you talk about Paul talking about how to treat the quote slave in the household
24:47
and that he was willing to be there present and even redeem this person in a socio-economic
24:53
framework that you have these kinds of terms used and systems used, we are bound to make
25:00
blunders.
25:02
So then I would turn the question on its head and say, all right, if you believe that
25:06
we have evolved more morally, why is it in the 20th century that we killed more people
25:12
in warfare than all of the previous 19th centuries put together.
25:17
So it is not an honest representation of how we have actually come into believing in moral
25:24
framework.
25:25
In fact, there are some things now that we have reversed over 5,000 years of civilized
25:31
history for thousands of years.
25:32
Some people never believed some of the things that we have begun to believe.
25:37
So I would say that to me, the most important phrase been in the Ten Commandments.
25:45
I don't believe there's a better moral framework that starts with the very being of God and
25:52
all the way to the sacredness of my life, my neighbor's life, my neighbor's marriage,
25:57
my neighbor's property.
25:58
I mean, this goes back, you know, to 3,500 years ago.
26:03
The most important phrase to me, Ben, and that is, I am the Lord your God that brought
26:09
you out of the land of Egypt.
26:13
That redemption is prior to righteousness.
26:19
And then righteousness leads on to worship.
26:22
So when you get to Exodus 20 and you're dealing with that beautiful moral law and then you
26:26
move 5 chapters later and you move into the tabernacle and the framework of reference,
26:30
I think it is the change of heart that is the only answer to the moral framework.
26:38
And here's the scary thing.
26:41
God did not send us His message to make bad people good.
26:47
Morality alone will never save us.
26:49
Sometimes in the name of morality, people have done some horrible things.
26:53
It is the fact that the heart is a need of redemption, in need of forgiveness, and it
27:00
is redemption that must precede righteousness.
27:03
So to talk about morality having been involved, when you go back 3,500 years ago and the moral
27:10
law is given to us, it was because people had already violated that relationship with
27:16
God.
27:17
So I say, as far from morality evolving, right from the beginning we have known what it was
27:23
all about.
27:24
So what happens in the first three chapters of Genesis happens in this world every day.
27:30
What happened in the temptation saga, Ben, I think is very critical and your book points
27:35
out what has happened as a result of this flaw, okay?
27:40
In the day that you eat the need of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die.
27:44
That's the word of God.
27:46
But the enemy of our souls comes and says, "Ah, you will be as God, knowing good and
27:51
evil."
27:52
That has been the battle for millennia.
27:55
What is the battle to allow God to be God or to play God?
28:00
And then the defining good of evil, what happened when they are confronted?
28:03
I didn't.
28:04
No, anyway, I didn't, the serpent.
28:07
This idea of violating the authority of God and becoming autonomous and then blaming
28:13
everything else, this is not evolved.
28:16
This goes back over three millennia long and we have challenged it every day in this victim
28:23
culture.
28:24
What are we doing?
28:25
So, my fault is this person's fault.
28:28
We don't believe in absolutes.
28:30
We have autonomy.
28:31
So on the one hand, we claim to be autonomous.
28:33
But when we go wrong, we blame somebody else, it's someone else's enormous.
28:37
So I do not accept this idea that it is somehow evolved.
28:42
You go back millennia ago and you see the value of human life and the value of a moral
28:47
law, millennia back.
28:50
Now I thought that was a really interesting way to put it, because that's obviously a
28:53
big question, and guys like Sam Harris or the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, they constantly
28:58
bring that up like, okay, how do we get to this point where we're not just slaughtering
29:01
and murdering each other?
29:02
It's like, oh, because we've evolved to do that, right?
29:05
That was bad things that we used to do when we were just monkeys that were dragging our
29:08
knuckles on the ground.
29:09
But now that we're upright monkeys with way less hair, we just discovered we've evolved
29:14
as a people to understand that these things are bad.
29:17
It's not a moral law.
29:18
It certainly didn't come from a moral law giver.
29:20
But I love how Robbie put it, where he's basically like, look, the battle is between
29:24
allowing God to be God and trying to be God ourselves.
29:28
And that has been the battle since the very beginning.
29:30
And so the idea that we've evolved to the morality that we get to now is bunk, and you
29:35
can see it in modern day society where the things that we allow in our society, the things
29:40
that we say are good things and they're just okay and things that we should just kind of
29:44
be okay with.
29:45
So you think about homosexuality, transgenderism, you know, all this plurality of thinking
29:50
in all these different areas, not doesn't really work that way.
29:53
That's not really how this was supposed to be again, because we have a moral law that
29:56
was given to us by a moral law giver, right?
29:59
So that's kind of how we get into it.
30:01
But this first part of the presentation, kind of the first third was really kind of
30:05
deeper philosophical issues, and then we start getting into more cultural based type
30:09
issues.
30:10
So let's go into the next clip here.
30:11
This is going to be at the 21 minute and 22nd market guys.
30:14
I'm pretty sure I've been forgetting to give you those.
30:16
I told you from the beginning that I was probably going to forget.
30:18
So I apologize, I'm a bad person, but this one is at the 21 20 mark.
30:24
So in your worldview, do you make a distinction between that which is sinful and that which
30:28
you consider immoral?
30:30
So this is a sort of deep philosophical issue in the religious community.
30:34
Is there a difference between doing something that the Bible considers sinful and doing
30:38
something that is moral on some sort of naturalistic level, the difference between hurting
30:42
somebody else and for example, engaging in a consensual behavior, this is obviously taking
30:46
a modern example, engaging in a consensual behavior that doesn't hurt a third party per
30:50
say, but maybe a sin against the natural wall or a sin against the Bible.
30:55
I think sin is a vertical term.
30:58
It is not merely a horizontal term.
31:02
When David sinned with what happened with Bathsheba and he falls on his face before God
31:07
in Psalm 51, what does he say against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil
31:14
in your sight Nathan confronted him sin is a vertical thing morality can very easily become
31:20
a horizontal term and I think this is where we are getting grounded literally and figuratively
31:27
been when we only talk about a moral framework.
31:31
If you go to India today moral reasoning is very different to that of say the moral reasoning
31:37
of the West and sin to me is a violation not of something abstract, it's a violation of
31:45
a personal command.
31:47
There is no sin in God that means there's no contradiction in God.
31:51
God is a self-existent being it is impossible for him not to exist he exists eternally.
32:00
So if I am to be in keeping with that will of my heavenly father when the prodigal son
32:06
returned what is he say I've sinned against heaven and against you in that order we take
32:14
the vertical and make it horizontal.
32:18
So I like how he puts that there that basically sin is a vertical thing not just a horizontal
32:22
thing because that's been a question a lot of times again if you get into any of these
32:25
conversations into deeper philosophical or theological issues with people and kind of
32:29
the easiest example is homosexuality.
32:31
So it's like, you know, hey, you bigoted Christian, what is it a problem to you?
32:36
It's not hurting you.
32:37
If someone decides they want to be in a homosexual relationship and they want to sodomize their
32:41
boyfriend.
32:42
What does that matter to you, right?
32:44
And they probably wouldn't wear it that way.
32:45
But it's kind of one of those things that that's kind of hard to reckon with.
32:48
Well, you know, they aren't doing that to me, you know, they're not raping me.
32:51
They're not inconveniencing me.
32:53
It's just something that I have to think about from time to time.
32:55
Is it really that big a deal?
32:56
Well, yes, it is a big deal because you're sinning against heaven and against God.
33:01
You're you're sinning against your creator, right?
33:04
And again, I'd say this all the time, we have varsity sins and junior varsity sins, right?
33:08
Depending upon the age with which you are at that exact moment or, you know, the family
33:12
you grew up in, there were certain sins that were bigger than others.
33:15
I mean, how many of you out there know people, maybe you are one of those people where you're
33:18
a divorced Christian, right?
33:20
And then you've gotten remarried.
33:21
Well, Jesus had a pretty clear standard on that.
33:24
You're an adulterer and the person you married is now an adulterer just for having married
33:28
you, right?
33:29
We all have our sins that we kind of pay attention to and then the ones that we don't.
33:33
We usually pay attention to the ones that we don't struggle with.
33:35
We try to not we don't really pay attention to the ones that we have have a big struggle
33:39
with because it's kind of getting right in our face, right?
33:42
But I do like how he talked about how sin is a vertical issue.
33:44
It's not just an innocent thing.
33:46
It's not just people doing their thing.
33:48
They're not just going their own way.
33:49
They're not just libertarian and living everything out.
33:51
It's just it's a very different type of an idea.
33:54
But then in the example here and we'll go to clip around 23 minutes and 15 seconds in,
33:59
they kind of continue with an example that we can all relate to.
34:04
And you know, our morals struggle these days bend to me, which is very deep, by the way.
34:09
And if I may just digress for just a moment, I'm not the first time I came to the West
34:14
Coast.
34:15
It was in the 70s.
34:16
Okay.
34:17
I was on undergraduate Toronto at that time.
34:20
And I have to say to you, yesterday as I walked through Los Angeles, this state is a microcosm
34:29
of the collision course in which we are headed culturally.
34:34
Probably one of the most beautiful states anywhere in the world.
34:37
It's got the mountains, it's got the ocean, it's got the deserts, finest mines in this
34:43
country from cyber capacity to artistic splendor, all of this.
34:48
And yet what did I see yesterday as I walked?
34:51
If you had taken me back to Calcutta 40, 50 years ago, I would have been walking past
34:58
many homeless and thinking to myself, how are we going to solve this problem?
35:02
So what we have done in debunking the notion of sin and talking merely morality, we have
35:09
ended up with a dead end word that people really cannot relate to.
35:14
In fact, if you want to end a discussion with a press reporter, just use the word sin.
35:19
And that's it.
35:20
So I frankly, I like what you've done in your book.
35:24
To me when I'm talking to a person and they say to me, what do you think is wrong then?
35:29
I say it's a violation of purpose.
35:32
We have violated the purpose for which we have created.
35:36
They can connect much more with that existential rub.
35:39
And then of course they look at you and say, what do you mean by violation of purpose?
35:43
I see if you take a car and run a muck in a crowd of people and kill them.
35:48
Can you blame General Motors for it?
35:50
Some will say, that's not why I fashioned this car, it was for transportation.
35:54
So we've run a muck in what we have done with our values.
35:58
And then we blame the creator for it.
36:00
So I think morality is good for civil coexistence, what Calvin talked about the fourth years of
36:07
the law type thing.
36:09
But morality alone will not save this society unless we develop an accountability to our
36:15
creator, not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that life at its core
36:21
is sacred.
36:22
The desacralization of life is at the core of what has happened.
36:27
We do not know what it means to be human and in losing that definition, as Chesterton would
36:33
say, we will our feet firmly planted in midair.
36:37
So I really like the dichotomy that he paints there, where we don't talk about sin anymore.
36:43
Right.
36:44
We just talk about morality.
36:45
But again, how do we know morality is what it is?
36:48
We spent a large chunk of the discussion earlier in this podcast and they did in their interview
36:52
talking about a moral law and a moral law giver, right?
36:56
But again, we're not allowed to talk about sin and he's right.
36:59
When you bring up sin in a conversation with someone that doesn't believe in God, I mean,
37:04
you're pretty much 90% of the time going to get an eye roll, a pretty serious eye roll,
37:09
right?
37:10
Because they just don't really care to see things in that way.
37:13
And imagine talking to a more militant atheist when you're talking about morality.
37:17
They're okay with talking about that because they can kind of put strictures around what
37:20
exactly they want to discuss in that area.
37:22
But gosh, you just can't even mention sin.
37:24
Sin is not a real thing.
37:26
God's not a real thing.
37:27
We're technically not a real thing.
37:29
If you think more kind of in the Eastern religious sense, like we're just kind of neurons firing
37:34
left and right there, there's not actually anything happening here.
37:37
We're just a random, I think you called a call occasion of atoms that are bouncing off
37:40
of one another.
37:41
You know what?
37:42
Jeff Durbin calls it, you know, Stardust, rather a bouncing off of other Stardust, right?
37:47
That's kind of the way that we think about it.
37:48
But at the same time, it is a violation of purpose when we're only talking about things
37:52
in a sense of morality without talking about sin, we don't understand our purpose.
37:56
And so again, that kind of got more to some cultural scenarios.
37:59
And even if you're not from California or visited California, it's obviously well publicized
38:03
the things that are going on in that state.
38:05
It's absolutely insane what's happening over there, right?
38:08
I mean, it's you've heard people say, you know, really derogatory things about the types
38:12
of people that live there.
38:13
But at the same time, it's like, it's impossible to live in California right now and be conservative.
38:19
There are no Republicans that are in state office whatsoever.
38:23
You can't have a pro life position and really live in that state.
38:26
I mean, I think it'd be hard to operate a business out of there and it's crazy that
38:30
Ben Shapiro still lives out there.
38:32
He basically lives out there because he's close to everything being in LA, but I wouldn't
38:36
put it past him.
38:37
I think within the next 10 years, Ben Shapiro is going to be in Texas, right?
38:40
Because of all the different benefits of being in a state like Texas and still being kind
38:44
of a centralized hub and not being out there where all that nonsense is going on.
38:48
So I thought that was a very interesting way of putting it.
38:50
Now, as we move along here, we're going to get to a clip that's around the 26 minute
38:53
Mark will actually about 2547 in, but Ben Shapiro asked a question about the role of government.
38:59
So again, you know, he made it about halfway into this podcast without getting into anything.
39:03
That was truly political.
39:04
But again, this is Ben Shapiro's world.
39:06
He's one of the, he has one of the biggest microphones in all of political talk, especially
39:12
conservative political talk at the moment, but he does talk about the role of government.
39:15
But I want you to hear how he words his question here.
39:19
So when we look at the role of government in all this, there's a really interesting debate
39:23
that's broken out in the conservative movement right now between one wing that's more libertarian.
39:28
I would admit I'm in this wing, the wing that still defends classical liberalism and a sort
39:33
of fusionism, the idea that rights are important and rights are important because we have duties
39:38
that there's the, the, and that duties are to be imposed socially, but not necessarily
39:42
by government.
39:43
And then there is a group of folks on the right who argue in convincing fashion that
39:48
liberalism may in fact be part of the problem, that if you have a liberal free society, this
39:53
grants the ability for people who oppose traditional morality to tear down the structure, to tear
39:59
away at community that the individualism that is integrally connected to liberalism, that
40:04
that individualism tears away at a lot of the same communal values.
40:07
And so you, what you end up with is an atomistic society in which there is no community, no
40:12
common moral fabric, you end up with the rights without any of the duties and that eventually
40:16
ends in exactly what you're talking about, the sort of breakdown of society.
40:20
So where do you think the proper role of government is in either enforcing morality or not enforcing
40:26
morality?
40:27
What has to be done socially?
40:28
And what can the government be encouraging or should it be encouraging?
40:30
And that's the tough question of our time.
40:33
And that's the tough question of our time.
40:35
And I liked Robby's answer here, but I wanted to kind of, you know, shorten this up a little
40:39
bit.
40:40
He gives a very interesting answer saying, you know, it's not about right and left, but
40:43
it's instead about up and down again, he talks about the vertical nature of sin, that type
40:46
of concept, that idea, and he talked about how people on Capitol Hill disagree vehemently,
40:51
basically own one word.
40:53
And that's the word God, right?
40:54
And that really informs your worldview if you believe in God or don't believe in God.
40:59
But at the end of his answer here, he gives an incredible statement that we should reckon
41:04
with.
41:05
And that's at the 30 minute and five second marks.
41:06
I'm going to go ahead and play that here.
41:09
We took secularization evicted God, then we faced pluralism and pluralization and we took
41:17
it to mean relativism.
41:19
And then we went to privatization where we were told that faith should be made private.
41:24
So the key to me is redefining whether secularism is really at the core of what our government
41:31
should be, or will we honor the fact of our founding fathers that this was made for a
41:37
moral people, so it's made for those who had the freedom to believe you privatize faith,
41:43
you will ultimately privatize morality and you will then publicize the destruction of
41:47
one another.
41:49
The whole key to me is are we are secularly conscious people or is there a transcendent
41:55
framework of value for me and you with all of our differences that we can cordially sit
42:01
back and even agree to disagree and give each other a hug and say, Hey man, here we go.
42:08
Now this is a huge point that he's making.
42:10
Again, he kind of talked about we had secularization.
42:13
That's kind of where we're at.
42:14
You know, we've evicted God from the public square and from kind of public discourse.
42:18
And then we had pluralism, but we took it to mean relativism, which obviously we have
42:22
talked about before about moral relativism and how that just isn't a worldview that has
42:26
anything that's undergirding it.
42:28
And then we moved to privatization like, Hey, you know, if you want to believe that stuff,
42:30
leave it on your own.
42:31
Don't really bring it out here.
42:32
You know, we don't need to see all that nonsense, you know, keep it to yourself.
42:35
But he begs a huge question.
42:37
And I think it's a bigger question for where we're going to be as a country, as the United
42:40
States, as opposed to where we're at now, but is secularism at the core of how we want
42:45
to operate?
42:47
Do we really want secularism at the core?
42:50
And I kind of go back and I just thought of this during the 2016 run up to the election,
42:55
where we're in the Republican primary portion of the race and Senator Rubio from Florida,
43:01
Marco Rubio, he was asked by an atheist at one of his kind of town hall discussions.
43:06
He says, Hey, listen, I'm an atheist.
43:09
And so if you become president, how is that good for me?
43:12
That's essentially his question.
43:14
And Rubio, you know, without even skipping a beat goes, you better hope that I operate
43:19
like a Christian, because if I do, it's good for everybody.
43:23
Again, I'm just summarizing his quote there, but he's like, the thing about it is is even
43:27
if you're an atheist, even if you don't believe in this stuff, you like living in the world
43:30
where this is our reality, you like living in a world where we care about people, where
43:36
we're not just taking the old monkeys outside and shooting them because they're too inconvenient,
43:42
where we're taking the retarded monkeys down the road and drowning them in the river because
43:46
they serve no utility, right?
43:49
You're really glad we live in that world.
43:51
We're really glad we live in a world that has some sort of morality to it and that we're
43:56
not just animals.
43:57
We're not just highly evolved animals that wear pants and talk to one another, right?
44:01
You really do enjoy that.
44:04
So regardless of if you don't believe it or not, it doesn't change the reality of where
44:07
you're living, bro.
44:09
And that's a great way of putting it.
44:10
We've secularized everything.
44:12
We've gotten God out.
44:13
Where is that going to leave us as a country as we move forward?
44:18
Where is that going to go because we've seen what happened in the 20th century.
44:21
Anybody that's listened to Jordan Peterson, like you can't go five minutes into a Jordan
44:25
Peterson talk without him talking about, you know, the communist regimes of the 20th century
44:29
and how the godlessness of the 20th century less led to the most amount of death and murder
44:34
in the history of humanity in one century.
44:38
And it was from all these atheistic regimes, I mean, how are you going to disagree with
44:44
that?
44:45
You've really got to to really get in there and understand where you're coming from if
44:50
that's your worldview, right?
44:52
So I really like how you worded that in there.
44:54
Now Ben Shapiro is going to kind of get into a question that I'm sure many of us have imposed
44:59
at one time or another when speaking with unbelievers.
45:01
Let's go and get into that.
45:02
This is the clip starting at 32 minutes and eight seconds.
45:06
I talk with a lot of college students just the way you do.
45:08
And many of them ask the question, you know, yeah, is your suggestion when you talk about
45:12
religion, there can't be a good atheist or a good secular person.
45:15
I always say, well, I don't know a single religious person who believes that there can't
45:18
be a secular person who acts well and acts in concert with with public morality.
45:23
It's a silly question, but it does raise the secondary question, which is, okay, well,
45:28
if I'm a good secular person, I don't believe in God, but I still abide by a certain level
45:31
of morality.
45:32
What makes God necessary to my life?
45:34
Why should I think about God as opposed to just sort of behaving in the way that we
45:37
all sort of agree commonly is good?
45:39
I think it's a great question, but it hangs on the peg of one flaw.
45:44
And that peg says autonomy is all that really matters.
45:48
Being autonomous that I'm a law unto myself.
45:52
First of all, your disclaimer is very valuable.
45:56
I believe there are many good people that I have met or skeptics who are non-believers
46:02
in God.
46:04
Sometimes they put us Christians to shame, you know, when they when I see some of the
46:08
courtesy and the generosity of some of them well received, but the fact of the matter
46:13
is they are using a word that is only self-referencingly defined.
46:19
I am a good person.
46:22
How do I decide that?
46:24
And if I am only going upon my own reason, you know, in some cultures, they love their
46:31
neighbors and other cultures, they eat them, both of them may think that they are good
46:37
and that they are doing good.
46:40
Think of what we are doing today while considering ourselves a good culture.
46:46
It is unthinkable some of the decisions we are making at the highest level of lawmakers.
46:54
And yet we call ourselves good.
46:56
It is not a self-defining motive.
47:00
First of all, if I believe goodness is purely on my definition, I have to give that prerogative
47:06
to every other human being.
47:08
Even the naturalistic framework of Emmanuel Kant, you know, the universalizing of a principle
47:13
would apply right here.
47:15
But the fact of the matter is when I am a cross-cultural person, okay, even within India,
47:21
I was raised in the north, born in the south.
47:24
The color tension, Ben, the tension between the complexions of people while I was growing
47:30
up, I come from the south, so I am darker complexion, but I moved to the north.
47:35
It was tough.
47:36
And in some parts of India, that is still so.
47:38
And you see the matrimonial column wanting to marry a wheat complexion, whatever that
47:45
means.
47:46
You know, my brother used to say, "Is this a whole wheat or what we are talking about
47:51
out here?"
47:52
We've got all these tensions that go on.
47:54
So cultures have different values in self-referencing behavior.
47:58
Once upon a time, the Sati system in India, thank God it was abolished.
48:02
You know, whether wife had to burn herself and the pyre of a husband, so on, they thought
48:06
they were good people.
48:08
So to say I am good is a highly risky statement if you do not believe in absolutes.
48:16
It is a relativistic term, and if you say, "All truth is relative," then it is a self-destructing
48:23
statement.
48:24
It destroys itself.
48:25
Is it an absolute or is that statement relative to?
48:28
So I say, yes, many good living people who are skeptics and have done wonderful things
48:35
in this world, but to give oneself the prerogative of defining good leads to a world of chaos
48:42
and that is given everywhere else.
48:43
And here's what I say.
48:46
America talks a lot about rights, but we have not yet defined what is right.
48:53
My rights stand on the bedrock of an absolute definition of what is right.
49:01
And that's why people like Bilbo Force and others were on the forefront of fighting
49:06
slavery because it was a wrong nobody had the right to inflict that on any human being.
49:13
So that's my answer.
49:15
My answer is that there are good people, but they're living beyond the foundation on which
49:21
their lives are standing.
49:23
America has talked a lot about rights, but we have not yet defined what is right.
49:28
I mean, that's awesome.
49:29
That's some pretty awesome stuff.
49:30
And again, if you're any type of a cultural commentator or someone that really just pays
49:34
attention to culture, you got to realize that that's true.
49:38
We talk so much about our rights.
49:39
My right is an American.
49:40
I'm going to do this.
49:41
I'm going to do that, you know, whatever the situation might be.
49:43
And those are good things.
49:44
And you're going to hear me kind of being one of the voices that's in that camp.
49:48
But if we've evicted again, going back to the last section, if we've evicted God from
49:53
culture, if we've evicted God from the public square, if we've evicted him from government,
49:57
how do we know what's right?
50:00
How do we just assume that we're just going to keep getting it right over and over like
50:04
it?
50:05
Like we shouldn't be that naive, but we are.
50:07
And again, I love how we talked about self-defining good, whatever good is leads to chaos because
50:14
guess what? your good is not the same as my good, he kind of brings up that same thing
50:18
and he says it a lot, but it's like in some cultures, you know, you know, they eat people,
50:23
right?
50:24
Like it's like there are things that people think are good.
50:26
What about people that are going nuts, right?
50:28
The people that think killing people is okay, people that are sociopathic or psychopathic
50:32
or any of those types of things.
50:33
If they have that type of a brain abnormality that they think, should we go with how they
50:38
define good?
50:39
No, we shouldn't do that.
50:40
We should go with what the most people say is good.
50:41
Okay, now we're going to talk about this big grandiose thing where it's like all these
50:45
people that are thinking in the same way.
50:47
Well, that's not necessarily good either.
50:49
I mean, just think about it.
50:51
Just remember whenever people didn't think that the or when people did rather think that
50:56
the earth was the center of everything, there wasn't a heliocentric view, right?
51:00
Do you remember that?
51:02
So if we just went with the majority and went with what everybody said, then okay, the earth
51:05
is the center of the universe, everything else revolves around it, which isn't true.
51:09
It's defiantly untrue, so we can't just go with what most people say.
51:13
If most people said the earth was flat, they just completely went against all the different
51:17
evidences that we have out there to the contrary.
51:19
Do we go with that just because more people say that?
51:21
Guys, this is where relativism fails, right?
51:24
We talk about moral of a relativism all the time.
51:26
It's not a good way to operate.
51:28
We have to have a moral law, something that we can come back to.
51:32
So again, I think Robbie's doing an amazing job in this interview of kind of setting up
51:37
themes here, so he's got several themes that he's going through that he's kind of building
51:42
this argument that's going to crescendo at some point.
51:44
And to be honest with you, I think a crescendos around this time of this clip, which is around
51:48
47 minutes and 15 seconds in.
51:49
So this is the last question that we're going to cover.
51:51
It's not the last question that they go over, but it's last one we're going to look at.
51:55
And this is where we really get to the crux of why everybody's watching this interview,
51:59
right?
52:00
People that like Ben Shapiro and like Robbie Zacharias, they're not just like, Oh, two
52:03
of my friends that I want to watch talk to each other.
52:05
So they want to watch these guys square off about Judaism and Christianity, right?
52:10
You know, about the New Testament and the Old Testament, like, how are we going to square
52:14
these two things and how are these guys going to respond?
52:17
So around the 47 minute, 15 second mark, we're going to see Ben Shapiro get into it.
52:21
Okay.
52:22
So let's talk about an area where we disagree and that is on the veracity of the New Testament
52:26
versus the Old Testament.
52:27
So let's start with some kind of the broader philosophical, philosophical framework.
52:32
What do you think that Christianity adds to the world that Judaism didn't in the first
52:36
place?
52:37
First of all, I want you to know how proud I am to have friends like you and Dennis Prager,
52:44
Michael Medved.
52:45
I'll be back with Dennis again.
52:47
I think I remember Dennis's comment when we were talking on this.
52:50
He was brilliant.
52:51
What he said, he said, when Messiah comes up, just have one question.
52:55
Have you been here before?
52:58
And I think that is what it'll really boil down to.
53:02
I don't like to say the word add because it seems like it is something superimposed
53:08
that wasn't there.
53:10
I think it was already there, Ben.
53:12
Of course, my own upbringing was so different.
53:15
It was an outcome.
53:16
My ancestors were orthodox into priest generations to go from the highest cost to the end of
53:21
priesthood.
53:22
I think it is that one verse, one line that the moral law hangs upon.
53:28
I am the Lord your God, the brother out of the land of Egypt, that redemption motif.
53:33
I think it moved beyond the metaphor from Egypt although it was real.
53:39
It moved beyond the blood sacrifices and it moved to the very person of the Son of Man
53:45
that Daniel talked about and the perfection of the law, which was not violated, but a
53:52
bond and endorsed.
53:54
So what I see at the person of Jesus Christ are two very real things, Ben.
54:01
Number one, it is the fact that he embodied that, which was the purest that was called
54:11
for by this very rigorous 613 system of laws that were given.
54:18
And if you move down even to Habakkuk, which is then quoted three times in the New Testament,
54:26
from 613, David reduced it to a handful, Isaiah reduced it even more, Michael brought
54:31
down to three to do justice, to love mercy and to accomplish before you got.
54:36
But the Habakkuk phrase of the just shall live by faith, which I understand is more
54:41
correctly represented as by his faithfulness, that when you move into the person of Christ
54:47
two things happen.
54:49
The law is honored and not debunked, but the relationship question, you know, when you
54:57
give the four propositions in your closing chapter, you know, starting all the way from
55:04
purpose and then in relationship.
55:08
The most moving moment in your book is when you talk to your daughter, okay, I loved it.
55:12
I'm a grandfather of five and my grandson, Jude, brilliant guy, he uses words like hypothesis
55:20
and all of that.
55:21
He's only about his turning age tomorrow, okay?
55:24
But my daughter Naomi lost her carcase.
55:29
She stopped going crazy in the house, slapped a forehead and said, "I must be losing my
55:34
mind."
55:35
Little Jude was five and a half then, stood in front of her and he said, "Mommy, what
55:39
have you do, please don't ever lose your heart because I'm in there."
55:46
That personal relationship, as much as I value and love the law, I need to go beyond that
55:54
relationship.
55:55
And so here's what I say.
55:57
The most beautiful moment in the New Testament to me.
56:00
If I were to choose one moment or two, first I would want to listen to Jesus' talk on
56:06
a mass road because he connects all the dots going back to the beginning.
56:10
Brilliant history lesson.
56:12
You would love it, I think, as he talked on the mass road.
56:15
But the second moment was when he was on the amount of transfiguration, who does he bring
56:20
with it Moses and Elijah, two of the most thundering prophets for whom he was the undertaker?
56:28
Okay?
56:29
We don't know exactly where Moses was buried and Elijah goes up on chariots of fire.
56:35
But then he goes to the cross.
56:38
I know I can't pay for myself.
56:41
The redemptive factor of the purest paying for the impure.
56:46
Not that there was no penalty, but he paid it and then rises again from the dead.
56:51
To me, it's a composite that doesn't violate what preceded, I think it completes it.
56:57
And to me, the attractiveness, and I really appreciate you even giving me the opportunity
57:02
to share it.
57:03
Let me give you an illustration of this.
57:05
I was in Jerusalem some years ago.
57:07
You may know the name of Moshe Charon, the well-known scholar on Islamics in Israel.
57:12
Okay, I was writing a book on an imaginary conversation between Jesus and Muhammad.
57:17
It would be really supposed to be.
57:22
So I'll tell you what he said to me, "Great man, he's probably written more on any inscriptured
57:31
stone than any other human being around there."
57:34
He looked at me and he said, "Mrs. Zachariah's you're a very clever man."
57:37
He said, "Well, I'll tell you something you don't know."
57:40
I said, "There's a lot I don't know, sir.
57:41
So let me tell you something."
57:42
He said, "You don't know about me."
57:44
He said, "I'm now a professor."
57:47
He said, "But I used to work for the Masat."
57:51
He said, "Mrs. Zachariah's you're a Christian, I'm a Jewish man, but we both have one thing
57:56
in common."
57:57
I said, "What's that?"
58:00
He said, "Comunion with God."
58:02
I said, "You're right.
58:05
My goal in life is to have communion with God."
58:07
He said, "So am I."
58:08
He said, "But I picked up extremists who would go and blow themselves up and what people
58:14
don't know."
58:15
He said, "They would have a leaden girdle, a leaden girdle around that midsection so
58:20
that they could protect what they felt they were going to use in paradise finally."
58:25
He said, "That's a different world view."
58:29
That's a different world view.
58:30
He said, "You and I can talk because we have the same goal, communion with God, but if
58:36
a person thinks of an erotic and essentially driven eternity, I'm not on the same page
58:41
with that person, we have completely different goals.
58:44
So I say to me in Christ, I see the completion of the story because I hunger not just for
58:53
propositional truth when Jesus comes down from the mountain and Peter goes, "What does he say?
58:59
But now we have the word of the prophets made most sudden and you would do well to pay
59:04
heed to it as a light and a dark place.
59:07
So I think it is a completion."
59:10
I mean, what a great, great answer to that question.
59:13
Again, he could have gone a lot of different directions, but essentially he just preached
59:17
the gospel.
59:19
And to be honest with you, that's all you really need, right?
59:22
In that type of situation, just preach the gospel.
59:25
And so I mean, he talked about how in his view and in the Christian worldview that the
59:30
law is honored in Christ, that the law is fulfilled.
59:33
Jesus tells us that and that the personal relationship part is important.
59:37
Again, the discipleship part, again, in the Judaic worldview, you don't really get the
59:42
discipleship thing necessarily with God.
59:44
It's just basically laws that you're trying to abide by in order to honor God, right?
59:50
That's more so what you're doing.
59:51
But the key there, they talked about is communion with God.
59:54
And he drew a very, very thick line between kind of the Islamic worldview, which is obviously
1:00:00
very murderous and very bloody and very sickening whenever you obviously think about what they
1:00:05
think is going to happen to them on the other side of their jihad.
1:00:09
But at the same time, he puts you, you know, kind of the, the Jewish worldview and the Christian
1:00:13
worldview on the other side, which I think is a great dichotomy for him to draw.
1:00:18
So what I want to do for you right now is I want to kind of give you an idea on, on my
1:00:21
response to this, because obviously I've been able to come in and out here and kind of give
1:00:24
you my overall idea as we kind of get into it.
1:00:26
But there's kind of three big thoughts that I have on this discussion between Ben Shapiro
1:00:31
and Robbie Zacharias.
1:00:32
The first big thought that I have is that Robbie really leaned on the Old Testament,
1:00:38
not logic, which that's kind of the first thing about the presentations is understand
1:00:43
your audience.
1:00:44
Right.
1:00:45
And in terms of this, obviously the audience is us and all the millions of people that
1:00:48
are going to listen to this interview, but his audience was an audience of one.
1:00:52
It was Ben Shapiro right across from him.
1:00:54
And so John MacArthur and William Lane Craig, whenever they were on the Sunday special,
1:00:58
they leaned a lot more on logic and New Testament references.
1:01:02
But I mean, I kind of was just keeping track as we were going through.
1:01:04
And as I was kind of listening to this, about all the different Old Testament references
1:01:08
that Robbie Zacharias used.
1:01:10
So he talked about Job.
1:01:11
He talked about Habakkuk, the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, Genesis, Psalm 51, David and Bathsheba,
1:01:17
Egypt, blood sacrifices, 600 plus rabbinical laws, Daniel, Isaiah, Moses, Micah, Elijah,
1:01:24
and you know, I, there may have been even more in there.
1:01:26
But again, when you're talking to an Orthodox Jew, that's the paradigm that they understand.
1:01:32
Everything that I just listed there, they know it and a lot of them know it by heart.
1:01:35
And so it makes a lot of sense why you would kind of make those references.
1:01:39
And so I feel like for a guy like Robbie, obviously he was preaching the gospel to a
1:01:43
Jew.
1:01:44
And how do you get a Jew to kind of come to that realization?
1:01:47
Obviously the Holy Spirit is going to do his thing.
1:01:49
In addition to that, you're giving them things that they can attach themselves to.
1:01:53
I'm reminded whenever we talked about Andy Stanley and Jeff Durbin, when Andy Stanley
1:01:57
was basically talking about, he's like, hey, look, I don't care what your on-ramp to faith
1:02:01
is for Jews.
1:02:02
Sometimes the on-ramp is the Old Testament.
1:02:04
And then they figure out that, oh, my gosh, Jesus is the guy that was basically being talked
1:02:09
about all throughout all of these writings in the Old Testament.
1:02:11
Like he was the one that was foretold and those types of things.
1:02:14
And so I think that that's really important.
1:02:16
I think that John MacArthur and William Lane Craig did fantastic jobs, but I really think
1:02:20
Robbie really drove the point home.
1:02:22
The second kind of big idea that I thought through is of anyone in Christendom, Robbie
1:02:28
would be my pick for a Christian to go on the Joe Rogan podcast on the Joe Rogan experience.
1:02:33
And I know we talk about Joe Rogan a lot, but that's one of the things about Joe Rogan's
1:02:36
podcast that kind of disappoints me is that he doesn't really have people on from differing
1:02:41
points of view when it comes to religion, right?
1:02:44
And he doesn't really posit any type of religion. I think he would probably call himself an
1:02:47
agnostic, right?
1:02:48
You know, it's impossible to know, you know, that type of a thing.
1:02:51
But at the same time, like he's never had, you know, a Robbie Zacharias or William Lane
1:02:54
Craig or a John MacArthur, any kind of big time pastor get on there and basically talk
1:02:58
about the gospel to talk about the Old Testament, talk about the New Testament to talk about
1:03:02
how we got the scriptures, you know, basically in the palm of our hands as of today, he doesn't
1:03:07
have anyone on there to talk about how, you know, the gospel was gathered and how we can
1:03:12
go back to the original words that I was written in and, you know, basically given apologetic
1:03:16
for the Christian worldview.
1:03:17
I mean, he doesn't do that really for any worldview. He doesn't really check people
1:03:20
when they talk about, oh, yeah, you know, I meditate a lot or, you know, I do, I do
1:03:24
yoga or I'm a Buddhist or, you know, I'm just kind of like, I'm a love person, you know,
1:03:28
I just do love or whatever the thing might be. But can you imagine a conversation like
1:03:32
this over three hours because again, this is Ben Shapiro's version of a long form discussion,
1:03:39
but it is, it is just an interview, right? It's Ben Shapiro asking the question. He's
1:03:42
not really giving his opinion a lot. He's allowing a kind of a wide berth for the person
1:03:47
to talk. But on the Joe Rogan podcast, it's two to three hours of him kind of going back
1:03:51
and forth and talking. Now Joe does a good job to make sure that the guest gets, you
1:03:54
know, a lot of the microphone time. But at the same time, he's not just sitting there
1:03:57
with his list of a dozen questions and he just wants to go through them in order, you
1:04:00
know what I mean? And so, uh, I think it's not likely that we'll see a guy like Robbie
1:04:06
Zachari's be on the Joe Rogan experience. But, you know, if you're pray for people, I think
1:04:10
that'd be something to pray for. And the kind of the last thing here that I think is kind
1:04:12
of a big idea is this is an amazing example of how to comport yourself when dealing with
1:04:17
an ardent believer of another religion. So this just so happens to be a religion that
1:04:22
kind of believes in the first half of our book and not second half, you know what I
1:04:25
mean? But just think about it. If you were going to be talking to a Muslim or a Sikh or
1:04:30
a Hindu or, you know, any type of religion that's different from your own, this is kind
1:04:34
of a good road map for how to traverse a conversation like that. You know what I mean? I mean,
1:04:40
these guys weren't at each other's throats. I mean, potentially they were before the interview
1:04:44
and after the interview, but you got to pretty much assume that these guys were cordial with
1:04:48
each other from the jump and they still are now and would consider each other friends.
1:04:52
And so this is a good example for us at when we're going to enter the fray and have those
1:04:55
conversations. It's not about winning, right? It's not about squashing the other person.
1:04:59
It's not about owning them, right? You can still address their concerns. You can still
1:05:03
address their worldview without destroying them. All right, guys, before we get out of
1:05:06
here, we're going to do a quick resilience boost. As you know, by now we are immense
1:05:09
ministry and our mission is cultivating manly resilience. Specifically, we do that by providing
1:05:13
content that for just spiritual, mental and physical toughness. So for your edification
1:05:18
today, I've obviously got the YouTube link to the Sunday special episode 60 with Robbie's
1:05:22
Eckeriah's, but then I've also included the ones that I've talked about a lot on this
1:05:25
episode, which is episode 29 with John MacArthur and episode 50 with William Lane Craig. If
1:05:30
you enjoyed this conversation with Ravi Zacharias and Ben Shapiro, I think you're going to get
1:05:34
a lot out of the conversations that he had with John MacArthur and William Lane Craig.
1:05:37
I really think you'll enjoy it. Guys, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. We really
1:05:41
do appreciate it. If you would, please subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify or Google Play
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1:05:49
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1:05:52
know why you like the content. I'm currently booking speaking engagements for the remainder
1:05:55
of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. So if you want me to come speak to your men's event,
1:06:00
to your team, to your company, whatever, hit me up, email info at undaunted.life. That's
1:06:04
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1:06:15
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1:06:18
and as always, we want to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to use their entire
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music library for our content. The intro out to a track on this podcast is our song King
1:06:26
of Sorrow, which is off their latest record entitled Phantom Anthem. The links are in the
1:06:30
description. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
1:06:36
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical toughness, keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:06:56
I don't know.