TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: REPLAY - The RDL Podcast's very first episode: Ep. 1 | Microbes and Martians: How Socialism Spreads Its Sordid Stain - Originally aired on The Blaze Radio Network - July 11, 2015
Date: 6/7/2024 Length: 2:00:14
Daniel Lapin 0:14
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and I am fueled by a deep desire to reveal how the world really works. I am propelled by a passion to clarify that the more that things change, the more we must depend on those things that never change. And who better than your rabbi to pull out and lay out on the table in front of us the things that do not change now, in order to to to get this show going and to clarify what it is we're going to be looking at I'm going to start off with something very basic indeed, and that is that we live in a world of duality. We seem to live in a world where twos matter very strongly, and we're so used to it that we hardly give any thought to it, right? We We realize that a spectrum line runs between two ends, good and evil, right, black and white, light and darkness. It's, it's, it's, it's something we take for granted that a spectrum line doesn't have three ends any more than a piece of string has three ends. In fact, we could scarcely imagine a world in which a piece of string would have more than two ends, but that is the dual nature of the world in which we live. And so, not surprisingly, the number two has special significance, not just because you've got light and darkness and good and evil and black and white and hot and cold, and for that matter, male and female. And yes, one of the basics of this shown of this discussion is that there are, in fact, two genders, and I realize this obviously flies in the face of a society that has almost entirely surrendered to a spasm of superstition on this topic with an entire range of choice of gender, but that's not really how the world works. And not surprisingly, the entire digital revolution hinges again on this duality, does it not? In other words, a switch is either on or off. Now, in the in the natural world, yes, there, there is an analog reality as well. Right? Flowers grow just a teensy, weensy little bit very slowly. They don't grow in in digital leaps. So, yes, we do recognize that there is an analog. Our ears function on a logarithmic scale, as it's called. It's an analog. Our ears are not either receiving or not receiving. There's a range of volume. But the fact is that a digital system works on binary numbers, which is two. It doesn't work on threes or fours or fives. It works with ones and zeros, with just two alternatives, with two states. And I tell you all of this because it's important to understand that this is something that flows from the very opening words Genesis. Now by by way of disclaimer, I want to make certain that you all understand that this show is not for exclusively for people who take the Bible seriously and regard it as as God's message to mankind, but regardless of where you stand personally on the issue of faith, regardless of what your state of knowledge of the Bible is, or what your view and opinion of the Bible is, and the at the very least, I'm sure, regardless of of where you come On that particular idea, regardless the one thing you most certainly would agree with is the extraordinary influence this majestic and mysterious volume has had on the story of civilization. So it, and I will say this, that this is possible. The very first generation in 2000 years, in which people who view themselves as educated and knowledgeable and even sophisticated people are utterly, sublimely clueless about the Bible. There are people who pontificate on television, who make pronouncements of great solemnity, who have no idea whether Leviticus is a book of the Bible or a man's aftershave lotion. And this is something we should be aware of, that another duality is the duality between two classes of people in the world today, people who know something about the Bible and people who don't. And so that's just by way of explanation as to why it is you will hear me quoting from the Bible. It is hard to think of a book that has had more in fact, I think I'll just be explicit about this. There is no other book that has had anywhere close to the significant impact on civilization as the Bible. And so when I speak about the very early in the book of Genesis, what is the very first thing that God creates as matter of fact, it's light.
Daniel Lapin 6:25
It's the 25th Hebrew. Word of the text is the word, or in Hebrew, or in English, light. And a lot of things flow from that. By the way, the Jewish festival of lights, which is Hanukkah, is the only Jewish festival to fall on the 25th day of any month, and so falls on what is known as the month of kislav on the 25th day. That has to do with the fact that the word light makes its appearance in the Bible on the 25th word. It's not an accident that Christmas, which is seen as a time in which light came into the world also takes place on the 25th of a month, and it's also no accident that people typically decorate their homes or their Christmas trees with lights during that particular time. And so at any rate, light is the very first thing created. And again, I'm not going to, I mean, this is not going to be a heavily technical discussion in any way whatsoever. But again, I think part of what everybody should know as part of general knowledge, regardless of whether you're interested in the in the mathematics and the physics or not, but is that light is a very difficult thing to understand. Even today, with the advanced knowledge we have in physics, in in thermodynamics, in in energy, it's still to this very day, is extremely difficult to understand light and as a matter of fact, the the the the problem revolves around the fact that light behaves as if it's two things at the same time. On the one hand, light behaves as if it is a stream of tiny tennis balls being fired out from the flashlight you hold in your hand as you go down to a dark cellar. And the reason that light bounces off mirrors in exactly the same way that a tennis ball bounces off a wall to which it was hit, seems to suggest that a light beam is a stream of tiny photons beaming out from the light source, and many experiments would tend to confirm that. But then, if we put that aside and run an entirely different set of experiments that that have to do with what we call interference, we end up with an inescapable conclusion that No, light's not tennis balls, it's waves and it's oscillating levels of energy. It has to be but on the other hand, it also has to be tennis balls. And so which is it? And the answer is actually that it's both. And so that duality that tunas quality in light makes its appearance right at the very beginning of the Bible. Now the reason I tell you all of that is in order to lay the groundwork for perhaps one of the of the most basic existential questions of life. And if you think about that for a moment, what is the sort of one basic question that whether you are man or woman, or whether you are of any particular race or of any particular religion or. Of any particular nationality, regardless, it's something common to all humans, a very basic question. And that basic question is this, how did we as human beings arrive on this isolated Speck, this unique spot in a remote galaxy, far far away from anything and everything. How did that happen? And you won't be shocked to hear that there are only two possible answers to that question, and it's a very good question, because it's not as if we found any indication that there are any other creatures even remotely approaching our uniqueness anywhere else in the universe, and that's after we have spent very large, unimaginably massive quantities of your tax money on something called SETI, s, e, t, I search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. In other words, spending a lot of money to try and find out maybe there are other intelligent forms of life in the universe. Well, not only have we not yet found the slightest hint of anything similar to us anywhere else in the universe. But as a matter of fact, we're not even actually able to with to certainly and arguably identify any other places on which life could even exist. And so here we are and see, here's the problem. The problem is that when anything unique happens, it's suspect. Let me give you an example. I would trust that you know nothing whatsoever about roulette. But unless you've lived in admirably sheltered existence, you probably know that it's a gambling game in in which a ball flies around a spinning disc with 36 slots, and people bet on which slot the ball will fall into. Some casinos also have a zero, which is when the ball falls into there. All bets go to the casino. Some casinos have two zeros, but the bottom line is that that is what a roulette wheel looks like. Now, if you watched a roulette wheel for three weeks, and in that time, the ball fell into number seven only once, you know you've got a rigged wheel. It's not possible in the same way as if you flip a coin 500 times and heads comes out only once. There's something wrong, because random events never happen. Uniquely random, never random events just cannot happen. Only once. Do you follow what I'm saying? It's a really important point to understand because, and by the way, this is something that mathematicians understand. If you if you were able to conjure up a random number generator, and there are a number of ways of doing that, you can be sure that will throw out the same number, if you watch it long enough, it has to, because if a certain number events can happen, let's imagine there's 36 possible places that the ball can fall into on a roulette wheel. Then if the roulette wheel is not rigged, if it's a if it's a wheel that is mechanically sound and truly random. Then over the course of 1000s and 1000s of wheel spins, it will fall into each of the holes the same number of times, and the more spins you give it, the closer that will come to equal. So in other words, you might watch the roulette wheel for just a few minutes and and it'll go into a whole bunch of of different slots. You might even notice that if you watch it for a while, it'll go into one slot twice. It that could happen. But if you were to watch it for for a few years, spinning away, ball dropping in, it'll come out at the end of all of that that the ball fell into every one of those 36 slots exactly the same number of times. Any exception to that suggests that there's something rigged about the wheel. The reason this is so important to understand is what I'm going to tell you in the very next segment. You see if we on this earth are a unique phenomenon? Well, there we go. See, I said I was going to tell you about that. Think, for just the moment now, on that mathematical principle that nothing that is truly accidental ever happens only once. Yes, if it only happens once, it wasn't an accident. If it happens only once, if it truly is a unique event, it was not a random coincidence.
Daniel Lapin 15:52
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and we're exploring the question of, how did we humans arrive on planet Earth? A tiny, little, insignificant and obscure planet in a tiny and insignificantly obscure solar system in itself, a tiny and obscure part of a galaxy in a remote corner of the universe. And here we are. And what's more, in spite of the fact that large sums of money, incalculably large sums of tax money, and have been spent on trying to find other forms of intelligence life in the universe. To date, that has not happened. And by the way, if it should happen, it wouldn't worry me in the slightest, not as a person with a scientific training, and not as a God fearing religious, Bible believing person. Neither way would it bother me. I'll tell you why we were talking about a very important principle that has many applications in mathematics, and that is that no truly random event happens only once. And so, you know, if, if, if somebody trips, you know, regularly at the same place, then a prudent analysis would say, you know, there must be a bit of carpet sticking up, or there's an uneven floor, or maybe it's on a flight of steps. And the place that everyone seems to trip, it happens to be the one step that has a different riser. You know, all the steps are seven inches. This one happens to be nine inches, and people trip. Well, hello. Yes, I would think they do. There is a reason for it, and and it's obviously, you know, it's something that makes sense. But when something happens only one time, only one time, then it becomes a different kind of problem. And you have to say to yourself, if it only happened once, okay, then it's not an accident. If something happens only once, then it's not random. When things happen randomly, then you get a distribution of events. And so if a trip is random, it would be on all the on all the steps, on all on any one of the steps in the flight of steps. If people just trip at all points, then those are just accidents. But if it's only on one particular step that people trip, then that's not random. That's not an accident. You have to ask yourself, why? And guess what? Turns out you measure it, and this one step happens to be a different measure. People get used to a rhythm, running up or down steps. This violates the rhythm. And guess what? Somebody trips. And so if we find other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it is then perfectly possible, from a mathematical point of view, to say that the development of life on this planet was random, accidental, evolutionarily unpredictable, just one of those things that happened. And you know what the proof is? The proof is that it happened on this planet, and it happened on that planet, three light years away, and it happened somewhere else. And you can see this sort of thing happens. But if life is not found anywhere else in the universe, and after considerable searching so far it hasn't, then this becomes a very big problem for who actually only for the person who is conditioned to believe that we humans are here on this planet. By a random, coincidental sequence of events. And this brings us back to the duality. Remember, I was talking about the fact that we live in a world where twoness is so much of a factor, where things seem to happen in twos, and that two is a very important number. Well, you won't be shocked to hear that there are two answers. There are two possible ways to answer that question, not 11, not seven, not one, two ways to answer that question. What are the two ways? Well, very simple. How did we arrive on this planet? Why are they human beings on this planet. Answer number one by a lengthy process of unaided, random materialistic evolution, primitive protoplasm turned into Bach and Beethoven. That's one explanation for how we're here. The other explanation for how we're here is that the good Lord created us in His image and put us here. Those are the two answers, and the truth is that there is absolutely no way scientifically to prove either one of them. You see that is so important, I want to repeat it. There is no way to prove either one of those positions. Well, you might say, I've heard that scientific evolution is a proven fact. It's unargued. And my answer to that is that, look, you don't have to be a biologist, you don't have to be an astrophysicist, you don't have to be a scientific historian, and all you need to be is an intelligent observer to say to yourself that things that are proven do not continue exciting controversy. Let's put it this way, there's not a lot of controversy in the culture about whether the planet earth is round a sphere or whether it's flat. Now, there might have been people, once upon a time who thought the Earth was flat. I'm not sure, but there might have been, and and I say that advisedly. By the way, a lot of a lot of times people say, Oh, well, they believe the Earth. It's not true. That isn't so I don't know that anybody ever believed the Earth was flat. But if they did, and they said, Well, look, you know, put a marble on the floor and it doesn't roll anywhere. So obviously everything's flat. People believe that, okay, maybe. But now it's pretty clearly established that the Earth is round. In fact, I think we can safely say that it's a scientific reality that the Earth is round. And what's more, there's no cultural argument about it. There's no debates about who's teaching what in schools. There's no people yelling about it in debates and arguments. There no there are no faculty members being fired from universities because they believe that the earth is flat. No, it's settled. But if the origin of human life on this earth was settled science that no scientists would be losing their jobs at universities because they question that people who occupy exalted positions at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC would not be losing their jobs. Why? Because of their beliefs and their views, the conflict rages, and it's far from settled. And that's why I said it is not possible to prove that we are here on this planet because the good Lord created us in His image and put us here. It is also not possible to prove that we are here because of a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution that enabled primitive protoplasm to become baboons and baboons to become Bach and Beethoven. And obviously, if there was a way to prove it either way, then faith would vanish. If it was possible to prove that we were here because of a materialistic process, then the faith would be gone. And if it was possible to prove that we were here because of a a loving God created us in His image. Well, that would take faith away too, wouldn't it? And so all the benefits that accrue to us, those people who do have faith, all the benefits that accrue to them, are benefits that would vanish if, in fact, it was possible to prove one way or the other. So faith is retained. Mind in a very positive and useful kind of a way. But that basic question still only gets answered in one of two possible ways. How did human beings arrive on this planet? Well, I told you there are only two possible answers, and this is why there is such a frantic search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, because this the minute intelligent life can be found elsewhere in the universe. Then it is a definite possibility, yeah, it's a possible definite that we could be here as a result of a random series of coincidences that enabled amino acids to form out of a some sort of primeval sludge. Because, look, it happens somewhere else as well.
Daniel Lapin 25:54
But as long as we don't find intelligent life that resembles humans anywhere else, we're kind of stuck, because it's very difficult mathematically or scientifically to say that we are here because of a random process, because, like roulette wheels, random processes do not deliver unique results. Just never happens. So we're left with only two possible answers. And you might say, Well, okay, fine, you know, where's all this going? You know, you've, you've been talking to us for for 25 minutes now, and and we're talking about these hypotheticals about the origins of life. You know, why? Why is this important? Why are we talking about this? Well, I'm going to tell you why, because these subjects we're discussing have the most direct consequences on what we feel about money, about taxation, about inheritance and whether there should be a death tax, What we feel about At what age should young people be having What's it all about? And and many, many other questions. The the way that societies or cultures or civilizations answer these questions depends to an amazing extent on how it answers that fundamental question. How did we get here, you see, and by the way, just in case, some of you are saying, wait a second, wait a second. Rabbi Lapin, you're saying that there are only two ways to answer the question of how we got here. Either God created us in His image and put us here, or we're here as the result of a billions and millions of years of random evolutionary accidents. But wait a second, there's a third possibility, maybe little green men in spaceships came and put us here and and I just want to explain that that's really not an alternative answer, because all that does is postpone the question of, where did they come from. So not so simple. So I'm afraid we are left with only two possible ways of answering the question of how did we get here? Now, the way you answer that question is going to force us into answering another question, and the other question is, are we nothing but, oh, about $9 worth of common chemicals cunningly strung together. Are we just a bunch of molecules? Are we just, you know, we are hydrogen and oxygen, we're carbon, we're nitrogen, we're potassium, we're sodium, we're chlorine. And when you put all these things together in the right proportions and in the right arrangements, wow, you get a person. Is that what we are? Or are we unique creatures touched by the finger of God? Now I think it's pretty clear that how you answered the first question will dictate how you're going to answer the second question. If you say that we are here because the good Lord created us and put us here, why? Then you would not say we're nothing but a bunch of common chemicals put together. You'd say, No, we're a unique creature touched by the finger of God. But if, on the other hand, you say, No, you know what? I think I am going to live my life as, as if we are here because of a random sequence of coincidences, a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution. Well, then you're probably going to say, and the result is that we are nothing but. A bunch of chemicals, just like everything else on the in the universe, there's stones, there's liquids, there's solids, there's vegetable material and there's animal material, but all we are is just a different arrangement of of the basic elements. Well, what's the difference? Well, don't you wonder what the practical life results are of how you choose to answer that question? Because you see the problem is that you kind of do have to answer that question. Why? Well, that's what I'm going to explain as soon as we come back.
Daniel Lapin 31:25
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and we're exploring why it is that you cannot ignore this question. The question of how we humans ended up on this planet, how we got here, is not something that you can just put aside. This is not a question that can be ignored because any sentient, thoughtful person realizes that their consequences to the to how you answer that question and and what's so difficult to relate to is that we, in this sort of post industrial era, we're so used to solving questions scientifically. We're so used to saying, Look, I don't know what the answer to this is, but I'll look it up on the internet, and then I'll tell you. But what about questions that that don't lend themselves to that sort of answer? For instance, there are questions for which science is simply not the right instrument in the same way that I might take a refrigerator thermometer and take it outside on a very hot summer's day in Washington, DC, and I'd want to see what what the weather is. And the thermometer does absolutely nothing at all. It doesn't show me anything wrong instrument or how's about if I try to use a a, shall we say, an iPhone or or a smartphone, in order to try and find out if there are any, if there's any radioactive radiation in a particular room. No, for that, you need a Geiger counter, if you take a a regular domestic thermometer that tells you how hot the weather is, and you used it to find out if your freezer is working and safe to keep food in, is the freezer cold enough it won't work, it won't tell you anything. And so in for certain questions, science simply is not the right instrument and and secondly, there is the question of belief as opposed to facts. And the truth is that we human beings are much more belief driven than we are fact driven. You see when it comes to facts, you and I wouldn't have a very long discussion if we were discussing which, how high is Mount Rainier, 70 miles south of Seattle. And we wouldn't argue about it. Pretty soon somebody would say, well, I'll go on the internet, and they'll come back and they'll say, Well, I found out Mount Rainier, 70 miles south of Seattle, is about 14,900 feet high. And we also, okay, fine, end a conversation. But what happens if we start off the conversation by saying, you know, I believe that mount, Rainier is the most beautiful mountain visible from any major American city. And somebody else would say, Well, you know, first of all, I'm not sure what you'd call major and I can think of cities that have more beautiful mountains. And there'd be a conversation. And you. What do you mean? Why do you call it beautiful? There are others that are more beautiful. And why do you believe this? And we'd have a real conversation that we'd find out about each other. And so whenever you converse about beliefs, you discover a lot about the other person, and you have a connection when you speak about facts you don't and the problem with the question of how we arrived on this planet is that we obviously are here. So far as we know, there are not any other places where human beings exist, and so we're here uniquely. The question of how we got here is a very interesting question, particularly because it's a question with a duality to it. It has only two possible answers, and as of yet, we have no way of proving. We have no way of turning either of those two answers into a fact. At the moment, they are beliefs. But wait a minute, wait a minute, and anybody other than cerebral cerebrally compromised. Cretans know that there are many things in life. It's not just this question, but there are many things in life where you don't have a way of proving it. You don't have a way of arriving at the fact, and you proceed anyway. Let me give you an example. When most people get married, you really know for a fact that you'll live happily ever after? I don't think so. Nobody can know that you believe it. If you didn't believe it, you wouldn't do it. How about when you make a major investment, you buy a home, or you make any other major investment, do you really know that it's going to work out fantastically? No, of course not. If you did, there'd be zero risk, and if there's no risk, there's no possible reward. Anytime there's so many important decisions in life, there's so many major actions we take where we simply don't have the facts and what happens to the young man who says, you know, I don't want to get married until I'm absolutely sure, until I've got all the facts in the result is that he will remain a lonely and potentially destructive single male. Yes, because most of the destructive damage in society is done by single males and and so yes, you cannot wait, because life has a way of requiring you to make decisions and make commitments. And so we have no option but to go ahead and act on our beliefs rather than on facts. You can't help it. We have to. And so in what way does this question and the answer you believe you want to give? How does that all work? Well, the best example I can give you is something that a teacher of mine had happened to him. He was traveling from New York to Jerusalem to Israel, and he was traveling on El Al Israel national airlines.
Daniel Lapin 38:12
And by the way, the word El Al actually, in Hebrew, means to up, meaning being on your way to a higher place, isn't that? Isn't that neat El Al to upon going up to a higher place and and so my teacher is traveling, and he's got two of his students traveling with him to to help help him on the journey, just as part of his entourage, if you like. And what happens he, as luck would have it, he finds himself sitting next to one of the top officials of what's known as the Histadrut, which is the Israel sort of the trade union organization, and so obviously, this particular individual was one of the old time Israeli atheists. He was originally from Russia. He was a socialist. And he came to Israel in the early days, and before the state even and and, you know, found himself the head of the the number one socialist of the country, as you can imagine. This was a very interesting conversation, because you had, if you like the country, one of the country's leading atheists and one of Judaism's most devout and scholarly rabbis sitting next to one another in on an LL airplane. Anyways, after they're both seated in their seats and and the captain's welcoming everybody aboard and asking everyone to get their seats. A young man who'd been sitting a number of rows behind in in the coach class came forward, and he took off the rabbi's shoes and replaced them with slippers, and the eyebrows on his neighbor with whom he'd already started a conversation rose. And so he he explained. He said, you know, on a long flight, my feet swell, and his socialist neighbors said, Tell me, me too, he said, So I switched to to to slippers. Anyway, plane takes off. They're on their way, and it's going to be another hour before they serve a meal. Pretty soon, one of the other young men comes forward with a little package of sandwiches in a brown bag, gives them to the rabbi and goes back to EC the rabbi opens and offers his neighbor a sandwich. The neighbor gratefully accepts and and the rabbi says, you know, I just I get hungry, and by the time they serve the meal, I'm starved. And so my wife knows I like to eat, so she sends some sandwiches and and this way we have something to eat. The Friends of the East fellow says, Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing. He said, I just want to tell you I'm so impressed with the way your sons take care of you. And the rabbi said, Oh no, no. Those aren't my sons. Those are two of my students. Now, if my sons were traveling with me, they would really be taking care of me. And the eyes of the hardened socialist leader teared up, and the rabbi said, What's the matter? Did I say something to upset you? And he said, No. He said, but I just want to tell you that I've got four sons, and I've been thinking, what have they ever done for me, like your students do for you, let alone what your sons would do? And I realized, my students, my sons, have never done anything for me. All that seems to happen is I'm busy doing things for them all the time, but your sons seem to behave very differently, and it saddened me, and the rabbi said, Don't be upset. You must realize that your sons have been as faithful to your teachings as my sons have been to mine. And the socialist leader looked at him in puzzlement and said, What do you mean? And my rabbi said to his socialist friend, he said, Look, you have surely answered the most basic question of life to your children, where did we come from by saying that through a random process of unaided, materialistic evolution, godless, totally random, totally materialistic. You know, primitive molecules turned into human beings, you've told that to your sons. And a man nodded. He says, That's right, that's, that's, that's science, that's what I teach them. And the rabbi said, look, that means that every successive generation is more highly developed. Every successive generation is one generation further away from primitive protoplasm. You are a generation that is further removed. You're a generation further away from the baboons. Is that? Is that? Not so this is, this is what you've explained to your children. Me, for my part, I explain that each generation is one generation further away from God. I teach my children what I believe, which is that we were created by God, and therefore the second generation was a generation removed from Adam, and the third was the third, and we are now many, many generations removed from the generation that actually was touched by God and created by God, and so that means that that as as time has gone by, my sons recognize, they recognize that I'm a generation older that puts me closer to Adam, closer to God, therefore it's only appropriate that they are are of service to me, but you taught your your children that you are a generation closer to the baboons. Therefore it's only appropriate that you serve them, because they're a generation more advanced, more developed, more sophisticated than you are, and so your children are raised in the way that is faithful to your teachings. My children faithful to mine. And this really, I think, serves as a very it's an interesting little story. It's a true story. And when he told it to me, it made a lot of sense, because I realized that the real life decisions we make, that impact the kind of marriage we have, that impact the kind of home we create, our relationships with our children and our siblings and our parents, our relationships to money, which is I'm going To explain very soon, all flow from how we answer this basic question. And so that's why it is that we have to realize what the question is. We have to realize that we have to make a decision on this question before all the facts are in. In other words, we're going to have to decide. Provide this entire question on a belief basis, because life won't allow us the luxury of postponing the question, shelving the question, tabling the question until such time as it might become clear, but right now, we've got to choose how we want to live our life. And I look around and I say, well, here are the people who live their lives as if we believing that we're descended from baboons, and here are the people who live their lives choosing to believe that we are touched by the finger of God, created by him. These are two different ways of living, two different ways of building families, two different ways of relating to business and money and finance. And I'm going to choose the one, and I'm going to believe according to that way, that's how it works. And when we come back, I'd like to dive into how these answers impact our money, our families, our very lives, and then we're going to be able to see what it is that we can do about them. Be right back.
Daniel Lapin 46:56
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and we continue with the most fundamental question of life, really, the one big question that everybody has to grapple with at some point or another, whether you're male or female or black or white or American or anything else, or whatever faith you are, or of no faith at all, the one big question we all struggle with is, how did Human beings arrive on this planet, and we do not have the luxury of ignoring the question, because so many of the other decisions we make in life are going to flow from that one. And this is the question we have to proceed with now, which is so fine. What difference does it make? And first of all, I want to explain that the way that science works is that we try and find an explanation for things we notice going on, and that explanation works for a while, until we find something that it doesn't explain, where It falls down. And this is always very, very painful for for for scientists. For instance, there was a British scientist called Rutherford who was trying to understand in the 19th century, early 20th, well, late 19, he was trying to figure out how atoms work. You know, what is the basic structure of the most elemental particle in the universe. And that, back then, they thought it was an atom, and he came up with, with an idea of what the inside of the atom might look like. And everyone was very excited, and he was faded and honored and and he was the the great scientist of the day. He was, he was blazing new paths through a new science of atomic physics. Well, you know what came the change of the century from the 19th to the 20th. And there was a Polish mathematician called Herman Minkowski. And then soon after that, there was a a Swiss mathematician called Albert Einstein. And you know what, pretty soon, the Rutherford model of the atom was no longer applicable. It didn't answer everything. It didn't explain everything. And and so the Rutherford model was consigned to obscurity. And, and I don't even think Rutherford lived that long. And generally, this sort of thing happens where people cling to their theories that for so long that like the generation in the desert had to die out before the Israelites could enter the Promised Land, the people whose minds had been poisoned by slavery discovered that it's much easier to take people out of slavery than it is to take slavery out of people. And Moses had to let that entire generation die because they were simply never going to be able to adapt. It was only their children who could adapt to life as free people in their own. Independent Land of Israel, and that happens very much in science as well, where sometimes a whole generation of scientists literally has to pass or retire, in most cases, because science scientists seem to have relatively short careers before the next generation is able to come up with something that more effectively explains the observation. So imagine, if you will, a little child seeing a radio for the very first time, and he sees this box that voices come out of. Now, if he imagine that he's a smart child, but with no knowledge at all of anything at all in the world other than this phenomenon, or, if you like, let's imagine that he's a Martian, a very smart Martian, after I've just finished explaining that there are not any Martians, as far as we well on Mars, on Mars, they certainly aren't. But for the purposes of this little Lapin thought experiment, let's just imagine a very smart, intelligent Martian just arriving on Earth. He's smart and intelligent on Mars. He knows nothing about Earth, and he sees a radio, and he sees his voices coming out of it. What does he think? What is his first thought? Well, he might come up with his scientific theory to explain this remarkable phenomenon of voices coming out of a teensy, weensy little box. And he might postulate to himself that there must be a breed of very small human beings. And they take these small human beings and they put them inside these boxes, and they play music in there, and they talk in there, and that's how we hear it. Now a perfectly reasonable conclusion for a Martian to arrive at and and that could be his scientific theory. And he might even write letters back to his friends on Mars and say they got two kinds of beings on this planet, two kinds of intelligent beings, tall ones and short ones. The short ones are Teensy. They're less than an inch big, and they fit inside these little boxes. They call radios, and they talk, and you can carry them around, and they tell you about the weather. All very interesting. Well, pretty soon his friends say, why don't you break one of those boxes open? Take a picture of the little guy. We'd love to see it. And he breaks a radio open. No little people inside. Bang Goes that theory. He's got to come up with another theory. That is how science works. Back in the early 1700s It was a wonderful time, because so much was beginning to be uncovered. There was a man called Leuven hook, Anthony lervenhook, who lived in Holland, and he was obviously a very devout and religious Christian. And he was the man who started building microscopes. Nothing like that had ever existed. He had a grind his own lenses out of glass, and he made better and better ones. And he started peering into water in you know, they used to sometimes put barrels of downspouts, and they'd fill up with rain water. And he took some of that water and looked, and to his astonishment, through his primitive microscope, he saw 1000s of teensy, weensy little organisms in the water cavorting around and swimming around and moving around in the water. And he he literally electrified the Royal Society of scientists back in London when he started telling them about these teensy creatures he's discovered that exist in water and and then he died in 1729, and then in right after, after that, was born, an Italian young man called Lazaro Spallanzani. And Spallanzani, also, also a Christian, decided to go further on this. And he was trying to struggle to find out where these things came from. And at that point, still, and we're talking about, you know, the mid 1700s so it's, you know, it's within modern American history. Human beings believed in the spontaneous generation of life that just out of water could come these little creatures out of nothing. They just happened. They just came. Spalanzani said, well, we need an experiment. And he challenged the orthodox way of thinking. And what he did is he put clean distilled water in a glass flask, which he then sealed shut, and he waited, and he saw that when he examined it weeks later, there were no little creatures in it. He therefore refuted the theory that in water, little things just came to life automatically. He later showed that when he didn't seal the water and he allowed air to get it at, tiny airborne microbes began to grow in the water. You know, we think of him as germ. So whatever you call them, but we realize now that, like everything else, microbes do have parents, but that's not something that was well known at the time. People had their pet theories, and along came Lazaro Spallanzani and and he said, Well, let's check it out. And sure enough,
Daniel Lapin 55:22
he turned out to be right. He upset the theories of everybody around and so one of the things that distinguished Spallanzani as a scientist was that he was meticulous about his honesty. He even devised experiments to challenge his own theories. He wanted to make sure that he arrived true at the truth and and that was wonderful, because what is very often the case, and there's a lot of bogus science, there's a lot of scamming going on in science, you know, because there's so much money in it, there's so many government grants they give out, and there's so many prestigious university positions that people come up with theories and then cling to them. Spallanzani was was an exception, and so the second half of the 18th century, Spallanzani turned the scientific world on its head, as he explained that everything had an origin, the the origin of human beings, by the way, at the same period of time, they used to believe in homunculus or homunculi, which is that in inside human reproductive organs and and material were teensy, weensy little human beings. Back to my Martian and the radio story, but they really believed that. And you can actually see 18th century pictures they painted of what these creatures looked like, tiny, tiny, little human beings, you know, contained in with inside human beings, because they simply had no idea of how a sperm and an egg fertilized joined together to become something entirely new. They had no knowledge of that was simply not understood. And so this idea of testing a theory is something that is very worthwhile doing. It doesn't happen quite as often as science, in science as it used to, because so much of science has become politicized today and on this, this discussion later on, we will, we will get to that. We will take a look at that as well, I can assure you. But for now, let me give you some examples, maybe just two examples, of how we might test the theory that human beings are nothing the result nothing but the result of a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution, where primitive organisms turned into some more sophisticated organisms, and they turned into turtles and they turned into baboons, and baboons turned into Neanderthals, and Neanderthals turned into Einstein and that's, that's how it goes. Well. How might you test that? Well, you see what you've got to realize, please and and just bear with me on this. Is that, for those of you who do believe that that's how human beings arrived on this planet, why? Then it follows as naturally as night follows day, that we are nothing but animals we are in in quality just the same as animals. We have less hair than some animals. We can run faster than tortoises, but not as fast as cheetahs. Our eyesight is is better than some creatures, but it's not as good as owls. And is it actually? Maybe owls use their ears well. We hear better than some, not as well as others. We're just another animal on the spectrum of animals. And so clearly, does this follow that Yale University ran a an exhibit a number of years ago at their Peabody Museum where they classified the human being as just another creature, and they show the sort of lineup. And to this very day, you can go to museums where they will show you the famous silhouette pictures of baboons. It's like seven or eight figures. The first one is very clearly a baboon, the last one is very clearly a person. And they show the progression. Little by little, the baboon goes upright, he stands up on two legs, and then he becomes more and they call him erectus. He is now an erect, standing creature. And this is very much a doctrine of belief within the school of thought that believes that we're here because of a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution. Fashion and, and if that's the case, then believing in that fashion and, and many very smart people do believe that they obviously have to conclude that we are nothing but smart animals, and that's why I said earlier that we are nothing but $10 worth of basic chemicals, right? It's not hard, it's not hard to figure out what we are. I mean, after all, we are. A whole lot of us is water, like 70% of us is water. And talking of that, allow me this very slight diversion, when I ask you to question coincidence, always question coincidence. What a strange coincidence that we human beings are the same proportion of water as the oceans are of the surface of the earth about 70 approximately 70% of the surface of the Earth is covered with sea, with ocean and about 70% of the weight of a human being is water. What a strange coincidence. Here's another one. Ocean water is salt water. What is the water inside the human being? Well, just taste your tears next time, if you're not sure, wow. Also salt water. Hmm, that's interesting. And could it be an accident that in the Lord's language, Hebrew, one word is used for the days of your lives and for the oceans of the world, same word, hmm, yamim in Hebrew means all the oceans and all the days of somebody's life, hmm. All right. Well, we still got to ask ourselves, are we really nothing but hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and potassium and sodium and chlorine? Is that what we are, or are we something really remarkable, creatures touched by the finger of God? What are the scientific questions we might subject the theory to in order to get at least a feeling for how we should believe and what makes more sense that I will tell you just as soon as we return in a moment,
Daniel Lapin 1:02:57
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and as usual, I do my best to reveal how the world really works. And one of the ways that the world really works in is that we we should probe for explanations, and we should test the explanations we come up with. We should try and understand the world in which we live, and on the basic question we've been talking about in this program of, how did human beings arrive on this planet? The two answers, as we've already covered, are essentially a materialistic answer and a religious answer, an answer that is secular, or an answer that is spiritual and and that's really a choice that we have to kind of make, which is, do we live only in a materialistic world, in which case only materialistic explanations can make sense, or do we live in a spiritual world? Are we human beings only body, or are we also soul? And we really have to ask ourselves that, because if we are only body, then every single problem that we have can be solved pharmacologically. There is a pill to be popped for everything. And sure enough, sure enough, today, a very large number of children at schools, particularly boys are drugged by the school. The school makes them take drugs because whatever is wrong surely can be fixed with a combination of chemicals. Remember, I said that this approach, the materialistic approach, says that. That we human beings, if we are nothing but the result of a random process of lengthy, unaided materialistic evolution, why then we are nothing but an arrangement of chemicals. And if that's the case, no matter what goes wrong, all we have to do is rearrange the chemicals until they're back the way they were meant to be, and you do that with more chemicals called pills and tablets, medications and drugs. Well, if that is indeed what we're all about, then yes, of course, no matter what else us, we need to resolve it with medication. But if, on the other hand, we are not just body, but we're also soul, well then there are certain problems that we all go through which have their origins in the Spirit, not the body, that have the origins in our soul, not the body, and this basic conflict is what drove apart to friends and colleagues in the 20th century, early 20th century, they were Sigmund Freud, the fodder The father of modern psychotherapy and Carl Jung. Now, Carl Jung was not a Jewish man, but he he was Christian. He He had some religious sensitivity, and he said that the so that the human being was body and soul, and he was the one who encouraged, he encouraged Wilson to come up with Alcoholics Anonymous. And you know that the the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous starts off with the idea in the belief, of a greater force. And all of this came about because Carl Jung recognized that we are body and soul, and therefore, if we're body and soul, then certain things that go wrong with our body could have the the basic problem embedded in the soul, not the body. And so the solution may not be chemicals, drugs, tablets and medications, but the solution may be something spiritual. And he recognized that alcoholism was not a physical as much as a spiritual disorder when people drank alcohol, although the addiction becomes a very powerful, difficult to resist, physical drive, the basic cause is the searching for some spiritual satisfaction. And he says that's why the old monks of medieval times used to call alcohol Spiritus in Latin, which evolved in English into spirits. And to this day, that word is used for alcohol, isn't it spirits, because the recognition that alcohol was useful in making spiritual pain go away, not physical spirit as a matter of fact, it's not even good for you physically, but it's so helpful spiritually that people fall prey. And it's very understandable. And so Carl Jung, great psychiatrist, encouraged the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the reason it has been the most, I mean, history's most successful treatment program for alcoholism is because of the spiritual element. But meanwhile, his friend and colleague, whose name was Carl Jung, who was a secularized Jew, decided that we must be here because of evolution. Therefore we are nothing but an arrangement of chemicals. Therefore there is nothing wrong with us that cannot be resolved chemically. And although the pharmacological industry, the pharmaceutical industry had not evolved yet in in Carl Jung's days. And Carl Jung, pardon me, I'm talking about Albert Einstein. What is the matter with me? I'm sorry. Talking about Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Freud, most of his work was in the first half of the 20th century, mostly before World War Two. The pharmaceutical industry hadn't yet evolved to the point it is today, where there's literally a pill claimed to solve everything. And so as a result, Sigmund Freud became the dirty old man of psychiatry, where every single thing had a most base and materialistic solution, namely a.
Daniel Lapin 1:10:01
And and he saw that in almost everything. Now, I will tell you this, that when I first read Sigmund Freud's introductory lectures in psychotherapy, I saw that this was a very, very smart and thoughtful man. I mean, this was, this is not a nobody at all, and, and those will, I mean, I regretted that I didn't ever have the opportunity. I didn't live in the right era to be able to hear those lectures in person. Actually, I never knew. I must find out if they recorded. I don't know about that, but they, they, I read them, and they were wonderful. But then, of course, he also wrote a fair amount about religion. He wrote about Moses, and he spoke about religion as an illusion and and so to this day, although there are many, many people in the psychiatric industry who follow the Freudian approach, that tends to be an approach where being faithful to the Freudian model means regarding the human being as all body, not soul, and therefore, solve everything with pharmaceuticals, solve everything with drugs and and that's where we are today. I'm afraid it's just how things are now. The the the the struggle between these two men resulted in them breaking up eventually, because it was not, it was not possible for two people with such with two such conflicting and incompatible views of reality and how the world worked to get on. And sure enough, they didn't. And there are people they who practice Jungian psychiatry, and there are people who, the overwhelming majority, who practice Freudian psychiatry, again, a simplification of a vast field, but enough to give you the idea that real life consequences flow from whether you regard the human Being as a unique, special creature touched by God, or whether you regard the human being as just an accident of a mindless Cosmos, there really are consequences. And one of the ways you you you can test, and again, you're not necessarily going to end up with a conclusive result, because that's kind of not really how science works, but you can certainly end up with clues and guides. So for instance, one of the the most amazing things about human beings is altruism. Now, when a parent gives up a life in order to save a child that can be answered by the behavioral biologists, that can be answered by those who say that we're just sophisticated animals, and like all animals, we are focused on the survival of our species, and so for a parent to Give up a life to save a child, makes perfect sense. You'd expect that to happen, okay, fine, but that's not what I'm talking about when I speak about altruism. I'm speaking about when a stranger sacrifices for someone else, when soldiers give up their lives or risk their lives in order to save their comrades. That's altruism of the highest order. How does that work? In what way does that help evolution? And this is a problem whilst all kinds of ingenious theories are advanced, because those who do believe that we're here because of an accident of of statistical, random evolution. Those do work very hard because they're baffled by the question of altruism. They work very hard at trying to come up with an explanation that explains what evolutionary purpose is served by altruism. It's a very tough one to answer, because to save my own flesh and blood makes sense. But why would I save somebody with whom I only share a religion or a nationality, and these are spiritual constructs. I mean, after all, no animal thinks as of thinks of itself as being part of a nationality. You know, there's no animals that say, Well, you know, I'm sorry, I can't come down there. I'm a Canadian bear. I don't go to the United States, right? Animals don't think that way. Nationality is a human, spiritual construct. It's not an accident, by the way, that socialism, which believes in an utterly materialistic world, not an accident. That socialism believes in the abolition of nationalities. In fact, the song that communists sing is called the International I out of my kindness. Consideration for you, I will refrain from singing it, but that's what it is the International. And before John Lennon had his conversion process where he rethought a lot of the things of his life, later in his life, he sang imagine, and there was again, a socialist dream of everyone, part of one, no religion, no nationality, all, one big, happy human family. Well, doesn't work like that, does it? And and so the the the idea of us caring about people with whom we have only spiritual connection, not blood connection, is very powerful. So in other words, tribal societies make sense on a materialistic level, right? Tribal societies would make sense because it's all blood. And in places like Saudi Arabia, for instance, the aristocracy, the ruling people are all relate related by blood, which is not true in more spiritual democracies like, you know, England and America, for instance, where the ruling people are not necessarily all related to one another, other than occasional exceptions. So where there is a spiritual reality, we acknowledge that connection. I will sacrifice for a fellow American. I will sacrifice for a fellow believer in God. You know, whatever it is, but these are things that cannot be explained in a materialistic view. So altruism is definitely a problem. But it's not the only problem. There are others as well. There are very serious problems in the in the world view, of materialistic human beings, and one of them is an almost insurmountable one, if somebody truly believes that there is no creation, there is no God, we human beings, are on this planet because of a unique accident of evolution, which hasn't happened anywhere else in the universe, as far as we know. But it did happen here. You have a big problem when I say one word to you, just one word, and all of a sudden, you are thrown back and flung into disarray as you scramble to come up with some way to explain this phenomenon. What is that one word? I'll tell you just as soon as we get back, stay with us. Don't go away.
Daniel Lapin 1:18:36
We're back. Yes, we were talking about the fact that the world of Western academia, Western politics, Western entertainment, is today almost entirely dominated by a materialistic view of reality, and there are very real life consequences to having that position. And I said that that there was one word that terrified materialists, all those people who have decided to run their lives on the belief that mankind is on planet earth because of a lengthy process of materialistic, random evolution, there was one word that would send them reeling back in horror and terror. What is that word? Here it comes. Are you ready? Placebo, that's right, placebo, placebo, scary word, if that's what you believe. Why is it scary? Let me explain you see, amazingly enough, no less a place, no less a place than hot. Harvard, the highest pinnacle of American academia. Harvard now has a clinic focused entirely on placebo. It's amazing, when you think about it, absolutely remarkable, and this is, it's called the program in placebo studies and the therapeutic encounter. And this is a, it's a Harvard affiliated program, Harvard affiliated hospital. This is amazing. And this, this began about, oh, about 15 years ago or thereabouts, maybe a little bit more. And what happened was that, I think it, I think it flowed from a particular clinical drug trial which had 270 subjects, and they all, all the subjects complained of very horrible side effects. The patients had joined the study hoping to alleviate horrible pain in their arms and elbows and shoulders and wrists, and in one part of the study, half of the subjects got tablets, got pain reducing pills, and the other half were offered acupuncture treatments and and they were warned that these, both these things, had side effects. They both alleviated pain, but they came with various side effects. And would you believe people on half the people, 135 people, were given acupuncture, and half the people were given tablets, and they all began calling in, saying the side effects were killing them. The side effects were terrible. They were making them sluggish and causing pain. Even, by the way, even the ones who had acupuncture, they had been told, Look, the acupuncture will make your pain go away, but it will cause redness on your skin and swelling. Listen to this carefully. I'm telling you something truly remarkable, and the side effects. All, they all complained about the side effects and but they also reported real relief from the carpal tunnel syndrome and the shoulder pain, everything that so they were having the side effects, and they were being cured. They were the pain, the pain relief was working very well. Now Harvard was astounded by this, and this was, I think, part of the reason they started up a whole study center, because these findings were absolutely exceptional. You want to know why, because the pills that half the patients had been given were actually made out of cornstarch. There was no medication. There was they were they were placebos. There was nothing there. And guess what? The acupuncture needles, they were retractable, bogus. No skin ever got punctured. No skin ever got pierced by a needle. And so these, these patients, were part of this amazing study right where nothing was done to them, but they were told by people who looked very impressive, with a lot of degrees. They were told, looks at listen, you got to be ready for the side effects, although it's very effective with the pain. And sure enough, they reported great pain relief, but terrible side effects, including swelling of the skin and redness of this. Can you okay, my friends, this is why those people who view the world as entirely material hate the word placebo because placebo proves the existence of a soul. Placebo teaches us about holistic medicine that very often we suffer from, what a long time, a long mid 20th century, wasn't understood, and that was psychosomatic disorders. In fact, my father was involved in a post world war two psychosomatic situation, and it was just at the beginning people were not yet sure of what this was all about, but what psychosomatic disorders were was where something in the soul caused the body to have a physical manifestation, a physical symptom. In this particular case, was a member of my father's synagogue who started getting pain in his arm, and it got worse and worse, and then his arm got weaker and weaker, and finally his arm became paralyzed, and he went to neurologists and physicians and specialists and everybody came back with the same thing. There is no damage. There is no nothing is wrong with your arm. No. Are okay. Muscles are okay, bones are okay. There is no there's nothing wrong. But the guy couldn't move his arm. It was just painful and hurtful and damaging, and he couldn't do a thing. And so my father worked on the basis that this must be, therefore a spiritual condition, which, since had never got treated, resulted in a physical disorder, got it. This is all what holistic medicine is grappling to understand. And so my father started talking to him, and they had conversational session after session wherein it turned out that the most life shattering experience he had was that he served in the South African army that fought on the side of the allies in World War Two. Much of the South African army was assigned by the British High Command and by the Allied Chiefs of Staff to defend the British fortress in Tobruk in North Africa. I think that is, I think it's in Libya, where Libya is today, if I'm not mistaken, but it's somewhere near there. And Tobruk was a very big fortress. Was a massive fuel supply place. They had their fuel tanks there, and the Allies really depended on it. And at a certain point in the war, the Germans and the Italians captured Tobruk and took a lot of people prisoner. This particular individual was assigned to a perimeter defense of the fortress of Tobruk, and he and his buddy had a machine gun nest where they were trying to keep the invaders away, and the British, the German and Italian forces, were getting closer and closer, and he was firing away. And his his buddy was helping to feed the ammo belt into the machine gun, and he was keeping keeping the advancing line of of Germans back and, and all of a sudden he he heard his his buddy call out in pain, and he said, I've been hit. And and he started groaning. And so this, this man tells my father, I had no choice, but I had to start feeding the ammo belt myself. He couldn't do it, and he was moaning. And then he said to me, pass me some water. Pass me some water. And I said, I will in a minute. Hold on. And he said, I couldn't give it him just then, because I had a switch. We'd run out of Ammon ammo on one belt out of feed in the next belt into the machine gun. Meanwhile, the machine gun barrel is starting to get red from the heat, and normally it needs to rest, cool down, and I've got the Germans and Italians clambering up the hill in front of me, and I've got to keep him back. He says, When finally there was a lull in the fighting, I turned around to grab the bottle of water and give it to my buddy, and he was dead. And it was clear to my father, the way the man told the story, that this was a very powerful, very moving and very soul shattering moment. And my father built, I remember using furniture and cushions and a couch, he replicated the the machine gun nest outside to Brooke, and he said to the man, he got my mother to bring in a broomstick. And he said, Here's your machine gun. Just position yourself just the way you were. Says, now have me just where your body was when he got hit
Daniel Lapin 1:28:34
and and he said, Now show me what you would have done when he when he wanted the water. How would you have passed the water? And the man took his paralyzed arm that hadn't worked for over a year, picked up the bottle of water my father had put there as a prop, and passed it to my father, and he Oh, he said, What long I move on? And my father then explained to him, he said, you feel so bad. You've been punishing yourself, and you've been telling yourself you contributed to your friends demise and all you could, you could have made his last few minutes more less painful by giving him the water. And you, you've been psychically and spiritually beating yourself up until the very arm that could have and in your mind should have given him the water and didn't gets punished with paralysis. Says, Now you just saw it's not really paralyzed. This is all spiritual, and you've got to understand that you are doing what you had to be doing. Your friend himself would have been the first to tell you, keep firing, because the water is not going to be too much. Do me much good when we get overrun by the Italians and the Germans and and so by explaining to him that he this, this is this is war, you very often have to make a choice between two tough things. And here, his choice to to keep Manning his weapon was, in fact, the. Thing for him to do. And this is, in fact, what cured the man. And this, this got written up. This was one of the early cases of psychosomatic disorder that was well understood in South Africa, where where this event took place. So placebo and psychosomatic disorder, these kinds of ideas are ones that cause tremendous consternation to those who see the world in purely materialistic terms, because if we are purely materialistic, then the only way to fix and cure us is with material things, namely tablets and pills and medication and drugs. But the very fact that there is such a thing as a placebo which has no physical effect, it's only spiritual, and it depends on your belief in the in the Doctor Who gave it to you, and your belief in how well he explains what it's going to do for you. And yes, it's all untrue. It doesn't matter. Powerful belief in something untrue is more effective than a lack of belief in something that is true. We human beings are incredibly impacted by belief, incredibly impacted something very, very powerful. And it's something we have to understand. And so as we as we continue with this program, you're going to be able to see more and more instances of how this applies. And more importantly, you're going to see more and more instances of how you can apply it in your own life. And that's where it gets to be truly, very interesting indeed. Now I said that we were going to take a look at some of the ways in which how you answer this question of namely, how did we get on this planet? Is going to impact your attitudes about taxes, about inheritance, about about all many, many things that are the at the heart of what is the essence of life, all impacted. Now we're going to take a look at how that is and why that is. Why is it that if somebody tells me how he would answer the question of how human beings arrived on this planet. I can tell him what his opinion is about the inheritance tax. I can tell you what he believes about education in public school, even before he tells us himself, wow, how does that work? Well, because we human beings, are hardwired to seek spiritual coherence. We are hardwired to find consistent meaning in our lives, and so much of it flows from how we decide to answer that question, and remember, there's no option of waiting, because many decisions in life have to be made long before we're likely to have any definitive answer, beliefs, not facts. That's what governs everything? We're going to look into that, and I'll show you why taxes flow so directly from that question, as soon as we resume in a moment, filling
Daniel Lapin 1:34:17
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin. And the question we are exploring is, what are some of the political, cultural, real life implications of how you answer the fundamental existent, existential question of, well, how did we get to be on this planet. How did that happen? Are we here? Because God created us in His image and put us here? That's one possibility. And the only other possibility there is is that we are here through a process of unaided, materialistic. Evolution. Now I just want to clarify that there really is a dichotomy here. There's a duality, like I explained at the beginning of this program. It's one or the other, and the two answers are not only opposite of one another, they're incompatible. Now some people have sometimes said to me, well, Rabbi Lapin, you know, maybe God decided to use evolution and and the answer is yes, of course, God could have used a lawn mower or a food processor. He could have used whatever he wanted. That's not the point. That's not the option. The question is not, what did God use? The question is, was God involved at all. And that's why there are only two answers, yes or no. Either God was involved, and he created us in His image. I don't know what he used to create us. It doesn't matter for now, but he did create us. Or alternatively, the other view, which is unaided, materialistic evolution, no God, no intelligent force, no nothing. Just random coincidence, collision of atoms and molecules that began to form the organic building, building blocks of life. You got to choose. It's one or the other. What are the consequences? Well, let's take a look. One of the consequences is, is very, very interesting. Remember that If you're going to say that we are not creatures touched by the finger of God, and that God had nothing to do with us, and this was a totally materialistic process. Why? Then the conclusion is that you and I are nothing but sophisticated, smart, intelligent animals. We don't swim as well as whales, but we swim better than rats. We we don't run as fast as leopards, and we're not as big and strong as elephants. Our brains are bigger than many of other creatures. There may be some creatures, I don't know about whales or elephants, their brains may weigh more than ours. I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. The point is that it's just a case of degree. We're just different from them in a bit more hair, a bit less hair, bigger head, smaller head, but we're all basically just animals. Well, if that's the case, then it makes sense that if we are animals, we need to be taken care of, either by a farmer or by a zookeeper. One or the other. Think about that for a moment. We need a farmer or a zookeeper, and it so happens that people who look at life this way think they know the very perfect zookeeper and farmer to take care of us. It's called government, and I want you to think for a moment about what happens. Imagine, again, it's a silly thought experiment, but imagine a cow coming to a farmer one evening and saying to the farmer, Farmer Jones, before we quit for the day, I need to speak to you on behalf of all the other cows. I've been assigned the spokesman, and I've come here to tell you that we all feel you're taking away too much of our milk. Got it. We'd like to set a cap above which you cannot take the milk. This is negotiable. Maybe you'll get 50% of the milk we produce. We'll keep 50% maybe you'll get 60, we keep 40. But let's talk about it. Bottom line is you can't have everything. Farmer Jones puts down his pail, pushes his head, hat back on his head, looks at the cow and says, look here, cow, I want you to understand something. You're here because I arranged for the veterinarian to come along and impregnate your mother with sperm I bought from a farmer who has a few bulls. That's why you're here. And I was here to birth you the night you were born, and whenever you're sick, I'm the one who gives you medicine, and I feed you every day. See that tractor, I drive it over here with your feet every single day. And when you're dead, I'll haul your carcass away and bury it. But until, until then, you're mine. I own you, you will give me all the milk you make. Think about it, and you'll realize that's the deal that socialism makes with citizens. We will educate your children. We'll give you medicine when you're sick. So we'll give you money to live on when you're too old to work, and we might even bury you at the end of the day, but until then, we own you. Until then you give us everything. Now we might be really nice, and we might end up just charging you 70% income tax or 50% income tax, but no socialist politician would ever give you an answer to the question of, what is the maximum percentage that any citizen should ever have to pay of tax? And no one will answer that because, in the final analysis, they don't want to rule out 100% because that's the ultimate deal to every man according to his need, from every man according to his ability. That's the ultimate dream. And you might remember I spoke earlier about there being a twoness to the world. There's male and female, there's day and night, there's light and darkness, there's heat and cold. And you know, some of those things have a spectrum, but others are digital, right? They're, they're, they're, they are, they are just what they are. Well, that's not, those are not the only things. Those aren't the only things that are dual, you see, and I'm going to, I'm going to come back to that and and lay, lay that out for you. But be aware that the other thing that's that's also dual, and works in twos, is ways of arranging human society. And that's very important. How many ways do we have arranging human society? Well, we've got no arrangement at all, total anarchy, which nobody really likes. And then we've got a vision of America's founders, which is based on a biblical, what I call an abramitic vision of human society. Then we have a centralized tyranny, where a central government takes control of more and more and more people's lives. That's the Tower of Babel built by Nimrod so that's a nimrodian style of life. And then the next one is tribal. There aren't a lot of ways of organizing human society. And what almost everyone agrees is that the first one of anarchy is intolerable, and that's one of the reasons that after anarchy, people accept dictatorships. There was anarchy in Italy that brought in Mussolini. There was anarchy in Germany, and that brought in And you remember the old joke, sad, sick joke, but people say, well, at least he made the trains run on time. Yes, he killed millions of people. They said it about Stalin also, but he made the In other words, he restored order. And human beings do not like living in a state of civil chaos and anarchy, and so you rule that out. That leaves three possibilities, tribalism, abramidic or Nimrod. Well, tribalism. Here's the problem with tribalism, and that is, if you're not born into the right tribe, things don't go quite as well for you. And one of the ideas formulated by a political philosopher, who was it rolling, I think so, who said, look the way to design a human society is to say you can choose whatever society you want, but you cannot choose where you'll be born in that society. So you go ahead and choose what society you want the country to have, but you may be born to a single mother. You might be born to a wealthy married couple. You might be born in a good situation. You might be born handicapped, and so you've got to decide what sort of society do you want, and you've got to make that decision before you get to say
Daniel Lapin 1:44:12
where you belong, where what's going to happen to you. That's the problem with tribalism. Tribalism is not a great way to organize the society. There's something wrong. There's something else wrong with tribalism, which is that no tribal society has figured out how to build a bicycle factory, let alone a chip fabrication plant. Tribal societies don't progress. They don't achieve very much. And so unless you happen to be in a tribal society, and you are in the ruling tribe, and you're having a wonderful time. Other than that, in that situation, almost everyone else says, You know what? Given a choice, I don't think a tribal society works. So when you rule out anarchy and you rule out tribalism, there really are only two other ways to organize human society. Abraham and Nimrod, freedom, self accountability, independence and economic ownership, privacy, or alternatively, centralized governmental tyranny, increased government control, diminished freedom, diminished independence, and no private ownership of wealth. That's pretty much the choice. And so again, again, we get this Tunis where there there's two choices. It's one or the other. And a little further on, we'll, we'll understand what Abraham and Nimrod have to do with the whole story. But for now, let's go back to the cow talking to the farmer, and the farmer says, Sorry, I'm the farmer, and you'll give me everything in exchange for which I'll take care of all your needs. Which is kind of the deal that centralized government tyrannies make with their citizens. You work, you get what you need to keep body and soul together, but everything else belongs to us. That's what they say. And so the farmer is a very good metaphor for that governmental role. So is the zookeeper. By the way, what is a responsible zookeeper do when after he feeds the lions, he comes back a few hours later and notices that one lion has gathered all the meat that he gave out to each of the lions in one big pile in front of him, and he's keeping all the other lions away and they're hungry. He's got all the meat. What does the responsible zookeeper do if he discovers that when he put out all the feed for the elephants. One elephant gathered all the feed to himself, and all the other elephants are sitting around looking hungrily at the big elephant who took all the food. Well, a responsible zookeeper goes out and redistributes the meat. A responsible zookeeper goes in and redistributes the feed for the elephants. In other words, my friends, I your rabbi. If I were persuaded, if you could persuade me, somehow, utterly convince me, that we are on this planet not because of a god. There's no God. We're here through a process of unaided, materialistic evolution, and that we are nothing but sophisticated animals. I will be the first to preach and practice redistribution of of wealth, of everything. It's the only moral thing to do if we are nothing but animals, that means we're incapable of creativity. If we're nothing but animals, it means whatever food there is has to be hunted or gathered, and there's no reason why one person should have any more than anyone else. But if in fact we are touched by the finger of God, and if in fact we are unique creatures, called human beings, uniquely among all the creatures of the planet, uniquely equipped to create, not just to consume. Then each of us has a soul, and if with a soul comes a different way of evaluating the lazy food equation. Some people say I'd rather sit under a tree and eat less. Other people say I want to work very, very hard because I want to be able to eat more. Because, if we have souls, each of us behaves in our own unique way. Animals all behave the same animal behavior. Animals do what animals do in each species, human beings a different story entirely. What has this got to do with inheritance? Well, think about that for just a moment, because I'm going to be back with the answer in just a moment,
Daniel Lapin 1:49:39
I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin and we carry on with the discussion of how it is that the way you answer a philosophical question can have a lot to do with the inheritance tax that is applied to. People's possessions when they pass on. Let me try and explain. Look, if indeed, the answer to the existential question of how did we get to be here is that we're only here by a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution. Well, then that means that we're nothing but animals, as I've said, and if we're nothing but our it's pretty obvious, right? It's straightforward. It follows very simply that that if primitive protoplasm became amoebas, amoebas and amoebas turned into turtles and turtles turned into orangutans and orangutans turned into people, then people are just a little bit further advanced than orangutans, but we're basically animals. And if we're basically animals, then any specific special contact between us and our children is nothing but a false conceit. There's no truth to it. After all, when did you ever see a dog that recognized its puppies? When did you ever see a dog go up to another dog and said, aren't you, my son? There's no such thing. And even the connection between an animal and its mother lasts for only a short while, and then it's gone. But the idea that this particular creature touched by the finger of God retains a relationship between parent and child, till life separates them, till death separates them. That is unique to human beings. No other creature does that, and so people who shape their worldview based on a materialistic approach that everything is only biology and materialism. Well, those people say, Well, wait a second. When a human being dies, it shouldn't be any more relevant to his children than it is when a dog dies to his children. It's it's just not that relevant to them. You might say it's sad, but it's sad for everybody. The loss of of a member of the community is the member of a loss of a try same for everybody and and their approach is, look, it is totally wrong that when a a wealthy person dies, that only a tiny little group of children, namely those that are biologically related to him, should benefit. That's not right, because we're one community. We're one group of people, and we're all animals. In a sense, we're just sophisticated animals, and it's wrong for any one group to get more than other groups. And the only way to treat the possessions of somebody who goes home to the Lord, the only way to deal with the possessions of somebody who dies is to distribute his possessions among everybody else. And because that's not always practical, we'll have the zookeeper or the farmer take care of it for us. In other words, the government dream is 100% death tax. The more polite name of the tax is inheritance tax, but it's really a death tax, and as you can tell, I consider it to be profoundly immoral, not only because the owner of that, the departed human being, already paid taxes. That's his money. He's paid taxes when he earned it, there was withholding, and he paid property taxes and he paid capital gains taxes, and it's all been taxed, so now it's his and he should be able to do whatever he wants with it. If he wants to give it to his children, they should go to his children. But that only works if you believe that human beings are unique creatures touched by the finger of God, but as long as you believe that human beings are absolutely nothing but animals and we're just sophisticated animals, then there is no particular relationship between people and their children. It's a biological one. And as soon as your children are grown up, just the way, when a puppy is developed, it can have nothing more to do with its parents. So it is with human beings move right on. And by the way, that is why, in the early days of Israel, the kibbutz movement took children away from their parents and raised them by the kibbutz in a in a sort of group area, because the idea was to shatter the relationship between parents and children. There was the. That was the goal, that was the idea. That's what they're trying to do, to separate and and that's why it was that in the Stalinist era in Russia, there were rewards and honors for any children that turned in their parents betrayed their parents. You know, you farmers were supposed to hand in all their man, all their everything they grew, was supposed to be handed in other words, 100% taxation like the farmer and the cow. Stalin arranged and ruled that every farmer has to hand in everything he grows. And then the local communist apparatus will determine how much each person it'll they'll divide it up. I mean, really, that's just exactly how they worked. And there were some farmers who either felt that they had grown it and worked hard for their crops and they wanted to keep enough for their families before they handed in the rest when their children betrayed them, those children were rewarded and the parents were executed. And I don't know if this is still the case in Russia, but during the days of the Soviet Union, there were many statues of a little boy called Pavlov Morozov. He was a member of the Young Pioneer movement, which was like the communist Boy Scouts. And he famously handed in his parents. He told his he told the local communist apparatus that his parents were keeping some food back for the family. They were not being good communists. They didn't hand it all in like they were told to. And the parents were executed. And little public Morozov was was honored and raised by the state. And I don't know what became of him, but I think he was, you know what? I think he was killed by an uncle. I think he was, I think he was, there was revenge going on anyway. It's not, it's not relevant. It's not important for now. But the important thing to realize is that one of the big areas in which God created us and we evolved materialistically separate. Those two worldviews separate, is on the question of inheritance tax, whereas those of us who believe that we were created by God would say there should be no such thing as inheritance tax, the government has nothing to do with it. Keep the farm, the farmer and the zookeeper out of it, because when the man passes on, it's between him and his family. He will give it to his wife, his widow. He'll give it to his children, but it's nobody else's business. Along comes the other viewpoint of the materialistic worldview, and says, No, wait a sec. Look when he dies, it's just like an animal. He dies. All the stuff is left behind. It's not his, he doesn't exist anymore. And if it's not his, whose is it? It's the state's belongs to everybody, and as a as an agent of everybody, the government will take control of it, and that is why the real dream? The Labor government in England lived this dream after World War, 200% inheritance tax, everything that a person leaves when he dies. What do you mean? Children? Everyone's children should benefit, not just yours, and that is why it is that if anybody confides in me as to whether he believes that we are here as the result of unaided materialistic evolution, or he believes and if he a person tells me that that's what he believes, I will tell you where he stands on the inheritance text. It's almost inevitable. It follows on absolutely naturally. How about the area of if we are created by God, and we are unique creatures touched by the finger of God, then the first few chapters of Genesis are a manual. They tell us virtually all we need to know about male female relationships,
Daniel Lapin 1:59:09
and we understand that a good and loving God provided us with an entire approach to how to relate to someone of the opposite gender, and there's a thing called marriage between a man and a woman, and that is something that civilizes Man, and it's good for women, and it creates the appropriate environment for their children. And what's more, God made the interaction between male and female pleasurable in order to help us understand that the deepest joy in life is doing something for another person, and we begin to understand that the entire area of physical intimacy is endowed with the sacred. It's part of the way we have connecting with God. It, because when you think about it, what would be the best way of getting to to know a musician? Let's imagine you really, really, really liked Freddie, Mercury of Queen. It's a British band from the 70s. And if you could have your choice, you'd love to spend an evening having dinner with Freddie Mercury. There's only one problem, and that is, he's dead, so you cannot have dinner with him. It's not possible. And so how do you express your infatuation with Freddie Mercury? There's only one thing to do, and that is get to know his work. Because if you can surround yourself with his creations and absorb them and wrap yourself around them and make them a part of your life, that's as close as you can get to Freddie Mercury you follow. Think about this. You want to get close to the Creator. You want to be close to God. It's really tough. It's not as if you can invite God to dinner. It's not as if you go for a walk with God. What's the best way get to know His creation? You can study the world. You can study science, you can study physics, and little by little, you will begin to see the unity in creation. You'll begin to connect with what God is, and your relationship with him becomes strengthened. But there's another way as well. You can look at the apex of His creation. It's all very well looking at mountains and lakes and rivers and trees. But how about looking at another human being? That's the apex of God's creation. This is like Freddie Mercury's best song. How do you do this? Well, you get to know another person, and that's why God uses in the Bible the phrase and he knew her. Cain knew his wife. That's not just a poetic euphemism that is there to tell us that physical intimacy is at the heart of getting to know another person. Knowing her, she knows him, he knows her. That's part of it, and one of the reasons that people tend to use religious language in in passion like oh God, is because there's a deep realization deep within our souls that by getting to know this, this other person, in Such a soul bearing incredible way, we are actually getting a deeper insight into the creator, the Creator who created them. And so that is why it is that to people who view us as the children of God, is sacred, but to people who believe that we are here through a materialistic process, is secular. It's it's just purely biological. Guess who's in charge of curriculum of government schools. We're accustomed to calling them public schools, but I don't think that's absolutely accurate. Anything government school is a far more accurate word or phrase to use for the system of education to which the majority of American students are subjected. And maybe in if you're living in another country, it's probably true there as well. What's that all about? Well, ed is all about biology, because they truly, and in a very heartfelt way, believe that that's the whole story. There isn't anything else. And if there isn't anything else, it's pretty clear, isn't it? Isn't it clear that that's all that that's what it's all about, and that's why it is that if you tell me how you believe on the question of how human beings arrived on the planet, I'll tell you what you think about It's pretty predictable, and that's rather remarkable. Now that brings us as far as we're going to go in this program, but don't miss the next one, because we're going to move on to the difference between physical and spiritual. We're going to look at the beginning, the very first verse of the Bible. We're going to look at the difference between hardware and software in the computer business. We're going to understand the Internet, and we're going to begin to get a deeper insight into the forces that shape politics, that develop civilization, and yes, that imperil and threaten civilization with very frightening consequences. And if we have any interest whatsoever in defending everything we hold dear, you need that information. Coming up next time I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, God bless.
