Fireside Chat Ep. 307 — What Does God Care About Most? | Fireside Chat

Hi everybody, Dennis Prager. Wow. You are meeting Mr. Tubbs. Not the first time I acknowledge, but rare, a rare Mr. Tubbs sighting. You have no idea how much my wife worked to get him into this bed. And so far it's a good minute and a half. I would say that he's been in there. All right. A lot to talk to you about and take your questions. Thank you for being with me. So last week I spoke about how few American students, and I suspect this is true almost universally know about evil, know about how much evil took place in the 20th century. I mentioned that 45% couldn't even identify Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp, uh, and probably 80% couldn't identify, uh, Gulag where Stalin killed tens of millions of Soviet citizens and so on. So I have a related subject and you can go on the internet and see my column on the subject. It's one this week. It's fascinating for me to see the reactions people have. I always read comments, not just on my own articles, but on any article on a, on a subject that is of great interest to me. I titled the article, what does God most care about? I want to make sure that that is the exact title. What does God most care about? Yes, that's, that's what I wrote about. And I have an answer and it's really important whether you are secular or religious. Not everybody agrees with me. That's fine. But I'd like to make the case that God most cares about good and evil more than anything else. God cares about how his creatures treat each other. His creatures are us. And I give about 10 different arguments. I will give you a few of them now. It's clearly important because I don't think a lot of religious people have taught that God cares most about how you treat your fellow human beings. They've, a lot of people have taught that God cares most often about something else, theology, ritual, worship. I mean, a whole host of things. So let me give you argument. Number one, every society that I know of every ancient society of which I am aware, had a flood story or as anthropologists call it a flood myth. A story about how the gods, it was always the gods destroyed the world and started all over, usually with an individual, sometimes with a group, sometimes with two individuals, whatever it might be. There is such a flood story. Of course, the most famous one is in the Bible when Noah was saved. That's Noah's Ark. Why did God in the Bible? I don't care if you believe in the story or not as literal, it doesn't matter to me. The lesson is what matters to me. What is being taught matters to me. Why did God destroy the world? It says so because it was filled with people doing evil toward one another. That's why the land was filled with Hamas. Hamas is a Hebrew word, often meaning violence. Evil is obviously the intended term. That's why God destroys the world because it was filled with evil. By the way, that was unique. Of all the stories I have read, that was the one that only emphasized the moral issue, evil. Here's an example. The most famous flood story from the same part of the world at the same time was in Mesopotamia. At the same time that the Bible was written, or at least Genesis was written, about, let's see, about 3,200 years ago, or whatever you dated, 3,000 years ago, it doesn't matter. At about that time in Mesopotamia, there was a story called the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the gods destroyed the world then too, but you know why? You'll love this. You will truly love this. At this point, let me remind you that the rest of the Fireside Chat, and I hope it's obvious, I hope it's obvious to you that it's worth watching or listening to the rest, it's at a prageru.com. And we do that because we don't trust that the big tech companies will just not pull the plug one day. So we'd like you to get used to watching the Fireside Chat and all PragerU content, straight to PragerU. Also, there's a PragerU app, which makes it really easy. So see you there and we continue.