Fireside Chat Ep. 305 — How Can We Explain Bad Religious People? | Fireside Chat

Hi everybody, the Fireside Chat, Dennis Prager here, and Snoopy is in position. I hate to say it, but he might be on some relaxant. He's not? Wow, I'm impressed. One day, Mr. Tubbs, hopefully, will take his seat, but it's happy. Good to have Snoopy. Well, my friends, this is an opportunity to do what I do every week with you. I'm very committed to the Fireside Chat, and I have a sense that many of you are, because so many people make reference to Otto, the late Otto, and to the Fireside Chat, wherever I go. Very tough subject that I'm going to open up with before I take your questions. Very tough, but it's so important. There are many, many important subjects, and so I won't say this is the most important, but I don't know of one that's more important, and people don't like to deal with it. Certainly religious people don't like to deal with it, and that is, and I guess it's a two-part question, it's the same, they're related, they're not identical. How do you explain bad religious people? Isn't religion supposed to make people good? And if it doesn't make people good, I don't mean perfect, I mean good, then what's its primary use? Some people will have different answers, by the way. To me, the primary question is, does it make good people? That's why, to be honest, and I know not all of you will agree, that's just, it's fine, it doesn't matter. We have to understand that on many issues, disagreement is fine. On some issues, it's not. If you think that it is okay to put kids on hormone blockers, that's not a disagreement I respect. You're not only wrong, you are promoting evil, a term I rarely use, just accept it, you know, really terrible things. So sometimes disagreement is necessary and unbridgeable, and sometimes it's necessary but it's okay. So I'll just give one example, then I'll go back to the subject. So people very frequently will speak about searching for the true religion, and I have a different view on that subject, and I brought more people to religion, I think, than any other living American, so I have a very good track record bringing people to religion. Part of the reason is, I'm not advocative of any one faith. If it's Bible-based and it will make you a better person, I'm happy. That's all I ask. But people will say, you have to find the true religion. Okay, fair enough. My definition is, if the religion makes you a considerably more decent human being, then that, to me, suffices. I don't use the word true because it's a matter of faith. It's true that I have five fingers on each hand. That's not a matter of faith. But religion is not empirically verifiable. I believe God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, but I believe it. I don't know it. I know I have ten fingers. I don't know that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. I believe it deeply, but I acknowledge that I don't know it. And that's why it's not the same. When you say you're looking for truth in religion, it's not the same as truth empirically. This is true, five fingers. Religion, by definition, involves faith. So I judge everything by its fruits. That's why I've always said, if the left made good people, I'd be a leftist, to be honest. But it doesn't. It makes bad people. Liberalism is not here or there. Conservatism is mixed. But leftism makes bad people. The doctrines are embittering. They make ungrateful people. And ingrates are all mean. There is no nice ingrate on the face of the earth. So I do. That's my judgment. I admit it, because my deepest religious belief is called ethical monotheism. God's primary demand is that we treat each other good or well, depending on which word you wish to use, the adjective or the adverb. By the way, if you're a parent, you can relate to that. Aren't you most moved by the way your children treat your other children and other people? Isn't it painful when your children have terrible rifts? That's how God feels. So given that one of the fruits, if not the primary fruit, you would think of the tree of religion is goodness, not perfection, there's no such thing as a perfect person. God is perfect. There's no such thing. I don't aim for perfect people. Just people who are decent, because I divide the world not by religion, not by race, not by sex, but by decent and indecent. That was the famous line of Viktor Frankl, asked if he hated the German race, because he went through the Holocaust. And his book, Man's Search for Meaning, is one of the 10 books that most influenced me. And his answer was, no, there are only two races, the decent and the indecent. That's how I look at the world. Okay. So how do you explain bad religious people? So listen to this. This is something I'm sure you're not familiar with, except maybe a tiny fraction of you, but is fascinating. So let me remind you at this point that the rest of the Fireside Chat, and these are rich chats, is at PragerU.com. We're trying to get everybody to start watching the chats at PragerU directly, because we don't know how long social media, big tech, will be there and not censor us. They've done it in the past, and only God knows when and if they will do it in the future. So please go to PragerU.com now, and download as well, at any time, the PragerU app. It's the easiest way to watch everything we do. Thanks.