Faith with reasons

0:00Additional support comes from Waters Edge Kingdom Capital, faith-based asset management for churches, schools, and ministries backed by 80 years of experience, helping Christian institutions close the gap between beliefs and investments, free alignment assessment available at watersedge.com slash capital. You're listening to a special weekend edition of the world and everything in it. I'm Mary Rygard. Today we're talking about an urgent question facing our culture. Can morality exist without God, or are good and evil matters of personal opinion? My guest is Joel Alprson, assistant to Dennis Prager, a Jewish intellectual and conservative commentator who founded the media organization Prager U. Alprson assisted Prager on his latest book titled If There Is No God, the battle over who defines good and evil.

1:02The book grew out of a series of lectures Prager delivered to teenagers over 30 years ago. Alprson helped to preserve and refine those lectures to demonstrate the rational foundation for biblical morality. Jews and Christians share a great deal, the old testament, and adherence to particular values, known as Judeo-Christian values. Obviously, the most important thing to Christians is the divinity and saving grace of Jesus Christ. That is understood by my guest today. This interview, however, is about the origins of morality and how those common Judeo-Christian values improve societies. In our conversation, we break down why logic alone falls short in securing the sanctity of human life. How Christians and Jews can make common cause on shared values. And how believers can articulate their convictions with confidence, reason, and clarity.

2:03So Joel, you've known Dennis Prager for how long now? 44 years as of today. 44 years today, and we're recording this on September 24th. Okay, so I'm curious. Why did you think his conversation from 30 years ago with a bunch of teenagers needed to be a book release now? So I contacted him on the 30th anniversary of the event. I said, Dennis, can you believe it? It was 30 years ago that you did this event that I organized. And he said, you have a transcript, and I said, yeah. And he says, well, send it to me. I'll post it on the website. I said, no, I said, it's too good. You can't do that. You can't just give this away without having worked on it and developed it. So in any event I did, I did not send it to him. I developed it myself into a book. I showed him several pages of it, and I said, we have to work on this and create a book out of this. And he was ambivalent, which meant it wasn't going to happen. So I was not as if he doesn't have other things he needs to do.

3:04So it wasn't as if he doesn't care about disseminating his ideas. But without telling him, I further refined the book and shopped it out for publication without telling him and came back to him with the best book contract he'd ever gotten. And at that point he couldn't say no. So unbeknownst to either of us during that time he became injured terribly. And I worked with him next to his hospital bed, standing next to his hospital bed, to finish this book. And I'm proud to say that it made the New York Times bestsellerless twice. How twice? How does that work? Well, it's based on sales. So if the book sells well enough in another week, it can return to the bestsellerless again. Oh, I see. That's the backstory of how the book came to be. And you've worked on a lot of other things with Dennis. But today we're going to focus on this particular book if there is no God. So in this book, Dennis argues that without God, judgments about what is good and what

4:04is evil really are just each individual's opinion. So what is the argument to say a thoughtful atheist who thinks morality can have a firm foundation without any religion? What's your basis? I mean, is it Bob? Bob says, Bob says murder is bad, so all of us should not murder. Or is it common sense? I'll give you an argument. And I actually offered this argument that's used in the book. What's the argument against saying that people in their last year of life should be allowed to die? Imagine the money that could be saved in society. If instead of putting people in palliative care in various facilities that are massively expensive to maintain, we give them drugs that allow them to painlessly expire. And the countless billions of dollars every year that we save could go to fight cancer and HIV and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and all these other diseases and could benefit humanity in some really profound ways.

5:07What's the argument against that? That's common sense. That's logic. That's a reason. What is it about the human life that says it's so precious that it transcends the thinking that would say, well, we could save money and benefit so many other people? Where does that come from? And if everything is left to, here's what I think, then what does Bob have to say when Richard says something different? It's like trying to say that there's two different standards for mathematics. You can't, you can't do math unless there's an overarching transcendent principle for math. And by the same token, if morality is basically up to each one of us to decide, there's no such thing as morality. There's just a bunch of opinions. And we are sliding down that road really fast. The US now has 10 states with assisted suicide. But I mean, that's a whole other story. Correct. All right. Well, let's talk about young people. How would you describe the disconnect between Bible teaching and young people back then to

6:11young people today? Well, I'd say things have only gotten worse. I think what I fear now is that at least 74 kids showed up for this weekend and challenged Dennis and questioned him. I questioned whether 74 kids would show up now. So I think things have only gotten worse. It used to be the questions were raised. I don't even know to what degree questions are being raised. But even when they are raised, my concern has been it was at that time and it is today perhaps even more that we're not arming ourselves with the kind of convincing answers. Non-faith-based answers. You can't use a faith-based answer to answer somebody who doesn't have the same faith. If I don't believe in God or the Bible or Jesus, then quoting the Bible and God in Jesus is simply not going to be very convincing. I have to have a common sense rational answer in addition to my faith to convince people. So I don't think much has changed except I think things have gotten even worse. Well, one thing that really jumped out at me in a lecture you gave at the Nixon Library

7:13earlier this year is that one of your big goals is that you want us to stop getting laughed at. What do you mean by that? I mean that our answers should be convincing enough that people should say, okay, I may not still agree with you, but I don't find what you're saying nonsensical. And I think when we, again, when we offer faith-based answers and we say God said or Jesus said or the Bible says, what many people here are religious fairy tales. Okay, you believe it and now you're saying it with passion and so your passion should be sufficient to convince me. Sorry, sorry, a rational person isn't going to accept it. I wouldn't accept it when I was younger. I didn't accept it. It was why Dennis became really important in my life. It's funny. I used this analogy for those who have seen or remember Karate kid. There's a famous scene in the movie where Ralph Macho worked for the Okinawan guy who taught him Karate, but over the summer he waxed cars, he painted the fence and he sanded

8:15the floor. He spent the whole summer doing that and he got so frustrated and so angry. And finally he confronted his Okinawan friend and said, you know, you told me you're going to teach me Karate and all you've had me do is do these jobs for you all summer long. And only at that time did his Okinawan friend explain to him that those motions he was going through were the foundational motions of Karate. And by the same token, I was going through a lot of the motions in Judaism about certain observances and ritual and all that. And it was only later and it was really through Dennis that I learned these motions had meaning, these motions had purpose. And I think our job is to explain what the purpose is of these beliefs and the stories in the Bible and the laws. What is the purpose? The real world contemporary relevant to my life today purpose and we're doing a horrible awful job of conveying that when much of the time we're not even trying to convey that kind of an answer. You know, another analogy that comes to my mind is I know some football players who take

9:18ballet lessons. I mean, it seems to be unrelated, but ballet builds basic skills of movement. So it makes sense. All right. Well, let's talk about this hypothetical question. Dennis poses about a beloved dog and a human who is a stranger. Talk to us about that. Yeah. Dennis had a flight one time. And if you're lucky enough to be on a flight with Dennis, unfortunately, because of his condition, that's not as likely to happen anymore. But if you were fortunate enough to have a flight sitting next to Dennis, there was an excellent chance you were going to enter into a conversation with him, not because you initiated it because he did. He's remarkable in this way. If you stand in an elevator with him, there's a good chance that at least you'll do something funny in the elevator before you reach your destination. So in any event, he had a conversation with somebody and I don't remember the particulars he certainly would. But there was a question about the value of life, human life versus animal life. And he was surprised by the woman's answer. And he said, well, if your dog and a stranger were drowning, who would you say first?

10:19And he assumed the woman was going to say, well, of course, the stranger. And she paused and had to think about it. And that's when he realized that that wasn't a slam dunk question and answer. That was more of a challenge to people than he realized it would be. So you mentioned the talk that I gave at the Nixon Library in March. So one of the big surprises to me was that Dennis was at a fabulous hospital. I really loved this hospital. I loved the people there. The people there were incredibly devoted to their patients were fabulous with him and just really good people. And so we were working on the book there. And I decided I would start asking a lot of the nurses in attendance this question. Those who have dogs, it doesn't apply as much to be blue don't. And I was very surprised that the majority of the nurses said they would save their dog first. These are people who were caring for humans, devoting their lives to the well-being of humans. And still, despite that, and despite how good they were and are, they were still voting

11:23for the dog. And it was yet another sad indication of where our society is going. You know, I'm a dog lover. I have three cattle dogs. And that was, I admit, it was tough for me too. But it was that very hypothetical that made me realize you have got to predetermine decide your values ahead of time. You can't wait until the moment arrives. You know, as I told my then teenage daughter, you don't wait until you're in the back seat to decide whether you're going to go all the way with some boy. You have to decide ahead of time that you will not do that. Well, yet you're 100% right. The other thing is making the right decision. A lot of the answers were I don't know. Sometimes the answers were just, I'm not sure. Which is still really bad for the person who's drowning. Well, it is. OK, so let's move on to some difficult parts of the Bible. Some passages have to do with slavery and child sacrifice and really terrible things

12:25just to take a few examples. Right. Now, some people might say, I don't want anything to do with a religion like that. So how do you work through those objections? Right. So first of all, it's really important to have clarity about these things. For example, you know, very often people will say, well, the Bible says, you're not supposed to kill it. And yet you have capital punishment laws. The Bible contradicts itself. You contradict yourself. How can you say that? The actual commandment is thou shalt not murder. It's not thou shalt not kill. I really wish people understood that. I wish churches would have their Bibles printed accordingly. I wish people understood that. Slavery, the explanation that I've learned from Dennis through the rational Bible that I've worked with him on, is that the laws of slavery were made so difficult as to make them evolutionarily not possible anymore. It was so difficult to own a slave according to the laws of the Torah that had the Torah

13:28to simply said, no more slaves. It would have been like saying to people, um, stop eating meat. You can't just take something that's so universal and just say, don't do it anymore. So instead, what the Torah did was it said, okay, you want to own a slave, you can own a slave. However, if he runs away, you can't bring him back. If you knock out his tooth, he's free to go. There were all kinds of laws that were imposed on the slave owner that the Talmud, the brilliant commentary on the Torah said that those who own a slave own a master. The idea was for the Torah to basically outlaw slavery by evolution rather than revolution to say it's going to be so difficult for you to own a slave, you won't want to own a slave anymore. That's the explanation that's not offered. People point to the Torah and they say, the Old Testament and they say, slavery, it's an antiquated document. It doesn't comport with our understanding of morality today. So forget it. What's the point? All right. Well, here's another point Dennis makes in the book. He encourages people who are not sure that God exists to nevertheless live as though

14:33he does exist. Joel, can you think of how that might be apparent in an ordinary day? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of examples, but I can think of, there was a time, you know, Dennis has granted me remote access to his computer. And I remember he had a recording that he had made between himself and somebody else that was private. That I could have listened to the recording and he never would have known. Nobody would have known. Only I would have known, but I also thought God would know. And that's what helped convince me not to listen to the recording. So even if I don't believe in God, but I live as if God exists, I'm probably going to be more honest, more decent person as a result. If I believe that there's a celestial traffic cop up there who is monitoring my moral driving habits, so to speak. I'm probably going to make better moral choices than if I go around thinking, you know, I can make allowances for this and I can make allowances for that. If I'm left to my own designs, I'm generally going to be pretty lenient with myself and

15:37pretty liberal with myself about the choices that I make. But the God that I should believe in or hopefully will believe in, he's not going to be quite so lenient. And if I accept him as my moral judge, even if I don't believe in him, if I believe in the concept where I decide I'm just going to buy into the concept, I'm probably going to make better, more honest moral choices. I'd say it's the same with spouses. If we have each other's cell phone passwords, I think both sides would be more honest. Yes. Yes. And this reminds me of something else Dennis has said over the years. We judge others by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean by being lenient with ourselves. It's very, very easy for us to be understanding with ourselves and the great thing about having a standard for morality. It's, and Dennis uses this analogy. It's like speed limits. The speed limit doesn't vary. The signs don't change because of my feelings that day.

16:37The speed limit is the speed limit no matter how I feel that day, no matter how good my intentions are. So by the same token, right and wrong don't change because of my mood. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Period. All right. Another idea from the book is that people need some kind of friction in their lives in order to grow and then to prosper in their mind, heart and spirit. So tell me what kind of friction helps me to become a better person. When I challenge myself to do the right thing, when I don't want to do the right thing. So giving charity, for example, in Judaism, there's a tradition of giving 10%. I don't want to give 10% of what I made this year away. I'd rather, you know, Dennis and I share a passion for high-end audio equipment. So we're both audio files. I'd rather put it into a really great amplifier or great cables or something like that. I don't want to give my money away for free. I'd rather selfishly spend it on myself or on my family.

17:39But there's friction there. There's friction that says, do the right thing because, and here's, this is another rational example for this. Why, what's the argument for giving money away? What's the argument for being charitable? Did I really come into the life that I had completely on my own? I was born to good parents. I was born in the United States of America. I was born in good health. I was responsible for all of that. I don't think so. I think I was really, really fortunate. There are a whole bunch of other people out there who didn't share that fortune, who were not born to the right parents. We're not born in this country. We're not born in good health. The obligation for me to help them is an acknowledgement of my good fortune and an acknowledgement that I had nothing to do with the things I just mentioned. For many people, they had nothing to do with their situation. The friction is to acknowledge that and to act on it. With that friction in much the same way that when I go to the gym, which I hate, I push myself to try and do the things that I don't like, I hopefully become physically stronger

18:41as a result. I hopefully become morally stronger as a result of this friction in much the same way. I could hear your lawnmower in the background there, Joel. So I'm glad that you've now changed locations in your house. Well the world and everything in it audience is mainly Christian and they do share your concern about passing on moral convictions to the next generations. Where can Christians and Jews make common cause? I know it's disconcerting to a lot of Christians that Judaism doesn't hold Jesus as its Lord and Savior, but they should get a lot of comfort and consolation and knowing that our values are pretty much one to one aligned. And that's where we ought to live. We ought to live with the belief that the Bible is divine, divinely authored, that we read the Bible or hopefully we'll read the Bible in the same way, which is as the word of God, and take the laws as our directive as to how to lead good lives. When we die, we'll find out who was right and who was wrong and that's fine.

19:46I'll have to live with the consequences one way or the other. All right, well, let's segue now into what a shock it was to hear of Dennis's spinal cord injury back in November 24. It left him with quadruplegia and you were working with Dennis up to that time and then afterwards. Can you talk about how your friendship with Dennis changed after his spinal cord injury if it did at all? Yeah. The friendship itself didn't change. The logistics and the dynamics did in the beginning when I would fly to see him. He was originally at Cedarsina Hospital in Los Angeles. The first two or three months, he couldn't speak at all. He was full time on a ventilator. And so spending time with him, I actually spent Thanksgiving night with him with my wife's support. But imagine standing in front of a man in a hospital bed and running your finger across a piece of paper with an alphabet on it and having him nod when you get to the first letter, the

20:48right letter, I should say, that might be necessary just so he can say water. W-A-T-E-R. That's the time it takes to convey that simple message. Just as a side note, one way of explaining who Dennis is, is I remember one time I was spending time with him in his hospital room when he couldn't speak. The only way he could call me over so that I would grab the chart and have him spell out for me what he wanted to say was to make a clicking sound with his teeth. That's all he couldn't speak. So he had to make this clicking sound. So I would come over and I brought the paper over and I ran my finger across the letters with T-H-A. He called me over so I would spell out, thank you. That was the only reason he called me over. But in the midst of his pain, in the midst of this profound change in his life, in the midst of all he had to contend with, he wanted to make sure that I knew that he appreciated what I was doing for him.

21:50I was really living out the gratitude that he taught so much about over the years. Joel, what is one conversation you hope a listener will be ready to have after reading the book if there is no God? I don't think it's so much the conversation as much as the willingness to confront and I don't mean confront by sticking a finger in somebody's face, but I want people to feel confident that they have a response to the people who laugh at God, who laugh at the Bible, who laugh at religion, that they're willing to stand up and say, you might find this funny or you might think this is ridiculous, but that's what I really want. I want people to have the confidence and the willingness, again, not to offend, not to insult, not to look for a fight, but not to get rolled over by being silent. And I don't think our side is good at all at representing its side. There are two reasons, I believe. One is a fear of being laughed at.

22:51I think the other reason is we don't feel we have the rational arguments, which is why the name of Dennis's Bible commentary is the rational Bible. It's meant to be a provocative title because people don't generally associate reason and the Bible, but guess what? The Bible can be eminently reasonable and rational and we have to know the arguments and have the confidence and the courage to stand up and say, here's my contention, here's what I say about slavery, here's what I say about homosexuality, here's what I say about the existence of God that these laws came from God. I'm willing to stand up and possibly have you laugh at what I say, I'll live, I won't shrink or die because you disregard what I have to say. These ideas are too important for me to remain silent. If people have the faith that they say they do and they have the convictions they say they do, it would be really important for them to represent that faith in those convictions by speaking up more. Yeah, encouragement to have courage, each one of us.

23:52You've touched on this next one, but let's go at it in another way. If somebody said to you, Joe, I don't believe the Bible is divine, so why should I care? What Leviticus or numbers says? What do you say? First, I'd say thank you for saying that. Thank you for telling me because people only speak when they have a concern. The people I worry about the most aren't the people who argue the opposite point is the people who say nothing. People who say nothing don't care. The people who say something who raised the argument, they have to care. So I love the fact that somebody would say something like that to me. My argument is, and this is the argument I make to myself, is the best places in the world are founded on these principles. There's a reason why people aren't dying to try and enter Libya or sub-Saharan Africa or Cuba or North Korea. These places are bereft of the Judeo-Christian God. The places we'd most want to live happen to be founded on the principles that come from the Bible. If I had to leave America, I hope God forbid I should have to, but if I did, I'd want

24:56to move to Israel or Canada or Australia or somewhere in Western Europe. Is it a coincidence that all of these countries have judicial systems and democracies that are founded on the principles of the Bible, on Judeo-Christian principles? I don't think it's a coincidence. It's not just the notion of, gee, did God actually inscribe the tablets or did Moses actually come down with the law from God or did God actually split the Red Sea or was Jesus actually resurrected or not? For people to discuss, who want to discuss the truth of the stories of the Bible. What I want to know is, and I think what others want to know, who challenge, is, does it work? Does it actually make a difference? Does it have relevance to my modern-day life? The answer is, look around the world, look where you'd prefer to live and ask yourself, why is it the places you'd most want to live are the places that happen to be founded on these principles? I don't think it's an accident. These principles, these laws, these ideas, they work in the real world.

25:59That's the reason to follow it is, in the laboratory of life, the Bible has passed with flying colors. It's what we Christians call the fruit of the Spirit. It's the evidence of faith. Yeah, exactly. And I'll be perfectly honest. If that weren't the case, I don't think I would be a committed Jew. If I'm going to ask an atheist to drop their faith, then I have to be willing to drop mine in the face of sufficient evidence. I can't just say, you guys have to put your beliefs up on the altar and be willing to sacrifice them, but I don't have to. I should be willing to go ahead and have my beliefs challenged in the same way and be willing to give them up if the evidence is strong enough to say, you're following a really bad system, it's making people worse. If I thought my system, our system, the Judeo-Christian value system was making people worse, then I'd get out. It would be very, very hard because I've been so immersed in it and so committed to it, but I have to be just as honest as I ask other people to be.

27:00I'm convinced that our Judeo-Christian value system is superior because I see it working in the real world. I want other people to see it as well. And the only way they can see it is if others are making the argument for it. Yes, and that's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. I read that you were not satisfied with the answers to spiritual questions that you had when you were a boy. So I'm wondering after all of these years working with Dennis and in particular on the Rational Bible series, such a deep dive into the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, did you finally find the answers that your young self was looking for? Oh, yeah. I mean, from a spiritual standpoint, like we're just passing right now through the Jewish High Holidays, which is by far, religiously, the toughest time of the year for me. I have a terrible time with prayer. You want to talk about friction, showing up at synagogue and submitting myself to the prayer services that Orthodox Jews submit themselves to or in many cases enjoy is putting

28:00it politely a very big challenge for me. So I don't know at my age that I'm ever going to really change and say, I love prayer and I just feel the presence of God around me all the time. I don't know that I'll ever be that person, but my connection to God and the Torah is more intellectual. And I think in some ways comes with everybody as much passion as for somebody who is more spiritually oriented. I connect to God on a different wavelength. Mm-hmm. I can resonate with that. I recall somebody telling me, you know, you just have to doubt your doubts, but that wasn't satisfactory to my young mind. I didn't want to doubt my doubts. I wanted my doubts to be answered. Why do I have to doubt my doubts? You know, it's funny in the Jewish tradition, we're supposed to be an orlegoy and a light to the nations. How can I be a light to the nations? How could even be a light to my family if I have a lot of doubts? Having occasional doubts is fine. Having questions is fine.

29:00But if I have fundamental doubts, how can I be a light to anybody even to myself if foundational issues aren't resolved? They have to be resolved. And the good news is I think that there are fantastic resolutions. So just as you know, as you ask me about slavery and homosexuality and there are others, that another of the toughest ones is unjust suffering. Probably the toughest one is unjust suffering. A lot of people will say the Holocaust, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. You know, how does a just God allow for that? Well, first of all, people don't blame man for that. They blame God for that, which I think is tremendously unfair. I think the harder challenge by far is a tsunami, is cancer, is a tornado, the kind of things that presumably we don't control and that God allows for in the world that he created. How is it fair to a newborn infant that's born with half of a heart or half of a brain who suffers for a certain amount of time and then dies? How does a just God allow for that?

30:02That I would say is the single toughest challenge that I know of. And I don't think that there are a lot of great answers to that. But done well, and this is an argument that Dennis makes, done well if you don't do Judeo-Christian values, what is going to even come close to matching it for creating good societies? So I'm going to throw all of that away because of unjust suffering. I could see how somebody could say that and I couldn't laugh at them for saying it, but so much more good is being done in our world because of these values that I simply can't sacrifice them by saying, there's unjust suffering that I can't answer for, therefore I'm throwing it all away. And it's easy to overlook the tremendous work faith couched in Judeo-Christian values has done to alleviate suffering. It has. It has, although for the family who lost that child, it's hard to say exactly how much of their pain has been alleviated.

31:02So I talk to people like that with a lot of humility, but I think we have to be very, very practical about this. If there was another way of creating good societies, I would definitely look into it. I would definitely be interested in learning more about it and even potentially following it. But if you get rid of the Judeo-Christian value system, I don't begin to know what replaces it that comes anywhere close to creating societies anywhere nearly as good as the ones that we have. That's what worries me is people think, well, socialism or communism or atheism or just rational, being rational. And I gave you the question about what you do with people in their last year of life and give you a perfectly rational approach to that. None of those work, none of those work or have worked. So I like to say I'm a businessman when it comes to religion. I want to, when people invest, they want to know what performs the best and that's where they'll put their money. I put my stock in what performs best religiously. This performs the best religiously. There's no question. All right.

32:03I want to touch on this idea of passing along values to our children. It's important. A secularist or a humanist might say, I already know right from wrong. So who needs God for that? So one more time, Joel, what is that person missing? They know it's wrong. How did they know that it's wrong? First, how did they learn that it's wrong? I think so sorry they learned that it was wrong because their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents actually believed in these Judeo-Christian values and then they taught it to their kids and that's how he found out. Second of all, no. I don't even know, KNOW know that it's wrong. I believe that it's wrong. This no thing is problematic. When you can say with absolute certainty, I know that it's wrong. I have faith in a trunk because I have faith in God and I have faith that God said it. Once you get into the realm of no and be absolute certainty, that automatically becomes a

33:04trap. There's no no when it comes to religion. There's faith when it comes to religion. There's evidence when it comes to religion. So this notion of already no, but how did you come across that? You had an inspiration. The universe imbued you with great moral clarity and now you're going to give us the gift of sharing your moral clarity with us. Sorry, it doesn't, there's no humility in that whatsoever. People aren't faced with the consequences of their statements and they take what Judeo-Christian society has given them as if they arrived at it on their own. They didn't arrive at it on their own. They got it because they lived in a Judeo-Christian society, but they don't acknowledge that. They think that they are so morally clear and so upright and just that it was really a product of their existence. Sorry. Joel, we're near the end of our time here. You are an orthodox Jew talking to Christians. What would you like to say to them? Fight. Don't just profess your faith.

34:05Don't just attend church. Don't just study the Bible. I want a strong Christian America. A strong Christian America is a better America for everybody including the Jews. But if the Christians don't fight, and I say the Christians because the Jews are less likely to fight, I'm sorry to say, only 10% of us are orthodox, believe that the Torah comes from God. Most of the non-orthodox Jews tend to lean left of center and are not nearly as willing or likely to fight for these values as the orthodox are. And look, a lot of my friends are not orthodox. The majority of my friends are non-orthodox. So I love and appreciate them. But if it comes to what's going to benefit society, I need the folks who are our allies, who are the most convicted about these values to not be silent. They have to stand up. They have to speak. They have to be willing to become uncomfortable. You know, you talk about friction. There's friction that comes with standing up and confronting uncomfortable situations.

35:07But folks, to my Christian partners, if you don't stand up and fight, we're done for. We are done for. There isn't another firewall. The Christian America is the firewall of American values. And if that firewall gives, then America, as an experiment, is done for. I pray for strong Christians and strong Christian America in this regard. Joel Alperson, I have so enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It was my pleasure, Mary, I appreciate you reaching out to me and I wish you all the best. You've been listening to an extended interview with businessman and writer Joel Alperson. We'd love to hear what you thought about this conversation. Drop us a line at editor at wng.org. That's editor at wng.org. And if you enjoyed this special weekend edition of The World and Everything in it, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.

36:10It really does help other people find our work and expand our reach. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk to you on Monday and have a great weekend. I'm Mary Rygard. I'm Mary Rygard.