https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7yN2vv3bXhA
It seems obvious to me, which doesn’t mean it’s true, that societies that are desirable are free societies, and free societies are predicated on rule of law, the law independent of the and transcendent in relationship to the rulers, and on a conception of man that gives every individual an intrinsic dignity that basically has a religious substructure. And that to the degree that we are citizens of those lands, and we believe in the principles by which they operate, then we’re bound to accept that view. Because without accepting that view, the whole system makes no sense. Like the foundation stone is pulled out from underneath it. And that’s quite the conundrum, you know, that there’s a biblical vision underpinning the states that are the most productive. Now, the radical types, the leftists in particular, say, well, the reason that the West is wealthy and free is because it was built on the backs of the poor and in the West and also in the Third World. But one of the reasons I found your book so interesting is that you’re not so fond of that viewpoint. You look at India, for example, and as far as I could tell, you believe that the distribution of the biblical narrative in India has clearly been a net positive. And so maybe you could outline a little bit of Indian history, because I think people would find that very interesting. The British came in. India was fragmented into hundreds of cities or states, small states ruled over in many cases by Muslims. That was the scene when the British arrived and the British had their problems. But the introduction of the biblical narrative into India, in your estimation, had a positively transformative effect, much like it had in Western Europe. That’s true. Thank you. You’re doing a wonderful job in arguing the case that you just outlined. And I hope that many people in the West and in the East will listen to you because we don’t believe it anymore. But it’s also partly because we’re so damn ignorant. I mean, I was struck by reading in reading your book how much I didn’t know. You know, for example, this is very embarrassing to relate. I didn’t realize I knew India was fragmented before it was unified into a modern nation state, but I didn’t know it was fragmented and fundamentally ruled in many cases by the Muslim Empire. That I just didn’t know that. And that’s pathetic that I didn’t know that. And I also your book also helped me understand. See, in the West now, we tend to think of the entire Christian tradition as oppressive in the Catholic sense. And I’m not criticizing Catholics, by the way, that it was a mono monopolistic belief system that was fundamentally oppressive. Now, your book helped me understand to what degree that oppression, if it existed, was a remnant of the Roman Empire and the Empire worldview. And that it was the introduction of the Bible and its distribution in all the vernaculars that actually blew the remaining Empire part of Christianity into fragments and then in a very positive way. And that’s analogous, as I said, to the effect of the Christian or the biblical narrative on India, which, yep. So please, please go ahead with the Indian story. That’s true. In the year 1000 is when from Afghanistan through Khyber Pass, Mahmood Ghazni, an invader, began to invade India and attack. Between 1000 and 1031, he came about 16, 17 times, looting primarily temples, religious temples, because that’s where the wealth was. The kings will store the wealth in the temples and he would loot the temple. There was a very small Khyber Pass, only one place from where invaders could come from Afghanistan and Persia, etc. India could have built a small wall of India. We didn’t need a great wall of India to keep the invaders out. But the Indian rulers never built this small wall to the point that almost 200 years later, 1191, Muhammad Ghori comes from Afghanistan all the way to Delhi, almost 1000 kilometers. And he fights with the Hindu king of Delhi. He loses, goes back. 1192, he comes back, defeats Prithviraj Chahan, kills him, and Delhi is taken over by Muslims in 1192. So what has weakened the Hindu kingdoms from 1000 to 1192, almost 200 years, is a religious ritual called the horse sacrifice, Ashwamedh Yajna. The Hindu kings are sending a horse and behind the horse are a few hundred young men. They’re going into a village, either village becomes their property and begins to pay tribute to their king or they have to fight a war. So at that time, Delhi’s small, a bigger kingdom is Khandaj. The two Hindu kings are sons of real sisters, so they’re first cousins. One of the kings of Khandaj Yajna, he starts this Ashwamedh Yajna horse sacrifice. But his brother, who is smaller kingdom, but more competent ruler, he refuses to accept the sovereignty of his cousin. So hatred develops between two cousins who are governing two important kingdoms in North India. So after 1192, when the Muslim invader has been defeated by the king of Delhi, the king of Khandaj Yajna, he invites the Muslim invader to please come back, kill my brother. And that’s how Delhi is taken over by Muslims. And then Muslims, different dynasties, different kinds of Muslims rule India until Delhi, until 1858. So how much and how much to what degree were they ruling over the rest of what was India as well at during that period of time? It was expanding and contracting the Mughal Empire for about 200 years or so was the most expansive. But the British had begun to come during the Mughal Empire, but only to trade with permission. The French came. And what was the consequence of the Mughal Empire in relationship to the typical Indian’s life and to the structure of the state? They built the Taj Mahal, but they didn’t build wheelbarrows for the laborers who were carrying bricks and stones. So you build pyramids, you build Taj Mahal, you build palaces. This is the whole Middle Ages. But you don’t care for the wheelbarrows. So even today, women are carrying bricks and stones and mud and cement on their head as they’re building four story halls because you don’t care for the poor. So India was weakened by what a religious ritual, Ashwamedhya, which was supposed to make a king very strong. So kings did become strong. Nation became weak and divided, which allowed Muslim rulers and then French and British and others to come and take over. So India for a thousand years, almost eight, nine hundred years, was slave. Now, there were pockets of Hindu kingdoms, but some of those Hindu kingdoms were worse. Even compared to the Muslim ruler like South India, Travancore. When you go to the restroom, you always close the door behind you, right? You don’t want a random passerby looking in on you. So why would you let people look in on you when you go online? Your online privacy is important. That’s why I use ExpressVPN and you should too. Using the Internet without a VPN is like going to the restroom without closing the door. How is that? Well, your Internet service provider knows every single website you visit. They can sell this information to ad companies and tech giants who then use your data to target you. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. So your online activity can’t be seen by anyone. It works on phones, laptops, even routers. So everyone who shares your Wi-Fi is protected. And all you have to do is just fire up the ExpressVPN app and click one button. It’s as easy as closing the bathroom door. Get an extra three months of ExpressVPN free by going to expressvpn.com slash Jordan YT. That’s expressvpn.com slash Jordan YT for an extra three months free. Expressvpn.com slash Jordan YT. And these all these rulers, Hindu and Muslim alike, existed in a completely exploitative relationship in relationship to their subjects. There was no conception of individual worth, as you point out. There was no conception that the life of a slave, let alone a female slave, let’s say, or even a female period for that matter, had any real intrinsic value. That unfortunately is correct. Let me give you a very shameful example of what this means. So in South India, in what is now Trivandrum, Travancore, no lower caste woman was allowed to cover her top. If she covered her top, she has to pay breast tax, which depends on the size of her breast. Now, even the upper caste women in Travancore, this is Kerala, South India, they, when they go into the temple, they have to remove their upper cloths. Because you’re honoring the priests, you have to be bare chested. On the street, if a noble, someone from noble family royalty is passing through on the street, the upper caste women have to take their cloth off and throw petals, flower petals. This is Hindu India, while the British are ruling in India. So these parts of history are suppressed because they are shameful. Obviously, they are shameful that there is more slavery in the Hindu kingdom of Travancore in South India than in the Muslim kingdom in the North. So this is partly because of caste system. So the horse sacrifice is one thing that had weakened India. The caste system had weakened India because if the kings are exploiting my wealth and putting that wealth in gold and silver and diamonds in the temples, when an invader comes and attacks the king, why should I sacrifice my life? Why should I fight and defend my kingdom? Because I have no stake in this kingdom. You are treating me as untouchable. And this is what is happening in India today, every day, that the lower caste people who are trying to recover their dignity, that the Hindu religious system has made me lower than animals. Jesus Christ is making me a human being, a child of God. You won’t allow me to enter your temple. Jesus is making me a priest of the most high God. So if they want to convert, there’s persecution happening every day in India. And the supreme… OK, so now you also made the case that in the caste system, for example, I thought this was very interesting and quite damning from a modern perspective or maybe from a biblical perspective, not so much a modern, that there was no sense in the Hindu caste structure that the poor and downtrodden and let’s say the untouchables were to be revered or served or regarded as intrinsically noble, partly because the doctrine of karma was predicated on the assumption, A, that they deserved their suffering and earned it in some cosmic sense, and B, that if you did even attempt to alleviate their suffering, all you did, all you were doing cosmically was prolonging it, because the suffering that they had garnered as a consequence of karma was deserved and was going to be played out no matter who interfered with it. And so there wasn’t just an absence of care, let’s say, in some sense, for the downtrodden and the outcast, but there was an insistence that they deserved their position and that anything that might be done to help them would actually be counterproductive. Now, have I got that right? Yes, except I’ll take it a little farther. That is that inequality is self-evident truth, including in America. The men and women are equal was never self-evident to Americans. Whites and Black slaves are equal was never self-evident to Jefferson’s and Washington’s and the American Founding Fathers. Equality is not a self-evident truth. Inequality is self-evident truth. Quite the contrary, right? You could say that equality is so non-self-evident that it would take divine fiat to make it a reality. Exactly. So, yeah, I know that’s a powerful argument. And Jefferson knew that. Therefore, in the Declaration of Independence, he wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred that all men are created equal. It was Benjamin Franklin who put pressure on him. And he was trying to please Thomas Paine, the deist, the rationalist, that no, we can’t say that these truth is revealed to us by sacred writings. So, right. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Well, I think it was it might be fair to say that those truths are self-evident in a culture that’s absolutely saturated by Protestant biblical presumptions. That’s true. But they’re not self-evident otherwise. Yeah, they were not self-evident 500 years ago when Martin Luther discovered priesthood and kingship of all believers. Because at that time, if a Christian went to the church in Germany, average Christian only got the bread, symbol of Christ’s body, not the wine, the symbol of blood. The blood was only for the priests. So the division between priests and laity resulted in war. Because if all men are created equal, if every child of God is supposed to serve God as his priest, manage his kingdom as a king, then this was a revolution, a theological revolution. Right. So, yes, and it was resisted. That was part of the reason I suppose that the translation of the Bible was resisted by so many people in the hierarchical church, because people knew they knew full well. But if the actual words were distributed widely, that that would create a bottom up revolution as people realized their fundamental, not only their equality, but more than that, their equality before God and their fundamental worth and their capability of having a relationship with truth. And there is maybe no more revolutionary doctrine than that. You know, it hit home for me how revolutionary the book is. And even in Western history. That’s absolutely true. So that doctrine of human equality, the first thing it does in Germany, 1524, 1525, is the Peasants’ War. I’ll come back to that. But before that, before Luther translates the Bible into German, you have Wycliffe in Oxford, who is translating the Bible into English, along with his friends. This is before printing existed, before Gutenberg. And wasn’t Wycliffe killed for his trouble? Was he burned? Fortunately not. After he had been buried, his bones were dug out. Oh, yes. His bones were burned and the ashes were scattered. But he didn’t die. Part of his time, there were two popes, for a while there were three popes fighting with each other. Each of them wanted British support. And Wycliffe had become a hero in Britain because of taxation. So the British was… So he escaped that doom. But they got Tyndale, I believe, if I remember correctly. Yes, Tyndale was burned. But Tyndale is 150 or so years after Wycliffe. So that’s interesting even that, that the resistance to the translation lasted multiple centuries. It wasn’t a flash in the pan. It was an extremely dangerous act to translate the Bible into a vernacular language. And you’ve got to ask yourself why? You’re absolutely right. Because it was Bishop Arendale, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who banned Wycliffe’s Bible and prohibited that no one is allowed to translate the Bible into English without permission. So Tyndale spent a whole year knocking at the doors of three bishops, trying to get permission to translate the Bible into English. All three of them refused. So he became a refugee, which was also illegal to leave England without permission. He left England, went to Wittenberg under Luther, began to translate the Bible, the New Testament. Then he came to Belgium. That’s where he printed it to smuggle it into England. So anyone who was found 100 years earlier with a page of Wycliffe’s Bible hand copied, he could be burned at stake because the church has banned translation of the Bible. So the Bible was an explosive, revolutionary book. Okay, so let’s go back to India then. So now you have the Muslims ruling India and you have the Hindu gods or the Hindu kings ruling India. And it’s a caste-structured society and there’s no shortage of oppression and there’s no real development at the individual level. And the British start a mercantile relationship. And then the biblical corpus enters the Indian landscape through the operation fundamentally of the British, but of missionaries, not the mercantilists per se. Although a fair number of the Christian influenced British politicians were all already pushing favorably for India’s independent development several hundred years ago, way before it actually happened. Yes. Now, a few missionaries from Europe had come to South India before the British missionary movement got going. And they had begun to translate the Bible into some of the South Indian languages, et cetera. But this was a small private initiative. The missionary movement per se got started only in 1793 when William Carey, a cobbler in England, he was a Baptist. He was a Baptist, so he was not allowed to go into Oxford or Cambridge. These were Anglican universities. So he taught himself while working as a cobbler, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, geography, politics, mission, Navy history, et cetera. And he wrote a book, a small book, inquiring whether the contemporary church is under an obligation to go and evangelize the world, to disciple all nations, or was that a command given only for the first generation of proposals? So his book, An Inquiry into Obligation of the Christians to Disciple All Nations, it’s a very long title. That’s what begins the modern missionary movement. But ironically, 1793, when his book is published, is the year when the British Parliament banned missionaries from going to India. So the East India, British East India Company is governing Bengal, which includes Bangladesh, Assam, et cetera. That’s a large part of eastern India. But missionaries are not allowed because evangelical movement is already creating a problem for Africa, British rule in Africa, because British companies are bringing African slaves in British ships, selling them in the Caribbean and South America, North America. And evangelical conscience, which believes that all human beings are equal, therefore slavery is immoral. They are creating problems. And it is the members of House of Lord in England who have taken these companies. They don’t want missionaries to go. We’re having a good time in Africa and India. We’re making a lot of money. We don’t want morality injected into business. Right. But it does get injected. Wilberforce manages it unbelievably well. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve really been struck by lately is this. This is postmodern and radical leftist insistence that exploitation is wrong. I think, well, why do you think exploitation is wrong? You have to buy the doctrine of the inalienable rights of the individual and the natural rights of the individual and the divine worth of the individual before slavery is wrong. And you don’t buy any of that. But if you do, but if you do buy it, you end up like Wilber like Wilberforce and you put yourself on the line to what to cost. It cost England a tremendous fortune over a multiple decades to eradicate slavery around the world because of its moral inappropriateness, because of the sacred nature of each individual. That’s absolutely right. That if a woman is an animal and I can buy a cow, keep a cow in lock and chain and sell it out, why can’t I buy girls, keep them locked and sell them? Is a girl different than an animal? Does she? And if power is the if power is the only force that is real and the only force that’s credible, then obviously you can buy and sell if you have the power to do it. You can only not do that in some fundamental sense if there’s a transcendent order, let’s say that that can use each individual with fundamental worth. That inalienable right to liberty that a woman cannot be kept in cage because she is made in God’s image who is free.