KLAVAN: Why I Left Judaism for Christianity

okay so let's go through some of your faith journey because you know obviously that's shaping how you're you're seeing the world in terms of your your fiction writing um and you have a pretty interesting faith journey obviously you and i ended up in very separate places but but you you started off you're born into a jewish family i've said to you before we've had this conversation but you were born into an extraordinarily secular jewish family right so and and now obviously you're religious christians how do you get from point a to point b well the weird thing about my family was that it was secular but it was also committed to my father at least was committed to the traditions so we went to hebrew school we were bar mitzvahed uh we learned this stuff but it did occur to me that um i've always had this i won't call it an obsession that's a little too much but i've always had this idea that things should make sense if things don't make sense you should change your mind and and part of that was because of a kind of dysfunctional atmosphere in my house where we were taught a lot of philosophical ideas that were just untrue and and it's very damaging you know because you don't want to tear away from your family but at the same time you want to find the truth and so i became kind of obsessed with finding the truth so you're there praying and you're there learning hebrew which is not my language and you're there wearing you know the hat and the thing you know anything well if there's no god and my mother was a stone atheist and my father was just kind of like you know he didn't want to he didn't want to get in trouble with god but like he wasn't he didn't exactly believe in him either and and after a while you start to think well this is ridiculous this is ridiculous so after my bar mitzvah i mean that was kind of the turning point i was bar mitzvahed i got thousands of dollars worth of gifts that i put in this box and one day i got up and threw the box away because with everything in it and i just thought like you know this this is the old lady at the end of titanic yeah exactly this is ill-gotten gains you know this is not what i i wanted and i i didn't really i expected to live my life as a sort of intellectual agnostic you know like the way i mean i think this kind of was the default uh position of thinking men in my day you know and it's kind of still is still now exactly you're doing this routine now yeah right and i and i think that was going to be it that was really my position which is very flattering to the intellectual mind because you can analyze everything into dust you can just no matter how small the point is you can break it up into even smaller pieces because you don't have that bottom line of there has to be meaning there has to be morality that has the problem was when i was 19 i read crime and punishment and it convinced me that the moral world existed it convinced me that kant was right there was the starry sky above and the moral law within and that was that was undeniably true and because of that i kept circling around where does this morality and meaning come from and i'm not i wasn't satisfied with things i hear from guys like our pal jordan peterson uh the the italian philosopher marcelo pera you know they live as if there were a god i think to live as if there were a god is essentially to want the conclusions of a syllogism whose premises you don't accept right and it's not right it just makes no sense and so again everything had to make sense to me and ultimately i mean i had when i was a kid i've lived like these two lives i had terrible emotional problems because i had a terrible relationship with my father my my household was dysfunctional in this very invisible way there's not a lot of violence there was not a lot of hatred it was just this kind of invisible dysfunction and so i cracked up you know there came a point when i was like 28 years old i just stopped working basically i just went boom something's wrong and at that point which was would have been the smart point to seize hold of god like a piece of driftwood and floating behind the ocean i thought like well that then i'll never believe because it'll always be this thing i did because i was weak because i was down on my luck because i was broke and it'll always be this crutch that i seized hold up it just shows you how stubborn i was about things making sense you know and uh and so instead uh by the grace of god i i found a shrink who cured me and i always laugh about this i'm the only person i've ever known who was cured by psychiatry but but he did you know in within the course of like two three years of talking to this guy i was a completely different human being and it was only then when i felt sane when i felt certain that my impressions were correct when i felt certain that i was not living a delusional life that it seemed obvious to me that there was a god because of my moral stance in the stance that if everybody on earth there was a time there was a time when everybody on earth believed that slavery was right even the slaves they would have said yeah i don't want to be the slave but this is the way things are at that time slavery was wrong and once you say that you're screwed god-wise i mean you cannot you cannot get away from the idea that somewhere there is this moral base this base of meaning and this is the thing that's become fascinating to me now because they're guys like you and me who actually believe but we're kind of anomalies in the world of the thinking man i think there's a there is right now the world of the thinking man is divided by into two on one side you have people like jordan peterson marcelo perez uh douglas perry who wrote that book the strange death of europe and uh the novelist we were talking about wilbeck who were basically saying the west can't survive without the judeo-christian thesis we should all ascribe to the judeo-christian thesis i myself do not believe right they're all saying the same thing i myself cannot believe on the other side you have these guys like yuval harari and who wrote sapiens and stephen pinker who are saying no no no my friend you know we we are going up and up and up this has been an absolute harare i think that harare is at least more intellectually honest than pinker i mean i think pinker does this whole routine where the enlightenment will save us and everything is going to continuously get better and you can carve away the foundations of western civilization nothing will crumble and harare is basically like well maybe civilization sucked in the first place right maybe if we just go back to living in fields and we were happy when we were eating grass and all this kind of stuff and at least at least he's honest that way and he has this kind of vulcan idea that we're all living in a delusion like he's he the problem with him is he says the most unique his phrase i would never say the most unique but he does he says the most unique thing about sapiens is the fictions we create so we have a fiction that there's a god we have a fiction that we have human rights we have a fiction of money money has no value system but that's not how fiction works i mean fiction fiction describes something it does not create things i can i can create a delusional world through fiction but good fiction creates it describes reality so money is a good example money describes the value of something to a human being when he has a lot of it or when he doesn't have a lot of it that's what it describes you know it's actually it actually does have a value that we're accepting the the paper doesn't but the idea does and because harare is a vulcan who doesn't accept that there is a human life that matters um he thinks it's all being created by fictions but the fictions are being created by that [Music]

Channel: Andrew Klavan

Views: 673,459

Keywords: Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, Klavan, Andrew Klavan, Daily Wire, Sunday Special, Religion, Christianity, Judaism, God, Jesus

Id: CGDZnO8zRSI

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021