Stay Free - Russel Brand - Does the Bible Foretell Today’s Conflicts? — Dinesh D’Souza - SF664

00:00:07.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Franz Russell trying to bring real journalism to the American people.

00:00:17.000 Dinesh, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:00:21.000 It's a real pleasure.

00:00:22.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:23.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:24.000 Now, in your new book, Dragon's Prophecy, you interpret scriptural allusions towards what appear to be, you know, well, I mean, I've not read your book, Dragon's Prophecy, yet, but it says here that you are saying that contemporaneous conflicts in the Middle East are connected to biblical prophecy.

00:00:52.000 Now, even, you know, me as a new Christian going through the Bible just the second time now, when I'm reading, gosh, Isaiah, when I'm reading Daniel, like there's a lot of sort of prophetic literature.

00:01:05.000 Firstly, you know, like I'm so amazed by how often I feel Christ in there.

00:01:10.000 I really didn't think I would find that, you know, when I first came to him in Old Testament literature.

00:01:15.000 But I do also think, oh my God, it's so crazy.

00:01:17.000 It's talking about sort of basically saying Gaza.

00:01:20.000 It's talking about places that are in the news today.

00:01:23.000 What is dragon's prophecy about?

00:01:25.000 And is it, you know, can you explain it for us?

00:01:29.000 Sure.

00:01:29.000 There's a book and there's a film.

00:01:32.000 The book was actually written by a fellow named Jonathan Kahn.

00:01:35.000 I made the film that goes with the book.

00:01:38.000 And I added some elements.

00:01:39.000 I added some elements in the film that are actually not in the book, notably a kind of exploration of biblical archaeology.

00:01:49.000 But let's talk about the Bible for a moment because the Bible is a very remarkable document in that it doesn't prove things, it asserts them, right?

00:01:59.000 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

00:02:02.000 And it raises right away in your mind all kinds of questions like who's talking?

00:02:08.000 So the Bible is a declaration of truth, but it also has this prophetic element.

00:02:16.000 And by the prophetic element, what we mean is that it seems to foreshadow or forecast things that are going to come in the future.

00:02:26.000 Obviously, as Christians, we believe that the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, foreshadow Christ, right?

00:02:33.000 So the Hebrew scriptures anticipate Christ who becomes the fulfillment of those scriptures.

00:02:39.000 So what we do in this film is really very simple.

00:02:42.000 We try to look at some of the political and cultural and even the war between Israel and Hamas.

00:02:52.000 Look at it through the lens of the Bible and ask if the Bible has some interesting things to say about all this.

00:03:00.000 What does it have to say?

00:03:01.000 And primarily, what's the center of your assertion in the film?

00:03:08.000 And forgive my error earlier.

00:03:11.000 No, no.

00:03:12.000 So let's look at it.

00:03:14.000 So you have this battle with Israel and Hamas.

00:03:19.000 And according to the film and the book, it is the battle we're seeing in front of us is a kind of an eerie replay of battles that we've seen before.

00:03:31.000 So the author, Jonathan Kahn, makes the point that in ancient times, the most persistent enemy of the Israelites was the Philistines.

00:03:39.000 The Israelites fought other people, but the Philistines were there from the beginning to the end.

00:03:44.000 They were the most determined, the most fanatical.

00:03:47.000 The Bible mentions the Philistines many, many times.

00:03:50.000 Saul was involved with the Philistines.

00:03:52.000 David fought the Philistine known as Goliath, and on and on it goes.

00:03:56.000 Now, interestingly, the name Philistine is in fact connected with the name Palestinian in a very strange way.

00:04:05.000 There's no attempt to say that these are like the same people or one is the great-great-grandfather of the other.

00:04:11.000 But what we are saying is that the term Palestinian comes directly out of the name Philistine.

00:04:19.000 But not only that, there's a kind of odd similarity of tactics.

00:04:25.000 Let's look, for example, at the biblical hero called Samson.

00:04:30.000 Samson is the representative of the strength of Israel.

00:04:34.000 He is captured by the Philistines.

00:04:36.000 And where do they take him?

00:04:37.000 Well, the Bible says they take him to Gaza.

00:04:41.000 So Gaza is in the Bible. 0.67

00:04:42.000 It was one of the five cities of what was then called Philistia.

00:04:47.000 And interestingly, when Samson gets to Gaza, the Bible says that the people of Gaza said, strip him and bring him out so that he can entertain us.

00:04:58.000 And interestingly, again, after October 7th, captives who were taken to Gaza were brought out.

00:05:04.000 Some of them were stripped down to the waist.

00:05:06.000 They were paraded.

00:05:07.000 And you see all these people highly entertained, celebrating Allahu Akbar.

00:05:13.000 And so what the premise here is that what we are seeing in front of us is not just a one-off, it's not just an historical event.

00:05:22.000 To some degree, it's an event that is biblically evocative.

00:05:26.000 We have the feeling we've been there before, and the conflict is conducted in the exact same place.

00:05:33.000 I mean, Philistia is where Gaza is now located.

00:05:37.000 And so the idea here is to expand our minds and to try to think of these things not simply as events in front of us, but rather as events that are part of an unfolding of a grand biblical narrative.

00:05:50.000 That's good.

00:05:52.000 I am don't, obviously, I don't, obviously, but I don't speak Hebrew.

00:05:56.000 So I don't know what word is used in the original text for Philistia, but I did hear, but obviously there's, for an English speaker, an etymological resonance between this word Palestine and the word Philistine.

00:06:11.000 But I wonder, I thought I'd heard somewhere that the term Philistine was one of those labels that had been conjured by the opponents of the tribe rather than the tribe themselves, rather, like the word Hindu, for example, being a word that had come from sort of rivals and is sort of a very generic and initially derisory term.

00:06:31.000 Or even Welsh, you know, as someone from the UK, the word Welsh means something like them over there.

00:06:39.000 So what is the philological root of the term Philistine?

00:06:46.000 So the real issue is historical and not etymological.

00:06:52.000 And here's what I mean by that.

00:06:54.000 I'm not actually sure where the original term Philistine came from, but let's just take it that this is the term in the Bible.

00:07:03.000 It is obviously given in Hebrew.

00:07:05.000 It is then later rendered into Greek.

00:07:07.000 That's the sound of it, Philastine or Philastini.

00:07:11.000 But here's the point.

00:07:12.000 When the Romans came in, they were faced with some Jewish revolts that actually occurred over a period of about 300 years.

00:07:21.000 And the Romans became very annoyed.

00:07:23.000 And to punish the Jews, the Romans said, we are going to take the name of your ancient enemies, the Philistines, and we are going to rename your land. 0.97

00:07:33.000 So it's no longer going to be Israel or Judah.

00:07:36.000 It is going to be Palestine. 0.99

00:07:38.000 So that is the way, historically, in which the word Philistine became transported into Palestine.

00:07:47.000 And then later is picked up by Yasser Arafat.

00:07:49.000 You know, you have to fast forward 2,000 years for The Palestine Liberation Organization.

00:07:56.000 That's the connection between Philistine and Palestine.

00:08:00.000 Yes, Dinesh, thank you, thank you.

00:08:02.000 Although, of course, etymology and history will, of course, align because, in a sense, etymology is the history of words.

00:08:09.000 So, in this, they're sort of analogous disciplines.

00:08:13.000 Naturally, now, my interest is this: that whenever we are using scripture to tell a story, which I guess is all any of us are doing to some degree, we have to be cautious as to whether we are submitting very profound spiritual truths to cultural forces, even if they're powerful geopolitical ones.

00:08:38.000 And I suppose when I hear just your own brief appraisal of the subject of the film, I can see how that narrative would be very appealing towards, you know, given the nature of contemporary geopolitical conflict and how divisive Middle Eastern war is right now, that almost how much we can tell of each other, whether we say Israel versus Palestine or Israel versus Hamas or what we would talk about,

00:09:07.000 how we would describe the 20th century conflicts that led to the establishment of modern Israel, whether modern Israel and biblical Israel can be rightly regarded as the same entity, what the function of the nation state is.

00:09:22.000 And all of those questions are pretty profound.

00:09:24.000 And I've never really got anywhere with anybody of any benefit by analyzing those terms.

00:09:31.000 But one thing I will say is that my understanding of the word prophecy is that it's not about the future, it's about beyond time, that there are deeper truths that trans traverse time, that are more profound than time.

00:09:47.000 And when I'm as any sane person would, reflecting on what might be a resolution to this seemingly unending and ancient conflict, I do often consider the way that our Lord addresses his chosen people throughout the books of the Old Testament.

00:10:07.000 And it seems to me that he's pretty overall peeved, miffed, irked by the conduct of the Israelites. 0.95

00:10:16.000 And I wonder how one might interpret Yahweh's relationship with his chosen people, his disappointment, even with like, you know, the Nazarene Samson there, like how we might look at God's relationship with his chosen people and how we might be able to perhaps find common ground in this endless and detestable conflagration in that region, which seems to do nothing but divide. 0.52

00:10:46.000 And yet, somehow, don't we have to participate in finding a solution, a conclusion, a truce, a peace?

00:10:55.000 We absolutely do.

00:10:57.000 Let's begin with God, God's relationship with the Israelites.

00:11:02.000 And you also refer to the way that Jesus, for example, looks at the Jewish environment of his own time.

00:11:09.000 And you'd have to say that the relationship is troubled, is perhaps putting it mildly.

00:11:14.000 It is acerbic, confrontational, at times denunciatory on both sides, by the way.

00:11:21.000 The Israelites abandoned God. 0.72

00:11:23.000 They started worshiping the idols.

00:11:24.000 And it happens again and again and again.

00:11:27.000 I have to say, as someone who is a student of different cultures, you know, Russell, in just about every other culture and religious tradition, the religious and sacred books are very triumphalist.

00:11:40.000 You know, the heroes are great.

00:11:42.000 They never do anything wrong.

00:11:43.000 All the bad stuff is suppressed.

00:11:45.000 The Bible is so unusual in the sense that if you remove God from it, you would think that anti-Semites wrote it, right?

00:11:53.000 By that, I mean that the heroes of the Bible are almost all of them highly suspect characters.

00:11:59.000 Abraham is passing off his wife as his sister.

00:12:03.000 You know, David is engaged not just in adultery, but in effect murder by sending Bathsheba's husband to the front line. 0.51

00:12:11.000 So these are hardly, on the face of it, admirable figures.

00:12:15.000 Jesus could not have been more tempestuous about the religious authorities of his day.

00:12:21.000 And yet, I think the strange thing about the Bible is that you get the sense that the covenant is held together not on the human side so much as on the divine side.

00:12:32.000 That God is always saying, and yet I'm not giving up.

00:12:35.000 And you know, I want to destroy the earth, but and yet I'm going to get no end to the boat.

00:12:40.000 You know, I'm going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, but hey, the Israelites, you're still my people. 1.00

00:12:46.000 So you've got this very strange, fraught, antagonistic relationship.

00:12:52.000 And it has to be interpreted both on the spiritual side and on the, you could call it the earthly side.

00:12:59.000 I'm relying here on Augustine's distinction between the city of God and the city of man.

00:13:03.000 And here's my way of kind of getting out of all this: it is that I do believe, you know, when people use the phrase replacement theology, that in the city of God, the new covenant does replace the old.

00:13:18.000 Jesus does make everything new.

00:13:21.000 Once Jesus dies and is resurrected, there is no other way to heaven except through Jesus.

00:13:26.000 I think this is all Christians of all stripes believe this.

00:13:31.000 A separate question is what happens on the city of man.

00:13:35.000 So God makes certain types of land promises, for example, to Abraham.

00:13:40.000 As far as I can tell, he never takes them back.

00:13:42.000 They're not conditional promises.

00:13:45.000 And not only that, but they can't be, right?

00:13:47.000 If you and I go out and buy a piece of property, it's not conditional.

00:13:51.000 We own it forever.

00:13:53.000 We can give it to our descendants.

00:13:55.000 If it was conditional, we would never have owned it at all.

00:13:57.000 We would be like renters or lessees, but we wouldn't, in fact, own that land.

00:14:02.000 And so I think this distinction between the actual piece of land that God goes, okay, this is yours, is separate from the kind of new covenant and the new era that is spiritually inaugurated by Jesus.

00:14:18.000 That inauguration seems to explicitly, I mean, primarily, I suppose, in the book of Revelations and in some of Paul's writing, imply that there can be no lasting peace till the branch is grafted back onto the tree.

00:14:33.000 And should I wonder, therefore, our fundamental and primary efforts as Christians be the evangelical and devout attempt to bring the word and to bring the benefits of baptism to the chosen people as an absolute priority.

00:14:56.000 As Christians, should, and this is a question, should our position not be forming political alliances with Israel on the basis of what looks like geopolitical expediency, but a theological devoutness towards what appears to be God's explicit will in the very books that we're discussing now and that you're using for all of your argument.

00:15:23.000 Well, I think we have to make a distinction between what we as individuals should do and also as a church and also what nation states do.

00:15:34.000 By the way, you saw this distinction very clearly, for example, when Erica Kirk said about Charlie Kirk, you know, she says, I forgive the man that did this, right?

00:15:43.000 And then Trump, on the very same day on the very same platform, basically goes, I believe in an eye for an eye.

00:15:49.000 I'm not sure I would be that forgiving.

00:15:52.000 And I don't think, by the way, that the assassin should be given a kind of free pass because he should be held accountable to the law, right?

00:16:02.000 So we can simultaneously exercise our Christian prerogatives as individuals and at the same time insist that the state carry on its job and its duties as a state.

00:16:14.000 So I would say that if, you know, if I was a civil magistrate in charge of the United States, I would try to make political, beneficial alliances.

00:16:21.000 I would recognize I live in a dangerous world.

00:16:24.000 There are good guys and bad guys.

00:16:26.000 There are friends and there are enemies.

00:16:27.000 There may not be permanent friends or permanent enemies, but there are people who are friendly to you at a given time and for a given purpose.

00:16:35.000 So I think that that is separate from saying that you, Russell Brand, I Dinesh D'Souza, we do have the Great Commission.

00:16:43.000 We are supposed to go out and preach to the world.

00:16:46.000 We are supposed to testify Jesus.

00:16:49.000 I mean, if you look at this film, The Dragon's Prophecy, there are a lot of things that will have Jews cheering about it because it shows archaeologically the presence of the Jews and their ancestral homeland.

00:16:58.000 But the movie is explicitly Christian.

00:17:01.000 It ends with my wife Debbie and I, you know, basically splashing in the River Jordan and getting baptized with Christian music playing in the background.

00:17:09.000 So there's no effort here to withhold the evangelistic mission that we have as Christians.

00:17:17.000 And I think that is separate from our political duties and certainly our duties of statesmanship in the world.

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00:18:16.000 Yes, because now that you've touched upon the death of Charlie Kirk, one of the, you know, I met Charlie a few times, but didn't know that much about him other than he was conservative and Christian and remarkably bright and a brilliant debater and communicator.

00:18:36.000 But the sort of posthumous Charlie Kirk is, I think, whether you admired and loved Charlie Kirk or detested him, you would have to accept that the object of posthumous Charlie Kirk has become a different entity and is functioning culturally in a way that I just would not have foresaw or imagined possible, really.

00:19:00.000 And to unpack that a little, Dinesh, what I'm seeing, and Charlie Kirk is a good away as making this point as anything, I suppose, is this endless fracturing and fragmentation, these attempts to purpose and utilize Charlie Kirk's death for a number of causes.

00:19:17.000 But why I'm so blessed and pleased to bask in the light of our Lord is partly because, you know, as you said, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis have done my thinking for me.

00:19:33.000 Not that I need to disengage now, but my position where it differs from the position of Jesus Christ is a position that's not super worth contemplating.

00:19:45.000 So what I wonder is, is in this sort of complexity of this endlessly fractured and fracturing, fragmenting time that's likely to get kind of worse because of the way that the social media is unfolding, and yet the alternative is unthinkable, centralized control over social media.

00:20:04.000 Who do you want to give that authority to?

00:20:06.000 Me personally, no one other than Christ.

00:20:09.000 I feel now more than ever, we must be clear that our love of Christ can't be collapsed into a similar devoutness and dedication towards any political movement or political project.

00:20:24.000 In fact, it seems to me that our Lord, as you've already mentioned, was against Pharisaism and Babylon more than really anything else.

00:20:37.000 And I think that I feel the sense, perhaps as all Christians do, of his return.

00:20:44.000 I feel it viscerally, corporally, intimately, and personally.

00:20:49.000 And I also feel it apocalyptically that we are approaching end times because I can't imagine how much longer this Luciferian real-time Babylon could continue for Dinesh.

00:21:00.000 Now, I know you know a lot more about this than I do.

00:21:03.000 So do you feel therefore that even, as you said, that the Great Commission might now come to the very forefront and separate political projects about, well, let's just, you know, render unto Caesars.

00:21:16.000 I mean, I feel that that was a derisory.

00:21:18.000 Have your coin, have your little lump of matter.

00:21:22.000 How do you think we should be seeking to resolve tribal conflicts in this country over an object like the death of Charlie Kirk, the emergence of new polarities, even in what was for a minute a pretty tight space?

00:21:36.000 Candice Owens and the Turning Point being perhaps just the most obvious example, but Tucker Carlson and who knows who will be next to be sort of pulled out.

00:21:48.000 And the reason I suppose these two issues are somewhat connected, and then gosh, and this is a genuine question, is like, I wonder if people that obviously support and love Israel, like you, and I love Jews, and I certainly don't contest that Israel shouldn't have a homeland.

00:22:09.000 Is there an opportunity for a kind of a loving embrace to not a loving embrace?

00:22:16.000 What I'm going to say is a kind of an iteration of what's available in scripture and how that might be applicable now when it comes to orienting ourselves towards peace, both when it comes to this ongoing and endless battle that we've referred to and described in the first part of our conversation, and secondary, but in a way, somewhat significant, cultural clashes, such as the turning point Candice.

00:22:38.000 How are we going to bring about peace, given that the Prince of Peace is who we worship?

00:22:44.000 Well, I saw your questions have such a, they are so sinuous and they go in so many directions.

00:22:50.000 I'm a bit like the mosquito in the nudist colony.

00:22:53.000 I'm not sure where to begin.

00:22:55.000 There's so much to say, but let me try a few thoughts.

00:22:59.000 The first one, the first one is that the Bible will forecast certain things, like the end times.

00:23:10.000 I think we have to be very cautious because the book of Revelation is, for anyone who reads it, it's quite deliberately obscure.

00:23:18.000 It's deliberately veiled.

00:23:20.000 It's not obvious.

00:23:21.000 It doesn't read like, for example, the Gospel of Matthew, which is written in a straightforward narrative voice.

00:23:30.000 For me, I'm not into the kind of reading of the entrails.

00:23:33.000 I don't try to tell you what's going to happen like month by month or year by year.

00:23:37.000 What I will be looking for are the really big signposts.

00:23:41.000 So, the fact that the Jews who were scattered over a couple of thousand years came back, as is repeatedly predicted in the Bible and undeniably predicted thousands of years ago.

00:23:53.000 And not only that, it qualifies as one of those really great predictions because predictions are good if they're extremely unlikely, right?

00:24:00.000 If I were to tell you, toss a coin and I'm going to call heads, that's not a very good prediction because there's a 50% chance you're going to get heads anyway.

00:24:08.000 But when the Bible makes implausible predictions and they come true, you got to pay attention.

00:24:13.000 So, I pay attention and I say, Yeah, it does seem to me that we are somewhat in the last, you could call it last epoch or the last era.

00:24:21.000 How it's going to play out, I don't really, I don't really know.

00:24:24.000 Now, I also agree, you know, when you mentioned Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, and he was a good guy who was kind of caught in the middle.

00:24:33.000 He was caught in the middle because his organization had an older group of donors who were pro-Israel, by the way, mostly a combination of like Jews and evangelical Christians.

00:24:44.000 And then he is in an environment where younger people are a little bit more anti-Israel.

00:24:50.000 And so, Charlie was like the kind of entrepreneur trying to keep these two groups kind of together.

00:24:56.000 And so, this is an understandable kind of challenge.

00:25:00.000 I don't agree with Charlie when he says things like, you know, my donors were threatening me.

00:25:04.000 They're not threatening you.

00:25:05.000 It's not your money.

00:25:06.000 It's their money.

00:25:07.000 They don't have to give it to you.

00:25:08.000 There are many other worthwhile organizations.

00:25:11.000 If you want to keep their money, you're going to have to listen to them.

00:25:13.000 That's the nature of having a non-profit institution.

00:25:17.000 I also think that, and I was at the Charlie Kirk funeral right up there in the front.

00:25:21.000 Some of the rhetoric I think was inappropriate.

00:25:26.000 And by inappropriate, what I mean is it elevated, it almost took Charlie as a secular martyr and put him in the same zone as Jesus Christ himself.

00:25:36.000 And a number of people did that in one way or another.

00:25:39.000 Tucker did that.

00:25:40.000 You know, when Tucker said, Hey, listen, I can think of these guys and they went after Jesus for the same reason that people went after Charlie.

00:25:47.000 The answer is no.

00:25:48.000 It was not the same reason.

00:25:51.000 The Jews killed Christ for a completely different reason than Charlie Kirk was killed. 0.53

00:25:56.000 Not to mention the fact that Christ came to earth to die, which is not the same as Charlie Kirk.

00:26:01.000 And so this kind of facile analogy of Charlie and Jesus, you know, doesn't really work for me and kind of offends, but it doesn't offend me because Tucker used the word hummus.

00:26:12.000 It offends me because I think it raids the example of Jesus to make the analogy in this way.

00:26:20.000 Yes, I think comparing anyone to Christ, other than inso much as Paul says, that we might through annihilate, as John the Baptist says, and as Paul says, that through getting smaller, getting less, we may experience Christ more.

00:26:39.000 And I got to say, Dinesh, it's this sort of these mystical and personal encounters with Christ that are overwhelming me lately.

00:26:48.000 The mystery of Christ, the mystery of a present visceral, interior Christ is overwhelming me.

00:26:56.000 And I'm really like learning how to deal with that right now as best as I can.

00:27:02.000 The other thing that I want to bring to you as a fellow Christian and as an educated man is when I came to the Lord aged 50, near enough, I suppose, I was pretty counterculturally well-versed, not academically.

00:27:23.000 I'm an autodidact, but I can interpret information quickly, not necessarily correctly, but quickly, and I can assimilate information pretty quickly.

00:27:33.000 And I've read somewhat the Maharabhata, and I've read somewhat the Vedas, and I've read somewhat Sufism and a lot of philosophy.

00:27:40.000 I've impacted and compacted and consumed quite a lot.

00:27:43.000 And when I came to scripture and found that there was nothing wanting, I was kind of alarmed because I was expecting fables and fairy tales and sort of wan, diluted, ethical philosophy that I thought was going to offend me.

00:28:02.000 And when it was so awesomely psychedelic and so profound, and when you said what you said about the book of Revelations, for example, about it being opaque, I took the way that I'm experiencing, say, the comparable philosophy prophecy in e.g.,

00:28:22.000 Ezekiel or Daniel, and the obvious and presumably deliberate resonance and rhyme with Old Testament prophecy in the book of Revelation is that there is a language of symbol that must be accessed necessarily if you're going to transcend the limits of limitations of language,

00:28:43.000 not just when it comes to translation between languages, but when it comes to interpretation between the mind of God and the mind of man.

00:28:53.000 My ways are not, your ways do not conform to the patterns of this world.

00:28:57.000 So when I'm reading Revelations, when I'm reading all of the books of the Bible, I'm reading it, you know, in the order that we were given it in post-Nicene Council, and I am struck by how explicitly it says both in both Testaments, evil is in control of the world.

00:29:16.000 Most recently, in the first epistle of John, towards the end of that book, chapter five, evil is in charge of this world, he says.

00:29:24.000 And then he and then, and I think deliberately, obviously, deliberately, but interestingly, don't worship false idols.

00:29:32.000 I think we live in a culture of false idolatry.

00:29:34.000 I think all false idolatry begins in self.

00:29:36.000 This is the one area that we've touched upon in our 30-minute conversation now, Dinesh, where I am an expert: addiction.

00:29:43.000 Addiction is just extreme attachment, extreme attachment.

00:29:46.000 Everybody is overly attached.

00:29:50.000 And I would say attachment is, you know, an Eastern word that encompasses the same territory as false idolatry.

00:29:59.000 Evil is in charge of the world.

00:30:01.000 Do you agree with that?

00:30:02.000 If evil is in control of the world, does it matter whether the Lord is using Nebuchadnezzar or David or Saul? 0.63

00:30:09.000 Does it matter?

00:30:10.000 Does it matter when Christ is Lord and King?

00:30:13.000 Isn't this a time for us to absolutely ensure that we do not afford people the ability under the guise and veil of politics to engage in false idolatry and further sin?

00:30:23.000 At least in our discourse, Dinesh.

00:30:27.000 I agree completely.

00:30:28.000 And I also think that this is the radicalism of the Bible.

00:30:35.000 By that, I mean that if you go back to the culture of the ancient Greeks and you take, for example, Socrates or Aristotle, even Plato, they have a shared assumption.

00:30:46.000 And the shared assumption there is that vice equals ignorance.

00:30:51.000 In other words, the idea here in Socrates is that if you do something that's wrong, it's because you don't know better.

00:30:58.000 And that if you knew better, you wouldn't do it.

00:31:01.000 So ultimately, Socrates spends a lot of time in the intellectual task of trying to teach you what the right path is because he assumes that if you knew what it was, why would you go anyplace else?

00:31:14.000 Now, contrast this with the statement in Paul, where Paul says, the good that I would, I do not.

00:31:22.000 And the evil that I would not, that I do.

00:31:25.000 So, what Paul is saying is: you don't have to tell me what's right or wrong.

00:31:29.000 I actually know, but my will is perverted.

00:31:33.000 My will is pulling me in the wrong direction.

00:31:36.000 I am choosing to do what is bad.

00:31:39.000 And this is a much more profound idea.

00:31:42.000 And it's the idea, I think, at the root of the Bible that the great clash in the world is not between ignorance and knowledge, it's a clash between good and evil, the forces of good, the forces of evil, and ultimately a cosmic battle between God and Satan.

00:31:57.000 When I use the phrase the dragon's prophecy, the dragon is a reference to the devil.

00:32:03.000 Yes, yes.

00:32:04.000 And one can see why the classic world is used as sort of formative and foundational for contemporary materialism and atheism.

00:32:12.000 Because if what you want is for the global imperialist state to replace God as the supreme authority, and that's always been my deepest concern, is that we are through bureaucracy and technocracy, and indeed obviously technology and the utilization of technology, advancing towards global imperialism.

00:32:31.000 And these tribal conflicts, significant and serious though they are, are merely masks, cudgels, and tools to corral us into the ultimate power of what I'm assuming would be when I consider the dragon, when I consider the beast, I note this peculiar anodyne creature, this bureaucratic and sanitized creature.

00:32:57.000 I note too that C.S. Lewis, when depicting demons, uses a bureaucracy in the screw tape letters.

00:33:04.000 It's through bureaucracy that control will be asserted.

00:33:09.000 And so I feel, Dinesh, that yes, I agree with you that Paul, I think that's in Romans, isn't it?

00:33:16.000 Where he says, I can't, you know, like, what is it?

00:33:17.000 I can't manage, I cannot marshal my appetites.

00:33:20.000 What is that sin?

00:33:22.000 What is this fallenness?

00:33:23.000 What is this brokenness?

00:33:24.000 What is this tendency that I have, like Satan, to, or at least Lucifer, to demand my own dominion, to demand my own closed circuitry, which one might format neurologically, closed circuits of self.

00:33:40.000 How, other than through Christ, through his divine inward light, a light that's beyond photons, a light not visible to our limited eyes, how do you suppose, Dinesh, that we might invite this into our hearts and into our conversation?

00:33:58.000 And my intention and nascent understanding, my inchoate understanding, is this is going to be what solves the current political trajectory towards legitimizing authoritarianism through crisis.

00:34:19.000 That only through the claim that Christ Jesus is available to all of us, that our individual sovereignty is unbreachable and unimpeachable, and that we must peculiarly, given that international socialism might be regarded as one of the primary enemies of Christ, there's a kind of fraternity and brotherhood through his church that we must now achieve.

00:34:42.000 And I don't know that we can achieve it unless we're very robust in our devoutness and our zeal.

00:34:48.000 And do you agree with that, Dinesh, or is this the zeal of the newly converted you sent in me?

00:34:55.000 No, I think that if you were to ask me about what is the what is an important difference today between Christianity and Islam, I would say that Islam has not lost the force of its original revelation.

00:35:14.000 You have Muslims today of all educational levels and all over the world, and they are pretty much as serious about Islam as the Muslims were in the 8th century or the 7th century.

00:35:27.000 And you can't say that that's true of Christianity, alas, by which I mean that the force of Christianity, which shaped the West, and the West cannot be comprehended outside of that Christian dynamism that drove it for 2,000 years.

00:35:44.000 But it looks at least to a lot of outsiders, and I'm not an outsider, but to a lot of outsiders, like Christianity has become a spent force.

00:35:51.000 That yes, you got some devout believers, you got a Russell Brand, you got a pastor over here.

00:35:57.000 But as a culture, the societies of the West are not animated by the Christian spirit in the way that they used to be.

00:36:07.000 And I think we actually need to get a lot of that back.

00:36:10.000 So it's not just the fire of individual revelation, it's also the cultural fire.

00:36:18.000 You know, look, people like Columbus didn't get on a boat without having some Christian fire in them. 0.98

00:36:23.000 I don't deny that Columbus may have had, I want to be an explorer, I want to find gold.

00:36:28.000 Those motives were there too.

00:36:29.000 But there was also that kind of, let's call it, missionary zeal that comes out of genuine devoutness.

00:36:37.000 And I think that we need that today to heal our own societies, but also to resist evil in the world.

00:36:45.000 You aren't Catholic, I don't suppose, or Eastern Orthodox.

00:36:49.000 So then you must believe in the ongoing decentralization of the church and forms of Protestantism.

00:36:55.000 And I wonder if that process is at an end.

00:36:57.000 I strongly believe when I think about even confiscatory tax systems, like in Europe, naturalized American, aren't you?

00:37:04.000 So in your country, America, I feel, I know that even in the most libertarian hues, the government still plays this sort of central cultural role.

00:37:14.000 And I feel that perhaps part of the advance in evolution we might make in this fast evolving and advancing time is to assert once more that Christ and his church have to be at the very center of cultural life, that government must be minimized and that the social contract to take care of one another and to ensure fairness and to ensure reverence and stewardship of the land might once again return to the church.

00:37:39.000 But I don't envisage a centralized church, an imitation of Roman Catholicism, although I love Catholics or Eastern Orthodoxy, although what I know of Eastern Orthodoxy seems pretty mad and gorgeous to me.

00:37:52.000 What I mean is that the local church should be the heart of the community and government should be minimized where possible.

00:37:58.000 The obvious proviso, as you know, as Marx observed, is that rampant commercialized global corporatism will devour us like locusts if not opposed.

00:38:08.000 But I wonder if now we're using the very technology that threatens to destroy us, that if we might advance a spiritually ungirded church, decentralized, communitarily, enshrining the sovereignty of the individual under Christ, the family and the community, and have direct democracy wherever possible, mightn't that be a great salve towards the incessant and unending tribalism that we're discussing in various ways,

00:38:36.000 whether that's turning point Candace or Israel-Palestine?

00:38:39.000 How might we do what do you curious about ideas like that?

00:38:45.000 You know, it seems like people have been advocating in the last few minutes a kind of Protestant philosophy, but you actually haven't because within Catholicism, believe it or not, there is something called the principle of subsidiarity.

00:39:00.000 And the principle of subsidiarity basically means that things should be scattered to the winds and everything should be done as far as possible at the local level.

00:39:11.000 Now, if something cannot be done at the local level, then you do it at the state level.

00:39:15.000 But even the state level is preferable to the national level.

00:39:18.000 And the national level is preferable to the global level.

00:39:21.000 So in other words, our sympathies move in concentric circles kind of outward.

00:39:26.000 So this is, I would say, in some ways a Protestant ethic, but it's also a Catholic ethic, both.

00:39:32.000 And the only kind of minor qualification I would add is I do think that there's nothing wrong in even having a national ethic in which we are able to unapologetically assert certain Christian principles.

00:39:47.000 Let me give an example practically of what I mean because we seem to be speaking in a fairly high level.

00:39:52.000 You know, if you or I were to go to, let's say, United Arab Emirates or Qatar, and we said, we've secured funding.

00:40:00.000 We want to build 100 churches in your country.

00:40:04.000 They would say, no.

00:40:06.000 And then he would say, wait a minute, why not?

00:40:08.000 What about religious freedom?

00:40:10.000 Well, you have a lot of mosques around here.

00:40:12.000 Why can't we?

00:40:13.000 We're talking about buying private property and putting up our own churches.

00:40:17.000 And they would go, sorry, pal, this is a Muslim society. 1.00

00:40:21.000 And so we make the rules around here.

00:40:23.000 We're not saying you can't have a church.

00:40:25.000 We're just saying you can't have 100 churches because we want to have essentially a certain character and tone of the society as a whole.

00:40:34.000 And we get to say what that is.

00:40:36.000 Now, we have lost the ability in the West to do the same thing and to basically say, well, listen, we're not against religious freedom.

00:40:43.000 We're not against people following their own religion.

00:40:45.000 But the truth of it is we are a society with a kind of Christian ethic.

00:40:50.000 Call it Judeo-Christian, call it Christian. 0.99

00:40:52.000 To me, it's the same thing.

00:40:54.000 Bottom line of it is we get to establish the kind of overall tone and character of the society.

00:41:01.000 And if you don't want, you don't like it, you're not forced to come here.

00:41:05.000 But if you do come here, you need to subscribe to our system.

00:41:08.000 You need to join our club.

00:41:10.000 You need to live by our rules.

00:41:12.000 Yeah, I agree with that.

00:41:14.000 Except when earlier you said, Dinesh, that our Christianity is rather sort of lacking a priapic edge, perhaps not the 100% right word, but I wanted to have a sense of urgency.

00:41:28.000 That's a well-chosen word, my friend.

00:41:31.000 You said that mosquito nudist colony thing earlier.

00:41:35.000 You put nudity in our conversation, Dinesh.

00:41:37.000 Now, like, you're born in India and naturalized American.

00:41:41.000 I'm born in England.

00:41:43.000 And gosh, I can't envisage a time when I go back to that UK.

00:41:47.000 And I was just thinking about the impact of British colonialism on your mother country there.

00:41:53.000 And indeed, the sort of problems that occurred after the departure of the UK that I suppose probably to one degree or another continue to this day because of the, if not arbitrary, then certainly not sort of absolute nature of division of territory when undertaken by colonial or imperial or economic or even mineral interests.

00:42:21.000 I wonder if, is it fair to say that the journey of Christ's church has so often been partnered with imperial interests, probably from the conversion of Constantine onwards.

00:42:34.000 And I sometimes, before coming to our Lord, I wondered if it was this, you know, this before I came to him.

00:42:40.000 I wondered if it was the plasticity and the mobility, motility too, of Christianity that somehow contributed to its success as a global religion, but at the expense of its essence, giving us this kind of cordial, sort of diluted version of Christ's church.

00:43:01.000 And as you say, Islam doesn't have that problem. 1.00

00:43:04.000 If you meet like a white Muslim with a big beard and wearing the outfit, you know what you're dealing with. 1.00

00:43:10.000 If you meet like an African-American Muslim with a shaved head, you know what you're dealing with. 1.00

00:43:14.000 They've kind of, as you said, they've kept the sort of the verb vitality of Islam intact.

00:43:21.000 And of course, a Muslim would say because it's a superior faith, it's a more recent faith, it's better adjusted to the war, you know, the sort of martial conditions of its inception and I suppose the conflict that continues to this day. 0.98

00:43:34.000 So I wonder if part of the liberation of Christ Church might be a kind of attitude towards secularism that's assertive, in a sense, in the manner that you've just described.

00:43:46.000 That we should say, well, you know, as Charlie Kirk did, gosh, I just saw a video of it the other day, so it's the only reason I know it.

00:43:53.000 That, you know, the founding fathers of this country, America, were Christian.

00:43:58.000 But as you say, it's Christian or Judeo-Christian undergirding that's wrought whether it's the Magna Carta or the Constitution or the writing of pain or whoever. 0.66

00:44:08.000 And so what I would say is, should we as be Christians before all else, Christians before Americans, Christians before English, Christians before whatever nation?

00:44:18.000 And should we be how far should we be willing to take that?

00:44:21.000 Should we be willing to take that all the way to look, if America gets in the way of Jesus, Jesus.

00:44:26.000 If America gets in the, if England gets in the way of Jesus, Jesus is like, I'm following Jesus. 0.72

00:44:32.000 And isn't that the distinction that you've drawn between modern Islam and contemporary Christianity, the one that I've just defined, that it is a priori, that they are Muslims before they are, I don't know, Saudi or Qatari or certainly, you know, one might imagine any Muslims in Western nations.

00:44:55.000 You know, right during the Iran conflict, and the which culminated in the Trump administration dropping those bombs on the Iran, the nuclear facilities, one of the mullahs was quoted as saying, basically, we don't care about Iran.

00:45:15.000 We care about Islam.

00:45:17.000 And that is quite honestly what you're saying in a different way.

00:45:21.000 And I agree with it completely.

00:45:23.000 That even though I have no problem thinking of myself as like America first, in reality, I'm not America first.

00:45:29.000 I'm Jesus first, right?

00:45:31.000 And it's God, family, and country kind of in that order.

00:45:36.000 While I am a resolute patriot under certain conditions, I would certainly give my life for my country, which is America.

00:45:42.000 The truth of it is, I would not betray Christ for my country.

00:45:46.000 And nor should you, and nor should or would any true Christian. 0.99

00:45:50.000 So, yes, I agree that Jesus is the first priority, and all good things flow out of that.

00:45:57.000 Since the Westphalian treaty, haven't we all betrayed Christ by allowing him to be subordinate to nation?

00:46:04.000 I say this is an Englishman who loves England, you know, that the church of England, even obviously, you're a man of letters and words, even syntactically, one can feel the church beneath England in that little idiom, church of England.

00:46:18.000 You can feel the church quaking under the freight of empire and the cargo of royal might.

00:46:25.000 She or he that may have been anointed by the oils of Christ, holding a scepter that seems and wearing a crown that subordinates and enslaves him.

00:46:37.000 Certainly, I would say that one of the things that's excited me since coming to our Lord is that if people are going to use the lexicon vocabulary of Christ, if they're going to use the hermeneutics of Christianity, then we've got some interesting territory on which to operate because I feel like any Christian knows that what Christ is, is love.

00:46:57.000 He is love.

00:46:58.000 And what he is telling us again and again is to love one another and to come from a place of peace and to be willing to die for, as he died for us, for what we believe in.

00:47:07.000 And when, as the early disciples all experienced the sort of a second baptism after the death and resurrection, might this be a time that we, like the church, continually resurrected, that we experience a resurrection of devoutness, a resurrection that, like you said, of the sort of martyr mindset of the Muslim mullah that you just quoted, means that if we don't love Christ unto death, then how much do we love Christ Dinesh?

00:47:39.000 Yes, I think to me, you know, some years ago, I did a series of debates with a lot of the prominent so-called new atheists, people like your countrymen or your Christopher Hitchens and many others, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

00:47:54.000 Wow.

00:47:55.000 And they were, and the way that these guys were portraying Christianity, they were basically saying that Christianity elevates the sort of commitment to Christ over everything else.

00:48:08.000 And it ignores all these other legitimate commitments to our country, to our family.

00:48:13.000 Now, when I first read the great work called The Pilgrim's Progress, there's a wonderful opening scene where the young pilgrim, his name is Christian, and he meets this guy called Evangelist.

00:48:26.000 And Evangelist says to Christian, fear the wrath to come.

00:48:31.000 And Christian is like, what are you talking about? 0.98

00:48:33.000 And the evangelist says, look over there, look over there.

00:48:36.000 And Christian looks, but he doesn't really see anything or he doesn't see anything all too clearly.

00:48:41.000 But his mind is made up.

00:48:43.000 And so he begins to sort of pack his things and to get ready to go on the spiritual journey. 0.98

00:48:49.000 Now, here's where the plot gets really interesting because his family and his neighbors come to him and they go, you're crazy. 1.00

00:48:57.000 You're nuts. 1.00

00:48:58.000 Are you actually going to abandon your family? 1.00

00:49:00.000 Are you going to abandon all your other commitments in life and go following some light that you don't even really see?

00:49:07.000 And then John Bunyan writes, But Christian took the index fingers of both hands and put them into his ears and rushed into the street shouting, life, life, eternal life.

00:49:23.000 The point being here that when it comes to the divine light and the priority of Christ, everything else becomes secondary, including the legitimate claims of his bleeding wife and his needy children and his neighbors.

00:49:38.000 Where are you going?

00:49:38.000 When will you be back?

00:49:40.000 Christian is like, well, I'll be back, but the most important thing for me to do right now is actually to follow the light because that's how I save my immortal soul.

00:49:51.000 And that is, I think, a priority that as Christians, we don't want to lose sight of.

00:49:56.000 Otherwise, we're just hopeless facsimiles of the soul anyway.

00:49:59.000 You know, if we are not in Christ, if we are not willing to block out the senses, shut down the olfactory distractions, then what are we anyway, other than the playthings of Satan, who, as we've said again and again in this conversation, is king of this world, as it says in all of the temptations, as it says in Revelations, as it says in the letters of John, as Paul repeatedly says, but most notably in Ephesians, he's in charge.

00:50:23.000 Satan is in charge of the world.

00:50:25.000 So that means the institutions.

00:50:27.000 Now, I'm a person that I've moved through some institutions now, Dinesh.

00:50:31.000 I've moved through institutions like Hollywood, British television, British media.

00:50:35.000 I've had some flirtations, one might say, with government and the judiciary.

00:50:39.000 And it's my, I feel it and I see it.

00:50:42.000 He is in charge.

00:50:43.000 Satan, in a thousand different ways, whether that's through flesh or whether it's through mentality, without the full armaments, without wearing the girdle of truth and the granted breastplate of righteousness, without that helmet of salvation to stop my own mind going crazy, I can't bring the good news to anyone and I can't defend myself and I can't fight in this battle.

00:51:03.000 So, I'm going to, thanks once again for giving me a praise on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Process.

00:51:08.000 I've picked it up a couple of times, and for some reason, you know, when you try and read something you've been told to read, you're like, I need you to be better, not better, easier to read, or more rewarding more quickly.

00:51:17.000 I don't know, man.

00:51:17.000 I used to be a heroin addict.

00:51:18.000 I need quick stimulation. 0.68

00:51:20.000 I'm probably like that mosquito in the nudist colony that you described earlier.

00:51:24.000 So, I guess what I feel like is, and it's in a sense, it's the same question again and again and again.

00:51:30.000 And I know, like, I'm grateful to talk to you because some of your political documentaries have made real waves, notably, obviously, Mule.

00:51:36.000 It sounds like Dragon's prophecy is going to be an impactful film.

00:51:42.000 I just want to get beyond tribalism and quibbling, and I want to get to the place that you're describing there in Pilgrim's Process of Life, Life, Eternal Life, because I can't be a father to my children or a husband to my wife without Christ.

00:51:56.000 Without them, I'm a denizen of Satan's mad realm.

00:52:01.000 I'm just, you know, like Paul, and that's good company to be in.

00:52:05.000 I do what I don't want to do, and I won't do what I'm supposed to do.

00:52:08.000 So, and like the thing is, is here we are.

00:52:10.000 You know, we are online pundits for better or for worse.

00:52:14.000 We're in this thing, you know.

00:52:15.000 If some clip goes viral, if we say something interesting about Candace Owens and Turning Point right now, or Charlie, God rest his eternal soul, or Trump, or whoever it is in the news cycle, or Joe Rogan saying there could be an AI Christ.

00:52:27.000 I'd say that sounds like an AI antichrist myself.

00:52:31.000 You know, it could be seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.

00:52:35.000 And I feel that other than awakening in them a reverence and relation, a reverent relationship with Christ, there's not a great deal else I can offer people.

00:52:48.000 Christ is the ultimate answer, but I also think that in the Christian tradition, there are some resources that allow us to get along even in Satan's domain, which is the earth.

00:53:02.000 And we do that by holding on to some things like the natural law.

00:53:08.000 So, the natural law, I think, is the law of conscience.

00:53:13.000 It is a law that we all have as human beings.

00:53:15.000 Think of people, for example, who are not Christian.

00:53:18.000 By and large, they still have a moral compass.

00:53:20.000 In fact, we couldn't punish them for doing bad things if they didn't, because they do know internally the distinction between right and wrong.

00:53:29.000 We do have in the Hebrew scriptures the Ten Commandments.

00:53:33.000 It's probably not a complete sort of chronicle of all morality, but it's pretty good, 10 rules to live by.

00:53:41.000 And obviously, if the world lived according to the Ten Commandments, it would be a happier and more peaceful place.

00:53:47.000 And so, I think that there are ways, even in this kind of curse domain that we call the earth, for us to get along, even with some of the people who are not in our camp theologically by appealing to some of these common moral principles.

00:54:03.000 Well, yes, I mean, indeed, for a moral compass to work, it would have to be detecting and reading an irrefutable magnetic field, an absolute and universal law, the same way that a regular compass works.

00:54:15.000 And that would be the same, I suppose, as Mosaic law saying no other gods first, nothing.

00:54:22.000 Not your father, not your mother, not your reproductive organs, not no screen, not no cultural artifacts, certainly not these mad, crazy high altars and these weird antennae that detect and direct your energy so peculiarly.

00:54:36.000 Might ask a few sort of more contemporary questions.

00:54:39.000 What did you think about the Joe Rogan AI Jesus?

00:54:42.000 He sort of just said in a podcast the other day, Joe Rogan, who seems to be getting interested in Christianity, certainly, and he's going to church, I understand.

00:54:51.000 He said, like, you know, what's more virgin than AI?

00:54:54.000 Do you think that AI is more likely to take us to Christ or an Antichrist?

00:55:00.000 Well, I would say that AI is, as far as I can see, thoroughly amoral.

00:55:07.000 And by amoral, what I mean is that it is quite possible to populate AI with all the empirical knowledge in the universe, all the historical knowledge, all the commentaries that have ever been said.

00:55:21.000 And AI can process, regurgitate, interpret.

00:55:24.000 But what I'm asking you is, does AI have a conscience?

00:55:27.000 And if so, where does it come from?

00:55:29.000 It doesn't.

00:55:30.000 It can't.

00:55:32.000 And so for these reasons, I think we can use AI as a tool.

00:55:36.000 But if we are looking to AI to supply our morality, I would say we're looking in the wrong place.

00:55:41.000 Secondly, when you were having that conversation with Hitchens and Daniel Dennett et al., men that I admire, that I've not met, I've sort of spoken to Sam Harris, I've spoken to Richard Dawkins, I've spoken to many competent, confluent, and brilliant atheists.

00:56:01.000 What position do you find to be most effective when dealing with atheists? 0.99

00:56:05.000 And what scripture and what positions and what flaws, problems, and contradictions in materialism do you find are most useful, Dinesh?

00:56:16.000 I would begin by saying that I think that for some, but not all, of these eloquent atheists, that upon probing, you discover that they are wounded theists.

00:56:31.000 And by that, I mean it's not that they don't believe in God.

00:56:34.000 They have a beef.

00:56:36.000 They have a rage.

00:56:37.000 They have an issue with God.

00:56:40.000 The issue could be personal.

00:56:42.000 It could be philosophical.

00:56:43.000 They're angry with God.

00:56:46.000 And so the anger is camouflaged as unbelief.

00:56:51.000 Because in a sense, the anger by itself is if you say, okay, God, I'm against you, but I have no ability to overthrow you.

00:56:57.000 There you are sitting on your throne.

00:56:59.000 There's nothing I can do about it.

00:57:00.000 In a sense, your best revenge is just to say, I don't believe in you.

00:57:04.000 And so I want to put that on the table because in my experience, having been pretty close to some of these guys, Hitchens particularly, I often ask myself, is this really what is driving him wounded theism rather than atheism in the classic sense?

00:57:21.000 The second thing I found with a guy like Hitchens is that you had to earn his respect by making a point that he never thought of.

00:57:30.000 And if you did, he would then scratch his head and be willing to listen to you.

00:57:35.000 And so I, for example, one time I think I got through to him was he was making an argument that goes back to Sigmund Freud, where he was saying that religion is wish fulfillment.

00:57:45.000 We believe in heaven because we all want to live in adult Disneyland.

00:57:48.000 We all want a world better than the one we have now.

00:57:51.000 And so we kind of make up or conjure this imaginary world.

00:57:55.000 And I said to him, I go, well, that would in fact indeed explain the Christian idea of heaven.

00:58:02.000 I go, but how would you explain the Christian idea of hell? 0.71

00:58:05.000 I go, hell is worse than anything on earth.

00:58:08.000 Why would anybody make that one up?

00:58:10.000 And yet the Christian idea of hell has gone alongside the idea of heaven from the very beginning.

00:58:16.000 Eternal damnation is much worse than anything we could experience in this life.

00:58:20.000 So tell us why a group of people cooked up that one.

00:58:24.000 And he was like, hmm.

00:58:26.000 I don't think he had quite thought of it.

00:58:28.000 It caught him by surprise.

00:58:30.000 And I could kind of see him wrestling with it.

00:58:33.000 He may have mumbled an S-H-I-T like under his breath.

00:58:37.000 And we were kind of fast friends after that.

00:58:40.000 That's lovely.

00:58:41.000 That's reassuring because I've always admired Christopher Hitchens.

00:58:44.000 I never had the privilege of meeting him.

00:58:47.000 May God rest his soul.

00:58:49.000 Not that he would thank us for saying that.

00:58:51.000 But I also detect in phenomenal intelligence as something that is so like our Lord that it seems that it really merely needs to be turned inwards.

00:59:03.000 Dinesh D'Souza, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:59:06.000 We'll put a link in the is your is it I guess it's you a movie you can watch online, right?

00:59:11.000 It's not something people have got to get up off of their redundant blubbery and wander to a multiplex to see dragons prophecy.

00:59:19.000 They can go see dragon's prophecy or wicked 2.

00:59:22.000 It's going to be online, right?

00:59:24.000 Yeah, I'll give you the website.

00:59:26.000 It's thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.

00:59:29.000 The dragonsprophecyfilm.com.

00:59:31.000 And you can watch stream it or you could get DVDs right off that site.

00:59:36.000 I might watch it.

00:59:37.000 Mostly I like the idea of you and your wife frolicking in the Jordan.

00:59:39.000 I've never been to Israel.

00:59:41.000 I'd like to go.

00:59:43.000 Is it good?

00:59:45.000 It's well worth going because it is, well, you have to go with a kind of a mission.

00:59:50.000 And the mission we went with is we were like, we've heard about all these remarkable discoveries in biblical archaeology that thousands of years later are taking people who are only in the Bible.

01:00:01.000 They've been in the Bible for centuries.

01:00:02.000 And now they are jumping into the pages of history, like by the pathway of archaeology.

01:00:08.000 So if you go in search of that, I think you'll find it endlessly fascinating.

01:00:12.000 What's the best one?

01:00:13.000 What's the best example of someone leaping out of archaeology in a scripture?

01:00:19.000 Pontius Pilate.

01:00:20.000 So Pontius Pilate was for 2,000 years in the Bible, but he was only in the Bible.

01:00:27.000 There was no extra biblical or non-biblical verification.

01:00:31.000 A couple of other people referenced him, but they're unreliable sources.

01:00:36.000 And then while they're digging in the area called Caesarea Maritima, Caesarea by the sea, out comes a stone tablet out of the ground and written on it, Pontius Pilate, prefect of, I don't know if it's a prefect of Israel or Prefect of Judah.

01:00:53.000 But anyway, the point is it made it really clear this was Rome's man in Israel.

01:00:59.000 And in fact, it gave him the exact same title that he was assigned in the Bible.

01:01:04.000 And suddenly Pontius Pilate is now an accepted historical figure.

01:01:07.000 I could give you a dozen examples, but that's just one notable one.

01:01:11.000 That was good.

01:01:12.000 That got here.

01:01:13.000 That might have been my favorite hit out of our whole chat, which I've really, really enjoyed.

01:01:17.000 And I'm reminded of a British comedian called Frank Skinner, who was a cradle Catholic who came back to his faith later in life, said that when he was like thinking about coming back to Christianity, that he sort of like was thinking about it and reading about it.

01:01:33.000 And he eventually went and met his church to talk to a priest.

01:01:37.000 And the regular priest weren't on.

01:01:39.000 And they had some old guy there that was stepping in that was an older priest.

01:01:42.000 And I feel like Frank Skinner describes him as wearing like a hearing aid and being a little bit sort of old and maybe not fully present.

01:01:49.000 And Frank Skinner was describing all of his sort of esoteric struggles with faith and morality and the church and who knows what.

01:01:58.000 And the old guy just went, come back.

01:02:02.000 You want to come back?

01:02:03.000 Come back.

01:02:04.000 Come back.

01:02:05.000 I didn't attempt to do it intellectually at all.

01:02:09.000 I kind of like that.

01:02:11.000 It bypasses the intellect, huh?

01:02:13.000 Absolutely.

01:02:14.000 No, sometimes that's all it takes.

01:02:17.000 Yeah, thanks, man.

01:02:19.000 Thanks, Dinesh DeSouza.

01:02:20.000 Well, I wish you well with your film and thank you for making time for me today.

01:02:25.000 Well, thank you very much.

01:02:27.000 God bless you.

01:02:28.000 Thank you.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 17, 2025

Does the Bible Foretell Today’s Conflicts? — Dinesh D’Souza - SF664

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