Stay Free - Russel Brand - Science, Faith, and Totalitarianism: A Conversation with Dr. John Campbell- SF514

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:03:07.000 Brought to you by Pfizer.

00:03:09.000 Thank you.

00:03:11.000 What is your name?

00:03:15.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:03:18.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.

00:03:30.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:03:32.000 Those of you that watched our content throughout the pandemic period, where we made our bones, made our reputation, and made an impact in the independent media space, will remember that as well as talking to people that are now in the upper echelons of American health, like Jay Bhattacharya, and Marty Makari, and Bobby Kennedy, and Aaron Seery and Callie Means and more.

00:03:51.000 We also spoke to Dr. John Campbell.

00:03:53.000 Many of you still watch his YouTube channel without knowing that much of his power comes from a surprising source and resource.

00:04:01.000 And we're going to be talking about that.

00:04:03.000 If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be there for about the first 15 minutes.

00:04:05.000 If you know Dr. John Campbell's content, you know that he meticulously manoeuvres around the complications of YouTube and their imperative to censor content.

00:04:15.000 If you're not on Awaken Wonder yet, become an Awaken Wonder now and you get to join us live for conversations like this one as well as my deep dives into Christian content with a variety of people.

00:04:26.000 And remember now, we are streaming four times a week but the content's better than ever because we're making content just like this.

00:04:33.000 It's not that you can really change yourself, can't it?

00:04:35.000 You can change us.

00:04:37.000 Holy Spirit.

00:04:38.000 Holy Spirit.

00:04:39.000 We're going to jump in the ocean.

00:04:40.000 Nice, it's cold.

00:04:41.000 Aim for the hand. 0.99

00:04:51.000 Nice work.

00:04:51.000 I'd like to see you at the tribunal.

00:04:53.000 How many people did you kill? 0.57

00:05:01.000 What's it like to kill people? 0.99

00:05:02.000 If you ask somebody in the military, like, oh, how many people did you kill? 0.97

00:05:05.000 And they're like, oh, I've killed this many, and yeah, like, beat their chest, they're lying to you.

00:05:11.000 If God touches you like that, then that belongs to God.

00:05:15.000 Don't take that nowhere else.

00:05:16.000 There's nothing that can reproduce the feeling when the love of God hits you.

00:05:20.000 We'll be with you on YouTube for a couple more minutes, and I'm going to just let you know how much I love Dr. John Campbell.

00:05:27.000 The way he communicates information is par excellence, is second to none, is fantastic.

00:05:32.000 He's a man you can rely upon, you can lean upon, and you can trust.

00:05:36.000 Throughout the pandemic, he was like, hmm, this study doesn't seem to make sense.

00:05:38.000 Well, the data they're giving us on vaccines, that doesn't stack up.

00:05:42.000 It's almost as if the media and government are in cahoots with one another.

00:05:42.000 Why?

00:05:45.000 He has a very particular style of communicating, but he is a scientist, a doctor, a man of integrity and authority, and these are the kind of people we need in positions of power these days.

00:05:54.000 Let's begin the interview, but we won't be able to finish it on YouTube.

00:05:58.000 It will have to be on Rumble.

00:05:59.000 And if you haven't got Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium now so you can have a friction-free, advertising-free experience over Where free speech reigns supreme.

00:06:09.000 And remember, you can support our content by subscribing to Rumble Premium or becoming an Awakened Wonder on Locals to get additional content free from Adverse.

00:06:16.000 Click that link that's in the description now.

00:06:18.000 Without further ado, let's join Dr John Campbell.

00:06:21.000 I'm here with Dr. John Campbell, one of the great heroes of the pandemic era, whose content and journey lifted many spirits.

00:06:32.000 Because John Campbell, like I would say men like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makari, are the kind of people that reassure you that there are people that are able to straddle the worlds of science and faith, of acknowledging that science is great at telling us how things happen, but not why things happen.

00:06:50.000 That we are able to rely on clinical trials, empiricism, and the great principles of science, but what we can't rely on is the fallibility of humankind and to reduce and subvert systems of science to systems of exploitation.

00:07:06.000 In so much as if science is a subset of corporatism and commercialism, then what kind of empiricism is left?

00:07:13.000 If big pharma and health ultimately are controlled by corporate and maybe even globalist interests, and maybe it's even darker than that, how can we rely on their findings?

00:07:22.000 Who pays for the clinical trials that happen?

00:07:25.000 Who will refuse to pay for clinical trials that ought to happen?

00:07:28.000 Who's spending money to prove that natural immunity and vitamin D, sunshine and deep breaths are effective when you could have clinical trials to demonstrate that new mRNA technologies are valuable, maybe even invaluable?

00:07:41.000 All of these questions were worked out live by my guest, John Campbell, who's a teaching professional as well as a medic, whose brilliant trademark Non-blustery, straightforward, let's face it, British style was a beacon to many and an inspiration to many more during the pandemic period.

00:08:04.000 Dr John Campbell, thanks for joining us for this live conversation available to our Awakened Wonder community.

00:08:10.000 Click the link in the description if you want to become an Awakened Wonder.

00:08:13.000 Thanks for joining us, John.

00:08:15.000 I wish all those things were completely true, Russell, but I appreciate it.

00:08:18.000 Thank you very much indeed.

00:08:21.000 What things weren't true?

00:08:22.000 I think it was all true.

00:08:24.000 Well, it's what I aspired to be.

00:08:26.000 I'm not sure we always quite got there, but it's a bit of a process and we're still working on it.

00:08:31.000 It's pretty insane.

00:08:33.000 Some of the things we wanted to talk about today, Russell, was the overlap between faith and science.

00:08:39.000 Is that an area that we're interested in?

00:08:43.000 The power of transformation.

00:08:44.000 For example, just before our conversation, I was watching that clip of Trump with that journalist from Meet the Press, and where he sort of talked candidly about his appetite to investigate causal or correlative links between vaccines and autism,

00:09:02.000 and just how, sort of what a vertiginous kind of A pang is induced when you see that conversation that had been so successfully chased to the periphery, discussed by the President of the United States on the mainstream.

00:09:16.000 Now, of course, I really want to talk to you about Christianity and faith and principles.

00:09:20.000 Indeed, how can you ever ultimately discuss politics without discussing faith and virtue and ultimately discussing God in some form, God in inverted commas at the very least.

00:09:31.000 But I wanted to start with that.

00:09:33.000 Are you surprised by how quickly things appear to be changing?

00:09:36.000 A few examples.

00:09:37.000 Marty Makari now is the head of the FDA. Jay Bhattacharya is the head of the NIH. Bobby Kennedy is the head of the HHS. Well, all of these await confirmation, of course, so we don't want to be too presumptuous.

00:09:50.000 Are you astonished to see these kind of conversations taking place publicly?

00:09:56.000 Quite frankly, given the calibre of people that are now being given a public voice and the amount of work they've done over the decades, and they're finally being liberated, as it were.

00:10:08.000 These are people that have been studying this, been working in this field for all of their lifetimes.

00:10:15.000 They know all of a sudden They're giving the political freedom.

00:10:18.000 So given that they're in their positions that they have now, I can just only imagine the kind of relief that they're feeling to be able to actually speak all of a sudden, and it's just brilliant to see.

00:10:30.000 So I'm delighted.

00:10:33.000 I'm surprised the way it's gone, but I'm not surprised at what they're saying because we've got some very high-caliber, very thoughtful people.

00:10:41.000 And you raised a really interesting point there, Russell.

00:10:43.000 We've talked about correlations.

00:10:46.000 Let's say between vaccines and injuries before.

00:10:49.000 But it's always been difficult because we haven't had the full data to adjudicate on the likelihood of causality.

00:10:56.000 And now we're going to get full data.

00:10:58.000 I'm actually very optimistic that we're going to get release of a lot of primary source data.

00:11:03.000 We're not short of brilliant statisticians.

00:11:06.000 We've got number crunchers just waiting to analyse this stuff.

00:11:10.000 We can even now pay professionals to analyse it on behalf of the government, and we can get some real hard data, and we can change correlations and suspicions into real science and real cause and effect data.

00:11:24.000 Thank you.

00:11:28.000 is disproved when the hard data comes out, but I am concerned about some of the things that the hard data is going to bring out.

00:11:36.000 One of the things I'm remarkably concerned about now is cancers in younger people, for example.

00:11:42.000 You know, we've got so many anecdotal reports.

00:11:44.000 Are we going We've got plausible mechanisms of action why some drugs and some vaccines could be causing cancers.

00:11:51.000 It's plausible.

00:11:52.000 It's not ridiculous.

00:11:54.000 But we haven't got that final data that's going to link the cause and the effect.

00:11:59.000 And I'm really optimistic this is going to come out.

00:12:02.000 People will crunch it straight away, I'm pretty sure, and then let's hope for the best.

00:12:07.000 But it is an anxious time, as well as an illuminating time, I would say.

00:12:13.000 It's the kind of...

00:12:18.000 Optimism, ephemeral optimism that can exist, I would say, in liminal and chaotic spaces.

00:12:25.000 It seems sort of weird to say that, because when you're talking about Trump and Elon Musk, obviously you're talking about incredibly powerful people.

00:12:32.000 But real power goes way beyond human power.

00:12:36.000 And increasingly, Dr. John, I've been thinking...

00:12:41.000 But, you know, say if you, I pay attention to David Icke, which is an interesting thing, because David Icke usually, like, I'm one of the people that David Icke goes on to X to sort of criticise, you know?

00:12:52.000 And, like, I understand it and appreciate it, because I think David Icke feels like, hang on a minute, I've been talking about all this stuff for ages, and these people now that are making money, or at least have influence in these spaces, you know, they're not going far enough, they're compromised, they're, like, you know, all All sorts of opinions that I'm sure have their own validity, but for a lot of people, David Icke will have been written off for being too extreme.

00:13:17.000 A lot of people will say that, like, you know, gosh, and this is a charge that gets offered at a means directed at many, that he's an anti-Semite.

00:13:25.000 Lots of things we get, and some people just think that David Icke is ridiculous.

00:13:28.000 But when it, gosh, it's almost like the more that is revealed when it comes to, you know, high-powered, high-profile paedophiles, the potential that there are sort of institutionalised sex things going on. 0.78

00:13:41.000 The ritualisation of those activities.

00:13:44.000 Then, you know, for corporatism, an agenda to assert and exert citizen management by claiming it's for the good of people, using crises to justify authoritarianism.

00:13:56.000 Not that Ike is the author of a lot of those ideas.

00:14:01.000 Noam Chomsky is the person that says, you know, problem, solution, reaction, or whatever it is.

00:14:06.000 That's, I think, Chomsky that came up with that.

00:14:09.000 But what I'm...

00:14:11.000 I guess this was a roundabout way of me asking, John, and sort of moving us towards the area that I'd like to discuss with you, is that a lot of people now, because of the emergence of independent media, are able to and willing to attack establishment narratives, whether it comes to the field in which you have garnered some renown, you know, big pharma, medicine, healthcare, or...

00:14:36.000 When it comes to reporting on wars, you know, even with, like, recent events in Syria, straight away, people are like, this reporting saying that this al-Qaeda group are great seems sort of a little bit compromised, and look at the funding ones, some of them are funded by the Pentagon, some are funded by the CIA. We're all kind of a fae with information that, not that long ago, John, would have been really esoteric and would have been coming from the left.

00:15:00.000 I'm thinking about people like...

00:15:01.000 Naomi Klein with her book Shock Doctrine about how South America was continually being co-opted, corrupted and overtaken by deep state US interests.

00:15:11.000 How coups were continually being sponsored.

00:15:13.000 Now, these tropes tend somehow to exist on the right and pertain to a type of power that still remains political and material one way or another.

00:15:23.000 What I'm wondering, John, when we're talking about faith versus science, is are you becoming increasingly sympathetic to the idea that power may go beyond the simple matter of controlling resources and controlling information?

00:15:39.000 Very much so, and I think what you're sort of starting to get at there, Russell, is the link between predeterminism and free will.

00:15:49.000 I think it is important that people have free will.

00:15:52.000 We have to have free will to have moral accountability, and we do have moral accountability.

00:15:58.000 In terms of all those other things that you've talked about there, I think you're absolutely right in that independent media is available, we can actually get video from people on the ground, we can assess that, and we can go by the quality of the evidence.

00:16:15.000 Now some ideas might seem far out, but where is the evidence for those ideas?

00:16:20.000 And it's that, as C.S. Lewis said, we need to follow the evidence Wherever it leads.

00:16:26.000 But I agree with you completely that I think we're in a transition stage at the moment.

00:16:32.000 So in the past, it's been considered unscientific to believe in transcendence, unscientific to believe in God, unscientific to believe in creation.

00:16:46.000 But I think that's changing fundamentally now, because in the past we knew much less than we do now.

00:16:52.000 I remember when I started to learn science, probably 40 years ago now, the amount of knowledge was really quite limited.

00:16:58.000 Now we know so much more about so many things, and I would actually contend now quite strongly that it is scientifically very difficult to defend atheism.

00:17:10.000 Because there is so much evidence.

00:17:12.000 In the past, when we knew less about science, people used to say, well, we don't know how that happened, so probably God did that bit.

00:17:21.000 That's what's called the God of the gaps idea. 0.78

00:17:25.000 And this has been totally consigned to history by the emergence of greater levels of understanding and a more refined, detailed understanding of science.

00:17:38.000 And now it is so improbable that what we see occurred through naturalistic terms and pure probabilistic terms, I actually think it is scientifically inconsistent to take an atheist view now, as we move on to the god of knowledge.

00:17:54.000 Away from the God of the gaps.

00:17:57.000 And maybe just to start off with one really simple example.

00:18:01.000 The first book in the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

00:18:07.000 Well, when I was young, I started to take an interest in astronomy.

00:18:11.000 There was two views in astronomy.

00:18:13.000 There was Big Bang and Solid State.

00:18:15.000 Now it's pretty well accepted that the Big Bang...

00:18:19.000 That was the way that things began.

00:18:21.000 Just before I go on Russell, I just want to predicate this actually because there's a big cultural difference here between the United Kingdom and the United States.

00:18:29.000 Now in the United Kingdom, people don't really think about this in churches and in Christian circles.

00:18:35.000 If you go to a church, you could go, I've been going to church for decades and I don't think anyone Maybe a few people because they know I'm interested in science, but basically people don't take an interest.

00:18:47.000 Famous British physicist John Polkinghorne, professor of physics, went from being a professor of physics to being a vicar in the Church of England.

00:18:55.000 And he said once in 10 years in the Church of England in his parish, no one asked him any scientific questions.

00:19:01.000 It's just not an issue in the United Kingdom.

00:19:04.000 But in the United States, it's a huge issue.

00:19:07.000 Where people take a particular stance on creation and they almost elevate this to a doctrinal status.

00:19:15.000 Now, this is not what you might call an article of faith or a salvation issue.

00:19:21.000 It's perfectly possible to have a wide range of issues from what might be called young earth creationism to old earth creationism and theistic evolution.

00:19:31.000 In my view, all of those are completely consistent with different interpretations of scripture.

00:19:37.000 What I'm keen not to do is to offend people who have a particular view and think that particular view is important.

00:19:45.000 And of course, their view is important.

00:19:47.000 But the way I look at it is the vast majority of science is based on an empirical understanding of the world.

00:19:55.000 So having predicated that, to get back to my original example...

00:19:58.000 In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.

00:20:01.000 So there was a big bang creation event, in my view, about 14.7 billion years ago, round about then.

00:20:08.000 That's when most physicists think it happened.

00:20:10.000 Now, at that point, at that point in time, Physicists tell us that the universe was phenomenally massive and phenomenally small, probably smaller than an atom to begin with.

00:20:21.000 But before that singularity occurred, there was no matter, energy, space or time.

00:20:29.000 All matter, energy, space or time came into existence at that point.

00:20:35.000 Therefore, what caused the universe, by definition, cannot predate the universe.

00:20:41.000 There must be a cause of the universe which is external to Matter, energy, space or time.

00:20:47.000 Now a lot of physicists don't like that idea and they're now jiggling around with ideas of faith, which are ideas of faith, like a multiverse for which there's no evidence because by definition we can't know what's outside our universe.

00:21:00.000 So a lot of scientists are aware of the theistic implications of that and are trying to sort of get out of it.

00:21:07.000 But that physics is there.

00:21:09.000 And the universe that that gave rise to is one which was needed to evolve over a period of time.

00:21:17.000 So, for example, that had to expand out the way at a particular rate.

00:21:22.000 Now, if that expanded too quickly, then all the matter in the universe would just fly apart and you wouldn't get the formation of galaxies and the formation of stars.

00:21:32.000 But if it didn't fly out fast enough, compared to the mass and the electromagnetic forces in it, then it would fly out a little bit, then clump back in again into a big crunch, and we would have no universe.

00:21:44.000 And it turns out that the balance between the electromagnetic forces, the momentum of this and the mass, has to be fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 55. The probability of that happening just the right amount.

00:22:00.000 So that's one with 55 noughts after it. 0.94

00:22:04.000 Now, if you take a coin and you make a pile of coins all over the continental United States, we'd have 2p coins or whatever coins they have in the States, 5 or 10 cent coins.

00:22:18.000 And then you pile that pile all the way up to the moon.

00:22:23.000 And then you do that on several million other United States.

00:22:26.000 Then you've got 10 to the 40 coins.

00:22:29.000 Now, if you get one of those coins and put a red dot in it and chuck it into that pile, remember this pile goes all the way to the moon, and I say, right Russell, pick out that coin, and you just happen to pick out that coin with the red paint on it, then the chances of that are 1 in 10 to the 40. And they're the sort of probability that I'm going to

00:23:00.000 have to stop you there, John, because we're moving into territory that YouTube would like to get all over, I'm sure you know how that goes.

00:23:06.000 So click the link in the description to join us for the rest of this conversation.

00:23:10.000 Before that countdown ends, click the link right now.

00:23:14.000 We're going to be talking about extraordinary stuff like the We're going to be talking about George Orwell.

00:23:18.000 How many of you have been looking at that picture there in the background thinking, when's he going to mention George Orwell?

00:23:22.000 When's he going to mention George Orwell?

00:23:23.000 We're going to be talking about Trump, news media, autism, vaccines and so much more.

00:23:28.000 Click that link and join us.

00:23:30.000 The analogy you just gave was used when I was in church yesterday at Destiny Church by the pastor on stage when speaking about the 300...

00:23:45.000 Prophecies in the Old Testament about the coming of Christ.

00:23:49.000 Now when I approached that, he used exactly the same thing.

00:23:52.000 Texas, coins, red dot.

00:23:54.000 He didn't use all the way up to the moon.

00:23:58.000 It actually comes from John Lennox originally.

00:24:00.000 He's the founder of the analogy.

00:24:04.000 Nevertheless, what's very striking is when you're talking about scripture, my kind of still somewhat intact, cynical, sceptical mind says, Yeah, but if you're saying that in Isaiah these predictions of Christ are made,

00:24:21.000 and in Daniel these predictions of Christ are made, and way back in Genesis and even Enoch, if you want to get non-canonical, that these predictions of Christ are made, it's sort of possible that people that wrote the Gospels those few decades after the life of the historical figure of Christ,

00:24:40.000 that it's quite possible that they Deliberately concocted those correlatives in order to fulfill prophecies that they would be familiar with as devotees of that scripture themselves, scripture that they were often referencing.

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00:25:57.000 What comes to my mind when you enter into sort of the mathematics of the bizarre, John, let's call it, the sort of Texas red coin analogy, is that what you're ultimately saying, if you ask me...

00:26:12.000 Analogous to what you previously said, that prior to this molecular moment 14.7 billion years ago, there is no energy, matter, space or time.

00:26:24.000 And what is recurrent through scripture is the...

00:26:30.000 Allusion, rather than the description for such a thing would be impossible, of entities and states of beingness that are beyond our comprehension, are beyond our instruments of measurement, be they sensorial or amplifications of those sensual instruments through various Renaissance technology and what's been extrapolated from them,

00:26:56.000 that We are at some point forced, whether scientifically or theologically, to enter into the faith state knowing that we have a hardware problem, that the human being has a limited capacity for understanding.

00:27:13.000 And what do I find in Scripture when I countenance that notion is the phrase,"...the peace that passeth all understanding." That when I open myself to belief, when I say, even though on some level I can never make sense of the idea that God,

00:27:32.000 after an Old Testament's worth of hectoring and punishing and sacrifice and symbol and prophecy and forewarning, eventually comes God, comes God's self in human form to experience human life and to somehow, I have to try to find a way, John, of...

00:27:53.000 Delineating or espousing, inauguring energetic states and frequencies that are impossible without the kind of helix and fractal alchemy of God and man, fully human, fully divine, being incepted, being conceived of, being actualised.

00:28:18.000 And in this figure of Christ, when I sort of say, alright, I'm gonna, like what my teacher says, believe, receive, obey, abide.

00:28:27.000 You know, that believe is the first step.

00:28:29.000 The rational mind cannot do it, will not do it, will not say...

00:28:35.000 I'll believe, you know, and it's only actually in Scripture, in particular, John, in a book like Acts, you know, where I think, like, what's going on there?

00:28:43.000 How come these people, at the end of Luke, at the end of John, the beginning of Acts, there's this, just something happens that changes the world forever.

00:28:54.000 Empires start to fall.

00:28:56.000 People start to believe a new thing.

00:28:59.000 It's not just the teaching.

00:29:01.000 It's the miracles.

00:29:02.000 It's not just the teaching and the miracles.

00:29:05.000 It's the prophecy.

00:29:08.000 It's the continual description of miracles.

00:29:12.000 Of ideas that precede and preempt spiritual discourse.

00:29:17.000 When I imagine the sort of dendrite flow of quantum fields as best as one can.

00:29:24.000 A super state of potentialities.

00:29:26.000 The kind of havoc of the poetry of the world of bosons and quarks.

00:29:33.000 That it's like a kind of...

00:29:36.000 The unmanifest is made manifest.

00:29:39.000 The unmanifest is made manifest.

00:29:42.000 And in that is a peace that pass of all understanding.

00:29:45.000 And in order to abide in this, you must love one another as I have loved you.

00:29:50.000 And that love means sacrificial love.

00:29:53.000 That's the only love.

00:29:54.000 That's the update on the Deuteronomic is not just love thy neighbour, but love everyone.

00:30:01.000 And not just love them as you reckon they might like to be loved, but as I have loved you.

00:30:06.000 It's like burst open the seed of the self to that ordinary, botanical, horticultural miracle of the growth of the seed.

00:30:16.000 One of the most consistent New Testament metaphors, and one of the metaphors that we'd find in any agricultural faith, I'm sure, that burst open and let the seed die.

00:30:25.000 That kind of death has to happen.

00:30:27.000 And wow, and look at the body language that I find myself automatically adopting to sort of try to convey that. 1.00

00:30:34.000 It's just fascinating to me that for the longest time, John, I regarded Christianity as stupid in a word. 1.00

00:30:42.000 It's like, that's a stupid idea, and it's for stupid people. 1.00

00:30:46.000 And you're British like me, so you'll get these references. 1.00

00:30:48.000 It's songs of praise.

00:30:50.000 It's boring.

00:30:51.000 It's dull. 1.00

00:30:51.000 It's dumb. 1.00

00:30:52.000 It's C of E. It's tedium. 0.99

00:30:54.000 I didn't see the magic of the Eucharist or the marvel of even song or the colossal impact of the saints or the word itself.

00:31:03.000 All of that obfuscated and obscured.

00:31:06.000 You've talked already of the distinction between British and American Christianity and it struck me, John, that the reason perhaps British Christianity is not inquisitive in the manner that American Christianity is is because That British Christianity is inert, because Britain has no empirical, no sort of imperial project anymore.

00:31:31.000 Britain is a dead state, inert now, is an inert tangent to American colonial power.

00:31:37.000 America is still a burgeoning and priapic force, and therefore... 0.91

00:31:43.000 Their matters of dominion are engaged at a heightened level in what's going to be in power.

00:31:49.000 Is it going to be Luciferian false post-enlightenment power?

00:31:52.000 Or is it going to be military, rational, material power?

00:31:55.000 Or is it going to be Christ?

00:31:57.000 Is this going to be God's kingdom?

00:31:58.000 Whereas in England now, it's like...

00:32:00.000 It's over.

00:32:01.000 We're just sort of waiting around in our cardigans for the clock to run down.

00:32:05.000 So there are sort of distinctions in the way that sort of Christianity sort of plays out in different territories.

00:32:12.000 You know, anyway, John, I recognise there's no question in there.

00:32:15.000 I could drag one out of it, but I've said so much, I'm sure you've got comments.

00:32:17.000 No, it's interesting.

00:32:19.000 What I've heard, Russell, is you struggling.

00:32:23.000 And trying to draw analogies to the incarnation, you know, veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hell the incarnate deity.

00:32:33.000 How can that be?

00:32:34.000 You know, God himself contracted to a span of human life.

00:32:38.000 It is so beyond comprehension.

00:32:40.000 And the way that you were trying to put that into words is fascinating because you've got this idea, you've got this spiritual belief.

00:32:53.000 We're trying to share this idea, but it is so incomprehensible, so miraculous, so beyond our ability to understand it, that you end up with these analogies which all seem incredible, but totally inadequate.

00:33:10.000 Everyone feels that.

00:33:11.000 Anyone who understands this in any depth feels that.

00:33:14.000 I think you mentioned there There's a tension to things as well.

00:33:20.000 The idea of human beings' ability to understand things, and if that is limited.

00:33:27.000 Now, Martin Rees, the previous astronomer royal, says that human ability to understand things is intrinsically limited, and they'll never fully understand the universe.

00:33:38.000 Now, whether that's true or not, we don't know.

00:33:40.000 It's certainly true that we have limited ability to understand spiritual things.

00:33:45.000 As Christians, we believe completely in the Holy Trinity, but I really couldn't.

00:33:49.000 I've heard many people give analogies of that, but these are things we can't explain, and that's reassuring to know that there's things about God that we can't explain.

00:34:00.000 But I think it's important to realize that intellectual pursuits can lead people in the right direction.

00:34:07.000 C.S. Lewis, for example, basically reasoned himself into faith.

00:34:12.000 But ultimately, the Gospels say, unless you come to Christ as a little child, you don't come at all.

00:34:18.000 So ultimately, you just put your hand up and say, Daddy, please.

00:34:22.000 But sometimes you can get to that point via processes of thinking about it.

00:34:29.000 The cross-cultural links between the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, in this area of creation.

00:34:35.000 And a lot of that actually goes back to historical things.

00:34:39.000 So in the States, they had this thing, the Scopes trial, the monkey trial, where there was a big debate about whether evolution should be taught in schools or not.

00:34:47.000 So it's become part of American culture where it isn't part of English culture.

00:34:52.000 I don't think it's necessarily a lack of curiosity on behalf of the British, although we do suffer from chronic curiosity disorder.

00:34:59.000 That is true.

00:35:01.000 But I think it's just one of these cultural differences that's arisen.

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00:36:10.000 Sometimes I feel that there are latent fields beneath what can be discerned that have characteristics, otherwise we wouldn't be able to sort of even make stereotypical, let alone archetypical, diagnoses of, you know, an Italian, a French person, the Latin American temperament, the American South.

00:36:32.000 All these things have some sort of tombra to them, and I suppose relativistic and rational.

00:36:37.000 A praise of that would be, oh, well, that's somehow been inculcated, but they would say the same thing about ethics and morality, whereas C.S. Lewis is, in a sense, the sort of tip of the spear for me when, in my own wrestling with C.S. Lewis, let alone the subject of C.S. Lewis's own grapple,

00:36:57.000 is that he's talking about You know what good is, and you know what worship is, and you know what sacrifice is, and you know what it is when you've done wrong.

00:37:08.000 And like when you read, who's this sort of the American Manhattan pastor that sort of somewhat took on a somewhat Suez Lewis type mantle?

00:37:18.000 Tim, he's like, do you know who I mean?

00:37:22.000 He's wrote a book called...

00:37:24.000 He's pretty good, this guy.

00:37:26.000 He sadly died recently.

00:37:29.000 Someone will know in the chat.

00:37:33.000 One of the arguments that he takes up are, well, if you're talking to an atheist and you say, do you believe in God?

00:37:41.000 No, I don't believe in God.

00:37:42.000 And many of the straw man arguments that follow...

00:37:47.000 Then, what is humanitarianism?

00:37:50.000 Where is it derived from?

00:37:51.000 And George Carlin's famous stand-up, Tim Keller, thanks, blessed old bird, I mean Tim Keller.

00:37:58.000 Where are rights derived from?

00:38:01.000 Why would you have rights?

00:38:02.000 Why is it important to, for example, have women's rights? 0.95

00:38:07.000 What is that based on?

00:38:09.000 What are the principles?

00:38:11.000 Before too long, without God, you're...

00:38:15.000 End up saying, like, just because I think so.

00:38:18.000 Like, you know, in the end, you yourself are God.

00:38:22.000 You can't say...

00:38:23.000 You know, when I hear, like, say, an atheist that I like and admire, like, say, Ricky Gervais saying, I don't need a God to tell me not to murder, that's not the argument.

00:38:33.000 The argument is...

00:38:34.000 Without a God, your decision not to murder is the same as a person's decision to murder. 0.63

00:38:42.000 It's like you can't make a claim for morality.

00:38:50.000 Yeah, arbitrary morality.

00:38:52.000 And I'm reading at the moment at the recommendation of Jordan Peterson, Mercier Eliard's book, The Sacred and the Profane.

00:39:03.000 He's talking about without the sacred, we have homogeneity of space.

00:39:12.000 That all things are not just An endless outpouring of space, gently referring to the earlier part of our conversation and the rules of the universe emerging from that explosion.

00:39:24.000 It's worse than that.

00:39:25.000 It's worse than an uninterrupted space.

00:39:28.000 It's nothing but arbitrarily gathered shards and fragments of a billion unrelated realities that we, again, just nominally...

00:39:41.000 Choose to allot meaning to.

00:39:44.000 Without the concept of the sacred, mankind will continually revert to sacralising either the biographical or the rational.

00:39:57.000 And the examples Eliard used is, like, you'll look back to the place where you fell in love, or you'll create your own personal theology in the absence of a theology.

00:40:09.000 By the way as well, John, I'm not saying let's choose God because if we don't choose God then look at all the chaos.

00:40:17.000 I'm saying...

00:40:19.000 I believe it.

00:40:20.000 I believe it now.

00:40:22.000 I believe it.

00:40:23.000 And I'm struggling, and I'd love your...

00:40:26.000 I would love, like, how...

00:40:28.000 Like, you see, like, there is this sort of...

00:40:30.000 You know, the problem with the Bible, if I may be so bold, is you have to move between poetry, history, philosophy, continually, and you're sort of not clear what...

00:40:42.000 Where you are when.

00:40:44.000 Like, you know, because I've seen, like, very clever atheists say, well, you know, even when you're looking at the book of Genesis, why does it not, why does it sort of, you know, we know that the stars preceded the heaven and the earth because the, you know, the component parts of our material reality came from stars.

00:41:00.000 We, inverted commas, know that, or at least that's how it appears when looking at the way that various elements are formed in the furnaces of stars itself are sort of bizarre and magical.

00:41:12.000 Miracle, actually.

00:41:13.000 So I wonder how you reconcile the observable and demonstrable inaccuracies of Scripture.

00:41:21.000 And Ashela's asking, have I asked about the Shroud of Turin yet?

00:41:23.000 I've seen that video on Ashela, and we will be talking to John Campbell about that.

00:41:28.000 If you haven't seen that video yet, go watch it now on YouTube for all my misgivings about YouTube.

00:41:34.000 John Campbell is one of the people that uses it most elegantly.

00:41:37.000 But for now, John, I wonder how you move around.

00:41:39.000 When something is plainly not true, or plainly not true scientifically or inaccurate, or what about when saying it's at odds with our contemporary morality, with sexuality, the rights of various people to be in same-sex partnerships, all of that stuff.

00:41:56.000 How do you move through that, John?

00:42:01.000 Great difficulty, Russell, is the answer to that question.

00:42:07.000 Let's just take one example there that you gave.

00:42:10.000 The stars becoming visible.

00:42:13.000 On the third day or whenever it was.

00:42:15.000 I think it was the third day.

00:42:16.000 Well, I mean, the idea, one idea there, this is the Hugh Ross reasons to believe idea, is that the scripture, the Holy Spirit there who wrote that, the witness to that event, was hovering on the surface of the deep.

00:42:32.000 So that account was written from the perspective of an observer on the surface of the earth.

00:42:40.000 And the idea is that there will be a lot of debris in space, a lot of density in the atmosphere, and that the stars will only become visible at that period of time.

00:42:49.000 So that's one interpretation.

00:42:52.000 But actually, if you look at Genesis, the first two, three chapters of Genesis really I think probably the best interpretation is a guy called John Walton, and he says that this is basically a temple story, the way that God built a temple, because eventually he would come into this temple.

00:43:10.000 So what we have to realize is that the scriptures were written by human authors in a particular time, in a particular place, and in a particular culture.

00:43:19.000 Now, it is our job to try and understand their cultural background, their cultural river, rather than try and pose ours on them.

00:43:29.000 So, when Genesis was written, okay, the order in Genesis, if you allow for the fact that the stars became visible on the third day, is roughly the right order of the way things that happened, roughly.

00:43:42.000 Certainly closer than other creation accounts in other religions.

00:43:47.000 But the people writing that had no concept of science.

00:43:52.000 So I think it's unreasonable for us to try and deduce any science from that.

00:43:58.000 It's not what it's about.

00:44:00.000 We have to put ourselves in the mind of the individual.

00:44:03.000 And you're right, a lot of scripture is clearly analogous, is clearly poetic.

00:44:10.000 Think of the Song of Songs, for example, the beautiful love poetry.

00:44:15.000 In that, we have to try and work out what genre it is and interpret it accordingly.

00:44:24.000 But Alistair Beggar, a British preacher who works in the States, he said the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.

00:44:32.000 So in other words, there's a lot of peripheries, but the main things...

00:44:37.000 Plain.

00:44:38.000 So Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour, you know, the ichthyus, just those five letters. 0.88

00:44:44.000 Those things are plain.

00:44:45.000 The main things are plain, and the plain things are the main things.

00:44:49.000 So we've got all these fundamental main tenets of what we believe.

00:44:54.000 And round about that, you've got a lifetime of interest to work this out.

00:44:59.000 And by the time that you and me take our last breath, we won't have worked this out.

00:45:04.000 So there's plenty to keep us interested.

00:45:07.000 Now, some scriptures are open to cultural interpretations.

00:45:12.000 For example, Paul exalts believers to greet each other with a holy kiss.

00:45:17.000 Now, every time I go to church on Sunday and no one's greeting me with a holy kiss yet.

00:45:23.000 So what does that mean?

00:45:24.000 We're being unscriptural?

00:45:25.000 Well, of course not.

00:45:26.000 We shake hands.

00:45:27.000 Some things are culturally determined.

00:45:31.000 But other things are not culturally determined.

00:45:33.000 So if you look at the early believers in the Book of Acts, wondering which part of the Old Testament law they should adhere to.

00:45:44.000 So it was clear they didn't have to adhere to the dietary law, but they should abstain from sexual immorality and from things strangled and from eating blood.

00:45:54.000 So these things were carried on.

00:45:58.000 So, some things are carried on, some things are culturally determined, other things are absolute, and there is some legitimate disagreement which camp things would fall into, but we have to be aware of the risk that I am likely to interpret things in a way which is convenient to me, in a way which is convenient to my lifestyle, so we have to strive for the objectivity.

00:46:27.000 Of what the scripture is saying and not interpret that in the light of what I would like to be true to give me the lifestyle I would like.

00:46:34.000 In other words, the scripture has to dictate the lifestyle.

00:46:37.000 The lifestyle does not dictate the interpretation of the scripture.

00:46:40.000 I think they will be some of the guidelines I would use, but it's not an easy field.

00:46:46.000 But remember that the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.

00:46:50.000 I've never heard that before, and I will remember that.

00:46:52.000 And in fact, the idea of scriptural utility is dealt with in the Gospels through the dynamic between Christ and the Sadducees and Pharisees.

00:47:04.000 It feels like one of the main...

00:47:08.000 Whether it's John the Baptist or Christ, you feel like what you're dealing with, and then Paul and the apostles, is like, how do we deal with this now?

00:47:17.000 What is it to prepare for his coming kingdom?

00:47:21.000 What is it to deal with this perplexing, complex, and confusing idea that his kingdom...

00:47:30.000 We'll come again.

00:47:31.000 That we're dealing with some kind of atemporal, aspatial reality that's going to converge and collide.

00:47:41.000 I'm thinking about this in Erdinger's book on the engravings of William Blake in the Book of Job.

00:47:53.000 He talks about, like, Blake illustrates various aspects of the story of Job, and they're, like, really lovely.

00:48:00.000 Then being engravings, John, they're real, you know, sort of elegant and simple, beautiful starscapes and sort of various depictions of Job in his sort of torment.

00:48:10.000 And then, like, towards the end, there's the depictions of the behemoth and the Leviathan, who Yahweh, who this being a Jungian text...

00:48:20.000 Albeit based on engravings by Blake, Yahweh looks like Job.

00:48:26.000 So it looks like an encounter between some sort of accessible higher self and some manifest self.

00:48:35.000 But this thing that was in the analysis that's been on my mind ever since really...

00:48:40.000 It's been from Erdinger's commentary where he says, this is the behemoth that I have made as I made thee.

00:48:50.000 And here is the Leviathan.

00:48:52.000 Can you push down its tongue? 0.97

00:48:53.000 And in that I get the same sort of wonder and...

00:48:58.000 Bafflement that I get from my very, very limited interaction with, say, the Gitas and other Vedic texts, where through images one is seduced, led into a sort of a psychic space that's somehow beyond reason.

00:49:18.000 And contemplating the qualities of the behemoth and how that might psychically play out, it feels to me like it's dealing with corporealism and the leviathan as if it's dealing with a kind of at-depth reptilian limbic system instinctualism.

00:49:36.000 And then he says, there's this indication, John, that we are...

00:49:43.000 We're manifesting ourselves, God, through continually.

00:49:48.000 And why would God, why would Christ say, you know, I have sent you as he sent me?

00:49:56.000 Why would Christ say, love one another as I have loved you?

00:50:02.000 If there were no, inverted commas, meaning to it, no value to it, and in this Jungian analysis, which I suppose lingers in the framing of, obviously, psychiatry, but a type of psychiatry that has a greater expanse,

00:50:18.000 obviously, than his common counterpoint of Freud, Jung remaining open to the mystic in the way that he does, is that We are his temple, and as his temple, we have to become a dwelling place for God.

00:50:37.000 In our agency, or perhaps within what you earlier remarked upon when it comes to predeterminism versus volition, That we are, as I suppose even Gospel John's vine analogy suggests, we are flowing forth from that vine tended by the Heavenly Father, the root or the branch or the trunk.

00:51:06.000 We are an expression.

00:51:09.000 If we choose to be, if we can conduct that kind of wave particle collapse into Christ consciousness, and I don't mean that in a new age way, I mean as a branch of Christ, then we are.

00:51:23.000 Being God.

00:51:24.000 Like, we are being God into manifestation.

00:51:27.000 As in, the same way that Melville would say Noah's flood is still happening.

00:51:32.000 The same way that, of course, in the purest terms, the Big Bang is still happening.

00:51:37.000 It's like you can't make a qualitative...

00:51:39.000 Judgment on this moment of the Big Bang versus the first bit or the second bit or any of the other sequential bits of the Big Bang.

00:51:47.000 Creation is still happening.

00:51:48.000 Christ is still happening.

00:51:49.000 The Holy Spirit is still happening.

00:51:51.000 It's happening now.

00:51:52.000 It's happening now and it's happening in you.

00:51:56.000 Isn't it, John?

00:52:00.000 Again, fascinating to see you struggling with these concepts, Russell.

00:52:05.000 I mean, the book of Job is very difficult to understand.

00:52:09.000 I mean, we've got Leviathan, which is the sea creature, and the behemoth, which is the land creature, and many people have put different interpretations on what they are.

00:52:21.000 But the Book of Job, in a sense, is an attempt to explain suffering, isn't it?

00:52:30.000 Why do people suffer?

00:52:32.000 Why does bad things happen to good people?

00:52:38.000 And the other thing there I think you were trying to struggle with, Russell, was the relationship between God and man.

00:52:45.000 Now, there is a clear distinction between those.

00:52:51.000 You know, Jesus taught us to pray saying, Our Father.

00:52:54.000 So, you know, we can keep it as simple as that.

00:52:57.000 You know, Jesus said, say, our Father.

00:53:00.000 Okay, so we pray, our Father.

00:53:02.000 You know, that is the relationship.

00:53:04.000 He is the Father, we are the children.

00:53:06.000 And in some senses, you don't need to think about it in any more deeper sense than that.

00:53:11.000 But then you've got the idea that man is made in God's image.

00:53:15.000 Now, again, what does that mean?

00:53:19.000 It means...

00:53:21.000 That human beings are unusual, that they are exceptional, that they have the ability to understand the transcendent, that they have, if you like, without veering into blasphemy, some godlike attributes.

00:53:37.000 There again, there's a limit on that on this earth.

00:53:39.000 That was the fruit in the tree in the Garden of Eden.

00:53:44.000 We don't want to be like gods.

00:53:45.000 We maintain the child relationship.

00:53:48.000 We pray our father.

00:53:50.000 And yet, you know, the scripture says that we are co-heirs with Christ and adopted in his family.

00:53:56.000 So the best analogy I can give is that no, we are emphatically not gods.

00:54:01.000 We are children of God.

00:54:03.000 We are created.

00:54:04.000 We are not the creator.

00:54:07.000 That's another big distinction, really.

00:54:09.000 God always has been.

00:54:10.000 He is outside of time and he is the creator.

00:54:12.000 We are the created.

00:54:15.000 And in a sense, we have to know our position in that, and yet we've been given this elevated position as being adopted as sons.

00:54:24.000 But it's good to struggle with the transcendent and these ethereal ideas, because they are there.

00:54:32.000 And to struggle with them is interesting and fascinating.

00:54:34.000 But from a day-to-day practical point of view, just keep it simple.

00:54:39.000 Jesus said, pray our Father, so we pray our Father, therefore he is our Father.

00:54:45.000 You know, sometimes keep it just as simple as that.

00:54:50.000 While still trying to understand more, but practically we have to be immensely humble as human beings.

00:54:58.000 I realize I can't do anything.

00:54:59.000 He can do everything.

00:55:01.000 And humility is a key aspect.

00:55:05.000 We can't become proud.

00:55:08.000 And the nature of what it means to be made in God's image, we will know perhaps much more about.

00:55:16.000 Not in this life, you know, in future times.

00:55:20.000 At the moment, we are limited in our understanding, so we keep it simple and go by the main things being the plain things.

00:55:26.000 Thanks.

00:55:27.000 I like, I keep getting trapped in contemplation, you know, that's, I suppose, like part of the way I am.

00:55:36.000 Yeah, it's good.

00:55:37.000 It's good.

00:55:38.000 It's good.

00:55:38.000 Yeah.

00:55:39.000 So just work out ways to positivise it.

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00:56:58.000 We've all well there, like for people just listening to this.

00:57:01.000 Eric Blair in the background, yeah.

00:57:03.000 I'm guessing he's an atheist.

00:57:06.000 You know, he certainly was.

00:57:10.000 He was a staunch socialist earlier in life, wasn't he?

00:57:13.000 The reason he's there is in the United Kingdom now, there's a whole range of things you're not allowed to talk about, not just on YouTube, just generally.

00:57:23.000 And, you know, George, you know, there's a great hat in America, M-O-F-A, make all world fiction again.

00:57:31.000 And that's what we'd like to do, because unfortunately we see some of his, what I would describe as prophecies coming true, and they have to be seen as a warning.

00:57:41.000 One of those prophecies, you know, one of the most famous phrases in all world created so many neologisms and ideas that entered into our discourse and images and, as you say, prophecies.

00:57:58.000 It's something I've discussed a few times now, the famous, if you want an image of humanity's future, envisage a boot stamping on a human face forever.

00:58:08.000 Lately I've started to contrast that with the idea of man made in God's image.

00:58:16.000 And when you are stamping on a human face, you are stamping on the hallmark of God's presence in us.

00:58:25.000 I had a good conversation, John, with Tucker Carlson in which he said that Orwell was familiar enough with Soviet communism to make clear that that was what he was talking about, if it was his intention to critique that.

00:58:45.000 And Tucker offered the idea that Orwell could have been offering us, in those sort of dystopic prophetic books, The idea that social democracy has a tendency towards totalitarianism, although the reason I asked whether Orwell was an atheist at the beginning...

00:59:09.000 It seems that part of globalism is an attempt to annihilate God and then lay claim to the abilities that that God is typically endowed with, even if you're offering a sort of a rational appraisal of God rather than a faith-based communion with God.

00:59:29.000 I wonder what you think about that idea, that sort of Orwell is not just talking about Soviet communism and what it became, is talking about how social democracies might incline towards totalitarianism.

00:59:44.000 And given what we've experienced in the last sort of, you know, five, ten years, certainly in the sort of pandemic and post-pandemic era, it seems that totalitarianism...

00:59:52.000 Was, you know, and is in our country, being brought about not by 20th century style charismatic strongmen, as the critiques of Trump suggested, but in fact by a kind of technocratic Orwell-esque, Orwellian Huxley-esque, sort of Kafka-esque Kind of, you know, managed tyranny where we're sort of all doped up on Soma, baffled, uncertain about what's real and what to believe in and what to say.

01:00:22.000 A kind of a state of bewilderment.

01:00:23.000 And I wonder what you think of the significance is of Orwell's writing with regard to social democracy rather than just sort of state communism.

01:00:31.000 And the sort of poignance and significance of the boot stamping on the human face and whether or not you consider that to be a sort of a An image of desacralisation and the profaning of our relationship with God.

01:00:44.000 That's my question.

01:00:46.000 Yeah, I think there's a few answers to that.

01:00:49.000 Whenever you want to deliberately destroy humans and to mutilate humans, that is a problem related to evil, because humans are made in God's image.

01:01:03.000 I worked in Khmer refugee camps in the early 80s, and all the people there had been through the killing fields. 1.00

01:01:11.000 You know, they'd all seen relatives beaten to death in front of them.

01:01:16.000 By definition, they had an escape that come overland into the Thai Khmer border.

01:01:21.000 And some of the atrocities, I'm not going to go through them now, they're too appalling, but I've talked to missionaries who worked there and read missionaries who worked there, who knew the Cambodians in great detail.

01:01:33.000 And some of these atrocities, these mutilations, they said can only be explained in terms of the demonic.

01:01:39.000 So whenever you deliberately destroy humans, that is attempting to destroy the image of God in humans, whether that is crushing people physically, physically disabling them, physically killing them, physically mutilating them, whether it's abuse of people even after death, whether it's a psychological crushing, to me that's got a spiritual component because you are attacking God's workmanship.

01:02:07.000 In terms of Orwell, of course, he was initially writing because of his grave disillusion with the way that things had worked out in the Soviet era. 0.98

01:02:18.000 Stalin, of course, was the pig, the leader of the pigs. 0.98

01:02:22.000 That's very thinly disguised. 0.99

01:02:25.000 But I think it's more than that.

01:02:27.000 Yes, he was disillusioned, outraged, just totally peed off with the fact that he'd been misled in earlier life.

01:02:37.000 Believing that this was a possible utopian solution, you know, he'd had various theses, antithesis and synthesis and communism was this advanced synthesis that was somehow where humans went to be and he was so disillusioned with that, so disillusioned with their humanist ideas that he wrote his books to protest against that and to point out how bad it was.

01:03:02.000 But I think it's more than that.

01:03:03.000 I think he realised that this was a tendency to You might say a weakness, predisposition in human hierarchical power, that power is inevitably going to be abused.

01:03:17.000 I think he was warning about something.

01:03:19.000 Yes, he was having a whinge, if you like, about the Soviet era, but he realized that this is an intrinsic risk in humanity. 0.75

01:03:26.000 And hey, people, look out for this.

01:03:29.000 You know, George Orwell, when he wrote 1984, in 1948, he died in 1952 from tuberculosis.

01:03:35.000 He went to a Scottish island and destroyed himself away.

01:03:38.000 And he just sat there and wrote this book.

01:03:41.000 It's something he felt he needed to do before he died.

01:03:44.000 And look how right he has been.

01:03:47.000 It was a warning.

01:03:48.000 He saw the risks of power.

01:03:50.000 He saw the risks of control.

01:03:52.000 Now, I am concerned about a future dystopia.

01:03:57.000 I really am concerned about this.

01:03:59.000 So, for example, we saw that a dystopia existed for the slave class for a thousand years in the Roman Empire. 0.82

01:04:07.000 Okay, they did some clever things as well, but for a lot of the people, that was a dystopian situation.

01:04:11.000 We've seen a dystopian situation, a vile, idolatrous dystopian situation now in North Korea for several generations since the Korean War. 0.70

01:04:22.000 What's going on for 75 years now?

01:04:23.000 So these things can be perpetuated.

01:04:26.000 So there is a real risk that the Western world could sink into a multi-generation dystopian situation with control over food, with control over information, with control over food.

01:04:38.000 with elites in power.

01:04:40.000 I mean, we have seen it in Russia recently.

01:04:44.000 Putin, we could spend all day arguing about him, but he's retained control.

01:04:51.000 He rewrote the Constitution so that he could retain control for Russia. 0.77

01:04:55.000 For longer periods of time.

01:04:57.000 It is possible that strongmen get in positions of power.

01:05:00.000 That becomes a dynasty and a dystopia can be passed on potentially for centuries.

01:05:07.000 And that really concerns me.

01:05:08.000 And when I see control over information, When I see people trying to control healthcare, when I see people trying to control food supply, you control these things.

01:05:18.000 You control the population.

01:05:21.000 And some people, ordinary blokes like you and me can't understand this, but some people are motivated by power.

01:05:27.000 They want power over other people.

01:05:30.000 Personally, the idea appalls me.

01:05:31.000 I have no interest in control over other people at all, but I'm sure you haven't.

01:05:35.000 But we're ordinary blokes.

01:05:37.000 Some people do want that.

01:05:39.000 So some people actually...

01:05:42.000 Treat humanity with indifference.

01:05:44.000 The psychopathic group will treat humanity like pieces on a chessboard.

01:05:48.000 So you're as much used to me as your utilitarian output is.

01:05:53.000 You know, you're to be used, you're to be not used, you're to be disposed of.

01:05:56.000 Actually, I couldn't care less whether you live or die as long as you're useful.

01:06:00.000 But you get some people that are actually anti-humanity.

01:06:02.000 You know, they are actually evil and seek the destruction of human beings.

01:06:07.000 And I think Orwell was warning us about that.

01:06:10.000 And when you can combine that with warnings from Scripture as well, we do see that times, dark times, are going to be ahead.

01:06:19.000 But we also know that God will cut those days short, and God will put limits on the amount of evil that can be perpetrated on the people that he loves that are made in his image.

01:06:31.000 Beautiful.

01:06:32.000 Dr. John, the Shout of Turin video you made recently fascinates me because when it gets into relics and non-canonical documents, I start to wonder what direction, you know, like miracles and this thing happening, was it Guadalupe and this thing happened there and all that, you know, these appearances of the Holy Mother and appearances of saints and lords and all of that stuff.

01:07:02.000 I don't mean to be blasphemous or dismissive at all.

01:07:06.000 But when, like, with relics and stuff, it feels like, what is this paraphernalia?

01:07:10.000 And so, like, when I was younger, I would have thought something like the Shroud of Turin.

01:07:15.000 I would have thought, Come on.

01:07:16.000 I don't even see how by putting a tea towel or cloth on someone's face you would even get an exact image of that person's face.

01:07:25.000 I guess you're talking about God, so yes, I understand.

01:07:29.000 So why is it that you saw the scrutiny and analysis of the Shroud of Turin as worthy of your own analysis?

01:07:41.000 You're absolutely right.

01:07:42.000 I mean, there was a major industry in the Middle Ages on relics.

01:07:48.000 Every shrine had to have a relic, some toenail clippings from a saint or some bones from this.

01:07:53.000 And of course, most of it was absolute bunk.

01:07:55.000 And I was like you.

01:07:56.000 I'd kind of disregarded it.

01:07:59.000 But in Protestantism, there's a risk that we kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater.

01:08:04.000 So I was quite young when, I think it was 1978, when the Shroud of Turin Research Project was there, and there was a lot of publicity about it at the time.

01:08:13.000 But then, of course, the radiocarbon dating came out that disproved it.

01:08:16.000 It proved it was a medieval creation. 0.99

01:08:21.000 But now, that carbon dating has now been devalidated for quite a few reasons that we could go into.

01:08:30.000 If you look at the Shroud itself, Millions of people have been buried in millions of shrouds, but that is the only one with an image on it.

01:08:40.000 Now, I'm not saying this is the Shroud of Christ.

01:08:45.000 I'm saying, though, I find it consistent with what could have been the Shroud of Christ.

01:08:50.000 Personally, I think it probably was, but of course we can't prove it.

01:08:55.000 But this image, the image that is on it...

01:08:59.000 It's the image of a crucified man.

01:09:01.000 Now, unfortunately, I understand enough of the injuries and the pathologies to realise that that couldn't be faked.

01:09:10.000 It is the image of a crucified man.

01:09:12.000 So we have two possibilities there.

01:09:14.000 One is it is the image of the crucified Lord Jesus Christ himself, or it's the image of another crucified man mocked up to look like Jesus Christ.

01:09:26.000 But both horrific when you look at them.

01:09:29.000 But the image is completely unique in that it is the only shroud with an image.

01:09:36.000 So no one knows how that image got there.

01:09:39.000 The image is remarkably superficial.

01:09:41.000 It's only on the very About 200 to 400 micrometers thickness.

01:09:48.000 Remarkably thin.

01:09:50.000 And no one knows how that got there.

01:09:52.000 And as well as that, the image contains three-dimensional information.

01:09:56.000 So if you put it under this thing that they developed for looking at the depth of craters on planets, this VPA analyzer, You actually get three-dimensional information out of it.

01:10:06.000 Now, if we take a two-dimensional picture of you and then put it under this three-dimensional analyser, you'll just get gobbledygook.

01:10:13.000 It won't make any sense.

01:10:14.000 So we've got this completely unique image on a shroud which does depict the accurate pathology of a crucified man as specified in the Gospel.

01:10:26.000 So the scourging is the Roman style of scourging.

01:10:30.000 The crucifixion marks are the Roman crucifixion marks.

01:10:34.000 The wound in the side is as described, which seems to be a standard way that Roman soldiers had of killing people and making sure people were dead.

01:10:42.000 The crown of thorns is as described.

01:10:45.000 The facial injuries There's so many consistencies.

01:10:50.000 It makes it an extraordinary document and something that's well worth studying.

01:10:56.000 The bloodstains, we know are blood.

01:10:59.000 It's been demonstrated that it is blood.

01:11:02.000 There's pollen on it from Jerusalem. 0.96

01:11:06.000 There's dirt on the knees and nose and soles of the Shroud area that are consistent with the mineralogy.

01:11:16.000 of dirt in Jerusalem.

01:11:18.000 There's a lot of things that add up about it and it really is A mysterious object, but even if it's not the genuine, even if it is not the Shroud of Christ, it teaches us so much about the nature of crucifixion and the suffering.

01:11:33.000 It makes it a very poignant document to study and it's just remarkably interesting.

01:11:42.000 It's got a lot to teach us.

01:11:44.000 We can't be definitive about it, but personally, I think there's so many types of information from so many different aspects of study that, personally, I think it's much more likely than not to be genuine.

01:11:58.000 It's really hard to see how it's not.

01:12:00.000 It's a bit like what we were talking about before with creation.

01:12:03.000 There's so many things that are just right, and they add up.

01:12:06.000 And the probability of one thing being just right is maybe one in a hundred, then another one is one in a hundred, multiply by another one in a hundred.

01:12:13.000 And by the time you've got about a dozen or twenty of factors together, The probability of them all occurring together becomes massively improbable.

01:12:22.000 So it's interesting.

01:12:24.000 It's a pity that the Protestant Church has neglected it for a long period of time.

01:12:27.000 And I think it's got a lot to teach us.

01:12:31.000 Wow.

01:12:32.000 It makes me recognise again that there's a state of submission, which you just referred to earlier as humility, and this is the right word, that is kind of induced by standing on the edge of this cosmos, on the edge of this order, on the edge of this constellation of...

01:12:54.000 The patterns observable in the unknowable that somehow come to their climax in the cross and again and again this sort of almost the impossibility of it not being true.

01:13:08.000 It makes sense when I think of some of the people that have participated in Bringing Me to Faith, John, the most likely story is that it happened.

01:13:17.000 It's the most likely story is that it happened.

01:13:19.000 I think there's one other thing to say about the Shroud Russell.

01:13:22.000 It's, you know, the first photograph of the Shroud was taken by a guy called Seconder Peer in 1898, and he realised the image was a negative.

01:13:32.000 Before that, there was no photography, so people didn't know it was a negative.

01:13:35.000 And then, as we said, the 3D information, the biochemistry on the blood, the biochemistry on the Shroud, All of these things could only be realised after 1898. Before that, people We're aware of the image.

01:13:56.000 In fact, it probably goes back to what's called the image of Edessa before the Crusader period.

01:14:03.000 But it's only in recent times that the science has been available to analyse it properly.

01:14:09.000 And I just wonder, just me thinking out loud, is this a message that That God has left for our times, because it could only be understood in the scientific times.

01:14:21.000 And the way things are going at the moment, there's a lot of cause for concern.

01:14:27.000 I really wonder if we are heading into what might be called the end times, at least periods of tribulation.

01:14:36.000 And I get the feeling that this shroud is a scientific message to our time, because it couldn't have been fully understood in earlier times.

01:14:45.000 Now it can, and it just makes you wonder.

01:14:49.000 It's the sort of thing God would do, isn't it?

01:14:54.000 That is a sort of move that God would pull, is to leave some artefact.

01:14:58.000 I think so.

01:15:00.000 What I mean is things that are good for people.

01:15:04.000 Yeah.

01:15:04.000 You know, Russell and John might be struggling in the year 2024. I'll tell you what I'll do.

01:15:09.000 I'll just help them on a little bit.

01:15:10.000 You know, that's...

01:15:13.000 Thinking out loud.

01:15:14.000 You know, if you're watching this video, take that or leave it.

01:15:17.000 It's just me thinking out loud.

01:15:18.000 But, you know, is it a message for our times?

01:15:21.000 But if it's not, then we know that end times are coming.

01:15:24.000 We know that tribulation is coming.

01:15:26.000 We do know that he's returning, and it could be difficult times that lead up to that.

01:15:32.000 And I really wonder...

01:15:33.000 You see, in the past, we didn't have the...

01:15:36.000 The possibility for global control.

01:15:39.000 When the Roman Empire was there, or the Babylonian Empire was there, the Aztecs were happily doing their own thing in South America, weren't they? 1.00

01:15:45.000 The Inuit would be happily living in igloos, or the Aborigines would be happily walking around Australia. 1.00

01:15:54.000 We have the modality for global control that simply didn't exist before.

01:16:02.000 So the possibility of these global events that are described in things like the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation You can now see them coming.

01:16:11.000 I mean, just take one example.

01:16:13.000 No man may buy or sell lest they have the number of the beast in his forehead. 0.95

01:16:17.000 You know, when I was a child, well, that was ridiculous.

01:16:19.000 You know, if you wanted to spend some money, you got a half-crown point and coin out your pocket, if you had one.

01:16:23.000 I probably didn't very often.

01:16:25.000 More likely to be a sixpence.

01:16:26.000 But now, now, now Keir Starmer or some other politician could say, tell you what, it's costing too much to print money.

01:16:36.000 Scrub it.

01:16:38.000 Scrub it.

01:16:39.000 And then that means you'd be dependent on credit cards.

01:16:41.000 Then someone could say, look, these credit cards are inconvenient.

01:16:44.000 Why don't we just have a chip under our arm?

01:16:47.000 You know, that you just flash, you know, like some people do with their mobile phones now.

01:16:52.000 You know, the technology that no man may buy or sell lest he have the number of the beast is there now.

01:16:59.000 That could be done.

01:17:01.000 That could be done within a year quite easily if politicians wanted it to be.

01:17:07.000 And, you know, even in my lifetime, that wasn't possible.

01:17:11.000 There's things that are possible now that facilitate more power and control over more people than had ever been the case in the past.

01:17:20.000 And given what we know about human nature, having particular human beings with dictatorial power, I find a little concerning.

01:17:33.000 One, um...

01:17:34.000 Where is it?

01:17:35.000 What is it that I read?

01:17:38.000 I thought it was at the end of John 3. No, not John 3, maybe it's John 2. So...

01:17:50.000 Excuse me, John.

01:17:51.000 Because it's that bit of when, like, at the end of one of the Johns, it's like, this world belongs to him.

01:17:59.000 This world belongs...

01:18:00.000 This world belongs to him.

01:18:04.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, this.

01:18:06.000 Yeah, John 1.

01:18:07.000 We know anyone born of God does not continue to sin.

01:18:12.000 One who is born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them.

01:18:16.000 We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

01:18:22.000 The whole world is under the control of the evil one.

01:18:25.000 We also know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true.

01:18:33.000 And we are in him who is true by being in his Son, Jesus Christ.

01:18:38.000 He is the true God and eternal life.

01:18:40.000 And then the kicker, the sort of almost the...

01:18:46.000 The denouement.

01:18:47.000 Dear children, keep yourself from idols.

01:18:52.000 Like, that idols is your way into his control.

01:18:56.000 Like, if you are idolatry of any form, we'll take you back to him.

01:19:00.000 Oh, John, thanks, man.

01:19:01.000 Listen, I've got to go, because I've got my daughters outside, and I've got to work that out.

01:19:06.000 Hard work being a dad whistle.

01:19:08.000 Oh, I love it though.

01:19:10.000 I love it.

01:19:11.000 I love it.

01:19:11.000 It's crazy.

01:19:13.000 It's crazy.

01:19:14.000 It's driving me crazy.

01:19:15.000 And this world's driving me crazy.

01:19:16.000 So, isn't it mad, like the conversations that we used to have, and like, you know, when we were watching you before, that...

01:19:24.000 But, you know, like when I was watching you with the overhead pen shots, hmm, seems weird.

01:19:28.000 Look at that.

01:19:28.000 Oh, still got it.

01:19:30.000 Still there, still there.

01:19:31.000 Yeah, no, I'm not saying that it's gone.

01:19:33.000 I know that it...

01:19:33.000 I'm just saying that I didn't imagine that one day that you'd be telling me main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things, you know.

01:19:40.000 I didn't know that.

01:19:42.000 I didn't know that.

01:19:43.000 I didn't know that you were a man of Christ and a man that would help me to understand my own growing faith.

01:19:50.000 So thank you again.

01:19:51.000 And, you know, I'm not going to breach any confidentialities, Russell, but you have helped me in moments of difficulty, and I appreciate it.

01:19:58.000 I want to say publicly, I appreciate that.

01:20:00.000 Oh, thank you so much.

01:20:02.000 Thank you.

01:20:03.000 And as always, the messages that you sent came at just the right time and just the right place.

01:20:11.000 Oh, praise God.

01:20:13.000 Thank you.

01:20:13.000 So it was good.

01:20:16.000 Oh, thank you.

01:20:17.000 Thank you.

01:20:18.000 I'm glad that he can use me.

01:20:20.000 I'm glad that there's not so much of me that he can't make use of me.

01:20:25.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:27.000 Absolutely.

01:20:28.000 But isn't it interesting getting to know people?

01:20:30.000 Absolutely fascinating.

01:20:32.000 Yeah, I'm going to come there and go on one of them walks with you, where you're sort of walking around in a cagoule.

01:20:35.000 Oh, any time, any time, yeah.

01:20:37.000 Go to the church service, walk about a bit, not get so caught up in this world.

01:20:43.000 It's a bit cold this time of year, but as long as you're wrapped up, it's fine.

01:20:43.000 Always welcome.

01:20:46.000 This is what I wear.

01:20:50.000 I've got several layers on.

01:20:52.000 I love you, Dr. John.

01:20:54.000 Hope you've enjoyed this show with Dr. John Campbell.

01:20:58.000 We will be back soon.

01:20:59.000 Not with more of the same, but with more of the different.

01:21:02.000 If you're not on Awaken Wonder yet, become one now.

01:21:04.000 We make content like this.

01:21:05.000 This is the new and improved Russell offering.

01:21:08.000 Check this out.

01:21:11.000 People that they surrounded Trump with, the Secret Service members, none of them were qualified to be able to do that.

01:21:17.000 Such a vital instruction.

01:21:28.000 We'll be back soon.

01:21:29.000 Not with more of the same, but with more of the difference.

01:21:31.000 Until then, if you can, stay free!

01:21:55.000 Many switching, switch on, switch on.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 16, 2024

Science, Faith, and Totalitarianism: A Conversation with Dr. John Campbell- SF514

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