The Revd Dr Jamie Franklin is the Priest in Charge at Holy Trinity Church, Winchester, co-host of the Irreverend podcast and the author of The Great Return: Why only a restoration of Christianity can save Western Civilisation. He chats to James about Galileo, the Enlightenment, modernist architecture, and goodness, truth and beauty.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Return-Jamie-Franklin/dp/1399814923↓Monetary Metals is providing a true alternative to saving and earning in dollars by making it possible to save AND EARN in gold and silver.Monetary Metals has been paying interest on gold and silver for over 8 years.Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in their latest silver bond offering. For example, if you have 1,000 ounces of silver in the deal, you receive 120 ounces of silver interest paid to your account in the first year.Go to the link in the description or head to https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on honest money again with Monetary Metals.↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, James tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleThe official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.ukxxx
Welcome to The Dellingbot with me, James Dellingpole.
And I just wanted to tell you about something really exciting coming up quite shortly.
It's James Dellingpole's birthday bash.
His big birthday bash, I believe it's been called.
Can you guess why?
Well, unfortunately, I've got a big birthday coming up.
I don't normally like to celebrate these things, but this one is kind of unavoidable.
It's not actually on my birthday, it's on August the 1st.
My actual birthday was held on the anniversary of the day when the atomic bomb didn't go off over Hiroshima because nukes aren't real and it was a napalm strike.
But that's another story.
So my big birthday bash is on August the 1st.
And the highlights include, well, I suppose the highlight is me chatting on stage, doing a Dellingpod live with Bob Moran.
Now, apart possibly from my brother Dick, who's obviously easy to talk to because he's my brother, I think Bob is one of the people I most enjoy chatting to him because he's bright, obviously.
He's got hinterland.
He doesn't take prisoners and the conversation could go in any direction and it probably will.
I'm really looking forward to our chat.
So thank you, Bob, for appearing on the stage with me.
Also, we've got Dick.
Dick will be there, of course, and he'll be playing bass with unregistered chickens.
I've also got some of my friends from the world of natural health coming up.
And if you arrive early enough, you might be able to try some of their potions or even their treatments.
I'm not sure what they want to do, but there'll be stalls and things to look at.
And there'll be pizza.
There'll be pizza.
Really delicious.
The last time, last event I had, we've got the same caterers.
food is extra obviously but uh the pizzas were really good and they also did these really nice i These nice, I think it was pooled beef, something like that.
It was just food you'd want to eat.
I think the best thing about these events isn't even about me.
It's about all the other wonderful people that turn up.
You'll be amazed.
These are like the best friends you've never met because you'll suddenly feel, hang on a second, I'm not alone.
There are other crazies just like me.
They're really, really fun, these events.
I would do them much more often, but unfortunately I get so knackered because of my tedious illness thing.
I mean, I've barely recovered from the last one.
It's in the middle.
It's in central England, I will tell you.
It is surrounded by beautiful countryside.
There'll be BNBs and stuff you can stay in.
I would do that if I were you.
It's on a Friday night, August the 1st, I mentioned.
But you might want to make a weekend of it because there's lots of stuff to see around and about.
Or you could come early and have a walk.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Anyway, I hope I will see you there.
August the 1st, James' big birthday bash.
It's going to be fun.
Limited number, strictly limited number of tickets.
There's only going to be 20 VIP tickets for reasons which will become obvious if you buy one.
They're for people who want to have special quality time with James.
Otherwise, I just get a normal ticket.
You will have fun, but please be quick because there are limited tickets.
They're being very strict on numbers, the venue.
So get in there as soon as you can.
And won't it be great?
Like, August, I think, is a really boring month.
Everyone goes away.
You'll need something to cheer you up for the fact that you're not in Ibiza or Greece or wherever you would like to be.
This will make up for the fact.
And we'll all be able to commiserate with one another and have a really, really good time.
I'm so looking forward to seeing you there at James's big birthday bash.
Thank you.
Can't wait.
Welcome to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpole.
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Welcome back to the Delling Pod, Jamie Franklin.
I'm really looking forward to this, but I've got to ask you a very important question.
What's it like wearing a dog collar in this hot weather?
It's slightly constraining, to be honest with you.
So yeah, it is a bit tight around the old neck here, but I kind of have to do it.
It's my uniform.
I know.
I really like that about you.
I mean, it's not the only thing I like about you, but I do think if you're a priest, you kind of ought to wear the kit.
Yeah, I think so as well.
And you know, whilst we're opining, and I know you won't mind me saying this, I really think that clergy shirts should be black as well.
I have a very strong opinion about this.
Have you come across vicars who wear different coloured clergy shirts?
They wear sort of greyish ones and sometimes sort of mauvish ones.
Yeah, and blue.
I mean, you know, this is going to sound harsh because I'm criticising my own colleagues.
And, you know, my co-host on a Reverend Tom has a very bright sort of sea blue clergy shirt.
And I just can't stand them, to be honest with you.
I just think if you're a clergyman, you should just act and dress like one.
Don't try and be like everyone else wearing coloured shirts.
You know, our shirts are black and that's the way it is.
I don't think this conversation is frivolous.
And actually, I think it actually goes to the heart of what we're going to talk about, which is what it is like living in a post-Christian world.
Yes.
Now, you've written a book.
I remember you spent a long time writing it and you had your nose to the grindstone, but it was worth it.
For those who haven't seen it yet or read it, it's called The Great Return.
And I don't normally have time to read all the books by people I've done on podcasts, but I read this.
Do you know what?
This will amuse you.
Because I used to read books at bedtime, but now because I read the Bible and the Psalms when I'm in bed, and I tend to fall asleep after I've got to the end of those, I don't have time for my non-religious reading.
So I now read all my novels and non-fiction and stuff at lunch and at breakfast, because, of course, I don't read the newspapers, because I hate the newspapers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So thank you for helping me with all the lunches.
It's quite a good system, actually.
I read novels before bed.
That's when I do my fiction reading.
Do you?
Do you read the Bible every day?
Yeah, I try to, actually.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I do in morning and evening prayer, so that's always sort of a given.
Evening prayer is sometimes difficult, you know, with four kids and one is often exhausted, but morning prayer, always.
And I also have a Bible reading plan that I'm trying to stick to.
But again, it doesn't happen every day, but I try to do it.
It's not actually a Bible.
Well, I suppose it could be a Bible in a year if you did it every day.
But, you know, it's just a regular way of going through the Bible.
Well, I mean, from start to finish, just...
So the one I've got is called, it's got a really lame name.
It's called the Great Adventure Bible, which sounds like a child's Bible, but it's not.
It's a Bible reading plan, which is kind of, it's a Bible which you buy.
I got it from America, actually.
It's in the RSB translation, which is a good translation.
And then it kind of divides the Bible up into periods, and there's a reading plan that goes along with it.
So you read several different chunks of the Bible at the same time.
So, like, for example, at the beginning, you read Genesis and the book of Job, and it's always got Psalms or Proverbs going along with it.
So you're always reading stuff like that.
It takes you through the history chapters of the Bible whilst simultaneously chucking in, you know, something from the prophets or I suppose with the prophets, they would be the relevant prophets, you know, in terms of the timeline for the history that you're reading.
Or it will chuck in some of the poetic literature.
And then in the New Testament, there's a similar kind of thing.
So I suppose the idea is that you're going sort of chronologically through the Bible, doing several different readings at once.
That's a good approach, isn't it, actually?
Because when you read it from beginning to end, as it's printed, when you're going through the Old Testament, you come to bits where you think, hang on a second, I've read this stuff before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, lots of people, when they want to get into reading the Bible, you know, in a post-Christian age, lots of people have no Christian education at all.
And there's, yeah, lots of people are interested in Christianity.
They want to get into it for good reasons.
And then they start reading the Bible and they read Genesis.
And of course, Genesis is narrative-driven and it's very interesting, exciting book, which modern people can follow with no real sort of knowledge of anything, really.
And it's great.
And the first part of Exodus is like that as well.
But then, of course, you know, however many chapters into Exodus, you just suddenly run into the law and it becomes, the narrative kind of stops.
And then it becomes very alien and difficult for people.
And so they often give up halfway through Exodus.
So I think you do need some, at least a guide, but, you know, preferably a kind of Bible reading plan to sort of get you through it.
I'm slightly shocked with myself that it took me until my late middle age to read the Bible through.
Because I think even if you're not a Christian, It really ought to be high on your reading list just so that you can inform yourself about how civilization is thought for a very long time, at least Western civilization.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, our whole civilization is built on the Bible.
Western civilization is built on the Bible.
I mean, in many ways, this, you know, my book isn't really about the Bible, but in many ways, you could say that it is, because, you know, the foundation of Christianity is the Bible.
And if it's true, you know, that what I'm saying, if what I'm saying is true, which I think there's no doubt that it is, which is that our civilization has been built on Christian values, then really another way of saying that is that it's been built on values that come from the Bible and from the worldview that the Bible describes.
And so for kids nowadays to just grow up without any knowledge of the Bible is in effect for people to be growing up without any knowledge of our civilizational history in that sense.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you want to just, before we start sort of meandering around, just briefly outline your thesis?
Yeah, sure.
So the book is called, so the subtitle of the book kind of says it all really, why only a restoration of Christianity can save Western civilization.
In a sense, I don't really feel like I'm saying anything particularly novel or interesting.
Really, what I'm doing is a kind of synthesis of what many scholars and very bright people have done, which is to make the point that we live in a time of cultural forgetfulness.
And what we've forgotten is where we came from.
And where we came from is essentially from a civilization that was permeated by the Christian social imaginary or worldview, as you might call it.
That phrase, social imaginary, comes from the philosopher Charles Taylor.
And it basically just means, you know, the way that people just see reality within a given culture or social setting.
So the way you sort of automatically or instinctively see things.
So that used to be Christian, you know, back in 1500 or, you know, whenever.
Now it's not.
And we've forgotten that it used to be.
But the thing is, you know, our values, our cultural values, our idea of what is good, of what is beautiful, of what is valuable, all of this stuff has really come from Christianity in the first place.
We've forgotten it has come from Christianity and we've come to believe that it came from other places, you know, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, or whatever it might be.
And now we think that we can hold on to these values.
Not just talking about ethical values, of course, but ethical values are central to it.
We might think about aesthetic values or social values or whatever.
We can hold on to these things without Christianity, but the fact is we can't.
And, you know, like I said, many other people have said similar things.
You know, famously, Tom Holland's book, Dominion, is a kind of historical telling of this.
There's actually another book out at the moment with a very interesting guy, Bijan Omrani.
God is an Englishman, Christianity and the making of English civilization is making a similar point from a kind of historical perspective.
But I suppose the thing that I'm doing, which is perhaps taking it one step further, is I'm saying that the consequences of this are disastrous and that they're likely to become much, much worse unless there is some kind of widespread return to Christianity.
And by that, I don't just mean in a sort of nominal sense of people saying, oh, you know, Christianity was a good thing.
Let's revive its values.
I'm saying that lots and lots of people need to actually become Christians in order for this to turn around.
Otherwise, we're going to slide further and further into this, what would you call it, nihilistic culture of the worship of death, which we are, you know, sliding into day by day.
I mean, in a sense, I feel like my book is pertinent because everybody can see what's happening now.
You know, the gloves are off, the mask has slipped.
You know, we are decisively moving into a post-Christian period, if we weren't there already, which I think we probably were, to be honest with you.
So that's kind of my thesis in outline.
Yeah, you've actually helped me because I was, as you know, I'm writing a book about Christianity and my journey through it at the moment called White Pilled.
And I was stuck on the chapter about, it's quite autobiographical.
There's a chapter where I go out into the world after university, and I wanted to just cover that in one chapter, even though it covers about 30 years, the 30 years between university and my awakening.
And what you showed me was something I hadn't really understood very clearly before, which is the degree to which we are all going to put it in conspiracy theory terms.
We're all victims of a massive, massive psyop whose purpose was to render Christian belief almost impossible.
My favourite bit of the book, I can't remember the phrase you used, but you talk about how we now live in times where to believe in the supernatural element of Christianity, which ought to be the fundamental aspect of Christianity, now requires an act of almost rebellion against the system.
In the past, medieval times, they would have accepted that God was all around them and that God was judging them and that they interacted with his creation.
Now, to take the position that you and I take, which is that God is real, God created us, etc., etc., that is really a radical decision to make, isn't it?
Yes, indeed, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been very influenced by Charles Taylor.
I mean, I wrote my doctoral thesis on Charles Taylor, and I think a secular age really opened my eyes to this.
You know, a secular age starts with that question of how was it that in the year 1500, for example, you know, people just saw the supernatural as just a manifestly obvious component of reality.
And how is it that it was like that then?
And now Belief in the supernatural is optional and, you know, quite frankly, in many people's eyes, weird.
And of course, there's a long kind of genealogical explanation for why that might be, where you would take in the so-called scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and so on and so forth.
But essentially, the end of that process is that we're now imprisoned in a kind of illusion, you know, a fantasy that the material realm is the only sort of obviously existing phenomena that there is.
But when you actually draw back from that and you consider, well, various things, but you consider the way that most human beings have just encountered reality, or when you just think about it logically for more than about five seconds, you can see that the materialist paradigm is the most obviously fantastical nonsense that one could possibly dream up.
The author David Betney Hart makes the point that the very structure of our consciousness is orientated towards a supernatural reality.
Every time we make an ethical decision, for example, Hart says that this is essentially an act of faith because we are acting in such a way as to indicate that we believe in the reality of some kind of supernatural phenomenon such as goodness or some abstract concept like that.
So, you know, this world that we're living in, James, is a fantasy world.
You know, it's for so many reasons.
But I think when you say it's a psyop, I think you're absolutely right.
I think it's a demonic psyop.
I think the worldview that we have in the West is a perfectly realized diabolical plan to imprison people in a matrix-like reality.
Yeah, I don't know how far you go with this.
Probably almost as far as I do, but I believe that, well, as John tells us, that Satan is the God of this world and that his presence is all around us and his minions are acting all around us.
It's not just the World Economic Forum, say, or all the Bilderberg Group, or all these institutions that we Tinfall Hat people are railing against.
There's a supernatural control system which works above them.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I wouldn't sort of be able to say what I think all the kind of structure is and the interaction between the demonic and the human.
But the supernatural realm is real.
I have absolutely no doubt about that.
And the demonic is definitely a component of it.
Write about it in my book.
In fact, I actually got onto that book, Demonic Foes, because I first heard, what is his name, Gallagher, Richard Gallagher on this very podcast.
Yeah, this stuff is real.
The demonic is real.
And, you know, Satan's desire is to steal, kill, and destroy, as Christ says.
So, yeah, so I've got no problem with that kind of language at all.
I was actually reading, so like a scripture which just came to mind.
So that was always a bang on my desk as I was just getting my Bible.
A scripture comes to mind.
I was just reading this yesterday, the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 10.
He says, for though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
And this is where I think it's relevant to what I'm trying to do here.
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
You know, there's quite an interesting passage because it brings together that spiritual warfare aspect with the intellectual component.
And in the West, you know, we separate those two things out.
We say the intellectual and the academic is this kind of abstract, dry thing which has nothing to do with the spiritual realm.
But actually, these things have a direct connection.
You know, what we believe has a direct connection to our relationship to God and the supernatural.
Yeah.
If you'd met me maybe 20 years ago, I mean, I actually used this.
I remember taking my cue from organisations like the Institute of Ideas, the sort of sort of edgy kind of Marxists, Claire Fox and Co.
and Brendan O'Neill and Frank Ferrodi, whose ideology seemed to have a lot in common with my own.
And despite their being Marxists and me being supposedly libertarian conservatives, I thought of myself then.
But I used to talk about enlightenment values.
And I used to think of the Enlightenment as a self-so self-evidently a good thing that it, well, as self-evidently means it wasn't worth discussing, it wasn't worth discussing.
Of course, duh.
Like the scientists, they got rid of all that old religious, superstitious stuff, and we advance through science.
Hello?
And I think most people, even those who barely heard of the word Enlightenment or the scientific revolution, they've imbibed that view of the world.
Oh, yeah.
That the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages before that was something that we've thrown off, sort of an awkward, embarrassing phase, but now we're modern.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, it's total nonsense in almost every single detail.
Yeah.
I mean, where do you start with it?
It really is just...
That's why I had to...
So, I mean, this is the thing.
This is a perfect example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.
So science, modern science as we've come to receive it, arose uniquely in Western Europe, in Christian nations.
And there were other comparably advanced civilizations at the time, such as in China, for example, where science didn't arise.
Why does it arise in Christian Europe, it's because of the Christian metaphysics that was in play at the time.
You know, there's one God, a personal God, an intelligent God who created the universe.
Therefore, the universe has a kind of intelligible, rational structure to it, and it can be fruitfully investigated.
So you need to have that kind of conceptual building block in place in order for something like, well, just our conception of reason to begin with, which comes before really the full development of science.
But then science itself, you know, developing in the high middle ages.
Now, of course, at the time, the main science was astronomy.
But there were extraordinary advances in astronomy.
And there's quite an irony there as well, because one of the founding myths of modernity is, of course, with regards to science anyway, is of course the treatment of Galileo and his supposed persecution by the Roman church or by the Western Christian Church.
Again, a completely fabricated story.
And the notion that, well, almost completely fabricated, and the notion that he sort of came out with this idea that the Earth rotates around the Sun or whatever it's supposed to be, out of nothing couldn't be further from the truth.
Astronomical developments had been going on all the way through the high Middle Ages.
And mostly they were monks who were making these observations about the rotation of the Earth and all these kind of things.
Somebody like Galileo or Copernicus, they couldn't have done what they did unless those foundations had been put in place beforehand.
Now, was everything that was said during the Middle Ages about astronomy perfect?
Absolutely not.
But it was a period of progression from one discovery to another until you get to people eventually saying, yeah, it looks like the Earth revolves around the Sun and the planets move in these ways and so on.
But it's based on a legacy that comes from the Middle Ages, which you can trace.
Rodney Stark does this in one of his books in a really convincing way.
So the idea that science just kind of pops into existence in the 17th century is complete nonsense.
And what David Bentley Hart shows in The Experience of God is, and actually Bijan Omrani makes this point quite nicely in his book as well, is that really what was new, what was novel in the 17th century wasn't science.
It was a metaphysical worldview which can be seen as a kind of as a correlative, I suppose, to the inductive method.
Hart says that the method mutated into a metaphysics.
So the method of science, let's say, just to be simple about it, let's say what was said in the 17th century is really what we need to do is bracket off supernatural causation.
And they were also quite down on Aristotelian causation.
So they would rule out, for example, final causation or what we might call teleology, the idea that things have an orientation towards a certain end, and also formal causation.
So they would bracket out all of these things, and then they would use the method of induction in order to find things out, which is fair enough.
But what happened was that method was mistaken for an overall picture of reality.
And then you end up with this kind of, you know, this picture of nature where there's no...
And that really is the conceptual, it's a set of conceptual building blocks that then paves the way for, in a kind of intermediate sense, deism, you know, the idea there's a God who's separated from the world.
But then obviously for modern secularism and atheism.
So it's not like there was some genius argument that somebody that people came out with for, you know, this is why we should all be atheists.
It's a, you know, it's something that's grown out of the hubristic ideas that came along in the, well, really, really at the period of the Enlightenment after the so-called scientific revolution, rather than in the scientific revolution itself, because they were Christians who were mostly doing these things.
But it's the sceptics like Voltaire and people like that, who came after, you know, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and all these awful people who propagated these ideas.
Yeah, the French have punched above their weight in producing ideas.
Yeah.
So Voltaire and Rousseau and then later on people like Foucault and Derek.
I write about this.
They're evil people.
Foucault with a paedophile.
I mean, you know, if you actually look at what these people did in their personal lives, you know, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were the same as well.
I mean, I'm not saying they were rapists, but they were certainly paedophiles by our stance.
Yes, that was an interesting point you made about how what we understand now about the Enlightenment was basically the invention of atheists with an axe to grind.
You mentioned Rousseau and Voltaire, but also Gibbon.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I haven't read Decline and Fall, but when I was growing up, I was aware that this was a book an educated person should have read.
And you think about all those classicists in the Victorian classicists in the great age of, well, the last great period of the universities when you had all these, I don't know, Jowett and stuff, Balliol.
And they would all presumably have revered decline and fall and bought into its anti-Christian culture.
Oh, yeah, very, very strong anti-Christian element in it.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the argument of decline and fall is essentially that Christianity caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Look what you've done, Christians.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And ushered in the Dark Ages.
I mean, the myth of the Dark Ages largely comes from Gibbon.
You know, the idea that the end of the Roman Empire was caused by the sort of insidious leaven of Christianity, which then led into a period of intellectual and cultural stagnation, which was called the Dark Ages.
But I say it was called the Dark Ages because scholarship now has moved beyond that in the relevant fields.
Everyone knows there was no Dark Age.
I mean, it's just, it's complete nonsense.
Obviously, though, after the Roman Empire, there was, you know, it was a very, very difficult time when an empire like that collapses.
It's got all sorts of social and economic and cultural consequences.
How could it fail to have?
But nevertheless, the culture that was preserved was preserved because of Christianity, because it was preserved in Christian monasteries mainly through monks copying out classical manuscripts and all this sort of thing.
And then, as I say, when you get into the second millennium, then you have the beginnings of what we've come to think of as education, essentially, in the cathedral schools and then the early universities and so on.
This all happened during the so-called dark ages, as well as the building of the Gothic cathedrals.
I mean, you could go through all sorts of other examples, the foundation of hospitals and hospices and all sorts of things you could mention that happened during the so-called Dark Ages.
Just the whole thing has been utterly left behind by modern scholarship.
But what you could say about Gibbon, I suppose, is that, I mean, I haven't read the whole thing, obviously, I've read bits of it, but he was clearly a man of, he was a serious man.
I mean, he's not like somebody who writes these kind of things today, like, you know, Dan Snow or someone like that.
He was a serious intellect and a serious scholar.
And it's a great work of literature, clearly.
But the narrative it propagates is the thesis has been left behind by modern scholarship long ago.
Do you think he was, was he a pederast?
I don't know.
Well, I'm just thinking about it.
It gets quite a lot.
Do you know, I mean, Stephen Fry is an inheritor of that tradition, the reverence for the Greeks and their healthy attitude towards young boys and the Spartans.
Yes, indeed.
Well, I mean, that's, and look, I don't know.
I've got no, I don't know anything about Edward Gibbons' personal life, so I'd be hesitant to comment on it.
But you're quite right that the idea here is that really the many, I mean, in fact, we had David Starkey was saying this.
I don't know whether you saw this.
It was a few months ago, but David Starkey was essentially making a similar point on the, I think it was a Heretics podcast, which I don't listen to, but somebody sent this to me.
But, you know, Starkey was saying a similar thing, which is that, you know, our values, the ones that we really sort of, you know, that are really important to us nowadays, really come to us from the Greco-Roman world.
And he mentioned democracy as part of that, for example.
But that's essentially a big, you know, it's a big part of what Gibbon is saying.
He's saying, and other thinkers have said similar things, which is that, you know, really what we need is a revival of Greek culture.
Because, you know, the Greeks were the ones who had all the, you know, the art and philosophy and the sculpture and the literature and so on and so forth.
And really it was Christianity that came about and brought an end to these kind of things.
But you're quite right, is that a component of the Greco-Roman world was that pederasty was just completely normal.
I mean, Socrates was a pederast, you know.
I'm a big fan of Socrates, but not that aspect of him.
Not that.
Pederasty and, of course, effectively child sacrifice.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So, and one has to say that there were variations, as there are in every society.
But yeah, I mean, the practice of the exposure of infants was just absolutely routine.
You know, write about this really good book by a scholar called, I think his name is Jim Backe called When Children Became People, speaking about the way that the view of children changed as a result of Christianity.
But prior to that, children were not, they were not viewed as people.
They didn't participate fully in the logos, which is the rational principle.
And they could just be killed after they were born.
Obviously, abortion was common, which all of this would have happened at the behest of the man, the patrician, the father.
And exposure was, by which I mean after a child had been born, if it was not desirable for any reason, if it was a girl or if it was deformed or if it didn't come, you know, rise to some kind of ideal of physical measure, if it didn't measure up in some way, it would be left to die, you know, literally just left to the beasts.
And this was a completely normal thing in this culture.
It wasn't shocking, it wasn't unusual, it was totally normal, and people were absolutely fine with it.
And this is the point I'm making is that that might sound shocking to us now.
It might do.
I mean, I think it's becoming increasingly less shocking as we're seeing things which are comparable to it becoming possible in the modern age.
But, well, something must happen to people's consciences and to their souls in order to find that kind of thing acceptable.
My worry is that that kind of thing is going to become normal and acceptable in our culture as well, even beyond what we're seeing now.
And the reason, again, the reason is because the view of humanity that we have inherited from Christianity is fading.
We are forgetting it.
And it's going to change us.
Oh, totally.
I was going to give you another example, actually, of the cultural assumptions that I certainly had when I was younger, that abortion was really a mark of a civilized society, an advanced culture.
This culture had realized that women had rights and that they...
I just thought, well, yeah, abortion's what you do, so you don't get unwanted babies.
And it never occurred to me that this is actually just a rebadge version of what the Canaanites used to do and the various tribes putting children in the fire and sacrificing them to Baal and Moloch.
Yeah.
I mean, I really do see this as a kind of spiritual thing, ultimately, because I can't understand logically why people don't understand this argument that killing a child in the womb is not hugely morally distinguishable from killing a child after it's been born.
I don't really understand why people are reluctant to accept that argument.
And to me, I think it can only be that just people are...
They're either willfully blinded or they're so socially conditioned that they can't see the problem, which seems like an obvious...
Like rational.
I'm going with socially conditioned, Jamie.
I don't think they've troubled themselves to think about this for one fraction of a millisecond.
It's just there.
It's true.
And there is another element to it.
I saw a clip on Twitter yesterday.
I shouldn't go on Twitter so much, but sometimes I do do a bit of Doom scrolling on Twitter.
And I saw there was a singer.
I can't actually remember her name.
She's very famous.
I mean, I don't listen to any modern music, obviously, James, as I'm sure you don't either, but a very famous modern singer who was having an interview with on the BBC, of course.
It was a clip from the BBC.
And she was singing a song, like in a kind of joking way, about how she'd had four or five abortions, but she couldn't remember.
And it was like a joke.
And then the other one was like, oh, this is great, isn't it, that we can talk about this without anyone shooting us or something.
And you just think, yeah, this is the thing.
This was never about abortion being safe, legal, and rare.
This is why, like, I think the church is so naive when it says, oh, you know, in certain cases, we should, you know, it's fine for women to have abortion when, you know, it threatens the life of the mother and things like that.
Because that's not what it's about.
It's always the thin end of the wedge.
It's always to get to somewhere else, which is this point at which it's not just, you know, oh, we had to do this because there was some kind of tragic necessity.
It's actually a celebration of, well, what is it a celebration of?
The freedom to have sex with whoever we like and then to kill our unborn children if they arise as a consequence of it.
And this is actually a good thing.
This is the mark, as you say, the mark of a civilized society that women are allowed to behave like this and that they're facilitated by society.
Now, of course, I always, you know, obviously one has to say sometimes there are times when young women get pregnant by mistake and it puts them in a really difficult position.
You know, one doesn't want to be stupid and deny that.
But when you see the manifestation of it in popular culture, it's gone way beyond that.
And I think it's disclosive of the actual reality, which is a celebration of, yes, freedom and liberation from constraint, liberation from authority, but ultimately celebration of death.
I was thinking, we were talking earlier about what influence the devil has in the world and the demons and so on.
I think I was talking to somebody about this the other day.
You can always detect the whiff of sulfur when you see signs of inversion.
One of Satan's favourite tricks is to invert something.
And I see that diabolical element in the way that abortion has been rebranded a kind of the morally superior position.
Yes.
It's not about murdering.
I mean, it is about murdering children, but it's been rebadged as a woman's right to choose.
And it's her choice.
Choice.
And choice is really important.
Are you denying her choice?
That's how it works.
It's very clever.
Yeah, it's very clever.
And also the euphemistic uses of words like healthcare, for example.
It's got nothing to do with healthcare.
What was it called?
Planning.
Family planning.
Family planning.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a sort of dark humour in it, isn't it?
Because it's not about healthcare at all, anyone's health.
Because it's obviously dangerous.
In many instances, women to have abortions, and it's not healthcare for the child who's killed.
It's the opposite of healthcare in that sense.
But I think you're quite right about this inversion thing.
I think we see this with the assisted dying thing as well.
It's not assisted dying.
It's the state killing people.
That's completely different.
Because assistance is something you want, isn't it?
Assistance is a desirable thing.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's not dying because these people aren't actually dying in any kind of imminent sense.
They may have some kind of terminal diagnosis, but they're not in their death throes.
They're being killed.
I mean, in theory, anyway.
And there are many things like this.
Equality, the notion of equality basically means inequality.
It basically means discrimination.
And many, many words that we use in our culture today have the exact opposite meaning of what they used to mean, like inclusion.
Inclusion is about exclusion.
It's everywhere we look.
Yeah, environmentalism is about destroying the environment.
Yeah, that's another really good example.
Yeah, it's about the destruction of both the natural and the human environment with all of this, you know, these solar Panels and wind turbines, and goodness knows what else.
Can I ask you a brief technical question?
I don't know whether you know the answer to this or not.
When Satan claims a soul, what happens to the soul?
Can it be rescued later on?
Would you mean in this life now?
Would you mean like this?
In this life now?
If they don't repent?
Where do they go?
Where they die, you mean?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't...
You know, it's not, in popular culture, you have this kind of idea of hell as the domain of Satan, but it's not really.
Hell is the place where Satan and his demons end up, but they're, you know, they get thrown into the lake of fire in the book of Revelation.
So, you know, hell is the place of, hell is a manifestation of God's judgment.
So it's, so it's, it's not like, you know, Satan rules in hell and God rules in heaven and some people go to be with Satan and some people go to be with God.
No, Psalm 139, when I go down to hell, thou art there also.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, so whatever hell is, it's a manifestation of God's judgment.
And it's not, you know, it's not the, it's not like the dwelling place of Satan equivalent to heaven being the dwelling place of God.
I don't know, to be honest, I probably just don't know enough about the occult nowadays to know sort of how these things work.
But when you say when Satan claims a soul in this life now, do you mean like when people sort of give themselves to like that?
That would be an example, yeah.
I mean, he's building up this kind of army of allies, I suppose.
I'm just wondering, then there's the day of judgment.
Yeah.
And then these souls are presumably judged.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, so would so is your question really, is it about like, you know, what happens at the sort of final judgment?
Yeah, I suppose it is.
Maybe it is.
Yeah.
So, I mean, so it's an interesting conversation.
And I think in the book of Revelation, you know, you can see that the enemies of God, whoever they are, whether they are human or angelic, are cast into the lake of fire.
You know, the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
So that's what will happen.
You know, I think there's an interesting question about what is actually meant by hell.
Because my personal view is that hell is, for anyone who ends up in hell, it's a sort of self-chosen thing because it's to do with the rejection of the conscious rejection of God or the fundamental good in reality and therefore a sort of cleaving to infinite darkness and infinite sorrow and pain and loss in that sense.
So I think that that imagery of like fire and burning and things like that, I think it's symbolic of the reality, the awful reality of a soul in everlasting torment.
So yeah, so that's kind of what I think about that.
Sorry, we're getting slightly, I took you slightly off topic there because there's lots in your book.
Another thing I picked up on was that I think a lot of people, you see this actually in sort of awake circles, in sort of conspiracy circles as well.
There's definitely an element, the non-Christian element, which views the world as a kind of a mental construct that actually has no objective reality other than we're inventing it in our heads.
And that is probably the dominant worldview now.
People aren't aware that this is how they think, but that is basically it, isn't it?
That we're all atomized.
And the world is just a product of our consciousness.
Yeah.
You think there's a dominant worldview in culture in general?
Well, you think about the sort of the me generation, the me culture, that everything's about my feelings, my...
Yes.
Was that what, was it, who was, was it...
isn't that some kind of like Zen proverb or something like that?
I mean, it reminds me of, Yes, well, that's Samuel Johnson, isn't it?
Oh, right.
So what did Bishop Barclay say?
Well, he was the idealist philosopher of the 18th century, I think he was.
So, I mean, he's, you know, when you do A-level philosophy, he's the guy you read to read, you know, or undergraduate philosophy.
That's when, you know, his introduction to idealism.
So, you know, the idea that the world, I mean, I don't want to bastardize this.
I haven't studied this for a long time, but essentially, like, the world out there is not objectively real.
It's a construct of consciousness.
Ultimately, it's a construct of God's consciousness, but it doesn't really exist in any kind of objective sense.
So he covered himself there, didn't he?
By saying it's, don't worry, it's God's consciousness.
Yeah, exactly.
So what's that?
There's a famous kind of poem about God and the quad, and it's also got the word odd in it.
There's lots of people who are listening to this who will know this, but essentially, the point of the poem is that the quad exists when there's no one there to walk in it because God sees it, because you know, it's a mental construct of God in that sense.
So, John.
I don't want to interrupt your, have you finished your.
Yeah, yeah, pretty much, yeah.
So that's, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's, um, it, basically what it's saying is that the primary stuff of reality is consciousness rather than material.
So the material kind of is dependent upon consciousness.
And in a sense, I think that's correct, depending on what you mean by consciousness.
Because the fundamental reality is God, and God is a spirit.
So spirit is more fundamental than matter in that sense.
But I think it's going a step further to then say, and matter essentially doesn't exist.
It's not objectively real.
It is objectively real.
But it's contained within a greater reality, a supernatural reality.
Well, okay.
I like that kind of swerve that thinkers like Bishop Barclay and yourself have found.
I mean, I always, whenever that conundrum was presented to me about whether the tree doesn't make a noise, I was always, always of the view that, yeah, obviously it does.
Hello.
I mean, the squirrels still hear it, for example.
I thought it was a frivolous and stupid thing to, anyway.
That's, by the way.
But yeah, I mean, I think related to this is the idea that we're living in a simulation.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
Man.
Yeah.
Well, that's what Elon Musk thinks, of course.
And David Icke.
And David Icke, yeah.
For probably for different reasons, I imagine.
But I mean, you know, Musk says, you know, it's obviously going to be possible at some stage to create a plausible simulation of reality.
So what are the odds that that's not already happened and that we are not living in it?
So that's kind of his argument, really.
He can't even simulate a successful rocket mission into space.
Not at the moment.
No, we're not.
But it will be possible.
I mean, it's close to being possible now, isn't it?
These VR goggles and things like that.
So I think the fact is, I mean, these are very deep questions, but I think ultimately what this comes back to is like every act of cognition is in some sense an acceptance of some sort of fundamental principle.
Another way of putting this is to say that everything is based on faith in some fundamental sense.
Like the existence of the external world is a fiduciary act.
It's based on faith.
We don't know that the external world exists with some kind of mathematical certainty.
In a spiritual sense, we accept it as a gift.
It's something which is just given to us.
It presents itself to us in some sort of immediate sense.
And we accept it.
The world is there.
It exists.
It's given to us by God.
It's in some sense trustworthy.
And I guess it's just a question of whether or not you want to accept that.
If you want to accept you're living in a simulation, there's nothing that can be said to disabuse you of that notion because it's a first principle belief, isn't it?
I think you've spent too much time studying philosophy, Jamie.
I think I'm more like a medieval Christian.
I just sort of go out into the world and I'm always or almost always conscious of my the relationship between me, the world and God and it's all about What does God want me to do?
What's the right thing to do?
But I think that makes me quite weird in terms of modern culture.
I was thinking, for example, so many of my assumptions, my cultural assumptions when I left university went out into the world.
I mean, there's lots of stuff I completely misunderstood.
I didn't understand that fractional reserve banking was fundamentally evil and that there's a reason why God enjoins that, or the Bible enjoins that usury should be punishable by death and stuff like that.
I didn't get any of that.
But a lot of the other cultural assumptions, like that really, as an educated young man, my job was to experience as many drugs as possible and that my role model should be people like Geoffrey Bernard and Brendan Behan and Richard Burton and Oliver Reed.
I lived in a culture which celebrated excess of every variety.
That I fully expected that when I got married, I'd probably have an affair or two or three because kind of that's what you do because you see it in the movies.
Everything about our culture, not just little details, but everything points towards an anti-Christian take on the world, doesn't it?
Yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, obviously we're speaking in hyperbole here, but yeah, I would say generally it does.
I mean, I had a kind of similar, I mean, obviously I'm younger than you, but you know, when I grew up watching Friends, you know, and Friends is, you know, everyone's like, ah, isn't Friends funny?
But like, you actually look at what they're doing, you know, and what they're saying, you know, it's absolutely immoral to the extreme.
You know, it's not only the casual sex, but, you know, later on there's a celebration of surrogacy, for example, and all sorts of other deviant behavior.
And you just don't notice when you're a child.
You just watch it and you think, haha, you know, Ross is funny, haha, Joey's funny, sleeping with all these women.
Isn't it hilarious?
But it's programming you to think in a certain way about the world, you know, and it's teaching you about what's normal as well.
You know, it's normal to behave like this, it's normal to have sex with people you've just met and forget their names.
And it's normal to be a surrogate mother and yeah, this is all fine, you know.
This is the way the modern world is.
And many things are like this.
There are some particularly sticky moments on Friends, which you can find them on YouTube when you watch them without the laughter track.
Right.
And you realise that without being told laugh at this point, because it's funny.
Actually, it's really, really not.
That is really interesting.
You're going to disagree with me on this, Jamie, but the biggest tell for me that friends is part of the psyop is Ross's job.
Well, these are the introductions.
Yeah.
Why would I disagree with that?
Well, you don't believe in dinosaurs either?
Oh, no.
I mean, I'm really sceptical about the whole thing, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I know, you know, that they don't actually have these skeletons, you know.
I mean, these are not...
As they would be when you can make anything, literally anything you want, because it's all made up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
And I, you know, I've tested this as well.
When I lived in Nottingham, they had a T-Rex exhibition in the place called Woolliston Hall, which is a fantastic place, by the way.
I loved Woolerton Hall.
I used to go and visit there all the time with my family.
This T-Rex exhibition there.
And when you actually look at it, the bones that they say they've got are minimal.
You know, they say they've got seven or eight bones of this T-Rex.
Maybe more, maybe it's 30.
But anyway, it's hundreds of bones this skeleton's made up of.
But the bones aren't even out there.
They're not even the bones.
They're replicas of the bones that they say they do have.
So I do think, you know, I don't know.
I mean, I'd be hesitant to sort of say that, you know, to come up with a theory as to what's actually going on.
But I think the hubris and the presumption that underlies the modern scientific establishment, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the paradigm was basically completely wrong.
And, you know, there were massive creatures, but maybe they weren't as massive as people say they were.
Maybe they lived at a completely different period in history.
You know, blah, blah, blah.
I'm very, very skeptical about it.
Yeah.
Have you read Earth's Earliest Ages?
No.
What's that?
Oh, get hold of a copy.
It's good.
It's my bathroom reading at the moment.
But there's a bit where I just try and get hold of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think it was looking by somebody called Pember.
I may be wrong.
It's a book, is it?
Yeah, it's...
I just thought it was a bit...
Yeah.
You'll love it.
You'll love it.
It talks about Satan and stuff.
I've just got to the bit where Satan tempts Eve.
And Pember theorizes that at that particular stage of creation, the serpent probably had wings and was a lot more...
When God said, right, because you've done this to Eve, I'm going to blah, blah, blah.
So Pember theorizes that the serpent would have been the most beautiful of all God's creation.
And he had really shimmery, lovely scales and fantastic wings.
And Eve would have seen this thing and gone, yeah, I can trust you because you're a nice looking.
Yeah.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it reminds me of William Blake's picture, Satan in all his glory, or Satan in his original glory, which is kind of invoking that idea.
And I do think that's actually borne out by modern scholarship as well.
You know that book by Michael Heiser, The Invisible Realm?
Love it.
Yeah, it's a great book.
But he makes a similar point, which is that the whole idea of a kind of pre this creation angelic fall actually doesn't come from the Bible.
It's more sort of something that is propagated through culture, like Milton.
If you actually read the biblical text, what it appears to be saying is that it's actually in the act, the primal act of rebellion is the Garden of Eden, not just on the part of humans, but on the part of Satan as well.
And, you know, the Genesis 6 thing where the sons of God mate with the daughters of Eve.
Again, these are unfallen angelic beings at the point of the story.
It's in the act of copulating with human women that they rebel against God and then, you know, become, as it were, demonic beings.
And then it's from them that the Nephilim come, you know, the giants.
And Heiser sees that as the straw that breaks the camel's back, as it were, the thing that tips God over into, now I'm really angry and I'm going to flood the earth and kill all these Nephilim along with all the humans.
They try to.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's another question, isn't it, as to how the Nephilim then survive, because they clearly do, because they're in the later...
I'm not sure what it says in Genesis 6, but there is an issue there, because in the flood narrative, it's quite clear that everything is killed except for Noah and his family.
All the creatures on the earth are killed.
It's very, very clear.
So Heiser says, I mean, basically there are two possibilities.
Either some of the Nephilim just survived the flood and Genesis is speaking in hyperbole, or the same thing happened again after the flood.
You know, it's a sort of thing that happens more than once in history.
It's a funny thing, isn't it?
It's like a kind of inversion of the, it's a demonic inversion of the virgin birth, because it's demonic beings mating with humans and creating this demonic, half-human, half-angelic spawn, which wreaks havoc upon the earth.
But as I say, they're clearly there in the later books of scripture.
The Rephaim, I think the other descendants called the Anakim, and Goliath, for example, is an Ephelim.
He's, you know, in the narrative.
Yes, he definitely is.
Apparently he was a mercenary.
He wasn't of the...
He got defeated.
He was an import.
He was a ringer.
Oh, is that right?
Okay, I didn't know that.
No, there's so much...
Because it's so interesting.
Oh, yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it?
It's got everything.
Yeah.
Giants, floods.
Giants.
And, you know, where we're going to go next, where we came from.
Yeah.
I mean, this is important stuff.
I was thinking earlier on, we skated over the subject of the massive PSYOP involving Galileo.
Oh, yeah.
And as you've hinted, every school child knows, or did, at least when they educated them on that level, that it was the battle between rationalism and science on the one hand, of Galileo, and then the superstitious and unearned authority of the church on the other, Galileo versus the Pope.
And you tell the true story.
The problem is that the true story is nuanced.
Whereas the, I mean, you describe it really as a kind of power struggle or sort of bad blood, a sort of personal feud between the Pope and Galileo and the Pope...
Was it?
What did you say?
I was just thinking that.
I forget the exact one.
I have a question.
Who was actually a massive fan of Galileo's?
And they just fell out over details.
Yeah, so I mean, it is true.
Urban VIII.
Urban VIII, there we are.
It is true that this is nuanced.
And that's part of the problem, is that nobody wants to actually engage with historical reality, which is always nuanced.
And it's difficult to understand sometimes as well.
But you've got to put yourself in that...
So for a start, there was an assumption that science properly done would not contradict the doctrine of the church because people believed that the doctrine of the church was true.
So it's just a logical implication of believing theological premises, right?
That if this is true and somebody comes out with something that says something different, then that thing can't be true because you can't have two things which are contradicting each other be true at the same time.
So that was part of the worldview of the time, right?
But it wasn't even that.
It was that the Pope at the time, Pope Urban, simply asked Galileo to put a disclaimer in one of his writings to the effect that what he was writing was just theoretical, that these were just theories and not facts, which is hardly an outrageous thing to ask somebody to put, you know, for the sake of keeping the peace, just to make that kind of concession.
I mean, it's literally true anyway.
All of science is theoretical.
So it wasn't the most outrageous thing that could have happened.
But then essentially what happened is Galileo wrote a dialogue in which he put the opinions of the Pope, Pope Urban VIII, as he said, in the mouth of a character called Simplicio, which means idiot, fool, or something like that.
And then the Pope took umbrage at this.
And really, as you say, there was a clash of personalities, which resulted in Galileo being put under house arrest.
But he wasn't even precluded from carrying out further scientific investigation or anything like that.
So really, the idea that there was this massive clash between the old world of faith and the new world of science, it really couldn't be further from the truth.
And lots of people think, for example, that Galileo was interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition and that he was tortured.
But this is completely untrue.
None of that's true.
So it doesn't stand up as an example of rationalism versus faith or something like that.
It's just not true.
And also, again, just think about the milieu at the time.
Other people were astronomers.
Other people were writing scientific textbooks.
It was part of the cut and thrust of the intellectual culture at the time.
So yeah, so as you say, it's a massive side.
But I talk about many such things in this book, many kind of ideas that people are floating around in their minds, which they may have picked up at school.
I mean, that's probably the most famous one, but there are other ideas as well, like Christians believed that the world was flat until goodness knows when, which is not true.
I mean, that's another issue, isn't it, I suppose?
Well, indeed.
I was thinking on the subject of heliocentrism.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with the theory that heliocentrism is itself was introduced into the scientific culture by Luciferians, that essentially that geocentrism actually is the truth and the heliocentrism is just a kind of...
They conjured it all up to demonstrate something which isn't actually true.
Well, not really.
I mean, tell me about it.
Oh, that's...
Have you got one?
I'll listen to it.
Have you done one?
Do you know what?
I think I listened to it about five years ago, right at the beginning of my journey.
And it's a bit muddy.
But if I find it, I will send it to you.
I mean, it's out there.
Actually, you know what?
People will probably provide it in the notes below in the comments.
I hope they will.
So I was going to ask you, I'm amazed that you even got this book published by a mainstream publisher.
Did you have to kind of censor yourself at all?
Not really.
No, I have to say, my editor, Andy, is a complete legend.
You know, he works for Hodder Faith.
So he believes.
Yeah, he does.
I mean, I don't want to sort of out him.
No, don't, don't.
Don't be cruel.
He might get sacked.
I don't want to get him in trouble, but he is a total legend.
He doesn't just, you know, he's not, he doesn't just work with me.
He works with other really people I respect a lot, like Rodrea and Louise Perry and people like that.
These are, yeah, I mean, these are very much writers who are not part of the sort of, you know, the mainstream of Hodder and Stouton.
I mean, that sort of should go without saying.
But yeah, Andy is Andy's complete legend.
And he never censored me at all.
Now, occasionally he might say, well, you know, like, for example, in the bit about abortion and euthanasia, he said, it might be good just to just to say something about how, you know, there's a legitimate pastoral concern about people who, you know, accidentally get pregnant and so on and so forth.
So occasionally he asked me to nuance things like ever so slightly, but he never sort of got me to take anything out.
He was perfectly fine with all of this stuff.
And I think what he did is he really just added depth and nuance.
I think, you know, when we were discussing transgenderism, for example, he made a number of really helpful comments in terms of clarifying what actually the, you know, what actually the sort of transgender view of the world is and what the transgender ideology is.
So stuff like that.
But I never felt censored by him.
And yeah, so it was, in that sense, it was a really good experience working with him.
I mean, among C of E clergy, you're still quite out there in terms of your views on COVID and stuff, aren't you?
Yeah, definitely.
Do you get any grief for it?
Is it hampering you, do you find?
Only in the sense that it's like a kind of self-chosen position that I'm in.
I'm a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic, so I'll always be in a...
So in that sense, I'm always going to be a kind of, you know, a fringe figure.
And I don't mean it, I'm not, yeah, I don't feel sorry for myself.
I'm very, very happy doing what I'm doing.
Do I get any grief for it?
No, not, well, not recently anyway.
I did a bit.
You know, I'd rather, people can work this out from what I'm going to say, but I'd rather not talk about where I was or who I was involved with.
But in the last place that I was, I did get quite a lot of grief at points.
But that was actually because I did a tweet where I said that Christian couples should have as many children as they possibly could.
That was the thing that got, that really incensed people when I said that.
But yeah, it turns out I'm writing a whole book about how I don't believe in climate change or that the reaction to COVID was hysterical and crazy.
Nobody's really paid very much attention to that from the establishment so far.
And that's what they tend to do, actually, James.
That's probably my answer, really, is that I think a lot of the time, my experience anyway, is that when you say things that the establishment don't want to hear, they simply ignore you rather than attack you.
But that's been my experience anyway.
I think I keep quoting this every time we talk about it, but it's worth repeating.
Low children are inheritance of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
Yes.
It's in the Psalms.
Yeah.
And the Psalms are like the basis of pretty much everything, aren't they?
Yeah.
Like as the arrows are in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children.
Happy is the man who hath his quiver full of them.
They will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gates.
I mean, to me, like Psalm 127 is one of the most beautiful psalms, speaking about reliance on God, on God's provision, on the way it speaks about children.
It's a beautiful psalm and it's the truth as well.
This is why people can't stand this kind of thing when you talk about having children and how it's a good thing.
They just can't stand it because to me, it's the nexus of this whole thing.
This whole thing is an attack upon children and the coming generations.
And that's where I really see the dark hand of the enemy and all of this stuff.
I think that the enemy loves to attack children, childhood, innocence, innocent childlike joy.
This is what the devil can't stand.
So all of this stuff in some way or another comes back to don't have children, abort your children, indoctrinate your children, terrify your children by telling them that the apocalypse is coming because of climate change, blah, blah, blah.
All of that kind of stuff.
It's all just an attack upon the young and the innocent.
Well, this is another example of the inversion we were talking about, where the Bible urges us to go forth and multiply and celebrate as children.
And now, not having children is being held up as a virtuous thing to do.
Yes.
You're saving the planet.
Yeah.
And it's awfully convenient, isn't it, that we save the planet by being utterly selfish and self-centered and not having any children, you know, just living life exactly as we want to on our own terms.
So, yeah, it is a horrible inversion.
But, you know, what we can say is that it gives us a focus, doesn't it?
That we are, the battle here is for our children.
It's for the coming generations.
You know, it's not so much for ourselves.
In a way, we live in the world that we live in and we've inherited this world and this is the arena that we have to do the battle in.
But we have to look to the future, not for ourselves, but for our children and for our children's children.
And we're in it for them.
You know, that's what we're doing this for, is for the coming generations.
Have you done battle yet with kind of Enlightenment style intellectuals on the BBC and stuff?
Have you been on any of the talk shows?
No, no.
On the BBC?
Yeah.
No.
I don't think the BBC would be interested in having me on.
They've got to be able to do it.
In the old days, they would have done.
Programmes like Start the Week, when I used to break bread with the BBC, they would still have had somebody like you and me on.
Yeah, well, I think things have changed, haven't they?
I went on Times Radio a couple of years ago, you know, when some of the gay marriage stuff was going on.
I can't remember what it was.
And there were these two women on there, and they really laid into me about that, you know, it hasn't happened to me very often because it seems sort of obvious, doesn't it?
It's sort of an obvious thing to do.
Oh, you're a bigot.
Oh, you know, you don't like gay people, blah, blah, blah, and all this kind of stuff.
It's sort of a bit, you know, it's a bit obvious, isn't it, really?
But yeah, that's going to put them off, being obvious.
Yeah, exactly.
It's kind of an easy, is it me, you're an easy target, yeah, or you don't agree with gay marriage?
Oh, what are you some kind of bigot?
I mean, you know, it doesn't take a lot of intellectual power in order to formulate such an argument.
But I just pointed out to them that their fundamental premise, which was that if the church wanted to become relevant, it should marry gay people.
I just said that's not borne out by the empirical evidence.
You know, if you look at the churches where they started doing gay marriage, they're all in decline.
So your argument just doesn't make any sense.
But, you know, they didn't like this.
And then they, yeah, no, they were fine.
I mean, they were, you know, they were fine.
I don't care if people have these opinions.
You know, I mean, these are misguided people who are, you know, they're funded by Rupert Murdoch.
They've got a huge media platform.
You know, millions of people will listen to their nonsense.
You know, you've got to feel sorry for them, I think.
At the end, you talk about what sort of Christianity looks like.
And you're not arguing for Jamie Franklin to be Prime Minister and clerics everywhere to regain the power they had in the Middle Ages.
That's not your line.
You're saying the three qualities which are the essence of Christianity, which I agree with, that truth, goodness and beauty.
Yeah.
So, I mean, goodness, truth, and beauty are, you know, in the medieval period, they were considered to be the so-called transcendental basis of reality, which means that every sort of act of will or desire that a human being engages in is in some sense a reaching out for one of these things in the abstract.
For example, with moral actions, we do good things, not just for the action itself, not just because we find the action in some way attractive or compelling, but because we are committed to goodness as such.
And it's the same thing with truth.
We're interested not just in true things, but in truth as such as an ultimate value.
So anyway, the point about this is that this points towards some kind of ultimate reality, which in the medieval vocabulary was equated with God.
God isn't like a man with a beard who happens to be good.
God is goodness itself, and God is truth itself, and God is beauty itself.
And that's why all of our conscious experience in some way is orientated in the direction of these so-called transcendentals.
So that's where I get that vocabulary from.
And really what I was trying to...
Well, I mean, in terms of contemporary stuff, David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God is the best articulation of it.
No, I meant the Middle Ages, right?
There isn't a...
Yeah.
It's just that I thought it was something that I cleverly inferred by thinking about this stuff hard, that the truth, goodness and beauty were the kind of essence of God.
But it turns out that...
That's definitely correct.
But I didn't realise that the medieval times, this was a kind of very established understanding of the world.
Yeah, well, in some ways, and not to do down your achievement by coming up with it independently, but in some ways it's just obvious, isn't it?
Because, you know, if you think about it, we only experience good in a kind of adjectival sense in this life, you know, a good person or a good action or something like that.
But it's quite obvious that there's something beyond that, that that word good is referring to.
It's like some kind of quality which transcends these individual instances of goodness.
And that must be God.
Otherwise, God himself would only be another instance of goodness.
God, you know, a good God, a good, like God being like a good man.
And then goodness would be some kind of further abstract ideal beyond God.
So in some, it's got the chain has to end somewhere, you know, has to terminate in something.
There needs to be some kind of, you know, primordial ontological perfection, which all of this stuff relates to.
And that is, like, to use Thomas Aquinas' language, that is what we talk about when we talk about God.
That is who God is.
And that's why I said earlier about the naturalist paradigm being so absolutely absurd, is because it has to deny basically all human experience in order to believe that the material world is all that there is.
Because all of our experience is orientated towards truth, goodness, and beauty in the abstract, in the most abstract sense that there could possibly be.
So yeah, so that's definitely true.
I mean, just to get back to the book, though, the Reason I said that is because I think that these are things, you know, you always have this question of like, well, you know, we could see the utility of Christianity, but I can't necessarily believe in it.
I say, okay, well, that's fine.
And I accept that.
But, you know, and I do say, I do, you know, Christ says, you know, seek and you will find.
I believe that if people truly seek, they will truly find.
But if you can't accept the whole thing for whatever reason, and I understand there are problems with the church and this kind of stuff, orientate yourself towards reality.
Orientate yourselves towards the true, the good, and the beautiful.
And that will at least put you on the right path, as it were, to being part of the solution, let's say, rather than part of the problem.
Well, do you think that the Christian age mindset, when Christianity was a cultural norm, do you think it made it harder for institutions and individuals to lie as much as they do now?
So, for example, you've got whole scientific fields, paleontology being one of them, climate science being another one, which are based on lies.
There's no evidence to support either.
You just make shit up.
It's your job.
I mean, you could apply it to lots of, but you could apply that probably to the field of vaccinology, immunology.
Whole swathes of science are actually promoting stuff that isn't true.
Do you think that that institutionalized mendacity is a product of the post-Christian age, or do you think it's always been with us?
No, I think it most certainly is.
I mean, obviously, we're speaking in generalizations here, but yeah, I mean, I think we live in a culture which is fundamentally based on an untruth, which is that there's no God and that there's no spiritual realm and that we're not accountable to anyone or anything ultimately.
So why wouldn't you lie if that were your fundamental understanding of reality?
Ultimately, morality without God is preference, isn't it?
I mean, as much as your average atheist would want to deny it, there is no reason ultimately, if you can get away with it, not to lie or not to have an affair or whatever it is.
So, yeah, so I think that's certainly true.
I mean, institutions in the Middle Ages, I mean, obviously, things vary massively, don't they?
But I find it hard to think of anything that was as sort of systematically deceptive as the modern scientific establishment in the sense of something like climate change, which is, you know, it's got such a hold over the imagination of people in the West, but is blatantly complete fabrication, a complete hoax.
You know, many other things as well, we could name.
I mean, that's the most obvious one.
But yeah, that seems to me to be...
Because these ideas are able to be propagated and communicated so quickly and with such ubiquity that the level of propaganda that's possible nowadays is unparalleled in human history.
So that's got something to do with it.
But nevertheless, the kind of willfulness that people have to believe things which are blatantly false is astonishing.
In the same way that on the beauty front, I don't think that there can ever have before been a time where people had such a disregard for the aesthetic in terms of things like town planning and architecture.
I had an argument about this with a loved one who is a normie and this normie loved one who disagrees with everything because I'm obviously a crazy conspiracy theorist.
But I said, well, look at modernist architecture.
It's created in defiance of beauty and they know that they are not pursuing beauty.
And this normie person said, no, I believe that by their own lights, they are seeking out, that they're not deliberately trying to go against beauty.
I don't believe that.
I think they are actually, it's an act of defiance.
It's a bit like satanic rebellion against God.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
I'm not an expert in architecture, but I know that various modernist trends are basically attempts to invert what you would normally expect within nature, say.
So like in, if you take the example of Gothic cathedrals, Gothic cathedrals are built in some way to in some sense to imitate the natural world.
You know, like a pillar, for example, is like a tree.
There's a certain sort of aesthetic parallel between a pillar and a tree.
It rises up, there's a proportionality, there's a certain flow to it, and so on and so forth.
Modernist architecture is a deliberate inversion of this kind of thing, which I think is apt to be interpreted as a visual manifestation of the will of humanity or something like that.
So when you have buildings, for example, which appear to defy gravity, that look like they should fall over, this is an example of that kind of thing.
But the deeper issue is this idea that beauty is subjective, which is a completely ubiquitous idea.
But again, this is just false.
Beauty is a real thing.
It's a real quality which we are drawn towards as human beings, which we seek out.
And it's not purely subjective.
It relates to metaphysical reality, Which, as I say, ultimately, it's God.
God is the beautiful.
I think people have a problem with this because they say, well, you know, we can't agree on what beauty is.
But you could say the same thing for goodness or truth.
You know, you could say, well, not everyone completely agrees on what's moral, but we understand that there is such a thing as morality.
We understand there's such a thing as goodness, even if we can't agree on what it actually is.
It's the same thing with beauty.
There is such a thing as beauty.
We all experience it, and there must be something beyond that experience.
So, yeah, no, I don't agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And you can see what happens when that line of thinking is pursued.
It's not that people end up creating beautiful things, but in distinct ways with distinct visions of beauty.
It's that the whole concept of beauty is completely lost, you know, and you end up with modern art where it plays no role at all.
You know, countless examples could be rolled out to prove that.
Well, I thought the best example you gave in your book was where you pointed out how when prospective undergraduates are being shown around Oxford and Cambridge, their guides take them on a route which steers clear of all the that's Patrick Denine's illustration in his book on pace liberalism.
I forget what it's called, but that's absolutely right, isn't it?
So, you know, here's the Wayne Fleet building.
It says nobody ever.
Do you know the Gibson Quarter at Oxford?
Was that there when you were there?
I hope so.
I never heard of it.
What's it called?
It's up near the new mass building.
That probably wasn't there when you were there either.
But essentially, the theology department is there now.
Oh, is it?
Yeah.
And it's this horrible, you know, it's this horrible modern building.
It's like the building in the office, you know, that Ricky Gervais sitcom.
But if you go to Oxford and you go into the old Baudelayan library, if you go into the quad there, you can see the medieval, you can see, well, obviously the medieval architecture, maybe it's early modern architecture, but nevertheless, you can still see all the doors of the lesser subjects, the School of Arts, the School of Mathematics, School of Rhetoric, School of Grammar, School of Logic, all of it leading up to the great school, which is the School of Theology.
It's the Divinity School.
And that's where all the tourists go nowadays.
They go in there and it's that late Gothic, beautiful debating hall that was one of the earliest buildings of the university, beneath the Duke Humphrey Library, famously used in Harry Potter in the modern day and so on and so forth.
That was their view of what theology was.
Theology was the queen of the sciences.
It was what you progressed towards in the development of your knowledge as a human being.
And it was the crown of all the other subjects in that sense.
And it's reflected in the architecture.
And it's truly breathtaking, even if you don't understand it.
When you walk into that quad, I'm sure you had that experience.
When you walk into the quad of the old Bodleian Library, it's absolutely stunning.
It's just, you know, it's breathtaking.
Do you know, the first time I went in there, I think, was for my when you pick up your MA.
Oh, really?
Okay.
So when you graduated?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
So it didn't make the most of it.
I was blown away by it.
Oh, it's amazing.
Fantastic.
Yeah, I remember going in there and having almost like a kind of spiritual experience, just finding it.
You're right.
I did feel a profound sense of regret about not having discovered it earlier.
You never went to the library, the university library, in your undergraduate or master's degree?
We went into the Radcliffe Camera for my subject.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
I never really liked that place as much.
But just to finish off that thought, though, you know, if you look at where theology is now, theology is on the outskirts of the university in this modern, you know, this modern built, this modern, ugly building, which looks, you know, it's like a, you know, with a car park next to it.
That's, to me, that's like a picture of what's happened to our civilization.
It's like we've gone from this to this.
And this is the reason why.
It's because theology has become marginal.
It's become peripheral.
In Oxford, it's quite literally become peripheral.
But that's what happens.
When we reject the fountain of goodness, truth, and beauty, then the qualities themselves diminish as well.
And that's what I believe is happening.
Yes.
We're just wrapping up.
We'll deal with the final one.
Isn't the goodness part a bit of a hard sell to a lot of people?
Because everyone's been brought up in this culture where you've got sort of Charlie XCX telling you that, like, party drugs and sex are what you want as part of your fulfilled life.
Yeah.
And none of the stuff that we've...
Well, this is why I think we might be living towards the very end of history.
Because if you can see an acceleration of this kind of technology that makes all this kind of thing possible, then it is going to hold sway over the population of the world because it is so powerful.
You know, it is like we're close to the matrix, aren't we?
These VR headsets and so on, we're close to the matrix.
We're close to Cypher saying, if it's a choice between living in the real world or living in this world with this juicy steak, then I'm going to choose this steak.
That's going to be increasingly powerful for more and more people.
It's going to become increasingly difficult for the message of the gospel and of Christ to get through to people.
So that's one thing.
On the other hand, what might happen is if there is some kind of catastrophic crash, you know, I'm not an economist, but it does seem to me like I don't really see how a way of life is sustainable in the West, then it may revert us to some sort of more primitive state where people become more open to Christianity because these toys are taken away from them.
Having said that, I do think there are signs that things may be changing slightly.
There was this survey recently.
I don't know whether you've heard of it by the Bible Society.
It was called the Quiet Revival.
Have you heard about this, James?
Nope.
Well, I mean, it's really interesting.
I mean, check it out.
But essentially, it demonstrates that, so it was from the period 2018 to 2024, but it does demonstrate there's been an upsurge of church going in Britain.
And the most, for me, the most significant statistic was that between that period, Generation Z, which I think is 18 to 25 year olds, that church going amongst that age group had quadrupled.
Now, it was only 4% before, but it's gone up to 16% now.
And this is in Britain.
And the majority of those are men.
And this is something I've seen anecdotally.
You know, many of my friends have witnessed this.
And I've actually witnessed this in my church here as well.
Lots and lots of young men.
I mean, we have older men who've come along as well, but lots and lots of young men are becoming interested in Christianity and are more open to the faith.
Now, I think it's partly intellectual, but I think mainly it's a moral thing because I think people, particularly young men, are so sick of the empty promises of this society that they are turning to radical solutions.
And the most radical solution to the culture of hedonism and nihilism and the celebration of death is Christianity.
So I do wonder whether we are about to see the pendulum swim back in a different direction.
You know, as I say in the book, it's only really been since the 60s that we've seen a mass exodus from the church.
Obviously, the intellectual currents go back further than that, but it's only really since the 60s that we've really indulged in this experiment with a properly secularized post-Christian culture.
And I wonder, you know, as we see the effects of that, both in terms of individuals and their own sort of moral torpor and emptiness, but also at a widespread scale, as we push in in this high-handed way into this culture of infanticide and euthanasia, which we've embraced within the space of a week, I just wonder whether people are going to wake up.
That's my hope anyway.
And in some ways, it's a bit morbid because I'm saying that I think things are going to, you know, they need to get worse before they get better.
But I think people are increasingly going to ask themselves, you know, what have we done?
And is there any alternative?
And they'll start, you know, like I said, I begin the book with a quote from Yoram Hazzoni's book, Conservatism, where he talks about, you know, when you realize that a decision that you've made has set off a disastrous chain of consequences, you go back to the original decision and you revisit it.
I just wonder whether that might end up being the reality for lots and lots of people.
And I hope and pray that it will be.
Well, I do too.
Although I think it's more likely it's just going to get worse and worse and worse.
And we're going to get horses wading up to their whatever it is in blood.
Yeah.
And the Antichrist is going to appear and then Jesus is going to come back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and I am a premillennialist.
I'm sure you've taken an interest in Christian eschatology in this sense.
I do believe that there is going to be a tribulation which the church is going to pass through.
I don't believe in the so-called pre-tribulation rapture.
And if that is our generation or if it's one of the coming generations that are alive now, Christians are going to have to be really, really serious about their faith.
And they're going to have to be willing to suffer and to follow Christ on the way of the cross.
Yes.
Do we get...
Well, you probably get quite good props in heaven, I think, for going through the Great Tribulation, particularly if you get martyred.
There are all these images, aren't there, in the book of Revelation of these martyrs around the throne of God.
So, yeah, probably.
I mean, because you can imagine what the scene must be like in heaven with the martyrs up there, and everyone who's not a mosque must go, oh, I wish I'd suffered a bit more for my faith.
If only I'd gone for the lions.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
They're going to be at the top table, aren't they?
But I think everyone will be happy there.
Oh, that's good.
I think I'd be content with a lower tier and not have to be lioned or whatever.
Well, I mean, we're getting into the topic here of what heaven actually is and rewards and the beatific vision and all these kind of things.
Very, very interesting, but there's a lot to be said about these things.
A whole other podcast, I think, Johnny.
For sure.
For sure.
Well, it's lovely talking to you.
I've really enjoyed this.
And congratulations again on the book.
Is it doing okay?
I think it's doing all right.
It's hard to say, really.
I mean, I don't know.
Books don't do very well, generally.
Yeah, I think for what it is, it's doing all right.
But yeah, I've had a lot of good feedback.
I mean, lots of people say to me, oh, yeah, Reggie Book is great.
Really enjoying it.
It's really helped me and things like that.
So I've had lots of people say things like that to me.
So that's good.
I mean, that's what it's about, ultimately, isn't it?
That is what it's about.
Really, it is.
I'm not just saying that to make you be content with whatever sales you get, but it really is what it's about.
What matters is your constituency.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, the thing is, I don't really, it's not that I don't care whether or not the book sells well, because I do, obviously, but really, all I want to do is I want to help people to know Christ and to know the truth.
You know, That's what I actually care about.
That's the only reason that there's any point writing a book like this, because otherwise, it's just a lot of hard work and it's just slogging away at something for no reason, isn't it?
I'm not doing this because I'm playing intellectual games and because I want to sort of look clever.
I want people to know the truth, you know.
So that's why I've done it.
Speaking of knowing the truth, James, I want to read your book, Watermelons.
That's something I've wanted to do for a long time.
Oh, well, I'll send you a copy.
I'll send you a signed copy.
Or especially if you come to my summer event, I can give you one.
When's your summer event?
August the 1st.
Okay.
It's quite short notice, but I think people are...
They probably will by the time this podcast goes out.
What did I want to say to you?
Yeah.
Tell people where they can find you, listen to your podcast, buy your stuff.
Yeah, so I'm the host of a podcast called Irreverend Faith in Current Affairs.
It's like the word irreverent, but with a D at the end, so irreverend.
And you can find us on our website, irreverendpod.com.
It's me and a couple of other vicars talking about all the kinds of stuff we've just been talking about, I suppose.
So there's that.
I also have a blog, a substack called Good Things, and the address is jamiefranklin.substack.com.
And the book is available everywhere.
Maybe, I have seen some actual books in bookshops, but it's available online everywhere.
The other thing to say is I'm a priest in Winchester, UK.
So if people want to come and, well, if they're looking for a church, if you live in the area, if you want to come to church, then please visit Holy Trinity, Winchester.
I'm on Upper Brook Street in Winchester.
Great city.
Great city, great church.
We're an Anglo-Catholic traditionalist church.
So bells and smells and that sort of thing.
But, you know, if you'd like to come along and meet me and visit the church.
I think people might well want to come and see you, Jamie.
Maybe I'm making this up, but I imagine that quite a lot of the young men who come to your services are quite tweedy, quite old-fashioned in their dress sense.
I don't know, actually.
They're very based.
I mean, you know, this is probably, I would go so far, James, as I would say this is the most based Church of England church in the country.
Whoa, that's a good one.
It's not a high bar, probably, but I can't think of anywhere else that would be as based as this.
I can think of some.
But I was thinking in terms of High Church Anglicans.
I went to a service at one in, you probably know it, Leamington Spa.
Right.
And there was a symbol afterwards.
There were quite a few people came up to me, quite young men, who said, James Denningpole, what are you doing here?
Which suggests that this too was quite a bit happening?
Yeah, I was just, you know, in most Church of England churches, the assumption would be, you know, climate change is real and we can trust the BBC and, you know, wasn't it a good thing that we locked everyone down and, you know, the universal programme of vaccination and everything like that.
I would say here that it would be the other way around.
Like people would be, lots of people would be instinctively skeptical of those notions rather than, you know, unreflectively in favor of them.
You should have a picture of a dinosaur with a bar across it.
Right.
That would work.
You are right, by the way, when I've heard you say about children's clothes being like, they're either spaceships or dinosaurs.
That is definitely true, isn't it?
And, you know, one does wonder, like, what's all this dinosaur stuff about?
You know, Jurassic Park as well.
Have you discussed this on your podcast?
Jurassic Park.
This is another example.
At the very beginning of Jurassic Park, you've got Sam Neill there with his little brush brushing away the dirt from a completely intact.
I think it's a Stegosaurus skeleton, isn't it?
This is like, wow, look at this perfectly formed Stegosaurus skeleton that I've just found in the ground.
And again, it just makes you think, oh, wow, that's just the way people find dinosaurs.
Spielberg is, I would say, one of the Cabal's greatest propagandists.
Right.
To the point where I even now wonder whether great white sharks are dangerous.
Right.
Well, there's a way of testing that, I suppose.
Well, I've been in a cage with them.
Have you?
Yeah, and I didn't think they were that scary.
Really?
No.
I thought they were quite nice.
It actually cured me of my fear of great white sharks.
Right, okay.
Quite nice.
Yeah.
Like friendly.
Yeah, I mean, just interesting, yeah.
Is that theme tune as well, isn't it?
It is.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
See, that's how they get you.
They get you with a theme tune, yeah.
A bit like they had a soundtrack on Friends to tell you that unfunny things were funny.
So with Jaws, they gave you a scary soundtrack to suggest that the innocent shark was bad.
Yeah, so they changed that to sort of circus music or sort of Benny Hill music or something like that.
you know that would that would cure this propaganda perhaps perhaps some some fan some fan fans of this podcast could could do a selection of of experimental themes with with the jaws fin going through the water and see which which which music kiss.
hahaha Ha ha ha ha.
*laughter*
I could see that being like the plot of a dystopian sci-fi novel or something like that.
This is the way the rebellion breaks in, is they overlay the propaganda with different musical tracks.
It's a good idea.
So you've got the glasses that show that they are in fact they live.
And you've got the music.
Yeah.
Jamie, thank you so much for this lovely, fascinating conversation.
I'm sure you're going to get lots and lots of people coming to Winchester now.
Well, I hope so.
I hope so.
And everyone else, listeners, viewers, support me.
I quite need it at the moment.
Obviously I ask God's help all the time, but actually, you are the tool by which God can help give me the things that I need to survive.
So please do consider supporting me on Substack or buy me a coffee or supporting my sponsors as well.
And come to my event.
It's on August the 1st.
I don't know when this podcast is going to go out, but it'll be fun.
It really will be fun because it's a gathering of the clans and you'll be surrounded by people who make you feel like I'm not alone.
They're really good events.
So I hope to see you there.
Thank you again, Jamie Franklin.
A real pleasure, James.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed, in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
