Science, Faith, and Totalitarianism: A Conversation with Dr. John Campbell- SF514
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Those of you that watched our content throughout the pandemic period, where we made our bones, made our reputation, and made an impact in the independent media space, will remember that as well as talking to people that are now in the upper echelons of American health, like Jay Bhattacharya, and Marty Makari, and Bobby Kennedy, and Aaron Seery and Callie Means and more.
We also spoke to Dr. John Campbell.
Many of you still watch his YouTube channel without knowing that much of his power comes from a surprising source and resource.
And we're going to be talking about that.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be there for about the first 15 minutes.
If you know Dr. John Campbell's content, you know that he meticulously manoeuvres around the complications of YouTube and their imperative to censor content.
If you're not on Awaken Wonder yet, become an Awaken Wonder now and you get to join us live for conversations like this one as well as my deep dives into Christian content with a variety of people.
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It's not that you can really change yourself, can't it?
You can change us.
Holy Spirit.
Holy Spirit.
We're going to jump in the ocean.
Nice, it's cold.
Aim for the hand.
Nice work.
I'd like to see you at the tribunal.
How many people did you kill?
What's it like to kill people?
If you ask somebody in the military, like, oh, how many people did you kill?
And they're like, oh, I've killed this many, and yeah, like, beat their chest, they're lying to you.
If God touches you like that, then that belongs to God.
Don't take that nowhere else.
There's nothing that can reproduce the feeling when the love of God hits you.
We'll be with you on YouTube for a couple more minutes, and I'm going to just let you know how much I love Dr. John Campbell.
The way he communicates information is par excellence, is second to none, is fantastic.
He's a man you can rely upon, you can lean upon, and you can trust.
Throughout the pandemic, he was like, hmm, this study doesn't seem to make sense.
Well, the data they're giving us on vaccines, that doesn't stack up.
Why?
It's almost as if the media and government are in cahoots with one another.
He has a very particular style of communicating, but he is a scientist, a doctor, a man of integrity and authority, and these are the kind of people we need in positions of power these days.
Let's begin the interview, but we won't be able to finish it on YouTube.
It will have to be on Rumble.
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Without further ado, let's join Dr John Campbell.
I'm here with Dr. John Campbell, one of the great heroes of the pandemic era, whose content and journey lifted many spirits.
Because John Campbell, like I would say men like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makari, are the kind of people that reassure you that there are people that are able to straddle the worlds of science and faith, of acknowledging that science is great at telling us how things happen, but not why things happen.
That we are able to rely on clinical trials, empiricism, and the great principles of science, but what we can't rely on is the fallibility of humankind and to reduce and subvert systems of science to systems of exploitation.
In so much as if science is a subset of corporatism and commercialism, then what kind of empiricism is left?
If big pharma and health ultimately are controlled by corporate and maybe even globalist interests, and maybe it's even darker than that, how can we rely on their findings?
Who pays for the clinical trials that happen?
Who will refuse to pay for clinical trials that ought to happen?
Who's spending money to prove that natural immunity and vitamin D, sunshine and deep breaths are effective when you could have clinical trials to demonstrate that new mRNA technologies are valuable, maybe even invaluable?
All of these questions were worked out live by my guest, John Campbell, who's a teaching professional as well as a medic, whose brilliant trademark Non-blustery, straightforward, let's face it, British style was a beacon to many and an inspiration to many more during the pandemic period.
Dr John Campbell, thanks for joining us for this live conversation available to our Awakened Wonder community.
Click the link in the description if you want to become an Awakened Wonder.
Thanks for joining us, John.
I wish all those things were completely true, Russell, but I appreciate it.
Thank you very much indeed.
What things weren't true?
I think it was all true.
Well, it's what I aspired to be.
I'm not sure we always quite got there, but it's a bit of a process and we're still working on it.
It's pretty insane.
Some of the things we wanted to talk about today, Russell, was the overlap between faith and science.
Is that an area that we're interested in?
The power of transformation.
For example, just before our conversation, I was watching that clip of Trump with that journalist from Meet the Press, and where he sort of talked candidly about his appetite to investigate causal or correlative links between vaccines and autism,
and just how, sort of what a vertiginous kind of A pang is induced when you see that conversation that had been so successfully chased to the periphery, discussed by the President of the United States on the mainstream.
Now, of course, I really want to talk to you about Christianity and faith and principles.
Indeed, how can you ever ultimately discuss politics without discussing faith and virtue and ultimately discussing God in some form, God in inverted commas at the very least.
But I wanted to start with that.
Are you surprised by how quickly things appear to be changing?
A few examples.
Marty Makari now is the head of the FDA. Jay Bhattacharya is the head of the NIH. Bobby Kennedy is the head of the HHS. Well, all of these await confirmation, of course, so we don't want to be too presumptuous.
Are you astonished to see these kind of conversations taking place publicly?
Quite frankly, given the calibre of people that are now being given a public voice and the amount of work they've done over the decades, and they're finally being liberated, as it were.
These are people that have been studying this, been working in this field for all of their lifetimes.
They know all of a sudden They're giving the political freedom.
So given that they're in their positions that they have now, I can just only imagine the kind of relief that they're feeling to be able to actually speak all of a sudden, and it's just brilliant to see.
So I'm delighted.
I'm surprised the way it's gone, but I'm not surprised at what they're saying because we've got some very high-caliber, very thoughtful people.
And you raised a really interesting point there, Russell.
We've talked about correlations.
Let's say between vaccines and injuries before.
But it's always been difficult because we haven't had the full data to adjudicate on the likelihood of causality.
And now we're going to get full data.
I'm actually very optimistic that we're going to get release of a lot of primary source data.
We're not short of brilliant statisticians.
We've got number crunchers just waiting to analyse this stuff.
We can even now pay professionals to analyse it on behalf of the government, and we can get some real hard data, and we can change correlations and suspicions into real science and real cause and effect data.
Thank you.
is disproved when the hard data comes out, but I am concerned about some of the things that the hard data is going to bring out.
One of the things I'm remarkably concerned about now is cancers in younger people, for example.
You know, we've got so many anecdotal reports.
Are we going We've got plausible mechanisms of action why some drugs and some vaccines could be causing cancers.
It's plausible.
It's not ridiculous.
But we haven't got that final data that's going to link the cause and the effect.
And I'm really optimistic this is going to come out.
People will crunch it straight away, I'm pretty sure, and then let's hope for the best.
But it is an anxious time, as well as an illuminating time, I would say.
It's the kind of...
Optimism, ephemeral optimism that can exist, I would say, in liminal and chaotic spaces.
It seems sort of weird to say that, because when you're talking about Trump and Elon Musk, obviously you're talking about incredibly powerful people.
But real power goes way beyond human power.
And increasingly, Dr. John, I've been thinking...
But, you know, say if you, I pay attention to David Icke, which is an interesting thing, because David Icke usually, like, I'm one of the people that David Icke goes on to X to sort of criticise, you know?
And, like, I understand it and appreciate it, because I think David Icke feels like, hang on a minute, I've been talking about all this stuff for ages, and these people now that are making money, or at least have influence in these spaces, you know, they're not going far enough, they're compromised, they're, like, you know, all All sorts of opinions that I'm sure have their own validity, but for a lot of people, David Icke will have been written off for being too extreme.
A lot of people will say that, like, you know, gosh, and this is a charge that gets offered at a means directed at many, that he's an anti-Semite.
Lots of things we get, and some people just think that David Icke is ridiculous.
But when it, gosh, it's almost like the more that is revealed when it comes to, you know, high-powered, high-profile paedophiles, the potential that there are sort of institutionalised sex things going on.
The ritualisation of those activities.
Then, you know, for corporatism, an agenda to assert and exert citizen management by claiming it's for the good of people, using crises to justify authoritarianism.
Not that Ike is the author of a lot of those ideas.
Noam Chomsky is the person that says, you know, problem, solution, reaction, or whatever it is.
That's, I think, Chomsky that came up with that.
But what I'm...
I guess this was a roundabout way of me asking, John, and sort of moving us towards the area that I'd like to discuss with you, is that a lot of people now, because of the emergence of independent media, are able to and willing to attack establishment narratives, whether it comes to the field in which you have garnered some renown, you know, big pharma, medicine, healthcare, or...
When it comes to reporting on wars, you know, even with, like, recent events in Syria, straight away, people are like, this reporting saying that this al-Qaeda group are great seems sort of a little bit compromised, and look at the funding ones, some of them are funded by the Pentagon, some are funded by the CIA. We're all kind of a fae with information that, not that long ago, John, would have been really esoteric and would have been coming from the left.
I'm thinking about people like...
Naomi Klein with her book Shock Doctrine about how South America was continually being co-opted, corrupted and overtaken by deep state US interests.
How coups were continually being sponsored.
Now, these tropes tend somehow to exist on the right and pertain to a type of power that still remains political and material one way or another.
What I'm wondering, John, when we're talking about faith versus science, is are you becoming increasingly sympathetic to the idea that power may go beyond the simple matter of controlling resources and controlling information?
Very much so, and I think what you're sort of starting to get at there, Russell, is the link between predeterminism and free will.
I think it is important that people have free will.
We have to have free will to have moral accountability, and we do have moral accountability.
In terms of all those other things that you've talked about there, I think you're absolutely right in that independent media is available, we can actually get video from people on the ground, we can assess that, and we can go by the quality of the evidence.
Now some ideas might seem far out, but where is the evidence for those ideas?
And it's that, as C.S. Lewis said, we need to follow the evidence Wherever it leads.
But I agree with you completely that I think we're in a transition stage at the moment.
So in the past, it's been considered unscientific to believe in transcendence, unscientific to believe in God, unscientific to believe in creation.
But I think that's changing fundamentally now, because in the past we knew much less than we do now.
I remember when I started to learn science, probably 40 years ago now, the amount of knowledge was really quite limited.
Now we know so much more about so many things, and I would actually contend now quite strongly that it is scientifically very difficult to defend atheism.
Because there is so much evidence.
In the past, when we knew less about science, people used to say, well, we don't know how that happened, so probably God did that bit.
That's what's called the God of the gaps idea.
And this has been totally consigned to history by the emergence of greater levels of understanding and a more refined, detailed understanding of science.
And now it is so improbable that what we see occurred through naturalistic terms and pure probabilistic terms, I actually think it is scientifically inconsistent to take an atheist view now, as we move on to the god of knowledge.
Away from the God of the gaps.
And maybe just to start off with one really simple example.
The first book in the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Well, when I was young, I started to take an interest in astronomy.
There was two views in astronomy.
There was Big Bang and Solid State.
Now it's pretty well accepted that the Big Bang...
That was the way that things began.
Just before I go on Russell, I just want to predicate this actually because there's a big cultural difference here between the United Kingdom and the United States.
Now in the United Kingdom, people don't really think about this in churches and in Christian circles.
If you go to a church, you could go, I've been going to church for decades and I don't think anyone Maybe a few people because they know I'm interested in science, but basically people don't take an interest.
Famous British physicist John Polkinghorne, professor of physics, went from being a professor of physics to being a vicar in the Church of England.
And he said once in 10 years in the Church of England in his parish, no one asked him any scientific questions.
It's just not an issue in the United Kingdom.
But in the United States, it's a huge issue.
Where people take a particular stance on creation and they almost elevate this to a doctrinal status.
Now, this is not what you might call an article of faith or a salvation issue.
It's perfectly possible to have a wide range of issues from what might be called young earth creationism to old earth creationism and theistic evolution.
In my view, all of those are completely consistent with different interpretations of scripture.
What I'm keen not to do is to offend people who have a particular view and think that particular view is important.
And of course, their view is important.
But the way I look at it is the vast majority of science is based on an empirical understanding of the world.
So having predicated that, to get back to my original example...
In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.
So there was a big bang creation event, in my view, about 14.7 billion years ago, round about then.
That's when most physicists think it happened.
Now, at that point, at that point in time, Physicists tell us that the universe was phenomenally massive and phenomenally small, probably smaller than an atom to begin with.
But before that singularity occurred, there was no matter, energy, space or time.
All matter, energy, space or time came into existence at that point.
Therefore, what caused the universe, by definition, cannot predate the universe.
There must be a cause of the universe which is external to Matter, energy, space or time.
Now a lot of physicists don't like that idea and they're now jiggling around with ideas of faith, which are ideas of faith, like a multiverse for which there's no evidence because by definition we can't know what's outside our universe.
So a lot of scientists are aware of the theistic implications of that and are trying to sort of get out of it.
But that physics is there.
And the universe that that gave rise to is one which was needed to evolve over a period of time.
So, for example, that had to expand out the way at a particular rate.
Now, if that expanded too quickly, then all the matter in the universe would just fly apart and you wouldn't get the formation of galaxies and the formation of stars.
But if it didn't fly out fast enough, compared to the mass and the electromagnetic forces in it, then it would fly out a little bit, then clump back in again into a big crunch, and we would have no universe.
And it turns out that the balance between the electromagnetic forces, the momentum of this and the mass, has to be fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 55. The probability of that happening just the right amount.
So that's one with 55 noughts after it.
Now, if you take a coin and you make a pile of coins all over the continental United States, we'd have 2p coins or whatever coins they have in the States, 5 or 10 cent coins.
And then you pile that pile all the way up to the moon.
And then you do that on several million other United States.
Then you've got 10 to the 40 coins.
Now, if you get one of those coins and put a red dot in it and chuck it into that pile, remember this pile goes all the way to the moon, and I say, right Russell, pick out that coin, and you just happen to pick out that coin with the red paint on it, then the chances of that are 1 in 10 to the 40. And they're the sort of probability that I'm going to
have to stop you there, John, because we're moving into territory that YouTube would like to get all over, I'm sure you know how that goes.
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The analogy you just gave was used when I was in church yesterday at Destiny Church by the pastor on stage when speaking about the 300...
Prophecies in the Old Testament about the coming of Christ.
Now when I approached that, he used exactly the same thing.
Texas, coins, red dot.
He didn't use all the way up to the moon.
It actually comes from John Lennox originally.
He's the founder of the analogy.
Nevertheless, what's very striking is when you're talking about scripture, my kind of still somewhat intact, cynical, sceptical mind says, Yeah, but if you're saying that in Isaiah these predictions of Christ are made,
and in Daniel these predictions of Christ are made, and way back in Genesis and even Enoch, if you want to get non-canonical, that these predictions of Christ are made, it's sort of possible that people that wrote the Gospels those few decades after the life of the historical figure of Christ,
that it's quite possible that they Deliberately concocted those correlatives in order to fulfill prophecies that they would be familiar with as devotees of that scripture themselves, scripture that they were often referencing.
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What comes to my mind when you enter into sort of the mathematics of the bizarre, John, let's call it, the sort of Texas red coin analogy, is that what you're ultimately saying, if you ask me...
Analogous to what you previously said, that prior to this molecular moment 14.7 billion years ago, there is no energy, matter, space or time.
And what is recurrent through scripture is the...
Allusion, rather than the description for such a thing would be impossible, of entities and states of beingness that are beyond our comprehension, are beyond our instruments of measurement, be they sensorial or amplifications of those sensual instruments through various Renaissance technology and what's been extrapolated from them,
that We are at some point forced, whether scientifically or theologically, to enter into the faith state knowing that we have a hardware problem, that the human being has a limited capacity for understanding.
And what do I find in Scripture when I countenance that notion is the phrase,"...the peace that passeth all understanding." That when I open myself to belief, when I say, even though on some level I can never make sense of the idea that God,
after an Old Testament's worth of hectoring and punishing and sacrifice and symbol and prophecy and forewarning, eventually comes God, comes God's self in human form to experience human life and to somehow, I have to try to find a way, John, of...
Delineating or espousing, inauguring energetic states and frequencies that are impossible without the kind of helix and fractal alchemy of God and man, fully human, fully divine, being incepted, being conceived of, being actualised.
And in this figure of Christ, when I sort of say, alright, I'm gonna, like what my teacher says, believe, receive, obey, abide.
You know, that believe is the first step.
The rational mind cannot do it, will not do it, will not say...
I'll believe, you know, and it's only actually in Scripture, in particular, John, in a book like Acts, you know, where I think, like, what's going on there?
How come these people, at the end of Luke, at the end of John, the beginning of Acts, there's this, just something happens that changes the world forever.
Empires start to fall.
People start to believe a new thing.
It's not just the teaching.
It's the miracles.
It's not just the teaching and the miracles.
It's the prophecy.
It's the continual description of miracles.
Of ideas that precede and preempt spiritual discourse.
When I imagine the sort of dendrite flow of quantum fields as best as one can.
A super state of potentialities.
The kind of havoc of the poetry of the world of bosons and quarks.
That it's like a kind of...
The unmanifest is made manifest.
The unmanifest is made manifest.
And in that is a peace that pass of all understanding.
And in order to abide in this, you must love one another as I have loved you.
And that love means sacrificial love.
That's the only love.
That's the update on the Deuteronomic is not just love thy neighbour, but love everyone.
And not just love them as you reckon they might like to be loved, but as I have loved you.
It's like burst open the seed of the self to that ordinary, botanical, horticultural miracle of the growth of the seed.
One of the most consistent New Testament metaphors, and one of the metaphors that we'd find in any agricultural faith, I'm sure, that burst open and let the seed die.
That kind of death has to happen.
And wow, and look at the body language that I find myself automatically adopting to sort of try to convey that.
It's just fascinating to me that for the longest time, John, I regarded Christianity as stupid in a word.
It's like, that's a stupid idea, and it's for stupid people.
And you're British like me, so you'll get these references.
It's songs of praise.
It's boring.
It's dumb.
It's dull.
It's C of E. It's tedium.
I didn't see the magic of the Eucharist or the marvel of even song or the colossal impact of the saints or the word itself.
All of that obfuscated and obscured.
You've talked already of the distinction between British and American Christianity and it struck me, John, that the reason perhaps British Christianity is not inquisitive in the manner that American Christianity is is because That British Christianity is inert, because Britain has no empirical, no sort of imperial project anymore.
Britain is a dead state, inert now, is an inert tangent to American colonial power.
America is still a burgeoning and priapic force, and therefore...
Their matters of dominion are engaged at a heightened level in what's going to be in power.
Is it going to be Luciferian false post-enlightenment power?
Or is it going to be military, rational, material power?
Or is it going to be Christ?
Is this going to be God's kingdom?
Whereas in England now, it's like...
It's over.
We're just sort of waiting around in our cardigans for the clock to run down.
So there are sort of distinctions in the way that sort of Christianity sort of plays out in different territories.
You know, anyway, John, I recognise there's no question in there.
I could drag one out of it, but I've said so much, I'm sure you've got comments.
No, it's interesting.
What I've heard, Russell, is you struggling.
And trying to draw analogies to the incarnation, you know, veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hell the incarnate deity.
How can that be?
You know, God himself contracted to a span of human life.
It is so beyond comprehension.
And the way that you were trying to put that into words is fascinating because you've got this idea, you've got this spiritual belief.
We're trying to share this idea, but it is so incomprehensible, so miraculous, so beyond our ability to understand it, that you end up with these analogies which all seem incredible, but totally inadequate.
Everyone feels that.
Anyone who understands this in any depth feels that.
I think you mentioned there There's a tension to things as well.
The idea of human beings' ability to understand things, and if that is limited.
Now, Martin Rees, the previous astronomer royal, says that human ability to understand things is intrinsically limited, and they'll never fully understand the universe.
Now, whether that's true or not, we don't know.
It's certainly true that we have limited ability to understand spiritual things.
As Christians, we believe completely in the Holy Trinity, but I really couldn't.
I've heard many people give analogies of that, but these are things we can't explain, and that's reassuring to know that there's things about God that we can't explain.
But I think it's important to realize that intellectual pursuits can lead people in the right direction.
C.S. Lewis, for example, basically reasoned himself into faith.
But ultimately, the Gospels say, unless you come to Christ as a little child, you don't come at all.
So ultimately, you just put your hand up and say, Daddy, please.
But sometimes you can get to that point via processes of thinking about it.
The cross-cultural links between the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, in this area of creation.
And a lot of that actually goes back to historical things.
So in the States, they had this thing, the Scopes trial, the monkey trial, where there was a big debate about whether evolution should be taught in schools or not.
So it's become part of American culture where it isn't part of English culture.
I don't think it's necessarily a lack of curiosity on behalf of the British, although we do suffer from chronic curiosity disorder.
That is true.
But I think it's just one of these cultural differences that's arisen.
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Sometimes I feel that there are latent fields beneath what can be discerned that have characteristics, otherwise we wouldn't be able to sort of even make stereotypical, let alone archetypical, diagnoses of, you know, an Italian, a French person, the Latin American temperament, the American South.
All these things have some sort of tombra to them, and I suppose relativistic and rational.
A praise of that would be, oh, well, that's somehow been inculcated, but they would say the same thing about ethics and morality, whereas C.S. Lewis is, in a sense, the sort of tip of the spear for me when, in my own wrestling with C.S. Lewis, let alone the subject of C.S. Lewis's own grapple,
is that he's talking about You know what good is, and you know what worship is, and you know what sacrifice is, and you know what it is when you've done wrong.
And like when you read, who's this sort of the American Manhattan pastor that sort of somewhat took on a somewhat Suez Lewis type mantle?
Tim, he's like, do you know who I mean?
He's wrote a book called...
He's pretty good, this guy.
He sadly died recently.
Someone will know in the chat.
One of the arguments that he takes up are, well, if you're talking to an atheist and you say, do you believe in God?
No, I don't believe in God.
And many of the straw man arguments that follow...
Then, what is humanitarianism?
Where is it derived from?
And George Carlin's famous stand-up, Tim Keller, thanks, blessed old bird, I mean Tim Keller.
Where are rights derived from?
Why would you have rights?
Why is it important to, for example, have women's rights?
What is that based on?
What are the principles?
Before too long, without God, you're...
End up saying, like, just because I think so.
Like, you know, in the end, you yourself are God.
You can't say...
You know, when I hear, like, say, an atheist that I like and admire, like, say, Ricky Gervais saying, I don't need a God to tell me not to murder, that's not the argument.
The argument is...
Without a God, your decision not to murder is the same as a person's decision to murder.
It's like you can't make a claim for morality.
Yeah, arbitrary morality.
And I'm reading at the moment at the recommendation of Jordan Peterson, Mercier Eliard's book, The Sacred and the Profane.
He's talking about without the sacred, we have homogeneity of space.
That all things are not just An endless outpouring of space, gently referring to the earlier part of our conversation and the rules of the universe emerging from that explosion.
It's worse than that.
It's worse than an uninterrupted space.
It's nothing but arbitrarily gathered shards and fragments of a billion unrelated realities that we, again, just nominally...
Choose to allot meaning to.
Without the concept of the sacred, mankind will continually revert to sacralising either the biographical or the rational.
And the examples Eliard used is, like, you'll look back to the place where you fell in love, or you'll create your own personal theology in the absence of a theology.
By the way as well, John, I'm not saying let's choose God because if we don't choose God then look at all the chaos.
I'm saying...
I believe it.
I believe it now.
I believe it.
And I'm struggling, and I'd love your...
I would love, like, how...
Like, you see, like, there is this sort of...
You know, the problem with the Bible, if I may be so bold, is you have to move between poetry, history, philosophy, continually, and you're sort of not clear what...
Where you are when.
Like, you know, because I've seen, like, very clever atheists say, well, you know, even when you're looking at the book of Genesis, why does it not, why does it sort of, you know, we know that the stars preceded the heaven and the earth because the, you know, the component parts of our material reality came from stars.
We, inverted commas, know that, or at least that's how it appears when looking at the way that various elements are formed in the furnaces of stars itself are sort of bizarre and magical.
Miracle, actually.
So I wonder how you reconcile the observable and demonstrable inaccuracies of Scripture.
And Ashela's asking, have I asked about the Shroud of Turin yet?
I've seen that video on Ashela, and we will be talking to John Campbell about that.
If you haven't seen that video yet, go watch it now on YouTube for all my misgivings about YouTube.
John Campbell is one of the people that uses it most elegantly.
But for now, John, I wonder how you move around.
When something is plainly not true, or plainly not true scientifically or inaccurate, or what about when saying it's at odds with our contemporary morality, with sexuality, the rights of various people to be in same-sex partnerships, all of that stuff.
How do you move through that, John?
Great difficulty, Russell, is the answer to that question.
Let's just take one example there that you gave.
The stars becoming visible.
On the third day or whenever it was.
I think it was the third day.
Well, I mean, the idea, one idea there, this is the Hugh Ross reasons to believe idea, is that the scripture, the Holy Spirit there who wrote that, the witness to that event, was hovering on the surface of the deep.
So that account was written from the perspective of an observer on the surface of the earth.
And the idea is that there will be a lot of debris in space, a lot of density in the atmosphere, and that the stars will only become visible at that period of time.
So that's one interpretation.
But actually, if you look at Genesis, the first two, three chapters of Genesis really I think probably the best interpretation is a guy called John Walton, and he says that this is basically a temple story, the way that God built a temple, because eventually he would come into this temple.
So what we have to realize is that the scriptures were written by human authors in a particular time, in a particular place, and in a particular culture.
Now, it is our job to try and understand their cultural background, their cultural river, rather than try and pose ours on them.
So, when Genesis was written, okay, the order in Genesis, if you allow for the fact that the stars became visible on the third day, is roughly the right order of the way things that happened, roughly.
Certainly closer than other creation accounts in other religions.
But the people writing that had no concept of science.
So I think it's unreasonable for us to try and deduce any science from that.
It's not what it's about.
We have to put ourselves in the mind of the individual.
And you're right, a lot of scripture is clearly analogous, is clearly poetic.
Think of the Song of Songs, for example, the beautiful love poetry.
In that, we have to try and work out what genre it is and interpret it accordingly.
But Alistair Beggar, a British preacher who works in the States, he said the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.
So in other words, there's a lot of peripheries, but the main things...
Plain.
So Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour, you know, the ichthyus, just those five letters.
Those things are plain.
The main things are plain, and the plain things are the main things.
So we've got all these fundamental main tenets of what we believe.
And round about that, you've got a lifetime of interest to work this out.
And by the time that you and me take our last breath, we won't have worked this out.
So there's plenty to keep us interested.
Now, some scriptures are open to cultural interpretations.
For example, Paul exalts believers to greet each other with a holy kiss.
Now, every time I go to church on Sunday and no one's greeting me with a holy kiss yet.
So what does that mean?
We're being unscriptural?
Well, of course not.
We shake hands.
Some things are culturally determined.
But other things are not culturally determined.
So if you look at the early believers in the Book of Acts, wondering which part of the Old Testament law they should adhere to.
So it was clear they didn't have to adhere to the dietary law, but they should abstain from sexual immorality and from things strangled and from eating blood.
So these things were carried on.
So, some things are carried on, some things are culturally determined, other things are absolute, and there is some legitimate disagreement which camp things would fall into, but we have to be aware of the risk that I am likely to interpret things in a way which is convenient to me, in a way which is convenient to my lifestyle, so we have to strive for the objectivity.
Of what the scripture is saying and not interpret that in the light of what I would like to be true to give me the lifestyle I would like.
In other words, the scripture has to dictate the lifestyle.
The lifestyle does not dictate the interpretation of the scripture.
I think they will be some of the guidelines I would use, but it's not an easy field.
But remember that the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things.
I've never heard that before, and I will remember that.
And in fact, the idea of scriptural utility is dealt with in the Gospels through the dynamic between Christ and the Sadducees and Pharisees.
It feels like one of the main...
Whether it's John the Baptist or Christ, you feel like what you're dealing with, and then Paul and the apostles, is like, how do we deal with this now?
What is it to prepare for his coming kingdom?
What is it to deal with this perplexing, complex, and confusing idea that his kingdom...
We'll come again.
That we're dealing with some kind of atemporal, aspatial reality that's going to converge and collide.
I'm thinking about this in Erdinger's book on the engravings of William Blake in the Book of Job.
He talks about, like, Blake illustrates various aspects of the story of Job, and they're, like, really lovely.
Then being engravings, John, they're real, you know, sort of elegant and simple, beautiful starscapes and sort of various depictions of Job in his sort of torment.
And then, like, towards the end, there's the depictions of the behemoth and the Leviathan, who Yahweh, who this being a Jungian text...
Albeit based on engravings by Blake, Yahweh looks like Job.
So it looks like an encounter between some sort of accessible higher self and some manifest self.
But this thing that was in the analysis that's been on my mind ever since really...
It's been from Erdinger's commentary where he says, this is the behemoth that I have made as I made thee.
And here is the Leviathan.
Can you push down its tongue?
And in that I get the same sort of wonder and...
Bafflement that I get from my very, very limited interaction with, say, the Gitas and other Vedic texts, where through images one is seduced, led into a sort of a psychic space that's somehow beyond reason.
And contemplating the qualities of the behemoth and how that might psychically play out, it feels to me like it's dealing with corporealism and the leviathan as if it's dealing with a kind of at-depth reptilian limbic system instinctualism.
And then he says, there's this indication, John, that we are...
We're manifesting ourselves, God, through continually.
And why would God, why would Christ say, you know, I have sent you as he sent me?
Why would Christ say, love one another as I have loved you?
If there were no, inverted commas, meaning to it, no value to it, and in this Jungian analysis, which I suppose lingers in the framing of, obviously, psychiatry, but a type of psychiatry that has a greater expanse,
obviously, than his common counterpoint of Freud, Jung remaining open to the mystic in the way that he does, is that We are his temple, and as his temple, we have to become a dwelling place for God.
In our agency, or perhaps within what you earlier remarked upon when it comes to predeterminism versus volition, That we are, as I suppose even Gospel John's vine analogy suggests, we are flowing forth from that vine tended by the Heavenly Father, the root or the branch or the trunk.
We are an expression.
If we choose to be, if we can conduct that kind of wave particle collapse into Christ consciousness, and I don't mean that in a new age way, I mean as a branch of Christ, then we are.
Being God.
Like, we are being God into manifestation.
As in, the same way that Melville would say Noah's flood is still happening.
The same way that, of course, in the purest terms, the Big Bang is still happening.
It's like you can't make a qualitative...
Judgment on this moment of the Big Bang versus the first bit or the second bit or any of the other sequential bits of the Big Bang.
Creation is still happening.
Christ is still happening.
The Holy Spirit is still happening.
It's happening now.
It's happening now and it's happening in you.
Isn't it, John?
Again, fascinating to see you struggling with these concepts, Russell.
I mean, the book of Job is very difficult to understand.
I mean, we've got Leviathan, which is the sea creature, and the behemoth, which is the land creature, and many people have put different interpretations on what they are.
But the Book of Job, in a sense, is an attempt to explain suffering, isn't it?
Why do people suffer?
Why does bad things happen to good people?
And the other thing there I think you were trying to struggle with, Russell, was the relationship between God and man.
Now, there is a clear distinction between those.
You know, Jesus taught us to pray saying, Our Father.
So, you know, we can keep it as simple as that.
You know, Jesus said, say, our Father.
Okay, so we pray, our Father.
You know, that is the relationship.
He is the Father, we are the children.
And in some senses, you don't need to think about it in any more deeper sense than that.
But then you've got the idea that man is made in God's image.
Now, again, what does that mean?
It means...
That human beings are unusual, that they are exceptional, that they have the ability to understand the transcendent, that they have, if you like, without veering into blasphemy, some godlike attributes.
There again, there's a limit on that on this earth.
That was the fruit in the tree in the Garden of Eden.
We don't want to be like gods.
We maintain the child relationship.
We pray our father.
And yet, you know, the scripture says that we are co-heirs with Christ and adopted in his family.
So the best analogy I can give is that no, we are emphatically not gods.
We are children of God.
We are created.
We are not the creator.
That's another big distinction, really.
God always has been.
He is outside of time and he is the creator.
We are the created.
And in a sense, we have to know our position in that, and yet we've been given this elevated position as being adopted as sons.
But it's good to struggle with the transcendent and these ethereal ideas, because they are there.
And to struggle with them is interesting and fascinating.
But from a day-to-day practical point of view, just keep it simple.
Jesus said, pray our Father, so we pray our Father, therefore he is our Father.
You know, sometimes keep it just as simple as that.
While still trying to understand more, but practically we have to be immensely humble as human beings.
I realize I can't do anything.
He can do everything.
And humility is a key aspect.
We can't become proud.
And the nature of what it means to be made in God's image, we will know perhaps much more about.
Not in this life, you know, in future times.
At the moment, we are limited in our understanding, so we keep it simple and go by the main things being the plain things.
Thanks.
I like, I keep getting trapped in contemplation, you know, that's, I suppose, like part of the way I am.
Yeah, it's good.
It's good.
It's good.
Yeah.
So just work out ways to positivise it.
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We've all well there, like for people just listening to this.
Eric Blair in the background, yeah.
I'm guessing he's an atheist.
You know, he certainly was.
He was a staunch socialist earlier in life, wasn't he?
The reason he's there is in the United Kingdom now, there's a whole range of things you're not allowed to talk about, not just on YouTube, just generally.
And, you know, George, you know, there's a great hat in America, M-O-F-A, make all world fiction again.
And that's what we'd like to do, because unfortunately we see some of his, what I would describe as prophecies coming true, and they have to be seen as a warning.
One of those prophecies, you know, one of the most famous phrases in all world created so many neologisms and ideas that entered into our discourse and images and, as you say, prophecies.
It's something I've discussed a few times now, the famous, if you want an image of humanity's future, envisage a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Lately I've started to contrast that with the idea of man made in God's image.
And when you are stamping on a human face, you are stamping on the hallmark of God's presence in us.
I had a good conversation, John, with Tucker Carlson in which he said that Orwell was familiar enough with Soviet communism to make clear that that was what he was talking about, if it was his intention to critique that.
And Tucker offered the idea that Orwell could have been offering us, in those sort of dystopic prophetic books, The idea that social democracy has a tendency towards totalitarianism, although the reason I asked whether Orwell was an atheist at the beginning...
It seems that part of globalism is an attempt to annihilate God and then lay claim to the abilities that that God is typically endowed with, even if you're offering a sort of a rational appraisal of God rather than a faith-based communion with God.
I wonder what you think about that idea, that sort of Orwell is not just talking about Soviet communism and what it became, is talking about how social democracies might incline towards totalitarianism.
And given what we've experienced in the last sort of, you know, five, ten years, certainly in the sort of pandemic and post-pandemic era, it seems that totalitarianism...
Was, you know, and is in our country, being brought about not by 20th century style charismatic strongmen, as the critiques of Trump suggested, but in fact by a kind of technocratic Orwell-esque, Orwellian Huxley-esque, sort of Kafka-esque Kind of, you know, managed tyranny where we're sort of all doped up on Soma, baffled, uncertain about what's real and what to believe in and what to say.
A kind of a state of bewilderment.
And I wonder what you think of the significance is of Orwell's writing with regard to social democracy rather than just sort of state communism.
And the sort of poignance and significance of the boot stamping on the human face and whether or not you consider that to be a sort of a An image of desacralisation and the profaning of our relationship with God.
That's my question.
Yeah, I think there's a few answers to that.
Whenever you want to deliberately destroy humans and to mutilate humans, that is a problem related to evil, because humans are made in God's image.
I worked in Khmer refugee camps in the early 80s, and all the people there had been through the killing fields.
You know, they'd all seen relatives beaten to death in front of them.
By definition, they had an escape that come overland into the Thai Khmer border.
And some of the atrocities, I'm not going to go through them now, they're too appalling, but I've talked to missionaries who worked there and read missionaries who worked there, who knew the Cambodians in great detail.
And some of these atrocities, these mutilations, they said can only be explained in terms of the demonic.
So whenever you deliberately destroy humans, that is attempting to destroy the image of God in humans, whether that is crushing people physically, physically disabling them, physically killing them, physically mutilating them, whether it's abuse of people even after death, whether it's a psychological crushing, to me that's got a spiritual component because you are attacking God's workmanship.
In terms of Orwell, of course, he was initially writing because of his grave disillusion with the way that things had worked out in the Soviet era.
Stalin, of course, was the pig, the leader of the pigs.
That's very thinly disguised.
But I think it's more than that.
Yes, he was disillusioned, outraged, just totally peed off with the fact that he'd been misled in earlier life.
Believing that this was a possible utopian solution, you know, he'd had various theses, antithesis and synthesis and communism was this advanced synthesis that was somehow where humans went to be and he was so disillusioned with that, so disillusioned with their humanist ideas that he wrote his books to protest against that and to point out how bad it was.
But I think it's more than that.
I think he realised that this was a tendency to You might say a weakness, predisposition in human hierarchical power, that power is inevitably going to be abused.
I think he was warning about something.
Yes, he was having a whinge, if you like, about the Soviet era, but he realized that this is an intrinsic risk in humanity.
And hey, people, look out for this.
You know, George Orwell, when he wrote 1984, in 1948, he died in 1952 from tuberculosis.
He went to a Scottish island and destroyed himself away.
And he just sat there and wrote this book.
It's something he felt he needed to do before he died.
And look how right he has been.
It was a warning.
He saw the risks of power.
He saw the risks of control.
Now, I am concerned about a future dystopia.
I really am concerned about this.
So, for example, we saw that a dystopia existed for the slave class for a thousand years in the Roman Empire.
Okay, they did some clever things as well, but for a lot of the people, that was a dystopian situation.
We've seen a dystopian situation, a vile, idolatrous dystopian situation now in North Korea for several generations since the Korean War.
What's going on for 75 years now?
So these things can be perpetuated.
So there is a real risk that the Western world could sink into a multi-generation dystopian situation with control over food, with control over information, with control over food.
with elites in power.
I mean, we have seen it in Russia recently.
Putin, we could spend all day arguing about him, but he's retained control.
He rewrote the Constitution so that he could retain control for Russia.
For longer periods of time.
It is possible that strongmen get in positions of power.
That becomes a dynasty and a dystopia can be passed on potentially for centuries.
And that really concerns me.
And when I see control over information, When I see people trying to control healthcare, when I see people trying to control food supply, you control these things.
You control the population.
And some people, ordinary blokes like you and me can't understand this, but some people are motivated by power.
They want power over other people.
Personally, the idea appalls me.
I have no interest in control over other people at all, but I'm sure you haven't.
But we're ordinary blokes.
Some people do want that.
So some people actually...
Treat humanity with indifference.
The psychopathic group will treat humanity like pieces on a chessboard.
So you're as much used to me as your utilitarian output is.
You know, you're to be used, you're to be not used, you're to be disposed of.
Actually, I couldn't care less whether you live or die as long as you're useful.
But you get some people that are actually anti-humanity.
You know, they are actually evil and seek the destruction of human beings.
And I think Orwell was warning us about that.
And when you can combine that with warnings from Scripture as well, we do see that times, dark times, are going to be ahead.
But we also know that God will cut those days short, and God will put limits on the amount of evil that can be perpetrated on the people that he loves that are made in his image.
Beautiful.
Dr. John, the Shout of Turin video you made recently fascinates me because when it gets into relics and non-canonical documents, I start to wonder what direction, you know, like miracles and this thing happening, was it Guadalupe and this thing happened there and all that, you know, these appearances of the Holy Mother and appearances of saints and lords and all of that stuff.
I don't mean to be blasphemous or dismissive at all.
But when, like, with relics and stuff, it feels like, what is this paraphernalia?
And so, like, when I was younger, I would have thought something like the Shroud of Turin.
I would have thought, Come on.
I don't even see how by putting a tea towel or cloth on someone's face you would even get an exact image of that person's face.
I guess you're talking about God, so yes, I understand.
So why is it that you saw the scrutiny and analysis of the Shroud of Turin as worthy of your own analysis?
You're absolutely right.
I mean, there was a major industry in the Middle Ages on relics.
Every shrine had to have a relic, some toenail clippings from a saint or some bones from this.
And of course, most of it was absolute bunk.
And I was like you.
I'd kind of disregarded it.
But in Protestantism, there's a risk that we kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So I was quite young when, I think it was 1978, when the Shroud of Turin Research Project was there, and there was a lot of publicity about it at the time.
But then, of course, the radiocarbon dating came out that disproved it.
It proved it was a medieval creation.
But now, that carbon dating has now been devalidated for quite a few reasons that we could go into.
If you look at the Shroud itself, Millions of people have been buried in millions of shrouds, but that is the only one with an image on it.
Now, I'm not saying this is the Shroud of Christ.
I'm saying, though, I find it consistent with what could have been the Shroud of Christ.
Personally, I think it probably was, but of course we can't prove it.
But this image, the image that is on it...
It's the image of a crucified man.
Now, unfortunately, I understand enough of the injuries and the pathologies to realise that that couldn't be faked.
It is the image of a crucified man.
So we have two possibilities there.
One is it is the image of the crucified Lord Jesus Christ himself, or it's the image of another crucified man mocked up to look like Jesus Christ.
But both horrific when you look at them.
But the image is completely unique in that it is the only shroud with an image.
So no one knows how that image got there.
The image is remarkably superficial.
It's only on the very About 200 to 400 micrometers thickness.
Remarkably thin.
And no one knows how that got there.
And as well as that, the image contains three-dimensional information.
So if you put it under this thing that they developed for looking at the depth of craters on planets, this VPA analyzer, You actually get three-dimensional information out of it.
Now, if we take a two-dimensional picture of you and then put it under this three-dimensional analyser, you'll just get gobbledygook.
It won't make any sense.
So we've got this completely unique image on a shroud which does depict the accurate pathology of a crucified man as specified in the Gospel.
So the scourging is the Roman style of scourging.
The crucifixion marks are the Roman crucifixion marks.
The wound in the side is as described, which seems to be a standard way that Roman soldiers had of killing people and making sure people were dead.
The crown of thorns is as described.
The facial injuries There's so many consistencies.
It makes it an extraordinary document and something that's well worth studying.
The bloodstains, we know are blood.
It's been demonstrated that it is blood.
There's pollen on it from Jerusalem.
There's dirt on the knees and nose and soles of the Shroud area that are consistent with the mineralogy.
of dirt in Jerusalem.
There's a lot of things that add up about it and it really is A mysterious object, but even if it's not the genuine, even if it is not the Shroud of Christ, it teaches us so much about the nature of crucifixion and the suffering.
It makes it a very poignant document to study and it's just remarkably interesting.
It's got a lot to teach us.
We can't be definitive about it, but personally, I think there's so many types of information from so many different aspects of study that, personally, I think it's much more likely than not to be genuine.
It's really hard to see how it's not.
It's a bit like what we were talking about before with creation.
There's so many things that are just right, and they add up.
And the probability of one thing being just right is maybe one in a hundred, then another one is one in a hundred, multiply by another one in a hundred.
And by the time you've got about a dozen or twenty of factors together, The probability of them all occurring together becomes massively improbable.
So it's interesting.
It's a pity that the Protestant Church has neglected it for a long period of time.
And I think it's got a lot to teach us.
Wow.
It makes me recognise again that there's a state of submission, which you just referred to earlier as humility, and this is the right word, that is kind of induced by standing on the edge of this cosmos, on the edge of this order, on the edge of this constellation of...
The patterns observable in the unknowable that somehow come to their climax in the cross and again and again this sort of almost the impossibility of it not being true.
It makes sense when I think of some of the people that have participated in Bringing Me to Faith, John, the most likely story is that it happened.
It's the most likely story is that it happened.
I think there's one other thing to say about the Shroud Russell.
It's, you know, the first photograph of the Shroud was taken by a guy called Seconder Peer in 1898, and he realised the image was a negative.
Before that, there was no photography, so people didn't know it was a negative.
And then, as we said, the 3D information, the biochemistry on the blood, the biochemistry on the Shroud, All of these things could only be realised after 1898. Before that, people We're aware of the image.
In fact, it probably goes back to what's called the image of Edessa before the Crusader period.
But it's only in recent times that the science has been available to analyse it properly.
And I just wonder, just me thinking out loud, is this a message that That God has left for our times, because it could only be understood in the scientific times.
And the way things are going at the moment, there's a lot of cause for concern.
I really wonder if we are heading into what might be called the end times, at least periods of tribulation.
And I get the feeling that this shroud is a scientific message to our time, because it couldn't have been fully understood in earlier times.
Now it can, and it just makes you wonder.
It's the sort of thing God would do, isn't it?
That is a sort of move that God would pull, is to leave some artefact.
I think so.
What I mean is things that are good for people.
Yeah.
You know, Russell and John might be struggling in the year 2024. I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll just help them on a little bit.
You know, that's...
Thinking out loud.
You know, if you're watching this video, take that or leave it.
It's just me thinking out loud.
But, you know, is it a message for our times?
But if it's not, then we know that end times are coming.
We know that tribulation is coming.
We do know that he's returning, and it could be difficult times that lead up to that.
And I really wonder...
You see, in the past, we didn't have the...
The possibility for global control.
When the Roman Empire was there, or the Babylonian Empire was there, the Aztecs were happily doing their own thing in South America, weren't they?
The Inuit would be happily living in igloos, or the Aborigines would be happily walking around Australia.
We have the modality for global control that simply didn't exist before.
So the possibility of these global events that are described in things like the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation You can now see them coming.
I mean, just take one example.
No man may buy or sell lest they have the number of the beast in his forehead.
You know, when I was a child, well, that was ridiculous.
You know, if you wanted to spend some money, you got a half-crown point and coin out your pocket, if you had one.
I probably didn't very often.
More likely to be a sixpence.
But now, now, now Keir Starmer or some other politician could say, tell you what, it's costing too much to print money.
Scrub it.
Scrub it.
And then that means you'd be dependent on credit cards.
Then someone could say, look, these credit cards are inconvenient.
Why don't we just have a chip under our arm?
You know, that you just flash, you know, like some people do with their mobile phones now.
You know, the technology that no man may buy or sell lest he have the number of the beast is there now.
That could be done.
That could be done within a year quite easily if politicians wanted it to be.
And, you know, even in my lifetime, that wasn't possible.
There's things that are possible now that facilitate more power and control over more people than had ever been the case in the past.
And given what we know about human nature, having particular human beings with dictatorial power, I find a little concerning.
One, um...
Where is it?
What is it that I read?
I thought it was at the end of John 3. No, not John 3, maybe it's John 2. So...
Excuse me, John.
Because it's that bit of when, like, at the end of one of the Johns, it's like, this world belongs to him.
This world belongs...
This world belongs to him.
Oh, yeah, yeah, this.
Yeah, John 1.
We know anyone born of God does not continue to sin.
One who is born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them.
We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.
The whole world is under the control of the evil one.
We also know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true.
And we are in him who is true by being in his Son, Jesus Christ.
He is the true God and eternal life.
And then the kicker, the sort of almost the...
The denouement.
Dear children, keep yourself from idols.
Like, that idols is your way into his control.
Like, if you are idolatry of any form, we'll take you back to him.
Oh, John, thanks, man.
Listen, I've got to go, because I've got my daughters outside, and I've got to work that out.
Hard work being a dad whistle.
Oh, I love it though.
I love it.
I love it.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
It's driving me crazy.
And this world's driving me crazy.
So, isn't it mad, like the conversations that we used to have, and like, you know, when we were watching you before, that...
But, you know, like when I was watching you with the overhead pen shots, hmm, seems weird.
Look at that.
Oh, still got it.
Still there, still there.
Yeah, no, I'm not saying that it's gone.
I know that it...
I'm just saying that I didn't imagine that one day that you'd be telling me main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things, you know.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that you were a man of Christ and a man that would help me to understand my own growing faith.
So thank you again.
And, you know, I'm not going to breach any confidentialities, Russell, but you have helped me in moments of difficulty, and I appreciate it.
I want to say publicly, I appreciate that.
Oh, thank you so much.
Thank you.
And as always, the messages that you sent came at just the right time and just the right place.
Oh, praise God.
Thank you.
So it was good.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
I'm glad that he can use me.
I'm glad that there's not so much of me that he can't make use of me.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
But isn't it interesting getting to know people?
Absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, I'm going to come there and go on one of them walks with you, where you're sort of walking around in a cagoule.
Oh, any time, any time, yeah.
Go to the church service, walk about a bit, not get so caught up in this world.
Always welcome.
It's a bit cold this time of year, but as long as you're wrapped up, it's fine.
This is what I wear.
I've got several layers on.
I love you, Dr. John.
Hope you've enjoyed this show with Dr. John Campbell.
We will be back soon.
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People that they surrounded Trump with, the Secret Service members, none of them were qualified to be able to do that.
Such a vital instruction.
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