Hello my friends, this is episode number 10 of Patterson in Pursuit. I want to start today's show by thanking a few new Patreon supporters who are helping to make this production possible. Sean Balada and Elizabeth Kaluga. I want to thank you both very much for supporting the creation of a rational worldview and speaking of rationality today is the first episode where I'm talking about Religion. This interview is specifically about Christianity, and I'm not talking with a pastor I'm not talking with a priest or a bishop I'm talking with an economist who I have a lot of respect for and I know is a Christian. My guest today is Mr. Robert Murphy, who is the author of several successful books, including the politically incorrect guide to Capitalism, the politically incorrect guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, which I actually cited in my undergraduate thesis. He's written a couple of study guides for some important books in the world of Austrian economics. He's written a children's book and an introduction to Bitcoin. He's done a lot of interviews and I think he's generally a well-loved guy in the world of free market economics. But like I said today, we're not talking about economics. We are talking about Christianity and I'm so excited about this interview, not just because of the specifics of it, but because in my own research, I have discovered that religion gets a really bad rap. Now a lot of criticism of religion is very well justified. A lot of it comes from me as well. It's very tempting as an intellectual to dismiss all of the claims of every religion around the world.  However, if you have an open mind and you're willing to learn and study, it's possible to view religious claims in the exact same way that you would view philosophic claims or economic claims or any other claims, just a set of propositions that may or may not be true. And what I've found at least is that all of the major religions do seem to be pointing to some pretty deep truths that I'm just not willing to throw out. In the world of ideas, we have a lot of very advanced theories for explaining the world around us. However, there seems to be one consistent area of human experience that is not fully explained by our modern scientific worldview. In fact, not only is it not explained, it's dismissed, it's mocked. And that is what people have described as spiritual or religious experiences. And one of the allures of religion in general is to try to give an explanation for the existence of religious experience or spiritual experiences, try to provide some context and understanding of what is going on. Spiritual and religious experience are not something that is only isolated to one culture or one way of thinking. It seems to be fairly universal. And so you'd think we would need a rigorous explanation of what's going on. And as we talk about in this conversation, I have had my own what I would call spiritual experience. I give a little bit of details in this interview, and I'm sure I will talk a lot more about it in the future. And my guest, Bob Murphy, has also had what you could call a religious experience. And I can tell you, based on the many conversations that I've had with people, just personal conversations of well-respected intellectuals that I haven't recorded, a lot of people have shared similar stories, similar experiences, and they even have similar private beliefs. So that's the theme I want to be exploring and sorting out in this podcast series. I don't have all of these beliefs worked out. I have a general hunch, but I want an essential part of this pursuit of truth to incorporate religious discussion. If the most rational and reasonable conclusion is that there is no merit to religious discussion and it's a bunch of fluff, then fine. That's what we'll discover together. But if there is some truth that the different religions are pointing at, then I want to discover what that is and try to phrase it in as clear, concise, and non-mystical way as possible. All right, so that's enough for me. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Dr. Robert Murphy. I'll have a link to his website and some of his other work on the show notes page this week, which is steved-paderson.com slash 10. Enjoy. So Bob Murphy, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. Glad to be here, Steve. I'm a big fan of your work in economics and in political theory, and you wrote a great introductory book about Bitcoin. And on your blog every Sunday, you write a piece about religion and you consider yourself a Christian. And this is something I'm very interested in. I sort of consider myself a Christian, though I'm not entirely sure what that even means. So that's why I wanted to talk to you today, to try to learn and pick your brain about Christianity, because whenever you talk about religion and a lot of intellectual circles, it's kind of taboo. People were very quick to dismiss you and think that you're just a crazy crank. And so to actually have intellectual discussion is a bit of a rarity, so thank you. Sure thing. From the start, I'm not here to debate you or anything like that. I really do want to try to keep it informal and conversational, and just that's the way that I learn. I think that's the way a lot of my listeners learn. So at the very beginning, a sensible question would be to ask, what is your version of Christianity? There's a lot of different interpretations of a Christianity means. There's different denominations. People have their beliefs based on a religious experience or they're focused on the words of Jesus Christ or they're really big on the Bible. What is your version of Christianity? Sure. So I was originally raised Catholic, and then I fell out of that just so people can know my personal story, just a tad. And I'm sure this will come out in our discussion. But it got to the point where in undergrad, I was an atheist and actually referred to myself as a devout atheist. I thought that was funny and clever. And I would go around trying to convince people who were called themselves Christians to abandon that. I wasn't doing it to be a jerk or something. I thought I was freeing them. I thought they had this crazy system that their parents had taught them and that was just crippling them and so forth. And I was freeing their minds. So just so for your listeners, they can understand where I'm coming from. I'm very sympathetic to the sort of rationalist, scientific empiricist critiques of Christianity, particularly coming from people in the libertarian community who look at the church and think, well, Jesus, isn't that just like the state? And so I get all those nowadays because I used to agree with them. So just had that as a backdrop. So partly though, why I brought up the fact that I was raised Catholic is I'm not great at knowing the specific differences between all the various Christian sects because as a Catholic, it's more like you're a Catholic and then there's some Jewish people and then there's these Protestants and we don't really know what they're all into. Something about Martin Luther, and he was really upset about indulgences. That was kind of what I was. So as far as I'm right now, I refer to myself as a born again Christian. I formally accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, personal Lord and Savior. I had been baptized as an adult in a Christian church. I was bouncing around a little bit. I definitely like churches that where they preach from the Bible, like you'll read stuff from the Bible in the pastor, the preacher will go through and explain what that means, as opposed to people who are more just like, okay, everyone, let's go out there and just try to love people and do what Jesus would want. No, I want somebody who's actually noted the Bible way better than I do is teaching me. I guess the closest thing is I am, in terms of doctrines or whatever, I guess the Presbyterian, the Orthodox ones, they're the ones that I'm following and I need to study more, but I actually think I'm probably a Calvinist, as far as in terms of putting a label on some of which, again, if you want to talk about that, I'm happy to go into it. Stuff that when I was younger, I thought that is just absolutely nutty. Who could possibly believe in predestination? But it's like, well, you read the Bible. So now I was at the point where I'm wondering, how could anyone who believes in the Bible not endorse all that stuff so that I'm totally flipped in that regard? So I'll stop there since I think I've given you enough of an answer. Oh, yes, there's a lot to dive into there. So specifically, you say that you're really big on the Bible and like for me, in my own Christianity or whatever the heck it's called, that's a big sticking part for me is I'm not, I don't even have a good conception of the Bible. I was raised in a kind of a right-wing evangelical household and the whole, like my dad especially, my mom had a bit more of an open mind but my dad was kind of your traditional Bible thumping. If it's in there, it's true. There's no room for interpretation in the Bible and that never quite worked for me. There was some issues I had with that. For your respect that you have for the Bible, is it something that you believe is words written by men to best communicate their philosophy about God or do you think it's something that's divinely inspired or do you think it's literally the word of God written down verbatim and is literally true? Like what's your perspective on the Bible? Okay, sure. And again here, I would wanna study this a lot more before offering a definitive statement about my position. I think probably why I'm, so I definitely think it's the inspired word of God. I don't think it's just a bunch of metaphors or some people say, well, yeah, that stuff didn't literally happen. It's not like Jesus literally fed 5,000 people but it's just trying to show you the abundance of God's provision for. No, I really do think things that we would nowadays consider to be miracles occurred and that these things were recorded done and that's partly why I think Jesus was such a force that if he actually didn't do anything except go around and give really stirring speeches but then he didn't do any miracles, didn't actually heal people and then it was killed and never came back, I don't think we would know who he was. So that's part of it. Things like the Genesis account of creation there. I mean, and I believe me again like I told people I'm pretty well read in the scientific area so I understand all the disputes and so on. So there, to me, I think God certainly was inspiring the people who wrote that stuff down and then I'm thinking, you know, even according to the own Genesis account humans weren't there until several days into it, right? So no human directly witnessed those first things so that must have been a vision from God or God telling Adam, this is what just happened before I made you. So there, I mean it's, if someone had a vision and saw nothingness and then the creation of physical matter and that sort of thing, it's conceivable to me that the words he would use to write it down would be inadequate to capture what he just saw. You know what I mean? So stuff like that, you know, I'm a little bit more flexible than perhaps some other people. And again, remember, I'm coming, it's more like this, when I was younger I thought the Bible was nothing but a bunch of myths and on top of that in the Old Testament sadistic myths, like what the heck? He asked this guy to kill his own son. What kind of monster would do that? You know, and so now the more I study it, the more I see, oh, wait a minute, no, okay, I get what's going on there. And so that's why I think I probably treat it with more risk because I was never raised to believe it was, you know, an errant history book. And so I think that's why the more I study it, the more I realize the deeper it is, the more profound it is that I had originally thought. So that's partly explaining my attitude perhaps. So it sounds like you're kind of coming from in your, when you're in your college years, more of the Christopher Hitchens of a variety of atheism where it's like, not only is this a bunch of mythology, but it's evil and God, the character of Jesus Christ is like a zombie and it's all about death and violence and it's this evil story, not only just me. Well, hang on, let me clarify that though. I hope I was never as much of a jerk as Christopher Hitchens. But, and also when people, I was like very courteous in the stuff when I was trying to get people to abandon their view. So you're not like good to Christians. Yeah, I would say stuff to them like, now come on, the reason you believe this is because your parents taught you that if you had, you know, if you had had Muslim parents, would you believe in Allah and stuff like that? Right, okay. But as far as the, what I mean is, no, it was actually, I loved the character of Jesus and thought, oh wow, this is the greatest guy ever. I just didn't think, you know, it was a real guy. I just thought it was a story. But I thought the New Testament was great and beautiful. Whereas in contrast, I thought, whoa, the God of the Old Testament is completely different.  What the heck? Where Jesus loves everybody and is willing to die for you. So that's what I'm saying my sort of crude understanding is I thought the Old Testament was this qualitatively different thing from the New. Whereas now the more I study it, you can, to me, it's obvious that all the two are intimately related. You can't even make sense of the New Testament without the Old and vice versa. That's fascinating because that, because my current belief would have to be crude. Because that's kind of my, again, I have a superficial understanding of the Bible. And it does seem, at least from the outside, that the story of the morals of what's in the Bible or is this a category difference between Old and New Testament? But, yeah.  But, you know, when you, but now the way I would explain it is to say, okay, he stopped him at the last second.  He stopped him.  Okay, so that was the issue, that even your own, so that the moral there, the lesson is God is first, even above your children. Yeah. I can accept that, but what about ones where that wasn't? They didn't spit on him. But it just, but then it also too, though, it was because in the, my understanding here, you know, someone could correct me, but my understanding is it was not uncommon among the pagan cultures of that time to have engaged in child sacrifice. So, so our ears, that's absolutely horrific, but there that wasn't complete.  It was just, you should be willing to do it, but you're actually, you know, and then finally, of course, the ultimate or the obvious parallel or foreshadowing is that, you know, when it comes to giving up your own, your son for somebody else, that's actually what God does for us. You know what I'm saying? So God was just asking Abraham to do something, didn't actually require it of him, but then God in turn would say, however, I will allow my own son to be killed for you people. Well, doesn't it say, though, in the Old Testament, I mean, it's not just the story of sparing the child because doesn't it, doesn't God kind of command and permit slaughtering of people by the Jews? Oh, yeah.  So for there, I mean, since you brought it up, I'll go ahead and give it. And again, with this stuff, I recognize if you're coming to this discussion and you absolutely do not believe in this, that you think that, you know, Yahweh has just as much validity as Zeus, that what I'm gonna say is gonna bounce off you, when it's gonna say, oh my gosh, this, here's this intelligent guy bending over backwards to try to justify some, I can get that. And I would have said the same thing back when I didn't believe it either. So here it's more that for other reasons, I'm sure we'll get into like, I, you know, transformed and now I'm a believer. And then so when I'm presented with these awkward facts, so yeah, I actually got telling, you know, Joshua to lead his army in and slaughter babies, that is like, what the heck is going on there?   It's not that, oh yeah, there's nature running its track over here, then once in a while God comes in and intervenes and does something, I mean, no, everything is just a complete manifestation of his imagination or whatever you wanna call it.  And so to me, you know, it's a kind of silly human convention to say, oh no, he's a murderer if he tells somebody to stick a sword in somebody or if he just kills them because the kid has a rock fall on him or because there's a tornado that goes through or he dies of a heart attack when he's 87, ultimately God is in charge of all that. And so, you know, again, so it's not what the issue of in terms of morality or whatever, it's odd that he would order people to go kill others and there I don't claim to fully understand that but I would just say in terms of everything else, I recognize that Jesus clearly in my mind is the most moral character in literature and has the best value system and he said no one is good except God and there he's referring to the God of the Old Testament, God of Abraham. So it's like if the best physicist I ever knew comes along and says the best physicist in the history is so and so I'm gonna trust that guy's judgment. And so if the most moral person in terms of my limited ability to discern that stuff is this guy Jesus and he's telling me, no, the only moral being is God, then I'm certainly not gonna, you know, it would take a lot of presumption for me to just very to, you know, automatically say, oh my gosh, I read the story of the Old Testament and this guy's a monster. I'm going to say, yes, I don't understand that it would be a lot easier for me to tell people that I think the Bible has a lot of truth to it and it's, you know, a moral beacon if there weren't those stories in the Old Testament. So that's that. I have two that brings up two questions that I have here. One is if what you say is true that in your conception of God it's kind of the orchestrator of every death and therefore when somebody dies is sort of ultimately irrelevant. It was gonna happen anyway and it's all part of this grand plan. Would that, I think that necessarily would mean that there's no such thing as an inherent or intrinsic morality that dying by itself is nothing that's bad or that torture or slaughter is not something that is inherently a bad thing. Is that correct? I don't know that I would say that. I'm just saying that it's, I don't think it's correct to say if God had told someone to go put a sword in that person that that makes God a murderer as opposed to if he kills somebody with a tornado. I see. Okay, because it's- So I mean, listen, if a human, you know, again, we get these issues of free will and that kind of stuff too. So this is all really, it's really complicated, really fast. I don't claim to be able to solve something that the best thinkers in humanity haven't been able to totally understand. But I mean, yeah, if I certainly makes a difference from a human, you know, if I think I'm just following my own desires and I go and kill somebody, then I'm a murderer. Okay, but that's because I'm not in control of everything and that every moment of- I see, I see, okay. So let me ameliorate my question then. Would it be true to say then that there is no inherent inherent action that is good or bad when applied to God, but when you're talking about human beings, then you do have a kind of inherently good or bad action. Do you think that's more accurate? Well, it's more accurate, but I don't know if it actually is accurate. It's more defensible, because what I'm more saying is when you ponder the nature of God. So let me put it this way. I am saying everything God does is good.  Now, is it, and I'm saying partly to understand that, where because if God does something that at first blush looks like, well, geez, if a human king did that, we would have no hesitation and it's clarinet to be evil. I'm saying part of what's going on there is because when you ponder the nature of who God is and his relationship to the universe and the creation, he's in a different position. Right. Yeah, well, I mean, that would make sense if we're giving a kind of categorical distinction to God, then perhaps there is this separation between a kind of objective morality for us and an objective morality if that term even applies to God. But this is a great segue. Yeah, and we just don't finish that. I mean, because we have this phrase, right? You say, oh, you can't play God, right? And what does that usually mean? It usually means when humans are dabbling in areas where they have no authority to. And so what that means is, of course, God is allowed to play God. God's allowed to do things that would be monsters of humans try to do it. And I don't think it's merely saying, oh yeah, by definition, whatever God does is good.  Okay, oh my good, you know what I mean? It's not just gonna be some kind of tautology where, yeah, that still strikes me as awful, it makes my stomach turn, but I guess you're God, so I guess you can get away with it. I don't think it's gonna be like that. I think it's, we just, we had the tiny little pinprick of understanding and experience of everything going on and knowing the timeline of the universe. And I think once you saw more behind the scenes of what was going on, your jaw would drop and you would say, oh, now I see why you, things played out that way and you let that happen or you designed things to happen that way. Yes, that is beautiful. I see. So this perspective is very, very different and I'm sure very unpalatable for a lot of atheists out there like you would have, I'm sure if you're a 20 year old self, heard yourself speaking now, you'd think this guy's a nut job, this is crazy. So I'd like, and of course, I'm not saying I think that, I just, what I'd like is if you could explain how you got from there to here, did you have, did you undergo a, you said use the term transformed before, what does that mean? Was there a conversion experience for you? Because before you answered just to break the ice on this topic, the reason that I am, I have some kind of Christian belief is because I had a profound moment, an actual point in time at which I had a reason to believe that God exists. It was the first time that I experienced love with my now wife, I felt I had this realization of true love in which I would say I had enough reason to believe was categorically something divine and it totally turned my entire life on its head instantly, is this, do you have a similar story or was it kind of a gradual progression into this? How did that work for you? Sure, so it happened in grad school and at some point, and I wish I had written it down closer to what had happened when I had all the details fresh and I just kept saying, I'll write it down and then now it's a bit hazy but yeah, I was in grad school and I was very depressed. I mean, it's not like I went and talked to anybody about it but I mean, I would have been diagnosed as suffering from extreme depression if I had gone and talked to somebody about it. And it was kind of just like, I felt, what's the point of this? This is ridiculous, you know what I mean? I'd be arguing with people on stuff and they were all idiots and I was just going through it and it was just like, I'd be making these great points and nobody would get it and I was just like, what am I, what am I, this is all just a waste of time. These people aren't worth me trying to help them. I mean, that was kind of the feeling sorry for myself and just that was the where I was. And my material standard of living was higher than 99.999% of any human who'd ever lived in the history of that point and here I am just not even wanting to continue life because oh my gosh, these people on the internet aren't responding to the appreciation of my brilliant insights. So that's how messed up and narcissistic I was but that's where I was.   And so I mean, it was just stuff like that where, you know, so I seen dermatologists and they were giving me stuff that wasn't working and so I just finally had this, this insight that just, you know, cause I had reached this crisis point like what's going on here? Like just personal relationships, things that weren't working out.  And I realized how all these people had been like, I don't know tiptoeing around me or something or I just realized that I had totally misunderstood like 15 different interactions with people like significant things in my life up to that point and how I had walked away thinking like, oh yeah, that person didn't like me and rejected me and whatever when really I realized, no, the purpose was like really like intimidated and nervous around me.    Whereas I was like, what the heck? This person must not like me. And I, you know, so that totally, and I physically just felt relief just wash over me. And I instantly knew that like the flaking of the skin was going to just go away the next day. I had this tremendous urge to go buy orange juice and I just chugged it. I think it's because I needed the lighted and sear. So, you know what I mean? It was like all of a sudden just when this clarity hit me like physically I felt much better and I knew these little elements and stuff were just going to be gone. Like my back had been sore or whatever. I just knew I'll just, that's going to be fine. And so then because of that, now this was all, this was not a religious expiry. I was still an atheist. But when that happened, when I just instantly knew, oh yeah, my face is going to be good. Go back to being fine and, you know, 24 hours here.  And then that happened. Then I realized, whoa, these people who are talking about the power of suggestion and how the mind-body connection, they're not a bunch of charlatans.  The people don't like me and I said, and so I was just completely misinterpreting the sensory observations all along. And I just kept painting myself into a deeper and deeper corner and the stuff I was trying. And so I realized, no, once I just changed my attitude and realized what was going on, all of a sudden physically, all these ailments disappeared instantly. And so that's when I said, you know what? These faith healers are actually, you know, not complete snake oil salesmen. You know what I mean? That I realized, and then of course, the most obvious example is I realized, whoa, I bet you there really was a guy named Jesus who was a carpenter walking around who was nuts. You know, he thought he was the Messiah. He obviously wasn't because there is no such thing as God and that's all myth. But if he honestly believed he was and was walking around healing people of leprosy and stuff, it would work, you know, or some guy who just thinks he can't walk. And then this guy coming along who's got a reputation in the community now that, oh my God, he just healed 900 people the other day. He comes up and says, by the power of God, you're healed and you really believed it. I was thinking, maybe they would actually fix your legs and you'd stand up.  It was some guy who just from birth, he had legs and whatever and they didn't work. And so I thought, well, maybe it was just some kind of, you know, neurological thing that if he just, somehow then something changed in his mind that might alter the physiology and fix it. So anyway, so then I went from thinking it was total myth to, oh, wait a minute. I bet you there really was this guy walking around healing people.  So that was my, and I thought that actually fit the data better, you know what I mean? Cause it was kind of weird how could so many people throughout history have been converted in the face of persecution if it was all just a big myth. Like that didn't seem to make sense. So this made more sense to me that, okay, yeah, it's not supernatural of me, but I just observed firsthand how much if your belief system changes instantly that can, you know, have physiological ramifications immediately. Because I just, I didn't believe that beforehand.  It wasn't like their family history and that and their weight and so that didn't matter as much. What really mattered is when they interviewed them and said, why are you getting this surgery? The people who said stuff like, well, because I really wanna get back out in the golf course, those people would do it. Whereas the people who said, well, my doctor said I should try, I might as well. Those people it wouldn't work out. I mean, so it was an attitude in terms of who's gonna recover. So, you know, I had read that stuff and I was like, okay, fair enough. But so, but until I experienced it firsthand, I didn't realize just how true that was, that your mind can affect whether you feel sick or not, whether you are sick or not. So that's where I was at that point. But again, still in eight and then just, you know, I'll just spell out, they'll wrap the story up here. But it was just a series of things that just kept pushing me more and more where I went from thinking, okay. And so I finally got to the point that said, wait a minute. So yes, I think I could come up with a rational scientific explanation for how there was this guy who thought he was the Messiah going around healing people. And I said, well, if it really did exist, wouldn't there be a scientific explanation? You know what I mean? So it wasn't, in other words, it wasn't an either or it was saying, if there was a God, if he did send him aside and do all this stuff and heal people, of course we could look at it empirically and scientifically and see the results and explain it that way through that mechanism. But that's kind of a big coincidence. Cause I was doing stuff too, like with the 10 plagues. And I was saying, well, if the river, if something did happen and turn the Nile into blood, like it wasn't really blood, it was just some red, like chemicals or whatever. And I was like, well, wouldn't that make, you know, think about it, wouldn't that make all the frogs jump out? And then if the frogs are all jumping around, like wouldn't that make there be fleas? And you know what I mean? I might be getting the order of the plagues mixed up, but in other words, it seemed to me like, if just something happened and he got the first one right, the other things might follow step by step, like naturally. And so then I was thinking, okay, so I've explained it, but yet, isn't that kind of a huge coincidence that there was this guy who had these crazy visions telling him to go to the pharaoh and announce these things before they happen? So that's kind of where I was coming to realize that yeah, I could start to understand how these things could have happened mechanically or physically in terms of the laws of physics that are not violating anything that way, but yet there were these people who were predicting it beforehand. And that's, so anyway, it was that guy, but I did the last thing I'll say is, yeah, I did have a personal experience and when I realized that God really did exist and I just said, oh, I'm so sorry because I had spent so much time trying to convince people that it was all a myth and I heard a voice in my head say, I forgive you. So. Really? Yeah, so I mean, again, I can explain it.  So I get that, I'm not, I can explain that away. And I understand how an atheist, this would just, story would just bounce off him and he was like, yeah, whatever. But in terms of me saying, you know, geez, why do you believe this? Like, well, I, because he's communicated with me on a few occasions, so. So I do not think that you're crazy. You're under no obligation at all if this is something that's too personal, but I am extremely interested. I'm sure a lot of people are extremely interested in that experience that you had. What was that like? What caused it? It must have been enough, that must have been powerfully, I guess, transforming on the spot. Can you talk a bit about that moment? Yeah, I can talk a little bit. It's not that I'm squeamish or something. It's more that I would want to give more of the story. I don't want to take up too much time. So I'll just give some of the elements of it. It was all in the same, you know, it was on the heels of the earlier thing I talked about.   It was like Christopher Walken movie or something where he's like a fallen angel or something. But I mean, it was like, there was something in there and I was like, whoa. And then I rented something else. I can't remember. I mean, I could probably go Google it and figure it out, but it was like the movies I was just randomly in quotation marks had gotten from Blockbuster. Like they really were what I needed to see to keep pushing me. So it was like everything kept just kept pushing me. Like on trains of thought. And I was like, oh yeah, actually, that's how it worked. And it was just, I had gotten to the point where I was like, okay, you know what? Like it was pushing me. And I was like, you know what? If I see one more thing, then I will believe. And then I did see it. And I say, I'd want to write this up more to explain the context better. But, and I did see, you know what I mean? So it was kind of like I made this deal out loud.  And then I did see one more thing. And that's when I was like, whoop. And then I felt like I said this something. And that's when I was like, oh.   So there you go. Wow. So when you say you heard, it was auditory. You heard. Well, it was in my head. So I don't know whether you, I mean. So to make you feel a little more comfortable because I know this is awkward and uncomfortable to talk about. At least it is for me when I've spoken with people about this. In the experience that I had, I also, I wouldn't say I heard a voice that wasn't auditory, but in that moment, I, it was as if somebody was talking to me and what I heard or understood was even honestly thinking about it will make me well up because it's so, it was just so unbelievably profound. I heard as much as you love Julia, that's as much as I love you.   And I'm tearing up over here. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was, it was, it was, yeah. It was as you would expect, right?  It is as profound as you would expect for something like, you know, like some divine intervention actually happened. And that, at that moment too, it required an absolute certainty on my end that it's not something I was looking for. There was a series of articles I wrote years and years ago that I almost had to write. It was a, there was a piece called why reason comes first. And it was an argument against methodological faith. And I wrote another one called, it was like the methodological error of faith. And it was like, I had made maybe a few months prior this commitment, this, for reasons I understood that having positive belief in anything requires rational justification. And this is, I was liberated. It was, I had kind of finally fully thrown aside the indoctrination of my upbringing. And so I knew that that was my disposition. And so that moment had to happen exactly when it did. But yeah, we can, we can talk, I would actually love to at some point talk more about this and hear the backstory because I was talking to another gentleman on my podcast who also had a kind of communicatory experience where it was very profound for him, very life-changing.  But a lot's writing on the line for people to take us seriously and not dismiss what we're saying is cranky and that we're, you know, are we actually literally insane because we have these other beliefs? And so I think this is, it really is a taboo thing to talk about, like, yeah, by the way, you know, I can, I believe that logic and existence are inseparable and you know, we can fundamentally know all these truths and science is this amazing thing. And I think God talked to me. Right, yeah. I mean, somebody on my blog the other day said something funny, you know, wise guy remark, but I was like reflecting on the story of the Garden of Eden. And I was like, you know, like a lot of feminists get upset about that because they say how it, you know, shows. The woman was deceived first. So it seems like it blames, you know, the sin entered the world to the woman. And I, you know, Paul actually, you know, says that explicitly in one of his letters or something that I think didn't Timothy. But what I was saying, you know, you could flip it the other way. If you wanted to be pro-woman about it, you could say the devil knew if he hit Adam first, that he was gonna have to hit Eve also, whereas he knew if he just could take out Eve, the idiot husband would do whatever the place said, you know, and so that's the kind of thing I did. And so we're arguing about it. And then some guy comes in with a zinger and said, okay, but let's just all be clear, everybody. We're talking about, you know, a talking snake, right? We're just all, well, remember that, right?  This is, what are you talking about?   So, so I can't get that. Well, how do you deal with that?  Like, what are you smoking? Right. So it's, you're right, I do get that a lot. And so that's, for people who don't know, that's the compromise I've done. Cause it used to be, I would just throw stuff on my blog, a consulting by rpm.com, little plug. I would just randomly intersperse, you know, thoughts on religion and where, and you're right, I was getting that, people were hammering me. And so I said, okay, you know what guys, on six days a week, I will just talk about economic stuff or where secular matters. But on Sunday, I will just post on religious stuff. And that was kind of the, and so I said, if you can't stand it to see this guy who's so good when he's knocking crewmen, talking about the New Testament, well then just don't tune in on Sundays. You know, that's kind of the thing I did. And again, and it's, you know, I fully concede that if I was the one who believed this stuff or it was me and three other people, people would.  But it's so many people that's kind of like, well, you know, what are we gonna do? Not hire any Christians? Cause there's a lot of them around here. And we just see that probably wouldn't be a viable business model.  And I think also people think, well, you know, they have this segregated thing. But you know, I'm sure when it comes to, you know, new stuff that really matters, Bob uses his mind and then just when he goes to church, he indulges in these things because it makes him feel good that there's this guy in the sky, gotta take care of him.  So again, all I can do is explain to people, I get where you're coming from, you're not telling me something I didn't already know. I mean, just to show you how bad it was, I had planned on writing the definitive refutation of Christianity because I had read other ones. Like I've read, you know, HL Mankin's treatise on the gods. I had read, I think his name is George Smith, wrote something on atheism, maybe. And I just said, yeah, okay. Or Thomas Paine, you know, age reason. And I thought it was a good stuff, but I thought, no, someone really needs to sit down and do this thing correctly. And that's what I was gonna do. So I was, my plan at some point was to study the Bible and just document better that anyone had done all the inconsistencies and how crazy it was. Like, you know, I was thinking, it's kind of nutty. The God's mad at us, right? Cause the garden of Eden, we disobey him.  Then you can come and hang out with me. And that's a weird story. You know what I mean? And if you look at it like that, it is weird. But of course now I can see the other way I'm looking at it. It's not weird because it's actually, it's gorgeous. And I do specifically, is it the last, I don't wanna take up all of your day, but this is a last question specifically about what you just said. In your understanding of the character or the person of Jesus, I wanna know, I kinda wanna know if you felt the metaphysics of Jesus, what is Jesus? Is it that he was 100% like you and me a human and then through, for whatever reason, he was able to reach this high level of communication with something, you know, with God or he became enlightened. Or is it that he was intrinsically like this being God, this was like a literal son that he sent and from the beginning he was perfect and all these things like who is Jesus Christ? Okay, so here again I would, if anything I say contradicts the Westminster confessional then I'm going to retract it. But I mean, I'm being kind of cheeky but it's again with this stuff, I'm a novice in this but I think it's, again, think about so God is not part of the physical universe. He created the physical universe, right? So we have, so you know, there's a spirit or a soul. It's possible for there to be an intelligent being with desires and the mind who doesn't have a physical body. So I think among other ways of describing what happened is to say God was like, okay, I've taught you guys with my prophets, I've inspired them, I've taught you from the beginning, told you what the moral code is, I've taught you how to live, you cannot learn on your own, you're incorrigible. Now let me show you, I am going to take my spirit and go into the physical universe and be a man. So you can say like, what if I were going to be a man? This is how you guys should copy me.  Here, let me show you by my example. And so Jesus was God incarnate. And so you could say, you know, a sense God, the God that, you know, the spirit thing, you know, was in a sense the father and he was the son, you know, in terms of the way it would look in terms of unfolding of time, it would look like, well, if God of the heavens created the earth before, and then there were a bunch of humans being born and then all of a sudden this girl Mary gives birth, clearly the God that created the heavens is in some sense the thing that caused that. So that's where the father, son comes in. But at the same time, that really is the same God.  And so that's the sense of which I think Jesus really is the same thing as God. And that's why, you know, he says at one point, you know, I am like, he's right there. He's heartening the way God spoke in the Old Testament. What do you think of then? Cause the next step is a lot of Christians. And this is where I think I am very sympathetic. And I just don't know how to articulate and I don't know the answer to these questions. What do you think the connection is between Jesus and the rest of us, between God and Jesus and the rest of us? Because if I'm not mistaken, somewhere he says, you know, don't you know that ye are gods and I am in you and you are on me and that kind of idea. Now this is something that growing up in like a Baptist church, nobody really talked about that much about this stated connection between the person of Jesus, his connection with God and in that connection with human beings, that would be kind of heresy, but like, oh yeah, I have, you know, I have God. Like I've got God inside of me. Like that's a radical proposition if that's true. What do you think about that? Yeah, so I definitely think it's correct and biblically sound to say, if you're a believer that Jesus dwells or the spirit dwells in you, you invited Jesus in your heart and we are to act as the hands and feet of Jesus and that we're, you know, if you can get it to the point where you don't think that you're going out doing what you feel like doing, but you're like, what does God want to do through me? I mean, that's a very healthy way to live. I think that's what you're supposed to do. And so what's that? Is it the spirit of Jesus or is it the spirit of God? Or is that the same thing? Well, Jesus is God. I think it's easier for us to identify with Jesus. So I think that's partly the function of, you know, why did he do things that way? It's just, there's some being to create.   I'm gonna lead a perfect life and you can follow me. So I think it's easier for us to identify with him. Do you think then that implies there is a, the possibility for the connection that God, that Jesus had with God, and if Jesus is in us, that we have the same capacity to be like Jesus, or is there this divide between the person of Jesus, what he accomplished, how he lived his life and human beings? Does that make sense? Are we destined to be terrible creatures, or do we have the potential for living like Jesus inside of us? Okay, I guess I would say that, yeah, Jesus showed you what it would look like if you perfectly followed God's will. That's what you would do. And that's, you know, and you had perfect faith and obedience. So, but we are all fallen. And so I would say, no, it is impossible. You're not going to ever live up to that standard, but that's certainly the goal. And you can look forward to in the afterlife, being united with God at that point. But yeah, I think there is humans after the fall are incapable of certainly on their own doing that. And it gets dicey.  So aren't you in perfect union with God? Well, but you keep sinning. So that stuff gets really complicated. So I'm not sure, but I hope I've answered enough at least of your question. Yes, I mean, I'm not expecting that anybody has a full answer to all these things. But I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about it on that very, very exciting conversation. And I hope I'm sure other people will as well. So thanks very much, Bob. Sure thing. All right, so that was my interview with Dr. Bob Murphy. Make of it what you will. I humbly suggest that I don't think Bob Murphy is irrational. I don't think I am irrational. And I think a lot of the people that you're gonna hear on this podcast series, if you're coming from the traditional, rationalist scientific worldview, I think you might find a bit of discomfort at hearing so many people that you might even respect, that you might hear make clear and concise arguments in their respective fields, whether it's in economics or philosophy or biology or physics. When you hear those clearly articulated beliefs coupled with religious belief, I know for me that was very startling, but as I grow older and as I have more experiences, I think I'm starting to understand why. Thanks for listening, everybody. I'll talk to you next week.


Our next speaker is Alexia Torqui. Alexia is an associate professor of medicine and the director of the Fairbanks Fellowship in Clinical Ethics at Indiana University. Alexia studies patients' preferences for end-of-life care with a particular focus on surrogate decision-making for patients with impaired cognitive function. This is a line of work that Lexi has developed herself and very fundamentally important in the field of surrogate decision-making. Today, Lexi is going to talk to us on the impact of religion and spirituality on surrogate decision-making. Lexi Torqui. Thanks, everyone. It's great to be here today. This is kind of a new area that I've delved into, which is the impact of religion and spirituality. Of course, I had lots of ideas and things to share, and I thought about an hour of slides. I really had a hard time cutting them down, but I've managed, and at first I thought I'd just get the hook or kicked off the stage, but now I hear I'll get a hug, so maybe I'll just go back to my hour-long presentation. We'll see if it works. At least I can see the slides, so even if you guys can't, I can hopefully say something intelligent. I'm going to start off by acknowledging my team. And also, apparently I have a conflict of interest because my life partner works for a medical technology company, but I assure you I don't use mass specs or liquid chromatographs in my own ethics research. So I'm going to start off with a case, which I'm just going to kind of describe for you. So it's the case of Ms. R, who is a patient who's admitted to the hospital. She is critically ill. After a couple of days, she becomes septic and then develops cardiac arrest. Three days later, she is unresponsive and the medical ICU team sits down with her family to talk about whether to withdraw the ventilator. The family says we won't give up. We are praying for a miracle. Have any of you guys encountered a case like that? Okay, so this is one of the things that I've been very interested in, is just how family members incorporate religious and spiritual beliefs into their decision-making and how we as clinicians should respond to those. So what I'm going to do today is talk a little bit about the research that already exists on the association of religion and end-of-life preferences. I'm going to talk briefly about some research we've done exploring patient and surrogate preferences. Because most of our patients were Christian, I'll talk a little bit about Judeo-Christian perspectives on death and dying and propose a theoretical model in next steps. So I'd say that there's been a growing body of research that explores the impact of religion on preferences for end-of-life care. And I'll just give you a few example studies. One study by Van Nessetal found that patients who endorse growing closer to God during illness want more aggressive care. They did look at other variables such as religious attendance, identity, and spiritual growth and found that these did not impact desires for aggressive care. So it really depends on which aspect of religious experience you look at. Patients with higher level of religious practice are more likely to think DNR is immoral. Those who relate religion to a highly important one want more aggressive care. Finally, a study by Phelps that's been widely quoted that actually found that positive religious coping impacts aggressive care that's received at the end of life. So not just preferences, but actual care. I mean, as you know, there are a variety of dimensions of religious experience that have been explored, mostly one at a time, although that first study up there does look at several dimensions. So overall, there's kind of this general association with religiosity and preferences for aggressive care. So as many of you know, my own work has been motivated by the idea that making decisions for others differs in fundamental ways for making decisions for oneself. And so it's worth looking at whether there's any research out there about the surrogate situation. And actually, there's very little. One study that was done of the general public and published in a surgery journal found that over 50% of individuals believe that divine intervention could save a family member from a major trauma when physicians have determined care is futile. Another study of surrogates found that 64% expressed reluctance to believe physicians' futility predictions, and one of the things they cited was divine intervention. In fact, surrogates' prognostic estimates are not just what their doctors tell them, but things like optimism, intuition, and faith. So as you can see, there's not very much literature about this relationship. But what I think is important is that overall, there's evidence that patients and families who are more religious tend to want more aggressive care at the end of life if you account for the fact that there are various measures and definitions of religion and limited data for surrogates. As I'm sure many of you have experienced sometimes very complicated ideas and medical ethics get translated into very simplistic generalizations for both the general public and I think for practicing physicians. And I'm afraid that the message that's gotten out there as a result of this research is that religious people want aggressive care at the end of life. And I think that's problematic, and I think sometimes when we confront a family who says I'm expecting a miracle, don't stop, or we're going to continue aggressive care because of faith in God, we tend to end the conversation. It's like a block. We feel like there's nothing we can do. And I want to explore the possibility that there's a lot more going on there. So when you look a little deeper at this research, I'm going to start with a study by Balboni that surveyed patients that about 26% of all patients would want all members to extend life even if they were going to die in a few days anyway. And patients who expressed religious was more important to them were more likely to want all these measures with an odds ratio of 1.96. Now that seems like a potentially challenging situation for those of us in medical care who think that quality end of life care often can involve a focus on comfort. But the bottom line is that 74% of patients did not want these measures. And with an odds ratio of 1.2, it still has to be less than 50% who actually wanted a palliative approach to end of life care. Another study that I think has sometimes been misinterpreted as the Phelps study, which found, again, that patients with high religious coping tend to want more aggressive care. But if you look more specifically at the numbers, for example, you see that even of the high religious copers, only 13.6% received intensive life prolonging care at the end of life. And 71% of those patients received hospice at the end of life. So I think the conclusion from this should be that the majority of individuals, religious and non-religious, but here the majority of religious individuals want and receive comfort and hospice care at the end of life. And I think that's a very important conclusion for all of us to understand as we approach patients who are highly religious with questions of end of life care. So I want to talk now about some research that I've done over the years with both patients and surrogate decision makers about how they understand decision making. And I just love what Lynn has introduced us to of the concept of looking at how families and patients, ordinary people, kind of understand conflicts, maybe philosophical or religious ideas. I think that's incredibly important. So when I was in Atlanta, we interviewed a series of patients about their own preferences of end of life care. And one of the things I found is that in Atlanta, particularly where I was in an urban public hospital, religious talk was very prominent. In fact, I would say that there was kind of a social response bias and favor of it. And so even though we didn't particularly ask about religion, we got a tremendous amount of information about it. So patients reflected a variety of perspectives on this, some of which involved religious justifications for an acceptance of death. As this one said, I don't actually fear death as I did in the past because I know it's a deliverance. Death is a deliverance. Like this world outside of where we live in, it's about time for me to go somewhere else on another journey. So in this case, there are religious perspectives invited in acceptance of death. But in contrast, we found some who rejected death or wanted a long life and invoked religious reasons for this.  I'm 74 now. I want to get that age again. 74 again. We'll see. Ain't nobody want to die. You know nobody want to die. I can't understand people wanting to die. I want to live as long as the good Lord lets me live and you do too. So in this case, the patient was both reflecting her desire to live a long life in the hope that she did, but also a reflection that this was ultimately in God's hands and not in her own hands. More recently in Indiana, we've interviewed surrogate decision makers about their perspectives on death and dying. And so we've done a series of interviews and looked for similar themes among surrogates. And again, we find mixed perspectives. We find an acceptance of death. For example, a daughter making a decision for her mother who said, I feel that will be the best decision for her. This is about a DNR order. And if her heart were to stop beating, I feel like God was calling her home. In contrast, we find evidence of patients who struggle against death. A patient who hoped for a cure, or a family member who hoped for a cure for her sister. I just keep faith in God that she's going to be all right. In another situation in which two family members were asked about whether to write a DNR order for their parent. And the daughter who we were interviewing who was opposed to the DNR order challenged her sister saying don't you believe in miracles. As a reason why a DNR order should not be agreed to. So what we find in both our interviews with patients and surrogates is a tension between acceptance of death and struggle against death and hope for a cure. And some of the themes we found include of belief in the inherent value of life, hope for a miracle, the struggle, the heroism of the struggle against death, and then in contrast acceptance of death as God's will.  And I'll talk about a couple of these in greater depth. So there's a tremendous emphasis on the value of life in many world religions, probably all. And I'm going to talk more specifically about the Judeo-Christian tradition and particularly Christianity because that's where the majority of the patients in our studies were from. So there's a belief that life is valuable. Life was a creation of God. This is present throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. In a couple of years ago, I remember a wonderful talk here by Dan Salmacy in which he talked about the fact that the value of life is different. The value of life is infinite and it's different from other concepts like the length of life. I can't possibly do justice for it. But the bottom line is that this is a complex concept and yet for some of our patients it leads to a belief that they must struggle against death. It's perceived as heroic. It's perceived as an expression of their faith. And while it's true throughout our population of patients, we may have found it's particularly true for African-Americans. And Lavera Crawley has made the observation that in the African-American community such personal struggle takes on an air of dignity and nobility which resonates with broader social and political struggles to ensure equality or correct injustice. So an important theme for many of our patients. Another theme that pervaded our interviews and is certainly present throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition is that the belief in the miracles are possible. From Moses parting the waters to the miracles of Jesus this is an incredibly important belief and for many people keeping their faith means hoping for a miracle. And for some of them, they articulate that hoping for a miracle means we as physicians cannot take away aggressive medical treatment. However, within Christianity certainly death and the afterlife are central elements of theology based on the notion of the death of the body as the beginning of eternal life. And this also promotes a sense of acceptance that many of our patients voice throughout the interviews. Now I think these themes are central and I think specific prohibitions against restricting medical care or insisting on medical care are actually much rarer. So for example, some Orthodox Jews believe about the breath and the importance of the breath in life. Jehovah's Witnesses actually may refuse bread products and there are Catholic prohibitions against withdrawal of artificial nutrition in the PBS although it's possible that that's really because the PBS is not regarded as a terminal disease but rather as a state of profound disability. So the third and probably most important conclusion I want to draw for this is that the themes of acceptance of death and struggle against death are both important concepts for religious patients and surrogates. Both are perceived to be consistent with strong faith and so I want most of all to question the notion that a struggle against death and a desire for aggressive life prolonging therapy is more consistent with faith than the opposite. I think this is important both in how we approach our patients when religious themes come up in surrogate decision making or even in decision making and I also open some doors for research which I'm going to talk about a little bit next. How am I doing on time? Two minutes. Okay, alright, that's about right. So the questions I want to ask are when do the themes of acceptance versus struggle emerge and I'm particularly interested in the case of surrogate decision making. So there are two things I want to propose. One is that these may vary based on the religious dimension that is being measured. Religion, of course experience is a multi-dimensional concept. There are patients who may be high in intrinsic religiosity, who may be low in religious activity and most of the studies have actually just looked at one of these and not looked at how they fit together. So to give you an example, Pargament has developed the concept of religious coping in order to understand how individuals are making the use of religion to understand and deal with stressors. Including methods of coping to gain control, where some people might take a collaborative approach. In an item from one of the surveys is I try to put my plans into action together with God. Others may plead for direct intercession by praying for a miracle, for example and those may lead to very different hopes and very different desires with respect to what to do. In contrast, religious orthodoxy, confirmation to specific creeds or doctrines. So there's a scale for this to be religion specific because of the specificity of creeds. I believe one must accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior to be saved from sin. So I propose that it is important to measure not just one dimension of religious experience, but many when we're looking at how they impact these desires for aggressive care and comfort care and that we may find differences depending on the religious dimension that we measure. But second and probably and of course these are moderated or impacted by a variety of other issue demographic factors. But probably more important for the medical setting is I believe that these when these themes of acceptance and struggle emerge may vary based on other modifiable factors. Some of which are religious and spiritual and some of which are non-religious. And I'll just give you an example of trust. This is an area where there hasn't been a lot of research, although maybe tiny signals in some studies. But I was presenting this as a work in progress to colleagues and a neonatal specialist in the room who I will tell you off the bat as an atheist said to me this is so true. I sit down with my family and they talk about religion and then I've established trust and God leaves the room. Now I thought that was really interesting and of course it shows her bias. But I think her perspective was that patients and family members are often invoking their religious talk when they do not trust us. And I want to propose that honoring their religious experience and respecting them as individuals may in fact allow the conversation to move forward and religion may no longer serve as a potential barrier to making good decisions. So what I propose is that in addition to the dimensions of religion these other dimensions such as health literacy communication trust and spiritual support actually pay a tremendous impact on how this relationship plays out and I want to study this in a more elaborate or depth. So the next steps are that we're conducting a prospective study of 350 surrogates who are interviewed during hospitalization when they're actively making a decision for a seriously older adult. We're measuring these dimensions of religious experience and then also these things that I think may impact the relationship either through mediation or moderation. And then doing a six month follow up where we actually look at the care patients received at the end of life.  So the point of all this, it's nice to characterize these relationships and have a wonderful model but what I truly hope is that our decisions can be enriched by understanding the many factors that go into surrogate decision makers religious expressions during decision making and that religion should not be a barrier to good decisions about end of life care that in fact if we can establish trust, provide spiritual support and good communication it is possible that we'll be able to move through these conversations and provide effective end of life care when we need to. Thank you very much.


as you know the question is not whether we will have another pandemic in the future but when and one of the factors that we may well push us towards an imminent new pandemic are actually is the impact on climate and health so I'm really grateful to Honourable Minister Barakat to be with us today and talk us to us about climate and health and of course ahead of the COP28 that will be held here in the UAE. Minister thank you very much. Thank you very much and good morning everybody. One of our senior colleagues in the global health world Peter Piot was the first one of the first to say you cannot consider pandemic preparedness without taking into consideration climate and and how true that is and if you allow me I'll just share with you some slides to highlight the connection between climate and health. The WHO has stated that climate is the biggest challenge to health of the 21st century and if you look at a recent report of the IPCC the intergovernmental panel on climate change they say that under a high emission scenario we're expecting 9 million deaths every year by the end of the century just on climate reasons alone. If countries implement the Paris Agreement by the year 2050 we could be saving one million lives every year just from pollution alone and of course there's a financial toll in that you know by the end of this decade by the year 2030 we're looking at a cost of climate impacts on health of between two to four billion dollars every year. So climate does a lot of things that impact human health and you will have seen tragic news of flooding heatwaves of course zoonoses which means the jump of an infection a disease from an animal to humans and that's what triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. Vector-borne diseases vectors are essentially organisms that carry other organisms that cause disease in humans for instance mosquitoes and I'll talk more on mosquitoes in a minute and other things that affect what we call non-communicable disease like mental mental health. So climate change has a real impact on human health and we need to take this very seriously. I'm just going to talk a little on mosquitoes and forgive me this is not a nice topic but just to tell you there are many mosquitoes in the world and but these are three of the nastiest on the screen the one on your on the left Anopheles carries malaria the one in the middle IDs carries dengue and the one on the right Qlex carries West Nile fever these are all nasty diseases many of and many scenarios especially with children will cause death. The WHO has stated that climate change is causing a surge in mosquito related illnesses particularly malaria and dengue and we believe it's related to warmer temperatures redistribution of water human activity so many things are related to climate are causing a surge on these illnesses and this is the burden of malaria. We're talking about children under the age of five dying from cerebral malaria entirely preventable and this tragic scenario happens over and over again we're talking about you know of the 619,000 deaths from malaria in the year 2021 about 80% were for children under the age of five that's half a million children so half a million children every year and that's going that's expected to rise these children are dying from an entirely preventable disease. To add to this another of the mosquitoes that's called Stafensi Anopheles Stafensi having been largely confined to South Asia is now entering Africa because of warmer temperatures and other things and the problem with this particular mosquito vector so this Stafensi carries malaria the problem with this one is it actually likes to bite during the daytime so a big mainstay of managing malaria in the sub-Saharan region has been giving children bed nets that are covered in insecticides the problem with this mosquito is it bites during the day and if it bites during the daytime the bed nets are mostly ineffective you know you're not you don't even it's no point protecting them at night when the biting is also happening in the daytime and the other worrying thing about this mosquito is that it seems to be resistant to most of the insecticides particularly the ones used in indoor room spraying so this is of a concern. Anopheles has a cousin it's called ID's we saw it in the slide of the mosquitoes this mosquito carries dengue and climate change has accelerated the invasion of this mosquito into warmer into into other other climates that are not prepared for it it carries dengue and dengue is now spread in many many countries and the WHO has said that it's actually present in almost every in in every WHO region it will soon be endemic in the United States and many countries in Europe and the the number of people that are predisposed to it are almost half the numbers of people in the world the numbers of people who who have been modelled to have quoted last year were 390 million of whom just under a hundred million were symptomatic and and the number of deaths are in the thousands so this is what we're talking about when when we are worried about climate change moving on to other non vector issues like air pollution we know that over 90% of people breathe unhealthy levels of of air a senior surgeon and in North India in New Delhi is well known to speak about these topics and he said that whereas in the 80s 90% of his patients with with lung cancer were smokers he's saying that now half of them are non smokers and off those a fifth are actually between the ages are under the age of 50 so we we really need to take stock of this and start acting and this is where cop 28 comes in for the first time a cop is hosting a dedicated day for climb for health issues brought on by climate change and that day will be on the 3rd of December while cop is being hosted here in the United Arab Emirates in Dubai and and what cop 20 on on that day what we hope will happen is that it will be a watershed moment for climate and health where we will raise the issues off of the seriousness of climate on health issues lobby support and hopefully raise the issue of health on the political agenda there will be the first ever ministerial on climate and health we will be discussing public health issues how to build systems health systems that are strong enough to to deal with the climate changes and and also will address how to do this in a low carbon way so there's no point building hospitals that will generate more carbon and we're talking about looking at ways of doing it in a low carbon method of course climate change disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in the world women children ethnic minorities poor communities migrants or displaced people other populations and those with underlying health conditions and we have to address how to help developing countries deal deal with this problem this is what health systems strengthening look looks like we won't go through all the topics but it's a it's a it's a holistic approach you can't just take one element and say this is what a strong health system will look like you need all the elements and I will always emphasize leadership and governance so number one is a very important component of a country's response to threats and of course the last one is financing you can't do any of this without dedicated financing for dealing with these with the adaptation on the health day in COP 28 we are hope hoping to proceed with endorsement for a declaration on climate and health this declaration was announced during the World Health Summit in Berlin on the 17th of October this year and we're hoping that before the start of COP we would have had many countries endorse it and the declaration essentially is split into three parts it talks about adaptation the importance of adaptation to deal with climate health issues it talks about increasing financing because you know we cannot it isn't a matter of taking more money from the climate budget this needs to find its own source of funding and then it also talks about the importance of mainstreaming health in all the all the climate agendas and on my last note what is the legacy of COP 28 when it comes to health at the end of the day it's trying to save as many lives as we can by urgent catalytic action and including novel mechanisms for for looking at response so in summary COP 28 will be a call for action for the first time for climate and health issues thank you thank you very much honorable minister and congratulations to the for this initiative on bringing health into the COP 28 a major challenge for for the future and pandemic preparedness


permanent daylight savings time. The law now passed through US Senate, still not passed through the House. It is getting some pushback, but if it is adopted then Canada is sure to follow. So what is this all about? In some ways it seems like a very, very small thing. We're changing the clock by an hour. So it's really in some ways insignificant, yet I find it very symbolic of the way that we interact with nature. Now when we look at time, since the beginning of time you could say since long before anything that we know. Clearly every day the sun goes up and then the sun comes down. And there's been many different ways to count time and I find it all fascinating different kinds of time reckoning, but I won't go into all that. One of the most popular ways since ancient times is to have 12 hours of the day and 12 hours of the night. And then what took over as the popular system is to have have everything start at midnight. So you have 12 hours of the sun rising and then 12 hours of the sun going down. And then in modern times we had standard time where you know because if you base everything on the sun you know every time you move east or west you get a different time. So in order to get things a bit more more regular you could have a large area sharing the same time so you don't have to change your clocks every time you go to another town. Then we had standard time zones and some of them can get pretty wacky when we start to warp the boundaries so that they're really stretched. But for the most part you're never going to be much more than half an hour off whatever the true local noon is in your area. So at 12 o'clock that's considered to be the end of the morning. The sun is at its highest point and 12 o'clock at night that's midnight the lowest point of the evening and then the sun starts coming back. But then someone had a clever idea that we could actually pretend that the time is different than what it is. We could actually just change the clocks completely arbitrarily. The sun isn't changing still doing the same thing but we can when it's actually 12 o'clock we can pretend it's one o'clock. And the idea being that people don't like to wake up at 5 a.m. and so they're sleeping through all that beautiful sunshine in the summer so if we tell them at 6 a.m. maybe they're more likely to wake up or at least a little bit earlier than they would have. And at night people don't like to go to sleep at 9 p.m. most people. So what if you tell them it's 10 p.m. oh well then it seems a little more reasonable. So the entire idea of daylight savings time is all based on pretending. Pretending that the time is something different than it is. So this has been happening for around a century now and people really get tired of this whole changing the clocks it adds a whole new level of complexity having to change your clocks twice a year and then when you're dealing with multiple time zones dealing with people around the world it adds a whole new layer of confusion because the the dates of the daylight savings change can be different and so that causes the time zone different changes to be different and so leads to a lot of confusion of dealing with times. And so for all the clear reasons why nobody likes to do this twice a year clock change and it seems completely unnecessary now there is a strong movement to get rid of it. But then I was surprised to learn that we're not getting rid of it they're actually suggesting that we keep it permanently in place permanent DST and the idea well you know maybe we'll get people to use less energy because they can be out during the sunshine and you know maybe they'll be out later at night and do more shopping or something. So I mean the arguments for why we should have permanent seem to be pretty dubious but the idea is now that we're simply going to pretend permanently that when the clock says 12 the clock says 12 well it's actually 11 o'clock in the sky and so we're actually counting 12 we're counting 12 hours from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. and then as the Sun mostly goes up and then 12 hours from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. as the Sun mostly goes down. So I spent five minutes talking about this it seems completely insignificant and it really doesn't matter and so that's certainly true but it seems to me very symbolic because we are pretending that that the time is different than what it is. It's one level of disconnection from nature and I know it's just a number 12 o'clock is just a number but if we have 12 hours counting up the Sun's going up 12 hours counting down the Sun's going down that in some very very small way connects us to the natural environment around around us what's actually happening in the sky. We see when it's 12 o'clock every all the a.m. hours the Sun's going up all the p.m. hours the Sun's going down roughly within the you know a few minutes off because of our time zones and standard time but basically we have that connection a.m. is Sun going up p.m. is Sun going down and it just gives that very simple bit of connection to what's actually happening in the sky. But when we pretend that 12 is one well now the Sun is actually at its peak at 1 p.m. and so you know we sometimes call 12 noon and 12 at night midnight but now 1 p.m. would be noon and then 1 a.m. would be midnight. So why do why do we think it's okay to simply pretend what's happening in the sky simply to you know declare that nature is something other than it is. It seems to be it could be seen as an act of arrogance on the part of human society of just saying that we can redefine nature to be whatever we want it to be or simply an expression of this disconnection that it actually doesn't matter because we are so disconnected from the natural environment that it really doesn't matter what time we say it is. Those electric lights are going to be on and you know it's only one hour difference so why not why not just say it's whatever time we feel like it being. So once again very small point but I feel like it's a sign of how disconnected that we can easily become from nature and I wonder what other ways has this been happening where we've been sort of redefining away nature and sort of pretending that we can sort of living in an imaginary world in a way where we can define things to be what they want what we want them to be and maybe this is actually good because you know it's certainly not ideal to be living in a pure state of nature and it's wonderful to have walls and roofs and wonderful systems to live comfortably and all that could be argued as being disconnected from nature. I'm inside a room right now with walls and a very nice roof which is keeping keeping the snow off and that could be seen as being disconnected from nature but I'm okay with it. So is this another example of it just being okay to kind of create this imaginary environment for ourselves or is this just one little step too far in the direction of moving away from the nature around us. So I'd be curious to hear what you think about it.


It's time for the Lawn Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a presentation of the Lawn Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Lawn Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Lawn Jean Chronoscope? Edward P. Morgan and Larry Lusser, both of the CBS television news staff. Our distinguished guest for this evening is the Honorable Robert Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs. Mr. Secretary, if Larry Lusser and I, during the course of the discussion, refer to you as Mr. Ambassador, instead of Mr. Secretary, perhaps we can be pardoned, because we've both known you so much more recently as Ambassador, first to in North Africa, and then Germany, and most recently Japan. Now, with your position as Assistant Secretary in charge of United Nations Affairs, you're on the spot with us tonight, on the issue of the Korean conference. Sir, just a few nights ago, Sir Gladwin Jeb, the permanent British delegate to the United Nations, was sitting where you're sitting now, and he explained for us, lucidly, the British position as to why they were backing India for the Korean conference. I think it might be helpful if you, in your capacity, could explain the American position against India in this conference for Korea. Thank you very much, Ed and Larry. I just want to say a word, tell you how happy I am to be with you after all these years. I hope that you won't be using any titles to me at all.  But the question you ask is a very pertinent one, and I'm very happy over this opportunity to state briefly the American position on it. We're very disturbed and unhappy over the notion that an impression has been created that the United States is opposing India as such. That is not at all the position. We, after, as you know, long months of effort and paying a very high price, obtained an armistice agreement in Korea. Part of that agreement lays down the terms of reference for a political conference, which is to be held 90 days after the effective date of that agreement. The terms of reference limit the conference to the government's concern and to representatives of both sides. And in addition, the preamble of the armistice agreement relates to the belligerence. Now, India, by its own statements throughout in its conduct, throughout the period of hostilities, has earned the right of definition as a neutral in this affair. It is not a member of either side to the conflict and was not a belligerent, although it contributed an ambulance unit to the service in Korea. Therefore, and in addition to the fact that India agreed to act as the chairman of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, again stamping itself as a neutral, clearly brings it without the definition. We have no other choice, and it is without any thought of animus or opposition to India as such that we are forced to the position that India is not entitled and should not participate in the political conference. Ambassador, the Cuban delegate of the United Nations has said in a speech that if India participates in this impending Korean peace conference, then Sigmund Rhee is likely to walk out. Do you think that's a real danger or is that part of psychological warfare? Well, I don't think it's psychological warfare at all. Mr. Sigmund Rhee has very firm and ardent convictions on this subject and is against the participation of India. Obviously, a political conference dealing with the Korean question without the participation of the representative of the Republic of Korea would be null and void, and we cannot think in those terms. As you know, India has never recognized the Republic of Korea. There are no diplomatic relations between the two countries, and there is strong sentiment, perhaps on both sides. I'd like to explore this position of India just a little further if we could, Mr. Secretary, using the title. I've run across an editorial in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, which makes this point the desire of British and French UN delegates that there should be a multi-sided genuine peace conference rather than a mere continuance of haggling between two parties is not only understandable but right-minded. And then it goes on to say, however, that the trouble is that to hold such an all-in conference once would throw together questions which ought not to be considered together, namely withdrawal of Chinese aggressor troops and acceptance of Red China as member of the UN. Now, if you'll bear with me just a little bit, I sound as if I were a politician. They make this point. The United States delegation at the UN ought to make unmistakably clear that it does not oppose the holding of two conferences and that it would even welcome the presence of India as a mediator in the second. Would you care to comment on that, sir, to emphasize your first point? Yes, Ed. I think that's very pertinent to the question. We are entirely sympathetic to the notion that, eventually, there may be another political conference dealing with the larger far eastern situation. The present conference is to deal with two main items which are mentioned in the Arms Disagreement. One is the settlement of the Korean question and the other is the withdrawal of foreign forces from Korea. There's an additional word in that paragraph, et cetera. We presume that is a word added by the Communist representative at Panmunjom. We presume that that relates to the two items I just mentioned. But this conference is not to deal with the larger issues in the far east. It is to deal with a specific problem of Korea. And we feel that naturally India as a great Asiatic power, a friendly nation with whom we want to cooperate in every way in international matters should, of course, be a member of any larger political conference dealing with far eastern affairs generally in which she has a very direct and germane interest. Mr. Murphy, speaking of India as a great Asiatic power, what about Japan? Ambassador there very recently, Japan is only 100 miles away from Korea. Do you think it should have any role in the Korean conference? Or a far east settlement for that matter? Of course Japan is very interested in what happens in Korea. I do not believe that Japanese leaders expect to participate in this particular conference. They know that they do not fall any more than India or Formosa does within the definition of paragraph 60 of the Arms Disagreement. And that is the structure on which we're operating. Well, actually what do we hope to achieve in this political conference which should be held sometime in October? Well, there are two major issues. One is the question of the future political structure in Korea as a whole, the question of unification of the country. We have now an artificial division established first by an agreement of military commanders after World War II on the 38th parallel and now the line of demarcation resulting from the recent hostilities. The line is an arbitrary one. It has no relation to the basic political and economic factors in the country. Obviously at some time the country should and must be unified and we stand for the unification of Korea on a democratic and representative basis and we hope that at least this conference will make progress to that end if not accomplished. Mr. Murphy, if the conference doesn't go the way we want it to go and I'm trying to make a distinction now between the present UN assembly meeting which sets up the rules, the ground rules so to speak, for the conference and the conference itself, if the conference itself later in the fall doesn't go the way we want it to go. Will we pull out and go our own way with South Korea? Well, we have an understanding with the President of the Republic of Korea that if after a period of 90 days we come to the conclusion that the conference is being used for subversive purposes, for sabotage we will then reconsider our position and we maintain that at that point we shall have full liberty of action to determine what our future course shall be. We have not committed ourselves in any way to taking any specific action at that time except to review the situation and act accordingly. Mr. Murphy, the resolution which we concur on in the General Assembly says that no states shall be bound by the decisions of the conference unless they agree with those decisions. Do you think that means that we will go it alone with the ROK Republic or will we go to this political conference bound by certain UN requirements? Well Larry, I think it's customary in conferences of this character for the individual government to maintain an independence of action. We are not going to the conference as a member of a team or a delegation responsive to instructions as we will say the individual members of a national delegation receive their instructions from their government. That won't be the situation in this case. The group will be made up of independent governments responsive to their own governmental organizations. Mr. Secretary, a final question and a complete change of pace after this most interesting expose of our position. As we've said earlier, you have been all around the periphery of the Soviet Empire and in many other parts of the world and are now back in the department. You've watched our men of the Foreign Service and in the State Department operate. You are conscious of the fact that they have been severely criticized as a body. What is your considered judgment as to their caliber? Well Ed, I'm very grateful to you for an opportunity to say just a word. It'll have to be just a word, unfortunately. I'm naturally a prejudice witness, but I do wish to say that as a result of 32 years of association with the American Foreign Service and the Department of State, I am convinced and I think I know that the vast mass of Americans who are in the Department of State and the American Foreign Service consist of loyal and devoted public servants. Thank you very much. The opinions that you've heard our speakers express tonight have been entirely their own. The editorial board for this edition of the Laun Jean Chronoscope was Edward P. Morgan and Larry Lusser, both of the CBS television news staff. Our distinguished guest was the Honorable Robert Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs. If you're contemplating the purchase of a very fine watch, it would be profitable to compare the facts about Laun Jean watches with the fact you have about any other watch. And you'll find that the facts about Laun Jean are convincing proof of surpassing excellence, factual evidence that in a Laun Jean watch you have one of the world's very finest watches. 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We invite you to join us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening at this same time for the Laun Jean Chronoscope, the television journal of the important issues of the hour, broadcast on behalf of Laun Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner Distinguished Companion Watch to the world-honored Laun Jean. This is Frank Knight reminding you that Laun Jean and Wittner watches are sold and serviced from coast to coast by more than 4,000 leading jewelers who proudly display this emblem, Agency for Laun Jean Wittner Watches. Saturday nights watch the Medallion Theater on the CBS television network.