Undeceptions with John Dickson

Download the transcript for this episode here.

COMPETITION!
We’re celebrating our 500,000th download this month - half a million! And so, with the help of our major sponsor, Zondervan, we are giving away a book pack of five of Zondervan’s newest titles. We’ll throw in a copy of my new book Bullies and Saints AND an Undeceptions T-Shirt.

To WIN, all you have to do is leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (what used to be called iTunes), take a pic of the review and send it to us. Producer Kaley will pick the best-written review on October 25 (and I mean ‘best-written’ not necessarily most glowing). So be quick, you’ve got two weeks! 

LINKS

• Get to know our guest, Professor Xi Lian. 
• Read Professor Lian's book, Blood Letters: The untold story of Lin Zhao, a martyr in Mao's China.
• You might also like to seek out Professor Lian's other relevant books Redeemed by Fire: The rise of popular Christianity in modern China and also The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932.
• Meet our other guest I'Ching Thomas. 
• Read I'Ching Thomas' book, Jesus The Path to Human Flourishing : The Gospel for the Cultural Chinese
• Read more about Daoism (or Taoism).
• Get a broader background on Chinese religion from National Geographic. 
• More on the All Souls celebrations around China.
• Dig deeper into the idea of 'Actionless Action' or 'Wu Wei' here.
• Read the Analects of Confucius.
• Find out more about Christianity in communist China in this article from The Gospel Coalition.
• Winfried Corduan's book Neighbouring  Faiths is referenced by I'Ching Thomas about polytheism vs monotheism (amongst other things).
• Read more about Christianity in China from this article from 2020 in The Economist. 
• And this from Time about the imprisonment of a pastor Wang Yi (who led one of China's most well-known underground churches).
• Here's more about the 'sinicization of religion' in China from the Lausanne Movement.
• Read this article from the New York Times about China's 12 core socialist values.
• Christianity's growth in China is hard to predict, but Professor Fenggang Yang from Purdue University has given it a crack, estimating that China will become the largest Christian country in the world by 2030.

COMPETITION!

We’re celebrating our 500,000th download this month - half a million! And so, with the help of our major sponsor, Zondervan, we are giving away a book pack of five of Zondervan’s newest titles. We’ll throw in a copy of my new book Bullies and Saints AND an Undeceptions T-Shirt. 

To WIN, all you have to do is leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (what used to be called iTunes), take a pic of the review and send it to Producer Kaley at [email protected]. We'll pick the best-written review on October 25 (and I mean ‘best-written’ not necessarily most glowing). So be quick, you’ve got two weeks! 

LINKS

• Read the CNN report about the happiest country in the world for 2021.
• Watch the full report from VICE News on whether Finland is actually  that happy. This one's from 2019 - Finland has been the happiest country in the world for four years running.
• Read a little more from 20th Century philosopher Bertrand Russell on the conquest of happiness from Brain Pickings (one of those websites you'll get lost in ... see you next Tuesday).
• Meet our guest, Miroslav Volf.
  • Read more about one his courses at Yale, 'Christ and the Good Life' here.
  • And check out the centre he helped set up, the Yale Centre of Faith and Culture
• Watch this video chat between Volf and his teacher, Jürgen Moltmann (who John calls "one of the great theologians of the 20th Century)
• Read Flourishing by Miroslav Volf.
• Read this New York Times article, 'The other side of languishing is flourishing. Here's how to get there.'
• Languishing, by the way, is the emotion that the NYT reckons may just be the dominant emotion of 2021. Good thing you've listened to this episode, then.
• If you want to read more about Asceticism, go here.
• Other Undeceptions episodes mentioned in this ep are: 
  • Everyday Sacred (Ep 47), where we talk to Andrew Wilson and Tish Harrison Warren about finding God in "stuff". 
  • Guilty Conscience  (Ep 39), where we speak to Tyler VanderWeele towards the end about the health benefits of forgiveness.
  • Mental Health (Ep 38), where we speak to Tyler VanderWeele on the impact of religious communities on mental health.
  • Social Capital (Ep 5), where we to Andrew Leigh about the benefits of religious communities not just on individuals but society more generally.
• More on Francis of Assisi here. Or read his writings for yourself, here.
• The Michel Onfray quote, "Religions' glorification of a fictional beyond prevents full enjoyment of the real here below. They establish death on earth for the sake of eternity in heaven and seek to promote self hatred to the detriment of the body" is from The Atheist Manifesto. 
• More on Dionysus, here.
• Meet our next guest, Tyler VanderWeele.
  • Tyler heads up Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program.
  • His latest book was published in 2021, called Measuring Well-Being
  • You can find most of Tyler's research on religion, health and flourishing here.
• For an introduction on Aristotle, the Oxford Very Short Introduction series is good.
• Read (or re-read) Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Author and highly sought-after speaker Sam Allberry talks us through 'intersectionality' and ponders the wisdom and boundaries of this way of bestowing moral authority.

"Just as those who stand at an intersection can see in more directions than those who don't, so too - according to this thinking - those at the intersection of multiple minority and victim groups have more insight to bring to society." 

Today is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a series of coordinated terrorist strikes in the US that killed almost 3000 people and changed the world forever.  

Our guest for this single, Hans Kunnen, was one of several Australians in New York that day and has told his story many times over the last 20 years. But what struck us about his story was not how close he was to the action, or how he described the flames, the smoke, the hurtling bodies.

It is how he talks about the kindness of a stranger - the hope amidst the chaos of what was the most traumatic day of his life.

On the anniversary of the France's Reign of Terror, John asks where we got the idea that three centuries of the Spanish Inquisition represented the height of human cruelty.

In any objective history of human violence it would hardly rate a mention, especially when it stands alongside the terrors of the French Revolution.

** We’re talking about abortion in this episode, and occasionally we mention sexual abuse and violence. Nothing graphic, we promise. But some listeners may find what follows distressing. Be safe. **

We're weighing up the arguments of the Pro Choice and Pro Life movements. Perhaps we can convince you that the case against abortion - the pro-life case - isn’t as dumb and mean as it's often portrayed to be, and nor does it depend on religious dogma.

This episode is sponsored by Zondervan's new book The Global Church: The First Eight Centuries by Donald Fairbairn.

LINKS

• Read Judith Jarvis Johnson's groundbreaking article about abortion, where she offered the violinist thought experiment as a way to illustrate bodily autonomy: A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Autumn, 1971), pp 47-66. 
• Get to know our guest, Professor Margaret Somerville.
  • Read Somerville's book that first introduced her to John, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit
• Say hi to our guest, Dr Emma Wood.
• Here's some more info on Professor Michael Tooley, Emma mentions as we speak with her. He wrote a very influential book called Abortion and Infanticide in the 1980s, where he argues that an entity can't possess a right to life unless it has the capacity to desire its continued existence. 
• Here's the article called 'Reasons why women have induced abortions: a synthesis of findings from 14 countries', published in the journal, Contraception, in 2017.
• And here are the statistics on numbers of abortions worldwide, from the Guttmacher Institute
• Here's some more on Professor Peter Singer's argument in favour of abortion:
  "When a woman has an abortion, the fetus is alive, and it is undoubtedly human – in the sense that it is a member of the species homo sapiens. It isn't a dog or a chimpanzee ... But mere membership of our species doesn't settle the moral issue of whether it is wrong to end a life. As long as the abortion is carried out at less than 20 weeks of gestation – as almost all abortions are – the brain of the fetus has not developed to the point of making consciousness possible." He goes on: "Admittedly, birth is in some ways an arbitrary place to draw the line at which killing the developing human life ceases to be permissible, and instead becomes murder ... A prematurely born infant may be less developed than a late-term fetus. But the criminal law needs clear dividing lines and, in normal circumstances, birth is the best we have."
• Here's Don Marquis' article that we spend a lot of time on in the second half of this episode: "Why Abortion is Immoral", in the Journal of Philosophy vol.86, no.4 (April 1989), pages 183-202: "The claim that the primary wrong-making feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children. Since the reason that is sufficient to explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of birth is a reason that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong."
• Here's a link to the full New York Times podcast 'The Argument' episode called 'Why the Anti-Abortion Side Will Lose, Even if it Wins' (if you don't have a NYT subscription, just look it up on your podcast app - it was published on April 14, 2021. 
• Watch Paxton Smith's speech from her Texas high school graduation here.
• Read this article in The Economist called 'Texas's new proposal shows why abortion law is a mess in America', re: the so-called Texan "heartbeat bill". 
• Here's more on the Mississippi case that will come before the Supreme Court and challenge Roe v Wade, from the New York Times.
• Producer Kaley found this article really interesting while researching this episode: The epic political battle over the legacy of the suffragettes, in The Atlantic which explores why both sides of the abortion debate see themselves as inheritors of the early women's movement. 
• Read the paper by economists Janet L Yellen and George Akerlof called 'An analysis of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the United States', Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1996, which carried this quote (among lots of other interesting insights): “By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.”

It's this season's Q&A episode, where listeners get a chance to ask John Dickson their burning questions. 

This episode is sponsored by Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible by Michael F Bird, a new book published by Zondervan.

QUESTIONS

1. Is all “music” at its best good or beautiful and at worst simply neutral; or can some “music” be “bad”, “evil” or “ungodly”? (Check out our two episodes on music from Season 3: Creation's Music and Discordant Religion).

2. Are there dangers in pop music we might steer our children away from for example? 

3. Regarding the 7 Deadly Sins: what's their origin and their accuracy in terms of Jesus' teaching and Christian living? 

4. If I have a conversation with a person who is sceptical of Christianity about the issue of race, I know they're going to bring up times when God ordered the wiping out of a city or a whole race (like when Israel wiped out the Amalekites in the book of 1 Samuel) as evidence that the Bible is racist. What should I say? (Check out our last episode of Season 3, Racist Church)

5. Why were the Jews God's chosen people? According to a lot of Christian principles (at least the ones I was brought up with) people who were alive before Jesus but didn't know the Hebrew god would go to Hell for not knowing him. So, why did God choose the Jews? Why condemn the people who lived at the same time, but in other parts of the world i.e the Australian Indigenous peoples?

6. A listener comment that we made into a question: I thought that you gave the Black Lives Matter organisation a very soft run in this podcast. It is not anywhere close to a Christ-centred organisation. Their website, until recently, noted that they were seeking to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement” and “foster a queer affirming network” and “do the work to dismantle cisgender privilege”. Did you go too soft on this whole ‘Black Lives Matter’ thing on the Racist Church episode?
    
7. Andrew says he listened to that version of ‘Little Things’ by Ziggy Ramo and Paul Kelly, which tells the tragic story that Australia’s colonisation starts with the Pope’s ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ in 1493, which Captain Cook later used to claim Australia as ‘Terra Nullius’ - nobody’s land. He says he’s looked into the doctrine of discovery and it’s just terrible. Why did the church make such a decree?
    
8. What do you think about the idea of machines being “persons.” (Check out our two episodes on artificial intelligence: Artificial Intelligence and Homo Deus)

9. There seems to be a slew of so-called prophets coming out of the woodwork in the USA prophesying all sorts of messages especially about the political scene. What does the Bible say about this?

10. How does one explain the Egyptian culture and the God's that they believed in and the afterlife they believed in? Was there any part of the God that we worship today? Was he the same god then? 

11. Could the God of the Jews be the God of other faiths? Could other Faiths be just interpreting the same God in different ways? I've heard stories of other cultures around the world who hadn't been exposed to Christianity having similar principles and creation stories to that of the Bible. Could God have been revealing himself to them?

12. I was listening recently to a podcast 'People I Mostly Admire' hosted by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt interviewing Magician Joshua Jay. They speculate whether Jesus' miracles were simply tricks and they claim tricksters at the time were doing exactly the same thing, obviously inferring Jesus was just kind of a trickster. I have never heard this suggestion before and I wondered if you could fact check it based on your study of Jesus' times. 

13. Did the 100 Pages episode mention the talking donkey? How do you tackle weird and wacky thing in the Bible?

14. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, Mark describes how the women went away and said nothing to anyone. But other gospels say they went away and told people. What can we say about this contradiction in the Bible? (Check out our episode Bible Mistakes for more)

15. The podcast often proudly cites non-believing references. I value this approach but is there a weight behind all these people who know scripture so well but don't believe? 

Just when you imagine Christians are all so heavenly minded they’re of no earthly use … the Bible itself brings us back to the earth. That’s where the action is. In fact, the final great scene of the Bible doesn’t have us all floating up to heaven. It has heaven coming down to earth. 

Down … to … earth. There’s a lot in that phrase. 

As far as religions go, Christianity is arguably the most down-to-earth perspective you could imagine. 

LINKS

• Winnie The Pooh loves honey in the books and every movie he's in, but particularly the 2011 version we quoted from. 
• This episode is sponsored by Zondervan's new book, Becoming All Things by Michelle Ami Reyes
• Meet our guests for this episode:
  • Andrew Wilson, London pastor and author of a new book called God Of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World
  • Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
• Read Psalm 19, which begins "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." 
• Read more about CS Lewis' "supposals" ... and check out The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe while you're at it. 
• Watch the heartwarming Old People's Home for Four Year Olds. This one's the Australian version. 
• Or, for a similar feeling, watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV. John Dickson called it "the best show since The West Wing" ... and that's high praise!
• Read more from James K.A. Smith on cultural liturgies.
• Read more about CS Lewis' conversion to Christianity.
• More reading, this time on Wendell Berry from the New Yorker.