YouTube censorship of comments on a conversation with Prof John Lennox
The memory holing of carefully considered observations made in relation to the covid era
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
I recommend this recent conversation with Prof John Lennox:
I have long been an admirer of Prof Lennox, and would particularly recommend his books Seven Days that Divide the World, Can Science Explain Everything? and 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity:
But I was less than impressed by part of what he said in response to the question at 55:39:
Interviewer: I’ve got one more quote for you… it’s back with Richard Dawkins. He… accuses Christians of having a morbid interest in sin. Do they, John?
Prof Lennox: Yes, that’s a quote from The God Delusion. “It’s sin sin sin sin…” He repeats it half a dozen times.
Well, some Christians of course do have a morbid interest in things like sin and other things, because they may be depressed, they may have various chemical things wrong with their brains and so on.
But to take it at face value, sin is a question at the heart of Christianity because it’s what wrecks life. And when I first read that I thought, “But Richard, if you’ve got no solution to sin and no answer to the problem of human guilt” …it is something that… if you take it seriously, you will take a morbid interest in it.
The wonderful thing about the Christian faith is that if we are prepared to respond to Christ and trust him and repent of our sin — in other words turn away from it — we will receive peace with God and the guilt is lifted. That is a spectacular experience that I’ve seen happen with so many people.
So that interest in sin… you might as well say during the covid period, “Why is everybody taking such a morbid interest in covid? Everywhere you go it’s covid, covid, covid…” Because it was a pandemic that was beginning to kill thousands of people and threaten millions. And thankfully we got a vaccine. [emphasis added]
Now I’m not going into all the ins and outs of that. But the point is, there is something… sin is a very real thing, and guilt is a very real thing, which is why so many people young people I meet are burdened with it and would love to have some sense of peace and identity. And that’s what connects all the fields tonight.
You see, I meet many people. I still talk to a lot of people. And the big issues these days I find are not so much God as Creator but… “Where can I find meaning and identity?” But they’re connected you see, because a person without a past has no identity. They’ve lost their identity, and the big thing in the past of this universe is that it was created by God, and you were created in God’s image which makes you of infinite value. That gives you value to start with. But then there’s this big problem of human sin, and so therefore I think that Christianity is right in calling attention to it…
I am broadly in agreement with what Lennox is saying about sin here. I have written in not dissimilar terms e.g. in this part of The Big Reveal.
I do take issue with what he says in relation to the covid era though.1 And I posted a comment below the YouTube video.
But when I checked back the following morning, what I had written had disappeared!
I posted essentially the same comment again:2
That comment also disappeared. Despite the use of the number 1 rather than the letter i.
I tried again, without the link to the Pfizer post-authorisation marketing report:
And that comment vanished too. Memory holed. Again.
The same thing happened when I removed the reference to Edward Dowd (whose data on life insurance I featured in this post).
And removing the last line about the comment having previously disappeared didn’t help either.
It seems that it is not my account that is at issue though. I was able to post this:
And this:
Although around 45 minutes later, and after I had logged out, the second and more recent comment had moved well down the list of contributions:
I am reminded of the fact that YouTube — which is owned by Google — is part of the Trusted News Initiative…
…that I featured in this post:
And also of the media programming to which the professional-managerial class is especially susceptible, which is discussed in this section of this post:
And I am, alas, not surprised by any of the above.
Dear Church Leaders most-read articles
Some posts can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered as the solution to a problem
The ONS data I mentioned is featured in these posts:
The link to the Pfizer post-authorisation marketing report can be found here.
Discussion of Edward Dowd’s analysis of US life insurance data is featured in this post:
I’d also like to ask Lennox if he is aware of any robust data supporting either the safety or effectiveness of the so-called covid vaccines, and how much he has actually looked into the matter. I wonder too what he would make of reports such as these documenting irregularities — some would say fraud — in the clinical trials. And I wonder if he is aware that pharma companies describe their “covid vaccines” as gene therapy products, as discussed in this section of this post:
