Watching - or trying to - the painful encounter between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan show, I was reminded how much I dislike ‘debates’.

I explain why in a long-read piece I wrote a while back called ‘No I Don’t Want To Take Part In Your Stupid Debate.’

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/no-i-dont-want-to-take-part-in-your

It’s a good read. But if you haven’t time, the short version goes something like this…

Debates are the enemy of truth. They pretend that they are trying to get to the bottom of this or that important issue. But really all they tell you is which side is better at rhetorical trickery. Or which side the moderator is secretly rooting for. Or which side the audience is already biased towards. Or which side is prepared to play dirtiest. They are about as fair a way as achieving justice as trial by combat. I think debates stink.

Douglas Murray is a model debater. I certainly wouldn’t go up against him myself. But that’s because he plays to win not to make friends. To this end, he is more than happy to bring a knife to a fist fight, which is what he did on the Joe Rogan show.

Murray’s mission, it was evident from the off, was to crush - and crush utterly - his opponent, a stand-up comedian and libertarian political commentator called Dave Smith. He did so using a technique which students of rhetorical fallacy will know as ‘Argument from Indignation.’ That is, Murray’s tone throughout was a mix of lofty disdain and of but-barely-restrained righteous outrage.

Here, or something like it, was the message we got from Murray: “I cannot believe that I find myself having to engage with someone so inferior to me both morally and intellectually. But I shall endeavour - sigh - to be as polite as I possibly can under these extreme circumstances, and will do so by feigning to agree with my worm-like opponent on the occasional trivial point, in order to make him feel slightly less uncomfortable and to show everyone else how reasonable and amenable and magnanimous I am.”

Or, if you want to visualise his approach, imagine someone in a periwig, knee breeches and a gold-embroidered, Louise XIV-style silken coat stooping reluctantly to deal with a turd that his King Charles spaniel has inconsiderately left on his host’s lawn in the middle of a croquet match, there being no staff immediately available to remove it.

It’s a devastatingly effective technique because it puts your opponent instantly on the back foot. Rather than being treated as an equal addressing in good faith a different but valid point of view your opponent is represented as someone whose position is so ugly and reprehensible or so ignorant and incoherent - or both - that it barely deserves the courtesy of consideration. In this instance, rather than being given space to make his case, Dave Smith had to defend himself against the imputations that, first, as a mere comedian he simply wasn’t qualified to be talking about grown up subjects like history and politics and that second, he was dangerously close to being an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier and a fan of Adolf Hitler/Vladimir Putin/Evil generally.

When you see someone whose opinions you dislike being given this brutal treatment it’s quite tempting to join the lynch mob and cheer on their destruction. But in this case, I felt that Dave Smith was making some perfectly reasonable points and that he deserved a more generous hearing.

I especially agreed with Smith on the subject of ‘experts.’ Murray’s argument appeared to be that we should defer to them on almost every occasion. For example, on the subject of Winston Churchill he declared that we should listen to professionals like ‘his current greatest living biographer’ Andrew Roberts and not to ‘guys [who] are not historians’ like Darryl Cooper. Also, in Murray’s view, we shouldn’t listen to ‘very, very discredited’ historians like David Irving.

But what if the people Murray is insisting are the go-to experts have got it wrong? What if Ukraine and Gaza expert Murray is wrong about Ukraine and Gaza? What if Churchill expert Andrew Roberts has got it wrong about Churchill? It has been known to happen before, experts getting stuff wrong - as eminent (and no doubt ‘expert’) historian Lord Dacre once famously demonstrated when he verified as genuine the fake Hitler diaries.

I’ve experienced this ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon on one or two occasions myself. Climate change, for example. After spending about ten years looking into the subject, I came to the conclusion that all the award-winning expert climate scientists are a bunch of bullshitting liars, cheats and shills. It’s not that they are a teeny bit wrong about man-made climate change here and there. They are totally wrong about it in every last detail. The whole thing is a hoax - and a very expensive and destructive one at that. For more details, you can read the book I wrote on the subject, now available in an updated edition.

Then, of course, we had another handy example of the ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon in the form of the Covid vaccine. Or, as I prefer fondly to call it, the Death Jab. I remember well the period when it came out, because all the ‘experts’ - from my doctor to the Chief Medical Officer on TV to the vaccine manufacturers - were telling me, quite persistently, that I had to take it. Apparently it was ‘safe and effective’. It offered a high degree of protection against this deadly disease doing the rounds called ‘Covid’. And not to take it was an act of selfishness which might endanger the life of every granny in the neighbourhood and which by rights ought to render me liable for incarceration in an isolation camp, or which at the very least ought to prevent me from being allowed to go on holiday - or shopping or anywhere else.

Bizarrely, despite my not being at all an expert in either epidemiology or vaccinology, I somehow knew enough to resist all these blandishments and decide that the ‘experts’ were all wrong. I refused to take the jab. So did one or two other ignorant chancers who, merely on the basis of stuff they’d read or heard on the internet from people who sometimes weren’t even doctors. You’ll never guess what happened to us. Yes, that’s right. We all contracted this novel, Chinese-bioweapons-lab-generated disease called Covid and died hideously shortly afterwards, blood bubbling out of our mouths as we gasped our last desperate words “If only I’d listened to the exp…arrggh”.

No, I jest. What actually happened is that, despite having pointedly ignored the experts, we all ended up not getting any of the following conditions: myocarditis; blood clots; turbo cancer; reproductive issues; heart attacks; sudden death. If only the same could be said of the people who trusted the experts and did take the jabs. Sadly that isn’t the case. Some developed conditions that more or less ruined their lives. Others simply dropped dead, suddenly and unexpectedly. And those who were lucky enough to have escaped apparently unscathed must now live with the possibility that this could change at any moment, for the long term consequences of these expert-approved, safe and effective jabs remain as yet unknown.

Some unkind souls have suggested that people who took the vaccine have only themselves to blame. I disagree. We are culturally programmed to trust the ‘experts’ whether it’s the gent in the tweed jacket on Antiques Roadshow evaluating that cracked vase great-great-great-Uncle Jack brought back from the Sack of the Summer Palace, or the diet guru on breakfast TV telling us how much kale we should eat or the doctor telling us how cancerous that lump is. It takes a real effort of will to resist our ingrained inclination to go along with whatever plausible-sounding prescription we’re being sold by the people we assume know better than us. Especially when, as during Covid, you’re simultaneously being subjected to all manner of psychological warfare techniques to nudge you in the right direction.

What the authorities did to us during Covid was so horrifying that I’m not sure many of us have yet really come to terms with it. Perhaps most of us never will because to do so would involve accepting the almost unimaginable: that governments in every country in the world participated in a co-ordinated experiment designed to weaken, impoverish, immiserate, divide, maim and kill their populace under the risibly inappropriate pretext of ‘public health.’ And the reason they got away with it, in large part, was because of the misplaced faith so many of us have in those experts to whom my old friend Douglas - against all evidence - insists we should continue to defer.

I’ll put you immediately out of your misery. No. I do not for one moment believe the Resurrection was a psyop.

The only reason I posed the question was to respond to a series of essays by Agent131711 “Was Jesus’ Crucifixion a Hoax?’ whose clickbait-y title, as you see, I have shamelessly plagiarised.

https://substack.com/redirect/6690d3eb-2304-448e-8790-587ac6047707?j=eyJ1IjoiaDcyMTEifQ.E_Kz2BSV4qxXhteDOVQUQz_GOcfnaqP7CkzRLYmx1Gc

I’m a big fan of Agent131711’s work. His deep-dive essay series into subjects ranging from dinosaurs and chemtrails to the Pulse nightclub and Uvalde shootings, plague doctors, musical frequencies, EVERGREEN and vitamin supplements are always extraordinarily well researched, lavishly illustrated and highly readable.

Indeed, wearing my conspiracy theorist’s tinfoil titfer for a moment, I find him so on the money on so many topics, and so detailed and prolific in his output, that I wonder how he can possibly be the one-man operation he claims to be. No one could be that good on their own surely? And how did he get to be quite so good? Where does he acquire such high level information? Could it be that he is a Cabal insider - or a cabal of Cabal insiders? Might he be a gatekeeper? Limited Hangout? A trap of some kind?

Or am I just being paranoid? (And slightly envious: he’s one of the few Awake bloggers whose posts I consider absolutely essential reading).

His ‘Was Jesus’ Crucifixion a Hoax?’ series has, as you might expect, caused quite a stir among his readers. The Agent (as I shall now call him, so as to avoid having to retype all those digits) claims to have been raised in a fervently Catholic household and never to have questioned the Bible because ‘questioning it is something essentially forbidden in the Catholic faith.’ But now he has decided to subject Christianity to the same scrutiny he has applied to all his other conspiracy theory topics.

Here is his pitch:

So let’s say, hypothetically speaking, they misled us entirely on religion and, because we are dealing with very wicked people, they even misled us on what, or who, God is, if anything. Let’s say, hypothetically, Christianity is just another cult - a very powerful, very profitable cult, but nonetheless a cult, which, as cults are, was invented for no purpose other than control. What if it is just another way to take our time and money and steer us away from the truth while putting us into lifelong categories - sects - which require us to preach the teachings, recruit new followers and avoid and condemn our fellow man who doesn’t share our specific beliefs? What if this is just another plan to divide and conquer? What if, by misleading us, we can never reach a higher level (whatever that may be) because we spent our worldly lives believing in a talking snake, God appearing as a burning bush, Jonah living in a whale, the Nile river turning to blood, getting water from rocks, the fiery pits of Hell and arguing over what the mark of the beast is? What if?

I then thought to myself, “Being that Jesus was a real person, I should research this just like I would with any other topic and see what I can find”, so I decided to look into how Christianity actually came to be. I’m not referring to what the Bible tells us, I mean verifiable research… and it opened a massive can of worms…

These questions are, of course, nothing new in Awake circles. If I received a widow’s mite every time I read someone claiming that we are living in a matrix/we were created by space aliens called the Annunaki/the Old Testament God is actually Satan/Jesus Christ was an Ascended Master and a great teacher but just one mighty prophet among many/we are all mini-Gods and our true goal is to achieve Christ consciousness/the Bible is a Jewish conspiracy/the Bible is a Roman conspiracy/all religions are just a control mechanism/we invented all that scripture stuff because we couldn’t cope with the fact that we’re all going to die/are there any I’ve missed? then I’d be as rich as Joseph of Arimathea.

As a Christian, I don’t feel threatened by these narratives. This is partly because I don’t find them intellectually persuasive, nor do I find their sources - see this piece I did on David Icke, for example - very credible. And partly because I believe God quite deliberately arranged the path to Christian understanding to be fraught with difficulty. He doesn’t simply drop Christianity into your lap and make it such a no-brainer that’s impossible not to be a Christian. You have to earn your stripes, partly, yes, through a process of study, sifting of evidence and rational deduction - but partly through something much more nebulous, anti-rational and mysterious: the development of your personal faith.

That is, you can’t just bone up on your scripture, check that it all correlates with the historical records, and then say to yourself: “Right, that’s it. I’ve finished my homework. Job done. Christianity definitely stands up in the same way that ‘We didn’t go to the Moon’ stands up.”

Nor can you go through the same process and conclude: “Wait? What?? There are so many inconsistencies that no way does Christianity pass the test of rational scrutiny.” Well, I suppose you can because that’s effectively what Agent131711 has just gone and done in his latest essay series. What I mean is that this process is not nearly conclusive as The Agent seems to be implying it is.

One flaw in his process was neatly summed up in the comments below one of his articles. Annoyingly I can’t find it - perhaps someone else can kindly help me - but it went something like this: “If they can so quickly hide the evidence of what happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, how can you be surprised at the lack of documentary evidence for something that happened in the Middle East nearly 2000 years earlier?” So when I read The Agent saying “there is literally no documentation anywhere of Jesus, his miracles, his beef with the Jews or anything at all, until many years after his death”, I’m not muttering to myself: “Well that’s Christianity done then.” Rather, I’m thinking: “Hang on a second, The Agent. You’re kind of loading the dice here. Also, maybe even worse than that, for a supposed King of Conspiracy Theorists you’re actually coming across like a complete Normie.”

As I’ve often been wont to say on my podcasts - because it’s true - Christianity is the greatest of all the rabbit holes. That’s because, besides all the official stuff you’re taught at Sunday school or in scripture classes or you hear from your Normie vicar/pastor/priest/preacher whoever, there’s loads more complicated, fascinating background detail which you only learn about when you start digging beneath the surface. I don’t mean stuff like: “Wow! Jesus is actually an hallucinogenic mushroom.” I mean details like variations in translations and differing text sources; about non-canonical sources like the Book(s) of Enoch; and historical, geographical and socio-political contexts that aren’t necessarily mentioned specifically in the Bible but which can add much to our understanding of it.

A good example of this is the identity of the Edomites - and what became of them. And their relationship to Talmudic Judaism. Not to mention the history of the Church generally - and that of the various political factions which sought to twist Christianity to their own advantage. My point is that in the 2000 years since Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, a number of very powerful vested interests have been doing their damnedest to obscure the truth of Christ’s message and bury as much as possible of the physical evidence backing it up. They might well have destroyed manuscripts, including corroboratory documents from non-Christian sources; we know certainly that they have infiltrated and corrupted the translation process, whether in the form of the early Hebrew scholars who coined the unBiblical word “Jew” or in that of the liner notes to the Schofield Bible. Oh, and of course, they gulled a lot of people into believing that the Turin Shroud had been carbon-dated and it was definitely a Medieval fake. Which it wasn’t.

If you take your scripture seriously, which I do, then of course it’s no surprise that there are so many earthly, faux-scholarly reasons out there for doubting the truth of Christianity. Whether you prefer to identify the enemy as the Devil, or Lucifer, or the ‘Seed of the Serpent’, or the seed of the Nephilim, or the ‘rulers of the darkness of this world’, it all amounts to the same thing: there are powerful forces of evil abroad whose most cherished mission is to confound God and all His works. It follows, inevitably, that one of the main objects of their Satanic interference will be anything pertaining to Christianity, whether it’s texts, or the ecclesiastical hierarchy or the background culture which supports (or, as currently, mocks and diminishes) Christianity.

The world is run by evil people whose power largely depends on keeping us from the truth. All Awake people know this so it seems to me somewhat odd that The Agent should be surprised that these evil people should have given the cover-up treatment to something as antithetical to their interests as Christianity. But maybe part of his difficulties lie in his Catholic upbringing, which appears to have so put him off from contemplating the numinous that he is only capable of understanding and explaining the world in earthly terms. This is fine as far as it goes: The Agent is brilliant, almost unrivalled, at explaining the mechanism of the various conspiracies. But I don’t think he has ever taken the supernatural element as seriously as it should be.

That is, the reason that the people behind these conspiracies do stuff like drink the blood of children is not simply that they’re a bunch of sick, jaded perverts: it’s a form of Satanic sacrament. It keeps them young, yes; it’s a useful form of kompromat for controlling their fellows also; but most importantly, it’s an act of affiliation with and reverence for the creature they consider to be their boss. These people are the spiritual heirs of all those child-sacrificing tribes that, in the Old Testament, God is continually urging the Children of Israel to destroy. In return for this display of loyalty, the various evil entities that - with God’s permission - have been granted a degree of power and autonomy on earth lavish rewards on their servants: money, power, sexual conquest, the ability to ensnare, seduce, deceive and crush. The people who engage in occult practices don’t do it just because if they get lucky they might bump into Madonna at Kabbala class or because they like the robes and pointy hats or because they’ve seen Harry Potter. They do it because, as has been known from the beginning of the Babylonian mystery religions, dark magic works and gets you what you want.

The opposite of this dark magic is the holiness offered by Christianity. (Which, by the way, the bad guys who run the world loathe more viscerally and persecute more ruthlessly than any of the other supposedly viable alternative religions: why is that do you think?) The best observation I’ve ever heard on the difference between these two forms of supernatural power - one bad, one good - was in the conversation I had a while back with Nathan Reynolds. Reynolds was born into one of the Illuminati bloodline families, was sexually abused from an early age and trained up to be an assassin.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/118209251/

Reynolds described to me some of the rewards you get in return for serving the forces of darkness. He was granted ‘a power beyond anything most people could ever comprehend is real…I’m saying like dynamite explosive power, power that makes you superhuman.’ But the price you pay for this ‘quick-fix’ solution to your earthly desires is eternal damnation, not to mention endless nightmares.

When he renounced all this, repented of his sins and became a Christian, he got to experience the other side of the equation for the first time. ‘One side will offer you instant gratification but the other is going to offer you a life of suffering, but the development of righteousness in its end that will make you an amazing leader and a capable individual.’

Yup. That’s Christianity. It’s not the path you choose if you want a new Ferrari. Or if you want to shag lots of women who aren’t your wife. Or you want to get to the top of your business, whatever the cost. It’s a slow burn thing; a tempering process designed to make you better and stronger by putting you to the test. Which doesn’t on the surface make it sound quite as sexy and fun as the bling lifestyle offered to dutiful servants of Satan. But then, that’s partly the result of living in a culture which has been overwhelmed by the values of Satan - a culture which all the movies, all the TV shows, all the pop songs, all the stuff you’re being showed on social media make you feel like you’re missing out if you’re not getting more instant money, more instant thrills, more instant sex with more partners of indeterminate gender. One of the things Christianity does is help you see past all that Satanic cultural conditioning and to understand the world as it is and life as it ought to be lived, so that you are no longer under the spell of Satan’s deception.

But the secret of Christianity that really doesn’t get talked about often enough, perhaps because Christians are coy about it, or perhaps because our Satanically controlled information outlets - the media, publishing, the entertainment industry, etc - take great care to keep the secret suppressed, is that Christians get perks too. Sometimes, these take the form of what my friend Laura Brett, on our podcast about Psalm 63, calls ‘God winks.’

https://www.patreon.com/posts/126157763

A ‘God Wink’ is when God gives you a little treat to show you that he loves you or to tell you that you’re on the right path or to reassure you that your faith is not without foundation. Often Christians experience this in the early stages of their faith when they randomly open the Bible and discover that whatever text they see first offers extraordinarily relevant advice to their problem of the moment. (Cue one or two puritanical comments on the evils of ‘divination’. Yes. I know). The comedian and self-described ‘soldier of God’ Alistair Williams experienced a more spectacular God wink when - as he recalls on one of our podcasts together - he urgently needed £3000 he didn’t have to pay a tax bill. That same day, out of the blue, he received a cheque from a fellow Christian whom he’d never met with a note saying: “I’ve been told you need this.”

Later, as their faith matures, and through prayer and meditation (and fasting, ideally) they gain a deeper understand of God’s plans for them, they gain a powerful sense of purpose - almost to the point where, as Christ enjoins in Matthew’s gospel, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself”, they cease to worry about the future because they know that God has got it covered.

Then, of course, if they feel called to take it all the way they can achieve the sanctity of a St Francis of Assisi or of Elder Paisios, the monk on Mount Athos, whose holiness was such that he could work miracles. On the subject of the latter, I can highly recommend a book calledThe Gurus, the Young Man and Elder Paisios, the 2008 memoir of a young Greek man who decided to put ‘religion’ to the test by comparing his experiences on the Holy Mountain with his time spent among various gurus in India. The author, Dionysios Farasiotis, recalls a number of instances where Elder Paisios healed the sick (even of supposedly terminal illness), drove out demons and was able to describe in great detail places he had never been to, even to the point of being able to give directions.

It’s part of the Satanic cultural shift against Christianity that where once the lives of the saints were a source of inspiration to God-fearing folk we now mostly consider them as a superstitious myth to be scoffed at. I don’t doubt that this undermining goes back a long way. Even in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387 to 1400), you find a character called the Pardoner, who makes his living out of selling pigs bones which he claims were the bones of departed saints.

Anyway, I’ve gone on quite long enough.

Now I’ll give you the TL;DR.

Here are the two main reasons for my conviction that Christianity is not just another religion and not just a con trick but the real deal. Neither has anything to do with the kind of evidence The Agent seems to consider important.

• The evil people who run the world take it seriously and treat it as their greatest threat, confirming what the Bible tells us about the fate of the ungodly. I think we can take it as read that people so powerful and with such access to so many secrets know what the deal is.

• God makes His presence known to Christians all the time. He answers prayers. He even performs the occasional miracle. All Christians should know this. If you don’t then you’re not - yet - doing it right.