Now, the program you're about to listen to is from a recent event here in Colorado Springs. It features a presentation given by Dr. Ben Carson, who's a good friend of mine. He speaks from the heart and I hope that you'll be encouraged by his message that you're going to hear today and tomorrow's broadcast.
Now, Dr. Ben has had quite an impressive career. Not all of it I would have time to mention, but here are a few notable points for you to become more familiar with. He has dedicated his life to helping children with his medical career. Now, Dr. Ben Carson is a retired neurosurgeon and in 2016 he was a candidate for the office of President of the United States of America. And there is so much more to say, but without further ado, let's join Dr. Ben Carson for his presentation here on Family Talk.
Dr. Ben Carson: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Candy and I are absolutely delighted to be here. And I have to make a little confession before we start, everybody does disclaimers these days, have you noticed that? They say, "I'm a member of this board." Or, "I belong to this organization," so you have to take everything with a grain of salt. My disclaimer is I am not politically correct. That doesn't mean I intentionally try to insult people. I don't. I actually go out of my way not to do that.
But have you noticed these days that you can't speak to a group of people without offending somebody? And I remember when I was a kid, they had this saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." They don't teach that to the kids anymore. Now they say, "Go to your safe space." And what kind of people are we bringing up when we do things like that? It's a serious, serious issue. But I actually believe that we're in the closing days of this earth's history.
Now, if you read the Bible and it talks about what things are going to be like in the last days, I think we're there, and it would be like in the days of Noah where there was constant evil everywhere. We have drag queens in front of our little elementary kids. Think about what it must be like, if the Lord doesn't come back soon, he's going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. But I think he is coming back soon.
And the question is, what do we do while we wait? What do we do in our spheres of influence and do we truly recognize the things that are happening? The American dream is something that is so precious, you can go to any part of the world and they will tell you about the American dream. There's no other country that has a dream, we're the only ones. And part of that is because of the way that we were formulated. We had some tremendous founders, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, all of these guys, they were very smart and they studied every governmental system that ever existed in the history of the world. Why? Because they wanted to extract the best parts and leave the bad parts out. One of the things that became clear to them is that all governments end up essentially the same. It doesn't matter how they start, it doesn't matter how lofty their intentions are, they grow, they infiltrate and they dominate.
So they wanted to come up with a constitution that would prevent that from happening and that would maintain a free society for the people. Now, the Europeans thought we were nuts. They said, "You cannot run a country on the will of the people. You have to have a monarch. You have to have a ruling structure." But they were determined to come up with it. And during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there was so much arguing and fighting, the whole thing was about to fall apart. And the elder statesmen, 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin got up and he said, "Gentlemen, stop. Let's get down on our knees and let's seek wisdom from God." And they knelt down and they prayed and they got up and they finished the Constitution of the United States, which I think was a divinely inspired document, if we're willing to follow it.
But when Franklin came out of the building, he was asked, "Sir, what do we have, a monarchy or a republic?" And he said, "A republic, if you can keep it." We're as close right now to losing it as we have ever been. And we all have a role to play. We all have a sphere of influence that can help to maintain that type of republic that we have with fairness and justice for everybody.
But I had a dream, my American dream was to be a doctor. I loved medicine. It didn't matter what it was, Dr. Casey, Dr. Kildare, man, I was all over that stuff. I even liked going to the doctor's office. I would gladly have a shot just so I could smell the alcohol swabs, anything, anything that had to do with medicine, maybe not a COVID shot. It's not that I'm anti-vax, I'm not anti-vax by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe in real science. And it's interesting, we had people advocating that children should be vaccinated for COVID. Children who have a 0.025% chance of death or major morbidity if they get COVID. And you have no idea what the long-term effects of these vaccines are. And here's the good thing, only 13% of adults had their kids vaccinated. That means the American people are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. That's a good thing. It's a good thing to know that.
But my dream was unfortunately derailed by the fact that I was a terrible student. And my mother was extremely concerned, and my mother was, next to God, the most important factor in my early life because she was from a huge family and got married at age 13, achieved less than a third grade education, and then discovered that her husband was a bigamist some years after marriage. And she was so affected by that, she was so depressed that she actually tried to commit suicide. Took a handful of pills, and fortunately was found before she died and they pumped her stomach. But if she'd been successful, I certainly wouldn't have been standing here today. The Lord intervenes in our lives and He has plans and they go far beyond the plans that we have, but we all encounter people who are in desperate situations and we need to do something about it. When she was in the hospital, she met a woman, a Christian woman who really introduced her in a serious way to the Lord, and it made a tremendous difference in the rest of her life.
And even when I was this terrible student, she was always the one who was saying, "Benjamin, you're much too smart to be bringing home grades like this." I brought them home anyway, but she was always having these things to say and being encouraging while everybody was teasing me about being a dummy. But I did admire the smart kids. I would never tell them that I admired them, but I did. This one kid was the smartest kid around, his name was Steve. And he would always come up to you after a test and put his A in your face and say, "Let me see yours. Let me see yours," you wanted to let him see it, all right.
But I would always say to myself, not to him, "He's the same age as I am, how does he know all this stuff? How can he be so smart?" And I really was very impressed with him, but I wasn't very impressed with myself. I didn't think that I was smart either. But when my mother prayed and asked for wisdom, God gave it to her. Or at least in her opinion, my brother and I didn't think it was wise at all. I mean, turning off the TV and making us read books and submit to her written book reports that she couldn't read, we didn't think that was smart, but we didn't know she couldn't read them. But interestingly enough, even though I hated it in the beginning, I actually began to love reading those books because between the covers of those books, I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything. And poverty was gone for that time while I was in that book.
But I started reading about incredible people, entrepreneurs, explorers, scientists and surgeons. And as I read about their lives, it dawned on me that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you, it's not somebody else. I stopped listening to all the negativity and the people were saying, "You can't do this and the system's against you." I just threw all that stuff in the garbage, started thinking about what I could do. I was always reading. If I had five minutes, I was reading a book. I became the bookworm. And within the space of a year and a half, I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class. And I remember going up to Steve after a test and I said, "Steve, how'd you do on the test?" And he puffed out his chest, he said, "I got a 91." And I said, "Well, gee, that's too bad. I got 100." And I said, "Next time, if you need help, let me know." I was probably a little obnoxious.
But here's the key thing, I had the same brain when I was at the bottom of the class that I had at the top of the class, exactly the same brain, but a different attitude. What does that tell us about our responsibility to develop the intellect of the people in our spheres of influence, and certainly those people who are within our household. But when you start thinking about the human brain, you realize that we are made in the image of God. Think about the human brain, billions and billions of neurons, hundreds of billions of interconnections, it remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard, your brain can process two million bits of information in one second. You can't overload it. People tell you you're going to overload your brain, you can't overload the brain. If you learn one new fact every second, it would take you more than three million years to challenge the capacity of your brain. That is an incredible thing.
And think about how quickly it develops. You got a male gamut with 23 chromosomes, a female gamut with 23 chromosomes, neither one of which has the ability to become a human being, and then fertilization occurs. They fuse together, and all of the sudden you've got a zygote, 46 chromosomes, a complete genetic map for a human being, not part of the mother, not part of the father, a new individual whose brain is developing with millions of new neurons every single day. Within six to eight weeks, you see little eyebuds, little earbuds, little fingers and toes, a heart that's beating. It's hard to say that that is not a human being. And voila, nine months, out pops this little energetic ball of energy, pooping and peeing and eating, but it's so cute you don't care. But that brain is still developing at a rapid rate even at that point. That's why babies sleep so much. Newborns sleep 20 to 22 hours a day because their brain is continuing to develop and it continues to develop right into your 20s, your brain does not mature until then, and some people, and even beyond that.
But think about where we are as a society when we expect children with immature brains to make life altering decisions about whether they're a male or a female. Think about that. Isn't that the reason that God gave children parents to protect them from people who would take advantage of their immature brains, of their natural curiosity, of their suggestibility? And as Charlie was saying, we have responsibility. We need to speak out against these kinds of things that are occurring in our society. And as we're becoming more secular, look what's happening to us, increased crime, increased hatred, increased immorality, all kinds of things. Our families are falling apart. There's only 23.1 million traditional nuclear families left in our country.
And some people say that this is all of recent origin, but I would have to take exception to that, it's not of recent origin. And if you look at the congressional record from January the 10th, 1963, congressional record extension of remarks of Honorable A.S. Herlong Jr. of Florida in the House of Representatives, he gives the 45 goals of communism in America over 60 years ago. I'm not going to read all 45, but just a sampling. Like number 17, "Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum, get control of teacher associations. Put the party line in textbooks."
Number 20, "Infiltrate the press. Get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions, gain control of key positions in random TV and motion pictures. Continued discrediting American culture."
24, "Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them censorship and a violation of free speech and free press. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, promiscuity as normal, natural and healthy. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with social religion, discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a religious crutch."
Number 40, "Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents."
Does that sound like stuff that's going on? They've been working at it for a while. We think we won the Cold War, but they were planting the seeds of the destruction of our society, of the fundamental change of our society many, many years ago. That's why Khrushchev said to Eisenhower, "Your grandchildren's children will live under our system and we won't have to fire one shot." Because we're being played, we're being manipulated. And it's so important that we actually understand that that's what's happening to our nation if we're going to make a change.
And then there's such a big push to eliminate our faith, our Judeo-Christian values, our belief in God. As a person who grew up with a scientific background, I had an interesting perspective as I listened to the professors talk about ways that we didn't need God. And these are people who claim to be scientists talking about things like the Big Bang Theory. There was nothing, and then there was something, and then there was a big bang and everything was organized perfectly into our solar system. I mean, how... Well, I don't want to say stupid, but I mean that is ridiculous, especially if you apply science like the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, which says things move toward a state of disorganization. They're saying there's a big explosion and everything becomes perfectly organized. And I've asked some Nobel Prize-winning particle and nuclear physicists to explain that. And their answer always comes down to, "Well, we don't understand everything. And I say, "I don't know that you understand anything quite frankly."
And then there are the atheists who think that people who believe in God are total idiots. I was once involved in a public debate in Hollywood, it was myself and Francis Collins on the side of believing in God and Richard Dawkins and David Dennett on the side of the atheist. And at the end of the discussion, I said to Dawkins, "You win, because you've convinced me I came from God and you came from a monkey." And of course the audience just died and he was mortified, but it's kind of true.
But they do have their Gods, like environmentalism. At UNC last night, there was a student who stood up in the middle of my presentation and started talking about climate change, and I just told him he needed to respect his fellow students and sit down and wait until Q&A, which he was embarrassed enough that he did. But when he came back and he asked, "Do you or do you not believe in climate change and that we are contributing to the downfall of man with all the things we're doing?" Well, of course, God told us to take care of our environment. I said, "We have a responsibility to take care of the environment for ourselves and for those who are coming after us."
But I said, the climate is always changing. I said, "When the climate stops changing, we all die." And of course, the whole auditorium broke out in laughter, and he was so embarrassed he went and sat down at that point. But that is their God, climate change. They try to sort of connect everything to that in order to be able to control it. Because if you accept what they have to say, then you have to accept their solutions for it and their solutions are solutions that control you. Solutions like, everybody has to drive an electric car by 2035 even though there's no infrastructure to support the driving of electric cars and telling us that fossil fuels are causing all the problems when we've learned how to extract fossil fuels and use them in a way that has given us the cleanest air and water that we've ever had. And they don't think about those kinds of things.
Roger Marsh: What a thought-provoking presentation from Dr. Ben Carson. And that was only part one. If you missed any part of this program, by the way, remember you can always listen again on our website at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. You can also listen on the JDFI Family Talk app.
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And before we leave the air for today, I want to take a brief moment to thank you for your generous financial support during the month of December when we had a matching grant in place. Whether it was your first time donating or your 10th, we are so grateful for your gift. On behalf of the whole team here at the JDFI, please know how much we appreciate your prayers and your ongoing financial support. We would not be here without you. I'm Roger Marsh, join us again tomorrow for the part two of Dr. Ben Carson's presentation on advocating for our country and our freedoms. That's coming up tomorrow on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
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