John Cobb on David Ray Griffin and Process Thought

John Cobb was David Ray Griffin's mentor and colleague in process thought, one of the 20th century's most notable developments in philosophy and theology. In this interview, conducted two weeks after Dr. Griffin's death, Dr. Cobb recounts how the two of them founded the Center for Process Studies at Claremont College, and offers a tribute to Griffin's accomplishments—the foremost and most controversial being his work on 9/11. John Cobb has authored over 40 books and edited 16 more (including 9/11 and American Empire v.2, which I co-edited).

Below is a lightly edited transcript.

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Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audio-Visual. I'm Kevin Barrett, finding the best people I can find to talk to about what's really happening in this very strange universe or planet or creation or whatever level you're analyzing it on. And one of the best analysts I know is John Cobb. He's a co-founder of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont College and created the fascinating school of Process theology with David Ray Griffin, based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, who just passed away. Griffin was a dearly missed colleague of yours and mine, and you worked with him on everything. I worked with him on 9/11 Truth. So, John, where should we start?

John Cobb: Well, I'll be glad to tell you what he meant to me. And the 9/11 part is the part I most admire in all of David's accomplishments, but it's not the part that I know the most about.

So I think I have to explain a little bit about (how) I am different from the vast majority of people. When I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, I was exposed to process thinking, especially in the theological community. I should say I grew up as a Christian, a pious believer. And my relationship to God was extremely important to me and my understanding and so forth. And it was while I was studying in graduate school that I realized that the university as a whole does not have a place for God. Once modern science threw out purpose as a relevant factor in explaining anything—Aristotle's final cause was the way it was done—it meant that you never can explain something was done because somebody thought there was a reason to do it. Everything must be explained in terms of what makes it happen. So that was the worldview that the modern university occupied, especially after human beings became a part of this clockwork nature, in the official positions. Anything that had to do with meaning or purpose was excluded. And from my point of view, that was not just something I couldn't accept, but it was something that I thought was doing harm, really serious harm, to our society. Its official theory was that we were all zombies. Clockwork zombies. No one believes it. But that's the official position of the universities, and I just don't accept that. So I discovered that if we got rid of the basic metaphysics of Western society, which is substance metaphysics, and had instead a different metaphysics, a process metaphysics, that everything would fall out in a different way. And I discovered that as much through my encounter with somebody who had done it as in any abstract form.

And that somebody was Alfred North Whitehead. And his thought is very difficult for Western people to understand. Actually, it's almost impossible for us to think without thinking of substance, even though science now explains to us that the fundamental reality that is the quantum world cannot be understood in terms of substance. So we have a good deal of evidence on our side in rejecting substance. But scientists who recognize that say it's just queer and dismiss it that don't try to explain because it simply does not fit with their basic understanding of things. David Bohm, who I think was the most brilliant of the quantum theorists, said that the scientists will not be able to deal with quantum thought unless they begin starting all of their sentences with gerunds rather than nouns. Nouns suggest substances, gerunds suggests events or activities. And if we understand events as primary, and enduring physical objects are finally analyzable into events, we can understand how they come to play such an important role. We just have to reverse the way we look at things.

Kevin Barrett: So why do you think that's been so hard, especially in Western culture? Scientists were able to recognize that Newtonian physics works at a particular scale for most things that we deal with, but that it's been supplanted by Einsteinian physics. So they're able to make that kind of leap, and they haven't completely let go of Newtonian physics. And so why can't they do the same thing here in terms of embracing process as a higher level way of understanding things while recognizing that substance still works at a certain level?

John Cobb: I think that there are individual scientists who have done that. But if you are explicit about doing it, you get excommunicated. A lot of it has to do with the fact that there is no longer such a topic as science. There are only many, many, many sciences. And so when you pursue your particular science, you don't have to think about how it's related to the quantum field. And the university as a whole has no place for discussion of issues of this kind. So lots of philosophers rejected this topic a long time ago.

Kevin Barrett: And it's funny because so much of what we talk about in the humanities is predicated on the existence of meaning that arises from processes.

John Cobb: And humanities have a smaller and smaller role in the university. History has almost disappeared. There are sociological studies of past events, but I understand something different by history. Anyway, I am battling against what I take to be a rather large power and force. And in economics, I had a partner and of course, he was excommunicated. And erased.

Kevin Barrett: Who is that?

John Cobb: Herman Daly.

Kevin Barrett: Oh, right.

John Cobb: It's a very explicit excommunication. I mean, people used to think the church did excommunication. The University does much more now

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I've noticed that.

John Cobb: In any case, I was very close to Herman. So his personal experience with the official economics hierarchy (was that) they would refer occasionally to his ideas, but they would not mention his name. So it's erasure, which goes a step beyond excommunication. You can understand that I do not think highly of the academic disciplines. Heidegger correctly said they do not think. They discourage thinking. They teach you how to do a certain kind of research. But that's very different from thinking.

Kevin Barrett: I agree completely.

John Cobb: That's my background in fundamental life decisions. And when I discovered that the theories that grew out of substance thought were not only leading to chaos in the realm of thinking and to a kind of reductionism that is not helpful to human beings, I realized they were also leading to radically unsustainable behavior. And my recognition of that in the late sixties was again life changing. From that time on, I thought the most important question or issue was how we can keep the planet habitable for human beings. To me, that seem to be the most important issue. But that was not the issue that most people wanted to talk about. And so I have been on the margin in metaphysics and on the margin in my eagerness to save the world.

David was a student and he agreed, caught on, to my concerns very quickly. He understood me as well as I understood myself. Of course, that's never quite true. But you know what I mean by that. And we talked about the fact that at Chicago, which was the last place you could study process, they had closed the doors. So there was no university you could go to—I don't mean that there was nobody teaching it. I just mean it was at the extreme margins anywhere. If it survived, it was not supported in any institutional way, anywhere.

So we said, "we really need to create a center for process thinking." This was in the early sixties to mid-sixties. And I won't go into further detail about this, but I did have the opportunity to do that. And I said, what I have to have in order to have a center is a partner who teaches half time and has half time for administering the center. And I got what I asked for. And David Griffin was the person I wanted to have as my partner. And he did a marvelous job. So as far as the center and its offspring are concerned, David gets three-fourths of the credit. And what he did every year was to hold two conferences of a kind that no one else has ever held. Half of them, at least, were with the natural sciences. And he would study up on an issue and find the people in the field who seemed the most open minded and then ask them to come. He would write a paper explaining the process view on the topic. And we had really excellent conferences. And that meant that we were at least keeping alive the possibility of process thinking in the natural sciences. We did other things besides the natural sciences, but that was to me most impressive. He really educated himself in one topic after another in a remarkable way so that our visitors did not feel that we were ignorant theologians. (laughter) We were talking their language and their issues. So I think his ability to do that kind of thing was impressive. I would say that David was a person for whom truth is the number one issue, no matter what the topic. If the evidence was against something, he would not accept it. If the evidence was for it, he wanted to go with it, whether it was contrary to existing biases or not. And that showed up most dramatically, I think, in his response to 9/11. I would say also that though we were theologians, our understanding of theology distinguished us from most other people. I've been a little different. (laughter) From our point of view, our task as Christian believers was to look at every issue from a Christian perspective. And whether it was a traditional topic of Christian theology or whether it was a scientific issue, whether it was a historical issue or whatever it was, that was theology. He did not think he stopped being a theologian when he asked the questions about what really happened on 9/11: Who did it? Why did they do it?

Kevin Barrett: By the time I encountered it with his work on 9/11, I already had great respect for your work and his. I wasn't aware of it, of course, through the beginning of my career. But then in the nineties, as postmodernism became all the rage and it seemed that there was sort of a dead end where you had these scientific reductionist materialists on the one hand, and you had these postmodern nihilists on the other, and neither of them was offering anything very satisfying. I got into religious studies, actually, through the traditionalists, and I discovered that Process thought was really the only other interesting thing going on in religious studies—but that process thought, perhaps unlike traditionalism, actually had all sorts of powerful, constructive repercussions in all these other areas. So that's how I found out about it. And it was obvious to me that you guys were on to something.

John Cobb: And again, I mean, I take my share of credit. I was David's teacher. I was his companion. I supported him in all of this. But he was the one who really got into all of these fields on an individual basis and worked to find the truth. And so when 9/11 came along... I think many of us, even as we watched that day, (thought) those buildings did not look like they were coming down from fire as the official story told us. And as I recall, the BBC announced the fall of the third building before it happened. Well, these things are rather suspicious, to say the least. To say the least. So just watching it naively, it didn't sound right, but I had no idea of doing anything about it. But David did. And we lost a lot, from just the promotion of process thinking, by David's going all the way. It wasn't a minor commitment. It was his life. He published book after book.

Kevin Barrett: I think 13 total, 13 or 14 books.

John Cobb: I have tossed out the figure ten. But I didn't have any idea, I never counted them. He had my full support and he knew it. And there was that one little book that you and I both participated in. (9/11 and Empire v.2: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out.) But I, I just...There's so little concern for truth in our society. It's really, really distressing.

Kevin Barrett: Don't you find it ironic that the reason that religion has been marginalized is that the other side claims that the search for truth has shown us that all of these religious claims cannot possibly be true, so we can just dismiss all of them. They claim that it's their extreme concern for truth that's led them to that position. And yet when we look at so many of these issues, with 9/11 being such an obvious one, it becomes clear that there's virtually no concern for truth at all. What do we make of such a paradox?

John Cobb: Scientism is one of the terms that can be used. It really has nothing except a method of research that adds information about specific topics. There was a time when science meant a lot more than that. And if a person was a scientist, they took a certain responsibility and they really did care about truth. And they did want to develop a world view. But none of that has a place in contemporary scientistic thinking. I mean, they are still accomplishing an enormous amount. We must respect them in many ways. But they add to it what we Christians call idolatry. They take something that is partial as a particular function, and they absolutize it. And they don't think there's any other way that is responsible. The other major way of thinking about what happens and so forth is the historical way. And history deals with unique events. Science can only deal with repetitive events. That's a slight exaggeration. The Big Bang is not...well, I think they would say it's maybe a repetitive event.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. They can't make up their minds.

John Cobb: I don't think there ever was a Big Bang. And I think that they got—I mean, we could talk about that if you wanted, but—

Kevin Barrett: Well, I'm not going to argue with you! If you have a short version of why there wasn't a Big Bang...

John Cobb: Well, this is a short version, and I'm sure that even the people who have influenced me in it will say, Well, no, I'm not doing it right.

When when the red shift was found, there were two possible explanations. One of them was that the universe was expanding. The other was that light slowed down its passage through space, the space being filled with plasma. But there was no interest whatsoever in exploring that second possibility. I find it odd. You would think scientists would say there are two possibilities (so) we ought to give a little attention to both of them. But they gave 99.99% of the attention to expansion, and the rest of it was just ridiculing the idea that space might slow light down, but I don't see any reason to ridicule it. Einstein said that light speed in a vacuum is constant. But now we know there is no vacuum. So why do scientists feel they have to follow Einstein when the knowledge has changed? Then when it turned out that the predictions were way off, they invented dark matter and dark energy. To me inventing vast amounts of stuff for which you have no evidence at all should at least be cautionary. And if there's another theory that doesn't require that, at least a little attention should be paid to it.

So when the photographs of the cosmos from the new camera (which of course is nothing like what we usually mean by "camera") came, they gave absolutely no support to the Big Bang. The universe then seems to have been, so far as we can tell, very much like the universe now. And it should have been very different, if it was three fourths of the way back to the Big Bang, and the universe has been expanding at a very rapid rate ever since then. And there seem to have been very old formations then. So I think the evidence of the photographs should be decisive. And there are scientists who have said that. But the majority wants to tinker with the theory and adjust the theory to the facts some way. They don't want to say, oh, we should look at the alternatives.

Kevin Barrett: It sounds like Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' concept of the paradigm shift could apply here. At some point, people might wake up and notice this, just like they might wake up and notice some of the other things.

John Cobb: The university is so structured as to discourage paradigm shifts.

Kevin Barrett: Right. But Kuhn said that people have to die off. The old generation has to disappear before you can have any fresh eyes to figure out where they went wrong.

I haven't looked at this scientifically, I don't know whether this is one of those relatively few issues where I can develop enough scientific acumen to have a judgment on the scientific argument, or whether it's one of the majority of issues where I can't and have to try to analyze it in other ways, such as comparing the strength of the arguments on both sides at other levels. But it occurs to me that when I've seen this type of argument about creation in the past, it was usually a theological question. And in the history of Islamic thought we had al-Ghazali supporting the idea of basically a big bang type of creation and his philosophical opponents being against it believing in a steady state. And so somebody today might say, well, the Big Bang scientists have proved that Ghazali was actually right and the philosophers were wrong. But it's strange to me that with today's anti-religious bias in the academy, a defense of a kind of creationism would be something that they would be prejudiced in favor of. I would have thought the opposite. So how do you explain this prejudice?

John Cobb: Well, the the discovery of the redshift, that was an important fact that had to be dealt with. And I think there are basically only two ways to explain it. And I think that the authority of Einstein, who said light in a vacuum is constant, was projected on a universe in which there is no vacuum. And I do think that the fact that as a scientist now, you are not a scientist, you are a physicist studying a particular branch of physics or whatever, so that you're not encouraged to explore options. I really blame the victory of the academic disciplines for making scientism even worse than it already was.

Kevin Barrett: I think some of this does leak through. I know, just based on my cursory keeping up with the science pages of The New York Times and what's going on online and such, that over the past few decades, it seems that there's been more questioning of the Big Bang. It's become something that we notice is being debated.

John Cobb: The failure of the photographs to give any support to it whatsoever really upset the the establishment. And the responses have been diverse. I think the indication is that the result is going to be "We need to do more work on this." And ten years from now, they will still be doing more work on it.

Kevin Barrett: "More research is necessary." Right. This is one of the things I was impressed by when I discovered Process thought. I'd heard of it before, but it was the late nineties when I started actually reading it, and seeing these kinds of topics that are really quite different from what one expects theologians to be thinking about. And you and David were doing really good work on these topics. I remember (it) attracted my attention as I was researching Sufi miracle stories in Morocco and then comparing them to contemporary personal experience narratives of extraordinary or miraculous events. One of the things David had worked on was psi phenomena, and reincarnation as well, I believe.

John Cobb: Oh, yes.

Kevin Barrett: He mastered the research and then followed it where it led, which was that these kinds of things are much more scientifically probable than one would ever imagine from the mainstream dominant discourse.

John Cobb: That's right. Scientism has said everything has to be mechanistic. Now that mechanistic (paradigm) gets stretched a long way when you're dealing with the electronic world or the Einsteinian world. And therefore there is action at a distance. It is almost impossible to get it discussed among scientists. But there's a huge amount of evidence for it. Scientists are governed by metaphysics rather than by evidence. And that's very sad. That's not what science should be.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it's kind of what the (early) scientific movement was rebelling against in terms of hidebound dogmas restricting free thought.

John Cobb: And, of course, we don't we don't think something's true because it's in the Bible, or because it has been held to be true by theologians or something. But we think there's evidence for many, many realities that the scientists are just ignoring.

Kevin Barrett: And in terms of of process thought in Christianity, David has written a number of books, several about 9/11, with Christian interpretations. And that was the (topic of the) lecture he gave at the University of Wisconsin when I introduced him that was broadcast on C-SPAN. It was about the religious aspect of 9/11. And that led to the (9/11 and Empire) books including the one we co-edited.

And so I'm wondering about the way one deals with Christianity in Process thought. Many people find (Christianity) destructive (of free thought). For me, it was actually easier to reconcile critical, intellectual free inquiry with Islam, based on my experience of Christianity, which seemed to be much more mythologized, particularly in these dogmatic stories, and anthropomorphic stories about God, and the confusion of Jesus and God. All these things seemed very highly mythologized, almost as if they were designed to disable critical thinking. And I identified with the Enlightenment Unitarians who preferred Unitarianism because it allowed for that rational, critical thought. And they critiqued church and state and Christian Trinitarian dogma as being designed to disable rational thought. So part of the reason I ended up coming to Islam was precisely that. And I wonder about these seeming impediments in Christianity to the totally free inquiry that you guys were doing: how do you get around those and how do you explain those to other Christians?

John Cobb: Well, there were many Christians who felt the same way you did about the dogmatism and the supernaturalism and so forth, so that liberal Protestantism in its seminaries taught people views that are not at all the ones that you identified. So a lot had already happened. We are not the inventors of liberal or progressive Protestantism. But our concern was that liberal and progressive Protestantism tended to give far too much credence to scientism. And the Unitarians, who were so open minded, were not really open minded toward religious phenomena.

Kevin Barrett: From my perspective, that stuff doesn't even look all that Christian to me, really. The Unitarian minister here in Madison now is an atheist.

John Cobb: Oh, yes. Unitarians. Atheism dominates in the Unitarian Church. And to mention Jesus is to put yourself into an awkward position. To me, this is not tolerance. "Open-mindedness" is just another dogmatism. We felt we were doing something quite different. But I don't like and would much prefer to drop the word Trinitarian. But if you want to have it, there a lot of trinities I don't have any problem with. But the one the Roman church created makes no sense to me at all. It's all about substances and there aren't any substances.

So I don't feel that the fact that something has been turned into a dogma puts it beyond critical inquiry. But that you would find in many Protestant seminaries. My distress with that kind of liberalism is that it's not really open to the evidence, that the baby keeps getting thrown out with the bath. And so you'll find—I mean, I'm a Methodist and we have the great good fortune that our founder, John Wesley, did not think that the dogma were important. He said he had no problem with it himself, but he didn't think they were important to communicate. And for him God was not omnipotent. He was very much against predestination, which the Calvinists were holding on to. And so I don't have as much to react against as (some do). But because for some people the definition of being a Christian is to believe that Jesus was supernatural, or something like that. I prefer just to say I'm very seriously a disciple of Jesus. And I think the greatest disciple of Jesus in the modern world was a Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was a disciple of Jesus. But he didn't think it was a good idea to join the Christian church. He wouldn't have been welcome!

Kevin Barrett: There are actually Muslim disciples of Jesus, too, although they're probably a little different. But there are definitely a lot of Sufi saints who have had Jesus as their main spiritual guide.

John Cobb: Yeah, I think one can be a disciple of Jesus and separate oneself from the Roman church. And the Western church has been the Roman church. The influence of Rome on Western civilization, including the Christian part of it... Even when I was in high school, Latin was the most important foreign language to study, in a basically Protestant school. That would have been true in secular schools, too.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. I remember meeting Latin teachers when I was young. I never actually studied it.

John Cobb: It lasted right up until very recent times. The universities were studying the classics, and the classics were primarily the Roman Empire. Mm hmm.

Kevin Barrett: What do you think of the Russian critique, the Eastern Orthodox critique? We're seeing this renewed clash of civilizations, but instead of communism, it's Eastern Orthodox Russian civilization that's re-emerging. That's the new bogeyman. What do you make of that?

John Cobb: Well, I'm sympathetic with the Eastern perspective. But it is also, of course, (aligned with) supernaturalism.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. On steroids in some respects.

John Cobb: Yeah.

Kevin Barrett: Which doesn't mean it's not true, though. The miracles that they're experiencing, they may very well be true.

John Cobb: Oh, yes.

Kevin Barrett: You may explain them differently from how they would.

John Cobb: Yes. I have no objection to miracles, as long as we don't treat them as supernatural. We just have to realize the natural world is far more complex. Mind over matter is demonstrated in lots and lots of ways. But when Rupert Sheldrake tries to get biologists to even examine some very obvious phenomena, they kick him out. He's excommunicated. So we may be excommunicated both by the church and by the secularists.

Actually, in the last three years, our particular form of heresy in relationship to both of these has become much less negative. And I give these figures, which I'm sure are misleading because there are a lot of other things entering in, but I'll give them to you anyway. You can see after I had been publishing for 50 years, or actually maybe more than that—there is an organization called Academia.com that informs you how often you have been referred to in other people's essays.

Kevin Barrett: I get those.

John Cobb: Then you know what I'm talking about. Well, I had been referred to about 500 times. That means probably less than ten times a year. Fairly marginal. But I'm now up to 8500.

Kevin Barrett: Hmm. Interesting. You're being rediscovered. Maybe this video will go viral.

John Cobb: So over the last three years, the recognition (has grown) that we really need something different from what we have. Since we have developed something different, we're getting lots more attention.

Kevin Barrett: Just like when I discovered you in the nineties. It was obvious to me that what you were working on was the most obvious solution to the postmodern problem. Or at least the rough outline of the general path out of this postmodern dilemma.

John Cobb: And David is the one who invented the term constructive postmodern.

Kevin Barrett: That's right. Yes, I remember that. He had a conference or two about that, as I recall.

John Cobb: Yes.

Kevin Barrett: So where's David now? We live in a process universe. Consciousness is more primordial than matter. So where's David's consciousness now?

John Cobb: Well, I don't have any objection to using the word heaven as long as it doesn't have a spatial location.

Kevin Barrett: Can wine and virgins be part of it?

John Cobb: We don't have evidence of it having a clearly physical dimension. There are lots of accounts of near-death experiences: The heart stops beating, and then it starts beating. And people can tell you what happened. What happens is that somebody looks at the body from outside it. It seems like the sense experience,if we just try to analyze what's going on there. And there are millions of people who have had encounters with people who have died. It's usually a spouse, though it doesn't have to be. The first pastor of the church that I'm a member of was an extremely open minded person and he would talk about all these things. And it was interesting how often when he started talking about it, people said, "Oh, I didn't know you could talk about that in church." The exclusion of spiritual experiences from church is amazing.

Kevin Barrett: Right. Well, a cynic might say that's what churches were invented for.

John Cobb: That might be. Before the time of the church joining the Roman Empire, when the Roman Empire was persecuting the church, certain types of people were more likely to be found in the church than power seekers. When the Roman Empire put the church on a pedestal, power seekers were going to be heading for that.

And I think that the Christian faith has been understood so much better by the black community than by the white community, even though for a long time the blacks were not able to read the Bible. When they heard the stories, they heard what they really meant. When you're on top, it's hard to understand. Ideas and stories and so forth that are written by the people on the bottom. If you're on the bottom, you'll understand them much better.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. It seems to me the black community has a real genius for religion. I remember the Church of John Coltrane in San Francisco. Quite an amazing place. Black churches are generally more vibrant and interesting than the white churches that I've seen.

John Cobb: And Martin Luther King: If it were not for the black church, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did.

Kevin Barrett: And there's also Islam, which is far more advanced in the black community than in the white community as well. And it does occur to me that the liberal secularists who have tried to do supposedly constructive programs for poor people have actually harmed the black community quite a bit, because the black community was actually doing better when there was a religious basis for social life in that community, and there was very little divorce. Most children were born to married parents. And then the welfare system got "reformed" around 1960, and there's been a concerted war on the black family. Today, the majority of black kids are born out of wedlock, a bigger majority than even the white kids. And that strikes me as—well, if you were going to try to destroy that community, that's what you would do.

John Cobb: One of the Process organizations just had Tinker. He's an indigenous thinker. He was talking about the colonialization of the Native American mind. And the colonialization depends upon some positive aspects of relationship. The mind is not colonized just when soldiers come and try to kill you. And I think integration has—I mean, I'm not against integration (laughs) but I think that the situation of half of the blacks is worse than it was under segregation. I'm from the South. I'm from Georgia. And that little town that was my mother's home, so far as I had a childhood home in the United States, was in a little town called Newnan, Georgia. And the city limits of Newnan excluded the black community and the mill community. So the town of Newton was quite prosperous. And of course, the amount of money that was available in the black community for any purpose was very small. Nevertheless, the best jobs that were available for a black young woman were teaching in school. And I think that the black children had better teaching than the white children. And I'm quite sure they had better preaching. So there was, in the little ghetto, whatever you want to call it, that the blacks had, there was a strong community life. Now we have integrated and 50%, the group that used to be giving leadership in these ghettos, is now contributing to the white community. And the half that is left behind is worse off than it was.

Kevin Barrett: Yes. And it doesn't seem that the BLM movement and the tearing down of some Confederate statues and the media highlighting black people and interracial couples and all that sort of thing, none of that looks to me like it's really going to be improving the lives of a majority of black people, especially the underprivileged ones.

John Cobb: The black church has still a lot more vitality than the white church. And it is it does provide some alternatives in the ghettos.

Kevin Barrett: May God help it flourish and prosper. And. And the black mosques as well.

John Cobb: Yes.

Kevin Barrett: Well, John, we've pretty well finished the hour and covered a bunch of topics. It was really good touching base with you. You're certainly one of my intellectual heroes, spiritual as well, because you have the guts to, like David, go after the truth, wherever it may be. And God bless you for it.

John Cobb: There is a lot of truth in world religion. And I think a lot of truth in the Hebrew tradition. Mm

Kevin Barrett: Indeed. And, well, God willing, I'd love to talk to you again on some other topics because you've got interesting insights on such a wide range of them. But for now, it's time for me to go and get ready for the big soccer game. Having a big feast and watching the Moroccan team see if they can continue their miraculous run.

John Cobb: Okay. Go for it.

Kevin Barrett: Okay. Thanks, John. Great talking with you. Thank you. Take care. Bye.