Why RFK Jr. Believes in God – An Unbelievable Story

Well, I love making Americans healthy again. I'm a fitness guy like you, like I want to I want to see everyone healthy, have a good shot at life. But one of the things that impressed me is that Tony, when he comes, I only have one question and was related to that. You said for 19 years you've been praying. People don't necessarily know you as the spiritual side of Robert, but you've had a spiritual awakening and that has really helped you along the way. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I had you know, I've talked a lot about kind of on my journey, but first of all, I was raised a very, very Catholic family. And and I integrated that into my, you know, into my thought, into my soul. So I never had any bad experience with the Catholic Church. For a lot of people, a lot of people did. But I didn't. Mine was all good. We prayed the rosary every day, sometimes on multiple occasions. We went to church in almost every day. Well, in the summer, sometimes twice a day. And we prayed before and after meals. We prayed the rosary at night. We read the Bible every night. My dad read the Bible to me. So I, you know, that was part of of who I was growing up. But I was in a heroin addict for 14 years. And when you're living against conscience, which is a feature prediction, you tend to push any notion of God over the periphery of your horizons. And so I went and never walked away from the faith, but it just wasn't part of my life. And then I got sober in September of 1983. I was 28 years old. And I, I had at that point a spiritual awakening. I actually I had had a I had had a friend. You want me to talk about this? Yeah, I love it. I hope you know this part of you do it. Our audience lives here in this. So I had a I had a I knew, you know, that I the person I was was going to take drugs again. And I knew I had to have some kind of profound spiritual realignment. And I didn't want to be out on the street sort of wanting drugs and white knuckling it and struggling with that. I wanted to be like a normal person who woke up every day and just never thought about it. And and I knew that there had been people throughout history because we read the lives of the saints and and many of the saints had that as part of their experience. St. Augustine had been a, you know, womanizer. He was living in a bordello until he was 30 years old. His mother, St. Monica, was praying for him every day. And finally, when he was 30, he he he had the spiritual realignment. St. Francis of Assisi had the same thing. And then, of course, St. Paul at Damascus had the same thing. And I had a personal friend. It was a friend of one of my brothers, my brother, my David, who died of this disease. And he had become a moonie. He had become a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And he had joined the Unification Church. And he had he still hung out with us, but he didn't want to take drugs anymore. And he would talk about his stuff, his newfound life. And I and but he didn't want to. He had no the compulsion that he had had before was gone. And I used to think about him when I was when I first was was getting sober. And I was I would think I, you know, I this was my my twisted thinking at the time. I was would say to myself, I'd rather be dead than be a moonie. But I wish somehow I could distill whatever it was, whatever power it was that made him impervious to this compulsion without becoming like a religious nuisance. And I I read a book at that point by Carl Young. And Carl Young was a contemporary of Freud's. He also but unlike Freud, who wasn't about atheists, Young was a deeply spiritual man. His father had been a preacher. A very interesting relationship with his father. His father was had a dry faith. He was very good at uttering the the the, you know, the the palatives and the, you know, the contemporary or the sort of the consensual understanding of religion. But he never had an authentic spiritual experience, which Young did starting when he was about three years old. Young wrote this book called Synchronicity, where he talks about these coincidences that happen in our daily lives. And, you know, all of us have these things happen to us where you're maybe talking about somebody that you haven't thought about for 20 years. And all of a sudden, the phone rings and that person on the line and Young considered those interventions by God who would break his own rule, defy the laws of percentages, defy the laws of chance and come in and tap us on the shoulder and say that I'm here. He actually tells a story in this book of a of a patient. He ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe and Zurich. He talks about a patient, a female patient who is sitting on a couch talking to him about a dream she had. And and in the dream, the fulcrum of the dream, the subject is as a scarab beetle. And the scarab beetle is a very common piece of iconography that's on the hieroglyphics in Egypt and on the tombs and the obelisks. But but they don't exist in northern Europe. And he was in in Zurich. And he hears this bing, bing, bing on the on the window behind him. And it irritates him. But he doesn't want to take his attention off the patient by seeing what it is. And ultimately, he stands up in exasperation. He throws the window open and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his palm. And he shows it to this woman. And he said, is this what you were dreaming about? And those kind of things happen to him all the time. And God gave you some kind of faith encounter. Yeah, it well, what happened to me, he says in that book, he says he tries then. He's not only a very deeply spiritual man, but he is also a faithful scientist. So he tries to use scientific tools. He tries to reproduce that experience in a clinical setting. And he puts one guy in one room and another guy in another room. And he tried and have them flip cards. And he tries to get them to guess what the other guy is flipping. And he thinks if he can beat the laws of mathematics, a chance that he will have proved the existence of a supernatural law because he's beating natural law. Yeah. He never succeeds in doing it. And to his credit, he admits that this book, what he says is, I can't prove using spiritual or using empirical tools and scientific tools, the existence of a God. But having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his facility, he said, I can prove that people who believe in God get better, faster and that their recovery is more durable and enduring. And for me, that was more impactful than if he said he had proved the existence of a God, which I wouldn't have believed at that point, at that point. What? Well, yeah, with scientific tools. Right. Right. But what he was saying was what I heard him saying is that it's irrelevant if there's God up there. If you believe in it, that your chance of recovery is going to be much greater. And I had already made a commitment to myself. That I would do whatever I needed to do to improve my chance of recovery, but even one percent. And what he says, and then I was faced. So I made an intellectual decision. I'm going to start believing in God. And then I'm faced with the dilemma that everybody who makes that commitment has, which is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch or taste or acquire with your senses? And Young solves that problem. And he says, you fake it till you make it. You act as if and that the compliance will precede the evidence. You will see the evidence and it will be overwhelming. I think the way we talk about that is we talk about, you know, you you turn your life and will over or you surrender. Yeah. And Joni has a whole book on surrendering all. And when we surrender to God, he makes all things possible. And your life is like a whole testimony of like taking a drug act and now you ran for president. Yeah, it's crazy stuff, right? It's like a surrender of the heart and connected to the one who created you. I mean, it's like a we're like a computer not connected to the Internet without God. I mean, it changes everything, your perspective, your I mean, even divine insight and wisdom that he has gifts and talents, abilities that he's put on the inside of us that we don't even know about. That when connected to him, he's able to use us. And it's like he puts his super to our natural. And things happen, like you said, that you can't understand. You can't explain. And of course, I had this experience. I I did. I made a decision, OK, I'm going to surrender. And and the way that young, you know, sort of recommends is that I started looking at my life every day as a and that every day involved about 40 decisions that I have to make and that each one of them out for me had a moral dimension. So do I get out of bed when the alarm rings immediately? Or do I stay in bed for another 20 minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I make the bed? Do I hang up the towels? Do I when if I reach in the closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans and all of the wire hangers fall on the floor, do I go in there and clean them up? I am best. Do I put the shopping cart where it's supposed to go? I do. And when I make and that is a way of continually surrendering, of staying that posture of surrender all day, of continually ask myself, what is the next right thing to do? And I can and behaving even when I don't have an audience. And so I started I made that commitment to do that. And then I had this. This the day that I finished that book and I I was kind of I was, you know, very moved by that book. And the day that I'm finished that book, I went out on a volleyball court and somebody hit a volleyball on this very, you know, a really powerful punch and it came down and it landed on top of the goalpost. And I said, I'll allow. So everybody heard me. I said, that volleyball, that ball is going to get hit by a Mack truck. And the ball bounced back up and it went on kind of an errant flight. And then it landed on top of a chain link fence, rolled over the other side. And then it rolled about 60 or 80 feet down into a major thoroughfare and a big diesel with the bulldog came by and and popped it with this resounding pop. And there was just a moment when everybody went and looked at me and said, how did you do that? And then the moment passed. But to me, I was I had just finished that book. And it was like, you know, that was kind of my spiritual. It's kind of a poor man's spiritual awakening.