154 | Reza Aslan on Religion, Metaphor, and Meaning

Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably from person to person. Some believe in an anthropomorphic, judgmental God; others conceive of God as more transcendent and conceptual; some are animists who attribute spiritual essence to creatures and objects; and many more. I talk with writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan about his view of religion as a vocabulary constructed by human beings to express a connection with something beyond the physical world — why one might think that, and what it implies about how we should go about living our lives.

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Reza Aslan received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth; and God: A Human History. He has also worked in television, producing and writing documentaries, and serving as a consulting producer for the drama series The Leftovers. He recently started a podcast, Metaphysical Milkshake, with actor Rainn Wilson.

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0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll, and like many of the guests here on Mindscape, I am fortunate enough to have a Wikipedia page about myself. I mean, it’s not that I have it ’cause I didn’t make it or edit it, but it’s there. You can go to Wikipedia. And for some reason, recently I did go to it, I don’t even visit it that often, and I don’t edit it myself, so I was interested to see that most of my Wikipedia page is about religion and atheism. Not all of it, it does talk about my research a little bit, but a lot of it is about my philosophical religious views, the debates that I’ve had about religion and things like that, which is interesting to me because in my self-conception… It’s perfectly fair. I am an atheist, I’ve talked about it a lot, no question about that.

0:00:46.2 SC: But it’s still a small part, relatively speaking of who I am and what I do, but it speaks to the fact that people are interested, that these are issues that matter to people. The physics is there but the religion, or the atheism, that’s what’s really important. And it’s not wrong to be interested in these issues. The nature of the universe includes the question of whether or not it is mostly a naturalistic universe or some kind of theistic or spiritual or beyond naturalistic universe in some sense. So I’ve long wanted to have more conversations here on Mindscape about those issues, and we’ve touched on it before. We had Jeremy England, who is a physicist, but who’s also religious, and we had people like Marq De Villiers, who talked about the history of hell in an extremely amusing podcast that I recommend that you listen to if you haven’t already. But I wanted to get a religious person on to talk about religion, and so today’s guest, Reza Aslan, is a great person to do exactly that.

0:01:45.3 SC: Now, people who are classified or self-classify as religious or faithful or believers come in a lot of different varieties, right? So just saying that someone is religious almost doesn’t tell you that much about them. There are people who are very hardcore and also very… Almost anthropomorphic about it. They think that God is a person up there judging them, making the decisions, deciding right from wrong. And there are people whose versions of religion are not that anthropomorphic, are closer to something ineffable and transcendent and quasi-philosophical. So Reza is an interesting person for his personal journey. He was born to a Muslim family, converted to Christianity at some point and then converted back into Islam. So he currently calls himself Muslim, but he also, as we are gonna find out, listening to the podcast, his views are what you might call pantheistic. They’re something that God is not a person up there in the sky judging us, but God is a feature of the universe that is sort of transcendent and above the natural order of things, very important.

0:02:52.0 SC: And then he’s willing to admit, to be honest about his feelings about how this impacts the physical behaviour of the universe. There are some people who wanna say God is just a way of talking about the universe, but the universe obeys the laws of physics. Reza says nope. [chuckle] There are people and other biological organisms and things like that don’t exactly obey the laws of physics, because there is this spiritual side to things that does intervene. So we talk about that, we talk about what it might mean. And as always on the podcast, I’m here to listen to the person that I have as a guest and let them give their best possible case for their views while inserting my own opinions here and there, so you will hear me do that. So this is, I think a very reasonable discussion about two slightly different world views. We don’t get into theism versus anti-theism.

0:03:44.3 SC: I’m not trying to bash religion. There’s a whole discourse about whether or not religion is good or bad in the world, and that’s an interesting and important discourse, but it’s separate in my mind from the discourse about whether religion is true or not. And as I’ve often said, the question of whether religion is true or not is infinitely easier to me than the question of whether religion has been an overall good for the world, which is a messy, complicated thing, so we don’t talk about it that much. This is a much more philosophical, scientific kind of discussion than that. So hopefully it will be interesting, even though pragmatically in some ways, we’re not that far apart. And if this kind of thing is up your alley and you want more, Reza has actually teamed up with Rainn Wilson, the actor, known as Dwight on The Office and other places, to start their own podcast called Metaphysical Milkshake.

0:04:33.1 SC: So they’re gonna be talking about the meaning of life, existential questions of the universe with various people of different persuasions. So you can get more conversations with Reza and Rainn, etcetera, if you go to wherever fine podcasts are sold, Metaphysical Milkshake. The other thing, this is very far apart, this is a giant leap in subject, but I wanna announce that after some requests from various listeners, we have a merchandise store associated with Mindscape now. You can go to Tee Public, T-E-E-P-U-B-L-I-C, teepublic.com. Search for my name or even better, just go to the Mindscape homepage, preposterousuniverse.com/podcast. In the right-hand column you’ll see a link to t-shirts, mugs and more.

0:05:14.9 SC: So you can get t-shirts now that say Mindscape on them, and there’s different designs. There’s a Schroedinger’s Cat, awake plus asleep. There’s the core theory equation with all those Greek letters and so forth, there’s a little graph of complexity and entropy changing over time. You can get these on T-shirts, on mugs, on stickers for your computer, whatever you want. Masks, if you wanna have a mask with the core theory equation, here is your chance. So it’s a tiny bit of money for me, honestly. It was not worth the hourly rate, let’s put it that way. I’m not really in it for the money, but hopefully some people can have cute little t-shirts that remind them of the fun times they’ve had listening to Mindscape. And with that, let’s go.

[music]

0:06:12.5 SC: Reza Aslan, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:06:13.9 Reza Aslan: Hey, thanks for having me, Sean. I’m glad to be here.

0:06:16.6 SC: So let me start with the most obvious question, the question that is pushing us here. You started a podcast, you’ve begun a podcast. Why in the world would you do that? Doesn’t the world have enough podcasts? [chuckle] What is it that made you look around?

0:06:28.2 RA: Listen, Sean, I want in on that sweet, sweet podcast cash.

0:06:33.8 SC: Yeah, good.

0:06:34.5 RA: It’s just flowing, all those bucks. You know what I’m saying?

0:06:38.7 SC: How will you know what to do with it?

0:06:39.9 RA: Literally hundreds of dollars.

0:06:41.2 SC: Dozens of dollars will come your way due to this effort you’re putting in, I’m pretty sure. I just started a t-shirt store, that people have been asking me about that for a long time. “When are you gonna get merchandise?” And so I finally started that.

0:06:51.8 RA: That’s smart, we haven’t gotten to the merch yet on Metaphysical Milkshake. But this podcast started… The actor Rainn Wilson and I have been friends for a while, and people obviously know Rainn as Dwight on The Office. This kind of iconic character that he created, but what people don’t really know about him is that he is a deeply philosophical, very spiritual man. He writes and thinks a lot about the questions of the human condition. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we supposed to do? Is there free will? What happens when we die? These are the things that kind of animate him and they’re the kind of questions that have always animated me.

0:07:35.9 RA: And so he and I would get together, sometimes have breakfast, have lunch and have these kind of deep conversations about life’s big questions. And one day we were having breakfast and talking about the meaning of life, and then I think one of us just kind of said, “You know, we should maybe record this stuff and maybe people will wanna hear it,” and that’s how Metaphysical Milkshake was born. We basically… Every week is one kind of life’s big question and we discuss it ourselves, and then we usually bring on some kind of expert to help us figure things out.

0:08:11.2 SC: Well, and I think a lot of… Interestingly, despite the fact that we dress it up in robes of rationality and trying to think through this in a sophisticated way, a lot of times, the attitude that people bring to these kinds of questions is driven by their personality, just as much as it is by facts and reason and logic and things like that. And so there is a personality that it’s kind of like, let’s all just get along, aren’t we all saying the same thing? Let’s just ask questions, and there’s another kind of personalities like, “Here’s the answer, you should believe me.” So, which side of this personality divide are you coming down on?

0:08:46.7 RA: Definitely closer to the here’s the answer part, out of those two. The thing about Rainn is that he’s such a sweet guy and he’s exactly who you were talking about, that we’re all the same, we’re all pink on the inside. Let’s reach across the aisle. Let’s make common cause. Let’s find out the things that we have in common. And I am much more… There are certain things that are right and there are certain things that are wrong. There are certain things that are good, and there are certain things that are evil. And I don’t give a fuck about reaching across the aisle to evil. If you are somebody who refuses to acknowledge my basic humanity, my response to you, excuse me, is go fuck yourself, not, “Let me reach across the aisle and figure out why you think that I should go back to my country.”

0:09:42.0 RA: So, Rainn and I, we have the same world view in the sense that we see things through a spiritual lens, we are driven by a desire to experience transcendence in different forms, but we have different personalities, for sure, and it comes across in the podcast a lot, where I’m much more cynical and I’m much more, let’s just say, dark than he is.

0:10:07.2 SC: So, you will learn as a new podcaster that there’s a little button when you publish each episode for Clean versus Explicit. So, don’t worry, we’re explicit for this one, that’s okay.

[overlapping conversation]

0:10:15.0 RA: Sorry, guys. Listen, one thing you should know about me is that I really, really like to cuss. I enjoy swear words as a writer, as a thinker, as someone who loves words, I love swear words and I use them with pride.

[chuckle]

0:10:36.0 SC: I’m not sure what God thinks about that, but I’m glad that you are explicit about it. So, I like that sort of good cop, bad cop buddy act that you’re bringing then to the podcast, but then it opens up the next question, which is… So, we have set the stage a little bit, how would you characterise your own personal views about these questions? I know that probably there’s a lot… It would require more than a few sentences, but how should we think about your perspective here?

0:11:00.9 RA: I think Rainn and I, this is the thing that brought us together is that we refuse the simple dichotomy between science and religion, spirituality and reason. Those are false dichotomies. They’re false categories, as far as we’re concerned. We are both deeply spiritual, but we’re also deeply scientific in our outlook. And we don’t really find that much of a conflict between those two views. Certainly, there are ways in which both of those views can be stretched to the extreme. In terms of religion, it’s obvious. In terms of the science, unfortunately, for some reason, most people think that science is some kind of neutral force in the world for good. And in many ways it is, as a methodology, that’s certainly true, but science can very quickly become scientism.

0:12:06.8 RA: And scientism, the belief that science has an answer for every issue, the belief that indeed science should actually replace religion, I think is not just wrong-headed, but I think it can be a deeply dangerous way of manipulating science as an ideology instead of as what it truly is, which is a methodology.

0:12:32.5 SC: Well, I will encourage listeners who haven’t already done so to go back and listen to my podcast with Alex Rosenberg, who is the most happy explicit scientistic advocate that I know. He has taken up to reclaim the word scientism as a good thing. So, that would be a different point of view.

0:12:51.6 RA: I would disagree, but I’d love to hear that.

0:12:53.5 SC: Good, yeah. That’s why we’re here. But okay, that’s good as an, sort of, an attitudinal perspective you’re coming from, but I kinda wanna know the answer to the basic ontological questions about the world. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in afterlife? Do you believe that there are objective moral rules out there? Like the usual things that come along with a religious belief system.

0:13:15.9 RA: A spiritual belief system. Yeah, let’s start from the ground, right?

0:13:21.0 SC: Mm-hmm.

0:13:21.8 RA: And let’s get our terminology correct. So religion and faith are two different things.

0:13:29.3 SC: Okay.

0:13:30.3 RA: Faith is individual, it’s ineffable. Faith, as all of the best of cognitive studies of it go, is deeply embedded in our cognitive processes. It is an evolutionary impulse. This is the subject of my most previous book, which is called God: A Human History, and it’s all about the idea that what we think of as the religious impulse is a part of our evolutionary process. And there are many ideas about why it’s part of our evolutionary process, but what there is no question about, what there is no more debate about, is that it is an inextricable part of the human condition. Indeed, it’s a part of a human condition that actually, the archeological evidence is as clear as it gets, that it actually predates Homo sapiens. It’s a biological impulse that we see in Neanderthals. We have ample evidence of it in Neanderthal burial sites, Neanderthal caves, in which we have what is unquestionable the detritus of ritual experience. Let’s put it that way.

0:14:57.9 RA: And we even have some far less certain archeological evidence of that impulse in even earlier forms of humans. But that’s different than religion. Religion is merely the language, the systemic, highly controlled language through which we express this faith impulse, this impulse that is embedded in our cognitive processes, that is part of what it means to be human. So yes, you could say that I have a religion, but my religion is merely the language, the framework of metaphors and symbols that I use to communicate to myself and to like-minded people, the inexpressible experience of transcendence. So that’s the first thing that I would say. So I’m a person of faith, and if you would say, “Well, how do you express your faith?” I would say, “Okay, I would express it through the religion of Islam, ’cause it’s the language that I like the most, it’s the one that I’m most familiar with.” But to the question, do you believe in God…

0:16:15.5 SC: Can I actually bump in there?

0:16:17.3 RA: Oh, go ahead.

0:16:18.0 SC: Yeah, I know. I wanna know whether you believe in God or not, but you’ve said too many juicy things that I need to just like…

0:16:22.6 RA: Alright, let’s… Yeah, let’s break it down.

0:16:23.5 SC: I wanna expand a little bit. We have time to dig in here. I’m always a little bit curious when people talk about this evolutionary impulse towards faith or belief in transcendence or something like that.

0:16:35.0 RA: Yes.

0:16:35.8 SC: Number one, I’m sceptical that it’s true because I can imagine that it’s an evolutionary adaptation for something else that is sometimes expressed as faith or religion, rather than directly that.

0:16:47.5 RA: Yeah.

0:16:48.6 SC: But even, number two, it doesn’t seem to be inextricable to me, as some of us have extracted it pretty effectively and… But I don’t wanna talk about either one of those things. So what I wanna talk about is, in moral and ethical philosophy there’s a whole set of arguments called evolutionary or genealogical debunking arguments, where they say it’s an argument against moral objectivity. And the argument goes, look, clearly… Like, as you say, we evolve, we have pressures to survive that give us certain instincts, certain impulses, but the impulses that we get from evolution are chosen for their survival value or for their reproductive fitness, not for their truth. [chuckle]

0:17:32.3 RA: Supposedly, yes.

0:17:33.3 SC: Not for being correct. So once you say that there’s this impulse driven to us, given to us by evolution for this, that undermines the idea that this thing is true, like you’re sort of opening up a [0:17:46.3] ____ in there.

0:17:46.5 RA: Sort of, here’s the thing about… Here’s what’s important is that morality has literally nothing to do whatsoever with the religious impulse at all. In fact, what most people talk about when they talk about religiously-inspired morality is barely 5000 years old, and the religious impulse, conservatively, is at least 200,000 years old. We have material evidence showing proof of religious, of the religious, or what I’m calling the religious impulse, that goes back at least 200,000 years, if not more. So that’s why the argument of, “Oh, well, the reason that we have the religious impulse is that it helps us be moral people, it keeps me from stabbing the cave man in the chest next to me and eating all of his food.”

0:18:35.5 RA: No, it doesn’t. No, that’s not at all what religion was about, it never was until about 5000 years ago. The very concept of a divine law giver, of a divine law giver of a moral concept of religion is a brand new idea. The gods of Greece were as immoral as it gets, the gods of Mesopotamia were not just amoral, they were immoral. So by no means, and that that is a very… People who make that argument are making a very unsophisticated argument, but you’re absolutely right in that the problem with the, what I would say, a fairly accepted proposition that whatever the religious impulse is, it is a product of our evolutionary processes or cognitive processes, has to do with the fact that it is universal.

0:19:32.0 RA: And, as I say, it goes back to even before Homo sapiens arose as a species. Now, the question is, why? And you said it very smartly. The consensus view of those cognitive scientists, those cognitive theorists of religion who have studied this, is that because there is literally no adaptive advantage whatsoever for the religious impulse. I mean, none. If anything, in terms of the material resources that it requires, the energy that it requires, the anxiety that it produces, it’s the opposite of an adaptive advantage. So then, why? The consensus view seems to be that it is the unintended result of some other evolutionary… Some other adaptive advantage. And there are two primary candidates for this. One is the theory of mind, which most people are familiar with.

0:20:36.7 RA: The theory of mind is that thing that makes you realise that the thing that looks like you, feels like you, it’s an… It helps you create empathy and all that stuff. And then, of course, there’s what’s often referred to as the HADD, or the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, it’s that thing that makes us think that every knock that happens in your house is caused by someone doing the knocking. And sort of the prevailing theory is that when you combine those two evolutionary processes, that have very clear adaptive advantages, the unintended echo of that is the universal, ’cause that part’s unquestioned, the universal impulse towards religious belief. That’s a perfectly fine answer. I don’t question that answer. But I…

0:21:32.4 SC: So… I’m sorry. So just to be clear, I was actually not in any way making an argument that religion evolved because of morality. I was merely making an analogy between the structures of two arguments; one says, your beliefs in moral, objective truths are ungrounded because it would be too weird for those to be the same moral, objective… Moral truths that were given to us by evolution. I’m having trouble getting the sentence out. Likewise, analogously, if you say that there is a religious impulse given to us by evolution, it makes it highly unlikely that your religious beliefs about the world that you get from that, or that you associate with that, are true.

0:22:10.3 RA: True, and they’re not.

0:22:12.1 SC: Because you can… Okay, good.

0:22:12.8 RA: Yeah. So the religious ideologies that arise from this universal impulse, are nothing more than man-made frameworks. I use the analogy of language ’cause it just helps people think better, right? They’re man-made frameworks that help to, in obvious ways, control, but also to make sense of, what is a universal impulse, right?

0:22:42.7 SC: Right.

0:22:43.5 RA: The impulse is there. The decision to not believe is an active decision. But the belief impulse you are born with, for reasons again that may have nothing to do with the actual belief itself, but that’s just a kind of by-product, an accidental by-product, of some other impulse that we have. But nevertheless it’s there. It has to be unlearned, in other words.

0:23:12.8 SC: Let me give you a chance to tell our audience whether or not you believe in God.

0:23:16.4 RA: Yeah. So this is what I was gonna say. Any time anyone ever asks you the question, “Do you believe in God?” The only legitimate answer is, “What do you mean by God?” This word god, is such a… [chuckle] It cracks me up. It is probably the word that people assume we all share most in common, the definition of most in common, and yet it is unquestionably the most variable word in the English language. ‘Cause what you say God may mean something completely different than what I mean when I say the word God. So if you say, “Do you believe in God?” I would have to say, “Well, what do you mean by God?”

0:23:56.7 SC: Okay. Let me… That’s perfectly fine. I completely agree that it is entirely an ill-defined concept. Is there anything that you believe in, as part of the fundamental architecture of the world, that you are comfortable associating with the word, God?

0:24:11.6 RA: Yes. So my conception of God, whatever God is, and this is very much borne from my own personal experience but it is a part of… I’m gonna rely, ’cause we have no choice, I’m gonna rely on the language that I have available to me; this kind of ready-made, pre-packaged language, that is given to me, offered to me, by the religion of Islam, but in this particular case, very much more specifically the Sufi tradition within the Islam… Within Islam, which is kind of the mystical tradition within Islam. My conception of God is as pure, necessary existence. And so my view of God is not like a lot of other views of God. My god is not anthropomorphic, my god has no human qualities or human attributes whatsoever.

0:25:06.1 RA: My god is pure existence. But as pure existence, and this is where Sufism kind of comes in, as pure existence, that means that sort of just logically speaking nothing can exist that isn’t God. Nothing can exist outside of the thing that is pure existence. And so I am what is often referred to as a pantheist. I believe that all things are God. That God is all things, and all things is God. That nothing can exist, except in so far as it shares in the only thing that exists. And so that pantheism, which in my… The book that I was mentioning, my book, God: A Human History, is the earliest form of spirituality, is the kind of spirituality that I ascribe to now. But do I think that God has a will, a plan, a purpose? These are human terms. They don’t belong to God. Do I think God is good or evil? That’s a human construct.

0:26:11.2 SC: Yeah. I think it’s fair then to sort of flip it around, turn God off for the moment, and think about… I don’t wanna use too much technical, philosophical terms, but the ontology of the world is a word I already used; what the world is made of fundamentally. And in the philosophy literature, again, we separate out naturalists versus non-naturalists. So naturalists thinks there’s only the natural world, and non-naturalists think that there’s something extra. And naturalists have difficulty wondering what that would be, but it’s still the majority of people on earth who believe in it. And then within naturalists, there are physicalists, people who believe that there’s just the physical world. Then there are the people who think that the world has other properties, like maybe mental properties, consciousness, something like that.

0:26:57.2 SC: So within that tripartite distinction of physicalists, naturalists non-physicalists, non-naturalists, do you have a comfortable home in either of one of those three?

0:27:06.4 RA: Well, so I think if I were to be honest about the way that I approach my spirituality and my experience of the world, it has to do with that word that I used earlier, which is transcendence. I am not a physicalist, I’m not a materialist. I do not believe that the only reality is that reality which I can empirically experience, okay? I think that that is a profoundly arrogant and strangely anthropocentric view of what reality is. I do believe that there is a fundamental reality that lies beyond the material realm. And I believe that that reality can be experienced. That we have the ability. It’s not some kind of magical… I hate to use the word spiritual, ’cause then people immediately think that I’m talking about magical thinking. I believe that whatever the religious impulse is, it is a process of electrical currents in my brain. I believe that my brain is chemically created to have a spiritual experience.

0:28:32.6 RA: And so I believe that the fullness of the human experience cannot be contained solely by the material realm. I don’t think that the brain is meant to do that. I think that that realm of transcendence, that which lies beyond, is the thing that every human being, every brain, has the natural capacity to experience, and indeed the experience of it is the fullness of what it means to be human. So that’s why I’m a spiritual being. That’s why I long for spirituality. Not because I think it’s outside of the material, but I think it’s because it is… Or outside of reality, I should say…

0:29:15.4 SC: Good. Because it is separate from the material, it’s a different thing, yeah. Okay.

0:29:18.4 RA: It is separate from material. Yeah. That was the wrong… Yeah. But because I believe that it is a natural function of my brain that I should take advantage of in order to fully realise what it is to be human.

0:29:36.2 SC: Good. That part is very clarifying. I like that. I’m gonna ask you two more clarifying questions before you can back up and sort of justify some of the claims.

0:29:44.5 RA: [chuckle] Alright.

0:29:45.3 SC: Is there any sense that you believe in something along the lines of life after death?

0:29:52.2 RA: Yeah, so this is a topic that, as you can imagine, we deal with a lot on Metaphysical Milkshake. It is the ultimate metaphysical question…

0:30:00.9 SC: There you go. Yes. Plugging the podcast. Excellent. This is not your first rodeo. I like that.

0:30:06.1 RA: Yeah, that’s why… You gotta always bring in, “Apple Podcast. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.” [chuckle] I believe… Well, let’s just take it to its most basic scientific level. The fundamental rule of science is the preservation of matter and energy, right? So the notion that whatever exists today has always existed and will always exist as long as the universe exists. That the collection of matter that has made me who I am, and that has given me a sense of consciousness. Again, I don’t believe that consciousness is some magical thing that exists. I believe that it is the result of the matter that has created me. And that matter is eternal now. So that it’ll always exist. Once I’m gone, it’ll continue. The question is, will it continue still in the form of my consciousness or not?

0:31:16.8 RA: That’s where my spiritual views of the afterlife begin, right? So at that point, that’s where I have to say to myself, I would like to think that whatever combination of matter and energy has created my sense of me, that that sense will continue almost like as an imprint on that matter, on that energy. And so whatever the afterlife is, it’s that experience of returning to the universe, the matter that is me goes on to be the matter that is the universe, but that carries with it, again almost like an echo, the imprint of whatever my consciousness was. That’s what I’d like to think is the afterlife. But that’s obviously a far cry from either what most religion tells you, because religion wants you to continue to be you later on, and I think that’s where the trickiness comes.

0:32:29.8 SC: Well, I think… The difference as I would put it, is that you’re talking about that your existence having this persistent impact on the world after you’ve gone in some sense, but the difference is that when you’re alive the world can have an impact on you, and you can feel things about it, and think about it and respond to it and feel happy or sad. And it sounds like you’re not accepting the existence of those things once you die.

0:32:56.8 RA: I mean, again, I… Because language is so limiting when we’re talking about these kinds of things, we have to rely… I was gonna say we have to rely on metaphor, but even when we’re not relying on metaphor, we are using metaphor; because we have no choice but to talk about these things in terms of metaphor. But the Sufis have this sort of wonderful notion about how… The way to think about it is, a drop of water in an ocean, right? Like you’re the drop of water, and you are dropped in the ocean; now, do you still exist as an entity, as a drop? I mean…

0:33:35.3 SC: No, no you don’t. [chuckle]

0:33:35.4 RA: No, not really. Yeah. Right. I mean, not really…

0:33:37.4 SC: Pretty clearly, no.

0:33:39.0 RA: But the drop that was you is part of this larger ocean now. So the question is, is there a part of the ocean that is you, exclusively you…

0:33:52.2 SC: Right.

0:33:52.6 RA: Individually you? Or is the moment that you are part of that, the moment that the matter and energy that is me standing here talking to you, is now dead and gone and now slowly absorbing back into the universe, is any of that still me? I wish I knew the answer to that question, but this is again where the faith part comes in. Where it’s like, that is what I’m comfortable saying with confidence. That whatever is me continues forever. The question is, as it’s continuing forever, is it still me? Does it carry any of me, still? And that’s where my faith says, “Yes,” but that’s just pure…

0:34:41.0 SC: With the inflection.

0:34:42.0 RA: Do you like the way that I said, “Yes”?

0:34:44.4 SC: Exactly that inflection. Yes.

0:34:44.5 RA: Yes? Maybe? Yes?

[laughter]

0:34:46.1 SC: But, okay, I mean, just to be clear. That diverges pretty dramatically from what my understanding of the orthodox Islamic position would be, that there is a paradise, there’s a hell, which place do you go…

0:34:57.0 RA: Yeah, there’s a heaven, there’s a hell, there’s a place where good people go, and a place where bad people go. Yeah.

0:35:00.7 SC: But depends on what you did and what you believed. And so, that’s not part of your personal version?

0:35:07.5 RA: Well, look, those are again human attempts to make sense of the incomprehensible, right? Christianity has a heaven and hell, Islam has a heaven and hell, and I think most people, most of your listeners, would probably think that the concept of heaven and hell is an ancient concept, that it’s one that we would find in most religions, that it’s an early form of religion. The concept of heaven and hell is 3000 years old. It was invented by a man named Zarathustra. He’s the first person who said, “Actually, no, there’s a good death and a bad after death, and good people go to the good place and bad people go to the bad place.” That’s 3000 years old. Again, if you even… If you take me even remotely seriously, and you take my 200,000-year explanation for the origins of the religious impulse, 3000 years, a concept of heaven and hell, this is a very new idea. So yes, it’s true that there are Orthodox conceptions of what happens in the afterlife, but those Orthodox conceptions are exactly that; they’re conceptions. They’re ideas for how to think about the afterlife.

0:36:24.5 SC: I will say that Mindscape listeners actually do know better, because we had a wonderful podcast episode with Mark De Villiers who wrote a biography of hell. About all the different ways in which different cultures…

0:36:34.7 RA: I think I’ve read that. Yeah.

0:36:36.7 SC: Have invented this idea of hell, and it was fascinating and hilarious. And so, yeah, it’s obviously…

0:36:40.0 RA: Yeah. Hell, in fact again, very new idea. Very new idea.

0:36:41.2 SC: Very new idea. Okay, then the third question I wanna know. We had an ontological question, an afterlife question. Do you think that if you do believe in the existence of an aspect of reality that is transcendent or even spiritual, does that have any impact on our notions of right and wrong, moral and immoral, here on earth?

0:37:01.6 RA: Right. Yeah. This is a tough one. I mean, I think, because… Again, it goes back to this notion of God as a divine law-giver, right? That we know in our hearts what is right and wrong, because we were made that way by a god who gives us our laws. Again, if heaven and hell is 3000 years old, the concept of divine morality is barely 5000 years old. Barely. Very new idea. Ancient peoples did not look to the heavens for the source of their morality.

0:37:35.1 SC: Not to Zeus, certainly. [laughter]

0:37:35.2 RA: Yeah. On the contrary. Exactly. And so, this comes down to this notion of, is it that we derive our values from God, and then put them into the world? Or do we derive our values from the world, and then implant them on to God? And I’m definitely in the latter category, because again, going back to my definition of God, morality doesn’t really play a role in pure existence. Concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, these are human constructs, that we then try to divinise by placing in the sort of conception of the divine. And, by the way, that’s why it changes all the time. I mean, all you have to do is read the Hebrew Scriptures to know that what was okay in one book becomes not okay in the next book.

[laughter]

0:38:36.9 RA: So… But that doesn’t mean… And I think this is important. So usually when I talk like this, people say, “Oh, I get it, so you’re a relativist, and all that.” Not really, no, not really. Because I do truly believe that the answer to, is there a right or wrong, is there good and evil, is an answer that rests within us. That part I do believe. I just don’t think it was put there by God. And while it is a slippery slope, it’s a very tricky thing to talk about, because, as we say, morality is constantly changing, our consensus over what is moral and what is not is constantly changing based on the changing contexts in which we live. But I do think that there is a fundamental divide where moral certitude can rest. And that divide is, does it affirm humanity or not?

0:39:40.7 RA: And so I can sit here and say, “I don’t believe that there’s any such thing as the devil. I can tell you exactly how the devil was invented. I don’t think there’s anything as hell.” Again, those are all just absurdities. But I do think that there is evil; I just don’t think evil is a cosmic force. I think that evil is the proactive removal of a person’s humanity. That is where evil lies. And so I can talk with comfort about good and evil, without necessarily having to define those things in cosmic terms. Or, for that matter, in absolute terms, other than to say the denial, the degradation of humanity is morally evil, and the opposite of that is morally good.

0:40:41.0 SC: Well, good. So here’s where it becomes operational, right? What you just said about morality is like 98% overlap with my own extremely atheist view of morality. The 2% is that I would almost completely remove the certainty there, but I do think that morality is constructed by human beings, and there’s a lot of overlap between different people’s conceptions of what it is, so we can build up some social cohesion on the basis of that. So let’s dig into how that relates to religion in some way. Nothing that you said referred, just now, to the existence of this transcendent realm. So number one, is there any connection there for you; and number two, how should we think about the fact that more traditionally, or at least in more organised religions, or among many religious believers, they directly look to religious instruction for moral instruction?

0:41:43.2 RA: Well, let’s tackle the second part first, ’cause that’s… It’s basic and obvious. I mean, human beings are driven towards certainty. Moral certainty, philosophical certainty. Certainty is comfortable. Again, if we wanna talk about, is this part of our evolutionary drive? Yeah, I think so. I think that nature is scary, the world is frightening, and you need to… Death is a uncontrolled and uncontrollable phenomenon, and you need to figure out how to control it, and you need to figure out how to make sense of the world. And religion does that very, very well, by telling you what is right and what is wrong, what to do, what not to do. And as long as you recognise that those answers are created by human beings, not by the divine, then you can accept religion as precisely what it is. A set of moral rules, guidance, to live by. And religious people who truly do live by those moral rules and moral guidances tend to be very nice and wonderful and good people.

0:43:03.0 RA: So that’s a separate issue than your really astute question, which is, is there a relationship between this searching within oneself for that concept of moral certitude, and the, what I would say, is our evolutionary strive for transcendence? And it comes back to this notion that I was saying about, what does it mean to live life as a human to its fullest? And I think that’s where those two ideas that I just presented start to come together, in a way. I do believe that striving for transcendence, using the cognitive processes that you have, in order to expand your mind and to experience things beyond the material realm, is the fullest expression of being human. And I also believe that the dividing line, the moral dividing line, is about what promotes humanity and what doesn’t. What oppresses humanity.

0:44:19.6 RA: So fundamentally, all of it, in the end, comes down to human, to being human. That that’s my spiritual longing. My spiritual life is grounded in my experience as a human. That’s what I think is important to say. My conception of morality is grounded in my experience as a human. But because I don’t differentiate between human and divine, because I don’t differentiate between God and man, or creation and creator, then that fundamental desire to be human to its fullest extent is a spiritual thing for me. It’s a spiritual pursuit for me. In other words, I don’t look out there for God. I look in here for God.

0:45:18.9 SC: No, I think I get that, but I… I worry that it is making blurry a distinction that matters to me. So I wanna sort of interrogate it a little bit.

0:45:29.5 RA: Yeah. Tell me.

0:45:32.4 SC: Part of me wants to say that operationally, like I said, we’re not that different in our views on morality, so how would things change if the language you use… As you say, you like to say that religion is kind of a language that we use to interpret the world… What if we dropped all the religious part from that language? What if we were physicalists? What if we said, like, “Yeah, I’m a bunch of atoms, I obey the laws of physics. Once I become a complex collective creature, I don’t know what all of my atoms are doing, so it makes more sense to think of me as an agent that has desires and goals and makes choices and wants certain things to happen.” And that’s the world. That’s the world we have evidence for and we live in and we can be happy with that. I mean, how does my life change if I say that, versus adding on to it this other aspect of reality that is not captured by physicalism?

0:46:21.3 RA: Well, I think, in order to truly answer that question, we need to have a far more expansive definition of what religion actually is and what it does. I think the problem is, is that when people think of religion, they think of God. As far as most people go, those things go hand-in-hand; when about half the world’s religions don’t have a god, don’t have any conception of a god, and yet they’re still… We still call them religion. Theravada Buddhism; there’s no God in Theravada Buddhism. There’s no God in Gaianism. These are strict ancient religions. So then the question is, “Okay, well then what the hell is a religion then? Is it about ritual behaviour?” That’s not such a bad definition of religion. Ceremonial… Communal, ceremonial, ritual behaviour. But if that’s your definition of religion, then a football game is religion.

0:47:24.2 SC: Right. [chuckle]

0:47:25.3 RA: Right. Okay, so let’s remove the ritual aspect of it for a moment, and let’s go with what Reza is talking about, which is sort of the striving for transcendence. Maybe that’s what religion is. Okay, well then I guess mountain climbing is a religion then. Because a lot of mountain climbers I know do it because it’s an experience of transcendence for them. So what the hell is religion then? I would say, I would argue, that religion is… If you really break it down in all those ways, it’s just another kind of ideology. Religion as an ideology isn’t all that different from other ideologies; from patriotism, from nationalism, from communism. The difference people always say, is, “Oh, but religion has established itself on moral absolutism, and so that’s what makes religion different as an ideology.” Really? I don’t know about the patriots that you know about…

[laughter]

0:48:34.2 RA: But the patriots that I know about, there’s nothing that you can say or do that would ever change their mind that America is the greatest country in the history of the world. Right? Which is bullshit, in a thousand different ways. But it’s not about evidence. It’s about a belief system. I would say, that atheism, a lot of forms of atheism, is just another kind of belief system. It is predicated on a set of propositions, most of them unprovable, about the workings of the universe. Now, if we think of religion in those terms, then what we recognise very quickly is that religion in and of itself isn’t a force of good or bad. It doesn’t promote peace or violence. It isn’t about compassion or hatred. Religion is in many ways a neutral ideology, that the meaning of which is ascribed solely by the believer, him or herself. Religion is what the religious person says it is.

0:49:50.2 SC: Right, right. But… I’m completely on board with all of those things that you just said. And I kinda don’t care. I mean, these are…

0:49:56.3 RA: Have I not answered that? I gotta be honest with you, I forgot the question.

0:50:00.0 SC: Right. Exactly.

0:50:00.1 RA: I was waxing on and on about terminology, [laughter] like we annoying professors do.

0:50:05.2 SC: Forget the word religion, and forget all the sort of bad versions of either theism, or atheism for that matter. I wanna home in on your version. Pantheism, transcendence, an element that goes beyond the material to the world. And I wanna know, boots on the ground, how does it affect my life? How do I end up in a different place were I to believe that view of the ontology of the world, than if I were a strict materialist who just said, “Yeah, a bunch of atoms obeying the laws of physics”?

0:50:41.1 RA: Well, at the risk of kind of repeating something that I had said already, it’s because that is what human beings are designed to do. Human beings are designed… The brain, our cognitive processes are designed for transcendence. They’re designed to experience things beyond the material realm. So that’s just… To me, if you would say, “Why would I do that?” I would say, “Because that’s the human experience in its fullest sense.” But if what you’re saying is, “Okay, but why would I use… Why would I rely on a religion for any of that?” Okay? Okay, if you’re saying, “Okay, maybe I accept your view that transcendence is the natural human condition. The striving for transcendence. Fine. But why would I have to do it under any kind of religious umbrella?” Do you know what I mean?

0:51:43.1 SC: Well… I’m sorry, not to short circuit you. But that is… I’m asking the opposite of that. [laughter]

0:51:47.8 RA: The opposite of this. Okay, let’s go.

0:51:49.4 SC: I don’t care whether someone does it under the religious umbrella or not, I really wanna try to really home in on the distinction between a pure physicalist such as myself, who says, “Look, I’m a complex creature, biological organism, I have evolved, I have certain impulses, certain instincts. I also have higher cognitive capacities and I can sort of be a moral philosopher and try to sort of systematise my moral influences into an idea about what is right and wrong, purpose and meaning in my life.” That’s a view one can have on the fundamental nature of reality…

0:52:21.6 RA: Absolutely. Yeah.

0:52:22.2 SC: And our place in it. There’s another one that adds to that view, that there is something non-physical and important about the world, this transcendent realm, this thing that we strive for. And I don’t see what the difference in my behaviour going through the day is if I believe one of those versus the other.

0:52:41.2 RA: Oh, that’s a really good question. So let me put it in two ways. Number one, I would say the difference between you and me… And I don’t mean this…

0:52:49.4 SC: Got it.

0:52:50.1 RA: As a judgement or whatever… Is that you’re inside of a box, and you have full capabilities in that box, high capabilities in that box. And I have gone outside of the box, and I have said from an experiential place, not a rational place, from a place of emotion and an experience: “Sean, there’s something beyond this box. I’ve touched it. I’ve felt it. And in doing so, I have a different perspective on what it means to be human. Come outside of the box with me. Touch this thing.” How would it change behaviour? It’s not that it would change morality. I reject that completely. And by the way, that’s not just my personal opinion, the PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life has consistently done surveys on moral views of quote unquote “religious communities” in America, and every year, in every question, on every topic, atheists are the most moral community in the United States. And I mean on every topic, every question, every year. So this isn’t about morality. But I do think that when your perspective, when your world view, has expanded beyond the box, you can’t look at the box in the same way anymore. You feel an affinity with individuals inside that box. You feel a sort of common purpose of what the human condition is about that is different.

0:54:33.0 RA: So it doesn’t change your behaviour, I don’t think. It doesn’t change your morality, I don’t think. But it does change your world view. And that is important.

0:54:46.2 SC: Yeah, no, okay, good, that is important. That’s exactly what I was looking for. I can see how that particular set of beliefs would help orient one, in terms of the meaning of their life, not to put it in too grandiose terms, but what our goals are as we live our lives. So like you say, maybe not right or wrong, but how should I think about myself here embedded in the world? Therefore, since, good, since we’ve landed on a difference between these two views, now I wanna think hard about which one I should accept. So what if, let’s just say, hypothetically, someone were sceptical of your view that there is this other aspect of reality, and you said, “Well, yeah, look, I’ve seen outside the box.” And they said to you, “Actually, you’re still right there. You have imagined you’re seeing outside the box, but all of the seeing was done by stuff in the box, and there’s really nothing outside the box.”

0:55:41.5 RA: Yeah.

0:55:41.8 SC: How do we judge between these two things? What is the evidence we collect, pro or con?

0:55:44.7 RA: Well, this is what’s so great, is it goes right back to where we started, which is my refusal to accept the simple dichotomies of material and spiritual, of physical and spiritual, things like that. A more sophisticated “How do you know”, would be, “No, no, no, you didn’t look outside of the box, your brain fired off certain chemical reactions, chemical reactions that, by the way, I could repeat in the lab if you wanted to. I could stimulate certain parts of your brain and make you think you’re outside of the box. You weren’t really outside of the box. Just think you were outside of your box, because your brain tricked you into thinking you were outside of the box.” See, that’s the problem right there. Of course my brain told me I was outside of the box.

0:56:41.0 RA: The chemical reactions that happen in my brain are the only experiences that I have ever had. Period. Every experience, ever, ever, of the material or the non-material realm that I have ever had is just the result of electrochemical reactions in my brain. Nothing exists that doesn’t happen inside my brain. So that’s not a good argument. [chuckle] In fact, on the contrary, it’s my argument. My argument is, “Yeah, that’s right. I tapped in to that part of my brain that helped me experience outside of this box, and you should too. In fact, not only should you, but you must. Because your brain was designed to do this, and you’re not doing it.” You know?

0:57:33.3 SC: Good. So, I mean, now I gotta be my physicist self, just to…

0:57:37.3 RA: Okay.

0:57:37.7 SC: No, not even as an argument, but just as a clarification of how you think this works. I just finished writing a paper for The Journal of Consciousness Studies, in response to Philip Goff, who was a former Mindscape guest who’s a panpsychist, and he’s invited people from different perspectives to talk about how they think about consciousness. And my view of consciousness is, I’m a physicalist, so it’s a collective, emerging phenomenon, blah, blah, blah, but what I tried to emphasise in the paper was, look, if you think that there are aspects of the world other than the physical, either… There’s a dilemma that you’re gonna have to choose between, and it’s not that either one is right or wrong, but there’s only two choices. Aristotle told us this. Either you’re gonna change the laws of physics through the influence of those mental aspects, or you’re not.

0:58:27.2 SC: Because we have laws of physics that given any configuration of stuff in your brain is gonna tell you what they’re gonna do. And there’s no influence in those laws of physics of anything non-physical. So either you think the laws of physics aren’t quite right ’cause we left out an important part, or you think that those other aspects are completely epiphenomenal and just go along for the ride. Do you have a…

0:58:50.4 RA: Of course the laws of physics are incomplete…

0:58:52.9 SC: Ah, right, good.

0:58:54.7 RA: What kind of arrogant mind would think that we’ve got it figured out already? I mean again…

0:58:58.5 SC: Mine. Yes.

0:59:00.6 RA: This is the problem, is that it’s back to that dichotomy, right? So when you’re stuck in that spiritual, material dichotomy, you think to yourself, well, we don’t need the spiritual because we have the laws of physics that explain the material realm. And when someone shows up and says, no, what you call the material realm is missing something. It’s missing something that isn’t separate from the material realm, isn’t something that’s out there, it’s a means of experiencing the human condition. The means of experiencing reality that is more expansive than the five senses that we are locked in, right? So… I completely hear you. You’re like, but then we’ll have to rewrite the laws of physics. Damn right, we have to rewrite the laws of physics. [chuckle] The more we expand our understanding of the universe, the more we’re gonna have to change the frameworks around which… The frameworks we use to explain it.

1:00:09.0 SC: So you think, in other words… And so just to get… I don’t want to be too coy about it here. My view is, no, we’re not gonna change the laws of physics. The laws of physics are incomplete, there’s plenty of things we don’t understand, but as my long-time listeners know, the laws of physics that are required to explain what’s going on in your brain are a 100% super duper understood. [chuckle] There’s no room for them to be changed without violating all sorts of experimental data. Now, I mean, of course, you can imagine things, but the realm that we think we have confidence in, extends perfectly well to everything going on in human brains and bodies. So just to… So, we can argue about that if you want, but that’s not what I’m trying to get to. What I’m trying to get to is, you think, just to be super duper clear, that when you express… When you give testimony about having had some transcendent experience, or thought about the spiritual realm of things, there are neurons in your brain that are telling your mouth or your hands to make those noises and express those thoughts, and those neurons are, in some sense, being pushed around, the electrons and the atoms and those neurons, are being pushed around by something outside the laws of physics, or have been at some point.

1:01:30.1 RA: No. Yeah, no, I don’t know if I would put it as they’re being pushed around by something outside the laws of physics. What I would say…

1:01:38.1 SC: The currently known laws of physics.

1:01:39.1 RA: Yeah, the… Okay, yes. What I would say is that the laws that we rely on to explain the workings of the universe, and indeed the workings of the brain and consciousness and all of that, that those laws are incomplete in so far as they do not necessarily take… They’re not cognisant of the abilities that our brains have, the cognitive abilities that they have, to experience things beyond the material realm, to experience transcendence. I don’t think… But again, should they? I mean, do they? Or by definition, is that something that the… Well, no, I would say yes. So forget about that part. Yes, I would say yes they should, they should.

[laughter]

1:02:37.8 RA: They should. Because, again, I don’t wanna create this sort of separation. I don’t wanna say that what is… The experience of transcendence that I have is something unique that only I can do, or it means that I have tapped into something outside of myself. No. The experience of transcendence that I have had, are the normal workings of my cognitive processes that I have accessed and made use of in a way that everyone can and does. And some people don’t, or choose not to.

1:03:17.2 SC: Good. And I think this has been very good. I mean, you’ve been very helpful in sort of articulating a particular view, which I still want to think is just like, you’re almost there, Reza, you’re almost an atheist…

1:03:29.3 RA: [laughter] You know, you’re almost there, Sean.

1:03:30.4 SC: Work on yourself. [laughter]

1:03:30.9 RA: You’re almost there. Just a little…

1:03:31.0 SC: But, right. Exactly. This is what people are gonna say to each other. But I mean some people are nowhere close to being there, so there is a difference. But then, how I wanna sort of conclude the conversation is, again, more practical issues. I mean, as you said, and which I agree, there’s a lot of flexibility in the vocabulary that we use about these things; God and religion, etcetera. Religion in particular is far more than just a view of the ultimate nature of reality, it’s a set of communal practices, a set of ideas about right and wrong or whatever. And so the choice has to be made, when you’re someone who is like you, not a believer in an anthropomorphic kind of god, right? Guy up there on the throne with a beard giving us instructions. I mean, you could choose to adopt the spiritual but not religious kind of label, right? You just say, “I’m not Muslim, I’m not religious, I believe in this transcendent realm.” But you’ve made a choice, to identify yourself as Muslim. And so I wanna know why that’s a good choice in your point of view? And so I have arguments that it’s a bad choice, but why don’t you tell us why it’s a good choice first?

1:04:48.6 RA: Yeah, it’s a really good point. It does go back to that thing where… Okay, so let’s say you’re somebody who is spiritual, wants to experience transcendence, strives to experience transcendence. I would say that there are two ways of expressing that emotion. One is the sort of monastic way of doing so, where it’s all deeply internalized, it’s all a part of how you understand the world and your place in it, but it’s personal, is individualistic, it’s your business. But let’s say you wanna talk about it. [chuckle]

1:05:36.8 SC: Yeah, which people tend to sometimes do.

1:05:39.2 RA: Let’s say you wanna just even express it, in words. I mean just, if anyone listened to the last 15 minutes of this conversation, they would be like, “What the fuck are you guys talking about?” [chuckle] “What is this like transcendence and neurological phenomenon… ” People… You can’t communicate what I am trying to express…

1:06:00.7 SC: Can’t paint a picture of that.

1:06:02.0 RA: In these words, exactly. I do wanna communicate it. I want a community. I wanna be able to commune with others who have had similar experiences. And I want to be able to express, in human terms, what that feeling was like. I don’t know how to do that. I really don’t know how to do it. I can rely on symbols and metaphors, ’cause that’s all that’s available to me. So I have to use symbolic, metaphorical language. Now, I could come up with my own symbolic, metaphorical language. It would help me understand it. But if you don’t speak that language, how would I communicate it to you? And so I want to communicate it. And so, I know a language. I have this language. In my case, it’s Islam. That allows me to express what is fundamentally inexpressible. And allows others who speak that language to understand what I’m trying to say, and then, and to feel it.

1:07:18.3 RA: When I give lectures on this topic, I do this experiment sometimes, and this might work with your listeners or maybe it won’t, but we’ll see. But I’d say to them, “What if I said I have been washed by the blood of the lamb.” And then I ask people, “Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about.” And usually about half the audience, yeah, raises their hand. And I say, “Raise your hand if you have no idea what I’m talking about,” and the other half raises their hand.

1:07:50.0 RA: The audience… The half that has no idea what the hell I’m talking about heard me just say that, “What, you took a bath in lamb’s blood? Like what the hell are you talking about?” Because they don’t understand the metaphor. But the half that does understand the metaphor, because it’s a Christian metaphor, it’s an Evangelical Protestant Christian conception of being born again, being saved. That half, and I, not only do they understand me, but we shared an intimacy that is impossible to fake, or to re-create in other circumstances. Why? Because we shared the metaphor. And so, we had this instant intimate bond, that allowed us to communicate at a completely different level. We’ll call it a non-material level if you want to. But at a completely different level. That’s why. That’s the why. Why do I, somebody who has studied the world’s religions and who knows what bullshit most of religion actually is. [chuckle] Okay?

1:09:01.6 SC: Yeah, yeah.

1:09:02.5 RA: Why do I choose a religion? That’s why.

1:09:05.1 SC: Okay.

1:09:05.8 RA: Because I wanna be able to express it. I wanna be able to have a moment in which the person on the other side of me, says, “I get you. I know what you’re saying because I understand the metaphor.”

1:09:16.5 SC: Well, I do get… Go ahead.

1:09:17.5 RA: Can I just say one last thing?

1:09:19.4 SC: Sure.

1:09:21.0 RA: But if you start to forget that it’s a metaphor, if your belief is in the metaphor and not what the metaphor stands for, then you’re doing it wrong. And unfortunately that’s what most religion is, and that’s not religion’s fault, that’s just the human condition.

1:09:41.0 SC: Right, but since humans made up religion it’s kind of religion’s fault and human’s fault also. But so I get that, that’s a very clarifying answer also. And so let me just lay on, very quickly, a version of my worry. For even though I appreciate the answer you gave, those countervailing aspects. And I apologise to podcast listeners who’ve heard me tell this story before, but I was once at Renaissance Weekend… You know Renaissance Weekend? Like friends of Bill Clinton, and, you know…

1:10:06.1 RA: I’ve been to the Renaissance Weekend. Yeah.

1:10:07.2 SC: You’ve been to the Renaissance Weekend, right. So you know they invite you there, and then you’re on all sorts of panels and things like that.

1:10:11.7 RA: Yeah.

1:10:12.2 SC: You don’t even know before you show up what you’re gonna do. And it’s actually… It can be fun, there’s all different kinds of people.

1:10:16.1 RA: Yeah.

1:10:18.2 SC: So they had a sort of after-dinner entertaining panel about right and wrong. I don’t know who came up with this idea. Like, morality, right? So 12 people from the couple of hundred who were there, were asked to come up and share their reflections. I was one of them. And due to the inclinations of the organisers, there were 11 religious people and me.

[chuckle]

1:10:39.5 SC: And explicitly religious people, not like just personal monkish religious people.

1:10:46.3 RA: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:10:47.0 SC: And when it came for the prompting question that was asked to me, the question was, “I’d be really interested to hear, Sean, what your best argument for religion is?” [chuckle] And I’m like, I’m the only atheist up here, talking about right and wrong, and I’m not allowed to talk about atheism. And I think that this is a reflection of the fact that, with all the potential helpfulness of a shared metaphor, there’s also obviously potential danger in leveraging these views about the fundamental nature of reality into pretty strict, and not always correct, rules about living our lives.

1:11:26.3 SC: As we’re recording this, this week, the Supreme Court came down with a ruling that didn’t allow the City of Philadelphia to tell Catholic Social Services that they had to be able to let gay couples adopt. And their reasoning is that there is… It’s a narrow legalistic reasoning, but the culture war is that there’s religious freedom. Right? Catholic Social Services don’t believe in giving adopted children to gay parents. So that’s… And it’s an example where, in my mind, this religious language is co-opted and leveraged into a certain kind of regressive point of view. To me, that danger is bigger than the benefit you get from a shared metaphor.

1:12:13.4 RA: And here’s what I would say to you… By the way, I’ve got an op-ed on that Supreme Court case in the LA Times coming out tomorrow. I don’t know when this podcast will be available, but…

[chuckle]

1:12:23.7 SC: It’ll be in the past by the time the video will come out.

1:12:25.2 RA: It is precisely an op-ed from the perspective of three scholars of religion decrying the way in which issues of religious liberty are being used as a shield for prejudice and racism.

1:12:43.8 SC: Yeah.

1:12:46.0 RA: But again, there is nothing rarefied about religion in that regard. To blame religion for acts of prejudice or violence, or the negative things that come from religion, would be akin to blaming socialism for Nazism, or Communism for Marxism… Or Marxism for Communism. Or, for that matter, blaming science for eugenics. What I keep coming back to is that, this is who we are as human beings. We, because we strive for certainty, because we are naturally prejudicial people, and because we strive for power, we will use any ideology to control and to oppress. That’s just what we are. We will use secularism for that very same reason. I always remind people that Mao killed 10,000 nuns. Why? Simply because he saw religion as a force for evil that needed to be rooted out of society, and so he did so by slaughtering religious people. This is just what we do. So what you see as the negative aspects of religion, I see as just human reality.

1:14:23.1 SC: But I do… Sorry, I do wonder…

1:14:25.2 RA: And I can name a number of secular societies that force secularism in violent ways on people in the same way that religious societies, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, force religion in violent ways upon society.

1:14:39.8 SC: But my point is a little bit different than that. My point is not the Catholic Church is prejudiced against gay people, and that’s bad, and that makes religion bad. Like, okay, that is an argument one could have. But my point is, is not that religion is making people prejudiced, but that we have, as a country, we have decided to allow people to be prejudiced if they say it’s because of their religion. [chuckle]

1:15:04.8 RA: Yeah, yes.

1:15:06.0 SC: People will be prejudiced or not, religious people, atheists, whatever, but we carve out a protected class, and this is exactly what I worry about. Even if it’s just a metaphor, even if it’s just a vocabulary, there’s plenty of people who don’t treat it as a metaphor and they…

1:15:20.3 RA: No, no, no, but Sean, but again, what you’re saying is, that is a negative thing about religion. And I’m saying that’s a negative thing about the fucking constitution. Right? That the problem isn’t religion, the problem is America. The problem is the fact that we have given religion this elevated position in our society. But that’s not religion’s fault, that’s not an excuse, that’s not a reason why religion is bad. Right? That’s the argument that I’m trying to make. It’s… I’m trying to think of another stupid metaphor for this, but, you know…

[laughter]

1:16:09.3 RA: The Second Amendment. Right?

1:16:11.9 SC: Yeah.

1:16:13.4 RA: The problem is our constitution. The problem is the ethos through which this country was built and through which it is continuing to be run. The problem isn’t a machine called a gun, right? The problem is, is the human condition that compels us to elevate this weapon, or this means of control, to the place where it becomes problematic, and against, what I’ve been saying before about, against the… Oppressive to humanity.

1:16:48.9 SC: I love this metaphor. This is the best metaphor I’ve ever heard on this podcast in over 150 episodes. And so let me turn it against you, and I’ll give my final pitch, and then you’ll give your final pitch. This is exactly my point, that, like I said, forget about whether religion is bad or makes people bad, I’m not even sure that it’s sensible to give religion the credit; religion is an abstract concept, right? It’s people who are doing these good things and bad things. But, words mean something, words have power, metaphors mean something; we can not only communicate, but we can persuade, we can get people on our side through the use of a friendly metaphor that they’re happy with. Right? The problem is not guns, but guns give people leverage. If you only used guns properly, it would be fine. But guns open up this possibility to use them improperly and give people who wanna do bad things a huge amount of power. And therefore, even though it’s not guns’ fault, I would like them to be regulated. [laughter]

1:17:52.7 RA: Right. Yes.

1:17:54.1 SC: Likewise, it’s not religion’s fault that people are prejudiced. I completely agree with you, as you’ve said here and elsewhere, that we take our morality and give it to religion rather than the other way around. But I think that religion is an amplifier for some of those impulses. And what I think is that the… Like I said, I’m just gonna say it again, it’s not that religion makes us do bad things, it’s that religion can be used as an excuse for doing the bad things we wanna do.

1:18:25.4 RA: Right.

1:18:25.7 SC: And to me, it would be better if we just all faced up to the fundamental ontology of reality, realised that all of our morality, etcetera, was constructed, that we’re fallible, that we don’t all agree. Get together in the public square, hash it out, and live happily ever after.

[chuckle]

1:18:44.0 RA: No, listen, I completely agree. And you’re right. Using my metaphor, that’s a very good way of thinking about it; that religion amplifies some of the worst impulses in humanity. Historically speaking, it also amplifies some of the best impulses in humanity, including civilisation as we know it. So how do you get one without the other? How can you… Can you say, well, then let’s just rid the world of religion and then we won’t have that amplification either way? But again it depends on how you think about the human condition, whether you think we are naturally… That we’re naturally compelled to do good or the opposite. I tend to be a little bit more negative about that view, and so I can’t help but think that in a world without religion, we would have some other amplification.

1:19:41.9 RA: We would use any other amplification, including science, including secularism, including atheism, because I can give you many examples. Mao slaughtered those nuns in the name of atheism; that doesn’t mean atheism is a force for evil. [chuckle] We don’t need to talk about the crimes of science, but you understand what I’m saying here. I don’t know what we do about the amplification of bad that religion gives without sacrificing the amplification of good. And yes, I would imagine that most of your audience tends to focus on the bad stuff, but we can’t ignore the profound good that has come in. You just look at the last… The civil rights movement was a religious movement. The anti-war movement was a religious movement. These were movements that were predicated on the pulpit. So if we’re going to blame religion for the bad things that come out of religion, let’s at the very least maintain some kind of logical consistency, and also praise religion for the good things that come out of religion.

1:21:01.7 SC: I’m very happy to do that, but… I know I said I was gonna give my final spiel, but all… I’m very happy to give religion credit. Like Richard Dawkins, I love the art and the music, right? Religion is responsible for all sorts of good things in the world. And also good acts. Good… It can inspire people to be better than they would otherwise be. I just don’t wanna carve out a special legal place for people to be allowed to do bad things because they say it’s what their religion tells them to do.

1:21:34.2 RA: Yeah, I actually, I’ve written a lot about this carving out the special place, which I have a problem with too. I don’t… The idea that we don’t tax religions, to me is absurd. The notion that we actually, not only do we not tax religion, but that we give religion economic incentives to do in the world what government won’t do, [chuckle] is absurd. Or whatever we call it. Faith-based whatever. That is a failure of our very system. I couldn’t agree more about that. But in so far as a force in the world, I think the evils of religion are no greater than the evils of any other ideology that has had a global footprint. And I’ve mentioned secularism, atheism, communism, socialism, scientism. And the good of religion is pretty profound and much more difficult, I think, to commodify in a way that allows us to just put it on a balance. We notice the bad stuff, we don’t pay enough attention to the good stuff. That’s all I’ll say.

1:23:09.2 SC: And with that, I will give you the last word. Reza Aslan, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:23:12.5 RA: Thank you, Sean. Thanks for having me. Super fun.

1:23:15.9 SC: All right. That was a lot of fun.

1:23:17.3 RA: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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