#41 — Faith in Reason
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
170.46432
Summary
Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and economist and all-around interesting guy who is currently the Managing Director of Teal Capital. In this episode, we talk about how he got to where he is today, and why he thinks we should be talking about the limits of reason on a rational level. We also talk about the role religion plays in our understanding of the world, and the role that religion has played in shaping the way we understand the world. And we talk a lot about why we should all be trying to figure out how to have rational conversations about the world we live in, and what it means to be a rational human being in the 21st century. This is a good one, and I think you'll agree that it's one of the most important episodes of the podcast I've done in a long time, and that's a good thing. If you like what you hear here, please consider becoming a supporter of The Making Sense Podcast by becoming a patron. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we can't run the podcast without your support. Thank you for being a patron, and we're making it possible for you to enjoy what we're doing here! Sam Harris Thanks for listening to the podcast! - Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How did you feel about this episode? 2:30 - What was your favorite part of the conversation? 3: What would you like to see me talk about? 4:40 - What do you think about religion? 5:20 - What are you think of religion and its role in the world? 6: What does it mean to you? 8:00 9:00 -- What is the role of religion in human history? 11:30 -- How do you find it? 12:40 -- How does it have a place in the culture? 13:00 | What is a rational argument? 14:30 15:20 -- What does religion have a role in our society? 16:00-- How do we have a position against religion in the humanism? 17: What do we need to be rational? 18: What are we trying to take up? 19:10 -- Why is religion a force of reason? 21:10 | Why do we know it better than a good cop or a bad cop?
Transcript
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My guest today is Eric Weinstein, who is a mathematician and physicist and economist and all-around interesting
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guy, who is currently the managing director of Teal Capital.
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Now, as most of you know who have listened to previous podcasts, my interviews are really
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I would guess I usually take up about, I don't know, 40% of the space.
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But if this exchange seems a little more self-referential than normal, I would just like to give you a
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little context as to why, which I briefly do in the beginning of my conversation with Eric.
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Eric actually reached out to me, suggesting that he could help me think a little more clearly about
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how to engage the kinds of controversial issues I tend to deal with.
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So while we talk about many different things, the subtext is that he's performing a bit of an
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So I hope that explains why I didn't ask him more questions about all the fascinating stuff he's into.
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In any case, Eric is a very interesting guy, as you will easily discern.
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And he was also very generous in his efforts to talk some sense into me.
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So without any more preamble, I give you Eric Weinstein.
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So I was trying to remember how we got connected, and I now recognize why I was confused.
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So I heard you on Tim's podcast, and I love that conversation, and was poised to get in
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But then you got in touch with me, I think, just on your own on Twitter, having noticed
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And you expressed, and I have the quote here, but by email, you were dismayed to find that
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people who you expected would be rational and not at all anti-intellectual were in conversation
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with me on various topics proving to be just that, and you said that they were, you found
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them trying to rescue the failed bits of multiculturalism at seemingly any cost to logic and ethics.
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And this was at the time, Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, who you said that of, and you
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wanted to just reach out and see if you could help.
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And I obviously am very happy you did that, and I'm happy to have any help I can get.
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But then, in the setup to this podcast, you had the somewhat comical and perhaps disconcerting
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experience of pinging some of your friends about me, only to find that at least two of
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Maybe enemies is too strong a term for one of them, but you are friends with Nassim Taleb,
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the quant author of The Black Swan, and he has made his hatred, might not be too strong
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a word, but he certainly made his displeasure with me fairly indelible on Twitter.
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You know, that is odd for you to discover in the setup here.
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And also David Eagleman, the neuroscientist who I had kind of an aborted debate with, and
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that was far less prickly, but still a failure of communication, which from my side happened
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very much along the lines of these other failures you notice, where there's a kind of,
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I guess I often think of it as a, my opponent or the interlocutor who becomes my opponent
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finds him or herself wanting to play a good cop, bad cop routine with me.
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And I have a criticism of religion in most cases here, that people find, whether they're
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religious or not, and in most of these cases the other person is not religious, but they
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find it somehow synonymous with the breaking of some kind of taboo, or they consider it uncivil
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in a way, and they try to take a position against what I think is undeniably just the intellectually
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honest position to take at this moment in human history.
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The conversation breaks down, and so yeah, you and I are going to talk about the limits
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of reason on some level, and see if we can advance the tools we have mutually to have rational
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conversations, but it's just interesting that even the agenda we have here today in this
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conversation got subtly eroded by you, perhaps, you can tell me, but I would imagine a crisis
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of confidence on your side, where you, because you're reaching out to your network to figure
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out who is this guy, and you receive some pushback, but perhaps in the midst of answering
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that, you can say a bit about who you are, and your history of intellectual interests, and
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I mean, I think one of the things that caused me to come down, when it's obviously much more
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convenient to do this over Skype or over the internet, is I've seen too many good marriages
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and rich friendships break up over ASCII and Unicode, and that there's something about the
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electronic medium which denies us empathy, face-to-face contact, and very often we get off on a wrong
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foot and we don't know how to write it in real life. And so, in part, it's my distrust of whether
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these are essential conflicts. This could be like the Trotskyist-Leninist-Stalinists versus
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the Stalinist-Trotskyists, and these are hair's breadth of difference in that they tend to get
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much more exaggerated in terms of the heat that they generate. And then there's also this very
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interesting problem. And in fact, around my office, we call it the limits of discourse problem after
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some of your adventures and misadventures. And the question is, who can play? When two people sit
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down to discuss a topic, is there any set of descriptors which can predict whether the
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conversation will be rich or whether it will derail over more or less intellectually trivial features?
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Yeah. So, what is your background, briefly, in just your intellectual history and your current
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I mean, I think by education and credential, I would be a mathematician. I've held positions
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in mathematics, physics, and economics departments. I've worked in hedge funds and finance risk.
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And I'm now managing director of Teal Capital, working with Peter Teal in San Francisco on a
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wide variety of things throughout the Teal Foundation, our macro trading outfit, and various
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venture funds, and trying to make the world a better place in both the private sector and
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So, I know Peter, and not well, obviously. I've just met him a few times. But the first idea for
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this conversation was actually to have the three of us speak, and scheduling may have made that
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difficult. But also, I think it's a good thing, given what I've said on the podcast about Trump
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and his recent speech to the RNC. I just think we would, and I would love to talk to Peter.
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Peter shouldn't take this part the wrong way. But I just think we would have had to have spoken
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about Trump at length in a way that would have just subsumed everything else in the conversation.
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And I'm happy to speak about politics with you. But it's, again, this is one of those issues that
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proves so difficult to talk about. So I don't know what the outcome of my talking to Peter about
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Trump would be. But what do you think it is about politics, perhaps second only to religion,
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that makes conversation either reliably impossible or just so difficult?
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It's a great question, of course. I have a 2016 version of this answer that might not be the
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same as the answer I'd given in another election year. I think right at the moment, the problem is
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that a lot of us, and I assume you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 50. You're pretty close.
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Okay. I think that fundamentally, we're trying to express ourselves through people who don't
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represent us. And this isn't their time. This is our time. And there's no way I can represent
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myself through Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. They don't share my experience. I
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don't have the same reference points that they do. My life doesn't resemble theirs. They went through
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different formative experiences than I did. And I think that part of the problem is that we're trapped
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in prisons of language and we're grooved in ways of thinking that we're adapted to, and I think poorly
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adapted to the world of the 1980s and beyond, I feel like the Reagan era more or less went from 1980
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to 2008. And then we've been in a zombie period where we don't have new theories. We just sort of have
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these old theories that don't die because we don't have anything to replace them with. And they wander the
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landscape wreaking havoc. And I think that what you're doing and what I would like to think that I'm trying to do,
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and perhaps Peter is doing, is trying to come up with different languages and new ways of speaking
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so that people don't end up in these cul-de-sacs intellectually which seem to be attracting most
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of the population. So I think in some sense, Sam, it's our failure. It's your and my failure and Peter's
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failure that we are not expressing ourselves as ourselves. So I'm here as your future running mate
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potentially for 2020. I think we're doomed. And that says more about me than you.
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I really think, if I can make an analogy, let's assume that the marketplace of ideas is something
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we take seriously. We've been in sort of an era previously which you might think of as like a
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mutual fund area where there's only long only. Are you for multiculturalism or against it? Are you
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for immigration or against it? And I think that all of the really interesting positions right now
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are sort of hedge fund-like positions, and we'd call them relative value trades.
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So I'm for a mild increase with a lot of scrutiny on refugees
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to increase our refugee intake because I think it's humane, and I think that they make great Americans
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because they're so grateful that somebody took them in in their hour of need if we screen properly.
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And I'm against other forms of immigration like skilled immigration increases where we tether people
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to their employers through H-1B visas. So the idea is I don't have a pro or anti position on
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immigration. I have a long short position. And I think that because most people don't have an idea
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that you can hold a long short position, we're trapped in this nonsense discussion about, in my
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opinion, three topics which are dividing us, which are trade, immigration, and terror.
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And fundamentally, because you and I have not done a great job of pushing out
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simple models and good language for dealing with these things, I think that the generation before us
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talks in completely inadequate terms. And so it's up to us to rectify it. So that's one of the reasons
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Yeah. Yeah. I think we could probably add race to that list, and then I think it covers at least 80%
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of our problems. So what is it that you worry about now in terms of intellectual trends and
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bad ideas that are regnant? I mean, I have this line that I think is true, and I certainly have used
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enough to hope it's true, that bad ideas are worse than bad people. There are not that many bad people
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in the world. I think, you know, on any appropriate metric, there's probably 1%, you know, psychopaths
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walking around. But what you find more and more often when you pay attention is just that they're
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good people under the sway, or more or less good people, certainly psychologically normal people
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under the sway of bad ideas. And they think they're doing good, or they're committed to some
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principle that may be even locally good, or at least ethically defensible, but doesn't survive
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scaling, or they're not paying attention to the associated costs of living that way or thinking
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that way. And what I constantly find myself encountering are people who are absolutely sure
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they are on the right side of an important issue, but they're behaving, to my eye, patently
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unethically. And I think it probably does have something to do with what you just described
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as being non-obvious to them, that you can have a nuanced or a long-short position on any
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of these topics, and have that be not only coherent and intellectually defensible, but perhaps the
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only intellectually defensible position in the end. And yet, because it doesn't survive the broad
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strokes, litmus test of are you for immigration or not, or against Islam or not, or for religious
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pluralism or not, it comes under immediate stigma and kind of straw man attacks. Anyway, that's one
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thing that I noticed that worries me. But what sort of shibboleths and fake ideas and bad ones are you
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All of them. I mean, I'm really actually worried about the abstraction that makes it so difficult
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to think. Because one of the things that, and this is kind of a half compliment, half critique
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for you, is that I think it's so hard to do what you're doing, to sort of recreate an entire
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intellectual world from scratch, that is of a piece, that is interoperable, self-consistent, moral, decent,
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but which allows you to get everywhere. And I see you as sort of having this, it's almost like you've
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built a yacht that only you can sail with all of these cables and riggings. And so that's not going to
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work. I am estimating your vocabulary must be something 40,000 words or more. I don't have that.
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And I think that we have to, in fact, first understand that most of us aren't going to be
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able to pull off the trick that you're trying to do. It's too difficult. I've called you the
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intellectual Alex Honnold before because, you know, you're like this intellectual free soloist
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it can't be that we actually push people to do that. But I think
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that there's a hidden villain in the story. And I think that the hidden villain
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are these, you know, very often three-letter organizations, WSJ, NYT, DNC, RNC, FOX.
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And what they're doing is a really interesting trick of subtracting narratives that have this
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long, short character. And so I've come up with this model, which unfortunately we're not doing
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this on video. I'd go to a whiteboard. But if you picture an X, Y axis, an X and a Y axis,
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and the X axis is some sort of elite rent-seeking policy, something that the elite rent-seekers want.
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Rent-seeking is the ultimate insult from an economist. It says that you're
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trying to profit without really producing anything. And so if you're, you know, let's say,
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what was the founding myth of the Carlisle Group? They figured out that Eskimos had some
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right to a tax write-off from a failed Eskimo business. And so it turned out that you could
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sell those rights in some way and you could profit from it. So it probably wasn't intended
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to be, you know, for a Jewish businessman to figure this out, but that would be some form
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of rent-seeking. And so the real villains in the story aren't the elite, as we say, because
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I don't think, you know, top intellectuals and great scientists and fantastic athletes are the
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problem. I think it's the elite rent-seekers. And they have certain things they're trying to
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accomplish. And most of us don't really know who they are. They don't really want a lot of
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publicity, but they're very skilled operators in our system. And when they want a policy,
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what happens is, is that whatever organs are attached to that group, they tell a story that
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where there's smoke, there is always fire. And the smoke is opposition to their proposal. And the fire
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is some sort of moral failing. And so if you'll permit me visually, imagine that you're going
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counterclockwise around the XY plane. So the first quadrant I call the dupes, sometimes the
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ivy-covered dupes. These are people who have gone to maybe elite schools. They think that they are the
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elite, but in fact, you know, they're probably making less than half a million a year. They may
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have a second home, but they're not really in control and they don't realize that they are in fact
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being propagandized. And it's very difficult to work with this because they're convinced that
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they're the ones in the know. In the second quadrant, you have first principles, thinkers,
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contrarians, and people who are fiercely independent. In the third quadrant, you have
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troglodytes, people who are opposed to the elite policies, but also may have the moral failings that the
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elite wish to tar them with. And in the fourth quadrant, you have the shadowy rent-seeking
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elite. And so what happens is that the Y-axis is the moral virtue vice axis. And the media narrative
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is like a straight line running from the Southwest to the Northeast. It says that there's an absolute
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correlation between people who agree with the elite policy and moral virtue. And so what's happening
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constantly is if I'm a restrictionist on immigration, but I'm also a xenophile, I have a lifelong love of
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travel. I care about learning languages. Most of my friends come from foreign places. There's some
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sort of a story that you couldn't possibly be a restrictionist xenophile. You couldn't possibly
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both support the police and be absolutely outraged at their killing of innocents in unforgivable
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circumstances. And so what we're finding is that every time we try to tell a story about being in the
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second quadrant, we get mapped to the third quadrant because we oppose these things, but we don't have
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the moral failings that they would expect. And worse, people who aren't putting the same kind of
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intellectual energy, but who have an instinct that the elite policies are wrong, they end up in the
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troglodyte quadrant in quadrant three, unfortunately, because their intuition says, I think our immigration
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must be completely out of control. Who calls illegal aliens undocumented workers? If I take an illegal
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drug, is that an undocumented drug? If I do an illegal act of violence, is that an undocumented
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act? The Orwellian news speak triggers many people. And if they can't figure out how to hold the right
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long, short position, they may just have an instinct to actually start behaving badly and maybe believe
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that Mexicans are the source of our problems if they're crossing illegally over the border rather than
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becoming mostly landscapers or people in the service industry. And so in part, what I'm looking to do
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is to take the small number of people who are strong enough to try to voice this way of thinking and say,
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you know, it's entirely possible to oppose these policies, which are nakedly rent-seeking and still
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be quite virtuous. That expansion of the left-right model to the four-quadrant model, I think, is going
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to liberate a lot of people who've been drifting to the right, who wonder what happened to the left.
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When did it become a crime to support liberal ideas within what is traditionally thought of as left of
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center politics? When you started that description of the four quadrants, though, I imagine that you,
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and perhaps I think you suggested, that it is very much a top-down, somewhat star chamber effort to
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bend humanity to the will of the elite. And I guess that that may be going on as well. It's just,
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I feel like my encounters with really confused dogmatic thinking from both the left and the right
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has been more democratized than that. So it's hard for me to imagine that some of the
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the salon writers, say, who attacked me, or people on the left who now my friend Majid Nawaz calls the
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regressive left, people for whom any criticism of Islam as a set of ideas and of its consequences in
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the world become synonymous with bigotry and even racism. I feel like the people who purvey that
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confusion are just journalists trying to get by and bloggers, you know, people who are not in touch
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with whatever rent-seeking elite you imagine may be behind the scenes. So how-
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Yeah, are there two things going on that are fundamentally disconnected? Or is there actually
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communication between these names we don't know and the journalists and pseudo-journalists who we do?
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There is. I mean, first of all, the people who you're talking about in Salon, I would probably
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have in the first quadrant. They would think of themselves as very intellectual, very knowledgeable.
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But let's look at the exact construct of how you get into trouble with some of them.
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They don't mind you being against religions, but it's very important that you are against
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all religions equally, that no religion is worse or better than any one, any other religion.
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Right. So this, the idea is that is in some sense, the policy that all religions must be treated the
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same way. And let's take my religion and Jainism rather than anything involving Islam. So I come
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from a Jewish background. You cannot tell me that we Jews are no more nor less violent than the Jains.
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Deuteronomy suggests that savagery is in our past. We probably started this whole Abramic
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murderous frenzy against the apostates. And we have to take responsibility for it. Now,
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we don't kill apostates anymore because of some fancy footwork to deactivate the bad code.
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But the idea is that somebody who was neither Jewish nor Jain would feel incredibly uncomfortable
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making the comment that I just made. Right. And so the idea is that he who breaks the equality between
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religions, who voices any difference that some are better or worse on different points,
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must have a moral failing, which that they are secretly bigoted. And so the idea is, is that
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you are breaking the inference pattern. You don't seem to be, there's no vibe that you give off
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generically that indicates to me that you particularly hate any particular religion or
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group of people. But the idea is that by breaking that one principle, the next move is that you are
00:24:07.300
allowed to infer the moral failing that must have led you to do that. And so
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let's now swap out the two religions that we just talked about and talk about, let's say, Islam and
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Christianity. So if you wish to say that there's more of a connection at the moment between Islam
00:24:26.720
and terror than Christianity and terror, at least in 2016, this is prima facie obvious. There's just
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from statistics that nobody who's looking at what's going on, I think, can claim that suicide bombings
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are higher in Christianity than they are in Islam. However, I should say just as a caveat there that you will
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have people, and there have been articles written on this topic, I think even in Salon, claiming that
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right-wing Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a worse problem than Muslim terrorism. And they get to that
00:25:06.460
number by first starting counting the bodies after September 11th, right? And obviously there's been
00:25:13.620
very few terrorist incidents of any type in the U.S. since then. And they throw in attempted terrorist
00:25:22.440
attacks and acts of eco-terrorism, for instance. You destroy a car dealership, that's domestic terrorism.
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It's counted against Islamic terrorism. So in any case, there are people who believe, contrary to all
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rational analysis of the evidence, that Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a much bigger problem and
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is a likely bigger problem going forward. And I'm not against a careful, I mean, I have no prejudices
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against. I might point out something that almost never gets pointed out, that if I'm not mistaken,
00:25:55.660
all of the people who have successfully penetrated the U.S. Capitol building as suicide terrorists
00:26:03.260
have been Jewish. I think there's only one guy, and he was an Israeli. Now, of course, that can go
00:26:10.140
crazy on Twitter, but I think this is what we would call steelmanning our opponent's point. We can point
00:26:16.820
to, we can help our opponents make their case and then try to show them that we come in good faith,
00:26:24.680
because what we're really interested in is not pointing fingers at any particular group. We're
00:26:30.540
interested in figuring out how to restore civility. A much better argument against that would be to
00:26:37.160
say that every, you know, A-10 warthog is an instrument of terror. And I really want to talk about
00:26:44.980
message violence and the way that states communicate message violence, which would probably be something
00:26:48.860
that Noam Chomsky would want to discuss. And I think that that's a fair point. But where it gets
00:26:56.220
suspicious is where you start to see the motivated reasoning, which is, how do I shut you down so that
00:27:03.340
you don't point at something which feels very dangerous? And I think that you have an instinct
00:27:07.640
to point at very dangerous things, not to make the danger worse, but we don't yet have a truly
00:27:16.160
terrible terror problem. You know, ex-ante, ex-post, if you're, if it's your child is murder, you know,
00:27:21.520
that your terror problem is as bad as it gets. However, what you and I are both worried about
00:27:27.820
is where we are headed, future instability, and how we could get into a mess that we will
00:27:33.940
not really be able to get out of without significant damage and injury to the American
00:27:42.040
experiment that I think that both of us are very excited about, even if we're troubled about where
00:27:46.560
it is at the moment. And I think what you're really doing is you're looking forward and you're
00:27:50.900
extrapolating and you're thinking ahead and you're getting penalized in some sense for that act.
00:27:57.220
Oh, interesting. Maybe I'll unpack that a little bit because that's, that's all too true. So I,
00:28:02.840
but you use this phrase steel manning, which I haven't heard much, but obviously it's the opposite
00:28:08.580
of straw manning someone's argument. And I think it's a crucial feature of what I would generically
00:28:15.160
call intellectual honesty. If you're going to argue against a position, at minimum, you should be
00:28:21.080
able to summarize your opponent's view in a way that he wouldn't find fault with. And better still,
00:28:27.220
if you summarize it in a way that that's even better than he or she would come up with on his
00:28:32.060
own, then that is the thing you take down in your argument. That is the way any really civil and
00:28:40.640
productive debate should operate. And what I find most difficult to deal with, our podcast listeners
00:28:47.060
will, we'll, we'll have heard this a thousand times, but are the, the misrepresentations of my
00:28:52.780
positions, wherein the, the, the, the critic isn't even interacting with a view I hold and I'm getting
00:28:58.860
smeared for this fake view. And I think that's a, you know, as a general principle of public conversations
00:29:04.940
and just one's interpersonal dealings with people who you, you don't agree with, steel manning is
00:29:12.260
something we should just have in our, our heads is something we, we, we need to do and expect should
00:29:17.700
be done toward us in, in these conversations. But the other, the other point you, you make is,
00:29:22.340
is true, which is, and this is, this is often a point of confusion. I, it's not that I think
00:29:28.940
that the immediate risk of death from terrorism for any American or any Westerner really, or really
00:29:38.880
even any person in the Muslim world, though they, they run a far greater risk than we do outside of
00:29:45.960
it. It's not that I think that risk is immediately intolerable and worse than any other, other thing
00:29:52.800
we could be worried about. You and I are far more likely to die in a car accident in the U.S. than
00:29:57.840
as a result of terrorism. But what I worry about are, as you said, I worry about where this is all
00:30:04.960
headed. And, and in at least two senses, there, there's obviously the risk of much bigger forms
00:30:10.580
of terrorism. You can, we can worry about nuclear terrorism and biological terrorism. And I think
00:30:15.080
it would be at this point actually surprising if some, something, you know, orders of magnitude bigger
00:30:22.900
than we've seen doesn't happen in the next 50 years, right? So it's, it's, it's, this is, it's,
00:30:28.100
this is not science fiction. It's not an irrational fear. I think given how bad we are at stopping the
00:30:35.220
proliferation of technology and given that technology is only becoming more potent and given that there's,
00:30:40.680
you know, nuclear materials that are not getting uninvented. And given that the, you know, the
00:30:46.080
proliferators and the terrorists only have to be right once as the security people say,
00:30:50.440
and we have to be right all the time, the idea that we're not going to have at minimum a dirty
00:30:55.460
bomb go off and in a major city rendering some part of it uninhabitable for, for decades, that
00:31:03.080
seems actually far-fetched to me. And given our capacity to overreact to things, so even, so take
00:31:11.320
what may in fact be the worst case scenario. You have a nuclear bomb that goes off in the port of Los
00:31:16.520
Angeles or in Times Square and it kills, it's a, you know, a small one and it kills, let's say,
00:31:21.080
a hundred thousand people outright. A hundred thousand people, more than a hundred thousand
00:31:24.820
people die in our society every year from medical errors. The last time I looked, it was like something
00:31:30.020
like 200,000 people die from iatrogenic insults because doctors and nurses don't wash their hands
00:31:36.300
or give the wrong medication, et cetera. And yet, so we absorb those deaths year after year after year,
00:31:42.460
and we absorb every other species of death, whether it's, you know, from smoking or car accidents or
00:31:48.220
our own use of firearms. And yet, if a bomb went off in a city and killed a hundred thousand people,
00:31:55.680
our reaction to that, rightly or wrongly, I mean, you can certainly defend, you could defend a different
00:32:00.400
reaction to that than our reaction to heart disease, say, but our reaction to that and our overreaction
00:32:05.640
to that would very likely just derange human history for a generation at least. So I think
00:32:13.660
you have to price in our capacity to overreact to these things into the real world cost of these
00:32:19.040
things happening. And so in any case, that's just to, to expand upon what you, what you already just
00:32:24.180
said. I think it's, it's a, and there's a, and the problem is there's usually not time enough to
00:32:30.460
spell out everything in, in the context of saying, listen, we need to be worried about
00:32:35.580
this phenomenon of global jihadism. And there's a reason why we are appropriately worried about
00:32:41.740
what is being said and not being said in one community among all the other religious communities.
00:32:47.240
We're worried about the reform of Islam. We're not worried about the reform of Methodism and Mormonism
00:32:53.380
and Scientology, and for good reason. And that's something that at a certain point can't require
00:32:59.620
a 10 minute defense. It has to be, we have to have the shorthand version of that that's accepted
00:33:04.280
everywhere we talk about these things. Well, one of the things that I say that's unpopular in some
00:33:09.580
quadrants is that things that rhyme tend to be more true. Now it's not, it's not universal.
00:33:14.800
Obviously when somebody says if the, if the glove don't fit, you must acquit, um, that, that may or may
00:33:19.880
not be right. But in general humans, uh, when they have something very important to say, try to hone it to a
00:33:25.900
fairly well. And they make it mimetic. They make it easy to remember. It's probably in some sense,
00:33:31.500
uh, you know, sort of syntactic sugar for the brain so that it remembers, uh, the wisdom.
00:33:37.520
And I believe that it's important to have the hyperlinked statement so that when you,
00:33:41.620
if you don't agree with the statement, you can click on it, you can see the paragraph version,
00:33:45.740
the paragraph yields to the essay, really yields to the book. So depending upon how much information
00:33:50.200
you need to support an idea, um, uh, it's there. So if you made a statement, for example, that global
00:33:57.180
jihadism is actually one of the most serious things that we're facing, somebody says, come on, Sam,
00:34:01.680
you know, shark attacks, uh, are incredibly rare, but because of shark week, uh, we're in a constant
00:34:07.400
state of terror. Um, okay, well then that person would need to click on the hyperlink to see why it
00:34:13.380
is that you actually aren't going down that path. And so I think it's important that the user and the
00:34:19.740
listener be able to be in dialogue with your statements. So I think you need to make the
00:34:24.140
same statement at four different levels that fail over into each one into the next. Um, when you're,
00:34:30.400
when you're making these points. And I think that there are too few of these honed statements at top
00:34:35.120
level that neatly point, um, to the backups, because in general, whenever I run something to ground that
00:34:41.560
you're trying to say, um, I may not get it at first. I may not understand it. And I may not, uh,
00:34:48.040
so I, I often am arguing with my misinterpretations of you. And, um, every time I think I've got you
00:34:55.960
on something, uh, I discover some podcasts, some books, some talk where you've actually covered it.
00:35:01.200
Um, maybe not everyone, but it's, it's happened to me enough times, um, in listening to you that I'm,
00:35:07.920
I'm feeling that, uh, I now expected the default.
00:35:11.440
I need a better me to, to speak for me in, in those cases. Does anything come to mind as an example
00:35:18.480
of something that was initially problematic that you ran to ground and were satisfied or, or not?
00:35:23.500
I think for example, some of the spirituality stuff, I think that, um, well, I have some things that I
00:35:30.260
haven't run to ground yet. For example, I think you've said things that people can't, you've said
00:35:34.300
that people can't change their beliefs the way they change their clothes. And I think I'm actually
00:35:38.600
pretty good at that. Um, I think I maintain different rooms in my mind. I actually have
00:35:43.440
what I call a jihadi sandbox where I, I listened to the nasheeds. I watched the videos, I read
00:35:48.880
inspire and the beak and all these things. And I let the jihadi in me become animated so that I can
00:35:54.900
study my own reaction. Um, and I wonder, you know, sometimes I see you as, uh, this is like me being
00:36:01.240
really critical of you as the guy running into a, uh, you know, a screening, uh, of the Godfather
00:36:06.700
and saying, what's wrong with you people? Don't you realize it's just photons, you know, projected
00:36:11.120
against a wall. And, uh, you know, I need to know in part how you reconcile my need for fiction,
00:36:19.440
theater, uh, distortions of belief. I believe that in fact, in my least distorted States, it's usually
00:36:25.220
achieved, um, by having lots of different, uh, fictions, falsehoods, and incomplete pictures
00:36:31.120
that together yield a fairly complete picture. But, uh, you know, it's, I I'm fond of the double
00:36:38.540
distortion of somebody wearing glasses where their eyes are distorted and their glasses are further
00:36:43.440
distorted, but the compound of the two is an undistorted picture. So there are ways in which
00:36:49.300
I worry that the sort of new atheist project, um, really has a very limited market because
00:36:56.300
it's very important for me, for example, on Friday nights to put away my atheism, uh, and go into a
00:37:03.120
Jewish traditional Shabbat dinner where it's not that we're wink, wink, nudge, nudge, uh, going to
00:37:08.860
have Shabbat dinner. We actually kind of go through it and try to do the prayers, uh, straight up. And at some
00:37:15.020
point, my daughter was in a Jewish, um, preschool and they asked her something about believing in
00:37:20.600
God. And she said, uh, Oh, I only believe on God on Fridays. And I think that that's actually, uh,
00:37:27.000
a more healthy perspective. That's something that I don't know whether you've, you've talked about it
00:37:30.720
or dealt with it. No, no, I haven't. Well, I don't know that I could sign on the dotted line
00:37:34.760
with your daughter's statement there, but I think there's something a little euphemistic creeping in
00:37:40.020
there perhaps for her or for you, but I think the general picture you paint of a multiplicity of
00:37:48.200
beliefs, which aren't necessarily reconciled in any single brain or certainly any single moment
00:37:55.320
and a kind of piecemeal worldview that we change in and out depending on context. I think part of
00:38:02.600
that's inevitable. I think it's, and I said this somewhere, it probably was, I think it was my first
00:38:09.220
book, the end of faith, which is, it's probably computationally inevitable. I think, I think there
00:38:13.580
was a, an example I gave where if you just looked at the computational requirements of checking a
00:38:19.140
list of propositions for logical contradiction. And I mean, this is an NP complete problem where
00:38:25.280
there's, as you add propositions, the runtime for even a computer, the size of a universe with
00:38:30.400
components, the size of protons with switching speeds at the speed of light, you still would,
00:38:35.400
after 15 billion years, you'd be fighting to add, I think it was the 300th belief to the list,
00:38:40.360
right? So it's like, we're, we are not going to be perfectly coherent, even if, even if our minds
00:38:45.860
worked as just checking a list of propositions for, you know, syllogistic error. So there, there will be
00:38:52.860
contradictions. And there is a, just neurologically speaking, a committee in there that is pulling the
00:38:59.900
gears and levers of, of emotion and behavior. And we have a very strong emotional attachment to certain
00:39:06.500
things, which can cloud our cooler judgments about what is real. But I just think that, that in science
00:39:14.120
and in clear thinking generally, we do our best to, at least in those conversations, when we're asked,
00:39:23.160
you know, what do you really believe is real? We do our best to only promote to kind of the
00:39:29.660
canonicity, you know, in our worldview, those things that we think we can defend based on evidence and
00:39:36.400
arguments and logic. And, and we can be wrong about that. It's just that the, the, the possibility for
00:39:42.360
incoherence in one's worldview can be pretty startling because I mean, there are people who,
00:39:46.720
or in this, in this case, in, in the end of faith, my wife and I were in Paris and we had as a conscious
00:39:53.800
decision decided not, not to go near the American embassy. This was brilliant. Yeah. And then we were
00:39:58.140
also, and those of you who haven't heard this, you can listen to the, I think it was my last podcast on the,
00:40:05.240
where I'm re actually reading the end of faith on the podcast. And I, I read this episode, but, and we were
00:40:10.320
trying to get, get a hotel room with a view of the embassy garden. And the phrase American embassy
00:40:15.680
was just functioning in two discreet and incompatible ways in our minds. And so we just
00:40:21.320
had a, you know, a folly a deux and it wasn't reconciled for us until a friend said, don't you
00:40:27.980
realize we had actually checked into the hotel with a view of the American embassy. And a friend said,
00:40:31.580
what the hell are you doing? You're right. It's the 4th of July. You're right next to the American
00:40:35.340
embassy. And then we, then the walls came down and we realized we had, had been both seeking and
00:40:41.300
seeking to avoid proximity to the American embassy all day long.
00:40:45.680
Now that's an especially crazy instance, which even now I can't understand how, how it was true
00:40:51.800
of me, but no doubt there are many things I think are true, which are incompatible with other things
00:40:57.500
that I think are, are true. And only conversation with oneself and, and experiences reading and
00:41:04.500
argument with others can, can bring those to light. So for instance, your, your jihadi sandbox. I,
00:41:09.940
I also have that jihadi sandbox and I have a blog post that I've referenced a few times on the
00:41:14.660
podcast entitled Islam and the misuses of ecstasy, where I, I try, try to describe in a series of,
00:41:21.540
of embedded videos, just how deep my sympathy with the surface features of, of Muslim religion and,
00:41:29.700
and spirituality runs. And, you know, I think the call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things
00:41:35.780
ever to appear on earth. I love the sound of it. I love the sound of it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a
00:41:41.600
great one that I linked to in that blog post. And I love Kowali music, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,
00:41:48.380
the Pakistani singer. Saw him in Boston. What, what a show. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's unfortunately,
00:41:53.720
I never got a chance to do that. And I love the poetry of Rumi. And I, and I, and I even get
00:41:59.660
what the attract. Have you talked about this on any of your shows? Not, not at length, but I've,
00:42:05.580
I've. So this, I wanted to come down here and talk to you about this in particular, because I think one
00:42:09.840
of the things that's going on is that you do not spend enough time talking about all of the fantastic
00:42:17.700
contributions of this culture. And, um, you point in one case at the really appalling lack of scientific
00:42:28.240
achievements of Muslims, let's say, since the Nobel prize, um, has been given out. I think there've
00:42:34.480
been three in the sciences and one of them was, uh, to the great Ahmadi Muslim, uh, who contributed to
00:42:40.920
the standard model of physics. Um, so he would be considered, uh, not a Muslim in Pakistan. Right.
00:42:47.240
Um, but I think one of the problems is you're not advertising the emotional valence that I've
00:42:55.400
secretly suspected you must have. So, you know, when I, when I, when I struggle with this, I have a,
00:43:01.660
a friend group that is disproportionately Islamic and, um, it's been one of the great experiences
00:43:10.260
of my life since I was 16. My, my, my closest friend, um, you know, welcomed me into his family,
00:43:16.220
his culture, uh, completely eyeopening experience. And this is a friend from high school or a friend
00:43:22.960
from college. And, um, um, he, uh, you know, his family engaged in traditional practices with the
00:43:31.640
hand kissing and touching feet and all sorts of, um, or I guess the feet touching was a different
00:43:38.540
kind of field of, uh, respect, but the family was so courageous. I mean, his sister was brutally
00:43:45.440
gang raped in India and the, uh, the father supported his daughter, um, talking about it openly when you
00:43:54.860
would imagine that there were the feelings of shame and the issues of honor would have been dominant.
00:44:01.220
And so in my life, um, I have traveled, uh, always openly as a Jew in the Islamic world.
00:44:09.600
And I've been treated incredibly well. I believe that if the Nazis were ever to recur,
00:44:14.260
the floorboards under which I would be hidden would likely be Muslim floorboards. Um, so it's very
00:44:22.080
painful, uh, to not have this long, short language where in general, um, I've been in, you know,
00:44:30.880
in a, in a, in a largely Islamic social context since I, since I was 16, people don't ever address
00:44:38.300
you as, Oh, crusader. You know, I mean that, that kind of speech that you get used to watching ISIS
00:44:43.340
videos, which most people don't watch, but I've, I've watched a great deal of them just because I
00:44:47.420
need to know about this. Uh, you're talking about two completely different worlds that are connected.
00:44:54.380
And I think it's really important to advertise more, more heart, more empathy, more emotion,
00:45:02.700
because otherwise the very dry analytic way in which you go about thinking about this,
00:45:08.060
I think it's, gets too much play in a certain sense. You were so logical that the fact that the
00:45:14.920
texts say these very clear things or that there's ambiguity, but there's a hierarchy for resolving
00:45:20.640
the ambiguities. This appeals to your analytic mind. And I think both you and I have an analytic
00:45:25.820
bent and we would be much more tempted. Were we highly religious to go down these sort of, well,
00:45:31.880
you know, it says here in the text that this is true. And if I really believe this is the infallible
00:45:35.400
word of the creator and that, uh, I'm going against God not to follow directions, we would be tempted
00:45:42.860
by that interpretation. And so I think in part, it's a little bit, um, perverse that you almost
00:45:49.300
have more sympathies with the literal versions, uh, of, uh, of the religion than you do with what you
00:45:57.320
call. And I think it's somewhat disparaging nominal members of the, of these religions. And if I can
00:46:02.440
tell one story from my own, because I know it better, I grew up, uh, in an atheist Jewish household
00:46:08.920
and my wife who is from India grew up as a Jew in Bombay. Um, and so, uh, our commonality was Judaism.
00:46:17.180
So we, we got married in a Jewish context. Now, when I went to the rabbi, uh, I said, I want to do
00:46:23.560
this by the book. So he laughed and he said, well, why don't you write the ketubah for your,
00:46:28.300
your, your wedding contract? Um, so we wrote something, we gave it back to him. He says,
00:46:34.160
this, he says, I can't work with this. This is garbage. So he said, you know, why don't you come
00:46:39.340
back, come back with another version? So we, we did it. And he said, this is poetry. This is poetry.
00:46:43.720
This is the bride price of virgins. Treat it like a contract. So we went back to the original,
00:46:50.140
tried to do a modern version of it, uh, you know, and sort of an isomorphic version.
00:46:55.120
And finally he says, uh, this is the worst I've seen. I've been marrying people for decades.
00:46:59.920
So finally I exploded at him and I said, rabbi gold. I said, you know, I put hours and hours into
00:47:05.940
this and, uh, I don't think it can be done. And he looks at me and he says, uh, huh. And I said,
00:47:12.560
well, what is that about? He said, well, he said, you're trying to get married in a, uh, you know,
00:47:18.360
more than 5,000 year old tradition. And you have an idea that there is a by the book and it's very
00:47:24.240
important that you understand that it is impossible to be a Jew by the book because
00:47:28.160
this particular contract says the bride price of virgins will be in Zuzim, some currency that
00:47:34.400
hasn't existed for years. And that the contract itself cannot be a formality. It actually,
00:47:40.740
actually has to mean something. And since nobody knows what a Zuz is anymore,
00:47:45.080
it's literally impossible to fulfill. Now, I don't know if that's exactly right or exactly wrong,
00:47:51.680
but his point was, is that it's all create your own Judaism. There is no true Judaism.
00:47:57.140
And I think that that was liberating for me because I was having a very hard time
00:48:02.180
following some rules, not others. I don't really like pork, you know, really good prosciutto and
00:48:08.300
pepperonis, you know, as a pleasure. And I was always too far to, to walk to the synagogue on
00:48:14.460
Saturdays. So I think that it's very important to realize that there is no way usually to fulfill
00:48:20.060
these texts. And as a result, um, this lines up with what Majid Nawaz talks about, about multiple
00:48:28.220
interpretations are the beginning of de-radicalization. And I think what you struggle
00:48:32.700
with a lot is that you're very sympathetic to the literal and you're much less sympathetic to the,
00:48:38.520
uh, doped with nonsense or, you know, clearly our Judaism in the modern era is doped with
00:48:44.300
Christianity, which I think is a pretty good thing. Um, if it goes too far, I get very alienated,
00:48:49.620
but I think it's important to realize that the nominal versions of these religions, um,
00:48:56.820
are in some sense, the true versions of these religions within the civilized modern era and the
00:49:02.440
literal attempts to go back to, I don't know, sixth century or some thousands of years before Christ
00:49:08.980
are, uh, this is nonsense. So to, to rewind all the way to the point of my not expressing my sympathy
00:49:17.360
with the liturgy and iconography and spirituality and, and food, architecture, music. Yeah. Of,
00:49:25.380
of these cultures enough. I guess the, the way I have decided to go long short there is not so much
00:49:33.080
focusing on those features. Although I have a little bit, but more to point out that my,
00:49:40.360
my real sympathy and solidarity is with the people who are suffering most under theocracy. And those
00:49:48.060
are in this case, actual other Muslims who are not disposed to live under theocracy. So it's liberal
00:49:54.760
Muslims, it's Muslim women, it's apostates, it's free thinkers. And I, you know, I try to come around
00:50:01.340
if I don't do it in every paragraph, I try without letting too many minutes elapse on the clock to
00:50:07.080
come around to the point, just the, the stark acknowledgement that obviously no one suffers
00:50:12.820
the consequences of global jihadism and Islamist theocracy more than Muslims do. And, and, and it's
00:50:19.480
the Muslims I hear from in the ex-Muslims and the, and the liberal Muslims who I am always thinking
00:50:26.400
about in addition to worrying about the civilizational consequences of, of jihadism. And I, and I'm also
00:50:32.540
aware that my sympathy with spiritual aspiration and spiritual experience, you know, my, my like,
00:50:40.000
my finding something intelligible in, in the poetry of Rumi doesn't survive collision with the doubts
00:50:45.860
in the brains of many, of much of my audience. I mean, you know, I, I, I speak to atheists and
00:50:50.860
secularists who, who have no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about meditation. And they certainly
00:50:56.140
have no idea what Rumi's talking about and many of them don't want to know. And so there's, there's,
00:51:00.460
you know, it's not, I don't really, I'm not censoring myself on the basis of that, but it's just
00:51:04.400
Rumi's not so interesting to, to much of my audience, or at least hasn't been thus far.
00:51:10.900
The other reason why I focus on literalism is because I think there, there isn't a, there's an
00:51:17.380
asymmetry here and a real advantage to the literalists. And I don't know how we ever get out from under
00:51:25.760
this thing, because the issue for me is that there, there is a more and less plausible reading
00:51:32.500
of any scripture. And this is what I ran into with, with Majid in our conversation together. So, so the,
00:51:38.420
so the implausible readings don't survive very well because they are in fact implausible. It is,
00:51:43.920
it is, you can't really read any of these traditions to speak of the Abrahamic ones, Judaism,
00:51:50.240
Christianity, and Islam. You can't read any of their scripture and get as a plausible reading
00:51:57.440
the value that homosexuality is just as good, ethically speaking, as heterosexuality,
00:52:04.560
or that women are and, and must be the political equals and the moral equals to men, right? So it's
00:52:10.880
what you have to do is you have to bring those modern values to the text and cherry pick and
00:52:17.760
leverage in ways that is a bit of a, a pantomime of scholarship. It's not really, I mean, you,
00:52:25.980
you know what you want the answer to be in advance, right? It's not like, it's not like you're
00:52:29.720
discovering those values in the text because actually the antithesis is in the text and
00:52:34.220
wherever those topics are touched for the most part, it's certainly clearest on, on the case of,
00:52:39.480
of homosexuality. It's just, it's anathema, right? So it's, you know, it's, it's anathema in
00:52:45.900
the Hebrew Bible, it's anathema in St. Paul, it's certainly the anathema in, in the Quran and the
00:52:51.680
Hadith. And so it's, it's a, if you want gay people in the 21st century to have all the rights
00:52:58.100
and privileges and respect that you do and a right to want, well, then you have to find some rationale
00:53:04.500
by which to ignore these texts now, or at least those parts of the text. So, I mean, one thing I
00:53:09.960
would like people to be is just honest about that process. But the, but the problem is that once you
00:53:15.200
become honest about that process, there is something fundamentally corrosive about that
00:53:21.220
because you're, you, you are bringing merely human values to this project and based on your own
00:53:29.160
moral wisdom, 20, the 21st century upgrade to your ethical firmware, you are valuing those modern
00:53:39.060
moral intuitions more than you are valuing the word of God in that case. And being honest about
00:53:45.060
that, I think is, is in fact necessary for modern people to really modernize and, and tolerate a
00:53:52.540
plurality of views. And, and in this case, accept things like gay marriage. But in the face of that,
00:53:59.220
the fundamentalist, the literalist always has the advantage of being able to say, you see, these
00:54:04.920
apostates are not living by the letter of the text. It says right here, what you should do.
00:54:10.760
So who is living by the letter of the text? Now you might say ISIS.
00:54:14.600
Yeah. I mean, they're, they're certainly aspiring to, yeah, they're doing their best job.
00:54:18.340
But let, let me again, drag it back to Judaism because, uh, I'm always happier, uh, playing in
00:54:24.540
my own backyard than, uh, hopping the fence into somebody else's. I think, uh, Sam, that even what
00:54:31.340
you just said is not, it's not exactly right. Um, the way, and again, I wish this was original to
00:54:36.700
me, but it came from, uh, Ben Zion gold who, uh, just, just left us. And, uh, what he said to me
00:54:42.740
is he said, you realize that our rules for freeing slaves after, I don't know what it is, seven years
00:54:48.620
or something like that were progressive in their time. Um, and he said, do you wish to be loyal to
00:54:56.160
the spirit of Judaism, which was progressive in its, in its day, literal Judaism. But if you tried
00:55:02.180
to implement slavery now, you'd be absolutely regressive. So you are in fact forced into
00:55:07.380
choosing between letter and spirit. And why is it that you have decided that the letter is the true
00:55:12.820
and the spirit is the false. And I think that, you know, you, you, you were pawing at this with the
00:55:19.520
Quran. And I think, I think this is an incredibly important issue, which is that the Quran resists
00:55:26.160
and I'm going to dip into science a little bit, a sort of regulated expression model.
00:55:31.700
So if you think about the discovery of the operon and DNA, where you have, uh, something that digests,
00:55:37.540
I don't know, sugar and, uh, you don't want that protein produced, uh, on mass when there's no sugar
00:55:46.440
around. So you have some repressor that sits on the DNA and when there's sugar around, the repressor
00:55:51.200
is lured off of it and the, uh, proteins are transcribed and they digest the sugar. And so
00:55:57.340
there are parts of the code that you want to be active sometimes and not active others.
00:56:02.580
So the problem of course, with, uh, Islam is, is that it really is very well constructed to resist
00:56:08.920
a lot of this innovation, which I think what is by the, be the, it's this concept that you're not
00:56:14.240
supposed to innovate, uh, around the literal. But, um, the fact is, is that regulated expression has
00:56:21.040
always been a part, uh, of these religions. And so if you find somebody who is claiming, no, no,
00:56:27.220
it's a literal, this is just, just literal. And we have to live by the letter of the book.
00:56:32.460
And you point out the contradictions and you point out all of these things, you point the thing about
00:56:36.100
spirit, you can start to say, you know, God, if, if God exists is certainly open source, we've, uh,
00:56:41.840
cracked the nucleus of the cell, the nucleus of the, of the atom. We, we've learned a tremendous
00:56:47.800
amount and God is inviting us to understand how he or she, uh, has put this whole construct together.
00:56:54.140
And so, you know, is it, it's clearly the Quran is not the last word, nor is the Torah, because,
00:57:02.260
uh, in fact, God has left so much information, uh, should he or she exist, uh, that wasn't available
00:57:08.740
then, which is our text. If I, you know, I spit into a tube at some point and send it off to 23 and
00:57:13.960
me. And I was astounded that it came back, uh, you know, Jew, it was like 96.8 Ashkenazi Jewish.
00:57:21.040
And so with, with the multiple parentheses around your name, those were added later, but, uh,
00:57:28.500
you know, I, I think that part of the problem is, is that, I mean, it's almost like the ISIS variant
00:57:35.360
really appeals to your logical, consistent mind saying, you know, if it is about the text and
00:57:40.880
the text is perfect, this is the, this is the closest, uh, any nation on earth has come to trying
00:57:46.740
to carry this out. And, you know, I, I was always bothered. Why is it that, that homosexuals are
00:57:52.620
thrown off of buildings? And I had to, you know, chase it down, as you must know, to the hadiths
00:57:56.780
where it says, you know, that sodomites should be taken to the tops of cliffs and thrown off and
00:58:01.240
buildings stand in for cliffs. And then, you know, the ultimate weirdness is the denial that
00:58:07.400
there is any link whatsoever between these texts. And let's say this particular method of execution
00:58:12.900
of these supposed sodomites. And I think it's actually entirely possible to push back against
00:58:18.700
these things by looking at the fact that everybody who sets themselves up as a literalist, uh, is in
00:58:26.160
fact going to be failing, uh, by one form or another. And so when you realize that we are all failing
00:58:30.800
to live within these religions, that it is impossible, uh, to be as they instruct, um,
00:58:38.860
everything opens up. And so I think that in part, uh, this is actually a Sam Harris trap,
00:58:43.640
uh, based upon, uh, your capacity to decamp and to explore internally consistent ideologies,
00:58:53.200
Before I push back against any of that, let me just say that I have come to Jesus,
00:58:59.080
Jesus in the sense that I acknowledge that the trend that we have to foster is just what you
00:59:05.960
described. We, we need modernizing reformists, looser interpretations of all these traditions.
00:59:11.900
And that's, that's the end game for civilization. The end game is not for everyone to wake up on a
00:59:18.140
Tuesday agreeing with me that all of this is divisive nonsense and they have to be hang up their
00:59:23.060
shingle as, as atheists or skeptics. But first of all, my concern, my concern is that any analogy to
00:59:28.800
Judaism is very likely misleading in the sense that Judaism really is an idiosyncrasy for, for,
00:59:35.260
for many reasons, theologically, historically, as a matter of just demographics at this moment. And
00:59:41.220
I mean, it's, it's true to say of Judaism and impossible to say of most other religions that you
00:59:48.320
can find people who, for whom the religion, their Judaism is very important. And they might even be
00:59:54.360
rabbis and they might even be conservative rabbis, although they're, they're not going to be ultra
00:59:58.000
orthodox and they believe almost nothing in the books, right? They just, they're, they're wedded to
01:00:03.160
the tradition. They like the music. They like Shabbat. They like the, the, the food.
01:00:09.440
Sam, do you know the only problem with Jewish cooking?
01:00:14.120
Oh, so I think analogies to Judaism are dangerous because so many Jews, even quote,
01:00:23.960
religious Jews are deeply secular and some believe almost nothing supernatural in the service of their
01:00:31.500
religion. And I've, you know, I debated them. The one instance I keep coming back to is I was
01:00:35.780
debating, I think it was, it was Hitch. It was a debate that Hitch and I did with two rabbis
01:00:41.380
David Wolpe and Rabbi Artson, I think it was. And at one point I said something that presupposed
01:00:48.880
that I think it was Wolpe who's, who's conservative, he's not reformed. I said something that presupposed
01:00:53.720
that he believed in a God who can hear our prayers. And he turned to me and he said, just aghast,
01:00:58.920
he said, well, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear our prayers? Right. And so,
01:01:02.580
and then, you know, I was momentarily flabbergasted. It's like, so what are we,
01:01:06.580
what do you actually believe? You know, given that you do, this is your full-time job.
01:01:11.380
But you can't really map that onto Islam or Christianity. Certainly it's American variant
01:01:20.100
in any realistic way. But my other, my problem with some of what you said there is that, yes,
01:01:26.600
you can take the claim about slavery in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, that you can say, well,
01:01:33.400
there's the letter here, but then there's the modernizing spirit or the liberalizing spirit
01:01:39.240
of the text. But I just have two issues with that. One is that it was possible even 2,000 years ago
01:01:47.480
to understand ethically that slavery was wrong and to have a tradition that just repudiated it
01:01:53.720
or certainly never endorsed it. That kind of wisdom was, you know, among the Jains or the Buddhists.
01:01:59.640
I'm sure there are Greek philosophers who I can't think of at the moment who thought slavery was
01:02:03.820
wrong. It was possible to have that insight. And my other fundamental concern is just that
01:02:10.460
it would be possible for you and I to invent a religion right now that was better than any
01:02:17.280
existing religion. In fact, we could make it just as irrational. We could put a hell at the back of it,
01:02:23.200
like believe this list of propositions and be committed to these behaviors, or you will spend
01:02:28.440
eternity in hellfire after death. But the list of propositions and behaviors we would come up with
01:02:34.740
would be fundamentally benign and constructive and a much better operating system for a global
01:02:42.020
civilization in the 21st century than any of these religions. I'm not sure about that.
01:02:47.000
Okay. Well then, but if you're not sure about that, then take your favorite of the old school
01:02:50.440
religions and just remove a few of the bad precepts. You know, just change the bit about
01:02:55.160
homosexuality and slavery. And you've, you've in, in 30 seconds, you've improved Judaism and
01:03:00.460
Christianity and Islam. So, well, in part, um, I'm not sure the best way of making this point.
01:03:06.840
There, there are several things I care about other than truth. And one of them is fitness,
01:03:10.660
uh, in the sort of, uh, sense of, uh, natural sexual selection.
01:03:16.460
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