Advertising Atheism

and joining us tonight on the debate for the full hour justin trotter he's president of the free thought association of canada author kathy shadle who writes a blog called five feet of fury dot com united church minister greta vosper the chair of the canadian center for progressive christianity jordan peterson professor of psychology at the university of toronto and the author of maps of meaning the architecture of belief and tvo viewers will well recognize dr rob buckman author of can we be good without god behavior belonging and the need to believe well thanks everybody for being here this evening for what i'm sure will be a stimulating discussion we want to remind everybody that our thursday program is always informed by our viewers so they have sent us their emails online telling us what show they think we ought to do and tonight we had quite a conversation going online about this so this is what we're doing tonight uh we also would invite all of you to be involved in the broadcast send us your twitters your emails however you like to get to us at the agenda at tvo.org the agenda at tvo.org we'll try to get as many of your questions and comments on the air as possible over the course of the hour i want to put up two emails that we received already and this will start our discussion this evening here's the first one it says pure and simple i'm a theist and i think the ads are wonderful the ads in question we will see in a second here's the second one i am so glad to see that finally another view will be aired to the public as agnostic leaning strongly towards atheism and a active humanist i feel that our voices have been silenced for too long we've had to endure the ever accepted presence of religious oppression in our society we have far too long been forced to remain in the closet about who we are for fear of bigotry let's flip that over and hatred towards us and even threats of violence simply because we do not believe in god zeus allah or any other so-called higher supernatural power humanists believe in reason justice equality fairness and compassion for all humans well what are we talking about here tonight we are talking about something that toronto's transit system has decided to start a new ad campaign for atheism shall we show this here it comes there's probably no god so says the ad now stop worrying and enjoy your life that's what the ads say the so-called atheist bus so let's go around the horn and get some opinions on this there's probably no god now stop worrying and enjoy your life rob buckman first impressions well i i love the english campaign the word probably was put in by the advertising standards association is that there's no proof which of course there can't be the great thing is if you can get over the idea that there's probably no god so we're on our own to sort out our own messes and in many respects it's that bit it's not there's no no point in a sterile argument whether there is or is not it's only the influence on behavior that really matters so i absolutely welcome it justin what's the purpose of these ads to generate the discussion that i think we've seen to really bring atheists and non-theists into the mainstream and we've seen that the united church and various secular and and liberal-leaning muslim and christian and jewish organizations have joined us to have a discussion on our website on their websites to really take this the next level and show people that atheists have a point of view not just on god but on questions of ethics questions of free expression questions of religious accommodation some of the really very important questions of the day kathy your view when you saw this ad well it's certainly an improvement i'm old enough to remember when the public face of atheism was madeline murray o'hare rather a purposefully unattractive woman who was so universally despised that she ended up being someone dismembered her with a chainsaw so um i'd like to congratulate everybody for at least um toning it down slightly and presenting a slightly more attractive uh view at least we know that no one is going to be left to die in the desert over this greta vosper i was amused when i first saw the ad because the first time i i saw a picture of it it had a picture of richard dawkins beside it and and i thought how on earth did they get away with putting probably in there with richard dawkins because his idea probably is that it should be completely taken out of the language uh relating to god he's uh vitriolic about anyone who assumes that uh the tiny little whiff of an of a possibility should be uh uh completely expunged so uh so i i laughed when i saw the probably the conversation uh has to take place uh for exactly the same reasons that have have been articulated already um but i do think that we need to get beyond just the conversation about whether there is or whether there isn't to uh how it affects our lives and how we choose to live our lives uh whether we do or whether we don't we shall do some of that tonight jordan your thoughts i think it's a juvenile publicity stunt pulled off by people who really neither know about nor care about the actual issues get off the fence and tell me what you really think really no redeeming features whatsoever you've heard justin say it's actually kind of provoked a bit of discussion well i don't really regard atheists as an oppressed group personally i don't think there's any real historical evidence for that especially in north america and europe and at least recently and i think the debate is going fine without this sort of stunt and i think it's basically a media manipulation ploy that's good intruding there if i may you say the discussion's going fine but i think you're alluding to the theist club discussion you've seen the pages of our national papers that religious organizations are frequently invited to discuss issues of ethics issues of the interplay between science and faith issues of the reasonable accommodations of religion you rarely see an atheist or a proclaimed secular humanist from an organization or not actually being invited to participate until relatively recently so when you say that our our country's becoming more pluralistic and more say that well you're saying that we're including more people in the discussion i think you're ignoring the fact that atheists are not part of that discussion you've seen dawkins you've seen hitchens you've seen all these guys that write these books on atheism get massive amounts of media play so it's not like they're excluded if anything they're dominant so three years ago that's correct what's that richard dawkins book came out about three to four years ago yeah so i'd like and and it's got a perfectly fine uh a perfectly fine reception i mean and there's no evidence that he's being oppressed even though maybe he should be i don't think i use the word oppressed today i think his point is it's a fairly recent phenomenon that non-believers have been invited to partake in this discussion what about bertrand russell i mean why i'm not a christian is still in print uh god love us after all these years complete with all its misinformation and juvenile petulance but so this isn't anything new like i said i'm i'm dating myself but it seemed to me that every month madeleine murray o'hare was on phil donahue and they would have a little fight and you know this this is new perhaps it's your youth that makes you think that it's a new argument well can i ask you about that word probably rob buckman brought it up a second ago is it still considered provocative in 2009 to say there probably is no god i can't imagine i mean given uh the the atmosphere in universities alone although you know more about that than i do i'm i hazard a guess that the real provocative uh notion is that you're a believer as the students at the university of calgary who are pro-lifers discovered when they tried to have a public discussion and the discussion was literally shut down by people who are calling themselves secular and liberal um so i think sometimes the the default rebel position these days is is the religious one but it depends on what region i think of the world you're in now that's an interesting go ahead greg there are a lot of people who have been within christian community uh mainline or evangelical however who have not been exposed to any kind of support uh within their communities or from the the atheist or humanist uh communities who have wanted to seek beyond traditional doctrinal um experiences of their faith and who have intuited or read or thought themselves to the edges of those doctrinal positions and and want to go further shake their world views a little bit this ad campaign has allowed them to be affirmed in a way that they haven't been affirmed before and that is a very important part of what i think this campaign has done and has allowed them to seek out and find some community and that's a big part of what what we're we do at the canadian center for progressive christianity is try to bring people who are very isolated within faith communities who have been brought up in traditional christianity have conversations with other people so that they don't feel so isolated because i don't know that it is that a faith position is is necessarily the one that's marginalized these days perhaps um in in secular culture it may seem to be but a lot of people have grown up uh within faith traditions and and christian faith traditions i mean and they have these very pervasive beliefs and they invade the way that they understand themselves and what they've done that's right and wrong and how they're going to be judged for those actions buckman i think i agree with you strongly i i strongly disagree with jordan's use of the word juvenile because i think the word probably in there is not juvenile it's actually quite thoughtful and it really is i know it was put there as i said by the advertising council not by the the the original people but it's it's a fabulous way of saying what you believe cannot be proven which is a very important definition of belief and therefore it makes it mature not juvenile yeah i mean when we decided the free thought association of canada on what ad to use here what slogan we opted for the probably and that was our choice the transit commission never said whether we had to put that in there we think it's more intellectually honest because we are atheist agnostics skeptics we're doubters we thought that that was a more profound statement to make but i also want to pick up on something right let me forgive me let me just end up there okay you're not just representing atheists you are representing a broader community we're trying to build a big tent and greta mentioned community we're big into that we often hear that atheists and humanists don't do charitable things that we have no community and part of that is true and we're trying to build that and people often ask us if all we're doing is trying to raise membership that's not the first priority but we are trying to get people together so we can be a voice for them and do some good things so just probably because that's the problem an atheist of course there's no probably right and it would be a much smaller market that would be i'm sorry interrupted you wanted to make a second point as well that was it actually the community aspect that's that's the first priority of what we're doing jordan well i guess you know there was a little bit of discussion a couple of minutes ago about shaking people's world views you know and it's it's not something to be done lightly so so if you i mean i'm very interested in what happens to people when their belief systems collapse and not only what happens to people individually but also socially and so what i've learned about that that's most profound i think probably came from turn-of-the-century thinkers like nietzsche dostoevsky or tolstoy who were very much concerned about the demolition of belize structures and nietzsche the philosophers a real interesting case in point because he's the originator of the famous phrase god is dead but that isn't the phrase that's just the phrase that people like to remember the phrase is god is dead and we have killed him and there won't be enough water to wash away the rivers of blood and the rest of that phrase is a prophecy for the 20th century that he wrote 25 years before the 20th century began stating quite clearly that he believed that hundreds of millions of people would be killed in the 20th century because of the decline of standard religious beliefs that people would turn in particular and he prophesied this as well in particular they would turn to communism so you know none of this is a none of this is a game it's very dangerous full quote changes the meaning of that quite simply yeah rob buckman i think rivers of blood unfortunately are a human characteristic i would argue with you very strongly that it was not the decline of religion that led to so many millions of dead there have been millions of dead in the name of religion long before there was any possibility of decline i'm not millionaires that argument is also i think very means if you add up that argument is also here and then over here go ahead that's also that's a an interesting argument because in one way it's true and in one way it's not so the thing about global scale religions is that they unite many many millions of people now within that union there's relative peace of course the problem is is that there's different global religions and then on the borders between those religions there's still war now people who don't like religious systems point to the battle between religions but they never really notice that within the religions themselves millions of people are brought into a big tent let's say so you know you can't have it both ways religion unites and it divides and if you're going to you know pay close attention to the facts you've got to give due credit to both i do want to keep the discussion on the ads themselves but given that you made that point i feel obliged to let you follow up i don't think anybody's after forcing people to convert to atheism we're not talking about stalin or hitler or any of those really uh pathetic attempts that people make to a lot to put all of that you don't think you're talking about that well let me finish what i was going to say please what i would like to see is more critical thinking there are lots of societies where they have great critical thinking and science education people willingly choose to adopt atheism or secularism i'm thinking of northern european countries and books have been written that have studied the levels of atheism and secularism in countries like sweden and denmark they have great community programs great social welfare programs they found a way to adopt to a secular society and build a community without needing to rely on on churches okay jordan let me follow up with you on this you work in the university community which is supposed to be about challenging assumptions and really getting at the core of things if this bus campaign makes people question assumptions some would say assumptions that are made without thought isn't that a good thing well i would say a lot of your assumptions are made without thought and that's partly because a lot of the assumptions that people have are so complicated they can't figure them out i would also say that you know you have to believe things like everyone's everyone's morality is predicated on faith now there are people who will object to that characterization but as far as i'm concerned the psychological data that pertain to that is is it's established beyond belief everyone's saying everyone's morality is predicated on faith and the reason for that is that there's no first of all there's two reasons one is that you can't know everything and what that means is that at the bottom of your belief structure something has to bottom out in faith that takes the place of absolute knowledge and the second part of it is is that moral decisions themselves aren't based on objective descriptions of the world they're based on something else like a faith in the faith in the right thing to do it's not a matter of scientific debate morality wishy-washy jordan what you're saying um is not necessarily what the debate is about it doesn't say there's probably no such thing as faith it says there's probably no god and the point about this argument is really about whether a supernatural force that affects humankind's destinies has an existence and so far until very very recently that was the assumption and still at this moment probably 99.9 of the world believe that there is such a thing as a god and the beauty of this debate is it's challenging the assumption in the existence of a supernatural being not in the way you use the word in faith but in faith in the supernatural that's all and if we go back if we go back to the ad campaign themselves and and the the original ad that was written to to respond to some christian ads that sent people to a website that said that they were going to go to hell for eternity if they did not believe in salvation as uh given to them by jesus christ so so the original ads responded to that without that as a background they may not stand alone as well but but the the ends of the ad so don't worry now enjoy your life um if you're talking about not being a god there being no god then you have nothing to worry about or as the united church campaign came back saying there probably is a god so if there is a god you don't have anything to worry about if that's your worldview if your worldview is predicated on there being one or they're not being one if there is not one then you don't have anything to worry about the the intimation there is that then god isn't going to do bad things to you which is a very basic premise in our world view whose worldview the worldview of those who are afraid of that kind of god and the intimation in that particular ad campaign or that in the other ad campaign it's that now god is going to take care of everything so either of those uh foundational worldviews uh have problems with them so but the one that's a belief one that god is going to take care of everything i think is a particularly dangerous belief system in this day and age we can't afford to rely on a deity that we think is going to come in and sweep in and make the world a better place jordan than justin well the issue that rob buckman wrote raised with regards to faith the question is sure but it doesn't make any difference because the question then becomes faith in what okay so look at it this way you can have a coherent system of faith or an incoherent system of faith coherent wants better usually if the faith system is coherent there's an ultimate value at its pinnacle whatever that ultimate value is for you it's god now you might not think so but the thing about belief is it doesn't really matter what you think about belief because you don't understand the structure of your own beliefs and generally they're manifested in action and not in speech and technically speaking the value that's at the pinnacle of your hierarchy whatever that is for all intents and purposes that's god now you don't have to believe that and you don't have to know it but that's still how it works out justin well here we are debating faith and atheism which really is not the the introductory uh debate that we were going to have but i think it does prove that the ad campaign has been a success because it's an exact example of the debate we wanted to have so thank you for participating in that um but to get to what greta was saying to get back to that and what i think we're here to discuss greg i appreciate your editorial this week in the toronto star but to tell us that that that ad on the bus that that's our foundational world view to use the words you just use it's a bit superficial we're trying to get the debate open then we can talk about what our world view is if i can defend the use of that probably no sorry the second part now you know stop worrying and enjoy your life relax and enjoy your life who are we talking to there we're talking to a large group of people who are starting to think critically who are starting to think skeptically and that is scaring them because they still have one leg in their faith traditions and they're worried what if they're wrong what if they are going to meet their maker and he's not going to be too happy with them and so to those people who are saying if your critical thinking leads to a position of doubt that's okay embrace the doubt skepticism is not bad and i think that that's the least problematic of the two right let me hear from kathy on this because we haven't heard from you about kathy what do you think of this second part of the plus ad which says now stop worrying about me how critical thinking always ends up equating with the latest leftist fads but um i i can't let this go by uh you were saying that you know isn't it wonderful that in certain countries where they have a lot of atheism they also have these fabulous social programs not all of us believe that nanny statism is fabulous and i would also argue that in the very nations that you mention what is rushing in to fill the vacuum left by multicultural atheism in places like denmark radical islam so uh you can i think your fight may be with a sort of christianity that no longer exists especially in places like europe that is some sort of fantasy from you know two or three hundred years ago and perhaps the real problem is one that you'll have a much harder time dealing with with the mere bus ads do we want to put this email out now michael should we should we go to this okay we've uh again we're welcoming your emails at the agenda tvo.org we just got this one in from john who says i think it's more than a little ironic that atheists who have for years protested the presence of faith and religion in the public arena are now promoting their views so publicly i welcome the opportunity for free and open discussion on the things of god is there more or is that it okay does anybody want to comment on the irony of this pick up on that i i don't think it's ironic at all there are some atheists i don't know very many of them i don't think myself or dr buckman would be in that category who believe that um to be a secular society is one is one must be devoid of religiosity you know i think that all points of view religious and secular should be part of the public space that politicians can freely talk about religion so long as the public space isn't isn't saturated by it to the extent that it becomes the sort of dominant ethos that the public space is no longer a neutral one well it is a bit of a prerequisite down south isn't it right and so there's an issue with that but here i think we found a much better way to accommodate that discussion without endorsing a world view in the public space i'm a big fan of free speech you mentioned the situation with abortion groups on campus anti-abortion groups that have been banned you should know that the free thought associations the center for inquiry a group that i direct our campus groups have been the first groups to speak out against the banning of those of those anti-abortion student clubs who are not hypocritical on our defense of free speech i think you had some letters to the editor in some papers on that this past week which i did see uh rob buckman uh talk to me about this you may know arthur brooks the social scientist i think he just got pretend i don't okay i think he just uh i think he just took over at the american enterprise institute but he's been a well-regarded uh university professor in i think in upstate new york um syracuse he argues quite compellingly with lots of information uh that in the aggregate religious people are happier than non-religious people and he's got the data to prove it oh i don't have any argument with that at all i mean uh happiness in the sense of distress i mean one of my television series i went around uh west virginia where they did the snake biting thing you know they'd answer and actually there are studies that show this weird sect i mean this is by any standards including of all christian churches in in the us but they are actually less neurotic and less worried because they do believe in god will saving they they dance with the snakes and do all that stuff happiness unfortunately isn't the only criterion that you can measure it back it's a big one though isn't it not necessarily not necessarily happiness for whom i mean you could ima i mean for example before the abolition of slavery if you owned a plantation you were probably very happy what was wrong with that picture well as this chap called abraham lincoln who said there was something wrong with that picture and let's let's sort it out so merely one group being intensely happy is undoubted but not necessarily the criteria i would never even even debate this subject if it were not for the fact that people in the human race are so ready to kill each other uh because of a concrete belief in god and we know that why that is when i talk about in my book mentioned by dawkins that unfortunately that the brain system for aggression and translating emotion into action is unfortunately easily fed into by the bit of the brain that the processes belief so tragically human beings are programmed to take cudgels up and swords up in the name of what they believe in that's the problem not anything else jordan all right so what god was stalin killing 30 million people in the name very important point a really seriously important point um stalin did undoubtedly kill some people uh because they were religious most of the people that stalin killed and i have read the books i promise you were not actually killed in the name of no no you're missing my point no he was an atheist no i don't know and he was killing people in the name of atheistic communists no i disagree with that that's a bit completely it's like saying hitler was a vegetarian and therefore millions of people died in the name of vegetarianism he was a vegetarian the slaughters and the deaths that he caused were not in the name or the cause of vegetarianism it is very complicated to work out exactly what stalin was doing other than not to me well actually yes you're right the power structure was a absolute pyramid but it certainly it certainly wasn't killing people because they were atheists as opposed to theists that wasn't there so he was killing people because as a rational man his conclusion that life was so unbearable it should be wiped out uh you know you guys who were hang on a second you guys you're in you guys who are into uh you know rational thinking forget all the time that rational thinking can go in a variety of directions it depends on your initial presuppositions if you believe that life is worth living which by the way under some conditions is highly debatable you're going to come up with a pretty optimistic conclusion but if you've looked at life and you think that the suffering of most people is unbearable and that life is evil which is what stellan thought you have no problems whatsoever mobilizing everything you can to kill as many people as you can and if you don't have any faith like any faith in an ultimate authority that says essentially that life is sacred what's to stop you from doing that the fact that it's called morality yeah where does that come from well it started and i differed in terms of morality why yeah why um you're being very rude jordan you're being very rude indeed um my my my morality is as it were on display simply on the way i actually choose to live my life and the city i did emigrate to canada out of choice um when i hope that canada hasn't well i know you deal with very difficult things yes i do i know that and i'm not stalin and it it's very unfair to say that anybody who doesn't believe in god cannot have a morality that was the time that isn't exactly what i said i said that rationality can go in two directions that's what i said okay greta wanted a word here no i just i just wanted to to point out that if you have a belief in it your your belief system and your worldview will of course help you make decisions about what you hallow and what you do not and and if your belief system posits that there is an afterlife uh real estate which has much more value and much more worth than the one here then then and that life there is going to be much more favorable and much more beautiful and much more desirable than the one here then you will want those that you love to experience that in the best possible way that they can and you will you know you don't need to be an atheist to to find that life here is is wretched and not worth living then you can be a very strong theist exactly forgive me and jump since his name has come up a few times already on the program tonight richard dawkins why don't we hear from the man uh he was in the studio not too long ago and had this to say about that which we are speaking this evening roll tape people who believe believe they get their moral values from religion where do atheists get their moral values from if not religion i very much hope that religious people don't get their moral values from from religion but we know they do we know we do not we do not um if they did then they'd be uh stoning people to death um for showing an inch of skin um if you've ever read many of the books of the early books of the old testament you would not wish to get your morals from i was just going to say you're being awfully old testament with me here but well why why not i mean if you're if you're going to say well i get my morals from the new testament and not the old testament you're picking and choosing and you're picking and choosing on what basis you're picking and choosing on the basis of a modern contemporary view of what's of what's moral so we've talked about dawkins we've talked about hitchens and i i think it's fair to say and particularly i think justin you referred to it in the past few years i think it's fair to say that atheism is kind of um hot now there's a great deal of discussion about it kathy and i wonder what you would attribute the rise in that heat too um that's that's complicated um to be perfectly honest with you i think a lot of uh the recent uh discussions have been motivated by this sort of bizarre psychological hatred of of christian conservatives in the united states of america it's basically the last acceptable prejudice so this is a reaction to that i think so i think some of it is uh there was a you know things go in fads and as i said before i think they're atheistic fads and there are christian faiths the prejudice against religious folk sorry the statistics that we saw in the states a couple years ago suggested which demographic was the least trusted was it religious or atheists i think it was atheists so where are you getting this sort of belief from well i get it from making the mistake of leaving the house and and encountering uh people who because they consider themselves urban sophisticates who want to be invited to the best cocktail parties uh think absolutely nothing of saying the most slanderous libelous and frankly uh crude mean-spirited things about christians most of whom they have never actually known don't get us in trouble but what are you talking about well i'm i'm talking about uh the fact that it's it's almost impossible to uh watch comedy central or to go to a movie or to watch my favorite uh would be a law order in which inevitably the nasty villain uh blowing up the abortion clinic is this crazed christian even though i think there have been something like seven abortion doctor deaths since 1972 that's seven too many but certainly television shows uh often present the born-again christian as either a or as someone to be mocked and laughed at well we can discuss where what what worldview most villains have i would suggest most villains are labeled as uh believing in themselves as atheists who believe in nothing but but greed and profit and all of that but we can discuss contemporary culture i think that's a kind of trivial and trite example let's talk about the ad campaign in britain after the atheist ads were put up which said there's probably no god it's the same ad that we have you know the slogan the some religious organization is now trying to put up ads that describes atheism as a dark for a dark and sinister force that's been defeated now that their money's run out to put up ads a dark and sinister force how can you compare that level of vitriol to our ads you know you talk about immature ads do you want to compare the actual facts on the ground well i'd say that there is a bit of a a premise problem there you seem to be suggesting that if you're an atheist then you'll you don't worry and you have a happy life and i think what you're doing is pricking at people who feel that they're not worried and having quite a happy life thank you very much i i don't know i've met atheists who are worried and miserable and atheists who are happy i've met christians who are worried and miserable and christians that are happy atheists and people can both be good and both evil and they're well of course but it seems to me that the ad is a little bit of a poke at people saying you miserable worried people handling snakes i mean 20 people do that in the entire united states of america there's no reason to keep bringing that up but again these are the stereotypes that people robin jordan please so yeah the important thing is keep you know enjoy your life what the real message in there which i think we're all kind of agreeing on is try not to kill anybody in the name of this god yes that's the important thing if nobody was ever had ever been in the last 5 000 years killed in the name of a god or gods probably this wouldn't be an argument at all what we're really talking about is as it were practical morality practical ethics in terms of the behavior the fairness of the whole planet now i i would say that the argument that atheism is a dark and sinister's fault is kind of a bit uh disproven uh when you look at young trottier here and you look at me i mean we we we we may be ugly but we're not dark or sinners i will speak for myself i am ugly but i am not dark and sinister and that's the argument jordan jordan one second jordan and over here thing about that ad that i think is pretty funny because it's it's not the part that people concentrate on is the second part it's like don't worry be happy if that's like is that supposed to be the the alternative good that's what you're supposed to be doing with your life if you don't believe in god you're supposed to be not worrying and being happy wait let me finish the thing is is that it's perfectly possible that the highest value to which people should be devoted is neither the quelling of worry nor being happy and the fact that that is the other half of that statement indicates to me the level of moral reasoning that underlies the motives for putting the ad on the bus just curious what's what's more important than either of those things pursuing things that are meaningful that's more important trying to order yourself so that you act morally really regardless of whether or not it makes you happy or maybe even look i just heard a journalist today a journalist's wife who talked about her husband in sri lanka who pursued the truth knowing full well that he was going to be killed because he believed that the totalitarian atrocities of the state were unbearable now he wasn't not worrying and he wasn't being happy and the idea that those are the aims to which life should be devoted is solzhenitsin said you know that belief is demolished by the first boots that kick down your door and that's absolutely right greta and i agree with some of that sentiment because i i think that that we do need to go beyond that but i'm wondering if if if one of the important things that we're missing here is the whole concept of how we live and whether or not a values-based focus that i think faith-based traditions have been missing because we've been trying to figure out how to do religion instead of what religion should be helping us do and let's figure out how to live our lives and and if we were living in a values-based way we wouldn't be talking to people in that manner at those cocktail parties and we wouldn't be blogging using the the way that we you know we're all very bold when we're behind our keyboards and we speak and we say things that we perhaps wouldn't say to someone's face in a cocktail party we wouldn't treat each other the way that we treat each other and we would find ways to to settle differences that wouldn't end up with our doors being kicked down and and and i think that faith traditions could have much to offer by way of helping people walk through the difficult uh challenges of being in relationship with with each other either on a grand scale country to country faith tradition of faith tradition or on a on the little scale of person-to-person um and i think that that's what we should be challenging one another to do and that's what our faith tradition should be doing can i throw an idea to you here the tragedy often you know people have react they want one way or another to tragedy post 911 do you think 911 encouraged more people to say there's no god no i agree with gretchen unfortunately it was exactly opposite it was i i have to say 10 11 was it was very very hard um for atheism it was very it was very difficult we saw on 9 11 exactly what people will do in the name of a god and then they say and the alternative is and the alternative is much more complicated than one single word it's something to do with uh human relationships at all levels and it's certainly something to do with being fulfilled and if i could just put the little sort of thing under that poster it would say there's probably no god even more important than enjoy life is be fulfilled uh p.s don't kill anybody in the name of god or gods um after katrina uh ripped through new orleans the belief in god skyrocketed as well and a few weeks ago i left a message on a news producer's phone machine because i was so distraught that a news report juxtaposed two horrific stories uh one where a young child had been killed in a terrible tragedy and the next story was a story about someone who had also been in a tragedy but had been saved and they played a clip of that person someone from that person's family explaining that they had been saved because god had reached down and taking care of that person and the juxtapositions of those two stories was absolutely irresponsible and horrific and and i was i was like reflected reality no not because because it reflected that if there is a god and that and god turned his or her back on that five-year-old child opinion that was the opinion of a person for a news producer for a news producer to put those two things side by side it was irresponsible if you want to put those two things to i i think it's irresponsible for a news producer to put anyone's opinion about whether god saved someone or not on the news and i've written letters because it's just another aspect of human nature i don't understand why that's unfortunate except that it annoys you let's hear from greta what would be the problem with doing it because the implication is that someone who who dies or someone who didn't have that kind of care given to them a colleague of wine one time experienced a horrific tragedy in his own family as the result of a natural disaster the next day in the newspaper was a family who had obviously not experienced that same tragedy but it been in the same natural disaster and with the headlines saying god was with us so the implication is always that god is not in the other opinion i mean right the news people should not be reinforcing that perspective of god which you seem to have a rather strange idea about the average person perhaps you think that they're so dimwitted that unless news people uh manipulate them and tell them how to behave make this personal here well no but i'm just saying that you know the idea that these poor lambs who are watching tv will be manipulated by the fact that they saw a human being say something uh in a moment of uh distress and and fear and they expressed their opinion and the idea that uh ordinary people watching the news uh have to be assisted by tv producers to think a certain way or else i don't know what the i don't think that was your point well i that's what i'm getting from that is that people will be manipulating i wanted to say something about those snake handlers i know a professor at the university of tennessee named ralph hood who's probably the world's leading authority on the psychology of religion and he spent a lot of time um interviewing and and dealing with those snake handlers and they're very interesting people in many ways because they say for example well you know when you go to church nothing necessarily happens but when i go to church i don't know whether i'm going to come out alive or not and they're not stupid now there's also something very interesting psychologically behind what they do so we know for example from decades of psychotherapy work that one of the most therapeutic things you can do for someone is have them voluntarily face the things they're afraid of and most archaic cultures do that with their juvenile males particularly during initiation and i think there's good evidence to suggest that that sort of voluntary facing of fear which is something like acceptance of vulnerability helps regulate the nervous system because it like lots of people worry about really trivial things eh and so but if you go through something that's really not trivial and something that's really dangerous it gives your nervous system a reference point against which you can then judge the things that happen to you so even the snake handlers aren't necessarily so insane just in a word for you and then i want to cycle in another email here go ahead you're talking about male circumcision or what i call male genital mutilation that is not trivial i'm not talking about that i'm talking about and that's not voluntary you talk about we're not talking about that i'm talking about this now you've said quite a few things in the last two minutes or so okay you've said two things that are completely contradictory okay you you talk about that you're referring to infants and you talked about referring to you said young men you did say young men okay and you said voluntary yeah that that that does go together if you're talking about it let me try to get a full sentence out before you interrupt you you're putting words in his mouth that he says ought not to be there so what are you trying to do he did say young people and he said young men okay young men young men are not infants well young men are not doing something voluntary until they're old enough to choose for themselves what i think a lot of this comes down to is individualism versus group rights and i think you have to show this this week on individualism whether it's gone too far i'm a big fan of individual rights and i think that to suggest that we are enter we should have a culture in which we sort of give groups the ability to self-regulate to the extent that we put our young men or young women through ordeals to of initiation as you put it i mean that's a porridge that's one of the dangers i said that there are many archaic cultures that do that and that there's a reason for it i didn't say we should do it and i didn't say we should do it let me jump in here because first of all for full marks do you we did do that program last night individualism in the time of cholera or whatever we called it uh let's get another email in here if we can michael we'll bring this one up we just got this in just now it is worth noting the emailer says that obama in his inaugural address acknowledged america is made up of many faiths including islam and specifically included americans quote who do not believe in god now i'm sure all of you picked up on that reference in his speech that was an example i mean that was a fairly extraordinary thing for an american politician to say what did you think when you heard it my immediate thought was that it's time to reprint the american dollar and it should say in god or not we trust do you object to that being on the dollar those are the slightest you don't and i'm really serious about it there is a serious point here that actually the in god we trust on the dollar does demonstrate that there is a value and i'm picking my words carefully there is a value of interactions between us i give you a dollar you give me a dollar whatever there is a value in their interactions which is actually if you use children's work the faith that we have in the dollar which may shake it for time it's not in the faith of god and i i actually strangely not only don't mind but i actually i'm actually glad that the dollar bills have got um god printed on it and the value of the dollar is the value a secular value of the transaction between us because it's an allegory kathy i'm interested in your view on when you i presume you watched obama give the inauguration no i didn't you didn't you're the one person i've met who has not watched it you need to be in broader circles uh if i was sorry i just thought this was one of the most remarkable historical events of all time and i thought most people would want to watch particularly now if i want to hear absolutely if i want to hear marx's professor talk for an hour i would have gone to college okay well if you didn't see it i won't ask you about it then did you watch it obvious inaudible i've watched parts okay did you see the reference to the anyway you know the reference to non-believers which he said which i think probably is the first time not you know unbelievers have been referred to an inaugural address in a respectful fashion what did you think of it when you're good for him yeah like i i fully believe that people should express whatever opinions they have just doesn't mean they're right i wanted to talk about that dollar bill thing too you know because there is a reason for that phrase and the reason is this is that financial interactions are predicated on trust and trust is predicated on mutual integrity and the idea that you should act in an integral manner is rooted in as a historical sequence of ideas that suggest that inside each person there's something that's divine and that's rooted in the idea that there's something about consciousness that mediates between chaos and order it's a very complex set of logic the reason that the the financial system is embedded in that is because trust in integrity and in moral goodness is actually the foundation of the financial state so it it isn't just it isn't just an accident of history and it's it's not something that should be tampered with lightly so it's only been there for 50 years you know the in god we trust it doesn't go back to the founding of the country yeah it's only been there since like okay did i just hear kathy say that she didn't listen to president obama because if she wanted to spend an hour listening to a marxist professor that's what she said she did okay your opinion is entirely you you're right one thing that title to it he's a marxist one thing that's forgotten he didn't only say that he didn't only acknowledge the existence of atheists in other speeches he's actually mentioned humanism alongside confucianism and buddhism and other ethical systems what do you think the suggestion is well he's acknowledging that atheists don't just exist that's a that's a fact claim i mean you know it's nice to have that acknowledgement don't get me wrong but he's actually going further in suggesting or actually explicitly saying that that humanists atheists and secularists can actually find a moral code alongside and that complements religious ones greta what did you think i mean the inaugural address of a new president is arguably you know one of the most important speeches that will ever be given anywhere in the world that year and he mentioned non-believers which if i'm right that's an important thing for him to do given that many of the official events of the inaugural week were opened and closed and grounded entirely in in christian the presence of christians there was a lot of that inaudible so it was very good that he did include that right in his address so it it recognized that it we aren't just talking about a christian nation here there are a lot of of other perspectives there so rob you appreciated the reference to non-believers in the inaugural i really did okay did you were you i don't know if offended is the right word but were you um upset about the fact that uh you know rick warren came up there to give an invocation and there were other religious figures say the whole thing intellectually i would have preferred it if he wasn't but it really didn't upset me in the context of that of that of that speech and that occasion i i thought in some respects the rick warren and the the the songs and the yeah and the music contributed to an emotional tone and i thought that acknowledging the existence and the sort of convergence or confluence of the potential collaboration um with people of different faiths was actually more important than me getting intellectually upset by um mention of the of the songs or in god we trust on the dollar i mean that was that level of irritation it wasn't acknowledging plurality is great but if this diversity is founded on the uh on the you know the illusion that we all have this belief in god in common which is reinforced by these official religious ceremonies i think that's leaving out of a lot of people and we talk about building uh group cohesion through religiosity we leave out what five six percent of americans in canada thankfully don't have the same problem it would be leaving out maybe 20 of canadians that's a problem give it time you're right you're right but give it time it's also that i mean you can't just wipe out uh recognition of someone just by labeling them as a marxist and saying okay i'm not going to listen to everything they say and so and also you can't just say well rick warren if you're going to have christians okay rick warren is fine because he's a christian within that scope and the definition of all those people there are different perspectives and rick warrens is was one that was a very offensive uh to be increasingly smallly offensive right now his whole whole exclusion of gays and lesbians and his work in california to have prop 8 um destroyed or all of that work destroyed in california was very a significant part of it i don't understand why i can't think that way oh absolutely you can think that way i just think that making putting a label on someone and then dismissing them because of the label is i just think that that's unhelpful and i don't so well that's fine less than four minutes to go let me read one more thing here this is out of the national post from a couple of months ago and michael if you could let's bring this up here we're calling this the separation of church and state the aggressive militants such as dawkins and hitchens also don't seem to realize that secular humanism has already won its enemies are frightening and vicious but marginal and increasingly so freedom of religion in democratic capitalism has largely meant freedom from religion today most people of faith do not as they should believe that members of other faiths are automatically damned people live like secularists even if they don't call themselves secularists america is supposedly the hotbed of religious revivalism but take a walk in times square and tell me if that's the center of a christian civilization or a pagan one who wants in on that i think it's time for us to go home i agree with that people often just label uh atheists as pagans i see that all over the place what is that all about when i go to times square i don't see evidence of paganism any more than uh fine than christianity so i'd like to know what what he's basing that on it's an unfair curricular i think well do you agree with the premise of the piece which is that you know it's over the secularist of all we want yeah do you think that's true um well the thing is is not exactly because people can't do without belief and so you know one of the things and this is one of the things i think that's really flawed in in the thinking of people like dawkins is that dawkins believes that if people abandoned their traditional religious beliefs including their belief in god that they would inevitably move to a kind of rational secular humanism and i think that's completely absurd i think people like dostoyevsky thought i think people are we have very irrational souls you know very powerful romantic emotional highly motivated souls and the idea that the abandonment of traditional forms of religion is going to lead us to some sort of rational light is like look at the 20th century why would you believe that even for a second kathy do you think the secular humanists have already won the war where it comes to the public space no i think there's almost uh well then there would be no such thing as the culture wars i mean we wouldn't really be having this conversation so um i could be wrong but just for the sake of arguing i'll say it's 50 50 and it kind of goes like this and it's yin yang and that's i don't think they've won i don't think christianity is one i think there's always going to be that would you say the culture wars are in remission right now not in my world but that's not in your world enough but the last american election was as about absent from culture wars as you know one listen of any of the last five or six or seven i think there was a remarkable lack of culture wars in this last federal election in the united states do you not agree i think we're listening to two different kinds of broadcasts and reading many different newspapers and and we thought there was a war on so uh i guess other people didn't feel like fighting it who's the we um i'd say conservatives felt that they're i mean to me conservatives have their deeply held beliefs liberals have their deeply held beliefs the idea that there should be some kind of fakey unity was getting some of us a little disturbed and so yeah i think in in my world which unfortunately there are two it is a divided america divided north america to a lesser extent um we thought there was a war going on last minute to go here and uh okay rob buckman you get it here is there a part of you that wishes that dawkins and hitchens would shut up a little bit temper temper what they say it's simply in this that there's a huge gulf between belief and behavior belief is totally okay anyone can believe in anything invisible flying spaghetti monster but it's when you pick up a sword or whatever and you decide to kill your neighbor because he doesn't believe in the same color of invisible flying spaghetti monster and in many respects it's the it's the goal to separate belief from behavior that really matters and make all of these debates you know solved i'm reminded by our producer meredith martin that you got the last word the last time you were on this program and i suspect that's because you seem to wrap things up on time which is a very nice thing when you're trying to anchor a discussion can i thank uh please uh for appearing on the program tonight justin trottier greta vasper rob buchmann on the right-hand side of the table kathy shadle and jordan peterson on the left-hand side of the table for a mostly civilized and very engaging discussion tonight thanks everybody

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 921,969

Rating: 4.8054671 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, Agenda, Steve, Paikin, current, affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Society, Culture, Religion

Id: 48V0m2lia5U

Length: 53min 38sec (3218 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/sharingan10]

Atheists like this guy, yet in 2012 we'd be making fun of him

[u/[deleted]]

Just fucking lol at his shit critical thinking abilities

[u/[deleted]]

"You guys who are into rational thinking..."

[u/arist0geiton]

because he was an atheist

so's peterson

[u/SocraticVoyager]

Wait what, Stalin thought that life was so miserable that the best solution was to eliminate life? I admit I don't know much about Stalin but I had never heard this before. Where does this come from? It sounds like the solution that a rogue AI makes in science-fiction rather than a real man's ideology. Is he simply misinterpreting Stalin's "no man, no problem" quote or is he really thicker than I had previously imagined? Is there actually something to this?

[u/[deleted]]

After centuries of religious people killing each other in various wars, they blame killings on atheism???

[u/[deleted]]

I'm still amazed that so many of Reddit's New Atheists are total fanboys of this guy.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm gonna guess he's suggesting atheists cannot support objective morality.