Joe Rogan - What's the Difference Between a Cult and a Religion?

you for that are there more or less of them than people that are in cults there are vastly more paying attention than people in cults yeah well you have to default yeah I think that's way off because I think there's like a billion Catholics oh if you're gonna call Catholicism it's a cult I grew up in it okay it's just a cult with a billion people well you got a guy who dresses like a wizard and sitting on a golden throne no boy yeah that's that's but but that is why this is a problem is that there's many people that live their lives by these ridiculous ideologies that are illogical okay so I'm gonna challenge you on that detect them from predators and Facebook Likes I'm gonna challenge you on this please do Catholicism is not a cult what is the difference you know cult here's I had a bit for my act we just a cult is and it's created by one person and he knows it's in a religion that guy's dead okay so let me have this is boy this is rough territory but are you okay let's say let's say yeah all right let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablet oh that dude okay I don't know if Moses did come down the mountain with the tablet I don't think he did let's say dead okay um that he didn't know he was bullshitting people well do you know what religious scholars actually believe in Jerusalem actually believe that was all about now the whole burning bush tell me they believe there's the acacia bush which is rich in DMT and they think the metaphor of the burning bush was actually a psychedelic experience and that Moses during this psychedelic DMT experience came back from the other dimension that you go into when you go into the DMT trance with all this really standard these standard messages that I've myself have gotten from these psychedelic experiences that you have to treat each other as if we're all one and that our separations are all illusions that you are literally living a life that if I was born in your body and I had your genetics I would be you and you would be me because we are all the same and our differences are really what the illusion is we were these temporary beings and that negative thinking and negative feelings and all these things manifest themselves in negative actions and negative thoughts and you can change that and you can change the frequency in which you exist in this world okay like this is essentially what the 3,000 year old version of Moses or more than that Moses his tablets were that they were the God was the burning bush perfect perfect so can I ask you a question you've done some hallucinogens oh yeah and you've had some insight yeah and that insight had something to do with treating people yes definitely okay was it true well it definitely has benefitted me true or false I asked me is it true that you have had positive experiences from psychedelic drugs where you have interpreted those experiences and improve your life yes that's true okay so if you now go and you convey that thing to somebody who hasn't had the experience themselves is it well here's the thing about psychedelics as opposed to all the other ideologies is that they're very repeatable you don't have to believe in DMT if you smoke it you're gonna experience it whether you believe in it or not right and actually I think this is I mean I am a cautious fan I say cautious because I don't think I'm not a fan of the idea that these substances should be used recreationally I think that's a mistake I think I think it's fine to have a great time but that these things are so powerful that one should be deliberate about it and you know don't do it with a TV the only thing that I like about doing it recreationally is it's going to get more people to do it and that if you think it's recreational and then you do it there's going to be a certain percentage of those people that go what was that that's not what I thought it was I thought it was going in there to have a good time and I just communicated with God yep air quotes god yeah air quotes well but air quotes God is marvelous because air quotes God is the real deal yeah right in other words it's not a dude on a cloud right it's something it is a metaphor for something lodged very deep in the mind where you can't find it directly and this is a hack that many cultures have used to access that layer and it's all very familiar to us and when you talk to people that have studied DMT in particular one of the reasons why I think it's so familiar to us when you when you have this experience one of the first things that happens is you feel like you've been there before and they believe that this is because during REM sleep your brain produces DMT yeah you know it's very difficult to monitor but they have been able to through the Cottonwood Research Foundation which all started from the work of dr. Rick Strassman out of the University of New Mexico who wrote a book called DMT the spirit molecule which was one of the very first times where the DEA allowed them to do clinical studies on people with intravenous dimethyltryptamine which is like serious so instead of like this 10 to 15 minute trip you're gone for a long time half hour plus and deep deep experiences that a lot of these people mirrored they they all they they had like super similar experiences but through the Cottonwood research foundation they found that live rats are producing DMT in their pineal gland this has been proven now which was really just speculation it was there was anecdotal evidence but now they know that rats produced this so they don't know exactly when people do it because they would have to do the same thing they do there rats you'd have to open your brain up until they develop some sort of sophisticated detection methods it's just speculation as to when the brains producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug but it's there I know it's producing it we know it's produced in the liver it's produced in the lungs it's endogenous to the human system and we don't know why yeah well I'm pretty sure I have a good insight into why okay but for the moment let's pursue the issue of what the implications are yeah I'll hold on to wild cross my fingers yeah cross your fingers on that one the story you've just told is perfectly plausible whether it's 100% accurate or not and we don't know right but the idea that your mind contains mechanisms that go into some sort of psychedelic state without your conscious mind being able to tap into it so your conscious mind walks around during the day not realizing that you're tripping at some other moments for some purpose it's all very interesting you're not tripping in your sleeping mind for no reason at all you're doing it for productive reasons logically speaking it has to be the case that if you're burning energy and going through the costly exercise of thinking even in the psychedelic way that it's happening for a reason right and that means that we have carried this with us from an ancestral state into the modern state and we now have molecules that we can trigger it when we want to that gives you access to a style of thinking that you're telling me has altered your understanding of your relationship to other people and that it metaphorically lines up with what you often hear delivered in religious terms right abstractly yes right and so when you say Catholicism is a cult I don't agree because Catholicism historically must have been delivering messages that caused people to correct their thinking in ways that made them collaborate more effectively that made them better able to find the opportunities in their environment I'm not advocating that we should sign up for belief systems that are at odds with our modern environment but one thing we can say I believe for sure is that religions that have stood the test of time did so because their value to the people who believed in them was so great that those that disbelieved were out competed now so we get into trouble in the modern circumstance because we can look at many of the teachings of any of these ancient religions and we can compare them to what we learn scientifically and detect that there's something not right can I stop you there sure um Scientology is that a cult too early to tell okay but let's stop well the guy who created it well we do but we are huh so let me drag you back a so by the way I'm very uncomfortable Scientology and what it does but the problem is as Scientology itself points out if you looked at the inception of something like the Catholic Church you might be equally troubled sure um which is why I think they're both cults well but let's be careful about that okay what do you think a cult is what do you think it called it well I think a cult is the predatory version it is tapping into people's natural tendency to believe in what I call metaphorical truths and it is using it very often to extract resources from them I see a church well no not like a figure the Catholic Church is so long-standing and the population that has I guess what I would say is if a population succeeds by believing in these things then cult is not the correct I think you and I have different terms we're using different definitions of the word cult on but let me let me okay take there's a very interesting comparison so Joseph Smith who started the Mormon Church had a competitor right he had a competitor at the time as a book called the kingdom of Mathias right about his competitor at the time and to me the two looked equally plausible the story that they were selling now Mattias never had more than 30 followers and his religion died out and Joseph and Joseph Smith won and in the Mormon Church is obviously a real thing but these sets of beliefs are advanced by somebody whether those somebodies are cynical when they do it or whether they are earnest I think many of these the ones that we have that have lasted for long periods of time have been advanced by somebody who was in one way or another conscious or not DMT or not tapped into something that when delivered to other people actually constituted a kind of insight as opposed to being a con man right okay and so so the origins of the Catholic Church most likely came from some desire for order and a scaffolding of how to behave and to give people rule and structure for how to get through this life with the most amount of positivity in love and by disciplining them and having these grave punishments being held over the head burning in the fires the pits of hell if they decide to have sex with another man or we're two different types of cloth or you know whatever the other silly things that were in the Old Testament by doing this what they've essentially tried to do is offer people structure no it's it's not really structure it is a an analogue for truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them mmm so let's let's deal with the church on the one hand and Moses on the other okay Moses is obviously important in in Jewish history if Moses ate some DMT from the acacia bush they think it was smoke oh he smells why the whole thing the burning okay does let's say he smoked it let's say he was super savvy and farsighted and you know obviously he didn't know anything about molecules right I suppose that he had some ancient model of something and he there must have been something in that plant that caused crazy things to happen let's suppose he didn't believe that he had contacted God where the God had contacted him but he woke up from the thing and was like wait a minute I know what these people are doing wrong I'm gonna write it down and tell them came from God right is Judaism now a cult I think there are all cults I think all ideologies are cults I just don't I don't know I I don't think there is any one person who wrote first of all when you're dealing with Christianity you're dealing with translations right or Judaism your you're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore right and you're also dealing with an oral tradition of who knows how many years before was ever bothered to be written down but right but written down by people and then people decide what stays in and what doesn't they changed the rules like the priests used to be able to marry priests in the Catholic Church they the Pope wives sure now that they've ran armies I mean that this is clearly something that human beings have a hand in manipulating and changing and they do it for the benefit of the structure itself well they're not doing it for the benefit of the human beings that are a part of it they're doing it for the benefit of the structure itself oh that I don't agree what's in what case like the money and the the amount of I'm not I'm not saying you don't have corruption in all of these programs you do but I am saying that there is a it mean this is exactly parallel to what we were talking about before there is the predatory version which I would call a cult right and there is the earnest version which I would not call a cult now I'm very uncomfortable with any of these things governing policy in the present because none of them have a literal relationship with reality that allows them to deal with the fact that we've got all these new problems for which there are no there's no religious wisdom maybe there's a problem in the word cult maybe maybe we should just say a structure created by human beings which is basically all structures all structures all models of behavior where you have to adhere to certain things but the problem with religion and even with a lot of cults is these supposed grave consequences for deviating right well so all right let's let's pick up Catholicism because it's easy because so much of the structure is visible to us yeah okay I would argue that Catholicism is gonna be true of all of Christianity it's gonna be true of Judaism but Catholicism is it is easy to see how it would facilitate collaboration that effectively it would recreate in some sense the insight that you're talking about from DMT and that it would instantiate it in the population in a useful way that would facilitate collaboration and disrupt processes that cause infighting mmm thinking before it might be a structure it's the scaffolding for human behavior and ethics right but imagine I mean we can see it in Catholicism sure where it is so every week you have to go and confess to you're doing wrong to the dude in the box okay that's how they used to spy on you I mean that's what that was for well but why are they spying on you I mean knows they want to make sure that they don't get overthrown well I don't I think I think you're too cynical really yeah because what do you think they're doing well so first of all I'm a biologist okay how are these priests who don't marry passing on their genes they're not how they are Oh what are they doing they're sneaky no their facility of the lineage that they are in charge of so the point is they don't pass on their genes directly they're passing on their genes indirectly through the population their interests are synonymous with the population that they are they are preaching to and so you tell the dude in the box that you've been doing wrong imagine it's adultery okay oh god I'm if I die before next week and I haven't confessed my adult you go to hell I'm gonna go to hell that dad has a very unpleasant place I'm told that doesn't get to have something to tell him so now the person I've been committing adultery with is thinking oh well I was gonna keep this a secret but now the priest is gonna know that I've been committing adultery he's gonna hear from the other person and so I better confess too so now the priest has a sense of like oh there's an adultery problem right in the in the congregation and the priest is you know flipping through the book and thinking ho this week what should we talk about and so you know the priest then gets up at the pulpit and you know turn your book to Psalm whatever and starts going on about adultery and the people in the congregation who are engaged in adultery are thinking oh this is God talking to me directly God knows what I've been up to and he's not happy and that's why were reading this Psalm I better cut it the out hmm right so my point is the dude in the box who's taken a vow of poverty he's living in the church he does well when the town does well he he's not having babies of his own so he can't really get ahead by himself he gets ahead genetically speaking when the town does well and he's in a position to bought what's going wrong in the town and he doesn't have a dog in that fight because he's not involved in business he's not involved in mating and dating you know it's all relatively recent when it comes to the Catholic Church in the last couple hundred yes and I would argue if you look back at any of these traditions any of the ones that worked will successfully have addressed the question of how you prevent corruption from emerging well apparently with sexual corruption these guys were rock stars like the priests were essentially the the guys who had the direct line to God and just like professors have been known to do not you but you know some have sex with their students you know and because they're students like look at them like oh my god I can't believe the professor sitting down here with my work and you mean it's like that's a very minor connection in comparison to the connection to God anybody who's gonna ever anybody who's gonna have power is in danger of abusing assur I would say it's interesting that in the Catholic Church and in other traditions where marriage and making money are impossible that these appear to be evolved what's the word it's like error correction or protection from from a virus so an outbreak of corruption in the church is a bad thing from the point of view of the well being of the congregation and something that says well if you're a priest and you're spending money in town people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to have money and if you're you know hanging around with cute girls people are gonna look at you funny because you're not supposed to be having sex so this limits their ability to to get away with stuff I'm not saying it's zero obviously it's not but the idea that there will be protections in in each tradition for this that religions that don't successfully protect against abuses of power will succumb in competition to religions that do it effectively and so you're absolutely correct that all of the changes in religious texts that people believe in that's all human beings making decisions about right what to keep and what to throw out and I'm not arguing anything else what I am arguing is those that been insightful about what to keep from the point of view of the particular problems faced by the population that they are in will have a competitive advantage because they will function more cohesively than a population of atheists who doesn't have somebody looking out to prevent outbreaks of competition inside the delineator outbreaks of infighting so if you were looking at it in an objective way like say if you were an alien from another planet that didn't understand the language and you're just observing the structure you would cease error-correction the structure would say oh they realized there's an issue here with power and so they error corrected by making these priests be celibate and then they figured out a way to keep them from having money and that'll keep them from being invested in you know Inc okay yeah I see what you're saying and I think it's very misleading to people who analyze things the way you and I would because there's so much hocus-pocus associated with these structures that you know it's like constantly putting a finger in the in the eye of an analytical person of course I mean just the way they dress right I mean just the wearing the wizard costume and holding the staff and sitting on the golden throne and in all of it I mean all the pageantry to it it's all preposterous I mean I agree looking at as a modern person it looks preposterous to me on the other hand there is no way I'm telling you I mean most of my colleagues I'm sure would disagree with this but I hope to to show them to be wrong on this front the there is no way that the huge amount of effort and resource that is invested in these structures was an error cannot have been an evolutionary error because if it was the huge investment that populations put into these structures is an opportunity for some population that behaves in exactly the same way except it doesn't make that error to win right but when you get power and then you have the momentum of that power overcoming the the population and then you have positions where the the the behavior patterns are extremely restrictive and you have to behave inside these behavior patterns or there's grave consequences I mean you could conceivably run that for a thousand years without any error correction and that's what you've got with Islam right you've got a very ancient form of religion that Michael Shermer wrote a piece about it that's pretty interesting where he was talking about how it's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment mm-hmm and he makes these comparisons to like the corrections that have been had with other religions as time has gone on that haven't happened there and you could equate it to resource management you could create it to the part of the world in which they live you could equate there's a lot of different ways you could try to figure out why this happened but the reality is that that thing has not changed that structure has not changed well a long time I think you've hit on exactly the the right point Islam's mechanism for preventing outbreaks of Chain parasitism was to to hard-code the thing and this is a tragedy because it what it means is that where Islam needs to update it doesn't have the mechanism for doing it so what also has a built-in way to keep people aboard oh yeah he's become an apostate that you're allowed you can kill them right in kill apostates because there's no other religion that we have right now that operates like that has draconian imagines if Scientology did that right well I mean Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving well but how is that not a cult since it was created by a science fiction writer literally out of nowhere I'm gonna be horrified if I said it wasn't the cult to tell right so how's that possible okay so there could be some benefits in the future if Scientology continues to evolve and self-correct it could get to the point where it's a behavior pattern that could be complementary and perhaps even beneficial to people I do not believe that this is where it is headed but if a thousand years from now it had flourished and the population that believed these things successfully growing you'd have to say well there's something in that set of beliefs that's working for these rats so anyway I I'm not arguing that it isn't occult it has lots of hallmarks that make me think I'm troubled by well including much like Mormonism you know the guy who made it but this and unlike Mormonism which was in 1820 we have video we see Elrond hovers bad teeth and his captain's outfit on with the medals that he gave himself you're like hey what is this right oh right oh you get a planet when you die or something like that it sounds like a cult to me on the other hand you know I mean we've got us the Mormons get a planet when your dice are used Scientologists don't get a planet no no the Mormons do and it was in one of the Osmond Brothers albums they all went to these planets like in the album I forget what the album is it's a hilarious album but if you open it up it's all planets and the album the name of the album is this concept that you get a planet when you die something that seems didn't read to me because Lana verse is so big we can each afford to get as the plan that's it see that that is some Joseph Smith by the way it's a wonderful book if you if you read the the actual origins of Mormonism people to listen and go wait a minute what do they believe wow do they believe some wacky stuff but he had a golden or a seer stone rather that allowed him to read the golden tablets the seer stone was a special magic rock that allowed him to read these golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus I was at the inside of the album with all the planets so I believe he was actually illiterate yeah and that was a conman he murdered put a sheet over his head and dictated what he was supposedly reading to somebody else that's my understanding of it but it was a charismatic person but many people who've created cults he was I think what they did right Mormons are some of the nicest people I've ever met they have an amazing sense of community they're super nice and I've always said that if I was going to join a cult I think I joined the Mormons but where they as the regulations came in they started restricting the market they started the regulator's came in and stopped these people from having nine wives and then they're not gonna be so nice anymore the reason why they were so nice is because they have these crazy relationships they were having orgies every night well nine people live in the house of them they're allowed to have sex but there's a problem with your they because for everybody who had nine wives there were eight dudes who had not those guys got to get their together and start their own cult I guess we're you know well maybe they're gay I don't know well what about the women - right well how about a woman who has ten husbands you know this is for her that doesn't happen yeah it should right now it'd be possible no now see there's a very good biological reason it doesn't make any sense but no polyandrous on me he went

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 3,782,379

Rating: 4.6091452 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of, Bret Weinstein, Cult, Religion, Christianity, Islam, Scientology

Id: dqYdVrlbrHk

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Hypersapien]

At the head of every cult is one person who knows that the whole thing is a load of bullshit.

With a religion, that person is long dead.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Divinar]

The number of believers.

[u/[deleted]]

Tax exemption.

[u/igloohavoc]

Religions don’t pay taxes

[u/allshesgotcapn]

I was a student of Bret Weinstein’s at the evergreen state college in 2015

[u/hmrapp]

Think of an existential belief to be put inside a RNG by society. With some luck and good convincing that idea can be spit out and spread vast across generations. That’s religion.