Good evening and welcome Everybody to tonight's program at the Commonwealth Club. My name is Steven Sam I'm the editor of Santa Clara magazine, and I'm pleased to be your moderator tonight Joining us today is reza aslan round writer commentator religious scholar and author of both the New York Times best seller zealot the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and His new book God a human history just out in paperback He's a recipient of the prestigious James Joyce award and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside God a human history tracks the history and development of the three primary monotheistic religions today Judaism Christianity and Islam The premise of the book is that these three religions all conceived of God in human centric terms and explores the moral political social and even psychological implications of this conception We're grateful to have him here with us tonight to discuss such a nuanced and timeless topic Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Reza Aslan to the Commonwealth club So so Reza This is a wide-ranging book intellectually. I mean, let's let's start out with talking about that You've studied religion at Santa Clara at Harvard Divinity School at UC Santa Barbara But as you note in the book in passing, you've had your own journey through different faith traditions I'm wondering if we could start out with talking about that which I think is fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I I grew up in Iran and Was sort of culturally Muslim the way so many people are culturally religious. It was a part of my identity More than it was a set of beliefs and practices my father was a pretty Exuberant atheist. I should say. He you know, he had he was a Marxist in the Communists and You know never trusted anything anyone wearing a turban had to say about any topic he I like to say that my dad was is the kind of atheist who always had a Pocketful of Prophet Muhammad jokes that he would pull out at inappropriate times like that kind of atheist, you know my mother grew up Mostly she was mostly raised by her grandmother So she you know She had a little bit more of a traditional upbringing but she herself wasn't all that Religious when we left Iran in 1979 after the Revolution and came to the United States I think my father saw that as an opportunity to you know at the very least stop having to pretend and to kind of wipe our Household clean of religion so I didn't really grow up with much Of a religious education or a religious experience though I was always extraordinarily fascinated by religion and I think as you and I had discussed before I think part of it had to do with my experience of revolutionary Iran being able to see firsthand the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad I think that experience never left me in it and it created this lifelong interest in religion and spirituality though as I say, I never had an opportunity to Really do much about it to pursue it much as most people who who know me know when I was in high school, I went to an evangelical youth camp and and found Jesus and And that was also a profound experience for me It was a you know to hear that Gospel story for the first time was transformative and I spent the next Few years preaching that gospel To everyone whether they wanted to hear it or not. Frankly and then when I went to college, that's when I first began to learn about the historical Jesus as opposed to the the the Jesus of Christianity that Jesus that I had heard about it at church and and you know, all I can say is that that Jesus became more real to me and so although I Abandoned Christianity as a religion. I became even more fervent in my interest and and my pursuit of Who the historical Jesus actually was which ultimately led to to zel it and then? and You'll you'll appreciate this because you would know what Santa Clara is like But it but the Jesuit priests there Encouraged me knowing that I was still kind of searching for some kind of spiritual connection The Jesuits there encouraged me to look back to the to the religion of my forefathers And to study Islam again and and then I began to study particularly Sufi Islam and Realize that this was kind of this was stuff that I already believed that I that there was kind of suddenly a language for it And so yeah. Yeah Catholic priests converted me to Islam. That's that's what I mean. That's what I'm trying to say. It's which again makes perfect sense if you know Santa Clara and And then you know ever since then I think for me Making a commitment to study the religions of the world has created a Depth to my faith which I think is people don't expect I think for a lot of people they think well if you study the religions of the world then Obviously it becomes very difficult to take any one of them all that seriously Certainly, it becomes very difficult to take any of their truth claims all that same anthropological, right? Exactly and you see them you you see them for what they are, which is different languages for expressing similar sentiments but I always go back to something that the Buddha said which was that if you want to strike water, you don't dig six one foot wells you dig one six foot well and I want to strike water. And so I chose the well of Islam But of course what the Buddha was? Really saying was that your well might be yours and unique but the water that you're drawing from is the water that everybody is drawing from and that's kind of been sort of the the the principle Motivation upon you know, which I base my spirituality So you kind of touched on this a little bit, but maybe you talked a little bit about the the difference between religion and faith Thank you That's my favorite thing to talk about actually Because I think you know particularly in the United States we confuse them as one in the same I think just the way that we even talk about religion You know and some I believe in Christianity or I believe in the Quran as though these are things to believe in rather than things that point the way toward Belief faith is not religion faith is ineffable. It's individualistic, it's Fundamentally an emotion. I think that's the best way to think about faith it doesn't necessarily require a Rational underpinning to it. It is it is about the unique experiences that we have as human beings It's about the way that we define ourselves and in our place in an indeterminate world like any emotion love joy, it's it's nearly impossible to to locate and to Even express with words Religion is how we express it with words Religion is little more than a language made up of symbols and metaphors that allow a person of faith to express to themselves and to other like-minded people this Ineffable experience It's a way to express what is fundamentally inexpressible the problem arises when? people begin to confuse their religion for their faith, and I think that's when you start to get the kinds of irreconcilable Absolute isms that have in so many ways defined, you know the conflicts of religions in the modern world one of the things you do get into quite and quite deeply in the book is actually the relationship between language and how we conceive of God right how human beings came to Conceive conceive of God. Can you talk some about that? I'm kind of good in in ancient Sumeria for example, right how people began to think of God. Yes, so writing begins in ancient Sumeria, you know about 5000 years ago or so and before that time, of course, you know we do that there are distinct languages that allow communities to express their faith And there are certainly countless myths and stories that are being spread, you know from culture to culture But it isn't until we begin to write those stories down That this what I call this kind of cognitive impulse to humanize the divine becomes fixed it becomes solidified and you can understand why because Once we begin to write stories about the divine once the divine becomes a character In a narrative in a performance we naturally begin to Impose upon the divine motivations right human motivations which from human emotions and human reactions to certain Situations we start to give the divine a distinct personality We make the divine a kind of protagonist in a story and in doing so sort of fix this notion that whatever God is God acts and thinks and feels The way that we do God likes the things that we like and doesn't like the things that we don't like that Fundamentally what God is is nothing more than a divine reflection of ourselves And the act of writing the invention of writing Not only solidifies that but more importantly it accelerates the spread of that idea through cultures around the world And I mean that's very different and I kind of jumped ahead and in history right and that you trace in your book but it's very different from Literally what the first picture is that's recognized like this is the first picture of trying to depict the divine. Yeah Can you write yeah the oldest yeah Yes, yes. Yes you're talking about a Particular image that was discovered in the Volk caves in the southern Pyrenees Mountains in in France, of course we have You know artistic expressions In caves that go back Tens of thousands of years and in fact, what's really fascinating is that we keep finding older and older representations By the time I when I wrote this book, the oldest representation was about forty three forty four thousand years ago And we've already found older ones in the eighteen months since this book was published we now know for a fact that Homo sapiens were not the only species of human to create what we now call cave paintings cave drawings that Neanderthals also created fairly sophisticated cave paintings cave drawings and while there is still an enormous amount of debate about what exactly these drawings mean and that debate runs the gambit from they were creating the first Temples and in these underground caverns to this is nothing more than just Neanderthal graffiti You know where you've there's arguments for both But I do obviously think that the argument Is a bit more weightier on the notion that there is clearly some kind of spiritual significance to these cave paintings and we can talk about why I believe that later on I suppose but what I think is is really fascinating is that When you start to see these kind of anthropomorphic figures arise About 1820 thousand years ago is When you really get to the point where it's quite clear that what you're looking at is supposed to be reflective of some other reality that that what is being expressed here is not the world that we live in not the world that we belong in but a a world that is Just beyond this world this particular drawing which is Commonly popularly known as the sorcerer. It's kind of a collage of different animals, but with a distinct human face and expression to it is Often understood to be the earliest expression of God that that we have And I'm the radio audience didn't notice that I just put God in quotation marks But I it was God in quotation marks by which I mean a vine figure What we understand by the word God You can't really say that that's something that existed you know 18 20 thousand years ago that understanding of God, but nevertheless this notion of a divine figure a divine being who is Substantially substantively, I should say different than then we human beings That first expression of it is is quite remarkable. There's an image of it in the book that just it takes your breath away so one of the one of the points you make in the book kind of a connection and when some with some religions and Particulars you mentioned kind of a belief in an awareness of the be something beyond right the ritual of burial right the Undertaking that why yeah, it's funny because people ask this question more often than any other question, which is well How do we know how do we know that our prehistoric? ancestors Believed in things like the afterlife or ideas like the soul There's a lot of material evidence that's available to us. But the most obvious and Unmistakable evidence is burials We have burials of Homo sapiens that go back at least a hundred thousand years We have burials of Neanderthals that go back even further than that. We have burials of cro-magnon that go back nearly half a million years all of which express Clear All of which show clear expressions that what ever They believed about the human condition. They were convinced that this wasn't the end That there was something else to life that that life didn't end with the the destruction of the body that there was a Vital essence if you will about us, we'll just use the term soul just so that we all know what we're talking about But a vital essence that that continued on in another life This belief belief in a soul predates our species it's a belief that has arisen in every culture the world has ever known in every part of the world throughout all of human history and so as As such it's created this evolutionary puzzle we have to ask ourselves why if this is something that has existed before we existed if it is something that Evolved alongside us then there must be a reason for it. There must be to put it in Darwinian Turn some kind of adaptive advantage to this belief and We've been for the last 200 years trying to figure out what that adaptive advantage could be and just to cut to the chase There is none there is no adaptive advantage To faith people have come up with various Answers to this question. Well, you know perhaps what it does is create a Sense of social cohesion in the community maybe Accept that there is nothing inherently cohesive about the religious impulse Certainly kinship is a far more cohesive and leur element Yeah I mean that's that's how our prehistoric ancestors organised themselves not according to a common acceptance of symbols and metaphors, but blood Others have said well it you know it alleviates anxiety people who say that don't know anything about religion because it just Does not alleviate anxiety it actually creates anxiety Others have said well it you know, it answers on unanswerable questions perhaps though There is no reason to think that that's an adaptive advantage That that allows for the survival of our species on the contrary There there really and truly is No, we really have no idea. That's the answer. We just don't know. We don't know why this universal impulse Exists the best answer that we've come up with Is the answer that most cognitive theorists give which is that it's an accident That it's just some accidental byproduct of some other evolutionary adaptive advantage that grew some other cognitive process that arose deep in our in our evolution and as an echo of Necessary thing this universal belief in the soul arose maybe There's no way it's a pretty good answer. It's unprovable Maybe it's because we have souls that seems like a pretty good answer to and also equally unprovable So one of the other really interesting points in the in the book is connection between place between agriculture and Religion and how those things are connected and and I think the way you handle it inverts the way that most people have assumed What the relationship is between? Agriculture and human beings settling down and growing crops and and the practice of religion, right? This is I mean, I think to this day you probably still taught this At school, which is that agriculture arose because human beings stopped wandering and Settled down and once they settled down It became necessary to begin to domesticate animals and to grow crops Instead of what we were doing for tens of thousands of years before that, which was hunting and gathering We now know for a fact that that's not true We have ample evidence now that That human that human beings Began the process of experimenting with agriculture Specifically to address needs and concerns that arose around the creation of What can only be described as kind of centers of religious experience temples if you want to use that word? And and I trace it's a very complicated argument that I that I trace in in the book but what it really comes down to is this notion of what it means to try to Control and manipulate really nature to our advantage and the cognitive shift that's required in in doing that this idea that We can actually be the gods of of nature that were that we can you know manipulate the earth in in ways that only The divine can and and that cognitive shift like writing was one of these sort of moments in which this conception of The divine the way that we conceive of the Divine in these human terms Be game became more and more solidified to the place where as you rightly said in the introduction, you know, we're we are living in a world in which the vast majority of People whether they believe in God or not when forced to talk about God or describe God Begin to unconsciously describe themselves, but in divine terms So if we're talking about a connection with place Obviously one of the big stories in the news today has been about Notre Dame Cathedral And I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about Place and kind of and them and the role that it plays in kind of bringing bringing faith together And one of the members of the audience here wants to know, you know What governments can or should be doing more to protect religious treasures? Yeah, I mean, this is such a heartbreaking story in fact we were just At Notre Dame this this summer with our children and and I was as I was watching the the images of the the spire You know coming down and and the devastation of the fire I was flipping through photographs of my sons standing in front of Notre DOM, and I really it's really hard to to imagine you know, what what Paris would be like without that icon and If you've been following the news what you know is that it turns out that the damage isn't as bad as we thought it was that that the interior of Of the church is not nearly as damaged and and the the priceless artifacts that are in there seem at least for now To be safe. So thank God for that what I do find fascinating about the conversation however around this fire is the way in which the French and then in more general terms Europeans have been talking about Notre Dame and and Obviously lamenting it as a symbol of France But also lamenting its religious and spiritual significance. A lot of the conversation is about You know what? It's going to be like this Easter, you know not being able to to have Easter services there and moving forward. I Have been to no trade on doing Sunday services. There are like 30 people there So, what does that say, you know France not the most religious country in in the world. What does that say this kind of? national mourning for a building that not only has obvious cultural and nationalistic significance obviously, but Talking about it in these deeply religious and spiritual terms In a country that is anything but deeply religious and spiritual and it brings up. I think probably the most Fundamental aspect about religion something that we've already talked about a little bit So far, which is that? religion is first and foremost a matter of Identity that religion isn't about beliefs and practices of course beliefs and practices are important But that when someone says I am Muslim I am Christian. I am Jewish I am Hindu They're not making a faith statement More often than not they're making an identity statement and as an identity statement it is of course wrapped up and all the other Factors the multiplicity of factors that make up your identity your nationality your ethnicity your race your gender your sexual orientation your political views your Socioeconomic status all of those things are wrapped up in the words. I am Christian and I think that in moments like this when What is such an obvious symbol? For a particular kind of Christian identity becomes threatened you suddenly see that I that that that particular Thread of the French identity begin to assert itself, right it begins to rise to the surface This is not unusual It happens all the time here in the United States. I'm a perfect example of this is what happened after the attacks of 9/11 You remember when some people did a bit a sing remember that? anyway After the attacks of 9/11 For a great many people who were from the Middle East who had a Muslim background like myself for instance Suddenly that Aspect of our identity, which was tied up with so many other aspects of our of our identity Rose to the surface it became empowered it became very important to identify yourself as Muslim Even though you may have identified yourself as Persian before or Arab or Turkish before or South Asian before suddenly that that part of your identity Became much more important and I think that that give and take is Very important as we as we talk about from what is happening with religion in the United States What's happening with religious trends in the world? I think it's very common to just simply say that religion is going away that religion is dying but or that You know eventually science will do away with religion, but none of that Truly understands what religion is that? It is first and foremost a matter of identity Well, and if that's true It seems like it's become bound up and what is in increasingly identity politics is that it's hard to avoid It's very difficult to avoid and of course because religion is The language that still has the the most currency with the masses It is it is An aspect of identity that is very easily manipulated by political and religious leaders I think you know things like race and ethnic ness, excuse me, ethnicity and and gender and sexual orientation those are all very important factors of our identity, but religion tends to Subsume a lot of those Especially when it is poked and prodded when when it is made to feel threatened in some way suddenly rises to the surface and often with catastrophic results and and I should probably explain for those who don't know when when you said some some people did a thing right a reference to Representative Ilhan Omar and sort of that's the in the news cycle the last last couple days criticism criticism over that I'm wondering because you've mentioned your Your your children a couple of times, you know for those of us when we have kids It's that can sometimes be an important time to figure something out with religion. Like what are we going to do? What are we going to teach our kids? I'm curious how you've approached that if you wouldn't mind talking about that. Well, we we have a multi-faith family my wife Jessica Jackley that some of you know is a creator co-creator of kiva.org of here in San Francisco She's a Christian she comes from a very devout evangelical Christian family I'm obviously Muslim. We have a wonderful interfaith Marriage one that is predicated on a lot of the things that we were talking about Just a moment ago the the idea that we share the same values. We share the same viewpoint of the world We share the same faith, but we express that faith in two different languages. Now. I happen to be fluent in her language and it took her a while to become fluent in mine and It works wonderfully and then we had kids and so that the question was well, what do we want to do with our children? And to just torture them for a little more we decided that we want our kids to be multilingual We want them to be a depth at The religious landscape of the world. We want them to have to be literate in in Religion and we do we work very hard on that. We read them a lot of books we sometimes do the this thing that we just kind of jokingly call home church where we On Sundays we get together and we have a particular lesson drawn from some Religion, we visit a lot of different houses of worship this summer. We did something a little bit insane. We did an 80-day Round-the-world journey where I know it's don't don't three kids We went around the world in 80 days immersing ourselves in different traditions different cultures And then you know our hope is that they will lead meaningful Spiritual lives because I think that that's important. I truly believe that the that the human condition is such that a Sort of Sort of striving for transcendence I think that's the best way that I can put it that that the striving for transcendence that that the desire to experience a Reality, that is just beyond You know this material world that that that is the the the full expression of the human condition I want that for my kids. I want them to have that but how they have it is irrelevant to me What language they use to express? It is irrelevant to me. I have one of my sons two years ago after a particularly raucous Rosh Hashanah decided that he's going to be Jewish from now on and And he's been Jewish for two years. It's been its ease. We thought it was just a Passing fad, but he's very serious about it. We were in Israel this summer and he was walking around going my people These are my people I was like, let's just keep that quiet like don't I have another son who has become extremely interested in Hinduism for him that that came as a result of a we we have a Children's version of the Ramayana that we read sometimes and it's just sparked his imagination which makes sense It's about a blue God with a magic bow and arrow who kills demons I Mean it's more than that, but that's what he gets out of it and and so, you know, I think again for us it's about Giving them the tools to be able to express Their their spirituality in whatever terms they they want But you know not dictating that to them. So here's some of the audience wants to know. How do you deal with the Frequent assumption that people might have you know, you're a smart thinking person so you must be an atheist like I Don't know a lot of smart atheists actually. No, I'm just kidding You know, I think I think what that comes from is this notion that Religion or let me put it more specifically as faith is the product of an irrational mind That if you believe that something exists beyond the material realm then you're an idiot that if you want to actually Experience that thing then you're a fool and I think that that Perception which is so often the kind of rhetoric of the so-called new atheists Is itself a kind of gsella tree is itself a kind of fundamentalism, right? the the the the the the defining Characteristic of fundamentalism is soul access to truth and a refusal to accept the possibility That you are wrong that's fundamentalism and I think the way that I described faith earlier as a kind of emotion is to me a much more Rational way of thinking about what is as we've already discussed fundamentally a part of the human condition So You know, I I've I've kind of given up on these conversations about does God exist or not I'm really not interested in that that debate to be honest with you Well, what I'm far more interested in is what do you even mean when you say the word God? What does that word mean to you? It's so weird to me that this word Which of any other word of the English language is probably the most variable word is also the word that we all assume We all mean the same thing by when we use it I have a number of conversations with atheists who? You know say how can you believe in this sort of? You know old man in the sky who lives in the cloud and and judges your actions and hears your prayer I'm saying I don't believe in that that's like that's not my god. So I I will say one thing that I do find very interesting and there's been very interesting studies about this that When you ask an atheist to describe God that atheist does What the profound believer does which is as I said before they'd begin to describe themselves And so again to me, it's not a it's not a function of belief. It's a function of our cognitive processes We're just kind of Hardwired to think this way to to divin eyes our selves Whether we actually believe in the existence of a divine or not So another person here in the audience wants to know what what misconception about the origins of religion frustrates you the most Well look to put it in the simplest way, I think the misconception is that Or people who actually put it this way people who try to Explain the origins of religions why people believe, you know in such things as supernatural beings, etc Tend to do so by thinking of religion in in functionalist terms in other words, what they do is they say well what does religion do and then They say well then that's why religion exists. I'll give you a perfect example of this So people will say well what what is religion do well religion provides? moral guidance Maybe first of all, but okay religion provides moral guidance. So therefore Allah Freud religion arose because of the need for some kind of divine lawgiver some kind of absolute morality that would keep us from killing each other And and stealing each other's food Okay the concept of a divine lawgiver is barely five thousand years old the notion that religion has anything to do with morality is between four and five thousand years old the gods of Egypt the gods of Greece the gods of Mesopotamia were amoral beings they were a moral beings morality had nothing to do with it the very idea that Your actions on earth have a cosmic consequence that your morality your moral choices on earth Will lead to some kind of heavenly reward or some kind of divine punishment That belief is three Thousand years old what we call faith is Hundreds of thousands of years old. So again to talk about the Function of religion as though that explains the origin of religion is to me a silly exercise this is picking up that thread a little bit but one of the interesting things you touch on on the book is the The first couple of attempts at monotheism. They didn't go too. Well. Yeah No, it's I was talking about sort of the hundreds of thousands of years in which there can be such a thing as the religious impulse of those hundreds of thousands of years the idea of one God Is as I was just mentioning a little bit earlier barely three thousand years old and even then It didn't work the the ancient mind was incapable of Conceiving of the notion that there could be one God who was responsible for both good and evil Darkness and light the earth and the sky the Sun and the moon why why it didn't make any sense? It makes much more sense to have a different God for each one of these needs these want each one of these phenomena and For you know as you were saying For for many many thousands of years every time the idea of one God arose It was rejected often violently. So Until it became the foundation of one particular sect of Israelites Who sort of came upon the notion of what we would now call monotheism Which by the way is is a little bit different than what is often referred to as manometry, right? Manohla tree which is a very common religious belief throughout the history of religions is the belief that There is one high God who is higher than all the other gods your God? But there are other gods. Obviously there are other gods. It's just we don't worship those other gods When you read the Hebrew Scriptures what you see is not Monotheism you see Mont manola tree right there is no God before me That's not there is no God. It means I'm the highest God you shall worship no other gods but me doesn't mean there are no other gods, of course, there are other It just means you won't worship them. You will worship me That's the foundation of the Hebrew Scriptures. It's really not until This script historical event called the Babylonian exile In which the Israelites were destroyed by the Babylonians and scattered throughout Mesopotamia It's 586 BC in which the that idea that Know our God isn't the High God Our God is the only God there are no other gods, but our gods first took root And as historians, I think point out correctly it took root because of an existential crisis it took root because to deny the existence of That soul God would be to simply deny the existence of Israel and the Israelite community altogether and whatever doctrinal gymnastics were required to just believe in a single God who was responsible for all good and all evil was worth it if The alternative was no longer existing as a tribe Its you know, it's interesting hearing you describe that it brings to mind When our son was very young and was reading we reading some Bible stories to him Again, and again bad things kept happening to the priests of Baal and the Bible stories, right? Right and and he would keep asking So what did the priests of Baal do why why they keep you know, the heavy stuff keeps coming down down on them yeah, I mean it's it's really funny because I think Most those of us who do read the Hebrew Scriptures do so in English and in English The different gods that the Israelites worshipped because they worshipped different gods are all translated into English as either God or Lord God but if you read him in Hebrew, you would see that these are two Different names for two different gods the god of Moses is called Yahweh The God of Abraham is called L or Elohim. The God of Abraham is a Canaanite deity one of the most important deities in the history of religions the high God of Canaan, which makes sense since Abraham lived most of his life in the land of Canaan so clearly he worshipped the Canaanite God Yahweh that's the best that we can tell is a Midianite deity the Midianites were a Semitic tribe in the sinai part of you know under through the the umbrella of egypt which again makes sense because moses who was very likely in egyptian meets this deity in the sinai and when many many many many years later the the writers of these Scriptures begin to kind of write this material down. They have to figure out a way to reconcile these two different gods and so the first thing as most of you know this incredible story where moses comes across god in the form of a burning bush and that God Reveals himself to be Yahweh. Then. He immediately says I am Yahweh. I am the God of your forefathers Abraham and Isaac and Joseph You know the and that Statement is fundamentally false because Abraham and Isaac and Joseph and these guys they had they didn't know who Yahweh was they'd never heard of a deity named Yahweh that that the the Deity named Yahweh didn't exist in their world, I think you know these kinds of things are indicative of how Problematic it was For our minds to wrap around the idea That there there can be only one God that there is only one God there's just there's too many complication in that notion So with that notion of one God's I'm here in the in the audience wonders do you think that notion of one God one supreme god is fundamentally conflicting with with science or outside the scope of Well, I don't think it's conflicting with science, I mean I suppose I could just punt and say it's outside the scope of science but I do think that this this conversation that we have so often about You know, the conflict between religion and science is to me. I think we're just simply wrongheaded. I I think that fundamentally religion and science are two different modes of knowing there are two different ways of Experiencing and explaining the human condition and they asked two fundamentally different questions, right? I mean science is interested chiefly in how and Religion is interested primarily and why and I don't understand why these two things need necessarily to be in conflict with each other Yes, it is. Certainly true that the the the the principle of science is to disprove hypotheses and that's certainly not the case with religion that religion is so quite often about absolutes and and the idea of Disproving absolutes does not really occur to religious people But that's a issue of methodology more than anything else In fact, you know for those who often say that Eventually, you know will this science will do away with the religion that science, you know will discover some scientific Truth that will make everyone suddenly stop believing in religion People who say that know nothing about religion or science for that matter. I mean first of all, That's not the Sciences role secondly secondly religion Has always been in a constant state of evolution. It is constantly absorbing new information new realities when we discovered that The earth is not the center of the universe as the Hebrew Scriptures claim Christianity didn't go away It just simply absorbed that information and moved on if tomorrow aliens land in Union Square and you know they come you come out and take me to your leader will say no you don't want to see our leader, but but No, you definitely want to avoid our leader That's not gonna make religion go away religion will just simply absorb that new information Adapt and move on there is no scientific data That's going to take away people's Fundamental belief in transcendence that they're there their desire to commune with The divine that's not going to go away. That's part of the human condition. I have the feeling that right We were talking about different stories in the news, right? We you know for the first time we saw a picture of a black hole in recent days, right? I think many people probably reacted to that with Wonder and awe and and kind of a sense of this fantastic universe That we're a part of yeah. In fact, I would say that the flip side to that. Is that the more theoretical? Science becomes the more that we begun we begin to sort of Unwrap the the mysteries of the universe and begin to really bear down on the essence of reality At least I've noticed the more scientists begin to talk like religious mystics You know that the words that they use sound very familiar to me because I've heard you know Christian and Muslim mystics use these terms before Far from science and religion continuing to diverge I think what we are going to see the more we learn about the nature of reality is Science and religion actually converging I you know It's it's not science fiction to say that there may come a day in which those two things are the same thing science and religion I Did not expect an applause line virus, you know, we always get an interesting And one of the audience members here wants to know it actually like you to expand some more on why why burial is an indication of a belief in the afterlife or a goal rather than a ritual of Biological return to the land very good. Very good. Yes well There's a couple of reasons part of it has to do with that adaptive advantage issue that we were talking about Fundamentally again as we were saying the religious impulse is not an adaptive advantage if anything. It's a disadvantage Particularly in terms of the time and resources necessary to continue these rituals Time and resources that should be spent on survival Burial is a perfect example of that. There is literally no reason to bury a body it takes an enormous amount of resources and time and The you know, it makes much more sense frankly to just simply deposit a body You know on a hill somewhere and and let the the beasts of the wild have its way with it But not only do we bury these bodies not only do we take an enormous amount of time and energy to bury these bodies But we bury them in unmistakeably ceremonial ways for instance We bury them with the the trinkets and tools that were dear to them in life We bury them with tools and materials that they may need in the afterlife we bury them with their weapons with with you know their their necklaces their their you know shells things like that things that that the idea Be would be that they may need these things, you know in in the afterlife We return to the graves over and over and over again we conduct Rituals at these grave sites. This is kind of the first expression of what is often referred to as man ism or or So derogatorily speaking ancestor worship The idea that the Dead become one with the spirit world and that in appealing to the spirit of the Dead That dead will intercede between you and and the divine. It'll make it rain. It'll it'll help your crops It'll help your your child who is sick, etc That kind of ceremonial burial as I said before is Absolutely unquestionably evident when it comes to Homo sapiens, it is pretty clearly evident when it comes to Neanderthal and it is debatable when it comes to earlier species of humans, I mean obviously the further back we get the harder it is to be certain that what you are seeing is the result of deliberate action or just you know the movement of this you know The bones and and the sort of everything else that that that's going on through, you know hundreds of thousands of years of time but but yes burial has become sort of the the the most obvious way that we have to label something Ritual or ceremony? So there's there's a moment in the book in the chapter God is one Where you say warfare in the ancient Near East was considered less a battle of armies than a contest between gods and that sounds a bit like the premise of a book that you Have wrote a bit earlier called how to win a cosmic war. Yeah So, how are we doing with that? God not good not good at all. No, it's so this is true. So in the ancient world At this kind of what I was referring to earlier when I was talking about manometry right in the ancient world a tribe and its deity were one and the same they were they were a single entity and That had some consequences one of those consequences is that Warfare between tribes was a battle not between the tribes themselves But between their deities and if one tribe defeated another tribe that meant that that tribes deity Defeated killed the other deity And so that deity ceased to exist and now you worship our deity fast-forward to 586 BC and the Babylonian exile and now you understand what I was talking about because when the Babylonians whose high God was Marduk Defeated the Israelites who at this point they're hi Dad was a an amalgamation of Yahweh and L that scholars sometimes referred to as Yahweh L Which is a very awkward way of putting it, but that gives you an idea that Meant that Yahweh L was dead that Yahweh L did not exist anymore and that Marduk was now the God of Israel and The historical evidence shows a great many Hebrews went along with that they began to worship Marduk. They learned Babylonian they began to adopt Babylonian names and Babylonian customs But there was this core group In the heart of the Babylonian Empire That refused to accept that reality because to accept that reality meant that they as a people no longer existed and so they came up with a hitherto Radical and and never before Conceived of idea. I know this sounds strange because it's so it seems so obvious to us now But no one had ever thought this way before successfully no one had ever successfully thought this way before and You can see this in in the Book of Isaiah or what is often referred to as second Isaiah Their book of Isaiah is actually three three books combined into one Where suddenly this new idea arises which is wait, maybe Marduk didn't defeat Yahweh maybe this isn't all You know just sort of the end of everything. Maybe there is no Marduk. Maybe there is only Yahweh and What's happened to us is because we displeased Yahweh. And that this is Yahweh's way of punishing us for Believing that there is a mardukan the first place No one thought that before no one had said that before certainly no one had written that before and As I say it had profound implications for what would then become known as Judaism and then ultimately Christianity and Islam which arose out of Judaism So this year we're also marking the 40th anniversary of the revolution in Iran And this is this fall right the the taking of American hostages I'm wondering if you know if this year has a Particular resonance for you or kind of things that it's helpful for for people are important to keep in mind Yeah, I mean look, I remember exactly 40 years ago. I remember The experience of the hostage crisis both in Iran and then back here in in the United States It wasn't the easiest time in the world to be Iranian or Muslim in America as opposed to now when it's fantastic and You know, I mean I remember going to school and seeing, you know my teachers wear those little yellow ribbons in solidarity with the hostages and my Fellow students wearing shirts that say said bomb Iran, and I remember that my the bank wouldn't cash my father's checks because He had an Iranian passport or identification and I remember, you know anti-iran demonstrations on my Street if you know anything about me, you know that I spent like a good part of the 1980s pretending to be Mexican Because I thought that that would help Did not And now here we are 40 years Removed and we have an administration that has made going with war with Iran a priority We have a national security adviser who has written numerous a peds Saying that we should bomb Iran not to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, just just bomb it We have an administration that has now declared the IRGC the Revolutionary Guard to be a terror organization Which is literally the first step to war with Iran And I think we have an administration that knows that the only way to survive Re-election is to be in a war. And so I think you know watching this 40th anniversary Unfold itself in the midst of what I think is probably the The most tense this relationship between the u.s. And Iran has been in a very very long time is disconcerting to say the least So this mayor night may not be related to that an audience member wants to know what are the personalities of each god reveal about the cultures that Created them. It's a really good question well, so what we what we do is we differentiate our own attributes our own personalities the good and the bad and then we divinized each one of those attributes and create a god for each one of those attributes part of the reason why monotheism was such a hard sell is This idea that all of our attributes could exist in a single god that that was a very difficult thing for the ancient mind to wrap its head around right that this idea that that one God would have all of our positive and all of our negative qualities makes less sense that there would be a god for each one of those qualities What is really fascinating to me? however, when I began to dive really deeply - this phenomenon was the way in which our conception of the Divine n more specifically our conception of the afterlife the R of the heavens, you know the the Otherworld I Try not to use this word heaven because that word is loaded and it's a word that again only Sort of the the idea of heaven has only existed for about three thousand years When a Iranian prophet named Zarathustra was the first to come up with this idea Let me just stop there for a moment because I think it is very important The idea that there is a good place that in the afterlife Where good people go and a bad place in the afterlife where bad people go? Was Kate was the brainchild of a single individual named Zarathustra who around 1100 BC? Was the first to come up with it what we now call heaven and hell is three thousand years old barely three thousand years old and in that before that Of course before that notion the afterlife was just a continuation of this life your morality had absolutely, nothing to do with Your experience of the afterlife if you were a warrior in this life You're a warrior in the next life. If you're a slave in this life. You're a slave in the next life it just keeps going but for eternity and so as a result of that every time are Sort of the political situation on earth changes the afterlife the heavens Change in order to match it the word for this is political morphism, which is a word that's ridiculous And you don't need to know but it's just a word that I'd like to throw around and You see this a lot with you know? The the way in which human civilizations start off in these very sort of small enclaves tribal, right? There are many many gods This is my god. That's your god. That's fine. I worship this one I worship that one when you when you see early Sumerian writings Describing the heavenly realm it looks exactly the same way. There are many many gods. No one's in charge of anybody else it's kind of like a sort of a democracy of gods they all get together and they convene these meetings where they eat and drink and talk about what's going on in their Lives and then they get down to business And they talk about how what they should do about these pesky humans and no know God's Word supersedes any other God's words but then when those little tribes become city-states and then those city-states start to form together to become these empires all of a sudden the Concept of the heavenly realm changes as well. So you see later Sumerian writings where now suddenly there's a king of gods Marduk again Right Marduk is in charge of all the other gods and sure the other gods can talk and give their advice But Marduk is in charge if your Babylonian if you're a Syrian, it's uh sure Uh sure is the high God. He's the king of the of the gods Etc. Depending on who you are, you know, so that's what we do we Transform the heavens into a kind of cosmic version of the world that we live in and as that world Changes as the politics of our world changes as the very bureaucracy of our world changes How we conceive of heaven changes to match? so we're we're about at that time we have time for just one one more question, and I'm wondering This year marks the the 50th anniversary of a work that you've described as divinely inspired Right, you've said I believe that the Quran is divinely inspired. But I also believe Abbey Road is divinely inspired True so any tracks in particular and and more seriously when you say that What do you mean about creates creation and creativity and divine inspiration? Let me talk generally and then I want to I want to talk about every road In so far as that B road for me. Yeah, the golden slumbers medley right the last Basically side B beat the B side of Abbey Road Which was the Beatles great farewell to their to their fans to me that listening to that is is akin to a religious experience but more generally, I think we think that those those of us who do believe in a God and who do believe in the Possibility of being able to commune with that God think that God, you know speaks once and to one particular person That's a pretty I think limiting view of what the divine actually is I mean my concept of God is of a being that is in constant communication with Creation that is a fundamental part of creation that indeed cannot be separated from creation and so You know when people ask me my view of Scripture and whether I believe that it's divinely inspired or not Yeah, my answer is yes, I of course, I believe it's divinely inspired, but I don't think it's exclusively Divinely inspired. I don't think it's uniquely divinely inspired I think it's you know the result of a particular Inspiration at the particular divine inspiration in a particular time in a particular place for a particular audience And that's how we should think of Scripture All right. Well our thanks to Reza Aslan for joining us this evening. We would also like Yes Also like to thank our audience here and our audiences on the air and we would like to remind our audiences who are here the copies of his book God a Human history are available for purchase and he'll be happy to sign copies in just a few minutes I'm Stephen Sam and now this meeting of the Commonwealth Club the place where you're in the know is adjourned
