Reza Aslan - God: A Human History

[Music] welcome everybody welcome if you would please make your way to your seats we are ready to begin so hello everybody and welcome to Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills - our second Behrendt conversation of the year I am rabbi Sara Besson and we are delighted to be partnering with chevaliers books in order to be bringing dr reza aslan to speak about his newest book God a human history but before we bring out dr. s lon I want to give you a little bit of context about what the Behrendt conversation series is here at Temple Emanuel we started this program last year in response to how our Civic fabric has been tearing to the idea that it has become harder and harder for us to have conversations with people when we disagree especially on issues that are important to us so we were very lucky to have the Baron come the parent family come forward and to help us formulate this conversation series Lari parent his wife Stephanie hammer and his sister Judy Behrens all of whom have been significant part and thought partners in helping us shape this event we are very lucky to have them and to have events like these so you might be wondering what it is that a conversation about god has to do with difficult conversations and what I'll say is is this that I think that Jews are good at a lot of things but one of them is not necessarily our ability to talk about God right we don't often talk about what we do believe we don't talk about what we don't believe and I would even go as far as to say that a lot of us are probably pretty happy that our prayers are in Hebrew so that we don't have to think too hard about what it is that we're actually saying about God when we pray and I think it's because the whole idea of God is deeply personal what we believe and what we don't and it feels vulnerable when we actually have conversations about those deeply held beliefs but I want us to try so before we bring out dr. s line I want us to take 30 seconds to think of a moment in our own lives in your life when you have had a kind of spiritual or transformative experience you may or may not use the language of God right you may reject that that has anything to do with God that that's not the language that speaks to you in that sign but I want you to think of a moment of purpose or connectedness that you've experienced in your life because I'm going to ask you to share that moment with somebody who's sitting next to you so take 30 seconds to think in silence and when you're ready make eye contact with somebody sitting next to you maybe somebody you know or somebody you don't and take 30 seconds for each of you to share that experience if you haven't switched for the other person to speak switch now and go ahead and finish your thought with this sentence or the next sentence and focus your attention back up here because I would imagine that maybe that felt like a little bit of a risk right maybe that felt a little uncomfortable and perhaps even a little difficult but we are incredibly lucky that over the next hour and a half we are going to be guided through this difficult conversation by an extraordinary person dr. Reza Aslan dr. Aslan is a internationally renowned writer scholar producer commentator and his number one bestseller book last year called zealot the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth caused a lot of conversation in the public sphere about religion it was translated in over a dozen languages around the world he is a recipient of the prestigious James Joyce award he serves as a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside and holds a PhD in the sociology of religion from UC Santa Barbara personally I am a fan of the work that he has done through boom gen Studios which is a production company focused largely on content and topics about the Middle East one of my favorite documentaries was produced by boom 10 studios it's called the square if you saw it on Netflix about the early stages of the Arab Spring needless to say reza aslan is one of the most prolific and important voices on religion in the public sphere in our time today so please join me in welcoming dr. Reza Aslan thank you thank you everyone thank you thank you thank you thank you so we are we are so delighted to have you here this joy it is to be here you know I Drive by this temple all the time and it's one of the few temples in LA that I have never actually been inside of well we are delighted to welcome you yeah and you and I are gonna talk for about 45 minutes and then for those of you who are interested in asking dr. s on a question you've got cards on your chairs and in pencils so throughout the program we'll have people coming through to pick up those cards and filter them up to me also you can call me Reza I feel like dr. Aslan the problem is is that I'm like the useless kind of doctor you know like the doctor can't that can't help anyone and so like every time someone says dr. house and I get nervous that what if something goes wrong yes and people ask me for help and I'm no help that's fair it's it's probably appropriate to start on a first name basis because I'm gonna be asking you some very personal okay Shen's I'm ready um the first of which is that you start off this book discussing your own personal religious journey in your life and it's a really interesting and non-linear journey and i think it gives some good context about why you wrote the book so would you mind sharing just with this intimate audience sure a little bit about your religious experience yeah so I was born in Iran my family was you know culturally Muslim the way so many people are culturally religious with the exception of my father my father was always just like devout atheist you know like one of those atheists who always had a pocketful of Prophet Mohammed jokes that he would pull out at inappropriate times like that kind of atheist you know and so when the revolution happened I think my father basically thought maybe we should get out for a little while lay low until things settle down obviously they did not settle down that was 40 years ago and when we came to the United States this was of course you know 1979 1980 it was at the height of the Iran hostage crisis so it was not exactly the best time to be either Iranian or Muslim in America you know as opposed to now when it's fantastic everything's great now and and you know I think that that kind of pushed us to just sort of strip our lives clean of religion at all you know I mean certainly of Islam you know my mom would occasionally pray and you know sometimes we would do some of the the cultures and the and the holidays but but for the most part you know back then being Muslim was like being from Mars in fact I've admitted on numerous occasions that I spent like a good part of the 1980s pretending to be Mexican which tells you how little I understood America yeah it didn't help at all and but I think if there was something about my childhood experience of revolutionary Iran that left this lasting impression on me and particularly about the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad and despite the fact that I grew up in a you know fairly non-religious household I was always fascinated by religion and by spirituality and mythologies and and and I you know was looking for a way to kind of express that when I was 15 I went with some friends to what turned out to be an evangelical youth camp and I knew that it was a youth camp and I knew that it was Christian but I didn't really know what any of that meant to be honest with you and and when I I mean that was essentially where I first heard the gossip story and this um you know this incredible story about how the God of heaven and earth became a baby and and he died for our sins and that anybody who believes in Him will also never die and and will live forever and I'd never heard anything like that before in my life it was a transformative moment for me and I immediately converted to this very conservative evangelical brand of Christianity and then spent the next I don't know four five six years preaching that gospel to everyone your family included yeah whether they wanted to hear it or not frankly it was like and my family yeah and I I converted my mother and who still you know a devout faithful Christian and and then I went to college and I decided that I was gonna study religion for a living I what I've always wanted to be a writer I mean I knew I wanted to be a writer I don't I don't remember ever wanting to be anything else like there was never an other option for me but I'm also an immigrant and when you're an immigrant you can't tell your parents that you're gonna be a writer like that doesn't you know it doesn't compute in fact I remember this one conversation I had with my mom and only one conversation in which I said mom I am you know I think what I want to do is I want to be a writer and her response was who's stopping you from writing you'd go and be a doctor and then you write nobody stopping you and so I thought okay we'll all be in I'll be an academic who also writes that seems I need to get the title of doctor yeah exactly so could you call myself a doctor my mom milks that yeah and and look I had I had the experience that that pretty much everybody has when they go to college right when you suddenly realize that everything you thought you knew was wrong right like every assumption you ever had pretty much everything you had learned up to that moment was was wrong and this just I mean it blew my mind and and I abandoned Christianity and but I still was looking for some way of of you know continuing to study religion but also having a spiritual life and and it was actually the Jesuits at my university I went to Santa Clara University and if you know the Jesuits they're troublemakers all right they are troublemakers it was the Jesuits who basically said well why don't you I mean you know you grew up Muslim why don't you explore that and I knew nothing I mean like nothing about Islam at all and so I began to study Islam and I especially began to really delve into the way in which Islam defines God which is the opposite way of the way that Christianity defines gods very much the way Judaism defines God you know Christianity essentially says that if you want to know what God is imagine the most perfect human being that's God and that just stopped working for me after a while and what I was looking for was a different metaphor and the metaphor that I found particularly in the Sufi tradition of Islam was this concept of divine unity this notion that look if there is a God and if that God is one and if that God is indivisible then everything is God then there can't be any separation between creator and creation and I thought yes that works for me and so I you know I often say that I had an emotional conversion to Christianity and then I had like an intellectual conversion to Islam but I do want to say something I think that's very important and I feel like I should just get it out at the beginning cuz it always comes up anyway you know when you study the religions of the world it becomes very difficult to take any one of those religions all that seriously certainly it becomes very difficult to take the truth claims of any one of those religions that that seriously because it doesn't take long to realize that these are essentially different languages for the same emotion for the same sentiment and what I'm interested in is the emotion what I'm interested in is the sentiment certainly you know I have my own ways of expressing that sentiment but how one expresses it to me is irrelevant so you walk this really interesting line of being both a believer and of being a scholar of religions and you know I'll I'll confess my own bias when I pick up a book titled God I'm expecting one of two things right I'm expecting either a religious apologists right who is telling me why and how I should believe in God or I'm expecting a new atheist who's telling me that it's all right it's all baloney and it's absolutely ridiculous and here's why you should reject God right you have this really interesting quote at the beginning that hold on it says I have no interest and trying to prove the existence or non-existence of God faith is a choice and anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you yeah I love that that's about right but but what was it like for you of walking this line as a believer and as a scholar and did you feel yourself getting pulled yeah and by the way I should mention them is actually unusual in the field of religious studies most people go into the academic field of religion those who aren't going there in order to become ministers of sub one sort or another those who are going in there just for the academic discipline most people who enter the field of religious studies do so from a religious background you know it's rare that somebody who had no religious instruction at all decides I'm gonna spend my life studying the religions of the world that doesn't happen that often you know I think for those of us who do often we come at it from a particular perspective that's how we enter it and then when you start studying religion either religions or any particular religion from a historical and literary and cultural and sociological perspective an anthropological perspective rather than from a theological perspective which is usually how you were introduced to that religion as a set of doctrines is a set of beliefs often what happens is that your personal faith starts to crumble and it crumbles because so often and this is true by the way most people of who identify with a religion regardless of what religion we're talking about most people their faith is in that religion not in what the religion points them to and so when cracks or fissures start to appear particularly in the truth claims of that religion the whole edifice crumbles like I often think to myself had I converted to you know a more sort of liberal or progressive Christianity I probably would still be a Christian today but I converted to a brand of Christianity that is predicated on the inerrancy and literalness of the Bible like that's the foundation of you know fundamentalist evangelical Christianity that the Bible is literally true and it is absolutely without errors it takes about five minutes to realize that the Bible is full of errors as it should be when you're considering you know a text that was compiled by dozens of different hands over hundreds of years and those errors don't in any way diminish the divine value of the text not at all and it's ludicrous to think that the truth claims of the scripture are predicated on whether its facts are correct or not but that's the that's the religion that I was told that I was fed and so when I discovered that that was incorrect the whole thing crumbled because my faith wasn't in God my faith was in just this religion so there are almost a hundred plus people in this room who are walking away with a copy of this book to eat that that you have spent so much time writing bedtime reading without taking away the rationale for us reading it can you walk us through a little bit of this trajectory of the evolution of the human experience of God and and particularly this dichotomy that you point out between the dehumanized notion of God and humanized notion of God yeah so okay the basic argument of the book is that you can look at the entirety of human spirituality going all the way back deep deep into our evolutionary past to the very origins of the religious experience up to today you can look at that entire process as one long intimately connected ever evolving and remarkably cohesive attempt to make sense of the divine by humanizing the divine by implanting in the divine human personalities human motivations human emotions human weaknesses and strengths virtues and vices by essentially transforming God into a human until of course in the person of Jesus Christ he becomes literally a human being and what's fascinating about that is that it's kind of a function of our brains that believe it or not we don't have much choice in the matter it's a it's a cognitive impulse we do it without actually thinking about it and by the way it doesn't matter whether you believe in God or not that's the really cool part about it it a theists do this as much as believers do and in fact when you tell an atheist okay well fine you don't believe in God now describe what you mean by God you know it's interesting rabbi Aaron the senior rabbi here at the Congregation he always says to people I don't believe in the God that you don't believe in Yeah right and honestly that's such an important because this question of does God exist or do you believe in God or not we all assume that we mean the same thing by God it's so funny how we don't actually bother to think about the fact that this word this word that is probably the most variable word in all language is one that we just simply assume well obviously you mean the same thing that I mean by God but right so even even with atheists they do this thing and that we can talk about the reasons why we do it we can certainly have a conversation about you know what it is in the in the human mind that compels us to do that and why and we can also talk I think a you know at length about what to do about it I'd love to have those conversations but I do want to emphasize one thing which is this is not a good thing it's not actually a positive thing to humanize God because while it's true what it does do when you construct a God who looks and feels and acts and thinks just like you do it allows you to have a relationship to actually commune with that divine that you have constructed as essentially a divine version of yourself but what it also does is that it infuses that divine with your biases and your bigotries and your prejudices basically what you do is you create a God who becomes nothing more than a mirror reflecting back to you your own ideas the things that you love and the things that you hate and that is extraordinarily dangerous I really loves that little promo video that you did right that that piece where you say God doesn't hate gay people you hate gay people you love them yeah exactly and it's it's um it's what what I think is fascinating about it is that look religion has done a lot of good in the world and it's done a lot of bad in the world and I think that there's you know this this dichotomy this sort of conversation that we have all the time that you know people say no religion is a good thing no religion is a bad thing first of all religion is both those things and the reason it's both those things is because they are nothing more than a reflection of everything that's good about or bad about us we construct a God who's a divine version of ourselves and then we construct a religion based on that God that we constructed which is just a construction of ourselves and then we wonder why our religious institutions are so flawed well they're so flawed because they are human inventions and I think you know what I'd like to do is is at the at the very least start getting people to be aware of that cognitive impulse and to figure out whether that's something that they want to change or not this is where I think that you're laying your use of the metaphor language is really effective right like if you think about religion as a tool as a language then language can be used for good right language can be used for evil but its language is a necessity it's like it's an expression of what it is to be you're not gonna get rid of language I know it's we have to grapple with religion as though it were language and and try to pull it towards the good rather than towards the bad that's perfectly said yeah I mean I I preach this constantly don't confuse faith with religion they are not the same thing faiths as we've been talking about all this time is you know it's ineffable its mysterious its individual it's it's not a rational thing it's an experiential thing it's an emotion I think that's the best way for me to describe what faith is it's an emotion like any other emotion and our emotions are not rational things our emotions are based on our experiences our connections with each other who we are how we define ourselves you know emotions are mysterious things but we need a way to express what is fundamentally an inexpressible experience we need a language a set of symbols a set of metaphors that we can communicate those feelings to ourselves and to like-minded people and there are throughout the world a set of ready-made languages already and you can if you so choose you don't have to but if you so choose find one of those languages that resonates with you and use it to communicate this experience to draw connections you know with other people who have the same emotion so let's keep on this idea of kind of emotionality around religion your last book zealots about the life of Jesus of Nazareth mm-hmm it ruffled a few feathers you think some in the Christian community right had the critique that what is a Muslim doing writing a book about Jesus of course ignoring the fact that Jesus has a role to play in Islam as well some took issue with how you interpreted the sources and the evidence from the Arab but and I think just kind of contextualizing that reaction it really is about this sensitivity that religion has and and when people start poking at it it it can get very upsetting yeah so with this book have you happened upon any sensitivities that have been surprising or or have there been points of interest that people have really emotionally connected to yeah thank you for that question well so you know I we're about four years removed from zealot and so I feel like I've had enough time to kind of process the response and really you know I'm this is what I do I'm an academic so I want to like to analyze it and create you know data that I can that I can sift through and make certain conclusions about and one of those conclusions is that the the negative response to the book didn't actually come from Christians not even conservative Christians actually part of the reason why it was such a big bestseller was because many Christians bought it they discussed it in their churches and and you know had these you know interesting conversations about it the negative reaction came from one particular group of Christians and that was right-wing Christians and you know who in many ways have the same theology as mainstream Christians but who have a different politics and I think this is important to understand not just because of the context about what happened with the book but I think it helps us understand exactly what's going on right now in American Christianity because the the issue that people seem to have was about Jesus's politics you know that they had a very difficult time recognizing Jesus as you know a poor Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee whose entire message was predicated not on equality on the contrary but on the reversal of the social order Jesus didn't say the rich in the poor shall come together and hold hands he said the rich in the poor will switch places the first shall be last and the last shall be first that those who are wealthy now will become poor that that those who are fed will become hungry that those who rejoice will weep and this was an extraordinarily radical revolutionary idea in Jesus's time and it still is today the problem is is that Jesus has been you know defined by I think most modern particularly American Christians who would rather think of Jesus as you know a middle class business owner who really hated taxes right like that's that's Jesus you know that's literally Bill O'Reilly Jesus book by the way I'm not making that up that's literally his book and and I think that that to me was really fascinating to see that and of course now four years later we're seeing precisely the political division within American Christianity exert itself in the you know the Trump phenomenon and now with Roy Moore in Alabama being openly you know defended by Christians who are you know like shrugging off pedophilia yeah you know and it's extraordinary but but I got a glimpse of that four years ago yeah and then I I think for you know a large part of why people respond the way that tend to respond to my books is not because I'm courting controversy I promise you I'm not courting controversy I'm not avoiding controversy they're not courting controversy it's for what for the exact reason that you said that I think we have to understand that religion regardless of what religion you're talking about regardless where in the world you are talking about religion is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices that's not to say that beliefs and practices don't matter of course they do but when someone says I'm a Jew I'm a Muslim I'm a Christian I'm a Hindu I'm a Buddhist they are making first and foremost an identity statement it's a statement about who they are how they understand their place in the world how they define their relationship with other people it's not just these are the things I do and these are the things that I believe and so when someone feels as though some aspect of their religion is being criticized even from a historical perspective without you know any negative intention then what they're really reacting to is the fact that they feel that their very identity is suddenly under siege so it's not just hey maybe you know Jesus didn't really want you to drive a really nice car instead of you know arguing about the text or theology what I think some people feel is though is that I am actually attacking who they are as human beings but it comes with the territory and strangely I kind of mention this backstage I haven't really had that with this yet now it's only been two weeks it's plenty of time okay I don't know how this is gonna go so you can go deteriorate really quickly but so far I think it's because you know when I when I start telling people with the books about usually what happens is people start to go yeah like that yeah I guess I do do that and I guess that is a thing and so right away I think it takes people you know that it takes them off guard a little bit so and seeing how this is gonna go you do all have no cards now you can write your questions on and we'll have folks who are starting to go around and gather some of those no cards so please do take a moment we've only got a few more minutes where Reza and I are going to be in conversation just ourselves before we loop you in so you know the chunk in the middle you've described a little bit about this humanized versus dehumanized part of perspective on God then towards the end you bring back in your own faith experience right and you talk about how you arrived at a pantheistic notion of God through Sufism right through Sufi tradition within Islam so I'm gonna want you to explain a little bit about what pantheism is sure and you rightfully point out that there are threads of this that are in all other religious images yeah Judaism including Judaism that's right so I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you to speak a little bit about the Kabbalistic tradition okay seems soon to tie it into yours sure well so yes so at the end of the book I essentially make you know a kind of full throated argument for a more pantheistic view of the of God a God that is dehumanized to God that is not a divine personality who looks and you know acts like we do but a God who is essentially the animating force of the entire universe and and I do talk about how this was I mean the whole first you know like three chapters are all about you know prehistoric conceptions of the divine and I make an argument about how that's actually the original way in which the idea of God was understood as the the the the the force of the universe the creative force of the universe the universe itself and in our modern parlance we have a term for that it's called pantheism it's a new word but it's an old idea pantheism is a greek word that just basically means all is God and God is all it's the belief as I was describing earlier that there can be no division between creator and creation that they are fundamentally the same thing and that what we think of as the universe is nothing more than the Excel phix pression of the divine so first I should say that part of the reason that I make this argument is first and foremost I think it's a it provides a deeper spirituality in mind in my view a deeper more meaningful spiritual connection than thinking of God in these you know personality terms secondly because I think that it's a kind of spirituality that that can lead to greater you know connections between different religions and between different peoples and I think it could lead to actually a better world I mean if you if you see God in every human being if every human being is God then it becomes you know impossible to to denigrate or devalue human beings if if because those human beings are God you can't abuse or exploit nature because nature is God it's a it's I think a recipe for a deeper and more peaceful and more forward-looking spirituality and yes it exists in all religions and it exists in a very strong form obviously in the Kabbalistic formula particularly as it was evolved by the great shock Lauria and the lurianic kabbalah as it's often known why am I telling you this you all know this and the so so the notion of system is that again it starts with this fundamental problem at the heart of monotheism I should mention monotheism is a very new idea right in the hundreds of thousands of years in which we can trace human spirituality the concept that there is only one God is barely three thousand years old bear and by the way I know this is a tangent but I should say it's not that it didn't arise it's not that people didn't actually bring up the possibility there were numerous religious reformers who did propose a monotheistic system it's just that when it was proposed it was rejected sometimes violently so and the reason for that has to do with everything that we've been talking about all this time which is that while we as human beings are perfectly comfortable with contradictory and conflicting attributes within ourselves we are not so comfortable with contradictory and conflicting attitudes in God and so we are much more comfortable having a you know a different God for each one of our attributes right a god of love and a god of war in the god of the sky and the god of the earth and a father deity and a mother deity you know we want all those things spread out when someone says you know all those things exist in a single God the ancient mind doesn't get it why why would one god be both good and evil why with one god be responsible for darkness and light it just it doesn't compute and so one of the many conflicts that arose you know once monotheism started to stick if you will is well hold on a second how then how then do we explain creation because if there was God and God created the world what did he create the world from if not from himself and if he created the world from his self doesn't that violate the nature of God as indivisible and so the only possible response to that is that creation is God that however you define all of this that it is inextricable from from God and Luria's way of explaining this is he he coined a term that essentially means like contraction that's the best right contraction and what he said was you know what God did was that he he contracted his eins off right his infinite light he contracted it and in contracting it made space made conceptual space for creation to arise now just to be clear philosophers have a different word for that view they call it panin theism instead of pantheism it's just a little just to show that the difference there being that you know the idea is that God is is the universe but is also above the universe as opposed to pantheism which just says God is the universe but panin theism is just another form of pantheism it exists in Judaism very profoundly it exists in Christianity it exists in Islam and in the Sufi traditions it exists in Taoism and Buddhism and Hinduism it is it exists in philosophy actually the term pantheism is not just a religious term it's a philosophical term you know the the the great philosopher Spinoza was one of the one of the first to talk about this notion of monism right the idea of all things being irreducible to one thing in philosophy it exists in science you know in the very concept of the preservation of energy and matter the idea that whatever exists now has always existed and will always exist as long as the universe exists that's a that's a scientific fact and even there I mean scientists tend to call it Pam psychism they don't use the word pantheism so they don't say one all is God they say all is psyche meaning all his mind or all this consciousness but those are just words they're just words for the same idea and I think what I what I want to do with this book it's unusual it's not like the other books that I've written because this one is has a very personal been to it like I'm it's the first time that I'm actually saying this is what I believe and it would be cool if other people believed it too but that is that is ultimately what I want to do the British newspaper The Spectator accused me of wanting to start my own religion and said that you know give reza aslan 10 years and he'll be wearing a turban and flying his own private jet and I was like tempting yes that's doesn't sound too bad actually so it a lot of aspects of your career have led you to interview people who identify as religious right I'm I want to know when you have those encounters what are you most curious about and start anything you got a rabbi sitting in front of you is there anything that you you want to ask me you know what what I've noticed in the conversations that I have with religious people is usually twofold one that the the metaphors that they use to express their you know their religion ultimately express what seems to me a very similar faith experience right the questions that they asked the way that they asked them it's just that they use as we've been talking about all along like a different language so it's it's sort of like the equivalent of hearing someone suddenly speak you know French or German and and you need you know you need a translator right you need someone to tell you exactly what is being being said and once that translation starts then it's not just that you're understanding it's that you're connecting right you're actually having a dialogue back and forth and so that's the first thing that I notice and the second thing that I noticed is that they almost always confuse the metaphor for the thing itself you know what I mean where when you point out you know I believe something very similar to that and and this is how I describe it and the response is often no that's not the same thing right it's not the same thing because your metaphor is different than my metaphor and so therefore it's not the same thing you know I I noticed that you know the spiritual conversations that I have that are the most rewarding often are with you know this new sort of category of Americans who refer to themselves as the nons like the non-affiliated this is this you know it's it's basically a way of saying I'm spiritual but not religious but it's the way Jews have been pioneering that for years yeah well interesting interesting Lisa the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life which has been mapping Americans spirituality for decades how to actually come up with this new category only about 10 years ago because of the fact that a lot of people were turning in their questionnaires blank and just so simply refusing to choose you know which which category they were going to even though there is a category on that list that says atheist and another category that says agnostic and they would turn it in and say none of this matches what I am and so they had to come up with this new way of this new category and the category that they chose was titled non-affiliated and that's just kind of become known as non or the nons and in the 2016 Pew study twenty four percent of Americans chose non it's the fastest-growing label and and I think it tells you something about where we are as a nation and partly I believe it has to do with the the marriage of religion and politics in America over the last ten years I don't think it's a coincidence that those two things have risen in tandem with each other but I find that they are the most rewarding to speak to for this for this reason because the metaphors don't get in the way hmm interesting it's my last question before I start to get to some of these audience questions and these are great so far so I'm going to regret in advance that I'm not going to be able to get to all of these I I come at God in a very similar way that you do and one of the struggles that I have in understanding this this deep sense of connectedness and not separating creator from creation and in removing that the emphasis on reward and Punishment is this big looming question of morality right and this concept of God seems to leave morality in the hands of us as very imperfect beings is that you're read to and and if so like how do you grapple with that and and and where does morality fit into this conversation of religion yeah and and I actually address this at the end of the book because I do think it's a it's a large part why the pantheistic conception of God isn't very popular I think partly it has to do with the fact that when you dehumanize God it makes it that much harder to form a kind of personal relationship with them it's much easier to think of God as just some dude you met on the street and so like you know and have that conversation hey you're just like me let's talk let's connect God is not just like you and no offense to any but God's not just like you and and then the second thing is is exactly that well but if if God isn't punishing my misdeeds and rewarding my you know good deeds then why should I even have good deeds or misdeeds now what I find interesting is that oftentimes the people who asked that question tend to be very sort of conservative religious people be they you know devout Christians or you know ultra-orthodox Jews or you know fundamentalist Muslims those are the people who I think most often trip over this notion and honestly more than anything it just depresses me it really depresses me to think that you know your moral behavior towards other people and towards your world is predicated on getting a reward at the end of this thing like you're some kid who gets a lollipop for not crying while getting a haircut you know like how immature and childish are we as spiritual beings that that's what we need at the same time I get it and so part of my argument for pantheism as I was kind of saying a little bit before is that if you remove that aspect of the divine and instead infuse everything with the divine then it still prohibits you you know if you're if you're a you know devout believer it still prohibits you from acting immorally to other people and to the world because doing so is acting immorally toward God so if you're taking this god thing seriously at all instead of thinking of it you know some prize that you get when when it's all over instead think about this as your relationship with God and you know and I get it I get that it's a different way of thinking but you know that's why I think that it is a deeper spirituality the closest experience I've ever had to religious Epiphany was my third year for binax school happening upon that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who gives us this idea that commandment comes through the face of the other and it was just an AHA for yeah because I've never related you know Torah is beautiful and valuable and it's there for me to mine for wisdom but it didn't come with that sense of commanded nosov reward and punishment and these are the things you have to follow but but this idea that commandment comes through the fact that I am forced to face your existence right and you have a claim over me that was something that was just perfectly put so okay I've got a lot of the images so I'm gonna ask you to try to do these as rapid-fire yeah it's what I do you know I yeah do you plan to take this book to speak to read States out of New York City in LA do you suggest we do to tackle this I'm not sure what this is Oh 62% of Americans who don't know a Muslim I think it's actually higher than that but yeah yes I'm traveling the entire country you know I just I just came from Georgia and I'm off to Texas and and yeah and I do I mean look I mean I people ask me all the time about the audience's that I that I talked to and for the most part to be honest with you I don't really think about it partly it's just because you know that's I'm not a details guy and somebody gives me a list and says you're in Alabama tomorrow that's like oh I guess I'm in Alabama tomorrow and then I'm not clever enough to think of something new to say so I'll just say the same thing over and over again and and you know people there are people who react negatively there's no question about that but I think the one thing that inoculates me slightly is that I take faith seriously I don't denigrate people's faith you know I this is the foundation of Who I am you know if I if I actually do believe that religion is just different languages for expressing the similar faith then I'm okay with you know the different languages that that people bombard me with and I'm perfectly fine sort of meeting them where they are it doesn't bother me so that leads us to the next question so why be a believer as a Muslim why not be a more generic spiritual yeah I think that's a very good question and you can be sort of you know generically spiritual I don't think that mmm I think it's a very rare thing again going back to the nons there have been an enormous amount of study done on the nons that people who say that they are of no religious identity but they are spiritual that when they are forced to actually describe their spirituality immediately revert to the comfortable metaphors and symbols usually the ones that they grew up in so you know if you when you want to think about or talk about such a thing as faith you do just kind of immediately revert to the metaphors that you've been taught or the metaphors that you're you grew up and I chose my metaphors and I chose them because you know it goes back to something that the Buddha said that has become kind of a mantra for me the Buddha said that if you want to strike water you don't dig six one foot wells you dig one six foot well and Islam is my six foot well but again the important point there is that the Buddha was making it very clear that no matter what well you are using the water is the same the water you're gonna get - have you had a religious experience involving an altered state of consciousness and if so can you share a few words about it yes I've had a few in my life I had I had a number in my Christian years you know you're particularly in my in my Christianity it's a Christianity that's very very cosmic right it's a it's a you know evangelical Christianity is all about good versus evil light versus darkness and you know you're which side are you on kind of a thing and that there's a spiritual battle that you're just really that you're nothing more than pawns on this earth that the things that we do have cosmic consequences and that mindset I think naturally foments you know certain metaphysical transcendental experiences that are very real and but I think as I've gotten older the majority of my metaphysical experiences come through my family you know I once said that my family is my church and I and I mean that like my first of all I mean that quite literally my family literally gets together on Sunday it's just my family and we have like our own little thing that we call home church but it also is the source of my my spiritual connection it's where I it's where I feel closest to to God whatever however that that is being defined so I've got a couple questions here that I'm going to butcher in order to combine but they're they're pointing to this idea of monotheism and patriarchy alright or hierarchy and those structures being particularly linked so I'm just gonna throw that out that connection to you for you to comment on yeah easy let me take you on a very very brief like twenty thirty thousand year history of wolf of humans for them it's gonna be very very brief okay when we were hunter-gatherers primarily our gods were the gods of the sky because what was important at that point was geography landscape and so the way that we understood our connection with the deities was through those aspects of nature that helped in the hunt and most of those deities were male deities with some exception the moon is often seen as a female deity not always but it's often seen as a female deity but the Sun is most definitely a male deity the sky is a male deity thunder lightning these are male deities when we transitioned to agriculture interestingly enough our focus went from the sky to the earth now the earth as opposed to the sky is associated with female deities obviously right it gives us life you know we plant seeds in it it sprouts life we live off of it you know that the fertility of women became divinized you know in a way but then something very interesting happened which is that with agriculture came the rise of civilizations and with civilization came the creation of organized religion right religion like we was was not stable it was not static it was in constant movement but when we stopped moving and we settled down and we began to plant fields and builds villages and cities we also built temples a place to house the gods and here's the thing about temples is that the second you build something like that you need someone to administer it right you need someone who's in charge of that thing now and that the the idea of the intermediary between humanity in God almost always fell to men there were exceptions particularly in Mesopotamia when you have like very very powerful goddesses like Anana or as we as we know her Ishtar those kinds of goddesses who were extraordinarily powerful would have women in charge of them but even that was a patriarchal thing because the idea was that well the the the goddess is a woman and so it requires women to take care of her you know but the other gods does are all just male-dominated and so that is the process whereby what we start to see is the creation of organized religion almost immediately becomes a patriarchal thing and that that just extends for the next you know ten twelve thousand years it's it's a sort of an unbroken chain that can really go back to the very first civilizations and the very first temples that we built so do you think that the threading back in of pantheous or pantheism or panentheism from those earliest days will start to shift most feature most definitely because I mean it's not a coincidence that particularly once we start morphing into monotheistic systems the monotheistic God is always conceived of in male terms and so as a result you know I think it the idea is that well then men should be in charge of this thing but if you D gender God if you think of God you know as an it instead of a he or a she then yes absolutely it fosters I think less lesser patriarchal control over religious institutions you said God does not hate people you hate gay people right but we are born into a religion which has ideas that predate us for religious Jews for example even though we may not be gay people we may still want to exclude gay relationships and not because we hate gay people but because it's in Scripture and we believe in the divinity of Scripture how do you reconcile those things I mean I guess what I will say is that I assume that the person who believes in the divinity of Scripture when it comes to issues of homosexuality also believes in the divinity of scripture when it commands us to take our disobedient children to the outskirts of town and stone them to death so if you do that then I accept your interpretation of the divinity of Scripture but until you accept that part - see this is it I mean I'm joking obviously but it's remarkable how selective we are when it comes to what parts of the scripture we choose to read literally and what parts we say well but that's historical context that's just you know that's a cultural thing that's how they did it then we're not gonna stone our children today when they disobey us okay so historical context there but not historical context here you know I mean if you're gonna pick and choose fine pick and choose we all pick and choose everybody picks and chooses but at least admit that you're picking and choosing does God love Kevin Spacey [Laughter] I'm gonna take a hard pass on that question I don't want to go seek if anybody is recording anything I know that whatever I say is not going to come out right I think this one is more personally to you as race a believing Muslim rather than race as a scholar are there muslims spearheading a Reformation okay so I'm gonna be I'm gonna be an academic here and first define terms right just can't say God until we define God can't say Reformation until you define Reformation Reformation is not what you think it is okay I think because we you know live in in Protestant America we have a skewed view of Reformation as Reformation is a universal phenomenon that takes place in all great religious traditions when institutions and individuals begin to fight over who has the authority to define the faith to define the scripture the Jewish Reformation is what we refer to as rabbinical Judaism the the process whereby Authority for the the the meaning and message of the Jewish faith was rested from the temple priests by scholars and individuals rabbis who wanted to interpret the faith on their own now that process was accelerated by the destruction of the temple but that's what that means the Christian Reformation wasn't between Catholic intransigence and Protestant reform and by golly the Protestants won that's not what happened this was an argument between the institution in this case the papacy and individuals over which one of them gets to define the fate and in both of those cases the result of that argument was violence often catastrophic aliso the Christian Reformation resulted in the death of half the population of Germany alone the Islamic Reformation has been going on for more than almost a hundred years now and you're just not paying attention to it I think people look at the violence taking place in large parts of the Muslim world and say you know what they need is a Reformation the violence is the Reformation you're watching it before your very eyes this dramatic global fight over who gets to interpret this thing is it going to be the institutions of Islam the traditional schools of law the traditional ulama who have maintained for the last fourteen hundred years an iron grip over the meaning and message of Islam primarily because they're the only ones who could read the Koran they're the only ones who had access to the Koran or is it going to be individuals who are going to sees for themselves this power to interpret the text as they see fit now as we all know when you say that the interpretation of a sacred text rests in the hands of individuals not the institution you are opening up a can of worms because that means any individual any individual now has the power of an imam or the power of a priest or the power of a rabbi any individual can go to the text and define for themselves what the text means and so you're going to have individualistic interpretations that promote peace and tolerance and pluralism and you're going to have individual interpretations that foster violence and an autocracy and and bigotry and you know there is no Muslim Pope so nobody gets to say who's right and who's wrong and so the result of this is this gigantic clash over who gets to decide I mean I don't want to sound you know heretical here but probably one of the most signal vacant leaders of the Islamic Reformation the man that will probably look at a hundred years from now as playing a pivotal role in the Reformation is Osama bin Laden bin Laden's argument which was so profoundly popular was a new read this in his in his writings all the time stop going to mosque stop going to your mosque stop listening to your Imam don't pay any attention to al-azhar ignore the the Saudi clerics they have nothing for you instead go to the text yourself it examined the text for yourself and you will see that it compels you to act in these certain ways and it was by setting himself up as an alternative source of authority despite the fact that he didn't he has not had a single day of instruction in the Islamic Sciences he's an engineer he has no you know degrees in the Quran he's never studied Islam or Islamic law but that's where his power came from in fact the argument was even more succinct than that the argument was that it doesn't matter what the ulema have to say the very fact that they say it from a position of learning authority negates their position altogether and that's why you know the the leaders of his movement were doctors and engineers and sociologists they weren't Imams they weren't you know scholars or religious leaders that's not who they wanted and again I think if you understand what the argument is and what's at stake then suddenly things become clear stop talking about you know a reformation and stop recognizing the Reformation that you are living through I've got a couple questions here that are framing secularism kind of a foregone conclusion or in one case as a challenge can you speak a little bit more about the nuns and about their relationship to religiosity and what that implies about the future of religion well first let again let's define terms yep so there's a difference between secularism and secularization so we are not a secular country in the United States far far from it we are a secularized country in the United States secularism is an ideology that says religion has no place in the public realm that religion is a private thing and it should not be part of you know the public realm France is a secular country secularization is the process whereby political authority rests in civic leaders and not religious leaders right that's the whole idea of the separation of church and state and the anti Establishment Clause and all about stuff that we do not allow for our religious leaders to have political authority like for instance in Iran so I I make that distinction is I think sometimes people think that secularism is a necessity for modern societies that secularism is a necessity for democracy and that's not true at all I mean you can be a religious country and still be democratic as long as you maintain adherence to the principles of democracy chief among them is the equal rights for all people regardless of their faith regardless of their race or their ethnicity or gender but the idea that the the laws and values of a nation can be predicated on a particular religious morality well that's called America that's that's what we do here so what I would say is I think as the noms start to you know become a greater force in society funny story last week the very first elected federal representative in history came out as an on and it was like a big deal like they acted like he was coming out of the closet or something right he literally a House of Representative congressman who was like um I'm not sure I believe in God and that was like the Washington Post wrote an article about it right like that's that's the kind of country that we are so I think that as as the nons you know become a greater social and political force what you're going to see is less of specific religious influences on society but I don't think that you're gonna suddenly see the kind of secularism that we see in countries like France or in countries like Egypt and yes Egypt is a secular country Egypt is a country in which religious expressions in the political realm are responded to with profound violence I mean if you if you if you're running for president in America and you stand up in front of thousands of people and say as Mike Huckabee famously said when he was running for president that as president I will change the Constitution so that it is in better alignment with the Bible that was his trouble that was his a trump that was his that was his stump speech you know what we say okay well let's vote on whether we agree with that or not if you're a politician in Egypt and you stand up in front of thousands of people and say I want to change the constitution so that it is in better alignment with the Quran you will never be heard from again you will just simply disappear and no one will see you again so yeah Egypt is a secular country what is the best way to make people cognizant of the fact that they humanize God and the dangers of doing so and do you think that our innate desire to humanize God will grow stronger with our advances in science and technology or diminish well great question so the first part I kind of already said which is just simply ask someone to describe God just ask them you know don't say do you believe in God or not just say tell me describe God to me describe describe what you mean by God and and then point out to them that basically everything that they said is just a description of like a really powerful human being like a human being but with superhuman powers and they recognized it themselves and then secondly I think the opposite I actually think and I've written a little bit about this but it's something that I that I firmly believe I think that you know oftentimes in our conversations about religion and science you know we we tend to believe that these are diametrically opposed things that are you know diverging from each other first of all they're not diametrically opposed they're in many ways just sort of two different modes of knowing two different ways of approaching the fundamental questions of reality in existence and they don't necessarily need to be in conflict with each other secondly I think that what you're seeing now is the slow convergence of religion and science in many ways the more science begins to ask these fundamental questions about the nature of reality right not just about the laws of physics but about you know concepts such as proto consciousness and and you know the sort of issues like pan psychism that we were talking about the more scientists start to use language that at least to me sounds like some 16th century mystic you know and the way that they talk about these ideas and so I think probably what what we are going to see is a time in the you know not-too-distant future in which these two things science and religion increasingly begin to use the same kinds of terms the same kinds of language for those of you who think that Oh eventually science science will just continue to make discoveries and with each discovery religion will go away I don't think you really understand religion I mean you know when we discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe it's not like Christianity went away zài the Pope was like oh my bad never mind no Christians just absorb that information and moved on if aliens suddenly show up you know from some distant planet and you know walk out and are you know just like take me to your leader first of all we would say no no we're not you don't want to meet our leader trust us it's a it's just better it's better if it's just like this and then secondly we would just simply absorb that information in our religions and move on scientific discoveries do not diminish religion religion just absorbs those discoveries and keeps going so I think honestly that that's where I would say we're headed is is towards a convergence of these two things I think in the future religion is going to look a lot more like science than we think it will and science is going to look a lot more like religion so in your book you say there's no evidence that Moses ever existed if you never existed when was the concept that the character Moses created and I'm gonna add on to this this question can you just speak a little bit about the nature of Scripture right and and how it incorporates some of these things that don't have archaeological evidence or facts behind them how do those things come into being well so just first a correction so I don't say that there's no evidence that Moses ever existed I mean the problem is is that when you're talking about that far back in history the idea that you could actually pinpoint the exists an individual is impossible there is no evidence that Jesus existed and that's you know almost a thousand years later so I think it's important to understand that we're not talking about individuals we are talking about certain narratives and yes it's true that there has never been any archaeological evidence to show the existence of Israelites in Egypt or the the existence of a massive exodus of Israelites across the Sinai that doesn't mean that you know we won't find something one day but we just have never found any and there's been a lot of looking as you can imagine we've just haven't found any but I think you bring up a much more important point here one that we touched on slightly and that is this idea of Scripture being understood as either truth or fact right we as products of the scientific age have been taught that that which is true is that which can be factually verified and so we want we want that same idea of truth from our scriptures without recognizing that the people who compose these scriptures had a completely different understanding of the concept of truth that for them truth in fact were two totally different things and that the facts of an of a story are far less important than the truth that is conveyed in that story and I think again that we would be better off that we would have a more meaningful spirituality that we would be actually reading the scriptures in the way that it was intended if we also understood that truth in fact are two different things and that if we read our scriptures more interested in truth than we are in fact it was a scriptural original and strata then literalist that's good I'm not gonna steal back your welcome last question the Dalai Lama co-wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that seemed to say his belief system had evolved beyond religion to a belief in a secular ethics or morality is this what you have concluded as well or are you on a pathway to that look if I were to describe my ethics and my morality I think I would describe it in the same way that my ethics and morality are not predicated on what I think God does or does not want me to do to my fellow human beings and to my fellow you know creation my ethics and morality are predicated on this idea that I have certain responsibilities to creation and to my fellow human beings responsibilities that in my case come from the idea that I do see the divine in them but I don't necessarily need to see that in order to understand that there are proper moral and ethic ways of behaving in the world that that lessen suffering that lessen pain that lessen violence and all of that is a good thing in and of itself I do think that you know what's really fascinating about the the Dalai Lama and the way that he has been talking recently and this is perhaps for another time so I won't get too deep about it is that you know he he is preparing the world's Tibetan Buddhists not just those in Tibet but those around the world for essentially the end of that religion and it's an extraordinary thing to watch those of you weren't familiar with what I'm talking about the Dalai Lama has announced that he will not be resurrecting he will not be reincarnating I should say he will not be reincarnating that there will be no Dalai Lama after him and just so we're on the same page here the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of a bodhisattva called avila koteshwara and this Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who thousands of years ago decided that rather than getting off the wheel of rebirth and going into nirvana even though she and the rocket eshwara is a woman even though she has the ability she had that the ability to do so that she would continue to reincarnate over and over and over again until she had finally provided that same Nirvana to all of humanity the politics of the situation has created a situation in which China has said that it will decide who the next Dalai Lama is and it is actually demanded that the Dalai Lama reincarnate it is officially demanded it and the Dalai Lama's response to that has been to say no that that this is it I'm you know I'm essentially gonna go I'm gonna go to to Nirvana and leave you all behind yeah I know it's a like honestly like people like me who like live for this kind of stuff are just like we don't know how to process this you know religions die all the time religions go away yeah but they don't intentionally sunset they don't intentionally die because the the the the divine figure says it's all over everybody go back to your go back to your homes it's all over and this is caused this you know real conflict in the heart of Tibetan Buddhism many many Tibetan Buddhists are rejecting the dalai lama's not just his statement but now are rejecting the dalai lama if it even juicier they're being led by the dalai lama's younger brother which is like so fantastic that it's also a family thing and you know again to me like when I see things like that I mean this is why it's also fascinating right religion isn't just about you know the things that a person believes it has these profound social and political and even global aspects to it and part of the reason why we do need to be religiously literate why why you know I do the kinds of things that I do is because you can't avoid it you can't avoid religion and you need to be aware of it and need to be learning in it because it will help you navigate the craziness that is the world that we live in so what a wonderful note to end on and I'll just say I you know I'm a rabbi I do religion for a living as do you in a different way I haven't gotten to talk about God this much I think in the last five years in one setting and it's really a joy and I think that sometimes you know our community needs external catalyst to have the opportunity to reflect on ourselves so I want to thank you and I think we all want to thank him [Applause] so for those of you who do have books race' will be in our Chapel a4 book signing until 9:15 sharp and we have some cookies and tea for you to enjoy outside so thank you all so much for everyone [Applause]

Channel: 바카라 7시 테스데스크

Views: 54,184

Keywords: Reza Aslan

Id: wnF5TMb8uQg

Length: 89min 13sec (5353 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2018