The View from the End of the World | Sam Harris

The talk tonight is in a way overdue. We've been doing these Seminars About Long-term Thinking for almost three years now. And haven't had a single one about religion. We've had a couple where religion was referred to, usually approvingly. Because it is clearly a long term frame of reference. Most religions have rights having to do with with birth with marriage and with death. And they step right up to generational issues when lots of other institutions do not. But this is not what you would call a sanctimonious version of religion we'll be looking at tonight. It's a critique in light of current events. It's a critique in light of, I suppose, current science current rationality. Sam Harris' book joins a couple of others that I would recommend to you: "One True God" by Rodney Stark. The subtitle there is the historical consequences of monotheism. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has a book coming out very shortly called "Breaking the Spell." And we're beginning to see a pretty deep literature addressing some of the profound issues of religion through history and in our time. And that's what we have tonight with Sam Harris. It's a pleasure to be here. I want to thank Stewart and the rest of the Long Now Foundation for inviting me. I'm going to talk about belief and specifically what I consider to be the problem of religious belief. I actually think that how we deal with the subject of belief how we criticize or fail to criticize the beliefs of other human beings at this moment has an extraordinary significance for the maintenance of civilization. I think it could well be the most significant variable that's in our power to influence. So I'm going to talk about belief and I'm gonna say some pretty unpleasant things about religious belief. I want to warn you up front that I'm going to offend some people in this room. And that's really not the point. I'm not being deliberately provocative. I'm simply worried. I'm gonna worry out loud for the next hour and and try to make the case to you that we we have no reason to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Our world has been balkanized into separate moral communities. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews . We have most of the human population living with the idea that the creator of the universe wrote one of their books. And we have many such books on hand. They all make incompatible claims about the nature of this universe. They make non-negotiable claims and it is fundamentally taboo we should recognize to criticize religious faiths and this is a taboo. I'm about to break over the next hour. First... what do our neighbors believe? Well 22% of Americans claim to be certain, literally certain, that Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds like a superhero sometime in the next 50 years. 22% claim to be certain about this. Another 22% think he probably will come back in the next 50 years. So that's 44% of us who think that the human experiment is gonna unravel in their lifetime. And unravel gloriously. Of course this belief of Jesus's imminent return is knit together with myriad other beliefs. It's not an accident that 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews. This was in his capacity as an omniscient real estate broker. The idea it should be clear this is a fantastically maladaptive idea. This idea that no matter how bad things get someone's going to come down and wield his magic powers and rectify all of the misdeeds that we perpetrate on this Earth. In fact he's not going to come down until things get fantastically bad for us. So it's actually true to say that something like 44% of Americans if they turned on their television sets and saw that a mushroom cloud had replaced Jerusalem or San Francisco they would see a silver lining in this cloud. Because it would presage that the best thing that is ever going to happen is about to happen. (I'm a percussionist as well) Take another species of belief: we've all been pummeled with this idea of "intelligent design". This debate that is raging in our culture. That is really eroding the prestige of science and eroding the prestige of our intellectual culture in the eyes of the rest of the world. There really is a problem with society of intelligent design I can't imagine anyone in this room has not heard of it. But briefly it's this is notion that the machinery of the cell is so complex that it could not possibly have emerged through naturalistic processes. So there has to be a designer. And this designer while he's rather casually not named so much now this designer is the biblical God. Okay they say your your kids could one day be taught intelligent design in biology class and this should trouble all of us. But it is important to point out that intelligent design really is a red herring because depending on what pole you trust something like 44% or as high as 53 percent as of a month ago of Americans are creationists they don't fancy intelligent design as an explanation for evolution they don't think evolution occurred at all they think the universe is 6,000 years old and that our only genetic precursors in the natural world were Adam and Eve just consider for a minute the fact that something like half of our neighbors believe that we were created from dirt and divine breath in a garden with a talking snake and a hankering for apples take another belief that is really this is really a quaint idea and should be of marginal significance this idea that this Catholic dogma that condom use contraception is somehow unethical I can assure you that the the computational powers of the human brain are insufficient to argue successfully for this this idea on ethical grounds this is this is a ludicrous idea but map this on to sub-saharan Africa where something like 3 million people every year die from AIDS you would literally have Christian ministers preaching the sinfulness of condom use to people whose only information about condom use is the representation of the ministry this is this is genocide all stupidity and and yet because of the taboos around criticizing religious faith we cannot we cannot treat the Vatican which still upholds this view still mandates that this be taught we cannot treat them like the the criminally negligent organisation that they are at least on this subject we do not respect other people's beliefs it's important to point this out we on every other subject we evaluate their reasons you know if I stood up here and said the Holocaust never happened you would be under no burden whatsoever to respect my beliefs about European history you know we don't we don't respect Holocaust deniers Holocaust deniers don't make it on our boards of directors they don't become presidents and universities people who think that Elvis is still alive and well and living in middle America don't become presidents of universities they don't become senators we don't pass laws against Elvis worship or Holocaust denial but we successfully marginalize these views these views in every other area of our lives to be highly certain of something with a very low order of evidence or or in contradiction to a mountain of evidence is a sign that something that's wrong with your mind it's a sign that you cannot be trusted and yet on matters of faith we completely change the rules so what I'm arguing for you really is that we we should practice a kind of conversational and tolerance beliefs let's just pause for a minute and and think about what a belief is we are when we believe something to be true we are making our best effort to represent reality in our thoughts this is the difference between a belief and a hope for instance and when you when you hope that something is true you are you are representing this a possible state of the world but when you believe that something is true you are you are really trying to capture reality as it is in your thoughts now either you can have either you have good reasons for what you believe or you don't in every other area of our lives we demand good reasons and we become highly suspicious of people who cannot marshal good reasons for their core beliefs so there really is a conflict between religion and science so this conflict has been papered over by scientists and and religious people at almost every opportunity there really is a conflict here because it comes down to having good reasons or bad reasons the every religion is making claims about the way the world is everyone is in the business of describing the way reality is maybe either Jesus is coming back or he's not if he comes back out of the clouds Christianity will stand revealed as a science that will be the science of Christianity and every Christian who wants to will be able to say told you so here he is look at his magic powers and and any scientist in his right mind would be convinced by a sufficient display of magic powers these are claims that if these claims purport to be factual and yet no less an organization than the National Academy of Sciences literally our most prestigious scientific body has said that there's no conflict between religion and science because they quote represent different ways of knowing or quote ask different questions about the world this is entirely bogus would you just try to try to graph this this no conflict idea on to a real world decision that take take stem-cell research for instance no stem cell research is without a doubt one of the most promising lines of research in biology to generate medical therapies there are scores of conditions that could well be remediated one of these days by stem cell research and we are we are pulling the brakes on this research and these are and for religious reasons the fear is the release fear is that we have to kill embryos human embryos in order to conduct this research we have to kill them at a three to five day stage perhaps that sounds terrible what what is a a three to five day or the human embryo well it's a collection of 150 cells not organized into a nervous system there's no brain there's a it's a sphere of cells maybe 150 cells sounds like a lot of cells well there are a hundred thousand cells in the brain of a fly flies have brains flies have neurons very much like our own if we know anything at all about the relationship between physical complexity and the possibility of having an experience and the possibility of having interests a we know that more suffering is visited upon this earth every time we swat a fly then when we kill a three-day-old human embryo and yet the the ethical argument never has to get made because of the deference we have for religious faith someone need only stand in the oval office or on the floor of the Senate and say you know my faith teaches me that life starts at the moment of conception there are souls in those human embryos and you cannot one soul can't trump another you can't sacrifice one soul to benefit another end of argument well on the one hand we have these collections of 150 cells and on the other we have little girls suffering from diabetes and full body burns we've got men and women with Parkinson's disease we have literally tens of millions of people suffering terrible torments which could one day be remediated by this research okay it I submit to you if you if you think that the interests of a virtually microscopic collection of cells if you had 10 of these in the palm of your hand right now you would never notice if you think that the interest of these organisms may yet Trump the interests of a little girl with full-body burns you have had your ethical intuitions blinded by religious metaphysics no no ethical argument would get you there no argument that talked about human suffering and its and its alleviation would get you there it's not enough to say that these these collections of cells are potential human beings a given genetic engineering every cell in our body with a nucleus is a potential human being every time the president scratches his nose he's engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings this is literally so given the right conditions let's just linger for a moment I don't want to talk too much about stem cell research but it really demonstrates the point that we never have to have the conversation because faith Trump's rational argument on these subjects just take take them for a moment the claim that there are souls in this petri dish that every human blastocyst a three-day-old embryo is insult ok well unfortunately embryos at that stage can split into twins so what happens we have one soul becoming two souls embryos that an even later stage confuse back into climate what's called a chimera a single individual born of two embryos so do we have two souls becoming one soul the this arithmetic of souls doesn't make much sense so what I'm arguing for you tonight and what I argue at some length in my book is either we have good reasons for what we believe or we don't and faith is the license that religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail to keep believing in the absence of evidence and this is unacceptable in every other area of our lives and it's actually unacceptable even if you take the wrong religious object I mean just imagine how a senator would be perceived if in in the wake of Hurricane Katrina he said you know we really have not been praying to Poseidon enough and that after all is his jurisdiction that is the sea we're talking about he'd just imagine what a lunatic misuse of the human mind that would appear to be it's not like someone discovered in the third century that the biblical God really really exists and Poseidon he's just a myth they have exactly the same status except one has to speak of the biblical God something like 2 billion subscribers now in the face of this rather obvious conflict between religious fundamentalism certainly and scientific rationality many of us many well-meaning well-educated people especially in the West have created a kind of accommodation to modernity and we call it religious moderation now in my book I say some very critical things about religious moderation that's actually been some of the most controversial aspects of my arguments I want to I want to say those things now so you get a taste of my heresy in full the first thing to concede up front is that religious moderation is better than religious fundamentalism it nobody flies a plane into a building because he's a religious moderate the religious moderates are not organizing their lives around apocalyptic prophecy and this is a very good thing but religious moderation has some real liabilities and the first is that it gives an extraordinary amount of cover to religious fundamentalism because it because moderates also have made it taboo to criticize religious faith itself to criticize the basic project of thinking that you're a Jew or a Muslim or a Christian of raising your children to think believe that they are Jews or Muslims or Christians because because religious moderates are still attached to that that obeisance to to tradition they have they don't want anything too critical said about the people who really really believe in the literal word of their holy books and this is not serving us at this point it is even taboo among religious moderates to notice the differences among our religions that all our religions don't teach tolerance and compassion to the same degree and where they do teach it they don't teach it equally well this is the fundamentalist understand this you know our own fundamentalist demagogues when when Muslims start flying planes into our buildings they say Islam as an evil religion they don't have a problem that noticing the differences among religions moderates are the ones who have given us these euphemisms this idea that Islam for instance is a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists and that Osama bin Laden is is the the Reverend Jim Jones of the Muslim world or the David Koresh of the Muslim world Osama bin Laden is articulating a very plausible version of Islam that has more subscribers than we would like to admit but the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not fringe doctrines in in Islam this idea that that death in defense of the faith is the best thing that could possibly happen to another human being this really is a deal breaker and this really is believed by millions of Muslims maybe to linger on this point for a moment because it really is of excruciating relevance to us at this point where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers I mean if if occupation were enough if being conquered by an outside power and being hauled off to jail and tortured were enough to so deranged a society that it would form a death cult like we see brewing in the Muslim world we should see Tibetan Buddhists blowing themselves up on Chinese buses we should see Tibetan Buddhists in thronging in the streets calling for the deaths of Chinese non-combatants we do not see this and and we are we're profoundly unlikely to see it it's abettin Buddhists believe a lot of wacky things about the nature of the universe they don't believe those wacky things that you have to believe to form a death cult it's not that it's impossible that Buddhism could could inform at this kind of behavior and actually Zen Buddhism did to some significant degree and form the worldview of the kamikaze pilots during World War two it's interesting to know it over just as a Buddhist scholar that that one of the things then can be criticized for is not really focusing on compassion to the degree that other schools of Buddhism do and there's this whole martial spirit and tons of martial metaphors in in Zen Buddhism that lent themselves rather readily to Japanese nationalism but there are differences among our religions we are never by any stretch of the imagination going to encounter Jain suicide bombers so Jainism is just it's a religion of non-violence the more deranged you become as a Jain by your religious dog dogmas you will become less and less violent I mean the really fundamentalist Jane's wear cheesecloth over their mouths so they won't inhale bugs the core of Jainism really is non-violence but by no stretch of the imagination can you say that the core of Islam is non-violence religious moderates are uniquely ill placed to concede this so when the religious moderate sees the jihadist on the videotape say things like we love death more than the infidels love life and then he blows himself up it's the religious moderate who was left thinking no that couldn't be religion I mean that's not that's propaganda that's that guy must have lacked economic opportunities or I mean my only the the United States are misadventures in the Middle East must explain that that's not faith okay religious moderates don't know what it's like to be certain of paradise religious moderates don't know what it's like to really believe in the god of the Quran or of the bomb of the the Bible the Old Testament or new if all you have to do to satisfy yourself on this subject is consider the biographies of the nineteen hijackers who were these guys who woke up on September 11 and decided to fly planes into buildings the they were college educated many of them had PhDs they were middle class they were they were not people who had histories personal histories of political oppression they were not spending inordinate amounts of time at a ting for regime change in the Middle East but what they were what they were spending inordinate amount of time doing is hanging out at their local mosque in Hamburg talking about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise and the evils of infidel culture these were true believers and you can get their worldview out of the Koran very readily but we are at war with Islamic fundamentalism but not terror a terrorism is a tactic and you know it's a separate conversation to talk about what percentage of the Muslim world fits this description and we're certainly our policy now is not doing anything but alienate more Muslims and create more jihadists but we have an extraordinary problem because the doctrine of Islam really a bit we're at war with with Islamic fundamentalism but the the fundamental we're only at war with Islamic fundamentalism because the fundamentals of Islam really are a problem and I just want to make clear that I'm not talking about a race here I'm not talking about Arabs I'm not talking about an ethnicity I'm talking about John Walker Lindh the white guy from Marin who went to fight with the Taliban I'm talking about the logical consequences of ideas one study actually of known al-qaeda operatives found that two-thirds of them were college graduates and middle class well only 52% of Americans have been to any college okay this is this is not merely a problem of Education I don't know how many more architects and engineers need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize this is not merely a problem of Education our situation is far more sinister than that it is possible to be so well educated that you could build a nuclear bomb and still think you're going to get the 72 virgins in paradise another problem with religious moderation is that it is it represents a fundamentally unprincipled use of reason it really is intellectually bankrupt at least fundamentalists talk about evidence you ask a fundamentalist why he believes that Jesus is coming back and he'll give you a an evidentiary story he'll give you an argument it's not a good argument but he'll say things like the New Testament confirms all of Old Testament prophecy or all of the prophecies in the Bible have actually been come true in history these are not good reasonable claims but if these were true if this this was true this would be an argument for the you know maybe the Bible is emanating from some omniscient source okay what do moderates talk about when you ask them why they believe in God moderates talk about meaning this belief gives their lives meaning they talk about the good consequences of believing as they do I want you to appreciate for a moment just what a non sequitur this is when you transfer to some other subject some other consoling proposition this is it's actually there's an example in my book imagine if your neighbor claimed to believe that there was a diamond buried in his backyard that's the size of a refrigerator can you ask him why you see him out on his lawn digging every Sunday with his family imagine how you would feel about his mental faculties if he said well this belief gives my life a tremendous amount of meaning you know you don't understand my family and I really enjoy digging for this on Sundays and it has a remarkable bonding effect on us or what if he said I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a diamond buried in my backyard it's it's pretty clear that these responses are inadequate I'm deeply inadequate they're worse than that they really are the responses of a madman or an idiot and it's so easy to see and yet change the subject to the existence of God who can hear your prayers who's looking out for you despite all of the other devastation we see in the world going on each day God is protecting you and your family you change you change the subject to that proposition and all bets are off in fact you could not possibly get elected to office in this country unless you endorsed that kind of thinking about the existence of God another problem with the religious moderation is that it is it's not only intellectually bankrupt it is theologically bankrupt it's not like a closer look at the books delivers religious moderation I've got news for you I've read the books God is not a moderate and there's nowhere you read certainly let's just take Christianity and Judaism for a moment you read the Old Testament I mean that that is a the worldview urged upon us the the kind of society urged upon us is so needlessly horrible that the truth is most fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews can't take God at His Word you think the killing never stops if you if you were gonna draw your worldview you're gonna draw your to-do-list out of books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus you're gonna make mullah omar of the Taliban look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt I mean it is if your children talk back to you you kill them you kill homosexuals you keep your neighbors working on the Sabbath you kill him if a if a woman's on a virgin on her wedding night take her to the edge of town and stone her to death if you come if you come into a town and you see someone praying to a foreign god you kill him you kill his family kill every man woman and child in the town you kill wizards you kill mediums you kill fornicators and kill adulterers but the list is long and preposterous and there are actually some groups in this country that want to return to that style of life there there's this movement it's probably not no probably not well known to you all but the Christian reconstructionists also known as dominionists actually just bite the bullet here and say yeah well that is what God wants that law has not been rescinded and they're right the law is not rescinded but many Christians are living with this idea that Jesus somewhere in him in his ministry fundamentally repudiated all of Old Testament law there are a few lines where you can get Jesus to say something seemingly like that but there's there's so much else in the New Testament that ramifies Old Testament law and these Christian Reconstructionist by the way are are amazingly influential that the the level of activism we see in in the fundamentals community now has largely been seeded by them because they another thing Christian Reconstructionist believe is that Jesus is not going to come back until after a millennium of Christian beatific domination of the globe so we have to fully establish a Christian world before Jesus comes back there in a minority believing this but but their their energy the energy with which they have approached that task has been contagious and they these are not people believe in this stuff are not fringe characters in our society there are people who can get Karl Rove on the phone who want to practice the worldview of Leviticus killing homosexuals for instance you're just to linger on this point of what they what Christianity to take a specific subset actually advocates a it's it's not an accident that st. Augustine and st. Thomas Aquinas that two of the great lights of the Christian tradition both thought heretics should be tortured actually Augustine thought they should be tortured and his argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the Inquisition Aquinas thought they should just be killed outright these are these are the great lights of the Christian tradition these these guys are still taught in every great book seminar in this country and and it's important to point out that this is totally reasonable given certain rather ludicrous ideas if you but if you think that the creator of the universe really wrote this book it's it's insane not to live by it and living by it gets you by no accident the kind of life we saw for five hundred years in medieval Europe we were burning people alive for heresy again we look from our perch in the present we look back on this and we think well this these people were just deranged you know this is just a whole culture plunging into psychopathology it's really not true it is it just think about this if your neighbor can say something to your child that is so spiritually wayward that it could put your child in peril for eternity but literally just drive your child into eternal torment that person next door is far more dangerous than a child molester so really believing this stuff has consequences and we secularists and moderates have fundamentally lost touch with the fact that millions and millions of people really believe this stuff the final problem with religious moderation in my view is that because most of us most moderates are content to merely relax their hold on all of these superstitions and taboos that are coming to us from these traditions because it's just because moderation is just a hewing to these traditions into these texts into these dogmas but just kind of relaxing the literalism and it's believed that that is good enough in fact that is somehow necessary and redeeming and we did that's indispensable for us as a culture it prevents us from developing rational creative 21st century alternatives to religion the search for better alternatives has stopped because we're Jews where Christians were Muslims and all of that is terrifically important it's important to point out that we decide what's good in the good book but we take our ethical intuitions to the texts and when we read the golden rule for instance we decide yet that is a great distillation of our ethical intuitions do unto others as you would have them do unto you okay that's a keeper okay we decide that if this is the if the Bible is the best book we have on moral questions you know if you're a fundamentalist it's the best book we have because it's literally been inspired by the Holy Ghost or it's literally been dictated by the creator of the universe if you're a moderate is the best book we have because the the wisest people and the wisest tradition that has ever existed has has delivered us this text if either of those claims are true well consider consider what kind of morality falls out of that and consider a moral question that has been solved to everyone's satisfaction consider the question of slavery slavery was an abomination we are all we are we are relieved of a terrible moral burden no longer practicing slavery Thomas Jefferson would have been a better man had he freed his slaves absolutely if this is the best book we have the Bible is the best book we have old or new testament by the way we should be practicing slavery the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves he simply tells us not to beat them so badly that we knock out their eyes or their teeth because then we have to set them free but he otherwise tells us how to keep slaves Jesus clearly expects us to keep slaves he never repudiates the institution of slavery he talks about he refers to slaves in his parables he talks about slaves being beaten by their masters and and never puts this into question Paul in first Timothy admonishes slaves to serve their masters well and to serve their Christian masters especially well so as to partake in their holiness if this is the best book we have the abolitionists were on the wrong side of the argument and it should be no surprise to no one that the slave holders of the south for many long years justified their practices by resort to the good book so my argument and really one of the central conclusions of my book is that all we have is human conversation all we have is our own ethical intuitions exercised in conversation with other human beings you can either put your faith in a 21st century conversation with all of our intellectual resources available to us or you can put your faith in some other century's conversation as enshrined in one of these books you can put your faith in an in an Iron Age conversation you take the Bible or you can put your put your faith in a seventh century conversation - if you take the Quran the problem with faith is that it really is a conversation stopper it the moment you faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation it is a it is a a reason why you do not have to give reasons for what you believe this is really a problem because when the stakes are high we have a simple choice between conversation and violence at the level of societies we have a choice between conversation and war the faith religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity to conversation is considered noble but it's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying there's nothing that you could say that would change my mind I mean just imagine a medical doctor saying there's nothing that could be said that will change my mind that is that claim is synonymous with saying I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe there's nothing that could change about the world - that would cause me to revise my beliefs this is it should be clear this is intrinsically divisive I mean the only thing that guarantees that our collaboration with one another is truly open-ended is our willingness to have our core beliefs revised through the power of conversation now that there are two kinds of conflict born of faith and and it's mode as a conversation stopper there there are a lot of people dying in the name of faith and they're not explicitly theological grievances being exercised if you take something like the violence in Northern Ireland or the the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia these are these are conflicts that that are when these societies got stressed they broke along religious lines but it's not like the Irish we're fighting over the the the doctrine of the transubstantiation but still what the problem is their moral identities were organized around this this adherence to a tradition and there are they're clearly there are other forms of division in our world there is nationalism there's tribalism generally there's racism but but religious faith is the most articulate layer of human difference is really it is really the level at which you you can learn to demonize other human beings so there's that violence and it is it is pervasive in our world but then there's also the added violence that is explicitly theological where people would not otherwise be behaving this way at all but for what they believe about God and this is and jihadism and the the the daily explosions we see or read about in the world is the preeminent example here so my argument really and and the the the central argument of my book is that to make religious war unthinkable the way that things like slavery and cannibalism seem poised to become to make it unthinkable we have to undermine the dogma of faith we have to to repudiate this idea that beliefs can be sanctified by something other than evidence and argument now I've just said many nasty things about religion this is this is not to say that religion is merely a shell game that it's just a tissue of lies and self-deceptions and cognitive errors that are designed to inner us to the threat of death it's it is that to some significant degree but it is not merely that there is no doubt that human beings have spiritual experiences for lack of a better word I use these words use words like spiritual and mystical in my book and have received much grief from atheists on this subject but there's no doubt that there's a wing there's an end of the spectrum of positive human experience that very few people explore and that has traditionally been explored in a religious content of context and it is fantastically interesting it should be of interest to us scientifically and personally every culture has produced people who have wandered off into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights or spent 20 years in a cave and come out talking about how human experience our moment-to-moment experience of the world can be deliberately transformed through introspection through meditation through prayer through through deliberate uses of attention the problem is that these claims have always been made in a religious context and are now in our world virtually always cluttered with religious dogma to a greater and lesser degree the one in the spirit of violating the taboo of noticing are the differences among our religions the wisdom of contemplative life spiritual mystical wisdom is by no means been evenly distributed throughout the world no more so than scientific insight has been evenly distributed the East really does have something over the West when when it comes time to talk about an empirical non-dogmatic first-person science of it an approach to introspection that really delivers the goods it's not that there have been extraordinary individuals in the West there have been the meister eckhart sand other people who transcended the limits of their of their doctrine but the disparity is rather extraordinary between eastern and western mystical wisdom it's it's every bit into in my view it's every bit as as extraordinary as the difference between Western Western medicine and Eastern medicine and maybe there are some conditions for which Eastern medicine is better but you know if you have an appendicitis you better hope you can get to a western-style hospital and get a Western strain surgeon to work on you incidentally if you get do get an appendicitis you might consider the fact that you've been intelligently designed the appendix is proof positive that this is a bogus idea so I want I've lost track of time how are we to have a is anyone keeping the clock okay yeah yeah well briefly I just want to say what I think are the the messages of our contemplative traditions that we we can incorporate into our 21st century worldview that we must incorporate really because the burden is upon us to develop a thoroughgoing science of human happiness and approach to human happiness that addresses questions of human happiness at every level biochemically psychologically economically politically every level and one of one necessary level I would argue is contemplative we have to make sense of the fact that it's possible to go into a cave for ten years and be perfectly happy this is not to say that that that's a path to happiness for everybody then no doubt there are people who go into caves who are completely deranged or deranged by the experience but it the one of the core insights of our contemplative traditions is that there is something about human consciousness that can be recognized in the present moment the very part of you that is hearing the sound of my voice there's something that can be recognized about what it is to be conscious in this moment that transcends the vagaries of pleasant and unpleasant experience but there's a kind of mystical well-being that we can discover it's interesting to note that you know solitary going into a cave solitary confinement is considered a a punishment even inside a prison for most people this is what it's like to be the prisoner of one's thoughts and we in the West we have a really impoverished conception of sanity we we think all day long from the from the moment we were chased out of bed by our thoughts in the morning we think think think think think all day long and very few of us and certainly very few exemplars in in the Western tradition have have talked intelligently about possibility of not being lost in thought what would a human mind be like that was not continuously colored by this this discursivity and in in the east and in Buddhism especially they have spent millennia on this and delivered some very compelling insights and just to let this seem like a crazy eruption of speculative philosophy I just want to try to tie this down for a second because there it's I want to make sense up to you of the claim that it's possible to there's something to be glimpsed about the nature of your consciousness right now that is not obvious to you and yet is right on the surface and by analogy I want you to reflect on the existence of the of the blind spot the optic blind spot we all know we have a blind spot in both visual fields it's it's it results from the transit of the optic nerve through the retina of each eye we've all I'm sure all of you have had it pointed out to you you draw a spot on a piece of paper and you move that piece of paper until the spot disappears and that proves there is something there's an area in your visual field that you're not getting information from though your visual field seems seamless to you now most people in this world probably don't know about the blind spot and most of us who know about it go for decades without thinking about it we certainly don't notice it but it is there to be noticed to be if you look out across this room somebody is probably missing a head it's there to be seen and it takes some doing to see it there is an analogous fact about the nature of human consciousness and and the and the fact is this consciousness does not feel like a self it does not feel like what we take ourselves to be moment to moment most of our lives that the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts the the experience of our the experiencer of our experience and most of us feel like we don't feel identical to our sphere of experience we feel like we are having an experience we feel like we're riding around in our head somewhere behind our eyes not identical to our body not identical to the contents of consciousness this is a kind of cognitive error that really can be seen through and it takes some doing it takes some study it takes some meditation to you it can take a lot of work but it holds immense implications for us as a species and it holds immense implications for our conception of human happiness and what is norm normative human behavior and and finally science is starting to to turn its attention on this and now I'm sure many of you know that that there's a very fruitful dialogue happening between neuroscientists and and contemplatives mostly Buddhist contemplatives but contemplatively and what it links up to in neuroscience is this idea that that our brains really are plastic that we that there they are there's a neuroplasticity there that allows the brain to change itself based on how it is used the brain is really an instrument that changes based on how it is played and positive mental states are our skills essentially just as you can learn to play the piano you can learn to feel differently about other human beings you can learn to feel compassion where you otherwise wouldn't and this this dialogue is just beginning but it's it's something that it's a dialogue we need to have completely trained by religious dogmatism so to wrap up I just want one way of summarizing what I've said is that everyone really is a scientist in that everyone is making claims about the way the world is and everyone is a mystic in the sense that everyone is seeking happiness in a context that is in some basic sense hostile to the terms of our search we are seeking happiness seeking durable happiness in the context of an ever-changing experience so what I'm asking you to imagine is what would it be like to have a culture where we we came to terms with this fact where we came to terms with the reality of death did this astonishing fact that all of us are gonna die this is this astonishing fact that living long enough all of us will witness the death of everyone we love maybe if it is possible to find true well-being in the midst of this circumstance we should be desperate to find it and we should be desperate to use all of our tools all of our 21st century tools and and articulate these truths in terms that are not divisive in terms that are that do not demand belief in the preposterous so my argument really is that the endgame for civilization as we're talking about long-term thinking the endgame is not political correctness it is not the mere toleration of patent absurdity it really is reason and reasonableness and an openness to conversation thank you very much I'll talk about end times and the question thank you so the end times this is seminar sponsored to encourage long term thinking but it seems as if at least in the fundamentalist variety of religion there's a lot of emphasis on the end times meaning that we're about to have the end times we'd have no future can you say anything about what you've learned about this idea of the end times yeah yeah well there's as I said at the beginning something like forty five forty four percent of us subscribe to this basic view that the end is very near it's somewhere in the next 50 years and it should be clear that this has geopolitical consequences this has an amazing number of people are narrowly focused on literally one building in the Middle East and we have the the al-aqsa mosque built upon the site of the the old temple and many fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews Orthodox Jews think the Messiah will not come until that mosque is raised and the temples rebuilt fundamentalist Christians think Jesus won't come back until that mosque is raised and the temple is rebuilt and Muslims the world over take a an exquisite interest in the integrity of that mosque is considered the third holiest site in the Muslim world it really is not an exaggeration to say that that if anything happens to that building the wheels come off I mean this is it it really could be there's there's a there's a piece of architecture that could precipitate World War three it is considered so sacred and the Muslims incidentally have the same kind of eschatology there's slight differences incidentally Jesus is going to come back and preach Islam but this this idea that the world is gonna end and it is gonna end in your generation very likely and that is ending somehow is a good thing because it is the necessary precursor to the best thing that that's a very scary belief and it is it is not a fringe belief perhaps you you guys remember this but Reagan brought Hal Lindsey a religious lunatic of the first order and Jerry Falwell a lunatic of the second order perhaps it in to brief the the Pentagon on the the implications of Biblical prophecy for our strategic situation visa V the Soviet Union okay this is this is not the and and the current administration well I you know I'm not a fan of of the president's I don't think he we who knows what he believes but he doesn't strike me as a Pat Robertson character the fact that Pat Robertson could even aspire to to launch a presidential campaign should terrify us and the fact that people like him and and Dobson more relevantly at the moment have the ear of those in power and can exact concessions from those in power and we have people like Tom DeLay who say that they came to into the business of government to to forward a biblical worldview these these beliefs are operative and they are fundamentally hostile to our creating a durable future for ourselves now it's true we had a speaker maybe three speakers ago who came from a scientific point of view and it was offering a different kind of endtime so what do you think of the faith that a coming technological singularity will be a buck elliptic event in the next fifty years you must be speaking about Ray Kurzweil yes I have not read his book so I can't really comment on that thesis the idea that our exponential advances in technology could transform human society in a way that is presently unthinkable it seems to me there are good reasons to believe that and it's what the timeframe in is and what what transformations are likely that's that's certainly a subject for for reasonable debate the issue though is that there there are many scientific ideas that are fantastically strange far even stranger than the idea that somebody was born of a virgin or is coming back or that there's a there's a mission being who can hear your prayers I mean that those are strange ideas but you know Martin Rees the the the Royal astronomer recently wrote that because this this in this thesis in physics of inflation this idea that we hit there could be myriad bubble universes and all functioning by different laws and that basically everything that could be tried has been tried this gets this bequeaths the notion that you should expect that there are with this many universes that there are going to be many many civilizations far more advanced than our own and that these super intelligent beings will have invented computation and that their computation will be so powerful that that they'll be able to simulate whole universes in their computers and almost by definition these new these simulated universes will outnumber real universes and therefore we should expect to find ourselves in a simulation rather than in a real universe now this is a very weird idea and maybe it's it suggests one thing that it suggested me is that physics has now become so rarefied that it's almost impossible to know when a physicist is joking but the important thing to point out is that there is a difference between having reasons to believe this and having no reasons and to end and one thing we we maintain in scientific discourse no matter how weird it gets at the peripheries is an intellectual honesty where we when we're certain about something we claim we're certain when we're not certain we don't claim or certain and and and the pressure to vet ideas and to jettison Dogma wherever you can find it is exquisite in science and it is non-existent in Orthodox religion by the way that question was from Mark L we kind of like to use names here this is a question from amber if you want to raise your hand you can from all the feedback you've received on your book or in person at a talk like this one what comment or question has shifted your perspective the most from what you originally wrote or said that's that's interesting question I don't know if there's one comment one thing that I did just before the book was published is I created a website and the the difference between having done that and not doing it it was so extraordinary because I've just had thousands of emails and but for the website I would have no idea who was reading the book and what their their response was and the emails have just come from the most the craziest range of people I mean there there are the ministers in the South still practicing as ministers but have completely lost their faith and just can't figure out what other job they're qualified for they've written me then they're there are people who me one thing that's interesting and this is I didn't have to write my book to discover this you spend long enough in academia you discover this in fact you discover this nowhere so readily is in a philosophy seminar people very rarely change their minds maybe there you can I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen someone undergo a full change of perspective just fully blown in real time oh my god I didn't see it that way i repudiate everything I was talking about a moment ago no those are like supernova explosions in the universe rarely happen and and bearing witness to them and just seeing how intractable our attachment is to religious mythology even by by very smart people I mean I get the same objections over and over again it's it's it's really the whole notion of a meme is very compelling when you see the same language and the same why why is not coming to you from very disparate sources coming reflexively and yeah I mean that's I don't know if that's adequate answer that question so have you changed your mind about anything oh good question well I'm open-minded and the one thing that's come to me that is a doubt that is creeping in to my discourse on this subject is I don't know what the normative response would be to our situation I'm advocating something I'm advocating what I've come to call a conversational intolerance where we apply the same standards of reasonableness on on questions about God and ethics and the afterlife that we apply on every other subject but I clearly would not want the President of the United States to speak the way I just spoke you know that would be that would be so inflammatory I'm just just take the Muslim world as let's say we completely put our house in order domestically and the 260 million Americans who claim to be certain that they are in they have a relationship with God change their minds and thought just the way I thought then we still have an immense problem how do we speak reasonably in the face of the religious polarities in our world and I'm starting to feel that I might I simply die simply don't know and I don't know how steep the the honesty curve should should be and I and I'm the first to admit that I am not the face of diplomacy on this subject and so that I mean that has been brought home to me it's been hammered into me over these many months here's a question from Wayne Welch again if you want to identify what accounts for the resurgence of religious literalism fundamentalism in the US since the era the Scopes Monkey Trial say since 1920s yeah it's well there's certainly the perception that there's a resurgence and I think there is a there is a political empowerment even under the current administration that is appears to be new I can't untangle just how much I'm just paying attention to it more and how much it's always been there but the as far as what people believe that has been remarkably stable ever since scopes the Gallup polling goes back about 70 or 80 years and on questions like do you think Satan literally exists do you think Jesus was literally born of a virgin many many questions the the the percentages just tick you know within the margin of error through the decades it's not like we have suddenly produced many fundamentalists who weren't there 70 years ago this is a question from I can't read the writing as maybe Anoa whatever else can be said about religion it does provide an emotional component happiness and hope science does not have as much emotional impact because we dismissed emotions as irrational what can we do to focus a discussion on the emotional benefits of science instead of the irrational drawbacks of religion yeah that's a good question well the first thing to point out is that science has just fundamentally not addressed questions of human happiness for most of its career now there is a a conception of positive psychology now people are asking questions about human happiness and normative states in neuroscience and in psychology they're people doing neuroimaging work on compassion for instance but this is a really recent development and therefore religion has seemed to be the only game in town all these years even with even with the steady encroach of a scientific worldview that that has beaten back religious ignorance on every other subject there was a time where you could you know you have epilepsy really but nobody knows what epilepsy is so you're the diagnosis is demonic possession right well now that's not such a common diagnosis and we understand that when when people are having seizures there's another reason for it there has to be an analogous breakthrough on questions of happiness and on questions of spiritual it's and it's just you know it's in it's in the offing because the effort simply has not been made another another thing I'd like to to say in address to that question is that this idea that somehow our religious affiliations our religious beliefs are doing a lot of work for us they're really consoling and they're underwriting morality in some way this this is a this is largely disproved by just a character of belief in Western Europe I mean Western Europe is there's almost no resemblance to the United States in terms of the level of religious adherence and if you look at the the the UN indices of societies health you look at at per capita income literacy homicide rates rates of other violent crime every index of a society's health the most atheist atheistic societies in the world are the best off I mean societies like Iceland and Sweden and Australia and Denmark and the Netherlands I mean these are these are in Sweden something like eighty percent of people claim to be atheists you know here eighty-three percent claim to believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead so the idea that somehow this belief system is giving us is paying such great dividends in terms of our treating one another well in this society that that is that remains to be proven that said it is true that if you really believe that death is only a parent and you're going to be reunited with everyone you love after you die really believing that has consequences and it takes the sting out of death I mean it has to if you think that you just have to wait a few years until you die and then you're going to see your kid again and everyone else who you who you otherwise would be terribly agree to lose in this life one real problem with that is that we on the geopolitical level we want the sting very much in death I mean we are now confronting people who have taken the sting out of death and we have destructive technology proliferating we have to anticipate a time where we may have the functional the psychological equivalent of the nineteen hijackers as a regime with long-range nuclear weapons and that is in that situation you don't want the sting out of death you want that you want deterrence you want people who are afraid to die or otherwise don't are not eager to die and so anyway so this could be a long conversation about what positive virtues perhaps come out of religious thinking and what the alternatives are clearly we want rational alternatives this is a question from Dorian you can identify yourself if you want to the news maybe it's a San Francisco question the New Age scene especially the psychedelic angle consisted of people very interested in technology and science and spirituality what do you think about this fusion of spirituality and science and tech well one way into this is that at the level of the brain which we're talking about the fact that our nervous system is perturb a ball its perturb a ball based on how we consciously use our attention its perturb Obul based on ingesting various compounds that that either act like neurotransmitters or modulate our own neurotransmitters and neuromodulators but this is this is a as an organism we can intervene in our experience and and and certain interventions are normative and really interesting and worth pursuing and others carry serious liabilities I mean one problem but speak specifically about drugs for instance we have one word we have this word drug to name this range of compounds that some of which bear absolutely no resemblance and their effects to others the word drug is a word like religion you know there's a very different religions and there are very different drugs and you know like I'm sure many people in this room I've had psychedelic experiences that have been extraordinarily useful and there's also something about psychedelics in their current state which which seems rather imprecise and haphazard and you know I happen to think that meditation and meditation retreats you know very deliberate weeks and months spent practically practice various techniques of meditation is a much more systematic and mulai abilities and and some of the same state certainly can be experienced that way okay I have two questions remaining here here's one of them from Pat you describe some of the emotional experiences of being an elf's book and promoter of reason well it's a new it's my career as a heretic essentially just started so it's I guess by the in large part it's been it's been amazingly gratifying I mean the the the reception despite how in politic my message is that the reception has largely been a totally positive and supportive and I do get the occasional scary email and and many people who are praying for me but it's it's really you know it's it's very gratifying it's it's a it feels necessary and it's not it's not really there's something effortless about it because I just feel compelled to do it at this point it's not it's not like I I feel like I'm continually making choices to open my big mouth somebody like Stewart invites me and it's it's it just feels like an essential thing to be doing so it's there's there's not too much friction in me at this point and I've had a lot of to overcome in order to be able to do it but it's it's gratifying to just feel like I'm doing something that is necessary to do at this point so so the last question is host prerogative so it's a question for me I believe in God and the more I think about my belief this strange idea the more I use my reason the more I believe in God and actually I would like not to believe because it was actually easier as an atheist when I was in a sea it was actually easier took less work and now that I had do have a belief it takes more reason on my part so can you help me not believe what would you what which is one of those surprising questions that you have me do well I would want to know what you meant by God I mean precisely you'd have to unpack that belief for me because the again there's a range we've got there's one word God and when you dig into the details with people you get very there are people who just just want to assert that there's something bigger than ourselves you know that there's that there and that it has a kind of moral component to it that there's there is love in the universe or that it matters that that we treat one another well and those aren't and those are and and and they wrap that all of that up in the term God and it has nothing to do with a God who could possibly hate homosexuals for instance so I would need to know I mean if you actually want to have this conversation I'm happy to but I wouldn't I would need to know many other things about what you actually believe so so it's not about belief in God per se but more about religions what was that it's less about a belief in God and more about the dangers of a faith in or in every religion you mean my argument yes well it's it's about the dangers of dogma essentially it's it's the danger the danger of pretending to be certain about things that you're not certain about it's the danger of this double standard we're in every other area of our lives we maintain an intellectual honesty and we and we demand that others do likewise and yet on this subject we just rewrite the rules and I think that we can have we certainly can have ethical and moral experience we can have strong communities and we can even have the most esoteric mystical experience without ever asserting anything on insufficient evidence

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 251,600

Rating: 4.5006595 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, Psychology, Religion, Civilization, Extremism

Id: 06pSJJaoEsQ

Length: 82min 32sec (4952 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Somajames]

Sam was brilliant in the SALT convention debates. I especially enjoyed his interaction with Scott Atran.