AA Harris/Weinstein/Peterson Discussion: Vancouver

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You [Applause]

I guess we're in Vancouver. Wow, all right, that is daunting. So I hope you'll indulge me here for a second. Jordan and Sam have given me the honor of moderating this debate or discussion depending on how you view it. I think that actually creates a certain kind of responsibility, and I want to talk to you about my responsibilities and how I see it, and my respite sense of how you all have responsibilities in this as well.

I suspect that what's gonna happen tonight is actually historical, which doesn't necessarily make it good; there's lots of bad history. It could be good, though, and that's what I'm hoping will happen. So, the reason I say I think it's historical is that we are existing in a moment where all of the systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down. The university systems are breaking down, journalism is breaking down, and at that same moment, we have a network of people who are trying to make sense in an alternative way, and I have to say I think beating the odds for the moment.

So here's the problem: that network is not entirely in agreement with itself about some significant issues, and Sam and Jordan have some differences that have proved very difficult. So what could happen tonight is we could have some sort of a failure where things get even more muddled. We could tread water where nothing gets clear; maybe it would be entertaining; maybe it wouldn't. But best-case scenario is that we figure out how to make sense of things that have gotten in our way before, and if that happens, then you all will leave here, and as you talk in your various networks, you will have something to say about in what way we upgraded our software so that we could talk more deeply about difficult issues.

So to that end, we would ask the King not to film tonight's discussion and broadcast it online. It's not that we want to hide this; in fact, we encourage you to discuss it. But we would like to have all of us feel maximally free to speak here, to try out positions that we haven't tried out before in the hopes that we can get somewhere new.

All right, so I think with that we will just put Sam and Jordan to it and see if we can head towards some of the discussions that have proved difficult in the past. I think I'll just start by saying that when we first had the idea to do this, now some months ago—I'm getting a little reverb here, so if you can dial down, there's little feedback. When Jordan and I first decided to do an event together, it was after we did those somewhat ill-fated podcasts, and I joked that we would probably need a safe word for this event.

So that safe word, as will come as no surprise, is lobster. So you'll know things are dire when one of us says that. But, you know, I just want to express my motive for helping to stage these events because I reached out to Jordan, and it really was born of seeing him in conversation with people other than myself. I saw him do a podcast with Joe Rogan; I saw him speak to Dave Rubin, I saw him speak with Brett on Rogan's podcast, and I had so much admiration for him in those conversations. It's 90 percent of what he said in those conversations struck me as really wise and useful and well-intentioned, and 10 percent didn't.

But I noticed that it was close and clear to me that you've seen these successful conversations with other people who I respect. I began to wonder that I might be the problem, and I think I am the problem. I think—well, before you applaud, maybe I didn't mean that quite the way you took it. I think it's a good sort of problem for Jordan to have because it's what happens on those 10 percent moments and what doesn't happen that I think made our conversation so hard.

I think we need to clarify stuff between us, so I look forward to doing that, and thank you, Jordan, for agreeing to do this. It's an honor to share the stage with you, and needless to say, having Brett as a moderator is almost an obscene underestimation of the role he should be playing on any stage, because as you know, he's been on my podcast and that was one of the best conversations I've ever had. So thank you for doing this.

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All right, so I'm gonna jump right into it, I think here. So look, I put up a poll a couple of days ago to find out what people broadly speaking might want us to discuss. I've been taking a look at that, and I took a lot of notes, which is why I have my computer here, by the way, on my phone—it's not to check my email while the debates going on. The discussion I thought what I might do is just lay out some places that I think Sam and I agree, and because there's lots of places we agree.

Then I want to figure out where we disagree, which I've been trying to sort out, and then I want to see if we can hash it out a little bit and move forward on that a bit. So I'm going to lay out—see, one of the things that Carl Rogers said, this psychic psychologist, was that one good way to have a discussion with someone is to tell them what you think they think until they think that what you said reflects what they said. But look, this is a really useful thing to know if you're ever having a discussion with an intimate partner, for example, is that you have to put their argument back to them in terms they agree with.

It's very difficult, so I'm going to try to do that. And so the first thing is I think that partly what's driving you, if this is accurate, is that you want to ground a structure of ethics in something solid. And there are two things you want to avoid, two catastrophes, let's say. One is the catastrophe that you identified with religious fundamentalism, and the other is the catastrophe that's associated with moral relativism. That is reasonable?

Yeah, that's good, good, okay. Well, so it's crucially important that we get this right now. So, be—and that's something that I think we really agree on, because I've conceptualized that slightly different than you, and that might be relevant. But I think of that as a pathology of order and a pathology of chaos. So the terminology is slightly different, but I think we're working on the same axis.

So that's the first thing, and then in order to do that, it seems to me that's your first priority. Then maybe your second priority is something like, you know, you see undo suffering in the world—plenty of it—and you would think that things would be better if that wasn't the case. And that this morality, whatever it's going to be, is at least going to part ground itself in part on the presupposition that the less undo suffering in the world, the better. So is that also reasonable?

Yeah, I would just add to that the positive side of the continuum as well. So as you know the phrase I use, though, the word I use for this is well-being. Yeah, and I know from having—I don't think we spoke about this on my podcast, but from having seen you in other interviews, I think you think that phrase doesn't capture everything one could reasonably want. But I think it does, it matters. I've—you know, it's an elastic suitcase term for a reason.

Actually, in reading your book, I realized there's a point of contact here because you use the word "being"—capital B, "Being"—as though it were imbued with significant gravitas. And for me, well-being is simply just the positive side of being. You know, there's the negative side, the suffering we want to mitigate. But I think, however good consciousness can be in this universe, that the well-being for me subsumes all of those possibilities.

Okay, well, so what—so I focused on the suffering element, I think, as I've done in my own work, because I actually think it's easier to zero in on in some sense. Like, I think it's easier for people, and I think you lay out the argument in the moral landscape kind of like this. I think it's easier perhaps to gain initial agreement between people on what might constitute a generalized ethic to concentrate on what we don't want.

Yeah, I'm not saying that what we do want is unimportant, but it seems to me to be harder to get a grip on. We don't want our swifts; we don't want the Gulag Archipelago. So, and there are those—and I would add to just closing the door to moral relativism here—those who do want Auschwitz are wrong to want Auschwitz, obviously. It only happened because some people did want it. Now, it's not the victim's side but the perpetrator's side. And so crucially for me is the claim that I'm a realist. I'm a moral realist, and what realism means is that there are right and wrong answers to questions of this kind, and you can not know what you're missing.

In fact, we almost certainly don't know what we're missing on questions of human value, and our job is to discover just how good life can be and just what variables are making it needlessly horrible, and to mitigate all of that and live in a better and better world.

Okay, okay, okay, so that's a lot of points of agreement. So I also believe that there is a catastrophe of arbitrary moral injunction, and that there's a catastrophe of moral relativism, and that that has to be dealt with. And that there are genuine differences between the proper way of behaving morally and the improper way of behaving morally, and I think that they are grounded in human universals, even though there's a wide amount of variation.

So that's a lot of points of agreement, right? So we know that there's two things we want to avoid, conceptually speaking, which is the moral relativism and this kind of moral absolutism that's grounded in an arbitrary statement of facts that you identify with religious fundamentalism. I would identify that with fundamentalism more generally—not with religious fundamentalism per se—because I see it also having happening in secular states, let's say, like not too many.

So it doesn't seem to be religious fundamentalism, per se, that's crucial to your argument. No, it's not. So just to close the loop on that, the only reason why I would focus on religion in particular there is that religion is the only language game where in fundamentalism and dogmatism—where dogmatism is not a pejorative concept. The dogma is a good word in specifically within Catholicism, and the notion that you must believe things on faith—that is, in the absence of compelling evidence it would otherwise cause a rational person to believe it—that, you know, in a religious context is considered a feature, not a bug elsewhere.

We recognize it to be a bug, and that's why—so, all right. So, is it reasonable to assume that there's an association? We've already established at least in principle that there's an association between totalitarian regimes, let's say, and dogmatism, yeah? And the dogmatism that characterizes religious belief? What do you think?

Although at least in principle, the secularist totalitarian states and the religious fundamentalist totalitarian states do differ in one important regard, which is that the religious types ground their axioms in God, and the secular totalitarian types don’t. And so there's got to be something about totalitarianism per se that's independent of—that's associated with religious belief in the matter that you just described, but that's not particularly associated with the belief in God.

So, do you have any sense of what that might be?

Well, I would—I think one has to acknowledge that there's something uniquely pernicious, at least potentially, about religious beliefs because they—they have the otherworldly variable, the supernatural variable, the you’re going to get everything you want after you die, so this life doesn't matter issue, right? That allows for kind of misbehavior that is especially—for example—okay, so it seems that the claim would be that if you put forward axiomatically your claim that God exists, then you can use that claim to justify whatever arbitrary atrocities your system might throw off.

But the only point I was making there is that not all dogmas are created equal, but some dogmas are on their face more dangerous and more divisive.

Right, but what I’m curious about specifically is because it seems to me that the dogmas of the USSR and the dogmas of Nazi Germany were as pernicious as any religious dogmas, and they may also share important features with the religious lives, but it isn't clear to me from your perspective what those commonalities would be.

Well, so, I mean, in some ways, you're recapitulating an argument I've made, and this is an argument that I would make against you were you to claim, as you've had you have elsewhere that atheism is responsible for the greatest atrocities of the 20th century. The idea that Stalinism and Nazism and fascism were expressions of atheism simply doesn't make any sense.

Maybe in the case of fascism and Nazism it doesn't make any sense because the fascists and the Nazis, by and large, were not even atheist. Hitler wasn't a theist, and he was talking about executing a divine plan, and he got lots of support from the churches and the Vatican did nothing to stop them. Fascism, as you know, coexisted quite happily with Catholicism in Croatia, Portugal, Spain, and Italy.

But even in the case of Stalin, what was so wrong with that situation was all the ways in which it so resembled a religion. You had a personality cult; you had dogmatism that held sway to a point where apostasy and blasphemy were killing offenses, you know, the people who didn't toe the line were eradicated. And, you know, North Korea is a religious cult; it just doesn't happen to be one that is focused on the next life or supernatural claims.

So what would be the defining characteristics of a religious totalitarian movement that would make it different from a non-religious totalitarian movement? Because there's aspects that are similar.

Yeah, they may be very similar, but the problem is dogmatism. The overarching problem is believing things strongly on bad evidence. And the reason why dogmatism is so dangerous is that it doesn't allow us to revise our bad ideas in real-time through conversation. It is that dogma has to be enforced by force or the threat of force because the moment someone has a better idea you have to shut it down in order to preserve your dogma.

Okay, okay, so the commonality seems to be something like claims of absolute truth at some level that can't be—that you're no longer allowed to discuss?

Yeah, okay, and so—okay, so that's another point of agreement then I would say because part of the reason that I've been, let's say, a free speech advocate—although I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it—is because I think of free discourse like the discourse that we're engaged in as the mechanism that corrects totalitarian excess or dogmatic excess.

And so I also think that systems of governance that are laying themselves out properly have to elevate the process by which dogmatic errors are corrected over the dogmas themselves, which is why I think the Americans are right. Say with regard to their First Amendment, the process of free speech is the process by which dogmatic errors are rectified, and so it has to be put at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values.

I think you and I totally agree about the primacy of free speech.

Okay, good, okay, so that's another fine [Applause].

Okay, so then we could think there's one point that we should just lock in our gains here. It sounds like what you're saying is that the reason to fear religious dogma is really on the dogma side and not the religion side, which at least leaves open the possibility that something could exist over on the religion side that doesn't have that characteristic.

Right, that often they travel in tandem, but the thing to fear is not the religious belief; it is the dogmatic nature of the way it is.

Yeah, well the other way to say that is the only thing that's wrong with the religion is the dogmatism. If you get rid of the dogma, I've got no problem with the buildings and the music and the—and the paintings.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not a trivial point, and it's not just a joke, because the buildings and the music are very important parts of the religious process. And so I know there's a humorous element to that, but it's not like Sam is throwing out the baby with the bathwater there.

And to go further than that, I've got no problem—in fact, I’m deeply interested in the phenomenology of spiritual experience. So whatever experience someone like Jesus had, whoever he was historically, or any of the other major arts and patriarchs of the world's religions—those experiences are subjectively real, I mean that they're diverse. I'm not saying everyone's had the same experience, but there are changes in consciousness that explain both how religions have gotten founded by their founders and the experiences people have had in the presence of those people or by continued following their methodologies that seem to be confirming of the dogmas that grew up around those traditions.

And my issue is that whatever is true about us spiritually, whatever opportunity being born to this universe actually presents as a matter of consciousness spiritually, that truth has to be deeper than accidents of culture and just mere historical contingency is the fact that somebody was born in Mesopotamia and not in China and got a different language game. And so whatever is true there has to be understood in universal terms about the nature of human psychology and the human mind.

Okay, so another thing that I wanted to just point out obliquely, and then I want to return to outlining maybe where we agree, is that one of the things that was really shocking to me, I would say, was the—my reading of what was originally Jane Goodall's discovery about chimp behavior. You know, because there is this idea that was really rooted in Rousseauian thinking that the reason that people committed atrocities in the service of their group identity, let's say their tribal identity, was because culture had corrupted us.

So it was this uniquely human thing, but then of course Goodall showed in the 1970s that the chimps at Gombe—I think that's been pronouncing that correctly—would go on raiding parties, right? And so there'd be like four or five adolescent chimps, usually male, sometimes with a female in there. They would patrol the borders of their territory. If they found an interloper on the border near the border from another troop— even if it was a member of their troop that had emigrated, so to speak, and that they had had some history with—they would tear them to pieces.

And of course that was shocking to Goodall, and my understanding is she had some trepidation about publishing it, although she did. But then that's been noted repeatedly in other forms of chimp behaviors. So I've been really interested in the commission of atrocity in the service of belief, and it's tempting to pin that say on dogma and then to associate that with religious dogma, I think that's all tempting. But the fact that chimps do it shows that it can't be a consequence of something like religious belief unless you're willing to say that the reason that chimps commit atrocity in the service of their troop and their territory is because chimps are religious, and so they're not religious, and they don't really hold a secular totalitarian viewpoint.

But they act out—they still act out the atrocity element that's characteristic of human behavior. And so to me that makes the problem deeper than one of mere, let's say, surface statements.

Yeah, yeah. The obviously the problem of primate aggression, which we've inherited along with the chimps, is deeper or at least different than the problem of religious violence or totalitarian political structures.

Is that okay?

Well, we have these primate capacities that we have to correct for, and we're busily trying to correct for almost everything that we've evolved to do, and we don't like the state of nature for good reason. And virtually everything that's good about human life is born, I would argue, from culture-based, and you know, highly intelligent and necessary effort to mitigate what is in fact natural for us. I would say there’s nothing more natural than tribal violence.

Would you love this, or that you're describing James?

Okay, so then it also seems like we agree that the core element of tribal alliance, which would have its roots say in the chimpanzee proclivity to—or its analog in the chimpanzee proclivity to identify with the dominance hierarchy of the troop, is something that's a source of the proclivity for human social aggression that's independent of, at least, an independent of any obvious religious substrate.

So there are other reasons for group belief and the commission of atrocity that can't be directly attributed to religious dogma?

Yeah, I mean, as—and what most worries me about religion, I would say that obviously religion can channel these primate urges in unhappy ways, so you can get tribal violence that gets amplified by religious dogmatism, and that should trouble everyone, but it's not unique to religion; it's also nationalism, and it's racism, and it's all other kinds of dogmatism.

But what most worries me are those cases where clearly good people who are not necessarily captured by tribalism per se are doing the unthinkable based purely on religious doctrines that they believe wholeheartedly with good evidence. So you have the person who joins ISIS who wasn't even a Muslim before they converted, you know, 16 months ago, and they go all the way down the rabbit hole to the most doctrinaire, most committed, most uncompromising view of just how you have to live in this world if you’re going to be a Muslim, and they join ISIS based on the idea that salvation only goes one way, and the dying and defending that the one true faith is the best thing that can happen to you. There’s no question that there are individuals who have made that journey; in fact, there are individuals by the thousands who have made that journey, and there are far more benign versions of that. They’re people who just waste their lives, I would argue, converting to whatever the belief system is, and just wasting a lot of time worrying about hell or worrying about the fact that their child is gay, and the Creator of the universe doesn’t approve of that.

There are all kinds of suffering that strike me as truly unnecessary, born not of, again, ape-like urges, but ideas that any rational person would—if believed—what would follow to that same terminus. I mean, if the thing is—if you buy, if you buy the fact, again, to take Islam as a current example—if you buy the claim that the Quran is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe and never to be superseded by anything humanity does now or a thousand years from now, that commits a rational—sorry—that then the exercise of human reason is bounded by this, I would argue, pathological frame, which leads to certain outcomes that should really worry us.

So let’s take that claim apart for a minute because that's not your claim specifically—that the claim that you were describing—because that's really not the claim that religious fundamentalists make. The claim they make is worse than that because they claim that the Quran, say, or the Bible for that matter is the literal word of God, but more than that they claim that their understanding of that word is correct, which means they conflate two things like—because you could imagine a situation where you had a book, and I'm not saying this is the case, it’s an imaginative exercise, where you had a book that had all the answers that was extraordinarily complicated, and so that when you read it, it wouldn’t be obvious that you understood it, or perhaps wouldn’t be obvious that you didn’t understand it either. But you're not going to be able to—you can't get an uninterpreted version of the book, and so the fundamentalist claim is far worse.

It’s that not only is there an absolute reality—truth embedded in the book—but that their particular take on that absolute reality is the absolute take on that book. So they can conflate their own—they make an assumption of their own omniscience and then pass that off onto God.

Yes, except in their defense—and I don't often rise to the defense of fundamentalism—it’s very easy to get there because some of the claims in the book are not at all hard to parse. In fact, so many of them can only be honestly interpreted in one way. So to take again an example that will not be inflammatory to you but makes the point, it just says that the remedy for theft in the Quran is to cut the hands off a thief. Au! That is the unambiguous injunction. It’s not an allegory. It’s not. So you have to be—you have to indulge some kind of tortured interpretive scheme to avoid the shocking fact that the Creator of the universe thinks you should live this way for all time. And people like ISIS, I mean, to them—and this is my claim—it’s just that this is most of what is in these books, and this is what worries me about those books because they can't be edited.

Most of what's in the books is clearly not the best that humanity is capable of in the ethical domain or in this. So, and so clearly—that this is true for morality, you know, most pressingly—but it’s true for science, it’s true for economics, it’s true for anything else that we are wise to pay attention to.

So slavery is condoned in the Bible, in both testaments and in the Quran. There’s no getting away from that. Now you can say, “Well, it’s not the central thrust of any of these books,” but if you go to the books and try to figure out what the Creator of the universe wants with respect to the owning and needless and miseration of other people, right? He expects you to keep slaves, and he’s told you how to do it. You know, don’t knock out their eyes and their teeth. Don’t take—if you’re a Muslim, don’t take other Muslims as slaves. But it’s not an accident that the people who joined ISIS thought that it was absolutely kosher to take slaves—to take sex slaves—and I mean they were even—their use of their sex slaves was conducted as a sacrament. And that’s not an accident; it worked in rain over there that they use 80 girls before they raped them.

So this is not unlike what many people expect—it's not that this doctrine is being used as a pretext for people who would otherwise do terrible things like take sex slaves and rape them—and so there’s no net damage being done here by this belief system. No, these are, I would argue, in many cases psychologically normal people who are simply convinced of the absolute veracity of these ideas. And in the case of this—this is, I mean this is where you—you know, there’s a tension between, you know, how we pursue the same goals. Like, you know, as we've just established, we have many of the same goals. But insofar as you make religion look palatable, insofar as you suggest to your audience that they can have their religious cake and eat it too—they can have their reason, they can have their respect for science, they can have a 21st-century worldview, but they can also hold on to everything they love than Christianity or fear to lose—it is undoubtedly mostly Christianity, but whatever any religion, my concern is that it keeps us shackled to these Iron Age philosophies and these Iron Age conversations where we should be having a 21st-century conversation about everything, ethics included.

Okay, okay, so, [Applause] okay, so but I want to ask you a little bit about your feeling. Wait, wait, before you move on, I want to get each of you to clarify something so that we know where we are. So Sam, you said the problem here is that the dogma can't be updated, right? That slavery is with us permanently because it's written into the dogma, but clearly most of the traditions in which it's written into the holy book don’t practice slavery, and the people who adhere to these belief systems wouldn’t defend slavery.

So clearly there is the capacity for an update mechanise. But not really. I mean they've been forced—it had beaten out of them, right? I mean we fought a civil war in the US to get rid of slavery, but was Christians who bought slavery in England, though? What was that? It was Christians who were at the forefront of the movement to abolish.

There are Christians on either side of everything. I mean, there’s no one else to do a job, but that’s the update. But it was specifically Christians who were using their Christian belief as a justification.

Yes, and it’s much harder for Muslims, frankly, to fight against it now. The problem is that there’s a point I made, I think, in my first book, is that the doors leading out of this kind of fundamentalism don’t open from the inside; they get bashed open from the outside—and it’s humanism, and it’s secularism, and it’s scientific rationality that has exerted such pressure, such winnowing pressure on Christianity, you know, now for multiple centuries—that’s why we’re not encountering the Christians of the 14th century on a daily basis.

The way we don't—we are essentially encountering Muslims of the 14th century a—not only in the Middle East, but in our own—in terms of their intuitions about how we should all live. Right? I mean the fact that zero percent of UK Muslims think homosexuality is acceptable, right? Zero percent. I mean, there's almost no question you can come up with where we could pull this this society and say, “I mean do you think that the Lizard King is living in the Oval Office?” You know, that you never get a zero percent response to any poll question, right?

But if you ask Muslims on the streets of London, is homosexuality morally acceptable, apparently you can find no one who says it is. That’s shocking, and it’s not an accident, right? And it would be much easier if the book actually said, “Actually, you can love anyone you want, and you know, it’s not a problem.”

It is shocking, but I think you know, there’s a reason that you keep finding yourself at Islam, which may be the slowest to update for reasons that may be ancient, but that's a—you, that is useful.

Well, I can do it for Christianity. I just—I want to make the—I want to make the point as cleanly and as undistractedly as possible. But yeah, it's true. I have the same kinds of concerns about Christianity or Mormonism or Scientology or anything else, and they're all different.

And there's no reason to be because, you know, Islam, to take the case where it’s fine, Islam doesn’t represent any impediment to stem cell research, right? And because they just don’t think that the fertilized ovum is immediately ensouled—they wait, waits 40 days or 80 days or 120 days, depending on what hadith you believe.

So it's just that never came up when we were all complaining about how religion in this case, Orthodox Judaism and Christianity in the States was posing an impediment to embryonic stem cell research.

Okay, okay, so I wanted to ask you a clarifying question.

Yeah, sure.

In Pope’s same level, would you agree that there are things written into these religious texts that are unambiguously unacceptable viewed through a modern lens, and not because the texts are so complicated that we misunderstood something, but there are things that are just written in there that we now understand to be wrong?

Okay, so the first thing I would say is that we have to be very careful about equating all the religious texts, and I do actually think that there are careful—about that, but that’s something we can have a discussion about.

So because you know for a lot of my life, I would say more interested in the universal truths expressed in religious belief across different cultures, but I've become more and more aware of the important distinctions between the religious cultures, maybe in the last ten years. So it isn’t clear to me that you can just throw all religious dictum dicta in the same bucket.

And there may—there’s complex reasons for that. So, you know, and one question which you kind of sent it, Sam, already is do you see a hierarchy of unacceptability between different religious doctrines? I mean, and I would say act it—okay, fine, fine, fine.

So, okay, now, but here’s an interesting issue, and I think we’re starting to zero in on—we've covered what we agree on—a lot of it—but there’s no answer to Brett’s question because I think—sorry, sorry I answered the first half of it, but the second part is I think that this is where I’m going to sound like a postmodernist, which I really hate.

I would say sentence by sentence, yes, you’re correct. Paragraph by paragraph, perhaps. But here’s the problem with complicated texts, especially ones that actually constitute narratives. So imagine this, so imagine you’re at a movie and it’s a movie with a twist at the end, and so the entire movie is set up to make you think one particular way and to have one set of experiences, but when you put the twists in at the end, it changes the entire structure.

And so this is one of the complex problems that actually led to the rise of postmodern interpretations of literature, which is that if you take a complex narrative, there is a very large number of ways of interpreting it, and it isn’t self-evident which of those are canonically correct. And we can deal with that horrible issue later, but—but it's a good objection, and it’s true.

And what it does is it makes these sorts of things quite complicated because in the—the Bible is a series of books and they had influence on one another, and they were sequenced with a very complex editorial process, and there’s actually a developmental narrative that links all the chapters together. And what that means—that’s at least—I’m going to speak from the perspective or in terms of analysis of the Christian Bible.

What it means is that you have to read the beginning as if it’s also influenced by the end, which is what, by the way, and in case you think that I’m weaseling around here and I’m not, is that that’s exactly what you do every time you read any story, any work of fiction. You say, well, you’re not claiming that the Bible is a work of fiction. It’s like, don’t—that’s just a cheap objection. That’s not my point. My point is that it's a narrative and everything in a narrative is conditioned by all the rest of the things in the narrative.

And it is well known, like if you’re a screenwriter, for example, there’s an old dictum—remember who generated it was one of the great Russians—that if there’s a rifle lying on a table in the first scene, then it better be used by the end of the second scene or it shouldn’t have been there at all. So there’s this coherence I’m looking for—the rifle in your answer to this question.

Yeah, I want it used. My point is is that it isn’t reasonable to take a single sentence out of a coherent narrative and say that stands on its own, or it's rarely reasonable, because you have to interpret the word in the sentence and the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter, and the chapter in the context of the entire book. You have to do that.

Now you could object, and reasonably so, that there are some sentences that are so blatant that you can’t use context to paraphrase them, let’s say. But I think you also have to give the devil its due, that the Christian Bible is a developmental narrative, and the beginning has to be read in light of the end. And that is a—

That’s a fact, so what does that do to Moses’s laws of war?

No, this is not a narrative; this is instructions about what to do when you invade a foreign land. If you intend to take over that land, you kill everyone.

Wait—there are other rules in there about killing husbands and taking the wives. Yeah, this custom—it’s a brutal document, absolutely brutal.

And so my point would be I don’t know that reading that portion in light of the end—even if you call the end of the New Testament—I don’t know that it changes Moses’s laws of war and their acceptability.

Well hypothetically, if you take the New Testament seriously, it does, because it’s a document that supersedes it.

And I think there’s actually technical reasons, it doesn’t supersede it on every point. I mean, this is a problem; slavery is a very straightforward case because clearly the Bible thumpers of the South who were defending slavery with reference to the text felt they were on firm ground.

And I'd just invite anyone to read what the New Testament and the Old Testament say about slavery to see that they were on fairly firm ground, that the balance of the honest reading was on the side of clearly we can keep slaves, right? Jesus—Jesus never envisioned a world without slavery, and he had m, slaves to serve their masters well and to serve their Christian masters especially well.

English Protestants wouldn’t have agreed with that because, like I said, they were at the forefront of the fight against slave—

Okay, but I think they’re really influenced by something outside the text, and this is—

No, it’s begin—it’s, you’re making this harder than it is, and my concern is why.

Well, I don’t think I am because I think that the fundamental message in the New Testament, for example, is that so that usually all that if we, so—so Jews are in possession of a book that has some diabolical passages that would be better left out.

You’re not going to offend—it’s not like it’s in the Old Testament itself—in the Jewish Bible, there’s also the seeds of the same tension.

So for example, there’s a tension, and this would be a tension that’s of interest to you because you’ve stated quite clearly in your book in the moral landscape that you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater with regards at least to religious phenomenology.

You said that, for example, “I still consider the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but now I understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.”

Well, I’m trying to find the important psychological truths in the rubble, and so, but we have to decide also if we agree about that: are there important psychological truths to be found in the rubble?

Oh, absolutely.

Okay, so with the problem with revelation, this notion of revelation, this notion that some books weren’t written by smart people; they were written by God allows you—it confines you to take in the whole text even though this text was cobbled together over centuries and some four whole centuries some books were in the New Testament and then they got thrown out centuries later and some books weren’t in and then got put in.

So it’s an all-too-human process that got us these books in the first place, but once they were set, the believers imagine that you're stuck with every passage, and there are passages in the Old Testament that tell you to stone a—a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night. Take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death, right?

And where you can probably agree that those are wrong.

So yeah, there’s another point for greed. Only you don’t have to read the book to the end to know that it’s wrong. You can get—you can get that from the paragraph.

Yeah, but that is what I said. I didn’t say you had to read the end to the end of the book to those.

Well, you needed to read—to the end of the book to contextualize those statements within the whole.

I didn’t—there's no “ace culpa” there. There’s no extra context as to those kinds of statements, and there is in the Old Testament.

There’s a real—there’s a real tension, and this is, I think, the tension that would be of interest to you, is there’s a tension between the dogmatic and the prophetic traditions.

And I think to the degree that you’re interested in religious phenomenology, you find yourself on the side of the prophetic tradition, and the prophetic tradition has implicitly in it what would you call an implicit damnation of those dogmatic crew—those cruelly dogmatic rules. You see that emerge all the time.

Well, arguably in Christianity, I mean I think the only Judean see clearly there in the Old Testament and once again to Islam. But every prophetic—I mean the notion of prophecy is dangerous and worth worrying about.

I mean the idea that any ancient book contains in it a perfect description of rightly interpreted, however difficult to interpret it, if you're only smart enough, you could extract from this text a perfect window on to the future, right?

And that that whole generations of people have lived by the lights of this cockamamie idea, right? That the world is going to end, and it's ending is going to be glorious, right?

This is V at the center of most—the most in most eschatology. It’s just that when the wheels come off totally, right? This is, in some levels, the best thing that’s ever gonna happen because it’s showing you that that, in this case, Jesus is going to come back and throw the sinners into a lake of fire and at the sea.

I read—I’ve read to the end of the book, it’s pretty scary at the end as well, and the revelation is—

Yeah, yeah, you’re kidding.

Well, let that—so that’s a really good objection. But you know, like when I did my lectures on the Bible last year, I said they provided a psychological take on the biblical lectures, and that’s what I’m going to attempt to maintain here, because I don’t believe that I’m qualified to make fundamental metaphysical statements.

But, you know, that—this is—that scene that’s delimited out at the end of Revelation is a very interesting book read psychologically because what it—anything, this is—we should talk about.

Well, let me just address that; it’ll take a minute to do it, and I’ll try to be succinct. So, there’s an idea that’s expressed in that book is that it’s something like things are always falling apart in a fundamental manner. It’s part—it’s built into the strut, there’s an apocalyptic element to human life.

We fail in small ways and we fail in catastrophic ways, and everything that we have, we lose, and we die.

So there’s—and societies come to an end. There’s an apocalyptic element built into the structure of human reality, and part of part of what’s revealed in that strange book at the end, which is like a hallucinogenic nightmare in some sense, is that the hero is born at the darkest point in the individual in the journey.

And it’s a psychological truth, and it’s very, very apt because at the darkest point, this is also why Christ is born near the darkest time of the year, from a metaphysical perspective.

There’s an idea there that when things fall apart, that’s the time for the birth of the hero, and the hero in Revelation is also the place where truthful speech most clearly manifests itself, because in the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with truthful speech.

And so the notion there is that redemption under apocalyptic conditions is to be found in the revelation of truthful speech, which is something that you actually believe.

Well, I believe in truthful speech, but I also believe that you can play this kind of interpretive game with almost any text.

This is this way of—but then you can do it with the world, Sam, and that that wreaks havoc with your value-from-facts argument.

No, actually, I didn't hear what you just said. What was that?

Well, I said you can—you could make exactly the same object with the world of facts. There’s an infinite number of facts and there's an infinite number of potential interpretations.

And so Pat tracking the pathway from the fact to a value is actually impossible. It’s the same argument with regards to—

No, occasion—we should talk about that, but I don’t think that’s a good analogy.

They're more and less plausible interpretations of any situation, any data, and any text, arguably. But the problem is that you can—you can read into any story some [Music] apparently meaningful set of psychological insights which–

But you can do that with any set of facts too.

Well, no, I mean, there are certain things you can't—you can't over-interpret to your heart's content and come out anyway you choose.

My point is that first of all, this is why fundamentalism always has an edge over more “quote” more sophisticated theology, because the sophisticated theology is in most cases inspired by a more and more modern recognition that, well, we can’t read it literally because it either makes no sense or it makes barbaric sense, right? So we have to get away from the literal, and the more you get away from the literal, the more you are unconstrained by the text, and you can just broadcast on it anything you want to put there.

And so, you know, the literal X—there’s no question that most generations of Christians who read Revelation expected the world to end in some literal sense of this kind of phantasmagoria. I mean, there was gonna be a beast, and it was—I mean, this, you know, undoubtedly they thought this was gonna happen in their own time, you know, under Rome, but this is a—you know, if you’re going to go purely literary on any of these texts, you are on some level, you’re playing tennis without the net. You’re unconstrained by the text, and you can do with more or less anything you want.

Isn’t that argument working at cross-purposes with your other argument?

No, because it’s always tempting, first of all, there are lines that do not announce there that they’re susceptible to that interpretation, yes, you can—you can say, listen, Allah does not want us to cut the hands off of thieves; He just— He meant to cut the—you know, the the hand of their volition rather than their actual hands, right?

So you're constraining them rather than kind of—

Now, sure, undoubtedly there was some Muslim somewhere who wants to interpret it that way, but it gets harder and harder the clearer that— the line is.

And the problem with all of these texts is that there are so many principles, again, I mean, since it read Revelation any way you want, it is still a problem that it is perfectly rational on the basis of reading that text to expect the world to end and for Jesus—Jesus to be the only Savior of it.

Therefore if you, you know, if you happen to be born a Hindu or born a Muslim or born a Jew who doesn’t recognize Jesus to be the Messiah, you are screwed.

Well, you know, what—it's a funny thing though. I mean it's a strange thing, let’s say that one of the things we already agreed on as far as I can tell is that the antidote to pathological dogmatism is free truthful expression—something like that—is that?

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Well, but one of the things I would say that’s absolutely crucial to Christianity in particular is the notion that the thing that’s redeeming is exactly that.

And it doesn’t matter, so it’s a universal truth.

Now, if we both agree on that, the idea that the free expression of truthful speech is the antidote, let’s say, both denial and to totalitarianism, then the notion that that might be embodied in something like the word, which is truly, I think, the deepest of Christian ideas is that why is—how is that not the same claim?

Now let me elaborate it a little bit more or completely. So here’s the strange thing. First of all, I agree with you, by the way, about the danger of flying off the text. About as you move away from the text, your interpretation gets less and less constrained, and I think it’s also the same danger as you move away from the facts, which is, I think, why you want to ground values in facts, so I get that argument; I think it’s accurate.

But here’s something strange is that this notion that redemptive—redemption is to be found in truthful speech is actually embodied in Christian mythology, let’s say, as a personality, and not as an idea.

It’s actually something that you embody and act out. It’s not just an idea, and that’s why there’s an emphasis on the idea of the embodiment of the word in flesh; it’s a very sophisticated idea.

I mean, it’s an insanely sophisticated idea. So and there’s one more thing, and then…

Okay, so look, you—you’ve made the case, and I hope we can really get to this because this is the really tough part of our discussion, I think, is that you want to ground the world of values in something that’s true.

We could say objectively true, but let’s just say true for a minute, and I share that desire, but the problem is that I can’t see—and you actually state this in your book—I can’t see how you can interpret the world of facts without an a priori interpretive structure.

And this is an old philosophical claim; it’s not unique to me; it’s the claim of Kant, for example, that you can’t get directly from the fact to the value because there’s an interpretive framework that mediates between you and the facts.

And so first of all, I’d like to know if you accept that proposition, and then the second question would be—if you do accept the proposition—then what’s your understanding of the nature of the interpretive framework?

Because I think it’s best understood, at least in part, as a personality, or as a story, for that matter.

So—well, I think our intuition of truth, the intuition that there’s a difference between fact and fiction, or fact and fantasy, the intuition that we live in relationship to a common reality, which our understanding can converge provided we’re looking in the same direction with the same tools.

I think that is certainly deeper than religion. It’s not best captured by stories. Even if you could, as a matter of historical fact, point to its roots in story and myth and religion, that’s not an argument that it’s now in the 21st century best captured by story and myth and religion.

I think it’s a fundamental intuition to which our sanity, both personally and intersubjectively, is anchored.

I mean, to lose a sense of objective reality is to lose the platform on which you can communicate with anyone and or rationally expect anything to happen a moment from now—to think that your memory represents something about a prior state of the world and your beliefs represent something about a possible state in the future—all of this is anchored to a sense that there’s a difference between knowing something really and just imagining it, right?

There’s a difference between perception and hallucination, and all of these distinctions are born of this intuition. I think we do have clearly—we have fundamental intuitions which are either impossible to analyze or can be analyzed with respect to only other intuitions which we deem more rudimentary, upon which everything else we do as a matter of knowledge gathering and sense making is built.

So the intuition that 2 + 2 makes 4—you know, at some point you learn basic arithmetic, and you learn what addition is, and it’s demonstrated to you with objects, and you’re shown—you take two apples, and you take two more apples, and then you have four apples; look, just count them—the intuition that that can be generalized to any four objects, right?

That it's not just a fact about—right? This is something that we are clearly designed to have. There are places where it might break down, right? They might break down, and you know, the quantum level, it might break down, and in areas where our intuitions fail, we recognize those failures in science and mathematics by recourse to other intuitions which, again, are unanalyzable.

But so there is just this fact that we do pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Hmm.

And that’s not embarrassing.

Okay, so what’s the difference between—what’s that?

And I’m not trying to trap you here, seriously; not so.

So there might be mathematical intuitions a priori, let’s say, Kant identified time and space as a priori intuitions. But I think there’s a third category of a priori intuitions that are, in fact, stories or their personalities, or stories.

So let me give you an example. So I’m going to do a quick rereading of the moral landscape. So because, see, you talk about G.E. Moore’s argument of infinite regress; if you claim that something’s good, and you equate it with something, you can also ask infinitely why the thing you’re equating it with is good.

Now, it seems to me that the way that you step out of that argument—and correct me if I'm wrong here—is you tell a story. I’m not trying to be smart about that. You tell two stories. You tell a story about someone who has an absolutely terrible life, there in a jungle where nature is trying to kill them all the time.

Well, they're trying to be killed by nature while nature is trying to kill them all the time. Horrible barbaric thugs are making their life miserable in every possible way. Okay, so that’s one pole, let’s say. And then another pole, you identify—and these are hypotheticals, so I guess they’re fictions—even though they’re extracted from real situations—they’re they're meta-fictions, they’re meta-truths—that’s another way of thinking about it. You contrast a good life, and you know that’s a life where the person has enough to eat and enough shelter and, you know, they have the things that you would expect people to want, and you say, “This is a bad life,” and you say, “This is a good life.”

And so—and then you say that—that’s—and then you make a side move, which I would say is that—that’s an objectively verifiable fact. I would say I don’t think it is an objectively verifiable fact; I think it’s a fundamental moral claim.

And I think that’s where you put your stake in the ground. And I would say when I read that, I thought, well, if you take your jungle story, which you’ve extracted from a bunch of Horrors and compiled and you take your positive story, which you’ve extracted from a bunch of Horrors or a bunch of quasi-utopias, let’s say, and compiled, you’re two-thirds of the way to a landscape of hell and heaven, right?

So, why not continue the abstraction and say look what we’re really trying to avoid here is hell?

Oh yeah, we’re really trying to move towards this heaven, yeah.

But—oh yeah, but—

Well, no, as soon as we do that—

You might name it just landscape.

No, but my name for hell is—it's very interesting because, like, we’re talking about this at dinner; we’re talking about this at dinner and how that would be the overlap or lack of overlap between our audiences.

And so like I just heard from your audience, and you might have heard from the odd convert, but what’s amazing to me is, so like I have to do some work to figure out what point they think you made and I said if you’re going to produce a fiction—oh, I don’t go right to the end!

Okay, so you produced a fiction. It’s—you can tell stories by way of communicating certain ideas. I mean, that’s obviously so I’m not saying stories aren’t incredibly powerful and useful and inevitable, right?

It’s like we—you—wait, I think you are—you’re not saying that they’re—that they’re—

They’re no—they’re not inevitable, but you are debating their utility and power because, you know, you said that you don’t need this story as an intermediate.

Now we have a few doors open here which I think we should—we should extract the most out of these areas that we've touched and not run on something else!

Okay, okay, I think there’s two—talked about the utility of story, right?

Which is obviously a fact about the world about human psychology that you’re reading a lot into, and more into that—I’ll read it!

You talk a lot about the primacy of stories, and you’re trying to get me to admit that I even—I helplessly resort to storytelling to make my points, right?

Well, you think I think—this is a good place for us—it?

And I don’t want us to get bogged down, but I think it’s a good place for us to touch this topic of the distinction between literal and metaphorical truth.

What—you—I mean, you might want to introduce it, but because that, in my mind, that covers this [inaudible].

There’s different emphasis on stories.

Okay, briefly, but we are—we are at sixty minutes, and we had read to go an hour and fifteen before we started Q&A.

So I agree that metaphorical truth is relevant here. Metaphorical truth is my argument that there are some things which are literally false but if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would if you behaved according to the fact that they are false.

And so that these things hover in a kind of intermediate space; to call them false is incorrect, right? And I hear Jordan wanted to call them true because they’re so useful, right?

But you also call—look, this is what happens in the moral landscape, I think: tell me that—tell me why I’m wrong because I’m really trying to understand it.

See, I think you dealt with G.E. Moore’s problem of infinite regress by staking a moral proposition, and your moral proposition was, “Look, here's a way things can be horrible, and here’s the way things can be good. Can we accept that this is horrible and this is good and that we should move towards good?”

And if the answer is yes, we can accept that, then we can proceed. And maybe we can even proceed with extracting values from facts, but we have to accept that a priori presupposition first—and you insist that we have to accept it because it’s objectively true.

And I don’t think that's clearly so.

So the limit is to get that proposition clear, so my argument is that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad.

That’s hell.

Okay, that’s the—so hell is—is the religious version of that, but I’m just—you can forget about religion or whether there’s a God or anything else that we live in a universe that admits of the possibility of experience.

I’m asking you to imagine a universe where every conscious mind, every mind that can have an experience, is tuned to the worst possible experience for that mind for as long as possible.

So there’s no silver lining; there’s no lessons learned—everything that can suffer suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can.

Now that includes human beings, includes animals, and includes the future AI that we might build that can suffer. It includes beings that we’ll never know about, right?

So my argument is that’s bad. If anything is bad, that’s bad!

Okay, we don’t disagree, that the hell is bad if the word bad is going to mean anything.

That’s better—

You can’t say that’s fine, but it’s not a factual—it is—it’s a claim about—

So you would argue too, and again, if this—it’s hard to impart this intuition if someone doesn’t share it, but if someone doesn’t share this intuition, I have no way of interpreting any other word that comes out of their mouth after they admit they don’t share this.

So episode, just imagine someone saying, “And that doesn’t make it a factual claim.”

That’s all—

Well, you know, it is bad; we should avoid it; it brings Moore’s infinite regress to an end. All of that, I agree.

It’s deeper than a factual claim!

It’s just a claim about the is!

It’s a claim that is required to make any value judgment intelligible! Right?

Any value judgment?

So it’s like, it’s not—it’s not an arithmetic claim!

So an arithmetical claim about addition in this case is—now, you could say—you could say the same thing; you could say when I say, “Two plus two makes four,” you could say, but is that a factual claim?

And there’s some way of jiggering the way you talk about facts with respect to mathematics where I could say, “Well, it's not a factual claim, but it's an arithmetic claim.”

Well, I’m also not trying to just don’t see you need to [ __ ] eyes or—yep, fine. What I’m trying to do is to—what I’m really trying to do—we need to see the—the problem I have with your argument, and this isn’t—I don’t mean that you’re wrong; I see what you’re doing, and I see why you're doing it, and as far as I can tell, it’s laudable, but for the problem is that as far as I can tell, there’s problems it doesn’t solve and there are other problems that leaves unaddressed that don’t have to be unsolved or unaddressed.

And one of the problems is this problem of the intermediary interpretive structure. And you—you already said we need intuitions to guide our interrelationship with facts because we’ve already agreed on that.

So the question is, what are the nature of these intuitions? And I’m saying some of those intuitions take the place of stories, take the form of stories.

But even more than that, so I’m gonna go after the hell thing again, okay? Because you said—well, it’s bad, and you made sure that I also agree with that, which I do.

I agree with that, and then it's a point of profound agreement between you and I! Like, I've spent my entire life trying to understand why people did the worst things they could possibly imagine in the service of their dogmatic beliefs.

And so I think that that’s not good, seriously, and I’m no fan of moral relativism, so we’re on this—we’re in the same page there.

Now, but what I noticed in when you wrote the moral landscape is you tell it—and I’m not trying to trap you—you tell a story about it.

It looks to me like it’s a story about heaven versus hell, essentially. But it’s also a story about good versus evil.

And this is why it's because the question is what’s bad about hell. Now you say the suffering, it’s like, fair enough, man. True enough, but not true but not true enough!

So in what’s also bad about hell, in addition to the suffering, the actions that put you there; the malevolence that generates, okay, with that—that’s part of the suffering?

So, I mean—

Oh no, it’s not! No, it’s not! It’s not the same as the suffering.

It’s not—the having your hand cut off, it's the pleasure that's derived by the person who cut it off, that's more so.

But that’s part of my picture.

Well, Jordan, my picture of the moral landscape includes all of this; it includes everything that—and this is why I don’t readily answer to the name of utilitarian or consequentialist, because the way those views tend to be taught, they tend to take as—in the tally of consequences, you leave out the psychological implications of being the sort of person who would have sought those consequences or behaved that way, right?

So I would grant you—and this I’m explicit about this whenever I talk about this—that part of the picture of any consequentialist discussion of well-being are—is everything about the human mind and social relationships and societies borne of all the individuals living together.

Everything there that leads to different states of consciousness, so it's like you having negative intentions towards other people that give you—that produced certain negative actions in the world, they—those intentions themselves are part of the consequential picture.

Those intentions themselves lead that closed the door to certain kinds of positive mental states that you don't have—let’s say you don't have compassion because you wake up every morning just trying to figure out how to manipulate people.

Well, not being able to feel compassion for other people is a bad thing for many reasons we could adduce, and yet the usual consequentialist picture just looks at what’s happening out in the world in terms of the body count, and that’s not—it’s all part of this picture; it’s all—we’re all talking anything that can possibly affect a conscious mind anywhere is part of the picture that I’m painting that I’m calling the moral landscape.

Okay, so you—okay, I want you—I want you to let me step in. I think I can—we need to—we need to bring you guys—you know, somewhere.

All right? I’m gonna start with you, Sam.

Let’s swap out the idea of metaphorical truth for something a little harder-headed, heuristics, right? We have heuristics; we use them to perceive the world. They’re often highly reliable.

In fact, almost everything that you believe that lets you operate has to be a heuristic of some kind. I mean, if you decided to learn to drive and you got into the car and they said, “Okay, well it’s all quarks out there,” right?

You need to understand how quarks interact with each other; not useful, right?

Not useful, right?

What you need are some heuristics in which you can stipulate that there’s something called a vehicle out there, and you don’t have to be overly precise about what it is, and you learn to avoid it.

Okay, the heuristics vary a lot in quality; some of them are really good—the periodic tables are really good.

Okay, the idea of gravitational potential energy is kind of crappy, right? If I have a phone on a table here, I can tell you how much potential energy it has by measuring its mass and its distance from the ground, but if I've got a whole one depth on one side of the table and another depth on the other side of the table, I can’t calculate it because it’s a crappy heuristic—works well enough in regular stuff!

Right? Now, here’s the question: what if these religious texts are heuristics through which most people simplify calculations that they are in no position to do based on the limited amount that they are capable of perceiving, the amount that they understand about the things that are in play?

So they’re deploying these heuristics. Maybe to redo things that degrade—

Well, if it were true that religious heuristics increased well-being by allowing people to actually, on average, operate in the world in a way that increased well-being, what would you say about them?

That—all right, I would worry much less about them, obviously, and that's why I don't treat all religions equally, and there are religions I literally never think about because I’m not seeing the daily casualties of those belief systems.

So—but you say that as people get away from fundamental versions of these things—and I'm not advocating for fundamentalism here, which you say yourself—as people get away from the fundamental versions of these things, things tend to go haywire, and so in its essence, what you’re saying is, well, we tend to go haywire in what sense?

Well, I thought I was—in term multiplicity of interpretations?

Right, well, yeah, but so people are—it’s the researchers better or heuristics, and I think the pressure is—some of these heuristics are obviously so bad that there’s civilizational pressure to find better interpretations.

But you said that the fundamentalists have an advantage.

Yes.

What is that advantage?

Because if you just go back to the text and say, listen, I just want to—I want to understand what these words mean, right?

You get at the first pass the literal interpretation right, and you're not bringing any armamentarium you've brought your view you've got from the outside from other parts of culture to parse the text; you're just trying to really—if it’s in English and you speak English, you’re just trying to decode the words, right?

And when it says if the—if you’re—the girl’s not a virgin on her wedding night, take her to her father’s doorstep and stone her to death, that—you know what stone means? You know what girl means? You know what father means?

And you're, you’re 90 percent there to an obvious atrocity!

I get the horror of it, and we’ll get to that in a second, yeah.

But the basic point is to say that the fundamentalists have an advantage is to acknowledge something funky about those stories which I’m claiming are going to be some kind of evolutionary heuristic for living a life—though that mayhem defensible—they have, you know, it’s like, it’s why someone like, you know, Anwar al-Awlaki could make YouTube videos that so many people found compelling.

It’s because it’s—it’s totally straightforward. It’s like, the advantage is, listen, that a lot of people spend a lot of time lying to you about what these books mean and what the Prophet and how he lived, right?

You know in your heart that my interpretation of this is correct; you just read the words, right?

And there’s a strength in that; there’s—and it’s a honesty in that. There’s a—it’s just—it’s clear when it says sacrifice a goat, goat means goat, right?

Like you don’t have to do something else to make goat mean something that has nothing to do with goat, right? And so it’s—it’s—it’s an asymmetric war of—if you’re gonna try to make your dogmas more and more palatable by importing stuff that clearly was never even in the worldview of anyone who birthed these religions, you're playing—you’re not doing that because you want to live even more by God's word.

No, you found some of God's words unacceptable, right?

And that’s—and every spunda—fundamentalist can sniff that out, and they’re right to sniff it out because, in fact, either it is, in fact, the motivation.

Okay, so I think we have a tenuous kind of agreement that there might be some kind of utility—that that utility might be morally questionable sometimes—but that there is some reason that people would resort to a fundamental simple interpretation because as they depart from that interpretation, things get more difficult and it creates some kind of disadvantage.

Well, the part of the problem with that would be that as you move away from the text, you fractionate the moral belief system and you end up with a nihilistic situation.

So as you move away from the avant-garde, you move towards the parallel danger which is moral relativism and nihilism and so hopefully you can find some balance.

So let me ask you a question.

Oh, yes, okay, and also what time do we actually start this party? It’s 10:00; I just missed the time card, but I think we have another couple of minutes.

Okay, okay, so there’s no objective reality at a time. I think, haha, actually it’s a pretty good conversation we could have, but so here’s my question for you—is if we agree that there is some way in which religious texts carry some kind of value because they allow people to figure out how to navigate their lives in ways that might reduce suffering, reduce the complexity of the choices that they have to make, presumably you will agree that that would be consistent with an evolutionary interpretation that the fact that the stories themselves are, yes, functional would provide an advantage to those who were deploying them.

Yes.

So here’s the problem: isn’t it then also true that those stories are responsive to past environments, and so the claim that these things might be timeless would be suspect?

And yes, that you would expect a spectrum of durability. Some stories would be right in a brief moment as okay.

Oh, that's true!

Oh, that’s true so far, so good.

Well, so far, so good. This is actually, I think, quite excellent then because what we have is a recognition that there is something to these belief systems that has to do with practical realities in the past, and we also have an acknowledgment that we cannot trust in these things based on simple faith because even if they are—they can be certain to have worked at some point in the past, we don't know what their relevance is to the present, right?

Okay, fair enough. Like, that’s—and I would say that’s—that’s two things about that.

That’s exactly why we’re having this discussion and you see what happens in the most profound of such texts is the idea that the process by which your knowledge is updated has to occupy a position in the hierarchy of values that supersedes your reliance or Dogma is the fundamental claim, that’s why, for example, in Christianity the notion is that the word is the highest of values, and that's the embodied word, and that’s the thing that mediates between order and chaos, and everything else has to be subject to that.

And I would say that’s not a claim that’s unique to Christianity.

So for example—

Okay, no, I think—I think—because we’re we’re being told we’re out of time here.

So I want to give Sam his reaction to that as well, and then we’ll move on to Q&A.

Well, I’m tempted to just ask Jordan a question here. It’s hard to know what to save for tomorrow night, but I feel like we’ve got 3,000 people sitting here who would really like an answer to this question.

You say you believe in God—you have been—

No, I say I act as if he exists.

You say what?

I say I act as if he exists.

So a much more precise claim.

Okay, so then, what fits it? So you act as though God exists and, in addition, I’ve heard you say that I act as though God exists, that I can't realize, so far as—

Yes, yes, we’ll see that the night is young.

[Applause]

So in that sense, I'm not really an atheist.

I’ve heard you say this.

So that some of you is—well, if I were really an atheist, I would be far more poorly behaved than in fact I am.

Right?

Okay, so that’s a big distinction.

No, more likely!

What was that?

That’s a big distinction.

That you would—is very different than it would be more likely.

Taking the safety off the gun is not the same thing as shooting it, right?

Yes, yes, the temptations laid open to Raskolnikov would be more at hand.

Okay, just as they were to him.

So what, in that case, what fits what?

Well, what I—what is the God that you act as though he/she/it exists and what is that—what is the God-shaped thing I must have in my life to prevent me from being a quote real atheist?

Well, okay, first of all, I have to point out that there’s no possible way I can answer both those questions in two minutes.

Well, it’s the same question!

I mean, what is it like? What do you mean by God?

Okay, well, I’m going to tell you some of the things that I mean by God.

We do have to get the questions. We're going to do this tomorrow.

Maybe this is where we start.

Well, that was a pretty resonant statement. Now it seems like that constitutes an audience question, wouldn't you say?

I tell you what, let’s do this.

But let’s be deliberate about time!

Okay?

Well, I’m going to read some things that I wrote because it’s so complicated that I’m not sure that I can just spin it off the top of my head.

And so you’ll have to excuse me.

So—and what I’m going to do is sort of paint a picture by highlighting different things.

So