Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / SZEPS LIVE TOUR: "Atheism, Wokeness & Islam" with Sarah Haider

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SZEPS LIVE TOUR: "Atheism, Wokeness & Islam" with Sarah Haider · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Good day, humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. This episode of Uncomfortable
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  lodge your vote for sane independent media in the meantime. Enjoy this conversation and thank you
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  whether you're paid or unpaid for helping us to make debate healthy again.
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  Yeah, how long exactly do we spend talking about how stupid people are online before that
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  becomes like the actually stupid thing to do. It is already right. You're already there.
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  We're past that point. Was it ever a thing to do? I don't know. It was a fun thing to do for a while.
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  Yeah. Yeah. And I think the funds weren't off. At least for me, I don't know.
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  Are you still having fun? I think I do a lot of like poking fun at people,
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  how stupid people are online. I think I care a lot about people who are making grave intellectual
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  errors like systemically when in the way that we talk about big cultural issues, whether that's
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  calling about. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, if you're talking about January, you're talking about
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  Gaza, you're talking about immigration or something like that, then I try to like
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  forensically analyze the ways in which our conversations are falling apart or failing us.
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  But I think picking out an example of someone who's stupid online or some like university campus
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  protest that went crazy or someone who was de-platformed or something like that, I think that's
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  wasted time, life's too short. So is that your role as you see it, like as kind of an umpire,
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  you know, or like watching from the sidelines and also like trying to gain a kind of fairness,
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  you know? Yeah. I mean, I want to model how to have conversations about things that are hard to
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  have conversations about. Hence the name uncomfortable conversations. Yeah. Which is the name of the
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  podcast. Sarah Hader is with us one of my favorite thinkers about liberalism and I guess
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  conversation and how to think about our place in culture and the world. Sarah previously
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  co-hosted a great podcast, a special place in hell with Megan Downe and they have a sub-stack,
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  which you don't really use because you're on holiday. For those who are watching,
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  you've got a big, you've got a large baby bump. For those who are listening, you've got a large
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  baby bump. Yeah. How you going? It's rough. It's been a rough one. But the benefit is that I've
• 5:18
  just been totally out of it. You know, I've just, I've been forcibly removed from you know,
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  being terminally online. So that's great. Trust me, the world is not a place that you really want
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  to be focusing on at the moment anyway. And what happened anyway? Nothing much. Well,
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  in the last couple of months, actually, I think you, if you were around for the end of last year,
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  then you basically end the beginning of this year. That was bad enough. Yeah. Like the election
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  and then like inauguration. That was when I last remember it. And then it's been a haze. And then
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  since then you can basically check out. Yeah. Nothing's happened. I'll call you if anything bad.
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  I mean, you first came to my attention as a as a prominent atheist and like in your work with
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  you co-founded or you founded the ex-Muslims of North America. Co-founded ex-Muslims of North America.
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  And why? What led up there? Yeah. And that was, um, wow, that was a long time ago now. I don't
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  like thinking about that. But it was in 2013 that we co-founded that organization. And I was quite
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  young. I was really interested in making a difference like in the world as many of people are.
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  By the way, so everyone old now is thinking like, it's hilarious that you think
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  I'm like, okay, okay. Are you in my, in my, like, you know, Obama was still, you know,
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  that's not that long ago. That was his second term already. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was. That's
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  not ancient history. No, no, but it feels like it. It feels like it. Okay. And, uh, yeah, I,
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  I mean, that was a totally different time, right? It was like right after this like new atheist wave
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  and everything was going to change and we were all going to become less religious, more secular,
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  more intelligent and scientific and like enlightened, right? Did it feel that way to you? It
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  felt that way to me. I mean, it was definitely the Obama time to follow to me. Yeah. Was the end of
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  history. Yeah. And it had been settled. Yeah. And I felt like I was part of that change
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  with my organization and we advocated on behalf of apostates from Islam and the abolishment
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  of apostasy and Basemullahs internationally. So there was, you know, it was just a, it felt like
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  the right thing to do and the right time to do it. And history was with me, right? What was
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  your background with religion? How do you raise devout? I was raised as Shia Muslim. Yeah. And
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  primarily in the United States, although it was born in Pakistan. So I do have a little bit of
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  that immigrant experience, you know, rattling about, you know, it's part of the architecture of
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  like what I think of as myself. Yeah. Um, but I am very familiar with the diaspora, the Muslim
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  diaspora here because that's how I, that's how I was raised, um, and where I was raised. And then
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  I left religion, um, you know, 15, 16 for like the usual reasons. I decided I was an atheist and
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  then I decided that that meant what are the usual reasons? I was, this was the type of internet
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  atheism. You know what I mean, right? Like where I was just like, uh, yeah, walkins, Dan, Dan,
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  right? Those conversations were in the air and in, in my high school debate team as well.
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  Were you on the high school debate team? I embarrassingly know. No, no, I'm proud of it. You know,
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  what it was great. It was great things to do. It was a speaker with you. A speaker? What do you mean?
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  We have, we have different kinds of things. Oh, do you? Okay. Normally you would have in my
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  form of debating, you'd have the first speaker or second speaker on a third speaker. I don't
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  even know what. Oh, okay. Right. That could possibly mean. Like what do you mean? Is it like
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  the first highlight? Second violin? Like what does that mean? The first person gets up and
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  presents the case. Then the opposing side of the speaker gets up. Then the, then the other side
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  second speaker gets up and partially rebuts the first speaker, but also fleshes out the case.
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  And then the other team second speaker gets up and then finally the third speaker gets up for
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  the more unprepared rebuttal of the other team's case. And then the final third speaker gets up.
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  He was a whole group effort. It was great. Three three by three. That's real debating.
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  Oh, what kind of Milwaukee that was born out of here Sarah? No, we have that's debating.
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  We have a totally different form. We have a totally different form. We are just sort of the things
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  that each other in the schoolyard policy debate, which has teams. There's two people involved,
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  but I don't know if they call themselves first speaker or second speaker. It's not that formal,
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  but they discuss policy issues. And then there's Lincoln Douglas debate, which is values debates,
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  like sheds and morality and philosophy. And I think that's what I did.
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  And that's just a one person versus one person. And I loved it. And I thought it was great.
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  But it was, you know, there was those kinds of conversations around the air in the debate team.
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  And were you influenced by any of the big, the, the ideas who were kind of prominent at the time?
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  I mean, probably indirectly, you know, like by all, they were in the air.
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  Even like the God delusion and suddenly a little thought bubble above your head,
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  popped like a cartoon and you were like, I'm no longer almost.
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  I did that after I left the religion. And it was part of my, you know, part of my,
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  being like a little bad little teenager, where I would carry the God delusion around.
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  They're like very visibly read in front of my parents.
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  Just to shout just not that I don't even think they noticed, but I was doing, but
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  I was part of the rebellion, my teenage rebellion a little bit.
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  Did they care?
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  They did. I mean, at first, but at that point, I had already been established as an atheist.
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  You know, of course, it was very difficult because they thought I was actually headed to hell.
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  Yeah. Well, you know, yeah. I mean, if they're right about the cosmos,
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  and I guess we're going to hell some time. Yeah. Yeah.
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  See you there. Yeah.
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  And but lately, you've sort of spoken about how you kind of have lost, you've become
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  disencanted with atheism as a movement, if not as a, yeah.
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  Well, it's been, it's been some time. So I took a break from, from, you know,
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  I left my organization a few years back.
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  And I think the atheism movement, I mean, is it, it's strangely even call it a movement?
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  I don't know if there's much movement anywhere, you know, and if you go to
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  atheist conferences or meetings, you'll see a lot of people who are, I mean,
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  maybe the youngest person there will be like in their 50s kind of thing. You know, like,
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  it's definitely not that the wind behind it's back. No. The youth are somewhere else.
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  Well, I'm right. They're not in the movement, but they might, it may just be that the movement
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  has been so successful that everyone is basically secular and, you know, at least agnostic now,
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  but they don't need to find that. Exactly. They don't need the con that says that you remember
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  at the club. Yeah. I think that's part of it. And I think part of the problem is that
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  the atheism movement has failed to meet, you know, the needs, you can call them almost spiritual
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  needs, right? But like psychological needs of young people today and other, other movements
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  do meet those needs better. So that's where they're present. I think there are a lot of political
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  movements that young people feel much more entranced by. And I understand why I understand
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  kind of what's going on. I do feel like there's a little bit of a failure of the atheism movement
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  because we said, okay, there's no God in religion is, you know, bullshit. But what else is there?
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  And what's worth living for? And how do we build on from here? And I think it's that second part
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  that the movement kind of failed to pick up on. And the result was that we lost a lot of young people,
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  you know, so there's, there's that. But I also think that the movement has been co-opted by political
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  religions as well as just the kind of political religions. It just becomes so much more progressive
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  than it was when I first joined, you know, it was always very progressive. And I was very
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  progressive when I first joined. So it worked for me and I didn't have too many problems with it.
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  Although I noticed even back then that there was sort of a lack of intellectual diversity within
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  the atheism movement and community. And that's always a problem. That's a problem in any community,
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  any movement, any cause. You become too isolated. You don't think correctly anymore or well anymore.
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  And you become prone to all kinds of absurd biases. And in the case of the atheism movement and a
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  lot of progressive movements, I think, purity spirals that ended badly. And really make the work
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  itself difficult. And the work itself gets left behind and even forgotten. So it's a broader problem
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  with progressive activism. I think that it's so hard for specific organizations to stay on
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  mission. You know, when you say that there was a lack of diversity in the atheism community,
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  what kind of diversity are you talking about? What was the conformism? I mean, there was
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  political adherence, political diversity. I mean, presumably, and everyone always says this,
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  and I always said this. And of course, of course, it's, you know, quote unquote true,
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  that atheism is a valueless proposition, right? But if, in fact, it is, then it shouldn't be so
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  perfectly aligned, it seems as if with one political side, one political tribe in a
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  political, in a specific time and place. But wouldn't the liberal atheists say, yeah,
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  it can be a negative proposition insofar as all it's saying is that these set of religious
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  dogmas are, you know, there's no reason to believe in them. But that when the other side of
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  politics is so co-opted by religion and the conservative side is like, it's not our fault if no
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  conservatives want to become atheists because they're also tangled up. But I think they do. I think
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  they do. I think there are a lot of conservative atheists. I just think they don't join, you know,
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  they're not part of the atheist movement, even though they exist. They sort of just exist
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  peripherally in the conservative spheres are kind of quiet about their atheism.
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  And it's interesting to see the way that it's kind of playing out. It's interesting to see
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  my, some of my friends converting, you know, becoming religious, like growing up secular
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  and then suddenly finding their way to religion. I don't understand it, but I don't know if you've
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  seen it in your school at all. Yeah. Well, I've seen that phenomenon of secular people
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  coming to the conclusion that there's a god-shaped hole in everybody that needs to be found.
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  Yeah, that's what I'd write. It's like psychological, social, whatever.
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  Yeah. So, it's more of a sociological or psychological thing where it usually comes down to,
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  you know what, we underestimated the importance for a culture or a society or a human being
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  of having the structures of religion. I've known there are very many people who've gone,
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  you know what? I think it probably is true that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse.
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  Or, you know, I reckon it is true that Jesus rose bodily from his grave.
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  I'm strangely seeing some of that, not a ton of that, but some of that rise up. It's almost
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  as if it comes after the sociological explanation has been accepted, you know, like after they say
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  that maybe there's a need for religion, psychologically, and then some mysterious things happens,
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  and then, and then I will see, you know, people in my timeline that I've known for years,
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  suddenly say that they're a Catholic and there's only a certain world.
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  Yeah, I know that I see that happening, but I think, but I think the cause is flipped.
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  I mean, let's not put the cart before the horse. I think what happens is that there's a
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  recognition of the sociological or psychological importance of faith. And then once you
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  primed that, yeah, ground right, then you open, you open, there's an emotional clearing.
• 17:09
  Yeah, exactly. And then they can start believing nonsense because they sort of want to,
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  when they want to back themselves into religion somehow. So, but I don't, I don't really
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  happens the other way. I mean, I never find somebody say there's no good sociological or psychological
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  reason for believing, but I just think it's really compelling to believe that those
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  you just hang out with smarter people. But that happens. That happens. It's just the same kind
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  of person who's going to get pulled into a cult, if not a religion right now. Yeah.
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  But I've seen, I've seen, I remember converts back in the day when I was like,
• 17:44
  full into activism. There were some people who would convert into Islam and then leave,
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  you know, and that was always a strange kind of group of people. But they would convert in for
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  a very, you know, interesting, like emotional, like psychological reasons. Sometimes I would
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  ask them about specifically what, specifically what in the dogma, like what about like point me
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  to me, the chapter in verse and the Quran where you were like, this is it. Like this is the
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  the conception of the world that is so honest and so true and feels right, you know, all they say.
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  They didn't have an answer for me. That was what was interesting about it.
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  But does that then prove my point that they're probably just backing themselves into the faith
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  because they want to believe for other reasons? Right. But I'm saying that they're part of that
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  initial group of people that you say you don't know much about who just sort of go into the face,
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  think, think that there is an ideological reason, but the real, you know, underpinning is emotional.
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  Yes. I mean, coming back to the conservative link with religion and atheism,
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  one explanation for why there are so few conservative, a movement atheists might be that there's
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  like a conservative reverence for all the things that they think religion underpins like family
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  and, you know, small sea conservative structures and institutions. And there's a and godliness
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  and church goingness and community and like warm baked apple pie, you know, the traditions of
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  sort of Western culture are so bound up in a conservative's mind with religion that I would
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  imagine it's hard for them to. Would you say that that proclaiming themselves to be an atheist even
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  if they are a disbeliever in their hearts? Would you say that that's incorrect, that that binding
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  isn't correct? Not necessarily. I think it's not intrinsically linked to religion. But I do
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  think that sociologically it's so close to religion that we haven't done a very good job
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  on the secular left of figuring out how to replace it because the entanglement is so intense.
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  Right. And I mean, it kind of logically feeds into the other very well. In a way that
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  where it's secularism, you sort of have to make a longer logical argument to get to something
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  like pronatalism, you know. Wait, it's fleshed out for me. Pronatalism is an easier argument to
• 20:09
  get to religiously. Why? It's a not so obvious. God said so. All right. But if you already believe,
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  right? I mean, that's it's an easy step to make. Yeah, but God says lots of things to religious
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  people ignore. I mean, I thought you were saying that a religious world view fundamentally leads
• 20:31
  you to pronatalism, even if it were the case that God hadn't said, go forth and. Right. I think
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  it's fundamentally in very sort of background ways, reinforces pronatalism. Right. You know,
• 20:45
  in a way that secularism does not. And I found that like ever since I've become a little bit more
• 20:50
  of a pronatalist. And that's largely because I believe that we have a, you know, population to
• 20:55
  kind happening. And it's not going to be great for us economically or, you know, in any other
• 20:59
  way. I found that some of my atheists, like my atheist contingent of my audience can get quite
• 21:08
  mad at me. And I found that there's quite a bit of overlap between anti-natalists and atheists
• 21:16
  and hardcore atheists. Yeah. And the left broadly, which may be the linking between those two,
• 21:22
  those two things. Sarah Hader is with us if you're just joining us. Thank you for being
• 21:27
  Sarah. This is part of the Zeppes Live World Tour, where at least every day we're in some different
• 21:32
  place, talking to some fascinating person. You should subscribe to our uncomfortable conversations
• 21:37
  to get notified whenever we do. You just touched on an interesting point that you've written about,
• 21:42
  like, is your baby kicking? And my baby's always kicking, which is just madness in there. Yeah.
• 21:47
  What's going on? I don't know. Dance party and you tell me. Yeah. I mean, it's performing for the
• 21:52
  audience. It's such a weird phenomenon. For a guy to have to think about, like, I don't, I
• 21:57
  could just see your face, like, just twitch a little bit. And I was like, oh, there's an alien
• 22:01
  inside her, which is right there. Yeah. It's adorable. It is kind of, you know, in a way, like,
• 22:08
  there, it is pretty horrifying. Like, I could see how, like, the, you know, the horror movies,
• 22:13
  the parasite, like, coming out of you, like, you can even see it. I mean, somebody will do it
• 22:18
  in the video. I don't know if my, my, my stomach is in the shot, but if it is, you can do it.
• 22:25
  So they'll do a little zoom in. Yeah. And they'll make a meme out of it. So atheism and pronatalism,
• 22:35
  I mean, this brings us to the, to something that I think you've been interesting in wrestling
• 22:40
  with over the past year or so, which is the, the sort of quasi religious commitment to a bunch
• 22:48
  of left-wing ideas that secularists and atheists can find themselves wrapped up in, where that
• 22:55
  diversity of thought that you were hoping for in the atheist community originally that you didn't
• 23:00
  find is totally lacking when it comes to the shibbolaths of the left and that you are sort of
• 23:07
  smelling the same dogmas and kind of blasphemy to booze in progressives as you disliked in
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  the religious. Right. I think a lot of people have started to feel that way. Unfortunately,
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  they reach out to me because I'm like public and open about it. But I think I saw it happen
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  a few years ago when the luminaries of the atheist movement became very much
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  the villains like within the actual activist circles. So, you know, the actual organizations,
• 23:43
  atheist organizations, like movement atheism, you can call it. Suddenly it just became, they became
• 23:53
  not not quite taboo, but out of favor, not invited to conferences, to events, you could tell in
• 24:03
  conversation that they were like, they were they were the old and there's a new wave coming in
• 24:08
  that was more correct that we should be paying attention to. And I think it's part of why the
• 24:14
  movement has become so stagnant that it has sort of distance itself from the very people that you
• 24:20
  know really gave it that initial fuel. Right, but aren't those also the old people? I mean, you were
• 24:26
  bemoaning the fact that you were like, old people kicking out old people. It's not quite as old
• 24:32
  people kicking out the slightly older people. I think it's a it's a movement losing its way to
• 24:38
  some degree in favor of more prominent, you know, fatish political beliefs. And unfortunately,
• 24:48
  like it's like you can't be, you know, I noticed this years and years ago when some organizations
• 24:54
  started like expanding even their value statements, their their missions to some degree to to
• 25:01
  include almost progressive values like what you would call progressive value social justice values
• 25:09
  and started rearranging their programs to focus on those kinds of things a little bit more.
• 25:16
  And I could see that this would it would alienate people who are atheists who just cared about
• 25:22
  turned in state separation, you know, and wanted to have all the interesting conversations that
• 25:29
  come from that. You know, what do we do now? How do we find meaning? You know, I remember listening to
• 25:35
  some few interesting conversations in one from Rebecca Goldstein about, you know, what to do now,
• 25:41
  you know, what where to find meaning now and how do we think of ourselves as people now?
• 25:45
  How do we think of equality now? How do we undergird these kinds of philosophical things that
• 25:49
  are something to do with Christianity? And it, you know, that was fascinating. That was amazing.
• 25:56
  And those conversations kind of just got shut down in favor of, you know, the progressive cause
• 26:02
  of the day. And we're not even good at talking about that. Those are not our main causes. Those are
• 26:06
  my causes we understand. So we get to be the D team in, you know, like of progressive politics. And
• 26:13
  I think that that's, it's a terrible thing to see it happen to the movement, but maybe, you
• 26:19
  know, maybe something else can come in the future. Well, yeah, I mean, I can understand your
• 26:23
  frustration if you get into atheism because you want ex-Muslims to not be hounded, you know,
• 26:29
  for their blasphemy, then you end up in a room full of people who are all preaching from the same
• 26:35
  social justice hemishete in a way that sounds very much like religious dogma. Was there a moment
• 26:42
  at which you realized that this, that the left was basically inventing religions of a tone?
• 26:49
  I mean, it's sort of more of the issue.
• 26:52
  The multiple issues, I mean, obviously the Islam issue was the first time that I saw it,
• 26:57
  but I did not recognize it for what it was because I would think to myself that the reason that
• 27:04
  the left can get a little bit confused about Islam is because they have so much compassion over
• 27:08
  these like poor, suffering brown people, and the compassion is, you know, overriding any kind of
• 27:13
  logic and any kind of like consistency when you think about what the religion actually entails,
• 27:18
  what it actually asks of its believers. What was the era that the left was making?
• 27:23
  Multiple errors in terms of in terms of Islam, in terms of Islam, right? I mean, I think it's just,
• 27:29
  if you are opposed to Christianity for certain reasons and you must therefore be opposed to Islam
• 27:36
  for the very same reasons. It's a very, it's sort of that simple calculus was not,
• 27:41
  we have a big fly. I was so close to playing people's minds. You were not, you were not
• 27:45
  humorous. I was always going to a bomber at outskirts with a pair of chopsticks.
• 27:51
  Yeah, okay, so consistency between religions, like if you're going to object to Christian dogma,
• 27:55
  you should object to... Right, but I excuse that as not necessarily the time and the place in which,
• 28:01
  you know, we lost our way kind of thing, because I thought it was just an overwhelming like sense
• 28:07
  of compassion towards the poor, the suffering of marginalized brown people. And then I saw
• 28:14
  I did other avenues and that's when it became clear that it was actually, there was something
• 28:18
  else going on that was in some kind of either value or ideology or way of looking at the world
• 28:25
  that was more compelling even than old school liberal enlightenment values. And I said about
• 28:32
  thinking about what that might be. I think gender is, you know, an interesting lens in which
• 28:39
  to view it, view this as well, perhaps even more illuminating than Islam and like the problems
• 28:45
  around is... Gender in what way? Gender is, I mean, so I don't know about how you feel about gender
• 28:53
  ideology or, you know, trans, genderism or whatever. You don't need to please me. No, no, no, no. I don't
• 28:59
  know. I don't know where to start. You know, I don't know what assumptions to start from.
• 29:05
  But, you know, I see myself as a tolerant person and always have, you know, whatever you want to do
• 29:13
  in the privacy of your own home or even however one you want to think of yourself, that's your
• 29:18
  yes, your own business. But I found, if this was, I don't know, I mean, maybe five, six years ago,
• 29:29
  that suddenly there was quite a bit of intolerance around disagreement when it came to gender issues
• 29:36
  in the atheism community. Like trans issues, not like the division of gender roles in society.
• 29:42
  No, no, not that. That was, we all agreed on that. But it was more of what is sex, what is gender,
• 29:50
  what does it mean to be trans and how should society respond to that? And there was, I noticed
• 29:57
  quite a bit of, you know, it was like an orthodoxy. It was unquestioned and unquestionable
• 30:03
  to say that, you know, you could consider yourself, whatever you want to consider yourself,
• 30:08
  live how you want to live. But as far as how much society has to accept, that's a different question.
• 30:16
  You know, that becomes a question of material reality. And what is incumbent upon citizens
• 30:23
  in regards to other citizens and their desire to be seen as a specific person. But that conversation,
• 30:28
  you know, it's a, it's a fascinating conversation. Like it's philosophically interesting. It's,
• 30:33
  you know, I mean, there's aspects of it that are tied into religion to some degree. I mean,
• 30:38
  there's, there's so much of it that is amazing. And I wish we saw this like big debate, you know,
• 30:45
  kind of like we saw with the atheism and religion debates, people, you know, on stages and argue
• 30:50
  with each other and YouTube debates, that kind of thing. And it just didn't happen. It was just, um,
• 30:55
  why didn't that happen? Um, I think the social costs were just too huge.
• 31:00
  You know, and it's, it's very hard to ask that of people to ask them to, you know, in the case of
• 31:08
  the atheism community, to sometimes have left an original community, you know, sometimes to have
• 31:14
  experienced, uh, isolation, shouting, whatever, like from their original group, sometimes their family.
• 31:23
  And then now this new world that they've built, now you're asking them to push back on,
• 31:29
  uh, something that's, you know, consider dog, you know, dogma and this one. Why would those costs
• 31:34
  so high? It's still a curious sociological thing that I don't have a good answer for. Which,
• 31:38
  the, you know, why is it the case that for a long time, you've been able to stand up on a stage and
• 31:46
  argue about climate change, about economic policy, about supply side economics, about globalization,
• 31:54
  about the Iraq war, about male and female equality, about, um, but there's just a small handful of
• 32:03
  issues. And this is probably the prime one for the past, you know, five years or so, that you,
• 32:11
  as you say, the costs are sufficiently high that if someone would have, would have
• 32:14
  to get up and try to get up on a stage and say, I think there's a biological difference between
• 32:20
  males and females and that you can't switch from one to the other, um, and that women have a right
• 32:24
  to conceive of the biological women have a right to conceive of themselves as a class that's distinct
• 32:28
  from trans women. The penalties for too high for anyone to do that. Yeah. And nothing to gain really.
• 32:35
  It, it seemed as if, um, you know, I talked to a lot of my male friends with nothing to gain.
• 32:40
  You know, so females like, they have something to gain, especially if they feel that they're
• 32:43
  right to being fined. Um, they will speak out, um, but I noticed like some, my, my, my liberal
• 32:50
  progressive, look, I don't really agree with this. I don't really agree with this. I don't, I don't
• 32:54
  buy into it, but it's not worth the trouble that it'll bring me. Mm hmm. And it will only bring
• 33:00
  them trouble. Yeah. So is it functioning like a size? I think it's functioning as a priority test.
• 33:08
  Um, you know, that if you are willing, if you are willing to agree to this or at least agree
• 33:14
  to be silent when it comes to this, that you are revealing something about your true, true
• 33:20
  loyalties and what they buy. And after at that point, you can disagree on a lot of other things.
• 33:25
  Um, but it's, you know, it's like, um, believing in a miracle, you know, like,
• 33:30
  it's, it's that in itself is this test of faith where you can disagree on a lot of other things.
• 33:36
  But there's sometimes there's, there'll be some absurd thing that religion will ask you to
• 33:40
  believe in. And that will, for some reason, be the most important thing to believe. Uh-huh.
• 33:44
  That's interesting. So the divinity of Christ, for example, yeah, like you can't not believe that.
• 33:51
  No. And be a question. You're not believing all of other things. Yeah, you're not believing on
• 33:55
  a stuff, but you have to be certain that what was written down 80 odd years after it happened
• 34:02
  2000 years ago is absolutely true. Yeah. And if you don't believe that, nothing else matters.
• 34:09
  Well, you have to say that you believe in that for sure. You have to say so. Yes. And similarly,
• 34:16
  you have to go along with, and we should add, of course, when we say I have to, you don't actually
• 34:20
  have to because lots of people have been, you know, JK Rowling's from day one, but you have to,
• 34:26
  you have to be willing to be related or you have to be willing to be on the far right.
• 34:31
  To have been expressing those points of view, you can't be a nuanced, progressive,
• 34:36
  in good standing and air, those kinds of conversations. So if that's a kind of a dogma and it has
• 34:44
  its own sort of blasphemy rules around it, does it mean that the pro-religious people are right
• 34:52
  that we secularists and atheists really don't know how to live and we're always going to invent
• 34:59
  religions of our own making if we don't have preformed ones? Yeah. And it's an interesting question.
• 35:05
  It certainly opens it up. I mean, there's the Sam Harris kind of thesis from the moral landscape.
• 35:11
  I don't even know if you feel so forever ago. That does feel forever ago. Yeah. Yeah. But there
• 35:16
  was that conversation about conscience and reason, you know, create the values that we need to,
• 35:23
  to live and be happy and prosperous in the world. I wish that debate would get reopened
• 35:32
  now that we've kind of, you know, a few years along in these sort of political,
• 35:37
  secular religions are making their debut. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think Sam's point though,
• 35:47
  and what Sam will be on the show next week as well, I'm catching up with him in L.I. So if
• 35:51
  you're just tuning in, Sarah Hader is with us, writer, I suppose former writer, podcast,
• 35:58
  and activist, and now mother, but still has a great stop stack. And so I encourage you to consume
• 36:03
  all of her past work. And if you, you should subscribe to the uncomfortable conversation
• 36:10
  something as well. So he can tell when we're going on live with Sam next week. But I think his point
• 36:14
  was more of a pure rationalist brain in a vat kind of argument, which is like, if, you know,
• 36:21
  is there any, he was basically disputing the claim that there's no way to get from an
• 36:27
  is to an ought that there's no way to get from the world as it is to what we should do. And he
• 36:31
  was saying, if you just grant that the flourishing of sentient creatures is salient, then you
• 36:41
  could build, sure, that's a big, you know, that's where that's the anti-needleist, you know,
• 36:47
  it's coming from. But his, no, his point is we make that if on every other form of science,
• 36:52
  in the sense that there's always some bedrock that you have to accept. If it's physics,
• 36:57
  then you have to accept the structure of reality as salient. If it's medicine, you have to accept
• 37:02
  that you're like, you know, wellness is better than death. If it's, you know, whatever it might be.
• 37:07
  He's like, you just give me the grand me the tiniest bit at the beginning. And then you can
• 37:11
  build an edifice of morality. But I don't think he's saying that it is necessarily natural to
• 37:17
  humans to pursue and feel compelled to abide by ethics, which would be a more psychological
• 37:26
  and sociological claim. So I think the moral landscape is probably the wrong template. You're
• 37:32
  not going to take down faith with the moral landscape. You'll need structures, you'll need secular
• 37:38
  structures of some kind to frame our lives with, to give, you know, to punctuate them and to
• 37:44
  commemorate deaths and births and coming as a age. We just don't know what those are yet.
• 37:50
  Yeah. I mean, I wonder if there is, you know, then that's what I've been thinking about,
• 37:54
  or I was thinking about, you know, prior to this, to this pregnancy, where I wonder if there is
• 38:03
  not just a psychological and sociological benefit to faith, but, but genuinely,
• 38:10
  a rationally cognitive benefit to, you know, in so far as, in so far as you understand it,
• 38:20
  as this, you know, Darwinian, you know, memetic, you know, something that has evolved throughout
• 38:27
  thousands of years to be somewhat beneficial to us.
• 38:57
  Previously up until now, you had to go to the old sub-stack to do that and follow me on sub-stack
• 39:02
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• 39:07
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• 39:15
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• 39:21
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• 39:30
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• 39:35
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• 39:40
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• 39:46
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• 39:52
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