Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
diana walsh basulka
a professor of philosophy and religion
at uncw
and author of american cosmic ufos
religion and technology this book is one
of the most
fascinating explorations of the
interconnected nature of technology
belief and the mystery of alien
intelligence
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as a side note let me say as i did in
the recent video
on how many intelligent alien
civilizations are out there
that the nature of alien life
intelligence
and how they might communicate with us
humans is likely stranger than we
imagine
and perhaps stranger than we can imagine
what is most fascinating to me is how
the belief
in the communication with such
civilizations changes
people's understanding of the world and
as diana argues
the technology we create technological
innovation itself
seems to manifest the mythology in our
collective intelligence
that turns the seemingly impossible into
reality
just a matter of years through the
belief of individual humans
that carry out that innovation the
nature
and power of this belief in both
technology and extraterrestrial
intelligence
is mysterious and fascinating perhaps
holding the key to us humans
understanding our own mind
our consciousness and engineering
versions of it
in the machines we create if you enjoy
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alex friedman and now here's my
conversation
with diana walsh basalka
you are a scholar of religious belief or
belief in general
so the fascinating question uh what do
you think is the difference between
our beliefs and objective reality
what is real period sure what is real
easy question so first let me start with
belief
so belief is generally there are
different
definitions of belief just just as there
are different definitions of what is
real
okay so for belief in my field it would
be
attitudes toward something that dictate
our actions
okay so we believe the sun is going to
rise tomorrow
therefore we act as if it will rise
tomorrow all right
beliefs can be wrong for a long time
people believed and actually some still
do that the earth
was flat okay well that's obviously an
erroneous belief
so beliefs can be wrong
now the bigger question that
philosophers ask is um is this belief
accurate toward
what we consider to be objective reality
so now let me go to objective reality so
what is real
i don't think we can actually obtain
a correct understanding of what is real
and in that sense i have to refer to a
philosopher again
and that would be emmanuel kant so
emmanuel kant is
one of the he was uh
basically in the 1750s he wrote
critiques of reason and things like that
so he said well if you're a philosopher
or have any kind of understanding of
western history you know who he is
um he had this idea that we can actually
never get to the thing in
itself okay so he called that the
numenol the thing in itself
he said this let's take this table for
instance that you and i are talking
across
so this thing is a table you and i both
know that
we assume it's real we believe in it
because we put our water on it and our
water stays on it okay
um however can we know this thing um in
and of itself as a table
um so that would be what he then would
call
um the phenomenal how do we know that
that phenomena exists
as we know it is okay how do we know
we use our faculties so we use our
senses and things like that but
again even our census can be wrong so
i've been on committees just recently
this year
last year for hiring professors in my
department who
are philosophers and every and we're
hiring metaphysicians and
you know people who are thinking about
the nature of reality and basically what
what i've learned from them yeah they're
very loved to attend those faculty talks
metaphysics professors what's funny is
that right for each one of them
i'm convinced each time they all say
different things but they're so
convincing i'm like yes
hire that one right is it like
historical philosophy no particular type
of no they're they have an actual belief
they're practicing
facilities yes so what they do is they
come
and they're usually excellent
philosophers from
harvard or you know usc or whatever you
know they come
and they give what's called a job talk
that's what floss well
every academic does a job talk in order
to get it they talk to
us about a department about what they do
and so
it so happens that we need him as
metaphysician and now we're hiring again
for one
and so i've i've learned a lot about
metaphysics in the last year
and this is what i've learned um that
they use
physics as a basis for understanding
what
we can know about what is real and what
is real
is really difficult to pin down and so
your question is what is belief
well belief does it correspond to
reality that's the question i would ask
and first we don't even know what is
real so the table they would say how do
we know that the table even exists well
how do we differentiate it from the
floor for example so these are the
questions that philosophers are asking
no one else is of course but
philosophers are asking these questions
and they have different answers for it
so i would say that it's very difficult
to know
what is real and in fact what i do
usually is i
paraphrase my friend and colleague
brother guy consolmano
he's a jesuit priest he's also an
astronomer and he's the director of the
vatican observatory
and so he says this he's a very smart
person he says well
truth is a moving target you know so
so basically to know what is
real out there like gravity or something
like that you've got to approximate it
and as human beings you know we have um
senses
to tell us what at least so we don't get
hurt you know we're not going to fall
off
building or something like that we have
eyes to see and things like that so
we can approximate what reality is but
we're never going to get
to it um unless we develop better senses
okay
and i think that that is what we are in
the process of doing we're developing
better senses
we have telescopes we have microscopes
we have you know extensions of ourselves
which are now called technology and we
can get to
a better understanding of what reality
is and what the objective world is and
therefore our beliefs can be honed
so we can get better beliefs more
accurate beliefs but can we get beliefs
that actually correspond to reality
um not in any precise way
but in approximate ways so i hope that's
not like too
big an answer to your question what do
you think beliefs are in themselves can
become reality
i mean so you've now adapted the
in this little bit of a conversation
adapted the
metaphysician view of reality which is
the physics
yes but you know we humans kind of
operate in the space of ideas
very much so like we've kind of in the
collective intelligence of human beings
have come up with a set of ideas that
persist in the minds of these many
people and they become quite
strong and powerful like in terms of
like impact on our lives
they can have sometimes more impact than
this table does than the physics yeah
and in that sense is is there some sense
in which our beliefs
are reality even if they're not
connected to
physics yes even if they're not real
yeah even if okay
so yes absolutely so um
our beliefs are tremendously they uh
they create social effects
absolutely um there was a belief that
i'm gonna use this example uh-oh there
was a belief back in the day
and we're talking about when i say back
in the day i'm a historian so i'm
talking about like a thousand years ago
right that women had no souls okay so
look i don't know if
human beings have souls i can tell you
this though that if human beings have
souls probably
animals do too that's my own personal
belief that's not a professor belief
there
um but there was this belief among the
catholic
uh magisterium which is runs europe
that women had no souls so they had to
have this big meaning about it you know
did women have souls
but that belief had consequences for
women
i mean women were treated and have been
treated
as if they didn't have souls um okay so
there's and the soul was
really the essence of the human being it
was it's the it's called the animus
right it's what is the
the essence of what is eternal you know
when
women were eternal here's another
example okay this is an example from my
own research
all right so there in the catholic
tradition there's this idea
of purgatory hell and heaven
and these are three destinations that
people can go to
when they die and if you're great you go
to heaven automatically and you're
considered a saint
if you're okay you go to purgatory right
and you suffer for a time and then get
back into heaven
um if you're terrible you go to hell
right okay well there was a
place that the catholics determined and
this
this was a belief for a long time like a
thousand years
or more and it was called limbo all
right
and limbo comes from the latin limbus
and it means edge
and it was either on the edge of hell or
on the edge of heaven
no one really could determine which it
was no historians are like well this
person says it was
on the edge of heaven well listen um
this was a terrible
first of all there is no limbo anymore
in 2007
um benedict the then pope got rid of the
idea
that there was limbo okay so catholics
kind of went crazy because they didn't
really know they forgot that limbo
existed and they thought it was
purgatory
and they said how could you get rid of
purgatory but actually he just got rid
of this idea of limbo oh so that's a
distinct
thing from purgatory it was by the way
people should know they have a book on
purgatory that came before your uh
american cosmic yes i wrote a book on
purgatory yeah anyway so limbo is a
distinct thing from purgatory
yeah and the the the types of people who
go
to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans
okay like socrates or somebody like that
um
and children who weren't baptized so
think of this
think of for that like more than a
thousand years
mothers and fathers gave birth to babies
who weren't baptized
and couldn't be buried with their family
in these
burial and you know they then they
couldn't be reunited with them in heaven
think of the pain as suffering that that
caused and that was
nothing limbo's nothing yet the belief
in it
caused untold suffering and that's just
a small example
and that was as real to them it was
absolutely real
i mean the effects were real let's put
it that way the place itself
not real but the families themselves do
you think they really believed it
they totally believed it the table is
real
yes i've read but listen we have trigger
warnings
today right so don't read this it's
going to make you upset okay
history primary sources no trigger
warnings okay
so you're going through like you know
somebody's diary from
1400 and you hear the suffering and pain
that they went through
there were times in my research where
i'd have to put
my primary source down you know and just
basically go outside and take a walk
because it was so horrific i knew it was
true because they wouldn't write
something you know they're not gonna
write in their diary something that's
not true and it was horrible so yes
these people went through
untold suffering for nothing for you
know because they had an erroneous
belief
but they didn't know it was erroneous so
it's real to them yeah
uh so i don't know if you're familiar
with donald hoffman
he has uh this idea that in terms of
uh the distance we are from being able
to know the reality which is there
the physics reality is we're actually
really really really really far away
from that
yeah so like it's uh i think his idea is
that
we're basically like completely detached
from it
yes uh what what's your sense how close
are we to the reality
we'll talk about him a bunch of ideas
about
our beliefs in technology and and beyond
uh but in terms of what is actually real
from a physical sense how close are we
to understanding that
pretty far i'm going to use examples
from what i do
okay so this idea that
we're suspicious of what we actually
think is real
is not new of course it goes back a long
time thousands of years in fact
and philosophers i i'm not actually
technically a philosopher but
i was one i'm a i'm a professor of
religious studies
yeah what do you introduce yourself at
like at a bar when the bartender asks
what do you do i never tell people what
i do
especially on airplanes it's a bad idea
okay so
generally if they push though i say you
know i'm the chair of philosophy and
religion
although i stepped down last year so i'm
no longer the chair
but um i i've i have like a master's
degree in philosophy and i was a
philosophy major and i've studied a lot
i still
study philosophy so i integrated into my
research
um all right so this idea that
we can't know uh we're suspicious of
what we know it's called
external world skepticism that's the
official philosophical name for it
um our faculties and our senses don't
give us accurate perceptions
of what is there okay especially at a
quantum level or a molecular
level i mean that's just obvious so yes
so i think that you're
the person you mentioned is correct in
that i think we're far away from it
i think you're talking about our direct
senses but you know we have tools
measurement tools from microscopes to
all the tools of astronomy cosmology
it gives us a sense of the big universe
and also the sense of the very small
do you think there's some other things
that are completely sort of
other dimensions or
there's ideas of pan psychism that
consciousness permeates all matter
that that's there's like fundamental
forces of physics we're not even
aware of yet like oh absolutely
i do think and this is why i write about
technology and
um i i mean that's actually what i
specialize in
is belief in technology with respect to
religion
so in my opinion thank
goodness for think for technology
because where would we be without it i
mean frankly i think that
it's like marshall mcluhan was the
person who said
technology is like an extension of our
senses
and i absolutely believe that to be true
i think that we're lucky
that we you know that prometheus gave us
technology okay
and that we use it and we're making it
better and better and better and better
and that makes us more efficient it
makes us more efficient as a species
and like my point is
is that i think that our instruments i
mean
i don't want to be a religious
technologist you know
but our our uh our instruments will save
us
i mean they're already making life
better for us you think it's important
that they also help us understand
reality more directly
more deeply i think directly as a is
better than deeply i think directly more
directly is probably
a more accurate term for what you're
trying to i think
ask me you know can we actually i mean i
think you're asking me that question
that kant basically was trying to get at
was
can we know the thing in itself can we
know that can we have like some kind of
like
intense knowing of it it's almost
mystical
um and i would say that
that's where religion comes in okay
that's where we talk about religion
um and if i may also go back to emmanuel
kant
this idea that he just before he died
just as he died he was working on he did
this critique of reason
where basically he believed he he
basically
um talks about can we know what's real
he basically has this long you know
that question can we know it's real and
then you know a thousand pages later
no i'll just give you the rundown okay
so okay yeah yeah exactly um then he
does this other
uh critique and um okay so he does like
three critiques
then he does this critique of judgment
okay well judgment is this other thing
altogether
and i think that that's what you're
getting at so how do we know things how
can we know things
really intensely and intimately and i
think that he thought that judgment
was the idea that we can actually
um know the thing in itself and he was
working on that
as he died and then he never finished it
hannah arendt
another philosopher of the 20th century
took it up
took up the critique of judgment and
tried to finish it
oh why the word judgment because
judgment think about it
when you see a work of art who judges
that to be
decent okay so there's a there is um
a group of people who come to the
decision that
that's rotten or you know that's pretty
good
you know like um i noticed that you like
to play guitar
well you choose music that i happen to
like too okay
so you and i both have a you know sense
of judgment it's a sense
so he said there's a sense that some
people have
why do certain communities have a
similar sense
what what dictates that and so he was
working on that he thought it had
something to do with
the knowledge the intimate knowledge of
the thing in itself um
yeah so another um philosopher that
philosophers actually don't like at all
but religious studies people do is
martin heidegger so martin heidegger
has some great essays one is called what
is a work of art
and again he gets to you know he talks
about van gogh and van gogh's shoes you
know that picture the
the painting van gogh shoes it's really
a really intense picture
it's just shoes it's you know it's but
it's a
it's an amazing painting of shoes and i
think everybody can agree
that's a cool picture of shoes right and
so why
you know the question is why is that a
cool picture of shoes you know what kind
of
knowledge are we accessing to determine
that
indeed that that works right and in fact
we still like it
so basically the the nature of knowledge
and what does it represent
it can operate in the space of that's
detached from reality
or can it ultimately represent reality
i guess that's the is that that's the
space of metaphysics
is that is that yeah so what can we know
is actually called epistemology
but metaphysics is is basically
what is the nature of reality right and
those intersect
absolutely yeah a lot of things
intersect in philosophy we just have
fancy names for them another
non-philosopher
that may be considered a philosopher
since we're talking about reality is ayn
rand
and her philosophy of objectivism
what are your thoughts on her sense
of taking this idea of reality calling
her philosophy objectivism
and uh kind of starting at the idea that
you really could know everything and
it's pretty obvious
and then from that you can derive an
ethics about how to live life
like what is the what is the good
ethical life and all
the virtue of selfishness all that kind
of stuff uh
so you talk to a lot of academic
philosophers so i'd be curious to see
from the perspective of like
is she somebody that's uh
taken seriously at all uh
why is she dismissed as i see from my
distant perspective
by serious philosophers and also like
your own personal thoughts of like is
there some interesting bits
that you find uh inspiring in her work
or not okay so i'm rand
um i've had so many exceedingly
intelligent
students basically
give me her books and basically say
please
dr basulka read this book and i'll tell
them yes
thank you i've read this book before and
then want to engage in
you know let me put it this way they're
religious about
ein rand okay so to them ayn rand
represents some type
of way of life right her
objectivism um now why is she not taken
seriously
by philosophers in general well let me
put it this way
um philosophers in general tend to get
pretty
i guess you could call it they're
they're s
kind of scientists but with words i
always call philosophy
when i describe it to someone who's
going to take a philosophy class i say
it's basically math problems like word
math problems
okay so that's basically what it is so
they take words very seriously and
they're very formal
and definitions very seriously yeah so
they all want to get on the same page so
they're not so there is no confusion
so for ein rand to basically say you can
know everything
and you know and establish ethics from
that i think philosophers
automatically say no now that doesn't
mean i say no
um in fact we even we have at my
university a wonderful business school
and when you walk into the the uh dean
of the business school's office ein rand
is everywhere
so it's so i want to say that not all
academics are anti-iran um
and in fact i don't think philosophers
are either except that they don't teach
ein rand okay so in one one sense you
could say
that because they don't teach her
they're being exclusive in what they
teach
or very particular perhaps is another
way to put it
yeah it's hard to know where to place
people like her because um
you know do you put albert camus as a
philosopher so
i guess what's the good term for that
like literary philosophers
or whatever the term is it's annoying to
me
that the academic philosophers get to
own the word philosophy
because like it's just like people who
think deeply about life
is what i think about is philosophy and
like
to me it's like all right so i know
nietzsche
is another person that's probably not
respected in the philosophy circles
because he is you know full of
contradictions full of uh
i love nietzsche he's just my favorite
philosopher
oh really yes i absolutely love
nietzsche so he's definitely
you know i i love people that are full
of ideas even if they're full of
contradictions and nietzsche
absolutely and iran is also that
i'm able to um look past the obvious
ego that's there on the page and uh
the fact that she actually has in my
view a lot of wrong
ideas uh but there's a lot of
interesting tidbits to pick up
and uh the same same goes with nietzsche
and
i'm i'm weirded out by the religious
aspect here
on both the people who like worship iron
rand
and people who completely dismiss her i
i just kind of see as
oh can we just read a few interesting
things and get inspired by it and move
on
as opposed to no have a dogmatic
is there something you find about her
work that's interesting to you
um or her personality or any of that
oh i think she's fascinating um i don't
dismiss her
um she was a woman who reached a level
of success
with her mind at a time when that was
difficult so
i mean she's definitely um worth looking
at
for for even that reason um but also um
her idea i guess part
of the situation with rand first of all
i think that
um her work is you have to
it's misinterpreted okay and i think
that's the same with nietzsche
like a lot of people think that i mean
in fact
it is the case that nietzsche's writing
before the 20th century so he's got that
you know he's
somewhat his rhetoric is
sexist and racist and you know of the
time period
right he was a educated
philosopher of that time period however
um his books are amazing
and nietzsche's philosophy is incredible
and i think that i think that's what
you're
saying about rand too and i agree i mean
i think that
that um we get caught up i mean
likely we should and we should
contextualize these thinkers
in the time period within which they are
we should not forgive
their you know because there were people
during nietzsche's time that
were you know uh feminist and and not
racist and things like that and
you know so but uh each has
mary i mean i would say nietzsche is and
i you did ask me to talk about some of
the books that made the largest impact
on me
and the nietzsche's gay science is one
of them it's one of the best books
ever in my opinion i do think nietzsche
was uh
i don't know about exactly sexist he
certainly was sexist but
it felt like he didn't get laid much in
his life
no it felt like he was extra sexist
i was like his theories on women are
like all right he's pretty angry
he seems frustrated yeah like all right
calm down buddy uh the fate of
philosophers
i just ignore everything he just says
about women
[Laughter]
so can we can we talk about myth and
religion a little bit
yes i mean can we start at the beginning
which is like
myths how are they born
there's this collective intelligence
amongst us human beings and we seem to
create these
beautiful ideas that captivate the minds
of millions
how is such a myth born great question
okay so that brings us to terminology
again
in um in my field we
we definitely i think try not to
distinguish between religion i this is
going to be
controversial i think between religion
and myth because
we call other cultures religions
myths right and then we call our myths
religions and i guess myth has a bad
connotation to it that it's not
real yeah now what's interesting is that
um people like plato who lived thousands
of years ago 2
500 about um basically made this
distinction himself within his
own culture which was greek right
so plato's a very famous greek
philosopher
and he would say things like this he
would say that um
he would make a distinction between the
reality
of the one god or the one he would call
it
he didn't call use the word god but he's
referencing a divinity of
okay and he believes in the soul okay
so but he would also say that the gods
and goddesses of the greeks are just
myths
so even he would make that distinction
again you know
he would say the population is not too
bright so they believe in
these gods and goddesses but he himself
is talking to
his students and he's basically talking
about
forms you know so you know there that
live and
seem to live in these other dimensions
like this table let's go back to this
table that we're talking
um around right now he would say that
this table is the instantiation of the
form
table and that there is this table that
actually exists somewhere
it's where this place where numbers
exist like the number two
okay so there we use the number two
mathematically therefore it exists
but have you ever seen a real one have
you ever seen the real two
no no okay so but where does it exist so
he says that tables
so he was also talking about things that
you know
he says are real making a distinction
between
the people and and by the way he got
this from socrates is
his um mentor who was killed by athens
because
he would say such things people don't
like to be told that they
what they believe in is not real right
yeah by the way his idea of forms
is just he's just making me realize how
like incredible was that
somebody like that was able to come up
with that i mean that idea became a myth
that
the idea of forms right that permeated
uh
probably the most influential set of
ideas in
in the history of philosophy in the
history of ideas
yes yeah i mean plato we know him for a
reason right
yeah so let's say that we're not
it's a gray area between religious and
myths and maybe not even
it is gray yeah uh so what how's that
idea with like little plato
start and permeate through all of
society oh how does it happen okay so
there are different ways that religions
work
um so a lot of people would call the ufo
narrative today
like uh and this is what i talk about in
my book like a myth
right the ufo myth but a lot of people
believe in it okay
so how do these things work well what i
did was i took
um there's a ann taves at
um uc santa barbara she's a pretty
well-known academic
who studies religion and she has this
building block
definition of religion like it builds
okay and so
she says there are there's there are no
religious experiences
or mythic experiences there are
experiences
and then they get interpreted as
religious
or mythic okay and so i i use that
with the ufo narrative so i take
um and i compare it to the religious
narrative so basically what happens
um what happens is this is that a person
generally has a very
intense experience um it could be with
something that they see in the sky
a being you know that they see um you
know like moses in the burning bush or
something like that
they tell other people okay and those
other people believe them because
they say that guy let's take you okay
alex
okay so you're playing you know some of
your music
jimi hendrix shows up out of the blue so
jimi hendrix who's
who does electric church stuff right the
electric church movement
so he shows up i was i'm sorry for a
small attention i was
i'm not aware of i apologize if i should
be
i'm just know how to play all of the
songs
uh electric church is this
oh yeah yeah it's jimi hendrix's thing
yeah
so that was like a philosophy of his or
what yes yes so he thought he was it was
like a mission for him like
like he was a missionary and he was like
doing the electric church
it was through his mission of music that
he was actually
impacting people spiritually and i think
you have to agree that his music is
really spiritual yeah
wow that's so cool to know that there's
like a philosophy there yeah i wonder if
he's ever written anything
he's spoken about it many times
interesting yeah i actually do some
some research here wow that adds another
level of depth that's awesome
okay so okay so say lex is playing
yeah 100 one of his songs he shows up
what's your favorite hendrick song by
the way
oh that's a hard one i like castles in
the sand it's a sad one but
yeah i i like it so i'm playing
something yes
i show up and also boom just like elvis
does for people
yeah hendrix shows up all right and then
you're amazed and then he tells you
something
that's very very significant and he says
you need to tell other people this okay
so then like okay i go on social media
yes
and you start and because people believe
you and because you
are a person of um you know credibility
people believe you and so all of a
sudden a movement starts okay
and it's the hendrix movement it's
hendrix ii or something like that you
know we call it something
uh the next iteration of hendrix right
hendrix lives
but he lives is this vibration and only
lex can like you know
can can manifest this vibration okay so
like
this is this is how religion starts you
know excuse your audience who are
religious i'm actually practicing
catholics so
um this is how religion starts they
start with first off a contact
experience
not i mean not all of them but a good
portion of them
um some person has an experience that's
transcendent
sacred to them and they go and they tell
other people
and then those people tell other people
and then something gets written about it
okay and then it becomes because it's a
charismatic movement
people become affected by it and if if
too many people are affected by it
um an institution steps in and tries to
control the narrative
uh so this is what you'd call the
beginning of a religion
or a myth a very powerful myth and so
it's almost like
a star right a star is born okay yeah
when you say institution do you mean
some other organization that's already
powerful
doesn't want to become uh overpowered by
this new movement
yes absolutely is this usually
governments it's usually yeah
so i have a couple examples so i use the
example of the christian church
in my book because i'm most familiar
with the history of christianity
and you know christianity you know was
started by this jewish man
and it was a movement that you know he
was a very powerful
charismatic person other people believed
in him and then his followers talked
about him
and then other then you know usually
early christians before the
300s were generally people who were
disenfranchised because he had a pretty
radical idea that you know
humans should have dignity and this was
pretty radical during that time so women
who didn't have dignity and you know
slaves who didn't have dignity at the
time
um converted christianity in droves
and so what happened was that all of a
sudden um it became
this belief system that was under
current and then
constantine who was an elite
had an experience and made christianity
a state religion
and by that time there were different
forms of christianity
probably hundreds of them well most
likely and
constantine and the people who were
powerful with him decided that their
idea
this is the council of nicaea now
decided that there was
one form and they called it universal
the one form of christianity and this
should be it
and so they they kind of took out all
the other denominations of christianity
and different forms of it
so you can see that a very very powerful
set of beliefs
put a culture on fire right
and so how did they they had to deal
with that fire somehow
and so they narrativized it they decided
how do we interpret this and they
interpreted it
as they wished but that wasn't the only
interpretation of christianity
i have another example i'm in a catholic
church
um a lot of times and i'm going to use
the
example of faustina
she's um she's a nun and she's polish
and um i think it was in the early 20th
century if not the 1800s
that she had a very powerful uh
many experiences actually of jesus and
she
saw jesus with rays coming out of his
his
heart and basically she called this his
divine mercy
and it became a devotion in poland and
it spread
the catholic church was not not into
this at all okay
and so they did everything they could to
try to suppress faustina's
influence which was growing and growing
and growing
and growing okay and so they were very
successful in trying to keep her quiet
and she died okay years later john paul
ii
polish sainted her and
created the divine mercy devotion which
is worldwide now
and millions and millions of people but
do you see how they
they you know completely controlled so
fascinating that it
uh that it just starts with a single so
like you said contact experience yeah
experience is the key word and
is your sense that those experiences
are legitimate so it's not
yes that's artificially constructed yeah
i think for the most part there are
legitimate experiences that people have
why would someone want to put themselves
through what they go through like why
would jesus want to get crucified i mean
that's a pretty nasty way to
die you know why would faustina bring
this upon herself
um the people that i meet who've said
that they've seen ufos that most of them
don't want to be known
because of the ridicule that goes along
with it so i honestly think that
you know there are people who are maybe
not stable and
would like the attention but for the
most part normal people don't want this
attention
so you mentioned building blocks uh you
didn't mention
the word god or
sort of the afterlife are those
essential
to the myth so there's a contact
experience is there some other aspects
of myth and religion which makes them
viral
which makes them spread and captivate
the imagination
of uh people yes is there a pattern to
them i think that for each era it's
different
and people have first let's talk about
the definition of religion if that's
okay because
most people assume the definitions that
we in the west are familiar with which
is that you know that of
christianity islam um judaism
you know monotheistic religions and
there are
that's not i mean those are just some
religions there are so many different
types of religions
some religions have no god at all zen
buddhism for example is a religion
that asks you to take away
your belief structures like to kind of
like in fact i would call that a kantian
type religion
right and that it's it's basically
telling you to get rid of your concept
concepts of what you think about things
so that you can actually have the
experience like you were talking about
earlier
of the thing in itself and they call
that satori
so there are people who believe you know
they try
to they call it meditations and
meditation
um and it's fairly radical actually
um in some monasteries i don't know if
they still do this but
they'll whack you on the head if you
appear to be
um not focusing and you know that kind
of thing you know they do things to
basically take
you away from your conceptions of
reality
and bring you into a state of
all that is which is what they call
satori and that has nothing to do with
god
i like this religion anything that
involves sticks and whacking in order
for you to focus better
i'm gonna have to join a monastery so
okay so this so
uh digging into definitions of religion
so like what is
what do you think is the scope that
defines
a religion oh okay so in my field we
have a
but a few different definitions of
religion as you can imagine just like
philosophers have
different definitions of what is real um
so i take this definition
and it comes from john livingston and
it's um
religion is that set of beliefs and
practices
um that determine that is inspired by a
transformative
what is perceived actually to be a
transformative
and sacred power can you say that again
yeah
so religion is a set of it's not just
belief it's also practices
it's both belief and practices because
you won't have the practices without the
belief
so you have those together okay and it's
inspired
by what is perceived because we don't
know if it's real or not
what is perceived to be of sacred and
transforming power
so perceived by the followers or is this
connected to the original sort of
experience no no it well
it's it's perceived by the followers
that's a really good definition so
and that's the governing idea is that
there's something
of great power yes perceived to be of
great power to which
you can connect yourself either
emotionally or intellectually
somehow in order to explore the world
that is beyond your own capabilities
yes and is there communication also
involved
or generally yeah yeah that's a great
definition okay
so within that falls everything that
we've uh
we've talked about so far including
technology and
um alien life and so on
do you think ultimately religion
is good for human civilization
let me uh maybe phrase it differently is
what's
religion good for okay yeah that's a
great question
thanks for asking that most people don't
ask that and i think it's
the question to ask why do we still have
religion that's the question right
because
scientists and others scholars um
humanists even thought that
there's this thing called the secular
secularization thesis and it's this idea
that the more um we progress rationally
and we have better instruments for
understanding our reality
the less religious we will be but that's
been found to be untrue
we're still very religious okay so why
why is it around
well it's adaptive in some way in my
opinion most
many people would not agree with me but
i kind of see it as an evolutionary
adaptation now think about religions
okay think about
christianity again for one um here comes
this idea
when you have this ruthless empire
called the roman empire
which litters its its roads with
crucified bodies
to let you know don't mess with us
okay all right here all of a sudden you
have this guy saying
god is love okay all right well that's
weird
okay so why why does this take off well
it takes off because we're becoming
a um a colonial power
that means we're going into other
countries we're conquering them
we are you know how do we survive
together
as as cultures that don't clash
well we have to have a belief structure
that allows us to
and i think religions function that way
frankly so these
religions help us in from us
richard dawkins meme idea it
allows us to explore space of ideas um
and that in itself is the um so it's
like evolution of ideas
and we're just a powerful tool for uh it
is for ideas
because you know if if i believe that
men have souls do they
yes they do okay
we're still trying to figure that out
you know why still
in terms of souls do believe cats don't
have souls but
we'll never we'll never uh we'll never
be able to confirm that
maybe if we get better instruments you
know the soul instrument
you need to come up with that one please
for cats yeah
not just for cats but for all animals
and people in general
you can put them in like a little you
know soul machine
and find out what's the status of their
soul
[Laughter]
that's funny i hope will become a
scientific discipline of consciousness
and consciousness is in some sense
connected to
maybe what the meaning of the word soul
used to be
and i i think it's a fascinating open
question like what is consciousness and
so on that
maybe we'll touch on in a little bit
but yeah anyway back to our religions
being adaptive
i think that christianity probably
helped us um
become better people to each other as we
moved into
a more global society and i also this it
goes along with my book which is
basically making the argument that
belief in non-human intelligence or ets
or ufos uaps whatever you want to call
them
is a new form of religion and
how does that work with the the
scientific method
do you think there's always this role of
religion as being
in his broad definition religion as
being a complement
to our sort of very rigorous empirical
pursuit of understanding reality
there's always going to be this coupling
we'll always define
redefining new eras of civilization of
what
that religion actually looks like so you
talk about technology and so on being
the modern
set of religious uh beliefs around that
is so is that always going to is religio
is religion always going to kind of
cover the space of things we can't quite
understand with science yet
but we still want to be thinking about
oh i see what you're saying that's a
great question
when you say religion i would i would
use the word religiosity
uh because i think that we're moving out
of the dogmatic types of religions into
more of a
i hate to put it this way but an x-files
type religion where we can say
i want to believe or the truth is out
there
right but we don't know that it's out
there or we don't we don't know yet
what it is but we know it's out there so
there's this um this kind of built-in
um capacity for belief and something
that we don't have evidence for
yet and that's a sort of faith so i
would say yes to that question
absolutely
i think it's adaptive in that way we're
moving into a new i mean heck
we've already moved into this culture
most people have not caught up with it
yet
i see that in the school systems you
know and i think that
um i'm hoping we can catch up fast
because really it's moving faster than
we are so i mentioned to you offline
that i'm
finishing up on the rise and fall of the
third reich
i'm not sure if you have anything in
your exploration
interesting to say but the use of
religion
by dictators or the lack of the use of
religion by dictators
whether we're talking about stalin which
is mostly a secular
i apologize if i'm historically
incorrect on this but i believe it's
secular and hitler i think there's some
controversy about how much religion
played a role in his own personal life
and
in general in terms of influencing
the using it to manipulate
the public but definitely the church
played a role
um do you have a sense of the use of
religion
by governments to control the
populations
by dictators for example or is that
outside of your
little explorations as a religious
scholar
it's not outside of my framework
absolutely not
um i think that it's done routinely
um propaganda is done routinely
especially there's nothing more powerful
than religion
to get people to act i think
i have my mother's jewish my father is
was roman catholic okay from irish
extraction
and so both um members
both both great-grandparents came here
under duress
because they were being um what would
you call it
uh there was an act of genocide on both
sides
being done by other cultures okay so on
the one hand
obviously we know about the holocaust
okay so they came the great grandparents
came here to
avoid that and they made it um on the
other hand
uh there was an english um
genocide we just have to say it of the
irish
um it was called a famine but it wasn't
one it was a staged
thing and so um millions of
irish left ireland on coffin ships is
what they called them because they
usually wouldn't get here mine happened
to get here okay
so those that's the context that i'm
coming from so in each case
for one thing irish weren't considered
you know there was catholics weren't
considered
they were considered to be terrible and
there was a lot of anti-catholic
rhetoric here in the united states
which is kind of strange because one of
the in fact the most
wealthy colonial family were the carols
in maryland and they were catholic
so when you look at the united states
our history
and you see the separation of church and
state do you want to know where that
came from
that came from those guys they convinced
george washington and thomas jefferson
i mean they couldn't vote yet they had
they had
they have their names on the
constitution
is that not a strange contradiction so
here's here you can see how
you know propaganda works there was
anti-catholic propaganda
there was anti-jewish propaganda um and
all of and a lot of it was that
you know these people weren't human they
weren't human beings
um another thing i'd like to say is that
when the irish did come here and they
were indentured a lot of times
indentured servants
um but that's a that's terminology
then what is an indentured servant
slave pretty much
so in that sense religion can be used
derogatorily yeah derogatory as a useful
grouping mechanism of saying this is the
other
and you know it's powerful too because
behind it is a force of
um you know what people can tend to be
sacred a sacred force
right so you know it's up to god
to you know decide who's you know so you
have to go along with what god says of
course
well that's basically um that's not the
contact event you know the contact event
is
is usually some type of very specific
legitimate event that a person has with
something that
is non-human or considered divine
but when when religions become
narrativized i would call it by
different institutions
that's when you're in danger of getting
propaganda
you said nietzsche one of your favorite
philosophers he said
uh famously one of the many famous
things he said
is that god is dead yes
oh what do you think he meant do you
think he was right
okay good i love this question no one
asks me about nietzsche
and i love nisha okay so um first
actually i do
think and i could be corrected and
probably will be in all the comments
yeah well first nietzsche it's true
wasn't the first to say god is dead
i think hegel said it okay no one reads
hegel he's like so
difficult to read that it's impossible
same with heidegger as you mentioned
yeah he i love him but yeah he's really
hard to read um so nietzsche
basically said god is dead and let me
give you the context for him saying that
he also said this he said there was only
one christian he died on the cross
okay so um he despised christianity
and he said that and and the people who
practice it
absolutely yeah but again he believed in
jesus and he believed jesus was
he didn't believe he was a divinity he
believed jesus was a good man
and he died on the cross okay so he
believed in the morality
yeah he absolutely did yeah he did um
and
nietzsche basically was making a
historical statement about god is dead
he said and he was right he was
basically saying that in this in the
century in which he lived
um and he died i think in 1900 again i
could be
wrong about that so i just want to say
that i believe he died in 1900
okay so so he's writing in the 1800s and
he's basically saying
um god is dead and we killed him okay
so he's making a historical statement
that at that point in time
with science just kind of getting better
and industrialization
happening um the idea of
um this this thing beyond
what we know as material reality is dead
so this the substrate of western
civilization
is dead that's what nietzsche nietzsche
is saying
if that makes sense yes and he's
basically says with that
comes the ubermensch okay which is the
superhuman
and he says there aren't many of them he
says but they're going to come and he
also talks about the philosophers of the
future
and he's speaking and writing to them is
my belief
so he's basically telling you and me
because we're now the philosophers of
his future yeah
he's basically telling us this is what's
happening now
and look what it has done he says now
everything is is possible all manner of
terrible evil
because no one has the belief in god
anymore the belief that there's
uh that there is an afterlife you asked
about an afterlife so with this kind of
belief in
a morality comes this belief you know
you can have morals without god okay
people do
but what christianity is this idea that
you will reap what you sow so if people
don't believe that anymore what will
happen
and so that's what he's basically saying
is that the the basic
anchor for western society is now gone
do you think he was right absolutely
absolutely right
but then again what do you think if we
brought him back to life and he read
american cosmic your book um and he
wrote
he tweeted about it right
writing a review maybe for the i don't
know what they post for new york times
he'd be an
editorial writer uh with a blue check
mark on twitter
uh what do you think he would say about
this idea that you present
that's a grander idea of religion
and you know like religiosity like
yeah yeah wouldn't that kind of reverse
the idea that god is dead
yeah because it would bring up this idea
of external intelligences
that are not human which is basically a
lot of
religions talk about that right there
are bodhisattvas
there are angels there are demons you
know there's all these
types of non-human intelligences that
religion makes space for so what i'm
basically saying in american cosmic is
these new
things are within the realm of
ufos and uaps so with no i think that
well i think nietzsche would say that
that's a progressive adaptation of
religion
is what i would hope he would say
nietzsche however
is unpredictable i think i i couldn't
predict him
so i would say that it would be my hope
that he would say
this is an accurate representation
of a move into a new type of religion
and it's adaptive therefore progressive
he would probably be uncomfortable
reading a book by a brilliant